John Perkins | USAID, Economic Hit Men, Iran, & The China Model

Almost surely have a plan That's close-chested We'll do it live from the Sunshine State. I'm Greg Carlwood. And we have known for a long time that the empire runs on blackmail, coups, coercion, and cutthroat capitalism, a mob-like mentality of offering a deal you can't refuse, and a mix of unwanted carrots and sticks designed for domination and competition elimination, a system that works well for those living within the right imaginary box or those who have investments in the right companies, but keeps many others around the world in bitter poverty. Well, like many young guns in the early days of the internet, few videos were as impactful on me as the Zeitgeist series, the highlight of that series being the insightful interview with John Perkins that helped me understand the details of all this, where he explained the work he has done around the world as an economic hitman, a process where he would be sent to smaller countries that have resources our corporations covet and present their leaders with predatory loans sold as an opportunity for growth, new infrastructure, and development that uses their resources as collateral. Only the money never makes it to the country itself. It goes to the corporations in the club to build out said infrastructure and establish the means to extract said resources. When the loan can't be repaid, the leverage is used in a variety of unsavory ways, rinse and repeat. And John goes even deeper in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, now in its third edition, adding so much more context for the changing world. He's also the author of titles like Hoodwinked and Economic Hitman Reveals Why the Global Economy Imploded and How to Fix It, The Secret History of the American Empire, The Truth About Economic Hitmen, Jackals, and How to Change the World, The World As You Dream It, Teachings from the Amazon and Andes, The Stress-Free Habit, Powerful Techniques for Health and Longevity from the Andes, Yucatan, and the Far East, Touching the Jaguar, Transforming Fear into Action to Change Your Life and the World, and his first novel, which came out earlier this year, Message from Pleiades. We did an interview way back in 2014 and we're definitely overdue for an update, so let's get into it. The dark network defector and jaguar toucher, the economic hitman himself, John Perkins, 11 years later. Welcome back. Thank you. That was quite an introduction. I think you've covered everything. We can probably go off the air now. Yes, I try to get a little further downfield because I know you've done so many interviews explaining the basics of your background and the career you've had, and I'm really grateful that you've been so candid because I've gotten so many insights from you. Well, this part of the news cycle is kind of over. It came and went, but when Doge was doing all these cuts, USAID was being talked about a lot, and I remembered this term from your work. Maybe the only time I ever really heard it before, and front and center in the new edition, you include the original quote, economic hitmen are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, and foreign aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. So right away, I had a little different context for what USAID actually did than the way it was being framed in the news, but I reached out because I was curious what you thought of all that. When the internet tells us the new administration cut 83% of USAID's programs, canceling all but 1,000 of the 6,200 contracts, it seems significant, but what does that say to you? Maybe that the strategy has run its course or changed? Well, that's an interesting one, Greg, because it depends on what aspect you look at it from. So I wrote my books and included the aspect that people in what we call the less developed countries or the lower income countries, from their perspective, things like USAID are part of what we call the debt, D-E-B-T, trap. And they're part of this whole package that economic hitmen use in order to essentially steal the resources from these countries' oil and today, lithium, cobalt and rare minerals, et cetera. So if you look at it from their standpoint, getting rid of USAID is probably a healthy thing for them. But although I also have to say that in more recent times, since my book was written, USAID has changed a bit and is doing some very, very good things. I'm a founder of a non-profit called the Pachamama Alliance that works in the Amazon. We had a $12 million grant from USAID to help indigenous people develop local economies and we lost it. So there's a mixed blessing there. But I think perhaps most important of all is that if you look at it from the standpoint of the United States versus China, and China now is taking over the world, getting rid of USAID is a very bad thing. That plays right into the hands of China because it basically removes us from a lot of our connections with some of these countries that have resources that we desperately need, countries in Africa and Latin America especially. Yeah, I get that. And it is tricky because I kind of feel like there's so many conversations happening about this, but you got to kind of start one, you got to kind of start everyone with, well, we're $60 trillion in debt. The biggest expense we have outside of the military is interest on that debt. Now, how do you think we should spend money? Because I don't know if we have any. It's just crazy. We're in kind of a debt spiral ourselves or very close to one. And I guess to back it up, so I think a lot of people know your history, but you write about the four pillars of the economic hitman strategy being fear, debt, anxiety over, insufficiency, and divide and conquer. Talk to us about the nuances involved in those pillars and how they've changed over time because you wrote the original book, a second edition about the second wave of economic hitman activity, which is bringing it back home, using the tools against us, and also applying it to bigger markets than they initially were. And then, of course, now we have a third wave. But these four pillars, how have they changed over time? You know, the first one, the fear, is something that historically is how empires have been created by convincing people to fear something. In my day, it was to fear the Soviet Union. Therefore, they needed our support to keep away the Soviet Union. And historically, it's been that fear of attack by somebody else or maybe from us, a little bit like the whole mafia idea, you know, like, you know, you pay us to protect us from ourselves, basically. And so in my time, that really changed a lot where we went after the war in Vietnam. It was, we understood that those kind of wars don't succeed. And so the whole debt issue came in. And so the second one, debt, became the driving force behind imperialism, behind the U.S. expanding its corporate empire around the world with people like me. And the military played a much, much less significant role. But that didn't please the people who were in charge of the military-industrial complex, who were pretty powerful. They kept pressuring presidents and others to get them back in the deal. 9-11 gave them the tremendous opportunity to do that. So after 9-11, we'd started devoting huge amounts of money to Afghanistan and Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, Israel, Yemen. We just were pouring all of our resources there. We very much neglected Latin America and Africa. So the Chinese went in and they didn't spend money on wars. They did spend a lot of money on creating debt in Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world. This is an interesting map here that it's now a little outdated, but up here you can see in the year 2000, the United States was the number one trading partner in about 80% of the world's countries. By 2020, it was China. China is the number one trading partner with 80% of the world's countries. And that's grown since 2020 in the last five years. So China really took over. And to a large degree, that's because we were spending so much money on the military and so little money on making friends, making headway in Africa, Latin America, and other countries that have resources we covet. So that's fear and debt. And this idea of anxiety over scarce resources, well, that's always out there. So whoever you are, if you convince the country that, oh, you're a poor country, you need our help, we're going to help bring you out of the dark ages, we're going to help bring you out of poverty, take our loans, hire our companies to build big infrastructure projects, and your GDP will grow. And in fact, we can show that the GDP does grow when you invest, when you hire a U.S. corporation to build big electrification systems or power plants and transmission lines, ports, airports, roads, these sorts of things. You can show that the GDP grows. And so for many years, Craig, I believed that what I was doing was the right thing because I could show that when I got these countries to take these loans, their economy grew. It took a while for me to understand that GDP is not a measure of prosperity for a country. It's a measure of prosperity for a few rich families in that country and the international corporations that work in that country. So this whole idea of anxiety over scarcity is a catchphrase for convincing them that you can help them do better. And then divide and conquer. Well, that's an age-old ploy used by empires. You know, like, you know, two African nations who don't get along very well historically and you go in and you work with one of them and say, hey, you know, you've got to help us conquer the other one. And you work very hard to make sure that countries in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere don't cooperate with each other because then you can go in and cut deals with them. And that too has changed radically now. China has done an amazing job of creating this new Silk Road, which is a concept that leaders around the world find very attractive. It's very misleading, I have to say. I'm not defending what China is doing in any way, but I am saying that China's strategy is an extremely efficient one. And so China says, you know, if you kind of deal with the United States, Peru, you'll get the most favored nation. You will have good trading deals between you, Peru, and the United States. But that's it. If you become part of our new Silk Road, we'll help you build really good relationships and trading routes with all the other countries around you in Latin America, plus countries in Africa, Asia, India, all over the world. You'll be part of this huge international trading network. So that's a very, very clever strategy for China. When I was teaching in an MBA program in China, this program really took off and I was deeply impressed and I thought, jeez, why didn't we think of that? So all of these things kind of, they've really put the United States in a very, very difficult position globally and they've opened the door for China to step in in a big way, which it's been doing. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And I actually bookmarked an image of the map of the new Silk Road. I'll throw it up on the screen later, but it really does seem like they're connecting everywhere except us. Like, we're really the only ones not on that map. So it's going to be interesting, but I do like the 12 new chapters you added to the new edition and this is a quote here that's related to what we're talking about. You say, to a large degree, China's success in recent years is the result of hard and creative work by China's third wave of economic hitmen. Their team is not limited to the engineers, economists, and financiers of my time or to the second economic hitman wave of corporate henchmen that arose in the U.S. during the last decades. Like a well-organized sports team, China's economic hitman team has a great deal of depth. Well, lots of interesting things there. I'm curious what is so creative. I'm curious how they don't have the same limitations that you had. It seems after reading the book that China offers a lot more carrot than stick, kind of as you laid out in the Peru example, but how do we know that this is still manipulation? How do we know that they don't honestly just mean like, hey, let's all be trade partners, screw the U.S.? Because we've already seen some fruits, as you say, big debts and rights abuses in the Congo, but talk to us about their changing strategy, the depth of it, and what you really see under the surface having been on the inside of these kind of deals before. Well, of course, we don't know what motivates China or its leaders like Xi Jinping. I don't know. I can't read their minds. But if you look at history, the history is building empire. And China has a very successful history of doing that through trade, but not through war. You know, China doesn't go to war with other countries very much, except those right around it, ones that it considers to be part of China. You know, and that includes Tibet and parts of Tibet, near most of Tibet, and it includes Taiwan and Hong Kong and an area that borders with India. That's kind of like us saying that Texas is part of the United States, not Mexico, even though it originally was Mexico and we took it away. So China says, well, you know, we're going to protect our own sphere here, but China doesn't have military bases in many other countries. There's a couple of them. There's one in Djibouti, but they're more like refueling stations for its vessels. The United States, on the other hand, has military bases in over 100 countries. People hate that. Nobody really wants a foreign military base on their soil, except maybe the leaders of the country. But so China has done an amazing job of making friends from that standpoint. You know, there's an old Chinese proverb, if you want to build an empire, make friends, not enemies. And the United States has this long history of having, in my case, when I made loans to these countries, knowing full well that they couldn't repay the principal, and they would have to then practically reach bankruptcy, except countries don't, you don't define them as bankrupt, but too much debt. Then they would have to come back to us, usually in the guise of the IMF, I would go in and say, hey, we'll help you restructure your loans. But you have to meet certain conditions. And those include cutting taxes on your rich people and cutting wages on everybody else, privatizing businesses that were once government-owned, like water and sewage systems. Vote with us on the next United Nations vote against Cuba or whatever. Let us build a military base on your soil. And perhaps most important of all, your collateral on these loans, remember, your collateral was your oil. And so, now we want your oil. Let our oil companies go in and take out your oil without many environmental or social regulations and without paying you much money or any money. So, we have this reputation around the world of doing that. And also, there's the jackal aspect. I talk about where if countries don't buy into these deals, then we send in the jackals who overthrow governments or assassinate leaders. We have a long history of that. And if that doesn't work, then the military goes in. And China has a very, very different history in that regard. And so, it's economic hitmen can say, hey, look what the United States does. It poses these conditions on you that are just onerous. They're terrible conditions. We won't do that. We don't do that. The one thing we do do is we want to collateralize your resources also. But we're not going to do any of these other things. We're not going to interfere with your government. We're not going to tell you how to vote in the United Nations. There's another side to that. That's not entirely true. But it's a very, very good selling point. Yes, it is. And I think a lot of people listening, they hear about what China's been doing broadly, but they don't get a lot of details. Is there any, say, particular deal that China's economic hitmen have attained that you consider one of the best deals for China or one of the most lopsided deals? Because all these deals are lopsided, but if you had to pull one out from the various deals that they're making, does one strike you is like, man, they really got them on that one? Well, they just struck a deal with Colombia. I'm not sure this is the most significant one of all, but Colombia for many, many, many years have been the largest, the most important ally in Latin America for the United States and always been very strong, supportive, and is considered a democracy, although it's an interesting kind of democracy. I don't go into that now. And just recently, Colombia struck a very strong deal with China, which surprised everybody. And partly that's just because there is a lot of resentment of the U.S. things that I did while I was there. I had an office in Colombia. I had two offices in Colombia, one in Bogota and one in Barranquilla. And so there's resentment there. But another point I think is really important to make, Greg, is that China has an important story to tell the world, and that is that it had about 10% economic growth for three decades. It's 30 years. Nobody else has ever done anything like that. And it brought about 900 million people out of dire poverty. That's more than twice the population of the United States. And so China's economic hitman can go out and say, well, what did the United States done in that amount of time? year, the United States is federal basic wage rate, the minimum wage rate, federally speaking, hasn't increased since 1974 in the United States. Now, many states have increased it, so again, it's a little bit of a stretch, but the truth is that it hasn't. And that's a very telling statement to say, well, we've brought 900 million people out of dire poverty. We've had this amazing economic growth. What's the United States done? Which model do you want, Mr. President? You don't have to buy into our government system, but do buy into our trading system. Become a partner of ours on the New Silk Road. Let us help you develop your economy because we're good at it. We know what we're doing. We have a track record that proves that. It's a great story. It's a great story, you know? And if you're really a good con artist, and that's basically what economic hitmen are, con artists, you know how to spin that story in a way that's extremely attractive. Right, yeah. They're really just playing off of what we've done for so long, and we kind of shot ourselves in the foot by being so aggressive. I say we like I have any choice or say in anything, you know, that gets done around here, but, and you're just doing your job, as they say. But I kind of glossed over your background because I know you've gone over it so many times, but just for people who aren't familiar, some of the bullet points to your story, you wanted to avoid being drafted to Vietnam as you were wrapping up college in 1968. Your father-in-law at the time was high up in the Department of the Navy and his best friend was high up in the NSA and you were looking to take a draft deferred job with them, but then felt called to join the Peace Corps and go to the Amazon for three years, which they told you would actually make you much more useful to them. And after that, they reached out to you and got you set up with one of their corporate partners, a company called Charles T. Maine, and they sent you on your first job to Indonesia. Did I get most of that right? Yes. I love it. So before Indonesia, they had trained you by a woman who really seemed like a fixer in a Hollywood movie, Claudine, I believe, and she taught you some things about persuasion, as I understand. Can you talk to us about some of the things she taught you that really might be useful to anyone listening? You mentioned that I first was recruited by the National Security Agency or I was offered a job by them. Before they offered me the job, I went through three days of intensive tests, including a lot of it on a lie detector. And I didn't think I would ever get the job because I had to admit that I was opposed to the war in Vietnam, which I thought that they would not like. And I also had to admit that I'd lied to the police. I'd dropped out of college at one point before I went back. And I was with a friend who was Iranian. To celebrate, we went to this bar near the college. And a guy sucker punched me because he thought I was flirting with his wife. knife and my Iranian friend pulls out a knife and cuts him across the cheek just very gently. He had a technique for doing this where he put his thumb across the blade, just the tip. So it was a scare tactic more than anything. And then my writing friend pushed me into the men's room and we jumped out the window into a little river below and made our way back. And the next day the police brought me in and questioned me and I denied that I knew anything about anything he had done. And I totally lied. So I've got to tell the NSA that I lied to the police. I was involved in this knife fight and I think, well, this is going to screw me. But it did the opposite. So regarding Vietnam, they knew at this point that we were losing the war in Vietnam. This is now what, 1971 and they knew that we were I'm sorry, this was 1968 that we, they knew that, you know, this, this war, you know, what they didn't mind that I wasn't going to go in the war. And they were very impressed by the fact that I lied to police. This to them was a plus that I had the guts to do that. And as it turned out, my, my Iranian friend, his father was a general in the Shah's army and very close to the Shah, worked for the CIA. Right. I was going to bring that up. I was going to bring that up. Have a friend like this meant a lot. So, you know, they, and they also on the lie detector discovered that I had several weaknesses that they could use to hook me. And those were, I think, you know, most young men my age had those, but perhaps I had them more than a lot because I'd grown up in a boys private school where my dad taught and I was very, very shy of women and very fascinated by them. So one of my weaknesses was I wanted to have sex. I wanted to be able to, you know, seduce women. I was terribly, I was so shy I didn't even dare talk to women. Another one was that I wanted money because I grew up in the school, private boys school, where I was surrounded by kids with a lot of money and my dad was a teacher who didn't make any money hardly. And another one was I wanted power. And so those three things, sex, power, and money. And so Claudine now, once I start training with her, she knows all of this and she uses all of it, you know, to entice me. You know, the idea that I was going to make a lot of money, the idea that I was going to have a lot of power, I was going to be meeting with presidents of countries, I was going to be representing the World Bank and other such organizations, the IMF and others, and sex. You know, she was very good at that and very good at teaching me how to seduce wives of diplomats and people in high positions in government because that's one of the things that she was doing in that profession. So I don't remember the question anymore. Well, I was curious about some of the things she might have taught you about persuasion or seduction, especially these days when the young fellas out there, you know, their game is drying up with all the digital technology. They need some old school tips. Well, you know, one of the most important things that she taught me was, you know, seduction for most women and especially if you're dealing with some young wife of an older government official who's not very happy and the guy, her husband's not around very much and he's this real macho guy who's high up in the government and he doesn't really listen to her very much. She said, just really listen. Look the woman in the eye and say, what are you feeling? What's coming from your heart? And oh my gosh, you look, no, no, I know you're smiling but I know deep down in I can see in your eyes that you're really sad. Tell me about your sadness. Tell me what's frustrating you and they'll start to do this and then you're like, cry on my shoulder, go ahead, you know, like I'm here for you and so to bring this out it was and it was a technique that I did find often worked. All right. Well, you know, just looking people in the eyes these days is going to be challenging enough. Well, yes, things have changed and I wanted to say one other thing that is that when you you mentioned that, you know, I can't remember exactly how they said it, but like, who am I? Like, I don't have any power. Yeah. Story of my life, really. Yeah. Well, that's another thing that the Chinese love to point out to people in other countries that they say, they say, you know, the United States says you're a democracy. It says everybody has, everybody has equal right to vote and everybody has power. There's freedom of the press. You can speak out. You can change things. You can do what you want. And the Chinese say, well, yeah, that's not really true in the United States. Big corporations have a lot more power. Their executives may have one vote, but because they can finance political campaigns, that's incredible corruption. The Chinese will refer to this as corruption. It's legalized, so legally speaking, it isn't corruption, but it truly is true corruption that we have this system. And other countries are getting the hypocrisy of the United States' idea of what democracy and freedom of speech and those sorts of things really means. Yeah, great points. It's really like sometimes there's a lot of debate on, well, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy? Maybe there is no good guy. You know, a loan chart can come up to someone in poverty and be like, man, these credit cards, you know, they want 28%. They're ripping you off. This isn't fair. I'll come in and I'll give you the loan for 18%. You know, I'm your buddy. I'm your neighborhood guy. Well, you don't want to default on that loan. It's a lot worse than what Visa and Master Card are going to do, I'm sure. So, that aspect of your story about the knife fight, I think about this a lot because you say that this buddy of yours, his dad, was high up in the military in Iran, but also a CIA asset. The lines are a lot blurrier, I guess, than we realize. And I know that there's some history in Iran that in the 50s, the coup that happened was largely considered to be CIA fronted. Well, now Iran's clearly in the news. We might be going to war with them. I mean, who knows? Trump is in his two weeks to think about it phase, so we'll see what actually happens when this show airs and he makes a decision. But that is just interesting insight into Iran, just that little thread. And I know you, I think you maybe did some work or you saw the template applied in Iran that wasn't actually your personal job. But talk to us about Iran. A lot of people are wondering, we don't really, they're kind of a closed box to some degree, but we might be going to war with them, so it might be nice to learn a little bit about them. Well, it was my job. I had an office in Tehran, and over a period of 10 years in the 70s, I spent a lot of time in Tehran, never more than a month or two, and usually it was more like a week. But I was going back and forth a lot. And I had offices in Colombia, Panama, and Tehran, as well as my headquarters office in Boston. So I did. I spent a lot of time and I worked for the Shah, essentially, or I worked for the, you know, I worked for us. Who works for you? It's hard to tell anymore. The Shah worked for us, you know. So yeah, the history, the history there is that Iran had this democratically elected prime minister, his name was Mohammed Mossadegh, and he decided that he was going to force the foreign oil companies, which at that time was mainly what became BP, British Petroleum, he was going to force them to pay a fair share of their profits to the Iranian people, which they hadn't been doing. And they refused. And so he decided to nationalize them. And England came to Eisenhower, to the United States, and asked for help. And so the United States was very leery of Iran setting a precedent with Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries that if they did nationalize, then everybody would go that route. So Eisenhower was very happy to enter into this. And at that time, his secretary of state and head of the CIA were the two Dulles brothers, Ellen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, who, you know, may know about, who were incredibly fanatic anti-communists. And so they were determined to make sure that Iran didn't go with Russia, which, of course, Iran's right on the border. So there was all these aspects. There was oil. There was, you know, helping England. There was keeping Russia out. And but the fear was that Russia had nuclear weapons where we're just the Cold War is really gearing up. Eisenhower is afraid to use the military or to do anything overt in Iran because he doesn't want to start a nuclear war, which, as you pointed out, could still happen. And so he sent in this CIA agent, card-carrying CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's grandson. And Roosevelt goes in with literally with suitcases filled with with U.S. dollars. And he goes in and and and and just starts distributing all this money. He and he had a couple of, you know, assistants with him. And and they convince members of the police, members of the general public to demonstrate against Mossadegh and and to make it seem like Mossadegh is an unpopular head of leader. And at the same time, there's a huge propaganda campaign in the United States that's painting Mossadegh as a communist, as a friend of Russia, which just wasn't true. And but there was this huge campaign that would get rid of this guy and put him put in our own guy who had been designated as the Shah, whose family his father had been had been head of Iran previously. And he had a long history. And so it was successful. You know, it was a very, very inexpensive way of getting rid of having a coup that was that was successful. Most of that was placed under house arrest. The CIA brought brought the Shah in. This is all a huge CIA operation. It really had very little to do with Iran. It was the CIA. And it actually set the precedent for my job and for what would follow after that, because here you had this inexpensive and relatively safe way of overthrowing a government without incurring the wrath of the Soviet Union or anybody else. And it was it was very subtle and very, very effective. So but it also caused this huge wave of underlying wave of resentment. So now the Shah is in power and and remains in power from this was the early 50s that this happened when I'm there is throughout the 70s and the Shah is in power. I thought the Shah was popular and most Americans did. And part of the reason was that I didn't speak Farsi and most most most Americans didn't. And we had interpreters, translators, interpreters who were hired by the Shah. They worked for the Shah and they were trained in U.S. schools or European schools, English schools. So they were part of this system. So I would later realize that I was getting information that was very, very biased in favor of the Shah from the from the only people I could really communicate with. And there was this apparently this huge under under toe of of resentment that boiled to the surface in 1978. And when the Shah was then when the next year over this period was was overthrown very, very quickly and replaced by these by the mullahs. And, you know, I was rushed out of Iran on the morning that the fire started in a movie theater in Iran and that things really started to explode. This. Well, that's another story. Do you want me to go into that? Sure. I find this very interesting. I just can't. I don't want to over talk here. I'm here all the time. So August 1978, I'm in Tehran. I'm staying in the Intercontinental Hotel and and I'm at the bar in the evening and and I get a tap on the shoulder and I turn around and it's the guy who'd been in the knife fight with me and I hadn't seen him in like 10 years. I had been to school with him, you know, and he'd been a really good friend back then. But then he'd pretty much disappeared and he's tapping me on the shoulder and I turn around, we hug and we get into a conversation and then he says, I've got a ticket for both of us tomorrow to fly to Rome and stay at my dad's villa in Rome. And I said, no, no, no. I have a meeting tomorrow with the minister of finance. And he said, there is no minister of finance. Wait, what about your dad? He's very close to the shop. Not anymore. My dad's now in Italy outside Rome and his villa outside Rome. So that's where we're going tomorrow. We had tickets on Air France, the early morning flight. Well, reluctantly, kind of, I went. I figured I could always come back if this term proved not to be true. But I went and it was that later that day that these firebombs were put off in this movie theater. And the country started to erupt. I was just glad I got out when I did. I haven't been back since. There was this undercurrent and then the Mullahs take over. And now, of course, there's a huge undercurrent of resentment against the current regime, apparently. Right. Apparently. Sorry. It's like, apparently, because you just don't know. You've got this great history of understanding there's always unadvertised motivations and it's all about perception management and narrative control. And it seems like they're dusting off two of the big old plays they used to use. Well, they're going to have weapons of mass destruction. They're right around the corner. They're going to have it and they're going to use it on day one. They're going to kill us all. And, well, we got to liberate these people. This government is just so terrible. They want to be liberated. They're begging us to come in there. And, like, we've heard this tale a thousand times again where how many trillion in debt? Not our problem. Not our business. And I could honestly believe the oppression thing because I've seen pictures of Iran in the past, like, several decades ago, and it looks like Times Square. I mean, the people look like they're dressed in regular clothes. Like, it could be an American city. And now, obviously, it's far different. Is that their choice? I don't know how much is coercion and choice and oppression. Again, it's not my business. But we're seeing these two things used again. And I'm shocked that it's working so well. But knowing everything you know, how do you interpret the current news cycle and the current relationship and what we should even do versus what you, when you read between the lines, what does it seem like we're going to do? You know, let me go back a little bit and say that in talking about the way people look, when I was there up until 78, Tehran, there was an avenue called Palavi Avenue, which is named after the Shah's family. And it had all these, you know, coffee shops and bistros and restaurants. Yeah. It was beautiful. It was this big, you know, tree-lined avenue. And you'd sit there and Iranian people would walk by this in their latest styles, men and women. But I, of course, was especially impressed by the women who had shorter miniskirts than those in Paris. Hey, now. And they were very sexy. The dress was just, you know, mind-blowing. And then to think that within a very short period of time after that, they're all dressed very, very conservatively. I don't know how they could adapt to that. It must have been very, it must have been very, very difficult. As I said, I haven't been back. I have talked to Iranians since who've come out of Iran. And yeah, they tell me there's a very large undercurrent of resentment. But at the same time, there's still a resentment against the United States for taking out most of the debt. So you've got these two kind of conflicting things. People are torn. What do they want? And I think to complicate matters, right now in the United States, we have a president who part of his platform and running for president, was not to get us involved in foreign wars. Right. And there's a large part of his followers who were very adamant about that. They don't want us going into Iran. So I read and hear. But you've also got a president who many people suspect is wanting to run for a third term. And maybe we don't know. But if that's true and it's against it's the you know, the 22nd amendment says he can't. But if there's a war going on and China's involved because China now has allied itself with Iran. And so so if if we go into Iran, if we join Israel and and do something in Iran, if we send in the big bombers and drop the big bombs, we're also kind of declaring war on on China, that it could be interpreted that way, which then puts us in a position where a president could it could call on the on a war emergency act to stay in power. So, I mean, these are just issues that kind of swim around in my mind. And I don't know that this is this is all just a supposition. It's speculation. But coming from where I come from with knowing that there's always these stories behind the stories, I can't help but think about these things. So you've got these these couple of things you get the Iranian people. What are they what are they really thinking? You've got the American people, many of whom voted for a president who said he wasn't going to get us involved in foreign wars. And and then you've also got the possibility of a president who wants a third term. Yeah. All of these make for a very, very confusing story. I don't know what will happen. But what we I do believe that this is an incredibly dangerous situation, that it's it's potentially very explosive and could be devastating to the world. I mean, let's not get in a war over over over Iran. Right. Well, you know, the elephant in the room that has to be mentioned is Israel. And why do we treat Israel like the 51st state or really the first state? some people have described Israel as walking us like a dog. And it's just kind of crazy because the story that the alternative narrative that I hear again, I'm on the outside. I don't really know what to believe, but they apparently have a very sophisticated blackmail network. You know, that's another thing that wasn't in the news when we first talked 11 years ago is the whole Epstein thing. They say he was a Mossad agent. They say he's got blackmail on everyone. Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn. He also seemed to lean on blackmail as his form of power. Seems like even Diddy had a blackmail operation going in his little corner of his industry. So we've learned in the last decade that blackmail really makes the world go round. And I find it interesting that Elon and Trump had this falling out and Elon tweets, hey, here's a bombshell, everybody. Trump's in the Epstein files and that's why he won't release it. And then like 10 days later, the president who said he'll never get in a war is like, well, we got to do whatever Israel does. They might have a weapon. We got to get in there. And it's like, is there some unsavory tape that they have on you or some kind of dirt? I don't know. But I guess I would ask you because we talked about the four pillars. Blackmail isn't one of them. Did you ever see blackmail used as a tactic in these sorts of negotiations in your day? Yeah, of course. That was one of the reasons you'd seduce the wife of a diplomat because not only could you get information from the wife, but then you could use that as a way of blackmailing the diplomat who wouldn't have wanted to admit that, especially in some of the countries that, you know. Interesting. So you're like, I slept with your wife, I have the tape, and we're going to release it unless you sign the deal? Yeah. Oh, my God. That's bold. And honestly, it wasn't usually me who slept with the wife. I never was very good at that, but there would be somebody who would do that who would then pass the information on to me. But, you know, when we went into Panama and took out Noriega, and Noriega was a bad guy. I'm not defending Noriega in any way, but the way we did it was a huge mistake because it seemed like a huge mistake because we sent in the military. Planes came in, helicopters came in, people in military uniforms. It was an invasion, an American invasion, and it firebombed a huge section of Panama City and killed a lot of civilians. Still nobody knows how many, but it was just totally unnecessary to take out one man to do that. Noriega could have been taken out by many other ways. So I always ask myself, why did that happen? What was the point? And it pissed off the Panamanians. They're still pissed off. And all of Latin America, much of the world, which said, look, what the hell is going on here? It's one of those other things that makes us unpopular. Well, I went down to Panama City, and as I said earlier, I think I had an office in Panama. I knew a lot of people there, and I started asking around, and I included, I asked people whose houses had been firebombed. And what came out was this idea, and I have no evidence to back it up, but there was a building in that part of town that was a government-owned building where they kept archives. That we know. And it was said that in that building were videos and other information that had been taken on Contador Island, which is an island in the Pacific off the coast of Panama, owned by Panama, that was a place where people were taken, politicians, CEOs, where anything goes. There was cocaine. This is back before cocaine was really available everywhere else in the world. And there were women of all kinds. There were men of all kinds. It was whatever you wanted on Contador. And when Omar Toriyos had been president, it was a very, very hush-hush place. Nothing ever leaked out. But when Noriega became head of state, he had been formerly head of the Secret Service in Iran. And the story is, the rumor is, that he had cameras, that he had recording equipment, that he had the goods on the younger George Bush, who would later become president. And so he went to his father and threatened the older George Bush with certain conditions that had to be met for him, Noriega. And, oh, and I've got all this information on your son. And, and therefore, it wouldn't have been enough to take out Noriega. You had to take out the building that had all these files in it. Now, that's, that's a rumor that was fairly popular amongst certain Panamanians and in Panama at the time. I don't know, but, you know, the story behind the story. But it's really the only story that's made sense to me because I've never, I never, before I ever heard that story, and still I don't know any other reason why the U.S. would send in this military force, huge, large military force, and, and, and, and cause such horrible destruction to a major Latin American city. Yeah. Wow. That story, I am really intrigued by stories like it. And it also seems to be an equation that is used fairly often. I've heard this type of story. Again, it's always rumors and speculation. You really don't know, but it logics out. And this is even applying to the current situation. This is a little bit of old news by the time this comes out, but Trump just had this tweet that we've got the airspace of Iran locked down. That was what he said. And I'm hearing this story that Iran had made the comment that they got like 10 terabytes of data that they stole from Israel. What data is that? Is it just accounts and, you know, trade deals or is it the blackmail file? But there's speculation that you can almost see Iran gets the file and Trump freaks out and says, you know, you better give that fucking thing back or, or we're going to bomb you to the stone age. And he has tweeted in all caps, unconditional surrender right now. And suddenly his, his tune has changed. Maybe he felt comfortable with Netanyahu having the blackmail file. Maybe they've always had it. Maybe he knows it's safe there, but it doesn't seem safe with Iran if they by chance had it. But it does seem like blackmail brokering is one of those major stories behind the story at least half the time, maybe more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? And I mean, we, we, we do know that we, we, well, we know that everybody probably almost, I don't, I can't speak for everybody, but I would say that the majority of us have some secrets that we wouldn't like to be, have shared out there. I'm an exception because I've written a confession, you know, three volumes of a confession. I think, I think I've got just about everything out there. You're free and clear. But I'm sure there's some things that I didn't think about and in any case, we also know that, that Trump has, you know, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a pretty dark background there with him, with, with all kinds of things, women and business dealings. We know that his family is making a lot of money off, off deals that they're cutting, they can cut because he's president. And, and so to, to, to, to, to kind of speculate that, that there's something a lot more, there's a lot darker behind the scenes, you know, it makes a certain amount of sense to us. And, and again, I would say that I'm sure that it was true of, of, of, it basically that would be true probably most politicians that they do have stuff like that. Well, the, the, the speculation is that politicians can't even rise past the middle unless they're compromised by the real power. I mean, that's always been kind of talked about at least the last few decades. We talked about George Bush Jr. He liked to have fun. Clearly he was a little fast and loose Clinton seemed to like to have fun too. There's a lot of stuff about Clinton, you know, the Lewinsky thing. I've learned more about that in recent years that it seems like they're saying that she was connected to myself. She was planted in the office to get him to make a mistake. And then that was leveraged, you know, in the same way you leverage things, but you know, you don't have to sniff around in a two darker corners of the internet to hear that the Obama's got some secrets. It's, it just seems like you really can't rise to the top unless the people in real power can get you to do whatever they need you to do. Yeah. Incidentally, my, my, my cat's quite interested in this conversation. I love it. A bangle it looks like. But mind that he joins us. He's just a little tabby. I've got two. This is the male. It's a good looking cat. So I read that you began writing Confessions of an Economic hitman in the 1980s, but quote, threats or bribes always convinced you to stop. I'm curious about that. Can, can you talk to us about that at all? Because there has to have been thousands of people doing the kind of work you do, but I only know of one book about it. Well, one author, one author, I should say you've written many books, but I only know one guy who turned tail and told the rest of us what was going on. You know, that's an interesting comment because there've been quite a few Joe Stiglitz, who is won the Nobel Prize in Economics, was chief economist at the World Bank. He's written many of the same things I have. He said, for example, the World Bank, their models were biased to justify policy, not to come up with the right truth. Statistics were used that way. And he goes into a lot more detail, but he writes in a boring way, honestly. You know, he writes essays. It's very academic. It can't all be you, John. Well, I decided when I wrote this book, I wanted to reach a larger audience, so I wrote it like a novel. It's not a novel. It's nonfiction. But rather than trying to reach, you know, to have it build up its sales in all the academic institutions around the world, which is a huge market, incidentally. I think Stiglitz may have been wise to do that, but I wanted to reach the general public. And so, but there's been a number of other books that come out. David Corton wrote, you know, when corporations rule the world. There's many. But where were we? What was the real? Oh, why? What happened when I? Yeah. Right. So when I quit being an economic hitman, I started writing this. And remember, my real title was chief economist. But I started writing this book and I decided I would reach out to a lot of other people who had jobs like mine and to the jackals, those who overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders. And get their stories. As soon as I started making those telephone calls, I get call, anonymous calls from the, you know, strange muffled voices threatening my life and that of my infant daughter. And I took these calls very seriously because I knew what those people can do. I'd seen what they did to Allende and Chile and Arbenz and Guatemala and Mossadegh and Iran and on and on. You know, I knew what I knew what the possibilities were here. I knew it was a dangerous situation. And at the same time, I get taken out to dinner by the president of Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation, a big Boston-based engineering consulting firm that had been a competitor of my companies. And he takes me out to dinner and he says, you know, John, you have a great resume. You're a chief economist at our competitor. You have tremendous network and ability with the World Bank and other organizations. We would like to use your resume in our proposals. You won't have to do any work for us. We might ask you to, you know, take the private jet down to Rio de Janeiro once in a while and have dinner with a hobnob with the rich people there. But you won't have to do much for us. And just, he said, and I'm prepared tomorrow morning to write you a check for $500,000, half a million dollars. This is in the 1980s, Gray. I mean, half a million is nothing to sneeze at now, but it was a lot more back then. And I'm without a job. I've quit. So it was attractive. But also, my life's being threatened. And he says, just don't write the book. You can't work for us and have that book out there that we know you're writing. And so, you know, it's funny because I was getting the same strategy used against me that I'd been using against presidents and ministers of finance and so on for 10 years. And that is like, in this hand, I've got a lot of money for you and your families because when you build these infrastructure projects, as I said, that they really help the rich people who usually run the governments, the ones who own the businesses, the ones that own the industry. So they benefit from from stable electricity and growing electricity and highways and ports and airports. So he says, now, in this hand, John, you know, in this hand, I've got I've got a lot of money to offer you. Or in this hand, if you don't accept my deal, I've got a gun. And, you know, that was exactly what I would say to presidents. A lot of money or a gun? I didn't actually carry a gun, but they knew, as I knew, that there were people behind me that did carry guns or worse. And so what would you do? You get guys calling you on the phone threatening your infant daughter's life and your life. Are you being offered half a million dollars? Right. There would be no book out. I know that. Exactly. There was no book. And so, you know, in my own defense, I have to say I took the money. I didn't buy a yacht or a private plane or something. And I guess you can't do that with a half a million anyway. But I didn't I spent the money on going back to the Amazon where I had been a Peace Corps volunteer and knew now that the Amazon's being destroyed by oil companies and others. And I went back to the people I'd lived with as a Peace Corps volunteer, the Shuar, indigenous people deep, deep in the Amazon and said, hey, I want to help you guys save your rainforest. And so make a long story short, they welcomed me and I ended up forming a nonprofit called Dream Change that worked with this. And I wrote five books on indigenous people and shamanism. And you mentioned some of them at the beginning of the program, which was fine with Stoner Webster that I wrote those books. I had no problem with that. But I didn't write the book about economic hitmen. I kept my deal with Stoner Webster. But by the year 2000, that deal was no longer. I was done and the new chairman of the board of our CEO had taken over at Stoner Webster. He didn't want to keep this thing going and I didn't either. And 9-11, I was in Ecuador, deep in the rainforest. I'd taken a group of people. I take groups that I still do. If any of your audience wants to go with me, johnperkins.org, it's all there. And we were there on 9-11. And when I came home, I lived in Florida at the time, like you. And when I came home, I flew up to New York and went to Ground Zero. And as I looked at that pit, I knew I had to write about what I'd done. And not that there was any direct connection, but it just it triggered me to know that I had to expose what I had done. But this time I decided I wouldn't tell anybody I was doing it. I wouldn't contact other people that had done it. I wouldn't write an expose that included other stories. I would write a very personal confession. And I wouldn't tell it. So if I didn't tell anybody, nobody could threaten my life or offer me a bribe because nobody would know that I was doing this. And once I had it in the hands of a good New York literary agent and he's distributing it to publishers, I figured it's my best insurance policy that at that point, anybody that might want to get rid of me or want to threaten me, they can't do it anymore because they know that if something strange happens to me, the book's going to sell a lot of copies and I become a martyr. And that's exactly the opposite of what they want to have happen. So I went ahead and wrote the book completely in private, got it in the hands of a very good literary agent and we got it out there and it felt served as an insurance policy. Love it. Yes. And we are very thankful to have this book. It's so precious. I mean, now in its third edition, it just gets better every time. So I never really have heard you ask like, because the book is pretty open, it seems, but did you leave things out? Are there major things you have never told? I mean, is there stuff you'll take to the grave that didn't make it into the books? Of course. Well, I mean, hey, you're 80, let's rip the doors off. Well, I mean, I can answer this quite simply. I didn't tell you about all the hours I spent in front of a typewriter or a computer. That's boring. So I didn't tell you about that. That's not what you're interested in. You're interested in what's going to be in the movie. Is there a movie? There will be, but I can't talk about that. Okay, fair. Well, I'll just help. Not because the CIA doesn't want me talking about it, but because I have an agreement with the producers of the movie. And I don't know whether the movie will come out in my lifetime or not, but Hollywood has a slow process. It does. And they're struggling these days, too, to keep afloat. So there are things that you've never disclosed that would be in the potential movie if it comes out. Yeah. And or another book, which may coincide with the movie. Okay. And also, I write some in my newsletter. So my most recent newsletter contrasts. So two weeks ago, I did a shamanic workshop for 200 people in San Francisco where there were three people, two women and one man from the Amazon. And we were beating drums and shaking rattles and taking people on this. And these were quite prominent people, supporters, donors to the Pachamama Alliance, people with quite a lot of money and influence and so on. They're all, you know, we take them on this shamanic journey. And then four days later, I'm speaking in Las Vegas to 5,000 people on the main stage of the Bitcoin conference. I'm following J.D. Vance and the two Trump sons that they've been speaking on the same stage. And I'm speaking about economic hitmen. And, you know, so this my newsletter, which you can get on my website, people can go there, johnperkins.org and sign up for future ones. If you do, you can put your name in the little box of your email address. But anyway, so this newsletter is entitled Bitcoin Shamanism in the Bubble. And it's really addressing how we all live in these bubbles. So the shaman people kind of, a lot of them were saying, well, why would you speak at a Bitcoin conference, you know? And the Bitcoin people and people I talked to at corporations say, you didn't write those books on shamanism, did you? And so we live in these bubbles and the bubbles, as you alluded to earlier, have gotten much smaller because of social networking and the algorithms that we all operate under. But I think the challenge for us now and in the future is to keep expanding those bubbles. And one of the reasons I really like your show is because that's what you're doing. You're helping people expand their bubbles. And this is an incredibly important process. And it's why I write. It's why I hope there will be a movie because that'll reach people that never read books. And it's why I wrote a novel instead of, you know, all my other books are nonfiction because I know some people don't read nonfiction. So I wanted to get that similar message out in a way that's really fun and in a novel. But this restricted bubbles that we live in and the importance of expanding them. And we've got to move from this, what we call a death economy, the kind of economic system I created that's based on maximizing short-term profits for corporations and materialistic consumption for everybody else and is consuming and polluting itself toward extinction. We need to move into a life economy that pays people to clean up pollution, that pays people, you know, to regenerate destroyed environments, to come up with new technologies that create energy out of the air and water. You know, we know we can do this. There's so much that we can do. The life economy, which instead of maximizing short-term profits and materialism, maximizes long-term benefits for all life. So, you know, that's my goal at this point in my life is to move in that direction. So I wanted to make sure we get that in before the show went over. So I apologize for just kind of leaping in and doing that. All good. Yes. And in fact, I actually was going to end on the new book, The Message from the Pleiades novel, and I'm kind of the opposite, mainly probably because of what I do for work. I read a lot more nonfiction and I know that I have guests who will write novels and stuff, but it's just hard for me to cut around, like, what is the real stuff peppered into the story because it's all kind of intermixed. So I tend to stick to the nonfiction, but I am interested in this book. And when I initially reached out and saw you wrote it, I was like, wow, what a interesting book for the economic hitman guy to write. And of course you, you have these kinds of books peppered throughout your book writing career, but. No, that's the only one. That's the only nonfiction. Well, fair. But I'm talking about like, you know, touch the Jaguar and the stress-free toolbox. Like there are some things that touch along these themes, but I just was going to say this book, I've heard you say it's somewhat channeled, but it's about a disillusioned congresswoman who travels to Tikal and quote, on the first night perched high atop a 2000 year old pyramid. She hears a voice otherworldly haunting that takes her on a journey through the mysteries of human history. Can it truly be a voice from the Pleiades as Mayan legend foretells? And so I just think that it's an interesting subject matter for you to write about. Is there an underlying current of truth or personal experience peppered into this? Is there some kind of connection, you think, between pyramids, rituals, and messages from the stars that does have a realness to it? Let me just say that I've spent a lot of time in Tikal. It's a Mayan, you know, sacred site in Guatemala. And I take groups there. And yes, most of the experiences described in that book, I've experienced. And the Mayans believe they came from Pleiades and they believe that these thoughts we have, that's where they come from. They're channeled in from here. You know, other people would call it God or Jesus or, you know, Muhammad or whatever. But it's a fascinating, fascinating subject. And I have to say, I loved writing this book. It was so fun to explore these. And it's only 75 pages long. You can read it in an hour or two. I love it. I'm probably going to have to check it out because I just always, I want to know where the poetic license takes off and the facts. And so sometimes it's just like, you know, because I'll believe it all. That's what happens to me. So it needs to be clearly marked nonfiction, but amazing. So this has just been really great. I'm glad we could get past the John Perkins 101 stuff and get into some weird areas. As we're wrapping this thing up, I wanted to save a little more room for the tours. I'm obviously really interested in the tours. I probably won't get to go on one because these stages of our lives aren't in sync very well. But do you have any upcoming ones that you'd like to plug? Yeah, I've got a great one too, Tikal, to the Mayan cities. And we'll be with shamans the whole time there. We do amazing fire ceremonies. But it's next March. I, you know, I live in the Pacific Northwest, so I try to schedule all my overseas trips during that time of the year, which isn't quite so pleasant here when there's a lot of rain and so on. So this is in March, but it's March of 2026. And it's available now. In the meantime, I'm going to be speaking at events in the Republic of Georgia and Istanbul. And I do a lot of traveling also in the meantime. But the trips are usually in January and February and March. But it's all on my website, including the day-by-day itinerary that people can really get a good feeling for it. And they do fill up pretty quickly. I don't take more than 15 people in general, unless there's a couple of families that may take it up to 18 maybe. But it's small. And I've got an amazing partner, a guy who I've done this with for many, many years since the 80s. He's from Ecuador. And we have shamans with us the whole time. They're phenomenal trips. I've been doing these since the 80s. And I never get bored. Every trip is so different for me. I wouldn't keep doing it. I only do it because I love doing it. Yeah, very, very cool. I love being in new places, but I hate travel. So it's just one of those things. But of course, people can get the books anywhere they get books. They can follow the ongoing commentary and blog and get the newsletter at johnperkins.org. Anything else to leave them with? I think all your listeners should feel really blessed to be alive at this time in history. You know, we are on the cusp of redefining what it means to be human beings being human on this planet. We're evolving. And, you know, we move forward and then we take some steps back. I think we're in a little step back right now, but we're going to continue moving forward. This is an amazing time to be alive. And yes, tremendous challenges, tremendous crises, and also great opportunities for tremendous change and opening ourselves, expanding our bubbles. And I, again, just want to express my appreciation for the work that you do of helping people expand the bubbles of bringing this information out, because that's critical. Ah, too kind. Cheers to that. Yeah, I'm very thankful to be alive now. I really can't believe going back to my younger self and listening to the John Perkins interview and Zeitgeist 2 and being a naive stoner college dropout. Now I'm 40 years old and you're giving me a compliment. What a life. What a life. You are the man. So I've learned a lot about the inner workings of the big machine from you, and I will be forever grateful. Thanks again and take care. Serenity now, right? Truly this time, we could really use it. So anyway, I will start with saying I loved this interview. We had a good rhythm going. I felt like the vibe was high, and it felt like a home run. John said a couple of things in passing with some of the examples he chose to use that I don't agree with, but that is fine. You know, we've had the vaccine conversation a thousand times at this point, but I don't know how you can look at almost every other interaction and campaign from the West as exploitative and not see vaccines in that same context or just the medical stuff in general. From what I read, it looks more like the third world is regularly used as a medical testing ground and that they are likely the victims of a sterilization campaign under the guise of trying to provide help. Some researchers are looking at Zika under a new microscope as possibly vax damage for something experimental. Apparently the places that had the biggest outbreaks had recent visits from Western medicine, and that's interesting. We also did that interview with Professor Daniel Emawar about his book, How to Hide an Empire, and that's about all the U.S. territories that we control and what the government has done with them historically, including the testing of various birth controls on women in the Philippines and all the fallout from that. Like everything else, it just seems like it's all exploitation and value extraction framed as a good thing, and I don't put vaccination campaigns in a special category outside of that overall motivation that seems to drive everything else. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think if there wasn't something in it for them, they would just leave these people alone, defend for themselves, for better or worse. Small disagreement, and obviously far outside the scope of John's work, but it is an interview I truly enjoyed. I think that was obvious. I consider John's career to be one of the most elucidating careers to educate yourself on, from his recruitment and training to every one of his assignments and all the little insights he learned along the way. But this was good. It was a little bit different. Not only is my own first interview with him about his life story. Of course, I was, I guess, 29 years old when that came out. But I know a lot of you have either read the book or seen Zeitgeist or at least heard another interview with John along the way, so I didn't want to go that resume route. I almost tried to work backwards in a way. But I think it's awesome that John has applied his knowledge to arranging trips and bringing people to these new environments and interacting with these cultures they wouldn't otherwise interact with and facilitating real healing. It's a beautiful thing. If John didn't have this shamanic side of his story, then I don't know if we'd even have confessions of an economic hitman today. We might. That's just me speculating. But I believe in the power of entheogens to make one reflect and transform ourselves in altruistic ways. I also need to say that I screwed up. I said the U.S. is $60 trillion in debt, but it's only $36 trillion, so you can rest easy. Though the thing I said about the interest on the debt being our second largest expense as a country, dwarfed only by the military budget, that is true. And it is supposed to surpass the military budget in just a couple of years. That's what they say. Who knows? Maybe the military budget's going up too, right? But this is why I say, sorry, we just can't afford anything right now. Our cities are full of tents and drug-addled zombie people. Until we sort that out, on top of the debt, we have to rein in all spending. Businesses can't operate on blocks that are now campgrounds for unstable people. Kind of going to be in a death spiral for our cities if we aren't already. And as he said, minimum wage hasn't really gone up since the 70s. Everyone feels squeezed. We have some budgeting to do before we spend anything else. I mean, I get it. The popular sentiment out there right now is simply, what about us? You take our money, and then what do we get for it? Israel clearly has compromised our government, or some say we are the ones who run the show and that we funnel the money to Israel really just to buy back our own military weaponry, like a big money laundering scheme that benefits U.S. elite more than anyone. Again, Ben Shapiro, I think, has called Israel an aircraft carrier for the U.S. military on land. And I've been hearing that Netanyahu grew up way more American than Israeli before he was in the government. But I really don't care who's the top and who's the bottom. I just want us to get out of bed together. You know, it's been far too much. And when you see all the presidents go into the wailing wall, though, it just really makes you wonder who is in charge. Or actually, maybe it answers that question. But either way, this all leads me to the fact that, as you heard me say, we recorded this just a couple of days into the two-week window that Trump was going to use to think about what the U.S. would do with Iran. And I think it only took three days to wake up to the news that we bombed him. So a lot of this interview, I wouldn't say it's outdated. It's actually good context for Iran in general and historically. And I guess like Ted Cruz, we should all learn a little bit more about Iran if it's going to be such an important part of where we go from here. But yeah, clearly that hadn't happened yet. And you can tell that from the way we talk about it. It's all just super disappointing. And I'm really glad that I've stuck with saying both parties are corrupt and never getting pulled into one side or the other. Really, there's only one side. A lot of my colleagues are being pulled. Of course, I have wanted to be optimistic and hopeful about RFK Jr. particularly, you know, domestically more than anything else. But there's just no way to vote or have influence over about 80% of what goes on. And they hype up that last 20% to make it feel like you did something. What do we really think will happen next? It's all probability, but the numbers just went up for the false flag that draws us deeper into all this stuff actually happening or real retaliatory strikes. Though I assume a lot of that would happen at the bases in the Middle East first. Again, bring it the fuck home, boys. It's time. Who really knows? I try not to give in to fear or worry too much about hypotheticals, but it's not a great week for going down geopolitical conspiracy rabbit holes on the internet, right? Either way, I thought this one was super smooth, loved it, and wanted to get it out to you before some of the current events stuff felt a little outdated. I actually leapfrogged this over the other three that I have recorded already that have nothing to do with current events. They are timeless subjects, so it should be fine. And it is kind of a great way to end the soft launch of THC Plus TV based on the streaming data I can see. It's popular with the Plus people. It's costly, but if at least half the people who've been watching convert to sticking with it, then I'm a happy guy. Either way, the traffic's going to go down, so my cost should go down too. But video is just part of the business now. The YouTube account for THC is in shambles, but we are rebuilding from me abandoning it entirely is one problem, and maybe a little suppression. I try not to worry again too much about things I can't control, but nobody really shares audio on social media. It's just not done, but I hope that maybe some of you can help me out and share the video episodes or clip them if you want to and just spread stuff around. You know, we could use a little boost right now, but who couldn't, I guess. And yes, the $12 tier is available now on the website. If you want to be a new member of that, great. Or of course, Plus members can go to the account management page and bump up to it. I'm going to build it out on Patreon before the next episode comes out. It's not there yet, but I'll just cross my fingers and hope for the best, right? Other than that, it must be pointed out that John gets the award for being the first person to comment on the screen behind me at the studio. Listener or guest, I believe, but if you haven't seen it, I created these goofy ads for fake higher side products and the screen behind me at the studio just flips through them. Some of them are kind of funny, some more than others, but it's an idea that was partly inspired by Philip K. Dick's Ubik, if you're familiar with that book, and also just the general conversation about ads. It's just fun to think about shilling the higher side brand into licensing deals on everything from toilet paper and TV dinners to cigarettes and luxury watches. Even theme parks and airlines are in there too, but let's talk about other aspects of this new tier before we call it in. I wanted to give current Plus members some time with the Clip Genie transcripts and the word search thing for the full archive, but the guys are having a tough time actually getting it ready for a full rollout. I'm not exactly sure what to do because this is the last show before the switchover, but I guess just stay tuned on that, and if it gets done, I'll announce it on Twitter. Let's say that. And nobody has complained about this, but there is an issue playing the Plus show on the website in the Safari browser. Annoyingly, Apple controls who can have video streaming through Safari. You need something called Fairplay, so now I have to apply for a developer account and then apply for this stupid thing to make it work, but everything is super smooth on Chrome or other browsers. It's a problem isolated to Apple, but all right, that is about it. Sign up for Plus if you like the first-hour interviews and want more. This one with John went way deeper into his shamanic experiences, the healing that he's seen done when Western medicine couldn't help, PsyFX, and the very interesting answer he gave when I asked if that was also part of his training. It's provocative, but it always is. Double your pleasure, double your fun, get THC Plus the podcast, the audio for $8 a month if you are an audio person, or $12 for THC Plus TV if you've been liking the video. So we'll leave it at that for now, but I'm going to put a much more detailed table of the various options and benefits up when we play the ending song, so you'll have plenty of time to look at it, but I get it. It's getting a little complicated now, so context is needed for those who are curious. And the other thing we like to do is review the last episode. This would be the one with Alex Fulton about CryptoCuberology. It got a 4.6, and that is not bad. I would have put it a notch or two higher, but I know that synchromystic numerological pattern recognition, six degrees of who's who in Hollywood isn't everyone's thing, so I'm just happy with the 4.6. And the other thing we like to do around here is look at the meetup calendar and call out the upcoming events. We have one June 28th in St. Charles, Illinois at the Global Brew Taphouse for the THC slash FE meetup synergy hang. And also on June 28th, the Magic in Orlando at Blue Jacket Park in Orlando, Florida. Was going to try to go to that. Don't think I'm going to make it. And then July 2nd, we have the UTM Shoplifters and Truthers of the World Unite. So if you want to get together with other looters, you know this is a good way to coordinate. Joking, of course. But then also July 5th, we have the random Roswell meetup in Roswell, New Mexico at the Blackcock Brewery. Okay. Keeping it classy. And then July 16th, New Haven, Connecticut at NOLO. July 21st, Eden Terrence, Auckland, New Zealand. You know where it is, Gale Brath's Ale House. So looks like there's a good amount of events coming up in the next month and a half. If you're interested, you know where to go. Hiresidemeetups.com. Get more details about any of these events if you heard about one in a city near you or make your own. It's a beautiful thing. And with that, I'm going to get going. Let John know if you had a good time and appreciate his candidness. I know I do. Take care of you and yours. These are troubled times. I'm getting out of here. I've done my part. Your move, industrialist, wealth extractors, globalist, profit pillagers, and of course, economic hitmen. Your fucking move. We are in a lot of trouble across every industry. Food, water, and medicine, computer tech, and energy. But people aren't paying attention. Not much is getting through. Gains in the information war Getting long overdue What's left for The big old octopus To get its tentacles around Sure, it's got a grip On everything But it's a long Is on the work I need to be Justice over grace Thanks for waiting for You To be To get an opportunity life Incraft To tell people See me Soon Go To go Do