Where does money come from?

Credits Cards same as Cash, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

I'm sure I'm going to look very simple... but it's a genuine question.

Where does it come from? It's all symbolic anyway. If there were a hundred people living on an island without any contact with the outside world and they all had a pound each... and one of them opened a bank and offered the others 1% interest per annum... then how would they pay that interest? If someone invested their whole pound, then at the end of the year they'd be owed a penny and that would mean the banker had only 99p of their own pound left... which would make banking an inherently unprofitable business. Which (despite the recent evidence) it can't be... or there wouldn't be bankers.

If those hundred people continued to live with their pounds, swapping them here and there, the baker buying an apple from the greengrocer for a penny here and the greengrocer buying a loaf of bread from the baker for tuppence there, then I can see how some people would do better than others. Some people are going to get richer than others because more people spend more with them... but the sum total of their money would still be £100 and the only way of changing that would be to create more money out of thin air.

If some of them had kids that would just spread the wealth a little thinner. There are more people in the world now than there were 300 years ago and there's more money too. So where did it come from?

Someone has to have decided to just make more of it. Someone somewhere must be deciding to increase the amount of money in the world year on year. But who decides how much and where does it go to? Say you're one of the 100 people who all started with a pound each. And say you've decided that for your society's economy to function you need to have another £10 added in to the mix? So what do you do next? You mint another ten coins... and then where do you put them? Who do they belong to? Are they yours? The governments? How do they get into the system?

If governments are just creating more symbolic money each year, how do they decide how much to create? How do they balance that out with each other?

Let's say there was another group of a hundred people who lived on another island and they all started with two dollars each. Then one day, some brave mariner from Island A discovers Island B and the two islands start trading with each other. As it goes, what costs about a penny on Island A costs a couple of cents on Island B so everyone's happy trading two dollars for a pound.

So now what happens when the first island decides to add another £10 into their economy. They've just created something - out of nothing - that makes them wealthier than their neighbours. So what's to stop Island B deciding to just create even more money to make them even wealthier?

Countries borrow money from each other. For that to work there has to be some agreement between nations about where money comes from. You can't decide that a pound is worth two dollars if they're allowed to just make more dollars whenever they want.

Somebody somewhere has to be increasing the sum total of money in the world bit by bit... because there's more of it now than there was then... and there has to be some kind of international agreement between governments about how that works... or there would be no way of trading with each other.

So... on the off-chance that the World's Money Increaser (I think that must be his/her title) is reading this (and come on, I think there's every chance they google themselves) can I offer them this suggestion: make more.

You know how tax-payers are meant to be bailing out the banks with 500 squillion pounds? Why not just create a new 500 squillion pounds and use that instead? You won't even have to print the paper or mint the coins... because it's the kind of money that only really exists on computer screens and bank statements. Just tell everyone it's there... and then it is there... because surely that's how all money works anyway. Then the problem is solved and it won't have cost tax payers anything in real terms because we'll only be spending money that didn't exist before.

You know that National Debt that people are always going on about? However much it is... that's how much I'd create on Day 2 if I was in charge. Just make enough money to pay it off.

I don't know why no one seems to have thought of it sooner.

Genius...

After shows three and four I said something about how every show was turning out really differently as the guests - and the people pitching their ideas - had all stamped their personalities on their respective shows.

There was no chance of the last two recordings bucking the trend as our guests were Johnny Vegas and Germaine Greer respectively. They were both on remarkably good form. There was a moment in Johnny's show when I looked across and saw people literally crying with laughter. The fact that I was experiencing no small amount of physical pain at the time wasn't unconnected. Definitely a highlight. For the audience at least.

Germaine really is a remarkable woman. She's sharp, witty, feisty, flirty and seems to have boundless energy. A real treat. The fact that she left our show and immediately skipped into the studio next door to appear on a live show - Newsnight Review - only served to underline quite how fab she is. She's a force of nature and quite, quite, brilliant.

There's always a strange low after something like this draws to a close. Making the show has occupied pretty much every waking minute of the last few weeks - and not just for me. So many people have been putting in remarkable hours to make things happen. From the outside looking in I think people imagine there's an endless pot of money in tellyland and that anything you want built will be... but obviously that's nowhere near the truth. We've had a small team working really hard with quite limited resources... tie that up with a show that is constantly evolving as the recording approaches and you don't get a show out the other side without people going the extra mile to help.

It's going to be a bit strange on Monday when I don't head to Genius HQ in the morning... and I'm going to miss working with those people. But then it's going to be nice to sleep. And to have my social life back and... and I'm going to miss working with those people.

Facebook

Okay... so, there are some things that make facebook a bit of a mare.

One is that, when you have three thousand, ahem, friends, it can make opening your own profile a bit difficult. I've never understood all the applications that exist, I have no desire to be a vampire or a pirate or to send a stranger a questionnaire or... or any of that. But obviously lots of people do. And they often send them indiscriminately to their friends. So I often find I have 200 pointless invites waiting for me... from people who weren't really specifically aiming the invites at me in the first place... they were just clicking a button that meant some of their friends got an invite. The point of me using facebook in the first place was to try and live a more spam-free online life... but the reality is that facebook's never ending stream of applications that are developed faster than they can be blocked - not to mention all the groups and events - just add up to another kind of spam. A well-intentioned kind, maybe... but if you've got five minutes to check your mail and find 300 invites waiting for you first it adds up to the same thing.

The other problem with facebook is what happens when someone decides to create a fake profile, pretending to be me... and then goes ahead and mails people, creates groups and so on.

So, the sensible advice seems to be that I should set up a page instead of (or as an adjunct to) my profile. So I have done. It's here.

A Fake Me...

Hmmm. I'm having a bit of a problem with a fake me on facebook. I've been getting a lot of mail from people who've been taken in by him... and I don't like it.

(I also don't like how hard facebook have made it to report... and how slow they are at reacting...)

I have a website. (I know... you know.) Given that I have a website, what are the chances of me having a facebook profile or a Myspace profile and not linking to them? Pretty slim I'd have thought.

Which is how you can verify that this is my facebook profile and that this isn't. That second link has got nothing to do with me. Unless you're listed as his friend (or you're in the Brighton and Hove network) you won't be able to see his page. But he's using my photo, my name and my biographical details and basically trying to pass himself off as me. Which is kind of unsettling to begin with... but is made worse by what he then does as "me."

He's created two groups.

One of them is called Gormans Idea Group.

He introduces the group saying "A group for my friends and fans to post any ideas they may have, for new books or tv programmes for me to write, as i am suffering from serious writers block at the moment.... lol."

Agggghhh. Leaving aside the whole people-might-think-I'm-begging-for-ideas thing... there's also the fact that he thinks I'd use a lower case i and a lol. Lord help me. I don't lol. I often laugh out loud. But if I ever want to tell someone that I've laughed out loud... I don't lol.

His other group is just as bad. It's called Googlewhack Fan Club. My skin crawls even as I read the words. In his introduction he writes, "Been a while since i did the googlewhack series, thought i'd give my friends a chance to post their own. When i get chance i'll check them and post the results. maybe devise a leaderboard or something - DG....."

Where do I start? Googlewhack series? Well there's your proof that it's not me writing those words right there. What series would that be? There wasn't one. There was a stage show and a book. The stage show was filmed and is available on DVD. But there's no series. Then there's that lower case i again. And again. And again. And the idea that I'd encourage people to try and googlewhack... or even go near the game again myself. Ugh. Shudder.

I've written to facebook and asked them to remove him but they don't make it easy to report these things and they're being very slow in responding. Far slower than Myspace have been when similar things have occurred over there. If you're a contact of the fake me... or you're in the Brighton and Hove network and can therefore view his profile, why not take the time to click on the 'report this person' link that should be there towards the bottom left hand corner? Or e-mail him... gorman1@live.co.uk and ask him to kindly stop...

What Came First...

... the chicken or the egg?


It turns out that some of the time, the answer is neither. Sometimes it's the turkey.

What am I on about? Well, it turns out one in five large chicken eggs are actually small Turkey eggs. They taste the same, apparently. Actually, if you think about it they must do. Because if one in five large "chicken" eggs is actually a turkey egg, the chances are we've all eaten plenty of them and nobody I know has ever noticed. I had a three egg omelette for my lunch earlier so there's every chance I had one today. It tasted, y'know, kind of eggy!

It seems that if they put them in boxes and label them "turkey" eggs, they just don't sell as well for some reason. Duck eggs, yes, turkey eggs, no. I guess people think of duck eggs as being exotic or luxurious, whereas turkey eggs just seem a bit bargain basement.

I wonder what else we're eating without realising? Pig milk cheese anyone?

Two thirds...

Genius seems to be happening remarkably quickly now that we've started filming them. It feels like we've only just started but we've already got four out of the six shows done. Crikey. It's exhausting... but at the same time it's giving me an adrenaline rush and I think one is cancelling the other out. I expect I'll collapse into a heap the day after the sixth show.

This Tuesday/Wednesday our guests were Stewart Lee and Frank Skinner respectively. They were both brilliant. They also, both took really different approaches to the show which is one of the things that makes the job so exciting for me... it shows no signs of ever becoming routine.

There are so many variables in a show like this. It's not just the guest genius, there are also the members of the public who pitch their ideas, and of course the ideas themselves. The end result is that every show feels really unique... while at the same time, the series seems to have a really strong identity binding it all together. I hope that comes across on screen as well as it does in the studio.

Once again, our pitchers (for want of a better word) all seemed to have a good time. On paper, Genius could have been a show that chewed people up and spat them out and I'm really proud of the fact that we don't do that. Without exception they're always really beaming at the end of the night and whether they were deemed a genius or not, they're always happy that they took part. Before the show I always tell them that they're going to enjoy it... and I can tell they don't all believe me... but afterwards they always tell me how much fun it was. Which makes it all the more fun for me.

This time next week I'll be part way through recording the fifth show... and by the end of Friday night, the series will be over. Lorks.

By the way... a few people have asked a few questions about the show... so here are the answers:
1) It'll go out early next year some time. The dates will be on my site as soon as I know them.
2) Simply because we get loads more ideas from men than we do from women. Of the ideas we receive, something like 19 out of 20 come from men. We'd love to have more female pitchers too - get thinking ladies...
3) Yup, the ideas for this series are locked and loaded... but we're always looking for more. But I'm not the person to send them to. I'm the least organised member Team Genius... so visit the Genius website instead.
4) Yes, he is real and yes, his name really is Thorin.

...5, 4, 3, 2, 1

So that's the first two recordings done and dusted. But not edited. (I think they should dust them after the edit - there'll be less to dust that way and nobody enjoys dusting, do they?)

The guests were both fab - as I knew they would be. I've always said that the guests should come from different fields and make every show feel different and we definitely got that with Catherine Tate and Jonathan Pryce. There were a couple of times during show 2, that I caught myself in the middle of doing something ridiculous with Jonathan and had to pinch myself. "He's the finest Hamlet of his generation, a Bond villain, Madonna's hubby in Evita and Keira Knightly's Dad in Pirates of the Caribbean... and now he's here doing this with me!" What a ridiculous world.

The first show was plagued by a few technical problems which really slowed things down. It took a lot longer than it should and lost some of its sense of flow on the night so I'm very grateful to the audience for staying as energised as they did. It's always a learning curve and by the second show a lot of small kinks had been ironed out of the process so we were able to make everything happen much quicker and smoother.

But perhaps the best part for me was seeing the reactions of the, for want of a better word, contestants. They're naturally nervous before the show but afterwards, regardless of whether they were declared genius or not, they all seemed elated. When I chat to them afterwards the most frequent comment is always, "I'd like to do it again. Now." It's really quite exciting to be a part of.

For the next recordings we're going to jig a few things about and add in a few more rows of seating... that way we'll be able to get a load more people in too. Hurrah for things like that.