The Jordan Harbinger Show - 701: Ioan Grillo | How America Arms Gangs and Cartels Part Two

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) is a contributing writer at The New York Times specializing in crime and drugs. He is the author of El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency; Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America; and Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. [This is part two of a two-part episode. Make sure to check out part one here!] What We Discuss with Ioan Grillo: The Iron River may sound like something you'd find on a map of Westeros, but it's just a quaint term for the 200,000 guns manufactured or sold in the US moving across the border to Mexico every year. The private-sale loophole that allows "collectors" in the US to sell guns without requiring identification, background checks, or paperwork — often to criminals and cartels at a tidy profit. How "straw buyers" — that is, people with clean records — are paid by gun traffickers to pass background checks and buy firearms en masse without raising any red flags. If they are arrested in the act, however, their punishment rarely exceeds probation. There are 130,000 licensed firearms dealers in the US from which ill-intentioned gun traffickers can make their shady purchases. If that doesn't sound like that many, consider that there are only 14,000 McDonald's restaurants. Thanks to a Reagan-era law enacted ostensibly to protect the privacy of gun owners, the ATF finds its ability to efficiently trace guns hobbled because it can't use searchable, digital databases of sales. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/701 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the conversation we had with behavioral economist Dan Ariely about the invisible (and often frustrating) clockwork that makes us tick? Catch up with episode 417: Dan Ariely | The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So these guys surround a car, and suddenly one of these setters finds out, oh, my God, the door opens. So there's like a struggle, they slam a door shut, look for like to press a thing to lock it. And when they do that, the window winds down a few centimeters. So this guy sticks a gun through the window and sprays. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists,

even the occasional four-star general Fortune 500 CEO, arms dealer or underworld figure, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like abnormal psychology, technology and futurism, investing in financial crimes, disinformation in cyber warfare, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, part two with Yoan Grillo. This episode is a continuation of our conversation about Mexican cartels.

Again, it's pretty heavy, so if you've got kids in the car, you might want to switch to another episode. episode of the Jordan Harbinger show. We got plenty that's appropriate for all ages. All right, let's dive back in. Here's part two with Yoan Grillo. So yeah, let's talk about gun trafficking. The Iron River, as you called it in the book. And at first of the, oh, the Iron River, it sounds so Game of Thrones, right? Then you wrote there was something like 200,000 guns going from the U.S. to Mexico every year. I read that and then I rewounded and then I listened again and I rewound it, and I thought, wait, every year 200,000, that can't be right because the number is so insane. It sounds like what you would need if you were fueling an insurgency in Iraq.

Yeah, the number's mind-boggling. That's estimates. So you've got estimates, and there's this big study that was carried out, and it tried to look at it like the sales in certain areas of gun shops, how they were very abnormal, particularly gun shops right on the border with Mexico. But then you look at the hard numbers. So you look at the very solid numbers of guns that are being seized from cartels in Mexico, from gangsters in Mexico, and directly traced to, you know, US gun shops and gun factories. And you find over a 12-year period, about 160,000 of those. So that's already a very, very big number we can be totally sure about. But then you look at some of these things and like the fast and furious guns, and we can get into that particular juicy

scandal, the fast and furious thing. Yeah. But in the fast and furious guns, then you had a kind of, in some ways a kind of controlled experiment where you had 2,000 guns, and you saw only a pretty small percentage of those were recovered. So that gave you an indication of only a small percentage of guns that you are following being trafficked are really out there. Now, Fast and Furious, obviously, was a huge botched operation by the government, which many people see as being, well, they were deliberately doing this to try and show how bad the thing was. Either way, the numbers are huge. It's mind-boggling, you see this around. I mean, you see just the the armaments that cartels have that you can see again, again and again, in a daily, daily,

daily, daily these people, these killers, these paramilitary style cartel groups, you know, where they can have 50, 100 people with AR-15s, AK-47s, and see where they're coming from. Now, this is a, you know, a kind of mind, mind-boggling scale of this thing. But for me personally, for a long time, I was hesitant to write a book specifically about this issue, as we were discussing. in the first episode of the podcast, I've been 20 years, 21 years in Mexico now covering this cartel violence. Pretty early on, I bumped to this issue of the firearms coming from the United States and had a story about this in the Houston Chronicle back in 2004, you know, looking at it

right back then about these guns coming over. That was before the real increase. And I had other stories for the Associated Press and various people over the years. But I was hesitant to write a book about this because I was thinking, well, you have the Second Amendment. in the United States. And this is such a powerful thing that, you know, what difference does it make? You know, people have got the right to bear arms. They're going to buy guns and bring up to Mexico. And also, when I saw things like Sandy Hook happened in 2012, and it's like, well, you know, in the United States, there's no room to debate on this. This kind of, you know, even when children are being shot in a school, there's no movement about this. Now, this changed in 2017. And when in my own research,

I came across for a radio documentary I was doing a gun trafficker in prison in Sierra Juarez and had a long interview with a guy arrested by the military for bringing a whole bunch of firearms, 815s, mostly from Texas, from Dallas, he was buying them, taking them down into Mexico, doing it every weekend. And I talked to him in a lot of detail about how he got into this, what he was doing, what, you know, his motors operandi was. And I realized there's a lot to this, even beyond the Second Amendment. There's a lot into these details because actually there's a lot of holes in these laws or law enforcement, which is not happening,

even beyond the issue of right to bear arms or not. So, for example, he was going and he was going to Dallas to gun shows. And he was buying them. And he said, there's a black market at gun shows. So I can buy them with no paperwork at all, no paper trail. I walk in there, I buy 12 to 15, mainly our 15s every week, every weekend, and take them down to Mexico. So I went up there with a colleague and we took a recorder and we were recording in the gun show. And we're recording, you know, people and people talking to us.

And we realize what you have is you have this, you know, it's known as the private sale loophole, but it's also this abusing even the private sale loophole, which some people will call the gun show loophole. But you have a case where supposedly a private sale is exempt from background checks and from paperwork. The same way that if I'm, you know, you're just going to sell me an old microphone. You know, you don't have to be a registered microphone seller. You're just going to, I'll give you $100 for that microphone. No paperwork involved. But people were abusing that.

And you had people with tables full of brand new AR-15s selling them with no paperwork. So they were saying, well, I'm a private collector. But you're not a private collector. you're in the business of selling guns. Right, you're reselling the weapons. Yeah. You're buying and reselling without even using. So you're basically in the business of selling guns without a license,

which is a crime and which the ATF do send undercover agents in to try and look for. Now, there's cases, documented cases, and I found one down in Florida, of someone selling more than a thousand guns this way. Wow. And selling them, and then they eventually went and got him on tape and very aware of selling the cartels. And so the more I got into this, This is something, oh, this is quite a lot of meat there to get into.

It's not as simple as the Second Amendment. Another case, one of the biggest ways that these cartels are acquiring the firearms is through what they call straw buyers, straw purchases. You've got a clean record. I pay you some money. You go there and buy the guns for me. Now, they're only paying them off things like $100 to buy a rifle, $50 to buy a pistol. And the reason it's so low is because the recommended punishment is probation.

And you see these people go in and they're buying, there's one case where a guy went in bought 10 AK-47s, identical weapons. So he's buying, okay, I'll have 10 of those. Obviously something suspicious. You're buying 10 Romanian made AK-47s. Buying them for a guy who was working for a Mexican cartel, the Settas, supplying the cartel. The cartel used them in the murder of an American agent. Oh, wow. So even an American agent being killed with these guns, the guys, you know,

still only got probation. Wow. The people who are doing this go, you're not going to get caught. You're basically, this is an inconvenience at best for you. And that's even if you get caught. So here's a hundred bucks. Go get me a pistol and just don't ask any questions about what I'm going to do with it. Or an AK-47 in this case. Or it's a lot worse than that, go and buy me a gun. I mean, this case is on the, you know, because it's documented of people who've gone around spending half a million dollars in shops. So you're just there's a lot more going on with this issue than simply, okay, the Second Amendment exists, it's going to happen. But there's a failure in the basic enforcement of this issue that even many, you know,

gun owners, many pro-sect amendment people can be like, well, actually, yeah, I want my guns, I want the Second Amendment, but I don't want this massive sale of guns to the cartels. I'm sympathetic to that. I'm not one of those people who's like ban, I know I'm going to get some flag for this. I don't think we should ban all firearms from the United States. I don't think that's going to work. I think we have gun culture. It's just, you know, the toothpaste is out of the tube.

But I'd wager, and this is back of the napkin here, most gun owners probably want something akin to, hey, maybe we shouldn't let people go in and buy 10 AK-47s as a straw buyer for drug cartels. Like, maybe there should be a little bit of fill out this form and come back tomorrow because we need to make sure that you are not a supplier of illegal weapons that are going to get people killed. I mean, you can even have the low bar to gun ownership. you just need a bar to gun ownership. And again, this is not a Second Amendment episode, and I'm unqualified to talk about that particular angle.

But this, when we talk about the Iron River of guns flowing south, at those numbers, that's hardly hyperbole, right? And so are those 200,000 guns that are being trafficked to Mexico each year? Is it safe to say those are all for cartel warfare? Because it's nearly impossible. Ed Calderon told me it's almost impossible to buy a gun legally in Mexico. So this isn't people buying for home defense or sport, right? Right. So you have the bar gun legally in Mexico, and it's another thing that's been what I find surprising. When I got into this issue and I realized, you know, after this first interview with this guy, there's a lot of meat on this issue, a lot of weird things happening. So I got, you spent four years just diving into this issue of gun trafficking. You know, I went all the way to Romania to the factory that made these AK-47s, which then get imported to the United States and then sold in Mexico. You know, found people all over the industry, found a gun, you know, some, you know,

hard-line people in support of Second Amendment, the president of the Alaska Machine Gun Association, you know, and then as well as the victims and people, you know, campaign, all those issues. So you find there a lot there. I found many, many surprises. I mean, many surprise about this. One of them was that you can't trace a gun digitally. If it's literally a smoking gun is found at a crime scene in the United States. So literally, here's the smoking gun, the body's right there, phone up the gun trace center.

A lot of cops don't know this. They told me the gun trace center. You found out the gun trace center. Here's the serial number. Give me a trace. We can't do that. We're not allowed to digitally trace. We're not allowed legally to have a digital record of firearms.

You can't in the same way you can have a car license plates. Wow. So there's no digital database for the ATF to say this gun was purchased in an Illinois gun shop and then it moved to California with the owner and then it got stolen in Nevada from a car. There's nothing like that. Absolutely not. So what they have to do. and it's quite amazing place to go to.

This is the ATF Tray Center in West Virginia. They have to make phone calls. They make a phone call to the company which made the gun. Say, who did you sell it to? Or where did you distribute it? Oh, this shop here. Phone up the gun shop. Who did you send to this person?

Now, if they resold it in a private sale, it was stolen. I'll say it anyway. If the shop goes out of business, they give the paper records to this ATF Trace Center. However, the ATF Trace Center is not allowed to digitize them. So they have these massive, massive mountains of paperwork. And they're trying to find these kind of weird ways of getting around because they cannot have a searchable database. So these things like you get to these interesting things about gun law.

And even the Second Amendment from a legal point of view is a lot more complicated. You get debate about the Second Amendment. You get these different federal laws, the 1934 law, the 1968 law. You get these different state laws. So it's actually very, very complicated. Gun law in the United States is not super simple. I thought I was a lot of saying. Yeah.

It's actually very, very complicated. So we ask about buying a gun in Mexico. In Mexico, by surprise, people, there is a constitutional right to bear arms in Mexico. There is one. There is one, yeah. In the Mexican constitution of 1917. However, now that is, in some ways, clearer than the U.S. Second Amendment, into saying you can have guns, but only certain categories of firearms.

You can't have guns superior to the military. You know, you can have certain firearms here. However, to actually practically get your firearm in Mexico, there's a lot of paperwork. There's only one shop in the whole of country which sells guns legally, new guns. It's controlled by the Mexican military. You know, you go in that shop, you have to hand in your cell phone, hand in your paperwork, go through metal detectors, start going in a prison. You go and look at these guns and then you have to give in seven pieces of paperwork, including a letter from your employer and a letter from the police saying you have no criminal record.

When you get all this stuff, you can get the firearm, you know, take seven, several months, you know, and then it's going to be registered with them. But the cartels don't do that. The cartels buy them in the US. Now, there are other people buying guns in Mexico as well. Now, I mean, one of the groups who bore a lot of guns illegally were these groups of vigilantes or self-defense squads. So you start getting an arms race where you do get people who say, well, look, we're going to fight the cartels. So we're going to buy a bunch of guns and get our relatives who are in the US to buy guns and bring them down to us as well. So I'm going to get them to send me an AR-15, AK-47.

And I'm not going to stand up and fight the cartel. So you do get other people there. You do get some private citizens. You know, they might have somebody living in the US. And so I'm going to go home to Mishuakan. I'll buy a gun and take it home and give us a Christmas present to my brother. So you do get other people bringing the gun south as well. But it's the cartels who are buying these vast amounts.

Often it's known as ant-traffic that is these little amounts going down, like these kind of 12 to 15 guns. I talked to all kinds of people involved in the trafficking business. I talked to one guy who was working for the U.S. He was working for a U.S. company laying cable, who was an American citizen, had a U.S. government ID to cross the border, and he was bringing down in his truck a bunch of guns. This is like a side hustle for him. He's like, yeah, I'm here to fix some telecom phone lines,

but every time I come down, I bring down 15 rifles and just sell them on the side of the road. Even more in his case, he was bringing them in the boxes, the company boxes, the company trucks, using the ID. Wow. And he said he was into it. I mean, he started making some, quite decent money by the end. And he also, in fact, got involved in spying on the border patrol and using this kind of equipment. He was kind of a tech nerd as well.

Wow. So kind of spying on different border patrol staff and reporting all of their locations to the cartel. But he was started, he said he kind of did it for the adrenaline, was one of the things that he said. And he said it was kind of funny. He said one of the things that he was pissed off about, this is going back to the 90s and he got involved. And he was pissed off about Tupac being killed. That's the dumbest thing ever. ever heard in my life.

Yeah, I know. You know, we have this kind of stuff. I kind of relate to it at a human level, that kind of stuff. I mean, you can understand somebody thinking that. But how old was he? That's something a child would think. Like, that's a 17-year-old tough guy in mindset. In his 20s, he's like, I'm pissed off about Tupap being killed.

Fuck the world. I'm going to traffic guns to Mexico. Oh, yeah, which is obviously, you know, not the best defense in court. No, I assume you talk to this guy because he's in prison and regretting his actions or something like that. No, no. That guy didn't get caught. That guy didn't get caught. It had a very interesting story and it gave a lot of details.

So you get sometimes these ant traffic or all kinds of different people moving these guns. Sometimes these big amounts, there was one time there was a truck with 147 firearms in 147 AK-47s. And that was actually caught by the ATF. They were watching this. And their operations get very interesting as fast as furious shows. That was heading into Laredo, Texas. Laredo, Texas to November Laredo, Mexico. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest,

Yoan Grillo. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, these authors, thinkers, and creators, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. This course is about improving your networking and connection skills

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Now, back to Yoan Grillo. So your book did dispel some ideas for me. Like, I originally, I assume, some gun traffickers, or most gun traffickers, were these giant operations that we picture when we think about gun trafficking and arms trafficking, you know, something out of diehard, a dude on a yacht delivering loads of thousands of weapons covered by a burlap blanket, right, from former Soviet republics or two former Soviet republics. But it's not. It's like, it sounds like it's a dude driving across the Rio Grande down to Mexico with a Toyota Camry or a AT&T truck and a trunk full of guns.

I think this gets some, it's the real big issues of understanding a lot of the violence around the world today, a lot of the wars and a lot of the kind of what we see in Mexico and other countries, this weird hybrid between crime and war. So for a lot of people who, who are like in the kind of think tank complex about this, trying to look at this, they like to kind of divide this. Okay, we've got two boxes, two areas. We've got the traditional wars and the traditional gun traffickers, kind of gun runners to wars, which we can talk about and we can look and try and, you know, stop like North Korea,

building guns and selling them to terrorist groups, whatever, Iran, these kind of things. and then we have, you know, domestic crime and these criminals moving guns and somebody, you know, in a parking lot selling some guns in Baltimore Meridand. We actually find these things are linked and we've seen it kind of leveling out of this. Now, one thing is with the type of weapons and when you get into the AR-15s or the M16s, the AK-47s, and you see a lot of these same guns, basically the same guns, sold in domestically as well as using these war zones. Now there's the issue, of course, that the AK-47 and the AR-15 domestic versions are semi-automatic, but then you realize that in Mexico they can very easily convert them to fully automatic, but also that that distinction really between semi-automatic and fully automatic. These days in the war zones themselves, they're not really using fully automatic fire,

because everyone's got the capacity for that. They're now like more trying to preserve and fighting in a different way anyway. Yeah, well, we don't have trench warfare as much, right? So you don't need to lay down machine gun fire from Normandy. Just like spread anymore. So nowadays it's like things like these kind of tight urban warfare, things like Fallujah or that kind of stuff or, you know, some of the fighting around these cities in Ukraine right now. And then, you know, you can look even at the mass shootings and say, you know,

you look at the mass shooting in Paris, in the Bataklian in Paris, the disco there, where they got some guns which were Zastava-made. Yugoslav. Yugoslav rifles, exactly. sprayed on the people there and just firing automatic a bunch of sitting ducks literally. But then you can see somebody firing with semi-automatic fire like the attacker in the Florida disco some years ago, where he was using semi-automatic and he was actually being more efficient in a way, you know, in terms of bullets and masking people.

But we do see these similar weapons. So, you know, you have these rifles that can be used by an Islamic State group in Syria, or by a cartel in Mexico or by a mass shooter in the United States. So kind of leveling out of these type of firearms across these situations of crime, terror and war. And then you see these same networks involved. Now, like I say,

this traffic of United States to Mexico is complicated. It would be easier if it was these big James Bond villains. One of them being Victor Bout, one of these alleged James Bond villains is the Russian victor bout, who was bringing up. a whole bunch of heavy guns to Africa, following the fall of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, there's a side note there. He's now, they're looking at potentially, he's in prison in the United States, trading him

to get an American free from Russia in a trade right now. But it's a lot of the time these smaller criminals working as part of these big organized crime networks. Right. It would be easier to interdict this if it was one organization or even smaller numbers. Hey, this is something state-sponsored. It's coming up from Nicaragua and the military is involved and we can see them on our satellites. No, it's 3,000 different people transporting 25 or 50 or 100 guns at a time over and over and over again.

It's just like you said, ant traffic. You can't just squish the ant that's in the front of the line. You can't get them all, right? You can't get them all. You said earlier the ATF can't use databases, digitized databases for guns. That's because of political. it's in their charter or something right that, a regulation, right? It's not that they can't.

I'm trying to think of any good reason why that would be the case. Yeah, yeah. That was actually defined in the code following a law under Reagan, which was kind of protecting gun owners, protecting gun businesses, particularly. So one of the things there, part of the code of that law was to say you can't have searchable databases. You've had this kind of fight back and forth

about all these different things, and you realize all these things that happen with gun legislation. So a lot of what we have, like really the forming of the modern ATF, the background checks, or the forms before they were actually made with the instant background check system,

the actual forms themselves. This comes from like 1968, the Gun Control Act then. And then you have this kind of backlash to that. Another interesting thing out of this is, you know, you go back before, and, you know, it's only quite recently the guns have been this very politicized

cultural war issue in the United States. So, you know, you go back to the origins of the National Rifle Association and they're originally informed in New York. They weren't formed, you know, in, you might think, you know, Mississippi. They were formed in New York. They were both civil war veterans,

the people who fought with the North. One of them had worked at the New York Times. one of the founders of the NRA. That's irony. That's crazy. They actually initially that they realized in the civil war, a lot of the northern soldiers couldn't shoot. They couldn't shoot straight. So like we need to have some rifle training.

Americans can't shoot straight. Yeah, we still have that problem. Yeah, they can't shoot straight. And then as they moved on, they were like into promoting things like Olympic shooting and that kind of thing. And they were totally in favor of gun regulation. 1934, you had this act then,

which particularly was after you had the gangsters, Al Capone style. massacres and a lot of the Tommy guns, you know, spraying the speakeas with Tommy guns. That was actually when you stopped being able to buy, or even then they made it a weird thing of limiting how people can buy machine guns, fully automatic guns. Even then they made it a weird thing that you could still buy them. You had to pay a machine gun tax and be fingerprinted and photograph. You can still buy these, you know, machine guns now.

There's really, you know, weird things there. But right through, you had even the 1968 apps, you still had the NRA. favor of it. And then in the 70s, you started seeing a reaction and a reaction, particularly to the idea of rising crime in cities, to these various things. And you start to see a more militant to these militant groups. And this guy called Harlan Carter took over the NRA with a very interesting story this guy. He actually shot dead a Mexican teenager when he was 17 years old and later got away with it. Oh, wow. He was that as much more militant side. And then you've seen since then the kind of NRA development's idea of kind of no compromise at all. Now, I will say that I do think now, what are the difficulties

now and looking at the US climate right now? You'll be kind of getting to the bigger piece of American politics. But like how is it that the US now is still incapable of kind of moving on this issue? And so you still have, you know, this issue of the NRA becoming extremely adept at stopping any kind of movement. So universal background checks, which, would stop that idea of abusing the private cell loop off. Surveys show there's very, very big support for universal background checks, things like 89%, including among gun owners, including among conservatives. And they can't move on that because the NRA are very good at lobbying on that and stopping

any movement on that issue. But I do think on the other side as well that the Democrats, you know, I was wondering when I published my book in last year, this issue had become quite hot. of firearms and this issue of, you know, universal background checks. And they would have already moved on those issues by the time my book was published. Thinking this is kind of, they've got big support for this, hasn't happened. And it seems on many issues, the Democrats, despite, you know, they, when they won both houses, despite having, you know, a lot of power, cultural power, corporate power, have been very

bad at forcing any real agenda to do things, kind of pragmatic, practical things that find that a middle ground can agree on. For every American, this is frustrating. No matter which side of this you're on, you're frustrated with this right now, especially the result of, or the lack of results. It's really infuriating. I do want to talk a little bit about fast and furious,

you know, just in very brief. You know, what happened? People have heard about this besides the movie franchise. What happened? What was the original idea here? For people who don't know anything about this, the first, the kind of background, and then I could talk about some of my research

and really what happened to it. The story that really, broke out as you had the ATF in Arizona, out of Phoenix, Arizona, watching a group of these straw buyers that I mentioned, working with gangsters in Mexico to supply various cartels with firearms. And they were sitting there watching this and doing nothing. They were not stopping these guns going down to the cartels in Mexico. They were watching as this group bought 500 guns, then 1,000 guns, then 1,500 guns, and then 2,000 guns. Eventually, this blew up when one of these guns was used, or one of these guns was captured

from a group of gangsters who were involved in the murder of an elite border patrol agent from the Bortak unit in Arizona, Brian Terry. And after Brian Terry's death, there started to be some leaks, and this story blew up. It blew up to a very, very big political story. Immediately there was a lot of conspiracy theories came about this, or people were thinking this had to be a bigger thing. The bigger conspiracy in the United States side was this had to be the Obama administration deliberately doing this

to make the kind of gun owners look bad. On the Mexican side, people would say, well, look at the United States. They deliberately wanted to disable Mexico. They're deliberately selling these guns, pushing these guns down to Mexico. And then other people kind of more involved in this, start saying, well, wait a minute, these guns are going to the Sinaloa Carter, particularly of Chappoos Man. Is there some kind of deal between the American government and Sinaloa Carter? Now, I went into this pretty deeply. I got, you know, a lot of the papers, I talked to the confidential informant.

I talked to the Mexican president at the time, Felipe Calderon, about this, and got pretty deep into this. And I do believe it was a botched operation as opposed to some. something conspiratorial. Now, I do think there were certain conspiratorial actions afterwards to try and cover it up. So I do think later they're like everyone's kind of running away, trying to cover up themselves, and they start to behave in kind of more conspiratorial ways. The basic operation itself, it was a botched operation that comes from two main reasons. One is that you see these federal operations, these federal agents over a lot of years have got into these kind of things. And you look at, you know, what are the ATF doing? They're doing these kind of deep

stings where they penetrate biker gangs and they pretend to be bikers. You know, what do do they get in with drug traffickers and pretend to be drug traffickers. You watch drug traffickers move packets of heroin. You know, you're watching that heroin, which eventually goes and kills people or watch it move federal to try and build a case. So it kind of reflects a bigger thing of what, how federal agents operate in this environment, which can be in very racist ways. Another thing is simply the level of trafficking that's happened or the NRA argument, this was deliberately done to make the gun industry look bad. I mean, it was done, it could happen because this trafficking was such a large gun.

They could simply sit there in Arizona. Watch a bunch of these guys. They could see 2,000 guns be trafficked because it's such a huge thing. And the opposite effect happened than this making the gun industry look bad. This, for a decade, knocks the issue of your American drugs being trafficked to Mexico off the agenda. For 10 years, it was off the agenda. Now it's back on. Now, in fact, you've got the Mexican government filing a lawsuit

against American gun companies. You've got this issue much more in the news now, the kind of consciousness about it. But it had the opposite effect of actually clamping down on guns. It actually made, you know, everyone scared of touching the issue. Yeah, it's interesting how this blew up. There was almost 2,000 weapons. Most of them are still missing.

A lot of people thought it was some grand conspiracy, like you said, but it turned out to just be sort of a bungled ATF operation. I saw that you wrote that guns in the United States outnumber the next 25 countries combined in terms of the number of guns, which, I mean, I knew we had a lot. That is, that's bonkers. What was interesting about this was since we have such effective law enforcement here in the United States, on the whole, I know people are going to be like, what about, you know, that aside, we keep some of this violence in check because we have, we have responses.

The police, if you show up to a bank to rob a bank and you got hostages in there, or you are robbing a bank with a rifle. I mean, the SWAT team is going to come, and they're going to chase you, and they're going to kick down your door, and they're not going to stop until they find you. There's going to be helicopters. As evidenced by the news, there's some holes in this,

but countries adjacent to us, such as Mexico, that don't have as effective law enforcement, they suffer the consequences of the number of guns. So they have the number of guns per capita, minus the stability of law and order. So that was an interesting equation, right? It's not just the number of guns. It's the number of guns minus the,

the police presence or minus law in order or minus effective judges, trials, prisons and things like that, plus corruption. Is that accurate? Absolutely. I think it's a very central point when you look of this. I mean, America, United States of America, it's a, you know, a country I love and a fascinating country with a lot of paradoxes. And one of them is this, in the United States, you know, there's discussion about this now following Ovalde shooting, then people are also looking at what there's a lot of mass shootings or shootings happening every weekend in Philadelphia and Chicago. Look at this issue of violence in the United States. And it does have levels that are unlike, very, very different from any European countries, homicide levels, shooting levels, number of guns,

all of these things. However, and it's sitting here within the American continent. However, it's a very, very different also from Mexico, from Jamaica, from Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, that it has a very powerful law enforcement institutions. Now, there's a lot of issues with them, but they're very powerful. So you had this in the United States where we say, OK, we've got a lot of guns, a lot of guns in the hands of criminals, and a lot of guns in the hands of regular citizens. You know, you have criminals, drug dealers in the United States

who have a lot more guns than, say, drug dealers in Europe. And there's a lot more shootings over selling drugs in the United States. By then, also have then this very, very hard law enforcement hitting down like a hammer on this. So then you have two million people in prison and these kind of very hard law enforcement. Now, there is and there has been a selectivity to law enforcement in the United States. And I think you do need a selectivity. But an idea of going after violent criminals or particularly criminals who fight with law enforcement. I mean, if you fire at law enforcement, if you shoot cops in the United States, they're going to go after you

in prison. In Mexico, you can kill or in Central America, you can get away with killing 30, 40, 50 people, and they can start shooting the police left, right and center, and then you end up this kind of crazy situation. So if you look at these things, like if you, you know, where you can go in the United States, you can buy a 50 caliber rifle, you know, these 50 caliber rifles and they fire these bullets, you know, the size of the small Coca-Cola bottles or size of small knives. And in the United States, they're not using those to fire up cop cars, because if, you know, the criminals generally know if they did that, they'd end up in prison for life. Yeah. In Mexico, because they're overwhelming law enforcement.

You know, they're just, you know, they're just overwhelming it or they're working with them or whatever. They will use those. There's a whole bunch of incidents where they'll sit on the side of a hill or on a street and they'll fire those bang, bang into cop cars,

into military vehicles. There's video when this bunch of gangsters took over a city of Kulikand, Sinola, where they literally blew the leg off their soldier, because they have video of his leg being blown off with one of these 50-cow bullets. Is that when El Chapo's son

got arrested and they made that, So can you briefly, this is the craziest thing ever. This, I guess the police or the marina or whatever went in military, right? And went in and they busted him and maybe they didn't even know he was there. I'm not sure if they knew back then. There was some doubt. Like maybe they ran into him and went, holy crap, we got the big boss's kid here. This is crazy.

They arrested him. And then somehow that kid and his people managed to call so much backup that they, what, blocked off the whole city, surrounded the military barracks, had a standoff, set up roadblocks, checkpoints, brought in so many, fighters with so many guns that the government had to surrender, they'd let him go. Yeah, so I've looked into a lot of that case since then and looked at what I could understand about what happened with the operation. It began with, you know, the extradition order being asked coming from the United States.

You know, we want to go after Obidogu's man. Now, in the U.S., the law enforcement agencies are pissed because these Chapitos, these sons of El Chapo, have taken over El Chapo's empire and are moving huge amounts, particularly of synthetic drugs of opioids of fentanyl, which is, you know, causing a huge amount of deaths in the United States. Right. So they really want to go after these guys. And so they get their extradition order comes down.

It goes to Mexico. Now you have in Mexico these channels so that these orders can come through and not really be revealed because otherwise there's so much corrupt law enforcement, they're going to tell that, you know, someone's going to phone up and say, there's an arrest coming for you, go and hide in the hills for a few days. So you managed to get this kind of coming around. So a lot of even the higher levels of law enforcement. or the president and the secretary of public security, they don't know about this. And you have this

special military unit, anti-nacodics unit, who's got this order. But then they get this backup. Now, I initially thought they went in there with way too few people, but it's not actually as few as it first appeared. They actually went in there with over a hundred military and police. And it seems like a reasonable operation when you go into this house in Kulakhan. And you go in there and you kind of We were going to take him out, security area, and then take him to the airport. It seems like a reasonable operation. Yeah. But as they go in there, immediately the gunman of Obidio goes man, the line of defense,

start breaking out and start engaging and fighting with the military and the police people. They get to the house, they can't get him out. You see this amazing video where they go in there and he comes out of there and they say, look, call your gunman off. And he gets to the phone and then his other brothers are there and they're like, no, we're not backing down. So then you get this escalation. Now, you've got about 100 pieces of military initially, and you've got various guys from the Chapitos,

probably the same number immediately in these areas around. I've just been filming in Kulayakan. And the number of these cartel guys on motorcycles around the city is quite amazing. I mean, they've got a lot of people there. So then they start escalating. They get more military out and they get more cartel government out. And with a few hours, it's escalated. So this is according to the military.

You have about 350 soldiers and 700 to 800 cartel gunmen. Wow. So they're two to one, outnumbered two to one. Right. Now, not only that, what's amazing is how, I mean, these are gangsters. These are ostentatious gangsters. You see them on videos and they're guys who've got to table dance clubs and take drugs. But they're very effective at, you know, that's a modern insurgency tactic.

I mean, you know, that'd be the envy of, you know, guerrilla groups around the world. You know, you get 700 to 8 under government on the street within a lot. who are fighting the military, engaging the military. Now, not only that, they also go to where the houses of the families of the military are. So they go in there. And then these women and children are there, the wives, the kids, they're pushing out. They're storming in there as well. And they kidnap various soldiers. Now, you get to a certain point where then they get to the government level and they get to the Secretary of Public Security and ask the president himself, and they said, we're going to back down. Now, there's a lot of

questions about how corrupt the government is as well, particularly that guy who was the public security secretary, who's now the governor of Sonora. But either way, you know, when you talk to some people in the city of Kulayakhan, and there's people there who went to pick up their kids from school and, you know, they were sitting there hiding in the schools. A lot of them were like, yeah, it was good to government back down because otherwise we could have all been massacred. Now, that situation, it shows obviously that there's a very regular situation, but it is trafficking of firearms to effectively an armed conflict, a weird type of armed conflict that's happening in Mexico.

There's some people from the rights coming out with this idea of, so we should call the cartels terrorists. Now, I do agree that some of their actions can be considered terroristic actions and acts of terror. But I just replied to somebody's guys, say, okay, if you want to do that, it's a double sword. If you want to classify them as terrorist groups, then the people who are supposed to be able to selling guns to these groups, it's not going to be probation. They could do 25 years or more.

You're supplying material to terrorist group. This happened following the shooting in San Bernardino. The guy was affiliated to the Islamic States. The guy was spreading the guns and saying, well, you can do 25 years. You're supplying a terrorist group. Also, though, the people who are arriving at the US border and say, I want to seek asylum in the United States because I'm fleeing cartel violence. Right now, a lot of these cases, they'll so work. It's not our problem. We're sorry. is a lot of criminals in Mexico and you have to flee the cartel. But that's a law enforcement issue. But if they're saying, I'm fleeing a U.S. classified terrorist group that wants to kill me,

it can be harder for the judge to throw that caught out. That's a good point. So it could cause a refugee crisis because then we have to let people in by law. I mean, it changes the equation anyway. I think there's already a refugee crisis. There's already a serious refugee situation on the southern border. It's being big, particularly for the last 10 years, basically. It goes up and down.

They stop it temporarily. It comes back up again. It's big again this summer. And a lot of that's connected to this violence that's happening in Mexico, in El Salvador, in Honduras. But it would only add an extra, you know, if people want to try and classify them as terrorist groups. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Yohan Grillo.

We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. I love having these conversations. I love hearing from you as fans. And I love being able to feed my kids. So if you want to support one of our sponsors, and I love it when you do, you can find all the deals and discount codes all in one page. The page now is mobile optimized. It's searchable. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can search for any sponsor using the search box on that

page or on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com as well. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Yoan Grillo. Take us on a journey with an illegal gun. I know this could take a while, but like the brief version design and manufacturing in, I don't know, Eastern Europe or whatever, and then it ends up being used in a crime in Mexico? I'll talk through one, which I followed actually, you know, totally followed it in the book, you know, looking at the serial number. So we have this gun, we look at these AK-47s.

Now, it's interesting when you get, you know, where does actually a gun begin? Because then you get to, okay, the gun is made on this certain date, but then you get to the design of the gun and the factory, you know, so then you get to the whole history of AK-47s, which is kind of fascinating, and why these factories in Eastern Europe are sending these guns around the world. We could talk about the AK-47 was made in the Cold War.

The Soviets started establishing them in different places, and they would actually move them to their allies around the world. The Americans built the AR-15, you know, the AF-15, strike M-16, the combat, and they gave their own allies, so then you had both of these sides until you have these kind of rifles around the world. Do you have this factory in Kuzia, Romania,

which has been making AK-47s? And then in 2011, it rolled off one of these AK-47 rifles made for the US market, which have been slightly adjusted. So they have certain rules to try and get to the US market. They adjusted them to classify them as sporting rifles. And this being made in Cougier was then taken in and imported into Vermont of all places. So like, you know, you think of like, again, big gun states, you know, Vermont suddenly has this company, big warehouses of a company there importing AK-47s, taken there, and then, but then from there, taken to Texas. In this particular case, it went to Texas to a pawn shop, and it was sold along with nine other guns in this sale, which I mentioned earlier, a guy walks in and buys 10 AK-47s. He was in Iraq War veteran, hit hard times, and he was paid $600 to buy these 10 AK-47.

So $60 a rifle in that particular one. For a guy, he was buying weed off, buying marijuana off. Okay. But giving him the $600 bucks, handed him the rifles. Now, this guy was buying weed off, was also buying marijuana and also other drugs from the Cetas, who were a very heavy crime group from Mexico. So this guy supplies these guns to the Cetas. They bring them down, drive them over the border into Mexico, drive them to a place called San Luis Potosi, where they end up with a group of these Seta guys in San Luis Potosi.

We've practically gone to this whole history of being made in Romania to being with these through the United States and being with a bunch of gangsters in San Luis Potocet. Now, they're there one day when a car with diplomatic American plates, U.S. plates, is driving through their territory. and it has two US agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avala, who are driving down in this car with US plates, delivered some radio tap gear for an operation. Now, they suddenly get what's called a mobile roadblock where you have these two cars, force them off the road, have all these guns, and they're in an armored vehicle, but when they stop the car, it has this malfunction that it unlocks when they stop the car. Oh, God, the doors unlock when it stops.

I heard about this, actually. So these guys surround a car, and suddenly one of these setters finds out, oh, my God, the door opens. So there's like a struggle, they slam a door shut, look for like the press a thing to lock it. And when they do that, the window winds down a few centimeters. Oh, man. So this guy sticks a gun through the window and sprays. The guy in the driver's seat takes five bullets. the guy in the next seat next to him takes three.

Now, they're still like afterwards come out, still drive around to the front. One of the guy he's dies, this guy, Hymer Sapaati, he dies. Victor Avala, he's still alive. He's still conscious at this point. But he's like playing dead. The guys drive out to the front of the car, spray it some more. Eventually, they go. The helicopter comes.

They come. He manages to get on his phone and calls up the US Embassy. He's a very chilling recording with his phone call, which says, you know, we are shocked. We are shot. his wife happened to be at the embassy. She was also working there. Suddenly hearing her husband's voice. Oh, God.

They send in the helicopters, get him out. He's taken to the US and survives this. And then he eventually will sue ice over this. And there'll be a big kind of court case. Just to finish that story, the journey of that gun, he survives it, but he has some pretty serious wounds from the bullet wounds. One of the bullet wounds, they can't even remove the bullet completely. And he still has that.

and it's how those shootings happen very, very fast, but the effects can be a lifetime. You know, you can be injured, you can destroy your life, destroy your job if you survive. The problem with some of these guns, right, is that it's not like drugs where they're illegal from the start of the chain of the product. Drug trafficking is illegal at all points on the chain because the product is illegal. Gun trafficking is different because the product diverts from a legal industry, which makes it a hell of a lot harder to combat. And there's no specific law, if I'm correct here, there's no specific law on international gun trafficking per se.

There are definitely laws against distributing firearms willy-nilly, except for the one that we just talked about, that's a loophole. With drugs, it's like, hey, if you're caught with this, any amount of it, it's illegal, large amounts of it, it's a stronger punishment. With guns, you've got to prove the guns are illegal, that they're not able to be held by that person, that they're not able to be moved by that person, sold by that person. I mean, it's just, it makes it so much harder. I heard that there are online marketplace. These are illegal, obviously. Online marketplaces where people show things like boats for sale, but the ads are all written in some kind of code

so the buyers know that it's a gun and what type it is. Have you heard about this? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think it's a very good point about it. You have heroin. You know, you grow the opium illegally in Mexico. It goes to a lab where it's illegally processed into heroin. It's illegally transported into the United States

and it's illegally sold in the corner. So all parts of the chain is illegal. And you have very strong anti-drug trafficking laws. Now, they've failed for, I think, some of the reasons we talked about in the last episode. You can throw these guys in prison for a very long time. Conspiracy to traffic drugs and federal offences with firearms. And because you're policing a legal industry and then this kind of illegal firearms industry, this illegal selling on corners kind of thing.

So you actually have, there's no federal firearms trafficking law. They haven't got that. So a lot of the actual, you know, when we talk about straw buying, one of the reasons it's only probation, the actual law is not firearms trafficking. It's lying on a form. A lot of these guys who are selling guns to cartels are quite a big way. They're not done for firearms trafficking.

They're done for selling firearms without a license. So again, it's kind of a weird thing there. Now, you mentioned before you may, so you jumped to an interesting point. Yeah, the online marketplaces. I'm wondering, how do they figure that out, right? Obviously, they busted some people and they said, where did you get this? And he said, oh, I bought it on the Craigslist for guns. And they look on there and it's only boats.

What is that? Does that still operate? What is this? Right. So you have some dedicated websites with sell guns. You can still buy guns on those websites. Sure. A lot of a time with private sellers, you can avoid background checks, avoid paperwork.

I talk to gun people who sell guns illegally. Like one guy sold guns illegally in Baltimore, Maryland. One guy sold guns illegally at the retail level here in Mexico City. And they say one thing that they see is if somebody's really desperate for a gun, they'll put the price up. It's like really obvious. Somebody comes to us, I need a gun. Give me a gun now.

I need a gun. Give me a gun. And they call it every half hour. If you got a gun and it's obviously because if somebody wants to kill him, if somebody goes, I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you. And they're like, okay, I need a gun. So then I'm like desperate. So as soon as they do that, it's like, oh, great, yeah, I've got a gun with $2,000.

They're like, yeah, whatever. So if you talk about that in economic terms, it's a distressed buyer. A distressed buyer who does that. Now, you see some of that. on these websites where you saw that one case was like, need a gun right now, need a gun, we'll pay a no. And somebody sold him who's gone oozy. He took the gun,

went in and shot his ex-wife and a bunch of other woman at a spa. You know, he was desperate for it to go and kill his ex-wife. You still have those websites out there, but also you used to have selling guns on like Facebook pages. Yeah, like the marketplace, Facebook marketplace.

Yeah, so just right direct on Facebook. Now Facebook eventually, you know, after a bit of pressure and say, like, we're not going to allow people to sell guns on our website anymore. But then there people still use, they're like, got a nice gun case here. This gun case fits this gun exactly. And you know, what they're really doing is hinting, I'm selling you the gun. Right.

It's like 13 times the price of a gun care, or 30 times the price of a gun case. Yeah, exactly. So that way you can still find, find ways to buy guns through those pages. Jeez. Before you go, I'm curious about the 3D printed guns. Yeah. Is this mostly hype? And then ghost guns, those are not the same thing, which I,

I just learned. I thought those were the same thing. They're not. Yeah, yeah, fascinating issue. We've got two things here, yeah, as you rightly point out, and I think a lot of the media, journalists themselves, didn't understand the story, and so kind of played into the hands of some of these people. And I admit, you know, getting into guns, covering guns, I didn't grow up with guns. It was a hard learning curve. I wanted to make sure when I wrote this, I got really into trying to learn and understand technically what we're talking about. You have ghost guns as being like, as the ATFs, called them, unsealienable, serialized firearms.

This ATF guy said to me, you know, we shouldn't call them ghost guns. Call them unseerilized unlicensed firearms. So, yeah, you know, to be honest, I appreciate that. But like, I'm a journalist. We want to have phrases to people. Ghost guns has alliteration. Right, yeah. Ghost guns sounds good.

And people will go, oh my gosh, ghosts are scary and guns are scary. So it's ghost guns now. Yeah, no, not unseerized unlicensed firearms. You know, it's like in a bit of mouth. But anyway, you had these going for a lot. time of buying kits to buy guns. So you can buy these kits off the internet. Before how do you people buy these like mail order kits going back to the 80s? But like the internet, these took off a lot more. So people selling these kits to buy guns.

Now sometimes as well there's issues where you're still like buying whole guns, but then you can buy sometimes guns that are almost finished, but like 80% finished. So then you start getting into this discussion. I go, what is a gun? Oh, I'm only selling this part of a gun. That's not a gun. I mean, in this part, then there's only 80% you take this and you just drill a bit more of it and you can turn it.

Now, those are a big issue. In Los Angeles now, in California, you're seeing, when I was there with the ATF there, did some research in the book in 2019, it was about 30 to 40% of their guns. They were seizing from gangs, from criminals, were these ghost guns.

Could be even higher now. And there's various cases of, you know, verified crimes, murders, where they've been doing these. Again, with the laws, it's kind of hard to actually prosecute these people. These people can be buying these, making them, selling them on the black market.

It's quite hard to prosecute them and kind of fine crime. They've got drugs as well or involved in murders or offelons or that kind of thing. Then you've got the 3D printed guns. Yeah, yeah. That's even scarier

because it's like then a high school that can print this in their basement. It sounds scary. Now, you had this one that came out some years ago and was this kind of plastic one done by this kind of, God had also been at law school himself who made this thing and he was talking very much about the kind of libertarian cause and had this, you know, this 3D plastic gun.

I think a lot of journalists kind of fell for it. Like this is changing everything. It's really scary. Actually, the gun didn't really work. This first thing is like the thing about 3D printing is the cheap 3D printers. They used quite soft kind of plastic. it's not like super hard. People say, well, like a Glock is plastic.

Well, Glock's, in fact, not all plastic. And also it's like they've got very, very hard factory methods. Yeah, it's like a polymer that's all one piece to cast somehow. It's not drawn on with a freaking electronic crayon, like a 3D printer. Yeah, a cheap one anyway. So you had these cheap 3D printers. They made these guns. And actually, it's more of a threat to the guy firing it, or the girl firing it, than to the person.

So that was actually initially kind of a bit of a hype. I think the journey kind of didn't, you know, fell for it and the gun rights people, second member people, they understood it, but they were like quite happy. They're like,

ha, that would stop gun control. So they were like really, they kind of like playing into, even though they then know it didn't work. The guy who did that got a lot of hype, got a lot of fame. He was then selling a lot of actual ghost gun kits,

as well as other internet ventures. Then he got kind of stung, maybe even kind of set up, but he got stung for having relations with an underage girl. So you get it, honey trapped. Yeah, yeah. So that whole story of a kind of modern thing that went down. Then other people came into this and started creating new 3D printed guns,

trying to solve this issue. And it kind of more like happening on a grassy level. So you have these gun people, they call it the fuck gun control, FGC. Yeah. Yeah, fuck gun control. Now a lot of the time you realize, even though it's kind of hard to know, so you say, well, they're doing 3D printed, we actually realize that they're 3D printing some parts,

but they're still buying some other parts. Sure. So they're not really fully 3D printed guns yet. We haven't got there yet. You still see some video, but you have to really be a bit suspicious about it or ask questions about it. Someone goes,

oh, I've made a 3 billion in there. It really works now. It's like, you have been checked, does it really? Is it really like you say that any 15-year-old is going to go to their dad's basement where he's got his 3-D printer and then go, oh, dad just ends up pressing a thing

and print and come out with a new gun? That's not quite happening yet. By any means, will it happen? We'll see. And that could be a game changer. Maybe, but it hasn't happened yet. We haven't seen it happen yet. How do we even have any hope of making this situation better when cops in Mexico make like 200 to 500 bucks a month? They're widely corrupted. And narco makes that in a few minutes. It just seems like there's nothing standing in the way of cartels and their unchecked power. It just, it really does seem impossible. Am I missing something?

Well, I'd say that nothing's impossible like of this nature. And I think if we put somebody on the moon and, you know, created, being able to, you know, transplant heart surgery, you know, zap video from, you know, right now we can talk by video from Mexico City to Northern California. I think, you know, we can reduce violence. There's got to be ways we can do it. So I would say the solutions that I would say that I see and there's a bigger things and politics is kind of broken, but I would say that there's three areas that need to be attacked or need to be confronted, need to be worked on with this. So one area is how. How do you reduce the money from the black market, which goes into these cartels?

Drug policy reform, we've legalized marijuana to the extent. That hasn't really damaged the business in a huge way because they make the other drugs. But we need to still move through marijuana. Treatment. I mean, how do you try and stop these drug addicts giving all this money to cartels? You know, drug policy reform. It's not a simple button of legalization, but we have to have a discussion about all this money going to these organizations. who also then do other really bad stuff.

A second thing is something we could agree on kind of well. It kind of takes a lot of government or society to really move on this, but like creating environments that are better for the people who are being recruited to these organizations. So how do you change the motives of the kids? You know, right now if you're in an area when the cartels are winning and the government's offering you nothing and you don't really see much legitimate opportunity,

then you're going to join the cartel. But how can you reach out? How can you have real social work, real stuff to transform these areas that deprived and where the cartels are so powerful and offer something to these young people, mostly young boys, being recruited with these organizations? And the third is how do you build law enforcement that works? It's very hard, but that cannot be impossible. You know, how can you build police force or justice systems which can protect,

people, society from the most horrific antisocial crimes, and reduce this kind of murder rate. And they're the things, the huge challenges, but they're the three areas, I believe, that have to be worked on to try and move forward to this. I've got some thoughts on this one as usual, but before I get into that, behavioral economist Dan Ariely shares the hidden logic that shapes our motivations and helps us understand what makes us tick. Here's a preview. I think that we used to think that the big mysteries of life is the, you know, what's in

the stars. maybe microbiology, and of course, these are big mysteries. But the human mystery is wonderful. And even though it's just in front of us, there's so much we don't know. We operate as if we know how the world works, but because our model is wrong, we inflict more pain and increase suffering. I think it's true for lots of things. What is our understanding?

Think about how we waste our time, think about how we waste our money, how we waste our health, my mission is to do kind of good social engineering. And I think there's just a ton of progress to make. And sadly, we're not doing it in the right way. I think we're actually going backwards. And the process of social science in which we try different things and try to measure objectively what's going on

and attributing and trying to improve things over time, I think it's a wonderful process. So when people read or listen or think about those topics, I think the real benefit is to say, What can I take for my life? What are the things about my life that I'm not observing? Can I be a bit better in observing my own life? Can I try to implement something?

And then hopefully also can I try to experiment with something? Is there something I would like to try out in a few different ways and see what leads to a better outcome? For more with Dan Ariely on one of the best productivity tools around, what will help you utilize the most productive hours of the day and why even the best of us lie and cheat sometimes? Check out episode 417 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. This was heavy duty, like I said, guns in South America, they fuel crime and cartel violence,

which creates refugees, which creates immigration crises at our southern border, which whips up politics in the United States and helps create demand for, you guessed it, more guns at home and more security forces abroad. We end up with these migrant caravans. We end up with just fostering and fomenting disorder all through the whole system. It was amazing to me that in this book, Yohan's book, it's incredible how the ATF, the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms burrow. So the gun safety guys, the gun cops, they're actually scared of the NRA. The NRA has so much power they can slash budgets, maybe even kill the agency entirely.

It's a very sort of unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship from the sound of it. Look, that's crazy anyway you slice it. I really enjoy shooting. I think firearms are a lot of fun, but require a healthy dose of respect, of course. I don't understand why we would want to make it harder to trace guns used in crime. If you have an opinion on this, I'd love to hear from you. You know, again, I'm not one of those like, ban guns. I know that's not going to work.

We've got a gun culture that's unstoppable here in the United States. I just think we need some safer regulations here, especially. We certainly shouldn't be trafficking rifles and weapons to drug cartels. I think we can, even the craziest of gun nuts, right, can agree on this, I would hope. I want to reiterate this is not an anti-Second Amendment episode. it's about illegal gun trafficking. It's just so hard to separate the two, and that's really the problem. So save your one-star review for something that really makes you mad,

like my take-down of Reiki healing. People lost their freaking minds when we slammed Reiki healing on our Skeptical Sunday episodes. Bananas. I've never had so many. I thought the Carol Hoeven episode about trans and people and hormones, I thought that was going to get me canceled. Nah, it turns out it's going to be something about freaking acupuncture

or Reiki healing that's going to get me shot in the middle of the road somewhere. Unbelievable. Speaking of which, I heard something like 90% of murders in Mexico are never solved. Can you imagine that? Horribly tragic, absolutely unbelievable. Gun deaths annually around the world? A quarter million. Small arms are the real weapons of mass destruction, not nukes, forget it. I know we mentioned bikers and gun trafficking. Our Ken Croke episode, I think we're going to have a trailer in here about that. That's episode 6.73 if you want to go deep dive on bikers and gun trafficking. Guns really do touch everyone here in the United States. Back in Detroit, I did some work with the police.

back when I was really young, especially gang squad. And we used to say guns with bodies on them were worth less money. I always figured it's because there's more risk if you get caught with it. I'm pretty sure that's the reason why. It seems like if you're just going to use it in another crime and then discard it, it wouldn't matter as much, but I suppose risk is risk. I know earlier in the show, this may get clipped out, but Yohan mentioned the Saturday night special.

He's referring to cheaply made guns. And by the way, I learned that from 21 Jump Street. The TV show, not the movie. Shout out to my boy Johnny Depp. Don't forget to wash your sheets. When it comes to gun trafficking, there's a balloon effect of illegal guns and drugs. You squeeze the balloon on one side and the air just goes to the other part of the balloon. They're referring to what might be called the iron pipeline.

This is different from the Iron River that goes south into Mexico. The iron pipeline is, let's say you can't get guns in Chicago because it's a city and they want to ban guns or New York and they want to ban guns or somewhere in California and they want to ban guns. You can just go from one state where you can buy with reckless abandon, essentially, get any kind of rifle at any place you want. And then you can traffic it anywhere in the United States because we have free flow of commerce. That's the iron pipeline, and that's what makes it impossible for us to ban guns in any particular area.

Really, we have to take national action, but of course we all differ on what that might mean and what is appropriate. And either way you slice it, outlaws are always going to have more guns. In fact, 32,000 guns were stolen over a period of just a few years right here in the United States. You can imagine how big of a problem that actually would be. Again, big thank you to Yohan Grillo for coming on the show today. Links to all things, Yohan, will be on the website in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com. Books are always at Jordanharbinger.com slash books, and please use our website links if you buy books from any guest on the show. Or anywhere else, for that matter, take a look at our books page.

It helps support the show. Transcripts are in the show notes. Videos are up on YouTube. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes are all at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or connect with me on LinkedIn, find our course on networking using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day. It takes a few minutes today.

Come on, people, teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And if you don't know what's for you, well, I'll just tell you. Most of the guests you hear on the show, they subscribe and contribute to that course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who is studying or a student of gun trafficking, human trafficking, Mexican drug cartels and crime in the United States in Mexico, this is a great one to share with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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