Changing the Dream of Modern Medicine with John Perkins

00:19 Welcome back. We continue the conversation with former economic Hit Man and also shaman, John Perkins. In the first episode, we dove deep into a lot of the problems going on across the world in medicine and beyond that. Now let's start to focus in on what we can do about it and one of the examples in there with Monsanto, which has mentioned a couple of times in your book is in the African country of Mali that Monsanto was working to write their constitution the language so that they could propagate their GMO crops there and make a profit off of doing so. And Monsanto's kind of unanimously known as one of the most evil corporations out there for what they've done across many different things, which is part of the reason why Bayer recently bought them in the Monsanto name is going away. But we can see that once again, it's the same sort of Imperial test sticks that are used in the health field. Is there any difference there between what you've seen and what you experienced in your previous role and what is going on in health?

01:21 Well, I think the analogy is very strong. You know the power that the big pharmaceutical companies like Bayer for example, have is enormous in that field. We know that, but I think the book I just finished writing, which will be out later this year and people can preorder my website or anywhere Amazon or indie books or whatever, touching the Jaguar. I really get into this idea that our reality as human beings is molded by our perceptions. Totally. There is no, the United States, there's no China except as lead proceeded and when enough people except a perception on codified into a lie, it becomes a reality. The same could be said for religion and culture and corporations. In the United Nations, the perception that the world health organization, the perception, the pharmaceutical companies, what's that perception? But you have a bunch of investors that expect their pharmaceutical companies to make big rates of return for them.

02:21 And pharmaceuticals have a reputation for doing that. And so the pharmaceuticals could do that. They're not selling better health, they're selling short term suppression of symptoms because if they were really just selling better health, they'd eventually lose their rates of return and go out of business if they could really make the population more healthy. What they want to do is keep these diseases out there but have a way to alleviate or lessen them to a certain degree. And so there's this perception again that maximizing short term profits, that's only a perception, but that's what drives business today and it's created a reality of a very dangerous world or the world for healthcare is not really healthcare, it's symptom suppression and where the industry is basically consuming itself. And dictation, as I said earlier, but that's all based on this perception of short term profits.

03:16 And I think we're actually moving in a new perception. I feel it very strongly as I travel around the world a lot. As you know Logan speaking at places like it just this last year, the Czech Republic, The Bahamas will follow a lot in America and a couple of years ago Russia tried to all of the United States, many, many different places to many different types of audiences and everywhere I go I find that people are waking up including CEO to the fact that we are creating a monster. There is a death economy, it can't last. It's got to change. And the real question is how do you make it change? And I think the answer is you would get to change our perception of what it means to be successful as a business and as individuals. So it's all about perception and it is changing. You know we've got the whole conscious capital movement, the B corporation benefit corporation movement, the green new deal.

04:10 The top executives from 192 companies came together last August at the business round table and produced a statement saying that they no longer should their goal be to maximize short term profits. It should include taking care of their employees, taking care of their customers, or taking care of the communities where the businesses are located. That's very, very big. They've got to act on that now are we the consumers and investors and workers for the need to force them to commit to doing those things. But they did make the statement, they are creating a new perception and that's very important.

04:43 Yeah. Pachamama Alliance talks about changing the dream of the modern world and recognizing a piece of that is the dream of modern medicine. And in one of your, you kind of have two flavors of both. You have the stuff on the economic Hit Man and the shamanism and in the book shapeshifting talk about shape-shifting institutions and corporations going from the death economy to the life economy or this predatory capitalism to a more democratic capitalism. And I do definitely see that shift going on in there. And you and I both were capitalists, we believe in capitalism. It's just, it can't be this crony capitalism that is going on.

05:24 Yeah. Well, we don't really have capitalism today. We have oligarchies corporate monopolies and oligarchies and we, this is not when people say we're going to get rid of capitalism, what they mean is we get rid of the predatory form of capitalism, which really, in my opinion, is not true capitalism at all. Cause true capitalism is based on the idea that there's a lot of very healthy competition and the system we have now you, you buy out or you somehow you get rid of your competitors

05:54 so when the reason they started this podcast was like the system is very big, I obviously am not going to change it on my own. There's just so much power there. But I can help people that any individual can become sovereign in their own health by making the decision to do so. Then it's a similar sort of thing. A business can choose to maximize long term profits which will actually end up helping people and their customers and all that rather than short term profits. What are some other steps that people can make that will help this shift happen? Not just individually but on a larger scale.

06:31 And that's a large part of the book that touched Jaguar where you, I get into this and it's a fairly complex story and that all of us are different, but each one of us is driven by certain passions that we have and certain skills that we have. I have a passion for writing and hopefully some skills at it. So that's where I really focus my efforts. You have a passion for the health business and for this podcast, so you're focusing on that. Let's say I have a good friend who is a carpenter and he has the passion for building things with his hands, Cochran trait and the way he can move forward with this is to make sure that he uses sustainable materials as possible and lets his customers know that he's doing that and if the price is a little bit more, he can let them know that that's not a cost, it's an investment.

07:19 They're investing in the future. Each one of us needs to really look at what it is we want to do with the rest of our lives. Beginning this afternoon, beginning of tomorrow, what do we want to do? What would make us happiest? Because if we're not doing what makes us happiness, brings us satisfaction, well then we're never going to be prosperous. No matter how much money we have. And we can all contribute in our own way. And I think one of the questions to ask is, okay, I want to do what makes me happiest, but how do I also contribute to this idea of a long term life economy? So yes, I love to write, but now I devote all my writing to writing about things that will lead us toward life, economy, a long term life economy. The carpenter I mentioned can do his carpentry. With that in mind, how does he make these more and more sustainable in using local materials, teachers, parents, whatever you are, it's really important to ask yourself, what is it that I most want to do that will bring me the greatest satisfaction?

08:15 And then you ask what's stopping me? And that's where the idea of touching the Jaguar, which comes out of the Amazon, comes in and we say there's a Jaguar that stands on our path that stops us. So let's just use my example as a writer that may have a Jaguar that stands there and says, I just don't have time to write or I don't have anything to write about. And if I let that Jaguar stop me, then I'm going to be unhappy. But if I go ahead and touch that Jaguar, so the indigenous people say when you have something that stops, shoot, don't run from it. Don't deny it, don't turn your back on it cause it'll follow you. Go to it, touch it and take its energy. So if I go and touch that and say, well actually I do something to write about.

08:56 I have a really interesting story in my background. Everybody has an interesting story. Their background, if they think about it in the right way, and I'll make time, I'll get up half an hour earlier every morning and write for half an hour. If I write for half an hour every day and by the end of the year I've got a lot of pages written and a competent could say, well my client's just not interested in being sustainable. And you could say, well, carpenter is all about building for the future. So I'm going to convince them that building for the future means building for the future, not just the house, you know, next month and next year, but for the future of the children are going to inherit that house or whatever. So we touch that Jaguar, we look at what's stopping us from doing what we most want to do. And then we go to it and we touch it and we accept its energy and we mold our actions in such a way that we create a new reality for ourselves. Again, our perceptions, mold our realities. And so we moved from a reality that I can't do this. There's something holding me back to a reality that, well, yeah, I can do this. I just gotta change my perceptions about how to go about doing it. And then we take the actions necessary to make that happen. So I get up earlier every morning and write, for example

10:08 yup. Definitely done my fair share of that as well.

10:11 Yeah. Or the carpenter, you know, just start by saying, Hey, you know, I'm building this house for you guys and look, you know, look, I love you. I'm using this great wood that doesn’t come from using any old growth trees I'm using. I'm using woods that are very, very sustainably produced, and I just want you to know that the price, it may be a little bit higher, but think of what you're investing in your kids in the future. And just to start talking about that in a very sweet way, not being dogmatic and maybe even telling a story behind the tree and how that all happened.

10:44 I've been reflecting on the word materialism because that word is, speaks to this idea of, especially in the West here, we're just trying to gobble up goods and have five different cars and all that sort of thing. That's like one type of materialism, but it's also the philosophy that we're just our physical bodies and even consciousness is only an epiphenomenon of the brain. That's like philosophy and how these in a way seem to go hand in hand and that this is part of that perception, that dream that is beginning to break are beginning to fall apart. But I think it's interesting is we really need to look at kind of like deep light paradigms of how we think about the world, that if there's no shift there, then overall any small changes we make isn't going to be enough.

11:34 Yeah, well the small changes help, but ultimately what's really gonna matter is that we convince the businesses that we work for or buy from or invest in or even run our own. There has to be a new way of looking at what means and it means long term benefits, not necessarily long longterm profit because it depends on how we define profits, but long term benefits. And so we define people who are successful, that people who appear on the cover of Forbes, let's say, or the Wall Street Journal even are not the people who are making the most profits. They're the people who are making a better world and that better world includes a lot of nonmaterial things like how do we encourage more music and poetry and spirituality and people getting together and enjoying each other and enjoying life and enjoying nature and making nature more available to inner-city children.

12:34 And so there's so many different things. Regenerating, destroyed environments cleaning up pollution, paying people to actually clean up pollution, even paying a company like general dynamics instead of making missiles, make equipment that will mine all the plastic in the oceans and recycle it. So recycling, regenerating, destroying the environment, coming up with whole new technologies that don't use up resources. Yeah, solar and wind are a current example of that, but they're very primitive stages right now I think I'd like to say is 10 years from now that the technologies we have today, we'll look back at and say, how could we have been so stupid? Those are such analog types of technologies. Let's come up with, we'll hopefully we'll come up with much more and better ways to turn a or into energy and there's no reason why we can't do that and so on is, so Logan, I, I'm, I'm tongue-tied that it's, I guess we're excited that the future here is phenomenal.

13:37 The life economy offers us opportunities to do amazing things and we're not talking about going back and living in caves that could happen if we don't move in this direction. But if we do move in this direction, it means that we can enhance our lifestyles tremendously and become much more oriented toward the arts. Spirituality as you put it in that sometimes there's a word that turns certain people off. And by it I don't mean necessarily being more religious, it would be religious for some people, but it could just be a deeper feeling of connection with our families and with the places where we live. That's a deep type of spirituality also. So just feeling more connected. That connection that we've been losing and particularly losing through a lot of modern technology to get it back, to use that technology to bring us into this life economy.

14:31 Another quote or you're talking about in the book is, as you were saying right there, reminded me of it. We're not going back to the case. Well, there are big changes coming in one way. We might go that another way. Hopefully, things get a bit better, but it's not that we're going backward in time, but we quote, we can, in fact, return to the principles upon which pneumonic cultures are based. So some of those principles would be the connection. You're talking about connection to other humans, but connection to nature as well. Kind of sustainability that goes with living that way. What are some of the other principles that kind of, I guess to speak to that, the overall perceptions of people that pneumonic cultures have that we've really lost here in the West?

15:14 Yeah, and I want to start by saying I don't idealize individual people at all. There are very some ones in there are very crazy ones. They're compassionate ones. And there are brutal ones. There are well-balanced ones and there are psychotic ones. They're human like everybody else. What I do respect is in general, the traditional indigenous cultures placed a huge priority and I'm making a better future for the children or at least keeping the same future, not hurting the future. Looking at the long term. And that's something we don't do. We're looking at the short term really. Hey, what the stock market is doing today. You know what the next quarterly report is going to look like, these kinds of things. So I think that idea of taking care of the future, being good stewards, that if you think about it, Logan, we all come from those cultures.

16:07 We figured human beings have been on this planet as we know ourselves for roughly 250,000 years, it's only been doing three or 4,000 that we've moved in this direction away from long-term. And it's been particularly within the last couple of hundred years that we've really jumped that way. And even more so within the last 50 years. And it's a blink in history and we all come from these economies that truly world life economies and the indigenous people, people you visited in the Amazon, the Atwal, the Schwab and all these, these people are still living that way. Pretty much. They're losing it to a certain degree because our systems are coming in and the oral started music coming in and the mining companies are coming in. Cattle ranchers are coming in, but up until very recently they'd been living that way and we all come from ancestors that live that way.

16:59 We need to reconsider how we can live that way. In modern terms, again, not living in caves, but maybe take New York City, for example, get rid of all the highways, tendered them into solar panels in the city, all the streets, all the roads. Get rid of the cars. Can you create solar panels and turn all the garages, put mirrors on them and turn them into hydroponic gardens that can grow great food and also be beautiful places for people to visit and rooftops and so forth. You know, it's, there's so much that we can do. It's almost beyond imagination what the potential is, but we can't imagine it and therefore we can make it happen and I believe that we are in the process of making it happen.

17:40 Yeah, I feel that was one. The reason though, wanting to go to the Amazon is a lot of people say that travel is a great way to get educated and especially I feel like a lot of travel these days is just going from one big city to another and oftentimes cities are really the same. But being able to go to see indigenous culture, that kind of still living at least for the most part in that way really begins to shake the perceptions. I kind of feel with our media and the authorities and everything that we're really, most people get locked into a very specific way of thinking and experiences such as that are good for really shaking out of it and at least getting kind of a fluid worldview where you can begin to open up to new possibilities.

18:25 Yes, in particular, I traveled where you're going with an intent and a commitment to come back and change the world. You know, and I think that the trips that you've taken with me that would make that very clear and you know, people can go to my website, John perkins.org and see how on the trips that we do there, the intent always is to learn. For example, the Mayan people in Guatemala, they went through this, their culture, these huge cities, these huge pyramids, the cities were destroyed. Our calendar year around 900 they just abandoned them, went away because they destroyed their environment, they cut the trees, they drained the swamps, they did exactly what we're doing on our global level. They did it on a microcosm level and they know this. And so they invite us to come so that we can learn from them not to make that same mistake.

19:10 And I like to tell people, you know, don't just get on an airplane and travel to be a tourist. Travel to learn and to make a commitment to come back and spread the word and make changes as are doing by having this program. You know, and I think some of this, your commitment to all this, some of it grew out of some of those trips and those visits and the indigenous people and that's a great way to do it. You know when we travel, we leave a fairly big carbon footprint, but I was at suggested people do a benefit-cost analysis. The cost of you going into the Amazon or going into the Mayan sites is a high-carbon footprint, you know, track temple, a few plants and so on. But if you're going to offset that by coming back and really helping to change the perception of the world, that perception of human beings to change the human reality on this planet, to make a more environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling socially just much a mom Alliance, mission statement, human presence on this planet, then it's worth doing it.

20:10 Absolutely. And it definitely was life-changing for me. And I recommend people look into that for calls to you at all. I forget who was on the trip, but someone put it on his leg. It really was a pilgrimage and you know, not growing up religious or anything, didn't have anything like this in my life before, but that's I guess part of the reason why it was so profound. Right. Well, we're coming right up on the hour here, so I want to thank you very much. John, can you mention your website again? New book. We'll have links to everything in the show notes here, but yeah, anything you want people to be aware of.

20:43 Okay, thanks Logan. I'd love to, it's John Perkins. Dot. It's an org, not a com and there's a little box when you go on there that you can put your email address in and we'll receive the newsletters. I'd really encourage you to do that. That basically comes up once a month and on that I've got a big book tour coming up. Remember speaking at a lot of different cities around the United States. I'd love to meet your listeners and that'll be it. Now it's in the newsletters. Within the next month or two, we'll have all the dates and places set up. So I'd encourage people to do that. Can also please preorder the book touching the Jaguar. You can preorder it now through my website that'll take you to wherever you want to go to order it or in your local bookstore and that helps the book get on the bestseller list, which is great as far as spreading the word, you know, I'm not in this for the money, the books making, I'm donating a fairly decent percentage of the profits to the Pachamama Alliance, but I am in it to get this message out as much as possible.

21:39 So I really appreciate people helping me do that. And also on my website, it a link to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I'm on all of those. Thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, of course. Well, thank you so much John. This has been a pleasure.

It's my pleasure, Logan, and thank you for all you're doing and this is the way we get the word out. Thank you very much. Absolutely. My pleasure.