PREVIEW: ELON MUSK: Conversation with colleague and author John Tamny re the early moments of online banking when Elon Musk and colleagues created what is now called PayPal -- and how reluctant Wall Street was about the notion that customers would trust a
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2024
⏱️ 3 minutes
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Summary
1883 Wall Street
The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage for the Crypto Revolution by John Tamny (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Money-Confusion-Illiteracy-Currencies-Revolution/dp/1958682268/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Money, Tamny argues, is a natural market phenomenon and one that asserts itself even in a world of government-issued paper. While economists and pundits hide behind charts, equations and supercilious commentary about the so-called "money supply," Tamny provides familiar examples from the real-world to expose this mysticism as modern-day phrenology.
He makes plain throughout a book that rejects nearly all conventional wisdom about money that a focus on "money supply" is the surest sign of a thought process hopelessly off course. In truth, trusted money in circulation is a natural consequence of commerce, not the instigator as economists imagine.
That a free market for money has formed in a world of government currencies is what sets the stage for private money as the eventual replacement for government mediums of exchange. Precisely because money facilitates global cooperation on the way to staggering advances in productivity, it's essential that money be trusted as a measure in the same way that the mile, degree and tablespoon are trusted today.
Although academia and policymakers misunderstand money and inflation to a frightening degree, the thinkers, innovators, and risk-takers have forged a better way. The future is here for money; and that future, Tamny explains, is blindingly bright.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is John Batcher, conversation with my colleague John Tamney about Elon Musk in the early days, PayPal. |
| 0:11.0 | This is from a conversation over John's most recent book, Money Confusion, |
| 0:17.0 | how with literacy about currencies and inflation sets the stage for |
| 0:21.1 | crypto revolution. Well, for crypto revolution. |
| 0:23.0 | Well, the crypto revolution is well launched, but we're talking about |
| 0:27.2 | Elon Musk and how it is that he found investors or support for his idea of PayPal and online banking, how that was regarded |
| 0:37.3 | as radical or risky or useless. |
| 0:42.0 | Very early on, within easy memory. Here's John Tamney to describe Musk, and what he |
| 0:47.0 | says about PayPal applies to all of Musk's opportunities. At first, he's considered visionary, then it's considered nutty, then it's |
| 0:57.0 | considered a loser, and then he's the richest man in the solar system. |
| 1:02.0 | John Tamney, the money confusion, how literacy about |
| 1:04.9 | currencies and inflation sets the stage for crypto revolution upon us? Much more of |
| 1:10.2 | this tonight. It's such a great question and no it couldn't have been banks because |
| 1:16.2 | banks as a rule can't take risks. Banks are lending out money and they are getting being paid in interest rate for it. |
| 1:27.0 | Just about every technology company ever started has failed and so banks can't touch technology. |
| 1:34.3 | And here, Elon Musk was saying, |
| 1:36.4 | we are going to move finance and lending and banking |
| 1:39.7 | and investing online. |
| 1:42.2 | At a time in the 1990s when the vast majority of exchange of bills were |
| 1:48.6 | still paid via a check dropped into an envelope and put in the mailbox with a stamp on it and sent via regular mail. |
| 1:57.6 | And so what he was doing was so outlandish that the traditional investor wouldn't come near him. So he went to venture capitalists who as a rule are going to basically invest in 98 companies that vanish or go bankrupt based on two of them coming out and |
| 2:18.2 | paying for all their losses. |
... |
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