John Perkins, activist and author of the bestselling Confessions of An Economic Hitman series, has a most lively and enjoyable chat with James about: how he helped The Powers That Be pillage and destroy sundry South American economies; what made him realise that this wasn’t a good way to earn a lucrative, rock-star-type living; how he has made amends since; why he hasn’t been bumped off (apart from the time when he almost was…); what it’s really like in the remote Amazon; how he became a shaman…. https://johnperkins.org↓ ↓ ↓Tickets are now available for the James x Dick Christmas Specialon Saturday, 6th December 2025. See website for details:https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/?section=events#events↓ ↓ ↓If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn’t in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold
↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children’s future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me James Dellingpole and as you can tell by my Christmas not Christmas really jumper I'm going to talk to you about the excitement the thrill of my forthcoming Dick and James Christmas special.
It's round about two weeks a bit over two weeks to go before the party starts and I don't want you to be one of those people who misses out on what is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the year.
So many lovely people that you're going to adore if you don't know them already are going to be there in the adoring crowds watching me and Dick on stage and also watching the unregistered chickens of course beforehand and there's going to be some names and faces that you know.
Clive de Karl is going to be there with his magical chair and they're going to be people selling stuff that you want to buy on stools, you know, sort of magical potions, unguants and things like that.
And it's going to be fun.
I mean obviously I'm going to be good, Dick's going to be good, but you really come to these things to meet like-minded folks.
So get your tickets now.
I'm afraid to say that the evil Illuminati scumbag tickets, the VIP tickets as they were called before I changed the name, they've sold out.
But it doesn't matter.
I love you ordinary humble folk who just buy the ordinary humble tickets just as much.
In fact, maybe I'll like you more because you're horny handed sons of toil.
Anyway, please come and be there.
I think it'll be such fun.
I love seeing you.
It's on, I didn't mention the date, did I?
December the 6th.
Saturday, December the 6th.
And I haven't mentioned the other exciting thing.
You'll probably want to stay overnight and it's lovely countryside roundabout.
And the next day, I've commandeered the church service.
I'm going to decide what the hymns are going to be.
It's a really, really lovely church.
And if you fancy coming with me to the, it's the 9.15 communion service.
But I'm going to choose the hymns so there won't be any rubbish.
So it's Advent.
So we're going to get stuff like, I'm going to make sure we're going to get Ocum Emmanuel and Hills of the North Rejoice.
And maybe some other ones that we know and like.
You've got to be there, haven't you?
Got to be there.
December the 6th, Dick and James's Christmas special.
See you there.
I love Deadpool.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Delipole.
A listen on the town, subscribe with me.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say, I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But before we meet him, let's have a word from our sponsor.
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I think you'd be mad not to.
Welcome to the Delling Pod.
John Perkins, I have to say, I really should have had you on ages ago because you're kind of a legend.
You may not know it.
But can I ask you a start by asking you a rude question?
20 years ago, you wrote a book which explained how the tiny elite, although I hate to use the word elite to describe these people, how the cabal that runs the world, how they conduct economic warfare on all these countries in Africa and South America, your speciality.
And you laid it out and your book became a New York Times bestseller.
So it was allowed into the mainstream and sold in quantity.
How come you're not dead?
How did you get away with writing this book?
Well, yeah, first of all, it was rejected by 39 publishers because they were afraid of it.
They were afraid they'd lose their jobs.
I think that was the main reason.
That's not what they said, of course, but it wasn't funny getting 39 rejection letters, I'll tell you.
But they were, so in any case, it was very controversial at the time for a while, as you know.
And then the New York Times vetted it, vetted my life.
Several other people did because there was all this controversy as Perkins lying.
That can't be true.
And that's too good to be true.
So many people said, I knew that was what was going on, but nobody in your position ever said it.
And it was thoroughly vetted.
And they found nothing wrong with it.
It was all the truth.
And James, the reason I, you know, I'm alive, I think, is because when I first started to write the book back many years before, right after I left being an economic hitman in the early 80s, I decided to write an expose and I started contacting other people who'd had jobs like mine and the jackals, the ones who go in if the economic hitmen fail and overthrow or assassinate heads of state or their subordinates.
So I started to call these people on the phone, and I immediately got threatening phone calls that threatened my life and that of my infant daughter.
And at the same time, I got invited out to dinner by the president of a company that had been a competitor of my company, Stone and Webster Engineering Company.
And that was the competitor.
And he offered to pay me an outrageous retainer, consultants' retainer, half a million dollars to do nothing, essentially, to just so they could use my name in their proposals.
But then he said, but just don't write the book.
And so I'm kind of getting offered something very much like what I did with presidents of countries.
I would say to these presidents, hey, you know, in this hand, I got a few billion dollars for you.
It's going to help you and your family in this country, if you accept the deal I'm offering, or if you don't, in this hand, I got a gun.
I didn't have a gun, but that president and I both knew that the jackals were right behind me, and they did have guns.
And so now I'm getting offered pretty much the same thing.
We'll take care of you and your daughter if you tell the story.
And if you don't, we'll give you a very lucrative consulting contract.
So I took the money, but I didn't buy a fancy yacht or private plane or something.
Not that you could with $500,000, but $500,000 in the late 80s was nothing to blink at.
Still isn't.
But I put it toward going back to the Amazon, where I'd been a Peace Corps volunteer, and telling the Indigenous people there who I'd lived with that I wanted to help them preserve their forests that were under attack and still are.
And I formed a couple of nonprofit organizations, Dream Change, and I co-founded the Pachamama Alliance.
And I wrote five books on Indigenous people and the plight that they were undergoing.
And Stone and Webster was fine with me doing that.
It was non-threatening to them.
But I didn't write the book I really wanted to write.
And on 9-11, I was in the Amazon.
And when I came home, I went to Ground Zero.
And I decided I just, I knew I had to write this book.
But I decided that it would be, I wouldn't tell anybody I was writing it.
I would do it completely in secret.
And it would not be an expose that included other people's stories.
It would just be a personal confession, just my story.
And I figured that once I had the manuscript done and in the hands of a good literary agent, I'd already published five books, remember, and it was out in the hands of publishers.
It was my best insurance policy because anybody who thought that they could stop the message of getting out there by killing me would understand that killing me would turn me into a martyr and sell a lot more books than it actually did sell, which have been several million.
So, yeah, I thought it was my insurance policy.
That's still quite a high-stakes gamble, I'd say.
Because, I mean, imagine if they'd done, well, I suppose what happened to a degree to David Irving, the publishing industry decided that it wasn't going to publish this stuff because it was unhelpful to the people who owned the publishing industry.
They could have just silenced you and finished you off.
Well, the publisher who did publish it first was very courageous and integrative, had great integrity, and was on the verge of bankruptcy and needed something to pull him out.
And they vetted me pretty thoroughly before they published it.
And then after that, the New York Times and others vetted me.
But so they were pretty confident that I was telling the truth.
And they needed an exciting book.
And they'd always published books on economics and business.
And that was their specialty.
But those are, you know, those are pretty, those are niche books that get read perhaps in business schools and by academics.
But they needed a book that would be read by the general public.
And so, you know, my book is not just about economics, which it is about economics, but it's personal stories and written like a novel.
It's not a novel, but I, you know, and at the beginning, I talk about how I quote dialogues I've had with presidents of countries, et cetera.
And I say at the beginning, you know, I don't remember word for word these conversations, but I did take notes and I have good memory and I know the context of those and the theme of those conversations that came from those people.
So I'm going to recreate the conversation.
So, you know, it's a fun book.
You know, it's not dry.
At least that's what people tell me.
And that was my intent.
But I also would tell you that I was poisoned about four or five months after the book came out.
And there's been three books now.
There's a trilogy.
The most recent one is about China's economic hitmen.
But the second one, I tell this story, and it's also in the third one, that I was invited to speak at the United Nations about four months after the book came out.
It had already hit the New York Times bestseller list and been there for a number of weeks.
And I had to fly up to New York from where I lived in Florida.
And my publicist had arranged for a freelance journalist who didn't have a very thorough list.
He was a little sketchy.
But he offered, and we resisted him at first, but he was very persistent and offered to pick me up at the airport in a nice car and take me out to lunch and then deliver me to a friend's house near Central Park where I was staying before speaking the next day at the UN.
And so I said, yeah, well, why not?
That sounds better than a cab.
So he does.
And, you know, it was a very disappointing interview we had over lunch.
He didn't ask very interesting questions.
But in the process, after the dinner was on the table, the lunch was on the table.
I went to the bathroom, which I'll never do again.
And within a couple of hours, I was at my friend's apartment and I lost a tremendous amount of blood, internal bleeding.
She called a very good gastroenterologist, very famous one, who happened to be a friend of hers.
And he said, you'll be dead within two hours to me.
I'm on the phone with him.
And I'm in a state of shock.
Essentially, I'm lying on the floor covered by a blanket, and I've lost all this blood.
And he said, get a cab.
Don't wait for an ambulance.
Get a cab and go straight to Lenox Hill Hospital.
And I'll call ahead and get transfusions going.
And in the end, they removed about 70% of my colon.
And it's never been proven, but I'm convinced that I was poisoned.
The problem is we didn't even think about that till after the operation.
And when I then talked to the gastroenterologist and said, do you think I was poisoned?
He said, well, it's entirely possible, but the evidence has been destroyed.
We incinerate parts we take out from human beings immediately.
So there was no evidence and the guy disappeared, the guy who I'd interviewed.
All my publicists had was his email address and nobody was responding to that.
Looking back on it, do you remember any qualities about this guy that with hindsight you should have noticed?
I mean, apart from the fact that he was unprepared?
Yeah, I was on a pretty big high at that point.
Here's a book that's been rejected by everybody.
It was on the New York Times bestsellers for about a year and a half, and this was the beginning of that run.
And I was doing a lot of interviews, including the big press.
And so, you know, I sort of saw this as relaxing.
Guy meets me, takes me out to lunch, doesn't ask very, doesn't ask questions that I have to be concerned with how I answer them.
They're very rode.
I've already answered these questions a thousand times.
So it actually seemed like a pretty good, and he was very nice.
I remembered him quite well.
And, you know, after that, while I was still in the hospital, I called this friend of mine who was a jackal, who was one of the assassins that's hired.
I write about him in that book also.
And I asked him who he thought did this.
And he said, well, I'm pretty sure it wasn't one of the alphabet agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA, because they said, if they had tried to assassinate you, you wouldn't be talking to me now.
They're better than that.
And he said, besides, they have nothing to gain.
You know, if something strange happens to you, it's going to sell a lot more books than it would have otherwise.
And that's the opposite of what they want.
They just don't want the word to get out there.
And let's face it, an author is not usually a real threat to those organizations because readership takes too long to react to something like that.
You're not like someone who's exposing their internal secrets like WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden or one of those.
It's quite different from that because I wasn't exposing anything about them that wasn't pretty much public record if you dug deeply enough.
Yes, yes.
So who did they think it was if it wasn't the three-letter agent?
So I asked him, and he said, well, I think it was probably a fanatic, somebody who either hates the work you did or hates the fact that you exposed the work you did.
And I said, well, do you think he'll strike again?
And he said, no, I doubt it.
He's obviously a coward.
He didn't confront you straight on.
If he did it, he poisoned you.
And he's disappeared.
And he probably figures he accomplished his task.
You lost a large part of your digestive system.
And he probably thinks he scared you.
And he's not going to show his face again.
He's disappeared.
He knows you can recognize him.
And what do they think it might have been that you were poisoned with?
What can achieve that effect?
There's several things that the doctors have told me and they don't know.
It's one of those things where they incinerated it.
I mean, it could have been ground glass.
It could have been a simple something like that.
That's my belief, at least.
I've done a little bit of research, but I really haven't spent much time on this because it's over.
There's not much I can do about it.
And I have no proof.
Yeah.
So are you still on speakers with the jackals?
They don't hold it against you that you blew the whistle.
This guy that I'm mentioning, he was home from Iraq at the time.
He was a contractor in Iraq.
And in Afghanistan.
And he sent me this picture of a bunch of the guys reading my book.
He said, you know, they found it really interesting.
They love it.
You know, these guys, these guys are pretty, they get pretty big egos.
And I'm not saying that all of them loved it, but at least he and his friends did.
And he did.
In fact, I've got photo.
He was a really good photographer.
He was a sharpshooter, amongst other things.
And I've got some great photographs of him that he took in Afghanistan around the house.
And he signed them to Jack the from Jack the Jackal, because that's his name in the book, to John the Economic Hitman at the bottom of the pic.
Yeah.
I don't know how this works for you, but I'll show you one.
It's right here.
I'm in my office.
It's right here in my office.
It's kind of cool.
The light's not very good, but he's in one of these vehicles.
Oops.
In the desert.
Can you see?
Yeah, I can just see it.
Yep.
Yep.
What am I doing wrong?
There we go.
Yep.
Yeah.
And you can see his mirror there.
What just happened?
Well, anyway, down here is his inscription to John Economic Hitman from his name, the Jackal.
I'd quite like to have a friend called the Jackal who could take care of things for me if ever things got spicy.
You got to pay him, though.
Why do you?
Yes, if he's a friend.
I knew him because I've been a martial artist most of my life.
And he was a black belt.
When he was home in Florida during breaks in his work, which they get pretty good breaks, he belonged to the same martial arts school.
And we sparred together.
And the first time I sparred with him, I didn't know him, didn't know who he was.
But what I did know is even if I could hit him, I didn't want to.
Because if you hit the guy, man, he went wild.
You know, he, yeah, and we became very good, we'd go out to lunch after, you know, I was very defensive whenever I sparred with him.
Even as a friend, if, you know, if he, if he got hit, he would go crazy and retaliate.
And I, you know, when he came home on these little trips, he had a very beautiful wife who was a psychologist, fortunately.
And, you know, he'd see guys looking at her and he'd pick fights with them in bars and stuff.
He got into a lot of trouble on his vacations and he'd end up in jail for the night and stuff.
And, you know, I said, well, I thought you could get this out of you while you were there.
And he said, quite the contrary.
I have to stay sharp.
I have to keep the adrenaline up when I'm home for a couple of weeks because if not, when I go back, I'll be killed.
Right.
Yes.
But I've done podcasts with people who sort of are familiar with this realm.
And I kind of get, well, okay.
And you listen to the story of you must have listened to Kay Griggs, the woman who married somebody in the U.S. Marine Corps, who she thought was a fine, upstanding man, but basically he was on these black ops operations in Central America and stuff like that.
And they're all kind of orphans.
They're traumatized.
They have participated in often gay bonding rights.
And they're basically psychopaths.
That's what they do.
Is that not the vibe you got from these people?
I think a lot of them are, yeah.
And it's hard to tell who's a psychopath, you know, and who isn't these days.
Like, think of our politicians, think of business executives, you know, like.
Oh, they're all, surely they all are, John.
I mean, to do a lot of what is done that makes people successful these days, you almost have to be a psychopath.
I mean, it's not, there are exceptions, of course, but it helps.
And, you know, what I'll say about him is that he, his father was an executive, American, an executive with Middle East Airlines, and he grew up in Beirut.
And he was erroneously taken prisoner by the PLO as a, I think they thought he was, they thought he was an Israeli agent.
He wasn't at the time.
He was 18 years old.
And he and a buddy were taken by the PLO off the streets when there was a shutdown in Beirut.
They didn't know.
They'd been in a movie theater.
They came out of the movie theater.
Car comes by, picks them up, and they get badly pistol whipped.
And then they get taken to the head of the PLO in that district.
And he's pissed off at his men.
He said, these guys, they produced a ticket from the movie theater and he had them sent back.
But that pissed him off a lot.
And he saw violence.
He grew up seeing violence all around him.
So he used to set up on the hill outside above Beirut and look down with binoculars and see people getting beaten up and killed and raped.
And so he had this and he developed a very strong dislike for Muslims and people that weren't white.
So he had, and he was very, you know, he made a point of that those are the only people that he would kill.
He wouldn't, he wouldn't, you couldn't, you, you couldn't, the mafia couldn't hire him to go after people in the United States that looked like him, you know, sort of thing.
So he had this mentality that was steeped in personal experiences growing up in Beirut.
And, you know, I mean, I can totally relate to that because what I realized is when I was an economic hitman for the first seven years out of 10 that I had that job, I thought I was doing the right thing because I'd been to business school.
I'd been taught that what I was doing was the right thing.
It's the way to help developing countries, poor countries, become prosperous is by giving them these huge loans, hiring U.S. corporations to build big infrastructure projects, putting the countries deep into debt, but their economy would grow.
And so I thought I was doing the right thing.
And there's so many people in these kinds of businesses, James, that are steeped in the belief that they're doing the right thing.
It's trained into them.
It's in our education system.
Just think right now, make America great.
Well, what does that really mean?
And it isn't just the MA people that learn it.
I grew up believing America is great.
We can do no wrong around the world.
That's part of our education.
You pledge allegiance to the flag.
I did every morning when I went to school in the morning.
I pledge allegiance to the flag.
Who has an allegiance to a piece of cloth?
We had the same thing in Britain, in England.
We thought that we won the lottery in life by being born an Englishman.
And we looked at the Union, the Union flag, and red, white, and blue.
It's fantastic.
We civilize the world.
We're great because Shakespeare and all the stuff we invented and the Industrial Revolution.
And then we kind of created America.
And you're right.
It's a kind of brainwashing program that takes place and you don't know you're being brainwashed.
Well, even I went to a soccer game last night, which you'd call football.
Yeah.
And it was the local high school that's the girls' team is in the state championships right now.
They won every game.
They have a 16 to 1 record and they're great.
And I love soccer.
You know, the beginning of the game, we all have to stand and look at the flag as they play the national anthem.
And, you know, I have to say, it gives me a throb in my heart.
I feel it because I grew up with that.
And I have ancestors that go back to the 1600s in the United States.
I consider myself, people say, well, what's your heritage?
And I say, it's American.
And, you know, I had ancestors, forgive me, James, but I had ancestors that fought the American Revolution.
Yeah, well, no, I can see why that would matter.
And I grew up with that.
And every war since up through World War II, I had relatives who died in those wars.
And, you know, you grow up with this.
And then later in life, when you begin to see that the lies behind that, that some of them, they're not all lies.
But I mean, I also understand, no, I was on a Zoom call a few days ago with, well, yesterday morning, with a Nobel laureate from a woman who'd won the Nobel Peace Prize from Yemen.
And, you know, she was saying, you know, the United States is a leader.
You guys in the United States, you've got to get it together because the world still looks to you.
And right now, she said, our terrible politicians in our country and many other countries are saying, well, if the United States, which is a democracy, can have a leader that defies the law the way your current leader does, then we can do that too.
So, you know, we grew up with this idea that America is a leader, and in a way, it really is.
So we took pride in that.
And now, how do you turn it around?
And that's very deeply ingrained in many of us.
And in this friend of mine, who is the jackal who we've been talking about, you know, he'd grown up in Beirut and he was very, very steeped in the acceptance of violence to accomplish things.
And he was very, very angry at the way he'd been treated by the PLO.
I was going to ask you what qualities the talent spotters saw in you when they recruited you to become an economic hitman.
But it sounds like it's patriotism and sweet naivety.
They exploited your good nature.
Yeah.
How much time you got?
Well, did you come from an well, you obviously came from an elite background.
If you can trace your ancestry back to the Pilgrim Fathers or the early settlers, you're old, your old money, old, I mean, there's still cachet for that, isn't there?
Yeah, but we never had money.
We were farmers.
You had breeding, though.
And my dad was the first in his side of the family and my mom on her side of the family.
They were both the first people in their families to go to college.
And they were both from farm families in Vermont and New Hampshire, but mainly Vermont.
And my dad got a full scholarship to Dartmouth, which was the next town over to where he lived.
And he used to laugh at one point, a dean at Dartmouth College after he's entering his sophomore year, the dean picks him in and says, Mr. Perkins, have you considered transferring to the University of New Hampshire?
And my dad said, well, why would I do that?
The dean said, well, here you are with all these Rockefellers and people, and your dad is a janitor here.
His dad was a janitor at Dartmouth.
And my dad said, I can't afford to go to the University of New Hampshire.
I have a full scholarship here.
And the dean says, I'm pretty sure you can get one in UNH2.
In fact, I'm pretty sure we can help you get one if you need to.
My dad said, yeah, but I live at home.
I eat at home.
I hitchhike to college every morning or walk.
And I couldn't afford any of the expenses.
And so he stayed in Dartmouth and later got a master's degree in languages from Middlebury and was a teacher.
So we, you know, in a boys' boarding school.
So I grew up on the campus.
My dad didn't get paid hardly anything, but he got free.
We got a house and I ate in a dining room with 200 some odd boys since I was the time I was three or four years old.
So we never wanted for anything, but we never had money.
And I was surrounded by money.
So I came from the, it was a town where I went to through eighth grade, was very poor, an old New Hampshire mill town where the mills had failed.
And those the kids I grew up with were poor, very poor.
I love some of them.
Some of them destitute.
And then I'd go up to the campus where I lived and was surrounded by these rich kids.
It was quite an interesting education in and of itself.
Well, yeah.
And some of these kids, I imagine, I mean, you mentioned if you had Rockefellers there, some of these kids must be the kind of people who were behind the schemes that you later became part of, then when you were an economic hitman.
Well, so after I graduated from Boston University Business School, I wanted to avoid the draft.
I did not like what was going on in Vietnam.
And I was married.
I got married my senior year.
And my wife's dad, he was very high up in the U.S. Department of the Navy.
They lived outside Washington, D.C.
And he was very good friends with a man who was very high up in the National Security Agency.
And that was draft deferable.
And so they arranged for me to have an interview in Boston.
And it was three days of very intensive tests, including under a lie detector a lot of the time.
And it was interesting because I thought I totally failed.
Because first of all, one of the, I mean, there were a lot of questions, but the two that really got to me were one of the ones was, you know, what do you think about the Vietnam War kind of thing?
And I had to be honest and say, I don't believe in it.
I think it's wrong for us to be there.
So I figured, well, they're not going to like that very much.
And another one was, have you ever done anything Illegal that relates to the law.
And we got into it, and they said, Well, did you ever lie to the police?
And I said, Yeah.
And I told him the story, which was true.
So when I quit, I went to Middlebury College originally, and I quit in my sophomore year.
And a friend of mine who was Iranian took me out that night to a bar to celebrate.
And I got sucker punched by a big Vermont farmer who thought I was flirting with his wife, which I wasn't, but anyway.
And my friend, Farhard, this Iranian guy, pulls this little jackknife that he used to carry out and cuts the guy across the cheek and then pushes me into the, and this is all in one of my books.
I can't remember which one, but and pushes me into the men's room.
And we jump out the window into the Otter Creek, this river down below, and make our way back.
The next morning, the cops come and they drag me into the police station.
And as I'm sitting there waiting in the waiting in a waiting room, the door opens and out comes Farhard.
And they don't let us speak to each other.
He looks very somber.
And then they take me in and they ask me all these questions.
And I lied.
And I said, no, I don't think he carried a knife.
I didn't have saw anything.
No, none of that.
Well, he got kicked out.
I quit.
I just quit that the day before.
And so I tell the police.
I lied to the cops.
I was in this fight.
I lied to the cops.
You know, then I got to like that.
Well, they offered me a job.
And later, what I discovered, you know, they really liked the fact that I had the guts to lie to a cop and protect a friend.
And it turned out that Farhard, I mean, I knew that Farhard's father was a general in the Shah's army, Shah of Iran.
And he was a CIA asset.
So the fact that I had lied to protect a friend whose father happened to be very important to them in Iran at the time was great.
And they all knew that we were losing the Vietnam War at this point anyway.
So anybody would be a fool to really want to go there.
Like, you know, they didn't hold that against me.
So it was kind of interesting that they, and, you know, in the process, which would also come back later to haunt me or serve as maybe help me, they learned that, you know, I had three weaknesses, which were probably pretty common among guys my age, but given my background, perhaps even stronger than with most.
And one of those was I wanted power, money, and sex.
Now, I grew up in a boys' private school, boarding school.
I'd never been around women very much after eighth grade.
And even there, I didn't date or anything.
And money and power, I was very jealous of these kids at this prep school that I went to four years of high school with them.
And my friends would go home for Christmas vacation to Park Avenue and wealthy mansions in New York or Argentina or Paris or wherever.
And I'd be stuck on this little campus shooting baskets by myself in the gym.
And so this job, then I was trained by this woman, Claudine, who knew I had these three weaknesses because the NSA was sharing all their information with Charles T. Main, the company I worked for, and it was very deeply connected with the intelligence industry.
And so she knew all this in training.
And she, you know, she made it obvious that I was going to get money and power.
I was going to get a lot of money, get well paid.
I was going to have a lot of power in the world.
And she was very good at the sexual side of it.
What's not to like as a young man?
I can see that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's like I'm going to go to Indonesia.
I'm going to go travel all over the world to places that I dreamed of before and heard about, but didn't ever expect I'd go to it.
And she made it sound like I was going to, you know, at that point, James Bond was becoming his first couple of movies with Sean Connery to come out.
I'm like, yeah, oh, okay.
I'm going to be James Bond.
Well, I mean, those films would have been out a while, wouldn't they?
When was your...
This was the 80s, wasn't it?
That you were an economic hitman?
Yeah, so, yeah.
So the interview with the NSA was in 68.
So, no, sorry, 65.
Oh, okay.
But back then, I went.
So there's another story there where I went in the Peace Corps and into the deep Amazon.
So once I get offered this job with the NSA, I've accepted it.
And I'm still in business school.
I've got another three or four months in business school.
I'm walking down a corridor at Boston University, and there's a Peace Corps recruiter giving a talk in one of the rooms.
And I go in.
And afterwards, I went up and talked to him.
And I'd grown up, as I said, my family goes back to the late 1600s, early 1700s, in New England.
And I'd always had this fascination with the Indians who lived in that area and how well they were able to survive in the forests.
And my ancestors, too, having, you know, he got a living from the land and as hunters and minimal farmers.
And I always thought, God, I'd like to live that way.
I want to live close to nature like that.
And I also knew that the only place in the world where people, one of the few places in the world where people still do that, was in the Amazon.
So after this Peace Corps volunteer finished his spiel, I went up to him and I said, hey, you know, if I volunteered for the Peace Corps, do you think I could get to the Amazon?
And he said, oh my God, nobody wants to go there and we need people there.
So I'm sure you could get there.
So I go back and I tell this guy who's high up in the NSA, a friend of my wife's father, that I'm really, I'd be really interested in this.
And I know I've accepted a job at the NSA.
And he immediately says, do it.
And I'll help you get into the Peace Corps and to the Amazon if you need help, because you will learn another language.
You'll learn survival skills.
You'll learn how to deal with other cultures.
You'll be much more valuable to us when you get out.
That'll be great training for you.
And he said, but also understand that you'll have skills in your business school.
You may not actually end up working directly for us.
You might work for, he says, there's a lot of businesses that are deeply connected with us.
You might be working for one of them instead.
So I go off three years.
Peace Corps was two years.
I extended it for a third year because I still hadn't turned 26, which is when the draft no longer wants you.
And so three years in the Amazon and in Ecuador, and it was an incredible experience.
So I went through all that before I joined this company.
And it was then after I joined the company that Claudine, this woman who trained me, yeah, and I don't remember what your question was, but.
No, It doesn't really matter, does it?
It sounds like fiction, doesn't it?
I mean, it's amazing that you had this life with A sexy trainer and these pulling strings for you.
Yeah.
But you know, James, I joke about this that that was maybe, you know, less than 10% of my life.
And you come right down to it.
I mean, you don't write about the many hours you spend in front of the typewriter writing reports or in a library doing research or, you know, all this stuff that's really quite boring.
The hours I spent sitting in waiting rooms waiting for a meeting with the president or whatever.
The hours I spent in hotel rooms waiting to be called to have a meeting.
You don't write about that stuff.
So there were times when things, there was a lot of really boring administrative type of work that I did.
But there was the other side, the side that I write about, which was extremely exciting.
And I think it's a little bit like somebody said it's a little bit like being a fireman.
You sit around the firehouse for hours and hours and hours and hours playing cards or whatever.
And then you get called to a high adrenaline situation.
And that was sort of like my life.
Global warming is a massive con.
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screened in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
We've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question: okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that micro just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Movik Diet.
There we go.
It's a scam.
Well, for those few, most people probably know what an economic hitman is and does.
But tell us, for those who don't.
Okay, so my real title was Economist, and then very quickly I became chief economist at this consulting firm out of Boston.
And I had a staff of anywhere from 15 to 50 people, depending on different situations, because a lot of them were hired as consultants temporarily.
And my job was using them to identify countries that had resources our corporations covet, like oil in those days was a big one.
And then go arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations using that resource as collateral on the loan.
And the money never actually went to the country.
So we'd go to a country like Ecuador, where I've been a Peace Corps volunteer and later became an economic hitman, and say, you get lots of oil.
You know, we want to help you build your electric power system, which is abysmal.
And we want to build, you know, hydroelectric plants and transmission lines.
So we'll give you this loan for X billions of dollars.
And the collateral is the oil you have in the ground because you get a lot of it.
But you won't actually get the money.
If you'll sign off on the loan, the money will go from the World Bank to Halliburton or that bank in Houston or Boston or New York or San Francisco, Bechtel, whatever.
One of our companies will go in and build this project for you.
They'll make a lot of money.
We'd have to say that in the process, our American companies would do very well from this.
And you, Mr. President, and your family, and your cronies, you own the big industries.
You will benefit a lot from all the electricity or whatever the infrastructure is.
And you'll be able to show that the economy grows because GDP does grow.
And GDP per capita, which you're telling you, people, everybody's getting better because this is economic hit, economic growth per capita is increasing.
And you looked really good.
So do that.
Or if you decide not to do that, well, remember what happened to Salvador Allende in Chile.
Remember what happened to Arbenz and Guatemala and Mossadegh and Iran and Lumumba in the Congo and Ziem and Vietnam.
All these heads of states that didn't play the game that went down one way or another.
And so what's a president going to do or minister of finance or whoever calls the shots in this particular area?
They don't accept the loan.
Well, I had two clients that didn't, and that's another story.
And so then, you know, the loan would be out there.
The majority of the people in the country would suffer because money was diverted from health, care, education, and other social services to pay the interest on the loan.
And in the end, the loan, the principal, couldn't be repaid.
So we go back in, usually in the guise of the International Monetary Fund, and say, hey, since you can't pay your loans, sell your resource, oil, or whatever, real cheap to our corporations.
This is a collateral.
Vote with us on the next United Nations vote against Cuba or China these days.
And let us build a military base on your soil, you know, et cetera.
All these what we call conditionalities.
So basically, what we were doing was building an empire where we had control over these countries and their resources.
And, you know, the first seven years out of 10 that I had this job, I thought I was doing the right thing because I could see that the economy did do better.
And you could produce all kinds of graphs and charts that show that when you invest this in infrastructure, the GDP, gross domestic product grows and the gross domestic product per capita, which means everybody's doing better.
But then I saw in the head of state of Panama, who later was Died in a very suspicious plane crash, private plane crash, probably assassinated.
He took me aside and said, John, don't you know that you're lying to yourself in the world?
Our people are not doing better.
GDP is doing better, but that really measures how well the wealthy are doing and the big corporations, including the international corporations that have offices here, that have businesses here.
And he said, the majority of the people are suffering.
And GDP per capita simply is the gross domestic product divided by the population.
It has nothing to do with the prosperity of the majority of our people.
But, you know, the whole system, James, is set up so that we can prove that the stuff we do is beneficial.
Right.
But just you were saying that you would present them with this, with these two scenarios: one in which their family and their friends benefited, and also the economy grew and all sorts of good stuff happened.
And on the other hand, look at what happens to Lumumba or whoever.
That's a threat.
I mean, that's a when you said that.
No, they already knew it.
I didn't have to say much.
I mean, these guys all know it.
And when one of them goes down, like Torrijos did in a suspicious plane crash, and so did this other client of mine, Jaime Roldos, the president of Ecuador, within three months of each other, they both had these very suspicious private plane crashes that killed them.
And they both had rejected our offers.
And that gets around.
Everybody knows in Africa and Latin America and throughout that this is happening.
And it doesn't take much to, you know, say, you know, you say something like, yeah, well, I understand why you're not accepting this deal.
I totally understand why you're not accepting this deal.
I had another client who didn't accept it either.
And so I can understand that.
And they'd say, well, who's the other client?
And I'd say, Salvador Allende of Chile.
Right.
That's not a threat.
I see.
It's just like, this is what happens.
What can I do?
Yeah, I get that.
Did you?
The ones who got, let's face it, they were assassinated.
I mean, plane crashes, these things don't fall from the sky, do they?
I mean, by accident, this is the bombs and things.
Did you feel any pang of guilt when these people went down?
I mean, did you feel responsible in any way?
Yeah, when I quit, you know, so I began about that point.
So after I knew what I knew, I spent another three years in the job.
And it was very, very hard to get out of James, to leave.
First of all, people made it very difficult for me, my bosses and others.
And they offered me, I was one of the few partners in this firm, the company that I served.
I was made their youngest partner.
You know, I was making a lot of money.
I was flying first class around the world, something I'd always dreamed of, staying in the finest hotels, eating in the best restaurants, drinking expensive wines and whining and dining with presidents and beautiful women.
I mean, my God, it was like the American dream.
And I didn't want to believe what I knew to be true.
And I think that's extremely telling because there's a lot of people, I'm sure, today doing things like what I did that believe that they're doing the right thing.
And if they come to the conclusion, and many of them never do come to the conclusion, I think many of them don't get the enlightenment that I get from this president of Panama.
But even if they do, they don't want to quit.
You know, they've got it made.
And, you know, I think it really helped me that I've been in the Peace Corps and I had this value system.
My dad, who was a teacher, I knew he could have made a lot more money.
He was an incredibly talented linguist.
He spoke about five languages, and he could have made a lot of money as a translator for an oil company, you know, or whatever.
But he used to say, money, John, money's not everything.
I'm very proud of the fact that I'm teaching all these young men here year after year after year, men who come from influential families.
I'm instilling them.
I'm not just teaching them languages.
I'm trying to instill in them, you know, a moral sense of value as I'm trying to install in you.
And I was an only child.
So I was raised with a lot of integrity, quite frankly.
Both my mom and dad came from these, like I said, this history of New Englanders that were had a lot of integrity.
Yes, I think you were probably quite unusual in that.
I mean, of all their picks, I think probably they made a mistake with you.
Because I mean, I imagine their vetting procedure is pretty good.
They just didn't work out that you had this.
Well, they knew all that, but they thought it worked to their advantage.
And it did for many years.
So 10 years.
I served them.
I served them.
I cut a lot of deals that I look back on, and I'm not proud of doing that.
But my daughter, who's now in her 40s, was interviewed back when the book first came out by a major news outlet.
And they said, so are you upset that what your dad did?
How do you think he feels about it?
She said, well, I know he doesn't feel good about some of the stuff he did.
But she said, I think he, like me, my daughter, know that if he hadn't done those things, he couldn't be exposing them now.
And I feel that way, James.
I've come to grips with the fact I did this stuff and I've spent the rest of my life, which has been far more than was in there.
So I got out in about 1980.
And ever since then, I've devoted myself to trying to change this system and writing about it, talking to you and others about it, trying to point out that we've created a global economic system that just isn't working, what we call a death economy that's based on short-term profits and short-term materialistic consumption.
And it's causing huge problems.
We all know that.
And we need to turn that around and create what we call a life economy that's based on maximizing long-term benefits, not short-term profits.
You've got to make short-term profits if you run a business, but you don't have to maximize them.
You can put some of that money into making the world a better place, however you want to do that.
And that's where we've got to go if we want to survive as a species.
And that's what I'm devoted to these days and have been for a number of years.
Yeah.
Well, I admire what you did.
Do you think, I mean, the books had, I mean, I asked at the beginning, why you haven't been bumped off?
And you said, well, they don't really care about publishing stuff that's already in the public domain.
And you've put out a lot of information, but ultimately, it hasn't changed anything, has it?
I mean, this is still the global economic business model, disaster capitalism or the death economy.
I mean, it's increased, hasn't it?
Yeah.
And yeah, now China's involved doing something very similar, but much more effectively.
Africa, particularly, or all over the world.
Here's an interesting map that in 2001, which is the top in 2001, which is the top, the United States was the number one trading partner with 80% of the world's countries.
20 years later, that had completely turned around.
And by 2023, China was the number one trading partner with 70% of the world's.
Is that Greenland I'm looking at there, which is all pink?
Yeah.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So Australia, very pink.
Yep.
That's extraordinary.
Yeah, you can get that online.
There's the, if you want.
Lowry Institute.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And China's just a bang of job all over the world.
Their economic hitmen are very successful.
I taught at an MBA program in Shanghai a few years back and realized when I got there that what they want, they wanted to pick my brain about what I'd done right and the mistakes I'd made.
So, yeah.
So how do they do it better?
Well, for one thing, they have a great story to tell.
You know, they averaged 10% economic growth for 30 years.
Nobody else has ever done anything like that.
Certainly the United States hasn't done that.
They brought about 900 million people out of dire poverty.
And nobody else has done anything like that.
That's more than twice the population of the United States.
And so you go to a president of that African country or Latin American country and you say, hey, which model do you like?
The one where the federal minimum wage today is less on a real inflation-adjusted basis than it was in 1974.
That's the United States.
Our federal minimum wage today is less than it was in 1974, adjusted for inflation.
Now, not every some of the states have much higher rates.
I don't want to paint the bad picture here, but something like 30 states still have the minimum federal wage.
And do you want that?
Or do you want what China has, where they brought 900 million people out of dire poverty?
And then they also go in and say, we're not going to try to impact your government policies like the United States does.
We're not going to build military bases on your soil like the United States has done in over 100 countries.
And nobody wants military bases from a foreign country on their soil.
We're not going to tell you how to vote in the United Nations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So they've got a very, very good argument.
Oh, yeah, and we happen to be the leader in solar and wind development.
And we're going to help you build up your solar and wind energy in this country.
And so what it just goes on and on.
I mean, they've got a very good story to tell.
And they're very effective at telling it.
Their economic hitmen are smart.
And where does the iron fist in the velvet glove come in?
What's their when do they turn nasty?
You know, they do not have the reputation.
As far as we know, and as far as, you know, leaders in other countries never heard of them assassinating or overthrowing a government, except within their own, what they consider to be their sphere of influence, which is Hong Kong, where they didn't actually overthrow a government.
They had a lease with England that they took advantage of.
And there's a threat in Taipei and can't figure it out.
Maybe they're counting the Taipei.
What?
Taiwan?
No.
The little island officer.
Macau?
No, the little island.
Macau is already there.
But yeah, no.
Anyway.
For most.
No, that's Taiwan, isn't it?
Yeah, sorry.
I don't know.
This is crazy.
So it's early in the morning here.
Sorry.
So, you know, they threatened a few of their neighbors that they consider to be part of their fold, that they consider to be actually part of China.
But other than that, they don't build military bases.
They've got a couple in Africa that aren't really military bases.
They're staging sites.
They're supply depots like in Djibouti.
So they don't have that reputation that we have.
And that's another huge advantage that they have.
Do you think the Chinese are less evil than the powers that be in the West or just more subtle?
More subtle.
I think whether it's evil or whatever you call it, nationalistic, they're out to gain the same thing.
They want to control the world.
They want to be the number one superpower.
They want a garden of the resources.
They want to pull the resources in.
But I think they're smarter than we were in terms of looking at what the unintended consequences of all of this work is.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you must look at South America, for example, and think these countries have been turned into economic basket cases by people like you.
I mean, people working for agencies that haven't they?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Raped, exploited, whatever you want to call it.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's, you know, it's as old as history when you come right down to it.
I was going to ask you that.
Because this must have been practiced by the ruling elites since time immemorial.
Well, for the last two or three thousand years, certainly.
And incidentally, the country I was trying to think of is Taiwan.
Yeah.
Taiwan.
Taiwan.
Oh, yeah.
So you've, oh, I see.
So you had it right.
I had it right.
You know, but listen, it was really nice.
I thought you were saying the capital of Iran, which is Tehran.
No, Taiwan.
Okay.
It's my English pronunciation, probably.
Okay.
What was your question?
Well, this goes back a long way.
I was wondering, can we credit any particular empire with inventing this behavior?
Was it the Romans or the Greeks or the Phoenicians or the yeah, it goes way back.
I don't know.
I think you can say, you know, supposedly the people from the Asian steppes came down and attacked the southern people who were agronomists, whatever.
But I think what's even more important, James, is to understand that we've been considering ourselves as humans for about 200,000 years.
And most of that time, we lived as we had a life economy.
We had a circular economy.
We didn't trash the earth.
We knew that we were a part of nature, not apart from nature, very much like the indigenous people that I work with and spent, and still every year I spend time in the Amazon with these people, deep, deep, deep in the Amazon.
And those people continue to live as though they're a part of nature, not a part from.
So when did we start seeing ourselves as superior over, apart from nature?
I don't know the exact date, but it goes back probably 3,000 years.
But for most of the 200,000 years that we've been humans, we worked that way.
So it's not, I don't think it's in our DNA to be exploitative and destructive of nature and to feel that we're the gods, we're superior over nature.
I think our DNA tells us that we need to live as part of nature, but we've taken a big step backwards because of the way that we've educated ourselves and the philosophy that we've developed around the magic of our incredible ability to dominate nature.
Yeah, you see, I don't buy into the idea that this is the kind of the general character of mankind.
I mean, I recognize that we are very susceptible to the blandishments of evil, as you were.
You didn't know it, but it's very easy to be sucked into this thing and participate and do evil even unwittingly.
But I get, you know, I've been looking into this stuff for the last four or five years.
Before that, I was completely naive.
I thought that the world was a lovely place and isn't Britain and America great and we're the world's policemen and we're making it better.
But anyway, I think that the world is run by a tiny, tiny minority of generationally rich psychopaths.
And they weed out from any kids that don't show themselves to have the necessary ruthless traits, they will weed out.
They'll either bump them off or they'll die of drug overdoses or what, you know, in car crashes or whatever.
So you've got us, you know, nice people, just wanting to get on, want to look after our families, make the world a better place.
And then you've got this predator class.
And the predator class have been there for generations.
And okay, some families move up, some move down.
But basically, they're working for the guy with the horns.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think, you know, I agree with you.
It's basically about leadership.
And there's a tendency amongst humans that the narcissistic sociopaths rise to the top.
The systems are set up that way, the structure.
I don't believe in any.
I have not seen, ever experienced anything that leads me to believe there's some overriding cabal of a handful of people that call the shots everywhere in the world.
I just haven't experienced that at all.
But there is an overriding philosophy and a system and systems around the world that make it very attractive, that make it possible, more than possible, that push the narcissistic sociopaths to the top.
And they all, they don't have to get together and meet as a cabal, but they do all know that their interests are served by the same sorts of things.
So a Malay of Argentina and a Bukali of El Salvador and a Putin of Russia and a Trump of the United States all know that they have common interests and they should get together to defend those interests.
And those interests are really about as much complete control as they can possibly exert over their countries.
And in the case of the United States and China, I forgot to mention Xi of China.
He's in that category also.
In the case of the United States and China, their goal is to influence the whole world.
And so there's this common thread of belief and a belief in maximizing materialistic consumption, hoarding, getting as much of whatever there is to get as you possibly can as individuals and as the countries that you lord it over.
And so, yeah, and how do we overcome that?
Because I think we can go back at least 3,000 years and say this has been the history of the human race.
that it's been the sociopaths, the narcissistic sociopaths who's risen to the top.
And there are exceptions.
I mean, I think, you know, England's had some very good prime ministers.
I think the United States has had some good presidents, starting with George Washington.
But I really don't think anybody gets to that position without being a narcissist to some degree.
I think they're probably, John, I don't want to out-cynic you, but I think they're all Romans.
They're all compromised.
Well, it really depends on what philosophy they buy into.
So George Washington may have had the same characteristics as a Donald Trump.
I don't know.
But the fact of the matter is he was defending a system that he believed in, which he wanted to get rid of the British monarch and implement some sort of a system that he could at the time call democracy, which, as we now know, has never really been a true democracy.
But his belief system was based on, you know, defending freedom of speech, freedom for this and freedom for that, and all the things that our Constitution talks about.
And that was in direct opposition to King George of England at the time, who wanted, you know, at the time, Washington was not interested in expansion, not even within the landmass of what's now the United States.
King George was interested in building the British Empire to compete with the French and to some degree the Spanish empires at the time.
Washington wasn't interested in that.
He wanted to be free of all that.
And at the same time, I'm sure the way the whole system in the United States is set up is to make sure that elite peoples continue to control.
The Senate is all about that.
And he was in favor of that.
I'm sure.
He lived that kind of life.
He had slaves.
He had a very luxurious life.
But he was driven by a different set of principles.
And so I think the time now calls on us to try to understand that, yes, we're going to have people rise to the top that are probably sociopathic narcissists.
There may be no way of getting around that as a herd animal.
We are a herd animal.
We follow the leader.
And so how do we convince the people that want to rise to the top that the way to rise to the top is by taking care of the earth, by looking for long-term benefits for the future, what I call a life economy?
How do we put on the covers of our most important magazines and our news programs and get the faces of celebrities out there that will defend Defend a life economy and condemn the death economy.
I think that's the only answer that we can come up with because I think as our species has proven time and time again throughout its most recent 2,000 years, 3,000 years, that it is about leadership.
And people who rise to the top are narcissistic sociopaths to a very large degree.
So what do you think about Gaddafi?
who was always presented to us, I mean, as long as I can remember, in the days when I used to listen to the news, Gaddafi was always presented to us as a sort of madman, a flatulent madman, dangerous, crazy, who was at best a figure of comedy, but actually underneath was dangerous.
And yet, since he got brutally murdered, I've been exposed to another side of it, which is that actually Gaddafi tried to stand up.
He tried to sort of represent the African nations against this kind of hegemony that economic hitmen represent, where there's a kind of the Western, well, America particularly, but I suppose Britain as well, are crushing any countries that show any sign of independence.
Do you see, was Gaddafi destroyed basically for resisting the West?
Yeah, I think that's true, but I also think that Gaddafi was a narcissist sociopath.
Right, so he wasn't good for his country, you don't think?
Well, I don't know.
No, I wouldn't say that.
He was better for his country than what's happened since, I think, in many respects.
But I think his motive, if you go back to principle, what's the motive?
What's the driving force?
He wanted to create a superpower among the Arab nations, and he wanted to be the leader.
And he wanted to get everybody to accept the gold dinar, a certain currency, as the way to sell oil, which meant OPEC, which meant Saudi Arabia, which meant so much of the Arab world.
So Gaddafi had, I think, these visions of grandeur.
And as a result, he catered to, you know, when the United States, and to a certain degree, England made overtures and made him out to be a good guy.
He's our friend.
They did that for a while.
He bought into that.
And then when the United States turned against him, he then worked harder to make allies throughout the Arab world.
But his whole goal, I think, was to use whatever he could.
And he could be very cunning and capable.
But I think he also was a madman to a certain degree.
But he was driven by this principle of creating an Arab alliance that he would be the leader of.
I think that was his driving force.
And in the process, I think he did some good things for his country.
But we go back to this idea of what is the driving principle behind our leaders.
And as long as we, whether we are communists or Democrats or Arabs or Jews or whatever, we follow the leader that seems to be taking us down the path toward greatness.
I think MAGA, Make America Great, sums it up.
I think Gaddafi could say, make the Arab world great.
And Putin would say that about Russia and Xi about China.
And the people within those countries, all of them to a certain degree, follow that.
Enough people fall in line behind the leader, go with the herd, a critical mass, enough to keep those leaders in power.
When suddenly somebody else comes along and says, hmm, I have a better idea of helping our country become better.
I have an idea that supposed to the current leader, if that person can convince enough people, they'll try to go with that person.
Depending on what kind of a system you have, what does that mean?
But I think that that person usually also is probably a narcissistic narcissist.
You know, I think, you know, I was very successful in my job.
So I have no doubt that I have some narcissism in me.
I think we also, to a certain degree, but it's a matter of degree as to how much we have.
And also what our background is.
So my narcissism now is, I want to be really successful at turning things around.
I love being invited to be on shows like this.
I love the fact that my books do well out in the public.
There's a certain narcissism involved in that.
But I want my narcissism to be aimed toward creating a life economy.
Your Panama guy, the chap who died in the plane crash, he sounds like he was really good.
He was really brave and decent.
Tell me about him.
He was.
Juan Martorrijos, he was very good for his country.
But he was also driven by wanting to be adulated by his people.
And he worked very hard at doing good jobs for his people because that was the way to get that kind of adulation.
Above all, he wanted to get the ownership of the Panama Canal in Panamanians' hands, and he was successful.
He's the guy who negotiated the contract with Jimmy Carter.
Does Panama still have the rights?
Yes, well, yes.
Legally speaking, of course, Trump has been threatening that.
And I have no doubt that this huge American fleet that's off the coast of Venezuela, it's also off the coast of Panama.
Let's not forget it's in the Caribbean, is a threat to Panama as well as Venezuela, though we don't talk about that here.
The whole emphasis is on Venezuelan drug people.
So he, you know, he was a party animal.
I know one of his daughters, who's a prominent lawyer in Washington, D.C. today, and she's illegitimate, and she says she has at least 22 illegitimate brothers and sisters.
Yes, he was a womanizer.
He was a player as well as a...
Yes, he was a womanizer, and he loved parties.
He invited me to these parties, and he loved good rum and cigars and other things.
And yet at the same time, he was very popular and doing a, he was very nationalistic.
He wanted to help his country.
He made that very clear when I met with him.
I'm not going to buy into your deals, John, but here's an alternative.
And I want you to understand what you're doing in the world.
So he had all that.
He had tremendously, he had tremendous integrity.
But he was also, you know, he was driven by wanting to be adulated and wanting to be a popular guy.
But he wasn't taking your loans.
No, because he saw popular as being, well, he made me go back to my company and say, yeah, let's get small loans to help small farmers, irrigation projects, and small fishermen.
And I went back thinking, this will never work.
I went to my boss, Bruno Zambotti, the president of the company at the time, and I told Bruno, this is what Omar wants, but I know that's not what we do.
That's not what the World Bank does.
And Bruno said, well, let's make it work.
Let's do these projects that'll put us in good light, and maybe out of that, we'll get better things in the future.
And let's see what happens.
But let's try this.
And we did.
And those were good projects, small-scale projects.
It's the only place where I was actually involved in doing those kinds of things then.
And now I'm involved in that very much through the non-profits I do in Latin America, in the Amazon.
But so, so Omar was, you know, he is a great example of somebody who wants to be powerful, but is driven by a principle that is truly good for his people and ultimately the world.
So those people exist and we can do that.
And, you know, go ahead.
Am I not right in thinking that during COVID, something like five African leaders were bumped off by the powers that be?
I know President Magafuli of Tanzania was definitely disappeared.
But I think there were a few more.
Are you aware of this?
Well, I remember reading about it.
I've never worked in Africa except North Africa, Egypt, which really is debatable whether that's it's Africa geographically speaking, but culturally, not so much.
And so I have no personal experience in Africa, and it's hard to comment on for me.
I don't like to comment on things where I don't have personal experience, but I remember reading, you know, as you have about a number of these things that happened.
Yeah, unfortunately, I haven't traveled in South America as much as I'd like.
I've only been to Colombia and South America, but I've traveled quite a lot in Africa.
And I'm sure it's the same that when you go to South America, you're quite conscious that this is a continent with massive, massive natural resources.
And yet, these countries haven't developed in a way commensurate with these natural resources.
That there's something, something wrong.
And well, you've described it.
This the West.
Well, how would you characterize the people who, this, this blob that makes these decisions, that sends in economic commitment to because it's not, it's not, it's not America, is it?
It's a sort of level above sovereign countries.
It's a sort of shadowy, businessy, corporate elite.
Do you have a name for them?
Corporatocracy, the corporatocracy.
And, you know, it's all of that.
So the people in government, for the most part, come out of business and go back into it.
And so it's what we call in the United States a revolving door, where, you know, somebody will be very high up in an oil company, and the next thing you know, they're in charge of the agency that regulates oil companies and know that they're going to go back to work for the oil company after four or five years in that job.
So what are they going to do?
They're going to serve the best interests of the oil companies.
And in places like the World Bank and the IMF and other such organizations, most of the people in high positions there were ministers of finance or something equivalent in some country of the world.
So they're all part of this system.
So they're going to support the system.
So you have that over and over and over again, where you've got that group of people that are all of them At the highest level of their minds, they serve the same god, which is the god of consumer materialism and maximize.
I mean, who do you think?
What's the name of this god that they serve, these people, basically?
Greed.
I mean, it's got to, it's got to be Satan, hasn't it?
Ultimately, I personally don't believe in ultimate evil, but I do believe in greed, and I do believe in destruction.
You can call it whatever you want, you can call it evil, yeah, you can call it evil.
But the thing that some horn guy there is is, and I don't really see that.
You don't believe in him.
I don't see a God that sits on a throne with a big, big beard either.
So, those are two personifications that I just don't.
But the concept of, I would say, understanding that we are a part of nature, part of the world, a part of the world, or apart from the world.
And you could define being a part, believing that you're a part from the world is evil.
You could say that.
And believing that you are a part of the world is good.
Well, that's one way of putting it.
Well, you've spent time with shamans, haven't you?
A lot.
I was trained as one back when I was in the peace where one saved my life back in 1969.
And then for the next couple of years, I had to, my exchange with him was that I had to train with him.
And I didn't particularly want to at the time, but there was no future in shamanism.
I didn't even know what a shaman was.
But he saved my life.
How did he save your life?
Well, that's a story.
And I've only got, I've going to have to get off in 10 minutes, Jake, unfortunately.
Can you tell it in 10 minutes?
Well, I was dying.
I was deep in the Amazon.
I couldn't keep any food down.
I couldn't, I was, I was dying.
I was lying on the floor.
I couldn't even stand up.
And I certainly couldn't get to take the three-day trek through the jungle and up into the Andes to find it to get to a doctor.
So this one night, this shaman offered to heal me, and he gave me what now we know of ayahuasca, if you know what I mean by that.
I'd never heard of it at the time.
Nobody that I knew ever had.
But I went on this vision quest and I saw this jaguar.
So one of my books, recent books, is called Touching the Jaguar, which goes into this.
So he says, when I'm in this deep trance, he says, touch the jaguar.
And in this vision quest, I see this jaguar and I go out and touch it.
And as I touch it, I hear this voice.
It's like my mother saying, son, the food and drink will kill you.
Now, the schwa, who I was living with this indigenous nation called the schwa, and like most indigenous people in the Amazon, they don't drink river water because they know it's got organic matter in it, dead trees, dead animals.
The women make a kind of beer called chicha by chewing and spitting manioc.
And then that sets up a like a beer that you can add water to and it's safe because it's alcoholic.
And that's what they drink.
And I was drinking a lot of it because you get to rehydrate in the Amazon.
And they eat some very strange food, squirming white grubs live down the, you know, very nutritious, but not at all what I'm growing up with.
So when I ate these things and drank these things, I'd hear a voice saying it'll kill you.
At the same time, on this, on this shamanic journey, I saw that these schwa people are very robust.
The men were all built like Tarzan.
And people live to be very old if they don't die of a hunting accident or some such thing.
And so I saw during that experience that it wasn't the food and drink killing me.
It was my perception.
You know, my mindset that was killing me, the belief that these foods were killing me and drink.
And the next couple of days, I recovered.
And then the shaman said, you know, came to me and said, so now you owe me.
You need to be my apprentice.
So I did that for over a year.
And it was a very fascinating experience.
And I've been, you know, I've trained with other shamans since then in the Andes and in Iran, in Indonesia to a lesser degree, not that intensive, but and made studies of them.
I've written five books on shamanism.
So I'm, you know, it's, I, I, it's, but I think what's really important here is to understand that shamanism, just like capitalism, is based on perceptions and changing perceptions.
And that's modern psychotherapy.
That's quantum physics.
That's marketing.
That's politics.
Our perceptions mold reality.
Our perceptions mold our perceptions determine how we act and how we act molds reality.
So this is what I've been talking about, you know, recently with you is that the perceptions of our leaders as to where they want to take us and what's going to bring them the greatest satisfaction as narcissists is what we need to deal with.
How do we create a perception that success is not about materialistic consumption?
It's about making a world that our children and grandchildren will thank us for.
If we can have that be the driving perception of the people that we idolize, instead of the ones who make billions, let's put Musk in the trash bin and say, we don't want to be like that.
We don't want to be like Zuckerman or any of these people.
We want to be like Jack Dellingpole.
Or James Dellingpole even.
Yeah.
James, James.
Sorry.
I agree.
I totally agree.
The world would be so much better.
John, you can do the other half.
We'll share the roles.
I think it'd be really good.
I'd love talking to you very much.
I'd love to go to South America.
I'd love to go to the Amazon with you.
I'm going to go to the next one.
I'm going in January.
Oh, they're not.
I mean, there's so many myths that are just crazy.
Like, piranhas don't attack people except in a very rare state.
What about the kanzero fish that swims up your urine stream?
I've never seen one or known.
I've never been in an area where there were any.
I've heard about them, but I've never been a lot of places, but they haven't been there.
I don't know.
There's a lot of urban myths.
I think those do exist.
And I've swung with a lot of piranhas.
I know they exist.
But the myths are, you know, it's crazy because I've been going to the Amazon since 1968 a lot.
I've probably spent, you know, I don't know, maybe close to 10 years of my life there.
And I've taken over 2,000 people there.
And I've never had any serious problems.
I'm very envious of you.
Tell us where we can find your stuff.
JohnPerkins.org.
And yeah, johnperkins.org.
And there is a there's a special trip to the Amazon coming up in January, which is not on the website because it's by invitation only because it's a film that's being made.
So people have to agree to be filmed and so forth.
So But if somebody like you really wanted to go and were willing to be part of a film, we got a couple of spaces.
I don't take more than 15 people because I want the trips to be intimate.
I want people to really feel the forest.
It's all about the Indigenous people.
It's all about learning from them.
It's not about helping them or changing them.
It's about learning from them, which is helping them.
It sounds so cool.
I just have a sneaking suspicion.
If I said to my wife now, I've just done this great podcast with this guy, and he's invited me to the Amazon in January.
Are you cool with that?
I don't know.
I'll try.
Your wife would love it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So, johnperkins.org.
Remember.
I'm an organism.
John Perkins.org.org.
John.
Thank you.
It's been lovely talking to you.
Everyone else, if you've enjoyed this, obviously you have.
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