 Thank you, Sandy, and thank everybody here for coming to this event, and thank you for making it possible for me to come to this event and to even just to have this event. And of course, I'd like to thank Lou Rockwell for making all of this possible. It's been one of the central things in my entire life. And of course, I'd like to thank Greg and Jane Gandhi for sponsoring this lecture on the dollar descent. And given the topic, when I woke up this morning, I, well, I actually look at it every morning, the price of gold, and I noticed that it was up almost $12 an ounce, and it was approaching like $1,900 an ounce. And then I just checked it a few minutes ago, and it's up another $40 an ounce. So it's obvious that the market has, you know, perfect expectations of the future and is realizing that I'm going to be speaking on this topic here today. And silver's up a dollar an ounce. So they're very leery of what I'm going to be telling you today. And I actually wrote several talks in preparation for this conference. We ended up with a dollar descent, but I'm really not going to be talking about the first definition of descent, which is, according to the Oxford Language Dictionary, you know, moving downward, sinking, dropping, all of that stuff, going down, dropping, falling, sinking, depreciating, because you pretty much all know that part of it. And in the last year or so, the American population and the world population realizes that their paper money is going down in value and that the prices of the goods that they buy have been going up at a very quick pace. Instead, I'm going to talk about the second notion of descent, which is the origin or background of a person or thing. It's in terms of people, it's your family or your nationality. And so I'm going to be talking about the sort of family and nationality and the origin of the dollar here today, because that's really just as important to know where something came from in terms of where it is today. The dollar actually comes to us from Germany, the taller. It's spelled like it's the Thaler, but it's the taller, which is a large silver coin first minted in Germany, some of the lower German principalities, the Holy Roman Empire, and lastly the Habsburg Monarchy. So this is a large silver coin. The previous silver coins that circulated in the world tended to be much smaller. The coins from Venice, for example, were much smaller in weight. The taller was approximately equal to one ounce, was a one ounce coin. And basically you're talking about maybe 25, 26, 27 grams of pure silver in an overall coin that weighed 29 to 30 grams of weight. And the most famous of the German Thallers was the Maria Theresa Thaler, which was minted at the end of this period in the Habsburg Monarchy. Maria Theresa ruled over the monarchy for a considerable period of time, and it was generally considered a bullion coin that was used throughout the monarchy and really throughout Europe, and it really even transcended Europe and circulated in North Africa, in the Middle East, and elsewhere. So it was a very successful, long-lived coin that actually outlived that period. But it's important to realize that this was an important form of money in what's called the early modern period, that historians date from around 1500 to about 1800. The earliest Thallers were minted in southern Germany in the first and second, started in the first and second decade of 1500. And it was present during a period in which the world, the European world and elsewhere, became a sophisticated modern society that emerged and spread, including what historians refer to as the growth of the rich lower classes, which is sort of a contradiction in terms, but you have to remember that the class system in Europe long before this period involved the nobility, the kings and queens and the large estate owners, which were one class, the upper class, and then you had the clergy class below that, and then you had the lower classes, the serfs, the peasants, which made up of the vast majority of the population, but it was a population that was literally dirt poor. And so it was really in this early modern period that you see the development of really a middle class. And one of the offshoots of the German Thaler was the Spanish peso, which was minted in large quantities in Mexico. It was a large coin that circulated in the United States or actually the colonial, during the colonial period, very successful. In fact, you could find Spanish pesos circulating in the United States almost up until the point of the American Civil War. So this is a very long period of time in which the Thaler or the peso was the dominant money around the world. Gold was not really that much in circulation. It wasn't used in day-to-day commerce. And actually during this period, silver coins were the dominant form of money both in hand-to-hand transactions as well as longer-distance international-type transactions. And I have taught at Auburn University for a long period of time, and you'll notice that there's nobody around in town right now because they're having what's called fall break. And fall break is actually only one day off. And they didn't get Columbus Day off, but they suspiciously got this day off, which just happens to be the day before the LSU football game in Baton Rouge, which will give the Auburn student body, or at least a small percentage of it, an opportunity to travel maybe to home or on some historical excursion or maybe to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And also in terms of teaching, Google has made teaching, you've had to really revolutionize your teaching because students can just look things up. So giving a lecture on the International Monetary Fund over a couple of classes just really isn't much of a payoff for the students because they can just look it up and read it if they ever had to understand it for any reason at all. So I just can skim over that and say, this is a scam, that's a scam, but you have to come up with something new. You have to prove your value in class. And the Spanish peso is one of those things. The Spanish peso, as I said, it circulated the United States throughout the colonial period and throughout the early American period, and it was a big coin. So in terms of day-to-day commerce, what people would do is to cut the Mexican peso into pieces. So if you look at a coin as a pie, you could cut it in half and you'd have two half pesos, or you could take one of the halves and cut it into two, and you'd have quarter pesos, and then you could cut the quarters into two, and you'd have a real, so that the real or one-eighth of a peso was considered a normal thing that you would use in transactions so that, you know, for us nowadays, two-bits kind of refers to something that's cheap and it's not very good. So if you're concerned about a product like computer security, you want the gold standard of internet security. You don't want two-bit internet security. So one of the things that I can show my worth to the students, let's see if I can do this here, part of my lecture on monetary history is to talk about these reals, these Spanish peso, Spanish pesos, and cutting them up into pieces, you know, so that you can have two-bits, four-bits, whatever, and let's see if I can get this to work. Well, this is a fight song that occurs at Auburn football games. All right, Tiger fans, get your hands up for two-bits. Four-bits, six-bits, a dollar, all four, all burn, stand up and holler. And I explained to them that your dollar actually comes from this Mexican peso, which was originally a German coin from the early modern era. And, you know, the early modern era is important. That's when the commercial revolution occurred. That's when trade developed. That's when commercial fairs took place, maritime commerce, a huge increase in the population, which was a good thing, urbanization, the formation of cities, the agrarian revolution, applied science, you know, Galileo, Newton, so forth, classical music, classical philosophy, the development of architecture. So this was really the period when the failure and the peso were circulating in the economy when food production went way up. It became much better for you. You had spices or antioxidants in your food so that you had a better diet and a longer life expectancy. Clothing during this period switched from, well, just they called it clothing or dress. It was very pitiful, but the words fashion became used to describe clothing for the first time during this period. And the whole mercantilist battle of this period was fought over clothing. Clothing from various countries was competitive and they would form protectionist policies to try to skim off money for the state. And even shelter really developed for the first time. You think of the pyramids and the Roman villas and all of that, but prior to this time, people were living in huts constructed out of mud and grass. And by the end of this period of time, people were living in houses constructed of wood and bricks. So it was a major, major step forward in human economic development. Okay, Thomas Jefferson picked up on this here in the United States. Our currency was the Spanish peso and he wanted to imitate that. He had long advocated adopting the Spanish peso, French technology that was used at the time or under development at the time. And he did add some innovations, but nothing to change the tradition that had started in Europe hundreds of years earlier. And so while he was in Paris looking at this new French technology, Congress was passing the Mint Act, adopting his proposals and they actually placed the U.S. Mint initially under the Secretary of State, which was Jefferson at the time who advocated hard money, no paper money, no special privileges for banks and things of that nature. And of course, the dissent of the dollar took a long time. Silver remained in our coinage until 1964. We still had a gold standard until FDR took us off of it in 1933. And then of course, we went completely off any kind of metal based, commodity based money in 1971. I was a coin collector, I had some silver certificates at the time and I was told that they wouldn't be redeemed for silver, that they'd only give me one of these paper notes, a modern paper note. And that ticked me off so much that it sort of is one of the main impetuses for me being here right now. I don't get mad very easily, but I still remember that. And then of course today, the Jefferson Nickel is actually the last remaining money that we have in our system that has any kind of equivalent commodity value. So there is a tradition, it was successful, it was amazing for human economic development and I appreciate all of you being here for me to discuss that with you. Thank you.