966: Patrick Winn | Wa State: When a Drug Cartel Becomes a Country

966: Patrick Winn | Seeking the Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA

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[00:00:12] Patrick Winn: These guys are very sophisticated operators. I mean, it's not easy in most scenarios. This thing flops, it's not gonna work out, but it did work out. This is a serious nation state, like you might want to take it seriously.

[00:00:31] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Russian spy, cold case, homicide investigator, real life pirate, special operator, Hollywood filmmaker, or legendary actor.

[00:01:02] And hey, if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I appreciate it when you do that. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, and cults and more.

[00:01:17] That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started, my guest today, Patrick Wynn, he's a journalist who got basically obsessed with the idea of this remote tribe in Burma slash Myanmar, which is essentially one big drug cartel.

[00:01:37] They're called the wa, and they live in the mountains on the borders of Burma, Thailand, China, et cetera. And they went from growing poppies, heroin production to methamphetamine production. And it's essentially a country within a country. They're in Burma, but they got their own legal system. They got their own army borders, they got their own power grid, their own cell phone network.

[00:01:56] The military junta over there in Burma can't really go in there and do anything 'cause it's in the mountains and it's dangerous and nobody's lied with them and they just run this country. Selling homegrown meth throughout Asia, generating billions of dollars. And so far nobody's been able to come even close to stopping them from doing this.

[00:02:15] Patrick actually traveled to Burma and to was state, which is no easy task, by the way, to get the inside scoop. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. It's really a minor miracle that this guy is still alive. And the story is fascinating, as you might imagine. So here we go with Patrick Wynn.

[00:02:34] So I read the book, man, and I was thinking, all right, this guy is going to some crazy place in the mountains. What's this all about? And then I realized not only are you going to Burma or Myanmar, you're going to this sub-state of Burma, which is essentially a narco state run by a big drug cartel. So even if you get there and something goes wrong, then you escape.

[00:02:56] You're in Burma with a military junta that maybe doesn't want you there. So I, I don't know, it just seems like a really daring. Thing to do. And I thought, okay, either this guy's got a screw loose, he's missing something, or he is fearless, or it's just not that dangerous, and it's just all kind of a big misunderstanding.

[00:03:11] But then of course after I read the book, I was like, no, there's no misunderstanding here. These people are potentially very

[00:03:16] Patrick Winn: dangerous. Well, I'm not a fearless person. I do try to get next to fearless people and get them to tell me their stories. I think very, very carefully before I take risks, is it worth it?

[00:03:28] And more importantly, am I gonna bring trouble to someone else? What propels me forward is usually an obsession with telling the story. And once I get fixated on a story, and this is one hell of a story that sort of helps me propel myself. Through any fear that I might have, but not a tough guy, as you can probably tell, just a really, really curious guy.

[00:03:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, I'll take it. I, you never know who's tough, man. That's the thing. Some people look tough. They're not that tough. Other people don't look that tough. You don't wanna mess with those people either. By the way, is it Burma or Myanmar? In fact, in your book you said, I flew to Burma, and but the guide asked you something and you hesitated before saying Myanmar or Burma in a conversation with the guide because it was politically charged either way, kind of.

[00:04:15] So what, first of all, which is it? Is it Burma? Is it Myanmar? And why is it politically charged either way. What does that mean?

[00:04:21] Patrick Winn: Yeah, it's both. Burma is the colonial name for the country. It used to be a British colony. It was after a mil military regime changed the name to Myanmar in 1989. A lot of people thought, well, we don't like this military regime.

[00:04:38] In fact, we despise this military regime. We're not gonna switch over to calling it whatever you wanna call it. The rationale from the regime was, let's get rid of the old colonial words and start fresh. But people that hate that regime, which includes the United States, includes the State Department, said, no, no, no.

[00:04:55] We're gonna continue to call it Burma. So why is it politically charged if someone is from more the milieu of freedom fighters despising the regime, which is a large part of the population, they might prefer Burma, Myanmar, however, is the official name of the country, and I go back and forth all the time.

[00:05:15] It's just, it's not set in stone.

[00:05:17] Jordan Harbinger: Huh, interesting. Because I, of course, we've heard of countries switching like, oh, we're not Rhodesia anymore. Right. It really is a different country in many ways at that point. And then you have other countries that go through revolutions like South Africa, or big changes, I should say, like South Africa.

[00:05:30] They keep the name and you have this place. Yeah. It's confusing, but I can see. Do people get offended if you use the wrong name or is it just like, oh, now I know your politics and maybe I like you a little bit less? Yeah, more the

[00:05:41] Patrick Winn: latter. I've never said Myanmar to someone and they gave me the stink eye look.

[00:05:46] I've talked to people who are actively trying to destroy the military regime. Mm-Hmm. There's a raging revolution happening there right now. And they'll use Myanmar because they grew up under the regime. They went to regime schools and that was what was beaten into their head. So it's not a massive faux pa, it's a preference.

[00:06:03] Gotcha. Okay. Tell

[00:06:04] Jordan Harbinger: me about was state because, well, I've looked at many lists of countries and never heard of was state. So this is not an official country, and yet they seem to have their own government inside of Burma. I don't understand how that's possible.

[00:06:17] Patrick Winn: Really was State is for my money, the most fascinating place in the world.

[00:06:22] You're right, if you go to the un, you're not gonna see their flag on the wall. It's not formally recognized, but it is a fully functioning nation state inside Myanmar. So the military regime of Myanmar can't just go in while state has borders. You go in and you're not invited, there's gonna be big trouble.

[00:06:42] Mm-Hmm. Once you get inside, you're gonna see it's a country, it's a nation state. It has its own highways, it has its own electricity grid, it has its own cell phone towers. It's a government with ministries of health. Finance, it runs its own school system. It's got everything that a country has. Now, do the leaders feel the need to go to the un to go to the world and say, please recognize us?

[00:07:09] No, they don't really care that much what the outside world thinks about them. They don't actually wanna play that game. They're happy to have their own autonomous state. They know it exists and they don't really care if you think it exists too. So if I'm

[00:07:26] Jordan Harbinger: online playing Call of Duty, could I be playing with a kid from was state or is it not quite as developed?

[00:07:31] And yes, I said kid because I don't know how many adults are on there and I'm not talking to people. Just to be very clear, I none of those creepy old guys on there. I'm playing, I don't care. I'm not chitchatting, but I know that people play online games and sometimes like kids pop into those things. Or is this just like a very isolated North

[00:07:47] Patrick Winn: Korea type place?

[00:07:48] You might find the sons are perhaps daughters of people who are highly connected. Mm-Hmm. In the WA government, which is run by sort of a ruling council. Okay. Literally called a poll bureau. Yes. They might have access to this. By and large, most WA people are living in villages that are pretty remote.

[00:08:08] They're farming. They previously made their money from farming the opium poppy. So in WA state, the soil is really bad. Picture a topography. That's like the Rockies, right? Like peak slopes. Peak slopes. It's not a wide open place where you could plant a lot of rice. It's tough to grow crops there, but in that soil, it's very bitter and alkaline.

[00:08:30] It's actually perfect for growing the opium poppy. Mm-Hmm? Opium, poppies like chili weather. They like bitter soil and they produced massive amounts of this. This is what really, like geography steered the WA people towards the drug trade wasn't necessarily a conscious choice. Hmm. So yet back in the day, they've since switched to methamphetamine, which we can get into.

[00:08:52] But back in the day until say around the nineties, they were producing a lot of the opium that was synthesized into heroin. That was nicknamed China White. It's actually from WA state that was making its way into the us. So for my generation, I was born in 1981. Mm-Hmm. I was in middle school during like the grunge era and people were talking about heroin chic and the models were kind of weighty and right.

[00:09:17] People were OD-ing on heroin. So a lot of that stuff would have been coming from the WA territory and that's what really caught the attention of the DEA. So, no, that's a lot. It is. Do you

[00:09:29] Jordan Harbinger: know what percentage of American heroin came from was state

[00:09:33] Patrick Winn: or any? Any guess? I don't have to guess too much. It's somewhere like 50, 60%.

[00:09:38] Oh wow. At its peak was coming from Myanmar. There was a rival heroin producer there, but the WA had the most plentiful and potent opium poppy. I mean just like, maybe it's a crap analogy, but the way that grapes grow in wine country and France. So poppies just grow beautifully in WA state. And the great thing about the opium poppy is when you collect all the opium, just this big.

[00:10:03] Clump of brown molasses, opium, and you wrap it up in canvas or even put it in a clay pot, it does dry out and become more potent and refine itself. Sort of like wine in a cask. So you can transport it really, really far if you need to. It's very handy if you're in a really isolated, landlocked, mountainous area.

[00:10:27] 'cause you know, it's not like you're gonna grow, uh, tomatoes and onions, bananas. Yeah. And ship it to Yeah. And ship it to people in the cities, though it would be rotten by the time it got there. So that, again, that really pushed them towards the drug trade.

[00:10:38] Jordan Harbinger: Right. We need a crop that grows in this garbage soil and doesn't rot slash gets better over time.

[00:10:44] And a small amount yields a high amount of money. And it doesn't matter how legal it is 'cause we make the laws like you're just asking for drug trade

[00:10:52] Patrick Winn: under those circumstances. Yeah. And I would just add that like 99.9% of Americans have never heard of the wa No. Even though our government has had a profound effect on their civilization, that's about a, a million of them total.

[00:11:07] They live in the mountains where Burma and China meet. And in in WA state, I know most people have not heard of them, but in Southeast Asia, they're one of the most denigrated and vilified. People you can think of. Oh, really? So if you say, I'm w to someone in a city like Bangkok where I'm at right now.

[00:11:27] Mm-Hmm. You might hear a response, oh, what are you, are you a drug runner? And the other thing you might hear is, oh, did you? Or your parents cut people's heads off. That's the other big reputational thing about the WA until about the sixties, they did live in these isolated fortresslike villages that were home to WA warriors, and they did cut off their enemies heads and put them on sticks.

[00:11:53] And as I say in the book, it's easy to to start denigrating from there. Right? Mm-Hmm. But as I say in the book, French revolutionaries also severed heads. And Samurai did, and Scottish clans did. And they all had a reason. I mean, it wasn't just, they'd been called savages. No, no, no, no, no. It's more complicated than that.

[00:12:11] A human skull on a stick is an excellent way to communicate. No trespassing. Stay out of my territory. Yeah. And the shock value helped keep them free. So yeah. So that's the rep drug running and headhunting, although they haven't been head severed in Wall State from what I could tell, since the sixties, maybe the early seventies.

[00:12:32] Jordan Harbinger: Why did they stop doing that suddenly? It just seems like a weird departure. If you said they stopped a couple hundred years ago, I'd be like, well, okay. They joined civilization the sixties, it's a little late to stop cutting off heads and putting 'em on sticks instead of writing a sign that says no trespassing, it's a little

[00:12:45] Patrick Winn: bit late in the game.

[00:12:46] Yeah. Modernity had not come to them. Right. So in the sixties they were still living as their great-Great grandparents did. They got organized. So the problem was they weren't just cutting off intruders heads, they were cutting off rival clans heads. I see. They were cutting each other's heads off some important figures rose up within was society and said, we've gotta get United because.

[00:13:10] The WA territory is right next to China, and China went fully communist in 1949. Mm-Hmm. There was a very legitimate threat of communist coming in and taking over their territory. So they had to get united to repel that. It was very difficult to do Right. Also, the CIA became interested in them. Shocker.

[00:13:33] You have a indigenous people with a warrior reputation, right On the back step of communist China, the largest communist country on earth. The CIA came in, I found this, this insane, I found this then secret memo from 1953 that the C ccia a wrote that said, you know what the wa really want is to be ruled by white men.

[00:13:53] Oh, yeah.

[00:13:53] Jordan Harbinger: That always works out. Well, I'm sure they do. Can't wait.

[00:13:56] Patrick Winn: They didn't as you, as you might imagine, right. Narrate. They didn't want that. They did not at all. They did not record scratch. Nope. But they did become of great interest to the Ccia A and the CIA did. Used their territory as a launching pad for raids into communist China.

[00:14:13] So they set up what they call listening stations, listening posts in wa territory that could soak up Chinese radio chatter from the People's Liberation army. They could listen to what the Chinese were saying to each other. They recruited some pretty badass wild warlords to go in there, steal documents, tap phone lines and things like that.

[00:14:36] They did this with the help of, uh, Taiwan Taiwan's military intelligence, which was a junior partner of the CIA and also highly opposed to communist China. Right. That's really how the US Empire became interested in the wa. And just to put a pin on that, like today, WA state. The nation state slash narco state that it is, is very much a target of the CCIA A and a target of the DA.

[00:15:01] But back then they thought they could use these opium harvesting indigenous warriors for American purposes. Yeah, that,

[00:15:09] Jordan Harbinger: that is quite fascinating. I, I would imagine that's very useful, right? You have these mountain raiders that the communists can't necessarily get to easily and it's like, Hey, what if we just give these guys a bunch of guns and they go in and mess things up and harass the PLA and keep them from spreading, but also maybe do a little bit of our dirty work and all they want is a couple hundred bucks or like some modern technology that we can get for next to nothing.

[00:15:32] It seems like a pretty big deal. Deal. M

[00:15:33] Patrick Winn: sixteens. Yeah, literally M sixteens. How big is, was state?

[00:15:37] Jordan Harbinger: If it's a million people, what sort of population Density. It doesn't sound like a lot if there's a lot of farming and a lot of

[00:15:42] Patrick Winn: mountains. Yeah, it's pretty spread out. In WA state now there's about 600,000 people.

[00:15:48] A big chunk of their, their original territory, their sort of ancient homeland did get swallowed up by communist China. So that took a big piece of their population away. Mm-Hmm. WA state now is about 600,000 people. Dude, it's big. I mean, I know it's not on Google Maps, but its territory is big. It's as big as Belgium.

[00:16:08] If you just look at the actual soil of the Netherlands and not its aquatic holdings, it's as big as the Netherlands. Hmm. It's vast, vast place. I mean, it's not easy to run a nation state that's that large. Right. It's expensive. In fact. So unlike, I know, people's idea of drug traffickers comes from Mexican cartels.

[00:16:29] Right. Mexican cartels principally are financial engines. They're trying to make money, they're trying to make profit. The financial engine of was state is narcotics. They do other stuff, but primarily make their money from narcotics. A lot of that goes into upholding and defending their homeland. I'm not trying to make them sound super noble or anything, but just as a matter of fact, mm-Hmm.

[00:16:53] They need a lot of money to not get swallowed up. So they have an a nationalist agenda, not just a profit seeking motive.

[00:17:01] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. So it's hard to say, right? It's, it's a, whereas drug cartels in Mexico are business operations pretty much solely, this is almost more like they kind of have the reverse proportions, right?

[00:17:12] It almost seems like a nationalist thing and it's like, well the only way we're gonna be able to fund this thing is through drug trade. And then that became, but it's hard to say who's pulling the strings now, because once you get a taste of that sweet drug money, it's probably really hard to

[00:17:22] Patrick Winn: let it go.

[00:17:23] It's as much of what my book is about. Yeah. There was a clash within was state that got really hot in the nineties where you had one leader trying to pull it in the opposite direction saying, Hey, let's actually make friends with America and wind down the drug trade. That's what's gonna be better for our survival.

[00:17:42] There was their trafficker in chief, A drug Lord wanted to make it into an even more powerful narco state. And so when the DEA says, oh, that's just a criminal syndicate, they're just this like jungle mafia. No, there's, this has been this internal clash as what they wanna be. And I got most of that story from one of the top three leaders of former leaders of WA state who was himself A DEA informant.

[00:18:10] So it's quite a story. Yeah, the book goes into

[00:18:12] Jordan Harbinger: a lot of detail on that. How armed are these guys? 'cause it sounds like the ccia A armed them, but I assume at some point we kind of wound that down. And look, small arms are powerful if you're harassing jungle patrols on the border of China in the 1950s and sixties.

[00:18:28] But if you wanna really protect yourself, you need more than that. So I, how armed are they and where do they get

[00:18:34] Patrick Winn: the weapons? And just to be clear, the ccia A has not been entangled with. propping up any WA people since the Cold War, since they founded their nation state, they've more or less been targets of of the CIA MM-Hmm.

[00:18:46] But as far as their arms go, good. They get weapons funneled to them from the People's Liberation Army. Beijing will deny this, but when you look at the stockpile of W Weapons, which they show off in parades, you're gonna see anti-aircraft weapons. You're gonna see heavy artillery, armed personnel carriers, high-end automatic rifles, mortars, armed drones even.

[00:19:10] It's a pretty sophisticated military. So you may ask yourself, why would China support a heavily armed Yeah. Narco state, right ons. It almost sounds like a cons. Yeah, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. It theory, right? It does. Yeah, it does. It's not everybody can go to Google and you can look up wall leaders who are indicted by the DA, some of the D's most wanted people in Asia.

[00:19:34] Doing photo ops with diplomats appointed by Xi Jinping. So very much real. China has a different strategy than the US does. So the US on the, on the American Mexican border, primary mission is to go in and bust up cartels and lock up drug lords. I mean, that's its ultimate goal when you do that. You create these power vacuums and smaller cartels, rush in to fight it out.

[00:20:01] Mm-Hmm. And you have these, all this bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of people killed in Mexico over these feuds. Not blaming all of that on the United States, but we play a role in keeping that going. Sure. China has a different strategy. So it looks at the big, bad cartel, for lack of a better word, on its border.

[00:20:20] And it says. Wouldn't it be better if we could control them? Mm-Hmm. Wouldn't it be better if we had one big leviathan, one big whale that we could have a say in what they do? That they were indebted to us? 'cause they get their weapons from us. Mm-Hmm. What's the alternative? To have power vacuums and a bunch of smaller piranhas just chewing each other to bits, massive amounts of bloodshed on the Chinese border.

[00:20:44] They don't want that. So they play a different game. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the US take up that model because I don't see it. A nationalist nation building project No. In Mexico. So it's a different circumstance. But the problem is, Jordan, the DEA, just applies the same model to the wa.

[00:21:02] Right. Their a trafficking syndicate must destroy them, must, you know, wipe out their executive branch, their leadership. And therein lies the problem.

[00:21:11] Jordan Harbinger: By the way, to be clear, I'm sure when you say you don't see a nation state building force in Mexico, you mean from the drug cartels, right? Because the Mexican government and people who live in Mexico are certainly trying to build a functioning democracy for all its faults.

[00:21:24] Right. You just mean the drug cartels are not nationalists, they don't care about Mexico, which I agree with that.

[00:21:29] Patrick Winn: Of course. I don't see an indigenous movement in Sinaloa trying to, you know, break free and create a new state of Sinaloa that is, you know, a shining beacon for the Sloan people or something like that.

[00:21:40] No, the Mexico as a nation state, it's, it's built, it's already there. If the analogy doesn't work, and that's fine. Latin America and Southeast Asia are two very different places, but our policy is informed by Latin America principally, and then it gets applied to Southeast Asia and it doesn't quite work.

[00:22:00] And this is why the DEA has been very unsuccessful in, um, taking down

[00:22:05] Jordan Harbinger: the w I'm guessing if they get their weapons from the Chinese, they can say, oh, and by the way, we don't wanna see any of the meth you guys produce in China. Are they able to do that? Or is it just kind of like, well, it's still drugs and hard to control.

[00:22:18] Patrick Winn: Yeah. I never landed like a document that said we, the wa people will not send any mess into China. Right. The man I mentioned earlier, this principal source of mine was a top WA leader and a DEA asset. He told me yes. In fact, it's understood. It's an unwritten policy of the wa We're not gonna let any. Meth or any drugs seep into China.

[00:22:43] And that means that this works out to Beijing's benefit as well, right? Drugs gotta go somewhere, so they pour into Thailand. And from Thailand there are ports where drugs can be shipped all across the world. And just to be clear, the WA are not the principle masterminds of the Asian drug trade writ large.

[00:23:07] Primarily it's a place to produce drugs. And then you have these namely ethnic Chinese international trafficking syndicates who move it around the region and around the world. Why don't the WA do that? Well, one thing, they're primarily focused on their territory, their nation. Also being an international drug trafficking syndicate is a very complex, sophisticated, logistical operation.

[00:23:34] It requires people who speak your same language in multiple cities around the world. The Y are pretty focused on themselves. They just don't have that network. Yeah, it makes

[00:23:45] Jordan Harbinger: perfect sense that Chinese merchants or just an international merchant class, I mean, they could just as easily be Brits, right?

[00:23:51] Doing this kind of thing. They're well suited to it, and if you have crime syndicates like Chinese triads or whatever, those guys are all over the world. Every major city pretty much has them, and they go way, way back. A lot of ties, a lot of real estate, a lot of logistical infrastructure for everything from human trafficking, so why not drug trafficking, especially in their own backyard, Southeast Asia.

[00:24:13] So that, yeah, it's quite fascinating that this is kind of how it works. Why state sounds a little bit like. I mean, maybe that's not quite right. Cutting off of the head seemed a little anarchic, but they stopped that. Surely they have rules and laws. Do they have police? They must have things like police and judges, or is it a little less formal than that?

[00:24:33] Patrick Winn: Police pretty sleek highways, yes. Their own law. It's sort of tempting to say it's a lawless place. Mm-Hmm. And law enforcement will tend to call it that. No, not exactly. I mean, look, it's not Denmark and I'm not saying it's a nice place to live. I think in a more ideal world, the profits from the drug trade more that would be shared with the general populace.

[00:24:58] So just like say Saudi Arabia is a petro state and it uses petroleum to finance. You know of things for its people. Wall State could do a better job of being a narco state that spreads the narco wealth into why couldn't you have a better school system? Why couldn't you have better hospitals? It doesn't have much of a safety net there.

[00:25:22] So not enough of it is shared. But I mean, shocker, I mean, I don't think anyone will be too astonished to hear that, but as a nation state, yes, it is pretty highly functioning. Anarchic is not a way that I would describe it at all.

[00:25:39] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Patrick Wynn.

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[00:27:53] This course is all about improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you, much like Patrick did, to track across Burma and get into was state. Anyway, this course will help you in all of those ways, but in a super non cringey down to earth way.

[00:28:07] It's not gonna be awkward, it's not gonna be cheesy, just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer in a few minutes a day. It's all it takes, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So, hey, come on in.

[00:28:20] You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Patrick Wynn. Earlier, and I'm reading the book, and it's like, if you wander outside your village, someone pounces and cuts your head off and then puts it on a spike and fertilizes their garden with it, with your magical spirit that comes outta your brain or whatever, they, this certainly sounds more like a, what's the right word?

[00:28:43] Is it more like an oligarchy where just rich drug lords have the power? And are we talking about a lot of corruption and it seems like the, at least the wealth gap is quite large. But what did you feel, I mean, you went there and we'll talk about that in a second, but you went there. Does it feel safe or does it feel chaotic?

[00:29:01] Patrick Winn: This will blow people's minds. It's probably the most stable place inside the country right now. Inside of Burma? Yeah. Yeah. Inside of Burma and Myanmar, it's, uh, they're undergoing a raging revolution. Some call it a civil war. Mm-Hmm. Law state, because its autonomous stands apart from that. And there are no battles there.

[00:29:21] There is no war there. We don't have a perfect. Vision or insight into everything happening there. So I'm not saying it's free of violence, it's far from Utopian. I would never say anything like that, but it's stable. And this has been a people who have been isolated in part by choice for quite a long time.

[00:29:43] That's becoming less and less true. So the Chinese version of TikTok is called? Yeah, I don't speak Chinese. Yeah, it's okay. So you see like WA soldiers, I'm sorry, men and women posting like dreamy montages on TikTok and trying to look cute. And doing like TikTok style dances. That's funny. Or just like hanging out and drinking beer.

[00:30:11] It really pierces this idea that they're this dark people locked away. It's like, no, they're not seeking the outside world's attention, but hey, they're on, they're on social media break dancing and doing all sorts of stuff. I mean, that's gotta be kind of

[00:30:26] Jordan Harbinger: interesting to be surfing, doin. And then you see like a, I don't know, a wa narco thirst trap post.

[00:30:34] Just like, what's going on here? What's up with the beret? Oh, I see. Oh, what's with the kilo of meth or, or whatever behind this woman in the photo. Oh, I see. She's flexing. Like it's just kind of a funny mental image.

[00:30:47] Patrick Winn: The was State, army United was State Army has a lot of female soldiers a lot. And so you see them on there just as much as the guys really.

[00:30:55] It really, yeah. When you think of narco picture, like a narco, a narco warrior or whatever. Few people are gonna imagine a small Asian woman. Yeah. That's not the first thing that pops into your mind. Right. And to be honest, Jordan, like the 30,000 troops in the United Wall State Army primarily are not involved in the narco trafficking trade specifically.

[00:31:19] It's really kind of this division. So you have the army, which is there to uphold the state, and I mean, because everyone's scared of them. They don't have anyone to fight. So a lot of times you see them like gardening or patching up or potholes on the road and things like that. Then you have separately a ministry of finance that orchestrates the drug trafficking.

[00:31:42] And these days, I mean, they used to produce it all in-house, but these days we've kind of gotten more sophisticated. Often they'll invite an outside, usually Chinese criminal syndicate onto their territory. I. And say, so this would be a good place to build a meth lab. It's next to a stream. Meth labs need a lot of water.

[00:32:01] You guys build it, you go find the chemists. We may play a role in helping source the chemicals. 'cause the chemicals to make meth come from the same general Chinese pharmaceutical chemical industry that produces the chemicals that are made into fentanyl and sold to Americans. It's a whole other story.

[00:32:18] Yeah. But we'll play a, a limited role in this. Why don't you guys do all the hard work and we'll just collect rent? We'll just tax the operation. Wow. This is a smarter, more corporate way to be involved in, in the drug trade. You don't have to do it all yourself. Right. So they're

[00:32:33] Jordan Harbinger: basically then acting as like the administrators of a special economic zone.

[00:32:37] Instead of trying to be state run industries with little education and, and resources. Like bring in the pros. Bring in the pros, let 'em run here. We run security. They pay us taxes slash rent and we're good. You're right. That is pretty. Uh, it seems like a better. Division of labor and it's also it, it probably keeps things a little bit more calm at home too.

[00:32:58] Just the political kind of, and it ties them further with China. I mean this is all kind of good things that for them that come from that. How big is the drug trade then with WAS state, do we have a dollar figure at all?

[00:33:11] Patrick Winn: Uh, sort of, so the UN will say that the Asian meth trade, this is the largest meth trade in the world.

[00:33:17] The overall economy is about $60 billion. So just to put that into perspective, like most countries, GDPs aren't $60 billion. There are countries in Southeast Asia that have smaller economies than that, but that's looking at the Asian meth trade from top to bottom. That is counting the value of the trucks that carry the meth and the street dealers in Australia who might be selling meth produced in was state somewhere in Sydney.

[00:33:47] That's a giant number. I've had people ask me like, oh, so was State has a GDP of $60 billion? No. I don't know what the GDP of was state is. I'm not sure that the leaders know either. That's really hard to put a dollar amount on. I would imagine it's in the billions, but it's not quite that large. A lot of the money is really flushing into the syndicates that move it across borders.

[00:34:13] Mm-Hmm. So the Y might have a role moving it into Thailand, but then from there it goes to one of Thailand's ports and it goes, it could go all the way to Japan or Taiwan or Australia. Every time a kilo of meth or heroin or anything jumps a border, it jumps up in value. Sure. And so I think it's actually those international syndicates that are soaking up the really big profits.

[00:34:40] Yeah, that,

[00:34:40] Jordan Harbinger: that does make a lot of sense. Do you think that the drug trade in was state is bigger than the GDP of Burma? Or is that a ridiculous

[00:34:49] Patrick Winn: idea? I don't trust the GDP figure for Burma from Yanmar. Uh, it's somewhere in the 50 billion range.

[00:34:56] Jordan Harbinger: It says 65. But if they're self-reporting,

[00:34:59] Patrick Winn: eh, okay. Yeah. Who, who knows.

[00:35:01] I mean, I don't trust that at all. There's so many things that are sold illegally in Burma from gyms to timber. There's human trafficking, there's an arms trade. It's just highly unstable figure. So, no, I mean, I wouldn't imagine that it's bigger. The GDP for Wasted is bigger than Myanmar, just 'cause Myanmar is a much bigger country.

[00:35:20] Obviously was state sort of nests inside of it. Mm-Hmm. But I'll put it this way, Jordan, they're bringing in a lot of money. Mm-Hmm. They're primarily producing crystal meth, which is like the stuff you see on Breaking Bad. Yeah. But they have a different type of meth that. Was pioneered by WA State's premier Drug Lords name is Wei Shang.

[00:35:41] This is a little pink pill called Yaba, and it's got about 20% meth in it. The rest is caffeine and other fillers. It smells like Oreos, like the vanilla cream filling of Oreos. Wow. And they, they scent it.

[00:35:57] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, they scent it. It's not just a coincidence. That's probably a good idea. 'cause it probably smells disgusting if you don't do that.

[00:36:03] Patrick Winn: I've been in the room where large bags of this have been cut open and it smells like you're in like a candy store or something. And this stuff, I tried to compare it to something that Westerners would understand, like Big Max, right? Mm-Hmm. So the best data I could find on Big Max was that somewhere in the neighborhood of like half a billion or sold a year, it could be more than that, but according, again, to the un, two to 6 billion of these pink meth pills are being produced every year.

[00:36:33] Not entirely in was state, but a lot of them are. I mean, they also sell for about $2. I've been away from the US a long time. I don't know how much Big Macs are going for. Yeah, I don't. Okay. We're in similar price point, just a massive, massive, massive, massively popular product here in Asia. And you take meth, especially a pill that only has 20% meth, you might perform better at your job if you're doing really repetitive labor.

[00:37:01] So if I'm cutting up pineapples that are gonna be sold in Walmart somewhere, or I'm stitching up sneakers that are gonna be sold, you know, in the mall somewhere, I'm doing something over and over and over and over. And if you're on meth, that repetition becomes kind of pleasurable. So it actually has a, a role to play in the economy?

[00:37:20] No, no one's doing fentanyl here in Southeast Asia. Even heroin is. Not very popular anymore. It's all about meth. It's

[00:37:28] really

[00:37:28] Jordan Harbinger: shocking that it outsells this Yaba outsells Starbucks or McDonald's in these places. Do they stamp a logo on the pills like they do with ecstasy in Europe, in the United States or so I've

[00:37:40] Patrick Winn: heard.

[00:37:40] Oh yeah, they do. Every meth pill or many meth pills are stamped with the letters WYI have been asked many, many times, and I've tried to find the answer as to why those two letters are the like logo. I mean, it's as recognizable to Asian drug users as the Nike Swoosh, as I say in my book. Wow. Wow. I don't know exactly what the W is all about, but I do know this originally in, say, the middle of the last century, amphetamine tablets were sold here and they were sold by Burroughs.

[00:38:17] Welcome, a huge pharmaceutical company. Those pills had, I believe a unicorn stamped on them. And so Thai people called them Yama. Ya means medicine and ma means horse. At some point, when the DEA came and created a huge base of operations in Thailand, those things became illegal. Nobody sold them anymore except on the black market.

[00:38:41] So you had all these guys making up what they called horse pills, amphetamine pills in back alleys and things like that. It was really the WA who seized the initiative to produce those at scale. And then they became called yaba. BA means crazy, so crazy meds or insanity pills. So that's a quick potted history of the yaba meth pills that are super popular.

[00:39:05] Yes, they are branded. One other thing it's interesting about branding, when they produce crystal methamphetamine, you can't stamp a logo on a crystalline shard of meth. So they put them in right. Tea pouches. They're shiny foil pouches that say this certain brand of tea, well, that brand of tea doesn't exist.

[00:39:27] It's just a way to show traffickers down the chain. This was produced in a solid facility. This is gonna be upwards of 95% pure when you see this T brand. You know, it's good stuff. Wow. That's

[00:39:43] Jordan Harbinger: quite interesting. The idea that they have like brand loyalty branding, almost like a marketing department kind of thing here with the stamping and the wrapping.

[00:39:52] It's really, I mean, that's partly a real business and you can just see how far they've come, so to speak with this stuff. Back in the day they were making a third of global opium or something like that, right On brand for Cold War CIA times. Opium becomes heroin trade, heroin smuggled through Thailand to Bangkok, sold to Chinese gangsters, makes its way, I think, to Vietnam right into the veins of the American troops there.

[00:40:14] And then why the switch to meth? Is it just easier to transport and make or what? What is heroin less popular now? I don't

[00:40:20] Patrick Winn: even really know. I'll give credit to the principle track flicker in chief of was state is again, his name is Wei Shong. I give him credit as a visionary here. He went all synthetic before any of the Mexican cartels did.

[00:40:36] He saw the writing on the wall. When you have to rely on a crop like Coka or the opium poppy, it kind of sucks. I mean, you have to rely on this army of peasant laborers to produce it. Oh, what if there's a big cold snap and the crop turns out to be not so great? And oh my God, you have to control a lot of land that can't be growing food on that land.

[00:41:00] It's kind of a pain. So. He realized and he convinced the WA government to go along with this, to wholesale shift to methamphetamine for two reasons. One, it was understood that methamphetamine could be a more popular drug in Southeast Asia as heroin was sort of phasing out. And two, if you're primarily producing methamphetamine, which is what the Southeast Asian market wants, you can sell it within Asia at this point.

[00:41:30] They did this in the late nineties, early two thousands. So at that point, Southeast Asia had a vibrant enough working class they could afford drugs Back in the day. Vietnam era. Vietnam War era, you wanna sell narcotics at scale. You have to sell to Americans. I mean, we are the most ravenous consumers of narcotics in the world.

[00:41:51] We still are. And only Americans. And Europeans and others. Mm-Hmm. But only more developed countries could afford to just gobble up a lot of drugs. If you're taking your heroin into the fields and valleys of Southeast Asia, you're gonna find a lot of people who grow rice, don't have much money, probably don't even handle that much money.

[00:42:13] These are not very good consumers of drugs. They can't afford it. Right. That's why it was such a godsend when the United States sent so many gis into Vietnam. Mm-Hmm. You had these young American guys who had a stipend from the military and you had a base. They were also very traumatized 'cause they were in a war and they could afford heroin.

[00:42:34] So after you got used to selling it to them, then you think, all right, well we gotta sell it to them when they come, go back home as well. And it wasn't until the early two thousands when Southeast Asia was rich enough to. Buy its own drugs and methamphetamine is what they want. You focus on them. And by not selling heroin to the United States anymore, it helps the DEA stay off your back.

[00:42:59] I mean, the DEA is still gonna come after you, but they can't justify a massive, expensive, paramilitary style war against your territory.

[00:43:08] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned earlier the division, wall state, some people wanted drugs and money. Other people, I guess thought, Hey, we're never gonna develop further if we can't get assistance and join the legitimate world.

[00:43:19] So does that division still exist? I know you mentioned there's Christian groups in Wall State, so I assume missionaries got in there at some point if there were Christians and, but, or, or they kind of have, they kind of squashed that and now they're all rolling in the same direction.

[00:43:32] Patrick Winn: Yeah, I should probably back up and explain how I would even know about this because like Jordan, for the past 10 years, I've been trying to like peer into the inner circle of law leadership.

[00:43:44] Most of these guys are indicted by the DEA Mm-Hmm. So it is kind of like trying to get an interview with El Chapo or something like that. It's an mission impossible. It was about five years ago when I was becoming friendly with a WA guy in Myanmar, in a city close to WA State town. And he knew I was trying to interview the leadership and he, he had met them, he was pretty high up in the United, was state army.

[00:44:11] And he said, okay, I'm ready to introduce you to my father-in-Law. You wanna interview a leader? Let's go meet my father-in-Law. So who the hell is your father-in-Law? Yeah. It's like, all right, we'll see. So we walk up the street to this compound with security cameras on all the awnings, big cement compound, and were let inside.

[00:44:32] I go through the gates. We're sitting in this very sort of austere living room, and I look around and I see two things that are really interesting. One is a portrait of Mr. Father-in-law, in a WA uniform in his younger days looking very debonair. I say, oh, this guy was, was really high up. I, I mean, I'm, I'm used to seeing, like you, you think of WA leaders or DEA indicted guys.

[00:44:58] You think of mugshots, right? Right. But this guy was, you know, the other thing I noticed on the other wall is a portrait of Jesus with like blonde Jesus. Blonde Jesus, or blind Jesus. I dunno if he could see, but he was definitely blonde. Okay. That is,

[00:45:13] Jordan Harbinger: I guess, an interesting choice.

[00:45:16] Patrick Winn: Okay. So I said, okay, this guy is Christian, which is unusual for AAH leader.

[00:45:20] Yeah. Because most of them are not just anti-American, but anti-Western in general. So. In walks a former top three leader of was state. And at this point he is in his seventies. He flops down, he asks who I am. I tell him, look, I'm American. I also said I was a journalist. I figure this is the part where I get thrown out.

[00:45:45] Yeah, you're lucky. All right. You know, what do you wanna know? And it's like a figure from the Old Testament. He's, he looks you right in the eyes. 'cause he's like dark, compelling eyes. He has this, um, kind of sandpapery voice. He's just a very severe person. He had been a top DEA asset. And as I went and continued to visit with him and visit with him, he eventually revealed this to me.

[00:46:11] He said that he was one of the most important informants for the DEA in Southeast Asia ever. So I had to check that out. I asked him for the names of his DEA handlers, tracked a few of them down. They said, oh yeah, that guy's legit. We called him Superstar. That was his code name. So look, being a journalist, mm-Hmm.

[00:46:32] I have to check out everyone's story. So I go back to this man, his name is Sa Lu, and I say, SA Lu, just try to check everything out here. What was your code name? And he goes, oh yeah, superstar. So this is the guy who is trying to take was state in a different direction. This is the guy who, because he was, his family was Christianized by missionaries.

[00:46:53] He believes in America and he believes America is this great Christian nation that can like save his people from the darkness, which is in his mind drugs. So he worked with the DEA to team up, like the DEA, teaming up with the drug cartel to have them wind down their operation in exchange for American aid.

[00:47:12] So he was the principal driver of this movement to unite the law with the Americans, which is pretty extraordinary.

[00:47:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That must have been, I mean, that was kind of your. 10 years to a lucky break situation from the sound of it. Wow.

[00:47:25] Patrick Winn: It felt like a lucky break, but when you're obsessed with something for 10 years Sure.

[00:47:29] And you keep beating your head against the wall, I guess eventually the door opens. Yeah. That's kind of how

[00:47:32] Jordan Harbinger: a lot of this stuff works. Eh? It must have still been so hard to get into was state. I How did you end up getting into the territory? Because when you met this guy, this was in what, Rangoon or something like that?

[00:47:44] In Burma, or was he living in, was state when you met him?

[00:47:47] Patrick Winn: If so, how did you get there? Yeah. He, he was living in a Burmese town called cio, which is about 50 miles from, WAS state. Okay. When you're a top level leader and also a DEA informant that has a way of bringing you into conflict with the, the wa, other WA leaders and he, at that point he had been driven out.

[00:48:08] So yeah, I did not meet him in in WA state. So how did

[00:48:11] Jordan Harbinger: you get into WA state? I assume you didn't get smuggled in because you're still alive and your head is not rotting on a spike. And I don't care if they don't do that

[00:48:18] Patrick Winn: anymore. Um, no. Um, my head is firmly attached, maybe not firmly, but I had been asking to go to their capital and to interview their current leaders, DEA indicted leaders for a long time.

[00:48:35] Once I forged this relationship with SA Lou, this former leader who at that point was on the outs with them, I became a known quantity to the WA government. And that certainly hurt my chances of going to the capitol and sitting in the boardroom with one of the leaders, which, hey, maybe that never would've happened Anyway, also, covid happened and the was state went into lockdown, so I had to get creative.

[00:49:02] What I did is I went to the perimeter of was state, which also touches Northern Thailand. If anyone's ever been backpacking in Thailand, if you were to keep going north and north and north. You would go into Myanmar, that's what it will say on Google Maps. But if you go over at the right part, you're actually going into was state.

[00:49:25] So I went across the border into the fringes of, WAS state into a village that was still in the process of being dominated by the United was state army. And so from this village, I mean you could see wa fortresses up on the hill looking down on it. At that point the was state government was dictating terms to this village, which was not ethnically wa it was most of the people there were from a, a different indigenous group, but they were being swallowed up by WA state, which is still expanding as best it can today.

[00:50:00] Oh wow.

[00:50:00] Jordan Harbinger: So there is, it kind of colonizing other

[00:50:02] Patrick Winn: parts of Burma? Yeah, actually it's territory just expanded, uh, two weeks ago. It is still actively expanding. It has other revolutionary militias around its territory that do its. Spitting, or maybe that's putting it too strong, but it funds them, it gives them weapons, it supports them.

[00:50:22] It's, it's a growing nation state. I mean, it's a young country. It's only existed for 35 years, and it would like to expand as best it can. So yeah, I, if anybody has listened to this and thought that I was describing W State as this great noble enterprise, I think it's a legitimate enterprise to want their own nation state.

[00:50:42] But they've done ethnic cleansing. Mm-Hmm. I mean, a lot of nations in their founding stages engage in ethnic cleansing. And the WA government has done that too. So when I was in this village, you know, with the WA fortress looming, looming above us, I had villagers telling me pretty horrific stories about people being hurt and maimed and driven outta their homes.

[00:51:06] And, you know, trying to farm rice. Very recently and having WA officers come down and be like, Nope, you can't do that. Kind of starving them out. Mm-hmm. So it was the other side of the coin. Yeah. Yeah. Yikes. So who is the

[00:51:19] Jordan Harbinger: leader of WA state now? Or is it sort of a group? You have a council of people or do they have a president, a dictator?

[00:51:26] How does it

[00:51:26] Patrick Winn: work? I said they're highly organized. They're not quite organized enough to have a dictator like it. It ain't North Korea, you know? Right. They don't, it's not an Orwellian state or anything like that. Yeah. They do have a, a leader, his name is Bao Ba. This was a man who, according to my research, had actually participated in some headhunting when he was a young man, possibly a teenager.

[00:51:48] But you can hear that and think, oh my God, what a psycho, or something like that. Nah, that's not how it is. I mean, these guys to maintain a rogue nation state with the CIA bearing down on you and the Chinese Communist Party bearing down on you and others. Junta and Burma, that'd be pretty smart, right? The Junta and Burma, he's kept them out too, so you can't write this guy off as a simpleton.

[00:52:15] I think the ruling council, the ruling poll bureau of was state, are playing a political game that is far more sophisticated than any played by anyone in US Congress. I think if you went into US Congress and grabbed someone from either party and had them play like 40 chess at the level that the war are playing, they wouldn't last two weeks.

[00:52:37] These guys are very sophisticated operators. I mean, it's not easy in most scenarios. If we were to look into the multiverse in most scenarios, this thing flops, right? They're an indigenous people. Mm-hmm. There's only half a million to a million of them. They are hated by their neighbors. It's not gonna work out, but it did work out, and that's kind of the.

[00:53:02] What I wanna put across in my book, like this is a serious nation state. Like you might want to take it seriously.

[00:53:13] Jordan Harbinger: This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Patrick Wynn. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Progressive. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. So while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, maybe doing a little grocery shopping.

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[00:56:42] Now, for the rest of my conversation with Patrick Wynn is the leader that you mentioned. Is he also the chief drug trafficker or is he kind of more civilian administrator of the

[00:56:54] Patrick Winn: territory? He's the strong man. Okay. Yeah. A lot of wa people don't like this, but it's sometimes said about them that in WA state you have the muscle and the brains.

[00:57:05] So the muscle is bow. He's the guy who runs the army. He's the guy who runs really the the nation. Then you have we, he's the financial mastermind. He happens to be half Chinese and speaks Chinese fluently. So he's more able to plug into the international narcotics trade. So Wei would be the real figurehead for running the drug operation.

[00:57:31] Wei Shong again, I think he is the most successful drug Lord perhaps ever, because after all he's not caught. But this is a guy who, I mean, if you were to look at, he dresses like, he's like the manager of a radio shack or something. He doesn't wear a bunch of gold rings. He doesn't wear a bunch of jade. He doesn't have a big harem.

[00:57:52] He's a germaphobe. I think he could fairly diagnose him with uh, OCD. He's really smart though, and he's incredible at his job. He loves to make money. I don't even think he likes to spend it. He just loves to generate profit. So he's not a leader of men. There's very few photos of him in existence. He doesn't wanna be anyone's great leader.

[00:58:17] He doesn't want everyone's adoration, so he's handling the financial side, but you gotta have a face on things, and that's bow. So muscle and the brains, how do they launder and transfer

[00:58:28] Jordan Harbinger: money? Right? Because if they're dealing in essentially a cash business, but with Chinese gangsters, what good is the money if they hike it up a mountain?

[00:58:36] How do they handle the logistics

[00:58:38] Patrick Winn: here? Do you know? Yeah, I do know a little bit about that. And the DEA has targeted their shell companies as well. Sure. Yeah. While leaders have quite a number of shell companies, they at one point were big stakeholders in an airline in Burma. Everything from banks to casinos.

[00:58:56] Back in the day they were producing CDs. I mean, or they had a stake in like just this very promiscuous portfolio of things. Yeah. From cement factories to chemical factories to making CDs to, um, loan sharking. So they spread it all around. There is sort of a wa ink out there that controls a lot of money.

[00:59:19] Again, my argument is that I wish that they would, if you're gonna make money from the drug trade, I wish that you would build more schools and hospitals with that, but that's just my personal critique. Yeah,

[00:59:28] Jordan Harbinger: I, I get it. I mean, that's kind of the problem, right? Is, is once you get a taste of that, you're like, why should I share this with other people when I could buy a villain in France and nobody can do anything about it?

[00:59:36] I mean, that's, that's the problem with crime and not having rule of law in many ways. By the way is this area where King's Roman Casino is. Uh, I, we did a show about cyber slavery in that area and also wildlife trafficking, which episode 5 45. And the guest on that show, Rachel knew where she went undercover and went to King's Roman Casino.

[00:59:57] And I wanna say it was on the border of Thailand and Burma or something like that. But I'm not sure. Is this the same kind of lawless

[01:00:04] Patrick Winn: area? King's Roman Casino is also under sanctions from the US government, in part because the US alleges that it's been sort of a way station for methamphetamine flowing out of was state to the international market.

[01:00:21] So yeah, it's in the constellation of, of this underworld. I've spent some time there myself. Fascinating place. I mean, if you want to buy methamphetamine or ketamine in King's, Roman, I. Very easy and no one's gonna give you any trouble for it. Hey, look, if you go out here on the streets of Bangkok and smoke meth in public, you'll probably get arrested.

[01:00:43] It Kings Roman. It's just highly available and yeah, it's kind of plugged into that general underworld for sure.

[01:00:50] Jordan Harbinger: What is that casino like? I, the only kind of casinos I've been into are in Vegas, essentially, or like a small, tiny one in some European city, or like Monte Carlo. I'm imagining these are a little bit like a Motel six to the Ritz Carlton in comparing a King's Romans casino to, I don't know, Caesar's Palace, maybe.

[01:01:11] It seems like it's a pretty gnarly place. Wildlife trafficking, underage prostitution, meth trade. Human slavery, eh, you know, seedy doesn't quite

[01:01:22] Patrick Winn: do it. I like gambling myself and, uh, I, nothing is more fun than like a hot craps table. No. In this casino it's all Bacara, uh, which I find an extremely boring game.

[01:01:33] But the King's Roman complex in general is catering to mainland Chinese visitors primarily. So Bacara is their game of choice. It's what they like in general. Like a Chinese casino is less wild weekend with the boys and a little more like, I'm gonna sit here and smoke cigarettes and drink milk tea and focus on my Bacarra game.

[01:01:57] It's a different gambling culture. Yeah. The casino in general is just a weird place. I mean, you walk up to it and there are these giant statues of, I think they're like Roman gods or something like that, or they're supposed to be, it's hard to tell these Corinthian pillars. I mean, it looks like a jersey mob boss is having a psychotic fever dream and this is what like got spat out.

[01:02:21] It's an odd place.

[01:02:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Stopping the smuggling of this stuff. It's gotta be very difficult. Right, because the WA seems super loyal to one another. You mentioned in the book they often hang themselves in the jail cell if they get captured and they almost never talk. That is something like straight out of a, a movie like a ninja movie like or a who kills themselves when they get caught.

[01:02:40] It's like something KGB spies did in the Cold War.

[01:02:43] Patrick Winn: It's crazy. Yeah. That was a story told to me by a Thai anti-narcotics agent who when this yaba, these meth pills started really flooding into Thailand, they had orders to catch wa people and flip them. So a team of like, let's say usually they would travel with 10 guys and eight of them have on big heavy backpacks full of meth.

[01:03:06] And there's one guy in the front of the column and one guy in the back with automatic rifles, and they would come across the border into Thailand and drop it off and zip it back across the border. So what the Thai military was trying to do is catch one of these WA guys and flip them and turn them into cis confidential informants and send them back into the WA drug trafficking operation to snitch.

[01:03:30] Mm-Hmm. Massive failure. Massive failure. They wouldn't talk according to what this soldier told me, wouldn't talk at all. He was massively frustrated. So he would put them in a cement cell and at one point, as he told me, they figured out if they left a length of rope in there, that a lot of the people they caught would kill themselves rather than facing the judicial system.

[01:03:54] And this guy was so bitter about it. I think he was perfectly happy with that outcome. But there's all types. Just like in any culture, there's all types of people. And I've met some of the most sensitive, loving, caring WA people you could ever imagine. So giving, so trusting. But when you do hear stories like that, it makes you think there is another side, this like warrior ethos.

[01:04:13] Mm-hmm. That also still exists in the culture. What's the capital

[01:04:17] Jordan Harbinger: city of WA state. And what is that place like in the book you kind of talk about it briefly. You say it has everything Rangoon has, but what does that mean? That's kinda like saying, oh, this place is everything Pyong Yang has in North Korea.

[01:04:27] It's like, well, okay, so no electricity half the time and nothing works.

[01:04:31] Patrick Winn: What is it really like there? Most people would look at it and it would remind them of a like a second or third tier Chinese city. So it's up in the mountains, it's right on the border with China to facilitate trade coming over very easily.

[01:04:44] Paved streets. They have got some casinos, a lot of like administrative buildings, you know, all around it is very pastoral, but the city itself, somewhere between a town and a city and streetlights police. You're picturing like a hideout with skulls on the walls. It's certainly not that. And from my understanding, the electricity is 24 hours a day.

[01:05:09] Hey, they got a bowling alley. If you were to go to the capital of, of Myanmar, Yangon or Rangoon, they call it, it's gonna be a much more tense environment. Especially because the, the revolution, the Civil War is underway. Power does go out a lot. There's a lot of poverty. I'm not saying that the WA capital is, uh, paradise by any means, but compared to the reputation, it's surprisingly developed.

[01:05:35] I know Chinese people

[01:05:36] Jordan Harbinger: call WA State Shanghai Jung, which means like knockoff China. And it's actually a really clever play on words, right? Because it also means mountain fortress China. 'cause sanja means mountain fortress, but it also means, somehow, it also means knockoff like counterfeit goods. And I was pretty damn proud of my Mandarin that I understood that play on words when you wrote about it.

[01:05:56] But I assume that they don't like being called that.

[01:05:59] Patrick Winn: No they don't. Yeah. It's kind of like the Chinese, like slur on was state would be like pictures, like a Rolex watch that says like Rolex. Mm-Hmm. And it's got like one letter off like, oh haha. It's like a bootleg imitation of China. No, no. Why? People hate that.

[01:06:15] And right now there's a new crop of leaders coming up who are in their, most of them in their forties and fifties, and they have a decision to make. So are they gonna continue being more or less a client state of China? Because let's face it, the whole experiment with allying with the US didn't work out.

[01:06:35] Mm-Hmm. Thanks to the CIA. So they've got to have a strong relationship with China. There's no way around it. But could they push back more? Are they in a position where they could say, if, if Beijing makes a request that they don't want to honor, could they say, nah, next. And at the moment they. Do their best to kinda ride that wave.

[01:06:57] Mm-hmm. To make sure Beijing is happy and to maintain their autonomy. I mean, I don't think, I have to remind people that if you're an indigenous minority on the borderlands of China, like Tibetan or Uyghur, you will come under heavy suppression from the Chinese state. The WA have faced that threat as well.

[01:07:18] This is one reason why even though they're buddy buddy with China, 'cause they have to be, it's one reason they need their own nation state. So they're not totally swallowed by China. It's a really difficult equilibrium to maintain. So where are we now then

[01:07:31] Jordan Harbinger: the West now with the W Are we trying to stop 'em from selling drugs?

[01:07:34] Have we given up on trying to stop them from selling drugs? Are we helping them somehow do something, develop et cetera? Or are we just kinda like, well can't get in there hands off.

[01:07:44] Patrick Winn: More the latter. So, I mean, I talk to many DEA agents, former DEA agents for this book. As well as a lot of wa figures as well.

[01:07:54] Lots of anti-narcotics folks. I, I got the story from them, but when I went to the DEA headquarters and just asked for some participation in this, they seemed happy to talk about Mexican cartels. Right? Mm-Hmm. Uh, they kind of brushed me off and, all right, look, they have no obligation to talk to me. Right.

[01:08:12] But I'm pretty sure the reason is because they don't have a positive story to tell here. The strategy of the DEA is to build up some figure that you've never heard of, some drug trafficker into a big monster, and then they go slay him or lock him up. Right? And there have been some efforts to make sort of a villain character out of WA figures, namely this drug trafficker away Shang.

[01:08:39] But you have to slay him or lock him up to reap the rewards, and they just can't. I mean, I. The only way that they could stop him is by invading, and they're just not going to do that. So I think it's a bit of an embarrassment for the DEA and it's another indictment of the drug war in general. I will just add that, you know, I'm, I'm pretty critical of the drug war in the book.

[01:09:04] However, I did meet some DEA agents along the way who I respected greatly, who I found to be, you know, moral driven people. And so I don't want people to think this is a bash the US government book either. I'm just trying to tell reality as it is. Mm-Hmm.

[01:09:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Are they shifting at all the WA to maybe some cyber crime now?

[01:09:27] 'cause I heard again at King's Roman Casino, like extortion scams, crypto scams, online gambling, or is that mostly the Chinese gangsters

[01:09:34] Patrick Winn: running that stuff recently? The W have hosted some of that stuff. As it turns out, this is a red line for Beijing. This is something that China did come in and say, you're not doing this.

[01:09:46] Because a lot of it, I mean we hear about it targeting people all over the world, but originally these scam compounds, they were scamming Chinese people. Right. It's a lot easier because they speak the same language. Right. While people tend to speak Chinese and ruining people's lives left and right. And so Beijing stepped in and said, no, no, no.

[01:10:07] They actually even put out arrest warrants for some like mid-tier WA leaders. And as I understand it, so far, the WA government is participating in bringing justice to these guys. So this is one area where I think the WA will will lay off. It's not worth it. You don't want Beijing to be pissed off at you?

[01:10:29] No. Yeah. Interesting

[01:10:30] Jordan Harbinger: that they're able to. Enforce their will out there. Well, it seems like the WA are not going anywhere. I wonder, is the Junta in Burma trying to take them out at all, or are they just kind of like, yep, there's another country inside our country can't do anything about that.

[01:10:43] Patrick Winn: Good luck.

[01:10:43] They, they know better. They know better. Like the W Government is the most stable government in Myanmar. It's one of the most like peaceful places in Myanmar. Why the Junta can't go in there? I mean, I don't think they could defeat the war. For one thing, you're talking about heavy mountain biting. That's something that Highlanders are better at than low landers, which is where most of the Burmese troops are gonna come from.

[01:11:08] Right now the regime is getting its ass kicked by much smaller players. So to take on the w, forget about it. Yeah. And then you have, they have to wonder about what happens when, if they wage war on the W and China steps in and says, these guys are our, our little buddies, our protectorate, hands off. China is supplying a lot of the weaponry to Myanmar's regime.

[01:11:33] Even though the regime is really on the outs with China. China's getting increasingly fed up with them as they crumble, but I dunno, I'm almost willing to predict that was state will outlast the Myanmar government as it currently exists, I think was state will be there in a hundred years. I'm not so sure about Myanmar's regime.

[01:11:51] Check in with me next year. I'm not sure they'll still be there. Sure,

[01:11:54] Jordan Harbinger: sure. Interesting. What about other groups or other cleans? 'cause whenever there's this much money involved, you just, you make enemies of people who just wanna steal your business and steal your market shares or is There's just nobody in a position to do so with the law.

[01:12:06] Patrick Winn: There's other smaller sort of crime families with their own territories all throughout Myanmar's Mountains. They also invite international Chinese criminal syndicates to come and run meth labs on their turf. They just don't have as much turf. The WA seem to understand that it's all about geography. You want to control territory.

[01:12:28] If you could control the territory that is adjacent to the international market, which in this case is Thailand, you're king. Like I said before, you can just invite outsiders to come in, run the meth labs and charge 20%. So yeah, the smaller operators, they don't have the weapons to take on the law, but they also just don't have the turf.

[01:12:50] And if you wanna maintain that much turf long term, you do need kind of a nationalist ideal. I mean, how many people wanna fight and die and serve some crime boss? Well, not many. How many people are willing to uphold and serve a nation that is protecting their indigenous homeland? I think quite a lot. And so the WA have every advantage in that category.

[01:13:16] Jordan Harbinger: Well, it sounds like you're a pretty adventurous person, man. I'm wondering what the next project is for you now that you've. Cracked wild state. Are you going deeper into that or are you gonna pick something else?

[01:13:24] Patrick Winn: I think I'm gonna breathe for a while. Mm. This one really took it out of me, man. Like five years of really grinding before that.

[01:13:33] 10 years of like nipping around at the edges. Honestly, dude, like I think there's a bigger story to tell that maybe I can't access. I think somebody who speaks Chinese, which is the lingua franca of the drug trade in Asia and who can blend in better, they might have better luck getting another side to the story or getting deeper than I did.

[01:13:58] But you gotta come to this region, you gotta stick around. I've been here 16 years, uh, reporting on crime for 10 of those years. Like I'm around. In Spanish. There's this word, I don't speak Spanish, but as I understand there's word narco patista. Yeah. Which means like nar narco journalist. Yeah. And I would like some more narco patista here.

[01:14:19] Hey, come blow the roof off this thing. Do a better job than I did. Even, I mean, I hope this sparks greater interest in this world and, and a more nuanced take on it. Uh, not this good versus evil drug war stuff.

[01:14:33] Jordan Harbinger: Well, thanks for coming on the show, man. It's really an interesting look at something that most of us have never even heard of and won't hear about anywhere else for that matter.

[01:14:41] So thanks for indulging us

[01:14:42] Patrick Winn: here. Great question, Jordan. Thanks so much.

[01:14:47] Jordan Harbinger: If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. There was a meeting

[01:14:54] Patrick Winn: where people can come and see how North Korea is the propaganda way I.

[01:14:58] It was like three hours praising Kyil ung by what he did for the country. When people ask me how is it to go to North Korea, well, it's quite difficult to describe because it's like your whole body is on overtime. You know you are being followed and what do I say and what do I do? How do I react to things?

[01:15:20] I'm going to the US to meet up with a CI agent. I was like, wow. And I find out how that agent thinks. One of the most important thing he taught me was to be a perfect mole or undercover agent, is that you have to be 95% yourself and then 5% mold. The last 5% is the one who observe. And I was really good to networking with people without people actually know.

[01:15:46] I was networking with them. Everything was recorded, so I just literally took the pants down on a whole regime exposing their women's program. It's a never

[01:15:56] Jordan Harbinger: ending story. For more on Hal Ulrich The Mole, A Danish chef and family man wound up working undercover in North Korea to expose its illicit arms trade.

[01:16:05] Check out episode 5 2 7 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Patrick Wynn will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com, or ask the AI chatbot also on the website transcripts in the show notes as well. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

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