Is Fort Knox Empty!? | News You Might Have Missed

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] Elon Musk tweeted out looking for the gold at Fort Knox. There's a lot of conspiracy theories that gold might not be there, and Elon Musk questions this. So is the gold there? Now, what would happen if he went there and, oh my gosh, there really isn't the gold there? This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_00] There is so much news coming out every day that there's a lot of news that is important that people might have missed. So one thing that's really important, I see it going all over the place. On Saturday, Elon Musk tweeted out looking for the gold at Fort Knox. And Elon Musk then tweeted, this gold is the property of the American people. I sure hope it's still there. And it's a legitimate thing.

[00:01:03] [SPEAKER_00] First off, everybody's responding to this. Michael Saylor, who's bought billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, he tweeted out, Bitcoin fixes this problem, which is interesting. I'm going to discuss that in a second. But look, if people are nervous about the gold in Fort Knox and whether or not it's there, it is an important thing to address.

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_00] So in the next 20 minutes, I am going to describe everything you need to know about the gold at Fort Knox, whether or not it's there, what would happen if it's not there, what would happen to the price of gold, and some other things about this too. Like, you know, should we get back to a gold-backed currency, and so on.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_00] In fact, one newspaper article I was reading today said, we need to know if the gold at Fort Knox is there because we need to know that the dollar is safe because it's backed by that gold. Now, this is the most important issue. The U.S. dollar is not backed by gold. It used to be. So what does that mean?

[00:02:05] [SPEAKER_00] It means if I had a dollar bill, the dollar bill was like an IOU, and I could go to the bank and say, I am returning this IOU, and I want $1 worth of gold in exchange for this dollar bill. For centuries, the dollar was always backed by gold. I can always theoretically exchange every dollar I have for gold. Why would I do that? I don't know. If you have a lot of money, you're going to have a lot of gold to move around in a wheelbarrow.

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_00] I don't know what you would do with all the gold, but theoretically that's how it worked. And you can say that's how it's worked for the dollar for the past two or three hundred years, but it's actually worked for all currency for several thousand years. So the way paper money even started was there were goldsmiths. So people who stored gold for people, you know, for wealthy people, for instance, but really for anyone.

[00:03:00] [SPEAKER_00] And if I deposited, let's make up a number, $100 worth of gold at a goldsmith, then the goldsmith will give me a receipt. And the receipt says, oh, I have $100 of gold at the goldsmith. I can now use that receipt to either get my gold back at the goldsmith, or I can use the receipt to pay for things in the market. And then whoever I pay, they can use the receipt to get gold out of the goldsmith. So this is the invention of paper money was because all paper money was backed by gold.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_00] People kind of intuitively thought, well, paper is paper, but gold is something of real value. It's a real scarce metal. So gold was hard to mine. It was rare. So gold had value, but paper, anybody can make paper. So paper didn't have any value. So they had to basically make up this story that the paper now we all use as money was backed by gold.

[00:03:52] [SPEAKER_00] But in 1971, for the first time in thousands of years, the main currency of the world, which was the U.S. dollar, was no longer backed by gold. So here's what happened. Richard Nixon was the president of the United States. It was August 25th, 1971. And Richard Nixon basically had a major problem. So because of the 1960s, U.S. spending went up incredibly because of two things. We were spending a lot of money on the Vietnam War.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_00] In addition to the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was president from 1963 to January 1969, and then President Nixon took over. In the 60s, Johnson, in addition to funding the Vietnam War, also started the Great Society programs, which created, among other things, it created Medicare, which is health care for people over the age of 65. 65, so it's free health insurance for anybody over 65.

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_00] And it also created Medicaid, which was a welfare program to get medical help for people who couldn't afford the medical help. So why is this important? Well, today, in 2024, Medicare and Medicaid, just those two programs created by Johnson in the 60s, accounted for almost 30% of all federal spending, about $2 trillion worth of spending.

[00:05:13] [SPEAKER_00] So even back then, in the early 70s, we just created all these programs, and we're funding the Vietnam War. We can't pay for this out of the revenues that the U.S. generates from collecting taxes. We have to print money. We have to create new money. But you can't create new money if you don't have new gold to pay for the new money. And I'll give you an example.

[00:05:35] [SPEAKER_00] Now, because this gets a little bit into the economics of gold and a gold-backed currency, but because the U.S. was the biggest economy in the 60s, and still is, and because the U.S. dollar was backed by gold, everybody in the world wanted dollars because they knew it was safe. They could trust it. I mean, the U.S. had then and has now the biggest army, the biggest military. So this guarantee of gold is safe.

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_00] So the dollar became very, very strong, like everybody wanted dollars, which meant all other currencies became weak versus the dollar. So what happens when foreign currencies are weak, but the U.S. dollar is strong, and this is still happening to this day, is foreign countries make goods that are cheaper in general than U.S.-made goods, which is why our iPhones are made in China and not here. And this leads to the whole tariff discussion, but I'm not going to get into that today.

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_00] But when other countries are selling more items to the U.S. than the U.S. is buying, that's called a trade deficit. We were spending our dollars in other countries. For instance, we buy iPhones with dollars that go to China. So back then in 1971, other countries had $35 billion in their reserves.

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_00] But we only had $10 billion worth of gold in Fort Knox and a few other places. By the way, all the gold in the U.S. is not just in Fort Knox. For instance, there is gold buried under Wall Street as well. But Fort Knox has about 60% of the U.S.'s gold. I'll get to that in a second.

[00:07:12] [SPEAKER_00] But in any case, if other countries had $35 billion worth of dollars and we only had $10 billion worth of gold, Nixon thought to himself, and by the way, his Treasury Secretary was John Connolly, the Federal Reserve Chairman was Arthur Burns. They also agreed with Nixon on this. If all the other countries said, hey, we want $35 billion worth of gold, hand it over. It says here in the dollar, oh, it's backed by gold. Well, the U.S. would go broke. We only had $10 billion worth of gold.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_00] It's the first leader in history to do this. Nixon said, you know what? We cannot do it anymore. The dollar is backed by the goodwill of the U.S., but nothing else. It is not backed by gold anymore. Everyone was like, what the heck? We can't trust the U.S. dollar anymore. And so the dollar fell. The dollar became weaker, which was Nixon's intent.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_00] But this had a side effect of creating a lot of inflation because why trust the dollar so that you needed more dollars to buy a McDonald's hamburger because people stopped thinking that the dollar was valuable to some extent. And, you know, within the next 10 years, we got up to double digit, like over 10% inflation per year. It was pretty scary. This then was most recently in 2021 after all the money was printed for COVID.

[00:08:30] [SPEAKER_00] So anyway, the U.S. dollar is not backed by gold. It's pretty important to know this. Right now, Fort Knox has 147.3 million ounces of gold. It's a lot. It's $425 billion worth of gold. But again, last year, the U.S. spent over $6.7 trillion. So $425 billion doesn't help our spending that much.

[00:08:59] [SPEAKER_00] By the way, the U.S. made in revenues about $4.9 trillion. So it lost about $2 trillion. This is very important. So that means the federal government spent $2 trillion more than it made. Well, how does it pay for that? It doesn't sell off its gold. Remember, we only have $425 billion worth of gold in Fort Knox. But what the U.S. does is it can't tax people more. The taxes is how the U.S. generates the $4.9 trillion in revenues.

[00:09:27] [SPEAKER_00] Again, the expenses were $6.7 trillion. So the U.S. prints money. The Federal Reserve prints money. And it does this. Or the U.S. borrows more money. Either way, it's borrowing money. And eventually, this money has to be paid back. The U.S. is over $36 trillion in debt. And forget about paying the debt back. In 2025 alone, for the first time, just our interest rate payments,

[00:09:54] [SPEAKER_00] the U.S. interest rate payments, will cost over a trillion dollars a year. So let's get back to why is it important, though, that Elon Musk does audit or at least check, is the gold there in Fort Knox? And the question is also, why would we suspect otherwise? First off, Fort Knox was created in 1936. It's in Kentucky. And the reason it's in Kentucky and not close to one of the major cities on the coast

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_00] is because historically, if you're a country that's the boundaries are two oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, well, the worry is the coast could get invaded. You know, hypothetically, in some, you know, science fiction world, the coast could get invaded. They wanted the safest location in the U.S. to be, you know, away from the coast. So it's in Kentucky, about a thousand miles or so from the coast. Maybe not that much, several hundred miles from the coast. And it hasn't always just held gold, by the way.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_00] The Declaration of Independence was held there. The U.S. Constitution was held there. More recently, I think these things were bought by our many-time podcast guest and friend of the show, David Rubenstein from the Carlisle Group, who then put the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence at the Smithsonian. But that's neither here nor there. So Fort Knox, is it truly safe? Can you get in there? Well, here's an interesting thing. Some interesting facts about the security of Fort Knox.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_00] First off, it's worth noting a few things. After Elon Musk tweeted, I sure hope the gold is there, tweet, you know, implying that Doge is going to visit Fort Knox, which I think they should do for various reasons. But Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, I mean, the gold is in his state. He tweeted back, let's do it. Because Fort Knox wouldn't even let Rand Paul in. That shows you how secure it is. They don't let anybody in.

[00:11:46] [SPEAKER_00] In fact, the only three times since Fort Knox was created in 1936, only three times did a non-Fort Knox employee, like non-security guard, visit Fort Knox. So in 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president of the United States who created Fort Knox, he toured Fort Knox.

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_00] Then in 1974, there was 104 congressmen who were like, why did we get off the gold standard? We want to make sure the gold is there. So all these congressmen were allowed into Fort Knox and they said, yes, the gold is there. And then in 2017, Mitch McConnell, who was a senator from Kentucky, and Stephen Nugent, who was the treasury secretary, they visited Fort Knox and they said, yes, the gold is there.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_00] But very important to know, those aren't audits. Like those 104 congressmen didn't audit Fort Knox. Yes, there was gold there. It looks like gold. We think there's gold there, but it doesn't really mean the gold is there. Now, the treasury department does do a basic audit every year at Fort Knox and they share it with the public. But we have to trust that that occurs now. And they don't count all the gold.

[00:13:03] [SPEAKER_00] There's 147 million ounces and it's highly secure. It's very hard to get to the gold. But basically what they do is they take a random sample of the gold and they weigh it and they determine scientifically that, yes, this random sample is not fake gold. It's real gold. And they do that every year. And again, we have to trust them. And they don't sample the entire gold.

[00:13:28] [SPEAKER_00] They just simply check some, you know, maybe like a million ounces and say, oh, yes, these million ounces are gold. Now, I stated also the gold was actually, it's actually hard to get to. It's interesting. So the gold is held in these giant vaults. No one person knows the full password to get into any of these vaults. So like if everybody, hypothetically, if everybody died who knows part of the password, we're in big trouble. I guess it's stored somewhere.

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_00] But the other thing is these are each door into the vault is 20 tons. There's 16,000 cubit feet of granite around the gold, 4,200 cubic yards of concrete, layer of steel after layer of steel. The gold is impenetrable. It is not possible to get to all this gold. So that's why there's no real reason to visit it. Although, again, in the past 82 years, it's only been visited three times by people who don't work for Fort Knox.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_00] So I do agree. Even though the U.S. dollar is not on the gold standard, just in our imaginations, and some people don't even know, U.S. dollar is not backed by gold. And part of the mythology of the U.S. dollar is that it's so strong because in the worst case scenario, we have all this gold to protect us. But I will mention, we only, again, we only have $425 billion worth of gold.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_00] Guess how many dollars the foreign nations around us, you know, in the world have of the U.S. dollar? They have $7 trillion in their reserves. So, again, the amount of gold we have is only a fraction of the amount of dollars that foreign countries have of ours. We have 5% of the gold or 10% of the gold we need.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_00] If we went back to a gold-backed currency, we would not be able to pay all the countries that want the gold backed by the dollar. So, you know, there's no way to go back to a gold standard. That ship has sailed, but it's still, somehow, it's part of the U.S. reserves, and gold is an asset that has been going up, and it's at all-time highs right now.

[00:15:42] [SPEAKER_00] And quite legitimately, there's a lot of conspiracy theories that gold might not be there, you know, including, and Elon Musk questions this. So, is the gold there? He should be able to visit. Now, what would happen if he went there and, oh my gosh, there really isn't the gold there?

[00:16:05] [SPEAKER_00] Well, my thinking is, a lot of people are saying, oh my gosh, this would drive the price of gold way up because the U.S. would have to buy all the gold it claims was there. And the dollar would crash. Everybody's saying the dollar would crash. Actually, I don't think either is true. The U.S. doesn't need gold to back the dollar. The dollar has not been backed by gold for over 50 years. So, who cares if we have the gold or not? Now, of course, I care, and you should care, because if the gold's not there, where is it?

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_00] They claim to have $425 billion worth of gold, 147 million ounces. The gold's not there. Where is it? Who took it? Who stole it? Is the U.S. missing a half a trillion dollars almost? Like, this would be a serious issue. The real reason I think that Musk would like to see if the gold's there is, A, do we trust the U.S. and what they've been saying? Again, people have only been there in 2017 and 1974 and in 1943, so we just don't know.

[00:17:04] [SPEAKER_00] And the other thing is, since the dollar is not backed by gold, why do we even hold the gold? Like, we're just holding it there. It's not even as much to pay half of the interest that the U.S. owes every year. The trillion dollars the U.S. is going to owe just in interest payments. We're not going to reduce the debt. We're just going to pay the interest is a trillion dollars. So we can't even pay half the interest bill this year.

[00:17:30] [SPEAKER_00] So I think, quietly, I'd like to know if the gold's there because I think the U.S., and maybe Elon Musk believes this as well, the U.S. should start secretly or quietly selling off its gold just to make the half a trillion dollars. And, okay, it only pays half of the interest rate for one year. Fine. Pay half of the interest payments for one year. And I'll tell you why that's interesting in a second.

[00:17:53] [SPEAKER_00] But we don't really need to have the gold in the strategic reserve, which is why Michael Saylor says much more accountable from an audit point of view and potentially much more lucrative is to include Bitcoin in the strategic reserve. And perhaps this is Elon Musk's ultimate goal here is to increase interest in crypto for the strategic reserve. Look, gold has no actual use. Yes, it is rare to mine.

[00:18:21] [SPEAKER_00] There's only so much gold in the world, but there's also only so much Bitcoin in the world. There's only going to be 21 million Bitcoins. Gold does have some industrial use. You know, gold is antibacterial. And gold can be used to conduct electricity, like in a semiconductor. But why would you use gold when for 180th the price, you could use silver, which is why we have silverware, because it's antibacterial.

[00:18:47] [SPEAKER_00] So if there's bacteria in your food, between the time your silverware picks up the food and it goes in your mouth, silver is killing the bacteria. Which is why also you could have a silver filled cavity or a gold filled cavity in the dentist's office. Of course, you get your cavities filled with silver and not gold because it's 180th the price. Which, you know, some people do put gold in as more as a statement of luxury that they can afford it. But silver is used for this. And in semiconductors, silver is used for semiconductors, not gold.

[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_00] It's 180th the price. And when you have millions of semiconductors in a computer, this is an important savings. So gold has no real industrial use. Bitcoin, whether you like crypto or not, it doesn't matter. Bitcoin has a million man hours of coding in it. And as David Sachs, the crypto czar of the United States says, Bitcoin is the internet of money.

[00:19:42] [SPEAKER_00] Bitcoin can recreate this decentralized internet just using the code that was used to develop Bitcoin. People don't really know. There's heavy industrial or software use for Bitcoin. I'm not going to get into that here, but this is Michael Saylor's point. There's actual use for Bitcoin. Bitcoin, there's no real fundamental use for gold. So really, we only keep that gold for kind of purely, I don't want to say sentimental reasons. There's a strategy to it, which is that people believe that gold has value.

[00:20:12] [SPEAKER_00] It doesn't really have value, but people believe it. So it's interesting. It's important to know the gold is still there and it hasn't been stolen. But I think if all the gold is there, the reality is I think Elon Musk and probably Donald Trump want to sell it. There's no real reason to have this gold. We might as well slowly sell it to pay for, you know, pay down some of our debt and so on. And also right now, as I said earlier, the U.S. spends $6.7 trillion, but it makes $4.9 trillion from taxes.

[00:20:41] [SPEAKER_00] And it spends on Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Defense, interest payments, and then other sort of things. So if we could one day sell half a billion dollars worth of gold or half a trillion dollars worth of gold, okay, that year, we maybe could avoid having a deficit. We could avoid printing money. Printing money and borrowing money is bad because ultimately you, the taxpayer, have to pay it back.

[00:21:08] [SPEAKER_00] Or there has to be inflation to pay it back. And that also affects you. So inflation is a hidden tax and taxes are, of course, direct taxes. The money comes directly out of your pocket to go to the government. Inflation, the money comes out of your pocket in the form of you have to pay more for an egg. You have to pay more for your house. You have to pay more for a car. It's as if you're paying more in taxes.

[00:21:31] [SPEAKER_00] So every dollar the government spends more than it makes, it comes out of your pocket ultimately, whether in the short term or the long term. So, okay, if we have a half a trillion dollars worth of something we can sell that has no real use, might as well sell it and use that money to pay down the debt. If there's no gold there, then it sort of demonstrates that we don't really need gold. Nobody needs gold. And I actually think gold will crash.

[00:21:57] [SPEAKER_00] Like gold is running up right now because there's some speculation that there's no gold, that what Elon Musk will find is that Fort Knox is empty. I don't think he's going to find that. I think he's going to find that it's all legit. But, and I think he knows this, he just wants to get access to it so he can start selling it on behalf of the U.S. If there's no gold there, A, there's, means there's fraud somewhere. So A, we have to investigate where the fraud is. B, it also means the world just didn't need the U.S. to have this gold.

[00:22:26] [SPEAKER_00] So I think gold will just crash because people will finally realize it's useless. So that summarizes the Fort Knox issue. There's another issue I want to just quickly address, which is the U.S. penny. So last week, Donald Trump said we're no longer making the U.S. penny. And why did he say that?

[00:22:48] [SPEAKER_00] Because a penny, which used to be 100% copper, is now 97.5% zinc and only 2.5% copper. And even with that, you know, percentages, that ratio, it costs almost four cents to make a one cent penny. So it actually costs 3.7 cents to make a one cent penny. And there's something like 5 billion pennies created annually.

[00:23:18] [SPEAKER_00] So ultimately, there's a net loss of $80 million a year because we make the U.S. penny. Now, so why do we make the penny? Well, even though most goods are not, like, it's very rare to go to the store and someone says, oh, hamburger costs you $2.21. Like, why would they make it $2? Well, but there's sales tax on almost all goods.

[00:23:44] [SPEAKER_00] So sometimes when the sales tax is calculated, the final payment is in pennies. It's like, you know, a hamburger that cost $2 but had, you know, a 6% sales tax is going to cost $2.12. So you have to have that $0.12. You have to have exact change. And that's where pennies come from. Or that's where pennies are mostly used right now. If we didn't have pennies, people would probably round up the sales tax and you would pay with nickels.

[00:24:12] [SPEAKER_00] But it's estimated that because of that rounding up, it would cost consumers about an extra billion dollars a year. Which, by the way, is not a big deal. There's 300 million people, let's say, in the U.S. So it costs everybody $3 or $4 a year extra in sales taxes. Not such a big deal. And the goal here is to reduce government spending, which is the $80 million a year the penny costs us. That said, I will note that the quarter and the dime together, they cost less than the worth.

[00:24:40] [SPEAKER_00] A quarter, it costs about $0.10 to make a $0.25 quarter. And ultimately, we make about, you know, an extra $3 billion a year because of the quarter and the dime. The nickel costs us money. So they should probably get rid of the nickel too. And anyway, you know, you'd have to look to see how much people pay in cash versus credit cards. Since COVID, a lot more companies are requiring people to pay just in credit cards. So I agree with getting rid of the penny.

[00:25:06] [SPEAKER_00] You know, you can't just casually say, oh, we only lose $80 million on this. And meanwhile, our expenditures per year are $6.7 trillion. So it's not really making a dent. It adds up. It's worth it to not stop making the penny. Particularly, we're making a lot of money on the quarter. We're making some money on the dime. Probably get rid of the nickel too. And ultimately, you probably should get rid of, you know, coins and just have paper.

[00:25:35] [SPEAKER_00] Why do we need a penny that's backed by metals when $100 bill is backed only by paper? It's not backed by any metal. So maybe you can make a penny bill. I think for nostalgic reasons, people are upset. They want Abraham Lincoln is on the penny. It's people collect pennies. And here's the thing too. Yes, each penny costs you about almost three cents. And it loses almost, you make a penny for almost four cents.

[00:26:02] [SPEAKER_00] And you only make a penny from distributing a penny. But a penny stays in circulation on average about 30 years. So you can divide that up by 30 years. It doesn't really cost that much. But hey, having a kind of discipline of cutting spending happens at every level. You know this when you save money for your personal life. And it's the same thing with the government. So Elon Musk is taking a philosophy. Let's just starting from scratch.

[00:26:31] [SPEAKER_00] Let's say we made no pennies per year. Would we suddenly start making 5 billion pennies a year? No, it costs $80 million to do that. We're not going to do it. So I think the penny is an interesting case study in how Elon Musk is thinking and how Donald Trump is thinking. But more of the philosophy of Elon Musk. He did this at Twitter. He basically got into Twitter, fired everybody, and then said, okay, now where are the problems? Who do we need to keep? And then he kept about 20% of Twitter's workforce.

[00:26:58] [SPEAKER_00] And he's doing the same thing at every level of government. So a lot of people disagree with this approach. There might be problems that happen. And I agree with that. But I think the overall philosophy is correct and is interesting. Start from zero. Start from what's called first principles. Like if you have nothing, what do you need to run a country like the U.S.? And starting from scratch. And this is how you're able to say, well, look, we just, we spend almost $2 trillion on Medicare and Medicaid.

[00:27:26] [SPEAKER_00] How much fraud are we spending of that $2 trillion? Same with social security. This is a big expense in the U.S. How much fraud is there? Perhaps I'll do a podcast episode on this. But for now, Fort Knox, the penny, these are all interesting examples of the philosophy of cutting spending. And I hope you learned something from this. I just want to mention two other things that I thought was interesting news very quickly.

[00:27:53] [SPEAKER_00] One is Boom Supersonics is a company that they created a supersonic plane that just recently flew for the first time. Last time the U.S. commercially had a supersonic plane was the Concorde, which was run by British Airways and I think American Airlines. It last flew in 2003. It famously exploded in the air. The Concorde went faster than the speed of sound. And so I took the Concorde once back in today. It was amazing.

[00:28:23] [SPEAKER_00] It was only a two and a half hour flight. I had a breakfast meeting in London. I took the Concorde and I had a breakfast meeting in the U.S. And it was amazing. But since 2003, there's been no commercial supersonic plane. But now Boom Supersonics is supposed to start delivering planes in the next few years. And I think by 2029, there might actually be supersonic flights again. Well, here's what's interesting. They not only flew a supersonic plane faster than the speed of sound, but there was no sonic boom.

[00:28:51] [SPEAKER_00] They figured out how to get rid of the sonic boom by, I don't know, twisting the air around the plane. I don't understand the science. But the whole problem with having domestic supersonic planes like New York to L.A., New York to Miami, Miami to Las Vegas, whatever. The whole issue was the supersonic boom was so loud it created too much noise pollution. So it's always been illegal to fly commercial supersonic planes domestically in the U.S.

[00:29:19] [SPEAKER_00] But now with this new invention, and by the way, planes were the biggest inventions for something like 70 years. You know, from basically Orville and Wilbur Wright flying their first plane, I think in 1914 or earlier, I forget. All the way to the rockets of the Apollo program going to the moon. There was so much innovation in planes and aircraft.

[00:29:46] [SPEAKER_00] But for the past 50 years, there's been hardly any innovation at all in commercial airliners. Until now, this boom supersonics. They eliminated the sonic boom. All of your lives might change because guess what? You're going to fly in an hour or two hours from New York to L.A. instead of six or seven hours. That's going to be incredible. It's going to be great for the economy. It's an amazing thing. Here's another piece of news that I thought was weird.

[00:30:15] [SPEAKER_00] But in Mississippi, they're trying to pass a law that says, and I give this up to everybody else to research. I decided not to research this. This bill literally says a man cannot ejaculate without intent. And how do they even enforce that law? How does the police come in and say, oh my gosh, you are guilty of ejaculating without intent. You're going to jail. You're a criminal. So I don't understand that law.

[00:30:45] [SPEAKER_00] I'm not researching it. You can tell me on Twitter. Also tell me if you like this style of podcast. Did you learn something? Share this with your friends who don't know about Fort Knox, the gold, how we got off the gold standard, why gold is important, what will happen if there's no gold in Fort Knox. Share with a friend if they want to know why the penny costs so much more than it's worth. Like what's the value of the penny and should we get rid of it or not? So share this with your friends. News you might have missed. Signing off. I'm James Altucher.