YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Calderon

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313
first
2022-12-12
most recent
2022-12-12
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “The amount of assassination attempts he got was basically a proof of how uncorruptible he was because he kept trying to paint 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 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 US 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. So I don't consider myself Catholic. 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.”

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

  2. “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 Izawoda. 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 on patrol when he was placed in charge of us, I actually drove him around Tijuana. He was one of those lead from the front type of people.”

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

  3. “So you get stopped for a traffic violation of some sort, and the cop walks up to you. Obviously, you don't say the word bite, but it's like a slang term for it. And he asks for your paperwork. And if you get fined or get a ticket, you say, can I pay the ticket here is what they say. And put your money inside the paperworking hand over to the cop. Morida. You think it's, you know, I'm just going to do it and nobody knows, you know, but it's a systemic thing. A lot of people do it. And then they don't trust the police because they are fed with this.”

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

  4. “It's always there, like on the outskirts or even in the center how you can grease things to make things easier and how it's like this personal thing, I'll just pay off the Antijuana we have Mordida is what we call it when you pay a cop off Namordida means a”

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

  5. “Juana produces kids like that. She produces the environment itself, produces a pretty specific person, I guess. Our normal is our baseline normal is way different than most.”

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

  6. “I guess some people are born with certain predispositions. And if they're in the right environment, some of the negative aspects might flourish more than others. For me, I mean, I grew up skateboarding in Tijuana. And I remember breaking into my first backyard pool. It was a house at a cartel guy owned, and we used to skate the pool in the back of it. So I learned how to pop open padlocks with a small vehicle hydraulic lift. And I remember doing that. And later on in life, I got to train with people from other parts of Mexico and work with them. And I remember pulling that trick off and they were like looking at me like, where'd you learn that? Like burglars at Dijuana. And they're like, wow, that's interesting. Like all people from Tijuana like that. And I said, no, we're not all like that. But I guess in some way we are because”

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

  7. “I figure out that she was basically trying to make me into what she didn't have in a way. And if I can get to see somebody's parents, you know, that's usually a sign of something, at least for me as far as figuring out where people are. I think there's something to be said about nature and nurture and how some people come up. Some people are just born with that predatory instinct, you know, and you'll never know. I mean, they spend their whole life practicing how to hide it. But if he can figure out somebody's background childhood where they're from, you can kind of tell something about them. I'm from Tijuana. I'm a survivor. That's my background as far as where I'm from.”

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

  8. “I mean, for an example of my own background, my mom didn't have a father. He left really early on in their childhood. My mom raised her two sisters and basically kept a household. She was a great mom. She was a badass. She was very independent. She showed me how to be independent. She showed me how to kind of watch out for others and kind of build me up in that way. And I had a great childhood as far as, you know, as far as her and kind of like how she molded me. Later on, I figured out that when I had my own kid,”

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

  9. “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, you know, the amount of... 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.”

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

  10. “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 life experience at my end. Know 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 somebody is just a mask or a persona that they kind of created for themselves.”

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

  11. “Mexico has a culture of corruption. Like, you know, you have your kid that goes to school at public school, and you want him to be in the morning, not in the afternoon school. Time period. So you go off and grease the wheels with the director of the school, people hearing this in Mexico, nod their heads because this is something that happens from early on. So there's a systemic and cultural thing to it, you know, as far as getting around rules. And this happens because, you know, the people that are in charge in Mexico, the government is, you know, their tandem amount is trust between criminals and the cartels down there for a lot of the culture. So people don't trust the government and much less criminality.”

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

  12. “And sometimes the payment for some of this corruption is just to continue on living. You encounter people that seem incorruptible, that go through FBI background checks that go through all of the security measures that all of us were put through, you know, polygraph tests. And then later on, you know. Turns out they were on the take or they became somebody that was corrupted. I think what I found out is that anybody at any level, they could be a very strong, hard to get person right now. People get corrupted through their families, through need. Mexico is a place where a lot of instability occurs. So financial needs, health.”

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

  13. “I mean, first off, anybody can be got, anybody can be corrupted. You're working in that field and you. Realistically, the training we got and profiling and investigation and stuff like that was basically you learn from the older guys there. And some of those guys were already corrupted from the start. So trust no one remembers seeing that X-Files episode where that was stated, you quickly learn that even if you are somebody that to your own mind appears incorruptible, small changes happen around you, wheels get greased, the money gets put in front of you.”

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