Robert Moriarty (321gold) on BRICS Gold-backed currency

Transcript of video

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

Bryan: Good morning, Bob. It is Friday, August 11th. It's about 10 o'clock in the morning for me here on the East Coast. You're in France. I believe it's 4 o'clock on your Friday afternoon. So happy Friday.

Bob: Thank you.

Bryan: Good to see you. I want to give a little bit of an introduction. I think most of your audience knows who you are and what your background is, but we might have some new viewers.

So, Bob is a Vietnam veteran, flew 832 missions in Vietnam, both in the F4 fighter and in the Cessna Bird Dog. And most of those missions were in the Cessna. And I think he actually saw more action flying the Cessna than flying the fighter.

He's also the author of 10 books. Two in particular that are relevant to Precious metals investors “Basic Investing in Resource Stocks, the Idiot's Guide”, and then “Nobody Knows Anything, Investing Basics - There are no Experts, There are no Gurus”.

And so, Two excellent books on investing in the resources, Precious metals, and the mining stocks. Kindle edition - 99 cents. So, for two bucks go read those books.

Bob: The purpose is to give the information to people freely. You get the book in Kindle version, you can get it softback or you can get it hardback. And believe it or not, a lot of people want hardback because they keep going back to it.

Bryan: I grew up with books. The house I lived in, everywhere you looked, there was a bookshelf. And so I've got an affinity for holding a book in my hands.

So, there you go folks, for two bucks you can go read those books - and they're well worth reading. And then of course, Bob is the founder, curator and writer on these two websites, 321gold.com and 321energy.com. I looked this morning, it looks like you started 321gold in the year 2000.

Bob: Uh, actually 2001.

Bryan: Okay, so 22 years running this website and what's most relevant, I think, about your background for this particular conversation, Bob, is that through this website you visited more than 400 mining projects.

Bob: somewhere between 400 and 500. I never counted them, but I was doing 2 or 3 or 4 trips a month for really 15 to 18 years.

Bryan: Wow, that would be exciting. On one of those trips you did a long road trip with Quentin Hennigh and you ironed out or brainstormed a Gold currency.

Bob: Not necessarily a Gold currency. It was a monetary currency. We had both Silver and Gold.

Bryan: That's interesting. Would you describe it as a Precious metals backed currency or Precious metals as money?

Bob: It would be both. We were of a like mind. And we were doing this back in 2008 and 2009 and we realized the debt-based system of the West is doomed - and that's obvious to everyone now. And the question has to be, if the monetary system is doomed, what do they come up with next? What I do as much as I can is use history.

Now, if you go back to the French Revolution, 1789, the direct cause was the French involvement in the American Revolutionary War. And frankly, the colonists would have lost the war had it not been for the French. However, what nobody realizes is how expensive warrants are, and it literally bankrupted Louis XVI.

The war ended in 1783, and by 1789 the mob in Paris could no longer afford wheat. And they started a revolution - the French Revolution. All revolutions are economic in nature. And, since Gold and Silver were hoarded because nobody wanted to use them, the revolutionary government printed notes called Assignats and they did that to an unlimited degree, just as we are today.

And they were printed from 1789 till 1795 and then that financial system blew up and then they printed something called mandats, and that did the same thing. And then a French colonel named Napoleon seized control. And he went back to a Gold and Silver standard. And interestingly enough, all of the wars that France fought until he was defeated were financed because the economy was doing so well, having real money.

We're going to do the same thing. We're not going to do it because anybody wants to. We're going to do it because we have to.

Bryan: Yes, I agree. In the excitement about this upcoming BRICS summit and the possibility of them announcing a Gold backed currency, I've been giving a lot of thought to whether a Gold backed currency would really accomplish anything.

Because Gold backed doesn't mean exchangeable. I want a currency that I can take to my local bank and say, “Here's my paper money. I want physical Silver and Gold.”

Bob: Well, that covers a lot of things. I'm going to send you the thing that Quentin and I came up with.

Bryan: Let me ask you a question while you're digging there. Do you remember leading up to the launch of the Euro, I remember that they were touting “Gold backed”.

That the euro was going to be backed by 10% Gold, 15% Gold, something like that. And of course, now if you go look at Wikipedia or poke around on the internet, the Euro has always been a fiat currency, no mention of Gold backing. Am I misremembering?

Bob: No, no, that's accurate. It was supposed to be backed to 15%.

Bryan: I'm glad you're able to confirm my memory of the Euro launch. That was a sales pitch.

Bob: Yeah, of course it was.

Bryan: That was part of trying to get people to accept the idea of a new currency, and that's my concern. You know, when I see people talking about Gold-backed or oil-backed or rare earth metals-backed - I don't care what it's backed with - if I can't take it to the bank and exchange the paper currency for something physical, it's just a sales pitch.

Bob: Well, here's the key. First of all, you have to look at the definition of money. Money is anything that two people agree is money. It can be shells, okay? It can be salt. It can be cows, okay? It can be pieces of paper. It can be Gold. It can be Silver. It can be big round rocks. As long as two people agree, okay?

And you’ve got a lot of people now who believe the Cryptocurrencies are money. And, they shuffle the money back and forth, okay? Well, maybe it is. But is it going to be long term? I don't think so because it doesn't solve any real problems. It is a solution running around looking for a problem. Gold and Silver have solved financial issues for 5, 000 years.

Bob: Here's the key. Few people realize this, but the foreign exchange market in the world is $6.5 trillion dollars a day. And that is a form of slippage. It costs a lot of money to convert currencies. Right now, if I want to exchange dollars for Euros it costs me 3 or 4% and that mounts up when you're talking about $6.5 trillion dollars a day.

Bob: What Quentin and I came up with is this. Every country would use Gold and Silver Coins in grams - and this does not preclude you from having paper instruments that are fully backed by Gold and Silver, okay? But that would be exactly what the Coins would look like, and I talked to Quentin here a week ago, and I realized that under the Silver Coins, it should have been two and a half grams, five grams, 10 grams, 20 grams, and that would be equivalent to a dime, and about a quarter, and a half dollar, and a dollar.

The strange thing is if you could eliminate the slippage from currency exchange you could add a couple of percent to profit on every trade and the key is you don't need dollars and you don't need pounds and you don't need euros and you don't need rubles if you go back to Gold.

And if you go back to the last days of the 19th century Chile had Gold. Argentina had Gold. Brazil had Gold. Germany had Gold. Russia had Gold. France had Gold. The UK had Gold. And the timeframe between about 1825 till 1900 was the greatest period of growth in world history. And we're going to go back to that again.

But we've got a financial system that is utterly broken and we need to fix it.

Now, we should at least discuss the BRICS thing. Okay, because you and I are of the same mind. If you go back, what happened was somebody at an embassy, I think in Kenya, put out a Twitter saying they were going to come out with a Gold based currency at the BRIC Summit in Johannesburg in a couple of weeks.

And since then people have made it abundantly clear that it's not on the agenda. That goes back largely to the influence of Modi in India, who is dead set against the Gold backed currency because he wants to retain the ability of government to print an unlimited amount of money. And, of course, you can't do that under a Gold and Silver based system.

So, here's my feeling. I don't think it's going to happen.

But the most important countries in the BRICS, which would be China and Russia, are being attacked. They're being attacked in Iran. They're being attacked in Niger. They're being attacked in Europe - and they're going to fight back with whatever tools they've got available to them.

When the United States started putting restrictions on chip manufacturing equipment to China, China said, “Okay, well, here's these three commodities - we're not going to ship them out of China. Okay, try making your chips without the inputs.”

The United States - the idiots - and I don't use that word casually - the idiots running the United States - and it's certainly not Biden - this is Obama's third administration and Victoria Nuland and Sullivan and Blinken - are the guys who are really running it and they're clueless - they're utterly clueless. You cannot attack people without expecting to be attacked in return.

Now, when I went to Vietnam. We had all these absolutely fabulous plans on how we were going to defeat the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Now, what do you suppose the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were doing at exactly the same time? They were sitting there saying, “Okay, this is how we kick their asses.” And, of course they did.

The way to win any conflict is to not get into the conflict. We have opened a can of worms in Ukraine. The origin goes all the way back to the end of World War II and the United States has been trying to attack the Soviet Union slash Russia since 1945.

This war has totally destroyed Ukraine. Okay. There have been over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed. We have totally destroyed their military and much of their infrastructure. And, the idiots, the neocons in Washington want to open another war in Africa and another war against Iran.

I read a report last night that the United States government – Blinken - and I love him, I always think “Blinken and Nod”, okay. Blinken went to the Taliban and said, “Hey, by the way, we left a couple of million dollars worth of equipment there, and if you would attack Iran, we'll give you all that seven billion dollars that we owe you.”

And I'm thinking, God, that is evil. That is absolutely evil. But we have an evil empire. It's in a state of collapse. And the way to cure the financial system is go back to honest money. If you’ve got honest money, you can have an honest economy. If you don't have honest money, you can't have an honest economy.

Bryan: It has occurred to me - you mentioned global conflict - economic warfare is another form of warfare. One of the ways that Russia and China could - because China's next - if Russia falls, China's next - so, one of the ways that Russia and China could fight…

Bob: Hang on. Okay. Did you just say if Russia falls?

Bryan: Yes.

Bob: Are you kidding?

Bryan: Well, I don't think they will.

Bob: Russia is stronger today because of the sanctions. It's the EU that's going to fall, and it's NATO that's going to fall, and it's the U.S. that's going to fall - and it's suicide, and it was absolutely done to themselves.

And forcing Russia and China into bed together - if you want to go to war with the two most important countries in the world, you want to be armed with something better than a slingshot, okay? And these guys in Washington, the neocons, have armed the military with slingshots, and they're flinging bullshit at the Russians. And guess what? It's not a question of if the Russians lose. It's a question of if the U.S. loses, and it's going to be the biggest military disaster in history.

We've seen things that are absolutely unbelievable. The United States attack on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 was the biggest act of terrorism in world history, and Germany allowed their economy to be destroyed so they could prove they're a good little lapdog for the US.

That's total insanity. They were not operating according to what's good for Germany, which is what countries should do. The United States should do what's good for the US. France should do what's good for France. Germany should do what's good for Germany.

And for Germany to destroy their economy on behalf of the United States - to attack Russia - Russia's a neighbor, okay. Why would you attack your neighbor? Russia didn't do anything. Russia's guilty of selling cheap natural gas to Germany. Oh God, that's horrible. We need to nuke them.

So, we're at a period of peak insanity. One of the things that I want to mention, because it goes back to this BRICS and Gold thing.

One hundred percent of what people hear from the mainstream media today is a lie. Not 99 percent, not 50 percent, not 75 percent, 100 percent is a lie. So, if you want to find out what's going on, all you have to do is listen to the media and then invert it.

Okay. The Committee of Congress that investigated the January 6th uprising destroyed all the records. Now, the American taxpayers paid for that. There was a thousand people who were either in jail or have been charged with crimes. And the committee that investigated destroyed all the videos, all the records, and there's nothing that shows what was discussed.

We're at peak anxiety, and I think that the market's going to crash soon, and we're going to have to go back to reality.

Reality is - one, don't believe what the mainstream media is saying, and two, you've got to renew your financial system and come up with something that makes sense.

Now, I do believe that BRICS is going to stumble into some kind of Gold-backed system. When they do it, I can't possibly predict, but all of the people who jumped on the bandwagon, it came out authoritatively and said the BRICS was going to go to a Gold standard on August 22^nd - they're full of shit too.

Bryan: Yes. We got an official statement from an ambassador from South Africa, explicitly stating that there is no BRICS currency on the agenda for the August summit.

Bob: So, here's what you have to understand. There’s nothing that you're told that is absolutely authoritative.

And what you have to do is, you have to look at it rationally. You have to look at the background. Now India, certainly it's against the Gold backed currency, but you know, some guy in South Africa comes out says, “It's not on the agenda.” You don't have to believe that either, but you have to compare one guy saying, “Yes, it is, and they're going to announce it”, and one guy saying, “Well, it's not on the agenda.”

It's probably not on the agenda.

Bryan: Well, one of the things I've been thinking about, Bob, is that to successfully launch a Gold backed currency, or any currency, Cryptocurrency, whatever, there's a fair amount of infrastructure needed. You need a legal system, you need a central bank and…

Bob: No, you don't.

I mean, go back to, you know, 2000, 2,500, 3000 years ago. Do you realize how significant the introduction of Coins was?

Bryan: No.

Bob: It was a giant deal. Okay, because they had used Gold and Silver literally going back 5,000 years. However, some guy said, you know, instead of us handing each other lumps of metal, why don't we make little tiny pieces that we can use to transact things.

All people had to do is introduce Coins and it just overnight went ballistic because it was such a great change. If one country in the world went to the system that Quentin and I came up with, 14 years ago they would be the richest country in the world because everybody would want to deal with that.

And then everybody would turn around and say, “Hey, that's a fucking good idea. We need to do that.”

Bryan: Back to the global conflict idea. One of my thoughts is that Russia and China could back their currencies with Gold. Not a BRICS organization, but the countries, Russia and China - they back their currencies with Gold.

The Western economic system basically collapses. And this global conflict is over.

Bob: Well, the Western financial system is collapsing now. Okay. But did you happen to see what Poland has literally announced in the last day or two?

Bryan: No.

Bob: They're buying Gold. Okay. They're adding Gold. Now nobody goes out and buys hundreds or thousands of tons of Gold and Silver, unless they intend to use it for something.

And strange enough, I absolutely argue, and I've talked to Quentin, and we would like to see Bolivia use Silver to back their currency rather than Gold, because Bolivia's got a lot of Silver, and the San Cristobal mine and Potosi is still producing Silver, and literally all they would have to do is use the Coins that we designed, and I told Quentin, I said, “Quentin, that's a really good idea, and if you'll find somebody to make the Coins, I'll pay for it.”

And all you’ve got to do is get started and then everybody's going to say, “Damn, that's a good idea.

Bryan: Yes, I agree. Wasn’t Potosi the main mine for the Spanish 500 for years?

Bob: Yeah, of course. We've been getting Silver from Potosi for 500 years.

Here's what's bizarre. And this is really important to understand.

If you go to Peru, and I can't remember the name of the city, but in the south of the city, there's a convent - giant convent - and they've got a lot of things going back to the 16th, 17th, 18th century and they show Chinese china (dishware) and Chinese silk and tea, the Silver was produced in Potosi.

It was sent to Manila. Manila traded to China for tea and china (dishware) and silk. That was shipped to Spain and to South America. And then the British looked at it and said, “Damn, you know, we'd like to have some of that stuff. So, what we'll do is we'll grow opium poppies in Afghanistan and India and ship that to China and turn them into a bunch of junkies.”

And that's exactly what they did. Of course, Britain was the most important military power in the world. And they defeated China every time they attacked them. China had an opium problem, literally, going up into the 1950s. And believe me, they were pissed. So they don't feel all that guilty now at shipping the precursors to fentanyl to the United States because it's the United States that is addicted to drugs now and it used to be China.

So it's turnabout. It's about fair play.

Bryan: Yeah. The opium wars. I've only studied that a little and it's mind boggling that the Chinese allowed that to happen. But of course, you don’t realize until it’s too late.

Bob: China didn't have the power. Okay. England had the military power. And every time China tried to fight back and said, “No, we're not going to let you import this thing,” England would sail a ship into Hong Kong, blow the shit out of a bunch of Chinese stuff. But the opium war was not about opium.

The opium war was about Silver and all that. Silver came from Potosi.

Bryan: It's hard to make predictions. Especially if you're talking about the future. You've said that we're headed into a collapse. The collapse is already occurring. What do you think the next couple of months are going to look like? What are we headed into this fall?

Bob: They're going to be fugly. Okay, let me give you an example. I did an interview a week ago and I think it was posted on Saturday. The comment that had the most reaction from the readers was that nobody could predict the future. And strange enough, that's not true.

Okay. There are things that happen on a recurring basis. And if you study history and you study sentiment, you could see things that are clearly going to happen. In 2008, well 2007, I was in Singapore on a tour and we had like 15 people. And we were touring Vietnam - Gold mines in Vietnam and Indonesia and Malaysia.

We were all over Southeast Asia for about two weeks. Somebody spent a lot of money. I mean, we had a chartered G5. It was really cool. We were sitting in a restaurant in 2007.

And the Bear Stearns Hedge funds had just collapsed. I think there were two or three of them. And I was sitting next to a banker from Australia who was in charge of their derivatives. And, obviously, when you're on a mining tour and you got a bunch of guys, you know, liquor makes everything better.

I was about half trashed and I turned to him, and said, “Look, these derivatives, you guys just make that shit up, don't you?” And he kind of smiled and said, “Well, uh, yeah, we do.” And I said, “Well, take this and smoke it. This just started The Great Collapse, okay, and it's not going to be next week or next month, but this Bear Stearns funds going under is what's going to bring the system down.”

And of course, that goes into 2008. So, in January of 2008, I was speaking at a Gold conference in Vancouver. And I never have a prepared speech, ever. I'm incapable, I'm too old, and I'm too lazy to do that. I always speak extemporaneously. And Joe Martin said, wait, you’ve got to have a title. I said, “I don't want a title.”

I don't want to have a speech, so why would I have a title? He said, “Because we're going to print it in all the forms and everything, you’ve got to have a title.” I said, “Okay, we'll call it The Financial Collapse of 2008.”

So, I go to Vancouver, I'm in front of two or three or five hundred people, and it's President's Day, and the market dropped like two hundred points, three hundred points, big drop. So I said, “Look, Joe Martin required that I came up with a title. And I just threw this title at him because I'm convinced it's going to happen. If you don't believe that we're going to have a financial collapse in October, Go home. Now. Turn your fucking television on, and you can watch it.”

Okay, and literally, I knew people who got caught and they were long, and they believed there was going to be a crash, and it was President's Day and they couldn't transfer money from their bank to pay their margin. I knew guys that lost millions of dollars who were correct on the market.

They just happened to be long on President's Day. But you go into October 2008, I had been predicting it for like 15 months. So, I believe - and I could be wrong, okay - there are no gurus - there are no experts - I write books and make a lot of money at 99 cents - markets like to crash in October.

We are absolutely seeing absurd sentiment in the S&P 500 and NASDAQ, and the time is right for a major crash. So, we need to have another interview in November, and you can say, “Damn Bob, you called that absolutely correct. That's just magic.” Or you could say, “You know, you were running your mouth. You had no idea what you were talking about. You were dead wrong. And now the S&P 500 is hitting new highs, and everybody's trading Cryptos and making tons of money. How does it feel to be a fool?”

“Well, damn, you know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”

Bryan: One of the challenges with knowing what's going on in the financial system is that so much of it is hidden. For example, people don't understand that their pension funds, their retirement funds, insurance companies - on their books, they've got all kinds of garbage that Wall Street has sold to them. And, for example, commercial mortgage-backed securities - we can look and we can see that the commercial real estate market is clearly in the process of crashing - we've got any number of examples now of buildings that have sold at 63% less than they sold for the last time they flipped - and so we know that those Commercial backed securities are taking a hit, but we don't know how bad that hit is.

And we don't know how many derivatives have been created on top of that debt. Same story for bonds, whether you want to talk about government bonds or corporate bonds, or municipal bonds for that matter - all of that kind of paper is crashing, but we don't see it. We're not seeing headlines saying, “This pension fund just lost 40% of its assets.”

And so, you tell somebody, “Hey, the markets are going to crash in October,” and they say, “Well, I'm up 15% since January”, and so they stay long.

Bob: Let me correct you on one thing and the way I'm going to do this is to use a comparison. Okay, the biggest financial gurus in the 1920s would have been Bernard Baruch and Joseph Kennedy and the people surrounding them.

They knew bad things were coming. And they weren't prepared. And actually, you make far more money in a depression than you do in a booming economy. Okay? Because nothing changes physically. The only thing that changes is who owns things. When people are prepared, it is a time of opportunity to make money like you never even dreamed of.

And I'm going to throw this in. Every society has rich people, and every society has poor people, and what determines the stability of a society is the size and nature of the middle class. The United States and the EU have been destroying the middle class for years, and that is exceptionally dangerous.

At the same time, it gives you the opportunity to make a decision. If, as a member of the middle class, you're being destroyed - and believe me, people do realize it - you have a choice. Would you like to be among the rich or would you like to be among the poor? And it's a decision that everybody gets to make and that's exactly why I run my site and that's exactly why I do interviews because I'm trying to help people make the decision to get rich rather than to get poor.

Now let's go back to 1929 again. In 1929 the average Joe had no access to information, period. The only thing he knew is what he was fed on the radio or in the newspaper. Now if you compare that to now, there is more information available now than at any point in time in recorded history. The question is, are you going to listen to the mainstream media or are you going to do your own independent research?

And I encourage people every time I can, if there was ever a time you want to study and think and listen and learn, now would be the time.

Bryan: You, mentioned the middle class as being the key to a strong economy. My understanding of the American economy during the 1800s - that was the first time that we really had a significant middle class in America.

And it's interesting that we were on a Gold standard. The middle class was able to develop and that was the greatest period of growth in our country - just emphasizing how important the middle class is. And as you say, Bob, right now they're being destroyed. Inflation is a destructor. A market crash will certainly be a destructor.

Bob: And taxes.

The government is out of control. It is run by idiots who are utterly clueless. The military industrial complex has controlled the United States literally since about 1940. Enormous fortunes are being made today. There is the greatest disparity between rich and poor than in world history.

And you've got people like Mark Zuckerberg pouring 419 million into the hands of local Democratic committees. Okay. And, of course, these guys went out and went to a print shop and printed off as many empty ballots as they could. Okay, the 2020 election was the most corrupt election in American history. And anybody who does any research into it realizes that the Hunter Biden laptop was in the hands of the F B I - and they knew the Bidens had taken millions of dollars in Bries - from the Russians, from the Ukrainians, from the Chinese.

They knew all that shit before the election. Okay, so they just charged Trump with lying about calling a stolen election. Guys - it was a stolen election. Now, if you're a Democrat, you could say it's a wonderful stolen election. If you're a Republican, you could say it's a rotten stolen election. But the fact of the matter is you cannot have a free society and when either party is stealing elections.

Bryan: Well, this will be a good test of YouTube's censorship policies. Supposedly now it's okay to say that the 2020 election was stolen.

Bob: Isn't that wonderful? That's like talking about COVID. It's okay to say, by the way, it was all fraud. Because it was all fraud.

Bryan: I think that is still verboten - we're not supposed to say that COVID was all bullshit.

Let me see. I've got a list of questions. We talked about Gold backed currency versus Gold is money. And I believe you're saying, basically, it's got to be Gold is money - or Gold and Silver. We need a real currency to have an honest economy.

Bob: Exactly. Real money.

Bryan: Do you think it's likely that Russia or China is likely to back their currencies with Gold?

Bob: No, they bought it just because they need it to store it and gather dust. Of course, they're going to do that. Of course.

Poland is buying Gold. Every individual, every company, every government agency, every country needs reserves. And there are no better reserves than Gold and Silver. They're doing it because they can see the fatal flaws of the Euro and the Dollar and that's what the BRICS is all about. And I think there are 37 or 70 - there's a bunch of countries that have applied to join BRICS. France - actually Macron - went to BRICS and said, “Hey, I'd like to come sit in on the meetings.” And they said, “Take a hike.”

Bryan: You know, Schadenfreude.

It's when somebody who deserves to have the shit knocked out of them gets the shit knocked out of them.

Bob: That's right.

Bryan: And so we've had several examples of that. Newland going to Niger - and they basically told her to go pound sand.

Bob: No, they didn't.

Bryan: What'd they tell her?

Bob: They told her that she needed to go on a diet.

Bryan: Now, that's being mean.

Bob: You know, it is absolutely part of international statesmanship to tell people to fuck off. Okay? That happens all the time. I love Ukraine. Those idiots running that country have destroyed the country, have killed hundreds of thousands of their soldiers, and they come out and say, “Well, we're not going to have peace talks with Russia until Russia leaves.”

Excuse me, why would they do that? We're seeing some really incredible stuff, some incredible stupidity.

Bryan: You mentioned Ukraine. I saw an interview just a few days ago, Bob, it was between Scott Ritter and a young woman in Ukraine.

She's probably in her 20s - marrying age - at the age where you would think an attractive young woman was thinking about getting married and having children and what the future is going to look like. And there she is living in a destroyed country with no future. And it was really sad.

Bob: Well, it's entirely predictable. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and all the former republics split off, guess which country had the worst performance economically between then and now?

Bryan: Was it Ukraine?

Bob: Uh, gee, what a shock. Okay. Ukraine is absolutely the most corrupt country in Europe, perhaps in the world.

I listened to something yesterday where a guy was saying, “Well, you know, it's part of the culture in Ukraine. Ukraine wouldn't be Ukraine unless it was corrupt.” Well, if you've got a corrupt country with a failing economic system, you're going to put a lot of people into poverty. And that's exactly what they've done in Ukraine.

They've got the Nazis running the country, and those are not fake Nazis. Those are real Nazis, okay? And, as a result, it's destroyed the country. And the bizarre thing is, all they've done is helped Russia and China, so all the idiots in the United States who think that war was a good thing - it's accomplished exactly the opposite of what they thought it was going to do.

Bryan: Yeah, a very unfortunate situation. And no recovery - Ukraine's not going to recover - probably ever.

Bob: Let me give you an example. In 1976, I was making a living flying small airplanes all over the world doing airplane deliveries. The U.S. dollar was going down in value so fast that you could buy an airplane, you could own it for five years, and you could sell it for more than you paid for it in the first place.

It was the Golden era of delivering airplanes.

So, a guy came to me and said, “Look, I want you to buy me a Beach Bonanza and I want you to bring it to the UK.” He sold bits (burners) for cookers (kitchen stoves). And at the time in the UK, you had to buy the cooker from the government. And nobody in the government realized, well, sometimes cookers need bits. So, this guy had this incredible business in Southampton.

He was making money hand over fist. So, I find an airplane for him. He buys it. I fly it to the UK. He had me take him from Southampton to Biarritz, France. And he and his wife had bought a French farmhouse for nothing. At the time you could buy a French farmhouse and 10 or 20 hectares for a couple of thousand British pounds.

So, we drove down to Spain. And of course, Spain had a revolution in the 1930s and Franco took power. There wasn't a building built in Spain between 1936 and 1976. They went through 40 years of nothing and exactly the same thing's going to happen to Ukraine - that country is destroyed.

They're going to lose access to the Black Sea. They're not going to be able to ship their grain out anymore. Now, BlackRock and Vanguard think they're going to buy the country for peanuts. The corruption in Ukraine has destroyed the country. The United States wanting to wage a proxy war against Russia has been incredibly destructive to Ukraine and it's going to be 40 or 50 years before they recover. Why would anybody want to live there? Why would anybody want to invest there? It was a shithole before and now it's a cesspool.

Bryan: My understanding is that 90% of Ukraine's GDP came from the four oblasts that are now part of Russia.

And so 90% of GDP from Ukraine is now Russian GDP. That's most of the productive agricultural land and the natural resources. And so, even today, what's left of Ukraine is not an economically viable country.

Bob: The word Ukraine - everybody confuses that Ukraine was never a country - Ukraine was a region.

When I was young, people didn't talk about Ukraine. They talked about the Ukraine - the region - which was really in between prosperous Europe and Russia - and Ukrainians had it good. Then they got a bunch of corrupt people in power, and the United States and Boris Johnson are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the destruction of what could have been one of the richest countries in Europe.

Bryan: Colonel McGregor points out that Ukraine was a 500-mile buffer between NATO and Russia, and that was a good thing.

Bob: Absolutely.

McGregor also says there's not going to be an election in 2024.

Bryan: At this point, given that they can control the elections via the electronic voting machines and reviving the dead, having every voter submit eight votes with a ballot box, remote voting - I'm not sure that they would not have an election - I mean, what would be the point? If you control the electoral system anyway, why would you not let the people pretend that they still had a vote?

Bob: Because they're stupid. Let me give you an example of stupidity.

Jack Smith (Special Counsel for US Dept. of Justice) went after Trump for political reasons, and he charged him with lying about the validity of the 2020 election. When you charge a person with a criminal act or crime, you actually give them subpoena power. Now, that is the kiss of death to the American political system, because once Trump hires some reasonably intelligent lawyers, they're going to use that subpoena power, and they're going to find out that absolutely the election was stolen.

I'd like to subpoena Mark Zuckerberg and trace $419 million and find out how many votes he paid for. Very few people know that. Nobody pays any attention to it. The idiots at the FBI were talking to Twitter on the day the New York Post article came out and said, “Well, we know the laptop is legitimate and it belonged to Hunter Biden because we checked the serial number with Apple.”

They knew prior to the election - the 51 intelligence officers who signed off that it had all the aspects of a Russian disinformation project - I'd love to have every single one of those assholes in a courtroom saying, “You signed this document - said that it had all the attributes of a Russian disinformation. Were you aware that the FBI knew the laptop was real?”

That subpoena power is the most important political event probably in the last 15 years. Nobody believes for a minute that Trump's going to roll over and plead guilty. Why would he? Trump has the ability to destroy the military industrial complex.

That's a big deal. He threatened to do it before. Now he's got the power.

Bryan: And you would expect that he's pissed off too.

Bob: I would think so.

Bryan: One of the analysts that I follow - his name is Cliff high – he categorizes the period of time that we're currently in as, “secrets revealed.” It's a period of time in which all of this nefarious stuff that our government has been up to comes to light and a wider range of people become awake and aware of how corrupt the system is.

Bob: Not the system - how corrupt the Democrats are - how corrupt Facebook is - how corrupt Google is - how corrupt Twitter is. We're up to $20 million in bribes paid to the Bidens and everybody's pretending it didn't exist. And that's really slick.

Bryan: And I suspect that $20 million is a drop in the bucket. If we knew the real number - I suspect it's billions.

Bob: I don't think it's billions.

Joe Biden is a small time grifter. He was at the last of his class when he became a lawyer. He failed the bar exam several times. He's lied about everything in his entire life. Joe Biden's a grifter. Let me give you a perfect example. What president in the last 30 years managed to pad their fortune more than anyone else?

Bryan: I would suspect it was the Clintons.

Bob: Bingo. They took hundreds of millions. Biden has a little $20 million. Give me a break. $20 million is chump change. The Clintons managed to rip off their foundations for hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, how cool was that?

We've got Obama, who's made $50 or 60 million dollars since he left office and he and his wife hate whites - and absolutely believe in climate change. So, they live in a white only suburb - an exceptionally rich area right on the ocean. I'm going, wow. Do people not realize how much fraud is taking place right now? So, Cliff High is absolutely correct.

But the guys that wrote The Fourth Turning - same thing. All that shit was predicted. It was predicted in 1997. And the guy who was one of the co-authors of The Fourth Turning has just come out with another book saying, okay, we're in the fourth turning and here's what's going to happen. So, these are things we have access to now.

And it is incumbent on everyone to educate themselves. There are no experts. There are no gurus. You’ve got to learn how to think for yourself and you have to learn how to take responsibility for yourself.

Bryan: I just started reading, The End of Growth which talks about peak oil and demographics. I believe the book is going to get at some of the same ideas in The Fourth Turning – that basically, it's time for change. We're at a period where radical change is going to occur, whether we like it or not.

Bob: That's a very accurate statement.

Bryan: Well, Bob, we've been going for about an hour, a little bit over an hour at this point. Have you got anything else you'd like to share with the audience?

Bob: The interesting thing about The Fourth Turning is everybody who's familiar with the book is aware that it predicted a turn towards totalitarianism. But less obvious is the fact that he said it would be a regrowth of people wanting freedom. So, I don't look at the chaos that we're in as necessarily a bad thing. Like a hurricane, you’ve got to go through it.

But you’ve got to plan for what's happening on the other side. And it's, again, it's incumbent on people to educate themselves and take responsibility for themselves, because you think those idiots in the government are going to take care of you - they ain't.

Bryan: Right. And historically, if you were trying to protect your wealth, you got out of paper assets and you put it into physical Gold and Silver. And so that's my advice for anybody that's willing to listen is get out of the banking system, get out of your paper investments, get into physical Precious metals.

Bob: I wouldn't go that far because it's too restrictive. Paper assets are about to assume their real value, which is zero and real assets are about to assume their real value, which is substantial. So, it's not just Gold and Silver. It's land, it's productive companies.

I would buy a tanker of oil if I had a place to store it. But it's a time to be in things that are real rather than things that are imaginary. And, strange enough, we are starting to see leadership from other areas in the world. And that's what the whole BRICS thing is about. And they're saying, “Hey, wait a minute, the Western based financial system has been screwing us for 500 years and we're tired of it.”

And frankly, I fully support that.

Bryan: It's refreshing to see the events in Africa right now - that the African people are standing up and saying, “Look - no more. We're not playing your colonial games anymore.” And, it's going to be messy, but it's refreshing. I see that as part of what you were, saying about fourth turning.

We have a choice. We don't have to go down the totalitarian road. We can go down the freedom road. And I think that some of the events in Africa right now – Niger - they're choosing the freedom road.

Bob: Everybody has a choice and that's a good thing. What the United States hasn't come to grips with yet is that they're living in this echo chamber.

The people of Washington make two giant mistakes. One is they talk to each other and the other is they listen to each other and they don't listen to anyone else. This whole thing about Ukraine. Putin went to the US and went to NATO in December of 2021. He said, look, you guys lied 30 years ago about not expanding NATO to the east and you lied in the Minsk 2 agreements, and we want a rock-solid guarantee of security, and we want you to stop lying.

And they (the Americans) said, “Take a hike." That was pretty dumb and the United States is about to fall into the trap in Africa. France and Nigeria and Ivory Coast are about to invade Niger. And they're going to find out what it's like to fight a real enemy as the Ukrainians have.

Bryan: You posted an interview on your site this morning.

You talked about your wine production this year not coming in well, and you referred to it as Chateau Fax. Is that this year?

Bob: I'll give you a short synopsis. All of the weird weather of the last two years has been due to that giant volcano, the underwater volcano that erupted in January 2022.

That threw billions of tons of water into the atmosphere. The wine crop in the south of France has been destroyed. There have been hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of damage, but the record rains in China, the turnaround on the west coast where they had record rains out there, the thing in Maui.

That's going on right now. There's a lot of tragedies. None of that was climate change. 100% of it was because of the volcano and the water thrown into the atmosphere, and it's going to continue. There's going to be an impact for another two or three years.

Bryan: Yes. I find it interesting that you see headlines about record heat - hottest year ever - and absolutely no mention of the volcano

Bob: Strange enough that the record heat - also, the world's magnetic pole - it's about to shift and the Van Allen belt that protects the Earth from radiation from the sun has decreased significantly. So, it's a combination of the magnetic forces decreasing and the volcano at the same time. For all I know, the volcano may have been triggered by the magnetic forces decreasing.

The earth has gone through climate change for four and a half billion years, okay? They used to call it global cooling, and then that turned out to be fiction, and then they called it global warming, and that of course turned out to be fiction. Now they call it climate change. Well, hell, everything is climate change.

Jesus, give me a break. It's fiction, it's part of the plan of the oligarchs to control people. And if you hear climate change, you know you're listening to an idiot. It doesn't exist.

Bryan: An idiot or somebody with an agenda. There's some planetary alignments going into 2024, 2025 that could have some serious impact on us living here on planet earth, but we don't want to get into that.

Bob: You want to know the good news? Everybody's got to die of something.

Bryan: Yes. Nobody gets out alive. That's the way I say it. Nobody gets out alive. So, this year's wine is Chateau Fax. Last year?

Bob: No, no, last year's wine.

Bryan: But you didn't have Fax last year.

Bob: Well, so?

Bryan: Okay. Is there any wine for this year?

Bob: Yeah, last year's.

It's so bad now. I deliberately planted grapes that I wanted. Okay, there are Pinot grapes because I like Pino - and everybody said it's the wrong grape for this area. But last year's wine was really excellent. I mean, it was good wine.

The correct grape for this area is not as sensitive to mildew and fungus as the Pinot grapes, but the guy who made the wine for me, he's lost 50% of his crops. It’s been catastrophic. And I'm going to tell you, you can go all over the world and agriculture has been hurt significantly.

And in India, they're not going to export rice. India produced 40% of the rice in the world, and they're saying nonsense. We need it here. So, there's going to be food issues, but it's not climate change that causes it - its economic stupidity and changes in magnetism and the volcano.

Bryan: Yes. I understand that the volcano, it was not just water vapor, but ash as well that will particularly affect the growing of crops in the southern hemisphere. So they could be even more affected by the volcano in the southern hemisphere than we are here in the northern hemisphere.

So, interesting times, but, “May you live in interesting times.” Isn't that what the Chinese say?

Bob: That's an ancient Chinese curse.

Bryan: Exactly, yes. I'm not cursing you, Bob. I really appreciate you coming on. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Where can people find your work?

Bob: 321gold.com, 321energy.com, and amazon.com.

Bryan: And speaking of your work, how's the latest book coming along?

Bob: Well, there are some things we just don't discuss. Okay. I have the best intentions.

Bryan: I've only written and published one book, but I feel your pain and I'll probably never do a second book based on my experience of the first one. You'll probably never see a second book from me.

Bob: It's not pain, it's just I'm lazy. I've easily got 10 books. I edited a book for David Cullum, who is absolutely brilliant. I've come out with the book about small airplanes all over the world. And I wrote a book about what's her name? Kamala Harris, “Word salad from Kamala Harris.”

So, what's going to happen if there is a 2024 election? The Democrats are going to whack Trump and then they're going to whack me.

Bryan: You're funny. Okay, let's go ahead and wrap it up. Good talking to you, Bob.

Bob: Thank you, sir.