#125: John Perkins / Economic Hitman / Death and Life Economies / China / Central and South America

0:01 Welcome to another episode of Come Together and We Are Live. John Perkins. Mr. Perkins, John, thank you so much for doing this. I am I'm so excited that to be talking to you. How are you? Great. It's my my pleasure to be with you, Ephraim. Thank you so much. Thank you. So as a quick introduction, I, I, I, I mentioned to you when you spoke the other day, but I read your book and it immediately blew my mind that the confessions of an economic hitman and did. And I'm going to try to make the conversation, I guess, or ask my questions as pointed and condensed as possible. So we could try and make this, you know, as, as you know, as packed with information as it could be. But can you give me a brief breakdown of what the with the hitman Dubai?

1:00 I found your YouTube little animation that I thought was really excellent. So I'm going to post the link to that too. But you know what, what what? What was your responsibility? Yeah, I should say that that animation I had nothing to do with. It just appeared it uses my voice but they never asked my permission. No. I I often use it 'cause I don't, I don't ask their permission. I've actually tried, but they don't seem to exist anymore. But I love it. I think it's a great video and I like to say it's very humbling because it does in 2 minutes what I have to spend 250 pages in a book to try to do. And it pretty much covers what an economic hitman does. So, yeah. So it's it's it's pretty hilarious. It's a lot of fun.

1:43 So I I encourage your viewers to watch. It's accurate. It's very accurate. It felt like it. It felt like the best SparkNotes I've ever seen. Exactly. So yeah, my real title is chief economist at a major Boston based consulting firm. And but you know, I had a staff of anywhere from 10 to 50 people at different times. And what my job really entailed was identifying countries with resources our corporations covet, like oil or other resources. Today, it might be one of the rare minerals and, and lithium cobalt things that are used in high tech. And once we identify that country, to convince the country to take a huge loan from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations, the money never actually went to the country. The resource was used as collateral. So the country signed off on the loan, but the money actually went to our own corporations, big engineering corporations like Bechtel or Halliburton or Brown and Rood or Stone and Webster to build large infrastructure projects in that country.

2:55 Things like electric power systems, highways, ports, airports, industrial parks. And these were things that benefited a few wealthy families in those countries, the people who own the businesses, the industries, the commercial establishments. And they benefited tremendously from this improved infrastructure, as of course did international corporations, our corporations, and of course the, the, the, the engineering companies that built the projects made huge profits off of it. But the majority of the people in a country suffered because money was diverted from from education, healthcare and other social services to pay the interest on the loans.

3:41 And in the end, the country couldn't pay the principal. So we'd go back, usually under the guise of the International Monetary Fund and say, hey, since you can't pay your, your, your debts, you, you owe us, sell your oil real cheap. It's, it's your collateral. Sell it real cheap to our oil companies without environmental or social regulations. Let us build a military based on your soil. Sell, sell off your, your water and sewage systems and other Public Utilities to our investors. Vote with us on the next United Nations vote here. See Cuba or some such thing. And in that way, we were really building a global economy. Yeah, and that was, and as I was reading the book, I think even within the 1st 1015 pages, I, I was struck and then it was kept on getting further reinforced, but by the notion that there was America, the empire that was acting along the interests of any empire, which is to expand.

4:43 And then there's America, the homeland, which is, you know, the people that are kind of just funding and living there. The question I wanted to ask is when we like, you know, for example, let's say hypothetically or like in your case, when you, when you were dealing with working in Panama and you know, the government, let's say we gave or the World Bank gave a loan to the, to the government of Panama to build the infrastructure. That that's a sense that's taxpayer dollars going to going to the country, correct? It's American taxpayer dollars going to Panama. Yes, often very indirectly through the World Bank or the Inter American Development Bank. Yeah, which the the the United States is not the only, but the primary financer of those institutions. And then it's paid back at the end of the loan. Who?

5:35 Who gets who? Who Who is Panama paid return the loan to to directly to the corporations that are doing the work or to the World Bank? No, to the World Bank. The World Bank makes the loan, then the money is used to hire American companies to build these infrastructure projects. And I should mention also that it, it was my job was pretty easy because the, the, you know, I, I, I like to make the kind of, it's a metaphor. But I, I say that, you know, I walk into a president's office and say, hey, in this hand, I've got a few billion dollars to build these projects that are going to help you and your friends and your family because you own, you own the industries. And if you don't agree to this deal, and this is how I got a gun.

6:23 And I didn't actually carry a gun, but I knew and he knew the president knew the people right behind me, we called jackals did carry guns. And we have a long history of overthrowing or assassinating governments. For example, a Hendi in Chile and harbins in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and on and on and on. The list is very long. So, so you know, the president's faced with this choice, do I take this money and and put my country deep into debt and help my family and friends, or do I risk being overthrown or assassinated? Yeah, it's a pretty impossible position to be in, I imagine, you know. Well, it's not much of A choice, frankly, for most people now. The President of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos, and the president and the head of state of of Panama, Omar Torrijos, were the only clients I had that that did not buy the deal. They took the risk and they both ended up dying very suspicious deaths in their private airplanes. Well, and they were both people that you admired greatly, right? I mean, at least the tone in your book indicates that they were both very admirable.

7:33 And, you know. Yeah, great people. Yeah, they were guys with a lot of integrity. And I, I frankly had mixed feelings because my job was to bring them around, you know, and I, I was, I was ambitious. I wanted to be successful in my job. But I also liked them, especially Omar Torrijos of Panama, who was extremely charismatic. He was a party animal. He was a really good president, but he also liked to enjoy life. And we became quite good. I felt like we were good friends. And so, you know, I had very, very mixed feelings that I wanted to succeed at my job. But on the other hand, I really admired these guys for taking your stand.

8:14 I, I, I was idealistic and it made to sound to your listeners like, well, no, how could you be idealistic and do this job? But for most of the time I did the job, I believed I was doing the right thing. Because statistically we can show that when you invest this money in, in infrastructure projects in a poor country, you grow the economy, the GDP increases rapidly and significantly. And it does. And GDP per capita, which makes it sounds as sound as though everybody in the country is doing better per capita. Wow, That's everybody. And so that's what I was taught in Business School. And the World Bank continued to promote this.

8:54 And so I believed in this for a lot of the time. And it was really Omar Torrijos of Panama who took me aside one time and said, John, don't you realize that you're lying to yourself and to the world? GDP only measures how well the really wealthy are doing in the big international corporations. It measures how what kind of wealth they're bringing to the rich people of the country. And GDP per capita is simply that number divided by the number of people in a country. Doesn't really tell you anything about how well the the average citizen is doing. Right, right, right. So you say, is there in a in AI guess in a more ideal world, in a little bit more of a, let's say moral way or a fairway of, you know, trying to make these kind of deals?

9:41 What would be the, what steps along the way would enable the population of the country that you're actually giving the loan to to actually succeed? Would it be that the interest wouldn't be as high? Would it be that you're not giving them a loan that's so huge that they couldn't afford to pay back? It would be a smaller loan. What would, what would have to be the steps that would actually allow a country to actually become, you know, more wealthy and more and more modernized, I guess. That's a that's a key question and it's a question that I had. I just, I spent a lot of time in Latin America today and I, I just came back from a former Soviet country and, and, and the Middle East and Europe. And I'm asked that question a lot by these countries and by African countries.

10:30 And my response is, you know, that the, the only that I think the best way in the long run is to recognize that, that you have resources that the world wants that otherwise we wouldn't be doing this. And in the case of Africa, it's the wealthiest continent in the world on a based on resources. And the poorest. Yeah. I mean, it's got the most resources. It's got incredible resources, probably Latin America's second. And yet they're very poor from a from a human standpoint, from an average human standpoint. And but if they could come together, could unite and say, you know, like we're not going to take on this debt of these outrage with these outrageous conditions. Yeah, we we don't have the technology to develop some of these resources.

11:20 We need your help US or now China and other parts of the world. We need we need your industry. We we need your technological know how. But these are our resources and, and so we expect you to help us develop value, add it. We don't want to just produce barrels of oil that you ship out and send to your refineries. We want refineries here. And beyond that, we want plastic companies. We want the companies that use the oil to do things other than just power cars. We, we, we want industry here. We, we, we demand that we're not going to continue this process, but really that that's going to take a, a united effort on the part of many of these countries.

12:05 And in both Africa and Latin America, they'll tell you, you know, they have this long history of division. It's, it's, and it's a lot of it was imposed it, it's a result of, of colonialism by the Portuguese and the Spaniards in Latin America and now the Americans and by the Dutch and the, and the British and the French and others in, in, in Africa. So I have this history of division. It makes it hard to do this, but I like to look back to the US history. There was a lot of divisiveness between the 13 colonies back in the 1770s. You know, the, the South had very different interests than the North. And within each of the colonies in the north and each of the colonies in the South, they had different interests from their, their neighboring. There was a lot of divisiveness.

12:53 It took, it took an effort, it took a big effort. It took a tremendous amount of politicking by people like John Adams and, and Benjamin Franklin and others to pull people together. But they did it. So they became united. And, and I, and I really want to encourage Africa and Latin America to do something similar. And it doesn't require all the countries, but it requires a a significant number that have these resources that the world desperately wants. Sure, sure, sure. I mean, and I guess, I guess just, I guess piggybacking on this, on this notion, we, there's more opportunity now than ever to kind of democratize news and information and messaging to get across, you know, especially on different platforms that you know, because like what you, you know, so let's say America or China goes to Africa, America or China or both of us go to Africa and say, Hey, we want, you know, XY and Z resources. And they say, well, we know these resources are valuable to you.

13:54 We insist on, you know, being dealt to fair hands. You know, in this, in this, in these negotiations. They say, well, you know, we have the money in one hand. We have the jackals in the other hand. And they say, well, we have a microphone, you know, or we have, you know, we have, we have the world, you know, we have the voice of, you know, civility and, and humanity, you know, on our on our sides. And like what you said, I think it would require a massive organized effort of just saying we're not being treated fairly for the whole world to be like, Oh my gosh, they're not being treated fairly. And to take a step. I mean, you know, I mean, that's you could, you could definitely make the argument that that Hamas and Gaza are currently winning the OR have been winning the PR war for the last two years relative to Israel, judged by the fact that the sentiment overwhelmingly lies with them at the moment. And, you know, I think that if any, if any country that was quote, UN quote on the on the bottom, you know, could manage to rally some kind of effort and democratize the information, make their voices unified, then you really have a chance of fighting of fighting.

14:57 Oh, absolutely, you're right. And incidentally, it may be that Hamas and Palestine, the Palestinians are winning, but but in a way, it's, it's actually Netanyahu and his administration that's losing the propaganda war. I mean, shooting themselves in the foot. But both, it takes both. And I think that's a really good point that I, I emphasize what needs to be done in in Africa and Latin America. But at the same time, the people of the United States need to be better educated about this. So we, we have the sense, you know, like I people will tell me, well, why are they demonstrating against embassy in, in Ecuador or wherever? We're just there to help them. Well, that embassy is not there to help the people of Ecuador or any other country for the most part.

15:41 That may, that may not be true. Maybe they are there to help countries to some degree in Europe. But really that embassy is there to serve the interests of American corporations for the most part. And American foreign policy, which right now and for quite some time has been very expansionistic. It's either, it's the most expansionist now, I think despite the fact that Trump came into the presidency saying he, you know, he, he didn't want to get involved in these things, but that's been our history of getting involved in these things and, and expanding and expanding. And so, but Americans don't understand that we truly think, I believe that a majority of Americans truly believe that what we're doing in these other countries is helping them.

16:24 And maybe to their detriment that oh, you, you can't help them. Well, it's true that we shouldn't be helping them in ways that exploit them. But we can offer services, technology and, and, and money to help, but only if it truly is used to develop. Yeah. And to develop these countries, to develop the businesses in these countries, help employment in these countries. We talk about the immigration problem. The immigration problem is a problem because we've created economies in Central America that are just exploited by our corporations. NAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and I mean the North American Free Trade Agreement and Kafka, the Central American are are totally biased to helping out big corporations and in the process making it very, very difficult for the average person in in much of Central America to make a living. So they emigrate.

17:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder So what I I, I can vouch for both myself anecdotally and with really almost everyone that I know it. I know only a handful of people that know much about any other part of the world other than America that grew up here. And even then, you know, what they know is, is severely limited. And, you know, so actually I do want to dedicate probably, you know, a chunk of this recording to talking a little bit about other countries, especially from your experience. I think that that'd be extremely valuable. One thing I wanted to ask for you to please elaborate on a little bit was the notion of a corporatocracy that you've discussed. Because I think that the way that you, the way that you expressed it in the book, at least had put it into such plain and digestible terms.

18:17 And a notion that primarily has been kind of put, put aside for the kooks, you know, for the conspiracy theorists. And, you know, you walk around with terms like a deep state or whatever it is. But but there is, but, you know, there is this notion of a corporatocracy. Can you explain what that is please? Yeah, well, my, what what I've written about is the corporatocracy is not really a conspiracy theory as such. So that's sort of overarching agreement with the Bildenberger whenever they get together to be in dark corners and, you know, to to plot things. But the conspiracy, if you want to call it that is, is a a philosophy that is part of what I call predatory capitalism, which is the kind of capitalism that rules the world right now. And that philosophy is that you maximize short term profits regardless of the social and environmental cost that drives these corporations.

19:13 And it pretty much drives our governments that to set up policies that help us maximize materialistic consumption and short term profits for corporations. Now, corporations need to make profits. All businesses do. But they don't need to maximize them to the extent that they just basically disregard the future, right? You know, and the idea of maximizing profits regardless of the social and environmental costs is ridiculous when you think about it. And yet that's the driving force. So let's say you take the oil companies and you may have Exxon and Chevron and Shell are all competing for you at the gas pump. They're all advertising our oils better than their oil, you know, saying, but that's what they're doing. But but if, if, if, if any country in the United States or any of the countries where they have oil wells begins to look like they're going to institute policies that in some way are going to negatively impact the oil company, the oil companies, they all basically.

20:15 They don't have to come together in a dark room and agree to do this. They don't even have to meet with each other. They just automatically know we're all going to fight to get rid of this policy, to keep this policy down. We're all, we're going to spend a lot of money on, on, you know, we at Shell are going to hire our lawyers and, and you at Texaco or Chevron are going to hire your lawyers. And we're, you know, we're all going to fight this, this, this policy and that goes through all, all the various industries, whether it's retail or food production or, or chemicals or pharmaceuticals. So, so that's this corporatocracy. But on top of that, you've got the fact that most of our government officials come out of the corporate world or plan on going into it when they leave the government.

21:05 Yeah, yeah. The revolving door. And that's a form of corruption that's been legalized. It's so it's, it's not corruption legally speaking, but it is corruption on, you know, from any standpoint. And, and of course, these last few years, it's gotten a lot worse over these last few, few months. I mean to say it's gotten a lot worse the the Trump administration is blatant about it, which may be a good thing because it's bringing to the surface the fact that the presidents and other politicians use their positions to enhance their own personal wealth and that of their friends and cronies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

21:49 It's been. I don't know whether this is just the media that I've been consuming lately or whether or not this is the zeitgeist, but it certainly feels as if it's been a lot more blatant. You know, the transfer of wealth, prestige and power is like unfolding in front of people's eyes And it almost and, and then at the same time, life becomes a lot more, a lot more difficult for the middle lower, you know, economic class of, of, of individuals. And there's just nothing like you could just it's a good silent groan, you know, like there's, there's not really much that's happening other than everyone just kind of throwing up their hands and being like, well, I guess, you know, I guess this is life now. I guess, you know, I guess I, you know, there's not there's really, it doesn't feel like there's necessarily a way out. Do do you have any kind of, you know, hope or what kind of positive other than, I guess messages, messaging, other than the speaking and the coming together that we were talking about, you know, is there anything else that could happen? Yeah.

22:49 Well, I think yeah, first of all, yeah, it's, it's definitely gotten worse. So. So I actually think we have developed the, the conspiracy theories in a way coming true. It's it's self realization. I think we have in the last months we've been moving beyond the kind of corporatocracy that I talked about and we've been moving much more into an overt one, an oligarchy. And that's not just true in the United States, it's it's been happening in many, many other countries, Argentina among so many countries, Italy, countries in Europe. You know, we're moving in this direction increasingly.

23:29 And and I think that the message here is it's these terrible mistakes that we've all made in the past. Those those in power, those are not even necessarily in power. I don't consider myself to be in power, but I'm part of, you know, this white American privileged class. And we've kind of sat back and watched, you know, the Democrats have not done a good job at dealing with what's going on. And I'm not, you know, I'm not just coming down on the Trump administration. I think the Trump administration is stirring the pot and that that's probably a good thing. It needs, it needed to be stirred. The question is, can can we? Can we cool down the pot before it boils over? Yeah.

24:12 That's the big question. Can we truly save democracy? Because I think I'm a, I'm a very strong believer in democracy and we've never really had it in the United States, but throughout our 250 year history, we've been kind of on an upward trend. You know, women didn't have the right to vote until the 19 until 1919, but they did get it. And and then and then we've still got tremendous inequality and and so on. But I think we were moving in in the right direction. And it takes time. 250 years is not a lot in human history. But but now it seems as though we've taken a step back, as have so many, many other countries and really deeply concerned about this.

24:57 I was just recently in the Republic of Georgia, which used to be part of the Soviet Union. And they're terrified, you know, they, they do not want to be part of the the equivalent of the Soviet Union again. And they see what's happening in Ukraine. They are expecting that it will happen to them if it unless it gets stopped in Ukraine. And you hear this all over Europe. It's a tremendous amount of fear. We in the United States are very privileged in that we've got the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean in Canada and Mexico. So, yeah, these are not enemies. I mean, we're, we're, we're, it's getting close. Are we? Are we going to turn Canada and Mexico into enemies? That would be a terrible mistake.

25:39 But I don't think we are going. I don't think that's going to happen. And and so we've been so privileged because most every other country in the world has neighbors that at one time or another, including usually fairly recently, were their enemies. So, well, they're very, very aware of these kinds of threats. We're not. We're not. We're spoiled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, something's gonna, I mean, I guess something's gonna you're spoiled until something wakes you up in life. You know, that's usually how it that's usually how it works. So I'm hoping we can learn, you know, before we before we get one of those wake up calls that we're not, you know, that we're not very happy about. Speaking of Ukraine, there was a whole, and again, it wasn't a huge, huge deal on the news, but it was kind of a couple of months back that Trump was trying to push Zelensky towards a mineral deal.

26:27 You know, is that the would that be the equivalent of, you know, extract, extracting this pound of flesh that like, hey, we just propped you guys up for X amount of years and gave you X amount of billions of dollars. And now we're expected to. Now you're expected to work with us, whether you like it or not. Yeah. We didn't give them that money. We, we, we, we've, it's, it's, there's a lot of it is loans. Some of it has been granted. Oh, I see. Most of it is loans and let's remember that most of that money or great a large share of it that came back to us for them to buy military equipment from us and, and, and, and other supplies from us. So, yeah. And, and why are we in Ukraine? So that the people of Republic of Georgia would say we, we went through the same thing you, you.

27:13 So the I mean Russia annexed the large parts of of of the Republic of Georgia recently and the world didn't react at all. When was that? It was what, 2000? Shit, I just came from there, you know, 2007, 2000. Within the last 20 years. Yeah, yeah, Oh, yeah. There's I, I've met with a lot of people who were told you've got 48 hour, told by the Russians you've got 48 hours to get out of your house and and move 350 miles away. We now have taken over the section, but who knows about that? I, I didn't really, I knew, I knew about it, but I didn't really know about it until I get there and talk to these people. And so they say, well, why doesn't the world know about it? Why Ukraine?

28:06 Why not us too? We, we, we want to support Ukraine, but what about us? And the answer is they don't have the resources. Ukraine has these amazing resources that, that are available to including it's, it's known as the bread basket of Europe, huge, huge agricultural production. So that's why. And it's about these resources. It isn't about just human decency from a here's. The thing as a from a from. A human standpoint, yes, you and I and many other people were very sympathetic to the Ukrainians or the Palestinians or whoever. So there's that human aspect. But from a governmental policy standpoint, it's all about resources. It's all about superpower status, and usually that also means it's about personal ambition of of heads of state like President Xi of of China and President Trump of the United States, or any president of the United States for that matter.

29:09 Yeah, I've heard before that the issue with organizations like governments or corporations that they act like sociopaths in the way that they're kind of treated like people, but they're never responsible for actions. They don't feel, you know, when they hurt someone or when they do anything. There's no sense of remorse or guilt or any kind of morality to kind of hold anyone back. And everyone kind of just points at the other person or looks up, you know, rather than and, you know. And so I mean, I guess that would be the purpose of having generally speaking, democracy is to say is for the for the humans to say, whoa, like the humanity in this situation has gone way down, you know, and and the way that you're the way the government, which we don't even expect to behave like a human because they're not humans.

29:52 It's just a machine that's like, you know, almost like moving on its own accord, you know, the way, you know, we have to we are going to re navigate. We're going to take the debt, we're going to take the steering wheel and we're going to, you know, realign what the values and the way they were behaving are, you know, is I guess are I'm not sure which one you put there, but I guess, I guess ideally that's what democracy would be about, right? Yeah, it's, it's an unfortunate fact of history, I think that systems have been created that that do encourage nationalistic sociopaths to rise to the top, whether it's in government or business. Sure. It looks big business.

30:34 It's that's just there like, who wants that? Who wants those jobs except somebody who's narcissistic and sociopathic. I don't want one of those jobs really. You know, it's tough. And I wouldn't say that everybody that has those jobs is that way. And there's certainly varying degrees. Some are more so than others, but it's a system that we've created that does that. That's not human nature in my opinion. And as you know, I spend a lot of time with indigenous people in the Amazon and elsewhere in the Himalayas and, and, and so on and so forth. And if you really look, if you look at indigenous cultures throughout history and let's face it, we've, we've all have, we all come out of indigenous cultures. It's in our DNA to want something better, to realize that as the indigenous people in the Amazon that I, I continue to spend a lot of time with, understand if anybody in the community is suffering needlessly, then everybody is suffering.

31:36 So somebody may have a broken leg and they may suffer something, whatever, but if they're lacking in love or they're lacking in food or water or or housing or whatever, everybody suffers. You've got to take care of them and, and when they form organizations to get together, for example, right now in the Amazon, it's a big step to, to, to oppose, for the indigenous people to come together to oppose the oil companies and the, and the, and the, and the Chinese big mining operations that are going in, in cattle ranch. And when they do that, they, they, they have a system where they elect for every community elect someone can't serve for more than two years.

32:19 And then that person then meets with the guy in the next in the other communities of the same nation. But we used to go try, but now at least in many parts, they recognize as nations. And then they, and then they come together to elect 1. So let's say the Ottawa people of the Amazon, there's 46 different communities that send in 40 to 6 different representatives and they are like 1 to, to meet with the representative from the Schwarf Federation and, and the Kichawa Federation. And then they all come together and it's all just for two years. So these guys, these people are elected to really serve the interests of the community. It's a bottom up approach where we've got this top down approach where you don't, you know, what's, you know, the community I live, live in, what's the chances that it's really going to have an impact outside of this community? And it's, it's controlled by the top. And you don't, you know, you don't get to the top, you don't get to be president of the United States unless you've got a huge support system behind you and a lot of money behind you. And the system is rigged for that way. And it's rigged.

33:32 You know, it's become increasingly rigged that way with Citizens United and in recent Supreme Court, the decisions that really favour big corporations and favour the power of the executive branch of government. I'm going to let you decide which way, which path you want to go down. Do you want to talk a little bit about China or do you want to talk a little bit more about the South and Central American tribes and a little bit more of, you know, the I want to, I want to go a little bit more into the other types of books that you've written and other types of work and philosophy and meditation and practices. Which which path would you like to meander down? Well, I think they're connected. So let's let's try this one.

34:15 The two biggest countries, the two most powerful countries in the world, China and the United States, contribute almost 50% of the world's economy, something between 40 and 50% and also between 40 and 50% of the world's pollution. And what we've really done is created a, what economists are calling a death economy, an economic system that's that's killing itself, that's polluting and consuming itself toward extinction. And it is based on this one goal of maximizing materialistic consumption and short term profits for corporations. Can I? Ask real quickly, I'm so sorry, just to, but real quickly, China doesn't operate on that same time as time scale and corporate interests as America do, do they?

35:01 Certainly not the same. No, they don't. And neither one of those in the time scale they're much, they look to the long term much more. But it's still considered a death economy in that sense. Yeah. Because what they're, they're, they're, they're, they're still looking at making huge profits, maximizing profits regardless of social and environmental costs. And then the maximization of profits may include a little bit longer term. So it may not be quite as maximized. Right. Right. Yeah. And it's still looking at controlling the resources of the world, you know, and a major difference is that many of the big corporations in China are 51% or more owned by the Chinese government. So they don't really have to tax their corporations because they profit from them. You know, you're already getting 51%. You know, it's a hell of a lot more of our corporations. So it's it's actually a very smart system and their economic hit band are just doing a bang up job. I mean, they're they're smart.

35:58 I think you know this. This map tells. You about please? Yes. Can you explain the top in the bottom? So the top, the top is like in the year 2001, the United States was the number one trading partner in 80% of the world's countries. By 2023, China had taken over 70% of the world's countries. Crazy. And, and since 2023, it's gotten more so. So, you know, China's economic hitman. Well, first of all, they have a great story to tell, and that is that they brought over 800 million people out of dire poverty. That's huge and more than twice the population of the United States.

36:43 And they have, they had economic growth of around 10% a year for 30 years. Nobody else has ever done that. So if you're the president of a country in in Africa or Latin America or, or other parts of the world that you want to develop your economy, you look at that as a pretty successful model. You may not like the Chinese government, you may not like the way they run, but you think that that economic system looks pretty damn good compared to the US system where we put our our federal minimum wage today is lower when adjusted for inflation than it was in 1973. Wow. And that's crazy.

37:25 Yeah. And, and, and some country president of the country looks at this stuff, you know, and also there's a tremendous resentment of the United States. If you're a Muslim country, you really resent the fact that the United States went into Iraq and Afghanistan and is, is, is supporting Israel against the Palestinians. This history and, and, and, and so many country we have, we've have military bases in over 100 countries. China has them in one, maybe 2. And they're not really very strong military bases. They're supply bases. People don't like to be occupied by a foreign power. We didn't in the United States back in the 1700s when the British were here. We always went to war over Cuba.

38:09 Yeah, yeah. You know. Yeah, and, and, and now Venezuela, you know, we, we, we want to control the policy. I hate, you know, Maduro. I'd, I'd like to see him go, but that's another story. Anyway, so, but the thing about China and the United States both is we're is we're competing is to expand the death economy. And the the challenge today is to get these two countries that have so much influence in power politically, economically, militarily, to work to create a life economy and a life economy. This gets back to the other side of the story here. The indigenous people have had life economies.

38:52 We're up to 200,000 plus years. We've conceived ourselves as human beings. We've we've lived most of that time in life economies. It's only been within the last several thousand years and it's gotten worse in the last few decades that we've had this death economy. And so the life economy, you know, is a recyclable economy. It's a circular economy. It recycles it, it, it, it circulates and it doesn't destroy resources. It helps to replenish resources. So as a practical case, we, we pay people to clean up all the plastic that's floating around in the oceans and recycle it to replant devastated environments, devastated forests, to, to, to restore all of devastated environments, to recycle, to create new technologies.

39:38 You know, we, we've been on that path. Solar, wind, electric cars is taking us in the right direction, but we need to go a lot further, a lot faster. And so the, the life economy is not about, you know, living, going back and living in caves or having lousy lives. It's about paying ourselves and each other to do things that make the. Future of the world, a better place to make the world a better place for us, our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren. And it's exciting, you know, I, I think this is an incredibly exciting time. That's why I say we're stirring the pot And I, I'm hoping that out of this pot, you know, comes an amazing Stew of life economy. I would, I would, I would love that. Can you so tell me some stories, perhaps if you, if you don't mind, of some of your experiences in South America or Central America and about the cultures? Because again, one of the things when, you know, I emailed you when I reached out, one of the things that I said, aside from how much I loved your book was I've been so I've been learning more about different parts of the world. I never dreamt, you know, I, I could never, I could never even imagine existed, you know, and you started bringing a lot of life to a lot of these South and South and Central American countries.

40:57 So do you want to just tell me some, you know, some of your favorite aspects of these countries or which countries in particular are, you know, speak to you or resonate with you? Yeah, well, yeah, there's a lot that speak to resonate with me. I'm particularly enthralled by the Amazonian people who live so close to nature and, and really is believe that they are a part of nature, not a part from it. And, and that's the biggest thing. And, and I don't idealize these people. There are murderers amongst them. They're crazy people. There are wife beaters. You know, there's good and bad people. They're people, but they have a philosophy of life that they live as part of the economy, as part of the part of the natural world, part part of part of the world. Whereas we have a philosophy that we are a part from the world, that we have a superior over it. And that's, that's the basis of our, of our problems. And so I, I take people on trips of the people who've read my books on, on indigenous cultures often to, to learn from the indigenous people.

42:02 It's one of the aspects that they are most impressed with is how much these people live within the system as part of it. They're not destroying it. They are trying to keep others from destroying it. They're trying to keep us from destroying it, but they've they've always, always lived as part of it. And as I said, we all have that in our DNA. Do they, do they have multiple religions or one religion or what's their, how do they, what's this version of, I guess of, of national storytelling or, you know, philosophical compass, you know, what's their compass? Yeah, I don't think you can generalize and there's there's many different. There's a bunch of them.

42:45 Yeah, but but if you were to, to generalize, you'd say, you know, they, they believe that everything has spirit and soul trees and the animals and the rocks and the rivers. So they, they honor that and most of them believe in some bigger force that we would call God or different. There's different words for it. And most of them believe in that, that, that beyond all of this is that. And they believe for the most part, and again, I'm generalizing here that, you know, life, the soul never ends, that the body dies, but we, that we transform often into trees or plants. They, many of them believe that, you know, being human is one of the toughest aspects that you don't want to come back as a human being.

43:33 The humans, we're here as humans to learn about the difficulties that humans have such power. So we're here to learn how to use that, that power over the rest of nature to, to continue to, to, to support nature, to continue to be part of nature. And we're, and right now we're in this incredibly difficult, chaotic, but important time of really understanding that we need to evolve into a better understanding of what it means to be human beings, being human on this planet. And they understand that. And again, I don't idealize them as individuals, but as a philosophy of life to really understand this. And again, we all come from that. But I love that about the indigenous people and the Amazon and, but I, but I also the Mayan people of, of Central America are, are incredible because they know that they went through something around the year 900 in our calendar, like what we're going through today.

44:37 They have these huge pyramids, you know, amazing, amazing pyramids that just phenomenal. They built these. They don't get any attention relative to Egypt, right? Very little attention. To Egypt, yeah. And to me they're much more impressive than the Egyptian pyramids. I've spent time in both because there's 2 views that the shamans still use them in their ceremonies, that they're, they're, they're, they're a living part of these people's lives, but they don't build them anymore. And so between the years 800 and 900 in our calendar, they had drained the swamps and cut the forest in order to build these vast, spectacular cities. And there were dozens and dozens of these huge cities.

45:20 Some are just now being discovered by Lidar technologies. And, and as they built these cities, they changed their environment like we're doing. The rain stopped and, and the food dried up. And so the cities began to go to war with each other, which they'd always been peaceful before over scarce resources. And then eventually the people who lived outside the cities but supported the city. So you only have the royalty living in the cities and their administrators and their religious people, you know, the upper class, the people lived outside and supported the cities, gave them, you know, provided the food and everything else just said I, we don't want to kill our neighbors anymore. We're leaving.

46:03 And they went up into the mountains or deeper into the jungle. They abandoned the cities. The cities were grown over by nature took over, which is a wonderful aspect. And for hundreds of years, nobody knew these pyramids were there. Maybe some of the Mayans knew, but nobody from the outside world knew until the the 1800s when they were rediscovered and started to be excavated. But so today the Mayan people who who left and they, they kept their traditions. They were built their calendars, their incredible calendars and their readings of the calendars and their prophecies and their fire ceremonies and their and their respect for nature. And they live very simply. They didn't they. So they kept those things, but they didn't continue to build these cities. They realize that you got to live much more simply and have really good lives and enjoy your families and, and, and provide good food.

46:57 So they've got this and now they want to teach us because they've seen what happens when you take this too far. So which? Which countries in particular are these? Did this happen in? Did this I just what do you which country are you talking about where this happened? Well, for the Maya, it's, it's, they were basically what today we, we, we consider to be Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Salvador and Belize, 5 countries and probably the one that's done the most to kind of protect these sites and, and, and continue to use them is, is, well, Mexico's done a good job, but it doesn't allow the shamans to do their ceremonies. Guatemala does.

47:41 And so those two countries, Mexico and Guatemala and Guatemala are the ones that have the most preserved, you know, if they preserve this and you know, so I are. Part of their culture. What are? Psychedelics, part of the culture, they're part of the. What I didn't? Are psychedelics part of their culture? Oh, with some of them, Peyori is now in the Amazon and that's in Central America. And the fire ceremonies, they do take you into altered states. I mean, they're amazing. So it's it's not something you ingest, but they do use peyote in some of them.

48:23 But many of them don't use anything except the fire ceremonies. Historically, we don't know exactly what they did, but now in the Amazon, ayahuasca is a very important in many of these cultures. And you probably know what ayahuasca is and that's, you know, very, very strong. This takes you into altered states. I just. I'm still here because I continue. OK, so yeah. And, but you know, it's, it's, it's very interesting to me that I was trained as an ayahuasca shaman back in 1969. I was a Peace Corps volunteer living deep in the jungle with the schwa people. And, and I was dying at one point and a schwa shaman saved my life using ayahuasca and then demanded that I become an apprentice for a couple of years.

49:13 So I did. Wow. When was this? Was this before After your economic career? Long before this is right after I got out of Business School and I joined the Peace Corps because it was a way to avoid the draft and I didn't believe in the war in Vietnam. So I joined the Peace Corps. They sent me deep into the Amazon and I got very sick. At one point I was dying in ayahuasca. They saved my life and and I was trained as an ayahuasca shaman. And you know, I take people there now who one night we do it. They don't have the opportunity to do it. They don't, Some of them don't. They don't have to. But, you know, I am concerned that some of these are being, I think are being misused or overused now because typically indigenous people will take ayahuasca once just if they really need it.

50:05 And some guy the other day asked me, he said, you know, what was the, how many? He said I took ayahuasca 20 times last year. How many times did you take it and say, I haven't taken it for 10 years and I'm still working with that plant. It's in me and it's working with me. And the shamans who serve ayahuasca do when I was trained to say you, you take it a lot more than that. But the normal people, you don't. It's not it's I, I, I'm afraid in this culture of that we're in now to some degree with some people, it's almost become a social addiction. People say, well, there's an ayahuasca ceremony next Saturday night at so and so's house. Let's go. And, and that concerns me that we may be, it's using it like, like so many things that, you know, I mean, we, we can say we experience something similar with antibiotics where we, you know, being abused. We certainly have experienced with tobacco tobacco's, another sacred plant that's used in the Amazon. And it's very, very important, but it's used in a special way and in ceremonial ways.

51:09 We've perverted that in the United States and and throughout most of the world by, you know, producing cigarettes that are terribly harmful. Because we consume, because we care about, we just care about just, you know, you know, trying to fill our insatiable, you know, hunger for whatever it is, you know, and. Yeah. And if you have a, if you have a great experience on ayahuasca tonight, last night, if you had a great experience and you say, well, I want to do that again. Or if you didn't have a good experience, you say, well, if it didn't work, but I understand it, that might have just been that that particular potion or whatever, I, I need to try some more.

51:50 Whereas the fact of the matter is in both times, it probably did work. You've just got to understand it and maybe give it time to work with you or for you to work with it and not and and really open yourself to what the plants trying to tell you. When I was dating my wife, we're married for just about four years, 4 1/2 four years now. And, and you know, she asked me, you know, you know, one of the important conversations prior to, you know, our getting married, you know, she was asking me about whether or not I consume drugs. And I told her for honesty. I was like, you know, I've done I've done LSD a couple, you know, a couple of times and she was like, and she couldn't understand me when I and she's like what's last me did I said two years ago and she couldn't understand that like that, like, you know, in her head, like a drug was like something that like you want to do all the time.

52:43 And I was like, I did that once and I do not feel the need to like I will never. I won't do it again until I feel that calling. It's not a it's not, it's not just something I just do or just take for fun. I mean, I could be like, I mean, I happen to be very into like, you know, the counterculture, Grateful Dead hippie kind of movement, you know, But I think I'm very happy that I'm watching it as an observer from the side 100 years later, you know, 870 years later, then, you know, living in it at the moment, I'm sure I would have had a much harder time finding a healthy balance with, you know, again, the consuming and the and the magic. But you know, one of the things I had to explain, and there's an enormous amount, I guess of stigma, reputation around it is that this isn't addicting.

53:25 I'm not like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not here to at least I'm trying to be thoughtful or conscientious about it. You know, I'm like, this is, this is part of a journey and part of an experience. And I did a breath work class recently. I forgot, I keep on forgetting the name of it, but it takes you into, I guess, another elevated state. And again, I did it to check on, I felt like I needed to check under the hood of my, of my head and see where I was in my life. And I did it. And my wife keeps on asking me. She says, you know, there's another class this week, another class this week. I'm like, I, I'm not, I'm not there yet. You know, I, I checked into the hood and I'm still working with what? With, you know, with what the, with what it's telling me, you know, but, but you know, I, I, I, I, what you're saying deeply resonates with me.

54:06 Well, good. Yeah, No, it sounds like you're dealing with it just the right way. It it is something that can be very, very important in our lives, but it can also be misused. And, and it's got, you've got to be conscious and mindful of the way that you use it. And I know I'm going to have to get off in in about 5 minutes, but I'd love to do more of this. I enjoy very much talking to you. So I'm sorry I've got to get off, but I have other commitments. Part 2 Another time if you have time but. I want to leave you with, I don't want to leave your listeners with five questions that we can all ask ourselves. So this to me is the key to where we're going. So if we want to transform the death economy to a life economy, we all know that there's certain practical things we can do. Use less fossil fuels, eat a more plant based diet. You know so many things that we can all that we can all do that we know.

55:01 Consuming the way that we do. Yeah, exactly. But 5 questions that go beyond that. And one, the first question is what do I most want to do for the rest of my life? That's so important, so important. And I would answer that question by saying I want to write. I love to write. My day is not complete unless I've spent an hour or two at least writing. But I have a friend who's a who's a Carpenter, the opposite end of the spectrum. He says I want to work with my hands and wood question, how do I do this in a way that will help transform the death economy to a life economy? So whether you're a plumber, a teacher, a parent, a student Carpenter, a writer, whatever you are podcast host, you know, that's what you want to do.

55:46 But how are you going to do it in a way that makes the world a better place? And as a writer, I'd say I'm going to write about those things and try to inspire people. And my Carpenter friend would say, well, I'm only going to use sustainable woods. And I'm going to plant a tree for every tree or hire somebody to plant a tree for every tree that's cut from my work. And the question #3 is what's stopping you? What voice is telling you, well, you're not good enough to do that. You don't have the time to do that? You know, that would be it for a writer. He might be. Yeah, like, I know that to be a successful writer, I've got to write for at least two hours a day. I don't have time. And my Carpenter friend might say, well, my, my clients don't want to pay the extra price for me to plant trees and use sustainable materials.

56:38 Question 4. When you really confront that blockage, that thing that's holding you back #3 when you're really confronted, when you don't run away from it, when you go out and touch it, when you confront it, how does it change your perception? Because we change reality by changing our perceptions. And, and, and I would say, you know, as a writer, well, I could stop writing for, I could stop watching television for two hours every night and write or get up a little early in the morning, right? My Carpenter friend would say, I'm going to tell my clients that the extra price is not a cost, it's an investment in the future. They're investing in the future.

57:18 And the 5th question is what actions do I take immediately? Where do I get started? What are they going to start writing about? And the, I got to start, you know, building cabinets using and telling my clients that they're investing in the future. And I think, you know, if we all do that, we can all take different paths, but we're all going to head toward transforming the death economy to a life economy. Very exciting to be alive and do this. Yeah, I think the most important question that I've I realization, I think I've one of the most important I've ever had in my life is that I'm the only thing that's ever holding myself back from anything. You know, like. That. That that changed when I realized that that changed everything about the way I live, about the way I think about the way I act, about the way I exercise and eat and the way I conduct business is I'm the only thing that's getting in the way of myself, you know, or not, you know, I could be my best friend or my or my worst enemy, you know, But just that realization that there's no one out there but you, that's, you know, that's putting that, that block in front of you, you know, I think was was really important. John, thank you so much for the time, for your incredible, incredible work.

58:28 Maybe we'll be able to do Part 2 if you have the time, because I think this is awesome and I could, I would love to talk to you about while I, while we were talking. I have 100 notes that I'm of of follow up ideas that I have. But one day, one day I hope I'll be able to do this again. Thank you, this is amazing. Let's do it again. And maybe we want to concentrate more on the indigenous and the I and the use of some of the plants and where the Yeah. Can I, I'm sorry real quickly, real quickly as we close, I'm sorry, becoming, I guess, a trained shaman in ayahuasca and then going off and being an economic hitman. Did you what was the? Do you have an internal conflict the whole time or were you again ideal like?

59:10 That has to be in the next show that. Has to be in the next show. OK, we'll lead off to that question. OK. That's awesome. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate everything. Take care. All the best. Bye.