November 5, 2020 • 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. 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.
(00:21):
Carrot plated Gold Edition gold plated didn't know what happens?
Like if you put a bunch of gold together, it
means more carrots, I think. So I'm afraid to doubt you, though,
because I had a movie crushers say that. I'm all
I do lately is say you're wrong? Do you What
(00:41):
do they mean lately? I know, I don't know. He
must be a newcomer to the podcast. Slightly distressing, says,
Josh's is all the time lately. Josh makes really good points,
and all Chuck does his poopa it by just saying no,
you're wrong. It's like, does that even happen once? If
it may, I'm sure it's happened more than once. But
(01:01):
if it makes you feeling better, I haven't noticed, and
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. Oh, man, you
know it's funny, is I didn't even see that coming chuck. Yeah,
that was good, good stuff. And I almost just said
the s wort, that was good stuff. You're wrong, it
(01:25):
was mediocre. Let's just do this Fortes. Yeah, no, let's
do a real podcast episode. This, uh, this is interesting.
All I could think about was heist movies. Oh really,
I don't know what I thought about. I think I
was kind of stuck in the thirties. I just thought
of everything is kind of old timey and quaint because
(01:48):
it's kind of in a way where the story really
kicks off the story of Fort Knox. In case anybody's
listening and didn't check the title, Oh, I thought we
were doing an episode on the United States Bullion Depository, Buddy.
That is the same exact thing in a lot of ways.
But actually they're different too. Let's talk about this, right. So,
(02:09):
But for anybody who is outside of the United States,
and I would wager that a lot of you, I'd
wager all the Golden Fort Knox that a lot of
you are very familiar with Fort Knox, because it does
seem to be kind of like this world famous place
where the United States hoards its gold and it's just
totally impenetrable, so don't even try. Um. But there's also
(02:31):
like a lot of conspiracy theories too that there's no
gold in there, and we'll talk about all this and
why there's golden there too, But I feel like we
should at least give like a background on Fort Knox
and the ins and outs of it, don't you. Yeah.
In nineteen o three, this is where it all started. Um,
the U. S Army said, you know what, I think
we need some training ground out here in Kentucky, in
(02:52):
West Point, Kentucky. And everybody said, why, Yeah, I don't
know good at places any I guess, and use that
area they got, Um, 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,
(03:16):
a Revolutionary War officer, as Camp Knox. And someone very
quickly said, that doesn't sound at all tough. It sounds
like children belong here and people roasting smores about Fort Knox.
It sounds like all the best forts started out as camps. Yeah,
So they said Shure in Ny two, it became officially
(03:37):
Fort Canucks right, nice one. Um. So yeah, so it
started out as a legit army base. Um. 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. Um, the United States Mint said, hey, we
could use a new spot to store some gold, because
we got a lot of gold. I this isn't even
(04:00):
all of it, but we need a new spot to
store some gold. And they actually took possession of part
of Fort Knox um and built what's known as, like
you said, the United States bully On Depository. Um, they're
in Kentucky and it is legitimately Fort Knox is now
not just the army camp. Even more famously, it is
(04:22):
really what you officially would call the United States Bullyon Depository. Yeah.
And the camp is still there, and some say it
is Um there is sort of a means of maybe
intimidation maybe back up, like hey, there's an army camp
right next door. But they you know, also asked to
borrow that name because it sounded tougher than the Bullion Depository,
(04:45):
and they said, sure, you can go ahead and just
call that building Fort Knox as well, and that's where
we moved um, well, not all of it, but we
had a lot of gold at the time, as you
were saying, and it was, um it was a little unnerving,
I think, to have most of the gold and the
country stored in Philadelphia, the ment there and in New
(05:07):
York because it was so close to the coast, and
if some warring nation wanted to invade us and grab
our gold, then they wouldn't have far to go to
get it onto a boat. Yeah, truly, which is you know,
pretty sensible, really, and I never really thought about that.
But New York is not very far from water, and
neither as Philly, so why not. So they decided to
(05:29):
move um as much as they could. And there was
silver moved too. There's a lot of stockpiles of silver
that we're not even gonna bother within this story because
silver we're talking gold here, and they moved a lot
of it to Denver, and they very quickly said, well,
the Denver met's a great place because it's protected from
the from the Pacific Ocean by the rocky mountains, which
would make that makes it much more difficult for an
(05:52):
invading army. To come in from the Pacific and steal it.
But we're we've run out of space and we need
some some more space for all the spillover gold. And
that's when they decided to build a Fort Knox, which
in Kentucky is protected from the Atlantic Ocean by the
Appalachian Mountains. So it's pretty pretty clever. Why they why
they chose Fort Knox. Yeah. So the Treasury, like you said,
(06:14):
took control of that land in thirty six and then
in thirty seven, and 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 um just a few months. Cost about
it impressive, Yeah, UM cost about a half a million bucks.
(06:36):
In the nine seven they said we're open for business, Um,
bring that gold from New York City. They did, and
they they did it the way, exactly the way that
you would think they would do it. They had um
a lot of um. They had a secret location where
they were loading it. They sent a bunch of trains
out um that were decoys, UM. And it didn't all
(06:58):
happen at once. It wasn't one ship mint that made
its way from New York and Philadelphia over to U Kentucky.
It would have been in the movie, I think exactly. Yeah,
But um it happened like actually in in many shipments
over several years. But supposedly they did it like sometimes
darkness of nights and there was decoys, um. And they
(07:18):
were always protected by a number of groups from the
post Office um uh, inspectors that are licensed to carry guns.
Which would I hate to say it, everybody, but that's
the one that you would try to hijack if you
were going to hijack like yeah right, um yes, chuck
(07:40):
all the way to the army, you know, which I
would I would probably not try to hijack that one.
If I were going to hijack one, which I wouldn't do,
it would probably be the postal inspector one. Yeah. And
you know, I'm sure that they've someone has written a
movie treatment at some point for a nine seven try
(08:00):
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 the likely train that's poor guys?
Um So we've got the gold shown up at Fort Knox.
And the thing is is like this was like people
(08:21):
knew about this. It wasn't done in secret, Like this
was this is known about UM And I think I
get the impression that the reason that it was talked
about and discussed, and they were like little tidbits here
there in the in the um, in the popular media,
um to give this idea like Okay, yes we're moving
this gold, but like, don't even try it, Like here's
just enough that you need to know to not even
(08:43):
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 uh impregnate
for Knox. Oh pretty sexy. So uh, first of all,
(09:04):
you can't just take a tour. I mean you can
tour almost anything in this country except for Fort Knox.
Even if you're sitting congress person, the chances are you're
probably not going to get a tour. Yeah, I mean,
if ed is correct here who helped us put this together,
there have only been three official tours, Is that right? Yeah,
(09:24):
that's what I saw. So there's there was one from
FDR himself, which is pretty understandable. UM. There was one
in the seventies, which we'll talk about, UM, which made sense,
but it was a congressional delegation. And then I think
in two thousands seventeen, Stephen Minusian and a delegation toured it.
So there's at least three, but those are the three
(09:47):
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 Fort
Knox is to basically reassure the public there's there's a
lot of golden there. Don't even more about it. Yes,
the gold's there. That's pretty much the reason why anybody
gets a tour of Fort Knox. I wonder if they
let FDR in just to say, hey, you might as
(10:09):
well just urinate on this golden person, because that's what
you're about to do with policy. That's that's probably what happened.
We'll get to that later with the gold standard. Uh.
And of course you didn't urinate on it. Even with policy,
you don't know. You can't ever tell what that FDR.
So here's a bunch of things, and this this next
(10:29):
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. Uh, but should we take
a break first? Oh? Sure, man, Yeah, I think that's
(10:50):
a great cliffhanger. All right, great, we'll be right back. Alrighty,
(11:23):
So we promised you stats and figures about Fort Knox
and issues of Popular Mechanics. I know, how's this for you?
The vault requires, of course, multiple people to open it up,
and each person nobody knows the entire combination. Each person
it knows only a part of it. And even if
you got it open, there's a one d hour time
(11:46):
delay locks, so you gotta wait. If you have them
at gunpoint and you all force and you force them
all to open it, you gotta sit around and wait
for four days, no matter what. That's my favorite one.
It's pretty great. Mm hmm. That in the fact that
it's really just artificial intelligence from the future is the
only one that has the entire combination in its possession.
(12:06):
What else, Um, well, let's see, they're the the vault
itself is actually inside a building. So you remember in
our Alcatraz episode where the cell Blox where buildings inside
of the larger prison building. That's exactly the same thing,
and not coincidentally they're built around the same time. UM,
So I think there was that kind of you know,
(12:28):
impenetrable building within an impenetrable building in the Zeitgeist kind
of thing going on. Um. 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, um, the flooring is two
ft thick of granite um, which you are not going
to get through even if you successfully dug under. And
(12:51):
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 I are separating you from the building.
There's a huge blank field around the building, so it's
not very easy to kind of walk up to it.
And they apparently have said that the field around the
(13:14):
building is a mine field, which means that they apparently
studied cartoons to design Fort Knock, which I love. You're
like what would while e coyote do exactly? Um, yeah,
it is, I mean it's it's it's definitely worth googling
a uh like an aerial image of this building. It's
(13:34):
it's pretty interesting. I mean it it does. It sits
out in the middle of nothing, uh, in this big
flat area, and there's like a circular driveway around it.
And you know, it's made of what you think it's
made of, which is granite and concrete and steel. They
said that the walls are also two feet in thickness,
(13:56):
and inside those walls are fabricated steel hills that are
so closely smushed together that they say a human hand
can't even get between them. Right. Uh, So you need
a baby or a child. You need a baby hand.
So you got to bring a baby. You have to
bring diapers and food to last the baby four days
(14:16):
until the time lock. Yeah. Of course, don't forget a
gun to hold people off with. Ye and probably some
people you don't like to send through the minefield the
clear path for you. Yeah, and you've got to get
one of those diaper genies to put the diaper in,
otherwise it's gonna smell in there. Oh man, it would
smell so bad in that little building. Uh here's another
cool thing. Well, the whole the whole building isn't huge.
(14:37):
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, um, something the size of
like a maximum security prison or something like that. Um,
it's not huge. But um the building inside the building,
so the vault inside has an eighteen inch space clear
(14:58):
on every side and have all these mirrors everywhere. And
of course now they have real cameras. I guess this
was from the popular mechanics pre camera. You just use
mirrors to make sure that you could see every square
inch of this thing. Yeah. So if you did somehow
manage to get inside the vault, the people who whose
job it is is to watch the vault would see
(15:20):
you immediately and they post yeah yeah. They would just start,
you know, lobbying dead letter office packages at you until
you got annoyed and left. And of course there's heavy artillery.
There are um four corner machine gun turrets essentially on
the outer building. Looking so, I'm sorry, I was confused.
(15:44):
Is that on the outer building or is that part
of the vault. I think that's outside. Okay, I don't know.
I couldn't quite tell. I didn't and I didn't see
it outside. Did you see him outside? Well, I mean
I saw, I mean I didn't see any really close ups.
Everything was kind of an area all and I did
see what looked like corner turrets, but maybe they are inside. Okay.
(16:05):
I don't know if I'd be shooting up machine guns
inside a granite room. Yeah, that's actually probably a pretty
bad idea. I I mean, I've seen wildly condy too.
Those bullets bounced all over the place, that's right. Um,
So you've also got a door to contend with. So
so so far, you've got two ft thick everything to
get through. Um, which means that your best bet is
(16:26):
to go through the door because rather than twenty four inches,
it's only twenty one inches thick. But you should probably
be dissuaded by the fact that it's blast, drill and
torch proof, said the US Mint director from back in
two thousand and sixteen, Philip Deal. Yeah, and again this
is all under the banner of don't even think about it, buddy. Right, Um,
(16:47):
between the uh, 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 fifties something, or Danny or Danny,
that's true. I don't think they gave jobs like that
to Danny in the nineteen fifties. Okay, maybe not in
the fifties. That's fine. But I got called out for
(17:09):
letting that Stooges comment pass, and I'm not gonna I'm
not going on the grill again for you, pal what
that ladies don't like the Three Stooges. We got not one,
not two, but thrice emails about that, and most of
them were not happy. Well, actually two of the three
were very fun about it and said that they love
the Three Stooges. But yes, but they weren't happy. One
(17:30):
I couldn't tell. And I even wrote her back and
I was like, I can't tell if you're really mad. Well,
and I said, but I said, I was just 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
funding around with it. Yeah, it's like everybody not liking
(17:51):
Detroit or Kentucky like Google that right, or Google women
don't like Rush the band. Hey, hey, hey, let's just
let's bail out of this while we still have our limb. No,
people can likelyly like. But trust me, have been to
a Rush concert and there was there was a lot
of masculinity in that room. What year was that, because
I'll bet I was at the same concert depending I
(18:14):
went to it must have been eight or eighty nine. No, No,
I wasn't not that one. This would have been It
would be like, m we just missed each other. Yeah,
just by a few years. Had I just hung out
at the Omni for three or four more years or
had you, we would have passed each But you're right, women,
(18:35):
like all sorts of things have been like all sorts
of things, that's right. And Danny and Dottie can both
be secretary, that's right. And we don't even call him
secretaries anymore, Chuck, we should just stop podcasting all together.
We have aged out of it. So to me, the
only way in would be, uh, the escape tunnel, yes,
(18:56):
which they thought of that they realized that they actually
put a tunnel underground that you could use to get
into the UM, the depository, the actual vault UM, which
they installed in case somebody got locked in there, which
I'm really surprised they even installed that um or design
that in there. I would think like, if you have
(19:16):
people guarding it as closely as it's being guarded all
the time, that if you got locked in there, they
could let you out and just give you food or
something through those those slots that for the four days, yeah,
or just in the Yeah, that's an even better idea. Actually,
now that now that you mentioned it, but now they
didn't do that. They actually put an escape tunnel in
(19:38):
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 UM only opens
from the inside. It's impossible to open from the outside,
which I take to mean it doesn't have a door
knob on the outside, and then UM that's it guarded
(20:01):
by people who are ready to just shoot you up.
If you try to approach this door with your own
door knob that you brought to open it from the outside, right,
because you're not gonna come in here with a presumably
a freight train to steal all this gold. Where are
you gonna put the tracks? You can't do it. Are
you gonna get that gold out of there? I just
(20:22):
love the fact that we're trying to you know, we're
doing a podcast in explaining in dissuading people from trying
to get into Fort Knox. I mean, it's just so
like seventies to me, your thirties or you know. The
other cool thing is is that it can go off grid,
has its own water and power. So if you you know,
(20:44):
in the movie version, of course, once again, I would
think you would try and knock it off the line somehow,
get those cameras down, but they say, no, no, no,
we have those generators. We can live off grid. There's
a gun range in the basement, so if you want
to brush up on your machine gun down there, you
can do that. No, that's kind of like a little
little lan yacht to the whole thing. Like, by the way,
(21:07):
these guys are training um with guns downstairs in the
basement for fun because they've got nothing else to do.
They're just waiting for you to come who is guarding
it though, Um, from what I understand, their treasury agents
right and the army um can be called in if needed,
because again it's like right there, Yeah, the U S.
Met Police Force, Yeah, which I imagine is a it's
(21:29):
probably a pretty cool gig to have. I don't know
where they would have come up, but I swear we've
mentioned that they exist before. It seems familiar to me.
Have we done this all before? No, we haven't done
this one, but we have talked about money and currency before, um,
And I feel like that's where that's where we're at.
Don't you like that that maybe we should talk about
(21:50):
the goal itself, because I mean, yes, it's cool that
there's a twenty one in blast door and there's a
door that only opens from the inside and these ape tunnel.
But I think what everybody's really fascinated with as much
as anything is the fact that there is a lot
of gold inside of four knocks. Yeah. And this will
um kind of hit home too. If you've ever seen
(22:12):
movies where you're bringing gold out of a place in
a duffel bag, those gold bars weigh almost twenty eight
pounds apiece, just one, yeah, just one of those things.
So if you see people throwing them around in a
movie or putting ten of them fifteen of them in
a duffel bag and slinging it over their shoulder, that
is not realistic at all. They're seven inches long, three
(22:34):
and five eights inches wide, one in three quarters inches thick.
And wait, twenty seven point five pounds each, yeah, or
four hundred troy ounces. If you know what that means.
I have no idea. Um, 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.
(22:54):
I didn't realize this, but as far as the Treasury
is concerned, and to me, this really kind of goes
to men straight, like how little the actual value of
maintaining this gold horde is that just for bookkeeping, they
they assign like an arbitrary value, the statutory value of gold.
It's what it's called at forty two dollars and forty
(23:16):
four cents and ounce, so that they can keep track
using that dollar amount of how much gold is in
uh Fort Knox, rather than you know, tracking it as
it as it relates to, like the international gold market. Yeah,
and so I did the math this time. I did too.
Let's see if we came up with the same thing.
So the supposedly there are forty metric tons of gold,
(23:39):
which by the way, is about two point five percent
of all the gold ever mind in the world in
human history. That's pretty impressive. And if we're just going
I'm gonna make sure we use the same numbers here
for metric tons, can use that forty two point four
four since per ounce. Okay, I did it differently, But
let's see if we came up with the same figure. Well,
(24:00):
what what what value did you use? Like? Oh, no,
you go first, Mr Jear, wrong guy. So using the
statutory value of gold that the US is set, I
came up with six point eight billion dollars worth of gold.
Close for mine. Close for mine. I used a different method.
And this is one of the great joys of math
(24:21):
is there are different approaches to the same problem. What
did you do? UM? I took that forty s hundred
metric tons of gold and UM divided it by pounds
seven point five pounds. So I came up with the
number of individual bars that I multiplied that number of
individual bars, which is three sixty eight thousand and seven
(24:42):
hundred and seventy three bars. By that sixteen thousand, eight
hundred and eighty eight dollars per bar I came up
with in the neighborhood of six point to five six
billion dollars worth of gold. Well, first of all, there's
a psychologist that's listening to this, that is really yeah,
looking at what that means for both of our personalities.
(25:04):
For sure, I say a lot. You know, did you
use Are you sure you use metric tons and not
just tons? Yeah? I I did um pound to metric
ton conversion. You know how you can go on the
internet and just say pound metric ton and like it
brings up a little conversion thing for you. Yeah, I
was just I was just making sure because at first
I didn't do metric ton and that was different. And
(25:26):
did a short time that is short ton, and that
came to about six closer to your number. 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 round. What I wonder. What I did was I
just took how many ounces or in forty six in
(25:50):
a ton in a metric ton, multiplied that by and
then multiplied that by two. Right, Well, I proposed that
move along because I just suddenly rose. There's probably people
who's like their fingertips of Doug under their eyeballs. They're
so they're in such agony hearing us discuss math like this. Well,
what's what's important is that the Fed in New York
(26:13):
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 have die another day. I don't know, but it
was a good one. That was the one with Sam Jackson. Yeah,
that was pretty good. Um. And by the way, I
need to say something. I realized that I said, Event
(26:35):
Horizon is a good movie and holds up. I went
back and saw it again again, and I was like,
this is way jokier than I remember from last time. Yeah,
and sadly there's a there's a sheen or a coating
of hokey nous that I guess maybe they brought in
somebody to punch up the script or something, and that
(26:56):
was their contribution, but it's not so it doesn't hold
up anymore. No, And it's a great galactic love crafty
and horror movie and concept and in some parts, but no,
it's unfortunately rather hokey. I'm I'm a little gutted to
say that. As our British friends would say, maybe you
should watch it again in like three years and it
might be back on truck for you. Well maybe, you know,
(27:18):
maybe it's me that's the problem. Well, you know, taste
waxes and waynes. Yeah, that's true. Uh, 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
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
(27:39):
released to the public. They may have been promotional coins
or test pressings. Um. And so there's some of that stuff,
including uh, the Chicago Way dollars coins that flew on
the Space Shuttle. Is that funny? Yeah, that's soccer juwiyah. Yeah,
that's like the American bastardization. It's Chicago Way. Oh, well,
(28:01):
maybe we should keep this in okay, because I've never
heard anybody say that. I really thought you'd just pronounced
that other people say it like that. Yeah. I think
it's one of those things where like the native pronunciation
is Chicago Way, and Americans were like saka jaweeah. No,
oh my god, my, I've got so much egg on
my face. Maybe we won't keep this part in. You
(28:23):
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 Chicago Way? Huh? Is it Chicago? I
think it's just Chicago Way. And I only learned that
from Ken Burns. God bless Kimmer and you man, Thank
you for setting me straight in front of a million people. Uh.
(28:45):
Let me see here in nineteen thirty three gold double
eagle twenty dollar coin. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Sure,
there's an aluminum dime no penny, an aluminum penny from
four which I'd love to see that thing. I would too,
but it just strikes me as a little sad. Sure, um,
the the they're there have also been because Fort Knox
(29:06):
is just so well known as this I pregnable place
and it really is, you know, legitimately you cannot get
into it no matter how hard you try. Um. It's
actually served as the site the storehouse for some like
truly valuable stuff, um, like the Declaration of Independence, the
Bill of Rights, um, the Gettysburg Address, a Guttenberg Bible, um. Uh,
(29:28):
the Magnet Card. Actually during World War two, England's like, hey,
can you hang onto this force because the Germans are
really like up our butts right now? Yeah, so they
so we held that at Fort Knox during World War two. Um.
Which is I mean, that's just fascinating to the idea
that some apparently some secret service agent traveled secretly with
(29:49):
a bunch of these documents from Washington, d C. And
put him on a train out to Kentucky to go
to be held in Fort Knox during World War two.
I love it. That's really cool. And that was temporary area.
Think didn't they return them right afterwards? Oh yeah, for sure.
Apparently they dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in ninety three and
they're like, we need to get the um the Declaration
(30:09):
of Independence out there. And they found out that the
guards were using it as a place mat to eat
their dehydrated foods. You know, they'd swapped it with with
something that they only use crayon to forge, kept the
original themselves. So should we break now before conspiracies or
wait and break before gold standard? We'll break now, And
(30:30):
I'm not a hard percent sure I'm going to be
able to come back from the Chicago Way thing. Okay,
So it might just be you when we come back
from from break No never, okay, Chuck. So one of
(31:08):
the things, one of the favorite things Americans love to
do is to suggest quite seriously in a lot of cases,
that there is no such thing as a gold in
Fort Knox, and that there hasn't been golden there for
a very long time. And if you went there and
you saw gold, well you're a fool, because the best thing,
the best possible scenario, is that you saw something like
(31:30):
tongue sten that was spray painted or plated in gold,
and that the golden Fort Knox is not there and
hasn't been there for a very long time, and not
only that it was sold for the most nefarious, outrageous
purposes we can possibly come up with. Yeah, So they
audit Fort Knox and they count the gold allegedly supposedly,
(31:53):
Dotty and Danny get in there with their adding machine
and they type everything out. Um, and I love how
Ed put this. He said that all the conspiracy theories
rely on quote, some fundamental misunderstanding of how currency works,
how the gold standard worked, or just outright nonsense. But
it's kind of true. Yeah, I know, it totally is,
(32:14):
because there's this call for which we'll talk about the
gold to be used again the way originally was, which
is a 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 you misunderstand how currency works or how
economies work, and you probably don't fully understand how the
(32:36):
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 the
global economy really started to take off was when we
decoupled our currency from being pinned to gold. So that's
another seems to be another um factor in in in
kind of banding about conspiracy theories about Fort Knox gold too. Yeah,
(33:00):
and a lot of these conspiracy theories are anti Semitic. Yeah, Um,
there are believe it or not. There are some really
smart people who think who 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.
UM woman named Judy Shelton who Trump tried to push
(33:21):
for appointment to the FED to the Federal Reserve UM
and I'm not sure if she believes in the conspiracy
theories or she just wants to go back to the
gold standard. Yeah, they're not. I mean, it's not hand
in hand. It's just if you do think we should
go back to the gold standard, it's basically impossible for
your attention not to follow on Fort Knox. And then
you may be like, well is there even gold there? Yeah? True,
(33:44):
but there are some truly whay could do things out there. Uh,
this Peter Better guy? Oh is that how you're saying
his name? What is it? If his Yeah, if his
name is not Peter Beater, then I'm sad I am
to be your beater the E T E. R. That's
what I'm gonna call him at least. Yeah, it's like
Peter with a B. Yeah, but his first name is Peter.
(34:07):
It's magnificent, it's perfect. So he has thrown a lot
of conspiracies out there since the seventies, uh, 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 uh and you know, a
(34:30):
sin to power basically, yeah, because they would have all
the money and they sunk the value of the money
so they could buy everything else at rock bottom prices
like they bought the gold. Apparently this involves the Rothchilds,
which automatically makes the whole thing anti Semitic, because the
roth Child's started out and you know, are still around
as far as I know, UM as a Jewish banking family,
(34:53):
uh many many centuries ago. UM and rose to power
and wealth pretty quickly and actually had a huge um
role in a lot of world affairs, like we're 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 um,
(35:14):
they're kind of like one of the o G conspiracy theories.
And usually it was based on a combination or it
was based on suspiciousness of a combination of them being
Jewish and then being extraordinarily wealthy. Yeah, there's this other guy.
Is his name is yan nieven Huis. I'm sure that's wrong. Um,
(35:35):
he had an alias named KU's Jansen ko O s.
And I listened to and read some interviews with this
guy and he did you check into him? He seems
he seems like a pretty level headed economist, right, that
just seems to think that these audits aren't correct and
there is something kinky going on. He didn't seem really
(35:57):
out there though. No, it's it seems like a case
of paying too much attention to details and 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.
(36:17):
That's my impression. I could be wrong. I don't know
much about cous Jansen. Yeah, but the interview just seemed
very level headed. Um, he wasn't talking about um robotsoids,
which is what Peter Peter talks about, right, literally talks
about stuff like that. Well, that's what makes it believable.
Is the OIDs on the end. If there were just robots,
(36:39):
it would just seem rather far fat. What about Ron Paul?
His is a little out there. He thinks it's all fake, right,
so Ron Paul. I can't tell if Ron Paul is
the source of a lot of this or was an
amplifier for a lot of it, But he's tapped into
or is part of one of the larger um kind
of follow wings of of conspiracy theories as far as
(37:02):
Fort Knox is concerned, which is that that either like
I was saying earlier, there's either no gold there really,
or the goal that is there is fake and the
real goal has been sold, And that the US has
been doing this for a very long time for all
sorts of uncertain reasons. Um Like that, and that usually
(37:22):
these days that China has been the big recipient of
cheap gold, and maybe we've been doing that because if
we sell China 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. Um. 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
(37:44):
people's goal that can't be sold off secretly by the government.
And here's to me where it's like, even if there
is it any gold in Fort Knox at some point
in in the not too distant past, but the past,
for sure, we've gone so far are beyond that having
any importance whatsoever based on the dollar value of the
(38:05):
golden Fort Knox that it legitimately doesn't matter. But that's
why I think some people are like, no, it doesn't matter.
That is our goal. That's America's gold. Um. I've seen
it referred to I think ed said somebody referred to
it as the equity of our national wealth. Um. And
there seems to be like a certain amount of like
American pride or patriotism in in being really mad about
(38:27):
the idea that Fort Knox doesn't have any gold anymore,
that the American people were duped by, you know, whatever
elites are running the show at the behest of whatever
Jewish people are running the elites. Uh. 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
(38:47):
of consistently blown away that money all money is. It's
just something that everyone has agreed on has value. Yeah,
and that's what we've been doing forever. But yeah, since
there has been a little ingets and trinkets, 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
(39:09):
can with gold, which is a problem you can. I mean,
like think about womp them that was extensively used and
I believe the Pacific Northwest by more than one Um
tribe and nation. Um womp them was where 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
(39:29):
could conceivably be a stick as far as humanity is concerned. Right,
But in our case and in the case of paper
money these days, it is uh, we've had to make
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.
(39:53):
It's it's nice for making pretty trinkets. But uh, and
they use it in some electronics and stuff like that.
It 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, if you think
about it, and love, and the irony is is that
(40:14):
we're doing our best to kill all that stuff away,
you know, the stuff that really matters. Man, pravo, pravo.
I wanna give you a hand to help you down
from your soapbox, and I'm gonna put a king robe
around you. Okay, it's goldflecting. It's got like the little
white leopard, um like like caller, yeah, whatever that is.
(40:37):
You look great, And that was wonderful. No, it's just
it's just so funny. These things that we've agreed have
value really don't. And the things that really truly have
valued are really just the things that keep people alive,
right right, But even like taking that hippie stuff out
of the equation, there was a time where people said, um, no, gold,
gold actually is valuable. People of value gold for eons now,
(41:00):
Like it's one of the first things humans agreed had
inherent value, even though it doesn't really have inherent value
because it was yeah, and so it made sense that
we we would say, Okay, gold is really hard to
lug around and like, um, 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 um. So
(41:23):
that's kind of where we got paper currency in the world,
and that's what we've been using for a very long time.
But over time the problems, the issues that can arise
from pinning your your currency to gold, um, they became apparent.
For one, you're very you're limited to the amount of
gold that exists in the world, which is substantial. I
(41:44):
mean all the golden Fort Knox is only two and
a half percent of the all the gold that was
ever mine. So there's a lot of gold in the world,
but that's a finite amount, which is why some people
are like, yeah, that's why we should pin our currency
to gold. It prevents it from getting out of hand
and you can't just print how over much you want. Um.
The problem is that it's like you were saying, like
with a stick, you can go in the forest and
(42:05):
go get a bunch of sticks. Conceivably, you a private
company could go mine a bunch of gold that you found,
you found a horde and um you you can mind it.
And that will affect the value of not just gold,
but of entire national economies in the global economy as
a whole. If everybody's pinning their currency to gold. Yeah.
(42:27):
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 UM and I
don't think we even mentioned that. The reason we did
this to begin with is because when we first had
(42:50):
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
coins for many, many years. But when they brought out
paper dollars, and part of this was because understandable because
private banks and I think we talked about this in
currency UM and especially in the South pre Civil War South,
(43:13):
there were all kinds of values for their paper currency,
so none of it really meant anything. Yeah, a bank,
a company of a town could print their own money.
There was no federal monopoly on printing money in the
United States until some time after the Civil War. I think,
so people just said, yeah, we don't like this paper
currency thing. So we came along and said, all right, well,
(43:33):
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 traded in for gold if
you want to. Right. So that's that's how we went
forward for a very long time, and then kind of
slowly but surely we started to move away from it,
particularly starting UM in nineteen where the Federal Reserve was
(43:56):
established UM, 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 UM, that there's no
golden fort Knox believe, kind of ruined the world when
we established the Federal Reserve UM. And one of the
first steps that said was like, okay, we need to
maintain of the value of all of our currency in
(44:20):
circulation in gold as a as a country, which was
a lot different from that's a huge amount of money
that can can now be printed, and more money that's
out there, more things can be bought because that money
can be traded for services and goods, and you can
employ people with it, and all of a sudden, your
economy can start getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And
(44:41):
that's exactly what happened. And as that became more and
more evident, UM, we started moving further and further away
from from UM the gold standard. Yeah. And like I
said earlier, kind of joke that Roosevelt, they allowed him
to urinate in person on the gold Uh. He really
led the charge in the thirties because of World War
One and the in the Great Depression, and said, you
(45:02):
know what, we really kind of need to get away
from this gold standard officially. And I'm gonna take a
series of actions weakening that link between gold dollars being
backed by gold, and you can't exchange it anymore. Everyone,
So don't even think about that. And not only that,
you can't hoard gold like we we basically want all
(45:23):
the gold and all that we want to hang onto it. Yeah.
And so for a very long time, the only reason
people maintain gold, or countries maintained gold, or the United
States maintained gold was to UM to pay off foreign
debts if need be. Uh. And then Nixon said nuts
to that in one and from that moment on, the
(45:45):
United States currency and economy was decoupled from gold and
it has been ever since. UM. And you again, you
can look, I'm not a roth child robot oid. I
just believe in progress, basically. And if you go back
and look at the world economy and the United States
economy since nineteen seventy one, it's made some pretty impressive
(46:05):
gains since then, UM. And that's largely due to decoupling
from golden being able to print money. Now that said,
and this is an entirely different podcast that I think
we need to do. Sometimes there are massive problems with
paper money, paper currency, what's called fiat currency UM, or
a fiat system of currency where by fiat by proclamation,
(46:27):
we say our currency is worth this amount, and that's
what we do now, which is totally made up and
totally in the air. But as long as people have
faith in in the government, in the economy, and the workforce, UM,
we can survive those ups and downs through that that
that sense of faith not just among our citizens but
(46:48):
also people around the world. Understand. Yeah, I mean, let's
let's just all keep agreeing. Let's keep that pinky swear
going exactly, so why do well, why do we still
have Fort Knox? Then if we don't need the gold, well,
I mean they're not just gonna give it away. You
(47:08):
still gotta keep it in one in a couple of places, right,
That's I mean, that's one thing I think there is
a certain amount of that national pride to even among
the governments, Like 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. UM. One thing I
did see is there are like lots of other countries
have lots of other gold hordes themselves. And although the
(47:30):
gold market is basically separate, it's like its own thing.
That's you know, it responds and reacts to the UM,
the stock exchanges, UM and other markets, but it's not
it's not you know, entangled with It's its own thing.
So really, if you UM released a bunch of gold,
you're really going to mess with the gold market. But
it's gonna have a ripple effect through the through the world, UM,
(47:53):
then the other markets in the global economy. So it
would be really foolish to release a bunch of gold
old onto the market for the US to sell or
any country to sell its gold hordes off. It would
be a real big problem that you don't need to have.
It's easier to just keep the gold in Fort Knox. Instead, agreed,
that's why it's still around. You're not. This turned out
(48:15):
to be a pretty good aside from Socca juwillyah, And
now I'm wondering if I even pronounced wampum correctly. Well,
how humiliating Chuck Wampum was the real thing? You know? Uh,
if you want to know more about Fort Knox and
start looking at pictures of it, you'll you'll see what
we're talking about. And since I said you'll see what
we're talking about, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna
(48:38):
call this wet Lands follow up uh 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
cat tails just as you brought them up. Wow, we
love this stuff, these coincidences. And She's like, no, I'm
(49:00):
listening to the Four Knocks episode, so laid on me
I'm tunnel 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 cat tail selfie, which I included
in this email. Lovely picture. Growing up in New Jersey
in the eighties, cat tails were called punks, and my
(49:22):
dad would take the dried out plants and light them
to keep away mosquitoes. That's where the punk is. Yeah,
I've never heard of that. Have you heard of that?
Uh huh? I never heard of that. Back then, it
seemed like a normal thing to do. But having grown
up moved away from New Jersey, who I have never
come across anyone that ever partakes in this practice anymore.
It was such a huge part of my childhood summers.
(49:43):
I'd forgotten about it until now until listening to the episode,
and then I happened to walk upon some in the
adjacent Mark Marshes in That moment truly delighted me. Mosquito
season is over where I live now in d C.
But on next summer's to do list is to cut
some cat tails from the park end and introduce my
two teen sons to that distinctive punk smell that made
(50:05):
me against federal law. Now though, oh, really taking punks
from the park land it seems like against the law. Well,
i'll tell you what, Donna H. Look into that. We
don't want you to get in trouble, that's right, or
to do anything you shouldn't do. But I get the
urge to want to introduce things to your children that
you did back then that weren't necessarily proper. But the
(50:28):
nanny state will say no and throw you in jail.
So don't try it, Donna. Yeah, maybe, I mean where
I saw the wetlands recently where I was hiking here
in Arabia Mountain. You can't beautiful granite outcroppings part of
Stone Mountain actually, and you can't. My daughter wanted to
take those rocks. As if you can't take the rocks,
we get thrown in jail by the nanny state. You
can't do it. You gotta leave those rocks. Um, what
(50:51):
else did Donna say anything else? Now? That's it. That's
from Donna H. That was great, Donna, thank you very much.
Be careful with the cattails. We won't tell if you do,
but we just don't want you to get in trouble. Um.
We're no snitches. Uh. If you want to get in
touch with us like Donna did, Uh, we want to
hear from you, and you can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
(51:15):
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. 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.
(00:21):
Carrot plated Gold Edition gold plated didn't know what happens?
Like if you put a bunch of gold together, it
means more carrots, I think. So I'm afraid to doubt you, though,
because I had a movie crushers say that. I'm all
I do lately is say you're wrong? Do you What
(00:41):
do they mean lately? I know, I don't know. He
must be a newcomer to the podcast. Slightly distressing, says,
Josh's is all the time lately. Josh makes really good points,
and all Chuck does his poopa it by just saying no,
you're wrong. It's like, does that even happen once? If
it may, I'm sure it's happened more than once. But
(01:01):
if it makes you feeling better, I haven't noticed, and
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. Oh, man, you
know it's funny, is I didn't even see that coming chuck. Yeah,
that was good, good stuff. And I almost just said
the s wort, that was good stuff. You're wrong, it
(01:25):
was mediocre. Let's just do this Fortes. Yeah, no, let's
do a real podcast episode. This, uh, this is interesting.
All I could think about was heist movies. Oh really,
I don't know what I thought about. I think I
was kind of stuck in the thirties. I just thought
of everything is kind of old timey and quaint because
(01:48):
it's kind of in a way where the story really
kicks off the story of Fort Knox. In case anybody's
listening and didn't check the title, Oh, I thought we
were doing an episode on the United States Bullion Depository, Buddy.
That is the same exact thing in a lot of ways.
But actually they're different too. Let's talk about this, right. So,
(02:09):
But for anybody who is outside of the United States,
and I would wager that a lot of you, I'd
wager all the Golden Fort Knox that a lot of
you are very familiar with Fort Knox, because it does
seem to be kind of like this world famous place
where the United States hoards its gold and it's just
totally impenetrable, so don't even try. Um. But there's also
(02:31):
like a lot of conspiracy theories too that there's no
gold in there, and we'll talk about all this and
why there's golden there too, But I feel like we
should at least give like a background on Fort Knox
and the ins and outs of it, don't you. Yeah.
In nineteen o three, this is where it all started. Um,
the U. S Army said, you know what, I think
we need some training ground out here in Kentucky, in
(02:52):
West Point, Kentucky. And everybody said, why, Yeah, I don't
know good at places any I guess, and use that
area they got, Um, 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,
(03:16):
a Revolutionary War officer, as Camp Knox. And someone very
quickly said, that doesn't sound at all tough. It sounds
like children belong here and people roasting smores about Fort Knox.
It sounds like all the best forts started out as camps. Yeah,
So they said Shure in Ny two, it became officially
(03:37):
Fort Canucks right, nice one. Um. So yeah, so it
started out as a legit army base. Um. 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. Um, the United States Mint said, hey, we
could use a new spot to store some gold, because
we got a lot of gold. I this isn't even
(04:00):
all of it, but we need a new spot to
store some gold. And they actually took possession of part
of Fort Knox um and built what's known as, like
you said, the United States bully On Depository. Um, they're
in Kentucky and it is legitimately Fort Knox is now
not just the army camp. Even more famously, it is
(04:22):
really what you officially would call the United States Bullyon Depository. Yeah.
And the camp is still there, and some say it
is Um there is sort of a means of maybe
intimidation maybe back up, like hey, there's an army camp
right next door. But they you know, also asked to
borrow that name because it sounded tougher than the Bullion Depository,
(04:45):
and they said, sure, you can go ahead and just
call that building Fort Knox as well, and that's where
we moved um, well, not all of it, but we
had a lot of gold at the time, as you
were saying, and it was, um it was a little unnerving,
I think, to have most of the gold and the
country stored in Philadelphia, the ment there and in New
(05:07):
York because it was so close to the coast, and
if some warring nation wanted to invade us and grab
our gold, then they wouldn't have far to go to
get it onto a boat. Yeah, truly, which is you know,
pretty sensible, really, and I never really thought about that.
But New York is not very far from water, and
neither as Philly, so why not. So they decided to
(05:29):
move um as much as they could. And there was
silver moved too. There's a lot of stockpiles of silver
that we're not even gonna bother within this story because
silver we're talking gold here, and they moved a lot
of it to Denver, and they very quickly said, well,
the Denver met's a great place because it's protected from
the from the Pacific Ocean by the rocky mountains, which
would make that makes it much more difficult for an
(05:52):
invading army. To come in from the Pacific and steal it.
But we're we've run out of space and we need
some some more space for all the spillover gold. And
that's when they decided to build a Fort Knox, which
in Kentucky is protected from the Atlantic Ocean by the
Appalachian Mountains. So it's pretty pretty clever. Why they why
they chose Fort Knox. Yeah. So the Treasury, like you said,
(06:14):
took control of that land in thirty six and then
in thirty seven, and 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 um just a few months. Cost about
it impressive, Yeah, UM cost about a half a million bucks.
(06:36):
In the nine seven they said we're open for business, Um,
bring that gold from New York City. They did, and
they they did it the way, exactly the way that
you would think they would do it. They had um
a lot of um. They had a secret location where
they were loading it. They sent a bunch of trains
out um that were decoys, UM. And it didn't all
(06:58):
happen at once. It wasn't one ship mint that made
its way from New York and Philadelphia over to U Kentucky.
It would have been in the movie, I think exactly. Yeah,
But um it happened like actually in in many shipments
over several years. But supposedly they did it like sometimes
darkness of nights and there was decoys, um. And they
(07:18):
were always protected by a number of groups from the
post Office um uh, inspectors that are licensed to carry guns.
Which would I hate to say it, everybody, but that's
the one that you would try to hijack if you
were going to hijack like yeah right, um yes, chuck
(07:40):
all the way to the army, you know, which I
would I would probably not try to hijack that one.
If I were going to hijack one, which I wouldn't do,
it would probably be the postal inspector one. Yeah. And
you know, I'm sure that they've someone has written a
movie treatment at some point for a nine seven try
(08:00):
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 the likely train that's poor guys?
Um So we've got the gold shown up at Fort Knox.
And the thing is is like this was like people
(08:21):
knew about this. It wasn't done in secret, Like this
was this is known about UM And I think I
get the impression that the reason that it was talked
about and discussed, and they were like little tidbits here
there in the in the um, in the popular media,
um to give this idea like Okay, yes we're moving
this gold, but like, don't even try it, Like here's
just enough that you need to know to not even
(08:43):
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 uh impregnate
for Knox. Oh pretty sexy. So uh, first of all,
(09:04):
you can't just take a tour. I mean you can
tour almost anything in this country except for Fort Knox.
Even if you're sitting congress person, the chances are you're
probably not going to get a tour. Yeah, I mean,
if ed is correct here who helped us put this together,
there have only been three official tours, Is that right? Yeah,
(09:24):
that's what I saw. So there's there was one from
FDR himself, which is pretty understandable. UM. There was one
in the seventies, which we'll talk about, UM, which made sense,
but it was a congressional delegation. And then I think
in two thousands seventeen, Stephen Minusian and a delegation toured it.
So there's at least three, but those are the three
(09:47):
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 Fort
Knox is to basically reassure the public there's there's a
lot of golden there. Don't even more about it. Yes,
the gold's there. That's pretty much the reason why anybody
gets a tour of Fort Knox. I wonder if they
let FDR in just to say, hey, you might as
(10:09):
well just urinate on this golden person, because that's what
you're about to do with policy. That's that's probably what happened.
We'll get to that later with the gold standard. Uh.
And of course you didn't urinate on it. Even with policy,
you don't know. You can't ever tell what that FDR.
So here's a bunch of things, and this this next
(10:29):
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. Uh, but should we take
a break first? Oh? Sure, man, Yeah, I think that's
(10:50):
a great cliffhanger. All right, great, we'll be right back. Alrighty,
(11:23):
So we promised you stats and figures about Fort Knox
and issues of Popular Mechanics. I know, how's this for you?
The vault requires, of course, multiple people to open it up,
and each person nobody knows the entire combination. Each person
it knows only a part of it. And even if
you got it open, there's a one d hour time
(11:46):
delay locks, so you gotta wait. If you have them
at gunpoint and you all force and you force them
all to open it, you gotta sit around and wait
for four days, no matter what. That's my favorite one.
It's pretty great. Mm hmm. That in the fact that
it's really just artificial intelligence from the future is the
only one that has the entire combination in its possession.
(12:06):
What else, Um, well, let's see, they're the the vault
itself is actually inside a building. So you remember in
our Alcatraz episode where the cell Blox where buildings inside
of the larger prison building. That's exactly the same thing,
and not coincidentally they're built around the same time. UM,
So I think there was that kind of you know,
(12:28):
impenetrable building within an impenetrable building in the Zeitgeist kind
of thing going on. Um. 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, um, the flooring is two
ft thick of granite um, which you are not going
to get through even if you successfully dug under. And
(12:51):
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 I are separating you from the building.
There's a huge blank field around the building, so it's
not very easy to kind of walk up to it.
And they apparently have said that the field around the
(13:14):
building is a mine field, which means that they apparently
studied cartoons to design Fort Knock, which I love. You're
like what would while e coyote do exactly? Um, yeah,
it is, I mean it's it's it's definitely worth googling
a uh like an aerial image of this building. It's
(13:34):
it's pretty interesting. I mean it it does. It sits
out in the middle of nothing, uh, in this big
flat area, and there's like a circular driveway around it.
And you know, it's made of what you think it's
made of, which is granite and concrete and steel. They
said that the walls are also two feet in thickness,
(13:56):
and inside those walls are fabricated steel hills that are
so closely smushed together that they say a human hand
can't even get between them. Right. Uh, So you need
a baby or a child. You need a baby hand.
So you got to bring a baby. You have to
bring diapers and food to last the baby four days
(14:16):
until the time lock. Yeah. Of course, don't forget a
gun to hold people off with. Ye and probably some
people you don't like to send through the minefield the
clear path for you. Yeah, and you've got to get
one of those diaper genies to put the diaper in,
otherwise it's gonna smell in there. Oh man, it would
smell so bad in that little building. Uh here's another
cool thing. Well, the whole the whole building isn't huge.
(14:37):
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, um, something the size of
like a maximum security prison or something like that. Um,
it's not huge. But um the building inside the building,
so the vault inside has an eighteen inch space clear
(14:58):
on every side and have all these mirrors everywhere. And
of course now they have real cameras. I guess this
was from the popular mechanics pre camera. You just use
mirrors to make sure that you could see every square
inch of this thing. Yeah. So if you did somehow
manage to get inside the vault, the people who whose
job it is is to watch the vault would see
(15:20):
you immediately and they post yeah yeah. They would just start,
you know, lobbying dead letter office packages at you until
you got annoyed and left. And of course there's heavy artillery.
There are um four corner machine gun turrets essentially on
the outer building. Looking so, I'm sorry, I was confused.
(15:44):
Is that on the outer building or is that part
of the vault. I think that's outside. Okay, I don't know.
I couldn't quite tell. I didn't and I didn't see
it outside. Did you see him outside? Well, I mean
I saw, I mean I didn't see any really close ups.
Everything was kind of an area all and I did
see what looked like corner turrets, but maybe they are inside. Okay.
(16:05):
I don't know if I'd be shooting up machine guns
inside a granite room. Yeah, that's actually probably a pretty
bad idea. I I mean, I've seen wildly condy too.
Those bullets bounced all over the place, that's right. Um,
So you've also got a door to contend with. So
so so far, you've got two ft thick everything to
get through. Um, which means that your best bet is
(16:26):
to go through the door because rather than twenty four inches,
it's only twenty one inches thick. But you should probably
be dissuaded by the fact that it's blast, drill and
torch proof, said the US Mint director from back in
two thousand and sixteen, Philip Deal. Yeah, and again this
is all under the banner of don't even think about it, buddy. Right, Um,
(16:47):
between the uh, 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 fifties something, or Danny or Danny,
that's true. I don't think they gave jobs like that
to Danny in the nineteen fifties. Okay, maybe not in
the fifties. That's fine. But I got called out for
(17:09):
letting that Stooges comment pass, and I'm not gonna I'm
not going on the grill again for you, pal what
that ladies don't like the Three Stooges. We got not one,
not two, but thrice emails about that, and most of
them were not happy. Well, actually two of the three
were very fun about it and said that they love
the Three Stooges. But yes, but they weren't happy. One
(17:30):
I couldn't tell. And I even wrote her back and
I was like, I can't tell if you're really mad. Well,
and I said, but I said, I was just 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
funding around with it. Yeah, it's like everybody not liking
(17:51):
Detroit or Kentucky like Google that right, or Google women
don't like Rush the band. Hey, hey, hey, let's just
let's bail out of this while we still have our limb. No,
people can likelyly like. But trust me, have been to
a Rush concert and there was there was a lot
of masculinity in that room. What year was that, because
I'll bet I was at the same concert depending I
(18:14):
went to it must have been eight or eighty nine. No, No,
I wasn't not that one. This would have been It
would be like, m we just missed each other. Yeah,
just by a few years. Had I just hung out
at the Omni for three or four more years or
had you, we would have passed each But you're right, women,
(18:35):
like all sorts of things have been like all sorts
of things, that's right. And Danny and Dottie can both
be secretary, that's right. And we don't even call him
secretaries anymore, Chuck, we should just stop podcasting all together.
We have aged out of it. So to me, the
only way in would be, uh, the escape tunnel, yes,
(18:56):
which they thought of that they realized that they actually
put a tunnel underground that you could use to get
into the UM, the depository, the actual vault UM, which
they installed in case somebody got locked in there, which
I'm really surprised they even installed that um or design
that in there. I would think like, if you have
(19:16):
people guarding it as closely as it's being guarded all
the time, that if you got locked in there, they
could let you out and just give you food or
something through those those slots that for the four days, yeah,
or just in the Yeah, that's an even better idea. Actually,
now that now that you mentioned it, but now they
didn't do that. They actually put an escape tunnel in
(19:38):
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 UM only opens
from the inside. It's impossible to open from the outside,
which I take to mean it doesn't have a door
knob on the outside, and then UM that's it guarded
(20:01):
by people who are ready to just shoot you up.
If you try to approach this door with your own
door knob that you brought to open it from the outside, right,
because you're not gonna come in here with a presumably
a freight train to steal all this gold. Where are
you gonna put the tracks? You can't do it. Are
you gonna get that gold out of there? I just
(20:22):
love the fact that we're trying to you know, we're
doing a podcast in explaining in dissuading people from trying
to get into Fort Knox. I mean, it's just so
like seventies to me, your thirties or you know. The
other cool thing is is that it can go off grid,
has its own water and power. So if you you know,
(20:44):
in the movie version, of course, once again, I would
think you would try and knock it off the line somehow,
get those cameras down, but they say, no, no, no,
we have those generators. We can live off grid. There's
a gun range in the basement, so if you want
to brush up on your machine gun down there, you
can do that. No, that's kind of like a little
little lan yacht to the whole thing. Like, by the way,
(21:07):
these guys are training um with guns downstairs in the
basement for fun because they've got nothing else to do.
They're just waiting for you to come who is guarding
it though, Um, from what I understand, their treasury agents
right and the army um can be called in if needed,
because again it's like right there, Yeah, the U S.
Met Police Force, Yeah, which I imagine is a it's
(21:29):
probably a pretty cool gig to have. I don't know
where they would have come up, but I swear we've
mentioned that they exist before. It seems familiar to me.
Have we done this all before? No, we haven't done
this one, but we have talked about money and currency before, um,
And I feel like that's where that's where we're at.
Don't you like that that maybe we should talk about
(21:50):
the goal itself, because I mean, yes, it's cool that
there's a twenty one in blast door and there's a
door that only opens from the inside and these ape tunnel.
But I think what everybody's really fascinated with as much
as anything is the fact that there is a lot
of gold inside of four knocks. Yeah. And this will
um kind of hit home too. If you've ever seen
(22:12):
movies where you're bringing gold out of a place in
a duffel bag, those gold bars weigh almost twenty eight
pounds apiece, just one, yeah, just one of those things.
So if you see people throwing them around in a
movie or putting ten of them fifteen of them in
a duffel bag and slinging it over their shoulder, that
is not realistic at all. They're seven inches long, three
(22:34):
and five eights inches wide, one in three quarters inches thick.
And wait, twenty seven point five pounds each, yeah, or
four hundred troy ounces. If you know what that means.
I have no idea. Um, 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.
(22:54):
I didn't realize this, but as far as the Treasury
is concerned, and to me, this really kind of goes
to men straight, like how little the actual value of
maintaining this gold horde is that just for bookkeeping, they
they assign like an arbitrary value, the statutory value of gold.
It's what it's called at forty two dollars and forty
(23:16):
four cents and ounce, so that they can keep track
using that dollar amount of how much gold is in
uh Fort Knox, rather than you know, tracking it as
it as it relates to, like the international gold market. Yeah,
and so I did the math this time. I did too.
Let's see if we came up with the same thing.
So the supposedly there are forty metric tons of gold,
(23:39):
which by the way, is about two point five percent
of all the gold ever mind in the world in
human history. That's pretty impressive. And if we're just going
I'm gonna make sure we use the same numbers here
for metric tons, can use that forty two point four
four since per ounce. Okay, I did it differently, But
let's see if we came up with the same figure. Well,
(24:00):
what what what value did you use? Like? Oh, no,
you go first, Mr Jear, wrong guy. So using the
statutory value of gold that the US is set, I
came up with six point eight billion dollars worth of gold.
Close for mine. Close for mine. I used a different method.
And this is one of the great joys of math
(24:21):
is there are different approaches to the same problem. What
did you do? UM? I took that forty s hundred
metric tons of gold and UM divided it by pounds
seven point five pounds. So I came up with the
number of individual bars that I multiplied that number of
individual bars, which is three sixty eight thousand and seven
(24:42):
hundred and seventy three bars. By that sixteen thousand, eight
hundred and eighty eight dollars per bar I came up
with in the neighborhood of six point to five six
billion dollars worth of gold. Well, first of all, there's
a psychologist that's listening to this, that is really yeah,
looking at what that means for both of our personalities.
(25:04):
For sure, I say a lot. You know, did you
use Are you sure you use metric tons and not
just tons? Yeah? I I did um pound to metric
ton conversion. You know how you can go on the
internet and just say pound metric ton and like it
brings up a little conversion thing for you. Yeah, I
was just I was just making sure because at first
I didn't do metric ton and that was different. And
(25:26):
did a short time that is short ton, and that
came to about six closer to your number. 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 round. What I wonder. What I did was I
just took how many ounces or in forty six in
(25:50):
a ton in a metric ton, multiplied that by and
then multiplied that by two. Right, Well, I proposed that
move along because I just suddenly rose. There's probably people
who's like their fingertips of Doug under their eyeballs. They're
so they're in such agony hearing us discuss math like this. Well,
what's what's important is that the Fed in New York
(26:13):
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 have die another day. I don't know, but it
was a good one. That was the one with Sam Jackson. Yeah,
that was pretty good. Um. And by the way, I
need to say something. I realized that I said, Event
(26:35):
Horizon is a good movie and holds up. I went
back and saw it again again, and I was like,
this is way jokier than I remember from last time. Yeah,
and sadly there's a there's a sheen or a coating
of hokey nous that I guess maybe they brought in
somebody to punch up the script or something, and that
(26:56):
was their contribution, but it's not so it doesn't hold
up anymore. No, And it's a great galactic love crafty
and horror movie and concept and in some parts, but no,
it's unfortunately rather hokey. I'm I'm a little gutted to
say that. As our British friends would say, maybe you
should watch it again in like three years and it
might be back on truck for you. Well maybe, you know,
(27:18):
maybe it's me that's the problem. Well, you know, taste
waxes and waynes. Yeah, that's true. Uh, 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
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
(27:39):
released to the public. They may have been promotional coins
or test pressings. Um. And so there's some of that stuff,
including uh, the Chicago Way dollars coins that flew on
the Space Shuttle. Is that funny? Yeah, that's soccer juwiyah. Yeah,
that's like the American bastardization. It's Chicago Way. Oh, well,
(28:01):
maybe we should keep this in okay, because I've never
heard anybody say that. I really thought you'd just pronounced
that other people say it like that. Yeah. I think
it's one of those things where like the native pronunciation
is Chicago Way, and Americans were like saka jaweeah. No,
oh my god, my, I've got so much egg on
my face. Maybe we won't keep this part in. You
(28:23):
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 Chicago Way? Huh? Is it Chicago? I
think it's just Chicago Way. And I only learned that
from Ken Burns. God bless Kimmer and you man, Thank
you for setting me straight in front of a million people. Uh.
(28:45):
Let me see here in nineteen thirty three gold double
eagle twenty dollar coin. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Sure,
there's an aluminum dime no penny, an aluminum penny from
four which I'd love to see that thing. I would too,
but it just strikes me as a little sad. Sure, um,
the the they're there have also been because Fort Knox
(29:06):
is just so well known as this I pregnable place
and it really is, you know, legitimately you cannot get
into it no matter how hard you try. Um. It's
actually served as the site the storehouse for some like
truly valuable stuff, um, like the Declaration of Independence, the
Bill of Rights, um, the Gettysburg Address, a Guttenberg Bible, um. Uh,
(29:28):
the Magnet Card. Actually during World War two, England's like, hey,
can you hang onto this force because the Germans are
really like up our butts right now? Yeah, so they
so we held that at Fort Knox during World War two. Um.
Which is I mean, that's just fascinating to the idea
that some apparently some secret service agent traveled secretly with
(29:49):
a bunch of these documents from Washington, d C. And
put him on a train out to Kentucky to go
to be held in Fort Knox during World War two.
I love it. That's really cool. And that was temporary area.
Think didn't they return them right afterwards? Oh yeah, for sure.
Apparently they dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in ninety three and
they're like, we need to get the um the Declaration
(30:09):
of Independence out there. And they found out that the
guards were using it as a place mat to eat
their dehydrated foods. You know, they'd swapped it with with
something that they only use crayon to forge, kept the
original themselves. So should we break now before conspiracies or
wait and break before gold standard? We'll break now, And
(30:30):
I'm not a hard percent sure I'm going to be
able to come back from the Chicago Way thing. Okay,
So it might just be you when we come back
from from break No never, okay, Chuck. So one of
(31:08):
the things, one of the favorite things Americans love to
do is to suggest quite seriously in a lot of cases,
that there is no such thing as a gold in
Fort Knox, and that there hasn't been golden there for
a very long time. And if you went there and
you saw gold, well you're a fool, because the best thing,
the best possible scenario, is that you saw something like
(31:30):
tongue sten that was spray painted or plated in gold,
and that the golden Fort Knox is not there and
hasn't been there for a very long time, and not
only that it was sold for the most nefarious, outrageous
purposes we can possibly come up with. Yeah, So they
audit Fort Knox and they count the gold allegedly supposedly,
(31:53):
Dotty and Danny get in there with their adding machine
and they type everything out. Um, and I love how
Ed put this. He said that all the conspiracy theories
rely on quote, some fundamental misunderstanding of how currency works,
how the gold standard worked, or just outright nonsense. But
it's kind of true. Yeah, I know, it totally is,
(32:14):
because there's this call for which we'll talk about the
gold to be used again the way originally was, which
is a 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 you misunderstand how currency works or how
economies work, and you probably don't fully understand how the
(32:36):
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 the
global economy really started to take off was when we
decoupled our currency from being pinned to gold. So that's
another seems to be another um factor in in in
kind of banding about conspiracy theories about Fort Knox gold too. Yeah,
(33:00):
and a lot of these conspiracy theories are anti Semitic. Yeah, Um,
there are believe it or not. There are some really
smart people who think who 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.
UM woman named Judy Shelton who Trump tried to push
(33:21):
for appointment to the FED to the Federal Reserve UM
and I'm not sure if she believes in the conspiracy
theories or she just wants to go back to the
gold standard. Yeah, they're not. I mean, it's not hand
in hand. It's just if you do think we should
go back to the gold standard, it's basically impossible for
your attention not to follow on Fort Knox. And then
you may be like, well is there even gold there? Yeah? True,
(33:44):
but there are some truly whay could do things out there. Uh,
this Peter Better guy? Oh is that how you're saying
his name? What is it? If his Yeah, if his
name is not Peter Beater, then I'm sad I am
to be your beater the E T E. R. That's
what I'm gonna call him at least. Yeah, it's like
Peter with a B. Yeah, but his first name is Peter.
(34:07):
It's magnificent, it's perfect. So he has thrown a lot
of conspiracies out there since the seventies, uh, 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 uh and you know, a
(34:30):
sin to power basically, yeah, because they would have all
the money and they sunk the value of the money
so they could buy everything else at rock bottom prices
like they bought the gold. Apparently this involves the Rothchilds,
which automatically makes the whole thing anti Semitic, because the
roth Child's started out and you know, are still around
as far as I know, UM as a Jewish banking family,
(34:53):
uh many many centuries ago. UM and rose to power
and wealth pretty quickly and actually had a huge um
role in a lot of world affairs, like we're 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 um,
(35:14):
they're kind of like one of the o G conspiracy theories.
And usually it was based on a combination or it
was based on suspiciousness of a combination of them being
Jewish and then being extraordinarily wealthy. Yeah, there's this other guy.
Is his name is yan nieven Huis. I'm sure that's wrong. Um,
(35:35):
he had an alias named KU's Jansen ko O s.
And I listened to and read some interviews with this
guy and he did you check into him? He seems
he seems like a pretty level headed economist, right, that
just seems to think that these audits aren't correct and
there is something kinky going on. He didn't seem really
(35:57):
out there though. No, it's it seems like a case
of paying too much attention to details and 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.
(36:17):
That's my impression. I could be wrong. I don't know
much about cous Jansen. Yeah, but the interview just seemed
very level headed. Um, he wasn't talking about um robotsoids,
which is what Peter Peter talks about, right, literally talks
about stuff like that. Well, that's what makes it believable.
Is the OIDs on the end. If there were just robots,
(36:39):
it would just seem rather far fat. What about Ron Paul?
His is a little out there. He thinks it's all fake, right,
so Ron Paul. I can't tell if Ron Paul is
the source of a lot of this or was an
amplifier for a lot of it, But he's tapped into
or is part of one of the larger um kind
of follow wings of of conspiracy theories as far as
(37:02):
Fort Knox is concerned, which is that that either like
I was saying earlier, there's either no gold there really,
or the goal that is there is fake and the
real goal has been sold, And that the US has
been doing this for a very long time for all
sorts of uncertain reasons. Um Like that, and that usually
(37:22):
these days that China has been the big recipient of
cheap gold, and maybe we've been doing that because if
we sell China 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. Um. 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
(37:44):
people's goal that can't be sold off secretly by the government.
And here's to me where it's like, even if there
is it any gold in Fort Knox at some point
in in the not too distant past, but the past,
for sure, we've gone so far are beyond that having
any importance whatsoever based on the dollar value of the
(38:05):
golden Fort Knox that it legitimately doesn't matter. But that's
why I think some people are like, no, it doesn't matter.
That is our goal. That's America's gold. Um. I've seen
it referred to I think ed said somebody referred to
it as the equity of our national wealth. Um. And
there seems to be like a certain amount of like
American pride or patriotism in in being really mad about
(38:27):
the idea that Fort Knox doesn't have any gold anymore,
that the American people were duped by, you know, whatever
elites are running the show at the behest of whatever
Jewish people are running the elites. Uh. 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
(38:47):
of consistently blown away that money all money is. It's
just something that everyone has agreed on has value. Yeah,
and that's what we've been doing forever. But yeah, since
there has been a little ingets and trinkets, 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
(39:09):
can with gold, which is a problem you can. I mean,
like think about womp them that was extensively used and
I believe the Pacific Northwest by more than one Um
tribe and nation. Um womp them was where 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
(39:29):
could conceivably be a stick as far as humanity is concerned. Right,
But in our case and in the case of paper
money these days, it is uh, we've had to make
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.
(39:53):
It's it's nice for making pretty trinkets. But uh, and
they use it in some electronics and stuff like that.
It 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, if you think
about it, and love, and the irony is is that
(40:14):
we're doing our best to kill all that stuff away,
you know, the stuff that really matters. Man, pravo, pravo.
I wanna give you a hand to help you down
from your soapbox, and I'm gonna put a king robe
around you. Okay, it's goldflecting. It's got like the little
white leopard, um like like caller, yeah, whatever that is.
(40:37):
You look great, And that was wonderful. No, it's just
it's just so funny. These things that we've agreed have
value really don't. And the things that really truly have
valued are really just the things that keep people alive,
right right, But even like taking that hippie stuff out
of the equation, there was a time where people said, um, no, gold,
gold actually is valuable. People of value gold for eons now,
(41:00):
Like it's one of the first things humans agreed had
inherent value, even though it doesn't really have inherent value
because it was yeah, and so it made sense that
we we would say, Okay, gold is really hard to
lug around and like, um, 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 um. So
(41:23):
that's kind of where we got paper currency in the world,
and that's what we've been using for a very long time.
But over time the problems, the issues that can arise
from pinning your your currency to gold, um, they became apparent.
For one, you're very you're limited to the amount of
gold that exists in the world, which is substantial. I
(41:44):
mean all the golden Fort Knox is only two and
a half percent of the all the gold that was
ever mine. So there's a lot of gold in the world,
but that's a finite amount, which is why some people
are like, yeah, that's why we should pin our currency
to gold. It prevents it from getting out of hand
and you can't just print how over much you want. Um.
The problem is that it's like you were saying, like
with a stick, you can go in the forest and
(42:05):
go get a bunch of sticks. Conceivably, you a private
company could go mine a bunch of gold that you found,
you found a horde and um you you can mind it.
And that will affect the value of not just gold,
but of entire national economies in the global economy as
a whole. If everybody's pinning their currency to gold. Yeah.
(42:27):
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 UM and I
don't think we even mentioned that. The reason we did
this to begin with is because when we first had
(42:50):
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
coins for many, many years. But when they brought out
paper dollars, and part of this was because understandable because
private banks and I think we talked about this in
currency UM and especially in the South pre Civil War South,
(43:13):
there were all kinds of values for their paper currency,
so none of it really meant anything. Yeah, a bank,
a company of a town could print their own money.
There was no federal monopoly on printing money in the
United States until some time after the Civil War. I think,
so people just said, yeah, we don't like this paper
currency thing. So we came along and said, all right, well,
(43:33):
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 traded in for gold if
you want to. Right. So that's that's how we went
forward for a very long time, and then kind of
slowly but surely we started to move away from it,
particularly starting UM in nineteen where the Federal Reserve was
(43:56):
established UM, 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 UM, that there's no
golden fort Knox believe, kind of ruined the world when
we established the Federal Reserve UM. And one of the
first steps that said was like, okay, we need to
maintain of the value of all of our currency in
(44:20):
circulation in gold as a as a country, which was
a lot different from that's a huge amount of money
that can can now be printed, and more money that's
out there, more things can be bought because that money
can be traded for services and goods, and you can
employ people with it, and all of a sudden, your
economy can start getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And
(44:41):
that's exactly what happened. And as that became more and
more evident, UM, we started moving further and further away
from from UM the gold standard. Yeah. And like I
said earlier, kind of joke that Roosevelt, they allowed him
to urinate in person on the gold Uh. He really
led the charge in the thirties because of World War
One and the in the Great Depression, and said, you
(45:02):
know what, we really kind of need to get away
from this gold standard officially. And I'm gonna take a
series of actions weakening that link between gold dollars being
backed by gold, and you can't exchange it anymore. Everyone,
So don't even think about that. And not only that,
you can't hoard gold like we we basically want all
(45:23):
the gold and all that we want to hang onto it. Yeah.
And so for a very long time, the only reason
people maintain gold, or countries maintained gold, or the United
States maintained gold was to UM to pay off foreign
debts if need be. Uh. And then Nixon said nuts
to that in one and from that moment on, the
(45:45):
United States currency and economy was decoupled from gold and
it has been ever since. UM. And you again, you
can look, I'm not a roth child robot oid. I
just believe in progress, basically. And if you go back
and look at the world economy and the United States
economy since nineteen seventy one, it's made some pretty impressive
(46:05):
gains since then, UM. And that's largely due to decoupling
from golden being able to print money. Now that said,
and this is an entirely different podcast that I think
we need to do. Sometimes there are massive problems with
paper money, paper currency, what's called fiat currency UM, or
a fiat system of currency where by fiat by proclamation,
(46:27):
we say our currency is worth this amount, and that's
what we do now, which is totally made up and
totally in the air. But as long as people have
faith in in the government, in the economy, and the workforce, UM,
we can survive those ups and downs through that that
that sense of faith not just among our citizens but
(46:48):
also people around the world. Understand. Yeah, I mean, let's
let's just all keep agreeing. Let's keep that pinky swear
going exactly, so why do well, why do we still
have Fort Knox? Then if we don't need the gold, well,
I mean they're not just gonna give it away. You
(47:08):
still gotta keep it in one in a couple of places, right,
That's I mean, that's one thing I think there is
a certain amount of that national pride to even among
the governments, Like 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. UM. One thing I
did see is there are like lots of other countries
have lots of other gold hordes themselves. And although the
(47:30):
gold market is basically separate, it's like its own thing.
That's you know, it responds and reacts to the UM,
the stock exchanges, UM and other markets, but it's not
it's not you know, entangled with It's its own thing.
So really, if you UM released a bunch of gold,
you're really going to mess with the gold market. But
it's gonna have a ripple effect through the through the world, UM,
(47:53):
then the other markets in the global economy. So it
would be really foolish to release a bunch of gold
old onto the market for the US to sell or
any country to sell its gold hordes off. It would
be a real big problem that you don't need to have.
It's easier to just keep the gold in Fort Knox. Instead, agreed,
that's why it's still around. You're not. This turned out
(48:15):
to be a pretty good aside from Socca juwillyah, And
now I'm wondering if I even pronounced wampum correctly. Well,
how humiliating Chuck Wampum was the real thing? You know? Uh,
if you want to know more about Fort Knox and
start looking at pictures of it, you'll you'll see what
we're talking about. And since I said you'll see what
we're talking about, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna
(48:38):
call this wet Lands follow up uh 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
cat tails just as you brought them up. Wow, we
love this stuff, these coincidences. And She's like, no, I'm
(49:00):
listening to the Four Knocks episode, so laid on me
I'm tunnel 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 cat tail selfie, which I included
in this email. Lovely picture. Growing up in New Jersey
in the eighties, cat tails were called punks, and my
(49:22):
dad would take the dried out plants and light them
to keep away mosquitoes. That's where the punk is. Yeah,
I've never heard of that. Have you heard of that?
Uh huh? I never heard of that. Back then, it
seemed like a normal thing to do. But having grown
up moved away from New Jersey, who I have never
come across anyone that ever partakes in this practice anymore.
It was such a huge part of my childhood summers.
(49:43):
I'd forgotten about it until now until listening to the episode,
and then I happened to walk upon some in the
adjacent Mark Marshes in That moment truly delighted me. Mosquito
season is over where I live now in d C.
But on next summer's to do list is to cut
some cat tails from the park end and introduce my
two teen sons to that distinctive punk smell that made
(50:05):
me against federal law. Now though, oh, really taking punks
from the park land it seems like against the law. Well,
i'll tell you what, Donna H. Look into that. We
don't want you to get in trouble, that's right, or
to do anything you shouldn't do. But I get the
urge to want to introduce things to your children that
you did back then that weren't necessarily proper. But the
(50:28):
nanny state will say no and throw you in jail.
So don't try it, Donna. Yeah, maybe, I mean where
I saw the wetlands recently where I was hiking here
in Arabia Mountain. You can't beautiful granite outcroppings part of
Stone Mountain actually, and you can't. My daughter wanted to
take those rocks. As if you can't take the rocks,
we get thrown in jail by the nanny state. You
can't do it. You gotta leave those rocks. Um, what
(50:51):
else did Donna say anything else? Now? That's it. That's
from Donna H. That was great, Donna, thank you very much.
Be careful with the cattails. We won't tell if you do,
but we just don't want you to get in trouble. Um.
We're no snitches. Uh. If you want to get in
touch with us like Donna did, Uh, we want to
hear from you, and you can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
(51:15):
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
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