The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 3rd Edition by John Perkins

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 3rd Edition by John Perkins Los Angeles Times Bestseller How do we stop the unrelenting evolution of the economic hit man strategy and China’s takeover? The riveting third edition of this New York Times bestseller blows the whistle on China’s economic hit man (EHM) strategy, exposes corruption on an international scale, and offers much-needed solutions for curing the degenerative Death Economy. In this shocking exposé, former EHM John Perkins gives an insider view into the corrupt system that cheats and strong-arms countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars and ultimately causes staggering income inequality and ecological devastation. EHMs are highly paid professionals who use development loans to saddle countries with huge debts and force them to serve US interests. Now, a new EHM wave is infecting the world, and at the peak of the devastation sits China, a newly dominant economic power, with its own insidious version of the US EHM blueprint. Twelve explosive new chapters detail the allure, exploitation, and wreckage of China’s EHM strategy in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. If allowed to continue its rampage, the EHM strategy—whether executed by the United States or China—will destroy life as we know it. However, all is not lost. Perkins offers a plan for transforming this system that places profits above all into a Life Economy that restores the earth. He inspires readers to take actions toward a new era of global cooperation that will end the United States’s and China’s EHM strategies for good.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. As if you've never heard that before, that's always on the show why is that i

don't know why it's something we started like million years ago and then when i stopped doing people said why the hell do you sing that part we love it quit uh stop not doing it and uh we continue ever since and then you run up to me at shows and go the chris boshow and i go security anyway guys welcome to the big show we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here because we love you we love you from the deepest bottom parts of our heart you know we love you so much we don't even charge for the show and i bring this up as a matter of shaming and guilt of course to get the plugs in sam harris i was listening to his show brilliant mind uh he charges for his show and i was listening to one going god damn i gotta pay eight dollars

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And you know what? For all the depth of love that we have for you, we will love you even more, as if that were possible, but I'm not sure. But we're going to spin it that way. Thanks, Monis, for always tuning in. As always, we appreciate you. We have an amazing author on the show today. He's going to be talking to us about his amazing book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

John Perkins is on the show with us today, and he's got his third edition out of his amazing book in New York Times bestseller, all updated and expanded with 12 explosive new chapters. And we're going to be talking to him about what goes into his book and everything else. But let me tell you, this guy isn't just some author of a book. He's the chief economist at a major consulting firm. He served as an advisor to the World Bank, the UN, the IMF, Fortune 500 corporations, leaders of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and plus U.S. government agencies. That too. He's written 11 books that have been published in over 35 languages. His groundbreaking confessions of an economic hit man spent 72 weeks on the new york times bestseller list and has sold more than 2 million

copies and now he's got the third edition of it out we're going to get a chance to talk to him what do you know he's here today he just showed up on the show he's like hey you want to talk about my book and we're like damn it yes let's do it welcome the show john how are you thanks chris it's it's great to be with you uh you always it's always it's always it's always worth a good laugh it's always a great way to start off the show be there you go we call it infotainment around here we inform people and make them smile and therefore they learn better or not at all one. One of the two. I haven't figured it out yet, but it seems to work for us. It's very Shakespearean, you know. Rap, rap, tragedy, and laughs.

That's true. I mean, we try not to kill anybody on the show, but there's still time. John. And we don't want to make it you, John. That's for sure. Maybe myself. I'll probably die from this eventually. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs.

It's a.org. Oh, a.org. Well, that would be except those two. I'm very organic. It's johnperkins.org is my name. Judges, can we accept a.org? Yes, we can. Okay, great.

I'm so glad to hear it. Give that to me once again because I think I interrupted you mid-org. johnperkins.org. There we go. JohnPerkins.org. There you guys go. So, John, when was this book originally published? Well, so it's really a trilogy. The first one was published in 2004. The second one in 2016.

A lot happened between 2004 and 2016 in the economic hitman realm and in many other realms right and now a lot more has happened since 2016 so we get this third edition which the subtitle is china's economic hitman strategy and how to take the global takeover how to stop the sorry ways to stop the global takeover china china is is there something bad about china we'll get into it so uh you originally called the book and it still is called that confessions of an economic hitman uh give us a some history or background beyond the reasoning of that title. Well, during my time as an economic hitman, as you mentioned earlier, I was chief economist at a major consulting firm. I had a staff of up to 50 people.

And my job really was to go out and identify countries that had resources U.S. corporations wanted, like oil, and then arrange huge loans to that country from the World Bank or its sister organizations. The money, however, never actually went to the country. It came back to big engineering firms in the United States, Halliburton, Brown and Root, Bechtel, Stone & Webster, companies like that, or maybe General Electric, some of the equipment suppliers, to build big infrastructure projects in these countries. Things like power plants and industrial parks, highways, ports, things that would benefit a few wealthy families,

the ones that own the businesses and the industries. And, of course, make huge profits for our corporations. But in the long run, the people suffered because money was diverted from health, education, and other social services to pay off the interest on the loan. And in the end, the principal couldn't be repaid. That was part of the strategy. Wow. That was actually a strategy to never get the principal paid?

Yeah. Usually these countries, we knew ahead of time that we were going to give them two bigger loans that they weren't going to be able to repay the strategy so we implemented what was called neoliberal economics and that means we went back in usually as the guy in the guise of the international monetary fund and restructured the loan for the country, you know, kind of deal with them. But that deal insisted that they sell their resource, their oil, or today it would be lithium, cobalt, the things that are used in a green economy. They sell these real cheaply to our corporations without many, if any, environmental and social restrictions. But they privatize, you know, privatize their government-owned

or their publicly-owned sectors like their utility companies, water and sewage systems, electric companies, sell them to our investors, drop regulations, basically trickle-down economics. It's known as neoliberal economics. So we insisted on these things, and then our corporations, our oil companies, our mining companies could go in and very much exploit the resources

the country had. You mean we weren't spreading democracy? Isn't that interesting? Like all historical empires, we sell a good story, and that is that we're spreading democracy. Of course, under Pinochet, Chile, that was not a democracy. It was a terrible dictatorship. We've seen it in Saudi Arabia. We see it in Egypt today.

No, what we do is spread American corporativism, big corporations, what we call the corporatocracy. The people who run our big corporations also have tremendous influence in government. And basically this whole empire is a corporate empire supported by the US government and these banking interests that are controlled by the US.S. government and these banking interests that are controlled by the U.S. government like the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department, USAID and many of the other institutions.

These are known as the Washington Consensus. So you get the Washington Consensus putting money into these countries and then the neoliberal economics comes along to make sure that the money comes back to us in many different forms. It sounds like we're spreading capitalism or unbridled capitalism as opposed to democracy.

Well, it's a form of capitalism that I call predatory capitalism. Ah. Yeah. You know, real capitalism, it says, well, the government doesn't own the means of production or business. That's one of the definitions. But also included in that definition is a healthy respect for competition. And, you know, these systems destroy competition for the most part. You know, our big businesses take over, and the small businesses in these countries where we work really don't have a chance unless they're helping us, our corporations out in one way or another. And it's really very,

very exploitative. So, and it is true that the government doesn't own the means of production or business in the United States, but those who own the means of production and the businesses really in a way own the government to a very large degree, as I think we all know at this point. Yeah, and especially with Citizens United and other things that SCOTUS has done in recent ruling of the last 10, 20 years, I mean, it just seems to have amplified how much top people of capitalism and kind of almost an oligarchy system. Do you think that we're an oligarchy? That's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I think to a certain degree we're an oligarchy,

and maybe not to the same extent that a country like Russia is today, but we are a corporatocracy, is the way I would put it, where you really get these people who run our big corporations and often you know somebody who works for as high up and an executive in an oil company ends up going to car going going down to the government for a few years uh and runs one of the businesses that's supposed to be regulating the oil companies knowing full well that he or she is going to go back to the oil company and say condoleezza rice secretary of, is a great example of that. And there's many, many, well, the Bush family itself. Bush family, Hal Burton,

the Cheney. You know, we just had a few days ago, Stephen Simon on, who he did some stuff with the usual people you're probably aware of you know um i'm i'm trying to put something in but you know we're state department different things he wrote the book grand illusion the rise and fall of american ambition in the middle east and basically profile the 40 years of presidencies then and you know what they try to do and we'll fix it you know sometimes made it worse. And so it was interesting to me.

In fact, you mentioned Condoleezza Rice. I was just earlier about an hour ago watching Jon Stewart's interview with her and Hillary Clinton. And, you know, it was all the usual, and I'm not being, I'm not trying to be glib about it, but it was the usual, you know, the democracy and spreading the beautiful shining city on the hill sort of image of what we're trying to do in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all these different places. But, uh, you know, I, it's interesting how we try and use that sleight of hand to do what you're talking about. Um, and you know, I mean, the joke that everyone talks about that really isn't a joke. It's true. The truism is you know uh

when you need help in your country uh do you have oil you know that sort of thing you want to trade it in dollars you know there's a lot of argument about that going on right now uh so let's step let's dive into the core of your book give us like a 30 000 feet of of what you initially wrote and then let's talk about some of the new additions and chapters and why those are important to add. Well, you know, I think the initial book was about what I've described. And there's another layer here. That's the people we call jackals. And these are, if a country's president or minister of finance,

whoever we're dealing with, doesn't buy into our deals, doesn't play the game with us, they know that these jackals will come in. These are people who usually are CIA assets or maybe they're one of the other organization's assets, but they overthrow governments and sometimes assassinate leaders. And, you know, unfortunately, the United States has a long history of this. We mentioned Pinochet of Chile.

Well, you know, he came in after Allende was taken out in a CIA-supported coup that Henry Kissinger has admitted to. And we've admitted to doing such things with Mossadegh and Iran and the Mongols and the Congolese. Yeah, yeah, over and over. So it made my job pretty easy. You know, I'd go into these presidents and say hey you know here in this hand i got a few million a few billion dollars uh that it's going to benefit your family you know and and on the other hand if you don't play this deal in this hand i've got a gun and you know i never carried but i knew that people you know with guns and implication yeah so did these presidents and

you know a couple of my clients that didn't buy into these deals was the democratically elected president of Ecuador, speaking of democracy, Jaime Roldos, who pissed off the oil companies, who pissed off American business, and was taken out, basically. I mean, he died in an airplane crash. It's never been proven that it was an assassination,

but there's a lot of evidence that points that way. If you want to kill somebody, an airplane crash is a great way to do it because the smoking gun goes down with the plane. I'm laughing about this, but it was tragic. And shortly after him, Omar Torrijos, head of state of Panama, who had negotiated the Panama Canal Treaty with Jimmy Carter and was standing up to the United States in many ways, he met the same fate. His private plane went down in almost the same conditions as Jaime Roldo's. These guys didn't play the game. But most of the clients I worked with in Colombia and Argentina and Guatemala

and Indonesia and in many other countries, you know, played the game. And they benefited, their families benefited, and our corporations benefited. There's almost like a mafia element to where we show up in a country and go, yeah, it's a nice country you got here. I'd be ashamed if something happened to it. But we got a deal for you. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. So the original book goes into that kind of stuff and a lot of examples. And the second book that came out in 2016, the second in the trilogy, looks at this new wave of economic hitmen that came along. And basically at that point, every major international corporation had gone global. Globalization had occurred after 2004 on a a big scale and every major corporation has its equivalent of economic hitmen they have their own and so you know you're like a corporation will say we need to build a new industrial plan a big multi-billion dollar facility and they and their

economic hitmen go to indonesia and they go to philippines and they go to malaysia and they they compete you know they say hey we'll build a plant here and hire a lot of people if you will reduce your taxes on us or not make us pay any taxes or meet any environmental regulations. And, you know, maybe lower your wage rates a little bit or the conditions around. So there's this incredible competition. So every major corporation, and that's just one example of how these economic hitmen work. The second book, The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman, is about that. And now this third book is what's happened in the time since then, which is China's economic hitmen have really, really learned from our successes and our failures, and they've outmaneuvered us. Their economic kit men are more efficient than ours are all around the world today. So

they have become the number one investor and the number one trading partner on every continent. There you go. I mean, I've seen a lot of that in, we've seen a lot of that in Africa. You know, sometimes they've even repossessed ports. Russia has been called in to kind of be the gun enforcer in some of these countries. And the precious metals, this fight over these precious metals and what develops to do these things, it's really interesting. It's almost like a game of who can exploit who first and best at this point yeah you know i gotta i just happen to have here a print of a pretty interesting map um so the red shows where china is the number one trading partner and the blue is the united states and you can see our reach doesn't go nearly as far as theirs uh down below it points out that a hundred and

i think it's a let me see a hundred and a hundred and twenty four countries are in the top try to with china and 56 away the united states so i get that right 124 i got it right there you go so you know the china's reach has just been phenomenal. And this has all happened in less than a decade. It's been truly amazing what China has done. And I have to say, Chris, part of it is because the United States devoted so many resources to Afghanistan and Iraq. And really, we neglected Latin America and Africa and parts of Asia, and China moved in. And today, something similar is happening where we're devoting tremendous amounts of resources to Ukraine, and China's moving into the parts of the world that we're kind of leaving behind. It's why the U.S. Vice President recently spent quite a lot of time in Africa

because she was trying to overcome this tremendous momentum that China has built up on that continent, partly as a result of the fact that we neglected Africa for many years. Was there any sort of racial bias as to why we neglected Africa? I know they went through a huge age crisis that wiped out, I think, a quarter of the population and really stunted the future growth of that

continent. Well, it's interesting that I think the average age, not life expectancy, but average age in Africa is about 19 years old. And in the United States and in China and Russia, it's something close to 40 years old. It's twice what it is in Africa. So yeah, very young population. The race issue is a fascinating one. In December, there was a meeting, a global security meeting held in Munich in Germany. And the Global South, it was fascinating to see how what we call the Global South, Africa, Latin America, you know, the places that they have this very, very different understanding of the war in Ukraine than what we get and what much of Europe gets. And they actually said they felt that the war in Ukraine was a white person, European-American war.

And to them, you know, and I'm not defending this. I'm simply pointing out what came out of those meetings that they said, you know, you're putting a lot more resources into ukraine than you ever did to help us fight covid we've got starvation we've got terrible malnutrition we've got lousy health conditions we need help uh we we need people to invest in our economy and you haven't done that and and you know europe has accepted tremendous amounts of migrants from immigrants from uh uh from ukraine and not done the same with people from africa so there's this there is this you raised issue and you raised the race issue and you know again i'm i i don't i'm not defending

in any of these particular aspects but you get very, very different view when you talk to people in Africa and Latin America. I just came back from Latin America. I was there most of January and some of February, and I speak Spanish fluently. You know, in talking to people, they have such a different view of the world than we do. And to them, the biggest problems in the world are malnutrition, climate change, and what that's doing to their economies, and disease. And so they're saying, gee, just stop fighting you guys. Stop all this competition in the north and the insanity in the north and deal with what's really important in the long term to the long-term survival of our species yeah it's definitely something to contemplate and uh you know we as a

as america have a 400 year history with issues with race and and uh everything else that's gone on with us so you know there is some of that in play i think some of the administrations that we've had you can kind of look at and go, there might've been some preference there. In your book, do you talk about, you know, there's been some recent interesting moves that the Biden administration has done, the chip thing, where they cut off the chips to China. And it seems like there's been a real push to move to manufacturing. There was Pelosi, House Speaker Pelosi, going to Taiwan, which has really pissed off the China folks. Do you get into some of that?

Yeah, I do, very much so. And I think to cut to the chase, the conclusion and perhaps the most important theme throughout the book is that this economic hitman strategy, whether it is being implemented by the United States or China or anyone else, it's basically a competition that's a race to disaster. It's like nuclear war between USSRsr and russia back in the day yeah well and it's you know it's but there's no question that that our current economic system uh has created what we can call a death economy it's an economic system that's that's consuming and polluting itself into extinction in the short term it's in, and in the name of short-term profits,

it's depleting the resources it needs for the long term. And this is true whether it's being done for China or the United States or whomever. It is ultimately a self-defeating strategy. And we need to understand that we in china can disagree on an awful lot of things uh but let's agree that nobody wins this race nobody's a winner on a dead planet so it's terribly important that we stop this competitive strategy for for for go for exploitative domination of the world and turn this death economy into a life economy and in a life economy chris is an economic system that will pay people to clean up pollution you know to come up with ways to mine all the plastic that's in the oceans and recycle it as one example, and to regenerate coral reefs and

other devastated environments, rainforests, forests everywhere, recycle, create new technologies like solar and wind and things that we haven't even thought of or we haven't pursued yet that don't ravage the earth. You know, to move from this death economy to a life economy doesn't mean that we're going to we're going to have to give up on good lives at all it means quite the opposite but it does mean that we will pay people to do things that not only make some short-term profits because business needs short-term profits. We all know that. But not these excessive short-term profits.

Instead, devote a great deal of that effort to the long-term survival of human beings on this planet and all life forms for that matter. So the future success stories will be those that have worked toward creating a life economy there you go uh do you talk in the book about you know the interesting thing about china in recent strategy you know you we've seen everything that you talk about your book i don't know if you touch on the islands they build the man-made islands they built in the Pacific American oceans. But the one thing that's interesting is how bad the one-child policy has really seemed to cripple them and their future and may end up putting them in a situation like Japan is going through right now.

Well, Japan is still the third largest economy you know well and then and by a long long distance so china and the united states together produce about 45 of the world's economy the gdp and and and japan is way down about seven percent so it's it's much lower but i think you know you know, there's a lot of people in the United States who want us to be convinced that China's in decline. I don't see that. And I see this new generation of Chinese students. And I taught in an MBA program in Shanghai, a Chinese MBA program. I had some incredible Chinese students,

you know, I see them moving in a very different direction. They don't want pollution. They've lived with horrible pollution. They say, you know, you in the United States, your kids don't have any idea what pollution is. We do. And we don't want it for future generations. They don't see their slowdown in economic growth quite the same as we do, because their slowdown means that they're more approaching something that was normal for the rest of the world. While they were going at 10% a year for 30 years, the rest of us were going, you know, much, much less than that. And that's kind of what they're doing now. So they've come out of this huge growth period that they needed to bring them out of the cultural revolution, out of the tragedy that Mao created until he died in the mid-70s.

And they've pulled themselves out of that with a huge effort. And now they're kind of balancing off that abnormality. their slowdown in economic growth, the level that's more consistent with the rest of the world, is necessarily being a sign of deterioration or decline. That's interesting. I wondered about that because I guess there's, I don't know what the number is, but there's an incredible amount of men in China who can't wife up, who can't family up.

And certainly if you're not generationally growing as a country, as a people, that was one of the things that made us a superpower, having that marketplace and having that population growth. Japan is projected to be in a declining society of generational growth. And there's questions of the impact of how well it can support itself in the future. And some people speculate China's that same way. Well, there's a huge difference because China has really reached out to Africa and Latin America as markets and as places to supply them with their resources.

And I said, you know, they recognize that the population of africa is extremely young and and they're drawing on that they they that's an asset for them they see that as an asset so they they have really reached out to the world japan certainly did that too with its in many of its manufacturing goods its cars that they sold around the world but china is exceeding all of that china is doing a a much better job than Japan ever did in that regard. And let's not forget that China's declining population is declining from over a billion people, almost a billion and a half people. We've still got less than 400 million in the United States.

So they've still got a huge, huge population. Yeah, definitely. And so let me ask you this. There's been talk about, and I think it's more than talk, people have talked about how moving manufacturing from China to Mexico, which proximity-wise gives us an interesting trading route. I don't know why someone didn't think about it sooner. But do you see this as a viable solution?

I mean, Vietnam has risen as a replacement to China and other things. Well, China is moving increasingly, and its policy is to move away from kind of the cheap goods that it was famous for, very much like Japan did back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, and into much higher tech goods. So I think it does make a lot of sense for companies to move to Mexico and other places. And I was just recently took a group of people to Guatemala. Every year I take people to get to know the Mayan people and there's some amazing stuff there. You can check it out on my website, johnperkins.org.

And I invite all your listeners to join me on the next trip. And a man on this trip was a senior vice president at HP, formerly Hewlett Packard. And his company, incidentally, was ranked by Newsweek, I think it was last year or the year before, as the greenest company in the United States. And they're very determined to do this. And yeah, they're looking at moving their facilities

to places like Mexico and other places. I think a lot of companies are doing that. If I were a CEO of a company, I would certainly be looking at diversifying around countries. But it's pretty hard to rule out China these days because it's such a to rule out China these days, because, you know, it's such a huge market for one thing. And it's got a very, you know, it's got some very highly educated, well-trained people that are staying in China. There's some leaving, but there's a lot staying.

So, you know, this, the idea of seeing China as an enemy, I think, is a huge mistake. And while I think it's good for companies to diversify where they locate their plant and the markets they reach, let's not try to segregate this between the United States and China. Like the Cold War you mentioned earlier, we don't want to repeat that. It doesn't make any sense to repeat that. The world is too small we're too deeply integrated now to repeat that that tragic mistake there you go and so you think we're in the third wave of this economic hitman the ehm as you refer to it and uh i think it's getting better are they getting worse from the three different waves that we've processed through? Well, it depends on which.

Well, so it's getting better for China, worse for the United States, and worse for the world. As I said before, this competition on the economic hitman strategy, and basically the whole thing is run by what you could define as an economic hitman strategy. And basically the whole thing is run by what you could define as an economic hitman strategy. I go into detail in the book about the four pillars of the economic hitman strategy, which basically define the economy and economic growth. And the way these were being applied by both countries and others is taking us into terrible climate change and the threat of

nuclear war and terrible environmental devastation and income inequality. So in the long run, this is not beneficial to anyone. In the short run, we can talk about whether China is doing better, the United States is doing better. But when we define better as increasing what we call gross domestic product or gross global product in this case, it's a misnomer. And it's very misleading because those statistics measure how well the wealthiest people are doing. They don't really measure overall prosperity. And I'll give you an example.

And this is one of the reasons that I was an economic hitman for 10 years, and I believed in what I was doing. I thought that that model I was using, that economic hitman strategy, was helping poor countries. Because statistically, we'd show that when you invest a lot of money in infrastructure infrastructure the economy grows and it does when you measure it by gdp but that doesn't mean everybody's benefiting it only means in most cases that a few people are benefiting so here's an example in the united states we have three individuals three who own as much wealth as more than half the country, if those three individuals last year made 10% return on their wealth and half the country lost 3%, lost 3%. And the rest of the country remained the same, we'd show an overall growth of something close to 4%.

It would look as though the entire country benefited, but in fact only three individuals and their families benefited, and everybody else either lost or stayed the same. And if that's true in a country like the United States where three individuals have as much wealth as half the country, what about in a country where three individuals or two individuals or families have as much wealth as 90% of the country? If you take the world as a whole, you've got a handful of people,

less than 100, who have tremendous amount of wealth. So the way we measure our global economy is totally biased in favor of the rich and big corporations. So we've got to stop that measurement and start measuring what it really means to have prosperity for everyone. Yeah. I mean, we've been watching the deconstruction of the middle class since the Reagan era times.

Maybe you can say some of it came from either Carter or Nixon, but definitely it seemed to have accelerated. You know, the trickle-down economics, I'm still waiting for my check from Ronald Reagan. Yeah, we've seen this. We've seen this huge rise of ultra-rich people. Even over COVID they got richer, you know, and

it seems like the pan-globalism of these quote-unquote oligarchs, I'll throw around the term for fun, you know, they're making more money globally as opposed to some of this locally. You mentioned earlier the Iraq and Afghanistan war and some of the different things that we're focused on. I hear people say it even today,

like we're spending all this money in Ukraine, like, hey, we can't fund schools, we can't fund, we got infrastructure falling apart in this country. A lot of stuff does seem to have been ignored here for a long time. I'm still waiting for the Trump infrastructure week to come through. I think that's any day now. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think you hit the nail on the head there. While the brutality that Russia has exhibited toward Ukraine is outrageous and it has to be stopped, we've got to be careful that that war doesn't drain us all of our resources. And also, it's a huge diversion from this long-term real problem of climate change that we're facing and the deaf economy in the world that's causing huge crises that are that are you know my 14 year old grandson and all his brothers and sisters around the planet are going to inherit we've got to confront that definitely i mean we're seeing that with uh rising sea level tides and you know higher craziness and uh weather patterns and different things you know you you mentioned a really good point i mean i i didn't realize how important

ukraine was to the global environment when it came to like sunflower seeds or wheat or other different things i was like wait yeah and, yeah, I can see fighting over it, but it's almost like China has really benefited from our, like you say, a hyper focus on, uh, we need to be the policeman in the world and democracy. And, you know, we focused all this time in Afghanistan, Iraq and resources. And then, you know, we were even guilty of doing what you called the hitman theory there where, you know, we're pouring money in that country and really just the guys who were running it were getting rich and embezzling money and

sending it to swiss banks and different things like that nature um well how do we how do we dial this back how do we get on a on a corrective thing you know you mentioned your website that all of us are it's important to all of us to try and correct this. How do we do that? How do each of us have that role to play? You know, I think, Chris, that is the most important point of the book is to say that we must transform the death economy to a life economy. And every one of us has a role to play.

You know, we are all consumers so we're victims of this economy but we're also collaborators in the way we consume many of us are investors or managers or owners or in these companies and we have a lot more power than we realize you know i've had a number of chief executive offices of major corporations, people I know who said to me, I want my company to be greener, but I have grandchildren. But I know that if I lose market share, my main investors will fire me and replace me with someone who only cares about market share. So they beg me. They say, hey, tell your audience, and I'm telling this audience right now, write emails, Twitter, whatever it is, the way you communicate.

Pick a company or join a consumer campaign and pick a company that you want to see changed and write them a letter and say, hey, you know, I love your product, but I'm not going to buy it anymore until you pay your workers in Indonesia a fair salary or living wage or clean up the pollution you've caused or whatever the issue is. And when you do change your policies, I'm going to make sure that hundreds of thousands of people know this.

And you send that email to all your social networking circles and you ask them to send it to all of theirs and to send it to these executives. And I've had executives plead with me to try to encourage people to do that because they say, you know, I don't read all these emails, but somebody looks them over and I get a matrix once a month that tells me, and if I have all these emails insisting that we change, I can take those to our primary investors and it has a lot of power. Does the, you know,

the Gen Z generation seems to be bringing like a lot of quote unquote woke ism to stuff. And it seems to be like, you know, there's discussions about, I never know if it's true or not but there's a lot of discussions among corporate uh stuff that that okay this new generation they kind of want these you know more environmental friendly more you know racial tolerance and inclusion you know more you know more of whatever the hell Bernie says. Does, I mean, is that having an effect? Is that weighing on the scale at all?

Absolutely, and perhaps more in much of the rest of the world than it is in the United States. Again, you know, I think that we haven't experienced terrible pollution. We have not had enemies on our border in anybody's lifetime, where most of the rest of the world has. We've got Canada and Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And there's sharks in them too. Yeah, there's sharks. And plastic too. I think the plastic is more dangerous. I think most of the sharks are on the land, actually.

The sharks are on Wall Street. They've crept up the ocean into Wall Street. But so, you know, as I travel in places around the world, and I'm going to be speaking in three or four different places in Europe this summer, including a huge rock festival, 55,000 people. This is my third year there. I didn't know there was a break during the pandemic, but before that, and now I'm going back. And I find, you know, that young people around the world are very, very concerned.

And that's true in the United States, too. But again, maybe a little less so here than in many countries. Chinese young people are very concerned. They've experienced these terrible conditions. So that is our hope. That's my hope, that the future generations will get this and somehow correct the mistakes that my generation made. And often we didn't know we were making those mistakes. We made tremendous contributions to medicine and science and technology.

There's no question. And the arts. But we've gone past the limits. And we've created this death economy. And so it's up to this these next generations that are coming along to to fix that it'll be interesting each generation kind of seems to have this this uh i want to say glory hole i don't know why but i'm going to go with glory hole this this sort of this sort of uh you know enlightenment and yeah we're going to change

things like the boomers had you know we're going to change things like the boomers had you know we're going to change things love and peace and then as soon as they start having families they kick right into gears the ibm life and you know uh they change uh i think i don't know if us gen xers ever has any sort of thing we were just trying to fucking survive as latchkey kids in the streets uh you know until the uh street lights came on you know we're on our own uh the millennials definitely had seemed to have some sort of mandate or self-mandate or whatever you want to call it to improving the world more and i don't know they just spent all the time on instagram now this new generation like you say does seem to have its own

mandate but uh does tiktok play into into uh some of the scheme of your book do you talk about at all or maybe your thoughts on the whole tiktok debate well tiktok i'm on tiktok sometimes there you go it's kind of fun uh i recently i have conversations with my cat sometimes on tiktok which is kind of fun. I should tune in for that. But, you know, TikTok and all the social media is the future. It's the present, and it's going to get more and more that way. And we can complain about it and so on and so forth, but it's there. And the question is, how do we use it appropriately?

You know, when the Gutenberg press was invented back whenever that was uh it it said you know that a lot of people pronounced that it would be the end of the world because up until then the church had controlled everything that got printed everything that got distributed was basically hand copied by by by monks and so the church you know control all this religious data and they said well you know if everybody can can print their own stuff that's the end you know the devil yeah over so devil did take over i think yeah television again when i was a kid it's like wait a minute this is going to destroy us and maybe that but here we go again but so i you know i think that think that it's what it is. And I do believe that, you know, you talk about each generation having hope. And we had a lot of changes.

When you think about it, when I was in college, nobody would have ever considered there to be such a thing as same-sex marriage. Forget about the whole transgender issue and all the issues around gender and and sexuality and and and you know there were no women or ceos back in those days and i remember i went to business school i don't remember how many were in my class but there were a lot there were several hundred in my class and there were only three women. I mean, things have changed a lot. And look at how we've changed it. You know, it wasn't very long ago that we said solar and wind can never compete economically with fossil fuels. Well, that's no longer true.

And so there have been huge changes that have occurred. We sometimes forget that. And some of them have been disappointing and some of them have caused problems. But we're able, you know, that that very technology that you're talking about is enabling us to do this right now. Of course, I don't have to fly to wherever you are in order to be on your show now, which wasn't true 10 years ago. I would have had to fly there to be on that show or you would have had to send a camera over here. You know, it's amazing. It's the changes that have occurred are phenomenal. The question is, how are we going to use them? And we need to change our perception

about what it means to be successful human beings, being human on this planet, and stop working towards short-term materialistic gains and focus on long term benefits for all life. There you go. That's always a good idea. I find that focusing on long term for life is probably self-serving enough to want to chase after because I kind of like to be here tomorrow and get a burger. Lastly, as we go out, because we want to tease why people should buy your book and get them to order it,

what do you hope people walk away from in this new updated version? Well, all the things we've been discussing, we must transform the death economy into a life economy. We simply must make that happen. And the role that each of us can play. And so at the end of the book, there's a whole process of what each individual really five questions that it goes into some detail uh that we can each ask ourselves so how do we participate and you know like the first question is what is it i most want to do for the for the rest of my life what will give me the greatest satisfaction i'd say i want to write i love to

write and and my i have a friend who's a carpenter who'd say i want to work with my hands in wood second question is how do I do that in a way that's going to help transform the death economy to a life economy? And I would answer by saying, I'm going to write about these things. I want to inspire people through my writing. And my carpenter friend will say,

well, I'm only going to use sustainable materials. And I'm going to tell all my clients that when they use sustainable materials, it's not an added cost. It's an investment in the future for them and their children. Yeah. And then the last three questions deal with what are your personal blockages that are keeping you from doing whatever you most want to do,

and how do you take actions to change those? And it goes into some detail around that. But I think the important thing, Chris, is it doesn't matter whether you're a podcast host or like you, or a writer like me, or a plumber, or a teacher, or a dentist, or whatever you are, a parent, a student, whatever you are, you can ask yourself these five questions and participate in doing what you most want to do for the rest of your life in a way that will help contribute to a world that all of our children and grandchildren will want to inherit. There you go. Well, that's definitely a lofty goal,

and it's important for the future of whether you talk about the U.S. Empire or whether you talk about the future of our children and grandchildren, as you mentioned. So there you go. I think the subtitle here is How to Stop the Global Takeover. And that's not China's global takeover. That's the global takeover of this death economy.

And I think that's just, that is, to me, that's the most important part of the book. It's not necessarily the most fun part. The fun part, I think, is talking about some of the things Economic Hitmen and Jackals did, some of the stories. I like to write it like it was a novel, even though it's not a novel. It's nonfiction, but full of story.

And these are lofty goals. Should the people of America start looking at some of these panglobos billionaires and trying to support or vote or move political powers in such a way that they're supportive of them? And the Koch brothers are notorious for being, you know, people that, in my understanding, are big pollutants. Do they need to, you know, we need to look at how we vote as well. Well, yes yes absolutely. You know how do we vote for people in politics and

for corporations that are moving us toward a life economy and you know I think one of the sad things about the billionaires and big corporations is a lot of them don't pay taxes or they pay very few taxes and they benefit from all the services they get they benefit from our fire departments our police departments our schools our airports our highways all of these things they benefit from and they don't pay their fair share uh and and so i think that's uh you know the the idea of not uh the idea of taxing making sure that the rich and the big corporations pay the fair share of taxes is extremely important.

Yeah. Vote in the marketplace and vote in the voting polls. There you go. I mean, we should, I think we should have, I think this has been a joke from a comedian, so I don't want to say it's mine,

but I think someone said once that politicians, you know, NASCAR, they, they're covered in all the badges of all the companies that sponsor them? We should have that same thing with politicians. I love that idea. I like that idea.

Funny as hell. Like, I'm not voting for that guy because Skittles is sponsoring. I don't know why you'd be not want to vote for some of Skittles. I mean, come on. It's a great candy. I don't know. I'm probably going to sue now by Skittles. Anyway, guys, it's been wonderful to have you on, John,

and it's a very insightful conversation we've had and hopefully given people some hopes for the future and some ideas on what to change. Well, I appreciate you, Chris, and all that you do, and thank you for having me on the show. It's been a great pleasure. And keep up your great work, you know, getting the message out, informing the public and inspiring and getting people to ask questions and question everything. And, you know, that's part of democracy.

Democracy is required that we be critical of what we're doing in order that we can change it. Yeah, we had two choices. We either had Kim Kardashian content, the Kardashians content, or Housewives of whatever this week, or smart, brilliant authors like yourself on, and we chose that. Man, I should have dressed differently for the show, I think. Probably. I don't know.

I should too. Anyway, John, as we go, give us your.org so people can find you on the interwebs, please. JohnPerkins.org. And please put your email in the little box that says subscribe to my newsletter because then you'll know where I'm going to be appearing. You'll learn about the trips I take people on to shamans and so forth. And I travel around a lot and speak at different places. So I hope I'll meet some of your audience.

But if they put their email in the little box, the newsletter comes out just only about once a month. It's absolutely brilliant. It's short and fun, and we'll let you know what I'm up to and where I'm going to be. So I'd love to meet some of your audience. There you go. Order it up, folks.

Remember, fine books are sold. Remember, see how the value of bookstores. Sometimes they're a bit overgrown. You might need a tetanus shot if you step on some nail. Confessions of an Economic Hitman, the third edition out February 28th, 2023 by John Perkins. Thanks for

coming on the show, John. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for Jess Crisfast, youtube.com for Jess Crisfost, and let's see, what is there? LinkedIn as well. Somebody says, I adore John Perkins. He showed us the tricks of the economic trade we never knew about.

Thank you, JP. So thank you, Cheyenne, for offering that up. There you go. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.