This week's video the one you're watching now will be on YouTube Next week's video will be on Patreon for some of us. Danger is fun and many of the fun things we do are dangerous. Snowboarding is slightly dangerous. motorcycles are very dangerous Mexican Roads are a little dangerous So This Is A Highway in Mexico When you look on a map of Mexico and you see all the highway signs and all the highway lines, this is what they mostly look like.

This is: Highway 51 in Guanajuato Mexico So I'm going to show you how you do a pass on a highway in Mexico Okay, so I have my left blinker on I am communicating to oncoming traffic that I am going into a pass and I'm communicating to that silver car right in front of me that I'm going to pass it he has pulled over half into the breakdown Lane I am half in the other lane as I approach the oncoming traffic. If if they were closer, they would have pulled into their breakdown Lane they would have pulled halfway into their breakdown Lane Now this guy's got his hazards on I think he's communicating to me to pass. This isn't a safe place to pass Now it is a safe place to pass. Left blinker on okay person in the breakdown Lane over there that was not a safe pass for me I shouldn't have done that but I didn't see those two guys on the scooter now.

I have open road and this is the highway and yes, there are speed bumps on the highway. I Hit it too A little dangerous but fun the more experiences we have with Danger the more we learn how to mitigate it and the more we learn the limits of our control. Were you scared? I was annoyed but quite frankly at first I was annoyed. but when they got out with the guns that were half the size of my body I was like this and I did push back when he asked you to get out of the car.

that was totally inappropriate. That was a lie and I was not willing to cross. Yeah well, I was scared and I think we were so cheerful in this footage because we were in shock I think we had just escaped a life and death situation and two hours later safe and sound at breakfast in Ixtapa I looked like I had aged five years and I want to enchilada because we were just held up at gunpoint and um I need a drink. So this is what it was like getting robbed at gunpoint in Mexico Thank you better help for sponsoring this Channel and generally making my life better.

About a year ago I Called Better Help got set up with a therapist by filling out their little questionnaire and just right out of the gates. They connected me with a therapist and it was very very helpful and one of the things that I found that was special about better Help in particular is that it's a good system for finding out how to be in therapy because you can go from one therapist to another and because their questionnaire system is so thorough and easy to answer the questions aren't you know they aren't clinical or expert questions, they're just general questions about your mental health. It's quick, you don't have to pull up anywhere and hide your car and your your therapist will meet you at your comfort level whether it's text or video or you know Audio Only So if you need a therapist, check out betterhelp there's a link in the description and the URL is right here. We had just filled up with diesel and we were getting to the point in the highway where the speed limit gets up to 60 miles per hour.

A silver Mazda Cx-30 pulls up alongside of us and the passenger starts pointing to what I think is my wheels. I I'm up high so I look down. I can see down into the Mazda and I see that both the driver and the passenger have long guns in their hands and they weren't pointing to my wheels. they were pointing for me to pull over.

I Pull over, they pull in front of me, they get out. They have long guns in their hands and radios with very long antennas on their hips. They look like Hector and Mungo from the Heathcliff cartoons. a skinny mean idiot and a big doofy idiot and the skinny mean idiot Hector is talking to me in some kind of cartel slang I can't understand a word he's saying.

Now to you the viewer, it's obvious oh, this guy just wants money. but in Mexico you get pulled over all the time at checkpoints for cops. Legitimate cops that want to just check your paperwork and you don't just immediately bribe a cop. If these people were cops, you have to investigate as to are these cops.

So I said Papellis Papellis, do you need my, you know, do you want my papers and they were like no, no and so Hector kept repeating this one word over and over again and Isabel said the word in English meant napkins I'm not cooperating I'm just saying we just want to go to the beach, we just want to go to the beach And so Hector with his killer eyes tells me to get out of the car. at which point Isabel who's sitting right here very sweetly and politely says no, no, he's not getting out of the car and at that point I said quieres dinero do you want money and Hector said yeah he was like see like matter of fact of course and I'm a New Yorker and everything's negotiable including a Shakedown So I pull my wallet out. There's a thousand dollars in American bills and another 500 in Mexican pesos. I pull out a 500 peso bill, hand it to him and the whole thing ends.

500 pesos is like 25 dollars. They go back to their car, radio my license plate to somebody we pull out. I'm pretty sure they don't pull out behind us and Isabelle very bravely shot two seconds of footage of the robbers as we were leaving. car seats are not mandatory in Mexico So X was in the way back playing with his iPad missed the whole thing.

thank God and that's our Mexican robbed at gunpoint story driving down to Guerrero I fantasized about what I should or could have done I couldn't have outrun them. their car was faster than mine I couldn't have pitted them without putting the family in extreme danger I had done the exact right thing, but it annoyed me. It annoyed me because the exact right thing in that situation was to submit to the guidance of my fear, my well-trained fear. We had two weeks left of our trip and the remainder was golden.

Perfect. Yeah, you hold them on this week's Patreon only video I Stole this episode from the New Covetables by Charles Eames but the idea came from a Patreon patron. These are a few of my favorite things.