April 6, 2024 • 51 mins
When 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:23):
of an episode.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Gold plated.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Isn't that what happens? Like if you put a bunch
of gold together, it means more carrots?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
What do they mean lately?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
They must be a newcomer to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You're wrong.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Oh man, you know what's funny is I didn't even
see that coming, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Oh see there.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, that was good, good stuff. And I almost just
said the ES word. That was good stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
You're wrong, it was mediocre.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Let's just do this for forty five minutes.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, no, let's do a real podcast episode. This is interesting.
All I could think about was heist movies.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Oh, I thought we were doing an episode on the
United States Bullion Depository, Buddy.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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
(02:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And everybody said, why, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
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
(03:48):
someone very quickly said, that doesn't sound at all tough.
It sounds like children belong here and people are roasting s'mores.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So that's always going to say.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
How about Fort Knox.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It seems like all the best fort started out as camps.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, so they said short. In nineteen thirty two, it
became officially Fort Canucks.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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
(04:29):
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,
(04:49):
it is really what you officially would call the United
States Bullion Depository.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
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
(05:15):
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
(05:36):
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 1 (05:47):
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
(06:09):
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
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
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
(07:00):
few months.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
It's impressive.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
It would have been in the movie, I think, exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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
(07:58):
hate to say it, everybody, but that's the one that
you would try to hijack if you were going to hijack.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, I mean all the way to be honest.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
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,
(08:41):
those poor guys.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
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,
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
Fort Knox.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Even if you were a sitting congress person, the chances
are you're probably not going to get a tour.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
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 1 (09:52):
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.
(10:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
That's probably what happened.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
You can't ever tell what that FDR.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
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?
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Oh? Sure, man, Yeah, I think that's a great cliffhanger.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Right, great, we'll be right back alrighty, So we promised
(11:52):
you stats and figures about Fort Knox.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
And nineteen thirties issues of Popular Mechanics.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
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
(12:18):
all force and you force them all to open it,
you got to sit around and wait for four days,
no matter what.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
That's my favorite one.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
It's pretty great, m h.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:12):
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
(13:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
They're like, what would wile E Coyota do?
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
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
(14:17):
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 1 (14:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, and you got to get one of those diaper
genies to put the diaper in, otherwise it's smell in there.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Oh man, it would smell so bad in that little building.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
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
(15:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
And of course there's heavy artillery. There are four corner
machine gun turrets essentially on the outer building, just looking down.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So I'm sorry, I was confused. Is that on the
outer building or is that part of the vault?
Speaker 2 (16:15):
I think that's outside?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Okay, I don't know. I couldn't quite tell, and I
didn't see it outside. Did you see him outside?
Speaker 2 (16:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, that's actually probably a pretty bad idea.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I mean, I've seen Wiley Cody too. Those bullets bounce.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
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
(17:06):
US MINT director from back in twenty sixteen, Philip Deal.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
For Danny or Danny.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
That's true. I don't think they gave jobs like that
to Danny in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
What the ladies don't like the Three Stages?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
We got not one, not two, but thrice emails about that,
and most of them were not happy.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Well, actually two of the three were very fun about
it and said that they love the three stooges.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
But yes, but they weren't happy.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, it's like everybody not liking Detroit or Kentucky like google.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
That, right, or google women don't like Rush the band.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Hey, hey, hey, let's just let's bail out of this
while we still have our limb.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
What year was that, because I'll bet I was at
the same concert depending I went to.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
It must have been eighty eight or eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh no, I wasn't not that one.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Okay, yeah you were.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This would have been maybe like ninety two, ninety three.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
We just missed each other.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
But you're right, Women like all sorts of things, and
men like all sorts of things.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
So to me, the only way in would be the
escape tunnel.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
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
(19:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, or.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
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
(20:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Right, because you're not going to come in here with
a presumably a freight train to steal all this gold.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Where are you going to put the tracks? You can't
do it?
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Are you going to get that gold out of there?
Speaker 1 (20:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
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
(21:26):
to brush up on your machine gunning down there, you
can do that.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Who is guarding it though, from what I understand their
treasury agents?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
The army can be called in if needed, because again
it's like right there.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, the US Mint Police Force. Yeah, which I imagine is
it's probably a pretty cool gig to have.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I don't know where they would have come up, but
I swear we've mentioned that they exist before.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
It seems familiar to me. Have we done this all before?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
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
(22:29):
fascinated with as much as anything, is the fact that
there is a lot of gold inside of four knox.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
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
(22:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:54):
as it relates to like the international gold market.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, and so I did the math this time.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I did two. Let's see if we came up with
the same figures.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
That's pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Okay, I did it differently, But let's see if we
came up with the same figure.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Well, what value did you use?
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Like, no, you go first, mister, you're wrong guy.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
So using the statutory value of gold that the US
is set, I came up with six point eight billion
dollars worth of gold.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
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?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
What did you do?
Speaker 1 (24:52):
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
(25:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
For sure, it's gotta say a lot.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
You know, did you use Are you sure you used
metric tons and not just tons?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
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
(27:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
But it's not so it doesn't hold up anymore.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Maybe you should watch it again in like three years
and it might be back on track.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Were you, well, maybe, you know, maybe it's me that's
the problem.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Well, you know, taste waxes and wains.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah, that's true. It's true.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
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
(28:14):
of that stuff, including the Chicago Way dollars coins that
flew in the Space shuttle. Is that funny?
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, that's sokka juweah.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, that's like the American bastardization. It's Chicago Way.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah. I think it's one of those things where like
the native pronunciation is Chicagoway and Americans were like saka Jowellah.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
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?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I think it's just Chicagaway. And I only learn that
from Ken Burns.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
God bless Kim America's teacher cut and you man, thank
you for setting me straight in front of a million people.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Let me see here at nineteen thirty three gold double
eagle twenty dollars coin. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah. Sure there's an aluminum dime, no penny, an aluminum
penny from nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Which I'd love to see that thing.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
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
(29:47):
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,
(30:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
I love it. That's really cool. And that was temporary.
I think. Didn't they return them right afterward?
Speaker 1 (30:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
And they found out that the guards were using it
as a place mat to eat their dehydrated foods.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
You know, they'd swapped it with something that they only
used cryon to forge, kept the original themselves.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
So should we break now before conspiracies or weight and
break before gold standard?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
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.
(31:36):
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
(31:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
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
(32:35):
currency works, how the gold standard worked, or just outright nonsense.
But it's kind of true.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:24):
kind of banding about conspiracy theories about Fort Knox gold too.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
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
(33:49):
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 1 (33:58):
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 2 (34:11):
Yeah? True, But there are some truly wackado things out there.
This Peter Better guy.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Oh is that how you're saying his name?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
What is it better? Better?
Speaker 1 (34:22):
If his name's not Peter Beeter, then I'm sad.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
I am too. Peter Beeter, the et e r. That's
what I'm going to call him, at least.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, it's like Peter with a bee. Yeah, but his
first name's Peter. It's magnificent, it's perfect.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
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
(35:24):
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.
(35:45):
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 2 (35:55):
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
(36:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
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
(36:47):
be wrong. I don't know much about kus Jansen.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
What about Ron Paul, His is a little out there.
He thinks it's all fake, right.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
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
(37:34):
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
(37:54):
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,
(38:18):
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.
(38:40):
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
(39:02):
the show at the behest of whatever. Jewish people are
running the elites.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
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,
(39:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
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.
(40:21):
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
(40:44):
kill all that stuff away, you know, the stuff that
really matters.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
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?
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
It's gold flecked and it's got like the little white
leopard like.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah caller, yeah, yeah, whatever that is.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
You look great in it. That was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
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
(41:37):
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,
(41:58):
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
(42:18):
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
(42:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
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
(43:15):
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
(43:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
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
(44:33):
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
(44:56):
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
(45:16):
gold standard.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
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
(45:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:39):
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
(47:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
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,
(48:03):
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.
(48:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
You're not.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Wampum was the real thing? You know?
Speaker 1 (48:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
She's like, now, I'm listening to the four Knox episode,
so lay.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
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
(49:53):
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
(50:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
That made me against federal law. Now though, oh, really
taking punks from the Parkland, it seems like against the law.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Yes, but the nanny state will say no and throw
you in jail. Try it, Donna.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
If you can't take the rocks, you go get thrown
in jail by the nanny state.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
You can't do it. You gotta leave those rocks.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
What else did Donna say anything else?
Speaker 2 (51:20):
No, that's it. That's from Donna H.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:23):
of an episode.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Gold plated.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Isn't that what happens? Like if you put a bunch
of gold together, it means more carrots?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
What do they mean lately?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
They must be a newcomer to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You're wrong.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Oh man, you know what's funny is I didn't even
see that coming, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Oh see there.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, that was good, good stuff. And I almost just
said the ES word. That was good stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
You're wrong, it was mediocre.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Let's just do this for forty five minutes.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, no, let's do a real podcast episode. This is interesting.
All I could think about was heist movies.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Oh, I thought we were doing an episode on the
United States Bullion Depository, Buddy.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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
(02:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And everybody said, why, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
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
(03:48):
someone very quickly said, that doesn't sound at all tough.
It sounds like children belong here and people are roasting s'mores.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So that's always going to say.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
How about Fort Knox.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It seems like all the best fort started out as camps.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, so they said short. In nineteen thirty two, it
became officially Fort Canucks.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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
(04:29):
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,
(04:49):
it is really what you officially would call the United
States Bullion Depository.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
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
(05:15):
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
(05:36):
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 1 (05:47):
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
(06:09):
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
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
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
(07:00):
few months.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
It's impressive.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
It would have been in the movie, I think, exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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
(07:58):
hate to say it, everybody, but that's the one that
you would try to hijack if you were going to hijack.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, I mean all the way to be honest.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
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,
(08:41):
those poor guys.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
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,
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
Fort Knox.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Even if you were a sitting congress person, the chances
are you're probably not going to get a tour.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
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 1 (09:52):
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.
(10:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
That's probably what happened.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
You can't ever tell what that FDR.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
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?
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Oh? Sure, man, Yeah, I think that's a great cliffhanger.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Right, great, we'll be right back alrighty, So we promised
(11:52):
you stats and figures about Fort Knox.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
And nineteen thirties issues of Popular Mechanics.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
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
(12:18):
all force and you force them all to open it,
you got to sit around and wait for four days,
no matter what.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
That's my favorite one.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
It's pretty great, m h.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:12):
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
(13:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
They're like, what would wile E Coyota do?
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
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
(14:17):
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 1 (14:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, and you got to get one of those diaper
genies to put the diaper in, otherwise it's smell in there.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Oh man, it would smell so bad in that little building.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
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
(15:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
And of course there's heavy artillery. There are four corner
machine gun turrets essentially on the outer building, just looking down.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So I'm sorry, I was confused. Is that on the
outer building or is that part of the vault?
Speaker 2 (16:15):
I think that's outside?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Okay, I don't know. I couldn't quite tell, and I
didn't see it outside. Did you see him outside?
Speaker 2 (16:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, that's actually probably a pretty bad idea.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I mean, I've seen Wiley Cody too. Those bullets bounce.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
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
(17:06):
US MINT director from back in twenty sixteen, Philip Deal.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
For Danny or Danny.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
That's true. I don't think they gave jobs like that
to Danny in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
What the ladies don't like the Three Stages?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
We got not one, not two, but thrice emails about that,
and most of them were not happy.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Well, actually two of the three were very fun about
it and said that they love the three stooges.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
But yes, but they weren't happy.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, it's like everybody not liking Detroit or Kentucky like google.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
That, right, or google women don't like Rush the band.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Hey, hey, hey, let's just let's bail out of this
while we still have our limb.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
What year was that, because I'll bet I was at
the same concert depending I went to.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
It must have been eighty eight or eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh no, I wasn't not that one.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Okay, yeah you were.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This would have been maybe like ninety two, ninety three.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
We just missed each other.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
But you're right, Women like all sorts of things, and
men like all sorts of things.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
So to me, the only way in would be the
escape tunnel.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
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
(19:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, or.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
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
(20:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Right, because you're not going to come in here with
a presumably a freight train to steal all this gold.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Where are you going to put the tracks? You can't
do it?
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Are you going to get that gold out of there?
Speaker 1 (20:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
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
(21:26):
to brush up on your machine gunning down there, you
can do that.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Who is guarding it though, from what I understand their
treasury agents?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
The army can be called in if needed, because again
it's like right there.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, the US Mint Police Force. Yeah, which I imagine is
it's probably a pretty cool gig to have.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I don't know where they would have come up, but
I swear we've mentioned that they exist before.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
It seems familiar to me. Have we done this all before?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
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
(22:29):
fascinated with as much as anything, is the fact that
there is a lot of gold inside of four knox.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
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
(22:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:54):
as it relates to like the international gold market.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, and so I did the math this time.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I did two. Let's see if we came up with
the same figures.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
That's pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Okay, I did it differently, But let's see if we
came up with the same figure.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Well, what value did you use?
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Like, no, you go first, mister, you're wrong guy.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
So using the statutory value of gold that the US
is set, I came up with six point eight billion
dollars worth of gold.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
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?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
What did you do?
Speaker 1 (24:52):
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
(25:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
For sure, it's gotta say a lot.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
You know, did you use Are you sure you used
metric tons and not just tons?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
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
(27:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
But it's not so it doesn't hold up anymore.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Maybe you should watch it again in like three years
and it might be back on track.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Were you, well, maybe, you know, maybe it's me that's
the problem.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Well, you know, taste waxes and wains.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Yeah, that's true. It's true.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
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
(28:14):
of that stuff, including the Chicago Way dollars coins that
flew in the Space shuttle. Is that funny?
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, that's sokka juweah.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, that's like the American bastardization. It's Chicago Way.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah. I think it's one of those things where like
the native pronunciation is Chicagoway and Americans were like saka Jowellah.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
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?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I think it's just Chicagaway. And I only learn that
from Ken Burns.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
God bless Kim America's teacher cut and you man, thank
you for setting me straight in front of a million people.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Let me see here at nineteen thirty three gold double
eagle twenty dollars coin. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah. Sure there's an aluminum dime, no penny, an aluminum
penny from nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Which I'd love to see that thing.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
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
(29:47):
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,
(30:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
I love it. That's really cool. And that was temporary.
I think. Didn't they return them right afterward?
Speaker 1 (30:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
And they found out that the guards were using it
as a place mat to eat their dehydrated foods.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
You know, they'd swapped it with something that they only
used cryon to forge, kept the original themselves.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
So should we break now before conspiracies or weight and
break before gold standard?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
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.
(31:36):
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
(31:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
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
(32:35):
currency works, how the gold standard worked, or just outright nonsense.
But it's kind of true.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:24):
kind of banding about conspiracy theories about Fort Knox gold too.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
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
(33:49):
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 1 (33:58):
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 2 (34:11):
Yeah? True, But there are some truly wackado things out there.
This Peter Better guy.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Oh is that how you're saying his name?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
What is it better? Better?
Speaker 1 (34:22):
If his name's not Peter Beeter, then I'm sad.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
I am too. Peter Beeter, the et e r. That's
what I'm going to call him, at least.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, it's like Peter with a bee. Yeah, but his
first name's Peter. It's magnificent, it's perfect.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
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
(35:24):
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.
(35:45):
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 2 (35:55):
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
(36:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
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
(36:47):
be wrong. I don't know much about kus Jansen.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
What about Ron Paul, His is a little out there.
He thinks it's all fake, right.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
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
(37:34):
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
(37:54):
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,
(38:18):
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.
(38:40):
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
(39:02):
the show at the behest of whatever. Jewish people are
running the elites.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
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,
(39:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
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.
(40:21):
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
(40:44):
kill all that stuff away, you know, the stuff that
really matters.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
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?
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
It's gold flecked and it's got like the little white
leopard like.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah caller, yeah, yeah, whatever that is.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
You look great in it. That was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
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
(41:37):
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,
(41:58):
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
(42:18):
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
(42:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
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
(43:15):
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
(43:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
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
(44:33):
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
(44:56):
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
(45:16):
gold standard.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
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
(45:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:39):
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
(47:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
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,
(48:03):
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.
(48:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
You're not.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Wampum was the real thing? You know?
Speaker 1 (48:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
She's like, now, I'm listening to the four Knox episode,
so lay.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
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
(49:53):
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
(50:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
That made me against federal law. Now though, oh, really
taking punks from the Parkland, it seems like against the law.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Yes, but the nanny state will say no and throw
you in jail. Try it, Donna.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
If you can't take the rocks, you go get thrown
in jail by the nanny state.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
You can't do it. You gotta leave those rocks.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
What else did Donna say anything else?
Speaker 2 (51:20):
No, that's it. That's from Donna H.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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