Inequality & Environmental Destruction: How Economic Hitmen Keep Countries Poor | John Perkins
- Shelby Mertes
- Sep 17
- 33 min read
Global poverty isn't just a result of history - it's an active system designed to extract resources from developing countries while keeping them in debt. Former economic hitman John Perkins reveals how corporations and wealthy nations impoverish the places with the most resources, and why this threatens humanity's survival. We explore the connections between inequality, environmental destruction, and our global economic system, plus what each of us can do to transform the "death economy" into a "life economy."
John Perkins spent decades as chief economist at a major consulting firm, advising the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Fortune 500 corporations on projects around the world. But he was actually functioning as an "economic hitman" - engineering massive debt that allows corporations to control developing countries' resources.
Before that life, he lived in the Amazon rainforest studying with shamans, and he's continued that work alongside his career as an author, speaker and activist. His bestselling book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" exposed how the global economy really works. His other books include “Shapeshifting”, "Touching the Jaguar", and most recently, the novel "Message from Pleiades." And he's a founder of the Pachamama Alliance, working with indigenous people to protect the Amazon rainforest and all of Earth’s ecosystems.
RESOURCES:
John Perkins’ website
John’s latest book, Message From Pleiades
Pachamama Alliance
Dream Change
The Divide, by Jason Hickel
TIMESTAMPS:
0:01 - Introduction
1:02 - The Human Survival Project - latest news
7:01 - John Perkins introduction and background
7:52 - What is an economic hitman?
10:15 - Shelby's perspective shift on global poverty
12:30 - How the corporate empire system works
16:53 - Who's really doing the corrupting?
21:18 - Why infrastructure money never reaches local communities
22:45 - Historical context - 200,000 years of human cooperation
24:00 - Global forces overwhelming indigenous communities
25:00 - Texaco in Ecuador - the propaganda and the reality
27:40 - Amazon destruction and environmental tipping points
28:49 - Amazon soil and climate cycles
30:32 - Economics destroying millions of years of evolution
31:00 - Mayan civilization - a cautionary tale
33:39 - Solutions: What should we do?
34:10 - Death economy vs. life economy
36:51 - Corporate responsibility and policy challenges
39:00 - The five questions for personal transformation
44:20 - We're all collaborators in the system
45:35 - American Revolution analogy - critical mass for change
47:06 - Arthur Ashe quote: "Start where you are"
47:53 - How can the world help developing countries?
49:53 - China's economic success vs. US mistakes
52:00 - Fair deals instead of exploitation
53:02 - Final thoughts and what we've missed
56:05 - John leading tours to the Amazon
57:01 - We're evolving as a species
TRANSCRIPT:
Shelby (00:01) Today we're talking about wealth inequality between richer and poorer countries and trying to protect nature and climate from the ravenous over-consumption of everything and about our complex global economy and about ancient indigenous wisdom. These things are all connected and sitting at the intersection of these things is today's guest, John Perkins. Let's dig in.
Shelby (00:30) Welcome to the Human Survival Podcast, where we aim for world cooperation on critical threats to humanity. To survive, we must see ourselves first as citizens of the human race. To thrive, we must protect what is beautiful about humanity. This show is offered by the Human Survival Project, a grassroots movement for citizens around the world to push for a redesigned and much stronger United Nations. Our global threats need global cooperation. This is urgent, so let's start.
Shelby (01:02) Hi friends, welcome to the Human Survival Podcast. I'm Shelby Mertes. Thanks for joining us. So I have not been with you in a while. It's been a little bit since we've offered you an episode of the show, and it's for a good reason and a good cause. This show is part of a larger effort, the Human Survival Project, which is a fairly new organization.
It's a global grassroots effort to get a redesigned and much stronger United Nations, especially to deal with the existential threats that humanity faces. The climate change, the destruction of nature, pandemics, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and other technology, and so on. And so we're building a vehicle for citizens around the world to push for redesigned United Nations. As part of this, I've been working on a new website, and the team has as well. It's a big effort. It's a lot of work. These are very complicated issues that we're dealing with, and we're boiling this down in a way that everybody can understand. Without jargon, you don't have to be an expert in global affairs to understand this stuff.
So it's very hard work, but we're getting close to the finish line and expect to have this for you soon. Our website at the moment is fine for you to go look at. It's just a quick introduction to us. But this new website will offer a really thorough explanation of the various existential threats that humanity faces, why we need a much stronger United Nations to solve these issues.
And then we'll talk about our work over the coming years to build global political will to make this fixing of the United Nations happen. So it's not just a website, it's also laying the intellectual foundation for this new effort that we're building. So it's gotta be done right, and it will be, and it's been a lot of work, but we're almost there.
And when we offer it up, I will let you know about it right here. So today, I'm excited about this conversation. We have a great guest with amazing expertise and background. What we're going to talk about is a couple things. One is global inequality between wealthier and poorer countries.
And this is often framed in conversations as a moral or ethical issue, which it obviously is. But we approach it also as an existential threat because global poverty gets in the way of solving these other threats that we face, like climate change and the destruction of nature and war, massive migration due to climate change.
And so we have to deal with inequality if we're going to handle these other things. Also what we're going to talk about today is the destruction of nature, which we obviously rely on nature for our survival. And it's being pretty quickly destroyed due to ravenous consumption, often by people in wealthy countries who want to buy stuff and have energy and all that stuff that they enjoy.
And there are global systems propping up all of this consumption and we're going to look into that and see what we can do to solve it. And like usual on the show, we don't want to just complain about the problems. We want to figure out some solutions and see what we can come up with and put it out there. So today's guest is insanely well qualified to talk about all of this. John Perkins.
As chief economist at a major consulting firm, John was advisor to the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, Fortune 500 corporations, and government and business leaders around the world. Before that, he apprenticed with shamans when he lived in the Amazon rainforest from 1968 to 71 and has since studied with shamans from many different cultures.
His many books on economics, shamanism, and transformation include the Confessions of an Economic Hitman trilogy, Shapeshifting, Touching the Jaguar, and his most recent, the novel Message from Pleiades. I've read a couple of his books. I found them fascinating. He's an amazing writer. I highly suggest his work. His books have been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 70 weeks, sold millions of copies, and are published in at least 38 languages. John has spoken at shamanic gatherings, economic forums, and universities around the world, and has been featured on ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR, the History Channel, New York Times, Washington Post, many other publications. And he's been featured in numerous documentaries.
He's a founder and board member of the Pacamama Alliance and Dream Change. He's partnered with indigenous people in the Amazon to save the rainforest from the ravenous consumption of wealthier countries. John, welcome to the show.
John (06:58) Thanks, Shelby. That was a mouthful.
Shelby (07:01) It was a mouthful because you have been busy, my friend. You have been doing some work for years. So maybe a place to start is on the inequality side of things. What drew me to your work was when I read Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which laid out this whole global system of, well, you can describe it better, but maybe you could start by telling us, just give us an idea of where this part of your work came from as an economic hit man and even what that work is and how does it inform your worldview of what you talk about these days.
John (07:52) Yes, well first, Shelby, I wanted to say how glad I was to hear you at the beginning saying how addressing inequality is such an incredibly important part of all of the other problems. I take groups of people to visit some of the indigenous people in the Amazon every year, small groups, and the Mayan people of Guatemala. And I have one coming up just coming in March if some of your people want to go, I'd love to have them join me. But in any case, one of the things that always strikes me and the indigenous people themselves comment on it. Recently, on the last trip I did to Guatemala, we worked with this amazing Mayan shaman who's extremely knowledgeable. And he said, we see how these groups that come down here to try to help the environment, save the environment, our rainforest. And there's other groups that come down here and try to help get rid of poverty. And he said, they seem to think they're separate.
He said, they're not separate. It's the same issue.
And we can say the same thing about the destruction of the environment, of all of it, climate change, everything is so interconnected. As an economist, I would say it all goes back to the big problem. The real problem is that we've created a death economy, an economic system that's consuming and polluting itself toward extinction. And that all these other problems, they're big problems. They're all symptoms of that overarching problem, it's the economy.
And that was my job really as an economic hitman was to promote that type of economy and an economic system that's based on a goal of maximizing short-term materialistic consumption and short-term profits for corporations, regardless of the social and environmental costs. It's a terrible goal and it's driving us toward self-destruction, no question about it. So we need to really look at that overarching issue and see that all these other things are totally integrated and part of that we need to deal with all of them.
Shelby (10:15) Yeah, yeah. When I read your book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, around a similar time, I read another book by Jason Hickel called The Divide. And I'll put that in the show notes also for people to look at. But I had this shift in my understanding of how all this works.
I don't want to toot my own horn, but more than most people, I'm aware of history and world affairs and such. I had seen poverty around the world as simply a result of history. So for instance, in Africa, Europeans and Americans extracted slaves for many years, which devastated the place. Or there was colonialism for many years, which subjugated these places. There was the Cold War, where the United States and the Soviet Union used poorer places as pawns, like overthrowing governments and exerting control over them to try to win the Cold War battle.
And then I thought, since then, it's just a result of these places being a few steps behind because they were held back by this stuff. I didn't quite realize that there's currently systems in place that are still keeping these folks down. And usually to extract resources or cheap labor from these places.
And it gave me a better understanding that the United States where I live and say Europe and some other wealthier countries are still really actively getting in the way of development of these places. Can you describe how some of these systems work and how the global system does still keep these places down economically?
John (12:30) Yeah, it's an intent to expand an empire. Essentially, it's a corporate empire, and it's supported by the United States in a big way. Most of the corporations are somehow or another involved in the United States. So the way that this happens, I think my own personal story is a good example.
My job was chief economist, as you said. I had a staff of up to 50 people working for me. And what we would do is identify countries that had resources our corporations wanted, like oil, for example. Or today it could be lithium and some of the rare minerals that are necessary for high tech. And then we would arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. But the money never actually went to the country.
Instead it went to our corporations, usually engineering corporations, to build big infrastructure projects in that country, things like electric power systems, highways, ports, airports, industrial parks, things that would benefit a few rich families primarily, because these are the people that own the big industries and the banks and the commercial establishments. They benefit greatly from these huge infrastructure projects. But most of the people don't even get to participate in that side of life. They don't have electricity. They don't have cars to drive on the roads.
And in fact they're hurt by this because money is diverted from social services like healthcare, education, in order to pay off the interest on the loans that we've set up.
And then in the end, the principal can't be repaid. And that's actually intended. We set it up so that the principal is so high it can't be repaid. But the collateral on the loan is the resources that we covet, that we want, the oil or the minerals, whatever it is that that country has that our corporations want. And so at that point, we go back in, usually in the guise of the International Monetary Fund, which is the sort of policeman of all of this.
And we say, okay, we'll help you restructure your debt. But there's some conditions around that.
And those are that you've got to sell your collateral, your oil or whatever, real cheap to our corporations without many environmental or social regulations. Privatize your government businesses, your schools, your water and sewage systems and so forth and sell them to our own investors at cut rate prices. Vote with us on the next United Nations vote against Cuba or whatever it is we're involved in at that time, let us build a military base on your soil. And in that way, we've really created this vast empire. It's the biggest empire in the history of the world. And it's been done primarily through debt, through economic hitmen. Of course, throughout history, usually empires were built by the military. This one's been built primarily through economics, although all of these presidents and their cabinets know that standing behind us are people we call jackals who will overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders if they don't play this game. And sometimes when they're unable to do that, the military does go in, as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and we've seen in many other parts of the world. Vietnam during my time in college.
It's a system that's set up intentionally to put these countries deep into debt and own them. And of course, meanwhile, yes, the very rich people are benefiting in those countries, even though they're putting their countries into debt. Their businesses are growing and they get other perks along the lines. I can address that, basically bribery, corruption, and I can go into that if you want me to.
Shelby (16:53) Well, a thing I often hear about corruption in developing countries is that it kind of has a finger pointing attitude to it. Like, you guys aren't developing because your leaders are so corrupt. And through some of the stories you've shared in your books, it sounds like that corruption is often happening through corporations through wealthy countries bribing those officials to get certain things. It sounds a little more complicated than that simple scolding that I often hear.
John (17:33) Yeah, you gotta ask yourself, who does the corrupting? It's kind of like the whole thing of should you blame the prostitute or the john who goes to the prostitute? No pun intended on my name.
Shelby (17:38) Right, yeah.
John (17:53) Now who do you blame? So yeah, but incidentally my company where I was a partner in this consulting firm had very strict rules against corruption, overt corruption. We followed the laws of the United States, which are supposed, which say you can't bribe people. But there's so many ways around that. And here's just one example. I would go to a president of a country and I'd say to him, hey, if you buy into this deal, if you sign on the line, you buy into this huge loan, I'll make sure that you and all your cronies, all your friends, the families, that their children get into US colleges. My firm was located in Boston. We have some excellent colleges and universities in Boston and we had great connections with all of them. And so we can make sure that your kids get into these schools and we'll give them full scholarships. You won't have to pay anything. We'll give them jobs when they graduate and during summer vacations, etc. Now that's worth a hell of a lot of money to anybody. But it's especially worth a lot of money if you happen to be in one of these countries. And it's totally legal what we were doing. It was totally legal, but it's definitely a bribe. We'd also say things like, hey, your brother owns the John Deere franchise. We'll rent a lot of John Deere equipment, and we'll pay premium price for it. We'll pay $2 million for a million dollars worth of equipment. There's nothing illegal about overpaying for something like that.
It's a bad business commitment, it was a bad deal. And what you do with that extra million dollars, what your brother does with that extra million dollars, well, you can tell him he has to give a lot of it back to you if you want, but whatever. So there's so many ways around this. So yeah, there's corruption in these countries, but we're doing the corrupting. Somebody's doing the corrupting. And any local corruption that people talk about, like having to hand money under the table to get a credit card or a passport or something. That's pretty small potatoes compared to the big corruption and compared to the kind of corruption actually that goes on in the United States where corporations can hire lobbyists and can basically contribute huge amounts of money to political campaigns. That's corruption too. Legal corruption again. So if it's legal, it's not really corruption, but it should be defined as corruption.
Shelby (20:26) Yeah, I know, I know. Yeah. Another interesting piece of this, you described how money gets lent to these developing countries to build infrastructure or whatever projects. And you would think that would be a great opportunity to create jobs and have that trickle through the economy in the local place. But you've described how those projects were often done by American contractors.
And so it wouldn't actually give the local people jobs in the way that you would hope. It was actually creating business for American firms. Can you describe more how that works?
John (21:18) Well, yeah, part of the stipulation on the loan to the country is that they have to hire companies to build these projects that are on this list that the World Bank gives to them, a list of companies that are primarily US corporations or in many cases, some of the European companies are in there also. Now, if the company has any integrity or if it needs to use this as a bribe, it'll say that it's going to hire some local subcontractors. But all the big money goes right back here. In fact, the country never sees most of the money.
It's Ecuador, Peru, the Republic of the Congo, whoever gets this loan. But the loan doesn't ever go to them. It goes from a bank in Washington, DC, the World Bank, let's say, to a bank in Houston, Texas, to Brown and Root, or San Francisco, to Bechtel Corporation, or Boston, to Stone and Webster. So the country never actually sees the money. But they're stuck with having to pay off the loan or selling off their collateral, their resources.
Shelby (22:44) Yeah.
John (22:45) It's a game that's very old. The Mafia's played it. It's been played throughout history in one way or another, at least throughout recent history, which I would say goes back about 3,000 years. That's recent when you consider that we're 200,000 years old as the Homo sapiens sapiens, I think, or 200,000 years. This is all pretty recent. As you mentioned I spent a lot of time with indigenous people. I mentioned I take small groups to the Amazon and also to the incredible, beautiful sacred sites of the Maya in Guatemala. And when you look at indigenous people, when you look at the history that we all come from, 3,000 years is a blink in history. Throughout most of those 200,000 years, we didn't live this way at all. We were much more communal. We were much more oriented to helping our communities, to working for the benefit of the communities. It wasn't about taking from anybody else. And you see that now with indigenous cultures in places like the Amazon.
Shelby (24:00) Yeah. Yeah, it must be interesting to be in an indigenous culture, just try to do your thing. And then there's this onslaught of global forces on you. Like, there's the place, the companies going in to get resources. Yeah, there's these global forces like the IMF and World Bank with the lending and the finance and it's just kind of wild how everyone, even in remote places, is so attached to these global forces and these global systems that impact everybody.
John (24:42) Yeah, yeah, it's really quite terrifying. You mentioned I was living in the Amazon. I was in the Peace Corps from 1968 to 71 in Ecuador, mostly in the Amazon there. And I still go back every year. And I spent a lot of time in other countries, Bolivia, other countries that are there. But to see the changes that have happened since 1968, since 1970, it's just, it's very disturbing. It's very, very sad. And when I was first there in 68, the oil companies were just beginning to come into that area. It was primarily Texaco.
And the country believed that Texaco had this incredible propaganda campaign that they were going to bring Ecuador out of the dark ages into the modern world. And Ecuador was going to make a lot of money off this oil, but it was a lie. The oil companies didn't, basically didn't pay up. So there was actually a contract that said that Ecuador would get a certain percentage of all the oil taken out of its rainforest, about the profit, percentage of the profits taken out by the company. And Texaco Ecuador never made profits, all the profits were made by Texaco Latin America. It was a bookkeeping game and so Ecuador couldn't get anything for many many years. That changed in more recent times under a president named Rafael Correa where the whole system was remodeled because this is a guy who had a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois, understood the system, but over and over, you see this, how corporations and our government has participated in horrible schemes to deprive people around the world from resources that they should have, that are theirs, that they should be recompensed for. We talk about helping poor people, but it's quite the opposite for the most part. And there are exceptions to that, of course.
Yeah, it's very sad. But in the process we've also destroyed these terribly important environments. The rainforests are much smaller today than they were in 1968. And we need them for oxygen, for absorbing carbon dioxide and water. A lot of the world's water, a fifth of the world's fresh water is generated in the Amazon rainforest. One fifth of the world's water comes through that river. And it's really, really important.
Shelby (27:40) Well, and the destruction of the Amazon is getting so bad that it could actually disappear, basically, or cease to be a rainforest. With enough cutting down of forest, scientists tell us that we could reach a tipping point where the whole thing just turns to savanna and grassland, and it won't even function as a rainforest anymore, which would just be horrendous for the climate and obviously for everybody living there. And I don't think many people understand we're on the verge of such a tragedy.
John (28:20) Well, and it's not just the cutting, that's certainly a big thing, cutting and burning, but also the climate change itself. In recent years, the Amazon has experienced droughts that it's never had before in all of its history, as far as anybody can tell. Certainly not in any history that's remembered by any indigenous communities or anyone. And that's the climate change. It's a cycle.
Shelby (28:47) They both reinforce each other.
John (28:49) They do, they do. And so you get this horrible situation going on and there's major changes happening there. And I don't think most people understand that the soil in the Amazon rainforest is the second worst in the world, next to deserts. It's extremely thin. People think, oh this must be very lush soil. No, it's very, very thin and it feeds itself. So the trees decay, they drop their leaves, the leaves decay, there's all kinds of microorganisms that turn that into soil that can be used. The trees, different species have to grow very far apart from each other. You don't have a whole set of one species near each other. Because they have to spread their roots way out, their roots are very shallow. And so you've got a tree of this one species here and then a mile away and maybe there's another one and all other kinds of species in between because their nutrient requirements differ. But when you cut the trees, the soil then gets washed away in the rains. It may take a couple of years because the root systems may continue. But after a couple of years, it washes away and below that is clay in most places. And the sun then comes and bakes the clay and you've basically destroyed it. It's extremely difficult to revitalize that, to regrow forests. It can be done, it's being done these days, we're working on different processes for doing that. But in nature it isn't done. Nature has to be helped at that point.
Shelby (30:32) Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous that we have economics making it so that people clear this rainforest that has evolved over millions of years in order to just farm it for a couple years and then have to abandon it. It's pretty perverse.
John (30:52) Yeah. Well, one of the reasons that I like to take people to the Mayan people of Guatemala is that they built up this huge civilization, these incredible pyramids, much more impressive than the ones in Egypt, as far as I'm concerned. Where I take people into Tikal, deep, deep in the jungles of Guatemala, incredibly spectacular place.
Over a period of roughly a thousand years or more, the Mayan people built up all these cities and we're finding more and more of them all the time, vast cities. In the process, they cut the forest and drained the swamps. And so eventually they changed their climate. They did exactly what we're doing today. And they could no longer, the rain stopped. And they could no longer grow crops. And so these cities that had been peaceful went to war with each other.
And eventually the people who lived outside the cities, the majority of the people lived outside the cities. It was just the royalty and their administrators and priests and so forth lived in the cities. But most of the people who served the cities, who were heavily taxed to provide food and everything else to the people in the cities, they just said, screw this. We're not going to go to war anymore with our neighbors. And we're not going to put up with this crap anymore. And they went up to the mountains or deeper into the jungle. And they kept a lot of their culture so they still have their old shamanic techniques, they still do incredible fire ceremonies and calendar readings, it's beautiful culture, but they stopped building cities. The cities were abandoned. Now they live very simply in very simple houses. They live very good lives for the most part, except for the modern world encroaching on them and some of the wars that have occurred due to modern politics.
It's a microcosm. The Mayan people invite us down there and teach us about this because they say, we've already gone through this. We can show you that it doesn't work. We destroyed our world. By the year 900 AD, the civilization as such had disappeared. All these cities had been overtaken by the jungle. Nobody even knew they were there until the mid-1800s because the pyramids, these huge pyramids, 20 stories high or more, were covered with trees and dirt and looked like mountains or hills. And you still see a lot of them like that. They've excavated quite a few, but there'll be right next door to an excavated one there'll be one that's still, you'd think it was a natural hill. It isn't. It's a pyramid.
Shelby (33:39) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. So here we are with this big pile of problems we've described. What should we do about it? I mean, if we want to as a world help these places develop economically in a healthy way without destroying their environments, what would new systems look like that are far better than what we're doing now?
John (34:10) Yeah, well that's really what I devote my life to now is looking at how do we transform a death economy, degenerative death economy into a regenerative life economy.
And the way I see it is that the death economy is based on this principle, this goal of maximizing short-term profits for corporations, short-term materialism. A life economy is based on, it has a goal of maximizing long-term benefits for all life, which again is what indigenous cultures have always believed in. We all come from that heritage, if you go back far enough, this belief that you've got to make the world as good or better than it was for you, you got to make it as good or better for your children and grandchildren.
So that's the life economy. And we're not talking about going back and living in caves or thatched roofs or something. What we're talking about here is paying people to clean up pollution, to channel all the plastics floating around in the ocean and recycle all of that, to regenerate destroyed environments, to recycle, to come up with new technologies for creating energy, solar and wind, that's been very, very successful. And it's just at its frontier. There's so much further we can go with that. And we can probably produce energy out of air or water. So how do we pay people to keep moving into a life economy, an economic system that looks to the long term rather than the short term? And companies, businesses have to make a profit to keep going, but they don't have to maximize the profit. They can put some of that money into future, into making the world a better place, and into their employees. Not this business of maximizing short-term profits for a few shareholders. Why does anybody need to have $400 billion, which I guess is what Musk and probably Trump have and others? It's like, why that?
And why should the continent in the world that has the most resources be the poorest from a human standpoint, the richest in resources, that's Africa. And it's the poorest as far as people are concerned. Why is that? It's because they've been so terribly exploited. We need to turn that around. We need to turn that around.
Shelby (36:51) Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think that we can look to, say, corporations being more responsible, obviously. But I think in order to do that, there's got to be public policy that pushes them to. Because without such policy, the economy as it's constructed right now, where everyone's competing with everybody, then in order to compete against the next guy who might be environmentally slimy, I need to be environmentally slimy too.
I don't know if slimy is the best word, but if I as a responsible company want to invest in environmental responsibility, that costs money. And if the other guy's not doing that, then my product is going to cost more and the customers aren't going to buy it because they'll buy the cheaper one from the other guy. And so without systems to manage this competition between us, it's kind of challenging for corporations to sometimes do the right thing. So are there ways to get our economy to work better, maybe through pricing or something, subsidies and taxes or whatever to manage this competition?
John (38:19) Well, that's a very important question that should be addressed in business schools and through education. But I think, assuming that your listeners don't have the opportunity to run big companies and get them to change, I would like to address that. What can each one of us do individually? And I don't want to talk about the obvious, which is consume more plant-based foods, use less fossil fuels. And all these things that we know, buy recycled clothes and recycling, these are all important, but those are all out there. What I like is something that we explore on these trips to like Guatemala and others where the shamans talk to us about this is that there's really five questions that we can each ask ourselves that will help us personally move to this life economy. Do you want me to go into those five? Yeah, it'll take a second here, but they're also in my books if people want to see. But the first one is
Shelby (39:32) Please, I'd love to hear them, yeah. Take your time.
John (39:43) What do I most want to do for the rest of my life? What will give me the greatest satisfaction? Because let's face it, if we're going to move to a life economy, it has to be an economy that we feel good about. We have to enjoy our lives in that process. So the first question, what do I most want to do for the rest of my life? And I would answer that by saying, I want to write. I love to write. I don't want a day to go by where I'm not working on some writing, because I love it.
But I have a friend who's at the opposite end of the spectrum. He's a carpenter and he says, I want to work with my hands and wood. So then the second question, and anybody can be a plumber, you can be a teacher, you can be a podcast show host, whatever it is, you can ask, what do I most want to do? And then the second question is, how do I do this in a way that'll help transform the death economy to a life economy?
So I would say, well, I'm going to write about things that inspire people to do that, that talk about these issues, that inspire people to do that. And my carpenter friend will say, well, I'm only going to use sustainable materials in my woods. And I'm going to hire someone to plant a tree for every tree that's consumed in my carpentry work. And whatever you are, again, there's things you can do to make that happen. The third question is, what's stopping me from doing this?
And the writer might say, well, I know that to be a successful writer, I've got to write for two hours a day, every day, but I don't have time. And my carpenter friend might say, well, my clients don't want to pay the extra price for sustainable materials or for me to hire someone to plant trees.
So that's a blockage that gets in our way. We all have those blockages. There's some voices telling us, hey, you're not smart enough, you're not big enough, you're not the right gender, you're not the right color, you don't, whatever the heck. We have those things that tend to hold us back. So we gotta address those. And the fourth question is, when I really confront that blockage... So I wrote a book called Touching the Jaguar that goes into this. So the indigenous people say the blockage is a jaguar standing in the trail. But it's through vision quest. You see this jaguar and you can't run from it, because if you run from it, it'll chase you. But if you reach out and touch it, not a real jaguar, but in the vision quest, you touch it, it gives you energy. And it gives you a change. It helps you understand how you can change your perception, because perception molds reality.
When we change our perception, we change our actions and then our reality changes. So the fourth question is, when I touch that jaguar, when I confront that blockage, what happens? And so I would say, my goodness, well, yeah, I have to write for two hours a day. Well, I could turn off the television for two hours every night or get up a little earlier in the morning. And my carpenter friend will say, well, I'm going to tell my clients that the extra price is not a cost. It's an investment in the future for them and their children. It's an investment, not a cost. And so the fifth question is, OK, so what do I do? What actions do I take right now? What actions do I take? So the carpenter friend has to start using materials like this, which are sustainably produced. And I have to start writing. And so we get these five questions.
And if everyone could, we could all take different paths as long as we're all headed toward that same destination of transforming this death economy to a life economy. And on these trips, I often take very high up business executives. Recently there was a CEO officer from Hewlett Packard, HP, and we've had oil company executives and it changes them and you get them to ask these questions, but we can all participate in this. We need to recognize that we're all collaborators in this problem. It's not the corporations per se that they're the obvious, but it's because we demand from them certain things and as investors we expect them to make these huge profits. We can change that though. We have to change who we see as our heroes. Who do we put on the cover of Fortune magazine or Time magazine? Why don't we put Shelby there? Because he's...
Shelby (44:20) Or John.
John (44:21) So yeah, I mean it's a matter of redefining what we see as success. Success should not be about accumulation of materialistic consumption and short-term profits.
Shelby (44:41) Yeah, indeed. Something I like about what you've just offered is that with a lot of these big challenging issues, people tend to look at those big bad corporate folks as the enemy or the problem. And obviously there's issues there, right? But all of us participate in it. And so I find often that finger pointing at the corporations to be sort of disempowering or even when we finger point at those bad politicians who weren't doing their job or whatever, it's disempowering because it fails to recognize ourselves as having the power. Like we can do this if we all get together and make it happen. So it's right in line with what you're talking about.
John (45:35) Yeah, yeah, it's totally, yeah, I like what you're saying very much. And I often look back to the American Revolution, great student of history, especially growing up in New England, the American Revolution. Jefferson at one point after the revolution was over, he made the comment, and I think historians have kind of backed this up that's not exact, in 1775, when the revolution started, probably about a third of the people continued to be British loyalists, Tories. They didn't want to break away from England. And a third of the people were patriots. They wanted to break away from England. And a third of the people didn't know or care what they did. And yet, over time, that third that wanted to break away gained more and more people from both of those sides, particularly from the ones who weren't paying much attention, but also some of the Tories. And I think we're in a situation like that today where we've got to recognize it doesn't take everyone to ask themselves those five questions. But if a critical mass of us, and we don't even know what that is, it's estimated it may be something around between five and 10 % of the population, it doesn't have to be a lot. If we really start moving in that direction, we will get there. And again, this idea that we can all take different paths. But let's go for the same destination of a death economy. I mean, transforming a death economy to a life economy.
Shelby (47:06) Yeah. You're reminding me of this quote by the tennis player Arthur Ashe. He said, start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. And it's just like all of us are involved in something. We can make change at our workplace or in our family or individual consumption or in our neighborhood or town or nation. There's all these levels of engagement that we can just try to tap in and do something and trust that the other guy is going to do that too and that enough of us will be doing our thing in enough ways that make this change for the better. So, yeah.
John (47:50) Yeah.
Shelby (47:53) Well, so something I'm curious about, I mean, we led into this conversation talking about the inequality and the environmental destruction. As we look at these developing countries that need to be uplifted some, and in a way that protects our environment, how can the world help them? Either as me as an individual or as public policy or these global systems or whatever level you want to talk about, but how can these places be helped in a healthy way that's actually good instead of the helping systems in air quotes that we often see?
John (48:46) Again, I suggest that people do whatever comes best to them, whatever they most want to do with their lives, but do it in a way that transforms this death economy. That's the best thing, because if we're transforming that death economy into a life economy, it's going to happen. But also, if you look at it from the standpoint of some of these other countries, I think it's really, really important that they collaborate with each other.
I say this to my friends in Latin America where I spend a lot of time every year, many years. And you've all got these awful debts, or most of you do, terrible debts that have been imposed by the system that I explained. And as you come together and demand that those debts be changed, and China, incidentally, is standing right in the wings and has been very successful at getting rid of the United States, sending them out.
China is taking over Africa and Latin America very, very successfully. Its economic hitmen are phenomenally successful.
Shelby (49:53) So they learned from the United States and are maybe doing it better.
John (49:56) Yeah. Yes. Well, I taught at a program in Shanghai, MBA program. And I realized when I first started there that why I was there was so they could pick my brain about what I'd done right and what I'd done wrong. Yeah, I mean, here's an interesting map. It's five years old now, but it's gotten worse. But it tells you like, so in the year 2000, up here, the United States was the number one trading partner with 80 % of the world's countries. By the year 2020, China was the number one trading partner with 80 % of the world's countries. And China's getting even more now, so it's more than 80 % now. But that happened in 20 years. And a lot of it was because the United States made such mistakes. We spent so many resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we bullied people. Anyway.
That's another whole conversation. We don't have time to go into all that right now. But I think what we need to do is change our dialogue about these countries and recognize that these are not poor countries. These are countries that have been shoved into poverty. These are countries with rich resources and rich cultures and amazing people. And to not recognize that and to not recognize how much we depend on them for everything, because we do, is a mistake. And when you depend on other people, you shouldn't be exploiting them. That doesn't work, ultimately. In the long run, that doesn't work. The Chinese actually have a proverb that says, if you want to create an empire, make friends, not enemies. And how do you make friends? Well, you really, truly, you want to help people, but it doesn't mean you've got to give them things. It means that you've got to do fair deals with them.
If you're going to take their oil, give them a fair share of the profits, truly, not just on paper, but to really make it happen that they get that. And then encourage them to invest that in value added systems. Don't just take the oil. Help them build oil refineries. Help them build plastic factories. Well, let's get rid of plastic. But help them use whatever the resource is.
If you're taking lithium from them, help them build factories that make batteries using the lithium. I encourage this. We do the opposite as of today. The death economy does the opposite. It exploits them and it does it intentionally and overtly. So let's create a new dialogue and let's understand what we're doing. Let's each of us as an individual understand that the cost of, I can't find it right now, this iPhone that I carry around, what goes into that and who is making it possible for us to have that iPhone.
Shelby (52:51) Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's war and slavery involved in that phone. It happens. Yeah, yeah.
John (52:58) Yeah, it continues, it continues.
Shelby (53:02) Yeah. Well, we're hitting the homestretch on this conversation. And I know that you have to go in a little bit, but is there anything that we've missed or anything on your mind that you want to get out there before we wrap up?
John (53:20) Yeah, thank you, Shelby. I'd like to say I think that we should all feel very blessed to be alive right now. We are truly at a turning point in human history. And we can turn from the death economy to a life economy, or if we don't, we're going to have to face very, very dire consequences. I can't even begin to imagine how bad it will get. But we have this opportunity.
We are at this time right now where we understand the situation and we understand how dire it is. We get, we know that and you'd have to be a fool not to know that, not to be scared, not to be upset, not to be worried. But so we're at this time now when we have this opportunity to use what we know to drive us to make these changes. And it is, all these things that we do, it's also very, very important that we recognize the importance of our leaders. All of these things revolve around leadership. As you mentioned earlier, we need policy changes. And so that may be part of what it is every person does who says, what do I most want to do for the rest of my life? So I write about changing the death economy to a life economy, but in that process, I also recognize that we have to point out our terrible failures as a leading nation and our own leadership that is taking us down the wrong road. This isn't just Trump, it's been going on for some time. It's certainly gotten worse in the last six months, but it's been going on for a long time. And we need to recognize that I love America. I'm a very loyal American. My family goes back to well long before the American Revolution. To be a loyal American, you've got to be willing to criticize.
Democracy requires criticizing, self-evaluation, and then making the changes. And a lot of that is all about changing perception. What does it mean to be successful? Because when we change perceptions, we truly do change reality. And that's a key point. And here we all are at this time. We should feel blessed to be part of this and to do our part in it. And yeah, so, and beyond that, I would just ask people to check out my website, johnperkins.org, if they want to know any more about what I do or join me on one of these amazing trips to the Mayan people or whoever.
Shelby (55:57) Yeah, yeah, I might be joining you at some point. I've wanted to get down there and going with you would be quite a way to do it. You never know.
John Perkins (56:05) Well, hurry up because I'm 80. I'm 80 and I'm in really good shape. I just swam laps this morning. I jog in the woods every other day and I swim laps every other day and I'm in good shape. But God, at 80, you've always got to ask yourself, how long can I keep doing this? And I love doing it. I love taking people on these trips. I love being with the shamans. But yeah, don't wait.
Shelby (56:21) And time flies. All right, I'll hurry up. I will hurry up. Definitely. Well, John, thank you so much for this conversation. This has been enjoyable and interesting and informative. And I'm grateful for you spending some time with us. Thank you.
John (56:32) Yeah. Well, thank you, Shelby. It's been my pleasure and my honor. And I love what you do. Keep up your great work. This is so essential. Keep it up and help everybody recognize that we truly live in this time of incredible transformation. What an amazing time to be alive.
Shelby (57:01) It really is. Despite all the challenges, if I were to choose when to be alive, it would be right now. Because it's the most chance to do good. Yeah.
John (57:03) Yeah. We're evolving as a species and we're part of that incredible evolution. We're evolving really fast.
Shelby (57:18) It's a big moment. Yeah. Well, and thank you, dear listeners, for joining us. Thanks for spending a little time, and we will talk with you soon. Take care.