Oh my God, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, man.

Oh, my. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 65, money, inflation, and interest rates.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to have a fairly introductory look at some of the concepts of money, inflation, causes and effects of inflation, and we'll also look at interest rates and exchange rates.

This is intended to be a sort of an introductory, take at some of these matters,

preparatory to future episodes where I hope to look at, say, monetary policy and central banks

in more detail, as well as other things such as the business cycle and unemployment and

things like that. So in order to understand any of those things, we'll need some background

in money and inflation and exchange rates, So that's what I hope to put forward

in this podcast. There are no specific prerequisites for this episode. However, if you've

listened to some of my previous episodes on economics, for example, episode 12 on the price

system, and episode 16 profits and competition, that might be of some use to you.

Alright, so let's make a start.

The first thing I want to talk about is just money as an abstract concept and explain a bit about the history of money and the uses and purposes of money.

So, the first question that we want to ask here is, what is money?

When people think about money, they generally think about notes and coins and things like that.

You know, the money is a $20 bill or something like that. But that's actually not what money is.

That's just an example of money, because money can actually be many different sorts of things, and it has been over the course of history.

So if we look at the concept of money at a bit more of an abstract level,

we could define money as something like an item or record of some sort

that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services in a particular area.

So what is money depends on the conventions of a particular area or

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