Composition Analysis

Emotion Expression

Color Strategy

Text Strategy

Visualizing Scale

The Belief Framework

Narrative Economics

Connecting Past to Present

If we took all of the gold that has ever been mined in all of human history and put it all in one place in a giant cube here in Washington DC, it would look like... (screen whooshing) This. (percussive music) Oh. This is it? (knuckles thunking) I mean, it's pretty big, but I kinda thought it was gonna be a lot bigger.

So, what's all this gold even used for? Well, 45% of it is used for decoration and jewelry. You got necklaces, you got earrings. You've got this giant Buddha that's just solid gold. There's an old Egyptian coffin made of pure gold. Largest gold coin in the world. It's got a kangaroo on it. It's 45% of all the gold. You got a small portion of all this stuff that gets used for industry. Stuff like the fillings in your teeth or electronic components that use the special properties of gold to work. But then a huge portion of all this gold is just sitting in vaults around the world. Mostly in New York and London in the form of bars gathering dust.

Governments and investors have been on a gold buying spree lately. I mean, look at the price of gold. - President Trump is seeking more control of the Federal Reserve. - Gold prices saw to a record high after U. S. President Donald Trump criticized Federal Reserve. - Russia and China have been buying a lot of gold bars, and Florida is trying to make it so that gold can be used as real money again. It seems like gold is having a comeback. But actually what I'm learning is that it never went away in the first place. - [Voiceover] Would you look at that. (coins clinking) (mystical music) (coins clinking) (ethereal music) (upbeat dramatic music).

So, how did all of this gold get here to earth? Well, a lot of the gold that humans mined came to us on one of these. An asteroid loaded up with heavy metals that formed from exploding stars. (stars booming) If you zoom into one of those metals, you'll see some really weird looking atoms. The electrons are moving nearly the speed of light. This absorbs the blue light and reflects the yellow and red light. Look, it's yellow. It's shiny like the sun. No other metal does it quite like this. (upbeat dramatic music) These gold deposits sat in Earth's crust for billions of years, undiscovered. Some rivers dug in, eroding the earth and revealing these pieces of shiny stardust. It caught the eye of some humans who noticed it was different.

- Found this shiny rock that they dug out of the ground, that they could turn into things, that it didn't tarnish. - [Johnny] It was a dense metal, but it was somehow soft and workable. It didn't rust. It was incorruptible. Was it eternal? - Gold has chemical properties that have proven to be very interesting and useful to many societies across the kind of many centuries. And some of those properties have to do with its purity. Some of them have to do with its malleability. Some of them have to do with its indestructibility. And some of it has to do with its aesthetic intrigue. - [Johnny] From China to the Indies, people independently fell under gold spell.

At first for decoration and celebration of their rulers and their gods. Indian healers made medicine with it. To the Inca, gold was the sweat of the sun that covered their temples and adorned their faces with it. The Greeks made statues. King Solomon plated his temple with it. And 6,000 years ago, this guy was buried with a gold bracelet with beads, with his scepter, with a sheath. Oh, and not for his sword, but for his. Yeah, I mean I guess it was pretty valuable stuff. Chinese emperors ingested gold trying to become immortal, which spoiler alert doesn't work. But as humans gathered in larger and larger groups, empires grew. They became greedy and hungry for more land. The story of gold starts to evolve, helping kick off one of the most significant psychological inventions humans ever came up with. The invention of money. (coins clinking) (ethereal music).

- It's a commonly accepted medium of exchange that many people are willing to accept it. In early societies, one of the most common things was cattle. - (slurping) Yep. We're talking about cows. We'll get back to gold in just a sec. Let's go inside the human brain to see how money evolves. So yeah, instead of just trading something I want for something you want, humans started settling on commonly useful things that they could carry around and that would be valuable to most people. - Historically, lots of objects have served as monies. So, you got barley, salt. - Cows were something that many people needed for food. They were transportable 'cause they could walk. They were pretty easy to maintain 'cause they eat grass. - [Johnny] This is the most obvious version of money. Something that is practical and useful. It'll help you survive.

But they also have drawbacks. Cows don't make good money. That's a weird sentence I never thought I would say. But yeah, they spoil. They're hard to divide. You can't easily bring them to far away places to do trading. So, eventually humans found something better. That shiny soft metal pulled from the riverbeds. It was easy to shape, to split up. - So it's easy to carry around, it's easily divisible. - And it just looks cool. (sniffs) And humans love shiny things. (slurping) So, that was like a nice added bonus. It was rare, but not too rare. Like, there was enough of it, but it wasn't like everywhere, which like, that's an important part of this.

But gold doesn't feed you. It doesn't keep you warm. It doesn't shelter you. Yes, you can make jewelry and like a dagger out of it or something. But like, it's not that intrinsically useful unless we introduce a very powerful ingredient to the mix.

It's a very human ingredient called belief. This guy believes gold is valuable and so does this guy. If someone believes that gold is valuable and so does another person, that belief turns metal into a system. He trades it for wheat. I'll give you gold. You give me wheat. You then take that gold and go trade it for salt or fabric. Gold becomes valuable not because of what it does, but because what we believe it means. So, this is a big psychological step for us. From cattle which has utility to gold which has no utility, but is scarce, durable, divisible, universal. And don't forget, as in shiny. And all this is made possible because of collective belief. Belief that if I have this metal, I'll be able to go use it to buy things that help me survive. And if everyone believes it, then it works. - [Lawrence] Gold and silver became the dominant monies throughout the world.

(upbeat rousing music).

- If collective belief can turn metal into money, as a collective, I believe that we can change a broken media ecosystem into something better. Me and my team have been working on a new chapter trying to build a place for community-led journalism. You can join the wait list at newpress. com to get early access as soon as it's ready. But for now, we're talking about gold. So, the belief in gold spreads throughout the world a few thousand years ago. Not just as a thing that we do to worship the gods, but as a means of trade, a currency, a money. This also happened with gold's forgotten cousin, silver. Poor silver. It just didn't get those fast moving electrons to make it shiny. And there's like too much of it too. Anyway, soon gold was being stamped into standardized coins being used as a near universal form of money all around the world. It was magic, but it was also mania. (tense percussive music).

When the Spanish landed on the shores of modern day Mexico in 1519, they met the Aztec civilization and one thing caught their eye. Gold, lots of gold. Including these gifts that the Aztec king was presenting to the Spaniards. Giving it to them for free. The Aztecs were using lots of gold, but not as a currency, but as decoration, for worship, for armor, for blades. It wasn't economic. But to the Spanish, gold had become economic, a means of trade. It was wealth. And here it was in extreme abundance and they wanted it. Or in the words of one Spanish conqueror. "We suffer from a disease of the heart that can only be cured by gold. " The Spanish ended up massacring the Aztecs with their weapons and their diseases. (crowd clamoring) They took as much gold as they could find. These statues and masks and jewelry and blades. Melted them down, shaped them into uniform units of value and stamped them with a seal of authority.

They spent the next century ripping through the Americas, chasing every rumor of golden cities and sacred wealth. Places like El Dorado, Cibola. Men fevered by greed for this shiny metal stuff, fueled by conquest and spoils that built their cathedrals, and ended up kicking off a race among the European empires. A race for more and more gold. - Let's not forget what the Spanish found when they came to the New World. Gold. Mountains of it. - And then of course, this leads to a cottage industry of renegade sailors, sometimes hired by other empires trying to intercept these ships going to and from the New World with hopes of finding one of these chests full of gold.

Now, I was disappointed in my reporting when I discovered that most pirates weren't actually after gold and didn't find a lot of gold. They were after more boring stuff like lumber. And they didn't really have these X marks the spot type maps where they buried their chest of gold. - (gasps) Look, it's the X. - X marks the spot! - That's mostly a myth, but it's also kind of a useful example of how gold inspired these, like, big grand stories of adventure, of jackpot. How it enlivened the imagination and inflamed this greed in people's minds. I mean, I get it. How sick is the idea of a bunch of gold that never rusts buried somewhere in the Caribbean, ready to turn a peasant into a count? - Greetings. - God, I love "The Count of Monte Cristo" from the early 2000s. (slurping).

So by the 1800s, this psychological leap is complete. There is a near universal belief in gold as a currency, a means for exchange, the universal money. Big European empires had already torn across continents in search for it. And now, it was the turn of regular people. The dreamers, the risk takers, the desperate men who joined the hunt for gold. Men with nothing to lose. Chasing rumors of riches and doing pretty reckless and extraordinary things, all for a shot at striking gold. A big group of them in 1849 fled into the Western United States, helping build California, becoming the 49ers, all in search for gold. These guys are in Canada's Yukon where it is very cold and they're looking for gold. I mean, this happened everywhere. South Africa, Australia, the Amazon. Each place the same story. Men intoxicated by the idea of getting rich off of gold, doing whatever it takes to get their hands on the stuff. Even forcing others to mine it for them. This frenzy of hope, chaos, migration.

It was gold fever and it didn't just move markets, it moved human beings, entire populations. It was as the writer of this excellent book puts it, "... a murderous, cruel, intoxicating, brutal adventure that swallowed an entire civilization and spatted out as coins. " Man, I love when rigorous historians write beautiful language.

Okay, let's dive back into the brain really quick and see what's going on next. (bright music) Hold up. This is actually a perfect time for me to thank today's sponsor to get my gold, so that I can keep running this company. And it's actually something that I use. It looks like this. Enable threat protection. Boom! I'm in. So, Nord VPN used to just be a virtual private network. A VPN that allows you to connect to the internet via another country. These days, it's a lot more. It's more and more a threat protection tool, a dark web monitor. It's basically an all around tool that allows you to connect to the internet and be safe from a whole host of different threats that exist online. Threats to your data, threats to your identity, threats to your computer itself. It blocks sketchy sites, phishing links, malware, even fake online shops. I mean, I still use it mostly as a VPN, like, when I'm in other countries, I connect to the internet via the United States, so that my computer doesn't freak out and like, make me do a bunch of two-factor identification.

Also allows me to like, watch stuff that is only available in other countries sometimes. But yeah, it is this very easy tool that kinda just works in the background. You're not pressing a lot of buttons for you to get the value out of this. It's very affordable. The dark web monitor can go out and check to see if your credentials have leaked into any hacker forums and they alert you right away. So, it's just a generally good tool to be connected to all of the time. If you've got Auto-connect enabled, that just works in the background. Threat Protection Pro is what you're looking for here. This is especially useful when you are at, like, a public WiFi, like a cafe, or a airport or something. So, if you go to nordvpn. com/johnnyharris, that helps support this channel when you click that link. It also gets you a huge discount on the two-year plan plus four extra months. Again, that's nordvpn. com/johnnyharris Thanks NordVPN for sponsoring today's video. With that, let's dive back into the brain and keep telling this story about gold.

It's about to get real juicy.

We're about to take another big psychological leap here. The leap from a belief in this soft, shiny metal to a belief in paper. (coins clinking) (ethereal music) - [Thomas] One of the problems with physical gold is that if you wanna trade it in large quantities, it's pretty heavy to carry around a lot of gold. And what people decided was that they could deposit their gold into a bank. It would give them a bank note, which was essentially an IOU. One ounce of gold was worth approximately $20. So, basically if you had a $20 bill, you could go into a bank and redeem it for one ounce of gold. - Most individuals when they got paid, they gotta pay envelopes stuffed with bank notes. So, that was the everyday medium of exchange. As long as you trusted that the bank notes were good, you really didn't think about much which bank had issued the notes. They all exchanged one-to-one against each other and against gold and silver dollars. - If you wanted gold instead of the bank note, you could come in and redeem the bank note and they would give you gold. - So, now instead of believing in gold, we are believing in banks. Trusting them that if they give us this piece of paper, it actually represents the gold that they are holding safe in their vault. And that at any moment, if I needed the gold, I could go to the bank, get the gold.

That is now a pretty far abstraction from cows. Something that feeds us. We're now carrying around paper. But once again, it follows the same rule that if everyone believes it and if the banks don't give us any reason not to believe it, then this worthless piece of paper turns into economic power, a currency. And in fact, if we can do that, it's really convenient. It makes trade way easier. Theoretically, everyone thrives here. So, oh. Yeah, silver. Okay, yeah. Instead of gold in the vault, a lot of economies had silver in the vault. And a lot of economies were trying to have both metals, giving them each a specific value and pegging that value so that it wouldn't change too much. But this becomes a problem. It's really hard to have two metals as the foundation of your paper money. And then suddenly, if there's a big discovery of silver in Nevada or something, there's way more silver.

So, it throws off the value of silver, but it's pegged to the value of gold. And so, all this arbitrage happens. This was a huge decades long debate here in the United States. It got really political. You've got this guy running for office, mostly on a platform of silver. And some people think that the "Wizard of Oz" is an entire commentary on this debate between gold and silver. And while reporting this story, I was multiple times very tempted to go down this rabbit hole. (inhales deeply) This is a video about gold, not about silver. Sorry, silver. So, we'll save that one for another day.

And indeed by 1900, gold, this shiny metal that humans have been using for thousands of years to do trade endured as the one metal that we would base our entire economy off of. At least here in the United States. But a lot of countries too. We set a firm standard. 20 bucks gets you one ounce of gold. There's a finite number of gold. It doesn't fluctuate too much. Anyway, this was called the Gold Standard. And the United States and a bunch of other big countries were on the Gold Standard in the early 1900s. (tense dramatic music).

Okay, let's get back to the human brain because we're about to go through our third massive leap in the psychology of money. Let me warn you, this one's kind of weird. And I went to college for this one monetary policy in economics, and I'm gonna do my best to explain it, but starts to get a little bit wacky. And we're also entering some controversial territory. Economists who are much smarter than I, debate this stuff, what I'm about to say. And they all have different takes and they have strong feelings about it. So, I'm gonna do my best here. But like, in the comments, you're gonna see some strong opinions. I welcome them. Just be nice. (coins clinking) (ethereal music) So, it's early 1900s. Banks have gold in their vaults. They give you a piece of paper that says you're entitled to the gold in the vault. But it turns out, human beings are struggling to adopt to the paper thing fully. - There are a series of financial panics.

You probably don't wanna get into the causes of the panics. The banks had a limit to how many bank notes they could issue. So, when people wanted more currency and they couldn't get bank notes, they would take gold and silver coins outta the bank vaults. And now the banks are losing reserves. Now, they have a problem. - So, here they all are at the same time, rushing to the bank to pull their money out all at once. (rousing music) This is not good for an economy that grows when you give banks money to lend out to other people and trust that not everyone's gonna try to take it all out at the same time. We made a whole video about this. How modern finance and credit works and how that multiplies the money supply in these weird ways. You can check that out. But for now, just look at this picture of a bunch of people on Wall Street trying to get their gold out. And know that this is not good for the economy.

So, the US government decides that having all of these decentralized private banks who are giving out paper money is just too prone to these vulnerabilities, to everyone going and taking all the money out at the same time. So, they decide to make one bank. One bank to rule them all, AKA the Central Bank, AKA the Federal Reserve, AKA the Fed. We're just gonna call it the Fed from now on. Why did the US government decide they needed to centralize this around a single bank? - It's a federal institution that will cope with potential panics and shortages of currency and shortages of back reserves. - The Fed would be the big bank that would be given a bunch of power to set the rules for the rest of the banks. - By issuing more currency when it's desired. - Now, it was still technically pegged to the gold standard, but a huge difference was now, you couldn't just go to the bank and exchange your paper for gold. And the Fed would be in charge of controlling how many of these bank notes were floating around the economy. - And so, in the United States, we have the Federal Reserve that is the monopoly provider of dollars. Which in turn determines how the economy works, how people spend money, how people borrow money. And their goal at first was just to make sure that this doesn't happen again. (somber upbeat music) Look at this fancy machine that the Fed has. It's not a literal machine.

This is completely symbolic. Don't over interpret the analogy here. So to be clear, we're still on the gold standard at this point. It's like 1913 or something. Every 20 bucks is pegged to an ounce of gold. But now, the Fed has all of these levers to play with. These levers that invisibly incentivize people to borrow money with the interest rate, to spend money.

And with their new power, the Fed starts fiddling around with all of these levers. Hey, look, if you lower the interest rate more people will borrow money. They'll spend money, they'll start businesses, more jobs. - Many critics have said that they kept interest rates below where they should have been. They made credit too abundant. And so, you had an overinvestment boom in the 1920s that although there were genuine investment opportunities due to technological change, electrification, the automobile, things like that. - Wow, look, it's an economic boom. It's the roaring '20s. The stock market just quadrupled in five years. Times are good. Thanks in part to the Fed pulling some of these levers. Though this, like many assertions I'm about to say is kinda debated. Try not to get sucked on the economic debate rabbit hole here. So, things were good in the 1920s. Maybe a little too good.

(upbeat music) Uh-oh. (upbeat music).

- [Lawrence] The Fed over amplified that boom and raised it to an unsustainable pitch. (rousing music) - [Johnny] The bubble burst, the good times ended, and the US and the rest of the world falls into a great depression. - [Lawrence] The money supply in the early years of The Great Depression starting in 1930, there are bank runs that drained a lot of the gold out of the banking system into individual's wallets and under their mattresses. - Again, we made a whole video about what recessions and depressions are. Check that out. Oka, but watch what happens here. One of the very important levers that the Fed has on this symbolic machine is to put more money into the economy. And they do this through a bunch of different indirect mechanisms. But the result is there's more money to go around and borrowing money is cheaper. They can make the interest rate go down. So, it's like, doesn't cost that much to borrow money. During the Great Depression, most economists agreed that the Fed should have done this. So, why aren't they using this? It's the Great Depression. People aren't spending money, people are losing their jobs.

Lower the interest rate, get more money into the economy. But look. They can't really do that very much. The money supply is fixed to gold. - If the Fed started to issue more notes, it could reach a point where it was constrained by not having enough gold to back them. - If you lower the interest rate, then people are gonna borrow a bunch of money. But then, what if they show up to the bank with all that money and demand gold bars in exchange for their paper? They might do that. Everyone's kinda panicky. So, the Fed is envisioning this nightmare scenario where all of their gold goes away and the whole system falls apart. So, instead of lowering the interest rate, they hike it up. They defend their gold. The historians who debate this stuff don't agree on all of this, but they do agree that this course of action made the whole thing worse. Made the Great Depression last a lot longer. 10 years of misery.

- And so, the Federal Reserve, instead of saying, "Hey, we made a big mistake. We shouldn't have caused this bubble in the economy. " They said, "You know what? We need even more power to control the money supply. " And that's what happened. - That resulted in the president coming out and saying, "Hey, the gold standard really just screwed us over. We weren't able to pull all of our levers because we were pegged to this obsession with being backed by gold. So, let's be done. Enough is enough. We need flexibility in a crisis. " And if you wanna go way down the technical rabbit hole, look up the unholy trinity. That's a very technical explanation of what's going on here. All the sources are in the description as always. So it's 1933, and FDR comes out with an executive order saying that Americans need to turn in their gold bars in exchange for flimsy dollar bills, and the government could now print as much or as little money as they wanted to guide the economy's behavior to keep it humming along, and hopefully keep prices stable. Now, you don't have a finite thing called gold.

That is like, there's only so much of it. Because now you just have an infinite thing called dollars and a Central Bank who can effectively print as much of it as they want. The more they print, the less each is worth. So, prices go up. That's inflation. Anyway, let's go back into the brain because this is, like, the biggest psychological leap of them all. Money is still belief, but without the gold standard, the belief is in the government, in their paper, even if it's not backed by anything. It is a belief in the government's ability to run this machine properly. This is called fiat money and it's a whole lot different than cows where we started. It started in 1933. This is how money was valued in the United States by a decree from above. (techno music).

Now, full disclosure. I went to Brigham Young University, studied econ, and studied under a school of thought that was very much like pro Fed. The Fed and fiat money is sort of like, the best thing we got going. It makes mistakes sometimes, but it's better than the gold standard. I intentionally talked to two economists for this story who were like a little more skeptical of that take to kind of help balance me out. And my hope is that the story I just told you about in this moment in time is a fair characterization. But if there's any professional economist watching, I would love your take on this. Like, I would love a good faith critique or like a alternative view or whatever. This is, economics is not science, it is psychology. And so, we get to debate it endlessly. So, gold is out. And so, what? Are we at the end of the road for this shiny metal, this thing that humans have loved forever? Not so fast. (coin clinking) (ethereal music).

So 1944, World War II is winding down. The US is realizing that in just a matter of years became the most powerful country in the world and defeated the two rising empires, and was now on top of everything. So, they get all of their ally countries together, a couple dozen countries in a hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire with the goal of designing a new global economic system. A set of rules that everyone will play by. (gentle upbeat music) And the US of course, takes the lead on what this system will look like. They propose that instead of creating some universal global currency as some were proposing, the world should instead opt for the US dollar to become the universal, globally accepted currency that everyone else's currency would be like attached to. And the rest of the countries are like, "Um, it seems kinda sketchy that we're just trusting you and your dollar. " And the US says, "Okay, but remember. All of our dollars are still backed up with gold. Normal citizens can't turn it in for gold. But we promise to you countries that all of your dollars can be turned in for real gold bars, $35 per ounce. You can come to us and exchange them for gold whenever you want, and we'll promise we'll keep it in the vault. Speaking of the vault, look at our vault. This is Fort Knox. It's in Kentucky.

This is where we keep our gold and we have a lot of it now because a lot of you all, world, gave us your gold in exchange for weapons we made for you during the war. So, the dollar is king and we'll back it up with gold. Take it or leave it, guys. " And they indeed took it and the dollar became the king of global trade and investing. And gold was once again at the center of our concept of money, but not for long.

Turns out the US couldn't keep its promise to back up all of its dollars with gold in its vaults. They were printing more money, they were giving it out, and the world catches on. And some countries get kinda pissed. - Until finally there were so many dollars that they started to redeem them. Germany and France in particular. - [Johnny] Like, France apparently sends a Navy ship in the 60s to show up to New York to be like, "Hey, we're gonna give you our dollars, we want our gold. " - And the Treasury ran out of gold and we shut the gold window in 1971. - I directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets. - And finally the president at the time who is President Nixon comes out and is like, "Okay, okay, okay. Yes, we don't have the gold anymore. You got us. But guys, come on, be reasonable. We're all used to using the dollar by now. The whole global economy is used to this. We're America.

We've proven that we're stable. You can trust us. I mean, look at our economy and look at our military. We are safe and stable. Use our currency, invest in our government, and you can sell those bonds whenever you want. We'll give you dollars and you can use that to buy oil and whatever you want in the global economy. We promise we're good. " And the world without much choice was like, "Okay, fine. " (gentle music).

And just when we thought we couldn't get any further away from cows, here we are. Our concept of money takes one more bonus step to here, where so much of the global economy runs on a currency that is built off of collective belief in a story, in a system, in an S with a line through it, in 19 people who sit in a fancy white building in Washington DC, and try to accurately predict the future and make decisions to pull proverbial levers to ensure that the dollar doesn't lose its value in all of our minds.

So, have they done a good job? Well, a lot of people say yes. - People from the Fed would say, "Look, we've done a great job. You know, the Federal Reserve is better than putting this into a private market like we had before the Fed. " - That being able to create new money in the economy helped us recover relatively quickly in the 2008 crash or during COVID. But a lot of people say no. That the Fed does a terrible job. - But I think the evidence says that actually they have not done very good. You know, the Fed basically caused the Great Depression. - That inflation is out of control and that the people running it are never faced with the consequences for not doing a good job. Several economists I talk to think that it's a lot of power to put in a government agency that isn't incentivized by the free market. But most monetary economists, the people who study this stuff, like the vast majority, think that, hey, the Fed's not perfect, doesn't get it right all the time, but like, this is the best version of a modern complex economy, and it generally works. - What you described as the Fed has made some mistakes, but we can't imagine living without it. That's probably 90% of the econ profession or maybe higher. But everybody now has grown up in a world where it's hard to imagine what things would look like without the Fed.

And it's especially hard to imagine once you're on a fiat money standard. If you're on a fiat money standard, somebody has to control the quantity of fiat money. And if it's not a Central Bank, how do you do that? - I'm actually not gonna have an opinion on this. I'm still kind of making up my mind. (coins clinking) (ethereal music).

So, let's wind this video down by getting back to the central question at the beginning that we started with, which is, "Why are people buying gold again? Why is this happening? " - The price of gold is near an all time high. - Have you seen the price of gold lately? - [Reporter] Gold is up more than 13% this year. - So, since we've gone totally off the gold standard since 1971, and in fact even before that. People have started holding gold as a hedge against inflation. - Despite all of these mental leaps and these vast abstractions of economic value, here we are turning back to gold.

First off, foreign governments never got rid of their gold. The US still has huge stores of thousands and thousands of tons of gold in Fort Knox and other facilities. And so do a lot of other countries. A lot of countries store their gold in the United States and New York City in this gold reserve that is buried, like, 50 feet into the bedrock of Manhattan. And it just sort of sits there gathering dust and being a little reserve, a just in case type of thing. But a lot of regular people, investors buy gold too whenever they start to feel a little bit sketchy about the big psychological bargain they've made with the government. This, all of this is pretty actually kind of squishy. It's very mental. All of this requires us to believe, but over here really requires us to believe and even trust. Trust in the US government and an economy. And recently that trust has been waning. America has rival nations that are trying to get the world to stop trusting the dollar. They wanna replace it. They don't like how much leverage it gives the US. The US economy and government have also been kind of all over the place recently.

The stop and go and stop and go of tariffs from Trump's administration for a few months in office got people really spooked. Like, can we trust these people with our entire sense of value in our currency? And now that Trump is attacking the Fed and threatening to control it, people are turning to gold in a bigger and bigger way. And for at least for now while I'm recording this, there seems to be some trepidation about people believing in the dollar. But that's why you see this kind of going back in time on the psychological leaps. (techno music) - In the last few months, well, since the start of the Trump administration, there has been a loss of faith in the dollar vis-a-vis other fiat currencies. People are worried inflation may go up either because of real shocks like the imposition of tariffs.

So, people are rushing to other stores of value that don't rely on a central government. The shiny metal, gold, is one of them. But there's another currency that people are opting for, that kind of looks a little bit like gold, at least mentally. - [Reporter] Bitcoin is essentially the new gold. - It's becoming really the true digital gold. - I think a lot of young people are comfortable with digital assets and digital currencies and would switch over to Bitcoin or something different. Either one of those things would provide a check on the Federal Reserve because people would have an alternative, and the Fed would know that if they created too much inflation, people would switch over. - Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may represent a future path for this psychological journey of money that we've seen here. But it seems to be too early to tell. But it does seem like we are entering a new chapter on this journey of our sense of value and currency, and trust and belief. I'm not sure what it's gonna look like. I don't presume to know. But as we've seen in this story, I think it's a pretty good guess that no matter what happens next, no matter what we invent with crypto or whatever, that shiny metal, that thing that has fascinated us for thousands of years, the thing that can be divided and stored and doesn't tarnish and that shines like the sun? Gold, I think, will always remain in the background as this thing that we turn to when things feel uncertain. (gentle rhythmic music).