[00:02:46] John Perkins: And I had a staff of anywhere from 30 to 50 people working for me, depending on the specific time and projects. And my job really was to identify countries that have resources that corporations want, like oil. These were usually the lower, what we call lower income or developing countries. And then I would arrange a loan for that country from the World Bank for, for, for a lot of money, but the money wouldn’t actually go to the country.

[00:03:15] John Perkins: Instead, it would be transferred from a bank in probably in Washington, D. C. or New York to a big construction company’s bank like Halliburton or Bechtel or Brown and Rood or Stone and Webster. You probably know the names.

[00:03:28] Preston Pysh: Yes, sir.

[00:03:29] John Perkins: And companies then would make a lot of money building big infrastructure projects in the country I had identified, things like electric power systems.

[00:03:38] John Perkins: Industrial parks, highways, ports, airports, things that we could show would help grow the economy, you measure the economy by GDP. And so originally when I took on this job, I thought, you know, like, I’m doing something really good here. I’m helping, you know, helping these countries become more prosperous.

[00:03:58] John Perkins: But over time, I began to realize that really what we were doing was making the rich of those countries richer and more powerful and helping our own corporations to make a lot of money because in the people that benefited were the rich who owned the big industries and the commercial establishments.

[00:04:16] John Perkins: The businesses that benefited tremendously from better infrastructure, and yet the majority of the people in the country who weren’t involved in these kinds of activities ended up suffering because money was diverted from health care. Education and other social services to pay the interest on the debt.

[00:04:36] John Perkins: And, but, you know, that’s not obvious when you know, the statistics of gross domestic product, GDP growth, it looks like everybody’s benefiting. The fact is GDP is an extremely biased statistic bias toward the rich and powerful, and you know, the other side of this coin was that the, if the president of the country or the minister of finance or whoever I was dealing with, didn’t accept these loans.

[00:05:01] John Perkins: They were very aware that there were people in the background we called Jackals who were usually CIA assets who were prepared to overthrow the government or, or assassinate someone. And you know, unfortunately the United States has a long history of this with Chile and Arbenz in Guatemala and Mosaddegh in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo, and, and most recently as Zelaya in Honduras in 2009.

[00:05:25] John Perkins: Where we’ve actually instituted these practices of overthrowing or assassinating leaders. And so, these presidents know this, you know, so basically what I’m saying is, Hey, here in this hand, I got a, I got a whole lot of money. It’s going to help you and your family and your friends. But if you choose not to take this money in this hand, I got a gun.

[00:05:44] John Perkins: I never actually carried a gun, but these presidents knew what I was talking about, that there were people behind me that did carry guns.

[00:05:50] Preston Pysh: When I was reading it, the so what, like if I had to really compress what I experienced after finishing the book, it was very simply, it was your job was to get other countries, other businesses, Individuals in debt up to their eyeballs as much as possible to basically force feed a dollar network effect around the world.

[00:06:14] Preston Pysh: Would you say that that’s properly characterized based on?

[00:06:18] John Perkins: Yeah, it’s what’s called the debt trap. And it’s, you know, it’s the new, most convenient and successful form of imperialism building an empire. And this empire is really a corporate empire, more than an American empire, cause let’s face it, Preston and many of these corporations.

[00:06:35] John Perkins: When they prosper, they don’t help the United States, they don’t help the citizens here, they don’t pay taxes. They may be listed as U. S. corporations, but as we all know, a very large percentage of the most profitable Fortune 500 corporations don’t pay taxes. And yeah, I did also want to mention that, you know, so when these countries couldn’t pay the principal on the debt then the, I go back in using the guise of the International Monetary Fund and say, hey, we can help you refinance your loan.

[00:07:02] John Perkins: But to do that, you’ve got to meet certain conditionalities. You’ve got to sell your oil or whatever the resource was. And today it’s likely to be lithium or cobalt or some of the minerals that are used in the high tech industry. You’ve got to sell these to our corporations at cut rate prices without environmental or social regulations.

[00:07:21] John Perkins: Or vote with us on the next vote against Cuba at the United Nations, for example, or let us build a military base on your soil or privatize all your public sector businesses, your water and sewage systems and so forth, and sell them to our investors at low prices or maybe all of those things. And so, yes, we were really building this corporate empire and, and at the same time, an economic system that’s really failing us.

[00:07:45] John Perkins: What, what we could call a death economy. It’s causing climate change, it’s causing income inequality, it’s causing a lot of unrest around the world.

[00:07:53] Nico Lechuga: John, I have a question on that. So the economic imperialism thing, like, rung so true of what you’re constructing. My question is, at the beginning, when you’re constructing these loans, would you have already modeled out the additional loans?

[00:08:08] Nico Lechuga: Based on the country defaulting that we’re going to be taken and then the courses of action that you were going to take from an economic imperialism standpoint of the military base or the taking some of the production of the assets from that country. Was this already kind of preplanned for 5, 6 steps out?

[00:08:25] John Perkins: Yeah. You know, it’s a strategy. So it’s defined as in the case of the minerals that they’re the collateral. So you give the loan to a country like, let’s say Ecuador, it’s got a lot of oil out in their very fragile Amazon area. And you give them a big loan and you use their oil, but sitting still in the ground as collateral.

[00:08:47] John Perkins: So when they can’t pay their debt, you go back in and say, now, okay, so now you can let our oil companies come in and take that oil at very cheap prices without. Many regulations, and when you’re going forward with doing this, you’re pretty aware that the country is not going to be able to pay back these debts, but they are going to be able to show this economic growth.

[00:09:08] John Perkins: So the president is in an interesting position because he’s being handed this report that we’ve done that shows that if, that if he takes on these loans, the economy will grow and it probably will. And he can take that to the local press. And to his people, and it can be a very popular thing. Oh, my goodness.

[00:09:26] John Perkins: You know, this president’s done great things. He’s building all these highways. Look at how the roads have improved. I was just in Ecuador, which is one of the countries where I did this. And I just saw, you know, incredible road construction. And now most of the Chinese are playing the same game as we are.

[00:09:41] John Perkins: So they’re doing the same thing. They’re building, you know, hydroelectric plants and mines and so forth. And this can look very, very good on paper to the people. very much. And let’s face it, you know, presidents, even under the best conditions, don’t, don’t serve for more than, usually more than eight years, possibly 10 in most countries, and often it’s a lot fewer than that.

[00:10:03] Nico Lechuga: And then on that point, so the economic growth, I think you hit on the electrical systems in your first book, and then you hit on the Chinese construction of like dams and roads in the third book, and this economic imperialism. Can you walk us through, when you’re putting together these models, how much of the debt, so let’s say I take out 10 in debt, how much of that debt would you expect to come back to western countries, like through programs with Halliburton and Bechtel, versus how much money is staying in that country?

[00:10:33] John Perkins: The money itself, all of it, plus interest, plus more comes back because the construction company, you mentioned Halliburton, let’s say, is making big profits off this, which theoretically some of it comes back to the United States, although Halliburton now is, I think, officially their headquarters is in Dubai, but notwithstanding that, and the banks are very insistent that these loans ultimately get repaid in one way or another.

[00:11:01] John Perkins: So, And at the same time, the oil is now being cyphered off or whatever their resources out of the country to the U. S. or international, it’s called an international oil companies. So they’re not making money off that either, very much. So the whole system is, is very, very rigged. What the country does show is that it’s experienced economic growth as a result.

[00:11:26] John Perkins: But again, most of that economic growth benefits the very wealthy and powerful in those countries. And in so many of these countries in Africa and in Latin America and elsewhere, you know, very few families essentially control the economies of these countries. And these families go back to very long time ago to colonial periods in Latin America.

[00:11:46] John Perkins: For example, most of these countries have families. Who were given these incredible land grants, their, their ancestors who were generals under the Spanish conquistador, under Cortez of Zaro, or one of the other conquistador who gave them huge amounts of land. And their family still has tremendous power within these countries, so they, they benefit significantly.

[00:12:10] Preston Pysh: John, one of the things that I think is lost on a lot of listeners of our, of our community is just how this relationship with the IMF and the World Bank. Works in harmony with this us agenda to push dollar dominance around the world through this indebtedness. So if you were going to explain that relationship very simply for people to kind of be able to wrap their head around it, because I think people are familiar with the word IMF or world bank and they know that they’re out there, but they just don’t understand how they fit into the bigger picture.

[00:12:42] John Perkins: Well, those organizations are all part of what we call the Washington Consensus. Just to make it even a little bit more complicated, so it’s the World Bank, the sister organizations, the Inter American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the U. S. Treasury Department. But basically this is, this would be a scenario.

[00:13:00] John Perkins: So USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, sets aside a small amount of money. In my day it would have been several hundred thousand dollars, now it’s probably a couple of million. And it’s a grant to our country. Let’s stick with this case of Ecuador since we started there. But it could be so many different countries.

[00:13:20] John Perkins: And that’s this grant is used to hire my company, the consulting firm to go in and do a study and say the World Bank is interested in giving a huge amount of money to this country, Ecuador. My job is to go in and make a study of where that money should be spent. Should it go into developing the electrical system building hydroelectric facilities and transmission lines, or maybe it should go into highways or ports or airports.

[00:13:46] John Perkins: I produced a study that says the best investment would be a huge hydroelectric plant and all the transmission lines that go along with it as an example. And that would be-

[00:13:57] Preston Pysh: In that, and I’m sorry to interrupt you, so in that scenario, let’s say that what they were ultimately after was oil or some type of like natural resource.

[00:14:05] Preston Pysh: And you’re looking at the set up inside this country. And let’s say they don’t have a lot of power. So step 1 is we’ve got to get power into the country so that then they can extract this raw commodity that we’re actually interested in in year 10 from now or year 15 or 20 or whatever. So. I’m assuming that there was like a much bigger, grander strategy with respect to the timing of like how you guys did this, were you part of that orchestrating that or were you a little bit more granular in just the power like you would have been told?

[00:14:37] Preston Pysh: Let’s let’s go after power inside this country.

[00:14:40] John Perkins: I would know I would know if I’m if I’m any good at my job. I know that. Yes, part of it is exactly what you’re suggesting. And so chances are this hydroelectric plant that we’re that we’re that we’re giving that we’re going back to the World Bank to say, give this country a large amount of money to hire our companies to build a hydroelectric plant.

[00:14:58] John Perkins: Chances are the hydroelectric plant. It’s out in the Amazonian area where the waterfalls and where the rivers, what’s called the headwaters of the Amazon, the sacred headwaters area. And that’s where the oil happens to be.

[00:15:14] Preston Pysh: Mm-Hmm.

[00:15:14] John Perkins: So when you build the hydroelectric plant, you’re also building big roads.

[00:15:17] John Perkins: Yeah. You get construction machinery in there, which is going to be a big benefit to the, to the oil companies also. So yeah, there’s, there, there is that, that, that sort of thing that often goes on. Not always. Anyway, so I go back to the country with this, the study and I say, so here, you know, with this study the world bank is, is willing to give you this very large loan.

[00:15:39] John Perkins: And but you have to sign off on and use oil as your collateral. And so the president says, well, look, let me take this to the people and gives his report to the local newspapers and says, you know, I’m, this is what I want to do. And maybe he’s even going to have a referendum and the people are going to say, yes, we’ll do by God.

[00:15:55] John Perkins: This shows that our economy is going to grow it. At 8 percent a year, and it’s only, it hasn’t been growing at all in the last few years. We’ve got hyperinflation, we’re, we’re going to get rid of that because the report would show that. And so then, then the money is diverted to a big construction company in the United States, let’s say, and one of the big ones that we’ve mentioned earlier, and they go down and build a, build a project.

[00:16:18] John Perkins: And meanwhile, the country’s paying the interest on the loan, and they’re diverting money from social services or other programs to pay the interest. But in the end, they can’t pay the principal. And so we go back and say, remember, the collateral is the loan, is the oil. So now we’re going to start taking oil.

[00:16:40] John Perkins: Oh, and also, and now this is when we go in as the IMF, which is kind of the, you might call the policing force behind the World Bank or the Inter American Development Bank. And we go in as the IMF and we say, yeah, well, and, and you’ve got to meet some of these other conditionalities. Let us build a military base on your show.

[00:16:58] John Perkins: And that’s exactly what happened. At one point in Ecuador, for example, built this huge military, US military base on the coast of Ecuador and on and on. So it’s that kind of scenario. It starts with a grant. Mm-Hmm. country doesn’t have to pay for it from the us, from the USAID. Then it moves into the loan and then it moves into the conditionalities to restructure the loan.

[00:17:20] Nico Lechuga: Can you walk us through, I think it was in the books, of how the IMF kind of works as this backstop. So I’d love to get like the listeners just to understand that if Western lenders beyond the World Bank are applying these loans or giving these loans to developing countries, And they’re concerned about the creditworthiness like this was it seemed like a machine that you had created or that you were a part of and that you could replicate time and time again, but it seems like the IMF was that backstop that would come in restructure those loans and make it sure that the Western lenders were always made whole on their loans.

[00:17:51] Nico Lechuga: So then you could rinse repeat over and over again. And keep the country up to its eyeballs in debt.

[00:17:57] John Perkins: Yeah, you’ve described it very well, Nico. I don’t know. Is there a more specific question? I, you hit it right on the nail on the head.

[00:18:06] Nico Lechuga: I was more, I was more curious of like the lenders and the, sorry, the lenders and the IMF relationship that they understand that the IMF is always going to step in or in this type of scenario.

[00:18:17] Nico Lechuga: And kind of how is that working relationship? It’s fascinating from your seat of you’re actually on the ground and we’re just observing this from really your words.

[00:18:26] John Perkins: In these financial institutions, I know this is going to be the case, and before they make the loan, they’ll probably check in with the IMF and make sure that the country that they’re doing this with, I mean, they probably already know there’s a list, but they want to make sure that where they’re doing this is a country where the IMF will step in, and there may be some countries where that wouldn’t happen.

[00:18:48] John Perkins: And they, they wouldn’t make the loan to those countries. So there is this, it’s this old boy network. They all know each other very well. And, and at the various levels of these organizations, and they, they communicate with each other frequently.

[00:19:01] Preston Pysh: John, it seems like when I look at interest rates since the early eighties, they’ve just continued to go down up until COVID.

[00:19:09] Preston Pysh: And I think that that continual step down in advanced economies of interest rates going lower and lower helped mask everything that was happening because as they rolled the debt, they were able to roll it at a lower interest rate, which just seemed like we’re kicking this principle further and further.

[00:19:26] Preston Pysh: If you can’t repay it, well, then we’ll just, we’ll negotiate the commodities or the, the military base or whatever. But I think it was almost like a tailwind for them to have these interest rates going lower and lower. I’m curious if you agree with that. And more importantly, for where we’re at right now, moving forward, it almost seems like they’re not going to be able to get Inflation under control in advanced economies right now.

[00:19:49] Preston Pysh: And does this cause this entire economic hitman model to really start to blow up in the face of these advanced economies?

[00:19:58] John Perkins: There’s a couple of questions. I think the answer to the first one is yet the lower interest rates didn’t help. I think because suddenly the banks are in a position or the economic hit men are in a position to go to countries and say, Hey, look, the interest rates pretty low.

[00:20:12] John Perkins: You can afford this loan. I mean, maybe you couldn’t afford it before in the higher interest. But now with the lower interest rates, this is this is the time for you to do this. And in fact, you can take out a bigger loan. I, you know, you can make an analogy with a home buyer in the United States or, you know, the interest rates go down, the banks will tell them well.

[00:20:29] John Perkins: You know, instead of a 300, 000 home, you can afford a 400, 000 loan because the interest rates are lower when the interest rates go up, you got to go back to a less expensive home, same sort of thing. And as far as the, so the next question was, as interest rates are increasing, do I see the system blowing up?

[00:20:49] Preston Pysh: Yeah, does the, does this model really start to get hard for them to control? And like we’re seeing El Salvador right now, basically. Bucayley giving the middle finger to the IMF and World Bank and adopted Bitcoin as, as a new legal tender inside of the country. Like, I think that there’s countries that are starting to figure this out in a very meaningful way, and I’m just kind of curious if you would agree that it’s starting to unravel itself at this point.

[00:21:18] John Perkins: Well, I think the biggest unraveling force for the Washington consensus is China, because China steps in and will may offer lower interest rates or better deals in other respects. Actually, we can go to Ecuador as an example. When Rafael Correa was elected president, and I know Correa very well, I was just recently in Mexico City on a TV program where he interviewed me, he likes my books, he has a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois, incidentally, he knows our system extremely well, he was president of Ecuador for 10 years, and one of the first things he did Was to appoint a commission to look into whether Ecuadorian people really owed the money that the World Bank and IMF said Ecuador owed.

[00:22:02] John Perkins: And the commission concluded that I think it was about 10 billion dollars. I may have the number wrong, but it was a lot of money that they said no. The Iquorian people don’t owe this. This money was taken out as a loan by the military dictatorships back in the 70s without the consent of the people. The people didn’t get any benefits.

[00:22:22] John Perkins: These military dictators now are long gone. They’re living in Switzerland or Miami or someplace. And maybe they owe the money and, and Cor laughingly said maybe John Perkins owes the money. He was one of those economic hitmen that was here back then, but the Ecuadorian people don’t owe it. And he refused to pay a fairly significant amount of that bi in the billions of dollars.

[00:22:44] John Perkins: And therefore, by the standard and Poors and Fitch ratings through Ecuador entered the dump. They basically said, Ecuador’s a worthless country. It’s nobody should invest and go to Ecuador to do anything. And immediately the Chinese stepped in, and they gave Ecuador a big loan, very low interest rates that made it easy for Ecuador to pay off the interest, and the quota ratings went up.

[00:23:08] John Perkins: And then China made another loan. And as a result, Perea, who again has a Ph. D. from a U. S. university in economics, Threw the United States out, basically, and he closed out, he did not renew the lease on this huge military base, and the United States had to move its military base from Ecuador to Colombia.

[00:23:27] John Perkins: He went up against the United States and embraced China, and so now Ecuador owes a lot of money to China, and China’s gone in and built the huge dam, they’re building big mines. They’re doing the same thing that we were doing, except they’ve offered some better conditions. Record, or at least the conditions that appear to be better, not always what they appear to be.

[00:23:51] John Perkins: But, and I will say one other thing here that China has an incredible marketing tool, and that is if they had about 10 percent economic growth for 30 years, they brought about 800 million people out of poverty. They, they increased the middle class tremendously. At the same time, since the early seventies, the United States has not had any real increase in average minimum wage.

[00:24:20] John Perkins: If you take down to inflation since the, since the seventies, we’ve gone from 60 percent middle class down to 50%. If you’re the president of a poor country and you’re looking for an economic model, you’re probably very, very tempted. Look at the Chinese model, not necessarily the political system, but the economic model is, is a very impressive one.

[00:24:44] Nico Lechuga: John, on that, do you see China running the same playbook as the United States and other Western developed economies have run to date that have the backing of the World Bank and the IMF, or do you see China in this type of scenario running kind of an economic proxy war against the United States?

[00:25:00] John Perkins: It’s both.

[00:25:01] John Perkins: Nico, you know, I was asked to teach at an MBA program in Shanghai, which is mainly Chinese students who had been singled out to be the future leaders of the economy of China. And very quickly, I learned that the reason I’d been invited was because these students wanted to pick my brain as to what I had done that was successful, what I was successful and what I’d done that were failures.

[00:25:23] John Perkins: And they’ve done an amazing job of, they’ve been much more efficient in some respects. They really have learned from our mistakes and our successes. And I talk in this latest book about the four pillars of the economic hitman strategy. And one of those is fear, you know, fear. We talk about fear of Russia or fear of China or whatever, and they talk about fear of us.

[00:25:45] John Perkins: Prepare your neighbors and another 1 is that which we’ve been discussing and and the 3rd 1 is anxiety over insufficiency. Oh, you’re really, really poor country. And we’re going to help you leave that anxiety. We’re going to help you rise out of poverty and the last 1 is divide and conquer. And China’s made alterations in the way all of those are approached, but especially, they’ve made a huge alteration in the last one, divide and conquer.

[00:26:14] John Perkins: So, for example, when the United States would go into a country like, let’s move from Ecuador to Peru, like Peru, and for no particular reason, but just because Anyway, so, and they would say to Peru, hey, you know, let’s, we’ll do this deal and we’ll give you most favored nation in our trading agreement. So, bilateral trade between Peru and the United States will, will be, will be really good.

[00:26:37] John Perkins: China, on the other hand, goes and says, we’re not interested in bilateral trade. We’re interested in connecting you with the world, the new Silk Road. The belt and road initiative. And so Peru, we’re going to, we’re going to build you these power plants. We’re going to do basically the same thing the United States would do, but we’re also going to build you a big port.

[00:26:55] John Perkins: So you’re going to be connected with Africa. In Asia and Europe, and it’s not just about China and Peru. It’s about we’re going to help Peru become a world integrated with the world on a commercial basis, and that’s huge countries really like that. Oh, and incidentally, we’re not going to ever try to influence your, your policies, your government policies, we’re not going to build a military base and China hasn’t built military bases in very many places other than in its own sphere of influence with a couple of exceptions like Djibouti, where it refuels its ships that go around African Horn and so forth. But it doesn’t have a military presence, and they say we’re not going to build a military base here, we’re not going to ask you to privatize your industries and sell them to our people, we’re not going to ask you to vote with us in the United Nations vote, which isn’t entirely true because they do expect these countries to side with them on the Taiwan issue.

[00:27:53] John Perkins: But they seem less draconian, and let’s face it, there’s a tremendous amount of resentment against the United States and our European allies and the World Bank because of the way we’ve imposed our will on countries. And, you know, we’ve been willing to overthrow democratically elected presidents like Allende and Robbins.

[00:28:15] John Perkins: And we’ve, you know, we’ve backed terrible dictatorships like in Chile and many others.

[00:28:23] Preston Pysh: One of the stories that really stuck out to me in the book it was somewhat early on you were talking about, you were just implementing a lot of these field reports and coming up with the various models. And there was a person that I forget which country it was, but there was a person who was working on a report that was estimating that the growth would be like 10%.

[00:28:43] Preston Pysh: And your boss was like, that’s not enough. Like it needs to be juicier than that. And you were like, Oh, well, I could, I could come up with a model that does 20 percent or basically double what the other person was doing. And the other person was very hesitant to adjust their model. And because you were, you were able to not only expand it, but do it in a way that was really backed up with what appeared to be a lot of evidence.

[00:29:07] Preston Pysh: Like you were promoted immediately in this, this behavior of trying to get the country in as much debt as possible by sensationalizing a lot of the, the, the reporting and the numbers was just somewhat mind blowing to me that this, this was the incentive structure that you were, that you were dealing with.

[00:29:26] Preston Pysh: Can you talk about just some of the mechanics of this and how other people that were doing similar jobs as yourself? Thank you. Really kind of talk to the incentive structure that was behind all of this.

[00:29:39] John Perkins: Yes that’s a, that’s a really good, good point, Preston. We, yeah, you’re talking about my relationship with a guy named Howard Parker, who’s, and, you know, he was very old school and you were looking at electrical growth. And, you know, if you could show that the economy was going to grow by, let’s say 12%. If the electrical growth went up by 9 or 10%, and Howard would say, well, he’d worked for the utility industry all of his life, retired as very high up executive of a major U. S. utility company, then gone to work for our consulting firm. He’d say, well. The United States has never been electrical growth of more than 6 percent a year anyway, and, and I would say, yes, but if you, you know, you’ve got to suppress the man, if you build these facilities, and you have the electricity bill, people will buy it.

[00:30:27] John Perkins: They just can’t get it. Now. That’s why the growth is so low. And so I believe that what I was saying was correct and my boss very hardly was pushing me to make these much higher forecasts and Howard would make. And I thought, you know, it was correct. And I think, you know, and I also, I come out of the Peace Corps.

[00:30:46] John Perkins: And I, I was steeped in this idea that we could really help poor countries rise out of poverty. And, you know, I was, I’ve been to business school where I saw these econometric models that show this relationship between infrastructure growth and GDP growth. And I thought GDP growth was a good measure. At that time, it took me quite a long time to realize that GDP growth.

[00:31:10] John Perkins: It’s basically a tool of the rich. It’s a poor statistic. If you want to measure true prosperity.

[00:31:17] Preston Pysh: Yes. We have a, we have a friend Alan Farrington, and this is like one of his favorite talking points is, is bashing how terrible GDP is. It’s like listening to him go down. That path is amazing, but sorry.

[00:31:29] Preston Pysh: Keep going, sir.

[00:31:30] John Perkins: I’ll leave it at that, but yes, it’s a, it’s a lie as far as measuring overall prosperity is concerned. And, you know, I think there’s a tremendous number of people in this industry today, working for the World Bank or whoever, that really believe they’re doing the right thing. And at the top, they gotta know the truth behind it.

[00:31:51] John Perkins: I believed for a long time that I was doing the right thing. And I have to tell you that once I started to understand I wasn’t, and this, this, I was helped in this very much by the head of state of Panama, Omar Torrijos, who understood the system and told me, John, don’t you understand that what you’re, you’re lying to yourself and you’re selling all the rest of us a lie.

[00:32:11] John Perkins: Once I really understood that, I didn’t want to believe it. Yeah. I was making a lot of money. Yeah. I came from, you know, relatively poor teachers. I was a poor teacher’s son in New Hampshire. We, you know, we weren’t starving or impoverished, but I’d never left New England until I joined the Peace Corps. And now I’m traveling first class all over the world, whining and dining in the best restaurants, staying in the finest hotels, and You know, hang out with presidents.

[00:32:40] John Perkins: I didn’t want to give that up. So once I began to understand the fallacy of the system, I didn’t want to understand it. I wanted to fall for the line that everybody was out there promoting. And I think there’s an awful lot of people in that situation today. We all lie to ourselves at one level or another.

[00:32:58] John Perkins: You know, you know, I can just, I, my, my car, I don’t drive that much .

[00:33:03] Preston Pysh: No, I, I think, I think it just speaks so much to your character to be able to hear the other side of the argument. And then, and you talk about this so well in the book. I, and I love the way that you, that you show this struggle as you’re discovering this and you’re having these conversations with other people when you are trying to un understand the other side of the impact of what’s happening.

[00:33:24] Preston Pysh: And I just find it so profound to speak to your character that to then have the courage to write and explain your point of view to the world, whether people want to you know, side with you or not. I just think it’s so profound, and I think it’s just so courageous of you. And I think Nico’s got the next question.

[00:33:45] Preston Pysh: So go ahead, Nico.

[00:33:47] Nico Lechuga: John, I had a real big question on this, and I feel like it was. I think there’s a seminal moment in U. S. economic imperialism that you hit on in, in all the books. And this is the, the Saudi, the deal with Saudi Arabia and the transition to a petrodollar and Saudi buying U. S. treasuries. I would love if you can just simply walk through for all the listeners that deal and the petrodollar post that.

[00:34:14] John Perkins: Yeah, that was quite, yeah. So, the context is the early 70s when Saudi, so OPEC, which was led by Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia was the biggest oil producer in the world, had a lot of clout and did not like what was going on with Israel and our support of Israel and Israel defeating the Arab world in many respects, and so there was an oil embargo imposed against the United States, and you guys are probably too young to remember it in person, But I do very well and, you know, long lines at the gas stations and our economy was in a nosedive.

[00:34:49] John Perkins: And it looked very, very serious. Without oil, what are we going to do? And we were very, very dependent on imported oil. So the Treasury Department comes to me and others at my company, and they said, you know, we can’t let this happen again. Do something. I go off to Saudi Arabia with several of my assistants.

[00:35:08] John Perkins: People work for me and set up an office there. And the State Department, I mean, the Treasury Department signed a very large contract with my company to And to develop the electrical system in that country also, but we had to work out a deal with the Saudis on this whole thing. And this wasn’t about debt because Saudi Arabia didn’t need to borrow money from anybody.

[00:35:27] John Perkins: They had the money. We wanted them, we wanted their money, and we also wanted to have them beholden to us so they couldn’t put us, they couldn’t blackmail us again like they had basically with. The oil embargo, so we worked out this deal, basically, whereby, as you said, Saudi Arabia would have to reinvest most of their petro dollars in US treasuries.

[00:35:51] John Perkins: And the interest from those treasuries bonds would be used to pay US corporations to essentially Westernize Saudi Arabia to build big cities that were Western type of cities to build petrochemical plants and other industries in Saudi Arabia. for listening. And at the same time, it part of the deal was that Saudi Arabia would never sell oil for anything other than dollars.

[00:36:16] John Perkins: So, as you also mentioned, Nixon had just taken us off the gold standard in the 1971, I think, and the dollar was floating out. There was, it was the nerve wracking time. And so now it’s suddenly on the gold standard. It truly is a petrodollar. And so we, the agreement was that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t sell oil for anything other than dollars.

[00:36:39] John Perkins: And also they would never charge more for oil than the oil companies would ultimately be in agreement with. And our part of the deal was that we would protect Saudi Arabia. As long as they kept their part of the deal, we would always stand behind them, as we did during the Gulf Wars, both Gulf Wars under both Presidents Bush and as we did after 9 11, when we, you know, hustled some of their family members out of the country, and on and on, and this deal has been extremely significant.

[00:37:10] John Perkins: We call it the Saudi Arabia, Arabia, money laundering affair, Sammy kind of was a money laundering affair, oil laundering affair, you know, it’s beginning to fall apart now and partly because China is now, you know, becoming such a strong entity and Saudi Arabia does not want to lose that customer and, and that ally and so they’re, you know, they’re wavering a little bit.

[00:37:35] John Perkins: And the other thing is that, the Arab world has been very unhappy with the way we’ve treated the Moslems and our stance on, on in Israel, and despite Saudi Arabia’s Fairly good relationship with Israel, and despite all these other things what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and, and so on, you know, it’s been a thorn in the side of the, of the, of the Islamic world.

[00:37:59] John Perkins: And so there’s a lot of factors here at play. We in the United States hear about how poorly Uyghur people than other Muslim groups, but in the Muslim world, yeah, they’re concerned about that, of course. But they also know that China, China hasn’t sent armies into any Muslim countries, as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere.

[00:38:23] John Perkins: So, so the, so the, this whole deal that’s lasted since the early 70s until now, and it’s still in effect, it’s, it’s losing some of its, its teeth.

[00:38:35] Preston Pysh: You know, what I find really fascinating right now, John is if you would take all the countries in the world and list the net producers on one side and the net consumers on the other side, what you’ll find is all the net producers are the enemies or have been in the media, the enemies of the United States.

[00:38:54] Preston Pysh: I just find that really quite fascinating. And like, when we look at, well, why are, why is the U.S. at odds with anybody that has excess production out of their country? And I think it kind of holds a key to understanding what’s playing out right now with the breakdown of the, of the petrodollar system.

[00:39:15] Preston Pysh: And I think that also when we’re looking at interest rates and how they were literally compressed, I think we got to, what was it, Nika, maybe 18 trillion of negative yielding debt in the world of all these advanced economies. It was somewhere in that ballpark. So we basically compressed. The yields to nothing, the prices were sky high on all debt leading up to COVID in 2020.

[00:39:35] Preston Pysh: And now it seems like all of this mathematically is starting to unravel itself with the treasury and the Saudis pricing everything in dollars. It seems like this entire agreement is falling apart. And it’s like, well, where does, where does this go next? I’m curious if you have any just thoughts on this idea of the net producers versus the net consumers at odds with each other in the world and, and maybe what the root cause of a lot of this is.

[00:40:03] John Perkins: I was a, one of the coauthors of a book called the game as old as empire. That’s what this is really, you know, where it’s building empires and one of the biggest net producers. I think you’d say is China.

[00:40:17] John Perkins: Of course, China definitely is threatening yours hegemony. Is China an enemy? I would really like to think of China as a competitor, but not an enemy that we’re all suffering from climate change.

[00:40:33] John Perkins: We can’t afford to have enemies. Let’s face it. Wars are just wars are part of the destruction of the environment and part of our problem today. We don’t need to define China as an enemy. It is a competitive. But competition can be good if it drives you to be better. And I would like to think that we look at it that way, but we don’t.

[00:40:53] John Perkins: We now, anybody that comes along that seems to possibly be better than us at doing anything, we object to. Back in the 70s, we went through something a little bit similar with Japan, where Japan was threatening us as, you know, they’re so efficient and they work so hard and they put in so many hours. And they were, they were moving out of a period where we said they produce junk products into one where they produce quality products.

[00:41:20] John Perkins: They were leaders in quality. That was concerning to us, but Japan was a fairly small country, didn’t have much of a military or no military, it wasn’t a real threat. China now, they come along and it’s got this amazing economy, and it’s also militarily very, very imposing and impressive. And so, and, and there’s no question, I think, that China wants to take over.

[00:41:44] John Perkins: They would like to replace the dollar with the UN or, or, or something. They don’t want to do it too quickly because we owe them a lot of money, so they don’t want to see the dollar collapse, because that would be very harmful to them. Plus, there’s such an interrelationship between China and the United States and Europe, our NATO allies, the European Union, in terms of trade, in terms of finance, in terms of so many things.

[00:42:08] John Perkins: The China’s being has to be relatively careful and yet clearly they want to be the main superpower and they’re headed in that direction. And so the United States is strongly opposing it, and, you know, I think that’s probably a smart move on the part of the, but I think the idea of demonizing them, or seeing them as an enemy in some sort of a, of a war, or defining it as even, even, even defining it as an economic war.

[00:42:39] John Perkins: To me, it’s a big mistake. It isn’t. It’s wrong competition. We are extremely competitive with China. They’re competitive with us. That can be a good thing, though, competition. You know, I like to think of when I was in school, I was a, I was a pretty good tennis player. And I was always vying for the number one spot on our team.

[00:42:58] John Perkins: I was usually number two, but I was trying to take over number one. And number one and number two, the way you took it over is to beat number one. And so we played these hard games. We were, and I think every time we played each other, we improved. But we, you know, but we were highly competitive. And then we came together as a doubles team in, in big matches with other schools.

[00:43:19] John Perkins: We were the number one doubles team. And so now the skills that we’ve developed competing with each other are serving us as a team. Yes. And I, that’s a, I think that’s a great example of how competition can make you stronger. And we all need to unify now to create the, you know, to transform this death economy, this economic system that’s polluting and consuming itself towards self destruction into a life economy that pays people to clean up pollution, develop new technologies that don’t ravage the earth.

[00:43:51] Nico Lechuga: John, I have a question on that. I’m curious. So two part question. One is if the ability for the U. S. to continually print more money enabled really this entire economic hitman, economic imperialism model over the past 50 years. And then second part of that is you talk about bringing the world together.

[00:44:10] Nico Lechuga: There’s something like Bitcoin that is unable to be controlled by any country, can’t be printed. There’s no more that can be created. Do you think that that takes away the teeth of all this economic imperialism?

[00:44:23] John Perkins: I think that possibility is there. However, if you look historically at the powerful empires, They usually are able to overcome those kinds of obstacles.

[00:44:34] John Perkins: And we know that China now is implementing its own sort of form of cryptocurrency. So, I suspect that maybe what will happen is that the smart, you know, countries like China, maybe the United States will. Somehow co opt the crypto movement. I don’t know. I mean, I think that I think that we are going to move away from the central banking system because it’s just plain not working well.

[00:45:00] John Perkins: And basically everybody knows that whether they want to admit it or not is another question. Cryptocurrency is here and we all use it, you know, to a certain degree. Like even if you’ve never bought it, bought anything, you use a credit card. You know, we, we, we, we’re all, we’re all dealing in digi, digitized forms of currency on a big scale.

[00:45:18] John Perkins: A lot of places don’t take, do, don’t take money anymore. You know, I can’t all put in so many places where shop you can’t buy anything with, you know, with currency, you gotta use credit, including on the airlines. We’re definitely moving in that direction, how that plays out though remains to be seen. And I, it’s hard to believe that the big powerful economies like China and the United States and the European union won’t somehow worm their way into having control over these systems.

[00:45:48] Preston Pysh: It almost seems like co opting is the specialty of a lot of the government models, like just co opt everything with enough time and duration. John, I know you got to go real soon here. If there’s one thing that you want to leave our audience with, maybe a very short compressed, like, so what of, of the book and what you were trying to accomplish with this, what, what would that message be for the audience?

[00:46:17] John Perkins: Well, I think the message is one of, well, I not think, I know the message is one of hope that we are in a time of extreme crisis, challenge, and also incredible opportunity.

[00:46:29] Preston Pysh: Yes.

[00:46:30] John Perkins: You know, as I travel around the world speaking at various events, or as I, as I do lots of podcasts in many countries, I’m just about to do one after this with a podcast in South Africa and people around the world are, there’s a consciousness revolution.

[00:46:46] John Perkins: Yes. People are really understanding that we cannot continue with this economic system we have, which we call a death economy. We have to move into a system where we pay people to mine the plastic in the oceans, you know, and recycle it. To plant trees, and to reforest areas, and to fill in old mine pits, and to create new technologies for energy and other things that we haven’t even dreamed of yet.

[00:47:10] John Perkins: Yeah. You know, solar and wind have been improving rapidly, but they’re still in their infancy. So we’ve got this incredible opportunity, so I’d like to leave people with the idea that we should all feel very blessed. To be alive at this time when we were facing big crises. But we have incredible opportunities to move the human experience to a new level of consciousness and action that takes us to a completely new understanding of what it means to be successful human beings being human on this amazing planet where we live.

[00:47:45] Preston Pysh: God, I love that. I love this book. I’m serious. Like one of the top books I’ve read in the past five years. If, if you’re listening to this and you have not read this book, you have got to go out and check this thing out. It is unreal. John, thank you for your time. We’ll have links to that in the show notes.

[00:48:05] Preston Pysh: We’ll have links to anything else that you want us to highlight there if people want to check it out, but thank you for your time, sir. This has just been such a pleasure.

[00:48:13] John Perkins: My pleasure. Indeed. Keep up your great work and yeah, please connect to johnperkins.org.

[00:48:17] Preston Pysh: Yes, sir.

[00:48:18] John Perkins: And the new book is on there too. Yeah.

[00:48:21] Preston Pysh: Yes, sir. We’ll have that.

[00:48:22] John Perkins: Thank you guys so much. I’ve really enjoyed it. Keep up your great work.

[00:48:25] Preston Pysh: Thank you, sir. Have a blessing.

[00:48:27] Nico Lechuga: Thank you, John.

[00:48:28] John Perkins: Thank you.

[00:48:29] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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