Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels | Lex Fridman Podcast #346

00:00:00.000 | When it's quiet, that's when it hits you.

00:00:02.880 | That's what I think that's what a lot of people experience

00:00:04.960 | when they come back from a conflict zone.

00:00:07.060 | Everything that was life and death,

00:00:11.480 | everything that mattered, all the noise, all the chaos,

00:00:14.120 | all the people that are around you that would die for you,

00:00:16.280 | kill for you, you would kill for them.

00:00:18.600 | All the millions of dollars worth of equipment

00:00:22.840 | and stuff like that you were responsible for

00:00:24.360 | now are all gone and it's just you.

00:00:28.880 | - The following is a conversation with Ed Calderon,

00:00:32.320 | a security specialist who has worked for many years

00:00:35.320 | on counter narcotics and organized crime investigation

00:00:38.840 | in the Northern border region of Mexico.

00:00:41.600 | I highly recommend you follow the writing and courses

00:00:45.280 | on his Patreon and website, edsmanifesto.com.

00:00:50.040 | This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

00:00:52.040 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:53.840 | in the description.

00:00:55.040 | And now, dear friends, here's Ed Calderon.

00:00:59.520 | What does your experience in counter narcotics,

00:01:02.520 | investigating the Mexican drug cartel,

00:01:04.560 | teach you about human nature?

00:01:06.720 | - Wow, I mean, first off, anybody can be got.

00:01:09.800 | Anybody can be corrupted.

00:01:12.140 | You know, you work in that field and you,

00:01:16.120 | realistically, the training we got and profiling

00:01:20.340 | and investigation and stuff like that was basically

00:01:23.240 | you learn from the older guys there.

00:01:25.320 | And some of those guys were already corrupted

00:01:27.080 | from the start.

00:01:28.360 | So trust no one.

00:01:30.960 | I remember seeing that X-Files episode where that was stated.

00:01:34.320 | You quickly learn that even if you are somebody

00:01:37.260 | that to your own mind appears incorruptible,

00:01:41.480 | you know, small changes happen around you,

00:01:43.480 | wheels get greased, money gets put in front of you

00:01:45.880 | and or things get threatened like your life.

00:01:49.160 | And sometimes a payment for some of this corruption

00:01:51.960 | is just to continue on living.

00:01:54.040 | You encounter people that seem incorruptible,

00:01:57.240 | that go through FBI background checks,

00:01:59.800 | that go through all of the security measures

00:02:03.680 | that all of us were put through, you know, polygraph test.

00:02:07.120 | And then later on, you know,

00:02:09.600 | it turns out they were on the take

00:02:10.880 | or they became somebody that was corrupted.

00:02:14.120 | I think what I found out is that anybody at any level,

00:02:18.520 | they could be a very strong, hard to get person right now,

00:02:22.040 | but people get corrupted through their families.

00:02:27.440 | Through need.

00:02:28.800 | Mexico is a place where a lot of instability occurs.

00:02:33.160 | So financial needs, health.

00:02:36.260 | - So a crack could form through the wall of integrity

00:02:38.780 | and then over time it seeps in somehow.

00:02:42.200 | - Mexico has a culture of corruption.

00:02:44.040 | Like, you know, you have your kid that goes to school,

00:02:46.480 | at public school and you want him to be in the morning,

00:02:48.660 | not in the afternoon school time period.

00:02:52.800 | So you go off and grease the wheels

00:02:55.540 | with the director of the school.

00:02:57.520 | People hearing this in Mexico will nod their heads

00:02:59.800 | because this is something that happens from early on.

00:03:02.480 | So there's a systemic and cultural thing to it,

00:03:05.240 | you know, as far as getting around rules.

00:03:06.880 | And this happens because, you know,

00:03:08.360 | the people that are in charge in Mexico, the government,

00:03:10.200 | is, you know, their tandem amount is trust

00:03:14.440 | between criminals and the cartels down there

00:03:16.240 | for a lot of the culture.

00:03:17.160 | So people don't trust the government

00:03:18.440 | and much less criminality, so.

00:03:20.980 | - When you meet a person sticking on human nature,

00:03:24.080 | do you think it's possible to figure out

00:03:25.580 | if they can be trusted?

00:03:26.820 | So you said anyone can be corrupted.

00:03:30.340 | You know, how long would you need to talk to a person?

00:03:34.160 | And even in your own personal, private life, just a friend.

00:03:37.800 | Or is trust a thing that's never really guaranteed?

00:03:40.340 | - I think that trust is never really guaranteed.

00:03:42.520 | I know a lot of people are gonna say

00:03:43.760 | that's a sad way and hard way of living your life,

00:03:46.040 | but, you know, life experience at my end,

00:03:48.080 | you know, people change.

00:03:50.800 | You know, the dynamics of a relationship might change.

00:03:53.680 | I look at people's character,

00:03:55.160 | specifically their past and past experiences if I can.

00:03:58.480 | Somebody that presents himself in front of you as somebody,

00:04:01.640 | but you quickly learn that that somebody

00:04:03.840 | is just a mask or a persona

00:04:05.440 | that they kind of created for themselves.

00:04:07.920 | - And they might not even be aware of the persona.

00:04:09.880 | Like, is there some deep psychological stuff?

00:04:11.680 | - Sometimes.

00:04:13.000 | I've experienced a lot of failure in my life.

00:04:16.320 | You can see it in my nose.

00:04:17.640 | You know, you can see it in my lack of a digit, you know.

00:04:22.920 | The amount of, you know, the amount of failures

00:04:26.680 | you can see in somebody and how they wear them

00:04:28.400 | sometimes is a pretty telling thing

00:04:29.940 | as far as them being able to be trusted

00:04:32.160 | or that you can trust their story or their experience.

00:04:35.880 | And when I say experience, I mean,

00:04:37.360 | I've met some criminals, like former criminals,

00:04:39.600 | or, you know, some people of that background

00:04:41.880 | that I trust with my life, you know,

00:04:43.840 | because they're not reformed,

00:04:46.680 | but they figured out that that's not a life

00:04:48.960 | that can live long enough to kind of continue on.

00:04:51.360 | And I've also met people that are in law enforcement

00:04:54.240 | that I wouldn't trust with my car keys, you know,

00:04:57.000 | because, you know, whatever persona they adopted

00:05:00.040 | over the years is a pretty good one, pretty good mask.

00:05:04.060 | Sometimes such a good mask,

00:05:05.280 | they don't even know they're wearing it.

00:05:06.640 | - And on top of that, it's not just the psychology.

00:05:08.760 | There's also a neurobiology to it.

00:05:11.120 | I've been very fortunate and deliberate

00:05:14.760 | to surround myself with good people throughout my life,

00:05:18.440 | but I've recently gotten to sort of observe,

00:05:20.840 | not close to me, but nearby,

00:05:24.500 | somebody that could be classified as a sociopath

00:05:27.560 | and a narcissist.

00:05:31.160 | Like, I don't wanna use those psychological terms,

00:05:33.380 | but just, it's like, oh, people, you know,

00:05:37.840 | come with different biology, too.

00:05:39.920 | So it's not just like the trauma you might experience

00:05:42.720 | in your early life and all the deep complexity that leads,

00:05:46.020 | all the deep complexity that leads to the psychology

00:05:49.980 | that you have as an adult,

00:05:52.400 | but it's also the biology you come with, the nature,

00:05:56.360 | that you might not just have the machine

00:06:00.400 | that can empathize deeply with the experience of others,

00:06:03.420 | or maybe a machine that gets off, gets a dopamine rush

00:06:07.760 | from the manipulation of other humans

00:06:10.280 | or the control of other humans.

00:06:11.520 | - Yeah, I mean, put an example of my own background.

00:06:15.280 | My mom didn't have a father, you know?

00:06:18.440 | He left really early on in their childhood.

00:06:21.220 | You know, my mom raised her two sisters

00:06:24.860 | and basically kept a household.

00:06:26.660 | She was a great mom.

00:06:29.640 | She was a badass, you know, she was very independent.

00:06:32.820 | She showed me how to be independent.

00:06:34.140 | She showed me how to kind of watch out for others

00:06:36.380 | and kind of build me up in that way.

00:06:38.580 | And I had a great childhood as far as, you know,

00:06:41.780 | as far as her and kind of like how she molded me.

00:06:45.380 | Later on, I figured out that when I had my own kid,

00:06:49.720 | you know, I figured out that she was basically

00:06:53.520 | trying to make me into what she didn't have in a way.

00:06:57.040 | And if I can get to see somebody's parents, you know,

00:06:59.680 | that's usually a sign of something, at least for me,

00:07:04.160 | as far as figuring out where people are.

00:07:06.320 | I think there's something to be said

00:07:07.640 | about nature and nurture.

00:07:08.920 | And now some people come up,

00:07:10.680 | some people are just born with that predatory instinct,

00:07:13.640 | you know, and you'll never know.

00:07:15.600 | I mean, they spend their whole life

00:07:16.920 | practicing how to hide it.

00:07:18.220 | But if you can figure out somebody's, you know,

00:07:21.680 | background, childhood, where they're from,

00:07:23.280 | you can kind of tell something about them.

00:07:25.120 | You know, I'm from Tijuana, you know, I'm a survivor.

00:07:27.640 | That's my background as far as where I'm from.

00:07:29.940 | - Culturally, genetically, psychologically,

00:07:35.280 | the full shebang.

00:07:36.560 | - Yeah, I guess some people are born

00:07:38.480 | with certain predispositions.

00:07:40.520 | And if they're in the right environment,

00:07:42.400 | some of the negative aspects might flourish

00:07:44.200 | more than others, you know.

00:07:45.560 | For me, I mean, I grew up skateboarding in Tijuana.

00:07:49.080 | And I remember breaking into my first backyard pool.

00:07:52.400 | It was a house that a cartel guy owned,

00:07:54.560 | and we used to skate the pool in the back of it.

00:07:57.560 | So I learned how to pop open padlocks

00:08:00.980 | with a small vehicle hydraulic lift.

00:08:05.140 | And I remember doing that.

00:08:07.440 | And later on in life, I got to train with people

00:08:10.320 | from other parts of Mexico.

00:08:11.800 | And work with them.

00:08:14.000 | And I remember pulling that trick off,

00:08:15.580 | and they were like looking at me like,

00:08:16.960 | "Where'd you learn that?"

00:08:18.560 | Like, "Some burglars in Tijuana."

00:08:20.640 | You know, and they're like, "Wow, that's interesting.

00:08:22.400 | "Like, are all people from Tijuana like that?"

00:08:25.280 | And I said, "No, we're not all like that.

00:08:27.040 | "But I guess in some way we are."

00:08:28.840 | Because, you know, Tijuana produces kids like that.

00:08:33.320 | You know, she produces, like the environment itself,

00:08:35.320 | produces a pretty specific person, I guess.

00:08:39.240 | You know, our normal or our baseline normal

00:08:42.160 | is way different than most.

00:08:43.480 | - The trajectories that you can take in life

00:08:46.000 | are defined in a way that aren't available

00:08:49.960 | elsewhere in the world.

00:08:51.200 | - Yeah.

00:08:52.040 | - And so you develop, I mean, part of that's psychological,

00:08:54.320 | part of that is cultural and so on.

00:08:56.080 | Part of that is the cultural trauma.

00:08:59.280 | But then also the ethical lines based on the corruption.

00:09:02.360 | 'Cause I grew up in the Soviet Union,

00:09:03.840 | there's the same kind of understanding

00:09:05.800 | that there's some gray area of corruption.

00:09:08.720 | - Yeah, it's always there, like on the outskirts

00:09:11.680 | or even in the center.

00:09:13.400 | How you can grease things to make things easier

00:09:16.040 | and how it's like a personal thing.

00:09:18.080 | I'll just, you know, pay off the,

00:09:20.880 | in Tijuana we have a mordida is what we call it.

00:09:23.200 | You know, when you pay a cop off.

00:09:25.320 | Una mordida means a bite.

00:09:26.760 | So, and--

00:09:30.400 | - But what's the bite aspect?

00:09:33.880 | - So you get stopped for a traffic violation of some sort

00:09:37.160 | and the cop walks up to you.

00:09:38.640 | Obviously you don't say the word bite,

00:09:39.920 | but it's like a slang term for it.

00:09:42.480 | And he asked for your paperwork and, you know,

00:09:45.560 | and if you get fined or get a ticket,

00:09:49.040 | you say, "Can I pay the ticket here?"

00:09:51.160 | Is what they say.

00:09:52.920 | And, you know, put your money inside of the paperwork

00:09:54.960 | and hand it over to the cop.

00:09:56.000 | Mordida, you think it's, you know,

00:09:57.840 | I'm just gonna do it and nobody knows, you know,

00:10:00.240 | but it's a systemic thing.

00:10:01.280 | Everybody, like a lot of people do it.

00:10:02.760 | And then they don't trust the police

00:10:04.120 | because they are fed with this.

00:10:07.040 | - Yeah, I mean, same thing was in the Soviet Union.

00:10:09.440 | It's funny.

00:10:10.280 | But then there's something inside you

00:10:12.840 | where that kind of, those opportunities come,

00:10:16.640 | like with a police officer,

00:10:18.120 | where you realize you could just pay a little bit of money

00:10:20.400 | and get out of a thing.

00:10:21.720 | And then you realize you can pay a little bit of money

00:10:23.760 | or do a favor to get your kids in a better school

00:10:26.480 | or something like that.

00:10:27.600 | But there comes opportunities where you,

00:10:30.080 | where, all right, if I do this little thing,

00:10:33.320 | I can make, I can get a huge promotion

00:10:36.120 | or I can get a huge increase in my power

00:10:39.200 | or get a lot of money.

00:10:40.680 | And something inside you says, no, that's not right.

00:10:43.840 | And I wonder what that is.

00:10:45.480 | 'Cause like, yeah, 'cause it feels different

00:10:49.920 | than the legal systems within which you operate.

00:10:52.720 | There's some kind of basic human integrity, human decency.

00:10:55.720 | I wonder if that's like constructed or it's always there.

00:10:58.960 | If it's like, again, nature versus nurture.

00:11:01.240 | - Yeah, I think, for me, it was looking at,

00:11:04.000 | at seeing that in somebody else

00:11:05.760 | that I kind of learned about it.

00:11:08.000 | There's a man that I consider a mentor figure.

00:11:12.080 | His name's Lieutenant Colonel Lee Zelda.

00:11:14.400 | He was a lieutenant colonel from the army

00:11:16.120 | that basically came over and took over the group

00:11:18.040 | that I used to work with.

00:11:19.700 | He was incorruptible.

00:11:23.720 | He was, that was the essence or the aura that he projected.

00:11:30.320 | The first time he went off on patrol

00:11:33.160 | when he was placed in charge of us,

00:11:34.640 | I actually drove him around Tijuana.

00:11:36.780 | He was one of those lead from the front type of people.

00:11:40.580 | The amount of assassination attempts he got

00:11:44.520 | that was basically a proof of how uncorruptible he was

00:11:48.320 | because they kept trying to pay him off.

00:11:49.880 | And when that didn't work,

00:11:50.840 | they tried to kill him several times.

00:11:52.160 | I think the last assassination attempt

00:11:53.840 | took the use of his legs.

00:11:55.760 | And that man is still a dangerous person in my mind.

00:11:58.480 | But for me, and people can gather a little bit

00:12:02.760 | about my background and where I'm from

00:12:04.520 | and some of the access I currently have

00:12:06.920 | to train the federal institutions here in the US

00:12:09.240 | as far as my background and if I was corrupted or not,

00:12:12.240 | because there's a lot of that out there.

00:12:14.200 | The Catholic guilt that's kind of built into some of us

00:12:19.600 | is always kind of there.

00:12:21.760 | (speaking in foreign language)

00:12:23.160 | The devil was under the bed.

00:12:26.440 | So I don't consider myself Catholic,

00:12:30.200 | consider myself culturally Catholic, I think,

00:12:32.280 | is what I kind of say with that.

00:12:34.880 | I had a pretty good structure with my dad and my mom

00:12:36.920 | at the house and they never let me get away with things.

00:12:41.800 | And I think my mom was a pretty big moral compass for me.

00:12:45.820 | But Lieutenant Colonel kind of leading from example

00:12:49.960 | and seeing his work and how much profound change he caused

00:12:54.760 | in the people that work with him as far as,

00:12:57.520 | we felt supported and we felt like we had a guiding figure

00:13:00.640 | during this.

00:13:01.580 | Tijuana was the most dangerous city on the planet

00:13:04.440 | when I was working there and he took charge.

00:13:06.640 | - What does it take to be a man, the Lieutenant Colonel,

00:13:09.880 | who maintains integrity after assassination attempts?

00:13:13.740 | Is it possible for a normal human to do that?

00:13:16.240 | Or again, is it genetic?

00:13:17.560 | - That's an interesting question.

00:13:18.800 | I'll say this, seeing him,

00:13:21.280 | I mean, the last assassination attempt he had,

00:13:23.640 | they took use of his legs, he was with his kid.

00:13:26.000 | There was a recklessness to it.

00:13:30.160 | I can see that now,

00:13:32.040 | like now that I have enough distance from it,

00:13:34.920 | I could see that there's a recklessness to being that way.

00:13:38.640 | And also you're putting jeopardy people around you

00:13:40.960 | if you take that route.

00:13:43.020 | So I think there's a sacrifice to it,

00:13:44.540 | a very powerful and hard one to make for a lot of people.

00:13:47.720 | For me, it was, I wouldn't get picked to get

00:13:52.480 | on board with some of the operations groups

00:13:55.480 | that I wanted to work with because I was known

00:13:57.320 | for not taking money or not being trusted

00:14:01.280 | by certain older segments of the organization

00:14:04.240 | that I was with, with stuff,

00:14:05.640 | because they knew that I wouldn't,

00:14:07.680 | I wasn't on the, I wouldn't get money.

00:14:10.040 | So there's always a weird sacrifice to it.

00:14:13.760 | And you're almost kind of like masochistic in that way

00:14:16.240 | when you get approached with it,

00:14:19.640 | they're like, "Why are you being an idiot?

00:14:21.560 | Why are you driving around that beat up car?

00:14:24.160 | Look at the Hummer H2 that just drove in

00:14:26.400 | with the other guy that is doing exactly your same job."

00:14:29.360 | Society as a whole down there doesn't reward it,

00:14:35.800 | or at least doesn't see it in the people

00:14:37.360 | that don't take that route in Mexico.

00:14:39.160 | For them, all cops are corrupt, all of them.

00:14:42.240 | And seeing it again from the outside,

00:14:47.440 | I'm not there anymore.

00:14:49.480 | There's almost like a, "Why didn't you Ed?"

00:14:52.520 | That could have been easier maybe,

00:14:56.080 | or you could have been dead long ago,

00:14:59.320 | because people that are on the takedown there

00:15:01.120 | are usually owned by one side or the other.

00:15:04.040 | And when that gets found out,

00:15:05.640 | if you have somebody that you're paying off

00:15:07.360 | that hints you off of drug operations in the area,

00:15:10.800 | your rivals are pretty keen on killing you.

00:15:13.040 | - Money aside, so like a Hummer aside,

00:15:16.040 | how much of a motivator's fear?

00:15:18.920 | - It's a big one.

00:15:19.760 | I'll say for me, I didn't think I was gonna lift the C30.

00:15:26.400 | I was sure of it.

00:15:28.560 | - Did that concept scare you,

00:15:30.200 | or was that just a principle of life

00:15:33.840 | that you're operating under?

00:15:35.440 | - I lost my brother when I was 13 on a two.

00:15:40.560 | He was 19.

00:15:42.240 | He was like the VIP of the family.

00:15:45.640 | - You miss him?

00:15:47.920 | - Oh, every day.

00:15:48.800 | He was a skateboarded BMX, motorcycle hunter,

00:15:54.760 | one of the best marksmen that I've ever seen shoot.

00:16:00.080 | - So better than you at everything.

00:16:01.840 | - Yeah, he was the best of us is what we would say.

00:16:04.640 | And when he died,

00:16:06.400 | it was almost like a concert at his funeral.

00:16:10.000 | I met three of his girlfriends

00:16:11.360 | that all introduced themselves like the one.

00:16:15.720 | To this day, every now and then I get pulled aside down

00:16:18.960 | when I go back home,

00:16:20.280 | and they, "Hey, you're Eric's brother."

00:16:24.840 | Despite all the stuff that I've done,

00:16:26.400 | I'm still, every now and then I get recognized.

00:16:29.040 | That made my mom and my dad go into a horrible depression

00:16:35.880 | and basically left me to my devices when I was a kid

00:16:39.000 | from 13 onwards.

00:16:43.360 | I had this self-destructive aspect to me after that,

00:16:47.280 | I think, again, something that's come up in therapy

00:16:50.040 | after I've been gone through all that,

00:16:52.840 | and had this notion that if I can only die good

00:16:55.880 | in some way, shape, or form, or for something,

00:16:58.960 | that it would matter,

00:17:00.400 | and they would look at me with the same reverence

00:17:03.720 | I did with my brother.

00:17:05.600 | - So dying isn't the problem.

00:17:09.080 | The goal of life is to die for something good.

00:17:11.360 | - Yeah, at least that was my mindset

00:17:16.240 | going through that job.

00:17:17.960 | I remember I was in medical school before that,

00:17:22.120 | second year of medical school.

00:17:23.720 | I was doing pretty good, and then 9/11 happened,

00:17:26.080 | and that wasn't an option anymore for me.

00:17:28.360 | The economy was horrible.

00:17:30.480 | Couldn't afford to stay there,

00:17:31.920 | so I sat in the newspaper,

00:17:34.640 | and my big brother, who's still alive and head,

00:17:38.560 | he's like, "No tenemos."

00:17:41.360 | You're not gonna do that shit.

00:17:43.800 | We wouldn't dare.

00:17:44.720 | And all of a sudden, I was in a field

00:17:47.600 | having my hair shaved off,

00:17:49.280 | and a bunch of the gafes,

00:17:52.400 | the guys that later turned into the Zeta Cartel military,

00:17:55.920 | were in charge of our training,

00:17:57.840 | and I went through that process.

00:18:00.040 | - In what field were you, and why is your head being shaved,

00:18:03.640 | and what the hell was going through your mind?

00:18:05.960 | What was the leap that you took?

00:18:07.560 | - I was sold the idea of this being

00:18:09.560 | a new Americanized police force

00:18:12.360 | that they were constructing in Mexico.

00:18:15.480 | - So elite, special force, kinda--

00:18:18.800 | - Prestigious, elite.

00:18:20.400 | The people in charge of our training

00:18:21.560 | were a lot basically ex-Mexican gafe people.

00:18:25.960 | Gafes are what the special forces kind of originated,

00:18:29.160 | and a lot of their members turned into the Zeta Cartel,

00:18:32.360 | so they were brutal in their training.

00:18:36.080 | We were sold this idea of it being scientific,

00:18:39.400 | educated-based, and a career path.

00:18:44.560 | And all of a sudden, we're in this refurbished prison

00:18:48.200 | that wasn't good enough to be a prison,

00:18:50.440 | and they turned it into a training ground.

00:18:52.560 | And I quickly kinda realized

00:18:55.560 | that they were training us to be a paramilitary group,

00:18:58.080 | not a community policing organization,

00:19:01.240 | which in my mind, I thought,

00:19:03.040 | that's what we were gonna be doing.

00:19:04.720 | - What was the hardest process of that training for you?

00:19:08.080 | 'Cause this is like a fragile, innocent boy

00:19:11.880 | becomes a man kinda process.

00:19:13.920 | - They're turning us into something that they could use.

00:19:18.240 | So it's a breaking down.

00:19:19.600 | They break down the individual.

00:19:22.920 | - Physically and mentally?

00:19:24.800 | - Yeah, I think it's a half-done initiation process,

00:19:29.800 | I think, in a way, looking at it from now,

00:19:34.640 | to the past, the shaving of the hair,

00:19:38.800 | the stripping off your identity.

00:19:41.120 | Everybody gets a number.

00:19:44.480 | The uniforms, the running around

00:19:49.720 | and being treated like human garbage.

00:19:54.640 | The first thing they said to us

00:19:55.760 | when we were lined up in that field was,

00:19:58.360 | (speaking in foreign language)

00:20:02.400 | which means there's bread and dick to eat here.

00:20:05.280 | And the bread ran out a week ago, right?

00:20:08.040 | So it was, I mean,

00:20:10.400 | I can't equate it to anything in the military

00:20:13.040 | ever in the United States,

00:20:13.960 | because people down there

00:20:15.080 | could actually get physical with us.

00:20:16.360 | I mean, they could actually hit us

00:20:17.960 | and punch us and shit like that,

00:20:19.200 | which is not allowed here anymore,

00:20:21.920 | at least in most of the militaries

00:20:24.800 | and as horrible as down there.

00:20:26.720 | AK-47s being shot around us to simulate reality,

00:20:31.160 | basically causing hearing loss, that type of stuff.

00:20:33.720 | - So chaos, abuse, really challenging you.

00:20:38.840 | - Yeah. - Again, physically

00:20:39.800 | and mentally.

00:20:40.640 | - And an open door there always.

00:20:42.400 | So if you don't wanna be here, you can just walk out.

00:20:44.840 | And the more you go into it,

00:20:46.760 | time-wise, you're more invested you are.

00:20:48.600 | So in a way, you're kind of building your own chains

00:20:51.760 | while you're going through that process.

00:20:53.240 | - Were you tempted to walk out?

00:20:54.440 | - Yeah, several times, several times.

00:20:57.320 | Specifically seeing some of the ways

00:20:59.200 | that people that I thought were better

00:21:02.240 | or stronger than me were walking out or quitting

00:21:05.960 | because of something that happened in there.

00:21:09.400 | There was some sexual assault stuff

00:21:12.880 | happening in there as well.

00:21:15.160 | - Were you afraid of that?

00:21:17.280 | - Always, you know, you're in a place like that

00:21:20.160 | and there's females in the environment

00:21:22.320 | and some of the instructors are doing what they do.

00:21:25.600 | So that was like a cause for alarm.

00:21:27.160 | I mean, these people are in charge of our safety

00:21:29.040 | and education and look at what's happening here.

00:21:30.800 | So you could see some of the smarter ones leaving,

00:21:35.080 | not looking at this as a viable choice for life.

00:21:37.920 | - How did that change you, those few months?

00:21:40.920 | - I had this motivation,

00:21:43.680 | this idealistic motivation in my head,

00:21:46.280 | making a difference.

00:21:47.280 | They drill a lot of nationalistic kind of,

00:21:55.400 | the flag marching.

00:21:58.720 | You being part of a group and the group being,

00:22:00.680 | you know, behind you and all of this.

00:22:02.320 | - What was the nationalistic pride?

00:22:05.400 | It was in the nation of Mexico?

00:22:07.040 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:22:08.360 | - What's the vision of this great nation of Mexico

00:22:10.480 | that you were, did you believe,

00:22:12.080 | did it get into your blood?

00:22:13.920 | - It got into my, I mean, it's indoctrination, you know,

00:22:16.640 | it's a paramilitary group.

00:22:18.880 | So everything there is basically modeled

00:22:21.160 | after the military.

00:22:22.760 | So that's what they were trying to kind of instill in us.

00:22:25.880 | I was a team leader in there.

00:22:29.320 | After three months, basically, I was,

00:22:31.680 | we went through a bunch of trials, physical trials,

00:22:36.760 | mental trials and stuff like that.

00:22:37.920 | And some of us were named team leaders.

00:22:39.880 | And I, you know, bought into it.

00:22:43.320 | You know, I'm the, I'm supposed to be here, look at me.

00:22:46.240 | I'm making headways.

00:22:48.680 | I'm sticking out a bit, you know.

00:22:53.160 | And I was pretty proud of what I was going through there,

00:22:57.920 | six months.

00:22:58.760 | Then you get the reality check when you signed

00:23:01.640 | the dotted line and how that, none of it really meant

00:23:05.480 | anything as far as what we were about to go out and do.

00:23:08.600 | You know, an example of this,

00:23:12.400 | we were trained with a 92FS Beretta,

00:23:15.920 | which is a nine millimeter pistol, Italian made.

00:23:20.760 | We got to shoot 20 rounds out of that gun.

00:23:23.520 | And then we, when we got out, we were handed a Glock 17,

00:23:29.440 | which I've never seen one in my life.

00:23:33.840 | I was trying to figure out where the safety was

00:23:36.680 | and a few other people there were handling those guns

00:23:41.680 | in a horrible manner.

00:23:42.720 | So we were very under-trained, under-equipped,

00:23:46.800 | and there was a lot of assumptions about what we knew.

00:23:48.880 | And all of a sudden we're being cast into this,

00:23:51.000 | the start of one of the bloodiest

00:23:55.600 | and longest lived modern conflicts in our history

00:23:59.280 | that doesn't get called that,

00:24:00.560 | but it's basically been an ongoing war in Mexico

00:24:04.080 | that is still to this day, amassing bodies.

00:24:09.080 | - So the Mexican drug war.

00:24:10.960 | - The Mexican drug war, which is,

00:24:13.440 | it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it started

00:24:16.680 | because when I was going through training,

00:24:18.400 | there was already stuff going on.

00:24:20.640 | I went into training in 2004 and there were already

00:24:24.040 | major cartel related events all over Mexico by then,

00:24:28.760 | but not at the size or scope as I was about to go into.

00:24:33.120 | When President Felipe Calderon kind of took office down there

00:24:37.080 | and actually officially kind of kicked it off

00:24:39.440 | by putting the military in play

00:24:42.600 | as part of it basically militarized the drug war,

00:24:47.360 | including us.

00:24:48.840 | - Who are the major players in this drug war?

00:24:52.120 | So the politicians, the military, the police force,

00:24:56.960 | the cartels, all Mexican, then the United States,

00:25:01.960 | China, just to lay out all the pieces on the board.

00:25:06.680 | - First off, there are giant local drug markets in Mexico

00:25:09.840 | that are fought over,

00:25:12.040 | just local drug markets that are huge in scope.

00:25:14.880 | - So no exporting to other locations?

00:25:16.840 | - Just to start, yeah.

00:25:18.400 | So a big problem in Mexico

00:25:21.080 | is basically those local drug markets.

00:25:22.560 | And an example of that,

00:25:24.320 | and one I have a lot of experience with

00:25:25.720 | is the one in Tijuana,

00:25:27.160 | which not only feeds the local populace,

00:25:29.800 | but also feeds the populace from San Diego

00:25:31.800 | that crosses down into Tijuana and buys their product there.

00:25:35.560 | And now, a phenomenon that's occurring now

00:25:39.600 | is marijuana trafficking is going from California

00:25:42.840 | down into Mexico because they produce better weed,

00:25:45.880 | which is fascinating to see now.

00:25:48.000 | - So there's already a channel,

00:25:49.320 | and you're kind of reusing that channel.

00:25:51.280 | - Yeah, there's a lot of people and vehicles

00:25:53.320 | getting checked when they drive down.

00:25:54.840 | And Tijuana is being called San Diego South now

00:25:57.560 | because all the economic migrants are living down there.

00:26:02.240 | 90% of all houses in Tijuana, new houses,

00:26:05.000 | are being bought up by Americans.

00:26:06.480 | So that'll tell you something about the impact and change

00:26:09.040 | that's going on down there.

00:26:10.800 | So you have these local drug markets

00:26:12.240 | that are being fought over.

00:26:14.000 | You also have these drug routes

00:26:15.400 | that go through Mexico, up into Mexico,

00:26:17.760 | around Mexico, through the ocean, under the wall,

00:26:21.200 | drug tunnels over the wall,

00:26:24.080 | and on backpacks on migrants

00:26:28.400 | that go up into the United States.

00:26:30.100 | Not only do the cartels make money off drug trafficking,

00:26:34.760 | but also extortion, money laundering,

00:26:38.600 | paid protection schemes.

00:26:40.040 | Any mining operation in Mexico will have to pay protection,

00:26:44.920 | or else it'll get hit.

00:26:46.000 | A lot of times, the largest money makers

00:26:50.120 | for some of these criminal groups are protecting

00:26:53.640 | and taxing anybody that goes across the border.

00:26:56.260 | So that's also a big issue.

00:26:57.740 | And it's not just, again,

00:27:00.920 | some Americans think it's like the cartels.

00:27:03.480 | They imagine this single or maybe two or three groups.

00:27:06.880 | There's several out there.

00:27:08.640 | I don't have a current estimate,

00:27:11.080 | but last time I checked,

00:27:12.240 | it was somewhere in the vicinity of 50,

00:27:14.760 | the 70 different groups,

00:27:17.360 | some small that just dedicate themselves

00:27:19.220 | to a single little town somewhere.

00:27:21.300 | There are armed groups

00:27:22.140 | that are basically in control of that area,

00:27:23.740 | to some bigger federations, like the Sinaloa Cartel,

00:27:26.720 | which is probably currently the largest

00:27:29.240 | and most powerful one in Mexico,

00:27:31.600 | and the New Generation Cartel,

00:27:32.920 | which is growing exponentially right now.

00:27:35.940 | So these criminal groups are players in that conflict.

00:27:41.680 | Then another player that doesn't get talked about

00:27:44.840 | is politics, politicians.

00:27:46.440 | There's an ongoing discussion that has been going on,

00:27:51.200 | I think, since Trump was elected

00:27:53.200 | about cartels being terrorist organizations or not,

00:27:57.840 | or if they fit that description.

00:28:00.220 | Well, we are living through multiple assassinations

00:28:05.220 | on political candidates out in Mexico right now.

00:28:08.520 | And most of those assassinations are motivated

00:28:11.280 | by one side sponsoring one candidate

00:28:15.080 | and the other side sponsoring the other.

00:28:16.720 | What I mean by sides, I mean cartel groups.

00:28:19.560 | So they have elected officials that are on the take.

00:28:22.380 | And this is, we have many governors

00:28:25.380 | who are under investigation on the run

00:28:27.080 | or in prison right now, state governors.

00:28:30.400 | So politics is involved in it.

00:28:31.800 | That's a big player as well.

00:28:33.060 | That doesn't, when you think about the cartel problems,

00:28:36.040 | you don't think, well, some, at least some,

00:28:37.960 | most people don't think about that aspect of it.

00:28:40.320 | - So to have integrity as a politician in Mexico

00:28:43.080 | means you have no protection

00:28:46.280 | and under constant threat of assassination.

00:28:49.400 | - We've just seen the arrest and prosecution

00:28:51.600 | of the head of all Conrad Cartel operations

00:28:54.240 | when I was active in the form of Garcia Luna,

00:28:57.360 | who was, he was the guy, Felipe Calderon,

00:29:00.200 | who kicked off the drug war.

00:29:01.400 | That was his guy.

00:29:02.520 | Turns out he was on the take at that level.

00:29:06.280 | - Is there like a spectrum of how on the take you can be?

00:29:10.680 | Are there ethical lines that you can cross?

00:29:13.040 | Some of it is money.

00:29:14.160 | And then is it possible to operate in a gray area

00:29:17.920 | that does not result in destructive ethical violations,

00:29:24.200 | deep ethical violations?

00:29:27.800 | - I have no idea.

00:29:28.640 | I don't think there is realistically.

00:29:30.480 | I mean, anything that kind of supports some of these groups,

00:29:34.040 | you know, you're supporting things of a horrible nature.

00:29:37.240 | I just posted recently on my Instagram account

00:29:42.040 | of a lady that was in Guanajuato.

00:29:45.360 | She's one of seven recently assassinated women

00:29:48.000 | that are looking for their kids, basically.

00:29:51.320 | There's a bunch of groups and organizations out there

00:29:55.440 | in Mexico, some in Tijuana that I've actually walked with,

00:29:59.160 | who are taking control of trying to find the bodies

00:30:03.880 | of their kids.

00:30:05.520 | That's her up there.

00:30:06.680 | - Maria Carmela Vasquez, a mother who searched

00:30:10.800 | for a missing son, was shot to death outside her home

00:30:13.560 | on Sunday.

00:30:15.960 | Her son, Osmar Vasquez, disappeared on June 14th.

00:30:19.640 | The 46-year-old woman is the fifth mother

00:30:22.160 | to be killed this year while searching

00:30:24.280 | for their missing loved ones.

00:30:25.720 | She was a member of the Payamo Missing Person Collective.

00:30:30.600 | - There's many groups out in Mexico

00:30:32.040 | who basically have given up on trusting the government

00:30:34.360 | to find their kids.

00:30:35.320 | The number of missing in Mexico is a debated topic

00:30:42.080 | because, you know, the government itself

00:30:44.400 | doesn't release those numbers,

00:30:46.400 | or at least hasn't done a good job about keeping them

00:30:49.400 | and/or releasing them.

00:30:50.520 | Mexico is a country that has industrialized body disposal.

00:30:55.120 | You know, in Tijuana, we had the stew maker,

00:30:58.040 | the legendary stew maker, which is a guy

00:31:00.240 | that basically used caustic acid

00:31:03.080 | to get rid of bodies at a massive level.

00:31:09.760 | - So there's a separate operation

00:31:11.120 | for getting rid of bodies and murdering the people.

00:31:13.520 | - At least in Tijuana, we saw that phenomenon,

00:31:15.840 | and it's obvious that it's going on all over Mexico.

00:31:19.840 | - Who's having those discussions about mass murder

00:31:23.000 | and getting rid of people?

00:31:23.960 | I've been reading a lot about World War II recently,

00:31:27.000 | and there's, was aggressive innovation on the Nazi side

00:31:29.880 | of how to get rid of a large number of people.

00:31:32.120 | But for the longest time, both the Soviets,

00:31:34.040 | and the Soviets were more brutal with this.

00:31:36.560 | It's literally, it's a engineering problem

00:31:39.360 | of how you kill a large number of people

00:31:41.360 | and get rid of their bodies.

00:31:42.760 | So the Soviets were more into just laying people,

00:31:47.760 | laying people down into the grave,

00:31:50.320 | face down, and then shooting them in the back of the head,

00:31:52.640 | and then doing that on mass scale.

00:31:53.880 | So you just pile people on.

00:31:55.720 | And then there was obviously innovation with the Holocaust

00:31:57.880 | in terms of gassing people and all that kind of stuff.

00:32:00.800 | - I'm not sure exactly where these tradecraft skills

00:32:05.360 | are coming from specifically.

00:32:07.320 | You hear discussions of Israelis training

00:32:09.920 | some of the cartel groups back in the late '90s,

00:32:13.440 | specifically the Arionofis cartel.

00:32:15.240 | There's a lot of stories about that.

00:32:17.160 | A security specialist coming down and showing them things

00:32:19.520 | like how to make caustic soda,

00:32:21.300 | how to put rocks inside of bodies,

00:32:24.400 | and then chicken wire them around

00:32:26.280 | to throw them into the ocean or river

00:32:28.640 | so that their bodies don't float.

00:32:30.840 | And when you kind of-

00:32:31.680 | - You put rocks inside a body

00:32:33.240 | to make sure the body doesn't float?

00:32:34.640 | - So you open up the intestinal tract, put rocks inside.

00:32:38.680 | You cut where tattoos are, you take off hands and faces,

00:32:43.180 | and throw them somewhere else,

00:32:44.880 | and you wrap them in chicken wire.

00:32:46.280 | - So make it not identifiable.

00:32:47.880 | - Yeah, and throw them into a body of water.

00:32:50.640 | And this is a horrible thing, but it's actually-

00:32:54.680 | - It's a craft.

00:32:55.520 | - It's a trade craft.

00:32:56.360 | - It's a trade craft, and there's a link to the US

00:33:00.720 | as far as that trade craft.

00:33:02.040 | You have to remember that the United States

00:33:04.600 | had a thing called School of the Americas and the CIA,

00:33:08.640 | and they showed things, and a lot of that stuff

00:33:12.160 | is out there in the hands of people

00:33:14.000 | that are of that generation.

00:33:16.480 | - So there's a manual-

00:33:18.280 | - There's a manual somewhere.

00:33:19.640 | - Like with chapters, and it's like

00:33:21.240 | how to get rid of the body.

00:33:22.520 | - There's manuals out there.

00:33:23.480 | - Under time constraints, or how identifiable

00:33:28.480 | can the body be afterwards,

00:33:31.000 | what are geographical constraints, all that kind of stuff.

00:33:33.680 | - I think that was common back in the early 2000s,

00:33:37.440 | and maybe the late '90s when some of these things

00:33:39.800 | were going on, but they've lost even that

00:33:43.440 | as far as respect for the government,

00:33:45.000 | or bodies being found.

00:33:46.560 | Right now, what you usually see is just bodies

00:33:48.920 | being burnt to a crisp and buried in a field somewhere.

00:33:51.520 | That's usually what you'll see.

00:33:53.800 | Some of the groups like this woman belong to

00:33:58.080 | basically taking it upon themselves to go out

00:34:00.120 | to find clandestine graves in the outskirts

00:34:04.800 | of the towns that they live in,

00:34:07.640 | probing the ground with these metal probes,

00:34:11.480 | and seeing if whatever they encounter

00:34:15.640 | in the bottom of these clandestine graves

00:34:18.960 | stinks or not.

00:34:20.320 | If they find IDs or clothing, they kind of gather that,

00:34:22.920 | and they basically present it to the investigative

00:34:25.960 | authorities in the towns or the states they live in,

00:34:28.520 | which basically are doing their jobs.

00:34:30.360 | Over 90% of all murders in Mexico were never solved.

00:34:34.080 | So they've even stopped trying to get rid of bodies

00:34:39.040 | in that way.

00:34:39.880 | - How does a cartel take power?

00:34:45.680 | How does it gain control of this local area

00:34:49.040 | that you mentioned, and then grow,

00:34:51.720 | take control of a region?

00:34:53.760 | And how does it do so in this dynamic relationship

00:34:58.760 | between politicians and the military and the police force?

00:35:03.760 | - It's a thing that happens over time.

00:35:06.120 | There has always been a big effort,

00:35:07.640 | even when I was in, to buy or own certain members

00:35:12.560 | of the police force.

00:35:13.520 | Even when we're going through training,

00:35:14.760 | some people get pulled out during training

00:35:16.560 | because they were found out to have some sort of parent

00:35:19.400 | or sibling that was a cartel member,

00:35:21.800 | or their FBI background check came back negative,

00:35:25.800 | you know, when they were already in the training program.

00:35:28.840 | So I think part of it is, first off,

00:35:34.720 | they take advantage of the fact that Mexico

00:35:36.920 | is a young country.

00:35:37.800 | It's a country of young people.

00:35:39.360 | We have a big group of young people that have

00:35:45.040 | little to no opportunities to come up.

00:35:48.720 | When I was in, when I went to take that career path,

00:35:52.040 | a lot of my friends took the other option.

00:35:54.440 | They went to work for some of these criminal groups.

00:35:57.040 | So they have this going for them.

00:36:00.440 | They basically have a lot of bodies to hire cheaply.

00:36:04.240 | - And leverage in terms of forcing those bodies

00:36:08.040 | to do whatever is needed,

00:36:09.560 | because the alternative for those people is nothing.

00:36:12.120 | - There's no options.

00:36:13.280 | So you have a kid somewhere who is working on a field,

00:36:17.120 | or you have a kid like me that was out of the job,

00:36:19.760 | out of school, and the only options for me

00:36:22.840 | was this ad in the newspaper, which seemed like a long shot,

00:36:26.760 | or going with some of my friends that had cars now

00:36:30.600 | and were hanging out all night at these bars.

00:36:33.200 | And some of them had, you know,

00:36:35.640 | Draco AK-47 pistols in their cars,

00:36:39.200 | and it would look cool, you know?

00:36:41.240 | - So there is a trajectory.

00:36:42.640 | There's many trajectories possibly in your life

00:36:44.960 | where you could have been still operating

00:36:48.080 | in a criminal organization in Mexico.

00:36:51.520 | - Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of options, you know?

00:36:54.760 | - Do you think you'd be good at it?

00:36:56.720 | - I don't know.

00:36:57.560 | I mean, I'm pretty good at what I do now,

00:36:58.960 | which is teaching people how to detect it

00:37:00.480 | and kind of fight against it, you know?

00:37:01.880 | So I think--

00:37:03.240 | - I have a sense that the skills transfer pretty well.

00:37:07.120 | That's also the dark side of this whole thing.

00:37:09.960 | - A lot of the people that I used to work with,

00:37:11.780 | you know, I know things, and I have some training,

00:37:14.120 | and I had some specialized training,

00:37:15.640 | and I currently do, I've done, you know,

00:37:18.400 | presentations for the Secret Service and the FBI,

00:37:20.720 | and you name it, I've gone there and shown them what I do.

00:37:23.680 | A lot of the people that I used to work with

00:37:26.960 | who are out of the job are in the wind, you know?

00:37:29.440 | And some of these people are way more trained than I am.

00:37:31.480 | You know?

00:37:33.080 | It's interesting what the reason why I get looked for,

00:37:38.080 | and they ask me questions,

00:37:39.360 | is because I actually have the experience

00:37:41.040 | that my university was the most dangerous city

00:37:43.800 | on the planet.

00:37:45.160 | And when people ask me about some of that stuff,

00:37:47.080 | I could speak from experience

00:37:48.480 | as far as encountering some of that directly.

00:37:51.120 | Some of the people that I used to work with

00:37:52.440 | who were way better at it than I am are in the wind.

00:37:55.720 | Yeah, interesting thing in Mexico.

00:37:57.640 | If you are of a police organization

00:37:59.400 | and you get fired or you quit,

00:38:03.560 | you are ineligible to join another police organization.

00:38:06.640 | That discounts you.

00:38:08.400 | So for somebody like me,

00:38:09.640 | who was a professional operations group member

00:38:12.720 | or a police officer in Mexico of that region,

00:38:15.760 | there's no options for me outside of that.

00:38:18.680 | So they themselves basically have created

00:38:20.960 | this inescapable box for some of these people

00:38:24.120 | that go into that line of work.

00:38:25.480 | And where do they go after?

00:38:27.480 | I've heard offers of $12,000 to join

00:38:33.080 | some of the organizations out there.

00:38:35.240 | Plus, you know, they get benefits,

00:38:38.040 | not like the government, you know?

00:38:39.520 | I'm still waiting for my liquidation check.

00:38:42.960 | This has been out of service for like six, seven years.

00:38:45.920 | I'm still waiting for my check.

00:38:47.480 | So some of these people,

00:38:50.640 | it's obvious that the opportunities

00:38:52.280 | are presented to them out there are stronger, you know?

00:38:55.120 | And again, the youth is what gets eaten by this war.

00:38:59.520 | And that's one of the main things that they start with,

00:39:02.480 | just the youth.

00:39:03.960 | We had a phenomenon in Tijuana,

00:39:07.440 | late '90s, early 2000s called the Narco Juniors.

00:39:10.200 | Narco Juniors were basically middle class

00:39:15.200 | or upper class families,

00:39:17.160 | had kids that were bored

00:39:18.240 | and they just joined some of these cartel groups.

00:39:21.040 | These cartel groups saw in them

00:39:22.680 | opportunities to get into regular industry,

00:39:25.560 | to go through the family businesses,

00:39:27.520 | to kind of establish themselves,

00:39:29.160 | use some of those businesses for storage,

00:39:32.400 | or figure out how to use some of their

00:39:34.600 | transportation businesses for drug muleing.

00:39:37.120 | So this is how they start

00:39:38.760 | in getting into different areas

00:39:42.040 | that they regularly couldn't.

00:39:44.160 | And that's how it starts.

00:39:47.320 | You owe somebody,

00:39:49.000 | they get into paid protection type schemes,

00:39:52.880 | which are also common all over Mexico.

00:39:55.120 | And sooner or later, they start owning businesses

00:39:59.240 | and they regulate some of their income.

00:40:02.360 | So they become part of the local economy in a big way.

00:40:07.520 | I had this experience in Sinaloa

00:40:08.960 | where we were driving down this shitty street

00:40:11.640 | and all of a sudden it became a cool, nice,

00:40:14.360 | curvy highway type thing.

00:40:16.400 | And I looked around there, it's like,

00:40:17.600 | this is a nice road.

00:40:19.280 | And the guy was with me, he said,

00:40:20.400 | "Yeah, the cartels built it."

00:40:21.880 | You go to some of these towns

00:40:24.560 | and the cartels are the government there.

00:40:26.960 | They build the hospitals, they build the churches,

00:40:28.960 | they build the schools.

00:40:30.640 | COVID happens, they're enforcing the mask mandates.

00:40:34.160 | They're out enforcing the mask mandates.

00:40:36.880 | The stay at home policies.

00:40:39.000 | They're the ones delivering supplies

00:40:41.280 | to the townspeople in bags,

00:40:43.560 | courtesy of so-and-so cartel.

00:40:45.400 | So they become the Robin Hood characters

00:40:50.960 | of their environments.

00:40:51.800 | If they're smart,

00:40:52.800 | these groups basically turn into that,

00:40:54.800 | Robin Hood, stealing from the rich

00:40:56.680 | and giving to the poor,

00:40:57.640 | or at least that's the projection that they give.

00:41:00.080 | - What's the role of violence in this operation?

00:41:05.560 | - I'm extreme.

00:41:07.360 | It used to be that there were rules,

00:41:09.200 | as you say, like, don't go after kids,

00:41:12.280 | don't go after women,

00:41:13.800 | but all those things are gone now.

00:41:15.760 | They had been gone for decades, I think.

00:41:18.720 | The escalation of violence.

00:41:22.360 | You kill one of mine, I'll kill four of yours.

00:41:24.600 | You kill four of mine, I'll go after your family

00:41:26.680 | because you were in hiding.

00:41:28.040 | There's stories of high-level cartel people

00:41:32.520 | getting their sons and daughters murdered,

00:41:36.600 | mutilated in revenge killings.

00:41:39.920 | So I think it's at a point where it spiraled out

00:41:43.720 | of semblance of a rule set

00:41:45.920 | as far as who can get exposed to some of this violence.

00:41:48.960 | Those highly-produced ISIS videos

00:41:50.960 | where they show torture and executions,

00:41:54.200 | according to some of the sources that I've talked to

00:41:57.640 | here in the United States

00:41:58.640 | that were looking at that phenomenon,

00:42:01.240 | they said that it seems to be that that was influenced

00:42:04.280 | by some of the narco blog videos

00:42:06.640 | that were coming out of Mexico in the early 2000s.

00:42:10.920 | Basically, that some of these groups were the first ones

00:42:12.840 | that got wind of the fact that you can export terror

00:42:17.840 | or the horror that an execution has through social media.

00:42:21.920 | Way back when Facebook was a bit more

00:42:24.240 | of a wildland area,

00:42:27.000 | you could see these in newsfeeds,

00:42:29.360 | videos of executions, tortures,

00:42:31.440 | and stuff like that coming out of Mexico.

00:42:32.920 | - On Facebook?

00:42:34.000 | - Way back when.

00:42:34.840 | - Wow.

00:42:35.680 | - This was a different time.

00:42:37.000 | - People who criticize social media in the moderation

00:42:41.600 | is a tough job,

00:42:44.320 | because the brutal world out there.

00:42:46.920 | - I mean, I remember seeing some of these ISIS videos

00:42:49.440 | on Facebook way back when,

00:42:51.480 | and they cracked down on all that.

00:42:53.880 | But one that's kind of clear,

00:42:56.560 | and I'm not gonna say where to find it,

00:42:59.880 | but people out there might've seen it

00:43:01.720 | because some of these videos get shared

00:43:03.280 | through WhatsApp groups and chat groups out there.

00:43:07.040 | One of the ones that caught my attention way back when

00:43:09.320 | was two guys getting executed by a chainsaw.

00:43:12.840 | And people can kind of imagine what that would be like.

00:43:19.600 | - This is produced on purpose?

00:43:23.040 | - Yes.

00:43:23.880 | - Like it's videotaped on purpose?

00:43:24.720 | - Yeah, it's a cartel group, rival cartel members,

00:43:28.080 | and a way to send a message to those other rival cartel

00:43:31.920 | is to basically execute these people in front of a camera.

00:43:35.920 | I mean, you can't get to your rivals,

00:43:38.640 | but you can make them see what they're doing,

00:43:42.160 | or at least make their people look at what happens

00:43:45.600 | if you invade their territory.

00:43:48.320 | - Just an escalation of brutality and the violence as well.

00:43:51.320 | - I mean-

00:43:52.160 | - And that leads to terror,

00:43:53.200 | and then some mass communication of terror.

00:43:55.680 | - Yeah, I mean, you have videos of some of these people

00:43:58.440 | engaging in cannibalism in front of a video

00:44:01.040 | to see how brutal they are,

00:44:02.440 | or people taking out somebody's heart while they're alive

00:44:07.440 | and filming it.

00:44:08.480 | And it used to be social media as a whole,

00:44:10.880 | you would see some of these videos,

00:44:12.000 | they would get put down in a few days.

00:44:16.520 | But now there's a telegram groups,

00:44:18.600 | there's live leaks,

00:44:21.200 | there's a bunch of other sites out there

00:44:23.160 | that kind of disperse some of these videos.

00:44:25.480 | And it's basically a bulletin board for them

00:44:29.040 | as far as, "Hey, you got into my territory,

00:44:31.320 | well, this is what's gonna happen to you."

00:44:33.320 | - Is there a game theoretic way to remove

00:44:39.560 | this kind of brutality, to deescalate the brutality?

00:44:42.800 | 'Cause it seems like if a cartel takes power

00:44:46.000 | that exceeds the power of politicians in a locality,

00:44:49.640 | there's a strong incentive to reduce the brutality,

00:44:52.760 | to crack down on this kind of chainsaw executions.

00:44:57.000 | - You know, there was a recent leak of government files,

00:45:02.000 | called the Guacamaya leaks.

00:45:05.160 | It's our version of WikiLeaks, I guess.

00:45:08.200 | And it was mostly documents

00:45:11.240 | coming out of the Mexican military.

00:45:13.520 | I haven't seen it talked about a lot here in stateside,

00:45:16.360 | but it's a pretty big thing down in Mexico.

00:45:18.680 | And in some of those documents,

00:45:19.760 | it reveals how powerless the government is,

00:45:23.240 | I mean, as far as the military goes.

00:45:25.080 | So that's another player in Mexico, the military.

00:45:28.020 | The military has been out in force in the streets,

00:45:32.960 | basically doing a policing role

00:45:34.640 | since Felipe Calderon was the administration.

00:45:37.520 | He basically militarized the drug war.

00:45:39.840 | Felipe Calderon was to the right of the political spectrum.

00:45:45.600 | And his main rival, who was way to the left,

00:45:48.560 | is now in power.

00:45:49.720 | And one of the campaign promises he had

00:45:53.400 | was to demilitarize the drug war,

00:45:57.160 | to send the military back to its barracks and all that.

00:46:00.440 | And he's basically continuing on.

00:46:01.880 | They just passed some legislation

00:46:03.920 | that basically keeps the military on the streets

00:46:06.440 | for a few more years, you know?

00:46:08.740 | And I think some of these documents that were leaked

00:46:13.840 | are very telling as far as why that is.

00:46:17.840 | They have, the military now has a vast amount of power

00:46:21.480 | when it comes to security industry.

00:46:24.160 | I mean, they're in charge of building airports

00:46:25.960 | and train lines in Mexico now.

00:46:27.520 | Their documents themselves show how certain regions

00:46:33.560 | in Mexico who have a specific military presence

00:46:37.640 | work for one side or favor one side of the cartel.

00:46:40.440 | - They're corrupted too.

00:46:42.240 | So there's these military forces that are in part corrupted.

00:46:45.080 | - Yes.

00:46:46.120 | - And the cartel, who operates with violence,

00:46:49.200 | somehow finding a balance between each other.

00:46:51.440 | It just feels like throughout human history,

00:46:55.260 | there's dictators or leaders that come

00:47:00.260 | into situations like this

00:47:02.220 | and really crack down on the violence.

00:47:04.080 | - Yeah.

00:47:05.080 | - So it seems like that's not happening.

00:47:07.040 | It seems like there's a kind of market

00:47:09.560 | of violence happening here.

00:47:11.040 | - There's a systemic amnesia that happens

00:47:13.120 | every presidency in Mexico.

00:47:15.160 | So president comes in, he has five to six years

00:47:19.540 | to do whatever he needs to do, and he does everything.

00:47:22.280 | And as soon as he's gone, everything he did,

00:47:25.080 | even what was working, gets chopped off.

00:47:30.080 | Police organizations get defunct

00:47:33.040 | or the names get changed, uniforms change.

00:47:36.900 | - So there's a lot of turnover everywhere?

00:47:39.760 | - Every five years federally, there's a turnover

00:47:41.960 | and things change.

00:47:43.500 | - What about the cartels, do they persist?

00:47:45.560 | - Yeah.

00:47:46.400 | - Do the leadership persist?

00:47:47.280 | - I mean, the Sinaloa cartel has had a figurehead

00:47:52.160 | behind it since the '80s, the same one.

00:47:54.800 | I mean, it's a federation of smaller cartels

00:47:58.720 | that are all kind of linked up,

00:47:59.800 | but pretty much historically,

00:48:01.440 | he was considered the head of the Sinaloa cartel.

00:48:04.240 | Elmira Zambada has been there since the '80s.

00:48:08.280 | So in a way, yeah, he's persisting.

00:48:11.400 | He's surviving all of these presidencies.

00:48:14.580 | Again, these documents that were leaked

00:48:17.500 | are a clear sign of what strengths and weaknesses

00:48:20.820 | there are as far as the government's main weapon

00:48:23.860 | against some of these criminal groups,

00:48:25.100 | which is the military.

00:48:26.980 | And if people doubt this, they can look it up now online

00:48:30.860 | because all these documents are out there.

00:48:32.940 | But just a clear thing, the Mexican Navy or the Marina

00:48:37.940 | doesn't work with the Mexican army.

00:48:40.540 | They don't speak to each other.

00:48:41.880 | So that should tell you everything you need to know

00:48:44.200 | as far as trust.

00:48:46.080 | - That could be just bureaucratic dysfunction.

00:48:48.100 | - They don't trust each other.

00:48:49.640 | - Are they both struggling with the problem of corruption?

00:48:53.040 | - Some of these documents that are already out there

00:48:55.320 | talk about the ports in Mexico,

00:48:59.040 | which are probably the main conduit

00:49:00.960 | of precursors of methamphetamines

00:49:03.120 | and precursors of things like fentanyl into the country.

00:49:06.540 | They're operated and guarded by the Marina, right?

00:49:10.000 | So these things are happening under their watch.

00:49:12.520 | And then you get talk about the army in certain places,

00:49:17.520 | basically working counter cartel operations

00:49:21.800 | to specifically one side, not another,

00:49:25.040 | as far as the rival groups out there.

00:49:27.520 | And we have a long history of some of these groups going,

00:49:30.120 | military groups going rogue.

00:49:31.440 | Losetas are a prime example of this.

00:49:33.400 | These special forces units that basically turned around

00:49:37.760 | and went to work as bodyguards for the Gulf cartel

00:49:40.200 | and then decided to,

00:49:43.040 | but what they basically did

00:49:43.880 | was an internship with a cartel.

00:49:46.440 | They went out there, did bodyguarding for the Gulf cartel,

00:49:50.520 | and then realized they can do a better job

00:49:52.760 | than they were doing, so they started their own,

00:49:55.240 | sparking off one of the, again, one of the bloodiest

00:49:57.720 | internal cartel wars in Mexico's history.

00:50:01.800 | - Who was El Chapo?

00:50:03.920 | - El Chapo was a part of the leadership,

00:50:05.600 | or at least a faction of the leadership in the cartel.

00:50:08.000 | It's a federation of different, of small organizations,

00:50:11.080 | well, I say small organizations,

00:50:13.080 | basically families or organizations

00:50:14.680 | that conform this larger group,

00:50:17.240 | which is the Sinaloa cartel that is based out of Sinaloa.

00:50:21.240 | Basically, they are people that have family

00:50:26.240 | and power nucleuses there in Sinaloa.

00:50:29.200 | I mean, who was he?

00:50:31.960 | I think he was a high-level operator

00:50:34.440 | for the Sinaloa cartel.

00:50:35.560 | He had his own drug routes, his own networks,

00:50:38.480 | his family nucleus down there,

00:50:41.640 | still in control of some of those operations,

00:50:44.040 | so his arrest really didn't change anything.

00:50:46.800 | But he wasn't the mastermind, number one leader

00:50:51.920 | that I think the media and the government

00:50:54.920 | kind of portrayed him as.

00:50:56.560 | - Who was the mastermind?

00:50:58.600 | - If you go down there and you read

00:51:02.520 | what most of the brave journalists in Mexico that we have,

00:51:07.520 | say another aspect of this war

00:51:09.720 | is that a lot of journalists get killed.

00:51:11.200 | I think Mexico has some of the top numbers in the world.

00:51:14.800 | This is no secret to anybody.

00:51:18.160 | El Mayo Zambada is the name of the historical figurehead

00:51:22.720 | of this cartel, or at least somebody who people theorize

00:51:27.120 | or suspect to be the main guy or the main person

00:51:30.920 | that is in charge of some of this criminal group.

00:51:33.240 | - Is he still alive?

00:51:34.920 | - That's the going rumor that he's still very much alive.

00:51:37.560 | The interesting thing about him

00:51:38.640 | is that he learned his craft in Los Angeles.

00:51:41.040 | So people thinking that Sinaloa cartel

00:51:43.440 | isn't a Mexican thing, it's actually,

00:51:45.280 | he apparently learned a lot of his craft

00:51:49.240 | from people in the United States.

00:51:52.000 | - And that's the craft of leadership,

00:51:53.720 | the craft of business, the craft of which aspect of the craft?

00:51:56.680 | - The craft of getting a product from Colombia,

00:52:00.280 | putting it through Mexico.

00:52:01.400 | - And the logistics.

00:52:02.360 | - The logistics part of it.

00:52:03.760 | - And he somehow is operating in the shadows,

00:52:11.240 | so he's not a known entity.

00:52:13.320 | - I don't have a clear number of this,

00:52:14.860 | but he was interviewed by a magazine

00:52:16.640 | called Proceso in Mexico,

00:52:18.680 | and some pictures were taken of him.

00:52:20.840 | This was over 10 years ago, probably,

00:52:22.560 | and that's the last time anybody's

00:52:24.240 | ever seen a picture of him.

00:52:25.640 | - What's it like to be a journalist?

00:52:27.320 | So can a journalist have a conversation with him and live?

00:52:31.560 | - Not unless he asks to have that conversation.

00:52:34.240 | I think he reached out to this journalist to talk about it.

00:52:38.380 | There's a media wing to the work that we do,

00:52:43.280 | a sister page called Demoler,

00:52:45.120 | and it's run by some pretty good people.

00:52:49.400 | And the way we met is that I was basically training them

00:52:52.680 | how to work in hostile environments,

00:52:54.240 | and they were like, "Oh, we're gonna go report

00:52:55.880 | "on cartel activity in Mexico."

00:52:58.480 | And I was like, "(sighs)

00:53:00.480 | "That is a year and a half ago,

00:53:03.860 | "a reporter went to the president's daily briefing,

00:53:08.480 | "press conference that he has."

00:53:09.720 | They called them La Mañaneras,

00:53:11.680 | President Manuel Lopez Obrador,

00:53:14.960 | and told him to his face,

00:53:17.160 | "I have threats on my life, they're trying to kill me."

00:53:19.920 | And it happened.

00:53:23.120 | There's been a slew of assassinations and murders

00:53:25.480 | of members of the press all over Mexico.

00:53:27.240 | It's not an easy job.

00:53:28.840 | Either they say too much,

00:53:33.080 | or they say things that favor one side or the other,

00:53:36.000 | which is another aspect of it that is interesting.

00:53:38.400 | I don't consider myself a reporter.

00:53:40.720 | I don't report on the news in Mexico.

00:53:42.520 | I have friends that do that very well.

00:53:45.080 | I commentate on some of it only.

00:53:46.760 | But you see a lot of these cartel reporters go down there,

00:53:51.160 | talk to a specific side,

00:53:52.400 | and basically speak one side of the story,

00:53:55.440 | and that is not something that the other side wants.

00:53:58.800 | If you go down there and speak to one side,

00:54:01.800 | you're saying what they want people to know or hear.

00:54:04.320 | So in a way, you're kind of spreading

00:54:05.640 | some of their cartel propaganda in a way.

00:54:08.240 | And that's how some people get shot.

00:54:12.120 | - Do you think it's possible to go in there

00:54:16.120 | and have a conversation with a cartel leader?

00:54:20.200 | - Well, Sean Penn- - Or somebody like me,

00:54:22.320 | for somebody like Sean Penn?

00:54:23.800 | - This is what I will say.

00:54:25.160 | After that whole Sean Penn thing,

00:54:27.880 | I think a lot of people would reconsider

00:54:30.160 | a meeting with anybody of any level

00:54:32.080 | that has any variety here in the United States.

00:54:34.240 | They wouldn't trust anybody to get that close.

00:54:36.560 | There are people out there that will talk to reporters,

00:54:40.000 | people that are working on a lab or laboratory

00:54:42.840 | somewhere in a hillside, somewhere down south,

00:54:45.400 | in the Sierra, low-level people that get authorization

00:54:49.600 | to speak to reporters and stuff like that,

00:54:51.280 | but they don't say anything that isn't being taught

00:54:53.120 | or shown in various different ways

00:54:55.160 | or outlets out there for them.

00:54:56.920 | I mean, some of these guys have Instagram accounts.

00:54:59.040 | Some of these guys blog about it.

00:55:00.960 | - But not the leaders.

00:55:01.800 | - TikTok, no, not the leaders.

00:55:03.720 | I think after what happened to El Chapo Guzman,

00:55:07.000 | I think that opportunity, that window was closed

00:55:11.040 | for some of the leadership down there.

00:55:13.520 | - I think, I disagree.

00:55:15.120 | I think they're just more sensitive,

00:55:17.320 | realizing that there has to be a deep trust.

00:55:21.720 | It's not just anybody and not any high-profile.

00:55:24.720 | I've gotten a chance to speak

00:55:26.400 | to some very high-profile leaders

00:55:28.120 | that don't speak to journalists,

00:55:30.080 | and they understand the value of trust.

00:55:32.720 | - If they have something to say,

00:55:35.440 | which I don't think they do, you know,

00:55:37.600 | I don't think they, unless at some point in the future,

00:55:41.640 | which is something I suspect might be coming,

00:55:44.880 | that there is some sort of armed intervention

00:55:48.560 | or external attack on some of these criminal groups

00:55:52.080 | that really puts the pressure on them.

00:55:55.760 | - You don't think there's a human aspect to this,

00:55:59.320 | of a human being wanting their story to be known?

00:56:03.080 | Versus, is this different than the propaganda machine

00:56:07.520 | of I have something to say,

00:56:09.160 | I have some message to put out there

00:56:11.720 | to play the game of politics and power and money

00:56:15.040 | and all that kind of stuff?

00:56:15.920 | Isn't there also a human being

00:56:17.480 | underneath all that armor that,

00:56:19.600 | for the sake of perhaps ego, legacy,

00:56:24.080 | wants to be understood?

00:56:25.880 | - I think in a way, they already do that.

00:56:28.400 | There's corridos, which are basically Mexican folk songs

00:56:31.400 | that get sung about some of them.

00:56:34.040 | So in a way, some of these singers

00:56:37.320 | are reporting on some of their lives,

00:56:39.560 | and it's a great honor to have a corrido made about you.

00:56:43.280 | Somebody made a corrido about me

00:56:45.280 | based on my interviews, right?

00:56:46.840 | I didn't pay for it, so it's a real one.

00:56:49.240 | It feels cool.

00:56:50.080 | - So creating a myth, the legend of the man.

00:56:53.400 | - I think it's about,

00:56:54.600 | I think a way you can find somebody like that

00:56:58.480 | is somebody that wants to get their story,

00:57:01.560 | specifically clear and straight,

00:57:03.520 | coming from that culture

00:57:07.680 | and getting to work for the government down there

00:57:10.680 | and then not working for the government down there

00:57:13.560 | and being on the outside, being critical

00:57:15.360 | of not only the government that is in place now,

00:57:17.280 | but also the government that I actually work with.

00:57:19.640 | I can tell you that there's villains

00:57:21.560 | all over the place down there.

00:57:22.720 | Everybody's a villain, you know,

00:57:24.320 | at all levels in some way, shape, or form.

00:57:26.600 | And some of these people,

00:57:27.840 | I think in a way, including El Chapo,

00:57:30.680 | I think that some of that meeting was about film rights

00:57:34.120 | and stories and being able to get his story out there.

00:57:38.000 | I think, I'm not too sure, because I wasn't there,

00:57:40.880 | but I suspect that some of that was going on.

00:57:44.160 | If you can bring an honest voice down there,

00:57:47.200 | they can trust to put that out there.

00:57:50.240 | Yeah, I mean, I think you could try.

00:57:53.840 | - I'm interested in that kind of thing,

00:57:56.520 | because ultimately in some of those places,

00:57:59.440 | like inside a cartel at the very top

00:58:03.480 | is when you can really look at the raw aspects

00:58:07.520 | of human nature in a way you can't necessarily elsewhere.

00:58:11.120 | - There's a youth coming into power down there.

00:58:13.880 | And when I say youth, I mean,

00:58:15.320 | some of the old guard is going out

00:58:16.920 | and some of the new guard is coming in.

00:58:18.760 | An example of this is El Chapo Guzman's sons,

00:58:22.480 | who are now in their own right,

00:58:24.920 | kind of gaining legendary status.

00:58:27.040 | There was an attempted arrest on his son

00:58:30.200 | that led to the famous Culiacanazo incident,

00:58:34.800 | which we are now learning more about

00:58:36.480 | because some of the Guacamaya leaks

00:58:38.360 | are kind of speaking more about what happened that day.

00:58:42.800 | Basically a federal operation,

00:58:45.040 | they say to arrest El Chapo Guzman's son,

00:58:50.040 | turned into a siege to try and get him free.

00:58:55.720 | They called in the Calvary,

00:58:57.440 | basically the whole of the Sinaloa cartel

00:58:59.160 | showed up to try and rescue him.

00:59:01.360 | Interesting thing about that is,

00:59:03.120 | in reading some of the documents

00:59:05.120 | and also just seeing some of the videos

00:59:06.480 | and stuff like that came out of that incident,

00:59:08.820 | the cartels were the ones evacuating

00:59:10.440 | the citizenship from the area.

00:59:13.080 | They were the ones going restaurant to restaurant

00:59:14.880 | saying, "Hey, if you wanna exit the city,

00:59:16.480 | "go through here, take your families, get down,

00:59:18.880 | "but you have to leave because the army's coming here,

00:59:20.660 | "they're gonna fight us."

00:59:21.920 | - So there's like a deep morality to all of that.

00:59:26.840 | Underneath the violence, there's a humanity.

00:59:28.880 | - I mean, it's their home.

00:59:30.240 | It is their home, and they were fighting for their home

00:59:33.320 | and they were fighting for leadership from their home.

00:59:36.020 | There is a morality, there is a humanity there.

00:59:38.920 | And again, if people wanna paint them all

00:59:42.220 | with the villainy aspects,

00:59:43.640 | everybody's a villain in somebody else's story,

00:59:48.640 | if you kinda look at it that way.

00:59:51.040 | - People should check out your Patreon,

00:59:52.880 | should check out your field notes.

00:59:54.480 | You're a really good writer, your Instagram too.

00:59:56.760 | You write about, you have a quote

00:59:59.000 | in your field notes about villains.

01:00:00.760 | Quote, "I once worked for a villain,

01:00:04.200 | "a savior to some and a biblical demon of old to others,

01:00:08.060 | "a true product of his environment.

01:00:11.020 | "He was the best and the worst of us.

01:00:13.400 | "We're all potential villains in someone else's story,

01:00:16.080 | "he would say to us as we would head out into the unknowns

01:00:20.980 | "that the night had waiting for us.

01:00:23.100 | "It was during one of these nights that I looked around me

01:00:25.620 | "and saw horns and pitchforks among my people

01:00:28.560 | "and realized what he meant.

01:00:32.040 | "We were no knights of the round table.

01:00:34.400 | "Whatever we were, we were needed.

01:00:36.600 | "In the end, I guess that justified

01:00:38.560 | "most of what was about to happen."

01:00:41.240 | Do you think El Chapo, do you think people like him

01:00:43.240 | are good or evil?

01:00:45.720 | - I think there's no one without the other.

01:00:47.800 | I think there's a cost to their goodness that they do.

01:00:52.800 | The roads they build, the hospitals,

01:00:55.480 | the career paths that they pay for.

01:00:57.640 | There are doctors in Mexico that their careers

01:01:00.640 | were paid for by some of these groups.

01:01:03.560 | And they do a lot of amazing good for the community.

01:01:06.640 | I remember there was a surgeon

01:01:11.160 | reconstructing cleft palates.

01:01:14.300 | In one of my travels that I did out there,

01:01:17.240 | I spent some time actually going out there

01:01:20.200 | after I got out of the job to train people

01:01:23.080 | and this type of stuff that I show people.

01:01:25.760 | And they told me, I told them,

01:01:30.040 | "You're doing God's work.

01:01:31.520 | "This stuff is like legit.

01:01:33.260 | "This is God's work."

01:01:35.080 | Building smiles for people.

01:01:36.920 | And I said, "Yeah."

01:01:38.000 | And then, "Can I talk to you?"

01:01:38.840 | "Yeah."

01:01:39.960 | He said, "My career path was paid for by cartel,

01:01:44.960 | "a group of cartel members.

01:01:46.540 | "They paid for my career path

01:01:47.800 | "because they wanted somebody on hand

01:01:49.540 | "that could fix their teeth."

01:01:51.000 | - Do you think some aspect of that

01:01:53.480 | is just sort of manipulative control

01:01:56.520 | or is some of it also just, again,

01:01:59.320 | a care for the population, for fellow human beings

01:02:02.280 | that are one of your own?

01:02:04.260 | - I think both.

01:02:05.640 | I think there's, again,

01:02:06.920 | it's hard to just make them saints or devils.

01:02:11.040 | Some of the good they do in some of their communities

01:02:15.180 | and don't ask anything for in return.

01:02:17.340 | And even if they don't ask it for anything in return

01:02:21.060 | where the military shows up,

01:02:22.340 | they are immediately met with rocks and roadblocks

01:02:26.020 | and everybody's main weapon down there,

01:02:29.740 | since most Mexicans can't buy or own firearms,

01:02:34.020 | their main weapon down there is silence

01:02:35.780 | and their eyes to report to the people

01:02:38.180 | that they consider the good guys in their environment.

01:02:41.460 | So, that's a hard question.

01:02:47.260 | I think there's a bit of both

01:02:49.300 | and both the government and the criminal groups

01:02:52.440 | that are operating down there.

01:02:54.020 | - Silence is their main weapon.

01:02:57.500 | So, El Chapo is currently in prison.

01:02:59.420 | Is he worth talking to?

01:03:03.220 | - I'd say yes.

01:03:04.100 | - Is there things that to you are interesting about him

01:03:07.540 | that are still not understood?

01:03:09.580 | Is he a window into something

01:03:11.180 | that you don't understand about that world still?

01:03:13.260 | Or are curious about in that world?

01:03:14.900 | - I think he's a window into the family dynamics

01:03:17.660 | of that world.

01:03:18.480 | When I say family dynamics,

01:03:19.700 | Mexico has a big thing about compadres and hermanos.

01:03:23.900 | We have people that we call family

01:03:25.780 | that we're not necessarily a family.

01:03:27.620 | He is somebody that witnessed the construction

01:03:34.140 | of what is now the Sinaloa cartel.

01:03:37.660 | Like he was in it way back when he started off as a farmer

01:03:42.260 | and then went into trafficking.

01:03:43.820 | He's from a town called Bandera Huata,

01:03:45.580 | which is basically, that's the Wakanda of cartels.

01:03:49.080 | Basically, that's where a lot of that originates.

01:03:52.980 | The things that he saw as far as

01:03:55.620 | how some of these things got built,

01:03:57.820 | I think would be an interesting topic of conversation

01:04:00.780 | with somebody like him.

01:04:01.980 | - So that story is a story of evolving family dynamics.

01:04:05.500 | So part of the story of the cartel is individual humans.

01:04:09.340 | - Marrying other families, getting named padrino,

01:04:13.500 | basically godfathers to other people's kids.

01:04:15.880 | Forming family and blood ties and influence ties

01:04:20.360 | to people not only in Mexico, but in the United States.

01:04:23.540 | And seeing how that dynamic and family dynamic

01:04:26.580 | is still there.

01:04:27.520 | So he's gone, he's in prison,

01:04:30.620 | but he's probably on his way

01:04:33.500 | to be our next clandestine saint.

01:04:36.860 | You go to the chapel of Malverde.

01:04:39.620 | Malverde is basically a Mexican Robin Hood's folk saint

01:04:44.260 | down there who is a saint of traffickers.

01:04:47.360 | And at his shrine, you have a small little chapel shrine

01:04:52.360 | right next to it.

01:04:53.860 | So he's on his way to sainthood in Mexico,

01:04:57.100 | not recognized by the Catholic church,

01:04:58.700 | but that doesn't matter in Mexico anymore.

01:05:00.920 | Speaking to somebody like him,

01:05:03.940 | you can consider him somebody that lost,

01:05:07.860 | he's arrested, but his family's okay.

01:05:10.880 | His legacy is out there.

01:05:13.380 | He's probably gonna be the next folk saint

01:05:16.020 | when he passes away.

01:05:17.300 | - Do you think he feels like the new wave

01:05:20.660 | of what the cartel has become has betrayed him,

01:05:22.660 | has left him behind?

01:05:23.820 | Because it seems like the way the cartel operated

01:05:28.840 | has changed over the decades.

01:05:30.420 | - Yeah.

01:05:31.900 | Well, number one, their power and influence is bigger.

01:05:35.300 | You know, there are Sinaloa cartel operations in Colombia,

01:05:39.780 | straight to the, like in the source of it.

01:05:43.020 | And then they have a clear presence

01:05:47.460 | in places like Chicago and Los Angeles.

01:05:50.020 | They're in the United States.

01:05:50.980 | The whole thought process that a lot of Americans have,

01:05:53.860 | like, "Oh, we don't want that trouble over here.

01:05:56.500 | "We don't want them to get here,

01:05:57.900 | "or like build the wall and all this."

01:05:59.980 | - So they're deeply integrated into legitimate businesses.

01:06:02.700 | - I mean, they've been having kids and families up here

01:06:05.060 | since for a long time.

01:06:06.460 | Some of these people have American passports

01:06:08.900 | that work not only directly for them,

01:06:10.940 | but have blood ties down there.

01:06:12.260 | You know, there's been dragnets and arrests

01:06:15.020 | of some of these criminal organizations, states.

01:06:18.220 | New Generation Cartel had one two, three years ago,

01:06:20.980 | where I think it was Operation Anaconda,

01:06:23.180 | I think it was called.

01:06:24.460 | They arrested over 80 of their operatives.

01:06:27.020 | And this is a new cartel that is very militaristic

01:06:29.460 | and growing in Mexico.

01:06:30.660 | And they had over 80 arrests in the United States,

01:06:33.340 | you know, of members of them operating here.

01:06:36.020 | - And so you could be a legitimate operator

01:06:39.740 | inside the United States.

01:06:41.940 | That's hard to detect.

01:06:43.700 | Makes you wonder how many in the US government,

01:06:47.100 | the politicians here.

01:06:50.060 | The role of the United States in the drug war,

01:06:54.460 | financially in terms of power, is very big.

01:06:58.180 | - Yeah.

01:06:59.020 | - Surely there's politicians that have a finger into this.

01:07:01.780 | - Immigration is part of it.

01:07:03.780 | Illegal immigration is part of it.

01:07:05.780 | And the influence that that has as a bargaining chip

01:07:08.620 | and a political chip.

01:07:09.460 | We saw this with the first caravan kind of coming up

01:07:11.620 | and how it was politicized.

01:07:13.060 | The money, Fast and Furious,

01:07:15.780 | and guns being basically let walk down into Mexico.

01:07:20.700 | People that don't know, basically,

01:07:22.220 | the ATF had this operation where they were looking

01:07:24.820 | at straw purchasers of firearms.

01:07:27.100 | Basically people buying up a specific type of firearms

01:07:30.300 | that were on a shopping list that the cartels wanted to buy.

01:07:33.300 | Including, you know, 50 cals, FN-57 pistols,

01:07:37.500 | which are small pistols with a high velocity round

01:07:39.860 | that'll go through a bulletproof vest.

01:07:41.820 | AR-15s of all kinds that could quickly be modified

01:07:47.500 | into full auto down in Mexico.

01:07:49.540 | With a, with a, drilling a few holes

01:07:51.540 | and making a few things to them.

01:07:54.220 | So these people were buying all these,

01:07:55.980 | the ATF was watching them and allowing them

01:07:58.340 | to walk those firearms into Mexico

01:08:01.180 | under the guise of trying to track them somehow.

01:08:04.180 | Which doesn't make a lot of sense for most people

01:08:06.540 | that kind of look at that operation.

01:08:07.780 | The only people found, the only reason people found out

01:08:10.260 | about it was because of the murder of a few federal agents,

01:08:13.540 | of the US federal agents that were killed with those guns.

01:08:16.620 | One of my friends was shot with one of those pistols

01:08:19.380 | outside of his house.

01:08:20.660 | And they shot him and they shot her, his wife.

01:08:24.340 | Both of them were killed.

01:08:26.100 | Daughter was in the backseat, lost part of her arm.

01:08:29.580 | When that happened, the guns were unique.

01:08:32.380 | They were like, oh, we didn't never,

01:08:33.780 | like the mata policias is what they call them down there,

01:08:36.060 | the cop killers.

01:08:37.940 | I hadn't seen those before.

01:08:39.740 | So they were unique and interesting.

01:08:41.380 | And later on in life, I was watching CNN

01:08:45.540 | and seeing the hearings going on.

01:08:47.020 | I was like, oh, that's where they came from.

01:08:49.220 | Two federal agents changed a lot.

01:08:53.900 | It was politicized, there was a whole scandal up here.

01:08:56.260 | But in Mexico, how many people died with those firearms?

01:08:59.660 | You know, being let down, being let go down there.

01:09:02.540 | And also what type of sentiment you think

01:09:05.100 | the local populace has of the United States,

01:09:06.900 | after all those guns were basically handed over

01:09:09.460 | to some of these groups.

01:09:11.380 | You know, gun trafficking is another giant part

01:09:14.300 | of the equation and part of the problem down there,

01:09:16.420 | as far as the amount of munitions, weapons.

01:09:20.780 | And now we were also getting tradecraft material

01:09:25.540 | from conflict zones outside of Mexico.

01:09:28.020 | So weaponized drones.

01:09:30.620 | The first time we saw some of those weaponized drones

01:09:34.220 | was in Syria.

01:09:36.340 | And like a few weeks later, you know,

01:09:39.420 | grenades were being dropped on the roofs

01:09:41.700 | of some public officials' building.

01:09:44.300 | - The cartels are using drones?

01:09:47.020 | - Yeah, that's been going on for a while.

01:09:48.900 | There's a place in Michoacan

01:09:50.100 | that has some pretty interesting videos.

01:09:51.980 | And the interesting part of it is because

01:09:54.380 | the federal police down there are actually working

01:09:56.420 | hand in hand with a United Carteles Unidos group,

01:10:00.340 | which is basically the local cartels,

01:10:01.860 | to try and fight off the New Generation Cartel

01:10:04.740 | moving into Michoacan.

01:10:06.700 | So even the federal forces are fighting with the cartels

01:10:09.700 | to try and keep this larger cartel out.

01:10:11.780 | And there's videos of these civilian drones

01:10:14.260 | basically dropping explosives.

01:10:17.740 | They found some explosive testing ranges out there

01:10:20.660 | that are basically replicating stuff

01:10:22.700 | that you would see the IRA use during the troubles out there

01:10:26.580 | from homemade mortars.

01:10:27.900 | You know, IEDs have been used in Mexico

01:10:31.380 | that not that much,

01:10:32.780 | but they're making like a presence again.

01:10:35.260 | You know, we don't have a lot of ordinance around like Iraq,

01:10:37.860 | but we do have a big mining industry down there.

01:10:40.940 | So mining explosives of all kinds are pretty easy to get.

01:10:45.020 | So you start seeing that.

01:10:47.260 | And also, I mean, there's some exotic weaponry

01:10:49.780 | coming in from the South now and from the ocean.

01:10:52.500 | Some of it is probably US military equipment

01:10:57.420 | sold to various South American governments

01:10:59.820 | that are now not as stable as they were,

01:11:03.060 | and they're kind of making their way into black markets.

01:11:05.100 | So a lot of those 50 cal

01:11:07.300 | and vehicle mounted technical type machine guns

01:11:10.900 | and some of the RPGs and man pads

01:11:14.900 | or remote control guided missiles

01:11:16.540 | that have been found in cartel hands

01:11:18.660 | are probably making their way up from down South.

01:11:21.100 | - Do you get these like multimillion dollar systems

01:11:23.700 | like the HIMAR system in the Ukraine?

01:11:26.420 | You get like super sophisticated advanced technology

01:11:28.700 | or we're not?

01:11:29.700 | So like, this is like military grade.

01:11:31.860 | I'm not sure what the application would be exactly

01:11:33.900 | in Mexico.

01:11:35.260 | - Some of the sophisticated stuff I see in our man pads,

01:11:38.780 | which is basically remote guided missiles.

01:11:41.100 | I've seen some of those found down there.

01:11:41.940 | - What is the application exactly?

01:11:43.920 | A display of power?

01:11:46.740 | - There are no fly zones over parts of Mexico.

01:11:50.100 | - For this reason?

01:11:51.340 | - The New Generation Cartel took down a helicopter.

01:11:54.580 | There's been incidents of military helicopters

01:11:58.460 | falling from the sky and they said

01:12:01.500 | that it was mechanical issues.

01:12:03.900 | But again, I'm not gonna do conspiracy theories out there,

01:12:08.340 | but there's a lot of videos on TikTok

01:12:11.300 | of Sinaloa cartel forces at parties

01:12:15.220 | carrying around rocket launchers on their backs.

01:12:18.180 | - So there's an increased probability

01:12:21.740 | of mechanical failures over those areas

01:12:24.500 | when you're flying a helicopter.

01:12:26.500 | - Yeah, there's no fly zones

01:12:27.700 | over some parts of Mexico.

01:12:29.460 | And another thing you're seeing now is night vision,

01:12:33.540 | night vision equipment that is clearly military grade

01:12:37.100 | from the US that was probably abandoned

01:12:39.620 | in some war field out there,

01:12:41.380 | maybe Afghanistan or somewhere like that.

01:12:44.060 | And it's being found in safe houses

01:12:46.780 | and in the hands of cartel forces.

01:12:48.660 | You wanna talk about a scary opponent,

01:12:51.700 | somebody wearing night vision with a suppressed firearm.

01:12:55.980 | Those types of capabilities are now out there.

01:12:59.500 | Also, there's this tendency to think in every now

01:13:02.780 | and then you'll see these cartel videos

01:13:04.100 | with these guys carrying around these 50 cals

01:13:05.860 | and they show up, they stand there like,

01:13:07.900 | you know, boasting about their rifles

01:13:09.900 | and everybody laughed at them

01:13:10.940 | because the 50 cal or anything like that

01:13:14.460 | without a optic on it, you know,

01:13:16.540 | it's like you're gonna shoot,

01:13:17.980 | you're praying, shoot basically,

01:13:19.420 | see if you can hit anything with it.

01:13:21.700 | But now there's a few of my sources

01:13:24.380 | of obscene, you know, sophisticated,

01:13:26.780 | laser guided range finders and sighting systems

01:13:30.700 | on some of these that are being found out there.

01:13:33.020 | - How much damage can 50 cal, what's the application?

01:13:35.940 | - They started getting them specifically

01:13:37.860 | with the proliferation of armored vehicles in Mexico.

01:13:40.580 | Mexico has a giant industry in armored vehicles as far as.

01:13:43.580 | - So there's a race in terms of armoring,

01:13:46.340 | like protecting especially high value targets

01:13:50.700 | and then weapons that can deal with those armored,

01:13:54.780 | the protected high value targets.

01:13:56.780 | - There was an attempted assassination

01:13:59.900 | of a state prosecutor somewhere in,

01:14:01.860 | I think Central Mexico, I forget exactly where,

01:14:03.900 | but she was riding around a up armored Jeep,

01:14:07.460 | Cherokee I think it was,

01:14:10.100 | and their main means of firepower was 50 cals

01:14:14.900 | and that car was left in pieces.

01:14:18.140 | He survived in it,

01:14:19.100 | so I think the armored vehicle company that sold her

01:14:22.060 | that vehicle has it in the display room.

01:14:24.060 | Then before my time, probably two, three years

01:14:27.860 | before I was actually active,

01:14:29.780 | they tried to kill the head of public security

01:14:32.100 | in the state of Baja,

01:14:33.820 | and with him it was a grenade launcher,

01:14:35.860 | 40 millimeter grenade launcher.

01:14:37.940 | It skipped off the armored vehicle

01:14:40.980 | and landed in the car behind it, made the back explode.

01:14:45.020 | One of the guys that I used to work with

01:14:46.660 | was actually in that car, he survived it.

01:14:49.660 | But you started to see,

01:14:50.900 | oh, they're using our vehicles now,

01:14:53.100 | let's get 50 caliber now to try and defeat that armor.

01:14:57.140 | So that, yeah, there's always this race of technology

01:15:03.300 | basically down there, armored vehicles,

01:15:05.940 | how do you take on an armored vehicle?

01:15:07.500 | Well, there's a few ways, 50 cals,

01:15:09.900 | if you can mount them in the right way

01:15:11.820 | and shoot at a car like that,

01:15:12.900 | or a bunch of kids with balloons and acrylic paint

01:15:17.020 | on the front windshield and blind the vehicle

01:15:18.820 | so they can't drive it anymore is another way.

01:15:21.820 | A tow line across a road painted black

01:15:26.980 | so you can't see it, and cut the thing in half.

01:15:30.660 | Again, I'm not saying any secrets,

01:15:32.220 | these are things that people have seen out there.

01:15:34.660 | Shoot at the radiator, you know?

01:15:38.220 | Some of these radiators are not,

01:15:39.700 | even the more sophisticated vehicles out there

01:15:42.500 | don't have a sufficient armoring around the radiator

01:15:45.100 | or the battery housing of some of these vehicles.

01:15:47.820 | There was a case of a guy,

01:15:48.900 | I think his nickname was El Pelalacas

01:15:51.020 | or something like that, out in Sinaloa,

01:15:53.220 | level cartel guy, he had an armored vehicle,

01:15:55.540 | he was riding around and he got ambushed,

01:15:58.660 | shot at his car, he was like,

01:15:59.820 | "Ah, I have armor, you can't shoot me."

01:16:02.340 | And somebody went up to his car

01:16:03.620 | and just put the barrel right in the locking mechanism.

01:16:06.580 | And that got him, you know?

01:16:09.780 | So it's an interesting place as far as people

01:16:14.420 | getting certain types of guns.

01:16:16.180 | Armor is prolific down there.

01:16:18.900 | I mean, everybody down there,

01:16:20.260 | all the cartel members,

01:16:21.380 | you'll see them wearing plate armor.

01:16:22.980 | So that's an issue.

01:16:24.540 | It's not like you can shoot somebody square in the chest

01:16:27.340 | and it'll go down.

01:16:28.180 | - Are they afraid to kill Americans?

01:16:30.900 | So I know, I was traveling in Ukraine on the front,

01:16:35.020 | so a lot of the journalists

01:16:36.420 | would travel in armored vehicles.

01:16:38.300 | And at first I was like,

01:16:40.060 | "It seems like this would attract attention."

01:16:43.100 | It seems like they would want to hit those targets.

01:16:45.620 | But then I realized over time, as I learned,

01:16:48.540 | there's a fear of killing Americans.

01:16:51.860 | There could be a drastic escalation of conflict.

01:16:54.020 | - Yeah, it's not worth it.

01:16:55.620 | It's kicking a beehive.

01:16:56.860 | Yeah, there is a tendency to shy away

01:17:01.900 | or stay away from that.

01:17:03.300 | I mean, they don't want the heat or the attention.

01:17:05.980 | - Outside of that, everyone's game.

01:17:08.460 | - Everyone's game, but also there's been many cases

01:17:10.700 | of Americans being killed down there.

01:17:12.860 | I mean, we saw the Mormon massacre that happened down there

01:17:16.300 | and all of them were American, Mexican.

01:17:19.580 | They had both nationalities and blonde kids,

01:17:22.260 | white, being massacred in the middle of a desert

01:17:28.460 | and the cars basically catching fire.

01:17:30.780 | This happened and the Americans sent the FBI down there

01:17:35.780 | to kind of review some of what happened down there.

01:17:39.540 | And I think that was when Trump started talking about

01:17:43.820 | kind of reviving this whole notion of cartels

01:17:46.780 | being labor-related terrorist organization,

01:17:48.860 | probably more of a political pressure point

01:17:51.700 | he was using to try and get Mexico

01:17:53.420 | to reinforce its southern border, which it hasn't.

01:17:58.420 | But there's escalation.

01:18:00.220 | This already happened and nothing happened,

01:18:03.500 | so we can probably get away with it.

01:18:06.540 | And again, there's a newer generation moving forward now

01:18:09.220 | of people coming into power.

01:18:11.100 | - More brutal, more technically savvy.

01:18:13.540 | - Well, they have the experience of their parents

01:18:15.620 | and the people behind them and what they've done

01:18:17.500 | and what they've gone away with.

01:18:18.580 | And now, yeah, more savvy about information warfare.

01:18:23.100 | Their main recruiting tool is TikTok.

01:18:26.220 | You go to TikTok and you'll see a bunch of these kids

01:18:28.460 | at a narco party dancing around.

01:18:30.140 | And some of these are videos by cartel members filming

01:18:33.140 | other cartel members in cartel-controlled territory.

01:18:35.340 | And that's a window into that life for,

01:18:37.380 | who's on TikTok now?

01:18:40.140 | Kids.

01:18:41.380 | - And the enticing aspect of that is the money,

01:18:44.580 | the fun, the high roller life.

01:18:47.620 | - And the possibility of making it to a level.

01:18:51.780 | - Yeah.

01:18:52.620 | A fame of respect, power, money.

01:18:57.140 | - Here in the US, somebody might,

01:19:01.580 | I want a mansion.

01:19:02.900 | And I would have like, that's their mindset.

01:19:05.140 | I want to live like that rapper.

01:19:07.900 | Down there, I mean, if you can buy a house for your mom,

01:19:12.220 | or pay off some debts that you might have,

01:19:14.700 | or a car, that's enough to kill for.

01:19:17.820 | - So you also, one of the many things you did is,

01:19:22.060 | you did security, tried to protect in this war,

01:19:25.660 | try to protect people, high value people.

01:19:28.020 | How do you do, you and others,

01:19:29.820 | how is it possible to protect a high value target,

01:19:32.900 | like a celebrity, or an important politician

01:19:35.700 | in this situation?

01:19:36.580 | - So I was tasked to protect the governor of Baja

01:19:41.580 | and his family.

01:19:42.980 | I was basically replacing a whole contingency

01:19:45.340 | of people that were already there,

01:19:46.980 | that turned out to be corrupted.

01:19:48.980 | That wasn't my field, I was operational.

01:19:51.820 | I was working with other people,

01:19:53.780 | doing the counter narcotics stuff,

01:19:56.140 | and the director of the institution that I was in,

01:19:58.900 | basically called me and said,

01:19:59.980 | "Hey, you're gonna go and replace these people."

01:20:03.700 | And I, what happened to them?

01:20:04.940 | Well.

01:20:05.780 | - So you were known as a person

01:20:07.900 | that could be kind of trusted.

01:20:09.540 | - I was tasked for that, so I think they considered that.

01:20:12.700 | And I specifically worked for a governor named

01:20:17.700 | Jose Guadalupe Osuna-Millan,

01:20:21.060 | who was probably one of the best governors

01:20:22.420 | we have had in the state.

01:20:23.660 | And people wanna see if I'm trustworthy or not,

01:20:26.660 | they can ask him directly.

01:20:27.660 | And I still speak to some members of his family,

01:20:30.700 | and we're still friends in that way.

01:20:33.300 | - Is protecting people technically a difficult problem?

01:20:37.380 | - For my experience in that time and place,

01:20:40.460 | he was basically spearheading the drug war in Baja

01:20:45.380 | when he was in power.

01:20:46.380 | So he had threats from all over,

01:20:48.300 | not only him, but his family.

01:20:50.060 | First thing I realized working that job in Mexico

01:20:53.060 | is that we had people coming in

01:20:56.580 | to do specialized training of that regard,

01:20:58.700 | Israelis, teaching us how they would do things in Israel.

01:21:02.940 | That didn't make a lot of sense for us in Mexico.

01:21:06.220 | We had people that had some Secret Service experience

01:21:08.980 | kind of showing us how they would do celebrity,

01:21:12.340 | bodyguarding somebody maybe in California of that nature.

01:21:17.180 | Didn't make sense for us.

01:21:18.660 | Then we got to experience some cross-training

01:21:20.940 | with NSW, Naval Special Warfare people,

01:21:24.660 | who were coming off protection details

01:21:26.980 | in Afghanistan and Iraq.

01:21:29.740 | - Is there some useful crossover there?

01:21:31.580 | - We were struggling with the acceptance

01:21:34.020 | that we were basically doing protection details

01:21:36.340 | in a war zone.

01:21:37.980 | - So the approach that had to be taken in Mexico

01:21:41.980 | was similar to the approach you would take

01:21:43.380 | in Afghanistan during a war?

01:21:45.660 | - Some of the overt militaristic type approaches

01:21:48.180 | to security that we had to adopt,

01:21:50.060 | from we didn't move him in a single armored vehicle.

01:21:54.220 | We had two of them that looked exactly alike.

01:21:56.780 | So when we would move around,

01:21:58.140 | we would switch one car through the other every now

01:22:01.140 | and then we would arrive to an event.

01:22:03.300 | They would open the door and it would be one of us.

01:22:05.020 | And they were like, "Hey, where's the governor?

01:22:06.580 | He's in the back one."

01:22:07.460 | So we would move to that.

01:22:08.500 | So we had to do stuff like that.

01:22:10.660 | And again, this is a young me

01:22:12.460 | who didn't have any specialized training.

01:22:14.380 | I was on YouTube learning some of these things,

01:22:19.260 | going online, learning about armored vehicles,

01:22:21.580 | learning about architectural armor.

01:22:23.460 | - I think you just described a large percentage

01:22:25.900 | of the Ukrainian military, how they operate,

01:22:27.980 | which is on YouTube,

01:22:29.060 | trying to figure out how to use some of this technology.

01:22:30.940 | And that's actually incredibly effective.

01:22:34.020 | - Yeah.

01:22:34.860 | - I do quite a lot of stuff where I'm totally not an expert,

01:22:37.780 | totally uneducated and so on.

01:22:39.420 | It's kind of surprising how quickly you can get caught up.

01:22:42.100 | As we were talking offline, if you take a course,

01:22:44.740 | if you talk to an expert, if you learn from an expert,

01:22:46.940 | you can catch up really quickly.

01:22:48.900 | For me, it was all of a sudden,

01:22:50.700 | I have this director calling me in

01:22:53.020 | and I'm wearing Vans, you know, in jeans, you know.

01:22:56.140 | - Yeah.

01:22:56.980 | - T-shirt.

01:22:57.820 | And all of a sudden I had 80 some people

01:22:59.460 | that I had to move around.

01:23:00.940 | And I was in charge of securing planes,

01:23:05.060 | which I, what do I know about that?

01:23:07.860 | Airport hangers, armored vehicle maintenance

01:23:11.540 | and purchasing and figuring out how to set up

01:23:15.340 | a counter assault group for a protection detail.

01:23:18.700 | And I was like, where am I gonna learn all this?

01:23:21.180 | - Were you able to quickly figure some of these things out?

01:23:24.140 | - On the fly, basically, you know, as I was going,

01:23:26.780 | I remember having this experience,

01:23:29.420 | being in the, our security office on my laptop,

01:23:32.980 | figuring out how to set up a counter surveillance

01:23:36.500 | aside to our protection detail.

01:23:38.620 | Basically how to have people looking for people

01:23:40.980 | that might be looking for us, you know, type thing.

01:23:43.860 | And then going to San Diego to Coronado

01:23:48.860 | and training with some people from former SEAL guys

01:23:54.540 | and NCIS people who did that job in war zones

01:23:58.860 | and seeing them critique some of the solutions

01:24:02.580 | that we came up with on the fly and being like,

01:24:04.540 | oh, we never saw that before.

01:24:06.420 | Oh yeah, this is, we're doing it down there.

01:24:08.540 | So getting that compliment

01:24:11.020 | and also getting their feedback.

01:24:12.820 | Like we probably do this or do that.

01:24:14.980 | And it was a learning process on the fly that was pretty,

01:24:19.060 | I mean, seat of your pants level.

01:24:20.900 | - Is it possible for the family

01:24:22.980 | and for the high value person to have a sense of normalcy,

01:24:26.900 | to have a normal life?

01:24:27.740 | - I mean, I tried.

01:24:28.860 | I was already starting off on the wrong foot basically,

01:24:31.460 | because trust had been violated

01:24:33.660 | by the people that I was replacing.

01:24:35.140 | So I had to gain that back.

01:24:37.380 | Then young kids in that family that wanted to have a,

01:24:40.860 | you know, go out and stuff like that.

01:24:42.540 | In the most violent city on the planet.

01:24:45.420 | So I had to do my homework and figure out places

01:24:48.340 | where they were safe to go to

01:24:49.540 | and make friends with certain club owners

01:24:53.540 | and figure out ways to put security in some of these places.

01:24:56.780 | And having to create this bubble of normalcy

01:25:00.380 | around some of these people was pretty difficult.

01:25:03.300 | And there's no way that that is a normal for anybody.

01:25:08.300 | And, you know, God bless them.

01:25:11.900 | I know it wasn't easy

01:25:14.660 | and I know that it affected their lives

01:25:16.220 | and they lost on a big part of their youth.

01:25:19.460 | Being under that security supervision and bubble

01:25:22.380 | does probably does a lot for somebody specifically

01:25:27.140 | growing up like that.

01:25:28.300 | You know, you lose opportunities of things

01:25:33.060 | that we take for granted, you know, just going out,

01:25:34.940 | just not telling anybody and going to the store, you know,

01:25:38.180 | because you want to get some snacks or something like that.

01:25:39.900 | That's not available to some of these people.

01:25:42.460 | - I have to be honest, when I was in Ukraine,

01:25:44.580 | that was a really big benefit.

01:25:45.740 | - You'd escape?

01:25:46.620 | - No, I couldn't hang out.

01:25:47.700 | I couldn't eat when I'm stressed.

01:25:49.580 | I would fast and not eat much.

01:25:51.060 | So I get lost weight.

01:25:52.420 | So it's great.

01:25:53.260 | It's great for the diet.

01:25:54.180 | - That's a good diet to be in.

01:25:55.180 | Basically be under protective custody.

01:25:56.620 | That's a good idea for a good new diet.

01:26:00.460 | - And just life.

01:26:01.300 | It allowed me to focus, get a lot of reading done,

01:26:03.820 | focus on the important things in life.

01:26:05.780 | I mean, I joke, of course,

01:26:09.020 | but there's some complexity to this

01:26:13.740 | in terms of normalcy of the family,

01:26:16.060 | but also just how to operate,

01:26:18.180 | like have a mental clarity and a lack of fear.

01:26:22.020 | Just basically be good at your job, whatever that job is,

01:26:24.900 | as a politician, as a leader, even as a soldier.

01:26:28.300 | - Somebody that I, again, I think it was Lisa Ola,

01:26:31.620 | she said this to me,

01:26:32.740 | or said something like this to a group of us,

01:26:35.140 | that there's nothing wrong with being paranoid.

01:26:37.180 | It's about educating your paranoia.

01:26:38.780 | And knowing what to be afraid of.

01:26:41.380 | If you're afraid of everything,

01:26:42.980 | you're basically overwhelmed.

01:26:44.620 | But if you start educating yourself

01:26:46.460 | as far as specifically what to prioritize,

01:26:48.620 | as far as what to worry about,

01:26:50.940 | in a war zone, working, protecting somebody,

01:26:54.300 | you're not looking at everybody's faces,

01:26:56.020 | you're just looking at their hands,

01:26:57.380 | because that's what's gonna kill you.

01:27:00.060 | That's an example of focalizing what you're paranoid

01:27:03.100 | and what you're afraid of.

01:27:04.460 | - So looking at the hands,

01:27:05.540 | that's specific to a particular situation.

01:27:08.060 | But also figuring out which situations to avoid

01:27:11.980 | and which is okay.

01:27:13.420 | I mean, that's like ultimately

01:27:14.740 | one of the biggest things you could do.

01:27:17.500 | - Route analysis.

01:27:18.700 | You have to get to the airport

01:27:20.940 | and you send off two cars to analyze two routes.

01:27:23.700 | And then on the fly, you just change trajectory

01:27:28.180 | to create randomness and unpredictability,

01:27:32.740 | and have that as a security feature.

01:27:36.780 | Having a convoy of four vehicles

01:27:40.020 | separate into two convoys

01:27:42.100 | and show up in different parts to, again,

01:27:45.300 | make it hard for people to guess where you're gonna be.

01:27:47.940 | Putting out false information

01:27:49.380 | as far as where it's gonna be,

01:27:50.820 | who's gonna be, and that type of stuff.

01:27:53.180 | - It's kind of amazing how many assassination attempts

01:27:55.460 | Hitler avoided just by having a pretty strict schedule

01:27:59.060 | and being a little bit off in terms of timing.

01:28:01.980 | Just like showing up 15 minutes late

01:28:04.060 | or to a slightly different location.

01:28:06.060 | - We were going through training

01:28:07.740 | specifically around this type of stuff

01:28:09.420 | and operational training,

01:28:12.100 | basically showing us how to ambush people.

01:28:14.740 | When I started making a group for myself

01:28:18.700 | as far as counter ambush,

01:28:20.340 | this CAT teams, they call them up here in the US,

01:28:22.700 | basically a group to respond to a high violent ambush.

01:28:27.500 | First off, the first rule,

01:28:28.700 | if you find yourself in an ambush,

01:28:30.860 | it wasn't a successful ambush

01:28:32.560 | because if you find yourself in it, you're alive.

01:28:35.300 | - Yes.

01:28:36.460 | - But if you wanna create an amazing counter ambush team,

01:28:38.940 | you have to make them ambushers.

01:28:42.380 | And with ambushing, you figure out

01:28:44.780 | where all the opportunities

01:28:47.060 | of not only successfully doing what you need to do

01:28:50.100 | are in your favor, but also to escape with your life.

01:28:53.100 | We're not gonna be received by virgins in heaven.

01:28:57.340 | That's not the type of mentality that we had down there.

01:29:00.180 | But we started learning about some of these things

01:29:03.260 | and also seeing cartel forces

01:29:05.380 | apply some of these ambush tactics

01:29:06.960 | to the military or the federal forces.

01:29:09.340 | - What is an ambush?

01:29:10.300 | What are we talking about?

01:29:11.180 | So that's a surprise attack

01:29:12.780 | with an asymmetry of power kind of thing?

01:29:14.860 | - There's a contingency somewhere

01:29:16.660 | moving towards a place that you control and own,

01:29:19.760 | where you have the advantages,

01:29:20.980 | where they can't see you, but you can see them,

01:29:24.420 | where they can't predict you,

01:29:25.620 | but you can predict where they're gonna pass,

01:29:27.520 | go through places where they forcibly have to pass,

01:29:30.500 | places where they're predictable,

01:29:33.060 | places where you can not only predict,

01:29:35.740 | but also have a plan for yourself

01:29:37.440 | to escape and exit that place.

01:29:39.740 | - So how do you train for counter ambush?

01:29:41.420 | - You turn into a perfect ambusher.

01:29:44.220 | That's how you train for counter ambush.

01:29:45.580 | - Also always trying to make sure

01:29:47.020 | you have more information about other people.

01:29:49.860 | You have the element of surprise, all of those things.

01:29:52.460 | - And Musashi would say, "Know your enemy, know his sword."

01:29:55.620 | Basically that, it's simplified.

01:29:58.280 | - There's a lot of enemies around you in Mexico.

01:30:01.340 | There's a lot of uncertainty, right?

01:30:02.740 | 'Cause it's, well, I guess that's what route analysis is.

01:30:05.980 | - Yeah, you prepare for the probable.

01:30:08.660 | And if the impossible happens,

01:30:10.180 | you're halfway out of it, hopefully.

01:30:13.220 | And if you find yourself in an ambush,

01:30:14.580 | it wasn't a successful one.

01:30:15.940 | As far as our training and the mindset,

01:30:20.620 | my experience with it,

01:30:21.820 | the adversarial thinking part of it

01:30:25.980 | has always been a very powerful one.

01:30:27.860 | I think one that a lot of people ignore,

01:30:29.820 | kind of like leave to the wayside.

01:30:32.440 | Specifically in all conflicts out there,

01:30:34.060 | there's a tendency for a military force

01:30:36.820 | or a conventional force of any kind

01:30:38.420 | to be trained in a way where they dehumanize the enemy.

01:30:41.300 | And when that happens,

01:30:43.620 | you become blind to the enemy's story,

01:30:45.700 | it's his capability, his story, his ability.

01:30:48.920 | If you treat the other side like an inhuman monster,

01:30:53.500 | it's hard to take notes.

01:30:55.760 | - So there's a part of this is a radical empathy

01:30:59.620 | for the quote unquote enemy.

01:31:02.340 | - At least for me personally,

01:31:04.260 | I wasn't one of the guys that would grab them,

01:31:06.380 | beat the shit out of them,

01:31:07.220 | put them in the back of a van,

01:31:08.300 | just tie them up and gag them.

01:31:10.220 | - So you were able to see them as human?

01:31:12.260 | - I learned that from my mother.

01:31:13.740 | She said, "Nobody's against you, Ed,

01:31:16.420 | "they're for themselves.

01:31:17.660 | "Learn this and you will make friends of enemies."

01:31:21.860 | She said that when I graduated

01:31:23.700 | and I carried that with me throughout my whole career.

01:31:26.540 | - But isn't there then a pain of killing another human?

01:31:29.580 | - Always.

01:31:30.740 | But there isn't, again,

01:31:33.220 | I apologize to go back to Ukraine,

01:31:34.740 | it's my only experience of this kind of harshness.

01:31:37.260 | - And it is a powerful experience.

01:31:38.980 | - There's a dehumanization that happens.

01:31:41.660 | I suppose this is common in war.

01:31:43.940 | There's something like a video game aspect

01:31:46.340 | where people are almost having fun,

01:31:48.300 | there's a humor,

01:31:49.820 | and I think underneath that,

01:31:51.540 | the prerequisite is to see the enemy

01:31:54.140 | in the same way you see the enemy

01:31:55.540 | when you play "Call of Duty."

01:31:56.860 | You don't really think,

01:31:58.460 | you think of them as NPCs, the bad guys.

01:32:01.220 | The Russians are called orcs in Ukraine.

01:32:04.860 | I mean, there's all kinds of other names.

01:32:06.300 | - For us, it was mugrosos,

01:32:08.380 | malandros mugrosos, like dirty people.

01:32:11.060 | There's always something.

01:32:12.180 | - Over time, those are just words,

01:32:14.380 | but over time, it gathers a kind of,

01:32:17.660 | like a meaning to it

01:32:19.980 | that's more than just the words, orcs.

01:32:22.780 | They're less than human.

01:32:24.500 | They're dirty, they're too dumb

01:32:26.940 | to understand the evil they're doing,

01:32:28.500 | or whatever the--

01:32:29.900 | - It's useful, it's useful.

01:32:31.420 | It's part of the program.

01:32:32.260 | - But like, that's what,

01:32:33.620 | I've talked to soldiers,

01:32:35.300 | and some of them do have stories

01:32:38.540 | of momentarily remembering

01:32:40.940 | that there's a human on the other side.

01:32:42.900 | I talked to one woman

01:32:45.140 | who's this really badass soldier,

01:32:48.300 | she saw this really brave soldier on the other side

01:32:53.420 | do something that was almost stupid,

01:32:57.900 | how brave it was.

01:32:59.740 | And then she was trying to shoot him,

01:33:01.740 | and she missed.

01:33:03.420 | And she said she couldn't sleep the night after,

01:33:06.820 | thinking, why did she miss?

01:33:09.900 | Why did she miss?

01:33:11.460 | And then she thought she missed

01:33:13.660 | because he was a hero.

01:33:16.140 | And she had this brief realization

01:33:18.140 | that there was a hero on the other side.

01:33:19.900 | The other side is heroes.

01:33:22.460 | But then that quickly disappeared.

01:33:24.620 | Again, but she had this moment,

01:33:25.660 | there's a human being that rises

01:33:27.780 | to defend his nation,

01:33:29.260 | to defend his people,

01:33:30.620 | and he could be heroic on the other side.

01:33:32.620 | - There are things that we're trained to depress,

01:33:34.620 | or conceal, or hide, and kill in us

01:33:38.820 | when you're trained for something like that.

01:33:40.700 | Or when you're in a conflict zone like that,

01:33:42.340 | and you hear the narrative constantly being blared out

01:33:44.460 | that the other side is a orc,

01:33:46.500 | or whatever word you wanna use.

01:33:50.100 | But we live in a day and age

01:33:52.300 | when you can see Americans going off to Japan

01:33:55.780 | and shaking hands with some of their former enemies.

01:33:58.180 | I mean, some of us have seen that.

01:34:00.380 | And how things change.

01:34:02.100 | I think years from now,

01:34:03.340 | a lot of the stuff that we are taking right now

01:34:05.900 | is of the utmost importance, won't matter anymore.

01:34:09.140 | - The question is how many years?

01:34:11.140 | That's a question I ask of a lot of people

01:34:14.300 | in that part of the world.

01:34:15.700 | And a lot of them currently,

01:34:18.940 | they're also self-aware about it.

01:34:20.500 | They're like, "I'm not sure I trust my current feelings."

01:34:23.860 | But the current feelings are generational.

01:34:26.660 | Like for decades, I will not just hate the leadership,

01:34:31.620 | I will hate all of Russian people.

01:34:33.860 | - I can't understand that on my side of my life experience,

01:34:36.820 | because our war has been an internal war

01:34:39.540 | amongst our people, amongst our houses.

01:34:41.420 | - While that is the propaganda,

01:34:43.580 | there's also a deep grain of truth

01:34:45.460 | that there is a oneness to the people of that region.

01:34:48.620 | - Yeah.

01:34:49.460 | - But people will get very offended at that idea,

01:34:52.260 | because right now it's a very strong nationalist borders.

01:34:56.260 | But there is a cultural history that connects people.

01:35:00.460 | I mean, in some deep sense, we're all connected.

01:35:02.900 | We all come from Western Africa,

01:35:04.820 | and then all came from fish before then,

01:35:06.460 | depending on your view of history, of life on earth.

01:35:11.460 | But there is a oneness to us,

01:35:15.820 | and often you forget that in conflict.

01:35:18.860 | - I had an experience working.

01:35:21.820 | There was a friend of mine who took the other path,

01:35:24.420 | and went to work for some of these criminal groups.

01:35:28.900 | I was operational, and I was,

01:35:31.820 | we saw a bunch of people in a gas station, parked.

01:35:35.940 | Back then, the main modus operandi that they had

01:35:40.980 | was that they would impersonate

01:35:42.700 | or dress up as federal police.

01:35:45.300 | And that's how they would move around the city.

01:35:47.340 | We saw these suburbans in a gas station,

01:35:53.780 | and some of the guys were carrying around AK-47s.

01:35:56.780 | And that's not a standard issue firearm.

01:35:59.900 | So we saw that, and I got off on foot,

01:36:04.900 | and walked by to try and get a better sense

01:36:09.900 | of what was going on.

01:36:10.820 | I took everything off, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

01:36:15.360 | And I got a whistle from one of the guys that was there,

01:36:19.120 | and my name was called.

01:36:20.880 | It was one of the guys that I grew up with.

01:36:24.480 | Redhead kid, looked like El Canelo, you know?

01:36:28.720 | There's redheads in Mexico, by the way.

01:36:32.160 | I think it's probably some of the Irish

01:36:34.520 | that betrayed the American side

01:36:37.160 | during the last Mexico-American War

01:36:38.880 | that stayed down there, had a bunch of kids.

01:36:41.120 | It's probably from there.

01:36:42.360 | - Love is stronger than anything else, I think.

01:36:44.960 | - This redhead kid, when I say kid, I mean he was my age.

01:36:48.480 | Now, to my eyes, he's always gonna be younger now.

01:36:51.320 | He whistled, told my name.

01:36:55.960 | Said, "Hey, (speaking in foreign language)

01:36:58.240 | "What are you doing here?"

01:36:59.080 | I was like, "Oh, shit, I'm just going home.

01:37:02.200 | "I'm still going to get a taxi."

01:37:04.360 | Said, "Oh, okay."

01:37:05.520 | He walked, as he walks over,

01:37:07.000 | he has a plate carrier with AK-round magazines on his chest.

01:37:13.000 | AK without a stock on it, just carrying it in his hand.

01:37:16.800 | He comes over and he hugs me.

01:37:18.800 | I could feel the magazines on my chest.

01:37:21.520 | Mind you, I have a gun on me, tucked.

01:37:25.320 | And next to him is buzzing in my back pocket

01:37:30.280 | as people are trying to figure out what the fuck's going on.

01:37:34.760 | He asked me, small talk shit, like, "Hey, what are you doing?

01:37:39.040 | "What do you work at?"

01:37:40.280 | I was like, "Oh, I'm just looking for a job.

01:37:41.840 | "I used to work at a video store."

01:37:44.360 | So he's like, "I haven't seen you in a while.

01:37:47.000 | "How's so-and-so of your family?"

01:37:50.160 | "Good."

01:37:51.000 | "How's so-and-so of your family?"

01:37:51.840 | "Good."

01:37:53.120 | It's like, yeah, this is an interesting job you have.

01:37:57.400 | He's like, "Yeah, it's pretty good.

01:37:58.800 | "They pay us well.

01:38:00.240 | "You get a car, there's money,

01:38:04.240 | "and nobody fucks with you.

01:38:05.360 | "You get respect."

01:38:06.440 | I was like, "That's awesome.

01:38:08.800 | "If you want, I can get you in.

01:38:10.840 | "If you ever want that."

01:38:11.680 | I was like, "Oh, I'm too much of a coward for that," I told him.

01:38:15.440 | - Conversation like any other between two friends.

01:38:19.760 | - He hugs me before I go.

01:38:22.520 | I said something to him, I can't remember what.

01:38:26.320 | And he says, "Hey," in my ear,

01:38:28.320 | "I know what you do for a living.

01:38:29.720 | "It's not a safe place for you to be in."

01:38:32.600 | And I walk off.

01:38:37.280 | A few moments later, the army showed up.

01:38:39.880 | And you could feel the amount of rounds

01:38:46.440 | going off from two blocks away.

01:38:49.960 | We came back with our guys, and it was over.

01:38:59.160 | - So he didn't survive that?

01:39:01.960 | - I looked through the bodies and the cars.

01:39:07.000 | They were left, there was bodies all over the place.

01:39:10.200 | People left there.

01:39:11.360 | It was a mess.

01:39:13.560 | I spent like an hour looking for him.

01:39:17.960 | The only way I could recognize him was his hair.

01:39:23.480 | I stayed with his body all night.

01:39:29.640 | There's a bridge in Tijuana that goes over the river

01:39:35.040 | and a place called La Mesa.

01:39:36.560 | And that's where the forensic offices were.

01:39:40.440 | His body was taken there,

01:39:42.000 | and I stayed with his body until it was released.

01:39:44.800 | I told his family about it.

01:39:46.200 | 'Cause I knew them.

01:39:50.160 | That aspect of us versus them,

01:39:52.440 | or they're the enemy and shit like that.

01:39:55.520 | And my mom told me those words,

01:39:58.520 | "Nobody's against you, they're just for themselves.

01:40:00.600 | "So don't make the mistake of dehumanizing anybody."

01:40:03.920 | - And those roles could have been easily reversed.

01:40:06.480 | - I could have been shot in the face there.

01:40:08.960 | That aspect of conflict brings where, let's say,

01:40:11.680 | bad guys, good guys, heroes, villains.

01:40:16.320 | There's an innocence to that that goes away.

01:40:22.400 | - Is your mom still with us?

01:40:23.800 | - No, almost three weeks before I decided to quit,

01:40:27.600 | she passed away.

01:40:29.160 | - Did that have a role to play?

01:40:30.560 | - A major one.

01:40:32.560 | After I got done on the protection detail with the governor,

01:40:35.800 | like everything down there, again, the whole cycle,

01:40:41.320 | he got his turn.

01:40:42.160 | So when he went away, politics change.

01:40:46.360 | And down there, basically,

01:40:48.480 | if you're a gubernatorial candidate,

01:40:52.320 | you have either a friend of a friend or a family member

01:40:56.120 | be the head bodyguard guy.

01:40:57.800 | And the guy that won the elections

01:41:00.080 | had his head bodyguard guy already there.

01:41:02.760 | So all of us were sent back to whatever we came from.

01:41:06.800 | So I went back to work on the streets.

01:41:08.880 | I was back on the operations group.

01:41:12.040 | I was working with the sub-director directly with him,

01:41:15.560 | basically, back on the ground doing the stuff

01:41:18.840 | that I was doing before that job.

01:41:21.000 | We were moving away from the successes

01:41:24.400 | that had been had by people like Lazola

01:41:27.560 | when they were in charge of that whole process,

01:41:29.480 | the people that I used to work with.

01:41:31.640 | Some of the only successes in that counter push

01:41:34.360 | against cartels in Mexico,

01:41:37.000 | and you can kind of like, it's documented,

01:41:39.040 | you can read about it out there.

01:41:40.240 | A bunch of people wrote papers on it.

01:41:42.160 | Some of the only successes were had by Lazola

01:41:44.600 | in the places where he had leadership.

01:41:46.160 | He not only pacified Tijuana,

01:41:49.040 | he also did the same in Juarez.

01:41:52.080 | He was sent to be the police chief in Juarez too.

01:41:55.600 | But politics change and heroes become villains.

01:41:59.320 | A lot of people started calling him a villain

01:42:01.560 | because of his unorthodox approach

01:42:04.120 | and human rights violations and all this type of stuff

01:42:06.960 | kind of come to the forefront.

01:42:09.440 | And people forgot, you know,

01:42:10.880 | people forgot what it took to get Tijuana

01:42:13.080 | off the most dangerous city list on the planet.

01:42:15.440 | And people were vilified, people like him.

01:42:21.360 | And the police force that I was a part of

01:42:23.680 | started getting compromised.

01:42:26.600 | A lot of the things that were put forth

01:42:28.160 | to try and keep us honest.

01:42:29.760 | There was a program, they had these centers called C3s.

01:42:34.040 | Basically you would go there every year,

01:42:37.320 | you would get your financials checked,

01:42:39.760 | you would get a physical, psychological evaluation,

01:42:42.560 | you would get a polygraph exam done on you,

01:42:44.400 | all the works to try and see if you were somebody

01:42:47.680 | doing something wrong.

01:42:49.480 | And all of that was canceled

01:42:51.920 | because it violated your human rights.

01:42:55.520 | If you get fired from a job

01:42:57.920 | because of a failed polygraph exam,

01:42:59.560 | because that was not an actual admissible

01:43:02.080 | way of firing somebody.

01:43:04.120 | So all of a sudden you had people

01:43:05.520 | that were known cartel compromised people

01:43:09.120 | that were fired five, six years ago,

01:43:12.080 | showing back up to work,

01:43:14.120 | with their back paid and everything.

01:43:17.200 | So this started happening and I quickly realized

01:43:23.120 | that it was gonna be hard to stay there.

01:43:27.320 | I was driving home from work

01:43:32.240 | and I got a call from my brother

01:43:34.000 | that my mom had been going through some health issues

01:43:40.320 | that had turned into psychiatric issues.

01:43:45.120 | So we were basically taking turns trying to take care of her,

01:43:50.120 | locking the door so she wouldn't wander off

01:43:52.160 | and stuff like that.

01:43:53.240 | Not only was I dealing with the job on the street,

01:43:57.240 | but I was dealing with that.

01:43:58.560 | And also I had a two year old

01:44:02.920 | and a marriage that was difficult, that had time.

01:44:07.920 | So I was trying to figure all these things out.

01:44:10.720 | - Made more difficult by your job?

01:44:12.440 | - Yeah, it's not a financially secure job,

01:44:16.400 | and the pressures that it has and the odd hours

01:44:19.320 | and all that made it really hard.

01:44:21.960 | And then all of a sudden my brother calls me

01:44:25.800 | and tells me that, "Let's go to the hospital."

01:44:28.040 | And something happened to my mom.

01:44:30.240 | It wasn't my turn to watch her,

01:44:33.960 | so I felt pretty shitty about that.

01:44:37.320 | I got to the hospital and the doctors came out

01:44:43.200 | and told us that she was gone.

01:44:46.160 | It was a massive heart attack.

01:44:49.840 | She had a pacemaker by then, so she was gone.

01:44:53.600 | She was in her 60s, so we kind of expected something,

01:44:59.920 | but not, that was hard for me.

01:45:06.080 | She was my center.

01:45:08.880 | She was gonna be the one that I would ask for advice

01:45:10.680 | as far as work, as far as she'd leave it or not.

01:45:12.800 | - The ground was removed from under you.

01:45:14.800 | - There was nobody, yeah, there's nothing underneath me.

01:45:17.800 | I get three days off work, that's what they gave me.

01:45:21.440 | I'm trying to grieve as I go back to work.

01:45:29.160 | Dark shit crosses my mind as I'm going through that process

01:45:34.280 | of trying to figure things out.

01:45:35.920 | - Dark shit like suicide, dark shit?

01:45:38.840 | - Yeah.

01:45:39.680 | - So it was very low for you, it hit very hard.

01:45:41.960 | - Yeah, I wasn't allowed to grieve basically,

01:45:45.760 | and I wasn't allowed to grieve for a few years

01:45:48.880 | for different reasons.

01:45:49.980 | I went back to work and--

01:45:52.480 | - You weren't allowed, other people,

01:45:53.880 | also you yourself were not allowing yourself to grieve.

01:45:57.040 | - There was other people with me

01:45:58.680 | that didn't allow me to grieve.

01:46:00.360 | I went to work, got called into the office,

01:46:04.400 | and I was basically told that I was gonna be reassigned

01:46:07.960 | after what I just went through.

01:46:10.120 | The reassignment was going to be something

01:46:13.080 | that I saw as unacceptable.

01:46:18.080 | It was, the people in charge at that point

01:46:22.880 | were obviously corrupted,

01:46:25.240 | and what I got from their conversation

01:46:28.640 | was that they wanted us to work for a specific side.

01:46:31.620 | And I knew that that was the time to go.

01:46:37.800 | I asked for a license, basically a license

01:46:42.040 | is unpaid absence from work, basically,

01:46:45.160 | leave of absence, I think it's what you call it up here,

01:46:47.720 | which by law is allowed, and I was denied for no reason.

01:46:52.720 | So I'm invested in this job, you know,

01:46:58.640 | I have a good salary, and I have a category in there,

01:47:03.640 | so by the level of time you spend in there,

01:47:09.180 | you get a category, so I was a pretty high category agent.

01:47:12.820 | I had all this training, and again,

01:47:16.880 | training that would be useless in the private sector,

01:47:19.360 | well, in the public sector in Mexico,

01:47:21.000 | I couldn't change from one corporation to another,

01:47:23.440 | I couldn't go to work for another police institution, so.

01:47:26.240 | I took a deep breath, and I resigned.

01:47:33.080 | I went to the office, I said, "I need to resign."

01:47:35.760 | They said, "What?"

01:47:37.120 | I need to resign.

01:47:37.960 | Some of the people in the office that knew me

01:47:39.240 | from a long time were like, "What's wrong with you?"

01:47:41.600 | They thought I was having a mental breakdown.

01:47:43.840 | Handed all over all the paperwork,

01:47:48.460 | took a big trash bag, put all my stuff in there,

01:47:51.320 | plate armor, tear gas grenades, gas mask,

01:47:56.080 | satellite radio, MP5 magazines, an MP5 submachine gun,

01:48:01.080 | Glock, Glock magazines, all of it, helmet,

01:48:06.040 | and I handed it over in the armory,

01:48:08.340 | and I left.

01:48:13.040 | I made some phone calls.

01:48:15.660 | I was married to an American, and my daughter's American.

01:48:21.600 | I never envisioned myself coming to the United States,

01:48:25.400 | do that process for myself, you know,

01:48:26.960 | 'cause I was invested in that job.

01:48:28.760 | I thought I was gonna die or retire from that.

01:48:33.900 | And it quickly became like an issue

01:48:37.940 | because everybody was wondering

01:48:39.260 | why I left the job so abruptly.

01:48:41.380 | So there were some threats made when I left

01:48:45.220 | by people inside the office, and I probably,

01:48:49.260 | you know, it's anonymous shit.

01:48:50.940 | - So there's significant pressure not to leave.

01:48:53.300 | It's hard to leave this kind of job.

01:48:55.020 | - Yeah.

01:48:55.860 | - The system makes it difficult to leave.

01:48:57.820 | The individuals, to the degree they might be corrupted,

01:49:01.740 | really don't want you to leave.

01:49:03.060 | - There's no support, yeah, there's no support.

01:49:05.140 | - And it's probably the opposite of support.

01:49:06.780 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:49:07.780 | - Almost like implied or explicit or implicit threats.

01:49:11.700 | - Yeah.

01:49:13.060 | Luckily, I had developed some friendships

01:49:16.060 | in the United States with some of the people

01:49:18.020 | that I used to work with and cross-train with,

01:49:20.980 | and some friendships that I developed with people

01:49:23.880 | that I would just talk to and make friends with stateside.

01:49:28.120 | One of them is a Navy SEAL reservist

01:49:31.940 | whose name is Dan Stanchfield and his wife, Kelly.

01:49:36.500 | They opened the doors of their house to me

01:49:40.220 | and my kid and my wife at that time.

01:49:43.400 | As I seek to basically look for the American dream,

01:49:49.180 | I crossed the border with my kid,

01:49:55.060 | and nobody knew anything, you know.

01:49:57.620 | I didn't tell anybody, just, you know, my wife.

01:50:00.820 | And I was off.

01:50:03.820 | When I came to the States, I already kind of dabbled

01:50:08.900 | in the whole training field and showing

01:50:11.580 | some of my experience to people.

01:50:13.480 | So I had at least a seed of that out there.

01:50:17.420 | People knew me for that.

01:50:18.720 | But all of a sudden, I was in the middle

01:50:24.420 | of an avocado orchard in the middle of California

01:50:30.060 | and everything's quiet.

01:50:31.460 | And there's no more radios going off all of the night.

01:50:36.460 | There's no more three cell phones on the counter.

01:50:39.820 | There's no guns, there's no rifles,

01:50:41.820 | there's no 80 people calling to see what's going on.

01:50:46.820 | There's nothing, it's just quiet.

01:50:50.020 | And it's during the time when Trump got elected,

01:50:53.860 | so the immigration process that usually would take

01:50:57.260 | I had most things going for me.

01:51:02.260 | The immigration process that would take

01:51:04.900 | at most a year took two years.

01:51:07.660 | So it was not an easy process to not only come to the US,

01:51:12.660 | but come to the US with that pressure,

01:51:19.260 | kind of underlying pressure as far as being an immigrant

01:51:22.060 | at that time here.

01:51:23.580 | - And then your own personal psychological, the PTSD,

01:51:26.860 | of going from a war zone to a avocado orchard.

01:51:31.680 | - The word PTSD and TBI and all of these things,

01:51:37.940 | I didn't know any of them.

01:51:39.800 | It was through people that I got to meet

01:51:43.980 | in the training field that were Marines, SEALs,

01:51:48.900 | Marisoc guys, those types of people

01:51:52.900 | that started giving words to some of the things

01:51:55.700 | that I felt, which I didn't really know.

01:51:58.300 | We would treat post-traumatic stress

01:52:02.020 | with alcohol and vacation time.

01:52:03.780 | A bottle of Mezcal.

01:52:06.020 | When you see the bottom of it, your troubles are gone.

01:52:09.940 | - Cured.

01:52:10.780 | - Yeah, immediately.

01:52:11.940 | I was an alcoholic as well as all of the other stuff.

01:52:16.540 | I was drinking myself to sleep every third night.

01:52:20.700 | My marriage obviously was failing.

01:52:24.900 | It wasn't easy for her.

01:52:28.500 | She was brave and she did what she could.

01:52:32.460 | And I totally respect and understand her process with it.

01:52:36.260 | But when it's quiet, that's when it hits you.

01:52:41.260 | I think that's what a lot of people experience

01:52:44.100 | when they come back from a conflict zone.

01:52:46.200 | Everything that was life and death,

01:52:50.620 | everything that mattered, all the noise, all the chaos,

01:52:53.260 | all the people that are around you that would die for you,

01:52:55.380 | kill for you, you would kill for them.

01:52:57.700 | All the millions of dollars worth of equipment

01:53:01.940 | and stuff like that you were responsible for

01:53:03.460 | now are all gone and it's just you walking into a Circle K

01:53:07.660 | and buying three cans of Fosters

01:53:09.980 | to drink yourself to sleep.

01:53:12.700 | - Yeah, you write on your Patreon brilliantly

01:53:15.620 | about BTSD, about the cost of things you've done and seen.

01:53:23.020 | Quote, "When it's over and we're far from that chaos

01:53:26.900 | and noise of death being close and life being real,

01:53:30.020 | that is when some of us remember in the quiet nights

01:53:34.400 | in a field in Tennessee, looking at fireflies,

01:53:37.300 | walking through a fair, holding hands with a lover,

01:53:41.020 | asking you what's wrong.

01:53:43.240 | At your kid's birthday party,

01:53:46.220 | leave early to avoid the ending of a celebration.

01:53:49.460 | That is what the quiet means to some of us."

01:53:52.580 | So that's speaking to that silence, the quiet.

01:53:55.660 | How do you live with and thrive

01:53:57.820 | with this newly learned term of PTSD?

01:54:01.900 | - If anything, I would recommend people

01:54:03.900 | that have any of these issues to go to places

01:54:06.460 | where other people have their issues.

01:54:08.660 | So you can, it's not a competition,

01:54:11.040 | but you get to see the scope of problems in the world

01:54:14.180 | and you sometimes feel kind of lucky as far as your own.

01:54:17.660 | - Like it humbles you. - Yeah.

01:54:19.460 | - It makes you appreciate all the different kinds

01:54:21.440 | of struggles that people go through.

01:54:22.780 | - Yeah, I mean, I went through some horrible shit,

01:54:24.260 | but there's some people there that went through

01:54:26.700 | more horrible shit or stuff that I don't think

01:54:29.980 | I could have survived.

01:54:31.460 | When I went through that process of figuring things out,

01:54:34.420 | you know, the first thing that glaringly pointed out

01:54:36.860 | or stuck out to me was my inability to process things.

01:54:40.860 | Like there was a big pause button there, a giant one.

01:54:46.420 | Everything was on pause.

01:54:48.320 | My grieving, not only my mom, but my brother.

01:54:52.360 | So I had a pause button on me, so I was 13 basically.

01:54:56.380 | Then I got to bury many of my friends

01:55:02.020 | and inform their wives or girlfriends of what happened.

01:55:06.740 | And that all again was paused

01:55:09.680 | because I wasn't allowed to process.

01:55:14.580 | You know, I spent years without going on vacation

01:55:17.000 | because I was a workaholic.

01:55:18.620 | And I found at the core of my issues, alcohol.

01:55:25.140 | A giant pause button in the form of alcohol.

01:55:28.660 | Basically I would drink my problems away

01:55:31.780 | or specifically I would, it's like if you have a mess

01:55:35.020 | in your house, you just put a big tarp over it,

01:55:37.100 | you know, to cover it up and alcohol was that for me.

01:55:39.740 | And it festered more and more as I not only went

01:55:46.220 | through the process of learning about PTSD,

01:55:48.240 | going through therapy, but refusing to let that go.

01:55:51.360 | You know, like going through therapy

01:55:52.720 | and seeing what other people's problems were.

01:55:54.600 | And I don't wanna, you know, this is the only thing I have.

01:55:58.840 | I'm not, you know, I'm not hurting anybody with it,

01:56:01.440 | you know, why do I need to get rid of that?

01:56:05.180 | By this point I was traveling across the country

01:56:08.360 | and training people and showing some of the experiences

01:56:11.640 | that I had to other people, speaking, being on podcasts

01:56:15.240 | and having conversations like the one I'm having with you.

01:56:17.700 | - So speaking to the skills that you've developed.

01:56:20.300 | - And in a way basically reliving and reopening

01:56:23.180 | a bunch of shit for myself every time I do it.

01:56:25.480 | So it was, I was getting triggered

01:56:29.580 | and the way I would manage that was I would drink,

01:56:32.640 | you know, at the end of the night,

01:56:34.340 | after a weekend class somewhere,

01:56:36.760 | when I talk about the fireflies in a field in Tennessee,

01:56:40.320 | it was a moment where I was forcing myself

01:56:43.460 | to try and be sober and we did this medical class out

01:56:46.420 | in the hills in Tennessee, a beautiful green place,

01:56:51.380 | beautiful family there that hosted us.

01:56:55.120 | And it's the first time I ever saw fireflies.

01:56:57.060 | So I was like, I thought I was having

01:56:58.940 | a hallucinogenic experience when I say,

01:57:01.180 | why is the wire, why is the dust glowing?

01:57:04.020 | You know, is what I thought.

01:57:06.240 | A friend of mine is a veteran,

01:57:09.580 | he's ran off to the woods and grabbed one

01:57:12.500 | and brought it to me and showed it to me.

01:57:14.460 | I was like, holy shit, what is that?

01:57:16.100 | That's a firefly.

01:57:17.740 | Wow, how do they glow?

01:57:19.140 | I don't know.

01:57:20.380 | And he's crushing it in his hand and said, it's gone.

01:57:23.500 | And that, you know, brought me back immediately

01:57:26.420 | to holy shit, you know, it kind of like,

01:57:29.820 | I was off somewhere and I was back and I had to go drink.

01:57:33.860 | I went through that process of like going off

01:57:37.620 | at getting on and going off, getting off at my marriage.

01:57:42.460 | Separate.

01:57:43.300 | And that was another end of the world aspect to everything.

01:57:49.460 | I lost my mother, I lost the job

01:57:53.540 | and then the marriage failed and it was on me.

01:57:58.540 | I basically went somewhere

01:58:04.420 | and did a stock of everything that was going on.

01:58:11.260 | And made a decision to stop drinking.

01:58:15.240 | Yeah, had some bad relationships after.

01:58:20.160 | And I just came to a place where I need to stop drinking.

01:58:24.500 | - You've gotten to a point so low,

01:58:27.140 | was this a decision you arrived at by yourself?

01:58:30.220 | Was there some inspiration

01:58:32.340 | or was it just the point is so low, lost so much?

01:58:36.020 | - It was the start of COVID.

01:58:37.620 | So this is recent, this is probably too,

01:58:40.700 | I'm gonna have two years sober in December.

01:58:44.560 | - So when you talked to Rogan the first time,

01:58:47.700 | you're still struggling with this dema.

01:58:49.500 | - I was in and out of the car, basically,

01:58:51.060 | is what I would say, you know,

01:58:52.380 | I was in and out of and then trying to get rid of it.

01:58:56.140 | - That must be a super stressful experience

01:58:58.820 | talking to Joe Rogan the first time,

01:59:00.300 | did you drink that night?

01:59:02.220 | You remember?

01:59:03.200 | - The second time I was there, I went somewhere,

01:59:06.220 | God shit face.

01:59:08.220 | It was stressful, not for any other reason

01:59:12.540 | than I felt the responsibility to the people

01:59:15.020 | that couldn't speak about it.

01:59:17.300 | So that's the pressure.

01:59:18.460 | It was the start of COVID

01:59:21.180 | and things started getting shut down and slowed down.

01:59:24.180 | My dad got really sick and almost died.

01:59:28.780 | We had to set up like some Jason Bourne level shit

01:59:34.140 | at my brother's place.

01:59:37.180 | He was in Mexico, you know,

01:59:38.620 | so we had to bribe a guy to get us an oxygen tank

01:59:43.140 | and I had to, Jimmy Reagan, a respirator

01:59:46.900 | and it was some shit.

01:59:49.840 | But my dad was like, he survived it, you know,

01:59:57.500 | the doctors were like, say goodbye.

02:00:00.020 | And my dad was like, yeah, say goodbye to him, you know.

02:00:03.020 | (laughing)

02:00:05.420 | - Okay, so your dad's a gangster, I got it.

02:00:07.620 | Tough guy.

02:00:09.980 | - He did some gangster shit that day.

02:00:12.040 | But on my end, I was being isolated basically

02:00:16.340 | as COVID is, everybody's slowing down,

02:00:18.340 | no more classes, no more excuses to go out there and drink

02:00:21.260 | and no more socializing.

02:00:22.640 | So social drinking turned into alone drinking

02:00:25.660 | more and more and more.

02:00:26.900 | I bought a bottle of gin

02:00:33.100 | because I was down in Mexico taking care of my dad

02:00:36.260 | and they closed down beer production in Mexico.

02:00:40.880 | So beer went away and beer was a way I kind of managed it.

02:00:45.880 | It's not hard alcohol, it's just beer, so you know.

02:00:49.320 | But that went away so it was just hard alcohol

02:00:52.300 | that was what was available down there.

02:00:54.260 | One night alone at the house, my dad's house,

02:01:01.820 | I drank a bottle of gin, a whole bottle of gin.

02:01:04.220 | I almost died.

02:01:06.660 | And after that, you know,

02:01:10.180 | some people started noticing that I was isolating

02:01:15.420 | more and more and it was kind of eating away at me.

02:01:18.320 | I was in a relationship at that point

02:01:23.380 | when I started seeing everything

02:01:25.940 | just kind of fall apart around me.

02:01:28.460 | And I drank half of a glass of wine

02:01:33.460 | and it made me sick internally in my mind.

02:01:41.360 | And my kid said to me, and I don't know,

02:01:47.260 | nobody coached her, nobody said anything to her.

02:01:49.500 | She's a pretty intuitive kid.

02:01:51.780 | She said, "I don't drink anymore, Dad."

02:01:55.860 | And I was out of nowhere in the middle of the night.

02:01:58.420 | And I stopped.

02:02:01.540 | I stopped that night.

02:02:04.780 | I remember waking up at three in the morning

02:02:08.580 | and taking a cooler that I had

02:02:10.260 | and just dumping all the beers in it

02:02:11.660 | and chucking them in the garbage

02:02:14.340 | and with a knife poking each of them

02:02:17.100 | to not be tempted to go pack for them.

02:02:20.620 | And then the second day I went around

02:02:23.360 | and started finding the hides that I had

02:02:25.340 | because I had some hides.

02:02:27.540 | And then I went somewhere and locked myself in for two weeks.

02:02:33.740 | I had the withdrawals,

02:02:43.900 | the clearest nightmares that I'd ever had in my life

02:02:48.460 | for two, three weeks.

02:02:51.420 | I went somewhere, I don't want to keep them private,

02:02:54.700 | but I went somewhere where they offered a place for me.

02:02:59.700 | And when I asked them about it, it's a community,

02:03:04.300 | I gave them some money for their school as a donation.

02:03:07.500 | I gave them like a few thousand dollars.

02:03:10.900 | I said, "Yeah, sure, come.

02:03:12.500 | "You can go through this process here.

02:03:14.100 | "You're cool as fuck, people."

02:03:15.900 | The first thing they did when I got there

02:03:17.580 | is they stood me up in front of everybody

02:03:19.280 | to thank me for the donation

02:03:21.260 | and then told everybody that I was an alcoholic.

02:03:23.580 | And if anybody saw me drinking,

02:03:25.140 | I was to be kicked out of there immediately.

02:03:27.300 | And I felt horrible.

02:03:33.100 | So that was where I started.

02:03:39.380 | - Is that temptation still there?

02:03:41.080 | - There was a moment when it was

02:03:46.060 | and some therapy circle,

02:03:52.900 | there's a rodeo clown friend of mine

02:03:55.780 | who his body's, his spine is basically fused together,

02:04:00.220 | you know, type of guy.

02:04:01.420 | We've been friends and enemies and friends again,

02:04:06.340 | you know, during the art therapy circle sessions.

02:04:10.980 | - Oh, so like there's an intimacy there.

02:04:12.740 | - Yeah, he didn't know anything about me.

02:04:15.460 | One time when we were telling our story,

02:04:18.420 | he stood up and told his story and then he heard mine

02:04:21.580 | and then he was pissed off at me

02:04:23.020 | and didn't wanna talk to me for a while.

02:04:25.500 | And then later he told me that it was because

02:04:28.100 | he saw what I did with my experience

02:04:29.940 | and how much of a difference that he perceived

02:04:32.660 | that I was making with it.

02:04:34.700 | And he felt jealous that he couldn't do the same

02:04:37.780 | with his experience because he was just a broken

02:04:40.660 | ex-rodeo clown.

02:04:42.340 | He told me when I was going through the process,

02:04:45.180 | like, "Hey, you're an internet celebrity person,

02:04:47.660 | "you know, you're known."

02:04:50.520 | "Aren't you worried about people finding out

02:04:53.600 | "that you're recovering drunk?"

02:04:56.240 | And I said, "Yeah, it's fucking scary as shit

02:04:58.080 | "if people find out that I am going through this process.

02:05:00.920 | "It's scary that, you know, the critique,

02:05:03.740 | "you know, I already get a lot of shit

02:05:04.940 | "for being an ex-police officer in Mexico

02:05:07.180 | "and all the negativity that comes from that."

02:05:10.080 | And he said, "Don't be.

02:05:13.680 | "You know, you can't pickpocket a naked man,

02:05:16.980 | "so just get naked."

02:05:18.640 | And what does that mean?

02:05:20.040 | Write about it, post it online.

02:05:22.720 | You never know, somebody out there might get inspired

02:05:25.320 | to do their own kind of process.

02:05:27.020 | So I started posting about it, cowardly in a way,

02:05:32.040 | because I wanted to make other people keep me on the path,

02:05:34.920 | you know, but in other ways, you know,

02:05:37.520 | desperation, you know, I don't wanna drink anymore,

02:05:42.160 | I don't wanna go back on that path,

02:05:44.680 | which I know leads directly to a bad death.

02:05:47.720 | I'm not afraid of death, I just want a good one,

02:05:49.920 | I don't want a bad one.

02:05:50.880 | I think that was gonna lead me to a bad death.

02:05:53.180 | I started writing about it and sharing it online,

02:05:58.000 | you know, through my Fever Dreams post

02:06:00.800 | and just being humorous about it online

02:06:04.520 | and getting a lot of hate on one side, you know,

02:06:07.960 | having a few people and companies that I work with

02:06:10.380 | kind of step back and seeing this guy has some issues,

02:06:13.400 | to having other people kind of make fun of

02:06:15.720 | or make light of that weakness portrayed.

02:06:20.000 | - Oh, so getting hate, getting criticism,

02:06:23.040 | because here you are a counter-narcotics police officer,

02:06:26.960 | there's no, has a drinking problem,

02:06:28.640 | so is that like supposed to be what, like flaws revealed?

02:06:32.920 | - Weakness or a perception of alpha in the US, I guess,

02:06:37.680 | that some people have, you know.

02:06:39.600 | - You were supposed to be strong and here you are.

02:06:41.640 | - I mean, I'm not Jocko Willink, I'm not David Goggins,

02:06:45.000 | you know, I wake up at 10 in the morning sometimes

02:06:48.160 | and I'll have cornflakes with my eight-year-old, you know.

02:06:51.880 | I like days off, I used to wake up at 3.30 in the morning

02:06:55.520 | every day to review what happened during the night

02:06:58.600 | and then go off for a jog and then the gym

02:07:02.320 | and just be ready to be able to murder somebody

02:07:04.800 | with my hands if I had to, but that is,

02:07:07.280 | I couldn't maintain that during the whole process

02:07:09.600 | of getting out of it, now leaving alcohol.

02:07:12.180 | I remember just being honest with it

02:07:14.520 | and just seeing the two sides of it, you know.

02:07:17.960 | Joe told me never read the comment section, right?

02:07:22.160 | Which is a beautiful, it's a beautiful piece of advice,

02:07:27.000 | but they get you sometimes when you talk about

02:07:32.000 | some of these things openly.

02:07:34.500 | And some of the comments were positive

02:07:36.480 | and I've been seeing people comment, sending me messages

02:07:40.840 | and meeting people on the road that are five months in.

02:07:45.060 | 10 months, some people that have been on that wagon

02:07:50.060 | for way longer than I have.

02:07:52.280 | And there's, it's cool when you meet people

02:07:58.580 | that are superhuman or perform

02:08:04.100 | and take an extreme ownership of things

02:08:06.980 | and are just amazing people that are thriving out there.

02:08:11.740 | It's inspirational, I see some of these people

02:08:14.220 | and I'm like, holy shit, I need to figure out

02:08:16.340 | how to get to some semblance of that, but I'm not that.

02:08:19.500 | I've been through the ringer,

02:08:22.060 | I fucked up a shit ton of times.

02:08:24.140 | My nose is an example of that, a few missing teeth.

02:08:28.980 | But in a way, I think all of that is part of the process

02:08:32.780 | that not a lot of people wanna talk about, you know.

02:08:35.700 | Independently of the experience I got down there

02:08:38.260 | and some of the things that I show and talk about

02:08:40.140 | and some of the advocacy I do related to women like her

02:08:44.180 | that are trying to look for a better life

02:08:47.900 | and trying to find their missing kids,

02:08:50.000 | training people to not get into those situations,

02:08:53.640 | but also showcasing the fact that people

02:08:56.620 | that go through some of these processes

02:08:58.460 | have a journey to go through.

02:09:01.120 | I just came into your studio with a duffel bag

02:09:05.620 | straight from the airport and I'm gonna leave

02:09:08.060 | early tomorrow morning to somewhere else.

02:09:10.900 | I've been on the road for almost,

02:09:14.940 | I think five years nonstop.

02:09:17.300 | I go back to a specific place every week

02:09:20.260 | to see my kid for two, three days, and then I'm back out.

02:09:23.480 | You know, some people are like, are you running?

02:09:27.140 | Like, are you worried, are you just afraid about something?

02:09:29.020 | No, but I am on this weird path, I guess,

02:09:33.840 | trying to look for something that I think

02:09:36.060 | I've been missing as far as my afterlife of a sort,

02:09:41.060 | you know, coming out of that.

02:09:42.660 | - What do you think that is?

02:09:43.500 | Are you looking for some kind of

02:09:44.380 | deeper understanding of humanity?

02:09:46.980 | Like, from the specific experiences you had

02:09:50.220 | to get some deeper understanding

02:09:52.380 | of what the hell we're all doing here?

02:09:54.860 | - I meet people every weekend with different stories.

02:09:58.140 | You know, people come to some of my classes.

02:09:59.660 | You know, I show them how to weaponize the environment,

02:10:02.140 | how to harm themselves, how to not get abducted.

02:10:05.900 | I meet people that have gone through those experiences

02:10:07.860 | and are basically trying to work through

02:10:09.440 | some of their own issues

02:10:10.660 | by going through the training like that.

02:10:12.660 | I get to meet people that are, you know,

02:10:16.420 | people that I've only seen online, you know,

02:10:18.620 | or seen in videos.

02:10:19.980 | I remember meeting Royce Gracie in "Harbor City."

02:10:24.340 | - I heard of that guy.

02:10:25.720 | - He's a pretty interesting character.

02:10:27.420 | I remember seeing him in a bootleg VHS video.

02:10:30.220 | I told him about it.

02:10:31.660 | We were doing a class out at Emerson Knives.

02:10:36.060 | It's a knife company, but Mr. Emerson

02:10:39.620 | also has like a jujitsu gym there

02:10:41.180 | where Royce trades out of.

02:10:42.580 | That's his space.

02:10:44.240 | And, you know, they're teaching how to defend

02:10:48.340 | against somebody trying to stab you.

02:10:49.860 | And I'm showing them all the ways you can get around that

02:10:53.660 | and fabricate and improvise and smuggle things,

02:10:57.020 | basically the adversarial side of that.

02:11:00.020 | That's what I'm known for.

02:11:01.920 | The psychology and kind of the ways that people do that.

02:11:04.640 | And I remember him seeing some of the stuff

02:11:08.200 | that I was doing and just being like,

02:11:10.600 | "Where are you from?"

02:11:11.440 | "Mexico."

02:11:12.280 | Makes sense, you know, somebody from Brazil, you know,

02:11:15.380 | tipping the hat to somebody from Mexico

02:11:17.620 | as far as him seeing the violence

02:11:20.600 | and some of the mentality behind it.

02:11:24.280 | - So for people who don't know,

02:11:25.640 | Royce Gracie is the legendary martial artist

02:11:29.000 | that probably introduced Brazilian jiu-jitsu

02:11:31.160 | to the American audience, to the world,

02:11:33.080 | to the process of UFC and showing the effectiveness of it

02:11:36.080 | in practice that a little skinny guy

02:11:40.240 | can defeat a big aggressive guy.

02:11:42.520 | - An anaconda, a small anaconda walking into that ring

02:11:47.520 | with his family behind him.

02:11:49.360 | - Wearing pajamas.

02:11:50.380 | - Wearing pajamas and everybody was like,

02:11:51.440 | "What is this guy wearing pajamas for?"

02:11:53.360 | And then he would strangle people with those pajamas.

02:11:56.340 | I remember seeing that and just having it,

02:11:58.680 | I think probably what a generation before

02:12:01.600 | had with Bruce Lee, I guess,

02:12:03.240 | my generation was Royce walking into that octagon

02:12:09.240 | and changing paradigms.

02:12:12.560 | Seeing him in that gym,

02:12:14.400 | it's also an avid gun owner and shooter,

02:12:18.560 | which is interesting, you know,

02:12:20.560 | having seeing somebody like him who is well-versed

02:12:24.400 | with his hands also be a man that has gone into the realm

02:12:28.000 | of being well-versed with weaponry,

02:12:31.120 | which is an aspect of martial arts

02:12:34.320 | and the martial way of thinking that, you know,

02:12:37.320 | some people kind of,

02:12:38.320 | the purist will stick with one side of it,

02:12:42.080 | but he's obviously a warrior in a lot of ways.

02:12:44.800 | - So just as a small tangent,

02:12:46.680 | so you're somebody that you don't just look

02:12:49.280 | at unarmed combat, you look at the full spectrum

02:12:52.000 | of the chaos of combat that's outside of the realm

02:12:55.400 | of jiu-jitsu and even just mixed martial arts.

02:12:57.880 | Unarmed, armed with knives and beyond.

02:13:01.800 | Was his mind open to the fuller spectrum of violence?

02:13:05.560 | - Yeah, I mean, he was in the middle of this class

02:13:08.440 | that we were doing where people were basically

02:13:10.080 | focusing on both.

02:13:11.920 | Ernest Emerson, who's famous for his knives,

02:13:15.000 | he has a knife company, he's done knives for NASA,

02:13:17.760 | you know, not only that,

02:13:19.360 | but he's also a very avid martial artist.

02:13:21.440 | He trained with a lot of Filipino martial arts

02:13:23.640 | related to knives and stuff like that,

02:13:26.120 | but a different mindset, you know,

02:13:28.160 | a defensive mindset, trying to train people

02:13:30.200 | how to defend against that.

02:13:32.000 | And you have Royce, who's, he's from Brazil.

02:13:34.760 | I mean, he has some street in him.

02:13:36.240 | That's something that, you know, those guys,

02:13:38.160 | (speaking in foreign language)

02:13:39.760 | we say in Mexico.

02:13:40.800 | Seeing the ways he would, he stepped in there

02:13:44.920 | and provided some encouragement to the people there

02:13:47.320 | as far as, you know, how people sometimes focus on the,

02:13:50.680 | this is a system and this is a way,

02:13:53.720 | but there's other ways out there

02:13:54.880 | that might negate or defeat the ways

02:13:56.720 | that you are concentrating on, you know?

02:13:59.800 | So, kind of get out of that bubble.

02:14:01.560 | My whole kind of speciality or what I focus on is mindset

02:14:05.800 | and figuring out the software

02:14:07.600 | that some of these people gain and gather from.

02:14:10.000 | If I need to arm myself, you know,

02:14:13.360 | the easiest thing to manufacture in most places

02:14:15.400 | is a pointed object.

02:14:16.560 | So, I can take that crystal big pen

02:14:18.960 | that you're writing on that notepad with

02:14:21.320 | and using the friction from the carpet,

02:14:23.320 | I can turn it into a hypodermic needle

02:14:25.600 | that you can then poke into somebody's neck.

02:14:27.320 | - What's the process of doing that?

02:14:28.800 | - I can do it right now if you want.

02:14:30.160 | - No, but can you use your words for the listener

02:14:32.840 | and also 'cause I'm terrified?

02:14:34.520 | - No, I could, basically you can take the heat

02:14:38.280 | and friction created from this carpet.

02:14:39.880 | - Yes.

02:14:40.720 | - You can grab that pen.

02:14:41.880 | In and of itself, it will pierce flesh,

02:14:43.800 | but it will slow itself down

02:14:45.240 | because it has a few angles on the tip.

02:14:48.560 | - Oh, you wanna wear down the angles.

02:14:50.000 | - So, if you take that tip off and you grab it

02:14:52.320 | and then grind it on an angle on the carpet,

02:14:54.680 | the heat will actually turn it into a hypodermic needle

02:14:57.760 | if you know what you're doing.

02:14:59.040 | - Hypodermic meaning like it smoothens the entry.

02:15:01.960 | - It'll make a point and an angle

02:15:03.960 | that will guide its way into your flesh.

02:15:06.240 | So, you can actually go through a torso with that

02:15:08.320 | if you know what you're doing.

02:15:10.360 | - As a small tangent, you also gave me a present.

02:15:13.320 | (laughing)

02:15:14.960 | Could be one of the most epic presents I've ever received.

02:15:17.720 | You gave it to Rogan.

02:15:20.240 | Can you explain what I'm holding in my hands?

02:15:22.000 | - There's a guy online, Coffin Tramp, is his moniker.

02:15:26.280 | It is a G10 rod.

02:15:30.840 | G10 is a very strong material, basically.

02:15:34.520 | A lot of people make actually G10 knives,

02:15:36.760 | which are basically non-magnetic, non-ferrous objects

02:15:39.320 | that can be utilized as a stabbing implement.

02:15:41.720 | The core of it isn't an actual pencil core.

02:15:46.640 | It's a G10 core, and it's encased in oak, hard oak.

02:15:52.640 | So that is capable, again, of stabbing through a torso.

02:15:55.280 | Now, the guy that made that is an artisan,

02:15:59.120 | you know, he makes that, it looks like a pencil.

02:16:01.080 | It's concealed in the nature of the object itself.

02:16:04.960 | But that small object is capable of being introduced

02:16:08.080 | into a chest cavity.

02:16:10.080 | You know, all it takes is about the half of your thumb

02:16:15.640 | or the length of your thumb to stab into your chest cavity,

02:16:18.200 | and now your pericardium is pierced,

02:16:20.600 | and it's being filled with blood,

02:16:22.440 | or your whole heart is pierced,

02:16:23.880 | and you have a few minutes to live

02:16:26.320 | if you're at a standing heart rate.

02:16:28.880 | - So this has the effectiveness of a knife, essentially.

02:16:33.080 | - It has an effectiveness of a shank or an ice pick.

02:16:37.240 | It's not gonna cut, but it's gonna make a hole

02:16:38.960 | where it shouldn't be.

02:16:41.280 | - Here, the pen is literally mightier than the sword.

02:16:44.320 | - Yeah, well, it's...

02:16:46.000 | (laughing)

02:16:47.560 | This is really epic from a perspective of an academic.

02:16:52.480 | This is a symbol of both intelligence and violence.

02:16:57.880 | I love it.

02:16:58.720 | - And also the current state of affairs

02:17:00.240 | where people need to arm themselves

02:17:02.160 | with things that are concealed as far as their purpose

02:17:04.600 | in a place where, in a country or in a society

02:17:08.280 | that limits their ability to arm themselves.

02:17:11.280 | So if you're going to a safe place,

02:17:13.800 | you're going to a place where no weapon's allowed,

02:17:16.040 | which means a target-rich environment if you're a predator.

02:17:19.160 | That's a sign of rebellion.

02:17:23.360 | - Let this be a signal of everyone should be terrified

02:17:27.520 | when you're around me.

02:17:28.600 | 'Cause even a pencil can murder you,

02:17:31.520 | and I intend to use this.

02:17:32.880 | - And nobody owns life,

02:17:34.360 | but anybody that can hold a frying pan owns death

02:17:36.880 | is a quote that I heard once, which is a beautiful one.

02:17:39.480 | - I'm looking at you.

02:17:40.320 | If anyone betrays me, this is the way to go.

02:17:42.900 | Can you, given all your experience

02:17:45.080 | and all the different ways

02:17:46.040 | when you think about martial arts and violence,

02:17:48.340 | in Mexico, in the world, speaking of hoists,

02:17:53.320 | what is your approach to conflict, like a street fight?

02:17:59.400 | What advice would you give people in the full spectrum

02:18:02.920 | of what a street altercation might entail?

02:18:06.680 | What is the best way to approach it?

02:18:08.600 | - I think before you get there, you have to prepare.

02:18:11.600 | This is one of the first things I tell people

02:18:13.880 | is if you don't have a basic TCCC training class behind you,

02:18:18.440 | you should reanalyze your life and your ability to prepare.

02:18:22.720 | - T-C-C-C.

02:18:23.920 | - Basically how to stop somebody from bleeding out

02:18:26.040 | or dying from a stab wound, gunshot wound,

02:18:28.120 | or any of those types of wounds,

02:18:29.880 | or an amputated leg during an IED scenario.

02:18:32.240 | Anything you would see in a Boston Marathon type event

02:18:35.720 | or a Vegas shooting event

02:18:37.800 | where people are getting shot, stabbed, cut.

02:18:39.840 | - So understand how to help people,

02:18:41.360 | how to help yourself post violence.

02:18:45.120 | - You don't wanna be a detriment to the situation.

02:18:48.160 | You wanna be an asset.

02:18:49.600 | So build yourself up as an asset in a situation like that,

02:18:53.380 | because you might be doing that on yourself

02:18:54.960 | or on somebody else.

02:18:56.120 | - And also it helps you understand

02:18:58.320 | what situations are going to result in a lot of,

02:19:02.640 | in a difficult situation to deal with afterwards.

02:19:05.480 | - Yeah, it also teaches you what to stab and what to shoot.

02:19:09.360 | If you're thinking about it in a full,

02:19:11.640 | and on all the dimensions of it, you know.

02:19:14.000 | You know, there's all knowledge can be weaponized.

02:19:17.800 | And I think that's the approach

02:19:19.120 | all people should kind of figure out for themselves

02:19:22.240 | when they start getting ready,

02:19:23.840 | or if they wanna take the responsibility

02:19:25.920 | of their own safety in their hands.

02:19:27.640 | - So in a self-defense situation,

02:19:29.080 | there's a lot of questions here, but what does one stab?

02:19:31.920 | - There's the carotid arteries,

02:19:34.960 | which are used commonly in jujitsu as something to choke,

02:19:38.000 | because they feed a computer, you know.

02:19:40.560 | - So there's a lot of blood flowing through

02:19:42.960 | that requires for the successful operation of the computer.

02:19:46.000 | - And not a lot of stuff is guarding the outside world

02:19:49.420 | from your carotid arteries.

02:19:50.960 | - That's a really weird design, by the way.

02:19:52.840 | - It is not a smart one.

02:19:54.920 | - It doesn't even make sense,

02:19:55.840 | because with mammals, they bite each other's neck.

02:19:57.720 | Like, why can't you have more protection?

02:20:00.720 | 'Cause this is the only, like,

02:20:02.040 | us humans don't use our mouth to kill each other,

02:20:04.940 | but most mammals, most predators do.

02:20:07.520 | It's like, why the hell don't we protect this?

02:20:09.480 | - We do have a defensive mechanism,

02:20:11.360 | and you see it sometimes when people are ambushed

02:20:13.880 | and people try to open up each other's necks from behind.

02:20:17.400 | If you push somebody's neck forward,

02:20:19.760 | the carotids will actually lower themselves

02:20:22.640 | and be encased in more flesh and muscle.

02:20:25.120 | If you pull a head back, not so much.

02:20:28.160 | So that's a way that at least I think the evolutionary,

02:20:31.480 | we have a defensive mechanism for that.

02:20:34.780 | There's a few videos out there

02:20:35.960 | of people's getting their neck sewn back shut

02:20:39.200 | after somebody pushed their head forward

02:20:40.920 | to try and slice their necks, and they survived.

02:20:43.320 | So this is a viable target.

02:20:47.640 | The heart is another one.

02:20:49.680 | Interesting thing about the heart,

02:20:51.600 | and people get alarmed when I talk about this

02:20:53.520 | and show it in classes.

02:20:55.160 | Again, a lot of the classes I do are for orientation

02:20:59.320 | and for people to recognize that behavior.

02:21:02.040 | So a lot of law enforcement comes to some of these classes

02:21:05.120 | and say, "Oh, that's horrible.

02:21:07.400 | "That's how somebody will kill somebody."

02:21:08.760 | Yeah, this is how people that know their shit

02:21:11.360 | will try and approach somebody and stab you to death.

02:21:14.000 | This is how they would do it.

02:21:16.120 | There's a tendency to view what we see in John Wick

02:21:19.480 | or view what we see in this martial arts community

02:21:22.600 | where they're slicing and dicing people

02:21:25.200 | different myriads of ways.

02:21:27.560 | A lot of that is based on dueling-based cultures,

02:21:30.340 | like the Filipino martial arts

02:21:31.840 | or some of the Italian martial arts out there

02:21:34.480 | where somebody's facing off with somebody else

02:21:36.480 | with a similar weapon,

02:21:37.960 | and where both of us are agreeing

02:21:39.320 | to basically get into a stabbing competition.

02:21:41.560 | That would make sense in that scenario, in that context,

02:21:45.720 | but I've never seen a lot of people

02:21:47.040 | actually get into these one-on-one knife altercations.

02:21:50.220 | What we see now in a modern context

02:21:53.000 | when it talks about weaponry

02:21:54.360 | is an ambush, counter-ambush-based scenario

02:21:58.360 | where somebody pulls out a knife

02:21:59.480 | during a grappling situation on the street,

02:22:01.880 | or when somebody turns a striking exchange of punches

02:22:06.880 | into pulling out a cheap gas station knife,

02:22:09.920 | or a pen, or a rock from the ground, or a handgun.

02:22:14.920 | Most modern combatants, when it comes to weaponry,

02:22:19.040 | should be kind of based on the whole aspect

02:22:20.960 | of ambush and counter-ambush.

02:22:22.200 | There's a lot of people showing valuable type of material

02:22:25.240 | and coursework on this out there.

02:22:26.880 | My whole approach and my specific kind of realm

02:22:30.760 | is in the aspect of how people go from the process

02:22:33.720 | of learning some of these things from experiential stuff.

02:22:36.640 | People that grow up in rural places,

02:22:39.080 | grow up on pig farms,

02:22:40.560 | that actually get the experience of processing a pig,

02:22:42.640 | for example, or processing an animal.

02:22:45.480 | Those people will have more skills, hunters,

02:22:49.000 | those people will have more skills with a knife

02:22:50.880 | if they pick it up as a weapon

02:22:52.160 | than most of the martial artists that I've seen

02:22:55.080 | kind of approach some of these classes

02:22:57.400 | where I go and have a simulated torso

02:23:00.080 | in the form of a pig hanging in a room somewhere.

02:23:02.960 | - Some of that has to do with just the familiarity

02:23:07.280 | and the comfort of just like the biology

02:23:09.360 | of a living organism.

02:23:10.360 | Like that if you cut off certain things,

02:23:12.360 | if you cut a certain thing, it's just a meat vehicle.

02:23:15.720 | - The same thing, the medical training should come first.

02:23:19.120 | Or if you don't have that, be a hunter

02:23:20.960 | or go to a butchery class.

02:23:23.280 | That will teach you more about how to use a knife

02:23:25.840 | on somebody else than anything.

02:23:28.920 | That'll give you the experience of flesh.

02:23:31.600 | Most people, I do this example every now and then

02:23:34.880 | where I have people bring in a tactical knife

02:23:38.320 | and they'll bring in a butter knife.

02:23:39.960 | And I ask them which will go through a torso.

02:23:42.280 | We have a pig there,

02:23:43.240 | so it simulates a torso pretty closely.

02:23:46.000 | Most people will say,

02:23:46.840 | "No, that butter knife is not gonna go through."

02:23:48.720 | And it does, it does go through.

02:23:51.040 | It's a thin enough, strong enough,

02:23:52.920 | sturdy enough that'll go through.

02:23:55.760 | Kitchen knife, a cheap one that cost 89 cents at a Walmart

02:24:00.760 | and an expensive $400 one.

02:24:04.520 | And the cheap one will outperform the expensive one.

02:24:07.520 | The tip will snap off during some of it.

02:24:10.600 | - Yeah, I have to say that just as a small tangent,

02:24:14.240 | I went to a farm and just seeing the butchering of meat

02:24:19.240 | and so on, and the processing of meat and pigs and cows.

02:24:26.160 | Ooh, that's uncomfortable.

02:24:28.520 | - Yeah.

02:24:29.360 | - But I think it also, it's honest and raw.

02:24:32.280 | And that's something that probably

02:24:33.560 | everyone should experience regularly.

02:24:35.480 | 'Cause it's also humbling to remind you.

02:24:40.200 | Like when I had a dog, Homer, he's in Newfoundland,

02:24:45.200 | that I was very close with and we lost him.

02:24:49.840 | And I just remember that I carried him.

02:24:52.000 | He's like 200 something pounds.

02:24:54.040 | I had to carry him, I had to put him to sleep.

02:24:56.480 | And one of the biggest realizations is like,

02:25:00.400 | oh, this is just a biological thing.

02:25:04.000 | To realize that this is just meat, this is not,

02:25:09.760 | and you can cut it.

02:25:11.240 | And then if you bleed,

02:25:13.000 | all of a sudden the life can disappear from you.

02:25:14.960 | - Yeah.

02:25:15.800 | - And it's all gone.

02:25:16.640 | It's like, holy shit, there's this meat vehicle

02:25:18.560 | that some people have referred to as Lex.

02:25:21.480 | I'm just a few stabbings away from--

02:25:24.200 | - Leaving.

02:25:25.040 | - Yeah, from leaving, goodbye.

02:25:26.240 | There's a soul that just flies away.

02:25:28.160 | - It used to be that we had to hang around,

02:25:31.040 | people would come back from battle

02:25:32.200 | and we would hear things next to the campfire.

02:25:34.800 | As far as, oh, he stabbed somebody here and this happens.

02:25:36.760 | But now we live in an age where you can,

02:25:38.680 | when I do a class, this is a stab to the heart.

02:25:42.760 | And here's like five videos of it happening live,

02:25:46.520 | on live leaks or whatever.

02:25:48.200 | And we can deconstruct that.

02:25:49.440 | Not only that, but what weapon was used.

02:25:52.680 | Oh, it was a gas station folder.

02:25:54.360 | It was a pioneer woman knife from Walmart

02:25:57.360 | with flowers on the handle, whatever it was.

02:26:00.120 | And people start realizing that it doesn't take a lot.

02:26:03.840 | That it doesn't take a lot of training

02:26:06.560 | because a lot of these people

02:26:07.560 | are not high level assassins trained

02:26:10.320 | by ninjas in the hills or anything like that.

02:26:12.480 | They're people that grew up rurally

02:26:14.280 | or learned by seeing that behavior in others.

02:26:18.640 | And when they start coming to the realization

02:26:20.200 | that it's pretty easy to do that

02:26:21.800 | and they start figuring out like,

02:26:22.920 | how do you counteract that?

02:26:24.000 | Well, number one, learn the behavior yourself

02:26:26.120 | so you can recognize it.

02:26:27.080 | The whole aspect of being a good counter ambush team

02:26:29.880 | is to be the best ambusher in the planet.

02:26:33.120 | So again, the whole aspect of Musashi saying,

02:26:35.720 | know your enemy, know his sword.

02:26:37.640 | You figure that out as far as learning that behavior.

02:26:41.080 | When you start seeing how some of these stabbings occur,

02:26:45.080 | the first thing you notice is that one of the hands

02:26:47.760 | is always kind of out of the picture

02:26:49.280 | or there's a lack of symmetry in the people

02:26:51.240 | that are about to do something horrible.

02:26:53.720 | So when you see lack of symmetry in the environment,

02:26:56.080 | somebody with their hands going backwards,

02:26:58.960 | there's a crowd of people and two or one individual

02:27:03.160 | is looking counter where everybody else is looking

02:27:06.840 | or there's a hyper aware individual in a crowd.

02:27:10.640 | The hyper aware are always usually out there

02:27:14.280 | to fuck somebody over

02:27:16.160 | or they're trying to keep those predators

02:27:18.400 | from fucking somebody else over.

02:27:19.840 | So unless you step back and you put yourself in the process

02:27:24.840 | of learning how they learn

02:27:26.480 | and you become that potential nightmare person,

02:27:30.320 | it's hard to recognize that in a crowd.

02:27:32.480 | - It feels like one of the significant ways to win

02:27:36.880 | or as a street fighter is to avoid it

02:27:39.160 | by sort of sending pacifist signals in every way,

02:27:43.200 | meaning avoiding the situation

02:27:44.760 | whenever there's like a hyper vigilant people,

02:27:48.880 | you just kind of avoid signaling

02:27:51.400 | that you're one of the players of interest.

02:27:55.240 | If we're talking about counter ambush,

02:27:56.840 | at which point do you do that versus shift to the aggression?

02:28:01.520 | - I think violence should be always an option.

02:28:05.760 | Everybody should have that option

02:28:07.240 | and you need to be good at that option.

02:28:09.200 | I think I heard Jordan Peterson talk about the fact

02:28:12.800 | that everybody needs to be dangerous

02:28:14.020 | but keep that shit under control.

02:28:15.680 | - Yeah, I think he was referring to a different context.

02:28:18.480 | - I know, I know.

02:28:19.800 | (laughing)

02:28:21.560 | I'm referring to the ability of--

02:28:23.400 | - The little physical conflict as well.

02:28:25.680 | - There's two cases that I saw of people

02:28:27.200 | just utilizing social engineering to a beautiful degree

02:28:30.120 | to deescalate shit.

02:28:32.280 | One guy somewhere, first off,

02:28:34.600 | if you're in a place where people are grabbing

02:28:36.080 | your wife's ass or something like that,

02:28:37.760 | like what are you doing there?

02:28:39.040 | There's a load of things that are wrong

02:28:41.920 | with everything that you're doing in your life

02:28:43.680 | to be in that environment.

02:28:45.240 | But let's say you're in an inescapable situation.

02:28:48.740 | There was this guy who was in a compromised position.

02:28:53.340 | Somebody wanted to fight him, like legit kick his ass.

02:28:57.120 | And he said, "Okay, let's go, but I just,

02:29:00.640 | I need to warn you that I have hep C before we go outside."

02:29:04.120 | And that--

02:29:06.000 | - It's masterful.

02:29:06.920 | - I was getting my phone out to film this, you know, maybe.

02:29:11.000 | And even I was just lowered my phone to give him a slow clap.

02:29:14.440 | That was a beautiful move, you know?

02:29:16.360 | And then there was this other man.

02:29:20.040 | There was a riot somewhere in Ensenada,

02:29:25.040 | the municipality of Ensenada and Baja.

02:29:27.080 | They were protesting.

02:29:28.020 | Some of the people that pick those fields down there,

02:29:31.240 | part of a tribe called Los Tricos.

02:29:33.840 | Very hardy, hardworking people, but nefarious people too.

02:29:37.920 | They're pretty good at their thing.

02:29:41.460 | There was a riot line they couldn't break.

02:29:45.300 | And this old man walks in the middle of the riot line

02:29:47.620 | and yells, "Grenade!"

02:29:49.020 | And throws an avocado in the middle of all the cops.

02:29:52.100 | And all, like, "Pfft!"

02:29:54.100 | He broke that riot line with an avocado.

02:29:56.100 | - That could have gone wrong in so many ways.

02:29:59.860 | - But it didn't.

02:30:00.860 | I don't know.

02:30:01.700 | To me, like, there's small lessons there.

02:30:03.860 | There is a case to be made about social engineering,

02:30:06.900 | about learning about behavior, about learning how to lie

02:30:10.060 | and how to kind of move your way

02:30:11.900 | or navigate your way around situations like that.

02:30:14.820 | Small things like bartering,

02:30:16.540 | knowing how to bribe people in conflict zones

02:30:18.860 | is the thing that I show when I talk about

02:30:21.300 | or train people to work in hostile environments.

02:30:24.580 | De-escalation, you know,

02:30:26.620 | is specifically kind of figuring out

02:30:28.500 | what is of value in the environment,

02:30:30.860 | what things you shouldn't be doing in an environment

02:30:32.980 | that might be considered disrespectful or out of place.

02:30:36.980 | You know, people have a tendency

02:30:38.340 | that didn't grow up in places that are violent

02:30:40.340 | to make continuous eye contact with somebody

02:30:43.740 | that might be an issue.

02:30:45.820 | Or smiling when there's nothing to smile about.

02:30:48.220 | I think, you know, there's a picture I saw somewhere

02:30:50.900 | of Russians taking a portrait and there's Americans there

02:30:54.940 | and the Americans are smiling, but the Russians aren't.

02:30:57.300 | Because what is there to smile about?

02:30:59.020 | Which is true.

02:30:59.940 | - And of course, it's not as simple as smile or not smile.

02:31:02.340 | There's subtlety to it, like you said.

02:31:04.020 | Eye contact is a super interesting one

02:31:05.900 | 'cause I found in my own life,

02:31:09.540 | like not making eye contact is,

02:31:11.420 | the people would be joking,

02:31:13.500 | but it's a really powerful way to de-escalate.

02:31:16.540 | And there's such a fascinating thing though,

02:31:18.860 | 'cause you could talk about drunk fights

02:31:21.260 | that are just, that are harmless,

02:31:25.420 | but I feel like the same dynamic applies

02:31:27.380 | to the most violent conflict, including wars.

02:31:29.900 | I feel like ego is part of this.

02:31:33.220 | So to me, the question of conflict,

02:31:34.860 | whether it's a street fight or anything else,

02:31:37.420 | is the calculus of, are you willing to take an L

02:31:42.420 | in terms of psychology?

02:31:45.620 | Somebody grabs your wife's ass, you mentioned.

02:31:48.020 | Boy, if you let that happen, you go home,

02:31:52.620 | you're gonna have to pay the price

02:31:54.660 | of you were the person who didn't define you.

02:31:57.020 | Like in your relationship,

02:31:58.740 | you didn't defend your wife's honor.

02:32:01.740 | You're gonna psychologically pay that price yourself.

02:32:04.980 | And depending on your wife,

02:32:07.500 | she might secretly also lose a little bit of respect for you.

02:32:11.700 | Now, how do you play that calculus?

02:32:13.660 | 'Cause now we see the war in Ukraine.

02:32:15.680 | I would say there is elements of similar posturing

02:32:20.460 | in the United States, in Europe, in Ukraine, Russia,

02:32:25.460 | China leadership. - At a macro level.

02:32:28.620 | - At a geopolitics, it's still somebody grabs

02:32:31.500 | somebody's ass and you're not backing down.

02:32:34.700 | - So to take those losses and basically just posture,

02:32:37.860 | lower your head and live to fight another day

02:32:40.180 | type of situation.

02:32:41.740 | The thing with modern violence is the access to weaponry.

02:32:46.140 | I mean, again, nobody owns life,

02:32:48.960 | but anybody can hold a frying pan can own death.

02:32:50.940 | I've seen people get double-leg take down somebody

02:32:55.020 | on the ground.

02:32:55.860 | It's a different thing doing in the mats versus concrete.

02:32:59.060 | That's a good way to kill somebody.

02:33:01.380 | The most prolific impact weapon on the planet

02:33:04.340 | is the planet itself.

02:33:06.500 | You can see various videos of people online where they fall

02:33:09.460 | and they hit their head or somebody hits their head

02:33:11.460 | and they go into the stretched out fit basically.

02:33:15.120 | And that might not kill you then,

02:33:17.460 | but it'll kill you that night or the second night

02:33:19.820 | if you don't get checked out.

02:33:20.980 | People bleed out internally, get an edema.

02:33:23.620 | Again, the whole aspect of me showing

02:33:25.420 | how some of these things,

02:33:27.040 | not only some of these methodologies

02:33:28.940 | and somehow people prepare for violence

02:33:30.920 | and how people experience violence,

02:33:33.420 | how they make their weapons,

02:33:34.460 | how the people fight in the streets and stuff like that.

02:33:37.180 | It's to recognize that behavior from the inception.

02:33:39.780 | There's a video I show where there's a bunch of street kids

02:33:43.780 | in Rio de Janeiro.

02:33:45.020 | I think it's during the Olympics where they're snatching

02:33:48.180 | chains and cell phones from people.

02:33:50.780 | And it's a fun video, see it.

02:33:52.460 | The first thing you learn about it is how they target people.

02:33:57.700 | Now, who are they going after?

02:33:59.900 | There's a bunch of people there.

02:34:01.440 | Why are they going after that specific person?

02:34:04.320 | And they start learning about profiling

02:34:06.480 | and how they identify victim mentality

02:34:09.000 | or the perfect victim, lack of awareness.

02:34:12.480 | They keep on a straight line, avoidance,

02:34:15.200 | avoidance of eye contact if they're doing something

02:34:18.160 | nefarious or wrong and how they pick

02:34:20.720 | who they're gonna go after.

02:34:22.040 | The small people, the women, even some of the men.

02:34:27.040 | And they separate the men that they're perfect victims

02:34:29.600 | versus the men that's gonna turn around

02:34:30.980 | and punch them in the face.

02:34:32.140 | What are they looking for?

02:34:33.440 | Well, first off, you notice that the men

02:34:37.340 | that are in that environment that look at them

02:34:40.320 | and are aware of their presence, the hyper aware,

02:34:42.740 | are the ones that are not good to target.

02:34:44.980 | So that's the first lesson there.

02:34:46.460 | So it's probably a good idea not only to be hyper aware,

02:34:49.540 | but to recognize that hyper awareness in others.

02:34:52.140 | If I wanna separate myself from the victim crowd.

02:34:55.060 | Another thing you notice is these are kids

02:34:56.820 | going after some grown adults.

02:34:58.340 | And some of these grown adult men are with women.

02:35:01.220 | And you see them kind of getting outside of the grasp

02:35:07.140 | of these kids that are trying to rip their chains

02:35:09.600 | off their neck or their cell phones.

02:35:11.800 | And they have no consideration for the women around them.

02:35:14.700 | You see other men that are with women

02:35:16.500 | and you see them grab the women and put them behind them.

02:35:19.860 | And immediately they'll say, "This is the wrong one.

02:35:21.940 | "Let me move off to the next one."

02:35:24.340 | So that small little lesson in those videos

02:35:28.180 | will show you first how these kids are growing up

02:35:31.540 | to profile and target who the perfect victims are.

02:35:34.940 | That's a school for them.

02:35:37.020 | And that is an adversarial school.

02:35:39.020 | We should look at that school and apply it to ourselves.

02:35:42.540 | - So in general, you think conflict,

02:35:45.060 | ultimately the people that are doing conflict,

02:35:47.380 | they're looking for weakness?

02:35:49.860 | - I mean, they're looking for opportunity.

02:35:51.980 | You know, opportunistic, that's the predators.

02:35:54.420 | That's what they do.

02:35:55.260 | They look for an opportunity, you know,

02:35:57.100 | from jumping down from a tree

02:35:58.300 | and getting the slowest gazelle

02:36:00.540 | to looking for the opportune moment

02:36:03.340 | to pounce on something that's probably big,

02:36:05.180 | but the risk is worth it.

02:36:06.700 | - I feel like there's several motivations,

02:36:09.260 | but isn't there also a power hierarchy motivation as well?

02:36:14.260 | Like you, there's something about the big guy

02:36:17.760 | that tempts you to send a message,

02:36:20.180 | especially with gangs.

02:36:21.100 | Aren't they constantly sort of trying to signal

02:36:25.100 | that they're the alpha?

02:36:26.200 | - Yeah, I mean, there's a different situation.

02:36:28.420 | You could be facing a sociopathic predator

02:36:31.500 | who is looking for something in you

02:36:33.500 | that you are the resource that they're looking after.

02:36:36.740 | Maybe it's a woman, you know.

02:36:38.580 | It could be a group of people that don't like the fact

02:36:41.060 | that you have a specific nationality

02:36:44.340 | or your passport is stamped in a specific way

02:36:46.460 | or that you pray to whatever God.

02:36:49.000 | All these factor in,

02:36:50.780 | but in the end, they all do the same thing.

02:36:54.340 | They look for an advantageous position.

02:36:56.620 | If I were to target you,

02:36:57.940 | I would put you in between that wall and me.

02:37:02.020 | So you have two avenues of exits

02:37:05.180 | and I would step on one of your feet

02:37:07.320 | to keep that avenue closed.

02:37:08.660 | So you have to go this way.

02:37:09.660 | So this is where my knife is gonna be.

02:37:11.620 | You see that behavior mirrored everywhere in the world.

02:37:15.900 | First off, you look for advantages, right?

02:37:18.200 | If it's something that's unavoidable,

02:37:19.740 | like you're in between me and my ability to go home

02:37:22.260 | or you're in between me and my ability to feed my family

02:37:25.580 | or you're in between me and my ability to posture

02:37:28.020 | to the people that are behind me,

02:37:29.340 | the young guys that I'm in charge,

02:37:31.860 | I will do everything in my power to end you, right?

02:37:35.780 | The motivations are not in my realm,

02:37:41.300 | but the ways they do it are, you know,

02:37:44.820 | and basically the advantage part of it.

02:37:47.500 | - So desperation is dangerous.

02:37:51.980 | - It's a dangerous school.

02:37:53.100 | When I say dangerous school,

02:37:54.020 | I mean the most dangerous people

02:37:55.700 | usually come from those desperate environments.

02:37:59.300 | You know, you can have people in Coronado

02:38:02.340 | holding onto logs in the ocean

02:38:04.040 | and go through this millions of dollars worth of training

02:38:06.620 | and just be professional killers for the government

02:38:10.900 | and just be these incredible human beings.

02:38:13.860 | And then there's a kid that will walk up to one of them

02:38:17.220 | when he's off, you know,

02:38:18.780 | and put an ice pick right into his chest

02:38:20.940 | when he's least expecting it.

02:38:22.780 | And that doesn't mean that one is superior than the other.

02:38:25.380 | It just means that there are more,

02:38:26.900 | that there's more than one way to become that, you know.

02:38:30.100 | - Teenagers terrify me.

02:38:32.180 | It feels like the intensity of desperation,

02:38:34.980 | like the capacity of a teenager, like 16, 17,

02:38:41.720 | to be desperate and also not have the matured understanding

02:38:46.780 | of ethics of the world.

02:38:48.460 | Like they have this intensity of feeling

02:38:51.020 | that is unlike anything else.

02:38:53.860 | - They don't have a volume knob to that.

02:38:55.540 | So it's like a garden hose without a nozzle on it

02:38:58.180 | so you can regulate it.

02:38:59.060 | They haven't developed that.

02:39:00.320 | They haven't learned that maybe from somebody else.

02:39:02.140 | Or it used to be warrior cultures,

02:39:04.900 | you would be an apprentice under somebody

02:39:06.980 | or you would learn some of these things from other people.

02:39:09.020 | Even some gang, modern gangs have a little bit of that.

02:39:12.740 | But if you're not and you're just this kid

02:39:14.420 | that's been playing Call of Duty all of his life

02:39:17.620 | or has been witnessing violence in media

02:39:20.980 | and there's no sense of,

02:39:24.620 | it's probably a bad idea to go off and do this

02:39:26.340 | because of all these repercussions.

02:39:27.900 | I could see how that could be a danger to society.

02:39:31.060 | And some of the volume knobs,

02:39:33.420 | some of the countermeasures to people

02:39:36.300 | exploding on somebody else with a weapon, you know.

02:39:41.300 | You see videos constantly online.

02:39:43.140 | I remember seeing this one of these two teenage girls

02:39:47.300 | somewhere in the US and one of them just,

02:39:49.900 | there's a fight, there's a hair pulling competition

02:39:53.300 | and all of a sudden one of them takes out a knife.

02:39:55.900 | And it just happens like that.

02:39:57.900 | And it's just pure unrestrained downward stabbing.

02:40:02.900 | Now, you're like, wait, where's that come from?

02:40:07.020 | Well, she's from an environment

02:40:10.820 | where she saw that as an option.

02:40:13.900 | She didn't see the repercussions of it.

02:40:15.540 | And she found herself in a place

02:40:17.500 | where she thought that was the only viable option,

02:40:20.500 | pulling out a weapon.

02:40:21.540 | And I think that's the dangerous part of it.

02:40:25.860 | - So how do you prepare to win those kinds of situations,

02:40:29.460 | to escape those kinds of situations?

02:40:31.300 | Like you said, it's training, it's exposing your mind.

02:40:36.060 | - I always tell people,

02:40:36.900 | like if you don't have a combative base,

02:40:38.420 | you don't have a base, boxing, jujitsu.

02:40:42.380 | - And that gives you what,

02:40:43.380 | like an awareness of your body kind of thing?

02:40:44.900 | - It gives you an awareness of your body,

02:40:46.740 | give you a spatial awareness.

02:40:48.180 | If you can't see the points with your peripheral vision,

02:40:52.620 | if you can't see the points of somebody's feet

02:40:54.620 | in your peripheral vision,

02:40:56.180 | they are in range to stab you in the heart

02:40:58.820 | if they wanted to.

02:40:59.740 | And that's something you learn from boxing,

02:41:02.220 | that you learn from jujitsu,

02:41:03.300 | you learn from a bunch of combat arts

02:41:04.740 | where you learn about distance and angling people.

02:41:08.500 | That comes from this experience that you have.

02:41:10.940 | You know, again, a lot of these things were just horseplay

02:41:14.460 | when we were growing up in some cultures

02:41:16.460 | or rough and tumble with your brothers and shit like that.

02:41:19.620 | But some of us are growing up in single kid homes now

02:41:22.780 | and we don't get that, we were missing that.

02:41:24.740 | And if you don't have it,

02:41:25.660 | then you find it in the jujitsu gym,

02:41:29.060 | you find it in the boxing gym,

02:41:30.300 | you find it in a Thai boxing gym,

02:41:32.300 | you find it in places where they specialize

02:41:34.620 | in focusing on certain aspects

02:41:37.700 | of this whole combative whole, right?

02:41:40.540 | It used to be before UFC,

02:41:42.460 | you know, the Kung Fu man,

02:41:44.620 | you know, Kung Fu guy, that's just street lethal shit.

02:41:48.540 | You can't use it in the sporting,

02:41:50.340 | you can't show you this because it'll kill you.

02:41:52.500 | Now we pretty much know that most of that was,

02:41:55.180 | you know, flights of fans here, BS.

02:41:57.060 | You know, it pains me too, man.

02:41:58.300 | I wanted to learn some of the D-Mock,

02:42:00.020 | the single punching and killing technique.

02:42:01.660 | You know, I remember those books,

02:42:02.940 | but that's just not-

02:42:04.060 | - I'm still on the lookout for that.

02:42:05.740 | - Maybe somewhere, I don't know.

02:42:07.180 | You know, maybe if you put a pen in your hand,

02:42:08.620 | that might turn into that,

02:42:09.860 | but that's the only way, right?

02:42:12.740 | But a lot of these myths are kind of like faded away.

02:42:16.580 | Now you see people that have different combative bases,

02:42:20.060 | combining them all and becoming a fighter.

02:42:21.860 | Now, that's, UFC fight,

02:42:25.060 | two people fighting each other is one thing.

02:42:27.340 | You know, you being in the middle of the Portland riots

02:42:30.820 | and a bunch of state troopers throwing gas at rioters

02:42:34.820 | and then rioters themselves fighting each other

02:42:37.060 | and you finding yourself in the middle of that,

02:42:38.700 | that's a completely different thing.

02:42:40.940 | And if you think you're gonna, you know,

02:42:42.620 | go on the ground and get in a guard

02:42:44.660 | with a guy swinging around a piece of a shovel handle,

02:42:49.660 | right, as tear gas is going on,

02:42:52.100 | because you got stopped there and your car was,

02:42:55.540 | you know, windows were broken

02:42:57.140 | and your family's in the backseat,

02:42:59.260 | you know, that is a different situation.

02:43:02.020 | So, you know, get medical,

02:43:06.220 | learning about weaponry, you know.

02:43:09.220 | I personally don't really like fighting on the ground,

02:43:14.180 | but that's why I forced myself to go to train

02:43:16.580 | with different people out there, you know,

02:43:18.820 | on the ground, you get to catch wrestling.

02:43:20.860 | - So top and bottom, neither, you don't like either.

02:43:23.660 | - I personally, I like being in a car

02:43:25.740 | and running everybody over, that would be great,

02:43:27.220 | you know, if I could, or driving really far away.

02:43:29.660 | Or I had this experience in Utah,

02:43:34.500 | some friends of mine, military,

02:43:37.300 | some of your best shooters,

02:43:39.900 | some of the best shooters in the US,

02:43:41.180 | you know, coming from the Marine Corps,

02:43:43.660 | were showing me how they, you know,

02:43:46.940 | would shoot something from really far away.

02:43:49.540 | And I was like, oh, you don't even have to be

02:43:52.900 | in the same vicinity.

02:43:55.060 | The scope of violence, how far you can be from it

02:43:57.700 | or how close you could be from it.

02:43:59.260 | - Just wait till we get to see what we can do

02:44:01.940 | in the cyber attack world.

02:44:03.780 | We can destroy your whole wellbeing,

02:44:05.900 | your whole life, your identity.

02:44:08.460 | - That's another aspect of it too.

02:44:09.940 | - Financial, and then figure out where you live,

02:44:14.340 | in terms of ambush.

02:44:15.940 | - Yeah.

02:44:16.780 | - Figuring out everything about you

02:44:18.220 | such that hurting you is easy.

02:44:21.220 | - I have a class where we specifically work

02:44:23.620 | on social engineering and kind of how you can go

02:44:27.380 | about something that, you know, at a micro level.

02:44:29.940 | I do a class with a guy named Matt Fidler,

02:44:33.580 | who does a, basically he's one of the premier experts

02:44:37.820 | on how to get into and bypass locks, basically.

02:44:41.860 | He'll show you how to open up every single,

02:44:45.740 | or bypass every single commercial lock available

02:44:47.900 | in the United States.

02:44:48.980 | Like he'll spread it out and open up everything.

02:44:51.740 | And that's like, right?

02:44:54.220 | And my part in his class is I talk about

02:44:56.580 | how you can pull some of that off in a public space

02:44:59.900 | and not get caught, or how you would employ

02:45:02.300 | some of these things in a context where it's useful

02:45:04.820 | for law enforcement, for the military, stuff like that.

02:45:08.380 | And so we have this exercise in a public space

02:45:11.900 | where there's a bunch of padlocks in the environment, right?

02:45:14.820 | And we paint them pink so people know it's our padlocks

02:45:19.620 | and we're not breaking into anybody else's padlocks

02:45:21.620 | if we get approached and asked about it.

02:45:24.100 | But I asked the students like,

02:45:25.580 | so you have to gather all these padlocks

02:45:28.500 | from this public space, you know?

02:45:30.340 | So how would you do it?

02:45:31.300 | So a lot of them are trying to pick them, you know?

02:45:33.100 | They're like very suspiciously picking them

02:45:35.300 | and stuff like that, that you get caught.

02:45:36.660 | And it's a whole situation.

02:45:39.380 | But the smart ones will basically develop

02:45:41.700 | a social media campaign related to the padlocks, right?

02:45:45.040 | A beautiful example of this.

02:45:48.700 | And this actually happened here in Texas.

02:45:50.980 | I did a class out in Dallas.

02:45:53.420 | We put the padlocks all over this public mall

02:45:56.020 | and the students basically came up

02:45:58.140 | with a breast cancer awareness campaign online

02:46:01.260 | that they made fake, well, they made flyers for it.

02:46:05.540 | They did the social media page on a campaign.

02:46:08.620 | They did this email chain.

02:46:09.980 | So when they went there, people were expecting them.

02:46:12.980 | So they normalized the behavior through social media

02:46:15.500 | and they were walking around with bowl cutters

02:46:17.500 | in the middle of a mall, cutting these things off.

02:46:20.460 | That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful solution

02:46:23.500 | to a complex problem of that nature.

02:46:25.140 | And again, the weaponizing part of it.

02:46:29.140 | Anything could be, all knowledge could be weaponized.

02:46:31.220 | And it's, if you focus on getting in a street fight

02:46:33.820 | with somebody with your fist or a knife, you know,

02:46:35.780 | you're missing out on the whole complexity of violence

02:46:38.140 | and the way that it's now being utilized.

02:46:41.300 | - So in terms of breaking out locks

02:46:43.500 | and the restraints and captivity,

02:46:47.900 | let's talk about a dark topic

02:46:49.660 | that you're one of the world experts in, kidnapping.

02:46:52.700 | So you teach courses on counter kidnapping

02:46:54.900 | and terrorism.

02:46:56.340 | I read an estimate that criminal gangs

02:46:59.300 | get $500 million a year in ransom payments from kidnapping.

02:47:03.100 | So just at a high level, what is kidnapping?

02:47:05.780 | Who does it and why?

02:47:07.340 | What are some insights that can help us understand

02:47:11.540 | what is this problem in the world?

02:47:13.580 | - It happens in different ways

02:47:14.740 | in different parts of the world.

02:47:15.740 | I mean, I just sent off a group of people

02:47:18.900 | that trained some of the Ukrainians

02:47:21.300 | and some of the stuff that they were showing them

02:47:23.620 | was some of the counter custody stuff that I showed them.

02:47:26.180 | A friend of mine named Vince went out there

02:47:29.020 | was showing them some of the aspects

02:47:30.380 | of how to utilize things like Kevlar cordage

02:47:33.420 | and how to infuse it in their uniform.

02:47:35.100 | So if they get a zip tie to cut them open,

02:47:38.380 | it's a war setting.

02:47:39.220 | So it's talks about being captive in a war zone,

02:47:43.580 | but the information or the methodology

02:47:45.780 | actually comes from Mexico.

02:47:47.260 | That methodology, as far as how I learned it.

02:47:49.620 | - In terms of how to escape from restraints and stuff like that.

02:47:51.620 | So in Mexico, you have abductions happening

02:47:54.900 | where cartels who hold control over a specific place or zone

02:47:59.900 | are having a hard time with financial situations

02:48:05.020 | as far as maybe they're not making enough money

02:48:07.540 | to pay everybody off.

02:48:08.580 | So they let them freelance basically.

02:48:10.580 | And a lot of ways, some of these criminal groups freelance

02:48:13.420 | or some of these groups actually professionalize

02:48:15.340 | and to abduct businessmen, abduct the sons of businessmen

02:48:19.100 | or people that have money to ask for ransoms for them,

02:48:23.380 | basically.

02:48:24.700 | And they've taken captivity and abduction

02:48:29.540 | to like an art form in places like Mexico.

02:48:31.820 | And it has a history all over the world,

02:48:33.300 | but specifically my experience with it

02:48:35.820 | was going to cartel safe houses

02:48:38.980 | that turned into holding places.

02:48:41.940 | You would see homemade prison cells and stuff like that.

02:48:45.500 | And people being held in captivity for months,

02:48:47.700 | if not years, as they were milking their family

02:48:50.740 | for everything they owned.

02:48:51.900 | - So it turns out into a business,

02:48:53.380 | they're not actually even interested in hurting the people.

02:48:56.540 | Physically, they're interested in hurting them financially.

02:49:00.700 | - Financially and also if they get hurt,

02:49:02.940 | they're hurt for a purpose,

02:49:04.060 | which is to make their family pay up faster or more.

02:49:06.820 | Some of the abduction groups that I've seen out there,

02:49:10.140 | professional ones in Mexico,

02:49:11.260 | basically make it a living to target people

02:49:13.780 | that have abduction insurance or that work for a company

02:49:16.540 | that have good abduction insurance.

02:49:17.900 | So it's almost like an ATM for them.

02:49:20.260 | It's like, "Ah, here again, ah."

02:49:22.140 | So there's some of that going on.

02:49:24.300 | Some not so much.

02:49:25.900 | Some abductions are express.

02:49:27.580 | I mean, I'll grab you with a gunpoint,

02:49:30.500 | take you to an ATM, you empty it out,

02:49:32.820 | and then you're on your way.

02:49:33.780 | That's an express kidnapping.

02:49:35.060 | That might not be worth you doing anything insane.

02:49:38.500 | You just go with the motions.

02:49:39.940 | But some people do get picked up.

02:49:44.420 | I have trained people with prior experiences

02:49:47.740 | of abductions in Mexico and here in the United States,

02:49:50.580 | people that have spent some time in captivity

02:49:52.460 | with loved ones here, like ex-boyfriends or boyfriends

02:49:55.940 | that tie them up and beat the shit out of them.

02:49:59.020 | And the restraints they utilize are zip ties and handcuffs,

02:50:02.660 | sometimes, or duct tape, or their own clothing,

02:50:05.260 | things of this nature.

02:50:06.740 | Basically what somebody's looking for

02:50:08.180 | when they tie anybody up is to convince you

02:50:10.620 | that they are in control, that they are God,

02:50:13.460 | and that any hope of you releasing those restraints

02:50:16.180 | or getting out of that situation is hopeless.

02:50:18.980 | From a cartel group picking you up

02:50:20.940 | in the middle of a dirt road somewhere in Cancun

02:50:24.260 | to ex-boyfriend showing up at your house

02:50:27.660 | and tying you up until you agree to get back with him.

02:50:30.380 | That's the same thing.

02:50:31.460 | And some of the restraints that are being utilized

02:50:35.380 | come from different places.

02:50:36.500 | I mean, I remember an instructor I had way back when

02:50:39.700 | told me that the proliferation of zip ties

02:50:42.820 | or restraint and criminal abductions

02:50:44.820 | came up after the movie "Heat" came out

02:50:47.180 | because everybody wanted to be Robert De Niro

02:50:48.980 | zip tying people in the bank robbery

02:50:51.140 | at the end of the movie.

02:50:52.900 | Criminals saw that and it became a thing.

02:50:55.540 | - It's hilarious.

02:50:56.380 | Can you actually speak to the,

02:50:58.260 | is it possible to systematically learn

02:50:59.900 | how to escape restraints, like handcuffs, rope, zip ties?

02:51:03.500 | - The best at it are not the military,

02:51:05.180 | the Nazi or program people, they are criminals.

02:51:07.700 | I learned how to get out of handcuffs from a 15-year-old

02:51:10.340 | who was in charge of meth sales

02:51:12.300 | in La Avenida Revolución in Tijuana.

02:51:15.340 | - Is there a system to it?

02:51:16.540 | - I mean, it's not specifically a system.

02:51:18.340 | It's usually what happens is they'll buy a set of handcuffs

02:51:22.540 | and they will mess around with them in a playing feature.

02:51:25.180 | So one thing I do in a class is first off,

02:51:28.300 | I'm honest about the fact that some,

02:51:30.620 | all the restraints are temporary, even marriage.

02:51:33.520 | - Wait, can we just pause in the deep philosophical?

02:51:38.140 | You're like Miyamoto Musashi with that statement.

02:51:41.180 | - All restraints are temporary, even marriage.

02:51:43.920 | I just like adding that one in there for last

02:51:47.380 | because this is a dark subject.

02:51:48.620 | - Every cage can be escaped.

02:51:50.300 | - All restraints are temporary.

02:51:51.540 | You either free yourselves from the restraints,

02:51:54.500 | somebody else takes them off,

02:51:55.820 | or you die and your body rots away around them.

02:51:58.540 | Those are the options.

02:51:59.640 | And I like that first option myself.

02:52:02.940 | The second option is pretty cool

02:52:04.180 | if you can convince somebody to do that for you.

02:52:06.300 | But that first option is an interesting one.

02:52:09.020 | You have to deconstruct restraints.

02:52:10.660 | Not all restraints are made the same.

02:52:12.820 | You can train to get out of handcuffs here in the US

02:52:15.360 | and focus on a pair of Smith and Wesson handcuffs,

02:52:18.060 | which are kind of the most common brand of handcuffs here.

02:52:21.060 | But if you find yourself in detention somewhere in Russia,

02:52:24.200 | the handcuffs out there are completely different.

02:52:25.940 | You know, the key way is different.

02:52:27.220 | The mechanism is different,

02:52:28.360 | but some of the same ways of bypassing those mechanisms are.

02:52:32.180 | - Let me write this down.

02:52:33.020 | So in Russia, what kind are they using in Russia?

02:52:35.380 | I think they're traveling there and need this information.

02:52:37.660 | - I'll send you a specific model

02:52:38.980 | and details on how to get out of those.

02:52:41.420 | But basically- - Just asking for a friend.

02:52:42.540 | I'm sorry.

02:52:43.380 | - So what I do is I take a pair

02:52:45.940 | of Smith and Wesson handcuffs.

02:52:47.120 | I put them in the middle of three people in a class.

02:52:50.380 | I spread them out and I have them place them on each other

02:52:53.860 | in a just playing manner.

02:52:55.260 | I have handcuffs keys there,

02:52:57.220 | and I have a pair of bolt cutters there

02:52:59.020 | in case somebody gets stuck, does something stupid.

02:53:01.540 | So they play with each other

02:53:03.020 | as far as putting them on randomly.

02:53:04.500 | I show them how to put them on appropriately.

02:53:06.620 | And then I show them a handcuff key

02:53:09.300 | and a handcuff key will open up handcuffs,

02:53:11.940 | interestingly enough.

02:53:13.840 | But the thing about a handcuff key is it's not made

02:53:16.380 | to be used by the person that is in those handcuffs.

02:53:19.540 | So that's the first lesson there.

02:53:21.600 | If you have a handcuff key,

02:53:22.860 | handcuff keys are the most used tool

02:53:25.440 | to open up handcuffs in custody situations.

02:53:28.800 | You know, both criminals escaping from the police

02:53:31.780 | to people escaping from criminals.

02:53:34.460 | Just the standard hidden handcuff key.

02:53:36.740 | So I show them how to modify the handcuff key

02:53:38.820 | so it's more optimal to use on yourself

02:53:40.700 | with just basic garbage that you can find.

02:53:43.020 | Piece of wire, a zip tie piece,

02:53:45.300 | basically how to put a leverage arm on the handcuff key

02:53:48.820 | so you can actually spin it in the key way,

02:53:50.820 | behind your back or in front of you.

02:53:53.100 | - Trying to think, I don't think I've ever been in handcuffs.

02:53:56.700 | - Appropriate way to handcuff somebody is palms out.

02:53:58.940 | - How much restriction is there in terms of-

02:54:01.260 | - There's a lot.

02:54:02.080 | It's a hinge handcuffs, there's a lot of restriction.

02:54:04.960 | With no chain in the middle.

02:54:05.920 | - Can you reach back?

02:54:06.980 | - You could try and reach back,

02:54:08.320 | or you can basically put yourself

02:54:10.260 | in a not compromised position

02:54:12.400 | and feed the most of your palm meat into the handcuff way

02:54:16.140 | so when they shut it on you,

02:54:18.680 | you have more space to work with.

02:54:21.240 | So you can spin your hand.

02:54:22.720 | We call it a passive resistance.

02:54:24.740 | Again, you go through a process with them

02:54:27.660 | where you deconstruct how people are handcuffed,

02:54:31.100 | handcuff keys and how to modify a handcuff key

02:54:33.000 | to be able to use on yourself.

02:54:34.320 | And all of these things they're constructing as we go.

02:54:37.420 | So they basically, "Hey, what's a grinding surface?"

02:54:40.120 | Well, there's concrete outside.

02:54:41.280 | So they grind an angle on the key

02:54:42.920 | so you can get a key not to go straight into the key way,

02:54:46.800 | but you can get it into the key way at an angle,

02:54:49.200 | for example.

02:54:50.040 | It's something that is out there as far as a method.

02:54:53.580 | You can't spin a key behind your back because it's small.

02:54:55.640 | It's designed to be used by somebody else

02:54:57.620 | opening those handcuffs on you.

02:54:58.900 | So you put an arm on it so you can leverage our arm

02:55:01.440 | so you can spin it behind your back.

02:55:03.240 | You learn how to put yourself

02:55:07.200 | in not a compromised position.

02:55:08.600 | If somebody asks you for your hands

02:55:11.280 | so they could be cuffed, you don't do this.

02:55:14.280 | You do that or you put yourself in a cable grip

02:55:17.120 | behind your back, which is a pretty strong grip

02:55:19.220 | and it's hard to spread those hands apart.

02:55:21.160 | It's also something that people go into automatically

02:55:24.040 | when they're in fear.

02:55:25.640 | So all of these things are advantageous for you.

02:55:28.360 | And you learn how not only people get restrained,

02:55:32.380 | but you see videos of them

02:55:33.420 | because I show a bunch of abduction

02:55:34.820 | that's actually happening live.

02:55:36.380 | Again, the best thing is avoidance,

02:55:39.700 | but specifically when you work around restraints

02:55:42.020 | is number one, learn how some of these restraints work.

02:55:45.740 | Number two is learning how some of the ready-made tools

02:55:49.940 | to get out of those restraints look like function.

02:55:53.540 | And number three, which is the advanced level

02:55:55.420 | is learn how to construct all of these things yourself,

02:55:57.940 | which is, I think that is the best thing

02:56:01.140 | you can show somebody.

02:56:02.840 | For handcuffs, I just use a standard pair of handcuffs

02:56:05.000 | and then we deconstruct other very specialized handcuffs

02:56:07.860 | that might be out there.

02:56:09.140 | And you show them, if you're gonna travel somewhere,

02:56:11.420 | learn what restraints are commonly available

02:56:13.700 | in the environment.

02:56:14.940 | Somebody going to a sub-Saharan Africa

02:56:17.100 | carrying a plastic handcuff key,

02:56:19.740 | that's gonna be useless out there

02:56:22.380 | because there's not gonna be standard handcuffs out there

02:56:25.060 | that would be open with that type of key.

02:56:28.660 | Out there, you're probably gonna be tied up

02:56:30.380 | with a chain and a padlock of some sort,

02:56:32.380 | maybe a 40 millimeter Chinese padlock

02:56:34.460 | with a plastic core that you can open with a lighter

02:56:37.860 | if you can burn the core, melt the core open.

02:56:39.900 | Or if you can leverage that open,

02:56:42.300 | that's a pretty easy thing to open.

02:56:43.700 | Or a bobby pin, you could reach all the way in the back

02:56:45.820 | and open the latch.

02:56:47.180 | - What about rope?

02:56:48.080 | Is that common?

02:56:50.100 | - Yeah, it is common.

02:56:51.420 | This is one of my favorite things for rope.

02:56:53.980 | Something I usually carry in some places.

02:56:58.340 | It's another gift for you if you want.

02:57:00.700 | It's a ceramic razor blade.

02:57:02.340 | - Nice.

02:57:03.340 | - Is it capable of cutting?

02:57:04.800 | - Nice.

02:57:07.580 | - Small, you can put it behind a label.

02:57:10.540 | I've seen some students put the Levi's label on there

02:57:13.060 | and just sew it back on.

02:57:14.860 | It is non-magnetic, non-ferrous.

02:57:18.540 | So in and out of that type of situation,

02:57:22.100 | you can get in it.

02:57:22.940 | And it's something you can have with you everywhere.

02:57:26.180 | This is a pretty fancy one.

02:57:27.420 | Or you can just grab a simple razor blade.

02:57:29.460 | And actually learning how to use

02:57:30.980 | or leverage a razor blade between your palms

02:57:34.420 | and know how to go up and down with it

02:57:37.500 | to be able to cut yourself out of rope.

02:57:38.340 | - And of course, so that's just practice to do that well.

02:57:41.340 | - It's practice and it's also exposure to just,

02:57:44.220 | this is a possibility.

02:57:45.380 | This is how you could hide it.

02:57:46.460 | Again, the whole smuggling aspect comes from a criminal,

02:57:49.820 | a criminal mindset type setting.

02:57:51.700 | So how things are hidden, where they're hidden.

02:57:54.580 | And when I talk about concealing objects of this nature,

02:57:57.140 | it usually comes from smuggling.

02:58:00.140 | The fact that I have something in a notebook

02:58:02.020 | comes from heroin smuggling.

02:58:03.500 | If you're not looking at the school of criminality,

02:58:07.300 | you're missing out on a big part of the equation.

02:58:10.680 | - So for people who wanna learn about this,

02:58:14.940 | do you teach courses on this?

02:58:16.500 | Do you know what's the, how do you get in touch with you

02:58:20.340 | or learn from you?

02:58:21.220 | Do you have stuff online or is it only in person?

02:58:23.140 | - So I have some stuff on my Patreon specifically.

02:58:25.780 | I have a Patreon where I share a lot of the online material.

02:58:29.460 | I basically a bunch of, this is my notebook.

02:58:32.380 | I have a bunch of stuff that I,

02:58:34.580 | I just met somebody in Philadelphia that showed me

02:58:37.020 | a pretty unique way of utilizing a box cutter as a weapon.

02:58:40.820 | So I wrote some of that down, I filmed some of it.

02:58:43.960 | And it's not for any other reason.

02:58:46.580 | I'm not trying to create dangerous people out there.

02:58:48.780 | It's like, hey, look at this.

02:58:49.900 | This is something that's out there, right?

02:58:52.260 | So a lot of that information,

02:58:53.340 | some of those notes and stuff like that,

02:58:54.660 | I keep on my Patreon.

02:58:56.420 | I used to share it openly on Facebook and Instagram,

02:58:58.620 | but that has not been possible anymore.

02:59:03.620 | - Well, I'm a member of your Patreon

02:59:05.660 | and I recommend people sign up.

02:59:06.820 | It's really great 'cause you also have philosophy.

02:59:09.180 | You're the Mexican Miyamoto Musashi.

02:59:14.180 | It's not just the skills,

02:59:17.300 | it's also the philosophy around it.

02:59:18.940 | Like I got that book of five rings

02:59:21.020 | before I went into training.

02:59:22.300 | Like I took that with me through training.

02:59:24.620 | The whole aspect of, you know,

02:59:26.020 | go to places frightening to the common brand of men,

02:59:28.860 | you know, be put in jail

02:59:30.220 | and extricate yourself with your own wisdom.

02:59:32.580 | I think he was speaking about experience,

02:59:35.420 | you know, the whole warrior's journey,

02:59:36.700 | the hero's journey of going out there and actually risking.

02:59:39.660 | I think that's a pretty big basis and aspect

02:59:44.340 | of what the work I do and showing some of these things.

02:59:47.300 | There's a tendency to people that say,

02:59:48.660 | "Hey, I'm afraid to go to Mexico.

02:59:51.140 | "What do I need to know?"

02:59:52.100 | Like, well, if you're afraid to go to Mexico,

02:59:53.940 | go to Mexico.

02:59:55.540 | I mean, I was in Detroit.

02:59:56.500 | I was pretty afraid when I was in Detroit

02:59:58.220 | and some parts of Detroit and the South Side of Chicago.

03:00:01.100 | But I don't wanna be dictated where I can go

03:00:05.820 | and where I can't go because of safety.

03:00:07.660 | I wanna take responsibility for that myself

03:00:09.660 | and figure out ways of being more capable

03:00:11.500 | and an asset to the people around me and myself.

03:00:14.660 | And that comes from experience.

03:00:17.220 | And people don't wanna risk getting a shoulder injury

03:00:19.860 | rolling in jujitsu or don't wanna risk

03:00:21.380 | getting a bloody nose in boxing, but that is the way.

03:00:24.060 | - Well, there's some aspect to fitting in.

03:00:28.100 | You quote Hattori Hanzo on imitation.

03:00:31.660 | "The most important thing you should keep in mind

03:00:34.020 | "when you go on a Shinobi mission

03:00:36.540 | "is to imitate well the language of the target province

03:00:39.620 | "and the ways of the local people.

03:00:41.580 | "This includes their appearances,

03:00:43.300 | "the way of wearing clothes,

03:00:44.940 | "the way of shaving their head,

03:00:46.780 | "the way of making up their hair,

03:00:49.020 | "the way of making up a sword or short sword,

03:00:51.220 | "and the way of refinement and luxury."

03:00:54.260 | So how do you fit into some of those places?

03:00:56.500 | So you know Mexico, but a person like me

03:00:59.820 | that doesn't know anything about Mexico,

03:01:00.980 | and say I'm interviewing somebody

03:01:02.900 | in a leadership position in a drug cartel.

03:01:05.820 | How quickly do you learn how to fit in?

03:01:08.180 | - I mean, it's not about fitting in,

03:01:09.420 | it's about coming up with a narrative for yourself.

03:01:11.740 | What that book is talking,

03:01:12.820 | that's a quote from the book called "A Shouninki,"

03:01:15.900 | which is like an actual legit ninja manual

03:01:18.740 | from like the 1500s or something like that.

03:01:21.700 | And they're not talking about blending in,

03:01:25.860 | they're talking about creating a narrative or a lie

03:01:28.900 | to your appearance and your behavior

03:01:30.460 | and your knowledge base.

03:01:31.460 | That's what they're talking about.

03:01:32.560 | So I would say first,

03:01:34.540 | if you're gonna go to a place like that,

03:01:36.460 | first off, learn what is common there,

03:01:38.420 | what type of common restraints might be placed on you,

03:01:40.620 | what criminal groups work out there,

03:01:42.700 | what type of guns they have.

03:01:44.760 | Not only what type of guns they have,

03:01:46.060 | but go to the gun range in Vegas

03:01:47.380 | and learn how to fire some of these firearms yourself

03:01:49.200 | so you know how to load them

03:01:50.260 | in case you run into a bad situation.

03:01:52.580 | How they tie the sword,

03:01:53.980 | how they wear their short swords

03:01:56.540 | could equate to how, you know,

03:01:58.740 | if you run into some issues.

03:02:00.300 | Also, it would give you a good idea

03:02:01.940 | how many rounds those hold

03:02:03.580 | so you can run at the right moment.

03:02:05.460 | - I like how you focus in on the tools of violence.

03:02:08.740 | But there's also the social engineering de-escalation, right?

03:02:12.020 | - Yeah, so if you are in an environment like that

03:02:14.300 | and you are carrying around a camera,

03:02:16.880 | that might be an issue.

03:02:18.040 | - Or the opposite, it might not be an issue.

03:02:19.960 | - Well, if you're asked, like,

03:02:21.360 | were you with, I'm with a news organization,

03:02:23.760 | or am I with a Christian aid group here?

03:02:26.000 | - Yeah.

03:02:27.200 | - And if you are with a Christian aid group,

03:02:28.720 | it's probably a good idea to learn some of the Bible, right?

03:02:30.880 | If you want a quick way of having somebody out there

03:02:34.200 | try and stop talking to you,

03:02:35.720 | you can start talking about Jesus

03:02:37.440 | in the middle of a little cartel territory

03:02:39.720 | when they approach you and take out the Bible.

03:02:41.680 | That'll quickly de-escalate.

03:02:43.320 | - What I usually prefer to do is I find somebody

03:02:45.820 | from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

03:02:47.900 | and beat them up in front of the,

03:02:49.820 | just to send a signal that I'm not a journalist,

03:02:51.620 | and I too don't like journalists.

03:02:53.300 | - That could be a way, but--

03:02:55.700 | - To send a message.

03:02:56.620 | - I think a lot of us miss the fact

03:02:58.100 | that we are capable of taking control of our own narrative

03:03:00.920 | and what we communicate to people around us.

03:03:03.140 | I could show up here drinking a Monster Energy drink,

03:03:06.700 | dumping it on the ground, scratching you know what,

03:03:09.220 | and just sit down and just be a rude motherfucker.

03:03:11.700 | That's not who I am, but I can do that.

03:03:14.200 | And you will believe me if I am good at it.

03:03:16.960 | Some of us miss the, some of us don't know this aspect

03:03:19.720 | because it's something we consider predatory

03:03:21.560 | or something that is wrong or negative or bad.

03:03:25.000 | And some of these aspects are actually,

03:03:26.800 | you know, they're pretty useful.

03:03:28.440 | I learned most of my tradecraft and skill craft

03:03:31.840 | from panhandlers and street performers.

03:03:34.560 | And when I had some training related to social engineering,

03:03:38.240 | those were the people that I learned from.

03:03:40.560 | I remember we were doing surveillance

03:03:43.500 | and there was a guy there that showed us

03:03:45.080 | how to do surveillance, you know, on the street.

03:03:47.340 | And he said, "If you can find a way

03:03:49.340 | "for somebody to smell you before they see you,

03:03:52.580 | "you'll become invisible."

03:03:54.420 | And I was like, "That's bullshit.

03:03:56.720 | "If you can find a way of somebody smelling you

03:03:58.960 | "before they see you become invisible."

03:04:00.500 | I didn't understand what that meant.

03:04:03.020 | So we went on a three-day bender, didn't take a shower,

03:04:05.700 | smelled like shit, no deodorant.

03:04:08.220 | You know, you smell like a homeless person,

03:04:09.700 | you look like a homeless person,

03:04:11.140 | and you approach somebody asking for the time

03:04:12.960 | and they smell you before they see you.

03:04:15.020 | And you are not there, you're not a human, you don't exist.

03:04:18.280 | So that was a pretty valuable lesson that I got there.

03:04:21.620 | - Yeah, so that's interesting.

03:04:23.260 | But like, I have this belief,

03:04:25.880 | it has to do with the way I operate in this world,

03:04:28.500 | I suppose, but if you come off as a person legitimately,

03:04:32.860 | I guess you could fake it, but I think it just feels like

03:04:36.820 | you can be extremely good, possibly the best in the world,

03:04:41.820 | if you practice it your whole life, at being you.

03:04:45.840 | At showing like you have nothing to hide.

03:04:51.180 | - A true believer, a true believer.

03:04:54.380 | - So like, yes, you can come up with a fake narrative,

03:04:56.600 | but then what I mean is like,

03:04:58.300 | live that narrative your whole life then.

03:05:00.400 | And then never falter from that.

03:05:05.860 | Like you are this person, that's what I'm trying to,

03:05:08.740 | I have nothing to hide.

03:05:10.500 | - I consider that a true believer,

03:05:11.980 | and yeah, that is a unique person when you meet them,

03:05:15.140 | and they are out there.

03:05:16.300 | There are people that will fucking walk into places.

03:05:19.620 | This is who I am, I don't give a fuck.

03:05:21.980 | This is who I am, if you don't trust me,

03:05:23.300 | well, shoot me, fuck it.

03:05:24.760 | This is my honesty, and if you don't trust me,

03:05:27.620 | well, look at all these people

03:05:28.580 | that I've interacted with in the past,

03:05:30.260 | and you can ask them about it,

03:05:31.340 | or you can see my effects on other people.

03:05:33.820 | That's gonna be my presentation card.

03:05:35.300 | - And so the way you said it now is using words,

03:05:37.860 | and it's blunt.

03:05:39.040 | Usually if somebody is blunt like that,

03:05:40.980 | like I'm a no bullshit person, that means they're not.

03:05:43.580 | That means they're a full of shit, actually.

03:05:44.900 | - But you do that through, I mean, I'm saying,

03:05:46.900 | I'm verbalizing your behavior, just walking somewhere.

03:05:50.500 | Let's say you're going to interview

03:05:53.840 | somebody very dangerous down there,

03:05:56.060 | and you walk into a room without worry.

03:05:58.200 | That is a presentation to you.

03:06:03.020 | - That's a pretty interesting introduction.

03:06:05.560 | You're not a threat

03:06:08.220 | because you don't consider yourself a threat,

03:06:10.860 | and you're walking in there with the confidence

03:06:12.340 | that you don't consider yourself a threat,

03:06:14.820 | which is an interesting way of going about it.

03:06:17.420 | My life experiences has been different.

03:06:19.980 | I wasn't programmed that way from an early age,

03:06:22.420 | and it's hard for me to go into that line,

03:06:26.040 | although more and more as I get older,

03:06:29.220 | and as I learn more about the world,

03:06:30.860 | and I've failed a few more times,

03:06:32.580 | I can understand or more cognizant of the fact

03:06:35.660 | that you don't really have to try that much

03:06:39.420 | if you believe in yourself and who you are.

03:06:43.820 | If you know yourself, I think that is at the core of it.

03:06:47.180 | If you know yourself enough to be able

03:06:50.540 | to kind of communicate that to people around you.

03:06:53.980 | - And you're not hiding from yourself

03:06:55.700 | or from the world your flaws, too.

03:06:58.620 | That was the other thing you spoke to

03:07:01.220 | that is probably inspiring to others

03:07:02.980 | is being honest about your flaws,

03:07:05.140 | about your weaknesses as a human being.

03:07:06.900 | - You can't pickpocket a naked man.

03:07:08.540 | - Yeah, that's right.

03:07:09.380 | That's really brilliant.

03:07:10.220 | - If you know how to be naked, and again, I'm not there.

03:07:14.200 | I think I'm working towards that

03:07:16.500 | just by hopefully going through shit

03:07:19.460 | and showing people, not telling them.

03:07:22.380 | Is it show me, don't tell me

03:07:23.580 | is another valuable lesson that I got long ago.

03:07:26.700 | I travel across the country,

03:07:29.780 | and I not only get to show people what I know how to do,

03:07:32.700 | but I give examples of it through things that I do out there.

03:07:36.940 | And I say this a lot, when I travel out there,

03:07:41.060 | I'm never alone.

03:07:42.140 | There's couches out there waiting for me.

03:07:44.060 | There's homes that I can go and stay at,

03:07:47.580 | and friends that I have out there

03:07:49.620 | that I have never even met.

03:07:51.700 | But that's been about me not only wearing

03:07:54.900 | some of those mistakes and past failures on my sleeve,

03:07:57.780 | but also turning them into lessons for people.

03:08:00.660 | And just telling people the fact that,

03:08:03.140 | I know how to do all this weird stuff,

03:08:05.860 | and I show people how to do it.

03:08:07.980 | But here's a bunch of weird memes

03:08:09.340 | that are very humorous about my culture

03:08:11.460 | and about going through therapy.

03:08:14.380 | And this is me doing something goofy.

03:08:17.620 | And this is me being an idiot

03:08:18.900 | in front of all you guys as well.

03:08:20.580 | This is me being the fool.

03:08:21.660 | I think that is another aspect of it.

03:08:23.900 | - I love that as part of that journey,

03:08:25.380 | you made enemies with the rodeo clown

03:08:26.940 | and meet up with him afterwards.

03:08:28.420 | - Oh, we're still, we're in a very toxic relationship.

03:08:32.340 | He knows who he is.

03:08:33.340 | He's probably out there listening.

03:08:34.660 | He's a-- - Love and hate.

03:08:35.980 | - We-- - All there.

03:08:37.020 | - We stopped talking to each other for months

03:08:39.140 | and then just send a dick message of some sort

03:08:41.940 | and just, we're back at it.

03:08:43.780 | - Back, yeah.

03:08:45.060 | Love expressed through anger, I love it.

03:08:47.140 | It's therapeutic.

03:08:48.700 | You have both very interesting career paths.

03:08:51.380 | If we can just jump back to a really interesting topic

03:08:54.620 | that I wanted to mention on narco-cultism.

03:08:58.700 | What are narco-cults?

03:09:01.020 | What's the relationship between,

03:09:02.580 | you kind of mentioned religion a little bit.

03:09:04.380 | - Yeah. - What's the relationship

03:09:05.780 | between religious culture and drug culture?

03:09:09.340 | - First off, Mexico is one of the most Catholic countries

03:09:11.220 | on the planet, if not the most Catholic country

03:09:14.060 | on the planet.

03:09:15.020 | Not only that, it is a country that has a root

03:09:18.740 | in a spirituality through its ethnic culture

03:09:23.900 | that other parts of the world got most of that taken away

03:09:28.900 | and/or suppressed or killed or taken away.

03:09:32.080 | When the Spanish came to Mexico,

03:09:36.020 | they were a product of a recently liberated group of people.

03:09:41.020 | They just got done being invaded by the Moors, basically.

03:09:46.500 | And they brought with them the image

03:09:48.060 | of La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

03:09:51.860 | And Hernan Cortes' vision of that,

03:09:54.140 | or version of that was a lady holding a crystal scepter,

03:09:57.000 | baby Jesus, and standing on a crescent moon.

03:10:01.740 | That's what he brought with him to the Americas.

03:10:04.780 | And when the conquest happened, a lot of people say,

03:10:09.340 | "Yeah, the Spanish came and conquested the Aztec empire.

03:10:13.380 | "The enemies of the Aztec allied themselves

03:10:16.380 | "with the Spanish and they took them down."

03:10:18.160 | That's what happened.

03:10:19.000 | And then the rest was famine and sickness.

03:10:21.980 | That's what killed most of them.

03:10:25.300 | They realized that it was gonna be hard

03:10:27.580 | to suppress some of the spiritual practices in Mexico,

03:10:29.980 | so they decided to meld them with Catholic iconography.

03:10:33.740 | So you see this cult to Tuanatzin,

03:10:38.620 | which is like a fertility variant

03:10:41.300 | of a mother goddess in Aztec culture.

03:10:44.660 | And they turned her into La Virgen de Guadalupe,

03:10:47.220 | which is the icon that a lot of Mexicans venerate

03:10:49.740 | as the La Virgen, the virgin.

03:10:51.560 | But in her, she conceals cultural elements from the past.

03:10:57.980 | She has a black sash across her stomach,

03:10:59.760 | which means she's pregnant,

03:11:01.100 | something common in the Aztec culture,

03:11:03.420 | in the Mexica culture.

03:11:05.180 | She's standing on a cherub that has eagle wings,

03:11:08.140 | that is a war god.

03:11:09.700 | That's the symbol of the war god down there.

03:11:12.060 | She has stars on her, which is a veil of certain stars

03:11:16.060 | that are related to some of the spiritual practice

03:11:17.780 | from before.

03:11:18.620 | Basically, they hid these things in that setting.

03:11:25.060 | Now you skip forward hundreds of years,

03:11:29.460 | and you start seeing things like Malverde,

03:11:33.460 | who was a bandit that lived in Sinaloa way back in the day.

03:11:36.920 | He would rob rich farmers

03:11:38.940 | that would go through the countryside.

03:11:42.140 | One time he was almost caught, and he was shot and injured,

03:11:45.060 | and he was wanted by the government.

03:11:46.580 | So he told one of his friends to tell them where he was

03:11:51.140 | and to give the reward money to the townspeople.

03:11:55.160 | So he did that.

03:11:56.000 | He was hung from a tree,

03:11:59.180 | and the order was not to bury him,

03:12:01.540 | just to let his body rot.

03:12:03.260 | And his body rotted away

03:12:04.780 | until it fell onto the ground, the bones.

03:12:07.460 | And each of the townspeople would go over

03:12:09.980 | and put a rock on top of his corpse

03:12:12.340 | until it became a pile of rocks.

03:12:14.800 | And then he started granting miracles.

03:12:17.000 | So again, this whole aspect of these criminals

03:12:20.640 | become in saints.

03:12:21.680 | And also a middle finger from the downward local populace

03:12:27.060 | to the church in a way,

03:12:28.860 | because he's not a recognized saint,

03:12:30.500 | but he has an altar and people venerate that.

03:12:33.720 | Then you have cartels that have a spiritual practice

03:12:38.740 | or spirituality behind what they do,

03:12:40.960 | which is part of their culture,

03:12:42.340 | but it's also like a tool they use

03:12:44.700 | to ingratiate themselves with the local populace

03:12:48.680 | or the population around them.

03:12:51.300 | They're icons of power,

03:12:53.340 | and sometimes of almost a symbol of rebellion.

03:12:58.020 | You see El Chapo's son, when he was arrested,

03:13:02.140 | had a Santo Niño de Atocha on his chest,

03:13:05.420 | which is a holy kid of Atocha.

03:13:09.220 | Spanish legend during the Moorish conquest,

03:13:12.300 | they said that a statue of that saint

03:13:14.740 | would go around and feed some of the hungry.

03:13:17.540 | That was the legend.

03:13:19.380 | And he's a saint of the persecuted.

03:13:22.020 | So the fact that when he was arrested,

03:13:24.900 | you see him wearing that,

03:13:27.660 | and then he was liberated is a miracle in and of itself.

03:13:31.260 | So it's proof that that works.

03:13:34.660 | You see, you can find one of those scapuladios

03:13:38.620 | anywhere in Mexico.

03:13:39.460 | It was the most, at least the sold one.

03:13:41.600 | So you see them utilizing some of these aspects

03:13:46.980 | in their own belief system as a symbol

03:13:50.380 | or as iconography, basically,

03:13:52.180 | for some of the things they do.

03:13:54.020 | Then you go into some of the other aspects of it

03:13:56.380 | that are out there, like Santa Muerte,

03:13:58.020 | which is actually a faith that I grew up in.

03:14:00.220 | Mexico has a weird relationship to death.

03:14:03.800 | We have parties at the cemetery on Day of the Dead,

03:14:06.740 | and I just went through one recently.

03:14:08.940 | This is November the 2nd.

03:14:11.280 | So we celebrate our dead,

03:14:15.060 | and we celebrate death in a way

03:14:16.540 | that I don't think a lot of cultures out there do.

03:14:19.220 | - So it's a joyful occasion.

03:14:20.700 | - It is a celebration, yeah.

03:14:21.940 | My eight-year-old put two beers on an altar,

03:14:24.920 | one for my mom, one for my brother.

03:14:27.020 | She bought a Snickers bar for my mom

03:14:29.500 | and a bag of pops for my brother,

03:14:33.980 | flower petals and marigolds,

03:14:35.340 | and pictures of them on an altar.

03:14:36.820 | - That's amazing.

03:14:37.940 | What kind of beer?

03:14:39.340 | - Tecate.

03:14:40.180 | Tecate Roja for my mother, because she was hardcore,

03:14:43.060 | and Tecate Light for my brother.

03:14:45.140 | He was more of an endurance drinker.

03:14:47.120 | And it's also for me,

03:14:50.100 | the relationship to death down there is different.

03:14:53.900 | So there's an icon in Mexico.

03:14:55.500 | It's actually one of the fastest-growing

03:14:58.180 | alternative spiritual practices in Mexico.

03:15:02.820 | And not only in Mexico, but here in the US.

03:15:04.940 | I've been to Santa Muerte temples across the country.

03:15:08.340 | I found one in Connecticut, out of all places.

03:15:11.080 | How I grew up with it, where I saw it,

03:15:14.060 | is my family was all Guadalupanos.

03:15:18.180 | We were Catholic, and we venerated

03:15:20.980 | the Virgin of Guadalupe, specifically,

03:15:23.300 | the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

03:15:25.920 | But every now and then, there were winks and nods

03:15:27.680 | to a skeletal saint in family practices.

03:15:31.520 | And even when I went to work,

03:15:33.560 | the older guys that I was working with

03:15:38.240 | would tell me, "Hey, we gotta go ask for protection."

03:15:43.160 | So they would drive me over to the church,

03:15:45.000 | and I thought I was going to the cathedral.

03:15:47.080 | And then we made a left turn, and it wasn't the cathedral.

03:15:50.240 | It was the market next to the cathedral in Tijuana.

03:15:53.640 | And in the little corner,

03:15:55.560 | there was a big Santa Muerte reaper effigy.

03:16:00.360 | And then I knew why I had to bring a bottle of tequila.

03:16:03.960 | I was like, "Why am I bringing a bottle of tequila

03:16:05.760 | to the church?"

03:16:06.640 | It was for her, for death, la muerte.

03:16:09.760 | It was partly hazing, and also,

03:16:14.440 | they did believe that they were basically imbued

03:16:18.840 | with being agents of death, in a way.

03:16:23.200 | So it was like a cultural thing as well,

03:16:24.960 | something that they wore on them as not only protection,

03:16:29.360 | but as also like a samurai would wear

03:16:32.480 | this death iconography on them,

03:16:34.120 | or how the Maori would do haka dances

03:16:39.120 | to some of these guys in their kind of warrior culture

03:16:42.520 | that they were growing up with

03:16:44.000 | or trying to imbue on us, the young guys.

03:16:46.760 | They would take us there,

03:16:49.400 | and they would imbue us with iconography of Santa Muerte

03:16:51.680 | to be like a psychological thing.

03:16:53.800 | - So that gives you strength and meaning

03:16:55.480 | in the face of struggle,

03:16:57.160 | like in the face of difficulties in life?

03:16:59.840 | - I think, you know, your closeness to death

03:17:02.040 | and having a relationship to death

03:17:04.120 | in the form of a symbolic representation of it,

03:17:06.640 | like Santa Muerte or an icon like that,

03:17:09.680 | makes it not as scary, I guess.

03:17:12.120 | Or not only that, but it's also something

03:17:14.600 | that the other side, the enemy, the cartels groups,

03:17:19.000 | they would venerate it as well.

03:17:21.000 | So when they would see it on you,

03:17:22.360 | it was almost debilitating to them.

03:17:24.520 | They were like, "Oh, are you guys cops?

03:17:26.280 | "Are you guys, why are you wearing that?"

03:17:28.880 | So there was an aspect of that to it.

03:17:31.760 | A momento muerte, muerte type thing,

03:17:35.520 | where you remember death, you know, type thing.

03:17:38.400 | - There's some aspect in which you don't wanna mess

03:17:40.240 | with a person who meditates on death.

03:17:42.760 | - There was some of that, yeah.

03:17:44.320 | (laughing)

03:17:45.520 | There was a saying, I think they probably took it

03:17:48.080 | from a movie or something like that,

03:17:49.560 | but I don't know where they got it.

03:17:51.920 | May I earn your need and be your wrath.

03:17:56.000 | - Oh man, that's a good line.

03:17:58.680 | - They would say that to the statue of La Santa.

03:18:01.920 | Another thing people, it's not a cartel specific saint,

03:18:07.120 | though, it's like everybody, at all levels,

03:18:09.760 | from the lady that sells tortillas,

03:18:12.160 | to the cops, to the military.

03:18:15.640 | There's some people in the military that venerate it.

03:18:17.800 | There's a very specific symbol of how this is

03:18:20.760 | like a weird relationship, specifically in Santa Marta,

03:18:24.040 | in Mexico, there's a shrine outside of Tijuana,

03:18:28.360 | right across the La Presa, it's like a water reservoir,

03:18:32.720 | right outside Tijuana.

03:18:34.400 | And there was a big Santa Muerte altar there,

03:18:37.960 | like on the roadside.

03:18:39.240 | And my former boss, Leza Ola, ordered that thing destroyed.

03:18:44.320 | So he ordered a truck to destroy it.

03:18:47.120 | It was a famous thing.

03:18:48.200 | And it was rebuilt the next night.

03:18:51.000 | And I know for a fact that some of the people

03:18:52.560 | that rebuilt that were some of the same guys

03:18:54.320 | that were there destroying it.

03:18:56.600 | - Oh man, that's pretty symbolic.

03:18:59.560 | So it's just, it's not something that can be killed.

03:19:02.160 | It's a part of the spirit of the people.

03:19:05.320 | - It keeps getting destroyed by ultra Christian groups

03:19:09.040 | or Catholic groups, and it keeps getting rebuilt.

03:19:11.480 | Personally, for me, as a, you know,

03:19:16.320 | I don't believe that there's a reaper skeleton

03:19:19.800 | in the sky protecting me.

03:19:22.240 | But I do believe in the aspect of an ending, you know,

03:19:26.440 | and how it's important to, you know,

03:19:28.120 | the ending is important in all things,

03:19:29.600 | and death should be present in life.

03:19:31.440 | And if it's not, then you're delusional about things.

03:19:35.120 | - So to you, it's a mechanism to meditate on death

03:19:37.520 | once again.

03:19:38.520 | - Yeah.

03:19:39.360 | And, you know, having my daughter, who's eight,

03:19:42.640 | view it as a benevolent thing, you know,

03:19:48.720 | she's a kid and she sees a skeleton

03:19:50.840 | that represents death and Jesus does.

03:19:53.000 | I think in a way, Mexicans have taken some of those aspects,

03:20:00.040 | be it day of the dead,

03:20:03.000 | some of these practices related to some occultism aspects

03:20:06.640 | around, you know, St. Judas, you know, San Judas.

03:20:11.360 | St. Judas is the patron saint of lost causes.

03:20:15.440 | And it's one of the most venerated saints in Mexico.

03:20:17.640 | You know, Jesus is probably the fourth or fifth

03:20:20.520 | you pray to, which is pretty funny, ridiculous.

03:20:23.520 | But the reason why,

03:20:26.160 | and this is something I heard from somebody that was,

03:20:28.480 | actually, we found him with a gun,

03:20:31.680 | and on his gun, he had a St. Judas effigy.

03:20:35.520 | And he said, "Oh, like, why St. Judas?"

03:20:40.200 | "Porque San Judas?"

03:20:41.480 | And he's like, "Well, he's the last saint you pray to."

03:20:44.280 | "What do you mean?"

03:20:46.600 | "Well, on the list of saints you pray to,

03:20:48.000 | he's the last one, because when you pray to Judas,

03:20:50.320 | you might get the other Judas on the line."

03:20:52.800 | - Yeah.

03:20:53.640 | - That's the last one you pray to.

03:20:54.480 | That's why he's like the lost cause of saint.

03:20:57.000 | How I remember, like,

03:20:59.240 | even how we try and bribe or like maneuver our way,

03:21:04.160 | even in spirituality, it's spiritual practices.

03:21:06.720 | - Yeah.

03:21:07.560 | - You know?

03:21:08.400 | - Such a fascinating culture.

03:21:10.160 | That's unlike anything else.

03:21:12.240 | - And it's right next door.

03:21:13.600 | And it's here too.

03:21:15.800 | Again, I found an altar in Connecticut,

03:21:19.720 | which is pretty fascinating.

03:21:20.920 | There's one in Arizona.

03:21:22.880 | Again, it's one of the fastest growing spiritual practices

03:21:26.360 | in not only in the US, but across the,

03:21:29.400 | there's somebody from Russia reached out.

03:21:32.840 | There's an altar out there,

03:21:34.200 | and there's a group of people praying to Santa Marta.

03:21:36.520 | And I've been posting and writing a lot about it recently,

03:21:39.280 | just from my own experience

03:21:40.520 | and some of the stuff that I gathered for myself,

03:21:42.320 | and all the way out there.

03:21:45.160 | Those people are fascinated by some of those aspects.

03:21:47.600 | - So I gotta ask you about the dark turn

03:21:49.440 | of that spirituality,

03:21:51.520 | or maybe you'll place this elsewhere,

03:21:52.920 | but who was Adolfo Costanzo, El Padrino?

03:21:57.240 | - He's just a guy that comes up in a period,

03:22:00.680 | I think he's at that initial period of cartels.

03:22:04.720 | This is before my time,

03:22:05.880 | and I've talked to some of the people

03:22:08.120 | that were there for some of that.

03:22:09.920 | - I mean, he kills a lot of people.

03:22:11.840 | - He was exposed and learned through his family ties

03:22:16.200 | about some of the Afro-Caribbean spiritualities

03:22:18.880 | that are now also exploding,

03:22:21.000 | as far as influences across the world,

03:22:23.640 | Latin America and in the US.

03:22:26.200 | When I talk about that, I mean, Santeria, Palo Mayombe,

03:22:30.960 | basically some old spiritual practices

03:22:33.880 | coming out of Africa that utilize things like Ngangas,

03:22:38.880 | which are basically spiritual vessels

03:22:42.520 | that have to be loaded with human remains in some cases.

03:22:46.680 | He was basically a spiritual practitioner

03:22:52.800 | that certain cartel groups would hire

03:22:54.640 | for them to curse the other side,

03:22:58.040 | to imbue them with invisibility,

03:23:00.360 | to be able to transport their drugs or protection spells

03:23:03.840 | and stuff like that.

03:23:04.840 | He was very successful at it, apparently,

03:23:06.920 | or at least that is the experience of the people

03:23:09.680 | paying for some of these practices.

03:23:12.400 | As his spells and his work kept getting bigger and bigger

03:23:17.400 | and more and more complicated,

03:23:19.080 | the ingredients he needed for these Ngangas or these spells,

03:23:23.920 | these cauldrons that he would fill with certain elements,

03:23:27.960 | grew in complexity.

03:23:30.320 | Till finally he said he needed the brain

03:23:33.240 | of a highly educated American of some sort,

03:23:35.400 | which led to his eventual downfall.

03:23:38.880 | He was basically responsible for abducting

03:23:41.560 | and murdering a young American who was a university,

03:23:45.680 | college student, I think.

03:23:47.680 | - Do you think he believed the,

03:23:50.880 | so this guy's murdering people to create,

03:23:52.920 | what, magical potions?

03:23:55.240 | - Vessels, yeah.

03:23:56.080 | - Vessels?

03:23:56.920 | - Yeah, I think he truly believed that he was capable

03:24:02.240 | of doing what he was doing, I guess.

03:24:04.040 | - And there was a culture that's spiritually inclined

03:24:07.480 | that kinda was on the same wavelength as him.

03:24:11.960 | - Yeah, it jived.

03:24:13.560 | I mean, some of these spiritual practices,

03:24:15.280 | again, there's a ritualistic cannibalism

03:24:17.920 | done by some of these cartel groups out there.

03:24:19.840 | - Was he involved in cannibalism as well?

03:24:22.200 | - He wasn't involved in cannibalism that I know of,

03:24:24.240 | but most of the things that he was kind of known for

03:24:26.640 | was basically requesting human body parts

03:24:29.560 | for some of the spell works he was doing.

03:24:31.800 | And then going to such a level

03:24:34.440 | where he needed a specific brain or head of somebody

03:24:37.680 | that was educated and American.

03:24:40.280 | So that kinda, again, led to his eventual downfalls.

03:24:44.480 | His ranch was raided, they found the body parts

03:24:46.680 | inside of these cauldrons that he was preparing.

03:24:49.040 | That's an interesting example of somebody.

03:24:50.800 | There's a cartel head somewhere in Central Mexico as well.

03:24:54.740 | El Mas Loco was his nickname.

03:24:57.880 | And he basically forced the citizenship around him

03:25:01.520 | to turn him into a saint.

03:25:03.820 | So he made a statue of himself.

03:25:05.640 | He was very big into Christianity,

03:25:08.880 | specifically kind of like the crusader mentality

03:25:13.520 | and all of that, kind of imbued himself

03:25:15.640 | and some of the people that were around him with that.

03:25:18.440 | And there's still altars to his death, to him,

03:25:21.880 | after he died.

03:25:22.720 | He died two times.

03:25:24.040 | One time, the government declared him

03:25:26.520 | that he was killing to shoot out,

03:25:27.520 | and it turns out he wasn't dead.

03:25:29.280 | So that was his first miracle.

03:25:32.560 | And then when he was really dead,

03:25:34.780 | some of his people and his loyal followers

03:25:36.980 | were, by gunpoint, kinda still forced to go

03:25:39.740 | and give flowers and venerate these effigies

03:25:42.300 | and statues of him as a saint.

03:25:44.180 | It's a powerful weapon.

03:25:45.940 | Spirituality in Mexico is a powerful weapon.

03:25:47.780 | And the Catholic church in Mexico

03:25:51.100 | has a pretty bad track record,

03:25:52.620 | but as far as that being used to control populace

03:25:57.620 | and stuff like that.

03:26:00.100 | And I think it's just another aspect

03:26:03.280 | that is being exploited in Mexico,

03:26:05.320 | in some communities, as far as the spirituality

03:26:07.440 | and the desperate need for people to believe in something

03:26:10.960 | and how that leads for some people

03:26:12.840 | to go into some horrible predatory behavior around it.

03:26:15.880 | - There's a fascinating dynamic at play here.

03:26:19.200 | So it's not just the United States and Mexico,

03:26:21.160 | it's also China that you talk about.

03:26:23.800 | China is the primary source of fentanyl in the world.

03:26:26.680 | So fentanyl is an opioid that leads to 70,000

03:26:31.680 | plus or minus overdose deaths in the US every year.

03:26:35.260 | So reading from Wikipedia, quote,

03:26:38.320 | "Compared with heroin, it is more potent,

03:26:41.020 | "has higher profit margins,

03:26:43.560 | "and because it is compact, has simpler logistics.

03:26:46.560 | "It can be cut into or even replaced entirely

03:26:49.320 | "the supply of heroin and other opiates."

03:26:51.800 | What do you think is important to understand

03:26:53.280 | about fentanyl as a drug?

03:26:54.940 | - There was a prescription opioid epidemic

03:26:57.480 | in the United States that kind of went down or stopped,

03:27:02.480 | well, it's still out there,

03:27:04.400 | but the epidemic specific around it kind of petered out.

03:27:09.400 | And there was also marijuana legalization

03:27:11.960 | happening at kind of the same time period,

03:27:16.280 | which people talking about marijuana legalization

03:27:19.600 | thought it was gonna hit the cartels in their pockets

03:27:21.680 | and it was gonna be like a death blow

03:27:23.920 | to these criminal groups.

03:27:26.280 | Well, now there's illegal pot grows in the United States

03:27:30.820 | being run by cartels in federal lands.

03:27:33.820 | There's the legal pot grows that are in some way,

03:27:36.640 | shape or form influenced and are run or owned

03:27:39.720 | by some criminal groups,

03:27:40.960 | and they're kind of utilizing that.

03:27:43.120 | The marijuana fields in Mexico

03:27:45.280 | turned into poppy fields once again.

03:27:48.600 | The problem is that some of these lands

03:27:51.220 | were leached of all the nutrients

03:27:52.840 | and they're not as good as something

03:27:55.480 | you would find somewhere in Afghanistan.

03:27:57.080 | So the yield and the quality of it

03:27:59.600 | wasn't as strong as it could be.

03:28:02.440 | So somebody thought about the right idea

03:28:04.480 | of putting fentanyl into the mix.

03:28:06.620 | And not only that, but also figuring out

03:28:11.600 | how to get fentanyl into Mexico.

03:28:13.960 | Mexico has a giant pharmaceutical industry

03:28:17.840 | that people kind of also don't kind of know

03:28:19.840 | or factor into this equation,

03:28:21.720 | which leads into the free ability

03:28:26.640 | of chemicals going in and out of the country

03:28:29.480 | and legal means of it happening, right?

03:28:32.440 | So not only the precursors to make it,

03:28:34.640 | but also the chemist and the industry

03:28:37.320 | to create it in Mexico as well.

03:28:40.120 | Some clandestine factories of fentanyl

03:28:42.720 | have been found in Mexico,

03:28:44.820 | but realistically it's not needed

03:28:46.480 | with the ways that the ports and the borders

03:28:49.760 | are down in Mexico.

03:28:52.100 | You started seeing an influx and a flood

03:28:55.660 | of fentanyl into Mexico,

03:28:57.620 | specifically related to infusing it into heroin.

03:29:01.260 | And not only using that to feed local drug markets,

03:29:04.460 | but send it up into the United States,

03:29:06.380 | which started off this process

03:29:07.860 | that we're kind of going through still.

03:29:09.940 | - Are these like similar highs?

03:29:12.240 | And drug wise, why do you infuse?

03:29:15.180 | I mean, probably you're not the right person

03:29:16.660 | to have this biochemical discussion of how--

03:29:19.180 | - I don't know about the biochemical aspect of it,

03:29:21.220 | but like speaking to guys that do Chiba down there,

03:29:24.460 | that's what they call heroin down there.

03:29:27.300 | It's like a nickname for it.

03:29:29.340 | Having them describe some of the older,

03:29:32.060 | stinkier, darker heroin they used to get

03:29:34.540 | before this whole fentanyl thing

03:29:36.600 | and the highs they would get

03:29:37.440 | and how much they would have to take

03:29:39.020 | versus some of the stuff loaded with fentanyl

03:29:41.060 | that they have to--

03:29:42.680 | - Also there's more higher potency.

03:29:46.060 | - Yeah, there's a higher potency to it.

03:29:47.820 | And also there's a--

03:29:49.620 | - More money to be made, easier to transport.

03:29:52.260 | - Yeah.

03:29:53.100 | - But then is this how China

03:29:55.660 | starts becoming part of the picture?

03:29:58.060 | - One aspect to it that people kind of miss

03:30:00.180 | is that there's no Chinese cartel.

03:30:03.540 | There's no criminal Chinese organization

03:30:06.540 | working unseen, getting around government oversight in China.

03:30:11.540 | I don't know of any such organization.

03:30:15.700 | - Anything that could be labeled

03:30:16.940 | as a criminal organization

03:30:18.340 | is deeply integrated with the government.

03:30:20.860 | - I mean, I've never heard of a giant criminal enterprise

03:30:24.620 | in China operating.

03:30:25.820 | So we have to assume then--

03:30:27.740 | - Independent of the state.

03:30:29.580 | - I would have to assume that some of these things

03:30:32.100 | are happening with the know-how

03:30:33.640 | and inaction of the government out there.

03:30:36.260 | When COVID hit, there was a shortage of fentanyl

03:30:42.740 | on the northern side of Mexico,

03:30:44.620 | specifically related to the Sinaloa cartel.

03:30:47.100 | These guys were actually trafficking fentanyl

03:30:49.580 | from the US down to Mexico to infuse their product,

03:30:52.760 | but not the New Generation cartel,

03:30:56.020 | which operates out of the central part of Mexico,

03:30:58.460 | the Colima area, which have access to the seaside ports.

03:31:02.980 | So even during the shutdown, they were getting supplied,

03:31:06.300 | which means to me, at least,

03:31:08.340 | or for anybody observing it,

03:31:09.900 | that the supply chain was not cut.

03:31:12.540 | And whatever was coming out of China

03:31:14.380 | was being let out of China

03:31:17.780 | by whatever official channels

03:31:20.100 | would be able to shut down or stop it.

03:31:22.180 | - God, I would love to know the organizational structure,

03:31:24.900 | the governmental structure of China,

03:31:27.520 | how they enable it.

03:31:30.940 | Because I can't imagine at the very top,

03:31:36.340 | there's like a portfolio of things we're doing,

03:31:38.420 | and one of them is fentanyl, right?

03:31:40.740 | - I think it's more inaction,

03:31:42.300 | or just the know-how that is happening,

03:31:44.820 | but just like hands off, just let this, I don't know.

03:31:48.420 | - If I were to understand how large bureaucracies work,

03:31:52.440 | it's looking the other way.

03:31:54.060 | - Yeah, you are now seeing pill presses

03:31:58.820 | brought to Mexico, industrial-level pill presses

03:32:01.700 | found in clandestine laboratories,

03:32:04.620 | where they're not only infusing the yields

03:32:08.920 | that they're doing with fentanyl,

03:32:09.940 | but also making fake pain medication

03:32:13.060 | that is flooding US markets everywhere.

03:32:15.660 | That's where it is.

03:32:17.140 | Is that pain medication or is that fentanyl?

03:32:20.900 | Who knows?

03:32:21.740 | And that's how you see a lot of people dying from ODs

03:32:24.260 | that are supposedly taking pain pills,

03:32:26.340 | and that's not what they're doing.

03:32:28.500 | So the evolution right now you're seeing

03:32:30.060 | is making something look legit

03:32:34.580 | as far as pain medication that it isn't.

03:32:36.380 | And I mean, fentanyl is everywhere.

03:32:40.020 | They're infusing cocaine with it.

03:32:41.880 | I've been getting stories from the US

03:32:44.660 | of people buying it through Alibaba

03:32:46.500 | or just weird online sources,

03:32:47.940 | and it coming in different packages

03:32:49.700 | and just infusing it into whatever is out there.

03:32:53.900 | It is killing off a whole generation of people.

03:32:57.040 | And it comes from one place,

03:33:00.480 | or it's manufactured somewhere

03:33:01.920 | where it's being manufactured with the precursors

03:33:05.420 | and the element and know-how that comes from one place.

03:33:08.120 | - Are we talking about China?

03:33:10.780 | - Talking about China.

03:33:11.620 | - Because Mexico seems to have,

03:33:12.900 | what's the role, this is such a complicated,

03:33:15.340 | and how do you start to talk about the drug war

03:33:17.780 | when more and more and more China is the source of the drug?

03:33:22.780 | Is there a drug war going on with China?

03:33:28.640 | - There's probably an economic war.

03:33:30.140 | Well, you talk about, there's another side to China.

03:33:34.020 | The most, and this is something that's come out recently,

03:33:36.860 | a few years back, I think,

03:33:38.100 | but basically the ways you would move money back into Mexico

03:33:41.620 | after you have a load up here

03:33:43.300 | is that you would give it to a Chinese money broker.

03:33:46.340 | They would put it into the Chinese banking system

03:33:48.300 | and it immediately would just disappear from American eyes.

03:33:51.620 | And then another money broker in Mexico

03:33:53.320 | would receive it through a money transfer from China.

03:33:55.740 | - So China's incredibly good at money laundering.

03:33:58.360 | - That's another aspect to it.

03:34:00.900 | I mean, their banking system is invisible to the US,

03:34:03.500 | basically. - Which allows--

03:34:04.820 | - Which allows the monies to move from one point to another.

03:34:08.020 | So money brokers and people moving money

03:34:09.740 | for the groups down there are Chinese.

03:34:12.140 | So that's another aspect or element of China

03:34:14.860 | as far as its presence.

03:34:16.420 | - What's the role of intelligence in all of this?

03:34:20.900 | FBI, CIA, the Chinese intelligence agencies?

03:34:27.380 | - Right now, Mexico is going through

03:34:29.080 | a nationalistic resurgence and a leftist presidency,

03:34:34.700 | which is not friendly to US interest in a lot of ways.

03:34:38.700 | The US has had a pretty bad track record

03:34:42.260 | with its foreign policy in Mexico,

03:34:44.260 | with a lot of damage being done by the last president

03:34:46.900 | as far as his rhetoric.

03:34:49.060 | - Donald Trump?

03:34:50.140 | - Which has been weaponized and utilized

03:34:51.900 | by the left down in Mexico.

03:34:55.660 | - So America is not seen positively?

03:34:58.980 | - No, every now and then I post something about Mexico,

03:35:01.300 | some horrible thing happening down there.

03:35:02.700 | It's like, why doesn't US send people down there?

03:35:05.140 | Are Mexicans looking for US intervention?

03:35:07.420 | It's like, no, that is beyond what anybody

03:35:09.980 | in Mexico would want.

03:35:11.420 | Specifically, you see the sentiment out there.

03:35:14.380 | They don't view the US as somebody

03:35:17.220 | that's gonna come in and fix anything

03:35:18.500 | or somebody that's gonna help or as a friend.

03:35:21.460 | When the Ukrainian conflict happened,

03:35:24.840 | Mexico basically abstained from saying anything,

03:35:29.840 | which is a wink and a nod to Russia.

03:35:32.280 | It has openly been pro Maduro and openly celebrated

03:35:37.200 | to some of these regimes popping up across Latin America,

03:35:42.000 | which is, that is what people voted for.

03:35:46.400 | That is a sentiment down there.

03:35:47.760 | They're going towards the left of the political spectrum

03:35:49.980 | because they've been basically violated over and over again

03:35:53.980 | by all these different presidencies

03:35:55.680 | that have promised change, brought corruption with them,

03:35:58.740 | and they are our choices.

03:36:00.640 | So this is the best we have right now.

03:36:02.720 | And all of the enemies of the United States

03:36:06.520 | are taking full advantage of that.

03:36:08.280 | We recently had a general address

03:36:11.000 | to the Senate committee hearing, I think.

03:36:12.760 | He was talking about the prevalence

03:36:14.960 | of foreign intelligence services in Mexico and why that is.

03:36:20.360 | Well, you know, Mexico has a lot of the mineable lithium

03:36:24.540 | on the planet underneath parts of it,

03:36:26.860 | specifically in the north.

03:36:28.180 | It is going through a process,

03:36:31.680 | they call it the Cuarta Transformación,

03:36:34.100 | the fourth transformation is what the president

03:36:36.020 | of Mexico calls it, which is, in a way,

03:36:40.020 | it's basically we're here to stay type thing.

03:36:42.940 | You know, they just nationalized mining lithium

03:36:46.500 | and taking control of that and using that as leverage.

03:36:48.500 | If the United States ever wants to go to Mexico,

03:36:50.820 | it's probably not gonna be related to cartel issues.

03:36:53.300 | It's gonna probably be related to energy, I think.

03:36:55.300 | You know, they're kinda thinking ahead, I guess.

03:36:58.580 | - Well, what about also, just imagine a world

03:37:01.660 | where India and China are doing fentanyl trade

03:37:07.020 | with Mexico or whatever transport.

03:37:09.360 | Imagine Chinese military moves, makes an agreement,

03:37:15.060 | a NATO type of agreement with Mexico.

03:37:17.600 | That's pretty possible.

03:37:18.860 | Again, we're seeing a militarized Mexico.

03:37:21.620 | It's another aspect of Mexico that, again,

03:37:23.740 | I haven't seen talked about a lot here in the US.

03:37:26.920 | The main promise that the current president had

03:37:28.940 | was he was gonna make the police, the federal police,

03:37:31.920 | and the security issues in Mexico civilian.

03:37:36.920 | He was gonna do exactly the opposite

03:37:39.620 | as his main rival, Felipe Calderon,

03:37:42.180 | the guy that started off the drug war officially.

03:37:44.660 | And what does he do?

03:37:47.060 | He dissolves the civilian leadership of the federal police,

03:37:50.480 | dissolves the federal police, creates the National Guard,

03:37:53.800 | which is a military unit,

03:37:55.680 | and he puts the military in charge of that.

03:37:58.380 | Now the military has a full monopoly

03:38:00.500 | over all federal policing.

03:38:02.740 | When you cross into Mexico,

03:38:05.000 | you'll see them wearing these white camouflage uniforms.

03:38:07.420 | Those are National Guard people,

03:38:11.080 | but they're the military.

03:38:13.600 | So now you're seeing a militarized Mexico

03:38:16.200 | with some of these leaks that happened

03:38:17.800 | during the Guacamaya, the Guacamaya leaks.

03:38:20.900 | You're now seeing that Mexico has been hosting

03:38:23.800 | members of the Haitian military,

03:38:26.300 | and they've been training them up

03:38:27.900 | to go back to police their country.

03:38:31.400 | That's not something that Mexico has been known for,

03:38:34.620 | to hosting other nations and training them in such a way.

03:38:37.520 | So it's an interesting maneuver.

03:38:40.800 | Like Mexico has been historically neutral

03:38:42.660 | about getting involved in foreign conflicts,

03:38:45.660 | about voting and resolutions as far as invading

03:38:48.400 | or not invading or doing all of these things.

03:38:51.180 | Mexico has been historically kind of neutral

03:38:53.060 | when it comes to some of these things.

03:38:54.100 | And now we're training foreign military forces

03:38:57.460 | to go and do that role somewhere else.

03:38:59.660 | We have the military building airports

03:39:02.900 | and building infrastructure in Mexico,

03:39:04.620 | and a lot of their higher ups

03:39:06.140 | getting very wealthy around it.

03:39:08.740 | And they basically have a monopoly over

03:39:14.140 | who gets to have guns down there.

03:39:16.100 | There's one gun store in all Mexico

03:39:17.800 | and it's run by the military.

03:39:19.340 | And the only way you can buy a gun there

03:39:21.000 | is if you can buy a plane ticket to fly there

03:39:23.620 | and have enough money to sustain that right

03:39:26.180 | or that privilege.

03:39:27.780 | So you're seeing the military not being

03:39:31.240 | in its traditional role of just being the security force.

03:39:34.520 | Now it's policing.

03:39:35.860 | It's involved in, it's getting involved in politics

03:39:39.760 | in a big way.

03:39:41.080 | It's legislation that has passed to keep it on the streets

03:39:44.780 | and the policing role for more years now.

03:39:47.100 | So that should be looked at closer by anybody observing it

03:39:51.100 | from afar, the militarization of Mexico

03:39:53.380 | and where it's going.

03:39:54.800 | - Because if you move towards a world

03:39:57.300 | where a World War III happens,

03:39:59.620 | it feels like Mexico will be the center

03:40:03.140 | because a hot war would be fought on the ground.

03:40:07.460 | And so you have a very difficult parallel

03:40:10.500 | between Mexico and Ukraine.

03:40:12.260 | Both don't have nuclear weapons, both have relationships.

03:40:15.420 | So Ukraine has a relationship or a pull towards it,

03:40:18.740 | the European Union and NATO.

03:40:21.300 | Mexico, at least currently, has a kind of slow pull

03:40:24.940 | towards China, India potentially, and Russia.

03:40:29.100 | And you have this divide between power centers in the world.

03:40:33.620 | And in terms of, just imagine hundreds of thousands

03:40:38.380 | of Mexican troops, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops

03:40:42.100 | on the border, on the US border, on the Mexican side.

03:40:47.100 | - And also the fact that that border doesn't mean anything

03:40:50.100 | to any sort of conflict that would happen regionally

03:40:54.220 | because that's a very easy to cross border.

03:40:57.580 | Doesn't matter how many walls you put across it,

03:40:59.980 | people are already here.

03:41:01.280 | This is not gonna be a war fought off

03:41:03.660 | in some overseas place.

03:41:05.580 | Like you're not gonna, this is something, if it happens,

03:41:09.020 | if destabilization is utilized in Mexico

03:41:12.140 | to cause a conflict there and it turns into a Vietnam

03:41:15.180 | or a proxy war down there of a sort,

03:41:17.900 | which I think in a way you're already kind of seeing

03:41:21.140 | some of that through some of the conflicts

03:41:23.140 | going on down there.

03:41:24.080 | You have a new generation cartel that is being fed fentanyl

03:41:28.660 | from the Pacific side ports.

03:41:30.580 | And suspiciously, you wanna think that maybe

03:41:35.420 | it's favored by a foreign government of some sort

03:41:37.860 | in some way, shape or form, who knows.

03:41:40.880 | And then you have a historically in control

03:41:42.940 | Sinaloa cartel that may or may not be favored by the US

03:41:46.140 | in some way, shape or form.

03:41:47.940 | You can imagine a further conflict down there

03:41:51.180 | and people fostering it and seeing the effects

03:41:54.300 | of basically setting a fire on the feet of the United States.

03:41:59.260 | It's second largest consumer of US products is Mexico.

03:42:04.220 | The massive wave of immigration

03:42:07.420 | that is going to be basically weaponized.

03:42:09.880 | You saw the collapse of the border security structure

03:42:14.360 | with a contingent of 3000 Honduran Guatemalan immigrants

03:42:19.360 | in that first wave of caravans coming to Tijuana.

03:42:23.720 | You saw, it was pretty bad.

03:42:26.080 | It was pretty bad and it could have gotten worse.

03:42:30.260 | Now, what is gonna happen when that wave

03:42:32.500 | is no longer 3000, but a million people

03:42:36.620 | being displaced by violence or being in fear

03:42:40.740 | of whatever conflict might originate down there

03:42:43.820 | and just that massive wave of migration and move.

03:42:47.140 | I think that's an interesting thing

03:42:52.060 | that people should look at and how can you affect change

03:42:56.580 | to try and stop some of these things to happen.

03:43:00.020 | - Well, let me ask you at a philosophical, at a human level,

03:43:02.500 | what do you think about immigration?

03:43:04.580 | Illegal and legal immigration from the direction of Mexico

03:43:09.580 | to the United States?

03:43:11.680 | So we have an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants

03:43:14.940 | in the United States and estimated 45 million legal

03:43:19.940 | immigrants in the United States.

03:43:22.740 | - A few things about that.

03:43:24.980 | When COVID hit, there was no shortages of produce

03:43:28.660 | in the supermarkets, which means that,

03:43:31.600 | I mean, illegal immigration is pretty much

03:43:34.500 | the backbone of all produce and some of the farming

03:43:37.340 | industries out there, most of it.

03:43:40.280 | So illegal immigration and illegal workers

03:43:44.620 | in those fields are essential workers in a way.

03:43:47.860 | I think there's a weird relationship in the United States

03:43:49.840 | with some of these workers and how they're demonized

03:43:52.220 | and how they're called criminals.

03:43:53.740 | I think there was a state out there that passed

03:43:57.420 | anti-illegal immigrant worker legislation.

03:44:01.940 | The farmers had to look elsewhere for people to show up

03:44:05.980 | to work in some of these fields, which basically caused

03:44:08.860 | millions of dollars worth of losses

03:44:10.640 | for some of these farms.

03:44:12.340 | Anywhere you go out there in the United States,

03:44:15.640 | you go into the kitchens and there's gonna be paisanos

03:44:18.020 | there, you know, French, high-level French restaurants.

03:44:21.460 | You'll see people from Puebla there that made their way

03:44:24.300 | legally and might have legalized or regularized their way

03:44:28.420 | into the country or in a sanctuary city.

03:44:31.500 | You go to the service industry, hotels, you know,

03:44:35.060 | those are the people changing the blankets.

03:44:37.220 | Those are the people in the washrooms.

03:44:39.820 | You have them doing jobs that no American wants to do,

03:44:43.060 | realistically, and they're everywhere in this country.

03:44:45.700 | And they are the backbone of some of these industries

03:44:48.960 | that are essential in this country.

03:44:50.780 | - Do you think there's a deep sense

03:44:52.220 | in which they are American?

03:44:54.340 | - I think they're indispensable.

03:44:55.820 | And anybody that says they aren't is delusional.

03:45:00.380 | If you take every single legal worker out of the industry

03:45:03.460 | in the United States and send them back,

03:45:05.740 | like there's a movie out there called,

03:45:07.220 | like "El Día Sin Mexicanos", "A Day Without Mexicans",

03:45:10.660 | you know, everything would stop.

03:45:13.940 | So the relationship is there.

03:45:16.580 | People talk about the history of slavery in this country.

03:45:20.140 | Like it's a thing that is in the past.

03:45:22.100 | There's endangered slaves in the country right now.

03:45:26.660 | People that are paying off their people smugglers

03:45:30.060 | because they brought them into this country

03:45:31.380 | and they haven't been able to pay that fine or that fee yet

03:45:35.060 | and are basically being held hostage by that

03:45:37.220 | here in the United States.

03:45:38.700 | So there's slaves right now in the United States.

03:45:40.500 | You know, people are talking about it

03:45:41.580 | as a historical context.

03:45:43.660 | - What do we do about it?

03:45:44.980 | How are we supposed to think about it?

03:45:46.420 | - We're gonna have to rethink how we look at immigration,

03:45:49.500 | illegal or legal immigration from Mexico

03:45:53.380 | and how we view Mexico as a foreign country.

03:45:56.660 | Your relationship to Canada is one thing.

03:46:00.660 | Your relationship to Mexico is another.

03:46:02.620 | The foreign policy towards Mexico has been pretty nefarious

03:46:08.420 | as far as the United States in a lot of ways.

03:46:10.900 | You know, you can go back.

03:46:12.420 | There was a student massacre during the Olympics

03:46:15.700 | and the president in turn at that time was on the CIA payroll

03:46:19.900 | and it was a counter communist type maneuver

03:46:22.980 | that they were doing down there.

03:46:24.780 | But there's some bloody hands on the US side

03:46:28.340 | of some of the things that have been happening in Mexico

03:46:30.860 | as far as destabilization and influencing

03:46:32.900 | and meddling in foreign policy out there.

03:46:36.100 | Most of the guns that are used down there

03:46:37.700 | come from the US, you know?

03:46:39.260 | And that's another interesting aspect and responsibility

03:46:42.020 | that people shouldn't kind of think about up here.

03:46:44.580 | - So there is on the drug war side,

03:46:47.300 | a machine that's fueling the drug war.

03:46:50.820 | - I mean, there's a giant drug habit up here, you know?

03:46:53.380 | - But also a governmental intelligence

03:46:56.500 | and military support through the sale of weapons.

03:46:59.540 | - I don't know about the sale of weapons,

03:47:00.820 | but you know, there's some very,

03:47:03.180 | you talk about poorest borders coming up.

03:47:07.580 | There's poorest borders also going down, you know?

03:47:10.060 | There's a flow of guns going down and munitions,

03:47:14.420 | which again, they don't kill anybody by themselves.

03:47:16.860 | You know, they get put in the hands of the desperate

03:47:19.100 | that are trying to feed a giant drug market

03:47:21.860 | to the south, to the north.

03:47:23.300 | You know, Mexico has a saying,

03:47:24.740 | "Mexico, Mexico, (speaking in foreign language)

03:47:29.500 | "Mexico, far from God, but close to the United States."

03:47:32.500 | And there's definitely a responsibility on both sides.

03:47:38.700 | This is no longer a Mexico problem, a US problem.

03:47:41.980 | This is a regional problem.

03:47:44.180 | And if we don't think of it as a regional problem

03:47:46.540 | with our brothers on the southern side of it,

03:47:49.180 | and with family, we're related in blood.

03:47:52.260 | There's like, we are,

03:47:53.380 | Mexico and the United States are like this,

03:47:57.140 | but it's become popular in politics.

03:47:59.620 | They just throw a line, right?

03:48:02.420 | And I think we need to get to a place

03:48:04.900 | where we can figure out how to make those connections

03:48:06.940 | and repair some of the damage done by like,

03:48:09.100 | just years and years of bad policy

03:48:11.780 | on both sides of the border.

03:48:13.220 | - Policy and rhetoric, the way we talk about it,

03:48:15.420 | the way we think about it, not just the actual policy,

03:48:17.660 | but seeing the humanity in the people that are here.

03:48:20.980 | - Yeah, it's an easy thing.

03:48:22.380 | They're coming to take our jobs is something you hear.

03:48:25.740 | There was a state out there that passed some anti-legislation

03:48:30.740 | as far as illegal workers on fields.

03:48:33.420 | And it led to massive losses.

03:48:35.340 | Nobody wanted to show up for those jobs, basically.

03:48:38.180 | People would show up one day and they wouldn't come back,

03:48:40.060 | and they were doing jobs that people just don't wanna do.

03:48:43.580 | Are they taking that from the locals?

03:48:46.420 | Or are they filling an essential role

03:48:48.340 | that we feel guilty about?

03:48:50.820 | And the rhetoric around it is more about guilt than anything.

03:48:55.380 | I am an immigrant myself.

03:48:58.620 | I've gone through the experience of doing it legally,

03:49:03.100 | and I've seen people not do it legally

03:49:07.020 | and are in way better places than I am, basically,

03:49:11.180 | by going around some of the system.

03:49:13.660 | The system itself, the immigration system here in the US,

03:49:16.820 | there's something wrong.

03:49:19.540 | It's kind of broken.

03:49:20.540 | And people coming here illegally are not only,

03:49:26.220 | they're looking for a better life for themselves,

03:49:28.740 | a better life for people.

03:49:30.260 | This whole aspect of vilifying them,

03:49:31.900 | and they're like, "Oh, this immigrant

03:49:34.260 | "did this horrible thing.

03:49:35.220 | "This immigrant did that horrible thing."

03:49:37.420 | And people saying, "Go back to your country."

03:49:41.460 | At the same time, they go to a hotel

03:49:43.380 | where all the service staff is from that part of the world,

03:49:46.860 | and they're here irregularly.

03:49:49.060 | Or they go to the Whole Foods,

03:49:51.340 | and they get some produce there,

03:49:53.020 | and it's picked by some of the same people they're vilifying.

03:49:56.900 | And again, we need to kind of think about that

03:50:00.580 | and analyze that for ourselves.

03:50:02.420 | - Yeah, the idea of go back to your country

03:50:04.460 | and finding the other and having a disdain

03:50:07.500 | and a hate towards the other.

03:50:09.220 | Ever since I had a recent conversation with Ye,

03:50:12.180 | formerly known as Kanye West,

03:50:13.820 | I got to hear a few things from,

03:50:17.020 | let's say, unfriendly messages from white nationalists.

03:50:23.020 | And I got to learn about this world.

03:50:25.060 | I continue on the journey of learning,

03:50:28.460 | which is the idea that the United States,

03:50:30.580 | this country, should look a certain way,

03:50:32.660 | should have a certain skin color,

03:50:33.980 | should have a certain religion,

03:50:35.500 | and everything else is a pollution, is a poison to this.

03:50:39.180 | I may sound hateful right now,

03:50:41.260 | but they usually frame it in a positive way,

03:50:44.380 | like the purity.

03:50:45.420 | I'm sure Hitler also phrased everything in a positive way,

03:50:48.540 | especially in the 1930s, about the purity of Germany.

03:50:51.440 | But the reality of the United States,

03:50:52.820 | and one of the things that makes it,

03:50:55.460 | at least the ideal of the United States,

03:50:56.980 | is the soup, the mix.

03:50:58.980 | Unlike so many nations I've traveled to,

03:51:01.820 | the diversity, the good kind of diversity,

03:51:04.580 | is what makes this country great.

03:51:07.140 | And so I think it needs to be based on

03:51:10.740 | accepting the different subgroups

03:51:14.900 | that make up the United States,

03:51:16.020 | versus trying to purify it.

03:51:17.540 | And I think Mexican immigrants is just another flavor

03:51:21.220 | of saying, "This is the other.

03:51:23.500 | "Let's reject the other."

03:51:24.860 | - Yeah, I saw that interview, by the way.

03:51:28.100 | That you showed a basic restraint in that interview.

03:51:31.460 | My experience, and I came up here,

03:51:35.020 | again, Trump was elected when I came up here,

03:51:37.980 | so it was a weird time for me,

03:51:40.620 | as far as being an immigrant

03:51:42.060 | and the immigrant experience for myself,

03:51:44.060 | by both being basically the bad,

03:51:48.340 | the ones that were talked about in that way,

03:51:52.220 | and also having a bunch of my friends

03:51:53.380 | who were very conservative,

03:51:54.380 | and wearing some of those MAGA hats around me,

03:51:57.340 | and like, "Hey, Ed."

03:51:58.380 | Well, I mean, I'm a guest here, so I have to,

03:52:04.820 | but it's a balancing act,

03:52:07.420 | is what I've been looking at it as.

03:52:10.380 | On one side, there's the woke side of it,

03:52:14.020 | which everything goes,

03:52:15.180 | and then the other side is like,

03:52:16.140 | "Let's hold on to some of these things

03:52:17.500 | "that make us who we are."

03:52:19.500 | On my end, I wanna get to a place

03:52:21.740 | where I can smoke a joint, conceal, carry a firearm,

03:52:24.940 | be at my gay best friend's wedding,

03:52:27.100 | and I want the government not to say anything about it,

03:52:29.460 | and I think there's parts in the United States here

03:52:31.500 | that kind of feel the same way,

03:52:33.460 | but there's extremes on both sides

03:52:35.220 | that are pulling you to one side or the other,

03:52:37.620 | and I've seen more of the United States than most Americans.

03:52:40.900 | I'm in a different state every weekend,

03:52:43.260 | so I get to go to,

03:52:44.420 | I'm going to Tampa tomorrow,

03:52:47.780 | then I'm going back to California,

03:52:50.300 | then I'm going to Tennessee later,

03:52:52.460 | then Kentucky, so I get to see all types of people

03:52:55.260 | and all types of mentalities,

03:52:56.820 | and ways that people live,

03:52:58.340 | and this country is more diverse than most would think,

03:53:01.900 | you know, if you only see it

03:53:02.980 | through the lens of television or media.

03:53:05.660 | What I keep seeing out there that, for me,

03:53:07.740 | is like the reason I came here, I guess,

03:53:12.740 | and a lot of the reasons that I feel a vested interest

03:53:16.460 | in this country, not just because, again, my kid's American,

03:53:19.740 | so I have a very, very big interest

03:53:22.100 | in this country doing well,

03:53:23.780 | but a thing I see is there's still the opportunity

03:53:27.460 | and the ability to do something with yourself

03:53:30.060 | and opportunities out there for people like me

03:53:32.420 | that come here with nothing.

03:53:33.620 | I came here with an experience base, a truck.

03:53:38.620 | - And some demons.

03:53:40.300 | - And yeah, and a bunch of demons in a bag,

03:53:42.780 | and I'm here with you talking right now

03:53:45.980 | about some of those experiences.

03:53:47.380 | - To another immigrant.

03:53:49.020 | - To another immigrant,

03:53:49.900 | and both of us are reaching people out there

03:53:53.060 | that might not, haven't heard a voice of people like us

03:53:57.620 | that come here with our own bag of demons,

03:54:02.220 | but where else in the world can two people like us

03:54:05.020 | have a conversation with an audience like us

03:54:07.540 | and not be shot outside of this

03:54:10.180 | because of the stuff we're saying?

03:54:11.620 | - Yeah, listen to with love and respect, not derision.

03:54:16.620 | Let me ask you for advice.

03:54:21.460 | What would you say to young folks,

03:54:23.780 | wherever they come from?

03:54:27.060 | So in high school and college,

03:54:28.540 | they're thinking of how to live a life,

03:54:31.740 | have a career they can be proud of,

03:54:34.420 | and especially if they're struggling,

03:54:36.420 | especially if they're at a low point like you were

03:54:38.860 | when you came here.

03:54:41.020 | - Travel.

03:54:41.900 | Travel is one of the biggest things in the world

03:54:44.060 | that I would ask people to kind of go out to,

03:54:47.060 | see how other people live.

03:54:48.300 | Don't go there with your own preconceived notions

03:54:50.900 | or trying to make people act like you act.

03:54:53.540 | Go out there and travel and actually experience the world.

03:54:57.100 | It doesn't have to be another country.

03:54:59.580 | Going from Tennessee to Seattle

03:55:02.660 | is a pretty interesting change of scenery.

03:55:06.860 | - Who's better at knife fighting?

03:55:08.060 | Just kidding, you don't have to answer that.

03:55:10.020 | (laughing)

03:55:11.220 | - Tennessee.

03:55:12.620 | But the traveling is one,

03:55:15.780 | and knowing how other people live

03:55:17.500 | is one aspect of it that I would tell people.

03:55:20.580 | It's risky, it's dangerous,

03:55:22.020 | but that is part of the journey

03:55:23.860 | is one of the things I would ask young people

03:55:26.300 | to kind of consider.

03:55:27.460 | Service is essential,

03:55:30.540 | and it should be at the basis of all of our lives.

03:55:33.340 | Service, start there, start with service.

03:55:35.940 | In any industry, you're gonna go start your own restaurant,

03:55:40.060 | you have to work in the kitchen first, service.

03:55:42.260 | If you're gonna be a part,

03:55:43.380 | a productive member of this country, service.

03:55:45.660 | And I'm not talking just about the military,

03:55:47.500 | because the military, it's a process,

03:55:49.540 | and it's a lifestyle, and it's a thing

03:55:50.860 | for some people out there.

03:55:52.220 | It's not even a choice for other people

03:55:53.460 | if they want an education, and I get that.

03:55:55.780 | Community service of any kind is an essential thing.

03:55:59.980 | The ability to go out there and interact with the people

03:56:02.620 | that you would normally not interact with,

03:56:04.460 | the homeless population that there is in this country,

03:56:07.900 | the older population that, in Mexico,

03:56:11.780 | our old die in our homes,

03:56:14.020 | but here you send them off somewhere else to die,

03:56:17.740 | which is an interesting, weird detachment

03:56:19.420 | that I've seen in the US as far as

03:56:21.700 | how the elders are cast aside.

03:56:24.220 | If I can say anything to young people,

03:56:27.660 | is to start figuring out a life of service,

03:56:30.340 | and that's gonna expose you to a bunch of experiences,

03:56:33.660 | to a bunch of people out there

03:56:34.620 | that you might not regularly meet and see, and realities.

03:56:38.420 | Education is out there.

03:56:41.700 | It is expensive, but I've sat through a bunch

03:56:45.540 | of really expensive classes

03:56:47.060 | that I've managed to see on YouTube,

03:56:49.220 | and learned a lot from them.

03:56:50.940 | So education is out there,

03:56:53.820 | but it doesn't have to be as expensive as they make it.

03:56:56.900 | It's all about the individual

03:56:58.180 | and what he does with that education.

03:57:00.180 | The dream is free and the hustle is sold separately,

03:57:02.220 | is something else I would watch somewhere online,

03:57:06.460 | but the ability to take information, process it, and use it.

03:57:11.060 | We're expecting everything to be safe,

03:57:14.180 | processed, and given to us in a platter,

03:57:16.300 | and taking that and digesting it,

03:57:18.540 | and thinking that's gonna make us somebody

03:57:20.380 | that's gonna be productive or valuable in society.

03:57:22.860 | What's up to us?

03:57:25.860 | The US talks a lot about freedoms,

03:57:27.700 | but doesn't talk a lot about responsibilities.

03:57:30.180 | I think that's a big part of, take responsibility for it.

03:57:33.820 | Like I came here without anything,

03:57:35.700 | and the first thing I thought was,

03:57:37.540 | I have a responsibility for the people that I've worked with,

03:57:41.060 | and the people that are going through

03:57:42.340 | the same problems than I am,

03:57:44.220 | how can I figure out a way to help?

03:57:46.780 | - Yeah, the dark side of thinking a lot about freedom

03:57:49.900 | is thinking too individualistically,

03:57:52.820 | meaning thinking about me,

03:57:54.100 | how to optimize my situation,

03:57:55.580 | forgetting that the deepest growth

03:57:58.940 | you can do as an individual is by taking care of others,

03:58:01.860 | by helping others, by being of service,

03:58:03.820 | by being useful to your community locally,

03:58:06.220 | and then hopefully also at scale,

03:58:08.580 | and that's how you grow,

03:58:10.660 | and that's responsibility of helping those around you.

03:58:13.380 | - There's an isolationist aspect to culture now.

03:58:16.660 | It's like we are separate.

03:58:18.660 | There's almost like a spiritual or cultural amputation

03:58:23.140 | in a way where, you know, when I was a kid,

03:58:27.260 | the house where all the bikes outside of it,

03:58:29.500 | that was where all the kids were hanging out,

03:58:32.420 | and now everybody's on their phone, you know,

03:58:33.900 | in their separate houses chatting on whatever.

03:58:37.040 | There's a detachment to there.

03:58:40.220 | That's a weird aspect to it.

03:58:42.300 | And also the aspect of, I need to be safe.

03:58:45.700 | I can't be offended.

03:58:47.180 | Don't hurt me, safe spaces.

03:58:48.740 | This is my right.

03:58:49.580 | This is my right.

03:58:50.700 | This is my reality.

03:58:51.620 | You need to respect it.

03:58:53.420 | You know, respect is earned.

03:58:55.420 | And where I come from, respect is earned.

03:58:57.460 | There's freedoms, but there's dangerous freedoms.

03:59:01.220 | Any freedom you have in Mexico

03:59:03.780 | is a dangerous freedom in a way, you know?

03:59:06.460 | You can drive home drunk in Mexico.

03:59:09.100 | You can if you bribe a cop on your way there,

03:59:12.140 | and if you don't die or crash into somebody else.

03:59:14.420 | That's a dangerous aspect of freedom.

03:59:17.060 | But there's a responsibility to all of it.

03:59:19.820 | It is a twisted responsibility in a twisted way

03:59:23.100 | to kind of talk about it and describe it,

03:59:25.020 | but I think the aspect of people screaming

03:59:29.500 | for freedom up here, or their rights,

03:59:31.460 | or their privilege without the responsibility,

03:59:35.780 | you know, what are you doing for your community?

03:59:38.380 | You're complaining about this.

03:59:40.940 | What are you doing about it?

03:59:43.500 | Another thing I've noticed in traveling around,

03:59:46.020 | it's scary, is the whole people getting shouted down

03:59:50.300 | or canceled because of what they express or say.

03:59:53.220 | Some of the creepiest experiences I've had in the US

03:59:56.860 | has been through universities,

03:59:58.460 | or just seeing young people that have an opinion

04:00:01.140 | that is completely outside of reality, you know?

04:00:03.540 | People telling me how things are in Mexico

04:00:06.780 | because they learned it through a college course.

04:00:10.460 | - Yes.

04:00:11.300 | - And seeing sons of immigrants criticizing me

04:00:16.300 | because of my opinion of Mexico,

04:00:19.180 | or what I have to say about it.

04:00:20.820 | And if you wanna encounter the worst enemy of a Mexican,

04:00:24.580 | it's usually a second, third generation Mexican up here

04:00:27.460 | that shouts you down for what you're saying.

04:00:30.580 | - I mean, in general, entitlement,

04:00:32.340 | all of those kinds of things.

04:00:33.900 | Some of that comes with just being young in general,

04:00:37.180 | but yes, humility at a societal scale

04:00:41.660 | would benefit significantly, especially the young.

04:00:44.820 | So I would say some of the service that you're speaking to

04:00:48.300 | comes with being humbled.

04:00:51.900 | - Yeah.

04:00:52.740 | - And that is one of the best things you can do

04:00:55.740 | as a young person, whilst maintaining the dream

04:00:58.180 | and the ambition, humble yourself

04:01:00.220 | to the reality of the world.

04:01:01.820 | - Yeah.

04:01:02.940 | One small example, a micro example of this.

04:01:06.420 | My kid, there was a homeless guy.

04:01:11.220 | She was out with family members.

04:01:16.100 | This homeless guy showed up, he was erratic,

04:01:19.540 | mentally disturbed, created a scene.

04:01:22.980 | She was upset.

04:01:24.540 | There was a little bit of trauma there.

04:01:25.620 | She was like, "Oh, now all homeless people are bad."

04:01:28.260 | So with her, she does art pieces sometimes for me

04:01:33.580 | and helps me make designs

04:01:35.260 | for the clothing brand that I have.

04:01:37.460 | And we take some of that money

04:01:38.500 | and we buy socks and underwear.

04:01:40.480 | And sometimes I have them in the car,

04:01:44.180 | sometimes I drive around and see somebody that needs something

04:01:46.220 | and I give it to her.

04:01:47.340 | I says, "You helped me earn this money

04:01:49.540 | "that's gonna help these people.

04:01:50.900 | "So you should just give them these."

04:01:52.740 | And she's like, "Oh, thank you."

04:01:57.740 | She's like, "Yeah, cool."

04:02:00.060 | Roll up the window.

04:02:01.060 | She used to roll up the window really quick,

04:02:03.900 | now she doesn't.

04:02:05.740 | They cease to be scary

04:02:08.540 | because now some of them have names.

04:02:10.500 | Now some of them know her name

04:02:12.140 | when she crosses by there.

04:02:14.340 | So there's contact there.

04:02:16.720 | She's more connected than I am in some of these places now.

04:02:19.620 | She has friends in low places and in high places.

04:02:23.900 | That comes later, I guess.

04:02:25.700 | But she is learning about service.

04:02:27.860 | She's learning about not everybody out there

04:02:31.740 | is an enemy or bad or scary.

04:02:36.380 | She's learning about service.

04:02:38.420 | And she's basically learning that lesson

04:02:40.900 | that I got from my mom long ago.

04:02:42.980 | Nobody's against you, they're for themselves.

04:02:44.980 | Don't take anything personal.

04:02:46.900 | And if you're not doing something for other people

04:02:48.660 | while you're working, then you're not doing anything.

04:02:51.100 | - So when you were young,

04:02:53.300 | you were pretty sure you're gonna die before you're 30.

04:02:57.500 | What's your relationship with death today?

04:02:59.580 | Do you think about your mortality?

04:03:01.320 | Are you afraid of it?

04:03:02.500 | - I'm not afraid of it.

04:03:03.620 | If anything, I'm afraid of meaningless death

04:03:08.620 | or at least a meaningless walk towards it.

04:03:14.060 | I'm afraid of losing the use of my legs, I guess.

04:03:16.380 | I'm afraid of not being able to go out there

04:03:18.700 | and do things anymore.

04:03:19.860 | I'm afraid that I'm not physically capable

04:03:22.540 | of doing the job that I used to do.

04:03:24.300 | So if anything, I'm afraid of stillness.

04:03:28.620 | It's something I always quote a lot in my writing.

04:03:31.040 | Stillness is death.

04:03:33.000 | - So you always want to be challenging yourself,

04:03:35.080 | moving, growing, like you're traveling

04:03:37.920 | so you get all these experiences

04:03:39.440 | and filling your life with all these experiences.

04:03:41.560 | And if it ends, when it ends, you're ready for it.

04:03:44.840 | - Yeah, I'm not afraid of the end.

04:03:47.120 | The ending is important in all things.

04:03:49.520 | First time I got a promotion,

04:03:50.760 | I got two silver coins handed to me.

04:03:53.100 | Here's a silver coin and this is another silver coin.

04:03:57.560 | She said, "I'll give you the other one when your job ends."

04:04:00.500 | It depends on you if you wanted to have it over your eyes

04:04:04.980 | or in your pocket, right?

04:04:07.700 | And the lesson there is that this job you're getting,

04:04:11.220 | it's pretty cool and you're gonna be in charge

04:04:12.580 | of all these people and it's pretty important,

04:04:14.060 | but it's gonna end.

04:04:15.980 | So you always have to, the ending is important

04:04:17.780 | in all things.

04:04:18.620 | If we don't keep that in mind,

04:04:21.180 | then if you think we're immortal and nothing's gonna end,

04:04:23.020 | I think there's an atrophy, a spiritual atrophy in that.

04:04:27.180 | - For the sake of spiritual flourishing,

04:04:29.680 | this conversation too must come to an end.

04:04:32.360 | So I think a beautiful way to end it

04:04:34.000 | and I'm a huge fan of yours.

04:04:35.680 | Thank you for being a man with a life well lived

04:04:39.760 | and for talking with me today.

04:04:41.320 | It's an honor, man.

04:04:42.160 | It was an awesome conversation.

04:04:43.680 | - Thank you for having me on.

04:04:45.720 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

04:04:47.200 | with Ed Calderon.

04:04:48.640 | To support this podcast,

04:04:49.760 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

04:04:52.440 | And now let me leave you with some words

04:04:54.780 | from Al Pacino's character in Scarface, Tony Montana.

04:04:58.600 | "You don't have the guts to be what you want to be.

04:05:02.840 | You need people like me so you can point your fingers

04:05:05.340 | and say, that's the bad guy."

04:05:07.660 | Thanks for listening.

04:05:10.200 | I hope to see you next time.

04:05:12.140 | (upbeat music)

04:05:14.720 | (upbeat music)

04:05:17.300 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels | Lex Fridman Podcast #346

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