Economists Uncut

Economic Hitman Reveals FATAL MISTAKE about Trump Tariff Threats (Uncut) 02-03-2025

Economic Hitman Reveals FATAL MISTAKE about Trump Tariff Threats

The whole issue around Greenland, around Canada, around imposing tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and you know, I’m really sad to see this because it opens the door to China much wider. The door’s already open, but it’s getting wider that way. You know, there’s an interesting Chinese proverb that says, if you want to build an empire, make friends, not enemies.

 

And China’s doing that. They are very, very good at selling, for example, the New Silk Road. They talk about it.

 

You’re watching Capital Cosm. My name is Danny. Today’s guest is John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

 

I’m super stoked to interview John. I first came across his work so many years ago, 15 years ago. He was really kind of like my gateway into alt media, you could say.

 

So I’m very honored to interview you here, John. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s my pleasure, Danny.

 

I’m really happy to be with you this morning or afternoon, whatever it is where you are. Let’s go with morning. How about that? I think most of the people out there may know who you are, John.

 

Again, you were one of the people that woke me up so many years ago. But for people who may not have read the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, or may not have come across you, if you can kind of give us a background on who you are and the story of your journey. Who is John Perkins? Well, that’s a little bit mysterious to me, too.

 

But yeah, so I was chief economist at a major U.S. consulting firm, better known as Economic Hitman. And before that, I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer deep in the Amazon rainforest where I’d studied with shamans. So before that, I’d been in business school.

 

So there was a strange mixture of things going on in my life. But as an Economic Hitman, what my job was to identify countries with resources our corporations want, like oil in those days. And today, it’s more likely to be some of the rare minerals, lithium and other minerals that are necessary for high tech.

 

And then to arrange a huge loan to the country that had these resources, using the resource as collateral. The loan would be used to hire U.S. corporations, mainly engineering construction companies like Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown & Root, Stone & Webster, to make huge profits building big infrastructure projects in that country. And these would be projects like electric power systems, highways, ports, airports, things that benefited a few wealthy families, the ones who own the industries who get the most use out of the infrastructure.

 

But it would actually be detrimental to the majority of the people because money would be diverted from healthcare, education, and other social services to pay the interest on the loan. And in the end, the principal couldn’t be paid. And so we’d go back, usually in the guise of the International Monetary Fund, and say to the country, hey, now you can’t pay your loan, so give us your collateral, sell your oil real cheap without environmental or social regulations to our corporations, or vote with us on the next United Nations vote against Cuba or China or whatever, let us build a military base on your soil.

 

What we were really doing is building an empire through economics. And I have to say in my own defense that for the first seven or eight years that I did this, I thought I was doing the right thing because the World Bank, business schools teach you that if you want to help a poor country invest heavily in these infrastructure projects, and you’ll see the GDP, the gross domestic product grow. And it’s true.

 

And so, you know, we’re trained to believe that that’s the answer. And in fact, GDP per capita is held out as representing the prosperity of the people. And it wasn’t until I’d been in the business for a while that I came to understand that GDP per capita really represents how well the wealthy are doing, how well the big corporations are doing, divided by the number of people in the country.

 

It really does not reflect overall prosperity. So the people can be actually getting poorer while the wealthy are getting wealthier, and it looks good as a GDP statistic. Yeah, because GDP is a very crude metric.

 

It’s just gross transactions. It doesn’t tell you where the transactions come from, what the transactions are being spent on, etc. Correct.

 

And it doesn’t even include, for the most part, transactions that occur in local markets, particularly in low-income countries, you know, these markets that are out in the countryside, farmers markets and so on. They’re really not even included in GDP in many cases. Now, are we still seeing this economic hitman program ongoing today on behalf of the IMF, the World Bank, etc.? Is this still an ongoing operation? Well, it’s actually gotten worse, Danny.

 

So the first book I wrote was 2004. Ten years later, I came out with a second part of the trilogy, which really got into, it’s called The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman. And it talked about how the same thing was continuing to go on that I described.

 

But in addition to that, every major international corporation has their own version of economic hitman. So you’ve got the big tech industries, all the industries will go into a country and say, we’re going to build a facility someplace here in Asia. And then the economic hitman from that corporation will go to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and see who will give them the best deal, the lowest taxes, the lowest wage rates, the most collateral on some resource.

 

So it really spread. And it also spread to the United States and Europe with the incredible amount of debt that individuals get, education debt, healthcare debt. These are all part of the system that really entraps us in a system.

 

And now the third book, which came out a little over a year ago, is about China’s economic hitman. And today, they’re taking over the whole world. They’re the number one trading partner in about 80% of the world’s countries.

 

The United States held that position in the year 2000. In 25 years, China has completely replaced us in many parts of the world. And a lot of that has to do with the efficiency of their economic hitman.

 

Is it using the same playbook as our economic hitman? Because I’ve often heard the argument that sure, China might be doing the same thing in places like Africa, but they’re not loan sharks in the same way that the IMF was or is. Is there any stark differences between the way China does it and the way that the Western powers do it? Well, yeah, there’s a lot of differences. The end goal is pretty much the same.

 

Dominate world resources and dominate populations. But China has an amazing story to tell. It can tell a president of a country in Africa or Latin America or Asia, wherever.

 

Look, we averaged 10% economic growth for 30 years in a row. We brought about 900 million people out of dire poverty. That’s more than twice the population of the United States.

 

Nobody else has done anything like that. And that’s a very, very appealing story if you happen to be the president of a country that’s trying to develop. The United States has much worse statistics.

 

We actually haven’t had a real increase in the federal minimum wage since the early 1970s. Can you imagine? I mean, we have the same basic federal minimum wage that we had in the early 70s. And so, you know, China, the China’s economic hitmen have this amazing story to tell.

 

And it certainly is very biased in their favor. There’s no question. I mean, there’s stories behind those stories, too.

 

But also, the United States has really played into China’s hands by focusing so much of our energy and money on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, and Syria, and Ukraine, and those parts of the world. We neglected Latin America and Africa and much of Asia. And China didn’t get involved in any of these wars.

 

It didn’t waste its resources on wars it couldn’t win. Instead, it went in and really applied its expertise in developing trade and in infiltrating itself into the economies of these countries. So we really played into their hands.

 

And today, I think we’re playing into their hands even more. You know, the current administration has alienated so much of the world. I just came back from Latin America a couple of weeks ago.

 

And, you know, the idea that the United States would say it’s going to take back the Panama Canal and bully Colombia into taking more immigrants and so on and so forth, this is having a very, very negative effect. And it’s opening the door even wider to China. Interesting.

 

So it appears to be strengthening this, you call this BRICS plus alliance. That’s kind of like this alternative to the Western sphere. Yes.

 

BRICS has become very, very popular and very powerful around the world. That stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But those were the founding countries.

 

And China is the one behind all of that. But now it includes a lot of other countries. And, you know, they are outspending the World Bank and its sister organizations.

 

And they have a, I guess I’d like to say a more gentle reputation of not strong-arming countries the way that our policies do, not demanding that governments support their policies overseas and so on. Now, that’s the reputation that they spread. It’s not entirely true.

 

But it’s out there in a big way. On the other hand, the United States increasingly has a reputation for bullying in countries. And we’re seeing that very, very strongly right now.

 

You know, the whole issue around Greenland, around Canada, around imposing tariffs on Mexico and Canada. And, you know, I’m really sad to see this because it opens the door to China, much wider. The door’s already open, but it’s getting wider that way.

 

You know, there’s an interesting Chinese proverb that says, if you want to build an empire, make friends, not enemies. And China’s doing that. They are very, very good at selling, for example, the New Silk Road they talk about.

 

And they’ll say, well, they’ll say to Nigeria or Peru or some other country, they’ll say, you know, the United States will give you most favored nation status. And so that means that you have a really good trading relationship with the United States. We don’t do that.

 

We give you the world’s trading status. We’re going to build ports for you and airports that allow you not just to trade with us, China, but also these ports will allow you to trade with the whole world. We’re going to open you up to this New Silk Road, which is a global road.

 

Now, again, you know, I want to emphasize, this is a really good story. And it’s effective. You know, this isn’t necessarily true.

 

And there’s a lot of play behind the scenes, the stories behind the stories that China, again, its goal is to become the world superpower, to replace the United States as the world superpower. And you see it heading down that trajectory without any hiccups so far, or are there significant obstacles to reach that point from where it stands right now? Well, there are, you know, China’s, under President Xi, since the pandemic, China’s made a lot of mistakes. And it’s built a lot of sloppy projects.

 

I just came from Ecuador a couple of weeks ago, where they built a huge power plant on a fault line in the very environmentally sensitive area of the Amazon rainforest next to an active volcano. It’s not working properly. It’s got eight big generating units.

 

It’s never run all of them at once. Well, the one time it tried to, it shorted off the whole electric system of Ecuador. It’s a poorly planned, poorly constructed project.

 

And that’s just one of many. So China’s made a lot of mistakes. But these mistakes are counterbalanced on a larger level, in a way, by the US mistakes, because these are project mistakes.

 

And China can say, well, we can fix those. And we’re learning, we’re on a learning curve. And we can fix those.

 

But when you start to really bully countries, and when you get so deeply involved in wars in the Middle East, and you spend so much money and so much energy on those wars, and in the process, you know, you send a message that’s struck the world that we’re anti-Muslim. You know, why else would we defend Israel against Palestine? Why would we go into Iraq and Afghanistan? So here in the United States, we talk about the Uyghur problem in China, that China has an anti-Muslim, but most of the world sees it quite differently. They say, yes, those are issues.

 

But the United States is the real anti-Muslim country. And so there’s all these subtleties that I think most people in the United States don’t understand how serious some of our policies are in helping us decline from being the world’s number one superpower and helping China to rise up in that direction. Yeah.

 

In regards to the Uyghurs, I’m sure there’s been many injustices done to them on behalf of the Chinese government. But I think people also need to realize that a lot of these, a lot of the Uyghur population, or a decent enough percentage, is subversive. I mean, you see this happening in Syria, where the Tajikis were part of this overthrowing of Bashar al-Assad, right? So you have to see it from the Chinese point of view.

 

Yes, they may be a little heavy handed, but I guess China just doesn’t mess around with subversive elements within its country. Well, and this deportation of immigrants in the United States is really offsetting the criticism of China as not messing around with subversives, because people have been classified as criminals and subversives, and we’re mass deportation. So, yeah.

 

So the way the world looks at this is very differently from the way we in the United States have been sort of brought up to look at this. And I would add one thing more. My most recent book was a third edition, which is this book in English about China’s economic hitman.

 

And the other two books in the trilogy were published by a big publishing house in China, in Chinese, of course, and very, very popular. My publisher and I figured this book would not be published in China because it’s very critical of China. It talks about these projects that have failed, that are poorly engineered, poorly constructed.

 

It’s very critical. Well, I just received this a couple of weeks ago. It’s the Chinese edition of this book, and I have a good friend who’s a professor here from China, and he’s read it, both of them.

 

He says that they’ve not censored the book at all. So again, we have this kind of impression that China blocks information from the outside world. I think, based on my own personal experience, I’d have to reevaluate that.

 

I really don’t know, but I do know that they’ve published my book, which is very critical of China. So what’s the rationale behind China’s blocking of American social media, though? Because people will point to that as, I guess, censorship of American media. Well, then people will look at the United States as blocking TikTok.

 

So there’s two sides to both of these arguments. I think China says, well, because U.S. media is very propagandistic, it’s in their own defensive interest to block this, which is exactly the argument that’s used by us to say that China can’t own TikTok and other outlets. So there’s these both sides.

 

So certainly the Chinese people get a biased view of the United States and NATO and the West, but we also get a very biased view of China. And at least up until the pandemic, we have to remember that China sent a lot of students to the United States and Europe, to colleges, universities, and graduate programs. Those people were free to study whatever they wanted when they were here and take back that information.

 

Now, during the pandemic, that changed and it’s still kind of changed. That’s really declined. But there was a period in there where China was sending students all over the world and learning a great deal about us and about the rest of the world.

 

We didn’t do that very much. We tend not to send students to places like China. A few, yes, but not to the extent that China’s done it.

 

So I think that China’s been a pretty… And I taught, incidentally, in an MBA program in China. And I realized, as soon as I got there, I realized that what they really wanted me there for was to learn from me about the successes. How had I been successful as an economic hitman? And what were the mistakes? What were the failures? So they could learn from my successes and my failures.

 

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Yeah. And it was kind of comical when we had that brief banning of TikTok. And there was this unintended consequence of red-pilling the youth on behalf of China.

 

So they all ended up downloading RedNote. And they started watching all of these videos of China’s architecture and China’s advancements in technology. And they were like, why don’t we have any of this? And then we reversed the TikTok ban as you well know.

 

When it comes to China and I guess this AI model that was rolled out DeepSeek earlier this week, it’s very interesting to note that they actually released it on inauguration day, January 21st, but it didn’t really start getting traction up until about a week ago. And then a couple of days after that, you had Alibaba come out with another higher performing AI model, better than DeepSeek as well, which was already considered better than OpenAI’s model or Meta’s model or any other American derived model. A lot of people attribute that to the open source aspect that these Chinese models were derived in, whereas compared to the closed source environment that we have here with OpenAI’s model is close to the public, Meta’s model is close to the public, et cetera.

 

What I’m trying to get at is you look at China’s offensive. They could have single-handedly caused a market selloff to a significant degree by just releasing one or two of these models, whereas in contrast you have, for his good stuff and his faults, he’s Donald Trump talking about building an iron dome over the United States. So you see a big contrast between the mindset of China, we’re looking ahead and building things like better performing AI models.

 

And here in the United States, it’s kind of like hunkered down, very military-esque type of thinking and this kind of stuff. What does the contrast of thinking, of philosophy, what does that portend for the relationship between the two countries down the line? Well, I think you hit the nail on the head, Danny, that the way we approach building an empire between these two countries is very, very different. China has a long, long history of being incredibly capable at developing trade.

 

And this goes back to Marco Polo and the old Silk Road and even before that, and it continues to do that. So while the United States has something like over 700 military bases around the world in over 100 countries, China has one major one in Djibouti, and then maybe four or five smaller ones, but they’re mainly units that repair and refuel their ships or their airplanes and things like that. Nobody likes an occupying force, a foreign military on their soil.

 

We have a lot of that around the world. And we’ve been very warlike in attacking Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and many other countries where we are very deeply involved in the old system of empire building that is militaristic, as well as using economic hitmen. And during the period between the end of the Vietnam War and the year 2000, we focused very much on debt, on what I did, on economic hitmen.

 

And I think that was really smart. We stayed out of the military involvement to a very large degree. We were stung in Vietnam.

 

We didn’t want to repeat that. The military, what’s called the military industrial complex in the United States, objected to that. They wanted to play a bigger role.

 

So when 9-11 came along, the military steps in, in big time. And then we had both, but there’s been more of an emphasis on military during this century than there was before. And at the same time, China has not been very militaristic, with a few obvious exceptions like Taiwan and Hong Kong and Tibet and the Indian-China border and that area.

 

But China says, well, these are part of China. We can dispute that certainly, but that’s their justification. And they’ll say, well, you guys took half of Mexico.

 

What are you complaining about? So the United States is looked at as a very warlike militaristic country. And I talk in my books about how if presidents didn’t buy into my overtures as an economic hitman to burden them with all this debt and build these incredible infrastructure projects for them. If presidents didn’t buy into that, that they knew that standing behind me were people we call the jackals, who are usually CIA assets that either overthrow governments or assassinate leaders.

 

And we have an incredibly long history and reputation for doing that, that’s been admitted by Henry Kissinger and others, that we were deeply involved in the overthrow of Allende in Chile, of course, Mossadegh in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo and Torrijos in Panama and Roldos in Ecuador, more recently Zillay in Honduras and many, many others. So we have that reputation. And it’s in this day and age of globalization, it’s serving us less and less well all the time.

 

It’s again, opening the door to this idea that China doesn’t do that. And for the most part, they haven’t done that, except as I said, in their own territory. And I’m not saying this because I’m a very loyal American.

 

I want to see us do better. That’s why I write about this. I think in a democracy, we have to be open to criticizing ourselves so that we can do better.

 

And I know we can do a lot better and we need to do a lot better. And if we can look at China as a legitimate competitor, just like back in the 70s, I well recall how we were competing with Japan in a big way. And that actually helped us a lot, that competition, the fear that Japan was overtaking us in technological areas, helped us to develop our own businesses.

 

If we can really look at that as China’s competitor, yes, this business of open AI versus China’s different systems, Alibaba, etc. If we can look at that as a healthy competition, then we’ll get better at what we do. Both countries will probably get better.

 

And theoretically, the world will benefit from that. Yeah. It’s been about a week since, a little over a week since Trump’s inauguration.

 

There has been some good, along with some bad, but here’s some good. Trump did announce that we are pulling out of Syria, right? He is a little bit more, he’s a little less antagonistic per se to Putin and Russia, or at least Putin’s not pushing back on him as much as he was with Biden. What are the odds that we see a pulling out of the Eastern Hemisphere by way of the Middle East, by way of Eastern Europe, and we start seeing a shifting of prioritization from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere? Meaning, again, to your point, you did mention the acquisition, potential acquisition of Greenland, potential acquisition of the Panama Canal.

 

What do you make of this kind of realignment potentially from East to West? Do you see this kind of coming into fruition where Trump pulls us out of the West, or sorry, out of the East and more so into the Western Hemisphere? I really have no idea. I try to be basically apolitical. I’m not criticizing Trump per se or defending him.

 

Either way, what I try to look at is what’s serving us best in the world. By threatening to take over the Panama Canal, we’re alienating ourselves from a lot of Latin American countries. Whether you think it’s the right thing to do from a strategic standpoint or not, it is alienating people.

 

Actually, from a strategic standpoint, the fourth fleet, the U.S. Navy, stands right off Panama. Whether we own the canal or not, we control it totally if we want to. If we want, we don’t control it because we don’t need to right now, but we could.

 

I think what I try to do is look at what’s best for the United States and putting ourselves in a position where the world becomes our enemy, or that they fear us. It does not help us in a time when China, at the same time, is presenting a picture of itself as the good guy that’s going to help the world. Again, I’m not saying that China actually does that, but they have a story to tell.

 

I think it’s really important for people in the United States, for us to recognize that we want to be a world leader, absolutely. I want us to stay on top and spread democracy and spread our way. We’ve got to be smart in the way we do that.

 

That’s what I look at in these situations. I think the first two weeks of the Trump administration has not helped us in that way. I was very hopeful when Trump got elected.

 

I was thinking, yeah, well, there’s a lot of good that can come out of this. We get Europe to invest more money in NATO and in its own defense systems. Many of these things are great ideas, but there have also been some things that have put us in a difficult position.

 

I was on a Zoom call yesterday with a bunch of people from Latin America from four or five different countries. All of them are deeply, deeply concerned at the that they are afraid of it because of the bullying of Colombia. Really, Colombia gave in because it’s got to.

 

It’s a much smaller economy. It depends on the United States. But in the process of giving in, it also upset a lot of people.

 

The idea of taking over the Panama Canal really, really scares Latin Americans. How do you think they react? Fear. Do they react to the U.S. or do they find partnerships elsewhere? What do you think will be the unintended consequences of this? Oh, definitely they’ll turn more and more to China.

 

They’ll see China not only as an alternative investment, which it already is, and a trading partner, because China is the number one trading partner in most of Latin America now. But they’ll also see China as possibly being a bit of a protection against U.S. influence. Where does Russia fit into all this? Does Russia have any presence as it relates to having an economic hitman position as well? Not really.

 

It never really did. During the Cold War, which is when I was an economic hitman, China, excuse me, the Soviet Union really didn’t have much to offer. Latin America, we used to talk about the red tide, but it was very small.

 

Che Guevara was the number one exporter of Soviet ideology militarily, and he only had about two dozen people in his army when he was taken captive in Bolivia. The Soviet Union, the fear during the Cold War, and still, is that Russia has nuclear weapons and some crazy leadership that might threaten to use them, has threatened to use these, that might actually use them in a terribly devastating way. I think Russia is feared, but it doesn’t have the sphere of influence.

 

I don’t know anybody in any country around the world that really wants to adopt the Russian system or be part of that system. Whereas China’s different. People have a much greater respect for China and for what it’s done in the world and the way it’s done it.

 

And what do you make of Iran? Iran seems to kind of want to be a little less provocative in the Middle East lately. They didn’t falter with Operation True Promise 3 like they said they would. In Davos last week, their vice president came out and just pretty much tried to say that we just want to normalize with Europe and the United States.

 

What do you make of Iran’s presence in the Middle East? Do you see them kind of normalizing with the U.S. moving forward or not? Iran has had these huge setbacks and I spent a lot of time in Iran during the 70s, the whole period of the 70s. I was working for the Shah, basically, of Iran as a consultant for U.S. corporations really. The Iranian people are very, very proud.

 

They’ve always seen themselves as leaders in the Middle East, but they’ve taken a real tumble recently. They had a president assassinated. They’ve watched Hezbollah and Hamas, which they support, fall apart in recent years.

 

And Israeli missiles have now gone into Iran. Iran has had some devastating setbacks in the last few years. Who knows where they’re going to go next, but I think they must be feeling the need to negotiate more with us because I think they’re getting to see that they can’t really beat us, they’re also, at the same time, apparently developing a nuclear capability.

 

They’re a scary country, let’s face it. Under the Mullahs, I think they’re a very scary and unpredictable country. And they’ve also suffered some serious setbacks.

 

And when countries suffer setbacks like this, they can either go in one of two directions. I think they can go the way that Germany did after its many setbacks after World War I when it adopted Hitler and Nazism. Or they can go to the radical route of becoming more and more warlike, more and more isolated and insulated.

 

Or they can see that it’s important to reach out to the world and become more globalized. And I don’t know what Iran’s going to do. As you mentioned, it looks as though right now that they’re in a position of trying to negotiate themselves into a better position with the rest of the world.

 

That could just be a ploy. Who knows? I think we have to wait and see what really happens in Iran. And the other country too that’s been, appears to be making a lot of news in the Middle East too, is Turkey.

 

Turkey is very unique because it’s kind of like that nexus point between Europe and West Asia, Middle East. What do you make of Turkey becoming, can Turkey become the new superpower of the Middle East considering that they were, it appears that they were behind the toppling of Assad. They do have a big presence there in the northern part of Syria.

 

Is Turkey kind of positioning itself to re-establish a lost Ottoman Empire? Fascinating. It’s a fascinating question. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Turkey in the 70s and also in the last decade or so.

 

I’ve spoken at several big conferences there and followed Erdogan, the head of Turkey. And you know, back maybe 15 years ago, he was looked at as the hope for the Middle East. He was this democratic president, supposedly, that was good, that was exhibiting very wise leadership and maybe would set a tone for the Middle East.

 

But then something happened and he became very dictatorial and quite unpopular. You know, the statistics show that he’s popular, but that’s rigged. And now he seems to be coming back in though, as you said, you know, his role in Syria and reaching out to the world.

 

And, you know, as you point out, Turkey is right there. It’s the dividing line between Asia and Europe. It’s in a very pivotal position and it controls the, you know, the transportation between the Black Sea and the rest of the world.

 

So that means a lot of Russia and other parts. It’s in a very critical position. And again, it’s something we have to wait and see where it goes next.

 

But it certainly seems as though Erdogan is trying to reestablish his credibility in the world that he had previously and then lost for a long time, and now seems to be trying to regain that. And I think he sees this as an opportune time when things in the Middle East are in such flux. And as you pointed out, he was deeply involved in the overthrow of Assad.

 

Yeah, it’s very interesting times indeed. John, thank you so much for coming on, my friend. Anything else you want to talk about that we didn’t get into before we wrap up? Well, you know, I think what’s important about all of this is that what we’ve really done, Danny, is create what many economists are calling a death economy, an economic system that’s consuming and polluting itself toward extinction.

 

You know, we talk about the problems of climate change or income inequalities or species extinctions or whatever. But the problem behind all of those problems, the big problem, is this economic system that’s based on excessive materialism, maximizing short-term profits for corporations regardless of the social and environmental costs. And all of these things that we’ve been talking about revolve around that and revolve around gathering more and more resources.

 

What we really need to be looking at is transitioning to what we call a life economy, which is an economic system that pays people to clean up pollution, to come up with ways to corral all the plastic floating around in the oceans and recycle it, to rejuvenate devastated environments, to recycle, to create new technologies that’ll produce energy out of air and water and things we haven’t even conceived of. And we’ve been headed in that direction to a certain degree with electric cars and solar or whatever, people thinking in that direction. And AI offers the opportunity to really move in that direction.

 

So I think we’re living at this very exciting time where right now we’re very focused on the problems between China and the United States, Russia, Iran, North Korea. We haven’t even talked about them, but the things we’ve been talking about. But the real issue is, what are we going to do as human beings from a global aspect? And I think, my hope is that throughout all this chaos that we’re experiencing now, will come a realization that China and the United States and Latin America and Africa, we all have to work together to create an economic system that’ll truly serve our children and grandchildren, that’ll serve future generations.

 

And right now, we’re experimenting with it, but we’ve been on a course of creating an economic system that’s making a very scary world. I have a grandson of 17 years old, very, very smart guy, and he’s really concerned about the world he’s growing up in as well he should be. So I’m hoping that out of all this chaos will come a resolution on the part of all of us to work together.

 

We can compete on many levels, but let’s compete on levels that will take us to a life economy. And incidentally, throughout most of the 200,000 years that we’ve considered ourselves human beings, we’ve lived in a life economy. It’s only been in the last couple of thousand years, particularly in the more recent decades, that we’ve moved into this extreme materialistic view of the world.

 

But our past as human beings has been to live in an economic system that rejuvenates itself. It’s regenerative, not degenerative. So I’m hoping that that’s where we’re going from here.

 

And I think all your listeners should feel blessed to be alive at this time because we are at the cusp. We are really exploring human evolution. What does it mean to be human beings, being human on this planet? It’s an exciting time to be alive.

 

Yes, extreme challenges and extreme opportunities to really move into a new level of consciousness, a new evolution of being human. I think you put this very well. We are heading into uncertain times.

 

I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going to happen next, especially with the advent of AI. Just look at the recent progress that we’ve seen from AI from 2022 up until today. I don’t know if you recall the AI generated video of Will Smith eating a bowl of spaghetti back in 2022, but it was all discombobulated.

 

It was nonsensical. It didn’t really make much sense. As of a few months ago, we’ve perfected Will Smith eating noodles and spaghetti and so forth.

 

This is not a trivial matter. AI is progressing at a rate that is seemingly exponential. You had the rollout of DeepSea.

 

You had the rollout of Alibaba’s AI, showcasing that these models can be built without intensive capital expenditure. Who knows where we might be four years from now? We could very well be in a much, much different world then. Thank you so much for coming here, John.

 

You offer a brilliant diagnosis as well as brilliant potential solutions down the line in Hope. Where can people find you if they want to hear or see more? JohnPerkins.org. Everything’s there. I really encourage people to put your email address in the little box where you’ll receive a newsletter about once a month.

 

It’s fairly short, but I think it generates a lot of conversation. JohnPerkins.org. Sign up for the newsletter. Then you’ll also, on the newsletter, get where I’m going to be speaking at various events around the country, around the world, and taking people into Latin America to learn there.

 

That information all comes with the newsletter. I really encourage people to do that. Awesome.

 

We’ll have the link to that down below, so be sure to check it out, guys. If you got value out of this video, be sure to give us a like and type GOJOHNGO in the comment section. If you disagreed with anything, however, do let me know.

 

I do read the comments. So drop me your thoughts. I do read them.

 

Subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss an episode and check us out on Substack, capitalcosm.substack.com, where you can get early access and ad-free versions of all of my videos, as well as uncensored versions for the videos that require it. With all that said, thank you guys so much for watching, and I’ll catch you in the next episode. Bye, y’all.

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