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Sept. 24, 2021 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:09:02
Timcast IRL - Over 30k Illegal Immigrants Break Through US Border w/Ed Calderon
Participants
Main voices
e
ed calderon
01:18:49
t
tim pool
40:47
Appearances
i
ian crossland
04:27
Clips
l
lydia smith
00:57
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
unidentified
you you
tim pool
you Happy Friday everybody!
This country seems to be on fire in a bunch of different ways.
And that fire is burning brightly today.
We have a new story that apparently 30,000 Haitian illegal immigrants entered the country.
A bunch of them are missing.
17,000 are apparently being allowed to stay.
And I guess what happens, you get enough of these people at the border, the government panics because of the bad press and says, just let them all in.
Just let them do whatever they want.
Just make the pictures go away.
It's kind of where we're at.
So you know what?
We're going to talk a lot about that stuff because we're hanging out with Ed Calderon and you're an expert, man.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
ed calderon
Yeah, sure.
My name is Ed.
I worked for the Mexican government for about 12 years doing counter-narcotics work, working against people traffickers, working against cartels, and specifically kind of spending a lot of time and experiencing the border on the southern side of it, you know, looking at some of these problems firsthand.
Um, currently we're working, train people across the country from Border Patrol to FBI, Secret Service, uh, people that just want to be safe.
And a lot of the things that I, uh, showcase and kind of show people are directly related to that experience that I had down there.
So.
tim pool
And there's apparently like, I don't, I don't, I don't know if this is too off the beat path, but you're mentioning like weird occult stuff too, like stuff that goes on down there with like unsolved murders.
ed calderon
I do training for law enforcement stateside related to Mexican occultism and criminal occultism.
tim pool
That's going to be fun.
We'll talk about that.
ed calderon
Sure.
Basically showing them the current versions and symbology and trends as far as Santa Muerte, the veneration of Malverde, which is like a Mexican Robin Hood.
to how some of these groups utilize some of these things in a ritualistic fashion to create fear in their enemies or to initiate people within their ranks by having them do crazy things like eating somebody's heart.
tim pool
Right on.
Well, that sounds like it'll be a fun conversation.
ian crossland
I'm glad you're here.
Hey, good to see you, buddy.
Ian Crossland, happy to be here.
Thanks, Tim.
lydia smith
Yeah, I'm in the corner as well.
I was just texting with one of my friends.
He's like, yo, I'm at this class with Ed Calderon.
And I was like, oh, that's crazy, because we're having him just next week.
So I'm very excited to have him.
I'm excited to hear what's going on on the border.
I'm afraid it's going to be depressing, but I'm looking forward to being informed.
tim pool
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Now let's talk about what's going on in the news with this border crisis.
We got this story from the Daily Mail.
Mayorkas admits 30,000 Haitian migrants entered the U.S.
as Del Rio Camp is finally cleared.
Homeland Security boss doubles previous figure as he revealed 17,400 are applying to stay.
8,000 have been deported but 2,600 are missing.
Now, here's the crazy thing.
Apparently, there's a bunch of Chilean and Brazilian IDs these guys have.
So, they were saying these are refugees.
Like, oh no, there was an earthquake in Haiti.
They're refugees.
What's happened here?
ed calderon
So, they've already been given refugee status by another country.
That's why they have the IDs, which is an interesting, you know... I don't know a lot about immigration law here.
Being an immigrant myself, I did a little research, but they were already given refugee status by another country.
So that's why they have those IDs.
Those are part of their packages to be given that status in those countries.
tim pool
So do you know the specific details about why they're coming here?
Just economic migration?
ed calderon
I mean, so things are economically, they're pretty bad in a lot of places in South America.
Um, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of Haitians actually stayed in Mexico, for example, and a lot of them were given, given the refugee status in Mexico.
Um, after Trump lost the elections and after Biden came into power, there, there, there was a massive kind of like a Spike and chatter and conversations in some of these Facebook groups attached to the migrant caravan groups that are out there.
That's how they communicate.
And the main narrative that was pushed forth is that the doors are open.
Come now.
ian crossland
You were saying before the show, there's like massive networks of Facebook groups that are all like organized just to get people across the border.
ed calderon
And it's interesting, I mean, they're kind of automated, like, as soon as something changes or shifts, like, they're, oh, don't go to Tijuana this time, go to, go through Texas.
Don't go to, don't go through California, go to Texas now.
tim pool
That's modern warfare.
Having a bunch of network groups automated to tell people, you know, oh, hey, now, now, like, to push a message that triggers a reaction.
And then what happens is you got to think about fourth and fifth generation of warfare, which you cite very often.
But in today's day and age, you can't send a plane with a bomber.
You can't send a fighter.
You're going to spark an actual hot kinetic war.
But you can send disruptive forces.
You can disrupt local economies.
You can spread political ideology.
Or you can create a migrant crisis, which exhausts our resources.
ed calderon
You see a script being handed out to these people as far as what they need to say.
You see advice to people.
Oh, if you can't make the trip but you have young children, have your children make the trip for you so they can later on claim you and chain migration can happen.
ian crossland
How does chain migration work?
ed calderon
If I get granted citizenship, I can then ask for my parents to also be granted... So you can sponsor people?
tim pool
So if you, as a legal citizen, right?
Let's say you know somebody who lives in the Philippines.
You could sponsor them and assume, I think it's 10 years of financial liability for the individual, and it makes it substantially easier for them to come.
Not perfectly easy, but substantially easier for them.
So you get these kids that'll come.
The parents will bring their kids.
Once the kids are old enough, they say, I sponsor my parents.
If the person who's sponsored accrues any public debt, then the person who sponsored them has to pay for it.
ian crossland
So you basically can just Is it easier to sponsor family than friends?
ed calderon
Yeah.
Yeah.
tim pool
It's hard to sponsor friends.
ed calderon
And a lot of these kids that you see on the border that are being smuggled over, I mean, they're not, they're not, they're not voluntarily taking the trip.
You know, um, there's a few videos out there.
I've actually posted some of those videos on my, on my Instagram account, which shows them.
They're clearly being, I mean, uh, we had some medical professionals comment on there.
I don't know.
Uh, that's my, not my field, but I'm actually experiencing people under the effects of things like hypno.
unidentified
Wow.
ian crossland
What's it called?
ed calderon
Roofies.
I've seen people and the effects of that with the lack of dilation.
tim pool
So why do you think this weird stuff is happening where they're giving out scripts and they're sending out these mass messages?
ed calderon
I mean, it seems to be like an organized attempt on just moving a bunch of people into this country.
And when I say organized attempt, I was in Tijuana for the first caravan when it hit there.
And it was clearly organized.
People are being transported.
Organizers were being paid in dollars.
The camps were being set up in certain places and were being completely supplied and funded by people from California driving down and giving them supplies.
With this current version of it, you see people waiting on the other side of the border for some of these people as soon as they cross and getting basically distributed across the country.
You see people on the southern border of Mexico, as soon as they cross, basically catch them with buses and organizing their transport on the way up.
So there's a logistic, there's a whole, it's a whole logistical process that's being organized by somebody.
ian crossland
Are they bringing them from South America or are they there waiting to catch them when they enter Mexico?
ed calderon
I mean, they are basically, the whole advice that they're given on some of these social media groups is to amass or organizing groups.
It's safer for them, right?
Different than it was with the last Honduran kind of mostly Honduran migrant caravan.
One of the reasons they avoided going to through the central part of Mexico into Texas was because most of the members of this caravan were actually 18th Street gang members.
Which traditionally have a rivalry with the 13 Mara Salvatrucha people.
So that's why they went all the way through California to avoid that.
But these guys are Haitians so they don't have that problem.
Chilean Haitians.
They don't have that problem so that's why they went straight into that spot.
tim pool
Any ideas why they're trying to get all these people to come to the US?
I mean, I know the people on the internet have a lot of ideas.
ed calderon
I mean, it's an interesting way of disrupting your economy.
Enemies?
I mean, you have enemies abroad.
You have people sending chemists to show cartel groups how to make fentanyl in Mexico.
You have fentanyl-laced heroin exploding all across this country and it's being produced in Mexico.
And you have a cartel group in Mexico that grew exponentially during the COVID epidemic.
And the only reason it did so was because it had access to the Pacific side seaports and an open relationship with a supplier from China.
tim pool
So I don't... That's what I was going to ask, China.
Seems obvious.
ed calderon
It's pretty... A lot of people in Mexico that observe these things closely.
And I have a lot of friends that are still active.
tim pool
It sort of feels more and more like China planned our downfall 50 years ago, and we're, like, catching it at the last minute.
It's too late.
ed calderon
I mean, from my experience looking at some of these things progressing, you see this new cartel down there, the Cartel de Jalisco de Nueva Generación, the New Generation Cartel.
A lot of videos of them on social media where they have all this military equipment and they're raising their rifles and stuff like that.
They are expanding at a dramatic rate across the country and people can't figure out how it is possible for these groups to be expanding.
And they're like, well, I mean, they're a violent group and they have connections in Mexico and Mexico.
They're obviously a proxy group for somebody externally.
And then you realize that on the state side, these criminal groups are using Chinese banking apps to hide their money to send back to Mexico.
And also, fentanyl.
Just the massive amounts of fentanyl being brought into Mexico and now being produced in Mexico.
People say, oh, criminal groups in China are smuggling it out.
That's not how China works.
There's not a secret Chinese criminal enterprise that doesn't talk to the government out there.
If it's coming out of China, the Chinese state knows about it.
Legalized weed brought fields of classically planted marijuana fields turned into poppy fields in Mexico.
unidentified
Whoa.
tim pool
And somebody figured that... So we got to legalize opiates now, so that the fields will turn into what?
ed calderon
I mean, so the heroin out there is not that strong, not like the Afghani stuff.
So they laced it with fentanyl.
unidentified
Wow.
ian crossland
So they legalized weed in Mexico and then they started planting opiate?
ed calderon
As soon as you saw the legalization of weed in California, some of the crops changed into poppy.
And this is around the time of the prescription opiate epidemic and how it was kind of waning down.
And they were ready for something else.
And that something else was fentanyl-laced heroin.
And now the new thing is bogus pain medication laced with fentanyl.
So now you're finding weird pill presses in Mexico and they're manufacturing something that looks like a... But this is killing their own customers.
That is the suspicious part of it.
Classically, cartels didn't behave that way.
Sinaloa cartel wouldn't behave that way.
But this is a new breed of militarized narco insurgency that is probably a proxy group of somebody outside of the country.
tim pool
China!
ed calderon
I don't know.
ian crossland
That's the Opium Wars.
tim pool
Come on, who else would it be?
ian crossland
They played a long game, and I mean, the Opium Wars technically ended 170 years ago, but I don't think they ever ended.
They don't want to get back, you know?
tim pool
Yeah, I heard that with Afghanistan, that the Taliban shut down the poppy fields, but then as soon as we came back in, we started them back up.
Is that true?
I don't know if that's true.
ed calderon
I don't have any experience in the Middle East.
I do have friends that were out there, and they say that, you know, that was part of the actions of the U.S.
in Afghanistan, was to protect some of those fields.
unidentified
Wow.
ian crossland
There's images of American troops in poppy fields.
I imagined that they were real.
ed calderon
I don't know.
tim pool
Now, you mentioned that when legalized marijuana came to the States, a lot of these fields turned to poppy.
I was down in Mexico, this is almost two years ago now, and I heard from a lot of people that when marijuana became legal and they couldn't make money off it, they started just hijacking avocado companies.
ed calderon
Yeah.
That's true?
Well, not just hijacking, but paid protection.
So Mexico has cartel groups, not just one.
They have several.
They have a few big ones.
But one of the ways they operate and one of the ways they make money is not just selling drugs or trafficking drugs to the U.S.
They also control a large, local, giant drug market.
And abductions for ransom and paid protection rackets.
We recently had somebody get a pipe bomb for their birthday because he refused to pay for protection in the state of Guanajuato.
tim pool
Protection from them.
ed calderon
From the cartels.
tim pool
From themselves.
ed calderon
Yeah.
So what you saw with some of these avocado orchards and some of the auto defenses or the self-defense groups that grew out of some of these conflicts out there.
They would go to an avocado orchard.
See, avocados in Mexico and the industry around them are just multi-million dollar industries.
tim pool
They grow on trees, right?
ed calderon
Yeah, yeah.
But there's like a lot of them down there.
Wow.
tim pool
I would love to have an avocado tree.
That'd be awesome.
ed calderon
That'd be pretty great.
They said, oh, this is a good business you have here.
It would be a shame if somebody burned it all down or abducted you.
So give us money to protect you.
That's how it works.
tim pool
And the cops, there's no cops.
ed calderon
The cartels are the police.
So I mean, that's in some areas in Mexico.
tim pool
So, what's the difference?
They come to you and say, if you don't pay up, we'll drag you out of your house at gunpoint?
Sounds the same here.
You know, pay your taxes.
No, I'm kidding.
Not paying taxes in the U.S.
is a civil violation, I guess.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
But, I mean, let me ask you, though.
If the cartel shows up and says, you're gonna pay us to protect you, and you say, okay, here's the money, they'll actually protect you from criminals and... Yeah, it's true.
ed calderon
I mean, I had the surreal experience of driving on a road in Sinaloa that was cartel-made better than the public roads, right?
lydia smith
Of course.
ed calderon
So during the COVID epidemic, on the news, not even on the news, just the social media, you would see the cartels handing out supplies to people, you know?
You would see cartels enforcing mask mandates in some places.
If we find you without a mask outside, we'll get you with a board.
Wow.
tim pool
That's one way to enforce a mandate.
ed calderon
So they, in a lot of ways, they are the government in some places.
I mean, there's no fly zones over some cities because they will put down your helicopter.
unidentified
Wow.
ed calderon
So yes, that's the thing with Mexico and the U.S.
as well.
The U.S.
refuses to recognize that its neighbor is not governed by a single entity.
I mean, not publicly, it doesn't say it.
It refuses to recognize that Mexico doesn't have a crime problem and has an insurgency problem.
And it's not fighting an insurgency group, it's fighting several narco-insurgencies,
which meet every single part of a definition of a terrorist group.
I mean, if somebody sends you a pipe bomb for your birthday, what is that group doing?
tim pool
Yeah.
If you don't pay your taxes, that won't happen.
You're going to knock on the door and some guy in a suit will be like, you need to pay your taxes.
And you'll be like, okay.
I'm taking you to court.
unidentified
Okay.
ed calderon
I mean, the amount in Jalisco alone has somewhere around 10,000 people that are missing or bodies that were found, clandestine graves.
So it's mass graves are found in Mexico.
ian crossland
Wow.
tim pool
Because of cartels specifically?
ed calderon
I mean, yeah, cartel-specific.
ian crossland
You were talking earlier about the Juarez killing fields.
I've never heard of these until.
Can you explain what those are a little bit?
ed calderon
It's a phenomenon that happened in Juarez back in the early 2000s where, you know, basically women were found murdered, raped, and ritualistically killed in a lot of parts in the desert on Juarez.
Mostly women that worked in some of the maquiladoras, basically the large industrial plants that work out there.
A lot of weird rumors around that, you know, um, there was a lot of, a lot of the media and the government in Mexico was saying it was cartel related because that's the easiest thing to say.
Oh, somebody died.
Somebody was killed.
He's probably involved in the cartel.
That's the way that you just get rid of 90% of most of over 90% of all murders in Mexico were never solved.
So, you know, it's a perfect place for that.
ian crossland
At what point does a gang become a cartel?
Like what's the difference really?
ed calderon
I mean, a cartel specifically, if you're a large enough group where you have influences and or fear on behalf of the police towards you, you're a criminal enterprise.
If you tax people to start their businesses where you control, if you are in control of a drug route up into the United States, or if you traffic drugs yourself, I think you're kind of there.
tim pool
I guess the definition of a cartel has to do with merchandising, manufacturing, and distribution.
So I guess if you're going back to like the old trope of the mafia, that was just the local group being like, you're gonna pay us, so we're gonna smash your face up, we'll protect you, you know, protection racket, that's more like mob stuff.
But with the cartels, it's specifically around the products and the manufacturing and the distribution.
So I guess a lot for a lot of drugs.
ed calderon
I think specifically, one thing I've always tried to do is just tell people to realize that these guys are defining themselves now.
I mean, it's a whole new definition.
Well, Trump wanted to send the army down.
Remember that?
U.S. that wants to not label them a terrorist organization, probably because of immigration.
tim pool
Well Trump wanted to send the army down.
ed calderon
Remember that?
Yeah, but I think it was a pressure thing they did to Mexico to try to get them to enforce
their own borders.
So I think the only reason why you won't label the cartels a terrorist organization is because
now people fleeing from Mexico have a legal claim to asylum.
Because now they're leaving a terrorist group that the U.S.
ian crossland
in some way, shape, or form... But the reality is, if they are acting like a terrorist group, then those people really are fleeing.
ed calderon
Well, I mean, there's ghost towns in Mexico, people that fled cartel terrorism, basically.
tim pool
This is crazy to me, like, it's self-destructive.
I mean, why would the cartels do something that would negatively impact the economy that they want to benefit from?
ed calderon
Yeah, again, these groups get formed, grow, leadership gets killed, one cartel turns into two, a 40-year-old cartel head is now a 25-year-old guy after the other guy got killed, and it's a chaotic thing.
tim pool
We talk a lot about the COVID stuff.
I don't want to get into specifics of COVID, but basically like a virus.
We've talked about how Ebola is a bad virus in that it's so extreme that people become debilitated or get quarantined or noticeably sick, and that limits the ability for it to spread.
And the viruses that are quote-unquote good or successful are the ones that your body doesn't react to.
So the virus infects every single human possible and flourishes and lives on because it's not causing too much damage.
I think about these cartels and I'm like, if you've got a town and people are doing stuff, you can extract, you can steal from those people, but there's a fine line, right?
It's the goose that, it's killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
And so you eventually find out, you know, this story reminds me of, or like is similar, I guess, to like the virus.
They become so extreme They burn out the area cause everyone to flee and there's
nothing left to get and then they have to leave There's nothing there for any for them anymore. Yeah, I
ed calderon
mean Sinaloa the state of sinaloa and culiacan specifically is a
pretty good example of the of you know How some of these cartels classically operate?
The mexican president went to sinaloa and shook hands with el chapo's mom and talked to his lawyer
And then later, a few years later, two years later, he went and did a meeting with the local poppy and weed growers, like this televised with the, with the head of the, the, of the, of the security of the army next to him and said, people are bringing fentanyl from China and, All these chemicals, like, what about the poppy field growers?
And what about the weed growers?
Like, what about us?
unidentified
We need to support the local kind, right?
tim pool
That's great.
Which president was that?
ed calderon
That was Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
tim pool
Really?
unidentified
Wow.
tim pool
Him, huh?
ed calderon
He's a pro-Maduro, pro-Venezuela guy.
He's way to the left.
tim pool
I heard that he does these things in the morning where he comes out onto his balcony and starts yelling to the people.
ed calderon
Is that true?
He does that every Mexican Independence Day.
What he does is a thing called Los Mañaneros, which is basically goes on a rant for about an hour of different subjects.
You know, the last one was he was demanding for Spain to apologize for the conquest, you know?
unidentified
What?
ed calderon
Wow.
I mean, most Mexicans are a mixture of native and Spanish.
We're all kind of mixed, you know?
Yeah.
It's a weird thing to kind of focus on when the country's burning, you know?
tim pool
So let me ask you about the border, man.
When you heard this large man with orange skin and swirly blonde hair say, build a wall, what was your initial reaction with your experience being on the border?
ed calderon
The fence, because it was a fence, not a wall.
The fence had already been built up and was already kind of highly secure in places like the border between Tijuana and San Diego.
And drug prices, specifically cocaine, have been stable for 30 years.
So it means that that doesn't realistic.
As far as a safety feature for the United States, it's a counter narcotic feature or safety to keep the bad people out.
tim pool
Isn't there like a point where the fence just goes to the water and you can just go around it?
ed calderon
Yes, there is.
And there's always a, there's a bunch of border patrol there and you know, they'll, they'll tackle you if you, if you try it.
tim pool
They throw you back on the other side or what?
ed calderon
No, they'll tackle you, they'll put you in a processing center, and then put you on a bus, and then you'll be walked across San Ysidro probably in a few... Like, right now, the way things are?
Like, it's the next day, I think, you know?
tim pool
Doesn't that seem insane?
That, like, you're on one side of the fence, and you walk over, and they grab you, and then do all of this crazy administrative work instead of just pushing you back and back together?
ed calderon
Yeah, no, I just want to grab you and process you and then send you back, which is an amazing drain of resources.
Right.
Another thing, like right now during the whole Haitian push into the U.S., a lot of the checkpoints around the area that were usually manned for counter-narcotic interdiction stuff, completely abandoned.
And you hear chatter on the southern side of the border with some of the guys that are, you know, crossing the border not to migrate, but with loads on their backs.
It's Christmas.
tim pool
Wait, wait, wait, so U.S.
Border Patrol is not manning these... U.S.
ed calderon
Border Patrol abandoned most of their posts, specifically some of their, you know, some of their roadblocks that they have, and also some of the counter-narcotic interdiction stuff that they usually do in some places.
A lot of these places where ghost towns are abandoned because they were all concentrated on that specific border area.
And also just hearing some of the conversations here and some of the people that I used to work with on the south side of the border, they're all saying it's Navidad, it's Christmas, you know?
The cats are away.
ian crossland
Are they walking across the border?
Are they going through tunnels?
Are they sending drones across?
ed calderon
All of it.
I found one of the first drones that ever crashed in Tijuana when I was active.
tim pool
Is this the Biden administration?
Or just the borders open?
ed calderon
The borders open.
The borders open and also these massive immigration influx into the United States put most of your already outstretched resources into a single spot, which means it's Christmas for trafficking Everywhere else.
Yeah.
Bullets and guns from the north to the south and cash.
tim pool
This country is being strangled out.
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
Strangled.
Slowed demise.
There's a pillow over the face of America right now.
ed calderon
And again, this border crisis is making millions and millions of dollars for people that are just waiting for the cat to go, you know, to be busy somewhere else.
You know, this is tunnels.
There's somewhere, I mean, somewhere over 50 to 60 active tunnels on the border.
I talked about fully submersibles way back in the day.
Nobody believed me about those.
Those have already been found.
tim pool
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
They're using submarines to smuggle stuff and people and... Drugs.
Drugs.
ed calderon
You wouldn't use something as valuable as a fully submersible submarine for people because then the people have a tendency to talk, you know?
I came here in a submarine.
uh but yeah fully submersibles uh drones uh like squadron of drones um catapults small catapult oh i heard these stories they launch them over the trebuchets that's the first time i when i saw one i saw one in mexicali and i saw and i was like That's a trebuchet.
How do you know that word?
I watched the JPBS ones.
I think I learned about them.
tim pool
And so they're flinging drugs over.
ed calderon
They fling drug loads over.
The RC cars, electric controlled remote cars, RC cars just speed out there.
Drones, tunnels, people that have border crossing cards, like there's a sentry program in places like Baja, where people that cross the border regularly get extra verified by the US.
and cartels are aware of this so they see oh you're a sentry pass guy let me put some load on the bottom of your car because you're already trusted traveler and that's an easy way to get drugs into the country.
tim pool
It's like that thing that kids do when you're like shopping at a 7-eleven and then your friend puts a candy bar in your hood so you don't know it's happening and you walk just like normally out of the store and you're not acting suspicious and the kid walks up and it's like yeah!
ed calderon
Yeah, that only with a, you know, key of coke.
You know, that happens a lot on the border.
tim pool
A kilogram of Coca-Cola.
Yeah, just a two liter, I guess, right?
ed calderon
Yeah, some sugar.
It's it's a it's a classic story that a lot of people get caught like that.
And it's again, these guys are just looking for holes in the already whole written wall.
tim pool
So Trump was right.
ed calderon
He was right about what?
tim pool
Securing the border, in general.
I mean, securing the border... Specifically, so what you're saying is Trump is correct and we should build a big, beautiful 30-foot concrete wall from sea to shining sea?
ed calderon
I mean, I think a wall's not feasible.
I'm kidding.
tim pool
But I mean, like, in terms of, like, focusing on the border and saying we've got serious problems here.
ed calderon
Yeah, so there's serious problems with things coming from the U.S.
into Mexico.
That's part of the issue.
It's not just things coming into the... Oh, what's happening the other way?
tim pool
Kidnappings?
ed calderon
Bullets, guns...
tim pool
Well, to be fair, Obama gave those people those guns, so that was a fair deal.
ian crossland
That's the Fast and Furious program.
ed calderon
It was bad, but... That's like CIA delivering weapons to... I mean, I don't know a lot about the Fast and Furious on the U.S.
side.
I just know it was a program started by the Bush administration, specifically, and then continued on with the Obama administration.
Two of my friends were killed by some of those guns.
Wow.
FN-57 pistols.
One of them was coming out of his house with his daughter in the backseat and his wife.
Him and his wife got killed and the daughter lost an arm.
The kids that shot them had FN-57 pistols.
18 and 19 year olds.
tim pool
You were working border security for Mexico, though.
ed calderon
I was not working border security.
I was working generalized regional security, basically.
But a lot of our work was basically working against people that were trying to get stuff through the border or trying to get things from the U.S.
tim pool
How does that work with the cartels, then, right?
Because the government's certainly not in complete control.
ed calderon
No.
I mean, realistically, there's no border security in Mexico.
There's a place where people cross by and there's border agents, but they're looking for taxable goods.
They're not looking for... Every now and then they'll get contraband.
People trying to smuggle guns or bullets in.
But they're realistically not looking to secure the border on the Mexican side.
And the government itself has a case of amnesia every six years when the new president comes in, everything gets, you know, all this was successful, this was failure, everything's bad, get rid of all of it.
I'm going to start this new thing.
And they just change the name of the police, change the uniform, and same corrupt people come in.
tim pool
Yeah, they're right on.
Why give up?
It's cash.
All their pockets are getting greased, right?
ed calderon
That's the thing.
And it's, I mean, I went through two terms of that, basically 12 years working down there.
It's unwinnable.
ian crossland
Do you think there's any value to the U.S.
and of Mexico and the U.S.
of America to become one country?
ed calderon
The whole concept of an American, a North American union?
Well, I mean, I think the U.S.
needs to realize, I mean, I hear a lot of people just close the border, you know, just pull the wall, close the border.
That's the second largest trade partner, right?
tim pool
We could, however, if we annex Canada and Mexico, conscript the Canadians to fight the cartels for us.
ed calderon
Yeah, sure.
Just send them down there.
tim pool
Put down the FN-570!
ed calderon
Well, it's another funny thing.
When Trump was in the presidency and the border was a bit harder to get across, people smugglers would just fly people to Canada.
lydia smith
Oh, really?
ed calderon
Yeah, that was one of the ways they would just fly people to Canada and they'd just walk down.
lydia smith
That's clever.
tim pool
There are places in Canada where you can see these videos on Reddit where it's like there'll be like a teenager standing in between the US-Canadian border and it's just like a chain going across like two orange posts and there's no one anywhere near it.
There's one part where, I think it's in Minnesota, Where it's the honor system, you drive in, pull up to a booth, go up to the booth, like it's like a little shack, you go inside, pick up the phone and say, hi, you give me your name and say I'm entering the country and say, OK, thank you.
And then you hang up and then you drive.
ed calderon
Yeah, that will never happen, I think, on the southern border.
But it's an interesting thing.
tim pool
I mean, it feels like it's worse.
Well, people just walking through like they don't even have the phone call.
ed calderon
They don't have a phone call.
Yeah, there's there's videos.
There's trail videos and rancher videos in Texas of What if, like, what if somebody has property up against the border and then they see some dude with, like, an AK coming from the border crossing onto their property?
basically armed cartel groups in Texas just you know moving around and just
tim pool
coming back and what if what if like what if somebody has property up against
the border and then they see some dude with like an AK coming from the border
crossing onto their property I mean do they have a right to defend their
unidentified
property and stop this guy's like I mean I think they do have a right to defend
ed calderon
their property and they have the means if they're in Texas The problem is that these people can get to you.
tim pool
Yeah.
ed calderon
These people have a reach and their reach isn't dependent on them crossing the border.
Another weird myth that Americans have is that, oh, we don't want that.
They're coming into this country.
They want the cartels here.
They're coming.
They have been here for years.
They have blood ties in this country.
They're in the military.
They're in the border patrol.
They're in politics, apparently.
They're everywhere.
The border fence and the border itself, they crossed it years back.
Places like Chicago, places like L.A.
When they legalized weed, some of these groups had already gone into the, you know, they were already producing weed, right?
So, they went into the legal weed and the legal weed industry.
They did both.
They were growing illegal weed in federal lands on the US side.
unidentified
Wow.
ed calderon
So, they are here.
Like, I hear a lot of people talking about military intervention in Mexico.
It's not Afghanistan.
It's not Iraq.
It's right there and also it's right here.
If that happens, it's going to be an interesting conflict because I don't think it's going to be like any conflict this country has ever fought.
Specifically, it's going to be really close.
tim pool
I mean, they have presence.
Many of these cartels have a presence in all the big cities.
I know there's graffiti all over Chicago.
In New York, there was some big story 10 years ago about MS-13 operating in New York City.
So, yeah, man.
ed calderon
I mean, it's scary.
And also the fact that Mexico has a lot of problems.
But it also has a lot of resources.
lydia smith
Right.
tim pool
Yeah.
ed calderon
Including one of the largest mineable lithium deposits on the planet.
unidentified
Really?
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
Are they mining it?
They should just splash water on it.
ed calderon
Well, there was a Canadian company owned by China that wanted to buy some of those mining rights, and that ended pretty quickly.
And then right around the area where some of this stuff is, is where the Mormon massacre happened down there, which is an interesting coincidence.
ian crossland
When was that?
ed calderon
Oh, that was about two years ago.
Yeah, recent.
tim pool
Which is crazy because isn't that a Star Trek episode?
ed calderon
What?
tim pool
That like Mormons from Earth go find another planet and then like an alien race kills them and there's an incident where they go and investigate this Mormon massacre.
ed calderon
Are we talking about Next Generation?
tim pool
Next Generation, yeah.
ian crossland
I've been thinking about that show today.
ed calderon
I was into that when I was a kid.
I'm sorry.
Who would you be?
tim pool
Maybe I'm misremembered.
ed calderon
Riker.
Riker.
ian crossland
You look like him too.
ed calderon
Riker all the way.
unidentified
Number one.
ed calderon
Riker and I would get some of the data arms, you know, just crush people.
ian crossland
Okay, I'm confirming what you're talking about the lithium mine in Sonora largest deposit with proven probable reserves reserves of 243.8 million tons of probable reserves about four and a half million tons of lithium as of 2019.
ed calderon
If the US actually goes in there and into Mexico, I think it's not going to be about regime change or cartels or terrorism is going to be about making batteries.
Yeah.
tim pool
You guys ever put water on lithium?
ian crossland
No, I think I've seen heaven explodes, right?
tim pool
Yeah, it rips the hydrogen out of the water, I guess, or the oxygen out, I can't remember.
And then it heats up really, really quickly and starts on fire.
That's the craziest thing.
Splashing water starts on fire.
But this is like grade school, high school science class stuff.
ed calderon
Every now and then you'll see somebody with a smartphone with an old battery.
unidentified
Boom.
tim pool
So when you were doing security, you're out on the border, are you spending a lot of time out in the middle of nowhere in the desert and stuff?
ed calderon
Yeah, sometimes, yeah.
tim pool
Have you ever seen any aliens?
ed calderon
I saw a few U.S.
drones flying places where they shouldn't be flying.
tim pool
I was only asking, what I want to say is, like, have you experienced, like, weird things?
ed calderon
Creepy things?
tim pool
Yeah, I assume the answer is yes, right?
But I don't want to make this, like, obviously, like, Bigfoot or Chupacabra.
No, I mean, like, literally, like, have there been, like, weird people?
Have you, like, seen operations happening?
And weird stuff, like aliens.
ed calderon
Weird calls from high up people, you know, telling us to, you know, deliver certain people that shouldn't be arrested, you know.
tim pool
Corruption.
ed calderon
Corruption of some sort, but on both sides.
tim pool
Or undercover operations.
ed calderon
Could be, who knows.
Seeing armed Americans in Mexico working.
unidentified
Whoa.
ed calderon
Yeah, Americans working in Mexico armed.
That's a thing.
tim pool
I've heard stories that, there was one story I was reading about, I don't know if you've read this one, like a journalist went to El Chapo's house or whatever.
You ever hear this one?
I think this may have been, it's been a long time, but apparently like, Uh, maybe, maybe this is top, maybe this is confidential
information.
I can't remember anyway, but he was working with Americans.
His security were all North American accent guys, like top level,
former military, stuff like that.
ed calderon
The new generation cartel has a training camp somewhere in Jalisco and American
SF something or other has trained them.
So I don't know if it's an official capacity.
It can't be an official capacity, but some sort of former military specialized training.
That's what you see out there.
tim pool
Has there ever been a moment where you were like crap your pants scared seeing something?
ed calderon
Geiger counter being put into a drug tunnel.
ian crossland
Yeah, what was up with that?
tim pool
And it went off like crazy or what?
ed calderon
No, but just the fact that they were testing the Geiger counter on drug tunnels was weird, you know?
Like I knew what a Geiger counter was, and I was like, wait, is this some Jack Bauer...
unidentified
Smuggling in nukes?
ian crossland
Shit going on smuggling in who is who is putting the Geiger counter in there?
ed calderon
We just heard it so usually when you would find something like that you would get somebody on the US side
Coming down into it to verify where you know verify the the exit point or sometimes on the Mexican side would go down
into it Like a we found something we're gonna walk, and then we're
gonna ping you to see where it leads. You know The military would usually do that.
But experiencing some of that and actually seeing somebody, we heard the guy at your counter and I was like, should we not be here?
That was like a weird, unknown thing.
I mean, I guess the worry by the U.S.
government, somebody might kind of put a nuke into the country like that.
I don't know.
I experienced that once and that was kind of like creepy.
ian crossland
How is it that there are all these tunnels that they know about and they're still there, that they haven't like buried them?
ed calderon
Like who knows about them?
ian crossland
Well, you just said there were like 80 or some that we know about.
ed calderon
People talk about somewhere along the lines of 50 to 60 active tunnels on the border.
And if they know... I mean, they know they're somewhere.
They just don't know how to find them.
Or they know how to find them, but they won't do anything to find them.
unidentified
Maybe.
ed calderon
I don't know.
tim pool
What if we did a moat and filled it with alligators?
I read once in the news that Donald Trump suggested that.
ed calderon
Alligator moat?
I think it's going to be expensive feeding all those alligators.
Also, Mexicans have a tendency to make stuff out of alligators.
tim pool
There was a story where they claimed that Trump suggested building an alligator moat.
That's insane.
ian crossland
Is that the Babylon Bee or is that real?
tim pool
It's real, yeah.
But they just make stuff up.
ed calderon
They just make stuff up.
tim pool
Trump could nudge nudge as a joke and be like, you know what we need is some alligators in a moat, right?
I'm just kidding.
ed calderon
And they'd be like, he said it, it's true.
It's a complicated issue.
There's no way you can make from sea to shining sea a border wall.
I mean, some of the new parts of the border wall have already fallen over.
tim pool
This is the funny thing about when Trump was like, he wanted concrete.
The border patrol agents were like, we need to see on the other side.
ed calderon
Yeah, we need to be able to see what's coming.
tim pool
Yeah, and he was like, oh, okay.
And so then they experimented with, like, half bollard fencing, half concrete, and they were like, you still can't see a lot of it, and then it doesn't make sense.
And so they were like, just do a big, multi-layered fence with patrols, and that seems to work.
And target key areas, and that seems to work.
There's a lot of areas that's, like, really hard to pass anyway, right?
Like mountains and rocks and water.
ed calderon
Yeah, and also, I mean, what you want if you're a smuggler is to jump over a fence and have a population where you can blend into immediately.
That's what you want.
Another reason why you wouldn't have a concrete border wall or just a flat steel fence like that is because wind knocks it over.
That's the simple reason why that's just not feasible.
But even with these new iron slats that they made, I mean there's a bunch of cartel videos and just smuggling videos of them.
Actually making their own fake fence and putting it over the real one and putting a hinge to open it up.
Or small concealed doors where they just pierce through.
ian crossland
So they'll cut it and then replace it with a door.
ed calderon
The door?
Jump over it.
Rope ladders.
You name it, they do it.
It's interesting to see that.
And again, they say it's to slow people down.
tim pool
We were talking before about you were doing trainings on occult stuff.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
So there's actually a position in which they're like, you need to explain to these agents occult ideology or like symbolism or...
ed calderon
There's law enforcement every now and then reaches out.
I mean, agencies, local, state, and federal sometimes reach out with questions and do a lot of consultation related to them finding a safe house somewhere.
I don't know.
I can talk about some of these.
Somewhere on the east coast they found this house with a bunch of cartel stuff in it.
Guns, plate armor, with a certain type of setup, and a giant Santa Muerte statue.
Santa Muerte is basically In Mexico they venerate death as a deity.
So a giant reaper statue in a place and it had certain colors, the candles were a certain way, there was a plate with certain offerings and you know five federal agents that are Caucasian from you know that have no idea what they're looking at are now asking me like what does this mean?
And I was exposed to a lot of this stuff growing up in Mexico and also, you know being part of some of that growth and going through my training and then Arresting people that are part of the cult and also just going doing my research out there So they ask questions like what are these candles mean?
Or what does it mean if it's this color or the the statue was a black statue?
It wasn't sometimes you find them in rainbow colors or red or yellow rainbow death rainbow death Basically, if you want to cover all your bases... Is that an LGBT death?
If you have money problems, love problems, if you want to kill somebody and you don't want to get killed back, and you want to have luck in a future endeavor, you go for a rainbow statue because it covers all your bases.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Really?
ed calderon
Yeah.
But if you want to, you know, if you're in the profession of death dealing, in which some of these people are basically consider themselves agents of death, You have a black statue because she gives you the authority to kill other people and you're under her protection.
So small insights like that is what I provide to some law enforcement professionals out there that are finding some of these things and don't know what they mean.
unidentified
Yeah.
ian crossland
Do you think that they're using them just to scare other people or that they really believe?
I mean, I know it's speculation.
ed calderon
It's a belief.
It's a belief.
And it's not just the cartels.
I mean, it's in the, I mean, I was exposed to some of that in the police forces as a hazing, hazing rituals.
And it's like some of the people that I used to work with were part of the cult as well.
It's like, it's like spread out.
It's a desperate place.
It's one of the most Catholic countries in the world, and some of these things just thrive in places like that.
They have Santa Muerte, which is a death deity.
They have Malverde, which is like a Mexican womanhood.
It's a dude that used to rob the rich and would give the money to the poor.
He was hanged, and they didn't allow him to bury his body.
But where his body eventually rotted away and landed they put a bunch of rocks there and they started venerating him as a saint and you know there's a there's a there's a shrine to him in Sinaloa.
You go there and you see pictures of people with their you know new raptors and the states you know like thank you for letting me cross and I just came back to repay you you what you did for me or Somebody with a gold AK somewhere, you know, like this.
unidentified
Wow.
ed calderon
So people, it's a belief system.
So a lot of this is actually being brought with people stateside.
So there's like a Santa Marta church in LA.
There's a roadside, every now and then you find like, I find like roadside graffiti and or shrines of Tumal Verde or like some of these things are like, it's here now.
tim pool
Does that just mean St.
Death?
ed calderon
Santa muerte.
Yeah.
The holy death.
tim pool
Holy death.
ed calderon
Santissima muerte.
Santa muerte.
The saint of death, basically.
tim pool
Have you ever encountered some of these people like in your dealings with security?
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Do they come off as like weird when you're encountering them?
ed calderon
I mean, they are realistically, they're as weird as a Catholic.
Because it's concealed within Catholicism, but it's basically a cult or a veneration of an Aztec death deity.
That's what it is.
lydia smith
It's a fusion.
ed calderon
It is the last surviving lineage of any sort of Mexica or Aztec death worship in Mexico.
So you're bringing in the sainthood of Catholicism and you're combining it with... So Catholicism is basically the cloak that it has concealed itself into all day.
unidentified
Right.
ed calderon
So back in the day it wasn't a public thing.
So you would see a Virgin Mary statue and behind her there was a skeleton painted.
So that's how they would hide their veneration, right?
And even to this day, the Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin, the brown Virgin that they venerate in Mexico, there's an eagle feathered cherub underneath her.
Pushing her up.
unidentified
Interesting.
ed calderon
And a cherub doesn't have eagle wings, specifically black-tipped eagle wings.
That is the Aztec war god.
And the Aztec war god was given birth to by Cuauhtlicue, which later on turned into a holy death.
So in a lot of ways, it's always been kind of concealed in plain view for people.
But now it's adopted itself into being venerated by marginalized communities, criminal groups, police officers, the military, you know, that is who venerates it.
And its elements have crossed the border and every now and then the law enforcement finds them up here and they're like, what the hell are we looking at, you know?
And, you know, some of the ritualized killings they do for video purposes that they spread on social media and stuff like that.
tim pool
See, that's a bit different from, like, Christians, you know?
I don't think we get a lot of that.
ian crossland
You get some weird stuff, for sure, but... Alex Jones was on before and talking about, like, these kind of blood rituals that they would do, the Aztecs and stuff, and I looked into it, and it's called bloodletting.
It's an ancient, very well-known practice.
tim pool
Bloodletting is just like, you have a headache, so you drain blood or something.
ian crossland
Similar, yeah, and it's like, he was like, you put glass through your genital, and it's like... Yeah, that's all bloodletting.
ed calderon
That's ancient weird stuff.
I went through a bunch of weird hazing rituals when coming up through training and a lot of them were done by people.
So a lot of the training that I went through first was done by GAFA members.
GAFA members are the people that later on turn into the Zetas.
It's basically a Mexican army SF group that said, these guys pay more.
So they just left the barracks and became bodyguards.
Biggest cartel heads back then.
A lot of these guys were the ones that were in charge of our training coming up, so they were pretty brutal in some of the training.
And they also introduced a few weird occult elements into some of the training we got, right?
unidentified
Interesting.
ed calderon
So, they would cut you to see if you would flinch, right?
So, they cut me with a knife right there.
And there was always some sort of pain or just suffering of some sort to see if you were strong enough.
And there was always bleeding happening.
It was a weird thing.
ian crossland
So you were under, were you undercover?
ed calderon
No, this is, this is, this is from this government training to get you into go to work on some of these things.
And again, it's the occultist elements in that are everywhere.
Like they're infused into the culture.
You see them within the military and you see them within the criminal groups.
know, I remember the first time we went to a house and we found this giant
actual humans called statue.
Um, and the bottom of it, they had a bowl and it had the picture of the guy that
ran us or the guy, one of our bosses was in the bowl and looked at it.
It's like, took a picture of it and send it back.
And he's like, burn the house.
Yeah.
tim pool
You ever, you ever experienced anything in like pursuit of or investigation of,
you know, some occult stuff that gave you pause or made you question, I mean, stuff real.
ed calderon
I think, uh, things have a power that we give them, right?
Things have a power, the power that we give them.
Uh, so specifically, I think, uh, There was this lady who was, she was pretty famous, I can't say her name, but she was pretty famous for being like the head witch of cartel people.
Oh wow.
And everybody feared her.
Everybody feared her.
She had the mal de ojo power.
She could curse you by your sight and stuff like that.
When I wanted to learn more about this type of stuff for my own research and just to know about it, to kind of gather some of this information to then kind of transfer it to people that might need it later on in life.
I helped out two of her sons that were in a stolen vehicle thing, right?
So I helped them out.
And I told him, I just need an intro to your mom so I can, you know, talk about some of these things.
Sure.
I went to her place where she would do her, you know, her work.
She's arrived in a Mercedes in the back, you know, changed out of her, you know, good clothes and put on a weird, you know, you know, witch costume, I guess.
Lady comes in.
My husband is cursed and he works for the cartels and he's cursed and I need my work done on him.
Okay.
Um, I don't know the name of the demon that is placed on your husband, so I can't take this job.
Slides over the $500 that she just put on the table.
unidentified
It's like, wow, this is an honest witch.
tim pool
Yeah.
lydia smith
Wow.
ed calderon
But if things start happening at your husband's house at three in the morning, I think I might know the name.
So come back.
As soon as she leaves, two kids walk in with a bag full of cats.
And they get tasked with going and following this lady and going to her house and dumping these cats in her backyard.
She comes back with $5,000 to get rid of this curse, whatever this is.
Black magic at its core is just a form of weaponized psychology, I think.
tim pool
So this is not something that made you believe, it's something that made you not believe.
ed calderon
This is something that made me respect the ability of manipulation that some human beings have.
unidentified
And reanalyze everything I thought was real.
tim pool
I knew a guy once and he worked with a guy.
And when I started talking to him, he told me this story about how he lent his friend five grand.
And I was like, what?
unidentified
Why?
tim pool
And he was like, no, it's fine.
He's good for it.
He's paid me back before.
And I'm like, dude, what happened?
And he's like, yeah, he asked to borrow 500 bucks, you know, a couple weeks ago and said,
I'll pay you back on payday.
And I lent him the money and then sure enough, payday comes around, he paid me back, no problem.
And then, you know, he needed to help out.
You know, he was trying to get married, but his family didn't approve of his wife.
So he needed, you know, to go fly back home to China where he could then, you know,
sort things out with his family.
And he's got a job here.
I was like, bro, you just got conned.
He stole all your money.
He's never coming back.
And that's what they do.
You give me 500 bucks.
I wait a week, hand it right back to you.
I never spent it.
That way in a week I can be like, hey, can you lend me five grand?
You know I'll pay you back.
I paid you back last time.
That's the trick.
So when she's like, no, no, I can't take your money because I have to know if the demon is real.
And then they go nuts on you.
And then you're like, she was right.
ed calderon
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's, I call it, I nickname Mexico the upside down, you know, because it's a different place.
People don't realize how different it is.
We would get numbers attached to us, like a hall sign or a nickname.
My nickname was a Skeletor.
They called me Skeletor.
I was pretty skinny when I first got out.
I had a number given to me, a 2-4.
I had an upside down 4 on my number and I didn't realize it was a joke.
The joke was my first job working was to cut people down from a bridge that were hung by cartels.
That was one of my first jobs.
And talking about some hair raising experiences.
This was pretty subtle, but it made me realize a few things about Mexico.
We got to this place and they had two and what was remaining of another one hanging from a bridge.
Uh, we got there and I got, I remember going there and I got like, hey, bring the breaching kit, which is a pair of bolt cutters and a thing to knock down the doors.
And I was like, yeah, we're going to hit a house.
And then all of a sudden we're going to go somewhere else.
And I got handed the bolt cutters and I didn't know what I was going to do.
I got there and I was like, oh, we're gonna, you know, you're the one in charge of cutting
them down.
I go over, they put a flatbed thing on the bottom and we just cut somebody down.
And I was like, this is horrible.
This is horrible.
Older guy there smoking, a guy, Jaramillo was his name, older guy smoking says, that's
kind.
They're being kind.
I was like, how is this kind?
I mean, at least his family is going to have a body to cry over and bury.
The body is a gift.
And I was like, this is kindness here.
tim pool
I've heard crazy stories about what they do to people, like flaying them alive.
ed calderon
Explosives put on people, dragging them through a city.
unidentified
Horrible.
ed calderon
I mean, the videos are out there.
And some of these, I mean, some of the afters of these some things.
Like there was a guy, Paul Solero was a stew maker in Tijuana.
He never killed anybody, but he said that he learned from Israeli specialists how to get rid of bodies.
And he got rid of bodies at an industrial level with caustic soda.
lydia smith
Oh, wow.
ed calderon
And one of my guys ran through a field once and got his foot inside of one of the pits where he would dump things and he had to go to the hospital for chemical stuff and also the hole exposed the smell.
Which is, to this day, I can't go to Korean barbecue places because it freaks me out.
tim pool
People in the United States do not realize how good they have it.
ed calderon
They don't not only realize how good they have it up here, they don't realize how some of this is also starting to pop up up here.
And also how some of the stuff that happens down there affects up here directly.
tim pool
You were saying before the show, when we were talking, that like 90% of murders are unsolved in Mexico.
ed calderon
Over 90%, yeah.
So, I mean, imagine that.
tim pool
I read this crazy story for our more attentive listeners.
You may have heard me say it.
I think I was reading it on like Reddit.
This young woman was at a bar.
I think it was in Austin or whatever.
And she was with her boyfriend and like two of his friends.
So it's like three guys and a chick.
They walk out of the bar and she's like 10 or 15 feet behind them.
Just like whatever.
And then as they're goofing off and walking, her being that far apart was enough.
Car pulls up, they jump out and grab her and try pulling her into the car.
She screams, her boyfriend and the friends hear and they run over and they grab her and they're trying to keep her out of the car and the car starts driving and they pull her out and the car speeds off.
And apparently that's like these kidnappings in Texas and places like that on the border.
You think you're in this American city, everything's going to be great, and then a car just pulls up and the next thing you know you're a slave.
ed calderon
I'll give you the story and you tell me where it happened.
A bunch of armed cartel members dressed like federal agents go to a house, do a mock raid on the house, abduct somebody, and then they found him later on dead.
Where did this happen?
ian crossland
Kansas City.
ed calderon
It was California.
lydia smith
Oh, I was going to say California for sure.
ed calderon
It was California.
tim pool
Where in California?
ed calderon
Right across the border to San Diego County.
tim pool
Which one's on the U.S.A.?
Mexicali or Calexico?
ed calderon
Calexico.
tim pool
And then Mexicali is just on the other side.
ed calderon
El Centro, Calexico, yeah.
Arizona is the abduction capital of the U.S.
unidentified
Wow.
ian crossland
Arizona.
ed calderon
Arizona.
A lot of abductions happen in migrant communities that never get reported.
A lot of executions and murders happen in migrant communities that never get reported.
ian crossland
That makes me wonder, when you said 90 or more percent of murders are unsolved, is that accounting for people that just disappear?
ed calderon
No, that's not accounting for people that just disappear, which I don't have the numbers in my head right now, but they're pretty astronomical as far as how many people are just missing in Mexico.
tim pool
Which basically means dead.
Or they could be sold into slavery.
ed calderon
Well, that's an interesting other aspect of it.
During the COVID epidemic, protozoa were stocked.
Which means in certain parts of the country, child labor is allowed in the states only when it comes to agriculture.
There's kids working in some of these fields.
Governor Newsom in California has a winery that didn't close during COVID and there was a bunch of kids working on those fields that are, you know, Mexican immigrants.
They are working to pay off their crossing, a lot of these people.
So in a lot of ways, there's modern-day slavery going on right now.
Getting across the border, not like the Haitian push that came in, but if you're a Mexican and you cross the border illegally, you have to pay.
And if you can't pay, you get a little tab on your wrist, so when you get picked up on the U.S.
side, they know you're still low, so you get processed in a bit different way.
Some of these people end up in fields and in manufacturing places across the country and some of them go into, if they're female, some of them go into the trade as well.
And they're basically working off their debt.
And if they can't pay it, their families that are already set up stateside are paying it.
Wow.
ian crossland
What's like the average that someone would have to pay for something like that?
ed calderon
It depends on who you are and where you're crossing.
5,000 is a number that I've heard.
tim pool
Where do people get this money?
ed calderon
They don't get it, so they cross and they pay it off over years sometimes.
And some people might owe $5,000, but you think they're going to say, oh, with interest now.
unidentified
Of course.
ed calderon
And these people get stuck into this circle.
And also, if they don't pay and they get something bad happen to them, do you think they're going to report that to the police here in the United States?
It's a whole silent community that just doesn't say anything.
tim pool
It's upside down, man.
ian crossland
Yeah, I was just thinking like, geez, start a GoFundMe to help pay these people off.
And I'm like, can you even get involved in that?
Because it's already this illegal trade.
tim pool
You can't pay them.
It just would make the system worse.
It would incentivize more of the same.
ian crossland
How do we fix this?
ed calderon
I mean, first recognition of a narco-insurgency with multiple fronts right next door to your country, and it is a narco-insurgency.
Recognize the fact that the Mexican government is not going to help you fix the problem, you know?
Because it's part of the problem.
Realize that they are terrorist organizations.
They are their own definition of a terrorist organization.
The U.S.
should come up with a new definition for them because they're a new definition.
They're utilizing pipe bombs, mortar bombs.
They're utilizing IRA-style tactics to develop explosives now on drones that they land on police vehicles.
unidentified
Like in that game, Watch Dogs.
tim pool
You ever play that?
ed calderon
Do drones.
tim pool
Drones with bombs on them.
ed calderon
Or you can go to Michoacan and see it for real.
tim pool
Man, I remember warning some government officials when I was doing consulting on drone stuff.
When consumer level drones were first becoming prominent.
I actually, uh, there was this organization that sent a person to, like, these news organizations and they asked me, because I had a bunch of expertise in doing work with drones, and then I was talking to them and they were like, what are the concerns about safety?
And I was like, oh, the most obvious one?
Someone straps a bomb to a consumer-grade drone for a couple hundred bucks and there's nothing you can do about it?
And they were like, Yeah.
Like, what do you do?
Even if you get the drone down, it's a flying bomb.
ed calderon
It's a flying bomb.
So the cartels are basically making homemade claymore mines, and they're putting them on the bottom of a drone.
tim pool
And these drones are dirt cheap.
ed calderon
Yeah.
And all these Chinese Alibaba-level drones, but they're workable.
And you have one of those go off high enough, the radius is pretty good to get a lot of people.
Or they land on top of a car and explode them.
tim pool
Especially put, like, nails and stuff.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
Depending on how much weight they can carry on them.
If they do, you know, moderate-sized drone, they can do this crazy stuff.
ed calderon
I posted a video up recently of a quad drone with a guy holding on to it.
unidentified
Whoa.
ed calderon
And they were being lifted up.
And it was, like, somewhere in the hills in Mexico.
They're kind of testing that out for something.
Maybe breaking somebody out of prison or something.
tim pool
Casey Neistat did that big drone where it pulled him on a snowboard and then, like, lifting him up and everything, too.
ed calderon
Yeah.
ian crossland
That's exciting.
I mean, I know it's a different context, but that's super cool.
ed calderon
I mean, if El Chapo was in prison long enough, I mean, he probably could have gotten out with a drone.
That would be some Batman level villainy going on, right?
tim pool
I mean, it's the craziest thing right now.
A drone big enough can just automatically fly by tracking GPS and then stop over you and then drop a rope and it can pull you out.
ed calderon
Yeah, that's crazy.
I remember finding one of the first drones, like a first drug load drones in Tijuana.
And I'd never seen one outside, like in reality I saw them on the internet and stuff like that.
And all of a sudden I find this quad drone on the ground with a giant brick of meth, you know?
Wow.
tim pool
How big was the drone?
ed calderon
I mean, it was probably about that big.
tim pool
Those guys, when they fly, their blades are strong and so fast, they'd slice your fingers off.
unidentified
Oh, wow.
tim pool
Yeah, no joke.
ed calderon
When we found it, we still had one of the guys who still had his sirens on, the police car he was driving.
He said, shut them off.
That was one of several.
ian crossland
Like, you could hear the... So that one had gone down, but there were others still up there?
ed calderon
Yeah.
unidentified
Oh, boy.
ed calderon
And this is a while ago.
This is 2008 or something like that.
unidentified
2008?
ed calderon
Yeah.
Wow.
And they're better now at it.
Yeah.
According to most of those guys, they say magic hour is moonless night with fog.
That defeats every single security feature of the border right now.
A moonless night with fog, that'll get its magic hour for them.
tim pool
Zero visibility.
ed calderon
And you can't fly.
You can't send a helicopter out there.
ian crossland
Yeah, I think I think like infrared IR, you know, detection.
But I mean, I would imagine they don't have all the advanced technology all over.
ed calderon
I mean, right now they don't have enough people to I mean, again, it's magic hour for them.
Like everybody is, you know, on the border.
Well, they were on the border trying to quell this massive migration push into the in the United States.
I mean, other parts of the border were probably ignored and were left alone.
And just I mean, again, it was magic hour for them.
you know, what got through a lot probably, you know.
tim pool
There's no end to this. I mean, I wonder if the stuff we see in the news...
Actually, let me ask this. Does it feel like it's worse now than it's been in the past?
ed calderon
Yes. I think it's just numbers-wise, it's worse. Having experience, I went through the group that
I was a part of, pacified the most dangerous city on the planet at that point, which was Tijuana.
And it got off the most dangerous list. Things went back to normal, economic boom, a bunch of
high rises came up in Tijuana, and it's currently going through that.
And now it's back at almost number one again, right?
And you scratch your head like, we did all this work?
What happened to all this work?
And then you start realizing that, well, the politics went to the left on this side.
We were put through a process of selection and also review.
So I had to do a polygraph exam every year.
And my financials were looked through with a fine-tooth comb.
I went through an FBI background check.
I had random drug testing, psychological evaluations, and this was tedious.
They would go to our houses and take pictures of how many TV screens we had there.
And if we had a new one, you'd have to ask.
That ended because people started saying I was inhumane and it was against their human rights.
So when I, the last day I was on the job, there was a guy in that, the new guy that was in charge, which we investigated for cartel ties.
Was there at the office and I was like, wow, weren't you like not here?
Oh, I'm back.
And also my back pay, my back back paid everything.
He's back.
And now he's in charge.
tim pool
Yeah, sounds like they sold you out.
ed calderon
I mean, they sold everybody out.
And another thing about it is, like, I'm not I'm not specialty guy.
I know a lot of things.
I train a lot of people.
And I had a lot of weird training from the US side and the Mexican side.
All the people that I used to work with, which were also trained like me that speak the same level of English that I have that have the same training, same education, same experience.
Those people don't didn't have the opportunities that I had.
What do you think they're working on?
Why they're working?
$12,000 every two weeks.
And they're working for one of the largest cartel groups on the planet right now.
ian crossland
So they were like, basically every year they were testing and checking, checking to see if you'd been co-opted.
And then who decided, like what president or what organization decided to stop?
ed calderon
The last president was, uh, the last president went through a process of kind of changing some of those things.
Again, Mexico has six years of a presidency and that just goes into a process of amnesia or everything that the last president did, even if it was good, it's bad.
And we went from the far right down there, which was Felipe Calderon, which started the drug war, to a president now that invited the Venezuelan military to march on Mexican Independence Day and shout, Viva Maduro, Viva la Revolución.
So that's what we're going through right now.
And most of the people that I used to work with, I mean, they clearly were like, this is BS, let's just go to work for the bad guys or the good guys, depending on where you're down, right, where you are down there.
tim pool
You can see what this leftist Maduro stuff manifests into.
I mean, this guy went to the poppy fields and said, what about our drugs?
ed calderon
Yeah.
They're normalizing a bunch of stuff that is not normal, you know?
tim pool
Well, it's a fire.
It's a fire that's spreading.
What's left over after the fire burns down the forest?
ed calderon
Burnt husks?
When I say normalizing things, I mean, when he leaves office, things are normal.
The president going to Sinaloa and talking about supporting poppy field.
plantations and and shaking hands with a known like Joel Chapa Guzman's mom and the lawyer and naming the former governor of Sinaloa the ambassador to Spain which is the the door of drugs into into Europe.
unidentified
Wow!
ed calderon
It does it because it's fine.
Because he's the president and it's okay.
And it's fine.
Just the behavior and the people that are being invited in and the open relationship to Cuba now and Cuban intelligence being all over the country now.
It's kind of weird.
tim pool
I want to pull up this story real quick.
This is from the BBC.
Biden said, quote, people will pay for horseback charge on migrants at border.
So yeah, I'm sure you heard the fake news that the Border Patrol guys were riding the horses, and the photos came out, and the Democrats were like, they're whips!
So then what happened is the Biden administration is like, OK, you can't use horses anymore.
And now Biden's saying they're going to pay.
The reason I bring this up is you were just talking about how, you know, once once the left came in, all of a sudden they were much more in favor or at least, you know, it's like implicit.
ed calderon
So the current president down there said, abrazos no balazos, hugs not bullets.
That was his whole counter.
That was his whole security policy for the cartels.
tim pool
So whether, you know, for the U.S., whether it's intentional or not, you have Joe Biden now, based on fake news, condemning the Border Patrol guys.
It's just continually weakening our security.
It's erasing it.
ed calderon
Just knowing some of the people that were there, because I know some of those people that were there.
A lot of them were Latinos.
A lot of them were actually Mexican, second generation, third generation Mexican people.
Uh, they're riding around in horses and they're utilizing the strap.
Have you ever ridden a horse?
They're not, they don't have crops that whip, they don't have a whip.
tim pool
It rains.
ed calderon
The rains, that's what you see.
They are completely under manned, under supported and they're trying to do a job which is stopping people from crossing the border illegally and also they're I mean, I saw somebody go out down there trying to make it about race.
tim pool
Of course.
ed calderon
And just seeing, so the U.S., and again, this from my experience training law enforcement here stateside, just went through the whole Black Lives Matter corrosion, which is a corrosion.
Speaking of somebody that comes from a country where police are not viewed well, this bleeds down a very dark path.
Yeah.
People don't want to be police officers in the United States anymore.
Police academies have whole generations that are just empty.
There's places where they don't have police, you know, they can't pay them enough and or you can't get paid enough to work in some of these places.
That leads to a void, an authority and policing void in some places.
What comes next?
You know, Mexico comes next, you know?
The corrosion of the small rules getting set to the side.
Small rules get set to the side, you know, you can walk into a Target in California and just fill a bag full of stuff and just walk out, no problem, as long as it doesn't pass.
You know, small rules.
I'm from Tijuana.
You know, it's not a first world place.
But I go to L.A.
and I want to wash my hands afterwards, right?
It's amazing to see how it's slowly shifting.
The corrosion that's come in this country as far as being against law enforcement.
Again, not all law enforcement is okay.
There's bad people in law enforcement.
There's bad, horrible people in law enforcement in Mexico.
There's people that did horrible things here in the states.
There's people that are corrupt that are working for law enforcement.
There's people that shouldn't be working for law enforcement here stateside that have a completely bad mindset as far as what they're doing.
But what comes if you don't have a police force?
You know?
Like, I was in the Portland riots, day 101 of the Portland riots.
I went out there.
People would be like, hey, are you going to be out there?
Yeah.
What do you want to do?
What do you want to see?
I always want to go to the weird places.
So I went to the riots.
2% CS gas was being utilized against the protesters.
Which is basically pepper.
tim pool
Yeah.
ed calderon
And something you put on your steak.
There was a snack cart going through the protest line, which is pretty amazing.
There was a little Asian girl with a bicycle helmet shouting, you know, kill the police or something like that.
And then somebody threw a Molotov at the police and that landed on the feet of a protester there.
Who do you think all of them screamed for when that happened?
tim pool
Yeah.
ed calderon
And the state police walked over, put him out and went back through the line.
tim pool
You want to know what would happen if there were no police?
I'll tell you.
If something like Portland happened, in a place where there were no police, the locals would walk out with their guns, and it would not be pretty.
See, the issue is, in places like Portland, where you do have the right to keep and bear arms, more so than many other states, regular people know, if Antifa shows up with Molotov cocktails, and I defend myself, I go to prison.
So they don't do it.
It's because they're scared of the police, and the police allow Antifa free reign.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
So I'm not, I've not been a big fan of, you know, the police over that specifically and over the lockdown stuff.
And a lot of people have said, oh, you can't blame the cops.
You got to blame the leadership.
And I'm like, no, I think if the cop walked up to the guy and arrested him and said, you deal with it later, at the very least, you know, that would slowly start putting a stop to these things.
If they started actively, you know, going where these rioters were going when they go into residential neighborhoods and stopping them from going to people's homes and threatening the residents.
We're not doing it though.
ed calderon
I was there for a night, and I'm not the smartest man alive or anything like that, but I was there for a night and I could figure out that all these people there were not from Portland, that they were all bussed in and or drove in and all carpooled in.
I could tell you exactly where they parked.
I could tell you where their plates were from.
I could tell you where they were car surfing.
I could tell you just by walking around there and hearing their conversations.
I could tell you what social media they were utilizing to organize their Look at the McCloskeys, right?
tim pool
You can criticize them for waving the guns around or whatever, but the point is, a group of Black Lives Matter people broke into private property.
And when they simply brandished their weapons on their own property, as people were on their property and said, get out, they got arrested and charged for it.
So regular people know this.
Antifa gets free reign.
Black Lives Matter gets free reign.
You can't defend yourself.
Remove the police.
People start defending themselves.
The riots are over instantly.
People, it would not be, it would not look good.
And I would not want to see what happens.
But I tell you, if the cops won't actually enforce this, if the justice department, if the justice system will not hold these people to account, Eventually, the police start losing support.
We start seeing things like we did, where Trump supporters and conservatives were throwing the Blue Lives Matter flag on the ground and stomping on it.
And then eventually they're like, I don't care.
Get rid of the cops.
Whatever.
So be it.
If you're not going to protect me, you're going to ignore what they do and then come at me when I try to protect myself, like we've seen in the press numerous times.
People are gonna say no to it.
As long as they're paying attention.
ed calderon
It's the small rules that go first, and then the big ones start getting corroded, and I think we're past the small rules part.
tim pool
Oh yeah, it's insane.
ed calderon
And again, I come from a country where that happened probably in the 80s and the 90s, and this is what comes after, you know?
Mad Max level.
tim pool
And you see the Haitian migrants walking back and forth.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
There's no border.
I'm sorry.
There's no border.
You can't call it a border.
That's not correct.
ed calderon
It's not.
There's no border.
And also, the people that are enforcing the border on this side are now even more neutered than they were.
lydia smith
Right.
ed calderon
So, you go into, you know, hypotheticals and, you know, again, if somebody, like some evil entity out there wanted to do something on the border, Christmas.
Right now.
Christmas.
Yeah.
Navidad.
unidentified
Yeah.
ed calderon
This is Christmas right now.
You know?
And also, Who wants to go into border protection?
tim pool
Who wants to go into any of these jobs?
ian crossland
That guy with the reins, he's being demonized by the president.
tim pool
They took their horses away over fake news.
Biden is attacking them saying they'll pay because...
This is what happens every single time.
Look, the Democrats come out and say Hunter Biden's laptop story is fake news when it was real.
They come out and say Russiagate is real news when it's fake.
Ukrainegate is real news when it's fake.
They're whipping people.
It's fake news.
How often are we going to see our culture, our country, capitulate to the lies from these psychopaths who just scream random garbage when they panic?
ed calderon
Yeah, I mean, the racism thing with one of the most Latin groups of federal police out there is pretty insane.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a migrant.
Like, I'm a legal resident of this country.
I went through my process during Trump's election, which made my process that usually takes six months into one that took two years.
And I'm not a fan, and I was pretty disappointed, but I went through it legally.
Right?
I went through it legally.
And... I'm an idiot.
You're just weird.
I'll say it in Spanish, que pendejo.
I should have just, you know, just sat on that board and just crossed and get shipped out to any, you know, whatever.
tim pool
I got, I got, I got friends.
I have a friend in Eastern Europe and it's actually a brutal conversation to be like, I would like my friend to simply visit, simply visit, you know, two weeks, come see America for once, damn near impossible.
And then she's like, should I just go to Mexico?
And I was like, well, I can't, you know, obviously you're joking, right?
But that's the reality of like, even people in other countries are like, that's why you see people in Africa fly to Brazil and then come to Mexico because they know the border doesn't exist.
ed calderon
It's an open joke internationally that, you know, it's a hard thing to get a visa, but it's easy to just travel to Mexico.
Yeah.
And it's not, you don't, so that you don't even need a visa to go to Mexico.
You can just violently cross the Southern border into Mexico, beat, beat federal police in Mexico, beat them up, cross the border violently.
Just make it all the way through, go to the border and be welcomed on the other side.
ian crossland
That they'll fight.
So they'll fight the police and the Southern border.
ed calderon
They'll fight the police in the Southern border.
They'll throw rocks at them.
They'll, they'll, they'll be violent towards them.
Uh, they will go through communities and all the communities are just doing this to them.
You know, just go past.
When the first migrant caravan came up into Tijuana, the locals protested.
unidentified
Yeah, I remember that.
ed calderon
The Make Tijuana Great Again hats, which I may or may not have something to do with that.
The mayor of Tijuana was wearing a Make Tijuana Great Again hat, right?
But they were, like, called racist.
Like, all these guys are brown.
Right.
And also, we just absorbed a whole segment of the population of the Haitian migrants coming into Tijuana, which I mean, as far as our experience with them, they were pretty good.
They melded into the populace.
They worked.
They're fine.
Now, these Hondurans came in and they were saying that they were going to turn Tijuana into Honduras.
Right.
They were saying that they were going to shoot people, that they wanted to mess with them.
Two of them got picked up by the cartels immediately.
Whoa!
Immediately.
So they calmed down a bit.
And then they were complaining about the food that they were being given.
Because they didn't want beans.
They thought that was pig food.
Which is, if you tell that to a Mexican, it's like... But that's the experience that the locals have had with them.
And it's not a good experience.
And it's amazing that, you know, the first camp they had was next to a school.
They had to cull the school down because they kept getting harassed by the people there.
But the Americans would come in and hand out backpacks, tents, food, clothing, and these guys were like, thank you, muchas gracias, thank you, thank you, and then you would see that at the open-air market being sold and flipped, right?
And it was like...
Is anybody seeing this?
American media shows up.
Get the kids out.
Let's put them around.
And the females out.
Put them here on the, on the outskirts so they can get, that's what they need.
tim pool
That way AOC can show up and start crying at the fence, tricking a bunch of dumb people into voting away their rights and their, and their sovereignty.
ed calderon
The last, the last caravan that showed up in Tijuana set up right on the border and right in the middle of it.
And I'll post this picture up tonight.
I think I'll find it.
Right in the middle of that camp, Biden flag.
tim pool
Yeah.
ed calderon
You know, and yeah, I went around and talked to a few of them.
They were pretty defensive.
But main thing is that the door's open.
Welcome in.
This is the time.
The door's going to close again, probably in a few years.
So we need to go now.
lydia smith
Let us in, Joe Biden.
ian crossland
You said that in the 80s is when the little things started to become overlooked and then it led, slowly led towards.
ed calderon
I mean, Mexico's have always been, their corruption's always been systemic there, but Yeah, I mean the true corrosion that you know that you know criminal enterprises and feeding the massive drug market in the states and the corruption that kind of produced in Mexico kind of started growing and how the corruption seeped into uncorruptible organizations like the military.
Mexico had like the military was like the uncorruptible like these are these are the last defense and then you had the Zetas.
You know?
And then you had a bunch of generals being arrested for cartel ties.
And then that shifted now.
That's why you see the Mexican Marines being utilized more now.
The U.S.
said, well, we don't use the Mexican military.
We're going to use the Mexican Marines now.
That's what we saw during the El Chapo raid.
But now some of those guys have been arrested guarding cartel guys, you know, bodyguarding cartel guys.
Mysterious stuff happening in certain parts where they control the ports.
I mean, if they are incorruptible and they are the leading defense in Mexico against the cartels, why are voice fentanyl flooding the country?
These guys are in control of the ports.
unidentified
So I think it's all for money.
ed calderon
I mean, yeah, for them, yeah.
I think a big part of it is money.
I think a big part of it is lack of opportunity.
I mean, for somebody like me, growing up in Tijuana, either it was going into work for a call center, going to work for a cartel, or going to work for the government.
And after coming out of working for the government, I can't tell you the difference between working for a cartel or a government down there as far as how it was at the end.
ian crossland
Call centers are rough.
That's boring.
ed calderon
I mean, that's the opportunity you have down there.
Wow.
I was studying medicine when 9-11 happened and the economy just went in the toilet down there after that because nobody wanted to cross the border and have fun in Tijuana anymore.
So the only opportunities were me and a few of my friends.
When I grew up in Tijuana, I was like a skater kid.
Skated.
The first time I did any lock picking and stuff like that, now I teach that and stuff like that.
The first time I did any lock picking and stuff like that, I had to break into some cartel house that had been abandoned and we wanted to skate the pool and stuff like that, right?
So that was my childhood.
And it was fun.
It was interesting.
Tijuana was a pretty interesting place.
But it changed.
A lot of my friends that I grew up with went to work for the cartels.
There was a redhead kid that I used to know.
I went in to work for the government and we both used to skate.
His shorties was his thing.
That was his brand.
Yeah, yeah, he had the vodka shoes with the zipper tongue thing to hide his weed in there.
He was a great kid, you know, hang hung out with him.
And we just lost touch when I turned 20.
And I went to work for government.
He just, you know, disappeared.
I found him working later on.
I was walking across a gas station.
We're doing some surveillance stuff.
And he called me over like, God, Ed.
Oh shit.
Like wearing an AK-47 magazine carrier and an AK in his hand.
I was like, hey, what's up, man?
He's like, hey, what's up?
unidentified
Come over.
He's like, no, come over here.
ed calderon
So I wasn't in uniform.
I was carrying a gun.
I was working, but I wasn't doing anything specific as far as being overtly what I was.
He called me over, gave me a hug, was like, hey dude, what have you been doing?
Oh, just fucking looking for work and stuff like that.
And he leaned over and said, I know You probably better get out of here.
It's like, yeah, dude, I'm sorry, man.
Yeah.
What's up with you?
I'm like, I'm just working here.
You should come over.
Like, it's a good, I mean, it's well paying and shit like that.
unidentified
I'm like, ah, we'll figure it out.
ed calderon
I walk out of there, my phone's going crazy because they saw me, you know?
And as soon as I got back to the group that I was with, the military showed up and they shoot out for, I don't know, like a solid 30 minutes.
Whoa.
I went there afterwards and it took me about 10 minutes to find him.
He was shot dead underneath a car.
He was the only one with red hair there.
He was a redhead.
I stayed with his body all night and called his parents to release the body.
The war down there is different.
It's not going off to Afghanistan and doing things.
It's not going off to the Middle East.
It's within our homes with people that we speak the same language with.
Sometimes we would kill one of them and they would kill one of us and the funerary service were at the same place.
It's a different war and as far as what it produces as far as individuals and people and bad people and just The methodology that is being showcased as far as the first people that we've seen in the Western Hemisphere weaponize drones are the cartels.
And that's a light that is now like ideological and methodological idea now that is out there.
The first people that weaponize torture videos and stuff like that on social media were the cartels, not ISIS.
ISIS got the idea from the cartels.
It's turning into the school.
It's turning into a school of thought, of method.
It's turning into a producer of people.
Of bad people and good people maybe?
I don't know.
But people that are capable.
What you saw in Afghanistan when the CIA went in there and trained some of the local populace to fight the Soviets.
And what that later turned into.
Um, the U.S.
trained people in Mexico.
I was one of them.
And what is that going to turn into in a few decades?
You know?
tim pool
Same thing it always does.
ed calderon
You know, that's, it's, it's, it's the, uh, it's a scary thing that I, again, I'll see this covered on the U.S.
side a lot and people don't talk about it that much.
Or if they do, that's, it's like something that's in the future for them.
Like they're coming here.
Eventually they'll come here.
It's here already.
Um, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's a scary part of it that just the ignorance around.
ian crossland
You think if people learn Spanish it will help?
ed calderon
I think all of you are going to be speaking Espanol or Mandarin in a few years.
ian crossland
We should be teaching kids like six or seven languages in school.
unidentified
Other countries do, we don't.
ed calderon
You can't get into a career path in Mexico unless you know English.
A little bit.
tim pool
That's true for a lot of countries though.
ed calderon
Yeah, it's always been interesting for me to meet people in the States that don't speak
another language.
It's pretty weird, right?
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
That's most, I'm pretty sure, right?
ed calderon
Si.
unidentified
Nice try.
tim pool
Un poquito.
ian crossland
Un poquito.
ed calderon
I travel across the country every weekend.
I do classes all over the country, so I get to see weird places and experience this country.
For three years I've been traveling nonstop.
So it's just interesting seeing, going from LA.
to Alabama, to going to, like, living in Kentucky for a bit, and everybody was like, hey Ed, aren't you worried about Kentucky?
It's very racist.
It's like, Mexico's very racist.
These people are amateurs.
tim pool
Yeah, America's, like, one of the least racist places I've ever been to.
You know, maybe it's hard to quantify exactly how racist a country might be.
Especially, like, you go to some of the Scandinavian countries and they're, like, arguably way more racist, but some people might be, like, kinda not.
But I'll tell you this, I think Sweden is super, super, super racist.
ed calderon
Okay.
tim pool
Yeah, they're the kind of racist where they really don't like non-Swedish people, but they openly pretend like they're not racist, so they do a bunch of things to make it... They want to make it seem like they're not racist and are super welcoming, but then behind closed doors they're like...
Others are not.
Yeah, totally.
ed calderon
No, legit.
We have blackface comedy still on TV in Mexico.
unidentified
Oh, wow.
Wow.
ed calderon
There's a there's a comic called the Mean Penguin.
People can research this.
And you tell me that's on the newsstand still.
So it's there's there's all of the telenovelas and all the news and a lot of the popular culture down there.
Everybody on TV is Caucasian, the Mexican Caucasian people, because that's Our idealized version of beauty, you know?
Wow.
You give a kid a brown Barbie and a white Barbie and ask the kid which one is the evil one.
unidentified
Oh wow.
ed calderon
No way!
It's an experiment they did down there.
tim pool
So what's the result?
ed calderon
I mean, raise the brown one.
tim pool
And what do you think if you did that in the United States today to a kid, which one do you think they would raise up?
ed calderon
The white one.
tim pool
That's right.
Isn't that weird?
ed calderon
Diablo Blanco.
tim pool
How about just like, I don't know, you can't tell if they're evil or not.
ed calderon
Well, I mean, that's too hard.
As far as the racism thing, I get a kick out of seeing some of the commentary as far as racism here in the United States.
When I, you know, like go to Asia, you know, and just see how different Asian countries treat each other.
Go to Mexico.
I'll tell this story about my family.
Can I tell this?
It's just a small, short story.
My daughter is on the light side.
You know, she's a bit light-skinned.
My niece has a daughter and she's a little on the brown side.
On Christmas, my dad put my niece's daughter on his knee and my daughter on his other knee.
He told my daughter, tu eres la princesa.
You're the princess of the family.
My niece's daughter says, what about me?
You can be the princess's maid.
tim pool
Wow.
ed calderon
That's my dad.
unidentified
Yikes.
ed calderon
That's how the culture is down there.
tim pool
That's how it is in Brazil.
So when I was down in Brazil, I've been down there several times, I actually have a visa, and what I was being told by our fixer, our local guy, our friend, he's like a pothead on the headshot, he was like, There are people who are both black, and he was like, and they'll argue with each other over who's blacker.
ed calderon
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
tim pool
Because, like, it's bad, and they're all extremely racist, even against themselves.
And he was like, it's crazy to see that people who are darker skinned will, like, they'll become a grandmother.
And then there'll be a picture of her with her husband and their kids, and it's like having more and more white kids, and then their great granddaughter is, like, white, and she's like, how proud am I?
That's really weird to me, how racist these people are.
ed calderon
Just to get a clip, my dad is brown.
That's just how things work outside of the United States.
tim pool
These college kids, they don't get it.
unidentified
They're like, America's racist!
tim pool
Not only that, but I'm like, whenever I hear one of these people say that America's racist, I'm like, have you ever spent 10 minutes in a skate park?
In America?
You want to go somewhere to hear the N-word more than any... Go to a skate park.
I'm not even kidding.
It's like every other word.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Because it's like an urban culture thing now, I guess, for these kids.
ed calderon
Yeah.
I get... My mind gets blown when I see second generation, third generation Mexican, you know, kids here and they use the N-word more than anything.
It was like, why are you using that word?
That's not a... You know, again, I'm new here, so I don't know.
unidentified
Yeah.
ed calderon
So I'm just hearing it.
I'm like, wow.
tim pool
Let's go to Super Chats, everybody.
If you haven't already, smash that like button, subscribe to the channel.
We love hanging out on Friday nights.
We always try to just kind of like chill, lay back, and make Friday nights a little different.
Not so heavily focused on like the news cycle of the week or whatever like we do earlier in the week.
It's more chill, more chill.
So smash that like button, send your Super Chats.
We're going to read some of your comments right here.
All right, let's see.
Jackson Dowdle says, can you have a debate between an ANCAP and a populist like Brian Kaplan and Jack Murphy?
Yes.
lydia smith
Brian Kaplan.
tim pool
Not familiar with who Brian Kaplan is, but, you know, we can certainly organize something like that.
That'd be fun.
All right, this question I'm assuming is for Ian.
Ducktator says, so did any of the cults ever manage to summon Cthulhu?
Is that what actually happened in 2020?
ian crossland
I defer to Ed.
ed calderon
I mean, I don't know.
I gave a death whistle to Joe Rogan that he blew and not everybody blames COVID on that, so I don't know.
tim pool
No, for real?
ed calderon
Yeah.
So in Mexico, they have these death whistles.
It's an Aztec death whistle.
Supposedly, when the Aztecs would attack a village, they would blow those every night before they attack to just keep people up, you know?
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
And then he blew it.
ed calderon
I said, that's pretty cool.
You want this?
Like, oh yeah.
He blew it on the show.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
So wait, Joe Rogan blew the death whistle on his show?
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
That proves it.
ed calderon
There's a few of them, you know, so maybe.
ian crossland
Have no fear.
ed calderon
I don't know if it was Cthulhu.
Maybe somebody asked a version of Cthulhu, you know?
ian crossland
I guess the answer's no.
Short answer.
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
Steven Valdez says, Ed is a legend.
Ed, are you ever going to write a book?
ed calderon
It's uh, yeah.
Yeah, it's not what people think.
I'm not... Most of my writing is going to be related to post-traumatic stress processing.
ian crossland
You were saying psychedelics have helped.
ed calderon
Certain types of psychedelics have helped in the processing part of it, yeah.
It's a...
Every now and then I write these things called Fever Dreams and I post them up on my Instagram account and they seem to touch people.
My world has ended a few times in a lot of ways.
And talking about some of the traumas, talking about some of the... I mean, I'm nine months on the wagon right now.
ian crossland
So it was like, how many years were you involved in this experience?
ed calderon
Twelve years working and right now six years on the road teaching, training and stuff like that.
So it's been a road.
lydia smith
Before we move on, I have to ask you, do you think that the reason that some of these military members and police officers use this symbol of Santa Muerte is because it takes some of the guilt of killing other people off of them?
ed calderon
it is definitely yes they have dispensation um you and so in a place where the government is doesn't really have your back and there is no realistic um so like in the u.s you go off and fight for your country and you get back and sometimes you get flag waves on you you get you know if you wear a uniform you fly You can fly for a discount or for free and you get preferential treatment if you're a veteran and stuff like that.
There's no such thing in Mexico.
You get spit on.
Oh, what do you do?
Like I hid what I did for a living for a long time from my family.
Because it's something to be ashamed of.
So there's no concept of a veteran in Mexico.
unidentified
Right.
ed calderon
Wow.
Although it's clearly a giant war that we're currently still going through.
unidentified
Right.
ed calderon
So if you don't have any support, if you don't have any... I learned about post-traumatic stress when I came to this country.
I didn't know what that was.
That's the level of just abandonment that people have down there.
Uh, so I think part of that is that, you know, just seeking some sort of comfort or some sort of backing in something that is as dark and or as light as a death deity.
You know, that's what I think that's a big reason why some of that is so popular and prevalent down there.
lydia smith
Interesting.
Okay.
tim pool
All right, John Doe says it costs $2,500 for a U-Haul from Maryland to Florida, but only $600 for a U-Haul from Florida to Maryland.
They claim supply and demand.
Well, see, it's really simple.
If you're in Maryland, there's probably no trucks.
Because everybody's fleeing.
If you're in Florida, there's a ton of trucks.
lydia smith
Because nobody's leaving.
tim pool
Because everybody's fleeing to Florida.
So if you want to go back, it actually works out really well for them because you're basically doing them a service, bringing the truck back.
Otherwise, they got to go pick the truck up and then bring them back.
So yeah, it costs more money.
How about that?
All right, here's a good one.
Jason Brian says, Did Dim Fool talk about the Arizona audit yet?
No, we didn't.
Why?
It just came out.
So, you know, I often wonder to myself, I'm like, there's a lot of people who jump the gun on stories and then get them wrong.
And I'm like, this thing was like announced, I think like 4pm.
And there's like, no way I'd have enough time to go through what they said to talk about it on a show.
But, you know, here's, I'll tell you this.
The other night a whole bunch of stories emerged where they said the Arizona audit confirms Joe Biden won.
Okay.
They didn't actually even see the audit when they wrote those stories.
And that's the important detail because I'm pretty sure the audits don't actually make
any strong assertion like that.
What there is something going around, it's showing a list of like failure rates, basically
like duplicate votes or things like that.
So there's a lot to go through.
I have not fact checked any of it.
And by the time we're going to do a show on a Friday night, there's just, look, I got
to tell you guys the worst possible day to release information like this is on a Friday.
Like, everyone's tuned out, view counts are always way down.
Honestly, I don't get it.
And then they give the media an opportunity to preempt them on a Thursday, which is not a good day, but not a Friday!
It's better than a Saturday, I guess.
But seriously, a Friday evening is when you publish news to die.
So, I'll look into it, and I'm gonna go through all of it, absolutely.
And I gotta tell you, I think it's a lot of what we heard from Matt Brainerd.
Check out the members-only segments at TimCast.com, and then we'll see what we can get to in those when we break it down.
All right.
Montana Linderman says, today's my birthday and I'm stuck at work, but at least I have Tim and everyone to listen to.
I watch you guys every night.
You guys are amazing.
Montana, thank you for your super chat and thanks for watching and listening to the show.
lydia smith
Happy birthday.
tim pool
You know, it's just, we look at cameras and we talk about stuff.
Sam Finley says, Ed Calderon makes James Bond look like a punk.
ed calderon
Well done.
Jaime Juan.
No, James Bond.
tim pool
Alright, let's see.
Trevor Cameron says, Tim, gonna play some more D&D?
Does the DM have a hard time keeping track of initiative?
Check out my Kickstarter and FB, Deck of Heroes and Fiends, October 1st.
Well, alright then.
Yes, we do plan on playing D&D.
Alright, let's see.
A lot of people want me to talk about the Arizona audit and, uh, you know, obviously there's a bunch of superchats throughout the show being like, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it.
It's like, I have to go through it and, like, fact check it.
Here's the thing.
With a lot of stories like, um, Afghanistan.
Initially, my assessment is based on the preliminary reports, and then it turns out, like, I didn't realize in the start of the Afghanistan withdrawal that we abandoned Bagram the way we did.
So my assessment was, like, changed, and I was like, wait a minute.
I read this Wall Street Journal article.
Look what they're doing.
Here's the challenge with the AZ audit.
As you probably already know, the mainstream media is not going to do a fair assessment of what the details are, which means this is one of the stories, along with many other, that we actually have to have our crew dig into, and we're gonna do it.
We're gonna look into it.
That being said, My opinion is you want to know the easiest way to make sure a Republican never wins again is convince them all you can't win.
And then they don't go out and vote.
So you've got Democrats going door to door.
Look at it this way.
New York City.
How many people live on one city block in New York City?
ian crossland
A lot.
tim pool
Now, one, the same distance, in a rural county, how many people live in that same distance?
One?
So, when you're in New York and you've got universal mail-in voting, and two little democratic activists can say, we're gonna spend, you know, an hour on one city block, they can talk to a thousand people.
If a Republican wants to go to a suburban area, one city block is gonna get him, what, 25?
So with universal mail-in voting, denser population areas are substantially easier for voter turnout drives.
They knock on the door, did you vote yet?
You didn't?
There it is, fill it out, have a nice day.
Did you vote yet?
Republicans doing it, serious disadvantages.
So I think you gotta focus on your ground game, your organizational powers, and I'll tell you this, Whatever may be going on here, I think it's demoralizing people.
I think the audits are great.
I think new investigations build the trust.
But man, do conservatives need to get their ground game going.
And libertarians, to be honest.
Democrats have ground game, dude.
They know how to go door-to-door, and they have the advantage of population density.
I think that plays the biggest role.
And that's exactly why there was such a major push for universal mail-in voting.
It's overt.
That's why they were screaming when they said Donald Trump was stealing mailboxes.
Because that is what gives them their major advantage.
And it's not breaking the rules.
It's like the law was changed for universal mail-in voting.
ian crossland
I had a friend that worked the Obama campaign in 2012 and he said it was so incredibly organized and effective.
And then he worked the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and he said it was terrible.
So I have a feeling it's not just Democrats.
It's this establishment.
tim pool
Exactly.
They know how to run a machine.
And the establishment Republicans don't want Trump or the populists.
So they're like, it's all you.
And it's much more difficult.
All right.
Immediate Casualty Care says, perfect guest for the topic at hand, as well as a guy to learn from when it goes wrong.
Ed was kind enough to do an IG review of our low profile trauma kits, asking for nothing in return.
A good man who knows all things.
Bad guy.
Yeah, there you go.
ed calderon
Yeah.
ian crossland
What is that?
ed calderon
It's a low profile way to carry around medical equipment with you.
You know, I mean, it's, it's a scary time and I'm not, you know, fear mongering, but it's a pretty good idea to have at least some basic knowledge and base and materials to stop somebody from bleeding out.
ian crossland
We have like 30 medical kits here.
We had like six, and I was like, Tim, can we get two more?
And he bought like 20.
I was like, yeah, that's a good idea.
tim pool
Let's pass them out if we need to.
30 employees.
We've got multiple acres.
ian crossland
Animals.
ed calderon
It's a weird thing.
People want to go and shoot guns and train how to fight with knives and do all this stuff, but they don't want to learn how to plug holes.
Or like, every now and then, I do training related to counter-abduction.
And everybody's like, we're never going to learn how to get our handcuffs.
That's coming.
But first we need to talk about Narcan.
tim pool
Right.
ed calderon
And first we need to talk about roofies and how to flush your system and how some of the, why chemical restraints are a thing.
tim pool
So you do a hostile environment training, stuff like that.
ed calderon
Non-permissive environment training is what I got, what it's called.
I didn't name it that.
That's what the first people that I started training here in the States said, that's non-permissive environments training.
Okay.
tim pool
Do you ever get these really arrogant people who are just like, they think they know more than you, they think they're hot stuff, and they're going to survive the apocalypse?
ed calderon
I get all types.
I get some people that are preppers that prep, but they can't run a mile.
I get the people that are really worried about COVID and they want to wear a gas mask when they go outside, but they would just take some vitamins and eat healthy and just run a bit.
A little bit of that might help you.
I get all types.
tim pool
I did a hostile environment training, and it was for insurance purposes, they made me do it.
ed calderon
Of course.
tim pool
But I've actually, you know, I'd actually been on the ground in a bunch of civil unrest, civil conflict, and, like, I was in Ukraine before it erupted into, like, the separatist fighting.
I was in Venezuela, which was, like, probably the scariest, where I had to flee the country.
And so they made me do this training, and there was, like, a weather guy there who was, like, trying to give advice to people, and I'm just like...
Like, Weatherman, you can't tell this woman what she's gonna do when she gets abducted and there's landmines.
I'm sorry, you have no idea what you're talking about.
ed calderon
One of the things that I kind of struggle with, a lot of the stuff that I do is like, I didn't go through SEER training, or I wasn't part of the American military.
A lot of my teachers were, like, the first person I saw get out of handcuffs and teach me how to get out of handcuffs was a 15-year-old kid that was a meth dealer.
Right?
The first person I saw that showed me how to make something to cut through zip ties with a Kevlar cordage was a fisherman.
ian crossland
Was that when you were a kid?
When you were younger?
ed calderon
No, just working and meeting weird people.
One of the things that I find the most off-putting is people not realizing the teachers are all around us and they're not all going to wear a green beret and have been a military guy or something like that.
Most of the people that know and study the craft of getting around things Those are the best conversations I have.
And if I do a class and I start talking about bribing a public official, and Americans start getting like, you can do that?
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
They don't get it, man.
ed calderon
You don't get it.
We got scruples here, huh?
Normal is a fluid concept.
And you can't travel with your normal.
That's the first red pill I give people.
tim pool
Yeah, man.
Egypt was certainly crazy.
Just like... When I try talking to... I'll tell you this.
Here's a challenge in the United States.
When I was doing the heat training, hostile environment stuff, someone asked the guy running the course if women should be worried about sexual assault.
And his reaction was to stutter and go, Men can get raped? Yes, men. It's like, dude, see this is
the problem. In America, they can't say certain things because they get sued for
harassment or treating people, you know, not like, you know, not like for violating people's rights,
ian crossland
I guess. Sensibilities.
tim pool
Yeah. When you say like, there's a reality of that women, you know, a guy will get killed and a woman will get raped.
Like, when you're dealing with a lot of these places around the world.
And then when I have to deal with stuff like being in Egypt, what the security company is going to allow a woman to do versus what they're going to allow a man to do, you'd probably have every feminist in this country screaming, it's not fair.
There was a story about, I could be getting this wrong, so just keep that in mind.
A reporter with Vice was out, I think in Algeria.
And she was told not to go to the soccer stadium because women aren't allowed and she said, I'm going to do it anyway.
And she got assaulted and then sued vice over it.
Even though the security people are like, you can't do that.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
But these, there are these people who think that Algeria is going to be like America.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
And they don't realize like you walk in the wrong neighborhood and they should be like, that's a beaten.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
They don't realize that in Egypt, it's like you walk in the wrong neighborhood and like, you're not covered up and you're not here with your man.
You're in trouble.
ed calderon
Normal is a fluid concept.
You can't travel with your normal.
You can't travel with your Bill of Rights.
That's an amazing thing.
Also, it's like seeing Americans in Mexico doing like, oh yeah, just this guy tried to push me in a van and I just stabbed him in the face.
I'm just going to wait for the police here.
unidentified
That guy was probably a cop.
ed calderon
What do you recommend?
Go to the embassy or flee.
Not being allowed to, not being able to are two different things.
Outside of the United States, females during training, like I do, restraints for handcuffs, zip ties, duct tape.
Show people how to get out of that and also how to, you know, manage some of that stuff.
Women always get more on them because they're going to get it the worst.
unidentified
Yep.
ed calderon
That's my way of treating them differently.
tim pool
Now, to be fair, though, we did in our training do a scenario where we got surrounded at gunpoint and all the women were brought into a barn.
And then the trainers told them and start screaming, you know, bloody murder.
And and then the guys outside are laughing, saying, I think you know what we're doing and stuff like that, because he was trying to make that point.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
So it wasn't all overtly, like, you know, trying to avoid the realities of these things.
ian crossland
Do you have, like, we talked about basic, like, natural rights in the United States.
Do you have that in Mexico?
ed calderon
Yeah, but nobody, there's nobody to enforce them.
ian crossland
So they don't exist, really?
ed calderon
I mean, human rights are a thing in Mexico, but usually they only involve people that are, you know, have enough money to kind of put them on their side.
We support a small media group that we work with called Demoler.
It's on Instagram if you want to check it out.
Basically just cartel related news out of Mexico and it's all verified by myself and other people that work around it.
There's a guy that stole a few candy bars from the store and got placed into a process, a legal process, for three candy bars.
A very lengthy one.
Wow.
And in the same vein, there's a police commander that was involved in the massacre of 135 people or something like that, that is currently, you know, he just had the lawyer up and there's no problem, right?
And we did this comparison.
If you have enough money, if you have an influence to the law, it's a matter down there and your rights are, you know, thing to the side.
You can own a gun in Mexico if you're upper middle class.
There's one gun store in Mexico.
ian crossland
Wow.
tim pool
One gun store in Mexico?
ed calderon
It's a single gun store in Mexico City.
And the only way you can buy one is you have to fly there.
unidentified
Wow.
ed calderon
Get a bunch of paperwork and buy an overpriced, underpowered caliber to be able to defend yourself.
unidentified
Like what?
tim pool
Like a .22?
unidentified
Let's say a .380.
ed calderon
You can't get a 9mm down there.
That's military only.
So yeah, low calibers, horrible, horrible quality guns.
And they're all, it's a monopoly run by the military down there.
And they're in their best interest not to harm people, so they make it really hard.
tim pool
Speaking of guns, DW says, Tim, did you see Matt Gaetz voted yes on red flag laws?
2A or bust!
Sorry, Matt, you're no longer MAGA.
Also, saveamericachat.com is number one for America First discussion.
I'm going to look into that because that is a big no-no.
Red flag laws are bad, bad, bad news.
They do not work the way people think they do.
And if Matt Gaetz voted yes on this, it's exactly the problem we have with Republicans.
That's why I think the Republican Party is garbage.
Now, you want to look that up?
unidentified
Yeah, I'm looking it up.
You're looking it up?
Yeah.
tim pool
Because I'll right now be like, that's dumb.
So you guys aren't familiar with red flag laws?
ed calderon
I am, I am.
tim pool
One day you're at home and you get a knock on the door and it's a bunch of cops being like, we're here to seize your firearms, your weapons.
And you're like, says who?
Says this warrant?
What are you talking about?
Well, you're a danger to yourself or others or they're ours now.
Now, it's not what 2A says.
So the problem is you get no chance to rebut for the most part.
If they came to you and said, we are going to make an attempt at a seizure.
You have 30 days, you know, here's your court date or whatever.
Still bad in my opinion.
Because it puts the burden on the individual who has the right to keep and bear arms.
But at the very least, you'd be able to go to the court and be like, no, it's not true.
Someone's made a false claim against me, and I will not stand for this.
But these things end bloody.
ed calderon
Yeah, you're guilty.
ian crossland
Someone gets a medical marijuana card, and now they're no longer mentally stable.
Someone jaywalks, now they're no longer mentally stable.
No.
tim pool
Red flags are not good.
They show up to a guy's house, knock on the door, then the guy answers the door with his gun, which he legally owns, and they say, we're taking your guns, and he says, yeah, for my cold dead hands or whatever.
They fought and the cops killed the guy.
That didn't need to happen.
This is not a good idea to go to Americans who are like, my cold dead hands, and instigate that kind of thing.
And that's what you get.
You get Republicans whose position is, I'll compromise Democrats, and Democrats say, give me everything or else.
So instead of Republicans being like, we want to repeal the NFA and all gun restrictions, they say, we're okay with some gun control, and then you end up moving further and further into the gun control territory.
ed calderon
As somebody that I'm from here, I'm from Mexico, of course, and there's a part in the Constitution that allows for the possession and self-defense with guns in Mexico.
But there's a single federal firearms law that just that's that what deals with everything everything firearms in Mexico.
You're not legally allowed to buy a gun outside of the normal processes, but it You know, New Year happens and everybody's shooting guns up in the air.
ian crossland
What's the... Oh, right.
ed calderon
No, but main thing is I've been in places where having a gun is the difference between being targeted and not being targeted.
I've been in places where everybody that has guns are having guns illegally.
They're all criminals because they have a gun.
But if they drop their guns, if they get rid of their guns, the cartels are going to run in and take their daughters.
lydia smith
Right.
ian crossland
There's a city Luke talks about.
Do you remember?
tim pool
Chiron.
ian crossland
Chiron, where there's no police, there's no cartels.
ed calderon
Well, they kicked out the police because the cartels were on the take.
And they armed themselves.
There's a problem with some of these groups down there.
Like, there was a Netflix documentary on one of these Autodefensa groups that came up during the mid-2000s.
Uh, they, they're basically cartel groups that now are being, uh, guarding home, you know?
They just switch, you know, t-shirts.
ian crossland
Oh, and Sharon.
tim pool
Let me, well, let me, let me, we got, we have some of these groups.
We got a super chat.
Uh, Smashing Random Key says, how does Sharon still exist?
How was it even allowed to happen?
ed calderon
I mean it's a small, it's a very small community and a lot of the weapons that they have are not the best weapons.
A lot of them were stolen from the local police armory and a lot of them are just hunting rifles or things that have been trafficked there like decades ago.
The reason they're not, they're being left alone, it's just too much of a hassle and also they're too much in the public eye right now.
So why mess with them?
But eventually they'll drop out of the public eye and influence will start seeping in.
How they usually kill these groups is that they can't self-sustain.
tim pool
What happens when a bunch of extremely wealthy Bitcoin ANCAPs start sending resources so they can self-sustain?
ed calderon
Oh, that would be amazing.
tim pool
Well, that's what we're hearing a lot of.
So when this went down, you have a lot of people who are like Bitcoin millionaire ANCAPs who are like, Anarchy?
Freedom?
No cartels, no government?
I'm there, baby!
And they're bringing their resources, they're bringing guns, they're bringing security.
ed calderon
I mean, if that's one way, another way is basically just televising the revolution.
Giving them eyes.
One of the main problems that these communities have is that they don't have eyes.
They don't have a way to cast out their story, their reality.
I get bombarded with pictures, videos, and stuff like that from all over Mexico.
And they say, dude, Ed, please post this.
I was like, where is this from?
This is from here.
Okay.
Just give me enough.
I'll send it to them all there.
Or I send it to, or I post it myself.
The main thing is that news coverage down there doesn't want to put it up because it goes against the government.
And that's not, that's not good.
And up here.
They don't care unless it's like something specifically related or tied to the U.S.
So main thing is giving these people voices.
Give these people the ability to tell their own stories and televise a revolution.
If they can figure that out, getting them guns, getting them bullets is only going to push them so far.
tim pool
ReallyNow says, I have been to 20 different countries.
Listening to you talk about racism is accurate.
I have never experienced racism more than in Europe.
Definitely, I'd say so.
Particularly, people probably don't want to believe it, but Sweden, man.
No joke.
I go to somewhere like France or the UK and it's like, okay, there's racism.
No, you go to Sweden, and it's like extremely ethnically homogenous.
They pretend to not be racist, but boy, are they racist.
I'm telling you, man, I'm like in a car with a guy driving into a black neighborhood, and he's shaking and freaking out, being like, don't make me do this, man, and we're like...
Calm down, what are you doing?
We walk around the neighborhood, everything's fine.
Or I should say these migrant areas, a lot of Muslims, a lot of Somalis.
We walk around and it was like, there's nothing going on, man.
Go to Chicago.
That guy would fall to the ground and melt into a pile of jelly if you went to Chicago.
It's crazy to me, but it's not just about stuff like that, it's about how they don't hire people.
They shuffle them into these pocket communities where they force them to fend for themselves.
It's just brutal, man.
ed calderon
I've had some weird experiences here in the States that are not specifically, I mean, just uncomfortable now.
Like somewhere in Tennessee, somebody asked me if I was a Christian.
I said, yeah, I'm Catholic.
unidentified
He said, you're not a Christian.
ed calderon
And I was like, okay.
And I said, you know, I, I took it with humor because it's humorous to me, you know?
But realistically, a lot of the specific hate that I've gotten in this country or life specific, like, Discrimination has been by some of the members of my own community, Mexicans.
Second generation, third generation people that call themselves Latinx for some reason, you know?
I was like, qué?
Latinx?
Cabrón, you know?
tim pool
I wonder if YouTube gets mad when you say those things.
ed calderon
I mean, it's... Do they?
tim pool
I have to know.
ed calderon
Yeah.
I mean, it's a whole thing where like... I've been swearing the whole time.
Yeah, you just talk.
You're talking bad about Mexico.
Mexico is a beautiful place.
What parts of Mexico did you live in?
unidentified
Yeah.
ed calderon
Well, I go down there to Cancun and go there.
tim pool
Mexico City is nice.
ed calderon
Mexico City is nice.
It's beautiful.
There's a lot of stuff that happens in Mexico City.
There's, you know, and outside of the outskirts of Mexico City, there's some pretty, you know, they got the pick.
People listen to this.
They can tell me about some of the places out there that are pretty, you know, A lot of bad stuff happened.
Yes, there's some beautiful places, there's some beautiful people, and I'm not in a fight with the people of Mexico.
I love the people of Mexico.
Part of me doing this and the stuff that I do is trying to give them voices and telling stories about stuff that happens down there.
But most of the hate that I got up here has been people are completely detached from that reality.
So talking to the dad who is from Mexico, like, what's the first thing you did when you get out to this country?
I bought a gun.
unidentified
That's okay.
ed calderon
And then you talk to his grandson, what about you?
Oh, my dad's got a gun.
It's like, oh, guns kill people.
That's scary, right?
Aren't you afraid that people are carrying guns up here?
They have guns down there.
I was like, is that in front?
No, that's a beautiful thing.
ian crossland
Do the cartels 3D print weapons?
ed calderon
No.
ian crossland
Because...
The reason I ask is because you said in 2008 they were using these advanced technology drones.
ed calderon
I'm wondering if they're... Nah, I haven't seen 3D printed.
It doesn't make sense for them.
I've seen them being utilized a lot in Europe and stuff like that.
And in Myanmar I think has some sub guns showing up 3D printed.
Mexico, it has the largest commerce of firearms in the world next to it.
And the government in Mexico just sued a bunch of the firearms companies stateside because of the guns that are being trafficked.
Mysteriously enough, they didn't sue Sig Sauer because they're trying to buy guns for the military.
tim pool
I always tell people when they're like, aren't you scared when you go to these countries?
Like, I haven't traveled in a while, but I used to fly.
I was on two planes a week.
And I'd be like, no, because people aren't crazy.
You know, this idea that you have got like kind of two camps of people.
You've got these people who think they can ride their bikes to Tajikistan and it's going to be fine.
And then they get hit and then ISIS jumps out and kills them.
That literally happened.
And then you have people who think you'll go to South America and they'll drag you through the streets and brutally beat you.
And I'm like, Yo.
So, some people believe stupid things, and it drives them to do something.
But it's not like their behavior isn't predictable.
What I mean is, if you're going to an area where you know ISIS is dominant, and you know what their ideology is, and you know what they're looking for, okay, well then, you're probably gonna be watching for that, and you gotta be careful.
But I was like, especially with going to like Venezuela and Brazil, South America stuff, I'm like, I know what a general idea of these people's motives, especially when it comes to like gangs, cartels, making money, running a business.
You don't interfere, you don't bother them, you mind your own business, you're probably fine.
My favorite though is when we were in Venezuela and they told me like a very common thing, one of the most common things is express kidnappings.
They'll pull up, they'll throw you in, they'll drive you to an ATM, say, take out your money, and then, you know, they'll ditch you or whatever.
But one guy told me a story where he got express kidnapped, and the guys are armed, they're putting a gun at him, and they're like, they, you know, drive him to an ATM, they're like, take out all the money, and he's like, I only have a couple, you know, hundred, whatever, and then they're like, take it out, they take it out, and then they're like, get in the car, and he's like, okay, and they're like, do you want a ride, man?
Is there somewhere we can drop you off?
He's like, yeah, I gotta go to work, and they're like, yeah, no problem, let's know where, he's like, yeah, it's around here, thanks, man, and they're like, alright, have a good one, dude.
Like, it's the craziest story, you know?
You think that, like, but after they get their money, they're just like, we'll drop you off now.
ed calderon
Yeah.
tim pool
Hope everything's alright.
ed calderon
It's a thing.
I mean, it's a business.
It's a business.
They're human as well.
I had this guy who was a cardiologist.
He got abducted.
He spent like two months in.
And they did horrible things to him.
You know, basically wanted to convince his family to pay up.
When he was let go, he was let go because we did something and we found where he was being kept.
And, you know, we encountered the people that were holding him.
uh, when we were debriefing him, he would kept asking about the people that are
watching him because he was worried about them because these people, you
know, weren't specifically the ones responsible for abducting him, but they
weren't responsible to look out for him when he was, like they're being forced
to do it.
Dog kennel then they had set up for him.
Uh, and he was like, Hey, are they okay?
Are they fine?
I was like, what?
Stockholm Syndrome, basically.
They weren't fine.
None of them were fine.
And he went into a weird depression because of some of the stuff that happened to them.
It was so weird.
And again, stories like that are... My mom told me this long ago and it kind of made things clearer for me.
Nobody's against you.
They're for themselves.
tim pool
Exactly.
ed calderon
When you learn that?
tim pool
This is basically what I mean when I say people aren't crazy.
I've had to explain this to them.
If you know like what they're doing and why they're doing it, then it's like they're not going to randomly do things for the most part, right?
They don't want to put risk themselves.
They want to get something out of you.
So understand the motives of the person to the best of your ability and then try and navigate the situations.
And that means, like, I had someone try to pickpocket me in Spain.
They didn't succeed.
But I'm not about to pick a fight with a guy who's probably got friends around the corner operating as their backup.
He comes up, tries to grab my phone, fails, and then I just back away and avoid the situation.
Because what they do is, they'll have someone waiting around the corner or someone sitting down who's their spotter.
In case a fight breaks out, then they jump you.
So it's like, he failed, it's better that he's like, my risk is too high right now, I'm gonna walk.
And I'm like, and I'm not gonna get into a fight with him.
ed calderon
Yeah, part of that normal is a fluid concept lesson that I give people is, you know, I can walk around here with my iPhone, but somewhere else that's going to be a meal for a few weeks for somebody.
tim pool
Month's salary.
ed calderon
Yeah, I can walk around here with my earring, but I'll go to Brazil and it's going to be ripped off your ear.
Don't be a resource.
Check yourself.
Make a travel debit card with a prepaid travel debit card.
Carry a travel phone.
Carry a burner phone that you can give out to somebody.
Just give out as a gift.
Every now and then I do security contracting jobs and the first thing I do is I go to the parking attendant, go to the major D, or go to the guy that knows everything.
And I give him a phone, a smartphone that's worth probably like $150 or $200 on eBay.
And I get the best intel on the planet there.
I just call him directly.
When I'm done, you can keep the phone.
Really?
unidentified
Snap?
lydia smith
Yes.
ed calderon
Key to the city.
Yeah, dude.
But again, it's weird to tell people like, Ed, so what can I make to defend myself?
Buy a phone, give it to somebody there, make a friend.
unidentified
Yeah?
Friends.
ed calderon
There you go.
I love it.
Invest in people.
tim pool
Yep.
Right on, man.
Well, it's been rad having you.
For everybody else, thanks for hanging out on this Friday night.
Smash that like button.
Subscribe.
You can follow me at TimCast.
You can follow the show at TimCast IRL.
Make sure you check out youtube.com slash castcastle.
We're going to a top secret location this weekend, which is going to be a crazy vlog, which will probably be up on Monday.
unidentified
Maybe.
tim pool
We'll see how it goes, but it's going to be a whole lot of fun.
Like, I can't say too much.
We just got to go and film it first.
But, Ed, is there anything else you want to shout out?
Website?
Book?
ed calderon
Twitter?
Check out my Instagram, edsmanifesto.com, and check out our new source, Demo Lair, on Instagram.
ian crossland
Demo Lair?
ed calderon
Demo Lair.
ian crossland
Thanks for coming, man.
That was great.
ed calderon
Thank you.
ian crossland
Love you, Ed.
That was really, really fun, man.
Thanks.
ed calderon
Thank you.
Lydia?
ian crossland
Oh, I'm Ian Croson, by the way.
lydia smith
I was going to say, are you telling us who you are?
tim pool
It's all about Ed, man.
unidentified
I forgot.
lydia smith
Yeah, there we go.
OK, yeah.
Now that we know who Ian is, I really appreciate Ed coming a lot.
I feel like I learned so much.
And I'm going to have to go back and watch your different appearances on Joe Robin as well.
I am Sour Patch Lids.
I push buttons in the corner for a living.
Thank you guys for coming.
tim pool
Man, it's been great.
I think I'll have to, you know, I'll never forget that Joe blew that death whistle, and it's all his fault.
ed calderon
That's it.
ian crossland
Yeah, can someone get him on the horn?
lydia smith
Yeah.
tim pool
Joe, what have you done?
But, hey man, it's been a blast, and for everybody else, thanks so much for hanging out, and we will see you all at the Cast Castle vlog over at youtube.com slash castcastle, or timcast.com.
Be a member.
We got a huge library of content.
You can always go there and search our massive list of podcasts with all of our guests.
We got, like, Couple from Steve Bannon, we've got tons from Jack Posobiec, Will Chamberlain, all this awesome stuff.
So definitely check that out, and we'll see y'all next time.
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