The One You Feed - John Perkins on How Perception Creates Reality

Starting point is 00:00:00 Capitalism in its purest sense is the human ability to trade things, to negotiate, to work with each other, and I think that's part of human survival, actually. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

Starting point is 00:00:52 This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed

Starting point is 00:01:34 jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. languages. John was formerly a chief economist at a major consulting firm advising the World Bank, United Nations, the U.S., and other governments. He is now the founder and board member of the Pachamama Alliance and Dream Change, non-profit organizations that partner with indigenous people to protect the environments and that offer global programs to change the destructive ways of industrial societies. Hi, John. Welcome to the destructive ways of industrial societies. Hi, John. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. It's great to be with you. Happy to be here.

Starting point is 00:02:32 We're going to talk about your book, Touching the Jaguar, transforming fear into action to change your life and the world. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

Starting point is 00:03:02 And the grandfather says, the one you feed. father. And he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think it's a great parable, Eric. You know, I've got this cat looking over my shoulder here and she would say, well, obviously don't feed that hateful wolf, the angry one, the bad one, because it might come after me. And I think we can all look at the world that way, that it's absolutely true. And in my experience, my former life as an economic hitman, I was very aware that if you were in the process of promoting a world that looked like the world that I was promoting, if you fed that world, you'd get it. And what I was really promoting was what we call predatory capitalism, a form of capitalism that's extremely destructive and has caused, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:52 climate change and so many of the problems we have today, what we call a death economy. If, on the other hand, we go out and we feed the good wolf, we feed the compassionate wolf, we get a world that's represented by what we could call a life economy, an economic system that is itself regenerative. You know, unfortunately, through most of my life, we've had a world situation where we keep feeding that bad wolf, if you want to call it the bad wolf, where we keep feeding that wolf that's all about there's never enough in the world. I get to take mine, and to get mine, I got to hurt somebody else. It's not a win-win. It's a win-lose. And we look at that on individual levels. We look at that

Starting point is 00:04:36 on corporate levels. We look at that on national levels. And this is a time when we need to turn that around. And I think the book, Touching the Jaguar, goes into how indigenous people have come up with these prophecies that tell us that we're at a time in history right now where we have the opportunity to turn that around, to feed the compassionate wolf, the good wolf, the wolf that's going to bring us a better world. Excellent. So I think let's start by taking apart some of what you just said there. And I think in order for us to understand your story, we've got to back up a while, like you said, and we've got to talk about your past, as you said, as an economic hitman. So let's first start there. Describe for listeners what that means to be an economic hitman. And then I think from there, that can lead us into conversations about

Starting point is 00:05:26 life and death economies and indigenous people. Yeah. So Eric, you know, my title was chief economist at a major consulting firm, a company called Charles T. Main in Boston. It was later sold and the name no longer exists. It was sold to Parsons. But I had a staff that ranged anywhere from 30 to 50 people at different times. And my job and my staff's job was to identify countries that had resources our corporations want, like oil, for example, or today more likely copper and other resources. And once we identify that country, we would arrange huge loans to that country. But it was with the understanding that those loans would be used to hire our corporations to build big infrastructure projects in the country. In fact, the money never actually went to the country. They had to sign

Starting point is 00:06:16 off on the loan. They had to guarantee the loan through their resources as collateral. But the money came directly to our corporations, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons, the Brown and Roots, the big engineering companies, the general electrics, and countries that provide the material and the machinery for power plants, hydroelectric plants, transmission lines, industrial parks, highways, ports, things like that. And for the most part, these things benefit a few wealthy families in those countries. First of all, they make huge profits for our corporations. They benefit a few wealthy families that own the industries and the commercial establishments. But most of the people in the

Starting point is 00:06:56 country end up suffering because money is diverted from education, health care, and other social services to pay off the service on the debt in the end the country can't pay its principal on the debt and so we go back usually under the guise of the imf international monetary fund and say hey you know we'll restructure the loan for you but you have to meet these conditionalities in order for us to do that you have to sell your resource oil whatever real treat to our corporations without environmental or social in order for us to do that. You have to sell your resource, oil, whatever, real treat to our corporations without environmental or social regulations.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Privatize your public sector businesses like your water and sewage systems, your utilities, maybe your schools and prisons and sell them to our investors at cut rate prices and let us build military bases on your soil and vote with us on the next United Nations vote. So in that way, we really fed that bad wolf, if you will. And that was my job.

Starting point is 00:07:52 And, you know, I don't want to keep talking too long here, but I'd say that, you know, when I got started in that business, I thought I was doing the right thing. Because in business school, they'll teach that if you want to help a poor country, you invest a lot of money in infrastructure, what we were doing. And statistically, you can show them that the GDP, the gross domestic product, that our measure of the economy grows, and it does. And so it looks like it's a good thing. But over time, I began to realize that GDP was a lousy measure. It measures the rich. It doesn't measure prosperity in a country. It measures how well the rich people in a country are doing, not how well the average people in the country are doing. But it took a long time for me to realize that because the system is rigged to show us that that's a metric that's important to

Starting point is 00:08:42 use. Gross domestic product, gross domestic product per capita. And they're basically kind of meaningless statistics if you're trying to really see how our country is truly doing. It's so interesting as I read your work and I learned about it, I originally would have been like you were and I would have thought, well, that sounds like a good project. That sounds like good work. It sounds like the IMF that must be good, investing in poor countries. And just fascinating to see the way the whole system is set up and who the ultimate benefactors are. Yeah. And here's an example, Eric.

Starting point is 00:09:13 So the United States is representative in a way of many countries. There's three individuals here in the United States that have as much wealth as half the population of the United States that have as much wealth as half the population of the United States. If their income grew last year by 10% and half the population of the United States lost 3%, we'd still show a growth rate of around 3.5%, an increase, even though half the country's a lot worse off. That's GDP. That's what we measure. And that's true throughout the world, where we have this tremendous imbalance between the haves and the have-nots, or really the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, the middle

Starting point is 00:09:57 class. Are the have countries, the U.S. and other countries, are they competing for these sorts of projects in less developed parts of the world? Is the U.S. competing, countries? Are they competing for these sorts of projects in less developed parts of the world? Is the U.S. competing, say, with China for this type of project? When we hear about them going into markets in Africa, is that part of what we're wrestling over? Yes, I think the very sad aspect of this is that up until 1991, there were two superpowers, really. There was the Soviet Union and the United States. And to a certain degree, that maintained a balance. If I went into, let's say, Colombia or Ecuador or some African country and tried to impose my will upon them, they could turn to the Soviet Union and use that as leverage. Even if they really wanted to take my deal, they could probably get

Starting point is 00:10:41 a better deal from me. The Soviets are coming. If you don't, we'll take their thing. And I would back off a little bit. In 1991, after the time the Soviet Union was no longer, we were the world's only superpower. And the United States had an opportunity at that time to really promote democracy and a real pure form of capitalism. But we didn't do that. Instead, we promoted this, what I call predatory capitalism that favors monopolies, that is extremely exploitative. And we didn't make democracy look very good either. We supported a lot of dictators around the world, like in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and many other places. So there was a tremendous resentment growing, an undercurrent, and countries didn't have options. so they played along with us.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Countries that had resources, they wanted to develop poor countries that had copper or oil or gold or whatever, but they didn't have the technologies to exploit them. So they needed to bring in our technologies and they needed our financing. We were the only options out there. Well, today China's come along. President Xi has made a big point that China will not try to interfere with countries' politics or their foreign policies. So China actually, I think, has learned a lot from our mistakes. And I think China has the same goals. It wants to exploit resources. I'm not trying to paint China as the good guy here at all, but I am saying that I think China has really learned from us.

Starting point is 00:12:07 So we're finding, for example, in Latin America that China is taking over. It's investing more in Latin America now than we are. Its trade is larger than the United States trade with many of the most significant, most powerful, economically powerful countries in Latin America today. We're finding the same thing is true in Africa. We made big mistakes. China's learned from those mistakes. And under the Trump administration, those mistakes escalated even more. We became more isolationist. Let's now transition to talking about what a death economy is and what a life economy is. A death economy is an economic system that's really based on

Starting point is 00:12:45 one perception. So we can get into this later, but Touching the Jaguar is all about perception and realizing that how we perceive the world creates reality. And we have a perception that is growing for decades, but really, really took hold in 1976 when Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics. And Friedman said many amazing things, but one of the most important things he said, as it turns out, was that the only responsibility is to maximize short-term profits for a few investors, basically, regardless of the social and environmental costs. And that's driven business ever since. And as I said, it was growing before then, but it really took off then. And, you know, this idea of short-term profit really gives corporate executives the right,

Starting point is 00:13:35 in fact, the mandate to do whatever it takes to maximize short-term profits, including destroying the very resources upon which their companies depend in the long term. And so in doing that, they've created this death economy. And it's an economic system that's consuming itself into extinction. It's using up, in the short term, our long-term potential. And it's also based to a large degree on war or the threat of war. Our economy is very, very dependent on the war industry,

Starting point is 00:14:05 and many economies are. But it's about consuming things to the point of absurdity. And it's really created a system that doesn't work. So many of today's crises, income inequality, the climate change that we're experiencing, and you can use the pandemic, species extinctions, the destruction of incredibly important resources, that's the death economy. And it's based on this one goal of maximizing short-term profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs. And that's also what we call predatory capitalism, a view of capitalism where a few people can own almost everything. You know, oligarchy is basically, or at least control large segments of the economy and have tremendous power over governments also through their wealth. And so a death economy, you described its features, is capitalism by its nature a death economy? No, and I think that's a very important distinction because a lot of people say you've got to end capitalism.

Starting point is 00:15:09 And I understand what they mean. They mean we've got to end predatory capitalism. The definition of capitalism is that it's a system whereby the means of production and commerce are owned by individuals, not by the government. And where you have competition, thrives on competition. Well, we do have a system today where the means of production are not owned by the government, but that's been reversed. The people who own the means of production basically own the government. We've seen in this last election how important money is, and big money, huge amounts of money. Crazy amounts of money, crazy amounts of money, crazy amounts of money. And that's around the world. And even after the election's over, I mean, the amount of

Starting point is 00:15:49 money that's spent on lobbyists, spent on advertising, again, it's spent on changing perceptions is huge. So even though means of production are not owned by the government, they're owned by a few individuals, the important means of production, other small, you know, family ownership of small businesses. But if a big business comes along and wants to drive the small business out, they will. We know that. We've seen it happen over and over with some of the big box companies. But that's not capitalism. That's a form of capitalism. It's predatory capitalism. Small markets, the farmer's market, you may have one in your town. A lot of people do. They're all over the developing world. Indigenous people have these small markets. That's capitalism. My grandson's lemonade stand

Starting point is 00:16:29 is capitalism. And capitalism is based on the idea that you're going to have healthy competition and that nobody's going to control markets. That's pure capitalism. We don't have that. And I think it's a very important distinction to make. So when people talk about getting rid of capitalism, I'm all totally in favor of getting rid of predatory capitalism. But I think the basics of capitalism are kind of even trade barter is a form of capitalism. So it seems to me that capitalism in its purest sense, and I don't want people to be confused about this, capitalism in its purest sense is the human ability to trade things, to negotiate,

Starting point is 00:17:12 to work with each other. And I think that's part of human survival, actually. Right. And I don't want to turn this into a long economic discussion, because that's not really what we do here. Listeners are probably like, where are we headed with this? And hang on, we're headed towards the territory you're used to. But I think these are important ideas. You said something really important there in that in capitalism, the means of production is owned by individuals, not the government, right? And so much of what we see now is yes, that's true. But as you said, the people who own the means of production also now own the government. Thus, we're not on a level playing field. It's not pure capitalism in the sense that

Starting point is 00:17:51 it's a level playing field. The market is highly rigged at this point in favor of the people who have the money to lobby the government to act in the way that they would like to see things go. Correct. Yes. All right. So let's talk about your journey. So you're an economic hitman. You don't know that at the time. That's not the term you would use at the time. You're an economist. You think you're doing good in the world. And over time, you slowly begin to realize, oh, hang on a second. Maybe this work isn't really working out very well for the vast majority of people in those

Starting point is 00:18:26 countries. So what happens next for you? Talk about sort of the journey from there to today. I know it's a long one, but maybe the next couple steps for you. Yeah. So let me just step back a minute and say that one of the things that I had in my favor of trying to convince these leaders of countries to accept these huge loans that they knew would put their people deep into debt was that they knew that if they took on these loans, they and their friends would make a lot of money because they own the industries. They benefited from the infrastructure. But they also knew that behind me were people that we call the jackals. And these are usually CIA operatives or assets who will overthrow governments or

Starting point is 00:19:06 assassinate leaders. And, you know, the United States has admitted to a long history of this, Allende of Chile and Arbenz of Guatemala and Lumumba of the Congo and Mossadegh of Iran and Diem of Vietnam and on and on. Two of my clients who were killed because they didn't accept these deals, the president of Ecuador and the head of state of Panama, Jaime Roldos and Omar Torrijos. So these people are there in the background. Now, when I decided to get out, after 10 years, I realized that what I was doing was not what I thought I was doing, and that I needed to get out of doing that. My conscience was bothering me. I didn't want to be in this any longer. And I actually wanted to expose the system because I knew about it. I could do that.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So I started to write a book about my experiences. I wanted to be an expose. So I contacted other people with my job, economic hitman type people, and some of the jackals who I knew. And I immediately got anonymous phone calls threatening my life and the life of my infant daughter. And at the same time, I get invited out to dinner by the president of Stone and Webster Engineering Company, which had been a major competitor of my company. And he takes me to dinner and say, you know, you've got a great resume. You're a chief economist of one of our competitors. We'd like to use your resume in our proposals. You won't have to do

Starting point is 00:20:25 any work for us at all. Just let us use your resume in our proposals. And I'm prepared to write you a check tomorrow morning for $500,000. Now, Eric, this was the late 80s. Half a million dollars is nothing to sneeze at today. But back in those days, it was a lot more. And then he said, just don't write the book we know you're working on. You can't write the book. So I was being hit the same way that I'd been hitting other people. I'm getting threatened. My life's being threatened. My daughter's life is being threatened. And on the other hand, I'm being offered a bribe. It's a legal bribe. There's nothing illegal about paying a guy a retainer as a consultant, though that was a huge retainer, even by the standards of those days. So I'm being hit. And what would you do in that case? I took

Starting point is 00:21:11 the jackals very seriously. I took the money. And what I will say in my own defense is that I didn't go out and buy mansions or fast cars or something. I put the money toward creating a new career. I wrote books about indigenous people. I went back to the Amazon where I'd been a Peace Corps volunteer before I became an economic hitman. I went back to the Amazon and I formed two nonprofit organizations, Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance, where I'm a co-founder of, to help the Indigenous people and also to get the word out how we need to change the perception of what it means to be successful as businesses. And I wrote books on Indigenous people, which was fine with Stone and Webster. They were happy with me writing those kind of books. And this went on for

Starting point is 00:21:55 a long time. And then after 9-11, and I was in the Amazon on 9-11 with these Indigenous people, after I came home, I flew to ground zero. And as I stood looking into that pit, I knew I had to come clean. I had to write the book. But this time I decided I wouldn't write an expose. I wouldn't contact anyone else. That was the problem. The word had gotten out. I would write it in secret. I'd write the whole book. Assume that when I had it in the hands of a very good New York agent and publishers, it then becomes my insurance policy. It's any self-respecting jackal would know that killing me would sell books. I'd become a martyr and people would want to buy the book, which was the opposite of what they wanted.

Starting point is 00:22:36 So that started me on a whole new trajectory here. And I wrote the book that became Confessions of an Economic Hitman. And, you know, it's sold a couple of million copies now in 37 languages, I think, and has become quite well known. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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Starting point is 00:24:24 Your work with indigenous people is a lot of what your most recent book, Touching the Jaguar, is also about. And so I want to make sure we have time to get into some of that wisdom that you've gotten from the indigenous people. And also then I'd like to transition to some of what can we do, normal people, to participate in life economies. I'd like to start that discussion by asking what is Touching the Jaguar? Why is that the title of the book? What does that mean? You know, when I was a peace-go-on here, I was out in the Amazon and I got very sick. I couldn't keep any food down.

Starting point is 00:25:02 I was dying. I couldn't keep any food down. I was dying. I couldn't leave. It was three days of incredibly difficult hiking through dense jungle, et cetera, to get to the nearest medical facility. A shaman in the Shua culture, an indigenous culture in the Amazon that I was working with, hunters and gatherers, offered to heal me. And I had no idea what a shaman was. I graduated from business school. And he was very fierce looking at these tattoos, like out of the movies. I didn't think I had any choice. That night, I had this traumatic healing.

Starting point is 00:25:34 He took me on this vision quest. I've got my eyes closed, and he's chanting. I see this amorphous form in front of me. The shaman yells, touch the jaguar. Well, it's nighttime, dark, middle of the jungle. I open my eyes. I look all around like, where's the jaguar? Where's the jaguar? And he says, no, no, no. Close your eyes and see the jaguar. So I did. And this amorphous form shapeshifted into the face of a jaguar that said, and it sounded like my mother's

Starting point is 00:26:03 voice, the food and drink will kill you. And I realized at that moment that, you know, I'm eating some very strange foods in the jungle, squirming white grubs. That's the delicacy for these people, you know, it's actually high protein. And they don't drink water out of the rivers because they know the rivers have got organic matter and dead animals in them. And so the women make a kind of beer called chicha by chewing and spitting manioc root. It's spit beer. Then you can add water to it because it's alcoholic and it's safe to drink. Well, I'm drinking a lot of this spit beer because you've got to rehydrate.

Starting point is 00:26:37 And there wasn't any Perrier. And so on this vision quest, I see that when I eat and drink these things, I hear a voice saying, it'll kill you. At the same time, I saw how incredibly robust and healthy the Shuar are. These are hunters and gatherers. The men have legs that would make Olympic soccer stars jealous, you know. And they live to be very old if they don't die in a hunting accident. So in that night, that vision quest, I saw that it wasn't the food and drink killing me. It was my perception, my mindset. And after that, the shaman told me that my payment to him would

Starting point is 00:27:12 be to be his apprentice. One of the first things he taught me, he said, you know, when we say touching the jaguar, what we mean is you've got to face your fears. You've got to face the things that are holding you back, that are keeping you from being healthy or keeping you from doing what you want to do in the world. If you run from what's holding you back, in this case, this voice saying it'll kill you, the jaguar will chase you. But if you go out and touch the jaguar, it gives you the energy and the know-how to change your perception. And when you change your perception, you change your reality. Our reality is molded by our perceptions. This is a shaman deep in the jungle saying this,

Starting point is 00:27:49 and as it turns out, you know what I mean, that's the basis for modern psychotherapy, for advertising, for marketing, for politics, quantum physics, you name it. As human beings, our perceptions control our reality. Yeah, you talk about this idea that human reality really is molded by our perceptions, and that in order to change ourselves or the world, we've got to break through barriers that hold us in old ways of thinking and acting. And the shaman, I think his name was, how do you pronounce it, Ensa?

Starting point is 00:28:19 Yes. Ensa. The word he used was Arutum? Arutum? Yes, Arutum, yes. Which in Shuar, it really means the power of nature, the power of life. It's the great strength that you get when you touch the jaguar. Because the idea is in touching the jaguar, you are actually absorbing jaguar's energy. Yeah, the jaguar, you're able to look at things with a new perception. So there's a reality spit beer and if my perception is it's killing me it takes me to a perception

Starting point is 00:28:51 where i'm getting sick that same reality spit beer and squirming like grubs and i realize oh wow this is local organic food and it's actually very high in nutrition it's making these people healthy therefore to make me healthy it takes me to a new reality, which is I am healthy. And if we look at today's world, the death economy is based on the perception of maximizing short-term profits and short-term materialistic consumption. If we change that perception and say, hey, the goal of business and the goal of individuals should be to maximize long-term benefits for people in nature. For all of us, we move to a new reality, which is a life economy that's a regenerative economy. It's an economy that pays people to clean up pollution and regenerate destroyed environments and recycle

Starting point is 00:29:36 and create new technologies that don't ravage the earth. So it's all just about touching that jaguar. We're all afraid of change, but we know we got to change. We know this isn't working now. And the virus has really taught us this. When we touch that jaguar, we can change our perception about what it means to be successful. It's not about just being successful in the short term. It's about the longer term. One of the things in the book that's really interesting is you work with these different cultures in the Amazon that traditionally are enemies of each other. But over time, that starts to change. It's a great point, Eric. Thank you. When I was first there in the late 60s, early 70s,

Starting point is 00:30:17 the Shua were fighting the Achua and the Waurani and the Zapata and the Quechua. And there were all these nations were fighting each other. And the reason was because they're hunters and gatherers and they need a territory. And if somebody's encroaching upon their territory, they fight them. And these are small battles, usually not big wars, but sometimes they were fairly large, but fighting each other. And then the oil companies came and it was Texaco in the late 1960s. Texaco came into that area, the northern Amazon region of Ecuador, and created havoc, huge amounts of pollution. They just lost a $9.5 billion lawsuit to the Ecuadorians over this pollution that they

Starting point is 00:30:57 caused. And so the indigenous people changed their perception. They went out and they touched their jaguar, they would say. The jaguar was our neighbors are our enemy. That was the perception. They went out and they touched their Jaguar, they would say. The Jaguar was, our neighbors are our enemy. That was the perception. They changed that perception and say, no, our neighbors are our brothers and sisters, and we've all got to come together to stop the real enemy, which is the oil companies. And so they did. They came together and they formed federations. They asked me to come in. They asked the nonprofits to come in, then I mentioned, pay for lawyers to do this in the courts, as well as demonstrations and even sometimes attacking oil platforms. But they came

Starting point is 00:31:30 together. And then they had to touch another Jaguar. They had to realize that the real enemy was not the oil companies. It was the dream, as they put it, the perception of the world that needed oil us and the oil was being drilled because we have a perception of this as they put it you have a dream of large buildings and heavy industry and lots of cars and now that dream is destroying the planet as we know it and so they then reached out and touched that jaguar and said we've got to go to people we most fear and that wasuar and said, we've got to go to the people we most fear. And that was us. And again, to then work with us, these nonprofits, Pachamama Alliance, Dream Change, to change the dream of the modern world. And that's the goal of these nonprofits is we've got programs in something like 90 countries now that are trying to bring this message out that we've got to turn the death economy into a life economy. Essentially, that's it. So it was a great example

Starting point is 00:32:26 of how these indigenous people kept realizing that they had to touch the jaguar and change their perception. And when they did, it changed their reality. So let's move into the question that a lot of people have when they hear something like this story. And so many of our listeners, we think about economic destruction, climate destruction, all the issues. We go, okay, I want to do something. Where do people start? What's the path that you recommend

Starting point is 00:32:53 for starting to change these death economies, which we're all a part of, into more of a life economy? You know, there's an overall answer to that. It's one that I think we all pretty much understand that we ought to shop consciously. But I'd like to say that it's much bigger than that. It's not good enough just to shop consciously.

Starting point is 00:33:15 You need to change perceptions. So if you decide not to buy Nike's shoes because they've got, I'm just using that as an example, because they don't pay their workers in Indonesia or China a fair wage, You need to let Nike know. And then you need to let all of your social networking people know and ask them to send a message to Nike saying, hey, I love your shoes, but I'm not going to buy them anymore until you pay your workers in China or Indonesia a fair wage. And if you find a company that you can buy better products from, let them know why you're buying from them. So to get that perception out there. Consumer movements can be so easy these

Starting point is 00:33:51 days with social networking. If we just keep letting our circles know and sending out messages and be nice. Nike, I love your product, but I'm not going to buy it anymore until you and get everybody you know to send that out and ask them to have everybody they know to send it out. And this has an impact. It has a huge impact because a lot of those executives in those companies, they want to do the right thing, but they've got to hear from their customers. Their customers have to push them to do that. But if we take this to another level, every one of us has a lot of power and we have a role to play. And I talk in the book about a daily practice, or it could be once a week that takes less than 10 minutes, that each one of us

Starting point is 00:34:31 can do to go into what can I personally do? And it's based on five questions. But the five questions that start it are one, what do I most want to do with the rest of my life? What will bring me my greatest satisfaction, my bliss? And I'll give a couple of examples. I would answer that question by saying, I want to write. I love to write, Eric. I love to write books. You know, I've written, I've published 10 books and written a few more than I've ever tried to publish. I love to write. And I have a friend who's a carpenter who would say, I want to spend the rest of my life working with my hands and wood. Kind of the opposite end of a writer. Second question is, how do I do this in a way that

Starting point is 00:35:09 helps other people? It can be one other person or lots of other people. As a writer, I'd say, I'm going to write about transforming a life economy into a death economy, transforming fear into action to change your life and the world. That's what I want to do. I want to help people that way. My carpenter friend would say, I want to get people to build things using sustainable materials. And the third question then is, what's holding me back? And as a writer, I might say, oh, I just don't have enough time. I know I need to write every day, but I don't have time. And the carpenter friend of mine might say, well, people don't want to pay an additional price for sustainable materials. And so the fourth question then is, when you touch that Jaguar, how does it change your perception and your actions?

Starting point is 00:35:54 And I would say, OK, so, well, I can get up a half an hour earlier every morning and write, or I can watch an hour or less of television every night and write. watching an hour or less of television every night and write. And my carpenter friend would say, when I touch my Jaguar, it says, tell your clients that the added price is not a cost, it's an investment. They're investing in the future for themselves and their children and the world. And then the fifth question is, what actions do I take? What does that drive me? And for a writer, you got to write, you know, you got to write. And for the carpenter, it's like, well, I got to go out and build this cabinet using sustainable materials or this house. And I got to tell whoever you're building it for, look, you're investing in the future by doing this. And so the five questions are, what will bring me the most satisfaction? How do I help other people?

Starting point is 00:36:38 And these are in the book, incidentally. What's stopping me? What's the jaguar that's holding me back? What happens when I touch that jaguar? How does it change my perceptions? And what actions do I take? And I think those last three questions, what's the jaguar? How do I touch the jaguar? What are the actions I take? Those will change frequently. So as a writer, okay, I've set aside half an hour every morning and an hour every night. But now the next question is, what am I going to write about? And then the question beyond that is, what's the first sentence? But each time you do that, you reach a new level of higher consciousness about yourself. You go deeper and deeper into

Starting point is 00:37:15 your own satisfaction. So it's a process that's constantly evolving. And if we do it every day, or even once a week, you can get up in the morning and for six or seven minutes, just go into the syllabus. You may have it written down and look at what you're going to do during that day and commit to doing it. If we do that, we will get a better world for ourselves and for future generations. Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon The way we spend our money is important, right? The companies that we give our money to matters. And then also not just voting with our dollar, but sharing why. Right. And how we live, all of that.

Starting point is 00:38:42 But it's not enough just to shop consciously because you want to do that, but you also want to let the companies know. I speak at a lot of international conferences, economic conferences. I was recently speaking at one in Russia of about 12,000 people. And this included a lot of CEOs from big American corporations, as well as presidents of countries. Putin was one of the other speakers there, etc. And, you know, after I give my talk at the receptions that are always held in the evenings with some wine and cheese or caviar or whatever the Russians are serving that night, executives will come up to me and they'll say things like, you know, I really want to do the

Starting point is 00:39:20 right thing. I've got grandchildren. I've got children and grandchildren. I want to make my company greener, but I know that if I lose half a percentage of market share or my stock price goes down, my major investors will fire me and they'll replace me as someone who only cares about stock prices or market share. So what I would ask of you is please spread the word out there. Tell people to send me lots of messages, tweets, however they want to send messages, and get their networking circles to do this. And I want to hear things like, you know, we want to buy your product, but we won't until you do better.

Starting point is 00:39:58 And if I get 100,000 of these messages, I can take them to our executive committee, to our major investors, and tell them, hey, these are our clients. We've got to listen to them. And so I think, you know, it's really important for people to understand the way this is moving. And before the pandemic, we were seeing some major changes in business, the Green New Deal, conscious capitalism, B corporations, benefit corporations. Back in August of 2019, 180 some odd executives of what's called the Business Roundtable, very, very important executives from the biggest companies in the world came together. And they basically said, we can no longer just go for short term stock prices. They basically said, we've got to help create a life economy. And I

Starting point is 00:40:42 think they meant it, but they have to be pushed. We, the consumers, the investors, the employees, all of us have to come together to push them. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a jaguar that a lot of us face is we feel like there's nothing we can do or that, you know, just being one person, we just fear that it won't matter. Yeah. And it does matter because we're not just one person. You know, we can organize. And that's always been powerful. I recall what Franklin Roosevelt, at the end of World War II, he was meeting with a bunch of labor leaders from the car industry. And at the end of the meeting, he said to them, you know, I think you

Starting point is 00:41:25 guys understand now that I'm on your side. I want to do what's the right thing for labor. But now you've got to go out there and get your rank and file to force me to do it. Because the only way I can get this through Congress is if I get your support. And I think that's so relevant today that a lot of corporate executives feel this way. You know, I'd also have to say that there are sociopathic corporate executives who don't give a damn, but they're not driven by profit. They're driven by success, which is based on a perception. And as long as our perception is short-term profits are success or what drives success or what defines success, that's what will drive the sociopaths. But if we can turn that around and say, no, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:06 we're going to put on the cover of Fortune magazine, Time magazine, and so on and so forth. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Starting point is 00:42:25 Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight.

Starting point is 00:42:45 How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Starting point is 00:42:56 Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

Starting point is 00:43:07 It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The executives that are creating long-term benefits for all of us, that are really buying into this Green New Deal, conscious capitalism, benefit corporations, et cetera. And when we start honoring them and when business schools hold them out as the icons, then things turn around. And the only way that's going to happen is if you and I and all your listeners get involved

Starting point is 00:43:38 in this and understand that we do have the power to turn this around. So, you know, we've got two things to do. One is to answer those five questions I mentioned and really push forward with our individual agendas. And that may include this, or it may be additional to the idea that we also need to be conscious of how we shop and get organized, let the people who we're buying from know why we're buying from them, and the ones that we're not buying from know why we're not buying from them. This is very, very important. There's something else you said in the book that I thought was interesting. You

Starting point is 00:44:07 were saying that it's important to start telling a new story, which is to look for the good news that's happening, the good things that are happening, and to make sure those are getting shared and amplified. And you added to that something I thought was really interesting because you said, even if we're tempted to see those things as greenwashing or token gestures, that it's still really important to share those stories and believe in them because they help to change the overall narrative. Yes. Once people start to change their perception, even if it's for the wrong reasons, it has a mushrooming effect. And I think you tell in the book the story about a good friend of mine who's a friend now who, in order to make her neighbors think that she was an environmentalist, began to hang her clothes out to dry on a line outside her house rather than using the dryer. And she did it to please her neighbors, basically, to make it look like she was a good person. But she said that got her started. And now she's devoted her life to

Starting point is 00:45:11 developing programs that help people understand the importance of being environmentally sensitive. But it all started by hanging her clothes out for the wrong reasons, perhaps. You may think that Walmart is just greenwashing when they start having organic foods or doing various things like that, but it has a big impact ultimately. And it may be done for that reason to begin with, but that has an impact. And so we should encourage companies to do that more and more. Yeah, I love that idea of sort of looking for the good news that's out there there because we get very overwhelmed by how big the problem seems and how insurmountable. And I think that finding things that are changing

Starting point is 00:45:52 helps us to fight off despair because despair is no good. Despair causes us to give up. Right, right. And you know, I think the coronavirus has been a major teacher because it's shown us that we can change. And we may not like the changes that we have to make sometimes, but they can turn around and come to our advantage. So I know so many people who at the beginning were very upset by being more isolated and so on. But in the process, they figured out that, well, now that I'm spending less time going to the office and I'm doing it online instead, I can also have more time to read the books I wanted to read, or maybe to write a book, or to learn to play the

Starting point is 00:46:30 flute or the piano, or spend more time with my family. I don't have to spend all that time commuting. And that's just one example. I think we've all learned. And I was supposed to do a big book tour all around the United States and to Europe. And I've done a lot of it virtually. And that's actually meant that we can have a lot more people because of what I'm doing, a bookstore in Miami, Florida, for example, which I've done in the past and just did. In the past, people, young people who came lived in the neighborhood. But this time I had people from Europe and Africa, people who had been to Miami and signed up on the, been to that bookstore and signed their email list. So, you know, we've, we found that there's some, there's some opportunities that are created. So we've, we've had to change and we've seen that we can change.

Starting point is 00:47:15 And we've also seen how change has impacted the world. A lot less pollution. We can see in those satellite images over China and other places, how we've cut back. So we're learning. This has been a teaching experience for us. Yeah, it sure has. Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Starting point is 00:47:33 It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. I really enjoyed the book, and I love the work that you're doing, and I'm happy that we got a chance to do this. Thank you, Eric. I'm so happy, too, and you're welcome. And I just want to say I deeply appreciate the work you're're doing and your show and thank God that you're doing it. Thank you for doing it. Keep it up. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

Starting point is 00:48:21 When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

The One You Feed - John Perkins on How Perception Creates Reality

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