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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and it's just us here today to explain something that every

person in the world should know about. The gold standard. I have an intro. I have an intro. Hold on.

Oh, God. Chuck. Yes. Have you ever gone to a bank and traded a dollar in for actual gold?

No, I've never even seen gold in person that wasn't like, you know, on a whatever, a ring or something.

Sure. And that is a huge use for gold.

I've never seen nuggets or bars, ingots.

I haven't either.

I have never even seen a gold coin now that I think about it.

I don't think I have either.

But there was a point in time where you could see gold anytime you wanted if you went to

your bank and you took a certain amount

of dollars or pounds or francs or pesos because countries all over the world were on what's

known as the gold standard and just a quick broad stroke explanation I guess is that on a gold

standard every single one of your dollars or pesos or

francs or Deutsche marks are redeemable for gold, which means that you have to have an equal amount of

gold in your country, in safes, in vaults, to cover every single dollar or peso or Deutsche Mark or Frank out there.

You can't just keep printing money.

You can only print as much money as can cover the amount of gold that you have.

Yeah, which is, you know, it's sort of a public safeguard to say, hey, your dollar, your paper money or your

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