YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Calderon

lines on the record
313
first
2022-12-12
most recent
2022-12-12
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Have a journey to go through, you know, I just came into your studio with a duffel bag straight from the airport, and I'm going to leave early tomorrow morning to somewhere else. I've been on the road for... Almost, I think, five years nonstop. I go back to a specific place every week to see my kid for two, three days, and then I'm back out. You know, some people say, Are you running? Like, are you worried this is afraid about something? On this weird path, I guess, trying to look for something that I think I've been missing as far as my afterlife of a sort, you know, coming out of that.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Perform and take an extreme ownership of things and are just amazing people that are thriving out there. It's inspirational. I see some of these people and I'm like, holy shit, I need to figure out how to get to some semblance of that. But I'm not that. I've been through the ringer. I fucked up. I shed a ton of times. My nose is an example of that, a few missing teeth. But in a way, I think all of that is part of the process that not a lot of people want to talk about, you know, independently of the experience I got down there and some of the things that I show and talk about and some of the advocacy I do related to women like her that are trying to look for a better life and trying to find their missing kids, training people to not get into those situations, but also showcasing the fact that people that go through some of these processes.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Which is beautiful. That's a beautiful piece of advice. They get you sometimes when you talk about some of these things openly. And some of the comments were positive and I've been. Seeing people comment, sending me messages, and meeting people on the road that are five months in. Ten months. Some people that have been on that wagon for way longer than I have. What's cool when you meet people that are superhuman or”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I mean, I'm not Jocko Wilnick. I'm not David Goggins. I wake up at 10 in the morning sometimes and I'll have cornflakes with my eight-year-old. I like days off. I used to wake up at 3.30 in the morning every day to review what happened during the night and then go off for a jog and then the gym and just be ready to be able to murder somebody with my hands if I had to. But that is, I couldn't maintain that during the whole process of getting out of it now leaving out alcohol. I remember just being honest with it and just seeing the two sides of it. You know, Joe told me never read the comments section”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Desperation. I don't want to drink anymore. I don't want to go back on that bathroom, which I know leads directly to a bad death. I'm not afraid of death. I just want a good one. I don't want a bad one. I think that was going to lead me to a bad death. Are writing about it and sharing it online through my Fever Dreams post. Just being humorous about it online. Getting a lot of hate on one side, you know, having a few people and companies that I work with kind of step back and seeing this guy has some issues to having other people kind of make fun of or make light of that. Weakness portrayed.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “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. I already get a lot of shit for being an ex-police officer in Mexico and all that negativity that comes from that And he said, Don't be That 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. But in other ways, you know,”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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 could 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, yeah, you're an internet celebrity person.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “There was a moment when it was And some therapy circle. There's a rodeo clown friend of mine who his body's bine is basically fused together, you know, type of guy. We've been friends and enemies and friends again during our therapy circle sessions.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Clearest nightmares that I've ever had in my life. Two, three weeks. I went somewhere. I want to keep them private, but I went somewhere where The offer at a place for me. I asked him about it. It's a community. I gave them some money for their school as a donation, again a few thousand dollars. Yeah, sure, come. You can go through this process here. Cool as fuck people. The first thing I 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. That was where I started.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Was in a relationship at that point when I started seeing everything just kind of fall apart around me. I drank half a glass of wine. And it made me sick 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 pretty intuitive kid. Said, I don't drink anymore Out of nowhere in the middle of the night. I stopped Stop that. I stopped that night. I remember waking up at 3 in the morning 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 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 hides. And then I went somewhere and locked myself in for Two I had the Withdrawals.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “He did some gangster shit that day. But on my end, I was being isolated basically as COVID is 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 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 that kind of managed it. It's not hard alcohol. It's just beer. That went away, so it was just hard alcohol. That was what was available down there. One night alone at the house, my dad's house, Aya. Drank a bottle of gin, a whole bottle of Almost 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”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Second time I was there, I went somewhere. God shit faced. It was stressful not for any other reason than I felt the responsibility to the people that couldn't speak about it. So that's The start of COVID, and things started getting shut down and slowed down. My dad got really sick and almost died Had to set up like some Jason Bourne level shit at my brother's place. He was in Mexico, you know, so we had to bribe a guy to get us an oxygen tank and I had to Jimmy Rig a respirator. And it was some shit But my dad was like. He survived it. The doctor was like, say goodbye. And my dad was like, yeah, say goodbye to him.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “He's crushed it in his hand and said, It's gone. That brought me back immediately to holy shit. I was off somewhere and I was back And I had to go drink I went through that process of going off at getting on it, going off, getting off my marriage. Separ That was Another end of the world aspect to everything. I lost my mother. I lost the job. And then the marriage failed. And it was on me. Basically, went somewhere and did a stock of everything that was going on. And made a decision to stop ranking. Had some bad relationships after. And I just came to a place where I need to stop drinking.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And in a way, basically reliving and reopening a bunch of shit for myself every time I do. I was getting triggered and the way I would manage that was I would drink at the end of the night after a weekend class somewhere when I talk about the fireflies and a field in Tennessee. It was a moment where I was forcing myself to try and be sober. And we did this medical class out in a In the hills in Tennessee, it's beautiful green place, beautiful family there that hosted us. It's the first time I ever saw flowery flies. So I was like, thought I was having a hallucinogenic experience when I said, why are the dust glowing? What I thought a friend of mine. He's a veteran. He's ran off to the woods and grabbed one and brought it to me and showed it to me. It's like, holy shit, what is that? That's a firefly. Wow. How do they glow? I don't know.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Giant pause button in the form of alcohol basically. I'll drink my problems away. Or specifically I would, it's like if you have a mess in your house, you just put a big tarp over it, you know, to cover it up and alcohol was that for me. And it fastered more and more as I not only went through the process of learning about PCSD going through therapy but refusing to let that go. Like going through therapy and seeing what other people's problems were. I don't want to, you know, this is the only thing I have. I'm not, you know, I'm not hurting anybody with it, you know. Why do I need to get rid of that? By this point, I was traveling across the country and training people and showing some of the experiences that I had to other people, speaking, being on podcasts and having conversations like the one I'm having with you.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I mean, I went through some horrible shit, but there's some people there that went through other moral shit or stuff that I don't think I could have survived. When I went through that process of figuring things out, you know, the first thing that glaringly pointed out or stuck out to me was my inability to... Process things. There was a big pause button there, a giant one. Everything was on pause. My grieving, not only my mom, but my brother. So I had a pause button on me. So that was 13, basically. Then I got to bury many of my friends. Inform their wives or girlfriends of what happened. And that all again was paused because I wasn't allowed to process. I spent years without going on vacation because I was a workaholic. I found at the core of my issues alcohol”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “If anything, I would recommend people that have any of these issues to go to places where other people have their issues so you can, it's not a competition, but you get to see the scope of problems in the world and you sometimes feel kind of lucky.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “When it's quiet, that's when it hits you. I think that's what a lot of people experience when they come back from a conflict zone. Everything that was life and death, everything that mattered, all the noise, all the chaos, all the people that are around you that would die for you, kill for you, you would kill for them, all the millions of dollars worth of equipment and stuff like that you were responsible for now are all gone and it's just you walking into Circle K and buying three cans of fosters to drink yourself to sleep.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “The word PTSD and TBI and all of these things, I did not, I didn't know any of them. It was through people that I got to meet in the training field that were Marines. Seals, Marislock guys, those types of people that started giving words to some of the things that I felt, which I didn't really know, you know. We would treat post-traumatic stress with alcohol and vacation time. Bottle of Mescal, you know, when you see the bottom of it, your troubles are gone. Immediately. I was an alcoholic as well as all the other stuff. I was drinking myself to sleep every third night. Marriage obviously was failing. Wasn't easy for her, you know, she was brave and she did what she could and I totally respect and understand her process with it, but”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Everything's quiet. No more radios going off all over the night. There's no more three cell phones on the counter. There's no guns. There's no rifles. There's no... AD people calling to see what's going on. There's nothing. It's just quiet. It's during the time when Trump got elected, so the immigration process that usually would take, I had most things going for me and immigration process that would take. Most of the year took two years. So it was. Was not an easy process to not only come to the US Come to the US with that pressure kind of underlying pressure as far as being an immigrant at that time here.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Luckily, I had developed some friendships in the United States with some of the people that I used to work with and cross train with and some friendships that I developed with people that I would Talk to and make friends with states One of them was a Navy SEAL reservist whose name is Dan Stanfield. And his wife Kelly, they opened the doors of their house to me and my kid and my wife at that time. As I seek to basically look for the American dream, I cross the border. My kid, and nobody knew anything. I didn't tell anybody, just my wife. I was off When I came to the States, I already kind of dabbled in the whole training field and showing some of my experience to people. So I had... Least a seed of that out there. People knew me for that. All of a sudden I was In the middle of an avocado orchard. In the middle of California.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I never envisioned myself coming to the United States to do that process for myself. I was invested in that job. I thought I was going to Or retire from that And Quickly became like an issue because everybody's wondering why I left the job so abruptly so. With some threats made when I left By people inside the office, and I probably anonymous yet.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “All this training, and again, the training that would be useless in the private sector in Mexico, I couldn't change from one corporation to another. I can go to work for another police institution. I took a deep breath and Resigned. I went to the office. I said, I need to resign. They said, what? I need to resign. Some of the people in the office that knew me for a long time were like, what's wrong with you? They thought I was having a mental breakdown. All the paperwork took a big trash bag, put all my stuff in there, blade armor, tear gas grenades, gas mask, satellite radio, MP5 magazines, and MP5 submachine gun Glock Glock magazines, all of it, helmets. And I put it in the, I handed it over in the armory. And I made some phone calls. Was married to an American, and my daughter's American.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “There were other people with me that didn't allow me to grieve, you know. I went to work, got called into the office, and I was basically told that I was going to be reassigned. After what I just went through the reassignment was going to be something that I saw as Accept It was People in charge at that point were obviously corrupted. And what I got from their conversation was that they wanted us to work for a specific side. And I knew that that was the time to go. Asked for a license. Basically, license is unpaid absence for work, basically, leave of absence. Which by law is allowed And I was den No I'm invested in this job. I have a good salary and I have a category in there. So by the level of time you spend in there, you get a category. So it was a pretty high category agent.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I wasn't allowed to grieve basically, and I wasn't allowed to grieve for a few years for different reasons. Went back to work and”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Was nobody, there was, yeah, there's nothing underneath me. I get three days off work. That's what the And Trying to grieve as I go back to work. Dark shit crosses my mind as I'm going through that process of trying to figure things out.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It's not a financially secure job, you know, and the pressures that it has and the odd hours and all that made it really hard. And then all of a sudden my brother calls me and tells me that let's go to the hospital. Something happened to my mom. It wasn't my turn to watch her, so I I felt pretty shitty about that. I got to the hospital and. The doctors came out and told us that she was gone. It was a Massive heart attack. She had a pacemaker by then. So she was gone She was in her 60s. We kind of expected something, but not, you know, that was like. Hard for me. She was my center. She was going to be the one that I would ask for advice as far as work, you know, as if she leaved it or not.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That had turned into psychiatric issues. So we were basically taking turns trying to. Take care of her, you know, locking the door so she wouldn't wander off and stuff like that. So not only was I dealing with the job on the street, but I was dealing with that. And also I had a A two year old, and a marriage that was Difficult at that time. So I was trying to figure all these things out.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Basically, would go there every year. You would get your financials checked. You would get a physical, psychological evaluation. You would get a polygraph exam done on you. All of the works. To try and see if you were somebody doing something wrong. And all of that was canceled because it violated your human rights. If you get fired from a job because of a failed polygraph exam, because that was not an actual admissible way of firing somebody. So all of a sudden you had people that were known cartel compromise people that were fired five, six years ago showing back up to work. They're back paid and everything So This started happening and it quickly realized that it was going to be hard to stay there. I was driving home from work and I got a call from my brother. That Mom had been going through some health issues.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And people forgot, you know, people forgot what it took to get the Juana off the most dangerous that he list on the planet. And People were vilified. People like him and the police force that I was a part of started getting compromised. A lot of the things that were put forth to try and keep us honest. There was a program. They had these centers called C3”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Stuff that I was doing before that job. We were moving away from the successes that had been had by people like Lisola when they were in charge of that whole process, the people that I used to work with. Some of the only successes in that counter push against cartels in Mexico. And you can kind of like it's documented. You can read about it out there, a bunch of people wrote papers on it. Some of the only successes were had by Lezo and the places where you had leadership. He not only pacified Tijuana, he also did the same in Juarez. He was sent to be the police chief in Juarez too. But politics change and heroes become villains. A lot of people started calling him a villain because of his unorthodox approach and human rights violations and all this type of stuff kind of comes to the forefront.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Major one After I got done on the protection detail with the governor. Like everything down there again, the whole cycle. He got his turn. So when he went away, you know, poth exchange. And down there, basically, if you're a gubernatorial candidate, you have either a friend, a friend of a friend, or a family member be the head bodyguard guy and the guy that won the elections had his head bodyguard guy already there. So all of us were sent back to whatever we came from. So I went back to work on the streets. I was back on the operations group. I was working with the subdirector directly with him, basically, back on the ground doing.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Could have been shot in the face there. That aspect that conflict brings where it's a bad guys, good guys, you know, heroes, villains, you know, how you... There's an innocence to that that goes away.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “That aspect of us versus them, or they're the enemy and you like that. My mom. Told me those words. Nobody's against you. They're just for themselves. So don't make the mistake of dehumanizing anybody”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “He hugs me before I go Something to him. I can't remember what. And he says, hey, in my ear, I know what you do for a living. It's not a safe place for you to be And I walk off. Few moments later, the army showed up. And you... Could feel the amount of rounds going off from two blocks away. We came back with our guys, and it was over. I looked through the bodies and the cars that were left, you know, there was bodies all over the place, people left there. It was a Spent like an hour looking for Only way I could recognize him was his hair. I stayed with his body. All night there's a There's a bridge and Tijuana that goes over the river and a place called And that's where the forensic offices were. His body was taken there, and I stayed with his body until it was released. I told his family about it. I knew”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “How's so and so of your family? Good, and how's so and so of your family? Good. Like, this is an interesting job you have. He's like, yeah, it's pretty good. They pay us well and get a car. There's money and nobody fucks with you. You get respect. I was like, that's awesome. And if you want, I can get you in. If you want that, it's like, oh, I'm too much of a coward for that. I told God.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “His redhead kitten. When I say kid, I mean, he was my age now to my eyes, he's always going to be younger now. Whistled. Told my name. Hey, Gaskeek out. I'm like, what are you doing here? He's like, ah, she had to just, you know, going home. She's going to get a taxi. As he walks over, he has a plate carrier with AK magazines on his chest, AK without a stock on it. Just carrying his hand in his hand. Comes over and he hugs me. I can feel the magazines on my chest. Mind you, I have a gun on me, you know, tucked. And Next Hill is buzzing in my back pocket. As people are trying to figure out what the fuck's going on. He asked me small talk shit. Like, hey, it's like, what are you doing? Like, what do you work at? And I'm like, I'm just looking for a job. I used to work at a video store. So he's like, I haven't seen you in a while.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “There's Red Heads in Mexico, by the way. I think probably some of the Irish that betrayed the American side during the last Mexico-American War that stayed down there had a bunch of kids. It's probably from there.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I had an experience working. There was a friend of mine who took the other path. And went to work for some of these criminal groups I was operational and We saw a bunch of people in a gas station parked. Back then, the main modus operandi that they had was that they would impersonate or dress up as federal police. And that's how they would move around the city. We saw these suburbans in a gas station. And some of the guys were carrying on our AK-47s. And that's not a standard issue, firearm. We saw that and I got off on foot and walked by to try and get a better sense of what was going on. I took everything off wearing jeans and a t-shirt. And I got a whistle from one of the guys that was there, and my name was called. It was one of the guys that I grew up with. Redhead kid looked like Elcanello, you know?”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Can't understand that on my side of my life experiences because our war has been an internal war amongst our people and amongst our houses.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “There are things that we're trained to depress or Conceal or hide and kill in us when you're trained for something like that, or when you're in conflict zone like that and you hear the narrative constantly being blurred out that the other side is an orc or whatever word you want to use. But we live in a day and age when you can see Americans going off to Japan and shaking hands with some of their former enemies. I mean, some of us have seen that and how things change. I think years from now, a lot of the stuff that we are taking right now is of the utmost importance won't matter anymore.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I learned that from my mother, you know, she said, nobody's against you there for themselves. Learned this and you will make friends of enemies. She said that when I graduated and I carried that with me throughout my whole career.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Least for me personally, I wasn't one of the guys that would even grab them and beat the shit out of them and put him in the back of a van, just tie him up and gag him.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “You prepare for the probable. And if the impossible happens, you're halfway out of it, hopefully. And if you find yourself in an ambush, it wasn't a successful one. As far as our training and the mindset and my experience with it, the adversarial thinking part of it has always been a very powerful one. I think one that a lot of people ignore kind of like leave to the wayside, specifically in all conflicts out there, there's a tendency for a military force or a conventional force of any kind to be trained in a way where they dehumanize the enemy. And when that happens, you become blind to the enemy's story. It's his capability, his story, his ability. If you treat the other side like an inhuman monster. It's hard to take notes”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “There's a contingency somewhere moving towards a place that you control and own where you have the advantages where they can't see you but you can see you can see them where they can't predict you but you can predict where they're going to pass go through places where they forcibly have to pass places where they're predictable places where you can not only predict but also have a plan for yourself to escape and exit that place.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Not going to be received by virgins and heaven. That's not the type of mentality that we had down there. But we start learning about some of these things and also seeing cartel forces apply some of these ambush tactics to the military or the federal forces.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “We're going through training specifically around this type of stuff and operational training, basically showing us how to ambush people. When I started making a group for myself as far as counterambush, those cat teams that they call them up here in the US, basically a group of respond to a high violent ambush. First off, the first rule, if you find yourself in an ambush, it wasn't a successful ambush because if you find yourself in it, you're alive, you know. But if you want to create an amazing Cameron Ambush team, you have to make them ambushers. And with ambushing, you figure out where all the opportunities of not only successfully doing what you need to do are in your favor, but also to escape with your life.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Route analysis, you know, you have to get to the airport and you send off two cars to analyze two routes. And then on the fly, you just change. Trajectory to create randomness, unpredictability, and have that as a security feature. Having to a convoy of four vehicles separate into two convoys and show up in different parts to, again, make it hard for people to guess where you're going to be pulling out false information as far as where it's going to be, who's going to be, and that type of stuff.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Somebody that I again, I think this is Lisaola. She said this to me or said something like this to a group of us, that there's nothing wrong with being paranoid. It's about educating your paranoia and knowing what to be afraid of. If you're afraid of everything, you know, you basically overwhelmed. But if you start educating yourself as far as specifically what to prioritize as far as what to worry about in a war zone, working, protecting somebody, you know, you're not looking at everybody's faces, you're just looking at their hands because that's what's going to kill you. That's an example of focalizing what you're paranoid and what you're afraid of.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Probably does a lot for somebody specifically growing up like that. You lose opportunities of things that we take for granted, just going up, just not telling anybody and going to the store because you want to get some snacks or something like that. That's not available to some of these people.”

    2022-12-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #346 – Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source