Main points:

He argues that money originally was a form of blood debt. If you accidentally hurt someone, you owed them. Usually a debt denominated in kind, i.e. I owe you 2 cows or 5 chickens. Money was invented as a way to make comparisons between the sizes of debts and I guess to trade debts. He also argues that money was always a state monopoly and state sanctioned.

I found his arguments to be a bit speculative. Just because a practice of blood debt was observed in ancient societies doesn't automatically mean that money was invented to measure blood debt. It's just as plausible that it arose as a form of economic debt. His argument that money predates markets is unpersuasive because he doesn't define what a market is. A handful of people trading and agreeing to some form of IOU is enough to constitute a market that uses a form of money. I'm not sure anything he said disproves that possibility.

Lastly, he seems to push a lot the idea that money requires state sanctioned monopoly. This also is unpersuasive because the entire concept of a nation state wasn't necessarily around in ancient times. I imagine there was some social coercion around accepted forms of money, but would you call loose coalitions of tribes using different forms of money a "state sanctioned monopoly"? That's a far cry from what we have today. Moreover, it's unpersuasive whether the monetary unit began circulating first, which the tribal leader then sanctions, or whether the monetary unit begins to circulate because the tribal leader sanctions it. Correlation does not imply causation.

Anyway, worth watching, I guess, because I wasn't aware that this kind of view was out there.

@Undisciplined @denlillaapan