This is the complete, edited & augmented transcript of e007 of the Pirate Soldier King Podcast, in which Graceann Bennett interviews author Gregory Roberts about topics and details of his True Crime / Prison memoir, Pirate Soldier King. This segment focuses on Prison Politics vs. present-day GeoPolitical Realities, and the eerie similarities between the two..
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FULL TRANSCRIPT : PSK e007 / POLITICS:
Graceann Bennett: All right! Welcome to the Pirate Soldier King Podcast!
We are interviewing Gregory Roberts, the liver of the life and the teller of the story… about crime, punishment, and the road to redemption. So today’s topic is going to be all around politics. Prison politics, Geo-politics, RealPolitik, you name it. Ready?
Gregory Roberts: Hot topic!
GB: Yes, hot topic. Let’s get into it:
Prison Politics
GB: Alright. Okay, so: politics in prison, aka prison politics.
So does that actually exist?
GR: It completely exists. It’s the backbone of how things run in prison. As we’ve mentioned before, “prison is run by the prisoners.” It’s run by the inmates.
You were saying earlier how many C.O.s there are, in ratio to the prison population?
(ED NOTE: a “C.O.” is a Corrections Officer, more commonly known as a Prison Guard. Basically, a cop within the prison — armed, with a bulletproof vest and a badge, whose duty is ostensibly to maintain the peace inside the prison, and to keep the prisoners both safe and contained.)
Okay: so each unit, which is like a large room with 64 cells, holds up to 128 people. So generally it would be 110 to 120 inmates, with two C.O.s on duty, per unit. The C.O.s pretty much stay in their office, which is basically a cell with a desk in it and a little red “do not cross” line taped outside the door.
So they stay in there. And we do what we do.
All right. Okay, so one of the things we want to get into is kind of how prison relates to the broader geopolitical landscape they’re in right now because there’s a lot going on.
That’s a connection!
Keys to the Car
Yeah, so we’re going to get into it. Geopolitical landscape. and then, but in terms of prison politics, if you could think about… Tell us how it’s run in prison. What is the, you know, we have like the house and the Congress and elected president, our democracy, all these different moving parts. So if we’re going to think about how it’s structured in prison, how does it actually work?
<thinks for a moment> I would call it like multi-level tribalism. Each unit kind of has its own thing going on. Each of the gangs has a Speaker — or a head of the gang, or who, as we say, “has the keys to the car.”
The keys to the car?
That’s the shot caller. The gang is the “car” and the leader has the “keys.” So when you enter a unit, somebody asks you “what car do you ride in?” You say “West Coast Independent Whites” or whoever it is you run with. Then you say “who has the keys?” and they say “go see J.T. up in cell 420.” Like that.
So “the Keys” is the Shot Caller. That’s the man who basically tells everyone else in your tribe what’s going to happen and how it’s going to play out. It’s also the person who negotiates with the other heads of the gangs as to, for instance, who has which table in the day room, who has which TV… basically, how the physical space of the dayroom, and the cell real estate, is divided up between the races and the gangs. Territory.
And also, pretty importantly, the Keys settles disagreements. Like when you have– say I have a tribe member and you have a tribe member and they have a beef, one of them owes the other one money and they’re not paying, “how are we gonna resolve this?”
So the bad way to resolve it is to have one gang put pressure on the other gang, because that brings everyone into the fray, and can escalate into gang war, and race war, and a total prison riot. All that can escalate very very quickly.
Hands Laid, Debt Paid
Generally the good way to resolve it for the gang to resolve it internally. So the leader of the gang is going to say “Hey Johnny, you owe Ghost there like $2,000. Either you’re gonna pay it or we’re gonna lay hands on you” — you know, beat the shit out of him with a 2-on-1 or a 3-on-1.
And that conversation is interior to the gang. So we’re all policing ourselves, keeping everybody straight. Yeah, yeah. Because they want peace. And strangely enough, in many ways, if you appropriately beat your own gang member to within an inch of his life, and its properly witnessed, then the $2,000 debt to the rival gang is forgiven.
We have a few sayings to express that idea: “When blood is spilled, the debt is killed.” and more gently: “Hands Laid, Debt Paid.”
that is, if you beat up your own person — because you took care of it. Because the lesson was made and everyone said, “Dayam, so that’s what happens if you don’t pay 2000. Got it, I’m paying!
…And to be clear, these are legitimate debts. I mean, people, you know, have racked up that debt through drugs or gambling or all these sorts of these things.
OK, so they’re… Is there just one person in charge of the tribe? You said the shot-caller. But what are the different jobs you can have within the gang?
I mean, there’s really only three. There’s the Speaker, who’s the mouth, who does the talking to the other heads. Sometimes there’s the Hand. The hand is– look, Speaker says “beat the shit out of that dude there!”… and the Hand takes care of it. Like the Hand is the action, the speaker is the mouth.
And then the head?
The Speaker’s pretty much the head.
Multi-Level Tribalism
I said “multi-levels” because look: one unit is 120 men, but there’s a whole prison: so that’s 1,200 men, 10 units… and there’s a Speaker for every unit. So when we go to yard — multiple units at a time — the heads of the of the gangs, all the Speakers coordinate with each other…
So sometimes there’s like — you know — information trickles from unit to unit. Like, people move around tiers and, you know, the gangs have to be coordinated in thought and action, across the whole prison.
And generally, each tribe has a leader, a leader who all the Speakers look up to. That’s the dude who represents that particular race or gang, for the entire yard — the entire prison. El Hefe. When the shit goes down, those are the men — the high council, basically — who get called to the Captain’s office, to negotiate the truces, and to make the promises, before we get let off lockdown.
And in fact, the tribes — the gangs — are coordinated across the entire United States of America. And at the highest level, they interface with the street gangs.
Wow. So is there any story that you want to tell us about, like, anything that’s happened on a national level? how…
I mean, I can only really tell one story, which is fairly serious, and happened towards the end of my bid at Beaumont.
Bloody Beaumont
We had just come out of lockdown and they were letting out like two units at once and we heard the grenades go off — because when violence happens in the Yard, they launch grenades from the gun towers before they shoot the guns — and that kind of shocks everyone.
Its a massive, deafening boom! you feel the ground shake, and there’s this big mushroom cloud, right in the middle of the Yard — and so the sirens start blaring, and everyone hits the deck face down–
— well, everyone hits the deck, that is, except for the combatants, who typically keep swinging and stabbing until they are taken down by force.
In this case it was MS-13 and I think two Mexican cartel members — or Mexican Mafia gang members who had actually — they were acting out beef that happened at other prisons… but either two or three of them got killed in the ensuing melee. I mean it was a stab-out.
And so we went into hard lockdown.
Lockdown
Basically, in each and every tier, you hit the deck. The guards hit the alarm, the sirens wail, the lights flash, and everyone goes face down on the ground.
And then, two by two, you go into your cells and they slam your door shut and lock you in. And so we were in lockdown for two months, and not leaving our cells at all for two months. Food and toilet paper shoved through a slot in the door. Maybe we got a shower every four days or so — marched there in our boxers and crocs, locked into the shower in cuffs.
But like on the fourth day of lockdown, we got a memo from the Warden saying, “Hey, you know, because of the shit that just went down on the yard here at Beaumont, the entire United States Federal Prison System is locked down”–
— because they didn’t want it, they didn’t want the revenge killings, the escalation. That’s gang-versus-gang, and that stuff amplifies and echoes out fast.
And so they brought in the FBI, you know, the FBI came in with like all their forensic kits and cameras and toys, like a team of like 30 of them, a little army — and they took all the blood samples, interviewed all the gang members — nobody talks, of course —
and they shook us down, hard. Emptied out every single cell in the prison, one at a time: threw all our stuff out on the open tier, put our mattresses and food through metal detectors, strip searched us, and all this.
Looking for weapons, looking for drugs, looking for records of communications — messages, notes, ledgers. Yeah, so that’s an example of things going sideways and then the BOP acting to prevent it from going national.
And by the time they got us out of lockdown, they pretty much had moved a lot of Speakers around, to different units, different prisons — put some of them in ADX, which is SuperMax — basically completely isolated them from the system, cut off their comms.
Also, the wardens and the captains brought all the Speakers into the Captain’s office, and they’re like “Look, guarantee us that you’re not ordering another hit. Promise us there’s gonna be no more retaliation. Guarantee us that this is resolved…”
And they don’t let you out of lockdown till they have the word of the gang heads that “yeah, okay I’ve told my people not to act on this, to stay cool and calm, to not to seek revenge.” Then slowly, ever so slowly, like a pressure-relief valve, they open back up the yard.
One cell, two cells, 8 cells, 16. Finally, maybe a month or two later, after everything is running smoothly with no violence or retribution, we might get back up to Full Programming. Full Yard. “Wide Open,” as we’d say. Education, Church, Yard, Rec, Sports. That would be heaven.
Okay, so the politics: What are the politics in place for? Is it for peace? Is it for control of resources? Is it for power? Like what… for all of them?
Politicking
Okay I’ll start by saying like one of the fascinating things to me about prison is that politics is actually a verb. It’s called “politicking.” And so when you first get in, people are like, “Yo, you better get your politicking on point!” …you know?
And then you see somebody talking to other people, and they’re like, “Look at that motherfucker. He’s just politicking his ass off.” And I was — I couldn’t get my head around it. I grew up in Washington, DC, so I’m familiar with “politics,” but I couldn’t understand the verb for the longest time.
And I finally — it was part of my dictionary studies. I thought, well, really: what’s politics?
Politics is: the manipulation and deployment of power and influence… power to manipulate masses into action. Of course! That’s what it is: it’s the play of power! ….and how do you do that?
You do that with alliances, by persuasion, by coercion — just every possible method, by any means necessary. And I realised, so that’s what politicking is. Politicking is flexing power and really building alliances so that when the shit hits the fan, you know who has your back and this sort of thing.
The person who’s got most people at their back is the person who’s gonna survive. Mm-hmm, okay. So in terms of, like you talked about, like is it the alpha, you said they’re all alpha males anywhere in prison, but there’s an alpha alpha? Yeah, I don’t wanna say all alpha.
Prison is a Dog Park
Like, alpha is a relative term, right? And it might be an abused term these days also.
Prison reminds me of a dog park.
Like at dog park, 12 dogs come together who’ve never met each other before. They all sniff each other’s butts. Some of them try to hump each other, right? It’s not even generally sexual, often its just a power play… but at the end of 30 minutes, every dog on the yard has figured out what the pecking order is. They’ve figured out who’s the dog that can kick everybody else’s ass.
They also figure out who’s the dog who’s reasonable, and isn’t trying to hump everybody. They sort it out, quick — and it’s the same in prison politics. There’s new fish coming in all the time. So every, I don’t know, every 3 days, 10 days, a new bus comes in, with a whole new load of prisoners, and there’s a new person or two or three or five who comes onto the tier, lugging their mattress with them… new fish come in, old buddies transfer prisons or go home.
Not so much in jail, but you know, so every time someone comes in your unit in prison, it’s a disruption to the established order, and you have to figure out, pretty quickly, where they sort. So I wouldn’t say everyone’s alpha males. I would simply say that criminals tend to be more masculine than the feminized metrosexuals of present-day civilized America.
They’re comfortable with guns, they beat the shit out of people, they fight to survive, and they speak their mind without forgiveness or worry. So I’d say it’s a pretty strong crew.
Right, okay. So what was your role in the prison politics scene?
Pretty much I stayed out of the way, for the most part. Strategically — I’ll just be transparent here — every time I got into a new tier or a new celly situation…
“criminals tend to be more masculine
than the feminized metrosexuals
of present-day civilized America…
—
They’re comfortable with guns,
they beat the shit out of people, they fight to survive,
and they speak their mind clearly
without forgiveness or worry.”
Workout Partners
…I just aligned myself with the biggest, baddest, strongest White motherfucker I could find. And then I went out on the tier and befriended them — just by being real and asking about their lives and things like this — by being human. And then I made sure that I was their workout partner. Because when you work out with somebody, you bond with somebody.
A lot of prison workouts are designed specifically to prepare you for combat. So when you’re in sync, you know, we’re like: I’m doing five pushups, you’re doing five pushups. And we’re looking at each other in the eye and we’re coaching each other, pushing eachother. Go! two more, two more, keep going, motherfucker!
You know, that’s a real bonding. And it’s like, feels like: “Okay, I’ve just worked out with this guy for 30 days in a row for something like 45 hours or more, total. And you feel as if — you both feel: “yeah, if it goes down to a fight, we know each other and we know how to push each other and we’ll have each other’s backs.”
It may not be explicitly stated or discussed. But you’re building respect that way. Because a lot of people have fast or short workouts, even in prison, but I always went full throttle. So I was with guys much bigger than me, but I never gave up …and people drop out of the workout.
And I was just like, no, I’m, I’m, I’m mind over matter. I don’t care if my body is collapsing. Like I will finish this workout with you, no matter what. And then they were like: “Damn, you know, Phoenix, you look like a skinny ass white boy, but damn, you’d like… you go through.”
So that was your way to survive. Or your way to be aligned with the right person. So that’s like a political move.
It was a political move. Looking back on it, I see it. When I was in it, it wasn’t really conscious. I was just like, what I told myself — the story I told myself was: “I want to get shredded, ripped: these guys are freaking stacked, they’re physical specimens. I thought: I’m in prison, I want to come out looking like them, so how will I accomplish that? Well, I’ll just work out with them.
Looking back on it, I think… I think it was a prison politics survival move. In fact, clearly it was.
a Leader shall rise
Okay. Okay. So they have a, yeah, that makes sense. So how do people in prison politics and you these leaders, they don’t get, they don’t get elected. You don’t have votes, right? So they just sort of, what?
No (laughing). No, you don’t vote. It’s pretty much a meritocracy — not what merit might be deemed to be in the, in the, in the real world, but a meritocracy being who spent the most time in the hardest prisons, and who has run the most gang operations on the street.
So basically, the more hardcore criminal you are, the more respected you are as a leader on the yard. A lot of that is because you know how prisons operate. You have the confidence and the vision to understand when to order violence and when to negotiate. And that’s not something that a normal person is prepared for.
I mean, even someone in the military, someone used to violence — they’re on a different wavelength than what a boss gangster has to deal with. So if you have prison experience and street gang experience, then you understand those nuances and how to call the shots, as well as when to call the shots. So people naturally look up to that.
And people would order someone to… Order things around, right? use their power…
Actually, they would use their power quite rarely. I mean, it wasn’t flexed a lot. The most flexing I saw was when the Mexican gang leader, he got really mad because he thought the workouts were getting shoddy and like a third of the Hispanics weren’t participating. Hispanics is mandatory. All of them must work out at every, like you have to go to every yard, you have to get out there, you to work out with the crew in sync. So they’d always have like 12 to 30 guys doing the workout hard. And it was all like endurance, basically burpees of every possible style and shape and kind.
So that started to get like a little lazy. And so actually the head of that gang, he was my age and he didn’t work out much. He just, cause he operated things, but he actually came to the workout and he was like, look motherfuckers, like you guys are sloppy. You’re not ready for combat. He goes, I’m running the workout today and you’re going to do it. And he was a little overweight too, but he, he whipped them into shape.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So you have like real leaders, like they’re leading an army.
Yeah, that’s what it is.
The Compassionate Alpha
Huh, okay. That’s great. What is, then — well, you talked about like leading out of fear… or, you know, out of respect, right? So where does that respect actually come from? How do you lead in prison?
I’m gonna shout out here to my son Maxwell.
In my bank robbery days, I started to get really convinced of this “Lone Wolf” role. As in: the wolf is the apex predator, and I’m going to go in and eat all the sheep, which in my mind were the bankers and… the “sheeple,” some say, the “NPCs.” Like, I embodied that lone wolf ethos… I said to myself: I am this. And that carried me forward for a while.
One day, I was expressing that very idea to my son — just as an idea, not in the context of bank robbery, mind you — but just saying to him, very directly: “Let’s get some facts about the world straight, kid. For one: Might Makes Right… and the Alpha, the leader of the pack… that’s the one who can beat every else up, who can physically and psychologically dominate all challengers, from both within and without.”
…and he… he corrected me. He was just 12 years old and he says to me, very calmly and logically: “You know, Dad: that may be the model of a Darwinist alpha male, but…” he says “the best possible leader is the compassionate alpha.”
I blink. What?!?
He continues: “We live in a civilized society. And in a civilized society, the compassionate Alpha–” and honestly, I had no idea what he’s talking about. He’s 12 years old. So I prompt him: “Okaaay… explain?”
He says “Well, the compassionate alpha is actually the leader whose primary interest is the elevation of every member of his pack. So he’s like finding out the buttons of each of his tribe members, and finding out their flaws, and helping them to address their flaws in order to make them better, so that everyone…” right, you know what is the saying? “The rising tide lifts all ships”
“…so he’s not oppressing and bullying and enforcing, rather he’s lifting everyone up. And so he’s building respect through compassion for his tribe.” That little speech of his really — he explained this to me, and it really affected me deeply. I looked into my heart and thought, I believe that. I told him, a bit in shock: “I think you’re right, son.” And it kind of changed my whole mechanism, from there forward.
And I actually witnessed that — the leader as a compassionate alpha, not just a beastly badass — I saw that manifest in prison. Like the gang members, I would say, you know, maybe not to the point of “Hey, <puts his arm around an imaginary youngster> let me mentor you” type of thing. Maybe not that far, but…
The Root of Respect
You seem like you got mentored a little bit.
Oh, I got mentored. Yeah. There and back again. Yes. For sure. Because prison was a strange land to me — I often say, I was a Stranger in a Strange Land [Exodus 2:22]. So I was doing a lot of listening. And asking a lot of “stupid questions.” Yeah. And sorting out my lessons from all the things — all the answers — I heard.
But yeah, so I’d say there’s a mix in prison between the Darwin Alpha and the Compassionate Alpha. My first celly at Beaumont was Travis, and he just looked at me straight — he was very honest, a great communicator. So one night he takes a long appraising look at me, and says: “Look, Phoenix. This is how it works: there is no respect that doesn’t originate from fear. All respect comes from fear. That’s it.” He goes, “If you think somebody can kill you, you respect them.”
And I was like: “Well, that doesn’t exactly square with my Compassionate Alpha Theory.” And I was like, “You know, there’s other ways to get it, Travis. There are other ways to earn and keep respect.”
And Travis is like: “Nope, that’s it.” He goes, “You may try and put all these comfortable lies above it, your little happy stories, but at the root of it, it’s very very simple: if you think somebody can kill you, you respect them. That’s it. Period.”
“if you think somebody can kill you,
you respect them.”
Huh. I mean, that would be the same idea in corporate America… if they think they can fire you, then they respect you.
The Role of a CEO
Yeah, yeah, if you equate — and I certainly did as a CEO — if you equate firing with a sort of metaphorical death, the death of the employment per se, then yes. exactly.
And on the compassionate side of that boss equation, you — especially as a CEO — you’re giving your employees salaries and hopefully mentorship to make your company better. You’re essentially allowing them to provide for their families, pay their mortgage, put food on the table, buy nice clothes for their wife or kids or whatever, or themselves. So there’s a provider role there. I always felt as CEO that…
That the dark secret of all CEOs is that it’s you who are actually working for your freaking employees.
That is true. You may sign their paychecks, but you’re working for them. You’re working your ass off to make sure that they keep going. And does that happen, that happened in prison with, I guess that guy with the Mexican Mafia who is making all the soldiers stronger and better… by kicking their asses. Right?
Absolutely. So he was making them better. Yeah. And he was also making them more likely to stay alive in prison.. which is pretty important.
Yeah. Right? And not to mention, more likely to have their gang maintain the power. Right. And it did seem like from reading your book and talking to you that… well it seems that even in such a violent place, peace is the desired outcome.
Absolutely. You do not want to go to war.
Yeah. Right? So lets now think about today and what’s going on in the broader geopolitical landscape. Based on what you’ve said, it sounds like prison politics on a global scale! So with that, we’ve got to get into some gnarly stuff. How do you see what’s going on today? Do you have any kind of observations that might–
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Alright, exactly, keeping it holy. Yeah. Alright, well thank you for that shout out.
You’re welcome.
RealPolitik
Greenland & Panama
So, back to our interview here: in terms of what’s going on politically now that you find interesting — or do you have a different perspective on it coming from your prison life to our present day American reality — and you look at what’s going on in politics, and compare it to prison politics — anything to say there?
Yeah, yeah a lot to say there. Yes. For instance, Panama.
This may be unpopular. But anyways, I fully support Trump saying “Let’s take Greenland and Panama.” Globally, strategically, if you’re playing the game Risk or Diplomacy, hells yes you take those places.
Greenland has a population of roughly 60,000 people. If we can somehow convince them, say: pay them $100,000 each, and get them to vote? “Yeah, we’re switching from Denmark to USA.” Okay, that’s done. Check it off the list. Now you’ve got a whole military base and whatever resources are there. Boom.
Next: Panama. Panama is obvious. It’s like the Suez Canal. It’s the only connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for shipping lanes. China does effectively own** that now.
[**ED NOTE: China was muscling in to own it, by developing a pair of key ports at the terminuses, and by extending its legendary Belt and Road initiative deep into Panama. But in recent months, a) BlackRock has purchased, outright, an 80% controlling interest in one of China’s Panama terminal megaports, and Panama has stated that it will not be participating in future Chinese Belt & Road projects… so the tide may already be turning…]
So while these things — the annexation of Greenland and Panama — are a complete violation*** of the modern peace,
[***ED NOTE: a violation, perhaps, but not historically unprecedented. In the late 19th century, the United States “bought” Alaska from Russia (1867), for $7.2 million USD, or approximately $0.02 (two cents) per acre. 30 years later, in 1898, the United States unilaterally “annexed” the islands of Hawaii. There was no purchase there. We simply declared “its ours” and met no viable resistance from either the natives nor the international community.]
One of the things that prison does, politics-wise, is to strip it raw. Like, there’s not a lot of bullshit. You’re like, okay, that’s the deal? What’s are the things? The key drivers?
Money. Power. Drugs. …and Life.
Life, as in: are you getting damaged or not? Pretty fucking simple. Not a lot of window dressing.
Blood Money & Taxes
Americans don’t like to admit what their tax dollars pay for and what our military does. And the Iraq war, Afghanistan, there’s massive casualties on the other side there that are largely not acknowledged. Same with Gaza, perhaps.
And we’re paying for that. How are we paying for it? We pay our federal taxes every April. We write the check or it was already taken from our paycheck. whatever, 20, 33 % that goes to our military budget, of which X percent is ammunition that is used to kill people or to enforce the destruction of property and people. I that’s what happens. If you tell it to most people, like, well, I don’t want to deal with that. Like, right? Yeah. Yeah, I just pay my taxes and I’m a good citizen of the United States.
That’s the real face of global power. There’s a significant part of Afghanistan and Iraq that was done to secure oil pipelines, resources.
It’s the ugly truth. In prison, you’re not worrying about how ugly that truth is because it’s it’s recognized. Here in “civilization,” it’s a little more camouflaged… and I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy.
What do you think that we should know that we don’t know that we would know if we were in prison… about the way the world works? I mean, you talked about how many people were killed in Iraq so we could get the oil… and our oil, our gas is cheaper than — you’re talking about how much we pay for gas versus Germany.
So just help us understand some of the stuff that maybe we don’t want to look at but that’s true.
Ride or Die
I think the first thing I say is: “Ride or Die.” Which translates to basically: who’s got your back? You know, “ride or die” is is kind of a gang thing, a gang concept… it’s like: when the shooting starts, who’s in your car — in your physical car that you’re driving, who’s with you that you trust — you know, that’s gonna shoot back and and protect you? And you protect them. Or:
Who’s going to run from the cops with you? These are very real serious things that can… Life or Death, or Prison or Freedom… like major decision points.
And military people understand this inherently. You’re in the same platoon or squad, you guys are going into combat, you have an ironclad agreement of how you’re protecting each other and what your reliance on eachother is.
We have “best friends” in the world, but I think a lot of times those aren’t tested and maybe we don’t even know how deep they would go. Right?
We might say “ride or die,” but maybe it’s not true. Right?
Right. But I hope it’s true. It’s like, but how can you strip that away and find out?
For instance, let’s say you’re in South America, right? And the shit goes hella sideways and you get kidnapped or something. Who will you call from America, who’s going to be on the next flight, with $10,000 in a bag to save your ass, and maybe even a gun, right? Like: who is it?
And, and knowing that, you know that in prison, you know. If the shit hits the fan, you know who’s going to really have your back. And I would say it’d be a good thing for everybody to know that. And most of us probably know intuitively, but it’s a good thing to know it in the real world.
And I’m sure that — I mean, I don’t play in the global political realm, but I’m sure at that level too, it’s good to know who your true allies are also…
Creative Destruction
Uh-huh. So but now like with the United States kind of losing some of our allies like how would that be?
Maybe it’s testing our allies.
Okay, so how do you see it first like how do you see what’s going on right now where all these tariffs are happening. We’re saying Greenland’s ours. We’re gonna take the Panama Canal. We’re gonna change the name of the Gulf of America.
Well that’s done.
Yeah, right. So all the things, right?
So that’s pure. That’s pure. I’d say it’s Machiavellian politics, mixed with absolute chaos. There’s some flipping tariffs back and forth, wild charges, rapid reversals, and this sort of thing.
It’s destabilizing, for sure. I don’t think that anyone can judge. We’ll look back in 20 years and say either “that was the worst presidency ever” or “my god, in retrospect, that was twistedly brilliant.”
I would reserve judgment for quite some time because the things that are happening right now are pretty seismic. They’re absolutely disruptive, but I wouldn’t call a shot on them whether it’s like… destructively disruptive or creative destruction that’ll bring us to better place.
The Ugly Truth
So do you think that with Trump, he’s more okay with just putting the ugly truth out there, like you would in prison?
Yeah, and I think he’s also a pathological liar …which complicates things, to be sure. Yes, he certainly does not shy away from attacks and ugly truths, and some of the things he says are just like… they are things that no one on the left will acknowledge, but which are just true.
Like, I mean, he’s saying, “We’re negotiating globally, and tariffs are simply a forcing function of that.” It’s true. Like, he’s utterly taking a wrecking ball to the global order, and people are calling and kissing his ass and…
Presidents and Congress have been doing this for a hundred years, but it’s all been double-talked. It’s been like, “Yes, we’re having a summit and this, and the other.”
And Trump’s just like, fuck them all. Let’s come on. Let’s go. Now I don’t know if he has the right agenda for our country, whether it’s a personal agenda of his, just to build his personal power and brand, versus actual benefit for the citizens, but he’s…
Trump: Gloves Off
…he’s doing what every President’s done, but with the gloves off and… and he’s just calling a spade a spade in many cases.
Okay, so it’s more like an MMA fight versus a football game.
Hahaha. That’s a good metaphor, I’ll buy that.
Perhaps: an MMA fight… with clowns.
Ha! That’s interesting. He likes MMA fights.
I do, I love MMA.
Well, haha, I said Trump likes MMA. He watches that all the time. Anyways: So maybe there’s an analogy there: just like “gloves off!”
Yeah. Definitely gloves off. And for people who want to see what’s happening, you know, who will be saying, “Oh my God! I can’t believe he’s doing that!” You know, if you actually want to strip it down to bare bones and actually see what’s happening.
You’ll realize: “Oh, okay. It’s been like that all along.” It is negotiations. It is power struggles. There are assets in the world, and the major players desire to control those assets: Oil, Energy, Minerals, Metals, Crops, Land, Waterways… and China, for instance, China just does it — their maneuvering for control — in a different way.
China just moves into parts of Asia, and breeds. They send in their people and they fuck the locals and they hybridize the population, both linguistically and culturally. Suddenly its 50 years later, and everyone speaks Mandarin and eats Chinese food. That’s what happened in, for instance, Tibet. China invades without guns. The end result is the same. Cultural assimilation. Economic annexation.
But Trump’s going with very a different style. Different from China, and most certainly different from his U.S. predecessors. You could say, correctly, that Trump is playing prison politics, globally. The New York Times appears to agree:
Uh-huh. He’s going with a different style, for sure. Okay, and then time will tell whether it works or not. Yeah, Right. But this would be more — at least people in prison would understand this way of doing it. Because no one’s trying to hide anything.
Yeah, people in prison are, I’d say, 80% in favor of Trump.
Eighty Percent?
Yeah. Because they see him as a gangster. And they’re not wrong.
Okay.
They were happy that he, you know, took on all those cases, the federal and state cases, and pretty much never plead guilty, pushed for trial, and came out more or less victorious. He lost some civil cases, sure — and he’ll pay the price for those: money, whatever.
Money vs. Power
Elon vs. Trump
And what about: when you think about politics, and think about Elon Musk with Trump, and what’s going on with that… what would that alliance be like in prison? And what do you feel is going on there?
It’s perfect! Look: Elon’s the money and Trump’s the power.
There’s a quote in a great show on TV about the presidency: House of Cards. In this one pivotal scene, there’s a billionaire talking to a Congressman. The billionaire’s flexing. He says: “You know, I got this many billions. I can buy your whole state” …this, that, and the other.
And the congressman’s just sitting back, and laughing. Now, the congressman’s not worth more than a couple million dollars. He’s set, but he’s not anywhere near billionaire level worth.
And finally the billionaire notices and is like, “What are you laughing at?!?”
The congressman replies: “You see, you got money and you think that’s something. That may be something in New York or Los Angeles… but I’m in Washington DC. This is the power center of the world. I got power, and power crushes money, any day of the week.
…because you can flex and spend and throw cash around, fine… but I can change the law.”
Buying In
So in prison there was actually like — well, following that story. In prison, the law is the gang order.
But there’s a guy who came in, who had millions on the street. But he was from a low-power gang. He was kind of like on his own amongst the prison gangs.
And he got — and he was very strong — but he got kind of messed with at the start. And so he basically, well. He paid the Mexican gang a million dollars cash to become a permanent part of their gang.
And from then on, boom, he was right in there alongside them, done. Like the deal was done.
So he bought the gang?
No! He bought membership into the gang.
Yeah. Ah, so he went into their gang.
Yeah. Through cash. Yeah. And then he built the power.
To be clear, he was a fairly high-powered gangster himself. Like he was he was no one to trifle with, at all. But in the Fed Pen, he was a bit of a fish out of water. He had his money. He had his street gang. But it had no presence or standing in prison.
What I’m saying is that he negotiated himself into the table, and using cash, got it. Which gets to the point I’m trying to make, as we translate prison politics out into the national political landscape:
Elon is kind of the same thing.
That’s… yes. Thank you. Thank you for connecting that.
Elon & Trump
Yeah So Elon’s basically buying his way in, a $150 million donation to the Trump campaign… and will stick around for as long as he’ll last …or rather, for as long as Trump will tolerate him.
Trump definitely has the power.
For sure! Trump could dump Elon in a hot second. You know, again: change the law, activate specific tariffs that target Tesla or SpaceX, or…
…or he could just federalize SpaceX, say: “Look, the Air Force is 80% of your contracts; we’re just taking your company.” As in, “Yo, here’s the Defense Production Act, (a law that allows the federal government to seize corporate assets unilaterally in time of emergency or war), thank you very much. Thanks for building this cool company for us. We’ll take it from here.”
So if you’re gonna predict the future, do you think that’s gonna last the whole presidency, that buddy relationship?
No way. No way in hell. No, what’s gonna happen– I mean, come on: Trump’s gonna kick Musk to the curb.
When?
I don’t know…. next month, next year? I mean Musk has already come out effectively saying things on X like “Tariffs are a terrible idea, I can’t believe you’re doing this!”
(obliquely, but obviously, with his snarky post on X of a 1980 video showing how many countries and humans contributed to the manufacture of a single, simple #2 pencil)
You don’t disrespect the king like that!
By the way… I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I actually tend to agree mostly with Musk on that — the realities of the global supply chain — but, hey man: it’s prison politics, yo!
I think politically Musk has so much “fuck-you money” that he just doesn’t care, and so he’s pretty much just playing it as he always plays it — taking his ketamine, not giving a fuck, stating his truth, whatever it happens to be that day…
All without much forethought, without any actual political savvy. He’s not really trying to manipulate Trump. He’s just basically his “oval office buddy,” and he appears to be enjoying the ride… and that ride is most certainly gonna terminate at some point.
But then… does Musk have any leverage with SpaceX?
I mean, does he have technology? Sure! Or are you asking, could he just get kicked to the curb on SpaceX too? No, no, I mean, SpaceX is not going to lose the government contracts. SpaceX is like Boeing or Northrop-Grumman with the Defense Department. They’re joined at the hip.
Right. So that’s a safety move. I mean, least he’s that aligned with the government.
Business-wise, I don’t think SpaceX has any problems whatsoever. Power-wise, I think, yeah, Musk will just go back to being the richest person on Earth (boo hoo!), and no longer be sitting in the West Wing.
Then he can go back to flexing his capitalist muscle, and Trump can continue his chaotic political crusade without him.
The End of Soft Power
Uh-huh. Okay. Switching it up. You think about going from Biden to Trump, and we had friends in Europe and had friends with our soft power, right? And different types of missions and more quote-unquote “diplomacy.” Now we have Trump and now there’s different people, different agendas.
What’s “soft power?”
Soft power is just influence …and we, you know: we give money to Africa to cure AIDS, and we were building roads in different remote places, modern infrastructure. We’re doing nice things for people. And so we have the “soft power” of, you know, ingratiating ourselves to them.
Okay… so like social cred.
Social credit, right. And we have some soft power because we’re doing nice things for the world, right? So now we take that away. We’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna take away all that aid money… U.S.AID, all that goodwill. All that goodwill, and we’re take that. Like, be nice. Be a nice global citizen.
Economy is Warfare
Yeah, and now we’re like, okay, fuck you. We’re not gonna do this anymore. We’re gonna take our money away because it’s a waste of money, right? We’ll move to being more insular, so we don’t have that soft power any more, and then we just go in with fear. You know, like these tariffs, and so, you know his first–
Is this tariffs “fear,” or is it just like economic negotiation? Economy is warfare.
So you know, it’s just — I mean it’s fear in terms of, for instance, you could take the stock market or certain economies like Canada could say “okay, I’m out of business now. I’m gonna be in a massive recession.”
That’s fear, right? Maybe that’d be fear if your whole economy gets upside down.
Yeah, but the global economy is pretty integrated at this point… like you see this like when the US stock market tanks, the Nikkei and the Euro tanks too, you know, they’re like, they all tracked fairly closely +/- 3 percent.
Yeah. I mean, I know we can’t, we can’t predict the future, but I’m just, I’m just curious.
I think the question here is, was the soft power ever real?
I do believe in goodwill. Like yes, let’s let’s cure AIDS. Let’s cure malaria. Let’s let’s cure polio. Like let’s do it as a gift to the world. I believe in that, right?
But the current administration doesn’t, so we’re removing those gifts. But the question is — I mean, there’s no question that those gifts make the world a better place. But is that actually power?
Axis & Allies
Okay. Well, who will our allies be if we take this plan of action? So back to prison life, you do want allies, right? You don’t want to just be like alone, an island. You need to have allies to survive.
Yeah, like the Whites were a minority in the federal prison system. So there was pretty much a national, or at least a regional alliance, between the Mexicans and the Whites.
So it’s like NAFTA
Haha, Yeah.
Yeah, and how Trump is like easing up on that, saying “Okay Let’s just get this whole thing lined up. He’s nice there… nice exactly because that’s the alliance.
Okay, we’re kind of connecting the dots here, sure. Mexico: that’s the manufacturing, right? I mean, Chevrolet, Chevys: the engines are built in Deerfield — sorry, Dearborn, Michigan — but the cars are built in Mexico, right?
But he’s saying “forget about China”
That’s been a long time coming. mean, look, China has our balls in a vice. They’ve had our balls in a vice for 20 years. They control their currency rate. The whole FOREX is a free market globally, except China.
China locks their currency rate. And anytime they want to do something, they’re just like, “hey, +10%. schping!” <waves magic wand>
And altering the exchange rate like that — by mandate — when everyone else is free market. So that plus all our manufacturing, you know, this is why Apple stock dropped, what? 15% because you have Shenzhen* where the 500,000+ employees of Foxconn that makes every iPhone — they make a million iPhones a day literally.
(*Ed Note: The iPhone plant is actually in Zhengzhou, about 1,000 miles north of Shenzhen)
Okay, so that’s all China and yeah, there’s an argument, a huge argument for getting all that mission critical manufacturing out of China, or at least…
Re-shoring Manufacturing
For instance, the AFL-CIO. I actually many years ago talked to the head of the AFL-CIO, and he was like, “Yeah, we can’t get American wages any higher. Like it used to be, yeah, we’re trying to get the factory workers up to 35, 45, $60 an hour, you know, whatever, like getting them to six figure salaries.”
He was like, “That’s not going to work anymore, because they’re offshoring. The only way we’re going to rise American salaries is by rising Chinese salaries first. Because that’s the competition. We need to be on an even playing field.”
“So pay the Chinese five times more than they’re getting now, improve their life, and that will improve the American life… because then we can start to actually compete.”
and China, you — there’s still, I mean, don’t know what the actual wages are there today, but I’m pretty clear It’s less than five dollars an hour — perhaps significantly less than that, like two dollars an hour, right? Yes, $2/hr for skilled labor.
Like these are the iPhone builders. That’s that’s a very high-end piece of technology. Requires high precision and very skilled labor. You’re not getting that in America for $2/hr. Hell, you’re not getting that for $20/hr.
So There’s a dependency there that — It doesn’t necessarily have to come back to the US because we just don’t even have the skill sets for manufacturing like that anymore. But it certainly should be distributed globally.
And this — these tariffs, these policies — is definitely going to force that, that trade war. And again, I agree with Trump on this. It’s going to be hella painful. Like, you go to Walmart, this is going to be +25% across the board on prices.
It’s all made in China. So the pain is coming soon.
And: I do believe there’s a brighter horizon once this all gets sorted out. In the meantime, it’s going to be ugly.
CashApp & Karma
Okay. So another part of power and politicking is just… Money… and how money moves around.. So how does money move around in prison?
CashApp.
CashApp. Really?!?
For real money, yeah.
And that guy (the CEO) got murdered.
(Bob Lee, CEO of CashApp — Murdered on Streets of SF, April 2023)
He did.
It was karma. He gets stabbed on the street in one of the richest neighborhoods in San Francisco, by a dude who thinks he drugged his sister who then got raped. Two in the morning…
Autopsy reports indicated that Mr Lee (founder / CEO of CashApp) was under the influence of alcohol, ketamine and cocaine at the time of his death. Defence attorneys argued that a pattern of drug use had made Mr Lee aggressive.
They said the assailant was angry with Lee for introducing his younger sister, Khazar Elyassnia, to a drug dealer she said gave her GHB and other drugs and then sexually assaulted her that same evening. Both men and the young woman were seen at the drug dealers home earlier that night.
The reason I did laugh about it — I did, because I thought: “What a sweet irony of fate.”
Most all drug money in prison moves through CashApp. You call your people on the outside, that’s the go-to app. It’s not Venmo, it’s not PayPal, it’s just CashApp. Because they have the least — intentionally, the least amount of reporting to the government, the least amount of tracking.
They’re not even a bank. They’re an app, not a bank, technically, so they run completely outside of all state and federal financial regulation — but they run, I don’t know how many, hundreds of millions of dollars a year through their system.
Yeah, like Bitcoin
Kinda sort of. I don’t know who uses CashApp in the real world, like in the free world, but it’s the only– like if you make any moves over $50, you do it through the outside, through your people, through CashApp.
My person cashapps to your person on the outside, it’s verified with a second phone call, and then the transaction’s done. And then we exchange the goods in prison. Money flows on the outside, goods and services flow on the inside. Boom.
Wow, and you used it too?
Oh yeah.
Crypto
So, and then in terms of, so that brings us other, to another form of currency. So if you think about politics, in the world order and moving money around, what do you think is going on with crypto? And how is, how are the politics of that? You know, do you have any view of that? Did that happen in prison or is that just-
No, no crypto in prison. No crypto. So, but what would you say the political jockeying is right now when it comes to crypto? I think crypto is the inevitable destination of global currency markets.
The federal government will have its own crypto, authorized by the feds. Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan will have their own crypto. The irony of crypto is it started out being pretty much anarchists, anarchists and libertarians. And with, especially with the Trump administration, there’s total alignment. Crypto funded his election bid to a large degree. The crypto billionaires who are these fringe young kids who…
It’s not generational wealth. Like they bought a thousand Bitcoin when it was like 50 cents a Bitcoin and forgot about it. know, and then Bitcoin’s at a hundred thousand. They’re like, “I have a hundred million dollars.”
I’ve seen this, right? Like, guy who’s done nothing his whole life suddenly buys a freaking Porsche in Miami, like a racing Porsche, GT3 RS. With Ethereum! Like, no cash, no bank, no nothing. Just transfer the Ethereum and goes and gets the car.
So, you know, it’s — that underground population, mostly youngsters, many worth north of $100 million — is kind of a hidden power in the world. Generally untracked, un-nationalised, and un-recognized.
I was amused forever as like, I think the current crypto economy is around two trillion right now. That’s 2% of global GDP, just as far as the market cap. It is the better currencies, not Bitcoin, but the better currencies are probably some of more efficient and distributed.
They’re the most sophisticated transaction networks in the world. Circle might be the best one, like Ripple and Circle. So I think it’s inevitable that it basically gets adopted by governments and banks and financial systems and that’s — blockchain is how it works.
Intriguingly, I would say like for the first 10 years, Bitcoin transaction volume was probably 80% criminal transactions. Even today, when the Russians hack in and take over US hospital networks, the ransom is always paid in Bitcoin.
Okay, in prison, do they change up the currency system across the years, the centuries? Does anything like that ever happen? You have those books of stamps you talked about in an earlier episode (episode 004: The Prison Economy).
Right. And you have like the mackerel packets, right? And so you have all these different forms of currency. Does anybody — like some creative genius, say, “Okay, I’m this prison entrepreneur and I’m an innovator and I’m going to rethink how currency works in prison, from the ground up?”
Nope.
Nope?
It’s much simpler than that. It’s still completely old school.
All right. So this is gonna wrap up our episode today Lots more and we’re getting into meaty — some really meaty subjects today. So thank you Gregory, for this enlightening, perhaps controversial–
Spicy subjects!
–spicy… Spicy, Yes! Okay, and we’re gonna wrap up this illuminating episode of the Pirate Soldier King Podcast: Prison Politics Edition!
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