In this episode, Alex talks about his first vacation to Costa Rica, how he got there, and why he doesn t like going on vacation in the summer anymore. Alex also talks about how he almost died on a plane in Costa Rica and why it s a good place to go on a vacation if you like to surf and do drugs. And he talks about what it s like to be on the run from the law in the middle of the night in a small town in Central America. Alex is a writer, entrepreneur, podcaster, and podcaster. He's also an avid surfer and has a real estate company in New York, but he doesn't live in the big city, he lives in the small town of Montezuma, Costa Rica. If you like surfing and drugs, you'll love this episode. It's a wild ride through Central America, and it's a great place to take a break from the hustle and get some rest and relaxation. This episode is sponsored by Costa Rica Airline, a Costa Rica airline. Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase when you book your first Costa Rica Vacation. All you have to be 21 years old or older than 18 years old, and must be able to pay $35 or more than $50 to get a discount. The offer ends in August 2020. You must be 21 or older to receive a discount code at checkout at the Costa Rica Traveler Experience, which includes a free of their own airport lounge and a free boarding pass. at Costa Rica Viceroy package, and a discount of $50 or $75 or $99 or $150 at VGA or VGA, plus a VGA membership, plus they'll give you an additional $100 or they'll get you an upgrade when you get a VIP membership when you sign up for a complimentary cart with VGA and they get $5 or they get your first place to use the VGA discount, they'll also get $25 or they receive $25,000 in VGA Plus they'll receive $5,000 or they can get you a cart and they'll have a complimentary VGA & they get a 5-piece of VGA Pro membership. you'll get an ad-only version of the ad-free version of this podcasting service. They also get a complimentary copy of the entire show.
Transcript
Transcripts from "Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:01:52.000But yeah, back in the early 90s, and well, back in all of the 90s, I ran a newsprint tabloid, and there's no real business in January and August.
00:04:24.000But those planes are so petrifying because
00:04:29.000America now, you have to have two engines on those little planes in case one goes.
00:04:34.000So they sold all the one-engine planes to Costa Rica.
00:04:37.000So if something goes out there, you're gonna die.
00:04:41.000And I remember once I was with my girlfriend, who's now my wife, and she's squeezing my hand and she, because the turbulence is mental there, right?
00:04:48.000And she goes, I don't know if we're gonna make it.
00:04:51.000And I go, honey, this is like a bus, okay?
00:08:17.000I'm in a surfer town with gorgeous hunks.
00:08:19.000They do this thing where they wear their surf shorts kind of low and they get those nice little lines by their pubes.
00:08:26.000And there'd usually be three chicks there that were half decent and we couldn't get them because I'm not attractive and I can't compete with surfers and they had their pick of the litter.
00:08:38.000So, after a couple years there, I've realized you gotta bring in your own ladies.
00:08:45.000You gotta import the poon, which we did.
00:08:50.000And, uh... So, we would just go there and do cocaine and smoke pot, and it was great pot, it was crappy pot.
00:08:58.000And I wish we could get back to those days, because I can't smoke marijuana now.
00:10:07.000One time we did coke there and uh... Costa Rica is an interesting little place in Central America because I heard a lot of CIA guys will retire there so there's a vested interest for the Secret Service to make sure it's a safe place.
00:10:23.000Now it's a disgusting violent place like all of Central America because you're dealing with savages who will murder you and it's full of illegals
00:10:34.000It's full of people from Panama, and Honduras, and El Salvador, even Guatemala, who go there to work.
00:10:45.000Like, I remember there was a story there, there was some Panamans who got in a fight because one of them had slept with the other guy's wife, and he chopped his hands off.
00:10:55.000He chopped the other guy's hands, plural, off.
00:13:45.000So I go to the bathroom with him and he's like, don't, and we're doing bumps, you know, bumps where you put coke on a kid, and he's like, don't fuck around, Kevin.
00:13:54.000Cause when you fuck around, you get abused.
00:13:59.000I was like, uh oh, this guy is past the point of no return.
00:14:05.000And then I heard a couple days later, he had smeared his own feces all over the inside of his tent and was screaming about Satan and 666 and stuff.
00:14:24.000So, the town is like the Wild West, and in the 90s, if someone was robbed, all the locals, like the white people, the expats who lived there, they would literally get on horses.
00:14:35.000Like the Wild West, and go find the guy and chase him out of town.
00:14:40.000But the Coke story I was telling originally, and I don't do cocaine anymore, I don't think you should do that drug after your late 30s, because your heart, you'll die.
00:15:12.000So, I guess from Nicaragua or something, or Panama, or even South America, they ride their boats up, trying to get up to at least Mexico, or maybe even America, these drug dealers.
00:16:50.000So the son, the way they deal it is they take plastic bags and they cut the corners off and then they put it in the corner and then they tie that up in a knot.
00:16:59.000And the son goes, I can sell these for 10 bucks each and that's going to be enough to buy a house, basically.
00:17:05.000And I'm not going to cut it because I don't want to mess with it.
00:17:08.000So we bought it when we were down there and it was pure, unadulterated,
00:18:09.000I heard that's the way it is in Colombia.
00:18:11.000A secretary, you know, your mom, your aunt, will just have a bag.
00:18:16.000You know, she won't have a kilo at home, but everyone will have a little bag of coke.
00:18:20.000And then I believe the story in America was they decided that the Negro is unable to handle this drug and they become erratic and violent and criminal.
00:19:37.000You would do a line and it's known to increase the desire but hurt the performance and you could do a line and the performance would be improved.
00:20:10.000And I remember I'd just be sitting there on the porch and he would run in, do a bump, do a shot and run out and go back to work.
00:20:19.000Several times a day that's just life down there is you do bumps you have a joint in your mouth you you do a shot Everyone has a buzz at all times.
00:20:29.000In fact, I remember now there was this German dude who died of a hangover He had just been herring the hair of the dogging for five years and when he finally Quit he went into shock and had a heart attack and croaked
00:20:48.000But yeah, that cocaine that year was one of the best experiences of my life, I'm afraid.
00:20:57.000So, uh, we would do that in the 90s, go down there, and I don't know how many times I'd be in San Jose, or even in Montezuma, and you'd be talking to a guy, and just like that black dude, you know, it'd get weird when it was time not to be friends anymore, like, I don't know, time to go home to bed, I'm not marrying you.
00:21:16.000And we go, alright, well, we're gonna head out, man.
00:21:18.000Talking to some guy who hadn't spoken to Americans in, you know, a month.
00:21:23.000And he hadn't spoken English in a month.
00:21:25.000And, uh, he'd go, we'll see you again soon.
00:22:12.000Jesus and you realize this guy was probably in I don't know California and he hit a black kid killed him and Then just kept driving and has lived there ever since Like one of the guys down there, I know we'll call him Jay
00:22:33.000And he looked after our house down there, which costs a fortune.
00:22:46.000I just sold all my property because I hate having extra houses.
00:22:50.000It feels audacious no matter how much money you have.
00:22:52.000There's something about and you know in Canada you grow up like this with a cottage but unless it's a shack it just feels weird to turn the lights off in a three-story house and turn the heating down and turn the water off so the pipes don't explode and then just have a home sitting there empty
00:23:18.000Now, you say, well, why don't you have the homeless stay there?
00:23:19.000Obviously, that's ridiculous, and they trash the place.
00:23:21.000Even my friends, when I let them stay there, there was major problems.
00:23:25.000But, you know, when they hear, oh, she's got a home in St.
00:23:28.000Thomas, and she has a home in Paris, and you just think, why don't you just rent a place when you want to go to Paris?
00:23:33.000Like, I was paying 200 bucks a month to this caretaker,
00:23:37.000So by the end of the year, I'm up to, what, $2,400 or whatever?
00:23:42.000That's an awesome vacation house I could have had.
00:23:45.000And I'm not including all the taxes and the bills and the headaches and, oh, the pump broke, and we gotta, you know, there's a hole in the roof, we gotta fix that.
00:24:08.000It's like someone gives you an allowance of $2 a day, and you have to buy rice and a potato or something, and you just starve to death.
00:24:14.000Like, if you use the washing machine, which was tiny and could wash one sock, if you use the washing machine that day, you couldn't use, uh, you couldn't have Christmas lights on that night, or your music had to be all batteries.
00:24:34.000Eventually we got some money and we got we got more money I should say because we had money when we bought the place and we got wiring and and city water not pumped up from the river and we bought a pool had a pool put in and of course solar couldn't even dream of handling any of that.
00:24:50.000But um yeah Jay he was a fascinating guy.
00:24:55.000I could do a whole book about this guy.
00:25:10.000And in the 80s, there was a weird thing where punk was like Satanism.
00:25:16.000And everyone was scared of their kids turning into punk rockers.
00:25:20.000And there was a scam going on, Rolling Stone, back when it was good, they wrote about this really well.
00:25:25.000There was a scam going on where your insurance would cover your kids going to a mental institution.
00:25:32.000And a lot of parents, shitty parents, realized that it was cheaper to send your kids off to institutionalize them, it was cheaper than keeping them at home.
00:25:41.000And because there was a financial incentive from these centers, because of this insurance thing,
00:25:46.000They would sort of push out this propaganda that you know your son if you catch him listening to suicidal tendencies Or wearing a black t-shirt or the dead Kennedy's you should send him away or he's gonna start worshiping Satan and kill your whole family and You know dumb people would fall for this and again sometimes parents
00:26:05.000Like, you think if you did that to a bear?
00:26:07.000If you said, we're taking away your cub, ma'am.
00:26:13.000It would hit your head off, like, t-ball.
00:26:16.000Like, it wouldn't even, it wouldn't even stop chewing whatever it was chewing.
00:26:18.000It'd just be like, no, we're not doing that, and just send your head flying through the air.
00:26:23.000But humans, no, we can be convinced to give up on our children.
00:26:27.000So anyway, it was during that era and his parents caught him listening to, I don't know, suicidal tendencies or smoking a marijuana cigarette, they caught him.
00:26:48.000He comes back and in rehab he learns about this thing called drugs that he wasn't really familiar with and there's a thing called coke and there's a thing called heroin and speed and LSD and oh it sounds fascinating and all these people at rehab would tell him about how awesome it all is.
00:27:03.000So he comes back interested in drugs at 14 and so his parents catch him with another joint and they go all right so now we have a serious drug addict on our hand.
00:27:17.000Alright, so now you've taught this kid drugs, and you've taught this kid discipline, and how to fight, and mental toughness, and organization.
00:27:26.000You just made the best drug dealer in the world!
00:27:31.000So he comes back to Chicago and he's going to college and he becomes one of the top coke dudes in the city.
00:27:41.000And his talent was, I can speak black.
00:27:45.000So I'll go to the hood, I'll go to the south side and I'll get all these guys to sell me their kilos and then they'll like it because I can go talk to the rich white kids and sell them that and set us up with dealers and stuff like that.
00:28:00.000So, he was able to speak to both cultures.
00:28:09.000And so he was a major player in the South Side with the black gangs, and he was also a major player with the bourgeoisie up in the North.
00:28:18.000And he said, you know, at the peak of it, he was living with two other dudes and there was a pile of cocaine on the kitchen table that was like a basketball, as big as a basketball.
00:28:30.000And you would just walk by, do a scoop, on your way out.
00:28:35.000I mean, this guy must have done a mountain of cocaine over the years.
00:28:39.000So, he also had all the cops paid off.
00:28:44.000And he gets a call that goes, shit's about to go down, get rid of everything.
00:29:46.000I remember in Rolling Stone there was some story about a janitor who bought his kid a grow plant, a grow light, not even knowing what it is.
00:29:54.000And he ended up, I don't know, 10 years in prison, and he's never smoked marijuana in his life.
00:29:59.000So that's the kind of hysteria we were in.
00:30:01.000It'll sound weird to millennials today, where if you got caught with a house full of pot, dealing bails of it, you'd probably get a couple years worse, especially if it was your first offense.
00:30:13.000So he goes, hmm, I can go to trial and risk ten years and the lawyer was saying it's like a one in two chance you'll get ten years or I could just leave.
00:30:24.000So he left and he became our buddy down there and ended up looking after my house and
00:30:32.000Uh, you know, we had some great talks with him.
00:30:35.000And it was really interesting because he would, I'd laugh at him all the time because he'd talk about how he's in jail.
00:30:41.000Because he doesn't have a passport, no one knows his real name, if his mother dies he can't visit her.
00:30:44.000And I'd go, oh poor baby, you're here in this tropical paradise.
00:30:48.000And he goes, dude, I know you can't understand this, but jail is jail.
00:30:53.000Of course this isn't as bad as Alcatraz.
00:30:55.000Of course I like not getting raped and stabbed.
00:30:58.000But there is something intense about not having your personal freedom.
00:31:02.000And I got arrested for headbutting a guy.
00:31:06.000In New York, and I only spent four hours in the clink.
00:31:10.000And it was, they gave me a cool clink because they liked that I beat up a dude who beat up a woman.
00:31:15.000And so I wasn't down with the animals in the cages on the bottom floor.
00:31:19.000I was up in like a Barney Miller, you know that 70s show?
00:31:26.000I was in the cell next to their desk and I could hang my hands out and hear them riff and stuff.
00:32:14.000So I, I get what he is talking about now.
00:32:17.000Um... So, what he did was he just got in the car and he drove all the way from Chicago to Montezuma.
00:32:27.000And he learned Spanish perfectly without an accent.
00:32:29.000By the way, we make the best immigrants, do we not?
00:32:33.000Like when we go to Japan or something, we're like, uh, I'm sorry to bother you, but is it... ...or... And they're like, no, means your mother's a whore.
00:34:25.000He eventually would accrue more and more money, then he built a cabin, and then he built a house, and then he became the Donald Trump of Montezuma.
00:34:32.000He owned the main restaurant and the main hotel that everyone would stay in, the fancy one.
00:34:36.000Like, eventually I started bringing my parents down and our friends, and in 1999, when we bought the house, we had a whole, we had like a hundred people come.
00:35:14.000So you would walk by his house, because it was along the beach, and you'd see it through the trees, and there'd just be two guys with machine guns.
00:35:22.000Someone still managed to rob him and oh no this was before the machine gun guys I wasn't there for this but I was told that someone tried to rob him so what he did was he wrote thief whatever that is in Spanish on a piece of paper tied it around the guy's neck and then he duct-taped him to a hand trolley to a dolly and just marched him through town and everyone screamed at him and he just humiliated the guy and had him sit there baking in the Sun like that's how you would handle stuff back then
00:35:52.000It was a lot of hippies, a lot of eco-tourism.
00:35:55.000So anyway, Jay would look after these guys.
00:35:59.000And eventually he moved up the ladder to foreman.
00:36:03.000And he would help them build stuff and build 3 million dollar homes.
00:37:02.000Like I don't, I'm not going to need anything legal done for another 15 years.
00:37:07.000And these guys won't shut up and they feel so terrible about what happened to my dad and I feel bad for them because I don't have any favors I need.
00:37:21.000He has been on the lam since 1990, I believe.
00:37:24.000He's been on the lam since the early 90s.
00:37:27.000And he doesn't know what his status is.
00:37:36.000He would ask, every time he would, you know, work on a house, he'd say to one of these millionaires, Hey, when you're back in, in Chicago or whatever, can you look up my file?
00:37:44.000And they would come back and they'd say, yeah, we looked up your file and it is bad.
00:38:18.000God, I love how people rely on the state.
00:38:22.000You know, here in the burbs, there's this thing going on with kids where boys are getting bad grades for being badly behaved.
00:38:31.000So the teachers say, you know, if you could go to a doctor, a psychiatrist, school one or whatever, and have him diagnosed with ADHD, then it's a disease, his bad behavior, his rambunctious behavior.
00:38:59.000And then they go to the doctor and the doctor says, all right, well, he's going to need Adderall or Ritalin to combat this disease that he has called being a boy.
00:39:07.000This disgusting, horrible disease where he wants to go pew pew and play cops and robbers.
00:39:12.000So we're going to kill that urge in him and try to just make him stare catatonic at the teacher like a robot, like a Pink Floyd video.
00:39:20.000And I'm not talking about some weird case.
00:39:22.000I'm talking about a general trend in America.
00:39:25.000And so the state makes you make your kid a speed addict because Adderall is methamphetamines.
00:39:44.000And your head is soaring through the air.
00:39:50.000So, she takes his case, he finally tells me his real name, and people had screwed this guy over so bad in the past.
00:39:58.000I remember he paid one dude $10,000 to provide him with a fake passport, and the guy just kept the money, spent it at restaurants, and then gave him a found passport, and said, go glue your face in that.
00:40:44.000In fact, you've been a free man for five years.
00:40:47.000And he was so fucking mad at all these rich people who had been lying to him because it's such an asset and you save so much money having an American be the go-between and to hassle them and negotiate them down.
00:41:05.000That's been, that's been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to them.
00:41:10.000So they didn't want Jay to know that he was a free man.
00:41:25.000You kept a man in a tropical jail because he was good at facilitating your luxury.
00:41:32.000So Jay went to I think it was Argentina with his wife and their kid and I don't know I think he their marriage fell apart because he was too free.
00:41:45.000You know that must have chipped away his soul knowing with his wife that he could never leave and if she was mad at him she could just take the kid at any given moment and he'd have no rights.
00:42:05.000I think he remarried and he sees his daughter, you know, across the world.
00:42:09.000This makes my stomach churn, by the way, the thought of having my daughter on the other end of the planet and seeing her for a couple months, a year.
00:43:21.000There was one weird story here, and I don't want to get sued, so I'll try to be diplomatic, but I think Juan, I think Juan Phoenix, River Phoenix's dad, I believe the way it went with them was the mom was big on, let's get these kids acting.
00:43:34.000I want them to become famous movie stars.
00:46:15.000And after a couple of whiskeys, he'd start telling me the gossip, and my hair would turn white, because that story was not unusual.
00:46:21.000There was another story when we were down there.
00:46:22.000There was this Dutch guy, and his... Everyone did coke, some people did crack.
00:46:31.000I remember this dude, Mike, he leans over to me at dinner, and he was just like, he would just do a line so he wouldn't have to eat, and he would hold his beer gut, and he goes, Gavin, man,
00:46:40.000No matter how much coke I do, I just cannot get rid of this gut.
00:48:36.000He had locked himself in his bedroom and he could hear that his wife and his son were trying to come in to kill him and he got so scared he had a heart attack and died.
00:48:48.000So that's the gossip in Montefuma, Coco Rica.
00:50:29.000Well, the food's disgusting as far as locals go, but there's like, there's these Italians who have a restaurant called Amore di Mare where they make this crazy food that would make your head pop off.
00:50:42.000But if you want to go somewhere, just save up a bunch of money and then rent a mansion and you'll still be way farther ahead than just the core costs you spent over the year.
00:51:48.000Now, I could have made that with Bitcoin in an hour and a half.
00:52:00.000But it just amazes me that people have this beautiful view of the world and the different cultures and how wonderful they are.
00:52:06.000I can only assume they haven't been there.
00:52:08.000Or they're like Joe Strummer from The Clash who grew up rich and they go, they visit Indonesia and they have a delicious meal with wonderful servants.
00:52:18.000You notice that, by the way, with diversity.
00:54:05.000Like in Costa Rica, and most of Central America, to be handicapped is to be ashamed.
00:54:10.000You should be ashamed of your handicapped kid because God clearly doesn't like you.
00:54:14.000So they just keep their handicapped kids in the basement and they don't want you to see your son with cerebral palsy because God hates you, obviously.
00:54:23.000That's primitive and disgusting and profoundly sad.
00:54:45.000So all of that crap washes back to Montezuma onto the beach.
00:54:50.000So you're walking along the beach and there's, after the main touristy area, which they maintain, but you go for a little walk and it's just nothing but flip-flops and combs and shampoo bottles.
00:57:55.000And so he's going around looking for new places they could build a preserve and he's telling the oil companies to screw off and they can't spend money there.
00:58:11.000The 80s, 70s, 80s, we had that guy on the beach.
00:58:14.000Driving a trolley through town in the in the 90s with thief written on a guy people riding horses like vigilantes One time I could talk about Montezuma for a hundred years one time Jay was on the beach And he got a the cops wanted to see his papers now his papers were all fake And he realized if I'm just like this is some dumb trespassing thing There'll be a domino effect where the next thing they know I'm a fugitive So he started fighting
01:00:03.000We've always been the most open to progress.
01:00:07.000It's always been the best place to be for freaks, for albinos, and gays, and anyone who is an oppressed minority somewhere else is always better off here.
01:00:18.000Yet, you have someone like Trevor Noah go, yeah, Colin Kaepernick has noticed how racist America is, even though he was abandoned by black people and adopted by white people.
01:00:30.000America's a horrible racist place that I just emigrated to because I got an awesome job and I left apartheid South Africa behind.
01:00:39.000Which, by the way, is no longer apartheid.
01:01:10.000It was a waste of money to buy a house there, and it was a waste of money to spend all this time, all this money and maintenance trying to maintain a home there.
01:02:05.000Stay where you are, I'll stand here strong on my land, if you stay where you are.
01:02:15.000I also had a chorus where it goes, you can come here for a holiday, but stay where you are.
01:02:23.000I've been trying to get a country singer to help me record that.
01:02:25.000I got a whole chapter, I mean a whole verse about Mexico and all these other things that you're beautiful, but you're you and I'm me and we're not, we're done mixing for a while.
01:02:35.000We're gonna stand here strong on our land, and if there's one great example that the West is the best and the rest ain't shit, it's Montefuma, Coco Rica.