Ed Calderon is a security specialist who worked on counter-narcotics and organized crime investigation in Mexico. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Policygenius: https://www.policygenius.com/ - Bambee: https://bambee.com and use code LEX to get free HR audit - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off EPISODE LINKS: Ed's Instagram: https://instagram.com/manifestoradiopodcast Ed's Patreon: https://patreon.com/edsmanifesto Ed's Website: https://edsmanifesto.com Ed's Field Notes: https://edsmanifesto.com/field-notes Ed's Twitter: https://twitter.com/eds_manifesto PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:13) - Corruption (40:55) - Cartels (56:16) - El Chapo (1:13:27) - Weapons (1:25:33) - Assassinations (1:34:20) - Counter-ambush teams (1:57:46) - PTSD and alcohol (2:20:25) - Improvised weapons (2:23:57) - Street fights (2:52:54) - Kidnapping (2:57:10) - Escaping restraints (3:06:38) - Imitation (3:15:06) - Narco cults (3:28:01) - Adolfo Constanzo (3:32:29) - Fentanyl (3:49:14) - Immigration (4:00:34) - Advice for young people (4:09:06) - Mortality
Chapter 1: What insights does Ed Calderon share about working in counter-narcotics?
The following is a conversation with Ed Calderon, a security specialist who has worked for many years on counter-narcotics and organized crime investigation in the northern border region of Mexico. I highly recommend you follow the writing and courses on his Patreon and website, edsmanifesto.com. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Policy Genius for life insurance, Bambi for HR services, Onnit for supplements, and Insight Tracker for biomonitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
This show is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. I often meditate on my mortality. Every day when I wake up, I have a mantra, part of which I literally imagine the day before me being the last day I have on this earth. And I think that's a really... powerful way to clarify what matters. And it's not about the career.
It's not even about maybe the people in your life. It's about the way in which you interact with those people. It's about the richness of feeling that you draw from every single moment you have with those people. And even with the moments you have by yourself. Just the intensity of life itself. How much are you open to experiencing that intensity? That's what meditating and your mortality does.
It increases your openness to that ever-present intensity that's all around us. Anyway, with PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $17 per month for $500,000 of coverage. Head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com.
This show is also brought to you by Bambi, an outsourced and automated HR solution for business. Bambi was built to give business a dedicated yet cost-effective HR option at just $99 per month. We are currently on this incredible team, an incredible journey we have together on the podcast. Sort of this creative pursuit of... of editing, of planning, just figuring this whole thing out.
I'm just very fortunate to be working with incredible people, a variety of people. They all have different backgrounds, a different way they see the world, a different way they think, they have different flaws and strengths, and it's just a constant inspiration to me to have a chance to work with them.
Now, when you have a team like we do or a larger team as it grows and grows in size, human resources is really important.
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Chapter 2: How does corruption manifest in the context of law enforcement?
And especially when you're a small business, it is indeed important, but it should also be affordable. And that's why the $99 per month that Bambi provides is a huge incentive to try them out. Schedule your free conversation today. Go to Bambi.com and type Lex on their podcast when signing up. Spelled B-A-M-B-E-E.
This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition, supplement, and fitness company. They make Alpha Brain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. I take it when I have deep work sessions, especially in the morning. It keeps changing, but these days when I wake up... I do a mantra. I walk over, get an electrolyte drink as the coffee is being made.
Then an Athletic Greens drink for the nutrition. And finally, I walk over with the coffee to my computer. And my favorite thing to do to start the day is something that I left unfinished from the night before, which would be a programming task. So anything involving programming, when you just have this... screen full of code, and I can focus on a design problem.
For some reason, it's a great warm-up to my brain. I can clear out the distractions of the world and focus on these little puzzles. And it's also clear that I can make progress on solving little puzzles, little puzzles here. Whether it's debugging or building a new thing, all of it just makes me really happy.
especially as the project nears completion, whether it's the intermediate stages of its completion or the final thing. Particularly, oftentimes, what that programming is is scripts that automate various aspects of my life and make me more efficient, but it's also larger projects that I do for machine learning and robotics work and beyond.
Anyway, during those moments, if I'm feeling really out of it, I will take an AlphaBrain to give me a boost. You can get a special discount on AlphaBrain at lexfriedman.com. This show is also brought to you by Insight Tracker, a service I use to track biological data. I've been getting softer and fatter. over the past few months. And recently, a few days ago, I decided to change that.
So I'm on a stricter diet now, on a stricter exercise regime. And it's amazing sort of the improvement in how I feel about this world, how I feel about just the way I move about the world, the way I think for prolonged periods of time, is able to maintain focus. It's a very low-carb diet. I mostly fast, mostly eat once a day.
I mean, maybe that's for another time to discuss what my preferences are there. Maybe people don't care. Probably they don't care. But my body is definitely operating at a higher level of performance under a strict diet.
And it's interesting to measure that through data, to get blood data, to get DNA data, fitness tracker data, and use all of that to see if I'm doing better or worse than I was before. And based on that, make recommendations for diet and lifestyle changes. That's exactly what Insight Tracker does. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsightTracker.com.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of trust in relationships within the drug war?
When you meet a person sticking on human nature, do you think it's possible to figure out if they can be trusted? So you said anyone could be corrupted, right? You know, how long would you need to talk to a person? And even in your personal private life, just a friend. Or is trust a thing that's never really guaranteed?
I think trust is never really guaranteed. I know a lot of people are going to say that's a sad way and hard way of living your life. But, you know, life experience at my end. People change. The dynamics of a relationship might change. I look at people's character, specifically their past and past experiences, if I can.
Somebody that presents himself in front of you as somebody, but you quickly learn that that somebody is just a mask or a persona that they kind of created for themselves. And they might not even be aware of the persona? Is there some deep psychological stuff? Sometimes. I've experienced a lot of failure in my life. You can see it in my nose. You can see it in my lack of a digit. The amount of...
You know, the amount of failures you can see in somebody and how they wear them sometimes is a pretty telling thing as far as them being able to be trusted or that you can trust their story or their experience.
And when I say experience, I mean I've met some criminals, like former criminals or, you know, some people of that background that I trust with my life, you know, because they're not reformed. But they figured out that that's not a life they can live long enough to kind of continue on in.
And I've also met people that are in law enforcement that I wouldn't trust with my car keys, you know, because, you know, whatever persona they adopted over the years is a pretty good one, pretty good mask. Sometimes such a good mask, they don't even know they're wearing it.
And on top of that, it's not just the psychology. There's also a neurobiology to it. I've been very fortunate and deliberate to surround myself with good people throughout my life. But I've recently gotten to sort of observe, not close to me, but nearby, somebody that could be classified as a sociopath. Yeah. And a narcissist. Yeah. Like, I don't want to use those psychological terms, but just...
It's like, oh, people come with different biology, too. So it's not just like the trauma you might experience in your early life and all the deep complexity that leads to the psychology that you have as an adult, but it's also the biology you come with, the nature, that you might not just have the...
the machine that can empathize deeply with the experience of others or maybe a machine that gets off gets a dopamine rush from the manipulation of other humans yeah or the control of other humans yeah i mean put an example of my my own background uh
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Chapter 4: How do personal experiences shape one's perspective on morality in crime?
But then there's something inside you where that kind of, those opportunities come. Like with a police officer, where you realize you can just pay a little bit of money and get out of a thing. And then you realize you can pay a little bit of money or do a favor to get your kids in a better school or something like that. Yeah.
But there comes opportunities where you – where, all right, if I do this little thing, I can make – I can get a huge promotion. I can get a huge increase in my power. I can get a lot of money. And something inside you says no. Yeah. That's not right.
Yeah.
And I wonder what that is. Because like – Yeah, because it feels different than the legal systems within which you operate. There's some kind of basic human integrity, human decency. I wonder if that's constructed or it's always there. Again, nature versus nurture.
I think for me, it was looking at seeing that in somebody else that I kind of learned about it. There's a man that I consider a mentor figure. His name's Lieutenant Colonel Izaola. He was a lieutenant colonel from the Army that basically came over and took over the group that I used to work with. He was incorruptible. That was the essence or the aura that he projected.
The first time he went off on patrol when he was placed in charge of us, I actually drove him around Tijuana. Uh, he was one of those lead from the front type of people. Uh, the amount of assassination attempts he got was basically a proof of how uncorruptible he was because they kept trying to pay him off. And when that didn't work, they tried to kill him several times.
I think the last assassination attempt took the use of his legs, uh, That man is still a dangerous person in my mind. But for me, and people can gather a little bit about my background and where I'm from and some of the access I currently have to train the federal institutions here in the U.S. as far as my background and if I was corrupted or not, because there's a lot of that out there.
The Catholic guilt that's kind of built into some of us is always kind of there, you know? The devil was under the bed, you know? So I don't consider myself Catholic. I consider myself culturally Catholic, I think, is what I kind of say with that. I had a pretty good structure with my dad and my mom at the house, and they never let me get away with things.
And I think my mom was a pretty big moral compass for me. But Lieutenant Colonel, kind of leading from example and seeing his work and how much profound change he caused in the people that work with him, as far as we felt supported and we felt like we had a guiding figure during this time. Tijuana was the most dangerous city on the planet when I was working there, and he took charge.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Ed face while caring for his father during COVID?
we had to set up like some Jason Bourne level shit at his, at, at my brother's place. We, we, he was in Mexico, you know? So we had to bribe a guy to get us an oxygen tank. And I had to Jimmy Riga respirator. And it was, it was, it was, it was some shit. But my dad was like, yeah, he survived it. You know, everybody, the doctor was like, say goodbye. Yeah.
And my dad was like, yeah, say goodbye to him, you know.
Okay, so your dad's a gangster. I got it. Tough guy.
Chapter 6: How does Ed describe his relationship with alcohol and its impact on his life?
He did some gangster shit that day. But on my end, I was being isolated, basically. It's COVID. Everybody's slowing down. No more classes. No more excuses to go out there and drink. And no more socializing. So social drinking turned into alone drinking more and more and more. I bought a bottle of gin because I was down in Mexico taking care of my dad.
And they closed down beer production in Mexico. So beer went away. And beer was a way I kind of managed it, you know. It's not hard alcohol. It's just beer, so, you know. But that went away, so it was just hard alcohol that was available down there. One night alone at the house, my dad's house, I drank a bottle of gin. A whole bottle of gin. I almost died.
And after that, you know, some people started noticing that I was isolating more and more and it was kind of eating away at me. I was in a relationship at that point when I started seeing everything just kind of fall apart around me. And I drank half of a glass of wine
Chapter 7: What insights does Ed share about the role of spirituality in Mexican culture?
And it made me sick, like internally in my mind. And my kid said to me, and I don't know, nobody coached her, nobody said anything to her. She was a pretty intuitive kid. She said, I don't drink anymore, Dad. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the night. And I stopped. I stopped. I stopped that night.
I remember waking up at three in the morning, uh, and taking a cooler that I had and just dumping all the beers in it and chucking them in the garbage and with a knife poking each of them to not, you know, be tempted to go back for them. And then the second day I went around and started finding the hides that I had because I had some, you know, hides. Yeah. And, uh,
And then I went somewhere and locked myself in for two weeks. Uh, I had the, the withdrawals, uh, the clearest nightmares that I've ever had in my life for two, three weeks. I went somewhere and I want to keep them private, but I went somewhere where they offered a place for me.
Chapter 8: How does Ed view the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico regarding immigration?
And, uh, when I asked them about it, they, it's a community. I gave them some money for their school as a donation. I gave them like a few, a few thousand dollars. I said, yeah, sure. Come, you know, you can, you can go through this process here. Cool as fuck people.
The first thing they did when I got there is they stood me up in front of everybody to thank me for the donation and then told everybody that I was an alcoholic. And if anybody saw me drinking, I was to be kicked out of there immediately. And I felt horrible. So that was where I started.
Is that temptation still there?
There was a moment when it was. And some therapy circle. There's a rodeo clown friend of mine who his body's... His spine is basically fused together, you know, type of guy. We've been friends and enemies and friends again, you know, during our therapy circle sessions.
Oh, so like there's an intimacy there.
Yeah. He didn't know anything about me. One time when we were telling our story, he stood up and told his story. And then he heard mine, and then he was pissed off at me and didn't want to talk to me for a while. And then later he told me that it was because he saw what I did with my experience and how much of a difference that he perceived that I was making with it.
And he felt jealous that he couldn't do the same with his experience because he was just a broken ex-Rodeo clown. He told me when I was going through the process, like, hey, you're an internet celebrity person, you know, you're known. aren't you worried about people finding out that you're recovering drunk?
And I said, yeah, it's fucking scary as shit if people find out that I am going through this process. It's scary that, you know, the critique. You know, I already get a lot of shit for being an ex-police officer in Mexico and all that, all the negativity that comes from that. And he said, don't be. You know, you can't pickpocket a naked man, so just get naked. And what does that mean?
Write about it. Post it online. You never know. Somebody out there might get inspired to do their own kind of process. So I started posting about it. Cowardly in a way because I wanted to make other people keep me on the path, you know. But in other ways, you know, desperation. You know, I don't want to drink anymore.
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