#38 Paratruther -Gold: How it Shaped History with Alan Ereira

The mysterious power of gold to shape human civilization extends far deeper than most realize. In this captivating conversation with Alan Ereira, author of "Gold: How It Shaped History," we uncover gold's extraordinary journey through time and its profound impact on humanity.

Herrera reveals how his work with the Kogi people of Colombia sparked his fascination with gold. This indigenous culture, which managed to resist Spanish colonization by retreating to their mountain sanctuary, maintains a sacred relationship with gold as the "fundamental source of fertility in the world." Their warnings about excessive gold extraction mirror concerns voiced by ancient Roman writer Pliny, suggesting a cross-cultural understanding that modern society has forgotten.

The archaeological evidence tells a remarkable story. Six thousand seven hundred years ago at Varna on the Black Sea shores, the first known deliberate use of gold created what we immediately recognize as royal regalia - a crown, scepter, and chest disc. This same pattern appeared independently across civilizations separated by vast distances and time, suggesting something deeply ingrained in human psychology connects gold with power and divinity.

Perhaps most fascinating is gold's cosmic origin. The tremendous forces required to create gold atoms likely came from neutron star collisions - catastrophic events visible across the universe. This means all Earth's gold arrived after our planet formed, deposited from space in a cosmic jackpot that continues to influence our destiny.

From ancient Babylon to modern central banks, gold's monetary role has shaped economies and empires. When Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem for its temple gold, he unwittingly caused inflation that disrupted ancient economies. Similarly, when Spanish conquistadors brought American gold to Europe, it transformed the social order. Yet through all these fluctuations, gold maintains its purchasing power in ways fiat currencies cannot match.

As we navigate today's financial uncertainties and potential shifts away from dollar hegemony, gold's enduring significance offers perspective on what truly constitutes value in our world. Whether viewed as sacred substance or economic anchor, gold continues its millennia-long relationship with humanity, connecting us to our past while potentially securing our future.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back.
This is a special episode forthe podcast.
I've wanted to have thisgentleman on the show for quite
a while.
I grabbed his book off ofKindle originally I was flying
out to do an episode of TinfoilHat out in LA and got into his

(00:22):
book and I thought, wow, this isabsolutely amazing.
It's right up my alley.
We're going to really reallydig into it.
It's a deep history of gold andit's called Gold how it Shaped
History.
My guest is Alan Herrera andhe's been generous and gracious
enough to join me and talk aboutthis magnificent book.

(00:45):
Alan, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction.
I'm very glad to be here, thankyou.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Well, like I said originally, this has been since
December and it's a densehistory and very well written I
mean beautifully written.
Actually, there's an excerpt Iwant to read here in a minute
that, just right out of the gate, captures, I think, the picture
that you wanted to paint of howgold flows through history and

(01:15):
it really is surprisinglyinterlinked in so many ways.
You know how we view money andhow we view value, and we're
going to really dig into some ofthat history.
I got some questions for you,but I wanted you to talk a
little bit about your story andwhat inspired you to write this,
because it it's, it's a body ofwork that I think, um, it's

(01:35):
unlike any other history of ofmetals, like I've read, you know
, narrative histories of gold orsilver, and that's because
that's what I do, being being aprecious metals dealer and this
is my wheelhouse as a podcaster.
But this is the most uniquehistory that I've ever read and
I wanted to see what yourprocess was.
What inspired you to do this?

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Well, what inspired me?
I didn't ever intend to do ituntil I got instructed to.
I didn't ever intend to do ituntil I got instructed to.
I've been working for over 30years about 35 years with an
indigenous people in thenorthern part of Colombia, who
are totally extraordinarybecause they are the one

(02:19):
civilization that did not gettransformed by the Spanish
invasion.
They're on the highest coastalmountain in the world and that
provided a refuge for them, andso, although the Spanish tried
to take over and try to destroythem, they had somewhere to

(02:42):
retreat to, and the reason thatthey have survived is that they
actually do believe that theyhave the job of taking care of
the world, and this supremesense of responsibility means
that they cannot allowthemselves to lose their culture
and their knowledge, and theirknowledge of how to look after

(03:06):
nature, which they believe isabsolutely fundamental to the
survival of the planet.
And they believe that thisextraordinary mountain that
they're on is a version of theplanet in miniature that they're
taking care of, because itrises all the way from the
Caribbean tropical seas toglaciers in a very short

(03:26):
distance, and so you have allthese different microclimates on
the mountain, and they have anextraordinary understanding of
this world and understandthemselves to be part of it, and
that their survival and itssurvival are the same thing.
They had hidden themselves awayfor a long time, since the

(03:48):
conquest, and then they came tothe conclusion in recent decades
that towards in the 80s, thatthey were failing to look after
the world because the damage wedo is so massive.
And at that point, as atelevision producer, I made

(04:08):
contact with them and said ifyou want to speak to the world,
I can help you.
And they went with that, andthey decided that this was an
opportunity that they shouldseize to tell us that we're
destroying the world.
Of course, they thought wedidn't know and they thought
that by telling us we wouldchange our ways.
Well, they got that bit wrong,but they kept trying to explain

(04:32):
to me and the camera what waswrong with what we do, some of
which we already knew even then.
We knew, some of which wedidn't know and still don't.
Uh, and one of the key thingsthat they kept on about was how
important it is to treat goldcorrectly, because gold, they

(04:53):
kept assuring me, is thefundamental source of fertility
in the world, and if you umupset its behavior and mistreat
it, then you are actuallydestroying the capacity of the
planet to survive, and of us tosurvive, and all plants and
everything.
This seemed very mysterious tome.

(05:16):
So, in the making of the filmthat we made together, I played
down the emphasis on goldbecause I thought if I don't
understand it, the audiencearen't going to understand it
and that is going to just createa puzzle in everybody's minds
and they aren't going to buyinto everything else that
they're saying, which we know isreally important.
Um, and actually my own beliefat that point was, like all the

(05:39):
rest of us, I think, if goldwere to vanish from the earth
and there wasn't any gold, whatwould change anything?
Probably nothing, um, and thatwas my attitude.
But the coggy kept coming backto this year after year, saying
you've got to understand thenature of gold, it's really
fundamentally important.
And so I began, on the basis ofthis constant hammering, to

(06:03):
start to look at the history ofgold in other cultures to see if
there was anything thatreflected what the Kogi were
talking about.
And that's when the kind ofthunderbolt hit that I realized
that what the Kogi were sayingwas only strange to us, it was
not strange to our ancestors,and on a global scale, to our
ancestors.
And on a global scale, you cansee that gold was regarded as

(06:27):
obviously, fundamentally,basically important to the
connection between the materialworld and the world that
surrounds us, the invisibleworld that surrounds us, and
it's kind of the portal betweenthem and, from the Kogi
perspective, through that portal, that is the doorway of life

(06:48):
and death.
So this really matters.
So that's what took me intothis and therefore took me into
this huge study, initially, ofwhat are the different cultures
and how have they regarded goldand why and what sense can we
make of it then?
Well, where does thatcontribute to us regarding gold

(07:10):
as having some kind of intrinsicvalue, even though we don't
have the faintest idea why orwhere that comes from?
And how has that then fed intothe notion that gold is value?
And how did that idea that goldis value and monetary value,
the basis of all trade andcommerce, how did that have an

(07:33):
impact on the development of theglobal economy?
Because it did have a colossalimpact, simply because we
committed ourselves torepresenting the global economy
in a limited material substancewhich we would constantly be
running out of, and that hasdriven the whole of our history.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
It's fascinating too that the Kogi and you're right
about this and they, they reveregold, obviously, and they take
it from the surface, but theirissue is the extraction, the
digging, the you know, theextreme mining and the things
that, especially the modern day,you know you're miles below the

(08:19):
earth's surface and you go toplaces like south africa and
it's it's uh, it's like anentire metropolis under there.
It's insane the amount ofexcavation that goes on.
So their issue is that we'redoing too much.
It's a sacred metal, it's asacred substance, but too
extracted.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
It's an organic part of the world and, if you start,
and because we don't see theearth as a connected,
interconnected body, we don'tsee the earth as a as a
connected, interconnected bodywe don't see an issue with
lifting some of its organs outand effectively, you know,
tearing out the kidney orwhatever, because we don't
understand that it can be akidney, that it can be totally
connected to everything else,whereas their perception of

(09:00):
nature and the world is thateverything is completely
interconnected and boundtogether.
And that attitude about deepdigging, I discover, is not at
all unique to the indigenouspeople in America.
The Romans were saying exactlythe same thing.
That came as a big surprise.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
It was Plinomius, how do you pronounce it?
The Roman writer Pliny, yes,yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
And other writers, but Pliny, yes, went for it in
quite a big way, yes, and thatthis was absolutely monstrous
and that it's this business ofdigging into the earth and
taking it.
Now, when the coggy told me allthis, we that was that.
I mean this first conversationabout it, 1990, when they were

(09:51):
saying you've got to stop takinggold out of the earth, the deep
digging it's got to stop.
Between 1990 and now we havetaken out as much gold from the
earth as we took out in theentire history of humanity up to
1990.
So it was roughly 100,000 tonswas in the world when the Kogi

(10:13):
started talking about it to me,and double that now.
We have actually acceleratedthe rate of plunder
spectacularly.
Accelerated the rate of plunderspectacularly.
Now, the coggy idea of scienceis different from ours in that
our science is.
We like to try and think thatour science is about notions of

(10:34):
cause and effect.
What makes one thing happen?
Until you've established causeand effect, perhaps you haven't
got a scientific basis for whatyou're talking about.
The coggy notion of science ismuch more to do with correlation
.
They don't have a writtenlanguage.
Their knowledge of the world isentirely oral, passed from

(10:55):
generation to generation withyears and years and years of
oral teaching.
Their experts are all trainedfor 18 years in the dark, taught
everything that the society canprovide them with as knowledge.
So they have this vast body ofknowledge and the way in which

(11:16):
they understand it is what isthe correlation between one
thing and another?
Rather similar, actually, tothe way in which artificial
intelligence works.
In terms of artificialintelligence create works by
pattern recognition, and thecoggy worked much the same way,
using all this knowledge to seethe patterns in it, and so for
them.
It was not at all surprising tounderstand, to know that as our

(11:41):
looting accelerated, so changesin the planet accelerated and
the problems of survival ofspecies became deeper and deeper
and deeper, and new diseaseskept appearing, like AIDS and
COVID and so on.
All of which they were sayingbeforehand, that this is going

(12:02):
to happen if you carry on, andso on.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
All of which they were saying beforehand that this
is going to happen if you carryon.
It's so interesting that thisisolated tribe and again, I love
that you open with this themetoo, because it overlays and you
mentioned this earlier thismetal, this substance, how it

(12:25):
interlocks and has so muchacross oceans and time All
throughout human history.
It links us from onecivilization to the next and
we'll definitely talk about this, like the difference between
the Persian view of gold and theMacedonian or Greek view of

(12:46):
gold at the same time, in thesame time in history perhaps, or
Babylonian view of what goldwas, not necessarily a monetary
mind, but it's so interwoventhroughout the story of humanity

(13:10):
and this particular event thatyou know.
You didn't go down there tointerview them about gold.
It wasn't on your mind.
You had to.
Actually, it had to cyclethrough many, many times for
years.
They had to bully me, yeahright, and so it cycled through
and this prompted you to writethis book.

(13:31):
As a matter of fact, I actuallyread an excerpt of this when I
gave a talk in Mexico, becauseit was so fascinating to me that
you put this synopsis togetherof just some of my thoughts on.
We might not share the exactsame viewpoints on what gold is,
but it definitely stuck out tome when I read this this is from

(13:57):
your introduction of your bookis something ancient and
visceral happening, connected tothe old magical power that
makes us believe that gold is anunchanging store of value, as
you cannot eat it, warm yourselfwith it, grow anything from it
or wrap yourself in it.
You might describe it asinherently worthless.

(14:17):
Nations have no actual use forit except as security against
the day when everything elseloses its value.
Possessing it is an act offaith, not of reason.
A lump of gold has no moreinherent value than a Bitcoin or
a painting.
It is simply worth what someonewill give for it, which is not
fixed in any way.

(14:38):
Its value is subjective, adreamed bulwark against collapse
.
The size of a nation's goldreserve measures the darkness of
its nightmares.
Now that's that's.
Uh.
I just I chills when I readthat on the plane, you know, six
, seven months ago I go, he'scapturing a snapshot of

(15:00):
something.
I think that again is that'sthe mystery.
That's the question mark thathangs over all of this is, you
know, gold, and silver too, butgold especially.
Like.
What is it about this metalthat it's so connected to us?

Speaker 2 (15:17):
And it seems to be cultural, independent of culture
.
What happens to it is thatsense of value is not connected
to the cultures, to any specificculture or any specific moment
in our history.
It's always there.
I mean, one of the strangestexamples of that, I think, is
that when Nixon went off thegold standard in 1971, the Nixon

(15:41):
shock and said that the dollarwould no longer be exchangeable
for gold.
A lot of people began to thinkwell, that's it.
Gold will now have noparticular value because its
value was its monetary value inthe exchange between that and
the dollar.
And some years later, in fact,the British Chancellor, gordon
Brown, sold half Britain's goldreserves because he thought

(16:03):
there was no point in havingthem because gold was not going
to increase in value.
And yet when he did that, whenNixon did that, that was when we
bought the house I'm sitting inhere, and the cost of that
house in gold sovereigns if we'dpaid for it in gold sovereigns

(16:24):
would have been around 2,000gold sovereigns.
The house has increased interms of pounds since then by a
multiple of about 145.
Its price in gold sovereignshasn't changed.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
That's the magic trick about gold as a monetary
use, as opposed to what moderncurrency and fiat currency is,
and they don't teach, especiallyin this country.
They don't teach you that, it'sjust inflation, because it's
superstition, isn't it?
Right, you're not supposed toknow that, it's something that

(17:05):
is burned into your mind, thatinflation is just part of life,
you know, and that, uh, you knowyou have to invest and there's
all these other things, andthat's.
That's a completely differentrabbit hole.
But you're absolutely right.
Gold, even with you know.
You mentioned something earlierand when you interviewed the,
the kobe, in 1990, and there was100,000 tons of gold that had

(17:29):
ever been mined and then it'sdoubled since that time.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
And even with that, even with the… that doesn't
change its value, correct?
Yes, that's right, it'sunrelated to supply.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
Oh, isn't that interesting.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
And also, obviously, because gold is completely
indestructible.
Every piece of gold that wehave had we've still got.
Almost all, yes, yes, the onlystuff that can disappear is
either stuff that gets lostsomehow in granulation or is
mixed in a special acid that candissolve gold, from which it

(18:05):
can be recovered again.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
It's like shipwrecks and things like that.
I mean just fractions of theactual supply that was mined.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
But they're all still there.
Yes, yes, it doesn't goanywhere.
I mean, it's not like copper,of which there is less and less
copper.
Once it gets mined, the amountof copper in the world goes down
because it reacts with otherthings.
The same applies to iron itchanges into something else.
Gold will never change intoanything else.
It will always just be gold.

(18:36):
And one of the as you know, oneof the extraordinary things
about gold is that you canhammer it down to the thickness
of a thousandth of a sheet ofpaper and you can roll it up and
still make the same object thatyou were hammering in the first
place, and you can draw that.
If it's an ounce of gold, youcan draw it out to a thread

(18:59):
miles long, 50 miles long, andyou can roll that up again and
again.
You can make the original goldring or whatever it was that you
started with.
It doesn't change.
There's nothing else like thatvalue too.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
I mean it does it's.
It's not quite like silver.
I mean silver is an industrialmetal.
It's the most thermoconductivemetal, along with the monetary
gold has, and perhaps it hasn'thad enough study or there isn't
enough emphasis on it, but uh,medical uses um, medical uses
are slight.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Um, obviously, from the time of the egyptians, it
was being used to help fixpeople's teeth, and that's
precisely because it doesn'treact with anything in the body.
It's the one unreactivesubstance you can put in
people's mouths and it willstill be there.
And, incidentally, for thatreason, in ancient times, when

(20:02):
gold coins were very preciousand very, very tiny, the place
where you kept your gold moneywas in your mouth.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, that's true.
I was thinking in your book.
There was another aspect tothis too that I didn't know, and
you always think some peoplesay gold and silver is god's
money or something like that,because it comes from the earth,
but actually gold isextraterrestrial.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Yes, absolutely nobody understands where the
hell it comes from, because theprocess by which um subatomic
particles can be pushed togetherwith such force as to create
atoms of gold is so colossalthat the process that created

(20:52):
the solar system didn't comeanywhere near it.
That wouldn't have created anygold at all.
Um.
So the only way in which wethink gold can have been
produced at the moment the manthe best guess is by the uh
collision of um ultra massive uhstar bodies at the end of their

(21:19):
lives, which hit each othercolossally large, at almost the
speed of light, and produce agalactic explosion of such
brilliance that it crosses thewhole universe.
And possibly out of that comesthe gold that we find on Earth.

(21:40):
So all the gold, as far as weknow, that is on earth has
arrived after the earth wasformed, because anything that
was on the earth when it wasforming would have sunk into the
center because it's so heavy.
So all the gold that is foundarrived after the earth already
existed.
It has to have been depositedhere, it has to be from a very,

(22:05):
very distant interstellarexplosion of colossal magnitude,
and then somehow we won ajackpot there is gold over the
whole planet.
In fact it's rare in one sensein that its distribution is
small, but it's not rare inanother sense because it's

(22:27):
actually everywhere.
The ocean's full of gold.
All living things are full ofgold, but only tiny, tiny
quantities.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, every living thing.
And I forget the actualmeasurement how much gold in the
ocean, you know, per liter.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
There isn't.
Every hundred pounds ofseawater you will get a tiny
tiny bit of gold, but the othercurious thing about this
interconnection betweencivilizations all reacting the
same way.
One of the strangest things thevery first culture that we know
of that used gold.
This was a culture on theshores of the Black Sea 6,700

(23:06):
years ago.
A cemetery discovered in aplace called Varna on the shore,
and there is a cemetery thatcontains in the graves not
necessarily with bodies, but ingraves six kilograms of gold,
which is a fair quantity.
These are the first people whohave been using it at all, and

(23:28):
only one of the bodies in thiscemetery has actually got gold
on the body.
And it's got a lot of gold onthe body.
A high percentage about a thirdof the gold in the cemetery is
on this one body.
And what has it got?
It's got gold around the headwhich has clearly fallen off

(23:49):
some perishable headdress, acrown, and the right hand is a
stick with a hitting object onthe end of gold wrapped in gold.
It's got a gold scepter and inthe middle of the chest is a big
gold disc.
What you're looking at isimmediately recognizable.

(24:09):
We know what that is.
That is the regalia of a king.
That's the first use of goldand it gets immediately
translated, or very shortlyafter the first discoveries into
this concept of a specificregalia.
And that regalia we in englandare terribly familiar with it

(24:33):
because it was being used, uh,two years ago in westminster
abbey to crown charles the third, who also had a golden crown, a
golden scepter and in the disccould become an orb.
And you also find that there'sno connection between this
civilization and that one, whichwas completely destroyed and
forgotten after 250 years.
And you get exactly the sameregalia in South America, long,

(24:58):
long before Columbus, a thousandyears before Columbus.
You have the gold headdress,the gold scepter, the gold disc,
some sort of mind worm.
I don't know how you explainthis.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
That's the mystery interwoven through this and one
of the other fascinating partsabout your book that I don't
believe I'd ever heard thenomenclature or described the
you want to talk about theskeleton horizon.
Is that part of the Arna story?

Speaker 2 (25:34):
That civilization.
This was the first place to usegold.
It starts to use it inintricate ways.
They develop a good metallurgy.
This is the beginning ofmetallurgy.
Right, we're at the start ofthe Copper Age.
They're using the process ofusing kilns to do stuff.

(25:56):
Presumably, first of all,they're using it to make pottery
and then and their pottery isfabulous, wonderful stuff and
then they develop it to.
They discover copper, and youcan develop copper in you by
smelting.
And then they find how did theyget the gold?
I don don't know, gathering upfrom a river bed would be

(26:19):
extremely difficult to gatherthat much quantity for these
tiny populations.
It may be that they found a fewnuggets, one big nugget or some
smaller nuggets maybe.
Anyway, they are making goldand they're using it as a
celebration, or more than acelebration, of power.
There is now hierarchy in whatwas a hunter-gatherer and early,

(26:43):
early agricultural world, andsuddenly you have a person who
is distinguished by this costumein death of regalia, by this
costume in death of regalia, andit implies an entirely new kind
of civilization, of culture, inwhich you have specialization

(27:07):
of people who are doingdifferent kinds of works and not
every family is doing the samework in order to be able to
produce gold, to get it, to mineit, to smelt it, to make it,
you need specialist techniciansand workers and those are going
to have to be supported by othermembers of the society.
So you have a completely newkind of society which is
recognizable to us, which is adifferentiated society, and this

(27:31):
is there for about 250 years,and then it gets completely
wiped out.
Something happens, obviously,the people, other people in the
region don't seem to get on withthis differentiated society and

(27:54):
they slaughter them.
And the cities, the townsthey're actually little towns,
250 people or so they'recompletely destroyed and you get
a site where there's one calledUnatsite which is actually the
one where the oldest gold objectwas found which is completely
turned into a charnel house, andthe assault on it is done at a

(28:16):
time when the men aren't there.
So it's another society whichhas come in militarily, and this
is the beginning of militarytype conflict a group of people
acting together as soldiers.
It's the first time we see it.
It may have existed in otherplaces, it may have existed in
earlier times, but we don't havethat evidence.
Here we have clear evidence.

(28:36):
These are people using weaponsfor slaughter.
And Unasite is.
Everybody in it is killed, theheads are all smashed in,
they're heaped up in buildingswhich are then burned, and the
whole site is then covered in alayer of ash.
This when the archaeologists aredigging.
They look for evidence of achange from one time to another

(29:00):
as they're digging down, andthat changes.
The space where that happens iscalled a horizon, and here it's
called the skeleton horizon,for obvious reasons.
It's where the dead are.
This whole civilization hasperished, gone, and its memory
doesn't survive.
There are no stories about thatculture.

(29:22):
There's no evidence thatanybody ever went back to get
the gold.
Um, they clearly didn't.
The cemetery isouched not likeancient Egypt, for example.
There's no interest in gettingthe gold and the use of gold
really isn't seen again forabout 1,000 years, and it first

(29:46):
props up about 1,000 miles away.
So there's nothing inheritedfrom that Varna civilization,
that Bulgarian civilization.
But what they're doing thenstarts being done again.
The same kind of objects beingmade again.
It's very odd.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
No connection whatsoever, no possible
connection whatsoever.
No history passed down.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
No, nothing.
No, we don't have any storywith no sign of any stories, I
mean later on you do have signsof stories, so stories like the
golden fleece, for example,which comes from the other side
of the black sea, um, fromgeorgia, um, there you have
stories which get passed down.
By the time we come acrosswritten stories or pictures of
the Jason story, that story isalready very old.

(30:40):
But there is no suchtransmission of the stories of
Varna, of the Bulgarian side.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Yeah, and is that the cover of your book?

Speaker 2 (30:52):
That is that figure.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, I'm going to show it here.
That is a reconstruction.
Reconstruction yeah, Veryinteresting.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
And there's a photograph of the actual
excavation inside.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
And you have some.
There's some good photographsin the hardcover book, for sure.
Oh, and especially theirdigital has it.
But I love the hardcover yeahbut I love the hardcover.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, I mean, everybody loves hardcover books
because somehow you can'tremember an electronic reading
of a book because it's notassociated with any physical
activity, whereas if you read ahardback book, you've got a
piece of paper and yourexperience of reading the book
and of where you are when you'rereading the book makes the book

(31:36):
in a way more real in yourmemory.
You have a physical memory ofas well as a conceptual memory I
like the, the tactileexperience of having an actual
book.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
I'll find that because I travel a lot and um,
that I'll get, I'll just doubleup.
I'll also put one on my Kindlefor reference and things.
But yeah, it's something thatyou can't reproduce, that and
that's why I love.
I love physical books, eventhough they're going out of
style, unfortunately, I think,in so many ways, like it's hard
to, it's harder to get them.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yes, well, you still can't beat the old scroll.
Can you the scroll?
Beat the old scroll, can you?

Speaker 1 (32:13):
The scroll, get a good scroll.
Well, I wanted to ask you too.
Just while we're still on thegold in ancient times I read I
think it was a history of goldby Matthew Hart.
I don't know if you've heard ofthis book.
He wrote a history of gold andthis is something that stuck out

(32:34):
in my memory for many, manyyears.
But he said that before the,the columbus uh, just, you know,
quote unquote discovered thenew world.
You have the in the westernhemisphere that all the of the
gold in the known world prior to1492 could fit in a six by six
foot cube.
So that's all of the gold thatnever been mine.

(32:55):
Does that sound about right toyou?

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Well uh well, I it's.
It's not too far out of line.
Yeah, um, why don't?
I haven't done that particularpiece of arithmetic, but I do
reckon that in the uh, uh, 14th,13th century Europe, all the

(33:19):
gold that Europe had would havejust about fitted in a bathtub.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
That's fascinating.
You know, in your history too,you talk about, and I think
there was a difference between avery big difference, stark
difference between the PersianEmpire the way that they viewed
gold, or the Babylonian Empire,or the Babylonians themselves

(33:47):
how they viewed gold, and theway that Alexander the Great and
the Macedonians and the Greeksor the Romans would have viewed
gold as is that a correctanalysis.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
I think, absolutely.
History begins, as far as we'reconcerned, being literary
people, with Herodotus and hishistory of the Persian War, of
the Persian War, and that bookwhich tells the story of the
great conflict between Greeceand Persia.
He sees that as being wherehistory begins.

(34:21):
He's writing in the 5th century, so he's kind of close to it.
Bc I'm talking about here andthat war.
What he doesn't reflect on, butit's really significant,
significant is a war betweengold and silver.
Persia expresses itself in gold,um, and it issues gold coins,

(34:49):
which are not really monetary,but they are representations of
power and their way power isexercised.
In persia.
There's no market, so, uh, itdoesn't have markets at all, uh,
and it's uh, so it's.
Everything is essentially theproperty of the great king, the
king of kings, um, so tradeisn't something that can be done

(35:15):
by negotiation, um, but coinagedoesn't serve that purpose.
What the gold discs do, withtheir image of the king stamped
on them as an archer, they areindications of the royal favor.
So everybody who wants a placein the royal court or the

(35:39):
structures of power knows thatbeing granted access to gold,
these golden discs, is very,very important, because that's
their whole status, depends onthese gold, what we would
consider coins and do considercoins.
In Athens, the currency issilver and they have very pure

(36:08):
and very beautiful silver.
They make beautiful silvercoins.
They don't carry an image ofthe king of kings or anything
like that.
They carry an image of Athenaand the owl.
It's the protector of the city.
And as far as the Greeks areconcerned, as far as the
Athenians are concerned, gold isthe currency of tyrants.

(36:31):
It speaks of tyranny and thesilver currency.
Herodotus is very strong onthis.
What Athens represents isdemocratic fairness, exchange,
trade, a commercial and socialcompact that allows society to

(36:54):
flourish, and that, to him, iswhat really matters and also is
ultimately the key to the Greeksdefeating the Persians.
Tyranny will stumble and fallwhen faced with the power of a
society which bonds together intaking responsibility for its

(37:14):
actions.
Democratic society that's thefirst history book, that's where
everything comes from in ourway of thinking about these
things, which is really quitestriking and splendid, and it's
so obvious to Herodotus that hedoesn't even talk about that,
but it's the story he's telling,nevertheless, and the of, of

(37:35):
course, what happens.
Although silver wins over goldin that conflict, gold
ultimately triumphs in theancient world and, uh, the
reason that gold triumphs in theancient world is because gold
is the offering to the gods thatpeople who are neither Greeks

(37:58):
nor Persians want to make,particularly the Celts.
And what the Celts are aboveall is mercenaries.
So if you want to put togetheran army in the ancient world and
you're going to have to hire ityou're going to need gold coins
.
Not because the gold coins willbuy I guess they will allow the

(38:23):
soldiers to buy things toincrease their physical wealth
but most importantly, it allowsthem to make offerings to the
gods.
And the gold that the Celts geta great deal of it goes into the
ground and into the lakes, butwhat it's doing is financing
armies, and that is where thebalance of power becomes really

(38:45):
important.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
There's also you mentioned the.
Athenians and the Persians andthe difference and, of course,
athena's image on the silvercoins and that, that stark
difference.
And then I I didn't know this,but you go to the in your work,
you go, you mentioned the bookof Daniel and the Bible and you

(39:08):
that story of the writing on thewall and I thought your, your
viewpoint on that was really youwant to explain that it's very
interesting and it has to dowith that silver to gold.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
It is exactly.
It is to do with the silver.
Well, the whole thing of silverand gold in the ancient world
is tremendously important.
One thing I really shouldmention is the way in which gold
currency actually comes intoexistence, Because the first
coins that are being made as I'msure you and anybody who's
interested in the history ofcoinage knows they are silver

(39:44):
gold alloy called electrum, madein Lydia.
And these stators they'recalled, and these staters
they're called are the basicunits of trading value, and the

(40:05):
reason that they exist isbecause electrum is a natural
blend of gold and silver.
It was very useful for tradersbecause they could carry much
more wealth, as it were, muchmore trading wealth in the form
of electrum than they could havesilver.
Electrum contains gold, whichwas worth at the time roughly 10
times the value of silver, soit's meant you could cart more

(40:28):
of it about from one place toanother.
And so long as you have astable relationship between the
value, the ratio between goldand silver values, then this
coinage makes complete sense.
And the bright idea of the Kingof Lydia was all these traders
are turning up with electrum,which is undifferentiated.
Nobody knows exactly how muchgold and how much silver there

(40:50):
is in what a particular traderhas brought.
So it's got to be tested inevery transaction.
There's got to be a touchstonetest or some kind of test to
find out what its actual valueis, how much of it is gold, how
much of it is silver.
This is tedious.
So what the king of Sardis doesis say look, you give me your

(41:11):
electrum, I will test it, I willhave my guys define its value,
and then they'll give you coinsthat are a precise mixture of
gold and silver to the value ofwhat you've given me.
That's what the coinage is,which is a wonderful way of
accelerating business, and he'sable to charge a significant
premium for doing it.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
So he does very well out of it.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
Everybody's very pleased with it.
It means trade flourishes inthe ancient world on these huge
trade routes which are comingall the way up a thousand miles
or more from babylon and fromother cities which have no
access to metal and have noaccess to stone, but which do
have huge quantities ofagricultural produce and they

(41:52):
can do big exchanges.
So this is very valuable.
But then Babylon becomes thedominant power by conquering
Assyria and in the process a newking of Babylon arises called
Nebuchadnezzar, who has thewonderful idea that now that he

(42:13):
has supreme power and hasdefeated Assyria, he should turn
Babylon into a city that isunrivaled in the history of the
world.
He is going to make it glow andflourish and he is going to
build a new kind of city whichis fabulous.
This is the place of thehanging gardens of Babylon and

(42:35):
the Babylon that everybodyfantasizes about at the time.
In order to do it, he's goingto have to get a lot of material
from outside his territory.
He's going to have to gotrading.
He's going to have to buy allkinds of stuff.
For that he's going to needgold.

(42:56):
Where is the biggest quantity ofgold?
Well, it actually happens to bein Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem
temple is a great store of gold.
When Babylon was fightingAssyria, the king of Israel
invited Babylonian emissaries tocome and have a look at how

(43:16):
much gold he had, because he washoping to get them to assist
him and create some kind ofunion to defeat Assyria.
That didn't go anywhere, butwhat it meant was that Babylon
knew where the gold was, andthat explains this utterly
mysterious assault of Babylon onJerusalem.
Because Jerusalem's not on atrade route and it's not on a

(43:38):
military road, and yetNebuchadnezzar launches an
attack which lasts for 30 months.
It ties up the entire militarypower of the empire for 30
months.
Why would he do that?

Speaker 1 (43:53):
We now know that?

Speaker 2 (43:53):
the answer is it was for the gold, and you can see
the effect of that.
After he succeeds, he takesJerusalem apart, stone by stone,
in order to get it everythingin there, takes it all back to
Babylon, releases it onto themarket.
Because Babylonian temples keptrecords of prices every month,

(44:15):
prices of six commodities for450 years.
You have a continuous financialrecord and each monthly record
of prices of those commoditiesis tied to a description of the
positions of the planets, whichmeans that we have a date for

(44:35):
every price in this 450-yearrecord.
So these are called theastronomical diaries for that
reason.
So that means that this hasonly recently been translated.
It's all in the British Museumand that means that we can now
see the sudden inflation thathit after the destruction of the

(44:57):
temple of jerusalem.
The release of all this goldonto the market, which had the
effect in the ancient world thatthe discovery of america had in
the 16th century flooding theworld with gold.
The effect of flooding theworld with gold at that point
was that the relative values ofgold and silver went out of sync

(45:18):
.
So instead of the coincontaining a known ratio of gold
and silver that made sense, theratio now had gone so far out
of sync that the silver in thestator was worth more than the
stator.
So they start melting thestators down and and in

(45:41):
excavation in sardis, a friendof mine who was a british museum
metallurgist and archaeologist,found one of the sites where
they were melting down thestatus and extracting,
separating the gold from thesilver.
This completely wrecked musthave completely wrecked the
economy of the ancient world.
Trade becomes impossiblebecause there isn't a coinage

(46:02):
anymore.
Um, sardis is in deep trouble.
At that point the king ofsardis dies and is replaced by a
guy called croesus, and isreplaced by a guy called Croesus
who has his own place inhistory.
Croesus says I'm not going totry and force people to use this
alloy anymore.
This doesn't make any sense.

(46:23):
I'm going to make, instead ofone stator, two stators.
One stator will be a puresilver, the other one will be a
pure gold and the fact that theprice between them may vary.
All that means is or gold andthe fact that the price between
them may vary.
All that means is that we canchange the size of the gold
stators to match as we go on, oryou can just pay what you think
they're worth in terms of theiractual relative value from day

(46:45):
to day, but you don't have todestroy the currency.
It can all carry on and thatstabilizes the currency and that
makes everything work sostraight away.
You have this extraordinarything of the link between moving
on to a gold standard, the goldcoin, and divinity.

(47:06):
This has come out of thedestruction of the temple.
So the destruction of thetemple is actually much more
important in terms of globalhistory than we have ever
realized.
We only know about it in termsof biblical history.
This economic history is reallystriking and the Daniel story is

(47:26):
really a kind of comic elementin this in a way, because what
happens is that the assault onbabylon by cyrus of persia which
is when daniel is in babylon um, that assault, um is at a point
where, uh, he is going tototally disrupt that.

(47:48):
He is going to totally disruptthat attack is going to totally
disrupt the economy of Babylon.
And the writing on the wall inthe story now, was there any
writing on the wall?
I have no idea.
It seems very unlikely, but inthe story it says that the
writing on the wall is mene,mene, tekel, ufasin, which gets

(48:11):
translated generally as beingweighed, measured and found
wanting.
But that's not actually itsmeaning.
Many and tekel and ufasin arethree coins or two coins, and
and a word that means halved, sotekel is the shekel.
So mene, tekel, ufasin meansthat the value of the coin is

(48:43):
halved and it's actually afinancial prognostication that
is going to follow from an eventthat nobody knows is going to
happen.
But when it happens, veryshortly afterwards, when Cyrus
takes Babylon, there is acomplete collapse, of course, of

(49:05):
the ratio and an enormous lossof power and value in the
economy of Babylon, and it'sit's easier to understand what
that is, that writing on thewall in terms of a financial
prognostication, like suddenlyseeing seeing the writing on the
wall, is like seeing your atrader seeing his screen
suddenly being covered in red.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Yeah, I like that, that analogy that you wrote, and
I'd never looked at it that way, I'd never understood that, and
that's fascinating Really.
The picture too.
It's kind of a Twilight Zonemorality tale.
You conquer Jerusalem for thegold.
You extract it from everytemple, from everything.

(49:48):
You extract the gold and youtake it and of course it
collapses as the unintendedconsequence of not enriching you
but devaluing you what youvalue.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
That's right.
Yeah, this happens a lot ofcourse in history.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Yeah the parallels to columbus, you know, and the
1492 and onward, and the Spanishand the conquistadors.
I've looked at that pattern ofhistory and I thought, well, if
there was not this explosion ofgold and silver onto the market

(50:25):
and all the rest, would it havehave created?
I don't think so.
The history, the pattern of theriver of history that we're on
right now, where the stream ofhistory, where you have the
Industrial Revolution and allthis other thing, I think
markets exploded.
There was a lot of growthpost-New World and into the 16th

(50:48):
century, unless I'm reading itwrong.
Did it have a similar effectthat it did on the Babylonians?

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Yes, yes, and what you're looking at in the 16th
century.
The fundamental problem is whenyou have an, you know,
inflation.
What is inflation?
Too much money chasing too fewgoods yeah, that was what my
father taught me when I was akid.
That's what inflation is.
So the too much money chasingtoo few goods means that all

(51:23):
that money is pouring into aneconomy which actually isn't
developing or changing in anyparticular way.
So because there is money, thisgold is coming in and there is
nothing else happening.
So all that can happen is thatthe gold loses its purchasing
power.
But in economies where you canget change, the way in which

(51:45):
that inflation affects theeconomy is that the social
change then makes new thingshappen.
So what happens with thatinflation affects the economy is
that the social change thenmakes new things happen.
So what happens with thatinflation which fundamentally
transforms the nature ofEuropean civilization, is that
people who are living on incomesthat can't adjust to the
inflation, which means basicallylandowners, because land has

(52:07):
got fixed rents in the earlymodern period, so it doesn't
matter what happens to the valueof money.
The rent isn't going to change.
So the purchasing power of therent is going down.
So this means that the greataristocrats are all being
impoverished, whereas people whohave activities where they can

(52:28):
change what they charge forthings, which means traders, but
also certain kinds offunctionaries Soldiers do very
well out of an inflationaryperiod.
Builders do very well out of aninflationary period, so do

(52:48):
night watchmen these people whocan charge what they need to
charge.
So you get a change in thenature of society, where new
people become rich and the oldgrandees live lives of
increasing impoverishment intheir grandiness, and so the

(53:10):
nature of society itself changes.
This is one of the ways inwhich gold directly affects
history, without anybody reallyunderstanding at the time that
this is what's going on.
And new societies and culturesare being born out of this
change in purchasing power andopportunity, and old ones are

(53:32):
changing because what wasregarded as the elite part of
the culture becomes theimpoverished part.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
It's interesting too, like the Spanish have their
just through their grasp, butlike all the gold and silver
flows through, they don't keepanything their empire't uh
bolstered.
By it I mean maybe a temporaryboon, but nothing like it's.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
Just um filters through and and well, there are
a number of reasons for this.
I mean, one is, of course, inthat period there are very, very
few people who understandanything to do with economics or
record keeping or accountancy,so they don't actually know what
the how much money they've got.
Um, and none of the sovereignsof 16th century europe had any

(54:24):
idea of what the value, what thevalue of their own incomes was,
of what the value of their ownincomes was.
They, just because theirstandard of living was not
something they calculated, itwas entitlement, and they left
it to nature to provide thatentitlement without having any
way of working out what it was.

(54:45):
And this carries on for anastonishingly long time.
It was, um, and this carries onfor an astonishingly long time.
I mean in the 18th century when,um, uh, the french economy runs
into terrible trouble in the18th century because france has
got no gold.
Um and uh, so you have louisthe 14th who, having built
himself a suite of regalfurniture out of silver, now

(55:08):
decides he's going to have asuite built out of gold.
He can't do it because thereisn't that much gold in france,
and france runs out of goldcompletely.
And a chap comes up with apossible solution of replacing
gold currency with paper money.
He says I can perform magic, Ican make gold out of paper.

(55:30):
And people think that he'smaking a joke.
He is making a joke, but he'salso saying actually you don't
need gold as the basis, you gowith currency, we can print
paper money and it'll work.
Um, and it didn't work.
The reason it didn't work wasbecause, of course, they printed
far more of it than they could,so it just devalued itself.

(55:53):
But there's a very interestingcommentary on this by Rousseau,
who wrote that when this man,john Law, came along to teach
everybody that he could havepaper money, this man, john Law,
came along to teach everybodythat he could have paper money.
There was nobody in France whounderstood the meanings of any

(56:14):
words to do with finance.
They didn't know what creditwas, they didn't know what a
share was, they didn't knowanything about interest.
They had no understanding ofany of these things.
We live in a society in whichwe are all very, very plugged in

(56:36):
to numbers and we all keeprecords, we all keep accounts
for ourselves and we all knowwhat money we have put away
where and what's happening to it, where and what what's
happening to it.
This is a very modernphenomenon.
By and large, people have noidea of what money they had or

(56:57):
what would happen to it, becausethere's no numbers.
Were a mystery to people I.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
I would be able to talk to you for hours, which now
kept you here, and I promisedyou I'd be just at an hour or so
, but I want before I can talkfor nine days.
Unfortunately, there's somethingI was taught by the colleague,
it's fascinating and there's andI'm glad you brought up john
law because I was, I had that onmy notes to get to, but we've
covered anyway.
What we got there is funnybecause you got there without me

(57:29):
even prompting, because we'regoing to talk about john law and
there was, you know, theoutlawing of gold at certain
times and it always comes back.
And now we've this is my lastquestion for you and going in to
wrap things up because I wantthe audience, uh, wanting more.
So they go get your bookbecause it's against very, very

(57:49):
well written, very dense, it'sgot so much in there stuff you
didn't know.
I mean, uh, I'm still, I I'mgoing to read it again just
because there's so much in there, uh, and it's unlike anything
else.
So you know, we've we talkedabout the nixon shock earlier
and and you know, if you look atthe metrics of things that
happened since 1971 and theworld, what's happened to the

(58:10):
world, like the financial worldthat we've become, especially in
the United States, back before1971, there were no commercials
about getting into the stockmarket.
There was no 401ks.
There's no IRAs, there was no401ks, there's no IRAs.
It was, you know, the Americandream was, you know, you get a

(58:36):
well-paying job, you own a home,put some savings away, things
like that, and it would retain,you know, its value over time
and you would be able toaccumulate.
You know your work, you'd beable to store that away.
And that's changed drastically.
No-transcript, nobody eventalks about that anymore.

(59:20):
It's like not even on the, noteven on the docket.
So we live in a post.
You know this world, it it'spost gold standard, it's a fiat
standard, at least for now.
Where do you think this ends up?
I mean, do you think that theworld, when they talk about it

(59:40):
at Davos and the great reset andall these other things, does
this come into this gold?
Because you see central banksbuying?
Do you see central banks buying?
Do you see this pivot againwhere we go back to a gold
standard?
Or, as gold as it becomes, doesit retain its monetary place,
its throne as the world'sreserve currency somehow?

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
The idea of gold as a currency has obviously always
been slightly body batty, butit's always been there all the
same.
Um I, where we are going now,um, personally, uh, right,
firstly, I have no propheticpowers.
I have no idea what's going tohappen.
Um, but um, I am conscious,from reading a lot of history,

(01:00:31):
that the notion that you canhave, for example, a man living
in your country who is reckonedto have more than one dollar for
every star in the solar systemis meaningless and unsustainable

(01:00:51):
.
But that is the Musk arithmetic.
Apparently, more than 450million.
That's the number of stars inthe solar system, in the galaxy,
not the solar system, the wholeMilky Way.
He's got more dollars thanthere are stars in the Milky Way

(01:01:12):
.
If you believe that and youthink that that is sustainable,
then you can carry on beingcheery about the way life is
going to move.
If you think, however, thatthat will go the way of John
Law's paper money, which thereis quite a history of that sort

(01:01:32):
of thing happening then we'reall going to go through a period
of extreme pain.
How you come out the other end,I don't know.
We will come out the other endbecause people are very
inventive and they create thingsand people need to stay alive
and they will find ways of doingdeals with each other, but
whether it will be on the basisthat they're doing the deals now

(01:01:54):
, I can't really see how thatwill work.
Of course, as we all know, thereare a number of countries
powerful, very wealthy countriesthat in some cases that are
anxious to have nothing to dowith the dollar and are looking
for alternative basis forcurrency.
And I think the BRIC countriesnow have an economic scale

(01:02:19):
because they include China andIndia and Brazil that exceeds
the non-BRIC countries.
So the possibility of thembeing able to organize their
life around a non-dollar,non-currency, which uses gold, I
think, is probably quite high.

(01:02:39):
Also, one of the effects of themassive increase in the value
of gold is that it is graduallymoving closer to the point where
there is enough valuerepresented in the gold in
circulation to match the scaleof global trade.
Not yet, but it's moving inthat direction.

(01:03:02):
When it does get there, if itdoes get there, then perhaps you
can expect some kind of returnto a gold standard, and that
would imply I don't know you'llbe better at the arithmetic of
this than me, but it would implythat the gold price is going to
quadruple to reach that pointwhich?

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
probably wouldn't happen.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
It'd be something like that yeah, which is not out
of reach.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
No, not out of reach at all.
It's interesting.
There's a lot of argumentsgoing on right now.
A couple of years ago, I was atthe Bitcoin conference in
Nashville and I watched MichaelSaylor, who pushes Bitcoin and
he's got his company that buysBitcoin showing the charts of

(01:03:52):
the global wealth, and I've justalways stuck with me, alan.
It has these blocks of hundredsof trillions here and there
between currency, real estate,sovereign wealth, funds, bonds,
so it's hundreds of trillions inthe world economy.
And then over in the left-handcorner had these tiny graphs and

(01:04:12):
that was like gold's market capat like $20 trillion, and then
it was like Bitcoin's at $2trillion, and so it's like a
fraction of all these supposedwealth in the world.
And so I think there's a lot ofroom for these things like gold

(01:04:39):
or silver or Bitcoin to absorbsome of that so-called value
around the world.
My question to you with thishistory and this is where I stop
short of, because I like thetechnology of something like
Bitcoin and of course, youalways know how much is on the
ledger it's digital I could sendyou Bitcoin right now and in
that way, it's superior to gold.
Of course, gold does somethingthat Bitcoin can't do and that's

(01:04:59):
.
You can hold it in your hand, Ican wear it, I can store it.
You know other things outsideof the digital ledger.
However, a lot of the Bitcoinpeople believe that Bitcoin is
going to demonetize gold andsilver.
I don't ever see a day, becauseof our history, that gold is

(01:05:31):
demonetized or that it doesn'thave this intrinsic value of
some sort.
Do you have any thoughts onthat as we close?

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
I just wanted to get your take on it.
Gold is peculiar.
You can't, obviously, use goldto go out and buy a loaf of
bread.
That bit's impossible.
Nevertheless, gold seems to beexchangeable everywhere in the
world if you ever need to.
One of the big differences inmy head between gold and these

(01:06:00):
digital currencies is, of course, that gold doesn't depend on an
infrastructure, and anythingthat depends on an
infrastructure is itselfinherently risky.
Obviously, if the current stopsflowing, your Bitcoins are a

(01:06:20):
little difficult to access, butthe gold is just lumps of stuff.
Money is stuff.
I personally am a greatenthusiast for the Chinese
theory of currency and what it'sfor, called the Guangxi, which
starts a theory of money writtenin probably the 6th century BC,

(01:06:42):
which says money doesn't haveto be stuff.
It really shouldn't be anythingof any particular value.
Have to be stuff, it reallyshouldn't be anything of any
particular value.
What it is is the mechanism bywhich trade can take place.
So this is purely arepresentation that allows trade
to take place, and there needsto be enough money in the system

(01:07:04):
for the trade to balance.
If there's too little, thenthat's what the Guangxi calls
light, and you have devaluation.
If there's too much, it's whatthe Guangxi calls heavy, and you
have inflation, and thesethings will tend to balance out
over time.
It's a very sophisticatedtheory, developed, as I say, 6th

(01:07:27):
century BC and finally graspedto a certain extent in 18th
century.
Europe Took a little while, butthe whole theory of that which
was, incidentally, the basis ofthe Mongols introducing paper
currency, which worked prettywell for a long time and that
was using that text is thatthere has to be an authority

(01:07:51):
that stands behind it.
There has to be an imperialpower which is going to stand
behind that valueless currencyand say that's what it is and if
you don't treat it like that, Iwill cut your head off.
Now, it's possible that that'swhere we're going.
It depends how confident peopleare in wanting a democracy.

(01:08:16):
It's easier to run a moneysystem with an imperial power
mandate that says this is whatthe money is going to be worth,
mandate that says this is whatthe money is going to be worth
and you're going to do it, oryou're in deep shit, um, and if
you hit a big crisis, as we maybe going to, then that can be

(01:08:38):
one of the things that emergesfrom it is a monetary power
which is a political power thatsays I'm going to make this work
, and the population will tendto be enthusiastic about that, I
suspect.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
Well, I think we think along the same lines.
It's almost like there's achange in the economic system
that's precipitated by a crisis.
Sometimes you could call itmanufactured, we'll see.
You could call it manufactured,we'll see.
And we certainly dug ourselvesinto a hole with whatever this
fiat experiment is since 1971.

(01:09:15):
For good or ill, here we are.
I call it the giant digitalpuffball.
I like that.
We need to make that into at-shirt.
Well, again, alan herrera, the,the book is gold.
How it shaped history.
Ladies and gentlemen, go get it, it will enlighten you.
It's a great work.
And, before I close, alan, um,again, thank you for being here,

(01:09:38):
thank you for doing the show.
Uh, so enjoyed our, ourconversation and maybe we could
do this again, or maybe anupdate, but I wanted to uh see
what else you're working on, ifyou wanted people to find any
other parts of your work oranything that you do well, the
other thing that I'm alwaysworking on is stuff with the
kogi, um and uh.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
If you, uh, I've just put a piece on facebook, um,
with a wonderful article on thekogi and which I think should be
very rightly read, because hereyou have people who say you've
got the world into deep shit.
We know how to get out of it.
Listen to us, stop thinking youknow everything.

(01:10:22):
We can tell you how to dothings that will actually
protect nature and look after it.
That's a voice we really need.
When I first went to them, theysaid we can help you and I
thought I've never heardindigenous people say something
like that before.
They usually say we want you tohelp us.
That's the voice I want to hear.

Speaker 1 (01:10:45):
Interesting.
Yeah, this is a fascinatingthing with the Kogi and I.
I'd not known that.
I'd not known about them, themor heard about them before your
book and I'm interested to seemore of that it, so they

(01:11:12):
understand how you live withnature and help nature flourish.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
And they say we don't have the faintest idea, we
don't think that way, and so wehave to learn and they want to
show us, which is a great giftand so if you want people to
find your work, you have awebsite or anything people go to
or yes, people could go to thetwo possible websites.
One is my name, dot co dot, uk,alan herrera.

(01:11:35):
Dot co dot, uk, or the other ismore complicated, the name of
the trust, called the tyronatrust t-a-i-r-o-N-A trustorg.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
Okay, If you'll send me those after we're done
recording, I'll put them in theshow notes.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Thank you very much, indeed, it's been a wonderful
opportunity.
I'm very glad to have had thisconversation.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much for being sotolerant of me.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
Tolerant.
It's a fascinating show andlove the conversation.
I'm just.
I'm still rereading your bookright now and enjoying it.
So thank you for your work andeverything you do.
In a sea of things thatsometimes are just boring to me
anymore or horrifying, I get tohave a great conversation, so
thank you.
Thank you, Alan, and folks goout and find Alan's work and uh

(01:12:30):
support him and check up on him.
He's uh he's been very generousand um it's.
It's again as somebody who'sread a lot of history and I'm an
amateur, but, um, since I was ayoung soldier and, and, and
especially like northern iraqand ingesting history, I love
book.
So go get it and support Alanand support us.

(01:12:51):
Go get us a five-star reviewwhere you're finding podcasts
for Paratroopers.
It helps.
We got more great shows comingup with great guests, just like
this.
We'll see you next time, thanks.