Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin.

And Mike Prysner. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. We have a special guest today. We are joined by

Seamus Malacassili, a journalist covering Middle Eastern geopolitics. You can find his articles on Substack, and he also has a new

podcast called The Greatest Sin, which covers the multi-century history of foreign intervention

in Iran. Shemus, thank you for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Honored to be

on. So to start, we're really happy to have you,

and we're going to talk about, of course, mostly contemporary things happening today. But just to

kind of give some more background on your podcast and the reason for it, because it informs our

discussion today, you know, your new show is about the, you know, the long history of foreign intervention in Iran.

And why is it that you're dedicating a show to this?

And also, like, why is that so important for people to understand the context of like Iranian politics?

Today, not just U.S. Iran relations, but internal Iranian politics and all the things that we're going to discuss.

I think that's a good question. And it relates to the fact that I don't think it's a secret

that a lot of American journalists who are covering the Middle East, they operate from the position

of either not understanding the Persian language,

not being familiar with Iranian in culture,

not being familiar with Iranian history.

And to some extent, that's because maybe they don't want to,

but to the regular observer,

it's because there really isn't access to very easily accessible resources

for them to learn about it.

Either it's been hidden from them by the educational system or deliberately by the government

...