If you're just joining us, please find a space at a table because this workshop, this is a team activity, so it is best done in larger groups. I can see there's a table of three people over there that you can join. The tables are set up for five or six people. There's materials on the table for six people. So you can also grab a chair from the back of the room and use it to join one of the tables of six. Wow, there's something about standing right here where I'm getting a lot of feedback. I don't know what's picking it up, but I guess I'll try not to stand right there. Come on in and grab a seat. We are just getting underway. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Ellen Grove. I am an Agile coach. I'm from Ottawa, Canada. I'm also one of the organizers of Agile India, so in fact today is the day my theme team put together. So completely aside from my workshop, let me know what you think of how today is going, how the conference is going so far. But what we're here to do today is we're here to talk about team working agreements. Everything is awesome when you're part of a team except when it isn't, and we've probably all been on that team, right? It's a really special thing to be part of a high-performing team where people are working together effectively, where we're getting stuff done, where we're having fun doing it and we know how to work together and we know how to get through the rough stuff together. But it's not something that just happens.  There's a lot of stuff that we need to figure out about how do we work together? How do we get things going? How do we design a working relationship amongst ourselves so that we can be effective, so that we can help each other, so that we can communicate well together to do whatever the thing is that we're doing. So yes, so this is the name of the talk. Everything is better when we stick together and it's about building team working agreements. We are literally going to be building team working agreements because what we're going to be doing in this workshop is we're going to be exploring building team working agreements using LEGO's Curious Play. So this is not, if you're looking for a place to come and sit back and have a nap after lunch, this is the wrong room to be in. I would invite you, if that's what you were looking for now is a really good time to get up and move along. I'm hoping you'll stay because this is going to be a lot of fun. The other reason that I think that working agreements are really, really important and we talked about this a little bit, Nuresh kind of touched on this in his keynote this morning is really effective teams have a lot of diversity, of experience, of thought, different people coming from different genders, different experience, different power levels possibly and levels of influence in the organization. We don't want teams where everybody thinks alike because when everybody thinks alike we actually have no original ideas, we don't do new and daring stuff. So when we're putting teams together we intentionally want a mix of personalities, a mix of approaches and one of the things that we have to help teams do is figure out how are they going to resolve all those differences amongst themselves? How are they going to figure out what they have in common and grow those things and how to exploit those differences to their advantage because you absolutely do want to have differences on your team. Otherwise you get into this boring group think situation where consensus is really easy, decisions are really easy because nobody is bringing any new and controversial ideas to the table. You need to have that friction in order for great stuff to happen. So one of the ways, when I talked about that working agreements are a way that you can design the working relationship in the team. A professional coach is talking about designing the alliance between the coach and the client about how they're going to work together. A working agreement and maybe a discussion of the simple guiding principles the team is going to follow is the team designing the alliance with themselves about how they're going to work together. And you want to do this because you want to encourage diversity and thinking but still have harmony and behavior. We're all going to bring our different ideas and our different experience to the table but we're going to behave in such a way that we can make use of those differences rather than having them get in the way. Designing a team working agreement is a really good way to help the individuals on the team become a little more conscious, a little more reflective of their own behavior and how they fit in the team and can help inspire them and encourage them to focus on being a better team player rather than just focusing on be I'm doing my thing and it doesn't matter if you're doing your thing, right? Having good working agreements can help team members hold each other accountable as well because when the going gets rough, probably most of you have been on the team where you feel like three or four people are doing all the work and then there's that one guy over there. There's Chris over there who never really seems to get anything done. He's always late with his work. He's not doing his share but nobody wants to talk to him about it. So let's have a conversation before we start working together about what we want to do when we get in that situation because then we'll all feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more empowered to go and have that conversation and say, Chris, we got to talk.  But we want to put those agreements in place because it's a lot easier to do it before you need to have them. And it just fundamentally enhances group process by being very explicit about this is how we are going to work together as a group of people.  No, but it will help reduce some of the friction.  You spend a lot less time sorting it out in retrospective after the fact. So the kinds of things that you might do to create alignment amongst your team members, there's sort of two levels of agreements that you might want to reach. The first are simple guiding principles, which are the higher level principles that the team uses to guide their behavior in terms of what's important to them. And then working agreements, what I like to think of as working agreements are very specific behaviors designed to implement those principles. So the simple guiding principles, and, you know, Ken Beckman, Shannam and extreme programming explained are things like being present. We want to be present with each other. That can mean a whole bunch of different things though. The working agreement that might go with be present is, you know, no electronics during group discussions because we want people talking to each other, not their phones. Or it could be something like no headphones in the team room. Those are very specific actions that the team members want to hold each other accountable for in order to implement those principles. Your team wants to have very few of these. I worked with a team in the U.S. last year where they were very, very proud of, on the wall in their team room, they had a list of 40 items in their working agreements. And as coaches, we were quite impressed.  I said, no, it was easy. We just went around and grabbed them all from the other teams and put them together and there we go.  You want to have focus. What you want to do is use the items in your working agreement to really help your team focus on what are the things that are most important to us to be successful and what are the ones that we need to remind ourselves about. What are the things we need to pay attention to? Because if something the team is doing already together, we don't need to add that in a working agreement, put it on the wall. We can assume that we've got that one and move on. Where that becomes a little bit tricky though is when you have new team members coming onto the team. That's where some of those things that everybody on the team knows. Suddenly everybody on the team doesn't know them anymore. And maybe they have to be part of your working agreement to that point to help new people understand this is how we work around here. So the kinds of things, the other thing about working agreements that I tend to do a little bit differently than some of the other people that I've seen is I see a lot of working agreements which I mean they're action oriented but like they're be at the stand up at 9 o'clock or they're very like, they're kind of superficial things and the kinds of things that you want to capture, really capturing your working agreements are what are the things that are important to us as team members? What are the things that make us feel good about our work and working with each other? What are the things that we value and what are the goals in the team and how do we show it in our work and how do we show it in our relationship? How do we want to treat each other? This is the most important thing. How do we want to be together as a team and kind of the most important part about that is what do we want to do when we don't agree because high performance teams have lots and lots and lots of disagreements. What makes them a high performing team is they figured out how to get through it together. At that point, I'm going to stop talking and we're going to start having some fun. What we're going to do, I mentioned already, we're going to be exploring team agreements through Lego Serious Play. Everybody on their table should have a bag of Lego enough for each person at the table. If any table has more than six people, you might need to send somebody to the front to grab another bag. You also have these little cubes with pictures on them. These are called story cubes. We're going to use them a little bit. Feel free to take a look at them. Everybody should have a bag of Lego. Everybody's Lego has exactly the same stuff in it. We're going to use this to have a conversation. Is there... Do you guys who are sitting along the wall, do you want to grab your chairs and move to that table at the back where nobody can really see from or move that set yourselves up so that you can see me take a bag of Lego and take three cubes for your table? Just a quick check. How many people in this room have never played with Lego before? Okay. How many people have experienced with Lego? Those of you who haven't played with Lego, if you have experienced with Lego, please keep your hands up for a moment. This is your technical support. If you need help, if you're struggling to figure out how things, look around for one of those people and ask them for help.  A bridge is anything you want it to be. The only requirement I'm giving you about what a bridge is, you should be able to slide two fingers under the bridge. But apart from that, what I would like is entirely up to you. The only other thing is every bag of Lego should have a little minifigure in it. I would like your minifigure to appear somewhere on the bridge. I'm going to give you two minutes to build the bridge. Off you go. Okay. It's all good? Just under a minute left. No pressure. You can see some people are done already. Some people are still perfecting their creations. We're not worried about perfect though. Okay. So, if I can ask you to finish up your masterpiece. Now this is where we probably want to do a little bit of maintenance on the tables because for our building exercises, we're going to want to be able to see everybody's models. So if they're flowers, they're water bottles and things on your table, you might want to push them to one side, kind of clear out the area in the middle so that everybody can see.  You can look around and admire what everybody else built. And improvising using the materials at the table to make it even bigger and better, that's very cool. So just take a moment to appreciate the creativity at your table. Because I gave you very simple instructions, a very limited set of materials, a short period of time, but I am going to imagine that no two people built exactly the same bridge. Everybody, even though we started from the same place with the same instructions, everybody brought their own personality, their own ideas to it, and came up with something unique and creative. We are all creative people, right? And one of the things I love about Lego Serious Play is it helps bring out that creativity in all of us. There are people who go, we talked a little bit this morning about introverts and extroverts, and people who don't think they're creative, although I don't think creativity is linked to introvertedness or extrovertedness, but I've never seen anybody fail to be creative using Lego Serious Play. So anybody imagine that the person on their bridge was doing something as you built your bridge and as you put the person on it, you start to make up a little story in your mind about what that person is doing? Good. Good. Because Lego Serious Play is trying to jump. Awesome. I see that a lot, actually. I also see people hanging upside down from the bridge. Then we can have a different conversation about what's going on in your work life. But this is what we're going to do. In Lego Serious Play, what we do is we use Lego to tell stories, to share ideas with each other about things that are going on, and things that are actually big serious ideas. This is what it's Lego Serious Play for a reason. It's playful, it's fun, but we use this as a technique to talk about some pretty major stuff. My favorite case study, this was not something I did personally, but one of the inventors of Lego Serious Play, Robert Rasmussen, did some work with NASA after one of the space shuttle explosions. They were trying to pull a team of experts together to create a committee to figure out, oh my God, what went wrong, and how do we not have this happen again? This was after many lives were lost and many years of work were undone. This was a serious thing where a lot of people had a lot of strong feelings and strong emotions. Robert went in and did Lego Serious Play with that group of people to help them get focused on, let's talk about some of the things that we're feeling as a result of this huge tragedy, and also let's create our vision for moving forward. Let's create our vision for how we want to work together as a group of people who have just been through this really horrible experience. I can't think of a more sort of serious example than that of how you might use this technique. People sometimes look at it and go, ah, we silly little Lego block. That's fine for, you know, six guys in the garage at the startup or whatever, but this is a technique that's used in a lot of really difficult situations with unblocked conversations to help stimulate creativity, to help people come up with ideas they didn't know they had and literally get them on the table so that they can share with other people. So we're going to do another little creative warm-up exercise before we get into building working agreements. And what I would like you to do for the next exercise is take apart your bridge. You can take a picture of your bridge if you like, but you're going to build better stuff later.  Maybe use 20, 25 pieces. Use all of them if you're that kind of person. I just want you to take a couple minutes and build something interesting. But I want you to think about what that thing is. Come up with an idea of what you're building. Build something interesting. Build something that means something to you. Build something that you've got a little bit of a story about in your head. I'm going to give you about two and a half minutes to do that build. You're looking puzzled. You're going to be stunted by the challenge. Okay. And I apologize. I'm totally going to pick on you for the rest of the presentation, Chris, because awesome. Thank you. I'm going to give you about 30 seconds more to build. If you can finish up your creation. And again, move it out a little bit so that everybody at your table can see the magnificent thing that you've built. And I hope you've all got a story in mind about what it was that you built. Okay. Because what we're going to do now is this is where I mess with your head and make you do a little bit more work. What we want to do before we move into talking about working agreements is we want to warm up our storytelling muscles a little bit. So I asked you to think of a story about the model that you've built. What I'm asking you to do now is you're going to tell a story about your model, but it's not the story you've already got in your head. On each table, there's a little set of story cubes. These are little dice and they have different pictures on each side. And these are one of my favorite tools for doing sort of creativity thinking with people. What I'm asking you to do is rather than telling the story that's in your head about your model, you're going to roll the story cubes. There's going to be three images that come up. And you're going to pick one of those images and tell a story about how your model is about. I don't know. I've got this giant eye on mine. So maybe I thought I built a model about this is my house and now I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story about how my model is about how I see the world. Or maybe I'm going to tell you a story about how my model is about friendship based on whatever picture I choose. So the way this is going to work is the first one person at the table will roll the dice, pick an image, tell the story about their model. It's just got to be a short story. This isn't like a novel. Six word story in a tweet will do. You're going to tell a story about your model that's about one of the ideas on the dice and then you're going to hand the dice to the next person. They're going to have their turn. They're going to have their turn and you're going to go around the table. I'm going to give you about four minutes to go around the table. Off you go. You roll all three dice. You pick whichever idea appeals to you most story about your model that relates to whatever the idea is. You've got to tell it about your model.  It was just a little warm up exercise to get our storytelling muscles going. The other concept that I want to introduce with this, with the Lego series play is when we're building in Lego series play we're trying to harness the power of creating metaphor. We're not necessarily trying to build a literal representation of this is the answer to my question. You ask me a question about how my team works and this is my team and this is me and this is where my boss's desk is. We want to build the idea that's in our head about the nature of the relationship or about the opportunity. So your model can actually kind of mean anything. The story about it that you tell that is really the exciting and interesting part. And what we've done just in this warm up exercise is I've shown you all the steps in the Lego series play process. It's like all good things it's actually very, very simple. The way it works is as the facilitator I present a challenge to you I ask you to build something. Build a model and you attribute meetings to the model. You share your story about the model with the other people at the table so that you can hear everybody's perspective about the question. This is another one of the reasons that this is such a powerful tool because it helps level the playing field for the conversation at the table.  And that's a tremendous ways. We hire people for their expertise and their creativity and then what we want to do which is possible. The way LEGO Serious Play is structured where everybody builds everybody tells their story is designed to help get input on an equal playing field from everybody at the table and the whole process of having the build cycle before you tell your story can really help as well because there are some people who are just the kind of people who don't talk a lot in meetings, people who are more introverted or people who are just you know don't do that and if you ask them a question in a meeting they'll give you a two word answer. If you ask them to build a model and then explain the model you'll get oh and this and this and this and then there's this part and there's this part of this idea too and it's just it's amazing to see them blossom and to see all that creativity come pouring out. So this is how we use LEGO Serious Play in this workshop we're just going to do individual builds. We're going to bring our individual perspective to the table. If we had more time if we were trying to solve a bigger problem together there'd be another step where we might first build our individual perspective on the situation and then put our pieces together on the table to create a shared model and that can be really powerful if you're trying to create a shared vision a shared understanding of something that actual physical act of taking everybody's point of view and physically making it fit together and figuring out where things are the same things are different and how they relate to each other super powerful. So unfortunately in 90 minutes we're not going to get there today. Just before we get into the working agreement questions just a couple of things about how this works that I want to stress as I mentioned the way it works is very very simple I as a facilitator ask a question what you build is your answer to the question there are no wrong answers whatever comes out on the table that's awesome that's what we want to see. I encourage you to think with your hands because there are some things that you might go how am I supposed to answer that in Lego?  Honestly I've never seen anybody come up dry in a Lego series play session I actually I take that back when I did this at a conference recently last year in Scotland there were a couple of questions that were really similar we were doing something about conflict resolution and the first question somebody at the table was like I don't even know how to answer that question but then when the second question came around which was kind of coming at it from a different angle he was like oh yeah except for that exception I've never seen somebody fail to build something because they couldn't figure out what to build when you're sharing your stories about your models what I would like you to do is I would like you to listen with your ears but I would also like you to listen with your eyes I encourage you to ask questions about the model if somebody if Chris is sharing his story of the model it's perfectly okay to say hey you didn't talk about that does that mean something special those kind of questions are encouraged the kind of questions I would not want you to ask because it kind of keeps the point of the conversation don't go oh yeah I had that happen to me you know in response to the story excuse me two once did you try this did you try that that is not the place for this conversation what we're trying to do is get everybody's ideas out on the table so that everybody can share them so clarifying questions are great going off into rat holes about the detail of their experience and your experience and how that all fits together that's a different part of the conversation so please resist the temptation to do that and the last rule of Lego series plays everybody participates everybody builds everybody talks there aren't any spectators in this room right at the moment which is cool because usually I don't allow spectators either you're building or you're not in a conversation in a workshop not such a big deal but if you're doing this in your workplace to actually have a real discussion everybody needs to participate so getting on to the kinds of things the questions that we would want to have with the team the conversation we want to have the team as we're putting together this team working agreement the first question that I would like you to build is I would like you to build a model that represents either the best or the worst team member you have ever worked with your choice best or worse but I'd like you to build a model that talks about the best or the worst team member you have ever worked with hopefully it's not somebody sitting at your table can I give you about three minutes off you go and I'd like you to share the story what I find works well to help time box things in this situation is if somebody at the table can run a timer for the group and probably about five minutes is the right size for these groups for everybody to be able to share their story because we want to get to the essence of the story so if you can run a timer at your table for five minutes and then within the group you need to share that five minutes amongst yourselves tell your story so let's turn with the next question maybe the projector will come back on eventually but this question is about you the question you're going to build this time is what is the superpower that you bring to your team pretend for a moment that the people you're sitting with you've just been brought together to work on something big and exciting we're getting to know each other as part of a lift off and what I'm asking you to build is what is the superpower that you bring to this team that may not be obvious when people first meet you I'm going to give you about three minutes off you go in the space of very little time are you starting to get to know each other starting to learn things about each other that might not have come out in casual conversation right so now that we've talked about the strengths that we bring to the table you might want to take a moment line up your X-Men team take a little photo show the powerful team that you have assembled at your table I'd like to flip the question around a little bit and talk about what kind of help from your team do you need because this again is one of the signs of a high performing team where people ask each other for help and offer help all the time they're not afraid to show up and say hey I don't know how to do this I'm kind of stuck could somebody please help me on teams that are not functioning so well people are afraid to do that right because we're all hired to be professionals because of our skills because of what we bring to the team and it's really hard to drop that and go hey I can't do this alone please help me I think it really helps at the outside if we talk about what are the kinds of help that I would like for my teammates and that's what I'm asking you to build this time around what kind of help would you like from your team here are your new teammates what are the kinds of help that you would like from them in order to be the most successful team player you can be off you go we'll give you about 5 minutes to do the round of storytelling somebody gonna talk it's really important that everybody gets a chance to share their story and I always feel bad at conferences it's like we gotta get going but I don't want to cut off the last person at the table so you learned a little bit more about your team members now about we've learned about what are the strengths they have the superpowers they're bringing to the table and what kind of help they might need and that's something that we often don't talk about up front when we come together as a team how best can we help each other think about how much you can accelerate team development by having these conversations up front another question that you might ask I got this from a friend of mine at Agile 2015 last year and I think this is an awesome question we will not be building it today though because we're only going to do one more build and the time we have is if I appear to you to be stressed or overwhelmed I would appreciate it if you do what because we all respond to being under stress in different ways some people really want the support of their colleagues they want to go let's go have a coffee we can talk about with bugging you how can I help you other people want if they're under stress and I'm kind of one of these people it's like no no just leave me alone let me sort it out I'll ask you if I need help and it's probably a really good thing if you're trying to gel as a team to understand how your teammates approach the situation because if you're the kind of person who thinks oh when the going gets tough I absolutely want to have somebody sit down and talk with me and help me through it and bring that kind of help to somebody who's going no get away from me I just want to be alone to figure this out for myself there will be friction right so knowing that about people up front can be super super helpful the last build that we're going to do in our session today together and I think this is really this is one of the most important things to address in your team working agreement is the question of what do we do if somebody on the team isn't doing what I what we think they should be doing I picked on Chris I'll continue to pick on Chris what if we think that Chris is not pulling his weight on the team how do we want to handle it so what I'd like you to do for our final build of this session is that's your question what should we do as a team if somebody on the team if we feel like they're letting us down how do we want to handle it three minutes to build what should we do as a team if somebody on the team is letting us down go has everybody had a chance to share their stories do you guys need more time give it a minute more have you guys had time now just finished excellent so if I can ask you to bring your focus back to the middle of the room please I mean from the buzz from the energy in the room it's clear that you guys had some pretty interesting conversations about what's going on you've learned about what are the yeah what are the things that other people look for in their team members what are the superpowers that the people who are on your team bring to the team that they might not reveal to you we've talked about what kind of health we want from our teammates which is really really important and then what do we want to do if things aren't working out we've started to consider those questions if we don't think things are working out as they should how do we want to handle it we start to get insights from everybody this is the point at which and we're not going to build this today because we're getting pretty close to being at a time but this is the point at which I would sit down with the team and actually have a conversation about okay what behaviors do you want to put in your working agreement now that you've had a chance to talk to each other a little bit about what your strengths are what your concerns are how you would like help from your teammate let's start to figure out what are the rules what are the guidelines what are the actions the behaviors that we want to put in our working agreement that we want to focus on as a team you could use lego serious play to do this you could have everybody build what do you think is the most important thing to put in our working agreement ideally you want to have maybe five not more than seven so if you have a team of seven people you could ask everybody to suggest one if you have a larger team than that you could ask everybody to build what do they think is most important and then dot vote on them there's all kinds of different ways to do it but you want people to really be thinking about what are the hard things we need to do in order to figure out how to work together because those are the things that you want to put in a working agreement not the easy stuff like you know be on time for meetings although for a lot of teams that's really a struggle and maybe that's the first thing you have in your first working agreement you know or talk to each other rather than using email but it's about how do we really help each other how do we talk to each other when the going gets rough how can we support each other in being the most effective team members we can be what I'd be curious to hear from the room is what's something surprising that you learned in the course of this exercise what's something that took you by surprise in the discussions we had together over the leg up anybody have something were you able to build something that expressed trust though you can use this to convey some really abstract some really complicated ideas because I'm doing this in a workshop setting we didn't do as much of the warm up activities as I would do if I was doing sitting down with the team to do this because we're a little constrained by time and sometimes that can help with that blockage of how do I convey this really abstract but people can do it and it's a really powerful medium for getting to those things anybody have anything else they found surprising about this exercise that they wanted to notice yeah it's very very surprising that you can take something as simple as Lego and build these complicated ideas and have these conversations you had something fantastic thank you yeah yeah and that's that's one of the critical points actually is that hopefully this is what's on the next slide is that the purpose of having the working agreement is that the teams create a shared understanding of how we're working together and so that takes the responsibility from that off of the scrum master in the very early days of the team that's probably somewhere where the scrum master spending more of their energy is doing that kind of facilitation but you want to get to the point where the team members are taking on the responsibility for watching how the team is working together and how the behavior of individual team members is affecting the way the team is working and being willing to step up and identify when there are problems that need to be dealt with within the team whether there's an individual who is not adhering to the team working agreement or whether the team as a whole has kind of lost sight of what they said they were going to do together and has sort of gone back to old ways of working. Having that working agreement in place can be a super powerful tool for making that happen more easily. You know it helps the facilitators, it helps the team members you want to keep this visible this is something that you should have as a daily reminder of we agreed to be this way so when I work with teams ideally their team you know you have a big physical passport your team working agreement is somewhere near that big physical passport and you're looking at it at some point every day because the other thing about team working agreements is they are going to change as the team grows and as the team matures so this is something you want to inspect and adapt periodically along with the work you're doing whether you do it as part of your retrospective process or whether you find another way to do it in how you're working together periodically visit those working agreements and go hey is this what we need to focus on right now or are there other challenges that we want to work on in order to get better as a high performing team and I hope through this experience you've seen how LEGO Serious plays is a super powerful way to do this certainly not the only way but like you said about the amazing conversations people can have with this this little bag of plastic blocks 43 blocks we can have some really deep really important conversations very very quickly the LEGO allows you to cut through a lot of the BS that happens at meetings where people want to dance around or they're reciting from the script it makes it when you're building things and you have ideas coming from you know it's pulling up ideas that you may not have realized that you had you're having fun doing it you're getting emotionally engaged although I've had teams actually come to tears over LEGO Serious plays that's a different workshop but it provokes a strong emotional reaction too which helps people bring their full selves to the table and you can really get to the heart of the conversation very quickly so just before we wrap up first of all I want to thank you all for coming out to play with me this afternoon I really really appreciate it what I would like you to do as we leave today is to make sure you pack up your LEGO and leave it on the table so that we can collect it I think I got all of the story cubes but if they're there leave them as well please when you pack up the LEGO take my business card out of the bag I would prefer if you take it with you so that if you have any questions about LEGO Serious play you know how to get a hold of me but in any case take it out of the bag because that's how I know the bag of LEGO is for you so once again thank you very much for your time and attention you have to find for the question was how do you derive the working agreements for distributed teams you have to find some technique to have a facilitated conversation where everybody has equal input LEGO Serious play is really hard for facilitated teams it's I've done it where I've been the facilitator and the whole team has been somewhere else I haven't done it where the team is scattered around but you have to find ways of getting having a conversation where everybody has a chance to have equal input and probably some of the things in your working agreements are going to be specifically about how do we manage those complexities and communication that are caused by being in different locations in different time zones in different countries and you would want to explore those new working agreements so I realize that's kind of a general answer but there is no one oh just do it this way because it's going to really depend so much on your team and what's available to you but thank you okay thank you


This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to another show of the Human Action Podcast. Very happy to be joined this week by my friend, the person many of you already know as the main editor-in-chief of Mises.org, Ryan McMakin. Ryan, how are you doing today? Hello, Jeff. It's great to talk to you today. Well, so normally on this podcast we tackle books. That's what this show is all about. It's designed to encourage people to read particular books to help people walk through particular books which are perhaps more difficult or more lengthy and also to provide a review of sorts of particular books. And so we are going to do that this week with a really interesting text which was written way back in 1975 by an Englishman named Adam Ferguson and the book is titled When Money Dies. So it is basically a history and a cautionary tale about the hyperinflation which plagued Weimar Germany, particularly that beginning in 1923, which had its roots in earlier years. But Ryan, what's a little different about today's show is that this is not a book about econ per se. This is a history. This is a book which considers sociology. It considers war and peace. It considers monetary policy. It considers basically the entire contextual background from which sprang this horrible decade for the German people. So it's a little bit of a diversion for listeners today, but it's a book that I think is very important and needs to be read. Yes, if you're looking for a thorough economic explanation of what happened to the currency, you won't find much of it here. Although there's a little, there's a few hints of it later in the book where he talks about bubbles a little bit and without using the word mentions the malinvestment to a certain extent. But clearly the most important part of it is providing the human element and understanding perhaps how a society can really be destroyed on a sociological level by a great inflation. And really probably what's important for us is maybe how it would affect a society at even a less to even a lesser extent. And that's why we do not have a inflation to this level. So when I was looking at this, what I was trying to get out of it was really what were these events that enabled the state to get away with such a large hyperinflation? What was the mindset of the Germans at the time? That was very helpful. And then also being able to see maybe some of the rationales that the state was using. And so really there was a lot of questions that I had that the book helped to explain a certain bit that were beyond the economics of it and helped us to see what was going through the minds of ordinary people during this period because it's easy to just say, well, A happen and B happen. This can be explained by economic theory. But that leaves out a lot of letting us understand how these things happen and why this state was able to get away with what it could get away with for so long. And I want to add to the audience that we still have one case of this book left. So what we're going to do is give a free copy of this wonderful paperback When Money Dies by Adam Ferguson. Not a particularly difficult read. It's a few hundred pages, 250 odd pages, and very, very fascinating historically. So if you follow me on Twitter, which you should, at Jeff Deist, if you're not already, you need to follow me PM me via Twitter and I'm going to send you a link which you can fill out and obtain this book shipped to you in physical form for free to your home. So I encourage everybody follow me at Jeff Deist. If you're interested in this book or in today's conversation, just send me a private message and I will send you a link to get this book. But Ryan, I want to point out that the idea that this can't happen here. We're the US dollar, we're the world's reserve currency, inflation is well under control. We have a lot more scientific approaches to monetary policy than we did 100 years ago. All of this is of course not true. It could happen here. We don't know that it will happen here. We can't predict that. But there's a lot of rumblings out there, even amongst very mainstream thinkers on this topic of inflation. Obviously, earlier in 2020 in March, we had a huge amount of creation on the fiscal side by Congress in the $2.7 trillion CARES Act. And of course, since the coronavirus arose, we've had our own central bank here in the United States see its balance sheet, which had finally been reduced to under $4 trillion after some tapering from all the quantitative easing headache, the hangover we still have from most 7 and 08. That balance sheet had gotten to just under $4 trillion and now has risen all the way back up in less than a year to over $7 trillion and appears to be headed to $10 trillion. So all this said, we are hearing from people like Jerome Powell himself, the chairman of the Fed, saying, well, you know, instead of a 2% inflation target, since inflation is still too low, damn it, we're going to have an average inflation targeting of 2% over time. So it's okay if it goes up to 4% for a while because we've had zero for so long and that averages out to 2%. So that's, I think, a caution to a lot of investors. A lot of people are reading into that. We have very mainstream guys like Ray Dalio worrying about inflation from all this new money creation and of course credit creation follows that. And again, on the fiscal side, Ryan, we now see in 2019 anyway, for which we now have complete US Fedgov data service on debt, rose all the way up to almost $600 billion. So it's in a $4.5 trillion spending year in 2019 before coronavirus. So now we're well up over 12% of all congressional spending Congress's budget every year has to be applied to debt service. So that's just some background for everything that's going on and the idea that inflation or hyperinflation couldn't happen here, I think, is a silly thing to imagine. Well, and an important aspect of what's going on right now to also point out is that production is not soaring. It's flat or falling. It's hard to know right now what the data is going to look like as we go forward, but certainly based on the second and third data for GDP. It's a good reason to believe that production is not keeping up with people's needs. And so when you have production falling combined with a lot of money production, then that's when you start to get into the danger zone of inflation. Central banks the world over have managed to get along and get by for so long because people have been working hard, production has been increasing, worker productivity has been going up, efficiency has been increasing, and that helps take the sting out of price inflation that results from money supply inflation. But once you reach a point, and this is what happened in Germany, once you reach a point where production falls, whether it's through war losses, whether it's through increased problems with labor unions, rent control, loss of territory to the country, all of these things happen to Germany. But now, of course, production is going down due to both some cyclical issues, which we began to see back in September when we had the repo crisis. That's when the Fed started adding again to its portfolio. It wasn't just after the lockdowns occurred, but it's the lockdowns, of course, now, and people's reluctance maybe to go out even on their own, even if there hadn't been lockdowns that are contributing to this decline in production. And that could spell a real problem when you're looking at inflation issues. Well, I wish people would see how unnatural all of this is. I mean, the lockdown is clearly a hugely deflationary pressure on the economy. You have millions and millions of people staying home, driving less, eating out less, not vacationing, buying less. I mean, that's all incredibly deflationary. But then you have the Fed, the central bank, with an assist from Congress. And I dare say the new Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is not going to be any better on this, trying to stimulate, stimulate, stimulate. It's just, it's bizarre that we have these twin forces in kind of a whipsaw effect with respect to each other. And all of it is supposed to form some sort of coherent policy. It's absolutely a mishmash. Well, and something you get out of Ferguson's book and something you would notice just living life as well. I remember thinking in 2009 thinking, well, is this, am I living through the early days of a great depression? I have no idea. And nobody woke up in late Middle Ages in France and thought, oh, I can't believe I'm living through the Hundred Years' War. This is a real bummer. You don't know where you are in these chains of events. And that's an impression you get from reading Ferguson is people were really just doing things on an ad hoc basis. We need to keep things going. We need to keep the factories open. People need more money to buy food. So we'll print more money and we'll kick the can down the road and we'll deal with this problem later. Just print the money now and we'll mop it up somehow in the near future. And what happens is then things get away from you or you don't have the ability to see the larger picture of what's going in the economy because all social groups, social classes, economic groups, occupations, so on were affected in very different ways. So it's very hard to evaluate what's really going on out there. And when your policy is just go from one thing to another trying to fix whatever problem was created by the policy before it, that's how you end up with something like a hyperinflation.  There were potential problems there but they had a real hard way of figuring out where they were in the crisis. Well, it's important, I think, to point out as Ferguson does very capably in this book that you have to look at what happened in Germany in 1923, which was the worst year for their hyperinflation. In the context of what came before, in the political context, the historic context, the military context, so there were lots and lots of things happening prior. First of all, Germany had suffered through a war, which it had to finance, which was obviously a huge expense. And actually up until 1914, the German central bank, the Reichsbank, the Reichsbank held one-third of reserves in gold. So compared to our Fed today, that's a pretty hard money policy. So all of this changed as a result of the war, so war finance was a big thing. You mentioned also the loss of power and manufacturing capability and even territory that came out of the end of World War I where Germany was forced to cede not only the Alsace-Lorraine area back to France, but it was forced to cede some of its African territories, et cetera. North African territories, colonies, however you want to view them, but also they were suddenly faced with 250,000 idle men who had been soldiers previously entering the employment markets. And then of course on top of that, they were faced with the responsibility for war reparations, which had been forced upon them by the Treaty of Versailles and many of which had to be paid in gold or in some sort of unfavorable exchange ratio for the German mark to whatever currency they were repaying. So it's simplistic to say, oh, Versailles gave rise to Hitler. And that's why the right rose in Germany. And it was all this anger over German nationality being subsumed by this sort of guilt. But Ferguson, to his credit, I think, explains all this as saying, no, no, that's too facile. You have to look at this thing in its totality. And I think that's, as people who are sympathetic to the Austrian school perhaps were also guilty of that frequently and when we look at and try to explain events with purely an economics lens. Yes, Ferguson's very good at making the point that Hungary and Austria had hyperinflations also had big problems after the war and they didn't end up like Nazi Germany. So clearly there's other factors at work there. And also a point that Hans Sennholz makes at Mises.org and some of his work on postwar Germany, is that, yes, there were lots of issues related to the Treaty of Versailles and so on, but we can't ignore the fact that at the end of the war, the German Revolution happened, which basically was a left-wing takeover of the state. Now it wasn't a big social revolution where people became class traitors and that sort of thing that you see in some socialist cases, but it was essentially a situation where the left came to power. They, in many cases, threw the old ruling class out of their palaces in the middle of the night and they had to flee and that sort of thing. And so it certainly hurt that particular group of people. But the larger effects was that it brought in what you would expect from the left-wing social agenda. A lot more, well, many more laws were passed to give benefits to, say, labor unions and there was rent control and there were many more controls on production and business and there was a lot of welfare payment increases that went out. And so in addition to having to pay war reparations and those related issues, the Germans were voluntarily, through their legislatures, adopting a whole lot of other expenses that didn't have to happen, but which they had chosen to do because of a shift leftward in their economic policy overall. But I think one thing that comes through quite clearly in this book is that war has a lot to do with it and that war and inflation are inherently related because it's awfully hard to tax people to pay for war as you go, especially when a lot of those people have shifted from their hopefully economically productive lives into war production, if not outright conscription into the military itself. And so while I would say that Ferguson is right that hyperinflation didn't create Hitler without the ability to have gross monetary expansion, Hitler might have just been a footnote in history rather than turning Nazi Germany into an expansionary force as it became during the Second World War. Well, you might say that the hyperinflation in Germany is something of an economic Godwin's law of sorts right where the idea, if you're having a political discussion as time goes on, the odds that someone brings up Hitler increases to one. And you might say if you're talking about monetary policy, if you're in a casual, non-academic setting, the odds of someone bringing up the German hyperinflation as causing totalitarianism increases to one over time. So in many cases, people are reluctant to bring it up because it seems like you're just necessarily embracing this idea that, well, the Fed was printing a lot of money, therefore we're just one step away from 1923 in Weimar, Germany. But there's still so much to learn here, even if you don't think it would reach that point, which and it didn't reach quite to that point in Austria and Hungary, although they suffered immensely from their hyperinflations. There's so much to learn here about how these sorts of policies affect different groups and what a huge transfer of wealth it can be from one group of people to another group of people very unfairly and the sorts of inequalities it can cause from these policies. It's not just about rising prices. There are big political implications here and matters of equality that are made far, far worse by central bank inflation. Right. And one thing this book does so well is it really talks about some of the politicians and players involved. It goes through some of the German officials, both as the central bank and in political figures. And it also gives some really fascinating historical accounts from there's a whole chapter that's almost devoted to basically the privations of a housewife who is trying to get through the early parts of that year and keep her household together. And we're talking about, you know, barely together in terms of like calories. We're not talking about any sort of luxury.  But of course, that's becoming worth less and less. She's also a little better positioned than some because she has a nice stash of her husband's cigars, which immediately become worthwhile on the black markets. And so she's not permitted by law to exchange any of her rapidly declining marks for, let's say, Swiss francs, which her banker at the teller window advises her to do. But that's actually an illegal transaction, which can only occur on the black market in Germany during this period. So there's a caution. Watch out for all kinds of capital controls in the United States as a potential canary in the coalmine with respect to inflation. But it's fascinating to think of what people were willing to exchange for basic food stuffs for coal, which is how people heated their homes, of course, during some, you know, a cold German winter. And there's actually an expression that came out of all this because there was a patriotic appeal to German citizens to exchange some of their real assets for paper to show that they were part of this new monetary regime where there was going to be a lot of printing, but we were going to stand by our national currency, even though it had changed radically since its pre-war. You know, as I mentioned earlier, it's one third gold reserve requirement. And so the phrase, which became popular, and I'm quoting here from Ferguson, was the self-sacrificing spirit of the people. I gave gold for iron. And, you know, I thought that was very interesting to think of the German people still trying after World War I to have a cohesive national spirit and to do their part in an effort to prop up the currency machinations of their central government. But of course, as this book horribly shows, it didn't work. Yes, those are some of the sadder tales that you encounter where that feeling of inherent unfairness comes out. It's the people who followed the rules, who did what they were told, who tried to be team players. They were very often those who fared the worst because they didn't turn in their money. They didn't speculate as they should have. Buying foreign currencies would have been the wise thing to do, but they held on to their money and they held on to also their government debt, thinking that that would all be made good one day. But really, you couldn't trust the state. That was terrible advice. But a lot of people simply rejected outright advice from, as you know, from their bankers and others who told them, this is how you can protect your savings. And they didn't do it because they trusted the authorities. And it's also interesting to imagine that this was only 100 years ago.  But since then, Ryan, we've had a lot of crazy examples. We've had places after World War II experienced hyperinflations. We, of course, had famously the former Rhodesia's in Bow Boy. We've had even more recent examples in Argentina. We may, in fact, be seeing something of a currency meltdown in Venezuela today. Well, we are, I shouldn't say something, even Turkey. Which, if you recall, not long after the big crash of 1708, maybe in that sort of 2010-2011 period, Western media were touting Turkey for its GDP growth, 10% GDP growth, 8% or whatever, outpacing all the other countries in their recovery. And so, you know, this shows Turkey should be allowed into the eurozone. Of course, Turkey, something like 80 million people, would be the first or second biggest country in all of Europe, along with Germany. I mean, people were really talking about Turkey as an up and comer. But of course, what was happening, which is something that there's a parallel here with what the Germans suffered in the interwar years, is that Turkey was borrowing money in other currencies. They were borrowing money in dollars and euro. And this is just a decade ago, mind you. This isn't some far-off example. And they were using that borrowed money to finance all kinds of public work. So they built a big, beautiful international airport terminal in Istanbul. They did all kinds of things. So when you do that, you can basically gin up your GDP to look a lot better than you are. And then when the bills come due and you actually have to repay these debts in currencies, you can't print up, i.e., not in Turkish lira, then things get pretty wiggy. And what we've seen over the past few years is a really depressing fall of the Turkish lira, depressing for Turks if you're fortunate enough to be a tourist there or something. That's a different thing. But last I recall, it's something like eight to one lira to euro. So this is what this book talks about. I mean, we have more recent examples we can look at. Yes. Well, of course, we've got Venezuela. We've got Turkey, as you note. We've got lesser examples in some other places. And of course, back in the 90s, we had the former Yugoslav republics. And the overall issue when you see these sorts of things is it's important to remember that there's the boom that comes with high rates of inflation. And it goes back to that issue of, well, where am I in this crisis? And how big of a crisis is this? It's hard to tell when you're in the middle of a boom because employment is still strong. And that's something that's noted by Ferguson is that in the early days of the hyperinflation unemployment was still fine. It was one to three percent in most places. And the workers, they had their wages indexed to a variety of price indices. So especially since they received a lot of legal protections, they saw their wages go up. And government employees saw a lot of their wages go up. When you look at the inflation numbers, you have to also look at how much were wages of different groups going up. And in many cases, even in Germany at that time, in 21 and 22, wages were still going up by a little bit more than the inflation prices were going up. And so those people were doing fine. The people who were getting really hit hard were more the bourgeoisie types of people, the shopkeepers, the people who had to pay employees, the people who were maybe elderly and had all of their savings in government bonds or just in cash and so on. And those people were being destroyed. But that doesn't mean the whole country was doing poorly. And with a big part of the country is doing fine, then your GDP can look fine. And especially if your GDP calculation depends a lot on prices and it's calculated partly that way is everything looks fine during the boom. So you can look around and say, well, we have nothing to worry about. Yes, there's inflation, but we're in a boom. The economy is fine. Unemployment is 3%. I really don't see any reason to hit the panic button. And that's how you get farther and further down that road until it becomes too late. Well, Ferguson points out that despite the destructiveness of some of the bombings which occurred in Germany, there were still parts of the country which remained largely untouched physically by the war. And so there were still tremendous amounts of productive capacity in particular factories, for example, in Germany. And Bob Higgs makes this point. Robert Higgs, where he says, you know, even if we had some terrible crisis in America tomorrow, whether that was with the dollar or COVID, I guess, is a crisis of sorts, you know, that per se, as long as bombs aren't dropping and our fires aren't ravaging.  You still have the factories. You still have the farms. You still have the sources of energy and power. You still have the buildings. So there is hope. But what's the flip side of Robert Higgs's point is that it's remarkable how much damage you can do to an economy without any physical destruction, without a war. Simply by insisting on the wrong fiscal and economic and monetary policies. And I fear that because this is so far in the rear of Ymir and also because of the post-Bretton Woods Agreement, whereby the U.S. dollar became the de facto world's reserve currency, that we have been lulled into a false sense of security. And during the De Gaulle era in France, there was a treasury or finance minister named Jiskar Destang. And he is famous for coining the phrase exorbitant privilege. He said this post-Bretton Woods Agreement basically amounted to an exorbitant privilege for America. And what it's done remarkably and continues to do is to allow us to, in effect, export our inflation, just as we export our dollars. Because anybody who looks at the U.S. federal government, Ryan, looks at it with a clear eye and says, OK, here's their revenue, here's their expenditures. These are crazy people who are never, ever, ever going to get their house in order. Why would we ever lend them money except at, let's say, junk bond rates? That would be the rational response to a spend-thrift government like the U.S. But in fact, we see the opposite. We see bond rates, 10, 30-year bond rates, staying quite low. So this is all a result of a post-Bretton Woods arrangement, which is perhaps on somewhat shaky ground now as we see turmoil across the world. We see China rising in some nasty ways. We see COVID shutting down whole economies and creating a situation where maybe a lot of people are going to need some sort of, you know, UBI or something while they sit at home. So it's, you know, we imagine that arrangements last forever. And of course that isn't true. Well, and it's easy to see how Americans would be complacent or users of the dollar, people who have plenty of dollars around because those examples we noted before, Venezuela's in Bapway, Turkey, and so on, what was the way to protect your wealth? Well, get your hands on dollars. They all wanted dollars. So you can see, well, if everybody wants dollars, then do we really have to worry about the value of the dollar going into steep decline? And also you could come to the conclusion that the dollar will be the last domino to fall. You can look around and say, well, the EU, the euro, they're going to have problems before we do or the pound. And so then I'll have more warning. I'll know when we get to the dollar as that final domino. And then I can make adjustments accordingly. So you just look around and say, things are probably fine for now. And again, it's just so hard to predict when do things get out of hand. Where is that point where you can't just decide, oh, we're going to change course on monetary policy and then things will be fine because it's just really hard to calculate and know ahead of time what might happen. And again, it doesn't have to mean that the dollar loses all value. We've seen major devaluations in major currencies before, like the pound after World War Two and the pound didn't go to zero, but it certainly led to a significant impoverishment for the decline in geopolitical power for that country. And these are things you need to be aware of and not just pretend like they could never happen because people still want dollars. Because yes, we've benefited immensely from Bretton Woods. The question is how long can that be kept going? Well, and what this book is all about is a crisis of confidence in the currency. There is, whether we like it or not, I won't say animal spirits, but there is a psychological component to all of this. And I think, as you mentioned, I think the dollar is probably in good shape for a good long while. Now one thing that's different between today and other problems, other currency seizures like we saw, let's say with Greece and Italy during 07 and 08 with Iceland, things like that, is that there's a new player on the scene, which is Bitcoin. So there is potentially an avenue for people to walk away from dollars as the least bad currency, the least dirty shirt in the laundry. So I would just like to throw that out there. You mentioned that, or we mentioned that as Higgs points out, if you continue to have the productive capacity in place in a country, the workforce, the physical factories, plants, the agriculture, the power, et cetera, bad policies can perhaps be overcome more quickly because you don't have to build them from scratch. Now, right now, the policies of even people on the right, but certainly people on the left, amount to a form of MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, which is basically that we can, as a monetary sovereign, the U.S. federal government can create as much money it needs to pay as bills, including stimulating the economy through workplace schemes, full employment schemes or UBI, a universal basic income or whatever it might want to do. And that that's A-OK because we can continue to do this because people need the dollars. And of course, if you listen to my episode with Bob Murphy a couple of weeks ago on Stephanie Keltin's The Deficit Myth, you'll understand better what the MMTers are talking about. And while someone like Paul Krugman is not a per se MMTer in the sense that he doesn't want to just use direct fiscal policy to create new money, he still believes we should have a central bank and that the Treasury should issue debt. The central bank should be, there is a buyer of that as need be. So it's a little more circuitous. But nonetheless, he is still someone who says deficits don't matter, which is another way of saying that monetary expansion doesn't matter, at least under current conditions. But I was thinking about this the other day, Ryan, and this is something Bob Murphy points out, which is that this assumes that you already have a productive capacity in place. Even the Stephanie Keltin's and Paul Krugman's admit that you have to have a somewhat advanced economy and a currency which people respect and want in order to engineer your MMT dreams. You can't take a developing economy, which doesn't have the ability to build, let's say, automobiles and say, OK, let's just create a central bank. I have it create as much money as it needs and start paying people and then we'll have cars. Even the MMTers understand that, that more money in the economy per se does not just magically create new goods and services. So you need to have a productive economy and a sought after currency like the Euro or the Swiss Franc or the US Dollar before you can engineer this monetary expansion and say that it's going to work. So even the proponents admit that. And then, of course, you also have to assume that there's going to continue to be ongoing demand for that currency. And that's been a pretty good assumption. That's been a pretty safe assumption with respect to the US Dollar. Not so much with respect to the Italian lira or the Greek drachma or the Icelandic Kroner or a lot of other currencies in recent history. So those two things were not present in Germany in the 1920s. They didn't have as productive as economy as they needed and they didn't have any demand externally outside their own borders for German marks. In fact, a mark that was roughly on par with the French franc prior to the 1910s or certainly up to 1914 suddenly became worth like one trillionth of a French franc after the war. So things can get out of control pretty quickly. And that's what concerns me. If a Krugmanite wants to say, oh, you Austrians are doom and gloomers and you're always saying the sky is falling, I think I would rather be on the side of worrying about this than not worrying about it. Yes, it's good to be cautious because the assumption is you can always stop the problem in time and head off the real crisis situation because even these mainstream economists admit, right? Well, a moderate inflation is good, but a lot of inflation is bad because it leads to problems in calculation and might lead to a decline of confidence in the state and so on. And the political aspect is extremely important. A phrase that Sennholz uses is unbacked money is political money. And so if that's the kind of money you're using, you've got to be very acutely aware of the political situation. And so the geopolitical position of the state that is issuing that money is very important. Do people have confidence in the ability of that state to collect tax revenue down the line in order to pay off their debt? So if you want to keep spending as Germany now, you've got to convince people to buy your debt. And if they're only going to be convinced to buy it, if they think you're going to be able to collect taxes and pay them back later. Once they don't have confidence that that could happen, they're not going to buy your debt. And then the only person left buying the debt is the only institution left buying it is the central bank. And that's when you get necessary monetization of the debt. And that's when you then begin the downward spiral. So a lot of people are private institutions, hedge funds and so on are still buying U.S. government debt. But certainly a growing percentage of it as we see the assets of the Federal Reserve growing are being bought up by our own central bank. And that's certainly an indication of a declining confidence in the U.S. regime to be able to pay this off. If people had total and enthusiastic confidence about the U.S. regime, we wouldn't have to have the central bank buy up a lot of that debt. People would still be clamoring to buy it would be the best deal in town and they'd even be buying it at super low interest rates. But that's clearly being eaten away and that's why there needs to be this monetization going on. So you have to be very aware of the political aspect and assuming that the American U.S. regime will just last forever and everyone will love it and have total confidence in it. Of course, it's an extremely naive thought. Well, not only is Hans Sennholz good at making that point about political money, but Henry Hazard was an absolute master at talking about how inflation benefits certain special interests. And he's got a whole book full of very short essays called What You Need to Know About Inflation. We'll link to that with the show notes. We'll also link to the Sennholz article, which Ryan has referred to a couple of times here. And Ferguson himself in the epilogue to this book, When Money Dies, refers to this. He says at the end, he says, it remains so that once inflation is well underway, it develops a powerful lobby that has no interest in rational arguments. This was as true for Austria and Hungary as for Germany. So this is absolutely true. We all understand the cantalun effect, which says there are changes in relative prices resulting from changing the money supply based upon the specific injection point of that money. Money is never neutral. Mises counsels us. And so you have to understand that there are earlier recipients who actually benefit. So there's a lobbying constituency for money creation. And then also in the epilogue, what I really loved is Ferguson says, you know, what's so interesting is that there's just never that everyone understands that it can't go on forever, meaning the expansion itself. But there's never that perfect time to put the brakes on. And you could say that about the US government supposedly had one of the best economies in our history during the early Trump years, years 2017 to 2018 or 19. And if that were true, why was the Fed's balance sheet barely if at all being reduced and why was debt going up so quickly and why were interest rates still ultra low? I mean, all of those things belie the notion that this was truly a healthy economy in the organic productive sense rather than a healthy economy only in the sense that it's been juiced by fiscal and monetary policy. So Ferguson says that I'm quoting him much as it may have been recognized that stability would have to be arranged someday. And that the greater the delay, the harder it would be. There never seemed to be a good time to invite the trouble of that order. And that's that's what we find ourselves in today. There's never a new set of politicians to say, OK, party's over. It's time for us to pay for all that expansion we did back in 07 or 08 or now in 2020 that day never comes. Yes, the the idea also when you when you read this is that the pain ended in 1923 when they ended the the hyperinflation. But as they knew what happened once they did end the hyperinflation in 1923, that's when the pain started to come after that. And that's when the unemployment started to rise significantly. Of course, there had already been pain for the middle classes who are wiped out. But once that came once that period came to an end, then it started to really affect the working classes started to affect even the government workers and the political situation became very problematic. In fact, Ferguson kind of lists out what has to happen once you end the hyperinflation bankruptcies part time working unemployment strikes hunger demonstrations communist agitation and so on. And all those things did come then in 1925, 1926, 1927 with rising unemployment one estimate at one point was that only 30% of Germans were employed full time in the sort of work they had actually some some training and doing. They weren't just doing some sort of makeshift manual labor to feed themselves. And so there were many years that came after the end of the hyperinflation it wasn't the dawn did not arise with the end of the hyperinflation in 1923. There was a long night that came after that and didn't really even arrive until about 1948. Well, another excellent point by Ferguson in this book echoes one that you do also make so well, which is the cultural and social implications of what we would consider anyway, crazy monetary policy and the left likes to bash materialism and consumerism. And maybe with some justification in modern American society. But what we forget is the opposite. In other words, when things aren't consumerist materialist when things are actually very hard scrabble, and people are scraping to survive as this book so eloquently demonstrates there is a huge amount of cultural rot. And because I mean it's easy to be moral, I guess when you're not hungry, or starving or trying to pay your rent or something.  It's really quite remarkable how we don't talk about the effects of monetary policy in terms of the broader social and cultural ramifications. Well, and it really highlights the necessity of having some sort of medium exchange that you can use and rely on and which helps the economy function. And this is point of course, any economist may not just Austrians is that if you want to have a well developed industrialized economy you've got to have some sort of medium exchange that functions to really facilitate the movement of goods and services. And once you get away from that, it becomes very problematic and Ferguson notes in a fun turn of phrase that basically every morning the average person would have to engage in complex mathematical calculations just to keep a body and soul together. So if you want to figure out where can I buy food today, how do I get there on the train? How do I accomplish today's basic errands? You had to multiply all sorts of figures together in order to guess about what the prices would be that day and so on and this is just not how an economy can function. And again, it depends on who can who controls what sorts of resources as well those who control food and food resources and basic farm implements for example, or the source of things that you need to buy when you're at a very low subsistence level. And those people tend to suddenly do quite well for themselves. Artists suddenly are bankrupt and destitute. And this is a really just in many ways just a result of the fact that nobody is willing to engage in any sort of higher level economic activity anymore, because they can't think two or three steps down the road, because they can't make calculations. And without that you have a similar problem that you have with socialism where how do I invest my money? What do I do with it? What do I do now? Instead everyone just unloads their money as fast as they can and in order to buy things with the hopes that maybe something will improve later on. And so there's no real economic planning for the future anymore. Obviously there's no saving. There's no real investment. Certainly not economy-wide outside the few classes that are managing the benefit. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the book is When Money Dies by Adam Ferguson, an Englishman. He wrote this book back in 1975, but I would like to add that he wrote a new forward to it in 2010 where he actually brings up quantitative easing. So he does recognize that there are different euphemisms for deficit financing in electronic era. And so it doesn't really matter in his view whether the lack of monetary discipline is necessity. Let's say war. I don't think most wars are necessary, but we can understand that. Or profligacy, which I certainly think our own federal government here in the United States is guilty of. If you follow me on Twitter at Jeff Deist, all one word, J-E-F-F-D-E-I-S-T, PM me, send me a message and I will send you a link where you can get a free copy of this book, Send Your House. So there's your Christmas reading for you. I wish it was a little more cheery. You can also, at that same link, if you choose to, check a box to get a copy or multiple copies of Henry Hazlitt's Great Economics and One Lesson sent to you. Again, no charge. We want to get these books out there. That's one of our big projects. And in fact, Ryan for 2021 will be in really being out there and having some events which are designed to create a counter narrative to what's going on with money in the United States. Because I think we're in a very dangerous time and telling a different story about money is one of the most important things which I hope the Mises Institute can do or serviceably or competently well. We're also going to provide some show notes today with a link to an article by Hans Sennholz, which Ryan mentioned earlier. We're going to provide a link to some Henry Hazlitt articles on inflation, which is just phenomenal. And some of you may be familiar with the name in the econ or financial Twitter universe, Lynn Alden. She's a young woman who's writing a lot about money and what's happening in markets today. So I'm also going to link to an article of hers at Seeking Alpha, which might require you to give an email address. I'm not sure. But it's on the three types of inflation, namely monetary asset price and consumer price, which I thought was one of the best expositions I've ever read of these three different varieties. And why, you know, that when the Paul Krugmans of the world say, oh, there's no inflation, you don't have to worry about anything, they're actually not correct. You just have to look at what kind of inflation we're talking about. So all that said, Ryan, I want to thank you for your time today. I think this is a really fascinating book and a great discussion. And I want to wish all of you ladies and gentlemen, a great weekend. I'll see you guys next week.


So, you don't understand behind and polygroups, not a problem. This is exactly the same thing as behind, except instead of applying the actions to everything that is behind the face you start with, it only applies actions to things behind the face you start with that are also the same color as the polygroup you start with. So here you can see I'm clicking on a pink polygroup, so only the stuff behind that is also a pink polygroup is going to be affected. That's all it means. Same thing with the addition of a polygroup color filter. So same thing if we have a green polygroup here and here and here and target is set to behind and polygroup. If we left click here, even though all these are the same color green polygroup, it only applies the action to the ones that are also behind. So that's how that works. Hope that helps and as always up you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


You're gonna have that friend where you love being around them you enjoy their company y'all have a good time together but at the same time that friend you you still question a lot of the things that they do well PFF for me is that friend I love going over their list I enjoy them have fun talking about them but at the same time I still have to question so YouTube team keep it clean what's going on is engraving here with another video and in this video PFF did a list of the top their top 50 players not top 50 quarterbacks running backs wide receivers office no no no their top 50 players in the NFL and Lamar Jackson wasn't on that list before we get into this I got to say that I love y'all I appreciate y'all team keep it clean so much no matter what team you're a fan of I know it's like 90% Ravens fans but no matter what team you're a fan of thank you for coming through thank you for supporting the channel thank you to all the patrons thank you to all the subscribers thank you to anybody that supported the channel in any kind of way I love y'all I hope y'all are having a great day whenever you watching this I love you tell somebody you love them today I'm telling y'all right now I love y'all and I appreciate y'all now getting into this list this is PFF's list of the top 50 players in the NFL and like we said PFF I guess they feel like Lamar Jackson is not a top 50 player in the NFL like you can debate on if he's a top five quarterback you can have that debate but not a top 50 play the top not a top 50 player in the what not let's get into this list anyway number one and you know what first before we get into this let's see how they break it down one of the benefits of watching and grading every player on every play of the NFL season is the unrivaled ability to compare players with the help of the largest football database on the planet ranking seasons has been underway for quite some time over at PFF comm with everything from the best players at each position to the league's best position groups but now it's time to throw some love at the best of the best today we start presenting the top 50 players in the league heading into the 2021 season the ranking below is a projection of what we think will happen and not necessarily a reaction to a spectacular or underwhelming 2020 season additionally positional value is not considered here so safety's guards even running backs have just as good of a chance to rank highly as quarterbacks who would dominate the list if positional value was heavily factored so the fact that it's not based off of the 2020 season it's based off of a projection of what they are expected to do mixed with what they've done in the past in Lamar let's just get into it all right number one Aaron Donald from the Los Angeles Rams okay no problem with that at all no problem that at all it's crazy that him as not a defensive in not an outside linebacker but him as an interior defensive lineman a defensive tackle that he puts up the crazy numbers that he puts up the guy gets he doesn't get single team no nobody going against him he gets double team triple team quadruple team whatever word comes after quadruple that means five people he gets that team so Aaron Donald being here okay no problem moving on number two Patrick Mahomes okay no problem moving on number three Travis Kelsey now Travis Kelsey is nice number the third best player in the league Travis okay okay PFF now number four Quentin Nelson go out from the Colts number five why receive a Devontae Adams what y'all did y'all better not forget about the Andre Huck and anyway number six Khalil Mack number seven Tom Brady from the Bucks number eight Bobby Wagner from the Seahawks oh that's a surprising one okay anyway number nine George Kittle from the 49ers okay they over there having a little party at their tight end university right now they got like 80 tight ends there's like Ravens Ravens alone could have their own tight end university because they got like 23 tight ends on the team right now but that's besides the point number uh I said number nine already number 10 Aaron Rogers from the Packers okay 11 TJ Watt from the Steelers he's nice with it number 12 Derek Henry from the Titans okay 13 Zach Martin from the Cowboys okay now 14 Jaya Alexander from the Packers okay he uh probably did the best one of the if not the best corner league definitely up there if he ain't one he's two uh but he's nice man but he should be high number 15 more Packers loves David Bakhtiati okay number 16 Jalen Ramsey shout out to Jalen Ramsey okay should have been a Raven but anyway uh number 17 DeAndre Hopkins so y'all know that's my guy man number 18 Tyreek Hill uh number 19 Chris Jones from the Chiefs again uh number 20 Fred Warner from the 49ers linebacker uh 21 Joey Bosa from the Chargers 22 Russell Wilson from the Seahawks okay uh 23 Justin Simmons from the Broncos 24 Trent Williams from the 49ers 25 Edge Miles Garrett from the Browns okay we know about him personally 26 Daven Cook running back from the Vikings uh 27 Nick Bosa from the 49ers 28 Ryan Ramsey from the Saints why do I almost say 49ers again uh 29 29 hey we got one y'all Marlon Humphrey from the Ravens all right so I'm cool with that one Marlon Humphrey made the list all right okay go ahead hump do your thing hump is a cornerback and hopefully this year he'll get to play his actual position as outside corner hopefully he doesn't have to go into the slot because that would mean Tay Tay stayed healthy but okay Marlon Humphrey let's just read about Marlon Humphrey let's see why they put him at 29 Humphrey doesn't get the recognition he deserves because of his role within the Baltimore defense and the things they asked him to do precisely because he is their best coverage player over the past two seasons only Xavier and Howard has a higher pff coverage grade when in single coverage Humphrey has achieved that despite lining up in the slot on 58.8 percent of his snaps in that time a position that often leads to far more coverage losses because you know when you when you cover the outside the outside receiver it's you and the sideline no matter which outside receiver you cover no matter which side of the field you on it's you and the sideline you got help but when you move to the into the insides into the inside receiver to play that slot corner that's that's even tougher man but Marlon Humphrey he's asked to do that but anyway moving on number 30 Christian McCaffrey from the Panthers run CMC 31 Cam Hayward from the Steelers 32 Harrison Smith from the Vikings 33 Eric Kendrick from the Vikings 34 Alan Robinson from the Bears 35 Julio Jones now on the Titans 36 Bryce Callahan on the Broncos I got to say I don't I'm not familiar with Bryce Callahan at all there's no disrespect to him that's just me being naive oh he okay he's a slot corner back okay um number 37 Nick Chubb from the Browns 38 AJ Brown from the Titans 39 Evan Camar from the Saints okay 40 Josh Allen from the Bears okay now 41 John Johnson from the Browns formerly of the Rams okay 42 Grady Jarrett from the Falcons 43 Tarana Armstead from the Saints 44 Michael Thomas from the Saints 45 Stefan Digg from the Beals 46 Ronnie Stanley from the Ravens Ronnie made it he made it let's see what they had to say about Ronnie Stanley may be the best pass protector in the entire NFL at any position he has back to back pff pass blocking grades of at least 90 albeit in an injury shortened year in 2020 he has surrendered just 16 total pressures across his last 719 pass blocking snaps allowing his QB to be hit or jacked just three times in that period really well Stanley's run blocking has improved throughout his career but it's his pass blocking prowess that powers him to this ranking what separates him from a player like David Bakhtiari is a combination of longevity at that level in the undoubted effect Lamar Jackson in the Baltimore offense has on the ease of his job as a pass protector by comparison so um okay you know what let's just let's get to the rest of this little shout out to Ronnie Stanley though 47 James Bradbury from the Giants formerly of the Panthers too uh 48 Marcus Williams from the Saints even 49 Lavante David from the Bucks and number 50 Dak Prescott from the Dallas Cowboys you mean to tell me this list it includes Patrick Mahomes okay cool it includes Tom Brady okay cool it includes Aaron Rodgers okay cool it includes Josh Allen okay cool it includes Dak Prescott okay cool but you mean to tell me that it includes those guys at the quarterback position but no Lamar Jackson as a top 50 player like the fact that it would be it is for the top 50 players that makes it that gives it even more reason to include Lamar Jackson in there because I mean if it was the top obviously the top 50 quarterback because 32 teams he would definitely be in there but even in top 10 he would be in there but when you change it to top 50 players when you talk about Lamar Jackson as just a player and not even just a quarterback but a player his impact is that much deeper it's that much stronger it's that much more it carries that much more weight so the fact that this this has got to be now I know PFF I know they be trolling now trust me I know they be I know they be trolling we know they be trolling you you know but this is like the ultimate troll right here this is the ultimate troll right here I know what y'all are doing and I know why y'all are doing it too I'm on the y'all PFF again have fun going through that list going over that list and stuff have a great time with them but still they remain that friend where you got a question what they're doing and why they're doing it still love y'all though team keep it clean I appreciate y'all I love y'all PFF y'all need to get it together y'all gots to get it together you