Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels | Lex Fridman Podcast #346
when it's quiet that's when it hits you that's what I think that's what a lot of people experience when they come back from a conflict Zone you know the uh everything that was life and death everything that mattered all the noise all the chaos all the people that are around you that would die for you kill for you you would kill for them uh all these millions of dollars worth of equipment and stuff like that you were responsible for now are all gone and it's just you the following is a convers ation with Ed Calderon a security specialist who has worked for many years on counternarcotics and organized crime investigation in the northern border region of Mexico I highly recommend you follow the writing and courses on his patreon and website EDS manifesto. this is Al Le Reedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Ed Calderon what does your experience in counternarcotics investigating the Mexican drug cartel teach you about human nature wow I mean first off anybody can be got uh anybody can be corrupted uh you know you you work in that field and you you realistically the training we got and profiling and investigation andu stuff like that was basically you learn from the older guys there and some of those guys were already corrupted from the from the start so trust no no one I remember seeing that xfiles episode where that was stated you quickly learn that even if you are somebody that uh to your own uh mind appears Incorruptible you know small changes happen around you Wheels get greased money gets put in front of you and or things get threatened like your life and uh sometimes a payment for some of this corruption is just to continue on living you encounter people that seem Incorruptible that uh go through FBI background checks that go through all of the uh the the security measures that all of us were put through through um you know polygraph test and then later on you know it turns out they were on the take or they became somebody that was corrupted I think what I found out is that anybody at any level they could be a very strong hard to get person right now but uh people get corrupted through their families uh through need uh Mexico is a place where a lot of uh instability occurs um so financial needs health so a crack could form through the wall of integrity and then over time it seeps in somehow Mexico has a culture of corruption like you know you have your kid that goes to school at public school and you want him to be in the morning not in the afternoon School uh time period so you go off and uh Grease the wheels with the uh director of the school people hearing this in Mexico will nod their heads because this is something that happens from early on so there's systemic thing there's a systemic and cultural thing to it you know as far as getting around rules and this happens because you know the people are in charge in Mexico the government is you know there their tandem amount is trust between criminals and the cartels down there for a lot of the culture so people don't trust the government and much less a criminality so when you meet a person sticking on human nature do you think it's possible to figure out if they can be trusted so you said um anyone could be corrupt you know how long would you need to talk to a person and your even in your personal private life just a friend or is trust a thing that's never really guaranteed I think that trust is never really guaranteed I know a lot of people are going to say that's a sad way and hard way of living your life but you know life experience at my end you know people change uh you know the Dynamics of a relationship might change um I look at people's character specifically their past and past experiences if I can somebody that presents himself in front of you as uh somebody but you quickly learn that that somebody is just a mask or a Persona that they kind of uh created for themselves and they might not even be aware of the Persona like is there some deep psychological stuff sometimes I've experienced a lot of a failure in my life uh you can see it in my nose you know you can see it in my lack of a a digit you know um the amount of uh you know the amount of failures you can see in somebody and how they wear them sometimes is a pretty telling thing as far as them being able to be trusted or that you can trust their story or their experience and when I say experience I mean I've met some criminals like former criminals or you know some some people of that background that I trust with my life you know because they're not not reformed uh but they figured out that that's not not a life they could live long enough to kind of continue on and and I've also met people that are in law enforcement that I wouldn't trust with my car keys you know um because uh you know whatever Persona they adopt adopted over the over the years uh is a pretty good one pretty good mask sometimes such a good mask they don't even know they're wearing it and on top of that it's not just the psychology there's also a neurobiology to it I've I've been very fortunate and deliberate to surround myself with good people throughout my life but I've recently gotten to sort of observe not close to me but nearby somebody that could be classified as a sociopath yeah and and uh and a narcissist like I I don't want to use those psychological terms but just it's like oh people you know come with different biology too so it's not just like the the trauma you might experience in your early life and all the Deep complexity that leads uh all the Deep complexity that leads to the the psychology that you are have as an adult but it's also the biology come with the the nature that you might not just have the the machine machine that can empathize deeply with the experience of others or maybe a machine that gets off gets a dopamine Rush from the man manipulation of other humans or the control of other humans yeah I mean put an example of my my own background uh my mom didn't have a father you know she she he left really early on in their in their childhood you know my mom raised her two sisters and basically kept a household uh she was a great mom uh she was a badass you know she was very independent she showed me how to be independent she showed me how to kind of watch out for others and kind of build me up in that way and uh I had a great childhood as far as you know as far as her and kind of like how she molded me later on I figured out that uh when I had my own kid you know I I figured out that she was basically trying to make me into what she didn't have in a way and if I can get to see somebody's parents you know that's usually a that's usually a sign of uh of something at least uh for me as far as figuring out where people are I think there's something to be said about nature and nurture and how some people come up some people are just born with that uh predatory Instinct you know um and you'll never know I mean they spend their whole life practicing how to hide it uh but if you can figure out uh somebody's you know background childhood where they're from you can kind of tell something about them you know I'm from Tijuana you know I'm a Survivor that's that's my background as far as where I'm from uh culturally genetically psychologically the F shebang yeah I guess some people are born with uh certain predispositions and if they're in the right environment some of the negative aspects might flourish more than others you know for me I mean I grew up skateboarding in Tijuana and I remember breaking into my first uh backyard pool it was a house that a cartel guy owned and we used to skate the pool in the back in the back of it uh so I learned how to buy padlocks uh with a uh with a small uh vehicle hydraulic lift and I remember doing that and uh later on in life I got to train with people from other parts of Mexico and and work with them and I remember pulling that trick off and they were like looking at me like where'd you learn that like some burglars at Tijuana you know and they're like wow that's interesting like are all all all people from Tana like that and I said no we're not all like that but I guess in some way we are because you know Diana produces some produces kids like that you know she produces like the environment itself produces uh produces a pretty specific person I guess you know where our normal is our normal or our Baseline normal is way different than most the uh trajectories that you can take in life are um are defined in a way that aren't available elsewhere in the world yeah and so you develop I mean that's part of that psychological part of that is cultural and so on um part of that is a cultural trauma but then then also the ethical lines based on the corruption CU I grew up in the Soviet Union and this there's the same kind of understanding that there's some great area of corruption yeah there's it's always there like the on the outskirts or even in the center how you can grease things to make things easier and how it's like a personal thing I'll I'll just you know pay off the and Tijuana we have a Mor that's what we call it you know when you when you pay a cop off means a bite so and uh but what's uh what's the bite aspect so you get stopped for for a traffic violation of some sort and the cop walks up to you obviously you don't say the word bite but it's like a it's like a slang term for it and uh he ask uh for your paperwork and you know and if you get fined or get a ticket you say can I pay the ticket here is what they say and you know put their money inside the paperwork hand over to the cop more you think it's you know I'm just going to do it and nobody know knows you know but it's a systemic thing everybody like a lot of people do it and then they don't trust the police because they are fed with this yeah I mean same thing was in the Soviet Union it's funny but then there's something inside you where that kind of uh those opportunities come like uh with a police officer where you realize you could just pay a little bit of money and get out of a thing and then you realize you can pay a little bit of money or do a favor they get your kids in a better school or something like that yeah but there comes opportunities where you were all right if if I do this little thing I can make I can get a huge promotion or I can get a huge increase in in my power or get a lot of money and something inside you says no yeah it's not right yeah and I wonder what that is that cuz like um yeah I want because it feels different than the legal systems with which operate there's some kind of basic human Integrity human decency I I wonder if that's like constructed or it's always there if this like again nature versus nurture yeah I think uh you know for me it was looking at seeing that in somebody else that I kind of learned about it uh there's a man that I consider a mentor uh figure uh his name is Lieutenant Colonel Le ala he was a lieutenant colonel from the army that basically came over and took over the group that I used to uh work with uh he was you know Incorruptible you know he was uh that that was the the essence or the the the aura that he projected um the first time he the first time he went off on patrol when he was placed in charge of us I actually you know drove him around Tijuana uh he was one of those lead from the front type of people uh the amount of assassination attempts he got was basically a proof of how uncorruptible he was because they kept trying to pay him off and when that didn't work they tried to kill him several times I think the last assassination attempt took the use of his legs and that man is still a dangerous person in my mind but for me and you know people can gather a little bit about my background and where I'm from and some of the access I currently have uh to train the federal institutions here in the US as far as my background and if I was corrupted or not because there's a lot of that out there um the the Catholic guilt that's kind of built into some of us is always kind of there you know the devil is under the bed you know uh so I I don't consider myself Cath like consider myself culturally Catholic I think is what what I kind of kind of say with that I had a pretty good structure with my dad and my mom at the house and you know they never let me get away with uh things and uh I think my mom was pretty a pretty big moral compass for me but uh that Lieutenant Colonel uh kind of leading from example and seeing his work and how how much a profound change he caused in the people that work with him as far as you know we felt supported and we felt like we had a guiding figure uh during this Diana was the most dangerous city on the planet when I was working there and he took charge what does it take to be a man the lieutenant colonel who maintains Integrity after assassination attempts is it possible for normal human to do that or again as a genetic that's an interesting question I I'll say this uh seeing him I mean his last assassination attempt he had that took a use of his legs he was with his kid uh there is a recklessness to it you know I I I I can see that now like now that I have enough distance from it I could see that there's a recklessness to being that way uh and also you putting Jeopardy people around you if you take that route so I think there's a sacrifice to it a very powerful and hard one to make for a lot of people uh for me it was I wouldn't get picked to get on on board with some some of the operations group that I wanted to work with because I was known for not you know taking money or not being trusted by certain older segments of the of the organization that I was with with stuff because they knew that I would you know I wasn't on the you know they I wouldn't get money um so there's that there's there's always a weird sacrifice to it and you're almost kind of like massis in that way when you when you when you when you get approached with it they're like why are you being an idiot you know why are you why are you driving around that beat up car look at the Hummer H2 that just drove in with the other guy that uh is doing exactly your same job um Society society as a whole down there doesn't reward it or at least doesn't see it in the people that don't take that route in Mexico you know for them is all cops are corrupt you know all of them uh and you know seeing it you know again from the outside I'm not there anymore uh there is you know there's almost like a why didn't you Ed you know um it could have been easier maybe or you could have you could have been dead long ago you know because people that are on the takeown there are usually owned by one side or the other and when that gets found out you know if you have somebody that you're paying off that uh hints you off of drug operations in the area your Rivals are pretty keen on killing you money aside so like like a Hummer aside how much of a motivator fear it's a big one you know uh I I I'll say I you know for me like I didn't I didn't think I was going to lift the C30 and I was sure of it did that concept scare you or was was that just a principle of life that you you're Opera under uh I lost my brother when I was uh 13 on it too like you know he was 19 uh he was like the uh the VIP of the family you know you miss him oh every day uh he was a you know he was a you know skateboarded uh BMX uh motorcycle Hunter one of the best marksmen that I've ever seeing shoot so better than you at everything yeah he was the best of us is what we would say and uh when he died there was a there was was almost like a concert at his funeral you know I met three of his girlfriends that all introduced themselves like the the one you know yeah I uh to this day every now and then I get uh pull the side down when I go back home and uh they uh hey you're Eric's her ex- brother you know despite all the stuff that I've done I'm still you know every now and then I get recognized um that uh made my mom and my dad go into a horrible depression and basically you know left me to my devices when I was a kid um from 13 onwards I had this self destructive you know aspect to me after that I think you know again something that's come up in therapy you know after I've been gone through all that uh and had this notion that if I can only die good in some way shape or form or for something that it would it would matter and they would kind of you know look at me with the same reverence I did at my brother so dying isn't the problem the goal of life is to die for something good yeah at least that was my that was my mindset going through that job uh I remember uh I was in medical school before that you know was second year medical school was doing pretty good and then 911 happened and you know that wasn't an option anymore for me the economy was horrible couldn't afford to stay there so I saw this sat in the newspaper and my brother's my big brother who's still alive n uh he's like notas you know you're not going to do that shit you we wouldn't dare and all of a sudden I was in a field having my sh hair shaved off and a bunch of the uh gothis the guys that later turned into the Zeta cartel uh military were in charge of our training you know and I went went through that process in what field were you and why is your head being shaved and what the hell was going through your mind what was the leap that you took I was sold the idea of this being a a new Americanized police force that they were constructing you know in Mexico in Mexico so Elite yeah Special Force kind of prestigious Elite uh the people in charge of her training were a lot basically uh ex Mexican Gaff people gaffas are what the Special Forces kind of orig ated a lot of the their members turned into the uh The Zeta cartel so they were brutal in their training uh we were sold this idea of it being you know scientific uh Ed like educate educated based and like a career path and all of a sudden we're in this uh refurbished prison that uh wasn't good enough to be a prison and they turned it into a training ground and I quickly kind of realized that they were training us to be a paramilitary group not a not a community policing organization is which in my mind that's I thought that's what we're were going to be doing what was the hardest process of that training for you cuz this is like a a fragile innocent boy becomes a man kind of process it's it's uh they're turning us into something that they could use so it's a breaking down uh they break down the individual you know it's a physically and mentally yeah I I think it's a it's a it's a half done initiation process I think in a way you know looking at it from now to the past the uh the Shaving off the hair the uh stripping off your identity you know everybody gets a gets a a number um the uniforms the running around and and uh you know being treated like human garbage the first thing they said to us when we were lined up in that uh field was a which means uh there's bread and Dick to eat here and the bread ran out a week ago right so it was I mean I can't equate it to anything in the military every in the United States because people down there could actually get physical with us I mean they could actually hit us and punch us and shit like that which is not allowed here anymore at least in in in in most of the military isn't as horrible as down there um AK-47 is being shot around us to to simulate reality basically causing hearing loss that type of stuff um so chaos uh abuse really challenging you again physically and mentally and an Open Door there always so if you don't want to be here you can just walk out and the more you go into it TimeWise you're more invested you are so in a way you're kind of building your own chains while you're going through that process were you tempted to walk out yeah several times several times uh specifically seeing some of the ways that uh people that I thought were better or stronger than me were walking out or quitting uh because of something that happened in there uh there was some sexual assault stuff happening in there uh as well are you afraid of that always you know you're in a place like that and there's females in the in the environment and some of the instructors are doing what they do so that was like a cause for alarm I mean these people are in charge where safety and education and look at what's happening here so you could see some of the the smarter ones leaving you know not not looking at this as a viable choice for Life how did that change you that uh those few months I had this motivation this idealistic motivation in my head you know of making a difference and they drill uh they drill a lot of uh nationalistic kind of uh you know the flag marching it uh you being part of a group and the group being you know behind you and all of this what was the nationalistic pride was it in the nation of Mexico yeah yeah so what's the vision of this great nation of Mexico that you were did you believe did did it get into your blood yeah it it got into I mean it's an indoctrination you know it's a it's a paramilitary group so everything there is basically model after after the military uh so that's what they were trying to kind of instill in us I was a I was a team leader in there after 3 months basically I was um we went through a bunch of Trials physical trials um mental trials and stuff like that and some of us were named team leaders and I you know bought into it you know I'm the uh I'm supposed to be here look at me I'm I'm I'm making headways I'm I'm uh I'm sticking out a bit you know and uh I was pretty proud of what I was going through there uh 6 months then you get the reality check when you sign the dotted line and how that none of it really meant anything as far as what we were about to go out and do you know uh an example of this we were trained with a 92fs uh Beretta which is a 9mm pistol uh Italian made we got to shoot 20 rounds out of that gun and then we when we got out we were handed a Glock uh 17 which um I've never seen one in my life I was uh trying to figure out where the uh safety was and a few other people there were uh handling those guns in a horrible manner um uh so we were very undertrained underere equipped and there was a lot of assumptions about what we knew and all of a sudden we were being cast into this the the start of one of the you know bloodiest and longest lived modern conflicts uh in our history that doesn't get called that but it's it's basically been a an ongoing war in Mexico that uh that is still to this day you know amassing bodies so the Mexican drug war the Mexican drug war which is you know it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it started because when I was going through training there was already stuff going on I went into training in 2004 and there were already you know major cartel related events all over Mexico by then but not at the at the size or scope as I was about to go into you know when uh president Felipe Kon kind of took office down there and actually officially kind of kicked it off by putting the military in play as part of a as part of it basically militarize the uh the drug war you know including us who are the major players in this drug war so the politicians the military the police force the cartels all Mexican then the United States China just to lay out all the pieces on the board first off there are giant local drug markets in Mexico that uh are fought over you know just local drug markets that are huge in scope so no exporting to other locations just a start yeah yeah so um a big a big problem in Mexico is basically those local drug markets and an example of that and one I have a lot of experience with is the one in Tijuana which not only feeds the local populace but also feeds the populace from San Diego that crosses down into into Tijuana and buys their product there um and now you know phenomenon that's occurring now is uh marijuana trafficking is going from California down into Mexico because they produce better weed you know which is fascinating to see now so there's already a channel and you're kind of like reusing that channel yeah there's not lot of people in vehicles getting check when they drive down and Tijuana is being called San Diego South now because you know all the economic migrants you know um are living down there 90% of all houses in in Tijuana new houses are being bought up by Americans so that'll tell you something about the impact and change that's going on down there so you have these local drug markets that are being fought over you also have these drug routes that go through Mexico up into Mexico around Mexico through the ocean uh under the wall you know drug tunnels over the wall and on backpacks uh on uh migrant that go up into the United States uh not only do the cartels make money off uh drug trafficking but also extortion money laundering uh paid protection schemes um you know any mining operation in Mexico will have to pay protection you know or else they'll get hit uh a lot of times money the largest money makers for some of these criminal groups are you know um protecting and taxing anybody that goes across the border so that's also a big issue uh and it's not just again some Americans think it's like the cartels you know they imagine this single or maybe two or three groups there's there's several out there uh I don't have a current estimate but last time I checked it was somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 70 the different groups some small that just dedicate themselves to a single little town somewhere there are armed groups that are basically in control of that area to some bigger federations like the caloa cartel which is probably currently the largest and most powerful one in Mexico and the new generation cartel which is growing exponentially right now um uh so these criminal groups are are players in that conflict then another player that doesn't get talked about as politics politicians uh there's a there's an ongoing discussion that has been going on I think since Trump was elected about uh cartel's being a terrorist organiz cartels being terrorist organizations or not or if they fit that description well um you know we are living through uh multiple assassinations on political candidates out in Mexico right now and most of those assassinations are motivated by one side sponsoring one candidate and the other side sponsoring the other what I mean by sides I mean cartel groups so they're they have elected officials that are on the take and this is we have you know many Governors who are under investigation on the run or in prison right now uh State Governors so politics is involved in it that's a big player as well that doesn't you know when you when you think about the cartel problems you don't think well some at least some most people don't think about that aspect of it so to have integrity as a politician in Mexico means you have no protection and under constant threat of assassination we just seen the arrest and prosecution of the head of all Conor cartel operations when I was active uh in the form of Garcia Luna Who was the he was he was the guy Filipe gon who kicked off the drug war that was his guy turns out he was turns out he was on the take at that level is there like a spectrum of how on the take you can be are there ethical lines that you can cross some of it is money and then is it possible to operate in a gray area that does not result in destructive ethical violations I I deep ethical violations idea I don't think I don't think there is realistically I mean anything that kind of uh supports some of these groups you know you're supporting things of a horrible nature uh there I just posted recently on my Instagram account of a lady that was uh in Guan she's one of seven recently assassinated women that are looking for their kids basically uh there's a bunch of uh groups and organizations out there in Mexico some in Tijuana that I've actually watched with who are taking control of trying to find the bodies of their kids that's her up there Maria Carmela Vasquez a mother who searched for a missing son was shot to death outside her home on Sunday her son Oar Vasquez disappeared on June 14th the 46-year-old woman is the fifth mother to be killed this year while searching for their missing loved ones she was a member of the yo missing person Collective there's many groups out in Mexico who basically have given up on trusting the government to find their kids um the number of missing in Mexico is a deated topic uh because you know the government itself doesn't release uh those numbers uh or at least hasn't uh done a good job about keeping them and or releasing them um Mexico is a country that has industrialized Body Disposal you know uh in Tijuana we had the stew maker the legendary St maker which is ay a guy that basically used costic acid uh acid uh to get rid of bodies at a massive level so there's a separate operation for getting rid of B bodies and murdering the people at least at least in Tijuana we saw that phenomenon and I I it's it's obvious that it's it's going on all over Mexico who's having those discussions about mass murder and getting rid of people i' I've been reading a lot about World War II recently and there's was aggressive Innovation on the Nazi side of how to get rid of large number of people cuz for the longest time both the Soviets and the Soviets were more brutal with this it's it's literally it's a engineering problem of how you kill a large number of people and get rid of their bodies so the Soviets were more into uh just laying people laying people down into the grave face down and shooting them in the back of the head and then doing that a m scale so you just let pile people on and then there was obviously Innovation with the Holocaust in terms of gessing people and all that kind of stuff I'm not sure exactly where these tradecraft skills are coming from specifically um you hear discussions of Israelis training some of the cartel groups back in the late 9s uh specifically the Arian F cartel there's a lot of stories about that a security specialist coming down and showing them things like how to make costic soda um how to put uh rocks inside of bodies and then chicken wire them around and throw them into the ocean or or river so that their bodies don't float and when you kind of you put rocks inside of body to make sure the body doesn't float so you uh you open up the the intestinal tract put rocks inside uh you cut where tattoos are you take off hands and faces and throw them somewhere else and you wrap them in chicken wire so make it not identifiable yeah and throw them into a body of water and this is this this is a horrible thing but it's it's a craft it's a trade craft it it's tra it's it's tradecraft then it's uh it there's there's a link to the us as far as that that trade graft you have to remember that uh the United States had a thing called School of the Americas and and the CIA and they showed things and a lot of that uh stuff is out there in the hands of people that are of that generation there's a manual there's a manual somewhere on uh like with chapters and it's like how to get rid of the body there's manuals out there under time constraints or what what are how identifiable can the body be afterwards what what are geographical constraints all that kind of stuff I think I think that was common back in the early 2000s uh and maybe the late 90s when some of these things were going on but they've lost even that as far as respect for the government or bodies being found right now you what you usually see is just bodies being burnt to a crisp and buried in a field somewhere that's usually what you'll see uh some of the groups like this uh this woman uh this woman belongs to basically taken upon themselves to go out to find uh clandestine Graves uh in the outskirts of of of the towns that they're that they live in um probing the ground with uh these metal probes and seeing if the uh the whatever they encounter in the bottom of these uh these clandestine Graves stinks or not uh if they find IDs or clothing they kind of gather that and they basically present it to the investigative authorities in the towns or States they live in which basically doing their jobs you know over 90% of all murders in Mexico are never solved uh I mean it's uh so they they've even stopped trying to get rid of bodies in that way you know how does a cartel take power how does he gain control of this local area that you mentioned and then grow get take control of a region and how does it do so in this dynamic relationship between um politicians and the military and the police force it's a thing that happens over time there's always been a big effort even when I was in uh to buy or own certain members of the police force even when we going through training some people get pulled out during training because they were found out to have some sort of parent or sibling that was a cartel member or they uh their FBI background check came back uh negative you know when they were already in the training program um so I I think part of it is first off they uh take advantage of the fact that Mexico is a young country it's a country of young people um we have a a a big group of young people that have little to no opportunities to come up uh when I was in when I went to take that career path a lot of my friends took the other option you know they they went to work for some of these criminal groups um so they have this going for them they basically have a lot of bodies to to to to hire cheaply and leverage in terms of uh forcing those bodies to do what whatever is needed because the alternative for those people is is nothing there's no options yeah so you have a kid somewhere who is working on a field you know or you have a kid like me that was out of the job out of school and the only options for me was uh this B in the newspaper which seemed like a long shot or going with uh some of my friends that had cars now and uh were hanging out all night at these uh bars and some of them had you know Draco AK-47 uh pistols in their cars and it would look cool you know so there is a trajectory there's many trajectories possible in your life where you could have been still operating in a uh criminal organization in Mexico yeah I mean it's there's not a lot of options you know do you think you'd be good at it I I don't know I I mean I'm pretty good at what I do now which is teaching people how to detect it and kind of fight against it you know so I think uh I have a sense that that the skills transfer pretty well that's also the dark side of this whole thing a lot of the people that I used to work with you know I I know things and I have some training and I had some specialized training and I I currently do I've done you know presentations for the Secret Service and the FBI and you name it I've gone there and shown them what I do a lot of my a lot of the people that I used to work with who are out of the the job are in the wind you know and some of these people are way more trained than I am you know uh it's interesting what it the the reason why I get S get looked for and they ask me questions is because I actually have the experience that my University was the most dangerous city on the planet and when people ask me about some of that stuff I I could speak from experience as far as encountering some of that directly some of the people that I used to work with who were way better at it than I am are in the wind yeah interesting thing in Mexico if you are of the police organization and you get fired or you quit you are ineligible to join another police organization that that discounts you so for somebody like me who was a professional operations group member or police officer in Mexico of that region there's no options for me out outside of that so they they themselves basically have created this inescapable box for some of these people that go into that line of work and where do they go after you know I've heard offers of $122,000 to join uh some of these organizations out there plus you know they get benefits not like the government you know I'm still waiting for my liquidation my my my liquidation check this is been out of it out of service for like six seven years I'm still waiting for my check uh so some of these people it's obvious that they the opportunities are presented to them out there are stronger you know and again the youth is what gets eaten by this war and that's one of the main things that they start with just the youth we had a phenomenon in Tijuana early early n late 90s early 2000s called the Narco Juniors Narco juniors are basically board middle middle middle F middle uh middle class or upper class families had kids that were bored and they just joined some of these cartel groups uh these cartel groups saw in them opportunities to get into regular industry to go through the family businesses to kind of establish themselves use some of those businesses to store for storage or figure out how to use some of their transportation businesses for drug muing so this is how they start and getting into different areas you know that they regularly couldn't and you know that's how it starts you know you owe somebody uh they get into paid paid protection uh type schemes which are also common all all over Mexico and uh soon or later they start owning businesses and they regulate some of their income so they become part of the uh part of the part of the local economy in a big way I had this experience in CA where we were driving down this shitty Street and all of a sudden it became a cool nice you know little curvy high like Highway type thing and I looked around there I like this is a nice Road and the guy was with me he said yeah the cartel's built it you know um you go to some of these towns and the cartels are the government there they you build the hospitals they built the churches they buil the schools Co happens they're enforcing The Mask mandates you know they're out enforc enforcing the mass mandates the the the stay-at-home policies they're the ones uh delivering supplies to the to Town's people in bags you know courtesy of so and so cartel you know so they they they become the the Robin Hood characters of their environments if they're smart you know these groups basically turn into that you know Robinhood you know stealing from the rich and giving to the poor or at least that's the projection that they give what's the role of violence in this operation I'm extreme uh you know it used to be that there were rules as you say like you know don't go after kids don't go after women but all those things are gone now you know they had been gone for I mean decades I think uh the escalation of violence you know you kill one of mine I'll kill four of yours you kill four of mine I'll go after your family because you hiding um there's stories of uh high level cartel people getting their you know sons and and and daughters you know murdered mutilated uh and revenge killings so I think it's uh it's at a point where it's spiral out of semblance of a rule set as far as who can get exposed to some of this violence those highly produce Isis videos where they show torture and executions uh According to some of the sources that I talked to here in the United States that were looking at that phenomenon they said that it seems to be that that was influenced by some of the Narco Blog videos that that were coming out of Mexico early in the early 2000s basically that some of these groups were the first ones that got wind of the fact that you can um export Terror or the horror that an execution has through social media way back when Facebook was a bit more bit more of a Wildland area you could see these and news feeds uh videos of executions tortures and stuff like that coming out of Mexico on Facebook way back when wow this was a different time um for people who criticize social media and the moderation it's a tough it's a tough job because a brutal world world out there I mean I remember seeing some of these Isis videos on on on Facebook way back when and they you know they crack down and all that but uh one that's kind of clear and I'll see I'm not going to say where to find it but people out there might have seen it because some of these videos get shared through WhatsApp groups and chat groups out there uh one of the ones that caught my attention way back when was a a guy getting two guys getting executed by chainsaw um and you know people can kind of think imagine what that would be like but uh is it produced on purpose like it's videotaped on purpose it's a cartel group caught two rival cartel members MERS and a way to send a message to those the Rival cartel is to basically execute these people in front of a camera uh I mean you can't get to your Rivals but you can you can make them see what they're doing or at least make their people look at what happens if you you know invade their territory just an escalation of brutality in the violence as well I mean and that leads to Terror and that a mass communication of Terror yeah I mean you you have videos of some of these people engaging in C cannibalism in front of a video to see how brutal they are or uh people taking out somebody's heart while they're alive you know and filming it and you know used to be social media as a whole you would see some of these videos they would they would get put down in in in a few days but now there's uh telegram groups uh there's uh you know there's Live Leaks there's a bunch of other uh sites out there that kind of disperse some of this these videos and it's basically a bulletin board for them as far as you know hey you got into my territory well this is what's going to happen to you right is there a game theoretic way to uh remove this kind of brutality to deescalate the brutality because it seems like if a cartel takes power that exceeds the power of politicians in in a locality there's a strong incentive to reduce the brutality to uh to crack down on this kind of Chainsaw executions you know uh there was a recent leak of uh government uh files call them the wakamaya leaks it's our version of the of wik leaks I guess and it was uh mostly uh documents coming out of the Mexican military uh I haven't seen it talked about a lot here in uh stat side but it's a pretty big thing down in Mexico and in some of those documents it revealed how powerless the government is I mean as far as the military goes so that's another player in Mexico the military uh the military has been out in the in force in the streets basically doing a policing role since Felipe Calderon was uh Administration he basically militarized the drug war um Felipe Calderon was of uh uh to the right of the political spectrum and his main rival who was his way to the left is now in power and one of the campaign promises he had was to demilitarize the the drug war to send the military back to its barracks and all that and he's basically continuing on they just passed a uh some legislation that basically uh keeps the military on the streets for a few more few more years you know um and I think some of these documents that were leaked uh are very telling as far as why that is uh they have the military now has a vast amount of power when it comes to security industry I mean they're in charge of building airports and train lines in Mexico now um their documents themselves show how certain regions uh in Mexico who have a specific military uh presence work for one side or favor one side of the cartel or they're corrupted too so there's these military forces that are in part corrupted yes and then the cartel who operates with violence somehow finding a balance between each other and no I it just feels like throughout human history there's a dictators or leaders that come into situations like this and really crack down on the violence yeah uh so it seems like that's not happening it seems like there's a kind of uh Market of violence happening here there's a systemic uh Amnesia that happens every presidency in Mexico so uh president comes in he has five to six years to do whatever he needs to do and he does everything and as soon as he's gone everything he did even even the what was working gets chopped off police uh organizations get uh defunct or CH or their names get changed uniforms change so there's a lot of turnover uh everywhere every 5 years federally there's a turnover and that things change what about the cartels do they persist do the leadership persist I mean the scena law cartel has has had a Figure Head behind it since the80s the same one you know uh I mean it's it's a Federation of smaller cartels that are all kind of linked up but the pretty much historically who's considered the head of the the scena law cartel elayo Sada has been has been there since you know since the 80s so in a way yeah he he's persisting he's surviving all of these uh presidencies again these documents that were leaked are a clear sign of what strength and weaknesses are there are as far as the the the government's main weapon against some of these criminal Group which is the military and if people doubt this they can look it up now online because all these documents are out there um but you know just a clear thing the Mexican Navy or the marina doesn't work with the Mexican army they don't speak to each other so that should tell you everything you need to know as far as uh trust that could be just bureaucratic dysfunction they don't trust each other are they both struggling with the problem of corruption some of these documents that are already that are already out there talk about uh uh the ports in Mexico which are probably the main conduit of uh precursors of methamphetamines and precursors of things like fenel into the country they're operated and guarded by the marina right so these things are happening under their watch and then you get uh talks talk about the Army in certain places basically working uh counter cartel operations to to specifically one side not not another you know as far as the Rival groups out there and we have a long history of some of these uh groups going uh military groups going rogue lettas are a prime example of this these uh Special Forces uh units that uh basically turned around and went to work as bodyguards for the golf cartel and then decided to but what they basically did was an internship with a cartel you know they went out there did bodyguarding for the golf cartel and then realized that can do a better job than they were doing so they started their own sparking off one of the again one of the bloodiest kind of like uh internal Cartel Wars in in Mexico's history who was Al Chapo Al Chapo was a part of the leadership or at least a faction of the leadership in in the cartel it's a Federation of different uh of small organization well i' say small organizations basically families or organizations that uh conform this larger Group which is the the Cena law cartel that is based out of Cena law basically uh they are people that uh have uh and power nucleus is there in caloa I mean uh who was he I think he was a he was a high level operator for the SC law cartel he um he had his own drug routes his own uh networks his family is uh his family uh nucleus down there is still in control of some of those operations so his arrest really didn't change anything um but he wasn't The Mastermind number one leader that I think the media and the government kind of portrayed him as you know who who was The Mastermind if you go down there and you read uh what most of the uh Brave journalists in Mexico that we have I say another aspect of this war is that a lot of journalists get killed I think Mexico has a I think has some of the top numbers in the world and this is no secret to anybody uh elayo Sada is is the name of the the historical figure head of this cartel or at least somebody who people the or suspect to be the uh the the main guy or the main person that is in charge of some of of of this criminal group is he still alive that's a going rumor that he's still very much alive and the interesting thing about him is that he learned his craft in Los Angeles so people thinking that scena law cartel isn't a Mexican thing it's actually he he apparently learned a lot of his craft from uh people in the United States you know and that's the craft of leadership the craft of business the craft which which aspect of The Craft the craft of getting a product from colia putting it through Mexico and the logistics the logistics part of it yeah and he somehow is uh operating in the shadows so he's not a known entity I don't have clear number of this but he was interviewed by a magazine called processo in Mexico and some pictures were taken of him this was over 10 years ago probably and that's the last time anybody's ever seen a picture of him what's it like to be a journalist in that so uh can can a journalist have a conversation with him and live nonetheless he asks to to have that conversation I think he he reached out to this uh journalist to talk about it um there's a there's a media Wing uh to the work that we do a sister page called demoler and and it's uh run by some pretty good people and the way we met is that I was basically training them how to work in hostile environments and they were like oh we're going to go report on cartel activity in Mexico and I was like you know that is a year and a half ago a reporter went to the president's Daily Briefing uh press conference that he has they called him La Mayas pres the president Manuel Lopez zador and told him to his face like uh I have threats on my life they're trying to kill me and it happened there's been a slew of assassinations and murders of members of the press all over Mexico it's not an easy job uh either they say too much or they say things that favor one side or the other which is another aspect of it that is interesting I don't I don't consider myself a reporter I don't report on the news in Mexico I have friends that do that very well I commented on some of it only uh but you see a lot of these uh cartel reporters go down there talk to a specific side and basically speak one side of the story and that is not something that the other side wants you know if you if you go down there and speak to one side you're saying what they want people to know or hear so in a way you're kind of spreading some of their cartel propaganda in a way and that's how some people you know get shot do you think it's possible to go in there and have a conversation with a cartel leader well Shan pen for somebody like me for somebody like Shawn pen this is what I will say uh after after that whole Sean pen thing I think a lot of people would reconsider meeting with anybody of any level that has any notoriety here in the United States they don't they wouldn't trust anybody to get that close um there are people out there that will talk to reporters you know people that are working on a on a lab laboratory somewhere in a hillside somewhere down down south you know in the Sierra uh you know lowlevel people that get authorization to speak to reports and stuff like that but they don't say anything that isn't being taught or or shown in various different ways or Outlets out there for them I mean some of these guys have Instagram accounts you know some of these guys blog about it you know but not the leaders Tik Tok no not the leaders I think after what happened to to aapa Guzman I think that that uh that opportunity that window was closed uh for for some of the leadership down there I think I disagree I think uh they're just more sensitive realizing that there has to be a deep trust it's not just anybody and not any high-profile I've gotten a chance to speak to some very high-profile leaders that don't speak to journalists and they understand the value of trust if they have something to say which I don't think they do you know I don't think they Le unless at some point in the future which is something I suspect might might be coming that there is some sort of armed intervention and or external attack on some of these criminal groups that really puts the pressure on them you don't think there's a a human aspect to this of a human being wanting their story to be known versus versus this is different than the propaganda machine of I have something to say I have some message to put out there to play the game of politics and power and money and all that kind of stuff isn't there also a human being underneath all that armor that for for the sake of perhaps ego Legacy wants to be understood I think in a way they already do that uh there's coridos which are basically Mexican folk songs that get uh that get uh sung about some of them so in a way some of these some of these singers are reporting on some of their lives and it's like a it's a great honor to have a Coro made about you know I somebody somebody made a Coro about me based on my interviews right I didn't pay for it so it's a real one yeah it's it feels cool so creating a myth the legend of the man I think it's about uh I think a way you can you can find somebody like that is somebody that wants to get their story specifically clear and straight uh you know coming from that culture and getting to work for the government down there and then not being not working for the government down there and being on the outside being critical of not only the government that is in place now but also the government that I actually work with uh I can tell you that there's villains all over the place down there everybody's a villain you know at at all levels in in some way shape reform and some of these people I think in a way including El Chapo I think that some of that that meeting was about film rights and and in stories and being able to get his story out there I think I don't I'm not I'm not too sure because I wasn't there but I suspect that some of that was going on if you can bring an honest voice down there they can trust to put that out there yeah I mean I think he I I think you could try I'm interested in that kind of thing I uh because ultimately in some of those places like inside a cartel at the very top is when you can really look at the raw aspects of human nature in a way you can't necessarily elsewhere there is a youth coming into power down there and when I say a youth I mean some of the old guard is going out and some of the new guard is coming in uh an example of this is uh El Chapo Guzman's uh sons who are now in their own right kind of getting gaining Legend secondary status uh his uh his son there was an attempted arrest on his son that led to the uh famous kak gaso incident uh which we are now learning more about because some of the guacamaya Leakes are kind of speaking more about what happened that day uh basically a federal operation uh to they say to to arrest El Chapo Guzman's uh son um turned into a Siege to try and get him free they uh called in the calvary basically the whole of the scena law cartel showed up to try and rescue him interesting thing about that is in reading some of the documents and also just seeing some of the videos and stuff like that came out of that incident the cartels were the ones evacuating the citizenship from the area they were the ones going restaurant to restaurant hey if you want to exit the city go through here take your families get down but you have to leave because the arm coming here they're going to fight us um so there's like a deep morality too to all of that underneath the violence there's a Humanity I mean it's their home it is their home uh and they were fighting for their home and they were fighting for leadership from their home uh there is a morality there is a Humanity there and again I don't if people want to paint them all with the villainy aspect you know uh that's I mean everybody's a villain in every in somebody else's story you know if we if you kind of look at it that way people should check out your patreon you should check out your field notes you you're a really good writer your Instagram to you write about you have a quote in your field notes about villains quote I once worked for a villain a savior to some and a biblical demon of old to others a true product of his environment he was the best and the worst of us we're all potential villains in someone else's story he would say to us as you as we would head out into the unknowns that the night had waiting for us it was during one of these nights that I looked around me and saw horns and pitchforks among my people and realized what he meant we were no Knights of the Round Table whatever we were we were needed in the end I guess that justified most of what was about to happen uh do you think elcha do you think people like him are good or evil I think there's no one without the other I think there's a there's a cost to there's a cost to uh their goodness that they do you know the roads they build the hospitals the career pass that they pay for uh there's there there are doctors in Mexico that their careers were paid for by some of these groups uh and they do a lot of amazing good for the community I remember there was a uh a surgeon uh reconstructing cleft pallets in one of my travels that I did out there I I I had I spent some time actually going out there be after I got out of the job to train people and the the type of stuff that I show people and and uh they uh they told me like I told them like you're doing God's work this stuff this stuff is like legit this is God's work you know building Smiles for people it's like yeah and then can I talk to you yeah he said you know my career path was paid for by Cartel a group of cartel members they paid for my career path because they wanted somebody on hand that could fix their teeth do you think some aspect of that is just sort of manipulative control or is some of it also just again a care for the population for fellow human beings that are one of your own I think both you know I think there's again it's hard to it's hard to just make them Saints or or Devils you know the uh the some of the good they do in some of their communities and don't ask anything for in return you know uh and even if they don't ask it for anything in return where the military shows up they are immediately melt met with rocks and roadblocks and everybody's uh main weapon down there since most Mexicans can't buy or own firearms they the main weapon down there is silence and their eyes to report to the people that they uh consider the good guys in their environment right so that's a hard question you know I think uh I think there's a bit of both and both the the government and the criminal groups that are operating down there silence is their main weapon so El chap is currently in prison is he worth talking to I'd say yes is there things that to you are interesting about him that are still not understood is he a window into something that you don't understand about that world still or curious about in that world I think he's a window into the family dynamics of that world when I say family Dynamics um Mexico has a big thing about Compadres you know and armanos like we have people that we call family that were not necessarily their family uh he is somebody that witnessed the the the construction of what is now the scen of La cartel like he was in it way back when he started off as a as a farmer and then went into trafficking he's from a town called V wat which is basically you know that's the uh the wakanda of cartels basically that's where a lot of that originates um the the things that he saw as far as how some of these things got built I think would be an interesting uh topic of conversation with somebody like him so that story is a story of evolving family Dynamics so part of the story of the cartel is individual humans marrying other families uh getting uh getting named the Pino basically Godfathers to other people's kids um forming family and Blood Ties and influence ties to people not only in Mexico but in the United States and seeing how that Dynamic and family Dynamic is still there you know a so he's gone he's in prison but he is he's probably on his way to be our next uh clandestine Saint you go to the uh the chapel of malde Mal is basically a Mexican Robin Hood the folk Saint down there who uh is a saint of traffickers and at his Shrine you have small little Chapo Shrine right next to it so he's on his way to sainthood in Mexico you not not recognized by the Catholic church but that doesn't matter in Mexico anymore speaking to somebody like him who you can consider him somebody that lost you know he's is arrested but his family is okay his uh his legacy is out there he's going to be named he's probably going to be the next folk Saint when he passes away you think he feels like the new wave of what the cartel has become has betrayed him has left him behind or um because it seems like the way the cartel operated has changed over the decades yeah well number one their power and influence is bigger you know uh they there are Cena laa cartel operations in Colombia straight from straight to the like in the source of it and uh then there are clear uh they have a clear presence in in places like Chicago and Los Angeles uh they're in the United States the whole thought process that a lot of Americans have like ah we don't want that that uh trouble over here we don't want them to get here or like build the wall and all this so they're deeply integrated into legitimate businesses I mean they've been having kids and families up here since for a long time some of these people have pass American passports that work not only directly for them but have Blood Ties down there you know there's been dragnets and arrests of some of these uh criminal organizations States New Generation Cel had one two three years ago where I think it's operation anakonda I think it was called there was there over 80 of their operatives and this is a new cartel that is very militaristic and growing in Mexico and they had over 80 arrests in the United States you know that uh of members of them operating here and so you could be a legitimate operator inside the United States that's hard to detect makes you wonder how many in uh the US government the politicians here is it is the the role of the United States in the drug war financially in terms of power is very big yeah surely there's politicians that have a finger into this immigration is part of it uh illegal immigration as part of it and the influence that that has as a as a bargaining chip and a political chip we saw this with the first Caravan kind of coming up and how it was politicized the money fast and furious and guns being basically let walk down into Mexico people that don't know basically the ATF had this operation where they were looking at straw purchasers of firearms basically people buying up a specific type of firearms that were on a shopping list that the cartels wanted to buy including uh you know 50 Cals uh FN 57 pistols which are small pistols with a high velocity round that will go through a bulletproof vest um AR-15s of all kinds uh that could quickly be modified into full auto down in Mexico with a with a drilling a few holes and making a few things uh to them so these people were buying all these the ATF was watching them and allowing them to walk those Firearms into Mexico under the guys of trying to track them somehow which doesn't make a lot of sense for most people to kind of look at that operation the only people found the only reason people found out about it was because of the murder of a few federal agents of the US federal agents that were killed with those guns one of my friends was shot with one of those pistols outside of his house and they shot him and they shot her his wife both of them were killed daughter was in the back seat lost uh part of her arm when that happened the guns were unique they were like oh we didn't never like the matap polias is what they call them them they're the cop killers I hadn't seen those before so they were unique and interesting and later on in life I was watching CNN and seeing the hearings going on I was like oh that's where they came from uh two federal agents changed a lot and it was politicized there was a whole scandal up here but in Mexico how many people died with those uh Firearms you know being let down being let go down there and also what type of sentiment you think the local populace has of the United States after all those guns were basically handed over to some of these groups gun trafficking is another giant part of the equation and part of the problem down there as far as uh as far as the amount of Munitions uh weapons and now we were also getting um tradecraft material from conflict zones outside of Mexico so weaponized drones the first time we saw uh some of those weaponized drones was uh in Syria and like like a few weeks later you know grenades were being dropped on the roofs of some uh public officials uh building cartels are using drones yeah that's been going on for a while there's a place in mokan and has some pretty interesting videos and the interesting part of them is because the federal police down there are actually working hand inand with a United cartel Unos Group which is basically the local cartels to try and fight off the new generation cartel moving into mokan so even the the federal forces are fighting with the cartels to try and keep this larger cartel out and there's videos of these uh civilian drones basically dropping explosives uh they found some explosive testing ranges out there that are basically replicating stuff that you would see the IRA use during the when during the troubles out there from homemade mortars um you know IEDs have been used in Mexico that not that much but there they're making like a presence again you know we don't have a lot of ordinance around like Iraq but we do have a big mining industry down there so mining mining explosives of all kinds are pretty easy to get so you start seeing that and also I mean there's some exotic Weaponry coming in from the south now and from the ocean that some of it is probably us uh military equipment sold to various South American governments that are now not as stable as they were and they're kind of making their way into black market so a lot of those uh 50 Calon vehicle mounted technical type machine guns and some of the RPGs and uh man pads or remote control guided missiles that you that have been found in cartel hands are probably come making their way up from down south do you get these like multi-million dollar systems like the highr system in the in the Ukraine you get like super sophisticated advanced technology or not so like this is like military grade I'm not sure what the application would be exactly in in the Mexico some of the SOP some of the sophisticated stuff I've seen are man pads which is basically remote guided missiles I've seen some of those found down there what is the application exactly a display of power there are no fly zones over parts of Mexico for this reason the new generation cartel took down a helicopter there's been incidents of military helicopters falling from the sky and it it they they said that it was mechanical issues but again I'm not I'm not going to do conspiracy theories out there but there's there's a lot of videos on Tik Tok of uh Cena cartel forces at parties you carrying around uh rocket launchers on their backs and you know so so there's an increased probability of mechanical failures over those areas when you're flying helicopter yeah there's no fly zones over some parts of Mexico and uh oh man another thing you're seeing now is night vision uh night vision equipment uh that is clearly military grade from the US that was probably abandoned in some War Field out there maybe Afghanistan or somewhere like that and it's uh it's being found in safe houses and in the hands of cartel forces you want to talk about a scary opponent somebody wearing night vision with a suppressed fire arm those types of capabilities are now out there also there's this uh tendency to think uh and every now and then you'll seees these cartel videos with these guys carrying around these 50 Cals and they show up they stand there like you know like boasting about the rifles and everybody laughs at them because a 50 cal or anything like that without a optic on it you know is like you're going to shoot you're prey and shoot basically see if you can hit anything with it uh but now there's a a few of my sources have I've seen you know sophisticated uh laser guided uh rang finders and and sighting systems on some of these that are being found out there how much damage can fatig C what was the application they started getting them specifically with the proliferation of armored vehicles in Mexico Mexico has a giant industry and armored vehicles as far as so there's a race in terms of uh armoring like protecting especially high value targets and then weapons that can deal with those armored ected high value targets there was U an attempted assassination of a state prosecutor somewhere in I think central Mexico I forget exactly where but she was uh riding around a up armored uh Jeep uh Cherokee I think it was and their main means of of uh Firepower was 50 Cals and that car was left in pieces she survived and it so I think the armor vehicle company that sold her that vehicle has it in the display room um uh then before my time probably 2 three years before I was actually active they tried to kill the head of public Security in in in the state of Baja and with him it was a grenade launcher 40mm grenade launcher it uh it skipped off the ve the armored vehicle and landed in the the the car behind it made the back explode uh one of the guys that I used to work with was actually in that car he survived it um but you started to see oh they're you know using armor vehicles now let's get 50 caliber now to try and defeat that armor uh so that yeah there's there's there's always this uh this race of Technology basically down there armored vehicles you know how do you take on an unarmored vehicle well there's a few ways 50 Cals you know if you can mount them in a right way and shoot at a car like that or a bunch of kids with balloons and uh acrylic paint on the front windshield and blind the vehicle so it doesn't so they can't drive it anymore there another way um toll line across a road painted like the painted painted black so you can't see it and cut the thing in half again I'm not saying any secrets these are things that people have seen out there uh shoot at the radiator you know uh some of these radiators are not uh even the more sophisticated uh Vehicles out there don't have a sufficient uh armoring around the radiator or the battery housing of some of these vehicles there was a case of a guy I think his nickname was at bakas or something like that out in Cena level cartel guy had an armor vehicle he was you know riding around and he got ambushed he shot at his car he was like ah I have armor you can't shoot me and somebody went up to his car and just put the barrel right in the locking mechanism and that got him you know so it's an interesting place as far as people getting certain types of guns armor is prolific down there I mean everybody down there all the Cel cartel M you see them wearing plate armor so that's an issue it's not like you can shoot somebody Square in the chest and it'll go down are they afraid to kill Americans so I know I was traveling in Ukraine on the front so like a lot of the journalists would travel in like armored vehicles and at first I was like it seems like this would attract attention yeah like it seems like they would want to hit those targets but then then I realized over time as I learned there's a there's a fear of killing Americans there could be a drastic escalation of yeah it's not a beehive yeah it's yeah there's there's there is a tendency to shy away or stay away from that you know I mean these they don't want the Heat or the attention outside of that everyone's game everyone's game but also there's been many cases of Americans being killed down there I mean we saw the Mormon Massacre uh happen down there and all of them were American Mexican they had both nationalities and blonde kids you know white being uh massacred in the middle of a desert uh and the cars uh basically Catching Fire this happened and you know the America Americans uh sent the FBI down there to kind of review some of what happened down there and uh I think that was when Trump started uh talking about kind of Reviving this whole notion of cartels being labor terrorist organization probably more for of a political pressure point he was using to try and get Mexico to reinforce its Southern border uh which it hasn't but there's escalation you know oh this this already happened and nothing happened so we can probably get away with it you know and again there's a newer generation moving forward now of people coming into power more brutal more technically Savvy well they have the experience of their parents and the people behind them and what they've done and went gotten away with and now yeah more Savvy about information Warfare their main recruiting tool is Tik Tok you go to Tik Tok and you'll see a bunch of these kids uh at a narco party dancing around and some of these are videos by Cartel members filming other cartel members in cartel control territory and that's a window into that life for who's on Tik Tok now kids and the enticing aspect of that is the money the fun the High Roller life and the possibility of making it to a level you know yeah a Fame of uh respect power money here in the US somebody might you know I want a mansion and I want like that that's their mindset I want to live you know like that rapper down there I mean if you can buy a house for your mom you know or pay off some debts that she might have or a car that's enough to kill for yeah so you also one of the many things you did is uh you did security tried to protect in this this in this war try to protect people high value people how do you do you and others how is it possible to protect a high value Target like a celebrity or an important politician in the situation so I was uh I was tasked to protect uh the governor of Baja and his family I was basically replacing a whole contingency of people that were already there that turned out to be corrupted that was in my field I was operational I was working with other people doing the counter narcotic stuff and uh the director of the institution that I was in basically called me in and said hey uh you're going to go and replace this these people and I what happened to them well so you were known as a person that could be kind of trusted I was tasked for that so I I think they considered that and uh and I I specifically worked for a governor named uh jaman uh who was probably one of the best Governors we have had in the state and people want to see if I'm trustworthy or not they can ask him directly and I I still speak to some of members of his family and we're still you know friends in that way is protecting people like technically a difficult problem to solve for my experience in that time and in place he was basically spearheading you know counter the the drug war in Baja when he was in power so he had threats from all over not only him but his family first thing I realized working that job in Mexico is that uh we had we had people coming in to do specialized training of that regard Israelis you know teaching us how they would do things in Israel that didn't make a lot of sense for us in Mexico you know uh we had people that had some Secret Service experience kind of show us how showing us how they would do like celebrity bodyguarding or bodyguarding somebody maybe in California of that nature didn't make sense for us then we got to experience some cross training with some uh nsw Naval Naval special Warfare people who were coming off uh protection details in Afghanistan and Iraq is there some useful crossover there we were struggling with the acceptance that we were basically doing protection details in a war zone so the approach uh that had to be taken in Mexico was similar to the approach he would Tak in Afghanistan during a war some of the overt militaristic type approaches to security that we had to adopt you know from uh we didn't move him in a single armored vehicle we had two of them that looked exactly alike so when we would move around we would switch one card through the other every now and then we would arrive to an event they would open the door and it would be one of us and they were like hey like where's the governor he's in the back one so they would move to that so we had to do stuff like that and again this is a young me who didn't have any specialized training I was I was on YouTube learning learning some of these things uh going online learning about armor vehicles learning about architectural armor I think you just described a large percentage of the Ukrainian military how they operate which is on YouTube trying to figure out how to use some of this techn and and uh that's actually incredibly effective yeah you know I do quite a lot of stuff where I'm totally not an expert totally uneducated and so on it's kind of surprising how quickly you can get caught up as we're talking offline if you take a course if you talk to an expert if you learn from an expert you can like catch up really quickly for me it was all of a sudden I have this uh director calling me in and I'm wearing Vans you know and jeans you know t-shirt and all of a sudden I had 80 80 some people that I had to move around and I was in charge of U securing planes and uh which I what do I know about that airport hangers uh armored vehicle maintenance and and and purchasing and figuring out how to set up a counter assault uh group for for a protection detail and I was like where I'm going to learn all this were you able to quickly figure figure some of these things out on fly basically you know as I was going I remember having this experience uh being in the uh our security office on my laptop figuring out how to set up a counter surveillance uhp side to our protection detail basically how to have people looking for people that might be looking for us you know type thing and then going to uh San Diego to corado and training with some people from uh former seal guys and NCIS people who did that job in war zones and seeing them critique some of the solutions that we came up with on the Fly and being like Oh I we never saw that before Oh yeah this is we're doing it down there so getting that compliment and also getting their you know feedback like we probably do this or do that and it it's it was a learning process on the Fly that was pretty I mean seat of your pants level is it possible for the family and for the high value person to um to have a sense of normaly to have a normal life I mean I tried I was already starting off on the on the wrong foot basically because trust had been violated by the people that I was replacing so I had to gain that back then young kids in that family that wanted to have a you know go out and stuff like that in the most violent city on the planet so I had to do my homework and figure out places where they were safe to go to and make friends with certain club uh owners and figure out ways to put Security in some of these places and having to create this bubble of normaly around some of these people was pretty difficult and uh there's no way that that is uh a normal for anybody and you know you know God bless them the the I know it didn't I know it wasn't easy and I know it affected their lives and they they lost on a big part of their youth being under that that security supervision and bubble does probably does a lot uh for for somebody specifically growing up like that you know uh you lose opportunities of things that we take for granted you know just going out just not telling anybody and going to the store you know because you want to get some snacks or something like that that's not available to some of these people I have to be honest when I was in Ukraine that was a really big benefit youd Escape no I couldn't hang out I couldn't eat when I'm stressed I would fast and not eat much so I get lost weight so it's great it's great for the diet it's diet to be basically be under protective custody that's a that's that's that's a an idea for a good new diet and just life it allowed me to focus get a lot of reading done uh focus on the important things in life I mean uh I I joke of course but there's some there's some complexity to this in terms of normal state of the family but also just how to operate like have a mental Clarity and a lack of fear just basically be good at your job whatever that job is as a politician as a leader uh even as a soldier somebody that I again I think thisa said this to me or said something like this to a group of us that there's nothing wrong with being paranoid it's about educating your paranoia and knowing what to be afraid of if you're afraid of everything you know you're basically overwhelmed but if you T start educating yourself as far as specifically what to prioritize as far as what to worry about in know war zone uh working protecting somebody you know you're not looking at everybody's faces you're just looking at their hands because that's what's going to kill you you know that's an example of focalizing you know what you're paranoid and what you're afraid of so looking at the hands that's the specific to the particular situation but also figuring out which situations to avoid in which it's okay I mean that's like ultimately one of the biggest things you could do yeah route analysis you know you you have to get to the airport and you send off two cars to analyze two routes and then on the Fly you just change trajectory to to create Randomness and unpredictability and have that as a a security feature um having to a convoy of four vehicles separate into two convoys and show up different in different parts to again make it hard for people to guess where you're going to be putting out false information as far as who where's going to be who's going to be and that type of stuff it's kind of amazing how many assassination attempts Hitler avoided just by having a pretty strict schedule and being a little bit off in terms of timing just like showing up 15 minutes late or to a slightly different location we were going through training uh specifically around this type of stuff and and operational training basically showing us how to ambush people you know when I started making a group for myself as far as counter Ambush you know this cat teams that that they call them up here in the US basically a group of a group to respond to a high violent uh uh Ambush first off the first rule if if you find yourself in an ambush it wasn't a successful Ambush because if you if you find yourself in it you're alive you know yes um but if you want to create an amazing counter Ambush team you have to you know you have to make them ambushers and with ambushing you figure out where all the uh opportunities of not only successfully doing what you need to do are in your favor but also to escape with your life you know we're not uh we're not going to be received by virgin in heaven we're not that's not the type of mentality that we had down there but uh we start learning about some of these things and also seeing you know cartel forces apply some of these Ambush tactics to the military or federal forces what is an ambush what are we talking about so that's a surprise attack with an asymmet power kind of thing there's a contingency somewhere moving towards a place that you control and own where you have the advantages where they can't see you but you can see you can see them where they can't predict you but you can predict where they're going to pass go through you know places where they forcibly have to pass uh places where they're predictable places where you can not only predict but also have a plan for yourself to escape and exit uh that place so how do you train for counter Ambush you turn into a like a perfect ambusher that's how you train for counter Ambush also always trying to make sure you have more information about other people you have the element of surprise all of those things and Masashi would say know your enemy know his sword you know basically that you know it's simplified but there's a lot of enemies around you in in Mexico there's a lot of uncertainty right cuz it's well I guess that's what R analysis is yeah you you prepare for the probable yeah and if the impossible happens you're halfway out of it hopefully you know and if you find yourself in an ambush it wasn't a successful one uh but you you you uh as far as our training and the kind of the mindset my experience with it you the adversary IAL thinking part of it has always been a very powerful one I think one that a lot of people ignore kind of like leave to the Wayside uh specifically in all conflicts out there there's a tendency for a military force or a conventional force of any kind to be trained in a way where they dehumanize the enemy yeah and when that happens you become blind to the enemy's story it's his capability his story his ability uh you if you treat the other side like an inhuman monster it's hard to take notes you know so there some part of this is a radical empathy for for for the quote unquote enemy at least for me personally uh I wasn't I wasn't one of the guys that would you grab him beat the shit out of him and put him in the back of a van just tie him up and gag him so you able to see them as human I learned that from my mother you know she said uh uh nobody's against you at they for themselves learn this and you will you will make friends of enemies she she said that when I graduated and I carried that with me throughout my whole career but isn't there then a pain of killing another human always but there isn't again I apologize to go back to Ukraine is my only experience of this kind of harshness it and it is a powerful experience there's a dehumanization that happens I suppose this is common in war there's something like a video game aspect where people are almost having fun there's a humor and I think underneath that the prerequisite is to see the in the same way you see the anime when you play Call of Duty you don't really think you think of them as NPCs the bad guys the Russians are called Orcs in Ukraine I mean there's all kinds of other names for us it with mugrosos you know malandro mugrosos like dirty people you know there's always something over time those are just words but over time it gathers a kind of um like a meaning to it that's more than just the words Orcs they're less than human yeah they're dirty they're too dumb to understand the evil they're doing or what whatever the it's useful it's useful it's part of the program but like that's what and I've talked to soldiers and some of them do have stories of momentarily remembering that there's a human on the other side um I talked to one woman who's this really badass Soldier and she saw this Really Brave soldier on the other side do something that was almost stupid How brave it was and then she was trying to shoot him and you she missed and she said she couldn't sleep the night after thinking why did she miss why did she miss and then she thought she missed because he was a hero and she had this brief realization that there was a hero on the other side like the other side is Heroes yeah and then but then that quickly disappear appeared yeah again but she at this moment there's a human being that rises to to defend his Nation to defend his people and he could be heroic on the other side there are things that we're trained to depress or conceal or hide and kill in us when you're trained for something like that or when you're in Conflict Zone like that and you hear the narrative constantly being blured out that the other side is a orc or you know whatever whatever word you want to use but you know we live in a day and age when you can see uh Americans going off to Japan and shaking hands with some of their former enemies I mean some of us have seen that and how things change I think years from now a lot of the the stuff that we are taking right now is of the utmost importance won't matter anymore the question is how many years question that's a question I asked of a lot of people in that part of the world ah and a lot of them currently they're also self-aware about it they're like I'm not sure I trust my current feelings yeah but the current feelings are generational yeah like for decades I will not just hate the the leadership I will hate all Russian people I can't understand that on my side of my life experience because you know our war has been an internal War you know amongst our people and monst our houses why that is the propaganda it there's also a deep grain of truth that there is a a Oneness to the people of that region yeah but people will get very offended at that idea because right now it's a very strong nationalist borders but there is a cultural history that connects people I mean in some deep sense we're all connected we all come from Western Africa and then all came from fish before then depending on your uh view of of Life of history of life on Earth um but there is a Oneness to us and often you forget that in Conflict I had an experience working there was a friend of mine who took the other path uh and went to work for some of these criminal groups I was operational and I was uh we saw a bunch of people in a gas station parked back then the main you know MOS operandi that they had was that they would uh impersonate or dress up as federal police and that's how they would move around the city we saw these Suburbans in a in a in a gas station and some of the guys were carrying our AK-47s you know and that's that's not a standard issue firearm so you know we saw that and I got off on foot and walked by to try and get a you know better sense of what was going on I took everything off uh wearing jeans and a t-shirt and uh I got a whistle from one of the guys uh that was there and my name was called it was one of the guys that I grew up with redhead kid look like El Canelo you know uh there's redheads in Mexico by the way I think it's probably some of the Irish that uh that uh betrayed the American side during the last Mexico American war that stayed down there I had a bunch of kids so it's probably from there love was stronger than anything else I think this redhead kid when I say kid I mean he was my age and now to my eyes he's always going to be younger now he was a told my name said hey G that key cat I'm like what are you doing here it's like ah shit I'm just you know going home and she look going and get a taxi like oh okay walk as he walks over it's like he has a plate carrier with AK round uh magazines on his chest uh AK without a stock on it just carrying in his hand he comes over and he hugs me I could feel the uh the magazines on my chest you mind you I have a gun on me you know tucked and uh Nextel is buzzing in my back pocket as people are trying to you know figure out what the fuck's going on um he asked me small talk shit like hey it's like what are you doing like what what do you work at and I like just looking for a job you know used to work at a video store so he's like ah haven't seen you in a while uh how's so and so of your family good and how's so and so of your family good it's like yeah they like this is an interesting job you have he's like yeah it's pretty good they pay us well you get a you know you get a car you know there's money and nobody fucks with you you get respect I was like that's awesome you know and if you want you can get you in you know if you if you want that it's like oh that's I'm too much of a coward for that I told him conversation like any other uh between two friends he hugs me before I go some something to him I can't remember what and he says Hey in my ear I know what you do for a living it's not a safe place for you to be in and I walk off a few moments later the Army showed up and you could feel the amount of rounds going off from two blocks away we came back with our guys and it was it was over so he didn't survive that I I looked through the bodies and the cars that were left you know there was bodies all over the place people left there it was a mess I spent like an hour looking for him the only way I could recognize him was his hair um I stayed with his body all night there's a there's a bridge in Tijuana that goes over the river in a place called L Mesa and that's where the forensic offices were his body was taken there and I stayed with his body until it was released I told his family about it because I knew them and that aspect of you know us versus them or they they're the enemy and Sh like that you my mom told me those words nobody's against you they're just for themselves so don't make the mistake of dehumanizing anybody and those roles could have been easily reversed I could have been shot in the face there that aspect the conflict brings where they say bad guys good guys you know uh Heroes villains you know how there's an innocence to that that uh you goes away is your mom still with us no almost 3 weeks before I decided to quit she passed away did that have a role to play a major one after I got done on the protection detail with the governor uh like everything down there again the whole cycle you know he got his turn so when he went away uh you know politics change and down there basically if you're a c a gubernatorial candidate you have either a friend a friend of a friend or a family member be the head bodyguard guy and the guy that won the elections had his head bodyguard guy already there so all of us were sent back to whatever we came from so I went back to work on the streets uh I was uh back on the operations group I was working with the subdirector uh directly with him basically back on the ground doing the stuff that I was doing before that job we were moving away from the successes that had been had by people like Lola when they were in charge of that whole process the people that I used to work with some of the only successes in that counter push against cartels in in Mexico and you can kind of like it's documented you can read about it out there a bunch of people wrote papers on it some of the only successes were had by LOL and places where he had leadership he not only pacified Tijuana uh he also did the same in harez he was sent uh to be the lece Chief and wates too but politics change and you know Heroes become villains um a lot of people started calling him a villain because of his uh unorthodox approach and human rights violations and all of this type of stuff kind of come to the Forefront and people forgot you know people forgot what it took to get Tijuana off the most dangerous city list on the planet and uh people were vilified uh people like him uh and uh the police force that I was a part of started getting compromised a lot of the things that were put forth to try and keep us honest there was a program they had these centers called the c3s basically you would go there every every year you would get your financials checked you would get a physical psychological evaluation you would get a polygraph exam done on you all the works to try and see if you were somebody doing something wrong and all of that was cancelled because it violated your human rights if you get uh fired from a job because of a failed polygraph exam because that was not a actual admissible way of firing somebody so all of a sudden you had people that were known cartel compromised people that were fired five six years ago showing back up to back up to work with their back paid and everything so this is wow so this started happening and it quickly quickly realized that it was going to be hard to stay there um I was uh driving home from work and I got a call from my brother that uh my mom had been going through some health issues that uh had turned into psychiatric issues so we were basically taking turns trying to take care of her you know locking the door so she wouldn't wander off and stuff like that so Not only was I dealing with the job on the street but I was dealing with that and also I had a a 2-year-old and a marriage that was difficult uh that that time so I was trying to figure all these things out made more difficult by your job yeah it's not a financially secure job you know and the pressures that it has and the odd hours and all that made it really hard and then all of a sudden um my brother calls me and and tells me that let's go to the hospital my mom something happened to my mom it wasn't my turn to to watch her so I I felt pretty shitty about that I got to the hospital and the doctors you know came out and told us that she was gone it was a a massive heart attack she she had a pacemaker by then so she was gone she was in her 60s so you know we kind of expected something but not you know that that was like hard for me she was my Center she was going to be the one that I would ask for advice as far as work you know if I should leave it or not the ground was removed from under you there was nobody there was yeah there's nothing underneath me I get three days off work that's what they gave me and uh I'm trying to grieve as I go back to work dark shit crosses my mind as I'm going through that process of trying to figure things out um like dark shit like suicide that dark shit yeah so it was very low for you very it hit very hard yeah I wasn't allowed to grieve basically and I wasn't allowed to grieve for for a few years uh for different reasons I went back to work and other people also you yourself were not allowing yourself to grieve is it like there's there was other people with me that didn't allow me to grieve you know um I went to work got called into the office and I was basically told that I was going to be reassigned after I just what I just went through uh the reassignment was going to be something that I saw as unacceptable it was uh the people in charge at that point were were obviously corrupted and what I got from their conversation was that they wanted us to work for a specific side and I knew that that was the time to go I asked for a license basically license is uh unpaid absence from work basically leave of absence I think it's what you call it up here which by law is allowed and I was denied for no reason so I'm invested in this job you know uh there's I have a I have a I have a good salary a salary and I have a category in there so you the by the level of uh time you spend in there you get a category so I was a pretty high category agent I had all this training and again training that would be useless in the private sector well in the in the public sector in Mexico I couldn't change from one corporate to another can go to work for another police institution so I took a deep breath and uh I resigned I went to the office I said I need to resign they said what I need to resign some of the people in the office that knew me from a long time were like what's wrong with you they thought I was having a mental breakdown and it all over the all the paperwork uh took a big trash bag put all my stuff in there uh blate armor tear gas G grenades uh gas mask uh satellite radio um MP5 magazines uh an MP5 uh submachine gun GLOCK GLOCK magazines all of it helmet and I put it in the AR I handed it over in the Armory uh and I I left I made some phone calls um I was married to uh an American and my daughter's American I never envisioned myself coming to the United States do that process for myself you know so I was invested in that job I thought I was going to die or retire from that and uh it quickly became like an issue because everybody wondering why I left the job so abruptly so there were some threats made when I left by people inside the office and I probably you know it's Anonymous yet so there's significant pressure not to leave it's hard to leave this kind of job yeah the system makes it difficult to leave the individuals to the degree they might be corrupted really don't want you to leave there's no support yeah there's no support and there probably the opposite of support yeah almost like implied or or explicit or implicit threats yeah luckily I had developed some friendships in the United States for some with some of the people that I used to work with and cross Trin with and uh some friendships that I developed with people that I would uh just talk to and make friends with State Side one of them was uh is a Navy SEAL reservist who uh name is Dan Stanfield and his wife Kelly they open the doors of their house to me and my kid and my wife at that time as I seek to basically look for the American dream um I crossed the border with my kid and uh nobody knew anything you know I had I didn't tell anybody just you know my wife and uh and I was off uh when I came to the states I already kind of dabbled in the whole training field and and showing some of my experience to people so I had at least a seed of that out there people knew me for that um but all of a sudden I was uh in the middle of an avocado Orchard uh in the middle of California and everything's quiet and there's no more radios going off all over the night there's no more three three cell phones on the counter there's no guns there's no rifles there's no um 80 people calling to to to calling to see what's going on there's nothing it's just quiet and it's during the time when uh Trump got elected so the immigration process that usually would take I I had most things going for me an immigration process that would take at the most the year took two years so it was it was not a it's not an easy process to not only come to the US but uh you know come to the US with uh with that pressure kind of underlying pressure as far as being an immigrant at that time here and then your own personal psychological the PTSD of of going from a war zone to a uh avocado Orchard the word PTSD and TBI and all of these things I did not I didn't know any of them uh it was through people that I got to meet uh in the training field uh that were you know Marines uh seals uh marock guys those types of people that started giving words to some of the things that I felt which I didn't really know you know uh we would treat uh post-traumatic stress with alcohol and vacation time yeah botle mcal you know when you see the bottom of it you're troubles are gone cured yeah immediately I was I was an alcoholic as well as all the other stuff I was I was drinking myself to sleep every every third night uh my marriage obviously was failing you know it was it wasn't easy for her you know she she was Brave and she did what she could and and I I totally respect and understand her process with it but you know when when it's quiet that's when it hits you that's what I think that's what a lot of people experience when they come back from a conflict Zone you know the uh everything that was life and death everything that mattered all the noise all the chaos all the people that are around you that would die for you kill for you you would kill for them uh all these millions of dollars worth of equipment and stuff like that you were responsible for now are all gone and it's just you uh walking into a Circle K and buying three cans of Fosters to drink yourself to sleep yeah you write on your patreon brilliantly about BTSD about uh the cost of things you've done and seen quote when it's over and we are far from that chaos and noise of death being close and life being real that is when some of us remember in the quiet nights in a field in Tennessee looking at fireflies walking through a fair holding hands with a lover asking you what's wrong at your kids's birthday party leave early to avoid the ending of a celebration that is what the quiet means to some of us so that's speaking to that silence the quiet um how do you live with and Thrive with this newly learned term of PTSD if anything I would recommend people that that have any of these issues to go to places where other people have their issues so you can it's not a competition but you get to see the scope of problems in the world and you sometimes feel kind of lucky as far as your own like it humbles you yeah and makes you appreciate of all the different kinds of struggles that people go yeah I mean I went through some horrible shit but there's some people there that went through other more horrible shit or stuff that I I I don't think I could have survived when I went through that process of figuring things out you know the first thing that glaringly pointed out or stuck out to me was my inability to process things like there was a big pause button there a giant one everything was on pause my grieving not only my mom but my brother so I had a pause button on me since I were 13 basically uh then I got to bury many of my friends inform their wives or girlfriends of what happened and that all again was paused because I wasn't uh allowed to process you I spent years without going on vacation because I was a workaholic and uh I found at the core of my issues uh alcohol a giant pause button in the form of alcohol basically I I'll drink my problems away or specifically I would it's like uh if you have a mess in your house you just put a big tarp over it you know to cover it up and alcohol was at for me and it festered more and more as I not only went through the process of learning about pcsd going through therapy but refusing to let that go you know it's like going through therapy and seeing what other people's problems were and I don't want to you know this is the only thing I have I'm not you know I'm not hurting anybody with it you know why why am I why do I need to get rid of that uh by this point I was traveling across the country and training people and uh showing some of the experiences that I had to other people speaking being on podcast and having conversations like the one I'm at with you so speaking to the skills that you've developed and in a way basically re reliving and reopening a bunch of shit for myself every time I do it um so I was I was getting triggered and the way I would manage that was I would drink you know at the end of the night after a a weekend class somewhere when I talk about the fireflies and a field in Tennessee it was a moment where I was forcing myself to try and be sober and we did this medical class out in uh out in the hills in Tennessee it beautiful green Place uh beautiful family there that that hosted us and it's the first time I ever saw flow flies so I was like thought I was having a hallogen experience when I say why is why are why why is the dust glowing you know is what I thought a friend of mine is a a veteran he ran off to the woods and grabbed one and brought it to me and showed it to me I was like holy shit that's what is that's a firefly wow how do they glow I don't know and he's crushing it in his hand and say on and I that you know brought me back immediately to holy shit you know uh it kind of like I was off somewhere and I was back and I had to go drink I went through that process of like going off it getting on and going off getting off and my marriage separated and that was a another end of the world aspect to to to everything you know you know I lost my mother I lost uh the job and then the marriage uh failed and it was on me I basically went somewhere and did a stock of everything that was going on and made a decision to stop drinking yeah had a had some bad relationships after and I just came to a place where I need to stop drinking you've gotten de points so low was this a decision you arrived at by yourself was there some inspiration or was it just the point is so low lost so much it was the start of Co so uh this is recent this probably two I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to have two years Sil in December so when you talk to Rogan the first time you're still struggling with this demon yeah I was in and out of the car basically is what I I would say you know I was in and out of and then trying to get rid of it that must be a super stressful experience talking to Joe Rogan the first time did you drink that night you remember the second time I was there I would I I went somewhere got shit face it was it was stressful not not for any other reason than I felt the responsibility to the people that couldn't speak about it so that's a pressure it was a start of Co and things got it started getting shut down and slowed down my dad got really sick and almost died we had to set up like some Jason Bourne level shit at his at at my brother's place we we he was in Mexico you know so we had to bribe a guy to get us an oxygen tank and I had to Jimmy rig a respirator and it was it was it was it was some shit but my dad was like you know he survived it you know everybody the doctor were like say goodbye and the the my dad was like yeah say goodbye to him you know okay so your dad's a gangster I got it tough cut he did he did some gangster shit that day but uh on my end I was being isolated basically his Co is everybody's slowing down no more classes no more excuses to go out there and drink and no more social soci iing so social drinking turned into alone drinking more and more and more I bought a bottle of Jin because uh I was I was down in Mexico taking care of my dad and uh they closed down beer production in Mexico so beer went away and beer was a way I kind of Managed IT you know it's not hard alcohol it's just beer so you know but that went away so it was just hard ALC that was was available down there I uh one night alone at the uh at the house my dad's house I uh I drank a bottle of Jin a whole bottle of Jin I almost died and after that you know some people started noticing that uh that I was isolating more and more and it was kind of eating away at me I was in a Rel relationship at that point when I I started seeing everything just kind of fall apart around me and I I drank half of a glass of uh wine and it made me sick to my like internally in my mind and uh my kid said uh to me and I don't know nobody coached her nobody said anything to her she's she's pretty intuitive kid said I don't drink anymore dad out of nowhere in the middle of the night uh and I stopped I stopped that I stopped that night I remember waking up at 3:00 in the morning uh and taking a cooler that I had and just dumping all the beers in it and chucking them in the garbage and with a knife poking each of them to not you know be tempted to go back for them and then the second day I went around and started finding the hides that I had because I had some you know hides yeah and uh and then I went somewhere and locked myself in for two weeks uh I had the the withdrawals uh the clearest nightmares that I've ever had in my life for two 3 weeks I went somewhere where I want to keep them private but I went somewhere where they offered a place for me and uh when I asked them about it they it's a community I gave them some money for their school as a donation gave them like a few a few thousand dollars I yeah sure come you know you can you can go through this process here cool as fuck people mhm the first thing I they did when I got there is they stood me up in front of everybody to thank me for the donation and then told everybody that I was an alcoholic and if anybody saw me drinking I was to be kicked out of there immediately and uh I felt horrible um so that's that was where I started is that Temptation still there there was a moment when it was uh and uh some uh therapy Circle there's a there's a rodeo clown friend of mine who his body's his spine is basically fused together you know type of guy uh we've been friends and enemies and friends again you know in during the our therapy uh Circle sessions Oho like there's an intimacy there yeah um he didn't know anything about me uh one time when we was telling our story he stood up and told his story and then he heard mine and and then he was pissed off at me and didn't want to talk to me for a while and then later he told me that it was because uh he saw what I did with my experience and how much of a difference that he perceived that I was making with it and he felt uh jealous that he couldn't do the same with his experience because he was just a broken ex rodeo clown he told me when I was going through the process like hey you're you're a internet celebrity person you know you're you're known uh aren't you worried about people finding out that you're that you're recovering drunk and I said yeah it's fucking scary as shit if people find out that I am going through this process it's scary that you know the critique you know I already get a lot of shit for being a ex police officer in Mexico and all that uh all the negativity that comes from that and he said don't be you know that you can't pickpocket a naked man so just get naked and what does that mean write about it post it online you never know somebody somebody out there might get inspired to do their own kind of process so I started posting about cowardly in a way because I wanted to make other people keep me on the path you know but in other ways you know uh desperation you know I don't I don't I don't want to drink anymore I don't want to go back to that on that uh path which I know leads directly to a bad death I'm not afraid of death I just want a good one I don't want a bad one I think that was going to lead me to a bad death I started writing about it and sharing it online you know through my uh fever dreams post and just uh being humorous about it online and getting a lot of hate on one side you know having a few people and companies that I work with kind of step back and seeing this guy has some issues to having other people kind of make fun of or make light of that uh weakness portrayed Al getting hate getting criticism because here you are a counter narcotics police officer there's no has a drinking problem so is that like supposed to be what like flaws revealed weakness uh or a perception of alpha in the US I guess that some people have you know you were supposed to be strong and here you are I mean I'm not I'm not Jaco wilnick I'm not David Goggins you know I I'll I wake up at 10:00 in the morning sometimes and I'll have cornflakes with my 8-year-old you know um I like days off I I used to wake up at 3:30 in the morning every day to to to review what happened during the night and then go off for a jog and then the gym and just be ready to be able to murder somebody with my hands if I had to but that is I couldn't maintain that during the whole process of getting out of it now leaving alcohol I remember just being honest with it and just seeing the two sides of it you know Joe told me never read the comment section right which is a beautiful it's a beautiful piece of advice but uh it they get you you sometimes when you talk about some of these things openly and some of the comments were positive and I've been seeing people comment sending me messages and meeting people on the road that are 5 months in uh 10 months uh some people that have been on that uh wagon for way longer than I have um and uh there's it's what's cool when you meet people that are superum or perform and are take an extreme ownership of things and are just amazing people that are you know thriving out there it's inspirational I see some of these people and I'm like holy shit I need to figure out how to get to some semblance of that but I'm not that you know I've been through the ring I fucked up a shit ton of times you know my nose is a example of that I few missing teeth but in a way I think all of that is part of the process that not a lot of people want to talk about you know independently of the experience I got down there and some of the things that I show and talk about and some of the advocacy I do related to women like her that are you know trying to look for a better life and trying to find their missing kids uh training people to not get into those situations uh but also showcasing the fact that people that go through some of these processes have a journey to go through you know uh I just came into your studio with a duffel bag straight from the airport and I'm going to leave uh early tomorrow morning to somewhere else I've been on the road for almost I think 5 years non-stop I go back to a specific place every week to see my kid for 2 3 days and then I'm back out you know R you know some people like are you running like are you worried afraid about something no but I am you know on this weird path I guess trying to look for something that I think I've been missing as far as my afterlife of A Sort you know coming out think that is are you looking for some kind of deeper understanding of humanity like from the specific experiences you had to get some deeper understanding of what what the hell we're all doing here I meet people every weekend with different stories uh you know people come to some of my classes you know I show them how to weaponize the environment how to arm themselves how to not get abducted I meet people that have gone through those experience and then they're basically trying to work through some of the their own issues by going through the training like that I get to meet people that are you know people that I've only seen online you know or seen in videos I I remember meeting Royce Gracie in uh Harvard City I heard of that guy he's a pretty interesting character I remember seeing him in a boot like VHS video and I told them about it uh we were doing a class uh out at uh uh Emerson knives it's a it's a it's a Knife Company but the but the Mr Emerson also has like a Jiu-Jitsu gym there where Royce straightens out of that's his uh that's his space and you know they're teaching how to defend against somebody trying to stab you and I'm showing them all the ways you can get around that and fabricate and improvise and smuggle things basically the the adversarial side of that which is that's what I'm known for the psychology and kind of the the ways that people do that and I remember him seeing some of the stuff that I was doing and just being like where you from Mexico me makes sense you know somebody from Brazil you know tipping the hat to somebody from Mexico as far as him uh seeing the violence and some of the uh the mentality behind it so for people who don't know ho Gracie is the legendary martial artist that probably introduced Brazilian jiu-jitsu to the American AUD to the world through the process of UFC and showing the effectiveness of it in um in practice that a little skinny guy can defeat a big aggressive guy so an anakonda as a small Anaconda walking into that uh ring with his family behind wearing pajamas wearing pajamas and I was like what is this guy wearing pajamas for and then he would strangle people with those pajamas uh I remember seeing that and just having it I think probably what a generation before had with Bruce Lee I guess our my generation was Roy walking into that uh walking into that octagon and changing you know paradigms seeing him in that gym um it's also have a gun owner and shooter which is interesting you know having a beinging somebody like him who is you know well- versed with the his hands also be a man that has gone into the realm of being well versed with with Weaponry which is an aspect of of martial arts and uh the martial way of of thinking that you know some people kind of the purist will stick with one side of it but he's he's obviously a warrior in a lot of ways so just as a small tangent so you're somebody that you don't just look at unarmed combat you look at the full spectrum of the the chaos of combat that's outside of the realm of Jiu-Jitsu and even just mix martial arts unarmed armed with knives and Beyond was was his mind open to the the Fuller spectrum of violence yeah I mean he was he was in the middle of this class that we were doing where people were basically focusing on both Ernest Emerson who's uh famous for his knives he's has a Knife Company he done knives for NASA you know not only that but he's also a very Avid martial art artist he trained with a lot of Filipino martial arts related to knives and stuff like that but a different mindset you know a defensive mindset trying to train people how to defend against that and you have Roy who's uh he's from Brazil I mean he has some Street in him that's something that you know those guys those we say in Mexico uh seeing the ways he would uh he he stepped in there and and provided some encouragement to the people there as far as uh you know how people sometimes focus on the uh this is a system and this is a way but there's other ways out there that might negate or defeat the ways that you are con concentrating on you know so kind of get out of that bubble my whole kind of speciality or what I focus on is mindset and figuring out the software that some of these people gain and gather from if I need to arm myself you know the easiest thing to manufacture in most plac is a pointed object so I can take that Crystal big pen that you're writing on that uh Notepad with and uh using the friction from the carpet I can turn it into a hyperic needle that you can then poke into somebody's neck what's the process of doing that I can do it right now if you want to no but can you can you use your words for The Listener and also cuz I'm terrified no I I I could basically you can take the Fric the the the Heat and friction created from this carpet yes you can grab that pen in of itself it will pierce flesh but it will slow itself down because it has a few uh angles on to on the tip oh you want to wear down the angles so if you take that tip off and you grabb it and grind it on an angle on the carpet the heat will actually turn it into a hypodermic needle if you know what you're doing hypodermic meaning like it's it smoothens the entry it'll make a point in an angle that will guide it its way in through your flesh so you can actually go through a torso with that if you know what you're doing as a small tangent you also gave me a present could be one of the most epic presents I've ever received you you give it to Rogan uh can you explain what I'm holding in my hands there's a guy online coffin Tramp is his uh moniker uh it is a G10 Rod G10 is a very strong material basically capable they a lot of people make actually G10 knives which are basically non-magnetic non- feris objects that can be utilized as a stabbing Implement um the core of it isn't uh isn't an actual pencil core it's a G10 core and it's uh encased in uh Oak heart Oak so that is capable again of stabbing through a torso now the the guy that made that uh is an artisen you know it makes that it looks like a pencil it's concealed in it in in the nature of the object itself but that small object is capable of being introduced into a chest cavity um you know uh all it takes is about the half of your thumb or the length of your thumb to stab into your chest cavity and now your pericardium is pierced and it's being full with fill of blood or your whole heart is pierced then you have a few minutes to live if you're at a standing heart rate so this is uh this this has the effectiveness of a knife essentially it has the effectiveness of a shank or or or or an ice pick you know it's not going to cut but it's going to make a hole where not shouldn't be here the the pen is literally mightier sword yeah well it's uh it's this is really epic from like a persp perspective of an academic this this is this is a symbol of both intelligence and violence I love it and also the the current state of affairs where people need to arm themselves with things that are concealed as far as their purpose in a place where in a country or in a society that limits their ability to arm themselves so if you're going to a safe place you're going to a place where no weapons allowed which means a rich a Target Rich environment if you're a predator uh that's a sign of rebellion let this be a a signal of everyone should be terrified when you're around me cuz even a pencil can murder you and I intend to use this yeah nobody nobody owns life but anybody that can hold a frying pan owns death is a quote that I heard once which is a beautiful one I'm looking at you if anyone betrays me this is the way to go can you given all you experience in all the different ways and you think about martial arts and violence in Mexico and in the in the world speaking of hoist what is your approach to conflict uh like a like a street fight what advice would you give people in the full spectrum of what a street altercation might entail what is the best way to approach it I think before you get there you have to prepare you know so I one of the first things I tell people is uh if you don't have a basic t c training class behind you you should reanalyze your your life and your ability to prepare dple C basically how to stop somebody from bleeding out or dying from a stab wound gunshot wound or any of those types of wounds uh or an amputated leg during an IID scenario anything you would see in a Boston Marathon Marathon type event or a Vegas shooting event where people are getting shot stabbed cut so understand how to help people how to help yourself post you're no good you don't want to be a you don't want to be a detriment to the situation you want to be an asset so build yourself up an asset for in a situation like that because you might be doing that on yourself or on somebody else and also it helps you understand uh what situations are going to result in a lot of in a difficult situation to deal with afterwards yeah it also teaches you what to stab and what to shoot if you're thinking about it in a full and on all the dimensions of it you know you know there's there's all weapon all knowledge can be weaponized and I think that's the approach all people should should kind of figure out for themselves when they start getting ready or if they want to take the responsibility of their own safety in their hands so in a self-defense situation there's a lot of questions here but what what does one stab there's the kateed arteries which are used commonly in Jiu-Jitsu with something to choke because they feed a computer you know so there's a lot of blood flowing through that required for the successful operation of the computer and not a lot of stuff is guarding the outside world from your karate AR that's a really weird design by the way it is not a smart one doesn't even make sense because with mammals they bite each other's neck like why can't you have more protection CU this the only like us humans don't use their mouth to kill each other but most mammals most predators do it's like why the hell don't we protect this we do have a defensive mechanism and you you see it sometimes when people are ambushed and people try to open up each other's necks from behind if you push somebody's neck forward the kateed will actually lower themselves and be encased in more flesh and muscle if you pull ah head back not so much so that's a way that at least I think the evolutionary we' have a defensive mechanism for that uh there's a few videos out there of people's getting their neck sewn back shut after somebody pushed their head forward to try and slice their necks and they survived you know um so this is a viable Target uh the heart is another one um interesting about the thing about the hearten people get alarmed when I talk about this and show it in classes uh again a lot of the classes I do are for orientation and to for people to recognize that behavior so a lot of law enforcement comes to some of these classes oh that's horrible that's how somebody will kill somebody yeah this is how people that know their thing their shit will try and approach somebody and stab you to death This Is How They would do it uh there's a tendency to view what we see in John Wick or view what we see in in uh this martial arts Community where they're you know slicing and dicing people different myriads of ways a lot of that is based on dueling based cultures like the Filipino martial arts or some of the uh Italian martial arts out there where somebody's facing off with somebody else with a similar weapon and where both of us are agreeing to basically get into a stabbing competition that would make sense in that scenario in that context but I've never seen a lot of people actually get into these uh one-on-one knife altercations um what we see now in a modern context when it talks about Weaponry uh is an ambush counter Ambush based uh scenario where somebody pulls out a knife during a a grappling situation on the street or when somebody turns a striking exchange of punch punches into pull pulling out a cheap gas station knife or a pen or uh a rock from the ground or a handgun most modern combatives when it comes to Weaponry should be kind of based on the whole aspect of Ambush and counter Ambush there's a lot of people showing uh valuable kind of material and coursework on this out there um my whole approach and my specific kind of Realm is in the aspect of how people go from the process of learning some of these things from experiential stuff people that grow up in rural rural places grow up on pig farms that actually get the experiences of processing a pig for example or processing an animal those people will have more skills Hunters those people will have more skills with a knife if they pick it up as a weapon then most of the martial artists that I've seen kind of approach some of these uh classes where I go and have a a simulated torso in the form of a pig hanging in a room somewhere some of that has to do with just the the familiarity and the comfort of just like the biology of a living organism like that you if you cut off certain things if you cut a certain thing like it's just it's just a meat vehicle the same thing you know the medical training should come first you know or if you don't have that be hunter or go to a a Butchery class that will teach you more about how to use a knife on somebody else than anything you know that'll that'll give you the experience of Flesh uh most people you know I do this example every now and then where I have people bring in a a tactical knife and they'll bring in a butter knife and I ask them which will go through a torso we have a pig there so it simulates a torso pretty closely most people will say n that butter knife's not going to go through and it does you know it does go go through it's uh thin enough strong enough sturdy enough that it'll go through um kitchen knife a cheap one that cost 89 cents at uh at a Walmart and a expensive $400 one you know and the the cheap one will outperform the expensive one the tip will snap off uh during some of it yeah I have to say that just as a small uh tangent I went to a farm and um just seeing the butchering of me meat and so on uh and the processing of meat and pigs and cows oo that's uncomfortable yeah but I think it also it's honest and and raw and like that's something that probably everyone should experience regularly um CU it it's also humbling to to to remind you like when I um I had a dog Homer he in Newland that was I was very close with and uh we lost them and I I just remember I carried him he's like 200 something pounds had to I had to carry him I had to put him to sleep and like one of the biggest realizations is like oh this is just a this is just a biological thing yeah it's just and then to to realize that this is just meat this is not and you can cut it and then you if you bleed you all of a sudden the life can disappear from you and it's all gone it's like holy shit there's this meat vehicle that some people have referred to as Lex it's I'm just a few stabbings away from leaving yeah from leaving goodbye there's a soul that just flies away yeah it used to be that we had to hang around you know people would come back from Battle and we would hear things next to the campfire as far as oh you stabbed somebody here and this happens but now we live in an age where you can you know when I do a class I this is this is a a stab to the heart and here's like five videos of it happening live you know on live leags or whatever and we can deconstruct that not only that but what weapon was used oh it was a gas station folder it was a Pioneer Woman knife from Walmart with flowers on the handle you know whatever it was uh and people start realizing that it doesn't take a lot that it doesn't take a lot of training because a lot of these people are not high level assassins trained by ninjas in the Hills or anything like that they're people that you grew up rurally or learn by seeing that behavior in others and when they start coming to the realization that it's pretty easy to do that and they start figuring out like how do you counteract that well number one learn the behavior yourself so you can recognize it the whole aspect of being a good counter Ambush team is to be a best the best ambusher in the planet so again the whole aspect of moushi saying know your enemy know his sword you know you figure that out as far as learning that behavior you know when you start seeing how some of these stabbings occurred occur the first thing you notice is that one of one of the hands is always kind of out of the picture or there's a lack of symmetry in the people that are about to do something horrible so when you see lack of symmetry in the environment somebody with their hands going backwards um there's a crowd of people and some and a and two or one individual is looking counter the where everybody else is looking or there's a hyper aware individual in a crowd uh the hyper aware are always usually out there to fuck somebody over or are they're trying to keep those Predators from fucking somebody else over so unless you step back and you put yourself in the process of learning how they learn and you become that potential nightmare person it's hard to recognize that in a in a crowd it feels like one of the significant ways to win or as Street Fighters to avoid it by sort of sending pacifist signals in every way meaning avoiding the situation whenever there's like uh like a hypervigilant people you just kind of avoid signaling that you're one of the players to of Interest yeah if we're talking about counter Ambush at which point do you do that versus shift to the aggression yeah I think violence should be always an option you know everybody should have that option and you need to be good at that option I think uh I think I heard Jordan Peterson talk about the fact that everybody needs to be dangerous but keep that shit under control you know yeah I think he was referring to a different context but I know I know I'm I'm referring to the ability of the little physical conflict there's two cases that I saw of people just utilizing social engineering to a beautiful degree to deescalate shit right one guy uh somewhere first off if you're in a place where people are grabbing your wife's ass or something like that like what are you doing there you know there's a load of things that are wrong with everything that you're doing in your life to be in that environment but yeah let's say you're in an in inescapable situation there was this guy who was in a compromised position uh somebody wanted to fight him uh like legit kick his ass and he said okay uh I'm let's go but I I just I need to warn you that I have heepsy before we go outside and that masterful I was getting my phone out to to film this you know maybe and even I was just lowered my phone to to to give him a slow clap that was a beautiful move you know um and then there was this other man uh there was a there was a riot somewhere in uh uh in inada the M the municipality of inada and Baja they were protesting some of the the people that pick those fields down there part of a tribe called those tiis very Hardy hardworking people but nefarious people too they're they're pretty they're pretty good at their thing um there was a riot line they couldn't break and this old man walks in the middle of the riot line and yells grenade and throws an avocado in the middle of all the cops mhm and all you broke that ride line with an avocado uh that could have gone wrong in so many ways but it didn't I don't know to me like it's there's small lessons there there is a case to be made about social engineering about learning about Behavior about learning how to lie and how to kind of uh move your way or navigate your way around situations like that small things like bartering knowing how to bribe people in Conflict zones is the thing that I I show when I talk about or train people to work in hostile environments deescalation you know specifically kind of figuring out what is a value in the environment uh what things you shouldn't be doing in an environment that might be considered disrespectful or out of place you know people have a tendency that that didn't grow up in places that are violent to make continuous eye contact with somebody that might be a issue or smiling when there's nothing to smile about I think uh you know uh there's a picture I saw somewhere of Russians taking a a portrait and there's Americans there and the Americans are smiling but the Russians aren't yeah because what is there to smile about which is true and of course it's not as simple as smile or not smile there's subtlety to it like you said eye contact is a super interesting one cuz um I found in my in my own life like not making eye contact is other people would be joking but it's a really powerful way to deescalate and there's such a fascinating thing though cuz you could talk talk about drunk fights that are just uh that are harmless but I feel like the same Dynamic applies to the most violent conflict including Wars I feel like ego is part of this so to me the question of conflict whether it's a street fighter anything else is the calculus of are you willing to take an owl yeah uh in terms of psychology somebody grabs your wife's ass you mentioned boy if you let that happen you go home you're going to have to pay the price of you were the person who didn't defend you like in your relationship you didn't defend your wife's honor yeah you're going to psychologically pay that price yourself and depending on your wife she might secretly also lose a little bit of respect for you yeah now how do you play that calculus cuz now we see the war in Ukraine I would say there is elements of similar POS uring in the United States in in Europe in Ukraine Russia China leadership at a at a geopolitics it's still somebody grabs somebody's ass and you're not backing down so to take those losses and basically just posture you know lower your head and live to fight another day type situation the thing with modern violence is you know the access to Weaponry uh you know and I mean again nobody owns life but anybody can hold the fr frying pan can know death I've seen people um you know get double leg taked down somebody on the ground it's a different thing doing in the mats versus concrete that's a good way to kill somebody you know the most prolific impact weapon on the planet is the planet itself you can see various videos of people online where they fall and they hit their head or somebody hits their head and they go into you know the stretched out fit basically uh and that might not kill you then but it'll kill you that night or the second night you don't get checked out you know people bleed out and internally you get an edema again the whole aspect of me showing how some of these things not only some of these methodologies and some how people prepare for violence and how people experience violence how they make their weapons how people fight in the streets and stuff like that is to recognize that behavior from the Inception you know uh there's a video I show where there a bunch of Street kids in Rio de Janeiro I think it's during the Olympics where they're snatching chains and cell phones from people mhm and it's a fun video you know see it and it's uh the first thing you learn about it is how they target people now who are they going after there's a bunch of people there why are they going after that specific person and you start learning about profiling and how they identify victim mentality you know or the Vic the perfect victim you know lack of awareness they keep on a straight line avoidance avoidance of eye contact if they're you know doing something nefarious or wrong uh and how they pick who they're going to go after you know the small people the the women you know the the even some of the men and they separate the men that they're perfect victims versus the men that's is going to turn around punch them in the face you know what are they looking for you know well first off you know you you notice that the the men that are in that environment that look at them and are aware of their presence the hyper aware or the ones that are not good to Target so that's the first lesson there so it's probably a good idea not only to be hyper aware but to recognize that hyper awareness in others if I want to separate myself from the victim crowd another thing you notice is these are kids going after some grown adults and some of these grown adult men are with women and you see them you know kind of getting outside of the grasp of the the kids that are trying to rip their chains off their neck or their cell phones and they have no consideration for the women around them uh you see other men that are with women and you see them grab the women and put them behind them and immediately they'll say this this is the wrong one let me move off to the next one so that that small little lesson in that in those videos will show you first how these kids are growing up tar to to profile and Target who the perfect victims are that's a school for them and that is an adversarial school we should look at that school and apply it to ourselves so in general you think conflict ultimately the people that are doing conflict are looking for for weakness I mean they're looking for opportunity opportunistic that's the Predators that's what they do they look for an opportunity you know uh from jumping down from a tree and and and getting the G the slowest gazelle to uh looking for the opportune moment to pounce on something that's probably big but the risk is worth it I feel like there's uh several motivations but but isn't isn't there also a a power hierarchy motivation as well yeah like you there's something about the big guy that tempts you to send message especially with gangs aren't they send aren't they constantly uh sort of trying to signal that they're the alpha yeah I mean there I mean there's a different situations you could be you could be facing a sociopathic a predator who is looking for something in you that you are the resource that they're looking after maybe it's a woman you know it could be a group of people that don't like the fact that you have a specific uh nationality uh or your Pass Support is stamped in a specific way or that you pray to whatever God all these have factor in uh but in the end they all do the same thing they look for an advantageous position if I were to Target you I would put you in between that wall and you know me so you have two Avenues of exits and I will step on one of your feet to keep that Avenue closed so you have to go this way so this is where my knife is going to be you see that behavior mirrored everywhere in the world first off you look for advantages right if it's something that's unavoidable like you're in between me and my ability to go home or you're in between me and my ability to feed my family or you're in between me and my ability to posture to the people that are behind me the young guys that I'm in charge I will do everything in my power to end you right the motivations are not my realm but the ways they do it are are you know and the basically the advantage part of it so desperation is uh is dangerous it's a dangerous school when I say dangerous school I mean the most dangerous people usually come from those desperate environments you know you you can have uh people in Coronado holding on to logs in the ocean and go through this millions of dollars worth of training and just be professional Killers uh for the government and just be these incredible human beings and then there's a kid that will walk up to one of them when he's off you know and uh put ice pick right into his chest uh when he's least expecting it and that doesn't mean that one is superior than the other it just means that there are more there's more than one way to become that you know teenagers terrify me it feels like the intensity of desperation like the capacity of a teenager like 16 177 to be desperate and also not have the matured understanding of ethics of the world like they have this intensity of feeling uh that I unlike anything else they don't have a volume knob to that so it's like a it's like a garden hose without an nozzle on it so you can regulate it they haven't developed that they haven't learned that maybe from somebody else or you used to be Warrior cult cultures you would you would be Apprentice under somebody or you would learn some of these things from other people even some gang modern gangs have a little bit of that but if you're not and you're just this kid that's been playing Call of Duty uh all of his life or has been witnessing violence and in media and there's no sense of it's probably a bad idea to go off and do this because all these repercussions I could see how that could be a danger to society and some of the volume knobs some of the countermeasures to people exploding on somebody else with a with a weapon you know that you see videos constantly online that remember seeing this one of these two uh teenage girls somewhere in the US and one of them just there's a fight there's a hair pulling competition and all of a sudden one of them takes out a knife and it just happens like that and it's just pure and restrained downward stabbing you know you're like wait where does that come from well uh she's from an environment where she saw that as an option she didn't see the repercussions of it and she found herself in a place where she thought that was the only viable option pulling out a weapon and that's I think that's that's the dangerous part of it so how do you prepare uh to win those kinds of situations to escape those kinds of situations like you said it's training it's exposing your mind I always tell people like if if you don't have a combative base you don't have a Bas uh boxing jiujitsu and that that gives you what like an awareness of your body kind of thing it gives you an awareness of your body give you a spatial awareness if somebody if you C if you can't see the points with your peripheral vision if you can't see the points of somebody's feet in your peripheral vision they are in range to stab you in the heart if they wanted to and that's something you learn from boxing that you learn from Jiu-Jitsu you learn from a bunch of combat Arts where you're you learn about distance and angling people that comes from this experience that you have you know again a lot of these things were just horse play when we're growing up in some cultures or you know Rough and Tumble with your brother since she like that but we're some of us are growing up in single kid homes now and we don't get that we were missing that and if you don't have it then you find it in the you find it in a Jiu-Jitsu gym you find it in a boxing gym you have it you find it in a Thai boxing gym you find it in places where they specialize in focusing on certain aspects of this whole combative hall right used to be before UFC you know we the Kung Fu man you know that K Fu guy that's just Street Lethal shit you you can't use it and the sporting you can't show you this because it'll kill you now we pretty much know that most of that was you know Flights of Fancy or BS you know it pains me too man I wanted to learn some of the deach single Punchy and killing technique you know I remember those books but that's just not still on the lookout for that yeah maybe somewhere I don't know you know maybe if you put a pen in your hand that that might turn into that but that's that's the only way that's the only way right but uh a lot of these myths are kind of like faded away and now you see people that have different combed BAS is combining them all and becoming a fighter now that's UFC fight two people fighting each other is one thing you know you being in the middle of the Portland R and a bunch of state troopers throwing gas at Riders and then Riders themselves fighting each other and you finding yourself in the middle of that that's a completely different thing and if you think you're going to you know go on go on the ground and get in a guard with a with a with a guy swinging around a a shovel a piece of shovel handle right as tear gas is going on because you got uh stopped there and your car was you know windows were broken and your family's in the back seat you know that is a different situation so get medical uh learning how learning about Weaponry you know uh I I personally don't really like fighting on the ground but that's why I forced myself to go to train with different people out there you know uh on the ground you jitu catch wrestling so top and bottom neither you don't like either I I personally I like being in a car and running everybody over that would be great you know if I could or driving really far away or um I had this I had this experience in Utah uh some some friends of mine military uh some of your best Shooters some of the best Shooters in the US you know coming from the uh the Marine Core were showing were showing me how they you know would shoot something from really far away and I was like H you don't even have to be in the same vicinity the scope of violence how far you can be from it or how close you could be from it just wait till we get to see what we can do in the Cyber attack world we can destroy your whole well-being your whole life your identity that's another aspect of it too financial and then uh figure out where you live in terms of Ambush yeah figuring out everything about you such that hurting you is easy I have a class where we specifically de work on social engineering and kind of how how how you can go about something that you know a micro level uh we I do a class with a guy named Matt fidler who does a basically he's one of the Premier experts on how to get into and bypass locks basically uh you'll we he'll show you how to open up every single or bypass every single commercial lock available in the United States like like he'll spread it out it'll open up everything and that's like right and my part in his class is I talk about how you can pull some of that off in a public space and not get caught or how you would employ some of these things in a context where it's like useful for law enforcement for the military stuff like that and uh so we have this exercise in a public space where there's a bunch of PAAD locks in the environment right and they we paint them pink so people know it's our padlocks and we're not breaking into anybody else's padlocks if we get approached and asked about it but I asked the students like so you have to gather all these padlocks from this public space you know so how would you do it so a lot of them are trying to pick them you know they're like very suspiciously picking them and stuff like that they you get caught and it's a whole situation but the Smart Ones Will basically develop a social media campaign related to the bad loocks right um a a beautiful a beautiful example of this and this actually happened here in Texas I did a class out in uh Dallas we put the padlocks all over this public mall and the students basically came up with a breast cancer awareness campaign online that they they made fake uh well they made flyers for it they did the social media page on a campaign they they did this email chain so when they went there people were expecting them MH so they normalized the behavior through social media and they were walking around bull Cutters in the middle of a mall cutting these things off that's a beautiful that's a beautiful solution to a complex problem of that nature and again we the weaponizing part of it anything can be all knowledge can be weaponized and it's if you focus on getting in a street fight with somebody with your fist or a knife you know you're missing out on the whole complexity of violence and and the way that it's now being utilized so in terms of breaking out locks and restraints and captivity let's talk about a dark topic that you're one of the world experts in kidnapping so you teach courses on Conor kidnapping and terrorism I read an estimate that criminal gangs get $500 million a year in Ransom payments from kidnapping so just at a high level what is kidnapping who does it and why what are some insights that can help uh us understand what is this problem in the world it happens in different ways in different parts of the world I mean I just sent off a a group of people that uh trained some of the ukrainians uh and some of the stuff that they were show they were showing them was some of the counter custody stuff that I showed them uh for the Mind named Vince went out there was showing them some of the aspects of how to utilize things like uh Kevlar cordage and how to infuse it in their uniform so if they get uh zip tied to cut them open it's a war setting so it's talks about uh being captive in a war zone but the information or the methodology actually comes from Mexico that methodology as far as how I learned it in terms of how to escape from restraint and stuff like that so in Mexico you have abductions happening where uh cartels uh who hold uh control over a specific uh place or Zone um are having a hard time uh with financial situations as far as uh maybe they're not making enough money to pay everybody off so they let them freelance basically and a lot of way some of these criminal groups freelance or some of these groups actually professionalizing to abduct businessmen abduct the sons of business bus men or people that have money to ask for ransoms for them basically and uh they've taken you know captivity and and abduction to like an art form in places like Mexico and has a history all over the world but uh specifically my experience with it with it was going to uh cartel safe houses that turned into holding places you would see you know homemade prison cells and stuff like that uh and people being held in captivity for months if not years as they were milking their family for everything they owned so it turns out into a business they're not actually even interested in hurting the people no physically they're interested in hurting them uh financially financially and also this if they get hurt they're hurt for a purpose which is to make their family pay up faster or more uh some of the abduction groups that I've seen out there professional ones in Mexico basically make it a living to Target people that have abduction insurance or that work for companies that have good abduction insurance so it's it's it's almost like an ATM for them you know it's like ah here again H so there's some of that going on uh some not so much uh some abductions are Express I mean I'll grab you with a uh in guno take you to an ATM you empty it out and then you're on your way that's an Express kidnapping that might not be worth you doing any insane you know you just go with the Motions um but some people do get picked up you know uh I have trained people with prior experiences of abductions in Mexico and here in the United States people that have spent some time in captivity with loved ones here like ex-boyfriends or boyfriends that tie them up and beat the shit out of them and the restraints they utilize are zip ties and handcuffs some sometimes or duct tape or their own clothing things of this nature basically what somebody's looking for when they tie anybody up is to convince you that they are in control that they are God and that any hope of you releasing those restraints or getting out of that situation is hopeless from a cartel group picking you up in the middle of a dirt road somewhere in Cancun to uh ex-boyfriend showing up at your house and tying you up till you agree to get back with them that's the same thing uh and some of the restraints that are being utilized uh come from different places I mean I remember an instructor I had way back when told me that the proliferation of zip ties as a restraint in criminal abductions came up after the movie Heat came out because everybody wanted to be Robert Ino zip tying people in the bank robbery at the end of the movie criminals saw that and it became like thing hilarious can you actually speak to the is it possible to systematically learn how to escape restraints like handcuffs rope zip ties the best at it or not the military they not see or program people they are criminals I learn how to get out of hand us from a 15-year-old who was in charge of meth sales and in La revolution in Tijuana is there a system to it I mean it's not specifically a system it's uh usually what they what happens is they'll buy a set of handcuffs and they will mess around with them in a playing feature so one thing I do in a class is first off I'm honest about the fact that some you know all restraints are temporary even marriage this is this like wait can we just pause in the Deep philosophical you're like Moto Musashi with that statements all all restraints are temporary even marriage uh I'll just I just I just like adding that one in there for last because this is a dark subject every cage can be escaped all restraints are temporary you you either free yourselves from the restraints somebody else takes them off or you die and your body rots her way around them you know those are the options um and I like that first option myself the second option is pretty cool if you can convince somebody to do that for you uh but that first option is an interesting one you have to deconstruct restraints not all restraints are made the same uh you can train to get out of handcuffs here in the US and you know focus on a pair of Smith and Weston handcuffs which are kind of of the most common brand of handcuffs here but if you find yourself in DET in detention somewhere in Russia the handcuffs out there are completely different you know the key way is different the mechanism is different but some of the same ways of bypassing those mechanisms are let me write this down so in Russia what kind are they using they to travel in there I need this information I'll send you a specific model and details on how to get out of those uh uh but basically just asking for a friend I'm sorry yeah so what I do is I I take a I take a pair of smiing Weston handcuffs I put them in the middle of a of three people in the in a class I spread them out and I have them place them on each other in a just playing manner I have hand I have handcuff ke there and I have a pair of Bowl Cutters there in case somebody gets stuck does something stupid so they they play with each other as far as putting them on randomly I show them how to put him on appropriately and then I show them a handcuff key and a handcuff key will open up handcuffs interestingly enough uh but the thing about a handcuff key is it's not made to be used by the person that is in those handcuffs so that's the first lesson there if you have a handcuff key handcuff keys are the most used tool to open up handcuffs in custody situations you know both criminals escaping from the police to people escaping from criminals just the standard hidden handcuff key so I showed them how to modify that handcuff key so it's more optimal to use on yourself with just basic garbage that you can find piece of wire a zip type piece basically how to put a leverage arm on the Handcuff key so you can actually spin it in the keyway behind your back or in front of you I'm trying to think I don't think I've ever been in handcuff uh appropriate way to handcuff somebody's Palms out how much restriction is there in terms of there's a lot if it's a is a hinge handcuff there's a lot of restriction with no CH can you reach back you could try and reach back or you can basically put yourself in a in a not compromised position and feed the most of your palm meat into the Handcuff way so when they shut it shut it on you you have more space to work with so you can spin your hand we call it a passive resistance um again you go through a process with them where you deconstruct how people are handcuffed uh handcuff keys and how to modify handcuff key to be able to use on yourself and these all of these things they're constructing as we go so they basically hey what's a grinding surface well there's concrete outside so they grind an angle on the key so you can get a key not to go straight into the keywa but you can get it into the key we at an angle for example it's something it's something that is out there as far as a method you can't spin a key behind your back because it's small it's designed to be used by somebody else opening those handcuffs on you so you put an arm on it so you can leverage our arm so you can spin it behind your back you learn how to put yourself in not a compromised position if somebody asks you for your handcuff your hands so so they could be cuffed you don't do this you know you do that or you put yourself in a Gable grip behind your back which is a a pretty strong grip and it's hard to spread those hands apart it's also something that people go into automatically when they're in fear so all of these things are advantageous for you and uh you learn how not only people get restrained but you see videos of them because I show a bunch of abduction actually happening live again the best thing is avoidance but specifically when you work around restraints is number one learn how some of these restraints work number two is learning how some of the readymade tools to get out of the restraints look like function and number three which is the advanced level is learn how to construct all these things yourself which is I think that is the that is the best thing you can show somebody for handcuffs I just use a standard pair of handcuffs and then we deconstruct other very specialized handcuffs that might be out there and you show them if you're going to travel somewhere learn what restraints are commonly in the available in the environment somebody going to North subaran Africa ining a plastic handcuff key is that's going to be useless out there because there's not going to be standard handcuffs out there that would be open with that type of key out there you're probably going to be tied up with a chain and a padlock of some sort maybe a 40 mm Chinese padlock with a plastic core that you can open with a a lighter if you can burn the core melt the core open or uh if you can leverage that open that's a pretty easy thing to open or a bobby pin you could reach all the way in the back and open the latch what about rope uh that common yeah it is common uh this is one of my favorite things for rope something I usually carry and some places it's another gift for you if you want it's a ceramic razor blade nice is it capable of cutting nice right small uh you can put it behind a label I've seen some students put the leis label on there and just so it back on um it is non magnetic non FIS so in and out of uh you know that type of situation you can get in it and it's something you can have with you everywhere this is a pretty fancy one or you can just grab a simple razor blade and actually learning how to use or leverage a razor blade between your palms and know how to go up and down with it to be able to cut yourself out of course that's just practice to do that well it's practice and it's also exposure to just this is a possibility this is how you could hide it again the whole smuggling aspect comes from a criminal uh a criminal mindset type setting so how how things are hidden where they're hidden and when I talk about concealing objects of this nature it's usually comes from smuggling you know the fact that I have something in a notebook comes from heroin smuggling if you're not looking at the school of criminality you're you're missing out on a big part of the uh equation so for people who want to learn about this do do you teach courses on this do do you know what's the what's the rec how do you get in touch with you or learn from you do you have stuff online or is it only in person so I have some stuff on my patreon uh specifically I have a patreon where I share a lot of the online material I basically a bunch of this is my notebook I have a bunch of stuff that I I just met somebody in Philadelphia that showed me a pretty unique way of utilizing a box cutter as a weapon so I wrote some of that down I filmed some of it um and it's not for any other reason I'm not uh trying to create Danger people out there it's like hey look at this this is something that's out there right um so a lot of that information some of those notes and stuff like that I keep on my patreon I used to share it openly on Facebook and Instagram but that uh that has not uh been possible anymore well I'm a member of your patreon and recommend people sign up it's really great because you also have philosophy you're you're you're the you're the uh the Mexican mamoto Masashi uh so it's not just these skills it's also the philos around it like I got that book that book of five rings before I went into training like I took that with me through training the whole aspect of you know go to places uh frightening to the common brand of men you know be put in jail and extricate yourself with your own wisdom I think he was speaking about experiencing experience you know the whole Warriors Journey the heroes journey of going out there and actually risking um I think that's a pretty big basis and aspect of what the work I do and showing some of these things there's a tendency see to people say hey I'm afraid to go to Mexico uh what do I need to know like well if you're afraid to go to Mexico go to Mexico um I mean I was in Detroit I was pretty afraid when I was in Detroit in some parts of Detroit and uh the Southside Chicago um but uh I don't want to be dictated where I can go and where I can't go because of safety I want to take responsibility for that myself and figure out ways of being more capable and an asset to the people around me and myself and that comes through experience um and people want to risk getting a shoulder injury rolling in Jiu-Jitsu or don't want to risk getting a bloody nose and boxing but that is the way well there's some aspect to fitting in you quote Kor Hanzo on imitation the most important thing you should keep in mind when you go on a Shinobi mission is to imitate well the language of the target Province and the ways of the local people this includes their appearances the way of wearing clothes the way of shaving their head the way of making up their hair the way of making up a sword or short Sword and the way of refinement and luxury so how do you fit into some of those places so you know Mexico but a person like me that doesn't know anything about Mexico and say I'm interviewing somebody in a leadership position in a dra cartel yeah how quickly do you learn how to fit in I mean it's not about fitting in it's about coming up with a narrative for yourself with that book is talking that's a that's a quote from the book called a show ninky which is like a an actual legit ninja manual from like the 1500s or something like that um and uh they're they're not talking about blending in they're talking about creating a narrative or a lie to your appearance and your behavior and your knowledge base that's what they're talking about so I would say first if you're going to go to a place like that first off learn what is common there what type of common restraints might be placed on you what criminal group groups work out there what type of guns they have not only what type of guns they have but go to the gun range in Vegas and learn how to f some of these Firearms yourself so you know how to load them in case you run into a bad situation how they tie the sword you how they how they wear their short swords could equate to how you know if you run into some issues also it would give you a good idea how many how many rounds those hold so you can run at the right moment I like how you focus in on the on the tools of violence but there's also the the social engineering deescalation right yeah so if you are in an environment like that and you are carrying around a camera that might be an issue or the opposite not be an issue well if you're asked like who are you with I'm with the news organization or am I with a Christian Aid group here yeah and if you are with a Christian Aid group it's probably a good idea to learn some of the Bible right if you like if you want a quick way of having a somebody out there try and stop talking to you you just start talking about Jesus in the middle of a a little cartel territory when they approach you and take out the Bible that that'll quickly deescalate so what I usually prefer to do is I find somebody from the New York Times And The Wall Street Journal and beat them up in front of the just to send a signal that I'm not a journalist and I too don't like journalists that could that could be that could be a way but uh to send a message I think a lot of us miss the fact that we are capable of taking control of our own narrative and what we communicate to people around us I can show up here uh drinking a Monster energy drink dumping It On The Ground scratching you know what then just sit down and just be a rude motherfucker that's not who I am but I can do that and you will believe me if I am good at it some of us miss uh some of us don't know this aspect because it's something we consider predatory or something that is wrong or negative or bad yeah and some of these aspects are actually you know they're pretty useful um I learned most of my trade craft and skillcraft from panhandlers and street performers and when I had some training related to social engineering those were the people that I learned from uh I remember we were doing surveillance and there was a guy there that showed us how to do surveillance you know on the street and he said if you can find a way for somebody to smell you before they see you you'll become invisible and I was like that's bullshit if you can find a way of somebody smelling you before they see you become invisible I didn't understand what that meant so we went on a three-day Bender didn't take a shower smell like shit no deodorant you know you smell like a homeless person you look like a homeless person and you approach somebody asking for the time and they smell you before they see you and you are not there you're not a human you don't exist exist so that was a pretty valuable lesson that I got there yeah so that that's interesting but like I have this belief it has to do with the way I operate in this world I suppose but if you come off as a person legitimately I guess you could fake it but I I think it it just feels like you can be extremely good possibly the best in the world if you practice it your whole life at being you you yeah at being authent being at showing like you have nothing to hide and a True Believer is what I A True Believer so like yes you can come up with a fake narrative but then what I mean is like live that narrative your whole life then like I yeah I understand and then never falter from that like you are this person that's what I'm trying to I have nothing to hide I I consider I consider that a True Believer and yeah that is a unique person when you meet them and they are out there there are people that will fucking walk into places this is who I am I don't give a fuck this is who I am if you don't trust me well shoot me fuck it um this is my honesty and if you don't trust me well look at all these people that I've interacted with in the past and you can ask them about it or you can see my effects on other people that's going to be my presentation card and so the way you said it now is using words and it's blunt usually somebody's blunt like that like I'm a no bullshit person that means they're not that means they're are full of shit actually but you do that through I mean I'm saying I'm verbalizing your behavior you know just walking somewhere uh you know let's say you're going to interview somebody very dangerous down there and you walk into a room without worry that is that is a presentation to you you know that's a pretty in pretty interesting introduction um you know you're not a threat because you don't consider yourself a threat and you're walking in there with the confidence that you don't consider yourself a a threat which is an interesting way of going about it uh my life experiences have been different um I was in programmed that way from an early age and uh it's hard to for me to go into that line although more and more as I get older and as I learn more about the world and I've failed a few more times I can understand or more cognizant of the fact that you don't really have to try that much if you if you believe in your in in yourself and who you are if you know yourself that's I think that is at the core of it if you know yourself enough to to be able to to kind of communicate that to people around you and you're not hiding from yourself from the world your flaws too that was the other thing you spoke to that is probably aspiring to others is being honest about your flaws about your weaknesses as a human being you can't pick pocket a naked man and right if you if you can if you know how to be naked and again I'm not there I think I'm I'm working towards that just by you know openly going through shit and uh showing people not telling them is show me don't tell me is another valuable lesson that I got long ago um I I travel across the country and I don't not only get to show people what I know how to do but I I I I give examples of it through things that I do out there and uh I say this a lot you know when I travel out there I'm never alone you know there's couches out there waiting for me you know there's uh there's homes that I can get go go and stay at and friends that I have out there that I have never even met but that's been about me not only woring some of those mistakes and and past failures on my sleeve but also turning them into lessons for people and just telling people the fact that you know I know how to do all this weird stuff you know and I show people how to do it yeah but here's a bunch of weird memes that are very humorous about my culture and about being through going through therapy and this is me doing something Goofy and this is me being an idiot in front of all you guys as well you know this is me being the fool I think that uh is another aspect of it I love that as part of that Journey you made enemies with the rodeo clown and made up with him afterwards oh we're still we're still we're in a very toxic relationship you know he knows who he is he's probably out there listening he's uh love and hate we we we we stopped talking to each other for months and then you know just send a thck message of some sort and just you know we're back at it you know back yeah love expressed through anger I love it it's therapeutic you you have both very interesting career paths if we can just jump back to in a really interesting topic that I wanted to mention um on Narco cultism what are Narco Cults what's the relationship between you kind of mentioned religion a little bit yeah what's the relationship between religious culture and drug culture first off Mexico is one of the most Catholic countries on the planet if not the most Catholic country on the planet not only that it is a country that has a root in spirituality through its in in ethnic uh culture that other other parts of the world got most of that taken away and or suppressed or killed or taken away um when the uh Spanish came to Mexico they were a product of a recently liberated group of people they just got done being invaded by the Moors basically and they brought with them the image of La Guadalupe the Virgin of Guadalupe and heran Cortez's vision of that her version of that was a lady holding a crystal scepter baby Jesus and standing on a crescent moon that's what that's what he brought with him to the Americas and uh when the conquest happened you know a lot of people say yeah the Spanish came and conquested the me the the the astec Empire the enemies of the astec Allied themselves with the Spanish and they took took them down that's what happened and then the rest was famine and sickness that's what killed most of them they realized that it was going to be hard to suppress some of the spiritual practices in Mexico so they decided to M them with Catholic iconography so you see these uh this cult to uh toen which is like a fertility variant of a mother goddess in atic culture and they turn her into Lupe which is the icon that a lot of uh Mexicans venerate as the laian the Virgin um but in her she conceals cultural elements from the past she has a black sash across her stomach which means she's pregnant something common in the atic uh culture in the mahika culture she's standing on a cherub that has Eagle wings that is a war god that's the symbol of the war god down there she has stars on her which is a veil of certain stars that are related to some of the spiritual practice from before basically they hid these things in in in that in that uh setting now you skip forward you know hundreds of years and you start seeing things like uh malverde who was a bandit that lived in caloa way back in the day he would Rob Rich Farmers that would go through the uh the countryside one time he was almost caught and he was shot and injured and he was wanted by the government so he told told one of his friends to tell them where he was and to give the money the reward money to the town's people so we did that uh the he was hung from a tree and the the order was not to bury him just to let his body rot and his body R rotted away until it fell on the ground bones and each of the towns people would go over and put a rock on top of his corpse until it became a pile of rocks and then he started granting miracles so again this whole aspect of these criminals becoming Saints uh and also a middle finger from the downward local populace to the uh the church in a way because he's not a recognized saint but he has a an altar and people venerate that then you have cartels that have a spiritual practice or spirituality behind what they do which is part of their culture but is also like a tool they use to ingratiate themselves with the local populace or the or the population around them uh they're icon icons of power and sometimes of uh almost a symbol of rebellion uh you see El Chapo's son when he was arrested had a santono ATA on his chest which is a it's a holy kid of ATA his Spanish Legend during the morish conquest uh they said that a a statue of that Saint would go around and feed some of the hungry you you know that was the legend and he's a he's a saint of the p p persecuted so the fact that when he was arrested he was you see him with that wearing wearing that and then he was liberated is a miracle in of itself so it's proof that that works you see that that was you can find one of those scapol adios anywhere in Mexico that was the most highly sold one um so you see them utilizing some of these aspects uh in in their own belief system to as a symbol or as icon iconography basically for some of the things they do then you go into some of other aspects of it that are out there like Santa mu which is actually a faith that I grew up in Mexico has a weird weird relationship to death we have parties at the cemetery on Day of the Dead We I just went through one you know recently this this is uh November November the 2nd uh so we celebrate our dead and we celebrate death in a way that I don't think a lot of cultures out there do so it's a joyful occasion it is a celebration yeah my 8-year-old put two beers on an altar one for my mom one for my brother she bought a Snickers bar for my mom and a a a bag of pops for my brother uh flower petals and marry gold and pictures of them on an altar at that's amazing what kind of beer teat Roa for my mother because she's you know she was Hardcore and uh they got the light from my brother you know he was a more of a endurance drinker um and it's also for me yeah the relationship to death down there is different uh so there's an icon in Mexico it's actually one of the fastest growing uh alternative spiritual practices in Mexico and not only in Mexico but here in the US I've I've been to Santa Mora temples across the country I found one in Connecticut out of all places how I grew up with it or I saw it is uh we would we my family was guadalupanos we were we were uh Catholic and we venerated the V Virgin of Guadalupe specifically the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe but every now and then there were winks and nods to a skeletal Saint in in in family practices and even when I went to work uh the the guy the older guys that were I was working with would tell me like hey we got to go ask uh ask for protection so they would drive me over to the church and I thought it was going to the cathedral and then we made a left turn and it wasn't the cathedral it was the market next to the cathedral in Tijuana and in the little corner there was a big uh Santa mu Reaper Refugee and then I knew why I had to bring a bottle tequila I was like why am I bringing a bottle tequila to the church it was for her for death La it was partly hazing and also they did believe that they were basically imbued with the being agents of death in a way so it was like a cultural thing as well something that they they wore on them as not only protection but as also like a Sam like a samurai would wear this death iconography on them or how uh the mai would do uh Haka dances you know to some of these guys in their kind of warrior culture that they were growing up with or trying to inew on us the young guys uh they would um take us there and they would en viw US with iconography of sant Mar to be like a psychological thing so that gives you strength and meaning in the face of struggle like in the in the face of difficulties in life I think uh you know you closeness to death and having a relationship to death in the form of a symbolic representation of it like Santa Mar or an icon like that makes it not as scary I guess or not not only that but it's also something that the other side the en me the cartel's groups they would venerate it as well so when they would see it on you it was almost debilitating to them they were like oh are you guys cops are you guys who are you why are you wearing that uh so there was an aspect of that to it um a momental mi my type thing where you'll remember death you know type thing there's some aspect in which you don't want to mess with the person who meditates on death there was some of that yeah there was a saying I I think they probably took it from a movie or something like that but I don't know where they got it uh may I may I earn your need and be your wrath oh man it's a good line they would say that to the Statue of L Santa you know another thing people it's not a cartel specific Saint though it's like everybody like at all levels from the lady that sells tortillas to the um to the cops to the military there's some people in the military that venerated uh there's a there's a very specific symbol of how this is like a weird relationship in the specifically in Santa Marta in Mexico there's a there's a shrine outside of Tijuana right across the uh La Pressa it's like a water reservoir right tjuana and there was a big Santa morte uh altar there like on the roadside and my former bosle zaa ordered that thing destroyed so they he ordered a truck to destroy it it was a famous thing and it was rebuilt the next night and I know for a fact that some of the people that rebuilt that were some of the same guys that you know were there destroying it oh man that's pretty symbolic so it's just it's not something that be can be killed it's a part of the the spirit of the people it keeps getting destroyed by Ultra Christian groups or Catholic groups and it keeps getting rebuilt personally for me as a you know it's I don't believe that there's a a Reaper skeleton in the sky protecting me uh but I do believe in the aspect of an ending you know and how it's important to you know the ending is important in all things and death should be present in life and if it's not then you're delusional about things so to you it's a mechanism to meditate on death once again yeah and you know having uh my daughter who's eight uh view it as a benevolent thing you know she's a kid and she sees a skeleton that represents death and shees do it's like I think uh in a way Mexicans have taken some of those aspects be a day of the dead some of these practices related to some occultism aspects around uh you know St Judas you know San hudas St Judas is the the patron state of lost causes and it's one of the most venerated sa in Mexico you know Jesus is probably know the fourth or fifth you pray to which is pretty funny ridiculous but the reason why and this is something I heard from somebody that uh was actually we found him with a gun and on his gun he had a s Judas Effigy and uh he said well like why s Judas SAS and he's like well he's the last Saint you pray to what do you mean well on the list of saints you pray to he's the last one because when you pray to Judas you might get the other Judas on the line yeah that's the last one you pray to that's why he's like the Lost Cause of Saint how I remember like even how we try and bribe or like maneuver our way even in spirituality in spiritual practices yeah you know uh such a fascinating culture that's unlike anything else and it's right next door and it's here too again I I I found an altar in Connecticut which was pretty fascinating there's one in Arizona again it's one of the fastest growing spiritual practices in in the in not only in the US but like across there's uh somebody from Russia reached out there's an altar out there and there's a group of people praying to Santa Mar and I I've been posting and writing a lot about it recently just from my own experience and some of the stuff that I gathered for myself and all the way out there know people are fascinated by something of those aspects so I got to ask you about the dark turn of of that spirituality or maybe you will place this elsewhere but who was adalo castano Al padrino this is a guy that comes up in a in a period I think this is he's he's at the that initial period of cartel's this is before my time and I've I've talked to some of the people that were there for some of that I mean he killed a lot of people he was exposed and learned uh through his family ties about some of the afro Caribbean spiritualities that are now also exploding as far as influences across the world uh Latin America and and in the US when I talk about that I mean Sania uh Palo mayombe uh basically some old spiritual practices Coming Out of Africa that uh utilize things like in gangas which are basically spiritual vessels that have to be loaded with human remains in some cases he was basically a spiritual practitioner that certain cartel groups would hire for them to curse the other side to inew them with invisibility to be able to transport their drugs or protection spells and stuff like that he was very successful at it apparently or at least that is the experience of the people paying for some of these practices as his spells and his work kept getting bigger and bigger and more and more complicated the ingredients he needed for these anganga or these spells these cold that he would fill with certain elements grew in complexity till finally he said he needed the brain of a highly educated American of some sort which led to his eventual downfall uh he was basically responsible for abducting and murdering a young American who was a university uh college student I think I think you think he believed the so this guy's murdering people to create what magical potions vessels yeah vessels I think yeah I think I think he truly believed that he was uh capable of doing what he was doing I guess and there was a culture that's spiritually inclined that kind of was on the same wave length as him yeah it jbed I mean some of these spiritual practices again there's there's a ritualistic cannibalism done by some of these cartel groups out there was he involved in in cannibalism as well he wasn't involved in cannibalism that I know of but uh most of the things that he was kind of known for was basically requesting human body parts for some of the spell Works he was doing and then going to such a level where he needed a specific brain or head of somebody that was educated and American so that kind of again led to his uh eventual downfalls his Ranch was raided they found the body parts inside of these cauldrons that he was preparing that's an interesting example of somebody there's a cartel head uh somewhere in central Mexico as well uh elas loo was his nickname and he basically forced the citizenship around him to turn him into a saint so he like he made a statue of himself he was very big into uh Christianity specifically kind of like the uh Crusader you know mentality and all that kind of IM vied himself in some of the people that were around him uh with that and there's still altars to his death to him after he died he died two times one time the government declared him that he was killing a shootout and turns out he wasn't dead so that was his first miracle you know and then when he was really dead uh some of his people and his loyal followers are were like gunpoint kind of still forced to go and you know get flowers and venerate this these effes and statues of of him as a saint it's a powerful weapon spirituality in Mexico is a powerful weapon and you know the Church Catholic Church in Mexico has a pretty bad track record but as far as them as far as that uh being used to control populace and stuff like that um and I think uh it's just another aspect that is being exploited in Mexico with in some communities as far as the spirituality and the desperate need for people to believe in something and how that leads for some people to go into some horrible predatory behavior around it there a fascinating Dynamic of play here so it's not just the United States and Mexico it's also China that you talk about China is the primary source of fentanyl in the world so fentanyl is an opioid that leads to 70,000 plus or minus overdose deaths in the US every year so reading from Wikipedia quote compared with Heroin it is more potent has higher profit margins and because it is compact has simpler logistic itics it can be cut into or even replace entirely the supply of heroin and other opiates what do you think is important to understand about fent as a drug there was a prescription OB epidemic in the United States that kind of went down or stopped you know well you know still out there but like the the epidemic specific around it uh kind of petered out and there was also marijuana legalization happening at kind of the same time period which uh you know people talking about marijuana legalization thought it was going to hit the cartels in their pockets and it was going to be like a you know a death blow to to these criminal groups well now there's uh illegal pot grows in the United States being run by cartels in federal land uh there's the legal pot grows that are in some way shape or form influenced and or run or owned by some conal groups and that are kind of utilizing that the the marijuana fields in Mexico turn into poppy fields once again the problem is that some of these lands were leeched of all the nutrients and you know they're not as good as something you would find somewhere in Afghanistan so the the the yield and the quality of it wasn't as strong as it could be so somebody thought about the right idea of putting fenel into the mix and not only that but also figuring out how to get fentin into Mexico um Mexico has a giant pharmaceutical industry that people kind of also don't kind of know or factor into this equation which leads into the free ability of chemicals going in and out of the country and legal means of it happening right so not only the precursors to make it but also the chemist and the industry to create it in Mexico as well some clandestine factories of fentin have been found in Mexico but realistically it's not needed with the with the ways that the ports and the borders are down in Mexico um you started seeing an influx and a flood of uh fenel into Mexico specifically related to infusing it into heroin and not only using that to feed local drug markets but send it up into the United States which started off this process that we're kind of going through still as these like similar highs drug wise why do you infuse I mean probably you're not the right person have this uh biochemical discussion of how I don't know about the biochemical aspect of it but like speaking to guys that do cha down there that's that's that's what they call heroin down there it's like a nickname for it uh having them describe uh some of the older stinkier darker heroin they used to get before this whole fenel thing and the highs they would get and how much they would have to take versus some of the stuff loaded with fenal that they have to you know also there's more higher potency yeah there's a higher potency to it and also there's a you know more money to be made easier to transport yeah but then is this how China starts becoming part of the picture one aspect to it that people kind of Miss is that you know there's no Chinese cartel you know there's no criminal Chinese organization working unseen getting around government oversight in China I don't know of any any such organization that could be labeled as a criminal organization is is uh deeply integrated with the government so it's I mean I've never heard of a giant criminal Enterprise in China operating so we have to assume then independent of the the state I would I would have to assume that some of these things are happening with the knoow and inaction of the government out there um when Co hit there was a shortage of fenel on the Northern side of Mexico specifically related to the seen a la cartel these guys were actually trafficking fenel from the US down to Mexico to infuse their product but not the new generation cartel which operates out of uh the central part of Mexico kma area which have access to the seaside ports so even during the shutdown they were getting supplied which means to me at least for anybody observing it that the supply chain was not cut and whatever was coming out of China was being let out of China by by whatever official channels would be able to shut down or stop it I would love to know the organizational structure the governmental structure of China how they enable it because I can't imagine at the very top there's like a portfolio of things we're doing and one of them isend those right I I I think it's more in action or just the know no how that it's happening but just like hands off just let this I I don't know if I were to understand how large bureaucracies work it's looking the other way yeah you are now seeing um pill presses brought to Mexico Industrial Level pill presses founding clandestine Laboratories where they're not only infusing the the the the yields that they're doing with fenel but also making fake pain medication that is flooding us markets everywhere that's is that P medication or is that fenal you know who knows you and that's how you see a lot of people dying from ODS that are supposedly taking pain pills and that's not what they're doing uh so the evolution right now you're seeing is making something look legit as far as pain medication that it isn't and yeah I mean fenel is everywhere they're infusing cocaine with it I've been getting stories from the US of people buying it through Alibaba or just weird online sources and coming in different packages and just infusing it into into whatever is out there it is killing off a whole generation of people um and it comes from one place or it's manufactured somewhere where it's being manufactured with the precursors and the elements and knowhow that comes from one place well are we talking about China talking about China because Mexico seems to have what's the role of this is such a complicated and how do you start to talk about the drug war when more and more and more China is the source of the drug is there a drug war going on with China there's probably an economic War well you talk this another side to China uh most and this is something that's come out recently a few years back I think but basically the ways you would move money back into Mexico after you have a load up here is that you would give it to a Chinese money broker mhm they would put it into the Chinese banking system and it immediately would just disappear from American eyes and then another money broker in Mexico would receive it through a money transfer from China so China's incredibly good at money laundering that's another aspect to I mean their banking system is invisible to the US basically which allows which allows the Monies to move from one point to another so money Brokers and people moving money for for for the groups down there are Chinese so that's another aspect element of China as far as it's presence what's the role of intelligence in all of this FBI CIA the Chinese intelligence uh agencies right now Mexico is going through a a nationalistic Resurgence and uh leftist presidency which is not friendly to us interest in a lot of ways the US has had a pretty bad track record when it with its foreign policy in Mexico with a lot of damage being done by the last president as far as his rhetoric uh Donald Trump which has been weaponized and utilized by the by the left down down in Mexico so America is not seen uh positively no every now and then I post something about Mexico some horrible thing happening down there it's like why doesn't us send people down there like aren't Mexicans looking for like us intervention it's like no that is beyond what anybody in Mexico would want us specifically you see that the sentiment out there they don't view the US a as somebody that's going to come and infect anything or somebody that's going to help or as a friend uh with the when the Ukrainian uh conflict happened uh Mexico basically abstained from saying anything which is a winking a not to Russia it has openly been PR Maduro and openly celebrated some of these uh regimes be popping up uh across Latin America you know which is that is what people people voted for that is a sentiment down there they're going towards the left of the political spectrum because of they've been basically violated over and over again by all these different presidencies that have promised change brought corruption with them and they are are choices so this is this is the best we have right now uh and all of the enemies of the United States are taking full advantage of that you know we recently had a general kind of address a senate committee hearing I think he was talking about the prevalence of uh for forign intelligence services in Mexico you know and why that is well you know it has Mexico has a lot of the minable lithium on the planet underneath uh parts of it specifically in the north it uh it is going through a process they call it transform the fourth the fourth transformation is what the president of Mexico calls it which is uh in a way it's basically we're here to stay type thing you know they just uh nationalize mining lith and taking control of that and using that as leverage if if the United States ever wants to go to Mexico it's probably not going to be related to cartel issues it's going to probably related to energy I think you know so they're kind of thinking ahead I guess well what about also just imagine a world where India and China are doing fental trade with Mexico or whatever transport imagine Chinese military moves makes an agreement on NATO type of agreement with Mexico that's pretty possible uh again we're seeing a militarized Mexico it's another aspect of Mexico that again I I haven't seen talked about a lot here in the US the main promise that the current president had was he was going to make the police the federal police and the the the the the security issues in Mexico Civ civilian he was going to do exactly the opposite as his main rival Filipe Calderon the guy that started off the drug war officially and what does he do he dissolves the civilian leadership of the federal police dissolves the federal police creates the National Guard which is a military unit and he puts the military in charge of that now the military has a full Monopoly over all federal policing they're when you cross into Mexico you'll see them wearing these white camouflage uniforms those are those are National Guard people but they're they're they're the military so now you're seeing a militarized Mex go with some of these leaks that happened during the wakamaya the wakamaya leaks you're now seeing that Mexico has been hosting members of the Haitian military and they've been training them up to go back to police their country that's not something that Mexico has been known for to hosting other nations and and and training them in such a way so it's like an it's a it's an interesting maneuver like Mexico has been historically neutral about getting involved in foreign conflicts um about voting in resolutions as far as invading or not invading or doing all these things Mexico has been historically kind of neutral when it comes to some of these things and now we're training foreign military uh forces to go and do that role somewhere else um we have the military building airports and building infrastructure in Mexico and a lot of their higher ups getting very you know wealthy around it you know and they basically have a monopoly over you know who gets to have guns down there you know there's one gun store in all Mexico and it's run by the military and the only way you can buy a gun there is if you can buy a plane ticket to fly there and have enough money to sustain that uh that right or that privilege So you you're you're seeing the military not being in its traditional role of just being the security Force now it's policing it's involved in it's it's it's getting involved in politics in a big way you know it's um legislation that has passed to keep it on the streets and the policing role for more years now so that should be looked at Closer by anybody observing it uh from afar how the militarization of Mexico and where it's going because if you move towards a world where a World War III happens it feels like Mexico will be the center because a hot War would be fought on the ground and so you have a very difficult parallel between Mexico and Ukraine both don't have nuclear weapons both have relationships so Ukraine has a relationship or a pull towards the European Union and NATO Mexico at least currently has a kind of slow pull towards China India potentially and Russia and you have this divide between power centers in the world and in terms of just imagine hundreds of thousands of Mexican troops hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops on the border on the US border yeah on the Mexican side and also the fact that that border doesn't mean anything to any sort of conflict uh that would happen regionally because that that's a very easy to cross border doesn't matter how many walls you put across it people are already here uh this is not going to be a war fought off in some overseas place like you're not going to this is something if if it happens if destabilization is utilized in Mexico to cause a conflict there and it turns into a Vietnam or or proxy war down there of A Sort which I think in a way you're already kind of seeing some of that uh through some of the conflicts going on down there you have a a a new generation cartel that is being fed fenal from the Pacific side ports and and suspiciously you know you you you want to think that maybe it's favored by a foreign government of some sort uh in some way shape or form uh who knows and then you have a historically in control Cena law cartel that may or may not be favor by the US in some way shape or form you can imagine a further conflict down there and people fostering it and seeing the effects of basically setting a fire on the feet of the United States it's second largest consumer of us products is Mexico um the massive wave of immigration that is going to be basically weaponized uh you know you saw the collapse of the border security structure with the contingent of 3,000 Honduran Guatemalan immigrants in that first wave of uh Caravans coming to Tijuana you saw it was it was pretty bad you know it was pretty bad and it could have gotten worse now what is going to happen when that wave is no not no longer 3,000 but you know a million people being displaced by violence or being in fear of whatever conflict might originate down there and just that massive wave of migration and move like I think that that's that's an interesting thing that people should look at and you know how can you affect change to try and stop some of the these things that happen well let me ask you a philosophical at a human level what do you think about immigration a legal and legal immigration from the direction of Mexico to the United States so we have an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States and uh estimated 45 million legal immigrants in the United States if you things about that when Co had there was no shortages of uh produce and the in the supermarkets which means that I mean illegal immigration is pretty much the backbone of all uh produce and some of the farming Industries out there you know most of it so illegal immigration and illegal illegal workers in those fields are essential workers in a way I think there's a weird relationship in the United States with some of these workers and how they're demonized and how they're called criminals I think there's there was a state out there that passed uh anti- illegal immigrant uh worker uh legislation the farmers had to look elsewhere for for uh people to show up to work in some of these fields which basically caused millions of dollars worth of losses for some of these uh Farms um anywhere you go out there in the United States you go into the kitchens and there's going to be Panos there you know French uh high level French restaurants you'll see people from pbla there that uh made their way illegally and might have legalized or regularized regularized their way into the country or or in a sanctuary City uh you go to the service industry hotels you know those are the people changing the blankets uh those are the people in the washrooms uh you have them doing jobs that no American wants to do realistically and they're everywhere in this country and they are the backbone of some of these industries that are essential in this country do you think there's a deep sense in which they are American I think they're indispensable and anybody that says they aren't is delusional if you take every single legal worker out of the industry in the United States and send them back like there's a movie out there called like that the m a day without Mexicans you know everything would stop so the there relationship is there uh people talk about the history of SL slavery in this country like it's a thing that in the past uh there's endangered endangered uh slaves in the country right now people that are paying off their their people Smugglers because they brought them into this country and they haven't been able to pay that fine or that fee yet and are basically being held hostage by that here in the United States so they're slaves right now in the United States you know people are talking about it's a historical context what do we do about it how are we supposed to think about it we're going to have to rethink how we look at immigration illegal or ille or illegal or legal immigration from Mexico and how we view Mexico as a as a foreign country um your relationship to Canada is one thing your relationship to Mexico is another um the foreign policy towards Mexico has been pretty nefarious in the as far as the United States in a lot of ways you you can go back there was a student Massacre during the Olympics and the president in turn at that time was a c on the CIA payroll and it was a counter communist uh type maneuver that were doing down there but the there are some bloody hands on on on the US side of some of the things that have been happening in Mexico as far as destabilization and influencing and meddling and foreign policy out there most of the guns that are used down there come from the US you know and that's a that's another interesting aspect and responsibility that people shouldn't kind of think about up here so there is on the drug war side a machine that's fueling the drug war I mean there's a giant drug habit up here you know but also a governmental intelligence and Military Support through the sale of weapons I don't know about the sale of weapons but you know there's some very we talk about poorest borders uh coming up there's poorest borders also going down you know there's there's a flow of guns going down and Munitions which again gun they don't kill anybody by themselves you know they put they get put in the hands of the desperate that are trying to feed a giant drug Market to the South to the north you know Mexico has a saying Mexico Mexico far from God but close to the United States right uh and uh there's uh there's definitely a responsibility on both sides this is no longer a Mexico problem a US problem this is a regional problem and if we don't think of it as a regional problem with our brothers on the southern side of it and with family we we're related in blood there's like we are we are Mexico and the United States are like this but it's become popular in politics they just throw a line right and I think we need to get to a place where we can figure out how to make those connections and repair some of the Damage Done by like just years and years of uh bad policy on both sides of the Border policy and rhetoric though we talk about the way we think about it not just the actual policy but uh seeing the humanity and the people that are here yeah it's an easy thing they're coming to take our jobs is something you hear uh there was a state out there that passed some uh anti- U anti- legislation as far as uh illegal workers on fields and it led to massive losses nobody wanted to show up for those jobs basically they people would show up one day and they would come back and they were doing jobs that people just don't want to do are they taking that from the the locals or are they feeling an essential role that we feel guilty about and uh the redor around it is more about guilt than anything um I I am an immigrant myself you know I I've gone through the experience of doing it legally and I've seen people not do it legally and are in way better places than I am basically uh by going around some of the system um the system itself the immigration system here in the US is is there's something wrong you know it's kind of broken um and people coming here illegally are not only you know they're looking for a better life for themselves a better life for people this whole aspect of vilifying them and they're like ah there's a there's this immigrant did this horrible thing this immigrant did that horrible thing and uh people's call saying you go back to your country at the same time they go to a hotel where they're all all the staff is from that part of the world and they're here irregularly or they go to the you know the Whole Foods and they get some produce there and it's picked by some of the same people are vilifying again we we need to kind of like think about that and analyze that for ourselves like yeah the idea of go back to your country and finding the other and having a disdain and a hate towards the other ever since I had a recent conversation with yay formerly known as Kanye West I got to hear a few things from let's say unfriendly messages from White nationalists and I got to learn about this world um I continue on the Journey of learning which is the idea that the United States this country should look a certain way should have a certain skin color should have a certain religion and everything else is a pollution is a poison to this I made it sound hateful right now but they usually frame it in a positive way uh like the the Purity I'm sure Hitler also phrased everything in a positive way especially in the 1930s about the purity of Germany but the reality of the United States and one of the things that makes it uh at least the ideal of the United States is the soup the mix unlike So Many Nations I've I've travel to there the the diversity the good kind of diversity is what makes this country great and uh there so I think it's it needs to be based on the accepting the different groups that make up the United States versus trying to purify it and I think Mexican immigrants is just another flavor of saying this is the other let's reject the other yeah I I saw that interview by the way that was that you showed amazing restraint and then an interview my experience and I I came up here again Trump was elected when I was when I came up here so it was a weird time for me as far as being an immigrant and the Immigrant experience for myself um by both being you know basically the the bad the the the ones that were you know talked about in that way and also having a bunch of my friends who were very conservative and you know wearing some of those Maga hats around me and like hey Ed like like well I mean you know you know I'm a guest here so I have to you know but uh it's a balancing hat is what I've been looking at it as you know on one side there's the woke side of it which every everything goes and on the other side is like let's hold on to some of these things that make us who we are on my end you know I want to get to a place where I can smoke a joint uh concealed carrier firearm be at my gay best friend's wedding and I want the government not to say anything about it and I think there's Parts in the United States hereo that kind of feel the same way but there's extremes on both sides they're pulling you to one side or the other and I've seen more of the United States than most Americans I'm in a different state every weekend so I get to go to I'm going to Tampa in a bit tomorrow then I'm going back to California then I'm proba Tennessee later then Kentucky so I get to see all types of of people and all types of mentalities and and and ways that people live and this country is more diverse than most would think you know if you only see it through the lens of television or media what I keep seeing out there that for me is like a the reason I came here I guess and a lot of a lot of the reasons that I feel a vested interest in this country not just because again my kid's American so I have a very very big uh interest in this country doing well but a thing I see is the there's still the opportunity and the ability to do something with yourself and and and opportunities out there for people like me that come here with nothing I came here with an experience spacee a truck and some demons and yeah and a bunch of demons in a bag and I'm here with with you talking right now about some of those experiences to another immigrant another to another immigrant and both of us are reaching people out there that uh you know might not might haven't heard a voice of people like us that come that come here with our own bag of uh demons but where else in the world can two people like us have a conversation with a with an audience like us and not be uh shot outside of of of this because of the stuff we're saying yeah listen to with uh with with love and respect not not uh derision um let me ask you for advice what what would you say to Young Folks wherever they come from so in high school and college they're thinking of how to live a life have a career they can they can be proud of and uh especially if they're struggling especially if they're at a low Point like you were when you came here a travel travel is one of the biggest things in the world that I would ask people to kind of go out to uh see how other people live don't go there with your own preconceived notions or trying to make people act like you act like go out there and travel and actually experience the world it doesn't have to be another country uh going from uh Tennessee to Seattle I know it's it's a pretty interesting change of uh scenery who's better at knife fighting just kidding you don't have to answer that uh Tennessee uh but but uh the uh uh traveling is one and knowing how other people live uh is one aspect of it that would tell people uh it's risky it's dangerous but that is part of the journey is one of the things I would ask people uh young people to kind of like consider service is essential and it should be at the basis of all of our Lives service start there start with service in any industry you're going to go start your own restaurant you have to work in the kitchen for service if you're going to be a part a productive member of this country service and I'm not talking just about the military because the military it's it's a process and it's a lifestyle and it's a thing for some people out there it's not even a choice for other people if they want an education and I get that community service of any kind is an essential thing the ability to go out there and interact with the people that you would normally not interact with uh homeless population that you know that there is in this country uh the the older population that uh in Mexico our our old die in our homes you know uh you know but here you send them off somewhere else to die which is an interesting weird Detachment that I I've seen in the US as far as how the elders are are cast aside uh if I can say anything to young people is to start figuring out our life of service and that's going to that's going to expose you to a bunch of experiences to a bunch of people out there you might not regularly kind of meet and see and realities education is out there it is expensive but I've sat through a bunch of really expensive classes that I've managed to see on YouTube and learned a lot from them uh so education is out there but it doesn't have to be as expensive as they as they make it it's all about the individual and what he does with that education the dream is free and the hustle is sold separately is something else I watch somewhere uh online but the ability to take uh take information process it and use it uh we're expecting everything to be safe processed and given to us in a platter and taking that and digesting and thinking that's going to make us uh somebody that's going to be productive or valuable in society that's up to us the US talks a lot about freedoms but doesn't talk a lot about responsibilities I think that's a big part of you know take responsibility for shit like I came here without anything and the first thing I thought was I have a responsibility for the people that I've work with and the people that are going through the same Pro the same problems that I am how can I figure out a way to help yeah the Dark Side of thinking a lot about freedom is thinking too individualistically meaning thinking about me how to optimize my situation forgetting that the deepest growth you can do as an individual is by taking care of others by helping others by being of service by being useful to your community locally and then hopefully also at scale and that's how how you grow and that's responsibility of like helping those around you there's an isol relist aspect of culture now it's like we we're separate there's a there's almost like a spiritual or cultural amputation in a way where you know when when I was a kid the house with all the bikes outside of it that that was where all the kids were hanging out and now everybody's on their phone you know the separate houses I chatting on whatever um there's an attachment to there that's a it's a weird aspect to it and also the the the aspect of I'm I need to be safe I can't be offended don't hurt me safe spaces this is my right this is my this is my right this is my reality you need to respect it you respect is earned in my when where I come from respect is earned um there's freedoms but there's dangerous freedoms those those any freedom you have in Mexico is the dangerous freedom in a way you know you can drive home drunk in Mexico you can if you bribe a cop on your way there and if you don't die or crash into somebody else that's a dangerous aspect of Freedom uh but there's a responsibility to all of it it it is a twisted responsibility and a twisted way kind of talk about it and describe it but I think the the aspect of people screaming for Freedom up here their rights or their privilege without the responsibility you know you know what are you doing for your community you know what you're complaining about this what are you doing about it you know um another thing I've noticed in traveling around it's scary is the whole people people getting shouted down or cancelled because of what they express or say yeah some of the creepiest experiences I've had in the US has been through universities or just seeing young people that have an opinion that is completely outside of reality you know um people telling me how things are in Mexico because they learned it through a college course yes and seeing sons of immigrants criticizing me because of my opinion of Mexico or what I have to say about it and you know if you want to encounter the worst enemy of a Mexican is usually a second third generation Mexican up here that uh shouts you down for what you're saying I mean in general entitlement all those kinds of things some of that comes with just being young in general but yes humility uh humility at a societal scale would would benefit significantly espec the young so I I would say some of the service that you're speaking to is comes with being humbled yeah and that that is one of the best things you can do as a young person whilst maintaining the dream and the ambition humble yourself to the reality of the world yeah one small example a micro example of this uh my kid there was a homeless guy uh she was out with with some with family members this hom guy homeless guy showed up he was erratic mental mentally Disturbed created a scene she was upset there was a little bit of trauma there she like oh now all homeless people are bad so with her she does art pieces sometimes for me and helps me make designs for the clothing brand that I have and we take some of that money and we buy socks and underwear you know and I sometimes I have them in the car sometime I drive around see somebody needs something and I give it to her and says you help me earn this money that's going to help these people just give them these and she's like you know and a thank you and she's like hey cool rolls up the window uh she used to roll up the window really quick now she doesn't they they cease to be scary yeah because now some of them have names now some of them know her name you know when when they when she crosses by there so she's there's contact there she's more connected than I am in some of these places now you know she has Friends in Low Places and in high places that comes later I guess but she is learning about service she's learning about not every not not everybody out there is an enemy or bad or scary she learning about service and she's uh basically learning that lesson that I got from my mom long ago you know nobody's against you there for themselves don't take anything personal and if you're not doing something for other people while you're working then you're not doing anything so when you were young you were pretty sure you're going to die before you're 30 yeah what's your relationship with death today do you think about your immortality are you afraid of it I'm not afraid of it uh if anything I'm afraid of uh a meaningless death or at least a mean a meaningless uh walk towards it I'm afraid of losing use of my legs I guess I'm afraid of uh not being able to go out there and do things anymore I'm afraid that I'm not physically capable of doing the job that I used to do uh so if anything I'm afraid of Stillness you know it's something I always quote a lot in my writing Stillness is death so you always want to be challenging yourself moving growing like you're traveling so you get all these experiences and filling your life with all these experiences and if it ends when it ends you're ready for it yeah I'm not afraid of the end the ending is important in all things first time I got a promotion I got two silver coins hand it to me MH here's a silver coin and this is another silver coin and they he said I'll give you the the other one when your job ends you know it depends on you if you wanted to have it over your eyes or in your pocket right and uh the lesson there is that uh you know this job you're getting it's pretty cool and you're going to be in charge of all these people and it's pretty important important but it's uh going to end so you always have to the ending is important in all things um if we don't keep that in mind then if you think we're Immortal and nothing's going to end I think that's a there's an atrophy a spiritual atrophy in that for the sake of spiritual flourishing this conversation too must come to an end so I think a beautiful way to end it and I'm a huge fan of yours thank you for being a man with a life well- lived and for talking with me today as an honor man it was an awesome conversation thank you for having me on thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Calderon to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from albino's character and Scarface Tony Montana you don't have the guts to be what you want to be you need people like me so you can point your fingers and say that's the bad guy thanks for listening and hope to see you next time