Mario Bastunetti recounts his 1974 flight from Bulgaria to East Germany, his 1990 escape via 2,100 Leva for tickets through Havana, and subsequent smuggling into the U.S. after deportation threats under President Clinton. He details life in Treasure Island, Florida, and Sofia's hyperinflation, before pivoting to critique NATO, defend Putin against media bias, and challenge NASA's moon landing and evolution theories. Ultimately, Bastunetti connects societal decay to the ego, advocating for present-moment awareness through meditation to transcend fear and judgment. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Growing Up In Yugoslavia00:14:46
Some of the best podcasts on here with people that have never been on a podcast before.
Well, it's good to know.
So, this could be a fun one.
All right.
I just got done watching.
So, I wanted to like give myself a better understanding of what happened in the part of the world that you're from.
Cause I've never gone super deep on it.
Like, I had that guy, Beck Lover, on here.
You saw his episode.
He's from Kosovo or Albania.
He's from Albania.
Yeah.
But he was part of that whole Kosovo war and he was explaining what life was like over there.
I just watched a 30 for 30 on these two basketball players.
That are from there.
And one of them was from Croatia, and the other one was from another country over there, but it was like when it was Serbia.
Yeah, maybe it was Serbia, but it was when it was Yugoslavia.
Right.
And they won the Olympics together.
And I guess a guy walked out onto the court with this national Croatian flag and he grabbed the flag out of his hand.
It's like, no, we're Yugoslavia.
This is not, they're just like, they wanted to push out all like the dissenting sort of nationalistic movement over there.
And it drove this crazy void in these two people's friendships.
Well, Yugoslavia was a strange country to begin with because we always said that.
So the president of Yugoslavia was Tito, and we always said that he always goes a little bit of here and a little bit of there.
So whatever is good, he went with that.
So he was a capitalist and it was a communist.
So basically, Yugoslavia was a country that parted sometimes with the Western system and sometimes with the Russians.
So basically, it was a conglomerate of Yugoslavia, it was like several countries.
There was Bosnia Herzegovina.
Serbia, Harvatsko, what is Croatia, and then Kosovo was part of it.
I'm not very familiar with this history because we always learned it as Yugoslavia.
And the Bulgarians and the Serbs, so we're kind of like the same kind of people.
We use the same alphabet.
It's actually the Bulgarian alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet.
That's the same alphabet that the Russians are using.
And then the other side, like I said, I'm not very familiar.
I think the Croatians, they use the Latin alphabet.
And that was one of the things when Yugoslavia fell apart.
They started also like, what are we going to teach the children here and there?
And I think that was more of a kind of like separating them and turning against each other for political purposes.
That's what I think.
But again, like, I'm not, it was a country that there was not much information about it because it didn't belong to any of the blocks, actually.
It was kind of separate by itself.
With your background in your early life in that part of the world, seeing the shit that you saw, what?
What kind of perspective does that give you on all the shit that you see happening now with like Ukraine and Russia and that whole part of the world?
Well, au contraire of many people, maybe always complaining about their past life or anything like this, I can say that I grew up in a communist country, but it was a nice country.
I mean, I was a kid.
So, what do you know about communism?
You don't know anything about it.
You'll find out later.
But when I was growing up, I had a great family.
We had a house, actually, it was an apartment.
You know, we lived there, my parents, my grandparents, and my brother.
So, six people in the same place.
It was a decent sized place, it was right in the downtown area.
It used to belong to my grandfather, the whole building.
And then when the communists came, they kind of took parts of the building away and they left only my uncle, who was on the second floor, and we were on the third floor, the apartments.
And the other three apartments they sold off to some other people.
And I think they were communist people too.
Yeah, you told me, you kind of surprised me the other day.
You were like, yo, yeah, I got my neighbor mowing my lawn back in Bulgaria.
I was like, what?
You guys have lawns there?
Well, that's in the mountain house.
That's not, that's now.
Back then, no, there was no lawns.
There was no lawnmowers.
There was no real estate agencies.
There was no car dealerships.
So you couldn't just buy a car.
So, you saw the house there?
We just got a house there, yes.
My brother got a house.
He has a couple of houses there, yes, in the mountains.
It's actually close to a lake.
It's an old house, it's a beautiful house, and I'm planning to retire there.
Actually, I want to build my own little place there too in the same yard because it's a huge yard.
Why do you want to retire there?
Just because of the life, you know, more of a normal life, more like connected with people, like a spiritual life.
None of this.
Materialistic things.
And, you know, once you find out that materialistic things are not actually the things that make you happy, then you don't need them anymore.
You have to always think that there's always a better and faster car out there.
So if you buy a car today, then tomorrow is another one and another one.
And for some reason, the way people are brought up here is, you know, they're go getters.
They want to go get it.
And you have in your mind, I want to get this and I want to get a bigger truck and a bigger boat.
Very competitive.
Well, I don't know if it's competitive.
Maybe it's more of a consumer's.
I mean, it's competitive as well, but also consumers, I think.
So you got to stop consuming because you really don't need those things.
I mean, if you think about it, you sit in your truck and you're driving the same speed going from here to Treasure Island, for example.
If you're sitting in a McLaren, you're going the same speed.
The difference is one is half a million dollars or a million dollars, and the truck is like $50,000.
But you're driving the same speed.
Now, maybe there is a feeling that when you're sitting in the McLaren, people are watching you and you're getting excited because they're watching you.
But Is that the feeling you want to live for?
What other people think about you?
I don't know.
Not exciting for me.
Right.
Maybe you should give people listening a background of like your childhood and where you were, where you grew up, and what it was like when you first came to America.
So basically, I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria.
That's the capital.
And I lived in one place.
We never, we didn't move.
I mean, it wasn't like in the US where you move from place to place.
You know, you're born in one place and you live there.
Your grandparents live there.
Your parents live there.
That's The house, you know, and uh, I was there till fourth grade.
And in fourth grade, my dad got a job in East Germany and he was an interpreter from German to Bulgarian.
He was also a welding engineer.
What year was this?
This was 1970, about 1974.
Okay, so 1974, he got a job in East Germany, and the whole family my mom, my dad, and my brother we moved there, but we Stay in the house that we lived in in Bulgaria, my grandparents kept on living there and staying there.
So we lived in Germany only one year, but during that one year, I went to school there.
And when I was a little kid, my mom used to speak to me and my brother in German because she was a German major and she was just teaching us another language as babies.
So we spoke Bulgarian and she taught us German, and you didn't remember anything, but obviously it was somewhere in your brain because when I went to school, we were fluent in like six months.
I mean, everything just came from somewhere.
So we were actually put in a school with German people, like you take a guy that doesn't speak any English and you put him in school here with a normal school and you adopt it.
And all you have to know is ask, learn how to ask, what is this?
How do you call this?
And the next time you use that.
And every time you, every day you learn the new word.
It's even now in English, I will sometimes every day learn a new word because there is so many words, you know, and every day you come up with a word, you hear it, and then you could.
Now, once you learn it, you start hearing it in more sentences and understanding it better.
So, anyway, long story short, so we went to Germany, came back.
I was in fifth grade when I came back.
Then I lived there from fifth to eighth grade.
And in ninth grade, we went back to Germany and I finished high school there.
So I finished high school.
It was 1983 when I finished high school, and I had to go back to Bulgaria after high school to go to the Bulgarian military.
So, going to the military was obligatory two years.
And there was no excuses about it.
So, all the time.
You had to go to the military.
You had to go.
And how old were you?
I was 19.
19.
Yeah.
So, what was going on in that area of the world, right?
Like, in that time, were you paying attention to what was happening between countries and like.
No, not really.
I was a kid.
All we did is we played, you know, and we had a good time.
And I remember my grandfather, he was an engineer as well.
Would listen to the voice of America at night and like very light because it was the neighbors cannot hear it because it was considered propaganda.
And it was a country that all the communist countries people snitch on each other, so they listen to you, uh, say something and say, and then if they don't like you, they say, You know what?
I talked to Danny, and then Danny's like, He's talking against the president, this and that, you know, and then I'll come and visit you and start messing with you, really.
Oh, yeah, so that happened.
Oh, it happens all the time, yeah.
So you couldn't tell anybody what you're planning if.
It was something that was not legal, you know.
For example, when I left Bulgaria, I couldn't tell my best friends that I was leaving.
How old were you when you left?
I was 27.
And what inspired that?
Well, when I was a kid, we watched a lot of American movies.
So, you guys were, was it like, was America sort of like this big shiny city on the hill to you guys?
It wasn't like the shiny thing, it was like California.
And we were watching, there was this movie, Stunts.
I don't know if you remember it, an old, old movie.
And there was a bunch of stuntmen in Hollywood, and there was a need like some kind of intrigue on the inside.
And they were driving these cool muscle cars and motorcycles.
It was kind of appealing, it was like a different world, you know, was the movies, was the fantasy world.
Yeah.
So, and that's what made you want to come here?
Well, you started like thinking, Hey, what's going on over there?
What's going on over here?
But then when I went and lived in East Germany, we were able to watch West German TV.
So, the, the, East Germans could not block the over the air TV.
And of course, there's a lot of propaganda on TV, but you also see the truth.
Because when you go to a communist country to school, they tell you that in America it's terrible.
So the kids, they have to sit in this.
They used to show us this movie where they sit in a conveyor belt.
It's like a white, black and white movie.
And these little kids sit in a conveyor belt and they make sandwiches.
So the bread will come and you put the mustard and it slides over and they put the cheese and the next puts the ham and the next one wraps it.
And they told us that you have to be like when you're 12 years old, you have to go and work for your family to earn money and things like that.
Really?
Oh, yeah, it was all propaganda.
They didn't.
And if you couldn't see it, how can you know?
Because you perceive the world from the things that you see.
So basically, everybody gets information that could be visual, could be from, you know, like audio information or nature.
And then you start making a picture in your mind.
And then through all the things that you have learned, you start like dissecting that picture and thinking how the world works.
And if they give you only this kind of information, the world works the way they tell you it works.
Like Americans, for example, not to offend anybody, but extremely brainwashed.
Extremely brainwashed.
So, you were in East Germany, but you were getting some of the entertainment or news from East Germany or from West Germany, rather?
Right.
So, I lived in Brandenburg.
Okay.
It's only maybe like 50, 60 miles from Berlin, West Berlin.
And the West Germans, on purpose, of course, they were sending a strong signal.
So, you can actually watch.
There were only three channels, there was no cable.
So, there were like three East German channels and maybe three or four West German channels.
Mm hmm.
And on the West German channels, you can watch some American movies and maybe some shows and something different.
Of course, there was news.
We didn't care about the news.
We were kids.
What do we care about?
But there was some entertaining stuff, some Westerns and some action movies.
And on the East German station or in Bulgarian TV, you watched Russian war movies and you were over with.
I mean, you watched so many of those that you didn't want to watch anymore.
So it made kind of like I started maybe that bug of going to a different country and living in a different country.
And seeing that there is a different world out there that maybe wanted me to ask for more.
And I decided to, I cannot say I decided because I really don't decide anything.
Things actually fall in place in life.
You know, you decide something and go one direction, then things just expand and do their own thing, you know.
So I figured, hey, why not?
There's nothing to lose.
I mean, the plan was I go there.
If I don't like it, I come back.
So what's there to lose?
So you guys were just allowed to migrate to the United States.
And what year was this?
Well, no, this was in 1990.
1990.
Okay.
So in 1989, in September, the Berlin Wall came down.
Right.
So this was the crack into the communist bloc.
That was the time when Russia was falling apart.
Yeah.
What was it?
15% of the Russian population took down or basically ended the Soviet Union.
It was 15%.
It could be.
Like I said, again, I wasn't, I mean, we were very excited about it.
What actually happened is after Brezhnev died, They had a bunch of other presidents like Chernenko and Andropov, and then the alcoholic Yeltsin.
And the reason they had all these people is because when the Soviet Union started falling apart, they kind of like there's a bunch of oligarchs that started taking advantage of this.
And one of these presidents will support one guy, the other one, the other guy.
So it became kind of like a banana republic during that time.
And then it fell apart.
And then that's what happened when all these countries, Ukraine, came out of it.
Right.
Latvia, Litva, Estonia, and all these all separated all these republics that Russia had and they created the Russian Federation.
And then Putin came back.
Actually, Putin worked in East Germany.
The Fall Of A Republic00:03:18
He was an attorney, I believe.
And he worked for the Russian Secret Service as an attorney.
And then when he went back from Germany to Russia, this I mean, don't quote me on this, but this is what I read.
And we always get the information from somewhere.
He actually drove a taxi cab in Russia.
In Moscow.
I never heard that.
Yeah, well, where'd you read that?
Maybe we'll double check it too.
Where did you read that?
I don't know.
I read it somewhere.
Can we check it?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he can check it.
Yeah.
So you were there when the Berlin Wall came down?
So the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 in September.
And in November, and November, then after that was Romania that fell apart.
And when Romania fell apart, the president of Romania was Nicolae Ceausescu, and he was a vicious dictator.
He actually, when he was going down, he hired his secret service people to go to homes, and they were murdering people left and right.
Just for they ask him, Are you with us or against us?
And if you're against them, they took it off.
Vladimir Putin says he resorted to driving a taxi after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Who published this?
The Guardian?
Yeah, it's true.
I'm sure.
You're right.
Look at him.
I knew that a long time ago, but I just wanted to verify it.
So, yeah.
Actually, he drove himself.
He just went to Ukraine and he drove himself around in his SUV when he was visiting now.
Just last week.
Yeah, last week.
He drove by himself.
There's photos of him driving himself.
Yeah, it's him driving the truck, and there's a couple other guys in there.
That's wild.
Yeah, that's funny.
I wonder if that's because he just can't trust anybody to drive the car.
They're all in the same car.
What is there to trust?
Right.
I mean, if you hit a mine, you hit a mine, the whole car goes.
Still, people, yeah, people are willing to kill themselves just to get rid of Putin.
There were some, I saw like some videos of some attempts to kill him, of guys like crossing the meeting on the highway, like trying to hit his car.
There was one specific video I saw, but he wasn't in the car.
They actually hit one of Putin's cars, but it was like one of his guards driving it.
I'm sure there is all kinds of attempts, but actually, I believe he's a person that is actually loved in Russia.
So, really?
Not only in Russia, there is a lot of people that support what the Russians are doing.
Mm hmm.
And yeah, so.
Yeah, he's a driver.
He's a driver.
He's driving.
There he is.
Yeah.
So.
So, and then explain to me what it was like when you first came to the US.
Well, let's back it up a little bit because basically the way the story started.
So, then at 9th, 10th, and 11th, and 12th grade, I was in Germany, finished high school there.
It was a great time.
You know, the ladies, the German ladies are great, you know, and the philosophy is totally different.
It's not like.
Here is kind of like really difficult with dating, I think, because it's always this: hey, what you have, what you do, what you work, where you live.
You know, it's like it matters, you know.
Oh, yeah.
It matters to meet the person first and see if you like him.
And then if there is something, and what does it matter what I do?
I mean, you're, you know, in Europe, it's kind of like actually, especially in Italy, it's almost extremely offensive to ask somebody that you don't know well what they do for a living.
Dating Amidst Chemical Drills00:03:12
It's none of your business.
What does it matter what you do for a living?
Are you going to be a different person if you don't do this for a living?
I mean, let's say you were begging groceries at Publix.
You're still Daniel.
I mean, you're not going to be a different person.
Yeah, but girls want to be with somebody that can support them and support a family.
Yeah, but when did that story come up that the girls have to have somebody to support them?
I mean, I think they don't know.
Since I've been alive, I think.
Right, but didn't we say that women and men are equal?
And so if we're equal, then they can support themselves.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
It's a cultural thing.
I guess definitely a cultural thing.
Yes, definitely a cultural thing.
And it's a materialistic thing too.
So, but so, and then in 1983, I went to the military and the Bulgarian military is, I mean, it's not fun, let's put it this way.
It's not that you go there and you go during the day and you do some kind of exercises and then you go back to some kind of a nice barracks and you can go out in the town.
No, you go in there and you go in there for two years.
The first day you go in there, they shave your head.
All the way down, and they stick you in this bathroom that is like a huge room, and then they get a couple of hoses and start hosing off everybody in there.
And then they give you this stinky uniform that you have, and you wear this damn thing for like two years.
And you never, they don't let you go home, they don't let you do anything.
So you stay there at this area, wherever you are.
And I was on the Romanian border.
I actually am a medic.
So I went to medical school in the military.
It was 10 months to become a medic, you know, military medic.
And then while I was training for a medic, I got poisoned by poison gas.
Well, we used to have these gas masks, and they used to make us get up in the morning at 5 a.m. and summer, winter, whatever.
And they blow the alarm and said gas attack.
And then you put the gas mask on, and they make you run like three miles with the gas mask.
And it's really hard to breathe with a gas mask.
I mean, especially those old ones, they had the hose, and the hose was going in a little bag on the side.
And they had a little valve on the bottom, and we used to pull the valves out so you can breathe easier.
Well, when they did this chemical attack, they stick you in this room like this, and they open the room, they kick you in there, and you have to put your gas mask on.
So it's a drill, but they use real chemicals?
It's a drill, they use gas, yeah.
It's actually called EPRIT, they use it.
It's a chlorine based gas.
EPRIT?
EPRIT.
And I went in there, and a lot of people will panic when they go in there, and they will knock on the door, and there's a window, and you can knock on the window, and they think you're panicking, you know?
Well, I didn't have the valve in there because I. Took it out and I didn't even know where it was.
And it was an alarm, so it wasn't like you can prepare.
You know, they blow the alarm, you get dressed and you go and they tell you what's happening.
So I went in there and I started coughing, banging on the window, and nobody opened the door and I just passed out.
Traveling With Fake Passports00:15:45
And they obviously took me out and I woke up in a hospital and I could not talk when I turned to the left.
So I had a paresis or a paralysis of my voice box on the left hand side only.
So it was from inhaling those gases.
And then they let me go home.
They sent me actually to the military hospital in Sofia, what is the capital where I'm from.
And I remember going home and hitchhiking home.
And it was a rainy night and it was like really cold.
And I'm coming out there with my uniform.
And as a soldier, as soon as you go on the street, they will take you.
They're nice people.
So I was thumbing in these big truck stops.
I open the door and I look at the guy, but I cannot say anything.
Where are you going?
And I turn around and I'm going to Sofia.
And he's like, What are you talking with?
Then I had to turn around and explain to him that I cannot talk on the left hand side, you know.
So, how long was it like that for?
About six months.
Yeah.
And then I went to that hospital.
In the hospital, they did all kinds of, you know, like tests and things like this.
And then they knew that they messed up.
But you cannot sue the military in Bulgaria.
There is no such thing, you know.
So, they kind of gave me a better position as a medic later on.
So, I was in the Balkan, in the mountains, in a really nice area.
Oh, it was nice of them.
It was nice, yeah.
And well, anything was an upgrade from where you came from, you know.
And over there, I had my little cabinet, you know, where people come in, like a little room where people come in.
I give them like pills and stuff like that.
You know, you come, you have a headache, here's an aspirin.
You come here, my leg is missing, here's an aspirin, and things like that.
Have you got people with legs missing?
No, no, I'm just kidding.
And we used to play cards in there and goof around and all kinds of things, you know.
And after two years in this nonsense of wasting time, I got out of the military and started working for a company, a long story short.
And then when I, when communism started, fell true in Bulgaria in November.
So, on November 11, 1989, our communist president, who was elected in 1956 and won every election until 1990 and 1989, with 96% and plus.
And I never voted for him.
I was a kid.
I never even knew that you should be voting or whatever you're doing.
So, he was the only president that I ever had.
And they took him down, and things started to change.
So, now suddenly you could board a plane and go to a different country.
And my mom worked for the airlines.
And she told me it was December.
So this happened in November that he came down in December.
I went to this Christmas party and I met these people.
They were actually somewhat part of our family, but kind of distant.
And he said, Hey, we're going to Canada.
I'm like, Canada?
When are you going?
We're going soon.
What's going on?
He said, Well, you can fly to Canada and you can ask for political asylum, and then they will take you in.
And then what?
And then you start learning the language, get a job, and whatever you want to do, you know?
And I'm like, oh, that sounds pretty interesting.
So I asked my mom, I said, hey, do you know anything about this?
I do.
Well, she worked for the airlines and she wasn't very happy.
And I said, what do you mean you do?
And I want to go.
I want to do it.
And I, back then, I had a girlfriend.
She lived in our house.
She lived with me.
And I asked her, do you want to go?
And she said, yeah, I want to go.
And I remember, was on Saturday.
Actually, today's my anniversary.
Today's the 23rd.
I came.
In 1990, March 23rd, I came to Canada.
I left Bulgaria and went to Canada on this same date like today.
Wow.
And so, in order to go to Canada, I asked her, How are we going to do this?
And she said, Well, first of all, you have to pay for the ticket.
And I said, Well, how much is the ticket?
And the amount of the ticket for me and my girlfriend back then was 2100 Leva, LEVA, that's our money.
So, it's hard to explain it how much it is, but I can explain it in the way, let's say that, let's say the average salary here for, what's the average salary for one person?
Is it 40 grand or something?
Something like that, yeah, probably.
So, let's say it's like 40 grand.
Let's say it's 40 just for math, because back then it was less anyway.
So, 40 grand was the average salary.
I was making probably two and a half grand a year from our money.
So, it was a whole annual income.
For the two tickets.
But it's kind of hard to come up with, you know, like it's hard to come up with 45 grand, especially when you're like 25 years old, you know.
I mean, unless you have a good career and whatever, you know, but not in Bulgaria, you know, unless you're a communist, maybe, yes.
Right.
And so I came up with the money by we rented out my girlfriend's apartment.
She was actually an orphan, had her own apartment.
And we rented it out.
Everybody had their own apartment.
Nobody rented in Bulgaria.
Everybody, you bought it from, you got a government loan and you paid it off within 30 years and everybody had a house.
There was no real estate offices, I told you.
Then, how do you purchase it?
Where do you purchase it?
They just tell you, you apply, I want to get an apartment, and they look at you and see who you are and who your parents are.
And if you're a party member, you get it faster.
And if your parents are with them, you know, it's kind of like a hierarchy, you know.
And then, once you apply for that apartment, they look and see where you live right now.
I mean, if you have an apartment already, they're not going to sell you another one.
So, But when she got hers, you know, her parents passed.
So obviously, it was her parents' apartment anyway.
So, and so I rented that apartment to a friend of mine for a whole year in advance.
So, we got some money from there.
And this friend, she was a painter.
So, they made actually a studio out of this apartment.
You know, they were painting in there and all that stuff.
And it was also hard to get anything to rent because nobody was renting.
So, it was actually a renter's market.
So, I got good money for this apartment, rented out for 12 months in advance.
They paid me the money for the 12 months in advance.
And actually, I let them stay forever there because I mean, I never came back.
Wow.
And so, we got that money and bought the tickets.
And my mom told me, you know, sometimes when you board the Bulgarian plane, because the plane was going from Sofia to Belgrade, that's in Serbia, and then from Belgrade to Paris, and from Paris to Havana, Cuba.
So at the time I bought my ticket, you still could buy only a ticket going to another communist country.
But my mom knew that the plane lands in Newfoundland, Canada, for a refuel landing, where actually the Russians rent the airport.
To be able to refuel their planes.
Newfoundland, Canada, Gander.
Okay.
So the plane, she said, do not take the plane going on this date from Sofia to Belgrade.
We're going to take the train the night before and go to Belgrade.
And you're going to board the plane in Belgrade.
So I don't have to go through the Bulgarian customs because the Bulgarian customs were leery.
They knew about this scam, you know, that people are leaving the country.
And they were giving you a hard time.
Sometimes they delayed the plane so much that you missed your connections.
Why did they care so much about people leaving?
I don't know.
I mean, it's like it's control.
I mean, you couldn't do anything, you couldn't have a private enterprise.
There was no private enterprise.
Everything belonged to the state.
Except for you, you could rent your apartment, right?
Well, that was after it collapsed.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
And that's not an enterprise, really.
I mean, you cannot have your own butcher shop or your own.
Podcast or whatever, you know, or maybe you can have a podcast, but back then there was no stuff like this, right?
I mean, you cannot open a business and start selling things or producing things, there was no such thing.
So, you got a job, you went to school, and said they looked for a job, and you got a job, and that's it.
And everybody made the same amount of money, no matter what you did.
And you can only go to other communist countries, couldn't you?
And you can only travel to other communist countries.
So, in other words, if you were a doctor or a garbage man and you started at the same age, you made the same money.
Okay.
You got more money when you hit your tenure.
Let's say you were 10 years in the same business, then they gave you the next step up.
I think it started at 120, 160, 220 was after that.
And 250 was, I think, the boss.
Okay.
My dad was a boss.
He was making 250 level per month, what wasn't enough for anything.
But we had no mortgage.
Right.
So basically, all you bought is food.
And it was like 90% of the money went for food.
We didn't have a car ever.
And the only people that were like wealthy were people that were connected to the state.
There was no wealthy people.
There was no wealthy people.
No, there was the government employees later on that through corruption or whatever, they maybe had a fancy car.
But as far as the fancy house and like here, houses and yards and pools, no, not at all.
Okay.
Yeah, it didn't exist.
So you had to take the train to Belgrade?
So I took with my girlfriend.
Her name is Katya or Kate or whatever.
And then.
We went to Belgrade, and in Belgrade, we went to the airport.
And at the airport, we stood in line and got on the plane.
And there was a bunch of young people on the plane, my age.
And some of them, you know, they were talking.
We were kind of like staying aside.
We don't want to tell anybody anything, you know.
And then the plane, when we boarded the plane, they came in and collected all our passports after the plane took off.
And I don't know what they did with the passports.
We didn't know what they were going to do with it.
But long story short, when we landed in Paris, they put you in a special room, like a transit room, until you wait for the plane to go from Paris to Havana.
And So, you could not ask for political asylum while you went from Paris to Havana?
Yeah.
I thought you said it went from Paris to Canada.
No, no, from Paris to Havana.
Okay.
But it refuels, it stops in Newfoundland, Canada to refuel.
It's not a scheduled stop for you to get off.
So, there's a pit stop in Canada on the way to Havana.
In Newfoundland, Canada, yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Got it.
So, and they.
So, we boarded the plane in Paris.
That's when I understood why they took the passports because you cannot leave if you don't have a passport.
The passports are with the pilots.
Got it.
So you go on your plane and you move on.
They didn't want any refugees over there.
So basically, this iron curtain that first the communists didn't let you travel turned to the iron curtains where the Westerners didn't let you come.
The communists said, You can go wherever you want to.
And then the Westerners said, We don't want any immigrants.
So they blocked you.
So you could not go anywhere.
So that's why going to Cuba.
So.
Communist.
Communist country.
You're allowed to.
There is the Warsaw Pact countries, seven countries, you know, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, and so on, Poland as well.
And you could travel to those countries as much as you want to.
You can take the train, you can take the plane, whatever you want to.
Nobody cared.
But if you want to go to West Germany or Belgium or Holland, no way.
You have to go to the embassy, you have to apply, and 99% of the time you were denied.
Wow.
Yeah.
So we're taking off.
Approaching Cuba, and now we start talking.
The people on the plane, half of them are Bulgarian, the other half are French tourists that we picked up in France.
And the Bulgarians start like, you know, you start like kind of looking at people and you start thinking, hey, this is a cool guy.
This is probably cool, you know.
And they're all kind of like escaping.
So they're all on the same wavelength, I guess.
So I started talking to one of the guys, said, What's the plan?
He said, Well, so usually they have a cop on the plane.
And he might prevent us from coming down or whatever.
I mean, they were just yakking, you know.
I don't think there was a cop on the plane.
What the hell is the cop going to do on the plane?
The plane is in Canada landing.
You have to leave it for security reasons, for safety reasons.
You have to leave the plane while they refuel it.
So you cannot be on the plane.
Okay, got it.
So, but they were saying, like, if somebody tries to stop us, would you jump him and then you guys go?
And, you know, so we land over there.
And as soon as you land, I was told, you see this first cop that is down there and you tell him, I'm looking for political asylum.
And this was like March 23rd.
And in Paris, it was 74 degrees.
I had a short sleeve shirt.
We landed in Newfoundland.
You could not see, I mean, there was white and ice.
And there was the guy with the big muffs doing the plane thingy.
And it was so freaking cold.
And you had to walk from the plane to the terminal.
They didn't have like a bus or anything like this.
And it wasn't a long walk, but it was probably like, I would say, 25 degrees, and you were so excited.
I mean, that you were not cold, short sleeve shirt.
I just remember, like, somebody hit you with a steel frozen hammer right in the forehead.
I mean, you were so cold in here, but you were like, I got to get in there.
I got to get in there.
So we got in there and we asked the first cop, and he just took us and took us to a separate room.
How many of you?
62.
62 of you.
On one plane.
Oh, my God.
And nobody was saying anything until we were probably like half an hour away.
Nobody was saying, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.
No trust at all.
Yeah.
You can never tell what's going on.
I mean, there's there, there immediately somebody's going to go and snitch for benefits.
Do you think this was something that was happening every day?
People escaping on these planes?
Well, actually, I know because my mom worked for the airlines.
It started, it started like sometimes in November.
Somebody figured it out and it was stopped sometimes in April.
Okay.
So I just got out.
So what happened once you talked to the cop and they took you guys away?
I mean, it was just like in a movie, man.
They came in, they were cops, you know, first like in the movies, like their cops look like our cops.
And we said, We're looking for political asylum.
He said, This way.
And I was told not to bring any luggage with me.
So I had only a carry on.
And in the carry on, I was told, of course, you listen to people that don't know anything about things, you know, that they said, You have to bring a suit because you have to go to court and you have to look presentable.
So all I'm packing is, I'm going to Cuba, and all I'm packing is a toothbrush, a nice suit, and a Wool overcoat going to Cuba, you know, kind of like sketchy, you know.
Nobody looked in the luggage anyway, but and I don't have any luggage on the plane because you don't get your luggage off, it stays on the plane.
They don't go and get it for you, no matter what happens, it's lost, right?
Bringing A Suit To Court00:02:33
So I had this, I had $300 in fake visa traveler's checks.
They weren't fake, I think they were stolen.
I mean, they were real checks, but they were with an Arabic signature on it.
And I had no idea that you have to sign, you know, I signed on the top and you had to sign.
Have you ever seen a traveler's check?
No.
Well, back in the day, if you wanted to take money from one country to another, instead of going, there was no exchanges that you can do as easily as you can do them now.
So basically, you bought from Visa or American Express, you bought this paper that looks like a banknote, and it was traveler's checks, and they were accepted anywhere in the world.
So I bought them with Bulgarian money, converted whatever they said is so much in US dollars.
And it was 300.
And this was $300.
Checks and on one side on the top, you sign as the buyer, and then you sign, they have to sign the same signature as the spender.
I didn't know that they were signed on both places already.
What kind of makes it stupid because if somebody finds them, they can spend it, right?
But that was the idea behind it.
And I had stashed another probably $200 that my brother gave me, and my brother escaped before me, he went to West Germany before me.
Oh, okay, so he caused a little trouble for me, but very little, you know.
So it was kind of like at the end, and so.
Anyway, so we are at the airport, and just to back up a little bit, on that, so I traveled on Wednesday.
So on Monday, I was still, but that Monday prior to the Wednesday, I was in Bulgaria, and I'm walking down the street with my girl, and I'm seeing one of my colleagues with his wife.
And I go, Hey, what's going on?
You know, and he's like, Oh, I see you're taking a couple of days vacation.
I said, Yeah, yeah, what are you up to?
He said, No, nothing, you know, and that was it.
So on Wednesday, I landed in Newfoundland, Canada.
And my colleague works for immigration, for the Canadian immigration, because he speaks Spanish and Bulgarian.
So they pick him off the plane the same day that he comes off of the plane and he starts interpreting for them.
And he's questioning me.
Oh my God.
And I'm like, I'm sitting and looking at him, and he's like, So why didn't you tell me that you're coming here?
And I said, Well, why didn't you tell me that you're coming here?
He said, Well, I couldn't tell you.
I said, Well, I couldn't tell you either.
So he goes, So when they ask you if you smoke, you're smoking and your girlfriend is smoking too.
I'm like, Why?
An Unexpected Adventure Begins00:09:35
Just shut up.
I'm asked, I know the game here.
All right.
So, you know, they take you in this room and then they give you the, you know, search if you have anything on it and things like that.
Yeah.
Some people have brought some food, like they will bring, like, a loaf of bread and a can of meat or, like, some kind of a lunch meat or whatever.
They took everything away and asked him, Why did you bring this with you?
Well, we were worried if we have nothing to eat.
It's like, I mean, what loaf of bread?
What are you going to do with that?
But they didn't know.
So, people didn't know what to bring with them.
I mean, I, like I said, I brought a suit.
So, that suit.
Was at no purpose at all at the end, you know, it got thrown out probably, right?
And um, so um, we go in there and they ask, Do you smoke?
I said, Yeah, did she smoke?
Yeah, all right, so here's $60 for cigarettes, here's $60 for cigarettes.
I'm like, Ah, okay, wow, yeah.
The Canadians were very nice, so and now they processed us as much as they can, you know, they took your passport, so they kept possession of your passport, they didn't check it and they just kept possession of it.
Gave you some kind of a written note, paperwork, and told you, just wait outside.
I mean, there's going to be a cab, and you, you, you, you, and you, like we were five of us, four, five, yeah, five of us said, You all go with cab number, blah, blah.
All right, we go outside, and just like in the movies, there comes a yellow cab.
I've never seen a real yellow cab in my life.
You know, it's a Chevy Capri, like just in the movies, you know, and you're like, Am I dreaming or you're super excited, super afraid, and totally confused?
Emotions all over the place.
So we sit in, and I remember four people sitting on the back seat.
This is how big that car was.
You know, for us, that big.
Because if you go to Bulgaria, now most of the cars that look like a limo are the size of a Toyota Corolla.
Nobody drives in Europe big cars like here, you know, these huge cars.
I mean, there is some people who do, but 99% do not.
So they take us with this cab and they take us to a motel.
And that motel was called the Fox Moth Motel and had a hanging airplane in the lobby, like one of those biplanes, like a really cool plane.
And it was a brand new motel.
Nobody was there ever.
And they just opened it for us.
So we go in there.
I get a room with a king size water bed.
Never seen a water bed in my life, only in the movies, just the movie continues.
And wrestling on TV.
Ever watch wrestling on TV?
Have WWF?
Yes, have heard of it.
We are in heaven, you know.
We're laying on the bed, you know, like this is so cool watching the thing.
Phone rings.
I am sorry to bother you this late, but we usually close our restaurant at 9 30 at night.
But the chef stayed for you guys and made some food if you want to come down and have something to eat before you go to bed.
We'll go downstairs, hamburgers and Coca Cola.
Coke and hamburgers.
The movie goes on.
So, how good of an English speaker were you?
Probably half of what I'm now.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, did you order Coke and hamburgers?
No, that was the only thing that you can eat.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
They had made and fries.
They had Coke, fries, and a burger.
That was it.
Hey, I can always complain.
It was delicious.
So, we ate, and the next day, you know, we waited and waited and spent almost like a month in Gander.
And then they moved us to a different place, a fly fishing resort.
And that was in the mountains in Newfoundland.
Beautiful area.
The weather was cold, but the kids, as soon as it gets like the sun comes out and it hits like 45 50 degrees, kids are with shorts and tank tops riding their skateboards.
Wow.
I mean, that.
They're excited, you know.
It's kids, you know.
You see kids here swimming too.
And over there, it doesn't get much warmer.
So your body actually adjusts to that.
So it's not a big deal.
But for us, it was cold, you know.
I mean, it's kind of like cold.
So we were bored all day.
So we were in this resort and they had like freaking moose in the resort.
Like, have you ever seen a moose in real life?
Yeah, but not that close.
I was probably like 50 yards away from it.
We had one that was right in front of the door.
And we opened the door and you look up and this thing is like 13, 14 feet high.
This is like a huge animal, you know.
And we were scared shitless.
So we called the guy at the reception and go, Hey, there is a moose here.
What should we do?
He said, Just wait inside and then look out in a little bit.
And if he's gone, then come.
And that was exactly what happened.
They come here all the time.
It was some kind of an Irish guy running this place.
And he liked to drink.
And all the Bulgarians liked to drink.
So it turned out to be a party place.
So we were partying for probably a month or so.
A month?
But we waited for paperwork.
Seriously, in limbo, waiting for paperwork to be done?
Wait for paperwork, yes.
Paperwork was done, and they said, Now you can move around.
And I had my best friend moved to Montreal.
Long story short, he went through the China route.
So he went to school in China for porcelain.
He was an artist and he married his English teacher who was from Canada.
And then they came together.
Okay.
As I mean, he escaped from true China.
Right.
Wow.
And he was living in Montreal, and I was excited that I have a.
Friend in Montreal, and I'm gonna go check him out, and we're gonna have a great time.
He's gonna show me the ropes, and life is gonna move on, you know.
So, I had enough money to buy plane tickets for me and my wife to fly to Montreal, but then I befriended these people that actually we rode in the cab together and we also stayed in the same chalet.
They put you in these chalets, and there is like five people or six people that sleep in their separate rooms, very luxurious, very nice, you know.
They were like, Hey, can you help out?
Can we all go on the train and the bus and you help us out and I'll give you the money back?
And I'm like, All right, whatever.
So I did it.
And that caused us to go on a 52 hour bus trip from Kander, Newfoundland to Montreal.
And you go through the whole Newfoundland and it was snowing and this guy was going like 80 miles an hour in the middle of the night.
Then you go to.
Can you pull up a map of Newfoundland?
Then you go, yeah.
Can I have something to drink?
Yeah, yeah, some water.
Awesome.
You grab him.
Uh, we got some liquid death.
Is it water?
I think it's sparkling.
I think we're out of water.
Yeah, whatever it is, as long as it's not alcohol.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
There you go.
And um, thanks, man.
Liquid death.
Yeah, we're all out of regular water.
We just drink sparkling now.
Oh, this is good.
It's good, right?
Yeah, so there is uh, Newfoundland.
Let's see.
Oh, there you go.
Okay, way up there.
Holy crap.
It's the smaller island, the bigger one, this Labrador.
So, just can you zoom in on the small island?
No, that's the small island.
We were in the small island.
There you go.
So, St. John is the capital.
We stayed at St. John.
Okay.
And we actually, okay, we started from St. John and where to Porto Basque.
See where Porto Basque is on the bottom south and to the left.
Go left, left, right, right, left, left, left.
That's Porto Basque.
Okay.
So the bus went from St. John to Porto Basque.
And then from Porto Basque, we took the Queen Mary boat that actually.
We crossed the canal.
Right there, that little strait right there?
Yeah, that's not a little strait.
It's pretty big, though.
Yeah, it's pretty big.
And then we ended up in Halifax.
How long was that boat ride?
I think it was six hours.
The whole trip was 52 hours.
Okay.
So we ended up actually in Truro.
See where Truro is?
Under Prince Edward Island, where it says T R U R O, like underneath where it says Prince Edward Island.
Yes.
Right there.
This is where we landed.
Okay.
Right north of Nova Scotia.
Right, exactly.
And then from there, we.
Took a train going to Montreal and that took uh probably like 27 28 hours, maybe more, to Montreal.
So, see where Montreal is.
So, you're just visiting friends in Montreal?
It was my first destination because I knew somebody, it was somebody that I grew up with, I trusted him 100%.
Right?
Uh, you it's really great if you have somebody to just give you a little bit of a hint here and there so you can go the wrong way real fast.
Were you pretty paranoid during that whole time?
No, I was really excited.
I mean, it was actually like a Huge adventure, you know, very like, hey, and then you know what?
Things, if you worry too much, those things that you worry about, this is what happens.
But if you're just excited, all exciting things happen, you know?
So they, I remember going from Newfoundland, where it was probably like in the 50s, the warmest, and at night in the 20s.
And we took all this huge ride going over there.
And in Montreal, it was 78 degrees, it was hot as hell.
And I had this jacket on, like a down jacket.
Life At The Car Wash00:14:22
And we were not a single penny left.
Couldn't even afford to take the metro to go to the stop where I wanted to go.
So we had to walk to go to the YMCA.
So they had hooked us up to stay at the YMCA in downtown Montreal.
Okay.
And we had to present ourselves.
So we got over there and I called my friend and then we met up.
And the story was a little bit different.
So his wife was a total bitch.
And she was so upset at me.
Because when I landed in Gander for the first time, I called him from Gander, Collect, and he accepted the call.
And because this call was like $9 or something like this, she was so upset that I called Collect, that I was done.
I didn't exist anymore.
I was a user.
I was going to use him.
I was going to take his money.
He called you Collect.
I didn't know what the big deal was, but it didn't work out.
He got divorced anyway.
But anyway, so.
And well, and then I found out that he's pretty much a kept man, you know.
So, I mean, he did give us a few pointers here and there.
We did hang out a little bit together, but it wasn't like the old times, you know, like every day and all that stuff.
We did hang out quite a lot and had some mutual friends, and things were starting to go.
So, once we got there, they gave us welfare.
So, I got 460 bucks.
So, did my girlfriend then.
And we rented a place for 300.
You could rent back there a place for 300.
It was in the student area in, what do you call it?
It's in Montreal.
Anyway, it will come up.
It's a decent area.
It's a student area.
It's not like, you know, there's a lot of young people.
There's a lot of cool things happening.
It's not like a high crime or anything like this.
And I got up and the next day, you know, we met some other people there.
There was some guy from Czechoslovakia there.
We became friends.
He was married with his wife, you know, became friends.
And we started talking and he said, Hey, we got to go.
It's Wednesday.
We got to go.
I said, Where are we going?
He said, Wednesday is garbage night.
They put, You know, like big appliances and sofas, and this place was not furnished, you know.
So, we go, we go, and you go in the back alleys, and there is a sofa.
Looked at it, looked pretty decent, picked it up, put it upstairs.
Wow.
Then we found a TV, like one of those old console TVs.
Yeah.
And we wanted, I mean, I lived on the third floor, and there was no elevator.
And this thing was half the size of this desk, you know, with a console and all that stuff.
Not that it was like an old wooden thing, you know, with the columns on the side and a small screen in the middle only.
So there was this Canadian guy, Mike, that lived on the first floor, and he saw us struggling with this TV.
On the way, when we found the TV, we found a little baby carriage and we put it in the baby carriage.
By the time we came to the house, the baby carriage broke apart from the weight of the TV.
He goes, Hey, let me plug it in.
I'll tell you if it works so you don't have to drag it all the way up.
So we plugged it, and then he looks at it and it was all getting green.
He kicked it a couple of times and it warmed up and it came on.
It was a color TV.
I mean, it was like you had to wait five minutes to.
Warm up and start like getting color, but it worked.
So we got furnished from the garbage and then, you know, bought the utensils for the kitchen and whatever it is, garage sales and got a household going on.
And then I wanted to get a job, even though I was making money.
So you're just kind of drifting.
You really didn't have any kind of plan.
Yeah, I drifted.
Yes.
I waited to see what life is going to show me.
Okay.
Yeah.
But you still had your girlfriend back in.
She was with me.
Oh, she was with you.
She was with me.
And so.
You know, I said, I'm going to go and look for a job.
You should do the same thing.
And she said, Okay.
So I go down the street.
I mean, it's Rue Saint Jacques, was that the main drag?
There was a strip joint, there was a grocery store, a couple of car washes.
And I'm going, Well, I'm going to ask here, I'm going to ask there.
And I went to the car wash and I said, Hey, I want to get a job.
He said, All right.
It was a guy from Panama, Carlos.
He goes, Yeah, I'll hire you.
I said, How much are you paying?
It's like $6 an hour.
That was good back then.
And then we shared the tips at the end of the night.
Wow, that's pretty dope.
And it's only like right to the house.
So I had to do it.
I actually had a bicycle.
I go with the bicycle.
I just walk over there.
So I go over there, and it was a tough job.
One of those car washes that you wash by hand.
And we washed fancy cars.
So stations, when you're new, you do the wheels, the white walls and the wheels, the shittiest job.
You scrub all that stuff.
There is a guy spraying and the other guy doing this.
And every time they wanted to put armor roll, armor roll was a big thing back then.
And Carlos will announce it, Armor roll.
We're like, okay.
And then he goes one time and says, Armor roll inside.
Means they're going to put armor roll on the dash and all that stuff.
And I'm like opening the door and he looks at me.
He's like, pulls me on the side.
He says, You never open the customer's door.
I said, Well, I was going to go do the armor roll.
He said, You don't do armor roll.
Armor roll inside is only me.
I'm the only one that does armor roll inside.
All right.
Well, turns out that was a code for buying cocaine.
Oh, yeah.
So, his fancy car comes in, you know, armor all inside.
He goes, does the armor all.
Obviously, the money is somewhere, puts the stuff somewhere, done.
Wow.
What a clever way to do it.
Absolutely.
And one of the guys.
So, this guy was a Coke dealer.
Well, this was all.
But Carlos was the one doing it.
It wasn't the owner.
The owner was Italian.
Okay.
So, I think they busted him at the end and the whole thing fell apart.
But it was a big, big.
I mean, there was some.
People with some fancy cars, I'm telling you, some Ferrari.
What year was it now again?
This was 1990.
Okay.
So, you know, some real fancy cars and this and that.
And there was a black guy that I was working with with big dredge locks and he was singing that song.
There is a song from Lisa Stainsfield Been Around the World with My Baby.
Do you remember that?
Yes, yes, yes.
And he was singing it so good and he was singing it all day long.
So you couldn't get this freaking song out of your head, you know.
But you'll spray and sing.
I guess they were all high.
I didn't know anything going on back then.
I didn't even know what high means because we never had drugs in Bulgaria ever.
And I was a street smart kid and I left there at 27.
I didn't know what drugs are because there was no drugs.
Nobody had drugs.
Nobody wanted drugs.
But we drank.
How could you want something you didn't know existed?
We didn't know anything about racism either.
You guys had alcohol, you said.
We had alcohol.
You can buy alcohol anywhere you want to.
Nobody prohibited you.
I mean, if.
You could find that if you were tall enough to go in front of a bar, you could.
I mean, not that we have bars, but because they don't have bars over there like here, you don't go to the bar and so everybody there looked the same.
What do you mean by that?
You said there was no racism, so there was no.
Well, first, yeah, we're all Caucasian.
I mean, we have some gypsies.
Right.
And okay, maybe some people don't like the gypsies or so, but I remember when I went in school, we had a black guy, one black guy, his name was Yum, and he was from Angola.
He was the son of the king of Angola.
Wow.
So the son of the king of Angola had seven children, and they took each child because when they took Angola over from the communists, they took Angola over.
Pull up Angola, Austin.
I'm getting a geography lesson.
It's in Africa.
So they put all these kids in the seven communist countries.
They separated them in school.
Interesting.
And this guy, Yum, he was a tall guy.
Okay.
Oh, yeah, right north of Namibia.
Yep.
Namibia is a great place.
I've been to South Africa.
I want to go to Namibia.
I have friends that have been there.
Yeah, it's great.
It's a lot of Germans in Namibia.
Really good surf there, too.
That's what I hear, too.
My brother Jen went to Marseille kite surfing, he said it was amazing in Namibia.
No, in Marseille.
Oh, my friends!
Oh, yeah.
Uh, but anyway, so and um, so this guy, he was uh, he was a tall guy, you know.
And we had a basketball team, and he was on the basketball team, he was the best guy ever, you know.
So everybody, he was a celebrity, you know.
He was a celebrity, oh, yeah.
It's like in the school, you know, we're in high school, you know, super athlete alien, yeah.
And he had a fat ass, but he was tall, you know, so you couldn't do anything about it.
We were kids, you know, what's he gonna do?
It's like you just Dunks it or whatever.
And so that's why I'm saying we never had racism or anything.
Because you don't know anything about it.
He was just a different looking guy and he was cool and we respected him and you respected us.
And that's why I think life was good in Bulgaria because people were respectful.
You know, if you're respectful and well educated and you know how to behave, you know, without bothering other people and be polite to the elderly, that actually communism did not do anything to it.
The people were still friendly and nobody was stealing, nobody was robbing you.
There was no murders, there was no crime at all, zero crime, seriously, zero crime.
And everybody had to work.
You could not work.
They will stop you on the street and you had a passport with you.
And in the passport, you had a stamp that you were working in a company.
Wow.
And if you didn't have a stamp, they took you in.
Took you in where?
They took you in and questioned you and then they made you get a job and all that stuff.
And what happens if you refuse to get a job?
I never, I always had a job.
You never heard of anybody who never had a job?
Like something that would happen?
I'm sure you can hide if you want to or whatever and get in trouble.
But I mean, you know.
They put you in jail if you could be somebody who's like a dissenter.
Absolutely, yeah.
They could do whatever they wanted with you.
There was no rights.
Right.
I mean, you didn't know anything about it because, I mean, if they want to come and arrest you, they'll take you.
Right.
So they took my grandfather's apartment, just took it away from him because he had too many apartments.
They didn't buy it off of him.
They just said they confiscated it.
Yeah.
They said you're a capitalist and they took it away from him.
Yeah.
But when you're a kid, you don't know that.
Right.
You know, all your worries are.
Hey, what am I gonna eat?
And you know, no, I never worried about that, but you're excited, you know, you go to school, you have something to eat, you have something to wear, you have some cool friends.
So, what do you care what happens?
So, anyway, back to Canada in Canada, Montreal.
Uh, your guys slinging coke out of the car wash, yes, that was the first job that I got.
Uh, I remember every time you came home from that job, your clothes smelled so bad because they could get wet.
I had this, you know.
Crappy suit, like no suit, but like baggy pants, you know, that you wear and they get wet all the time.
You couldn't wash them all the time, and the shoes never dry and they smell terrible, you know.
But you put the stuff on and you go and work, and you earn a little bit extra money.
And you know, that extra money was great because I mean, we didn't have anything.
And if you're getting like 800 from the government and then you bring another four or 500 in, it's a lot of money, you know.
And life was cheap back then.
You could buy a dozen eggs for like 88 cents.
Wow.
So So I asked my wife, I mean, my girlfriend, she was still my girlfriend, and I said, So, did you find a job?
Yeah, I went down the street, I asked here, I asked there.
They don't have anything.
I'm like, Maybe better luck tomorrow.
I said, I found a job.
So I worked a few more months at Carl's, and this other guy came in, he was from Iran, and he was driving a big Mercedes.
And we started talking, you know, while we were washing the car, and he said, You want to work for me?
I said, Do what?
He said, I'm going to open a car wash over there.
I want you to come and tell me, you know, the logistics of the car wash.
You've been here for a while, what they do.
And I'm like, Well, how much are you paying?
He said, I'll pay you $6 an hour.
I said, Well, I get $6 here.
Hey, I'll give you some, I'll take care of you.
Okay.
So I quit there and I went and started working for this guy.
So, and we actually built the car wash.
It was all he had like was a warehouse.
And he made it like a drive through and put a couple of sprayers in there.
And then I said, you know what?
I'm going to make a sign for you.
When I was a kid, we used to make t shirts, like the shirt that you have.
Yeah.
So, because you couldn't buy shirts with any kind of writing on it.
Right.
So, we used to like cut them out of cardboard, make a stance, a stencil.
Like a stencil.
Yes.
And then spray paint?
No, with a little sponge and textile.
We didn't have spray paint.
Oh, shit.
And you texted it out.
And we used to make those shirts, the NHL All Stars.
Shoulders with a white star.
And then you put the flag in the front and then put a name on the back.
And my brother and I, we used to make shirts like this just for us, not for selling it.
Wow.
Or write down like band names like Sticks and Kansas and stuff like this and make shirts like this.
So we were, I mean, you know, we were making our own shirts.
So you helped this Iranian dude build his own car wash business.
So the same way we were making the shirts, I cut out the letters and then it was spray paint.
And I sprayed them on the building, on the whole building.
It was a huge building.
The letters were as big as a place.
Wow.
Lavea man meant like wash by hand.
And it was like that fluorescent green.
Turned out really good.
Business started going.
So he did start a business.
Building Shirts And Cars00:12:07
Yeah.
And they closed them after that for some reasons.
But I mean, this was just temporary jobs.
Then I cut the grass and this and that.
But my girlfriend never found a job.
She always said, no job, no job, no job.
And all she did, something on the balcony when the summer was around.
Unfortunately, she didn't cook.
She didn't wash.
She didn't do shit, basically.
But when I lived in Bulgaria, I made enough money.
And That wasn't something that she needed to do.
So we go out, or we lived at the house.
My mom would cook, things like that.
So, anyway, and things started to go south with her, between me and her.
And we got very, also very, like, you know, constantly bombarded by this unknown what's going to happen because they started deporting some Bulgarians.
You know, Bulgaria turned suddenly democratic.
On paper, you know, we got a new president, and now they said they're not going to prosecute you if you go back.
Uh, you're not going to get in trouble.
It's a friendly government, so that caused other countries to start deporting.
That caused like that caused like Canada.
I don't know about other countries because I cannot speak for that, but Canada started like sending some people back.
Okay, and it's fine, you can go back.
Yeah, they said, Hey, it's fine now.
You have a democratic president, so you can go back.
And they were looking for me and her, and I was not going to go back.
So that was in 1992.
Okay.
And in the meantime, in 1990, my mom passed away.
So I got a phone call from my brother, and then I couldn't even go back for the funeral.
So I couldn't go.
But my mom was happy because she wanted me to go somewhere, and I did go somewhere.
So where my dad didn't want me to go anywhere, and he was upset.
But then two years later, he was very happy that I went somewhere because Bulgaria went south, you know, got all messed up.
We had hyperinflation and all kinds of shit.
Right.
So, you know, now.
I lost my train of thought.
They were looking for you.
Oh, yeah, they were looking for me.
So, and they had my passport.
I never received my passport.
Okay.
And I went, I know now I've been like almost two years in Montreal.
I know a bunch of people and they know a bunch of people that do some, you know, like shady people, good people, bad people, any kind of people I know.
You know, I'm pretty much friends with everybody, not much enemies that I try to make or avoid, you know.
No matter if you're, you know, A bad guy or a good guy, I somehow can find a way to talk to you and just, you know, be real with you.
So I'm not going to criticize you.
I'm not going to tell you what to do.
Just a conversation.
So I asked, hey, listen, so these guys are looking for me and I have to go on this and this date.
And what's going to happen?
He said, don't go.
I'm like, why?
So and so went over there.
They put the handcuffs on him, put him on the plane and shipped him back.
I'm like, okay, good to know.
So what do I do?
He said, we have a guy that can smuggle you over.
To the United States.
I'm like, sure.
How much is it?
You can do it for 400 bucks.
I'm like, good.
So I'm like, where is the guy?
He's an Indian guy.
I'm like, okay.
How did you know the US wasn't doing the same thing, though?
I didn't.
You just thought that.
It was the only country you can cross.
There was no other country.
It's going to go south from there, maybe Mexico, the next one.
Right.
So, and I'm like, all right.
So, where do I find him?
So, you go over there, and it was the Kanawaki reservation.
So, we go over there with my, in the meantime, I made money.
I bought a car.
I had my first $400 Renault alliance.
Mm hmm.
Do you even know what a Renault alliance is?
Nope.
How do you spell it?
Pull up a 1983 Renault alliance, like alliance.
Alliance.
Yeah.
What's the first word?
Renault.
R E, the French cars.
R E N A U L T.
Oh, Renault.
Okay.
Renault.
Yeah.
1983 Renault alliance.
Hmm.
Peace shit.
But the car.
400 bucks.
400 bucks, yeah.
So my first car ever.
You know, how can you forget it?
That's the car that I crossed.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, there you go.
That's actually what color was it?
That's a newer one.
Try a 1980.
This looks way too new.
I mean, I bought it in '83.
Maybe it was in '80.
I was actually older.
I like that thing.
It was older than that, actually.
Should have cut the top off, had a drop top.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it was moving, so going from A to B, so who cares?
So I bought it from another Bulgarian.
So he was, I don't know, he was going somewhere too.
Yeah.
And so I go to, with my wife, we're going to, she still wasn't my wife then, but was she my wife?
Yeah, I think by then she was my wife.
So, anyway, so I had an attorney.
Just I have to back up a little bit.
And this attorney was a French guy.
His name was Francois de Coutot.
I still remember him.
He was a fucking crook.
If I see him, I'll beat his ass, you know?
So, he took all these Bulgarians as clients and made us pay a thousand dollar retainer.
It was 60 of us.
And he never helped anybody.
He took the money and just skipped.
And you could not do anything about it because he had no fucking status.
You couldn't complain.
Nobody believed you, and the whole nine yards.
So he told us, he said, I was already splitting up with my girl because she didn't want to work.
Things were different, it was a different world.
I couldn't do this.
Back in Bulgaria, we could do whatever we want to.
And I was making good money, and she was making some money, and then it was okay.
In the real world, you have to work to pay the real rent and all the good stuff.
So we go to the Indian guy.
Have you ever been on an Indian reservation?
I don't think so.
I mean, this is the first one.
I don't know if they're all like this, but you go and you go down the street, and there is a gate, like a regular gate, like a train, you know, where the train crosses.
And there is a little hut where the guard stays, and there was a guard with an AK 47.
That was actually two of them.
Indian guy.
Yeah, an Indian.
I mean, just not dressed in any uniform, just a guy.
Okay.
And he stopped the car.
He said, Where are you going?
I said, I'm going to see Hot Dog.
His name was Hot Dog.
He said, Okay.
You go down here, go left, go right.
Once you go in the reservation, it's like you're in a plan, you know, like in a housing plan.
It doesn't look any different.
I mean, maybe it's not as decorated, you know, but you go, there's a home here, a home there, then next street, just like similar to here, you know.
Not as pretty as landscaping, you know.
Right.
So we go in front of the house.
I park the car, knock on the door, and this guy opens the door.
Have you ever seen one flew over the cuckoo's nest?
Oh, yeah.
That guy opened the door.
I look up and I'm like, holy shit.
I said, I'm here to see hot dogs.
He said, I am hot dog.
I'm like, okay.
So and so said, you can help out.
Yeah, no problem.
Come on in.
So we walk in and you walk through the room, and there are cartons of cigarettes from the floor all the way to the ceiling.
And you're just walking in this little hallway between the cartons.
This guy smuggles cigarettes on a fast boat through Lake Ontario.
So he brings them from the US to Canada because cigarettes in Canada were $6.76.
That's why I stopped smoking when I moved to Canada.
For a pack?
For a pack of cigarettes.
And back then in the US, Pack of lucky strikes were 99 cents at the 7 Eleven, yeah.
So they just buy, bring him over here on a cigarette boat, no less, no less, yeah.
No pun intended, yeah.
That's great.
So I go in there and I sit at the table with him, and he's a very nice guy, you know.
He introduces himself, says, What's the date?
When are we gonna go?
And I'm like, This day, that said, Don't worry about it, it's gonna be fine.
I said, Do I give you any money right now?
He said, No, you don't give me any money until we cross.
I'm like, Well, that's really fair, you know.
So he came outside, looked at the car, said, Make sure all your lights are working, you know, no broken windows, don't have anything on the back seat, you know, just look like you're just going for a day trip.
I'm like, Okay.
But you still didn't have your passport.
I don't know.
I don't get it.
I'm not getting my passport.
I didn't get it.
Right.
So, and well, if I had my passport, I would have gone, I could have walked up to the border and crossed, you know, by asking for political asylum because the U.S. back then didn't care.
Actually, you could just walk into the U.S.
This was before 19.
Was that so Bush senior?
No, this.
Is that Clinton?
No, it was Bush Sr.
Okay.
Yeah.
Clinton was just up and coming because he deported me later.
That's why I know.
So basically, the Canadians had a deportation order against me and I skipped the country before they deported me.
So I went to the Indian guy and we met on the date when we were going to cross.
And I think we crossed somewhere around Plattsburgh.
I don't remember.
I was so, you know, crazy going on in my head.
And I had bought my first color TV in my life.
I was 28 and I was very proud because you could not buy a color TV in freaking Bulgaria, you know.
So I had this piece of shit, 20 inch color TV, the real big ones, you know, there was no flat screen TVs.
It wouldn't even fit in the back of my Renault Alliance, you know.
And I had it in the back seat and I go to the Indian guy.
He said, Yeah, that TV got to go.
I said, No, it cannot go.
I said, Oh, we'll put it in the Cadillac.
They had a Cadillac.
So we'll put it in the back of the Cadillac and then I'll give it to you on the other side.
I'm like, Okay.
I didn't want it to part with my TV, you know.
And, um, I'd rather die.
Well, it's my first freaking TV.
I mean, I don't know if you can even imagine a 28 year old guy getting excited about the color TV.
Yeah, no, I can't imagine.
It's just a thing, you know?
And so I got like, okay, so, and we're driving now, and I'm driving with my wife, and he's driving in front of us.
I'm following him.
He pulls over and he says, okay, we're going to switch cars.
I'm like, okay.
So your wife goes with my wife, and I'm driving your car.
And I'm like, okay.
I'm like, is he going to fit in this car?
You know, it was a small car.
So he basically kind of like squeezes in.
She starts going and he tells me, I said, give me a cigarette.
He said, you cannot smoke because if you smoke, it looks like you're nervous.
I'm like, that's why I want to smoke because I'm nervous.
He said, don't smoke, just breathe normal.
Try not to talk.
If they ask you, say yes and no very clearly.
Try not to talk so they don't catch the accent.
I'm like, okay.
So, I mean, I'm telling you, where I parked my truck is where we switched cars, and where the border patrol was, was around the corner of this building.
See, this is how close to the border he stopped to switch cars.
Wow.
So he sits in the Renault now.
She's going through the border.
It's just a gate, you know.
And it was around noon, and the guy comes out eating a sandwich.
Where are you guys going?
And she goes, We're going to go play bingo across the border here.
I'm like, Holy shit, that's good.
So she pulls through.
He leaves the gate open and waves us through as well.
We didn't even have to stop.
Wow.
And this guy has never driven a stick.
So he's now in first gear and goes like, and goes like 400, 5000.
I'm like, you're going to blow the engine.
So, what do you want me to do?
I said, you got to shift.
He said, we're almost there.
I said, just back off of the gas.
So it goes, then he turns around, right around the corner, got out, didn't even put it in second gear.
Crossing Borders For Work00:09:18
Wow.
And got out and said, all right, we're here.
Deal is done.
I mean, I'll take the money.
Here's your TV.
I gave him the money.
Here's your TV.
He was really nice.
I said, I need to go to Toledo.
I had a friend in Toledo where I was going to spend the first night.
Okay.
At the way to Chicago.
The destination was Chicago this time because the people that I befriended in Montreal had friends in Chicago.
So, and those friends were going to help us.
Okay.
So, we go, jump in the car, and start driving towards Toledo.
And I remember going to the gas station somewhere over there, and there was an armed guard at the gas station.
Like a guy with a shotgun.
And I'm like, what the hell is going on?
And I came from Montreal, where I mean, everybody, there's no crime, there's nothing, you know?
And I asked the clerk, I said, what's going on?
He said, oh, people steal shit.
So he's just looking out.
And I'm like, oh, that's very assuring, you know?
So anyway, so we ended up in Toledo and I spent my first night over there.
And then I went to Chicago.
And in Chicago, I met those people.
They were elderly people, they were in their 60s, really nice people.
And she co signed for me on the apartment application.
We stayed one night at her house, you know, with my wife.
And then she co signed for me to get an apartment.
I had saved a couple of bucks.
We got an apartment.
I think it was like $400 a month or something like this.
Right next to us, they had shot somebody because there was a chokeout line that they just had removed.
And they cleaned it up, and the Mexican rented the place.
So it wasn't the best neighborhood, let's put it this way.
And this was actually in Hoffman Estates, what wasn't a bad neighborhood.
Area, but there were some bad places that you can.
It's by Schomburg, Illinois.
Okay.
So I got this little apartment and I needed to get a job.
Now, the United States gave me a social security card.
After I settled down and everything, I went to immigration.
And we went and went to the registration.
And she said, So, how can I help you?
And I said, Well, I am here to present myself.
We came illegally to the United States.
States and we would like to apply for political asylum.
And said, I go outside, and if you look to the right, there is a line.
Go in that line, we go outside, there's 300 people in that line, 90% of them Mexican.
This is 1992.
Wow, in Chicago, stood in line.
My turn came.
Um, I didn't have a passport because the passport was gone.
I had a different Bulgarian ID that was in Bulgarian.
They took some of it, some information from that.
And then they wrote down, you know, all the vital, you know, the date of birth and whatever, you know.
And they gave me that little card, it was just that social security card like you have, but it has a stamp on it and says, Not authorized to work without employment authorization on it.
So when you went to get a job and they ask you back in the day, Show me your social security card, you showed they didn't hire you unless they wanted to hire you under the table.
Okay.
So of course, I found a job under the table at this company, fancy, fancy.
So, explain that again.
They wouldn't let you take a job.
They don't let you take a job until you get an employment authorization from the U.S.
So, you basically apply for this employment authorization.
Okay.
So, you're not allowed to get a job.
Not allowed to get a job.
But did they tell you you can go find a job and run to the table?
No.
That's the dumbest thing.
So, they say you have to be unemployed.
Well, they didn't say that, but they said that I cannot work in the United States because I'm not a U.S. resident.
So, I cannot work.
I mean, I'm applying for political asylum.
So, I'm kind of like, In limbo, so how long do they say it would take for you to get the?
I think it was about six months before I get my employment position.
Okay, but it's crucial if you don't have any money.
I mean, think about six months, a lot of money, yeah, that's a long time.
Well, that's why I had to find a job under the table, right?
Which I'm sure every single one of those people online did, yeah.
But they were, I mean, not that you know, they were different.
I got a job in uh, they were Mexican, so they probably had like 16 jobs each, right?
And they're like more into the landscaping and whatever.
Well, I did some landscaping, yeah, and all of these people are getting jobs, construction, yeah, whatever it is, yeah.
So, I started actually.
I think I started cutting grass for this guy from Hungary.
He was a Hungarian guy, he was an older guy.
He ran his own landscaping business, not a business, but maybe like 30 clients, and you do the dirty work and he pays you five, six bucks an hour under the table.
That was it.
So, that was the first job I got.
And then the Mexican that moved next to us, his name was Fernando, a real cool guy.
And one day we were having some beers out there and I. Tell my wife, yeah, you know what, you have to find a job, you need money.
I cannot, I mean, there's this is it's not working, you know.
And she goes, Yeah, I'll find a job, and but I don't have any papers.
And he's like, This Mexican guy does, oh, papers, we make papers.
What kind of papers do you need?
I said, Well, she needs to work.
He said, Well, I can, he goes, For 50 bucks, I can make a green card, and you cannot show it to the police or anybody else, but it's a green card good to get employment with.
Oh, wow, I'm like, Oh, that's cool.
So She got a green card.
We went, we go to his cousin's house somewhere.
I don't know where it was.
There's a bunch of people drinking beer in there.
And they obviously, this is not the first client that is coming in, you know.
And they're like, come on, come on over here.
And they pull this sheet of whatever light blue, whatever stand in front of it.
They take a picture, they laminate the ID and all that stuff.
I mean, they were pretty efficient, you know.
Yeah, right there.
And you get it 50 bucks done.
It was, I mean, it was good looking, but if you're a cop, you could have figured out it's not real, you know.
So, right.
Now they have all kinds of holograms and you cannot do anything.
And most people looking to hire people don't give a shit.
They're just like, they need people to work.
If you're applying for any kind of a job, they ask you, Are you a U.S. citizen?
Always.
Right.
But they're not like inspecting the thing.
They don't really give a shit whether you're legal or illegal, right?
Now, maybe, yes.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I honestly don't know how it is now.
So, long story short, then I got a job at Mark Shale's, which was an exclusive men's store.
Now I already had the paperwork.
So they gave me the card.
They hired me as a stock boy.
So I was restocking the shelves, you know, straight in the house shirts and stuff like that.
And this guy came to the store, and all the salespeople were busy.
And he goes, Hey, you work here?
I said, Yeah.
Can you show me some cruisewear?
I don't know if you remember that, but back in the 90s, there was this cruisewear.
People used to go to cruises and wear these polo shirts the green, the pink one, you know, the whole shirt is like, One color and has the little horsey on it, the polo horse, yeah, and the white pants, like really like Caribbean kind of dress, okay, was a thing, you know.
And we would sell all the colors and all the shorts and all the socks and all that stuff, you know, expensive stores, yeah, like South Beach type wear, exactly.
And Scotty Pippen used to shop in the in Mark Shales, oh, yeah, yeah.
So back then, he would they were exactly that was the time that they were champions, too.
Actually, he did come in the store a couple of times.
You guys made the big and tall clothes, they had everything they made custom for him.
Those suits were five grand a piece.
Now it's nothing, you know.
I bet.
Now probably it's 50 grand.
And so this guy that I said, well, maybe this shirt with that shirt and this with that and shorts with it.
So I put a couple outfits together.
And then, oh, I like this.
I'll take all these.
And what about this?
And what about that?
And I ran up like a $9,000 sale in clothing, you know.
That's a lot of freaking clothing.
They were expensive and they were paying 6% commission on the clothing.
And he said, well, I'm ready.
So let's go and ring it up.
And I'm like, well, I'll get somebody to ring it up because I didn't know how to work a register or anything like this.
And this old man came very helpful, this Jerry guy, you know, this little sleeves ball.
He goes, I'll help you ring it up.
So he took it, rang it up.
But the boss, Levitt, he was a Jewish guy, Levitt was his name, he somehow got wind of it that this has happened.
And then he said, they gave me like half of the commission.
Like 300 bucks, but I mean, in one day, 300 bucks.
I've never made money like this in my life.
And then he hired me as a salesman, so from stock boy to salesman.
Okay, so I, you know, started as a salesman, worked a little bit there.
And um, this guy came back, the guy that I sold the cruisewear to, and he said, I need to do this and this.
Making Money In One Day00:07:51
So we're talking, and he goes, I said, Where are you going this time?
He said, Oh, I'm not going anywhere, we have a little place in Treasure Island.
I'm like, Treasure Island, that's my favorite book.
What are you talking about?
He goes, It's a little island in Florida.
Have you been there?
I said, No, I've never been to Florida.
He said, Oh, let me show you.
And then back in the day, they didn't have like phones or anything.
So he pulls up a couple of postcards with an aerial of John's pass, you know, with the sand and the palm trees.
And I'm like, Oh, this place is the shit, man.
I'm going to move there.
What the hell am I doing here in Chicago?
Yeah.
And he goes, Had there been a bridge there already?
There was the old bridge.
The old, old bridge.
I wonder what year, because there didn't used to be a bridge there.
No, there was a bridge.
Like the pass didn't always used to be a pass.
No, but that was 92.
They built that.
92, 93.
Oh, okay.
There was a bridge there.
I know the bridge was there because I crossed actually the bridge.
But it was a different bridge.
It was actually two bridges before this one.
Two bridges before that.
Yeah, two bridges.
It was a real dinky freaking bridge.
Yeah.
It was like the dime bridge on Tierra Verdi, you know?
And.
The dime bridge that now it's a dollar.
What?
The dime bridge that now it's a dollar.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
So I'm like, well, this is a really nice place.
And I wrote it down, you know, Treasure Island.
And I mean, there was no computers to look it up or anything like this, but that was like embedded in my mind how this beach and it looked like Tom Sawyer's adventures, what I read as a kid, too, you know, with Huckleberry Finn going down the river.
And I'm like, wow, this is really cool.
You know what?
I'm getting out of this shithole here.
So there were a few things happening in the meantime.
My dad visited me, and, you know, there were other things, but maybe another time.
What was the process of your green card?
Were you trying to get a green card?
Were you trying to get citizenship?
I was trying to get a green card.
And what did they tell you the timeline was for that?
The timeline was that at least two to five years.
Two to five years.
Okay.
But you were allowed to work.
They said just wait it out, work, and two to five years, we'll get you a green card and you'll be a citizen.
Right.
Okay.
Well, if you had to go to a court case.
Okay.
So the court case is you came illegally to the United States.
So why did you come illegally?
And you say, because I search for political asylum from Bulgaria.
So they listened to your case.
Why are you looking for political asylum?
You know, I did have a case.
And then they say, then the judge says, well, now he can say Bulgaria is now democratic and you can go back.
All those bad people, they're gone.
Okay.
You know, that's exactly what happened, you know.
Because I got deported later on, too.
Okay.
So this is exactly what happened later on.
Right.
So I went to, from Chicago, I went to Florida.
No, I didn't.
Before I went to Florida, I already had split up with a girlfriend, but we lived in the same place.
And I had purchased a new car.
So now I had another Renault alliance.
But this one has a kick ass stereo in the back, man.
The whole thing had an amplifier, whoever had it before, you know.
Yeah, what's up?
Oh, yeah, it was boom, boom, and the windows vibrating.
You know, this in the 90s was the shit.
You know, the whole car was moving.
This is how powerful that thing was, you know.
And it was a little bit newer, you know, it was kind of like fancy for me.
When my dad came and visited me, I had two cars.
I had the two Renault alliances.
Oh, one was $700, the new one, and the old one was $400.
And he thought I was making it, you know.
He was like, Wow, you have two cars, son.
Good job.
You know, I'm like, yeah, that.
What was his, at that point when he came to visit you, was he trying to get you to go back to Bulgaria?
What was the situation in Bulgaria at that time?
I actually, the situation in Bulgaria was getting, well, the situation in Bulgaria never got really bad, but it deteriorated for a while and then recovered.
Okay.
Did he think about moving in with you?
No, no, no.
He was too old then.
Okay.
He came, I wanted him to come and visit, you know, because I couldn't go back.
And then he had the opportunity to come.
They let us travel, you know, at this time.
I think it was in 94, 93, maybe he came over.
Yeah.
And then I introduced him to these people that were actually his age, you know, the friends that helped.
And they became friends.
And it was a nice thing, actually.
It was a real nice thing that he came over because this was, well, then I went back and then he passed after that.
But anyway, so now I'm going down to Florida and I told the wife, I said, I'm going down to Florida.
We already got divorced in Chicago.
Got a $300 divorce special.
Some guy divorced us.
And I said, I'm going down to Florida and you're on your own.
And she started crying.
You're going to leave me here.
I'm going to die here in this cold and blah, blah, blah.
All right.
So here's the deal.
You come with me.
You go in the car.
I'll drive you down there.
I'll find a place for myself.
You're welcome to stay the first two nights there and then you're out of there.
You know, you go find your own place and then we'll go from there.
And she's all right, fair enough.
So we drive down from Chicago to Treasure Island.
Triptychs.
I don't know if you remember what a triptych is.
So you went to, it's like a map quest, but even older than that.
Really?
You went to AAA and you told them that you want to drive to Florida and give them the destination.
And they gave you a folder and maps.
And on each page, it told you what exit to take.
No way.
Yes.
Yes.
It was real nice.
Before my time.
It was free.
Yeah.
So I drive down there.
I come here a nice afternoon.
I think it was a Sunday or maybe Saturday.
It was still quiet.
And I pull up right where Bob's house is.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, somehow I end up right there where Bob's house is.
Yeah.
There was a little house right on the corner in the beginning of Lagoon Lane.
I don't know if you remember that.
Yeah.
Was a guy.
His name was Mike.
He had like one of those northern boats, you know, like was one of those blue boats with a cabin further up front.
Okay.
He came from Massachusetts.
He lived right on the corner where Lagoon Lane.
You know, goes down and then turns under the bridge.
Okay.
Right on that corner, that was the lot.
And he was, I drove by there and it said for rent.
And he had basically, it was like he had six rooms that he was renting.
I mean, little apartments or another body call them efficiencies.
Yes.
And they were fully furnished.
And I think mine was, 450.
That was the bigger one and was on the bottom floor on the water.
450.
Now it's probably 4,500 a month.
Well, that's gone now that they built condos there.
Oh, there's four condos, and each condo is $1.4 million.
So it's $4 million, $4,000.
Just for inflation.
Yeah, you're about right there.
$5.6 million, the same property.
Well, anyway, so I go over there and he goes, Well, I'm a commercial fisherman.
So rent is this, you pay it on the first, electricity is this, that's included, this, this, this.
Okay, cool.
And he goes, On Saturday and Sunday, I go out on the boat.
If you want to earn a couple extra bucks and a couple of fish fillets, you're welcome to come and help.
I mean, I'm like, wow, this is crazy.
Was a trooper fishing?
He was fishing for everything.
And we were catching everything back then.
There was fish everywhere.
On long lines?
Splitting Up And Moving On00:16:12
No, just off the boat.
Okay.
It was a small boat.
It was probably like a 24 footer, if it was that.
Okay.
And we'll go out, and there was another guy, Dean, that used to live there.
And Him and another guy, all four people, we go out and we, you can climb on the roof on that boat.
It was a hardtop roof and jump from the roof.
I had a bowl, man.
And then you go and then you get paid.
He used to pay like 20, 30 bucks or so to go with him.
And then he gives you like four, three or four fillets, like hogfish, grouper, whatever.
Yeah.
You know, it was great.
How many days did you guys go out for?
Just for the day.
Just for one day.
Okay.
I only went when he was going for a day.
So it wasn't one of those like true commercial boats.
No, no, no, no.
It wasn't.
He was just for, I think he was doing it for himself.
And on the other side, he was in construction.
I mean, they, They owned the house and they rented the business, you know.
So, six apartments and they lived in the same, it was a little like a hotel kind of thing.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
And then he was doing this on Sunday just for shits and giggles, I guess.
Okay.
And he was selling some of the fish, of course.
So, how did this all lead up to you getting deported?
Actually, it was Bob and I.
We were coming from somewhere, it was after midnight.
We were trashed and we were looking to pick up something from Beach Nuts to see if there is any pussy at Beach Nuts.
Oh, wow.
So, we go over there and there is this girl and she's fucking hot as shit, you know.
And I'm looking at her.
She's across the.
The bar with this other girl and some guy, and they're talking.
I'm looking at her, she's looking at me, and it's like a really a thing going on, you know, just in the looking, you know.
And then she starts suddenly kissing this other girl in the mouth, you know, like, and I'm like, wow, this is pretty crazy, you know, let me go and check it out.
So I walk by and I go right behind her, and they just finished kissing.
And I go, All right, it's my turn now.
And she said, Okay.
We started kissing.
And then she goes, Where are you from?
And I started talking.
And the other girl goes, Hey, don't talk to my sister.
She's married.
She has three kids.
That was the girl they were kissing.
They were sisters.
They were kissing.
They were just messing around.
They were crazy girls.
Cool girls, really cool girls.
Typical Tuesday night in Florida.
Yeah, something like that.
Treasure Island, at least.
You guys don't see that much over in there, over in Bulgaria.
I know.
We're pretty good at that part.
We're not that crazy, but it's more real stuff, not pretend stuff.
Yes.
And so.
You know, we started talking, and next thing, one thing led to another.
And she goes, Well, just follow us.
We're going to my friend's house.
They have a hot tub.
We're going to go in the hot tub.
It was a one night stand.
What happened to Bob?
I don't know.
No, I mean, it was a rule if you found somebody, you know, there wasn't always searching for each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Anyway, so I met this girl.
Her name was Terry, and I really fell in love with her.
And over this weekend, I mean, we just were burning up real love, you know, like on the phone, you know, like a teenager.
You hang up, I hang up, you hang up, half an hour phone calls, an hour phone calls, you know.
And she told me she was getting divorced, what wasn't actually the fact.
I mean, she might, she did get divorced, but it wasn't when we met, I guess.
I think everything is past.
This is the sister?
This is the sister that actually was married, the sister that wasn't married.
Got it.
She got married later on, but I married the older sister.
She was actually like seven years older than me.
Beautiful girl, looked like Paula Abdul.
Beautiful girl.
Remember Paula Abdul?
Yeah.
Kind of like mignon, like this, big teeth, nice ass.
Great girl, great woman, too.
And long story short, talking on the phone, this, that, and she said, Why don't you?
Oh, she flew me to.
She had money.
I mean, back then I thought she had money.
So she flew me to Pittsburgh in September, not even like three weeks after we met, you know.
And she had a clothing store in a little town in Zillianopol.
It's by Pittsburgh, it's a suburb of Pittsburgh, by Schomburg.
And so she flew me in and we had a great time, you know, all good stuff.
And somehow.
There was a pair of pants that so somebody came to this hotel and had a pair of pants on a dry hang, you know, the dry cleaning stuff, how the other carry.
Oh, yeah.
And it must have slid off and the pants must have fallen down right behind her car.
Nice pants, you know, whatever.
And some hotel worker went and found that those pants were there and decided to call Terry on the phone and the phone that was given or whatever the registration.
Or the car, I don't know how.
And they somehow called him and asked him if he had left his pants at this hotel.
And that created some suspicions in him.
You know, it's like whatever happened, I'm not going to get into many details on that.
But eventually in November, she came down again for her friend's wedding.
So I saw her almost every month.
You know, I met her in August, September, October, November.
I saw her.
And then in January, I was like, I got to move there.
I mean, I was in love.
I had to move.
I'm saying, I'm.
If you have ever been in love, in love, it's an amazing feeling.
It's just not amazing.
The world is just amazing when you're in love, you know?
So she felt the same way.
So I packed my shit and I moved to Pittsburgh in 1994, I believe, was February.
And Pittsburgh was on the front page with a winter storm and four feet of snow.
And I moved that day.
And Bob was showing me the paper.
Are you really, you want to move there?
Have you looked at the paper?
Do you see how much this white stuff is there?
The snow, you know.
So, I did move there and moved there, got an apartment, got a job.
Uh, she did get divorced.
Uh, we did get married.
Uh, we kind of got married on the hush hush, and uh, then uh, after we got married, so does that mean you get citizenship?
No, so I got married.
I moved in, we lived together already in her house.
Okay, I had a job, a real job.
Um Everything was registered at her house.
We went together to Vegas.
We went on vacations.
And one day I received a letter that I have to present myself in immigration.
And I'm like, well, what's that about?
Let's look it up.
She was an agent.
It wasn't her.
Our relationship was top notch.
I'm telling you, for the first, we were married for 10 years.
The first eight years was wonderful.
Wow.
Then it got fucked up.
Deportation made it even more adventurous, kind of like you know, it's like one of those books, you know, where the right, you know, those with a girl falling in the guy's arms and he's getting deported.
It was like a story, you know, brutal.
And so, I called, I had an attorney, his name was Goldberg, and I called him and I said, So, I have to go to immigration, what does that mean?
And he says, That means that.
You're gonna probably get deported.
They're gonna actually open up a case.
And I said, Well, what can we do that I don't get deported?
I am married.
I mean, I have a wife.
She had three children when I married her.
So I'm already in the family, and I'm, you know, it's kind of like a difficult thing to deport.
I have a job.
I pay taxes.
I have no criminal record, nothing.
And he goes, Well, just come on down here and we'll go to immigration.
So I go to his office and we call immigration from his office.
Actually, his office was downtown Pittsburgh.
It's right across the street, this immigration.
So we call and they say, We need you to come to the office here.
And he's like, Well, what's going to happen if he comes to the office?
Well, his order for deportation is going to happen.
And he's like, We have to postpone it.
And he said, Well, you can postpone it for two weeks or three weeks or whatever.
So we postponed.
And then my wife, that's my American wife now, her name was Terry.
And she goes, 'We gotta do something.' I know this girl Pat from El Equipo, that's the ghetto over there.
She, Black Path, she's really good.
She does magic.
She believed in this black shit, magic, black magic.
And I'm like, honey, I don't believe in this shit.
We're going.
All right, we're going.
So we're going.
So we go over there, and it's this crickety old house.
And Pat has a daughter in a wheelchair.
She pushes her around and parked her somewhere.
And then I asked her, can I record?
I had a little recorder.
I said, can I record what you're saying?
She said, you cannot record anything.
You cannot take any pictures, but you can write down whatever you want.
I was writing down everything I asked and said, so later on I can compare, you know.
So she goes, So what's going on?
We explain the situation.
He said, Oh, for this stuff, when is that hearing?
I said, Well, I have to call on the phone.
It's going to be a hearing over the phone.
It's next week on Tuesday.
It's going to be in Philadelphia.
And they're going to, you know, ask me questions over the phone.
I don't have to be present there.
And that's how it's going to work.
And she goes, like, okay, okay, what date is that?
Okay, so she writes down things and goes, like, well, what we have to do is we have to do some river work.
I'm like, what the is river work?
Well, river work is we go down to the river and we do some, you know, chants.
And I'm like, how much is river work?
It's like, ah, that's expensive.
That's about $250.
And I'm like, Terry, come on, let's get the fuck out of here.
I'm not going to do this, you know.
Said, no, we're doing it.
We're doing it all the way.
I'm like, okay, we're doing it.
So she does her river work and comes up and says, I see you next week in a white van with handcuffs.
I'm like, okay.
I also see you going to jail and you're going to spend some time in jail.
I'm like, oh, that sounds really good.
Okay, what else do you see?
She's reading your palm.
No, she did some rocks and whatever.
Some rocks?
Yeah, and the river work.
Oh, whatever.
Something, you know?
Okay.
And she says, this is what I want you to do on the day before.
So, before the judge, before the hearing.
So, you're going to go home.
You're going to write the judge's name on a piece of paper.
You're going to pour some white candle wax on it to seal it.
Some bullshit.
I'm like, okay, okay.
And Terry's writing everything down.
I know she's going to do it.
I mean, we're already two feet in into this, you know.
So, write down the name and then put it in an ice tray and then freeze the ice with the name frozen inside.
And you go into the bathtub and put some vinegar.
And then, after you're done.
In the bathtub and soak just a little spoon of vinegar or whatever.
And then you take a bath in there and you come out and you do something with some bleach or, I mean, I'm like, I'm not doing all this shit.
So, yes, you are doing it.
So, I'm doing this shit.
You know, the wife says I have to do it.
So, I'm doing it.
Is this like a witch doctor?
Something like that.
Yes.
Like a voodoo kind of like.
Okay.
Yeah.
Black magic kind of thing.
And I'm like, whatever.
This is not going to happen anyway.
So, next day comes around.
I'm waiting for the phone call for the hearing, you know.
My attorney calls me and says, I need you to come to the office.
We're going to take the call here on the conference call, you know, and I'm going to assist you.
If you have any questions, we're going to be in the speakerphone.
I'm like, okay.
So, what time is the call?
I don't know.
It was like 12 o'clock or 1 o'clock.
And he goes, come here at 11.
I'm like, okay.
So, right before 11 o'clock, I get a call and it's my attorney.
And I said, did they change?
What's happening?
He said, Well, unfortunately, the judge was in an accident on the way to the courthouse and he broke his leg on the turnpike.
I have never checked that.
Maybe we can check that.
I don't know how I have to find those dates, but we should check that.
And what was the judge's name?
I don't know.
I can probably find out.
I mean, I don't know if I all have the paperwork, but anyway.
And I'm like, oh shit, this thing is like working or it's a total coincidence, you know?
And so the judge this, the judge that, and they have postponed the meeting.
I'm like, good.
How long?
We don't know.
Okay.
Well, it wasn't that long.
So, probably a week later, another call come in immigration.
What's the come with your suitcases ready to go home to Bulgaria?
And I'm like, why?
What?
Oh, before that, they had actually put me and my wife in two separate rooms and asked us questions that only you would know.
So, for example, where do you keep your socks in what drawer?
What color is your toothbrush?
Where do you keep your towel in the bathroom?
You know, things only you would know.
Yeah.
And we were legit.
And they actually wanted a file with all the pictures of us being in Las Vegas and stuff like this.
If you haven't seen the movie Green Card, it's just like that.
Okay.
And so back then, I mean, there was no computers.
You could, I mean, there were computers, but it wasn't like what we have now.
And I had to go to Kinko's and get like color photos.
I mean, they were color photos.
And I had to make copies and put them in a booklet.
30, 40, 50, 60 photos from our vacations, you know.
And it cost like $5 for a freaking page or something like this to have it printed in color, you know.
So I had this binder that we gave to the FBI.
And then we had a car from the FBI hang out in front of the house for like four or five days just to make sure that I'm not bamboozling him something, you know.
All this money for nothing.
And the reason they picked me because I was the one that I never ran, I paid my taxes, and I always worked.
I never received welfare from this country ever in my life, ever.
Not even unemployment ever.
So, anyway, and I'm proud of it.
So, now the day comes and they're going to deport me.
You think welfare and that kind of stuff is a bad thing?
No, I think it's good if you need it for help, but I didn't need it for help.
I survived without it.
I think it's great that you can receive, but it's a help.
It's not something that you live off.
Right.
You know, it's to help you in a bad situation.
Yeah.
So, but it's not something you just milk forever.
Right, of course.
And that's what I think.
It's never good.
No, it's great.
It's great that you have it as a help, but it's unfortunately getting abused, you know?
So we are, they're calling, and I have to go to immigration.
I have to go with my suitcase.
And I'm refusing.
They come to the house.
They put me in a white van, put handcuffs on me, drive me to jail, and put me in jail.
Surviving Without Support00:06:24
Seven days in the Butler County jail.
The Canadians are fucking with me and not sending me my passport.
I'm waiting for my passport.
They know I'm in jail.
So I escaped from them.
Now they're fucking with me.
So the max was seven days.
So I spent seven days in jail.
I learned how to play spades in jail.
And it was all kinds of characters.
It was again like a movie.
You're in jail, you're lifting weights with those guys.
It was one of those transfer jails that if you did something in Miami, they'll put you in Butler County and then they'll drive you.
To Juliet, or whatever it is.
There was a guy from Cuba who was, he had a life sentence, he was going to go for a life sentence for cocaine.
We used to play chess together.
There was, I mean, there were all kinds of characters there.
There was some funny things, amazing shit, you know, like just in the movies, you know, like you're in the office, but in a jail.
And after the jail, there was no going home.
There was tell your wife to bring you your suitcases.
We're driving you to the airport.
And that was it.
They came, picked me up from jail.
She had my suitcases.
They took me to the airport, gave us like, 10 minutes together, it was terrible.
And I flew from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Sofia.
And I got deported.
And then a whole new adventure started.
So, first, when I got deported, it was funny because, I mean, for me, it's funny.
I don't know.
So, first, somehow I don't take this real seriously.
You know, it's like it's happening and it's happening.
So, you're just going with it, you know?
You're not really processing it all.
No, I mean, it doesn't bother me actually.
You know, it's not, I'm not worried.
You think this witch doctor lady was real?
Well, the things happened.
So obviously she was real.
You think it's a coincidence that she knew how the shit went down?
Way, way of a coincidence.
I mean, the coincidence that he has an accident and breaks his leg and doesn't attend, and the coincidence of knowing that I'm going to be in a white van with handcuffs.
Pretty specific.
Yeah, but I'm sure all the vans that they pick people up in are white.
Yeah, it was a thing.
All paddy wagons are white.
Are they?
Maybe.
Yeah, you're right.
Yeah, but I was there with handcuffs and it was next week.
So.
And I was in jail too.
I mean, maybe it was coincidence.
You know what?
Sometimes they know it's a logical step.
Did you think about it a lot though?
No.
You didn't really do that.
I mean, back then I was really mesmerized that this is even possible.
But then I, I mean, it wasn't.
It is a pretty big deal if you think about it, if it really can happen.
And maybe it can happen.
Who knows?
But I didn't elaborate on that.
And then in Philadelphia, the long flight to.
To Frankfurt.
So, I go on the plane and I was sitting in the aisle seat andor in the window seat.
I was sitting on the window seat and there was this beautiful lady.
She was from Sweden, maybe a couple of years older than me.
And we started talking on the plane and she goes, You know what?
I always take sleeping pills and I don't mean to be rude or anything like this, but I'm going to fall asleep and probably sleep through the whole flight.
Do you mind changing seats?
So, when you want to get out, you know, I don't bother you.
I'm like, yeah, sure.
So she sits at the window seat.
I'll sit in the aisle seat.
The plane takes off and I'm fucking going somewhere.
I don't know what's happening.
I mean, I know where I'm going.
I'm excited going there because I have friends and family there.
But I'm kind of like a failure.
I'm upset.
So I started ordering drinks on those flights.
Drinks are free.
And I drink this.
My wife taught me that it's called a cotton bowl.
It's a bottle of Bailey's and a bottle of scotch.
Those little ones.
Yeah.
You mix them on the rocks.
And you sip on it.
It's pretty good.
It sounds pretty good.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
Should try it.
Cotton balls.
So I'm down like eight cotton balls and I'm trashed.
And we're approaching Frankfurt.
And she wakes up and goes, So, how was your flight?
I said, Oh, I'm sorry, but I got a little blitzed here.
And she said, Oh, don't worry about it.
You know, it's okay.
I understand.
What are you drinking there?
I said, Oh, these are cotton balls.
You should try one of those.
And the guy walks by and she said, Can I have one of those drinks that he's having?
And he goes, Yeah, yeah.
He comes back with no drink and said, Sorry, ma'am, but we have strict orders for seat 18B or whatever the number was no alcoholic drinks.
Oh, because that was your seat.
Oh, my God.
And I'm like, oh, that's a little too late.
I'm already trashed.
He said, oh, whatever.
He brought her a drink.
So we go at the airport.
So nobody leaves.
So the plane lands, and they say, nobody leaves the plane.
They get you out first.
Yeah, just wait.
And I wait.
And two cops walk in, young, like about my age.
And one of the guys looks extremely familiar.
I look at him, he looks at me.
I look at him, he looks at me.
And I'm like, I speak German fluently because I finished high school in Germany.
And I go, Where do I know you from?
He said, Are you from Bulgaria?
I said, Yes.
We went to school together.
We went together to high school when I was in Germany.
No way.
He had an Uzi on him.
He was the guy guarding me to take me to the airport.
And he's like, Oh, man.
Now imagine you're a passenger and this is happening on the plane.
People come with guns to pick you up and you start hugging the guys that are picking you up with the guns, you know?
How are you doing?
He said, Hey, we got to behave.
Let's go.
Yeah.
So they take me out.
They take me to the back steps.
We go out and go in this little green VW bus with the blue light.
Drove me to the airport.
And he goes, What can I get you?
You want something to drink?
I said, Yeah, I would like a freaking beer.
You know, we're in Frankfurt.
I want a beer and a Frankfurter, you know, like a hot dog.
He said, dude, I cannot get you a real beer, but I can get you an alcohol free beer, you know, and I'll get you the hot dog.
Arrested On The Plane00:03:04
And that was it.
And then I sat there for four hours before I had to get to the other plane.
And then the same guys came and picked me up.
And now I was the last one going on the plane.
So you have all these Bulgarians on the plane now.
They're nauseous shit, you know.
And there is this boo, boo, boo, boo, blue, the green van with the blue light, four guys with guns walking a guy up the steps.
The guy is hugging one of the guards before he leaves.
Pretty confusing, you know?
And then I go in there and sit in the normal seat, not in first class.
So these people were like, who the fuck is this guy?
I keep it like cool, you know, don't talk to anybody, whatever.
So we land in Bulgaria and I go to the thing to give them.
Now I already have my passport now because they had finally gave it to me.
The passport is expired by like two years or three years, you know?
So, and now I know this for the first time.
This was before as well.
How much people smoke in this country, in Bulgaria?
Everybody freaking smokes all the time.
So you walk in and you go into the airport and you're going to check your papers where they actually check your passport and stamp it and welcome to whatever.
Right.
And the girl goes next with the cigarette in this little fucking cubicle, you know.
What the heck?
That passport is four years old.
I said, I know.
Oh, she goes like, And they have these computers, this DOS shit, you know, it's like with the green back then, you know, type names.
And she goes, Oh, there is a warrant for your arrest.
I'm like, Okay.
Perfect.
What else can you go for?
I said, What's the warrant for?
She said, For unpaid stipend.
So I used to receive a stipend when I went to the university over there.
So they gave you money for good grades or for whatever.
And at the end, it's a contract.
You know, once you find a job, you don't have to pay it back.
But if you don't find a job, you have to pay it back.
Oh, that's cool.
They pay you to go to school and get good grades.
Well, they pay you.
They pay you.
There's an incentive.
It's not a lot of money, but it's like, was like, maybe over two years, I got like maybe $1,500.
What was, I mean, decent.
I mean, it was decent.
Right.
It was some amount of money that I owed, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, it's better than here having to pay $60,000 a year just to go to school.
You get paid to go to school.
Well, over there, going to school is free because it makes sense.
It's meritocracy.
In order to go to school, you have to pass a test.
You cannot just go to school.
Right.
And if you get good grades, they pay you a stipend.
Right.
And if you're excelling, do you get a start?
Yes.
Makes sense.
Makes a lot of sense.
Yes.
And then you're a good guy and you become a boss of a company and you run the company in a good way instead of running it in the ground because you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
Yeah, you're right.
Meritocracy.
Exactly.
And so she goes, like, there's a warrant for arrest.
And I said, well, what is it for?
And she said, for this and this.
Marketing Umbrellas In Bulgaria00:03:29
And how much is defined?
And she goes, like, she gave me some number.
And I'm like, that doesn't tell me anything.
We are now in hyperinflation, by the way.
I land in Bulgaria in hyperinflation.
And I don't know if you know what hyperinflation is, but that's like that movie where with five cents you can buy a lobster dinner.
I have a $100 trillion Zimbabwe bill.
Yeah.
Well, we didn't go that far.
We went only to 10,000, I think.
Okay.
But when I was a kid, the biggest denomination was 20.
So went to 10,000.
Imagine that.
Wow.
And one American dollar when I lived in Bulgaria was $1, was on the black market, was three level.
Three.
When I landed in 1996, one American dollar.
Was $3,200 level.
So $100 were $32,000 level.
And that was a stack of money.
It looked good too.
And they had printed this new money.
It was beautiful money.
Unfortunately, I can still buy it because they took it off after that.
They eliminated it after four or five years.
But it was a beautiful banknotes, just the way they were done and everything.
They were probably worth more as a banknote with the art on it than for the money that they were, you know.
And So I go over there.
Well, how much is this in US dollars?
And she goes, That's $19.82.
I said, Well, can I pay it now?
He said, No, you have to go to court.
I'm like, It's 20 bucks.
I'll pay it now.
Listen, sir, are you going to argue?
No, I'm not going to argue.
Okay, go.
So I go.
And now I'm in Bulgaria.
My dad is there picking me up with my cousin.
My cousin was a representative for Marlboro.
So he drives a VW Passat like a station wagon, painted like a Marlboro box.
He's the most popular guy in Bulgaria.
Everybody knows him.
He's cool.
He has this car.
So he's like a salesman?
He's a marketing manager.
Marketing manager.
Funny enough, Marlboro does not sell cigarettes in Bulgaria.
What do they do?
Well, they don't sell him, Marlboro doesn't sell him, but they import bootlegged Marlboro.
From Iraq or Iran or somewhere from there and sell it, and he just markets it.
And they pay him for the marketing.
Who pays him?
Marlboro.
They pay him for bootlegged cigarettes.
They pay him to market Marlboro.
That's all it is.
So they're just paying him.
Well, later on, they started selling real Marlboro in Bulgaria.
For like branding?
Yeah.
Because they knew that eventually they would get real ones?
So basically, in all the bars, because we have a lot of bars where he's there outside, he would go there and fill the bars up with cigarettes.
No, no cigarettes, he'd have umbrellas.
Marketing, umbrellas, ashtrays, stuff like this.
Yeah, like Red Bull does now with all the bars.
Exactly, exactly.
And those things are free.
So Marlboro gives, actually, Marlboro should be paying you to put it in your bar.
Right.
But in Bulgaria, it's the other way around.
Hey, my bar is cool because I have Marlboro umbrellas.
Hey, can you call your cousin?
I'll give him a couple hundred for an umbrella.
You know, one of those things.
I hope he's not listening to this.
Well, he probably will, but who cares?
I live downtown in Sofia.
Like, so if you can imagine New York and if Manhattan is the downtown, I live in Manhattan.
It's not that I live in Manhattan, but it's right down spec in the.
Taking A Cab To Trouble00:15:21
Okay.
In Europe, living in the city center is a cool thing.
It's not the suburbs.
You know, it's the cool thing to live in the city center.
Okay.
And since my parents had this house forever and it's really in a cool place, actually, the house is gone now, but we'll talk about it another time.
And so I go to see the judge and it's right down the street.
I'm very familiar with the area, I grew up there and everything.
It's nine o'clock in the morning.
I go into this little courthouse and there's nobody in there except there's a lady in the reception painting her nails.
And I go, Hey, what's going on?
Where do I need to have to see this judge?
And he said, Well, he was supposed to be here at nine.
He's going to be here at 9 30 10.
Go downstairs in the cafeteria and you can get an attorney there.
And I'm like, but the cafeteria?
I need an attorney.
She said, yeah, just go down there and they'll tell you.
So I go down there at nine o'clock in the morning.
Don't forget this.
There is a guy that looks like Don Johnson from Miami Vice with a white three piece suit, brown shirt, gold chains, bald head, and wasn't that good looking like Don Johnson.
But, you know, squirrely hair, like glasses.
And a couple other guys sitting down there drinking white wine at 9 a.m. out of very nicely glasses with some feather cheese with some pepper on it, talking and drinking.
And I walk in and he goes, Hey, how are you doing?
I said, I am here to see Judge and so and so.
He said, Oh, he's going to be here soon.
Come on, sit down, have a glass of wine.
I said, I don't know.
It's a little early.
I don't feel like it.
I got to go to court, man.
He said, What are you going to court for?
I said, I have a thing.
I mean, I have to pay some money because I, you know, whatever.
And he goes, Oh, You know what?
You should get a lawyer.
I'm like, for what?
He said, Hey, what do you mean?
I can, you get the lawyer.
You know what?
You pay me six bucks and I'll cut this thing down to like $8 instead of $20.
I'm like, Are you shitting?
This is how much this inflation made the money work because you could go to a restaurant and for $6, you can feed five people.
I'm not kidding you.
And a nice restaurant, too, you know?
And I go, No, I'm just going to pay him and we're going to get it over with.
I don't have that kind of a time, you know?
He said, No, no, you cannot do this.
He's going to get offended.
He's come up with some story.
And I said, We're going to find a freaking lawyer now.
He said, Well, I'm a lawyer.
I'll do this for you.
I'll do it for five bucks.
And I'm like, This is such a fucking circus.
All right, let's do it.
So, what's the story?
I said, The story is I went to school.
They gave me money.
I promised to get a job here and work.
And I left the country.
And now I have to pay the money back.
How much money?
I said, I don't know.
The whole fine is so much, it comes to $19.62.
He's like, well, that's a lot of money.
And I'm like, all right, it's a lot of money.
You know, it was a lot of money for over there at this point.
And I'm like, okay, hey, this is a lot of money.
So, well, we're going to do this.
We're going to do this.
We're going to approach it.
I'm like, all right, let's go.
So we go up there and we went, how do you plead?
And I was like, going to say, guilty.
He said, I said, he said, not guilty.
And he talked to the guy, went to him and has something in the ear, blah, blah.
At the end, he has to find that it went down to $9 instead of $19.
And he got $6 because I gave him a dollar tip and everybody was happy.
You know, it took a couple hours for the whole nonsense.
So now I had paid my fine, and my cousin goes, We got to go and see this guy, you know, friend from the neighborhood.
He opened up a liquor store, and you should see his liquor stores.
He's the number one guy here.
The stores are called Toby, T O B I, D B I.
And his name was Todor, and the other one was Bobby.
So they call him Toby.
And really, you walk into these stores, and they look like you are in a fancy liquor store in the United States with the nice wood inside, the glass, the liquor displayed nicely, actually a lot fancier than here.
So this guy has like four or five stores, and he was a doctor when I actually was my neighbor.
One across the street, and he was a doctor.
He gave up his doctor thing to become a guy that has a liquor store.
Unfortunately, he also drank too much, and at the end, he did die from alcohol poisoning.
But anyway, so long story short, so we're going to this little restaurant, it's a local restaurant right next to the hospital.
And there is this guy that makes this salad.
You know, in Bulgaria, you always get like these big salads, and then you get this booze that you drink with the salad, and people talk and drink the booze and eat the salads.
So it's kind of like a very healthy thing, you know.
And this guy comes up with this, you know, roasted peppers with tomatoes, feather cheese, cucumbers I mean, beautiful stuff, you know.
I don't care because it's going to be five bucks or ten bucks.
You know, I'm treating the guys.
And we have my cousin with his wife, this guy Todor with his girlfriend, and another guy who was whatever, and me.
I think so.
And anyway, so, and.
Now, Bulgaria is free, you know, supposedly.
You can buy a gun in Bulgaria.
So Todor has a gun, Tosho, actually, they call him Tosho.
And he's going to show me his gun, and we're drunk in the restaurant, you know.
And he's like, I got to show you this gun.
I have a zigzag.
You can do this, this.
Come on, let's go outside.
I'll show you.
I'm like, okay.
So we go outside.
Goes like, bam, bam, bam.
We're talking about, we're downtown, you know.
Shoots in the air.
Jesus.
And Six, seven bullets, eight bullets.
And we go back into the bar, and I was like, wow, that's a cool gun, and this and that.
And my cousin said, Yeah, you go see mine.
I have a whatever, leopard, some Italian guy, little gun, you know.
And I'm like, What's with all the guns?
He said, Oh, you can get a gun now.
So I'm like, Well, that's really cool, but why do you have to go to a bar with a gun?
You know, what's the deal?
He said, Oh, I just, you know.
So half an hour passes by, and this little gypsy kid walks into the Bar in the restaurant.
It's a restaurant.
It's like four or five tables, you know.
Nothing fancy, but really good food.
So the gypsy walks in with this guy behind him with a shaved head, built like fucking, I mean, a huge guy like Hulk Hogan.
Not that tall, short, but like fucking a bully, you know.
And the little gypsy goes, Yeah, it was them over here at that table.
And then walks out with the guy.
Next thing you know, I see these two.
Have you ever seen a Land Rover Defender?
The old Defender, the square ones?
Two of those.
Pull up, and these four guys come out with AK 47s dressed in tactical gear and come into the bar and are gonna arrest us for the shooting.
And they come in, and in the same moment, the police come in too.
So these were private guards, we would have been gone if the police didn't show up.
Police shows up, they pack up their and they leave.
And we're like, What happened?
He said, Who has the gun?
Him.
Well, I mean, he says, Me.
They took him against the wall, frisk him, took the gun.
Take my cousin, put him against the wall, frisk him, take his gun, puts me against the wall, frisk me, grabs my balls and squeezes him like a motherfucker.
I'm like, what the fuck?
He said, where's your gun?
I said, I don't have a gun.
I didn't get the memo.
Don't get smart with me, motherfucker.
I'm all right, whatever, you know.
I said, what happened?
He said, well, some of you, some idiot, shot like a bunch of bullets up, and there is a 12 story building right across.
I mean, you should look when you're shooting.
And two of the bullets entered through the bathroom on the last floor and cracked the sink.
When this guy, who is actually a mafia guy, was shaving in there.
Oh, and so it broke the sink from the, you know, it's so you're shaving and your sink explodes, you know.
And they thought somebody was trying to whack him.
Holy shit.
And I'm like, fuck this.
I'm out of here, you know.
So they said, nobody's out of here.
You're all going to the police.
I'm like, I don't have a gun.
Why do I go to the police?
Well, you're not, but the other ones are going.
So they arrest my cousin with the Marlboro car, clown car, you know.
And.
He's the one that drove us, so that's the only car that we have.
Now, I don't have a Bulgarian driver's license and I'm already in trouble.
I do have an American driver's license and a Canadian and some other ones.
And he goes, I go, Well, let's go to the uh police station and who's gonna drive?
Well, I don't drive, I don't drive.
His wife goes, I can drive.
It was a stick, she goes in there.
I said, Can you drive?
She said, Yeah, but this is a stick, uh, whatever.
She's like hot dog, yeah.
I said, Get out.
So I go in the car and I start driving.
And so we are coming up with a plan now.
Let's go and get this guy.
We have a really, really good guy who is a prosecutor, really high up to.
This is in the middle of the night, like one o'clock in the morning.
We're going to wake him up, pick him up.
So we go, wake him up, pick him up.
Then I drive from this house to this other.
This is all short distances.
Sofia is, when I was a kid, I thought it was the huge city.
Now you can walk the center in like 20 minutes.
It's like Amsterdam, small in the middle.
And we go to pick up the prosecutor.
His name is the Cobra.
He goes, All right, so we're going to go out and pick up my friend.
He's a lawyer.
So, anyway, we're going to the police station to get the guys out.
So, we go.
I'm driving again.
Now, I have the prosecutor, the lawyer, my cousin's wife, and Todor's girlfriend, and I'm driving.
So, I'm driving right through the city of the center where I live, you know, like this the main drag, and I get stopped by the fucking cops.
And they stop me.
Where's the paperwork for the car?
I don't know.
Do you have a license?
Yeah.
What the fuck is this?
He said, It's a license.
It's an American license.
He goes, Have you been drinking?
I said, Yeah, I had a beer.
He said, Oh, you're in big trouble.
Big, big trouble.
Takes my license, walks away, and stands over in the corner there.
And I'm sitting in the car.
And I'm asking this guy, the prosecutor, asking, Hey, Cobra, what does this mean?
He goes, It means you got to get out of the car and he's going to ask you for some money.
I'm like, All right.
Is he going to ask him or do I offer it to him?
He's going to ask you, I'll come with you.
Okay.
I'm going with him.
I go with him and I say, Well, this is actually my attorney.
He's going to take care of things.
He's an attorney.
What the fuck?
Get the fuck back in the car.
You come here.
They don't have any respect.
I mean, they.
Whatever.
And I'm like, guess what?
He said, So, you know, you're in big trouble.
I'm like, I do, but I'm going to go and get those guys out of the jail.
He's like, Oh, you'll get the guys out of the jail.
You're in big trouble.
Doing that, he repeats it like five times.
I know I'm in big trouble.
What do you want me to do?
He goes, Well, you know, I'm gonna ask you now to blow the pipe, you know, and we're gonna read how much you have.
And the way you look, I mean, I we're gonna take your license, you're going to jail, and there's gonna be a big fine too.
How much is gonna be the fine?
He's like, Well, it's gonna be at least I would say like 4,000 leva, that's about uh, dollar 50, but a lot of money over then.
And I'm like, wow, 4,000 level.
I mean, I don't know if I can.
I'm fucking now with him.
You cannot tell him here it is.
I don't know.
4,000 is way too much, man.
Can we do 2,000?
And I'll pay you right now.
He said, no, it's 4,000 and it's right now.
And you're lucky that I'm a good guy because I'm going to let you go.
And I'm like, all right.
So I reach in this fucking pocket where I have this wad of money and I don't even know the feeling of the money yet.
And I pull out 8,000.
Four times 2000.
I pull it out and I take the two back, and it's like, oh, boat, you can go now.
And that was it.
And I was like, this is fucking crazy.
This is something.
We're not talking.
This is in a quiet street somewhere.
This is a smack like you're at the boardwalk at Clearwater.
People are walking, drinking, talking, going to restaurants, and we're paying off the cops.
Right.
Just like in Mexico.
Is it that obvious?
I think so.
Yeah, but it's not like this anymore in Bulgaria.
It's similar, but there's a lot of tricks to it now.
So, and so we go to the.
So, this is the place you want to move back to?
Yes.
Oh, it's.
I mean, if you get in trouble, you're going to get in trouble.
What year was this?
This was 96.
96.
Okay.
Clinton deported me then.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, old Bill.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I never asked you, but why did they specifically pick you to be deported?
Because they have a quota.
So, when you're going to become a new president, you're going to show how tough you're in immigration.
Remember back in the day, we were tough on immigration.
Now we are lax with immigration.
They just change the shit to keep you afraid or whatever.
So basically, you come and say, Yeah, I'm a tough guy and I'm going to deport all these motherfuckers that are here illegal.
And then he goes in the office and says, Hey, let's deport some motherfuckers.
Yeah.
Who do we have?
Oh, this guy lives there.
This guy lives there.
But those are all the ones that are legal.
We're not going to chase the other ones.
Get those six ones.
We'll get them out.
That's how I got on that list.
Wow.
My ex wife, Kathy, she got deported from St. Petersburg in 2009 or 10 by Obama.
Wow.
And this was like a long time after all this bullshit, you know.
But anyway, so that's how I ended up on that list.
Okay.
And then in Bulgaria, I spent 100 days, exactly 100 days.
We went skiing on the first week after I got there.
We went skiing to this resort, and it was the end of the ski season, and the hotel was closed.
So there was nobody in the hotel.
And I mean, there was personnel in there, but it was the last weekend of the ski season.
So, I go with my posse.
Now, I had a posse because I had money, you know.
I had a lot of money.
I mean, not a lot of money, but a lot of money that bought a lot of shit, you know.
And first, to go to the ski resort is probably, I would say, like about 100 miles, 110 miles.
But this mountain, you know, takes about two hours to get there.
And usually you go by bus or somebody has a car and drives you there.
I mean, most of the guys don't have cars or whatever, or they don't have cars and they're broken or whatever it is.
And I go, like, we're going to take a cab.
You cannot take a cab.
That's like going from New York to Massachusetts with a cab.
This is how they think.
I said, Why?
Well, take a cab.
Skiing With Free Drinks00:02:25
How much could it be?
Pulling a little closer.
He goes, I don't know.
Well, so the night before we go out and, you know, go somewhere, eat something, party around, and I'm getting home with this cab driver.
And I ask him, hey, how much would it be for tomorrow to drive me and a couple of friends to Pamporo?
This was the name of the resort, or Borovitz, I think.
Borovitz.
He goes, oh man, that's going to be expensive.
And I'm like, all right, come on.
I don't know.
Let me see this.
And he does all these fucking calculations in his head.
And now I know the numbers.
He tells me the Bulgarian number.
I know the American number.
He goes, It's going to be.
You have to pay the back way, too.
You know, I'm like, Well, you can pick up somebody over there.
No, I mean, I can, but I'm not going to do it.
You have to pay both ways.
All right.
How much is it going to be?
He goes, It's going to be about $9.
And I'm like, Oh, shit, $9?
Can we go like $8?
He goes, All right.
I'll do it for $8.
I was like, You come and be here at 6 30 in the morning.
6 30 in the morning.
He was there.
I gave him $10.
This guy almost blew me.
I mean, he was so fucking happy.
I mean, this is how much that money, there was such a hyperinflation.
And then we went to the resort and the hotel.
We go to the hotel and said, Well, there's nobody here.
I said, Well, I see there is a guy in the kitchen.
He said, Yeah, but this is the last weekend we're closing.
And I said, So what?
I said, I want like four rooms.
So he gave us four rooms.
And he goes, Well, If you're going to eat something, you have to go and tell the chef what you're going to eat, and you're not going to order from the whole menu.
So he's going to make you every day either like a breakfast item or lunch item if you're going to eat lunch here.
And we're okay, okay, we can do that.
So we go over there and we tell the guy.
So we go and we get up in the morning, eat breakfast, whatever, and then we go skiing.
And then we ski.
And when we ski down at 12 30, 1 o'clock, we want you to be down there with a little table, have a white tablecloth, and have like four Heineken's ice cold.
Next thing you know, 12 30, you go down there.
The guy's down there with a white tablecloth with everything.
Living large.
Living large.
That's cool, man.
Meeting An Embassy Contact00:04:24
So, what made you want to come back to the U.S.?
Well, I was married in the U.S., I had a job in the U.S., a house, a car, the whole thing.
But how do you go about getting back after you get actually deported, like legitimately deported?
Well, you actually file a petition or have somebody help you.
And I had, there is another story behind it, was actually Arlen Specter.
And he was a senator from Pennsylvania when I. Dealt with him as far as like he is a pathologist doctor, like Rand Paul is a doctor as well, you know.
And I don't know if he practices and then he's a senator or how that find out Arlen Specter and then like type in like Arlen Specter JFK and figure and find what see what it says JFK autopsy or whatever.
So I know there's multiple multiple autopsies done on him.
The first one that was done was like the one that they was not the official narrative.
So was the first one the one that you think was botched or what?
No, the first one was the legitimate one when they brought him to the hospital, right.
And then they immediately took him and rushed him out of there and took him back to Washington.
And that's kind of like when the whole cover up took place.
That's when the whole story took a twist.
Right.
Well, anyway, so this guy, and it was an election year.
Okay.
Generally credited to Warren Commission staffer Arlen Specter.
Okay.
So he was a part of the Warren Commission, Senator from Pennsylvania.
This theory posits that the single bullet theory known as the Warren Commission, Exhibit 399.
Caused all the wounds to the governor and the non fatal wounds to the pro.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
So, well, that's Wikipedia.
Anybody put anything they want to in there.
Arlen Specter, October was American lawyer, Pennsylvania, Democrat.
So he wasn't a doctor, he was a lawyer.
So I guess.
Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish parents, graduated from Pennsylvania.
He was in the Warren Commission.
Okay, no, no.
He helped formulate the single bullet theory in 1965.
He was elected district attorney of Philly in 1973.
Okay, so he was one of the head guys on the Warren Commission who helped develop that.
Bullshit single bullet theory, the theory that it went through.
I have to correct what I said that he was a pathologist.
He was not.
Right.
He was not.
This is what I was in.
I didn't read the whole thing.
I just knew that he was.
There's so many names involved.
It's hard to keep them straight.
So, anyway, it was an election year, and this guy, you know, said he's going to help.
And actually, through my deportation and everything, we created a new family.
And what I mean by that.
So, my attorney that.
I had an attorney and he had a helper.
His helper was named David.
And then Arlen Spector's secretary was, I don't remember her name anymore.
So, because David was dealing with his secretary all the time, they met and eventually they got married.
Okay.
And he's the one that helped me actually to come back, Arlen Spector, by signing some kind of a petition.
And I came back sometimes the beginning of August.
So, I was only gone from, I think, from April.
It was kind of funny.
What year?
96.
So you came back in 96.
Yeah.
Oh, that's when you went to Hawaii.
No, no, no, no.
Okay.
100 days from I was deported to Bulgaria, spent 100 days in Bulgaria during the hyperinflation.
Okay.
And then I got back.
And it was funny because I was, I would go to the embassy, to the US embassy, like almost every other day because they tell me, come tomorrow, come tomorrow, come tomorrow, because I was a legit case, you know.
Right.
And my dad used to make fun of me because I never actually unpacked.
I had the suitcase like in the living room and I just go and get a shirt and wear it, and then another shirt, and then we wash them and mix them up.
And I said, I got to go to the embassy today.
So I go to the embassy, and I think it was the 6th of August or something like this that I had purchased Jimmy Buffett tickets that I stood in line in Pittsburgh.
I know, and I could not go to the concert.
So I'm mad that I'm totally on a different wavelength.
I go in there and I say, So, is the paperwork ready?
And they go, No, we have to wait for this.
You have to take an HIV test.
False Flags And Real Guys00:08:50
HIV?
Yeah.
Okay, I'll take an HIV test.
So, you have to go to this hospital.
So, is it going to be ready for the sixth?
And they're like, Why?
What's on the sixth?
I said, I have tickets to the Jimmy Buffett concert.
And those people busted out laughing in that office.
How many immigrants come in there and bitching?
Hey, I'm going to miss the Jimmy Buffett concert.
That's so funny, man.
And I did miss the concert.
I did end up coming back on the eighth, I believe, or something like that.
The concert was in Pittsburgh then.
Yeah.
And I came back and life resumed.
So, what makes you want to move back, especially with all the crazy shit going on over there right now?
Well, there is really no crazy shit going on right now over there at all.
Are they NATO?
We are NATO, yes.
Okay.
By force.
I mean, small countries go with the winners.
So, as soon as NATO starts losing, we're going to drop NATO.
So, same thing like Bulgaria was with the Nazis.
You know, and then the Nazis started losing, and then we went on the Russian side.
By the way, Bulgaria was freed two times by the Russians.
The Russians came and freed us from the Ottoman Empire in 1876, and they also freed us in the Second World War from the Nazis.
Wow.
So they're not such bad people.
I mean, even though, yes, they are to a certain point, but I think the.
Who are such bad people?
The Russians.
The Russians are not bad people at all.
First of all, this idea that people grow up here and the thing they know when they say Russia that they're bad people, that's the worst thing that you can do.
I don't think people think Russians are bad people.
They think Putin's a bad guy.
No, he's not.
How is he a bad guy?
We're not going to talk about it.
He blew up those apartment buildings in Chechnya.
And you know this.
Huh?
How do you know that?
I had the journalist in here who was the only American reporter that was based in Russia.
He reported on it.
He wrote a whole book about it.
There was actually evidence that they found that KGB agents were there.
What was the purpose?
I don't know.
I know that they blew up something.
It was a false flag for the Chechen War.
They wanted to blame it on the Chechens.
Yeah, but we had a lot of false flags.
We had George W. Bush.
Yeah, I'm not saying that America is the good guys at all, but you know, I mean, you learn to compare them.
I mean, well, the only thing that I'm seeing right now is that whatever he says makes a lot of sense.
And whatever that idiot that we have now, I mean, you cannot even say what he's saying.
Right, but he's irrelevant.
He's fucking irrelevant.
He's irrelevant, but I think that actually there is a big war going on between Europe and the United States, the banking of Europe and the United States.
And the war in Ukraine is the reason they want to blame on that we're going to have a huge financial crisis.
There is a huge thing brewing in the financial sector right now.
What's going on between the bank in Europe and the bank here?
I watched something today, so I'm really not 100% on it, so I cannot really explain it that well.
But it's something with.
Something with the treasuries, you know, that our, you know, the 10 year treasury and the two year treasury and something like they're going to switch them from one to the other.
So basically, when Jerome Powell makes the rates go up, that fucks with Europe.
Because Europe are still at zero percent, because.
Right.
So that, and then Europe wants to fuck us over.
So they have some kind of a plan.
Right.
And they're using the Ukraine war because the, you know, they want to blame it on the Ukraine war.
Yeah.
So, I mean, this is just.
Beside the point.
So, but yeah, well, I mean, yeah, there's definitely a lot of nuance there, especially when you're talking about Putin.
Everyone, you know, he's portrayed as this evil man, this evil dictator.
But portrayed by whom?
By American media.
American media.
And it's just anybody you talk to.
Everybody, that's just like a known fact in America that he's a bad guy.
And that's exactly what I'm saying.
He's a bad guy because they tell you he's a bad guy.
Right.
And people build an opinion by somebody else's opinion.
So, yeah.
That's why I say that people are brainwashed because people think people don't understand that there is no better place than the United States in the world as far as like opportunities that you have, even now where it's so up, it's still better than most places, yeah.
And I'm not an expert on Russia or Putin by any means, but I do know that just from what I've read and the people I've talked to that have reported on it in person, that like I know had one guy in here, David Satter, who lived over there for over a decade, who reported on this stuff, and he was actually the first.
American journalist ever to be 100% banned from Russia.
Like they literally kicked him out and they won't let him back in.
He lived there for a long time reporting on this stuff.
No, I believe you.
I'm not saying that he's not.
I mean, but there is also people that through propaganda, they actually will believe one thing and then they don't see the truth or vice versa.
I'm not saying it.
Right.
I mean, it's hard work to understand what the truth is.
It's really hard work to cut through all the bullshit and the propaganda.
And especially when you see what just came out with the Twitter files.
That the FBI is working directly with Twitter and Facebook and all these social media companies.
But I mean, you should have known that.
I mean, I even kind of knew that after I think after Kennedy, even like before Kennedy, that this whole country was sold out to the CIA in the military industrial complex.
That was a long time ago.
And Kennedy was going to blow the whistle, I think, and that's why they blew up his head up.
Yeah, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, shit like Operation Ball.
Because there has to be, there has to think about it for how many years the United States existed and in how many wars do you know it's the only country that from the whole existence spent only like nine years in peace.
Nine years, nine or 11 years.
Google it and see how many years that the United States did not have a war.
It's less than nine years.
Yeah.
In a 200 year existence.
And then they are the bad guys?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know this democracy that we are spreading.
The Iraqi peoples are not happy.
They fucked up Libya.
Libya used to be a beautiful country.
Tripoli used to be a beautiful city.
Beautiful city.
It was the Paris of Africa.
And they fucked it up.
This bitch, whatever her name is, Crooked.
You know?
Who?
Hillary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of.
Sinister shit that goes on in the shadows of the American government.
It's dark.
It's all about the money.
And going back to the Putin thing, too, he is one of the few guys, something you would never see.
I mean, there are other presidents that we've had where you could actually watch an interview with them talking for more than two minutes.
It's not chopped up, where they're actually like explaining their ideas and how they run their country.
And explain their policies and how they're set up and what their beliefs are.
I mean, Obama was a kind of an articulate guy.
You could kind of like watch him talk.
He was very intelligent.
I mean, he had the look.
He had the, I mean, he fucked up international, like his international policy.
Started it in him.
Started it in him, yeah.
But if you look at Putin compared to some of these other people that we've had recently, especially Biden, and I don't know if you've ever seen the Oliver Stone interviews where he went over there, he spent.
Like a total of with Putin, like four or five months back, coming back and forth interviewing Putin.
And it was a sit down with him and where he was explaining this stuff.
And Putin was explaining all of his policies, what he's been doing, what his view is of Russia.
He calls himself the son of Russia.
And it was interesting because you could hear what this guy actually thinks, why he thinks that way, and what he believes in.
Again, I'm not saying that he's like some saint or anything, but it's, it says something when you can listen to a guy or a quote unquote dictator running a country listen to.
What he explained what he's doing and why he's doing what he's doing.
But do you approve of the things that he said, or are they negative, or are they positive?
Because the Stone documentary made a lot of sense.
Everything he said made total sense to me.
It seemed very logical.
I think he's a real guy.
He's real.
He does seem like a real guy.
He's a real guy.
And I think he changed.
He did.
I think he's good at whatever he does.
And I think when they changed the ideology after 92 from communism to.
Or the Russian Federation, you know, I think he changed as well.
And actually, as I know some Russian people, and I have a brother who deals a lot with the businesses in Russia, and he is a loved person.
So, yeah, the Cold War was really that's kind of the point where America went off the rails as far as the military industrial complex and us developing nukes, the whole nuclear race.
Questioning Satellite Truths00:14:54
And, you know, I'm reading this book now all about the creation of DARPA.
Oh, DARPA, yeah.
And all the crazy, you know, shadowy war technology that's been developed and like getting all the top scientists around the country and the world, Operation Paperclip, getting all these Nazi scientists to develop all this stuff.
Werner von Braun, he was the one that.
Werner von Braun, yeah.
He was almost the head scientist of DARPA.
Well, he was the head of NASA.
Yeah.
He built NASA.
Right.
Yeah.
Because he had all these, and he took all these German people with him.
Yeah.
That book's fascinating.
You should see what it says on Werner von Braun's.
Tombstone.
You should actually.
I've heard what it is.
What is it?
It's, I think it's Psalm 19 1 or something like this that the earth is stationary and we live on a flat earth.
He said we live on a flat earth.
And all this NASA shit is all this.
What?
Well, he said the earth is stationary.
Stationary?
The earth doesn't move.
Can you find that?
Warner von Braun.
Just pull up his tombstone.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Pull up Warner von Braun's tombstone, a picture of it.
I would love to see this.
And that's the whole thing that.
Supposedly, NASA is a hoax and they use those 19 billion dollars of budget every year.
What do they do?
Where do they go?
He said NASA was a hoax.
Well, he didn't say it in those words, but that's what somebody else interpreted.
There is a lot of people that believe that NASA is a hoax.
I'm one of them.
Why do you believe it's a hoax?
You tell me that they went to the moon with that thing made out of coat hangers and paper clips.
Come on, have you seen the lunar module?
Yeah, I've seen it.
And then you tell me that Nixon called on the fucking home phone and talked to them on the phone on the moon.
They cannot even get connections in West Virginia and they can close from the moon.
That's his tomb?
That is Psalm 19 1.
Now look up Psalm 19 1.
Look, I'm going to be honest.
I'm not completely sold on the moon thing.
I don't know what's going on, but yeah, the moon video did look fishy and I always question why we haven't been back since.
Because you cannot go on the moon.
Okay.
I've had people on here telling me that the moon was man made.
So I don't know what's true.
But I mean, we have satellites orbiting the earth.
Do we?
Yeah, I've had an astronaut in here who's been in outer space.
Come on, I had a monkey driving a taxi cab, so this doesn't mean anything.
There's astronauts on TV, they say they're astronauts.
You think there's no satellites?
I don't think there is satellites like they tell you they are.
They spin around the whole earth and all that stuff.
There's floating up there on weather balloons, most likely, but there is not.
I don't think there is those.
Where do you produce?
Try to find out.
Okay, okay, where you can build a satellite.
What company builds satellites?
Try to find out.
Okay, NASA.
All of our space programs, Tesla launching rockets.
There's people that have been on the space stations who have gone on the space shuttles and orbited the Earth and talked about it.
Why would they be?
What is the purpose of lying about that?
Well, that's a long other show that we have to do.
Well, the gain is that, long story short, is that we do not come from a Big Bang.
We are not a coincidence.
We live in an intelligent environment.
That means that we are created by somebody.
And you cannot be a Big Bang theory and it will come from monkeys and deny the existence of God.
When you make the earth round, there is no God.
Because on the flat earth, supposedly, we are the only people.
There's no aliens.
We're created by God.
The whole system is created by God.
That's in the firmament and the earth is not moving.
There's actually a lot of legitimate, credible physicists that are actually questioning the Big Bang theory now.
Like that's why they're already questioning it.
And it's all a theory.
But that doesn't mean the earth is flat.
All right, Psalm 19.1.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
The skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day, they pour forth speech, night after night, display knowledge.
There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
Yeah, but this is actually, you have to go into the old King James version if you can, because this is actually already.
Right there?
Yeah, it already went.
Okay, it's the same one.
Well, I'll find it for you.
It's kind of hidden, you know.
I'm not going to go into this if you.
I think this is fun.
Why?
What evidence.
Have you seen that convinced you to believe that that's true, that the world is flat?
Well, let's think about water.
So, do you think that water finds its level?
So, if I have a big bucket here and I pour water in there, it's going to be leveled, right?
Yes.
Okay.
So, what if this bucket is as big as the Atlantic Ocean?
It's going to be level where it all depends on gravity.
Okay.
Well, let me ask you this now.
If it's not leveled, that means that.
There is peaks and troughs somewhere, let's say.
Then, how does that water not just flow away?
Because the moon and the gravity, the poles of the earth, there's gravity.
Depending on the earth rotates.
Sounds like a lot of bullshit.
It's a lot simpler when you go out and you look at the horizon and it's flat as heck.
It's never curved, it's never round unless you're looking through a fisheye lens.
It's simple as that.
And you fly your drone like 1,300 feet up and take a picture and it's all flat.
There is no curvature.
Have you ever seen the footage of those rockets or those balloons that go way up into the atmosphere and everything is curved?
No.
Yes, with the ones with the Red.
Have you seen the Red Bull one?
Yeah, of course.
That's with the fisheye lens.
A fisheye lens.
Yeah.
So why are they shooting people up into rockets and they're coming down in these pods and they're going out there?
They're pulling the astronauts out of the plane?
It's a $19 billion budget.
But for what?
For the money.
Why would they be trying to trick people, spending all that?
What's the point?
What do you think all the other people are doing with you?
They're tricking you.
They're having wars in Ukraine to be able to do this and that.
Right.
But that's all for power and for the military industrial complex.
For money.
To sell weapons.
Right, for money.
They sell it in a different way.
And to fight over resources.
Well, NASA doesn't do anything, gets $19 billion for you.
What do they get from faking shooting people into space and bringing them down in the pods and building nine rockets?
$19 billion to be approved by Congress so they can get a budget for $19 billion.
They have to show something.
What else?
What about the Red Hot Chili Pepper song?
Red Hot Chili Pepper song.
Yeah, the one that the space is created in a basement, in a Hollywood basement.
The moon landing.
I don't know what song that is.
Yeah, it's one of the most popular songs.
Well, look, like I said.
Californication, the song.
Listen to the.
Space was made in a Hollywood basement?
Yeah.
And then you listen to Dave Matthews with Dodo when the earth was flat.
And it was like a pancake, and we all were afraid that we're going to fall off of it.
So we're going to let Dave Matthews ban and the Red Hot Chili Peppers start.
No, but those are artists.
They're telling you, well, are you going to have Dr. Fauci tell you that you have to wear a piece of fucking mask, and then everybody believes that?
Science is scientism now.
So, I mean, that's a completely different thing.
No, but it's the other opposite of can you believe Dave Matthews and can you believe Dr. Fauci?
Neither one you can believe, but I'd rather believe Dave Matthews than fucking Dr. Fauci.
Wouldn't you?
I mean, no, I've clearly, you can't bring Dr. Fauci into the earth being flat.
Come on, stop.
No, that's no connection.
That's not fair.
But I just, I want to, like, I heard that.
I forget where it was, but I heard that the whole flat earth thing was created on 4chan as like a troll.
This guy was trying to troll.
And actually, some people like saw it and they started to like take hold of it and started to believe it.
Because the earth was flat for forever until the last 16 years, 600 years.
The earth became round 600 years ago.
Before that, all the astronomers, Ptolemy, who was the biggest astronomer of Egypt, what do you think?
Those people were stupid and they couldn't figure out that the earth is not flat.
Why are those stars always in the same places?
Why is there celestial navigation?
If we are spinning around the axle with 1,600 miles, actually 1,000 miles an hour, and then we're spinning with over.
100 million miles an hour around the sun.
How is it possible that the Big Dipper has been there for the last 40 years?
Let's Google it.
Austin, ask Google how come if the earth is spinning, how come we always see the same constellations above us or the same stars?
But this is a whole cabal and everything.
Try to find something about the flat earth.
As soon as you start looking for something, they tell you that you're an idiot.
So it's cognitive dissonance.
Bam.
Yeah, you can fly literally over the North Pole and end up in Russia.
You can do this on the flat earth too.
You can fly straight in one direction and you will fly all the way around the earth and end up where you started.
You can do this on the flat.
It's like a CD.
So you just fly around like this and you fly to Russia like that.
It's not much of a difference.
Well, then, if it's a flat disk, what's under it?
It's nothing.
It's actually, they say it's a flat disk and then it has a firmament on top of it.
Like a torch.
Yes.
And then the sun and the moon are inside the firmament.
And this is all from the Bible, from the old Bible.
You got to read the old Bible, the Hebrew Bible.
If we do this again, I'll.
I'll bring materials okay, and they're online.
And how difficult it is to find anything online about reading about the flat earth that makes any kind of a sense.
I mean, if it's a bunch of just let somebody write something and don't suppress it.
Every time you pull up flat earth, you have the YouTube warning and underneath telling you that this is yeah, why do they have to?
I agree with that.
That's that's silly that they sometimes on your videos you have like things underneath said something about on your okay.
Well, what about what about ships?
How come they can they can sail off into the distance and after they get to a certain distance they disappear below?
The horizon because your eyes can see only so far.
If you go out here on the beach and look at Egmont Key, I mean, from Treasure Island, you know how you can see the gulf, the water, and then like an empty, like a white space, and then the trees.
Would you agree that you see?
I see this every morning because I walk the beach.
When you see what, when you're looking, I'm looking from the beach, I'm looking south towards Egmont Key.
Okay.
And I see the island, right?
All the way in the end, all the way at the end.
But the island seems to be like it's floating on top of the water.
Okay.
And if a boat will approach the island, the boat will go behind that floating line that is actually like a vibrating air and moisture.
That's why you cannot see it.
And this is what appears.
The sun does the same thing.
The sun just goes away from you.
Yeah, but you could get a telescope and look at it and still.
Like what?
At a boat going off into the horizon.
Right.
And you could zoom in on it and you can see it going.
I mean, see it moving because obviously you have a telescope.
Then you can zoom in and then it still disappears.
No, it doesn't.
No, it doesn't.
There's been tests done.
All right.
Can you pull up Nikon P900?
Just put Nikon P900 on YouTube.
Nikon P900?
What is that?
I used to have that camera, by the way.
It has a 2000 optical zoom.
Did you find about the constellations?
Yeah.
Okay.
Because the Earth's axis points at a point in the sky around which everything appears to move.
Including the stars.
In the north, this happens to be very close to the star called Polaris or the North Star.
And it is in the constellation called Ursa Minor or the Little Bear.
Right.
Because the Earth's axis points at a point in the sky.
It's a bullshit explanation and it doesn't mean anything.
It means because the Earth's axis points at the sky, points at the sky.
So the North Star is here.
That is true.
So if you take a camera, if you open up a camera lens, put it in your home, if you have a nice camera and you have cameras, open up and do a slideshow for three hours of the sky.
What are you going to get?
Have you ever seen it?
Yeah, yeah, at the North Pole.
The North Star is in the middle and all the stars are spinning around it.
Pull up like a, like a, go on YouTube and find a, like a video, like an animation that shows the.
Not animation, not animation.
Animation, anybody can animation.
No, no, no, but it'll explain.
Oh, I can explain.
Why, it'll show you visually why the stars say, see what, let's see what they're saying.
I know, but it's not going to be visually.
It's going to be an animation that somebody created.
Exactly.
And it's not.
Exactly, but it's going to be an argument for the earth being around.
Let me ask you this Have you ever seen with your own eyes, not heard from somebody, not used any tools?
Have you ever seen anything that shows that this place is curved, anyhow, or felt a movement?
You mean you can see it when there's videos of these things going up into the atmosphere?
No, no, no videos.
I'm talking, have you experienced with your senses that the earth is round?
Well, I can't fly up in the atmosphere myself.
That's a yes or no question.
On an airplane?
No.
Have you, with your own senses, experienced that?
That's impossible.
How could I see it when I'm five, six feet above the ground?
Me neither.
That's what I'm saying.
I haven't seen it in this round.
But when I go to the ocean, it's always flat.
I haven't seen an ocean that goes on the sides like, you know, up and down.
Right.
But you don't need to.
So you need to see it to believe it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Don't you?
Are you so stupid?
And you don't trust any of the videos or any of the documentaries or any of the history?
I don't trust any of the videos.
You don't trust any history?
I know, but I'll tell you, I do trust history, but history is written by the winners.
And one thing that I learned when I was a kid, when I was coming home with my history book, my dad used to take my history book and read it on Sunday after lunch.
And it was the most amusing book for him that he has ever read in his life.
Because it was written by the communists and it was a totally different story and it was a total bullshit.
And you will sit there and tell me, this wasn't true, this wasn't true, this is bullshit.
That's.
History is written by the winners.
Right.
But that goes for anything.
You can't really know.
I mean, no matter what you read in a book, how many books have you read that they're just depictions of science or history, but you haven't been there to see it with your own eyes?
History Written By Winners00:11:30
That isn't just because you haven't seen it with your own eyes.
It's the same thing with the Holocaust.
If I haven't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't speak about it with being sure about it.
Right.
But you sound like you're being, you sound like you're sure that the earth is flat.
Well, because with my own eyes, it looks flat.
And actually, I would like to know what kind of a lubricant they use for this 1,600 miles or 1,000 miles an hour in 24 hours.
You know, we spin like 1,000 miles an hour and how there is not a single shake.
There must be some hell of a gyroscope and they must be oiling that motherfucker good so it doesn't shake at all.
You know, look at this.
We're spinning right now.
It's a thousand miles an hour.
Because we're moving the same thing when you're in an airplane.
An airplane is going hundreds of miles an hour.
You don't.
What if it goes in the opposite direction of the spin?
If it stops and goes the other way?
No, if the earth spins to the left and you go to the right with the airplane, what does it mean?
It's going to stay in one place and the earth is going to spin underneath?
No, everything is relative.
If you start flying, the earth is rotating one way, but if you fly, that's why if you fly to California right now, it takes an extra hour to go one way than it does the other way.
That's the wind.
The wind, the atmosphere, it's all the same thing.
I mean, there's the wind speed, so it depends how the wind blows.
That's right.
So, I mean, that's but so you're telling me then, so the logic is that we have the earth, then we have the atmosphere, whatever other spheres, and then there is a vacuum.
Is this how you understand it?
Well, we have the core of the earth, we have the mantle.
I'm going bigger than that.
I'm going so.
We have the globe and then we have the atmosphere around it, and everything spins together.
Right.
And then when we penetrate this with a rocket, then we end up in vacuum, right?
There's a vacuum somewhere.
Right.
Do you agree on the vacuum?
I guess.
I mean, I'm not a.
Well, they say there's a vacuum.
I'm not an astrophysicist.
That the Tesla car just floats in the air because it's a vacuum.
A vacuum is you can just push something and it goes forever because there's no resistance.
Okay.
So a vacuum is a void.
Look, I'm not an astrophysicist.
No, no, no, this is simple.
You know what the vacuum is.
So you can take.
I can take this can and put a pump here and suck out the air and close it, and inside would be a vacuum.
Right.
Right.
So that vacuum is a void.
It's a void of something.
This is empty.
Right.
So if I break this seal, even if the smallest hole, that's going to suck on the air because the air wants to go into the void.
Right.
So if the earth is covered with the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever sphere, and then a vacuum starts somewhere, how is it sealed?
Because a vacuum has to be sealed.
It's a void.
As soon as you break it, how is the earth sealed?
Well, how is there a vacuum and where does the vacuum start?
That's my question.
I think it gradually, once you exit the atmosphere, it starts to gradually go away because all the gases that are in the atmosphere.
It's a gradual vacuum.
It's a void.
Something is protecting it to get.
I don't know.
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
And here's what I'm saying it is a theory, and everybody's entitled to believe whatever they want to.
And it is.
They say that great intelligent people will accept people to have two opposite theories and theories, and they will accept both of those theories.
So, in other words, we have to learn not to.
When somebody says something, and this is specifically an example with the flat earth hey, the earth is flat.
Oh, you're an idiot.
That doesn't mean anything.
You have to sit down and research it.
And usually, people that research the flat earth become flatters.
I've watched a lot of documentaries about it, and I've listened to a lot of people talk about it and try to argue for it.
And I've never been convinced.
I don't understand.
I think it's one of those things that people cling on to because they get some sort of sense of community and they believe it and they find other people that believe it and they make it a part of them.
And they cannot be convinced any other way.
Exactly.
And you know what?
And that's great.
And I cannot say that I'm 100% sure.
I'm really not 100% sure.
But from the things that I see with my eyes, And with the things that I feel with my senses and the things that I've experienced in life and been on an airplane many times and see it from up and down, and with some math that I have used with Google, I found out that a lot of those things don't jive.
And when things don't jive, and somebody, when you search for something, is somehow hidden, because you know when you search for something when it's hidden, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So, why hide it if it's not true?
And all the research about flat earth is hidden.
And everybody that says flat earth is an idiot.
It's already, you know, they have created this, like every Russian is evil, kind of like the same thing.
Right.
Well, I don't believe it's the right thing to censor people who believe the earth is flat.
That's idiotic.
That's the same thing as trying to censor people for talking about vaccines.
People should be able to talk about whatever they want, whatever they believe in, and they should be able to debate it and let their ideas compete and let people make up their own minds.
Because when we debate, we both are asking questions, we're talking, and we might be even creating something with a total agreement between the two of us.
Right.
Totally.
That's exactly what happens when you have a debate.
That's why they call it a debate.
You sit down and Everybody throws in like brainstorming or whatever they call it, you know, and that's what happens.
And for some reason, here is if you know, if you're a Democrat and I say I'm a Trump guy, you're stupid.
If it's the other way around, you're stupid.
That's a perfect example.
Well, that's what they did this because separation they have to separate the humans.
So once they separate, we lose our power.
We are very powerful individuals.
But here's the main thing I don't understand about it I understand the million military industrial complex.
People, you know, Halliburton, all these companies that are trying to make money and establish power and gain resources all over the world.
Geopolitical chess game.
It all makes it, you can trace it back to where the motivations are for doing those things, right?
You can understand there's corrupt players and governments.
But why, like, even with.
COVID 19 and these pandemics, you know, people trying to, the government trying to take more control after 9 11, trying to implement the, what was the act they implemented after 9 11?
What was it?
The Patriot Act, right.
You lose me at flat earth because what is the government's, what are they achieving by trying to create this false narrative of the world being round?
It's not even a narrative.
It's like, it's a religion, basically.
So, back in the day, let me answer this question.
First of all, it's a religion.
Who gains from it is what I'm saying.
Who gains from it?
Controlling people.
But how are you going to control people if they think the world's round?
Because people are actually extremely powerful individuals with their thoughts because they took all these powers away from us slowly but surely by telling you that you're a coincidence and you come from a monkey.
You don't come from a monkey.
Your consciousness, this is just the suitcase that you have today.
When you die one day, this suitcase is going to go away, and that consciousness that gives you that energy is going to continue somewhere else.
What do you think?
Is it just going to stop?
This is what you believe?
Absolutely.
Have you seen this happen?
What evidence do you have of this?
I don't have evidence.
I believe it.
I don't have to have evidence to believe something myself.
I'm not asking you to believe it.
Yes.
So I do believe that.
I believe.
But what evidence?
I mean, you're saying you believe that consciousness leaves the body.
We weren't created from monkeys.
The Darwin's theory of evolution is not real.
For example, But you're, but like what I'm saying is, you believe it because you believe it.
It's something that you've never seen or experienced with your own senses.
But then you're using the opposite argument for the flat earth theory or the round earth theory.
You're saying that you don't believe it's round because you've never experienced it or seen it with your own eyes, and therefore you don't believe it.
Right.
Because I haven't experienced it, but I have experienced spiritual things about consciousness.
And I think I understand a lot more about consciousness than.
So, in other words, I'm saying, well, It's what evidence I have.
I mean, I have watched and read and you know, people that are neuroscientists and do things, but they are on YouTube, they could be crooks, you know, they could be actors.
So, I don't have any evidence.
I'm not saying that I have any evidence.
I also don't have any evidence that the earth is flat.
I'm just saying that I don't see it being round.
And all the evidence that I see points always towards flat.
That's all I'm saying.
I'm not saying you should believe it or not or whatever.
And then I'm tying it in with the fact that when you have the round earth, then you have the Darwinism, and then you have this Big Bang bullshit.
And when you have the flat earth, you have God the creator.
And if you start in the beginning of the Bible, first, then let it be light.
He creates that universe and he creates it and creates the humans.
Right now, when I talk to you, your heart is beating.
Are you beating your heart?
Who is beating your heart right now?
My nervous system.
And who is telling the nervous system what to do?
It's the human organism.
It's the way it works.
It's electrons.
And there is no higher power telling you what to do?
Is somebody running this thing?
Yeah, all the cells and all the atoms and all the electrons were charged, they were electric.
I don't know.
I'm not a biologist.
I don't know.
You don't have to be a biologist, but that's what I'm saying is you're, I mean, the things that are happening in your body, you're not thinking about them.
They're happening automatically.
They're extremely complicated.
If I cut you with a knife, after a while, that wound is going to stop bleeding and is going to coagulate the blood and is going to start growing together.
Who tells that body to do that?
It's millions of years evolution.
It's a consciousness, it's a higher power.
You are part of.
That organism that you have, it's designed by somebody.
Like the plants are designed by somebody.
You know, there are bees that go on the plants and the plants spread the pollen around it.
Who the fuck talks about that?
What do you think the bees know that?
Say, let's go spread some pollen?
Who do you think it's designed by?
I think it's designed by God or the creator or whoever you call him, the guy with the beard, the girl, whatever she is, she, he, shim, whatever.
So then, how do you think we got here if you don't think that we're a part of evolution?
If we don't, we didn't evolve for evolution, evolve easy for you to see.
We were created by God, like Adam and Eve, like just like it says in that book that they were shuffling around for thousands of years.
So, you believe what the Bible says that we were just dropped?
I don't believe everything that the Bible says because the Bible has been changed many times and translated from many languages.
But I believe certain things in the Bible, yes.
I mean, I definitely believe that there is a creator, and I cannot see how there is not one.
Evolution Versus Creationism00:07:03
And I can also understand how, I mean, you can actually control your thoughts and you can create things through thoughts.
I mean, this is whatever you dream, this is what you get.
That's why people that live in the ghetto are upset because they live in the ghetto and every day they're upset about it and they end up living in the ghetto.
But if you pack up your shit and move somewhere else and you start believing that you belong there, you're going to belong there.
That's why I lived, wherever I lived around the world, I might have been poor, but I always lived in a good house because I grew up in a good house.
I cannot see it less than that.
So once you get a level, you only go up.
Yeah, but wouldn't that also be an effect of psychology, being in like a positive feedback loop or a negative feedback loop?
When you start out in poverty, that's why most people stay in poverty, is because that's all they see, that's all they're exposed to.
And you aren't exposed to positive thinking or different ideas.
You kind of just get stuck in that negative feedback loop.
And that's why.
A lot of people in bad neighborhoods around the country.
True, but then you have to look into how the human mind is also.
I mean, you have the ego inside you, and the ego is the thing that tells you what to do sometimes.
And you can listen to the ego or not listen to the ego.
And one day, when you are able to separate yourself from your ego, then you can actually understand and be able to observe the ego from the side.
And I don't know if I can give you an example, but I can try.
For example, I was a very young person, you know, I was, I mean, I had a short fuse, and, you know, we'd sit on the table, somebody says something, you slap them, you know, it was a normal thing sometimes.
And now, because after a while, you know, you grow and you learn and you learn from experience and you correct and then you become a different person at the end, you know.
So I wouldn't do this because it's not the right thing to do.
I mean, I'm talking when I was 15 or 16 years old, I've done it, and it's not a good thing.
And now I can see how I can see it from the side at a certain point how somebody will piss me off and I can actually, I just want to slap him, but I want to, I'm going to.
Contain myself and not do it because I know this is not the right thing.
So, there is the ego tells you the ego is the thing that always wants to buy things and do things and harm you.
And it's basically your subconscious mind.
Right.
Exactly.
And that actually is with the apple.
You know, when Adam bites the apple, then he becomes subconscious.
And I was looking at the Apple logo and I was thinking, hmm, it's also a bit off Apple.
Didn't that fucking phone make us subconscious of everything?
Facebook and this.
You're fat, you're ugly, you're gay, whatever.
Think about it.
Maybe that is the logo of the apple.
Maybe you should research that.
What is it?
Wait, wait.
Apple phones, Apple computer says an apple with a bite in there.
Right.
You're saying that was the apple?
Well, that came from the Adam and Eve story.
In the Adam and Eve story, the snake told Adam to bite into the apple and God told him not to do it.
And when he bit into the apple, he realized that he's naked and he became self conscious.
Is the apple something that means the same like Adam and Eve?
I just thought about it.
Huh, that's an interesting coincidence.
Is it?
Ask Google why Steve Jobs named his company Apple.
Maybe he was God.
Why did he pick the logo with the bite of the Apple?
That would be interesting.
That would be interesting.
But anyway, so what I was saying is like, and we got to probably cut it short soon because I got to go and work.
Yeah, it's almost 5 20.
Yeah.
This is great.
We should do another one where we talk a lot about Flat Earth.
Oh, we can talk a lot about it.
That would be great.
I would love to.
Yeah.
You're either thinking of the future.
And the future is what you perceive is going to happen, might not happen at all.
We don't know what you think.
So we're not looking at you funny because you're thinking that, because we don't know what you think.
Or you're thinking in the past, where you're thinking, oh, man, I should have never, like, you know, stolen this and this.
And I feel so bad.
And then, oh, my God.
And this is bad.
And, you know, and you always like, like a lot of people, this is the new thing that I've been observing in all these movies that you watch.
Everybody's suffering, you know.
Why is there a bitten apple as the Apple logo?
Nope, that's one of those logo urban legends.
The reason for the bite was to clarify it clear that the fruit is an apple.
Oh, okay.
Since with no reference, whatever.
What else would it be?
Like an ass?
Yeah, it's Adam and Eve.
That's what it is.
Well, if it was a cherry, do they have a bite in the cherry so we know it's a cherry?
No, man, if there was no bite, people could confuse it as a cherry because you don't take a bite out of a cherry.
Even though the name of the company is Apple.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, that's kind of goofy.
Sounds like a bullshit story to me, too.
Yeah.
Huh.
Yeah.
So, anyway, so the thinking in the past, I think that they happen already.
They don't mean anything.
They're not going to do anything to you.
They're not going to come and bite you or haunt you.
You should never feel guilty.
Right.
Why would you feel guilty?
Guilty of what?
I mean, you should feel guilty if you go and do something stupid and it's stupid.
If you go and.
So, what are you saying?
There's no reason for us to think about the past?
No, what I'm saying is that we're constantly either living in the past or in the future.
Life happens in the present.
Yes.
So, and if you learn to live in the present, and you can start by meditating, making that gap when you're between the thoughts, you know, you think one thing and then you think of the next thing, but there is a little gap in between.
Yeah.
And if you can take this gap and think about it and make it a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger by not thinking of anything, having an empty mind.
That's the present.
Yeah.
And when you're in the present, you're at 100%.
Yes.
And that's why you like surfing, right?
Yes.
So when you surf, you're in the present.
Not thinking about anything.
Right.
Because you had to pay attention.
Right.
And you're not thinking about the bills or whatever happened last night.
You know, you're surfing.
Right.
And this is the addiction to the moment of the present.
That's why you're addicted to this.
Like I'm addicted to play pickleball.
Because when you play pickleball.
Yeah, you're in the zone.
You're flowing.
Yes.
And you know, you know, you know, also, you know.
When you're regular.
Like right now, I'm not thinking about anything.
We're just talking.
Right.
Because we're.
Well, when we are talking, we're thinking of the conversation that we're talking about.
But as soon as you stop, you can think, like, oh, what a dumbass, you know, whatever, you know.
So, I mean, you can.
I'm not thinking, trust me.
My mouth's just moving.
But all these thoughts come.
Surfing In The Present00:00:50
And then the other thing is, we're putting all these people in boxes.
You know, you walk down the beach and all this.
Look, she's fat, ugly, blonde, fat, black, green.
There's a lot of the thinking.
You got to work with the thing.
We're talking about this zone.
And if you can learn to live in that zone, not only when you're serving.
By making that gap bigger, and you can do this through meditation, then life becomes amazing.
And then you start understanding life, and life is very simple.
It has its ups and downs.
Unfortunately, there's going to be downs.
It's not just smooth, but it depends how you take the downs.
I agree.
So let's finish on this note, and then we'll do another one.
Thank you very much.
I love the story, and I'm sure a lot of people, a lot of the listeners will love it as well.
I hope so.
Thank you for your time, and we'll definitely do episode two down the road.