2026-05-13
44 分钟Money starts from a set of ideas.
It starts from the underlying system of credit and clearing.
And then what is used as a token to represent that can actually be anything at all.
It could be gold coins or it could be stone disks.
Today on the story of money.
Well, Gillian, before we get into today's story of money, I want to ask you, what is money anyway?
Great question.
And people say it makes the world go round.
But the irony is it's also the most successful shared hallucination in human history.
It 's a type of alchemy, if you like, where we all pretend to agree that something that is intrinsically worthless,
like a slip of paper, is actually worth something from a horse to a house.
And it only works because we're confident the next person will play this trust game too.
So money is basically just a confidence game then?
It 's literally just a printed IOU on a piece of paper or maybe a shell that everybody hopes they would n't actually
have to cash in because the value is n't stored in a vault.
It only magically becomes real at the exact moment you hand it to a stranger who 's gullible enough to trust it and give you
something in return, like a service or some groceries.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's basically all about credit, which is the Latin word for to trust or he, she, it trusts.
But beyond the.