24 Burst results for "Calderon"
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"I mean, how much closer to death can you come than that? Pack up his wife, his kid, whatever he could carry in a duffel bag. And that was it. He left everything behind. And I hope that the law enforcement or future law enforcement is listening to this podcast. I hope you learn from him that he's continuing to learn. You never, I used to say when I was still on the job, if you think that you know it all already, but just because you've been on the job a long time, I don't want you working for me. I don't want you working with me because you're going to get yourself or somebody else killed. The criminals are continually evolving. Ed makes it a point to learn from the criminals because that's how you defeat them. You know, the things that he found out, he took the time and like you said, you just treated somebody with respect. Maybe you gave him a cigarette. Maybe you let him make a phone call. But that's how you learn from the evil element that's out there so we can defeat him in the So we're going to team him up like we said with Pete Forselli because we want to talk about Operation Fast and Furious. His big mission in life is to talk about all the deaths on the other side of the border. When we got done, he says he's not getting those threats from the cartel. He worries more about the government and people trying to shut him up and keep him from doing stuff. But it's interesting. He said he'd love to talk to Eric Holder, who was the AG during Fast and Furious. And I know Pete Forselli's got some strong opinions about AG Holder, about this fast and furious thing. You know, Pete's book doesn't come out until March of next year. But I'm really looking forward to it. He sent me an advance copy so I could read through the whole thing. And it is so eye-opening. And it's not just ATF leadership or lack of leadership. Wait till you read about the US Attorney's Office, the negligence that was there, the big attitudes, the big egos that, you know, I'm an attorney, you can't question me. I don't have time for you. Your decisions are resulting in deaths, but we're getting on a whole different topic here. I'm looking forward to having Pete back on the show. Yeah. Well, and I think that will be, I think we get him and Ed on at the same time. That'll be a hell of a discussion. I think you and I'll sit there and just be quiet and let those two talk. Welcome to the show and say thank you for joining us and happy our contribution. May be one of the easiest ones we ever do. Well, speaking of it easy to have great guests on like this. So let's bring this to a close here. We hope you guys enjoyed that episode. If you did head on over to Apple Spotify, hit those five stars. Let us know what you think about it. It's magic. We don't know how it works. We just know what really helps us also head on over to gamercrimespodcast.com. That's where you'll find out about edsmanifesto.com the book that he wrote, the things that are available. So make sure you head on over there, follow us on that thing called social media at Game of Crimes on Twitter, Game of Crimes podcast on Facebook and the Instagram, but make sure you join us at patreon.com slash game of crimes. We have a ton of good content. We'd like to, we've got our Q and A coming out. We've got our case of the month that we just did. We've got our, we actually did our narco meter review of Sicario, Day of the Soldado. That was one of the best movies I think we've seen when we, since we started doing narco meter. There's a hell of a lot better than Miami Vice. Fucking A. Sorry about that everyone. I've apologized like a thousand times and I guess I'll continue to. Well, if you, if you're not on Patreon, you won't understand what we're talking about, but we got a lot of concurrence that, oh, that hurt, that one hurt, but hey, we're not going to hold it against you. Only after another three or four months, we won't hold it against you. But hey, but seriously head on over to patreon.com slash game of crimes. That's where all the good stuff is. And we want to thank you guys. Thank you guys for joining us. You know, leave comments, let us know what you think about it because this is how we get these great guests. So thank you guys for playing along. Thank you guys for being players in the biggest, baddest, most dangerous game of all, the game of crimes. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"What are these things the public signs up for? Is this law enforcement? Tell us about your organization and what you're providing. I provide consultancy for companies, federal agencies, the military, you name it. I've worked with them. I have a wealth of knowledge and I don't want it to go to the grave with me. Instead of writing a book or selling this stuff online, I legit want to go out there and share it directly to people. So I do classes across the country as well. They're open to the public. I post them on my website, edsmanifesto.com. We show people how to survive in places that are not friendly to your presence there. So we've trained people that are involved in Doctors Without Borders, people going off to war zones to report on the news, people that just want to go to places that are kind of scary and they want to be prepared for it. So we go into that type of training for people. And if people are interested, they can go on our website and see what that's about. And we also run a Patreon page where I share a lot of the online training material. So if people can't go out to a class, they can join us there. And where I share a lot of the on-the-road hand texts we get into, I legit am a new member of the American experience and I make it a point to go and learn from everybody and anybody that wants to show me things that are related to this experience. Well, I'm going to give you a clue. If you ever go to Minnesota or the North countries up there, do not eat lutefisk. I remember eating a few experiences that I had. I went to Tennessee and I saw a bunch of people dancing with snakes. Those snakes are real. It's not a trick. Amazing experience. Americans go to Mexico to go to bullfights and cockfights. I'm Mexican. I went to see a bunch of white people dancing with snakes. Amazing experience. Then I went to Phoenix and I saw a bunch of people hanging themselves from metal hooks and got to experience that. And then I go to machine gun shoots and shot show and anime conventions and comic conventions and go to speak to universities about what's happening in Mexico and get yelled at by people that are three generations into this country and forgot about all that and they're calling me a warmonger or some bullshit like that. It's been an amazing experience. I'm grateful for all of it. There is no other place in the world where I would rather be and even with all the flaws that it has and that should say something to people. I'm looking at your Instagram account here. You've got 328,000 folks. Check him out at Ed's Manifesto. Do you still have a podcast? Yeah. It's a manifesto radio podcast that's on YouTube. I basically go and speak to people that are like me that went through the whole experience of coming up in a bad place, fighting for it, or fighting somewhere and coming back from it and kind of showcasing some of their experiences. I've had members of Dev Group on that now run Heroes for Horses programs where veterans come back and try and get settled. Oh yeah, PTSD. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Those animals are just magnificent. To the guy that I arrested on murder charges in Mexico and now we're friends, Conejo, a rapper who turned his life around. I recently had Liza Olan, my former boss, and we talked for about four hours about some of the stuff we went through. So if people want to kind of check out that side of my story, it's out there on YouTube at Manifesto Radio Podcast. Is that in English or Spanish? Both. I can do both. No kidding. You speak Spanish? Yeah, okay. I could speak Spanish with an Gringo accent. You want to hear that? Yeah, let's hear it. Mucho gusto, mi nombre es Ed Calderon. Me gusto ria de cielo es que Chipotle, es el mejor restaurant de comida Mexicana. There you go. Enjoy that. That's Chipotle. Chipotle. Gringo, say it. Chipotle. Tortellas and all that. Tortellas and donde es baños there, amigo? Every now and then I travel in New Mexico, I'll switch to that accent. I get treated really differently. I ate at Chipotle last night down in Miami. Yeah, and you're paying for it too, pal. I saw you run to the bathroom three times during this podcast. If you want botulism, you know where to hate it. Hey, but first of all, dude, thanks you for doing this. This is us seriously, us saluting you. Absolutely. Thank you for your service to your home country. Thank you for your service to this country. Bienvenidos. You know, welcome to the United States. Estado de Unidad. You know, appreciate the fact that you did it legally. You've gone through the slings and arrows. You know what it's like and gives you the credibility to talk about stuff. But what I really appreciate more, a lot of times cops, they want to hold on to stuff. It's my information. I don't want to share. You're one of those great exceptions to the rule of where you want to share everything you know with everybody and make everything better. And huge thumbs up to you for doing that. Yeah, and I'll just add to that, Ed. It's been an honor to have you on here. I know you're a busy man. We had to wait quite a while to get you on here. So thank you for giving us the time. But also, just like Morgan said, sharing the information you have to American law enforcement, American operators, so that it may help them somewhere down the road to save their lives. So, you know, you're becoming a patriot here in the United States. I'm glad to have you up here with us. I wish I could do more. And trust me, like every now and then I go out to show some of the young guys that are going off to different places to just, you know, put boot to ass. It was very costly to get some of this experience. And I can't for the life of me think about going to the grave with it. So God bless America. God save Mexico. And thank you for having me on. And God bless you. You perfect, perfect way to end this. So you don't go anywhere. Everybody else stay tuned for the debrief.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"But is it a slow slide into oblivion or is there an end game here that if we can do some things now, we can reverse where we're at again, never get to the point of where everything's hunky dory, but could we get back to the point to where we can neuter the cartels the same way you felt like your team got neutered, you're brought in and is there a way to neuter them or are they just, are we past the point with that? Too much of the toothpaste is out of the tube now. I think too much of the toothpaste is out of the tube. And I think too much of Latin America is no longer your friends, including Mexico and several segments of society in Mexico. Trump did a lot of good things and did a lot of bad things. And I think one of the biggest mistakes he made was making an enemy out of a whole country with his rhetoric. It stuck. And people have been utilizing that against U.S. interests for the past few decades, I guess. There's no better place to, like when we talk about social economic decline and all that stuff and the U.S. being on the downward, I see it, you know, I feel it. I was in the United States for the cancel the police effort and I go to different training academies across the country and I see the empty rooms and the lowering of standards and nobody wants to be a cop anymore in the U.S. and places where there's no cop responses and I could see that. But still, there's no other place I would rather be, even with all that. And I'm an immigrant and I've been through some shit. And I recently talked to my friend of mine who left Mexico and joined the IDF. He was a part of an elite border team that did direct action missions in some gnarly places. Amazing dude. Again, a Mexican immigrant went to Israel, fought a war out there, and then moved to the United States. And I told him, like, number one, get a truck. Number two, build a gym in your garage. And number three, guns. Right? And I was like, why do we as immigrants see that? And I think it's basically having a government or a constitution that gives you that responsibility. And I think it's a responsibility. It's not a right. It should be focused on more as a responsibility. The responsibility to keep yourself safe and keep your family safe and also to be able to maintain the ability to do that. So a gym and a gun range, so you can maintain that ability. And a big ass truck. There's no other place on the planet that allows you that. And I think that is what we're fighting for. And that's what I'm fighting for, too. I want my daughter to be able to see that when she's older. We challenge our listeners to, not all our listeners, but anybody that is unhappy living here in the United States, go live in a third world country. Just go down for a year and then see if that changes your opinion. If you're anti-gun, go down to Michoacan and have a cartel member show up and say which one of your pretty daughters he wants to take out for a night and be the guy in that conversation without a gun. And again, I've been in places like that, so that's why I moved to Texas. Unfortunately, we have very short memories here in the United States. We saw what happened in 9-11 and it actually galvanized our country, but it didn't last very long, did it? And then it wears off. And to your point, you get amnesia. You get fatigued. People forget what happened. And we go through this all again. Look, I can't think of a better way to kind of bring this to a close. Those three things, right? Guns, a gym, or a big truck, a gym, and guns, right? That's got to go on a t-shirt somewhere. But we would be remiss. Let's finish off by talking about edsmanifesto.com.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"Number one, I would first off clearly designate that China was not our friend in that aspect and is very much a sponsor of this effort being done to United States, you know, their banking industry and their industry in general is being utilized as a tool of mass destruction in the United States. So basically have a conversation about that and do something about it first, some sort of Navy blockade and or Navy search and seizure of these ships coming in and out of Mexican ports. That's number one. Number two, I think we're past any sort of solution that involves the Mexican federal government. I think there's two heads on, two sides of the same snake, cartels and government. It's hard to tease them out where one stops and where one begins. I think there's no clear solution that involves the Mexican government as it is right now. I don't see it. And when I say the Mexican government, the military is very much involved in this. And I mean, we have somebody here that talked about and worked with them for a while and not just myself that was involved in some of these conversations. I'm sure you've got the impression that an American friend of us, I think that's from the departed movie told us this once when he was working with us in Mexico. He said, hey, so what do you know about these guys? Like, not a lot. It's like, you do know something more, but we're treating you like mushrooms, you know? Feed them shit and keep them in the dark aspect of it. I don't think they're to be trusted, realistically. And we can go back in history to see all the amounts of times that they've been compromising people and information that has been switched. I mean, El Chapo Guzman's head of security was a member of the elite GAF special forces of the military. That's something that doesn't get talked about a lot. This is a situation, I think, that is beyond any sort of program implementation working with or trying to figure things out of that nature, I think, on my end. I could be wrong, but I don't see anything other than an open conflict in the future for both sides. I mean, there's something that's coming. And I think we're beyond any sort of policy that involves liaison coordination, counter narcotic stuff. I mean, the United States has been paying for that drug war for decades. When I first got on the job, the best effort the federal government can do was put a bunch of guys in the back of a truck and patrol the streets. That was almost 20 years ago now. What do you think they're doing right now with that taxpayer money that's being sent down there for this plan medi that they call paying for a lot of these police cars and fuel and salaries and weaponry? They're doing exactly the same thing? Same thing. Nothing has changed. So as US tax paying people as we are, why don't we audit where that money is being spent and why nothing has changed and actually why things have gotten worse? We should be talking about Mexico or Ukraine. Yeah. Well, we've got an organization that's responsible for that, but the hell, they can't even pass a budget for the United States government, which 20 years from now, we know on September 30th, we need the damn budget in place. Yeah. I'm trying to think how long that's been the case, Murph. I mean, I know when you were in government, yeah, before, yes, like October 1st, the beginning of a new fiscal year, let's have something in place by September 30th. Outrageous. Yeah. Outrageous. We're becoming the laughing stock of the world here.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"And I've been in Seattle and witnessed federally funded crack pipes and needles being filled with heroin from hillsides in Mexico that I've been to. You know, as somebody that's, I went through a lot of scrutiny to be in the U.S. and to migrate a lot. And I pay my taxes and I have four employees and I do my best to make my environment better and I try and help out anybody I can. And I very much consider me being in the United States a responsibility more than a privilege. And going there and posting about it, my post got taken down by Instagram when I said it's amazing to me that I'm in Seattle witnessing a bunch of needles on the ground that were federally provided being filled with fentanyl from China that was sent to Mexico and was grown into heroin and put into heroin. And then it's up here. And now the ground's littered with this. And somehow the U.S. is trying to figure out if cartels are a terrorist organization or not. And somehow they're involved in a drug war, which I was a part of for years. It's a joke. It's hard for some. Exactly. For me, it's that somebody had lost a lot for this. You know, when I say a lot, I mean I lost a home. I lost a bunch of my friends. I lost a lot of sleep and a marriage all because of this giant conflict. And I still think that there is something to be done. I just don't know who's going to be able to do it with the extent of corruption that I see at different levels. And yes, corruption is something it's commonly known of in Mexico, but it's also in the United States in a big way. Absolutely. Well, look, let's make you HMFIC for a year, right? What would Ed Calderon, HMFIC, are you familiar with that term? No. Head motherfucker in charge. You are HMFIC. You are the czar. I mean, it's like, how do we come, what is the plan we come up with? How do we come up with it? And how do we do it in such a way? Look, I'm not naive enough to think we get rid of everything, but how do we get, how do we get it back down to a point to where people, communities can thrive without being dependent upon the cartels? How do we stop this transnational shipment, you know, fentanyl, things like that. How do we address the cartel issue? So you're HMFIC for a year. What would you, what would his excellency Ed Calderon do if you had the power to do it? Enable blockade and search and seizure of every single ship coming from China into Mexico, number one, that would be the priority thing to basically cut the supply chain from China into Mexico. It's a national security thing. I don't know what the legalities of that would be. I've heard and seen Trump basically do something similar on the Atlantic side of the ocean during an operation where the Navy was very much involved doing counter narcotic stuff on that side of the ocean. And I saw the effects of that hat.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"And clearly coming from the US, because a lot of these things were pawned and or sold with mag pull dynamics, stuff on them, civilian switches on them, basically semi-automatics, which are meaningless in Mexico. You can machine that part quickly and just drop it in and turn them into full autos. So it was clear everything was coming from the US and it was like day and night flooding of weapons of new out of the box stuff with EOTechs on it. Well, a reporter got ahold of an internal ATF email, but it's apparently, well, I should say internal, it's going out to firearms dealers. Listen to this. It comes from ATF, FFL alert, the federal firearms license. It's you for unclassified. So they're sharing it, but law enforcement is advising federal firearms licensees of expanding interest of criminal networks intention to be utilized straw purchasers in acquiring large caliber firearms, such as 50 caliber and or belt fed rifles within the next 60 days. This activity is anticipated to occur through the entire state of Texas. Please contact your local ATF offices, blah, blah, blah. I mean, yeah. I mean, this is ongoing. And now they're like, do you say they're crossing the border just like they do to marijuana? We had an episode with a guy named John Norris, who was a conservation officer in California. You know, John? Yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah. We had him on talking about the impact, the environmental impact the cartels have had out in California, the billions of waters. To your point, you can make it legal all you want. Well, now the cartel is crossing over. Not only that, but you see things like this and you wonder, are they just going to arm up on this rather than trying to, you know, they just trying to bring guns across the border. They'll just come over here and buy them legally or, you know, illegally, but they're going to arm up on this side. Yeah. I mean, I think we're heading into this no return zone. The border right now is being controlled by two or three organizations, but there's no large swath of it, important swath of it next to a giant drug market that is controlled by the New Generation Cartel. Not yet. They're working on it in Baja. When that happens, now there's a corridor for them to move and grow within the United States. There's a case to be made about gang violence lowering itself in the United States in the early 2000s because of the Sinaloa cartel dominance in drug markets in the US. There's a case to be made because of that, because they went in and basically said, you know, we're in charge now. This is how we supply and distribute. There's a few other competitors out there. Yeah, I know. But there's a case to be made for the fact that they came in and calmed things down because there's no longer like a real competition as far as distribution from Mexico. What's going to happen when the New Generation Cartel has a clear footing into a large dark market like California? Competition. You know, that's what you see in Mexico. Mexico's violence is because the local drug markets are being fought over and distribution routes. That's the violence in Mexico. The next step is for that to happen in the United States. You know, it's amazing that the cartels haven't figured that out themselves in Mexico, because if they did join forces and stick together and, you know, I mean, I know its egos in the way and greed, all the factors that go along with that, but I mean, they would pretty much be unstoppable. I think these two organizations, the Senior Law Cartel and the New Generation Cartel, are at odds in as far as being able to ally themselves. There's too much blood already spilled between them. I think the danger is if they make it to the U.S. and have a clear pathway into it, basically the control of a large second of the border wall and what goes under it and through it, drug tunnels, etc. Now you have a group that can arm itself and operate itself on both sides of the border without the scrutiny of the United States seeing how they're moving. And also, now they're going to be competing in a very direct way within the United States for markets. So you're going to see high-level hits being carried out in places like the U.S. You already see them. It's already happening. But like high-level, I mean, like 40 people showing up to a town to execute somebody, you know, more armed incursions into the United States from Mexico, which is already happening. You know, people on the Texas border can tell you about this more than I can. We had border agents being shot at, law enforcement officers, you know, being shot at. I mean, it's the that's one cartel operating on the border, basically fighting off the border patrol. Now, imagine two cartels fighting each other and the border patrol in the middle of that. It's going to be an interesting open warfare setting. It's already happening in certain ways on the border in Baja and other parts of Texas where there's conflict for the border. And all that's going to be as far as an option is containment. But again, the cartels are already in the United States. I mean, Operation Anaconda, I think, arrested about 80 members of the new generation cartel in a sweep they did probably four years ago or something like that. And, you know, I've traveled across the country and every now and then I get people from some agencies sending me pictures of equipment of clandestine altars to Santa Muerte or to Malverde. And basically I'm tasked to say, hey, what do you think these mean? Because that's another part of my consultancy efforts. And I can tell them like, well, this altar is basically made by a Jalisco member. How do you know? Well, he's utilizing this and this, and that's a Jalisco thing. And they're carrying around sub guns and pistol calibers. That's a very specialized thing. And it's something I recognize from a certain group of people that we went after. So that probably means that they're here. You know, you start detecting stuff like that and it's already happening. You know, this is already here. In our conversations with John Norris, it just boggles your mind that the legislators in the different states that are in favor of legalization don't do any research first. You know, there's no attempt to see what are the potential consequences if we do this. All they're seeing is tax dollars. They can throw out the idea that, you know, oh yeah, this will stop Mexican marijuana coming across. No, it's not. And we've had a former member of the Mexican mafia on here twice, goes by the street name of Mundo. You probably know him. You know, and he's telling us that the Mexican mafia is playing the California legislation like a fiddle. And they're too naive or their egos are in the way and they won't admit it. Yeah, I mean in Colorado they're utilizing the loopholes around the money movements around marijuana to basically launder a shit ton of money for the cartels. They're already there figuring that out, right? So it's a game of chess and they're very much involved in it.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"How did that, that's gotta be a weird feeling is that you realize you were in handcuffs, you were kicked off, you were charged and now you're back. I mean, you talk about trust issues. I mean, inherently. They were laughing in the office, you know, the cars that were in the parking lot, you know, like I, you know, I didn't earn, I didn't earn, I didn't earn an absurd amount of money. And I basically drove the same car driving into that job as the one that left with it, left that job just for discretion purposes. But some of the absurdity you would see in those parking lots after, after these changes were made, it was pretty fascinating. You know, the overt nature of the corruption was like, Oh yeah, we're not going to hide anymore. Let's just take my Hummer H2 to work. You know, it, I was sent to work for the governor for a bit and I did, I basically ran security for the governor of Baja for about four years, three years to be exact. So I took care of him and his family, did a great job there. The man was amazing. His family was amazing. They did a lot of good for the, for the state as well. Was he highly targeted? Yeah, he was very targeted. I ran a protection detail that was based off of Mohammed Karzai's detail in Afghanistan. Exactly. Basically that's the same detail profile that we ran for the governor of Baja during that time. So he's dodging bullets too. Oh yeah. He's, we got in a few, we, we got in a few shootouts outside of his house. Hopefully one day I can get him on a, I can get him on a conversation podcast so he can talk about some of that, some of those issues that we went through, but it was rowdy. At the end of that, I was sent back to operations. Again, it's Mexico. I was, I was at the, you know, next to the governor and now I'm back in operations. And when I got back is when I started noticing all the changes. All these people were back. I was placed in a, I was placed in a security position with one of the directors there. And one of the guys that I still trusted, one of the old school guys. And we did a lot of work for about two years until, until he was moved and I had no other place to hide in basically to keep off going down that path. I was called into the office. They were going to be given new orders by the new director. And he basically said, you are either working for us or you're working against us basically in a clear, direct way. I, I got out of the office and said, I needed to work on something and figure something out. I printed out my resignation and signed it and left that same day. People that were at the office couldn't figure it out. They were like, whoa, what's going on? Like they couldn't see me leaving. You know, I've been there for so long and leaving that job in Mexico, it's job security. There's not a lot of it in Mexico. So it's, you either have cancer or somebody wants to kill you when you leave a job like that, you know? Well, so, but had you, so, and, and, you know, obviously you didn't, you didn't make that decision, but what were the dilemmas if you had stayed on, but refused to align with them? What do you think realistically would have happened to you? I'd probably put in a horrible job position somewhere all the way to the bottom and be pressured and pulled, pushed out anyway, in some way, shape or form. This is what happened. Would you have been targeted for a hit? Maybe. Maybe. Specifically, I knew I was going to be targeted if I said yes. So I left, I left, I left that same afternoon. A lot of questions were around my exit, you know, like, did he find a that was involved and he left because they weren't onto him or a bunch of rumors of that nature. What year was that? Yeah, that's 16, I think. No, seven, 16, 17. Yeah. I was, I just, I just lost my mother probably, like a few days before that happened. So I was going through a lot of, I was going through it. My mom had a lot of health issues and some psychiatric issues for, for the last years of her life. And I was basically a new father taking care of her. And also I had the job that I had. So I was spread thin and I didn't have a lot of, I didn't have a lot of options. Well, the seals say that's called stabbing the lifeboat. It's like, you stab the lifeboat, it's like, you got no choice but to make a decision now, right? So you stabbed the lifeboat, you turned in your letter. So what did you do? Well, it's funny enough, you say the seals. I had a, I had a friend that I met through some of the work that I did and basically conversations. Who's the Navy Seal Reservist and beautiful wife, Kelly, who we had developed a friendship over, over the years. And they offered me a place to stay if anything ever happened, basically. And something did happen. You know, you want to talk about who you're like, knowing who your friends are, you know, this is when you know who your friends are. It's fascinating how, how everybody goes away when you're, when you're not who you were, you know. I had already talked to them about this possibility of me having to leave and they offered a place, a place for me and my family to stay. And I'm married to an American. And my daughter's American. So in my mind, I'd never thought about myself going to the U.S. and living in the U.S. and doing all these things. So I didn't have a choice. They didn't even give me my liquidation money. Like it was that quick and fast. It was like, leave now. I crossed the border into San Diego and started my process that same day. Man, what about your home, your belongings, all that other stuff? Abandoned. Everything had abandoned. Everything was left. It was just me and my, my, my two and a half year old at the time in my arms and a duffel bag with, with just the essentials. And I crossed the border and I was, I was quietly sitting in an avocado orchard that same night contemplating my next move as a human being with my friend Dan who was giving me a shot of tequila. Well, you are an avocado orchard. What? You were in an avocado orchard. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was the quietest I'd been for over 12 years. I used to be on call and now, now you're not needed. Now I don't have anything. Now I'm naked, basically. I'm a naked skeleton sitting in an avocado orchard next to another weird naked skeleton too. If tequila's involved, there's a chance you actually were naked, but we won't ask. There was some nudity. There was some nudity problem at some point. Before we get too far down the road on this though, something that came out of your time, which is what we want to talk about now too. You have a site called edsmanifesto.com. A lot of great stuff there, but you started, you're doing some unique stuff now and it's based upon observations you made while you were doing the work. So let's talk about that. You started because obviously he ran into a lot of people that whether they're kidnapped or being restrained or people being taken against their will, you started noticing things. And one of them that I found interesting was there was a man cuffs and one of the other guys wanted to go, you know, whoop up on him. You said, no, no, no, wait a minute. Let me talk with him. Let me figure out how the hell did you do this? Yeah. Well, so I grew up as a street kid in a lot of ways. I skateboarded. I was very independent from like 13 on forward. Basically I've moved out of my house. Did I just hear a rooster in the background? Oh yeah. This is how you know. This is how you know. I kept thinking, wait a minute. I hear a rooster. This is on my end. There's a rooster next door. I grew up as a street kid, skateboarded and did a lot of bad stuff too because again, never dreamed about being a cop. So I had a lot of that in me. My mom was a devout Catholic and we grew up in my family's Guadalupano. So religion was very big. Golden rules and the 10 commandments were drilled into me basically. So I never took anything personal. I wasn't one of those guys. I was on an ego trip when I was wearing a badge or working. I saw humanity in everybody. I think two of the things that changed my life was my mom saying to me, nobody's against you. They're for themselves. You know, learn this and you will be better off. And my dad said, never let anybody own you. I think both of those things kept me alive during that time. Every time I would grab somebody and they would showcase something interesting, I would take a picture of it. I would write down some things or a video and I would share it with my people. You know, hey, look at this weird thing that I just found out. A burglar that we found who was breaking into these high value neighborhood places was utilizing expansion foam to drown out the sonic alarms outside of houses. And that was fascinating that they were doing that. So I wrote that down and took some pictures and shared them on a blog that I used to run, an anonymous blog that I used to run on Tumblr. It was called Ed's Manifesto. That's where it started basically. So not only was I writing some of these downs and having conversations with some of these criminals and some of these people that knew things that I was learning from them, I was also sharing it openly. When I say openly, I mean, I was posting some of these things online and like, hey, have you ever seen anything like this? And it'd be really like, oh, what's that? You know, slowly but surely that anonymous account gained a cult following. Then switched to Facebook and then Instagram. How long did it stay anonymous? It stayed anonymous for as long as I was still active. Basically, as soon as I started being a bit more known publicly when I started working for the governor of Baja, basically, and my face was on the newspaper every now and then because I was standing next to him. I'd show a little bit more of who I was and where I was, you know, when I left the job and went to the US. I mean, it was basically, I figured that I had to be a bit more public with it, I guess, because there was not a lot of other things I was doing. So I started being more in the open, showing my face more and talking a little bit more about my history while I was out. And it turned into a lot of training opportunities. People wanted to learn some of the things that I learned while I was down there. Well, let's talk about that for a second. I mean, let's talk about a couple of things that you discovered. What were a couple of things that when you discovered them, you go either like, oh, shit, that guy could have done that to me. At some point you ask, how the hell did you think of this, right? I mean, what did you do? It's the old trick we used to teach rookies to always make sure you look up. Where did a lot of burglars, you know, you'd get called out in the middle of the night. Where would they hide? They hide in the tree because a lot of times the cops wouldn't look up. They'd just look on the ground, right? That's kind of basic stuff. But what impressed you or how did you go about finding out from these guys? How did you think about this problem? What was the way you looked at the problem different than we were to enable you to figure out how to get out of handcuffs or flexicuffs or like using that sonic phone that you were talking about, that expansion phone? Yeah, I mean, my mindset first, not being allowed to and not being able to are two completely different things. You know, that's a red pill you take. These people have that red pill. They've been experimenting, utilizing monkey do monkey see experimentation, actually doing things live and seeing things and learning through experience. You have a cadet coming out or a police officer coming out who is trained to basically handcuff people in a certain way. And there are people that learn how to get out of these specific situations by learning through seeing somebody go through it and figuring out how to hide things, how to conceal things. We found a guy with a I remember seeing that and actually being the one that searched him, didn't find that. And for folks, we're on the podcast, folks can't see it, but you have held up like you're indexing your middle finger and it's like in the V. Yeah, so he basically cut off the ring off the key and put in superglued it in between his index and middle finger. He was handcuffed. You know, they did a shitty job handcuffing him. He didn't put him palms out and key way up like you should, but still he was handcuffed and he got free, couldn't figure out where that was. And through a conversation with him, he's like, yeah, so, you know, this is like, it's holding like, where did you learn that? It's like, ah, some weird Cuban dude showed me. Oh, cool. Where, where did he show you this? He said, oh, there's a, there's a few Cuban people around showing things like this. It's like, oh, that's cool. You know, what else did they show you? And he proceeded to take this magnet clasp off a face of this necklace that he had on. I think he was probably a Santero or some sort of Afro-Caribbean necklace that he had on for protection. So he takes it, he takes it off and it has a magnet clasp on it. So you can't be strangled with it. So he's smart about that too. He spun the magnet clasp on his finger and he said, put a key in your pocket. So I grabbed the handcuff key and put it in my pocket. And as he was basically sliding that magnet clasp around me, doing simulating, being up, doing a pat down, the key and the magnet reacted together. So he found a key that where it was hiding. So he said, if you want to want to search somebody and you're looking for something small and metallic, just a string of magnet on your finger. And you can basically carry with you a metal detector, you know, on your hand. If you're really worried about somebody hiding something of this nature. And I was like, okay, that's creepy. And I will take that into account. So I wrote that shit down and along with a lot of other things that I basically wrote down and stored and practiced and figured out for myself, a lot of these things were basically learned to then show to the newer guys that were coming on our unit. So I got to tell you, when I was a rookie police officer, Salina, Kansas, one of your rites of passage was they would do what they would it was called railing. They would handcuff you to the rails, you know, one arm on each side, because we had this stairway that went up to municipal court and there were these metal square rails on each side. Well, the way they'd always set it up is, you know, the lieutenant would call you and said, we're doing a weapons check. So, you know, they had the sand pit there, you empty out here. We had revolvers emptied out, hand it to them. And then the guys would attack you. And the goal was you had to resist. And this is back in the day when you could do that stuff. Well, I had been given a little bit of, I'd heard somebody talking about it and I said, well, if I ever got, if somebody ever got the drop on me and handcuffed me, what would I do? Well, we had, remember those old black leather boots you had them, they had the straps on the side, you'd wear them. Well, I took a, I took a spare handcuff key and I hid it inside of the straps of one of those. I cut a little thing and hid it down in there. Big mistake, my friends, because what I realized is when I, when I uncuffed myself and I think I'm feeling pretty smart, I got stripped down even farther next time when they handcuffed me to the rails, there was no hiding the key that I could reach anywhere there. Yeah. If you're going to do any trick like that only works once. There's no, there's no doing it twice. I mean, if it also, the rule is if they find one thing, you're naked. Yeah. If they find one thing, you're naked, you know. I wasn't quite naked, but let's put it this way. There was no way I was going to be able to hide anything. So a lot of the, a lot of the ways that these guys are learning is also through hazing rituals and hazing rituals. I know the US has been slowly kind of getting rid of a lot of them, but they have a place. I think they serve, absolutely. I think they serve a purpose. We got put through a lot and every now and then I hear some horror stories of people going through the military hazing rituals in the US and I'm like, we were actually physically beaten with sticks and punched in the face several times during our training. So the, but what I mean with the hazing ritual aspect of it, these guys are learning through experiences. When I started showing some of this stuff in the US, they would be like, Hey, did you learn this through your military training? Like, was this shown by you by some sort of specialty people? Like, no, these are all criminal. This is all criminal methodology that I'm learning. So why were they sharing that with you? I mean, you'd be surprised. Some people just want to talk. If you're not a piece of shit human being, give them a cigarette and allow them to make a supervised call to their mother to just tell them to not worry because he's not going to make it to home for Christmas. You can sit down with some of these people and learn some of these things. And also, if you don't know what you're looking at, you won't see it. So once you start delving into the site exploitation and seeing open laptops and seeing some of their browsing histories and looking at what they were looking at online, you start realizing how they were kind of looking at problems. We ran into a group that was abducting people at an industrial scale in Baja. And we got to see their laptops. One of them had an open laptop in the houses that, one of the houses that we found. And they were researching a civilian seer training in the United States. So they were researching how to get out of zip ties and basically fortifying their zip ties so that exploitation can be utilized on the zip ties that we're putting on people. Or they were seeing the proliferation of these plastic handcuff keys that were all of a sudden being put out. So they evolved their methodology so that when they would handcuff people, they would handcuff them and tie the handcuffs to their necks so they can lower them to get out. Because a lot of the businessmen and a lot of the people that were working in Baja at that time started getting counter-kidnap training from Americans or from Israelis. And it's an arms race. It's always an arms race. And I think what I brought new to the whole scene as far as training goes is I started getting involved in live conversations with some of these people to try and figure some of these things out. Very smart. It's led to a business for you now. It's more than a business.
Game of Crimes
A highlight from 119: Part 2: Ed Calderon Fights Cartels, Corruption, and Crime in Tijuana, Mexico
"How did that, that's gotta be a weird feeling is that you realize you were in handcuffs, you were kicked off, you were charged and now you're back. I mean, you talk about trust issues. I mean, inherently. They laughing were in the office, you know, the cars that were in the parking lot, you know, like I, you know, I didn't earn, I didn't earn, I didn't earn an absurd amount of money. And I basically drove the same car driving into that job as the one that left with it, left that job just for discretion purposes. But some of the absurdity you would see in those parking lots after, after these changes were made, it was pretty fascinating. You know, the overt nature of the corruption was like, Oh yeah, we're not going to hide anymore. Let's just take my Hummer H2 to work. You know, it, I was sent to work for the governor for a bit and I did, I basically ran security for the governor of Baja for about four years, three years to be exact. So I took care of him and his family, did a great job there. The man was amazing. His family was amazing. They did a lot of good for the, for the state as well. Was he highly targeted? Yeah, he was very targeted. I ran a protection detail that was based off of Mohammed Karzai's detail in Afghanistan. Exactly. Basically that's the same detail profile that we ran for the governor of Baja during that time. So he's dodging bullets too. Oh yeah. He's, we got in a few, we, we got in a few shootouts outside of his house. Hopefully one day I can get him on a, I can get him on a conversation podcast so he can talk about some of that, some of those issues that we went through, but it was rowdy. At the end of that, I was sent back to operations. Again, it's Mexico. I was, I was at the, you know, next to the governor and now I'm back in operations. And when I got back is when I started noticing all the changes. All these people were back. I was placed in a, I was placed in a security position with one of the directors there. And one of the guys that I still trusted, one of the old school guys. And we did a lot of work for about two years until, until he was moved and I had no other place to hide in basically to keep off going down that path. I was called into the office. They were going to be given new orders by the new director. And he basically said, you are either working for us or you're working against us basically in a clear, direct way. I, I got out of the office and said, I needed to work on something and figure something out. I printed out my resignation and signed it and left that same day. People that were at the office couldn't figure it out. They were like, whoa, what's going on? Like they couldn't see me leaving. You know, I've been there for so long and leaving that job in Mexico, it's job security. There's not a lot of it in Mexico. So it's, you either have cancer or somebody wants to kill you when you leave a job like that, you know? Well, so, but had you, so, and, and, you know, obviously you didn't, you didn't make that decision, but what were the dilemmas if you had stayed on, but refused to align with them? What do you think realistically would have happened to you? I'd probably put in a horrible job position somewhere all the way to the bottom and be pressured and pulled, pushed out anyway, in some way, shape or form. This is what happened. Would you have been targeted for a hit? Maybe. Maybe. Specifically, I knew I was going to be targeted if I said yes. So I left, I left, I left that same afternoon. A lot of questions were around my exit, you know, like, did he find a that involved was and he left because they weren't onto him or a bunch of rumors of that nature. What year was that? Yeah, that's 16, I think. No, seven, 16, 17. Yeah. I was, I just, I just lost my mother probably, like a few days before that happened. So I was going through a lot of, I was going through it. My mom had a lot of health issues and some psychiatric issues for, for the last years of her life. And I was basically a new father taking care of her. And also I had the job that I had. So I was spread thin and I didn't have a lot of, I didn't have a lot of options. Well, the seals say that's called stabbing the lifeboat. It's like, you stab the lifeboat, it's like, you got no choice but to make a decision now, right? So you stabbed the lifeboat, you turned in your letter. So what did you do? Well, it's funny enough, you say the seals. I had a, I had a friend that I met through some of the work that I did and basically conversations. Who's the Navy Seal Reservist and beautiful wife, Kelly, who we had developed a friendship over, over the years. And they offered me a place to stay if anything ever happened, basically. And something did happen. You know, you want to talk about who you're like, knowing who your friends are, you know, this is when you know who your friends are. It's fascinating how, how everybody goes away when you're, when you're not who you were, you know. I had already talked to them about this possibility of me having to leave and they offered a place, a place for me and my family to stay. And I'm married to an American. And my daughter's American. So in my mind, I'd never thought about myself going to the U .S. and living in the U .S. and doing all these things. So I didn't have a choice. They didn't even give me my liquidation money. Like it was that quick and fast. It was like, leave now. I crossed the border into San Diego and started my process that same day. Man, what about your home, your belongings, all that other stuff? Abandoned. Everything had abandoned. Everything was left. It was just me and my, my, my two and a half year old at the time in my arms and a duffel bag with, with just the essentials. And I crossed the border and I was, I was quietly sitting in an avocado orchard that same night contemplating my next move as a human being with my friend Dan who was giving me a shot of tequila. Well, you are an avocado orchard. What? You were in an avocado orchard. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was the quietest I'd been for over 12 years. I used to be on call and now, now you're not needed. Now I don't have anything. Now I'm naked, basically. I'm a naked skeleton sitting in an avocado orchard next to another weird naked skeleton too. If tequila's involved, there's a chance you actually were naked, but we won't ask. There was some nudity. There was some nudity problem at some point. Before we get too far down the road on this though, something that came out of your time, which is what we want to talk about now too. You have a site called edsmanifesto .com. A lot of great stuff there, but you started, you're doing some unique stuff now and it's based upon observations you made while you were doing the work. So let's talk about that. You started because obviously he ran into a lot of people that whether they're kidnapped or being restrained or people being taken against their will, you started noticing things. And one of them that I found interesting was there was a man cuffs and one of the other guys wanted to go, you know, whoop up on him. You said, no, no, no, wait a minute. Let me talk with him. Let me figure out how the hell did you do this? Yeah. Well, so I grew up as a street kid in a lot of ways. I skateboarded. I was very independent from like 13 on forward. Basically I've moved out of my house. Did I just hear a rooster in the background? Oh yeah. This is how you know. This is how you know. I kept thinking, wait a minute. I hear a rooster. This is on my end. There's a rooster next door. I grew up as a street kid, skateboarded and did a lot of bad stuff too because again, never dreamed about being a cop. So I had a lot of that in me. My mom was a devout Catholic and we grew up in my family's Guadalupano. So religion was very big. Golden rules and the 10 commandments were drilled into me basically. So never I took anything personal. I wasn't one of those guys. I was on an ego trip when I was wearing a badge or working. I saw humanity in everybody. I think two of the things that changed my life was my mom saying to me, nobody's against you. They're for themselves. You know, learn this and you will be better off. And my dad said, never let anybody own you. I think both of those things kept me alive during that time. Every time I would grab somebody and they would showcase something interesting, I would take a picture of it. I would write down some things or a video and I would share it with my people. You know, hey, look at this weird thing that I just found out. A burglar that we found who was breaking into these high value neighborhood places was utilizing expansion foam to drown out the sonic alarms outside of houses. And that was fascinating that they were doing that. So I wrote that down and took some pictures and shared them on a blog that I used to run, an anonymous blog that I used to run on Tumblr. It was called Ed's Manifesto. That's where it started basically. So not only was I writing some of these downs and having conversations with some of these criminals and some of these people that knew things that I was learning from them, I was also sharing it openly. When I say openly, I mean, I was posting some of these things online and like, hey, have you ever seen anything like this? And it'd be really like, oh, what's that? You know, slowly but surely that anonymous account gained a cult following. Then switched to Facebook and then Instagram. How long did it stay anonymous? It stayed anonymous for as long as I was still active. Basically, as soon as I started being a bit more known publicly when I started working for the governor of Baja, basically, and my face was on the newspaper every now and then because I was standing next to him. I'd show a little bit more of who I was and where I was, you know, when I left the job and went to the US. I mean, it was basically, I figured that I had to be a bit more public with it, I guess, because there was not a lot of other things I was doing. So I started being more in the open, showing my face more and talking a little bit more about my history while I was out. And it turned into a lot of training opportunities. People wanted to learn some of the things that I learned while I was down there. Well, let's talk about that for a second. I mean, let's talk about a couple of things that you discovered. What were a couple of things that when you discovered them, you go either like, oh, shit, that guy could have done that to me. At some point you ask, how the hell did you think of this, right? I mean, what did you do? It's the old trick we used to teach rookies to always make sure you look up. Where did a lot of burglars, you know, you'd get called out in the middle of the night. Where would they hide? They hide in the tree because a lot of times the cops wouldn't look up. They'd just look on the ground, right? That's kind of basic stuff. But what impressed you or how did you go about finding out from these guys? How did you think about this problem? What was the way you looked at the problem different than we were to enable you to figure out how to get out of handcuffs or flexicuffs or like using that sonic phone that you were talking about, that expansion phone? Yeah, I mean, my mindset first, not being allowed to and not being able to are two completely different things. You know, that's a red pill you take. These people have that red pill. They've been experimenting, utilizing monkey do monkey see experimentation, actually doing things live and seeing things and learning through experience. You have a cadet coming out or a police officer coming out who is trained to basically handcuff people in a certain way. And there are people that learn how to get out of these specific situations by learning through seeing somebody go through it and figuring out how to hide things, how to conceal things. We found a guy with a I seeing remember that and actually being the one that searched him, didn't find that. And for folks, we're on the podcast, folks can't see it, but you have held up like you're indexing your middle finger and it's like in the V. Yeah, so he basically cut off the ring off the key and put in superglued it in between his index and middle finger. He was handcuffed. You know, they did a shitty job handcuffing him. He didn't put him palms out and key way up like you should, but still he was handcuffed and he got free, couldn't figure out where that was. And through a conversation with him, he's like, yeah, so, you know, this is like, it's holding like, where did you learn that? It's like, ah, some weird Cuban dude showed me. Oh, cool. Where, where did he show you this? He said, oh, there's a, there's a few Cuban people around showing things like this. It's like, oh, that's cool. You know, what else did they show you? And he proceeded to take this clasp magnet off a face of this necklace that he had on. I think he was probably a Santero or some sort of Afro -Caribbean necklace that he had on for protection. So he takes it, he takes it off and it has a magnet clasp on it. So you can't be strangled with it. So he's smart about that too. He spun the magnet clasp on his finger and he said, put a key in your pocket. So I grabbed the handcuff key and put it in my pocket. And as he was basically sliding that magnet clasp around me, doing simulating, being up, doing a pat down, the key and the magnet reacted together. So he found a key that where it was hiding. So he said, if you want to want to search somebody and you're looking for something small and metallic, just a string of magnet on your finger. And you can basically carry with you a metal detector, you know, on your hand. If you're really worried about somebody hiding something of this nature. And I was like, okay, that's creepy. And I will take that into account. So I wrote that shit down and along with a lot of other things that I basically wrote down and stored and practiced and figured out for myself, a lot of these things were basically learned to then show to the newer guys that were coming on our unit. So I got to tell you, when I was a rookie police officer, Salina, Kansas, one of your rites of passage was they would do what they would it was called railing. They would handcuff you to the rails, you know, one arm on each side, because we had this stairway that went up to municipal court and there were these metal square rails on each side. Well, the way they'd always set it up is, you know, the lieutenant would call you and said, we're doing a weapons check. So, you know, they had the sand pit there, you empty out here. We had revolvers emptied out, hand it to them. And then the guys would attack you. And the goal was you had to resist. And this is back in the day when you could do that stuff. Well, I had been given a little bit of, I'd heard somebody talking about it and I said, well, if I ever got, if somebody ever got the drop on me and handcuffed me, what would I do? Well, we had, remember those old black leather boots you had them, they had the straps on the side, you'd wear them. Well, I took a, I took a spare handcuff key and I hid it inside of the straps of one of those. I cut a little thing and hid it down in there. Big mistake, my friends, because what I realized is when I, when I uncuffed myself and I think I'm feeling pretty smart, I got stripped down even farther next time when they handcuffed me to the rails, there was no hiding the key that I could reach anywhere there. Yeah. If you're going to do any trick like that only works once. There's no, there's no doing it twice. I mean, if it also, the rule is if they find one thing, you're naked. Yeah. If they find one thing, you're naked, you know. I wasn't quite naked, but let's put it this way. There was no way I was going to be able to hide anything. So a lot of the, a lot of the ways that these guys are learning is also through hazing rituals and hazing rituals. I know the US has been slowly kind of getting rid of a lot of them, but they have a place. I think they serve, absolutely. I think they serve a purpose. We got put through a lot and every now and then I hear some horror stories of people going through the military hazing rituals in the US and I'm like, we were actually physically beaten with sticks and punched in the face several times during our training. So the, but what I mean with the hazing ritual aspect of it, these guys are learning through experiences. When I started showing some of this stuff in the US, they would be like, Hey, did you learn this through your military training? Like, was this shown by you by some sort of specialty people? Like, no, these are all criminal. This is all criminal methodology that I'm learning. So why were they sharing that with you? I mean, you'd be surprised. Some people just want to talk. If you're not a piece of shit human being, give them a cigarette and allow them to make a supervised call to their mother to just tell them to not worry because he's not going to make it to home for Christmas. You can sit down with some of these people and learn some of these things. And also, if you don't know what you're looking at, you won't see it. So once you start delving into the site exploitation and seeing open laptops and seeing some of their browsing histories and looking at what they were looking at online, you start realizing how they were kind of looking at problems. We ran into a group that was abducting people at an industrial scale in Baja. And we got to see their laptops. One of them had an open laptop in the houses that, one of the houses that we found. And they were researching a civilian seer training in the United States. So they were researching how to get out of zip ties and basically fortifying their zip ties so that exploitation can be utilized on the zip ties that we're putting on people. Or they were seeing the proliferation of these plastic handcuff keys that were all of a sudden being put out. So they evolved their methodology so that when they would handcuff people, they would handcuff them and tie the handcuffs to their necks so they can lower them to get out. Because a lot of the businessmen and a lot of the people that were working in Baja at that time started getting counter -kidnap training from Americans or from Israelis. And it's an arms race. It's always an arms race. And I think what I brought new to the whole scene as far as training goes is I started getting involved in live conversations with some of these people to try and figure some of these things out. Very smart. It's led to a business for you now. It's more than a business.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"It's been a recurring thing that I hear like, oh, the DEA arrested him. No, we didn't say that. The guys we talked to made it very clear it was the Mexican Marines who went in, you know, they were working with them, but you're saying it was two federal police officers? He carjacked us. No, I mean, eventually, but I'm talking about the operation. I know what you're getting at, the actual arrest. The actual arrest was done by two federal roadside cops. He's in a dirty white, he's in a dirty t-shirt, you know. Yeah, he went through a sewer because he had some of the most advanced escape safe houses that anybody's ever seen in Mexico. At least on that end, he was the top of the game. And I say this because it seems to me that a lot of effort was put into the narrative of this operation, you know, and it was boggling the mind to some of us that have been in that field for years to try Why all that effort over some specific guy? You know, because if you designate somebody as a big figurehead and then you get that figurehead, you claim victory, you go, hey, we've done something about it, as opposed to have you really. I mean, is it about the stat or is it about the actual impact? And I know, Murph, we've had these discussions before. Well, even, and so the reason I was in Mexico City on those original meetings is as I was working out of our special operations division and I was running the Mexico Central America section. And I can't get into a lot of detail on some of this because it's, some of it's still classified and some of it you just don't want people to know capabilities. But there was a lot of discussion about that guy, about Chapo, and there were assets in place that could monitor certain things. The execution part was the problem. And this was back in, what do you say, 2003? I was there from 01 to 06, so this was 03 or 04. And my suggestion to everybody was let's bring in our special operators, just like we did in Columbia against Pablo. The problem is, once we got, we had Dev Groom, we had Delta down there with us, but then their general said, well, you can only be in the base, you can't go out in the field. Special mission unit Delta, Delta Force doesn't exist. Not the best frickin' operators in the world were confined to base. I mean, these guys are the frickin' studs of the world. But here was the difference. The Colombians invited us down there, the Mexicans won't. Mexico has a very, and I'm Mexican by birth, and I'm making my way into being a citizen in the U.S. Mexico in general has a very difficult relationship with the United States foreign policy, and it's historically been pretty bad on the Mexican end. So inviting the U.S. military to operate in Mexico is political suicide in every single way, shape, or form you can have in Mexico. If you do that, you're dead politically, and the army knows this. You go all the way back to Pancho Villa and the Alamo, and this is not something that just happened yesterday. Yeah, but I've heard rumors of very tall people wearing federal police uniforms that didn't know how to respond in Spanish. I was around for some of those weird fuckin' events. The main issue, I think, is that Mexico is realistically free-for-all and lawless. If the United States really wanted to stop the fentanyl flow through its borders, it would probably have to set up some sort of military or naval blockade on the Pacific and the Atlantic side. I've floated this idea of actually discussing this with the guy at DOD this morning, talking about the legalities of it. You almost get to the point where you have to declare a demilitarized zone. You have to say three miles either side of this is open for military action. To your point, you've got to blockade everything from the border to the water to the airspace. We're almost back into a Tom Clancy, clear and present danger thing, where you have to declare, until they declare the cartels a terrorist organization or something that gives them an official designation to go after them. To your point, it's a political issue and it's not been handled well. The whole terrorist designation thing, it's interesting. They're politicized in every way. That's why Mexico has one of the most... They assassinate a lot of political candidates in Mexico. I think it's one of the places where it's one of the most dangerous places to be one in the world. They also go after the press a lot because members of the press report on one side or the other. They're very much politicized and they're very much in the political sphere. They hang people from bridges and the amounts of the ISIS execution videos that you would see back in the day were all realistically inspired by the Mexican ones. The cartels they were doing this year, this wasn't anything new to them, beheading people. We got so upset, and we should have, when ISIS beheaded a couple of captors. But then there'd be 10 people you'd find buried in a mass grave all had their heads taken off and it was like just another day in news reporting. The ones that really pioneered the whole projecting horrible events aspect of it was Mexico. The cartels were posting some of these execution videos before ISIS. It's been interesting to see them basically express every single element that you would consider for a terrorist organization. It's a transnational group engaging in violence for a political end. They affect elections, they affect spending, they affect... I don't know why we haven't designated them that, but then the question is even if we did, what would change? I think I know one of the reasons why that hasn't happened, and it's a political and immigration reason. As soon as you declare all these organizations a terrorist organization, everybody coming over that border, fleeing from the violence, now has a legal claim to asylum. And that is a big issue. I think that is at the core of things. It's not like it's stopping anything at this point either. I mean, it's when you look at what's coming across, it's like everybody's claiming asylum anyway. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard issue. It's a complex one. Something has to be done, and if it isn't done, something's going to be forced upon the United States to react, and I think that's where we're headed. Five years ago, I said in five years, not two years ago, I said in five years, we're going to see some sort of military intervention by the U.S. and Mexico. And with everything that's going on, I think I'm pretty well on my way to kind of be right about that. Members of Congress have talked about that. It's a bipartisan thing, so something's coming. We're heading into elections now in Mexico. And what do you think about the woman candidate? Do you think she's got a shot? There seems to be absolutely nobody in the political realm that has any sort of name behind them. I think she's going to be a sure win for these coming elections. The other guy that was running, Evrat, who was basically taken out, he had some interesting ideas about the state of security in Mexico. And I think some of these are going to be rehashed by this political candidate. He had something called the Plan Anquil for Mexico, which is basically an AI-ran, Chinese state-provided security plan that involves social credit. Social credit, here we go again. Yeah, it's social credit and surveillance and drones and you name it, basically. And he showcases video of the people that were involved in the creation of this. There's a big segment of that on the Chinese president showing up in that video. I think that's where we're headed. There's open hostility and there's an open political hostility between Mexico and the United States now. There's a lot of tension going on and China's being invited in. And you can see that in different letters of the politics in Mexico and anti-Americanism in Mexico is at an all-time high. So it's a perfect storm. Let's rewind a little bit because I want to talk a little bit more about your time on the police force now and on this experimental group. What were some of the things that you got involved in that you started... At some point you felt like you could make a difference, right? So what were the things that you were doing that you thought, hey, man, I really can make a difference. I really can impact things. What kind of operations or things were you guys doing? We would basically get information from basically a national platform of information that just got started through leadership. And our leadership was basically the military members that were working in a civilian capacity at this point, like Lezola. Since they were members of the military and they were high ranking officers, they had access to information that none of us could ever have access to. So there was a clear line of communication from the top all the way to the bottom. And we had people that we can trust, that we can work with. And we had actual secrecy within the groups once we were settled. So we'd basically be going out every night, figuring some of these target packages out. From growth sites to laboratories to people who were running some of the most sophisticated abduction and ransom operations the world had ever seen back then. To just figuring out where things were coming from and where they were going to. A lot of that work was done in cooperation with the United States. I got to work on a lot of stuff with our liaison unit. So it was basically, you could see the pace of it as soon as Lezola got involved in actually being the director of us. And getting everything lined up so we could operate, it was clear. It was work being done, it was fear being felt on the other side of the table, the people we were fighting. Our weapons changed. Before we were on, it was unheard of to see a police officer carrying around a fully automatic rifle. Or a grenade launcher for that fact. Slowly but surely he started arming us and preparing us for a war. He very much treated it as a war, or as a counter-insurgency is what he would say. He would, instead of sending us out in small groups, he would send us out in big groups and we would operate in different parts of the city during the night and we would move around. So it was an unknown where we were going to be or what was going to happen. We didn't even know where we were going to be sometimes. Some nights we would just be moved around randomly. What was your area of responsibility? Just Tijuana or the state? All of Baja. I worked outside of Baja a few times on loan, but mostly all of Baja. And Mexico, if I remember, is structured, is it 38 states or 37 states? 37 states, I think. So you've got state police forces, right? Then you've got a federal police force. So back then the federal police was basically army guys dressed in grey and they would ride in the back of our trucks. That was the federal police back then when it first got started. It eventually professionalized and they were trying to figure out, so they were trying to catch up with what we were doing basically. But back then the federal police was army guys dressed in grey in the back of the truck. So there's federal police, state police, and local municipal police. The municipal police historically and all over the country has been the issue. Because it's local police that live there, that have their families living there, and obviously it's a very easy target to go after. And since there's a lot of them, you know, it's hard to move anything in a city without them knowing. So that's who the cartels basically didn't get involved with directly. And I think you mentioned it in an interview you did, it basically boils down to right, plateau or plomo, right? These guys are living there. Yeah, Lezola had a very interesting approach to cleaning up some of those municipal institutions. He basically took, when Tijuana was very corrupt, back then it still is now, but there was a time when he cleaned it up for a bit. He would go into the police precincts and say, hey, who's in charge? This guy. Oh, cool. Obviously he's in leagues with one of the two cartels that are fighting over Tijuana. So he would send him, move him to the precinct that was being ran by the other cartel. They would switch him. So they would immediately quit and then he would put his people in, you know? It was basically the best confident exam ever. Immediately most of these people would quit the next day. This sounds like Northern Ireland, the Protestants and the Catholics, you know, you switch things up. That's an issue in Mexico. I mean, some of this corruption just goes deep and is blood related. It's historic and it's very fractured. Even within a single city, you'll see one side of the city is involved with one group and the other side is involved with the other. So politics are always, it's a game of thrones almost, a level thing. But he did a lot of, we were working daily to get things back to a sense of normal or a sense of safety. When we were, when I got started, these cartel groups would broad daylight run around the city in convoys with AKs out the window, this Tijuana. And by the time we were probably five or six years in, that didn't happen anymore. They were hiding now. So things were changing. So we did feel that things were changing. How did you make it change? I mean, what did you do to make it? Because obviously at some point there's got to be, I mean, violence is inherent in things that happen like this. But how did you, from an operational standpoint, you talk about even like an insurgency. Do you get the public to work with you on this or is this just simply your tactics and your own resources? I think the municipal police was key. Lieutenant Colonel Isaulabe specifically went after cleaning up, professionalizing and sorting out the municipal police locally and using us as a brace to hold things while that was happening. And the municipal police was disarmed for a few weeks at some point. All of the municipal police in Tijuana, their guns were taken. So all of us were basically used and the military were used as an auxiliary police force in Tijuana. I remember going out on a few responding calls and that's probably the bulk of my real community policing experience was when I was basically replacing the municipal police. So he went at things systematically and I think he was allowed to do a lot at different layers of the government, which is why he was so successful. Since he came from the federal branch of the military, he was involved directly in basically institutionalizing a professional police force at a state level with us. And then he was put in charge of the municipal police in Tijuana. So he attacked it from three layers and from three sides. And I think that's what led to his success cleaning up the city, at least for the time it was, because it's pretty much back to square one right now. Was that during the Arellano Felix days? It was at the tail end of them. Something happened to the Arellano Felix cartel, probably related to most of their members being arrested or killed. There was a fracture there. A few of their top level lieutenants basically switched sides to the Sinaloa cartel. Among them, a guy named, they used to call him the three letters El Teo. He basically formed a hyper violent Sinaloa cartel cell in Tijuana and then went to war with the remnants of the Arellano Felix cartel. That's the bulk of the violence that I saw during the time that it was initially active down there. You would see 12 people show up dead one night. You would see shootouts in the middle of the day in different parts of the city. You would see the military basically show up and be involved in some of these shootouts as well. So it was very much an urban warfare setting. With a lot of the things I saw, I think when we would go to foreign training and learn from other people, I think I remember having this moment where we were being shown some of the IRA violence that happened back in the day in Ireland. How they were fighting the military, the English basically. That very much reminded me of some of the stuff that was happening in Baja at that time. I was going to say, we had two of my friends on from New Scotland Yard, the Counterterrorism Command, and one of them was working back in the day when it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary during the troubles in Northern Ireland and some of the tactics they did. He was there. He actually responded when they blew up Lord Mountbatten and the boat that he was on. We always wondered how much cross-pollination, was there any cross-pollination between the provisional IRA and some of those folks that are ending up in Mexico to teach them techniques to resist? Bomb making in Mexico comes directly from the IRA. There's no question about it. IRA people were arrested and detained in Colombia training the FARC members. Some of those same techniques and tactics have shown up in bomb testing fields in Guadalajara and Jalisco, for example. Those homemade mortar devices, mining explosives being utilized to arm civilian drones and to disperse very poisonous chemical pesticides as part of the payload. A lot of these actually do stem from some IRA influence, so there's definitely an influence there as far as the explosives that have been found all over Mexico. We've been experiencing this renaissance of explosives all over Mexico recently. Roadside IEDs are now a thing, and the military is actually learning and preparing for them now. It's something that hadn't happened realistically. We've had car bombs before, but roadside IEDs are now being utilized in places like Michoacán, for example. Murph, when you and Javier were down there going after Pablo, how many bombs a day were going off at the peak? It wasn't unusual to have 10 or 15 per day. There was one evening when we'd been out on ops all day, we came back, we were at the base in Medellín. That night we heard 17 different bombs go off. Wow. In Mexico, there's places where these bombs are being utilized, specifically drone ones. We don't have a lot of ordnance laying around all over the place, but we do have a shit ton of mining explosives that are all over the place. Do you see them using the ammonium nitrate to blow things up also? Every now and then, specifically what they utilize is a thing called Cemex, which is basically mining-level plastic explosives. Those loads are usually made with that. It's controlled and restricted, but it's Mexico. You can't have a gun unless you're poor. If you're poor, you can't have a gun, but if you have money, you can get whatever you want here. Let's talk a little bit more, because this leads into a discussion about, you're on for a long time, but you kind of crossed, as they say, the Rubicon. There becomes a point to where you realize, hey, what I'm doing isn't making a difference anymore. There are some changes in the government, changes in the unit. What starts happening where you start seeing going, yeah, this is not something I think I can do for the next 20 years. I've got to start thinking of an exit strategy. When does that kind of thinking start happening for you? I mean, it lays all the leaves, and it leaves under very bad terms, basically. Bad terms with who? With the government. He's basically pushed out by people who think he's doing too well of a job. Two of our guys get brutally killed, and one of them came out of the academy with me. I knew his family. Great guy. What's his name? Arenas. All right. We salute him. We dedicate this to your buddy. Absolutely. He was a lawyer. He had no reason to go into the police force. He just wanted to make a difference, and he had a giant heart. He was picked up outside of the hotel we were staying at by some dudes dressed in federal police uniforms who were not federal police. And while we were all being basically concentrated in the city to find these people, he was told to step down. That was the first major blow. Was he getting too close to something or just being too effective? I think he was being too effective. He was being too effective and too broad in his approach is what I think probably happened. He was basically going after everybody, and that is not something you could do for a long period in Mexico, apparently. Did he eventually suffer an injury? He had over nine assassination attempts on his life. They tried to poison him with the fruit juice that they would put in his fridge in the office. A military convoy was cloned. They found Hummers painted exactly like the military, and they were going to ambush him in some part of the city. A friend of mine was involved in the security, and he did some legendary shit to get him out of that. Eventually, when he was the police chief of Juarez, when he was leaving that job, he got shot in the back by somebody. That cost him the use of his legs. He's in a wheelchair now. He's still smart as hell, and I'm still afraid of him as a man, but when he left, it basically gutted us. He created a very velocos, forward-driven, militarized police force with a lot of dudes running around with machine guns just ready to respond to shit. All of a sudden, we were neutered. We were told to quiet down. We were told to be less overt. We were told to go back to community policing. We were told to stand down, basically. Things started slowly changing. Politically, this to-the-right presidency left office and was replaced by a central leftist presidency that was more of the old guard of politics in Mexico, the PRI as its own. The PRI, right. They had ruled for a long time. They lost the first election, I think. Wasn't it after Vicente Fox? Didn't he lose? In the PRI, that was their last. Vicente Fox and Calderón got back to the PRI with Pena Nieto. When he came in, a lot of stuff happened. It's the amnesia effect, is what I call it. Every presidential cycle ends, and anything that worked, if it worked because it was because of the other party, fuck that. It's gone. Gee, that sounds familiar. It certainly does. It's not unique to Mexico, pal. I think what's unique to Mexico is that they will throw out everybody. I mean, it doesn't matter if you have, there's no job security. Imagine this. Every five years, you would fire everybody from the FBI and rehire everybody new. This is the level of retardation that I'm talking about. You had these institutions that were built up over the span of two presidential cycles, like the one that I belong to. They were doing the job, they were getting good at it in a lot of ways, and then a lot of the people that were fired because of the polygraph exams being failed sued the government and were hired back because that's not illegal grounds to fire anybody, even though they were on the take. You would see people that hadn't been on the force in six years, seven years, just all of a sudden just show back off the office, people that you clearly knew that were working on the other side or back. And some of these guys you had actually arrested, right? Some of them were arrested by the unit that I was in, yeah, and they were back. That's got to be a weird feeling is that you realize you were in handcuffs, you were kicked off, you were charged, and now you're back. I mean, you talk about trust issues, I mean, inherently. They were laughing in the office. The cars that were in the parking lot, I didn't earn an absurd amount of money and I basically drove the same car driving into that job as the one that left that job just for discretion purposes. But some of the absurdity you would see in those parking lots after these changes were made, it was pretty fascinating. The overt nature of the corruption was like, oh, yeah, we're not going to hide anymore. Let's just take my Hummer H2 to work. In the meantime, go check us out. Also, patreon.com slash Game of Crimes. It's where we put a lot more content you won't hear on our regular podcast. We go into a lot more topics and folks, it is a lot of fun. So go check us out. Patreon.com slash Game of Crimes. In the meantime, everybody stay safe. We'll see you tomorrow for part two.
Game of Crimes
A highlight from 119: Part 1: Ed Calderon Fights Cartels, Corruption, and Crime in Tijuana, Mexico
"It's been a recurring thing that I hear like, oh, the DEA arrested him. No, we didn't say that. The guys we talked to made it very clear it was the Mexican Marines who went in, you know, they were working with them, but you're saying it was two federal police officers? He carjacked us. No, I mean, eventually, but I'm talking about the operation. I know what you're getting at, the actual arrest. The actual arrest was done by two federal roadside cops. He's in a dirty white, he's in a dirty t -shirt, you know. Yeah, he went through a sewer because he had some of the most advanced escape safe houses that anybody's ever seen in Mexico. At least on that end, he was the top of the game. And I say this because it seems to me that a lot of effort was put into the narrative of this operation, you know, and it was boggling the mind to some of us that have been in that field for years to try Why all that effort over some specific guy? You know, because if you designate somebody as a big figurehead and then you get that figurehead, you claim victory, you go, hey, we've done something about it, as opposed to have you really. I mean, is it about the stat or is it about the actual impact? And I know, Murph, we've had these discussions before. Well, even, and so the reason I was in Mexico City on those original meetings is as I was working out of our special operations division and I was running the Mexico Central America section. And I can't get into a lot of detail on some of this because it's, some of it's still classified and some of it you just don't want people to know capabilities. But there was a lot of discussion about that guy, about Chapo, and there were assets in place that could monitor certain things. The execution part was the problem. And this was back in, what do you say, 2003? I was there from 01 to 06, so this was 03 or 04. And my suggestion to everybody was let's bring in our special operators, just like we did in Columbia against Pablo. The problem is, once we got, we had Dev Groom, we had Delta down there with us, but then their general said, well, you can only be in the base, you can't go out in the field. Special mission unit Delta, Delta Force doesn't exist. Not the best frickin' operators in the world were confined to base. I mean, these guys are the frickin' studs of the world. But here was the difference. The Colombians invited us down there, the Mexicans won't. Mexico has a very, and I'm Mexican by birth, and I'm making my way into being a citizen in the U .S. Mexico in general has a very difficult relationship with the United States foreign policy, and it's historically been pretty bad on the Mexican end. So inviting the U .S. military to operate in Mexico is political suicide in every single way, shape, or form you can have in Mexico. If you do that, you're dead politically, and the army knows this. You go all the way back to Pancho Villa and the Alamo, and this is not something that just happened yesterday. Yeah, but I've heard rumors of very tall people wearing federal police uniforms that didn't know how to respond in Spanish. I was around for some of those weird fuckin' events. The main issue, I think, is that Mexico is realistically free -for -all and lawless. If the United States really wanted to stop the fentanyl flow through its borders, it would probably have to set up some sort of military or naval blockade on the Pacific and the Atlantic side. I've floated this idea of actually discussing this with the guy at DOD this morning, talking about the legalities of it. You almost get to the point where you have to declare a demilitarized zone. You have to say three miles either side of this is open for military action. To your point, you've got to blockade everything from the border to the water to the airspace. We're almost back into a Tom Clancy, clear and present danger thing, where you have to declare, until they declare the cartels a terrorist organization or something that gives them an official designation to go after them. To your point, it's a political issue and it's not been handled well. The whole terrorist designation thing, it's interesting. They're in politicized every way. That's why Mexico has one of the most... They assassinate a lot of political candidates in Mexico. I think it's one of the places where it's one of the most dangerous places to be one in the world. They also go after the press a lot because members of the press report on one side or the other. They're very much politicized and they're very much in the political sphere. They hang people from bridges and the amounts of the ISIS execution videos that you would see back in the day were all realistically inspired by the Mexican ones. The cartels they were doing this year, this wasn't anything new to them, beheading people. We got so upset, and we should have, when ISIS beheaded a couple of captors. But then there'd be 10 people you'd find buried in a mass grave all had their heads taken off and it was like just another day in news reporting. The ones that really pioneered the whole projecting horrible events aspect of it was Mexico. The cartels were posting some of these execution videos before ISIS. It's been interesting to see them basically express every single element that you would consider for a terrorist organization. It's a transnational group engaging in violence for a political end. They affect elections, they affect spending, they affect... I don't know why we haven't designated them that, but then the question is even if we did, what would change? I think I know one of the reasons why that hasn't happened, and it's a political and immigration reason. As soon as you declare all these organizations a terrorist organization, everybody coming over that border, fleeing from the violence, now has a legal claim to asylum. And that is a big issue. I think that is at the core of things. It's not like it's stopping anything at this point either. I mean, it's when you look at what's coming across, it's like everybody's claiming asylum anyway. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard issue. It's a complex one. Something has to be done, and if it isn't done, something's going to be forced upon the United States to react, and I think that's where we're headed. Five years ago, I said in five years, not two years ago, I said in five years, we're going to see some sort of military intervention by the U .S. and Mexico. And with everything that's going on, I think I'm pretty well on my way to kind of be right about that. Members of Congress have talked about that. It's a bipartisan thing, so something's coming. We're heading into elections now in Mexico. And what do you think about the woman candidate? Do you think she's got a shot? There seems to be absolutely nobody in the political realm that has any sort of name behind them. I think she's going to be a sure win for these coming elections. guy The other that was running, Evrat, who was basically taken out, he had some interesting ideas about the state of security in Mexico. And I think some of these are going to be rehashed by this political candidate. He had something called the Plan Anquil for Mexico, which is basically an AI -ran, Chinese state -provided security plan that involves social credit. Social credit, here we go again. Yeah, it's social credit and surveillance and drones and you name it, basically. And he showcases video of the people that were involved in the creation of this. There's a big segment of that on the Chinese president showing up in that video. I think that's where we're headed. There's open hostility and there's an open political hostility between Mexico and the United States now. There's a lot of tension going on and China's being invited in. And you can see that in different letters of the politics in Mexico and anti -Americanism in Mexico is at an all -time high. So it's a perfect storm. Let's rewind a little bit because I want to talk a little bit more about your time on the police force now and on this experimental group. What were some of the things that you got involved in that you started... At some point you felt like you could make a difference, right? So what were the things that you were doing that you thought, hey, man, I really can make a difference. I really can impact things. What kind of operations or things were you guys doing? We would basically get information from basically a national platform of information that just got started through leadership. And our leadership was basically the military members that were working in a civilian capacity at this point, like Lezola. Since they were members of the military and they were high ranking officers, they had access to information that none of us could ever have access to. So there was a clear line of communication from the top all the way to the bottom. And we had people that we can trust, that we can work with. And we had actual secrecy within the groups once we were settled. So we'd basically be going out every night, figuring some of these target packages out. From growth sites to laboratories to people who were running some of the most sophisticated abduction and ransom operations the world had ever seen back then. To just figuring out where things were coming from and where they were going to. A lot of that work was done in cooperation with the United States. I got to work on a lot of stuff with our liaison unit. So it was basically, you could see the pace of it as soon as Lezola got involved in actually being the director of us. And getting everything lined up so we could operate, it was clear. It was work being done, it was fear being felt on the other side of the table, the people we were fighting. Our weapons changed. Before we were on, it was unheard of to see a police officer carrying around a fully automatic rifle. Or a grenade launcher for that fact. Slowly but surely he started arming us and preparing us for a war. He very much treated it as a war, or as a counter -insurgency is what he would say. He would, instead of sending us out in small groups, he would send us out in big groups and we would operate in different parts of the city during the night and we would move around. So it was an unknown where we were going to be or what was going to happen. We didn't even know where we were going to be sometimes. Some nights we would just be moved around randomly. What was your area of responsibility? Just Tijuana or the state? All of Baja. I worked outside of Baja a few times on loan, but mostly all of Baja. And Mexico, if I remember, is structured, is it 38 states or 37 states? 37 states, I think. So you've got state police forces, right? Then you've got a federal police force. So back then the federal police was basically army guys dressed in grey and they would ride in the back of our trucks. That was the federal police back then when it first got started. It eventually professionalized and they were trying to figure out, so they were trying to catch up with what we were doing basically. But back then the federal police was army guys dressed in grey in the back of the truck. So there's federal police, state police, and local municipal police. The municipal police historically and all over the country has been the issue. Because it's local police that live there, that have their families living there, and obviously it's a very easy target to go after. And since there's a lot of them, you know, it's hard to move anything in a city without them knowing. So that's who the cartels basically didn't get involved with directly. And I think you mentioned it in an interview you did, it basically boils down to right, plateau or plomo, right? These guys are living there. Yeah, Lezola had a very interesting approach to cleaning up some of those municipal institutions. He basically took, when Tijuana was very corrupt, back then it still is now, but there was a time when he cleaned it up for a bit. He would go into the police precincts and say, hey, who's in charge? This guy. Oh, cool. Obviously he's in leagues with one of the two cartels that are fighting over Tijuana. So he would send him, move him to the precinct that was being ran by the other cartel. They would switch him. So they would immediately quit and then he would put his people in, you know? It was basically the best confident exam ever. Immediately most of these people would quit the next day. This sounds like Northern Ireland, the Protestants and the Catholics, you know, you switch things up. That's an issue in Mexico. I mean, some of this corruption just goes deep and is blood related. It's historic and it's very fractured. Even within a single city, you'll see one side of the city is involved with one group and the other side is involved with the other. So politics are always, it's a game of thrones almost, a level thing. But he did a lot of, we were working daily to get things back to a sense of normal or a sense of safety. When we were, when I got started, these cartel groups would broad daylight run around the city in convoys with AKs out the window, this Tijuana. And by the time we were probably five or six years in, that didn't happen anymore. They were hiding now. So things were changing. So we did feel that things were changing. How did you make it change? I mean, what did you do to make it? Because obviously at some point there's got to be, I mean, violence is inherent in things that happen like this. But how did you, from an operational standpoint, you talk about even like an insurgency. Do you get the public to work with you on this or is this just simply your tactics and your own resources? I think the municipal police was key. Lieutenant Colonel Isaulabe specifically went after cleaning up, professionalizing and sorting out the municipal police locally and using us as a brace to hold things while that was happening. And the municipal police was disarmed for a few weeks at some point. All of the municipal police in Tijuana, their guns were taken. So all of us were basically used and the military were used as an auxiliary police force in Tijuana. I remember going out on a few responding calls and that's probably the bulk of my real community policing experience was when I was basically replacing the municipal police. So he went at things systematically and I think he was allowed to do a lot at different layers of the government, which is why he was so successful. Since he came from the federal branch of the military, he was involved directly in basically institutionalizing a professional police force at a state level with us. And then he was put in charge of the municipal police in Tijuana. So he attacked it from three layers and from three sides. And I think that's what led to his success cleaning up the city, at least for the time it was, because it's pretty much back to square one right now. Was that during the Arellano Felix days? It was at the tail end of them. Something happened to the Arellano Felix cartel, probably related to most of their members being arrested or killed. There was a fracture there. A few of their top level lieutenants basically switched sides to the Sinaloa cartel. Among them, a guy named, they used to call him the three letters El Teo. He basically formed a hyper violent Sinaloa cartel cell in Tijuana and then went to war with the remnants of the Arellano Felix cartel. That's the bulk of the violence that I saw during the time that it was initially active down there. You would see 12 people show up dead one night. You would see shootouts in the middle of the day in different parts of the city. You would see the military basically show up and be involved in some of these shootouts as well. So it was very much an urban warfare setting. With a lot of the things I saw, I think when we would go to foreign training and learn from other people, I think I remember having this moment where we were being shown some of the IRA violence that happened back in the day in Ireland. How they were fighting the military, the English basically. That very much reminded me of some of the stuff that was happening in Baja at that time. I was going to say, we had two of my friends on from New Scotland Yard, the Counterterrorism Command, and one of them was working back in the day when it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary during the troubles in Northern Ireland and some of the tactics they did. He was there. He actually responded when they blew up Lord Mountbatten and the boat that he was on. We always wondered how much cross -pollination, was there any cross -pollination between the provisional IRA and some of those folks that are ending up in Mexico to teach them techniques to resist? Bomb making in Mexico comes directly from the IRA. There's no question about it. IRA people were arrested and detained in Colombia training the FARC members. Some of those same techniques and tactics have shown up in bomb testing fields in Guadalajara and Jalisco, for example. Those homemade mortar devices, mining explosives being utilized to arm civilian drones and to disperse very poisonous chemical pesticides as part of the payload. A lot of these actually do stem from some IRA influence, so there's definitely an influence there as far as the explosives that have been found all over Mexico. We've been experiencing this renaissance of explosives all over Mexico recently. Roadside IEDs are now a thing, and the military is actually learning and preparing for them now. It's something that hadn't happened realistically. We've had car bombs before, but roadside IEDs are now being utilized in places like Michoacán, for example. Murph, when you and Javier were down there going after Pablo, how many bombs a day were going off at the peak? It wasn't unusual to have 10 or 15 per day. There was one evening when we'd been out on ops all day, we came back, we were at the base in Medellín. That night we heard 17 different bombs go off. Wow. In Mexico, there's places where these bombs are being utilized, specifically drone ones. We don't have a lot of ordnance laying around all over the place, but we do have a shit ton of mining explosives that are all over the place. Do you see them using the ammonium nitrate to blow things up also? Every now and then, specifically what they utilize is a thing called Cemex, which is basically mining -level plastic explosives. Those loads are usually made with that. It's controlled and restricted, but it's Mexico. You can't have a gun unless you're poor. If you're poor, you can't have a gun, but if you have money, you can get whatever you want here. Let's talk a little bit more, because this leads into a discussion about, you're on for a long time, but you kind of crossed, as they say, the Rubicon. There becomes a point to where you realize, hey, what I'm doing isn't making a difference anymore. There are some changes in the government, changes in the unit. What starts happening where you start seeing going, yeah, this is not something I think I can do for the next 20 years. I've got to start thinking of an exit strategy. When does that kind of thinking start happening for you? I mean, it lays all the leaves, and it leaves under very bad terms, basically. Bad terms with who? With the government. He's basically pushed out by people who think he's doing too well of a job. Two of our guys get brutally killed, and one of them came out of the academy with me. I knew his family. Great guy. What's his name? Arenas. All right. We salute him. We dedicate this to your buddy. Absolutely. He was a lawyer. He had no reason to go into the police force. He just wanted to make a difference, and he had a giant heart. He was picked up outside of the hotel we were staying at by some dudes dressed in federal police uniforms who were not federal police. And while we were all being basically concentrated in the city to find these people, he was told to step down. That was the first major blow. Was he getting too close to something or just being too effective? I think he was being too effective. He was being too effective and too broad in his approach is what I think probably happened. He was basically going after everybody, and that is not something you could do for a long period in Mexico, apparently. Did he eventually suffer an injury? He over had nine assassination attempts on his life. They tried to poison him with the fruit juice that they would put in his fridge in the office. A military convoy was cloned. They found Hummers painted exactly like the military, and they were going to ambush him in some part of the city. A friend of mine was involved in the security, and he did some legendary shit to get him out of that. Eventually, when he was the police chief of Juarez, when he was leaving that job, he got shot in the back by somebody. That cost him the use of his legs. He's in a wheelchair now. He's still smart as hell, and I'm still afraid of him as a man, but when he left, it basically gutted us. He created a very velocos, forward -driven, militarized police force with a lot of dudes running around with machine guns just ready to respond to shit. All of a sudden, we were neutered. We were told to quiet down. We were told to be less overt. We were told to go back to community policing. We were told to stand down, basically. Things started slowly changing. Politically, this to -the -right presidency left office and was replaced by a central leftist presidency that was more of the old guard of politics in Mexico, the PRI as its own. The PRI, right. They had ruled for a long time. They lost the first election, I think. Wasn't it after Vicente Fox? Didn't he lose? In the PRI, that was their last. Vicente Fox and Calderón got back to the PRI with Pena Nieto. When he came in, a lot of stuff happened. It's the amnesia effect, is what I call it. Every presidential cycle ends, and anything that worked, if it worked because it was because of the other party, fuck that. It's gone. Gee, that sounds familiar. It certainly does. It's not unique to Mexico, pal. I think what's unique to Mexico is that they will throw out everybody. I mean, it doesn't matter if you have, there's no job security. Imagine this. Every five years, you would fire everybody from the FBI and rehire everybody new. This is the level of retardation that I'm talking about. You had these institutions that were built up over the span of two presidential cycles, like the one that I belong to. They were doing the job, they were getting good at it in a lot of ways, and then a lot of the people that were fired because of the polygraph exams being failed sued the government and were hired back because that's not illegal grounds to fire anybody, even though they were on the take. You would see people that hadn't been on the force in six years, seven years, just all of a sudden just show back off the office, people that you clearly knew that were working on the other side or back. And some of these guys you had actually arrested, right? Some of them were arrested by the unit that I was in, yeah, and they were back. That's got to be a weird feeling is that you realize you were in handcuffs, you were kicked off, you were charged, and now you're back. I mean, you talk about trust issues, I mean, inherently. They were laughing in the office. The cars that were in the parking lot, I didn't earn an absurd amount of money and I basically drove the same car driving into that job as the one that left that job just for discretion purposes. But some of the absurdity you would see in those parking lots after these changes were made, it was pretty fascinating. The overt nature of the corruption was like, oh, yeah, we're not going to hide anymore. Let's just take my Hummer H2 to work. In the meantime, go check us out. Also, patreon .com slash Game of Crimes. It's where we put a lot more content you won't hear on our regular podcast. We go into a lot more topics and folks, it is a lot of fun. So go check us out. Patreon .com slash Game of Crimes. In the meantime, everybody stay safe. We'll see you tomorrow for part two.
Game of Crimes
"calderon" Discussed on Game of Crimes
"Hola, hola, hola, amigos, amigos, players, playwrights, dudettes, everybody in between. Welcome to another fabulous edition of Game of Crimes. And the reason I say that as our guest, Spanish is his first language. And so I think in honor of that, we should go back to the original greeting, don't you, Absolutely. There's a reason we do things. I mean, we're just not haphazardly throwing things at you folks. This is all planned. It takes us years to figure out what we're going to do, or minutes, I don't know, one or the other. And whenever we do it, we can't remember what we did two minutes ago, but it takes us years to plan it out. You know, and I even practiced my Spanish with our upcoming guest here. I used my introduction, my hola, y'all, and he understood. And he actually had better white Spanish, you know, gringo Spanish than we did. Y'all are gonna love that. Hey guys, well, welcome back to another exciting episode, episode 119 of the 119th consecutive attempt to take us off the air. We refuse to go quietly into the night. Right. Thank you guys for joining us. Hey, just some quick housekeeping before we get started. Apple and Spotify, hit those reviews. Guys, remember, by the way, if you're on Google, Google podcast is going away. So make sure you're on one of the other major platforms there. Apple, Spotify, name your poison. But Stitcher's gone. Google podcast will be gone. But just make sure you leave your five stars wherever you can. Head on over to our website, gameofcrimespodcast.com for everything about the show, including merch and books. We list things over there, including with our next guest too. Follow us on that thing they call social media, at Game of Crimes on Twitter, Game of Crimes podcast on Facebook and the Instagram, but definitely where you have to be. And look, I tell you, we just had some fun. Again, patreon.com slash Game of Crimes. We just had, we did our 9-1-1 episode, the most unique 9-1-1 call I think ever taken in the history of 9-1-1 calls. You'll hear us laughing, doing a lot of laughing. You got to listen to it. You'd heard it before, but it was like one of the, can you imagine being the dispatcher taking this call and trying to, so what happened now? Then we get into a real serious case. Yeah, but we get into a real serious case, but we thought we'd lead off with something fun. But we also do a lot of stuff. We got our Q and A coming up too here. So if you've got questions for us, make sure you get us in, get that in for us as well. We've got case of the month and our warden of the throne. We just did another couple of good ones there. Quad case. We do a Murph picks too. I pick too. So great stuff, folks. Just go over to patreon.com slash Game of Crimes and also make sure you go visit our favorite mafia queen, Sandy Salvato, the iron fist with the velvet glove rules over everything that is called Game of Crimes fans. Just go to facebook.com slash, or just not slash, but search for Game of Crimes fans. Ask for admittance and you will have fun. I think they'll have fun. Don't you think they'll have fun, Murph? Absolutely. I can almost guarantee it. We guarantee it. There you go. For 30 days or you're money back. No. No. Well, it doesn't cost you anything for the podcast. Of course we can't give you money back. That's right. Hey, but Murph, but you know, this is a show about crime. We talk about bad people doing bad things and bad people doing bad things to good people. We take the story seriously, but... You know, we're not going to take ourselves seriously. And if you haven't figured that out yet, well, hang on. Yeah, because we're going to prove we don't take our seriously because guess what time it is, Murph? Guess what time it is? I know it's late afternoon for you and you're going to sleep, but guess what time it is? It's time. It's nap time. But what it is time for is small town police blubbers. All right. Hey, this one comes to us. Actually, I stole this from the Game of Crime's fan page, courtesy of Molly Fitzsimmons Schlenz. Hopefully I said that right. S-C-H-L-E-N-Z. Schlenz. So this comes to us, Murph, from Bath Township Police Department in Michigan. Michigan. Michigan. So this was posted on a Facebook posting by the Bath Township Police. Basically, they're talking about an encounter they had with the person. If you are going to get incredibly intoxicated at the bar and then drive home, we have a suggestion for you. Okay. On your way home, when you inevitably stop at that McDonald's for some McNuggets, a McDouble and a McFlurry, make sure the McDonald's is actually open. All of the lights being off and no one around would be a clue. Then when you sit in the drive-through at the closed McDonald's for 15 minutes honking your horn and cussing because no one is taking your order, make sure there isn't a police cruiser parked 20 feet away watching you fail miserably. And then after your failed attempt of getting food from the closed restaurant, do not squeal your tires out of the parking lot, over a curb and out onto the roadway. That is how you end up at the jail and the jail does not have any McFlurries. Hashtag McFailed. That's a bad night. Well, first of all, McDonald's too. Ugh, McNuggets? Do you know what goes into those things? They don't either. Bingo! And then on top of everything else, you're going to wake up with a hangover in lockup. It just gets worse. Yeah. It's going to get worse too if you go, hmm, my rear end's sore. Anyway, thank you very much. Anyway, hey, another stupid criminal story comes to us from Dallas. Okay. This happens all over the place. I'm glad to see it happens in Dallas too. Alright. And this guy has been through the ringer before. A hapless bank robber abided by a Dallas teller's request. Before he could rob the place, she wanted two forms of ID. And he fell for it? A judge sentenced 49-year-old Nathan Wayne Pugh of Say Cheese or whatever it's called. Say Cheese. To more than eight years on Tuesday, Pugh tried to hold up a bank in Dallas, the Wells Fargo Bank. By the way, F Wells Fargo. I'll tell you about that later. The teller stalled Hughes by telling him she needed to see two forms of ID, so what did he show her? His Wells Fargo debit card, duh, and a state ID card. He tried to flee with $800. He pleaded guilty in October to a bank robbery charge, MRF. He was already on parole for two aggravated robberies. The guy should have learned by now he's not cut out to rob banks. I'm surprised he didn't say, here, hold my gun a second. I've got to get this out of my pocket. What a moron. Well, hey, MRF, we'll end up with a final story. This one comes to us from Boise, Idaho. Hey, do you have a smartphone? I do. Yeah, this is smart. So let's say that you're a really stupid person. Does a smartphone make you smart or stupid? I would like to say it makes me smart when I'm trying to do things on and I feel really stupid sometimes. This guy feels really stupid, too, because a 21-year-old Idaho man is in trouble. With the law, he's charged with unlawful exercise at the function of a police officer. He tried to pull over a car. Uh-oh, that's bad. With his smartphone because he got a app for his smartphone that flashes blue and red lights just like the po-po. Oh, you're kidding. And he tried to pull someone over and they said, ah, it doesn't look like it's an officer. The person pulled in briefly behind the suspicious driver, followed the car, and called police who located Welch's vehicle. Police found an application on his smartphone that flashed blue and red lights. And then guess what? He got blue and red lights and then they arrested him. Oh, that is just stupid. Unbelievable. People just never cease to make decisions. So here's, you know, Alexander Welch, having a smartphone does not make you smart when you're naturally dumb to begin with. Sorry, pal. It just doesn't work that way. Son of an idiot. What is he going to pull the person over for, I wonder? Who knows? Just for fun and giggles, I guess. Hey, are you as stupid as I am? Ah, you are. If you fell for this, pulled over with the smartphone. Who are you going to hold it to? You're going to hold it outside? Like, you know, it's supposed to... Is he also going, woo, woo? He's going, wee, woo, wee, woo. Wee, woo, wee, woo. Well, I'll tell you somebody who is smart. It's our next guest. Oh, wow. Yeah. And we got to this smart person. This is a very, I'll tell you right now, very interesting story. And a very deceptive one, too, when you think where you think it's going and where it ends up taking us. So tell us a little bit about our upcoming guest, Murph. This is someone I've heard about. You have to, we've heard about this guy for a long time. He was a police officer in Mexico, believe it or not. Has some harrowing stories to tell. And you'll also hear him tell why he left the police and then immigrated to the United States. So he's currently going through the immigration process, but he just didn't stop there. He's taken the things that he learned and he's offering those up to American law enforcement, American military, security companies. We're talking about a guy named Ed Calderon. Ed's been on a lot of podcasts. He's got his own podcast. You'll hear us talk about that towards the end. But here's a man who lived in a third world country. And if you're from Mexico and I just called your country a bad thing, I'm sorry, but that's my take on it. But he went through experiences that make him appreciate living in the United States. And you're going to hear a story here. So this is one we've worked for months and months to get him on board. We finally were able to get on his schedule and just can't thank him enough. Well, Murphy, and when you say we work, this is a guy who's been on Joe Rogan's podcast, Jack Carr's podcast. This guy has made the major rounds and we were lucky to get him. Oh, I think he's been on Rogan two or three times. And I don't listen to those before we have a guest on because I want our interviews to be genuine and original. The word is organic. We want them to be ours. That's a trendy word. It'll go away. So anyway, I mean, this is a special guest, so just really honored to have Ed on here with us. Well, we can't get into Ed in our organic podcast, which is found in the organic aisle of Whole Foods. If you're looking for our podcast, we're in the organic section. But I got to ask you, we won't find out about Ed unless I ask you, are you ready, Murph, to play the biggest, baddest, most dangerous game of all, the game of crimes? Absolutely. So everybody get in, sit down, shut up and hold on. You're going to hear some things you're not going to hear anywhere else. Bring on Mr. Ed Calderon. Well, hey, I'm going to just break. We weren't saying our usual intro, but I'm going to do it for this because it's going to make sense. So hola, hola, hola, amigos, amigos, players, playwrights, dududettes, everybody, welcome back. We've got a really special guest on. Not only is he special because of what he's done, he's special because we had to book this far in advance because this dude is so busy. He's been on a lot of the major podcasts. I just listened to a three hour interview with Jack Carr. So we want to welcome former cop, really good guy. Welcome to Game of Crimes, Ed Calderon. Amigo, bienvenidos. Thank you for the multiple language welcome. I feel pretty excited. Do you want to say something? Do you want to speak in Russian? I don't want to speak in Spanish, so I don't want to speak in Spanish. And I'm going to tell you something. In the United States, I was like, sir, could you sit down with me and explain what a used to could means? What part of the South were you in? Somewhere in Tennessee. I was followed around a Walmart. There you go. There's two strikes right there. You were in Tennessee and at a Walmart. Yeah. That was my moment of learning. And well, third thing was, if you'd gone to a Waffle House after that, you would have completed the cycle. Oh yeah. Waffle House is definitely a very spiritual place where people, you know, you have to fight and eat at the same time. It's a great place to learn urban survival. There's a lot of people in Walmart that don't work at least, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. If I'm right, Ed, that's where you pick up some of your techniques is watching the fights at Waffle House, right? That goes into your training later? I mean, deflecting chairs is something that's probably, I think it's on their worksheet. That was a Jedi move. Yeah. What that one lady did where she deflected that chair, it's like, man, next thing I would have thought is, you know, pushing back and people hitting the wall, you know? One thing I always say is that we're an expression of where we're from and the environment that made us. And you could definitely tell she was from the hood. She'd been through a few fights. Yeah. As you guys can tell this already, this is going to be fun, but hey, we got to get started though with you too. You know, thing of ours, coso nostro, as we say, thing of ours. You were born and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, as they say. Yeah. But how did you, that's a tough area, right? I mean, you're not too far from San Diego, a lot of cross-border stuff, but what led you into wanting to become a cop? Did you have family, friends? What led you to wanting to become a police officer in obviously a very dangerous area? Yeah, well, first off, Tijuana was not that dangerous when I was growing up. I mean, the violence started kind of like really percolating to the top probably in the nineties. I was born in 1982, so I got to see Tijuana when it was still not as rowdy as it turned. I had nobody in my family that was a cop, and I was a punk rock kid, skateboarded. I would get in fights with the cops, the municipal cops in Tijuana, you know. It's always been a pretty corrupt institution, so I had to fuck the police banner in my room and stuff like that, so I didn't want to be a cop. That was far from my mind. But Mexico being the way it is, there was not a lot of options for a young man that didn't have a lot of career path choices. I did about two years of medical school. It was around 9-11 when the economy went into the toilet, and I had to find options. It was working at a call center. It was working at this weird experimental police force that I saw in an ad in the newspaper, or it was joining some of my friends that went on and joined one of the two major cartels operating in the area. So go back, experimental police force, what the hell is experimental police force? It was something that hadn't been talked about a lot. I recently did a long conversation podcast with my former boss and legendary Mexican lawman, Leza Ola. He was an army colonel, a very, very smart man. Basically, they handed him a program of training up a police force that he would then lead. He very much focused on creating a militarized, counter-narcotic, Americanized in a lot of ways, police force on the border and selecting the different types of people for it. Basically, he was looking for young and rowdy people for it because he knew he was basically going to go into a war. I saw the ad in the newspaper, showed it to my parents, and they were like, You're crazy. You're never going to be able to do this. That was their worst mistake, probably, because I love challenges. I found myself in a refurbished prison being trained up by members of the GAFE. These guys are where the Zetas originated. Mexican special forces guys were the ones in charge of our training. It was quickly apparent that this wasn't a run-of-the-mill police agency. They were getting us ready for something different. This one, were they going to focus on kidnappings? No. It was basically focused on anything organized crime-related. Everybody was hands-off in Baja and all over Mexico. Local police officers were basically working one side or the other. The army was working one side or the other, too, as well. They really wanted to try something different. They put all of us through FBI background checks, which was unheard of back then. As Mexicans, you know, and polygraph exams, surprise house visits. They would talk to the neighbors of the people that wanted to get recruited. It was very Americanized in its selection process, and even some of the training. I got to train in Coronado, for example, with some of the NSLU guys. What year was this? This was 2004, when I first got involved in the unit. Probably 2003-ish era was when it got started. So, when all this concept came up, I was in the original meetings for that operation, down in Mexico City, when we were at the embassy having a meeting with the ambassador. I think SOCOM was actually there, and some of the military forces, and then went over and met with the Mexican government and the officials. A lot of the questions were, they wanted to bring you guys up in the U.S. to train. They were trying to figure out how to get weapons across the border. That was the biggest problem we were encountering. This was still in the infancy stages. You mean how to get weapons across the border legally? Yeah. Well, you know, bring their weapons into the U.S. to train with, because you want to train with the weapon you're going to carry, right? Yeah. I think out of those meetings came a lot of the, probably a lot of the root elements of our training. Focusing on the M4 platform, focusing on the M4 platform as a viable weapon, H &K rifles and stuff of that nature basically being invested in, and then us basically going to go into the U.S. and learn from U.S. agencies and the military how to figure out this pilot program of what they were trying to do at a nationwide scale. They did it in Baja first, and then, when I say they, I mean Lieutenant Colonel de Zola, who was basically the guy that originated this form of policing in Mexico. He started in Baja, and then he got moved to Ciudad Juarez, where he basically had the same kind of results. He put the crime down to, he put those cities off the most dangerous cities on the planet. Well, it was not an easy process, of course, but a lot of that kind of started off with him. That's fascinating because we came back for a second meeting on that, and it was starting to move forward. I mean, even ATF was talking about, well, we can get the weapons across one way, but we can't get them across the other way. And we're thinking, well, just let one of the gun shops send them down to Mexico because they're doing it anyway. But that was a big joke in the meeting, but I never heard any more about that. Talk about zero degrees of separation. Here we are. There was an attempt. It didn't work, is all I'm going to say. It didn't work in the long run because, like everything in Mexico, things go in a cycle of five to six years, which is a presidential term. We had a lot of backing because we had two political terms of a federal, a basic federal presidency that were of the same party. So there was a continuation of efforts. Was that Fox? Yeah, it was Fox and then Calderon. Any relation? No, no, not at all. Not at all. I got a smile out of you. I remember I worked for a governor for a bit, and I used to have my name tag and stuff like that, and people look at it for a minute. It was one of the most corrupt presidencies that we ever had, the Felipe Calderon administration, not because of any other reason than what they decided to do, which is basically militarize this drug war and to put people in charge that were completely corrupted. Martinez Luna was one of the guys that was basically at the head of this institution that we were working under, and as things have come out recently, he was basically working for one of the largest criminal organizations in Mexico at the time. Yeah, Garcia Luna. Garcia Luna, yeah. Yeah, we used to meet with him too. I think he was in his initial meetings. Yep. So he was on the take for a long while, and he was the guy in charge of basically setting up programs and verification and selection programs for us. We had to go through multiple confidence exams, FBI background checks, polygraph exams almost on a yearly basis while he was in charge of us. Did anybody put him through a polygraph? That's a great question. He's in prison here in the United States now. Yeah, that's a great question. It's a question that I would ask American policymakers and people of that sort to think about. All of us, including myself, and people can verify this, I went through multiple FBI background checks. Every time I would go into training in the U.S., they would check our names just to see if anything popped up. But somehow the guy that was in charge of everything at a federal level was in constant communication with the other side. And our folks that were there in Mexico Station in Mexico City during that time, he was always very suspect. There wasn't an open sharing of information. I'm trying to be a little diplomatic here, but when a guy retires from the Mexican government, he moves to Miami and buys a $12 million house. In law enforcement, we call that a clue. Well, no, he's just thrifty. He saves his money and cuts coupons. He did. He just didn't tell anybody where it came from. I think what it should have revealed to Americans when that happened is the fact that this problem with cartels in Mexico is a problem that doesn't have any borders realistically. It is a top-down problem. Martinez Luna was in charge of the whole scheme of fighting and starting this drug war and utilizing federal forces, utilizing state forces, utilizing coordination with local forces and the military. Luna left, and he's in custody. But a lot of the people he worked with within the organizing structure of the military are still there. So let's talk about you for a minute too, because coming up through this, passing the background checks, that's one thing, right? But it seems that one cartel or the other, depending on which side, is most favored by who's ever in power, but you had to have been targeted to by them, right? Either for recruitment or for compromise all the time, right? How did that happen? How did that work? How did you resist it? So the first attempts at trying to figure that out were when we were going through training, people started getting kicked out during the process. It was a six-to-eight-month process of training where we're basically put through a boot camp, urban combat policing-type academy that is very much designed to make us quit, that type of selection process. While we were there, we're seeing members of the group that we're in basically being pulled out of formation, and we don't see them again. And since we're young and stupid, we can't ask any questions. We just assume the worst. Later on, it became apparent that these people were not passing their FBI background checks, and some of that stuff takes a while for it to come back. So these people were found to be people traffickers, or caught or arrested in the U.S. for something and deported, or they were found to have some sort of association. So even at the start, there were attempts to basically put some of their people in. When you got out, it was always somebody that's already in approaching you with a question. Hey, do you mind calling us when you're going out and where you're going to be patrolling? There's some money in it for you. It was that blatant and that up front? It was that blatant and that up front because these were people that belonged to different institutions. So when I got out, I was working for a thing they called the Pase de Operaciones Mixtas, which is a mixed operations group. Basically, I as a state agent would work with the military or would work with federal agencies to patrol or to be a guide or to figure things out for them as we were trying to go after certain targets in the region of Baja, for example. And within some of these groups, you would have state prosecutor office people that would show up and say, hey, come here, I need to talk to you. So those were the attempts. They would go after people first with questions, and they would offer money. I think the first time I was offered something was like $500 just to tell them where we were going to be during our operations, basically to report back on where we were. And what risk do you take when you say no to something like that? Oh, it's a big one. It's a big one. So why did you say no? Because I was living in a military barracks and I didn't have any family to speak of, and I had nothing to lose realistically. And that's exactly why they recruited people like me for that group. We were in a lot of ways protected. We were one of the best paid agencies in Mexico. I was one of the most highly paid agents in that group as well. So for me, it was just the math of it. And also, we had two generations of agents already out, and the horror stories we would hear back from people that said yes was enough for us to not fall in, fall for that one. They would tell us, the lieutenant colonel would say, the hand that steals will hide itself, but the hand that spins will give the other one away. Almost like warning children about the devil in a lot of ways. But it's true. Once you're in that pocket, you can't get out. And also, if you're working for one side, the other side views you as the enemy. So that's why you get people that work in some of these police institutions get assassinated outside their houses or murdered before they go to work. It's because they're working for one or the other side. And once you do that, you're basically putting a target on your back. There's no getting out of it and there's no dropping it and leaving and retiring. There's none of that once you're on that payroll. So it was just never an option for me. Very smart. Yeah, there's no retirement plan in the narco cartel business. You either die or you go to prison. Very few people have a 401k. And in the police. I had no concept of a retirement plan for me. And I worked for 12 years in a police institution that was one of the most highly paid in Mexico. Well, let's rewind a little bit to talk about some of that because one of the things that bothered me, we're both cops, you know that too. I mean, you cut us, we bleed blue. And it hurts me when, you know, I've lost friends. I know Murph has, you have. But the rate at which you lose some of the officers down there, the number of officers that are killed at any one time and some of these ambushes and stuff like that, it's just, for me, it boggles my mind because I think about some of the bad incidents we've had here in the US. And it only involves maybe four. There was a couple of times where four officers were killed, you know, something happened. But you've had instances down there where there's 20, you know, or more killed. How does the public, what is it that keeps the public from rising up? Is it fear? Is it the power the cartels have? What is it that keeps when you have a huge event like this from galvanizing people to say, look, we've had enough? Well, I think number one is the police is the enemy in a lot of these places. That's a sad fact of it. I remember realizing this when I was, I went with the military and a few of our agents basically to this small town in Ensenada. A lot of things had happened there and we were basically cleaning up. We were responding to something that happened overnight. I thought we were there to, you know, basically stabilize and keep people safe. The amount of spit that I had to clean off my gear and all the ways that I'm going to die screamed at me from all these ladies. I didn't realize that the people that were arrested and killed there, that were cartel members, were all family members of the towns we're in. They were the basis of the economy. We were the enemy. We were the villains. I think that's a big aspect of it that not a lot of people realize. That these organizations are so ingrained within the government and within the social status of everything that they very much are a government force of their own. They're very much providers, they're very much protectors, and they're very much linked with blood by the people that are around them. That's their armor. That's why they are hard to defeat. That's why they're hard to move out of the way. Well, that's kind of Pablo's approach too, Murph. You know, you become the Robin Hood. You provide all the money. You build schools. You do things. And pretty soon, I mean, even in Mexico, right, I think if I read, if I understand correctly, I think the cartels are the second biggest type of business in Mexico right now. Yeah. And I think Pablo Escobar and what happened in Colombia gets brought up a lot. And I researched and studied this deeply while I was going through my process, figuring things out on my end, as far as the work that I did. We are beyond that here. Pablo Escobar, you know, the amount and the size of influence that some of these criminal organizations have and the foreign aid that they get provided to them are not anywhere near what happened in Colombia. And also, you know, Pablo Escobar built himself a prison. The head of the Sinaloa Cartel, like the real originator of this cartel, has never been arrested. So there's no problem on his end, as far as the size of the scope of the issue. He learned his tradecraft in Los Angeles. The Sinaloa Cartel, truthfully, is more of the Los Angeles cartel if you really go back into the history of it. Not to interrupt you, but are you talking about Mayo? Yeah. Mayo Zambada? Mayo Zambada has never been arrested. And he learned most of his tradecraft in Los Angeles by people that were involved in the Bay of Pigs. So the scope of the problem, I think, is beyond anything you would see that you saw in Colombia. It is so ingrained in society, like the government, the military, everybody's in on it. It is interesting to see the concept the U.S. has of fighting these cartels. And they think there are just two of them that are fighting each other. But they don't realize that for them to be able to operate that openly, they have to have some sort of government sponsorship. We recently had a major, our version of the WikiLeaks incident, basically, a major leak of government documents from the Mexican military. They call them the guacamole leaks. Within them, the military themselves report on how certain military regions favor one cartel or the other. I mean, this is like the Pentagon reporting on, you know, I don't know, military units within the U.S. supporting one side or one gang or the other depending on the region they're in. So it's a clear problem. It's open. It also tells you a lot about the fact that there's two giant cartels in Mexico. One of them, the New Generation Cartel, which is very clearly kind of state-sponsored by some foreign entity, probably China, if I had to bet. And the Sinaloa Cartel, which seems to be involved in an internal political thing right now going on. And also its head, its historical head, has never been arrested. So it makes one wonder if he's not a U.S. asset of some sort or if the U.S. is playing favorites in some way, shape or form with its policy. Well, you made an allusion to Bay of Pigs, and that sounds like you're referencing. Are you suggesting that CIA was involved in training in some of the tradecraft? I mean, drug running at the scale that was seen after the Sinaloa Cartel got created. The stuff that happened with the DEA back in the day, which is way beyond my time. We only heard stories about it. I actually got to talk to some of the older federally guys that were still around to kind of witness some of that stuff. It's probably as clear as day that CIA has been involved in things in Mexico for years. Recent classified documents have revealed that a lot of the presidents in Mexico in the past few decades were actually on the CIA payroll. And this is no secret anymore. So there's obviously been some sort of effort by the U.S.'s foreign policy to not only be aware of, but also have some sort of control or containment operation around some of these criminal organizations that are very clear. Well, it doesn't seem to be working. I think... I mean, if you talk containment, there is no containment. I mean, you're getting to the point now where the cartels run. I mean, regions, they are better equipped than the military is. When I saw a picture of something, I had to look at it for a couple of seconds because I said, no, that's got to be military. Then you look at it, no, it's cartel. Armored vehicles, air assets, surface to air missiles, machine guns, high powered, they've got explosives. These things are, like you say, an entity unto themselves. I think what changed is that a new player got involved in Mexico. At some point during the legalization of marijuana in California, there was a big public thing said about them going after cartel money by making pot legal. Didn't work. Cartels were already growing pot in federal lands and still are. They were already involved in illegal grows and they just turned into legal grows. A lot of the crops in Mexico just basically changed to heroin. There's a specific point in the past where you could see the prescription opioid epidemic in the United States and heroin laced with fentanyl just replaced it in a very specific point in history in the United States. You can kind of tell around that time the legalization of marijuana was happening in California and that whole thing was happening. Mexican heroin is very weak. It's not like that stinky dark stuff you find in the Middle East or the stuff that you used to find even in Mexico that was brought in from other places. It was light colored, brown. Somebody somewhere figured out that if you add fentanyl to it, you could give it a very substantial kick and clients are going to like it. When I say somebody, all fentanyl back then came from a specific source, China, and started getting produced in Mexico. They send all the precursor chemicals there. In fact, they're even enabling a lot of the money laundering for the cartels back through the Chinese banks. In fact, there's a book, if you ever get a chance to read it, it's called Unrestricted Warfare. It's by two Chinese PLA officers and in it they actually lay out this whole thing around fentanyl. You look at it, there's the corollary to it, but they actually describe how to make a society implode on itself and it's through the providing. You've got to facilitate the money, the logistics with the chemicals. Man, you give people enough fentanyl, they'll do your work. They don't have to fire a shot. We'll kill ourselves. You say the containment failed. What happened is that a player game got involved in this whole foreign drug war policy the U.S. had in Mexico, a foreign entity. I think what you see is some sort of proxy war going on between Chinese state sponsored agencies in Mexico, including the military. In a lot of ways, we just saw the Russian and Chinese military contingent march at the parade, at the military parade in Mexico. Also, we have currently an open chavista, open to the open leftist, open Venezuela supporter in charge of the presidency in Mexico. Oh, hugs not thugs. He's a guy that has met with El Chapo's family and also I think at a press conference he told a group of Sinaloa farmers to not support foreign drugs being infused into the environment because they had to support local drug growers. Was this Lopez Obrador? Yes, this is Lopez Obrador. So for our listeners, we're talking about the president of Mexico here, just so there's no misunderstanding. And there's a novel approach. Hey, support your local drug pusher, support your local narcotics. Don't buy foreign, buy local. His counter drug policy has been basically selective and I think if people want to realize what sort of influence is currently in the federal government as far as who they're supporting, just look at who they go after. It's very specific. They're going after new generation cartels, they're going after factions of the Chapitos, which are Ochapo Guzman's sons. He's in custody now, but that doesn't stop anything, right? It didn't. From the perspective of somebody in Mexico working in law enforcement, the fascination and the effort against El Chapo Guzman was boggling to most of us because he was a celebrity, but he didn't run things. Not at the level that the U.S. seemed to think he was, I guess, which, I don't know, he was a big target. There was a lot of effort put to get him in custody and nothing really changed with his arrest, which was performed by two federal police officers, by the way, not by the DEA, not by the Mexican marina is something that I want to just get off my chest.
The Financial Guys
A highlight from Republican Debates, Election Predictions, and Media Criticism
"At some point we have to take the economy seriously. We can't just keep printing money and sending it overseas. Welcome to another Financial Guys podcast. I'm Mike Hayflick along with my partner, Mike Speraza. We are always excited to be here, Mike. Um, we are here after the second Bill's win. Yeah. Yeah. We will, we'll keep it at that. Every time we talk very little, things go well. So let's, let's keep it at a win and big game Sunday. Miami. What should be right. A massively popular game. I mean, when they put up 70 against Denver and we, we basically, did we shut out the three points? Three, three. Okay. We held, held Washington, the Washington commanders to only three. That should be a really, really dynamite game. So. Had to change their name due to political correctness. I know, I know. And we had some conversation about that. The people I was watching the game with were reflecting on, I guess the good old days when the, the nicknames of teams just didn't seem to matter as much, but it matters now. Now they want to take down statues. You're an Iroquois guy. They're taking that name away. The chiefs because apparently saying chiefs is very, uh, politically incorrect. I mean, a leader. You can't be called the leaders anymore. Maybe it'll be the Iroquois comrades because everyone's got to just hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Yeah. And, and you know, nobody gets a gender anymore. Nobody can dominate one or the other. Even if it's a sport, there really might not even ever be winners or losers. They might not even keep score anymore in sports. Like it's just going to be for the experience of it trophy for the trophy for the trophy. Line them all up. They're all going to look exactly the same. There'll be gender neutral trophies. When will we have a they, them team name? Like the, the Washington they, thems, like when, when, I mean, I know that sounds outrageous, but that's where we're headed. Yeah, it's true. It's going to be comrades. Friends. Yeah. The friends, the Iroquois friends, the Iroquois comrades. It literally is heading that way though. Something where you go, what is, what is this sport? Like we don't even know based on the name, what the sport is. We don't even, yeah. You won't know. Like usually you could derive some more information from things like that. Oh, no, no, not anymore. No, you're going to have to dig real deep. You're going to have to show up at these events and, uh, you know, maybe wear a nice hoodie and a pair of shorts at the events. Yeah, I agree with you. And, uh, you know, maybe right after you went through the Senate chambers to vote on something, you can head and do a game with your hoodie and shorts on. Anyway, the next one, the last thing I'll say is the next one will be the Patriots. They'll be getting their name taken because that represents Donald Trump and his movement. We got to take away the name Patriot, right? That'll be the next one. There you go. You know, I just, I can't with these people anymore. It's really getting to be absurd. Yep. Totally. So, uh, Mike, let's start with this one. A second Republican debate coming this Wednesday night, September 27th, and Dana Perino, who I've always enjoyed listening to. Um, she will be joining Stuart Varney and Ilia Calderon at the Ronald Reagan library. presidential Suitable place. I love it. Yeah. And, uh, I, we were just chatting a bit before the podcast, so let's just line this up. All right. I don't know the order, but we're going to have Pence, Christie, DeSantis, Rama, Swami, uh, Doug Burgum made it Dougie Dougie. Um, who is that? Who else? I'm I've got five Nikki Haley. Thank you. And then, uh, there should be one more. Um, I did pens from, let's write this down. One more time for everybody. Pence, Rama, Swami, right? DeSantis. How do I not remember? Tim Scott, Tim Scott. Thank you. So, so seven this time, um, not Asa Hutchinson, I think you said he, he didn't make it. Didn't qualify. So, um, of course the big elephant in the room is that Donald Trump again will not be there. Just tell me your thoughts, I guess, on this next upcoming debate. Are we going to hear anything different? Is there any going to be anything that really makes people go, Whoa, this guy's really racing to the front or female. Um, if it's Nikki Haley, anyone going to race to the front after this one? I really, I mean, I think we're kind of wasting our time here and I'm not saying it as a, as a Trump voter. I'm just saying it realistically. Right. I mean, at this point, the lead is 40 to 50 points. Nobody makes up that ground than a debate, right? Like Nikki Haley had a great debate last time. She's still polling single digits. Right. I don't agree with Nikki Haley stance on a lot of things, but she, she fared well in that debate and she really didn't grow or fall behind anymore. Right. So I think that's the tough part. When we look at these debates, the Donald Trump in the 2015, 2016 campaign years, that is your like unicorn, right? Where, where you just go up there and go bananas. And then you end up, you know, taking over the field. The difference was there was no Donald Trump in that election, right? Like you had a Jeb Bush, but he wasn't the guaranteed slam dunk candidate right now. You have Donald Trump, Mike, and he is the guaranteed slammed on Canada. The only one that we thought maybe had a chance was Ron DeSantis and he has crumbled mightily, whether you like him or hate him. It's just the facts. He's, he's in trouble. Right. I mean, so what, what are we accomplishing with these debates other than kind of a, I guess I'll say wasting our time. Yeah. And I, I just, I just think it's worth breaking this down a little bit. Like what is it that people like you and I think that these others are just inferior to a guy like a Donald Trump? Like, and I'll tell you my opinion first. Mine is I just don't think they'll win. And I just feel like more and more people need to, you got to vote and expect that the conservative Republican candidate in this case wins. And I don't think any of these other people could, could actually win. I don't think they have enough, you know, experience. They don't have the fortitude that a Donald Trump has. Well, I think that that to me is, is there's two reasons why I'm voting for Donald Trump, right? Number one was I thought he had a very good four year term other than the COVID 19 issue. And I, I'm telling you right now, I say this to people all the time. If it was Ron DeSantis, if it was Donald Trump, if it was Hillary Clinton, that, that, that whole debacle was, was a disaster and there was no way you were going to look good in that debacle. I'm just telling you. Yeah. Number one, but that was a Trump fault that I have. And if I ever talked to him, I would tell him that that I do not agree with what he did with COVID. It's easy for me to say that now, but, but at the end of the day, he had a great four year term other than that, in my personal opinion. Number two is every time they've tried to knock him down at the knees, Mike, that has made me want him back more, right? The, the every time they indict him, I want him back more, right? Every time they try and silence him with gag orders, I want him back more. This is how I think a lot of conservatives are feeling. And at this point, it's kind of like, okay, is Rhonda, here's what my other point, I don't mean to keep going on, but at the end of the day is whether it's Ron, DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Donald Trump, I'm going to use those three for a second. They will be treated the exact same way by the media, by the Democrat party. It doesn't matter who that candidate is. It doesn't matter. Right. People always say like, Oh, but, but Trump's hated. If DeSantis is a candidate, he's already taken crap from the leftist media, right? Like if he's the candidate, he's going to, it's going to be open up another can of worms. I don't think it matters. The reason why we got to go with Donald Trump is he's been there. He's been able to handle it. We know that whether you like him or not, he's handled the media and he's handled the Democrats well. And we need that experience. This is the election of our lifetime. And I will say that now, this is the election of our lifetime. We need to win. Dana Perino says, I believe the economy will feature prominently because we know that that is the biggest concern and preoccupation that is worrying Americans. And she says in many ways, in my opinion, the economy is the thread that runs through all of these other possible topics. For example, if you're concerned about crime, one of the issues is what kind of resources do you have and are you willing to use in order to help deal with that? I think she's spot on. I think when it comes to the economy, the economy sort of is the fuel and whether you then have a notion to, you know, actually shut down the border, improve childcare, improve education, then the, the economy obviously is the main thread that actually everything else seems to branch off of. If you have a lot of people working, for instance, you're going to have a thriving economy because supply and demand is going to balance out. You're going to have lots of products and services to offer and a lot of people can afford these things. Right. So, uh, I, I agree with her. Plus it is Fox business that's hosting the event. So might lean a little bit more toward economics. Yeah, I think it should. I agree with you. I mean, at some point we have to take the economy seriously. We can't just keep printing money and sending it overseas at some point, you know, and I say, I've said this to you, Mike before, going to get groceries now at times, like they ring all the stuff up and I'm like, Holy crap. I bought, I have a cat. I bought five cans of cat food. They're, they're the size of like a lacrosse ball, not even. And it's like $5 for five cans. I'm like this, this thing costs more than my kids at this point. This cat's going to be very thin. It's going to be out of crash diet. I mean, but seriously, how do people, Mike, that don't make money? And I say this in a sad way, like how do people that don't make money survive? Even going, you go to a local fast food restaurant for two people. My wife and I it's 30 bucks. I'm like, what the hell happened out here? I told that is what's going on. And that's scary. Yeah. When they have to make those kinds of hard choices. Right. Uh, all right. So, uh, let's move on. So speaking of Trump, we're talking about these other seven candidates that will be there Wednesday, this Wednesday night, nine to 11 PM in the second Republican debate, Donald Trump will not be there, but this came out like in a Washington post poll. Trump is now up 10%, uh, over a potential run against Biden, 10 % double digit. Now if you just pin Trump against Biden again, first your thoughts, and then we'll go a little deeper into this. Well, I'm not surprised. Um, I think, I think Americans are getting sick and tired of it. I think Americans are worried about our futures. I think the migrant crisis is hurting the Democrat party because you have liberal places like New York city that are waking up saying, Oh my God, we can't do this anymore. And there's like 10 ,000 migrants in New York city, not 10 million. Right. So like, like it's starting to click, I think with certain people, number one, number two, Mike, I think it's hard to hide Joe Biden's cognitive decline, right? The left can say whatever they want in the media. You just can't, when you fall over on things, when you do talk like that, I mean, they, it's a problem. It's a real problem and it's visible. Um, do I trust these polls? Yes and no. I think, if I think America is as smart as I think they would, the polls should be probably higher, like 30 % lead for Trump. Um, but I think the numbers that keep growing in Trump's favor, the margin of error is not that big, right? Michael, like you look at the Republican primary polls, the margin of error is not 40%, right? He's up 40%. So even if they're off by 20%, he's still up 20%. The same thing's starting to happen in these head to head polls with Biden. It started, you know, Trump down, then it was Trump even, then it was Trump three, five, now it's 10. I mean, that's a lot. Yeah. And so I want to read a little bit here. So the post ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle. This is, by the way, the Washington Post little write -up, uh, after the poll was done. Um, so this is, this is actually humorous. Although the sizable margin of Trump's lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest to virtual dead heat, the difference between this poll and others as well as the unusual makeup of Trump's and Biden's coalitions in the survey. So Mike, the more words, the muddier this all gets, right? It sounds like excuses coming up, right? It sounds like Kamala Harris. It really is. It's like, yeah, total word salad. Um, I just said suggested is probably an outlier, right? So, so this, this I thought was interesting. Um, Byron Byron York of the Washington examiner said the post dumped on headline news in quotes from its own poll. So basically they do a poll. They say that their poll is likely an outlier and, and he, he goes on to then say Washington Post sub heads suggests its own poll may be an outlier. That may be true, but they put no such disclaimer in headline three years ago when they published a poll of Wisconsin, right before election day in 2020, showing Biden up 17 points on Trump, 10 points more than the average of other polls at the time. That was real clear politics, president Tom Bevin. So, so funny to me, so interesting, right? Even when they try to do something where they want to take part in the polling process and inform all of us as Americans, Ooh, that's not really where we wanted to see that. That's likely an outlier folks. Yeah. Oh, Donald Trump's winning. Shit. That doesn't count. Okay. What are we going to do? Next one. Okay. These were registered voters. What are we going to do? This is 10 points. Holy shit. What are we going to say? Let's just say it's an outlier. Oh damn. That was a fake poll. Oh, those stupid polls. Yeah. I mean, and it might, I'll say this before we get onto another topic on what's, what's, you're starting to see it all come together. It's like, it's like when they see, you know, hurricanes forming in the ocean, right? We're starting to see it now. The polls are shifting to Trump. Now we have Hillary Clinton coming out saying things like, Oh yeah, who's to say Putin won't medal in the election in 2024 again, right? You have others saying like, Ooh, we got to get Trump off the ballot or people saying, let's indict Trump again for this or that let's put gag orders on him. It's all coming together. Now the new thing too, Mike is, Hmm, let's indict the Bidens and let's see if we can get, we can get a Joe Biden off the ticket. We've used him, we've abused him. Now we're getting them out of here. It's all, it's that wave in the ocean. It's that hurricane forming in the ocean. That's what's happening. And I believe that because why, why would Hillary Clinton come out and say, if you're so confident right in the 2024 election, if you're so confident and Trump's an idiot, he's never going to make it again and get rid of them. Why are you now saying, Hmm, maybe Putin will medal in the elections again. Why would you say that? Right. Right. And by the way, this is the same guy that's richer than ever because his country has been able to sell oil at a high rate since Biden's been in office. This is the same country that has had its way with the Ukraine walking in there and taking over land since Biden's been in there. Why would, why would Putin medal in the election to get in and probably in his mind, the nut job of Donald Trump back in office, it may drop a nuke on him. Why would he want Trump back in office? Ask yourself that question. Don't have to, if you have any sense at all, then you don't even have to ask that. Um, so anyway, let's see what the next number of polls start to reveal. Let's see if, let's see if polls stop coming out, Mike, right? Because once you have one that's got Trump winning by double digit, maybe they just start to say, polls are stupid. Polls are for racists. You're homophobic. If you read polls, I mean, we'll see. Or they come out with some poll from the middle of nowhere. That's like Biden up 35 points on Donald Trump. Right, right. This was from registered voters in the white house. Yes. We interviewed seven people and it was six to one, six to one. And the other one we fired, we don't even know who that was. Yeah. So, so let's go to this now. Every once in a while, Mike, I have to do this CNN, right? I go to the cnn .com site. I just got to see what they're finding note newsworthy, noteworthy, whatever you want to say. And honestly, and I've often reported this, I'm often in disbelief at what they aren't reporting. In this example though, I was like, Oh, a few stories down. Here's a story, Mike, why more women are choosing not to have kids. So right away I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, these are the most unlikable people, the most anti traditional family structure people ever. They probably don't want to have a relationship at all. They don't want to ever have true, you know, intimacy with anybody cause they just can't do it. They're just nasty. They're mostly on, you know, just awful. These lots, so many of these people. So I go on to read a little bit of this and you know, this is, this is someone named Diana Volek who, who never, who was never someone who dreamed of becoming a mother, right? And these are just some of the reasons given. They don't want the responsibility of being a parent. They fear a lack of support. They like their life as it is. They're still judged for being child free. So so even when they don't choose to have children, right? So I'm like looking at this and then suddenly I go, wait a second. This was published at midnight, uh, basically Sunday or Monday, you know, September 25th. That's that's now as we record editor's note, this story was originally published in August, 2021. Some details such as the ages of those interviewed remain the same as they were when the story first published. So you're telling me right away, I thought, is the Hollywood writers strike? Is it bleeding into CNN now? Cause there aren't enough stories. There aren't enough people to write like modern stories. There's not enough news. They had to pull a story from two years ago to talk about why many women are deciding not to have kids. Like how pathetic is that? How pathetic. This new trend too, of like, it's cool to just say, screw it. I don't want to have a family is the weirdest thing ever. And then we wonder why these people are miserable, right? I mean, again, is parenting easy? I'm a new parent. Mike, you know that you, you parented two girls for, you know, they're what? 25, 22, right? So you've had, you've had 25 years of parenting experience. I've had, you know, almost a year. It's the most enjoyable thing ever. Right? I mean you're finally, it's good not to be selfish. It's good to take care of somebody else and love somebody else. Right. And I'm not saying you don't love your spouse, but your spouse is an adult relationship. You have to have a relationship with a baby, which turns into a toddler, which turns into an adolescent, a young adult like that. There's nothing more special than that. You should want that. Instead it's like, Oh, kids are stupid. I'm going to be so rich. Really weigh me down. Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay. They're going to weigh me down. I want my independence. I don't want to be responsible to another human being. I've got myself to worry about and treat and, and you know, I don't know, a door like I get like, that's fine. I want to see the next story though be why many women are deciding that having a child is rewarding. It can become a very loving, you know, yes, you have to be responsible. Like it just was so gross to me like that. And two years ago, this isn't even news. This is like, Oh my gosh, we got to fill these headlines. What do we get out? Pull that one again. We don't like kids. We don't want anyone, you know, raising children, my God for, you know, I'll say this though, Mike and all seriousness too. Like, yes. Is, is it fun being a college degenerate and booze and all the time and having a blast? Sure it is. We all did it right. I mean, yes, of course it's a fun thing. Is it fun to not care if you can go to bed at 2am or 5am or 5pm? Sure. That's great. But at some point you have to mature as an adult, take your job seriously, take your family seriously and care about things like I always say this, Mike, and this is something I've brought up a million times. Think about being, you know, if you want it, like if you didn't want to have kids, I'm not saying people that can't have kids cause I feel for them. But if you, if you didn't want children, cause you didn't want the responsibility, what do you do in your sixties and seventies with no family? Like that breaks my heart, honestly. Right? Like I, what my relationship with my parents, my wife's with her parents, like it's, it's fun, right? It's, you're a family. You get to do things together and you get to enjoy each other. Who doesn't want that? I just don't get it. Well, there's a lot of people in Washington that actually have spouses and children and grandchildren. And clearly there is not a lot of love and support going on between all of them. Because some of these people, I mean, we know who we're talking about, the Mitch McConnell's, the Joe Biden's, they would not be in front of microphones if people actually cared about them. They would not let those loved ones go through what they go through on a daily basis, unless they have no connection, no personal connection at all. Um, all right. AOC. She's almost the last story of our day, but there's one more after this. So we got a bonus. We do a bonus story here, breaking news. So AOC wins the hypocrisy award mic for this, uh, at least this week, maybe the year on this one decade, this is hilarious. And, um, I'll just set this up for a second. So here she was on CBS's face the nation. And, um, she was discussing president Biden's plan to visit the Michigan auto workers on Tuesday. So host of CBS's face, the nation, Margaret Brennan points out a couple of interesting facts about AOC and her selection of vehicles. So let's go ahead and play that. Yup.
Crypto Cafe With Randi Zuckerberg
A highlight from Special Guest: Generative Art NFTs with Art Blocks
"Hello and welcome to Crypto Cafe with Randi Zuckerberg. I'm your host Randi and in this cafe we embrace newcomers and experts alike to all things tech disruption, crypto, NFTs, artificial intelligence, you name it. I am thrilled to bring you a special guest episode today focusing on the future of generative art which is a form of art created with the assistance of algorithms and computational systems. The future internet is predicted to revolutionize the way we interact with the digital world and that is not just limited to gaming, social media, a lot of the topics you hear about all the time. Generative art is an incredible just rising art movement and really a new incredible frontier for artists and collectors as well. For more on this topic and anything related to art and tech disruption check out thehug .xyz, the site that I'm a co -founder on which is the most inclusive destination for blockchain curious artists and art lovers. And I'm so excited today to have one of just my personal heroes in the art and web3 space and just the most incredible thought leader in the space, Jordan Kantor, artistic director of art blocks, the pioneer platform for NFT generative art. Jordan, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Randi. It's such a kind introduction. I'm really delighted to be here. I mean, gosh, I've been just following everything that you've been doing and it's really incredible what you've built with art blocks and how you've introduced so many people to incredible art and collecting. So maybe we can just start by talking a little bit about why are people so interested in digital art on the blockchain right now and how did you get interested and passionate about it? That's a great question. Thanks for asking. I mean, I think if I've seen a through line with most folks who are introduced into this space, it's always there's a friend who introduces them and it's a kind of one -on -one connection that gets you into the space. And the same is true with me as well. I reconnected with a friend of mine who was really quite deep in the crypto space and was an early advocate of crypto punks and autoglyphs and actually knew about art blocks before even I did. I joined the company just over a year ago and he was really presenting me with the problem or I would say a topic for conversation of what makes this art. He and I sort of had an extended conversation about that and through that process of trying to answer that question for myself, I really honed in on the work that art blocks was doing founded by Eric Calderon a couple years ago and got really interested in how the kind of most creative artists using code and algorithms to generate new artworks were gravitating to this space, into this form of generative art. And as somebody who comes from a creative background, but also with an eye on art history, I know that the kind of history of innovation in art is often when artists are using new technologies in new and novel ways. And I really found this coming together in a unique way with how on -chain generative art was bringing artists and code and audiences together in novel ways. And I think a lot of people have really kind of caught that bug and gotten very interested in the new democratic, open source sort of ways to collect and to interact with artists that this medium affords and I've gotten really excited about that. Absolutely. It is an incredibly exciting space right now. For anyone who's not familiar with art blocks, maybe you can discuss a little bit about how it works and how you think about bringing contemporary art to life this way. Absolutely. So on the sort of highest level, art blocks is a platform in which artists can publish their work through additions of generative, unique artworks that use creative code. And what distinguishes the art blocks platform, I think, is that we have a very selective application process. And we're always looking for artists who are pushing the boundaries of this medium in new ways either or technically conceptually or aesthetically. And so I think that the broad range of projects that we have represent many new directions in this kind of emergent art form. So you'll find a wide range of work at art blocks that I think represents a really diverse lineup of artists working in this in this field today. For sure. Absolutely incredible work. Sorry, did I just cut you off? Well, I was also just going to say art blocks has another business to business division called engine, which is providing this generative technology for brands to reach and build community in different ways. And that's also a really exciting area of growth and discovery. And it's a way in which we're trying to create opportunities and paths for our artists that are working in this medium to reach new audiences. But I work on the art side of the house. And in this sense, I would just say art blocks can simply be thought of as a publisher of unique on chain, digitally native artworks. And we really aim to help artists realize their vision and reach new audiences.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"I mean, really where the problem lies is if someone is trying to make money deceptively. And I think one of the like, it's like a double edged sword, the transparency of the blockchain is brilliant in that it shows every little tiny mistake and rug that exists. But as a result of that, every single tiny rug and mistake becomes sensationalized in a way because we can see it. And you know, oftentimes in the in the regulatory landscape, people say, oh, yeah, people do bad things with crypto. I think the problem is that people get caught doing bad things in crypto because of the transparency. And I think that if we had the same transparency in everyday business and everyday politics, it would be significantly worse in the real world than it is in crypto in terms of like the scams and the rug pulls. And so when we identify projects that are here just to make money, I think it's okay. I think you have really good designers that have a really good head on their shoulder that are like, hey, this is a way that I can monetize my work. And it's less of an identification of projects that are here to make money and more identification of projects that are here to deceptively make money. And I think that's really where like the bad vibes come from more than anything. And it's just unfortunate that that is something that's prevalent within our ecosystem. But it's also something that, you know, being here, being present, participating, being in Twitter spaces and dialogues, like you get to know the people that you can really, really trust. And look, decentralization is all about not trusting. But ultimately, at some point, somebody has to present something to you that you want to participate in. And you have to make sure that that thing you're participating in is more likely to have longevity. And that's going to be based on reputation. And reputation in the Web3 space is something that just evaporates in a heartbeat and actually somehow comes back in a heartbeat, too. So, you know, here we are having these cycles of like similar experiences as we've had in the past. So, yeah, definitely not here to call out any projects that are here to make money. I encourage everybody to make as much money as they can, but to do it in an ethical way, in a way where you're not convincing someone to buy your thing because they're scared that someone else is going to buy it. But to buy your thing because they just love it and they want to be a part of it. Very well said. Amazing. And I guess on that, should we chat a little bit about the NFT market? For a while, it looked like the NFT market kind of kept thriving despite the bear market in the crypto space. Do you think, you know, what prompted that, in your opinion? And do you think it was just kind of a yeah. Why do you think it continued on? And then why do you think it dropped? To me, I think that there is a very objective transfer of value from technology to content. And what that means is that there is a time where people were really excited about the technology, and I was too, and I am still, of course, today. And people accrued more value to the technology than the content. And what happens is when you accrue a lot of value to technology, well, part of what makes technology so great is its reproducibility. And so more people can do that same thing technologically. And more and more people do that same thing. And there's a dilution of that. What people cannot do the same thing of is create culture, create art. Like, yes, anybody can make art. Any five-year-old could have made a squiggle. But what happens is over time, whether it's people's participation, message, the visual aesthetics, the technological efficacy of a creative code, or whatever it might be, those things are demonstrated over time as being able to hold the dialogue. And that doesn't necessarily mean hold value, although there's often a conflation of value and participation. And so over time, the value has gone towards the content that is stored in the NFTs. And the NFT just being a simple method for storing a digital object in a way that enables someone to prove ownership of it for the first time in history. And as we have seen the value accrued to the technology migrate to the content, and we've seen that platforms that have and always will be here for the art, art for the sake of art itself, have seen significant transitions from technology to content, but not quite as significant transitions from value to content as other platforms. It was always just about the technology and how do you get as many things out there to as many people, etc. So I think that what's really changed and what's really helping people weather the market is this idea that to be a savvy collector in this ecosystem now, there's always going to be the hyper flipping because there's inefficiencies in the stock market, there's inefficiencies in every single market, and those people have a place here. And I think anyone that says that those people don't have a place here is a little misguided because the technology enables them to have a place here. And anything that we can't just like have our cake and eat it too, the technology does some really wonderful things and it facilitates some other things. But what is important is understanding the difference between the hyper flipping, just literally trying to profit off of the inefficiencies of the market and the collector and sometimes known as the patron that is actually following the life and the story and the interactions and the trajectory of the artist and forming their own opinion, not just about what the future value of the piece can be, although that could very well be impacted by what I'm about to say, but to form an opinion as to whether they want to be a supporter and be on that journey with that artist, not today, but tomorrow and for the next 5, 10, 40, 60 years of that artist's lives. And we've seen that in the art world that people can have met Andy Warhol at the age of 20 and followed the full art and career of the artists and not just, let me just throw out a name of Andy Warhol, any artist, right? Like it's like, that's happened. And people can be fans of an artist for an extended period of time. And I think what people are realizing now as we shift from technology to content, it's not just the content of the artwork, but it's the content of what the artist has inside their soul and what they're here to contribute to and what they want to see change in the world. And it ends up with a bunch of people that are just cheering you on and giving you motivation to get out of bed in the morning. And so you do more things and more thoughtful things and contribute in a more thoughtful way. And it kind of like snowballs into this thing that I've seen happen in a very short period of time for a lot of the artists that I follow in this ecosystem. And those artists today are thriving. No matter what, how bad the market is like, those artists are thriving. And that is freaking awesome. And that gives me hope that there can be a future here within this ecosystem for the people that are sending the right message and that are sticking to their integrity and to sticking to their ideals. And while that can't happen for everybody, just for supply and demand issues, I think there's a big opportunity for a lot of people that are here today to be very well heard and recognized and participatory in the future of the digital art. Absolutely. I love that. And I guess not to be negative, but what do you think the AI impact will have on the art world itself? I don't think it's negative at all. I love AI. I think AI is a tool. Generative art is a medium, but it's also generative distribution using blockchain technology is a tool. AI art is a medium in some cases in that the result is the facilitates the eventual end result. I love that. And I think that we are seeing a homogenization of art on so many different levels at so many different scales. Homogenization of generative art, of AI art, of just digital art in general. And anyone that fights AI is fighting that homogenization, but that homogenization is coming. We are letting more people, more individual humans create and do things that 10 years ago they would have had to have a full degree to do, or would have had to have some crazy manufacturing plant to do. We can now do with a 3D printer in our own home. We can now do because YouTube teaches us to do this. There's going to be a homogenization of every single thing that we do. There already is a homogenization of things that technology has facilitated from us. And what's so exciting are the people that are going to rise from that homogenization of AI, generative, digital, gosh, same thing has happened in traditional art forms. The people that will rise as the ones that make the biggest impact, the biggest contributions, the biggest excitement, the strongest messaging, the most impactful messaging. I think that people that rise from this will be the people that the AI could never replace. We all talk about, is AI going to replace our jobs? I think there are some jobs that not be replaced, but could be facilitated so much by AI that it starts becoming possible for one human to manage the job of many instead of, you know, I don't think we'll ever completely eliminate the human with AI. Or maybe not ever, anytime soon. But what happens through the homogenization is that people have to fight through the noise and they have to fight so much harder. And so what comes through, what comes through that noise ends up being so much more powerful and so much more impactful. And all it's doing, it's encouraging people to put their best work forward. One of my biggest inspirations of artists in the world once told me for, in thinking about art blocks and my concerns about making it an open platform versus a more exclusive kind of like best of the best type platform, is you're not encouraging artists to put their best work forward. You are not incentivizing people to make their best work. Homogenization and being okay with homogenization is not incentivizing people to do their best work. What's going to incentivize them is to differentiate themselves from everybody else. And that is something that will very much incentivize them to work harder. And AI is going to do that for us as is generative distribution mechanisms and as just like the advent of the NFT space. Amazing. I love the optimistic outlook. And a little last question is just how are you defiant? Oh, man, I feel like I'm so stubborn. And so focused, I don't know, I think maybe in this space of defiant in that I'm open to all of the things I am putting myself in every single person's shoes and fighting for every single participant, no matter what, because everybody comes from a different place. And that seems to resonate very well with the people in our ecosystem. And in a way, is defying the status quo of what Web3 is in terms of the dialogue and the divisiveness. And there's a lot of people like me in this space. And those are the people that are really pushing this forward. And I just, you know, shout out to all those people. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. This was so great. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"But there was a lot of things that I could just care less about. And what I've realized through this journey over the last 20 years of like also making art prior to art box and like being in the ceramic tile world where, you know, curating like tiles for what we show, what we sell in the company was an important concept. I realized that I've developed a sense of taste. And maybe what that means is conviction in what I want and what I like and what appeals to me and pride in sharing what I like with other people and not being afraid to express that to other people. Because I don't really know what taste is besides that other than just having an opinion, having a preference. And I think, you know, I've read this book called The 12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark, which, gosh, it's such an old book. And I think to most people in the traditional art world, they just find it so shallow that that was like my formative book about understanding the traditional art world. But like that book essentially talks about the branded collector, the branded artist and the branded gallery. And the idea that like, the gallery was the tastemaker, the people, the collectors would come in and they wouldn't know what to buy. They just wanted to participate oftentimes in art. And they didn't even know whether they wanted to show off to their friends. And so they were asking which one's the biggest flex, or because they really just wanted art for their home, but they were scared of making a decision that was going to lose value or make a decision where it would have been perceived as shallow, whatever it might be. And the gallery would help you with that process, that the gallery would walk you through and be the tastemaker and the one that would help you develop a sense of taste. And I think that the same thing is kind of happening with NFTs. I think you have the world of digital art, which is just one of many use cases of NFTs, is facilitating a broader group of people to develop a sense of taste. Which means, could be as simple as like, do you prefer board apes or crypto punks? And why? And not just like, because one value goes up, but like, this one speaks my language, this one I resonate with. To understanding the nuances between different outputs within the same algorithm in order to make a decision on buying a five to ten thousand dollar piece of algorithmic art based on small nuanced differences in what the algorithm produces, and then everything in between. I think that we are facilitating, by doing this behind a PFP, which a lot of people start pseudonomously in the NFT space, by doing this from the comfort of our home, by doing this in a way where, you know, we are creating an on-ramp for people to feel confident and comfortable. And this is not just art blocks, this is just like the digital art space in general, and develop a sense of taste and develop a compassion for artists and an understanding for artists careers and a desire to like elevate and promote the medium because they see that there's beauty and value inside of it. Amazing. And I guess it's maybe a little controversial, but which NFT projects do you think were only existed because they wanted to make money off of the projects? That's controversial. I think that many NFT projects started that way, and then eventually found a community of people that were just truly like in love with the project. And I don't think it's wrong.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"But there's something about the process. I've told this anecdote in the past, but when I was creating pieces in projection mapping world, I was using an iPad to control, using little sliders, what you would see on the wall. And what that's essentially is called parametric art, or parametric design. Architects have been using that for a really long time to help make buildings and to kind of design funky wavy shapes and buildings. Generative art is when you take parametric art and you randomly assign the location of each of those sliders into something that feels random. And in the world of projection mapping, I would be throwing it, like, you know, there'd be an event and I would hand people that were partying or having a good time an iPad and be like, okay, you control it. And they would look at all these like things and they saw the screen, you know, the projection piece would be 30 feet wide. It's larger than life. Very few times in our lives do we have the ability to directly control something that is that large and affects and impacts that many people. And so giving someone the iPad to do that terrified them. Partly because they didn't know what they were doing with the sliders. Partly because of this concept of taste, right? Like some people have bad taste, some people have good taste, but some people don't have taste. And I think that's okay. And I think that's our job potentially is to help people because once you have taste, it's just like it's like going from black and white television to color. Like it just opens the world of possibilities of what you, how you look at things and how you think of things and how you make decisions. And I think this really wonderful stepping stone towards that is this concept that with that iPad, I eventually got frustrated with people kind of not wanting to touch it. So I added a new screen on the iPad and it was a big red button. And so somebody would come in and they mashed the big red button and it randomized everything. And so they would press the button, but they didn't have aesthetic control. All they had control over was a binary yes or no, I'm not controlling it. So they would hit the button and the 30 foot screen would explode and it would change colors and they would be like, Oh, that's awesome. Did you see mine was yellow, whatever it might be. And there would actually be dialogue amongst a group of people and being like, Hey, did you see when I pressed the button? To me, that's part of the core tenet of what our box is doing is this moment of on-demand generative minting, where you are, you and the artists are giving up control of what's going to come out of it, but you know what to expect within a certain set of boundaries. And the artist sets those boundaries. When you see mint one, or sorry, mint zero on the platform, you don't even understand the boundaries. When you see mint one through 10, you start to understand the boundaries. When you see mint one through a hundred, you really get a good idea for what the boundaries are of that artwork. And so the more artworks that exist, the more of an understanding of what the potential can be of that artwork. There's something kind of powerful about that because someone's not making an aesthetic decision. They're making an aesthetic decision as to wanting to participate in the project itself, but not in the individual output that they're going to get. And I feel that my taste has been refined through the process of contemplating what I'm getting when I receive an artwork. And I now know that, for example, the color purple is one that I don't prefer as much as the color red or blue. Yellow is my favorite color, so that has always been easy. Or algorithms that have a dark background with little spots of color are something that makes me smile and makes my taste sensors tingle. And I think that there's this way of communicating that to a new audience by removing their requirement to make an aesthetic decision, something that oftentimes we feel judged by the aesthetic decisions that we make. But instead when there's a project and there's a thousand mints and there's a thousand people in that community and everybody comes together to mint it, they're all sharing the decision to participate in it, but they're not being judged on what their particular output was because they didn't actually have control over that. And what they can do is they can then say, hey, I really like the yellow one. And so they can trade a purple one for a yellow one with another user that prefers purple. And what that does is that augments the dialogue. It creates a whole different conversation than what it would have been like to collect something where everything's identical or what it would have been like to collect something in an isolated gallery where you collected a piece. And you know that other people collected similar pieces, but we don't know what they look like or who they are or where they live. Or if they're even open for a conversation, this technology has like hyper elevated the transaction of information and also artwork in a way that enables us to kind of have a more ongoing dialogue over the art. So yeah, it's just such a different experience. And I think Artblocks takes it to that slightly higher level than what non-genitive work does and that everybody has something that's unique to them. I believe humans are attracted to individuality and this platform and this technology enables expression of individuality in a way that we hadn't really kind of facilitated before. Super interesting. And I guess on the topic of taste, and maybe this is too philosophical, but what is taste and how could someone not have it? Because if you hype something enough, does it then become tasteful? Well, it depends on if you're hyping something because you promise people they're going to make money on it. Or if you hype something because you're expressing a wall. I feel like I went through a transition in my life where I went from maybe the word, maybe saying not having taste is not the right word. Maybe being indifferent to taste. There were some things in my life that I had very strong conviction on. I loved modern architecture. I love the color yellow. I like German engineering.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"What if the community curation in 2021 curated a bunch of PFP projects? Because that's what we were into. I mean, even I was part of that. We were all excited about that. We really wanted to set the tone, especially at a time when projects were selling out for really large amounts of money, that we were interested and curious to see what the feedback was from art people that have a history in the arts and understanding of the arts. So as of now, we've finally gotten ourselves together in a place where we have the bandwidth to really draft a community curation seed process, and part of that process is scary, right? The community curators have access to upcoming projects. Front-running is an issue in the NFT ecosystem. It's been an issue in the past. So, you know, no. You just can't. They can be anonymous to the public, but we have to be able to hold someone accountable if someone on the curation board gets access to something and buys something that they shouldn't have. That's just one example of how critical this seed is, and how sensitive the seed is, and how difficult it was to get to this point where we can have community curation. But now we have a contract and an agreement, and they may not have to dock themselves to the community, but they have to dock themselves to us because we have to be able to hold people accountable. In exchange for that, right now our honorarium is one ETH per quarter, and they spend one, two hours a week going through the projects and deciding which ones are curated. I think having a little bit of the community voice into the curation process would actually be a really positive thing in that our community is what got us to where we are today. Our community is the reason that ArtBlocks is faring a little bit better than a lot of the NFT projects out there. It's based on a very resolute vision of buy art because you like it, period. I think the community, which initially we were crucified for suggesting that, has very much come around to being actually accepted. I remember I would say that in Discord and people would be like, come on, you're delusional if you think of anybody who's actually buying art because they care about the art of the artists. Now we're looking at a meta where it seems that people seem to be curious about the future of digital art. That is creating a new group of people interested in art in the world that are defining the next generation of art appreciators in the world. In my opinion, I might be over indexing on that. The new community curation board seats will be done. We made an announcement on Twitter, and we would love to see what people say. I think there's a interesting way of applying. The original ones, a lot of them were just like who I was around when I first launched ArtBlocks, and then little by little identifying people that we thought would be really interesting to have their voice in the decision of curating. In the Web3 space, we are faced with very difficult gender diversity issues just by the pure nature of crypto. Unfortunately, by the pure nature of coding and being a coder and understanding this type of stuff, getting involved or having the curiosity to even get into this kind of stuff, we have a pretty significant gender imbalance, and it's starting to mirror the traditional art world. One of the things I like to say often is while we may not have the solution and we may not actually be the people that fix it, not making an attempt is a huge missed opportunity. One thing that we took a serious amount of time last year is to think through who are the voices on the curation board and who do they represent, and making sure that we started by working towards a more diverse curation board in terms of gender. I think another one that we have to tackle soon is more of a cultural diversity. It's like, you know, crypto oftentimes and art oftentimes is just a bunch of white dudes, and that feels like a huge opportunity for us to help that. It's not easy. Anyone that says it's easy, it's hard and it's complex, and there's a lot of feelings and a lot of emotions, but we're making efforts as we can to approach these things one at a time. Hopefully, over the course of the next year, we see a really well-defined curation board that includes cultural representation from all over the world. Here's something new. Bumper your assets to defend them from price drops without losing upside exposure. You set a price floor and term length, then lock your tokens into the protocol. When your term ends, if the price has fallen under your floor, you leave with stablecoins at the floor's value. Otherwise, you just take back your original asset. Bumper is going live in August, and it's one of the most innovative DeFi protocols for hedging being built right now. So check out bumper.fi. There's a link to that in the description. I want to double-click into the technical piece. How NFTs are represented on-chain, so the code, from what I understand, the code for generating the piece is committed on-chain, but the images themselves are not, and usually that's like HTTP or IPFS, or R-Wave in some cases. Right. Well, the images are just like, if the whole world operated on Artblocks technology, let's say, and this is complex because it could melt a computer by trying to process too many images, but the images exist because the infrastructure for marketplaces is reliant on an image, generally for thumbnails, for scrolling through projects, and if they weren't thumbnails, if they were live algorithms, and you had 10 live algorithms running in your browser, it would probably overheat your computer and shut down. So the images are stored on a server because the algorithm has all the information necessary to reproduce that image on-demand, and so if you open up an Artblocks algorithm, even, for example, I think one that I really like to use as an example is ringers. You can view ringers two ways. You can view them as the code generating in your browser, or you can view it as an image that was pre-generated and rendered and stored on a server. The code generated in the browser, most, if not all, of that information is available widely now in Web3 on-chain. Viewing the two are identical, pixel-to-pixel. If you have both open, they look identical. Something to me, and this is the nerdy nature, and hopefully we're spreading that level of nerdiness to the broader audience, the idea that I could stare at a ringer, and I know that it's actually being algorithmically... What I'm looking at was created algorithmically and is running live in the browser, even if it looks identical to the image of the ringer that's next to it, I am drawn from a technological perspective to the thing that's being rendered in the browser. I think that's so powerful and interesting, because of what I said earlier, we had an experience at the Samsung headquarters in New York where a lot of the concepts of resolution agnosticism, I thought, might be looked at as unnecessary until we see massive increases in resolution. Do we even want 16k screens? Because I can't tell the difference between my 4k screen and my 8k screen anyways. We had this opportunity in Samsung in New York at the Samsung headquarters where they allowed us to show Artblocks artworks on a three-story tall screen. That three-story tall screen is significantly higher resolution in terms of the number of pixels of height and width than a typical computer screen. We were able to not have to up-sample that artwork in order to show it on the screen. We were able to match the pixels to that screen. The difference is striking to the point where you walk into the Samsung building and you know what every Artblocks artwork looks like at this point, because we have a community of people who follow our product, follow the artworks, etc., and you see it at that scale and at that resolution for the first time. Once again, you're surprised and excited and invigorated about this concept of on-chain generative art, because of the ability to reproduce at the larger scale pixel by pixel. That's just one of those technical qualities of it being on-chain. Even though when you're looking at it on your screen and it's just being rendered live in the browser and it looks like a static image, the fact that all that information is coming together from blockchain data to be able to recreate the piece is just a new way of having dialogue with art. It makes it a performance art piece in a very weird way. The way that people buy it as a birth of the artwork in front of the artist and the collector at the exact same time. There's just so many different layers to this that really make this a unique experience and something that I think I would just love to see more people participate in. Amazing. I love that perspective. Why are you passionate about the blockchain industry? Why are you passionate about decentralization? Oh, for so many reasons. I think the number one reason is just having full transparency of what's happening with my stuff. Of course, you don't know what's happening with everything else in the world. Entering a time where I have less and less trust for the information that's being presented to me just because of the pure and sheer level of divisiveness within our country and within the world these days. Being able to stare at something with just absolute fact and certainty of its accuracy is something maybe we take for granted within our lives, but it's something we're not offered in any other aspect of our lives. It's like you go take your car into the shop and they're pulling up on your screen and you try to look at the screen like, oh sorry, this is private. It's like, well what is in my service records that I'm not even allowed to see? There's something really powerful about all this information being on the blockchain. And then the ability to natively store artwork on the blockchain, to me feels like a killer use case for, not the killer use case, there's going to be many killer use cases for blockchain but the ability to natively and nascently put artwork that can be scaled to any device on the blockchain in a way that it feels immutable, permanent, self-sovereign, meaning it's air-gapped, there's no external interaction with it. It just feels like a perfect fit, like it's a product market fit that I think a lot of times we seek in innovation. And you couple that with the distribution mechanisms, this technology facilitates generative arts distribution in a way that was not possible before. Generative art has existed for decades. If you start looking back into the history of generative art, it's like just trying to put yourself in these people's brains in the 1960s, entering these cold rooms without even a computer screen, just a keyboard, without even a direct output, wanting to test out what the boundaries are of algorithmic variability and seeing that that went for 60 or so years in a slowly evolving way where technology made it more three-dimensional or more easy, like with the advent of processing and P5.js, more compatible by being able to run it in the browser. There's a lot of things that have happened along the way, and then this ability for the artist, maybe for the first time in a long time, to be able to monetize this passion and effort was facilitated by blockchain technology. And to all the haters out there of blockchain technology, because I know that there are, and I see some of these tweets and it really makes me like this, like I feel some of these are very genuine and some of them are very disingenuous. I don't care about a lot of the other things. I feel very confident to say objectively that this technology facilitates this, what started as a nerdy hobby, into being a more mainstream, understandable, and acceptable form of art. And that alone makes me very bullish on blockchain technology, and that doesn't even touch on decentralized finance and all the other killer use cases of the technology. Amazing. I can feel your passion coming through and I have to give credit where credit's due because a lot of projects do this decentralization theater and you guys not only are building on the blockchain tech stack, but you also were one of the first projects that migrated to the Graphs Decentralized Network. I think actually Artblocks was the first NFT project that moved to the Graphs Decentralized Network. So very much an early adopter of decentralizing that data layer. So yeah, appreciate you walking the walk. My teammates at Artblocks are really incredible and very intelligent people. They're also lovely to work with and they have been just huge supporters of the Graphs since the very beginning. And yeah, all the credit goes to them for really identifying what they saw as the future of indexing and especially once things became more and I just have to give them entirely all of the credit for that. Working with them has been such a dream over the last couple years. Amazing. And credit to yourself too for building such an incredible team. And you alluded to the rollercoaster that is the NFT space that is crypto. Can you talk to us a little bit about maybe the major signposts in the last three years? What surprised you? What shocked you? What surprised me? I mean, everything has surprised and shocked me, everything. Like the good things and the bad things. Like the good things when somebody says and does something like where I'm just like, holy crap, that person, like this is the kind of person that we want in this ecosystem. This is the person that I want to be like. This is the person that I want to align with. This is the person that's going to change the status quo in the art world. This is the person, you know, I'll give you one example, Patrick Amadon, who, you know, kind of stood up for a, you know, he was part of a show that didn't include any women. And he was like, you know, this is interesting. Like there's this opportunity and we are missing this opportunity. So let's try to do what we can to make a change. And so people like that, that really are not sacrificing their integrity and not sacrificing their ideals and their morals in order to make this, gosh, I mean, oversimplifying, make this world a better place. And I do think that art can make the world a better place. One of my favorite artists, JR, has a book. It's like, can art change the world? And I absolutely think that it can. By putting art into the hands of more people, I think that we have a better chance of art changing the world and being influential and having an impact and being an on-ramp to culture, which is something I shared at a panel the other day. But yeah, everything has been completely shocking. Everything from, you know, the massive sell-outs at Art Box in the past to some of the, like, for example, you know, some of my favorite poet-based artists that have an open project on Art Box today that I think it's just like, is the community, you know, like, where's the misalignment with the community where there's like this beautiful, open, curated project on Art Box that hasn't sold out yet that, like, to me is representative of like the most beautiful parts of our ecosystem. And so everything is a shock. Everything is a surprise. We are just kind of managing it as we go. Every single one of us is learning every day. We are writing the playbook. Anyone that, like, thinks that they know in advance of what's supposed to be happening is wrong. And I think we should be careful of anyone that states with conviction that they know what is about to happen. When I started Art Box, I didn't think of it as writing a playbook. I thought I was just like expressing myself as a hobby. And I, as someone that has been a business owner for nearly 20 years prior, writing a playbook is the definitely not a great operational CEO and have a lot to learn with that respect. But when you're in a business where like everything is novel, everything is new, everything is changing, everything changes at a very quick pace. It's just so hard. And like all these things are curve balls, everything good and bad, even the good stuff is a curve ball and making you rethink. And if you're not willing to adapt and rethink and like embrace the change, you end up getting in a weird spot where it's just harder to get out of bed in the morning because you don't really realize like what brought you here in the first place, which is like the future promise of like decentralization and like on-chain art, et cetera. So anyways, I'm rambling. But yeah, everything has just kind of been a shocking surprise and it continues to be so. In fact, I think that'll be the day where we've maybe, you know, we used to say in the crypto space, like, you know, we're gonna make it like the day where I go a whole day without being utterly shocked by the events that happened within our ecosystem will be the beginning of a trajectory of potentially having made it right. Homeostasis, I know this drives people crazy, but homeostasis is the goal here. We just, we're nowhere near that. So we need homeostasis. So let's get there. And it might be two years and it might be 25 years. I don't know. But that is, you know, that's when things won't be so shocking anymore. And we'll actually make some real progress and like getting this into the world. Totally. I love that. And also on the, the everything changing, I think as long as you have a clear direction and mission, you can roll with the punches, you can pivot, but it's not hopping on trends, right? It's, it's sticking to that mission and, and the passion. And it sounds like you're doing that. Yeah. Not chasing the shiny objects, which it's hard. I have to admit, it's like very hard not to chase shiny things in crypto, but you know, we have to have discipline. Like that's, that's, I think partly why we're still here today. Absolutely. And I think I know what you're going to say to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. And I personally, I am learning how to just get art that I like, that I like, right? It's like, one of my friends told me that if you're trying to match the art to your room, you're doing it wrong. Like you pick art that you love and you put it up or put it in your wallet, I guess. So when you walk into a gallery, there's kind of this sense of, of provenance that, you know, that can be lost and it's sometimes it's difficult to evaluate. And sometimes it can even be intimidating because there's this information asymmetry. So what do you think makes generative art on the blockchain different than this? Do you think it's maybe less intimidating and more welcoming? Yeah, I think the blockchain is already less intimidating, I think, than the traditional art world was for me before all of this. Now it's just very much changed. You know, like the reception in the traditional art world for what we've built at Artblocks is just completely mind blowing. And it's, you know, changed perspectives. And, you know, part of that, I think, is just understanding that it's not going to be all crypto all the way. It's not going to be all traditional art world all the way. There will be a synthesis of how both worlds operated, and that will be the final result. Whether it weighs more into crypto aesthetics and ideals and, or traditional art world, only time will tell.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"It's a very different experience, I think, releasing on other platforms. As someone that likes to explore, I see that there's benefits to all of the different methodologies. I actually encourage artists to have experiences. I always refer to this as the circuit. You should not be concerned with trying something else out and going and putting your work in as many different hands as possible because I think if the beauty of what one of the most powerful parts of Art Box is, the distribution mechanism of the work, then ultimately the goal might be to get the work into as many people's hands more than to get the amount of revenue that you think you deserve for that work because this is web three. This is about community and dialogue. What happens after the mint is just as important as what happens before and during the mint. Being able to have that dialogue with the most people would be a metric of success for me. What that means is just making sure that you release it in a way that really celebrates the distribution mechanism that allows you to release something to 10,000 people by uploading 35 lines of code in 2021 without touching it again since. Absolutely, and it's a great way to build community with the collectors of the art. Another question I wanted to ask was just on the curation side. Are the curators full-time with Art Box? Are those community members? For those listening, if they have an interest or passion in curating art, how could they get involved? Well, look, the last couple years have been a complete roller coaster. One of the things that I felt is that it's really important to keep a vision of what we're here to do, which is to, in this case, get to work or create the opportunity to work with the best generative artists in the world. To do that, you have to be able to give them really good feedback too on curation processes. There was a time, I've been really interested in having community members be part of the curation board for a while, but there's all sorts of complexities, including just simply bandwidth, like just our ability to be able to add curatorial board members. We weren't able to revise the curation board until earlier in the year, or was it the end of last year? It was the end of last year, and then it just continues to evolve since then. These are not full-time Art Blocks team members. Curatorial board members receive an honorarium for every quarter that they serve on the board, and they have very strict rules that they have to abide by. What I'm really excited to say is that, as of yesterday, we announced the beginning of allowing community members to apply to the Art Blocks curation board. As silly as this sounds, in 2021, if the Art Blocks curation board was governed by the community, and the community was getting really excited about PFP projects, let's say, just like all the things in the metaverse, the Board Apes, and all the, you know, there's so many really wonderful projects out there, but Art Blocks is not necessarily meant to be, while there's actually been really wonderful PFP type projects on Art Blocks, Art Blocks is meant to have a message, and to be focused on art for the sake of art itself. Buy what you like from artists that you want to see succeed, as the great Art Gnome has said in earlier posts.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"The idea here is that an artwork, there is so much generative art. We get input all the time that art blocks and other platforms in the similar vein have inspired a lot of people that are coders into being creative coders into having this creative artistic side, which is really beautiful. And all that art is coming out of from a much larger audience than we had before. And what art blocks is committed to doing is to identify the pieces of art that are as much as possible raising the bar, doing something innovative, whether it's in the way they speak and the message they're trying to send, whether it's technical innovation, whether it's a combination of all of those things. And those are the projects that we're putting forward on art blocks as either presents or curated. The curation board on art blocks, which is a group of individuals that essentially evaluates every project and provides very thorough meaningful feedback for the artists, decides which ones from those to pick to elevate to a curated status. The curated projects happen significantly less often than the presents projects. And we're just moving towards this world where there's so much optionality for artists to release generative art, which is beautiful. I mean, if you would have said a few years ago that you would have, gosh, at this point, 20, 25 competing generative art releasing platforms in the world, like I would have been like, yeah, you're crazy. But at this point, we are now at that point where there's optionality for people to reduce work. And what art blocks does that a lot of other platforms do not do is take extra care with every single drop in every single algorithm that eventually becomes the value proposition of art blocks as curation, attention to detail, as the concept of minting generative art, whether it's IPFS based or on-chain generative art, is homogenized across 25 platforms that do the same thing. So we're out here to essentially provide to our collectors the best that we can get in front of them, generative art from the best generative artists in the world. And I think that we've been very lucky to get some of the best people in the past. And we would strive to get to work with some of the best generative artists in the future. So we'll see where that takes us. But in the meantime, it's always a struggle in Web3 to kind of balance and try to figure out what's best for the artists, for the collectors, for all the stakeholders. And it's been a navigation that I was not expecting, and we've learned a lot along the way. We'll continue to learn as we move forward. Absolutely. And I want to double click into two pieces there. First, just on the culture of the artists on art blocks compared to other platforms. I imagine it's a little bit different, right? Because you're giving away control to the users. Yes, you're setting parameters. But can you maybe talk about the culture of the artists compared to other projects? Well, you know, it's hard to compare to other platforms. A lot of platforms are using the same methodology, which is the on-demand generative minting concept, which means the algorithm is in place, but the output is unknown. Other ones are using pre-selected outputs, which has a ton of value in and of itself as well. I mean, some artists can craft the most stunning algorithm, but not love every single output and be willing to sacrifice, let's say, the on-chain nature of the work in exchange for making sure that every single one of the outputs meets their criteria for a beautiful piece. Where I think the culture is maybe a little bit different is that, and I think this is complex and I think it's just kind of hard to understand, is that there's always, you know, kind of like an indie vibe in the generative art world and art blocks was originally intended to be this open platform for everybody to release on. That was the original goal and we are taking steps to make it more accessible and more available for people to release on our technology. But as a result of the incredible caliber of art that is in the indie nature and really just kind of focused on a more exclusive nature, which is quite not my personal nature as someone that always kind of is concerned about inclusivity, but at the same time it's like you're between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, you want to recognize the incredible work that's on the platform and make sure that you protect and elevate that with more great art. On the other hand, you want to let anybody release anything, but that can lead to two completely different paths. The path that we chose often based on, probably because in 2021 it's like anything that was released would sell out because it was just kind of like nobody really understood what was going on. It was the 2021 bull run and opening it up even further was complex in that it felt deluded. This is the path that we chose and we love the path that we're on. This path enables us to work with a wonderful artistic director that comes from the contemporary art world that can speak to artists about their message and what they're doing. Our incredible art team spends time one-on-one with every single artist and walks them through the process and gets them to the finish line and gives them motivation at the time of minting and mint zero.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"And I felt like with my experience up until that point with the blockchain, that there was enough entropy in the blockchain so that I would, instead of getting to pick the green ones, the zombies, I would click claim and based on whatever the probability was of getting that, I would just get a punk. And if it was green, great. I got lucky. So that moment of feeling kind of selfish or greedy of claiming a lot of the green punks, it made me realize that the technology could facilitate more than that. And then that coupled with, you know, the years of spending time behind a computer and writing code that generated random algorithmic outputs. And then just the fascination with NFTs in general slowly from then led to what you eventually see as our blocks that was launched in 2020 as a platform for artists to store deterministic resolution agnostic art on the Ethereum blockchain in a way that I think truly demonstrates what the opportunity is for using the blockchain for art purposes. It kind of represents the most kind of native, I guess, way of utilizing blockchain technology to store information that can generate visual and audio outputs. Eric, can you double click into how art blocks work? So how artists are generally interacting, what role art blocks plays in curation, and how users met NFTs? Yeah, so the art blocks minting process is a little bit different than the typical NFT is minted in that generally an NFT is created by the artists themselves. And so they mint the NFT with a pointer towards the artwork, and then they take the step to list it on a marketplace. So they either mint it and list it within that same marketplace, or they mint it one place and then they list it on another. With art blocks, we actually are really excited about this idea that we're cutting out multiple steps in terms in exchange for enabling an artist to distribute their work to a broader audience in a novel way. And so the art blocks artist actually uploads their algorithm that they've worked on, that they've crafted, that they've given up control over and that they are uploading an algorithm that they feel confident has the variability and also the constraints that they would feel represents the work no matter what comes out, because they don't know exactly what's going to come out of the algorithm. And so they upload that algorithm on chain. And then the art blocks team spends quite a bit of time vetting each project to make sure that it's resolution agnostic, which means that it will continue to scale up to any screen resolution in the future. As technology improves, the artwork will scale up with it, which is something pretty novel in the art world in general. And also that it's deterministic, which means that every time you mint something, you anytime you watch or you look at your token, you're going to see the exact same thing every time. So that is your artwork. The artist also sets an addition size. And so when what makes things a little bit different on art blocks is the collector comes and actually triggers the execution of the smart contract to mint the token that did not previously exist. And the moment that they meant that token, they're also minting along with that token, some randomness, some entropy, that randomness mixed with the information stored on the smart contract of the algorithm is what generates the unique output for that generative artwork. And so the algorithm lives on the blockchain one time can scale to any resolution. The randomness is the only thing that needs to be different actually from token to token that is minted at the time of minting at the time of creation. And the two are combined together to create a visual output that is unique to that user. And at that point, it's just a token. It's a sovereign bearer NFT, which means that there is no external controller forces or factors that can apply that can be applied to it and all the information, or most of it, depending on which library is needed to generate that algorithm, is also stored on chain. In terms of curation, art blocks has multiple different kind of levels of curation. Right now it's been reduced. It used to be three. We used to have a curated playground and factory. Now we have curated and presents.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"calderon" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"Welcome to The Defiant. I'm your host, Tegan Kline. Today, we are joined by Eric Koldrone, founder of Artblocks, but you may know him as Snowfro. Eric is not only an exceptionally talented artist, but also a tech innovator and entrepreneur who has redefined the limits of artistic expression in the digital era. Today, we get into how Artblocks fosters creativity and community via the platform, how they differ from other projects. Eric shares his views on why you should even buy art in the first place, as well as his passion around generative art, as well as why he's passionate about decentralization. We get into his views on the NFT market fluctuations, and he shares a bit about the community of curators that are curating art on Artblocks and how you can get involved there. But first, Eric, you are definitely a crypto OG that saw NFTs before almost anyone. Can you start by telling us your crypto origin story and about your early involvement in the CryptoPunks community? CryptoPunks specifically, that was kind of my on ramp into an NFT. I discovered it through Reddit, through a link on the REth dev or R Ethereum, one of the two. And I remember I joined Discord as a result of wanting to talk to other people that were weird enough to collect these things at the same time. And that kind of became the trajectory for the next six years of just being very connected to the digital world before, during and after the pandemic. Amazing. And I bought my CryptoPunk at the height of the bull market. So tell me, how did you see it so early? Well, it wasn't a financial decision. I think that's part of it. I was into generative art. And I've been in generative art for a long time. And so I saw this as a really beautiful work of generative art. And then I was also like excited and eager to use any form of crypto technology. Anything that I could use my Ethereum for I did literally like every single app that existed. And this was just one of them. And this is the one though, that like really got me thinking and triggered my excitement for the future. And tell us about the passion for generative art. Where does it come from? Why are you so excited about it? I've been following a lot of the generative artists that have been around for a long time, for a while. And I originally actually started, I didn't even understand the concept of generative. I've been kind of a hobby coder my whole life, but not really like serious or a professional by any means. But I started creating an artwork form using technology called projection mapping, which there was some software out on the market that did what I wanted it to do, but not quite exactly how I wanted it to do it. So eventually I figured that I had to program it myself. And so whether it was within one of the programs that allowed scripting and then eventually just scripting from scratch, I got to a point where I was like writing code that generated a visual output. I would still have called it algorithmic art up until that part or even parametric art in that I was using sliders to control the visual outputs to the beat until a little bit later into that I added a button that just it was the randomized button. And so if you hit that button, everything just kind of changed and it kind of randomized at the same time. And that is, I think, where my just like love and appreciation for generative art really came from this moment of like on-demand generative creation, where the person creating it doesn't have to understand all of the intricacies, but can understand that they like it and they want to participate in the creation of it. So ever since then, it's been, you know, kind of just, yeah, following these amazing artists that were making this type of work well before there was like a path to monetization well before like there was any money to be made in generative art or very little money to be made. These people were just really passionate about creating visual stuff with code. And, you know, eventually leading to this point where art blocks became a place for people to release generative art in this new technology. Amazing. And can you tell us a little bit about the founder story of art blocks and the inspiration that came? Art blocks was thought of the moment that I was claiming my crypto punks. So that was the first time that I ever considered the concept of art blocks in that I was able to claim the punks that I wanted to claim, which was the rarer punks.
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
A highlight from Revealing ONE Secret for Crypto Adoption: Art Blocks Founder Erick Calderon
"Welcome to The Defiant. I'm your host, Tegan Kline. Today, we are joined by Eric Koldrone, founder of Artblocks, but you may know him as Snowfro. Eric is not only an exceptionally talented artist, but also a tech innovator and entrepreneur who has redefined the limits of artistic expression in the digital era. Today, we get into how Artblocks fosters creativity and community via the platform, how they differ from other projects. Eric shares his views on why you should even buy art in the first place, as well as his passion around generative art, as well as why he's passionate about decentralization. We get into his views on the NFT market fluctuations, and he shares a bit about the community of curators that are curating art on Artblocks and how you can get involved there. But first, Eric, you are definitely a crypto OG that saw NFTs before almost anyone. Can you start by telling us your crypto origin story and about your early involvement in the CryptoPunks community? CryptoPunks specifically, that was kind of my on ramp into an NFT. I discovered it through Reddit, through a link on the REth dev or R Ethereum, one of the two. And I remember I joined Discord as a result of wanting to talk to other people that were weird enough to collect these things at the same time. And that kind of became the trajectory for the next six years of just being very connected to the digital world before, during and after the pandemic. Amazing. And I bought my CryptoPunk at the height of the bull market. So tell me, how did you see it so early? Well, it wasn't a financial decision. I think that's part of it. I was into generative art. And I've been in generative art for a long time. And so I saw this as a really beautiful work of generative art. And then I was also like excited and eager to use any form of crypto technology. Anything that I could use my Ethereum for I did literally like every single app that existed. And this was just one of them. And this is the one though, that like really got me thinking and triggered my excitement for the future. And tell us about the passion for generative art. Where does it come from? Why are you so excited about it? I've been following a lot of the generative artists that been have around for a long time, for a while. And I originally actually started, I didn't even understand the concept of generative. I've been kind of a hobby coder my whole life, but not really like serious or a professional by any means. But I started creating an artwork form using technology called projection mapping, which there was some software out on the market that did what I wanted it to do, but not quite exactly how I wanted it to do it. So eventually I figured that I had to program it myself. And so whether it was within one of the programs that allowed scripting and then eventually just scripting from scratch, I got to a point where I was like writing code that generated a visual output. I would still have called it algorithmic art up until that part or even parametric art in that I was using sliders to control the visual outputs to the beat until a little bit later into that I added a button that just it was the randomized button. And so if you hit that button, everything just kind of changed and it kind of randomized at the same time. And that is, I think, where my just like love and appreciation for generative art really came from this moment of like on -demand generative creation, where the person creating it doesn't have to understand all of the intricacies, but can understand that they like it and they want to participate in the creation of it. So ever since then, it's been, you know, kind of just, yeah, following these amazing artists that were making this type of work well before there was like a path to monetization well before like there was any money to be made in generative art or very little money to be made. These people were just really passionate about creating visual stuff with code. And, you know, eventually leading to this point where art blocks became a place for people to release generative art in this new technology. Amazing. And can you tell us a little bit about the founder story of art blocks and the inspiration that came? Art blocks was thought of the moment that I was claiming my crypto punks. So that was the first time that I ever considered the concept of art blocks in that I was able to claim the punks that I wanted to claim, which was the rarer punks.
Investor's Edge
Trial underway in NYC for accused Mexican drug lord "El Chapo"
"To the lawyer representing the accused Mexican drug Lord, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman at his trial in New York has claimed his client was a scapegoat. The lawyer said the real leaders of the similar cartel living openly in Mexico and a bribe the condom previous Mexican president president Henrique Pena Nieto and his predecessor Felipe. Calderon? Immediately rejected the
Morning Edition
UK Supreme Court criticizes Northern Ireland abortion laws
"The new york conversation from npr news in washington i'm dave mattingly president trump travels to quebec tomorrow for a meeting of g seven nations it follows the president's decision to impose new tariffs on us imports of steel and aluminum from canada mexico and countries in the european union britain's supreme court is dismissing a legal challenge to northern ireland strict abortion ban while criticizing the ban as a likely violation of human rights npr's debbie elliott is in london the uk supreme court dismissed a legal challenge brought by the northern ireland human rights commission willing the agency did not have standing to sue but the court agreed with the premise that northern ireland's law likely violates the european convention on human rights because it bans abortion even in cases of rape incest or when the fetus is not expected to live in the nba finals the golden state warriors are a win away from repeating as champions last night in cleveland the warriors beat the cavaliers one ten to one or two behind forty three points from kevin durant the warriors lead the series three games to none cleveland's lebron james led the cavaliers with thirty three points he's on friday you know to to win a home floor on the ice the washington capitals can win their first championship with a win tonight in las vegas in game five of the stanley cup final the capitals lead the vegas golden knights three games to one i'm dave mattingly in washington i'm richard hake on wnyc in new york a restaurant worker delivering pizzas the fort hamilton military base in brooklyn is on the verge of deportation after he was detained while making the delivery the incident has local politicians questioning of soldiers are aiding immigration agents wnyc's matt katz reports in two thousand ten the federal government ordered pablo ville of asensio calderon deported for living in the country without documentation but he continued to work delivering pizzas regularly to fort hamilton and using his city id to enter then on a run last friday a military police officer asked for more i id and called immigration and customs enforcement ice took him to new jersey and expects to deport him to his native ecuador he has two young daughters with his american wife sandra chica spokesperson for the base didn't return a call for comments nypd officials say reporting which city schools use metal detectors would compromise students.