Stuff You Should KnowWhen Fort Knox was built in the 1930s to house America’s gold supply, it was billed as an impenetrable, impregnable, don’t-even-think-of-trying vault. But as the world has moved further away from gold, the stockpile’s lost a bit of its luster. Learn all about it in this classic episode.
Hey, everybody, it's me Josham. For this week's select I've chosen our episode on All the Golden Fort Knox from November of twenty twenty. One of the most surprising things we learned to 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 brainbuster of an episode.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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. Carrot plated gold edition.
Gold plated.
Isn't that what happens? Like if you put a bunch of gold together, it means more carrots?
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.
It's dressing is Josh is all the time lately, Josh makes really good points, and all Chuck does is pupu it by just saying, no, you're wrong. It's like, has that even happened once?
If it makes you I'm sure it's happened more than once. But if it makes you feeling better I haven't noticed, then that's what really counts, don't you think. Yeah, I guess, 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, good stuff. And I almost just said the ES word. That was good stuff.
You're wrong, it was mediocre.
Let's just do this for forty five minutes.
Yeah, no, let's do a real podcast episode. This is interesting. All I could think about was heist movies.
Oh really, I don't know what I thought about. I think I was kind of stuck in the thirties. I just thought of everything's kind of old timey and quaint, 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.
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, 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 Knox, 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 golden 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.
Yeah. In nineteen oh three, this is where it all started. The US 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 place as any I guess, okay, And they use that area. They got a few counties to kindly hand them over some land, and they use that area for training and stuff. Made it a permanent training camp in nineteen eighteen, 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.
So that's always going to say.
How about Fort Knox.
It seems like all the best fort started out as camps.
Yeah, so they said short. In nineteen thirty two, it became officially Fort Canucks.
Right, nice one. So yeah, so it started out as a legit army base. But then eventually in the thirties, which is why I've been stuck in the thirties 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.
Yeah, and the camp is still there, and some say it is there as sort of a a means of maybe intimidation maybe back up, like, hey, there's an army camp right next door. But they 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 and 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.
Yeah, oh 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 moved too. There was a lot of stockpiles of silver that we're not even going to bother with in this story because silver we're talking gold here. Yeah, And they moved a lot of it to Denver, and they very quickly said, well, the Denver Mint's a great place because it's protected from the from the Pacific Ocean by the Rocky mountains, which make that 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 spill over gold. And that's when they decided to build a Fort Knox, which in Kentucky is protected from the Atlantic Ocean by the Appalachian Mountain. So it's pretty pretty clever. Why they why they chose Fort Knox.
Yeah, So the Treasury, like you said, took control of that land in thirty six, and then in thirty seven they I mean, they started building you know there. You know, they couldn't just keep it intense even though those intimidating Appalachian Mountains were right there. They're like, we need a building here. So they built a building over just a few months.
It's impressive.
Yeah, cost about a half a million bucks. And in nineteen thirty seven they said, we're open for business, bring that gold from New York City.
They didn't. They they did it the way, exactly the way that you would think they would do it. They had a lot of 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 nights, and there was decoys and they were always protected by a number of groups from the Post Office inspectors that are licensed to carry guns. 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.
Yeah, I mean all the way to be honest.
I like, yeah, right, yes, chuck, all the way to the army, you know, which I would 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.
Yeah, and you know, I'm sure that they've someone has written a movie treatment at some point for a nineteen thirty seven train on the way to Fort Knox heist type of thing, right, and they surely would have cast those poor post office gun slingers is the likely train, those poor guys.
So we've got the gold shown 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 this is known about and I think I get the impression that the reason that it was talked about in discussed, and there were like little tidbits here there in the in the popular media 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 there that give a pretty complete picture of what you would be dealing with if you did, in fact, try to impregnate Fort Knox.
Oh, pretty sexy. So first of all, you can't just take a tour, and you can tour almost anything in this country except for Fort Knox.
Even if you were a sitting congress person, the chances are you're probably not going to get a tour.
Yeah, I mean, if ed is correct here who helped us put this together? There have only been three official tours, Is that right?
Yeah, that's what I saw. So there's there was one from FDR himself, which is pretty understandable. Sure, there was one in the seventies, which we'll talk about, which made sense, but it was a congressional delegation. And then I think in twenty seventeen, Steven Mnusan 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, but I would think they would kind of publicize that because the whole point of being a delegate to tour of Fort Knox is to basically reassure the public 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 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.
We'll get through that later with the gold standard, And of course you didn't urinate on it. Even with policy, you don't know.
You can't ever tell what 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 nineteen thirties issue of Popular Mechanics, which is kind of cool. But should we take a break first?
Oh? Sure, man, Yeah, I think that's a great cliffhanger.
Right, great, we'll be right back alrighty, So we promised you stats and figures about Fort Knox.
And nineteen thirties 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 one hundred hour time delay lock, so you got to wait. If you have them at gunpoint and you all force 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, m h.
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 zone geist kind of thing going on. And the only way, 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. Is 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, which means that they apparently studied cartoons to design Fort Knox, which I love.
They're like, what would wile E Coyota do?
Exactly?
Yeah, it is, I mean it's it's definitely worth googling a 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.
You need a baby in so you got to bring a baby. You have to bring diapers and food to last the maybe four days until the time Locke comes.
Yeah.
Of course, don't forget a gun to hold people off with. Yeah, and probably some people you don't like to send through the minefield the clear path for you.
Yeah, and you got to get one of those diaper genies to put the diaper in, otherwise it's smell in there.
Oh man, it would smell so bad in that little building.
Here's another cool thing. Well, the whole building isn't huge. I mean it's it's not small. It's ten thousand 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 prisoner or something like that. It's not huge. But the building inside the building, so the vault inside has an eighteen 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. Yeah.
So if you did somehow manage to get inside the vault, the people who whose job it is is to watch the vault would see you immediately, and they ostal service workers yeah. Yeah, they would just start, you know, lobbing dead letter off as packages at you until you got annoyed and left.
And of course there's heavy artillery. There are four corner machine gun turrets essentially on the outer building, just looking down.
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?
Okay, I don't know. I couldn't quite tell, and I didn't see it outside. Did you see him outside?
Well, I mean I saw 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 of granite room.
Yeah, that's actually probably a pretty bad idea.
I mean, I've seen Wiley Cody too. Those bullets bounce.
All over the re 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 twenty four inches, it's only twenty one inches thick. But you should probably be dissuaded by the fact that it's blast, drill and torch proof, said the US MINT director from back in twenty sixteen, Philip Deal.
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 nineteen fifty something, answering.
For Danny or Danny.
That's true. I don't think they gave jobs like that to Danny in the nineteen fifties.
Okay, maybe not in the fifties. That's fine. But I got called out for letting that stooge's comment pass, and I'm not gonna I'm not going on the grill again for you, pal.
What the ladies don't like the Three Stages?
We got not one, not two, but thrice emails about that, and most of them were not happy.
Well, actually two of the three were very fun about it and said that they love the three stooges.
But yes, but they weren't happy.
One I couldn't tell, and I wrote her back and it was like I can't tell if you're really mad. Well, and I said, but I said, I was just, uh, if you google women don't like three stooges, it's a 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 let's bail out of this while we still have our limb.
No, people can likely like. But trust me, I've been to a Rush concert and there was there's 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 eighty eight or eighty nine.
Oh no, I wasn't not that one.
Okay, yeah you were.
This would have been maybe like ninety two, ninety three.
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 EACHO.
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. We have aged out of it.
So to me, the only way in would be the escape tunnel.
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'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 those slots that for the four days.
Yeah, or.
That's an even better idea, actually, now that you mentioned it, but now 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 like 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, and then it's guarded twenty four to seven 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.
Right, because you're not going to come in here with a presumably a freight train to steal all this gold.
Where are you going to put the tracks? You can't do it?
Are you going to get that gold out of there?
I just love the fact that we're trying to you know, we're doing a podcast in twenty twenty explaining and dissuading people from trying to get into Fort Knox. I mean, it's just so like seventies to me, or thirties or fifties, you know. I love it.
The other cool thing is is that it can go off grid, 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 get those cameras down, but they say, no, no, no, we have those generators. 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 line yap to the whole thing. Like, by the way, these guys are training 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 their treasury agents?
Right, yeah.
The army can be called in if needed, because again it's like right there.
Yeah, the US Mint Police Force. Yeah, which I imagine is it's probably a pretty cool gig to have.
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, we haven't done this one, but we have talked about money and currency before. Yeah, And I feel like where 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 twenty one inch blast door and there's a door that only opens from the inside and 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 four knox.
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 twenty eight pounds apiece, just one, Yeah, just one of those things. So if you see people throwing them around in a movie or putting ten of them fifteen 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 in three quarters inches thick, and weigh twenty seven point five pounds.
Each, yeah, or four hundred troy ounces. If you know what that means. I have no idea, and I think it's what about ten twelve kilos a piece for those of you who aren't listening in the US 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 horde is that, just for bookkeeping, they assign like an arbitrary value the statutory value of gold. It's what it's called at forty two dollars and forty four cents an ounce, so that they can keep track using that dollar amount of how much gold is in Fort Knox, rather than you know, tracking it as it as it relates to like the international gold market.
Yeah, and so I did the math this time.
I did two. Let's see if we came up with the same figures.
So the supposedly there are forty six hundred metric tons of gold, which by the way, is about two point five percent 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 forty six hundred metric tons. Can use that forty two point four to four cents per ounce.
Okay, I did it differently, But let's see if we came up with the same figure.
Well, what value did you use?
Like, no, you go first, mister, you're wrong guy.
So using the statutory value of gold that the US is set, I came up with six point eight billion dollars worth of gold.
Close for mine. Close for mine. I used a different method, and this is one of the great joys of math? Is there a different approaches to the same proble?
What did you do?
I took that forty six hundred metric tons of gold and divided it by pounds twenty seven point five pounds, so I came up with the number of individual bars. Then I multiplied that number of individual bars, which is three hundred and sixty eight thousand and seven hundred and seventy three bars. Uh huh, by that sixteen thousand, eight hundred and eighty eight dollars per bar. Okay, I came up with in the neighborhood of six point twenty five six billion dollars worth of gold.
Well, first of all, there's a psychologist that's listening to this that is really yeah, looking at what that means for both of our personalities.
For sure, it's gotta say a lot.
You know, did you use Are you sure you used metric tons and not just tons?
Yeah? I did a 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.
Yeah, I was. I was just making sure because at first I didn't do metric ton, and that was different and did a short ton that is a short ton, and that came to about six closer to your number.
Oh okay, yeah, no, I 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 that I rounded it.
What I wonder what I did was I just took how many ounces or in forty six in a metric ton, multiplied that by forty six hundred, and then multiplied that by forty two forty four.
Well, I proposed that move along because I just suddenly rose. There's probably people who's like their fingertips are dug under their eyeballs. They're so they're in such agony hearing us discuss math like this.
Well, what's what's important is that the FED in New York actually has more gold in their Manhattan vault, which was in a movie six thousand tons of Gold. That would have been die Harder, Die Hard three. I believe it may die another day. I don't know, but it was a good one. That was the one with Sam Jackson.
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 again, huh, and I was like, this is way jokier than I remember from last time. Oh really, Yeah, And sadly there's a 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, love crafty and 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.
Maybe you should watch it again in like three years and it might be back on track.
Were you, well, maybe, you know, maybe it's me that's the problem.
Well, you know, taste waxes and wains.
Yeah, that's true. It's true.
There's another there's some other stuff in Fort Knox, and there has been other stuff through history in Fort Knox, because it's just it's 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 Chicago Way dollars coins that flew in the Space shuttle. Is that funny?
Yeah, that's sokka juweah.
Yeah, that's like the American bastardization. It's Chicago Way.
Oh well, maybe we should keep this in, Okay, because I've never heard anybody say that. I really thought you'd just mised pronounced it. Other people say it like that.
Yeah. I think it's one of those things where like the native pronunciation is Chicagoway and Americans were like saka Jowellah.
No, oh my god, 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 Chicagoway. Huh? Is it icagaweya?
I think it's just Chicagaway. And I only learn that from Ken Burns.
God bless Kim America's teacher cut and you man, thank you for setting me straight in front of a million people.
Let me see here at nineteen thirty three gold double eagle twenty dollars coin. That's kind of cool.
Yeah. Sure there's an aluminum dime, no penny, an aluminum penny from nineteen seventy four.
Which I'd love to see that thing.
I would too, but it just strikes me as a little sad. Sure there've 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, a Gutenberg Bible, the Magnet cart. Actually during World War Two, England's like, hey, can you hang on to this four because the Germans are really like up our butts right now? That's kind of cool, yeah, they So we held that at Fort Knox during World War Two, which is I mean, that's just fascinating to the idea that some 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 go to be held in Fort Knox during World War Two.
I love it. That's really cool. And that was temporary. I think. Didn't they return them right afterward?
Oh yeah, for sure. Apparently they dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in nineteen forty three and they're like, we need to get the Declaration of Independence out there.
And they found out that the guards were using it as a place mat to eat their dehydrated foods.
You know, they'd swapped it with something that they only used cryon to forge, kept the original themselves.
So should we break now before conspiracies or weight and break before gold standard?
We'll break now. And I'm not one hundred percent 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 brain No never, 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 a gold in Fort Knox, and that there hasn't been golden 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 plated in gold, and that the golden 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.
Yeah, so they audit Fort Knox and they count the gold allegedly supposedly, Dottie and Danny get in there with their adding machine 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.
Yeah, No, it totally is, because there's this call for which we'll talk about the gold to be used again the way originally was, which is the back our currency. If that's the if that's really the basis of your problem with the idea that the gold was secretly sold off in Fort Knox, then then yeah, you misunderstand and 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 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 It seems to be another factor in kind of banding about conspiracy theories about Fort Knox gold too.
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.
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?
Yeah? True, But there are some truly wackado things out there. This Peter Better guy.
Oh is that how you're saying his name?
What is it better? Better?
If his name's not Peter Beeter, then I'm sad.
I am too. Peter Beeter, the et e r. That's what I'm going to call him, at least.
Yeah, it's like Peter with a bee. Yeah, but his first name's Peter. It's magnificent, it's perfect.
So he has thrown a lot of conspiracies out there since the seventies, 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 you know, ascend to power basically.
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 roth Childs started out and you know, 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.
Yeah, there's this other guy. Is his name is Yan even Huis. I'm sure that's wrong. He had an alias named kus Janssen Koos 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, right 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.
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 kus Jansen.
Yeah, but the interview just seemed very level headed. He wasn't talking about robotoids, which is what Peter Peter talks about, right, literally talks about stuff like that.
Well, that's what makes it believable is the OIDs on the end. If there were just robots, it would just seem rather far fetch.
What about Ron Paul, His is a little out there. 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 goal that is there is fake and the real gold has been sold, and that the US has been doing this for a very long time for all sorts of 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 we'll 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, where like, no, that's our goal, that's the people's goal. That 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 the not too distant past, but the past, for sure, we've gone so far beyond that having any importance whatsoever. Yeah, based on the dollar value of the golden Fort Knox that it legitimately doesn't matter. But that's why I think some people are like, no, it does matter. That is our goal, that's America's goal. I've seen it referred to I think Ed said somebody referred to it as the equity of our national wealth. 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.
Right, because here's the deal, and this is where we kind of get in more to the of 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 is agreed on has value. Yeah, and that's what we've been doing forever. But 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 you can.
I mean, like think about wampum that was extensively used and I believe the Pacific Northwest by more than one tribe and nation. Wampam was They were like little 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 you may he's.
Concerned, right, But in our case, and in the case of paper money these days, it is 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 it's nice for making pretty trinkets, but 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, if you think about it, and love, and the irony is is that we're doing our best to kill all that stuff away, you know, the stuff that really matters.
Man, 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?
It's gold flecked and it's got like the little white leopard like.
Yeah caller, yeah, yeah, whatever that is.
You look great in it. That was wonderful.
No, it's just 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, But even like taking that hippie stuff out of the equation, there was a time where people said, no, gold, gold actually is valuable. People have value 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 yeah, and so it made sense that we we would say, Okay, 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 issue that can arise from pinning your currency to gold, they became apparent. For one, you're you're limited to the amount of gold that exists in the world, which is substantial. I mean, all the golden Fort Knox is only two and a half percent 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 horde, and you can mine it, and that will affect the value of not just gold, but of entire national economies in the global economy as a whole, if everybody's pinning their currency to gold.
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 and I don't eve 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 are like, I don't trust that at all, Like coins that people were kind of used to because they've been using trinkets and gets 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, and 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.
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 some time after the Civil War, I think.
So people just said, yeah, we don't like this paper current. So we came along said all right, well, what if we back it by gold and in theory all the money as a real gold value attached to it, and you can even come trade it in for gold if you want.
To, right. So that's 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 nineteen thirteen 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 golden fort Knox believe kind of ruined the world when we established the Federal Reserve, and one of the first steps that said was like, okay, we need to maintain forty percent of the value of all of our currency in circulation in gold as a country, which was a lot different from one hundred percent. That's a huge amount of money that can 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 from the gold standard.
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 thirties because of World War One 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 they all want to hang on to it.
Yeah, And so for a very long time. The only reason people maintain gold, or countries maintained gold, or the United States maintained gold, was to pay off foreign debts if need be. And then Nixon said nuts to that in nineteen seventy one, and from that moment on, the United States currency and economy was decoupled from gold and has been ever since. And you again, you can look, I'm not a wroth child robot oid. I just believe in progress, basically. And if you go back and look at the world economy, in the United States economy since nineteen seventy one, 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 that that sense of faith not just among our citizens, but also people around the world understand.
Yeah, I mean, let's let's just all keep agreeing. Let's keep that pinky squear going exactly. So why do we still have value? Why do we still have Fort Knox? And if we don't need the gold, well, I mean they're not just gonna give it away. You still got to keep it in one in a couple of places, right.
That's I mean, that's one thing I think there is a certain amount of that national pride to even among the governments. Yeah, we got 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 hords 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 it would be really foolish to release a bunch of gold onto the market for the US 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.
This turned out to be a pretty good aside from soaka juwiyah and now I'm wondering if I even pronounced wamp them correctly. Well, how humiliating, chuck.
Wampum was the real thing? You know?
Uh, if you want to know more about Fort Knox and start looking at pictures of it, you'll 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.
I'm gonna call this Wetlands follow up from Donna. Hey, guys, been listening for many years and always enjoy the shows in the banter. Today, out of 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 four 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 eighties, 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, who I have never come across anyone that ever partakes in this practice anymore. With such a huge part of my childhood summers, I'd forgotten about it until now until listening to the episode, and then I happen to walk upon some in the adjacent marshes in that moment truly delighted me. Mosquito season is over, where I live now in DC. But on next summers to do list is to cut some cat tails from the Parkland and introduce my two teen sons to that distinctive punk smell.
That made me against federal law. Now though, oh, really taking punks from the Parkland, it seems like against the law.
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.
Yes, but the nanny state will say no and throw you in jail. Try it, Donna.
Yeah, maybe, I mean where I saw the 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.
If you can't take the rocks, you go get thrown in jail by the nanny state.
You can't do it. You gotta 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, and you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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