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A Coin to Die For: EID MAR with Shanna Schmidt · Worth Its Weight

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: This October, Worth Its Wait, is taking a walk through the darker side of Numismatics.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Throughout the month, we'll explore the strange, macabre, superstitious criminal, and occasionally downright unsettling stories that money can tell.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: And there is no better place to begin than with a coin that celebrates one of history's most famous murders.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: The Eid Mar Denarius presents a fascinating contradiction.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: After all, a coin celebrating murder shouldn't feel this beautiful.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Brutus doesn't hide what happened to Julius Caesar.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: He puts the date of the assassination beneath two daggers and declares the result liberty.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: On the other side, he places his own portrait, adopting one of the very practices for which Caesar was condemned.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: It is simultaneously money, propaganda, political argument, historical document, and trophy.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: And, more than 2,000 years later, collectors still desperately want one.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: I am joined by the incomparable Shanna Schmidt, who will help me explore this tiny object and all it can tell us about the assassinations, liberty, hypocrisy, propaganda, collecting authenticity, and the enduring desire to possess history.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Shanna, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: We are so excited to have you.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: I'm excited to be here.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: So I have declared October to be the spooky season of Numismatics, and I wanted to begin with what may be the most unapologetically murderous coin ever struck.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: If you handed an eyed Mar denarius, or Aureus, but let's go with the one that's available more.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: If you handed an Eidmar to someone who knew absolutely nothing about ancient Rome, what story would you tell them about the object that they are holding?
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's a very good question.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Um, I would say that this coin is a confession and it was minted as a victory lap, so to speak.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: Most recently I was reminded to this, not talking politics at all, but with the dollar coin of Donald Trump, because it raised a lot of questions for modern society whether or not it's okay to have a living person on a coin.
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: And Julius Caesar was strangely enough, he was not actually the first person to put his portrait on a coin.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: There were actually moneyers that had done it before.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: There was one moneyer, Philippus, in I think 56 BC, that also had his portrait on a coin.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: But I think the larger issue was that Julius Caesar was in a position of extreme power and he had proclaimed himself dictator for life.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: Philippus didn't have that same issue, and so probably it wasn't viewed in the same context.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: It was just showy.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: Not scary.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: You know, people say no living person had ever put their image on a coin.
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: Well, that's not true, but in the whole grand scheme of things, this was a real issue, and it made quite a statement.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: So going back to the Eyed Mar and what Brutus did, it's it's interesting because the whole reason why Julius Caesar was murdered by his fellow senators was because of this coin that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: I use that.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: I always say the coin that broke the camel's back, and I think that is so true though.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: It's so true.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: One small thing can be the impetus.
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: And it was the impetus, and then the the irony of it all was that Brutus did the same thing.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Really bothers me.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: But yeah.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: What gives?
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: What gives?
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: What gives?
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: So you're you're thinking of it as a confession, or are you thinking of it as taking responsibility?
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: It's both.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: It's a confession, I did it, and it's a victory lap like I'm important.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: He obviously was concerned about his political future in the end.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: Who knows?
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: If if he would have survived, if he wouldn't have been murdered, then perhaps history would have been a little bit different.
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: But it it's definitely was a confession to say I was the one that did it.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: I will take responsibility, even though there were many other senators that were stabbing him, and I've seen different numbers.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: I've seen like 40 senators, 60 senators.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: So when I just say I'll just say numerous, numerous people were involved in the murder of Caesar.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: It was a lot of people to gather together to say, let's all do it.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: 100%.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: A lot of people were involved, and because of that, he was taking responsibility for the group.
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: So it it it is a confession, but it's also he's drawing a line in the sand and he's saying, you know, maybe I'm the next.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: I'm important here too.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: I've also heard that the the two daggers, some people think it could represent Brutus and Cassius, but obviously only one put their name on the coin.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: You know, you you talk to different scholars, and I'm sure there's different perspectives.
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: From a numismatist point of view, it's interesting, but I think the overall theme of it is the fact that this historic event is is captured on on these coins and what the magnitude of that and how that has kind of transcended that event and become historical jargon that continues moving forward.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: That's a great way to think about it.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It is historical jargon.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: So, how unusual is it to have a coin that commemorates murder, a specific murder?
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, I know there's battles, executions, conquests.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Are there any other examples of coins that do something similar?
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: Ooh.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: Uh, I gotta think about that for a second.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Um I I couldn't think of one, but that doesn't mean you can't.
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: Well, there's the b there's uh Alexander the Great when he was on his campaigns, but it again it's a battle.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: There's the porus, they call it the porus decadram.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: This coin shows King Porus on a he's on an elephant because that was his form of transportation in war, and and Alexander is trailing him, you know, and ready to strike, yeah.
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: Right, but that's a battle.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's affiliated with a specific person, but not not really.
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: I mean, you might you you would look at certain events, like you you look at the the coinage of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, which was shortly after, that kind of stemmed, started with the killing of Julius Caesar and then culminated with Actium and Augustus having Marc Antony and Cleopatra killed, or were involved was involved in that, because obviously they they did themselves.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: However, that went down.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: But no, I I I can't think of a specific coin that is that pointedly describing a murder.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: And I'm sure that I'm sure somebody is watching, listening will say, I know, I know one.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: Well that'd be great! So speak on up.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, speak up.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: Let's find out.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, so I want to kind of go through the symbolism of it and and look at that reverse as more of like a crime scene.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: So we have the two daggers on either side, that Liberty Pileus cap in the center, and I'd mar written below.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: So can you kind of walk me through what a Roman seeing those symbols in 42 BCE would have understood that we would probably miss today?
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so the Pileus to a Roman soldier, that's that's instantly understandable what that is.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: That's freedom from slavery, the cap of libertas.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: They would have understood that because that was jargon for their time.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: That was imagery that they would have been familiar with.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Is that like us looking at liberty today, very similar, where we innate?
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: 100%.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: And the two daggers, it could be Brutus and Cassius, like you had already mentioned.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: That that's quite possible.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: Or it could just simply mean the murder weapon itself.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: I think the multiple would be interesting.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Is it just for the symmetry of it, or is it to show there was a lot of aggression?
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: It was 23 stab wounds, I think.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think there's only so much you can fit on a small coin.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: That's a good point.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: Real estate is at a premium.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe it was just a matter of like the space that they had, but I do think that it's dramatic.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: I mean, if you think about symmetry, it's a nice design.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: You have a dagger on each side.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: Could have just been simply that whoever designed the coin along with uh Brutus and Cassius, that they said, well, let's put the two daggers because it's symmetrical.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: I like to think of them like a birthday cake where you can't fit all the candles on.
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: Like you're not gonna be able to show all the stuff.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: I mean, you could show the physical event of like this, you know, somebody stabbing, but I think this is even more impressive.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: It reads much faster, too.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: You don't have to kind of divvy up who's doing what.
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: But I think that Romans would have read it more like a headline.
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: They would have, they would have understood it immediately.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: What I find super interesting about this is that it is, I think, clearly from Brutus's point of view, that this is that this coin is saying, you know, we murdered a tyrant and and set Rome free.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Um my question would be: what if Marc Antony or Octavian had designed a coin about the Ides of March instead?
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: What do you think it might have looked like, you know, looking at it from a very different perspective?
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: Well, we've had the situation where Octavian, later Augustus, he was involved in the demise of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and we know how he how he reacted to that.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: And what Augustus, eventually Augustus did, was he had a coin that was struck in the provinces.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: So we uh it was a systophoric, the denomination was a cystophoric tetradram.
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: Because the Romans, their monetary system was based on the denarius as a silver coin.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: And so if it was a larger denomination and it was something that was struck outside of Rome, then they took on that Greek form.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: So it's it's called a tetradram or tetradrachma.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: And what he had on the reverse of it was the capture, he celebrated the capture of Egypt.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: So that's the way he interpreted or he wanted to show people his strength.
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: Brutus did it by, you know, showing the liberty cap and saying, I've brought liberty to the republic again.
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: We no longer have a dictator, and Augustus he used the Sphinx on the reverse of his coins, where he had come in and conquered Egypt, which was considered uh, you know, a formidable uh power at the time.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Oh, very much so.
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: And it became a Roman province after that.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: I think that's a great way to look at it to show what he did use, because he was so clever.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Augustus was so clever with how he used imagery on coins.
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: 100%, and there's so many coins.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: He knew how to advertise himself.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: He did what Caesar wanted to do, essentially, in the end.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: I I completely agree.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: One succeeded where the other really kind of struggled to find his way and was killed before he had the chance to figure it out.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: 100%.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: I want to go back to the hypocrisy, though, of Brutus putting himself on the coin.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Why do you think that was acceptable to him?
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: As you said, Caesar was stabbed just after putting himself on a coin.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: It was clearly one of the things that really spurred the assassination.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: How could Brutus possibly think this is cool to put himself on it?
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it's one of these questions that's very difficult to understand why he would have wanted to do it.
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: But I think that he's using first the fact that Caesar put his portrait while he was still alive on the coin, and we already talked about that others had done it before him, so he was 100% not the first.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: They were moneyers and they weren't in that position of power like Caesar was, and they didn't come in and say, I'm gonna be, you know, dictator for life.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: So he was putting his face up there.
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: First, it was a grievance.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: He wanted to justify killing him.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: So you think it's referencing one of the things that really made him feel that Caesar was overstepping his bounds by putting it there, I think.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Possibly.
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: So you could say that's hypocritical, but also you could see it that he's restoring the republic.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: You could see it as him as a representation of the republic, or you could say that this was never really his plan, and that it was a civil war, and he was the face of the new leadership that ousted this dictator, and he was gonna do it better.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of ways to look at this, and it's hard.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: And he put his name on it.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: He did Brutus and then Imperator.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: And I know that Imperator kind of changes over time from that military title into something that Augustus kind of moves toward an empire.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: But do you think that that word was meant to show that military strength?
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: What do you think he was saying?
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that to me, that almost kind of suggests that he wanted to be more than that.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: But you know, he put himself in this really hostile position, and I'm sure that he had to think about his own future, and maybe this was the solution for him.
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: If I take this bold step and I'm the face of the assassination, which he was.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: Very much.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: Maybe there was some talk of a reformation of the republic anyway, with him leading that.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: It's so hard to know.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: I'm actually surprised that there's not more written.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: Because, you know, people were writing at the time.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of historical references that can be legitimized.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: I would agree.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: And and that kind of leads me into this idea of I think we often look at coins, and I especially kind of preach this idea that coins are primary sources and metal, and we often look at them like little history books, I suppose.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: But but that's not really accurate always, because sometimes they're much more like a campaign ad.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: And so I I think that looking at those two different sides, literally and figuratively, of a coin, to see how they can be interpreted differently.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: But I agree, I'm intrigued that nobody thought it's weird that he did that, or or had a comment, considering we do have quite a few comments about his behavior as well as what was happening there.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: It was a really big deal.
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: So baby was just decided that somebody had to be the face of this plan to dispose of this volatile and dangerous human being, uh, Julius Caesar.
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: But it is interesting the hypocrisy surrounding the fact that he was taking this bold step to have his face, his image, on a coin while he was still alive.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: And then, right after that, then Brutus should do the same thing.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Well, and they both met a very similar and very timely end.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, the Eid Mar could have been minted only just a few weeks before Brutus himself died at the Battle of Philippi.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: It also shows us that the Republic did not return.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, his cause failed.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: So there's something quite ghostly about the fact that Julius Caesar and Brutus both took that step, hypocritical or or dictatorial, depending on how you look at them, and then both lost to their cause.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Do you think this coin has become an enduring symbol of Brutus?
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Do you feel that it really represents his lost moment or well it's it represents a few things.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: Ooh, goody.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: First of all, the Ides was a time before there was the Ides of March, there was the Ides that marked the middle of the month.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: And it was aligned also with the full moon.
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: Romans used that day to pay their debts, to settle accounts, to hold religious feasts, so on and so forth.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: And so pay your debts and settle your accounts.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, who knows?
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: And and the Ides of March is the middle of March.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: And so he took this very well-known time period, Brutus that is, and he made it infamous for killing this very important person at the time that was liked.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, Caesar wasn't disliked by the populace, he was a populist.
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: He was disliked by the senators because they feared for their own futures and they didn't like the fact that he was becoming so powerful and their way of life was possibly going to change.
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: But if we look at the Aid Mar and what people think about, Brutus became kind of a.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Was he the Benedict Arnold of his day?
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: And it's really interesting that you mention he was a traitor.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: He was a traitor.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: If you're a Brutus, you're a traitor.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: And people of a certain generation, that's what they would use.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, obviously, Benedict Arnold came much later.
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: And it's really interesting because I don't want to diverge too much from our topic, but I've been reading all about Benedict Arnold and what an amazing general he was.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: I I didn't realize the whole backstory.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: He was not destined to be a traitor.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: He wasn't originally.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Not at all.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: And this is what's really interesting to me.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: Think about all these things you learn as a kid, and you don't ever think about it.
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: Some really horrible, you know, phrases, which I'm not going to repeat some of them, but you know, you learn certain things, and one of those things which is less um divisive is he's a Benedict Darnold.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: That was the sign of a traitor, and that's what Brutus was.
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: I think the coin has become famous with this very deadly event that took place on that day.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: Brutus and his portrait are less understood and um known by the masses.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Do you think that's just today, or that would have been the same then?
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: You mean back when it happened?
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: Oh no, I mean I think then they everybody knew who Brutus was.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Um it's just history warping it to fit a more interesting narrative.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Now remember as well that we're talking about a time when there weren't newspapers, people found out through word of mouth, or they found out through coins.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: Through money.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: It's unbelievable.
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, coins were our propaganda.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: That was the way we advertised ourselves.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: If somebody wanted to boast about their victories, they would strike a coin.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: When Caesar was in Gaul doing his military campaigns there, you know, we have these wonderful coins with the image of Vercingeterix on them.
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: The long-haired Gaul.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: And there's one of a female that's struck around the same time.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: And these are struck under Money Ears, but these coins were Caesar's way of making the Gauls look like barbarians.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: He came in and he the barbarian.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: The long-haired, the the crazy native.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I hear it, yeah.
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: And listeners, if you're old enough, you know asterisk and obelix.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: Asterisk and obelix, that's the Gauls, that's Fair Singeterix.
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: Well, I don't think I made the connection.
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: It 100% is.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: And so coins have a way of transcending the events.
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: And yeah.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: Well, with all the information they carried, I'm interested to know how Romans, after the loss at Philippi, did they want these coins to still circulate?
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: I've obviously there are reasons why Augustus or you know Marc Antony would not have, and we think many of them were melted down as I understand it.
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: But do you think Romans themselves plenty of Eidmar that are available?
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: They're not Can I get one?
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Do you have like a hundred thousand dollars?
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: A hefty budget is.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I would say that the Eidmar is definitely a rare coin, rare in the sense that there's not, you know, millions of them.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: Because as we know, and part of the reason why I'm working on a PhD right now.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: I did not know that.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: Yes, I'm working on a PhD right now through the University in Madrid.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: Cool.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: My win is finding time to do this.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: I'm not.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: It's very difficult.
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: But I'm actually in my third year, and I I did a master's degree in 2013 through the University of Chicago, and I did my master's thesis on the cultural property debate.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: And I'm doing my PhD work on collecting coins as a form of cultural preservation.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: It's a mouthful.
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: But basically, the gist of it is that we as collectors, we as dealers, we are the reason why coins continue to be relevant.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: And that we can use coins as a wonderful teaching tool.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to get away from all the legal dialogue that takes place when we talk about coins and collecting and what's legal, what's not legal, which will also lead to s uh something else with the IDMAR, which is interesting to talk about.
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: Um, but I'm trying to get away from that with my PhD work, and I'm trying to talk about just how important collectors are and why we need collecting.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: The amount of information that they have stored.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: If it wasn't for collectors, the accessibility to coins would be very minimal.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: Collecting is very important for preserving cultural heritage.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: So you said that there was a connection, so I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you to what is the legal connection that you were referring to?
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: The legal connection I'm referring to is the United States in particular.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: We have what's called memoranda of understanding with other countries.
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: And we've had them for years.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: So basically, country A will come to the United States government and say, I want you to help me to control illicit disturbances of sites and the looting that occurs and the cultural heritage of our country being lost.
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: And so in this case, in in terms of antiquities or things like that, it's not a legal thing per se, but it's like an agreement between two nations.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: I want you to make it that US citizens cannot import these things into your country, what what whatever it is.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: Up until 2005, coins were never part of any MOUs.
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: And usually the United States would get something too, because it's an agreement.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: Like we could put a military base in your country or something like that.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: And up until 2005, coins were never included because of the the nature of coinage and the fact that coins were meant to were created in the first place to circulate move and the ubiquity of coinage.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: You know, I mean, coins just there were plenty of coins that were melted down.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: That's why during the Roman Empire, these usurpers they would be a ruler for, I don't know, three months or something like that, and then they would die.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: They struck coins.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: Okay, a lot of those coins are melted down.
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: That's why those coins are usually way more valuable now because there's just not an abundance of them.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: So coins never were part of it, and then in 2005 there was a Cypriot agreement, an agreement between Cyprus and the United States, and coins were added to the MOU list.
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: And that's when I talk about legality, that's what I'm talking about, even though it's not a legal agreement.
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: But the United States has said, we're making this agreement with you, so we're going to support this, yes.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: And I did want to touch on that because I know that you're quite expert in that area and and quite passionate, reasonably so, about making sure that we don't allow the collecting of coins to become the same as if you were dealing in ancient mummies and antiquities.
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we were talking about how rare an eyed Mar is.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: It's definitely a scarce coin, but there are several out there.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: What is absolutely rare, if it's even true, is an aureus.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: Have you ever held me personally?
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: Do you own one?
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: No, but my client who I curate for yes, he owns a few of them.
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: The real question is when I touch something ancient that I feel has that eerie association, or I think, oh, Brutus might have touched this coin, or it could have been spent by someone in the midst of the battle, I get goosebumps.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Does working with ancient material all the time kind of cure you of that, or do you still get those moments of connection to the ancient world?
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: Oh, the wow factor is when I hold Coin of Alexander the Great, or I hold an Athens tetradram, the wow factor is different.
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: It's it's just it's different.
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: I'm still amazed by how well struck and well preserved these coins are.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: But if you understand the nature of hordes, then it makes a lot of sense.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: There were no banks back then, and people they stored their coins, they put them in the ground for safekeeping, and they went off and fought wars or whatever, died, and their coins were found millennia later.
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: If you look at it like that, that's why coins are so important in archaeological digs.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: And that's another point that I love to make people aware of.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: Most coins are found in hordes with other coins.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: The preponderance of ancient coins are not found with other archaeological artifacts.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: They're found in groups of other coins.
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: But coins are very important for archaeological excavations.
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: And why?
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: Because it will tell you the date.
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: They look at the latest coin in that horde, the last struck gives you an idea when that horde was buried.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: And that's why they're important.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: Because we were doing the crime scene analysis.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna say it's kind of like when you get a crime scene where the watch got smashed and it stopped at the time of the murder or whatever.
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: It couldn't be after this point.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: And that and it's extremely important for archaeologists, and that's why you have an archaeological contingent that will tell people coins are so important, and this is why they belong in museums.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: But most people don't understand.
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: They literally don't understand.
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: I have people ask me all the time, like, oh my god, you have an ancient coin.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: I mean, how'd you get that?
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: It must be so rare, it must be so expensive.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: And I'm like, uh, it's ten dollars because it's very weathered, and you know, it's a Roman coin, late Roman.
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: It's a crappy example that has lived a very long life, but it's still a piece of ancient history.
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: For an archaeologist, it's very important, and I don't want to say that coins aren't an important piece of history.
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: They are in a lot of ways, but I think that collectors and dealers, we serve a very important function.
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: We help keep these items, which are very, very plentiful, and they are plentiful, within collecting community, and we give them importance that you're not gonna find within any museum ever.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: No, that's true.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: A lot of museums really don't know what to do with their coins, they don't know what kind of material they have, they don't know the references associated with them, so they can't even use them for that scholarly purpose, and they're certainly not putting them on display.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: And they don't have the real estate.
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: No, no, no.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: I work with the Art Institute of Chicago, they're lovely.
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: They have probably about two dozen coins right now that are on display, and what they do is they marry the coins with the antiquities.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: It's a beautiful thing, it's wonderful.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: They do it the right way, but they've got a few thousand coins that are literally in their basement.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: And I have been in the art institute's basement, and when they say that coins sit in basements, it's true.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: Years ago when I was working with my father, Harlan Burke, we had an auction house called Gemini.
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: We worked with the Art Institute and we actually sold one of their collections that they de-accessioned.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: And it was a collection of Alexandrian coins that they just simply didn't want.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: And they said, We're never gonna put these out, we're never gonna use them.
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: We could use the money for something else.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: And we can put them back into the market and and spur people's interest and the history and possessing that piece of culture.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: And there's a lot of people that would say that is a very bad thing that they did, but I won't be one of those people that would say that because I think it helps people to appreciate this, and what better place than within the collector community?
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Agreed.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: So I want to go kind of behind the curtain, if you will, into what you do as a coin dealer.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: Because I think we all have the impression of like, well, you buy and you sell, but but your work involves so much more than that because you're finding this material often internationally, you're representing clients at auction, researching provenance, and obviously dealing with cultural property laws.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: So what does an ancient coin dealer actually do that collectors don't see or or don't recognize?
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: You know, the amount that a a dealer and a collector and an academic those those lines are blurred.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: Some of the most amazing academics were actually coin dealers.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: You've got the knowledge, so yeah.
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: So there's no distinction between a dealer slash collector and an academic.
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: And I think a lot of people don't realize that.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: That's I think one of the biggest things many people don't realize that don't work within the business or or collect.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: I have so many friends that are in academia that they could care less about how much something costs.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: Or how much money they're gonna make.
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: They'd care about the history of it.
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: And I think that's what makes this business so intriguing and so fulfilling.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, you touched on this slightly, but you did grow up in the world of ancient coins with your father, Harlan Burke.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: And so at what moment did it stop being his world and kind of become yours?
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: Do you have like a oh, this is what I want to do?
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: Okay, excellent.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: I actually didn't want to do it.
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: Uh there it is.
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: It's a very, it's a very, and I'm sure at some point in time I've I'm sure I told you this, but when I started becoming interested in what I wanted to do for a living, I was probably seven or eight, and that was I wanted to be a concert pianist.
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: It was all about the music, and I still play, and I love music, and my my older son is a violinist, and I'm extremely proud of him.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: So I was a classically trained pianist, still am.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: Yes, you never lose it, you never lose it.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: But I studied music for two years at university, and then halfway through my father, who was always thinking practicality, said, You're gonna starve to death.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: Uh, you better get yourself a real job.
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: He said, Well, you're creative, which I am not.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: And he said, Why don't you go into advertising?
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: He didn't say, Why don't you come into my business?
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: He said, Why don't you go into advertising?
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: So I ended up getting my degree in communications and going into my senior year of university, I had an internship at an advertising agency called Ogilvie and Mather, and it was in New York City in Hell's Kitchen, and it was a great experience.
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: In fact, they wanted to hire me, but they wanted to give me like no money, and I was like, How am I supposed to live in New York?
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: And they were like, get get roommates, of course.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: So I ended up getting recruited by the company Leo Burnett, which is a very well-known Midwest advertising firm, and I worked for them for three years, and that started me on my profession as a media buyer planner, supervisor, and I worked in the media business for many years.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: So from the time I graduated, which I'm not gonna tell you because then you're gonna know how it works.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: There's no need.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: No from the time I graduated up until 2005, I worked in the advertising business.
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: And then in 2005, I was living in Germany with two children.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: My mother, always the mom, wanted me to come home.
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: And so she called up my father.
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: They're divorced since I'm five, and she said, Why don't you give Shanna a job?
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: And he was like, Sure, I'll give her, I'll give her a job.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: So that job turned into now in 2026, turned into a career.
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: So when did I first think about it?
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: I don't even think I thought much about it until maybe six months after I was working for my dad, where I was like, I kind of like this.
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: This is kind of cool.
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's interesting.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was never really pushed as a kid to go into my dad's business.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: In fact, it was quite the opposite.
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: I think my father never really envisioned his daughter in Numismatics.
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: It was my son's gonna do this, and my brother a boys' club, yeah.
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: And it is a boys' club, and it honestly it's not nice.
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: I mean, I I'm gl I'm very happy to see that times have changed, but I didn't feel entirely welcomed into this business right away, and it was more like I was a prop for a while.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: Okay, and I think that it changed in a good way.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: I well, I I hope so, and I think you're a big part of that change.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, because when you went out and established Shana Schmidt Numismatics, what were you hoping to do that other businesses weren't doing?
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: What were you trying to do?
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: Caroline, quite frankly, I just wanted to survive at first.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: So honest, I love that.
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: It's very honest.
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: You know, family businesses are extremely difficult, and I left my father's business, which by the way, everybody, we're all good.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: You know, we I talk with my family, love my dad, love my brother, all good.
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: But back then in 2016, when I left working for my father, it wasn't so great.
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: And so, yeah, I wanted to survive.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: I left with nothing and I needed to build the business from nothing.
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: And what I did was when I left my dad's business, I was like, what am I good at?
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: And what I was good at was connecting with people, and I did a lot of auction representation.
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: My roster of clients that I represented in auction was immense, and it was growing and growing.
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: And back in 2006, 2007, when I started doing the auction representation, because I didn't do it right away, there wasn't the proliferation of online auctions.
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: No, you had to be there.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: You had to be there, you had to view people needed somebody to go over there, and I was like, I'll go.
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: And if I get a dealer discount, that was the thing.
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: Oh I was getting from most of the auction houses, not in the United States, because it's actually considered illegal.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: Although one auction house, which I will not name, used to give me a discount.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: That's good business, and they gave other people discounts.
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: But if you were a dealer, auction houses would give you a 5% discount most of the time.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: And if you got a 5% discount, what I would tell people is you don't have to pay for anything then.
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: You get my services for free because I said I want to make 5%.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: So what I would do is I would offer the service.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: I was going over there anyway because I was gonna buy inventory for my father's firm and I was gonna represent big clients, which we weren't gonna charge them any more than what they needed to be charged.
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: So I basically started to build this roster of clientele by offering my services for free.
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: It's changed now, you know.
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: Thankfully, I've come into my own I've become more successful.
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: When I first left my dad's business, I didn't have any coins.
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: I had like my own little collection.
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: I collected Roman Republican coins, which is really funny because even though Caesar isn't Republican, he's part of the imperatorial time period.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: It was still it was at the expensive end of my collecting area because at the time Republican coins were beautiful.
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: If I could have collected anything, I would have collected Greek coins, but I couldn't afford it.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: Understood.
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: So I collected Republican coins, which had imagery that was as beautiful as Greek, but it was in a more affordable uh area for me.
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: Uh those were the first 20 coins that I sold were mine.
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: Were the coins that I was collecting that I no longer could collect because I had to pay my bills.
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: But I built up my inventory by taking any money that I took from auction representation, went back into the business to buy inventory.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: So now I have a very sizable inventory.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: And luckily, because auction representation has changed nowadays, there are still people that will ask me to represent them in auction, and I'm happy for that.
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: And I think that it's a very good thing, and I think it's it's foolish of people to bid on coins cumulatively millions of dollars that they're spending and not have somebody look at it.
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: Pretty pretty ballsy to assume that everything's gonna be okay.
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: Videos sometimes don't do it.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: You have to have somebody actually look at it.
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: You know, when I bid for people, they become anonymous, so it's a protection as well.
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: It does, yeah.
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: A lot of people like to use me as well because they don't have to worry about tariffs or anything like that.
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: Even though we're exempt from tariffs, it still happens that FedEx messes up and they still charge the tariff and you have to fight it.
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: FedEx mess up your joke.
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: And so I'm your advocate.
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: So if you want to use me, you get my advice.
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: You get advice on what do I need to be successful, you get the added value of me viewing the coins sometimes, if it's an important auction, the added value of me importing the coins, the added value of me paying the invoice, so you don't have to deal with international wires.
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of reasons to use somebody for auction representation, but my business model has changed quite a bit since the age of the internet and the proliferation of all these, especially during COVID when everybody and their mother started doing online auctions.
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: It's insane.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: That's why I do a weekly newsletter.
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: Even though I have a relationship with the auction house NAC and I am owner of NAC USA.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: I was gonna ask you about that.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Yes, go on.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: So go ahead, yeah.
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: I am not in the auction business for anybody listening to this.
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: I am not in the auction business in the respect that I have intel into what NAC, what their who their consigners are, how they set their levels.
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: I do not know.
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: If you think I do, then you're wrong.
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: What I do is I act as a conduit between the auction house in Zurich and the U.S.
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: customer.
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: So the US customer can buy an NAC auctions, they can opt in, which means they can tell the representatives in Zurich a lovely lady named Yvonne, they will tell Yvonne, yes, I will want to opt in so they can pay in US dollars, and then they can get for free their material shipped to this office.
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: Yes, for free.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: They will pay just the shipping from Chicago to where they live in the United States.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: It works very effectively.
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: Since we started this, it's been very, very effective, and some people were very suspicious, especially with my newsletters.
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: They were like, Why are you talking about other auctions?
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: It's like, well, because I'm in the auction representation business.
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: That has nothing to do with NAC.
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: So for me, when I went into partnership with NAC for this aspect of their auctions, it actually kind of hurt my representation business because for a while other dealers were saying, Oh, she's sharing what you're gonna bid on with NAC.
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: So you don't want to give her your bids.
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: You don't want to let her represent you because she's she's going to NAC and she's telling them That's tough.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: It was problematic.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: But it it it it seems like you saw that a bridge was kind of needed between the European auction house and the American collector, and and despite what it cost, perhaps, you just felt like you needed to build it.
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: First of all, NAC is an amazing auction house.
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: I think they are the bank loy of their time.
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: And and I felt like having that partnership with NAC was gonna elevate me to the next level.
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: They didn't trust anybody in the United States to work with them except me.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: That says something.
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: It was an honor that they wanted to take that leap of faith.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: Well, and it also it helps that collector market really feel like there is a way to kind of get into that European auction house environment that is so difficult to do online.
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: And NAC has amazing auctions.
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: They've been, I think they did their first auctions in the late 90s.
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: So they're a really good auction house to partner with.
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: So I I'm happy for it, but I'm definitely not in the auction business in the traditional sense.
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: My livelihood does not rely on getting consignments.
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: I definitely have brought consignments to NAC.
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: Having said that, I had one consignment, the Carl Subak collection of Roman Quinary.
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: Very nice man, and his son, John, and I spoke, and it wasn't just a given that he was gonna give his coins for auction to NAC.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: He actually had me look at one other auction house, and in the end, we decided that it was NAC that would get it because they were the better of those two.
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: But it's not a given.
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: So someone who doesn't get to go to auctions very frequently.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: When you're when you're sitting there and you're making bids, especially in the room, and I know now that with the online world it it's changed.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: Is it fun in the moment to kind of or is it quite stressful?
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: I find auctions extremely stressful because you're dealing with obscene amounts of money.
• 43:47
  unknown: Oh god.
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: I always used to say, That's my house.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: That's more than my house.
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: Just bid on a coin, that's more than my house.
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: And you know, I had a few moments where I did, frankly, really stupid things.
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: Like I I was working for my dad and I wasn't making a commission.
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: I was just going as an employee of his company and representing major clients.
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: I was bidding on a coin and I was with a colleague of mine and we lost the first two coin.
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: He was bidding on three coins.
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: We lost the first two coins.
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: And I knew what his total budget was.
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: And so I made a in hindsight, it was completely ridiculous.
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: I would never do this again.
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: But I made a decision after speaking with my colleague.
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: We laugh about it now, but he said, I think he would be okay if you took his cumulative budget and put it into this coin.
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: And I couldn't get in touch with him because I think he was hunting somewhere.
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: So I bought this extremely, extremely expensive coin, even more expensive, because I won it for much higher than what the level that he gave me.
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: So I took this leap of faith.
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: And why did I make money on it?
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: No.
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: Because I just was looking out for, and I still maintain that.
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: That's my mantra.
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: I'm looking out for the customer, but this wasn't a smart decision.
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: And in hindsight, I mean I was afraid.
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: I wrote him an email, I remember that night, and I'm like, I won this coin.
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: I think you'd be okay with it because it's really rare, and I know that you really wanted it, and you didn't get the first two, and I hope you're happy.
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: I didn't hear anything for two days.
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: And it was horrible.
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: It was so horrible.
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: And I was like, if I need to sell one of my children, let me know.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Please write that.
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: I think that he was shocked, but in the end, he realized that it was what he would have wanted, but he didn't give me the go-ahead, and that was a really ballsy thing that I did because I think I exceeded his level by like a hundred thousand dollars or something.
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: Is that all?
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: So all he wrote was good job.
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: And I was like, oh god, thank you.
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: Thank you, guys.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Well, and you hadn't gotten the first two.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: There's a bit of like a well, I've got to show up with something.
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, now in hindsight, I understand that a budget is a budget.
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: Usually I'll ask, can I do plus one increment, plus two increments?
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: Are you firm?
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: This is it.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: You have all that background.
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: I will know that.
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: And and I have exceeded people's budgets sometimes because I'll get it on a cut bid, and then I bid because I just finished the cut and it was a little bit more.
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: And I have told people if you don't want the coin, I'll take it.
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: And I've had more than a few people say, I don't want the coin.
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: That was my budget.
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: And I have been stuck with coins before.
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 46:40
  Speaker 3: I have to know my client.
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: And I have to be prepared as representation that I eat it.
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: Years later, he sold parts of his collection, and that coin he didn't lose money on it.
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: But he didn't make money either.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: That sounds like a win.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: He broke even.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: That's yeah.
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: So I'm happy to say that it actually worked out, but I did learn a valuable lesson.
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: So you you asked about me being in auctions and what it I can't remember your exact question.
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: That's okay.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: This was great.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: I I wanted to kind of get a sense of of the drama within that room and that desire to bid, but with all of those limitations.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: That's very challenging to keep all of that in perspective.
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: It's such a wonderful experience and it's so Do you get a buzz?
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: You get a buzz, you get a high.
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: And I definitely use psychology.
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: Excellent.
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: 100%.
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: I read the room.
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: I will bid sometimes more aggressively.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: If I think that it benefits me and my client to bid more aggressively, sometimes I will not bid at all until the very end and then throw my hand up.
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: It just depends on the situation.
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: But I actually don't like as much now to be in the auction room.
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: And there's a reason for it.
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: I think it can sometimes work against me if people see me bidding.
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: I think for other dealers, they're like, ooh, we're not gonna win.
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: You know, she put her hand up.
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: She's gonna they know the mentality of how I your reputation precedes you.
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: So with dealers, I know that they might back off.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: Auction houses, I'm not always convinced that they're playing by the rules.
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: And when they see me put my hand up, they're like, Yeah, we got a little space here.
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: So I think we're gonna we're gonna have the book bid.
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: I would love to say that all auction houses are just completely honorable, but I just don't believe that's the case.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: It's just not.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: People play games, and so what I prefer to do now, which is what I'm doing for most of these auctions, is viewing the coins and then getting out of Dodge and bidding either in another country or going home and being in my jammies and bidding there.
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: So glamorous.
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: So glamorous.
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: I like that it could be both though.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: What a wonderful to do what you do best in any different environment.
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: I think that's great.
• 49:06
  unknown: Yeah.
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: Well, I want to talk about those rooms, especially from that female perspective, because I I do think that you're often one of the few women in the room.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Um, and and how do you approach that?
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: And was there ever a point where you kind of realized I don't have to prove anything anymore?
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: How did you come into your own in that way?
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: Confidence, it's it's very difficult in this business, but I think that can be said for a lot of things, and I think it it goes beyond gender sometimes.
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: It's just like being a nudge.
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: Sure, sure.
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: But I think for me personally, as a female in this business, and I'm happy to say I see a lot more women in the business now.
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: At the beginning it was very tough for me, and I will say that I used my my youthfulness, and this could I appeal to to men on a s on another level.
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: And I'm being perfectly honest here.
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: I mean, I had to do that at the beginning because it's a hobby of primarily men, and I found some dealers they completely blew me off, and I was not a little kid, I wasn't even in my twenties.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: You had two kids, you'd had a career prior.
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so it wasn't this really young, I don't know what I'm doing.
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: Dough-eyed.
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a career before that, and but it's a business where you learn everything on your own.
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: My I'm sorry, Dad, but my father didn't teach me a damn thing.
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, maybe he taught me just by like me kind of watching him.
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: And but he didn't teach me anything about coins.
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: I learned on my own.
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: I remember he threw a you know a bag of coins at me.
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, a bag of coins, because that in those times people would come dump out a bag of coins at your booth.
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: It's not like that anymore because there's now mous in place and there's now a lot of restrictions, and that's illegal, and so we abide by the rules.
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: But my father had a bag of Alexander tetradrams and drams, and he said, I need you to attribute these.
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: And I was like, What?
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: Oh gosh.
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: And he was like, figure it out.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: It's just before you could ask AI what that means.
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah! And it was absolutely frightening.
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: But he gave me Martin Price and he wrote this huge corpus.
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: It's not even a dye study because it's impossible to do a dye study of Alexander the Great coinage because there's so many different dyes.
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: And he was like, you basically look them up by the symbols and can figure out what mint it is.
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: And so I did this, I attributed like some 200 coins or something like that.
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, talk about learning from the ground up.
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: I really did.
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: And when did it change?
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: I think that it didn't change until right before I left the firm and started my own business in 2016.
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: I think I lacked a lot of confidence because the people around me were constantly telling me I was wrong or weren't taking me seriously.
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: Even though I could do it and I knew a lot.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: I don't don't have a degree in numismatics.
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: Those are rather hard to get, as I understand, considering they're not really often.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: In the in this country.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: And and the and the reason why I'm in a PhD program in Madrid is because I don't have time to be a professor and teach classes while I'm getting a PhD.
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: I have three businesses to run.
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: I have a family, so I'm doing it where I'm literally just working on my dissertation.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: But you're doing it as well for you, right?
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: It's not as if your business needs you to have this degree.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: It's just because, as you said, it's that connection between this hobby and the academia and the enjoyment of the auctions.
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: 100% just for me.
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: And because I care about collecting, it's more than just about selling coins.
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: It's more than the joy that I've been getting from selling coins.
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: It's about preserving this business and this hobby for the future.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: The business side of it too.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: Because I believe that coin dealers and auction houses are vitally important and that we need them.
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: So I'm doing it also for the business of coin dealing and what it means and why it's important.
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: So that's a nice soapbox to present.
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll step down, I'll step down.
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: No, no, stay up here.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: I really want to talk about a dramatic second life of the IDMAR, which you've already referenced, which is one of only three gold Ori appeared at Roma Numismatics and sold in 2020 for 4.2 million, which was at that time a world record price for an ancient coin.
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: And it had a stated provenance that was subsequently determined to have been falsified.
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: So the authorities seized it.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: Roma, managing director, faced criminal charges, and the coin was eventually repatriated back to Greece.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: So when you watched this story unfold, I'm intrigued to know your view of this pretty bold criminal situation.
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: I was unfortunately extremely involved in this case.
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: Oh gosh.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: I was interviewed because I was one of the uh one of the people that was offered this coin before it went to auction.
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: Was interviewed by the FBI.
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: Many interviews.
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: It was very scary, very uncomfortable.
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: So I I was really involved with it.
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: And Richard Beale, I considered him a friend of mine, and I was admittedly extremely hurt.
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: After everything happened, I continued actually to bid in his auctions because I did consider him a friend.
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: And at the very end, he wasn't a very stand-up person.
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: And I tried to see past like there must have been other reasons or whatever for him to do this.
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: I think he did major damage to the industry and and he did nothing to help the whole concept of why collectors and collecting and dealers and auction houses are important.
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: No, he in fact he really hurt it.
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: So for me, it was hurtful on so many levels.
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: And the more important thing is he didn't get in trouble because it was a looted item.
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: He got arrested because he lied about a pedigree.
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: That's the very important distinction because I'm not convinced that any of the Orei that they're real.
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: That's my personal opinion.
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: Oh, but very interesting.
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: My personal opinion.
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: And what makes you say that?
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: For what reason would Brutus have struck only three gold coins?
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: Why would he have minted them?
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: This is just my personal opinion, okay?
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: So if you are one of the owners, I actually know who owns the whole one that NAC sold.
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: And if you own this, I'm not telling you that you have a forgery.
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: I'm just saying that this is my personal opinion, Shannon Schmidt's personal opinion, that I'm not entirely convinced that they're real.
• 55:48
  Speaker 3: So I think that he he did a lot of damage.
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: Pedigrees have always been important to me since 2005 because it had to do with being able to stay in business.
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: People in the coin business, when they passed the first MOU, we actually thought our businesses were gone because we're not going to be able to bring coins into this country.
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: It's just like a sinking ship because they're always making new MOUs and they're always adding coins.
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: And up till now, because the Roman Empire was so vast, the restrictions are aren't there for normal Roman coins.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: They're just found across Europe and Central Eurasia to the point where that would be very difficult to litigate.
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: It's the same thing with like Alexander the Great.
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: He had mints all over the known Greek world.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, they traveled with him.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: You know, I think that's such a cool fact that people don't think about, but among their supply chain and other things.
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: We've got to bring the necessities to mint our own coinage as we go.
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: And honestly, it ties back to the Eidmar, because that was also probably minted from a traveling mint.
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, think about where the coin did the coin go back to Rome?
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: To Italy, I should say.
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: No.
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: No, it went to Greece.
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: Why did it go to Greece?
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: Because it was apparently found there and it was their cultural property.
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: I think that opens up a lot of other conversations about cultural property, about collecting, about pedigrees.
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's so many different tangents you can take.
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: But overall, the situation with Roma Numismatics was some auction houses might have seen that as like a victory.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: They took a victory lap because they were like, he's gone, because he was such a big player in the market.
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: And you know, auction houses are competitive.
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: But I saw it as a real loss for the industry and a real loss for collecting and um and for our business and for being able to hold your head up high and be able to say, like, this is what I do for a living and not to be ashamed.
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: Because he brought a certain amount of shame to it.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: So can you explain for the listeners how important that pedigree or provenance is?
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, it feels like at some point the provenance can actually add perhaps millions to the value of a coin.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: And can you kind of talk about why that is?
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: Well, first of all, long ago they started doing coin auctions like in the 1700s in in Britain.
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: So when like in the 1900s, um, auctions were predominantly attended by dealers.
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: Private people normally weren't going there.
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: Even like big collectors, they would have representation there.
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: And the dealers would sit around in a circle.
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: This is per my father, by the way.
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: He told me this.
• 58:27
  Speaker 3: They would sit around in a circle and they would decide, I'm gonna bid on this, you're gonna bid on this, you're gonna bid on this, you're gonna bid on this.
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: And that's illegal too, unto itself, but whatever.
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: They would buy the coins and then they would quickly get rid of those pedigrees.
• 58:40
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 58:41
  Speaker 3: They didn't want people to know what they spent.
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: They didn't want to tie the coin to the auction.
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: So that's why you have a lot of lost pedigrees, and that's why the proliferation now of companies like L5 or X Numis, it's pedigree research, finding pedigrees for your coins.
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: That's become kind of a big business now.
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: There's one side of it, the legal side of it, that says this coin has been out of the source country since before that MOU was written.
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: Very important, right.
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: But then there's the collector part of it, like this coin was owned by John Quincy Adams.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Like how cool.
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, John Quincy Adams.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: You have an amazing collection, as I understand.
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: Pedigrees are just becoming much more important nowadays.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: Are we reaching a point where the history after an ancient coin was dug up is almost as important as the history prior to in a lot of cases, yeah.
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: People say that Augustus himself was a coin collector.
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: And I'm not sure if you can really prove that, but collecting has been around with certainty for longer than the United States has been around.
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: And we have coin auctions that precede the founding of our own country.
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: That's really cool.
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: Coin collecting has been around for a very, very long time.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: And I always say we're temporary holders of these coins.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: So piecing that history back together is also extremely interesting.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: And so you see coins.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: I'm selling a coin of the art institute right now that has a pedigree going back to like 1909.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: Well, and you've invested quite heavily in the S library.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: In the library, yeah.
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: And in the auction catalogs.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, something like did I read 800 linear feet of catalogs?
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: 800, 850 linear feet.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: It's a lot.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: It's fascinating, and we'll have to do a podcast sometime with me in the loft because they're 14 foot-high ceilings.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: That would be so cool.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: It's a loft in in the West Loop of Chicago.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: Because I don't have enough room at this office.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: I have a full library here in this office of reference books.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: On ancient coins and world coins.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: At the loft where the SNS library is located, just the auction catalogs are there.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: The SNS Library is the new iteration of what was the BCD catalog collection.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: And BCD, for those that don't know, was a man named Basil Demetriati.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: He's still alive, very much so.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: And he had this wonderful library that was located in Athens, Greece.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: And he also had an amazing coin collection, too, which he sold over a series of auctions with various auction houses like Bankloy, like NAC, like Lons.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: So he had this amazing catalog library that he had assembled over like 45 years.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: And I'll give credit where credit's due.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: My client, who I curate for, he actually owns the collection, but I have become the person that oversees this collection.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: And actually, we are in a very interesting position right now where all these companies are trying to do pedigree research.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: We have all the catalogs.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: Anywhere there was an ancient coin, wherever in the world, he had the catalog.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: And what we've done is we've taken the BCD catalog collection, now the SNS library, moving forward forward.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: We've taken the SNS library and we've started to include not just ancient coins but world coins and US coins.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 3: So now I also at my home, even, I've built a library.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: This library has more real estate than the average American.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: So now we're we're in three locations.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: It's crazy.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: We're also digitizing the catalogs.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: I heard that, and I also heard a rumor that you're kind of perhaps using AI to help use and search that material.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: This is really interesting.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: A relative of mine, a young relative, cousin's child, he is really good at coding and AI and all that stuff, all the stuff that I know nothing about.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: And he's been helping us um with AI.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: And right now we have no real vision for the future other than for the library and for helping to to preserve it.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: And we've been scanning the very delicate catalogs by hand, and we're doing OCR, which means that you can, you know, change the language, it you can cut, copy, paste, stuff like that.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: You can you have access.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: It's not just like a JPEG or something like that.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 3: It's a living document all of a sudden.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: It's a living document.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: And we were working with the Newman Portal to take ancient coin reference books, not catalogs, reference books and put them up on the portal.
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: So we were working with AI, uh, sorry, IA, Internet Archives in Indiana.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: Sorry.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: No, that's so confusing.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: We were working with Internet Archives to do the scanning, and we've changed gears now.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: I've talked to Tyler and I said, listen, the reference books are very important, but we've got thousands of reference books scanned now, so that we can be anywhere.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: And if it's out of copyright, we could put up on the portal.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: And I said, we need to switch gears, stop doing the reference books, and start doing the catalogs.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: And is that is that the goal to get it out there or I mean that's the question.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: I mean, I'm I've often talked about and thought about, you know, starting a research center.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, that does feel like where you're headed in many ways.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: Not to say that I might not do a cooperation with somebody, but I think that it needs to be done because what if there's a fire?
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: What if something happens and we lose all those kettles?
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: You're you're just you're holding it for the next generation.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: Passing it on temporarily.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: Like a coin.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: Look at that.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: What a lovely exit.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: We did it.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: We did.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: We did it.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Chana.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate this.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: I've learned a lot and I've really enjoyed the conversation, and I'm sure that our listeners have too.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: Speaking of listeners, don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: Till next time, I'm Caroline Turco, and this is Worth Its Wait.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker: Worth It's Wait is brought to you by the American News Medic Association.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker: It cannot authenticate, grade, or appraise your coins, addict finds, or suspiciously shiny 1943 Copper Sents, because it is a podcast and therefore lacks opposable thumbs and a loop.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker: Any opinions expressed about monarchs, pirates, or long-deceased mint officials should not be taken personally, especially by anyone who has been dead for more than 100 years.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker: No historical figures for harm in the making of this episode, though some may have lost a little luster.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker: If you find yourself explaining the difference between type one and type two varieties, or casually mentioning the coinage act of 1792 at dinner, there's only one cure.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker: Join the ANA at money.org today.