Robert Moriarty (321gold) on The Art of Peace - Satori Traders

The book is also relevant to today's world given that it was published in 2016 when the 'forever wars' were well underway. With the wisdom of age and broad life experience Bob provides politically incorrect insights into how the military industrial complex works hand-in-hand with Congress to enrich themselves.

In the video below Bryan interviews Bob about the book and current events related to the latest installment of the forever wars.

Transcript of video

Note: the transcript received some minor edits to make it more readable

[Bryan] Hello folks. And welcome. My name is Bryan Post. I have the privilege today of interviewing Bob Moriarty. We're going to talk specifically about his book, the Art of Peace.

Bob wrote this book in 2016, so it's relevant to current events today. And in the final chapter specifically, he talks about the forever wars. And, obviously that's relevant today since, we're currently involved in the latest forever war. Bob is a Vietnam veteran - obviously qualified to talk about the art of peace.

He flew 832 combat missions starting in the F4B, transitioned to the Cessna Bird dog. And interesting, you know, when most people, we look at jets and we think, Ooh, that's cool. After reading the book, I believe that Bob saw more action - he had a close up look at the Vietnam War from flying the BirdDog instead of the fighter.

Bob's written at least eight books. If you go look at Amazon, you'll find at least eight books that Bob has written. These two specifically, if you're interested in investing in the resource stocks, read these two books. [Basic Investing in Resource Stocks: The Idiot's Guide] [Nobody Knows Anything: Investing Basics: Learn to Ignore the Experts, the Gurus and Other Fools]

So for $7, you can read these two books on resource stocks. If you can't afford $7, Maybe you shouldn't be investing in resource stocks.

Bob's a little bit of a troublemaker, I think - that's my impression anyway. Here he is flying underneath the Eiffel Tower. I think Bob's one of those people who likes to color outside of the lines.

If you're interested in finding his work, go to 321 gold.com and 321 energy.com. He curates articles from other authors and he shares his own work on those sites.

This is just a flashback for you, Bob - I think this is where it started for you. (showing a map of San Diego harbor and the Marine Corps Recruit Depot) There's the Marine Corps, recruit Depot.

Obviously this is San Diego Harbor. I don't know if you're aware, on the ocean side of Point Loma there was a 16-inch gun emplacement. There's actually a number of gun batteries on the ocean side of the peninsula. The 16-inch gun is fun - the first time they test fired it, they only put a half load in and it shattered windows for three miles away.

One of the events you talk about in your book is being able to direct fire from the New Jersey and it's 16-inch guns and we'll probably talk about that. Let me stop sharing my screen here.

Hi Bob. Thanks for coming on with me today. How’re you doing?

[Bob] Of course.

[Bryan] How's fax?

[Bob] Hey fax. Come here.

[Bryan] This is Bob's recently adopted dog. I haven't seen him yet.

[Bob] Up, up. Come on. Do a trick.

[Bryan] You know, eating chickens, isn't that trick enough?

[Bob] Eating chickens wasn't quite as bad as the day that he chased the three sheep of the meanest guy in the village.

[Bryan] Oh, great. Does that guy know that that's your dog?

[Bob] Well, luckily for me there's about 10 black and white border collies in the village, so I just act very innocent, but frankly, I never knew sheep could run that fast.

[Bryan] Oh, funny. Well, let's talk about the book. I've got a couple of questions.

You dedicated the book to a staff Sergeant James F Moriarty - Army Special Forces – died at age 27. Can you tell us, Bob, who is that?

[Bob] That's my nephew. It's the only son of my twin brother, and he was in Jordan training the terrorists for the CIA to attack Syrian. And the terrorists went to the CIA and said, look, we want to have air support and air support just like the Americans do.

And the CIA told them to pound sand because they were getting paid and they were being supplied with weapons. So they went to the King of Jordan and the King of Jordan literally had one of his tribesmen attack four of the special forces guys coming back to the base. Three of 'em were killed immediately, and one of them was wounded, the perpetrator.

And the really interesting thing about it is he was in prison for about 18 months before the trial and just to make sure that CIA got the message, they promoted him.

[Bryan] America mucks around in so many places on the globe where we just shouldn't be. And this sounds like another instance of “we shouldn't have been there”.

[Bob] Well, strange enough, I'm writing a book about the same thing right now. And right after 9/11 an American General was at the Pentagon and somebody showed him a list of seven countries the United States intended to invade in five years.

And of course, none of them were enemies of the United States, but, we fight wars now for the benefit of the congressional military industrial complex. We don't fight wars to win.

[Bryan] Yep. And, you just mentioned a key point there. It's not just the military industrial complex. Eisenhower warned us about the MIC but he didn't mention that Congress plays hand in hand with the MIC.

[Bob] No - actually he did.

[Bryan] Oh, did he?

[Bob] Okay - it was in the original copy of his speech and someone went in before he gave the speech and cut out “congressional” because they didn't want Congress to be offended, but of course, I mean, absolutely Congress was in it.

[Bryan] Yep. So the taxpayer funds the military industrial complex, and the MIC gives money to the Congress critters to continue the game.

[Bob] Well, it's actually worse than that. Okay. Uh, Victorian Newland bragged about spending the United States spending $5 billion to bring democracy to Ukraine. And when I first heard that number, this assault prior to 2014, when I first heard that number, I thought, $5 billion dollars - that's a lot of money. I mean, exactly what were they doing? But there's no question about it - Ukraine was sending the money back to Congress. We know this because of the Hunter Biden laptop. I mean, we got a president of the United States that was taking money from China, Russia, Ukraine, and Romania, all at the same time. And nobody wants to talk about it.

[Bryan] Yeah. So you mentioned your identical twin brother and, and you mentioned him in your book as well, and you point out that you were separated at, I think it was age four. I'm curious, how did that affect you? I mean, that seems like a fairly traumatic event, you know, at age four you've got your identical twin brother and then you're separated.

[Bob] Well, strange enough kids cope with anything. But that was an interesting situation because one, I've never heard of any parents ever separating twins like that. And two, it raised the issue of how much has to do with culture and how much has to do with breeding. My twin brother and I are distinctly different individuals in what we do, but we share a lot of characteristics that you wouldn't believe are hereditary, including, smoking, what kind of cigarettes you smoke, what kind of drinks you drink, and it's just interesting.

[Bryan] Yeah. It's nature versus nurture.

[Bob] Exactly.

[Bryan] Did that strain your relationship with your parents?

[Bob] Well, actually my parents were divorced - we were born in 1946, but from about 1950 until 1964, there was no contact whatsoever. I was in Camp Pendleton and somebody came up to me and insisted he knew me. He said he had gone through high school with me in Texas, and I said, well, yeah, I did go through high school in Texas, but I don't know you. And he said, yeah, you know me, you know, we were best buddies. I said, I don't think so. And then it turned out he was from Houston and I was from Fort Worth. And I said, oh no, you don't know me - you know my identical twin brother.

[Bryan] That's funny. Where are we at? Chapter 13? I'm going to read this paragraph, it's about three sentences.

“Wars cost money as well as the blood of the young. While it's been nice of the Chinese to finance the stupidity of the United States in its role as Israel's attack dog over the last 15 years, if China put in a market order to sell its stash of T-bills and T-bonds, the US Dollar would turn to toast in a minute.”

Can you share with us, Bob, what do you think that would look like? If not only China, but China and all of the BRICS+ nations and candidate BRICS nations, if they all decided Sunday night that we're going to sell all of our US Treasuries, what would that look like?

[Bob] Total chaos and we're going to see it very soon. There is a slow motion move out of the dollar. And the amazing thing is you can't say that China and Japan or Russia and India are doing this to the United States. This is all self-inflicted by the United States. Okay? The United States decides that Russia is the enemy. So the DOD pays the Rand Corporation to come up with a plan - How do we get Russia to attack Ukraine?

And Rand said, “really easy - the red line is bringing Ukraine into NATO, and if you make it look like you're going to bring Ukraine into NATO, they will attack.”

The United States has effectively been at war with Russia slash Soviet Union since 1945, and it's entirely self-inflicted. So we go out and we steal $300 billion of Russian reserves with no legal basis whatsoever based on them invading Ukraine.

But nobody in the West has been told that the Ukrainians had 150,000 troops on the border and they were going to invade the Donbas in about 10 days. So, Russian law states that preemptive war is perfectly legal against Ukraine. It is probably the dumbest war the United States has ever fought because it was fought for absolutely no purpose.

Now, given the fact that I had almost two years in combat, I would certainly qualify as somebody who's very knowledgeable and we just could not possibly win a military war with either Russia or China. They have missiles now that have made aircraft carriers, the US Navy and the Marine Corps totally obsolete.

Very few people know this, but the BirdDogs were the smallest plane in Vietnam. We had the most aircraft lost per flight hour, but it was the deadliest plane in Vietnam because we were spotting targets. And I'll tell you, I think it was in the book, did I talk about going to the museum in North Vietnam and seeing that's a 16 inch shell?

No? Okay. You're going to get a kick out this because very few people know that the biggest weapon the United States has ever had in terms of a naval gun was a 16-inch gun. And it was on the latest model battleships during World War II - there are no US guns bigger than that. So in late 1968, the United States sent the battleship New Jersey over to Vietnam.

They were going to control it just north of the DMZ with a two seat A4 - and war winning wars has to do with psychology as much as anything else - so the North Vietnamese promptly shot up the A4 and we realized we couldn't operate an A4 in that area. So they sent up an OB10 twin engine, high-wing Rockwell aircraft, and they shot it up.

So they were kind of scratching their heads saying, you know, we got the biggest battleship in the world and we're trying to attack North Vietnam - how do we do it without getting airplanes shot down? And somebody said, well, send up a Bird Dog. Okay. They're small and they're cheap and they're actually pretty hard to hit.

So I controlled probably, 15, 20, 25 missions of the battleship New Jersey. And if you were going to fire a mission fire for effect, you would fire three guns with three rounds. The rounds weighed 2,800 pounds apiece. They had a 22-kilometer range, and they were terribly inaccurate. However, when one of those rounds went off, it woke everybody up in a five-mile area around there. The shells were actually made in 1944 and we were still using them 24 years later.

I've been back to Vietnam twice, visiting mining projects. And I talked to the president of this one mining company. We were staying in Danang, and I said, “I'd like to borrow your driver for a couple of days, and I'd like to drive out to Kason and then I'd like to drive into what was North Vietnam.” And they've got a museum just north of the DMZ. The North Vietnamese were living underground from 1965 until 1974. They had something like 180 babies that had been born who had never seen the sun.

So I go to this museum and I see the caves, and I see the fortifications, and they had a pile of ammunition that hadn't exploded. They had bombs, they had napalm bombs and they had a 16-inch shell, and I thought, “Hey, look at that. They had a 16-inch shell and the only thing that could have fired it was the battleship New Jersey.”

And I was thinking about telling them, “Hey, that 16-inch shell over there, I may have fired that.”

Then I thought about it and I thought, that might be a really bad idea. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

[Bryan] Funny. I've heard the 16-inch guns described as lobbing a VW bug 16 miles.

[Bob] Yeah, exactly. It's pretty incredible.

[Bryan] I was thinking just this morning that there were multiple wars going on during the Vietnam conflict.

We had an air war, we had a ground war, and then there was a tunnel war. And so you just mentioned the North Vietnamese living underground for nine years. Did you interact any with the tunnel rats? We had American soldiers going into those tunnels.

[Bob] Yeah, we did. And that was easily the worst mission and the most dangerous mission of the entire war.

But that was down around Saigon. So the North Vietnamese were in tunnels and they were in caves north of the DMZ, but we didn't have tunnels in Quang Tri in northern I Corps.

[Bryan] Okay. Can you tell us? The bird dog wasn't just a spotter, you weren't just controlling fire missions. You had some munitions that you could fire yourself.

[Bob] You had either four Willie Pete, white phosphorus, 2.75-inch rockets, or six 2.75-inch rockets. We did carry weapons in the aircraft, up to and including the M60, 30-caliber machine gun. We used to go trolling. If you're on the ground and an airplane flies over and he fires a bunch of rounds and they hit a quarter of a mile away, is he shooting at you?

[Bryan] No.

[Bob] Maybe - you don't know.

[Bryan] Okay. Oh, well, yeah.

[Bob] What do you do?

[Bryan] Fire back.

[Bob] You shoot back. We'd take this M60 up there and have several boxes of ammunition, and we shoved it out the windows - we flew the windows open - it was an incredible aircraft - it was something out of World War I, and we would troll, okay.

We would go over an area where there were indications of the North Vietnamese and there were no Viet Cong up there - it was all North Vietnamese soldiers as opposed to civilians or VC. And we'd find a hill or something that looked good and we'd go over and we'd shoot it up and we weren't shooting at anything.

However, we could hear them shooting back, and shooting at me is a really bad idea - nobody ever tried doing it twice.

[Bryan] Yeah. Wild stuff. You mentioned the night scope - you referred to it as a starlight scope. When you got access to that technology it was using the green technology - so you looked through the eyepiece and you're seeing a green image. Do you have any insight on the red technology? My understanding is the original night vision technology was in red and it got to Vietnam and the troops didn't have good experiences with the red night vision. Do you have any insight into that?

[Bob] Not really. I had never heard of that.

I'm not sure how much I went into this in the book - it was kind of interesting. The military has all these rules and the rules don't necessarily make any sense. For us to get flight pay we had to fly four hours a month, and we had to fly so many night hours every six month period.

Well, the bird dog was not instrument equipped and you couldn't fly IFR and you wouldn't fly at night because you couldn't see anything. So somebody came out, said - now bear in mind, I'm in Quang Tri - I'm living in a hut – the average temperature is 98 degrees with 115 percent humidity - I mean, it's miserable going out, getting shot at every day - and the ops officer comes up and says, “You have to fly, six hours nighttime or you're going to lose your flight pay.” And I'm thinking, what? Okay, I'm going to lose my flight pay because I haven't flown six hours in an airplane that you can't fly at night. What am I missing? Okay. There's obviously something here.

Now, I was young and stupid - which everybody is, I guess - I was 22 then. And I thought there's got to be some way that I can make life difficult for the North Vietnamese. And I knew they were carrying stuff across the mouth of the Ben Hai river, which was the separation between North Vietnam and South Vietnam at night because I could see tracks in the sand, literally.

So if I operated off the coast, I couldn't possibly be in anybody's firing range because we fired a lot of H&I - harassing and interdiction - shells at night - so there's a lot of areas you couldn't fly at night, and they're saying, “well fly over the base for six hours” - and I went, “I don't think that makes any sense.”

So, one of the guys in the back seat got his hands on a Starlight scope, and these things were expensive - they were probably $50,000 a piece back then. They [the Marines] were early adopters and we decided we'd go up and we'd fly right next to the DMZ and use the Starlight scope. What we didn't realize was, of course the airplane vibrates constantly so you can't rest the Starlight scope in order to get a clear vision, so you're getting this thing like this [Bob shaking his hands].

So the concept was good but the execution wasn't quite as effective as we had hoped - so we decided, well, that isn't going to work - what should we do? And we said, well, we should bomb the hell out of the area anyway. So that's exactly what we did. We knew they were down there - so it was a big surprise to them.

Now as it turns out, they were right in the middle of a mini Tet and they were bringing rockets down and they were intending to attack the Dong Hai combat base the next day. So we totally disrupted their attack by accident. This was June 5th or June 6th of 1969. And of course I had to have my hours by July 1st.

Okay? So I'm up there strictly by accident and we disrupt the attack. And then I fly back to Quang Tri and I drop off the guy in the backseat, and then I fly up to Don Ha - that's about five miles away - to pick up another AO to do another mission. And just as I landed at Don ha I could see rockets going over and I thought, those are going in the wrong direction.

Okay. And so Don Ha was under attack. So I added power and I went up and I found the area they were firing the rockets from. So I end up flying 3 to 3.3 hours all by myself - I control three or four airstrikes and a half a dozen artillery missions - I fly back to Dong Ha and this Marine Corps captain is waiting for me and the commanding general wanted to see me.

Well, I had been up all night – I was still hung over - I smelled like a goat.

“The general doesn't really want see me.”

“The lieutenant general wants to see you.”

So I go in and I talk to the commanding general of the second Marine division, and he wants to know what's going on. And nobody had told him that I had been warning for a week or two that something was happening because I could see all these footprints in the sand.

So they sent a battalion up and they attacked the remains - they wiped out an entire enemy battalion that day. [Bryan] Wow. You mentioned the DMZ Bob, and one of the silly things about the Vietnam War is that we couldn't cross the DMZ - and not only could we not cross it, one of the things you mentioned in the book is that before we would do any bombing in North Vietnam, we'd notify them - we'd give them 24-hour notice that, “Hey, we're going to bomb you tomorrow.”

Can you talk about what games did you play along the DMZ to kind of work around those rules?

[Bob] Well, the major attacks - and these would be attacks by the Navy or the Air Force, the Marine Corps really didn't have much of a combat role in North Vietnam - we had a few missions, but not very many - but for the major missions of the Air Force or the Navy, they would literally warn the North Vietnamese 24-hours in advance to remove civilians from the area. And of course, what that meant was everybody was locked-and-loaded and ready, and as soon as we showed up, they'd start shooting. Now, the area that I was working in around the DMZ, we weren't under the same restriction.

We couldn't bomb in the DMZ or in North Vietnam without permission - however, if we were taking fire we could get permission to attack.

[Bryan] And in the book you mentioned that you would sometimes try to attract fire so that you were then able to return fire into North Vietnam.

[Bob] Yeah, exactly. You did the same thing with trolling. And what you would do is load the M60 up with all tracers. So you go over and you're right on the edge of the DMZ and you shoot into North Vietnam - and they see tracers landing near them and they'd say, “the guys see us - they are trying to kill us” - and they would shoot.

And the strange thing is I would report perfectly accurately that I was taking fire and nobody ever asked who shot first.

[Bryan] That's right. Who shot first? Well…

In part two of the book you mentioned a Lieutenant Colonel Moriarty. Who is Lieutenant Colonel Moriarty?

[Bob] Well, that was a pure coincidence. He was a commanding officer of VMO 2. Okay. VMO stands for fixed-wing Marine Observation Squadron - VMO 6 was in Quang Tri and VMO 2 was in Danang. And, very few people know this, even the guys in the Marine Corps don't know this, but VMO 2 lost the most number of aircraft and casualties.

And then HCH 46 squadron and then VMO 6. The observation squadrons had the most dangerous missions in the war. I don't think that Colonel Moriarty was related to me, but I flew the F4 from July of 68 until November of 68, and then I flew the Bird Dog from November at 68 until July 69.

I figured, you know, I've got 800 some missions, I don't need to prove anything to anybody. So I extended my tour and I went back and I was flying VIPs around in Danang. And somebody called me up and said, look, we need you to fly DC-3/C-117 on a night flare mission and I said, okay, and in January of 1970, they were doing night practice bombing in the hills south of Danang. And you know, the war is over when people start doing night practice bombing and they brought out a pair of F4s and the number two aircraft hit the ground, spun and exploded. And the question was, had the crew gotten out and we got a helicopter up there to examine the wreckage and I said, “look, is there a big tube sticking out where the ejection seat should have been?” And the guy flew down and took a look at it and said, “yeah, there's two big pipes sticking out.” Nice. Well, actually the guy did eject then – they may be down there and he went down low level and he found them.

And, we managed to pull them out safely. But Colonel Moriarty was heading that mission, and Fred Smith of Federal Express was one of the OV-10 pilots on the mission. And of course, he was just a Marine Corps captain. I was a captain by that time, but, you know, we were nobody then.

[Bryan] Interesting.

I'm on chapter 16, so it's the final chapter of the book where you're talking about the forever wars. One of the things you say is that “With the advent of the internet, we no longer need big and powerful nations. Instant communication means that governments can no longer control the narrative.”

And obviously, they're certainly trying to control the narrative with the big tech censoring platforms. One of the interviews that you and I did got removed from YouTube - any number of people have been removed from Twitter. What are you thinking these days about controlling the narrative?

[Bob] It's interesting you say that because I haven't heard anybody discuss this, but I've been in computers one way or another, going all the way back to 1967 when I was in North Carolina. I used to fly Beach 18s with boxes of punch cards to Quantico, Virginia. Okay. And then I worked for Ross Perot after I got out of the Marine Corps.

So I've been associated with computers one way or another for over 60 years, or almost 60 years. I've seen governments lie - my biggest surprise about Vietnam was the extent to which the United States government was lying about everything - we were not allowed to mention that we were bombing Laos and Cambodia.

Now obviously we knew we were bombing Laos in Cambodia - and obviously the North Vietnamese knew we were bombing Laos in Cambodia - and obviously the South Vietnamese knew we were bombing Laos in Cambodia - and obviously the Cambodians and the Laotians knew we were bombing Laos in Cambodia.

So what was the only group that didn't know we were bombing Laos in Cambodia?

[Bryan] The American taxpayer.

[Bob] Yeah, exactly. And they were paying for the whole thing - and we could get court marshaled. They didn't censor our mail like they did in World War II. Okay. But if you got caught telling somebody outside the military that you were bombing Laos and Cambodia, you'd get court martialed.

But there were so many lies. The Air Force in Saigon was lying to the Air Force in the Pentagon about bombing Cambodia – the same Air Force, okay - but they were lying to each other. And one of the things that just absolutely shocked me about Vietnam was the extent to which the military lies about everything.

So, I'm not so naïve that I don't understand this. However, starting with Iraq and then continuing with Syria and then continuing with Covid - and now certainly with Ukraine - the military has made the decision to make a major effort on controlling the narrative.

Now, the First Amendment says the United States government can't censor what you're saying.

If Twitter or Google or Facebook decided for any reason they don't like you and they wanted to censor you, that's legal. However, when the United States government goes to them and has hundreds of former FBI and CIA agents working for Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that's totally illegal. Okay. And we know it's illegal - and why nobody has sued based on First Amendment rights it is just beyond me - but the degree to which the US government is trying to control the narrative now is really terrifying. Okay.

They are literally - you're allowed to say this and you're not allowed to say this. Matt Taibbi was testifying to Congress about Twitter, about all the CIA and FBI agents who literally were controlling Twitter and what Twitter was allowed to say.

And on a Saturday Christmas Eve the IRS shows up at his house and says, we need to talk to you about this tax return that you filed five years ago. And of course, Matt Taibbi said, “excuse me, what exactly are you guys trying to do?” There's some really scary stuff going on today. The control of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, of the narrative - and, are you aware that Robert F. Kennedy says that NSA was actually in charge of running the Covid war?

[Bryan] I haven't heard him say that. No.

[Bob] Yeah. He has actually said that, and he said it's a bio weapon that the United States paid for and actually Moderna and Pfizer didn't actually make it. Okay. They just marketed it and he said it was a government program from the beginning to the end.

Some really scary things there. And the degree to which the F B I and the DOJ has turned into the Pretorian Guard – okay, in Roman times they got to the point, they started off as being the bodyguards for Roman Generals and they ended up actually guarding the emperors.

And when the emperors didn't pay enough money, they'd just kill them and elect somebody else. I don't know where you go from there. There was an IRS whistleblower who said, by the way, I've been working on a case against Hunter Biden for years, and the IRS isn't doing anything about it.

So he testifies in front of Congress and the IRS at the direction of the DOJ holds his entire team, which means there's no investigation of Hunter Biden. And, let’s be candid, if Hunter Biden doesn't go to jail for a crime, there are no crimes in the United States. Hunter Biden is the biggest scumbag, dirtbag liar, cheater, child molester - everything you could name Hunter Biden did. I think somebody went through the laptop and all the emails and came up with 288 separate felonies and he hasn’t been charged with a single one. And that's a little scary.

[Bryan] It is. And just for the audience - insight into the censorship - as a video publisher, I'm sitting here thinking “well, can I publish what Bob just said?”

He's exercising his first amendment rights to speak his opinion, and yet I'm concerned that if I publish what he just said, that this video will get taken down by YouTube. And that's not right. That's not the way America is supposed to work.

[Bob] Yeah, but here's what's really scary. The most dangerous part of that is the self-censorship.

And strange enough, I'm writing a book and I'm saying some fairly inflammatory things, and I'm thinking, do I really want to publish this? And then I realize, wait a minute, you can either live in a free world as a free citizen, or you can be a slave - and you actually get to vote. Okay, which one would I rather be?

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter have realized that they've been exposed. So it's possible to say a lot of things now that you couldn't say six months or a year ago.

Now, one thing that I'd like to cover, because a lot of people don't know anything about war – what we did in Vietnam was not heroic.

It was their country. We had no business there in the first place. The war was illegal by every measure, and the Vietnamese were the bravest people I've ever seen. They were incredible. And guys with nothing but a ball of rice on one hand, an AK47 in the other hand, you know, 27 B52s would come in and drop 118 500-pound bombs and just carpet bomb the area – then the guy would get up and we’d fly overhead and he'd shoot at us. And that took some balls.

[Bryan] Yeah. The narrative currently for the American taxpayer is that we are winning in Ukraine. Now one of these mornings we're going to wake up and the Russians will have retaken Odessa and Kharkiv and will be on the edge of the Dneiper River - it'll be interesting to see what the narrative is at that point - I'm sure they will have one.

[Bob] Well, somebody writes me and gives me information - because I know where he is, it's credible information - and I had wanted to get some of the stamps that Ukraine put out of bombing the [Kursk] bridge.

You can't get those. However, this is very strange. They're coming out with peace stamps. Okay.

I will tell you categorically as a guy, you could line up a hundred guys and I’ve got more time at combat than all hundred combined - the Russians have been winning this war since March of 2022. Okay?

The fact that Zelensky was willing to come to the table in Turkey and talk about peace right after the war started meant he understood he had lost the war, and he had lost the war, and he'd lost the war in March, 2022. And then Boris Johnson shows up and said, “No, no, no, you don't want to do that. You can steal a lot more. We can really fund your retirement. Okay? You just keep fighting.”

From a military point of view, the Ukrainians pouring their best troops into Bakhmut was a crime against humanity. Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been massacred by the Russians because they chose to defend a city that's indefensible.

And you're going to see a lot more. You're going to see things happen very soon. Zelensky is afraid to go back to Ukraine. Yes. Now one, because he knows Putin's pissed about the firecrackers on the roof [of the Kremlin]. Yeah. And two, the generals are pissed because Zelensky is stealing so much.

There is a $400 million dollar scam going where they were buying fuel at an excessive price - and they were actually buying it under the table - and the generals are pissed because Zelensky tried to steal the whole $400 million.

[Bryan] Yeah. It's incredible the money that they're stealing from the American taxpayer - and the fact that we're funding the whole mess. Not only are we funding the conflict, we're paying the salary of the Ukrainians.

[Bob] Well, here's what we're doing. And you can do this right up until the moment you can't. I said this earlier, we don't fight wars to win wars - we fight wars to feed the military industrial complex. And everybody in the military industrial complex said, “Boy, Christmas is going to be wonderful this year.”

And what they don't realize is the Russians and Chinese have shown the world and the North Koreans, for that matter, have shown the world that, frankly, the American weapons don't work. They're expensive and they don't work.

Did you see the video of the attack on the Patriot missile battery?

[Bryan] I did, yes.

[Bob] Okay. Do you remember how many Patriot missiles were fired?

[Bryan] 30 or 32

[Bob] 32. Do you remember how much they cost apiece?

[Bryan] I've seen $1.5 to $5 million apiece.

[Bob] I believe that $5 million figure is accurate. But even if it's $1.5, if you fire 32 missiles at $1.5 million apiece, you just spent $48 million. Now, if you fire 32 missiles at $5 million apiece, you just spent $160 million - that used to be a lot of money - and the United States is bankrupt, the banks are going to close, the financial system is going to freeze, and we're going to have to come up with something else. I say this in the book, in the very last paragraphs of the book, saying that in the future, the good news is we're going to have a lot less government.

And the reason is because we can't afford the level of government that we've got today. And that's absolutely true. We have never had so much corruption in the United States as we have today. And the Hunter Biden laptop, Biden taking bribes, Hillary Clinton paying for the Russian collusion thing - there's stuff going on that I wouldn't dream of putting into a fiction book because nobody would believe it.

And it is going on and it's really scary. For them to go after Trump - and you have to take it all the way back to 2016 - and the president of the United States, Barack Obama, was a participant – had known that Hillary Clinton had paid for bogus information against the elected president of the United States. Okay.

That's about as close to treason as you can get. And of course, Joe Biden was his sidekick - he knew all about it. There were a 100 people or 200 people in the DOJ and the FBI and the Biden administration who were guilty – absolutely, categorically - of treason.

I don't like Trump. I didn't vote for Trump. I wish we had somebody other than Trump representing the Republican party. However, he was elected in a fair election - actually it was an election they were trying to steal - and nobody realized how much Hillary Clinton was despised - but he did win election. If he was the president of the United States, he shouldn't have the FBI and the DOJ and the former president of the United States yanking the rug right out from underneath him.

We have gone over the edge and there's no way, there's no good way to cure it.

[Bryan] Yeah. And political appointees - I think a lot of Americans are unaware that we have positions that are appointed by the president - they're not elected. So we have any number political figures who were appointed by Obama. And so when we see references to “currently Obama's still the president”, I believe that's what they're referring to. People like Victoria Newland and Jake Sullivan, those were Obama appointees.

[Bob] Well, here's what’s beautiful. Sullivan was the guy behind the Russian collusion.

Sullivan was working on the Biden campaign. Okay, so you get somebody working for the campaign who goes to Hillary Clinton. And they take all its data to the FBI and everybody knows it's fake. And then of course, what happens is when they steal another election - and the Democrats absolutely stole 2020 election - that was the most corrupt election in history. When they steal the 2020 election, this guy gets picked as Secretary of State - you couldn't make this shit up. Okay. Nobody would believe it. It’s too crazy. Nobody could be that corrupt. Yeah, they really could be.

[Bryan] They really could be. Have you seen a recent picture of Senator Feinstein from California?

[Bob] Yeah.

[Bryan] That's just one tiny example of how the politicians play their games. They're wheeling that woman around in a wheelchair. They want to hold her seat until 2024 so they can put Schiff in that seat.

[Bob] Actually she could resign and the governor of California could appoint Schiff. That's what's going to happen. There isn't a chance in hell she’s going to make it to 2024. I've seen dead people that looked a lot better than her.

[Bryan] Yeah, no kidding man. Elder abuse. That is truly an example of elder abuse.

[Bob] Excuse me. Were we talking about the president of the United States?

[Bryan] Well, yeah. He at least looks better than Feinstein does.

[Bob] Yeah. I think Feinstein is more capable of saying a sentence or two without sounding too stupid.

[Bryan] Yeah. Where are we at in the fourth turning, Bob? Are we nearly done? Have we got a couple of more years left?

[Bob] Okay. The fourth turning is a book that everybody that's concerned about what's going on in the world today - not just the United States - should read. Okay.

It was written by Howe & Strauss back in, I think, 1997, and they said there are four turnings and the fourth turning is a crisis phase, and you will have this tendency to go to totalitarian government, or there will be sprouts springing up of people who want freedom. And I'm starting to see people stand up and speak out and say things are wrong.

I mean, Categorically, it's embarrassing that we know so much about Covid now, and they're still trying to push that vaccine, okay? That's criminal. Other countries around the world like Sweden never gave it to their citizens in the first place. Denmark doesn't give it to anybody under the age of 50.

People under the age of 50 were never at risk. Children have zero risk, okay? And strange enough, we know categorically that the danger from the vaccine is far greater than the danger from the virus. Not only that, we know that they're planning another pandemic in in the next year or two. That'll be either Ebola or bird Flu.

So, we can either be turned into slaves, which is what the World Economic Forum would like to do, or we can fight for our freedom.

[Bryan] Yep. Are you aware, Bob, that they have added that vaccination to the National Registry of required vaccinations for school children?

[Bob] That's evil. That's a crime against humanity.

[Bryan] And one of the things that happens when a vaccination is added to that list is that the American taxpayer becomes responsible for any damage caused by any vaccination that's on the list.

[Bob] We've gone so far into - I don't hold any religious beliefs, it’s something I don't know - however, a lot of the things happening today are literally satanic, okay? Absolutely go across the line into devil worship - it's evil.

If you catch covid, and of course the test doesn't test for covid. It tests for any flu, and you go to the hospital, they are required to give you Remdesivir and Remdesivir kills between 20 and 45% of people in a standard dose over a five day period. Okay?

So we are killing people with drugs like Remdesivir that failed their drug trials, and it's still required. The WHO has now been given by the G20, the power to declare pandemics and lockdowns and vaccinations.

So, it's going to be interesting to see what happens. There are times when I was 20 - I was the youngest fighter pilot in the entire world - and it wasn't because I was smart, it was because I happened to be in exactly the right time at exactly the right place - and I looked around at really old people, like you and me, and thought, “damn, I don't ever want to get to be that old.” And now I look at young people and I think, “Damn am I glad I'm not 20 or 25 or 30”, because they've got to live with this monstrosity that we've created.

There's going to be interesting things happen, and the speed at which they're happening is faster than I ever dreamed.

[Bryan] And it appears to be accelerating.

[Bob] Yeah.

[Bryan] Are you aware there's an economic summit in St. Petersburg, mid-June - are you aware of that summit? [Bob] Yeah.

[Bryan] Any thoughts on, are they going to add some new members to BRICS? Will they announce their new reserve currency?

[Bob] Yes and yes.

[Bryan] Yes and yes?

[Bob] Yeah. Here's the deal, and I've talked about it in other interviews and the really interesting thing is I don't see anybody else talking about it.

The conflict in Ukraine is not a conflict between the United States and Russia. It's not a conflict between NATO and Russia. It's certainly not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia. It's a conflict between the debt-based system of the West and a resource-based system of the East. The debt-based system is past it's sell-by date.

It is fatally flawed. It is going to crash and it's going to burn the entire financial system down with it. The financial system in a year or two is going to be totally different than the financial system today.

Putin actually was one of the Young Global Leaders in the World Economic Forum. Very few people know that.

Now, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, the Prime Minister of Australia, Justin Trudeau, the assistant Prime Minister of Canada, all these people – Macron - were members of the Young Global Leaders. Those people were selected because they were malleable and they would believe what they were told. And Putin listened to all the bullshit and he said, “you know, this is real crap - this isn't going to work.”

The people in the west don't realize how fatally flawed the debt based system is. The total debt in the world now, I think it's $306 trillion dollars and it is never going to be paid off.

There has to be some kind of jubilee. Now, whether the jubilee is voluntary or whether it's involuntary, we don't know that yet. But the countries - I think there's 35 countries that have applied to join BRICS.

[Bryan] 81.

[Bob] 81. Damn.

[Bryan] Well, that's a mix of, they formally requested membership or they have expressed interest.

[Bob] Yeah. Okay. One day soon, NATO and the United States are going to wake up and realize the train has left the station and it's left the station without them.

It's going to be interesting to see with the fall of Bakhmut when the United States actually admits that Ukraine has lost the war - but Ukraine lost the war 14 months ago - it's just a question of admitting it.

For hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to die for nothing, it is a crime against humanity.

[Bryan] Yeah. Well, and people are focused on the conflict there in Ukraine, but what you just said, Bob, this isn't about war, you know, throwing bombs and airplanes at each other. This is an economic war, as you said, between the debt-based Western system and the commodity-based Eastern system.

And the next bullet that the non-Western world can fire, or likely will fire, is dumping US treasuries.

[Bob] There's so many things going on now. I don't know if you've ever played pickup sticks. Okay. It's a game that we played during the forties and fifties where you put a bunch of sticks down and you pull sticks out until it collapses.

There was an iron foundry in Germany whose history goes back to 1381 that had to close because they couldn't afford power. Germany just closed their last three nuclear power stations. The Netherlands, I think, closed theirs a few weeks ago or a month ago. The whole green energy thing is fatally flawed.

Climate change is something people made up. And Germany's economy is collapsing, and Germany did it to themself. Okay? They didn't have to buy into sanctions. And if they wanted to supply weapons to Ukraine - which personally I think it's stupid - but if they wanted to supply weapons to Ukraine, they could have done that and they could have still bought natural gas from Russia.

There was an extremely mild winter in Europe this year, or there would've been a counter attack by the Russians, but the ground never froze. And in another week, or two weeks or three weeks, it'll be hard enough that they can move tanks. I think that they will take Odessa, I think they'll march all the way to the border of Poland. And I think Ukraine has been destroyed as a country. And it's entirely self-inflicted.

In 1990, the United States sat down with the Soviet Union and the Germans and said, “we'll reunify Germany and NATO pledges not to move one inch to the east” - it is in writing - it occurred and the United States lied, and then in 2014, the United States paid for a Coup d’état in Ukraine and the two Eastern most provinces said we don't want to be part of that government because they hate Russians and they voted to join Russia but Russia said, “Nope, we're not going to fall for that. You're Ukrainian and you have sort it out.”

So, Donbas fought with Ukraine, even though Donbas was still part of Ukraine. And then in 2016 there was a ceasefire because Ukraine was getting their butts kicked - and the Minsk 2 agreement, Germany was part of, the UK was part of, the United States was part of, France was part of - agreed that Ukraine would stop attacking Donbas and there would be relatively free elections in Donbas.

And the Ukrainians lied, and the French and the British and the Germans all admitted, “Yeah, we just made it up. We knew we were going to give Ukraine a chance to re-arm.” Well they did give Ukraine a chance to re-arm.

Russia has effectively defeated all of NATO and they pretty much bankrupted NATO from the point of view of having weapons. Now when the dust settles, if the French and the British and the Germans actually say what we need to do is, we need to reward the US military industrial complex, they would be certifiable to do that.

Somebody needs to say, “look, I mean, how do we survive for 60 years without a war? We don't need war. It's only the United States that needs war.”

[Bryan] Yeah. So, with your background as an aviator, and lots of experience with airplanes, Bob, what do you think about the F 16? That's the next wonder weapon that we're going to send into Ukraine.

Is the F 16 going to make a difference?

[Bob] Are you kidding?

The M1 Abrams tank was being defeated in Syria with small arms. Okay. The F16 wouldn't last five minutes in Ukraine. Okay, this is funny and nobody I know is talking about, and part of the reason is because they don't have the background. I do have the background. If you took every penny the United States has spent on armaments since 1945 until now, you can take that money and you can flush it down the toilet.

It's been a total waste of time. None of our weapons compare to their [Russia] weapons. One of the things, if you're big and tough and drunk and you walk into a biker bar and start running your mouth, you don't want to be armed with a pen knife. And that's what the United States has done. Our Navy wouldn't last five minutes in combat with either the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans.

The Marine Corps is totally obsolete now. It's an amphibious warfare. How do you get troops ashore, if your ships have been sunk 200 miles away? How do you go in with helicopter envelopment like we used in Vietnam? They wouldn't last five minutes. Okay. We not only have lost, we have lost so catastrophically that every penny the United States spends on defense might as well be toilet paper.

[Bryan] One of the things people are saying about the F16 and sending it into Ukraine is, basically, we're sending them there so that they can be destroyed and the American MIC can then sell the F35.

[Bob] Remember, I was a fighter pilot, okay? Yep. The F35, it's the biggest piece of crap airplane ever designed.

It was over a trillion dollars in total cost. I mean, I cannot say enough bad things about the F35 – the F35 is a total waste of time. And now the DOD is saying, “we need a replacement for the F 35.” Well, they never got the damn thing to get airborne in the first place, okay? And they're saying “we need a replacement for it”.

The procurement system that the Pentagon uses is corrupt. It's fatally flawed, it doesn't work. And when the United States wakes up and realize that these trillions and trillions dollars that we've spent on weapons, none of them work. Okay. This a great idea. We'll throw F16s in there. The war's over. Okay.

It's just question of Zelensky waking up and saying, “you know, maybe I need to go to Italy and retire. Maybe that would be a good move.” And actually Europe's trying to get him to do that.

[Bryan] Yeah. My understanding of the F35 is that it is so bad none of our military forces want the damn thing.

And so we're trying to foist it off on our allies so they'll buy them.

[Bob] Well, that's the Greater Fool theory - and the problem, the fatal flaw with the Greater Fool Theory is sooner or later you run out of fools.

[Bryan] I saw some military figure - he wants to replace the A10 with the F35.

[Bob] Oh God.

[Bryan] Can you imagine that? I mean, the A10 kicks ass.

[Bob] Well, the Air Force has always hated the A10. Okay. Because it's way too cheap. Now as an F4 pilot, while I would like to call myself a fighter pilot, I flew one fighter mission. Okay? One fighter mission does not make you a fighter pilot. I flew 124 bomber missions. Okay? I was a bomber pilot. I wasn't a fighter pilot.

The very best airplane we could have used if Vietnam would've been A1, the Spad [Douglas A-1 Skyraider]. Which was a Korean War vintage single engine, single pilot crop aircraft.

Okay. The, the A1 could carry more ordinance than its basic weight. The limit on the A1 in terms of endurance was 6.5 hours of fuel and six hours for oil. So you knew when you landed, you were always going to have plenty of fuel, okay? Because you were going to run out oil before you ran out of fuel.

So in their infinite wisdom of going to A4s and A6s and F4s, the Navy and the Marine Corps gave up the Spad and they sent them to Litchfield Park to be retired. So the war starts getting interesting in 65 and 66, and the Air Force, somebody in the Air Force scratches their head and says, “You know, that A1, that's a hell of a close air support airplane - and the Navy and the Marine Corps just retired a bunch of them. Why don't we go steal them?”

And they did that. Okay? And they were operating the A1 over Northern Laos in the most difficult part of the war. I would've killed to put my hands on an A1.

When an F4 came out, they would give you their endurance – “I've got 45 minutes endurance. I'm loaded with this, my altitude is this.” And I'd always ask them, “What's your fuel state?” The F4 carried 18,000 pounds of fuel. So if this guy said he had 15,000 pounds of fuel, I knew that he had 30 or 40 minutes of endurance.

If he's telling me he’s got 10 minutes or 15 minutes endurance, I know he is lying to me. What do you do? It's an airplane. It's got six hours range. I'll tell you what. “Okay. Drop all your stuff and then orbit. Let me go back and get another airplane. I'll be back out here in 45 minutes. We'll do the same thing again.”

Great idea.

[Bryan] Yeah. But we retired that plane for some reason.

[Bob] We didn't retire it - the Navy and the Marine Corps did, and the Air Force stole it.

But the A10 was a remarkable close air support aircraft that was used in wars where you didn't particularly need close air support.

[Bryan] Yeah. I've got a relative that flew the A10 and he said when he's in a military bar, he can't pay for a drink.

[Bob] Oh, it's a great, great airplane and everybody who ever needed to call in close air support - absolutely couldn't buy a drink - the same thing was true the F4 and the A4 in Vietnam, because they carried a lot of ordinance, we carried 10 five-hundred pound bombs. You can drop bombs for 30 minutes.

[Bryan] Bob, we've been going for an hour and 20 minutes. We probably ought to wrap up. I've got one last question for you.

[Bob] Okay.

[Bryan] So tomorrow morning you wake up and you rule the world. What do you do first?

[Bob] I would start a new monetary system based on Gold and Silver. You cannot have an honest economy without honest money. And all of the derivatives of a fake economy, such as the military industrial complex, all go back to the fact that we've got fake money. Okay. If you knew you were spending real money, I mean, when I saw the video of the Patriot system - bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing - and what we didn't see was any explosions because it didn't hit anything. Right?

Okay. So these guys spent $48 million to $150 million in five minutes. And then the Russian missile blew them up. I go, “holy cow, they just got their ass kicked.”

So you need honest money. And strange enough, when you have honest money, you have some sense - some real sense of value, and we have no real sense of value - this is why we get FBI directors who lie to Congress and we get CIA directors who lie to Congress and we get NSA and CIA trying to overthrow the president of the United States.

We have the worst elements of the Roman Empire, and it's true because we have fake money.

[Bryan] That's a fascinating answer, Bob. If you asked me that question, I would've started with the political system, but I believe your answer is better - you can't have an honest world when you're dealing with dishonest money. It's just not possible.

[Bob] That's a good way of putting it. I say you can't have an honest financial system and you're more correct. You can't have an honest world with dishonest money.

[Bryan] Yeah. One last point on the Patriot system. My understanding is that Raytheon only produces about 200 of those missiles per year.

And in two minutes, Ukraine fired 32 of the darn things.

[Bob] Yeah. And missed.

[Bryan] Yeah, missed and then got destroyed. The system got destroyed. It’s just crazy.

Bob, it's been fascinating. I really appreciate you coming on and talking with us today. I've got any number of questions I'd like to ask you, but I want to respect your time and we'll chat again in the future.

[Bob] Super.