Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1253 - Ioan Grillo
Uploaded: 2019-02-27T01:30:59.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1253 - Ioan Grillo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1253 - Ioan Grillo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1253 - Ioan Grillo

here we go five four three two one first of all how many people get your name
wrong when they try
to pronounce it well so many people i don't even care anymore i just however it
comes out because
i live in it's a funny name where i come from right from england growing up it's
a funny name
but in mexico it's even stranger names so i just normally make it ian and my
second name grillo
which in spanish is grillo right so everyone they mess that up too if they see
it spelled yeah pull
this uh microphone about a fist from your face right there yeah here we go um
joan i don't think
i've ever heard that name before there's an actor called young grufford what's
he in he's in fantastic
four oh really he's the stretchy guy oh no in fantastic four so yeah he kind of
he's made that
name a little bit more a little bit more acceptable um how did you wind up
living in mexico city
so i i came to mexico or went to mexico in the year 2000 and uh i kind of
messed around for
a few years in the uk wanted to get into journalism so i found one way to get
into it was to start
working in a foreign country rather than going to my local newspaper and work
and go to a foreign
country and start working and i had a romantic idea about latin america
thinking i'd be like i saw the
movies salvador ah you know oliver stone's movie from the 80s i kind of had a
had a romantic idea
about running around with guerrillas um fighting military dictatorships um so i
arrived in mexico in
2000 and got a job at an english language newspaper how old were you 27 when i
first left the uk yeah 28
when i i messed around for a bit in mexico as well then got the job when i was
28. mexico city's a wild
place yeah yeah it's so packed it's it's hard to i've only been there twice for
uh ufc events yeah
but every time i'm there i'm just shaking my head like i can't believe how this
traffic works it's
crazy yeah 18 years and i've spent a lot of time in that traffic nobody cares
about red lights green
lights they don't care it's stressful everyone wants to cut you up all the time
yeah people shout at you a
lot you have to get used to people calling you like pendejo cerdo i try
different tactics now just try
and relax and not get angry did you know how to speak spanish before you went
there yeah yeah so
i spent one year in spain living in spain before i went there i spent a year in
the middle east as
well um and uh but yeah i started off when i arrived i spoke more to spanish spanish
which is like
right right right yeah so when did you start getting into narco journalism so
like i arrived to
say with a romantic idea about what i might cover in in mexico um or latin america
and right away i
realized all that idea of guerrillas and military dictatorships that are gone
that was the last century
che govara all that stuff i had gone but right away when i arrived my very
first of my first
back in the uk i grew up around a lot of drugs in the uk so going back to the
the 80s i grew up with
a lot of people taking drugs i had a few friends who died from heroin overdoses
back then four people i
knew died of heroin overdoses i had a sister who went who became uh schizophrenic
smoking a lot of a lot of
well no she became schizophrenic and there'd be a lot of drugs being smoked
around that time as well was
it pot yeah back then it was uh moroccan hashish there's there is a connection
you know and we've
been exploring that a lot lately uh yeah we we went into this uh marijuana
debate between um uh alex
berenstein and um dr mike hart from canada and we talked about it and i know
people that have had that
happen to them where they've had schizophrenic or psychotic breaks because of
just massive doses of
marijuana and especially people that don't do it or people that do it too much
for too long it does
happen i i heard that debate that's one of the reasons why it came to mind uh i
mean i don't know
uh a lot of people smoke weed smoke hash a lot of people it's fine uh now when
when my sister had a
breakdown when she was 18 and i was 16 at the time and when that came out it
turned out also my
my my grandmother had an issue with schizophrenia right and i think i don't
know if it's a time bomb
waiting to go off yeah or if it was how much the the the hash was involved in
that there's other issues as well
so i don't really know the science of it but anyway going back so so i've been
around a lot of drugs
before um so when i arrived in mexico actually one of the first uh first
arriving in mexico i ended up
hanging around with some some people and they were smoking a lot of crack in in
mexico it's one of some
of the first people i met wow um i went down to the beach like backpacking down
to the beach and these
people were smoking smoking crack and i was like this is kind of strange i didn't
know there's people
smoking crack down here so when i got a job at the local newspaper in english
and i just started
looking at the crime thing one of the first tools i did was on the issue of
crack being sold locally
and how that linked to to cartels and then very soon just very very quickly i
just fell in right away
like i said all these things happened by accident i just fell into covering the
crime beat and this is
going back to 2001. so 2001 was the same year that chapel was man escaped from
prison
uh then i was calling a lot then to a great journalist from tijuana jesus planconelas
a real
legend from tijuana who survived the shooting by by cartels and you know phoning
him up all the time
just getting him you know to give me information give me tips and that's how i
really started one of
the another big story i did back in those days was uh the court martial of some
generals for drug trafficking
and that was really where it began back then generals for drug trafficking how
much of an issue is that
uh i mean corruption must be unbelievably rampant so i mean corruption even isn't
a strong enough word
for it um sometimes i call it state capture i mean so this is the real
beginning and this has been a
whole crazy 18 years of covering this stuff i mean this is just the very
beginning back then i've seen a
whole lot of very crazy stuff in that time but like just to get a sense of how
bad the corruption is or
what it really means on on the ground level there like there's uh policemen
like you interview policemen
you get to know the policemen in a certain town certain city um and it's hard
to know you know how or
or military guys or politicians and you want to believe these are good people
you want to believe
there's good policemen out there who really want to stop crime so there's one
policeman his nickname was
tyson tyson like mike tyson his nickname was tyson because he was a well-built
bloke well-built guy and
he was friendly with the press forgot from michoacan friendly with the press um
and then it came out
that he was actually a drug cartel member a ranking member in the drug cartel
and he
actually confessed they they used to have a thing where the police the federal
police when they got
him got him to confess on camera and he confessed not only was he turning a
blind eye not only was
he carrying out murders he was training the young kids how to decapitate people
how to cut people up
and he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like you know how they managed
to cut limbs off how
he gets young people to train them to cut limbs off to get them to lose their
fear so that's the level of
corruption that could be a policeman you're dealing with and that's really who
they are
um so that's one of the the crazy things about the corruption down there did
you have any hesitancy
in getting involved in narco journalism knowing this i mean i would imagine
that's one of the most
dangerous avenues to pursue in journalism so this was little by little i got
involved in covering this
so like like going back to 2000 this hadn't happened this war hadn't happened
it was still like a crime issue at that moment so i began to cover these things
and then around 2004
i got a job for the houston chronicle out of houston texas i was covering i was
a stringer covering
mexico for them and i flew up to a lot to nuevo laredo and there was a turf war
beginning there which is
really the beginning of the drug war which has torn mexico apart began on the
border with texas in this
city called nuevo laredo over the bridge from laredo texas back in 2004 so
there was a lot of interest
from the the texas newspapers what was going on there's a whole bunch of bodies
piling up there
but again this going back to these days and this is kind of innocent looking
back innocent looking at
myself then and innocent looking at what mexico was like then they would simply
say go to the place i'd
drive up to monterrey rent a car and just drive the car to noble heredo with
just by myself and now
people just don't do that there's just too much crazy stuff going on but back
then it was still like
oh you can just do that so there was when you say crazy stuff like what kind of
crazy stuff i mean
now you can get stopped by an armed group driving on those roads you could you
could just drive along
and there could be a you know group of guys with guns could stop the car get
someone out takes take
you away i mean there's a whole people are a lot more careful about you know
where you now now when
i'm when you move around the roads you can be very careful how you move and how
you plan this stuff you
don't just wander by yourself drive around these places so so back then when
this was happening and um
there was uh these bodies turning up and i was trying to figure out why and and
i uh there was one
uh guy interviewed who was a head of chamber of commerce um and i talked to him
you know very
interesting guy about a couple of weeks later he became the chief of police for
the city and they
asked him they said are you scared um you know you scared about being killed he
said no i'm not
scared it's only the corrupt people who get killed and he was shot dead six
hours after he gave that
statement they shot him dead and that was one of the real markers of something
really strange is going
on in mexico something is like gonna erupt in mexico and then from there it
kind of just escalated and
escalated and uh um started working by the other media time magazine new york
times different people
and after a while i said i can't do this i can't just write news stories about
this gotta write books
about this because this stuff is big and it's complicated it must be immensely
complicated for the
the people that live there it seems like there's no escape i mean if you you
can't turn to the police
the police are the cartel there's the cartel the police all of the politicians
most likely if they're
alive have to be compromised yeah i mean there's been some very very desperate
people and i mean there's
been some very there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this
there's been heroes
there are heroes um just to get more of a sense of what that means on the
ground as well uh you know and some of
the things you see uh you know some of the things that stay with me you know
for a while it was quite
romantic coveredness it was like wow i'm covering i'm going to these places
where chapel guzman is
from you know i'll go up to the village and meet his mother and meet his family
um i'm writing about
these these crazy people but then you start seeing the human pain in all of
this um one of many stories
the the stick with me was a mother in monterrey a school teacher you know when
you have armed guys
moving around they're also like uh really affecting the civil population
attacking the civil population
and one mother um she was in her home with her two children in monterrey and a
it was like in the
night just chilling in their house and then the door broke down and about 15
guys in bulletproof jackets
all came in long arms just taking stuff from the house held the family you know
pinned them down and
they said to the mother which of your children i