YouSaid · the spoken record

Brendan Greeley

lines on the record: 61
first: 2026-05-28
most recent: 2026-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There was a moment early on where I was doing a project with another grad student, and they're all in their 20s, and I make no sense to them because I was like 47 when I started it and I had four children, and everything about me was a mystery. They had a pool going for a while on whether or not I wasn't on Instagram. But one of the graduate students said, Can you believe you're doing homework? And I said, I can't believe I get to do homework. This is amazing. I've had jobs. Jobs are the worst.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to study the history of money because it does end up sounding like this 2 a.m. Durham conversation. That frustrates me. I actually don't think money is that hard to understand. It's just finance. And so Harold James takes the finance of money seriously. And I was able to, you know, while I was taking classes there, think about this book and also make myself feel a little more comfortable that the book is in fact, it rests on solid ground. The people that I found as secondary sources, they are known to other people, right? And I am, this book is written within a tradition of thinking about money. And that, but also to your point, like, yeah, it's great. I love going back and getting a PhD.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the dog's name is JK Growling. So I'm in this room alone. With JK growling the dog sitting on the floor, and I begin to have ideas. The problem is if you have ideas alone in a room, one of two things is true. You're onto something or you're insane. And I got worried that I didn't know what I was doing. And around the same time, I got invited by Seth Rockman. He's a historian of early America at Brown, to a conference about the history of money. I literally did not know that there were historians who studied money. And I loved what they did. They were reading all the same things that I was reading. They were worried and they were curious about all the same things that I was curious about. They were dealing with the same questions. And I told a bunch of PhDs, this is amazing. I want to go get a PhD in the history of money. And they all said, no, do not do that. That's a terrible idea as PhDs generally do. But I applied to the program at Princeton because Harold James is there. This is a legendary financial historian. And I love the way he works. Because he takes finance seriously.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, an internet mob made me get a dog because my daughter did something cute. She was begging for a dog. And then I woke up the next morning and I put it on Twitter. I made the mistake of putting this on Twitter seven years ago. I woke up the next morning and JK Round. Yeah, now you have a dog.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually did. Yeah, so you know, I got this offer to write the book about the dollar. As a journalist, I said, yes. And then I kind of got into trouble because I started doing archival work and I didn't really feel like I knew how to do archival work. And I started reading a lot of secondary sources. And then I began to have ideas. That's a problem because when you are a person alone in an office behind your garage with a dog for years and you start to have ideas.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's very difficult to talk about this metal coin when we live in a paper and digital money world now. I think there's a connection. And I think the moment of transition between that coin and American bank money is really important. The details matter. The coins circulated in America as currency until the 1850s, the silver coin from the Spanish Empire. And so to tell the story of the dollar, what I realized is you cannot tell the story of the country. This is not the story of the Treasury Department or the Fed or of Alexander Hamilton or of America. This is the story of the currency, which is only sometimes a part of America.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is I had to explain what was this coin. Why was it universal? Why was it called the taller or the dollar? Why was Spain in charge and why were the colonies powerless to do anything about this coin? Then you end up with a different story. Alexander Hamilton called that coin the ancient dollar. Was already something that he knew. The way economists talk about money, there's this break between metal and paper.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is complicated, right? We did not have this moment of sovereignty. We did not have a new country. We did not call our currency the Washington. We called it the dollar, which means we're borrowing something else. We're basing our, we are pegging our currency as Americans at the origin of the country to an existing currency. It's hard for Americans to sort of conceive of how insignificant the colonies were at the founding. And so we didn't have any domestic source of gold. We didn't have any domestic source of silver. We're taking a global currency that's circulating between the Andes and China and through Europe. And sometimes it washes up on the shores of the colonies. We're so desperate to get it that we then peg our currency to this silver coin with a German name that comes from Spain's empire. That's really problematic if you believe in monetary sovereignty and if you believe that the country creates the denominator. So now you have a problem, or at least I had a problem.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So under that assumption, we had political independence, political sovereignty in 1776, 1789, however you want to define it, we should have also had monetary sovereignty under the assumptions that we use about money. Unfortunately, we're stuck with this problem, which is that our currency is called the dollar. That is a name that's derived from the German, and it referred to a Spanish coin that came from Bolivian silver or Mexican silver.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've got a phone. I can call people. And I thought I would start it in 1971. Let me close the gold window and then I sort of started unraveling the sweater a little bit, pulling on the thread. And I got to 1913 with the chartering of the Fed. And then you end up with a problem when you chase the history of the dollar back to 1789 or 1776, which is there's this assumption when we talk about money of monetary sovereignty. This is just the ability, it's very poorly defined. It's super hand wavy, by the way, monetary sovereignty, but generally it's the ability to the country that a country has to control its own currency.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This book was a rabbit hole. An editor suggested I read a book about the history of the dollar, and as you know, as a journalist, when somebody asks you to do something, you just say, yeah, I'll figure that out.”
2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source