Olivia: Okay, Jackson. Review this book in exactly five words. Jackson: Money is weird, biological, spooky. Olivia: I'll take it! Mine is: "Your brain on money is wild." Jackson: Wow, spooky and wild. That definitely sets a tone. A banker who wins Grammys writing a book about money… I have to admit, I’m intrigued. What are we getting into today? Olivia: That's the perfect way to kick off our dive into Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us by Kabir Sehgal. And you’re right, the author himself is a huge part of the story. He’s a multi-Grammy-winning music producer who was also a vice president at J.P. Morgan. He literally helped place the largest IPO in history. Jackson: Hold on. A top-tier Wall Street banker and a Grammy-winning artist? That’s like two different species of human. That alone makes me want to hear his take. So where does a guy like that even begin to explain money? Olivia: That’s the most brilliant part. He doesn't start in a bank, or a treasury, or even a marketplace. He starts in the jungle. Jackson: The jungle? Okay, you have my full attention.

Olivia: Exactly. Sehgal’s first big idea is that money isn't really an economic invention. It’s a biological one. He travels to the Galapagos Islands, the cradle of evolutionary theory, to see the origins of exchange in nature. Jackson: You mean, like, animals trading stuff? I’m picturing monkeys bartering bananas for back-scratches. Olivia: You're not that far off! He describes this incredible scene with a giant sea turtle. It’s covered in parasites, and it swims up to what’s essentially a "cleaning station," where these little wrasse fish are waiting. The turtle just hovers there, completely still, and lets these tiny fish eat all the parasites off its shell and skin. Jackson: Huh. So the turtle gets a spa day, and the fish get a free lunch. Olivia: Precisely. It’s a symbiotic exchange. Both parties benefit, and it’s a fundamental transaction for survival. The book is filled with these examples. Coral provides shelter to algae, and in return, the algae photosynthesize and provide the coral with energy. It’s happening everywhere. Exchange is a basic law of life, driven by the need for energy. Jackson: Okay, but that’s a long way from me worrying about my credit card bill. How does a fish cleaning a turtle lead to the New York Stock Exchange? Olivia: It’s all about abstraction. The book argues that money is just an evolutionary substitute for that fundamental currency: energy. Early humans needed tools for survival, like the hand axe. The book talks about these 1.7-million-year-old hand axes found all over the world. They were the Swiss Army knife of the Paleolithic era—used for digging, butchering, defense. But some were so beautifully made, so impractical for actual use, that archaeologists think they might have been an early form of currency. They were a symbol of skill, resources, and social status. They were a way of storing and exchanging value, just like that turtle-fish transaction, but in a symbolic form. Jackson: So a fancy hand axe was like the first Rolex. It showed you had resources to spare. Olivia: A perfect analogy. And this is where the psychology comes in, which is the second half of this primal idea. Our brains are literally wired to respond to these symbols of value. The book dives into the field of neuroeconomics. Jackson: Neuroeconomics? What is that, mind-reading for your wallet? Olivia: It’s close! It’s using brain imaging, like fMRIs, to see what our brains are doing when we make financial decisions. A neuroscientist at Stanford, Brian Knutson, did these fascinating experiments. He’d put people in a scanner and show them symbols that indicated they might win money, lose money, or nothing would happen. Jackson: And what did their brains do? Olivia: The results were incredible. The brain’s pleasure center, the nucleus accumbens, lit up like a Christmas tree not when they received the money, but in anticipation of it. The prospect of a gain was more stimulating than the gain itself. Jackson: Oh, I know that feeling. That’s why adding something to an online shopping cart feels so good, even if you never click ‘buy.’ It’s the thrill of the hunt! Olivia: Exactly! As the book says, "Money has done to us what Pavlov did to his dog." The anticipation of gain conditions our brain. And on the flip side, the prospect of loss activates the insula, the part of the brain associated with pain and disgust. This is why we feel losses so much more acutely than we enjoy gains—a concept called loss aversion. Jackson: That makes so much sense. Losing twenty dollars feels way worse than the joy of finding twenty dollars. But if our brains are so emotional and irrational about money, how did we build this complex global economy? Shouldn't it have all collapsed? Olivia: That’s the million-dollar question the book poses. It directly challenges the classic economic model of Homo economicus—the idea that we are all rational actors making self-interested calculations. The author tells this great story about Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, who for decades built his entire worldview on the idea that markets were rational and self-correcting. Jackson: Right, the ultimate believer in the system. Olivia: And then 2008 happened. The financial crisis hit, and Greenspan later admitted in a congressional hearing that he was in a state of "shocked disbelief." He said he had found a flaw in the model that he perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. He realized that "animal spirits"—our irrational, emotional impulses—played a huge role. Jackson: So the guy at the top of the financial world basically had his "the world is not what I thought" moment. Olivia: Completely. And the book argues that this is where behavioral economics comes in. It’s full of stories about our cognitive biases. There's a great one about Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, who as a young psychologist in the Israeli army, had to assess candidates for officer training. He developed a system, watched them perform a task, and made his predictions. Jackson: And he was great at it, right? Olivia: He was terrible! His predictions were barely better than chance. But here's the kicker: even after he knew his predictions were useless, he found himself continuing to make them with the same level of confidence. He called it the "illusion of validity." His brain felt like it was seeing a pattern, even when the data proved it wasn't there. Jackson: That’s like me with my fantasy football team. I have this whole complex theory about why I should draft a certain player, I feel like a genius, and then I come in last place. Every single year. Olivia: It’s exactly that. We’re wired to create narratives and see patterns, even when they’re not real. And when it comes to money, that illusion can be incredibly powerful and dangerous. It’s why we trust fund managers who are just lucky, or why we think we can time the market. Our primal brain is running a very old software on a very new and complex financial system. Jackson: Wow. So our brains are basically running on jungle software in a Wall Street world. That’s a slightly terrifying thought. It feels like the whole system is built on a foundation of irrationality. Olivia: And that leads us directly to the book's next huge, and maybe even more controversial, idea. If our individual brains are this irrational, what about the social systems we built around money? The story we all learned in school about how money started might be completely wrong.

Jackson: What do you mean, wrong? I remember the textbook pictures: a guy with a chicken trading it for a bag of grain. Barter. Then it got too complicated, so they invented money. Simple. Olivia: That’s the story we all know. But the book quotes an anthropologist, Caroline Humphrey, who says, "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing." Jackson: Wait, what? A pure barter economy never existed? Then where did money come from? Olivia: The book’s answer is: debt. Social debt, to be specific. It argues that in small, tight-knit communities, you don't need to barter. If your neighbor, the baker, needs a pair of shoes, you, the cobbler, just give them to him. You don't demand three loaves of bread on the spot. Jackson: Right, because you know he's good for it. He'll give you bread when you need it, or help you fix your roof next month. It’s a community ledger. Olivia: Exactly! It’s an unwritten system of IOUs and social obligations. The book has this perfect modern example. The author, while living in London, goes to a pub with his work friends. Everyone takes a turn buying a round of drinks. It's an unspoken rule. But as an experiment, when it's his turn, he just says, "I'm not going to pay." Jackson: Oh, no. I can feel the awkwardness from here. That’s a social crime. Olivia: The air went out of the room. He said the conversation became strained, his friends called him "weak," and the social fabric was torn. It wasn't about the few pounds for the beer; it was about him violating a social debt. He broke the implicit contract of reciprocity. Jackson: That’s so true. It’s not a financial transaction, it’s a social one. You’re not buying beer, you’re participating in a ritual of friendship. Olivia: And the book argues that this is the true origin of money. For millennia, human societies ran on these complex webs of favors, gifts, and obligations. Think of gift economies, like the famous Potlatch ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest tribes. A chief would gain immense status not by hoarding wealth, but by giving away enormous amounts of it in lavish ceremonies. The recipients were then in his social debt. Jackson: So wealth was measured by what you could give away, not what you kept. That’s a total reversal of how we think today. Olivia: It is. And the first evidence of what we might call "money" wasn't coins, but debt records. In ancient Mesopotamia, around 2100 BC, thousands of years before the first coins were minted in Lydia, we find clay tablets meticulously recording debts. A farmer borrows barley from the temple and will pay it back with interest after the harvest. A merchant takes a loan in silver to finance a trading expedition. Jackson: So money wasn't invented as a thing to replace barter. It was invented as a technology for tracking the debts and favors we already owed each other. It’s a social ledger. Olivia: You’ve nailed it. Money is, at its core, an information system. It’s a way to quantify obligations, to make them transferable, and to scale up that village-level trust to a city, a kingdom, and eventually, a global economy. The coin in your pocket is just a token representing a piece of that vast social ledger. Jackson: That reframes everything. But it also sounds like it has a dark side. If money is just a record of debt, that can be used for control, right? Olivia: Absolutely. The book doesn't shy away from this. It tells the harrowing story of a Burmese laborer named Raju, who borrowed money to pay a broker for a job in Thailand. He fell into debt bondage and was forced to work on a fishing boat under brutal, slave-like conditions. His debt became a chain. It’s a stark reminder that when we compute human obligations with money, it can become a tool of oppression. Jackson: Wow. So it goes from a friendly pub round to literal human trafficking. That’s a huge leap. Olivia: It is. And it shows the two faces of money. It can be a tool for cooperation, trust, and building communities. Or it can be a tool for exploitation and control. It all depends on the values we attach to it.

Jackson: Okay, so this is blowing my mind a little. Money isn't just economics. It's a mashup of biology from the jungle, psychology from our irrational brains, and anthropology from these ancient systems of social debt. So if that's all true, what's the big takeaway? How should this change how I look at the dollar bill in my wallet? Olivia: I think the book’s ultimate point is that money is never neutral. It’s not just a dead tool. It’s a living symbol of value, and it’s a technology that encodes our relationships, our biological drives, and our moral choices. It’s a mirror. Jackson: A mirror? What do you mean? Olivia: It reflects what we, as individuals and as a society, truly value. Sehgal ends the book with a powerful story. After the contested 2009 elections in Iran, protesters had few ways to get their message out. So, they started writing anti-government slogans on paper money. "Death to the Dictator." Jackson: On the actual currency? That’s brilliant. Olivia: It was. Because money circulates. It passes from hand to hand, from the market vendor to the taxi driver to the government official. It became a moving billboard for dissent, a physical carrier of a political idea. The money itself became a protest. Jackson: So the value wasn't just the number printed on it, but the message written on it. Olivia: Exactly. And that’s the synthesis of the whole book. Whether it’s a sea turtle getting cleaned, a brain anticipating a reward, a pub round among friends, or a protest message on a bill—money is always a symbol of what we find valuable. It’s a medium of communication. Jackson: That’s a much deeper way of looking at it. It’s not just about what it can buy, but what it can say. Olivia: And the book really leaves us with this final, profound thought. Every single piece of money that passes through your hands has a history and carries a value system with it. The real question is, what values are you encoding in your own transactions? When you spend, save, or give, what story are you telling? Jackson: That's a powerful question. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share one surprising way you've seen money used as more than just money. It’s a conversation worth having. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.