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SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode on all the gold in Fort Knox from November of 2020.One of the most surprising things we learned in this episode isn't that there might not be any gold left in Fort Knox, there most likely is plenty in there, but that because of the size of our economy, it doesn't really matter at this point if it's there or not.Hope you enjoy this brain buster of an episode.
SPEAKER_13: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_02: Hey, and welcome to the podcast.I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the million-carat-plated gold edition.Gold-plated.Isn't that what happens?Like, if you put a bunch of gold together, it means more carrots?
SPEAKER_03: I think so.I'm afraid to doubt you, though, because I had a movie crusher say that all I do lately is say you're wrong to you.What do they mean lately?I know.I don't know.They must be a newcomer to the podcast.Slightly distressing.All the time lately, Josh makes really good points, and all Chuck does is poo-poo it by just saying, no, you're wrong.It's like, has that even happened once?
SPEAKER_02: If it makes you, I'm sure it's happened more than once, but if it makes you feel any better, I haven't noticed.And that's what really counts, don't you think?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I guess.
SPEAKER_02: Although there are like a million plus people listening, so I guess their opinions count as well.You're wrong.Oh, man.You know what's funny is I didn't even see that coming, Chuck.Oh, see there?Yeah, that was good stuff.And I almost just said the S word.That was good stuff.You're wrong.It was mediocre.
Let's just do this for 45 minutes.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no.Let's do a real podcast episode.This was interesting.All I could think about was heist movies.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?I don't know what I thought about.I think I was kind of stuck in the 30s.I just thought of everything as kind of old-timey and quaint.Sure.All right.Because it's kind of in a way where the story really kicks off the story of Fort Knox, in case anybody's listening and didn't check the title.Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I thought we were doing an episode on the United States bullion depository.Buddy, that is the same exact thing in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_02: But actually, they're different, too.Let's talk about this, right?So for anybody who is outside of the United States, and I would wager that a lot of you, I'd wager all the Golden Fort knocks. that a lot of you are very familiar with Fort Knox because it does seem to be kind of like this world famous place where the United States hoards its gold and it's just totally impenetrable.So don't even try.But there's also like a lot of conspiracy theories too that there's no gold in there.And we'll talk about all this and why there's gold in there too, but I feel like we should at least give like a background on Fort Knox and the ins and outs of it, don't you?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.In 1903, this is where it all started.The U.S.Army said, you know what?I think we need some training ground out here in Kentucky, in West Point, Kentucky.And everybody said, why?Yeah.I don't know.Good as places any, I guess.Okay.
And they used that area.They got a few counties to kindly hand them over some land.And they used that area for training and stuff. made it a permanent training camp in 1918, and then named it after Henry Knox, a Revolutionary War officer, as Camp Knox.And someone very quickly said, that doesn't sound at all tough.It sounds like children belong here and people are roasting s'mores.Right, that's what I was going to say.How about Fort Knox?It seems like all the best forts started out as camps.Yeah, so they said, sure.
In 1932, it became officially Fort Canucks.
SPEAKER_02: Right.Nice one.So, yeah, so it started out as a legit army base.But then eventually in the 30s, which is why I've been stuck in the 30s, because so much of the story takes place there.The United States Mint said, hey, we could use a new spot to store some gold because we got a lot of gold. And this isn't even all of it, but we need a new spot to store some gold.And they actually took possession of part of Fort Knox and built what's known as, like you said, the United States Bullion Depository there in Kentucky.And it is legitimately – Fort Knox is now not just the Army camp.Even more famously, it is really what you officially would call the United States Bullion Depository.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and the camp is still there, and some say it is – there as sort of a means of maybe intimidation, maybe backup, like, hey, there's an army camp right next door.But they, you know, also asked to borrow that name because it sounded tougher than the bullion depository.And they said, sure, you can go ahead and just call that building Fort Knox as well.And that's where we moved.Well, not all of it, but we had a lot of gold at the time, as you were saying.And it was... It was a little unnerving, I think, to have most of the gold in the country stored in Philadelphia, the mint there, and in New York because it was so close to the coast.And if some warring nation wanted to invade us and grab our gold, then they wouldn't have far to go to get it onto a boat.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, truly, which is, you know, pretty sensible, really.And I never really thought about that.But New York's not very far from water and neither is Philly.So why not?So they decided to move as much as they could.And there was silver move, too.There was a lot of stockpiles of silver that we're not even going to bother with in this story because it's silver.We're talking gold here.Yeah. And they moved a lot of it to Denver, and they very quickly said, well, Denver Mint's a great place because it's protected from the Pacific Ocean by the Rocky Mountains, which makes it much more difficult for an invading army to come in from the Pacific and steal it.
But we've run out of space, and we need some more space for all the spillover gold.And that's when they decided to build in Fort Knox, which— in Kentucky is protected from the Atlantic Ocean by the Appalachian Mountains.So it's pretty clever why they chose Fort Knox.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.So the Treasury, like you said, took control of that land in 36.And then in 37, I mean, they started building, you know, they couldn't just keep it in tents, even though those intimidating Appalachian Mountains were right there. They were like, we need a building here.So they built a building over just a few months.That's impressive.Yeah.It cost about a half a million bucks.And in 1937, they said, we're open for business.Bring that gold from New York City.
SPEAKER_02: They did, and they did it exactly the way that you would think they would do it.They had a secret location where they were loading it.They sent a bunch of trains out that were decoys, and it didn't all happen at once.It wasn't one shipment that made its way from New York and Philadelphia over to Kentucky.It would have been in the movie, I think. Exactly, yeah.But it happened like actually in many shipments over several years.But supposedly they did it like sometimes darkness of night, there were decoys.And they were always protected by a number of groups from the post office inspectors that are licensed to carry guns.Yeah.
Which would, I hate to say it, everybody, but that's the one that you would try to hijack if you were going to hijack.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, let's be honest.Like, yeah, right.Yes, Chuck.All the way to the Army, you know, which I would probably not try to hijack that one.If I were going to hijack one, which I wouldn't do, it would probably be the Postal Inspector one.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.And, you know, I'm sure that they've someone has written a movie treatment at some point for a 1937 train on the way to Fort Knox heist type of thing.Right.And they surely would have cast those poor post office gunslingers as the likely train. That's right.
SPEAKER_02: Those poor guys.So we've got the gold showing up at Fort Knox.And the thing is, is like this was like people knew about this.It wasn't done in secret.Like this was known about.And I think I get the impression that the reason that it was talked about and discussed and there were like little tidbits here or there in the popular media was to give this idea like, okay, yes, we're moving this gold, but, like, don't even try it.Like, here's just enough that you need to know to not even come anywhere near this place.And over the years, little tidbits have kind of been released here.Give a pretty complete picture of what you would be dealing with if you did, in fact, try to impregnate Fort Knox.
SPEAKER_03: Ooh.Pretty sexy. So, first of all, you can't just take a tour.I mean, you can tour almost anything in this country except for Fort Knox.
SPEAKER_02: Even if you're a sitting congressperson, the chances are you're probably not going to get a tour.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.I mean, if Ed is correct here, who helped us put this together, there have only been three official tours.Is that right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: That's what I saw.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So there was one from FDR himself, which is pretty understandable.Sure.There was one in the 70s, which we'll talk about, which made sense, but it was a congressional delegation.And then I think in 2017, Stephen Mnuchin and a delegation toured it.So there's at least three, but those are the three that we know about.There may have been more. they would kind of publicize that because the whole point of being a delegate to tour Fort Knox is to basically reassure the public there's there's a lot of gold in there don't even worry about yes the gold's there that's pretty much the reason why anybody gets a tour of Fort Knox I wonder if they let FDR in and just to say hey you might as well just urinate on this golden person because that's what you're about to do with policy that's probably what happened
SPEAKER_03: We'll get to that later with the gold standard.And, of course, he didn't urinate on it, even with policy.You don't know.You can't ever tell with that FDR.So here's a bunch of things.And this next bit is going to be just sort of a lot of the facts and figures that we know and we've gleaned over the years.Some comes from official releases.Some comes from an old 1930s issue of Popular Mechanics, which is kind of cool. But should we take a break first?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, sure, man.Yeah, I think that's a great cliffhanger.All right, great.We'll be right back.
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SPEAKER_03: All righty.So we promised you stats and figures about Fort Knox.And 1930s issues of Popular Mechanics.I know.How's this for you?The vault requires, of course, multiple people to open it up.And each person, nobody knows the entire combination.Each person knows only a part of it.And even if you got it open, there's a 100-hour time delay lock.So you got to wait.
If you have them at gunpoint and you force them all to open it, you got to sit around and wait for four days no matter what.That's my favorite one.It's pretty great.Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02: That and the fact that it's really just artificial intelligence from the future is the only one that has the entire combination in its possession.What else?Well, let's see.The vault itself is actually inside a building.So you remember in our Alcatraz episode where the cell blocks were buildings inside of the larger prison building?Yeah.That's exactly the same thing.And not coincidentally, they were built around the same time.So I think there was that kind of, you know— impenetrable building within an impenetrable building in the zeitgeist kind of thing going on.
And the only place the vault and that building are connected is on the floor.But don't even think of coming up from under the floor because the flooring is two feet thick of granite. which you are not going to get through even if you successfully dug under.And I'll just go ahead and tell you why you would not be able to successfully dig under the building from the outside.It's because you have barrier after barrier after fence after razor wire separating you from the building.There's a huge blank field around the building, so it's not very easy to kind of walk up to it. And they apparently have said that the field around the building is a minefield.Yeah.Which means that they apparently studied cartoons to design Fort Knox, which I love.
SPEAKER_03: You're like, what would Wile E. Coyote do?Exactly.Yeah, it is.I mean, it's definitely worth Googling like an aerial image of this building.It's pretty interesting.I mean, it does.It sits out in the middle of nothing. in this big flat area, and there's like a circular driveway around it.And, you know, it's made of what you think it's made of, which is granite and concrete and steel.They said that the walls are also two feet in thickness, and inside those walls are fabricated steel coils that are so closely smushed together that they say a human hand can't even get between them.
Right.So you need a baby or a child.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you need a baby.So you got to bring a baby.You have to bring diapers and food to last the baby four days until the time lock opens.Oh, yeah, of course.Don't forget a gun to hold people off with.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: And probably some people you don't like to send through the minefield to clear a path for you.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and you got to get one of those diaper genies to put the diaper in.Otherwise, it's just going to smell in there.Oh, man, it would smell so bad in that little building.Yeah. Here's another cool thing.Well, the whole building isn't huge.I mean, it's not small.It's 10,000 square feet, but it's not – I don't know.You think of Fort Knox and you think of something the size of like a maximum security prison or something like that. Um, it's not huge, but, um, the building inside the building.
So the vault inside has an 18 inch space clear on every side and they have all these mirrors everywhere.And of course now they have real cameras.I guess this was from the popular mechanics pre camera.You just use mirrors to make sure that you could see every square inch of this thing.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so if you did somehow manage to get inside the vault, the people whose job it is to watch the vault would see you immediately.Postal service workers?Yeah, they would just start, you know, lobbing dead letter office packages at you until you got annoyed and left.
SPEAKER_03: And, of course, there's heavy artillery.There are four-corner machine gun turrets, essentially, on the outer building. Just looking down on that thing.
SPEAKER_02: So I'm sorry.I was confused.Is that on the outer building or is that part of the vault?I think that's outside.No?I don't know.I couldn't quite tell.And I didn't see it outside.
SPEAKER_03: Did you see them outside?Well, I mean, I didn't see any really close-ups.Everything was kind of an aerial.And I did see what looked like corner turrets, but maybe they are inside.Okay.I don't know if I'd be shooting up machine guns inside a granite room. Yeah, that's actually probably a pretty bad idea.I mean, I've seen Wile E. Coyote, too.
SPEAKER_02: Those bullets bounce all over the place.That's right.So, you've also got a door to contend with.So, so far, you've got two feet thick everything to get through, which means that your best bet is to go through the door.Because rather than 24 inches, it's only 21 inches thick.But... You should probably be dissuaded by the fact that it's blast, drill, and torch-proof, said the U.S.Mint director from back in 2016, Philip Diehl.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and again, this is all under the banner of don't even think about it, buddy.Right.Between the – there's a corridor that encircles the vault, and then the outer wall of the building, they do have some offices.I guess that's where Dottie, the secretary, has been since 1950-something years. Answering phones.Or Danny.Or Danny.That's true.I don't think they gave jobs like that to Danny in the 1950s.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, maybe not in the 50s.That's fine.But I got called out for letting that Stooges comment pass, and I'm not going on the grill again for you, pal.What, that ladies don't like the Three Stooges?
SPEAKER_05: Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02: We got not one, not two, but thrice emails about that.
SPEAKER_03: And most of them were not happy.Well, actually, two of the three were happy. very fun about it and said that they love the Three Stooges.Yes, but they weren't happy.One I couldn't tell, and I even wrote her back, and I was like, I can't tell if you're really mad?I said, I was just, if you Google women don't like Three Stooges, it's a trope.I mean, it's a familiar trope.I wasn't like inventing some sexist thing.I was just kind of funning around with it. Yeah, it's like everybody not liking Detroit or Kentucky.
Like Google that.Right, or Google women don't like Rush, the band.Hey, hey, hey, let's just bail out of this while we still have our limbs.No, people can like what they like, but trust me, I've been to a Rush concert and there was a lot of masculinity in that room. What year was that?Because I'll bet I was at the same concert, depending.I went to, it must have been 88 or 89.Oh, no, I wasn't at that one.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.Yeah, you were.This would have been maybe like 92, 93.We just missed each other. Yeah, just by a few years.Had I just hung out at the Omni for three or four more years or had you, we would have passed each other.But you're right.Women like all sorts of things and men like all sorts of things.That's right.And Danny and Dottie can both be secretaries.
That's right.And we don't even call them secretaries anymore.Chuck, we should just stop podcasting altogether.
SPEAKER_03: We have aged out of it.So to me, the only way in would be the escape tunnel, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yes, which they thought of that.They realized that they actually put a tunnel underground that you could use to get into the depository, the actual vault, which they installed in case somebody got locked in there, which I I'm really surprised they even installed that or designed that in there.I would think like if you have people guarding it as closely as it's being guarded all the time, that if you got locked in there, they could let you out.They just give you food or something through those slots that— For the four days?Yeah.Or just have food in there.I mean, it's inconvenient. That's an even better idea, actually, now that you mention it.But no, they didn't do that.
They actually put an escape tunnel in so that you can crawl out.It's not like a pleasant walk or anything.You crawl through this tunnel and then out into the minefield, basically.But the door that you reach that lets you outside only opens from the inside.It's impossible to open from the outside, which I take to mean it doesn't have a doorknob on the outside.Right. And then it's guarded 24-7 by people who are ready to just shoot you up if you try to approach this door with your own doorknob that you brought to open it from the outside.
SPEAKER_03: Right, because you're not going to come in here with presumably a freight train to steal all this gold.
SPEAKER_02: Where are you going to put the tracks?You can't do it.How are you going to get that gold out of there? I just love the fact that we're doing a podcast in 2020 explaining and dissuading people from trying to get into Fort Knox.I mean, it's just so, like, 70s to me or 30s or 50s, you know?I love it.
SPEAKER_03: The other cool thing is that it can go off-grid.It has its own water and power.So if you, you know, in the movie version, of course, once again, I would think you would try and knock it off the line somehow.
SPEAKER_02: get those cameras down but they say no no no we have those generators yeah we can live off grid there's a gun range in the basement so if you want to brush up on your machine gunning down there you can do that no that's kind of like a little little lawn yap to the whole thing like by the way these guys are training um with guns downstairs in the basement for fun because they've got nothing else to do they're just waiting for you to come now who is guarding it though From what I understand, they're Treasury agents, right?Yeah.And the Army can be called in if needed because, again, it's like right there.Yeah, the U.S.Mint Police Force.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.Which I imagine is probably a pretty cool gig to have.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know where they would have come up, but I swear we've mentioned that they exist before.It seems familiar to me.Have we done this all before?No. No, we haven't done this one, but we have talked about money and currency before.Yeah.And I feel like that's where we're at.Don't you like that maybe we should talk about the gold itself?Because, I mean, yes, it's cool that there's a 21-inch blast door and there's a door that only opens from the inside in the escape tunnel.But I think what everybody's really fascinated with as much as anything is the fact that there is a lot of gold inside of Fort Knox.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and this will kind of hit home, too, if you've ever seen movies where you're bringing gold out of a place in a duffel bag.Those gold bars weigh almost 28 pounds apiece. Just one.Yeah, just one of those things.So if you see people throwing them around in a movie or putting 10 of them, 15 of them in a duffel bag and slinging it over their shoulder, that is not realistic at all.They're seven inches long, three and five eighths inches wide, one and three quarters inches thick and weigh 27.5 pounds each.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, or 400 troy ounces, if you know what that means.I have no idea.And I think it's, what, about 10, 12 kilos apiece, for those of you who aren't listening in the U.S.And the weird thing, I didn't realize this, but as far as the Treasury is concerned, and to me this really kind of goes to demonstrate, like, how little... the actual value of maintaining this gold hoard is, that just for bookkeeping, they assign an arbitrary value, the statutory value of gold, it's what it's called, at $42.44 an ounce, so that they can keep track using that dollar amount of how much gold is in Fort Knox, rather than tracking it as it relates to the international gold market.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and so I did the math this time.I did too.Let's see if we came up with the same figures.So supposedly there are 4,600 metric tons of gold, which, by the way, is about 2.5% of all the gold ever mined in the world in human history. That's pretty impressive.And if we're just going, I want to make sure we use the same numbers here, 4,600 metric tons and use that 42.44 cents per ounce.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I did it differently, but let's see if we came up with the same figure.
SPEAKER_03: Well, what value did you use?Oh, no, you go first, Mr. You're wrong guy.So using the statutory value of gold that the U.S.has set, I came up with $6.8 billion worth of gold.
SPEAKER_02: Close for mine.Close for mine.I used a different method.And this is one of the great joys of math is there are different approaches to the same problem.What did you do?I took that 4,600 metric tons of gold and divided it by pounds. 27.5 pounds.So I came up with the number of individual bars.Then I multiplied that number of individual bars, which is 368,773 bars by that $16,888 per bar.Okay.
I came up with in the neighborhood of $6.256 billion worth of gold.Well, first of all, there's a psychologist that's listening to this that is
SPEAKER_03: Really looking at what that means for both of our personalities.For sure.It's got to say a lot, you know?Did you use, are you sure you used metric tons and not just tons?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I did pound to metric ton conversion.You know how you can go on the internet and just say pound metric ton and like it brings up a little conversion thing for you?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was just making sure because at first I didn't do metric ton and that was different.You did a short ton?I did a short ton and that came to about six closer to your number.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.Yeah, no, and I actually rounded a little bit because I was like, E, what the heck is that when the total came up?So I went back and redid it, and I didn't feel like plugging in all the same numbers, so I rounded it a little bit.
SPEAKER_03: What I did was I just took... How many ounces are in a metric ton?Multiply that by 4,600 and then multiply that by 4,244.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I propose that we move along because I just suddenly realized there's probably people whose fingertips are dug under their eyeballs.They're in such agony hearing us discuss math like this.
SPEAKER_03: Well, what's important is that the Fed in New York actually has more gold in their Manhattan vault, which was in a movie, 6,000 tons of gold.That would have been Die Harder?Die Hard 3, I believe.
SPEAKER_02: Die Another Day?
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.But it was a good one.That was the one with Sam Jackson.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was pretty good.And by the way, I need to say something.I realized that I said Event Horizon is a good movie and holds up. I went back and saw it again and again, and I was like, this is way jokier than I remember from last time.Oh, really?Yeah, and sadly, there's a sheen or a coating of hokiness that I guess maybe they brought in somebody to punch up the script or something, and that was their contribution, but it's not.So it doesn't hold up anymore?No, and it's a great— galactic Lovecraftian horror movie in concept and in some parts, but no, it's unfortunately rather hokey.I'm a little gutted to say that, as our British friends would say.
SPEAKER_03: Maybe you should watch it again in like three years, and it might be back on track for you.I will.Maybe it's me that's the problem.Well, you know, taste waxes and wanes.Yeah, that's true.That's true, Chuck.There's some other stuff in Fort Knox, and there has been other stuff through history. in Fort Knox because it's just a great place to keep stuff if you don't want to lose it or have it stolen.They have some rare coins in there.These are coins that were not released to the public.
They may have been promotional coins or test pressings.And so there's some of that stuff, including the Sacagawea dollar coins that flew on the space shuttle.Is that funny?Yeah. Yeah, that's Sacagawea.Yeah, that's like the American bastardization.It's Sacagawea.Oh, well, maybe we should keep this in.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.Because I've never heard anybody say that.I really thought you just mispronounced it.Other people say it like that?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think it's one of those things where like the native pronunciation is Sacagawea and Americans were like Sacagawea.No.Oh, my God.
SPEAKER_02: I've got so much egg on my face.Maybe we won't keep this part in.You have to say it.You said it wrong, though.You have to be like, that's wrong.That's wrong.Okay.Thank you.So it is Sacagawea, huh?
SPEAKER_03: Is it Sacagawea?I think it's just Sacagawea.And I only learned that from Ken Burns.
SPEAKER_02: God bless Kim Burns.America's teacher.And you, man.Thank you for setting me straight in front of a million people.
SPEAKER_03: Let me see here.A 1933 gold double eagle $20 coin.That's kind of cool.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure.There's an aluminum dime.No, penny.An aluminum penny from 1974, which— I'd love to see that thing.I would, too, but it just strikes me as a little sad.Sure. There have also been, because Fort Knox is just so well known as this impregnable place, and it really is, you know, legitimately, you cannot get into it no matter how hard you try.It's actually served as the site, the storehouse for some like truly valuable stuff, like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, the Gutenberg Bible, etc. the magnet card actually during World War II England's like hey can you hang on to this for us because the Germans are really like up our butts right now that's kind of cool Yeah, so we held that at Fort Knox during World War II, which is, I mean, that's just fascinating, the idea that apparently some secret service agent traveled secretly with a bunch of these documents from Washington, D.C., and put them on a train out to Kentucky to be held in Fort Knox during World War II.
SPEAKER_03: I love it.That's really cool.And that was temporary, I think.Didn't they return them right afterward?Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, for sure.Apparently they dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in 1943, and they're like, we need to get the Declaration of Independence out there.
SPEAKER_03: And they found out that the guards were using it as a placemat to eat their dehydrated foods.
SPEAKER_02: No, they'd swapped it with something that they only used crayon to forge, kept the original themselves.
SPEAKER_03: So should we break now before conspiracies or wait and break before gold standard?
SPEAKER_02: We'll break now, and I'm not 100% sure I'm going to be able to come back from that Chicago way thing.Okay.So it might just be you and we come back from break.No, never.
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SPEAKER_02: Okay, Chuck, so one of the things, one of the favorite things Americans love to do is to suggest, quite seriously in a lot of cases, that there is no such thing as gold in Fort Knox and that there hasn't been gold in there for a very long time.And if you went there and you saw gold, well, you're a fool because the best thing, the best possible scenario is that you saw something like tungsten that was spray painted or in gold and that the gold in Fort Knox is not there and hasn't been there for a very long time.And not only that, it was sold for the most nefarious, outrageous purposes we can possibly come up with.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.So they audit Fort Knox and they count the gold.Allegedly.Supposedly.Dottie and Danny get in there with their adding machine.Yeah. And they type everything out.And I love how Ed put this.He said that all the conspiracy theories rely on, quote, some fundamental misunderstanding of how currency works, how the gold standard worked, or just outright nonsense.But it's kind of true.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, it totally is.Because there's this call for – which we'll talk about the gold to be used again the way it originally was, which is to back our currency – If that's really the basis of your problem with the idea that the gold was secretly sold off in Fort Knox, then, yeah, you misunderstand how currency works or how economies work, and you probably don't fully understand how the gold standard was not really great and that America actually bought it. blew up and the whole world blew up after we switched off of the gold standard.That's how the global economy really started to take off was when we decoupled our currency from being pinned to gold.So that's another seems to be another factor in kind of banding about conspiracy theories about Fort Knox gold, too.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.And a lot of these conspiracy theories are anti-Semitic. Yeah, there are.Believe it or not, there are some really smart people who think who may or may not believe in some of these theories and some that believe we should go back to the gold standard, including Alan Greenspan, a woman named Judy Shelton, who Trump tried to push for appointment to the Fed, to the Federal Reserve.And I'm not sure if she believes in the conspiracy theories or she just wants to go back to the gold standard.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're not.I mean, it's not hand in hand.It's just if you do think we should go back to the gold standard, it's basically impossible for your attention not to fall on Fort Knox.And then you may be like, well, is there even gold there?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, true.But there are some truly wackadoo things out there.This Peter Better guy.Oh, is that how you're saying his name?
SPEAKER_02: What is it? Better Better?Yeah, if his name's not Peter Beater, then I'm sad.I am too.Peter Beater.B-E-T-E-R.That's what I'm going to call him at least.Yeah, it's like Peter with a B. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: But his first name's Peter.It's magnificent.It's perfect.So he has thrown a lot of conspiracies out there since the 70s, including a popular one that we sold off all the gold to these global elites for next to nothing.So they could hoard that gold and then one day just destabilize the economy of the world and ascend to power, basically.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because they would have all the money and they sunk the value of the money so they could buy everything else at rock-bottom prices like they bought the gold.Apparently, this involves the Rothschilds, which automatically makes the whole thing anti-Semitic because the Rothschilds started out and are still around as far as I know as a Jewish banking family many, many centuries ago and rose to power and wealth pretty quickly and actually had a huge... role in a lot of world affairs, like were able to bail out entire nations like France after they went into debt over war.Like this family could do that.And it started a lot of conspiracy theories.So they're kind of like one of the OG conspiracy theories.And usually it was based on a combination or it was based on suspiciousness of a combination of them being Jewish and them being extraordinarily wealthy.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's this other guy.His name is Jan Nievenhuys.I'm sure that's wrong.He had an alias named Kooz Jansen, K-O-O-S.And I listened to and read some interviews with this guy.And he – did you check into him?He seems – He seems like a pretty level-headed economist that just seems to think that these audits aren't correct and there is something kinky going on.He didn't seem really out there, though.
SPEAKER_02: No, but it seems like a case of paying too much attention to details and starting to see things that aren't necessarily there.Or if you do turn up a discrepancy, assuming that it does reveal some larger plot rather than just being a mistake or an accounting error or somebody forgot to carry the one.That's my impression.I could be wrong.I don't know much about Koos Jansen.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but the interview just seemed very level-headed.He wasn't talking about robotoids, which is what Peter Beter talks about.Right.Literally talks about stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's what makes it believable is the oids on the end.If it were just robots, it would just seem rather far-fetched.What about Ron Paul?
SPEAKER_03: His is a little out there.
SPEAKER_02: He thinks it's all fake, right?So Ron Paul, I can't tell if Ron Paul is... the source of a lot of this or was an amplifier for a lot of it, but he's tapped into or is part of one of the larger kind of followings of conspiracy theories as far as Fort Knox is concerned, which is that either, like I was saying earlier, there's either no gold there, really, or the gold that is there is fake and the real gold has been sold and that the U.S.has been doing this for a very long time for all sorts of for uncertain reasons like that.And that usually these days that China's been the big recipient of cheap gold.And maybe we've been doing that because if we sell China a bunch of cheap gold, it will actually keep the dollar low and will strengthen our exports.I'm not quite sure how that works.There also seems to be a certain amount of like national pride associated with it. We're like, no, that's our goal.
That's the people's goal.It can't be sold off secretly by the government.And here's to me where it's like, even if there isn't any gold in Fort Knox at some point in, in the not too distant past, but the past for sure, we've gone so far beyond that having any importance whatsoever based on the dollar value of the golden Fort Knox that it, it legitimately doesn't matter.But that's why I think some people are like, no, it doesn't matter.That is our goal.That's America's gold.Um, I've seen it referred to.I think Ed said, somebody referred to it as the equity of our national wealth.Um,
And there seems to be like a certain amount of like American pride or patriotism in being really mad about the idea that Fort Knox doesn't have any gold anymore, that the American people were duped by, you know, whatever elites are running the show at the behest of whatever Jewish people are running the elites.
SPEAKER_03: Right.Because here's the deal, and this is where we kind of get in more to the gold standard.And we talked about this in Currency and how both of us are kind of consistently blown away that – Money, all money is, is just something that everyone has agreed on has value.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Which we've been doing forever.Yeah, since there has been little ingots and trinkets.Yes.As long as you agree, I mean, it could be a, well, it could be a stick.It has to be something that you can't just go out and forage, although you can with gold, which is a problem.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. You can.I mean, like, think about wampum.That was extensively used in, I believe, the Pacific Northwest by more than one tribe and nation.Wampum was, they were like little seashells that you could go and collect if you wanted to, and they were considered valuable currency and were for a very long time, too.So, it could conceivably be a stick as far as humanity is concerned.
SPEAKER_03: Right, but in our case, in the case of paper money these days, we've had to make it incredibly hard to recreate and counterfeit.You can also listen to our counterfeiting episode.But what really struck me kind of with that thought experiment this time is that gold really doesn't have much value either as a commodity.It's nice for making pretty trinkets, and they use it in some electronics and stuff like that.But we've also just sort of agreed that gold is valuable. And the only thing that really has true value is food, air, and water, right? If you think about it.And love.And the irony is that we're doing our best to kill all that stuff away.Oh, Chuck.
The stuff that really matters, man.
SPEAKER_02: Bravo.Bravo.I want to give you a hand to help you down from your soapbox and I'm going to put a king robe around you, okay?Okay.Is it gold flecked?It's gold flecked and it's got like the little white leopard like collar.Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Whatever that is.You look great in it.That was wonderful. No, it's just so funny.These things that we've agreed have value really don't.And the things that really truly have value are really just the things that keep people alive.Right, right.
SPEAKER_02: But even like taking that hippie stuff out of the equation, there was a time where people said, no, gold actually is valuable.People have valued gold for eons now.Like it's one of the first things humans agreed had inherent value even though it doesn't really have inherent value.Because it was shiny.Yeah. Yeah.And so it made sense that we we would say, OK, gold's really hard to lug around.And like it's you just you don't want to actually trade gold.How about we make paper that represents a certain amount of gold?And so that's kind of where we got paper currency in the world.
And that's what we've been using for a very long time.But over time, the problems, the issues that can arise from pinning your currency to gold increase. And they became apparent.For one, you're limited to the amount of gold that exists in the world, which is substantial.I mean, all the gold in Fort Knox is only 2.5% of all the gold that was ever mined.So there's a lot of gold in the world, but that's a finite amount, which is why some people are like, yeah, that's why we should pin our currency to gold.It prevents it from getting out of hand, and you can't just print however much you want.The problem is it's like you were saying, like with a stick. You can go in the forest and go get a bunch of sticks.Conceivably, you, a private company, could go mine a bunch of gold that you found.
You found a hoard and you can mine it.And that will affect the value of not just gold but of entire national economies and the global economy as a whole if everybody's pinning their currency to gold.Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and the thing is it also – like if your economy is backed only by gold, it's really tough to make adjustments to the economy as a government, which is something as things have become more complicated over the years with finance throughout the world we've relied upon.Yeah. And I don't even think we even mentioned that the reason we did this to begin with is because when we first had the idea of paper currency, people were like, nah, I don't trust that at all.Like coins that people were kind of used to because they'd been using trinkets and ingots and coins for many, many years.But when they brought out paper dollars, and part of this was understandable because private banks, and I think we talked about this in currency, especially in the South, pre-Civil War South, there were all kinds of values. for their paper currency.So none of it really meant anything.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a bank, a company, a town could print their own money.There was no federal monopoly on printing money in the United States until sometime after the Civil War, I think.
SPEAKER_03: So people just said, yeah, we don't like this paper currency thing.So we came along and said, all right, well, what if we back it by gold?And in theory, all the money has a real gold value attached to it.And you can even come trade it in for gold if you want to.
SPEAKER_02: Right.So that's how we went forward for a very long time.And then kind of slowly but surely, we started to move away from it, particularly starting in 1913, where the Federal Reserve was established, which a lot of people, especially ones who think we should go to the gold standard and people who think that we shouldn't have or that there's no gold in Fort Knox, believe kind of ruined the world when we established the Federal Reserve. And one of the first steps it said was like, okay, we need to maintain 40% of the value of all of our currency in circulation in gold as a country, which was a lot different from 100%.That's a huge amount of money that can now be printed.And more money that's out there, more things can be bought because that money can be traded for services and goods and you can employ people with it. And all of a sudden, your economy can start getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's exactly what happened.And as that became more and more evident, we started moving further and further away from the gold standard.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and like I said earlier, kind of joke that Roosevelt, they allowed him to urinate in person on the gold.He really led the charge in the 30s because of World War I and the Great Depression. And said, you know what, we really kind of need to get away from this gold standard officially.And I'm going to take a series of actions weakening that link between gold dollars being backed by gold.And you can't exchange it anymore, everyone.So don't even think about that.And not only that, you can't hoard gold.Like we basically want all the gold.And we want to hang on to it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.And so for a very long time, the only reason people maintain gold or countries maintain gold or the United States maintain gold was to to pay off foreign debts if need be.And then Nixon said nuts to that in 1971.And from that moment on, the United States currency and economy was decoupled from gold and has been ever since.And again, you can... Look, I'm not a Rothschild robotoid.I just believe in progress, basically.And if you go back and look at the world economy and the United States economy since 1971, it's made some pretty impressive gains since then.And that's... largely due to decoupling from gold and being able to print money.
Now, that said, and this is an entirely different podcast that I think we need to do sometime, there are massive problems with paper money, paper currency, what's called fiat currency, or a fiat system of currency, where by fiat, by proclamation, we say our currency is worth this amount.And that's what we do now, which is totally made up and totally in the air.But as long as people have faith in the government and the economy and the workforce, we can survive those ups and downs through that sense of faith, not just among our citizens, but also people around the world.Understand?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.I mean, let's just all keep agreeing.Let's keep that pinky swear going.
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.Paper money has value.Why do we still have Fort Knox then if we don't need the gold?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, they're not just going to give it away.You still got to keep it in a couple of places, right?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's one thing.I think there is a certain amount of that national pride, too, even among the government.We got a bunch of gold and it's in Fort Knox and it's almost like symbolic of America's wealth and strength.One thing I did see is there are like lots of other countries have lots of other gold hoards themselves.And although the gold market is basically separate, it's like its own thing that's you know, it responds and reacts to the stock exchanges and other markets, but it's not, it's not, you know, entangled with, it's its own thing.So really, if you released a bunch of gold, you're really going to mess with the gold market, but it's going to have a ripple effect through the, through the world, in the other markets in the global economy.So you, It would be really foolish to release a bunch of gold onto the market for the U.S.to sell or any country to sell its gold hoards off.
It would be a real big problem that you don't need to have.It's easier to just keep the gold in Fort Knox instead.Agreed.That's why it's still around.You're not wrong.This turned out to be pretty good, aside from Sacagawea.And now I'm wondering if I even pronounced wampum correctly. Well, how humiliating, Chuck.Wampum was the real thing, you know.If you want to know more about Fort Knox and start looking at pictures of it, you'll see what we're talking about.
And since I said you'll see what we're talking about, it's time for Listener Mail.
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to call this Wetlands follow-up from Donna.Hey, guys.Been listening for many years, and I always enjoy the shows and the banter.Today, out on my morning walk, I was listening to Wetlands, Wetlands, Wetlands, and serendipitously came upon cattails just as you brought them up.Wow.We love this stuff, these little coincidences. She's like, now I'm listening to the Fort Knox episode, so lay it on me.I'm tunneling in as we speak.It was one of those weird coincidence moments that I just had to record.I walked off the path into the grasses and took a quick cattail selfie, which I included in this email.
Lovely picture.Growing up in New Jersey in the 80s, cattails were called punks.And my dad would take the dried out plants and light them to keep away mosquitoes. That's what a punk is.Yeah, I've never heard of that.Have you heard of that?Uh-huh.Never heard of that.Back then it seemed like a normal thing to do, but having grown up and moved away from New Jersey, boo, I have never come across anyone that ever partakes in this practice anymore.It was such a huge part of my childhood summers, I'd forgotten about it until now, until listening to the episode.
And then I happened... To walk upon some in the adjacent marshes in that moment truly delighted me.Mosquito season is over where I live now in D.C., but on next summer's to-do list is to cut some cattails from the parkland and introduce my two teen sons to that distinctive punk smell. That may be against federal law now, though.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?Taking punks from the parkland, it seems like against the law.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I'll tell you what, Donna H., look into that.We don't want you to get in trouble.That's right.Or to do anything you shouldn't do.But I get the urge to want to introduce things to your children that you did back then that weren't necessarily proper. But the nanny state will say no and throw you in jail.So don't try it, Donna.Yeah, maybe.I mean, where I saw wetlands recently where I was hiking here in Arabia Mountain, you can't.Beautiful granite outcroppings, part of Stone Mountain, actually.
And you can't.My daughter wanted to take those rocks.I said, you can't take the rocks, sweetie.
SPEAKER_02: You'll get thrown in jail by the nanny state.Can't do it.Got to leave those rocks. What else did Donna say?Anything else?No, that's it.That's from Donna H. That was great, Donna.Thank you very much.Be careful with the cattails.We won't tell if you do, but we just don't want you to get in trouble.
We're no snitches.If you want to get in touch with us like Donna did, we want to hear from you.You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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