Richard Lloyd Jones: The mythology says there's a free hand of benevolence calming or cajoling the marketplace, but it seems that's mostly dogma. Economics is a theology guided by whatever belief structure is in vogue in the brokers of power of the moment. And for most of recorded history, those powerful have not been our friends. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the economy of destruction.
This is a topic that's close to my heart, actually, and what first got me resonating with the philosophy of Dr. Norberto Keppe. His book, Liberation of the People, the Pathology of Power, really opened my eyes wide to the pathology behind the power structures and actually changed forever how I saw the world. The idea that we could analyze society through a psychological lens was totally refreshing to me.
And helped calm a deep anguish I'd had because I could see the distorted social structure we were living in but could never explain how it got that way. And how after every election everything continued pretty much as it had before. Keppe's book, by the way, Liberation of the People, is still available for free to you. You can contact me at rich at richjonesvoice.com for information on how to get a copy of that book.
Well, that's something about Keppe's work on psychosociopathology, but he's also put forward remarkable new ideas in science as well. His book, The New Physics, redefines the laws of physics and energy and even genetics dramatically. Actually, there's a big demonstration of this in a new motor that's been created based on his work, a free energy motor that works on Keppe's disinversion of a basic scientific tenant that energy comes from matter.
That's what people used to believe, but it doesn't. It comes from the essential energy field of the universe that's manifested into two forms, secondary energy, electromagnetic energy, the energy of Einstein's theory, and matter. Well, this will become clear on our site, actually. If you want to check that motor out, do so. You'll find it pretty fascinating.
Just click on the English site.
You'll see it right there. And by the way, all of Keppe's work is going to be explored in great depth at our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy in San Diego this coming September. You can check that out at www.wcatus.org. As always, write me if you want more information on any of this stuff, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Today, economist Eduardo Nascimento joins me to look at Keppe's ideas in economics.
You know, Eduardo, we're in trouble economically and environmentally, too. U.S. Is a disaster today. Trillions of dollars in debt, oil prices skyrocketing, mortgage crises deepening. Let's try to understand Keppe's work here to see if we can put our finger on the source of the problem there. I want to look at one of these graphics that Dr. Keppe does for his TV program and just go through this with you.
Eduardo, the first point on this in terms of improving our economic situation and everything in the world is to end interest rates. Wow, that's a dramatic step. How do you see that?
Yes, because that's a very strong way of derive money from the base of population that doesn't have, or they stimulate people to consume things they don't need. So that's a way people give a lot of their fruit of their work to people that already have a lot of money.
So that's a very important point because this is a source of income to people that really doesn't work.
Richard: I was thinking of it this way. If you get a credit card from a bank, for example, which there are thousands of them now, I get even emails now inviting me to get new credit cards almost every week. So you get a credit card And that's like a way of manufacturing money because that's a card that somebody then uses as money.
So it's created money by the bank or whoever's releasing the credit card. It's money that they've created, which is kind of a crazy thing anyway. But when somebody uses the credit card and then has to pay it back, they're paying it back with work that they actually do. Work that they have to do to earn the money to pay back this invented money that was invented by the credit card company.
Yeah, that's a very, very important thing because I always ask to students where the money comes from. And all of them have the idea that the Brazilian mint brings money. So the money comes from Brazilian mint. And what they're saying is very, very true. The money comes from banks. They can create much more money, 90 times. Sometimes it gets to 30 times more, for example, $1,000.
So they can make loans of $10,000, 10 times more or something like this.
Richard: In Canada, it's 300 times. So the money that I invest, that I put in my savings account of the bank, they can loan that out 300 times, which means they're making 300% on money that doesn't exist. Yeah,
and they receive interest rates based on this. They receive profit out of this.
And that's why we have so extraordinary profits in banks. For example, here in Brazil, there are banks that have more than 8 billion reais, 5 billion dollars as profit, not as income.
Richard: But I can feel the bankers sort of running to lynch us as we talk about ending interest rates. What does this mean? How can we do this? The whole system is based on interest rates.
How do we unplug ourselves from that? What's the advantage of us doing that? How do we do that? Is it even possible to do that?
Yes, there are some examples around the world. For example, one very known example is Jokke Bank there in Sweden. I think that you have already a podcast with Per-Erik from Jokke Bank. They don't charge any kind of interest.
They only receive a kind of fee for their services they do, just to pay the staff and make some promotions or to pay the facilities, these kind of things. So they don't receive profit out of money, because money, it should be just a way to facilitate the interchange of things. But now it's a measure of value. So if you have money, so you have power, you can buy a lot of things and you can even make a profit of it.
You can make profit of the money you have. So there in Sweden, that's a very interesting example. They have more than 30,000 members there in Sweden. And it really works and people are very satisfied with this bank. And
Richard: the bank is making money.
Yeah, they are able to survive, you know, in a very good way and try to help the society.
Richard: The history of banking is kind of a strange kind of thing.
It started with people who had a lot of gold and they didn't know what to do with their gold and they couldn't carry it around with them all the time. And they found the jewel makers, the jewelers in the towns had these strong boxes and they could keep the gold there with these guys and pay them a fee for it. But the goldsmiths got very smart, smart, in between quotes, right?
Because they realized that whoever was storing the gold there was not going to come for all their gold at one time. So they thought, well, listen, I can loan out a portion of this guy's gold. He'll never know. I can loan it out to somebody else with interest. I can make money on his gold. That's the basis of the banking system.
Yeah, so that's why Dr.
Keppel wrote a book called Work and Capital, because what really matters in the world is the work. And he perceived when he arrived there at the United States that the society was much more focused on speculation, on monetarism, these kind of things. And he perceived, oh, this is something wrong. What really matters is work. The whole bank system no deal with this, to create money out of money, not related to
Richard: real work.
Yeah, money is not tied to work, it's not tied to production anymore. All the production in North America is happening in other countries. So there's lots of money in the system in the United States, or even Canada, but no real production to base that on. And that's the same as having money that you're making on phantom money. It's not really money that really exists, but you're making money on this money that doesn't exist.
You're making interest on this interest on the money that doesn't exist. It's like an inflationary cycle that can never be sustained.
Yes, and that's why we are seeing what's happening to the economy there in the United States. You know, they must have an inflow of money from outside to keep this system. But what's happening now is there is no more production, it's just a question of faith.
If people start to not give more credit to this money, so the whole system will
Richard: collapse. Look what the Nobel laureate Robert Mundell is warning us about. China today has 1.6 trillion U.S. Reserves stockpiled. And they're terrified because if the dollar begins to be devalued more, that $1.6 trillion is going to devalue a lot because that's money they have invested in U.S.
Dollar reserves. So there's a big movement now, sort of behind the scenes. We're not hearing too much about it publicly, but behind the scenes, a real movement to try to freeze exchange rates so that the dollar doesn't fall more. And these Chinese industrialists and investors lose all their money or lose a big portion of their money.
Yeah, but everything that's based on wrong things collapse someday.
No, that's the same thing which happened with our own health, for example. If we construct a life based on real things, so our health will collapse. So it's the same thing with the economy.
Richard: And not being tied to anything real makes it dangerous. So Keppe's second point after entering interest rates is this thing you've been talking about, about giving value to work again, not giving so much value to capital.
Now capital is the king, not the work, not the production. The third element that he's included in his strategies to improve our economic situation and improve our society is to eliminate speculation completely. And again, I can see a lot of people running to lynch us as we talk about this. So although these are extreme measures, they're based on real fundamental psychological and life principles.
You can't make money from nothing, even though people are doing this all the time. Talk a bit about how you see that, Eduardo.
For example, if you observe the most powerful people in the world, You will find that there are many of them, maybe the majority of them, are people that just work with speculation. And what Dr. Kemp proposes is that the ones who really produce should receive the money from their own work.
So we talk a lot of sex issues as immoral, for example. But what's really immoral is someone that only has the money, receiving money out of it, not related to work, not producing anything to the society. In other words, you know, they are really taking things from
Richard: society, you know. And there's an argument for this, because what's happening, if somebody is investing, all of us in North America have some kind of investments, we're actually making money on somebody else's work.
But the argument in support of this is that we're actually helping to invest in the company. Without our money, the company couldn't grow. How do you answer that investment? Because many people are thinking, wait a minute, I'm investing, I'm also helping. Okay, I'm receiving something, I'm receiving 7% or 10% or 15% if I'm lucky on my money that I've invested, but I'm also contributing to that company's growth.
Let's talk about it from a trilogical point of view. If we have a trilogical company and I have money that I want to invest in the company to buy something, a new piece of equipment here in the studio or something like that, the company pays me back out of the profits that we generate through these new initiatives that we're developing. Which I think is a fair way to do it.
If I want to invest in a company, why am I investing in the company? Am I investing in the company to help the company to do something good in society, or Am I investing in the company in order for me to make money without doing anything? I think that's the
intention we need to think about, Eduardo. Yes, that's a very interesting point.
Because the way people invest money today is to make more money. It's not to just generate something that's helpful to society. For example, if we go to a stock market, for example, they only see figures. They don't see, for example, if they're investing in a company that's producing copper there in Peru, for example, and if these companies harm the environment and so on.
They only see if there is a demand of copper, big demand of copper, and there is a perspective of growing incomes. And if there is a perspective of growing incomes, so I will invest in this. And they say that I'm contributing to the development of the society. But the point is, do we need more copper? Do we need more other things? And that's an important thing that's happening nowadays to food, for example.
Richard: Look, if I invested in a company, I'm investing in that company to make money. I don't really care so much. There's more emphasis on this now, but I don't really care so much what they're doing to make that money. I mean, obviously, there's socially responsible investing now. These movements are starting to happen. So this is a good thing to see. But generally speaking, if I'm investing in a company, especially if I have a mutual fund, I don't even know which companies I'm investing in.
And the other thing is that if that company starts to lose money, boy, I'm going to pull my money out of there so fast it'll make your head spin. So I'm not investing to help the company. I'm investing for me to make money. And I want to make money the most percentage of money I can make on the money I've got invested, depending how risky an investor I am, how willing I am to risk my money.
I want to make the most amount of money possible. So the whole principle, I think, needs to be rethought. And that's what Dr. Keppe is talking about here when he talks about eliminating speculation.
Yeah, because if you perceive, the ones who receive more in this cycle are not the workers, the person that really produces. For example, if you take a very strong company or even a government, if you see to where this interest rate, where this interest, this amortization, the services of debts, is in the hands of few investment funds or banks.
It's somehow around 90% that's concentrated in the high level of society, you know. It's a way of taking money from the people that really works, people that really construct a country or enterprise, it's the same thing, to give this money to these people, not these very few people, and fewer and
Richard: fewer day by day. And Dr. Keppe is talking very much about linking the amount of money we make to the work we do.
And this is something that will change everything completely because I'm not going to be able to make money on just being a smart investor or having a good financial advisor. I'm going to have to make money based on my work. And I think this is something that could return us to basics. It sounds kind of like an old idea, you know, like we sound really old-fashioned when we say this.
But this will eliminate this whole making money with nothing because the economy has nothing to support it now. It's totally a bubble. As we're seeing in the United States, real estate problems that are happening there, the currency crises we're seeing, the looming problems with the dollar, the rising prices in oil, We're seeing the effects of this inflationary bubble that we have to start addressing.
And I'm afraid to say that the way we address it maybe has to be a little bit drastic. Because we can see that, as Dr. Kepley says in this graphic we're sort of considering here today, that capitalism is a manifestation of human pathology. If somebody is taking a lot of taxes for something or charging a lot of interest rates for something, it's because they want to.
In psychologically they want to take away from the people. The government takes here in brazil we see this a lot. A lot of taxes and very little return for the taxes we pay. Yes this is a sign of what dr Keppe talks about as envy. We want to deny the benefits to other people. It's not that we want the money to do something good.
We want to take the money so the other person doesn't have the money to do something within their own life. Yes and um i think the the
very roots of economics is very wrong. If you think about, for example, Adam Smith, his work was based on Bernard de Mandeville. And this Bernard de Mandeville wrote a book where he said that it was a country with a very aggressive government or something like this, or kingdom, I don't know.
And They made a lot of wars with other countries. There are a lot of problems. So they had to have ammunition, company armaments and health companies and these kind of things. So the economy was in a big proportion, no? And one day, one man came and one king came and said, oh, this is insane, let's stop it, no? Let's stop making wars that cause harm to our people.
And then the society starts to stop, no? Because the industry was based on ammunition, armaments, the insurance companies and these kind of things. So the kingdom was faced in economical term problems and then they say okay we have to start again make fights and wars and these kind of things. Because we are we're facing somehow problems and Adam Smith used this a lot in in his work because he thinks that everyone has to struggle for its own survival and these kind of things you know.
And and if every single person starts to make your one war to make your best to to receive to to gain more from the society the whole society will
Richard: benefit sure. And also these wars almost bankrupted kingdoms in the past so they had to think how are we going to get money to fund these wars, I know, let's start taxing the people.
The people go to fight the war, the people die in the war, and they're the ones that have to pay for the war that they're going to fight and die in. I mean, it's a totally crazy situation.
Yeah, and that's the situation we face today. For example, if we see from where the money comes
Richard: from. What about at the end here, we talk a little bit about what growth is, because they're pushing for growth all the time.
China has growth rates in double digits somewhere for the last five,
six, seven, ten years. I don't know, but double-digit growth rates. And what is this growth? What is it really? Yeah, that's a very important thing because when you see a program or economy speaking, they always say about growth. But what's this growth? So, here in Brazil, we had a state, Mato Grosso, it has a part of Amazon rainforest.
And it was the only state here in Brazil that grew to double digits. But based on what? Implantation of soya, implantation of wheat, and destruction of the forest. Because people only focus in, okay, we have to grow. But
Richard: grow in what area? If we look at the growth industries, we're going to see alcohol and tobacco, pharmaceuticals, armaments, cars, chemicals. But this is growth in destruction, not growth in production and helping us in some way.
What's the solution? Where are we going to go with this? Because this is a dire situation on the planet today. We can't keep producing chemicals and cars and these things that destroy us. We can't keep producing them at the numbers we're producing them in and calling this growth. DotaCap proposed a new
way of economics, the Trilogical Society, the new kind of enterprise called the Trilogical Enterprise.
These enterprises are based nowadays in Brazil with more than 20 years of history. There are some specific points that characterize the Trilogical Enterprise. One of the main points is that the growth should be based on something that's real and really matters to the society. Not to the inverted way society thinks, but the real values of society. Not to produce something linked to cultural things, to produce services that really matters to society, that are really important.
We have a school of languages, and we have a hotel, and we foster, for example, another way of medicine, not so much linked with allopathic. Trilogical enterprises are just based on real values, not in the value of money, necessarily. But what's very important to emphasize here is that these enterprises are very profitable. Because if we do things related to work, to what is really good, the enterprise will grow.
It's not the other way. If we make our society based on real values, it will grow, even in terms of money.
Richard: Dr. Keppe says in Liberation of the People, fantastic book, he said, my opinion is that as long as society is subordinate to economics, social justice is impossible. Every worker knows that his or her work generally does not benefit him or herself because it's not aimed at helping others.
The reader may be thinking of the thousands of doctors who are at this moment caring for the sick, but even medicine has been distorted by economic interests because the price charge for medical treatment makes it almost impossible to consult a physician. People go bankrupt in the United States if they have a heart attack or if they have cancer. So I think what Dr.
Keppe is talking about is disinverting this world of money, and our trilogical enterprises are doing directly that. To do a good service and receive money back for this service that helps humanity and helps the community and helps us who are working in the enterprises as well. And we need to change this pact that we have with the powerful by thinking that this kind of economic growth you were discussing before of destruction, that this is not a benefit to us.
We're following this path to our own destruction, and we need to make some big changes very, very fast. Yes, that's very important.
We have to think, okay, growth, but what kind of growth? So that that's a very important point you mentioned no the pact we'd have with powerful because powerful people they think this way that we have to destruct it to make the progress and and we think this way also.
And
Richard: we're doing much here in brazil to conscientize society about all of this you know. It's impressive to see how goodness and idealism in business can be very successful and profitable. A society based on these principles we're exploring here could really lay the foundations for a new civilization. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
