How Oil Prices Impact the Economy and Global Conflict

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1:07Hello, Rich Dad Radio Show, Robert Kiyosaki. Good news and bad news about money, as I 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, they 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 McGregor. 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.

1:53So 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 Kings Point. And Kings 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 my father was surprised. 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, Annapolis, Kings Point.

2:43Annapolis graduate, starting pay,$200 a month. Kingspointer,$2 ,000 a month. I wasn't very good at math, but I said I like Kingspointer a lot. 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. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing, Douglas, I went to Kingspoint in Long Island, New York, and for some reason I was fascinated by oil. and I started, my degree is ocean transportation oil. So my first port of call 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 Homo's.

3:36Again, 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 incident hanging on there. Oil is driving the world again. Oil is fertilizer, everything. And our national debt is at an 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? Well, that's an interesting question. Just a quick correction. I retired as a full colonel, not as a lieutenant colonel.

4:28So 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. And 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 material grandfather ran everything. And 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.

5:14You'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 what you were able to study, which sounds to me to have been very practical and useful. I was dragged through this curriculum. 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.

5:57And 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. I didn't particularly care much for that. I was always sort of lackadaisical about 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. And so So it was four years of solving equations because that's all you did.

6:39Okay, 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 know, you neatly finished your problem, underlined it with two red lines and, you know, 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.

7:24You know, I just I was happy to be done and finished and through. So happy that I never had to go back and do that again. So I really didn't enjoy myself until 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.

8:01We 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 else I could think of. And every four years, as a friend of mine, Ambassador Chaz Freeman 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.

8:46Well, 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.

9:29And now what I think we're seeing is something that 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 objects that come out of the ground is the way I like to talk about it. That's vital and essential. And 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.

10:09I 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. 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 loss of food. Well, I was talking to some friends in India, and I concluded that we are 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.

10:51We're going to face famine in many parts of the world. Right. So what the colonel is talking about is VRIC, is Vancouver Resource Investment Conference, and I own gold mines. And my first gold mine I took public was on the Toronto Stock Exchange, 2004. It was in China, Douglas. Yeah. As we struck gold, guess what they did? They took it. Oh, I'm sure. I'm so shocked. Yeah. So anyway, you know, 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. so I use a lot of money to buy oil in America in North Dakota and Texas so I like your opinion what's going on this guy Donald Trump he and I have written 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.

12:05Genghis Khan. 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. Yeah. In the provinces and so forth. And I think somebody said that roughly one out of five citizens in Persia is a Mongolian heritage. 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 do. Give me your 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 whack Iran, I just bought more oil in the States.

12:56So I make more money. I don't have to be a victim of this whole thing. When we come back, we'll be with Colonel Douglas McGregor, he's West Point, and he is our authority today on what's going on in the Straits of Hormuz. We'll be right back. For decades, Robert Kiyosaki warned the system was fragile. Most people laughed. They aren't laughing anymore. $39 trillion in debt. Inflation that won't quit. A dollar that has lost more than 90 % of its purchasing power since 1971. That's not instability. That's a collapse in slow motion. Robert's been saying this for 30 years. Savers are losers. Not because saving is wrong, but because saving paper money in a system that keeps printing more of it guarantees one thing.

13:42Your money buys less. The rich don't save paper. They own real assets, gold and silver, things governments can't print, things that have survived every financial crisis in history. Gold was$35 an ounce in 1971. Today, it's over$4 ,500 and still climbing. The biggest banks in the world are calling for$6 ,000 and higher. Most people ignore this. They stay in paper. They will pay the price. You have a choice. but the window won't stay open. Robert has spent 30 years teaching that financial education is the greatest asset you can own. That's why he's partnered with Priority Gold to bring that education directly to you through the Rich Dad Gold Playbook.

14:29Call 866-703-9895 or text Sky to 24999 to get your free copy. Learn how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver, tax and penalty free, with up to$10 ,000 in free silver on qualifying purchases. Call 866-703-9895 or text Sky at 24999. Don't say the thing that they keep printing. Own the thing they can't. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

15:18Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

15:26Welcome back, Robert Kills. Thank you for today to show our guest today. Very special guest is Carl Douglas McGregor. 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.

16:13Again, we're stuck in Hormuz. And again, the issue seems like oil. So Colonel McClicker, please take off. Let us know what's happening out there. Well, just a quick note. The sad part is that Ho Chi Minh was very open to doing business with us. He was. He was. Yes. 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, given 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.

17:08The 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.

17:55They 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 freed inflation.

18:42I 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.

19:20Really? 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.

20:08And if you look at the people that surround Donald Trump and the White House, these people are all Israel firsters. Now, go back to the Republican convention in 2024, before the election. It 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 woman of Pennsylvania. She was incredible. Died at 56, sadly, but she was a very sharp cookie. Triple majored in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. She was a Whiteman Cup tennis player and number one on the men's tennis team because she beat all the men. So this is 1939.

20:47It's quite an achievement for a young lady. Anyway, she made it very clear that what we wanted and what we were about. And 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? And 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 or the Republicans or anybody else.

21:38Answer is never. What is this flag doing there? And I think a lot of people - What's that in? What's that? Oh, I don't remember the city at this point. It was the Republican National Convention in 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 Kash Patel, and they said, what is your top priority?

22:29Oh, Israel. What? What? You're going to be the director of the FBI and your top priority is Israel? What's yours, Kash Patel? Well, Israel. Hambandi, 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'd have been a mob outside the building to hang you. Impossibility. And I think we all missed it. And so you've got to understand that we are currently being governed by people who are largely allegiant to Israel. And Mr. Netanyahu is really running the show.

23:19I think that's the best way to sum it up. We heard that J.D. 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's going to go on and watch the video. He says, oh, yes, everybody calls me every day. What is going on? This is insane. And 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.

24:01Why 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.

24:37It'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.

25:21It wouldn't be the first time that we said we want a diplomatic solution. How come every time we attack, they have nuclear weapons? Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons when they were found. And Qaddafi was similar. Yeah. Well, Qaddafi, sadly, he did what we asked. He opened up his nuclear and chemical capability. He allowed us to dismantle it. So, you know, he cooperated 100%. in. 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.

26:15They don't 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.

26:50And then it's back to what you were saying. What about all the other products? We're talking about industries shutting down. 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 right now. Yes, that's right. That's how old that ship is. But anyway, when 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.

27:45And I looked up and said, what's on the wall? Taiwan.

27:52So you're what I'm getting at, right? Yeah, yeah. Why would they have Taiwan in the middle of the wall in Okinawa? 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 said, 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 launched into southern China was staged out of Taiwan, are you going to let any foreign force of any kind occupy Taiwan?

28:49No. 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. 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. You know, I mean, it really shaped me up. Because my friends were all drug dealers. growing up in Hawaii, you know, they were in tropical agriculture, marijuana growers making a lot of money. I said, I don't want to be like them.