Can gold and blockchain fix a broken monetary system? George Gilder

kitcon news special coverage of freedom fest is brought to you by i trust capital you're watching kitco news coming to you from freedom fest 2021 in rapid city south dakota i'm michelle macquarie thanks for watching and joining me now is america's top tech futurist george gilder is a writer investor and economist his 1981 book wealth and poverty was the most quoted book by ronald reagan and defined the economic revolution of his presidency george is also the co-founder of the discovery institute and the cosm conference and he is here to discuss his latest book life after google the fall of big data and the rise of the blockchain economy georgia i'm very excited to be speaking with you today well i'm excited to be here for those that don't know you let's establish your credibility as a prophetic futurist because in your previous book published in 1990 life after television the coming transformation of media and american life you said the following about personal computers the rise of the telecomputer or teleporter will utterly transform the way we do business educate our children and spend our leisure time and will imperil such large centralized top-down organizations as cable networks phone companies government bureaucracies and multinational corporations you said that in 1990 and then you beat that with a quote involving microsoft that you said in 1992. give us the quote the quote is that the computer of the future i told the microsoft conference the computer of the future will be as portable as your watch as personal as your wallet it will recognize speech it will navigate streets it will collect your news and your mail it just might not do windows it'll do doors it'll open doors to your future and that was sort of the heart of my teleporter theory and still i haven't adopted my term teleporter and i'm waiting for some company to launch this the smartphone is a telephone smartphone is indeed the telepeter and and you predicted that in 1992. so how were you able to come to that conclusion because i studied microchips my first book on technology was called microcosm and it gave the history of the microchip and i actually handed the first microchip to ronald reagan i showed it to him a 64k d ram from micron technology of idaho and i told them that this microchip was going to transform the world that it that it was a fundamental change in the history of technology that would make possible his sdi his uh you know strategic defense initiative essentially anti-missile missiles that transform the cold war so i've i've been predicting the future really based on my understanding of microchip physics which i chose to study after writing wealth and poverty wealth and poverty became a global bestseller and and so i said i've done economics i don't need to worry about economics anymore um it's technology that really matters and the technology that was most important was the microchip because it was based on new physics it was the adverse technology of quantum physics and as we said wealth and poverty quoted by reagan so the microchip was what you saw then as the technology of the future and the basis for many of your forecasts and predictions what is the basis for your forecasts now the basis of my forecast now is the internet is a broken paradigm it it was launched without a ground state of security the internet is a gigantic copying machine and that's why these constant scandals of fake news and hate speech or whatever it's the internet is a copying machine it has no ground state of facts and truths and uh and even transactions and so i think and uh at the same time there's a gigantic global scandal of money to and uh the biggest industry in the world economy today is currency trading 11 big banks dominated it and they gain lots of profits from it but uh it's it's it's 70 times all the trade and goods and services in the world seven trillion dollars a day of currency trading and and so there's a breakdown in the world monetary system there's the breakdown in the world communication system and the answer to both those global crises comes in one new technology which is almost as transformative as the microchip and is enabled by the microchip and that's the blockchain and there are lots of different ideas for blockchains but essentially they take advantage of the incredible storage power that the microchip has unleashed to distribute a transactional records across the internet and thus uh no single person or single power center can uh double spend or defraud or or change these are this is an immutable database and that is a great new invention that is going to transform the world economy so blockchain transforms the world economy and linking back to one of the themes in your book and that is money is time tokenized time link those concepts together for us in the context of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin in particular the theory of the of uh life after capitalism my book that i'm following life after google it's also a theme of life after google is that wealth is essentially knowledge uh the as thomas all said the neanderthal in his cave had all the natural resources we have today all the difference between our age and the stone age is the growth of knowledge and what's the growth of knowledge it's learning so learning curves are the most fundamental fact of capitalism growth is learning it's uh with every doubling of total sales costs dropped by 20 to 30 percent and uh that's learning but money which is the is a measuring stick and measuring sticks all have to be based on something outside the system if they're based on uh you know commodity monies really our commodities are valued in money which is valued in commodities and you get one of these circular but there's only been one money that's been based on anything outside the system and that's been gold because gold is essentially an expression of time and time is what remains scarce when everything else grows abundant and that's why money is ultimately time tokenize time explain very quickly how gold is an expression the gold gold has is the one element that hasn't changed at the time to deliver an incremental unit in a thousand years in other words a man with a pan painting gold in a stream in the california gold rush could deliver a gold just just in the same amount of time that a gigantic factory that costs millions of dollars and takes 10 mind it then takes 10 years to build can deliver gold today and other words the time to extract an incremental troy ounce of gold has not changed in perhaps a thousand years perhaps it has changed a little with advanced mining technology but still very time intensive no because uh the more gold you uh extract the more diffuse and remote are the pro loads that you have to mine and so it it's it's become harder to mine incremental units of gold in proportion as the mining effort has expanded so so gold has been the one element that's peculiarly monetary and uh and like the ounce and uh so how does that link back to the concept of blockchain revolutionizing our economy and our paradigm and our monetary system how do you take the concept of gold the concept of money is time and the concept that blockchain is the technology of the future and fit them all together well blockchain is going to establish a ground state for the internet and the global economy that is an immutable database that can underlie the development of new wealth and progress it's um and it's immutable as time they're only 24 hours in a day you can't change time it's uh and it's equally distributed to all of us uh it's the foundation for all measuring steps whether and uh and money is a measuring stick and the problem today the crisis we face in the world economy is measure as money has become a magic wand for central banks and uh that results in continuous monetary crises and the wild extravagance of the global um uh currency exchange is the world's biggest um but but what we're going to do is establish a ground state for the world economy again which which brings gold back into play as uh through of the expression of money as time is that the answer a digital currency somehow linked to gold backed by gold on the blockchain is that what you're advocating for yes it but it has to be done just right and it has to it's it's and it has to it can't be uh with a limited total issue it has to recognize the new developments in time theory which uh and time prices are uh critical to understand the the most important recent development in economics is called time prices and uh they um measure the value of anything by the number of hours you have to work in order to buy it and uh and that time price can applies through time in any country in the world in any date in history this that same measure of time applies and it obviates all inflation measures and purchasing power parities and currency trading and all these various ways that in this groundless economy we attempt to establish values and manipulate values so money printing is really akin to stealing people's time it really is that's a good well put so i want to focus then on life after google and some of the themes you touch on there because they are linked to this part of the conversation and the point you make is that google is not just a company it's a system of the world what's the premise there well google really has been a great company which has dominated our era that it moved from search engines which implied cloud computing and [Music] data warehousing and [Music] machine learning and artificial intelligence and even on with the knowledge that all this is information they're processing and our genetic codes are equally information and dna they also reach into biotech and medicine and google so the whole era today is sort of epitomized by google system of the world and but the problem is that google's system of the world has no ground state and and that's why i believe that uh the blockchain and related cryptographic discoveries um hashgraph may be an important contributor that's a different kind of blockchain and represents the roots of a new economy and a new system of the world but back to old systems and marxism because you say that google is neo-marxist explain what you mean by that the neo-marxist marx's great error was to say that um that the industrial revolution the steam engine the dark satanic mills the uh loom all these developments of his era representative kind of final thing an eschaton this is the ultimate technology we've we've discovered the secret of producing wealth in the future all focus will be on distributing wealth and google is making the same error it's in google marxism says that machine learning ai robotics uh cloud computing biotech whatever is an ultimate thing it's it's a singularity as uh google's director of technology ray kurzweil calls it a singularity and it's going to produce a machine mind that eclipses human minds and and allows us all to retire to beaches while larry page and sergey brin fly off to nearby planets with elon musk in a winner take all universe and and my view is that uh ai makes you dumb as gerund lanier says it's it's it's a symbol system and symbol systems can't think they can shuffle symbols at gigahertz speed uh but ultimately the map is not the territory and you always need an interpretant between the map and the territory and a map is a symbol system the but the real objects of the world are the territory and you need human minds to interpret the map and and human minds are as co one human mind is as complex as its connectivity as the entire global internet one human mind takes a zetabyte to map the connectome of a single human mind it takes about a zettabyte to map the connect tome of the global internet so and uh but the one human mind operates on 12 to 14 watts of power the global internet takes gigawatts of of power maybe ultimately terawatts of power so ai is not a threat to the mind is what i'm hearing enhances human brains and thus allow people are not employed because they're unproductive people are employed for their productivity ai makes people more productive and thus more employable and ai is uh is just another stage in the history of computer science it's a wonderful advance it's parallel processing that i called for back in microcosm i said the future would be in parallel processing and that's what's that's what's going on then the neumann serial processing is being replaced by massively parallel processing which von neumann also invented but that's another so many tangents and topics to go down well george one of the reasons we're able to uh provide this content to our viewers for free is the free advertising revenue model which you say is inherently flawed and unsustainable and you write of all of google's foundational principles the zero price is apparently its most benign yet it will prove to be not only its most pernicious principle but the fatal flaw that dooms google itself google youtube free advertising it's how we get so much of our content explain why it's the fatal flaw because when you think of it the ads on the internet in general aren't really ads are they they're minuses [Laughter] you don't want to see them you miss them if you can most of the time and and ads that and the whole dream of google search and ai and machine learning and all these things is to only give you ads that you want to see and that's what i predicted in life after television in 1990 that in the future you wouldn't see any ads you didn't want to see and that's because you could have micropayments and you could essentially charge for little services for views or for in other words because money could be rendered digitally through micropayments you could support all these big projects with real payments that reflect marketplace truths and and that and and that's how entrepreneurs ultimately serve serve the public and gain profits is by giving people things they want when they want them and google is sealing themselves off from their ultimate customers by chiefly serving uh these intermediary advertisers and and and now there's a kind of rebellion against the fundamental principle behind google which was that it was going to understand your wants and needs better than you do yourself so that they would be able to to target the ads in an absolutely personal way and people resent that now and so that fundamental assumption means that advertisements won't get better and so that it's it's um i think that we have to move to real markets and real payments in order to create a real future economy based on blockchains so micropayments micro subscriptions micro services and i guess we're seeing that trend because the content that's happening slowly it's happening i don't see any ads on youtube i i pay my 9.95 a month or whatever it is and and and get to look at your program where you watch kid cone use on youtube but before i let you go on the concept of data cloud storage you say that that is also nearing the end of its era based on the premise of bell's law quickly break that down the bell's law says every 10 years technology improves between a hundred and a thousand fold and it entails an entirely new architecture and i'm saying that the new architecture is emerging and it's it's based on blockchains and distributed storage and uh today i have a one of my companies that i i like called lambda labs uh produces black produces whole data centers and a container you know that the whole progress of electronics ultimately triumphs to the extent that it uh captures the genius of human beings and human beings are not all human minds aren't all converged in some data center somewhere human minds are separate and distribute it and and technology will ultimately mimic the distribution of human minds and thus magnify them and technology itself as we move into a new era like the decentralized benefits of blockchain that's right yeah that's it blockchain is the first fully decentralized data system and it's and that's what that's it's genius and the reason that decentralization succeeds is the same reason human minds and human cultures triumph through their decentralized distribution around the planet well george here's what i predict i predict you and i will be continuing this conversation at another time love to do it the second part of this interview because so much more to break down with you but thank you so much for your time and joining us on kidko news at freedom fest thank you so much george gilder really appreciate it thank you kitco news special coverage of freedom fest is brought to you by i trust capital [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Kitco NEWS

Views: 40,736

Rating: 4.9382401 out of 5

Keywords: gold, silver, finance, news, investing, investing news, finance news, financial news, economy, precious metals, gold price, silver price, gold price today, silver price forecast, gold price forecast, kitco news, michelle makori, george gilder, blockchain, futurist, technology, cryptocurrency for beginners, cryptocurrency, monetary policy

Id: 0KAb2jb-z-Q

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Usaf02]

Any investor not scooping up hbar is foolish IMO. It will be a major part of the global economic system.

[u/el_crypto_dawg]

just don't shout that out loud in an airport

[u/sorath66]

I think it'll start catching on between December - April. They have a lot of announcements in the near future from everything from micropayment systems in Australia (EFTPOS) to tokenized carbon credits coupled with electricity kw in Europe (EDF). Most of the good CBDC stuff and automaker use cases are still under wraps. Siemens sometimes like their tweets. Breadcrumbs are everywhere. It pays to be early. It's early.

[u/Local-Session]

Can you link a timestamp? Very interesting interview, and bullish on crypto, but I didn't hear anything about Hashgraph in there specically (although I was only partially listening at one point)

[u/edscag69]

I hodl some HBAR, it feels undervalued

[u/Noxage_88]

Lots of fancy words there and not enough mention of moons

[u/avi0889]

Hbar smash.

[u/AnnaKoessi]

I hodl some too, it's an interessting project. Let's see where it leads

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