Aaron Perry
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John Perkins is an author and activist whose 10 books on global intrigue, shamanism, economics and transformation including “Touching the Jaguar,” “Shapeshifting” and the classic “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” (on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 70 weeks, selling over 2 million copies and published in 35 languages). As chief economist at a major consulting firm, he advised the World Bank, United Nations, Fortune 500 corporations, the United States and other governments. He regularly speaks at universities, economic forums, and shamanic gatherings around the world and is a founder and board member of the nonprofit organizations, the Pachamama Alliance and Dream Change.
In this episode, John discusses the critical need to transition from a “death economy” to a “life economy.” In his forthcoming book, “Touching the Jaguar,” he discusses the prophecy of the Condor and the Eagle, the legend of the Evias, living with the Shuar people, and the wisdom of the Kogi – our “Elder Siblings.” Narrowing in on the essential importance of our PERCEPTION, John emphasizes the power, wisdom, energy, and courage that come from confronting our fears.
SPECIAL OFFER – pre-order “Touching the Jaguar” at johnperkins.org and you’ll receive FREE admission to a special LIVE WEBINAR with John on April 29th, 2020, as well as a special digital booklet.
RESOURCESWebsite: https://johnperkins.org/Twitter: https://twitter.com/jperkinsauthorFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnperkinsauthor/Pachamama Alliance: Pachamama.orgDream Change: Dreamchange.org
Transcript
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Welcome to the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry, and today
we’re visiting with John Perkins. Hey, John. Hey, Aaron. Great to be with you. Nice to
be with you too. John Perkins is an author and activist whose ten books on global intrigue
shamanism and transformation, including the forthcoming touching the Jaguar, shapeshifting,
and the classic confessions of an economic hitman, which has been on the New York Times bestseller
list for more than 70 weeks and sold over 2 million copies, published in 35 languages.
As chief economist at a major consulting firm, John advised the World Bank, United Nations,
Fortune 500 corporations, the United States, and other governments. He regularly speaks at
university’s economic forums and shamanic gatherings around the world and is a founder and board member
of the nonprofit organizations, the Pachamama Alliance, and Dream Change. So, John, I’m so thrilled
that we have the opportunity to visit with you today. And as I was mentioning before we started
recording, just after finishing graduate school, I read your book Confessions of an Economic
Hitman, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s a remarkable reveal and truth telling. And I have to
note that in your bio here, to say that you regularly speak at university’s economic forums
and shamanic gatherings, I imagine that’s a combination that not too many people can include
in their bio. So, glad we could visit with you today. And thanks for being with us here.
Thank you, Aaron. It’s my pleasure being here. And yeah, you know, I’ve written what
prior books on shamanism and indigenous people, shapeshifting the world as you dream at those,
and four on global economics and intrigue, including Confessions of an Economic Hitman,
Hooding, Secret History of the American Empire. And you know, when I speak at economic forums,
somebody might come up to me afterwards, or even raise their hand and say, hey,
I can’t believe it. Are you really the same guy that wrote those shaman books?
And when I speak at, you know, sort of new age events and about shamanism, people say, hey,
are you the same? You can’t be the same guy that wrote that Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
And I’ve always understood that there was a very strong connection between the two,
you know, we can get into that more. But so, touching the J-Ware was written specifically
to make that connection, to show that, you know, basically, if we want to change the world,
if we want to move out of what I call a death economy, this economic system that I helped to
create as an economic hitman into a better system, what we call a life economy, the approaches
that shamanism uses about changing perception to change reality are extremely applicable.
So I decided, you know, I needed to be overt about that and write the book, touching the Jaguar.
Which, touching the Jaguar, transforming fear into action to change your life in the world,
which is really about bridging that would seem like a gap to many people between those two,
those two types of books. Absolutely. Yeah, disparate, you know, at the least, if not, you know,
entirely different universes really. I’ve been enjoying my advanced copy of touching the Jaguar,
and it’s such a rich read, and it really chronicles, in large part, your own personal
journey and history, as well as the stories behind the creations of these two really important
organizations, Pachamama Alliance and Dream Change, and the title, Touching the Jaguar,
obviously refers to something very important in those experiences. And I’m curious, can you just
give us a bit of a glimpse into what meeting and touching the Jaguar means?
Yeah, of course. So to the indigenous people in the Amazon, where I spend a lot of time touching
the Jaguar, like this guy down here, I wear one, so I can touch it all the time.
It means touching our fears, confining our fears. And so they say that, you know, if you run
from your fears, or the obstacles standing in your way of doing whatever you want to do,
these obstacles, these fears will follow you. On the other hand, if you touch them,
they will give you power, wisdom, energy, courage to move forward into where you want to go.
And now, give you an example. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer living deep in the Amazon,
with others together, with the Shwar people. Back in the late 60s, I became deathly ill,
I was dying. And I was a very, very, very long way from the nearest medical facility.
There was no way I could get there. I couldn’t even really stand up. And in one night,
a shaman healed me. And basically, what he did, he took me on a shamanic journey. And while I’m
on this journey, I’m seeing how, you know, I grew up from about 300 years of Yankee Calvinists
in New England. And we were very hygienic. Washed our hands a lot. And we ate very mild foods,
basically, potatoes in those days. And now I’m living with people in the Amazon who’ve never seen
a bar of soap. They eat some very strange foods, including a kind of a bee or a chichot, which is
made by women chewing maniac root and spitting it. It permits and turns into a kind of beer,
then they mix water with it and they can drink it. They know they can’t drink the river water
because the rivers have too much organic matter. And I mean, there’s no industrial pollution,
but there’s animals as deadly as the things like that. So I’m now living with these people.
I’m eating a lot of strange foods because there were no cliff bars. And I’m drinking a lot of
the spit beer because there wasn’t any pariette. And on this shamanic journey, at one point,
the shaman says to me, touch the jaguar. I’m always terrified. I’m like, where’s the jaguar coming
in? And then I see this jaguar. It’s a vision question. And I see this jaguar. And the jaguar,
basically, I hear this voice that says, it shows me these foods that I’ve been eating in the spit
beer. I see that too. And the voice comes to me and says, it’ll kill your son. And the food,
the drink will kill your son. This voice is speaking to me like my mother’s voice.
At the same time, I also saw how healthy the schwa are. And the men are all built like
tarzan. And the women who I was in my early 20s, the women who were looking very interesting.
People live to be very old if they’re not killed in a hunting accident or bitten by a poisonous
snake or something. And so on that shamanic journey, when I touched that jaguar, it came out and
it basically said to me, this is healthy food and drink. It’s making these people healthy.
And you know, I came to see later, it’s what we today call local and organic. Very, very
healthy food. The spit beer is very high in many different things. It gives you nutrition.
And after that was healthy. After that night, that when I woke up, I felt much better. And I
realized that it wasn’t the food and drink that had been killing me. It was my mindset, my perception.
And then the shaman asked me really kind of demanded of me that in payment for this, I become his
apprentice. This is 1969, and I graduated from business school. I’d never even heard of a shaman
doing figure there. And I had no interest in becoming a shaman. There was no futures in those days.
There is no, but he saved my life. So I became his apprentice. And then later, when I went back and
did what I’ve been trained to do in business school, I became an economist, chief economist, and did
what we call the work of an economic hitman, I would take time off whenever I could in places like
Indonesia and Iran and Egypt and all over Latin America and study with shamans. And what I learned
is that throughout the world, shamanism is based on this idea, this concept, this belief, this truth,
that our reality is molded by our perceptions. And then I began to understand that that’s not
in psychotherapy. That’s also quantum physics. And it’s advertising. It’s marketing mold, mold
the reality through perceptions. When you think about it, there’s no United States, there’s no
Ecuador, there’s no Russia, there’s no culture, there’s no religion, there’s no economy, there are
no corporations, except as we perceive them. And when enough people accept a perception or
codifying into law, it impacts reality. And that’s a common shamanic belief, but it’s also
everybody believed in a way. And so the idea of touching the jaguar is all about touching
perceptions that are holding us back, from being all that we can be, from being healthy, from
from doing what we most want to do in life. And when we touch that fear that goes into what change
it might necessitate for us to be all that we want to be a do, what we want to do. When we touch
that fear, that obstacle, that blockage, it empowers us to move forward and do what we really want to do.
Yeah, you know, John, this obviously is a central theme running through your book. And I want to
mention to our audience that we’re going to give you links to preorder the book, which will also
unlock for you a free live webinar with John on April 29th. So we’ll be sure to get you that
information here as well, but in what’s that John? I was just coughing. I thought you’re about
to say that’s okay because you’re at least 16 away. Yes, at least. Yeah, you’re on Vamer
J Island and I’m in Boulder, Colorado. So we’re about hundreds of miles apart at the moment.
Yeah. In the beginning of the book here, there’s one passage that I wanted to quote you,
if I may, because it for me really underscores and exemplifies what you’re sharing with us in
this book and in your work. And it says this, it says, as a former economic hitman who contributed
to the expansion of the death economy. And as one who has lived with the people of the Amazon
and apprentice with shamans, I’ve come to understand my obligation to change my own perceptions
and to do everything I can to help transform dysfunctional systems into ones that will serve us
all life on this planet. This I think, John, is an invitation that in a variety of ways, millions
of different ways, each one of us on this planet right now can respond to. And in varying ways,
we’re each affected by a variety of strange perceptions, we might call them. And it seems in
these times we’re being asked or being invited, we’re being led to really look through that and
to see the reality for what it is on this amazing living planet that we share together.
Yeah, I totally agree with you, Aaron. And it’s fascinating to me that at the time I wrote
touching the jive war, I had no idea, of course, that there was going to be a coronavirus.
And what I did know is that we’d been hit by many once and 100 year events every year or so,
the hurricanes, the fires, the earthquakes, the tornadoes, that the planet is speaking to us,
telling us that we must change. And so in fact, this book totally addresses that. I thought
it was as though the jago was reaching out and touching me and getting me to write a book that’s
I think it’s actually perfect for these times. And why I’m offering this workshop on April 29th
is because the book doesn’t officially won’t receive the book if you pre-order it until mid-June.
But it’s got this whole section about what each of us can do on a daily basis, a practice that we
can have through less than 10 minutes a day or every two days or once a week or whatever we want to do it.
And I felt that it’s really important to get that message out there now not to wait till the book
comes out. So people will be going through that and people will sign up but also receive another
little booklet for free that summarizes all of that before they’ll get the actual, so they’ll
get that digitally but the email before they actually get the book they’ve ordered which will have
a lot more in it than just that. But we are this incredible time of crisis and huge opportunities
to recognize that we must change, that we’ve reached a time in history where we must convert what I
call other economists, they’re calling it death economy and economic. It’s actually a governmental
social economic system that is failing us. It’s consuming itself into extinction that’s destroying
the planet as we know it. We must convert that into a life economy that’s a regenerative,
rejuvenating, pollution cleaning up, recycling economy that we can all move into would be employed
and it’s not about going back to live in caves. It’s about creating a new economic system. And I
think the hurricanes that once and a 100-year events were localized and people could kind of ignore
them unless you’re going through it. But if you went through it, one of these hurricanes or other
events and you live through it, you expected that the outside world was going to come and help you
within a matter of days, maybe a couple of weeks, bottle water would arrive, food would arrive and
then some leader would tell you, well we’re going to rebuild and we’re going to be better than ever
but we’re going to go back to the normal but even better. And it didn’t force us to think
globally. But this virus now, because we really didn’t listen to those things on a macro level,
this virus now I think it’s forced us to do that. Everybody, every human being on this planet
is impacted by this coronavirus. And there is no outside world. No one’s going to come to say
we’re understanding that we better change. We don’t really want to go back to normal because
normal wasn’t really working. We want to create a new normal, a healthy normal. One that’ll be
very, very comfortable to live in and a lot more satisfactory in the long run.
Yeah, I love that the one of the themes or tag lines for Pachamama alliances is cultivating
lives marked by environmental sustainability, social justice and spiritually meaningful
existences. And it seems that COVID in many respects is causing us to slow down. Many of us are
planting gardens who hadn’t in a long, long time and reconnecting with some of the fundamentals
of living on this planet. Yes. Well, the Pachamama alliance is very much based on that same
process like about 25 years ago. When we founded it, Bill and Lynn Twistonite were the co-founders
and we hadn’t, again, of course we had no idea there was going to be a virus like this on the way.
And over the 25 or so years since then, as the organization has evolved and worked to learn
from indigenous people and then to spread that word through I think we’re 87 countries now without
gene changing programs, gene changing, perception changing. You know, it almost is so we’ve
been moving toward this moment. Again, like the book, I think that organization is very much
a part of how we can understand the way to move forward with the virus, beyond the virus, and look
at the virus not as an enemy, but as an ally, as many people should have forward. And you know,
whether you look at this from the shamanic perspective, or perhaps some people would call the
woo-woo perception a perspective of, oh, Mother Earth is speaking to us, or which I think is a totally
valid, but if you don’t buy into that and you just look at it completely from this scientific
standpoint, it’s pretty hard now for anyone to deny the impact that human activities that
having on this planet. When you look at those satellite photographs from China where pollution
is cleaned up as a result of the reduced activity or the people of Los Angeles are seeing
blue skies from places where the stars are they never saw them before. And there’s so much happening
that’s very, very clearly telling us, not from a woo-woo standpoint, but from a totally scientific
standpoint, that we get to change if we want to continue to survive on this planet. So you can
look at this virus from many different, there’s a whole spectrum there. And all along that spectrum,
though, there’s just no questioning that we are getting a very strong message whether it’s the
shamanic message or scientific message or some combination of the two. Whatever your bias is,
this is just there for you. Yeah, it’s so potent. You know, I want to dig into this
life-economy vision that you’re sharing. And you know, with the Wyner community and the framework
we work with, one of the ways we think about this in terms of economics is,
is transcending the traditional model of extractive linear economics and value chain primary,
secondary, tertiary, the quaternary. And introducing the quintenary, which closes the loop and takes
it from linear to cyclical. And in the quintenary lives the sense of responsibility, stewardship,
regeneration that infuses all the other steps in those activities. As a way to invite people into
how this might look different. And I know you’ve done a lot of thinking and writing and speaking
and communicating on this. What if you were to summarize to still and pull out the essence of
what it will look like as we create a life-economy, what are what are some of the key themes that you
think it’s really important that regular folks become aware of? Well, you know, it can go in many
different directions. But here’s an example. Imagine if your tax dollars and my tax dollars
went to instead of paying for heavy military equipment, well, my pay the same company is right
beyond general dynamics of some brilliant engineers and scientists who would probably much prefer to be
making systems that mine all the plastic in the oceans, for example. Clean up old mine pits and
and oil spills. And there’s so much that we can do. We can pay people to clean up pollution all over
this planet. And you can walk in and around the streets, picking up blue, you know, pieces of glass
and plastic and so forth. And to regenerate the stored environments to to come up with whole
new technologies, recycle and wind and solar made huge headway in the last few years.
But we’re still dealing with primitive technologies, I think, from 10 years and now we’re going to
look back and say, hey, man, that stuff was pretty primitive. I hope that’s the case. You know, we so we
create new technologies that use wind and solar. And the air, I mean, there’s so much that’s just
waiting to happen out there. If we just put our investments into hiring people to do those kinds
of things instead of hiring them to make military equipment and to make a lot of let’s face it,
John, a lot of consumer products that nobody really, really needs. And it really doesn’t make
people happy except, you know, people may get it in adrenaline rush because it’s, you know,
this, this, this, the shop is addiction. You got to the store and you buy this and it makes you
really happy. And then the next day you’ve lost that adrenaline rush or whatever rush it is. And
you’re going to buy something else that I know, you know, people that I’ve been that way sometimes.
So, so we move into a new type of lifestyle and the kind of economy and doesn’t mean going back
to living caves. It means that we redirect our goals. And, you know, the, the death economy is
driven by a single goal for business. And that is to maximize short-term profits regardless of
the social living environmental costs. And that’s an idea that it drawing for some time, but it
really took off in 1976 when Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics and became very famous
for promoting that very thing. Next to my short-term profits, regardless of the environmental social costs.
And that’s a perception. And as we said, perception models reality. That perception has created a
reality that’s, that’s destructive. It’s unsustainable. That’s actually, if you want to think about it,
it’s, it’s actually an insane idea. Next to my short-term profits were very few people relay.
And that’s a new idea in history. It wasn’t new in 1976. He, he, he, he get it out there. It
had been growing. But if you look at the 250,000 years or so that we humans have been on this
and there’s been ourselves, it’s only been within a blink of a life, a blink of the history,
that we have had this idea that we need to maximize short-term benefits, short-term profits,
or for individuals for term accumulation of, you know, that, that, that,
laying the guy who dies of the moon always wins. I mean, that’s ridiculous.
Wow. Where did that come from? We have that mentality. And, and that’s a new mentality.
And incidentally, the people in the Amazon I lived with back when I was a Peace Corps volunteer
and, and most indigenous people never had that mentality. And we, we all come from the
heritage that doesn’t have that mentality. We come from the heritage that’s, let’s maximize long-term
benefits for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren.
And to return to that kind of goal to say that business isn’t there to maximize short-term profits,
business is there to maximize long-term benefits for everyone. Let’s pay investors a decent
rate of return for creating a life economy. And let’s all of us focus on how do we create long-term
benefits for ourselves rather than just short-term materialistic consumption? Absolutely. This is the
kind of thing where we’re seeing this incredible growth in acceleration with B corporations,
with social enterprise entities. It’s, to me, very exciting to see that not only are the seats
planted, they’re, they’re sprouting, they’re growing, in that we as consumers, we as
parents, as grandparents, as professionals have a tremendous opportunity to help further
accelerate that just through our consumer choices alone.
Yeah, consumer choices, our investment choices, and our employees. And if we all focus on that,
you know, I’ve got to say I speak a lot of economic conferences and I, I can’t tell you
how many chief, chief executive, people in very high positions have come up to me and said,
I don’t want to do better. I want my company to be greener. I have kids, I have grandchildren,
but I’m afraid that if I, if I do these things, probably in the short run, lose a little bit of
market share, or my stock prices will go down. And if that happens, my chief stock coals will probably
fire me and replace me with someone who only cares about stock prices or market share. But
they’ll say, you go out there and they’d say this to you, Aaron, they probably have.
You’re out there and tell your audience, says, hey, send me emails. Pick your company. I don’t
care whether it’s Walmart or Nike or wherever it is. Pick your company that you’re concerned about
and let your social networking circles join you in sending an email or text or tweet or whatever
it to them saying, hey, I love your products, but I’m not going to buy them anymore until you
pay your workers in Indonesia a fair wage or clean up the pollution you cost or use more
to sustainable materials. There’s a lot of executives that really want to get those messages
that they can take them to their main stockholders and their executive committees and their
boards and directors and say, hey, these are our customers. We got to listen.
And it is happening, like you said, you mentioned several things, be corporations,
the green new deal, the idea that last August at the business round table, 192 of the most powerful
executives in the world said, this can no longer be about maximizing profits. We’ve got to take
into account our consumers, our employees and the communities where we work. Exactly what goes
into creating a life economy. So it was happening before this coronavirus and I have a feeling that
this coronavirus will tip us much further over that point. I hope so. Yeah, absolutely. Let me just
take a moment to remind our audience. This is the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host,
Aaron William Perry, and today we are talking with John Perkins, the author of the forthcoming
touching the Jaguar, as well as several other books, including the very well-known confessions
of an economic hitman. And want to make sure you know that if you pre-order John’s new book,
touching the Jaguar, you can get a free invitation to a live webinar he’s doing on April 29th.
You’ll also get a digital booklet with some additional goodies. This is all in advance of the
actual book that you’ll receive in June. And to get all of this, you can go to touchingthejaguarbook.com
or you can go right to John’s website, johnperkins.org. And want to also mention that you can connect
with John on Twitter at Jay Perkins’ author, on Facebook, at John Perkins’ author. And we’ve been
mentioning Pachamama Alliance there at Pachamama.org. And we’ll talk a bit about DreamChange,
also DreamChange.org. Now, I want to give a quick shout out to all of our individual supporters
who make our podcast series possible. And if you haven’t yet joined our monthly giving program,
and you would like to, you can go to yonurth.org slash support. Want to give also a shout out to our
corporate sponsors. This includes Earthcoast Productions, Patagonia, Purium, Earthwater Press,
Waylay Waters, and of course, the LIDGE Family Foundation. For those of you who might want to
receive monthly shipments from Waylay Waters of those very special, PEMPFused Aeromatherapy
Soking Salts, very good in the time of Corona, you can join the monthly giving program at
yonurth.org slash Waylay Dash Waters and get those as well. So this is, it’s so exciting, John,
your book’s coming out soon. And that you’re doing this live webinar. And here we are,
coronavirus, communicating through digital technology. And I know you’ve got some thoughts about
where that might be heading and how this period of COVID may be indicating a bit of what our
future might be looking like in terms of digital communication technology. How do you see that
changing and altering our life ways, if you will, going forward?
Well, thanks, Aaron. Yeah, and I just recently published a newsletter about that, which people
can also get on my website, johnperkins.org, that I think I outlined 12 specific areas.
But I think it’s fair to say that we have experienced something profound.
Major changes in society, in the eating habits, in fashion, in architecture,
in business and everything else like that happens when there are things like rewards,
wars, wars of any kind to that matter locally, depressions, recessions, and pandemics.
And we’re going through that and people are understanding now that we can communicate so well
the way that you and I are communicating right now with a lot of other people out there.
And we’ve been doing a lot of that. You know, I had a patch of my my life forward meeting just
yesterday, where we had we brought in about over 200 of our major donors also into part of that
meeting. We’d never done anything like that before. We’d always travel to San Francisco,
which is where of course, to me, I live in the state of Washington. And you know, now I’ve learned,
I don’t have to fly any of these meetings. And we’ve all learned that. And we’ve, you know,
we’ve learned that so many things about being with our styles and being at home and maybe eating at home,
I’ve always enjoyed going to restaurants and I haven’t been there for a long time. I’m eating
healthier. I’m losing weight. I’ve jargoned for us like a forest nearby. And I’ve always done that,
in some other ways I keep my weight down. But when you go out to restaurants all the time, it’s much
more difficult. We very healthy here. And so many things I think what we’ll see is a is a real
movement in businesses from big physical complexes. You know, the universities are learning that they
can work using work digitally. Why do they need all those buildings? What that costs a lot of money
to do that. A lot of our biggest corporations I was talking today with with a person from the
from one of the big insurance companies and they have a huge campus outside Chicago. They’ve learned
that they don’t really need that campus. Everybody’s working at home right now. And that’s going on
and on and on. And people have become accustomed to ordering things by the internet. And having
them either delivered or you just go and pick them up, somebody else does. I don’t know with that
continuum that it’s a certain degree. I think people are going to be a little area of
flying and taking cruise ships because even if all of that gets back in the system theoretically,
there’s not a lot of people that have been trapped in places where they really don’t want to be for
several months. I know a few of them. And that’s a risk you take when you travel. So I think there’s
so many, many changes. I heard an expert yesterday on a program, a fashion historian,
say that beards will probably go out or they’ll be less than the fewer beards on men because
the masks don’t work so well with beards. And women may not grow such long fingernails in the
future because it’s hard to put on those rubber gloves and other gloves. So, you know, those
are fairly minor things, but it’s going to be a large changes in our economy. There’s no question
about it. The businesses that can be IT based, digitally based, they’re doing what you’re doing.
Those will thrive. The ones that have been really dependent on resource, on people being at a
specific location will probably go by the wayside or they’ll adjust. We’re seeing negative
oil price. I mean, we’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s amazing to think about that.
And it’s an interesting prospect. I work a lot. It’s been a lot of time at Ecuador and Peru,
and those are countries that are very dependent on oil. Ecuador particularly has been destroying
parts of its animals on rainforests to get at oil. And so the top of oil price is really
protecting the rainforest. And it’s also going to let Ecuador know that the major source of
their income is gone. I mean, their budgets are going to anticipate oil prices of
better than $60 or $70 a barrel. What are they going to get that? So, what’s going to happen
to their budgets? Well, there’s a lot of resources. The Amazon itself is a place that people can
can love, even in film, online, and in pictures. We don’t all have to travel there.
And so, we’re going to start valuing different things in different ways. I think we’re going to go
through major changes. I hope so. And I would also add air in that I think that the status quo,
the people with a lot of money and power who want to keep things the way they will try very,
very hard to have us go back to the old system. Including, I think there’s a lot of
information now suggesting that with this virus is just a conspiracy, that somebody that’s
Chinese or some organization, you know, sent this virus out there as a conspiracy thing.
To me, that’s, I don’t know what’s true, but what I do believe is that as Naomi Klein wrote
in her pivotal book, Choctaw doctrine, when things like this occur, then there will be people
that will try very hard to take advantage of it and convince us that we really don’t need to change
that we’ve taken care of it. We’ve got a vaccine that’s going to take care of it. We can do that
and so on and so forth. And while we may have a vaccine that will take care of it, we’ve got to
understand that we’re polluting the planet, you know. We’ve created a system that just
is viable and along and we must change. Absolutely. You know, this emerging phenomenon of us
getting more connected to our local environs, whether gardening or jogging more in the woods,
and doing more of our communicating and our work mediated by digital technology,
very much seems to fulfill a vision that William Irwin Thompson had back in the 70s when he was at
MIT, which he wrote in this essay called The Metta Industrial Village, which is like your book
Confessions, one of the really impactful things that I read 15, 20 years ago. And he basically
posits that we’ll head in this direction where we return to a more localized physical way of
procuring things like food and fiber and so forth. And in so doing, we’ll reengage with organic
ways of growing, regenerative ways of growing. And that will, meanwhile, become a very robust,
globally connected society through these communication technologies. He wrote that back and I think
it was 1972. And here we are. It’s happening. It’s like we’re living inside of his essay somehow.
Right. And even the city is like, I saw a model a few years back before all this was happening,
but of how a city like, let’s say, you know, it could be any city. And especially with gas prices,
going down that could work in the opposite direction, but we’re also learning that
how the oil coming is going to react to this. We don’t know. But I think what we’re learning is we
can’t create creating this pollution. So what if we, this model showed a city without any cars?
And where all the high roads had been converted into paths and gardens. And all the parking garages
had been converted into gardens. So you’ve got mirrors reflecting sunlight into all the different
floors of these garages. So even the cities can become relatively self-sufficient in terms
of growing food and so forth if we change these things. And to do that would accomplish two things.
You’d get rid of the pollution that burning oil and cars causes and all the congestion and all
the problems. And you’d also be able to create a very pleasant environment in our cities.
And with some forms of public transportation, but people could do a lot walking and having their
most of the stories they need in a neighborhood, more neighborhoods. I think that’s a, it was a,
it was a, I remember being deeply impressed by that model a number of years ago. And now it seems
to me it’s taken on new meaning and new urgency. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and we know that
more walking is going to have all kinds of health and mental and even immune system benefits.
I love that vision. Yeah, me too. Well, speaking of, you know, visions of the future coming to
fruition in the book, you talk about the prophecy of the Eagle and Condor. And it seems this is
increasingly bubbling up in different circles and probably speaks to our times as much as any other
specific prophecy or, or archetype or metaphor. And I’m wondering if you might share with us a
bit about what this is, what the prophecy of the Eagle and Condor means for our times. Sure,
it’s, and I’ll make it, it shows I can. It’s a prophecy that goes back thousands of years. We
don’t know how far back in probably came out of the Amazon or the Andes. And it says that
a couple of thousand years ago, they were saying back in the midst of history, human societies
decided to take two flights, two routes. One would be the root of the Condor, which would be the
root of the heart. They said that’s the root of that’s that’s the flight of the birds of the heart,
the Condor passion, intuition, creativity, might even say kind of the feminine part of ourselves.
And the other flight would be the flight of the Eagle, which would be the heart of the mind,
rationality, industry, science, the male path. And this prophecy said that for thousands of
years these two birds, these two paths, these two societies wouldn’t come together. They go
their separate ways. And then I was said that in the fourth Pachakuti, Pachakuti in the
Ketua language of the Andes, and of the Incas, is a 500-year interval. The fourth Pachakuti began
in our time about 1500. They said at that time in the fourth Pachakuti, the Eagle and Condor would
come together and they would clash. And the Eagle would be so powerful to practically drive the
Condor into extinction, but not quite. And of course, we know that happened. Columbus, 1492, the
industrialized worlds, the technically advanced worlds, and practically drove the indigenous
cultures into extinction. The prophecy goes on to say 500 years later in the fifth Pachakuti,
roughly the year 2000, the opportunity would arise for the Eagle and the Condor to fly together,
to soar in one sky, to dance, to mate, and to create a new offspring, higher consciousness.
And we’re seeing that happen. Beginning in the 1990s, really, is when people in the United States
began to take an interest in shamanism. When my books and shamanism got written, it became
quite popular and many others. And at the same time, the people, the Condor peoples, Latin America,
the shamanism, and all over, began to open up more to sharing their knowledge with us.
And of course, this is still continuing and it gets stronger every year. So we see these two
prophecies working. And we also see the male and female coming together legally and from many
aspects. We’ve still got work to do in all these areas. There’s no question, but it’s happening.
And it’s again, very, very possible that this coronavirus world will push us even more in that
direction. I want to ask you a question. You’ve clearly had some extraordinary experiences.
Experiences, a lot of us in this audience I imagine haven’t had ourselves necessarily. And
one of those is with what’s called plant medicine, the endogenes, the psychotropics. And I’m
curious, do you think, John, for us to move in this direction of creating a beautiful future,
sustainable future, just future, that it requires many of us or most of us to have those direct
experiences with plant medicine, or is it the kind of thing where maybe just a few of us,
a smaller number of us needs that for the society to transform?
Well, I think, Aaron, that there’s a consciousness revolution going on around the world.
People are waking up to the fact that we live on a tiny space station with no shells. We can’t
get off and we’ve been navigating it toward disaster. We need to change. And I think there’s a
conspiracy, if you will, of cooperation around the planet, the planet itself with its earthquakes and
its hurricanes and is telling us to work with us to do this. And the plants are doing the same thing.
So yes, we’re having what we call psychotropic plants,
ayahuasca, and all these mushrooms and peyote and all these different plants that people are
beginning to get this information from. It’s just one of many things. So I don’t think, you know,
I, yeah, I was trained as an ayahuasca shaman actually back in the 60s, back when I was in the
Amazon. It’s a great plant, but it’s not, you know, everybody doesn’t need to take it by any means.
There’s so many ways to wake up to what’s going on in the world. All the plants, I think,
are speaking to us. That’s why organics and vegetarianism and veganism, all these things are
arising. So it doesn’t mean everybody has to become a vegan, but it does mean that there’s a
consciousness that’s growing out of that. And I think the plants are speaking to us. I think the
animals are speaking to us. We’ve got peyotes running in tigers, bobcats, whatever, running
around streets. And we’re in Colorado. I think you’ve had some experiences there with these bacon
streets and some wild cats. And so, you know, this is another earth, Pachamama, this living
earth is working with us, conspiring with us, corroborating with us. That’s the better word,
probably corroborating with us, cooperating with us, joining with us to let us know that we’ve
got to re-navigate the space station. We’ve got to reboot the navigation system and the pilots
need to change course. That’s us. Where are the pilots? Yeah, I absolutely love that. Yeah, it’s
so spot on. And yes, indeed, here in the Rocky Mountain region of Boulder, we’ve been seeing a lot
more cougar sightings. Of course, cougar is a cousin of Jaguar. And it’s beautiful. Just the other
day, I saw Big Mama bear in her cup out near our home. And yep, there we go. So, I want to ask
one more question before we wrap up. And it’s not meant to be pointed, but I’ll mention that,
you know, when we named the book, Y on earth and launched the Y on earth community, one of the
meanings behind the name is it’s referring to Gen Y to the millennial generation, which
my kids loosely fall into. And I’m struck that I’m assuming you’re approximately a baby boomer.
And I remember when I was a teenager starting to awake into this reality and seeing this massive
consumer machine and then seeing my grandfather who lived through the depression as a teenager who
was a prisoner of war in the Second World War in Germany and had some very harrowing experiences
that brought right front and center the fundamentals of surviving on this planet. And so throughout
his entire life, he gardened avidly. He was a huge proponent of that. He walked a lot. He read a lot.
And I remember speaking with him about this fairly early on and him essentially commenting that
things were really getting off course. And this, you know, this was back in the 80s or 90s or
something. And I’m curious from your perspective, as a boomer, recalling this this thing you share
in the book toward the end that Howard Zinn said to you. He said, don’t run from the guilt. We’re
all guilty. We have to admit that although the big corporations own the propaganda machines,
we allow ourselves to be duped. You can set an example, show people that the way out redemption
comes from confronting and changing it, roll up your sleeves, take action. It’s such a beautiful
statement. And John, I’m really curious, you know, there are many of us who kind of get this
who are on this road to helping create this beautiful future in the near term. And I think
there’s also a whole bunch of us who aren’t seeing that yet and aren’t maybe convinced yet or aren’t
letting go yet of some of these old old paradigms and ways of thinking about life.
And what do you say to that? How do you create more of an invitation and a gesture of, you know,
we’re all in this together to some of those folks out there?
Well, Aaron, that’s why I write books and why I’m on your show and why, you know, I’ve been
traveling around until recently, speaking at places is to get the word out there. And I don’t
pretend to believe that I’m going to convince everybody. We don’t need to convince everybody. You
know there’s a, I’ve seen Howard Zinn, great historian, would tell you that at the time of the
American Revolution, roughly a third of the country were Tories. They thought we should stay
with England. And a third of the country were what we’d call revolutionaries. And then a third
of the country, the other third of the country didn’t know what to think they were someplace in
between. They really didn’t care. But the third that, you know, the validity of the revolution
it may have been less than that actually moved forward. And, you know, so my feeling is I just
do everything I can to get the word out there. And I’ll appear on right wing shows if that’s
what it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes it to get my own viewpoint out there. I don’t care if
people attack me. I have to defend myself. So I think just continue to get the word out there.
But also to recognize we don’t need to convince everybody. But I sometimes, I said to a person recently
who said, I get this uncle, this is just before Thanksgiving. And before we’re in this state of
isolation, I’d get this uncle, you’d be at the dinner table. And how am I going to convince him?
He just can’t convince him. And I said, well, don’t try. You know, don’t fight with him. You might
want to ask him some questions. You know, why do you believe this and just listen? And maybe he’ll
learn through asking himself questions. But don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t try to, you can’t push a string.
And there’s plenty of strings that we can pull. So that’s probably, you know, as much as anything
what we need to do. And I just say that, you know, in the book and in this upcoming workshop,
I really ask people to look at, you know, who am I? What am I? What do I really want out of my life?
We go through a whole practice of looking, what do I really want to do for the rest of my life?
What brings me the greatest satisfaction? What obstacles, jaguars stand in my way? How do I touch
these jaguars? How do I change the perception that these jaguars have given me and then let them
give me a new perception and then what actions do I take? And there’s a whole process which can go
through on a fairly regular basis to make, to do that. And when we do, we move into, you know,
where we really want to be and as individuals, as a society, there are certain people that just
are not going to go there. And at least not the beginning, you know, there’s that whole bell-shaped
curve. You’ve got the leading edge people and then you followers and so on and eventually they come
around. So most of them come around, they don’t all need to come around. So, you know, I take
great hope and the fact that we are making a, we have, even before the virus, we were making a
lot of progress. And now I’m hearing so many people talk about how we must change as far as
this teaching has done. You know, what you’re doing on this show is a huge step in that direction.
It’s great work and thank you for doing it. Yeah, absolutely, John. And just to reiterate and
remind folks, you can join John Perkins on April 29th for a special live webinar when you pre-order
his forthcoming book, Touching the Jaguar at johnperkins.org. And it is such a pleasure visiting
with you, John. I know we, we need to wrap up here in just a moment. And just want to thank you
for your time, for all of your work, for your courage, sharing what you’ve shared with us over the
years. And before we sign off, I just want to invite you. If there’s anything else you’d like
to share with our audience, that, that would be great. Well, thank you, Aaron. I think I’ve
pretty much done it. I just like to say, I think it’s really important that we all enjoyed what
we’re moving into. Feel blessed, blessed that we’re at this time when we have the opportunity. Yes,
this crisis and opportunities. And let’s just take advantage of the opportunities and move forward.
And do it from a place of great joy, because if we don’t enjoy what we’re doing, we’re not going
to be successful at it. So feel, feel the joy, feel the ecstasy, move into your bliss. And you know,
I like to write, but you like to, you got a great program. And if you’re a carpenter,
use sustainable materials and help people, they might be paying a little bit more for those
sustainable materials, but they’re investing in the future. It’s not a cross. It’s an investment
for themselves and their kids and their grandkids. And whatever you do, you can tie in this
idea of a life economy. And you can do it with joy. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, great. Well, thank you so much, John. It’s been great speaking with you.
Thank you so much. Keep up your great work. Look forward to talking to you again. Let’s see
it again. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s do it. That sounds great. All right. All right. Bye, bye.
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