129: John Perkins | Chinese Economic Hitman

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/john-perkins/

The following is with John Perkins.

This is John’s second appearance on the podcast, he has just published a new edition of the Confessions of an Economic Hitman, this time with a heavy emphasis on the role of China’s debt traps and chicanery among the belt and road initiative.

To hear more about John, what is an economic hitman and the key experiences that inform John’s worldview, be sure to check out his first appearance on the show.  

-----

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:16 – The 4 Pillars Of The Chinese Economic Hitman
• 11:23 – An Example Of The Chinese Economic Hitman At Play
• 17:24 – John In Kazakstan + The Belt & Road Initiative
• 25:40 – John In Australia & Thoughts On Geographical Determinism
• 38:57 – Sergey Glazyev & USD As The Worlds Currency
• 41:16 – China’s EHM In The Congo
• 46:58 – Serendipity In John’s Life
• 53:23 – How Shamanic Experiences Have Influenced John’s Worldview

🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg

Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode

• John Perkins – Confessions Of An Economic Hitman
• Jim Henry – Blood Bankers
• Offshore Finance & Financial Secrecy Starter Pack

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The following is with the great John Perkins. This is John's second appearance on the podcast. He's just published a new edition of The Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and in this one there is a heavy emphasis on the role of China's debt traps and the role that the Chinese economic hitmen are playing in the huge Belt and Road initiative. To hear more about what an economic hitman is and what John's personal experiences were, which informed his worldview, please check out his first appearance on this podcast, which was episode 104, a link to which will, of course, be in the description. But in this conversation, you can expect to hear some different stuff from John, more pertaining to the contents of his new book. There is a little bit about John sitting down with Kazakhstan's Prime Minister, a little bit about what John learned by teaching in China, some examples of Chinese debt traps, and as well, probably my favorite moment of the podcast, an amazing response from John reflecting on the role that serendipity has played in his life. So, I hope that you all know the drill by now. Pump your good juice into the algorithm. And to do this is via five-star reviews. Because this podcast took me five hours to put together, but will only take you five seconds to review. And with absolutely no further ado, here is the great man, John Perkins. Mr. Perkins, talk about the four pillars of the Chinese economic hitmen.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Well, thanks, Ryan. And please call me John. The four pillars are, you know, that these go back centuries throughout history. Go back to the classical times of Greek and Roman and Chinese and Persian empires. And they're basically one is the first is fear, fear of attack, fear of enemies, so on and so forth. The second is debt, putting people into debt. And in the old days, sometimes that was not even money debt. That was favored debts. It still can be. You're the potentate of another kingdom, and I I give you my daughter in marriage, but you owe me that kind of thing. And the the third one is anxiety over scarcity. The fear of not of starving or not being as prosperous as your neighbors. Sometimes it's not even about starving, it's just not being, you know, as as well off as the Joneses, so to speak. And the fourth is divide and conquer. So fear, debt, anxiety over scarcity, and divide and conquer. And throughout history, uh those have changed. You know, there used to be a lot more emphasis on fear, uh, and uh that's re that's re-emerging. But for a long period of time after the Vietnam War, when the United States was reigning pretty much supreme, we we were up against the Soviet Union in some respects, but not but economically the Soviet Union didn't have anywhere near the power we had. Only militarily did we did we fear them. And so at that point the military was pretty much replaced by debt, which was my job, which is what economic hitmen do, and we can go more into that. But so debt became the the driving force for many years. And uh then after 9-11, uh the fear re-emerged in the in the war effort, and of course, today with Ukraine and and all and and uh the fear that's driving a lot of relationships between China and the United States and Russia and the United States, uh, fear has taken is playing a big role. The threat of uh the threat of uh military um uh incursions.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

Is there anything unique or different to this um archetypal Chinese economic hitman?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Well the yes. Uh there's a big difference, particularly between the Chinese and the and the American. So uh the Chinese have really learned a lot from the successes and the failures of people like me. I taught at an MBA program in Shanghai a few years back, and uh what what I understood, what I came to under to see, was that those students were really picking my brain to see what I'd done right and what I'd done wrong. Uh and they have a different story. So, especially in the area of uh divide and conquer, they have this new Silk Road. So they say, we're not about dividing and conquer. The United States, during our time, we were very much about that. We always had some enemy out there, that's the Soviet Union, or uh uh for a while we didn't really have too much of an enemy, so that's when we focused on on debt. But then it was al-Qaeda uh and and uh Muslim terrorists and Iraq and Afghanistan. So uh f there's been a tremendous emphasis on that. Uh and and and dividing countries, you know, are you with us or are you against us in these wars? But the Chinese are saying, we're building a new Silk Road. We're building this Belt and Road Initiative is the official title, and it's going to connect the world. So they go to a country like let's say Ecuador, Latin America. And we would have said to Ecuador, here, take one of these loans from us. So both countries say, take loans from us and pay our companies to build big infrastructure projects. The loans are collateralized by some resource of yours, oil or copper, or today lithium and cobalt and the metals that we need for the green economy. That's the collateralization. Take this loan from us, hire our companies, American or Chinese, to build big infrastructure projects in your country that'll help a few very, very wealthy people, and therefore it'll look like the whole economy is increasing because GDP really measures how well the wealthy are doing. And eventually you're going to be selling your collateralized resource to us very cheaply because you're not going to be able to pay back your loan. That's part of the debt deal. And the Chinese say the same thing that we did. But we also said to a country like, let's say, Ecuador, it could be Nigeria or whatever, and you will develop a special trade relationship with the United States in the process, a bilateral trade relationship. The Chinese say, no, we're going to build you, if you're in Latin America, we'll build you core ports that connect you not just with other places in Latin America, but with Africa and with Asia and with Europe. So we're building this international trading network. We're not going to divide and conquer anymore. Uh that's what they say. And it's one of the reasons why they're they're being very careful not to be too critical of Russia, but to look to try to play a the role of a uh of a peace broker. I think she is very much trying to do that. We just heard recently that he's gonna have another m meeting with Putin very soon. Uh and uh so uh the Chinese have brought this new story to the whole thing. It's it's about bringing people together. Uh whether they you know whether it's a sincere attempt to do that or whether it's based on some you know very self-serving interests, or both, uh we don't know. But it's a very, very compelling story. And they also can tell the world, look, we had 10% economic growth for 30 years. We brought over 700 million people out of dire poverty, more than the rest of the world combined. Nobody else has done anything close to that. So if you're the leader of a low-income country with resources that that both like the United States and China covet, you might very well look at the Chinese model as being the one that you would prefer to choose, which isn't to say that you want to become you want a government policy like China's, uh, or social issues like China, but you you might choose their their economic system, which is very different from ours.

SPEAKER_02 7:53

You write in the book about um teaching at that uh MBA in uh Beijing that you regret not tampering down all the negatives from what you were doing. Um I got the sense that these guys came out in the other end with a playbook, and you had to be like, well, wait a minute, guys, this actually isn't a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah, they you know, they were very, very clever about wanting to know our system, and that was really what I was there to teach about. Frankly, I I I it was after I wrote the original confessions of an economic hitman, and they wanted to hear these things, and I was willing to talk about them. But I also really got a very strong message from them, which was a very positive one, Ryan, and that is time after time these students would tell me in class and outside of class, when I was having a meal with them or drinking beers with them, they'd say, you know, we created an economic miracle. And uh it and it it came at a terrible price environmentally and socially. We suffered under terrible pollution. We don't want that for our children. But we've shown that we can create a miracle. So in the future, we're gonna we're gonna create a green miracle. We're gonna become the greenest country on the planet. Uh I liked hearing that in a way, and I think they were serious I know they were serious. Whether they'll do it or not remains to be seen, but they are they're in the process. They're contrary to what most Americans think, they they are doing a lot in that direction. Um I came back from that uh that visit to China, a teaching spree, and uh I spoke at Cornell University to about 2,000 U.S. MBA students. There was a big gathering of MBA students from all over the United States. And I told them what the Chinese students had said, and I said, Don't you let them beat you out. You here in the United States, let us become the greenest country. Let's have a World Cup on which country is the greenest on the planet. Every year, let's have a competition. Now that could be a very, very good thing, uh, you know, but we'll we'll see if it it it happens. But in a way, it's beginning to happen. You know, where the United States is talking about, well, we've got to relocate uh our industries that make micro trip chips and other high-tech components that are currently being made in China, we're gonna make them here at home, and so on and so forth. So it's a we're very in this very, very interesting time, Ryan. And I think that the strongest message, and the mess, I think the biggest message of my new book, which is the third in the Economic Hitman trilogy that focuses on China, the strongest message is that these two countries, the United States and China, uh contribute about 50% to the world economy, and and the same to the world pollution. And we're locked in this competition. It's a it's a race to disaster. We have to turn it around. We both have to change. We have to recognize that there are no winners on a dead planet. Uh so who's gonna win? Nobody on a dead planet. We we we've created what we call a death economy, and we need to transform that into a life economy.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Well, with the optimism of an eventual transition to the life economy, nonetheless, there has been quite a lot of uh the death economy, as you put it, that's already taken place. So I'd love to ask you in your eyes what you think the most egregious example of the Chinese economic hitman at play has been.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Well, there's a lot of examples. And I haven't been every place in the world where the ch where they've built projects, but I have spent a lot of time in Ecuador, as you know, I was a Peace Corps volunteer there and an economic hitman. Then I was just there that this past year, I go every year. And uh they've they they've Ecuador was very upset with the United States' loan policies. Ecuador had a president named Rafael Correa who was president for over ten years, uh, after a long line of military dictators that came on and off, on and off. Correa has a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois. He knows our system very well. When he became president, one of the first things he did was appoint a commission to study uh the debt that uh Ecuador was told that it owed the World Bank and the other institutions that are part of that system. And that commission came to the conclusion that the Ecuadorian people did not owe about $10 billion worth of that debt. They said, you know, uh the World Bank never should have given this money to the military dictators. The people had no choice in the matter. Uh the military dictators made this decision and they made a lot of money off of it. And Correa kind of laughed and said, you know, the World Bank owes this money. Uh maybe John Perkins owes this money, because I was there when some of that was going on. But he said the Ecuadorian people don't owe the money. So he uh he he uh he defaulted on it. And immediately Ecuador's credit ratings went down, down, down, down with Standard and Poor's and Fitch and the other agencies, and it was a prior on the world economic scene. China stepped in and gave Ecuador a billion dollar loan, and then another billion dollars very soon and on pretty easy conditions to repay. So Ecuador is repaying the loans and their credit ratings going up. And at that time, Korea said, no more, we're not going to deal with any more of the US uh controlled banks like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. We're going to China. And since then, Ecuador has borrowed a tremendous amount of money from China. And but it's been the same conditions that China has the right to do certain things. One of the things China did with the loans was, and Ecuador asked for, was to build a huge hydroelectric plant that would serve almost half the country. But they built it out in a very, very fragile rainforest, part of the Amazon Basin rainforest, and they built it on a fault line next to an active volcano, Reventadoa. And it's never never operated at capacity. And the one time they tried to operate at capacity, it shorted out the whole electrical system of Ecuador. It's eight generating units, uh, uh most of them are have not operated. The generating house, the building that these are in, is filled with cracks. Uh it's a it's rather a catastrophe. But Ecuador still owes the money. And since Ecuador isn't paying back all the money as it should, uh to the Chinese, they're claiming they're collateral. And in this case, they're building huge mines to mine gold, copper, cobalt, and uh other metals that are necessary to the green economy. This mine is being built out in a very fragile rainforest again, and they they have, amongst other things, they've built this huge retaining wall of 263 meters high. Uh and it re it'll retain very, very toxic chemicals, uh, mercury and cyanide that are part of the mining process, and this huge lake has been developed to store these. I have a good friend who's one of the team of UN uh engineers, United Nations engineers who've gone out and studied uh this uh this dam, and they say it's it's bound to fail. When it fails, it'll empty a gigantic wave of toxic waste down the Zamora River in Ecuador, into Peru, through all of Brazil's rainforest, down into the Amazon River, right up the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean. So that's just one example. China has done some very, very bad engineering projects around the world. The Chinese, when you ask them about this, they say, yes, those are growing pains. We're on a learning curve. Pretty devastating learning curve if you happen to be one of these countries who still owes the money.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

Yeah. What about the other end of that uh Sinohydro story? Um, because um, and you document it in the book, but the um whole project was shrouded by all types of accusations of corruption.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Correct, yes. And in fact, President Correa no longer can go to Ecuador. He's he's living in Belgium where his wife is from and where he got an MBA. Uh he's been found guilty in absentia of uh I think it's eight counts now of corruption and other crimes. Of course, he he denies them. Uh and uh, you know, you know, his his his party is becoming increasingly popular in Ecuador, so he may, under under leadership, but still relating to him, so he may be back. Uh we'll see. But yes, there was all kinds of accusation of corruption, and I I think there's little doubt that there was a great deal of corruption.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

I don't think at this point I have not seen any evidence that he himself was corrupt, but certainly some of the people, it appears very likely that people under him were corrupt.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

So that's your sort of archetypal example of the Chinese enacting their debt trap diplomacy in Ecuador because uh the US um wouldn't lend the money, or at least uh Korea decided not to take the US's offer uh of the money, and so therefore they got into the pockets of the Chinese. Um there's this whole Belt and Road initiative, which is documented quite a lot throughout the new book. Um can you speak a little bit about what the Chinese economic and role is in the construction of and then as well the maintenance of and the planning of and all of the uh the Belt and Road initiative?

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Well, yes, I can address some of them. I know to today, uh China is the term number one trading partner with over 150 countries, and for the U.S. it's a it's a little over 40. So, you know, we're a third of what they were in the and that's that's changed radically in the past.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

That's an amazing statistic.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah, it is. There's a map you can get to you can you can Google it, I think. And there's a map that shows the red lines for China and blue lines for the United States, and it shows all these different countries. It's quite interesting. Um but you know, so here's an example. Uh China uh controls the ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. Uh it has leases on the land and it it it basically owns the uh container shipping operations at both ends of the Panama Canal. Uh little known fact to most Americans that we you know, people uh uh sometimes objected to the fact that uh that Jimmy uh that that uh Timmy Carter signed a deal with Omar Torrijos of Panama, uh turning the canal back to Panama. But the fact of the matter is uh that that didn't really make much difference. We still have uh military control of the canal if you want to look at it that way. We've got you know uh many ships offshore, and we've got military bases very close to Panama. We could defend it. But in the process, we allowed China to step in and buy up the land on both sides, or lease the land on both sides and operate these container ship operations. We just stepped in and let them do that. Uh in uh parts of Africa, American companies that used to own big mining operations have sold them uh to China. That's this there's details about that in my book. We've just stepped away in so many aspects. And uh during after 9-11, when the United States focused so strongly on Latin America, uh excuse me, on the Middle East, on Iraq and Afghanistan, we ignored Latin America and and Africa to a very large degree. We almost just sort of forgot about our relationships with them. And China stepped in. China didn't get bogged down at all in the Middle East, but it went to the rest of the of the world. And today it it's the number one investor and trading partner on every continent. And it's uh in the last couple of years, it provided more loans to lower income countries than the United States and all other countries combined. That's a that's an amazing statistic. Amazing. And that's all happened very, very short, brief recently. Uh, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the US stepped away and focused on on the Middle East. And now we we start to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and we get focused on Ukraine. And and I'm not saying we shouldn't be defending Ukraine, but but I am saying that we've basically once again left the rest of the world. And China's stepping in once again. So where there's a vacuum, uh China st China steps in.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

Kazakhstan is a crucial piece of this Belt and Road. Um I'd like to ask you about some of the specific relationships you mentioned throughout the book because you had uh an interaction with the Kazakhstan Prime Minister. He invited you into his office and you had a private correspondence with him. His name was uh Bakistan Sajentaev. But uh, what happened in that conversation and what did you learn about Kazakhstan and the Chinese economic human role?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Well, you know, uh it's a very interesting process. And Kazakhstan leader at the time, Nurievas, was uh uh uh a you know was a famous uh dic dictator. He he the prime minister doesn't have as nearly as important a role, but I also had had had dinner with with him, but the real leader. And he'd been in charge of the country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Uh and he walks a very he you know he's known as a brutal dictator. And uh I had dinner with him and a few other people. I have to say I was a little nervous going in there because I I figured that he didn't like me very much. Why'd you invite me to dinner? But it was it was a very pleasant dinner, and he was he was very gracious. Host and and wanted to again pick my brain to a certain degree. Uh, and he's he he he he he he left that office a couple of years ago. He got very old, and I think well, it's probably older than me, but he you know he'd been in long enough since 1991, and and there was a movement to to get rid of them, and they did. But what I learned during that visit to Kazakhstan was how critical Kazakhstan is to the new Silk Road and how it walks this this careful path because it has borders with many countries, but including China and Russia, and it's in a very critical position. Um so in a way it's it's representative of so much of the world that we're seeing right now over the issue of Ukraine, that uh it doesn't want to, it's it does none of the uh none of these countries have none of the leaders I've talked to are want to see this war continue. They want peace. Uh the the Ukrainian war does not serve anybody's best interests, except maybe the owners of a few corporations that build military equipment on both sides. Uh and uh Kazakhstan is is is in that same sort of position as is China of let's not alienate Russia, let's let's continue talking to Russia. And Kazakhstan also wants you know wants to stay on good the good terms with China, but at the same time it wants to be on good terms with Europe and the United States. And we see this around the world, Ryan, where where so many countries they just don't want to get involved in this in this competition between China and the United States, or now Russia's part of that uh that whole scenario, part of that equation. So they're trying to be very careful. And one of the things that I I hear from leaders in what we call the lower, we used to call the developing world the third world, and I don't like those terms. I prefer lower-income countries because that's true. Um one of the things we hear is that uh to them the Ukraine war is kind of a European transatlantic white man's war. Uh, and they're they're very quick to point out that we're spending a lot more money in fighting that war than we ever did in helping Africa uh fight the coronavirus. Uh or you know, we we were very careful uh with these patents and so on, with uh not not giving away our patents and not giving, you know, we we gave we gave medicines, but we didn't give them the right to make the medicines and so on and so forth. They resent that and they they they they say that the United States is very hypocritical because we say, well, Russia shouldn't invade Ukraine, but at the same time we invade Iraq and Afghanistan and we be previously uh Vietnam and and uh they say, you know, we're starving because of that war. We're not getting fertilizers, we're not getting food, the supply chains are broken, uh food and fertilizers are not coming out of Ukraine. We're starving. So for them, the world's big issue is climate change, starvation, malnutrition, uh, and uh all the things that are causing the immigration issues. And that's another one, like, oh, Europe's accepting immigrants from Ukraine, but not from Africa, really strongly. So you hear around the world a very different view from what we in the United States hear and and what you hear in so much of Europe and Australia and elsewhere, that you know, the the global south, and you know, use that term loosely, but uh the lower income countries see the world very differently from the way we do.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Speaking of Australia, in your research for the book, um I'm sure you know that we are one of the hundred and forty countries who boast China to be our largest trading partner. Um we're kind of an awkward cultural thorn in China's side, given our uh geographical location. Um but nonetheless, I mean, we'll sell them anything that we can, so it's a bit hypocritical. That's uh uh uh a sidebar. But in your um research of the book, specifically talking about Chinese economic hitmen, uh did you come across any interesting anecdotes that related to Australia? Ah well you know the The Great and Glorious Country.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yes. At the time I uh was writing the book, you know, this there was this um discussion of of forming a union between Australia and and uh the the British Empire, you know, the the the the uh UK and and uh the United United States AUKUS. Uh and now it's that's taken a step further. So uh this this movement to uh unite Australia in this effort to compete against China, but at the same time, well obviously, as you pointed out, Australia is dependent on China to a large there's an i there's an there's a codependency there. So it's uh and specifically I did not do it, I've never worked in China. I have no personal experience, I mean, uh excuse me, in Australia I've been there a number of times, but I've never actually worked there and I have no specific experience there. But I will say one thing that it's it's it's it's a little different. But my first assignment as an economic hitman back in the 1970s was Indonesia. And to learn about Indonesia, before I went to Indonesia, I went to Australia because the university in Canberra, I had more information on Indonesia than Indonesia had or anybody else had, than the World Bank had. Um I spent quite a lot of very delightful time in at the U at the university in in Canberra, and was I was staying at a ho home of one of the economics professors, and it was a it was a marvelous experience. And I was I was I was amazed at how much uh th this department at the university knew about Indonesia, that when I got to Indonesia I found the Indonesians didn't know half of what the Australians knew. And so this I think there's this long history of of Australia's uh involvement with Asia, even though it's it its heritage comes from Europe and especially from the United Kingdom, and uh but this is you're in this fascinating position, I think. And I think countries like Australia can really be leaders in providing a bridge of this recognition that we we must bring China and the United States together to transform the death economy to a life economy. Look, you know, we can disagree on everything else. We can fault well we can we can criticize China for its threats to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and they can criticize us for what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan or have done there. Uh we can criticize them for their treatment of the Uyghurs and other minorities, and they can criticize us in the United States for our treatment of uh immigrants. They can criticize Australia for its treatment of the Aborigines and so on and so forth. And we can go on and on and criticize each other, and we don't have to agree on much, but let's agree that none of us, as I said, can survive on a on a dead planet, that we we need to come together to realize that this economic system we've developed is failing us. It's a degenerative system that's consuming and polluting itself into extinction. It's in the short run, it's depleting the resources it needs for the long run. And I think Australia could play a very vital role in that because of your your codependence with China and your relationship with with it with Europe and the United States and the transatlantic countries.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

And we do wield quite a um like we punch above our weight when it comes to soft power and I suppose cultural influence uh because we are this odd one out on the you know eastern third of the world on the Asian continent.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Yes. Yes, you're not really you're not well you're obviously not a transatlantic country.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

No.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

You're in the Pacific. But uh uh but but you can relate to the transatlantic countries and you can also relate to the Asian countries.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

Yeah, growing up um Oh sorry, go on, John, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

No, and the middle as I was saying in the Middle Eastern countries and India, you're you're in this geographically, you're and geography plays a large, large role, larger than we want to admit. You know, I I uh you you mentioned I you know was in uh speaking at a big event in Russia and then one in Kazakhstan. This is in 2017 before Putin went crazy. And uh I flew to Kazakhstan with one of Putin's top economic ad his top economic advisor, Sergei Sergei Glasiev, and and Sergei had read my books. He speaks excellent English, he'd written his own book in English, which which I read, and we we got along really, really well. And uh one of the things he pointed out to me, he said, you know, you in the United States are very, very spoiled. You're in a very unique, privileged position. You don't you don't have any enemies on your borders. You get Mexico and Canada and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and you've got lots of lots of uh resources internally. You've never had to fight people on your border, at least not in the last hundred and fifty years or so. Uh that's unique. Almost no other country's in that position. Well, Australia is kind of in that position. You don't really have any enemies on your borders either. You've you're surrounded by water. You you you do have you've had enemies from World War II not not far away, but you know, and you've got lots of resources. So Australia, in some respects, from a geo geographic standpoint and and a and a resource standpoint, has a lot of uh similarities with the United States in in that regard.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

The only difference is is that um I think something like 90% of our land is uh almost uninhabitable because you can't grow anything on it and there is such a restricted amount of water. If we had the same land geography as the US had, then we would, without a doubt, be a similar-sized superpower because our population is camped at you know, 20, 25 million, whatever we are now, um simply because of the fact you can't live in the middle of the country. You can live on this thin sliver on the coast. Uh this is going off memory now, so it's almost certainly wrong. But something like uh 95% of the population lives on 5% of the land, something like that. Um, you know, and it's just concentrated to this idyllic, beautiful thin sliver of the eastern coast of like New South Wales and Victoria. Um but yeah, uh Peter Zihan and uh Jared Diamond and Tim Marshall, you know, these like uh great authors who've contributed amazing things, they all talk about the geographical determinism uh uh explanation for why the US is actually the just incredible superpower it is.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

Yeah. In addition to what you're saying, not only do we have these resources and we have the privilege privilege to be a long way away from enemies, we also have a have a very aggressive history. So, and that feeds into it too, you know, the history of desperate people from Europe uh moving to the United States, and a lot of them were very violent people. And increasingly we're we're we're we're re-evaluating our history and the history of how we treated the indigenous people and how we've treated immigrants throughout history, whether it was the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese who you know, in when they first arrived and so forth. Uh there's this there's this there's this streak of feeling like the dominators from the very beginning, this idea of dominating, and now we've taken that to the step of dominating nature, uh, which is also one of the characteristics of the death economy. So the death economy is is based on really the idea of human supremacy, that humans have the right to ravage the earth. Whereas the life economy is based on the idea that we have to uh that the goal is not short-term profits or short-term materialistic consumption, which is the goal of the death economy, but the goal of the life economy is long-term benefits for people and nature, and and paying people to uh mine the plastics in the oceans, and uh and and and you know, paying people to clean up pollution, and paying people to regenerate destroyed environments, regenerate coral reefs, and uh recycle and develop new technologies that go way beyond solar and wind. You know, we've done a lot very, very rapidly with solar and and and wind, but there's this forms of energy production and and everything else that we haven't even conceived of. So we can create an economic system that has a lot of room for growth, uh, but growth in new directions, growth in the directions of making the planet a more habitable place, uh and and and recognizing that we are a part of nature, not a part from nature, as your aboriginals have have always understood, and as our indigenous people, and all of us, we all come from ancestors for more than 200,000 years, knew that they were a part of nature and had to live within the limits of nature, we've deviated from that in the in the blink of history.

SPEAKER_02 35:53

This is a um terrifically irresponsible tangent to rundown, but uh given a lot of your um experience with you know traditional cultures deep inside the Amazon, do you uh guys have any insight into shamanic practices with the Aboriginals? Did they have sort of you know similar um traditions and ceremonies to worship and celebrate and get closer to the land? Uh because I've I've tried to figure this out before, but I haven't seen anything on it. It seems to be mostly in the Amazon.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Well, I never worked with the Aboriginal people of Australia, so I can't again I can't speak from personal experience, but I read books about the song lines, about you know that the and I but I have a painting on my wall here. And it represents the song lines and how people sing themselves into the future, how people sing themselves into what they want to be, which is typical of indigenous cultures of and and of I think human history, that we've always known that perception molds reality. And you can call it dreams, nighttime dreams, but also the dreams of what it is, what we want in our lives. We know that there's no Australia, there's no United States, there's no religion, there's no culture, except as people perceive them. And when enough people uh accept a perception are codified into law, it has a huge impact on reality. It's what molds human reality, our perceptions. And that's true of all indigenous cultures that I've worked with in uh in Iran and Indonesia and uh Egypt and Europe and all over Latin America and North America, and I'm sure the same is true with the in Australia. All of them understand that it's perception that molds reality. And we know that that's also the basis for modern psychotherapy. It's the basis for marketing, for politics. Uh, and uh and I think the good news, Ryan, is we can understand that what's created this death economy that we have, what's created climate change, what's created income inequality and species extinction, all the big crises that face us, they're problems, but they're not the problem. The problem is this death economy that generates all of those. And the the death economy is based on this perception that to be successful we must maximize materialistic gain, maximize short-term profits for corporations, maximize consumption for individuals. And that's just a perception, and it's proven to be a terrible one. And so we can turn it around, and I think we're I know we're in the process of doing it. You know, we've got tremendous movements like the Green New Deal and conscious capitalism and B Corporations, the United States benefit corporations, and people everywhere I go, uh or wherever I travel, I see people waking up to the fact this system isn't working anymore. How do we change it? We start by we change the perception of what it means to be successful.

SPEAKER_02 38:59

I um uh just want to bring it back to Sergei Glacier for a moment there. I I wonder if, as an economist, you got to speak with him about his ideas about the USD as the world's reserve currency.

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Yeah, no, it's I wonder what happened. You know, he was one of the people that was put on the US uh sanctions list, and I haven't been able to keep in touch with him. Um but uh I I don't know that we did have a we did have a strip yes, we did have a conversation about that. And uh, you know, Sergei pointed out that because the the only reason the United States can impose the kinds of sanctions it does is because we control the world's currency, the world's you know predominant currency of trade. If we didn't control that, we wouldn't be able to sanction countries the way we can. And of course, China now recognizes that. And it's why the Yuan is is becoming China's very interested in getting the Yuan to be the new currency because they realize that if you control the world's currency, uh you are able to sanction countries, you're able to control commerce and trade in in many, many ways. But and I remember Sarge and I talking about this, that China has to be very careful. Uh it may want the the the Yuan to be uh the the the major currency, but it can't happen too quickly because uh the United States owes China a lot of money in dollars. So China doesn't want to see the dollar devalue too rapidly, in order to get paid paid off first. And so, yeah, this whole currency issue is is a big one. And I don't think Russia uh has any any well, I don't know how Putin feels, but I I'm sure that Sergei wouldn't have ever thought that the Russian ruple would become the the major world currency, but but the belief is that the Chinese currency that that could very well happen, and probably you know, there's a pretty high probability that it is in the process of happening. Today, Russia is buying uh is is selling a lot of oil to China in in yuan. And also uh there's a they're negotiating a deal between Saudi Arabia and China for Saudi Arabia to sell its oil to China in in Chinese currency.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Maybe uh quick transition into Africa then. Um you know, we spoke about Howard French, his book The Africa, China, the Second Continent, um, in the last chat. Uh you had a specific chapter about the Congo. Um I'd love to hear your what your research uncovered with Chinese economic hitman in the Congo.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

Yeah, uh you know, so here you've got a a a region of the world that is becoming super, super important to the world, um because of its it it uh because of all the resources it has and and and a lot of them that are about the the green economy, things like lithium and and cobalt and and and and other such uh minerals and metals. Uh and China has been has been moving into the Congo. You know, I I remember I tell the story in the book about how back when I was an economic hit band, my my boss, uh chairman of the board of the company, he had he was he was this is in the 70s and he was in his late, he was in his 80s, and he remembered going into the Congo to look at developing a hydro project uh way, way back in the 1900s. And we were now looking at developing huge projects, especially hydro projects, and encouraging aluminum companies to locate there because aluminum companies need hydroelectric cheap energy, basically. And the decision was made um by my company that it was too risky. Africa was just too risky. Excuse me. And in a way, the United States made that decision. A lot of corporations, at least in the United States, made those kinds of decisions. And our banking industry made those kinds of decisions that Africa was risky. Uh China, on the other hand, has really stepped into Congo and it stepped into all of Africa and taken over. So I think now, I think there's 54 countries in Africa that are part of the new Silk Road. And at one point China began to forgive some of the debt that some of these countries owed it. It made a very smart move. They're falling back on that now that their economy is is is not growing as rapidly as as it had. But Congo, like this, the uh like the the part I I cited about Ecuador, is in that kind of a position where it's very attractive in one respect for them to side with China, to accept loans from China, to invite Chinese companies in. At the same time, they're seeing some difficult situations in in uh um some of the projects that are being built. And uh and as I mentioned earlier, too, some of the uh European and and American mining companies recently have sold off their assets to Chinese companies which I think has been a huge mistake if if we really feel that we're in a competition with China, which we undoubtedly are. Um but um the American and European and Canadian mining companies are are not willing to take some of the risks that the Chinese companies are willing to take. We have to remember that some of these big Chinese companies are fifty percent or or slightly more owned by the government. And uh China China has a lot of capital. So it's it's willing to take some risks with some of that capital to gain friends. So one of the things you see in Africa is China is saying, look, we don't need to necessarily make any return on our investments. The World Bank and and the US oriented institutions uh almost always want to get a return on their investment, a pretty healthy one. China does too, but it also is saying it's willing to sacrifice some of that in order to make friends. It wants votes at the United Nations. It wants to be accepted as part of the international community, and that I think that's particularly important to it in Africa because Africa's got all these resources and it's you know, if you can reach Africa you make you can build communications and transportation networks on land between Africa and China as well as as by sea.

SPEAKER_02 45:31

Is there a specific debt trap in the Congo that's top of mind?

SPEAKER_01 45:38

Well, I guess uh y uh y w what do you mean by specific?

SPEAKER_02 45:42

You mean um as a specific project, a specific deal. No, I've got nothing.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

Okay you know, I think mining, mining in general, and owning uh or controlling the rights to the mineral resources, which are extensive in the in Congo, and also um the energy facilities that go along with that. So, you know, the the Congo River and that whole network of rivers uh presents some tremendous opportunities for hydroelectric power. And many of the mining industries, and particularly if you want to set up a value-added system so you can be more attractive to countries like Congo and say, not only are we going to mine the products here, but we're gonna help you build the industries to they'll be owned by China by China, perhaps, but they'll be in your country and and hire some of your laborers, uh, and we can also produce them the hydroelectric power that's that's required uh to uh energize these industries.

SPEAKER_02 46:56

Um okay. Um well, John, we uh closing down on the time. So there are three questions that I tried ask as many guesses possible that I didn't get a chance to last time, which I would be thrilled to run by you. The first being, could you speak about the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_01 47:19

Yeah, I I I I write about this and I think in this book and others that I I think you know there's there's serendipity, or what we might call fate, and that happens. And what's important is how we react to it. So um, you know, for example, I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. But serendipitously, I happened to come of age when the draft was imposed in the United States, and I was draftable age. So for about nine years I had to fight the draft. And I had quit college. I got fed up with college and I went to work for the Hearst newspapers, and I loved that job. I loved working for the Hearst newspapers. I just I was in the city room, it was it was dynamic, it was exciting, I loved it. I never would have gone back to college. Um the draft sent me back to college. Serendipitous, the draft. But how did I react to it? I didn't go, you know, I didn't go to Canada, I didn't go to prison. If I had, something else would have happened. I don't know, maybe it would have been different. I instead went back to college and got a degree in business administration, which eventually allowed me to become an economic hitman, which then allowed me to write these books and expose the system and spend the rest of my life trying to change it. Had the draft not been there, that wouldn't have happened. The serendipitous draft. And then I got out of business school and I'm still eligible. So I joined the Peace Corps, which was you could get out of the draft by through the Peace Corps, sent me to the Amazon. I spent three years in Ecuador in the Amazon and the Andes, and that changed my life and got me interested in shamanism. And shamanism also taught me, has taught me how perception is so important and how we can use that now to transform a death economy to a life economy. So that one event of the draft, uh, which was in that and I was serendipitously born at a time when the United States had this draft and I was eligible for nine years. It had a huge impact on my life. It was totally unforeseen, and I deeply resented at the time. I did not want to go back to college, I did not want to join the Peace Corps. I wanted to, once I got out of business school, I wanted to go out and make a lot of money instead of going deep into the jungle. But in retrospect, man, what a gift, what a gift. And that's just uh one example, and uh there've been there've been many, there have been many in my life. And you know, boy, another one, a very quick one is you know, I for the seven, the first seven years or so that I was an economic hitman, chief economist of this consulting firm, I believed in what I was doing. I I could look at the statistics that if you invest if you go to a lower-income country and and they want to prosper and you invest money in these big infrastructure projects and take their resources as collateral, their economy grows. And statistically we can show that it does. But but then serendipitously, I I get to meet Omar Torrijos, who is the head of state of Panama. I've sent down there to corrupt him. But instead we become friends. And he invites me to barbecues and wild parties and so on and so forth. And at one point he, or several points, he takes me aside and says, John, don't you understand the lie you're selling to yourself and the world? You're not helping the people of these countries. You're helping a few rich families who own the means of production. That's what GDP measures. It does not measure prosperity of all the people. And so this serendipitous uh assignment to Panama and then and then hanging out with Omar and the fact that Omar liked me, even though I was there to try to corrupt him, he didn't want to be corrupted. Uh you know, it helped me understand after seven years that what I was doing was wrong, and it took me another couple to get out with uh that that business and spend the rest of my life writing about it. Again, it opened the door for me to see the story behind the story. My my life is full of serendipitous events, and again, I think what's always important is not that they happen to us, but how do we react to them? What do we do with them? You know, with the Vietnam War, I could have gotten angry, I could have gone and broken windows, I could have ended up in prison, I could have fled to Canada. There's a lot of things I could have done, and I'm not saying that any of those would have been bad, but I am saying that the way I reacted to that draft was it launched me on a path that I've been on ever since, and I'm very, very glad that I'm on it.

SPEAKER_02 51:48

John, what an incredible answer. And um, you know, it just reaffirms like uh life can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. You know, had you not done the three years in Ecuador and the Peace Corps, Charles T. May not might not have been interested in you to uh do the job which ended up taking you all around the world, and ultimately Benigomaterijos, and had you not met him, you never would have written the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and wouldn't have sold two and a half million copies and wouldn't have influenced um all these people around the world. So uh yeah, that was a that was an incredible response. Thank you very much for that.

SPEAKER_01 52:24

Thanks, Ryan. And I'd like to, you know, just to add that I think it serendipitously, all of us should feel blessed that we're born at this time. That was serendipitous. Very listeners born now, and this is an amazing time. It's a time of great challenges and crises, and a time when I think we're we we are on the verge of evolving as a human species into a a new uh a new outlook of what it means to be humans, being human beings on this planet, what it means to be successful. We're we're we're having to reevaluate that. And I think every one of your listeners uh should be feel very blessed as I do that we're born at this time when we have the opportunity to participate in this magnificent awakening, this this consciousness revolution. It's a consciousness revolution that we're going through. So, and you know, we just happen to be born now, but here we are.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

John, you mentioned the uh shamanism. Um I would love, and I understand if you don't want to say this publicly, but I would just love to hear your experiences and how it has influenced your worldview, how it has just fundamentally shifted the way you interact with the world.

SPEAKER_01 53:35

Well, you know, I tell the story in the books about how I my life was saved by a shaman in the Amazon when I was in the Peace War back in 1969. And uh, as a as a uh price for saving my life, basically, he he said I need to become his apprentice. I graduated from business school, it's 1969. I'd never heard of a shaman. There was no future in it. I didn't want to do it, but I saved my life. So I did. And his most basic teaching, and having studied with shamans on just about every other continent except uh Antarctica, uh, I found the same to be true that all over the world shamans understand this idea that we change reality by changing perceptions. And he taught me that back in 69, the guy deep in the Amazon, you know, uh wearing next to no clothes, looking very fierce, tattoos, you know, he was you're he was the uh metaphorical indigenous person, and uh, but very, very wise, and he knew that. And uh so I've seen that to be true in everything that we do in life, that that our perceptions as humans change things. And uh I, you know, I I've been recently in some discussions with some very well-known writers and thinkers who are quite pessimistic. They say, well, you know, we're doomed. It's too late, we can't we can't get here. And my response was, well, if that's our perception that we're doomed, then we're doomed, because perceptions doom all reality. But if we have the perception that we have a good possibility of changing, and then the probability may be lower, the probability may be higher that we're doomed, but if we focus on the probability, on the smaller probability, if it is smaller, that we have a really good chance if we just apply ourselves, then we have a really good opportunity to get there. We have to change, have that perception that we can do it, if we that we can do it and we will do it. And I like to say, you know, history is based on people who defied probability in every aspect, you know, defy probability. Being an American, I could say that we know that in 1774 the probability was that the British Army would defeat these bunch of farmers. Very strong probability, you know, probably 90%. But uh probably that probability proved to be wrong, and history history is written on that. I think the probability of Australia is when you know a bunch of prisoners came over there had a pretty pretty dour-looking future, but that all turned around, the probabilities turned around, and we could say that time and time and time again. And so uh I I think that uh shamanism taught me that uh in it it it very, very strongly. The the power of positive thinking, the power of saying, yes, we can do it, let's apply ourselves and take the actions to do it.

SPEAKER_02 56:30

And so how literally do you take that idea of thoughts can um influence reality? You know, if if you uh r visualize something again and again and again, is it simply like a first step in making the changes in the in reality that ultimately go towards the vision you had, or is there something deeper than that?

SPEAKER_01 56:52

Well, we need the vision. We need the dream or the perception, and then we need to take the actions. So, you know, when I was resisting the draft, I couldn't just dream that I wasn't going to be drafted, or I couldn't just dream that I was going to join the Peace Corps. I had to go out and apply and had to go for interviews, and you know, and and so on. We have to take the action. So there's the perception, and then there's taking the actions, and and then uh moving forward. And uh a quick story to end on here is that I I took a group of people to uh northern India years ago, Ladakh and in northern India, and the Dalai Lama invited us to his living room, there were about 33 of us, and we spent an afternoon talking to the Dalai Lama, and one of one of the people asked him, and he said, you know, there's a writer right now who's asking everybody in the world to take f 10 minutes off on a certain day at a certain time and pray for peace. What do you think of that, your holiness? And the Dalai Lama said, Well, that's good. Praying for peace, meditating on peace, that's really good. But if it's all you do, it's a waste of time and probably counterproductive. Because if you leave, if you stop praying for peace and walk away and say, I've done my job, it's counterproductive. You've also got to take daily actions. He likes that expression, daily, daily actions. You've got to take daily actions. So, and you know, he's the epitome of a guy who meditates for many hours every day and then goes out and writes books, travels around the world speaking. And I think that's a great story of uh and and that sums it up. Pray for peace, pray for whatever you want, and visualize what you want, and that's very shamanic. Visualize it, have the vision, have the dream, and then take the actions that'll help make it happen every day. Take some little action, even if it's even if it's just sending an email that uh you know moves you moves it forward. But do something.

SPEAKER_02 58:41

All right, John. Thank you so much for being flexible with your time and going over for me. Um again, absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. And the book's terrific. The audience will know where to find it. All the best.

SPEAKER_01 58:54

Yeah, my pleasure, Ryan. Thanks for all that you do.