September 18, 2014 • 46 mins
Even if you entirely eschew the concept of money, we'll bet you'd be hard pressed not to trade in some form of currency. Learn how everything from cows to cacao beans to tiny shells from Maldives have served as currency at some time or another.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry all Right, Yeah,
that makes the stuff you Should Know. Have you ever
(00:21):
had one of those? Uh? I don't know why I
wanted one, but when I was a kid, I wanted
one of those coined things you want your hip to
make change. I wanted one of those worse than anything. Yeah,
And I don't think like a peanut vendor. I don't
know when I said whatever was at six flags whatever
and I saw those things, I just thought it was boss.
That's really funny. And I don't think I knew that
(00:42):
you could buy them for like three bucks or else.
I would have bought a bunch of them. Yeah, because
there's not much to them. It's just like the thing's
not counting anything when you press it with your thumbs releases.
But each one, you know your quarters. They have different sizes,
so you know, you can just without even look and
you could go, here's three quarters, buddy. I know what
(01:03):
somebody's getting for Christmas this year. I just thought of
that out of nowhere. I haven't remember that since I
was a kid. I was obsessed with those things for
a little while. Well, you know what, you're technically obsessed
with a dispenser of currency. How's that seed that one up? Yeah? Yeah,
knocked it out of the part. I collected banks too,
which is a weird thing for a kid to do.
Banks like piggy banks. Yea even No, none of them
(01:25):
were piggybanks. What was your favorite one? Oh? Man, I
still have the collection. My mom's got them. Um wonder
if they're worth any money? And I doubt it. I
mean it was like a Garfield Bank and uh and
uh opus the penguin Eric Davis? Now was it Opus
from Bloom County? How am I blanking out on that?
(01:47):
That was my favorite comic. I don't know that sounds right, man,
I'm losing it, buddy. So the penguin from Bloom County,
we're going with that. I was obsessed with Bloom County
and then Change Counters and Biggiebanks. Cool. That was my childhood.
And Dale Murphy not Eric Davis? Now, who's that? Who's
for the Reds? Oh? The Reds player? Yeah? He was great, though,
(02:11):
I love it he as a non Reds fan, I
was an Eric Davis fan, I'm with you. Where are
you obsessed with? I like baseball, baseball cards? Did you
anything mad magazines? Yeah? Me too? Those are still I
think at my dad's house. They'd better be. You still
got him? Uh? What else did I collect? I saved
(02:32):
up my sports illustrated for years too. Um. And remember
the first one I ever got had Muhammad Ali on
the cover. That's how old I am. It was during
his comeback, and when he was like fat and mustachioed.
Don't call it come back. It was not not much
of one. That's not how that goes. Uh, how's that
first side track to get us going? I haven't even
done the intro. Let's hear it? So the intro is
(02:54):
as follows Chuck in two thousand thirteen New York Magazine,
not the New York Times, not New Yorker, New York Magazine,
which is an equally good publication in that time out
in New York, not the Village Voice, all right, Just
New York Magazine. Um, which is actually where the movie
Saturday Night Fever came from. It came from an article
(03:16):
that was later admitted to be completely fabricated by the author. Yeah,
in that magazine. Anyway, New York Magazine ran a really
interesting article in January called um Or January two team
called SuDS for Drugs, and it talked about how there's
a huge black market for tide laundry detergent, specifically liquid
(03:36):
tide in the United States. Yeah, they do not make
it anymore. No, they make plenty of it, but tons
of it gets stolen. And the reason why is tied
is such an agreed upon great laundry detergent that tied
and only tied. Like if you tried to use gain
(03:56):
or um all or anything like that, you would it
turned away. But if you have a jug of Tide
liquid laundry detergent, you can buy drugs in the United
States with it. It is agreed upon as a currency.
I had no idea even though you can just buy
it in the store. Yeah, that's that's the part I
don't get, because if you're a crackhead and you steal
(04:18):
a carton of them, then all of a sudden, you
didn't have to pay for this tide and you can
use it to buy drugs. Interesting, why don't use any
of that stuff? And I don't mean to pick on
just crackheads. If you're a junkie. Same thing. Sure, if
you have a gambling habit. Yeah, we've man, we got
we got a lot of crap from a couple of
people by using about using the word junkie. Yeah, it's
(04:41):
pretty derogatory if you think about it. I guess, well,
but it's a word with a definition which means something,
and that's what it means. I mean, it's not like
we were just like slagging people. Yeah, no, I get
what they're saying, though. You're saying like it's just such
a dismissive term of anyone who's addicted. It really kind
of flies in the face of the disease model of addiction. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
(05:02):
I had to talk to the people who call us
out on that. I get it. But the point is
tiede is now a currency as like remember our prison
episode where we talked about how honey buns are currency. Yeah,
same thing, right, cigarettes currency, deer skins, Yeah, those were
currency once. That's where we get the word bucks from.
(05:23):
I think what you're getting at. Oh, I can't wait
to get to that stuff later. Okay, etymology, I love
that stuff. Um, I think what you're trying to say
is that or what you are saying is that currency
is nothing more than the medium of exchange in a
substitute for something, a good, or a service. It is
(05:43):
an agreed upon that's the key. Yeah, it's got to
be agreed upon. Yeah, you can't be like I'll give
you five Lincoln logs for a car. Well that's what
you do when you're a kid, right, and you go,
I don't think I want Linkol logs, and everybody goes,
oh you do, right. But if the other person says
those Lincoln I don't want Lincoln logs, then what you
have are Linkol logs, not a currency, because it has
(06:04):
to be mutually agreed upon, like you say, like dollar bills. Yeah.
I've gone off on this on our show about the
amazing fact that this paper we have all agreed is
worth something, and as the only reason it's worth something
that people dedicate their lives to pursuing paper is is
(06:25):
as ephemeral as a cloud. Almost. Ye, not the greatest
analogy you I've made, but it's still kind of works.
All right. So let's let's talk on olden days and
currency as a substitute for things. Um, what currency did
was solved the problem. It allowed you to give change
(06:47):
and make change. Yeah, that's a that's a big one
because back in the day, if you had a bushel
of corn and you wanted a chicken, you would go
to your neighbor. Well, you had to find somebody they
had a chicken that on a corn. So that's the
first problem. That's a problem. But what if you do
find someone, You're like, great, my neighbor's got a chicken
and I've got this corn. He wants this corn, he
(07:08):
wants the corn, but he says, you know what, this
chicken is worth a lot more than that corn. Somebody's
getting a bad deal until you can make change. Yeah,
because what if you could. That's not the best example
because you could take out some of the corn. Let's
say you can't chop a chicken. Yeah, well you got
a cow. Your neighbor has a chicken, and it's not
an even trade. But you just need one chicken and
(07:32):
your neighbor just needs one cow. You can't make change
like that. You can't make change. So that's one of
the first roles that currency it's fulfilled, was a way
to make change, to make trade more equal. Yeah, and
before that, I think there were a lot of bad
deals going down out of desperation. You know, like if
your family really needed that chicken for a reason, you
(07:56):
might end up taking a bad deal just because you
need that chicken. You give your cow away for that chicken. Yeah,
and then your family would berate you. That's right. Where's
the milk, honey? Yeah, this is like the magic beans
and sit in all over again. Can't milk a chicken, honey?
You get berated by your wife. Another reason that currency
uh became popular is because it allowed you for the
(08:19):
first time to really amass wealth. Because you can harvest
all the corn you want, but that corn is gonna
go bad unless you can find a way to trade
it in. A barn full of rotten corn does no
one any good. It doesn't make you any richer, like
in in practice. Practically speaking, you would be an extraordinarily
wealthy person if you had tons of corn in theory,
(08:43):
but like you said, it's gonna go bad, so you
could lose all all your wealth would literally rot away.
That's not the case with say a gold coin. Gold
coins aren't gonna go bad and deteriorate. So there that
stand in for those enormous stocks of corn. Because you
had all that corn and then you traded it for
(09:05):
gold coins. So what you did was you took your
wealth of corn and stored it into something of equal value,
in this case gold coins. Yeah, and that had a
huge impact on civilization because the most powerful people were
not just the ones who held the political and military influence.
(09:26):
All of a sudden, if you could accumulate wealth, then
you could buy that jump. Yeah. It gave rise to
the merchant class, and it democratized. Is that the word?
It democratized the world. It did because before it was
like you were born into a wealthy, noble family and
that's gain power. And if you weren't t yes, that
meant that you worked the land for this wealthy family.
(09:47):
But if you can sell something and get money in
exchange for it, instead of a cow for a chicken,
you say that junk up and you buy someone to
go kill that landowner, and then that's your land. Right. Democracy,
democracy or uh. They are generally considered to be four
categories of UM currency. You have commodity currency, coins, paper money,
(10:13):
and electronic currency these days, and in the commodity system
it is a placeholder, like we said, um for purchasing power,
but it is also has value as a thing because
corn is valuable. Um, it's not just a piece of paper,
where in the case of the Aztecs or little cacao
(10:33):
beans were valuable and so they use those this money.
But um, one of the problems with that is if
the person you're trading with doesn't find that valuable, then
it's worthless. Yeah. Usually within a society, everyone will find
that commodity currency valuable. Like the Aztecs with cacao. They
love this stuff. They made chocolate out of it. It
(10:54):
was the elixir of the gods, that kind of stuff.
They drank it right. Yeah. Mina Zuma drank like forty
cups of it today until he died from drinking too
much chocolate. Um. But the cankey sitters who came didn't
value cocow beans at all, so rather than trade, they
just took everything yeah and dumped the cacao beans because
(11:17):
it was worthless to them. Yeah, but that is a
good example of a commodity based currency, Like even if
even if everything else falls apart, that cocw beans still
has value and that you can make chocolate out of it.
In the society, chocolate is valued ergo they value the
cocw beans which use it as currency. Plus in this case,
(11:38):
cocow beans um are easy to carry, so they're portable,
and they're plentiful and small so you can make change
with them. Yeah, but not everything was the cacao bean.
In commodity currency, a lot of stuff is perishable more
perishable um, a lot of like cattle is super bulky.
You can't carry on a bunch of cows, goats, goats um.
(11:59):
But never less, that is a form of commodity currency.
It's just had its downside. Like the goat has has
value in and of itself. Yeah, cute, cute milk, meat
and cute hair and cute and very cute. I'm gonna
get one of those pigmy goats one of these days.
It's gonna happen. You're gonna come over to my house
(12:20):
and the little goat is gonna bounce in the room.
Clip clop, You're gonna go. What the Have you ever
seen the lamb? I showed you that, right, dude, that's
probably my top five things ever. If you don't know,
be the lamb into YouTube right now. What was it
a lamb? I think so? I thought it's a pigmy goat.
(12:43):
I think it's a lamb. Jerrys this is lamb. Alright,
I win. Alright, here's some cocow beans. Nice. Alright, so well,
hold on, hold on. I feel like we've got a
really good flow going. Okay, so let's interrupted with these messages. Okay,
(13:07):
we're back. Let's see if we can get the mojo
back again. All right, the mojo is still flowing because
our message break in reality was only two seconds long.
That's our dirty secret. Coins is our next form of currency.
And they were first minute a minute in Lydia, which
is modern Turkey, and they're king uh Croasis or crosis.
(13:27):
So you know, I'm gonna make these little small metal ingots.
I'm gonna stamp them with our emblem. And it's six
for d BC and this is called coins and it's
worth something. And the Greek said this is great, and
the Romans said this is great, and they're we're gonna
make ours out of silver and gold. So it's actually
worth something. Although when you think about it, that's just
you know, worth something because someone says it's worth something. Gold, sure,
(13:50):
all of it. Yeah. I read this Forbes article that
basically said all currencies a fiat currency. Fiat currency means
that it has valued by fiat, like the fiat of
the king a decree um and it says the government
or the king says this has value. It's it's nine
seven gold. It's valuable, so go traded as such by fiat. Right. Yeah,
(14:14):
if you think about the only things that really have
real value or like food and water pretty much, you know,
like you can make the case that a commodity based
currency like cocao beans isn't necessarily a fiat currency because
it does have inherent value that anybody can use. But
gold is it's not really that valuable. It's not really
that useful, especially in like a pre industrial society. I
(14:38):
wonder if gold first became valuable because it was shiny
and literally, yes, they could make pretty things with it, honestly, yes, interesting,
I think that's exactly why. Because it's so malleable you
can't make tools out of it. Even today, it's not
that useful. I mean, they use it in some solid
state electronics and things, but it's not it's more valuable
(14:58):
simply because it's go old. Yeah, So even if it's
backed with gold, it is technically still a fiat currency,
I've never heard that term f I A T. So
what does the Fiat car all about? That mean? It's
just special because they say it is all right? Um
in China, I thought the Chinese made the first coins,
(15:21):
but um, yeah, Grabster says that it happened about the
same time it did in the West fifth century BC.
They started out oddly with tools like knives, shapes as
currency with little holes drilled in them so they could
keep it on a string, and they just shrank over
the ears until it was about the size of a coin, right,
(15:41):
so I thought was odd, But they kept a hole
in there. So even until like the mid nineteenth century,
the Chinese coins still where this, these little round coins
with a hole in the middle so you could string
them on a string. Yeah, that's because they didn't have
the little coin dispenser on the hip they would have
thought of that, which surprising because the Chinese invented practically everything,
(16:03):
the coin dispenser, the hip mounting coin dispenser. Did they
even still make those? Sure they do. I'll bet alright,
I'm gonna buy one. Um. If not, Archie McPhee probably
makes it in an ironic version. So who's that they make? Um?
You've seen all their stuff. They make like funny like
they were the original, probably like bacon air, freshener, car fresh,
(16:27):
they make stuff like that. They make horsehead, gotcha, they
outfit um, they all their stuffs in urban outfitters, probably
in the chakey section. Yes, all right, I hate them. Then.
Uh So, one of the big impacts of coins was
now the government actually controlled the money supply and could
(16:48):
manipulate it and say what it's worth. And Roman emperors
were dumb and said, you know what, We're just gonna
reduce your amount of precious metal and some of these
because that makes us richer. But that devalued things such
that it ended up being one of the factors in
their downfall. Yeah, they didn't quite understand how it worked,
and it took thousands of years for anybody to figure
(17:10):
out really how it worked. But basically, if you still
know how it works, kind of, you know, I think
we have a better grasp than the early Roman emperors
because they would say, hey, man, I've got a ton
of gold, and my predecessors would make ten thousand gold
coins out of a ton. But I, being as clever
as I am, I'm going to make twenty thousand gold
(17:32):
coins out of this ton and double my money. But
rather than double the money, it devalued the currency and
led to the decline of the Roman Empire. That's right,
like you said, but that's how yeah, And after that, um,
it took a while for coins to come back in fashion,
all the way to the Renaissance because in the dark Ages,
(17:53):
because of a lot of that uh stuff, people didn't
trust coins, right, and for good reason, because there was
a someone behind it who could decree the percentage of
gold in that coin. The thing is is um and
we'll get to this later. The powers that be can
decree value, but ultimately it's up to the general public,
(18:15):
the people who are trading in these things, to determine
really how valuable they are. There's something called perception of
value that has to do with just how valuable a
currency is are not we'll talk about in a minute,
but that's what happened in Rome. Uh. Next up, we
have paper money, or is they call it folding money
here in the South, and they paper money was first
(18:40):
developed by the Chinese as well, and they used um,
like you said, buckskin sometimes bark, parchment, and it was
a bill of payment and leather was also used in
Europe around eleven d which didn't really catch on then.
Now I think leather money be kind of cool though,
leather moniture. If you know, if you hate animal, what
(19:02):
better way to kill more of them? I wonder how
much a cow would have been worth then, yeah, because
you while they were using the skin for other stuff anyway,
good point though. Uh. In Sweden in sixteen sixty one
they issued paper money, but they didn't quite understand it
either and flooded the market with it, which made it
(19:22):
almost worthless as well. Still still had to figure it out. Um.
I get the the uh, I get the desire though, like, oh,
everyone says this stuff's worth something, let's just print a
ton of it exactly. Yeah. Um. So it didn't catch
on after the Swedish experiment of the seventeenth century, but
it didn't take too much longer. It was the eighteenth
(19:43):
century when paper money finally did catch on, and it
was based on the practice of goldsmiths at the time,
where if you gave them some gold, they give you
basically an iou say they were making something out of
the gold, or they were hanging onto the gold before
you you had what what It amounts to a promissory
note saying you bring this I O U back to me,
(20:06):
and I'll give you this amount of gold and return.
It was basically the first what what's called gold backed
paper currency. And once banks figured out just how that
could work in theory and in practice, anybody could start
issuing currency. Yeah, and um money was backed by gold,
even right here in the US all the way up
until nine UM every dollar had and not theory, every
(20:32):
dollar had gold somewhere, not just dollars. Pretty much any
paper currency in the world at the time was backed
by gold, silver, some sort of precious metal that we
all agreed was valuable because it's shiny. But there was
a stock somewhere in the world that you could trade
your paper money for that value in gold. Yeah, you
(20:54):
could go somewhere to the gold tradery say here, I
want all this money in gold. Did you know That's
what the the Wizard of Oz is about. It's an
allegory for the gold standard. Oh man, it's depending on
who you ask, it's about ten different things. It's an allegory,
populist allegory for the gold standards. I just posted an
(21:14):
article about like ten different theories on what Wizard of
Odds means on our Facebook page, and yours is right
and then everyone else is wrong. Thank you. That's all
I ever want to hear from you. I UM. So,
now we're on to E money, which is uh, it
seems like something super new, but it actually came about
(21:35):
after World War Two when UM banks started recording their
information of the day onto magnetic reels and taking it
to the Federal Reserve Bank, and all of a sudden
they said, you know, we don't need these silly ten
dollar bills because we can just record this all electronically.
And all it took then was a wire connection and
(21:57):
trust for people to trust that this really is money,
even though I'm not seeing any money right right then.
That is the real distinction of it, because with an
electronic transfer, originally you're transferring information about money, like I
will I have a hundred thousand dollars over here that
I officially give to you, and so that that electronic
(22:20):
transfer becomes a promissory note in and of itself. UM
and they figured out that they can do this after
they realize that money in and of itself isn't valuable,
so we can just do this whole thing electronically. And
like you said, they did have hundred thousand dollar notes
and apparently there's some in circulation still. There's a couple
hundred of them in circulation. They had five hundred, one thousand,
(22:44):
ten thousand, and hundred thousand dollar bills. There's a really
neat mental floss article that you can read called a
hundred thousand dollar Bill, The Story behind Large denomination Currency,
and it talks all about that. But it was prior
to the magnetic tapes that were passed from bank to
bank or that recorded this information, and this is how
(23:05):
banks would settle up transfers through ten thousand, hundred thousand
dollar bills. Yeah, and the hundred thousand UM has Woodrow
Wilson on it and they only made those for about
three weeks. But um, that was never like in the public.
That was just between banks. Like no, it was never
in circulation, and it's still there's still around from what
I understand though. Yeah, there was UM in nineteen I'm sorry,
(23:27):
in two thousand nine there were less than four hundred
five bills, thousand dollar bills, five thousand dollar bills, and
ten thousand dollar bills um, all between like three and
four hundred still in circulation, which I thought was pretty interesting.
And they're usually worth frame now, you know, but there
were way more than their face value. Um. This mental
(23:51):
Plus article points out that if you have a pristine
ten thousand dollar bill, it's worth at least ten times that. Wow.
And so they all had different presidents throughout the years.
It wasn't like a single version of it. Uh, there
was a bunch of different versions of all those except
for the hundred thousand. Yeah, it was always Wilson, right, Yeah,
because he just printed it for three weeks, would would he? Um?
(24:13):
I wonder why he got that on her Yeah, I
don't know, because he was money. He didn't even know it.
So uh with electronic money. Another few things really helps
submit that as a as a viable thing. One was
the first credit card in n Diners Club said you
know what, rich businessman, here's a piece of plastic, so
(24:35):
you can impress your friends by not even carrying cash,
and uh, pay for whatever you want with this thing,
and then we'll charge you some interest and then you'll
pay us back. And we got even further from the
commodity by saying, now you're not even using cash, we're
using electronic promissory notes by charging this that's the promissory note.
(24:57):
And then they realized, hey, this shouldn't be just for
rich dudes, because we can financially cripple everybody exactly. This
interesting is really neat. So everyone should have a credit card.
And today there's over two hundred million visas, which started
in ninety Then the Social Security Administration started doing e
deposits all the way back in and people kind of
(25:20):
got used to the idea that all right, I see
it's in my bank account now, so I trust it. Yeah,
which is a big step forward. Yeah, it took a
little while to catch on. But then now it's, like
the grabster points out, people started paying bills, transferring money
between accounts, and sending money electronically without ever even touching it. Yeah,
(25:41):
which is true. Like I hadn't thought about that. But
there's plenty of money that that I earned and spend.
That's just like it's never physical ever, that's all my money. Yeah,
I almost never have or use cash. Like I get
paid electronically. It goes to a bank in number, and
then I have a American Express that I pay for
things with, and then I pay for that electronically and
(26:05):
I'm just trusting that this is. As long as the
lights are on, I guess everything's working out right. Exactly
basic and basically it's like the future, like what everybody
talks about in the future, We're not gonna have money,
We're gonna have credits. Well, the future is here. Apparently
eight percent of the world's currency is in hard like currency.
This all sounds so dangerous when you start talking about
(26:26):
it like that, Like all it takes this one big
crash of electronic crash, and what if they were like
all that money that you thought you had, it is
not here. Now we don't know what happened to it.
It's entirely possible. Remember they have the fd I s
though yet United States at least remember the early days
of internet purchases, how distrustful we all were, Yeah, I'm
(26:50):
not putting my credit card, I'm not taking that thing in.
And it never occurred to us that we hand it
to like a waiter or you know, whoever that can
do anything with it. And then it finally just became
that's important, just because so many people were doing it
that the chances of your credit card being stolen um
were lower coupled with the fact that it became evident
(27:11):
that credit card companies were willing to just like white
clean deaths a crude like that illegally made people a
lot a lot more trusting of it. I guess. Yeah.
I had a lady in front of me this grocery
store the day that wrote a check, and I was
just like, oh, were you Just like I know, I
longer minute, but I did want to say, like, you know,
(27:32):
there's a better way of doing that now checks And
I can't remember the last check I wrote. It's been
years and years and years since I've written a check
for me. It's usually like like a government thing like
a tag or something, tag tax or something. Yeah, I
do all that with my card too. Uh. And then,
of course, if you want to talk about the bleeding
(27:53):
edge of electronic money, um e g. Bitcoin and that
kind of thing, should go listen to our bitcoin episode,
which we're told was pretty good. Yeah. I think even
the guys from pot on pod Our show and they
eisode and said we did a good job of explaining it.
So we'll talk more about money because that's the topic
(28:17):
of this episode right after these messages. So Chuck, we're
talking about the gold standard and how that's what the
Wizard of Oz is about. And um, prior to that,
with the gold standard, it was I mean, inflation happened.
(28:40):
The price of gold fluctuated, so therefore the price of
anything pegged to it, like the dollar, would fluctuate too.
With when we abandoned the gold standard officially in nine
but prior to that, I think in the thirties is
when it really started. Um, we really took a huge
leap of faith because there's nothing backing it anymore, Like
(29:00):
there's a huge it's a myth that you can take
your dollar bill and turn it in for gold. They will,
some guys in white coats will come and lock you
up in a padded room for a little while. They said,
you can come and buy this gold ring with your cat.
Pretty much you can buy gold bullion with it, but
you cant yeah, exactly, and we're going to charge you
some fees for that too. Um. So once we abandoned
(29:22):
the gold standard, it was a big leap of faith
because um, as Milton Freedman put it, quote, the pieces
of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have
value as long as we all think together and believe
together they will stay valuable. But there are certain times,
there's certain occasions and events when we all believe that
(29:43):
things become a little less valuable, that currency is a
little less valuable than at other times. So this perception
of value can have an impact on the value of currency.
And the Grabster gives a pretty good example. It's when
we deflate or deva value currency relative to other currencies,
which will do sometimes because we want to attract that
(30:06):
currency's native investors over here in the US. So like
if right now you can buy five francs to the dollar,
euros five euros to the dollar, um, and we say, what,
we want to encourage more investment in Europe. So we're
gonna let the dollar devalue um and we're gonna make
(30:27):
it so it's equal to three euros and then we'll
stabilize it. Well, that will encourage more people in Europe
to invest in the United States because the euro now
has more buying power relative to the dollar. But everyone
in the in the United States because wtf, we got
all these dollars and now it's worthless because you just
told us that you're going to make it worth less
(30:49):
relative to the euro. Nothing really happened to the dollar
that everybody agreed literally overnight that the dollar is less
valuable now because it was devalued. That's one way that
that currency can fluctuate these days. Yeah, I wish I
had a better understanding of the when people say what
the dollar is worth sometimes that just makes my head spin.
(31:12):
I have one for you. You're gonna love this, man.
Let's hear it. The Big Mac Index. It's it's exactly
what you just said. If you want an understanding of it.
There is a guy in six who wrote in The
Economist basically the Big Mac Index, and and it says
we cover this in uh one of them. We may
(31:36):
have done it in their stuff super stuff out to
the economy. Then that was eighty years ago, though it was.
But what so we'll go over it again. The Big
Mac Index says the price of an end of a
big Mac relative to the price of a big Mac
in another country. Right, So it's basically saying you can,
and it's tongue in cheek, but it actually does kind
(31:56):
of work. You can you can show the eying power,
the purchasing power of one um currency relative to another
based on how much a big Mat costs in each country.
And once you once you see it and and and
look at it like that, you go to the economists
and type in the big macindext and it will bring
this up. And it's an interactive scale um, which makes
(32:18):
it awesome, and you understand relative purchasing power. Well, I
should spend some time on that side, thank you. It
will make me hungry. So then the other way that
things can devalue is with supply, and that is just
basically supplying demand. Like when there's a lot more money available,
it by nature becomes less valuable. Yeah, demand is high,
(32:42):
prices go up. Demand supplies high prices go down, right,
So that's inflation and deflation that goes up, that goes down. Okay,
I guess we should answer this. Are you watching the
Simpsons every episode marathon? I've tuned in some here and there,
But what I've really enjoyed is that in flux of
articles about like the best seasons, the best episodes, it's
(33:05):
really like a tripped out memory lane. I do not
have f x X and so therefore I'm bereft. Yeah,
but you've seen them all anyway. Yeah, it would be
so nice to see him again like this you know. Yeah,
I mean they're running the NonStop, like you wake up
at three am. It's I know, I don't think I
wake up at three am and realize that I'm missing
at Simpsons right then, Well you caught Bed goes up,
Bed Goes down. That's because I love the Simpson exactly. So. Uh.
(33:29):
We talked about inflation and deflation. But um, if you
want to know more about that, you should check out
how much money is there in the world? Are super
stuff guided to the economy? Stag inflation? Those are all
some good episodes we've done on that kind of thing. Yeah. Um,
and we mentioned earlier, you know, I talked about I
can see how you might be incentivized to just print
loads of money if you want more of it. Um,
(33:51):
And we've covered and other shows why that's a bad idea.
But never has it been more evident than in post
World War One Germany they had I mean, this is
amazing stuff. I think Zimbabwe beat them eventually, didn't they.
I couldn't remember. It's hungry, Well, no, I think it
was Zimbabwe. Um, I don't know. Maybe it was hungry,
(34:12):
remember hungry. He had a revolution in the forties that
was just staggering numbers of hyperinflation. Yeah, but this is
a pretty good example of hyperinflation. Well, after World War One,
Germany um owed in war reparations about thirty three billion
dollars in like nineteen nineteen dollars, and they didn't have
that kind of money, so they said, well, let's just
print a bunch of it. Uh, and see what happened. Um.
(34:34):
It's not gonna be backed by any kind of commodity. Um.
And it resulted in hyper inflation to the extent where
in nineteen twenty three it was called the hyper inflation
of the Weimer Republic from June ninety one to January nine.
It's because they funded the war through borrowing. Only they
didn't like raise taxes to pay for the war. They
(34:55):
literally borrowed money to pay for World War One, and
it resulted in eventually forty two billion billion with a
b German marks was equal to one penny of US money.
And I didn't think that could be right, but it's right, yeah, um.
And it was so bad that they there was something
(35:15):
called a mental condition called zero stroke that it caused,
which is when you're compelled to write endless rows of
zeros because when you see some of these numbers, it
just you're like, is that even a number when you're
trying to do these calculations, and it it. There was
an influx of zero stroke in Germany at the time,
and so I was wondering, like, how did Germany ever recover?
(35:36):
They basically started over again and said this isn't money anymore.
We're gonna start over and we're gonna have a new
bank issues something called uh des now the UM rent
rent a mark, and this is our new money. Not
all that money is no good to start but this
(35:57):
is actually back. There was a bank, the Deutschen rent
a bank mortgaged land and industrial goods to the tune
of about three point two billion dollars like hard assets
that were backing this money. And it worked and it
turned around almost overnight to the point where a US
dollar was worth four point to rent a marks four
(36:18):
And I guess everyone just got on board. It's all right.
That old money is no good. Wall paper your walls
with it, and now we have new money, you know. UM.
A lot of historians credit that really difficult period that
Germany was put through um or put itself through, depending
on who you ask. After World War One is the
(36:39):
reason why fascism was allowed to take hold there, I
believe it, and the lead up to World War two,
because I mean when I say it's stabilized, its stabilized
the money overnight, but it still wasn't like they were
still in bad shape. You know, it took a while
to dig dig out of that. Did you see that
thing I sent you on um Cowery shells, Oh yeah,
(37:03):
it's a little bit. Cali shells are sea snail shells.
They're little, tiny white shells that look porcelain, and literally
for about two thousand years UM they were used as
currency throughout the world, and they came almost exclusively from
the Maldives UM. And they would like, if you were
(37:25):
an Arab trader, you would go down to the Maldives,
you would buy about a million uh Coweri shells for
one gold dinar. Then you go back to India or
go to India and you would sell ten thousand of
them for a gold dinar. So you could just make
a ton of money overnight. And then the further and
further away they got from the Maldives and the closer
(37:47):
and closer to China they got, which is a country
that used these things like crazy, they were worth more
and more. Yeah, and the Maldives, it's just like you
just scoop up baskets full of them, and they were
not nearly is valuable, but as you got away from
them Maldives, they grew more and more valuable, and they
were used His currency literally until the mid nineteenth century.
(38:08):
I mean they started and we have the earliest reference
in about three fifty b C. And in the eighteen
fifties is when the the currency finally collapsed, just because
there were so many of them on the market that
people would you know, they would pay using five hundred
thousand cowry shells and you'd have to count out five
(38:28):
hundred thousand cowery shells. And didn't they use them because
they were like pretty, and they were hardy and like
didn't break really easy, and they're portable, plentiful small, so
you can make change with them. Yeah, and people like them.
So therefore they became currency. But they lasted His currency
for like two thousand years. Again, all you have to
do is agree that's something, although that's a weird thing,
(38:49):
because that's something you can just go out and find
if you're in the right part of the world if
you're in the right exactly. That's why they were less
valuable in the Maldives, more valuable like in China. So, uh,
you want to talk etymology? Yeah, you said, what was
the first one? He said? The buck comes from from
buckskin and the sawbuck. I don't know where the sawbuck
is a tenner, right, I believe so the word fee
(39:13):
comes from the German word for cattle U v v
e h. Interesting, right, yeah, speaking of shells, you know,
I believe Pacific Northwest tribes used whop them whamp them,
which were white shells um, and the phrase shell out
comes from that. When you pay somebody in shells, you
(39:35):
were shelling out. I wonder if that's where clams comes from.
Probably what's your funny word for money? Beans, bones, simoleans, samoleans.
I tried to look up simolean because I think everyone
knows that's the cartoon currency, but I couldn't find anything.
It kept defaulting and saying, do you mean Somali money?
(39:57):
It was like, no, I mean Samolean. I think it's um.
I even put cartoons and I couldn't find much of
anything except like I couldn't find an origin, like who
made that up. Let's say Napoleon since it rhymes maybe
Chuck Jones. It's possible. Could ask our friend Jessica. She
might know you saw Charles Schultz's granddaughter email this. Huh No,
(40:19):
I didn't see that. Yes, and now Chuck Jones's granddaughter
and Charles Schultz's granddaughter are both stuff you should know fans,
which is uh pretty awesome. Waiting for a returne emails
like you gotta give me some inside story here please
about Grandpa? Um? Do you want to know the animology
of Semolean? Do you have it? Yeah? Man? How did
(40:41):
my Google uh skills not paying out? I am proud
of you, Chuck yeah for not saying yeah. Uh So.
Semolean is spelled s I M O L e O n.
It's an English word, all right, That's where I cut sidetracked.
They think that it is a late nineteenth century blend
of simone, which is apparently a French word for dollar. Okay,
(41:03):
and Napoleon really yeah? And why was it exclusive the cartoons?
I don't know, but they think it came from New
Orleans in the late nineteenth century. Simone um was either
dollar or sixpence coin. It was a British slang and Napoleon,
So I guess that's where Smolean came from. Would you
(41:25):
get that with the website words? Since dot eu? All right,
I believe that dot eu that says at all. They
have a clean look to their website, which makes me
believe that they know what they're talking about. Yeah, when
you look at a website, you can get a lot
of information about its accuracy, just if it looks like
a MySpace page from um, I hope my space is
(41:45):
around in nineteen because the penance will right in. Yeah,
it wasn't my space. Then my Space came about, and
the word dollar itself, um account in Czechoslovakia and a
town called well, it doesn't matter where it was. He
started minting silver coins in fifteen nineteen Yakimov and they
were called uh Taller Grossian, which was shortened to Taller's
(42:11):
and taller eventually became dollar in the United States. And
we talked in the Salt episode about how the word
salary came from assault. So I looked again because I
think he said that that wasn't true, that that's a myth,
and it's not necessarily true that it's a myth. From
what I can tell. It's just unproven. So in the
(42:33):
first century, Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian, says a
good beer too, that that's what the word salt came from.
Was they used to pay soldiers in antiquity in salt.
But he doesn't back it up and they can't verify it.
That's a good story. Yeah, at the very least is
about a two thousand year old story. So let's go
(42:56):
with you. It's true. Yeah. I had a history teacher
in college, my best history teacher ever, that said, never
let facts get in the way of a good story. Yeah.
I've heard that. He was a good guy. I can't
remember his name. He might have had him. He was man.
He was great, one of my first big inspirational teachers
in college. That is, I got you so much so
(43:17):
that I don't remember his name. That one guy. Uh.
If you want to learn more about currency, you should
listen to any number of our episodes on currency, including
this one again. Or you can type currency into the
search part how stuff works dot com. It will bring
up this article. And since I said search parts, time
for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this rare shout out.
(43:39):
We don't do this a lot um, but I'm gonna
do it today because I like the cut of this
dude's jib. My name is Jared Bagnal exclamation point. I'm
writing to see if you could do a tribute to
my wife, A Bree Bagnal and you're listener mail. I'm
a huge fan of you guys, but my wife is
most definitely your number one fan. Can safely say that
(44:00):
a few hundred of your listeners could be attributed to
her alone. She has dozens of people hooked on s
Y s K and from them a dozen each. She's
so excited every Tuesday and Thursday that your podcast comes out.
She tells everyone about them. She's the nicest person in
the world, caring, sweet, shy, and deserve some recognition for
being so awesome. Our one year anniversary is coming up.
(44:21):
Got married in Jamaica, and though it was an amazing experience,
she's still bummed that we couldn't go with our family. UM,
I would like to see I would like to see
if you could dedicate your listener portion to her into
our anniversary so everyone can know that she's great. But
it's pretty nice. Thanks Josh Chuck and Jerry Um. Did
I spell that right? No, you did not. How did
(44:42):
you spell it? J E r R Y. Let's just
get it on the record if we haven't before, j
E R I. That's right. Um. For the five percent
of people who listen to listener mail, hey, uh, this
would be a great surprise for her while running into
your podcast to hear this tribute. So Jared number two
fans writing on behalf of Bree number one fan at
(45:03):
the anniversary, Way to go, way to make it to
the one year mark. I wish you many many more
years of happiness to come. We both do. Yes, I'm
speaking for Josh, although thanks man. Do you wish them?
Of course I do. You're like, I'm glad for them. Uh.
If you want to take your chances to see if
Chuck will give you or your loved going to shout
(45:25):
out on the episode you know the podcast, that's what
I meant, good luck, uh exactly. You can try tweeting
it to us at s y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and as always,
(45:47):
join us out our home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry all Right, Yeah,
that makes the stuff you Should Know. Have you ever
(00:21):
had one of those? Uh? I don't know why I
wanted one, but when I was a kid, I wanted
one of those coined things you want your hip to
make change. I wanted one of those worse than anything. Yeah,
And I don't think like a peanut vendor. I don't
know when I said whatever was at six flags whatever
and I saw those things, I just thought it was boss.
That's really funny. And I don't think I knew that
(00:42):
you could buy them for like three bucks or else.
I would have bought a bunch of them. Yeah, because
there's not much to them. It's just like the thing's
not counting anything when you press it with your thumbs releases.
But each one, you know your quarters. They have different sizes,
so you know, you can just without even look and
you could go, here's three quarters, buddy. I know what
(01:03):
somebody's getting for Christmas this year. I just thought of
that out of nowhere. I haven't remember that since I
was a kid. I was obsessed with those things for
a little while. Well, you know what, you're technically obsessed
with a dispenser of currency. How's that seed that one up? Yeah? Yeah,
knocked it out of the part. I collected banks too,
which is a weird thing for a kid to do.
Banks like piggy banks. Yea even No, none of them
(01:25):
were piggybanks. What was your favorite one? Oh? Man, I
still have the collection. My mom's got them. Um wonder
if they're worth any money? And I doubt it. I
mean it was like a Garfield Bank and uh and
uh opus the penguin Eric Davis? Now was it Opus
from Bloom County? How am I blanking out on that?
(01:47):
That was my favorite comic. I don't know that sounds right, man,
I'm losing it, buddy. So the penguin from Bloom County,
we're going with that. I was obsessed with Bloom County
and then Change Counters and Biggiebanks. Cool. That was my childhood.
And Dale Murphy not Eric Davis? Now, who's that? Who's
for the Reds? Oh? The Reds player? Yeah? He was great, though,
(02:11):
I love it he as a non Reds fan, I
was an Eric Davis fan, I'm with you. Where are
you obsessed with? I like baseball, baseball cards? Did you
anything mad magazines? Yeah? Me too? Those are still I
think at my dad's house. They'd better be. You still
got him? Uh? What else did I collect? I saved
(02:32):
up my sports illustrated for years too. Um. And remember
the first one I ever got had Muhammad Ali on
the cover. That's how old I am. It was during
his comeback, and when he was like fat and mustachioed.
Don't call it come back. It was not not much
of one. That's not how that goes. Uh, how's that
first side track to get us going? I haven't even
done the intro. Let's hear it? So the intro is
(02:54):
as follows Chuck in two thousand thirteen New York Magazine,
not the New York Times, not New Yorker, New York Magazine,
which is an equally good publication in that time out
in New York, not the Village Voice, all right, Just
New York Magazine. Um, which is actually where the movie
Saturday Night Fever came from. It came from an article
(03:16):
that was later admitted to be completely fabricated by the author. Yeah,
in that magazine. Anyway, New York Magazine ran a really
interesting article in January called um Or January two team
called SuDS for Drugs, and it talked about how there's
a huge black market for tide laundry detergent, specifically liquid
(03:36):
tide in the United States. Yeah, they do not make
it anymore. No, they make plenty of it, but tons
of it gets stolen. And the reason why is tied
is such an agreed upon great laundry detergent that tied
and only tied. Like if you tried to use gain
(03:56):
or um all or anything like that, you would it
turned away. But if you have a jug of Tide
liquid laundry detergent, you can buy drugs in the United
States with it. It is agreed upon as a currency.
I had no idea even though you can just buy
it in the store. Yeah, that's that's the part I
don't get, because if you're a crackhead and you steal
(04:18):
a carton of them, then all of a sudden, you
didn't have to pay for this tide and you can
use it to buy drugs. Interesting, why don't use any
of that stuff? And I don't mean to pick on
just crackheads. If you're a junkie. Same thing. Sure, if
you have a gambling habit. Yeah, we've man, we got
we got a lot of crap from a couple of
people by using about using the word junkie. Yeah, it's
(04:41):
pretty derogatory if you think about it. I guess, well,
but it's a word with a definition which means something,
and that's what it means. I mean, it's not like
we were just like slagging people. Yeah, no, I get
what they're saying, though. You're saying like it's just such
a dismissive term of anyone who's addicted. It really kind
of flies in the face of the disease model of addiction. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
(05:02):
I had to talk to the people who call us
out on that. I get it. But the point is
tiede is now a currency as like remember our prison
episode where we talked about how honey buns are currency. Yeah,
same thing, right, cigarettes currency, deer skins, Yeah, those were
currency once. That's where we get the word bucks from.
(05:23):
I think what you're getting at. Oh, I can't wait
to get to that stuff later. Okay, etymology, I love
that stuff. Um, I think what you're trying to say
is that or what you are saying is that currency
is nothing more than the medium of exchange in a
substitute for something, a good, or a service. It is
(05:43):
an agreed upon that's the key. Yeah, it's got to
be agreed upon. Yeah, you can't be like I'll give
you five Lincoln logs for a car. Well that's what
you do when you're a kid, right, and you go,
I don't think I want Linkol logs, and everybody goes,
oh you do, right. But if the other person says
those Lincoln I don't want Lincoln logs, then what you
have are Linkol logs, not a currency, because it has
(06:04):
to be mutually agreed upon, like you say, like dollar bills. Yeah.
I've gone off on this on our show about the
amazing fact that this paper we have all agreed is
worth something, and as the only reason it's worth something
that people dedicate their lives to pursuing paper is is
(06:25):
as ephemeral as a cloud. Almost. Ye, not the greatest
analogy you I've made, but it's still kind of works.
All right. So let's let's talk on olden days and
currency as a substitute for things. Um, what currency did
was solved the problem. It allowed you to give change
(06:47):
and make change. Yeah, that's a that's a big one
because back in the day, if you had a bushel
of corn and you wanted a chicken, you would go
to your neighbor. Well, you had to find somebody they
had a chicken that on a corn. So that's the
first problem. That's a problem. But what if you do
find someone, You're like, great, my neighbor's got a chicken
and I've got this corn. He wants this corn, he
(07:08):
wants the corn, but he says, you know what, this
chicken is worth a lot more than that corn. Somebody's
getting a bad deal until you can make change. Yeah,
because what if you could. That's not the best example
because you could take out some of the corn. Let's
say you can't chop a chicken. Yeah, well you got
a cow. Your neighbor has a chicken, and it's not
an even trade. But you just need one chicken and
(07:32):
your neighbor just needs one cow. You can't make change
like that. You can't make change. So that's one of
the first roles that currency it's fulfilled, was a way
to make change, to make trade more equal. Yeah, and
before that, I think there were a lot of bad
deals going down out of desperation. You know, like if
your family really needed that chicken for a reason, you
(07:56):
might end up taking a bad deal just because you
need that chicken. You give your cow away for that chicken. Yeah,
and then your family would berate you. That's right. Where's
the milk, honey? Yeah, this is like the magic beans
and sit in all over again. Can't milk a chicken, honey?
You get berated by your wife. Another reason that currency
uh became popular is because it allowed you for the
(08:19):
first time to really amass wealth. Because you can harvest
all the corn you want, but that corn is gonna
go bad unless you can find a way to trade
it in. A barn full of rotten corn does no
one any good. It doesn't make you any richer, like
in in practice. Practically speaking, you would be an extraordinarily
wealthy person if you had tons of corn in theory,
(08:43):
but like you said, it's gonna go bad, so you
could lose all all your wealth would literally rot away.
That's not the case with say a gold coin. Gold
coins aren't gonna go bad and deteriorate. So there that
stand in for those enormous stocks of corn. Because you
had all that corn and then you traded it for
(09:05):
gold coins. So what you did was you took your
wealth of corn and stored it into something of equal value,
in this case gold coins. Yeah, and that had a
huge impact on civilization because the most powerful people were
not just the ones who held the political and military influence.
(09:26):
All of a sudden, if you could accumulate wealth, then
you could buy that jump. Yeah. It gave rise to
the merchant class, and it democratized. Is that the word?
It democratized the world. It did because before it was
like you were born into a wealthy, noble family and
that's gain power. And if you weren't t yes, that
meant that you worked the land for this wealthy family.
(09:47):
But if you can sell something and get money in
exchange for it, instead of a cow for a chicken,
you say that junk up and you buy someone to
go kill that landowner, and then that's your land. Right. Democracy,
democracy or uh. They are generally considered to be four
categories of UM currency. You have commodity currency, coins, paper money,
(10:13):
and electronic currency these days, and in the commodity system
it is a placeholder, like we said, um for purchasing power,
but it is also has value as a thing because
corn is valuable. Um, it's not just a piece of paper,
where in the case of the Aztecs or little cacao
(10:33):
beans were valuable and so they use those this money.
But um, one of the problems with that is if
the person you're trading with doesn't find that valuable, then
it's worthless. Yeah. Usually within a society, everyone will find
that commodity currency valuable. Like the Aztecs with cacao. They
love this stuff. They made chocolate out of it. It
(10:54):
was the elixir of the gods, that kind of stuff.
They drank it right. Yeah. Mina Zuma drank like forty
cups of it today until he died from drinking too
much chocolate. Um. But the cankey sitters who came didn't
value cocow beans at all, so rather than trade, they
just took everything yeah and dumped the cacao beans because
(11:17):
it was worthless to them. Yeah, but that is a
good example of a commodity based currency, Like even if
even if everything else falls apart, that cocw beans still
has value and that you can make chocolate out of it.
In the society, chocolate is valued ergo they value the
cocw beans which use it as currency. Plus in this case,
(11:38):
cocow beans um are easy to carry, so they're portable,
and they're plentiful and small so you can make change
with them. Yeah, but not everything was the cacao bean.
In commodity currency, a lot of stuff is perishable more
perishable um, a lot of like cattle is super bulky.
You can't carry on a bunch of cows, goats, goats um.
(11:59):
But never less, that is a form of commodity currency.
It's just had its downside. Like the goat has has
value in and of itself. Yeah, cute, cute milk, meat
and cute hair and cute and very cute. I'm gonna
get one of those pigmy goats one of these days.
It's gonna happen. You're gonna come over to my house
(12:20):
and the little goat is gonna bounce in the room.
Clip clop, You're gonna go. What the Have you ever
seen the lamb? I showed you that, right, dude, that's
probably my top five things ever. If you don't know,
be the lamb into YouTube right now. What was it
a lamb? I think so? I thought it's a pigmy goat.
(12:43):
I think it's a lamb. Jerrys this is lamb. Alright,
I win. Alright, here's some cocow beans. Nice. Alright, so well,
hold on, hold on. I feel like we've got a
really good flow going. Okay, so let's interrupted with these messages. Okay,
(13:07):
we're back. Let's see if we can get the mojo
back again. All right, the mojo is still flowing because
our message break in reality was only two seconds long.
That's our dirty secret. Coins is our next form of currency.
And they were first minute a minute in Lydia, which
is modern Turkey, and they're king uh Croasis or crosis.
(13:27):
So you know, I'm gonna make these little small metal ingots.
I'm gonna stamp them with our emblem. And it's six
for d BC and this is called coins and it's
worth something. And the Greek said this is great, and
the Romans said this is great, and they're we're gonna
make ours out of silver and gold. So it's actually
worth something. Although when you think about it, that's just
you know, worth something because someone says it's worth something. Gold, sure,
(13:50):
all of it. Yeah. I read this Forbes article that
basically said all currencies a fiat currency. Fiat currency means
that it has valued by fiat, like the fiat of
the king a decree um and it says the government
or the king says this has value. It's it's nine
seven gold. It's valuable, so go traded as such by fiat. Right. Yeah,
(14:14):
if you think about the only things that really have
real value or like food and water pretty much, you know,
like you can make the case that a commodity based
currency like cocao beans isn't necessarily a fiat currency because
it does have inherent value that anybody can use. But
gold is it's not really that valuable. It's not really
that useful, especially in like a pre industrial society. I
(14:38):
wonder if gold first became valuable because it was shiny
and literally, yes, they could make pretty things with it, honestly, yes, interesting,
I think that's exactly why. Because it's so malleable you
can't make tools out of it. Even today, it's not
that useful. I mean, they use it in some solid
state electronics and things, but it's not it's more valuable
(14:58):
simply because it's go old. Yeah, So even if it's
backed with gold, it is technically still a fiat currency,
I've never heard that term f I A T. So
what does the Fiat car all about? That mean? It's
just special because they say it is all right? Um
in China, I thought the Chinese made the first coins,
(15:21):
but um, yeah, Grabster says that it happened about the
same time it did in the West fifth century BC.
They started out oddly with tools like knives, shapes as
currency with little holes drilled in them so they could
keep it on a string, and they just shrank over
the ears until it was about the size of a coin, right,
(15:41):
so I thought was odd, But they kept a hole
in there. So even until like the mid nineteenth century,
the Chinese coins still where this, these little round coins
with a hole in the middle so you could string
them on a string. Yeah, that's because they didn't have
the little coin dispenser on the hip they would have
thought of that, which surprising because the Chinese invented practically everything,
(16:03):
the coin dispenser, the hip mounting coin dispenser. Did they
even still make those? Sure they do. I'll bet alright,
I'm gonna buy one. Um. If not, Archie McPhee probably
makes it in an ironic version. So who's that they make? Um?
You've seen all their stuff. They make like funny like
they were the original, probably like bacon air, freshener, car fresh,
(16:27):
they make stuff like that. They make horsehead, gotcha, they
outfit um, they all their stuffs in urban outfitters, probably
in the chakey section. Yes, all right, I hate them. Then.
Uh So, one of the big impacts of coins was
now the government actually controlled the money supply and could
(16:48):
manipulate it and say what it's worth. And Roman emperors
were dumb and said, you know what, We're just gonna
reduce your amount of precious metal and some of these
because that makes us richer. But that devalued things such
that it ended up being one of the factors in
their downfall. Yeah, they didn't quite understand how it worked,
and it took thousands of years for anybody to figure
(17:10):
out really how it worked. But basically, if you still
know how it works, kind of, you know, I think
we have a better grasp than the early Roman emperors
because they would say, hey, man, I've got a ton
of gold, and my predecessors would make ten thousand gold
coins out of a ton. But I, being as clever
as I am, I'm going to make twenty thousand gold
(17:32):
coins out of this ton and double my money. But
rather than double the money, it devalued the currency and
led to the decline of the Roman Empire. That's right,
like you said, but that's how yeah, And after that, um,
it took a while for coins to come back in fashion,
all the way to the Renaissance because in the dark Ages,
(17:53):
because of a lot of that uh stuff, people didn't
trust coins, right, and for good reason, because there was
a someone behind it who could decree the percentage of
gold in that coin. The thing is is um and
we'll get to this later. The powers that be can
decree value, but ultimately it's up to the general public,
(18:15):
the people who are trading in these things, to determine
really how valuable they are. There's something called perception of
value that has to do with just how valuable a
currency is are not we'll talk about in a minute,
but that's what happened in Rome. Uh. Next up, we
have paper money, or is they call it folding money
here in the South, and they paper money was first
(18:40):
developed by the Chinese as well, and they used um,
like you said, buckskin sometimes bark, parchment, and it was
a bill of payment and leather was also used in
Europe around eleven d which didn't really catch on then.
Now I think leather money be kind of cool though,
leather moniture. If you know, if you hate animal, what
(19:02):
better way to kill more of them? I wonder how
much a cow would have been worth then, yeah, because
you while they were using the skin for other stuff anyway,
good point though. Uh. In Sweden in sixteen sixty one
they issued paper money, but they didn't quite understand it
either and flooded the market with it, which made it
(19:22):
almost worthless as well. Still still had to figure it out. Um.
I get the the uh, I get the desire though, like, oh,
everyone says this stuff's worth something, let's just print a
ton of it exactly. Yeah. Um. So it didn't catch
on after the Swedish experiment of the seventeenth century, but
it didn't take too much longer. It was the eighteenth
(19:43):
century when paper money finally did catch on, and it
was based on the practice of goldsmiths at the time,
where if you gave them some gold, they give you
basically an iou say they were making something out of
the gold, or they were hanging onto the gold before
you you had what what It amounts to a promissory
note saying you bring this I O U back to me,
(20:06):
and I'll give you this amount of gold and return.
It was basically the first what what's called gold backed
paper currency. And once banks figured out just how that
could work in theory and in practice, anybody could start
issuing currency. Yeah, and um money was backed by gold,
even right here in the US all the way up
until nine UM every dollar had and not theory, every
(20:32):
dollar had gold somewhere, not just dollars. Pretty much any
paper currency in the world at the time was backed
by gold, silver, some sort of precious metal that we
all agreed was valuable because it's shiny. But there was
a stock somewhere in the world that you could trade
your paper money for that value in gold. Yeah, you
(20:54):
could go somewhere to the gold tradery say here, I
want all this money in gold. Did you know That's
what the the Wizard of Oz is about. It's an
allegory for the gold standard. Oh man, it's depending on
who you ask, it's about ten different things. It's an allegory,
populist allegory for the gold standards. I just posted an
(21:14):
article about like ten different theories on what Wizard of
Odds means on our Facebook page, and yours is right
and then everyone else is wrong. Thank you. That's all
I ever want to hear from you. I UM. So,
now we're on to E money, which is uh, it
seems like something super new, but it actually came about
(21:35):
after World War Two when UM banks started recording their
information of the day onto magnetic reels and taking it
to the Federal Reserve Bank, and all of a sudden
they said, you know, we don't need these silly ten
dollar bills because we can just record this all electronically.
And all it took then was a wire connection and
(21:57):
trust for people to trust that this really is money,
even though I'm not seeing any money right right then.
That is the real distinction of it, because with an
electronic transfer, originally you're transferring information about money, like I
will I have a hundred thousand dollars over here that
I officially give to you, and so that that electronic
(22:20):
transfer becomes a promissory note in and of itself. UM
and they figured out that they can do this after
they realize that money in and of itself isn't valuable,
so we can just do this whole thing electronically. And
like you said, they did have hundred thousand dollar notes
and apparently there's some in circulation still. There's a couple
hundred of them in circulation. They had five hundred, one thousand,
(22:44):
ten thousand, and hundred thousand dollar bills. There's a really
neat mental floss article that you can read called a
hundred thousand dollar Bill, The Story behind Large denomination Currency,
and it talks all about that. But it was prior
to the magnetic tapes that were passed from bank to
bank or that recorded this information, and this is how
(23:05):
banks would settle up transfers through ten thousand, hundred thousand
dollar bills. Yeah, and the hundred thousand UM has Woodrow
Wilson on it and they only made those for about
three weeks. But um, that was never like in the public.
That was just between banks. Like no, it was never
in circulation, and it's still there's still around from what
I understand though. Yeah, there was UM in nineteen I'm sorry,
(23:27):
in two thousand nine there were less than four hundred
five bills, thousand dollar bills, five thousand dollar bills, and
ten thousand dollar bills um, all between like three and
four hundred still in circulation, which I thought was pretty interesting.
And they're usually worth frame now, you know, but there
were way more than their face value. Um. This mental
(23:51):
Plus article points out that if you have a pristine
ten thousand dollar bill, it's worth at least ten times that. Wow.
And so they all had different presidents throughout the years.
It wasn't like a single version of it. Uh, there
was a bunch of different versions of all those except
for the hundred thousand. Yeah, it was always Wilson, right, Yeah,
because he just printed it for three weeks, would would he? Um?
(24:13):
I wonder why he got that on her Yeah, I
don't know, because he was money. He didn't even know it.
So uh with electronic money. Another few things really helps
submit that as a as a viable thing. One was
the first credit card in n Diners Club said you
know what, rich businessman, here's a piece of plastic, so
(24:35):
you can impress your friends by not even carrying cash,
and uh, pay for whatever you want with this thing,
and then we'll charge you some interest and then you'll
pay us back. And we got even further from the
commodity by saying, now you're not even using cash, we're
using electronic promissory notes by charging this that's the promissory note.
(24:57):
And then they realized, hey, this shouldn't be just for
rich dudes, because we can financially cripple everybody exactly. This
interesting is really neat. So everyone should have a credit card.
And today there's over two hundred million visas, which started
in ninety Then the Social Security Administration started doing e
deposits all the way back in and people kind of
(25:20):
got used to the idea that all right, I see
it's in my bank account now, so I trust it. Yeah,
which is a big step forward. Yeah, it took a
little while to catch on. But then now it's, like
the grabster points out, people started paying bills, transferring money
between accounts, and sending money electronically without ever even touching it. Yeah,
(25:41):
which is true. Like I hadn't thought about that. But
there's plenty of money that that I earned and spend.
That's just like it's never physical ever, that's all my money. Yeah,
I almost never have or use cash. Like I get
paid electronically. It goes to a bank in number, and
then I have a American Express that I pay for
things with, and then I pay for that electronically and
(26:05):
I'm just trusting that this is. As long as the
lights are on, I guess everything's working out right. Exactly
basic and basically it's like the future, like what everybody
talks about in the future, We're not gonna have money,
We're gonna have credits. Well, the future is here. Apparently
eight percent of the world's currency is in hard like currency.
This all sounds so dangerous when you start talking about
(26:26):
it like that, Like all it takes this one big
crash of electronic crash, and what if they were like
all that money that you thought you had, it is
not here. Now we don't know what happened to it.
It's entirely possible. Remember they have the fd I s
though yet United States at least remember the early days
of internet purchases, how distrustful we all were, Yeah, I'm
(26:50):
not putting my credit card, I'm not taking that thing in.
And it never occurred to us that we hand it
to like a waiter or you know, whoever that can
do anything with it. And then it finally just became
that's important, just because so many people were doing it
that the chances of your credit card being stolen um
were lower coupled with the fact that it became evident
(27:11):
that credit card companies were willing to just like white
clean deaths a crude like that illegally made people a
lot a lot more trusting of it. I guess. Yeah.
I had a lady in front of me this grocery
store the day that wrote a check, and I was
just like, oh, were you Just like I know, I
longer minute, but I did want to say, like, you know,
(27:32):
there's a better way of doing that now checks And
I can't remember the last check I wrote. It's been
years and years and years since I've written a check
for me. It's usually like like a government thing like
a tag or something, tag tax or something. Yeah, I
do all that with my card too. Uh. And then,
of course, if you want to talk about the bleeding
(27:53):
edge of electronic money, um e g. Bitcoin and that
kind of thing, should go listen to our bitcoin episode,
which we're told was pretty good. Yeah. I think even
the guys from pot on pod Our show and they
eisode and said we did a good job of explaining it.
So we'll talk more about money because that's the topic
(28:17):
of this episode right after these messages. So Chuck, we're
talking about the gold standard and how that's what the
Wizard of Oz is about. And um, prior to that,
with the gold standard, it was I mean, inflation happened.
(28:40):
The price of gold fluctuated, so therefore the price of
anything pegged to it, like the dollar, would fluctuate too.
With when we abandoned the gold standard officially in nine
but prior to that, I think in the thirties is
when it really started. Um, we really took a huge
leap of faith because there's nothing backing it anymore, Like
(29:00):
there's a huge it's a myth that you can take
your dollar bill and turn it in for gold. They will,
some guys in white coats will come and lock you
up in a padded room for a little while. They said,
you can come and buy this gold ring with your cat.
Pretty much you can buy gold bullion with it, but
you cant yeah, exactly, and we're going to charge you
some fees for that too. Um. So once we abandoned
(29:22):
the gold standard, it was a big leap of faith
because um, as Milton Freedman put it, quote, the pieces
of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have
value as long as we all think together and believe
together they will stay valuable. But there are certain times,
there's certain occasions and events when we all believe that
(29:43):
things become a little less valuable, that currency is a
little less valuable than at other times. So this perception
of value can have an impact on the value of currency.
And the Grabster gives a pretty good example. It's when
we deflate or deva value currency relative to other currencies,
which will do sometimes because we want to attract that
(30:06):
currency's native investors over here in the US. So like
if right now you can buy five francs to the dollar,
euros five euros to the dollar, um, and we say, what,
we want to encourage more investment in Europe. So we're
gonna let the dollar devalue um and we're gonna make
(30:27):
it so it's equal to three euros and then we'll
stabilize it. Well, that will encourage more people in Europe
to invest in the United States because the euro now
has more buying power relative to the dollar. But everyone
in the in the United States because wtf, we got
all these dollars and now it's worthless because you just
told us that you're going to make it worth less
(30:49):
relative to the euro. Nothing really happened to the dollar
that everybody agreed literally overnight that the dollar is less
valuable now because it was devalued. That's one way that
that currency can fluctuate these days. Yeah, I wish I
had a better understanding of the when people say what
the dollar is worth sometimes that just makes my head spin.
(31:12):
I have one for you. You're gonna love this, man.
Let's hear it. The Big Mac Index. It's it's exactly
what you just said. If you want an understanding of it.
There is a guy in six who wrote in The
Economist basically the Big Mac Index, and and it says
we cover this in uh one of them. We may
(31:36):
have done it in their stuff super stuff out to
the economy. Then that was eighty years ago, though it was.
But what so we'll go over it again. The Big
Mac Index says the price of an end of a
big Mac relative to the price of a big Mac
in another country. Right, So it's basically saying you can,
and it's tongue in cheek, but it actually does kind
(31:56):
of work. You can you can show the eying power,
the purchasing power of one um currency relative to another
based on how much a big Mat costs in each country.
And once you once you see it and and and
look at it like that, you go to the economists
and type in the big macindext and it will bring
this up. And it's an interactive scale um, which makes
(32:18):
it awesome, and you understand relative purchasing power. Well, I
should spend some time on that side, thank you. It
will make me hungry. So then the other way that
things can devalue is with supply, and that is just
basically supplying demand. Like when there's a lot more money available,
it by nature becomes less valuable. Yeah, demand is high,
(32:42):
prices go up. Demand supplies high prices go down, right,
So that's inflation and deflation that goes up, that goes down. Okay,
I guess we should answer this. Are you watching the
Simpsons every episode marathon? I've tuned in some here and there,
But what I've really enjoyed is that in flux of
articles about like the best seasons, the best episodes, it's
(33:05):
really like a tripped out memory lane. I do not
have f x X and so therefore I'm bereft. Yeah,
but you've seen them all anyway. Yeah, it would be
so nice to see him again like this you know. Yeah,
I mean they're running the NonStop, like you wake up
at three am. It's I know, I don't think I
wake up at three am and realize that I'm missing
at Simpsons right then, Well you caught Bed goes up,
Bed Goes down. That's because I love the Simpson exactly. So. Uh.
(33:29):
We talked about inflation and deflation. But um, if you
want to know more about that, you should check out
how much money is there in the world? Are super
stuff guided to the economy? Stag inflation? Those are all
some good episodes we've done on that kind of thing. Yeah. Um,
and we mentioned earlier, you know, I talked about I
can see how you might be incentivized to just print
loads of money if you want more of it. Um,
(33:51):
And we've covered and other shows why that's a bad idea.
But never has it been more evident than in post
World War One Germany they had I mean, this is
amazing stuff. I think Zimbabwe beat them eventually, didn't they.
I couldn't remember. It's hungry, Well, no, I think it
was Zimbabwe. Um, I don't know. Maybe it was hungry,
(34:12):
remember hungry. He had a revolution in the forties that
was just staggering numbers of hyperinflation. Yeah, but this is
a pretty good example of hyperinflation. Well, after World War One,
Germany um owed in war reparations about thirty three billion
dollars in like nineteen nineteen dollars, and they didn't have
that kind of money, so they said, well, let's just
print a bunch of it. Uh, and see what happened. Um.
(34:34):
It's not gonna be backed by any kind of commodity. Um.
And it resulted in hyper inflation to the extent where
in nineteen twenty three it was called the hyper inflation
of the Weimer Republic from June ninety one to January nine.
It's because they funded the war through borrowing. Only they
didn't like raise taxes to pay for the war. They
(34:55):
literally borrowed money to pay for World War One, and
it resulted in eventually forty two billion billion with a
b German marks was equal to one penny of US money.
And I didn't think that could be right, but it's right, yeah, um.
And it was so bad that they there was something
(35:15):
called a mental condition called zero stroke that it caused,
which is when you're compelled to write endless rows of
zeros because when you see some of these numbers, it
just you're like, is that even a number when you're
trying to do these calculations, and it it. There was
an influx of zero stroke in Germany at the time,
and so I was wondering, like, how did Germany ever recover?
(35:36):
They basically started over again and said this isn't money anymore.
We're gonna start over and we're gonna have a new
bank issues something called uh des now the UM rent
rent a mark, and this is our new money. Not
all that money is no good to start but this
(35:57):
is actually back. There was a bank, the Deutschen rent
a bank mortgaged land and industrial goods to the tune
of about three point two billion dollars like hard assets
that were backing this money. And it worked and it
turned around almost overnight to the point where a US
dollar was worth four point to rent a marks four
(36:18):
And I guess everyone just got on board. It's all right.
That old money is no good. Wall paper your walls
with it, and now we have new money, you know. UM.
A lot of historians credit that really difficult period that
Germany was put through um or put itself through, depending
on who you ask. After World War One is the
(36:39):
reason why fascism was allowed to take hold there, I
believe it, and the lead up to World War two,
because I mean when I say it's stabilized, its stabilized
the money overnight, but it still wasn't like they were
still in bad shape. You know, it took a while
to dig dig out of that. Did you see that
thing I sent you on um Cowery shells, Oh yeah,
(37:03):
it's a little bit. Cali shells are sea snail shells.
They're little, tiny white shells that look porcelain, and literally
for about two thousand years UM they were used as
currency throughout the world, and they came almost exclusively from
the Maldives UM. And they would like, if you were
(37:25):
an Arab trader, you would go down to the Maldives,
you would buy about a million uh Coweri shells for
one gold dinar. Then you go back to India or
go to India and you would sell ten thousand of
them for a gold dinar. So you could just make
a ton of money overnight. And then the further and
further away they got from the Maldives and the closer
(37:47):
and closer to China they got, which is a country
that used these things like crazy, they were worth more
and more. Yeah, and the Maldives, it's just like you
just scoop up baskets full of them, and they were
not nearly is valuable, but as you got away from
them Maldives, they grew more and more valuable, and they
were used His currency literally until the mid nineteenth century.
(38:08):
I mean they started and we have the earliest reference
in about three fifty b C. And in the eighteen
fifties is when the the currency finally collapsed, just because
there were so many of them on the market that
people would you know, they would pay using five hundred
thousand cowry shells and you'd have to count out five
(38:28):
hundred thousand cowery shells. And didn't they use them because
they were like pretty, and they were hardy and like
didn't break really easy, and they're portable, plentiful small, so
you can make change with them. Yeah, and people like them.
So therefore they became currency. But they lasted His currency
for like two thousand years. Again, all you have to
do is agree that's something, although that's a weird thing,
(38:49):
because that's something you can just go out and find
if you're in the right part of the world if
you're in the right exactly. That's why they were less
valuable in the Maldives, more valuable like in China. So, uh,
you want to talk etymology? Yeah, you said, what was
the first one? He said? The buck comes from from
buckskin and the sawbuck. I don't know where the sawbuck
is a tenner, right, I believe so the word fee
(39:13):
comes from the German word for cattle U v v
e h. Interesting, right, yeah, speaking of shells, you know,
I believe Pacific Northwest tribes used whop them whamp them,
which were white shells um, and the phrase shell out
comes from that. When you pay somebody in shells, you
(39:35):
were shelling out. I wonder if that's where clams comes from.
Probably what's your funny word for money? Beans, bones, simoleans, samoleans.
I tried to look up simolean because I think everyone
knows that's the cartoon currency, but I couldn't find anything.
It kept defaulting and saying, do you mean Somali money?
(39:57):
It was like, no, I mean Samolean. I think it's um.
I even put cartoons and I couldn't find much of
anything except like I couldn't find an origin, like who
made that up. Let's say Napoleon since it rhymes maybe
Chuck Jones. It's possible. Could ask our friend Jessica. She
might know you saw Charles Schultz's granddaughter email this. Huh No,
(40:19):
I didn't see that. Yes, and now Chuck Jones's granddaughter
and Charles Schultz's granddaughter are both stuff you should know fans,
which is uh pretty awesome. Waiting for a returne emails
like you gotta give me some inside story here please
about Grandpa? Um? Do you want to know the animology
of Semolean? Do you have it? Yeah? Man? How did
(40:41):
my Google uh skills not paying out? I am proud
of you, Chuck yeah for not saying yeah. Uh So.
Semolean is spelled s I M O L e O n.
It's an English word, all right, That's where I cut sidetracked.
They think that it is a late nineteenth century blend
of simone, which is apparently a French word for dollar. Okay,
(41:03):
and Napoleon really yeah? And why was it exclusive the cartoons?
I don't know, but they think it came from New
Orleans in the late nineteenth century. Simone um was either
dollar or sixpence coin. It was a British slang and Napoleon,
So I guess that's where Smolean came from. Would you
(41:25):
get that with the website words? Since dot eu? All right,
I believe that dot eu that says at all. They
have a clean look to their website, which makes me
believe that they know what they're talking about. Yeah, when
you look at a website, you can get a lot
of information about its accuracy, just if it looks like
a MySpace page from um, I hope my space is
(41:45):
around in nineteen because the penance will right in. Yeah,
it wasn't my space. Then my Space came about, and
the word dollar itself, um account in Czechoslovakia and a
town called well, it doesn't matter where it was. He
started minting silver coins in fifteen nineteen Yakimov and they
were called uh Taller Grossian, which was shortened to Taller's
(42:11):
and taller eventually became dollar in the United States. And
we talked in the Salt episode about how the word
salary came from assault. So I looked again because I
think he said that that wasn't true, that that's a myth,
and it's not necessarily true that it's a myth. From
what I can tell. It's just unproven. So in the
(42:33):
first century, Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian, says a
good beer too, that that's what the word salt came from.
Was they used to pay soldiers in antiquity in salt.
But he doesn't back it up and they can't verify it.
That's a good story. Yeah, at the very least is
about a two thousand year old story. So let's go
(42:56):
with you. It's true. Yeah. I had a history teacher
in college, my best history teacher ever, that said, never
let facts get in the way of a good story. Yeah.
I've heard that. He was a good guy. I can't
remember his name. He might have had him. He was man.
He was great, one of my first big inspirational teachers
in college. That is, I got you so much so
(43:17):
that I don't remember his name. That one guy. Uh.
If you want to learn more about currency, you should
listen to any number of our episodes on currency, including
this one again. Or you can type currency into the
search part how stuff works dot com. It will bring
up this article. And since I said search parts, time
for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this rare shout out.
(43:39):
We don't do this a lot um, but I'm gonna
do it today because I like the cut of this
dude's jib. My name is Jared Bagnal exclamation point. I'm
writing to see if you could do a tribute to
my wife, A Bree Bagnal and you're listener mail. I'm
a huge fan of you guys, but my wife is
most definitely your number one fan. Can safely say that
(44:00):
a few hundred of your listeners could be attributed to
her alone. She has dozens of people hooked on s
Y s K and from them a dozen each. She's
so excited every Tuesday and Thursday that your podcast comes out.
She tells everyone about them. She's the nicest person in
the world, caring, sweet, shy, and deserve some recognition for
being so awesome. Our one year anniversary is coming up.
(44:21):
Got married in Jamaica, and though it was an amazing experience,
she's still bummed that we couldn't go with our family. UM,
I would like to see I would like to see
if you could dedicate your listener portion to her into
our anniversary so everyone can know that she's great. But
it's pretty nice. Thanks Josh Chuck and Jerry Um. Did
I spell that right? No, you did not. How did
(44:42):
you spell it? J E r R Y. Let's just
get it on the record if we haven't before, j
E R I. That's right. Um. For the five percent
of people who listen to listener mail, hey, uh, this
would be a great surprise for her while running into
your podcast to hear this tribute. So Jared number two
fans writing on behalf of Bree number one fan at
(45:03):
the anniversary, Way to go, way to make it to
the one year mark. I wish you many many more
years of happiness to come. We both do. Yes, I'm
speaking for Josh, although thanks man. Do you wish them?
Of course I do. You're like, I'm glad for them. Uh.
If you want to take your chances to see if
Chuck will give you or your loved going to shout
(45:25):
out on the episode you know the podcast, that's what
I meant, good luck, uh exactly. You can try tweeting
it to us at s y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and as always,
(45:47):
join us out our home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.