David McWilliams (on the history of money)

David McWilliams (The History of Money: A Story of Humanity) is a journalist, writer, and economist. David joins the Armchair Expert to discuss having an unusually calm Irish family upbringing, being practically prescribed to study economics, and the impact that his father being screwed by the system had on him as a kid. David and Dax talk about his early, life-changing realization that no one actually has control over the economy, why economics should be seen as a form of communication about the world, and how the human advent of fire helps us to understand money. David explains the idea that the technology of trading money was an alternative to war, how money amplifies the trust necessary to function in complex societies, and why the reason that money is weird is because we are weird. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Today we have an economist on and this, I've been wanting to do this for a while and I think it was maybe probably Malcolm who planted the seed, which is Malcolm Gladwell said, "It is really peculiar how powerful money is in our lives."

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:21Dax Shepard?

  And how it is a forbidden topic.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I know.

• 0:24Dax Shepard?

  It's like there isn't a more relevant force that we don't talk about.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 0:29Dax Shepard?

  It's so interesting.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  For everything.

• 0:32Dax Shepard?

  I think as we know intuitively, it leads to envy.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:35Dax Shepard?

  So you just avoid it to avoid envy?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Or like bragging or something like it, there are traps.

• 0:42Dax Shepard?

  But like if you work with someone, they go, "How much do you make?" The issue is, or I'm afraid to say, because if I make more than them, we have issues now. And if I make less than them, now I have an issue with them.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I know somebody who, who a few times has like been in a group and said how much money they've made on something.

• 1:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  And I am like, I'm so allergic to it. Yeah. And I guess, I don't, is it regional?

• 1:08Dax Shepard?

  But I've always pretty much been very open about it.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12Dax Shepard?

  I remember Kate Hudson's brother Oliver.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15Dax Shepard?

  Who I love and was really tight with for a while. I think the first time we ever met, we were sitting in the backyard of someone's palatial house. And we're like looking at the city and it's just, it's pretty overwhelming with how gorgeous everything was. And this is 21 years ago. And I go, "Wow, this is quite a place." And he's like, "Yeah." And we both worked a bit as an actor. And I'm like, "Yeah." And then somehow, I don't know how, but

• 1:40Dax Shepard?

  he was just like, "Yeah, how much do you have in the bank?" And I'm like, "Oh, I have like $400,000."

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47Dax Shepard?

  He goes, "Oh my God, that's exactly what I have."

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50Dax Shepard?

  And I was so excited and we like, there was something very bonding about it too. But like, yeah, I've always kind of been that way. I had to learn about envy. I always had less than everyone, so it didn't matter.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:01Dax Shepard?

  And my family was very open about money.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Oh, see.

• 2:03Dax Shepard?

  And a lot of families are very tight lipped about money.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  My parents would never, I would ask them, "How much money do you make?"

• 2:09Dax Shepard?

  Isn't that weird?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  They would never tell me.

• 2:11Dax Shepard?

  My mom's approach, which I, I agree with was like, Hey, they got, you gotta learn how to manage all this and feed yourself. You better know what it like, I, I make this, the house is this, the groceries are this. Like, you need to understand.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25Dax Shepard?

  And that is more logical to be including your kids so they leave the house with a real sense of what it all is.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  I mean, they were definitely instilling like, you need to have enough, you need to be safe, everything costs so much money all the time. Like, they were instilling fear around it. So then I would say like, well, how much do you make? Like, if it's everything's so scary, and then they didn't want to say. That was not for us to ask.

• 2:50Dax Shepard?

  I know, it's very, very common.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52Dax Shepard?

  Um, what's, what you're already detecting if you're listening still, is that we had a break and now are so excited to be back together and chatting a lot. So this was an intro that kind of became a fact check. Alas, uh, David McWilliams's book is called The History of Money, and it's absolutely fascinating.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09Dax Shepard?

  It is, it is a force that really, you don't have the luxury of ignoring because it fuels revolution and despotic rulers and you gotta keep your eye on it.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21Dax Shepard?

  Please enjoy David McWilliams. We get support from Quince.

• 3:26Speaker 01

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• 3:35Dax Shepard?

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• 4:16Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time, and he looks iconic.

• 4:25Speaker 01

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• 4:44Dax Shepard?

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• 5:20Speaker 01

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• 6:01Speaker 01

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• 6:50Dax Shepard?

  Europe's surprisingly close to New York.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we really appreciate that because in our heads, America occupies a different place. Then you realize, five hours, it's not a big deal.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 7:02Dax Shepard?

  That's why the Vikings were able to get there.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, whereas you bastards, like, you're fucking miles away.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I know.

• 7:06Dax Shepard?

  We're the real deal.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  This is like going to a different civilization for us.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  For a lot of Americans, LA is a different civilization.

• 7:13Dax Shepard?

  Is it not maddening if you're in the rest of the world going like, that place changes so radically every four years?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I can't believe you went from Obama to Trump to Biden, back to Trump.

• 7:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  And you're kind of sitting here in America thinking, hmm, this is a country I really don't understand. I think most Europeans look at it and think, we thought it was left, now it's right. We thought it was socialist, now it's MAGA. Now you have Mamdammy in New York.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  It's all over the place.

• 7:38Dax Shepard?

  Do you guys at least know, though, that we don't either? I'm not kidding, that would comfort me that you guys understand we're as confused as you are.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  That now is very reassuring because we're watching the news, particularly as an Irish person, we thought we knew the United States. I was a dishwasher here. I was a bartender, a student. Came over to Boston, hung out with the Irish Americans. We kind of knew Irish, St. Patrick's Day, you guys came over. There's, what, 40 million Irish Americans? We thought, okay, we know this country.

• 8:06Dax Shepard?

  You're more than 10% of the place.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but now we have no idea.

• 8:10Dax Shepard?

  But we don't either.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Well, that's reassuring.

• 8:12Dax Shepard?

  And now in our defense, I think we're getting a lot of the heat. But this is a global phenomenon. It is not unique to here. There has been a very huge rise of populism and authoritarian type leaders. So it's like, it's not unique to here, but of course, unfortunately, we move the needle the most.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  You're the superpower.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  So like, America's got 4% of the world's population and 24% of the world's income. So that's huge.

• 8:34Dax Shepard?

  Yes, you got to take it serious.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  When America sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  That's so true, yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, we catch fucking COVID. So you look at the States and you think, okay, do I have any sense of what's going on in that country? But you know what? You're right, Britain has got a reform party, which is probably going to win. France has got Le Pen. Italy's got Maloney. Germany's got the AfD, you know? So it's all going the same.

• 8:55Dax Shepard?

  You got Putin.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  But at least Putin has the decency not to get elected.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  He's not doing this democracy stuff at all.

• 9:03Dax Shepard?

  Now, what I saw was great. It was on an English TV show and they said, and it was when Biden came in. And the joke on the show was, yeah, this season of America is boring. Because it were a TV show. So at least I hope you're entertained. Are you not?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, it's kind of like Succession.

• 9:18Dax Shepard?

  I hope you're having a laugh. I guess that's what I'm saying. Okay, so you grew up in Dublin and mom was an educator. Yeah, she was a teacher.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, my mom was a teacher. She's still with us. She's 90. And I brought her to New York six weeks ago.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  No way.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Extraordinary thing. So we're sitting at home and she's from Cork in July and we're chatting, chatting, chatting. And she goes, God, I'm 90 this year. So I said, yeah, you are. And I said, what do you want to do? She says, you know what I'd really like to do? I'd love to go to New York. The last time she was in New York, think about this, she went on a boat.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  In the early 60s. We forget, air travel is new. And it was really funny. She's 90. So it was myself, my wife, my two kids and granny. We go to New York. We're all jet lagged. After the third day, granny says, I'm going to go to bed for half an hour. I said, fine, okay, in the hotel. So myself, the kids and the missus are sitting having a drink. I thought she was gone for the night. Texts me by 7 o'clock, what's the plan? Where are we going?

• 10:14Dax Shepard?

  She was true to that now.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  She did 11,000 steps.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Oh my.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  On average, every day.

• 10:19Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  And she's 90. Anyway, so yeah, so that's my mom. She'll be listening.

• 10:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. Hello, mom.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Hi, hello, shout out.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  To Alice.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  To Alice. Shout out to Alice.

• 10:29Dax Shepard?

  Well, you're gonna bring her to LA now, next, on her 95th?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  No, it's a little bit too far.

• 10:32Dax Shepard?

  It's too far, okay.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Now, New York, she could do.

• 10:34Dax Shepard?

  Post up in New York for a few days and then swing back.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could do that.

• 10:37Dax Shepard?

  And then dad worked at a chemical plant.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  My dad's passed away a long time. He worked in a chemical plant, in a factory. You'd know it from Detroit. Blue collar, old school, Irish, really decent guy. Passed away a long time ago, two thousand and nine. But yeah, he was a good skin.

• 10:57Dax Shepard?

  Heavy drinker?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  On the contrary.

• 10:58Dax Shepard?

  What kind of working class guy was this?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  So it's interesting, in Ireland you've got these weird things, right? You've got the boozy working class guys, and then you've got these slightly teetotaly, not so much conservative, but they were not boozers. My dad wasn't a boozer, my mum wasn't a boozer. It was unusual Irish upbringing.

• 11:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  So there was no shouting and roaring, no fights, no slapping around.

• 11:17Dax Shepard?

  Dad never came home with a black eye?

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, none of that. It's funny, you know, when you watch The Wire and you see McNulty and all the paddies and all the cop paddies and the fireman cop paddies drinking. Wasn't our family.

• 11:27Dax Shepard?

  All to say, I'm not looking at that family and thinking, well, he'll certainly become an economist.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  No, that's true.

• 11:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, that's why I lay out both of those.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's true. I should have become a schoolteacher or something, or a cop, actually.

• 11:40Dax Shepard?

  I would almost think you would seem greedy to even go into that line of work.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  I went to school, and in Ireland we have this very strange, very narrow education system, which is highly academic. And essentially what happens is you do these final exams, you get a certain amount of points, you have the same thing, the GMATs, and those points allocate you to certain courses in university. And the points I got allocated me to doing economics.

• 12:04Dax Shepard?

  That prescriptive.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Almost that prescriptive, right? Doing kind of businessy, commercey thing. And then I went into this course and thought, okay, fine, well, let's have a look at this. And I realized, wow, this is amazing. This gives you a framework to totally understand the world. And I was completely hooked when I went to university. No sense of it at all prior to this. I had no sense of economics, I had no sense of what it was all about. Think about it, born in Ireland, so the economy is a disaster from day one.

• 12:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  We have a banking crisis, we have fiscal crisis, we have currency crisis, everything. Half of the country lives here, emigrated, and we have a war going on.

• 12:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  A little kid, your little head in the seventies, eighties, and you think, wow, the last thing you want to do is economics, because we can't do that. Because it's a mess. We can write, we can talk, we can sing, we can dance.

• 12:49Dax Shepard?

  He can join U2, maybe?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  He can join U2, maybe? All that sort of stuff. Yeah, the one success we had was Bono. The one success we had. And everyone's looking at this guy, saying, how did you do it? Anyway, the point is, I went to university, Old University in Dublin, Trinity College, where I teach, which is kind of a bizarre symmetry. And I thought, wow, we might not be able to understand Ireland, because we're a particularly weird bunch, but we could maybe understand America, maybe understand the globe. I think what happens if you're lucky, as a late teenager, something happens in your life. Where you think, okay, I like this stuff. Then you just do it.

• 13:23Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Then you do the masters, you do, you know, all that sort of carry on. And the reason I did a masters was because there was no jobs in Ireland.

• 13:28Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  So I did masters in Belgium. Nobody emigrates to Belgium.

• 13:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then you found yourself at the Central Bank of Ireland from ninety to ninety-three and some pretty dramatic shit went down in those few years, right? You have the German reunification, so they're gonna have to combine a currency and absorb this half of themselves that has nothing. You had Black Wednesday, is that what it's called?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the sterling thing.

• 13:54Dax Shepard?

  And then you had the EU, the treaty.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Maastricht, yeah. And I had no idea, and like none of us have any idea, that there was gonna be, as you said, German unification, which totally transformed Europe. Then you have the General Maastricht Treaty, which totally transforms Europe. And then the Brits did what they always do, which is they screw up.

• 14:12Dax Shepard?

  They screwed up massively. Talking like a true Irishman.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  No, but they screwed up massively. They screwed up massively. And so when their currency collapsed, our currency collapsed with it. So you're a kid, but this is your first job. And what is interesting about working in central banks, like working for the Fed here, you begin to understand how the system works and doesn't work.

• 14:32Dax Shepard?

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

• 14:44Speaker 02

  I do try to help. It's very easy to sit in the sidelines and say, you know, the state is this and it's that. But actually, when you work in the system, you realize that most of the people are actually trying to help.

• 14:54Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Most of the people are trying to do the right thing. So for example, I was born in the poorest country in the Western world.

• 15:01Dax Shepard?

  That can't be true.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  So you're the poorest of the rich. Ireland was the poorest country.

• 15:05Dax Shepard?

  You're saying Eastern Europe's not communist?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  No, so Eastern Europe is a communist, right? So when you're born in the poorest country of the rich world, it's maybe the most deleterious place to be. Because you're always comparing yourself to your neighbors.

• 15:18Dax Shepard?

  You can only up comparatively, yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Your neighbors are rich. Yeah. So when I was a kid, I worked in Boston, I worked as a dishwasher. We used to arrive over with degrees in mathematics and economics, and all the jobs you could get were washing dishes here in America. I remember working when I was eighteen in Boston, washing dishes. And I think to myself, okay, these Americans. Who we are serving are much richer than us. But they're not that smarter than us. They're not that better read, they're not clever. What are they doing that makes them so? Or what are we doing that makes us so backward?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  And that was something that always prompted me in the world of economics. The other issues, my dad, who you mentioned, lost his job when I was about 12. And we lived in a pretty middle class area. And that wasn't really supposed to happen. So I remember my dad, when I was looking at the window in the morning, he put on a shirt and tie and pretended to go to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's classic. You know, because of who we were, you know? And I remember as a kid, this really weighed on me. And I thought, how can this man, who was so decent, be made redundant by somebody else? Like, what is this world? How does it all work? How is it so much that he feels so ashamed and embarrassed? That he's letting on to our neighbors that he's going to work?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  But everybody knew he was. Very sad.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  It's also for him.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  It was for him.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  You asked me about working for the institutions and working in economics. That had a profound effect on me. You didn't want to be powerless. Precisely. How can a man who's decent, honest, get screwed by the system? So what is the system that's screwing him? So I'm get fucked by it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that was a sort of a propulsion mechanism. I mean, that I only realized as I get older. But to come back to it, I think that people in the institutions of state are trying to do the right thing. However, they will never experience what my dad experienced. And the reason they won't is because they're in the big public sector. So they can hide, they're not gonna get screwed. Nobody's gonna knock on the door and say, you're gone. And I remember also, he worked in this pharmaceutical factory, just a big kind of chemical factory. And I worked there for a summer when I was 15.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking to myself, fuck, this is hard work. Mm hmm, yeah. This is proper work. This is actually backbreaking work. Yeah, yeah, where you're in pain afterward. I was carrying crates and crates of chemicals. I was like 16, so as strong as I was ever gonna be, it was guys at 50 doing this. Guys at 40, guys at maybe close to 60. And they're bent over and they're broken. And they're working for the fucking industrial wage. I remember seeing this, thinking to myself, okay. That's hard work and you don't want to be doing that. So maybe not an obvious economist, there was a certain amount of triggers. I said, ah, maybe economics is more interesting.

• 17:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so these three events that you oversaw and I imagine in some capacity got to weigh in on as much as the Central Bank of Ireland would have been involved in any of them. How did those three events shape your overarching philosophy on economics?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Working inside the great institutions of state, the European Union, the Irish government, my only lesson was that nobody's in control. And that's a very strange thing to arrive that conclusion at the age of about 25.

• 18:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Because most of us watch the telly, you see Jay Powell coming on TV, the head of the Fed. You think, okay, he's in control, he knows what's going on. And once you work in these institutions, that slightly ephemeral, would incredibly satisfy notion that there's somebody in control disappears. And you realize that the world, the economy, the stuff that I do is entirely random.

• 18:50Dax Shepard?

  Can we drill for one second down on that? Cause I just was in a debate with my brother while he was in town. And my brother leans more into conspiracy theories than certainly I do. And we're chatting in the car and I said, David, my thing that I got to push back on a little bit is I've been lucky enough to know a lot of these people that you think are at the head of these conspiracies. And I'm like, no one really has as much control as you think. No one can pull the strings the way, not one person, not one entity, not even a collective of 20 people can. It's way too random and dynamic and there's too many players. And the notion that this person's in control of that, it's quite an illusion. That's just not how it is.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  What did he say to you?

• 19:23Dax Shepard?

  I don't think I sold him on it, no.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  But it's true. So I've always thought that economics is much closer to biology than physics.

• 19:32Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  So biology is messy, evolution is messy. The notion that humanity is an animal is that arrived at the top of this evolutionary chain, it's a mess. It's unpredictable and you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone next year. Economics became captured by, intrigued by, infatuated by physics about fifty or sixty years ago. And the reason I think this is what happened, this is to go back to your story about conspiracies, is that economists always wanted to be clever. And in the nineteenth century, the clever science was biology, so Pasteur and Darwin and evolution. In the twentieth century, the clever science was physics. So Einstein, he was a global superstar. And economists said, oh, why don't we be clever like those guys?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  So they introduced all these mathematics into economics, thinking that the world is predictable.

• 20:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it has the illusion.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  So to come back to your brother. So the idea is, is it possible that one person, one illuminati, run the world? No, because the world is beautifully chaotic.

• 20:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Because we are beautifully chaotic.

• 20:38Dax Shepard?

  And unpredictable.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  One of the joys of doing economics is to realize that at the core of this economics idea is this crazy thing called the human being.

• 20:47Dax Shepard?

  What's interesting is, yes, to your point, the biologists were kings and then the physicists were kings, but there has been this really interesting thing I've seen in the social sciences, which more and more psychologists borrow from economics. All these models of benefit and loss and these games you play, right? They're all kind of game theory-y, they're adjacent to economics, and they're using kind of the mathematical equations to help us get to, of all things, psychological phenomena.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  It's moving in that direction. And psychology, as we know, it's impossible to study the collective human, which is economics is about, without psychology, and particularly group psychology, maybe not individual psychology.

• 21:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, they call it behavioral economics now.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's becoming very vogue at the moment.

• 21:30Dax Shepard?

  It's persuasive, too.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  I think all sciences, pursuits, academia, once it starts to borrow from everywhere else, it's becoming much more interesting.

• 21:40Dax Shepard?

  Agreed.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  So I think that economists should be seen bizarrely in that field as a form of intellectual communication about the world.

• 21:47Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so your book, The History of Money, immediately appeals to me. I am of the opinion that we have this enormous force in all of our lives that everyone is completely uncomfortable to. I share this opinion with Malcolm Gladwell. He and I will lament often when he's on here. It's just like, how bizarre is it that it's the most powerful force in our life and it's almost the most taboo topic to ever approach? Your book is great in so many ways because we're gonna go through, how do we even get here? And I think we should start with how we got here. We should start with the previous most powerful invention of ours, which is fire.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  So I spent thirty years as a monetary economist, professional, private sector, public. And one thing that really struck me, after all this, was that economists didn't really understand money. So economists, my tribe, took it upon ourselves to explain money to the world. And I remember watching this, I said, do they really get it? I mean, the first thing I was always intrigued, I'd never met a rich economist, which was kind of interesting. They talk about money all the time, but they're not good with it.

• 22:49Dax Shepard?

  You say clairvoyance, you don't play the lottery. Well, why aren't we playing the lottery?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Okay, so I thought that was the first thing, that was unusual. And the second thing is, I thought, what does money do to us? Well, it's sexy, it's mendacious, it's dangerous, it's transgressive, it turns us into strange creatures. This is a mad force.

• 23:09Dax Shepard?

  Creates envy and jealousy.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  It creates envy and resentment, but also it creates love and great stuff and imagination and we're animated, it creates great innovation. I thought to myself, there has to be another way of looking at this. I mean, I've been thinking about this for about twenty years, but I was sitting during Covid in the basement, we'd have serious lockdown, and so you're kind of stuck. I thought... Actually, what money is, is this amazing technology that humans invented. We have been a species that has always been defined by mastering technologies, solving problems, figuring shit out. And so if you read anthropology, you realize that our big technology prior to money was fire.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  So we were the species that figured out how to make it, how to keep it, how to use it. And fire has changed us physically, makes our jaws smaller, makes our stomachs more.

• 24:04Dax Shepard?

  Our teeth.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Our teeth. Look at the three of us. We are the evolutionary products of fire.

• 24:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, there will be a lot of people that are anti meat eating that'll go like, well, if you look at our mouths, we don't have the teeth of a carnivore or a proper omnivore. And it's like, yeah, because they didn't have fire, we did.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And we could chew, yeah.

• 24:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  And fire makes stuff soft.

• 24:20Dax Shepard?

  Inedible.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. So that intrigued me, this idea that if the first 300,000 years of our existence as humans was characterized by the relationship between fire and us, this clever ape, which is what we are in effect, and that changed us. So we were a pyrophite species, adapting to and adapted by fire. If you look at the last 5,000 years, and particularly now, we have become, and I made this word up, so for the.

• 24:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 02

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

• 25:29Speaker 02

  You guys are doing a podcast. Rob is from Chicago. What is the technology that binds us all together that's actually money?

• 25:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  And so you can't understand this. Seven billion people on the world. There's no way in the world you can understand us without understanding our relationship with this technology.

• 25:46Dax Shepard?

  You make a great point. The rickshaw driver in Old Delhi. The one thing that assuredly he understands in the same way as the trust fund kid from New York is they both understand money. That's maybe the most unifying thing.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Can we add love to that? That's not a technology, but that's also a universal element if we're adding it.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Well, love is the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning. Love is the thing that keeps us together, but love is even more ephemeral than money as a force.

• 26:15Dax Shepard?

  And it can't meet any of our survival needs other than what it creates, which is a bond where you can create more of us.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  It's the most beautiful thing we have.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  I don't think you can live without it.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  No, we can't.

• 26:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I would die.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  You meet loveless people and you know it.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  You can sense it.

• 26:31Dax Shepard?

  What's exciting for me to talk with you currently about this is we know all of the pejoratives about money, right? Is the root of all evil. It is what makes everyone envious and jealous and all these things. And I think there are increasingly people in this country, which I think is only a gift of being in such a rich fucking country, is that people want to do away with it. Like, they really have this naive sense that it's evil. We need to do away with it. They really need to understand what a tool it's been for us. Probably everything they love about life will find its way down and be distilled into. Money created it in some way. So let's start in Mesopotamia.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Well, just on that point, I was educated by Catholic priests. And they came in and they said, money is the root of all evil. And I thought, well, that sounds okay. I accept that. That sounds cool. But then when you think about it, there was a French sociologist called Marcel Mauss. He said something very interesting from the 19th century. He said, "In order to trade, man must first throw down the spear." And what he meant was that trading and money was an alternative to war. Because in the old days, if I wanted what you had or you had, I'd kill you for it.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Monica, you say, "Well, actually, David, why don't we use this thing called dollars? And you give me $100, and I give you..." And suddenly, you have this technology that allows cooperation.

• 27:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, peace.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  So going back to Mesopotamia, what is absolutely fascinating for me was that civilizations that adopted money.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Particularly the Lydians and then the Greeks. They seem to acquire a competitive advantage over other civilizations. And I thought, why was there like, so for example, how did the Greeks, a tiny little civilization, fight off the Persians, which is a massive empire, for so long? Why did the Greeks break the intellectual ceiling? Why did they come up with rationality? Why did they come up with democracy?

• 28:22Dax Shepard?

  Because they're not genetically smarter or superior.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 28:24Dax Shepard?

  So we need a much different explanation.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  So I think what was actually going on was Greeks were the first monetized society. And the interesting about money is that if you start with a monetized society, then you have to count. Then you have to be precise. Then suddenly, if you're being precise, then you're being rational, you're being logical. So I was always intrigued by why the Greeks moved from myths to logic in about 300 years. Because it's not a long time. Right, right. I argue in the book that one of the reasons they did this is they were the first monetized society. And a monetized society requires precision. And precision requires you to be logical. And logical requires you to be rational. And rational requires you to question.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  The Greeks were the ones that came up with money and coins and coinage. And then the thing about coins, it makes money real. It puts it in your pocket. It's a day-to-day thing. You're starting to be commercial. What I was always intrigued about the Greeks was that they, at the center of the Greek cities, wasn't some big palace or some big wide street for soldiers to go down. Was the market. They put the agora in the center of their society. And once you put the market in the center of your society, everybody can come. Trading, spoofing, talking, all that sort of stuff. Moscow could never have been created by a democracy. Have you been there?

• 29:44Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Every street in Moscow is huge.

• 29:47Dax Shepard?

  For parades.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  For parades. Yeah. For parades, for guys walking down with guns and machine guns and shit like that, right? Whereas. You go to an old Greek town, tiggledee biggledee markets, the whole thing.

• 30:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, David, I did go in 95 to St. Petersburg and driving around the morning, I'm like, where would anyone gather? There's no cafes, there's no supermarkets, all the things that we take for granted. We underestimate that they're also the place that you gather and be social and meet your neighbors. There's nothing to congregate around here.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  And when you gather and you're social, you grumble, you get pissed off, gossip, all the good stuff.

• 30:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you challenge authority.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  I don't like the big guy. Okay, so yeah.

• 30:29Dax Shepard?

  It's by design.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 30:38Dax Shepard?

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• 32:05Dax Shepard?

  to get matched with a TurboTax Full Service expert today. That's TurboTax.com, only available with TurboTax Full Service experts, real time updates, and iOS mobile app. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 32:20Speaker 01

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• 32:30Dax Shepard?

  That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.

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• 32:50Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 32:52Speaker 01

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• 33:01Dax Shepard?

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• 33:21Speaker 01

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• 33:28Dax Shepard?

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• 34:07Dax Shepard?

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• 34:53Speaker 02

  So if you look at these civilizations and people say, well, why did they propel themselves forward so much? Lots of ideas have been thrown around. I think one of the basic ideas is they were monetized and the monetary mind changes the world.

• 35:10Dax Shepard?

  In Anthro, you spend a lot of time on this, which is, once we've moved to an agrarian or farming subsistence mode, you had surplus, which was a new thing. We had never had surplus. We had storage of food. So all of this facilitated specialized labor. Now you could have a cobbler who only did shoes. He didn't have to have an occupation that fed himself. He now could have an occupation where he'd become a specialist. So now he's going to learn everything there is to know about it in a way that someone would never have had the bandwidth to do. And then I'm presuming through monetization, that would have been all done with trading. And now you have calligraphers, you have writers, you have all these people that are dedicated to something other than feeding themselves. So knowledge is exploding, but still the trading system is very inefficient versus a monetary system to handle the trading.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  So the monetary system is the elixir of the trading system. It's what kind of hypercharges the trading system. And it's an amazing intellectual leap in economics. They call it the law of one price, but I don't think that really captures what it is. But the idea that the three of us could align upon a notion of value. So you want this, you want this, I want this. And rather than discuss it and convince each other that we're wrong, we say, okay, here's a piece of coinage, that settles the discussion. So if you think about societies, what is so essential for our urban societies to work is trust. You go to a cafe, you turn up, say, could I have a flat white? The geezer says, yeah, fine.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  He knows nothing about you, Monica. Doesn't know your track record, doesn't know who you are, doesn't know where you're from. But because of the dollar, that sufficient trust between the pair of you to trade. And so you click on your phone and it's done. Money amplifies trust and trust is essential for us to live in complex societies because we have to trust each other. So what you're seeing is the introduction of money had this incredibly constructive way of all humans, strangers dealing with each other. And once you start dealing with strangers, you start sleeping with strangers, you start hanging out with strangers, you start mixing with them, you've got exposed families and

• 37:21Speaker 02

  you're into the world that we begin to understand as the urban society that we all come from.

• 37:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Don't you think there's an argument for it engages distrust? Because if you're making the price, if I'm trying to buy something from you and you're like, it's $10 and I'm like, but it's not, Dax is having this happen right now with the Christmas lights situation.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  What's happening? What's happening? What's happening?

• 37:43Dax Shepard?

  I got a bid to install Christmas lights.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  And it's so much money and he's like, it's not that much, it cannot be that much money to do this.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  To install a few lights.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Right. And so he's like, I don't trust you because you've decided to up the charge, maybe because you know it's me and I have money or whatnot. So I feel like money rules a distrust.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Think about this in another way, Monica. I agree with you, but the price sets the signal to you, I don't trust you. So in the price is all this information. Can you imagine the guy, whoever's installing it, let's say the Christmas guy, Christmas lights guy, okay?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Santa Claus.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Santa Claus, right. So you're thinking, okay, I don't really trust you, but actually what triggers your lack of trust? Is the price. And in the prices, all this information in one number. This is where economics is fascinating. Yeah. So in one number, Monica says, shit, nah, I'm not having that. Then you begin the process of the negotiation. And then you will arrive at this conclusion, whether it's right or wrong. But my point is, it's money expressed in a number, which is the price, that triggers whether or not you trust somebody. And that's a fascinating thing. Yeah, it is. Because it's such an amazing shorthand for everything.

• 38:59Dax Shepard?

  Let's talk, though, a little bit about Mises, because once we have a monetary system, we get immediately some very abstract things built on top of it, which would be credit. The first person in human history to be written about is a guy borrowing, essentially, barley to brew beer.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  So he's a guy called Kushim. So it's the first name we know has been written down was a dude called Kushim.

• 39:21Dax Shepard?

  In the history of the world.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And the reason his name, so you think it's some great god or some great storyteller.

• 39:27Dax Shepard?

  A hero from town.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  No, he was a homebrew hustler. Could easily be from here in LA, okay? A guy doing his thing. And you think, okay, what was he doing? And then you realize that he was borrowing money from somebody else in order to make beer to pay that dude back in a year's time.

• 39:47Dax Shepard?

  Two and a half years?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Two and a half years. The rate of interest was thirty-three percent.

• 39:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 39:52Dax Shepard?

  It seems steep to us now.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  But again.

• 39:54Dax Shepard?

  Tiny window of time, though.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Tiny window of time. And that's what I found fascinating about doing this. I can now feel what Kushim, this guy, felt at night waiting for the harvest. So he needed a good harvest so he could get cheap cereal to pay back the dude. And then you realize money makes the ancient really modern. Because you know, if we look back at ancient history, like old Irish history, there'd be knights and big chieftains. It's not real for us. Whereas Kushim, you can see the dude. He's got a mortgage to pay. He's like, shit, I don't have money. I've got these guys paying, and the taxman on my back. And that's what I found fascinating.

• 40:31Dax Shepard?

  But it introduces this concept, which I love how you articulated it, which is credit is being able to spend the profits of tomorrow today.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:42Dax Shepard?

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

• 40:56Speaker 01

  The potential profits.

• 40:57Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  It's an amazing thing, right?

• 40:59Dax Shepard?

  And we kind of can't grow without that.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Money allows us to travel in time. And that's a really essential thing to grasp.

• 41:06Dax Shepard?

  Think how cool that is.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  So, for example, people listening to the podcast will have a mortgage. They go to the bank, they buy a house. Mortgage, in effect, is painting a picture of who you're gonna be in 30 years' time. And everybody believes this. And the rate of interest is the price at which we decide is the risk. It's an amazing idea. And you're traveling in time all the time with finance. As you said, you're borrowing from tomorrow from an unimaginable tomorrow. And an unpredictable tomorrow for reality today. And that's why credit and interest rates are so much more fascinating than economists talk about. Because what you're actually doing is you're traveling in time. You're projecting into the future.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  The three of us have no idea what's gonna happen in an hour's time. So we're painting a picture of the person we're gonna be over the next 30 years.

• 41:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that opens up the world of possibility.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  In the book, I call money magic.

• 42:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Because it is like magic. And what's more magical is we all suspend our critical faculties to imagine a future with money. And that I find, not just fascinating, it's just I find really electrifying.

• 42:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Minimally, it's very optimistic. Saying, I believe it's going to work out in the end, to the degree that I'll take this risk.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  But this is the thing, all of us humans are programmed to be optimistic. Which is why pessimists are so unusual.

• 42:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's when you have depression, when you think the world will be worse.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Why do you get out of bed in the morning? You get out of bed in the morning because in some little part of your head, you think tomorrow or today is gonna be better than yesterday. It's what doctors call your biological arrogance. Which is that we are going to be better today than we were yesterday. And we know biological arrogance is ridiculous notion because we're all going to die.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're all getting closer the other way.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  We should be biologically pessimistic, but we're not. And that is a beautiful elemental part of humanity. And I think money, to the extent that it is this amazing technology, animates that.

• 43:07Dax Shepard?

  That's why I can't believe we don't talk about it more. It is this incredible power. And it's not without its warts, but I do think people, without the awareness of how much it's given us, and you're only aware of the warts, which those are very visible.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:21Dax Shepard?

  You could really throw the baby out with the bathwater and I'd urge people to really understand the relevance in our life and our culture and our expansion.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  And why it's so emotional.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Money is complex because we are complex, because money is all about humanity. And we're weird, we're odd and we're different. Our brains are weird and therefore money is unusual.

• 43:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so it gives us writing. It gives us this new paradigm of, again, spending tomorrow's earnings today, which allows for growth and investment and hope, and it allows for trust. Okay, so you give us the Greeks, right? And they become probably the best sales pitch for money. What then did the Romans, you say the Roman Empire was built on credit. How did they take what the Greeks did and then expand it?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  If you watch a movie like Gladiator, you know, you think the Romans, it's all about killing Christians or killing animals or fighting, big armies, all that stuff, big muscular guys, beefy guys, buffed up guys, walking around with shields. And then you realize, okay, well, what was actually fueling this whole thing? What were they doing it for? What were the Romans conquering Syria for? What were the Romans conquering North Africa for? Why did the Romans go to Britain? They were looking for resources. Now, why were they looking for resources? Because it was an empire built on credit.

• 44:36Dax Shepard?

  Tomorrow had to be more profitable than today.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So they have this great expression called pecunia non olet, which means money does not smell. And so the Romans had this, and it comes from Vespasian, the emperor, because they actually used to tax. Piss, urine. Oh, what? Because in urine is ammonia, and they use it to clean their teeth. Oh, wow! So you think, now, so you think about it, okay? So you guys have American teeth. I have European teeth. American teeth are whiter, okay? We don't do that shit, okay? So you guys have American teeth.

• 45:13Dax Shepard?

  Austin Powers did a good job at that.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  No, but it's, it's, it's just a thing. Yeah. Europeans don't whiten their teeth, as a general rule, right? But Americans do. Now, why do you do that? Because you wanna look younger, you wanna look better, it's more beautiful. It looks cleaner? It looks cleaner. Yeah, I think it's that. When I see American teeth, I think, hmm, they're cleaner than us.

• 45:33Dax Shepard?

  They're veiner, but they also are cleaner.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  I have a mouthful of those, okay? So you think the Romans thought the same thing. And also, clean teeth are a symbol of youth, just kids with white teeth. And so they understood that in order to make their togus whiter, to clean their togus and their teeth, they needed this chemical. So it became valuable. So they used to have these big latrines, I know this podcast is going in a strange place, but here we go.

• 45:57Dax Shepard?

  No, we love it.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Big latrines, full of piss, which the Romans collected. And then they thought, okay, if piss is valuable, then we should tax piss. Wow. So there was a piss tax agent, right? That was his job, or her job. And fascinatingly, so the Colosseum was built by a guy called Vespasian. And Vespasian was a Roman emperor around seventy-two A.D. And so, of course, you're building the Colosseum, so you're spending money. So what he had to do, when you're spending money, is go to tax broadly. So he thought, let's tax piss as well as everything else. Now, his son, a guy called Titus, who subsequently became an emperor, was one of these sort of aristocratic sort of guys. Titus said to his dad, Vespasian, he said, look, man, we're the Roman Empire.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  We can't be doing something as derogatory, degrading as taxing piss.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  And Vespasian responded, pecunia non olet. Money does not smell. And what he meant by that is people don't care where it comes from, as long as it works. He was slapping down his son, saying, don't you be too uppity. But on the other hand, he was saying, this is an amazing concept. And so the Romans, you see, were this amazing empire of credit. The Romans, like the Greeks, had something very bizarre. They couldn't feed themselves. So the empire was too big. They didn't have enough agriculture. So they had to persuade other people. And they persuaded other people through military occupation and the credit. So what you see is all the credit cycles, like so frequently in 2008, what happened here in America? When the property market goes up and everyone's doing these things.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  The same thing happened, believe it or not, in AD 33, under a different emperor. So what you see is the Romans were like us. They speculated, they bought and sold.

• 47:40Dax Shepard?

  They spent tomorrow's money today, and sometimes tomorrow's money wasn't there.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  They had banking crises, they had their Lehman Brothers moment. That's what intrigued me about writing the book. You realize this is just the story of us.

• 47:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  And we never learn.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:53Dax Shepard?

  So with the obvious success of money up to that point, why, when we enter the Middle Ages, do we see money go away? What happened? Why?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Well, in Western Europe, it disappeared. The fascinating thing is if you look at, for example, Indian or East Asian culture, money existed there all the time. The fascinating thing with the Romans, they traded with Indians, but the Indians didn't want anything that the Romans made, because it was all second grade. So the Indians acquired gold from the Romans, because they said, you know what? We don't want your shit.

• 48:25Dax Shepard?

  Indians have always loved that gold, right?

• 48:26Speaker 02

  We don't want your shitty stuff. Even today, Indians hoard gold.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they love gold culturally, yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Big, big thing. So Pliny the Elder even noticed and remarked that all the Roman gold that they were getting from the Roman gold mines in Iberia, but also their robbing for everybody else, ended up in India. So what you see after the end of the Roman Empire, one of the things never really focused on the end of the Roman Empire was the Roman Empire ended around the same time as... As hyperinflation set in in Rome. So I think one of the reasons the Roman Empire collapsed was that the monetary system broke down. And once the monetary system breaks down, you break down the whole gel of society.

• 49:09Dax Shepard?

  Which we'll get to. We see this pattern emerge in Germany. We see it emerge in Russia.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  It's a well-worn trope, not even a trope, it's a phenomenon, that when you fuck with money, you fuck with people's heads. That's why inflation is so dangerous.

• 49:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, governments collapse.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Just the threat of it, even if it's not there.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's incredibly elemental force in our world. So one of the interesting things about the Dark Ages for me, looking at the history of money, was money disappears. Coinage disappears. People stop inventing, innovating in money. We also stop innovating in art, culture, in literature, in architecture, all these things that are expressions of human dynamism.

• 49:49Dax Shepard?

  We went backwards.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  In Western Europe, in Eastern Europe, in the Ottoman Empire, well, it was Byzantine Empire, and further east, we didn't. But in Western European civilization, we really went backwards. Now, is there a link between the elimination of money and the elimination of culture? I think yes. Money is the gelling agent of civilized urban societies.

• 50:09Dax Shepard?

  And an uptick in oppression and subjugation, because you have now the feudal system takes the place of this monetary system, right?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  So I mean, the last thing you want to be is a peasant born in eighth century Western Europe.

• 50:20Dax Shepard?

  You're an indentured slave. You're never getting out of that. You can't buy your piece of property. There's no, there's no means to do that.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Precisely. I mean, the promise of money today and then, and the reason people want it is that with money, you can change and alter your material situation. You can go from being poor to being rich. And that's what people want.

• 50:39Dax Shepard?

  Without that, it's just hereditary. And you can't break out of those shackles.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  So imagine when money disappears, that hereditary brace or straitjacket becomes even more tight. And then what you see is that when money begins to reemerge from Germany in the 10th century, you begin the process which leads. Inevitably, to the Renaissance, to the Reformation, to European civilization, to European philosophy, all that good stuff.

• 51:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Without money, you don't have it.

• 51:08Dax Shepard?

  Our next resurgence is the Renaissance, and you're in Florence, and they have now the very famous

• 51:13Speaker 02

  In Dante.

• 51:14Dax Shepard?

  Coin.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  The Floren.

• 51:15Dax Shepard?

  Tell us how that money created the greatest explosion of art, of literature.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  It's a fascinating story, which begins in India and is located in the island of Sicily, in the Mediterranean. And in the Mediterranean, Sicily, when the Arab faith, Islamic faith, literally burst out of Saudi Arabia. If you think about it, they conquered all of North Africa and Persia and into India. And what the Arabs were doing, like all conquerors, they were taking good bits of everything. And the bit they took from India, which is fascinating, is they took the concept of zero, the number zero, which Europeans, Greek philosophy, which is where our philosophical hinterland is, was obsessed by proving things. And if you're obsessed by proving things, there's one thing you really, really dislike

• 52:05Speaker 02

  is nothing, the void. And zero is the void. So Greek philosophy closed down notions of the void. Indian philosophy, on the other hand, embraced nothingness.

• 52:17Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Embraced the void, and therefore Indian mathematicians embraced zero. And they exported that to Persia. And the Arabs thought, shit, this is really interesting. So algebra is a Arabic word. You can't have algebra without zero. So they brought this, and the reason they brought it to Sicily is Sicily was this extraordinarily cosmopolitan antropo in the 11th century, where Arabs, Jews, Christians, Byzantines, all lived together, unusual in Europe. And there, a young man, who's now known as Fibonacci, who's the father of mathematics, was the son of a Genovese tax collector. And he went to school in Sicily.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  And he learnt from the Arab traders mathematics, algebra, zero. He brought that to Florence with him. And that created, I know it sounds weird, as accountants are tend to be diminished as not particularly interested.

• 53:17Dax Shepard?

  Creative.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it was accountants that brought this amazing thing called double entry bookkeeping into Europe. And this allowed European traders to begin to figure out sets of accounts. And this is the elixir of commerce, because commerce needs a technology. So imagine zero and double entry bookkeeping is the software.

• 53:40Dax Shepard?

  How does double entry bookkeeping work? Can you tell me in seconds?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, very simple. Debits, credits.

• 53:45Dax Shepard?

  So like a P and L sheet?

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you take your P and L, the podcast. How much we cost, how much money we're raising, how much of the advertising?

• 53:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what's our net?

• 53:52Speaker 02

  And then every week you can say, are we up, are we down? Relative to the next guy, the competition.

• 53:55Dax Shepard?

  It's kind of hard to imagine that wouldn't be obvious. It didn't always exist.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  It didn't always exist.

• 53:59Dax Shepard?

  You take it for granted.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  That like someone invented that.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Somebody invented it. Because it's not a natural way to look at the world. We think it's natural now.

• 54:06Dax Shepard?

  It was so baked in.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  But it came from somewhere. And it came from the Indians who gave it to the Arabs, who gave it to the Europeans, and then the Europeans doubled down on it. So that's what I find fascinating. So in a way, the book is about all these kind of odd things that you think, fuck, that's important.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, with our remaining time, I would love to talk about the.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Sorry, because we are going on.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  No, we do this.

• 54:28Dax Shepard?

  No, it's so fun. But I do want to make sure we get to the destructive power that it holds. And let's talk about revolutions.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, revolutions are usually about money. So the American Revolution was about money.

• 54:41Dax Shepard?

  We didn't want to pay that tax.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  It was about taxation, but it was also about resources. All that sort of stuff. We know all that sort of stuff. You guys started, let's say, setting the rules of the game. Revolutions all. Need to be financed. There was an expression in America, I'm not sure if it's still used, because not worth a continental. Is that still used?

• 55:01Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  It certainly was used up until the sixties. And the continental was the currency of the revolutionary patriots. Which was so devalued, so debunked, so debased, that this American expression, not worth a continental, was something that your fathers or grandfathers would have used all the time. So, because the continental was this shit currency.

• 55:21Dax Shepard?

  And that was the first one we came up with?

• 55:23Speaker 02

  That was your currency. The problem with the American revolution is you had no money. So the Brits squeezed you, so you had no money. So the French lent you a little bit because they wanted you to win, to piss off the Brits.

• 55:32Dax Shepard?

  Because they hate the fucking.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It's very simple, right? But of course, to pay the patriotic army, George Washington had to print a useless currency to keep everything going, called the continental. Because of course, that was the name of the United States before the United States, beginning of the United States. And in seventeen ninety-two, our friend Hamilton comes in and he goes, "No, we've got to have a proper currency. And we're going to call the currency the dollar." And the fascinating thing was the dollar didn't exist in the lexicon of America. Because the dollar is a German expression called a taler. And taler means valley. Most of the silver in Europe was found in a place called Jockumstaler, which is now in Czech Republic, but then was in Germany. So the taler was always seen in Europe as currency.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  The problem for the American revolutionaries was they were using the Spanish silver dollar, which was called the real, which was coming from Mexico. And they were using this as currency here. But even though the American patriots were anti-British, they were English. And their real DNA hated the Spaniards. So they couldn't name the currency after the real, after Spain. Hamilton, Washington, all those guys, so they said, "Fuck it, what name are we going to come up with?"

• 56:45Dax Shepard?

  Who do we not hate currently? The Germans seem pretty annoying.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Ah, the Germans. They'll have their day again, don't worry about it.

• 56:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get there, we'll get there. But today, we like them.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  All these stories are fascinating because... They're the stories of us.

• 56:57Dax Shepard?

  Well, here's where money has to be protected in some sense. So for the people who don't already know, I'm sure they do know. Post-World War I, Germany, as a product of the Treaty of Versailles, they get these incredible war reparations they have to make. And the end result of that is that their money becomes completely valueless, which is how we get Hitler. That's pretty well known. I didn't realize until your book, which is fascinating, is that Lenin, after the 1917 Russian Revolution, he said, how do we get rid of all remnants of the Russian government to now try this experiment? Communism, we must completely annihilate the currency.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's what they did.

• 57:38Dax Shepard?

  And so he just printed all day long as much money as he could to make it fucking useless. Think of the power. That's how that revolution stuck.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  That's how that revolution was successful.

• 57:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  That's the interesting thing.

• 57:50Dax Shepard?

  Through money.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  When we read about the Russian Revolution, Trotsky and the Red Army and the battles and the White Russians and the Red Russians. Actually, what Lenin did was so much more destructive. Because he said, okay, money exists in people's heads and stability exists in people's heads and the system exists in people's heads. So if I can destroy the very, very elemental tool of the system, I will destroy the system and they destroy the ruble. So suddenly you have no savings, you have no income. You guys don't know how much money you have, if you have money. And he destroyed the Russian society from inside out.

• 58:28Dax Shepard?

  It's the most destabilizing thing you could do.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  The fascinating thing is all he did was destroy the assumption in people's heads.

• 58:33Dax Shepard?

  Got them to not believe in the story.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  But that disproves that one person can't have a huge impact. That's the opposite of the conspiracy theory.

• 58:42Dax Shepard?

  You're right. If that person is totalitarian and can turn the printing press on, you're right, that person. But they can destroy Russia. They can't destroy the world.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  And it continues to. It's still this much later.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  But you forget that Russia is the biggest country in the world.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Physically, it's an enormous country.

• 58:56Dax Shepard?

  Most conspiracy theorists think there's a world cabal.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  No, there's not.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Right. I know. I'm just saying.

• 59:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  There are individuals in history that do have an impact.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  And Lenin was unbelievably intelligent person.

• 59:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's so clever to think about.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Scary as hell. You don't want that guy running your country at all.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  It's psychologically brilliant.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  And Hitler learned from that.

• 59:14Dax Shepard?

  Talk about the airdrop that Hitler was gonna have.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  So 1941, the Luftwaffe, the Battle of Britain.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  The Germans had conquered France, they'd conquered Netherlands, they'd conquered Belgium, conquered Poland. They thought to themselves, okay, Britain, yeah, it's an island, but they won't fight. The Brits are obsessed by their empire. That's what's really important to them. And of course, the Brits fought. And they were like, whoa. And the Brits beat them in the air. So they thought, we can't beat these guys in the air. We can't really invade them. What are we gonna do? So you forget that Hitler lived through the Weimar Republic. So he saw the destruction of German democracy from the destruction of German money, from the hyperinflation. He thought, okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna replicate that in Britain. So how are we gonna do this? Well, he said, we need to have the world's

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  greatest and still today largest counterfeiting operation. What? So this actually happened. This is the real true story.

• 1:00:11Dax Shepard?

  Listen to this, Monica.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  In 1941, Hitler and Himmler got together and they said, what we're gonna do is we are going to have the largest forgery operation ever in history. And we're gonna forge British banknotes, five pound notes, and we're gonna airdrop them over the UK. And we are going to destroy the spirit of the British people by destroying their money. Because this is what happened to us in Germany. And that's why we are here. They figured out the reason we're here with our crazy Nazi regime is because money was destroyed. And so, in an amazing story, the Nazis sent out to concentration camps all over Europe flyers that they needed, artists, mathematicians, printers, mechanical, people who were good

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  with paper, all that sort of stuff, right?

• 1:00:58Dax Shepard?

  Even to the degree where they had the serial numbers, correct?

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  The serial numbers. So they needed mathematicians, the whole thing. And so they went out and they found 127, I believe, Jewish men who had been artists, bankers, serial numbers. In the camps. And they brought them to a place called Sachsenhausen, which is a concentration camp outside of Berlin. It's only about 15 miles outside Berlin. So they took them from Auschwitz. They took them everywhere. And they brought them there and their job was to break the Bank of England. And they started in nineteen forty two. By nineteen forty three, they were ready to go.

• 1:01:32Dax Shepard?

  They had printed, can I say, the equivalent of ten billion dollars.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  What? Oh, my god.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  It was a hundred and eighty four million pounds.

• 1:01:40Dax Shepard?

  In forty two.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  The long and the short of it, they came up with the currency. What was most difficult for them was to figure out the paper upon which the currency. They thought that the paper came from Malaya, or what we now call Malaysia. But in actual fact, British currency was closed, it was washed and pulped, washed and pulped, washed and pulped and washed and pulped. And they figured that out. The watermark, the serial numbers, that wasn't the hard thing. The hard thing was the texture. So what they did was a Nazi turned up with a bucket load of this money in Switzerland in nineteen forty three, and he went ironically to the bank I used to work for, UBS, Union Bank of Switzerland, which is kind of weird. He said to the Swiss bankers, I've just done a trade in Germany. I think this is counterfeit money. Can you check it for me? So the Swiss bankers checked it, their big headlights, and they came back about a week.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  I said, no, this money is cool.

• 1:02:27Dax Shepard?

  They passed the ultimate.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  The guy then doubled down. He said, look, I know you say it's real, but I'm really suspicious. Could you possibly send this to the Bank of England to make sure that this is real? So the Swiss bankers sent the batch to the Bank of England. The Bank of England came back a couple of days later and said, yeah, this is stuff. We printed this money. They said, this is our shit. Therefore, the forgers had got it right. So the guy goes back to Sachsenhausen and says, we're in business. And they printed. And of course, the problem was, the idea was to airdrop this stuff over Britain in nineteen forty three, nineteen forty four. But by that stage, the Germans were losing the war in Russia and they couldn't risk Luftwaffe

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  planes because Luftwaffe planes were fighting in Russia. So they didn't have the planes. So they were going to airdrop the whole thing. It was called Operation Heinrich. Google it. It's an amazing story.

• 1:03:24Dax Shepard?

  And that would have been, even Churchill would have had a hard time straightening that out.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  What happens is, if you imagine, if you walk out in the street here and dollar bills come out of the sky.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Money everywhere, yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  You're going to put a few in your back pocket.

• 1:03:35Dax Shepard?

  And if it's indistinguishable, I mean, that could have been a tipping point.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  The interesting thing is, they had the money. So then what did they do with it? The Nazis. So the last two years of the war, the Nazis bought all the art, bought all this counterfeit money, so much so. That they bought Mussolini out of captivity. So Mussolini was kidnapped by Italian communists at the end of the war. The Germans didn't capture him. They paid for him and they paid for him with counterfeit British notes.

• 1:04:00Dax Shepard?

  So this money, is it in museums? I mean, has it been accounted for? Does it exist?

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  The amazing thing is the Bank of England at the end of the war was so worried about this money. So worried were they about the accuracy and the precision of these German counterfeits. And they knew there was millions of pounds out there that they retired all their five pound notes.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's smart redesign.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  And they redesigned the whole thing.

• 1:04:20Dax Shepard?

  Get rid of the fiver.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Because they were so aware that this was out there and it could undermine sterling. And of course, sterling was the dollar of the time. Sterling was the reserve currency of the world.

• 1:04:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 1:04:32Dax Shepard?

  That's why you need to think about it in this way. That's why you need to take inflation seriously.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Crypto seriously. You need to take all this stuff seriously.

• 1:04:39Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:04:42Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Thank you to our presenting sponsor HP for supporting this episode. Their HP Smart Tank printer is the last printer you'll ever need. Oh, here we go, Monica. With a refillable ink tank and up to three years of ink included. So you get thousands of pages of cartridge free printing. Hallelujah. To learn more, search for HP Smart Tank. We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff. But there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends.

• 1:05:25Dax Shepard?

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• 1:06:08Dax Shepard?

  So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.

• 1:06:17Dax Shepard?

  We get support from ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. So I went down this rabbit hole the other day on real holiday jobs that exist and I couldn't stop. Somebody out there is hiring a ham glazer, a professional ham glazer. Another place is hiring a lead elf, implying a whole hierarchy of elves I had never even considered. Here's the thing, these jobs need real skills. People like that are hard to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/dax. Plus ZipRecruiter has a new feature that

• 1:06:58Dax Shepard?

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• 1:07:24Dax Shepard?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

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• 1:08:13Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds once it's out into the world. You gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 1:08:29Dax Shepard?

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• 1:09:03Dax Shepard?

  Let's end on crypto.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  What we're talking about there is Hitler forging money, basically having his own printing press, not in all senses, but in a sense, all crypto is trying to do is replace the United States dollar.

• 1:09:14Dax Shepard?

  I think the distinction people need to think about is money conventionally has been state ordained.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Money is state.

• 1:09:21Dax Shepard?

  Yes. So crypto is private.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  So this is the key thing. So for example, what gives the United States dollar its potency at the end of the day is the fact that the United States government requires you to pay your taxes in dollars. So the dollar is soldered on to the American economic system. I can't pay for a beer in euros here. I can't go to a bar. I can't do it. I need dollars. The American dollar and the United States system are one and the same thing, and they are provided by the state, a state that whether you like it or not, is democratically elected. You have the institutions, the Federal Reserve. So money is public. The American dollar is a public good issued by the American state. Crypto is private money issued by private individuals and.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Private money means that the people who really, really benefit are the people who print it.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  It's a business.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  It's a business. So it's not actually money.

• 1:10:18Dax Shepard?

  I'll go further. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's not even a business.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:10:21Dax Shepard?

  It only works if people are buying into it.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  So for example, you say that.

• 1:10:24Dax Shepard?

  You get death threats.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Think of money.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Well, that's also the way money works. It only works if everyone buys in, but we just have.

• 1:10:31Dax Shepard?

  But it is backed by the state and it is related to something. It's related to GDP. It's related to debt.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  It's related to everything you've been talking about.

• 1:10:41Dax Shepard?

  Interest rates. There's a ton of mechanisms to help keep it a trustworthy story.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Three months ago, I was in Kenya. You fly into Kenya, fly into Nairobi, you get into the back of a cab. Taxi driver talks to you about dollars. What's the value of the dollar? So why is that? It's because the dollar is this universal currency that everyone understands the value of. In the book, I compare money to the language. What gives money its potency is its usability, that we all use it.

• 1:11:08Dax Shepard?

  How many people does it unite? That's its total power.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  The reason the English language is interesting is that the three of us can communicate using a language that maybe our grandparents didn't speak, like in my case. So we use this language as a technology so we can communicate together. English, if you were to look at it now, it's not the easiest grammatically. It's not the easiest phonetically. It's kind of weird. Night is N I G H T.

• 1:11:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, bullshit.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Don't get dacty.

• 1:11:34Dax Shepard?

  No, dyslexic.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  N I G H T.

• 1:11:36Dax Shepard?

  I could go on for three hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  So then A nit is K N I G H T, right? Okay. If you were to invent a language today that the world would use to communicate, it wouldn't look like English.

• 1:11:48Dax Shepard?

  Although, can I add one thing? We were in India or at Microsoft, learning about their AI. English is the most efficient language for AI.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Is it?

• 1:11:58Dax Shepard?

  It costs 40% more to have AI working in Spanish. It is a very concise language.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 1:12:05Dax Shepard?

  Weirdly now, in this age.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 1:12:08Dax Shepard?

  It has a value, which is you need less syllables in data entry to convey. It costs more to run models than other languages.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  So if you think the English language is the default language of the world, the dollar is the default currency of the world. So the way I look at crypto, crypto is like Esperanto.

• 1:12:24Dax Shepard?

  What's Esperanto?

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Esperanto was a language that was invented in Europe. Between the wars, that was going to be the unifying language. Esperanto is incredibly important to people who speak it, but the rest of us don't give a shit.

• 1:12:35Dax Shepard?

  It's still being spoken?

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  No, it's only academic, it's only academic right now, right? Crypto is the esperanto of money. Incredibly important to people who own Bitcoin, and they'll tell you. You'll sit in a bar and they'll tell you.

• 1:12:47Dax Shepard?

  No, it's a religion, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the rest of us don't give a shit.

• 1:12:49Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  You go down to the pub, you go down to the grocery store, give me this stuff in dollars. My point is that it's a private scam, which is a function of social media, tech bros, young males, all that stuff.

• 1:13:03Dax Shepard?

  People with too much money that are constantly looking to diversify and inflation proof.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  People with no money who want.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  That's why, it's preying on vulnerable people who need money.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  So it's the really rich and the really poor.

• 1:13:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's either or.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  The rest of us don't care.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and all of its appeal is all of the issues with it, right? So it's deregulated, there's no government oversight. But then when it's stolen, which so many people have had it stolen, there's no one to pick up the phone and call. There's no investigative body that's gonna go out and find your money.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Remember, it was meant to be anti-establishment. Who are the biggest traders in crypto now? Wall Street.

• 1:13:33Dax Shepard?

  Governments have been, the hoodwinked into it.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  The Trump family are now printing their own shit.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:01Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  We know that the vast, vast, vast majority of crypto, and I know Bitcoin, it's not crypto, it's the crypto family, right? It's the alternative money. The vast majority of this is still for criminal behavior. We know this, number one. Number two, the vast use of stable coins.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Is trading between people who already own stable coins. It hasn't broken out into the world. I think we are looking at maybe the most spectacular heist foisted upon people that we have ever seen.

• 1:14:53Dax Shepard?

  It's a pyramid scheme. It's a multi-level marketing scheme. It's a promise of riches for nothing. It's all there and someone's feelings are really hurt right now and I get it. People have made a lot of money on it, so I don't hate on them. I understand the appeal, but ultimately someone's going to hold them back and it's not going to be the rich people.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Making a lot of money on something that's speculative isn't a sign of reality. It's part of the speculative mania that makes us human. AI, the same sort of thing. What's going to happen when Nvidia or whatever that's share price collapses? It's just a speculative thing. We are in a casino world.

• 1:15:30Dax Shepard?

  By the way, we already watched NFTs come and go.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  Yes, I remember them.

• 1:15:33Dax Shepard?

  Talk about confirmation bias. That doesn't fit into my narrative. So I would just ignore the fact that there was billions of dollars lost in NFTs and that that's not even a thing people talk about. It'll go away like that.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  It'll be the same.

• 1:15:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Now, will digital currencies matter? Of course they will. And the states, the central banks will issue digital dollars. I've been in America for two days. I have not seen a dollar note.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  It's all cash.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  Right, you know, it's all cash. So I've been here, I haven't seen a dollar note. At the end of the day, the Federal Reserve will issue digital dollars and that's it.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  But isn't that what we already have?

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  We have that already. We have that already and we're going to migrate towards this. And some people want cash because they don't want to be traced. But as a general rule, the idea that some private tech bro is going to be issuing the money.

• 1:16:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I get that you don't trust the government. I get that you don't, but the notion that you trust an individual even more is fucking preposterous.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Hasn't that been proven a million times over? I don't understand that.

• 1:16:30Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  It's been a blast. Money attacks, I could be here all day.

• 1:17:01Dax Shepard?

  As could we. We've been policing ourselves.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Thank you guys so much.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at.

• 1:17:16Speaker 04

  How was the party?

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  There was a party last night. Rob and I were both there.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Rob, you better get behind a microphone so I can hear your update too.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  He was mingling and schmangling.

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  Oh, I bet he made a lot of connections.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  It was really fun. So yeah, last night. Well, when this comes out. All will be over. We'll know the results.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  All will be revealed, as they say.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  All will be revealed. But um, yeah, this week has a lot of events leading up to the Golden Globes. Last night was a Spotify by the Hollywood Reporter party.

• 1:17:49Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  And uh, and it was really fun. It was really fun. Many friends of the pod there. Saw Kumail.

• 1:17:56Speaker 04

  Oh, you did?

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  Dingles.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  And uh, Mel Robbins was there.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  Okay, great.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Friend of the pod, Amy Poehler was there, but I did not get to see her. She was walking out as I came in. I was sad to have missed her. Um, I brought Anna as my plus one and she's the best plus one because she's so fun.

• 1:18:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, and she loves free drinks.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was great. So much fun. They threw a really good party. Um, of co- oh, Jackie was there. Hung out a lot with Jackie Tone.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  Jackie Tone?

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:28Speaker 04

  Always a good time.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  And Joe. Jackie and Joe.

• 1:18:30Speaker 04

  Jackie and Joe, always a good time. Jackie and Joe.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a song in there for sure.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  Joe.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Um, now.

• 1:18:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Of course. Of course, things can't be.

• 1:18:42Speaker 04

  Complaints.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Not complaints. These are not complaints ever. These are like just insecurities.

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, uh huh.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  That I'm just, I'm just, you know, right with. So, you know, we're invited to this and you can't go, you're sick.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll get to that.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Okay, and we get there and Jordan, our old friend at Spotify, credible man and father.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  And husband.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  And husband.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  And son.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  I don't know how he is as a son. I can't speak to that.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Because his mom is Tom Hanson's partner and I've met her and she adores her Jordan.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Oh, that's nice. Anyway, Jordan's the best and he, so you know, he was arranging with me beforehand and he was like, do you want a car? Do you want a whatever?

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  And then he was like, let me, you know, tell me when you're pulling up. So I did. He's there and he was like, let's expedite you through the carpet. And they had asked me before, they're like, I just spit. I'm cutting that.

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I couldn't see it from here. And I got an eye exam yesterday, so I would have been able to see it.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Okay. Um, now people will rewind.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 1:20:19Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Cause then he was gone, and Anna was gone, and then I'm just standing, like, I don't know where, I don't know what to do now.

• 1:20:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  So then, from the side, they're like, go this way, and I was like, okay, and then I'm still standing.

• 1:20:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  I end up on the carpet, I'm taking pictures, but then there's nobody.

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  Really quick, before we move on from pictures, what's your comfort level during those pictures?

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  It's so awkward.

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  It's rough. It's fucking rough.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  I wanna look so cool, and I just don't, and that's fine, like, it's fine.

• 1:20:46Speaker 05

  You were gone so long, too, cause we ran into Anna while you were at the carpet, and she thought you were lost.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  She was, in a sense.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  I was, because, because, uh, Jordan was like, I'll meet you on the end of that carpet, so I was like, looking for him, because there was all these outlets, and I knew I was supposed to do them.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  But I didn't know how, cause I didn't have anyone there to help me.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  So then I just walked off the carpet.

• 1:21:15Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  So I didn't do any of those things I was supposed to do.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  And I felt really like.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  This is the thing I'm always.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Such out of water.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  This is the thing I, I talk about a lot in here, which is like, it's difficult for me, and I'm enormous, and.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  You mean, you mean tall wise?

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  Navigating the scenario, I'm a very big man who is not easily rattled, and as I always bring up the like, up-fronts when you go to New York, and it's like, here's this five foot one, eighteen year old.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  Woman from a CW show and she has to walk this gauntlet of all these maniacs.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  And like it rattles me and I so yeah, you were one of them. You're just this.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Just this little mouse.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  This little mouse scurrying around the red carpet. Where do I stand?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 04

  What smile? Am I supposed to smile or look seductive?

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  I mean, even the.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  Playful or panty dropper?

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  I did the pictures, which I was like, good, like, that's fine. But it was more like the outlets, which I I knew I had said I would do. So I felt like I'm I know I'm supposed to. But nobody's he and someone was like, where's your publicist? And I was like, I don't have one.

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Help. So I just scurried off my little mouse self, scurried off.

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  And then, uh, and then I entered the party.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Well, rest assured, on Sunday, we'll be together.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  And um.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  And we will have a publicist. Actually, we'll have a few, so.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  That will be, um, better. And I'm glad we're gonna be doing it together, but I don't lose me because remember I'm so small.

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  No, I'm gonna have two of you little people.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are.

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  So I gotta like bounce back and forth.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  You have a lot to handle.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  It's gonna be a busy Sunday for me on that red carpet.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. Anywho, so but it was really fun.

• 1:22:56Speaker 04

  Oh, good.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  And you know, it is fun for me to get to wear cute outfits.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  Yes, you love it.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  I do love that part.

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  Dream come true. They did have Ted Seeger's.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  Fuck, I can't believe I wasn't there.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  I know. And they have, I told you this already, but they had little, um, appetizer bites named after us.

• 1:23:14Speaker 04

  Fuck.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Yours was named, um. Yours was named Dax's Michigan Strip.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Was it a steaky?

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a seared petit filet steak atop a Chris Palenta square gluten free.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. Yeah, I feel lousy now. I there's no possible way it could have gone. Um, cuz I was like, I gotta go. I love Jordan and I and I owe him so much and I gotta go. And then, um, yeah, I got sick on December fifteenth. And as I've already talked about, I went to New York with my brother and just went hard, hard, hard. I've been never shook this cold, even until I got back.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  And then my sweet, sweet friend from London, England.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Jethro came to visit and he's staying at the house and we've been hanging out and sauna-ing together.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  And, uh, he hit me, I guess, Tuesday morning. He's like, oh, my God, dude, I feel so terrible. I hope I didn't get you sick. And I'm like, I'm already sick. I probably got you sick. I'm sorry. But no, no, no, no. It definitely had a new flavor.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  He brought in a new strain.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  And some second virus entered the scenario. Two front wars, they would say.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  And you're in the sauna, it's like you definitely got it.

• 1:24:23Speaker 04

  And we were kissing and talking and yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  But the sauna is really how it happened.

• 1:24:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  So now, yeah, now you have a new.

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  So really, it started going downhill and I was kind of ignoring him. Oh, it's the same thing I already had. No. It got much, much worse.

• 1:24:38Speaker 04

  So yesterday I woke up and I was like, I'm in trouble. I'm in, I'm in trouble. Let's hope this thing passes.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  And we have a big weekend.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  Huge weekend. And I had made a commitment to my sweet oldest girl that I was gonna take her to the go-kart track. Now, backstory about the go-kart track. I took her one time, like, three years ago, with my fantasy of her starting to race go-karts. I took her to K1, she rode our first session with the juniors. And these boys were passing her a bunch. And she thought she was terrible and she just didn't want to do it again.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  I was like, fuck, man, that, there goes that dream. So anyways, out of the blue, I was like, if you ever want to go to the go-kart track, I want to go. Oh, I want to go. Okay, so the whole ride there, she's like, I go, you're gonna ride in the adults. You're tall enough now, you're, you're five feet, so you can ride in the adult karts. No, I want to ride in the junior karts. I'm like, we're gonna ride together. We're gonna do this as a team. I got you, I'm gonna ride behind you, so no one can hit you. Like, I'm gonna be running buffer behind you.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  She's like, I don't know. We check in, and she's even trying to talk the workers into putting her into the junior.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  She's going with me in the adults. So, there's two different tracks at K1. One's, one's bigger and one's smaller. So the first session, we're on the big track, and there was four other strangers out there, adults.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:51Speaker 04

  And first lap was a little wobbly, shaky. Second lap, she started to get the, the feel, she started getting comfortable. By the end of this 10-minute session, she was like, totally comfortable in the car. We got out and she was like, elated, happy.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  And you get times. And there were six adults.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  And she came in third.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  And her time was thirty-four, okay? You gotta remember thirty-four. So, we come off the track and now I wanna teach her a little bit about the strategy. So I go to the big map of the track on the wall and I start explaining to her how to go through corners. And I like explain the whole thing to her. I don't take a ton of time. Maybe we're looking at that map for ten minutes. I'm explaining stuff.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  Then we go to a brand-new track. Um, the smaller track. And I start behind her. And within one lap, this fucking kid is on the race line the entire time. I'm like, oh, my god, did she get that quick? I was like smiling ear to ear behind her.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Speaker 04

  It was so fun. She like really loved the second session. We go back to the big track for our third one. And as we're walking to the thing, I said, well, what's our goal? And she said, I don't know. And I said, I think you gotta break thirty if you started at thirty-four.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  Break thirty. She's like, oh, thirty, that's four seconds.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 04

  So, we get on the track and we're going. And she's just fucking. Monica, I'm not, I'm not like proud-dadding it. It's bonkers how in natural.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  We get off the track, twenty-seven.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:24Speaker 04

  And I gotta tell you, when I go with the boys.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Seven seconds speeding.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  When I go with all the guys.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Speaker 04

  And I, and I generally am in first. I pulled up those old ones, cause I can look at them on my email. I'm running twenty-fours. I'm winning with twenty-fours. And she was running twenty-seven on her first day.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  Always I happy. And then I was completely dead.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  Cycling through fever, chill, fever, chill, fever, chill. And, uh, and then I felt terrible that I didn't go to that party. But I woke up and I have to say, definitely on the upswing. I was like, okay, I'm done with the fever part, I can tell.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Time to move the body a little bit and get going. You know, you get really upset when I

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  I mean

• 1:28:05Speaker 04

  Try not to get mad at me.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm a little mad at you in the way that you would be mad at me and you do get mad at me. If I'm like, oh, my back hurts. I'm like, why aren't you

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  drinking water or taking this? And, and you get mad at me and I said, don't get mad at me. And you said, well, you're not taking care of my friend.

• 1:28:22Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  That's what you say to me.

• 1:28:23Speaker 04

  But could you find, all I'll ask is if you could find a scientific paper or study that says you shouldn't work out while you're sick. And if that's the truth, I'll abide by it. But I don't think that's the truth.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Okay, it is. And so doctors, I'd like you to weigh in and I'll also find some studies on it.

• 1:28:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Um, you can do some light.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I went pretty light today.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  But I mean, no, like walk, like you can like take a walk.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  But if your body is trying to recover, it, it needs to.

• 1:28:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I have to manage two things. I have to manage the illness and then I have to manage my temperament and I just was completely stagnant for two days and that'll fuck with me. So that's also for me.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  I know, but then you're just gonna be sick for like eight months then. Which is not like you have to give your body some time to really recover.

• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:29:20Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by HP. My mental to do list is already full. Uh, fix something around the house, refill prescriptions. Remember to text someone back. Keep track of a million little life things. The last thing I want on that list is, oh, don't forget printering.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  No, it's horrible.

• 1:29:37Dax Shepard?

  It's the bane of everyone's existence. What if you could just take that off your list for years?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  The dream.

• 1:29:43Dax Shepard?

  That's the idea behind the HP Smart Tank printer from America's most trusted printer brand. Instead of those tiny cartridges that always seem to run out at the worst time, the HP Smart Tank uses a refillable ink tank and it comes with up to three years of ink included. It's built to be simple. The easiest tank printer you'll ever use with the best print quality, period. It's the last printer you'll ever need. I've definitely been in this situation where something that should take two minutes turns into a whole thing. Like I need to print tickets and get out the door, but then I realize I'm out of ink and have to deal with it right then. With the HP Smart Tank, that's just not something you're dealing with all the time. It's one of those things that just works when you need it to.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:30:23Dax Shepard?

  If you want to take one more thing off your mental to do list, search for HP Smart Tank.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Now, my snack was called Monica's Standards. And I loved that.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  I wish I got that. What's the standards part?

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  I have high standards.

• 1:30:45Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Doi.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  You think that's obvious?

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:30:49Speaker 04

  I think of music, standards, Sinatra. I'm like, do you have favorite standards?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  What did you think, Rob?

• 1:30:54Speaker 05

  I got it.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Okay. Um, because it was Mel's Permission Slip, Amy's Yes And, Dax's Michigan Strip, Monica's Standards. I think it was clear.

• 1:31:06Speaker 04

  Are you going to do the update, or do you want me to? I think you should read it in its entirety.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:12Speaker 04

  This is one of the funnest ding ding dings we've had on the show, for me.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  This is really fun. Also, there's another one. This is a separate thing. What did you send me, Rob?

• 1:31:22Speaker 05

  Oh, someone sent pictures of the Kmart thing.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, your shirt. The shirt I got you for your birthday.

• 1:31:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Um, someone sent an email. I'll pull it up. This is from Rob. So this person, Stephanie.

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Reached out. She said, "Listening to the podcast yesterday and heard Dax open his birthday gift for Monica. My first job out of Ohio State University was traveling manager for the KKRAD, Kmart Kids Race Against Drugs Program." Me?

• 1:31:53Speaker 04

  I said Sinbad on... So there's a photo up now of Sinbad on a lawn tractor that they put a fake hood scoop on, and it's all stickered up with the Kmart.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  I guess this is a ding ding ding.

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  I wonder if this program ever, like, it'd be impossible to, um, measure it, but do you think it kept a single kid off drugs?

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 04

  You do?

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  I, I really was affected by the DARE program. Um, I never did drugs.

• 1:32:20Speaker 04

  Do you think because of the DARE program?

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Um, "Me and 60-plus other postgrads got paid to travel the country for six months setting up this giant racetrack in Kmart parking lots."

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm gonna love this.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. She said, "It was a party. We would give kids the opportunity to race a slick-looking lawnmower, and one year later, a golf cart made to look like a Ford Mustang, thanks to sponsorship from Ford. We love Ford. We love Jim Farley, friend of the pod."

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  I'm going to Detroit next week to unveil the new Red Bull race car. And I'm gonna hang with Max Verstappen.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  And Jim Farley.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Fun.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  And, uh, Hajar, their new driver. And I think Ricardo.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Oh, fine.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Well, we love Jimmy. He's a nice man.

• 1:33:02Speaker 04

  We do.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Friend of the pod.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  And I got some sweet Fords I love, too.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Okay, for each child that went through the race, Kmart donated $5,000 to the local dare program. All the kids and volunteer staff received a free t-shirt like the one Monica got tax for his birthday. A lot of celebrities joined the cause from city to city, including Dick Clark, Mary Lou Retton, Paul Newman. You have the same shirt as Paul Newman.

• 1:33:25Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Kathy Island Shaq, Mary from Gilligan's Island.

• 1:33:30Speaker 04

  You notice there's no pictures of Shaq in any of those vehicles. Not a fucking chance.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  He can't fit in there.

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  Mini Mustang.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Friend of the pod. Anyway.

• 1:33:39Speaker 04

  That's adorable.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  I know. I thought that was so cute.

• 1:33:42Speaker 04

  But alas, that is not the...

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  That's not the ding ding ding.

• 1:33:45Speaker 04

  That's so cute. That's... Thank you for sending that.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

  But this, and I'm gonna remind people because they didn't listen to the fact check for Walter Isaacson. We discussed our flight home from Nashville. You were seated next to a cute boy. That cute boy started interacting a lot with the gal across the aisle from him. Then they...

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  I thought it was a meet cute.

• 1:34:02Speaker 04

  That was a meet cute. I was suggesting it was... They were already lovers. And now we received this email.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Yes. Emma sent me a text. She said, "The girl you saw holding hands with that guy on the plane is an armcherry," and wrote into AA.

• 1:34:19Speaker 04

  By luck, she happened to hear that fact check.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's a good listener.

• 1:34:23Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  She said, "I was listening to the Walter Isaacson fact check, and I am the girl from the January 3rd Nashville to LAX meet cute. I heard Monica recount the meet cute she thought she was witnessing between me and my boyfriend, which is now a very fun, treasured memory for us. After listening, I felt bad, and I wanted to figure out some way to let her know he didn't pick someone else over her in that moment. I checked the website as a long shot to see if there was a quick way to send an email and saw meet cute as a prompt, so hopefully this gets to her in some way. The full story from the other side of the aisle." My boyfriend and I were supposed to fly back from Nashville to LA on January 2nd. Last minute, we were able to snag a reservation at the restaurant Locust on the night we were supposed to leave, so we decided to pivot the flight to January 3rd. Rob just made a noise, so that must be-

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  He just came. Locust is great.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  I'm glad they got to go. We had a mix-up when rebooking our seats, so instead of sitting next to one another, we were sat across the aisle from one another. My boyfriend saw Dax get on the plane and tap me because he knows Armchair is my favorite podcast. While I was trying to act cool, the girl sitting next to me struck up a conversation, which is why my boyfriend wasn't talking to me and didn't appear to be with me when Monica first sat down. When I went to talk to him, I saw Monica sitting there. In an effort to give her privacy, I started texting my boyfriend rather than leaning into the aisle to talk. I also think people were still boarding the plane, so it was difficult to talk anyway. The irony is that while Monica was building this scenario out, I was thinking two things. One, Sim, I just downloaded all of season 5 of Friends to watch on this flight.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  I was locked into Friends and he was locked into his book. Two, I've listened to the podcast for years, and so I've heard Monica talk about meet-cutes. Immediately when I saw her sitting next to him, I was hoping she wasn't thinking about this as a meet-cute, because she deserves one, and my boyfriend is a little oblivious and wouldn't notice if she flirted with him. It was also hard enough for me to get attention on that flight. That said, Sam was looking great, that must be the boyfriend, and reading, so I wouldn't have blamed her. I had a crush on him too. I've listened to the podcast for years and realized I was being a little over the top, thinking this person I've never met would think about a meet-cute with my boyfriend, when in reality, the girl is really just trying to sleep on this late-night flight. I did ask him to hold my wine when I went to the bathroom, and we did hold hands during the turbulence, which there was a lot of, because I've become a bit of a nervous flyer.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  I've been with my boyfriend for three years, but it made me feel so happy to hear someone I think of as an absolute badass, an incredible businesswoman, and someone I am personally grateful for with Race to 35, describe our interactions. You don't typically get to hear unfiltered versions of how strangers observe you. It's a very interesting feeling, driving home from work, turning on a podcast, and hearing that someone perceived your actions as falling in love. I also have to thank Monica and Dax. In a lot of instances, it would have been very easy to try and make yourself or a friend feel better by cutting down the other girl in this scenario. I respect them both for fostering a story that built us up. A story that my boyfriend and I both feel represents our love.

• 1:37:18Dax Shepard?

  I love that email.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  It's so good. I love it. Shout out to what I still consider a meet cue.

• 1:37:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Now it's a meet cue between me and her.

• 1:37:29Dax Shepard?

  There we go. It is.

• 1:37:32Speaker 05

  This is the Locust Dinner.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Oh, you still think?

• 1:37:35Dax Shepard?

  He's still back there rubbing himself.

• 1:37:38Speaker 05

  Their dessert? This is like a shaved ice with whipped cream on top.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Is it an egg on top?

• 1:37:43Speaker 05

  No, it's, looks like an egg, but it's an insane dessert. I'm still thinking about that dessert, yeah.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's a carbuncle.

• 1:37:51Dax Shepard?

  Carbuncle?

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  It does look delicious. Anyway, that's it.

• 1:37:56Dax Shepard?

  That's a, that was a good update.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a really good update. Okay, so, yeah, let's do some facts. Okay, David. So he said air travel is new, newish, like we forget, you know?

• 1:38:09Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  And so then I was looking that up. We all know that the Wright Brothers had a successful flight. That was in 1903, Kitty Hawk.

• 1:38:18Dax Shepard?

  Great book, by the way, David McCullough. He's got a Wright Brothers book that's great.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  But really, it became mainstream in the 50s and 60s.

• 1:38:26Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  So, transitioning from luxury to common transport. So that is so recent.

• 1:38:33Dax Shepard?

  Of the many things we're gonna do with our time machine?

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:36Dax Shepard?

  The list is so long. I don't know when I'll get to this, but I would like to go back in time to like 1962 and fly Pan Am.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 1:38:46Dax Shepard?

  First class and see like, was it crazy? Like, did they really pamper you and treat you like you were royalty?

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I have a question about going back in time.

• 1:38:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Um, do you think if you go back in time, you could die? Like, you could die?

• 1:39:02Dax Shepard?

  For sure. Yeah. And it'd be so confusing because on your headstone it'd say born in 1987, died in 1950.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  That's what doesn't make any sense. Wow.

• 1:39:13Dax Shepard?

  That's a movie.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  That is a movie.

• 1:39:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  It's like some kids are going through the cemetery and then they stumble across that.

• 1:39:22Dax Shepard?

  And it's weird because they were so tight lipped about the technology that they had time travel, but then they just put it blatantly on a headstone. That'll be addressed.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Later.

• 1:39:29Dax Shepard?

  Loosely in the third act.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:31Dax Shepard?

  Hopefully so much will be going on, you'll not.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Just with one line of dialogue though.

• 1:39:37Dax Shepard?

  Clean everything up.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Okay, um, was Kushim or Kushum, now I forget, the first name ever written? Yes. All of, all his facts were correct, basically. I did do some checking though, because I was like, can that be right? And then, yes, it was. Um, it's, he's widely considered the earliest known individual name in recorded history, appearing on Sumerian clay tablets from around 3200 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia.

• 1:40:04Dax Shepard?

  Mm, mm, mm.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Is algebra an Arabic word? Yes. Meaning restoration, reunion of broken parts, or completion.

• 1:40:12Dax Shepard?

  Ooh, completion.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that. Were you about to say something?

• 1:40:16Dax Shepard?

  I was. I was gonna say how Lincoln always says, was that back in the 1900s?

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I know.

• 1:40:23Dax Shepard?

  And it sounds like a joke, and it is, but it's not a joke.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  It's not a joke.

• 1:40:27Dax Shepard?

  Was that in the 1900s, she'll say?

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so depressing. It's so depressing.

• 1:40:34Dax Shepard?

  It sounds like 300 years ago.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  It really does. It's really funny. It's a good joke. Okay, so is English the most efficient language for AI? English is considered one of the most information dense languages, meaning it conveys a lot of meaning with fewer syllables. But it is, it says it is not definitively the most efficient, as efficiency can be measured differently. Studies show it has a higher information rate, meaning per syllable. I mean, that's just in general. So for AI, yes. But languages like Spanish and French compensate with faster speech rates, balancing out overall information delivery, making them. Comparably efficient in terms of overall speeding communication verbally, obviously.

• 1:41:10Dax Shepard?

  Although we found out when our stuff was converted to Spanish.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  It was longer.

• 1:41:15Dax Shepard?

  Clearly did not pick up our speed of talking. And it was about 1.6 as long.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  I know, because I think what they were doing was keeping our speed.

• 1:41:26Dax Shepard?

  Our cadence and our speed.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Dax Shepard?

  And it made it, which is funny, because we experienced that right before we went to India and sat with the AI people who told us it was more efficient.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:41:37Dax Shepard?

  But I was like, it has to be more efficient. Why, why would it take an hour and a half to do, say what we said in an hour?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  I know, but also if, if a Spanish person was saying it, they would be saying it so much faster.

• 1:41:50Dax Shepard?

  He's like a talk really fast, but the computer runs at a standard.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:41:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  These are two separate things, but yeah, it's weird. Oh, and then I was looking up syllables for languages. Languages with very few syllables often have simple structures. Pop, rotoco, rotocost Papua New Guinea, having one of the smallest inventories, around 50 possible syllables due to few consonants and vowels. Isn't that interesting?

• 1:42:15Dax Shepard?

  Very interesting.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  And Japanese being notable for its extremely small set of 107 syllables.

• 1:42:21Dax Shepard?

  Ooh.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Dax Shepard?

  Papua New Guinea is one of the most fascinating places for many reasons, but it's one of the places where cannibalism has been well documented.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:42:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  Is it still?

• 1:42:34Dax Shepard?

  I doubt it.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36Dax Shepard?

  But that's also where they were weaning, they weaned children off of breastfeeding with cigarettes and yet no lung cancer. There's like a lot of interesting stuff.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  The very.

• 1:42:43Speaker 05

  It still occurs.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:42:46Speaker 05

  In really isolated cultures, like parts of Papua New Guinea.

• 1:42:49Dax Shepard?

  And it's different than you would think, because I had, actually had a class on this in Anthro, which is like, I think they consume their dead, like as a part of.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I think I've heard that.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  As a like, a respect ritual. Not like, we're hungry, let's eat one of the members of the crew.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's from corpses, it says.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  God, do you think it's like, like when you go to KFC and it's like, I'd like a drumstick?

• 1:43:15Dax Shepard?

  You want like a finger? Like everyone has their favorite body part.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Favorite part. It's like, can I have the calf?

• 1:43:20Dax Shepard?

  Did anyone already get the nose?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really want the calf. Can I? You always get the calf.

• 1:43:24Dax Shepard?

  You got the calf last time. Do you think as you're like, your grandparents aging and getting terminal, that you're with them and you're kind of eyeing them like, yeah, well, I gotta eat some piece of this guy.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  What do I want?

• 1:43:38Dax Shepard?

  Like, do you think you'd be distracted with knowing you're about to eat some of this guy? Trying to find like, oh, that area, that little patch of skin looks really healthy.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:47Dax Shepard?

  I hope I get that.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Ew. I don't, I bet if it's just part of your customs, you really like, it's nothing.

• 1:43:54Dax Shepard?

  You know, you, of course.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you think they cook it?

• 1:43:58Dax Shepard?

  I should know that. I can't remember.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Um, how much money was lost in NFTs? While exact total figures are elusive, the NFT market saw massive losses following its 2021 peak, with reports indicating 90 to 99% of collections lost significant value, leaving millions with effectively worthless digital assets.

• 1:44:21Dax Shepard?

  I kind of don't even feel bad for those people.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I do.

• 1:44:26Dax Shepard?

  It was just such a cash grab bullshit thing to begin with.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Desperate. People want money.

• 1:44:32Dax Shepard?

  They're desperate to get something for nothing, which I'm not very sympathetic to.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  I understand, but like, they're just desperate to have something.

• 1:44:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:44:41Dax Shepard?

  I was even wrestling with this last night.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:43Dax Shepard?

  I was thinking about like investing and like what percentage is acceptable? And mostly you just, you, you, you have to outpace inflation is the goal.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:53Dax Shepard?

  But what's funny is like, but why could, why is that even possible? Like this notion that you're, you're, you put your money here and then they just get paid.

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:45:02Dax Shepard?

  Ideally, something above 4%.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Dax Shepard?

  And like people are, you know, they're bummed if they're not making 10%. It's like, for doing what?

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:45:10Dax Shepard?

  Parking your money over there? It's kind of

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:45:13Dax Shepard?

  Fucking goofy.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:45:14Dax Shepard?

  And I too, I'm like, I gotta be making, it's like, why are you gonna get, you didn't go, you didn't show up and work? You didn't do anything?

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's because it's all comparison. It's like, because that guy has 10%, I should have that.

• 1:45:27Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  It's not about what you're doing to get it.

• 1:45:31Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Everyone's doing nothing to get it. Although, I guess in your head, you're like, no, but if I traded correct? Like, you do make it about your own actions.

• 1:45:38Dax Shepard?

  You convince yourself you have worked your way into these riches.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Um, what happened to your arm?

• 1:45:44Dax Shepard?

  What happened to my arm? Oh, I have a doodad stuck to it.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Oh, it's just a doodad?

• 1:45:49Dax Shepard?

  God, what if, you thought that was a skin tag?

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  I thought-

• 1:45:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you have a new tumor?

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  I thought it was a Band-Aid.

• 1:45:56Dax Shepard?

  I mean, look, if we do this long enough, I'm just gonna have like fucking things hanging off of all the skin tags everywhere. We'll do a ba-, we'll be the first show that went from audio to video, then back to audio.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Oh, alright, that's it, love you.

• 1:46:25Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking if your alarm is actually set before you go to bed? You could have sworn you set it, even remember looking at your phone. But apparently, looking at it and pressing the button are two different things because now you're waking up to sunlight and panic. Yeah, checking first always makes sense. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.