The Joe Rogan Experience

His books "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency" and "Gangster Warlords" are available now.

My first book is El Narco my second book is Gangsta Walords which also has uh um stuff on the MS 13 on the gangs in Brazil the gangs in Jamaica as well as Mexico and I'm working on my third book now and the third book is about about gun trafficking

An interesting story going back then to the late 1970s story in a book called Drug Lord by Terence Popper who interviewed a drug trafficker in the 80s. When he got his job as the heffed a placer which is the head of a certain territory. When he got the job he went with the state police at the time and said I want to become the head of the placer and they took him in and tortured him for two days unlike in a beta crap out of him put electric shocks on his nuts. One of the big torture domestics put water lace with chile in his nose it's not like one of these big say your whole face burns he's like torture techniques they have and after two days of torturing they said yeah well done you know you survive well you've got the job so what it shows is that the police had that up ahead the police controlled this they were like okay we controlled this racket and you know we can fuck around and torture and kill drug traffickers when we like you know in all of the presidency I mean there was uh in that time Carlos Salinas became president in 1994 his brother Raul Salinas there's the Swiss investigators bank accounts and said he had 500 million dollars in bank accounts which they you know they believed it was drug money so right up to the presidency this was being run when Mexico changed democracy so when I arrived in Mexico it was changing to democracy it was like wow great democracy's gonna happen free market's gonna happen you know we're in the good days of the 21st century now but what happened was you looked political control shifted so you had a bunch of different political parties and they were fighting over the drug trade and you know I was one time in Rebola Rebola when the federal police had a shootout with the municipal police they were fighting each other probably because they work with different drug cartels wow so that's what started but then you had the techniques like the technique of beheading wasn't really a big deal it was very very rarely used up until around 2006 and one of the first incidents was in a Kapulco in 2006 here in about June 2006 now it might have been after inspired by the al-Qaeda Sakawi you know video which was shown in full on Mexican TV remember when that came out when they decapitated the Guinear Rock and they decapitated first it was too policeman they decapitated later that year in september 2006 there was five heads they rolled onto a disco dance floor and then this thing just became just escalating just became this kind of like using this terror public terror so 2006 2008 was a big escalation and then 2011 12 were like crazy and then it subsided a bit the violence got a bit less public and it was more like hidden like masquerade stuff now the worst masquerade that's been discovered so far was in Veracruz now I've been to the side of it and it was 250 bodies were found in this masquerade in one place and it was right next to a housing state and there's families it was so one of the saddest things was you see there kiddies bicycles and basketball hoops and stuff right next to this and the field next to that they dug up 250 bodies and the smell was like emanating to this housing state and it's like in a middle cloud the dream of becoming middle class that was the kind of something this housing state I'm right next to it this violence but when I say a lot of these stories and I mean they're crazy stories but a lot of the weird thing is a lot of mexico lives a normality around this it's not what you see this is not what you say every day this is this happens but there's also just a normality that could just be like your outside here in LA and normal people living normal lives around this as well

and he basically predicted then you're going to say transformation in war an armed conflict around the world and you know we have like nuclear weapons but they're useless in these situations and then nuclear weapons you can't use a nuclear weapon to solve the problem in Mexico you can't use a nuclear weapon to deal with Islamic State you know these are internally insurgents in countries so if you look at Mexico it's kind of weird hybrid hybrid so between crime and war so I use the word crime wars in some of these places say Mexico El Salvador Guatemala Honduras where you have now many there are some situations in Mexico where it but you know there was a group who called the heliscord new generation cartel somebody that guy shot down a military helicopter using an RPG 7 wow they killed eight soldiers in a federal policeman in the helicopter there was one shootout which involved 2,000 federal police and 500 secade was like 500 cartel hitmen had this crazy battle from Mitchell can so sometimes you actually get it actually starts to look more like kind of regular conflict but generally it's all you know way more kind of hybrid so it's kind of weird mix and so I was trying to get my head around this for a long time for some years I was trying to think is this a civil war should we look at this and then it become okay this and then it was we know Robert Bunker when he when I talked to him one time and he said you know like there it doesn't fit into this theories you know it's not quite war it's more than crime it's a weird hybrid in between um so kind of crime war and that's the way you got to understand these these things but a lot of the conflicts around the world today this is spreading I mean you look up Somalia you look at Libya you look at a lot of these places it kind of weird mix instability yeah and then this is what a lot of refugees are fleeing from and I was down in um Tijuana um Christmas I followed the migrant caravan that came through uh Mexico of Central Americans you know which caused a big uh big storm here the Trump kind of here before the election

Chris Hedges wrote a book about the wall.

He wrote a book called America the Farewell Tour.

He goes, there's junkies in the bathrooms. There's like rats running around. He's falling apart.

There's a book about that called Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon written by a guy named Dave McGowan.

I'm going to tell you right now, Joe, it's kind of interesting.

There was a lot of bullshit going on in Laurel Canyon.

This book that you gave me is Family of Secrets.

It's a guy rust baker who's a legit journalist and it's been praised by Dan Rather and Bill Moyers.

We know there are trillions going into the black budget so Trevor Payglen wrote a cool book called I think it was him called Blank Spots on the Map and it just talks a lot about the black budget and I mean so we know it exists.

Did you ever reading the Sebastian younger?

Did you try a great book?

Yes. I read that off your recommendation actually.

It made complete sense. I probably would have used different terms in different places throughout, but the concept that he was talking about absolutely made sense.

So the SEAL team is one of the whether or not people live up to this an argument could be made but one of the key tenets is you know the Brotherhood which is just another way of talking about a tribe.

It's a part of that Michael Crite and book Congo.

Okay.

Remember there was a really terrible movie.

I know the book is called That Fucker.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen Relentless Enemies?

Ever seen that documentary?

No, no, no, it might be on Netflix.

Dude, I've got so much homework to do.

Yeah, Relentless Enemies, is a documentary about a very rare pack of lions.

It's also a book.

And he wrote a brilliant book, I think, in the 80s called 'Black Holes and Time Warps' where he talks about the the answer is we don't fully know, but most physicists think that even if they existed, they will be unstable.

I claim, and I started off as a joke, this actually I wrote it in an Infinite Monkey Cage book, this radio show that I do, but he ended up when I'd written it down, I thought actually, that makes sense, and I read some is similar actually I think.

He's a an intellectual from England who uh wrote about uh wrote the a book about immigrants in Europe called the strange death I think it's called Islam and the Strange Death of Europe

and uh he's basically talking about how people from these countries that have emigrated into Europe are changing the culture show they're changing the culture and there's all sorts of you know crimes and things that are happening that didn't exist before sure and people are developing these communities of like-minded people that didn't exist before no go zones and and he's saying that this is you know this is fundamentally dangerous but he's saying it from a point a perspective of understanding the actual facts involved and talking about the situation and talking about how these are people that don't respect homosexuals they want to throw them off roofs and they have these right opinions about yeah they have these opinions about people that are extremely antiquated not aligned with European values in the modern western world right

he and Sam Harris had a conversation and that conversation got flagged on YouTube uh it got flagged someone put it up in their their you know you make like a little watch list what is it called what it was it called the list you could when you put it on YouTube on your channel where you could the playlist yeah so he puts it on his playlist and he gets a compute a community guidelines strike against him for putting up this conversation between two intellectuals

What was the book I read what's the place where they go to meet every year Bohemian Grove build a bird group build a bird group that was one of my favorite books the truth about the build a bird group and what goes on there and the powerful people that meet and people always saying it's probably 10 guys in a room that run the whole fucking well okay but you show me them until then I'll stay on the left right fight and have fun right

the ideas of there's 10 guys they control everything and they don't give a fuck of its left or right they're just about money it's yeah but it's right the rock of fellows were involved yeah and they but it's weird that was real a creep they plan shit out decades ahead they plan on education yeah decades ahead though and and and it comes true like they write a sitcom script that last 15 year it would plot points it was that book was incredible I can't remember the author's name but yeah but I don't I don't mind

Do you ever read the Strange Death of Vince Foster?

It's a great book.

It's about Vince Foster who was in cooets with the Clintons shot himself they when they found his body the gun was still in his hand which never happens guns fly out of your hand there was less blood at the scene of the crime then was missing from his body so the idea is that someone moved him someone put him there.

This year, I'll connect you in. Um, I used to see, he's just interesting on this. I used to teach Taekwondo for a living.

I think it's actually called "The Souls of Yellow Folk."

His name is Andrew Cousins and he's a former operator who you know knows his shit and it's his first attempt at a fiction novel it's called a Failed State and it's set in Afghanistan and also here in the US and and a couple other places turkey and Germany and elsewhere interesting read a lot of technical information in there it's a fiction novel but he's dumped a lot of uh information in there so it's clear he knows what he's talking about um but it's worth it's it's it's worth the peak if anybody's looking for something to read look just sort of looking out for a buddy yeah all right yeah he's a good guy

He absolutely believes that we never went to the moon.

Then he released a documentary called The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.

And in his documentary, one of the things he did have is some really interesting footage of the lunar module where it looks like they're faking a shot of them being really far out but then when they remove this cover, the covers from all the windows that were inside the lunar module, not the lunar module. What is the one at the orbiter? It really looks like they're in low Earth orbit.

So I'm interviewing a dialog with Rachel Kleinfeld she has this new book called A Savage Order and it's about failed states and what happens to them and why corruption spread so quickly and then how to basically squelch that.