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May 22, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience

01:43:14

Joe Rogan Experience #1302 - Ed Calderon

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joe rogan

01:39:53

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jamie vernon

00:04

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joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boom.
		What's up, Ed?
		How are you, man?
unidentified		Great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for coming here, man.
		I appreciate it.
		Thank you for extending the invitation.
		Well, I love your Instagram.
		It's very informational.
		Tell everybody what you do so people get a handle on this first.
		I'm a non-permissive environment specialist.
		Basically, I teach people how to live, move, and travel in places where they probably shouldn't be traveling.
		You know, how to get out of handcuffs, how to get out of zip ties.
		And, you know, I show people how to survive in such environments.
		My background is in law enforcement in Mexico.
unidentified		So, you know, I spend a lot of time down there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And over the years, that's kind of led me into teaching myself how to survive in that environment.
		And apparently, after a while, that...
		Made me kind of sought after as far as teaching other people how to survive in such environments.
		So I've been doing that for a while here in the US, military, law enforcement, civilians.
		Yeah, and you started working in law enforcement what year?
		It's 2004. So you started before everything got really crazy.
		Yes.
		So you can kind of trace back where it officially kicked off.
		By the start of Felipe Calderon's presidency, which is the second-to-last president we had, he basically said, you know, full-on war against the cartels.
		And by that time, I was kind of just getting done with my training in northern Mexico as a police officer.
		And what I thought was going to be, you know, community policing and stuff like that turned into a full-on, you know, here's a basalt rifle and just go climb up on that humby with those military guys and let's go arrest cartel members.
		Oh, Jesus Christ.
		So you thought you were just getting a regular law enforcement gig?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, realistically, there was no sort of job description.
		This was post-9-11.
		I was actually in med school, and the economy all over the border with the tightened security and stuff like that kind of went down the drain, and most of the money that I was using for med school went away.
		That in the newspaper, young, unmarried individuals that don't have any kids, you're welcome to join, type thing.
		Wow.
		Young, unmarried individuals with no kids.
		They want that specifically.
		Yeah, that was probably a big alarm mill shit just under my head, but the, you know...
		There weren't a lot of opportunities for somebody my age there that didn't have a career.
		And I thought it would be, you know, everybody said, don't go, you know?
		Yeah, I would have said that.
		I was like, Ed.
		But to me, it was a challenge.
		And a lot of people said I couldn't do it, and I did it.
		And then it turned into something that wasn't what most people expected when they went into it.
		You know, it was a full-on Irving Warfare type situation.
		Wow.
		So...
		Post 9-11, the borders get tightened up, and the economy gets very bad in the border towns.
		Is that what happens?
		Because people can't get through as easily?
		Yeah, it's heightened security, so commerce is freely done on both sides.
		Border wait said you should take an hour now.
		It would take three hours or four hours, depending on the time of day.
		So things got affected.
		Also, a worldwide recession situation kind of happened, so everything kind of went down the toilet.
		I have a lot of family.
		In the border region and most of our family businesses that we had basically kind of tanked during that time.
		So from 9-11 to here we are 18 years later, it's been a pretty radical change.
		Yes.
		Is that safe to say?
		Yes.
		100% change?
		If you had to try to describe it...
		So, I mean, basically, the part of the country that I had most of my experience is the Baja, Sonora, Juarez-type region, northern Mexico, basically.
		What happened is that all the cartels started fighting for the most rich drug routes on the planet.
		One of them, of course, being the city of Tijuana.
		So the city of Tijuana, that's the corner of Latin America.
		It's the most cross-border on the planet.
		And with that, there's a lot of commerce that goes on in that region.
		A lot of things get shipped to Tijuana and then drove up into San Diego.
		And a lot of people have business on both sides.
		And among all of this movement...
		There's a giant organized crime war going on.
unidentified		It used to be overt, like on the streets.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Middle of the day, you would see these cartel convoys arriving at a restaurant and all the cartel guys outside with their AKs and stuff like that.
		This was 2004, 2005 era.
		And what is the military or law enforcement attitude towards that?
		So we go back to 2004 when I first got it started and it was look the other way.
		Really?
		Yes.
		Look the other way?
		Look the other way.
		That was specific instruction that you got?
		It was one of those things where I went there and I got a firearm.
		Here you go.
		Here's your Glock 17. Here are your two magazines.
		Here's your Mossberg 500. And you see all those cars over there?
		We don't ask them for anything, let them pass.
		We don't do anything of that nature.
		And then we would see members of the military as well kind of go the other way type situation.
		This is 2004. Do you think that this was just to avoid conflict or was it because of corruption?
		It's always corruption.
		At all those types of levels down there during this time, there was a lot of corruption.
		Things changed, but things in a way in some levels are always the same.
		There was definitely some sort of pact going on, some sort of fear-based pact during that time.
		And when Felipe Calderon finally said, you know, enough is enough, we're going to declare war, he basically militarized a lot of the counter-narcotic efforts in Mexico.
		So the military went from being in their bases or manning stations out there to actually actively going out and looking for cartel cells and trying to eliminate them.
		So basically army on the street type situation.
		And another thing he did was basically a lot of the police chiefs around the country were being traded out for former military officials or military guys, officers.
		One of them was Lieutenant Colonel Lezaola.
		I don't know if maybe your audience could look him up.
		He's a very famous lieutenant colonel from Mexico.
		He actually has a documentary on him called Mexico's Most Bravest Man.
		Pretty interesting guy.
		He was the one that headed us up.
		He directed us at the start of these operations against the cartels.
		And he basically said, you know, this isn't a policing problem.
		This is a counterinsurgency problem.
		So we're going to militarize it, basically.
		And after he kind of took control, everything changed.
		The cartels weren't as overt as they were, so they started going underground.
		So when you joined...
		You expected it to be regular law enforcement.
		When it became this counterinsurgency, militarized effort against the cartels, was there every time where you were like, I gotta get the fuck out of this job?
		This is too dangerous.
		Yeah, I mean, my generation, I was part of the seventh generation of officers going through this program, policing.
		And out of my generation, the first year we had...
		Two of them in jail for corruption charges and three dead.
		Out of how many?
		Out of 23 guys.
		So out of 23 guys, five gone.
		Two of them very dramatic.
		Two of them were kind of the origins of how I got into...
		The whole counter-abduction type thing.
		Two of my guys got picked up outside of a hotel in the downtown Tijuana and by cartel members dressed as federal police officers.
		The whole nine jars, the uniforms, the car, everything cloned.
		They got asked for their papers outside and Got put into a van.
		They found them a day later.
		Horribly mutilated and all this type of stuff.
		Tortured.
		Tortured.
		And that was the...
		This is real.
		This is real and I should probably have an escape plan.
		Yeah.
		And, but it wasn't, I didn't know anything else, basically.
		So it wasn't like I had something to fall back on.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it was good pay for what it was.
		And, yeah, but fear, that's when fear got, you know.
		This dress must be insane.
		Yeah, you're always on.
		We always had this thing on the meeting wall that said, there's no vacation even when there's vacation.
		You would go on vacation and you would get your gun to go on vacation.
		Of course.
		It was pretty insane.
		Now, have you ever been confronted?
		Yeah.
		Yes.
		Yeah, of course.
		I mean, there's no...
		There's no...
		It's not...
		You know, I have a lot of friends that are in military up here in the U.S. And it's not like...
		It's not like them.
		They go overseas and they do something in a different country with different people that don't speak the same language.
		I was doing all of this in the place I grew up.
		So I knew some of these people at times.
		Every now and then I would say, hey, I know that guy from when I was a kid.
		Or we were in school together.
		And now he has a plate carrier with an AK-47 and a gold gun on his pants, right?
		And it's like...
unidentified		Whoa.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The gold gun's a big giveaway.
		Oh, gold guns are...
		You know, that's how you know.
		Yeah, there's some amazing websites that document all the different stuff that the cartel has, but they love gold guns.
		Yeah, that's...
		El Chapo got a very special gold gun when he was...
		When he was named one of the top earners on the Forbes list, I think he got his number on the gun and everything.
		The second to last time he got caught, because he got caught a lot of times and escaped.
		Somebody in the military that got him took it.
		And it ended up in the museum.
		I think it's in a museum somewhere in Mexico City.
		Where a lot of these gold guns, that's a war trophy for those guys, right?
		So there's like a gold gun section of the museum?
		Yes.
unidentified		Yes, there is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mexico City.
		Wow.
		Yeah, that's pretty wild.
		Gold gun, gold AK-47s, you know.
		Now, if everything is so corrupt down there, how does a guy like El Chapo keep getting popped?
		Because when I saw his escape, I was like, this is hilarious.
		The fact that this guy goes to the toilet, and then he opens a door, and whoop, he's in a tunnel, and on an electric scooter, and goes a mile, pops up on the other side, and they had everything set up for him with electricity.
		I mean, I think the thing that people kind of don't understand about the corruption is it's not just corruption because people are greedy.
		It's also fear-based corruption.
		So if you don't do what I say, we're going to kill everybody in your family, even your dog, that type of thing.
		So after Little Chapo got escaped that last time, all of the staff at the jail got put in prison.
		So they were all part of it.
		There's rumors that they were.
		Seems like somebody had to hear all that digging.
		Of course.
		I mean, it's only a mile away.
unidentified		It was pretty deep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Some things that should have been patrolled weren't patrolled.
		It was a pretty good, well-made tunnel for what it was.
		Really well-made.
		So a lot of the people that El Chapo actually used for these tunnel operations, because the same people that he used for the tunnels in the border region...
		All the active tunnels that are somewhere along the border, all of those guys were pulled in from silver mining companies that used to operate all over Mexico.
		That kind of went into the toilet, so they were looking for jobs.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Get El Chapo out.
		It's a good job.
		Or drug tunnels, you know?
		When you saw all that shit go down with Sean Penn and Sean Penn visiting El Chapo and Sean Penn writing an article for Rolling Stone, were you like, what in the fuck is going on here?
		Yes.
		For some reason that might not be...
		Mainly was, why are they giving him this celebrity status?
		There's a lot of glorification and a lot of...
		People venerating some of these people down there, and they do a lot of harm.
		So he's basically giving a voice to somebody.
		It would be the equivalent of somebody up here giving a voice to somebody that was responsible for a lot of damage done to the U.S. Why do you think they did that?
		It was romantic, right?
		There was something about it.
		It's like, here's Sean Penn, one of our biggest movie stars, with one of the biggest drug dealers ever.
		I mean, he is El Chapo down, because I've been to Sinaloa, and I've actually done classes there, which was pretty surreal.
		He's a folk hero.
		He's Robin Hood, basically, to these people.
		And when the surreal moment that I had down there, I was driving along this...
		Bad, bumpy ride highway and all of a sudden turn into a nice kind of highway.
		And the guys that I was with told me, oh yeah, the cartel made this highway.
unidentified		And the back part of it, that's the government part of the highway.
unidentified		This is the good one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know?
		Schools, careers, lawyers, doctors, all their careers paid for.
		By the cartel.
		Immigration processes of people that want to come over here, sponsorships, all that type of stuff on both sides, right?
		So...
		The span of influence, that's how he kind of got to where he was.
		He was always helping people, and he was investing in people.
		And these people, these investments would pay later on.
		In a lot of ways, it sounds like he benefited them.
		He benefited some aspects of the community.
		Yeah.
		I mean, the reason why the military couldn't get him...
		People could say corruption, but because he had a human shield around him.
		All these towns owed schools, hospitals.
		Instead of Christmas down there, they celebrate the Day of the Kings.
		So he would get presents.
		Mother's Day, they would all get presents, that type of thing.
		Why would we want to help the military come in here and get El Chapo if he's doing this type of stuff?
		And that is the same all over Mexico with some of the cartels.
		The hearts and minds type approach is what makes some of these groups long-lived.
		So how much of an effort is there to eradicate the cartels?
		Because if you can get a guy like El Chapo, who at least in terms of popularity is at the top of the list?
		As far as popularity?
		He's at the top of the list as far as popularity, but as far as the actual drug dealers, is he at the top of the list or are there more clever folks that hide underground?
		Yeah, there's rumors of people above him that are still out there somewhere.
		That's the great conspiracy.
		El Chapo is basically the bank manager.
		Well, he has a compadre.
		A compadre is somebody that, if you're the godfather of my kid, you're my compadre, right?
		So he has a compadre out there, El Mayo Zambada, and he is still out there, right?
		And the extent of how he works and where he works is unknown.
		So he's more slick.
		Exactly.
		He tries to stay more low-key.
		Well, some people get sick with the fame, probably, and they want to go outside.
		Well, once that TV show Narcos came on, I think there's a lot of people who did not realize how crazy the life of Pablo Escobar was and what really went down in Colombia.
		Yeah.
		I mean, it's crazy.
		Pablo Escobar was a phenomenon in his time and age, but he was one man.
		I'll imagine replicating that type of insanity over the span of Mexico and it's about eight or nine guys, you know?
		That was the 90s, early 2000s because these guys were...
		Legion of Doom type thing where they would be enemies, but they would have reunions and they would meet up and kind of agree on certain things.
		Just like in the Pablo Escobar show.
		So they really do that?
		They get together and have meetings and sometimes they kill each other?
		That's a reality.
		They do at times, or did at times, because things are currently, after La Chapo, You know, things kind of shifted and changed.
		What happened?
		Well, the main thing is a power vacuum.
		And with the power vacuum and legalization on this side of certain substances like marijuana, the pot fields are now poppy fields.
		And new things like...
		Like them now dedicating themselves to heroin instead of the weed.
		Mysteriously, there's still weed fields down there for some reason.
		You guys are way better at making it than anybody down there, but for some reason there's still some weed fields.
		Well, I think it's a lot of access, especially in the states where it's prohibited.
		They're probably more willing to get it to the people.
		That's probably it.
		Meth precursors being brought in from China to Mexico are now being made in Mexico, like industrial-level stuff.
		Right.
		And a new upsurging cartel down there that is trying to overtake the Sinaloa cartel, the new generation cartel, is coming out of Guadalajara.
		And they're kind of really militarized, kind of wing of cartel activities that are trying to, you know, take control over the whole thing.
		What is the plan in terms of the government?
		I mean, if they can take out a guy like El Chapo, what is the plan to eradicate all this, and is there really a plan to eradicate it, or is it one of those things where it's sort of a plan on paper, but realistically they sort of accept the fact they're never going to get rid of these people?
		So, I have a thing, like basically, Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent.
	I have an image of a feathered serpent biting its tail.
	Mexico has a problem with amnesia, a six-year cycle of amnesia.
	Every president comes in and has all these plans to eradicate the cartels.
	The president goes out, nobody likes them anymore.
	The new guy comes in and says, well, I have a better plan.
	And that's the cycle we always go through.
	So it's a big issue in Mexico.
	Yeah.
	And currently we have a leftist president that doesn't want to have anything to do with the past administrations that are more on the right of the spectrum.
	His name is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO, vocally supporting Venezuela, that type of guy.
	Apparently he has a good relationship with Trump.
	That's what people say.
	But his whole thing was amnesty for the cartels.
	That's a campaign promise.
	Amnesty?
	Yes.
	What does that mean?
	Exactly.
	Nobody knows what that means.
	But that's what he was saying?
	Did he have a plan for this amnesty or is it just like a statement?
	It was a statement.
	And now if you see counter-narcotics operations throughout the country, the military is not as active as it used to be.
	Whoa.
	Some of the cartels are growing in influence.
	Because of amnesty?
	Could be.
	Basically, I don't see the efforts that were there when I was active down there.
	Things change.
	So I don't know.
	I truly think that the absurd...
	Because we're on route to having the most violent...
	in Mexico as far as cartel-related deaths, right?
	When I got out, Tijuana had been on the top most dangerous cities on the planet list, and I actually worked there when it was on the top.
	And through efforts both from the government and through people like Lieutenant Colonel Leiza Ola, Tijuana was gone off the list of most dangerous cities in the world, and now it's again at number one, right?
	Yeah, you sent me that.
	I was pretty shocked, because you don't hear about that here.
	It's six murders at night.
	I was down there two days ago, and it was...
	It's basically cartel on cartel.
	So they're cleaning each other out and just bodies appear in the morning, you know, on bridges, hung from bridges, torture, shot, you know.
	But again, nobody's doing anything about it.
	They should, you know, but kind of turning a blind eye in a lot of ways.
	And so with this leftist president, this guy who has this idea of amnesty...
	The people that are in charge of handling the cartel, the military and the police officers, they've got to feel like a little abandoned.
	Yeah, or maybe some of them will have a business plan and they're working on one side.
	Oh, so that's a problem too.
	Yeah, so people that aren't aware, you know, we have a separation of powers down there as well.
	The army...
	People constitutionally shouldn't be engaged in combating the cartels.
	They shouldn't be engaged in police roles.
	But there were some amendments done to the constitution and laws passed.
	But you have to realize that some of these people that are fighting the cartels in a policing type role from the military...
	Some of them can't read.
	Or some of them come from rural parts of Mexico that shouldn't be doing that type of activity.
	So you get a lot of failures on that side of the fence.
	We do have some high-level SF community members in Mexico that are doing the work, but they're few and far between.
unidentified		And then you have the federal police.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which has gone through about four or five name changes in the past, you know, ten years.
		Because every time, well, not going to call them that, change the uniform because they're all corrupt.
		Jesus.
		But now they're this police, right?
		So they just change appearances.
		They change the name, you know, but...
		Try to refresh the public opinion of it.
		There's a famous, you know, investigation, federal investigation police called the AFI. And they were like modern investigative federal police that's going to go after, and they were corrupt as hell.
		And all they did was get a name change and all these guys got shuffled around.
		And literally I was like, hey, I know you.
		No, I'm this now.
		But they're still the same person who compromised.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So those are the federal guys, right?
		Currently, they want to do like a national police force.
		And you're like, wow, they're going to get new people?
		They're going to be a national police force?
unidentified		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's the same guy.
		She changed her uniform, changed her hat.
		So that's on the federal side.
		So we're pretty wanting there.
		State side, each state has their own police force, investigation police force, and a preventative type force.
		And these are politicized because each state government may be opposed to the federal government.
unidentified		So there's some static there now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And each municipality has its own police force, and they might be completely different politically than the state and federal.
		It must, for you to have your life on the line over there and see all this chaos and obvious either lack of organization or outright corruption, it must be insanely frustrating.
		Yeah, I mean, putting people in that were clearly guilty of things, you know, and then seeing them come out.
		Or the legal system down there that I had to endure, you know, you would have to go and do a face-to-face with all these people.
		Go into a federal courthouse, leave your firearms behind, do a face-to-face with these people inside that you just got for however many tons of cocaine or pot or whatever, and then go outside and they're outside.
		Now I know who you are.
		There's no anonymity in that regard, so you would have to sign things.
		And then seeing some of the people that were with you working on your side and seeing how some of them would fall into corruption charges and then sue the government and then get your jobs back.
		But now you have somebody who's compromised within your own unit.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So they did try a few things to try and clean out police forces.
		One of them was a plan they called the C3 plan.
		It was like a filter for police officers down there.
		It's still in action, but it's questionable if it's effective or not.
		I saw a lot of people go through it, and later on they would turn out to be cartel guys.
		Basically, they would do a background check, FBI background check, polygraph exam, drug testing, all of these things to see that you were clean to work on these police forces.
		The problem is that the polygraphs turned out to be unconstitutional to fire somebody over them.
		So a lot of these people got hired back after they would fail basic polygraph exam.
		So again, it's a lot of attempts to clean it up, you know, and You would be on the level, and all these people wouldn't be on the level, but they were still there.
		What percentage of people are not on the level, if you had to guess, roughly?
		I'd say it would depend.
		I'd say 30%, probably.
		That's a lot.
		In my experience of the people that I work, that 30% weren't on the level.
		Well, you must cherish the 70. Oh, like family.
		Yeah.
		Like family.
		And you would know when some of these people weren't on the level, because...
		I have this running joke that I went in with the same car that I drove out of the office with.
		Shitty truck that I bought off my own dime.
		First truck, first car.
		And I drove out of the office when I quit the job that same day.
		I drove out of the office in that truck.
		But a lot of these guys would come in with their, you know, Hummers and H2s and just weird cars.
		So they go, wait a minute.
		This doesn't make sense.
		Like, we are working the same office.
		Why do you have a three-story house?
		That's so obvious, though.
		Prove it, you know?
		Yeah, but the obviousness of it.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The blatant...
		You're driving a nice car, living in a big house, and everybody else is like, what?
		Yeah.
		There's obviously these unwritten rules of you wouldn't tell on this guy.
		Of course.
		But, you know, it's obvious.
		Yeah.
		And when it came time to share information of a certain kind or...
		We're going to go over here and you would have to turn around and look around and see who was listening.
		You wouldn't trust a lot of these people.
		So how are we going to do our job if we can't trust the people that are working with us?
		Who was it that recently called for decriminalization?
		Was it your president that called for a decriminalization of all drugs in America to go along with Mexico?
		Is that what it was?
		Yeah.
		To try to do something about the cartels.
		Yeah.
		We're on the brink of legalizing marijuana in Mexico right now.
		There's been a few landmark cases and it's a gold rush type situation right now.
		There's a lot of companies down there that have had experience up here that want to go down there.
		Right.
		So the culture is ready for it, I think.
		Do you think that would help?
		I don't know.
		When it comes to legalizing pot up here, it hasn't helped down there as far as lowering things actually made things kind of worse.
		How has it made things worse?
		They changed what they were producing.
		The reason why there's a heroin epidemic up here and fentanyl epidemic up here I think it has some relationship with how things got legalized up here and how they switched product down there.
		So lighter colored heroin is coming down from Mexico.
		And I've worked with law enforcement up here in the U.S. doing classes and kind of, you know, they send me things like, what do you think about this, Ed?
		And I've seen that lighter colored heroin pop up in places as far off as Chicago.
		So you know because of the color?
		Yeah, the color, the smell, the consistency, you can kind of tell if it's Asian or Mexican.
		Is it a different strain?
		It's probably a different strain, and it's also the amount of sun it gets in the region where it's being grown.
		It's higher altitude, so it's lighter color, not as stinky.
		I don't know.
		But I think...
		That kind of relates to the legalization issue down there.
		It didn't affect them in the pockets.
		They just switched product.
		It's such a strange relationship because the reason why these drug cartels have so much power is because they're selling drugs to the United States.
		So it's like you have this connection to this country.
		That has this great big wall that it wants to build, and on one side, everybody's buying up all the illegal drugs, and on the other side, everyone's killing everybody to try to make and sell these illegal drugs.
		Yeah, I mean, and there's a lot of holes underneath that wall, and drones, drone technology.
		Is that wall going to help anything?
		Well, the wall's already been up for a few years.
		Part of it.
		In a place like Tijuana, which is one of the richest drug routes on the planet, and the drugs are cost the same.
		It's the same?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what about the ocean?
		Can't they just take a boat?
		I've seen one large submarine in my time working.
		Really?
		Large?
		Like military size?
		Like scientific size.
		Where the fuck does somebody buy a submarine?
		Online, apparently.
unidentified		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		You can buy a submarine?
		You can buy a small submarine for a small amount of money.
		I think the main part of the submarine ownership is maintenance.
		The reason we found it is that it wasn't properly maintained, so it...
		Sunk?
		No, it actually floated, couldn't sink.
		Oh.
		And it had a bunch of things hanging off behind it.
		Submarines scare the shit out of me.
		You can't see where you're going.
unidentified		Well...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, I've seen submarines, drones, like a squadron of drones with a bunch of loads on it, flying.
		How heavy can a drone get and still fly?
		I've seen full like two kilos on it.
		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So just flying the coke over the top.
		Yeah.
		And the only reason I found out about those is one of those crashed in a roadside next to the border fence.
		Were you around when that CIA drug plane crashed in Mexico with tons of cocaine on it?
		I wasn't there, but I was aware of that situation.
		What the fuck is that about?
		I mean, realistically, there's a lot of Americans running around in Mexico.
		Yeah.
		And there's a lot of cowboys, right?
		Yeah.
		A lot of people say, listen, we just make this one run.
		They're like, the government doesn't give a fuck about us.
		My pension sucks.
		It could be.
		Could be.
		Every now and then, and this isn't a secret.
		Every now and then you would see a dude out there that's blonde, tall, and has a bunch of tattoos that don't belong down there working on the military side of things in Mexico.
		Or some dudes doing something in some place that you would get a call, you know, oh, they're fine, just leave them alone.
		So who knows?
		Who knows?
		So, if it's 3 out of 10 were corrupt where you were, it might be like 1 out of 10 CIA guys?
		I mean, you know, usually we would get to, since I have a pretty good spoken English, I would get sent places for training or for liaison work with some people that would go down there, and I would never know where the hell some of these people were from.
		So, who knows?
		It seems like it's very loose.
unidentified		Like there's a lot of room for fuckery.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Calderon era, Bush administration era, there was a lot of stuff going on.
		Yeah.
		things kind of went dark for a while yeah explain the fact a lot of people don't know what the fast and the furious is it was a they had sold guns to the cartel under the guise that this is the way they would track the guns yes it seems so fishy oh i i i learned about it from cnn and i a few of my friends were killed with some of those guns down there which is you know
		everybody talks about the U.S. agent that was in Mexico has killed by some of these guns.
		But there was a lot of You know, Mexican agents and people, civilians killed by these guns as well.
		So there were very specific types of guns, you know?
		So imagine somebody giving you a shopping list about the types of guns you want, right?
		Including in these lists were.50 cal Barrett rifles and FN57s, which are a very, it's a pistol with a very high velocity round that goes through soft armor, like the type of stuff that was issued to us.
		So all of a sudden we're seeing these space pistols in the hands of the cartels in very specific parts of the country.
		But what a preposterous idea that they were going to sell it to the cartels so they could track them.
		That sounds like horseshit to me.
		That sounds like someone was trying to make money and they said, oh, we'll just say we're selling it to them to track it.
		Well, the suspicious part is that all of them went to one specific cartel, the Sinaloa cartel.
		So...
		It sounds like such horseshit.
		The fact that, I mean, who went to jail for that?
		Eric Holder didn't go to jail.
		Oh, he should have.
		He should have.
unidentified		He should have.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, there's blood.
		People died.
		I can't say the name, but somewhere in Baja, a little girl lost her arm.
		An agent that was a friend of mine got killed and the wife got killed with FM57 that directly related to that whole thing, right?
		You can go to jail for fucking tax evasion, but this guy can get away with that.
		Just the idea that you would run that by people and they would go, yeah, good idea.
		Give them guns.
		And to be clear, I don't know the realities of that operation on this side.
		People say it was happening way before.
		All I know is that when that happened, nobody told us.
		And there was definitely some weird resentment on part of the government down there and some people down there.
		That's sick.
		And there was some weird conspiracy theories going on as well down there.
		How could there not be?
		I mean, that seems like a conspiracy theory right in front of your face.
		Just the fact, oh yeah, we just sold them the drugs or the guns so that we could track them.
		No one's going to die.
		It's not like a bad idea.
		The main thing you would hear is people were- Settlement.
		Fast and furious executive privilege lawsuit between DOJ and House.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It's just how it wrapped up within the last two weeks, I guess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is just wrapping up?
unidentified		Yeah, just some settlement on March or May 8th.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, because this is from, what, nine years ago?
		Ten years ago?
		Yeah, at least.
		And the guns are still showing up, so I don't know how many of them.
		I've never known what numbers, but last time we found some, and I actually have images of the ones we found.
		They were buried in somebody's backyard inside of a water barrel.
		And all of them were obviously US origin guns.
		And they're like, what do you mean?
		All of them had very specific accessories on them that nobody else in the world puts these accessories on their guns at the US because they're pretty ridiculous accessories.
		Like what kind of accessories?
		Things that had letters on them, like see you in hell type things on them.
		Punisher skulls.
		Punisher skulls are the big one, right?
		That is hilarious that a cartoon skull from a Marvel comic book has become a gigantic part of Spec Ops.
		Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous.
		Well, the main rumor down there, like, conspiracy theory-wise, and you would hear all sorts of things, you know, because down there, there's no such thing as top secret clearance in Mexico, you know?
		There's like, hey, don't say anything, you know?
		That's about it, you know?
unidentified		So you'd hear crazy, crazy things.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Main thing was that the U.S. was planning an invasion.
		They're destabilizing the region so they can put boots on the ground.
		Oh, Jesus.
		That was the going conspiracy theory going on.
		The U.S. invading Mexico.
		Yeah.
		How fucking crazy would that be?
		Well, you know, as far as a reaction on the side of Mexico...
		This is purely speculation and weird rumors that I would hear.
		People were planning to poison drug loads on that side to create a health crisis in the U.S. as a reaction.
		When I heard it, it's like, who's talking about this shit?
		And so full-out war almost could be you know and then you would try to see well who's doing that in the cartels?
		So the cartels of the government are the same thing like what's going on?
		Right, right, right.
		And again, this is just weird stuff you want to create this is a crazy perspective right the Cartels would poison the drugs to punish the Americans for the military invading the country and Yeah.
		To create a health crisis in the U.S. So they would have to go back.
		Wow.
		I mean, the rumors.
		Do they know how many guns they brought over?
		I've heard all sorts of numbers.
		We never got told the same number.
		Nearly 2,000 firearms were illegally purchased for $1.5 million, according to the DOJ Inspector General report.
		Fuck.
		Hundreds of guns were later recovered in the United States and Mexico.
		Yeah.
		50 cals were – and it's always an escalation with the cartels, right?
		So they would get AK-47s and we would get German main G3s that were around the same caliber and we could fight back.
		And then all of our leadership started rolling around in armored vehicles.
		So let's get 50 cals to make holes in these armored vehicles.
		So it's always been an escalation.
		Jesus Christ, you guys were getting 50 cals so you could shoot holes in the armored vehicles.
		Yeah, so the cartels were getting them first and then we had to get them because they were rolling around in armored vehicles.
		So Mad Max-type armored vehicles.
		First they would make them, like homemade Mad Max armored vehicles.
		They found a few online somewhere.
		One of them was called La Bestia, which is like a giant...
		All that was missing was the guy with the guitar on the back of it, you know, like Mad Max.
		Yeah.
		And they would use these to roll into town, and like, how would you fight that?
		Right.
		So you had to get a.50 cal.
		Or get the military to shoot them from the sky.
		Oh, my God.
		There's a famous video from somewhere down in Mexico where they shoot a Vulcan rifle down at a cartel member in a car, an armored vehicle.
		But then you'd see, well, checkmate government against a cartel.
		But then you realize that the cartels, like the New Generation Cartels in Guadalajara, have actually downed helicopters in Guadalajara, military helicopters, because they have anti-aircraft capabilities.
		Jesus Christ.
		So now you're like checkmate cartels.
		Where does this go?
		I mean, how far does it escalate?
		That's the thing that you have to think about.
		So, killing and death is not...
		At the industrial level that is being done in Mexico, not just killing, but disappearing bodies, making bodies disappear.
		I was around when they got the stew maker.
		The stew maker was a guy that worked for the Sinaloa Cartel in Tijuana, and he would get rid of bodies using caustic soda.
		So he would get bodies every night and he had basically these industrial level barrels of it just going.
		What is caustic soda?
		It's a chemical mixture.
		You can get most of the components at a hardware store.
		Basically it dissolves bodies.
		He would get some of this mixture.
		He said in interviews that he got trained by Israelis how to do that.
		So who knows if that's true or not.
		But in the night he said he would get rid of dozens of bodies.
	And this gets rid of everything.
	DNA, bone, everything.
	So there's a lot of families in Mexico that are looking for their kids for years and there's just no way of giving them a body.
	And the amount of youth that goes into cartel work and just gets killed there.
	It's whole generations and whole towns of women and old men.
	They're out there.
	The whole generation's just gone.
	All the men are gone.
	I've gone to a few small towns where they looked at me like, Youth, a young man.
	So it's rare.
	At some places it is.
	Because the men are all getting killed.
	All getting got in the cartel operations and killed or recruited, forcefully recruited or voluntarily recruited, but whole generations just wiped out.
	Now, the people in your line of work, the people that are boots on the ground who really understand the problem, what is the thought in terms of what could be done to fix this?
	I think the main thing is any sort of plan to fight the cartels that involves just a six-year plan won't work.
	Because that's what the main problem has been with Mexico.
	Your presidential term is six years?
	Each president comes in with a six-year plan.
	He either does really good or does really bad, and then it gets forgotten, and another one comes in.
	There's also definitely an addiction to money from the U.S. side for counter-cartel operations.
	There's a Plan Merida, it's called.
	It's an international plan where the U.S. pays for counter-narcotics-type operations in Mexico.
	So there's an addiction to that money on the side of the government, so there's a lot of interest for that to keep going.
	So they don't want to resolve the problem as much as they want to...
	In some ways, you know.
	They refuse to professionalize the police forces down there.
	They don't put enough effort in that regard.
	You know, good people that are there that I know there's some amazing guys down there doing amazing work.
	And they get passed up for promotion because they don't know anybody high level.
	They don't work by their side of the game.
	So a lot of these people just get cast aside.
unidentified		And it's kind of hopeless in that regard.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A lot of the good guys, when they come out of the job, there's only a few options to them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I had options, but a lot of the guys that go out of the job don't.
unidentified		So...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They get recruited by the cartels.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did anybody ever attempt to recruit you?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You get offers.
		What kind of offers?
		There's a famous corrido, which is like a Mexican folk song called I'm Going to Talk About My Past.
		And it's a pretty interesting song.
		It's about a cartel guy that used to work as a cop and somebody from his past approaches him and says, you want to do a job?
		That's what you would get.
		People within the police forces asking you, you want to work on the side?
		That was the entry.
		Or, we'll pay you this much.
		What is it like when you say no?
		It's pretty hard.
		It's not specifically saying no, but just saying, I'm not the one to ask for this.
		And you say, I'm not the one to ask for this.
		You know what?
		I'm only in this for the money, for my paycheck, and I don't want to risk anything.
		And how do they leave that?
		They're not happy usually, you know?
		So you get on a list sometimes, and it's something that follows you.
		But it's a much better thing than actually getting into one of these guys' pockets.
		Once you take something, you're theirs.
		Right, like the mob.
		Like the mob, you know, a lot of these guys actually took, you know, a lot of these cartels down there, they kind of venerate the whole gangster era in the U.S. It's like a thing.
		So it's like a thing they look up to, you know?
		Right.
		So you see a lot of gold-plated Thompson machine guns down there who take pictures with them.
		So, there's a lack of professionalizing the police force.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that you think is a conscious effort?
		I think it's...
		You keep them fairly incompetent?
		I think so.
		A lot of ways, we were, as a group, the group that I used to work with, there was a lot of efforts to professionalize us, to getting that career path to actually making it a career.
		Right now, where I used to work, there's no pension.
		There's no retiring.
		If you want to get any sort of credit for anything, the credit companies won't even touch you because you're too high risk.
		Too high risk because you might get shot?
		Yeah.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is the most dangerous city on the planet, so they wouldn't touch us.
		And realistically, culturally, being a cop in Mexico is...
		Male porn actor and cop are probably along the same range as far as shame, you know?
		Wow.
		Yeah.
		We wouldn't eat at any restaurant that we didn't know the people, you know, because it would spit in there.
		Really?
		Yeah, there's hate.
		Why do they hate cops so much?
		As a culture in Mexico, police culture in Mexico has earned it.
		A lot of guys working both sides.
		A lot of guys being, you know, again, the whole...
		You're going to be a cop because you know somebody in there.
		And there's people that shouldn't be in any sort of public service.
		So there's a lot of corruption.
		Again, a lot of corruption.
		A lot of...
		A lot of things done wrongly by the cops, a lot of abuses, a lot of human rights violation type situations.
		It's earned.
		So the big shift over there in terms of crime, in terms of cartel crime, occurs first with September 11th, the tightening of the borders.
		Then it starts to ramp up after that.
		Because of what?
		The government first started targeting certain cartel heads.
		You cut one head off, Hydra.
		Two heads, three heads pop up.
		Power vacuum.
		Power vacuum.
		People fight to try to gain power.
		And the cartels realize, you know what?
		We are standing on the richest drug routes on the planet, so we should probably, you know, start fighting over them.
		And also what happened is that, you know, a lot of these people, it's something that Americans kind of don't get yet.
		This isn't a Mexican problem anymore, specifically, as far as the cartel of violence going on.
		A lot of these people had their kids up here in the U.S. in the 90s.
		A lot of these cartel guys, you know, El Chapo had kids in the U.S. And a lot of these people are now coming of age, you know?
		So cartel influence in the U.S. is a thing you're going to start seeing if you're already seeing it, but you're going to see more of it because a lot of these people are actually American-born U.S. citizens.
		Now working in tandem with any sort of interest down there.
		So that's going to be the new shift.
		And people are sometimes kind of horrified by some of the stuff that I post up, some of the cases down there.
		People can look up the Los Palillos gang in Southern California.
		There were an actual cartel group.
		That would kidnap people in the U.S. dressed as federal agents in the U.S. and drag them back down to Mexico.
		Now, this happened a few...
		almost, I think, nine years back.
		But this is happening in the U.S. It's not something foreign anymore.
		A lot of people want to think that you can build a wall and keep all that down.
		Don't get me wrong.
		Build that wall.
		I have nothing against it.
		But selling it as a security thing, I don't think it makes that much sense.
		In a lot of the parts where it is up, violence is rampant on both sides.
		But the argument would be that if the wall didn't exist, then it would be too easy to come back and forth at all spots.
		Yeah, it could.
		But again, drug novels, catapults, drones.
		For drugs.
		But in terms of kidnapping people and a lot of other things, you cut off at least some of the vehicle routes.
		Yeah, I get it.
		I get it.
		And I think, again, I'm not against the wall.
		Build the wall.
		I interviewed a guy.
		I do articles for a few magazines, and I interviewed a guy who's a coyote, a coyote.
		He moves people from the border.
		And he said this about the border wall.
		He said, it's good for business.
	You make something seem like it's harder when it isn't, and it's good for business.
	So you say, listen, I can't get you over to 3,000.
	It's got to be five now.
	It's tighter.
	Or fly them to Canada and they walk down.
	That was one of his new favorite methods.
	Northern United States probably got a lot of Mexicans now.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Canada border is hilarious.
		It's a path.
		Yeah.
		It's a carved out 100 yard path.
		We put pictures of it up the other day.
		We're like, look how hilarious this is.
		The difference between Mexico and Canada.
		Canada, they make it easy to know where the border is.
		Like, just get across here, eh?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You'll be fine.
		Snow Mexicans.
		Yeah.
		It's really strange.
		Well, I mean, it's the amount of creativity and problem solving that goes on the criminal side.
		If your best plan is a wall, a secure wall, these guys have been working against that best plan for the past 20 years.
		So they're already way ahead of the curve, you know, in that regard.
		There was an interesting time, and people can look this up, drone technology had an upsurge in innovation in Tijuana out of all places in the world for a time, you know?
		Like, why?
		That's funny.
		I wonder.
		What they were doing with those.
		What could be done to radically curb this?
		Like if you were the king of the world, I said, Ed, what are we going to do?
		First off, legalizing some of the substances would probably help.
		That would help a lot.
		That's a pretty good question.
		But even some substances that are legal, like fentanyl is essentially legal because you can get a prescription for it.
		But you're never going to have fentanyl just...
		Over the counter.
		It's just too deadly.
		You know, another thing that I think about, and that's a very good question.
		I wish I could answer it.
		I think everybody wishes they could answer it.
		Everyone just sort of shrugs.
		So the cartels aren't just a drug-fueled business.
		They also have money that is in property and legitimized businesses.
		They work in human trafficking.
		It used to be you can cross that border and go to the desert and cross it yourself, but now you have to pay a toll.
		Protection rackets on both sides of the border.
		Sex trafficking.
		Piracy.
		You name it.
		They have hands in it.
		So they just essentially took that drug money and just created a crime business.
		They diversified.
		They've been diversified for a long time.
		There was recently three cartel members from Sinaloa in Malaysia released out of all places.
		So just think about that.
		Two Sinaloa cartel guys somewhere in Malaysia...
		Got caught somewhere.
		And now they've been released.
		And they got like a hero's welcome in Mexico.
		They got a hero's welcome?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, Sinaloa, that, you know, again, Sinaloa is a pretty, that's, I have this nickname for Mexico.
		I call it the upside down, you know, because everything's basically upside down now.
		And yeah, these guys got, funny thing is that the Mexican government was involved in their release.
		And then they, you know, send them back and, you know, hero's welcome.
		What were they doing all the way over there in that part of the world?
		I don't know, you know, diversifying.
		Diversifying.
		So no one has a real plan.
		Here it goes.
		Malaysia pardons three Mexicans on death row.
		Oh, they were on death row.
		Damn.
		You want to talk about a kick-ass corrido and like a folk song song about you?
		Those guys are probably going to get an amazing folk song, you know?
		So there's a lot of romanticism connected to the cartel.
unidentified		I mean, it's romanticism, it's religion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's definitely some occultism involved in a lot of the higher-ups in these cartels.
		I can remember when I found out about the narco music.
		What are those songs called?
		Corridos.
		The folk songs.
		There's a lot of them, you know.
		And all of them have a secret language in them sometimes, or they're all a history of something that happened.
		And you pay somebody to make one for you, or somebody makes it for you.
		And then...
		If you do a good corrido song for somebody, the rivals will send somebody to kill you.
		Really?
		So even the musicians are on either side of the cartel kind of groupings as well, which is pretty weird.
		Wow.
		So...
		If you're for the wrong cartel, if you make a song, you kind of have to go into hiding.
		Or not play in any places where the rival cartel's territories are.
		Oh, Jesus Christ.
		Will they come to your territory to come get you, if you like?
		Yeah, there's been a few high-level singers, Mexican folk singers, that got killed for messing with girlfriends with cartel members or for singing the wrong song in the wrong place.
		So that's in the culture.
		And the religious occultism the cartels have as well.
		It's a pretty interesting thing.
		Things like Santa Muerte, the death cult that is kind of...
		In different parts of Mexico, it's like, think of a very dark Freemasonry type thing, right?
		Certain levels you have people that are part of that cult, from the cops, to the military, to the cartels, to prostitutes, to drug dealers.
		It's interesting how that kind of also has an influence on the way some people go into very risky businesses like being cops or cartel guys and how they wear or empower themselves by some of these occult iconographies.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Trinity is Jesus Malverde, which was a folk hero from the turn of the century, Sinaloa.
		Basically a bandit that got caught and killed and he turned into a saint.
		now there's a giant church to him in Sinaloa with a bunch of money stuck to the walls and and pictures of guys in the US with like a F-150 truck or a Hummer like thank you Malberto I'm living the dream now because of you Wow and two roadside altars with with a statue of the Virgin Mary and then you look behind her and there's a Reaper behind it because it's a hidden Santa Marta shrine and
		And they do that so the military doesn't destroy them because they have standing orders to destroy these things, which shouldn't be, but, you know, kind of religious persecution, but they actually do that.
		It's so different than the United States.
		In a lot of ways it is.
		I don't think we understand.
		I think the average person has no idea about the songs, no idea about the culture of it all.
		They have no idea the depth and how deeply it's connected.
		To society down there.
		I mean, the death cult worship is, I think you could probably trace it back to the Aztec days.
		So there's definitely, when you see all these highly violent, bloody cartel executions and things like that, I don't know.
		I think there's some sort of genetic memory from those times.
		It's not abnormal.
		Physically for some of these people to do that type of thing, you know, ripping somebody's heart next to a tree is like there's videos of that stuff out there.
		I remember getting contacted by people that I knew on this side of the border in the US that were very curious why all these people from the Middle East were looking at all these cartel execution videos and then a few years later you had ISIS doing some high production execution videos that were inspired by the cartels, you know?
		Wow.
		Isn't it interesting that we don't think about that?
		We think about, oh my god, look at ISIS. They're cutting people's heads off.
		They learned from Mexico, which is connected to us by land.
		You can fucking walk there.
		You don't have to fly to Afghanistan.
		You could walk there.
		It's not in Libya.
		It's near La Jolla.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You go to La Jolla, you see these fucking multi-million dollar estates with this gorgeous view and everyone's driving Ferraris and Porsches.
		20 minutes drive, you're in Tijuana.
		Yeah, the most violent city on the planet right now.
		That's so crazy!
		When I go to San Diego, that's one of the first things I think, is what a juxtaposition.
		How crazy it is that this is the border to Mexico, and it's all military.
		San Diego is filled with fucking SEALs and Rangers and Marines and bases, and it's just...
		All military down there.
		It's so military influenced, and it's right next to the most violent, dangerous city on planet Earth.
		More than Karachi.
		More than Pakistan.
		We were insured by MetLife, and the MetLife agent said something along those lines, like, you're better off going to Afghanistan or Iraq than...
		You know, working here, basically, numbers-wise.
		And I was like, thank you for that, you know?
unidentified		That felt like a good pat on the back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it seems like they're getting cartel on cartel crime confused with regular person crime.
		But that's how it always starts, you know?
		It usually starts off, and again, this goes back to everything cyclical down there.
		That snake eating its tail.
		So you get cartel on cartel crime, and then they finish each other off, and then they realize, well, now what do we do?
		So they start abducting people.
		Extortion.
		For money.
		Extortion comes into play, you know, protection rackets.
		Cross-us guy.
		Now they're very bold.
		Now they're at the party somewhere and somebody looks at them funny, so they come back and they shoot up the whole party.
		I like your daughter.
		She's pretty hot.
		I'm going to steal her.
		And if you do something, it'll kill you.
		And you're never going to see your daughter again.
		That's how it starts.
		That's how it starts kind of growing.
		Just bold, brazen, and cruel.
		That's how you get it.
		Sociopathic.
		That's how you get to that point.
		And again, I experienced it back in the 2006 era.
		And I saw it get into all the way to when the whole of the municipal police were, basically the army surrounded the municipal police office of the police of Tijuana.
		And they took all their guns.
		And a few of them were taking on a plane ride to Mexico City.
		And for a few weeks, there was no armed police in Tijuana, no municipal armed police.
		Imagine somebody disarming all of the LAPD and just having the army in there instead.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you would see these events and then things calming down.
		The only success story as far as a city coming back from the brink...
		Was Tijuana when all that, like the raging drug war went down.
		Lieutenant Colonel Lisa Ola, the guy that I used to work with, he took numbers down.
		Like everybody down in Mexico, he got hired then on to go to Juarez to try and replicate his success.
		The only successes were there because he basically treated the problem as a counterinsurgency problem, not a policing problem.
		And he got nine attempts on his life.
		The last one took the use of his legs.
		And he's currently running for mayor of Tijuana.
		Believe it or not.
		And he's in a wheelchair, but I would not want to mess with that guy.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Myself and some members of my family are actually helping out with his campaign.
		One of his campaign offices got shot up recently.
		So is there any plans or is there any push to try to treat the entire Problem as a counterinsurgency problem to replicate the success that they had in Tijuana.
		No.
		That was a solution brought in by the right side of the political spectrum in Mexico.
		So it's a no-go right now because everything's to the left.
		This guy just got in office?
		He has a few months in.
		So yeah, he just got into office.
		So you got five and a half more years of this dude.
		We're in for a ride.
		That's all I can say.
		Yeah, kindness doesn't seem to work when you're dealing with cartels, it seems like.
		No, you give them a hand and they'll take your feet.
		That's a Mexican saying.
		Man, for you to have been in that business and to sort of be connected to it but outside of it now, does it seem...
		I mean, it must be incredibly frustrating, but it also must feel futile, like you've wasted time almost, because there's no progress that's ever going to be made.
		I have a weird experience that I had.
		I burned about two acres of pot somewhere in Baja towards the end of my career.
		And then things happened politically.
		A bunch of shakes-ups up in the office.
		I got called in and the director of the institution that I was in at that time was a shady character.
		And I decided to say, you know what?
		My mom had just passed away and that kind of affected me a little bit.
		A lot a bit.
		And starting a family and stuff like that and said, you know what?
		This is not worth it.
		So I left.
		Quit my job, handed everything in.
		People were suspicious about why I did it.
		You probably found a million dollars somewhere and you're running or shit like that.
		So I had to leave in a hurry.
		Got a few threats.
		Luckily I had some great people on this side of the border.
		Friendships that I developed for a long while.
		And they helped me out.
		I went to Denver about two weeks after I got done with the job, and an old lady handed me a special cookie at one of the dispensaries.
		And I saw the people walking in, you know, and it's like, is this what I've been, you know?
		Burning and chasing people in the middle of the night and looking at drug planes and violence and all this.
unidentified		This is a lady with a cookie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now it's a store.
		It's a beautiful store in Denver.
		There's a store in front of LA, in front of the improv, that I have to put a video up because me and Andrew Santino were there last night making fun of it.
		I'll send it to you, Jamie, right now.
		Because it's so ridiculous.
		They have shit under glass, like you're looking at art pieces.
		I mean, again, I don't know why they're still producing pot in Mexico when you guys have it in the stratosphere as far as an art form.
		I'm going to send you this right now, Jamie.
		Yeah, well, they definitely have it down now.
		But it's just, it shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
		That's not hurting anybody.
		I just sent it to you.
		There's a bunch of, there's large shamanism and occultism all over Mexico and mushrooms have been used down there for, like, forever.
		Yeah.
		And, you know, growing up, stuff like that, you would see it, and it wasn't.
		The demonization comes from the conflict around it, not that.
		Well, there should be real demonization when it comes to things like fentanyl.
		Look at this.
		Turn the volume up so we can hear this.
unidentified		I'm inspecting the crystals, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They leave behind a magnifying glass.
		This is no bullshit.
		These are all in glass.
		So you can look at the crystals.
		Because a lot of these marijuana dorks are like wine dorks or any other thing where people really get into it.
		You take it too far.
		When he's looking at weed under glass, if Joey Diaz would be here right now, he'd spit him out.
		He'd spit him out.
		Right in your mouth.
		If you try to have weed under glass like it's a fine Chardonnay or something nonsense.
unidentified		It's just weed, man.
unidentified		That's all it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just fucking weed.
		Andrew Santino speaks the truth.
		It's just weed, man.
		That's some Angie Groucho type level stuff, right?
		How ridiculous is that?
		They give you a magnifying glass and they have all these displays.
		This is a hybrid.
		This is an Indica Strong hybrid.
		This is a Sativa Strong.
		Sativa Dominant.
unidentified		How are you supposed to smell it under that glass?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Good question.
unidentified		The rice stores have a little jar that you can smell through.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good question.
		We would just grab all of it, machetes, and just put it in a big pile.
		And just chop it up?
		And look, where's the wind coming?
		From over there?
		I'm going to sit over here.
		Wow.
		Yeah, you know, you would get a pass after that, so it was fine.
		You've got to get a little fucked up, burning all that stuff.
unidentified		Of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Secondhand smoke?
		Peanut butter M&M's, that was my thing.
		Was there a sense of frustration when it was legalized in so many states in the United States?
		In some regard, yes.
		What are we dying for?
		What are we fighting for?
		Why have I lost brothers?
		Exactly.
		A lot of people were killed over finding tons of pot somewhere, and now it's fine.
		Yeah, now you can just buy it.
		But the frustration isn't with the pot itself.
		Again, it's what happens around, the politics around it, the amount of money invested into fighting it, and violence and interests around it.
		But the plant itself, again, my mom used to grow it and put it in a jar with alcohol and rub it on her muscles.
		And it's a thing.
		It's always been there.
		And all of a sudden, you have full-auto machine guns protecting it in a grow somewhere, and full-auto machine guns in another place, people coming in there to burn it because you shouldn't be selling it.
		It's just...
		While I was doing it, my mindset was, these are bad people when I started.
		These are bad people that are drugs.
		And later on, I was like, just a plant, a stinky plant.
		Some people are smoking it.
		And never in my life did I encounter a hyped-up pothead that wanted to fight.
unidentified		So I was like, they should make this exclusive.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Everybody calm down.
		Coke is different.
		Method's different.
		Of course.
		But pot.
		When you were talking about how everyone with a six-year plan, it's not going to work.
		It's never going to work.
		It seems to me that with the romanticism of the cults and the way that it's ingrained in the culture and that they look at these people like folk heroes, that this is a generational problem.
		It seems like many generations before it changes and calms down.
		And I would struggle to think of what would be the thing that could cause it to calm down.
		Like, what could...
		What could be the catalyst for change?
		Yeah, and more so than things are getting even more complicated now with migrant caravans going through Mexico now.
		And now you have all these displaced people from South America now adding on to the problem of an already existing...
		How big is the caravan?
		We hear about it on the news, like from Fox News talks about it, like scare tactics.
		So I was, I don't know, and people can fact check me on this, but I was probably one of the first ones to publicly say that they were going to go, the first caravan is going to go straight to Tijuana.
		Everybody goes, no, they're not going to go straight to Tijuana.
		They're just too far off.
		They should just go to Texas.
		And they went straight to Tijuana.
		And, you know, there were about 3,000 strong when they got there, maybe a bit more.
		And, you know, a bunch of memes came up because of it.
		As they were going through all of Mexico, most of the people were pretty welcoming because they weren't going to stay.
		They were like, when somebody's doing a jog or running a marathon, they would hand a water bottle and good riddance.
		They finally got to TJ, and TJ is very conservative.
		Politically, it's a very conservative place.
		And they met with a wall of protesters wearing Make Tijuana Great Again hats.
		No!
unidentified		Yes!
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No!
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		And I may or may not have produced a few of those myself.
		And all of a sudden you see the mayor of Tijuana with a make Tijuana great again hat on his head.
		Wow.
		And the reason why they were so adverse to these guys coming in is that they were, a lot of them gang members, you know, 14th Street gang members.
		The reason why they didn't go the other route is because they would have to have crossed Los Cetas territory.
		It was a cartel that has problems with the 14th gang.
		So they were curtailing that.
		They were complaining about the food they were getting at the shelters.
		This is a third world country feeding third world migrants.
		And we were feeding them tortillas and beans.
		And there's a famous lady that was like, I'm not going to eat this.
		This is pig.
		You know, it's pig meat.
		I knew this.
		Make Tijuana great again.
unidentified		So it's trolling on another level.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		So these guys came in, but people started calling the people from Tijuana racist.
		The brown people from Tijuana are racist against other brown people.
		Wow.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you would see some of the news agencies from the U.S. come down and volunteer groups, hippies, with sending all their donations to these people in some of these Mario Caravan camps.
		They would grab the donations, turn around, and sell it on the backside.
		All of these things they would sell on the backside.
		So they were...
		We had just absorbed about 2,000 or 3,000 Haitian immigrants after the earthquake in Tijuana.
		No problems at all.
		They're integrated into the culture.
		All of a sudden, now we have Haitians in the culture.
		No problem at all.
		But these guys came in, and they were really kind of disruptive in that way.
		Do you think it was because of all the attention they were getting?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what they wanted.
		They wanted to create some sort of situation on the border, so they rushed the border a few times.
		I was around there when the famous picture of the lady with the kids running towards the border happened.
		They were throwing rocks at the Border Patrol guys, and they got the gas in response.
		And that's when she was running away.
		Yeah, and they had a lot of people there.
		So they had been throwing rocks.
		Yeah, they threw rocks constantly.
		That was their thing.
		It's funny how a photo can give you a totally different perspective.
		Again, anybody that's doubting any of this, go down to Tijuana and ask the people from Tijuana.
		The Tijuana people did not want those people there.
		They saw them as disruptive.
		Crime went up.
		One of the encampments that they have was next to a school.
		The school had to be shut down because of all the needles and stuff that was getting found outside of the playground in the school.
		It was a massive nightmare.
		And then we would see it on the news and it was like flowers and, you know, the narrative was like, I don't know what these guys are talking about.
		Well, Trump is such a polarizing figure that anything...
		That would be anti-immigration like that.
		They just don't even want to hear it.
		But the weird thing is how a lot of people, Mexicans, like Trump.
		Really?
		Yeah.
		Why is that?
		I think the whole, I'm going to defend our people type thing.
		They like that.
		Yeah, and people have to remember, most Mexicans are very conservative, you know, Catholic, conservative guys, so it kind of resonates with them a little.
		But, you know, again, we're divided as well as you guys are politically, so there's a lot of to-the-left type of leading people down there, so they, you know, again, narrative, you know, divide and conquer.
		But the people on the left, what is their perspective on the migrant caravans?
		Oh, support it, you know, open the borders, you know, let them through.
		But they're not boots on the ground.
unidentified		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, not that they're not Buddhists on the ground.
		Their cities are not the ones that are hosting all these people.
		Right, right, right.
		They're not right there while it's going down.
		They don't have a realistic perspective of it.
		It's a narrative.
		So imagine this caravan came into TJ and affected the businesses, the cross-border and tourism business of all the people that live there.
		So a lot of businesses actually closed down because of these people coming in.
		Really?
		Yeah.
		And the only reason they came in was to disrupt and create an international scene, which is exactly what they did.
		So did they plan on actually trying to get across?
		They were planning on jumping the fence and claiming asylum on the other side.
		And the famous Lady Frijoles that I kind of made famous on my Instagram account...
		She jumped the fence, claimed asylum, went to Texas, and then her and her sister assaulted somebody somewhere, and then she got arrested, got deported probably.
		So, you know, that's kind of the story of these people.
		And then you would attract some of these people on social media, so they would be all poor in the Maverick Caravan videos they would have on the news, and then you would see them on their social media accounts from back home, Louis Vuitton bags and stuff like that, you know.
		Maybe a fake one, but still, you know, they were fronting.
		They were flossing.
		You know, it's a weird dynamic on the border.
		And as far as I think it's being utilized in a lot of ways as a political type thing is currently because of the president you guys have up here.
		And correct me if I'm wrong, but they do make an effort to not go into tourist areas and to resort areas and the cartel.
		Well, this is the thing because they own it.
		Or they have investments in it.
		That's why.
		So like, if you go to Punta Mita or something like that, you think they have investments?
		It's in their best interest to have things, you know, quite.
		Yeah.
		A lot of people, so I do a lot of training, do a lot of classes, stuff like that, travel safety things.
		And people are amazed with some of the cases that I bring forth that they think they're going to get abducted or drugged by the cartels in some discotheque somewhere down there.
		Yeah.
		And it's usually American...
		Americans traveling down there doing their thing down there against other Americans and then coming back up.
		It's a perfect crime.
		Oh, really?
unidentified		Yeah, there's a lot of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, didn't that happen with a guy who killed his girlfriend down there?
		Yeah, there's a case of something like that.
		I think somewhere in the Caribbean.
		Yeah, that makes sense.
		That would be a good way to get rid of somebody.
		A lot of those cases...
		Oh, we made a mistake.
		The cartel got her.
		I miss her so much, man.
		A lot of the druggings that happen down there during the spring break type time frame, it's always Americans against Americans kind of doing that stuff.
		And people think the cartels are drugging people.
		No.
		Sometimes it's Americans taking advantage of the whole...
		I was staying with my family in Punta Mita at the Four Seasons and we had these golf carts and you could take the golf carts out of the resort and they're like can we take the golf carts to the town?
		They're like sure go ahead.
		We leave the resort The first thing you see is a military vehicle armored with soldiers standing at the border of the fucking Four Seasons with machine guns on the roof of this thing standing there ready to rock in case anything goes down.
		Probably waiting for the rival cartel guys to come through.
		So again, a lot of these people legitimized their business years back, so a lot of the money in those resorts probably traced it back to cartel interests.
		Wow.
		So it's just deep.
		It permeates the entire culture.
		Yes, it's part of the business model, and a lot of the money that moves around down there, there's some sort of relationship with it.
		Jesus Christ, man.
		It's got to feel, for a guy like you, who gave your blood, sweat, and tears and was a part of trying to stop this...
		It must feel so strange to watch this nightmare sort of play out.
		You know, so being up here, and most of my friends, for some reason, I have attracted so many, like, Marines to my life.
		I don't know why.
		I have a few SEAL friends, and mostly just crazy Marine guys.
		And I've been learning about what post-conflict is, post-conflict or being a veteran, a combat veteran, is through them, through their eyes.
		Things like post-traumatic stress disorder and stuff like that, TBI, are things that I didn't even know were a thing until I came up here.
		No one talks about it in Mexico.
		It doesn't exist.
		It's not, you know...
		It's not disgust.
		No, if you go into a situation and you, you know, do something somewhere, you get a few days off, you know, and that's about it, and you come back to work.
		Wow.
		And medical-wise, you know, like, I've been discovering all these issues I have from that experience down there, and it's...
		Like, what kind of issues?
		My nose has been pretty substantially destroyed.
		I have a few head injuries.
		I didn't know what they were.
		It's stress.
		Wear on the body.
		It's my age.
		I'm 36. I shouldn't be feeling like this.
		Through them, they kind of pointed me into like, you probably have this.
		This is what I had because I was in Iraq.
		I wasn't in Iraq.
		You might as well have been in Iraq.
		Well, that's the thing.
		And also, do you guys recognize your veterans?
		Not enough.
		Not enough.
		There's no such thing as a veteran down there.
unidentified		Somebody, one of my asshole friends...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Marine Frenza gave me a Mexican drug war veteran hat.
		Because all those guys had their own hats.
		So I think he gave me this Mexican drug war veteran hat and had an eagle being strangled by a snake.
		And it was pretty funny.
		But it made me realize how there's a bunch of guys down in Mexico that have done amazing things.
		And they're getting a recognition because it's a war that they deny.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's nothing happening.
		There's no war happening.
		This is the cartels, but there's no war.
		Even the current president said, you know, this is the end of the drug war because I said so kind of thing.
		Oh, so there's no war anymore.
		Okay, because why?
		The war is over.
		Did you have any involvement?
		This is barely related.
		But did you have any involvement or know anybody that had any involvement with...
		Those Mormon cults that are down there?
		Yes.
		I do know people that, in the Juarez region, that some of the Mitt Romney's family members in that region area, yeah, I know some federal police guys and military guys that...
		We're curious about the amount of firearms that these guys had because they basically fought the cartels off.
		How crazy is that?
		Well, it's pretty interesting being there and finding a white guy that speaks amazing English and was born in Mexico.
		And they're Mormons.
		And they're Mormons and they have to get a visa to travel to the U.S. People don't know that Mitt Romney's dad, the reason why Mitt Romney's dad never ran for president is because he was born in Mexico.
		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		I mean, there's a lot of white Mexicans, which is another weird thing that people don't know about.
unidentified		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Canelo.
		Luis C.K. Yeah, Luis C.K. Mexico.
		Canelo, yeah.
		Anybody that's of Irish ancestry, if you go into a bar in Mexico, some bars in Mexico, you can probably get some free drinks if you tell them you're Irish, because the Irish betrayed the Americans in the last Mexico-American War.
		And a lot of them stayed down there and married some of the locals.
		I got an Irish last name.
		I'm one quarter Irish.
		That's how you got a Canelo probably, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Mormon community in that area, basically a few of their members got abducted.
		Yeah.
		And the cartels wanted to do more against them and these guys...
		Apparently got some high-powered long-range rifles, and they were shooting at these people from afar, and they set up this whole security apparatus around their town.
		And the Mexican government basically looked the other way and kind of said, well, it's fine, just don't get too crazy with it.
		There was some sort of interaction as far as them trying to appease things with them.
		Realistically, the town that they made out there is a paradise.
		I mean, amongst other towns in that area, it's a beautiful place.
		Really?
		It's a beautiful place, very organized.
		What is it called?
		Is this it, Jamie?
		This is their Mormon little town?
		So what kind of military do they have that protects this town?
		Like if they've made their own military?
		So I actually got to do a few reconnaissance things there.
		This is passing by.
		And what I saw that they had were a bunch of basically machine gun nests on some of the hilltops.
		And they limited the amount of access points to that little town.
		So they had basically their...
		What happened when the people got abducted?
		I think one of them got killed.
		And then, you know, they wanted to kill other people.
		And there was this whole thing.
		They went to the government for help and they didn't say anything.
		So somehow they, you know, procured firearms down there.
		So they started defending their own.
		What a strange story that is.
		Because they left the United States when polygamy was illegal.
		Yes.
		When they started making polygamy illegal in Utah, they went, well, we'll just go to Mexico.
		Because back when they did it, there wasn't even cars.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it was like no big deal to live in Mexico.
		You're riding a fucking horse no matter where you are.
		No difference.
		So they said, we'll go over here.
		But it is a nice...
		I mean, again, it's a weird American-like town in the middle of Juarez.
		How many people?
		Coahuila.
		It's probably in the thousands, tens of thousands maybe.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		All Mormons.
		All Mormons and a lot of Mexican converts now.
		Really?
		Yeah.
		There's a lot of Mexican converts down there as well.
		And are there more than one family, more than one of these towns?
unidentified		I think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
		There's a lot of family names in that region.
		They're kind of famous.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think one of the barons are one of those.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's only this one town?
		There's a few out there.
		There's a few Mormon communities out there.
		Wow.
		It's all the same sort of deal.
		Armed to the tits.
		Discreetly armed.
		I don't know if it's as open as it was, but back then when it was really rowdy, they were openly doing things to keep people from not coming to their town.
		And they're full-on Mexican citizens.
		Yes.
		But they speak English and they're white.
		They don't speak Spanish?
		Some of them do, but they don't need to because they live in this community and they don't go out of it a lot.
		It's a weird place.
		That's fucking really weird.
		Yeah.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you're over here, do you see it any differently from looking at the situation over there and how crazy Mexico is from America?
		Like how ignorant Americans are to how bad it really is?
		Yeah.
		So I've been up here for four years now as a resident, right?
		Yeah.
		And I came up here at the weirdest time probably in U.S. history as far as, you know, when I was going through my immigration process, Trump, you know, got elected.
unidentified		So it was pretty interesting, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, being pulled to both sides of the political spectrum, you know.
		And seeing how people would talk about Mexico in ways that were realistic or just weird things that you would hear.
		It's like, that's not how it is.
		That's not how it happens.
		What's a big misconception?
		That it's a Mexico problem only and that the influence and the cartels aren't here in the U.S. too.
		They're out there everywhere.
		The border thing is like, that's the border, but they're on both sides.
		There's definitely cartel here in the US. So then most Americans thinking of it as a foreign problem.
		It's foreign if you live far from the border, maybe.
		But it's everywhere.
		It's everywhere.
		That's one thing that I always see...
		And also that it's a problem that Mexico should fix itself.
		You know, that's a lot.
		I also hear that.
		No, they should fix their own shit.
		Yeah.
		But the problems down there stem from firearms and money coming from up here and the big drug market.
		And, you know, the money going into some corrupt hands down there at times.
		And basically them burning the manual every six years and just starting anew on their fight.
		Does anybody else say this other than you?
		Like, does anybody say that politically over there?
		There's a few people.
		There's a few people.
		I was actually in charge of the governor of Baja's security detail towards...
		For two years, almost three years.
		I was put there because he was a very good friend of Felipe Calderon.
		He was his compadre.
		And he was very high level, and there was a lot of threats in his life.
		And again, he was heading up the tip of the spear for the counter-cartel operations in the whole of Mexico.
		And he implemented a plan in TJ that was then replicated throughout the country.
		And he would be very vocal in his counter-cartel rhetoric and how we could do better and how we should all work together.
		He developed these groups called boom groups.
		Basically, army, municipal police, state police, all of them working together in these operations groups and just going out there.
		It's the jurisdiction of everybody here to do whatever we need to do.
		And he was pretty, you know, instrumental.
unidentified		His name was Osuna Miyan.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And he's out of politics now.
		And he had a lot of threats on his life.
		And it was pretty interesting working with him.
		He's one of those, people think that all politicians corrupt down there.
		It's not true.
		There's some good ones.
		He was one, definitely worked directly with him.
		And I could tell you that he was one of those good ones.
		And Lieutenant Colonel Lee Zahola, who's now running for mayor of Tijuana, he's one of those vocal guys.
		There's a reason why he's been trying to kill him nine times, you know.
		He's saying something, you know, he represents something.
		There are good people down there willing to fight, it's just that there's a lot more bad people willing to kill.
		You must have seen some horrific shit over the course of your career.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		The bodies, the brutality, the torture, all that type of stuff down there.
		Again, I tell people, working down there is the closest thing to the Wild West you have currently.
		It's basically, and when people say third world country, there's a lot of cosmopolitan places just across the border that aren't necessarily alien to American eyes.
unidentified		Wow.
unidentified		Right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Now imagine all this, you know, crazy things happening down there.
		Like, there was a famous firefight in Tijuana, the Cupula, which is basically, there was a big cartel stronghold inside of this castle type thing.
		You know, it had a big giant dome on top of it.
		The Cupola shootout.
		And when that happened, basically a bunch of everybody responded to this thing.
		And it was next to a school and kids were being evacuated from it.
		It was pretty horrific.
		A lot of the people on the inside, they had a lot of people abducted on the inside and they basically executed all of them.
		And some of the people on the inside with the cartel guys would put zip ties on themselves and, you know, kneel down the ground so you would think it was them.
		And you saw uniformed police officers inside of there shooting outside to uniformed police officers.
		So you would see how the crazy corruption and, you know.
		LA shootout happens, bank robbery, two guys with AK-47s.
		North Hollywood, that one?
		Militarized the whole policing in the United States.
		That type of thing happens in Mexico every day and nothing happens, nothing changes.
		That's the crazy part.
		How that just is part of the normal now, down there.
		Nothing changes.
		No...
		No adjustments.
		No adjustments.
		No evolution.
		These guys used to roll around dressed as cops with cloned vehicles, and now they roll around in taxi cabs and are more discreet in how they move.
		These guys used to use drug mules and drug tunnels.
		Now they use unmanned drones.
		Other means to cross their drugs.
		So they're always kind of evolving and adjusting.
		And the government is trying to smash it with a hammer for the past, you know, 10, 15, 20 years.
		Just whack-a-mole.
		Whack-a-mole.
		What made you start your Instagram account?
		Because your Instagram account is excellent.
		It's Ed Manifesto, and you talk so much about the problems that are going on over there, and you also do a lot of situational awareness stuff.
		You show, like, what's wrong with this picture?
		What do you see here?
		Yeah.
		Main thing was, when I started, I was still active down there, so it was kind of like a reporting, you know?
		So I was trying to share things with people to try and raise awareness.
		But after that, it became more of a thing of, I just spent over a decade working in this environment down here, and I have nothing to show for it.
		So, I need to take that experience and make it worth it for people, to share some of that experience with other people, and to make it, you know, just to make it, I had to justify it to myself, I need to make it worth my while to having done that.
		There's not a lot of people doing what you're doing, though.
		No, no.
		The strange thing about me is my English and the fact that I worked on the border, so I had the opportunity to cross that border and share some of those experiences up here.
		I've been to the FBI Academy.
		Surreal.
		This kid from TJ is now at the FBI Academy showing some weird shit to some weird people.
		Secret Service Academy.
		Some of your SF guys have contacted me and I've done work for them.
		And I show them like, wow, Ed, like...
		That trick to get our handcuffs, that's pretty cool.
		Where'd you learn that?
		Like, who showed you that?
		15-year-old kid, you know, TJ, showed me how to flip handcuffs and weaponize them.
		That's pretty gnarly.
		Flip them and weaponize them?
		Yeah, so there's ways of releasing your handcuffs and flipping the side of the arm of the handcuffs so it looks like it's still on, but it isn't.
		And somebody approaches you and you flip it open and use that thing as a meat hook.
		And a 15-year-old kid showed me that after he tried to apply that on one of our guys.
		And that's the stuff I wrote in my little manifesto.
		Basically, a manifesto was a notebook.
		And I would write all these things down, document most of them.
		And when I would come over here to the U.S. to do training, I did some training with NCIS and Coronado during my career.
		And some of those guys were team guys, SEAL guys.
	That's how I met a few of them.
	And they were like, hey, Ed, this is how we do executive protection in the Middle East.
	I was like, wow, that's how we do it right across the border right down here.
unidentified		What?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah?
		Really?
		Yeah.
		Wow.
		That's crazy.
		Yeah.
		And, you know, we'd show them a flash drive with a bunch of pictures from stuff down there, and they would, like, be blown away by it and sharing information and kind of basically making use of that experience.
		A lot of people down there are mute.
		They don't share that experience.
		They don't think it's worth anything.
		I think I realize that that experience in that gnarly place is worth something, at least as far as sharing it.
		Not a lot of people think that.
		We downplay ourselves.
		We have this problem in Mexico.
		Most Mexicans are very doubtful about themselves.
		We're Mexicans.
		like what what what would we have to share with these high-level guys you know mm-hmm and you know being in a place like that low means low equipment low training being creative that's a lot of things that come up from those that experience of being you know solution wise as far as you know keeping safe well I think part of the problem With the United States of Mexico is our view of Mexico.
		And someone like you, what you provide is a realistic perspective and real information, real photographs, real stories.
		And just enough, and then this conversation, just enough where enough people hear it, it'll shift The idea of what is happening in MEXO a little bit.
		I mean, again, thank you for this invitation.
		Thank you.
		I have this weird comparison that I have with you as far as this podcast.
		I've listened to it way back when.
		And I remember this whole feeling of being around a campfire and hearing people talk about their things and kind of passing the pipe.
		It's pretty interesting.
		It's something I've only seen as far as exchanging information around campfires or shamans or...
		Sweat lodging type situations down there.
		A lot of our guys were native, so I would get invited to these sweat lodges and stuff like that.
		You get that exchange of information.
		But yeah, definitely start talking about it.
		That's the first step.
		And a lot of people don't want to talk about it because of fear.
		People are like, hey, aren't you afraid of talking about this?
		I was afraid for 12 years.
		Yes, I am.
		But I know that nobody else is going to.
		If not anybody else, you know.
		Well, if you stop and think about how many guys have worked on the border, how many guys have worked in these counterinsurgency operations, and how few are talking about it.
		And how many of them died, nobody knows who they are.
		Right.
		Or how many are still out there, nobody knows who they are.
		Or, you know, Sicario, that movie Sicario came out.
		Yeah.
		Those people are looking at that movie.
		So a lot of the followers are suspicious of that.
		Vinicio Toro having an MP5. I was the only Mexican rocking an MP5 submachine gun down there, right?
		So it's like...
		What did you think of those movies?
		Horrible.
		It's horrible.
		Unrealistic.
		If somebody doesn't hire me, I'll do it for free.
		I'll consult for free on that.
		I'll make it look a bit more closer to what it is.
		But the main thing is how everybody saw that movie and that's the reality, how fiction is kind of a basis for reality.
		So Sicario 2 comes out and it's basically the United States declaring the cartels a terrorist organization.
		And I saw that and I was like, hmm.
		Usually fiction kind of has a way of influencing reality further on the line.
		That Denzel Washington movie called Siege, where a bunch of terrorists attack New York and then militarize New York, and that's kind of like a president for 9-11.
		So you'd see Sicario 2, and then Trump now says they're thinking about declaring the cartels as a terrorist organization.
		Yeah.
		That's pretty interesting.
		Mainly because, realistically, Mexico has been calling them terrorists forever.
		Yeah, what did you think about that, about Trump doing that?
	Do you think that that actually is something that could happen?
	If you're going to militarize efforts against it, not just consider it a law enforcement type situation, I think people should be afraid down there if you do go that route.
	But just realize that's going to be open warfare, not in a foreign country across the ocean.
	It's going to be right next to your border.
	Yeah, where people can walk across.
	Yes.
	Or make things happen down there that will affect you up here in a very real way.
	And it'll get ugly before it gets better.
	You know, I hopefully doesn't, you know, but that's realistically...
	But if that doesn't happen, if they don't treat it as a terrorist organization and try to have some sort of impact on it, what could be done?
	I mean, I think culturally, they're trying to get us ready for that, you know?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I think that's what's happening.
	You see a lot of the cross-borders, U.S. military assets training Mexican Marines down there and having an open relationship with them.
	You see that.
	The push is to maybe preparing for something.
	I think they're preparing for something.
	What could that be?
	I don't know.
	So what we get about it publicly is just a small sliver of the actual conversations that are being had.
	Yeah, and also there's a lot of misdirection.
	There's a lot of misdirection.
	Subterfuge.
	Yeah.
	But listen, Ed, I really appreciate you coming down here and enlightening us and telling us all about this.
	And I really appreciate your Instagram account.
	The Instagram account is Ed Manifesto.
	What else do you have on social media?
	Ed's Manifesto on Facebook as well and Ed'sManifesto.com.
unidentified		Alright.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Beautiful.
		Thank you, brother.
		Appreciate it, man.
		Thanks for coming in here.
		Thank you.

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