John Perkins on How Perception Creates Reality

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is John Perkins, and author and activist whose ten books on global intrigue, shamanism, and transformation have been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than seventy weeks, sold over two million copies, and are published in at least thirty five languages. John was formerly a chief economist at a major consulting firm, advising the World Bank, United Nations, the US, and other governments.

He is now the founder and board member of the Pacha Mama Alliance and Dream Change, nonprofit organizations that partner with indigenous people to protect the environments and that offer global programs to change the destructive ways of industrial societies. Hi John, Welcome to the show. Thanks Sarah. It's great to be with you. Happy to be here. We're gonna talk about your book, Touching the Jaguar, Transforming Fear into

action to change your life and the world. But before we do that, we'll start, like we always do, with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up

at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed, So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think it's a great, terrible eric. You know, I've got this cat looking over my shoulder here, and she would say, well, obviously, don't feed that hateful wolf, the angry one, the bad one, because it might come after me. And I think we can all look at

the world that way. That it's absolutely true. And in my experience, my former life as an economic hit man, I was very aware that if you were in the process of promoting a world that looked like the world that I was promoting, if you fed that world, you'd get it. And what I was really promoting was what we call predatory capitalism, a form of capitalism that's extremely destructive and has caused climate change and so many of

the problems we have today, what we call the death economy. If, on the other hand, we go out and we feed the good wolf, we feed the compassionate wolf, we get a world that's represented by what we could call a life economy and economic system that is itself regenerative. You know, Unfortunately, through most of my life, we've had a world situation where we keep feeding that bad wolf, if you want

to call it the bad wolf. Where we keep feeding that wolf, that's all about there's never enough in the world. I'd get to take mine, and to get mine, I gotta hurt somebody else. It's not a win win, it's a win lose. And we look at that on individual levels, we look at that on corporate levels, we look at that on national levels. And this is a time when

we need to turn that around. And I think the book Touching the Jaguar goes into how indigenous people have come up with these prophecies that tell us that we're at a time in history right now where we have the opportunity to turn that around, to feed the compassionate wolf, the good wolf, the wolf that's going to bring us

about a world excellent. So I think let's start by taking apart some of what you just said there, and I think in order for us to understand your story, we've got to back up a while, like you said, and we've got to talk about your past, as you said, as an economic hit man. So let's first start there describe for listeners what that means to be an economic hit man, and then I think from there that can lead us into conversations about life and death, economies and

indigenous people. Yeah, so, Eric know, my title was chief Economists that a major consulting from a company called Charles Team Maine in Boston. It was later sold and the name no longer exists. It was sold to Parsons. But I had a staff that arranged anywhere from thirty to fifty people at different times. And my job and my staff job was to identify countries that had resources our corporations want, like oil for example, or today more likely

copper and other resources. And once we identify that country, we would arrange huge loans to that country. But it was with the understanding that those loans would be used to hire our corporations to build big infrastructure projects in the country. In fact, the money never actually went to the country and they had to sign off on the loan. They had to guarantee the loan through their resources as collateral.

But the money came directly to our corporations, the Bechtel's, the Haliburton's, the Brown and Roots, the big engineering companies that the General electric and countries that provide the material and the machinery for power plants, hydroelectric plants, transmission lines, industrial parks, highways, ports, things like that, And for the most part, these things benefit a few wealthy families in those countries. First of all, they make huge profits for

our corporations. They benefit a few wealthy families that own the industries and the commercial establishments, But most of the people in the country end up suffering because money is diverted from education, healthcare, and other social services to pay

off the service on the debt. In the end, the country can't pay its principle on the debt, and so we go back, usually under the guise of the i m F International Monetary Fund, and say, hey, you know, we'll restructure the law for you, but you have to meet these conditionalities. In order for us to do that, you have to sell your resource, oil, whatever real treat

to our corporations without environmental or social regulations. Privatize your public sector of businesses like your water and sewage systems, your utilities, maybe your schools and prisons, and sell them to our investors at cut rate prices, and let us build military basis on your soil and vote with us on the next United Nations vote. So, in that way, we really fed that bad wolf if you will, and

that was my job. And you know, I don't want to keep talking too long here, but i'd say that, you know, when I get started in that business, I thought I was doing the right thing, because in business school still teach that if you want to help a poor country, you invest a lot of money in infrastructure. What we were doing, and statistically you can show them that the GDP that grows domestic product, that our measure of the economy grows, and it does, and so it

looks like it's a good thing. But over time I began to realize that GDP was allowed to measure it measures the rich. It doesn't measure prosperity a country. It measures how well the rich people in the country are doing, not how well the average people in the country are doing.

But it took a long time for me to realize that because the system is raped to show us that that's a metric that's important to use, gross domestic product, gross domestic product per capita, and they basically kind of meaningless statistics if you're trying to really see how our

country is truly doing. It's so interesting as I read your work and I learned about it, I originally would have been like you were, and I would have thought, well, that sounds like a good project, that sounds like good work. It sounds like the I m F. That must be good investing in poor countries, and just fascinating to see the way the whole system is set up and who the ultimate benefactors are. Yeah, and here's an example, Eric, So the United States is representative in a way of

many countries. The three individuals here in the United States that have as much wealth as half the population in the United States, if their income grew last year by ten pc and half the population of the United States lost three we still show a growth rate of around three and a half percent, an increase even though half the country's a lot worse off. That's g d P. That's what we measure. And that's true throughout the world where we have this tremendous imbalance between the halves and

they have not. So there are really the extremely wealthy and the rest of US middle class. Are they have countries the US and other countries. Are they competing for these sorts of projects in less developed parts of the world. Is the US competing, say with China, for this type of project when we hear about them going into markets in Africa. Is that part of what we're wrestling over. Yes.

I think the very sad aspect of this is that up until there were two superpowers, really there was a Soviet Union in the United States, and to a certain degree that maintained a balance. If I went into let's say Columbia or Ecuador, an African country, and tried to impose my will upon them, they could turn to the Soviet Union and use that as leverage. Even if they really wanted to take my deal, they could probably get a better deal from me. The Soviets are coming. If

you don't, we'll take their thing. And I went back off a little bit in after daytime. But so the Union was no longer. We were the world's only superpower, and the United States had an opportunity at that time to really promote democracy and in a real pure form of capitalism, but we didn't do that. Instead, we promoted this that's what I call predatory capitalism, that favors monopolies, that is extremely exploitative, and we didn't make democracy look

very good either. We supported a lot of dictators around the world, like in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, many other places. So there was a tremendous resentment growing and undercurrent, and countries didn't have options, so they played along with US. Countries that had resources that they wanted to develop. Poor countries that had copper or or oil or gold or whatever, but they didn't have the technologies to exploit them. So they needed to bring in our technologies and they needed

our financing. We were the only options out there. Well, today China has come along. President She has made a big point that China will not try to interfere with countries politics or their foreign policies. So China, actually, I think has learned a lot from our mistakes, and I think China has the same goals that wants to exploit resources. I'm not trying to paint China's the good guy here necessary at all, but I am saying that I think

China has really learned from us. So we're finding, for example, in Latin America, that China's taking over, It's investing more in Latin America now than we are. Its trade is larger than the United States trade with many of the most significant, most powerful, economically powerful countries in Latin America. Today, we're finding the same thing as true in Africa. We made big mistakes. China's learned from those mistakes, and under

the Trump administer ation, those mistakes escalated even more. We became more isolationist. Let's now transition to talking about what a death economy is and what a life economy is. A death economy is an economic system that's really based on one perception. So we can get into this later, but touching the Jagger was all about perception and realizing

that how we perceived the world creates reality. And we have a perception that was growing for decades but really really took hold of ninety six when Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Freedman said many amazing things, but one of the most important things he said, as it turns out, was that the only responsibility is to maximize short term profits for a few investors, basically regardless of the social and environmental costs. And that's driven business

ever since. And as I said, it was growing before them, but it really took off them. And you know, this idea of short term profit really gives corporate executives the right and in fact the mandate to do whatever it takes to maximize short term profits, including destroying the very resources upon which their companies depend in the long term. And so in doing that, they've created this death economy. And it's an economic system that's consuming itself into extinction.

It's using up in the short term our long term potential. And it's also based to a large degree on war or the threat of war. Economy is very, very dependent on the war industry, and many economies are. But it's about consuming things to the point of absurdity, and it's really created a system that doesn't work. So many of today's crises, income inequality, that the climate change that we're experiencing, you can use the pandemic, species extinctions, the destruction of

incredibly important resources. That's the death economy. And it's based on this one goal of maximizing short term profits, regardless of the social, environmental costs. And that's also what we call predatory capitalism, a view of capitalism where a few people can own almost everything. You know, oligarchy is basically or at least control large segments of the economy and have tremendous power over governments also through their wealth. And

so a death economy you described its features. Is capitalism, by its nature a death economy. No, And I think that's a very important distinction because a lot of people say, you've got to end capitalism, and I understand what they mean. They mean we got to end predatory capitalism. The definition of capitalism is that it's a system whereby the means of production and commerce are our own by individuals, not

by the government, and where you have competition thrives on competition. Well, we do have a system today where the means of production are not owned by the government, but that's been reversed. The people who own the means of production basically own the government. You know, we've seen in this last election how important money is and big money, huge amounts of money, crazy amounts of money, crazy amounts of money. And that's

around the world. And even after the election is over, the amount of money that's spent on lobbyists, that spent on advertising, again it's spent on changing perceptions is huge. So even though the means of production are not owned by the government, they're owned by a few individuals. The important means of production other small you know, family ownership of small businesses. But if a big business comes along and wants to drive the small business out. They will.

We know that. We've seen it happen over and over with some of the big box companies. But that's not capitalist. That's a form of capitalism. It's predatory capitalism. Small markets, the farmers market, you may have one in your town, A lot of people do. They're all over the developing world. Indigenous people have these small markets. That's capitalism. My grandson's lemonade stand is capitalism, and capitalism is based on the idea that they're going to have healthy competition and that

you know, nobody's going to control markets. That's pure capitalism. We don't have that, and I think it's a very important distinction to make. So when people talk about getting rid of capitalism, I'm all totally in favor of getting rid of predatory capitalism. But I think the basics of capitalism are kind of even trade barter is a form of capitalism. So it's it seems to me that capitalism, and it's purest sense, and I don't want to people

to be confused about this. Capitalism and it's purest sense is the human ability to trade things, to negotiate, to work with each other. And I think that's part of human survival, actually, right, And I don't want to turn this into a long economic discussion because that's not really what we do here. Listeners are probably like, where are we headed with this? And hang on, work, work, we're headed towards the territory you're used to. But I think

these are important ideas. You say. It's something really important there in that in capitalism, the means of production is owned by individuals, not the government, right, And so much of what we see now is yes, that's true, but as you said, that, the people who own the means of production also now own the government. Thus we're not on a level playing field. It's not pure capitalism in

the sense that it's a level playing field. The market is highly rigged at this point in favor of the people who have the money to lobby the government to act in the way that they would like to see things go. All right, So let's talk about your journey. So you're an economic hitman. You don't know that at the time. That's not the term you would use at

the time. Uh, you're an economist. You think you're doing good in the world, and over time you slowly begin to realize oh, hang, on a second, maybe this work isn't really working out very well for the vast majority of people in those countries. So what happens next for you? Talk about sort of the journey from there to today. I know it's a long one, but maybe the next

couple of steps for you. Yeah, So let me just step back a minute and say that one of the things that I had in my favor of trying to convince these leaders of countries to accept these huge loans that they knew would put their people deep into debt, was that they knew that if they took on these plans, they and their friends would make a lot of money because they own the industries they benefited from the infrastructure.

But they also knew that behind me were people that we call the jackals, and these are usually CIA operatives or assets who will overthrow governments or assassinate leaders. And you know, the United States has admitted to a long history of this end day of Chile and urbans of watermelon, the moment of the congo and mossadeca Iran and ZM of Vietnam, and on and on. Two of my clients

who were killed because they didn't accept these deals. The President of Ecuador and the head of State of Panama Hammi Rhodols and Omartari host So these people are there in the background now. When I decided to get out after ten years, I realized that what I was doing was not what I thought I was doing, and then I needed to get out of doing that. My conscience was bothering me. I didn't want to be in this any longer, and I actually wanted to expose the system

from me because I knew about it. I couldn't do that, so I started to write a book about my experiences. I wanted to be an expose, so I contacted other people with my job, economic kiment type people and some of the jackals who I knew and uh. I immediately got anonymous phone calls, certainly my life and the life of my infant daughter. And at the same time I get invited out to dinner by the president of Stone and a Webster engineering company which had been a major

competitor of my company. And he takes me to dinner and say, you know, you've got a great resume. Your chief economists of one of our competitors. We'd like to use your resume in our proposals. You won't have do any work for us. So I'll just let us use your resume in our proposals and I'm prepared, right, you would check tomorrow morning for five thousand dollars. Now, Eric, this was the late eighties. Half a minute dollars. There's nothing to sneeze at today, but back in those days

it was a lot more. And then he said, I just don't write the book. We know you're working on. You can't write the book. So I was being hit the same way that I've been hitting other people. I'm getting threatened. My life's being threatened. My daughter's life is being threatened. And on the other hand, and being offered a bribe. It's illegal bribe. There's nothing illegal about paying a guy a retainer as a consultant, though that was a huge retainer, even by the standards of those dasts.

So I'm being hit, and what would you do in that case? I took the jackals very seriously. I took the money. And what I will say in my own defense is that I didn't go out and buy mansions or fast cars or something. I put the money towards creating a new career. I wrote books about indigenous people. I went back to the Amazon, where I had been at Peace Corps volunteer year before I became an economic

hit man. I went back to the Amazon and and I formed to nonprofit organizations dream Change and the pache Mam Alliance, when I'm a co founder of to help the Indigenous people and also to get the word out how we need to change the perception of what it means to be successful as businesses. And I wrote books on Indigenous people, which was fine with stone A Webster. They were happy with me writing those kind of books.

And this went on for a long time. And then after nine eleven and I was in the Amazon on nine eleven with these Indigenous people. After I came home, I flew to ground zero and as I stood looking into that pit, I knew I had to come clean. I had to write the book. But this time I decided I wouldn't write an next boy day. I wouldn't contact anyone else that was the problem that world have

gotten out. I would write it in secret. I'd write the whole book assumed that when I had it in the hands of a very good New York agent and publishers with them. Because my insurance policy, it's any self respecting Jacko would know that killing me would sell books. I become a martyr and people would want to buy the books, which was the opposite of what they wanted. So that started me on a whole new trajectory here, and I wrote the book that became Confessions of an

Economic hip Man. And you know, it's sold a couple of million copies now and thirty seven languages, I think, and has become quite well known. Your work with indigenous people is a lot of what your most recent book, Touching the Jaguar is also about. And so I want to make sure we have time to get into some of that wisdom that you've gotten from the indigenous people. And also then I'd like to transition to some of what can we do normal people to participate in life economies.

Like to start that discussion by asking, what is touching the Jaguar? Why is that the title of the book? What does that mean? You know? When I was a piece co of volunteer, I was out in the Amazon and I get very sick. I couldn't keep any food down. I was dying. I couldn't leave. It was in three days of incredibly difficult hiking through dense jungle, etcetera. To

get to the nearest medical facility. A shaman in the Schwak cultures, an indigenous culture in the Amazon that I was working with hunters and gatherers, offered to heal me. And I had no idea what a shaman was. Graduated from business school, and it was very fierce. Look you get these tattoos, you know, like movies, right, I didn't. They had any choice. So that night I had this

traumatic healing. It took me on the vision quest and I've got my eyes closed and he's chanting, and I see this a morphous form in front of me, and the shaman yells touched the jaguar. Well, it's nighttime, dark, the middle of the jungle. Out my eyes. I look all around, like, where's the jaguar, where's the jaguar? And he says, no, no, no, close your eyes and see

the jaguar. So I did, and this a morphous form shape shifted into the face of a jaguar that said, and it sounded like my mother's voice, the food and drink will kill you. And I realized at that moment that you know, I'm eating some very strange foods in the jungles scrimming white grubs like that's the delicacy for these people. You know, it's actually high protein. And they don't drink water all the rivers because they know the rivers that got organic matter and dead animals in them.

And so the women make a kind of beer called cheat it by chewing and spitting manioc root. It's spit beer, and then you can add water to it because it's alcoholic and it's you know, it's safe to drink. Well, I'm drinking a lot of this spit here because you've got to rehydrate, and there wasn't any paria. And so on this vision quest, I see that when I eat and drink these things, I hear a voice saying it'll kill you. At the same time, I saw how incredibly

robust and healthy the char are. These are hundreds and gatherers, and men have legs that would make Olympic soccer stars jealous, you know um. And they live to be very old if they don't die in a hunting accident. And so in that night, that vision quest, I saw that it wasn't the food and drink killing me. It was my perception, my mindset. And after that the shaman told me that my payment to them would be to be as apprentice.

One of the first things he taught me said, you know, when we say touching the jaguar, what we mean is you've got to face your fears. You've got to face the things that are holding you back, that are keeping you from being healthy or keeping you from doing what you want to do in the world. If you run from what's holding you back, in this case, this roy saying it will kill you. The jaguar will chase you. But if you go out and touch the jaguar, it gives you the energy and the know how to change

your perception. And when you change your perception, you change your reality. Reality is molded by our perceptions. This is a shaman deep in the jungle saying this, And as it turns out, you know, I mean, that's the basis for modern psychotherapy, for advertising, for for marketing, for politics, quantum physics. You name it as human beings that perceptions control our reality. Yeah, you talk about this idea that

human reality really is molded by our perceptions. And in order to change ourselves of the world, we've got to breakthrough barriers that hold us in old ways. Of thinking and acting. And the shaman, I think was his name, was how you process. The word he used was artum artum yes, yes, which in schwar it really means the power of nature, the power of life. It's the great strength that you get when you touch the jaguar, because the idea is in touching the jaguar, you are actually

absorbing aguard's energy. Yeah, the jaguar. You're able to look at things with a new perception. So there's a reality spit beer and if my perception is it's killing me, it takes me to a perception where I'm getting sick. That same reality spit beer and screaming right grubs, and I realize, oh wow, this is local, organic food and it's actually very high in nutrition. It's making these people healthy. Therefore, to make me healthy, it takes me to a new reality,

which is I am healthy. And if we look at today's world, the death economy is based on the perception of maximizing short term profits and short term materialistic consumption. If we change that perception and say, hey, the goal of business and the goal of individuals should be to maximize long term benefits for people in nature, for all of us, we move to a new reality, which is

a life economy. That's a regenerative economy. That's an economy that pays people to clean up pollution and regeneral destroyed environments and recycle and create new technologies that don't ravage the earth. So it's all just about touching that jaguar. We're all afraid of change, but we know we got to change. We know this isn't working now, and the virus has really taught us this. We touch that jaguere, we can change our perception about what it means to

be successful. It's not about just being successful in the short term, it's about the longer term. One of the things in the book that's really interesting is you work with these different cultures in the Amazon that traditionally our enemies of each other, but over time that starts to change.

It's a great point, Eric, thank you. When I was first there in the late sixties early seventies, the Chua we're fighting the Achua and the Warranty and the Apoda and the Quetchua, and there were all these nations were fighting each other and and the reason was because they're hunters and gatherers and they need a territory and if somebody's encroaching upon their territory, they fight them. And these of small battles, usually not big wars, but sometimes we

were fairly large but fighting each other. And then the oil companies came in. It was Texico in the late nineties sixties. Texico came into that area of the northern Amazon region of Ecuador and created have a huge amounts of pollution. They just lost a nine and a half billion to all the lawsuit of the Ecuadorians over this pollution that they caused. And so the indigenous people changed their processtion. They went on and they touched their jaguar.

They would say that the jaguar was our neighbors are our enemy. That was the perception. They changed the perception, say, no, our neighbors are our brothers and sisters, and we've all got to come together to stop the real enemy, which is the oil companies. And so they did. They came

together and they formed federations. They asked me to come in, and they asked the nonprofits to come in, and I mentioned pay for lawyers to do this in the courts as well as demonstrations and even sometimes attacking oil platforms, but they came together and then they had to touch another jaguar. They had to realize is that the real enemy was not the oil companies. It was the dream, as they put it, the perception of the world that needed oil us and the oil was being drilled because

we have a perception of this. As they put it, you have a dream of large buildings and heavy industry and lots of cars, and now that dream is destroying the planet as we know it. And so they then reached out and touched that jaguar, said we get to go to people we most fear, and that was USO and again then work with us these nonprofits Pachamama Alliance Dream Change to change the dream of the modern world.

And that's the goal of these nonprofits as we've got programs in something like ninety countries now that are trying to bring this message out that we've got to turn the death economy into a life economy. Essentially, that's it. So it was a great example of how these indigenous people kept realizing that they had to touch the jaguar and change their perception and when they did, it change

their reality. So let's move into the question that a lot of people have when they hear something like the story, and so many of our listeners we think about economic destruction, climate destruction, all the issues. We go, Okay, I want to do something. Where do people start? What's the path that you recommend for for starting to change these death economies which were all a part of into more of

a life economy. You know, there's an overall answer to that, and it's one that I think we all pretty much understand that we are to shop consciously, but I'd like to say that that's much bigger than that. It's not good enough just to shop consciously. You need to change perceptions.

So if you decide not to buy Nike's shoes because they've got I'm just using as example, because they don't pay their workers in Indonesia or China fair wage, you need to let Nike know, And then you need to let all of your social networking people know and ask them to send a message to Nike saying, hey, I love your shoes, but I'm not going to buy it anymore. To you pay your workers in China or Indonesia fair wage.

And if you find a company that you can buy better products from, let them know why you're buying from them, so to get that perception out there. You know, consumer movements can be so easy these days with social networking. You know, if we just keep letting our circles know and sending out messages and be nice. Nike, I love your product, but I'm not going to buy it anymore until you and get everybody you notice send that out and send and that has them to have everybody they

know to send it out. And this has an impact. It has a huge impact because a lot of those executives in those companies, they want to do the right thing, but they've got to hear from their customers that customers have to push them to do that. But if we take this to another level, every one of us has a lot of power and we have a role to play.

And I talked in the book about the daily practice or it could be once a week that takes less than ten minutes, that each one of us can do to to go into what what can I personally do? And it's based on five questions that the five questions that started are one, what do I most want to do with the rest of my life? I want to bring me my greatest satisfaction, my bliss, and I'll give a couple of examples. I would answer that question by saying, I want to write. I love to write, Eric, I

love to write books. You know I've written. I've published ten books and written a few more that I ever dread to post. I love to write. And I have a friend who's a carpenter who would say I want to spend the rest of my life working with my hands in wood, kind of the opposite end of the writer. The second question is how do I do this in a way that helps other people? Can be one of

the person or lots of other people. As a writer, I'd say, I'm going to write about transforming life economy into death economy, transforming fear into action to change your life in the world. That's what I want to do. I want to help people that way. My carpenter friend would say, I want to get people to build things using sustainable materials. And the third question then is what's holding me back? And as a writer, I might say, oh, I just don't have enough time. I know we need

to write every day, but I don't have time. And the carpenter friend of mine might say, well, like people don't want to pay an additional price for sustainable materials. And so the fourth question then is when you touch that jaguar, how does it change your perception in your actions? And I would say, okay, so well I can I can get it about half an hour earlier every morning, right, or I can watch it how or less of television

every night and write. And my carpenter friend would say, when I touched my jaguar, it says tell your clients that the added price is not a cost, it's an investment. They're investing in the future for themselves and their children in the world. And then the fifth question is what actions do we take? What does that drive me? And for a writer at you got a right, you know

you got a right. And for the carpenter it's like, well, I gotta go out and build this cabinet using sustainable tears or this house, and I gotta tell them whoever you're building it for it, Look, you're investing in the future by doing this. And so five questions are what to bring me the most satisfaction? How do I help other people? And these are in the book incidentally, what's stopping me? What's the jaguar that's holding me back? What happens when I touch that jaguar, how does it change

my perceptions? And what actions do I take? And I think those last three questions, what's the jaguar? How do I touch the jaguar? One of the actions I take? Those will change frequently, so as it right, Okay, I've set aside half an hour every morning and an hour every night. But now the next question is what are we going to write about? And then the question beyond that, what's the first sentence? But each time you do that, you reach a new level of higher conscienceness about yourself.

You go deeper and deeper to your own satisfaction. So it's a process that's constantly evolving. And if we do it every day or even once a week, you know, you can get up in the morning for six or seven minutes just go into this little bit, may have it written down, and look at what you're gonna do during that day and commit to doing it. If we do that, we will get a better world for ourselves, else and for future generations. The way we spend our

money is important, right. The companies that we give our money to matters. And then also not just voting with our dollar, but sharing why right, And how we live all of that. But it's not enough just to shop consciously, because you want to do that, but you also want

to let the companies know. Speaking at a lot of international conferences, economic conferences, I was recently speaking at one in Russia about twelve thousand people, and this included a lot of CEOs from big American corporations as well as the presidents of countries. Putin was one of the other

speakers there, etcetera. And you know, after I give my talk at the receptions that are always held in the evenings with some wine and cheese or cavier or whatever the Russians are serving that night, executives will come up to me and they'll say things like, you know, I really want to do the right thing. I've got grandchildren, I've get children and grandchildren. I want to make my

company greener. But I know that if I lose half a percentage of market share or my stock price goes down, my major investors will fire me, and that replaced me as someone who only cares about stock prices or market share. So what I would ask of you is please spread the word out there to help people to send me

lots of messages tweets. However, they want to send messages and get their networking circles to do this, and I want to hear things like, you know, we want to buy your product, but we won't until you do better. And if I get a hundred thousands of these messages, I can take them to our executive committee, to our major investors and tell them, Hey, these are our clients. We've got to listen to them. And so I think, you know, it's really important for people to understand the

way this is moving. And before the pandemic, we were seeing some major changes in business, the Green New Deal, conscious capitalism, b corporations, benefit corporations. Back in August of two thousand, nineteen hundred and eighties, some odd executives of what's called the Business Roundtable, very very important executives and the biggest companies in the world came together and they basically say it, we can no longer just go for a short term stock crisis. They basically said, we've got

to help create a life economy. And I think they meant it, but they have to be pushed. We, the consumers, the investors, the employees, all of us have to come together to push them. Yeah, yeah, And I think that's the jaguar that a lot of us faces. We feel like there's nothing we can do or that, you know, just being one person, we just fear that it won't matter. Yeah, and it does matter because we're not just one person. You know, we can we can organize, and that's always

been powerful. I recall what Franklin Roosevelt at the end of World War Two. He was meeting with a bunch of labor leaders from the car industry, and at the end of the meeting he said to them, you know, I think you guys understand now that I'm on your side. I want to do what's the right thing for labor. But now you've got to go out there and get your rank and file to force me to do it, because that's the only way and get this through Congress

is that I get your support. And I think that's that's so relevant today that a lot of corporate executives feel this way. You know, I also have to say that there are sociopathic corporate executives who don't give a dam, but they're not driven by profit. They're driven by success, which is based on a perception. And as long as our perception is short term profits are are success or drive success or what defines success. That's what will drive

the sociopaths. But if we can turn that around and say, no, you know, we're gonna put on the cover of Fortune magazine, Time Magazine, and so on and so forth, the executives that are creating long term benefits for all of us that are really buying into this green new deal, the conscious capitalism benefit corporations, etcetera. And when we start honoring them and when business schools hold them out as the icons,

then things turn around. And the only way that's going to happen is if you and I and all your listeners get involved in this and understand that we do have the power to turn this around. So you know, we've got two things to do. Want is to answer those five questions I mentioned and really push forward with

with our individual agendas. And that may include this, or it may be additional to the idea that we also need to be conscious of how we shop and get organized with the people who were buying from, know why we're buying from them. Are the ones that we're not buying from. Know why we're not buying from them? This is very, very important there's something else you said in

the book that I thought was interesting. You were saying that it's important to start telling a new story, which is to look for the good news that's happening, the good things that are happening, and to make sure those

are getting shared and amplified. And you added to that something I thought was really interesting, because you said, even if we're tempted to see those things as greenwashing or token gestures, that it's still really important to share those stories and believe in them because they helped to change the overall narrative. Yeah, once people start to change that perception, even if it's for the wrong reasons, it has a

mushrooming effect. And I think you're telling the book the story about a good friend of mine now who's a friend now, who, in order to make her neighbors think that she was an environmentalist, began to hang her clothes out to dry on a line outside her house rather than using the dryer. And she did it, you know, to please her neighbors. Basically you look like she's a good person. But she said that kind of started, and now she's devoted her life to developing programs that how

people understand the importance of being environmentally sensitive. But it all started by hanging her clothes out for the wrong reasons. But perhaps you may think that Walmart is just greenwashing when they start having organic foods or doing various things like that, but it has a big impact ultimately once they said it may be done for that reason to begin with, but that has an impact, and so we

should encourage companies to do that more and more. Yea, I love that idea of sort of looking for the good news that's out there, because we get very overwhelmed by how big the problem seems and how insurmountable. And I think that finding things that are changing helps us to fight off despair, because despair is no good. Despair

causes us to give up right right. And you know, I think the coronavirus has been a major teacher because it's it's shown us that we can change and we may not like the changes that we have to make sometimes, but they can turn around and come to our advantage. So I know so many people who at the beginning were very upset by being more isolated and so on it, but in the process they figured out that, well, now that I'm spending less time going to the office and

I'm doing it online instead. I can also have more time to read the books I wanted to read, or to maybe to write a book, or to learn to play the flute of the piano, or spend more time with my family. I don't have to spend all that time commuting. Uh. And that's just one example I think we've all learned. And I was supposed to do a big book tour all around the United States and to Europe, and I've done a lot of it virtually, and that's actually meant that we could have a lot more people

because of what I'm doing. A book tour in a bookstore in Miami, Florida, for example, of which I've done in the past, and this did in the past people known, people came lived in the neighborhood. But this time I had people from Europe and Africa, people who have been to Miami and signed up on that they've been to that bookstore and signed their email list. So you know, we've we've found that there's some there's some opportunities that

are created. So we've we've had to change, and we've seen that we can change, and we've also seen how change has impacted the world a lot less pollution. We can see those satellite images over China and other places how we've cut back, so we're learning. This has been a teaching experience for us. Yeah, it sure has well. John, Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk

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

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