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[Got “Life” Economy?] John Perkins discusses his updated 3rd edition of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in which his NYTimes bestseller is brought current with a special focus on China’s rise to global economic dominance alongside the United States, which has held the position of largest economy (and global influencer) since World War Two. Building on his distinction between a “Life Economy” and “Death Economy,” as presented in his book Touching the Jaguar (see Y on Earth Community Podcast Episode #72), Perkins makes clear the dysfunctions of “business as usual,” and lays out several of their key origins (including the 1980s “greed is good” attitude that was central to the economic theories of Nobel Prize winners Friedrich von Hayek (1974) and Milton Friedman (1976) who advocated shareholder profits as the ONLY objective of corporate behavior). In addition to articulating many of the key reasons we are facing the global crisis that stand now before us, Perkins also articulates the characteristics and strategies needed to change course and to achieve a “life economy” instead.
That is, Perkins is helping to find the path from a deeply flawed “predatory capitalism” to a much more ethically oriented “stakeholder capitalism,” in which an ethos of stewardship, regeneration, care of humanity, and relief of suffering is paramount. Having worked as an “economic hit man” (EHM) himself, Perkins now sees how China has deployed similar tactics around the globe in order to further its own national interest. He discusses the EHM strategy as having four main tactics: fear, debt, anxiety (over perceived/manufactured scarcity/insufficiency of capital and other resources), and a divide and conquer approach to securing access to resources, markets, and policy makers.
But, especially through his work with indigenous cultures in the Americas, Perkins has come to understand that our economic system isn’t the product of some immutable laws of nature, but is the outcome of prevailing attitudes, cultural biases, myths – what he calls our “dreaming” – and that we can and must now “dream a new reality” together if we are to survive and thrive during this momentous time of change facing our entire planet and species. “Perception molds reality,” he writes, and “living at a critical moment in history” we are invited – implored – to examine and transform our deep-held perceptions.
You can pre-order the updated version of Confessions today and receive FREE access to a special 90-minute “fireside chat” webinar program with John Perkins – johnperkins.org.
ABOUT JOHN PERKINS
John Perkins is the author of the NY Times best-selling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (now in its 3rd Edition), Touching the Jaguar, The Secret History of the American Empire, and Hoodwinked. He has lived four professional lives: as chief economist of a major global consulting firm where his actual job was that of an Economic Hit Man (EHM – clandestinely trained by agents of the so-called “Washington Consensus”), as CEO of an alternative energy company, as an expert on indigenous cultures, and as a writer, teacher, and speaker who promotes ecology and sustainability. He co-founded the non-profits Dream Change and Pachamama Alliance and applied his consulting fees to championing indigenous rights and environmental movements, working especially closely with Amazonian nations. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has become an international bestseller in 38 languages and has sold over 2 million copies. He has been featured on ABC, NBC, CNN, CNBC, NPR, A&E, the History Channel, and in Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Der Spiegel, and on the Y on Earth Community Podcast.
RESOURCES AND RELATED EPISODES
facebook.com/johnperkinsauthor
linkedin.com/in/johnperkinsauthor
Episode #96 – John Fullerton, Capital Institute, Regenerative Finance
Episode #72 – John Perkins, Touching the Jaguar
Episode #50 – Dr. Anita Sanchez, Indigenous Wisdom, Pachamama Alliance
Episode #25 – Hunter Lovins, A Finer Future
IMAGES
TRANSCRIPT
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth community podcast on your host, Aaron William Perry.
And today we’re visiting for a second time with author and activist John Perkins.
Hey, John.
Hey, Aaron.
Good morning.
How are you?
Great.
Good to see you again.
Hi, Chris.
John Perkins is the author of the New York Times bestselling, Confessions of an Economic
Hitman which is now coming out in its third edition as well as touching the jaguar, the
secret history of the American Empire and Hoodwink.
He has lived four professional lives as chief economist of a major global consulting firm
where his actual job was that of an economic hitman for which he was clandestinely trained
by agents of the so-called Washington Consensus as CEO of an alternative energy company,
as an expert on indigenous cultures, and as a writer, teacher, and speaker who promotes
ecology and sustainability.
He co-founded the non-profits DreamChange and Pachamama Alliance, and applied his consulting
fees to championing indigenous rights and environmental movements, working especially closely
with Amazonian nations.
Confessions of an economic hitman has become an international bestseller in 38 languages
and have a sold over 2 million copies.
He has been featured on ABC, NBC, CNN, CNBC, NPR, A&E, the history channel, and in time,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan L. Der Spiegel, and is now here with us today
on the Y-Earners Community Podcast.
John, welcome.
It’s great to have this opportunity to speak with you again.
Thank you, Aaron.
Thanks for that.
I want to make clear that the third edition is not like the third printing of the old
book.
It’s mostly new.
It’s about the China’s economic hitman.
So it does go into some of the old stuff, but sometimes with the China’s economic hitman,
how to stop the global takeover.
It gets confusing sometimes when people think of third edition.
They’re like, third printing, no, it’s different.
Yeah, and it’s been really great to dive into that over the last several days for
preparing for our discussion.
And I want to ask you about China specifically, but before we get to that, I think to help
frame this up for our audience, let’s discuss and revisit what’s going on with your distinction
between what you call a death economy and a life economy.
And specifically, what is it that you’re referring to when you use the term predatory
capitalism?
Can you explain this for us?
Sure.
Well, first of all, the death economy is something that I helped create.
It’s based on the goal of maximizing short-term profits, essentially for a few major investors.
We got us at the social and environmental costs.
And it’s really taking us to all the crises that we have today.
So if you look at climate change, income inequality, species, extinctions, environmental
destruction and so on and so forth, those are symptoms of the greater problem, which
is, I mean, there are big problems, but there are symptoms of what we call a death economy,
which is this economic system based on maximizing profits and materialistic consumption.
And you know, it’s ravaging the earth, it’s polluting itself and consuming itself basically
into extinction.
We all know, you know, hearts, we know it’s not working.
The life economy, on the other hand, is an economic system which human beings have had
through most of our history.
If you look at our history as being 250,000 years, the majority of that, we’ve lived really
a life economy, which is an economic system that’s built on long-term.
It’s built on looking at how we can provide better for our children and grandchildren
and future generations.
It’s based on the maximizing long-term benefits for life, not just human life, but all life.
And in today’s terms, we could say that it will pay people to clean up pollution, pay
people to mine all the plastic that’s floating around in the oceans and recycle it, pay
people to clean up the environment, regenerate the destroyed environments, recycle, develop
technologies that don’t ravage the earth.
And you know, Aaron, I think we’ve been headed in that direction for a number of years now,
benefit corporations, be corporations, the Green New Deal, conscious capitalism, there’s
so much that’s been going on in that direction, electric cars, solar and wind, which is now
really poised to totally replace fossil fuels, not because we’re going to ban fossil fuels
or because solar and wind are becoming much more economical.
So we are moving in that direction, but we need to make sure that we continue to move
there and not emphasize this very short-term profit motive.
And I have to say that the roadblock for that is Wall Street and it’s a whole concept
of investing money and making huge rates of return off those investments, especially
for a few very rich people around the world.
One of the things I found to be so important in your new version of the book is in the
Appendix, a death economy versus life economy that gets into some more detail describing
each and adding to what you just shared with us.
So that was one of the pieces that caught my attention when I was looking through the
book, John, it’s great to see that.
And you mentioned predatory capitalism.
Well, people often say we’ve got to get rid of capitalism, but to me that doesn’t make
a lot of sense because the little farmer’s markets all over the world and indigenous
people have had for millennia.
And we still have.
Those are capitalistic.
My grandson’s eliminating his capitalism, basically.
So capitalism, by definition, is a form of an economic form where business and industry
is not owned by the government.
It’s owned by private individuals.
And it’s highly competitive, but it’s also very cooperative.
It’s not cutthroat competitive at all.
And what we have today is in the United States and much of the world is an economic system
where the government doesn’t own the means of production.
Of course, it’s different in China and a few other countries.
But in the United States, the government doesn’t own our businesses, but the business is
on the government, essentially.
We all know, Aaron, that you can’t get elected to a high office in the United States without
a lot of money.
And most of that money comes through corporations or the owners of those corporations.
And they have a lot of influence.
The CEO of a big corporation that can donate millions of dollars to political campaigns
and lobbyists has a lot more influence than you or I.
You might say that CEO has a lot more votes than you and I have when we go to the polls.
It’s not quite that simple, but we know they have a lot of influence.
So what we’ve really done is turn capitalism on its head.
The means of business are not owned by the government, but the business owners own government
essentially.
And it’s become very predatory.
It’s not highly competitive.
It’s a big, big company, you know, the stories of Walmart and chasing the small drug
stores out of business and all these huge big-chain stores putting smaller people out of business,
trying to get rid of competition, forming more and more monopolies and it’s happening
throughout.
So that’s predatory capitalism.
It basically prays on all of us consumers and small businesses.
Yeah.
And so the directionality here that we’re hoping for and working toward is moving away from
a predatory capitalism to something we might call a stakeholder capitalism, a community
capitalism, or even a stewardship capitalism, right?
This is something you’ve been speaking to for some time now.
Yes.
And maybe we ought to just forget the word capitalism because it triggers all sorts of things
and people.
I found that over time and I think you know what we really want to move toward is whatever
means it takes to create a life economy.
And that does include co-ops and includes a lot of emphasis on local business, small businesses,
local agriculture as much as we can do locally.
At the same time recognizing that we have been globalized, you know, you and I, when
we have in this conversation, we’re in two different parts of the United States and
as people tuning in, they’re perhaps all over the world.
And you know, we are, we’re connected globally and that’s a good thing.
But the more we can do in terms of businesses, in terms of the food we eat, in terms of
the clothes we wear and the houses we build and so forth, the more we can rely on local
businesses to provide those for us, the better off we’ll all be.
And of course, the same is true in energy when we talked early about solar and we have
one of the great things about solar and when is it doesn’t need to be centralized.
You can have that every house can have their own unit or every community can have their
own units.
And that’s a, that’s a step in the right direction for many reasons.
Many, many reasons and not the least of which is that, you know, they don’t get wiped
out by hurricanes or people shooting up substations the way that we’ve seen that our centralized
systems are extremely vulnerable to these outside influences and now increasingly to
cybernetics that we know that, you know, somebody with a computer can take out an entire
power grid.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, before we turn to China and what’s going on there, I want to ask because I think
the history here is so important for folks to understand what happened in the 1970s with
Phun Hayek and Milton Friedman to Nobel Prize recipients, economics, Nobel Prize recipients,
what happened there in terms of the shaping of our narrative, the shaping of our perception,
which you point out mold’s reality that has had such an impact over these last few decades
in particular.
Yeah, I love that, which I said, you know, we do know that our reality is totally shaped
by our perceptions of reality.
There’s no United States, there’s no China, there’s no corporations, there’s no culture,
there’s no religion, except as people perceive them and when enough people accept a perception
or codify it into a lot has a huge impact on reality.
And when I was in business school, which was pre-1976, the perception was, I was taught
that a good CEO makes a decent rate of return for investors, maybe two, three cents a percent
above inflation when we had something called blue chip stocks and then we did just that,
two percent above inflation or so.
But a good CEO also, I was taught in business school, takes really good care of his employees,
gives them healthcare and insurance and retirement benefits and takes good care of the communities
where the corporation serves, you know, but donates money to recreation centers and other
services, takes good care of consumers and suppliers.
That all changed in 1976 when Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics and he said
the only goal of business should be to maximize short-term profits regardless of the social
environmental cost.
You mentioned von Hayek, he’d won the Nobel Prize a couple of years earlier, said something
very similar, but Friedman had the ear of Reagan and Fatcher and many other world leaders.
He was extremely well known and traveled around the world promoting this idea that all you
got to do is maximize short-term profits and that’ll take care of everything else.
He said, that’ll solve the environmental and social issues and of course we know it
doesn’t, trickle down economics, serves the rich, not everybody else.
So that was this huge change in perception and it changed everything, the way business
was done.
So it actually gave a mandate to corporate executives to do whatever they thought it
takes to maximize short-term profits, including essentially corrupting elected officials.
And when I say corrupting, these days they corrupt legally, so it’s not legally speaking,
it’s not corruption, but basically buying votes.
They say you can buy a senator’s vote for $10,000.
I don’t know, I haven’t actually done it, that’s the saying, and campaign financing.
It’s totally legal.
It’s not under the table, $10,000.
So this theory of maximization of short-term profits as the goal, as the mandate, it puts
executive officers in this position where they almost have to ignore environmental and
social benefits or they may lose their jobs.
And that was this huge change of perception.
Now the good news, Aaron, is that we are going through something similar to what happened
before Friedman, now, but in the other direction, headed toward looking at the long term,
looking at creating a life economy, like I said earlier, benefit corporations and conscious
capitalism and so forth, are moving in that direction.
So before, on Hayek and before Friedman, there was a movement moving toward this direction
of maximization of short-term profits, but they really, they get the perception out there
in a way that created actions that actually made it happen.
So we’re in a position now, I think, where we could move in that direction, what we need
is to really understand that we must change the perception of what it means to be successful.
Businessmen, human beings on this planet, it is not about short-term maximization of
materialistic consumption, it’s about long-term benefits for all.
You know, well, so beautifully articulated and thank you for sharing some of this history
with us because I think it’s so important for us to have a better understanding of how
we got to where we are, speaking of history, of course, China and the Chinese culture has
a very deep and long history and to transition now to focus our discussion on what’s going
on with China specifically. Fill us in. What is happening under the leadership of
Terminji, the New Silk Road, et cetera? What’s that play here now?
Well, China has taken over the world. Some people say, you know, we can’t let China take over
the world, but they’ve done it. It doesn’t mean that we can now go back in and compete,
but the fact of the matter is, they are the number one investor and the number one trading partner
with countries in every continent. They are the major world trading partner and investor today
in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, even the United States in North America.
And that’s happened to a certain degree because they’ve really learned their economic
hitmen learned from the successes that I and my fellow economic hitmen in the United States had
and also from our failures. And the other thing that, I mean, there’s a lot of things happen,
but one of the big ones was that after 9-11, the United States, we focused all of our attention
on the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan. We sort of forget about Africa and the
rest of Asia and Latin America. China, on the other hand, stayed out of the Middle East at that
time and really devoted huge efforts to developing what they call in the New South Road, this massive
trading network and making investments in all the rest of the world. And now, of course,
they’re moving into the Middle East now that we’re kind of dropping out of there. So they made
tremendous inroads and they have a talk about perception that they have a very attractive story
to tell to leaders of poor countries. The story is, we’ll listen. You know, we had, and we averaged
about 10% economic growth for three decades and we brought 700 million people out of poverty.
Nobody else has ever done that before. At the same time, the United States, we didn’t have that
kind of economic growth at all. Our middle class is actually declined since the 70s. We haven’t had
a real, when you can come for inflation, a real wage increase, average wage increase since the
1970s. So if you’re the leader of Columbia or Ecuador or Nigeria or Ghana or some other country,
and you’re looking at which model do I want to buy into, the perception can very well be that
you might prefer to take China’s model. And at the same time, Aaron, I mean, this is, I wrote a
book about this. I’m covering a lot in a very short period of time. The other thing is that
I talk to leaders in the, I’m headed to Latin America in January. I go trouble times most every
year and I spend a lot of time in Europe and parts of the parts of the world this next year and
always do and have virtually recently. And I hear, you know, if the United States is a democracy,
we don’t want it. You’re dysfunctional. You know, you’ve had a president who negated all the
agreements previous presidents made. Your Congress can’t seem to compromise on anything. We’re not,
we’re not looking too good to the world. And of course that the argument is made where you’ve
actually almost overthrown democracy in your own country and the still of possibility that will
happen. So, you know, we hear these things. So in a way, we have to take responsibility in the
United States for really opening the door wide China. And China has done a very good job of stepping
through that door and taking advantage of our failures, our mistakes, as well as learning from our
successes. One of the things I noticed in your writing is that there, there is a, a tenor of
concern around China’s ascendancy. At the same time, you are emphatic about the need for
increased cooperation among all of the nation states in the global community. And I’m curious,
especially kind of picking up on this previous thread you just mentioned and the fact that the
United States has interfered with, if not toppled, even through assassinations, many
democratically elected leaders and governments around the world as part of its foreign policy
over the last century or so. Do you see it as a positive or a negative that the United States’
prime position in the global community is being ratcheted down a bit, especially since the
setup of the Washington Consensus Institution’s Bretton Woods, all of that
engineering that occurred around the time of the Second World War.
You know, it’s a mixed bag, but I think the United States, we missed a really great opportunity,
frankly. When we set up the World Bank and the other Bretton Woods institutions at the
end of World War II, they were aimed at reconstructing a Europe devastated by the war and they did
a great job at it. They did a great job at it. And I had great respect for what the World Bank did.
When I went to business school and then went into work, did a lot of work with the World Bank
as an economic, as a chief economist, which was my official title. But the long games comes
to Soviet Union in the Cold War. And at that point, these institutions focused on promoting
our form of capitalism around the world in democracy and trying to convince countries not to buy
into the Soviet system. So we became obsessed with that. And that included supporting huge
big corporations, helping US corporations become more much more multinational.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, at that point, we had only super power. And we had
an opportunity to show to the world what a great influence we could be, how we could really
promote democracy in a good form of capitalism. But instead, these institutions were so tied in
with corporations and there was this patterns established that the emphasis was much more put
on helping US corporations regain the resources of other countries, oil, minerals, all sorts of
resources and markets. So these institutions became much more oriented toward promoting US
hegemony. And at the same time, we implemented something that’s known as neoliberal economics,
which is an economic theory that says that you shouldn’t tax the rich because trickle-down
economics works, they say. And you should cut back on that social benefits to everybody else.
And because people should earn, they should earn these things. We shouldn’t give them social
benefits. And also, that companies were encouraged to neoliberalism to privatize their public sector
businesses like water and sewage and electricity and take them out of government hands and give them
to basically US investors in many cases. So this neoliberalism was something that put tremendous
pressure on governments. We also put pressure on governments to join us in voting with us
at the United Nations against Cuba or whatever and allowing us to put military bases on foreign
soils where we now have military presence in well over a hundred countries. This is called
a lot of resentment. The Chinese are making a very important point that they’re not going to do that.
They don’t try to dictate how they say they don’t try to dictate how our country runs itself.
And they pointed out that their success, their economic success, did not include neoliberalism.
They didn’t privatize. They went the other way actually. So most of their major corporations in
China are owned at least in part by the government. And they show this as a benefit.
So it’s an interesting aspect to look at how this works. China comes across as being much more
benign with governments. And we can say, well, that means they support dictatorships. And it does.
I mean, they don’t necessarily support them. They don’t oppose them. But we’ve actually supported
them. And this is pointed out to me a lot, where I say, well, we promote democracy. And they say,
what about Saudi Arabia? What about Iran under the Shah? What about so many other countries,
Pinochet’s, Chile, and our hope, we have a long history of supporting brutal dictators as well
as democracies. So again, it is really open the door for China to step in. So there was this
void created after 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved. I think we blew some tremendous
opportunities. And then along comes China. And in 2012, 2013, when she became head of the government
there, he saw the opportunity to use everything that China had done before him to grow its economy,
to become a world class economic power. And he saw the way to use that and go out to the rest of
the world and bring the rest of the world into the Chinese sphere. And so he’s been very successful
at doing that. I think things are beginning to maybe perhaps turn around a bit now. We can talk
about that more if you want. But I think things are there’s now beginning to be some backlash
against China. And I think the United States is beginning to understand that it has to step to
the plate and do more in the world. Absolutely. Yeah, I’d like to talk about that before we go there.
I would like to ask you to briefly describe the four pillars of the economic hit man’s
strategy with fear with debt with anxiety and the dividing conquer strategy. Because I think it’s
really important that folks understand this because some of these forces are not only at play in
the broader global landscape, but also can affect us at the individual level as well. Could you
just run through that really quickly for us? Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a whole book about it.
We have read the book. Let’s see what we can do. So yeah, these four pillars, they’ve been around
for hundreds, a couple of thousand years. You know, I mean, the Romans and the ancient Chinese
kingdoms and the Persians and so on and so forth used them. So the first one is fear. Fear of
invasion. And you fear that another country is going to invade you. So you ally with them or you
ally with someone who can protect you against this other country. And oftentimes this fear is
created by the person in Washington by the country that wants to make the allies. But that’s a
very, very old one. The militarism basically debt. So people have always used debt, you know,
and it isn’t always money debt that can be, you know, the death that we know with the mafia,
you know, like, okay, so I’ll help you out with your daughter’s wedding and so on and so forth.
And then later, you know, like, I need to have that guy’s knees broken over there. You go break
on because you owe me or in the old days and empires, you know, you know, the king would offer
his daughter in marriage to the other potentate who was a little weaker than him and then the other
potent they would have debt to him through it, so on. So that’s a very, very old one also.
And then there’s the fear of scarcity. That is a huge one, the fear of poverty and the idea that
well, if you join us, if you join our sphere of influence, we can bring you out of poverty,
we can use the World Bank or China can use the Bricks Bank or whatever to bring you out of poverty.
So, but that’s also been around forever, the sphere of not having enough to eat, not having,
not having wealth. And the last one divide and conquer again, you know, like, yeah, come join us
and approach them kind of thing. These have been around a long, long time. But for many years,
perhaps the most important one was the fear one, the militarism and the divided conquer.
And that potentates the kings and so on and so forth and have used this for millennium.
That changed radically after when I was an economic hitman in the 70s because the failure
of our military in Vietnam was a shocking experience for not just for the United States,
but for countries everywhere to look at that. How the military, a huge military power in the United
States was defeated by people who had little cannons mounted on bicycles and shot down our planes
with those little cannons on bicycles. You know, I mean, this was shocking. And it probably shouldn’t
have been shocking because actually during the American Revolution, we kind of did the same thing,
you know, hide behind trees and this greatest army in the world was British Army was defeated by
a handful of, you know, farmers basically. But still it was shocking in the 70s when that happened.
So that’s when I was an economic hitman. At that point in time, the decision was made to
rely a lot more heavily on debt. So listen, if you can put countries in debt, you go in,
I go in and say, hey, here’s a country that has oil, some resource we want. And we’re going to
make you an offer that we’re going to give you a big loan and you’ll use that loan to hire our
companies to build big infrastructure projects in your country like power plants and industrial parks.
And these will, of course, make our country back companies rich, big profits, but also they’ll help
you in you’re talking to the leaders of countries who own the businesses and industries. And
yes, they will benefit from more electricity. And we don’t bother to mention that that’ll take
money out of the general coffers to pay for education and healthcare and other social services
for everyone else. It won’t help, it won’t help the majority of the people, but it will help if
you the rich people who we’re talking to. And then we say, but since at some point you won’t be
able to pay your debt off. And so we’ll help you by using the collateral, which is your resource.
You give that to our companies, real cheap oil minerals markets, whatever. I give that to us real
cheap without many environmental or social regulations. And so we decided that this was the way
to conquer countries, basically, to bring them into our sphere. And our sphere, we might call it
an American empire, but it really is, it’s a corporate empire. And the United States supports it,
but big time. But some of these corporations, you know, infamously, a hell of a burden,
don’t have to have the headquarters in the United States. They’re in Dubai. And these companies
don’t have any loyalty. They try to avoid paying taxes. And the big ones do avoid paying taxes.
They don’t have any loyalty in the United States at all. But the United States, but they do
they bribe, they bribe our Congress people legally. And they hire a lot of, they have a lot of
leverage through lobbyists and other consultants that they use. So, so they use the U.S.
big time, but they’re not loyal to the U.S. They’re the most part.
Interesting. Well, before we transition to some of the good news and some of the positive
emerging trends that you are seeing and tracking, I want to remind our audience, this is the
YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today we’re speaking
with author John Perkins, who has written many books, including Confessions of an Economic Hitman,
which now has a fully updated third edition available. And I want to thank some of our sponsors.
We have in the YonEarth community a number of folks who are giving monthly,
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Of course, I also want to mention the new book Readytossbook.com that features much of the wisdom
of guests like John and others who have been on our podcast. And I want to make sure, John, that we
tell folks where they can get a copy of your book and how folks can connect with you as well
via social media and otherwise. What are the best URLs to direct people to?
John Perkins.org, or economicitmanbook.org, the dot com. Sorry, economicitmanbook.com or at John
Perkins.org. And you can order the book pre-order it. So what you’ve got there is a pre-publication
copy, a galley copy. And that’s where it’s got a little banner across the bottom, across the
budget development flag there. But it says that. So it’s not in the bookstores yet, but it will be
in February and you’ll get a copy of February. But it looks to have you pre-order now. And if
people, if you go to my website, you’ll see how to do that through a local bookstore or wherever
you buy books. And that also, if you pre-order, it makes you eligible for a relatively otherwise,
for free, relatively otherwise fairly expensive webinar program that I will be doing in March.
Oh, that’s great. What a great offering. So that’s John Perkins.org and economicitmanbook.com.
And yeah, we encourage our audience to pre-order and read this book, everybody. This is a really
important education on some of our recent history and also current trends that are affecting all
of us right now on the planet. And John, picking up that thread, what is it that you’re seeing in
some of these positive emerging trends that are hopefully shifting and resetting some of the
balance and behavior of the United States, our companies, our citizens, and others around the
world. What is it that we can be hopefully hopeful about right now? Well, first of all, I think
it’s important to point out that before the pandemic, we were really well on the way to creating
this life economy. And there was a tremendous influence. There was a little step back during the
pandemic, but the pandemic also taught us that we can change and we can actually enjoy the change
and benefit from the change. I mean, despite all the problems and the deaths and the tragedies
around the pandemic, it also taught us that we are able to make some changes and learn from those
changes. And so once again, we see we’re moving in that direction. This is the idea of cars and
other technologies that don’t use fossil fuels. And the incredible technological advances that
are being made in solar and wind that are making it less, that are making it much more affordable
than fossil fuels. And of course, just this past week or so, there’s been announcements around
fusion energy, which I think is very exciting, although it looks like that wouldn’t be commercialized
for a couple of decades. It’s hard to know, but there’s been a big breakthrough in that.
So I think people around the world are understanding that we must change. And I’d have to say,
and I taught it an MBA program in Shanghai and China. And one of the things that really struck
me about the students, they’re the Chinese students who, who designated, this is one of the biggest
MBA cars and most important ones. And the students were basically designated to be the future leaders
of China. And one of the things they kept saying is, look, we Chinese created an economic miracle.
Nobody else has ever done this 10% for 30 years and bringing over 700 million people out of poverty.
But it came at a horrible price environmentally and socially. And we’re very, very aware of that.
We’ve had to live through the terrible pollution. Air, we couldn’t breathe when huge problems.
We’ve seen that. We don’t want that for our kids or grandchildren. But we’ve shown that we
can create a miracle. So we, the new generation of leaders, we’re going to create an environmental
and social miracle. And will they do it? I don’t know. But they certainly have been making some attempts.
Bloomberg recently came up with a study that showed that in the past seven years, China has
done more to abate pollution there than we’ve done in the United States in 30 years.
So, you know, and I’m not trying to paint China as a good guy. And it’s done a lot of bad things
and a lot of good things. But I am trying to say that all over the world, people are getting
- And let’s face it, there are no bad people. You know, we all want the same thing. We want
clean air. We want nutritious food. We want good water, portable water. And we want good soils.
We want good homes. And we want good futures for our kids. And we want health care and education.
Everybody wants that. And this bad leader, this question about that, because we got a few out there
right now, was very bad leaders. You know, we’ve seen that with Putin, who for a long time,
was beginning to look like a pretty good leader. He did a lot of amazing things to bring up Russia’s
economy. And then he kind of went off the hook, you know, crazy. But people around the world
have the same needs. And we must understand that we all need to come together to create a future
that our children will want to inherit, because we’re not going to do it in the United States alone.
China is not going to do it alone. Nobody’s going to do it alone. We can only do it if we work together.
We can disagree on just about everything else. You know, the China, we can we can
fault the Chinese for what they’re doing in Taiwan and Hong Kong and with the Uyghurs. And they
can fault us for what we’ve been doing in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And with our prison population,
which they point out is outrageous. The way we treat our prisoners and our immigrants,
the way we treat immigrants. So they criticize us for these things. We criticize them. We can
continue disagreeing on many, many, many aspects. But let’s agree on one thing. And that is
nobody thrives. Nobody survives on a dead planet. And we’ve been headed toward creating a dead
planet. So let’s understand that we all need to focus on agreeing that we must transform the
death economy to a life economy. Absolutely. Well, John, it is such a joy to have the
opportunity to visit with you again and to share a bit more of your perspective and wisdom
specifically around this transition to a life economy. It’s wonderful. It’s beautiful. It’s a
joy to be connected with you. And again, I want to encourage all of our audience to get your book.
Confessions of an economic hitman, the third edition. And while you’re at it, get
touching the Jaguar, too. We had a previous podcast interview with John about that as well.
And before we go, John, and we may be able to record a behind-the-scenes, shorter piece
together to share with our ambassador networks. So hopefully we’ll have that available as well.
Before we sign off for this moment with this podcast episode, I just want to open the floor up
to you to say anything else, share anything else you’d like to for our audience in these special
and momentous times we share it together. Thanks, Aaron. I think above all, I’d like to say that
I think we should all feel blessed that we live at this time because we’re at a time of human
evolution like no other time that’s human beings that ever experience. Where we really
are poised to redefine what it means to be humans being on this planet. And in this new Confessions
book, I outline a lot of things everybody as an individual can do. And five questions we can all
ask ourselves, which basically are, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? How will I do this
in a way that will help transform a death economy to a life economy? What’s stopping me from doing
what I most want to do for the rest of my life? And three, what’s stopping? What are the barriers?
Four, when I really look at these barriers, how can I change the perception so that I can turn
this around and five, what are the actions I take? And the book goes into the detail of how you
how you do that. But I think it’s really important for everybody to understand that we are all
have the power to make this happen and to enjoy the process. So that in such a question,
what do I want to do for the rest of my life? You know, for me, I answer, I want to write. I love
to write. I want to keep writing. And how do I do this in a way that transform a death economy
to a life economy? I write about that. I try to inspire people. What’s stopping me? Well,
maybe I don’t have enough time to write. Why don’t we confront that? Well, maybe I should turn
the television off for an hour every night and write instead. And then what actions do I take?
I got to write. And I think, you know, whether you’re a plumber or a parent, a parent or a teacher
or a carpenter or a podcast, or whatever you are, these are questions we can continually ask
ourselves. And I think to understand that every one of us has an important role to play in this
process. We have the power to transform this death economy to a life economy, to create a world
that our future generations will thank us for and will want to inherit. What an exciting time
here. Truly exciting. And, you know, programs like yours that are bringing this out to people
are so inspiring and exciting again. I keep using that word, but I’m excited.
Absolutely beautiful. Well, thank you so much, John, for visiting with us and for sharing
these insights and this wisdom with us. It’s much appreciated. My pleasure, Aaron. Thank you.
Take care. Yeah. Bye-bye. Keep it a great work, Aaron. Love what you do.
Thank you, John. Likewise. Talk to you, veteran. Okay. Thank you. Bye.
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