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Tyson Popplestone is a Comedian from Melbourne Australia. Join him for a brand new interview each week.
Tyson (00:00.606)
I'll edit this little first part out. I'll just make sure. All right. Yeah. I've made the mistake more than once of getting to the end of a podcast and thinking I was stopping the recording and actually starting it. So I'll never do that again. We're recording. It is so frustrating. John, I, um, I watched your Ted talk earlier this week, just in preparation to catch up with you. And I don't think there's a Ted talk that starts in such a compelling way as what you did, you say, um,
John Perkins (00:11.388)
That's so frustrating. Yeah, that's so frustrating
Tyson (00:29.282)
whenever you went and met with a leader or decision makers in a particular country, you went in with, not you physically, but cash essentially in one hand and a gun in the other. And you said, hey, well, choose wisely. And I thought, man, there's no surprise to me, just based on that opening line, that it's been such a popular TED talk. But at the risk of asking the question that every podcast host in the history of your interviews has asked you, I think it's important to lay down the foundation for...
anyone who haven't yet heard of you, what was it you were actually doing there? Why did you have those two objects in each hand, metaphorically speaking, of course?
John Perkins (01:07.844)
Well, it was my job. So, you know, officially I was chief economist at a major consulting firm, but, and I had a staff of anywhere from 30 to 50 people. And my job was really to direct them to locate countries that had resources our corporation wanted like oil, and then arrange a huge loan to the World Bank from those countries. And...
the money would have to be earmarked to hire our own corporations to build big infrastructure projects. So in essence, the countries never get the money. They never actually saw the money. It was transferred from the World Bank or one of the sister organizations to a bank that belonged to, that Bechtel used or Halliburton or one of the big engineering construction companies or some other company.
to build big infrastructure projects in the country itself. So the projects were built in the country. And these are things like electric power plants and transmission lines, industrial parks, highways, ports, airports, things that, as it turned out, really help the very, very wealthy in those countries, the people who own the industries and the businesses. And the majority of the people actually suffer because money's diverted from
the health, education, and other social services to make the interest on the loans. And in the end, the loans can't be repaid. So we go in, I go back to them, usually under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund, and say, well, listen, we'll help you renegotiate the terms of this loan, but in exchange, you have to sell your resource, oil or whatever it is, real cheap to our corporations without many social or environmental regulations.
or vote with us on the next United Nations voter. Let us build a military base on your soil. Things like this, what we call conditionalities. And so really what we were doing was making the country subservient to us, making it kind of part of a big global, what you might call a modern empire. An empire that's built primarily on economics, not on the military for the most part. And these leaders would know that if they didn't.
John Perkins (03:36.748)
accept these conditions that the people with the guns who we call jackals would come in and overthrow them or maybe even assassinate them. Of course, there's a long history of people like President Allende of Chile being overthrown and dying in the process and Arvind of Guatemala, Mosodek of Iran, Lamond of the Congo, Diem of Vietnam, and on and on. And most recently in 2009,
John Perkins (04:05.56)
I have to say that when I was doing this job, I thought in the beginning, for most of the years I did it, I thought I was doing the right thing. Because in business schools and through the World Bank, you can build these economic models that show that when you invest money like that in infrastructure, the economy grows. It does. If you measure it by GDP, which is how we measure it, unfortunately, GDP doesn't measure prosperity for the majority of the people.
It only measures, it pretty much measures how well the wealthy are doing in the big corporations, including international corporations doing business in those countries. So it's very skewed toward the rich and powerful. But people don't get that. And there's still a lot of people in this business who think they're doing something really good for the country, and they're really doing something good primarily for the very wealthy.
Tyson (04:52.59)
Thank you.
John Perkins (05:04.836)
And some of that trickles down, but a lot of it doesn't. And it leaves the country deep in debt. And it wasn't until, you know, I'd been in the business for quite a few years that I began to understand what was really going on and eventually got out.
Tyson (05:05.332)
Yeah.
Tyson (05:21.126)
Yeah, I think it was something I heard you speaking about with Patrick Bet-David, just on what you were saying about the rich getting very, very rich. And I mean, I might be skewing your numbers and it's the US that I'm referring to, but I think the number you gave was something like the three richest Americans have as much money united as what the rest of the American population does. And simply an increase in their wealth suggests when Joe Biden or whoever the president is, and they come out to do the economic reporting.
on the prosperity of the nation. They can say there's been a 4% increase in the overall income salary of American citizens, but it's actually only giving representation to these few really rich people. And so that was what was taking place in these places you were visiting. The decision makers who had the, take the money, take the gun, it's your choice. It was them, their friends, their family, who started to see some of the perks of this deal. But the rest of the population,
they never got to an opportunity to actually see the benefits of this investment in their area, their country.
John Perkins (06:26.864)
Yeah, absolutely. The example you gave is pertinent in the United States and probably Australia and most of the world. If you've got three individuals like in the United States that have as much wealth as half the population of the United States, if those individuals last year had a 10% growth in their wealth and the bottom half—
lost money or stayed the same, you would show that actually overall there was an economic growth of something around three or four percent. So it's very, very skewed that way. Yeah.
Tyson (07:13.478)
So when you went into these conversations, was there like an unspoken acknowledgement of the fact the people that you were speaking to, were they aware of what it was that was taking place? Did they know that there was a little asterisk next to this deal? Or do they always have the understanding that, oh, look, I mean, it's wild because obviously I consider the leaders would know so much more about this than what I would. But it's such a foreign world to me that it's hard to wrap my head around it completely.
I mean, when they were sitting down with you, did they just look at you as like, oh, okay, well, America's trying to help. Or did they know, okay, well, this comes with some serious terms and conditions if things don't work out as we hope it does.
John Perkins (07:51.912)
You know, I think that's, I don't think there's a generic answer to that. I think some of them realized and some of them didn't. But the fact of the matter is what they did know is that they were going to get wealthy off these deals. And you know, we had all kinds of ways of legally bribing people. My company was very careful to stay within the law, the corruption laws that were existing in the United States at the time, which were fairly strict.
that we couldn't hand money under the table, this kind of thing. But what we could do is promise, when I was meeting with the leader of a country, I could let him know that we would hire his brother's equipment, that his brother had a John Deere franchise. This is one example. And we'd be willing to pay $2 million for renting equipment that was only worth a million dollars. And what his brother did with the extra million was
entirely between him and his brother. So the president, you know, could get paid off by the brother. And there's nothing illegal about that. If anybody ever found out, which they never did, because nobody was checking into these things, but if they had, we would have said, oh, we struck a bad deal. Maybe fire somebody in our organization, who knows. But really, we were just saying, we didn't know. We were naive about what was going on in that country. We thought it was worth two million dollars.
And so there's a whole list of other examples that you can go into like that. You know, one of the really cool ones, if you wanna think of it that way, one of the more nefarious ones was we would offer to arrange scholarships for the president and all of his cronies to have their kids go to college in the United States. And my forum was located in Boston. We had extremely good connections with
many of the big universities in Boston, we were major donors or our board of directors were donors. So we could get these kids into these colleges and we'd give them full scholarships and hire them during Christmas vacation and summer vacation to work first at very good prices. And that was worth a tremendous amount of money to the leader of a country that has a lot lower income per capita than we do.
John Perkins (10:13.54)
It was worth a tremendous amount of money and there was nothing illegal about it. In fact, we'd brag about it. We'd go to the Boston Globe and say, hey, you know, last year we spent $3 million on assisting people in poor countries to get scholarships and we gave scholarships to them to come to the United States and go to college. We didn't bother to mention that we gave the money to people who probably didn't really need the money but were extremely helpful to us. There's so many ways to get around the corruption laws.
And we knew them all, I think.
Tyson (10:45.178)
Yeah. So a lot of people would assume that you were working for the government, but obviously the government is smart in the way that these things are organized and structured. So you're working for a private company and what it was being funded by government arms or how did you get an entry into the conversation with these people that you're making the deals with? It just, from my perspective, it sounds like a lot of admin work and a lot of emails, but
I mean, I've read your book and it doesn't sound like you had too much trouble getting the opportunity to meet, which I guess when you're promising a certain amount of money, it makes certain conversations a lot easier to have.
John Perkins (11:21.444)
Yeah, well, the World Bank was always looking for good projects. And they knew that we were, yes, we were a private company, wholly owned, basically a partnership and I became a partner. Um, and so we knew that the World Bank just wanted projects. That's what they do. So I would know that if I could, if I went, picked a country that had resources, our corporations wanted like, let's say oil in Ecuador, and this was an example.
I could go to Ecuador and I could talk to the president or the minister of finance or whoever I got to. It was pretty easy to get through to them because they knew that if I represented the World Bank and I couldn't say I was employed by the World Bank but I was a consultant to the World Bank and my company then would often have contracts. So initially we often had contracts with USAID and so USAID would offer a grant. So I could go to Ecuador.
and say, hey, you know, USAID is willing to give you a grant of $100,000, or in most days would be a lot more today, to hire us to do a study to see what would be the best thing for the World Bank to invest in today's terms several billion dollars in.
John Perkins (12:41.428)
They would say, well, what are we going to do to get this grant? I said, well, basically, you just got to sign off on it. The USAID is very interested in Ecuador. And of course, they would be because Ecuador had a lot of oil. And also, you know, the US government at that time was very interested in fighting Soviet communism. And so the president would sign off on it or whoever needed to sign off on it. And we then have the loan. And it wasn't a loan. It was a gift. It was a grant.
So the country didn't have to pay for that. And then we would go in and do this study and come to the conclusion of what the country really needed was an electrical system or a port system or whatever. And it would cost so many billions of dollars. And then we would represent the company and go back to the World Bank and say to the World Bank, hey, this country's interested in...
building a big electrical system, will you make them alone? And there would be a negotiation that would go on. So it's fairly straightforward. And let me just take a second to speak to my wife. Okay, hey, Kimmon, would you let Jaggy in, please?
Tyson (13:43.49)
Yeah.
Tyson (13:50.676)
Yes, sure.
John Perkins (13:57.868)
and then you're going to have to separate the cats. We got two cats that fight, but one of them's outdoors and one of them's indoors, and the outdoor cat's dying to come in. And yes, you'll hear a lot more if we don't let her in. Yeah.
Tyson (14:00.65)
Hehehehe
Tyson (14:07.134)
I thought I heard a meow before. Ha ha ha.
Tyson (14:15.146)
It's the blessing and the curse of online podcasts, isn't it?
John Perkins (14:19.916)
Yeah, it's it is a blessing actually we can do this. I mean you could come on much later when I was Made a mistake on timing. Anyway, that's done We can move forward
Tyson (14:31.394)
It'll be my turn in five minutes, John, so no worries.
John Perkins (14:34.852)
Okay.
Tyson (14:36.438)
Beautiful. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not sure if you'd finished your last thought of your interrupted by the cat.
John Perkins (14:42.864)
Well, yeah, no, the last thought was, so a president of a country or it might be a minister of finance or someone else, basically, and I'm telling them, look, we can give you this loan and we'll do a big study that'll show that your economy will improve. You can take this to your people. You can take it to the press in your country and say, hey, we just got this huge loan from the World Bank. We're gonna be able to electrify the country. We're gonna become modern.
We're going to come out of the dark ages, you know, where people are going to be happy. We're going to have lots of industry. We're going to have lots of economic opportunities. And I can sort of say that you'll have this incredible study to do this, and the World Bank will give you this loan, and we'll have all this construction going on. Or you're likely to see the jackals who can come in and overthrow you or assassinate you.
Tyson (15:38.098)
And was it that blatant? Like when we speak about the black, the Jackals, obviously we, you know, we do the handgun signal. I know I've heard you speak a number of times about really suspicious plane crashes with a number of people who had decided, you know, not to follow through with the deals or not to commit to the deals. Was it that blatant or did we have an understanding that it's not necessarily going to be an execution car style shot? It's going to be suspicious circumstances that there's no clear evidence that it was an accident or deliberate.
But you know, there's a fair asterisk next to the fact that it was probably a deliberate act.
John Perkins (16:12.616)
Well, I think.
John Perkins (16:16.584)
I just undid my cat's collar, sorry. Anyway, so you can cut that and I'll go right into the answer. So, you know, most of these leaders would know what had happened to another leader and they might sort of subtly remind them, oh, do you remember what happened to Allende or do you remember what happened to?
Tyson (16:18.754)
Hehehehe
Tyson (16:23.586)
Bye.
John Perkins (16:45.712)
Sukarno in Indonesia or Mosaddegh in Iran and just sort of remind them but they knew. I mean I didn't have to say we're going to send somebody in to kill you. I would never say something like that but I might say something about, well I was down in Chile not long ago and it's a shame what happened to a Allende There were ways to say these things that would bring to their memory that would let them know.
You know, it's kind of like the mafia movies, you see, where the Godfather doesn't actually say go kill the guy, but you know, wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it be a shame if, you know, do you remember what happened to Joe? You know, Joe didn't take our loan, and not only did his country not benefit from all the infrastructure, but gee, as a result, he got overthrown in a coup because the people were unhappy.
and they get the message.
Tyson (17:48.414)
Yeah. You often think about a person playing that role and you think they have to be hard, but I guess when you've got the evidence of the threat that's hanging over their head, you only need to point their attention towards what the possibility is in order for them to play the game as you hope they would.
John Perkins (17:49.469)
Thank you.
John Perkins (18:05.452)
And you sell them. I mean, I almost never had to do that because basically I'm offering them a deal where they're going to bring a lot of money into their country. They're going to be able to show the country and all the press in their country and everything how there's this great construction going on. There's these American engineers designing their system for them and they know that they're going to make a lot of money out of the deal. So, you know, most of them would be happy to take it. And let's remember that
Tyson (18:34.275)
for sure.
John Perkins (18:35.388)
that kind of corruption goes back a long time and most of the countries where I was working is a long history of colonialism in many of these countries. And they're used to, you know, in South America, they're used to either the Spanish or the Portuguese. And then, and then it's been a long history of American, you know, the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny and so on. And in Africa, you've got the long history with many of the colonial powers from Europe.
So many of the leaders in these countries come from traditions that are very old, very... It's part of their tradition, quite frankly.
Tyson (19:16.266)
Yeah. And you can tell, I mean, the initial response is to be frustrated or amazed at the fact that people would take these deals. But even as you speak, like the honest part of me, that I'm sure plenty of people would be skeptical to say out loud, we've got a new guest here. Welcome to the podcast.
John Perkins (19:33.568)
I just wanted to show you while there's all this noise in the background. I've got a cat named Jaggi. I wrote a book called Touching the Jaguar and I happen to be wearing a Jaguar shirt and I live with this small Jaguar. Her name is Jaggi. Actually, I live with two cats and this one of them. Yeah. So anyway, I apologize. But I think sometimes that, you know, when we do things like that, it kind of shows that we're people, not just an economic man.
Tyson (19:51.588)
I'm sorry.
John Perkins (20:01.176)
I love my cats!
Tyson (20:01.603)
I know in case anyone's only listening to the audio, you got to see how friendly this guy is. He's got two lovely cats and a colorful shirt. Yeah, John, it's a really interesting one. I was just going to say before we got a visit from the Jaguar himself that, I mean, you hear this deal. And if I'm being honest, if you're sitting in a room across from me and you're offering these offers, it's, I mean,
even on a purely selfish level without considering or even trying to justify the deal and how beneficial it is to our village or our town or our country or whatever. I mean, on a completely selfish level, it's very appealing. You can see why majority of people go, of course I'll sign up for this. Not only am I getting two million instead of one million from my hiring equipment, I'm also being able to justify it because, hey, look what I can say I'm doing for my country. It seems as though it's a no-lose situation apart from the fact
John Perkins (20:49.509)
Exactly.
Tyson (20:54.562)
that it actually holds your country back in terms of being able to pay back the debt.
John Perkins (20:57.924)
Yeah, yeah, but that doesn't that's not obvious and you go to your people and you get reelected because you've made all these improvements. They've seen better highways. You know, I can give you so many examples. I was just in Ecuador very recently and I was also in Guatemala and Costa Rica, Panama. All of these countries have better highways, better ports because of these kinds of deals. And you know, it so it's
Politically, it's a feather in a politician's cap if they spin it right and they don't bother to say, you know, we're burdened with a huge debt. And what they do point out is how many jobs this is gonna bring into their country and how it's gonna have the economic economy is gonna go up. So it's actually a pretty easy sell for somebody like me. You don't have to be too good a con artist to put that over on somebody.
Tyson (21:54.886)
sure. And I'm not sure like correct me if you if you think I'm wrong, but I don't know that the average member of countries population is overly stressed about debt. Like you hear about the trillions of dollars that the US are in debt now. And I've got plenty of American friends and family. And it's something you just throw away in passing conversation. It doesn't really make that much sense to us. It's like, okay, it's play money. Now it's pretend money. It doesn't seem like a real it doesn't seem like a real figure anymore. And so
when the figure becomes almost pretend in so many of our consciences, it seems as though something you can just forget because in your mind, it has no impact on you really. It doesn't surprise me that so many people can just flip it off as, you know, if they spin it right, it should be an easy game to play because most people don't, including myself, most people probably don't understand the full extent of what it really means.
John Perkins (22:46.312)
They don't understand what it means. They don't, and frankly, most people don't even want to think about things like that. You know, a nation's budget and the budget crises and all the financing of that just doesn't interest most people. It's boring to them. But what does interest them is, oh, well, we've signed a deal with this big and famous American company. Let's say Bechtel.
that they've all heard of, is coming in and it's going to build a huge power plant and big transmission lines. And we're getting all the money from the World Bank and we're going to create X number of jobs and it's going to help the economy grow and so on and so forth. So that's interesting to people and they don't normally think beyond that.
Tyson (23:41.138)
Yeah, I spent a lot of my younger life. I mean, I'm 37 now, so relatively young, depending on where you sit, I guess. But I mean, I'm starting to have conversations with people and especially in the last couple of years, I was never really overly interested in politics. I wasn't overly interested in just the way things were operating. My family was happy, I was happy. I was happy to go about life like that.
But here in Australia, I mean, it's only becoming less controversial to talk about now, I think, but just with the way that COVID played out and the politics around that in Australia, it became very interesting just to see the way different politicians and different corporations handled that situation. I know this is different to what you're in, but it was the first time that I felt I saw really, obviously, I had a front row seat to the way that government and big organization really worked together.
And I say that like, not as a, I mean, I've been called a conspiracy theorist plenty of times in the last couple of years. I don't think I am. Years before that was never a term that I had any sort of relation to. But I mean, it was very interesting to watch health officials constantly talk about the benefits of this product, which also happened to have some really great financial rewards for a small minority of the population or a small percentage of the population. And I mean, even setting aside how effective or ineffective
that the vaccine was, it must be difficult to really, you know, like follow the science or follow the truth or follow what's right and moral and ethical when there's so many dollars hanging over your head, even in that sense. I mean, as much as it frustrates me, like I said before, I think if you're a health official being offered money, not that I know they were for sure, but I mean, based on what I've heard, I guess they would be, it'd be a difficult offer to decline.
John Perkins (25:29.708)
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, it's there's so much subtlety in so many of these different things. It's such a there's so much gray area and it's very easy for someone like me in my position to come along and take advantage of that. And I have to say again, you know, for I only did this for 10 years and for the first seven of those years, I believe in what I was doing.
I believed that I was helping these countries. And, you know, I mean, I had a good education. I, you know, but that education included all these econometric models that showed that, you know, you can create a graph that shows that if you've invested some amount of money in this country, the GDP is gonna grow, and it does. And so it's so easy to believe in that system no matter, you know, how...
bad it is. And I just got distracted again because my wife came in and feed this cat and it's making so much noise.
Tyson (26:39.14)
You know what? The good news for us is the editor that I use can remove background noise. So even though it might be annoying you, it's not going to annoy our audience. I can edit that out.
John Perkins (26:47.96)
Oh, good. Good. Okay. So, yeah, so going back, so you can probably, we can just cut that. So yeah, and I had to mute for a while there, but let's see. Get you off mute. Yeah, you know, it's really easy for someone like me to walk in and convince the heads of state or their underlings and the people.
Tyson (26:51.447)
Hehehehe
John Perkins (27:17.588)
that this is going to help them. And I totally believed it myself. For seven of the 10 years that I had this job, I completely believed that I was doing the right thing. I'd come out of the Peace Corps, I'd been in the Peace Corps for three years, primarily in the Amazon area of Ecuador. You know, I believed in doing good for other countries and I thought I was doing good. And once I began to understand the truth behind this, that I wasn't,
It was, I didn't want to believe the truth. I didn't want to believe what I was seeing and understanding. And the president of Panama, Omar Torrijos, was very clear with me. He told me this. He was really helped me understand this, but I didn't want to believe it because I'm making a very good salary. I'm traveling first class around the world, flying first class, staying in the finest hotels. I grew up the son of a teacher in rural New Hampshire.
never had much money. And so this was a tremendous perk for me. And I didn't want to believe that what I was doing was not what I was telling myself I was doing, what I was telling others I was doing. It took me three years to really convince myself that I had to get out. And you know, that's this idea of I wrote a book called Touching the Jaguar, which is why I get the same, I'm wearing this Jaguar
You know, one of the things that the indigenous people that I had worked with and now work with a lot tell you is that when something's holding you back or when you're in denial about something, you can't run from it. It'll chase you like a jaguar standing in the path. You run from it, it'll chase you. But if you confront it, you will learn something. It'll help you change your perception. And so it took me really three years to confront that jaguar. Once I knew...
I knew in my head that what I was doing was not what I thought I'd been doing and what I was telling others that I was doing. And yet there was still all this information that proved to me that I was doing a good thing. I could just, and I went to the, what today we call HR, human resources. In those days we called it the personnel department. And I went to, it's odd that we call it human resources. You know, we look at ourselves as...
John Perkins (29:43.78)
just another resource. Anyway, I went to the head of that so I was gonna quit and no, no. And I, why would you do that? And you're the youngest partner this company's ever had. You're doing really well. You're gonna, in the next few years, you're gonna make a lot of money. You don't wanna quit. And I would wanna believe that. He'd say, you're doing the right thing. You're doing good stuff. Look at the reports, look at all this. You're doing really good work.
And I wanted to believe that even once I knew that there was a lie behind this. And I think a lot of people are stuck in that situation. Look, we all do things that we know we, we all know we shouldn't even be driving cars, right? There's so much that we know. Probably most of us know, and I dare say this to an Australian, but we probably shouldn't be eating meat. Yeah. And I actually gave that up.
Tyson (30:31.247)
Thank you.
Tyson (30:39.478)
Heheheheheheh
John Perkins (30:42.384)
few years the art of a vegetarian now, but for a long time I completely justified eating meat even though I knew it was creating environmental problems as one of the biggest polluters in killing animals. I mean we all do things and I'm not suggesting some of these kids about eating meat or driving their car, but I am suggesting that we all do things that we know we really shouldn't be doing. And I was doing that on a very big level. Eventually I get to my conscience and I…
Tyson (30:44.866)
Hehehehe
John Perkins (31:12.232)
quit and decided to devote the rest of my life to using what I knew to try to change the system. Because what we were really creating is this economic system we have today that we call the death economy, a system that's consuming and polluting itself into self-destruction. And we need to turn that around and create a life economy. And this death economy, and a life economy is a system that…
Tyson (31:13.592)
Yeah.
John Perkins (31:40.26)
actually pays people to clean up pollution, to mine all the plastic that's floating in the oceans, to replant forests and to regenerate destroyed environments and come up with new technologies like solar and wind. We're in the process of doing that. We need to do it more and more. The life economy is not about living in caves. It's about creating a new economic situation where we actually pay people to do long-term
John Perkins (32:10.364)
The death economy pays people to maximize short-term profits, regardless of the social environment and cost, and to maximize materialistic consumption. And so I eventually got this and realized that I need to devote the rest of my life to trying to transform the death economy to a life economy.
Tyson (32:15.362)
Yeah.
Tyson (32:32.53)
Yeah. I mean, those three years that you spent where you were awakened to the fact that you're probably in an industry that was living on borrowed time, I mean, on a personal level, what was the back and forth in your mind? So you could see the reports and you could see, no, like I can actually see there's benefits here. Sure. I get to fly first class and eat good food and stay in nice hotels. I mean, which would probably magnify the importance of a particular stat on a piece of paper that justifies a decision. But
But what did that conversation internally look like for you?
John Perkins (33:04.06)
Well, I would talk to people on my staff who they had a lot of respect for, who were also people with good consciences. And they believed in the system. They'd studied in business school. They had MBAs or PhDs in economics or anthropology or some similar subject. And they'd say, well, no, we are helping these countries. We're bringing in jobs, we're creating jobs. We're helping these countries, John. You get a...
got to understand you really are doing a good thing here. And so there was this whole process of that I went through of being convinced by many other people and convincing myself. And you know finally what happened was I took a vacation in the Virgin Islands. I rented a small sailboat and I anchored off St. John Island.
Virgin Islands and I rode the dinghy ashore late one afternoon and I climbed up this hill to this old sugar plantation that was in ruins and it was beautiful. It was all these stones of the old sugar plantation covered with bougainvillea and other beautiful plants and I'm sitting up there, I've got a few beers with me and I'm looking across the Caribbean at the sun setting over the Caribbean.
gorgeous and I'm thinking to myself, this is so idyllic. This is wonderful. What a great life. And then I was struck, this kind of this voice came to me, yeah, but remember this plantation was built on the bones of thousands of slaves. And then I had to admit, well, the whole hemisphere is built on the bones of millions of slaves, not just African slaves but local indigenous people too.
And then I had to admit that I was a slaver also, different kind, that I was enslaving people in death. And I was creating an empire. I was part of a colonialistic system. And at that moment, I made the decision I would never do it again. And I went back after that vacation to my boss in Boston, where our headquarters were, and I quit.
Tyson (35:26.718)
And how do you navigate the conversation? Cause I'm sure as you said, the times that you tried to leave or redirect your career before you'd been heavily inclined to stay on board, whether it was with words or facts or stats or what else, your mind was so made up that there was just, there was no way you were hanging around anymore.
John Perkins (35:43.428)
Yeah, pretty much. Although I will say that they hired me back as a consultant at a very, very wonderful price. And once I quit, I was like, well, what am I going to do now? And you know, I'm just about to get married and I, you know, like, wait, I don't have a job. And they, you know, they made it very attractive to come back financially, but also
from the standpoint that I was just going to do work with domestic clients in the United States. So I would no longer be involved in doing this. I would do a lot of expert witness work for utility companies that were trying to build another power plant in some location or something that they had to go in before the Public Utility Commission. And I was an incredible witness. I could do studies in the United States. And they said, well, okay.
So you don't want to do that international work where you're convincing countries, and they're like, all right, well, we got some work for you here. So I came back for a fairly short period of time as a consultant working on such things. And eventually I got out of that and formed a company that developed environmentally good power plants in the United States. It's things like cogeneration, things that back in those days, the state of solar and wind were just beginning to be even considered.
But there was this thing called code generation where you could use garbage and other waste, burn them as a fuel and code generate with the facility locally to produce electricity. So I began, I created a company that did that which assuaged my conscience for a while but eventually I got out of that too and realized what I really need to do is go out and speak to the world about what I've done, what I know and what we need to do to turn it around.
Tyson (37:34.818)
What year was this?
John Perkins (37:37.732)
Well, it was over a period of time. It was in the 80s that I was doing the, that I ran this company that did cogeneration. And then in the early night, in the late 80s, early 90s, I began publishing books. I went back to the Amazon where I'd been a Peace Corps volunteer and had some incredible experiences there too that convinced me to continue with this process.
And I started writing books about what the indigenous people have to teach us. And I formed a nonprofit to help them save their rainforest. And I began to get involved from that standpoint. And then I began that took me writing books, taking me speaking at various venues. And then eventually in the early into around 2000, I began to write the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Before that, I'd written five books that had been published on indigenous cultures that were leading up to this. So it was a, it was.
Tyson (38:28.555)
Yeah.
John Perkins (38:34.792)
quite a process to lead into actually writing about the economic hitman's aspect of it.
Tyson (38:42.902)
Yeah. And what was in the forward or the preface to the book itself that you speak about how it was a project that you're pretty keen to work on for quite a bit of time, but for whatever reason, certain things broke out, which just interfered with the timing of Confessions of an Economic Hitman. And even, um, yeah, I was listening. I drove, I was in the car for about an hour and a half, two hours last night. And I had, uh, as I mentioned earlier, you speaking with Patrick, but David, which was such a fun conversation. The dynamic between you two was so fun. Um,
He doesn't cut, what do they say? He's not backwards in coming forwards. It's a good description, which I respect and both terrified of as well. But that's a whole other conversation. But one of the things that I liked in that conversation was the story that you were pretty heavily, or you were offered some pretty good cash not to come public with the book in the early days. What people or companies were.
afraid of what you being open about what was actually taking place behind the scenes might actually do to their ability to be able to have those conversations.
John Perkins (39:48.388)
Yeah, so at one point I'm taken out to dinner by the president of Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation, a big, big company. And they've been a rival of ours, a competitor with us when I've been chief economist. And, you know, he takes me out to dinner and he says, you know, we'd like to hire you as a consultant to us.
you won't actually have to do any work for us. Not much, we might ask you to take a trip down to Rio de Janeiro to have a fancy dinner with some people or something. In our private jet, we might ask you to do a few things like that, but we won't, you won't have to do much work for us. But we'd like to be able to include your resume on our proposals. And that's a fairly common thing and you pay a guy a retainer and you can use his resume. You know, somebody that's impressive. He said, so,
know, and he said, I'm prepared to write you a check tomorrow morning for half a million dollars retainer. And this is back in the 80s. Half a million dollars is nothing to sneer at now, but it was a lot, a lot then, a lot more than it is now. And he said, of course, you just can't write that book we know you're working on, because I had been starting the book that became Confessions and I'd been
Tyson (41:04.246)
Hehehehe
John Perkins (41:15.08)
talking to other people that had been in the business and the word got back to him. And so he said, you know, so take it or leave it. You can come and work, you know, not work for us particularly, but take this very lucrative deal. And this is just a retainer. We'll be paying you on a monthly basis. Also, if you actually do anything for us, we'll pay you for that too. You know, or, and at the same time, I was actually receiving threats.
getting these anonymous phone calls, you know, with this muffled voice on the end threatening my infant daughter and my life. And so, you know, here I'm getting exactly what I had done before. I'm getting a pistol pointed at me and my daughter, or I'm getting a large amount of money offered to me. And so, you know, what would you do?
Tyson (42:12.778)
I know what I would do. I think you made the decision that I would make. I mean, you take the money.
John Perkins (42:15.66)
Yeah, yeah, and I wasn't being asked to do anything illegal. I wasn't really being asked to do much of anything at all. And so, yeah, it seemed like a really good opportunity.
Tyson (42:28.522)
Man, you can see how it works. It's not even a conversation. I've got a three-year-old and a one-year-old boy. I pretty much do anything. You know what, the very first thing I'll do is take half a million dollars to protect them. I'm like, that seems like the ultimate deal. What, my kid's safe? And I've got, I think PBD worked it out to be $1.7 million in 2022 money, which was when that podcast was recorded, which is, I mean, it's a nice little contribution just to keep going about your life. And so I was interested though, because...
Obviously you're paid not to write the book. And then in 2004 you did write the book. And so what happens, obviously at the very least the monthly repayments have stopped.
John Perkins (43:08.732)
Well, yeah, at that point, so I was, that offer was made in the late 80s. And by the time I broke the book, my contract was up. In fact, there'd been a new president come into the firm. And he and I had a history, which is something we have time to go into, but he didn't like me.
and I knew some things about him that he didn't really, he didn't want me around. So he ended that relationship and I'd made plenty of money off it. I was very happy to end it at that point anyway. So I ended it. So I had no obligation not to write the book any longer. And you know, at that point I felt that the most dangerous thing I could possibly do for my daughter now who's much older,
was not to expose what the heck's going on in the world because it's a dangerous world. Plus I'd also come to understand that really books aren't that they're not a big threat to most of the people in power because
people in power expect to be there for a fairly short amount of time, whether they're CEOs or elected officials. And books take a long time. If the books are going to actually create any actions at all, it's over a long, long period of time. And so I really, really come to understand that this probably wasn't going to be a big problem for me.
And a lot of time had gone by since those initial threats that had happened. And, you know, somebody way back then, back when the threats were made, I might have been a greater threat because I've been right in the business at the time, but now I've been out of it for a long time. And so, you know, it seemed reasonable at this point to do it. I also understood.
John Perkins (45:18.82)
and had several conversations I write about in the book, including with a woman, a Colombian woman, who at that time I was dating, I got divorced. And she kept saying to me, well, look, John, if people are, the CIA, the NSA, anybody who might be in a position to do something about you, the last thing they want is to see you
die mysteriously because that's going to sell a lot of books. They want the opposite. So if you write this book and get it out there, just don't tell anyone ahead of time that you're writing it. So you know the secret to being a good whistleblower is don't threaten to blow the whistle. Don't don't tell anybody you're doing anything until you have all the information you need and you made it public. Very quickly you make it public. And
at that point at least in my case that would mean that it would you know something strange happened and they've sold a lot of books and that's the art of what anybody would want.
Tyson (46:23.696)
Yeah
I mean, you've been pretty successful at selling books without anything tragic happening to you, which is probably the most frustrating thing that they could experience. How many weeks was Confessions of an Economic Hitman 2004 rendition on the New York Times bestseller list? I mean, it was there for a while. It's had plenty of eyes come to it. That'd be furious.
John Perkins (46:44.852)
73 weeks, it's a long, long time. And it's sold millions of copies in 38 languages. So yeah, it's gotten out there and continued to, and then there've been two volumes since, you know, it's a trilogy. And the other volumes have done quite well too. So yeah, it became, it was shocking. It was rejected initially by 39 publishers. All the big houses were, I think they were afraid of it.
Tyson (46:55.71)
That's so wild.
Tyson (47:09.751)
Yeah.
John Perkins (47:13.316)
And then finally a fairly small house in San Francisco, Barrett Kohler took it on and it became a huge success. And then the big companies wanted to buy the paperback rights and they did buy the, Penguin bought the paperback rights. It was a bidding war between Penguin and Random House. With my publisher, I wasn't even involved in that. I didn't make much money at all off the hardback. So, I mean, I'm sorry, off the paperback. And...
But that's what gets this distribution out there is happy to see a big publisher take it over because they know how to distribute it.
Tyson (47:46.298)
Yeah. What was the response to like the conversation around books not being a real threat because obviously, or people not necessarily, the leaders not being threatened so much by books because obviously they're in and out on a relatively quick turnaround. The media has become a really interesting place for this as well. And you can see that you can look to certain media platforms in America and Australia, I'm sure all over the world.
which you know for a fact, you're going to hear positive about Trump here. You're going to hear negative about him here. Same for Biden. We know that there's certain agreements or certain terms, or at least certain expectations when it comes to a particular media platform. How have the media responded to you and your story? Because I know you don't have to Google too far to see a lot of before your names allegedly and claims and it's smeared with an element of suspicion.
But I can't imagine a lot of media outlets, well, I guess depending on the side of the media that you're on, wanting too much to do with this because it would directly butt heads with whatever government organization they're more than likely protecting in their own way.
John Perkins (49:00.312)
Yeah, well, exactly, you know, and I was never I was on, you know, MSNBC and few of those and, and in some big print media had references, but never, you know, never invited to be on any of the really big shows, like, you know, Good Morning America, or something like that. And what was also interesting is that the New York Times, even though I was on their bestseller list for 73 weeks,
They never did a book review. They did eventually do a feature article on the front page of the Sunday financial section about the phenomena of the confessions books. And it was originally gonna be about a lot of books that are not confessions of a prostitute, confessions of a, I don't know, there are all these confessions and I was gonna be one of them. But once they got into it, they featured me. And then they mentioned the others. It was a pretty good feature.
And the journalists who did that really vetted me, in fact, including going back to my school, the college I went to, and checking on whether I'd really been thrown out of that. I quit that school and had a good friend who was an Iranian thrown out because he was getting a knife fight to defend me against the...
somebody and there was all these you know that's all in the book but I don't really want to go into that detail but there was this guy did a great deal of vetting and he went deep he didn't just he didn't just cover it superficially he really went deep and he concluded that you know basically what I was telling the truth and so they published this feature article but never did a book review so it wasn't it was not the book people who
I think the pressure was put on them just to keep me out of there, except they couldn't keep me off their list because there it was. It was selling books. They went there, they get this data from the bookstores and online vendors and so on. But their financial section saw that this book had made a lot of money for the publisher, was doing very well, and it was part of a lot of Confessions books that were doing well. So they did publish that article.
John Perkins (51:21.008)
But yeah, you're right. You know, the media was, they were afraid of me. And I think they're advertisers. That they're all very, very dependent on their advertisers. In fact, the journalist who did publish the article, he spent quite a lot of time with me, several days with me going to Chicago where I was speaking at bookstores and other events and in New York and elsewhere. And...
Tyson (51:21.066)
Yeah, has
John Perkins (51:47.016)
I got to know him quite well and one evening we had a few glasses of wine, we were quite relaxed and I said to him, you know, like you've spent a lot of time in Latin America, he had, and I said, you know, why don't you tell some of the truth about what's really going on there, some of the things that I talk about, you know that they're true. And he said, look John, he said, you know, I'm allowed, I'm not censored in what I write. I can write anything I want to write.
decides what he publishes and doesn't. And he works with the publisher. And if the publisher's advertisers don't, if the publisher doesn't think his advertisers will like something I write about, which is certainly true with a lot of stuff in Latin America, it doesn't get published. If I don't get published, I eventually lose my job. I get to keep, you know, I'm on the staff of the Times, but they, you know, you don't stay on the staff if you don't write articles that get in the paper. In those days, that would be online. So.
Tyson (52:30.404)
Hmm.
John Perkins (52:43.12)
It was a really interesting aspect of how, you know, that I had a new insight into that whole industry of how strongly it's manipulated by its advertisers and the advertising department's views of what the advertisers might want or not want. It doesn't necessarily have to be told by the advertisers, look, don't write anything about this guy.
in their heads they're thinking well we don't want if we write that we'll irritate one of the banks that advertise with us or one of the oil companies that advertise with us or one of the pharmaceutical companies. It's just again you know there's this subtle network that goes on.
Tyson (53:28.998)
Yeah, it seems more than ever the last couple of years, at least in my knowledge. I'm sure it goes back much further than this, but my awareness of it has grown. And I feel as a result of that, I've also noticed a lot of other people when it comes to the conversation around particularly mainstream media, um, as a result of the fact, we know that these, these channels or these organizations are bowing down to the advertisers. So you have to take what's being said with a grain of salt. And it's part of the reason that I've been so grateful to
And probably spend 90% of my time getting news or information or at least opinions from a variety of different podcasts. Like has, has the independent media world or independent podcasters, PbD, um, who, you know, Jordan Harbinger. I know you've been on a number of the big platforms have, have these guys. Um, do you feel lifted your platform or, or I'm not, I'm not sure. Like, it's just been really interesting to watch the impact that, that these people who are.
probably frowned upon and cast down by the mainstream networks, have probably done a lot for at least your profile.
John Perkins (54:34.884)
Yeah, well, you know, you might ask if the New York Times and none of the other big media cover my book, how did people, why did it sell so many copies? Why is it sold millions of copies? It's been to a large degree because it's been what we call the alternative media, which has become, I think, more and more and more in some respects the mainstream media. You know, and the first time the book hit the bestseller list was right after I was on Amy Goodman's Good Morning America. I'm not Goodman, sorry.
Tyson (54:42.21)
Mm.
John Perkins (55:03.548)
to nephocracy now. And that was back before she was very well known. I mean she was well known, but not as well as she is now. But I was on for about 10 minutes. Later I was on for a program for much longer. But that first 10 minutes right after the book came out, I was on her program. Just it was coincidental that I met her at another place where we were both attending and got an introduction. She said, well, come on my program in a couple of days. And I did.
that afternoon, the book went to number four on the Amazon bestseller list. And then very quickly after that, it was on the New York Times bestseller list. And then a lot of other alternative media picked it up in smaller newspapers and so on and so forth. So yeah, I think we're in a time now where podcasts like yours and you know,
YouTube and people's channels and so on and so forth these things have a great deal of power and sometimes That power is very much abused. I think also, you know, there's a deep concern I think we all have for the power of social media and how it can be terribly abused But it's also I think provided a lot of good alternatives to a mainstream media that is that is biased. Let's face it The New York Times this Washington Post
And I recently, I published a newsletter once a month. And if you were, if you was wanting to subscribe, just go to my website, JohnFerguson.org. There's a little box you put in your email. It only comes out once a month. The one that came out this month was about the problems in Latin America. I spent seven weeks so far this year in Latin America, traveling around, meeting the people. I was on an interview with Rafael Correa, former Ecuador.
former president of Ecuador. It's done a lot in seeing how terribly distressed Latin America is right now, highest crime rates in the world. And this is new in countries that used to be peaceful because of drug wars and because of many of the U.S.'s free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, which you probably don't even know what those stand for, North American free trade agreement, Central American free trade agreement, et cetera.
John Perkins (57:32.072)
And I wrote about this and you know, so a lot of Latin America's problems have to do with the United States. The drug war is there because they're selling drugs to the United States. These people in these countries aren't taking a lot of drugs. There's some of that, but most of it's coming here. And people have got so many comments that come back from that newsletter. People saying, why didn't I know this? I mean, I understand that this is great. Your newsletter was great.
How come the New York Times doesn't talk about this? How come it's not out there in the mainstream media? And it's sad, it isn't. I mean, sometimes you can go online, you can find articles, but they're usually way in the back of the newspaper. So, you know, it's because it, I don't know what it was because of this, because somebody has interest in not seeing it published in the mainstream. And again, this is not a conspiracy theory.
There is a conspiracy in a way, but it's, you know, advertisers are looking out for the best self-interest and publishers are looking to sell papers and they're looking to sell ads and on and on and on it goes.
Tyson (58:43.53)
It's amazing even in a world of independent media, how much power some of these mainstream platforms still have. I remember, one thing my mum taught me growing up was there's no such thing as a stupid question. And I mean, I've tried to apply that to as many different situations that I've found in my life. And as I mentioned at the start of the podcast, the last couple of years here in Australia, particularly in reference to COVID, if you had any questions around that, the mainstream media were very quick to...
to portray you as a certain kind of anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist nut job. And I mean, like even from a public appearance point of view, you can see why people are a little skeptical to ask the difficult questions because, you know, not only is their article or their show or pro, whatever it is not gonna be published if it contradicts the goals of the advertisers, but on top of all of that, it's like the very opposite of
You know, the, the meetings used to have, it's like a lose lose. Yeah. You're not going to get your work published. And also we're going to make you look like a nut job. I'm not sure for what I've heard is a dying industry. It's still seems to hold a fair bit of power.
John Perkins (59:53.732)
A lot of power. Yeah, no question about it. I mean, you know, we see that with the difference between, for example, Fox News and CNN. And, you know, we know a lot of Donald Trump's base power comes from Fox News, and they keep doing that. And it's very, very powerful. Yeah, so it's...
Fascinating also, you know, the most recent book of the confessions trilogy, which just came out just about a year ago, deals with China. And we're very quick to say, well, China doesn't have freedom of the press. You know, it's very biased news. That's true. But there's another side of that says that we don't, we have a very questionable regime of freedom of the press.
There is a freedom. I can speak out. Nobody's going to... I'm not going to be put into jail for what I say. But am I going to be published by any of the big mainstream media or not? And what you've been pointing out is, no, I really wasn't. So I've sold three, four million copies of books. But what is that compared to what Fox or CNN reaches? I don't know how many people you reach.
But I suspect it's minuscule compared to the big networks.
Tyson (01:01:20.418)
think they might, I think they might just have me covered by a little bit. John. It's, yeah, it's been so funny. Even watching the way, I don't know if you ever saw, I don't know if it was John Senna, the, the American wrestler. It was funny because a movie came out a couple of years ago that he was in and I, no one at, well, me, I didn't understand exactly what was going on until I dug into it a bit, he had put out a public apology, speaking Mandarin to his Chinese audience because he had referenced Taiwan. In.
John Perkins (01:01:25.404)
Yeah.
Tyson (01:01:50.29)
an interview and he's like, oh, obviously this isn't something I'm educated on. You go, wait, why is he putting out such a sincere apology? And you go, oh, okay. Obviously industry is a big part of this. He's trying to sell movies and obviously America is a relatively big population, but you compare that to China and all of a sudden your market expands quite a lot. And, and so you can just see in little subtle ways how all of a sudden, you know, little power plays, or at least money comes into the decisions that people make, the things that people say.
John Perkins (01:02:18.656)
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah.
Tyson (01:02:22.238)
It's very interesting, John. But hey, I've got my eye on the clock here and I told you an hour, we've gone over slightly. So I'm gonna love you and leave you, but I knew it was gonna be a fun conversation. I knew I was gonna enjoy it, which I did. And man, I'm so grateful that you made the time to come on it, it really means a lot.
John Perkins (01:02:38.172)
Well, I apologize for the cat's background. And I don't know whether you're going to cut all that out or not, but hopefully it'll add something to it. There, you know, there. I love cats. I love animals. What can I say? But, yeah, they just wanted to be part of this conversation, I think, you know. There these animals are very concerned about what's going on in the world today. But luckily, so they said,
Tyson (01:02:45.282)
I'm sorry.
Tyson (01:02:53.026)
We'll keep them in. Let's keep them in.
Tyson (01:03:05.45)
Hehe
John Perkins (01:03:07.504)
We didn't cause all these problems, but you know, we're having to deal with climate change. Ha ha ha.
Tyson (01:03:15.394)
John, you're a legend, man. Thanks once again.
John Perkins (01:03:17.968)
My pleasure, Tyson. Good to talk to you.
Tyson (01:03:19.69)
Oh, all right, I'll cut that off there. Man, I'll love you and leave you. I know you've probably got an evening to go and enjoy now. I know your wife's there waiting patiently. So I won't hold you any longer, but John, I'll get this edited and updated and I'll post it on Friday. So if you're interested, I'll send you the link, but yeah, it'll be out on Friday at Melbourne time. Awesome. Alrighty, thanks again.
John Perkins (01:03:28.71)
Hahaha
John Perkins (01:03:41.18)
Great. Okay. Thanks so much. Look forward to it.
Tyson (01:03:47.626)
Hey, thank you so much, you too. See you later.