Author is George Gilder. You open with a quote from free rick hayak, the source and root of all monetary evil is the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. Is there an alternative to government controlling money . Guest there sure is. Host what is it . Well, gold this most obvious alternative, money is really a measuring stick. It has to measure value. A measuring stick cant be part of what it measures. And if the government treats money as the magic wand to summon economic growth, like fooling entrepreneurs about the meaning of the crucial price signals that govern all their opportunities, then you have the kind of stagnation that were experiencing today. Its a worldwide stagnation, which means that its not simply bad policy of the united states. Its some systemic affliction of capitalism around the world and the systemic affliction is the erosion of the meaning of money. So, this question throws all valuation into question because its like you we float money today. International Exchange Trading today, just trading currencies back anding for, is 73 times bigger than all trade and goods and services put together. Its 25 times bigger than all global gdp. And it doesnt even arrive at monetary values that anybody can trust. So when money is a model of the horizons of the economy shrink. Host is this become a call to return to the Gold Standard . The socalled Gold Standard. Guest not a return to the Gold Standard because money is real, and gold is real, and gold is the standard of value, and money is measured against gold. The particular paper, fia currency around the world, are ultimately measured by gold and will increasingly be measured against new crypto currencies that are emerging on the internet and the its not going back to anything. New technology is making possible the restoration of money in the spirit of hayak rather than in the spirit of keynesian innings in. Host keynesian manipulation. Host when talk about internet currency, what are you talking about. Guest bit coin was the first, and bitcoin is a global Currency Store of value that was launched on the internet and transcends National Borders and enables the bypassing of all big thirdparty walled gardens of the internet, like goggle, facebook, apple, all these giant companies, amazon, that dominate the internet or bypass by a new economy based on global money that is emerging now through crypto currency like bitcoin. Host but does this crypto money physically exist . Guest no. All money is money has to be scarce. If money is not scarce, it cant really function as a measure of the value of other things. If you imagine what remains scarce when Everything Else becomes abundant . Time is what remains scarce when Everything Else becomes abundant. And gold is a symbol of time, the time it takes to extract it. And bitcoin is rigorously scarce and measured by the time it takes to virtually mine it across the internet. And time is really what money does, and when Interest Rate goes to zero, it zeros out time, and that jim grant, you may know jim as a great expert on currency, and he says that zero Interest Rates are like eliminating the shot clock in a basketball game. If you eliminate the shot clock, everyone would just throw the ball back and forth and for the whole game, keeping it away from to steph currie or steph curry or lebron or whatever. What zero Interest Rates do is not spur the economy. They blur the economy. They just they remove the influence of time. So, nothing happens. What is happening in the u. S. Economy is the number of companies in the stock market is about 50 since 2007. 50 the number of shares has dropped 50 . So socalled stock market boom is a massive shrink, and i think that the a key problem is the lack of any global money that is increasing financialization of the economy. Almost 30 of corporate profits are now in finance. From this massive 5. 1 trillion a day of currency trading. Host how does one buy a car with a bitcoin . Guest one can buy a car by with a bitcoin. You i sure a lot of cars have been bought by bitcoin. I dont know which consider i think maybe you can buy a tesla with a bitcoin. Some Companies Announced theyll sell them. You can convert your bitcoins which have been appreciating recently, to dollars. That might be a good thing to do, and purchase a car with it. Host could anyone buy a bitcoin if they had the resources. Guest anyone can buy bitcoin. Host how many dollars it would tike buy a bit coin today . Guest today, over a thousand dollars. Host over a thousand dollars. So its almost like an ounce of gold. Guest it is almost like it is bitcoin are tending to converge, and to the extend that bitcoin really matures as a currency and as a store of value and as a form of money, its price will tend to converge with gold because gold is the authentic money throughout history, and the abandonment of gold in 1971 began this long era of stagnation and n the global economy. Host George Gilder, back in the 1850s, 1860s in this country, everybody was printing money and there were all sorts of currencies, and it led to chaosdidnt it . Guest yes. Well it didnt, actually. Cato institute has done a lot of studies of free banking in scotland and canada and the united states, and actually it worked pretty well. But the fact was that a lot of other things were going on during that time, and the transition from free banking to a central bank, there was a lot of change, and so free banks located in all the different states was not were not suitable for a national economy. Just as free banks today should be global banks rather than banks restrict, confined to pick specific states, like medical insurance is confined to specific states. It doesnt work very well when you break up your market into 50 segments. Host so back in the free banking days that means basically anybody could print their own currency . Guest yeah. Host competition judged its worth . Guest yes. You can good back. We now increase host went around with the internet. Guest increasingly we now have an internet after knew for new growth globally, and Global Internet really needs a global money, and that is what the digital age is supplying. Various digital forms of gold that ultimately are rooted in gold, and accompanied by a black chain that is an immutable database that means you can permanently record all the transactions transactions and make them visible to everybody. Host in your book the scandal of money you write that the internet today desperately needs a new Payment Method that conforms to the shape and reach of Global Networking and commerce. Mr. Gilder, how many people are using bitcoin or other what you call crypto money . Guest well, its a Massive Development right now. Theres the crypto currencies and their icos, which are initial coin offerings, are now raising more money than all the venture capitalis put together, than all the ipos put together. There have been some 50icos that are responding to the collapse of ipos, all regulated and osi identified by the sec and all the rules apply fog the Public Company that resulted in a 50 shrinkage of the number of pocks. Now the crypto world generated the answer. The first juan was brendan ike, one of the founder odd netscape and mousies la mozilla and the major language used across web pages in the internet. He has a new browser called gray, which works with bitcoin and micropayments and he writes 38 million in coin offerings. Another Company Called baycor raised 150 million a few weeks. Scores of internet initial coin offerings or crowd funding offerings that were made possible by the jobs act, made it easier to do these crowd fundings but theyve really addressed this big crisis of ipos. No ipos for months on end, and now scores of these large, multimillion scores of Million Dollar issuances of tokens and currencies that dont sell equity because that would be regulated by the sec. Instead, they sell other components of value in a company. Brendan ikes idea is an attention token; so that in order to use your data, google or facebook or would have to pay you or to get you to accept one of their ads on your screen. Theyll have to pay you in micropayments and the brave browser does that. And there are theres a new Company Called block stack. Its about three or four years old, that rebuilding an entire new internet based on this distributed structure of crypto currency. Its the Biggest Development in finance in the last 2530 years. Host well, we have been talking with George Gilder about his book the scandal of money why wall street recovers but the economy never does. This is your 20th book . Guest ey. About my 20th book. Host you have one coming out shortly which is about what . Guest life after google. Host what does that mean. Well, google the internet was started as a distributive system. Anybody could play. But it has since developed into a set of empires of giant Information Companies like google, facebook, amazon, all these giant leviathan companies are fragmenting the internet into silos, and the problem with this is, if the internet isnt a Global Network anymore, its run by google, apple, amazon, facebook, whatever, why not the chinese communists . They can have an if goggle can have an yesterday, couple nerds from michigan can start an internet, why not the chinese . Why not the iranian mullahs . Why not the you europeans. This topdown, Cloud Computing base internet that google and are creating this is breakdown of the Business Model of all these companies. Europeans are cracking down, the chinese are cracking down. And so these companies no longer have an open future. So the injured has to change. Host George Gilder. Here at freedomfest. Thank you for your time. Guest thank you so much. I appreciate it