John Perkins recounts his recruitment by the CIA, his time in Ecuador where a shaman taught him to "touch the jaguar," and his subsequent work as an economic hitman for Charles T. Main. He details how he manipulated leaders into accepting predatory World Bank loans, causing debt enslavement, until his conscience awakened after witnessing historical parallels to slavery. Perkins discusses the suspicious deaths of Presidents Roldos and Torrijos, contrasts U.S. neocolonialism with China's Belt and Road Initiative, and critiques the "death economy" driven by profit maximization. Ultimately, he argues humanity must shift toward a regenerative "life economy" to avoid self-destruction amidst geopolitical manipulation and media corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Power, Money, and Sex00:14:37
They discovered three things in that process that characterized me, the things that I wanted in life.
I wanted power, money, and sex.
That's perfect for a CIA officer.
They knew they had me, they could hook me by giving me those things, by putting me in a position where I had the opportunity to gain those things.
And so then I went into the Peace Corps and then was recruited while I was still in the Peace Corps by this guy who had that information.
From the NSA.
And they figured out, you know, like, okay, so this guy's only got a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration.
But, you know, we don't have to put that in his bios.
We'll put the fact in his bios that he spent three years in South America working with indigenous people and he has a background in business administration.
Yeah, it's kind of a con, but it works.
And then I did hire people with very good credentials who worked for me.
I always thought.
That people who were in the Peace Corps could not work for intelligence agencies.
So you actually went to the Peace Corps after you were interviewed for the NSA.
And did they know you were going to go to the Peace Corps?
No.
So I wasn't working for the NSA.
What happened was I was desperately trying to avoid the draft.
I just didn't believe in the war in Vietnam.
And I was not about to go off.
I liked what Muhammad Ali said.
He said something, and I'm paraphrasing here.
You know, they ain't never done nothing to hurt me and I don't see any reason why I should go off and kill them or be killed by them.
And I felt the same way.
And my wife at the time, her father was very high up in the U.S. Department of the Navy, had the highest security clearance.
And his best friend was very high up in the National Security Agency, which was a draft-deferrable institution.
And so they arranged for me to have an interview.
with the NSA because this friend of the family was so high up.
And I did that in the JFK building in Boston, the federal building in Boston.
And I spent a couple of days going through all sorts of tests, including a lot under lie detector.
And, you know, I thought I'd never get the job because they asked me if I'd ever been interviewed and had difficulty with the police.
And it so happened that I tell this story in the book where I was at Middlebury College and was involved in in a knife fight in a bar there that a friend of mine who happened to be Iranian was, you know, pulled out a knife and cut the guy who was trying to beat up on me.
And he was thrown out of Middlebury as a result.
I quit Middlebury.
And so I thought, yeah, I had to admit that.
I was in this knife fight.
You know, I went through all this stuff.
And they also asked me how I felt about Vietnam.
I said, I don't believe in it.
So I figured they're never going to hire me.
But as it turned out, at that point in time, they knew Vietnam was going down.
And they didn't care that I didn't really believe in the war because they didn't really believe in it any longer either.
What year was this?
So this would have been 1968.
And it turned out that the Iranian guy who pulled the knife and was a very good friend of mine, his father was a general in the Shah of Iran's...
And a CIA asset.
His father.
So they liked the fact that I had lied to the police.
police.
When the police in Middlebury, Vermont, I went to Middlebury College, when the police brought me in to question me about what Fahad, the Iranian, had he pulled a knife on this guy?
Had he gotten into a fight?
I said, no, not that I know of.
I didn't see anything like that.
Of course, I was right there.
I lied to the police.
And I admitted this under the lie detector, that I lied to the police.
I thought, well, that'll get me screwed.
But in fact, they liked the fact.
They liked the fact that I had the guts to lie to the police and get away with it.
And they liked the fact that I was good friends with this Ronnie, whose father was a very good CIA asset.
So it was kind of an interesting process.
So I get recruited, and they offer me a job, which was basically as a trainee in the National Security Agency.
And I'm ready to do that.
And then I'm still in college.
This is my last year in college.
And I happen to walk by this room where there was a Peace Corps recruiter giving a talk.
And I wander into the room, and I listen to him.
And it struck me I'd always, I'd loved indigenous people growing up in New Hampshire.
My family goes back almost 300 years and I had a great, great, great something grandmother who was captured by the Algonquin speaking Abenaki of the upper northeast.
And so I'd always had this fascination with indigenous people, with the Indians.
And I knew there was only one place in the world where people kind of still live like that, the Amazon.
And I'd always had this desire. to go to the Amazon and live with these people.
So after this Peace Corps recruiter finishes his talk, I go up to him and I said to him, I said, hey, if I applied for the Peace Corps and asked for the Amazon, do you think I might get it?
And he said, are you crazy?
Yes, of course you'd get it.
Nobody wants to go to the Amazon.
And we're looking for people to go to the Amazon.
So I applied for the Peace Corps and asked for the Amazon and got it.
And so I was not working for the National Security Agency.
But while I was still there, in the Peace Corps the last year I was there.
I was there for three years.
I extended for a third year because I still wasn't 26, so I was still draftable.
So I extended for a third year.
Peace Corps is normally two years.
And on that third year, I was contacted by this guy who it turned out was a senior vice president for Charles T. Maine, the company I ended up going to work for.
And he also was a liaison.
He was in the Army Reserve, a colonel in the Army Reserve.
And he had the information about me from the NSA.
So he already knew a lot about me and wanted to recruit me for this job.
So while I was in the Peace Corps, I never worked for the NSA, but the NSA had my files.
Did they ever ask you, like, why did you do this interview and then jet for the Amazon for three years?
Oh, well, yeah.
So after I hear this Peace Corps volunteer, I call the friend of the family, my father-in-law's good friend, who we call Uncle So-and-so.
I don't want to use his name.
It was very close.
And I called him and I told him, I just heard this Peace Corps thing and they said I could go to the Amazon and I'm really interested in that, but I know you've gone out of your way to get me an invitation to be a trainee with the NSA.
Well, what do you think?
And he said, oh my God.
He said, do it because you'll be a lot more valuable to us afterwards.
You'll have learned another language.
You'll have learned to live in another culture.
You'll have learned to live, to survive under very difficult positions.
And he said, and you know when you get out, You may find that you're not actually working for the National Security Agency, but you may be working for a corporation that has liaisons with the National Security Agency or the CIA, which is exactly what turned out to be the case.
So, was this Peace Corps recruitment meeting happening in the NSA building?
No, no.
The Peace Corps recruiter was at Boston University where I was in my last year of college.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Totally separate.
They were totally unrelated at that time.
It sounded like it was conveniently close to where you interviewed for NSA.
No.
Like almost like they planned it.
No, no.
The NSA was downtown Boston and Government Center, and Boston University is further up.
Oh, okay.
I guess.
Still in Boston, but it's on the outskirts.
Mm hmm.
What country did you go to in the Amazon?
Ecuador.
Ecuador?
Yeah.
And that's where you learned Spanish.
Yeah.
And that's a funny story, too, Danny.
So I finally get this letter from the Peace Corps saying, you've been accepted to the Peace Corps and assigned to Ecuador.
And I said, oh, damn.
I wanted the Amazon.
I wanted Latin America, not Africa.
I had no idea where Ecuador was.
That's hilarious.
And I go to a map, a map of Africa, and I can't find Ecuador.
So I go to the index in the map, and it takes me to Latin America.
Oh, my God, yeah.
It has land in the Amazon, the upper Amazon.
That is hilarious, man.
I love it.
So, three years in, I was going to say Africa, three years in Ecuador in the Amazon.
And what were you doing down there specifically?
Well, so you can't make this stuff up.
I, you know, so first the Peace Corps sends me to eight weeks of training in Southern California, and this is to learn Spanish.
And if you speak another language, you know, eight weeks doesn't get you too far, but you get to be conversant.
I could pass the Foreign Service exam.
And also, they taught me about credit and savings co-ops, how to form credit and savings co-ops because I graduated from business school with a Bachelor of Science in Business.
And so now they send me into the Amazon.
And it was a very difficult place to get to.
It took a couple of days and a rickety old bus that was basically a wooden box built on a Ford chassis that was filled with people who were oh my God, it had pigs and goats and chickens and all these things on this bus and people who didn't bathe and it was an awful experience.
You drove the whole way?
Well, I didn't drive, but I'm on this bus and we're sitting in these wooden seats for a couple of days and then you get to the end of the road and spend the next day walking and riding horses through these trails deep into the Amazon.
And I'm being assigned to live in the schwa territory.
Now, the schwa are hunters and gatherers.
If you've ever seen a shrunken head or a picture of one, they did it because there's other head hunters, but they're the ones who actually shrink the heads.
So here I am going in there.
And as I'm making my way into this place where I'm supposed to spend the next two years, there's some people walking out to go to the market to get to the bus or whatever.
And so I just thought I'll practice my lousy Spanish.
To my chagrin, as I'm talking to these people in Spanish, I find that they don't speak Spanish.
They speak schwa.
So my first experience with U.S. government work was they teach you a language and send you to a place where nobody speaks it.
And then I finally get to the little community where I'm going to spend the next two years, and this one guy greets me, and he's the school teacher.
He's from up in the Andes, and he speaks Spanish.
And we can communicate, sort of.
My Spanish isn't very good, but I can communicate.
And he's like, Well, why are you here?
And I said, Well, I'm here to help you guys form your credit and savings co ops.
And he looks at me like, Are you crazy?
Are you crazy?
We're all in the barter system here.
We don't have any currency.
It's your bananas for my papayas.
You can't save credit bananas and papayas.
Why are you really here?
Immediately, the community was pretty suspicious of me.
This gringo comes in.
I'm taller than anyone.
I've got blonde hair.
Why is he here?
It was a difficult situation.
My second experience with US government work is they teach you a skill and send you to a place where nobody can use your skill.
What reason would they have to be suspicious of you?
Was there a lot of people coming down trying to exploit them?
The area has been known for gold and right now the Chinese have a huge gold operation so there had been prospectors and con artists and people.
So they were familiar with people trying to come in and take something from them and they assumed that's what I was supposed to do.
And the funny thing is, you know, so I told you I grew up almost 300 years of Yankee Calvinists in New Hampshire and Vermont and Connecticut.
And if there's one thing that's ingrained in you, and that background is that when you're sent in to do a job, by God, you do it.
So I would get up late in the afternoon, early evening every day in the center of this little community and give a speech in my lousy Spanish, which nobody understood.
about the benefits of credit and savings co-ops because that was my job and I didn't have anything else to do.
And it fascinated me that every day more people came to hear me.
And it reached a point very quickly where people were walking for several hours through the forests, these indigenous people, and they didn't have flashlights, they had to go back in the dark and I'm like thinking, my God, I'm making headway here.
I'm going to form a credit and savings co-op.
And the school teacher takes me aside late one afternoon.
He says, hey, have you, he said, don't grate your hopes up.
I know you think you're going to form a credit and savings co-op, but have you noticed that we don't have any newspapers here?
They were illiterate.
We don't have any televisions or radios.
There's no electricity.
He said, you're it.
I was Saturday night live every night to that community.
So the word had gone out through the forest that there's this crazy man, this tall, gangly, blonde guy who gets up every day and gives this speech in a language we don't even understand.
And one guy who does understand him says he makes no sense at all.
He's trying to get us to do something we can't do.
Ayahuasca Journey Begins00:03:07
He's crazy.
And he's not going to survive very long here.
So you better come hear him while you get a chance.
I was like, the sideshow, you know?
So that was in the beginning when you first got down there and you experienced that.
And then did you ever make any headway with well, about this time, I'm beginning to think damn, I should have gone to Vietnam.
I would have been with other people who speak English, other soldiers.
You know, we would have had Budweiser and, you know, who knows, you know.
Cigarettes.
And better.
Yeah, oh, yeah, way better.
But of course, we all know now that there's good stuff in the Amazon, isn't there?
I would find that out.
But I was really depressed.
I mean, like, I'm going to spend the next two or three years here and.
What am I going to do?
It was a struggle.
And then I got really, really sick.
I was dying.
I couldn't keep any food down.
any food down.
I reached a point where I couldn't even stand up.
I'm lying in the sleeping bag that Pisco had given me on the floor of this hut.
There was no way I could take that journey through the jungle back to try to find one of those rickety old buses and get back up to some medical facility.
So I'm kind of resigned to dying.
I am resigned to dying at this point.
Late one afternoon, the teacher comes up to me and he's leading this little old man by the hand.
This guy's scary looking.
He's practically naked.
He's got a loincloth.
But he's he's, his body's covered with these tattoos and he's little, but i'm lying down on the floor, so he looked pretty big.
And uh, and and the and the uh school teacher says this guy's the shaman.
I had no idea what a shaman was.
This is 1968, and and he says he can heal you.
Well, what would you do, Danny?
I would say, have at it.
Yeah, what else?
Let's get started, baby.
What have I got to lose?
Give me that good, give me that good dope, that good Amazon dope.
Yeah well, I never didn't even know there was such a thing, you know, but that night uh, he did.
So this shaman did give me what we now know is is ayahuasca, and it took me on this strange, strange journey and you know i'm hallucinating and and uh, but you know i've been going through some pretty rough times anyway and i've been basically haven't eaten for a long time and and, but on this journey I saw that, so at one point,
I've got my eyes closed.
I'm lying on this bench.
Some swarm men had carried me into the shaman's lodge and put me on this bench.
And I've got my eyes closed.
And the shaman says, it's translated by the teacher, but so it's going through a couple of steps.
The shaman says, touch the jaguar.
And it's the middle of the night in the middle of the jungle.
You can hear jaguars at night.
We've seen their tracks during the day.
Piranhas and Chicha Rituals00:03:11
I know they're around there.
And like, oh my God, like, you know, I wake up, I open my eyes and look around like, where's the jaguar?
And the shaman says, no, no, through the translator, no, no, close your eyes and see the jaguar and then touch it.
So I did.
And there was first this amorphous form and it became, looked like a jaguar.
And I reached out and touched it.
And as I did that, I saw and heard my mother. saying, son, the food and drink will kill you.
And I got to tell you, so the people in the Amazon don't drink water from the rivers because they know the rivers have got organic material, dead animals, rotting trees.
It's dangerous.
So the women make a kind of beer that's called chicha, and they make it by chewing manioc root and spitting it.
And the saliva acts like yeast.
It sets up a fermentation process.
And you get a beer and you can get very strong very quickly because you're in the tropics and you can add water to that.
And so that's what they drink.
And the foods, you know, one of the favorite foods is you reach into a rotting log and pull out a handful of squirming white grubs and down the hatch.
Insects?
Grubs, yeah, worms.
Worms.
High nutrition.
Yeah, high protein.
Yeah.
Piranha are actually a huge source of food down there too.
That's true.
Piranhas, yeah, but they're very bony, but yeah, you can eat them.
They don't eat, they don't attack people.
That's another than this week we can talk about.
But so I've swum with a lot of piranhas.
But so really?
Yeah.
And then later in life, I hung out with a lot of piranhas who were in the human form.
But they're dangerous, the ones in the rivers.
And that's another story.
But so I'm realizing I'm drinking a lot of spit beer because you've got to rehydrate.
So you're not drinking the beer to get fed up.
You're just drinking the beer because you need something to drink.
Yeah, that's all there is.
Basically, you can trust.
It's because it's got alcohol.
So the water's now been kind of purified with the alcohol.
There's no way to.
Like, harvest the rainwater or the river, or like water from like clean streams to drink?
Well, yes, theoretically, there is, but that's not their culture and their custom.
They do a lot of chicha, uh, okay, and it's considered also kind of a sacred drink.
The women make it, and it's their gift to the men who bring back the animals for protein.
So, the women make it, and so there's this exchange.
It's a real strong cultural thing.
So, they drink a lot of chicha, and they love it, and you got to.
Rehydrate frequently.
And I'm eating a lot of squirming white grubs and other things that I won't even mention because there weren't any cliff bars.
So no Perrier, no cliff bars.
So I'm eating and drinking these things.
But I realized on this ayahuasca journey that as I'm doing this, I'm hearing a voice like my mother in my head saying, It'll kill you.
Human Sacrifice in Ceremonies00:15:42
My mindset was saying, It'll kill you.
And at the same time, I'm seeing in the same vision quest how.
how robust and healthy the schwa are.
The men will carry two or three hundred pound dead boars and tape ears that they've killed in the jungle, out of the jungle.
They get legs that make a World Cup soccer star jealous.
And the women, well, I was in my early 20s, in the quite promiscuous culture by tradition, the women were looking quite good.
People live to be very old if they don't die in a hunting accident or a dugout canoe or something.
Yeah, that's interesting.
That's interesting, the mortality rate, like the age they live to.
It's probably the same age, if not older, as normal cultures.
They just don't, unless they, you know, as long as they don't die from wounds from hunting or getting, you know, combat wounds or whatever it is.
Right.
Or, you know, there's a lot of deaths in childbirth and a very, at the time, a very high infant mortality rate.
So that brings the whole average weight, you know, if you look at averages, that brings it way down.
But if people survive the first 10 years they're likely to live to be very old unless they listen to the accident like you said so I see on this This experience that it isn't the food and drink that's killing me.
It's my mindset.
It's my perception It's this voice that's telling me it's killing me our minds are so powerful and the next day I felt a lot better and I continued to feel better and and the shaman came back and kind of being translated later, but it turns out he spoke more Spanish than Then he let on at the beginning.
He comes back later and says, you know, I cured you.
You owe me.
And you need to be my apprentice.
Now, this is 1968, just going into 69.
And I have no, you know, I'm graduating from business school.
I'm going to go out and make money.
I want you to say, I'll out of here.
There was no future in shamanism in those days.
There is today.
But the guy saved my life.
So I took it on.
And that changed everything.
The community now suddenly accepts me.
I'm training with one of their most revered elders.
I'm learning their culture and no longer being held in suspicion.
I'm enjoying it.
I'm learning how to prepare ayahuasca.
I'm learning a lot.
And more than anything else, what he kept drilling into me was this idea of touching the jaguar, which is the title of one of my books, the second from the last book I just wrote a couple of years ago.
And what he said that is that when we have a blockage, when there's something that's holding us back, when there's something that's changing our perception, that's hurting us.
If we run from it, it'll chase us like a jaguar will if you run from it.
But if you reach out and touch it, it gives you the ability, the energy, the wisdom to change your perception.
And when you change your perception, you change your actions and then you change reality.
So this illiterate shaman was feeding me this very exciting philosophy of perception molds reality.
Which later I would study with shamans in other cultures, and they all have the same concept.
But it's also the same concept that runs psychoanalysis, modern psychoanalysis.
Perception changes our reality.
And business and politics.
Marketing is all about perception changing reality.
Danny, you can't get what you want in life unless you have a jacket just like mine.
And I'll be happy to sell this to you for a couple thousand dollars.
But you've got to have it.
If you want to have a successful show, you've got to have a jaguar.
I mean, that's the perception.
Perceptions mold reality.
And that's what I would use as an economic hitman.
But it was interesting.
So that's where I first really, really connected with this philosophical theory, which I probably have heard in Philosophy 101 in college.
But it never really meant much to me.
But now I've seen, practically speaking.
So touching the jaguar, what is the jaguar an analogy for?
A blockage.
A blockage.
It's something holding you back, something that's standing in your way of being all that you want to be or breaking through a blockage.
So if as a writer, if I have a writer.
So is it like a fear or is it something that we're conscious of?
Well, it's a yeah, no.
When you touch it, you become conscious of it.
That's the secret is you've got to confront it.
So it may be something well, in this case, it was my mother's voice saying, the food and drink will kill you.
That was the Jaguar.
That was the joke.
Will kill you.
And I believed it.
I believed it.
But what I saw when I touched that was it wasn't the food and drink that were killing me.
It was my mindset toward the food and drink.
And it's so many things in our lives like, well, you can't have a podcast.
You're not the right color skin.
You don't have the right education.
Somebody earlier asked about my education.
You can't be an economist.
You don't have the right education for that.
People telling us, you're not good enough.
You don't have enough education.
You don't have the skills.
You don't come from the right background.
Whatever.
You can't do this.
And those are these blockages.
And when we believe them, when we accept them, they create a reality for us.
But when we touch them and confront them and say, no, no, that's wrong.
I do have the ability to do that.
I don't need that kind of background.
Then we can move forward with things.
Isn't it interesting how drugs can.
Have such a profound change on the way we think about things.
Yeah, and things like ayahuasca, San Pedro, other things like that, these sacred plants, I don't even like to think of them as medicines or drugs.
I think of them as something that gets into our spirit.
They can do that, but there's so many, like the Mayan people don't use, I take groups to the Mayan.
I later studied a lot with Mayan shamans in Central America.
You studied with Mayan shamans?
Yes.
And I still, every year I take groups of people down to to hang out with them as they do.
Do you really?
People in the Amazon, yeah.
And they use fire ceremonies the same way.
They don't use some of them are now beginning to because they see a way to make money by doing ayahuasca or something.
That's been this whole commercial thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But traditionally, it's done with fire ceremonies, which as you're doing those fire ceremonies, you go into an altered state, which is very, very powerful also.
The mountains of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Colombia, who I also spend time with, they use what they call pagamentos, payments to the earth, where you just give something to the earth and you just really go into it and feel your gratitude and you really go into an altered state.
And drums will do it.
People take shinock journeys with drums.
So there's many different ways that open us to what we might think of as a portal to higher consciousness, to looking at things differently.
But in every case, this analogy of touching the jaguar kind of works.
Yeah.
It's amazing how much human sacrifice their minds are responsible for and how much, how many people they would sacrifice in conjunction with their rituals, their drug rituals, their ayahuasca rituals.
My, uh, there's this recent guy who came on the podcast a couple of weeks ago.
His name is Mike Corey.
He did a, he said he had one of the most profound ayahuasca trips of his life, um, with a Mayan tribe, I believe it was.
Maybe it was in the Amazon.
But, anyways, he was before that.
He was just like the concept of human sacrifice made no sense.
It just seemed like a primitive, crazy religious idea, right?
To bring the rain, like rain gods would make it rain if you would sacrifice a certain amount of people to them.
But then he said when he had this ayahuasca experience, it was like the universe being ripped open, like a human being being ripped open and seeing all the insides come out.
That's what it was like him seeing the universe being torn in half and seeing all everything that was inside of it.
And he said, like, the way it made him feel, it felt like something that was so powerful and so much bigger than himself that it would be worth him sacrificing his life for it.
And he thinks that's how the way the Mayans thought.
Interesting, because increasingly the Mayan elders and shamans, they call them the nanas and the tatas, and the daykeepers and archaeologists, and reading. in the glyphs, the writing that the Mayan people have, are concluding, and it's controversial, nobody knows for sure, but that the sacrifice didn't happen.
They executed enemies when the wars were on, or they executed criminals, and they did those in a ritualistic way that also was to please the gods or the spirits.
They really only believe in one god, but then it's like Chak, the spirit of the rain.
And that they weren't sacrificed because sacrifice means that you voluntarily do it to yourself or have someone do it to you, but you volunteer to do it.
And increasingly, I think that certainly is a body of thinking that there was no sacrifice.
And I don't know.
I mean, I'm no expert in these things, but it's kind of interesting to look at these different aspects.
But certainly, the rituals that the Mayan people did and continue to do today open you to this portal, to this touching of the jaguar.
And the Mayans have so much to teach us.
now because they did to their world back around the year 800, 900 in our calendar, what we're doing to ours.
So in building these vast cities, these huge pyramids and these amazing, amazing cities, you know, and there's many of them and they're discovering new ones all the time with LIDAR, you know.
In the Amazon and too.
Yeah, also in the Amazon.
Yeah, and this is in the Mayans of Central America.
And in building these cities, they drain the swamps and cut the forest completely.
And so they changed their climate.
And so it's very good evidence that what they changed their climate?
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
They had drought.
How did we know they changed their climate?
Well, because there's several ways, but I think the most impressive one is that these pyramids are usually built, the several pyramids, it's like those Russian dolls, one inside the other.
So one king would build a pyramid, and then the next king would come along and build a bigger pyramid over the first one, and then another king over that one.
And so on.
And they've cut into some of these pyramids in the Paten Peninsula of Guatemala, out near Tikal, this great city of Tikal.
And near there, there's a pyramid, one of several, where they've cut in.
And as they go in, they see that.
So what we see now are pyramids that just look like they're stone.
And that was the structure, but they were covered with stucco, a kind of stucco, plaster.
and painted usually red.
I mean, these are bright colors.
And in the original, the smallest pyramids, the plaster is very thick.
And each successive pyramid, the plaster gets thinner and thinner and thinner.
In the last one, it's very, very thin.
And to make that kind of plaster takes a lot of wood and very hot fires to melt down the limestone and turn it into this kind of cement, this plaster sort of thing.
And so that's one of the indications that they were just getting rid of the trees.
They were running out of trees.
And then, you know, so again, through many other techniques, you can see how the trees were cut.
Now that whole area, this vast area of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the Paten of Guatemala were probably just completely cut clear of trees.
And the swamps were drained, kind of like what happens here in Florida.
And they can see that the crop cycles changed, that they weren't producing the crops.
The cities went to war with each other.
Cities that had been relatively peaceful went to war because of scarce resources.
And so the theory is that as this happened, so all the people, the people lived outside the cities.
And it was only the royalty and their administrators and priests who lived in the cities.
The job of the priests was to call on the rain gods and the sun gods and all the spirits to make good growing seasons.
As the growing seasons declined year after year after year, it was obvious the priests weren't doing their job.
and the cities were going to war with each other.
So these people who lived outside the cities and had to pay these huge taxes in terms of providing food, clothes, jewelry, everything to the cities, got fed up.
And, you know, the priests weren't doing their job.
These guys were now being called upon to kill their neighboring friends in other cities.
And so they left the cities.
And they either went back to the jungle or most of them went up into the mountains, primarily Guatemala, Honduras.
where they've continued to live and conduct their traditions and ceremonies as they did back then, except they don't build pyramids.
They don't build cities anymore.
They live very simple lives, but they still do their fire ceremonies.
They still do their calendar readings and their seed readings and things that go back thousands of years.
A very, very impressive culture that continues, but they stopped cutting trees and draining swamps and building cities.
And so they invite us down now because they say, look, you've got to learn from us.
We destroyed our world and now you're destroying your world, which happens to be the entire world.
You think they're responsible for destroying the world?
Well, they can look now and see that they've destroyed their world.
That's what we consider a fairly small area now of Central America.
What was the time when the Mayan civilization was at its peak?
Do you know?
Yeah, well, there's several periods.
The classical period, though, runs up until about the year 900.
that had basically disappeared.
They'd left the cities.
900, right.
900 AD in our calendar.
But it began several centuries before then.
Ancient City Building Peaks00:09:44
And so they had this peak period of building cities.
Incredible construction that went on building these cities.
Around 800, what does that say?
After two millennia of steady growth, the Mayan population reached an all-time high around 800.
Wow.
Right.
And then it began to decline.
And by 900, it was pretty much gone.
Okay.
So between 250 and 900.
It was in its peak.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Isn't it remarkable how some of the most mind-blowing construction, architecture, and moving of giant objects happened way, way, way back in the past?
Things that it would seem almost impossible for us to do now.
Like, you know, those like, even before the Mayans, there was the Olmecs.
You've seen some of those Olmec heads that are down there?
Yeah.
Those things that weighed, they weighed tons.
We have no idea how they moved those across those mountains or those rainforests.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and then you looked at the.
How the hell did they do that?
And it showed the peak period there, 250 to 900.
That's a long time, a lot longer than we've been experiencing here.
Right.
Yeah, you don't even think about that, right?
But, yeah, no, you don't.
United States.
How old is the United States?
200 something?
Not even 200?
No, it's not even 300.
Oh, it's okay.
1780, I think, when we.
Right.
1783.
But.
Yeah, and you know the other thing that yeah look at that head I don't know is it are we on on visual too?
Yeah, video.
Yeah, we're on video.
Oh, so people can see yeah people can see this stuff look at that and That was before the Mayans I think Yes, I believe so Yeah, and I think we know very little about them.
We have the huge pyramid that's outside Mexico City, which I was just at recently That we don't really know anything about the culture that built that and the Mayans now believe you know, so Tikal and many of their other cities are are built in the To reflect Pleiades, seven sister stars, a clump of stars.
The Mayans believe they came from there, as do many other cultures.
It's interesting how this belief system.
They believe what?
That they came from Pleiades.
From another star system.
Yes.
Yeah.
But you know something else, Danny, that fascinates me is we have no idea what's gone missing.
We know that the Mayans had books.
And again, they're a glyphic type of writing, not an alphabet like ours, but very complex.
And there's four books that have been, that have been left.
So when the Spanish conquistadores came in, they destroyed most of their books because they thought they were pagan.
Right.
And then when the jungle took over, also already a lot of them have been destroyed because after 900, when the people abandoned the cities, the jungle took over.
And I know you can probably find some pictures of them.
Yeah, they just ate everything.
Yeah, so people thought these were just mountains.
They were actually pyramids covered with trees.
And there still are a lot of them like that.
Right.
And who knows whether, you know, I mean, it's conceivable that they had film or the equivalent of film, computers, lots of books.
If they had four books, then they probably had a lot more books.
We don't know what technologies they might have had that have been destroyed.
And if you think about it, if something should happen to our civilization now, some horrible catastrophe that basically wipes out the cities, and then a thousand years from now there'd be nothing left.
No.
The Hoover Dam, Stonehenge, maybe not Stonehenge, but the Hoover Dam would be here.
We know there was a guy who rode a horse.
His name was George Washington.
Yeah.
Just like what we find with them.
These things that are in stone, but there would be no cloud.
There would be no film.
There'd be no books.
It would have all been taken over by nature.
That's why we got to get a hard drive to the moon and save all of our information on it.
So in case a cataclysmic event does happen and a comet wipes out our civilization.
Are you volunteering?
No, I'm not volunteering.
But I'm sure NASA's probably thought about that, right?
You don't think they're going to put some sort of.
Hard drive up there, maybe a building and save the information, or maybe even some people, maybe some DNA.
I think you should go.
Oh man, I don't know.
That'd be pretty scary.
I don't know if I could do it.
What a view.
Think of the view.
The view has to be great, right?
You know, I was wondering the other day, why can't you see stars on the moon?
You know, when they're on the moon, you know, Edgar Mitchell talked about when he went to the moon.
He's like, when we went up there and did that mission, he's like, you couldn't see any stars.
The sky was just black.
I wonder why.
I knew Edgar.
He was a friend.
You knew Edgar?
Yeah.
Really?
Quite well.
And he lived in Florida.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I remember on the day Alan Shepard, was it Alan Shepard?
I guess it was Alan Shepard, who he was on the moon with that died.
He called me and asked me to meet him for lunch.
He was really torn up because he said, you know, they're all dying now.
And it was funny because he took me to his house and he showed me the camera and the watch and these things, you know, nothing was digitized.
They didn't have microchips.
So all the things they carried up to the moon with them were these heavy things encased, you know, they're just it's hard to fathom how they carried this stuff up there because it's so heavy.
The things that they had were so heavy, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Edgar was, you know, he then he came, you know, he had this incredible experience, yeah, on the moon and then came back and created the Institute of Nordic Sciences, yeah.
Well, when on his way back, he secretly did this telekinesis experiment with some people on Earth, right, with some tarot cards or something.
I forget what it was, some sort of like cards they were using to see if they could.
Transmit communication back and forth with telekinesis.
Yeah.
And then when they got back, all of them divorced their wives.
They had all kinds of crazy psychological issues.
They were really distraught when they got back for some reason.
And Edgar went through some very difficult times after that.
He did some pretty heavy drinking and he was a magnificent human being.
I think all of them did, right?
Had a huge impact.
I'm not sure of the numbers, but I mean, I remember he used to come to our house for dinner.
I lived in.
in the North Palm Beach area.
And he lived out near the Glades in that area.
And he used to come to our house.
And, you know, he went through a lot of difficult times.
Yeah, I think that whole experience had an incredible impact.
And, you know, here's a guy who was not woo-woo by any stretch of the imagination.
He was the right stuff.
You know, he was an aircraft carrier.
He flew off aircraft fighter planes during the Korean War.
Right.
And then he became a Navy test pilot and he wanted to go to the moon.
And he said, you know, there were so many good test pilots and people that he knew he had to have something that put him in a higher category.
So he went back to MIT and got a PhD in aeronautical engineering, I think, or something like that.
So now he has this PhD.
And so, you know, he gets selected because he had the physical qualifications.
But he also had the and like you said, and then there was this breakdown afterwards.
It was a tremendous yeah, emotional impact this had on these guys.
Yeah, a lot of people speculate that the reason, and even in that post game press conference after the moon landing, all those guys looked just like depressed, uninspired.
And a lot of people kind of claim that that's because it was all fake.
They never really went, they made up the story.
These guys thought they were going to go to the moon and they got briefed on some story.
And then there was even a guy who started up.
Started up some big movement about the moon landing being fake and he even wrote a book about it.
It was in like the early 70s.
I forget this guy's name, but he's basically the guy who started the whole fake moon landing conspiracy, or the idea that it that it was, that it was fake.
Um yeah, and there's a lot of big questions about it.
For sure I haven't done enough research, but well, Edgar became very convinced in Ets and Roswell.
I mean, he believes that you know we, That the government was withholding information about what they know about ET's landing here and being shot down.
So he believed in that, but he certainly believed that he was on the moon.
Right.
Right.
It's just like something happened, though.
Like it seems like there was something that happened to those guys that is just hasn't been explained to us or something that we can't comprehend.
Maybe it is just that.
Phenomena, that psychological breakthrough that happens when you're seeing the Earth from far away and you're seeing, I forget what the word for it is, but there's some sort of a psychological epiphany that happens when you're on your way back to the Earth and you're looking at the whole entire Earth, all the inhabitants of it, all the governments and the nations that exist there, and it's just this little ball and you're separated from it.
Yeah, and I don't think we have any idea what that does physically either.
The Overview Effect Connection00:04:42
The G forces, all the different things you go through, how does that impact your home hormonal system?
The overview effect, that's what it is.
The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts.
While leaving the earth from space, researchers have characterized the effects as a state of awe and self transcendent with self transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.
The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the earth from outer space are appreciation and perception of beauty.
But then why do you become a degenerate alcoholic and divorce your wife?
Unexpected and even overwhelming emotion in an increased sense of connection to other people and the earth as a whole.
Isn't that interesting?
An unexpected and even overwhelming emotion.
The effect can cause changes in the observer's self-concept and value system and can be transformative.
Yeah.
Isn't that interesting?
Did he ever talk to you about that when you guys no.
But, you know, as I'm reading this, it strikes me that some people go through similar types of things when they have deep shamanic experiences, you know, using some of the plant spirit guides, etc.
Yeah.
Yeah, this could definitely translate to drug experiences.
Well, what does that really mean?
What do those experiences do to us?
And so the indigenous people tell you, you know, it's the spirit of the plant.
It has nothing to do with the chemicals in the plant.
It's the spirit, and all plants have spirits.
So, you know, it's not just the ayahuasca, but anytime you go out in nature, you feel the spirit of all the plants that you're with, the trees, and talk to them.
Yeah, that's something that.
This guy, my buddy Paul Rosalie, talks about when he first went down there.
He's from Brooklyn and he went down to the Amazon when he was in his early 20s, I believe.
And he lived down there for years.
And the way he explained it was like when you get down there and you're walking through the jungle barefoot, after a couple days, something happens to you when you're disconnected from reality.
You're disconnected from modern society.
You don't have a phone.
You don't have a computer.
You don't have a radio.
Maybe you have a radio, but it's not with you.
And you're just walking barefoot through the jungle, you and your.
All you have is your body and your clothes.
Something awakens within us.
Like we have a deeper perception, deep, like more senses that become awake and alive within us.
The birds, the insects, all the little heartbeats beating around you.
You just have, you're more tuned in to the world and to nature.
And it's always like, yeah, the idea is that modern technology and these phones and everything that we are constantly surrounded with, Ubers and whatever it is, AI is.
basically sucking the life out of us.
It's dulling our senses.
Yeah.
Disconnecting us from reality.
You really realize that when you go down to a place like the Amazon.
I've taken in the past, since the mid-80s, I've been taking groups every year.
Now, this past year, two groups into the Amazon, two different times, never more than 15 people, a couple of exceptions.
And I have to say, there's been a couple of thousand people over this period of time, probably.
There was a time when I was doing seven trips a year.
I think everybody's come back changed in one way or another, and in a very positive way almost always, which doesn't mean positive things necessarily.
So I know a lot of people have come back and gotten divorced, and others have come back and gotten married, and some that have come back and quit their jobs and fired.
But it awakens a new sensitivity in you.
I think you're facing your own reality deeper, touching that Jaguar, touching the things that have.
Yeah, it's a new perspective, right?
Yeah.
kept us in this box, you know, of our belief systems.
And your belief system is kind of cracked open.
Like it's all about perception, you know, what is truth?
Right.
And just a few days in the Amazon living and hanging out with the people who live there, whose ancestors, you know, go back centuries, millennia living there, you get a whole new perspective and the relationship with the plants and the animals.
Yeah, it's similar to that overview effect.
Yeah, very similar.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
All right, well, let's get back to your progression through this in your life.
Cracked Open Belief Systems00:12:29
So, you were down there and you spent three years.
And then, what happened when you decided to come back?
Who did you start working for?
Did the guys from the NSA contact you?
What happened next?
Well, I was down there, and this man named Ida Grieve, who was a senior vice president at Charles T. Maine, this consulting firm out of Boston.
How do you say it again?
Charles T. Maine.
Charles T. Maine.
It's spelled C H A S, period.
T, period.
M A N N.
Oh, Chas T. Maine.
Yeah, but it's Charles.
I mean, that's what we call it.
Anyway, Maine.
We're using just Maine.
Okay.
What kind of company is it?
Consulting firm?
Yeah.
And it's been sold since then.
It was a private partnership.
Oh, look at that.
It's even on Wikipedia.
It was founded in 1893.
Engineering company.
Ooh, specialized in power generation, mainly hydraulic power.
Yeah.
Yes, and was bought by Parsons Corporation.
So they eventually dropped the name of maintenance.
They can't even, it's hard to find it these days.
In 1949, it began an association with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, working on projects relating to plutonium based nuclear reactors.
I was sent to Vienna to be the U.S. representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna.
Yeah, the company had a lot of influence in that area.
Wow.
No, they're.
Former Maine consultant, John Perkins.
Look at you.
Maine consultant.
An author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
I was actually not a consultant to Maine.
My title was chief economist.
But anyway.
With details and issues of third world debt and neocolonialism.
Great word.
Yeah.
And the company doesn't exist anymore.
It was bought out by Parsons, and then eventually they dissolved it.
Well, they dissolved the name.
They kept the clients.
Right.
We have about 2,000 employees of which about a percentage of them were partners and I was actually the youngest partner in the firm's history and it's a pretty secretive company.
We did a lot of our clients, a lot of work for the governments.
Our clients were World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Treasury, things like that and a lot of it was pretty Hush hush.
So, who started the company?
It says that guy named Charles T. Main back in the late 1800s.
Oh, oh, it was that long ago.
Yeah, so he started by the time I was there.
So, how did this company get so wrapped up in intelligence and the people running the show in the United States?
Only a few people in the company were involved in anything like that.
I was one of them.
But, you know, the company did a lot of real straight line engineering.
So, our job, like my job, was to, and I had a staff of up to 50 people, anywhere from 20 to 50, depending on when we're talking about.
Got a drag race going on outside.
Is that what that is?
I was afraid it might have been the helicopters coming in from these black helicopters.
Yeah.
They got better ways of ruining our lives now.
I don't know whether they're following you or me, but maybe it's both of us.
Maybe.
Two for one deal.
Yeah.
So anyway, my job was to identify countries with resources that our corporations want, like oil was one of the big ones back then, and then convince the country.
to convince the president or the minister of finance, whoever, to take a huge loan from the World Bank to hire U.S. engineering corporations to build big infrastructure projects like power systems, hydroelectric plants and the transmission distribution lines and highways, industrial parks, things like this.
These are things that benefited, first of all, the companies that built them, U.S. corporations that made huge profits off them.
building them, but also benefited a few wealthy families in those countries, including the president and his cronies, who owned the commercial and industrial establishments that benefit from that infrastructure.
But it didn't help the people.
In fact, the people, the majority of the people ended up suffering because money was diverted from education, health care, and other social services to pay off the interest on the loans.
And in the end, the loans couldn't be repaid.
And so the contract with the company to the World Bank or whatever establishment we were using as a banking institution was that their oil or whatever the resource was that we coveted was collateral on the loan.
So when they couldn't repay the loan, we go back, I'd go back, and now I'd be basically working for the International Monetary Fund, which is sort of the policing organization around all of this and say, hey, we'll restructure your loan.
But we own you.
But we own you.
And you need to sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies without many environmental or social regulations.
You need to privatize your water and sewage systems and sell them to some of our investors.
You need to let us build a military base on your soil and vote with us on the next United Nations vote against Cuba, for example.
So basically, we set these terms that were very colonialistic.
We were bringing them into our realm through the use of debt.
So, we were really creating an empire, but not through the military.
We realized after Vietnam that the military wasn't very effective at winning the hearts and minds of people.
And the way to do it was through economics.
Jesus Christ.
Hold on.
Let's wait a second.
There's a trash truck emptying a dumpster right outside of our door, and it's ridiculous.
I'm glad to know that's what it is.
It's not a tank pulling up.
Basically, you were just laying out.
The way you guys were colonizing the world and strong arming nations to basically bend to your will and let you use their resources for a discount because you guys basically conned them into some bad loan that they could never repay.
Yes.
And here's where the perception thing comes in.
We provided them with a really nice report, and that's where I came.
I wrote good reports.
I'd been an English major.
I like to write so I could write these reports.
And with all the statistics that my guys had produced.
But this report would say, if you invest all this money in building this infrastructure, hiring our companies to build this infrastructure, your economy will grow.
And we measured it by GDP, gross domestic product.
And it's true.
When you invest this money in that kind of infrastructure, the GDP grows.
And so the president would be happy.
He'd take it out to his people, take it to the news.
papers and say, hey, we've just taken out this loan.
Our economy is going to grow.
And it did.
And I believe for many years when I was doing this, coming out of the Peace Corps, I had a good conscience.
I thought I believed that I was doing the right thing because that's what econometrics show, that when you do this, your economy grows.
But what we didn't understand, what I didn't understand, is that GDP basically measures how well the wealthy are doing, how well the big corporations are doing.
It does not measure The prosperity of the average citizen?
No.
It's the overall country.
Right.
So it's a statistic that's warped in favor of big international corporations and the very wealthy and powerful.
But we were producing these reports Well, it's warped in favor of the country, right?
The GDP only reflects the country.
It only reflects the wealthy people in the country and the corporations in the country.
That's what it mainly reflects.
You're saying that they're mainly responsible for the largest percent of the GDP.
Yeah.
Well, here's an example.
Let's say there's three people in the United States that have as much wealth as half the rest of the population of the United States.
So if those three people last year made 10% on their investment and half the country lost 3% and everybody else remained the same, you can do a back of the envelope calculation, you would show a growth of almost 4%.
When in fact, only three people Made any money.
Everybody else either stayed the same or lost 3%.
Right.
And so these statistics are extremely, extremely deceptive, but they create this perception.
And then they put the country deep into debt, and then we take its resources.
And so it's a very, very clever and insidious system.
It's all based on a con.
So your chart that you would give them, showing them how their GDP would rise, how was that chart?
How did that chart work?
Did you basically show them the money that they were going to make, or did you basically manipulate the chart saying that the middle class, so the lower class, was going to be boosted by this?
How did that chart look?
The simplest answer to that is that you could chart other countries that are taking these loans.
You know, you could have a graph and you'd have a whole series of countries.
And the ones that had accepted these loans and built this infrastructure, their GDP had gone way up.
The ones that didn't get The loans, their GDP was still way down here.
That's the simplest explanation.
But we produced much more sophisticated models that went into each sector and showed what we could expect the industrial sector to grow by, the banking sector, the commercial sector, the agricultural sector.
So we created these very, very sophisticated, complicated econometric models that nobody but an econometrician could understand anyway.
But the World Bank liked them because they were all into that kind of stuff.
And the presidents liked the conclusion.
Presidents like the conclusion.
And incidentally, so the other thing was that these presidents or ministers of finance knew that if they didn't accept these loans, then the people we called the jackals would step in.
Felix Rodriguez?
I think Felix could be rated as one of those.
But yeah, these are people that either overthrow governments or assassinate leaders.
And usually they don't even need to step in.
So basically, I go into a president's office and I say, look, Mr. President, here's a few billion dollars I can offer you in a loan that you can use to really improve your GDP.
Or if you don't take this loan, I've got a gun in this other hand.
Now, I didn't carry a gun, but he and I both knew there were people behind me that carried guns.
And, you know, they'd overthrown Allende in Chile and Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo.
So we're talking about the CIA, CIA knuckle draggers.
CIA operatives.
And sometimes it's very convoluted.
So the CIA may actually use operatives from Argentina or some other place where they've got influence so they're not directly connected.
Right.
There are these people.
And the presidents of these countries know that they're there.
And so, you know, what do you do if you're a president?
I tell you, hey, Mr. President, I'm going to help you become rich and look really good to your people.
You'd be reelected and your family owns these industries and they're going to benefit from better electrical power and better highways.
Convolutional CIA Operations00:03:21
So I offer you this.
Or don't take it and you'll probably be thrown out of power and maybe taken out.
Well, first thing if I had half of a brain and I was aware of this kind of thing going on, I would avoid a meeting with you at all costs.
So, why would they take a meeting with you if they knew about this kind of shit?
Because you probably, if you're in that position and I come down and say, hey, I represent the World Bank, I'm going to help you and your family improve your businesses.
And they have no idea you're part of the United States.
No, they probably do.
But they know the World Bank is basically, you know, to a large degree controlled by the United States.
We just, The President of the United States decides who's going to be the President of the World Bank, and we are the largest investor by far in the World Bank.
We have a lot of influence there, as we do with the Asian Development Bank and all of those banks.
It's called the Washington Consensus, which is the Treasury Department and these various banks that get involved.
So, yeah, they know I'm connected, and they want to hear about these loans I can offer them because it's going to make them look good in office.
They're going to look good.
And they're not going to be around five or six or more like 10 or 15 or 20 years from now when we go back in and call in the loans and say, you know, you got to give all your oil to our people.
Yeah.
So when you're being initiated into this whole world, right, and you're being trained to do what you're about to do, how did that work?
How much did they tell you?
How much did they tell you about what you were doing and like what the ends were to this?
And how much of it were you ignorant to?
Well, so I was trained by this woman named Claudine who had a business card that she was a consultant to my company, Charles T. Main.
And she had all this information about what I wanted out of life money, power, and sex.
And she offered me all of them.
She did?
Yes, she did.
Yeah.
So she did the training in this apartment that she had on Beacon Street, very close.
So our headquarters were in Boston at the Provincial Center.
She not only gave me sex, but she taught me how to I was very shy.
I grew up in a boys' prep school.
My dad taught at this boys' boarding school in New Hampshire.
I spent my life with boys, and I was very, very shy around women.
And I really wanted not to be.
And Claudine knew this, and she handled it very, very well.
Wow.
She seduced you.
Didn't take much to seduce.
But she also taught me how to seduce other people because she said this could come in really handy sometime with the wife of some guy who's in a very important position that you may need to get information out of.
So I went through this training in this little apartment in Boston while I also had a a desk in our office building in the Prudential Center.
But she told me basically what I'd be called upon to do.
Also, she taught me the ropes of the business, which was to go to these countries and convince these guys to take these loans.
But it was all held out to me by her and by other people at Charles C. Meade that I was doing a really good thing.
Socialistic Movements Rise00:15:12
So I was doing what the Peace Corps is supposed to do, which is help countries, help people.
But I was doing it on a very big level because I was helping these economies to grow.
and I graduated from business school.
I've read all the reports the World Bank puts out and there was all this information that shows that when we invest money in these big infrastructure projects, hire U.S. corporations to build these massive projects, the economy grows.
Everything gets better.
And I believed it.
I believed it because the statistics show that that in fact is what happens.
So she said nothing about the jackals?
Well, she – no, she did.
I mean, she mentioned – Oh, she did.
She mentioned that, you know, sometimes presidents who – who balk at these sort of things, get into trouble with their constituencies.
And then, you know, we've also got to be careful because there's this red tide of communism that's sweeping the world.
Remember, this was at a time when we were convinced of the domino effect that if we lost the war in Vietnam, the communists would take over somehow.
Ho Chi Minh was going to move into Indonesia, which was my first assignment, to go to Indonesia and convince the Indonesian government to take over.
to play one of these games, to take this money, hire us to build a big power system on the most populated island in the world, Java, which also happens to have the biggest Muslim population of any place in the world.
Java, Indonesia?
Indonesia is huge.
I don't know whether today it's still the largest or not, but it was.
It was struggling.
Its president was flirting with the Soviet Union and China and us.
And we wanted to make sure they went with us.
So part of this whole operation ties in again with Felix Rodriguez and this belief, and it was very strong in Latin America, what's called the red tide of communism, was taking over Latin America.
Che Guevara and the Cubans were launching this campaign supported by the Soviets.
And we needed to stop that.
We needed to get these countries to buy into our system, to become part of our empire, if you will.
And so there was this driving force.
And I believed in that.
that idea.
And I believed that the best way to solve it was economics because we had proven that the military wasn't going to do it in Vietnam.
We were either losing or had lost the war in Vietnam.
And plus it just never seemed like a very efficient method to me of killing people in order to win them over.
So this seemed like a really, really good idea.
For many of the years that I was doing this, I really believed I was doing the right thing, as I think many people who still do these sorts of things believe that they're doing the right thing.
So she told you, even though you're going to do this and we're going to make their GDP better, we're going to help their people as well as help us.
help us if they don't agree, they're going to get the stick.
Well, if they don't agree, they're probably socialists or they're probably Soviet agents.
They're probably Soviet puppets.
And so they may need to be taken out.
And that was the justification for going after Allende in Cuba and Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and all of these people.
And we're only mentioning presidents, but we've also gone after a lot of ministers of finance and people lower down that don't make the news quite as.
quite as much.
So the idea being that if they're not willing to play our game, then they're probably Soviets or they're Soviet puppets.
And our press, if these people didn't play the game, our media machine would go to work to get out into the press.
Well, Allende is a Soviet.
He's this communist.
Well, Allende in Chile was a socialist, but he was not a Soviet communist by any means.
He was a socialist and he was democratically elected.
We took him out.
And we did the same thing in a number of other countries.
You know, this whole, it was such an, I fell for it.
But as I look back, how did I fall for it?
Like this idea that Che Guevara, with what, 25, two dozen people, idealists, poets, was going to take over Latin America.
And Cuba was going to support this.
And Cuba was having its own struggles.
And the Soviets were pouring some money into Cuba, but not a lot.
The Soviets weren't really that involved.
There was no real red tide.
There was they put their nukes on Cuba.
Yeah, they did.
And then they tried to put more, and Kennedy stopped them.
But when you think about it, we've got nukes surrounding the Soviet Union.
Oh, yeah, we do.
Hey, I can have a gun, but you can't.
Right, exactly.
You're the bad guy.
Yeah, part of that agreement for them to remove the nukes was they wanted us to remove our nukes out of Turkey, or was it Italy?
It was either Italy or Turkey?
I think it was Turkey.
But this whole concept of this red tide, what was really there was there was a very strong socialistic movement.
There was an anti-capitalism movement, an anti-U.S. movement, basically.
Nelson Rockefeller had really pissed people off when he was vice president.
He came to Latin America.
I was there at the time as a Peace Corps volunteer.
There were riots.
People did not want this man in Latin America.
He owned a lot of stores that were considered to be exploitative, grocery stores and other businesses.
His family owned businesses.
They also owned Standard Oil.
They were raping, especially Peru at the time, of its oil and moving into Ecuador.
So there was this very strong reaction against American imperialism.
And that moved people more and more towards socialism.
And so we then A lot of us believed, but this propaganda machine also went into effect of convincing our population and the population of many of these countries that it was driven by the Soviet Union, that the socialist movement in Latin America was not a socialist movement.
It was a Marxist Soviet movement, which it wasn't for the most part.
You think it was?
What did you think it was?
It was socialism, in other words, land reform, take land away from the big International corporations.
That was one of the things that a lot of these presidents wanted to do.
Raise taxes on the rich, give more land and more social services to the poor.
to the poor.
There was a movement in that direction which was called socialism.
But that's not what happened in Cuba, right?
I mean, people were literally hanging from the street signs in Cuba.
They weren't giving up their businesses to the government.
Yeah, Cuba was, I mean, that was a true revolution.
Yeah.
Yeah, but that wasn't happening anywhere else.
And Che apparently che was slaughtering people left and right, children, women.
Yeah.
I mean, that guy was the worst human being, the worst type of human being that could ever exist.
Well, he only had 24 people, I think, or 25.
With him in Bolivia when he got caught, you see, you're talking about slaughtering people in Cuba, yes, yes.
But by the time he reached Bolivia, which is where he was, he was Ronin when he did that.
I think, I think, um, Castro had given up on him then, he kind of like cast him out of Cuba and had uh separated himself from Jay, yeah, yeah.
But, but from our standpoint, we were selling the information, false information, that he was.
That he had a big force, that he was recruiting people, that he was part of this, he was spearheading this red tide of communism, which was a myth.
But I believed it.
Well, I mean, he definitely wanted to, right?
He may not have been in the threat that we made him out to be, but he was definitely, that's definitely what his aspirations were.
I mean, he went to the Congo and tried to, what did he try to do in the Congo?
He tried to start up an army in the Congo that ultimately failed.
Yeah, and Angola was used.
Angola was used as kind of a training ground for all his, he was in Angola.
Now, remember, so he was executed, I think it was 67, and I went in the Peace Corps in 68.
So by the time I'm an economic hitman in the early 70s, he's long gone.
Right, right.
But there was still this idea that the influence of the Soviet communism was driving the socialistic movement in Latin America.
There was a socialistic movement in Latin America.
But in my opinion, as I look back on it, it was probably a movement in the right direction.
And it was not a pro-Soviet movement at all.
It just happened to be it's socialism, not communism.
But the whole specter of Che was still very much lingering in the air as being obvious as evidence that the Soviets and Cuba had been very deeply involved.
In Latin America, right?
Well, I mean, the Soviets were funding the Iran or they were funding the Sandinistas, right?
Or was it the Contras?
I always forget who was on whose side.
We were funding the Contras, right?
And they were funding the Sandinistas, is that right?
They were funding the Sandinistas.
Right, yeah.
They were funding the Sandinistas.
That whole Iran-Contra fiasco.
That was a proxy war, right?
With the Soviet Union, because they were funding them and then we were funding the Contras.
We were selling arms.
We were selling arms and giving money to the Iranians.
But we were also down there, boots on the ground, training the Contras.
And Oliver North played a huge role in that.
The biggest commercial airport in Costa Rica today is Liberia, which was built by Oliver North as a huge military base.
Beautiful runway.
I fly in there.
It's bigger than San Jose?
Yeah.
I was just there last week.
In San Jose or Liberia?
I was near Liberia.
I was on that part of that.
I was near Nosara.
Oh, you were?
Which is where I teach every year.
Yeah.
Really?
You should.
Yeah, I teach at Blue Spirit, which is right there.
Oh, okay, cool.
It used to be part of Omega Institute in upstate New York.
Why do you teach down there?
Upstate New York.
Why do you teach down there?
Because they invite me to.
Oh, really?
That's cool.
Yeah.
I've been teaching there for years, ever since it first got started.
So you probably flew into Liberia.
No, I flew into San Jose.
I took a puddle jumper from there over to Cabano.
Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's it.
Yeah, I know that airport.
I was a little bit south, a little bit south.
Yeah.
Near Santa Teresa.
Well, the nearest, you know, actually the nearest airport would have been Liberia.
But so it's this huge. long runway where they could take the largest airplanes the US military had at that time that Oliver North oversaw the construction of this.
And then eventually it became a commercial airport, which it is today through World Bank financing.
All right, so where were we?
Your first assignment was going to Indonesia and trying to do a deal with the Indonesian head of state.
Yeah.
And who was that?
Sukarno.
Sukarno.
Okay.
And how did that one go?
Well, we were.
So there was this transition.
I always get those names confused.
Was it Sukarno who was overthrown and Suharto?
No, Suharto was overthrown and Sukarno took over.
Look it up.
Who overthrew who in Indonesia?
Sorry.
No, that's okay.
Let's get it right.
All right.
Those two names are so close.
It's just.
How do you spell Sukarno?
S U K A R N O. S U K A R N O A R N O.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Okay, General.
Here, I'll show it.
Oh, that's Suharto.
Okay, these are Suharto.
The military.
No, like.
General Suharto largely took control of the country and the Western backed military overthrown.
Yeah, so he overthrew Sukarno.
Okay.
And now you've got Suharto, but he's still.
There's this flirtation.
going on between the Soviets, the Chinese, the Americans, and our NATO allies to try to win the hearts and minds of Indonesia.
So Indonesia is seen as critical because Vietnam has fallen.
And the domino theory would say that so one of the next countries that Ho Chi Minh would move into would be Indonesia.
And it's a country that at the time was considered to be extremely rich in oil.
It had this large Muslim population, which was another benefit to gain from it.
It's in a very strategic location for trading routes through the Straits of I can't remember the name of the Straits.
But anyway, my job was to go in and my first job after I finished with Claudine in Boston and I go off to Indonesia to try to convince them to take one of these places.
large loans and use it to hire my company and other we didn't do construction.
We were an engineering company.
We did design and construction management.
So the big construction companies were ones like Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown & Root, Stone & Webster.
They would get the big jobs, but we would get our piece of the action.
And my job was to go in and convince the Suharto regime to accept these loans and hire our companies to do this.
This.
And in the process, we would be integrating them into our imperialism, if you want to call it that, into our sphere of influence, and keep the Chinese and the Vietnamese and the Russians out, or the Soviets out.
And it was really funny, Danny, because I had no idea what I was doing.
You know, I've been in the Peace Corps.
I know I can survive in these circumstances.
And now I'm going to be staying in.
Admitting to Slavery00:13:07
I'm flying first class from Boston to Indonesia.
I had to spend a couple of weeks in Australia at the University of Australia where they had a great library of Indonesian economics.
They knew more about Indonesian economics than the Indonesian.
So you were there to study?
Well, I went to Australia for a couple of perspectives, about 10 days, I think, and meet with some of the professors because I needed to write this report that would convince everybody.
So then I go to Indonesia for three months.
But I really have no idea how to approach these people.
And I remember one incident where I was meeting with this guy from the embassy who'd been dealing with Indonesians for a long time and all kinds of things.
And Claudine had kind of taught me the basics.
But now I've actually got to sit down with the Minister of Finance and others.
And I never actually sat with Suharto, but with people under him and convince them and talk to them.
about these economic terms that I really didn't understand too well.
And so this guy from the embassy, we're sitting at the bar at the Hotel in Indonesia, the Intercontinental Hotel, the best hotel in town where I'm staying, and we're at the bar, and he says, well, you know, John, if you don't really understand, just look at the guy and kind of roll your eyes and scratch your chin and say, oh, yeah, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Could you go into more detail?
Explain exactly what, you know, what do you mean by that?
And he said, just keep asking questions and act like you know something.
Act like you're really, really wise.
Kind of intimidate the other person into thinking that you really, you know, but you're interrogating him basically.
Right.
Yeah.
So it was great advice.
It worked pretty well.
And so I bluffed my way through the first month or so that I was there out of three and then began to catch on to how you do this thing.
So at what point, how long did it take for you to get.
intoxicated on this money and power that you had attained by doing this and swindling these people in high places?
It was intoxicating, but again, I go back to I didn't think I was swindling them.
I thought I was doing them a favor because I'd seen all the studies.
I'm still very naive.
I haven't, and this lasted for about seven years or so that I didn't see the light until I had an event after about the seventh year.
where I began to understand the nefariousness of what I was doing.
But for most of that time, and I was only in that job for 10 years.
So for 70% of that time, I believed in what I was doing, which made it all that much easier to convince others because I was convinced.
And all I had to do was produce these reports and convince the people that I'm going to give the reports to that I knew what I was talking about.
Right.
How did you discover that this was all a sham and this was all just some elaborate scheme to create some giant super empire for the US?
Most of the presidents and other top officials that I worked with bought into the system.
System.
They played the game.
There were two that didn't.
One was the democratically elected president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos, and the other was Omar Torrijos, the head of state of Panama.
They were both clients of mine.
Omar became, I'd like to call him a friend.
He was a party animal.
He loved to have barbecues with lots of rum and cigars and beautiful women.
Wow.
Did you get to join?
Yeah, yeah.
Nice.
And he was a great president, too, and he was really - he would not play the game.
At the time, he was very determined to get the Panama Canal back in the hands of Panamanians, which he eventually did with the treaty that he and Carter negotiated together.
And, you know, Panama is a small country, seems insignificant other than the Panama Canal, but he was standing up to - people called him the David standing up to the Goliath.
And he was famous all over the world.
Because of this, because he was taking this lead and he was very charismatic, very photogenic, good looking guy.
He took me aside upon several occasions and said, John, don't you realize what you're doing?
You're selling a lie.
This bullshit that you're giving about increasing GDP, yeah, that may happen, but that doesn't measure how the people are doing.
At one point he said to me, hey, why don't you – actually, the setting for this – Sorry, what country are we talking about right now?
Panama.
Panama.
Okay.
Yeah, Torrijos.
Torrijos.
Omar.
And so we're on this yacht, which, you know, somebody lent him, it wasn't his.
But we're on this yacht, and we're sitting in the cockpit of this yacht, this beautiful yacht, drinking margaritas or something.
And we're surrounded and smoking Cuban cigars.
And we're surrounded by these beautiful young women in their bikinis, you know.
Topless.
Yeah, I think probably at least one or two of them was.
And Omar says to me, he says, John, why don't you come work for me?
He said, you know, you won't make nearly as much money, but you'll feel really good about yourself and you'll have a lot of fun.
He spreads this out.
You know, look what we're doing, you know.
And he really laid it on the line to me what I was doing, the lie that I was selling the world and myself.
And so he really opened my eyes to this.
And then I started looking at it more and more.
And I was also dating a woman.
I was in the process of going through a divorce with my first wife.
I was dating a woman in Colombia.
She was Colombian and she also did business in Panama.
She had a little factory where she designed clothes and made clothes and she bought a lot of the materials in the free zone of Panama.
And her brother was a member of what would become FARC, you know, this famous organization, terror, we call it now it's the terrorist organization.
FARC.
Yeah, in Colombia.
And she also said, you know, you don't really understand what your country's doing.
So the big truck just went back into it.
Anyway, so she also really understood.
And she said, you know, you've got to stop doing this, John.
And I'm beginning to, my conscience now is beginning to bother me.
I'm beginning to really get at what we're doing.
And I'm looking into it more deeply.
And I said, yeah, but her name was Paula.
That's what I call her in the book.
That wasn't her actual name.
I said, but I can't get out.
They won't let me out.
My life will be in danger.
in danger.
And she said, no, I think if you just tell them you're tired, you want to retire, you'll never write about this or speak a word of it, and, you know, give it a try.
So she's putting pressure on me, and Torrijos is beating me the riot act of all of this.
And so I really began to understand that what I was doing was wrong.
Was Torrijo the first guy who said no?
Yeah, well, both he and Roldos about the same time were saying no, but I spent more time with him.
And Roldos was a lawyer and a former professor of law.
He was president of what country?
Ecuador.
Ecuador, right.
And I didn't really know him well.
He wasn't as easy to get to know, but he was kind of an introvert.
Got it.
And Torrijos was the opposite, so I got to know Torrijos quite well.
And anyway, so after about seven years of believing that I was doing the right thing, I'm suddenly discovering that no, I'm not.
And I'm lying to myself and I'm lying to the world.
But I didn't want to believe the truth that I knew now was the truth because I'm suddenly making a lot of money.
I grew up with the son of a teacher at a boys' prep school in New Hampshire.
We never had much money at all.
The house was given to us on campus by the school.
I ate with 200 plus boys in a big dining room from the time I was.
Four years old, never wanted for food, never wanted for a home, but we never had any cash.
And I felt very poor in some respects.
And here I was surrounded by wealthy, wealthy boys who would.
And then I went to that school for four years of high school.
And during Christmas vacation, I'd stay up here in the snow ridden New Hampshire town.
I had a key to the gym that my dad had, and I'd throw basketballs or practice tennis against the walls by myself.
My friends would be off.
You know, they'd come back talking about the orgies that they'd had in Paris or Buenos Aires or whatever.
I had this complex.
And now suddenly I'm flying first class around the world.
I'm wining and dining with presidents and I've got a lot of women available.
And so all these things that I'm making a really good salary and I'm a partner in this firm.
So I don't want to believe what I'm now coming to know is the truth.
Right.
I'm in denial.
And I think there's a lot of people in this business that would.
That are there today.
How many guys were there like you?
I don't know.
No idea.
Didn't know anyone else who was doing the same thing.
Well, I'd run into people.
We didn't, you know, yeah, I'd run into people who worked for other companies like mine, certainly.
I probably knew half a dozen to a dozen of these guys that I would run into, but we didn't.
But you weren't the only guy working for your company doing the same thing you were doing.
I was the only one writing those reports.
I had guys under me.
Oh, you were?
Okay.
And you had a president above me that I reported to, but I was in charge.
Wow.
And so, you know, for about three years, I continued to play the game.
And my conscience was getting the better of me, but it was increasing.
It was increasing.
And I was getting pressure from Paula in Colombia and getting pressure from Torrijos and others now.
I'm beginning to just, I'm asking questions.
I'm looking into this, but I don't really want to know the answers.
It was tough.
I was living in these two two worlds really.
And then I took a vacation in the Virgin Islands and I rented a small sailboat and I was with a woman who worked for me and was with me.
Dog.
Yeah, I know.
In those days it wasn't frowned upon quite as much as it is today, although we were pretty quiet about it.
But and we anchored the boat in Maho Bay, Francis Cove, on St. John Island, the Virgin Islands, and I rode the dinghy ashore.
and took a six-pack of beer with me, and I climbed up this hill to the Annenberg plantation.
It's an old, old sugar plantation that was in ruins on this hill.
And, you know, I'm sitting there looking, it's idyllic.
There's Bougainville, there's beautiful flowers, there's this old plantation, and I'm sitting there, the sun's setting over the Caribbean, and I'm drinking a few beers, and I'm thinking, God, this is the life.
This is so beautiful.
Suddenly I was struck by the fact that this this plantation was built on the bones of thousands of slaves.
And then I realized the whole American hemisphere is built on the bones of millions of slaves, not just from Africa, but from indigenous ones here, and we brought them in from China, whatever.
And then I had to admit that I too was a slaver.
I wasn't dragging people out of the forest and putting them in chains, but I was enslaving them with debt.
I was the modern form of a slaver.
And I get really pissed off at myself.
I remember this well.
I've written about it.
I picked up this big stick that I found there, slamming it against a tree, and I'm just really, really angry at me and the system and everything.
And at that moment, I made the decision I wouldn't ever continue with it.
And so a couple of days later, I go back to Boston, I go up to the president, my boss, and I resigned.
Enslaving People with Debt00:14:58
And of course, told me I couldn't and gave me, and I took another sort of little job being a consultant to him for a while.
You know, it was hard getting out.
It was very, very difficult getting out.
Plus, at this point, I wouldn't have a job.
So I lingered for a while around the fringes.
But I basically at this point made the decision.
And I never did any more of that international work.
So when I was a consultant to him, it was, I worked with the Burlington-Bermont Electric Department, building a wood fired power plant and I did some, some work with some of the utilities in in New York state, doing economic studies for them and some some other companies.
So I was doing, I continued to get paid and be part of the company and not talking about it.
But real quick, going back to Torrijo in Panama, what was the pitch to him?
And after the pitch, obviously it took a couple of years for you to have your epiphany on this stuff, but what ultimately happened to Torrijo?
Well, so when I went down, the idea was to get him to accept a large loan to build a huge, a couple of big hydroelectric plants.
Hydroelectric plants, of course.
And also transmission lines and distributions to modernize the electrical system of the country.
And he immediately said, no, I'm not going to do that.
He said, but if you want to work here, do small-scale projects, help our small fishermen and our small farmers, little irrigation projects.
and storage projects where the rural farmers can store their grains and can store their produce and help the small farmer.
If you want to do that, I'll let you in.
And I went back to my boss in Boston and told him this.
And he said, yo, let's do it.
We'll get in good.
We've never done this kind of thing.
It's not going to make any money for us.
But we'll work on winning Torrijos over.
And maybe eventually we'll get to do the other projects.
So we did that.
And I sent a number of the people who worked for me down there.
They spent time down there.
One of them included a woman who was a sociologist who did social studies.
Which he very much wanted.
It was totally different from anything Chelsea Mayne had ever done before.
It was successful from that standpoint and it endeared me to Torrijos.
But at the same time, he's telling me, yeah, all the stuff you're doing in these other countries and what you wanted to do here isn't going to help the people of these countries.
happened with him well he refused to to do anything yeah he refused to take the loans that i was And what was your guys' interest in Ecuador?
Oil?
Oil.
But so both of these guys died in very, very suspicious private plane crashes within less than three months from each other in 1981.
The first one to go down was Roldos, and he's in his plane with his wife and a couple of staff members.
The plane went down under very mysterious circumstances that all of Latin America impressed with was an assassination.
Of course, the US and everybody else denied that.
You know, if you're going to kill somebody, an airplane, a small plane crash is a really good way to do it because the smoking gun goes up in smoke.
It's hard to find any proof.
And Torrijos at that point got his family together and he said, you know, my brother Jaime Roldos of Ecuador was just assassinated.
I'll probably be next.
But don't worry about it because I've done what I needed to do.
I've successfully negotiated the Canal Treaty with President Carter.
And the Panama Canal is going to revert to Panamanians by the end of this millennium.
And less than three months later, almost exactly the same thing happened to him.
His private plane went down with his wife.
And I've since been friends with his daughter, who was 17 at the time and then became, well, I'm sorry, I'm going back to Ecuador.
This is the daughter of Roldos, Marta Roldos, who has become a friend and became a legislator in Ecuador.
And, you know, very, very intimately involved with this story.
And the family, what do they think about this?
What is, like, the daughter?
What does she make of the plane crash?
Does she think it was the U.S. assassinating him?
Yeah, she's very careful because she's a politician in Ecuador, so she doesn't want to piss off the United States.
So she's very careful about what she says in public.
What is the U.S.'s role in Ecuador and Panama now?
Did we ever successfully? implement any of these things after you left?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We built some big, there's a hydroelectric dam that I go by.
I take groups by every time I go into Ecuador, like I'm going to do in a couple of weeks.
And that was one of the ones that I financed.
A hydroelectric dam?
Yeah, got permission to build.
But what's happened now is the Chinese have taken over, basically.
So how do they take over?
From us.
From us.
Okay, so here's a story of how it happened in Ecuador, which is sort of a model for other places.
So when there was a period of 10 years in Ecuador, it had eight presidents.
I may have those numbers just a little wrong, but it's very much in that category.
I mean, just coups and counter coups.
And then in 2010, It's a Democratic elected president named Rafael Correa.
And Correa, who's also become a friend, I was just on a TV show that he produces out of Mexico now.
Oh, wow.
And he was president for 10 years.
He has a PhD from the University of Illinois in economics.
So he knew our system really well when he came into power.
And he got his master's degree, MBA, in Belgium.
He's married to a Belgian woman.
As soon as he came into power, one of the first things he said was, Ecuador does not, the Ecuadorian people does not owe all the money that the World Bank claims we owe them.
And he formed a commission to investigate that.
And the commission came to the conclusion that, I can't remember, and I may have the numbers long, but I think it was around $10 billion.
$10 billion Ecuador owes America.
Well, they owed more than that.
But I think, again, I'm not sure of the numbers here.
I didn't look before I came in here.
a large amount of money that Correa said we're not paying, that the commission said the people of Ecuador do not owe because these loans were undertaken during the military junta who ran the country back in the 70s when John Perkins was an economic hitman.
And the military junta or junta was put into control by the CIA and kept there by the CIA.
And they took the money.
The Ecuadorian people never had a say in it.
They were not elected.
There were three People around the country.
None of them have been elected.
So Correa said, We're not paying that debt.
And they used your book?
No.
No.
This was before I wrote the book that they came in.
Actually, it wasn't before I wrote the book.
Before they formed the commission.
It wasn't before I wrote the book.
And Correa endorsed the next book.
So maybe that did have an influence on them.
On the commission.
It may have.
I don't know.
But in any case, so Correa says, you know, Yeah, he said, my people don't owe this money.
The military guys who took the loan owe the money, but they're all in Miami or Sweden, Switzerland or someplace now.
They've left.
We can't get at them.
The World Bank probably owes the money because they never should have given a loan to us for these things.
They should have known better as a good banker.
And maybe John Perkins owes the money because he put the deal together.
Courier says this with total tongue in cheek and refused to pay the loan.
So immediately, Standard Poor's and Fitch.
and other rating agencies crashed Ecuador's credit standing.
So Ecuador became a pariah in the financial world.
They couldn't borrow any more money.
They were in Schittsville because they refused to pay their debts.
Well, most of these countries couldn't pay their debts anyways, right?
Yeah, but they said we're not going to pay.
Well, they could pay with oil.
They could pay with resources.
They could pay with resources, but Korea said we're not going to do that.
We're not going to do that.
Was there other ways they could pay?
Basically, that was it.
Just resources.
That's all you have to do.
And also, letting us build a military base, which we did in Ecuador, a big one before Korea.
So let us have a military presence there.
Yeah.
They're all these trade offs.
So let us have a military presence there.
Yeah, they're all these trade-offs.
Yeah, and sell some of your publicly owned government businesses to U.S. investors.
Vote with us in the next United Nations vote against Cuba, these kinds of things.
Right, vote with us.
Yeah, so Korea is they were just giving us the middle finger, though, and we didn't like that.
Exactly.
And the rating agencies downgraded them to junk credit rating.
So China steps in.
And China says, well, we'll help you out.
And they give Ecuador a loan for a billion dollars with very good terms, which Ecuador immediately started paying off.
So their credit rating goes up.
Then China gives them a second loan for another billion dollars.
And now Korea is buying into China.
And China is coming in and offering to build a hydroelectric plant, which they built a huge hydroelectric plant.
And now they're building big mines.
They're interested in copper, cobalt, and gold, which are all necessary for the high-tech industries.
They're building huge projects in Ecuador.
They're doing this all over Latin America and Africa.
And Mexico.
All over Latin America and Africa.
They are the number one investor in trading in many of the countries in these two continents.
They've really taken over.
So, how is their deal sweeter than ours?
A couple of ways that it's sweeter, or it appears to be sweeter.
Remember, perception controls reality, right?
So, one of the things is that they claim that they will not try to influence these governments in any way.
They won't try to.
get them to vote with them in the United Nations.
They do actually.
But they do it in a little bit more subtle way and they claim that they don't do it.
They won't try to influence whether they have a democracy or a dictatorship, which they don't.
They stay out of that pretty much.
They don't tell the country.
They don't go in and do the studies and say, like I did, invest this money in power systems or whatever.
They go to the country and say, what do you want to invest it in?
They go to the leaders of the countries and say, what do you want to invest it in?
We'll give you the money.
What do you want to use it for?
Then we'll help you build the project.
So they sweeten the deal that way.
That's a perception thing.
They saw what we were doing wrong and they felt like they were doing it.
Oh, they invited me to teach at an MBA program in Shanghai a few years back.
Who's they?
China.
The government?
Well, no.
It's an MBA program.
It's a university.
Okay.
So basically the government.
Well, there's a connection, I guess.
Yeah, a small one maybe.
But as soon as I got there, what I realized, what the students wanted from me.
These are students that mostly were Chinese.
There were some foreigners.
But most of them had been singled out to be the future leaders of China, the brightest.
What they wanted to learn from me is how to be a good economic hitman.
What were the mistakes I made and what were the successes I had?
I very quickly got the idea that I wasn't there to teach them anything about classical economics.
I was there to teach them about being an economic hitman.
They were picking my brains.
We were going on riverboat rides down the river outside Shanghai.
through Shanghai and so on and so forth.
And it was a lot of fun, you know, but I really got the message.
And so, but now one of the other things that they really have to sell to the world is the fact that they had economic growth of around 10% a year for almost 30 years.
They experienced that.
And when they came out of China.
Yeah, China.
And they brought over 800 million people out of poverty.
That's more than all of Latin America.
They brought them out of poverty.
They created a middle class.
During that same period, our middle class in the United States shrank from 60% of the population to 50%.
And you know that we have not had a real increase in the federal minimum wage since 1973 or 74.
In fact, it's lower today than it was in 70.
In relation to inflation?
In relation to inflation, the real – yeah, the real wage – I mean, the federal minimum wage is less than $8.
Now, who can live on that?
That's the federal.
A lot of states have much higher rates.
But that's the federal.
And so China goes in and they say, hey, look, you're the leader of this country.
It's a poor country.
We want to help you get out of poverty.
Same statements I made.
But would you rather have the American system that's really been a failure for its people?
And look at the government of the United States today.
It's dysfunctional.
They can't even decide on a budget for more than three or four months at a time.
Congress is dysfunctional.
Look at the politics right now.
I mean, I'm sure China's making a lot of haywit.
And they say, and they haven't increased their real minimum wage since the 70s.
And we, look at what we've done.
We've just brought our country out of the terrible time of the Mao, the Cultural Revolution.
And we've become one of the strongest economies in the world in less than three decades.
So, Mr. President of Ecuador or Peru or whoever you are, Which system do you think you'd prefer to have for your country?
Ours or theirs?
China's Exploitative Construction00:05:29
It's a big selling point.
And on top of that, what they say they really want to invest in is building this new Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative.
So we would go to a country like Peru and say, hey, if you buy into our system, you'll have most favored nation trading agreement with the United States.
We build a bridge between you, Peru, and the United States.
or you in Ecuador in the United States, you in Chile in the United States.
China goes in and says, we want to build not just a connection between China and your country, we want to help you build connections with all the countries around you and around the world.
So here in Peru, we're going to help you build a deep water port that you can trade with Africa.
We're not just interested in building a bridge between China and Peru.
We're helping you become part of the new Silk Road.
It's an amazing concept.
When I was in china teaching at this program, I kept thinking.
But China also happens to own all these other ports around the world that they're trading with, like in Africa and everywhere else.
Like their Belt and Road initiatives everywhere.
They're building ports, military bases, airports, roads.
Not many military bases.
Well, I mean, the place, a lot of the airports and I mean, they're building like train platforms and tons of roads, especially in Africa.
africa from what would i understand and embassies a lot of these locations that they're building can be very easily converted into military bases exactly exactly they're they're doing Panama, they own two huge container ports, one on each side of the canal.
They control a lot of the transport.
They don't control the canal per se.
Let's remember our military is very close to the canal.
We've got ships right off the coast.
But they control a lot of the commerce that goes through the canal.
Canal.
I mean, they have done a brilliant job, if you want to call it that, an extremely effective job of imposing their own form of imperialism on the world and pushing the United States aside.
At the same time, the United States got very bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and now in Ukraine and Israel.
And China stayed away from all of that while we were spending fortunes.
In the Middle East, they were investing heavily in Africa and Latin America and staying out of the military thing.
As you say, a lot of the facilities they built could be converted, but they're not military facilities.
And nobody wants a military facility on their soil from another country.
We didn't like it when the British had theirs here back in the 1700s.
No self-respecting Ecuadorian or Kenyan wants a foreign military base on their soil.
Right, right.
True.
And they're also, so in China, I've talked to guys on here, journalists that report a lot on Mexico and like the cartels that are going on and what the cartels are doing with the wars, the cartel wars in Mexico and stuff like that and trafficking.
And there is a heavy, heavy Chinese influence in Mexico working directly with the cartels.
In fact, they're sending chemists to Sinaloa, Mexico, to train them how to produce fentanyl that's getting trafficked into the United States.
And also, they have mines, lithium mines all over Mexico where they're actually, the Chinese are, they own the lithium mines and they're mining the lithium, but they're using the cartels as security.
Like they're literally hiring them, working with them to secure those mines where they're digging up all the stuff for batteries and stuff they're selling to us or whatever it is.
Yeah.
And in Ecuador, they've got huge mines they're building that and some of them are very poorly constructed.
I mean, they do some lousy construction work.
And they built this huge hydroelectric plant in Ecuador that was supposed to provide something between a third and a half of the country's electricity.
It has eight big generating units.
And it was built out in the very sensitive area of the Amazon, very ecologically sensitive.
And it was built on a fault line near an active volcano, Reventador.
Oh, wow.
As far as I know, at least as of a year or so ago, all eight units had never operated.
The generating house where their generators are kept was riddled with cracks and very poor construction.
I think they're working on improving that, but they've done some very sketchy construction around Africa and Latin America.
Isn't it true that a lot of the exploitative work that's going on in the Amazon, like the logging and the mining and the even leveling parts of the rainforest to turn them into cattle farms, that's all China.
Yeah, I can't speak specifically on some of those issues, but certainly I know that China has a huge influence in all those areas.
Global Economic Instability00:05:00
Yeah.
And the mining, particularly, where they really want to control the world's lithium and cobalt and the other rare minerals that are necessary for microchips and other high tech technology.
Yeah.
So how are we going to respond to that?
How is the U.S. responding to that now that China has basically figured out our flaws in this way of strong-arming other countries to gain their resources?
what's the next move?
I can't answer that.
I'm really concerned, Danny.
I think that the United States right now is so screwed up.
Let's face it.
We've got this.
Is it really, really more screwed up now than ever?
Or has it always been like this?
And it's just always the next news cycle that's making us feel like it's worse than it's ever been, from your perspective?
Well, I think it's more screwed up than it has been in my lifetime.
In terms of how it in unison relates to the outside world.
Now, I would say that going into Vietnam was a terribly screwed up policy, but it had the support, at the beginning at least, of both Democrats and Republicans and most of the people at the beginning.
That changed over time, particularly as the draft became stronger and stronger.
Kennedy didn't want it.
Well, yeah.
We don't think Kennedy wanted it, and look what happened to him.
I think we had a much more unified view of the world and we supported NATO and rightly along.
I mean, you can look at all those things as being screwed up too.
But when I say it's screwed up now, it's like the world looks at us and say the United States can't make any decisions and we can't trust them.
When Trump takes over power, he negates a lot of the agreements that were signed with previous administrations.
And Biden comes in and he tries to reinstate some of those.
So there's this constant flux.
And the world doesn't doesn't trust us as they used to.
When I say trust, they may have hated us, but they could see a consistent policy and many of their leaders were in cahoots with us, even if a lot of the people weren't.
So I think we're in a situation, and let's face it, the world is just a lot more dangerous now.
We have climate change.
We have horrible hurricanes.
Florida's under hurricane?
We have hurricanes all the time here, every year.
Yeah, but it's getting worse.
It's not getting worse.
It's the same.
Well, not according to the statistics, but there's more stronger ones more frequently now.
Really?
Yeah.
I feel like it's always been the same in my mind.
I'm expecting 27 this year, I think.
What?
Yeah.
Look it up.
There's one coming right now, right in the Atlantic.
I know.
I'm in a hurry to get out of here.
It's all you got until Friday.
You got time.
I look forward to the hurricanes because I get to surf.
Yeah.
Oh, that's a good point.
Yeah.
I mean, I lived in Florida for 30 years and lived through a few.
We chase the hurricanes.
We find out where they're going and figure out the best place to catch the waves.
You know what?
they say about people like that?
Yeah, I'm not right in the head.
Nihilists.
No, but in any case, I think that we are in a very difficult position vis-a-vis the Chinese right now.
We've made it easy for the Chinese to sell their marketing tools.
And I don't like that.
I mean, I'm very disturbed by that fact.
You know, another thing that's come in their marketing tools.
What do you mean by that?
Well, what I described before, that they've had economic growth of 10% a year for 30 years.
They brought 800 million people out of poverty.
And that's a good selling tool.
It's a good perception to present to the world that they are on the march.
Now, I think Xi, since the pandemic, he's gotten into a lot of trouble.
I think he's made some big mistakes.
Like what?
Well, closing down China the way he did.
The economy has never recovered from that.
And he's become more dictatorial.
He's now like Mao was in a way, the in-for-life kind of thing.
Thing he just got himself reelected you know elected, if you want to call it that.
I think he's made some big mistakes and I think that the door is open now if the United States wanted to go in and take advantage of those mistakes.
My concern is, i'm not sure that we're in a position where we're united enough or have enough willpower and the re and and commitment to spend the money to make that happen.
Yeah, it's always made me think, like the whole election cycle thing.
It seems counterintuitive because it's like yeah, that's.
Is that that's good for democracy that we have uh, eight years, eight years maximum term, four years minimum term for a president.
Corporate Power in Democracy00:03:28
But so much of that time is dedicated to getting reelected and the campaigns, and really nothing ever gets done.
Well, basically people in the House of Representatives, when they're for two years, they spend their two years trying to get reelected.
Yeah, exactly.
And you think of the money that's spent.
And it's just presidential campaign already, and we're not even through it yet.
Spent, I don't know, hundreds of millions, amazing amounts of money.
In democracy, I'm not sure about that, where corporations have so much power to influence politicians.
It's incredible.
Basically, we've legalized corruption in the United States.
So it's legal to own politicians, essentially own them, through campaign financing and offering them very lucrative jobs when they get out of politics as consultants or lawyers or lobbyists.
We corrupt politicians, but we do it legally.
It's just, it's on and on.
Isn't it true Rockefeller is the one who started that?
Started what?
Lobbying?
I don't know.
I thought I heard you say that in the podcast.
What I did say, what you may be thinking of is John D.
So after the United States became a country, one of the early things that the Congress did was to make sure that we wouldn't be in a position that we'd been in with the East India Company that controls so, that really a lot of the Revolutionary War was implemented against.
a huge corporation which was tied in closely with the royal family of England.
The Boston Tea Party is the most famous example of coming up against that company, but that was a huge problem.
Congress decided that no corporation could get a charter to be incorporated unless it proved that it was going to serve a public interest, such as building highways or bridges.
The corporate charter only lasted for 10 years.
After 10 years, they had to go back and demonstrate that they had, in fact, served a public interest and would continue to do so.
And no corporation could buy another corporation or sell the stuff to another corporation.
And that law stayed in effect for about 100 years.
And then John D. Rockefeller went to both the states of Delaware and New Jersey.
I can't remember which one he went first.
I think it was Delaware.
And he said, I'm building an oil company.
You guys have got oil on your land.
And an oil company can't be held back.
by just 10 years.
We're long-term.
You've got to change.
You've got to give me a charter that lasts much longer than 10 years.
You've got to allow me to buy the smaller oil companies that aren't doing so well so I can buy their equipment and I can expand this oil industry.
If you do that, I'll pay good taxes in Delaware and New Jersey.
You representatives can give yourself a better salary.
It turned around and that turned everything around.
So that law that had been standing for about 100 years suddenly went down the tubes and we've just gotten worse and worse and worse with Citizens United and so many other laws that give corporations so much power, you know, the rights of an individual but not the responsibilities of an individual.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Volatile World Situations00:08:58
I wonder what other countries think about us when they see what's going on with the election mania and the circus show that's going on, you know.
My friends in Latin America, and I've spent seven weeks there this year so far, and I'm going back again in August, even before this last debate.
But they were like, you know, the United States is the biggest banana republic in the world, but you don't have any bananas.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
Well, it's hilarious and it's sad.
It is sad.
It's very sad.
As an American whose family fought in the revolution and every war since, except the one in Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm really sad by what's going on.
And, you know, we've got Russia re emerging and we've got China, you know, taking over in so many respects and the two of them having alliances with each other and bringing in Iran and North Korea.
It's very disturbing.
What do you make of the whole Ukraine Russia conflict and everything that's come out with, like, all the corruption going on in Ukraine?
and the government ties, like the ties with – I know Biden was doing lots of business and Hunter Biden was doing lots of business with companies in the Ukraine, and Ukraine's just been like the middle of this tug-of-war between Russia and the US forever.
Yeah, I don't have any inside information.
I hate to speculate on things where I don't have experience.
I will say that I was speaking at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
I shared the stage with Putin back in 2017 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
And I was really impressed with Putin.
He made some very good points.
He said, you know, let's face it, all the countries of the world, we need to come together to stop climate change and to deal with the nuclear putin said that?
Yeah.
And to deal with the nuclear proliferation problem and income inequality around the world.
He said, those are the big issues.
We need to come together.
And he was convincing.
But, you know, I'm also and I hear what you're saying.
I think we insulted him.
I think we missed some opportunities to bring Russia into NATO.
He made overtures.
He wanted to join NATO.
I know, I know, I know.
I think we made some big mistakes.
That's the water under the dam.
But he was also the only reason NATO existed.
That was the selling point for NATO was him.
Exactly.
At that same conference, he says, you know, NATO was formed to combat the Warsaw Pact.
He says, there is no Warsaw Pact anymore.
Why do we need a NATO?
But I'm also concerned that I think something's, you know, he obviously was extremely aggravated and probably he was driven to that to a large degree by our policies.
And yet I think at this point, I'm very concerned that if he takes over Ukraine, he won't stop there.
Really?
That he'll move into other parts of the world.
You know, he's clearly stated that he thinks one of the biggest mistakes was the ending of the Soviet Union.
So I don't know.
Like I said, I don't have any inside information.
I've never worked in Russia or Ukraine or that part of the world.
So it's pure speculation on my part.
I don't like to speculate.
But I think what we all have to be terribly concerned with is how potentially explosive that situation is.
And we could say the same thing about Israel and Gaza and Hamas and Hezbollah.
We're dealing with some extremely volatile situations right now in the world.
Yeah, and there's also the influence of other countries in our country, too.
Like when you talk about lobbying, you talk about the Israel lobby.
John Mearsheimer talks a lot about the Israel lobby and how much influence they have over our politicians.
And there was a guy who just did it.
I forget his name, Congressman.
I forget which.
which state he was from, but he just did an interview, I think, with Tucker Carlson, and he was talking about AIPAC and their influence on the congressman.
And basically they all have like AIPAC handlers.
And I think Trump actually just got a $100 million donation from the Adelson, Adelson, Mariam Adelson.
Right.
How many countries have that much influence in their government from other countries, right?
Like how many other countries have their political system completely corrupted by a completely separate country?
That uses them to their advantage.
Well, that's colonialism, isn't it?
Yeah.
And of course, at the same time, we've got all the problems with social media influence from Russia, China.
Yeah.
And we're probably doing the same thing in those countries.
I don't know.
Probably.
But it's a.
I always wonder how much shit that we see, how much shit, like either the presidential election, whether it be them. doing this whole dog and pony show with Trump, dragging him through this crazy trial,
or whether it be with the COVID stuff or anything you see in the news, how much of it is just an intentional distraction for the people in power to keep their power and just to keep the people dumb and to keep the people distracted by nonsense so they can keep their agenda or even the UFO stuff, right?
Yeah.
How much of this stuff is just intentional distractions?
I'm reminded of that movie Gladiator.
Remember the movie Gladiator?
Was that before your time?
No, I remember Gladiator.
With Russell Crowe.
And I remember at one point these senators are, and I'm paraphrasing here, but the senators are sitting around basically saying, Aren't the gladiatorial events a great distraction from what we're really doing?
You know, and I think there is an awful lot to be said for that.
distracted their citizens from what they're really doing with high-flying concepts.
We're fighting this communist, we're doing this, and oh, just watch the next football game and enjoy.
Don't think about these things.
So yeah, there's incredible distractions going on.
And some of it's very much in the public arena and the political arena.
But there's all kinds of ways to get us to not think about what we're really doing.
Yeah.
And so many things are coming to light too that just show like all the lies that are happening.
Like, even with the recent, you see what happened with Fauci just recently when he had to go up in front of Congress and get questioned.
And they basically found out they got the audio recordings of the phone calls.
Fauci is basically, they had a phone call with him.
I forget exactly what he said, but he said something like, they won't be able to get a job without their vaccinations.
No vaccinations, no jobs.
They're going to be forced to do it.
I don't give a fuck.
Like, something along those lines.
And he denied ever saying that.
I guess I didn't hear that.
Yeah.
But so you think that was - is the supposition here that it was dubbed?
That he didn't actually say it?
No, he did.
He definitely said it.
He definitely said it.
I mean, his claim was that that wasn't his intention.
What he actually said is not what he actually meant.
Right.
But I mean, that does raise another point that, you know, we could probably get a recording of you sitting there saying, ah, I'm an agent of the Chinese government.
Right.
No, I don't think I've ever said that.
No, no, no, but with modern technology, we can dub it into something.
Oh, you're saying AI could do it.
Yes, AI can say it.
But Fauci admitted he said it.
Yeah.
I don't know about Fudge, but I mean, that is another thing that concerns us.
For sure.
Yeah.
Deepfakes, AI.
Turn off these cameras.
I don't want to be put in this position.
Yeah.
The deepfakes.
Yeah.
The deepfakes are AI.
AI is crazy, man.
What's going to, how is AI going to change everything?
You know, and with the problems, like the modern problems that we have in society today, like we think about war, conflict, climate change, whatever it may be, like is all that going to matter once we hit the singularity?
Once we hit the singularity, the AI is going to figure out how to keep the planet sustainable.
Let's hope so.
If you know, it is going to be another huge problem is going to be when AI figures out how to get, how to make people live longer and to make people live hundreds of years, you know, and then all of a sudden our population booms.
We've already got that problem, you know, Social Security is having a hard time, you know, how, you know, we've got that problem now, you know, we live too long.
Writing an Expose Book00:05:01
I'm about to turn 80.
Really?
Wow, you look great, man.
I don't want to say that.
I'm in great shape.
Yeah, you are.
Good for you.
You want to go a few rounds?
No, I don't want to go around a few rounds with you, man.
You've been spending a lot of time in the Amazon, Central America.
I practice martial arts most of my life, and it stays with you.
You stay in shape.
Everybody out there, as you get into shape, stay in shape because it really does make a huge difference.
I don't think I told you about the time I was poisoned.
No.
But there's an interesting story about.
Is this when you were writing your book?
Yeah, an interesting story about being in shape.
I wanted to ask you about that, too.
I brought that up because about being in shape.
thing.
Okay.
What happened when you decided to write this book and how did you go about writing the book?
Yeah.
So initially, after I got out of the business, I started writing a book that I wanted to be an expose, that I wanted to interview other people that had jobs like mine and the jackals, because I know quite a few of them.
And I started contacting them and almost immediately I got anonymous phone calls threatening my life and that of my infant daughter, who's now in her 40s, but yeah, she was an infant.
And I was terrified because I knew what these people can do.
I'd seen it.
And at that time, I had just left the job that Chelsea made.
And I get invited out to lunch by the president of Stone & Webster Engineering Company, huge engineering company, also out of Boston.
And he takes me out to lunch and he says, you know, you have a great resume.
You were chief economist at one of our rival companies.
And I want to use your resume.
in our proposals.
I want to have the opportunity to do that.
You don't have to do much work for us.
Maybe I'll ask you to fly a private jet down to Rio de Janeiro once in a while, have dinner with some people or something.
You don't have to do much.
Just let me use your resume.
And I'm prepared to write you a check tomorrow morning for $500,000.
Half a million dollars as a consultant's retainer.
Now, this is in the late 80s.
Half a million is nothing to sneeze at today, but it was a lot more back then.
It's a bigger sneeze.
Quadruple, probably.
And then he says, Just don't write the book that I know you've been working on.
So I'm getting exactly what I had dished out to presidents and others.
I'm getting, okay, in this hand, I've got half a million dollars for you.
You don't have to do much to earn it.
Just here it is.
Oh, and we're also going to pay you a monthly fee.
In this hand, the jackal has been calling me, threatening my life and that of my daughter.
Getting exactly what I'd been dishing out, and I know this.
What do I do?
What would you do?
What would you do, Danny?
What would you do?
Yeah, take the money and run.
Yeah, so I did.
I took the money, and you know, in my own defense, I'll say I didn't go out and buy fancy cars or a big house or something.
I reinvested into going back to the Amazon and offering and forming a nonprofit called Dream Change to help the people of the Amazon protect the forest where I had lived and that had such a huge impact on me.
And I started writing books about them.
So I wrote five books on shamanism and indigenous people.
Stoner Webster was fine with me doing that.
In fact, they They were happy that I'm writing books about things to get my name out there more and associated with them.
But I didn't write the book that they told me not to write.
Okay.
And then many years later, my contract with Stonewall Webster's over.
New presidents come into Stonewall Webster who knew me and didn't like me at all, didn't want me around.
We had a history.
And so I'm in the Amazon with a group of people on 9-11.
And when we when I got home, I was living in Florida at the time, I flew up to New York to ground zero.
And as I stood there looking down into that pit, I knew I had to write about what I had done, which doesn't say there's a direct connection, but it just struck me that I needed to write about what I'd done.
But I made the commitment at that point that I wouldn't contact other people.
I wouldn't write an expose.
I would write a confession, my personal story.
And I wouldn't let anybody know I was doing it because what got me into trouble before is I started contacting people.
So, you know, if you're going to be a whistleblower, don't warn people you're going to blow the whistle.
Blow the whistle and that makes sure you get all your ducks lined up.
And so I did that.
I wrote the book and it was interesting that it was rejected by 39 publishers.
I get 39 rejection letters.
That takes a lot of touching a lot of jaguars.
Commitment to Confession00:05:19
Yeah.
And then one publisher bought it and it went to the New York Times bestseller list very quickly and stayed there for like 70 some odd weeks.
Now weren't you worried about getting whacked?
No.
At that point, I figured it's my best insurance policy.
Even once I got it in the hands of getting it published, you mean?
Yeah, but even getting it in the hands before it got published, even when I was being rejected, it's out there.
There's no stopping it now.
And if something strange happens to me, it's going to sell a lot more books.
Shoot me now and see how many books get sold.
So now I figured that was my best insurance policy.
And I think I was right, except a few months after the book was published at the end of 2004, in early 2005, I was invited to speak at the United Nations.
And I fly up to New York from Florida.
And before, I'm doing a lot of interviews.
A lot of interviews.
And I have a publicist who works for a publishing company.
And there's this one guy who wants to interview me, but he doesn't have very good credentials, so we've been putting him off.
But finally, my publicist calls me, and she says, you know, he's offered to pick you up at LaGuardia and to drive you to where you're going to stay tonight, which is a friend's house, an old friend's on Central Park, and he'll take you out to lunch.
That'd probably be better than taking a cab.
Why don't you do it?
So I did it.
And we go to this restaurant, Italian restaurant, and I order it, and the meal comes, and I go to the restroom and eat the meal.
And this guy was was lame.
You know, he'd just, terrible journalist.
He'd ask stupid questions, not like you.
Thank you.
And a couple hours later, I'm in my friend's apartment and I had lost over half the blood of my body through internal bleeding.
Just gushed out of me.
And my friend happened to be a producer at Tom Brokaw's NBC Nightly News.
And she had a good friend who was a very well-known gastroenterologist, Pavarotti's gastroenterologist, calls him around 7 o'clock at night at home.
And I get on the phone and I'm shaking.
I've gone into shock.
And he says, you've got to get to Lenox Hill Hospital.
Don't call an ambulance.
Take a cab.
The ambulance is too slow.
I'll call ahead and get intravenous set up for you.
Wow.
You'll be dead in two hours.
So I go to this hospital and to make a long story short, they ended up taking out 70% of my large intestine, cutting it out.
Thought much about it at the time.
I was just trying to survive.
And as soon as that happened and the word got out, and I obviously had to cancel the talk at the United Nations, my publicist did, and sent word out to everybody that I had these interviews set up with.
You know, I can't come.
He just said, and people kept pouring in with email and phone calls saying, Don't you realize John was poisoned?
Never had occurred.
Well, I wasn't thinking.
I'm suffering.
I wasn't thinking.
So I asked my gastroenterologist, and he says, well, it's possible, but we can't prove one way or another because as soon as we take something like that out, we incinerate it.
Oh, no.
So the evidence is incinerated.
But that guy disappeared.
All my publicist had was his email address, and there was no response anymore.
He basically disappeared.
There wasn't any point in pursuing him because they had no evidence anyway.
You never could get a hold of him.
Nothing like that.
No.
So that's pretty much in itself.
That's proof, though.
It sounds pretty.
Pretty suspicious, yeah and uh.
And then I called while I was still in the hospital.
I called this friend of mine who, who was a jackal, who's been in this business, and I said, hey, do you think that?
Um, what do you think?
And and he said well yeah, I think it's.
It probably was an assassination attempt.
I said, who do you think did it?
And he said well, definitely not the Alphabet agencies FBI CIA, not them, not them.
He said if it had been them, you wouldn't be talking to me.
And besides that, they don't want to see you dead because that's going to sell books, If something, if you die from it, he said, it was true, already book sales have gone, spiked again.
He said, they're not too worried about books.
It's just the book is out there.
It's out there.
Killing you is not going to stop the book from being out there.
Right, the book's already done.
The book's done.
It's out there.
And he said, and I said, well, who then?
And he said, well, I think it was, my guess is that it was a fanatic who either hates what you did as an economic hitman or hates the fact that you came clean on it.
And I said, well, do you think I need to worry about him coming back?
And he said, no, I don't think he'll show his face again.
You know who he is now.
And he's scared.
These guys are cowards.
He did a cowardly thing and he probably feels that he scared the shit out of you and he doesn't, and he's not going to show up.
So he said, I don't think you need to be, maybe there's others out there, but he said, you know, you can't spend your life being worried about such things.
Pandemic Economic Tactics00:15:59
So, but it was a, you know, it was an interesting experience.
Oh, how I got into this, I said physical.
You know, so my doctor said, you know, one of the reasons you came through this so well, and, you know, I'm well now.
is that you were in really good shape and that served you well.
Your heart was strong.
Your body was, you know.
How old were you?
So this is 2005.
I was born in 45.
So I was 60.
Oh, wow.
Is that right?
I think so, roughly.
I'm not the guy to ask.
I'm an economist.
You know, economists can't do math.
We assume.
We assume.
45, 55, 65, 75, 85, 05.
50 years.
Yeah, 50.
Wow.
No.
How did you know these jackals?
And who were these jackals?
I wasn't 50.
I was 60.
Okay.
I was 60.
Well, this particular jackal, this is a funny story, too.
So I practiced martial arts.
What kind of martial arts?
Well, my degrees are in taekwondo.
Oh, okay.
But my instructor, who was Korean, Up in the North Palm Beach area, you know, we did a little of everything.
We did a lot of street stuff too.
And I'd gone on before then.
In any case, one day this guy comes in and says he'd like to join the school.
He's a black belt.
And my instructor says, okay, so put in a uniform.
Let's see how you do.
So he gets out there.
And then at the end, at the end of class for the last 10 minutes or so, we usually did sparring, which is called low contact sparring, without heavy gear.
You only tap somebody with your foot.
You kick them.
You know, you black.
Belts have to learn that discipline, and I'm the senior black belt in the school at this point.
I line up opposite this guy, and we start to go at it.
I get in a little bit of a hit, and he just comes at me like gangbusters.
I know at this point, I'm not going to hit this guy, I'm defensive.
I'm scared of him.
And anyway, after that, but I hung in there, you know, we had a good, he's probably good about it, and he joined the school.
we got to hanging out together and going out to lunch afterwards.
I used to practice in the late morning, and so did he.
And we got into this conversation about the Seychelles and the Indian Ocean.
And he had been part of a team that went in from South Africa to assassinate the leader of the Seychelles.
Really?
Yes, Francois.
I can't think of his last name right now.
That's right off the coast of Madagascar, right?
Yes, right in that area.
And so a squad had come out of south Africa that he had been on.
He was what?
Who was he working for?
Well, he was a private firm.
He was a mercenary.
CIA?
No.
Well, the CIA may very well have had something to do with that, but he didn't directly work for the CIA.
He worked for a guy named Jack Hoare, who would have been movies made of him, who was a very well-known mercenary in Africa.
Anyway, and I had been recruited.
I'd been actually at one point ready to go into Seychelles and try to corrupt this president.
And we decided he couldn't be corrupted, so they sent in a team to take him out.
But they failed.
And anyway, so we get into this conversation at lunch about the Seychelles, and I realize, oh, yeah, I know who you are.
And he knew that I knew who he was, and we became friends.
So when this thing happened, and I'm in the hospital, he lives in Florida.
I call him and we have this conversation.
The guy, despite his career, was a really good friend and very compassionate.
When I was recuperating, he made sure he'd come by and make sure I got up on my feet and walked like I was supposed to and got all the exercise.
That's interesting, man.
And he had a belief system.
He grew up in Beirut.
He was an American citizen.
His dad was an executive with Middle East Airlines.
And he grew up in Beirut and he'd been beaten up by the PLO.
when he was about 18 years old and went through a lot of shit with the PLO.
He hated communists.
He was rather a racist, too.
He went to South Africa and trained with the SAS in South Africa, a very elite force there.
In Zimbabwe and South Africa, both of those countries, he was very involved in some of the fighting there and had this exclusive training and really excelled at what he did.
an expert marksman, a explosives expert.
He knew the stuff.
Plus a damn good martial artist.
Wow.
Yeah.
And he said that if it was CIA, if it was the U.S., they would have succeeded.
They would not have failed.
They would have followed the alphabet.
And then he said they'd have no motive.
They don't want you to be more famous than you are.
And this did sell a lot of books.
The fact that I was in the hospital.
It did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And even today, you know, if they do, how much, how much influence or how much fuckery do you think happens inside the United States from these three-letter agencies?
How much influence do you think they have on like the media or like on domestic politics?
I think they have a lot.
A lot.
And I think it's not always clear who has it.
So these agencies are massive, you know, and there's empires within the empire.
So to speak.
Yeah.
Well, the U.S. government's the biggest organization, company, whatever you want to call it, in the history of the world.
Yeah.
There's like millions of employees.
Yeah.
So it's really hard to paint them with a broad brush.
Yeah.
And all those, I mean, sometimes I think they're competing with each other, some of the agencies within the agency or the departments within the agency.
So, you know, I think, you know, some of them may be, you know, fighting the, The DEA, we talked earlier in the Mexico situation, and some of them may be supporting the DEA.
I think it's a very complex issue, and I don't know.
I don't know that anybody knows.
You think about who's the director of the CIA, who's the director of any of these agencies.
They're mostly appointed by presidents.
You're president, you appoint me as head of the CIA.
Are the career Deputies and other top people, and they're going to share their most important secrets with me?
Hell no.
They don't know me from a hole in the ground.
I may have passed security tests and so on, but they don't trust me and they know I'm only going to be there for a few years and the next president is probably going to replace me with somebody else.
So why would they share their information?
So I have some control over some of the general policies, but as to what really goes on, the director of the CIA doesn't know, I believe.
Again, this is supposition on my part.
Yeah, it seems that the media, And the control of information in the U.S. is very much that is very much under control.
And it's very much like just like the congressmen are, the media is very much corrupted by organizations.
Don't know what the names of those organizations are.
And advertising dollars.
Oh, huge, huge.
You know, that really showed its ugly face during the COVID pandemic.
I have a guy who followed me around for several days after confessions came out in the New York Times.
a reporter who ended up writing a major article about the book.
He followed me around.
I was in Chicago giving a bunch of talks at different institutions in Chicago.
He spoke fluent Spanish and spent a lot of time in Latin America, as do I.
I said to him, how come you're not really writing the truth about so much of what's going on in Latin America?
You know damn well that the policies that we're saying and some of the countries that we're labeling as as dangerous and so on and so forth.
Why don't you write about these things?
And he says, well, John, you know, he says that the New York Times prides itself on not censoring its writers.
I'm not told what I can't write.
I can write anything I want, but my editor has discretion as to what he publishes.
And he is under the influence of the publisher who is under the influence of all of our advertisers.
So, you know, I've got to be very careful that I don't write something that's going to piss off.
The publisher or some of the advertisers.
And he says, if I don't publish frequently, if my editor doesn't accept my articles, then I'm going to lose my job.
So he says, theoretically.
Yeah.
Well, I had a guy on here, Jack Murphy, who's a former ranger.
He got out of the military and he decided to be in journalism and write on some of the stuff that's happening within the military and the wars and stuff like that.
And I'm sorry for people that are listening because I've told this story at Nazim on this podcast.
So I'm repeating this for like the 10th time.
But, anyways, he was working on a big article for about a year after the Ukraine war kicked off, and he had a bunch of sources that were former CIA who were basically telling him that the CIA was using a NATO spy service, a NATO ally spy service, to conduct sabotage inside Russia, like lighting ammunition warehouses on fire, blowing up train tracks.
It's like that because the CIA wanted plausible deniability.
They wanted to send their own people in there to do this stuff.
And he was working with one of these.
top three publishers in the US working on this article with one of the editors at one of these publications because they wanted to publish it through the whole process, back and forth, very open line of communication between them.
When it came time to publish the article, the editor says, okay, well, we've got to run that.
I've got to run this by the deputy director of the CIA.
They get on a three-way call with my buddy Jack, the editor at this giant publication, and the deputy director of the CIA, three of them.
And the guy said, the guy at the CI, I forget who the deputy director was at the time, this would have been about two years ago.
He says, this is absolutely false.
He goes, This is untrue.
So Jack assumes, Okay, we're just going to add a line at the end of the article saying that you deny any of this being true.
Yet I still have dozens of sources that say it is true.
Well, no.
The editor of this publication has an off the record agreement with CIA saying if they do deny anything, it's off the record.
And he kiboshed the whole article.
So they have ways of doing this.
That's not just blatant in your face.
They can't just say, Oh, no, we're not going to.
It's not like China where they're going to say, We're not publishing this because this goes against our empire or what we're doing.
They're basically saying the way the CIA does it is they're going to say, if you publish this stuff, A, we deny it.
B, if you publish it, you're going to put lives at risk.
You're going to put our operators' lives at risk, our military people's lives at risk.
So you're going to be doing a tremendous disservice to the country and you're going to be responsible for innocent lives.
Right.
Do with that what you will.
Yeah.
End up like WikiLeaks, like Julian is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
I mean, that guy.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we have all kinds of ways of.
The most recent thing was when Trump paid the National Enquirer or one of Trump's agents not to publish the article that they'd bought from Stormy Daniels.
Remember that?
So the publisher paid Stormy Daniels to buy the article and then trashed the article.
I mean, that kind of thing goes on all the time, too.
Republicans, Democrats, the politicians also have a lot of power that way.
Yeah, there's many ways toward corruption.
Yeah.
Corruption comes in many forms.
And another thing I wanted to bring up, when it comes to the economic hitman tactics that you used when you were doing this and what's going on today, there was, and I believe you talked about this before, but there was a country, I think it was Belarus, during the middle of the pandemic, the United States went to this country and said, We're going to give you basically a huge loan.
We're going to give you all this money for all this stuff, but you have to implement all these lockdown policies, all these mask policies, and take all these vaccines.
And the leader of this country basically said, no, this is like one of these economic hitman models.
We're not going to follow it.
Where the United States tried to implement all these rules across other countries.
You remember this?
I don't think I wrote that.
Stephen, no, you didn't write this, but you mentioned it before.
Stephen, there was an article I sent you.
This is it, right here.
Belarus president unwilling to accept additional terms to get foreign loans.
This was published when?
June 19th, 2020.
Okay, yeah, so right after the pandemic.
Who wrote it?
I don't know.
I don't know.
This is ever.
We can Google it again and figure out who covered it.
So it basically says additional conditions which do not apply to the financial part are unacceptable for Belarus.
Belarus president Alexander Lushchenko said when speaking about external lending during a meeting to discuss support measures for.
For the real economic sector on the part of the banking system, Belta has learned.
Belta's name is the publisher.
Lushenko asked the participants of the meeting how things were with the provision of foreign credit assistance to Belarus.
What are our partners' requirements for this loan?
It was announced that they can provide Belarus with $940 million in so called rapid financing.
How are things here?
The head of state inquired.
At the time, he stressed that additional conditions which do not apply to the financial part are unacceptable for the country.
We hear the demands, for example, to model our coronavirus response on that of Italy.
I do not want to see the Italian situation repeat itself in Belarus.
We have our own country with our own situation, the president has said.
According to the president, the World Bank has shown interest in Belarus' coronavirus response practices.
Interesting.
And it is ready to fund us 10 times more than it offered initially as a token of commendation for our efficient fight against the virus.
The World Bank has even asked the healthcare ministry to share the experience.
Meanwhile, the IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, and a curfew.
This is nonsense, he says.
We will not dance to anyone's tune.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I don't know.
Creating a Life Economy00:17:10
You know, and who is Belta?
Do you know?
Belta is the name of this website.
But, Stephen, open up a new tab and Google, open up a new tab on the browser and then just Google Belarus President IMF coronavirus.
Maybe that'll come up with some more.
IMF, so Politico says IMF awards Belarus $1 billion to fight the coronavirus.
So it sounds like the World Bank is tied into this and they're trying to give Belarus money to implement lockdowns for the coronavirus.
Why the hell would they do that?
And it's, yeah.
Belarus will get $100 billion payouts from the International Monetary Fund to fight the coronavirus pandemic, a move that has caused widespread anger.
IMF said it will distribute more than $650 billion in reserves among its members as part of the so called special drawing rights.
Wow.
Yeah, interesting because Belarus is kind of in the Russian camp, too.
It is in the Russian camp.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
It seems like things like this.
Like the coronavirus, they were just implemented for the government to grab more power, similar to 9 11 and the Patriot Act and the TSA.
All the powers and all the control that the government got from 9 11, they never let go of that.
All that stuff still has all that power.
Well, it's like you, you know, like Naomi Klein, you know, shock doctrine.
So when an incident like this comes along, yeah.
People try to grab power.
She writes about that a lot in that.
But just on another subject, I'm looking at this painting.
I don't know whether the audience can see it.
Oh, yeah.
Everybody loves this painting.
So it ties right into something I've been writing about.
And that is what if there were these flying saucers?
Let's assume there's a huge fleet of flying saucers, and we know that they're threatening to destroy us as human beings.
Okay.
So what is.
China and Russia and the United States and all the other countries do.
If there's an existential threat to the world, hopefully we'd all band together.
We could become the human race.
And history tells us that's what happens.
So my theory is that the aliens are here.
Okay.
Are you one of them?
Yes.
And so are you.
We all are.
That it's not human beings, but it's our philosophy that says we are a part from nature, not a part of nature.
We have the right to destroy nature.
We have the right to do whatever we want.
So the indigenous people, I they spend a lot of time with.
They believe they're a part of nature.
And they point out that when they come here and visit our cities, they see that we believe we're apart from nature.
We're supreme over nature.
And so, in a way, we have alienated ourselves from our planet intentionally as a philosophy.
It isn't human beings.
It's this philosophy that says that we have to maximize short-term profits.
We have to maximize materialistic consumption.
We are apart from nature.
So, let's get this out there and say, hey, we're the aliens.
Let's all come together and stop fighting about who's going to occupy Ukraine or Gaza or whatever.
And let's all join together to fight this philosophy that's destroying all of us.
Yeah, but isn't it okay?
And I've got to say, do I think that that's realistic that we're going to do it?
No, but it's a great philosophy.
It's a great story.
I'm writing a novel about it.
And there it is.
That ought to be the cover to my novel.
Do you have Van Gogh's permission?
No, we don't.
Nope, AI created it.
Well, he's dead, so I guess you don't need it.
I think the statues of limitations are up.
Well, I'm sure somebody owns the rights to all the Van Gogh stuff.
You can't just reach Cricut of Van Gogh and sell as a Van Gogh.
I don't know.
We're not selling it, though, so we're just having fun.
Steve put that up there.
Well, as your economic hitman on staff here, I don't know what I would advise you.
Yeah.
It's interesting what you said about us, we're becoming alien from nature, and we're in this competitive world.
To constantly innovate.
And it's largely fueled by materialism.
We always want the next greatest iPhone.
We always want the next best thing.
We want the nicest car, the bigger house, which is going to make us more attractive to mates.
It's going to make us more symbolically immortal.
We're going to create things that are going to live longer than our biological bodies can so people can remember us and it makes us feel important.
But That materialism and that competitiveness also is responsible for innovation and for technology and for everything that we've created.
And a lot of that is good.
Perception.
So, what's the perception driving all of this?
And the perception of maximizing short term profits regardless of social and environmental costs.
Now, so I talk about the death economy, which is what's That has created, and I was part of creating that, we've created an economic system that is marching us toward, that we're consuming and polluting ourselves towards self-destruction based on this perception of maximization of short-term profits regardless of the social and environmental costs.
What if we turned that around and said, let's have our goal be to make short-term profits for business because you've got to make some profits, but you don't have to maximize them.
Put a bunch of that money and put a bunch of the effort and energy.
Into creating a life economy, an economic system that pays people to clean up pollution, to corral all the plastic that's floating around in the oceans and recycle it, to regenerate destroyed environments, to create technologies, solar and wind.
We're on the way to doing that.
We are in the process of creating a life economy.
But let's pay people to do things that make life better, to make life for all living creatures and for my 16 year old grandson and all of his brothers and sisters around the world.
There's no reason. why we can't have really good lifestyles, but by paying ourselves to do things that are not based on short-term maximization and destruction, the death economy.
I like that instead of the term construction, often a lot of what we call construction these days is actually destruction.
So I think we can come up with an economic system that gives us both, that allows us to use these technologies in support. of all life and in support of future.
And we can have growth.
It's just that we can't have growth in areas where we've been looking at it, this extreme materialistic tearing up of the earth.
We don't need to go out and mine for copper.
There's a lot of copper around that's just not being used.
Think of all the pennies.
What about cobalt?
What about lithium?
We need these iPhones, don't we?
Yeah.
We need our Tesla cars that drive on batteries and that have these big fancy screens in them.
Yeah.
That's a lot of slave labor, a lot of mining of lithium.
It doesn't have to be slave labor.
Yes, women have to pay more.
But we'd also be paying people more to do these tasks.
Henry Ford said, I want to pay everybody in my factories enough money so they can buy a Ford car.
Well, what if we paid those miners in the Congo and elsewhere who are mining lithium?
What if we paid them enough so they could buy cell phones and electric cars and convert?
Then no one would be able to afford an iPhone.
Well, I think, yeah, if we look at human history, We've been around as and I would be willing to pay more for an iPhone if we would get rid of that shit.
Yeah, so would I.
I think a lot of people would, I think.
But it's a matter of redefining what it means to be successful.
For most of human history, 200,000 years or so that we've defined ourselves as Homo sapiens sapiens, wise, wise humans, which is kind of a laugh because who else is destroying but my cats aren't destroying the world around them.
They may be wreaking havoc on my house.
But for about those 200,000, most of those 200,000 years we've lived in a life economy, an economic system that regenerates itself.
And the indigenous people I work with, it's all about the long term.
They're not just looking at the short term.
And it's only been within the last blink of history, blink of an eye of history, maybe 2,000 years, but a short term in the history of humans, that we've been on this trajectory of creating a system that ultimately seems to be headed towards self-destruction.
And I would just add that when I was in business school back in the late 60s, I was taught that a good CEO makes a decent rate of return for investors, but also pays his employees well, gives them health care insurance, pension funds, and invests in the communities where his factories are built by putting money into recreational facilities, libraries, or educational facilities.
In other words, is a good citizen, not maximizing profits.
making enough profits, a decent rate of return.
And then in 1976, Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
And Friedman had the ear of the world.
And he said, no, the only responsibility of business is to maximize short-term profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs.
That was a fairly new concept.
It had been growing.
It had been growing.
But he really had to take off.
Thatcher loved him, and Reagan loved him.
And he traveled around the world.
Promoting this concept of maximization of profits.
And Jack Welch comes along at GE and other people became these icons at cutting costs, cutting people's salaries, firing people to make the bottom line, to make profits bigger and bigger and bigger, put it in the hands of a few wealthy investors who are already wealthy and make them more wealthy.
That's the course we've been taking and it's taking us into this death economy.
We have an opportunity now to turn that around, to redefine what it means to be successful humans, to create a life economy.
I have to say, Danny, I'm excited to still be alive at this time when we're moving in this direction.
I think everybody listening to this program should feel blessed that you live at this time, that we're here now, that we have this opportunity.
We are understanding that we're on a trajectory that's dangerous, very dangerous, whether we're talking about what's going on with potential wars and nuclear explosions, climate change.
It all comes back to an economic system.
that we can call a death economy.
These other things are symptoms.
They're not the problem.
They are problems, but they're not the problem.
The problem comes back to human greed that's defined in this idea of a death economy.
But human greed is not inherent in human beings.
I don't see it in indigenous cultures.
I don't think we had it for most of our 200,000 years.
People took care of each other.
It was important to be part of the community.
Native North Americans had this thing called the potlatch, and part of it was giving away.
It wasn't trying to take more from people.
It was giving away.
And the people I work with in the Amazon, if you're a good canoe builder, you build canoes and you give me a canoe in exchange.
I'm a good hunter, so I bring back some good meat for you on a weekly basis or whatever.
There's this exchange, but it's recognized that if anybody is suffering needlessly, I mean, people may suffer because they broke a leg or whatever, but if anybody is suffering needlessly for want of something, the whole community suffers and you take care of it.
I think that's human nature.
And I think we've moved away from it by a philosophy, a mindset, perception.
We get back to touching the jaguar.
Let's touch that jaguar and turn the perception around of what it means to be successful humans, be successful human beings, being human.
Let's be human.
I get what you're saying.
I agree with you.
But due to the trajectory that we're currently on right now in this world, in this nation, do you really see that? as a possibility?
I do.
How so?
How would it be implemented?
I wouldn't be sitting here with you if I didn't believe that.
I wouldn't be writing books.
I'd be, you know, wining and dining and bringing myself silly.
I don't know.
I don't know.
No, I do.
I think we're moving in that direction.
Really?
Yes.
I mean, solar, wind.
Solar and wind.
I have moved us away from fossil fuels.
They're at their infancy.
But 20 years ago, everybody said solar will never be economically feasible.
It is.
But that's just one example.
What I hear, and I've had the opportunity to travel around the world speaking because of these books that have gotten to be so popular, and more recently doing a lot of it by Zoom, and everywhere I go I see that people are really waking up to the fact that we have to change.
And that's the first stage.
They're not actually changing.
Remember perception.
Our perception is changing.
The next step is to implement actions that honor the new perception, and then that changes reality.
We haven't really got to taking the actions in a very strong way yet.
And as you mentioned earlier, we're being distracted terribly by the war in Israel and Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and so many, so many distractions.
The political outrage that's hitting this country right now is a big distraction.
And there's so many distractions, but people still around the world are getting that we need to change.
I mean, yes, I do think there's hope.
I would hate to put a probability on it because I also think there's a pretty high probability that we won't go that direction.
And if we don't make the changes that we need to make, we're headed toward more and more catastrophe, I truly believe.
So there's these two paths.
In fact, the Algonquin-speaking people where I come from in New Hampshire, a long time ago, said human beings at some point in history are going to be offered the opportunity to take two paths.
One path will lead to their destruction as human beings.
The other will will lead to a much more glorious world.
I think we're at that crossroads right now.
Uh, that's my belief and and i'm sticking to it, and it may may not be true, but but it does.
It gives it gives me the hope that we can take the right path and and I see people around the world wanting to do that yeah, I think it's got to be a lot more microscopic, it's got to be at a way more foundational level.
It's got to go way deeper than just solar and wind and green energy.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
I don't think the solar and I think that in some ways actually one of the distractions that we've been talking about.
I don't know.
I'm not a climate expert, but I don't think that the solar and the wind and all the fight about climate change.
I think it's more of a dog and pony show than really serious.
I think it's been more of a political football.
Well, if you lived on one of those islands and being inundated right now, you might not feel that way.
What island?
There's a bunch of them out in the Pacific Ocean that are being, you know, they're sinking or being, they're not actually sinking.
The ocean is rising around them.
And we're definitely seeing glaciers melting tremendously.
I go to the Andes and these, the Cotopaxi, these great mountains that have these, you know, the glaciers are melting rapidly.
There's a lot more desertification in Africa.
Climate Change Dog and Pony Show00:07:12
Yeah, but isn't this all cycles?
Aren't these cycles, the climate change and the rising and falling of the ocean level?
Isn't this been happening for hundreds of thousands of years in cycles?
Sure, there are cycles.
In fact, I think in the Renaissance period, the climate was way warmer than it is now.
And I think usually those were – if they happened abruptly, it was because a great volcano went off someplace.
Cosmic impacts.
The Cardinal Cross, cosmic impacts.
And I think the catastrophe – there you go.
Pacific Island countries facing faster sea level rise, UN says.
Yeah.
And I think the equivalent to a big volcano going off in our times has been the incredible use of fossil fuels, the industrialization that has, you know, how can it not be impacting the atmosphere?
How can it not be impacting the climate?
I think it's definitely impacting the climate, but I don't think it's going to be as near and as catastrophic as an issue to human lives as the media makes it out to be.
I think the media, I think like things with like the media and a lot of the climate activists, I think a lot of it's disingenuous and it's used as a political football, like I said.
And, you know, you have these guys flying around to these Davos conventions and their private jets.
There's like a hundred, like a thousand private jets that show up there and, and to do this talk.
This talk, and they all want to implement these things with these big corporations.
How many deaths is it going to be responsible for?
And what period of time is it going to be responsible for that?
If you just look at the United States of America and look at the deaths that happen every year from drug overdoses, I think it's upwards of 100,000 a year.
Is it reasonable to say that climate change would be responsible for 100,000 American deaths a year in the next 10 years?
I think it's reasonable to say that climate change is responsible for way more than 100,000 deaths in Africa right now.
Right now.
Really?
Right now.
With the desertification, the change of climate, all these people trying to immigrate up to Europe.
We're seeing it in Latin America, too.
We're seeing tremendous changes.
We're seeing fires in the Amazon that never occurred before, extreme droughts.
Yeah, they're setting fires in the Amazon.
But they're also just happening.
And then streamed droughts, areas that I go into that never had droughts before are now having droughts.
Now, and I would just say, look, assume you're in a car and you're slowing down and there's a cliff over there and you're saying, well, the car's slowing.
I don't need to use the brakes.
We're not going to go over the cliff here, get closer and closer and closer to the cliff.
No, I don't need to use the brakes.
The car's going to slow down.
And maybe it will.
But why wouldn't you step on the brakes?
So if there's a possibility that we are creating the problem or a large part of the problem, Wouldn't it be reasonable to do something about it if there's a possibility?
We don't know for sure, let's say.
Let's buy into your contention.
We don't know for sure.
But there's that possibility, and it's a distinct possibility.
So we should do everything we can to put on the brakes.
Don't wait for the car to come to a stop by its own inertia.
Let's put on the brakes.
Totally.
And we have this opportunity.
Again, I want to say that creating a life economy is not putting us back to live in caves.
We're creating a new economic system that benefits all life.
And we've had it before throughout our history.
Indigenous people still have it.
We can do it.
We can do it.
And yeah, solar and wind are not the answer by any means.
They're just one tiny, tiny speck of a possibility that's been happening.
But there's all kinds of possibilities that can happen.
If the Mayan people had really understood what they were doing, they could have prevented their culture from collapsing.
But they didn't.
And now they're telling us you're making the same mistake.
Yeah, I think, you know, at the end of the day, getting back to your history and everything that you've done, I think a lot of this has a lot to do with the fight for power in the world of the big superpowers, the nation states.
At the end of the day, those guys are going to do whatever they want because, at that level, it's lawless, it's anarchy.
Yeah, that's the sad part.
And I think, you know, one of the first things that we could do, I think one of the most obvious things we could do is to make it illegal for corporations to buy laws and to buy policymakers.
Totally agree.
Reverse, yeah, the laws that have given corporations so much power, like Citizens United and other ones.
Yeah, totally agree with you.
And, you know, and I also agree, leadership is the problem and it's always been the problem, you know.
Been the problem, you know, where you had Rome had a pretty good democracy for a while until finally one of the leaders, one of the Caesar, decides, no, no, no, I want it all for myself.
And I think we're, you know, that's, I think that's been the downfall, you know, the hubris of our leaders throughout history has been the biggest problem for us.
And how do you get around that?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I think if we can redefine.
change the perception of what it means to be successful humans.
So it isn't about owning a bigger yacht.
It isn't about having a bigger house.
It's about doing things that feel better, that make things better.
You know, when I was an economic hitman, I was making a lot more money and I thought I was living the American dream.
But at some point, when I told you about it, I went through this epiphany.
But at the same time, I was also recognizing that I was not happy.
I was living on alcohol and Valium.
We didn't have some of the drugs we do today.
Qualids?
Yeah.
I was flying off from Boston to Indonesia.
One period of three months, I went, I think, 12 times.
Wow.
And that's halfway around the world.
And so I'd arrive at a destination at night and go into the bar and drink myself silly and then take Valium so I'd fall asleep.
And then the next morning, I'd stuff myself with caffeine so I could go into a meeting and negotiate a multi-million dollar contract.
And I realized, geez, I think I'm happy because I'm living the American dream.
Yeah.
Then why am I living like this?
Why am I doing these things?
I'm not happy.
Right.
And I think there's an analogy there with where we are as a species now that we think we're happy by having bigger yachts and bigger houses or whatever.
You know, I downsized my house a lot.
Resetting Our Perspective00:02:29
And I just got to say, it does away with a lot of worries.
And cleaning bills yeah, and electrical bills.
I'm so happy to live in a much much, much smaller house today, a tiny house yeah yeah man, I think.
Uh, going back to your idea about aliens, I think one of the one of the ways we could reset ourselves and reset our perspective, if aliens landed here, it'd give us a new perspective on the world and the universe.
Maybe that that overview theory that your buddy Edgar Mitchell had happened to him, would happen to the world if the aliens came.
But they won't come well because uh, we are the aliens, It's not humans.
It's our philosophy of life right now.
Our modern, not a human philosophy, but a modern.
And that may go back a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand years, but it's still modern in terms of overall human history.
Right.
Well, John, thank you so much for coming down here and doing this.
I really appreciate it.
It's been a lot of fun, Dan.
I really enjoyed this.
I really enjoyed this talk.
It's been inspiring and eye opening.
And tell people where they can find your books, find more of your talks, get in touch with you.
All that stuff.
JohnPerkins.org.
I'm an orgasm.
I'm an organism.
Beautiful.
Yes, I'm not a comm.
I'm an org.
So, JohnPerkins.org.
All the information is right there.
And I'd love it if people sign up for my newsletter, which comes out about once a month and is incredibly brilliant and is changing the world.
No, but you just put your email address in the little box right there.
Oh, look at that.
There's your website.
Oh, my beautiful.
Beautiful.
Who is that handsome devil?
Handsome devil.
And look at that.
You update your book.
I love how you do updates.
Oh my God, look at that.
Awesome job.
Well, that's in Russia.
That was at the World Economic Forum.
St. Petersburg Economic Forum, internationally with Putin.
Yeah.
Was Klaus Schwab there?
Yeah, I imagine he was.
Wow.
I didn't meet him.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks again, John.
Look at that.
Everybody go to John's website, johnperkins.orgasm slash books.
You can find his books, all of his incredible talks and lectures.
Thanks again, man.
I really appreciate it.
Also, we did a Patreon exclusive QA.
If you guys want to go check out that on Patreon, it's linked below.