So that makes it really frightening.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

So, yes, the big question is, so what do we do about it? And actually, that's in this new book, The Art of the Steel, Trump and the Economic Hitman Presidency.

I spent a lot of time looking at what can we all do? How do we reverse? How do we recognize that these four pillars exist? And how do each of us employ these and get our societies to employ them in a rightful way? And, you know, like, for example, fear, like, how do we turn the fear of speaking out in the United States as this fear of speaking out? I know that I'm vulnerable to some sort of attack from fear.

a result of this book.

I don't know whether it will come or not, but I know it's a distinct possibility.

How do you overcome that fear? How do you overcome the fear of failure? How do you overcome the fear of success? So for people, individuals to look at this and for larger societies, communities, we need to work more with our communities.

Whilst you talk, in the back of my mind, I'm asking myself, what did it take for you to become who you have become today from the time when you were the economic hitman? Because your thoughts, your everything, your personality must have been completely different then.

And with that, John, I'm going to, I'm going to turn it over to you to, uh, announce this very, very good and exciting news.

So, uh, I don't know, it's probably about a month or two ago, I guess Wade contacted me about an idea of basically we're going to host, uh, a hundred thousand dollar squirrel hunt.

Uh, Joy Dog Food and USDC is going to host the first ever true $100,000 payout hunt next year.

Me and Joey and Les and the board of directors, we all got together and run numbers and ideas and different things and come up with a pretty good idea we feel like that will that'll give everybody time to, you know, pay a big entry and, uh, hunt for an awesome, uh, awesome payout.

Uh, of course we're going to be holding it in, uh, Manchester, Tennessee, which is why, you know, Joey, Joey has, that's our connection down there.

And that's as good a place as any to hold a squirrel hunt.

I really do.

Yeah.

Mm.

So like I said, 20, in 25 years.

Um, [laughs] it's, it's, you know, China's done an amazing job, there's no question about it.

But one of the reasons they've been able to do this amazing job, uh, for one thing, they have good economic hitmen.

I taught at an MBA program in China a few years back and realized that I was, I was there to help them understand how to be successful economic hitmen and not make the mistakes that we'd made and have the successes.

[laughs] But the other thing...

And, and they have a really good story to tell.

But are we still really just being controlled by the same people?

Honest.

Uh, and I, I, I, you know, I think what he's seeing in Latin America is there's been a movement toward the right, uh, anyway, and that's, that's a cyclical thing.

[laughs] We went to the left, and the right, and the left more recently, and then a- now the r- the right is on the incline, and that's, that, he likes that, and that's to his favor.

And he saw Venezuela as, as an easy victim, some- a place where he could go in and take out the leader, uh, in a very dramatic way, and, um, at the same time, the, the drug war.

You know, Latin America is a, an easy bad guy for the United States because of the drugs coming in, which it's, you know, we, we don't give much thought to the fact that w- we have a [laughs] heavy demand for those drugs.

And, but, you know, it, it, it's an easy, it's an easy scapegoat.

Latin America's the problem.

Yeah

Thousands in the jungles.

Yes, thousands.

There were millions of people living there, probably more than who live there now, they're beginning to believe, the anthropologists.

And then in the process, they cut the forests and they drained the swamps to build these cities and they changed their climate.

And so they reached the point where they couldn't produce produce anymore.

They couldn't grow crops.

And So the cities began to go to war with each other over scarce resources.

Yeah.

What's in your new book?

I do wanna point out that this, although Trump's name is in the subtitle and appears on most every page, the book really isn't about him.

It's about a system that's been in existence all of my lifetime, of presidents who've used economic hitmen strategy.

There's four pillars of that sa- strategy.

It goes back hundreds of years, and it was what I really helped to develop in the modern form.

And every president's used it during my lifetime, as I said, but Trump has taken it to a new level, brought it out into the open.

He's the first president to actually be an [laughs] economic hitman, as well as a jackal, and those are the guys that come in when economic hitmen fail and either overthrow or assassinate leaders of countries.

Yeah

What was it like to come up with that, that book on, on China's, um, role in this, this game?

Well, Graham, you know, the, and, and Darren, it's always, it's always been very con- it's been, the, the, all the books have been controversial, and I'm, I'm used to, used to that.

And, you know, my publisher says, "You know, if you, if you don't get a lot of crap on, from, from some, from some people at least, you're not doing the job because that means you're stirring people up." And I, I kinda like that, that analysis.

But it is funny.

So you mentioned that I write books on indigenous people and shamanism also, and I've, I s- I spend a lot of time in the Amazon.

I was there as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late '60s.

I've been going back ever since.

But, um, how do we do that and stop it from being, "Hey, well, I can pay these Mexicans a fraction what I'm paying these Americans to build cars, so we're gonna do it there"?

What was SAMR and why was it such an important project for the economic hitmen of the world?

Well, SAMA, first of all, it represents a Saudi Arabian money laundering affair.

And it was in the early 70s that the United States had gone through a terrible recession, really a depression.

And we were worried that it was going to get bigger because of OPEC stopping the production of oil because of the role the United States had played in helping Israel recover.

in the wars in the Middle East at that time.

And Saudi Arabia was by far the leader of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which had tremendous power.

The US Treasury Department came to me and I guess a few others and said, hey, we got to stop Saudi Arabia from being in that kind of a position where it has so much power.

I love the thing that you were sorry when they were gone.

So clearly, whatever one thinks of the war, Ukraine is now bound up in the United States Federal Reserve somehow.

Yeah, and that's something that most Americans don't realize.

We're giving Ukraine all this money.

We're giving them all these weapons.

People don't realize that we're not giving them all of that by any means.

We're putting them deep into debt.

They become extremely dependent on us.

So just finally, how urgent will be the need for an actual concrete initiative from the BRICS summit in Delhi in September that will help to at least mitigate against Trump's antics?