what in the world is going on let's ask longtime pentagon official michael maloof michael in your days at defense you worked closely with secretary donald rumsfeld so take us inside the pentagon with the new boss lolita austin how much and and the secretary of defense really changed a great big military machine. well i think. the idea of austin versus rumsfeld is like comparing apples to oranges you have rumsfeld who was a very dynamic policy driven individual he was a former congressman then and so he had a far greater. appeal and and perspective on on policy direction especially toward national security austin is a good soldier he takes orders and everything that he has done to date suggests that he salutes and the the commander in chief and does whatever by and once clearly the power base for national security and foreign policy resides at the state department's not at the defense department and. austin will carry out whatever biden wants and and the emphasis will be more on diplomacy that seems to be the direction that they want to go but in doing that there will be efforts to push american democracy around the world human rights and to back it up with military might so that's going to be another avenue of concern particularly given the neo conservatives that are influential within the biden administration something we can go into a little later but there's. that that's not to take away from what a good person austin is he's just not a policy driven individual i recall during your and rumsfeld years and colin powell was the secretary of state tremendous. conflict between the 2 and it took a kind of lisa rice to be referee between the 2 of them that's how. contentious policy. the issues had become in those days. rumsfeld was a very strong. individual i remember briefing him a few times and and he would kick out briefers and he had a particular style that he wanted just in the presentation of his briefings and i mean the man was. a piece of work. and is something else. knows i love it was a very smart he was he was very smart he was very driven and. was pleased to have worked under yeah he was a great sound bites i loved when steve carrell played him in that movie does that mean a lot to the men and women in uniform that austin was a soldier. well he they know that he is a good soldier but you know what the problem for austin is that he was supposed to be a civilian leader in the military he was granted a waiver i'm sure that military individuals identify with him he had out of phys more with the military i think than with the policy wonks in washington that's very clear to me right now he's clearly yeah more at home among the military base and and he does have the ear of the of the military personnel and i think that for them that that's a good thing he is and he would probably in that respect be a good secretary of defense and looking out for the troops but in terms of civilian leadership and policy direction for national security policy he's not the one. well he's got a hell of a budget there and i've been reading that the average fighter jet in the u.s. air force fleet is 28 years old the workhorse f. 16 was designed in the 1970 s. and the air force had been working with lockheed martin to replace it with the f. $35.00 loaded up with enough technology to cost a $100000000.00 copy now after 28 plus years of r. and d. the air force has reportedly concluded that the f. 35 is not the replacement for those cold war era f. 16 s michael have i got all that correct and when we go back to the drawing board fail this costly 2 heads roll. no i think it's because the new nuclear quietness where always imposed over time on on beefing up the technology within the within the f. 35 i don't think it's their fault the air force has come out now says it wants a smaller less expensive aircraft. they've they've just. reinstalled rated if you will a new version of the f. 15 so it's a it's a they're going back to what works and this the f. 35 is a very delicate machine and and the technology i think that they're discovering is that it can be countered and that's one of the reasons why they're so concerned about the sale of s $400.00 by the. purchase i should say of us were hundreds by turkey from from russia that. the they had the ability to be able to counter the f. $35.00 is there and so the but they if they want something is going to dog fight and b. be more. and conduct itself more with other other aircraft then they're going to have to go with a lesser version that's more versatile the f. $35.00 is probably a great standoff aircraft. but it and yet it still hasn't got all the stealth characteristics in fact some of the stealth capabilities can be are losing the capabilities and the and the they're noticing damage as they can put it up to full throttle for example with up back some of the techno technology and stealth technology it's on a so it so much has been jammed into this airplane over a short period of time that oftentimes the technology as it is isn't really there they're developing it as as they're trying to make it operational on this seems to be the problem i'm down to about a minute but you've had such a wary eye on that neighborhood that i must ask about a hot spot this new administration is focused on get us up to speed on iran. well in a thumbnail sketch it's getting worse. with the one thing that we're not hearing a lot about is the increasing agitation that is the existing between israel and iran right now iran you have netanyahu coming out for elections and in march 23rd the presidential elections in. iran coming up in. june. and you have the by the administration wanted to reach rejoin the. nuclear agreement with iran which is absolutely a red line for israel and one thing that's going almost virtually on record is the fact that there has been increased activity between iran and israel and that has to do with the. shipping of oil by iran and efforts by israel to sabotage and so this is increasing even though you only heard of one attempt by allegedly by iran against an israeli vessel but israel is also doing the same against iran the other area that i'm looking at very very closely will be the end of the south caucasus and the into john when with a push by nato. to move into that area and given the some of the people that biden has in his administration namely toria nuland and she's very much she was very instrumental in the coup with him in ukraine during the obama years i expect some fireworks to occur and you will see a diminishing necessarily in afghanistan he will see of troops that is you will see a diminishing of troops in in syria so i think that were really end for it for more suspense on the military side appreciate your perspective on all of this a long time pentagon official michael maloof thank you for. back into the big picture movie theaters have reopened in new york city and are open or re opening elsewhere expect to spread out and unless you're consuming the overpriced for his freshman expect a mask up but after that new james bond movie has sat on the shelf for over a year we're finally going to get this see daniel craig now 53 in his final performances double 07 and 35 years after top gun tom cruise returns as maverick. you should be at least a 2 star. yet here you are. captain. one is that. sort of life mistress or. the cinema stars are a like veteran baseball players now struggling through spring training trying to squeeze in one more season but another movie sequel is an old modish to harold ramos who co-wrote national lampoon's animal house he was bill murray's army buddy and stripes which he also co-wrote and he directed hits including caddyshack groundhog day and analyze this but you know his face best as egon in ghostbusters he left us too soon but is remembered in another sequel we can't wait to see some how the town that isn't anywhere near a tectonic plate as most. movie loud music. is shaking on a daily basis. my grandmother. my mom says we're just trying to put you out. who are you. coming up bitcoin fool's gold this is the big picture on our t. america. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to a guest of the world of politics small business i'm show business i'll see that. so ironic that all the people that are in the big point bubble talk about the other bubbles that the fed is inflated without recognizing that they're in a bubble themselves and it's like a bubble is generally in the eye of the beholder nobody can tell their own bubble as they've got all these people who are involved in the crypto bubble they can't see it. i chuckled when i spotted this at the supermarket that vending machine that you dump spare change into swap for paper money or amazon credit is now selling bit coin let me tell you my bitcoin sob story for several decades i've been writing a monthly newsletter to my colleagues in the talk radio industry and there's no charge is free if you want to subscribe you can go to my website holland cook dot com but for the 1st 25 years i was selling subscriptions it was $99.00 a month and about a half dozen years ago one of my subscribers asked could he really knew by pay and in bitcoin i said what's big cohen can you imagine how much tat $99.00 worth of big cohen would be worth today but now is it too late to get into big cowen or is this fool's gold it's debatable crypto currencies here to stay as serious asset class big queen making progress to replace dollar it's getting close to 50 percent or so over taking silver so the global silver markets approximately just under 2 trillion so certainly within a few months because it'll be a vaulting over silver it's on its way and my believe in 2021 to get half way or so against the market. capitalization of gold that is it would be 4 trillion on its way to 10 trillion and then you know want to get past all there's only the dollars left and the thing about declawing is that it is the apex predator or it is the shark in a notion full of goldfish and our plankton and which is the u.s. dollar they print a lot of dollars but they're not particularly robust has value to the extend people believe as. the bitcoin is it's just. something that has new. it is ruth well people think. this can be used to 1000 as opposed to less than 10000 years ago. was a tense of a cent source issue. or it could be nothing nothing let's get a 3rd opinion from r.t. boom bust co-host christi i kristie in layman's terms how does crypto currency work. well crypto currency at a very pure and simplest form is a peer to peer form of payment that can be exchanged online for goods and services and there's uses a technology called block $10.00 which is a decentralized technology spread across many computers that manages and record these transactions in an immutable ledger so because of the security and permanent digital permanence that the ledger is documented and copied across all these computers and that's a big part of the technology the feel this means that no one person no one entity the organization owns the block and can have control over it and that's really the big difference between crypto currency that other kid if you're forms of pain and things like paper our vendor yes they kind of do the same thing they do payments in exchange for goods and services but the big difference is that paper and pen and square and all of these other forms of payment they're centralized entities and they dictate a limit of who you cannot can or cannot pay how much you can or cannot withdraw in one day basically life big banks these institutions control how you spend your money whether you like it or not and that is the main currencies financial freedom to be able to truly control your own money and own it because your money deposited at the bank is actually not yours not really because if you want to make a withdrawal of say a couple has a 1000 that would require a lot of paper work hours at the bank to sign up not to mention deposit fees withdrawal fees wire fees cetera and that's when the market climate is actually same like right now during periods of heightened fear in the markets when there's a run on the banks when we had the financial crisis when everyone is clamoring to make withdrawals forget about it you won't be able to get anything out or move anything and that's what i mean by you don't really control your own money not when times matter because when things get tough banks are the 1st to clamp down and that leads to a very dangerous situation and big point that was actually born out of the last financial crisis as a way for the. ordinary person. back control of his. so about that coinstar vending machine i see at the supermarket instructions are insert us paper money into the cash except door and receive voucher with a bitcoin redemption code and create a crypto currency wallet kristie based on that and what you have just explained to us is crypto currency affectively debit card and if it is aren't we better off with a debit card which won't fluctuate. it's actually very different than a debit card i was saying that quiet is more so a reserve currency yes you're absolutely right if we are talking about debit cards and things you want a stable currency for that because bitcoin is the swing while it but that's not exactly a bad thing i think most point holders they actually appreciate the wild swings in volatility as because of that it appreciate it over 900 percent in 2021 already so to your point yes price stability is a necessity when you're using it as a currency so when you want to use like a debit card to purchase items you want to stable currency for that you also want to currency with a high throughput and settlements that won't cause or could just network and have high fees and that's why when we talk about crypto currency there are thousands of cryptic currencies and development not just because they climbed that was never really intended to be used for mass market adoption for transaction throughput he lacks that a lag that a visa and master card it can basically only do about $4.00 transactions per 2nd versus visa that can do almost over $700.00 so there are other points that are more suitable and scalable for processing these types of transactions going that are geared more towards enterprise and frictionless on board an adoption make wine the use case scenario is more of a reserve asset that all of the other all coins try to get. interesting aspect you've raised there we're talking a crypto currency with r t boom bust close kristie i bitcoin gets a lot of ink and airtime because it's in the news because of the fluctuation it's pretty much become the clinic's the scotch tape the generic term for crypto what are some of the others and do they work similarly or differently than bitcoin. yeah crypto currency is basically the umbrella term for the face and decline of the name that people actually know the most but just like the equities market the entire crypto ecosystem is divided into many different categories we have things like privacy and security coins that include things like dash minera the cash and they specialize in appearing the identity of this and there are privacy reasons and then we have another big category of the exchange coins these are points issued by changes that allow you to trade and pay the trading fees the fees tokens and this has been a really hot as ever since trading volume exploded late 2020 and includes things like b. and the 4 by a man who coined s t p for the derivative change where volumes are now absolutely exploding derivatives and futures are gaining a lot of attention right now as these traders more leverage to trade with and then have stable quiet what we talked about coins are back to or pegged to a global fiar currency and these are point that traders lead to in times of market volatility and include things like us tether makers dye fracs exciter and then you have one of the biggest which is the 5 phase or decentralized buying and that includes all of the application like the centralized change back to the centralized lending forms prediction market yield farming liquidity mining cetera and in this case so many tokens but just to name a few muni compounds and this is a rapidly growing base that primarily contributed to the crypto boom we saw last year built east so then you have the newest base that is also rapidly gaining popularity which we talked about last week boom. which stands for non wonderful total and the s. and p's in compass everything from our work to digital fashion items to virtual real estate and these tokens give ownership to digital property and they're all characterized by their unique qualities and authenticity and their fame or they're basically collector's items and cannot be duplicated they have that infamous 6 2nd clip of trump being sold for 6600000 recently and also the for. tweet ever is being auctioned off as well yeah i'm going to keep an eye on this because it is so new and the fact that these n f t's are available for free somewhere else is curious but the back to big coin it was just several years ago that our dear departed chum bart chilton was aghast when bitcoin top 20000 and a year later it was 3000 and change lately its top 50 k. kristie for the average investor or in the middle class is this too scary to be part of an ira portfolio. i believe it carries the same risk as any alternative investment to carry the same misconceive in equities because yes on a day to day basis the cook does this is much more volatile than equities but volatility has been steadily declining as the technology matures and i would actually round out an investment portfolio as an alternative at that given it's a low correlation to traditional assets such a stock and even gold because while i had same return profile of a high beta equity name it's more so correlated to gold as a safety. and also if we just take out the psychological portion of what you just said and value a simple return from a percentage basis point bitcoin should be your star investment that's absolutely no other assets as before as well in the same period of time from 3000 to over 50000 over a 16 x. return so logically if we have value performance and assets based on our ally then big question absolutely be part of the i report but not of. the past was a long and arduous one but it means that if you bought the coin at any point in time in existence and just held it you're basically in the money and that's the point of an irish count right to not lose their money an arm or place and the goal and benchmark then when the great addition. yeah that i really wish i took that 99 dollars kristie i have from boom bust i want to catch up with you in a few weeks to see how this and f.t. is doing but thank you again for your time in the big picture nasa is mission statement for the mars exploration program is to explore mars and to provide a continuous flow of scientific information and discovery through a carefully selected series of robotic orbiters landers and mobile laboratories interconnected by a high bandwidth mars earth communications network as the perseverance rover landed on mars a couple of weeks ago we had a veteran space journalist john. to brief us and you can see that episode of the big picture and you tube dot com slash the big picture r t the images and video perseverance of sending back are stunning and now for the 1st time we can hear maurice turn up your volume because the martian atmosphere is so thin that what you're about to hear will be faint but listen to the wind. you can see and hear the planet mars at nasa. and that is the big picture holland cook back with another show same time next week meantime if you want to set your d.v.r. direct t.v. channel 321 dish 280 r.t. america is streaming live at youtube dot com slash r t america our shows are at youtube dot com slash the big picture our t.v. and all of the above is in your pocket or purse or any device with our portable t.v. app at portable t.v. or in the app store or google play be aware of the ides of march happy st patty's day. and question more. according to secretary of state playing games china is the only country with the economic military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system all do movies values and relationships that made the world to work the way we wanted to is china really a threat to washington's legal system. but the demick know certainly no border to nationalities. has emerged with the facts in the world pete's sake. commentary says. we can do better we should know. everyone is contributing way but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever the challenges created the response has been so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it together. vision there is some sort of. cryptic currencies bruce is promising to bring about in the financial world the regime critics argue whether they. were spot on about this i'm joined by peter schiff stockbroker chief economist and global strategy. chief economist and global strategy the capital flows into the show with us thanks for having me on your show but it's as you say there isn't worth anything like france's gold that is going to bother to cash out a big coin i'll have to say $50000.00 or whatever for a guy that actually that he used to buy gold isn't spilling worthless is it is it really that well there's a difference between the value and the price i mean midpoint certainly has a price because people are willing to buy it and so people value would in the sense that they think it's worth something and so they're willing to buy it. that's different from something that actually has real value intrinsic value i mean gold doesn't have value simply because people believe in it gold has value because it's a metal and it has properties that are very unique that other metals don't have that makes gold.