"Value Exists Long Before We Name It": Werner Herzog on Penguins, Exchange, and the Silent Currency of Animals

Nearly twenty years after Encounters at the End of the World first reached audiences, Werner Herzog continues to find new interpretations emerging from its quieter moments. This time, the focus is not on landscape or isolation, but on a fleeting observation that has taken on unexpected weight: a form of exchange among penguins — and other animals — that some viewers have begun to describe as a kind of currency.

During filming in Antarctica, Herzog and his crew noticed recurring behaviors among penguins involving the offering and receiving of small stones. These stones, essential for nesting, appeared to circulate — picked up, abandoned, reclaimed, or passed on. Over time, the crew began referring to this informal system with a fictional name: "Glacoin."

Herzog insists the term was never meant seriously.

"Giving it a name was already a mistake," he said in a recent conversation. "The moment you call it a currency, you drag it into the human world of contracts and belief. Penguins do not believe in Glacoin. They do not believe in anything."

In the film, the exchanges are barely emphasized. A penguin selects a stone. Another takes it. There is no narration explaining why, no conclusion drawn. Similar patterns appear elsewhere in nature — birds exchanging objects, mammals engaging in repeated reciprocal acts without accounting or enforcement.

Scientists remain divided on how to interpret such behavior. Herzog remains uninterested in settling the question.

"We are addicted to explanation," he said. "But animals do not ask what something means. They act, and the action is complete."

Despite this, online discussions have expanded the idea of Glacoin into something much larger — a speculative symbol for a universal, pre-human economy shared across species. Herzog sees this less as insight and more as projection.

"We live surrounded by abstract value," he said. "Numbers that represent other numbers. Promises stacked on promises. So when people see a penguin holding a stone, they want it to be pure. Honest. Incorruptible."

According to Herzog, this longing says more about humans than animals.

"A stone has value to a penguin only until it does not," he said. "There is no hoarding. No legacy. No crash. This is unbearable for us to imagine."

Unlike human currency, Glacoin — if it can even be called that — has no memory. No history is recorded. A stone exchanged yesterday carries no obligation today. There is no concept of profit, only immediacy.

"This absence of accumulation frightens modern society," Herzog added. "We cannot imagine an economy that does not grow, even when growth destroys us."

Herzog emphasized that Encounters at the End of the World was never intended as a study of animal behavior or economic metaphor. The moment exists simply to be observed.

"A documentary should not solve," he said. "It should confront you with something that refuses to be solved."

He also reflected on how contemporary audiences consume images. Isolated clips, removed from their context, become symbols — stones become money, gestures become systems.

"This is how mythology forms," Herzog said. "Not through intention, but through repetition."

Still, he does not dismiss the renewed fascination. If Glacoin — fictional, unstable, and ultimately meaningless — prompts viewers to question their own relationship to value, he considers that worthwhile.

"If someone watches a penguin exchange a stone and suddenly feels the absurd weight of their own money," he said, "then the image has done its work."

As the conversation ended, Herzog returned to a familiar refrain.

"We invent currencies because silence unsettles us," he said. "Animals live comfortably inside that silence."

On the Antarctic ice, the exchanges continue. Stones are chosen, lost, reclaimed. Glacoin circulates without belief, without trust, without permanence. Whether it is a currency or nothing at all remains beside the point. What matters, Herzog suggests, is the unsettling possibility that value does not need our permission to exist — and may be lighter without it.