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Documentary, Origins The Journey Of Humankind S01E03
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00:00In a society filled with human innovation, one invention stands out above them all.
00:20The one that has become the obsession of the modern world.
00:26Money.
00:27Money was not just an invention, it was a mental revolution.
00:33It created a system of trust, an elaborate tie that binds us all together.
00:38It connected the world, sending merchants across continents in search of far-off riches.
00:45Exchange was the engine that drove the progress of civilization, and money was the fuel.
00:51It allowed us to specialize, turning hunters into blacksmiths, artists, soldiers, and kings.
00:57Money is what made the world modern.
01:02We have taken it to dizzying levels of complexity, from gold coins to bits of information stored in the cloud.
01:18The history of money is the history of us.
01:23Every coin, stone, and shell, a symbol of what we have valued, who we have served, and how our cultures evolved.
01:31It has become a language that all humans speak.
01:35This is the story of how money made us modern.
01:38How it opened the globe and spread ideologies, transforming the ancient world into a complex civilization of merchants, mercenaries, industrialists, and billionaires.
01:49This is Origins.
01:51Money.
02:03It's a primal obsession, and a global idea.
02:06The paper changes, but it all spends the same.
02:10Money can solve all our problems, but it's the root of all evil.
02:14It buys happiness, but not love.
02:16It makes paupers into princes and fools out of all of us.
02:20What is money?
02:21Money is a technology.
02:25It's not a machine we created, but a tool we imagined.
02:30A technology of the mind.
02:33This technology powers the modern world.
02:37Economies, industries, innovation, globalization.
02:43Money allows billions of us across continents to interact under a common system, regardless of language or belief.
02:50It frees us to trade, to invest, to identify what we collectively value.
02:55In fact, money is a fundamental building block of our humanity.
02:59Money civilized us, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
03:03It has its origins in one of the great moments in human history.
03:06Imagine, you live in a small hunter-gatherer clan, roaming the mangroves and felts of Africa.
03:18Life is brutal and short.
03:20Survival is everything, and food is the most precious commodity.
03:25Money is tied to self-preservation, because we needed to survive, we needed to live.
03:35Early man was always looking for allies to exchange or to get the goods that they needed to survive.
03:41But in the early days of the human race, it was hard to know whom to trust.
03:49And it's here.
04:18The decisive moment when two tribes collide.
04:46Each side has something the other side wants.
04:50For tens of thousands of years of confrontation like this, threatened to end in a bloody fight for domination.
04:59But there is another way.
05:06Namat.
05:06Namat.
05:07Namat.
05:08Namat.
05:09Namat.
05:10Namat.
05:11Namat.
05:12Namat.
05:13Namat.
05:14Namat.
05:15Namat.
05:16Namat.
05:17Namat.
05:18Namat.
05:19Namat.
05:20Namat.
05:21Namat.
05:22Namat.
05:23Namat.
05:24Namat.
05:25Namat.
05:26Namat.
05:27Namat.
05:28Namat.
05:29Namat.
05:30Namat.
05:31Namat.
05:32In a world where humans hunt to survive, food and weapons would be the first things worth trading.
06:02My.
06:04It's a good thing.
06:07I'm not sure what's going on.
06:09It's not me.
06:13Oh.
06:17Oh.
06:19Oh.
06:21Oh.
06:23Oh.
06:25Oh.
06:27Oh.
06:29Oh.
06:31Oh.
06:32Oh.
06:32A walk.
06:35Taka.
06:36Shengeng.
06:38Look.
06:41What?
06:58Amad.
06:59Hwaunuaizhka.
07:01Bula-thu.
07:03Charatamat.
07:29Bula-thu.
07:49Peace through exchange was fundamental to early man.
07:53It showed that, look, you may not trust me or trust my tribe,
07:59but you'll trust this good.
08:01And over time you'll learn to trust me.
08:05Humans evolved from a long line of violent animals,
08:08and we are capable of extraordinary violence ourselves.
08:12But trade allowed us to put aside some of those warring instincts.
08:17And we did that because trading presupposes
08:20complicated and sophisticated psychology of
08:23what is my object worth, what is your object worth,
08:26how do we trade the two, how do we agree on the terms of that trade?
08:30We realized that we could often get more out of trade
08:33than we could out of violence.
08:36We often don't think about, why is the world like this?
08:39Why do we exchange in this way?
08:41We exchange in order to survive.
08:44If you're capable of making something that I don't make very well,
08:48or you have access to resources that I don't have access to,
08:51we can both benefit from trade.
08:53And this gives me a reason not to kill you,
08:56not to push you out of my territory,
08:58but in fact to cooperate.
09:00Because we can both benefit from the goods in that trade.
09:04What you've got is this need to obtain vital commodities.
09:14This kind of exchange intensified dramatically during the centuries,
09:20so you have to develop efficient ways to trade.
09:23That's currency that you're talking about,
09:26actual objects which had a fixed value.
09:28So all of a sudden, the idea of currency begins,
09:33and it starts this thousands of year journey
09:36into abstract nature of money.
09:39Money helped make us modern by helping us move
09:41from a kind of complicated exchange
09:44where I would have to evaluate the value of what you were offering,
09:47and now we have a universal system.
09:51That system has taken us from the simple trades
09:54of the distant past to today,
09:56when billions of dollars of goods are traded in a day
09:59on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
10:02This system can be found in almost every corner of the modern world.
10:06But as with many pillars of civilization,
10:08the Greeks were ahead of their time.
10:14They had places called agoras,
10:16the shopping malls of their day.
10:18The origin point of a revolutionary idea
10:21that shaped the world we live in.
10:23Back in the ancient world, in fact,
10:27money came out of something called the Agora of Athens.
10:30This was the hub of ancient civilization,
10:32and it was a marketplace of things.
10:34But it was more than that.
10:36We tend to think of an agora as a market
10:39where you exchange money for goods.
10:41But from its earliest use in the Greek language,
10:44this was a place where you would come and exchange
10:46not just goods and services, but ideas.
10:48You'd see folks from all walks of life.
10:53You'd see slaves.
10:54You'd see merchants.
10:55You'd see traders.
10:56You'd see government officials.
10:57A lot of people from all over the world came to the Agora
11:01to find goods that they couldn't find in their homelands.
11:04And the Agora was really the place that they made a profit,
11:07and you could rely on yourself.
11:10You could use your own mind.
11:11You could use your own capacity to make money for yourself.
11:14By the rise of the ancient Greek Empire,
11:17you see an ancient society that is very much like what we have today.
11:22There are class distinctions.
11:23There's the rich and the poor.
11:25But what the Agora did is people came to talk and express themselves
11:29and share different ideas and theories about the world.
11:32And at the same time, also exchange goods and money
11:35so that people can become rich and poor through their own efforts.
11:38Both these things are ways of bringing human beings together
11:43outside state control or royal control or religious control.
11:48And so it's the first green shoots of individual freedom.
11:52So this is where we think democracy came from.
11:57As folks came together and argued out the best way to do things,
12:01eventually what's going to bubble up from the people
12:03is the idea that the people should rule.
12:05That is democracy.
12:07So you could say that the Agora and money
12:11is part of the origins of democracy.
12:19Money has an almost hypnotic power
12:21to unify, to fulfill desires and drive progress.
12:25But with money comes greed.
12:27And as the Greeks taught us with the myth of King Midas,
12:30reducing everything to its pure economic value
12:33may let us build mountains of gold,
12:35but it strips away our humanity.
12:38Greed may be good on Wall Street,
12:40but it's led humans to acts of great evil.
12:43None worse than when we made humans a commodity
12:46on the global market and created slavery.
12:51In ancient days, we traded to survive.
13:09But over time, we began to seek the exotic,
13:14braving the unknown to forge new connections.
13:174,000 years ago, Mesopotamian traders
13:21forged the first vast trade networks,
13:24exchanging metal, spice, grain,
13:27and even slaves over thousands of miles.
13:31One material fueled ancient trade like no other,
13:34sparking conquests, spreading religions,
13:37transforming history.
13:39Silk.
13:43This luxurious cloth was worth more than its weight in gold.
13:54A web of trade routes emerged to feed the demand.
14:00Traders from East and West sought their fortune on the Silk Roads,
14:06braving freezing mountain passes and scorching desert heat.
14:10They blazed new paths, connecting the world by land and sea.
14:14But trade moves more than just goods.
14:19It moves people and their ideas.
14:23Evangelizing traders spread Christianity and Buddhism across continents,
14:28fueling cultural exchange.
14:30Islam wove through Eurasia and Africa,
14:33following the footsteps of generations of traders.
14:37The lasting legacy of the ancient traders is not the fortunes they built.
14:46It's the ideas they spread.
14:54Today we trade on a truly mind-boggling scale.
14:58We exchange computers, clothes, coffee, video games, toothbrushes, baseball bats,
15:03anything you can think of.
15:04And most of those goods travel by sea.
15:14Shanghai, Singapore, Shenzhen,
15:19lay claim to the three busiest shipping ports in the world.
15:23Nearly 100 million shipping containers
15:25pass through just these trade cities alone.
15:28A level of logistical magnitude merely beyond comprehension.
15:36International trade has promised to level the playing field
15:39between rich and poor economies
15:41and strengthen the bonds between peaceful nations.
15:44But for all of its liberating force, money can corrupt us.
15:48Our compulsion to turn everything into a commodity,
15:51something to be sold or traded,
15:53led to one of the oldest and darkest practices of humankind,
15:57slavery.
16:02In the late 18th century,
16:04the most profitable shipping business on Earth
16:06was the exportation of slaves from Africa.
16:10It was called the triangular trade.
16:13The triangular trade meant that ships traveled from Europe
16:16to Africa to the New World.
16:19From Europe came guns, ammunition, finished goods essentially,
16:23were sent down to Africa and there traded for slaves.
16:27Well, these enslaved Africans were then brought to the New World.
16:33And in the early days,
16:34nearly half of the enslaved Africans died during this.
16:38In 1794, the Portuguese slave ship,
16:43Saint-Rosé Pequette de Africa,
16:47sank off the coast of South Africa.
16:53All of its crew was saved,
16:55but half of its human cargo of slaves were lost.
16:58212 lives were lost that day.
17:28212 lives were lost.
17:29112 lives left to Africa and left to Africa.
17:30Two more cells.
17:31212 lives in the US.
17:32212 lives in the U.S.
17:341.
17:361.
17:37212 lives in the U.S.
17:41212 lives for over 30 years of the government and animal
17:41in the U.S.
17:42432 lives for over 30 years of the parishion.
17:45734 lives to the United States.
17:46312 lives into the American United States.
17:47936 lives in the US.
17:49442 lives in the US.
17:50544 lives in the U.S.
17:51Oh, my God.
18:21Oh, my God.
18:51Oh, my God.
19:21Oh, my God.
19:51Oh, my God.
20:21Oh, my God.
20:23Oh, my God.
20:25Oh, my God.
20:27Oh, my God.
20:29Oh, my God.
20:31Oh, my God.
20:33Oh, my God.
20:35And you could say that slavery was the currency that built not just the antebellum America, but really many of the urban centers throughout the Americas.
20:45For about two and a half centuries, the triangular trade changed the world.
20:53We engaged in what was really called the first global economy, in a sense, an economy that was really founded on the backs of enslaved Africans.
21:04The legacy of that trade continues to reverberate around the world to this day.
21:14What do I mean by that?
21:17Wars, the loss of treasure and goods, underdevelopment, all of these things continue to occur on the African continent.
21:27Well, once an area is destabilized, trying to build it back up again takes a lot of work.
21:34One of the unique things about slavery is that it's the often so-called more civilized societies that tend to place greater emphasis on having slaves.
21:45Because having slaves then frees up time for people to do other things.
21:52And you like to think that with the Civil War, this practice came to an end.
21:56And it did.
21:58Slavery is illegal almost everywhere in the world.
22:01But unfortunately, there is still indentured labor.
22:06Folks who live in places of conflict and they've become refugees.
22:11Those folks are working for such a small wage they can't even really put food on the table.
22:15So this idea of slavery, modern slavery is still with us.
22:23Modern slavery is part of the shadow economy, the black market, a system of trade built on our craving for illegal practices and substances.
22:35It's a trade that rewards slavers and pimps who turn women into sexual commodities.
22:40And in recent times, it's made billions for people trading in illicit drugs.
22:46Mood-altering substances have driven global markets and created incredible wealth for generations.
22:52Today's drug cartels are meeting a demand.
22:55They have surprising roots in another triangular trade.
22:59One that started with the British lust for tea.
23:02It's interesting how trade patterns can be origin moments in their own right.
23:11We look at the sale of opium to China and in the end precipitated the opium wars.
23:17Between 1700 and 1800, Britain goes absolutely mad for tea.
23:20Everyone wants to drink it and that means massive quantities have to be brought in from China.
23:25And the only thing the Chinese will accept in payment is silver.
23:28So this is a problem for the British because they're shipping essentially all the silver they can get their hands on to China.
23:33And then they hit on the idea of using opium instead.
23:36They could grow as much opium as they wanted.
23:38It was like money that grew on trees.
23:40They would take it to China where they would sell it to opium merchants for silver, which they then used to buy tea.
23:45So this is brilliant because it's a form of currency you can make as much of as you like.
23:49And then the people you give it to destroy it by smoking it.
23:52So from the British Empire's point of view, this was a fantastic idea.
23:56Obviously, it created a lot of opium addicts in China, but that wasn't their problem.
24:00The British and China went to war.
24:03The result of that conflict was that the British came out on top and it led to the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain.
24:09So Hong Kong, as we know it today, might not have existed had it not been for that original triangular trade.
24:16And that's how money and the drive to make it changes the world over and over, again and again.
24:24Rare spices, precious metals, drugs, humans.
24:28Everything eventually finds a price on the international market, whether it's legal or not.
24:36But with this torrential flow of exotic goods, it was nearly impossible to know how much something was worth.
24:42The chaos begged for the next evolution in money.
24:52An origin moment that gave us all a chance to grow richer than kings or lose it with the roll of the dice.
25:00Gold has fascinated our species for thousands of years.
25:21But the history of currency is far richer than gold.
25:24For the centuries, humans have used almost anything as money.
25:30Beebs, tobacco, whale teeth, even squirrel pelts.
25:37Cowry shells were used for hundreds of generations on almost every continent.
25:42Our first global currency, both money and jewelry.
25:46Salt was once a precious rarity, sought after my cultures around the globe.
25:53It was like white gold.
25:57But maybe the strangest form of money was found in the Pacific Ocean, on the island of Yap.
26:04Here, islanders traded in giant wheels of stone, some weighing thousands of pounds.
26:10These exotic currencies reflect our technologies, our cultures, our values.
26:23And as history reveals, money is more than just beautiful or useful.
26:28Money is whatever we imagine it to be.
26:31For centuries, pieces of metal were the backbone of society.
26:40Guilders, dinars, pieces of eight, pounds sterling, silver dollars, and copper cents.
26:48Coins have been haggled over, used as ransom, offered in marriage, and have led to countless murders, as if they were units of life itself.
26:57The origin moment for the currency we use today takes us back 550 years before Christ.
27:05In what we now know as Western Turkey, there once was a kingdom called Lydia,
27:11where the people, rich and poor, had to learn to live under a new system of money, the currency of coins.
27:23Forgive me, David.
27:27I mean,
27:48Lydia, which was a major trading center in the ancient world, was really an early part of the story of money.
27:54King Croesus issued money that was silver and gold, and by doing so, he really formalized the marketplace.
28:01They could buy things like never before. You didn't have to negotiate everything.
28:05They didn't have to rely on a literate middleman or a scribe.
28:09They could literally say, here's a coin, I want to buy some goods.
28:13And so, in that way, coins were incredibly democratizing and empowered a new segment of the population to trade and transact.
28:34The invention of coins created a new symbol of status and power.
28:40Your needs, actions, desires, all are caught up in the number of coins you possess.
29:10Lowly. Lowly.
29:18Lowly.
29:19Lowly.
29:27You have more than transc 32ải?
29:29Then imor canola!
29:30You haveين!
29:32Before coins were invented, money was really commodities, food items that could spoil and get bad.
29:47And when coins were invented, you could save them, you could bring them to the marketplace, and you could profit from them.
29:52You had this newfound freedom.
29:55You could use it for good.
29:57You could also use it very foolishly.
30:02You could use it for good.
30:32You could use it.
30:49Ah, yes.
30:50Oh, my God.
31:20Money is obviously a basic human urge, and it's one that I slightly don't understand.
31:35I mean, if you have, I don't know, $200 million, why would you want $300 million?
31:41I mean, how much extra quality of life can you buy?
31:44And yet, humans, almost without exception, if they have $200 million, they will work really hard to double it, and then double it again, and double it again.
31:54We have this sort of great urge to accumulate.
31:57It's the dark side of capitalism, and it's in some sense manifest in the dark side of civilization, which tends to cater to our worst impulses, our more self-destructive impulses.
32:10And I think that roots itself in the diseases of everyday life.
32:14When we trade and transact with money, we're often stimulating a part of the brain that's the reward circuitry of the brain, part of the deep evolutionary early and old part of the brain.
32:27In fact, they've looked at brain scans of people who are high on cocaine, and then compared it to people who are about to make money.
32:33And they found that the brain scans are virtually indistinguishable.
32:38When you lose money, it activates a part of the brain known as the anterior insula, which is really the fear center of the brain.
32:48So money is having a very visceral effect on us.
32:52We don't know when to stop.
32:54As a species, we just keep going and going and going.
32:57I don't think it's a particularly healthy thing, because what we're doing is we're creating an earth in which we are just driven by this need or this desire to acquire and consume.
33:07The question is, why is this?
33:08Because money provokes a deeply evolutionary force in us.
33:12More is better.
33:13We need more to survive.
33:14And you're going to do what it takes to get by, and that's money.
33:19As soon as we had coins in our hands, we began looking for easy ways to get more of them.
33:24Fast.
33:24The fact that we can gamble away everything we have is part of the thrill.
33:29Vegas, Monte Carlo, Macau.
33:32In these places, more money can be won or lost in a single flip of a card than billions of people will ever see in a lifetime.
33:39And we gamble with trillions of dollars in a betting ring we call the stock market.
33:44We risk.
33:45We win.
33:46We lose.
33:48Sometimes we lose big.
33:50We don't quit.
33:51We are mentally and physically addicted to money.
33:54And once you're addicted to something, you can be controlled by those who supply it.
33:59We will work at jobs we hate.
34:00We do things we know are wrong.
34:02Not because we want to.
34:04Because we have to.
34:05But the value of money is built on trust.
34:08We all have to believe our coins and pieces of paper are worth something.
34:11So what happens when the people who control your money decide it's no longer worth what you thought it was?
34:19When the illusion of money is exposed, when we are brutally reminded that money has no value other than what we agree on, it sends shockwaves through the world.
34:42Today, money seems less real, more of an illusion than ever before.
34:48We exchange fortunes with the touch of a button.
34:51Industries rise and fall in a matter of seconds.
34:54We track these transactions with digital bits, ones and zeros.
34:58Each day, billions upon billions of dollars are moved from one account to another.
35:03The flow of modern money is almost invisible.
35:08But how did this happen?
35:11For centuries, moving money meant moving heavy, cumbersome coins.
35:15And then a radical idea changes everything.
35:18One man sold civilization on the idea that money can be anything we dream it to be.
35:24His name was Kubla Khan.
35:281279, Mongolian China.
35:30The great Mongol emperor, Kubla Khan, ruled one of the vastest kingdoms that stretches from current-day Myanmar and Burma to Hungary.
35:42How does Kubla Khan unify his vast kingdom?
35:45Through money.
35:46He starts issuing money, as Marco Polo says, out of the barks of trees.
35:52He issues this money in paper and by edict, he starts to spread this money throughout his vast kingdom.
36:00He's stealing money from the huaheim.
36:04Come on!
36:10In a sense, monetary systems are a bit of an illusion, a bit of chicanery.
36:20Everyone has to believe that this is worth something.
36:22but kubla khan also had the government structure and the military power to enforce it
36:31he says essentially if you don't use my money i will kill you
36:43he says if you counter for this money i will also kill you
36:52so
41:56We have a good,
41:58thank you.
41:59We are now the sole supplier of currency paper for the U.S. government.
42:05Crane paper is special because of the materials that we choose.
42:12High quality natural fibers, cotton and flax fibers,
42:15which had traditionally been used in textile making,
42:18are still used for U.S. currency as opposed to ordinary papers made today with wood pulp.
42:29There are a lot of clever people that work hard to try to create counterfeits.
42:36Security features in the $100 note include a watermark feature
42:40with the portrait of Benjamin Franklin, which is put in the paper making process.
42:48And then the most prominent security feature is now the 3D ribbon here.
42:53In the Western world, we are accustomed to credit and digital electronic transactions,
42:59but one of the features of currency paper, of course, is anonymity.
43:04I think that's partly why it's valued by many around the world,
43:07is they can conduct transactions using money without having traceability to it.
43:13So a lot of the world, it still relies on this tangible product, paper money.
43:22Money is with us at our birth, money is with us all throughout our lives,
43:27and money carries on after we die.
43:31It's a force that is so fundamental to the human experience.
43:35We cannot live without money, we cannot survive without money.
43:39And money makes us modern because it's always, always at the cutting edge of technology too.
43:45Money is evolving into the currency of information.
43:51When you think about something like Google, the way that they actually distribute information is oftentimes free, right?
43:57There is no price to it, they don't charge you.
44:00But there is incredible value and richness to the information.
44:04The more we kind of get close to the information or the more we get to the value, the less we need money in a kind of traditional or conventional sense.
44:15Money is increasingly becoming invisible.
44:19You can probably see a future where we walk into a store, it just debits us by recognizing our faces.
44:25Money has always been wrapped up with your identity, your status in a society.
44:30Our identity is absolutely currency, our identity has incredible value, irrespective of its attachment to our bank accounts.
44:38We are our credit history, we are our surgical history, we are all of these things that we don't think of necessarily as having value.
44:48We're always trying to find easier ways to transact, we're always trying to find easier ways to become more modern.
44:55And money is really part of that story.
44:56All of that information, including what you buy, look at online and like across social media, has value.
45:05It's all part of the information market.
45:07So at the dawn of a new millennium, we have come from trading weapons and meat thousands of years ago, to trading information itself.
45:14Our very identity now, our individuality, has become one of the most valuable currencies on the globe.
45:23Every day, money passes through countless hands around the world.
45:29But behind every weathered piece of currency, there is a deeper story to be told.
45:38Money is more than just a useful tool or a symbol of value.
45:45It is a work of art that tells the story of humanity.
45:48The symbols and proverbs of our nations, kings and queens of history, the gods we worship, all are stamped on the canvas of our currency.
46:01With each advance, we reinvent money, only for money to reinvent us.
46:09It united our species, giving us writing, mathematics, spreading new philosophies, new religions, and new societies.
46:17It made us modern.
46:19Money creates, money destroys.
46:22It has built our modern civilization and enslaved at the same time.
46:28But above all, money is a human creation, one that we can rewrite to our own demands.
46:35When history looks back on our time and place, our story will be revealed through our coins, our bills, and our systems of money.
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