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Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
Col. Douglas Macgregor: Why I Sold Bitcoin — Coming Crash, Gold Reserve Status, and China's Grip on our Military
01:15:14
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- [00:00]
A
I know everybody sees the little flag that is on the lapel of all the congressmen and senators. I'm a patriot. And they wave the flag. But over here, there's a pocket. It's open, it's very deep, and it fills up with cash from insider training and lobbyists and so forth. So all of these people have grown very, very rich over the last several decades as a result of the fact that we just print money.
- [00:30]
B
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Joining me live at the Rumble Studios in Washington, D.C. my most popular guest, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Thank you so much for joining me here in person.
- [00:41]
A
Well, thanks. It's nice to be here.
- [00:44]
B
You've been putting out so many interesting articles and tweets, Just about all. All that's broken in the current system. And I want to zoom in with you a little bit. I want to focus half of the show on. On how we got here, what the problem really is, and then let's talk about some solutions and give people some hope in the second half. So, first of all, let's talk about this financial system, because you've been bringing up lately in some great videos and posts, again, the fact that our money is not backed by anything anymore. And that changed in the 1970s. So why don't you give our. Our listeners and our viewers a sense of what happened over time and what that has meant for. For the value for the purchasing power of our money.
- [01:25]
A
Sure. Well, I think we don't want to bore everybody to death with a, you know, a fact sheet of everything that's happened since 1971, but we have to go back and understand that when we came off the gold standard, which at the time was billed by President Nixon as a temporary phenomenon, that really was a dramatic strategic change. Now, we also need to understand why we came off the gold standard, because a lot of Americans don't understand that in 1970, 71, we were broke. We had squandered enormous quantities of money, not only on the Vietnam War, which was a huge drain, but also domestically, because, remember, LBJ was trying to do two things at the same time. He wanted his war on poverty and his massive big government programs to be successful. And he decided he was going to fight this war in Vietnam, which people had promised would not be the drain that it turned out to be. Sound familiar? So bottom line is, when Nixon comes to power and he looks at the true financial state of affairs, sits down with his Secretary of the treasury and so forth, he understands we've got to come off this standard, because if we Don't. We're going to default. I mean, it was that serious. But coming off the gold standard was hugely beneficial to this process of financialization. When you look at the people that are currently governing your country from the shadows, these are eight, nine, ten billionaires. They're all interested in the same thing, which was to continue to enrich themselves. So these people are calling the shots from behind the scenes. These are the people that are shaping the behavior of the President and the Congress both because effectively they own everything. I mean, let's be frank. I know everybody sees the little flag that is on the lapel of all the congressmen and senators. I'm a patriot. And they wave the flag. But over here, there's a pocket. It's open, it's very deep, and it fills up with cash from insider training and lobbyists and so forth. So all of these people have grown very, very rich over the last several decades as a result of the fact that we just print money. The dollar used to be a promissory note. In other words, if you turn it in, it's worth some amount of gold or silver. Well, that went away. So what's it worth? Well, it's backed by the trust and confidence in America's institutions, its military power, its economic productivity. Well, that's fine until you wake up someday and you figure out, my gosh, we have no more economic productivity. We're not building anything, we're not producing anything. So how did all of these people become billionaires? Well, they became billionaires because of financialization. Financialization simply means transaction fees. You move money from one place to the next, and you take a fee as a result of moving the money. That's a very simplistic way to look at it, but it's accurate. And everybody believes that that money is worth something. But what's the evidence for it? Does it translate into anything? And of course, this is what you've come into, and you're an expert on this. You know much more about it than I do about Bitcoin and why Bitcoin is such an enormous development because it's independent of the banking system, which is why all of those billionaires hate it. They. They like the banking system because the banking system is their cushion. It's. It's their. What's the right word? Refuge. When things go badly, they go there. Well, how do they survive all the disasters? We went through 2007, 2008, and you'll remember there was a woman named Sheila Baer, and she was involved with the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and she suggested in a meeting, well, we should bail these people out, but we should do it at 10 cents on the dollar because they should be punished for their mismanagement of finance. And of course, what happened? We bailed Everybody out at 100%. So you bail everybody out 100%. Everybody thanks you very much. And everybody was bailed out. I mean, you go to the Carlyle Group, they were bailed out. Doesn't matter where you go. And here, for instance, with the Carlyle Group, they're looking at an $11 trillion problem or more. They and BlackRock, all these big firms are back where they were in 2007, 2008, only worse. So what happens? Well, Bessant helps them. Private equity funds, hedge funds that where do they get their money? Well, you have the repo window and he's continued the whole time sending money to keep this market from collapsing. And everybody says, well, we can do this in perpetuity because we're the reserve currency. But that's not going to work very well because you inevitably debase the currency.
- [06:01]
C
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- [07:41]
A
Turns around and begins to do with Alice, Alistair McLeod over in London or James Grant or any number of people have said buy gold. Some cases are buying silver. But the point is, if you look at gold, gold has just gone through the roof. Well, that's a very wonderful thing if you could afford to buy it and keep it. And a lot of us have. But not everybody has that privilege or has that ability. So what does that mean for the currency? We're not really sure. But we think that at some point the quantitative easing, which has now begun again in earnest, it's never really stopped, but now it's kicked up again, is underway. And where does that inevitably lead you? Well, if you listen to Luke Roman, for instance, as one person, but there's Peter Schiff and a whole series of people, they'll tell you it leads to bankruptcy because your currency is debased. So how do we deal with that? I don't have an answer, but I think we are now finally closer to financial Armageddon than we have ever been. And as we were talking when we got started about bitcoin, bitcoin right now is joined at the hips to some extent with the stock market. When the stock market tanks, there'll be a tendency for bitcoin to tank. The difference though is that much like 29, 30, 31, 32, the market isn't going to recover right away. And that goes back to the fact that we don't have a production base, we don't have a manufacturing sector, we're not building anything. And we have all of this cheap labor that we've imported legally or illegally, and we won't be able to employ them. That's another problem we're going to have to deal with. But what I'm trying to get to though is that bitcoin though will recover. And a lot of people think, oh no, that's the end of digital currency if this happens. No, it's not, because we don't have enough gold on hand to back our currency. And see, that's the real issue. Where is all the gold? Where is it in Fort Knox? Is it under the streets of New York City? We had a Deposit of gold up in West Point, New York, underneath the military economy is it there and everybody wants to inventory it. No one ever gets to see it. And the Germans and the Italians have come in and said, we'd like to have our gold back because they deposited gold under those streets of New York City and they got about 40% back. And then we're told we don't have any more to send right now. Well, where is it? This has happened in London already on the gold exchange. They couldn't pay everybody the gold that they were trying to purchase. So they said, well, it'll take two weeks. And as Alastair McLeod points out, well, this is ridiculous. It's never taken more than a day or a matter of hours. So where is the gold? I think that's where bitcoin comes roaring into the equation because you need a store of value. And if we can't back everything with gold, what do we do? This then leads to a divergence in the financial system on a planetary basis. You're going to end up with brics and the countries that are joining it. Then you're going to end up with Europe and North America and a few other countries. And if we can't go to gold and they're going to go to gold, what do we do? I think bitcoin is going to fill the requirement. At least that's my supposition.
- [11:01]
B
Wow, that's fascinating. There's so much to unpack there.
- [11:05]
A
Let's not all unpack it today.
- [11:07]
B
Well, one of the things I love about bitcoin is its apolitical nature. The fact that it would fulfill the role of a new neutral reserve asset, which it seems like we're moving toward and we really need. Because it has, to your point, hollowed out our industrial base. Being the dollar as the reserve currency, it's been a double edged sword. It's benefited some people, the elites, those close to Washington D.C. those in the financial industries. To your point, the financialization, but really for the majority of Americans, they're really struggling because their purchasing power has been absolutely destroyed. One thing I, I wanted to talk to you about is you are one of the only people who point out that this is a problem that's both on the left and the right. This is a uni party. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I feel like we've become so tribal. I mean, today you have to pick a side. Left or right, red versus blue. But it seems like no matter who gets in office, the problems for the average American Just balloon. So talk to me about how we got there.
- [12:05]
A
Well, everybody is culpable. You know, if you go back to 2016, when President Trump first ran for election, a couple of times, he brought up the national sovereign debt. He talked about the requirement to cut spending, that we just can't go on as we are. He did that twice. And then suddenly the whole topic vanished because everybody around him said, oh, you can't do that. You know, why not? Well, we wouldn't survive. Who wouldn't survive? We know who wouldn't survive. Or the people that run the financial system, you know, call it whatever you want, the billionaire oligarchs, as they call them in Eastern Europe, whatever it is, they wouldn't survive. And they're, they're very worried right now. They may not say so publicly, but they're extremely worried about the situation. I, I agree with you. There is a uni party. Are there any differences? Yes. I mean, you, you have one at one attitude towards rule of law in one party and a different one in the other. I mean, clearly the left has decided they would just as soon suspend federal law, keep the borders open. Now, that appeals to some people on the right who are interested in cheap labor. But most of the people on the right say, no, we can't afford that because these people are coming in, they're getting free health care, free housing, free this, free that, and our own citizens at the same time are suffering. And if you go back to the depression in 1929 when Hoover was president, as soon as it became clear we were headed into an economic depression, he said, you know, we've got to get all of these people out of here who are temporary workers, migrants, and so forth. So he signed an executive order, and with the help of the U.S. army, they expelled, deported, use whatever term you want, 9 million Mexicans. Now, why would that happen? Was that not inhumane? Was that not unkind? Well, Hoover, who is, by the way, a Quaker, much as I was raised as a Quaker, was by no means inhumane. Quite the contrary. He said, I've got to get these people out because the American citizens will need the jobs that they are performing. Remember the jobs no one will do. Well, when you don't have anything to eat and you've lost your job and unemployment is at 20%, you'd be surprised what you're prepared to do. And he knew that. That process, by the way, continued under FDR. He deported 3.5 million. Most of this was Latin American labor. Most of it was from Mexico. Truman continued it 2.1 million. And then Eisenhower had Operation Wetback 1.5. Now, why would Eisenhower do that? Well, at the time, remember, when he took office, we had a huge debt, which he dramatically reduced, by the way, and dramatically cut spending to do it. He cut defense. He did not increase defense at a point in time where arguably we had a very serious threat from the Soviet Union. All of these presidents recognized that you had to take care of American citizens first. And I think that's the divide right now between the left and the right. The left is not really interested in that. In fact, I don't even think they're interested in citizenship or national identity or culture or language or anything else. That's the divide. But other than that, when it comes to money, they're all feeding eagerly together at the trough. And I don't see any evidence that that's going to stop. I know that I was told by a friend who's inside the government that there is an investigation right now of several senior people in the Senate and how much money they've pocketed largely as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. Now, whether or not that ever comes to light, anything is ever revealed, who knows? Yeah, you know, there's so much wrong. The corruption is so widespread. Where do you begin? Whom do you prosecute? And it's not a question there of left or right. Everyone has got his hand out or her handout. That's a tragedy.
- [15:59]
B
I mean, it seems like we are just going to keep spending no matter who's in office, and that's the biggest problem. We're at about 120 or 130% debt to GDP. $38 trillion debt.
- [16:13]
A
Well, what do you do? I mean, Natalie, if you're a congressman or a senator, are you going to turn around and shut down? You know, we used to call it food stamps. Now we have a new terminology for the various health and welfare programs to help people that need it. And a lot of people do, you know, do you shut it down? What are people going to do? I mean, you go on YouTube and look at the places there where federal aid and assistance is provided. And what happened when it shut down for three or four days, right? You had riots, you had violence in the street. People said, what am I going to do? I can't feed my child. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nobody wants to do that. So what do you do? You do nothing. And President Trump, he wants to be popular. He wants to be loved. He wants to be the. What is it, the purveyor of the golden age. So what's he going to do? Cut spending? What happens if you cut spending? I don't think people realize that we're actually in a position where suddenly the machine could seize up. And everybody says, oh, no, that's not possible. We can keep doing this. Again, I defer to people like Peter Schiff and Luke Grohman and a host of other people, all of whom Nassim Taleb have all looked at this and said, no, you can't. There will be a payday. And it's not in 10 years. I've heard people tell me, oh, Doug, quit worrying about, we can do this for 10 more years.
- [17:40]
B
Right?
- [17:41]
A
Good luck.
- [17:42]
B
Well, we're running these massive fiscal deficits and a lot of people, at least in my community, are waiting for the big print to come because they are anticipating something will once again seize up in the market, likely, you know, treasury dysfunction. And that's going to create a domino effect. And what, what do they always do? They rush in and they liquefy the market. They add liquidity, they add more units to the system. And we've been able to kick the can down the road. But this is where I want to kind of expand on your forecast because you say we can't keep doing that forever. We're certainly going to destroy the, the reserve currency status of the dollar. And if you look actually at the reserves of central banks around the world, gold has just for the first time hit the number one position. It hasn't for many, many decades, but it's, it's been accumulating in many of those central bank reserves. And now gold is taking a position ahead of U.S. treasuries, which is just fascinating to me. And we've seen gold out.
- [18:39]
A
Well, you know, Nassim Taleb has said that gold is now effectively the reserve currency.
- [18:46]
B
And I just hasn't been marked to market yet. Really.
- [18:49]
A
I hold his judgment in high esteem and I think he's right.
- [18:52]
B
Well, so how do you think that this crash, so to speak, will play out? Tell me, what do you think is gonna happen? And you don't believe that the stock market's gonna go back up. Cause all we've known in our lifetime, starting with the great financial crisis that wiped out my family, is they come in, they print. It might take a little bit of delay, but eventually we hit all new, new all time high in the stock market. All of a sudden, real estate bounces back. You know, all these assets hit new all time highs for the average person. They probably don't own them and they're suffering because their wages have not kept up with all of this inflation, this monetary inflation. But how do you see it playing out?
- [19:27]
A
Well, I think it's useful again. And I do this because most of your really top people in economics and finance do it as well. I go back to the historical record, and in 1939, Morgenthau went across to testify on the Hill. And afterwards he gathered a few friendly Democrats members and had a private conference with them because he wasn't going to tell the Republicans. And you can read this. There's a wonderful book on the New Deal. It's called New Deal or Raw Deal. And in his private commentary, which was recorded, he says, our unemployment today in 1939 is as bad as it was in 1932. Everything we've done has failed. We've spent money and we've spent money and we've spent money. All we've done is add to the debt. Now that is 1939 from 1932. And he didn't like to admit it, but he said, we're exhausted. We didn't know what to do. Now, one of the things that kept us afloat at the time that very few people are aware of, is that we demanded from the British and the French, to whom we had lent great deal of money so they could fight the first World War. That's one of the reasons we went in, to bail them out. Sadly, we demanded that they pay us in gold. And so we had this steady influx of gold from overseas into our banks. We don't have that now. So in 1939, things began to change when it became clear that there probably would be a war. And there were lots of discussions between Morgan Tao and Bernard Baruch and others with the president trying to figure out, how do we get out of this? And at the time, Franklin Roosevelt thought, well, if the British and the French go to war against the Germans, that will save us. Because then the British and the French and the Germans will be locked again in another immobilized trench warfare scenario. In other words, there won't be a winner. If they go to war, it'll drag out. The longer it drags out, the better for us because they'll need everything that we have, our commodities, our money, everything. And that will help us recover. We'll get back to full employment and so forth. Well, you know what happened? The opposite. That war broke out, and it ended very, very quickly in 1940 with the defeat of everybody by the Germans. Incidentally, Stalin also thought that the war would drag out, and it would weaken Germany and exhaust the Allies and open Europe to his invasion. So what happens at the end of the war is something he hoped to achieve in 1940. As long as his potential opponents, Germans, British, French, everybody were weakened. None of it worked out as anticipated. I don't know exactly how this will go, but I think we've got to go back to the Depression and you don't snap your fingers and create an enormous manufacturing base. Now what we did have during the Depression, we did have manufacturing and we did invest a lot of money. But the real kick came during the Second World War when enormous sums of cash were delivered to the big industries. The industries then built fabulous production machines. Henry Ford is still very famous for what he put together up in Illinois and Michigan and all these places. Everybody was delighted because when the war ended, even though there was a temporary drop, we were able to take all of that manufacturing base and transform it overnight into commercial use. So instead of producing tanks and aircraft and all these other things, we produce toasters. We produce every conceivable home item that you could find. Things that had been invented 30, 40 years earlier but had not reached the market, suddenly reached the market. That includes, for instance, silk stockings. We used to get excited over parachutes. Remember the, that was the, the substance from which ladies hoes were subsequently made. You know, then you got the transistor revolution. All of this comes out as a result of the Second World War. There's a great book about. It's called the Master Switch, written by a brilliant man at Columbia University. Everybody should read it. He explains how these things take time. You don't just like AI. AI will revolutionize everything. I'm sure it probably will, but not overnight. And that's what everybody fails to understand. And right now we've got a president says, I want to return manufacturing in the United States. Great, let's do it. How do you do it? Hasn't worked very well. It's taking time. There. There needs to be a long term strategy. We were rescued by the Second World War and some people think, oh, well, then another war will rescue us. Warfare has changed. So it's not a question of how many tanks or unmanned aerial vehicles or guns that you can produce. The problem is I don't know exactly what's going to happen, But I think Nassim Taleb is right. I think gold is now the real reserve currency. The days of our reserve currency are numbered. And I think it's going to become painfully obvious that we really aren't. Because you've got the Saudis doing business with the Chinese and Yuan. You have the Chinese that have set up gold vaults now, one in Hong Kong and one in Saudi Arabia and Riyadh. Gold is now being moved back and forth in these areas between the various actors. We're being left behind, frankly speaking. So we're. What we really need to do, which is going to happen whether we like it or not, is we're going to have to turn internally, we're going to have to look at the United States. We're going to have to discover the truth. Our problems are self made. We made them and we've got to fix them. The question is, can we do it with the kind of government we have? Because for everyone that stands up and says, yes, I agree with you, I want to do this. Someone else stands up and says, that's not in my interest or in the interest of my constituents, and you fight. FDR effectively became a dictator. He had problems on the Hill from time to time, but he really had enormous authority and power. We're going to have to have a president with enormous authority and power, but he's also going to have to be someone who knows what he's doing and surrounds himself with talent, really great talent. FDR figured out that he didn't understand everything. And many of his advisors were upset with the money that was distributed to the major industrial figures because he said, well, those people didn't vote for you. He said, I know that, but if I give them the money, they'll make it work. Well, we need to find some sort of arrangement like that right now. We have lots of billionaires, but they didn't get there by building things. That's the problem. We've lost our, our capacity, as you pointed out. You sent me this article that talks about all the minerals and rare earths. Yeah. How many people know anything about smelting? Anything? How many know anything about how you mine and where you mine? We've lost that. Now we can regain it. And everybody talks about rare earths and they, they need to stop and consider what's already out there in Canada as well as places in the United States. This is not a hopeless picture, but we've never built a refinery because a refinery for rare earths is going to cost you a billion dollars. So how do you get that with the government? The government has to do that. That's what happened under fdr and that's what happened during the Second World War. The government intervened. Here's the cash. Make it happen. We're going to have to go back to that in some fashion. But we have to have a strategy. We have to know what we're doing. Right now I don't see any strategy for anything and I don't think we have people in Washington who really know what they're doing.
- [27:29]
C
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A
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- [29:12]
B
I want to zero in on all of this a little bit more because to your point, you can't just flip a switch and suddenly we have a powerful industrial bas, especially for some of these critical supply chains. We might have some of the rare earths or potential here, but we can't refine it. I mean basically China has a monopoly on a lot of this and we need some of these rare earths and critical minerals for everything from electric vehicles to things that go in our cell phones, satellites, missiles, everything related to national security and the, the military industrial complex that has also been so hollowed out. Let's talk a little bit about this because it seems like the administration badly. Right, and, and that's the, the big push. But I think they're underestimating how long it's going to take. I mean, we are probably 15, 20 years behind China and we're going to need to print the money in order to buy it. Which also says something about our Treasuries.
- [30:08]
C
Right?
- [30:08]
B
This is what Luke Roman writes about. It's like, well, if we're printing to purchase commodities or to re. Industrialize, then those Treasuries aren't worth very much. Why should anyone else trust them and hold them in reserves?
- [30:19]
A
Right? It's happened already, isn't it? Nobody really wants to buy our debt. And the real danger at this point is that the Chinese, who have been in a measured way shedding our debt, in other words, offloading treasuries, they could suddenly accelerate that with terrible consequences for us. They're not the only ones. We look at Japan, that's a good example of what could happen to us. I think Luke Roman is right. I don't think there are any easy answers. But you need a government that is led by people who first of all recognize the problem, understand there is no quick fix, and secondly, are prepared to tell the truth because the American people haven't heard the truth for a long time. They really haven't. Most Americans think, oh, everything's fine, you know, as long as I can buy a six pack of beer, put it on the back of my bike or throw it in the trunk of my truck, go home, watch the game on, on Monday nights, you know, pick up a burger, you know, what's the problem? Well, that's the beauty of fake money. When you don't have sound money, you just print and you print and you print. But in the meantime, the house that was you paid 11,000 for in 1970 now is 50,000. The car is now 20 times more expensive. All these problems are hitting, so people are beginning to feel it, but not to the point where they're ready to go into the streets with pitchforks and torches. That's coming. And they're going to need answers. They're going to want answers. They're going to want a government that responds. That's one of the reasons that FDR did many of the things he did, even though at the time it wasn't clear that it would work. He said, people have to believe that we care. They have to see action. Well, this time around, it's going to be even tougher. And I don't have an easy answer, but what we've been doing with these tariffs is hitting a lot of friends over the head, and it hasn't helped us very much. And we have misconstrued what we're dealing with. In China, for instance, Chinese are preeminently interested in business. These people have no interest in war whatsoever. That's the last thing on their minds. And Taiwan, for instance, we keep talking about it and talking about if Taiwan doesn't declare independence from China, that's red line number one. And red line number two does not invite us to put missiles or troops on Taiwan. Nothing's going to happen. The Chinese understand the consequences for business in Asia if they go in there. Everyone in Asia will be horrified. Now, if they declare independence and then we put missiles and troops there, everyone in Asia says, well, China has every right. But right now, there's no reason for the Chinese to become excited. What the Chinese have said is that they're going to quietly build the capability, that if they have to go, they can do it. But they haven't said they're going to do it. Remember, the original plan was reunification by 2046, and the assumption was that they would grow together. And I think that will happen provided we stay out of it. But then you have people interested. You talked about the military industrial complex. The Navy wants this huge surface fleet. What if the Navy. What. What are we going to do with it? Park that aircraft, carry off the coast of China and see how long it lasts. It's not going to last very long. Same thing with the Russians, you know. Park it where? Off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Forget it. They'll. They, they will neutralize it. They may not sink it. They don't really need to. How many holes do you need in a flight deck before you can't use it anymore? Then it's. Or make it dead in the water. I mean, my point is, we have this legacy force from the Cold War, the old industrial age with an industrial age military. We're trying to graft new things onto it. Doesn't work very well. At some point, you need to take a clean sheet of paper, rip it out and say, okay, we've got to start over. We have a different. We have a different world, different requirements. Got to do things differently. Nobody wants to do that. I mean, I don't know how many times when I would give briefings to members of the Senate of the House on where we needed to go. With military power and specifically the ground force at the time. And they would look so well. Don't mention shedding unneeded equipment. Oh, that's bad. If you talk about that, people will oppose you because that means loss of income. They want to keep producing the big heavy metal items that they've always used.
- [34:41]
B
Right.
- [34:42]
A
If you tell them there's another way, this cheaper, faster, better, they're horrified. Yeah, but that's going to go away once we're completely broke.
- [34:49]
B
Right.
- [34:49]
A
When we can no longer print, it will and I don't know, maybe we'll come up with a new currency. I mean, that's what happened in Weimar. We changed the currency over in Weimar and then started from scratch. It was a lot of suffering, but they came out of it relatively quickly. Then they found a way to back the currency in the 1930s in Germany. With what? With Germany's economic potential and capacity, its manufacturing abilities, its engineering and its technology. In other words, it wasn't just gold. It was a range of these things that people had faith in German engineering and ability. We have got to rebuild faith in us, restore faith in us as a manufacturing power. And we still have this tremendous agricultural sector, and that needs to be optimized. We haven't really optimized it. We can produce more food than anybody in the world if we're willing to go into the agricultural sector and do things differently. And energy, huge opportunity in energy if we know what we're doing and we get out of this business of you can't, you can't drill here, you can't drill there, you can't do this, you can't do that. And the climate controls, everything else that has to go away. You've got to get back on our feet before we start to impose those kinds of restrictions. It's going to be tough, but that's where it takes a government with a very strong figure, strong strategy, smart people.
- [36:13]
B
Well, the military is really your expertise. And recently there was this fascinating op ed out of the New York Times, which I was actually surprised that the New York Times of all outlets, was willing to point out some of the things that have happened over the last few decades in the Department of Defense. But they talked about essentially the war games that they've been trying against China. And in every situation we lose because our weapons system get depleted or they're obsolete. Now that the technology is better, they're able to produce it cheaply and it's apparently able to take down our defense systems. I wanted to get your take on this because it also showed a little bit of the financialization and monopolization that's happened in the military industrial complex, because we basically, I think the article said, have five producers of these strategic equipment and military weapons that we need, whereas there used to be over 50 in just the 90s. That's not that long ago. And so everything is consolidated, concentrated, and yet we aren't able to win a conventional war against an adversary like China anymore.
- [37:23]
A
Well, you realize that we used to have 50 media corporations. Today we have six. And in the military, we went from 50 roughly different producing firms to about five. That was done with the best of intentions. It was not malicious at the time. Bill Perry, who was Secretary of defense in the 90s under Clinton, felt that we were moving into a new era where in order to preserve capability and production capability, we had to concentrate the capabilities in five firms. He actually believed there would be a peace dividend. Bill Perry was somebody that did not want to launch interventions all over the world. Unfortunately, he was wrong, and a lot of us were at the time. And when you talk about the military, there were a lot of people. I wrote five books, but I wrote two in succession, trying to get people to see that we needed to radically reform, reorganize, overhaul the military. And people thought it was interesting, but they said, oh, well, we don't really need to do this right now. And by the way, you know, that's going to make a lot of people unhappy because I talked about stopping the production of the M1 tank series. I said, we have to figure out how many of these we want. That's what we keep. We need to change the engines, for instance, to get rid of these terrible turbine engines that drink gas and burn at such a high temperature that you can track wherever they go from low Earth orbiting satellites. So, I mean, you can't surprise anybody. You can't disappear on satellite photography. These kinds of things need to happen. But then once we've figured out what we're going to keep, then we need to start tinkering and experimenting and figuring out what other kinds of things we want. New platforms, different kinds of platforms, different, different things. When we went into Iraq in 2003, I sat with the vice Chief of staff of the army at the time, Jack Keane, and whom I like, and I said, you know, we really ought to invest in this thing called the Typhoon. The Typhoon was a German system. It was an unmanned aerial vehicle, what we call a drone, and it could fly for about two hours. It had a 25 kilogram warhead on it. And it had, it could be used day or night. And I said, what we ought to do is fly these things ahead of our advancing ground forces. And if we see a target of opportunity we think is going to be helpful or important to us, we fly this thing into it. Maybe it's a command and control center, maybe it's an enemy air defense battery, whatever. And he said, well, what do you, what if you run out of those? I said, well, you get the battery, you'll have at least 2,000 of these things with warheads on them, so you're not going to run out. And I said, let's find out what it can do. And he thought, well, that's interesting. I said, he said, who produced it? I said, the Germans. Oh, so we didn't produce. Was not invented here. And what, what kind of a war are you going to have with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and others if suddenly you're using a German weapon system? I mean, these things seem ridiculous, but in retrospect it was an issue. We didn't do it, so we didn't experiment. We didn't find anything out. And experimentation in the military has historically meant this. This is the box that we use today. We want you to experiment with other boxes, but make sure at the end of the experimentation it's still a box.
- [41:09]
B
I mean, this is so crazy to me, Colonel, because over the last two decades we've spent like $8 trillion on foreign wars that have not served the American public and we've squandered away all that money. You would think that since we're printing it out of thin air, that we would at least get the benefit of having the most advanced weapons system that now could take on any country if needed to defend ourselves. But it seems like instead, like we just heard about recent aircraft carrier that the New York Times wrote about was billions, went billions over budget and was delayed by like five or six years. And then during the 12 day war with Iran, are the systems that we offered were depleted in like a couple of days and we, we literally don't have what we need to defend ourselves for national security. I don't understand that after all the money spent.
- [41:55]
A
Well, there are two things at work. One is, remember that in the United States, money equals capability. If you spend enough money, you get what you want. This is the American mentality. In other words, military power is on sale at Walmart. So you go into Walmart and you buy military power off the shelf. Now you have the newest toy. You should be good to go. But that's not the way military power works. Military power involves so many variables. So many different things are at work. People that have to work with, assimilate the technology, experiment with it, and figure out how to employ it. We don't do that very well. We like people at the lowest level to do what they're told. And the generals have relationships with people in the private sector, in the defense industry. And when they get to three or four stars, they want to make sure they retire into those defense industries and sit on the boards of banks and various things and get to work with hedge fund managers. For instance, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was picked by President Trump, this man Cain, he was all excited for Raisin Cain. I love that. Just like he loved bad dog Mattis until he didn't like Mattis anymore. Cain was affiliated with a hedge fund that was run by one of Kushner's brothers. That's where we got the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Well, he was a tough guy. He bombed isis. Well, bombing ISIS is not very challenging. ISIS has no air force, has no air defense. I mean, I hate to be blunt, but this is the other problem. All of these things, and you end up spending a lot of money. And then people say, well, we should be the best because we spent more money than anybody else. You saw this with AI The Chinese, with a pittance. A fraction of what we invest are much more effective producing something than we are. In that case, it had to do with artificial intelligence. We used to do these things better, but we were never brilliant, contrary to popular belief. And we made a lot of mistakes. And we flooded the battle space, if you will, with stuff to the point where our opponents were overwhelmed. And we forget. We all always go back to World War II and we forget. Well, there were 15 million Soviet soldiers. And we think that 15 million Soviet soldiers died in the war along with another 24, another 20 million or so civilians. Russians are very reluctant to admit these losses. In fact, in 2002, 2003, after Putin took over, he was trying to rebuild Russian morale, rebuild the sense of identity and love of country. And the NKVD archives were open when I was in Moscow in November 2001, sat with an historian and members of the General Staff Academy, and they told me we lost 39,900,000 based upon what we found in the archives, NKVD archives. And we're still counting. Now, why is that important? Well, he passed a law. You can't criticize the conduct of the Second World War because so many people were horrified when they found out about the losses. In other words, you could make the argument that Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union paid the road to Berlin with the bodies of millions of their citizens. Of course, they'd killed millions before the war began anyway. How do you sell love of country and patriotism with that kind of record? So I understand why they did what they did. But we also forget that that sacrifice was made. In the meantime, we did take losses. We lost over 200,000 killed just in Europe. That was the main event for us. Japan was a sideshow, Frankly. Japan was 10% the size of the U.S. economy. And we had the British and we had others that worked with us. The British Empire still had enormous assets and they poured in a lot of material and people. In other words, we were not alone. But when we talk about the war, we're as bad as the Russians. We have a bad habit of not mentioning what everybody else did and everybody else's role. So there's this myth that emerges from the Second World War that we are the superman. We're invincible, invulnerable, all powerful. Nobody can challenge us. That myth carries into the present. And you still have a lot of people say we're the greatest, nobody can challenge us. Well, I'm afraid that's wrong. And we're very fortunate that we have not taken any embarrassing, really big, embarrassing losses. That's one part. Second problem we've got in addition to the defense business and the failure to experiment and do things differently, everybody talks about, well, we need to be innovative so they form an innovation cell. Innovation cells don't innovate. People innovate. You knew that. You know that from Bitcoin. It's not you. We're building an innovation cell for X, Y and Z. Nothing comes out of it. That's not how you innovate. And the creative individuals who innovate are people that no one likes because they challenge everything and they find a different way forward. But that's the way the military works. So your real innovators are inevitably crushed really badly. In the US military, that's been true for forever. The second part of this is that we have no general staff. We don't select people for intelligence and character and competence. It's a good old boys network. So the people that rise to the ranks, well, like him. He's a good guy. That means he won't rock the boat. He'll join the club and keep things as they are. One of my officers, he went on to command and he told me that the commanding General he reported to, because he'd been with me for two years, did a great job, and we had turned in brilliant performance at the National Training Center. Nobody's ever matched it in the old training center. So he showed up to take command of his unit, and the general said, now, look, I'm happy to have you, and I think you're a great guy, but we don't want to do any of this innovation stuff like McGregor. Don't do that here. Just stay in your lane. In other words, don't think, do what you're told. Question nothing. When you run the armed forces like that, you get what you pay for, and that's a big problem. So are you getting a quality group of senior officers who are intelligent, imaginative, thoughtful, and creative? Not necessarily. You're getting people that are going to go along. That's what they're about. That's how they got there. They're company men. You've heard that expression, he's a company man. Don't expect him to change a thing. That's what you've got. So we need revolutionary change in the United States, not just in the private sector, where we absolutely need it. We need to break up these giant tech firms. They're too powerful on their own. We need to break them up. We need to create competition. We have to compete in the global marketplace. John McCain, very few people I met with him on this subject of the military, and I was very pleased because we got into a discussion of equipment, and I said, well, at the moment, the best producer of this particular material is German. And I said, I've talked to the German CEO that he'll build the factory here and they'll produce the material here with American labor. He said, that's great. I support that. I will do everything I can to help you. Unfortunately, he was alone, and what happened was that you got to look at the big five that I just mentioned, General Dynamics, the rest of these, they don't want anybody inside the United States competing with them.
- [49:57]
B
Well, right, exactly. And the competition is the one thing that would actually drive prices down and hopefully quality up. But we really don't have that. I mean, across the board. And to your point, I mean, it seems like it's just a couple of companies that have dominance and the money has ended up in stocks and maybe mansions in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Something productive.
- [50:17]
A
We're buying back stock.
- [50:18]
B
Yeah.
- [50:19]
A
And there was a time when that was viewed as essentially on the margin of illegality. Right now we. We actually. This is no big deal. Yeah, it's Terrible.
- [50:28]
B
Well, let's turn back to the financial system then, because do you think that this crash that you're anticipating will happen in 2026?
- [50:35]
A
Yeah.
- [50:36]
B
And you're basically seeing it as we can't print our way out of it like they're going to try to. But bond yields are going to continue to rise and stocks are going to continue to fall. Like, how do you actually say this? See this playing out.
- [50:46]
A
Well, look at Japan, their bond yields. What has happened there? Our bond market. Market is going to go under. The bond market in London went under last year briefly. They call them gilts, which comes from the old German word guilt for money. And they almost went under. And then you had. Liz Truss was removed. She went the way of the Buffalo because she was going to try and reinstitute that your policies, which made absolutely no sense and were unachievable in the current environment. You got this. I can't remember his name now. It's terrible. He had an Indian name and I can't remember it, but he stepped in, confidence was restored. Everything went back to normal. I don't think that's going to happen the next time around with Starmer. So I think you're going to see the crashes begin in Europe first. I think it's going to happen in France and Italy and probably Great Britain first. All of these places are running on fumes. They have no fuel, their economies are destroyed. Germany's economy is destroyed. And all of a sudden they want to convert Volkswagen. Volkswagen factory to produce tanks. What are they, nuts? First of all, future wars will involve tanks, but not on the scale that we've seen in the past. That's not necessarily where I put all my eggs, but the point is that I think Europe is going to go under first economically. We will then go under as well. I could be wrong. Maybe things will crack up here first, but I really think it'll happen first in Britain and France and Italy and Germany. And remember that the euro dollar is critical. And when the euro dollar crashes, everything falls apart. I'm not a financial analyst and I'm not a financial expert. I'm like everybody else. I'm trying to survive. I want to come out of this with my shirt. And My family lost $4 million in 1929. And the reason that my great grandfather lost $4 million, very simple. He believed Secretary of the Treasury Mellon. Mellon gave a speech in June of 1929, and he told everybody who was concerned about potential problems in the market. And he said, we live in an era of unbroken prosperity. Calm your fears. Well, what was he doing? He was converting everything into gold and cash. He was selling short on all the stocks.
- [53:14]
B
That's horrible.
- [53:15]
A
FDR tried to put him in jail, should have, but he wasn't able to do it. And I don't know what the consequence, what the details of the court case were, but he spent two, three, four years trying to put Mellon in jail. He should have gone to jail. My great grandfather was a very conservative man, but he was a very effective businessman. This is my mother. My maternal great grandfather said, secretary Mellon's a good man. He would never lie.
- [53:39]
B
Ouch. I mean, 4 million back then. Wow.
- [53:42]
A
And my grandfather kept saying, dad, sell out. Get out, get out, get out. Had he done that, everything would have been different. So, you know, these things are hard to forecast and hard to know. I don't have 4 million to lose, but I've got a lot to lose. So I have taken. When I tell other people I think this is happening, and they all say, well, what have you done? And I said, well, I've tried to build my cash position, which Warren Buffett does. He's 25% of everything's in cash. I've tried to invest in gold and silver and Bitcoin, but I've also sold bitcoin quite recently because I thought it would drop.
- [54:23]
B
Yeah, well, you actually did the same exact thing that Luke Roman did. You sold in the 90s.
- [54:27]
C
Right.
- [54:28]
B
And you believe that you'll be able to buy back lower. So tell me exactly why you did that. You believe that bitcoin will crash with everything, but then Bitcoin will recover, and you think it will ascend to being a more widely accepted store of value.
- [54:42]
A
Yeah. Because again, it's back to my earlier question. How much gold have we got? Where is it? Who's inventoried it? I don't know the answer, but I suspect that we don't have as much as we say we do, because if we did, wouldn't we let everybody know? What are the Chinese doing right now? They're buying it up left and right.
- [55:03]
B
And we don't know if the numbers.
- [55:05]
C
That any country reports are accurate.
- [55:07]
B
I mean, do we have access to any of those vaults? That's what's. So it's difficult with gold. You can't verify it very easily. You can't settle it across the world very easily.
- [55:15]
A
Well, one of my friends in India told me, said, oh, Douglas, the Indian housewives have more gold than you do. He may be right. I don't know. But everybody is out there buying up as much gold as they possibly can. And I don't know what we have. So if the world is going to diverge into the BRICs and then the rest of us, and we, the rest of us are not in a position to join brics because we can't peg to gold, what do you do? Bitcoin, digital currency, not talking about what the banks put out. That's a disaster. Forget it. That is a scam. Who wants to buy one? 1 coin for a dollar? People that stupid, that's the last thing in the world. Whereas bitcoin can go from 10,000 to a million very, very quickly now. It's not going to be perfect. There will be speculation, there will be problems. It's a bumpy road, but I think ultimately it will prevail because you can also do business with it. I mean, right now if you're in Moscow or St. Petersburg, you can't use credit cards, you can't even use your currency. What do you do? You go to the bank, you open a bank account and then you turn to bitcoin. And that's how people are financing themselves over, over in Russia right now that are from the West.
- [56:42]
B
That would be the ultimate chess move is if the leaders of Russia or China all of a sudden said we're accumulating bitcoin. I mean, that would be wild in game theory, but so what price are you looking for? Like where do you think you would buy back in? How low do you think bitcoin's going to go?
- [56:59]
A
Again, I am not a financial expert, you know, and I'm not a psychic, so. But I think it'll fall a lot lower than 70, especially when the market finally gives way. See, the market, contrary to popular belief, is not a reflection of the broader society. Whereas people out there already know the economy is bad. All I have to do is go to the grocery store. People are celebrating the fact that gasoline prices haven't received risen that much. So at least that hasn't hit. But we're going to see prices continue to rise. Inflation is higher than, than reported and alleged. I think everybody knows that. So the question is, how low does bitcoin fall? It'll fall with the market. If the market goes, you know, down substantially and there are great losses, I think people will be tempted to pull out a bitcoin. So it could go down to 40 or even lower. But my point to people is, and I don't know what the final outcome will be, that's fine, get back into it, because it will go like a Rocket people are talking about, well, it's going to be worth a million dollars a coin. It's coming. They're right. May not be coming quickly, but it's coming.
- [58:18]
B
So interesting. So you're very bearish in the short term, but very, very bullish in the long term. How do we get to the golden age that the Trump administration is talking about? How do we get to an era where America does achieve the kind of economic prosperity for the average person that it once had? Because I do think it's possible we should use technology for good. We can take some steps to right the ship, even though it feels like it's sinking right now. What would you do?
- [58:46]
A
We have 52 million people inside the United States who are not born here. We think that 30 million may be illegal. I hope that number is right. I hope it's not higher. What do you do with people that are non Americans who are here and are becoming a burden on the economy? It's back to my discussion of what was done during the Depression. If you don't do something about that and your pool of resources shrink so that you can no longer provide unlimited health care for millions of people that came here illegally.
- [59:23]
B
Well, and jobs, because AI is disintermediating jobs.
- [59:26]
A
Well, it's. The other point is that the people coming in, this doesn't mean they're all bad people. I, you know, that. That has nothing to do with it. But we're not bringing in people that have degrees in applied mathematics, that are civil engineers, all of whom also speak English. You know, there are more people in China that speak English than we have in the United States. Think about that. That's probably also true in India, though. I haven't seen the statistic.
- [59:53]
B
That's crazy.
- [59:54]
A
Validated. Yeah, well, I mean, they've learned to speak English. English is the international language of commerce and trade and so forth. So what do you do with all of these people? You've got to send them home. We cannot transform them into something because we weren't there when they went to school at the age of 5 or 10 or 12. We have to send them back. Now, when things improve and they want to come back to the United States legally, they can do that. They can certainly apply for it. But right now, I think it's a very fragile economy, and I would not want to be burdened with large numbers of people that we cannot employ effectively. And people say, well, who's going to run your sort of taco stand on the side of the road? Well, somebody else will. That's what we found out during the Depression. And in many cases, things that people do with manual labor will go away because they'll say, well, we don't need it. We found a way around it. That's the other thing we don't take into consideration. You can't innovate and end up going around things. One of the most interesting events in my life that really woke me up to this. I was visiting with. With some friends in Germany, and they took me out to this what we would call a backyard, which not all Germans have, but this man had a pretty substantial yard. That's very rare, beautiful yard, by the way, with lots of beautiful flowers on the edge. But this vast grass area, which, you know, he is like gold in Germany. And he had a dog house over here on the right side. And all of a sudden, the doghouse. Out from the doghouse came this robot. And this robot then cut the grass and harvested what was the refuse from the grass that had been cut. And after it completed, it went back into the doghouse, plugged itself in to be recharged. It had a map wild. Okay, so how much future is there in lawn care?
- [61:59]
B
Right?
- [62:01]
A
I guess that's my point. That's where we're headed. Yeah, I think it's pretty obvious, and that's a very modest example, but it really got my attention suddenly. Now this. This thing has a satellite map inside of it, and you can reprogram it to go different places, different things. It communicates directly with the overhead satellite that takes a picture of it and you're off to the races. And if it has something it can't do, it can't. It can't go down a certain slope. It'll tell you that it won't go down and stumble. It'll just say, can't do that. And then you know that you're going to have to go over there and do that manually or until they come up with a better robot. My suspicion is we'll come up with better robots. Don't you?
- [62:40]
B
Probably, yeah.
- [62:41]
A
Yeah.
- [62:42]
B
Okay, so. So what are the other steps toward this golden age?
- [62:46]
A
I think it'll take us a decade, a decade to recover from the damage we've done to ourselves over the last 20 years. And that's military damage, commercial damage, economic damage. And the other thing is, remember, we are, in the view of most people in the international system right now we're seeing as patient zero. Patient zero is a term for someone who has a communicable disease that is highly dangerous that you put in Isolation. At the end of the corridor, in a wing of the building that is guarded. That's the way we're viewed. We're seen in those terms. What's wrong with America? America shows up, tells you they want to do business with you, then explains that in order to do business with them, you have to change all these laws, alter the way you govern yourself. And oh, by the way, if you don't like that, we'll invade you and beat you into submission. That's the view of America. Now, this was not the view 50, 60 years ago, but it is now. We had an opportunity after Vietnam to rectify that. We haven't done it. We've doubled down on it. Now we're turning to Venezuela and Venezuela's strong man, Maduro, whom we don't like for whatever reasons. We don't need to waste time on that. You can always find a reason why you don't like somebody. He offered us an opportunity. He said, I'll give you this, I'll give you this, you have a stake in this, and so forth. And was rejected because we want him to expel Chinese investment. We want to want him to expel Russian presence of any kind in investment and potentially anybody else we don't like. It turns out that now, apparently Venezuela is harboring Islamists. Gosh, think about that. They have Islamists. Clearly they need to be bombed. So I don't think there are any Iranian training camps or anything else in Venezuela. It's a bunch of nonsense. But this, this is what the world is seeing now. Why don't we want to be down there with the Russians and the Chinese? Do we think we can't compete? Let's stop and think about that. We have the best oil engineers in the world. I can, I can take you to Texas and meet. You can meet them all. These people are brilliant. We have the best technology to drill for oil, particularly deep drilling. We're the best. Now you're telling me that if he allows us into Venezuela to exploit the oil and gas capabilities, maybe other mining areas, maybe rare earths and other things, and that we can't out compete the Chinese and the Russians? Venezuela is on our doorstep. They have to travel 7,000 miles or more to get there. How long does it take us to get to Venezuela from the United States? How many people do we have who already speak Spanish? My point is, I think we're making a bad decision. We can outperform the Russians and the Chinese if we're given the opportunity. In many parts of Africa now, things the Chinese built 20 years ago or 30 years ago are falling apart because the Chinese came in and said, well, the French want to take three years, the Americans want to take four years. It cost you a lot of money. We'll do it in a year and we'll charge much less. So they took the Chinese deal. You go to places like Angola and other countries in Africa, these things are falling apart. So what's the lesson? We can do better. We are under selling and underrating ourselves in that connection. So we need to get out of this business of immediately beating people over the head with the US Military, because obviously the drug issue is a serious one, but Venezuela is not at the center of that. Everybody knows it. Go to the Drug Enforcement Agency, the website, and look at where the drugs come from. By the way, now I'm told India has surpassed China in terms of fentanyl production and distribution. Now, do we want to bomb India? You want to bomb China with that? No. You need to control your coastal waters, you need to control your borders, you need to enforce the law inside the United States. We need much harsher penalties for the people involved in drug and human trafficking, particularly child trafficking. And right now, human trafficking is more lucrative than drugs. If you're in the Sinaloa cartel, that's crazy. It's terrible. But that's tough because now you're telling the population you're going to crack down with police power, you're going to go after these people, and now you'll have also, oh, I think that's terrible. This man should not be, should not face the death penalty for child trafficking. Really. And if he's producing, if he's the distributor for all the drugs, how many families has he destroyed? How many thousands of people have lost their lives because of him? And you don't want to take harsh measures against him. And every policeman that I've talked to, everyone in the law enforcement business, I've said, if we made it the death penalty for child trafficking, if we made it death penalty for people who distribute drugs inside the United States, what would happen? He said, oh, it would all stop. Oh, but that's mean. Well, how much do you love your country? How much do you care about the people inside the. Inside the country? I think we're turning inward now. I think that was the sort of message in the new national security strategy, which is not really a strategy, it's just a. A bunch of assertions about what we want to do. But the message is there. We need to turn inward. Our problems are at home. We're not going to solve them overseas, but that's tough. A lot of people don't want to go down that road and there's not a lot of money in it. If you're sitting on the Hill, Right. And the military, how do you justify big ticket weapon systems if you're principally defending the United States?
- [69:01]
B
Right.
- [69:02]
A
And what you've seen in Ukraine, there's a lot of evidence that the defense has now surpassed the offense in terms of its capabilities.
- [69:09]
B
Right.
- [69:10]
A
Defend the United States, that should be our number one concern. And the population that lives inside our country.
- [69:17]
B
Well, to wrap it up, my last question is specifically with regards to the economic side. What would you do if you were in one of these leadership positions? I mean, we basically have to print, we have to run things hot if we're going to pay for any of this. So it's, I mean, gold is gold has been a refuge. It seems like maybe we should move back to sound money.
- [69:39]
C
Right.
- [69:39]
B
So what would you do?
- [69:41]
A
Well, you have to go back to sound money. And for a short time, and I mean a short time, a couple of years sounds catastrophic, but it's usually a couple of years. That's what happened in Germany after the Weimar Republic. Credit dries up. That's your biggest problem. But it does return. And people will look at what we've got and they'll look for something called a strategy. If you look at China and the way they have built their economy, they have clusters around towns and cities across the country that produce certain categories of goods. Well, that's kind of what we did in the 1930s and 40s, particularly during the Second World War. In other words, we achieved economies of scale. We built certain things in certain areas. We've got to go back to that. We've got to look at the nation as a whole. We've got to figure out where are the resources, what are the needs, what are the goals? How do we maximize the value of the resources, human and material, within a broader national framework. Now, that's my point on government. Government has to move beyond what it has done in the past. That's something that a lot of people are uncomfortable with at this point. That may change when people can't eat. And that's what I'm banking on. The people are going to say, enough's enough. We have to have real action. We have to have a real plan. People don't realize it, but BMW, everybody's favorite automobile in the United States. BMW started out in Berlin. It was the Prussian Motorworks. And the government decided that they needed labor employment in Munich. So where did they move it? To Bavaria. Bavaria was just farmland. There was nothing there. And in the 1930s, they decided, no, we're going to build this up in Munich. And it became the Bavarian Motorworks. We're going to have to do things like that. We're going to have to make the decision to go to certain places and build things. But there has to be a grand design. The design is what you see in China. And that design came into existence in the 90s, and by 2001, 2002, that is now what you see. So China, interestingly enough, is in a position today that we were in in 1946 and 47. So you're not going to turn that around quickly in the United States, but you're going to have to have a plan that takes you into the next 20 years. And the Chinese today are more appreciative than they've ever been for all the hard work and the investment that was done over the previous 30 or 40 years. And that's why the government in China is supported by the vast majority of the population.
- [72:35]
B
Yeah, it's really interesting. We've got a lot of China hawks here, but they are ahead of us in so many ways, and they've subsidized critical industries and the buildup of infrastructure. They have us on energy. It costs about a century sixth of the price for one gigawatt than it does here. And a gigawatts a gigawatt, just like a bitcoin is a bitcoin. Right. So they do have a lot of advantages. But I think that some of these challenges are opportunities for us. The American spirit is strong. I know it's something you believe in, the grit, the determination. We got to pull ourselves up. I see bitcoin as hope for a lot of people in the working class to try to, you know, get some equity back when it comes to their financial status. So, Colonel McGregor, just always so great.
- [73:13]
C
To talk to you.
- [73:13]
B
Thank you for joining me. Any final thoughts? Thoughts?
- [73:16]
A
Try to keep me out of trouble. Be careful where you distribute this. I'm sure I've upset some people out there.
- [73:23]
B
Well, we're about the perfect place. No censorship on Rumble.
- [73:25]
A
Yeah. No, not on Rumble yet, but no. It. This is a big problem. Washington has failed us. That's what we've got to come to terms with. This financialization has to stop. This mindset of how much do I get at the end of the quarter has to go away in favor of what am I going to get in 10 years or 20 years. And by the way, that's the way J.D. rockefeller operated. That's how you got Standard Oil, which, fortunately, we broke up the largest corporation in human history. It had to be broken up. It was a monopoly. But let's give J.D. rockefeller credit. And when I say credit, I mean credit because he never borrowed anything. He accumulated cash. And when things fell apart and nobody else had cash and were trying to borrow, he didn't have to. We've got to get into the J.D. rockefeller mindset and we'll be successful again. I have every confidence in that. But the financialization, what do we get out of it in the next quarter? That's got to go away. There's no long term strategic planning or thinking of any kind.
- [74:33]
B
We need hard money again. That's what we need. Thank you so much, Colonel. Appreciate it.
- [74:37]
A
Yeah, sure.
- [74:38]
C
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of Coin Stories. Make sure you're subscribed to the show so you don't miss any new episodes. If you can, turn on those notifications and leave us a positive review, they really help the show grow organically with new listeners. We have a free weekly newsletter. You can sign up@thenewsblock.substack.com this show is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing should constitute as financial investment advice. And you should always, always do your own research. I'm always open to feedback and guest suggestions, so please feel free to reach my team@infoalkingbitcoin.com I'll see you next time.