transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] I tell everybody, until the aliens finally give us the secret to relate light, gravity and magnetism, and we know how we can move things without the carbon-based energy, we're stuck with oil.

Speaker 2:
[00:16] Hello, Rich Dad Radio Show, Robert Kiyosaki. Good news and bad news about money, as they say. We broadcast from Scottsdale, Arizona or Phoenix, Arizona, where it's either heaven or hell, and right now it's heaven, soon to be hell. And people keep asking me, how do you put up with the summer? I said, the invented air conditioning, thank God. But anyway, it's not that bad, it's a great place to live. And I guess today the man I respect tremendously is Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Macgregor. He's West Point Class of 76. And the reason that's important to me is because, for those who may not know this, in the world of military academies, there's five military academies. So West Point is the Academy. Then there's Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. There's Air Force Academy, Coast Guard Academy at New London, and King's Point, and King's Point's in Long Island, New York. And when I graduated from high school in 1965, my poor dad said to me, he said, you're so worthless because my grades are so bad. I'm not going to waste my time and money on your education. You better figure out how to get into school. So I applied and to my father's surprise, Naval Academy gave me a nomination. And so did the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. And Douglas, I sat there looking at these two brochures. NAPLUS, Kings Point. A NAPLUS graduate, starting pay, $200 a month. Kings Pointer, $2,000 a month. I wasn't very good at math, but I said I like Kings Point a lot.

Speaker 1:
[02:05] You also picked up some useful skills that you could use in the future. I'm not sure that the skills at the Naval Academy were nearly as good.

Speaker 2:
[02:12] Yeah. Well, the interesting thing, Douglas, I went to Kings Point in Long Island, New York, and for some reason I was fascinated by oil. And I started, my degree is ocean transportation, oil. My first protocol was Valdez, Alaska, driving oil tankers with standard oil. So I drove oil tankers all over the world. And now, as you know, we have a little incident going on in Hormuz. Again, it's oil. And by going to the Academy and studying oil, it was a very good education because civilization runs on oil. So here we are, 2026. We have this Hormuz of incident hanging on there. Oil is driving the world again. Oil is fertilizer, everything. And our national debt is at all time high. And we're at war in one of the most critical areas of the world. So Colonel, thank you for being part of the show here. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. One last question. How did you like West Point?

Speaker 1:
[03:30] Well, that's an interesting question. Just a quick correction. I retired as a full Colonel, not as a lieutenant colonel. So for your audience, people need to know that. I actually, in most cases, like the Military Academy. I'll be frank with you, I spent a year at Virginia Military Institute first before I went to West Point. My 50th anniversary as a member of the class of 75 was last year. This year, it's 50 years since I graduated from West Point. But I came from a very strict family. My grandfather, I was raised in his home. My maternal grandfather ran everything. When I first didn't get into West Point initially, he said, don't be concerned about that. I found a nice little military school in the south where you could spend a year. You'll enjoy it. So I said, yes, sir. I went there. And of course, I recognized quickly that he was a sadist because VMI was hell on earth for me. But it was excellent preparation for West Point. West Point was much more relaxed, actually, than VMI at that time militarily. The only problem I had, and you were talking about, which you were able to study, which sounds to me to have been very practical and useful. I was dragged through this curriculum, a 68% of your subject matter that you had to take, consisted of engineering, science, and mathematics. And we completed the equivalent of five semesters of math in three semesters. And we went to school six days a week. And we were tested in every class that we attended, which meant that every day you went in, you were grading. And I didn't particularly care much for that. I was always sort of lack of days to live in it. But I really, really disliked all the engineering and math. It bothered me. I just felt as though I was wasting time. I wanted to be a soldier. I decided, or my mother did, I don't know which, when I was five that I was going to go to West Point and become a soldier. So I wanted to be in the military. And I just found this annoying. So it was four years of solving equations because that's all you did. Okay, I'm here for thermodynamics. I'm here for civil engineering. I'm here for mechanical engineering. What are the goddamn equations? I have to memorize and figure out how to solve these. It's just formulaic. So if you were someone that liked that, who was formula driven, then you were a superhero at West Point. Everybody loved you. And you neatly finished your problem, underlined it with two red lines, and saluted smartly and went off about your business. I wasn't interested in any of that stuff. I needed a case of no-dos to get through it. So I graduated, I think it was 312 out of 835. I was happy to be done and finished and through, so happy that I never had to go back and do that again. I really didn't enjoy myself till I got to graduate school. And I was interested in studying things that I thought were important, and I was able to go on and study Soviet military force development, organization, strategy, and its impact on Germany. I also studied, because I was fluent in German, a lot of German military studies, German history. And all of that served me very well because I ended up immersed in strategy, which is acutely absent in Washington from everything we do. We have no strategy at all. We've never had a strategy. And that's one of our biggest problems. If you go to Japan or China or South Korea, if you're very fortunate and they trust you, which is difficult, you will discover they actually have a national strategy. They know where they want to go. They know where they want to be in five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. We have no such thing. And that's a huge problem. And that does more damage to us than anything. What else can I think of? Every four years, as a friend of mine, Ambassador Chad Streaman says, we give Washington a lobotomy because a new president comes in, throws everything out that was there before he arrived, and builds a new world. Well, you got away with that nonsense for the first 130 years, 140 years of the country, but for the last 100, it's played hell with us. And that's where we are. We have no strategy. We are impulse driven. And I think that's also true when you look at, and you and I met at the VRIC, and I was very fortunate to meet you. And one of the reasons that I went there is that I became very interested in precious metals, and I wanted to see what the rest of the world was interested in and was doing. And I was shocked when I looked at the level of investment in precious metals, in mining. It was modest, tiny compared with the investment in a whole range of other areas. And now what I think we're seeing is something that Gold, somebody in Goldman Sachs coined this. He called it heavy asset, low obsolescence. In other words, all the things that we've ignored, paid little attention to. Oil was part of that, obviously. The hard, the hard objects come out of the ground is the way I like to talk about it. That's vital and essential. When you were talking about oil earlier, it's in everything. And how do you get people to understand? We're not just talking about gasoline. We're not just talking about diesel. We're talking about a whole range of products from plastics to aluminum, sulfuric acid. I mean, everything that you could think of is bound up with petroleum. And no one in this country really understands the gravity of the situation that we confront today globally. The rest of the world is figuring it out. But we haven't figured it out.

Speaker 2:
[09:33] Yeah, the biggest thing, in my opinion, is fertilizer. You know, that grows food. And if that... You know, prices are high enough as it is, without a lot of...

Speaker 1:
[09:46] Well, I was talking to some friends in India, and I concluded that we're in the process of reversing the Green Revolution right now. If this drags on, and I think it's going to drag on for a few more weeks, it's going to take us years to recover from the damage we've inflicted on ourselves. We're going to face famine in many parts of the world.

Speaker 2:
[10:06] What the Colonel is talking about VRIC is Vancouver Resource Investment Conference, and I own gold mines. My first gold mine I took public was on the Toronto Stock Exchange 2004. It was in China, Douglas. As we struck gold, guess what they did? They took it.

Speaker 1:
[10:31] Oh, I'm sure. I'm so shocked.

Speaker 2:
[10:34] Yeah. Anyway, life in the fast lane out there. I want to ask you a question because we're at, and I'm also an oil guy. I use a lot of money to buy oil in America, in North Dakota and Texas. I like your opinion, what's going on? This guy, Donald Trump, he and I have read two books together, and he's out there pounding away on Iran. Iran is Aryan, stands for noble. I never knew that, but Iran has kicked ass and everybody's ever invaded him. Genghis Khan.

Speaker 1:
[11:15] Give the Mongols credit. The Mongols, they did an enormous amount of damage. But the interesting part is if you look at the way the Mongols organized Persia, that's the way it is still organized today.

Speaker 2:
[11:27] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[11:27] In the provinces and so forth. So the, and I think somebody said that roughly one out of five citizens in Persia is of Mongolian heritage.

Speaker 2:
[11:38] That's exactly right. There's a lot of stuff going on that's more than just oil. And when we come back, that's what I want you to give me an overview on what we can look towards, but also how not to be victims of it. For example, when I understood that we were going to, we're going to whack Iran, I just bought more oil in the States. So I make more money. I don't have to be a victim of this whole thing.

Speaker 1:
[12:08] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[12:08] When we come back, we'll be with Colonel Douglas Macgregor, West Point, and he is our authority today on what's going on in the Straits of Hormuz. We'll be right back. Welcome back, Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Radio Show guest today. Very special guest is Carl Douglas Macgregor. He's West Point Class of 76. We call ourselves Ring Knockers, as a band of brothers and all this stuff. And I was saying to him, I'm a lot older than he is, but my first tour as a midshipman was to Vietnam in 1966. And when I was out there, I said, what the heck are we doing in Vietnam? Beautiful beaches, other than Hawaii. And I found out again, it was oil. Occidental Petroleum was out there, and America wanted to make sure that the Chinese didn't get Vietnamese oil. So here we are, 2026. Again, we're stuck in Hormuz. And again, the issue seems like oil. So please take off, let us know what's happening out there.

Speaker 1:
[13:22] Well, just a quick note, the sad part is that Ho Chi Minh was very open to doing business with us.

Speaker 2:
[13:29] He was. He was.

Speaker 1:
[13:31] And we were so caught up in this Cold War and this obsession with communism. We missed an opportunity there. There was no reason to go to war. You have a similar situation today in Iran. I would argue there's no reason for war between the United States and Iran at all. Just as a side note, and this will be of interest to you, giving your background. When General George Marshall met for the first time with the British Imperial General Staff after Pearl Harbor, this would have been in January, February timeframe of 1942, they met to coordinate efforts, obviously, since we were now in the war. The British were always anxious to get us into their wars and they'd gotten us into the second one. And he walked in, I think, with a dozen men. And the British walked in with 50 or 60. The British were carrying suitcases with charts and maps. They laid them out on the table globally, and they pointed to everything that they wanted to control when the war ended. That included all of the oil, all of the harbors and all of the countries that had oil. And then it also included coal mines. And of course, not surprisingly, iron. Everything that makes us a modern civilization that contributes to our prosperity. They had identified all of it. We walked in with nothing, because we were there to quote unquote, beat the Germans and the Japanese. That was it. That's been our problem for a long time. And when you look at Iran right now, we're so busy trying to make Israel great again at the expense of the American people by fulfilling the wish list of Mr. Netanyahu and those who work with him, that we've lost sight of what's really in the American national interest. And we've lost sight once again of the criticality of doing business and avoiding war. We used to think war was destructive. Wars breed inflation. I don't care where you go, what you do, and how long you fight, you breed inflation. It comes with a package. So people, I thought, had learned, let's not get into this sort of thing, but we've done it. And I think right now, if you said, what's the purpose of the war? The answer would be, we're going to destroy Iran. Well, what happened to regime change? Well, that didn't work. Okay. Well, no regime change. And what about the air and missile campaign for three weeks? Well, they were supposed to collapse. That didn't work. So now what are you going to do? Well, we've got to destroy them. We've got to bring them to their knees. Really? And how does that help us? And oh, by the way, Iran is not alone. Iran has Russian friends and Chinese friends. And I would argue more friends than that. And every day they have more friends. And now our so-called partners in Europe are finally waking up and discovering that they don't have to be vassal states anymore. They don't have to do everything we tell them. And they figured out there's nothing for us to win down in the Persian Gulf. What they want to do is get the Gulf operating again and do business. But we don't seem to want to do that. I think the Zionist billionaires who ensured that Donald Trump won his re-election the second time around are demanding war. And if you look at the people that surround Donald Trump in the White House, these people are all Israel firsters. Now, go back to the Republican Convention in 2024 before the election. There was an event at that convention that was shocking to me. My mother was heavily engaged in politics. She was the president of the Republican Women of Pennsylvania. She was incredible. Died at 56 sadly, but she was a very sharp cookie. Triple major in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. She was a Whiteman Cup tennis player, and number one on the men's tennis team. She beat all the men. So this is 1939. It's quite an achievement for a young lady. Anyway, she made it very clear that what we wanted and what we were about. I saw this thing at the convention because I'd sat through many of them with my mother, and there was a giant Israeli flag on the wall, and above it were these words, Israel First, and this corpulent fellow walked out to the podium, and he held up his fist, Israel First, and everybody in the audience sat there, and you heard, and then people looked around at each other, what is this? I looked at that, and I said, this has got to be a first in history. When have we ever seen a foreign flag at a national convention for either the Democrats, the Republicans, or anybody else? Answer is never. What is this flag doing there? And I think a lot of people-

Speaker 2:
[18:43] What state was that in?

Speaker 1:
[18:44] What state? Oh, I don't remember the city at this point. It was the Republican National Convention, and what was that, early August or late July of 2024? And this was sprung on everybody, and it was just shocking. What I didn't understand at the time is that you had someone like Larry Ellison, who was instrumental in approving or disapproving whoever was picked for cabinet positions, for appointments in the administration. In other words, you had to sign up for Israel first. Then I remember when the cabinet was selected, and there were some interviews with people like Dan Bongino and Cash Patel, and they said, what is your top priority? Oh, Israel. What? You're going to be the director of the FBI, and your top priority is Israel? What's yours, Cash Patel? Well, Israel. Pam Bondi, Israel. What is going on here? I said, I've never seen that before. In the United States, if you had done a thing like that 100 years ago, and you'd said, well, Britain, or you'd said China or something else, it would have been a mob outside the building to hang you. Impossibility. I think we all missed it. You've got to understand that we are currently being governed by people who are largely allegiance to Israel. Mr. Netanyahu is really running the show. I think that's the best way to sum it up. We heard that JD Vance, while he was negotiating or in theory, negotiating with the Iranians in Islamabad, actually called Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu bragged about it in a cabinet meeting that was filmed. He can go on and watch the video. He says, oh yes, everybody calls me every day. What is going on? This is insane. His goal is not the same as ours. His goal is to become the hegemonic power over the entire region. Ultimately, he'd like to get control of those oil fields as well. He wants to use the American military power that we have to realize his dream. Why is it in our interest to do that? It is. You don't have to park a tank on top of an oil well to get the oil out. I thought that was a lesson we had learned. But we don't seem to have learned that, so we're using the wrong instrument for all the wrong reasons. And we don't seem to understand that the Iranians did not set out initially to close the strait. They said they would in time. It was Lloyds of London that closed the strait. Because none of the ship's captains could get insurance to move their vessels out of the strait. It was a war zone. I don't think enough people really understand that. It's not just because they could be sunk by us, which is clearly a possibility. It's not because of threats from Iran. It's because you cannot do business in a war zone. Capital flees, crisis and emergencies. We don't seem to get it. And what we should be doing right now is backing up and saying, what are we doing? You know, he keeps saying, I want the strait of Hormuz to be open. Well, it was open before we attacked. So stop attacking. That's the first thing. Back up. Say, we were headed down the wrong road. We need to find a more peaceful diplomatic solution. How tough is that? It should be easy. It wouldn't be the first time that we said we want a diplomatic solution.

Speaker 2:
[22:24] How come every time we attack, they have nuclear weapons? Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons when they were found. And Gaddafi was similar.

Speaker 1:
[22:35] Yeah. Well, Gaddafi, sadly, he did what we asked. He opened up his nuclear and chemical capability. He allowed us to dismantle it. So he cooperated 100 percent. What did we do? We killed him. We removed him. We created chaos and disorder. This thing is a catastrophe. And as you were pointing out earlier, we don't understand the implications. Everybody right now is saying, well, you know, gas prices are up a little bit, but we have a lot of gas here, so we don't have to worry. Then understand, oil is a fungible commodity. Just because you think you've got more of it than other people do doesn't mean it's going to get cheaper. I'm sure the boys in West Texas are happy and a few other places. But let's be frank, the American consumer is screwed. It's going to be $7 or $8 a gallon pretty soon. And if you live in Germany, you're already paying $11 a gallon. And the Irish, you know, look at Ireland. It's kind of the canary in the coal mine. It's a little island. The Irish there have no more diesel. They can't run the diesel. This is just a disaster on a scale we can't imagine. And then it's back to what you were saying. What about all the other products? We're talking about industries shutting down.

Speaker 2:
[23:58] It seems when we're in financial trouble, we go to war. Yeah, we just go to war. So I was also just in Okinawa. I was stationed there before we got on a ship, the MAUs, Marine Expeditionary Unit. I was on the Tripoli. And the Tripoli is still in Hormuz. That's how old that ship is. But anyway, I was in Okinawa just recently. The general walked in. I'm sitting in the same ready room. I sat there as a young pilot. And the two star walks in. And he says, gentlemen, everything on the wall is classified. And I looked up and said, what's on the wall? Taiwan. So here I'm getting at it, right?

Speaker 1:
[24:53] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:53] Yeah. Why would they have Taiwan in the middle of the wall in Okinawa?

Speaker 1:
[24:59] Because someone in Washington, and I must say you're going to hear this on the Hill, you hear this in the White House, that we need to be prepared to defend Taiwan against the Chinese. Just last week, the leader of the opposition party and the majority party in the parliament, the KMT, was in Beijing. And essentially, we're going to join with China in the future. There will be no war. We don't want a war. Well, they are going to be part of China. They are part of China. And if you're Chinese and you think back to 1937, and you realize that every major Japanese offensive washed into southern China was staged out of Taiwan, are you going to let any foreign force of any kind occupy Taiwan? No. What are we doing there? It's 6,000 miles away from us. Just as the Strait of Hormuz is 6,000 miles away. You know from your time in the Marine Corps, how hard is it to sustain operations over thousands of miles? This makes no sense.

Speaker 2:
[26:10] So anyway, I sit there watching all this and I recommend to all young men and women now, if you really want an education, try military school. I mean, it really shaped me up because my friends were all drug dealers growing up in Hawaii. They were in tropical agriculture, marijuana growers making a lot of money. I said, I don't want to be like them. And then by the way, I have a home in South Carolina, right next to the Citadel. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[26:48] That's a great school.

Speaker 2:
[26:50] Yeah. And I look at the young men and women coming out of there, I'm going, it's really kind of what America needs more. There's some stronger at the gut, you met in women because as our colleges, sure are putting that out.

Speaker 1:
[27:05] I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[27:06] Anyway, so final words there, Krenel.

Speaker 1:
[27:11] Something given has no value. You have to earn it. When you earn it, it has value. So at some point, if you go to school, you have to ask that gut wrenching question, do I really want to put up with this much crap to graduate? And that's what it was like in the military. How much are you willing to do to get to your goal? So I agree with you. We need more of that, not less of it. But I think all these institutions have been severely weakened, and that's a topic for future discussion because they have been weakened, unfortunately.

Speaker 2:
[27:45] So anyway, so when I graduated from King's Point, the Vietnam War was still on. I said, I can't hide on an oil tanker. I joined the Marine Corps, so Colonel, I say it to you, Semper Fi.

Speaker 1:
[28:00] Absolutely. We need more people with the Semper Fi spirit.

Speaker 2:
[28:07] Forever faithful. Thank you, my friend. I'm honored to have you on my program.

Speaker 1:
[28:13] I look forward to talking to you again, and especially when it comes to the topic of gold, I've made some good friends in Palisades Gold. So I could use a good tutorial from you.

Speaker 2:
[28:27] I like this stuff. I started buying it in Vietnam.

Speaker 1:
[28:31] Really?

Speaker 2:
[28:32] Yeah. Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 71 and 72. My co-pilot and I flew behind enemy lines, proving Marine pilots aren't the brightest to go buy gold. And we're trying to buy gold at discount. And I found out you can't buy gold at discount. I don't care if the NVA is there or not. Gold is gold. So, Colonel, thank you very much. Honored to have you in the program.

Speaker 1:
[28:59] Thanks a million.

Speaker 2:
[29:00] That's perfect. And we'll be right back. Welcome back, I'm gonna thank Colonel Douglas Macgregor. West Point is five federal schools. West Point's the oldest. There's Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Kings Point. I took Kings Point. And from Kings Point, I went in the Marine Corps. That's a long way of saying, so I'm a ring knocker like Colonel, but I took the easier route and joined the Marine Corps. And I flew for the Marine Corps for five and a half years. So this year, 2026, I will be the grand marshal of the Veterans Parade of Washington, DC. So if you have a time to go out for the Veterans Parade, I think it's in November of 2026. Watch for me. I'll be on the float. And I'm very honored to be the Veteran of the Year, representing the US. Marine Corps. And so in final words, I want to thank Colonel Macgregor. And I love the way he always wants to learn more. And we should all be the same way. This podcast is a presentation of Rich Dad Media Network.