Transcript for #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels

I mean, first off, anybody can be got. Anybody can be corrupted. You know, you're working that field and you You realistically, the training we got and profiling and investigation and stuff like that was basically you learned from the older guys there. And some of those guys were already corrupted from the start. So trust no one. I remember seeing that expiles episode where that was stated. You quickly learn that even if you are somebody that to your own 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 sometimes a payment for some of this corruption is just a continuum living. You encounter people that seem incorruptible that go through FBI background checks that go through all of the The security measures that all of us were put through, 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 people get corrupted through their families, through need. Mexico is a place where a lot of instability occurs. So financial needs help.

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 time period. So you go off and grease the wheels with the director of the school. People hearing this in the Mexico, not their heads because this is something that happens from early on. So there's systemic, there's systemic and cultural thing to it, you know, as far as getting around rules. And this happens because, you know, the people that are in charge in Mexico, the government is, you know, 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 criminality.

I think that trust is never really, really guaranteed. I know a lot of people are going to say that's a sad way in hard way of living your life, but you know, life experience at my end. You know, people change, you know, the dynamics of a relationship might change. But I look at people's character specifically their path and the path of experience as if I can. somebody that presents himself in front of you as somebody but you quickly learn that that somebody is just a mask or a persona that they kind of 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 you can see it in my nose you know you can see it in my lack of a digit you know the amount of You know, the amount of failure 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 people of that background that I trust with my life, you know, because they're not not not not reformed. But they figured out that that's not not a life that could live long enough to 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, because, you know, whatever person of the adopt adopted over the years. is a pretty good one, pretty good mask, sometimes such a good mask, they don't even know that wearing it.

I mean, put an example of my own background. My mom didn't have a father. She left early early on in their childhood. My mom raised her two sisters. and basically kept a household. She was a great mom. She was a badass. She was very independent. She showed me how to be independent. She showed me how to watch out for others and kind of build me up in that way. And I had a great childhood, as far as her and how she molded me later on. I figured out that when I had my own kid, You know, I figure 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 sign of something at least 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 predatory instinct. You'll never know. I mean, they spend their whole life practicing how to hide it. But if you can figure out somebody's background childhood where they're from, you can kind of tell something about them. I'm from Dekwana. I'm a survivor. That's my background as far as where I'm from.

Yeah, I guess some people are born with certain predispositions, and if they're on the right environment, some of the negative aspects might flourish more than others. For me, I grew up skateboarding in thickwana, and I remember breaking into my first backyard pool. It was a house that a cartel guy owned, and we used to skate the pool in the back of it. So I learned how to pop open padlocks with a with a small vehicle, hydraulic lift. And I remember doing that and 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 what you learned that. It's like some pretty learned iguana and like wow that's interesting. Like all people from iguana like that. And I said, no, we're not all like that, but I guess in some way we are because, you know, if you want to produce some produces kids like that, you know, she produces like the environment itself produces produces a pretty specific person, I guess. Our normal or baseline normal is way different than most.

Yeah, there's all it's all there. Look at the outskirts or even the center. How you can increase things to make things easier and how it's like a personal thing. I'll just, you know, pay off the Antiquan. Now we have a more these as what we call it. You know, when you pay a cop off, no more these that means a bite. So, and what's the bite? So you get stopper for traffic violation of some sort in the cop walks up to you. Obviously you don't say the word bite, but it's like a slang term for it. And he asked 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 your money inside the paperwork and hand it over to the cops more than that. You think it's, you know, I'm just going to do it. And nobody knows, you know, but it's a systemic thing. Everybody, they're like a lot of people do it. And then they don't trust the police because they are fed with this.

I think, you know, for me, it was looking at seeing that in somebody else that I kind of learned about it. There's a man that I consider a mentor figure. His name is Lieutenant Colonel Lee's Alda. He was a lieutenant Colonel from the Army that basically came over and took over the group that I used to work with. He was incorruptible. That was the essence or the aura that he projected. The first time he went off on patrol when he was a place in charge of us, I actually drove him around the Guana. He was one of those lead from the front-type of people. The amount of assassination attempts he got was basically a proof of how uncorruptly he was because they kept trying to pay him off and when that in the work they tried to kill him several times. I think the last assassination attempt took the use of his legs. 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 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. The Catholic guilt that's kind of built into some of us is always kind of there, you know. It's like a guigui bibahahatagama. The devil was under the bed, you know. So I don't consider myself Catholic, consider myself culturally Catholic, I think, is what I kind of say with that. had a pretty good structure with my dad and my mom at the house and you know they never let me get away with things and I think my mom was pretty a pretty big moral compass for me but Lieutenant Colonel kind of leading from example and seeing his work and how how much 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 during this The one that was the most dangerous city on the planet when I was working there, and he took charge.

That's an interesting question. I'll say this, seeing him. I mean, he lasts assassination attempt. He had, they don't look at the use of his legs. He was with his kid. There was a recklessness to it. You know, 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, and also you put in 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. For me, it was I wouldn't get picked to get on board with some of the operations groups that I wanted to work with because I was known for not, you know, taken money or not being trusted by certain older segments of the organization that I was with with stuff because they knew that I wouldn't, you know, I wasn't on the, you know, they won't get money. So there's that there's always a weird sacrifice to it and you're almost kind of like, massacistic in that way when you When you get a approach with it, they're like, why are you being an idiot? Why are you driving around that beat up car? Look at the Hummer H2 that just drove in with the other guy that is doing exactly the same job. Society is 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. And, you know, seeing it, you know, again, from the outside, I'm not there anymore. There's almost like a wide-inch you add, you know. That could have been easier, maybe. Or you could have been dead long ago, you know, because people that are on the take down 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 hints you off of drug operations in the area, your rivals are pretty keen on killing you.

It's a big one, you know. I'll say, you know, for me, I didn't think I was going to live this E30. You know, I was sure of it.

I lost my brother when I was 13 on a two. He was 19. He was like the... the VIP of the family enough. He was, you know, he was a, you know, skateboarded BMX motorcycle hunter, one of the best marksmen that I've ever seen shoot. So better than you had everything. Yeah, he was the best of us is what I would say. And when he died, there was, it's almost like a concert at this funeral. You know, I met three of his girlfriends that all introduced themselves, like the one, you know, yeah. to this day. I mean, now and then I get to pull the side down and when I go back home and the Eric's brother, you know, despite all the stuff that I've done, I'm still, you know, every now and then I get recognized. That 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. From 13 onwards, I had this self-destructive, you know, aspect to me after that, I think, you know, so again, something that's come up in therapy, you know, after I've been gone through all that. And I 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 it my brother.

Yeah, at least that was my I was my mindset going through that job. I remember I was in medical school before that, you know, second year medical school. It was doing pretty good. And then I'm 11 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 out in the newspaper and my brother's my big brother who's still alive and he's like, not that he must, you know, yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna do that shit. You wouldn't dare. And I was done and I was in the field having my share of hair shaved off. And a bunch of the gaffes, the guys that later turned into the Zeta cartel, militarymen were in charge of our training. And I went through that process.

I was sold the idea of this being a new Americanized police force that they were constructing in Mexico. In Mexico. So elite, yes, special force kind of prestigious elite. The people in charge of our training were a lot basically Mexican, Mexican, goff, people, goff is their, what the special forces kind of originated. A lot of their members turned into the Zeta cartel. So they were brutal and they're training. We were so this idea of it being, you know, scientific, like educate, educate it based and like a career path. And all of a sudden, we're in this refurbished prison that wasn't good enough to be a prison, and they turned it into a training ground. And quickly kind of realized that they were training us to be a paramilitary group, not a community policing organization, which in my mind, that's like thought, that's what we're going to be doing.

a fragile innocent boy becomes a man kind of process it's it's uh... there's turning us into something that they could use so it's a breaking down uh... they break down the individual you know it's uh... physically mentally yeah i think it's uh... 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 stripping off your identity. Everybody gets a number, the uniforms, the running around and being treated like human garbage. The first thing they said to us when we were lined up in that field was a I bunny Vatican, but I go monarchy, I got wood bun Which means 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 Everyone the United States because people down there could actually get physical with us I mean they could actually pay us in punches and chill like that which is not allowed here anymore, at least in most of the militaries and is horrible is down there. Thank you 47's being shot around us to simulate reality, basically causing hearing loss, that type of stuff.

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, time-wise, you're more invested you are. in a way you're kind of building your own chains like going through that process. Well, you attempted to walk out? Yeah, several times. Several times, specifically seeing some of the ways that people that I thought were better or stronger than me were walking out or quitting because of something that happened in there. There was some sexual assault happening in there as well.

Ball is, you know, you're in a place like that and there's females 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 of our safety and education and look at what's happening here. So you could see some of the smarter ones leaving, you know, not not looking at this as a viable choice for life.

I had this motivation, this idealistic motivation in my head, making a difference. They drill a lot of nationalistic kind of the flag marching. It being part of a group and the group being behind you and all of this.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I got into my, I mean, it's a indoctrination. You know, it's a, it's a paramilitary group. So everything there is basically modeled after the military. So that's what they were trying to kind of instill in us. I was a, I was a team leader in there after three months, basically I was, We went through a bunch of trials, physical trials, mental trials, and stuff like that. And that's some of us were named team leaders. And I, you know, bought into it. You know, I'm the, I'm supposed to be here looking at me. I'm, I'm making headways. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sticking out a bit, you know. And I was pretty proud of what I was going through there six 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. An example of this, we were trained with a 92 FS Baretta, which is a 9 millimeter pistol, Italian made. We got to shoot 20 rounds out of that gun. And then when we got out, we were handed a glock 17, which I've never seen one in my life. I was trying to figure out where the safety was, and a few other people there were handling those guns in a horrible manner. So we were very under-trained under-equipped, and there was a lot of assumptions about what we knew, and all of a sudden we were being cast into this, the start of one of the You know, bloodiest and longest lived modern conflicts in our history. That doesn't get called that, but it's basically been an ongoing war in Mexico that is still to the stay, you know, a massing 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 at 2004 and there were already, you know, major cartel related ends all over Mexico by then, but not at the at the size or scope as I was about to go into, you know, when President Felipe Coutheron 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 militarized the drug war, you know, including us.

First off, there are giant local drug markets in Mexico that are fought over, you know, just local drug markets that are huge in scope. So no exporting to other locations, just to start. Yeah. Yeah. So a big problem in Mexico is basically those local drug markets. And an example of that and when I have a lot of experience with this is the one in Dijuana, which not only feeds the local populist, but also feeds the populist from San Diego that crosses down into the, into Dijuana and buys their product there. And now, you know, phenomenon that's recurring now is marijuana trafficking is going from California down into Mexico because they produce better wheat, you know, which is fascinating to see now.

Yeah, there's not a lot of people in vehicles getting check when they drive down and Dijuana is being called San Diego south now because, you know, all the economic migrants, you know, living down there. 90% of all houses in Tijuana, new houses are being bought up by Americans, so I don't 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 or around Mexico through the ocean under the wall, you know, drug tunnels, over the wall. And on backpacks, on migrants that go up into the United States, not only do the cartels make money off drug trafficking but also extortion. money laundering paid protection schemes, you know, any mining operation in Mexico will have to pay protection, you know, or also get hit. A lot of times the largest money makers for some of these criminal groups are, you know, protecting and taxing anybody that goes across the border. So that's also a big issue. 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 several out there. I don't have a current estimate, but last time I checked it with somewhere where in the vicinity of 50, the 70, the different groups, some small that it 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 Sinaloa cartel, which is probably currently the largest and most powerful one in Mexico. And the new generation cartel, which is growing exponentially right now. So these criminal groups are players in that conflict. Then another player that doesn't get talked about is politics, politicians. There's a there's an ongoing discussion that has been going on I think since Trump was elected about cartels being a terrorist organism cartels being terrorist organizations are not or if they fit that description Well, you know, we are living through multiple assassinations on political candidates on the 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 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 present right now. state governors. So politics is involved in it. That's a big player as well. It 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.

We just seen the arrest and prosecution of the head of all Conrad Cartel operations when I was active in the form of Garcia Luna, who was the guy, Philippe Calderon, who kicked off the drug war. That was his guy. Turns out he was on the deck at that level.

I don't think there is realistically anything that kind of supports some of these groups, you know, you're supporting things of a horrible nature. There I just posted recently on my Instagram account of a lady that was in Guanajuato. She's one of seven recently assassinated women that are looking for their kids, basically. There's a bunch of groups and organizations out there in Mexico and some in Dijuana that I've actually walked with who are taking control of trying to find the bodies of their kids. That's her up there.

There's many groups out in Mexico who basically have given up on trusting the government to find their kids. The number of missing in Mexico is debated topic because the government itself doesn't release those numbers or at least hasn't done a good job about keeping them and or releasing them. Mexico is a country that has industrialized body disposal. And Dijuana, we had the Stu maker, the legendary Stu maker, which is a guy that basically used caustic acid to get rid of bodies at a massive level.

At least, at least in Tijuana, we saw that phenomenon. And it's obvious that it's going on all over Mexico.

I'm not sure exactly where these trade craft skills are coming from specifically. You hear discussions of Israelis training some of the cartel groups back in the late 90s, specifically the Yaryon Fields cartel. There's a lot of stories about that. a security specialist coming down and showing them things like how to make caustic soda, how to put rocks inside of bodies and then chicken wire them around and throw them into the ocean or rivers so the bodies don't float and when you put rocks inside of body to make sure the body doesn't float so you open up the intestinal track put rocks inside you cut where tattoos are, you take off hands and faces and throw them somewhere else and you wrap them and chicken wire. So making that identifiable. Yeah. And throw them into a body of water. And this is this is a horrible thing, but it's actually the craft. It's a tree craft. It's a tree craft. It's a tree craft. And it's a there's a link to the US as far as that malad tree craft. You have to remember that The United States had a thing called School of the Americas and the CIA and they showed things and a lot of that stuff is out there in the hands of people that are of that generation. Yeah, there's a manual.

I think I think that was common back in the early 2000s 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. What you usually see is just bodies being burnt to a crisp and buried in the field somewhere. That's usually what you'll see. Some of the groups like this woman, this woman belong to basically taking upon themselves to go out to find client-estine graves in the outskirts of the towns that they live in, probing the ground with these metal probes and seeing if whatever they encounter in the bottom of these these clandestine graves stanks are not if they find IDs or clothing they kind of gather that and they basically presented to the investigative authorities in the towns of the states they live in which basically they're doing their jobs you know over 90% of all matters in Mexico or 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

It's a thing that happens over time. There has always been a big effort even when I was in to buy or own certain members of the police force, even when we're 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 their FBI background check came back negative, you know, when they were already in the training program. So I think part of it is First off, they take advantage of the fact that Mexico is a young country. It's a country young people. We have a big group of young people that have little to no opportunities to come up. When I went to take that career path a lot of my friends took the other option. They went to work for some of these criminal groups. So they have this going for them.

There's no options. So you have a kid somewhere who is working on a field, or you have a kid like me that was out of the job out of school. And the only options for me was this bad in the newspaper, which seemed like a long shot, or going with some of my friends that had cars now, and we're hanging out all night at these bars, and some of them had, you know, drakeo, AK47, pistols in their cars, and it would look cool, you know.

I mean, it's not a lot of options. You know, do you think you'd be good at it? I don't know. 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. Yeah.

A lot of the people that I used to work with, you know, I know things and I have been training and I have some specialized training and I currently do, I've done, you know, presentation 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 so work with who are out of the job are in the wind, you know, and some of these people are way more trained than I am, you know, it's interesting what the, the reason why I get sought, get looked for and they asked 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 could speak from the experience as far as encountering some of that directly. Some of the people that I used to work with were way better at it than I am, are in the wind. 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 police officer in Mexico of that region there's no options for me 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 $12,000 to join some of the organizations out there. Plus, they get benefits and not like the government. I'm still waiting for my liquidation. My liquidation check. This has been out of service for like six, seven years. I'm still waiting for my check. So some of these people, it's obvious that the opportunities are presented to them out there stronger. 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 Dijuana. early late 90s, early 2000s called the Nako juniors. Nako juniors are basically board middle middle middle class or upper class families had kids that were board and they just joined some of these cartel groups. These cartel groups saw on 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 were drug-mueling. So this is how they start getting into different areas, you know, that they regularly couldn't. You know, that's how it starts. You know, you owe somebody, they get into paid protection, the type schemes, which are also common all over Mexico. And sooner or later, they start owning businesses and they regulate some of their income. So they become part of the part of the local economy in a big way. I had this experience and seen a lot where we were driving down this shitty street and all of a sudden it became a cool, nice, you know, Kirby High got like a high way type thing and I looked around there. It's like this is a nice road. And the guy was with me said, yeah, the cartels built it. You know, you go to some of these towns and the cartels are the government there that he built the hospital, say built the churches, they built the schools. COVID happens, they're enforcing the mask mandates. They're enforcing the mask mandates, the state home policies. They're the ones delivering supplies to the townspeople and bags, courtesy of so and so cartel. So they become the Robin Hood characters of their environment to their smart. These groups basically turn into that. Robin Hood stealing from rich and giving to the poor, or at least that's the projection that they give.

I'm extreme. 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 they're all those things are gone now. You know, they had been gone for decades, I think. 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 heard and hiding. There's stories of high-level cartel people getting their sons and daughters murdered, mutilated, and revenge killings. So I think it's at a point where it's fired a lot of semblance of a rule set as far as who can get exposed to some of the violence. Those highly-proof ISIS videos. or they show torture and executions. According to some of the sources that I've talked to here in the United States that we're looking at that phenomenon. They said that it seems to be that that was influenced by some of the narco blog videos that were coming out of Mexico earlier in the early 2000s. Basically, some of these groups were the first ones that got wind of the fact that you can export terror or the horror that an execution has through social media. Way back when Facebook was a bit more, a bit more of a wild land area. You could see these in news feeds. Videos of executions, tortures and stuff like that coming out of Mexico. On Facebook. Way back when. Wow. This is a different time.

I mean, I remember seeing some of these ISIS videos on Facebook, way back when and they crack down on all that. But 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. One of the ones that caught my attention way back when was a guy getting two guys getting executed by chainsaw. And, you know, people can kind of imagine what that would be like, but this is produced on purpose. It's a cartel group caught two rival cartel members and a way to send a message through those of the rival cartel is to basically execute these people in front of a camera. 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 and made their territory.

Yeah, I mean, you have videos of some of these people engaging in cannibalism in front of a video to see how brutal they are or people taking out somebody's heart while they're alive, you know, and filming it. And, you know, you used to be social media as a whole, you will see some of these videos they would get put down in a few days. But now there's telegram groups. There's, you know, there's live leaks. There's a bunch of other sites out there that kind of disperse some of 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.

There was a recent leak of government files. I call them the WakaMedia leaks. It's our version of the Wikileaks, I guess. and it was mostly documents coming out of the Mexican military. I haven't seen it talked about a lot here in a state 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. The military has been out in the in force in the streets basically doing a policing role since Philippe Piccalaeron was in the administration. He basically militarized the drug war. Felipe Calderon was up 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 drug war to send the military back to its barracks and all that. And he's basically continuing on. They just passed some legislation that basically keeps the military on the streets for a few more years. And I think some of these documents that were leaked are very telling as far as why that is. They have the military now house 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. They are document themselves show how certain regions in Mexico who have a specific military presence work for one side or favor one side of the cartel.

Yeah.

There's a systemic amnesia that happens every presidency in Mexico. So 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 get chopped off police organizations get defunded or change or the names good change uniforms change so there's a lot of turnover everywhere every five years federally there's a turnover and the things change what about the cartels today persist the leadership persist I mean, the signal law cartel has had a figure head behind it since the 80s, the same one, you know. I mean, it's a federation of smaller cartels that are all kind of linked up, but pretty much, historically, who's considered the head of the signal law cartel. Oh my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, oh, my, Again, these documents that were leaked are a clear sign of what strengths and weaknesses are there are as far as the government's main weapon again, some of these criminal group, which is the military. And if people doubt this, they can look it up online because all these documents are out there. But, you know, it's 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 trust.

Some of these documents that are already out there talk about the ports in Mexico. which are probably the main conduit of precursors of methamphetamines and precursors of things like fentanyl into the country. They're operated and guarded by the marina, right? So these things are happening under their watch. And then you get talks about the army in certain places, basically working counter cartel operations to specifically one side, not another, you know, as far as the right will groups out there. And we have a long history of some of these groups going military groups going rogue. Lysette does, or prime example of these special forces units that basically turned around and went to work as bodyguards for the golf cartel. This side of the boat they basically did was an internship with a cartel. They went out there, the bodyguarding for the golf cartel. And then I 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, the kind of like internal cartel wars in Mexico's history. Who was El Chapo? El Chapo was a part of the leadership or at least a faction of the leadership in the cartel. It's a federation of different, of small organizations. Well, I say small organizations. Basically, families are organizations that can't conform this larger group, which is the senior law cartel that is based out of senior law. Basically, they are people that have family and power nucleus is there in senior law. Who was he? I think he was a, he was a high-level operator for the scene in Wacartell. He, uh, me had his own drug routes, his own, uh, networks, his family, his, uh, his family, uh, nucleus down there, 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 was the mastermind? If you go down there and you read what most of the brave journalist in Mexico that we have, say another aspect of this war is that a lot of journalists get killed. I think Mexico has some of the top numbers in the world. And this is not no secret to anybody. El Mio Sambada is a name of the historical figure head of this cartel, or at least somebody who people fear rise or suspect to be the main guy or the main person that is in charge of some of the criminal group is still alive. That's the going rumor that he's still very much alive. The interesting thing about him is that he learned his craft in Los Angeles. So people thinking that scene law cartel isn't a Mexican thing, exactly. He apparently learned a lot of his craft from people in the United States.

The craft of getting a product from Columbia, putting it through Mexico and logistics. The logistics part of it.

I don't have a clear number of this, but he was interviewed by a magazine called Processo in Mexico. And it's a pictures were taken of them. This was over 10 years ago, probably. And that's the last time anybody's ever seen a picture of them.

I think he he reached out to this journalist to talk about it. There's a There's a media wing to the work that we do a sister page called Demolare. And it's 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 press conference that he has. They called him La Mignaneras. President and the president, Manuel Leposodrador, and told him to his face like, I have threats on my life that are trying to kill me. And it happened. There's been a slew of assassinations and murders of the members of the press all over Mexico. It's not an easy job 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 but you see a lot of these cartel reporters go down there talked with 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

This is what it will say. After that whole Sean Pan thing, I think a lot of people would reconsider meeting with anybody of any level that has any variety here at the United States. They wouldn't trust anybody to get that close. There are people out there that will talk to reporters and people that are working on a lab laboratory somewhere in a hillside somewhere down south, you know, in the Seattle. You know, low-level people that get authorization to speak to reports and stuff like that, but they don't say anything that isn't being taught 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 have blog about it, you know, they're not the leaders. TikTok, no, not the leaders. I think after what happened to the Wachapa Guzman, I think that that opportunity that when it was closed for some of the leadership down there,

If they have something to say, which I don't think they do, you know, I don't think they at less, at some point in the future, which is something I suspect might be coming. that there is some sort of armed intervention and were external attack on some of these criminal groups that really put suppression on them.

I think in a way they already do that there's corritos which are basically Mexican folk songs that get the get the song 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, it's a great honor to have a corrido made about you. Somebody made a corrido about me based on my interviews, right? I didn't pay for it, so it's a real one. Yeah. It feels cool.

I think it's about, I think a way you can, you can find somebody like that is somebody that wants to get their story, specifically clearance straight. 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 actually work with. I can tell you that there's villains all over the place down there. Everybody's a villain at all levels in some way shape perform and some of these people. I think in a way including El Chapo, I think that some of that meeting was about film rights and stories and being able to get his story out there. I think, I'm not too sure in which 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. I mean, I think I try.

There's 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. An example of this is a Chapa Guzman's son who are now in their own right kind of getting gaining legendary status. Is a is a son. There was an attempted arrest on his son that led to the famous Juliet Canaso incident, which we are now learning more about because some of the Guacamaya leagues are kind of speaking more about what happened that day. Basically a federal operation, they say to a rest, they'll chop a booze month's son, turn into a siege to try and get him free. They called in the Calberary, basically the whole of the senior 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. If you want to exit the city, go through here. Take your families, get down, but you have to leave because the army's coming here. They're going to fight us.

I mean, is there home? It is their home. And they were fighting for their home. And they were fighting for leadership from their home. There is a morality, there is a humanity there. And again, if people want to paint them all with the villainy aspects, you know, 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.

I think there's no one would help the other. I think there's a cost to, there's a cost to their goodness they do. You know, the roads they build the hospitals, the career paths that they pay for. There are doctors in Mexico that their careers were paid for by some of these groups. And they do a lot of amazing good for the community. I remember there was a surgeon reconstructing clap palettes. in one of my travels that I did out there, I spent some time actually going out there after I got out of the job to train people and the stuff that I show people. And they told me, like, I told them, you're doing God's work, this stuff is legit, this is God's work, building smiles for people. And they said, yeah, and then can I talk to you? He said, my career path was paid for by a group of cartel members they paid for my career path because they wanted somebody on hand that could fit their teeth.

I think both. I think there's, again, it's hard to just make them saints or devils. You know, some of the good they do in some of their communities. And don't ask anything for in return, you know. And even if they don't ask it for anything in return where the military shows up, they are immediately met with rocks and roadblocks and everybody's main weapon down there, which is most Mexicans can't buy or own firearms. The main weapon down there is silence and their eyes to report to the people that they consider. The good guys in their environment, right? So That's a hard question, you know, I think 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 I'll chop was currently prison

I think he's a window into the family dynamics of that world. I want to say family dynamics of Mexico as a big thing about compatriots. We have people that we call family that we're not necessarily a family. He is somebody that witnessed the construction of what is now the signal walker tell 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 Manita Watta, which is basically, you know, that's the, what kind of cartels basically. It's where a lot of that originates. The, the things that he saw as far as how some of these things got built, I think would be an interesting topic of conversation with somebody like him.

individual humans marrying other families getting getting named the other you know basically God fathers to other people's kids forming family and blood ties and influence ties to people not only in Mexico but in the United States it's seeing how that dynamic and family dynamic is still there you know so he's gone he's in prison but he is He's probably on his way to be our next clandestine saint. You go to the chapel of Malberde. Malberde is basically Mexican Robin Hood's folk saint down there who is the saint of traffickers. And at his shrine, You have a small little chapel just right next to it. So he's on his way to St. Hood in Mexico, you know, 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 just resurrected. But his family is okay. His legacy is out there. He's gonna be named. He's probably gonna be the next folks ain't when he passes away.

Yeah. Well, number one, their power and influence is bigger. You know, they, there are seen a little cartel operations in Colombia, straight straight to the, like in the source of it. And then there are clear, they have a clear presence in, in places like Chicago, Los Angeles. They're in the United States. The whole thought process that a lot of Americans have, like, we don't want that, that travel over here. We don't want them to get here, like build a wall in all this.

I mean, they've been having kids and families up here since for a long time. Some of these people have passed American pass reports that work not only directly for them, but have blood ties down there. You know, there's been drag nets and arrests of some of these criminal organizations, states, a new generation character, had one, two, three years ago, where the case operation on a con, I think it was called. There was that over 80 of their operatives. And this is a new cartel that is very militaristic and growing in Mexico and they had both 80 arrests in the United States, you know, that of members of them operating here.

Immigration is part of it. Ely, immigration is part of it. And the influence of that has as a bargaining chip and a political chip. We saw this with the first care of and coming up in 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 purchase or the firearms. Basically people buying up specific type of firearms that were on a shopping list that the cartels wanted to buy. including 50 cows, fn57 pistols, which are small pistols with a high velocity round that will go through a bullet-proof vest, AR15s of all kinds that could quickly be modified into full auto, down in Mexico. with a drilling a few holes and making a few things 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 guise 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 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 his wife. Both of them were killed. Daughter was in the backseat, lost a part of her arm. When that happened, the guns were unique. They were like, oh, we didn't ever let the Matapoli's ears is what they call them. They're the cop killers. I haven't seen those before. So there were a unique and interesting and later on in life I was watching Sienna and seeing the hearing going on is like, oh, that's where they came from. Two federal agents changed a lot and was politicized. It was a whole scandal up here. But in Mexico, how many people died with those firearms? You know, being led down, being let go down there. And also what type of sentiment do you think the local populist has of the United States after all those guns were basically handed over to some of these groups? a gun trafficking is another GI part of the equation and part of the problem down there. As far as the amount of munitions weapons and now we were also getting tradecraft material from conflict zones outside of Mexico. weaponized drones. The first time we saw some of those weaponized drones was in Syria. And like a few weeks later, you know, grenades were being dropped on the roofs of some public officials. Bill and Cartel's are using drones. Yeah, that's been going on for a while. There's a place in Michoacan and has some pretty interesting videos. And the interesting part of it is because the federal police down there are actually working hand in hand. with the United Cartheles Unile Group, which is basically the local cartels to try and fight off the new generation cartel moving into Michokan. So even the federal forces are fighting with the cartels that are trying to keep this larger cartel out. And there's videos of these civilian drones basically dropping explosives. They found some explosive testing ranges out there that are basically replicating stuff that you would see the IRA used during the travels out there from homemade mortars. ID's have been used in Mexico is not that much, but they're making a presence again. We don't have a lot of ordinance around Iraq, but we do have a big mining industry down there. So 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 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 markets So a lot of those 50 cow and Vehicle mounted technical type machine guns and some of the RPGs and Manpads or remote control guided missiles that you that have been found in cartel hands are probably coming the way up from down south

Some of the stuff I see in our manpads, which is basically remote guided missiles. I've seen some of those found out.

display of power. There are no flight 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 they said that it was mechanical issues. But again, I'm not going to do conspiracy theories out there. But there's a lot of videos on TikTok of the scene of Laura cartel forces at parties. carrying around rocket launchers on their backs.

There's no flight zones over some parts of Mexico. Another thing you're seeing now is night vision. Night vision equipment that is clearly military grade from the US that was probably abandoned in some more field out there, maybe Afghanistan or somewhere like that. And 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 firearm. Those types of capabilities are now out there. Also, there's this tendency to think in every now and then you'll see these cartel videos with these guys carrying around these 50 cows and they show up. They stand there like, you know, they're boasting about their rifles and everybody laughed at them because The 50-cal or anything like that without an optic on it. You're going to shoot basically if you can hit anything with it. But now there's a few of my sources have seen sophisticated laser-guided range finders and sighting systems on some of these that are being found out there.

They started getting them specifically with the proliferation of armored vehicles in Mexico. Mexico has a giant industry in armored vehicles as well.

There was an attempt at assassination of a state prosecutor somewhere, and I think central Mexico, I forget exactly where. But she was writing around a farmer Jeep. Cherokee, I think it was, and the main means of firepower was 50 cows, and that car was left in pieces. He survived, and I think the armored vehicle company that soldered that vehicle has it in this playroom. Then before my time, probably two, three years before I was actually active, they tried to kill the head of public security in the state of Baha. And with him it was a grenade launcher, 40 millimeter grenade launcher. It skipped off the other armored vehicle and landed in the car behind it. It just made the back explode. One of the guys that I used to work with was actually in that car. He survived it. But you started to see, oh, they're, you know, using our vehicles now, let's get 50 caliper now to try and defeat that armor. So that, yeah, there's, there's always this race of technology basically down there. Armor vehicles. You know, how did you take on a normal vehicle? Well, there's a few ways, 50 cows. 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 acrylic paint on the front windshield and blind the vehicle, so it doesn't, so they can't drive it anymore. There's another way. A total line across a road painted like the painted, painted blacks so you can't see it and cut the thing in half. Again, I'm not saying any secret, these are things that people have seen out there. but she would have the irradiator, you know, some of these radiators are not even the more sophisticated vehicles out there. Don't have a sufficient armoring around the radiator or the battery housing or some of these vehicles. There was a case of a guy, I think his nickname was at Bellalacas or something like that. I wouldn't see in the lower-level cartel guy. He had an armor vehicle. He was riding around and he got ambushed. The shot at his car. He was like, ah, have armor, he 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, look, I'll tell them. Cartelman was your see them wearing plate armor. So that's an issue. It's not like you can shoot somebody square in the chest and we'll go down.

It's not like it's not going to be high. Yeah. Yeah. 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, but also there's been many cases of Americans being killed down there. I mean, we saw the Mormon massacre happen down there and all of them were American Mexican. They had both nationalities and the blond kids, you know, white. being a massacre in the middle of a desert, and the cars basically catching fire. This happened, and you know, the America, the Americans sent the FBI down there to kind of review some of what happened down there. And I think that was when Trump started talking about kind of reviving this whole notion of car cells being laboral, terrorist organization, probably more of a political pressure point he was using to try and get Mexico to reinforce its southern border, which it hasn't. But there's escalation. You know, 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 one gone away with and now Yeah, more savvy about information warfare. Their main recruiting tool is TikTok. You go to TikTok and you'll see a bunch of these kids at an Arco party dancing around. And some of these are videos like Cartel members filming other Cartel members in Cartel control territory. And that's a window into that life for who's on TikTok now, kids.

the high-roader life and the possibility of making it to a level, you know, a fame of respect, power, money here in the US. Somebody might, you know, I want to mansion. That's their mindset. I want to live, you know, like that wrapper down there. I mean, if you can bike The house for your mom, you know, or pay off some debts that you might have or a car. That's enough to kill for.

So I was, I was tasked to protect the governor of Bahá 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. That was operational. I was working with other people doing the counter narcotics stuff and the director of the institution that I was in basically called me. And so they, uh, you're going to go and replace this as these people. And I, what happened to them?

I was tasked for that, so I think they considered that. And I specifically worked for a government, who said, well, I looped. I was one of the best governors we have had in that state. And people want to see if I'm trustworthy or not, they can ask indirectly. And I still speak to some of the members of its family. And we're still friends in that way.

For my experience in that time, in place, he was basically spearheading 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 we had people coming in to do specialized training of that regard Israelis, teaching us how they would do things in Israel. that didn't make a lot of sense for us in Mexico. You know, 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 NSW, Naval Special Warfare people who were coming off a protection details and 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, though.

Some of the overt militaristic type approaches to security that we had to adopt, you know, from, 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 car to the other, every now and then we would arrive to an event. They would open the door and would be one of us and they were like, hey, we're the governor. He's in the back one. So we moved 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 going online, learning about armor vehicles, learning about architectural armor.

For me, it was all of a sudden, I have this director calling me in. wearing vans, you know, in jeans, you know, t-shirt, and all the sudden I had 80, 80 some people that I had to move around. And I was in charge of securing planes, and which I, what do I know about that? Airport hangers, armored vehicle maintenance, and purchasing, and figuring out how to set up a counter assault group for protection detail. And I was like, where am I gonna learn all this?

As I was going, I remember having this experience. being in our security office on my laptop, figuring out how to set up a counter surveillance site to our production detail, basically how to pop people looking for people that might be looking for us, you know, a type thing. And then going to San Diego to Coronado and training with some people from 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, 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's, it was a learning process on the fly that was pretty, I mean, seat of your pants level.

I mean, I tried. I was already starting off 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 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 owners and figure out ways to put security in some of these places and having to create this bubble of normalcy around some of these people was pretty difficult. There's no way that that is a normal for anybody. And, you know, God bless them. I know it didn't. I know it was an easy and I know that it affected their lives and they lost on a big part of their youth. Being under that security supervision and bubble does probably does a lot for somebody specifically growing up like that. You lose opportunities of things that we take of granted, you know, just going out doesn't 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.

Basically beyond the protectable custody.

Somebody, then again, I think this is the police at Ola. They 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 start educating yourself as far as specifically what to prioritize as far as what to worry about, you know, war zone, 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.

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 create randomness and unpredictability and have that as a security feature. Having a convoy of four vehicles separated into two convoys and she'll have 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's going to be who's going to be in that type of stuff.

we're going through training specifically around this type of stuff and an 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 team that they call him up here in the US, basically a group of a group to respond to a high-violent ambush. First off, then first rule if you find yourself in an ambush, it wasn't as successful ambush because if you find yourself in it, you're alive, you know? Yes. 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 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 We're not going to be received by merchants in heaven. We're not that's not the type of mentality that we had down there. But 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 the federal forces.

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 them, where they can't predict you, but you can predict where they're going to pass, go through places where they're forcibly after pass, places where they're predictable, places where you can not only predict, but also have a plan for yourself to escape the next that place. So how do you transfer Connery and Bush? You turn into a like a perfect ambusher. That's how you train for counterouts.

And Masashi would say, you know, you're enemy, you know, with the word, you know, the basically that, you know, simplified.

Yeah, you prepare for the probable. Yeah. And if the impossible happens, you're halfway out of it, hopefully. And if you're finding yourself in an ambush, it wasn't as successful one. As far as our training and the mindset and my experience with it, the adversarial 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. 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. And when that happens, you become blind to the enemy's story. It's his capability. His story is ability. If you treat the other side like an inhuman monster, it's hard to take notes.

At least for me personally, I wasn't one of the guys that would be in grab them and beat the shit out of them and put them in the back of the van. Just tie them up and gag them. So you're able to see them as you. I learned that from my mother, you know, is that nobody's against you at there for themselves. Learn this and you will make friends of enemies. She said that when I graduated and I carried, I with me throughout my whole career.

You know, my lands with Mugrosos, like dirty people.

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're here the narrative constantly being blurred 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 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 stuff that we are taking right now is up with the utmost importance won't matter anymore.

I can't understand that on my side of my life experience because our war has been an internal war amongst our people and amongst our houses.

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, apart. Back then, the main, you know, Moses operandi that they had was that they would impersonate or dress up as federal police. And that's how they would move around the city. We saw these suburbans in a gas station. And some of the guys were carrying on our AK-47s. That's not a standard issue firearm. 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, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and I got a whistle from one of the guys that was there and my name was called. It was one of the guys that I grew up with. Redhead kid looked like El Canelo, you know. There's redheads in Mexico. I think it's probably some of the Irish that betrayed the American side during the last Mexico American war that stayed down there had a bunch of kids. It's probably from there. Love was stronger than anything else. It says redhead kid. When I said kid, I mean he was my age. Now to my eyes he's always going to be younger now. He was sold, told my name. He said, hey, cast a key coat on like, what are you doing here? It's like, oh, shit. I was just, you know, going home and still look good, going to get a taxi. He said, okay, walk as he walks over. So he has a plate carrier with a cave around the magazines on his chest. A.K. without a stock on it. Just carrying his hand. He comes over and he hugs me. I could feel the magazines on my chest. I mind you, I have a gun on me, you know, tucked. And, uh, uh, next hill is buzzing in my back pocket. As people are trying to figure out what to what's going on. Um, you ask me, small talk shit. Like, hey, it's like, what are you doing? Like, what are you working at? And, like, I'm just looking for a job, you know, just to work at a video store. So it's like a habit that I haven't seen you in a while. Uh, I was just so-and-so of your family. Good, and how's-so-and-so of your family? Good. It's like, this is an interesting job. He's like, yeah, it's pretty good. They pay as well. You get a car, you know, there's money and nobody fussed with you. You get respect. It's like, that's awesome. You know, if you want, you can get you in. You know, if you ever want that, it's like, oh, that's, I'm too much up a coward for that. I told conversation like any other yeah between two friends he hugs me before I go like something doing 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 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 far guys, and it was over.

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. Let's spend like an hour looking for him. The only way I could recognize him was his hair. I stayed with his body. All night there's a there's a bridge and thick one that goes over the river and a place called Amesa and that's where the forensic offices were. The body was taken there and I stayed with his body until it was released. I told his family about it because I knew them that I aspect of, you know, us versus them or they're they're the enemy and she liked that and my mom told me those words. Nobody's against you. They're just for themselves. So don't make them a state cut the humanizing anybody.

I could have been shot on the face there. Let me aspect the conflict brings where that's a bad guy. It's good guys. Heroes, villains. There's an innocence to the hot that goes away. Is your mob still with us? No. Almost three 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, like everything down there again, the whole cycle, you know, he got his turn. So when he went away, you know, politics changed and down there basically, if you're a combinatorial 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 body, our guy already there. So all of us were sent back to whatever we came from. So I went back to work on the streets. I was back on the operations group. I was working with the sub director directly with him basically back on the ground doing The stuff that I was doing before that job, we were moving away from these successes that had been had by people like Lizole, that 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 and 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 Lisa Olon, the place where you had leadership. He not only pacified Tijuana, he also did the same in Juarez. He was sent to be the police chief in Juarez too. But politics change and you know, heroes become villains. A lot of people started calling him a villain because of his, uh, on Northern Oxford approach and human rights violations and all of this type of stuff kind of come through the forefront. And people forgot, you know, people forgot what it took to get the one off the most dangerous cities list of the planet. People were vilified and people like him. And 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 C3s. Basically, you would go there 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 of the works they're trying to see if you were somebody doing something wrong. And all of that was canceled because it violated human rights. If you get fired from a job because of a pale polygraph exam, because that was not actually a admissible way of firing somebody. So all of a sudden you had people that were known cartel compromise people that were fired five, six years ago, showing back up to worship, back up to work with their back paid and everything. So this started happening and it quickly realized that it was going to be hard to stay there. I was driving home from work and I got a call from my brother. that my mom had been going through some health issues that had turned into psychiatric issues. So we were basically taking turns trying to take care of her, you know, locking the doors so she wouldn't wander it 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 two year old and a marriage that was difficult, uh, the tide time. So I was trying to figure all these things out, make 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, my brother calls me and tells me that let's go to a hospital. My mom something happened to my mom. It wasn't my turn to the watchers. So I've I felt pretty shitty about that. I got to the hospital and the doctors came out and told us that she was gone. It was a massive heart attack. She had a pacemaker by then, so she was gone. She was in there 60s. So we kind of expected something, but not, you know, that was like hard for me. She was my center. She was going to be the one that would ask where advice as far as work, you know, she'd leave or not. The ground was removed for one day. There was nobody, there was anything underneath me. I get three days off work. That's what they gave me. I'm trying to grieve as I go back to work. Dark shit crosses my mind as I can go in through that process of trying to figure things out.

I wasn't allowed to grieve, basically, and I wasn't allowed to grieve for a few years for different reasons.

There was other people with me that didn't allow me to grieve. I went to work, cut, call into the office, and I was basically told that it was going to be reassigned. after I just went through. The reason I was going to be something that I saw as unacceptable. It was the people in charge at that point 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 a license is unpaid absence from work. So leave a absence. I think it's what you call it up here, which by law is allowed. And I was denied for no reason. I'm invested in this job, you know, I have a have a have a good salary salary and I have a category in there. So the level of time you spend in there, you get a category. So it was a pretty high category agent. battle is training, and again, training that would be useless in the private sector, and the public sector in Mexico, I couldn't change from one corporation to another. I couldn't go to work for another police institution. So I took a deep breath and 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 paperwork. Took a big trash bag, put all my stuff in there, a blade armor to your gas grenade. Gas mask, a satellite radio, MP5 magazines, an MP5 submachine gun, Glock, Glock magazines, all of it, helmet. And I put it in the hand there over in the armory. And I left. I made some phone calls. I was married to an American and my daughter's American. I never envisioned myself coming to the United States. I do that process for myself. I was invested in that job. I thought I was going to die or retire from that. quickly became like an issue because everybody's wondering why I left the top so abruptly. So there was some threats made. When I left, by people inside the office and I probably, you know, the anonymous yet.

There's no support. Yeah. There's no support.

Yeah.

Yeah. Luckily, I had developed some friendships in the United States for some of the people that I used to work with. and cross-trained with and some friendships that I'd developed with people that I would just talk to and make friends with, state side. One of them was a is an ABCal Reserveist who's a name is Dan Stantfield and his wife Kelly. They opened 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, I cross the border with my kid and nobody knew anything, you know, I didn't tell anybody just, you know, my wife and And I was off. When I came to the States, I already kind of dabble in the whole training field and showing some of my experience to people. So I had at least a seed of that out there. People knew me for that. But all of a sudden, I was in the middle of an avocado orchard in the middle of California and everything's quiet and there's no more radios going off all the night there's no more three cell phones on the counter there's no guns there's no rifles there's no 80 people calling to to calling to see what's going on there's nothing there's just quiet and it's during the time when Trump got elected so the immigration process that usually would take at most things going for me and immigration process that would take at the most of the year took two years. It was not a, it's not an easy process. It's not only come to the US, but come to the US with that pressure, kind of underlying pressure as far as being an immigrant at that time here.

The word PTSD and TBI and all of these things I did not, I didn't know any of them. It was through people that I got to meet in the training field that were, you know, Marines, seals, martial arts, those types of people that start giving words to some of the things that I felt, which I didn't really know, you know. We would treat post-traumatic stress without alcohol and vacation time, blah, blah, let me scow. You know, when you see the bottom of it, your troubles are gone cured. Yeah, immediately. That was if I was in alcoholic, as well as all the other stuff, I was, I was drinking myself to sleep every, every third night. I married, obviously, was failing. You know, it was, it was an easy for her, you know, she, she was brave and she did what she could. And I, I totally respect, understand her, process with it. And 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. 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, all the millions of dollars worth of equipment and stuff like that. You were a sponsor for now, are all gone, and it's just you walking into a circle K and buying three cans of fosters to shrink yourself to sleep.

If anything, I would recommend people 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 sometimes feel kind of lucky as far as your own.

Yeah. I mean, I went through some quarrel shit, but some people there that went through a lot of more quarrel shit or stuff that I don't think I could have survived. When I went through that process of figuring things out, you know, the first thing that clearly pointed out or stuck out to me was my inability to process, things like that. There was a big pause button there, a giant one, everything was on pause. My weaving, not only my mom, but my brother. So I had a pause button on me, so I was 13, basically. Then I got to bury many of my friends and form their wives or girlfriends of what happened. And that all again was paused because I wasn't allowed to process. I spent years without going on vacation because I was the workaholic. And I found at the core of my issues alcohol. a giant pause button in the form of alcohol, basically, I'll drink my problems away, or specifically, I would, it's like, if you have a mess in your house, you just put a big tarp over it, you know, to cover it up, an alcohol that 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. 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 do I need to get rid of that? By this point, I was traveling across the country and training people and showing some of the experiences that I had to other people speaking, being on podcasts and having conversations like the one I'm having with you.

and in a way basically reliving and reopening a bunch of shit for myself every time I do. So I was getting triggered and the way I would manage that was I would drink at the end of the night after 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 and out in the hills in Tennessee, a beautiful green place, a beautiful family there that hosted us. And it's the first time I ever saw a fireflies. I was like, thought I was having a hallucinogenic experience. When I say, why is it, why is it, why is it dust glowing? You know, is what I thought? A friend of mine is a veteran. He was running off to the woods and grabbed one and brought it to him and she led it to me and was like, holy shit. What is that to firefly? How do they glow? I don't know. And it's crushing in his hand as it's gone. And that helped brought me back. And we did lead to holy shit, you know. 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 it, going off, getting off in my marriage. Separated. And that was another end of the world. Yeah, I expect to say everything, you know, I lost my mother, I lost the job and then the marriage failed. And it was on me. I basically went somewhere and did a stock of everything that was going on. and the meat is positioned to stop ranking. Yeah, I had some bad relationships after. And I just came to a place where I need to stop, Frank.

So this is recent. It's probably two. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have two years over in December. So when you talk to Rogan the first time you're still struggling with this demon I was in and out of the car basic is what I would say, you know, I was in and out of and then Trying to get rid of it.

got shit face it was it was stressful not not for any other reason then I felt the responsibility to the people that couldn't speak about it so that's a pressure it was a start of COVID and things got it started getting shut down and slow down my dad got really sick and almost died We had to set up like some Jason born level shit that is at my brother's place. He was in Mexico, you know, so we had to bribe a guy to get us a noxygen tank. And I had to Jimi Regan of respirator. And it was, it was, it was some shit. But my dad was like, you know, he survived it, you know, everybody, the doctor likes a good bye. And my dad was like, I can't say goodbye to him, you nice.

He did some gaster shit that day. But on my end, I was being isolated basically. It's COVID is everybody's slowing down. No more classes, no more excuses to go out there and drink and no more socializing. So social drinking, turn into a loan drinking more and more and more. I bought a bottle of gin because I was I was down in Mexico taking care of my dad. And they closed down beer production in Mexico. So beer went away and beer was a way that kind of manager that you know, it's not Howard alcohol. It's just beer. So you know, but that went away. So it was just hard alcohol. That was was available down there. I went night alone at the house, my dad's house, I drank a bottle of gin, a whole bottle of gin. And I almost died. And after that, you know, some people started noticing that that I was isolating more and more and it was kind of eating away at me. I was in a relationship at that point when I started seeing everything just kind of fall apart around me. And I drank half of a glass of wine. and it made me sick until I'm like internal in my mind. And my kid said to me, and I don't know, nobody coached her, nobody said anything or she's pretty intuitive kid. So I don't drink any more than, I don't know where in the middle of the night. And I stopped. Stop that night. I stopped that night. I remember waking up at three in the morning 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 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 hides. And then I went somewhere and blocked myself in for two weeks. I had the withdrawal. The clear nightmares that I've ever had in my life for two, three weeks. I went somewhere and I want to keep them private, but I went somewhere where They offered a place for me. And when I asked them about it, it's a community. I gave them some money for their school as a donation. I gave them like a few, a few thousand dollars. As yeah, sure, come. You know, you can, you can go through this process here. Cool, it's fuck people. The first thing I did when I got there is they stood me up in front of everybody to thank me for the donation. And then it told everybody that it was an alcoholic and if anybody saw me drinking, I was to be kicked out of there immediately. And I actually felt horrible. So, that was where I started.

There was a moment when it was. And some therapy circle. There's a rodeo clown friend of mine who is bodies. This spine is basically fused together, you know, type of guy. We've been friends and enemies and friends again, you know, in doing the art therapy circle sessions. Also like there's an intimacy there. Yeah. He didn't know anything about me. One time when we were stealing our stories, he stood up and told his story. And then he heard mine and then he was pissed off. It mean didn't want to talk to me for a while. And then later, he told me that it was because 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 jealous that he can do the same with his experience because he was just a broken, ex-robotial cloud. He told me when I was going through the process like, hey, you're an intern at celebrity person, you know, you're known. aren't you worried about people finding out that you're recovering drunk? And I said, yeah, it's fucking scary. A shed of people find out that I am going through this process. It's scary. The critique, you know, I already get a lot of shit for being a ex-polis officer in Mexico and all that, all the negativity that comes from that. And he said, don't be. You can't pick pocket and make it 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 be their own kind of process. So I started posting a cowardly in a way because I wanted to make other people keep me on the path, you know. But in other ways, you know, desperation, you know, I don't want to drink anymore. I don't want to go back to the on that 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. As our writing about it sharing an online through my fever dreams post and just being humorous about it online and getting a lot of hate on one side, you know, having a few people and companies that I worked 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 weakness portrayed us getting hate.

You were supposed to be strong and here you are. I mean, I'm not, I'm not Jockel. Well, I cannot David Goggins. You know, I'll wake up at 10 in the morning sometimes and I'll have cornflakes with my eight-year-old. You know, I like days off. I used to wake up at 3.30 in the morning every day 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 it, they get 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 five months in ten months. Some people that have been on that wagon for way longer than I have and there's it's what's cool when you meet people that are superhuman or perform and 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 down 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 ringer. I fucked up a shit ton of times. You know, my nose is an example of that. I mean, a few missing teeth. But in a way, I think all of that is the process and 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 trying to look for a better life and trying to find their missing kids, training people to not get into those situations, but also showcasing the fact that people that go through some of these processes have a journey to go through, you know. I just came into your studio with a duffel bag straight from the airport and I'm going to leave early tomorrow morning to somewhere else. I've been on the road for almost, I think, five years nonstop. I go back to a specific place every week to see my kid for two, three days and then I'm back out. You know, you know, some people are like, are you running? Like, are you worried? Is this afraid about that now? 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 after life of a sort, you know, coming up with that is, are you looking for some kind of deep understanding of humanity?

I meet people every weekend with different stories. People come to something like classes. 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 that are basically trying to work through some of their own issues by going through the training like that. I get to meet people that have only seen online or the scene in videos. I remember meeting Royce Gracie in Harvard City.

He's a pretty interesting character. I remember seeing him in a boot like VHS video. I told him about it. We're doing a class out at Emerson Knives. It's a nice company, but Mr. Emerson also has like a jujitsu gym there where Roy straights out of. 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 adversarial side of that. That's what I'm known for. This psychology and kind of the ways that people do that. I remember him seeing some of the stuff that I was doing and just being like, where are you from Mexico? Mexico makes sense, you know? Somebody from Brazil, you know, tipping the hat to somebody from Mexico as far as seeing the violence and some of the mentality behind it.

So an anaconda as a small anaconda walking into that ring with his family behind wearing pajamas. Where in pajamas and I was like, what is this guy wearing pajamas for? And then he would strangle people with those pajamas. I don't remember seeing that and just having it. I think probably what a generation before had with Bruce Lee, I guess. Our, my generation was Royce walking into that, walking into that, a hucked it on and changing, you know, paradigms. Seeing him and not Jim, it's also, I have a gun owner and shooter, which is interesting, you know, having a seeing somebody like him who is, you know, well-versed with his hands also be a man that has gone into the realm of being well-versed with, with weaponry. which is an aspect of martial arts and the martial way of thinking that some people kind of the purest will stick with one side of it, but he's obviously a warrior in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I mean, he was he was in the middle of this class that we were doing more people were basically focusing on both. Ernest Emerson, who's a famous, where his knives, he's a nice company, it's a nice renasa, you know. Not only that, but he's also a very avid martial 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 ton of trained people how to defend against that. And you have Royce, who's from Brazil. I mean, he has some street in him. You know, that's something that, you know, those guys didn't guy yet as well. We say in Mexico. Seeing the way he would, he stepped in there and provided some encouragement to the people there as well as, you know, how people sometimes focus on the, yeah. 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 concentrating on. 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 places is a pointed object. So I can take that crystal big pen that you're writing on that note pad with and using the friction from the carpet, I can turn it into a hypergeric needle. that you can then poke into somebody's neck. I was the process of doing that. I can do it right now if you want.

No. I could basically you can take the friction, the heat and friction created from the scar pit. Yes. You can grab that pen. In and of itself it will pierce flesh, but it will slow itself down because it has a few angles on the tip. Oh, you want to wear down the angles. So if you take that tip off and you grab 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.

It'll make a point in an angle that will guide it its way into your flesh. So you can actually go through a torso with that if you know what you're doing.

There's a guy online coffin tramp. This is a monitor. It is a G10 rod, G10 is a very strong material basically. A lot of people make actually G10 knives which are basically non-meagnetic non-ferrous objects that can be utilized as a stabbing of them. The core of it isn't an actual pencil core. It's a G10 core and it's encased in oak, hard oak. So that is capable again of stabbing through a torso. Now the guy that made that It's an hardest thing, you know, it makes that it looks like a pencil. It's concealed in the nature of the object itself. But that's my logic is capable of being introduced into a chess cavity. You know, it 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 paracardium is pierced and it's being filled with fill of blood or your whole heart is pierced and you have a few minutes to live if you're at a standing heart rate.

It has a defective vision of a shank or an ice pick, you know, it's not going to cut, but it's going to make a hole where it doesn't do chin B. Yeah, the pen is literally minor than the sword.

And also 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 target, which environment, if you're a predator, that's a sign of rebellion.

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 think before you get there, you have to prepare. One of the first things I tell people is if you don't have a basic T-triple C training class behind you, you should reanalyze your life and your ability to prepare. to make your pussy. Basically, how to stop somebody from bleeding out or dying from a stab wound gunshot wound or any of those types of wounds or an amputated leg during an ID scenario. Anything you would see in a Boston Marathon type event or a Vegas shooting event where people are getting shot stabbed cut.

You're no good to least. You don't want to be a detriment to the situation. You want to be an asset.

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 all weapon, all knowledge can be weaponized. And I think that's the approach to all people 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.

There's the carotid arteries, which are used commonly in digits with something to choke because they feed a computer.

And not a lot of stuff is guarding the outside world from your carotid arteries.

It is not a smart one.

We do have a defensive mechanism, and 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 carotids will actually lower themselves and be in case in more flesh and muscle. If you pull a head back, not so much, so that's a way that at least I think the evolutionary we've have a defensive mechanism for that. There's a few videos out there of people's getting their next zone back shot after somebody pushed their head forward to try and slice their necks and they survived. This is a viable target. The heart is another one. Interesting about the thing about the heart and people get alarmed when I talk about this and show it in classes. Again, a lot of the class 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. They're shit. We'll try and approach somebody and stab you to death. This is how they would do it. There's a tendency to view what we see in John Wick or view what we see in this martial arts community where they're, you know, slicing and dicing people, different media, it's a ways. A lot of that is based on dueling-based cultures, like the Filipino martial arts or some of the Italian martial arts out there where somebody's facing off with somebody else with a similar weapon. And we're both of us are agreeing to basically get into a stabbing competition. That would make sense in that scenario and that context, but I've never seen a lot of people actually get into these one-on-one knife altercations. What we see now in the modern context when it talks about weaponry. is an ambush counter-ambush-based scenario where somebody pulls out an aftering a grappling situation on the street or when somebody turns a striking exchange of punches into pulling out a cheap gas station knife or a pen or a rock from the ground or a hang-down. Most modern combatters And when it comes to weapon we should be kind of based on the whole aspect of ambushing counter ambush. There's a lot of people showing valuable type of material and coursework on this out there. My whole approach in 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 places, grow up on pig farms that actually get the experiences of processing the pig, for example. or processing an animal. Those people will have more skills. Those people will have more skills with a knife if they pick it up as a weapon. Most of the martial artists that I've seen kind of approach some of these classes where I go and have a simulated torso in the form of a pig hanging in a room somewhere.

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 a meat vehicle the same thing they own the medical training should come first you know or if you don't have that be a hunter or go to a butcher class that will teach you more about how to use a knife on somebody else than anything. That will give you the experience of flesh. Most people, I do this example every now and then where I have people bring in a tactical knife and then 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. Well, people will say, nah, that butter knife is not going to go through. And it does, you know, it does go through. It's thin enough strong enough sturdy enough that'll go through. Kitchen knife, a cheap one that cost 89 cents at a Walmart and a expensive $400 one, you know, and the cheap one will allow to perform the expensive one. It was the triple snap off during some of it.

It used to be that we had to hang around, you know, people will come back from battle and we've here things next to the campfire. As far as, oh, he stabbed somebody here in this happens. But now we live in a niche where you can, you know, when I do a class, I, this is, this is a, this, a stab to the heart. And here's like five videos of it happening live, you know, on live leaks 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. 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. That's as constrained by ninjas and the hills or anything like that. There are people that grew up morally 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 can't Iraq that? Well, number one, learn to behave yourself so you can recognize it. The whole aspect that being a good counter ambush team is to be the best ambush here in the planet. So again, the whole aspect of Musashi saying, know your enemy with sword, you know, you figure that out as far as learning that behavior. You know, when you start seeing how some of these stavings occurred occur, the first thing you notice is that 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, there's a crowd of people and two or one individual is looking counter where everybody else is looking, or there's a hyperware individual in a crowd. the hyper where our role was usually out there to fuck somebody over or they're trying to keep those predators from fucking somebody else over. 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 crowd.

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 I heard Jordan Peterson talk about the fact that everybody needs to be dangerous, but keep that shit out of control.

I'm referring to the ability of the little physical conflict. There's two cases that I saw with people utilizing social engineering to a beautiful degree to the escalate shit. One guy 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 lot of things that are wrong with everything that you're doing in your life to be in that environment. But let's say you're in an indescapable situation. There was this guy who was in a compromised position. Somebody wanted to fight him, like legit kick his ass. And he said, OK, let's go. But I just need to warn you that I have Pepsi before you go outside. And that It's masterful. I was getting my phone out to film this, you know, maybe. And even I was just lowered my phone to give him a slow clap. That was a beautiful move, you know. And then there was this other man. There was a, there was a riot somewhere in in Senada. I mean, the municipality went to Nalimba. They were protesting. Some of the people that pick those fields down there, part of a tribe called Los Drikis. very hard working people, but the various people too, they're pretty good at their thing. There was a right line, they can break, and this old man walks in the middle of the right line in Yale's grenade, and throws an avocado in the middle of the cops. You broke that right line with an avocado.

But it didn't. I don't know. To me, it's a small lesson there. There was a case to be made about social engineering, about learning about behavior, about learning how to lie, and how to kind of 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 show and when I talk about or train people to working in hospital environments, de-escalation, you know, specifically kind of figuring out what is a value in the environment, 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 it didn't grow up in places that are violent to make continuous eye contact with somebody. Then might be an issue or smiling when there's nothing to smile about. I think there's a picture I saw somewhere Russians taking a portrait and there's Americans there with the Russians aren't because what is there to smile about?

So to take the losses and basically just posture, lower your head and live to fight another day, type that situation. The thing with modern violence is, you know, the access to weaponry. You know, I mean, again, nobody owns life, but anybody can hold a frying pan, can own death. I've seen people Um, you know, get double egg takedown, 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 stretch out fit basically. And that might not kill you then, but it'll kill you that night or the second night if you don't get checked out, you know, people bleed out and turn, only get in a deema. Again, the whole aspect of me showing how some of these things, not only some of these methodologies and somehow people prepare for violence and how people experience violence, how they make their weapons, how the people fight in the streets and stuff like that. It's a recognize that behavior from the inception. There's a video I show where it's 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. And it's a fun video, you know, see it. And 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 they start learning about profiling how they identify victim mentality, you know, or 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 of areas were wrong. And how they pick who they're going to go after, you know, the small people, the women, you know, even some of the men, and they separate the men that their perfect victims versus the men that's going to turn around, punch them in the face. You know, what are they looking for? You know, well, first off, you know, you notice that 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 a good 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-aware is another. If I want to separate myself from the victim crap. Another thing you notice is these are kids going after someone going to adults. And some of these grown adult men are with women. And you see them kind of getting outside of the grasp of 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. 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 is a wrong one. Let me move off to the next one. So that small little lesson in those videos will show you first how these kids are growing up to profile and target to the perfect victims are. That's a school for them. And that is an adversarial school. We should look at that school and

I mean, they're looking for opportunity. Our opportunistic, that's the predators, that's what they do. They look for an opportunity, you know, from jumping down from a tree and getting the slowest gazelle too. Looking for the opportune moment of pounds on something that's probably big, but the risk is worth it.

Yeah, I mean, there's a different situation. You could be facing a sociopathic predator who is looking for something in you that you were the resource that they're looking after. Maybe it's a woman. It could be a group of people that don't like the fact that you have a specific nationality or your passport is stamped in a specific way or that you pray to whatever God. All these have a factor in. 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 me. So you have two avenues of exits. And I would 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 mirror everywhere in the world. First off, you look for advantages, right? If it's something that it'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. The motivations are not in my realm, but the ways they do it are, you know, and basically the advantage part of it.

It's a dangerous school, but when it's a dangerous school, I mean, the most dangerous people will usually come from those desperate environments. You can have people in Coronado holding onto logs in the ocean and go through this millions of dollars of training and just be professional with killers for the government to 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 put a nice pick right into his chest 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 that there's more than one way to become that, you know.

They don't have a volume knob to that. Yeah, so it's like a garden hose without an awesome 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 worried about culture as you would be would be your 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 as kid that's been playing Call of Duty, all of his life, or that has been witnessing violence and media, and there's no sense of, it's probably a bad idea to go off and do this because all of these repercussions. I could see how that could be a danger to society. Some of the volume knobs, some of the countermeasures, the people exploding on somebody else with a weapon. You see videos constantly online. I remember seeing this one of these two teenage girls, someone 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 styling. You're like, wait, where's that come from? Well, 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. I think that's the dangerous part of it.

I always tell people, if you don't have a combative base, you don't have a base, boxing, jujitsu, and 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 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 new kids, so you learn from a bunch of combat arts where you learn about distance and angling people. That comes from this experience that you have. Again, a lot of these things were just a horse play when we were growing up in some cultures or rough and tumble with your brothers and she liked that. But 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 and you get to Jim, you find it in the box and you find it in a tie box and Jim, you find it in places where they specialize in focusing on certain aspects of this whole combat of a hole, right? It used to be before UFC, you know, the Kung Fu man, you know, Kung Fu guy, that's street lethal shit. You can't use it in the sporting con, 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 fans here, yes. You know, it pains me too, man. I wanted to learn some of the democ of blue single punchy and kill technique. You know, I remember those books, but that's just not still in the lookout for that. Maybe somewhere, I remember. You know, maybe you should put a pen in your hand. That might turn into that, but that's the only way. That's the only way, right? But a lot of these myths are kind of like faded away. Now you see people that have different combative bases, combining them all and becoming a fighter. Now, That's the UFC fight two people fighting each other's one thing. You know, you being in the middle of the Portland rights and a bunch of the 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, going on the ground and getting a guard with the guy swinging around a shovel, a piece of a shovel handle, right? As Teregas is going on, because you got to stop there and your car was, you know, when those were broken in your families in the backseat, you know, that is a different situation. So, you know, getting medical. learning about weaponry. I personally don't really like fighting on the ground. But that's why force myself to go to a train with different people out there, you know. On the ground, you get to catch wrestling to top and bottom and you neither, you don't like either. I have had pride personally. I like being in a car and running that everybody over that would be great. You know, if I could or driving really far away, or I had this experience in Utah, some friends of mine, a military, some of your best shooters, some of the best shooters in the US, you know, coming from the Marine Corps. We're showing me how they, you know, would shoot something from really far away. And I was like, 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 can be from it.

I have a class where we specifically work on social engineering and kind of how how you can go about something that you know I'm on micro level. We I do a class with a guy named Matt Fiddler who does a basically he's one of the premier experts on how to get into and bypass locks basically. You'll, he'll show you how to open up every single or bypass every single commercial lack available in the United States. Like he'll spread it out and open up everything. And that's, 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 so we have this exercise in a public space where there's a bunch of padlocks in the environment, right? And we paint them pink. So people know it's our padlocks, they were 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 get caught and It's a whole situation. But the smart ones will basically develop a social media campaign related to the bad locks, right? A beautiful example of this and this actually happened here in Texas. I did a class out in Dallas. We put the padlocks over this public mall. And the students basically came up with a breast cancer awareness campaign online that they made fake, well, they made flyers for it. They did the social media page on a campaign. They did the email chain. So when they went there, people were expecting them. So they normalized the behavior through social media. And they were walking around bulk cutters in the middle of them all, cutting these things off. That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful solution to a complex problem that nature. And again, weaponizing part of it, anything can be all mileage can be weaponized. And if you focus on getting in the street fight with somebody with your fist or knife, you know, you're missing out in the whole complexity of violence in the way that it's now being utilized.

It happens in different ways in different parts of the world. I mean, I just sent off a group of people that trained some of the Ukrainians and some of the stuff that they were showing them was some of the counter-cussity stuff that I showed them for an online event, went out there, was showing them some of the aspects of how to utilize things like a Kevlar courtage and how to infuse it in their uniform. So if they get zip-tied to cut them open, it's a war setting. So it's talks about 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 strengths. Yeah, so in Mexico you have abductions happening where cartels who hold control over a specific place or zone are having a hard time with financial situations as far as maybe they're not making enough money to pay everybody off. So they let them freelance basically and a lot of ways some of these criminal groups freelance or some of these groups actually professionalize and to abduct the sons of businessmen or people that have money to ask for ransom for them basically and they've taken you know captivity and an abduction to like an art form and in places like Mexico and has a history all over the world but specifically my experience with it with it was going to Carthel Safehouse is that turned into holding places. You would see, you know, homemade prison cells and stuff like that, and people being held in captivity for months, if not years, as they were milking their family for everything they own.

And also, if they get hurt, they're hurt for purpose, which is to make their family pay up faster or more. Some of the abduction groups that have seen out their professional ones and 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 almost like an ATM for them. You know, it's like, ah, here we're again. So there's some of that going on. Some not so much. Some obstructions are expressed. I mean, I'll grab you with a in-gun point, 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 anything insane, you know, you just go with the motions. But some people do get picked up. I have trained people with prior experiences of reductions 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 that utilize our zip ties and handcuffs, sometimes or duct tape or their own clothing, things of this nature. Basically, what somebody is 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 and can't go into ex-boyfriend showing up at your house and tying you up until you agreed to get back with them. That's the same thing. And some of the restraints that are being utilized come from different places. I mean, I remember this instructor I had way back when told me that the proliferation of zip ties as a sort of strength and criminal abductions came up after the movie he came out because everybody wanted to be offered to near your zip tying people in the bank robbery at the end of the movie. Criminal saw that and it became like that.

They're not see a program people. They heard criminals. I learned how to get our handcuffs from the 15 year old. It was in charge of a meth cells and and love any other solution in the Qwana. Is there a system to it? I mean, it's not a specifically a system. It's usually 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 the restraints are temporary, even marriage.

All restraints are temporary, even marriage. I'll just, I just like adding that one in there for the last because this is a dark subject. Every cage can be escaped. All restraints are temporary. You either free yourselves from the restraints. Somebody else takes them off or you die and your body rots away around. You know, those are the options. And I like that first option myself. The second option is pretty cool if you can convince somebody to do that for you. But that first option is an interesting one. You have to deconstruct restraints, not all restraints are made the same. You can train to get out of handcuffs here in the US and focus on the Paris, missing Western handcuffs which are kind of the most common brand of handcuffs here. But if you find yourself 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 in Russia.

I need this information. I'll send you a specific model and details on how to get out of those. But basically, I'm looking for a friend, I'm sorry. So what I do is I take a pair of Smith and Weston handcuffs, I put them in the middle of a three people in a class, I spread them out, and I have them placed them on each other. In a just playing manner, I have handcuffs, keeps there, and I have a pair of bow-cutters here in case somebody gets stuck, doesn't seem stupid. So they play with each other as far as putting them on randomly. I show them how to put them on appropriately and then I show them a handcuff key and a handcuff key will open up handcuffs. Interestingly enough, 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 a standard hidden handcuff key. So I show them how to modify the 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 key way behind your back or in front of you.

I appropriate way to handcuff somebody's palms out. How much restriction is there in terms of it? There's a lot, if it's a hng handcuff, there's a lot of restriction. With no jail, can you reach back? You could try and reach back, or you can basically put yourself in a not compromised position. feed the most of your palm into the handcuff way. So when they shut it on you, you have more space to work with. So you can spin your hand. We call it the passive resistance. Again, you go through a process with them where you deconstruct how people are handcuffed, handcuffed keys and how to modify handcuffs key to be able to use on yourself. And these all of these things they're constructing as we go. So they basically, 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 keyway, but you can get it into the keyway at an angle, for example. 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 arms so you can spin it behind your back. You learn how to put yourself in not a compromise position. If somebody asks you for your hand, they could be cuffed. You don't do this. You know, you do that or you put yourself in a gable drip behind your back, which is 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 these things are advantageous for you. And you learn, I'm not only people get restrained, but you see videos of them because I show a bunch of a reduction they're actually happening alive. 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 ready-made 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 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 environment. Somebody going to North and Sub-Suppair in Africa, carrying a plastic handcuff key, is that's going to be useless out there, because it'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 millimeter Chinese padlock with a plastic core that you can open with a lighter if you can burn the core melt the core open or if you can leverage that open that's a pretty easy thing to open or a body pin you could reach all the way in the back and open the latch above rope uh the glummen yeah it is common uh this is one of my favorite things for rope something I usually carry in some places. Another gift for you if you want. The ceramic razor blade. Nice. Is it capable of cutting? Nice. Small. You can put it behind a label. I've seen some students put the Levi's label on there and just so it peck on. It is non-metinetic non-ferrous. So in and out of, you know, that type of situation. You can get in 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 in reverse. So 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 set, a criminal mindset type setting. So 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 missing out on a big part of the equation.

So I have some cell phone on my Patreon specifically. I have a Patreon where I share a lot of the online material like basically a bunch of this is my notebook I have a bunch of stuff that 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 and filled some of it. And it's not for any other reason. I'm not trying to create dangerous people out there. It's like, hey, look at this. This is something that's out there, right? 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 has not been possible anymore.

The whole aspect of, you know, go to places 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 the experience, you know, the whole warrior's journey, the heroes journey of going out there and actually risking. I think that's a pretty big basis in aspect of what the work I do and showing some of these things. There's a tendency to people say, hey, I'm afraid to go to Mexico. What do I need to know? Like, well, if you're afraid to go to Mexico, I don't know Mexico. I mean, I was in Detroit. I was pretty afraid when I was in Detroit and some parts of Detroit and the South Side Chicago. But 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 in asset to the people around me and myself. And that comes to experience. Um, and people don't want to risk getting a shoulder injury rolling into Jitsu or don't want to risk getting a bloody nose and boxing, but that is the way.

I mean, it's not about fitting in. It's about coming up with a narrative for yourself. Well, that book is talking, that's a quote from the book called a Shoninki, which is like an actual legit ninja manual from like the 1500s or something like that. And they're talking, how are talking about blending in? They're talking about creating a narrative or a lie through 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 groups work out there, what type of guns they have, not only will type of guns they have to go to the gun range in Vegas and learn how to fire some of these firearms yourself so you know how to load them in case you run into a bad situation how to tie the sword you know how they how they wear their swords swords could equate to how, you know, if you run into some issues, also it would give you a good idea how many rounds those holds, so you can run at the right moment.

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, were you with, and with the news organization, or am I with a Christian A group here? Yeah. And if you are with a Christian egg group, it's probably a good idea, or some of the Bible. If you want a quick way of having somebody out there trying to stop talking to you, you can start talking about Jesus in the middle of a little cartel territory when they approach you and take out the Bible. That will quickly de-escalate. So look at that.

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, 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 the, some of us don't know this aspect because it's something we consider predatory or something that is wrong or negative or bad. And some of these aspects are actually, you know, they're pretty useful. I've earned most of my trade craft and skill craft from Panhandlers and street performers. And when I had some training related to social engineering, those were the people that I learned from. 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, do you order it? You know, he's smell like a homeless person. You look like a homeless person and you approach somebody asking for the time and they smell even before they see you. and you are not there, you're not human, you don't exist. So that was a pretty valuable lesson that I got there.

And a true believer is what? Like true believer.

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 why I am. I don't give a fuck. This is why I am feet on trust me. Well, shoot me. Fuck it. 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.

But you do that through, I mean, I'm saying I'm verbalizing your behavior, just walking somewhere. 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. That's a pretty interesting introduction. You're not a threat because you don't consider yourself a threat and you're walking in there with the confidence that you're in consider yourself a threat, which is an interesting way of going about it. My life experience has been different. I wasn't programmed that way from an early age and 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 more cognizant of the fact that you don't really have to try that much if you believe in yourself and who you are, if you know yourself, that's I think that is at the core, but if you know yourself enough, to be able to kind of communicate that to people around you.

You can't pick pocket or naked man. And if you know how to be naked and again, I'm not there. I think I'm working towards that just by Yeah, hopefully going through shit and showing people not telling them is a show me don't tell me is another valuable lesson that I got long ago. I travel across the country and I don't not only get to show people what I know how to do, but I give examples of it through things that I do out there. I say this a lot. When I travel out there, I never alone. There's couches out there waiting for me. There's homes that I can 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 worrying some of those mistakes and past failures on my sleeve, but also turning them into lessons for people. And just telling people that, I know how to do all this weird stuff, and I show people how to do it. But here's a bunch of weird memes that are a few very humorous about my culture and about being it 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's another aspect of it.

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 a love and hate. We were there. We stopped talking to each other for months and then, you know, just send a thick message to some sort and just, you know, we're back at it.

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 ethnic culture that other parts of the world got most of that taken away and suppressed or killed or taken away. When the 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 Alavidikan, the Wadalupe, the version of Wadalupe. And Hernán Cortes' vision of that version of that was a lady holding a crystal scepter. Baby Jesus. and standing on a crescent moon, that's what he brought with him to the Americas. And when the conquest happened, you know, a lot of people say, that Spanish came in conquest of the, the, the, the Aztec Empire, the enemies of the Aztec, allied themselves with the Spanish, and they 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 kind of hard to suppress some of the spiritual practices in Mexico, so they decided to mill them with Catholic iconography. So you see this cult who's not seen, which is like a fertility variant of a mother goddess in Nath that culture, and they turn her into Levitin de Wetherlupi, which is the icon that a lot of Mexicans venerate as the Levitin de Virgin. But in her, she conceals cultural elements from the past. She has a black sash across her stomach, which means she's pregnant at something common in the aesthetic culture, in the Mahika culture. She's standing on a chair that has eagle wings that is a war god. That's a symbol of the war god down there. She has stars on her, which is a veil of certain stars that have related to some of the spiritual practices from before. basically they hid these things in that setting. Now you skip forward hundreds of years. And you start seeing things like Malvarda, who was a bandit that lived in Cinaloa way back in the day. He would rob rich farmers that would go through the countryside. One time he was almost caught and he was shot and injured and he was wanted by the government. So he told one of his friends to tell them where he was and to give them money the reward money to the townspeople. So we did that. The he was hung from a tree and the the order was not a barion just to let his body rock and his body rock rotted away until it fell on the ground bones. And each of the townspeople 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 become insane. And also the middle finger from the downward local populist to the church in a way, because there's not a recognized saint, but he has an altar and people venerate that. And 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 population around them. There are icons of power and sometimes of almost a symbol of rebellion. You see El Chapo's son when he was arrested had a Santoninho that torture on his chest, which is a holy kid of a torture. The Spanish legend during the Morris Conquest, they said that a statue of that saint would go around and feed some of the hungry, you know, that was the legend. And he's a saint of the person persecuted. So the fact that when he was arrested, you see him with that wearing that and then he was liberated is a miracle in and of itself. So it's proof of that that works. You see that that was you can find one of those scouple audios anywhere in Mexico. It was the most high least assault one. So you see them utilizing some of these aspects in their own belief system to as a similar as I kind of I can offer if you basically for some of the things they do. Then you go into some other aspects of it that are out there like something what which is actually a faith that I grew up in. Mexico has a weird relationship to death. We have parties at the cemetery on day of the dead, and we just went through one. Recently, this is November, the second. So we celebrate our dead, and we celebrate death in a way that I don't think a lot of cultures out there do. It is a joyful occasion. It is a celebration, yeah. My eight-year-old put two beers on an altar one for my mom, one for my brother. She bought Snickers bar for my mom and a bag of pops for my brother. Flower petals and marigolds and pictures of them on an altar. That's amazing. What kind of beer? I think I've got the Roja for my mother because she was hardcore and they got the light for my brother. You know, he was a more of a endurance drinker. And it's also for me. The relationship to death down there is different. So there's a Nikon in Mexico. It's actually one of the fastest-rolling alternative spiritual practices in Mexico. And not only in Mexico, but here in the US, I've been to Santa Morita temples across the country. I found one in Connecticut out of all places. how I grew up with it, where I saw it is, my family was on whether to burn us. We were Catholic, and we venerated the Virgin of Wetherloop, specifically the icon of the Virgin of Wetherloop. But every now and then there are links and nods to a skeletal saint in family practices. And even when I went to work, the older guys that were, I was working with would tell me like, hey, we've got to go ask, ask for protection. So that 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 Dijuana. in a little corner, there was a big Santa Martha Reaper effigy. And then I knew why I had to bring a bottle to Kila. It was like, why am I bringing a bottle to Kila the church? It was for her, for death. I'm with it. It was partly hazing. And also, they did believe that they were basically inbeued with being agents of death in a way. So it was like a cultural thing as well, something that they wore on them as not only protection, but as also like a samurai would wear this death iconography on them or how the minority would do haka dances you know to some of these guys in their kind of warrior culture that they were growing up with or trying to in view on us the young guys They would take us there and they would review us with an hour of yosantamartha to be like a psychological thing.

I think you know, you close and sit death and having a relationship to death in the form of a symbolic representation of it like a santamartha or an icon like that makes it not as scary I guess or not only that, but it's also something that the other side. the enemy, the cartels 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 or are you guys, why are you wearing that? Sir, there was an aspect of that to it. I'm a mental moody, a moody type thing where you remember death, you know, type thing.

There was some of that, yeah. There was a saying, I think they'd probably took it from a movie or something like that, but I don't know where they got it. May I earn your need and be your wrath?

They would say that to the statue of La Santa. You know? Another thing, people, it's not a cartel specific saint though. It's like everybody, like odd all levels from the lady that sells tortillas. to the cops, to the military. There's some people in the military that have been narrated. 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 shrine outside of Dihuana right across the Presa. It's like a water reservoir right throughout Dihuana. And there was a big Santa Marta altar there like on the roadside. And my former boss leaves all the order that thing destroyed. So 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 destroying it.

It keeps getting destroyed by ultra Christian groups or Catholic groups and it keeps getting rebuilt. Personally for me, I don't believe that there's a Reaper skeleton in the sky protecting me. 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 delusion all about things.

Yeah, and, you know, having my daughter who's eight, uh, be who it has a benevolent thing, you know, she's a kid and she sees a skeleton that represents death and Jesus does, it's like, I think in a way, Mexicans have taken some of those aspects, be it day of the dead, some of these practices related to some occultism, aspects around, you know, Saint Judas, you know, Saint Judas, Saint Judas is the patron state of lost causes. And it's one of the most venerated saints in Mexico, you know, Jesus, probably the fourth or fifth you pray to, which is pretty funny to retake us. But the reason why and this is something I heard from somebody that was actually we found him was a gun and on his gun he had a San Judas F.A.G. And he said, oh, like, why send you this? What does Uncleus? And he's like, well, he's the last Saint you prayed to. What do you mean? Well, on the list of Saint you prayed to, he's the last one because when you prayed to Judas, you might get the other Judas online. Yeah, that's the last one you pray to that's why he's like the lost causes saying how I remember like Even how we try and bribe or like maneuver our ways even in spirituality. It's spiritual practices.

And it's here, too. Again, I found an alternate Connecticut, which is pretty fascinating. There's one in Arizona. Again, it's one of the fastest growing spiritual practices. And not only in the US, but across there's somebody from Russia reached out. There's an altar out there. And there's a group of people praying to Santa Martha. And 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. All the way out there. Those people are fascinated by some of those aspects.

This is a guy that comes up in an a period. I think he's he's at that initial period of cartels. 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 kills a lot of people. He was exposed and learned through his family ties about some of the Afro-Coverrivian spiritualitys that are now also exploding. as far as influences across the world, Latin America and in the US. When I talk about that, I mean, Santería, Palo Mayombe, basically some old spiritual practices coming out of Africa that utilize things like in Ganges, 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 review 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 engongas or these spells, these cold runs that he would fill with certain elements grew in complexity. To finally, he said he needed the brain of a highly educated American of some sort. which led to his eventual downfall. He was basically responsible for abducting and murdering a young American, who was a university college student, I think.

Yeah, it jibbed. I mean, some of these spiritual practices, again, there's there's a ritual of secanibalism done by some of these cartel groups out there. Was he involved in cannibalism as well? He wasn't involved in cannibalism that I know of, but 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 eventual downfalls. His ranch was rated. They found the body parts inside of these colleges that he was preparing. That's an interesting example of somebody. There's a cartel head somewhere in Central Mexico as well. El Masloco was his nickname. And he basically forced the citizen ship around him to turn him into a saint. So he made a statue himself. He was very big into Christianity, specifically kind of like the Crusader. mentality and all that kind of in view to himself and some of the people that were around them 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 in turns out he wasn't dead. So that was his first miracle. And then when he was really dead, some of his people and his loyal followers were gunpoint kind of still force to go and get flowers and then generate these refugees and statues of him as a saint. It's a powerful weapon spirituality and Mexico is a powerful weapon. You know, the church Catholic church in Mexico was a pretty bad track record, but as far as that being used to control populace and stuff like that. And I think it's just another aspect that is being exploited in Mexico 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 was a prescription opiated epidemic in the United States that kind of went down or stopped, you know, well, you know, still out there, but like the epidemic specific around it, kind of petered out. And there was also marijuana legalization. happening at the kind of the same time period, which people talking about marijuana legalization thought it was going to hit the cartels and their pockets and it was going to be like a death blow to these criminal groups. Well now there's illegal Pot grows in the United States being run by cartels in federal land. There's the legal pot grows that are in some way shape or form. Influence and Iran are owned by some kind of criminal groups. They're kind of utilizing that. The marijuana fields in Mexico turn into Bobby fields once again. The problem is that some of these lands were leached of all the nutrients and, you know, they're not as good as something you would find somewhere in Afghanistan. So the yield and the quality of it wasn't as strong as it could be. So somebody thought about the right idea of putting fentanyl into the mix and not only that, but also figuring out a get fentanyl 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 that happening, right? So not only the precursors to make it, but also the chemists and the industry to create it in Mexico as well. Some clandestine factories of fentanyl have been found in Mexico. But realistically, it's not needed with the ways that the ports and the borders are down in Mexico. You started seeing an influx and a flood of fentanyl 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.

I don't know about the biochemical aspect of it, but like speaking to guys that do Chiba down there, that's what's what we call heroin down there. It's like a nickname for it. having them describe some of the old or stinkier darker heroin they used to get before this whole fentanyl thing and the highs they would get and how much they would have to take versus some of the stuff low to fentanyl that they have to you know so 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 transport yeah but then

One aspect to it that people kind of mess 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.

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, uh, the state. I would have to assume that some of these things are happening with the know-how and in action of the government out there. When COVID hit, there was a shortage of fentanyl on the northern side of Mexico, specifically related to the law cartel. These guys were actually trafficking fentanyl from the US down to Mexico to infuse their product. but not the new generation cartel which operates out of the central part of Mexico, the Colima area, which have access to the seaside ports. So even during the shutdown, they were getting supplied, which means to me, at least, or 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 think it's more inaction or just the know how that is happening, but just like hands off, just let this fly, I don't know.

Yeah. You are now seeing 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 fentanyl but also making fake pain medication that is flooding US markets everywhere less whereas with that pay medication or is that fentanyl, you know, who knows. And that's how you see a lot of people dying from odies that are supposedly taken pain pills. And that's not what they're doing. So the evolution right now you're seeing is making something look legit as far as a pain medication that isn't. And I mean, fentanyl is everywhere. They're infusing cocaine with it. 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 whatever is out there. It is killing off a whole generation of people and it comes from one place or it's manufactured somewhere where it's being manufactured with the precursors and the elements and know how it comes from one place.

There's probably an economic war. Well, you talk up with this another side to China. 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. They would put it into the Chinese banking system and immediately would just disappear from American eyes. And then another money broker in Mexico would receive it through a money transfer from China, which China is incredibly good amount of money laundering. That's another aspect. I mean, their banking system is invisible to the US basic glitch allows, which allows the money to move from one point to another. So money brokers and people moving money for the groups down there are Chinese. So that's another aspect that are element of China, as far as its presence.

Right now, Mexico is going through a nationalistic resurgence and left this presidency, which is not friendly to US interests in a lot of ways. The US has had a pretty bad track record when it's 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 in Mexico.

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, our Mexicans looking for like US intervention. It's like, no, that is beyond what anybody in Mexico would want. It's specifically you see that the sentiment out there. They don't view the U.S. as somebody that's going to come in and fix anything or somebody that's going to help or as a friend. When the Ukrainian conflict happened, Mexico basically abstained from saying anything, which is the winking and not to Russia. it has openly been pro-maduro and openly celebrated to some of these regimes popping up across Latin America which is that is what people voted for that is sentiment down there going towards the left of the political spectrum because 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 choices. So this is the best we have right now. 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 foreign intelligence services in Mexico, you know, and why that is. Well, you know, it has Mexico as a lot of the mindable lithium on the planet underneath parts of it, specifically in the north. And it is going through a process. They call it the Guarta Transformation, the Fourth Transformation is what the President of Mexico calls it. Which is an way, basically, we're here to stay. Type thing. You know, they just nationalized mining lithium and taking control of that and using that leverage. 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 relate to energy, I think. You know, they're kind of Thinking ahead, I guess.

That's pretty possible. Again, we're seeing a militarized Mexico. It's another aspect of Mexico that, again, I haven't seen talked about a lot here in the US. The main problem is that the current president had was he was going to make the police, the federal police, and the security issues in Mexico, civilian. He was going to do exactly the opposite as his main rival, Felipe 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. When you cross into Mexico, you'll see them wearing these white camouflage uniforms. Those are national guard people, but they're the military. So you're now seeing a militarized Mexico with some of these leaks that happened during the Wacomaya, the Wacomaya 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 training them in such a way. It's an interesting maneuver, like Mexico has been historically neutral about getting involved in foreign conflicts, about voting and resolutions, as far as invading or not invading or doing all these things. Mexico has been historically kind of neutral and it comes to some of these things. And now we're training for military forces to go and do that role somewhere else. We have the military building airports and building infrastructure in Mexico and a lot of their higher ups getting very wealthy around it. 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 gun there is if you can buy a plane ticket to fly there and have enough money to sustain that that right or that privilege. So 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 getting involved in politics in a big way. You know, it's legislation that has passed to keep it on the streets and policing role for more years now. So, that should be looked at closer by anybody observing it from afar, how the militarization of Mexico and where it's going.

And also the fact that that border doesn't mean anything to any sort of conflict 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. 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 a proxy war down there of a sword which I think in a way you're already kind of seeing some of that through some of the conflicts going on down there you have a new generation cartel that is being fed fentanyl from the Pacific side ports and And it's especially, you know, you want to think that maybe it's favored by a foreign government of some sort in some way, shape or form, who knows? And then you have a historically in-control scene in law cartel that may or may not be favored by the U.S. in some way, shape or form. You can imagine 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. The massive wave of migration that is going to be basically weaponized. You saw the collapse of the border security structure with the contingent of 3,000 Honduran, Guatemala, and immigrants in that first the wave of caravans coming to the quanna. It was pretty bad. It was pretty bad and it could have gone 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. I think that's an interesting thing that people should look at and, you know, how can you affect change to try and stop some of these things that happen?

If you think about that, when COVID hit, there was no shortages of produce and the supermarkets, which means that illegal immigration is pretty much the backbone of all produce and some of the farming industries out there, most of it. So illegal immigration and 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. There was a state out there that passed anti illegal immigrant worker legislation. The farmers had to look elsewhere for people to show up at the work in some of these fields, which basically caused millions of dollars worth of losses for some of these farms. Anywhere you go out there in the United States, you go into the kitchens, and there's going to be bisonals there, you know, French, high-level French restaurants. You'll see people from Puebla there that made their way legally and might have legalized, regularized, regularized their way into the country or in a sanctuary city. You go to the service in the street hotels. Those are the people changing the blankets. Those are the people in the washrooms. You have them doing jobs that know 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.

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. Yes, it may be kind of a day without Mexicans. You know, everything would stop. So the relationship is there. People talk about the history of slavery in this country, like it's the thing that is in the past. There's endangered slaves in the country right now. People that are paying off their people's mugglers because they brought them into this country and they haven't been able to pay that fine for that fee yet. And are basically being held hostage by that here in the United States. So there's slaves right now in the United States. People are talking about it's historical context. What do we do about it? How is supposed to think about it? We're going to have to rethink how we look at immigration illegal or illegal or illegal immigration from Mexico and how we view Mexico as a foreign country. Your relationship to Canada is one thing. Your relationship to Mexico is another. The foreign policy towards Mexico has been pretty nefarious as far as the United States in a lot of ways. You know, you can go back. There was a student massacre during the Olympics. And the president in turn at that time was a CAA payroll. And it was a counter communist type maneuver that we're doing down there. But there was some bloody hands on the U.S. side, but some of the things that have been happening in Mexico as far as the stabilization and influencing and meddling in foreign policy out there. Most of the guns that are used down there come from the US, you know, and that's another interesting aspect and responsibility that people shouldn't kind of think about up here.

I mean, there's a giant drug habit up here, you know?

I don't know about the cell weapons, but, you know, there's some very, you can talk about poorest borders coming up. There's borders also going down. You know, there's, there's a flow of guns going down and munitions. which, again, they don't kill anybody by themselves. They put the, 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. A Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, the, the, the, the, the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the 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're related in blood. We are, we are, Mexico and the United States are like this. but it's become popular in politics, they just throw online. And I think we need to get to a place where we can figure out how to make those connections and repair some other damage on by just years and years of bad policy on both sides of the border.

Yeah, it's an easy thing. They're coming to take our jobs as something you hear. There was a state out there that passed some anti-legislation as far as illegal workers and fields. And it led to massive losses. Nobody wanted to show up for those jobs, basically. 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 locals? Or are they feeling an essential role that we feel guilty about? And the rhetoric around it is more about guilt. than anything. I am an immigrant myself. I 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 by going around some of the system. The system itself, the immigration system here in the U.S. is there's something wrong. It's kind of broken. 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, oh, there's this immigrant did this horrible thing, this immigrant did that horrible thing. And people's cult saying, you know, go back to your country at the same time, they go to a hotel where they're all the service staff is from that part of the world and they're here irregularly. or they go to the whole foods and they get some produce air and it's picked by some of the same people that are realifying. And again, we need to kind of like think about that and analyze that for ourselves.

Yeah, I saw that entry by the way, that was like I used to show the basic restraint and then interview my experience. And I came up here again, Trump was elected when I came up here. So it was a weird time for me as far as being an American and the American experience for myself by both being basically the bad. The ones that we talked about in that way. And also having a bunch of my friends were very conservative. you know, wearing some of those maga hats around me and like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey On my end, I want to get to a place where I can smoke a joint, conceal carrier firearm, be it my gay, best friends wedding, and I want the government not to say anything about it. And I think there's parts in the United States here that feel the same way. But there's extremes of both sides that are pulling you to one side or the other. And I've seen more of the United States and most Americans. I'm in a different state every weekend. So I get to go to Tampa tomorrow. Then I'm going back to California, then we've brought Tennessee later. I can talk to you. So I get to see all types of people and all types of mentalities and ways of people live in 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 it for me is like, The reason I came here, I guess, and a lot of the reasons that I feel have vested interest in this country, not just because of kids American. So I have a very, very big interest in this country doing well. But I think I see is there still the opportunity and the ability to do something with yourself and an opportunity is out there for people like me that come here with nothing. I came here with an experience space, a truck,

And yeah, a bunch of demons in a bag. And I'm here with you talking right now about some of those experience and another immigrant. And both of us are reaching people out there that, you know, might not have in turn a voice of people like us that come here with our own bag of demons, but where else in the world can two people like us have a conversation with an audience like us and not be a shout-out side of this because of the stuff we're saying?

A travel travel is one of the biggest things in the world that I would ask people to kind of go out to, see how other people live. Don't go there with your own preconceived notions or trying to make people act like you act, go out there and travel and actually experience the world. It doesn't have to be another country going from Tennessee to Seattle. It's a pretty interesting change of machinery.

But the traveling is one, and knowing how other people live is one aspect of it that would tell people. It's risky, it's dangerous, but that is part of the journey. Is one of the things I would ask people, young people to kind of, I 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 start your own restaurant, you have to work in the kitchen for service. If you're going to be a part of productive member of this country, service, and I'm not talking just about the military, because the military, 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, the homeless population that there is in this country, the older population that in Mexico are old die in our homes. But here you send them off somewhere else to die, which is an interesting weird detachment that I've seen in the US as far as how the elders are cast aside. If I can say anything to the young people is to start figuring out our lives of service and that's going to expose you to a bunch of experiences to a bunch of people out there that 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. So education is out there, but it doesn't have to be as expensive as they make it. It's all about the individual, what he does with that education. The dream is free and the hustle is sold separately. It's something else I would like to watch somewhere in online, but the ability to take information, process and use it. We're expecting everything to be safe, process, and given to us in a platter, and taking that and digesting and thinking that's going to make us somebody that's going to be productive for valuable insights. What's up to us? The U.S. 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 it. Like I came here without anything and the first thing I thought was I have responsibility for the people that I've worked with and the people that are going through the same problems and I am, how can I figure out a way to help?

There's an isolationist aspect to culture now. It's like we separate. There's almost like a spiritual or cultural amputation in a way where, you know, when I was a kid, the house were all the bikes outside of it. That was where all the kids were hanging out. And now everybody's on their phone, you know, the separate house is like chatting on whatever. There's a detachment to there. That's a weird aspect to it. And also the aspect of, I need to be safe. I can't be offended. Don't hurt me. Say spaces. This is my right. This is my, this is my reality. You need to respect it. Yeah, respect is earned. And when I come from respect is earned, there are freedoms, but there's dangerous freedoms. Any freedom you have in Mexico is a dangerous freedom in a way. 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, but there's a responsibility to all of it. It is a twisted responsibility, a twisted way kind of talk about and describe it, but I think the aspect of people screaming for freedom up here or their rights or their privilege without the responsibility. You know, you know, what are you doing for your community? You know, you're complaining about this. What are you doing about it? You know, another thing I've noticed in traveling around, it's scary is the whole people, people getting shot it down or canceled because of what they express or say. Yeah. Some of the creepiest experiences I've had in the OS have been through universities, or just seeing young people that have an opinion that is completely outside of reality, you know. people telling me how things are in Mexico because they learned it through a college course. And seeing sons of immigrants criticizing me because of my opinion of Mexico or what I have to say about it. And if you want to encounter the worst enemy of a Mexican is usually a second, third generation Mexican up here that shouts you down for what you're saying.

Yeah, one small example I micro example of this my kid There was a homeless guy. She was out with some with family members. It's home like a homeless guy showed up. He was erratic mentally disturbed. Created scene. She was upset. It was a little bit of trauma there. She was 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 sometimes I have them in the car, sometimes I drive around and see somebody who needs something and I give it to her. I says, you helped me earn this money that's gonna help these people. So you should just give them these. And she's like, yeah. And they're like, oh, thank you. She's like, hey, look at all these rules of the window. She used to roll up the window really quick, and now she doesn't. They be, they cease to be scary because now some of them have names. Now some of them know her name, you know, 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 little places. And in high places, that comes later, I guess. But she is learning about service. She's learning about not everybody out there is an enemy or a bad or scary. She's learning about service. And she's 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.

I'm afraid of it. If anything, I'm afraid of the meaningless death or at least the meaningless walk towards it. I'm afraid of losing use of my legs, I guess. I'm afraid of 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. So if anything, I'm afraid of stillness. You know, something I was quote a lot in my writing stillness is death.

Yeah, how am I afraid of the end? The ending is important in all things. First time I got a promotion, I got two silver coins and a two. Here's a silver coin and this is another silver coin. I'll give you the other one when your job ends. It depends on you if you wanted to have it over your eyes or your pocket. Right, and the lesson there is that, 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, but it's going to end. So you always have to, the end thing is important and all things. 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 if there's an atrophy, a spiritual atrophy in that.