Billy Corben details his documentary evolution from the 2000 Florida recount to Cocaine Cowboys, funded independently after investors rejected its hypothesis that the narco economy built modern Miami. He contrasts this with the financial illiteracy plaguing athletes like Antonio Brown and critiques the two-party system as a "WWE match" that obscures truth, arguing for marijuana legalization in Florida despite Republican control. Ultimately, the discussion links sudden wealth, failed prohibition, and extreme partisanship to a society where personas blur reality, urging citizens to demand objective facts over political storylines. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Florida Man Documentary Origins00:02:06
Billy, thanks you for doing this, man.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
And the 305.
Your hair looks great, by the way.
Live from the.
Yes, I am the Lost BG.
The Lost BG.
Yeah.
Got this.
I was watching the BG's documentary on HBO, I guess a couple months ago.
And I was like, shit, I'm turning into Barry Gibb, like slowly but surely over the course of this.
So, what's work been like during this past year?
You know, so last year we did a documentary for HBO called 537 Votes for the 20th anniversary of the Florida recount in the 2000 Bush v. Gore election, which turned into quite the farce, especially down here in Miami Dade.
It's a presidential election that came down to 537 votes in the state of Florida for people too young to remember, but it was crazy.
It was like classic Florida fuckery.
It was really.
Almost the dawn of the Florida man like shtick or genre of news, you know, we're just like anything that can go wrong does go wrong in Florida.
And many times it has like national and international implications.
You know, it was after that that they just, you know, a year later that, you know, the 9 11 terrorists were like took flight training and were chilling in Florida.
And then, you know, it was like every single story seemed to have a Florida connection after that.
And people started, you know, it seemed like Jon Stewart sort of invented the.
You know, the Florida man concept, but we wanted to do this doc, and so um, we started shooting it fortunately in 2019.
I say fortunately, of course, because the zombie apocalypse you know started in what now a year ago.
Um, and so we had luckily our last day of our last interview that we had to shoot, our last like official day of production, I you not was Thursday, March 12th, 2020.
And if you remember, Friday the 13th was like that was the The day shit like shut down last year.
Far From Ideal Production00:02:20
And so we just got it in like under the wire.
And then we basically finished the entirety of this documentary like this, like the way you and I are talking right now, which is far from ideal.
But I had an editor in Alabama, a story producer in LA, motion graphics and animation in Detroit, a sound mixer in New York, a composer elsewhere in Miami.
And I was never in the same room with any of these people.
Uh, ever, uh, and we managed to get it done and premiere it in October, so it was again far from ideal, but you know, gets the Zoom gets the job done, I guess.
Does it really get the job done though?
Like, are you really is it the same?
Because, in my experience, it's not well, of course, it's not the same.
Like, you know, again, I mean, the experience obviously is not the same, but the end product, the end result, listen, I'll never know.
Meaning that, like, I finished the doc and it's there, you go to HBO Max, you could watch it, and I guess you, you tell me, can you tell it was.
That we did it like this with a bookshelf behind me and a red curtain behind you.
Like it's again, listen, it sucked.
There's no question that it sucked.
There's no question I would have much rather have been in the room, not to mention, you know, well, you know, this is a collaborative process.
And so the more minds you can get on something and the more eyes you can get on something, the better it becomes.
And so, you know, I have two producing partners, Alfred Spellman and David Sipkin, who I've known.
I mean, collectively, my entire life.
Dave, I've known since preschool, and Alfred, I've known since TV production class in middle school, and so down here in Miami.
And so, like, that's a brain trust right there, you know?
So, like, and we don't, despite growing up together, we do not agree on, well, almost anything, let alone everything.
And so when we're in the office together, you know, it's a creatively invigorating environment.
And so I'm with you in that not being there in the office and being able to kind of yell ideas, you know, across the room to each other, I think definitely was, it certainly didn't make for a better product.
If it diminished the product, I'm not, like I said, I'm not sure.
Miami Hustles and Lies00:15:38
I'll never fully.
I'll never know how much better it could have been.
I'll put it to you that way.
Right.
What's the name?
How do you pronounce the name of your production company?
It's a raconteur.
Raconteur.
Yeah, we spell it phonetically R A K O N T U R, but it's a French word spelled R A C O N T E U R.
And that means one who tells stories with skill.
Ooh, I like that.
So I wanted to ask you, I mean, to kick this thing off, which would be the perfect way to do it, I wanted to ask you about, I want to dive into the Cocaine Cowboys thing.
So, what inspired you to do that?
How did that whole thing start?
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Short answer is growing up in Miami.
I mean, you know, I grew up in a predominantly Jewish, like middle working class neighborhood, you know, single family homes.
We rode our bikes to elementary school and middle school, pretty basic kind of neighborhood.
And throughout the 1970s into the 1980s, which is really when I start to become conscious, I was born in 1978 in Fort Myers, and we moved down to North Miami Beach, a city, incidentally, with beach in its name and no beach in its city limits.
That's the story of Florida real estate.
It's all hustles and lies that came true.
The we uh, so I've lived in a native Floridian and a lifelong Miami.
And but you grow up in even a neighborhood as kind of basic as the one that I grew up in, and you noticed throughout the 80s, every other house had a new toy.
These are working people, but there was a Porsche in a driveway, they added you know, they added an extension or a second story to the house.
Everybody had a nice watch.
None of these people were in the drug business per se, but everybody benefited from it in some way.
It was such an economic boom.
That it didn't matter what business you were in.
You were a jeweler, you were in real estate, you were a car, you know, you sold cars, you sold wine.
I mean, like you name a sector in Miami, and it was, I'll put it this way Miami in the 1980s, the drug boom is the only successful real world example of Reagan's trickle down economics at work.
It's the only time that that actually worked, that the glut of cash coming into the narco economy trickled down.
To nearly everyone, I'll tell you a funny story.
The woman who cuts my hair, she's been in that racket a while.
And she, when Cocaine Cowboys came out, she goes, Billy, I have to tell you this hilarious story.
She said, Back in the 80s, you know, when you're leaving after your haircut, you know, give her a kiss on the cheek, you put a tip in her pocket, right?
You slide the tip in her pocket.
So she would go home and she'd turn her pockets inside out, right?
And empty all, you know, the folded bills and everything.
And one day she found a little baggie with white powder in it.
That one of her clients had slipped in her pocket as a tip.
She says, I was so young and naive at the time.
She said to a friend, She goes, What the hell is this?
And her friend said, It's worth more than gold, that it's weight in gold.
She goes, That's the best tip you could have gotten all day.
And there's just everybody has a story like that who was in Miami in any light, whether you're a cop, a lawyer, or you were cutting people's hair.
Everybody had a funny or bizarre or unfortunately violent or tragic intersection with the drug trade.
And so we kind of wanted to.
Look back and give some perspective on our childhoods growing up.
Because we didn't know as kids, we didn't know about the drugs, but like I was aware of the money.
Like people had money and I was wondering what the root of that was.
And it really was the narco economy.
So, how did you and your buddies decide, like, hey, we're going to go do this?
We're just going to, did you guys just go buy a bunch of cameras and start filming?
Or did you guys like take the traditional route and try to raise money and do it that way?
I thought you were saying, did you guys just go out and buy a bunch of cocaine?
What did you do?
Listen, the more I do these drug documentaries, the more I think I'm in the wrong line of work.
We had just done a documentary called Raw Deal, A Question of Consent that had premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001.
At the time, we were the youngest filmmakers in the history of Sundance and the only ones from Miami at that time.
We did 60 interviews in about five or six days with press from all over the world.
It was a pretty high profile documentary.
And it was our first that we just decided on a lark to go up to Gainesville, the University of Florida, and do.
Just took off, took a leave of absence from the University of Miami, and went up there to cover the story of an exotic dancer who had claimed she had been sexually assaulted by some fraternity men at the Delta Chi house at the UF campus in Gainesville.
And so, We get to Sundance and everybody's asking us the last question of every interview was the same.
Everybody asks, like, now that you've made it, right?
You've made a big splash at Sundance.
Are you guys going to move to New York or LA?
What are you going to do?
And so, as obvious as it was to them that we would move to New York or LA, it was just as obvious to us that we were going to go back home to Miami.
You know, first, that's why they call it home.
It's where you go and you're done with other shit, you know?
And then, second, we always had it in the back of our minds that maybe instead of being three more schmucks peddling our wares in New York or LA, like everybody does, that maybe we could kind of follow a path of like a Kevin Smith in New Jersey, M. Night Shyamalan in Philly, you know, Rick Linkladder, you know, Robert Rodriguez in Austin.
I mean, you name any of the figures, Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese in New York, filmmakers that you associate, John Waters in Baltimore, you know, or Barry Levinson in Baltimore.
Filmmakers you associate with their geography and where they're from, because that gives you an identity.
It gives you a brand, right?
You're the Miami guys, the Miami filmmakers.
So we kind of wanted to do that.
Now, Raw Deal was a Florida true crime story, which was definitely our genre, but we wanted a Miami, you know, we thought that Miami, Florida generally and Miami specifically, and you know this, is just a borderline untapped resource of incredible characters and stories.
And it's a never ending well.
If you're done telling all the incredible past stories, which is impossible, there's plenty more in the present and the future to come.
So we wanted to do that.
We wanted to tap that resource as nonfiction filmmakers and tell Florida fuckery is our genre.
And that's what we wanted our genre to be.
That was our vision and that was our gamble.
And so we were looking for a calling card production, right?
Like what's going to.
And we came up with this idea of City Made of Snow was the working title.
City Made of Snow was about the cocaine boom in Miami and the hypothesis that the drug trade and the revenue generated from it is really what built the modern city of Miami and county of Miami Dade.
And so we basically went to some friends.
We did angel investors originally out of the gate.
You know, we needed just enough money to do the interviews with the people we had started to forge relationships with who were John Roberts, who was a cocaine wholesaler at the time, Mickey Monday, who was a cocaine smuggler and trafficker.
At the time, Jorge Rivia Ayala, who was a hitman for Griselda Blanco, La Madrina, the godmother, who was in prison in the state of Florida, some of the police officers and attorneys.
So we just needed to afford to cash flow those interviews.
And we did exactly what you said.
We bought cameras and just started shooting.
And then we put together a sizzle reel, which didn't really have a term, it was more just a trailer.
I don't know that we called them sizzles back then, but we cut it together and then went out for.
The finishing funds, which we, which was a struggle.
But I should say this because I kind of left this out and you'll appreciate this.
After Sundance, you know, we could get meetings with everybody.
You know, we could pitch everybody.
People knew who we were and knew our company.
And so we pitched Cocaine Cowboys to everybody that we could, or City Made of Snow, I should say, before we changed the title.
And I got to tell you, nobody understood it.
Nobody thought there was any that was that interesting.
There was any room in the marketplace.
They said shit like, um, Yeah, haven't we already seen this in Blow or Scarface or Miami Vice?
And we're like, yeah, yeah, but this is the documentary.
Like, you have to remember, this is like 15, almost 20 years ago now.
So, the documentary business is not what it is now.
It was not what it is now.
You know, like, it's not the ubiquity, you know, outside of reality TV and reality competition series, there was not every channel had docs on.
You had like premium, you know, nonfiction, true crime.
That only has happened.
That renaissance has only occurred really in the, you know, Post Cocaine Cowboys in the last 20 years.
So it was just a tough sell.
And as it turned out, an impossible sell.
So we realized that we were going to have to, you know, get an angel and buy the equipment and just do it, do it indie.
But I would say limitations breed creativity.
And along the way, one of the things we realized was we needed a name change, a title change, because maybe City Made of Snow was just not, maybe that was a good title for a book, but it wasn't maybe sexy enough for a movie.
And when we started working on it, we really, the aesthetic was going to be a cocaine aesthetic.
I'll put it that way.
I had conversations with everybody, with the DP, with the editor.
Eventually, of course, we got the ultimate cocaine aesthetic composer in Jan Hammer, who did four years of Miami Vice scores.
And we just like, I wanted to fade to, I wanted to use a dolly in the interviews, which was pretty unprecedented at the time.
I can't say with absolute confidence that we were the first to do it.
I can say that after we did it, everybody started moving the cameras during interviews.
And I wanted to fade to white instead of black.
I wanted to, I wanted the cuts like the average feature film has about 1,500 cuts over its runtime.
Cocaine Cowboys has approximately 5,000.
You know, I wanted that synth drenched Miami Vice score.
So, like I said, we worked with Jan Hammer.
It was just like this was the whole, you know, I wanted to shoot with as many cameras as we could afford so we could have that, you know, that coverage and be able to maintain that pacing.
Yeah, we just, and then we went out and shot little reenactments or little recreations of shots that we shot on every format VHS, Super 8, 16 millimeter, 35.
We just like, We just, you know, it was like a very Oliver Stone esque kind of a mixed media found footage sort of a collage.
Yeah.
How much money?
What was the budget to create that?
Do you remember what it cost to make that movie?
I don't in the end because, like, we, you know, we made, we raised money kind of as we needed to on the go, you know, on the fly.
So that's an Alfred.
Alfred, the way we divide up the responsibilities in the company is I handle the creative, Alfred handles the business, and Dave lives in post production because, you know, most of the life of a documentary.
Is post production.
You can shoot for 10, 20, 30, 40 days, but the second you start rolling, post production begins.
So, post production can be a year or two years or longer on a documentary.
So, Dave oversees all of that because we have multiple projects going at the same time.
And who the hell can keep track of all these hard drives?
And that's the scariest shit for me is that we started, I mean, I was shooting on Super 8 film in film school at UM, and then we transitioned into Media 100s and Avid's.
Um, and then eventually Final Cut Pro, and and and and um, we it was everything was was was um, you know, tactile.
It was like it was physical film, it was physical tapes, right?
We're like, here, here's the thing, this is my movie right here, you know, it's on this tape, or usually dozens of tapes.
But the point is, is that when we went to like cards and hard drives, man, to this day, it makes me a little nauseous because like the fact that your footage like doesn't exist, it's all just zeros and ones on a thing that could just.
I mean, melt on the table or just break down.
Like, it's scary because, like, you work your ass off on this stuff and it never really, there's no kind of physical manifestation of it at any point.
It's all just, you know, and that really came into full view last year when it never really existed.
It was always just us kind of communicating like this.
And then hard drives we'd ship and then we'd wipe.
And it's, I don't know, it's fucking, I don't know, it's scary to me that this content doesn't exist anywhere physically.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Where did you go to film school?
Miami?
Well, I didn't go to film school per se.
They had a film department.
In Miami, okay.
Which is a pretty significant difference.
I mean, you look at FSU's film school, and it's outstanding.
It's like a conservatory, it's a real school.
It's not just a department within another school.
Film was just a department within the School of Communication at the University of Miami.
So I triple majored at UM in political science, screenwriting, because you had to pick a track.
Was it production, business, or screenwriting?
So I chose screenwriting because I will tell you the best.
Directing class I ever took, the best editing class I ever took, the best cinematography class I ever took were my screenwriting courses.
Breaking Horror Genre Rules00:04:17
Because the second you learn the parameters of storytelling and learn the rules so that you can hopefully break them someday and invent your own, that all happened for me in screenwriting.
And then I sort of self taught a lot of the other stuff, including editing, because, again, as soon as you understand, The format and the tricks of the trade and the rules of storytelling, you know, you're on your way.
That's interesting.
I mean, that's amazing.
It's rare, I feel like, to find people that went through traditional college that have found success on your level in their field.
The only other guy I know, or one of the few other people I know, that have gone through that route and got their degree in the film world is my friend Rob, who graduated from UCF in Orlando.
Yeah.
He went to the film school there and he'd made a.
The Blair Witch Project, the first one.
And that was like a crazy hit, made a ton of money.
And, you know, he was, that was, I think, his first project right out of film school.
Well, I'll tell you the truth.
We became successful when we took a leave of absence from school.
I mean, let me be perfectly honest.
I, you know, so it wasn't so much what we learned in school as it was, Our entrepreneurial and independence spirit, as certainly I'd have to think the case with Rob.
I mean, they broke every single rule on the Blair Witch Project like, every single rule.
You cannot name a rule or something that they would teach you in film school that they did not break with the Blair Witch Project.
There was nothing traditional about that, whether it's the story structure, the format, the performance, you name it.
It completely, it was the, you know, I had an interesting class at UM about film genres, and they taught us the cycle of a film genre.
And at the end of it is like satire or parody, and then reinvention.
And what was interesting about that is the example that I needed to write a paper, I think, and the example I used was the horror genre.
And the way that Wes Craven, who kind of helped invent the, At that time, the modern horror film genre came back and killed it with Scream.
Like, he's like, I'm going to make fun of all of the conventions.
We're going to parody it.
We're going to, you know, satire.
And, like, you know, the way the movie Airplane killed the disaster movie genre of the 70s, which were ubiquitous.
But then Airplane put a stake in its heart.
And Scream kind of did, it kind of said, yeah, it became its own franchise, but it did it by ruining the, not ruining, you know what I mean?
Burning it down, basically, you know, saying like, These are the conventions.
We're going to call ourselves out, virtually break down the fourth wall here.
And then what happened?
It's over.
You can't go and just make another one of those teeny bopper slasher films after Scream because we all know it's a joke.
We know the conventions.
So, Blair Witch says, We're going to reinvent the whole fucking thing.
And that's what they did.
They revived that genre.
And what happened?
The found footage genre became a thing of paranormal activity.
But then it started to come back again into the more traditional, stylized horror movies, which had basically been killed.
The cycle begins again.
And it's funny, that's what we did.
We talk about our movie Screwball.
That's what I wanted to do with the sports documentary genre.
I wanted to do what Wes Craven did.
You know, with our, I wanted to like kill it dead, you know, like, um, cause it kind of peaked with OJ, right?
I mean, you know, Made in America is like a masterpiece.
And it's kind of like, how do you keep making 30 for 30s after that?
That's the mic drop.
I mean, it's the first documentary to become an EGOT.
I don't know how it won a Tony, but it won a fucking, I don't know, like it's, it just won everything.
So it's like, we wanted to kind of put a stake in the, in the heart of the sports, the traditional sports doc, so we could start it all over again, you know?
You did a ton of 30 for 30s, right?
Killing the Sports Doc Genre00:15:09
A ton.
We did the U, the U part two broke, and then we did a 30 for 30 short called Collision Course, the murder of Don Aronow, the speedboat guy who was murdered down here in Miami back in the 80s.
So, what's that, three and a half?
We made like three and a half.
That's a ton.
I'd qualify that as a ton.
Nice.
Are you working on something with the WWE now?
Well, we did.
We produced one of these AE. Biographies that are premiering.
I think they're premiering like soon, right?
Yeah, like in the next couple of weeks or so.
We did the one on the ultimate Florida man, Macho Man Randy Savage, which by the way, that could have been his name.
Florida Man Randy Savage would have been a name.
He's not from down here, but he very much became the consummate Florida man.
And so we produced, executive produced the Randy Savage, I don't know how they're branding it, but like AE, WWE.
Biography, kind of a 30 for 30 of WWE superstars.
Did you?
His, the tree, his memorial of the tree he wrecked into and when he died is like five minutes down the road from where I am right now.
Oh, no shit.
Yeah.
I've had his brother on this podcast.
Oh, he's a character, man.
We went to, so I was not far from you a couple of years ago when we shot that, I guess in 2019 ish.
He, we went to his place and interviewed Lonnie there and then went to, we went to the, Of course, film B roll at the tree.
I mean, I think, you know, he wrecked into it, but I think he was probably dead before he hit the tree.
Oh, I thought he died in the hospital afterwards.
I mean, he, I guess my point is I don't think it was the accident, the crash rather, that killed him.
I think he was having a medical episode.
Oh, he was having, yeah.
So they jumped the median and they were driving into oncoming traffic.
And Randy's widow, Lynn, to her credit, I mean, quick thinking in the moment while Randy's kind of, I guess, seizing up or whatever, she realized like we could kill someone, we're driving into oncoming traffic.
She turned the wheel into the tree in front of the church, basically, to stop them from, God forbid, taking anybody else out.
But Randy was already in the midst of a medical episode when they jumped the curve and the median rather, and went into oncoming traffic.
Oh my God, man.
I watched the dark side of the ring thing that Vice did on it.
Yeah.
That was fucking stunning, man.
To hear about just like, like all, like the relationship between him and Hulk was insane.
It's like all the jealousy, all the, you know, when they would travel and, you know, all the fights he would get in with and how he'd be so jealous of his fiance when she would go hang out with Hulk and his wife.
And man, that was.
So we interviewed Terry in St. Pete, actually, for, you know, I love Tampa.
Tampa is the Florida of Florida.
It is.
It's real Florida.
Miami's not Florida, by the way.
Yeah.
Miami's nothing like any other place in Florida.
Miami and Key West are outliers.
They're like different countries.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And they, well, you know, they say in Florida, the further north you go, the further south you are.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But I like Tampa a lot.
And so I get to spend a lot of time there, obviously.
Well, I mean, listen, I think wrestling is the, my friend Mike Lauren says, wrestling is the Florida of sports.
You know, and Tampa is the Florida of Florida.
So it's only appropriate that, you know, wrestling has such a profound presence.
You know, in and around Tampa and St. Pete.
And so we, I think we tried to bring a little bit of that Florida flavor and that Tampa, you know, Bay Area flavor to the doc.
And I hopefully you'll see it in a couple of, you know, a couple of the pods.
But interestingly, oh, yeah, we talked to Michael, who was Hulk's costume designer back when Hulk was in a band in Tampa, you know, when he was a kid.
And then he went on to do Jimi Hendrix.
All the iconic, whether it was like the cover of magazines or Woodstock.
He dressed Jimi Hendrix.
He dressed a bunch of like rock and soul acts.
He dressed all the pimps of Tampa.
The Savage here?
What is it?
Yeah, he does.
Yeah.
Back in the 70s and 80s.
He'd be a great interview for you.
70s and 80s, did all the pimps of Tampa.
And I said to him, I said, Mike, I said, looking at Randy Savage's costumes, I'm like, it's kind of like cowboy pimp, right?
I mean, Like a lot, and he had never thought of it because he just you get inspiration and you try different things on someone to see how it fits and how it, you know, reflects the persona.
And he's like, Yeah, it is kind of cowboy pimp, is kind of the look of it, you know.
And of course, the pimps of Tampa influenced Randy Savage's famous wardrobe.
So we get into that, which is probably kind of new information.
But what's interesting is that the relationship between, you know, Terry and Linda and Randy.
And um, and Elizabeth all come to a head and are completely really uh disintegrate in Miami.
Um, and it happened, oh, yeah, they were on vacation down here, down there.
Hulk was shooting Mr. Nanny, the movie Mr. Nanny, and he was shooting nights.
And so, uh, Linda came with the kids, they stayed at this condo hotel called the Jockey Club in like the North Miami area.
She invited Linda, Hulk Hogan's wife, invited ex wife now, but at the time, invites Miss Elizabeth to come down with them to chill.
Like we, you know, you can crowd.
We have plenty of a big apartment, plenty of rooms.
You can crash with us.
Help me watch the kids.
And so she does.
Now, what Linda and Hulk didn't know was that Randy and Elizabeth, Miss Elizabeth, were on the outs.
And that Elizabeth was actually leaving Randy or running away from Randy.
And so, and Randy doesn't know this.
And so they come down and they're at the jockey club.
Terry tells this whole story himself in his own words in the doc.
And he's coming home from set shooting nights in the morning, and he's noticing that Miss Elizabeth's bedroom is empty.
And he's like, Where is Miss Elizabeth?
And he says to Lindy, He goes, If she's out playing around or whatever, he said, I don't want to get into it with Randy.
We need to get her her own hotel room.
She can do her own thing.
Like, I can't be responsible.
For whatever is going on.
So they get her a hotel room in the building, her own hotel room.
And within days, Randy is banging, the cop bang, you know, that FBI at 6 a.m. on the door, banging up.
Open up.
Yeah.
Open up, Elizabeth.
Well, good.
That's pretty good.
And Terry answers the door in his towel, and he is on a rampage, Randy.
And he says, Listen, brother, he's not, she, you know, she's not here.
She's got her own room.
I don't know.
They go down, and apparently she's in there with the tennis pro from the jockey club, which has a whole bunch of like professional tennis courts.
And because Miami in the 80s or the early 90s, they should say.
And a ton of cops show up.
It is an absolute, I mean, he's ripping the room apart allegedly.
And it's just this fucking.
And that was the.
Not only the beginning of the end of their marriage, Miss Elizabeth and Randy, but the beginning of the end of the Hulk and Randy friendship.
That's incredible that the real life bled into the theatrics of the actual what happens in the ring and the whole storyline of it.
You always wonder how real it is.
What's that?
The roids probably don't help.
No, hell no.
That makes you so fucking aggro.
But so, wait, was.
Elizabeth in the room with the tennis player when Randy came in?
I think that's what Terry told us.
That's his story, and he's sticking to it.
But I do know because my family lived there at another building at the time, they remember the scene.
It's not often that a line of cops, a parade of cops, show up to this condo development.
And so it was a memorable event for people who lived in and around there.
Yeah, I mean, it's got to be like having that level of fame and having that much money.
I mean, I don't know how old they were at the time.
They had to have been, what, in their 30s, maybe?
Late 30s.
Yeah.
Well, she was a lot younger, Miss Elizabeth.
But like, I feel like it's always worth thinking.
I'm sure that this is something that you understand pretty well dealing with, you know, doing all these pieces on athletes and stuff like that.
But when you acquire that much money and fame at such a young age, it's harder to process real life.
Drama or relationships or friendships because you don't have real life experience.
You just have the experience of being a celebrity, living in your own bubble, everyone saying yes to you.
You get this, I call it Superman syndrome.
Like you get it when you grow up and people are telling you how great you are and how good you are at something and you achieve some modicum of or some significant fame and financial success.
It definitely fucks with your head.
And actually, and especially for wrestlers who live in such a An action figure world where they are literally action figures and then they spend the rest of their lives trying to continue to look like their action figure, you know, physically and aesthetically and everything.
It's hard when you're kind of out of the spotlight.
And that's a lot of Randy's story when he gets kind of pushed out of the ring at WWE and winds up going across town, so to speak, working for the competition.
That was hard for him, buying up all the just for men at Walgreens to keep his hair and his beard.
Well, there was no hair, but to keep his beard dark.
And just like, it's a really interesting struggle that athletes and especially sports entertainment, because like it's, So much about the aesthetics and the look, you know, and maintaining that physique and everything.
It's hard, I think, psychologically to be kind of to feel like you're being put out to pasture, that your action figure is being dumped in the trash can, so to speak.
It's, you know, and it's hard.
I call that spotlight syndrome because you go from Superman to being out of the spotlight and you don't know how to process a lot.
You know, we made a documentary, uh, 30 for 30 called Broke, uh, about in part that phenomenon that, like, when you, when your professional sports career is over, which for most, Athletes is in their 20s.
If they're lucky, they're 30s, or if you're a baseball player, you're 40s, maybe.
But, like, I mean, in the NFL, the average career is like 3.3 years, and they have the lowest average salaries.
They have the highest rate of career ending injuries.
And when you're out, suddenly maybe you're at home with a wife and kids you don't really know that well or how well you get along with them.
You don't have the team doctor to take care of you anymore.
You may start self medicating.
You know, with prescription or recreational drugs, and you don't have that health coverage, you don't have that access to those resources anymore, and you are not bringing in, you are not generating the revenue you were generating just a short time ago, and you will never generate, odds are, that amount of revenue ever again in your life.
It's a tough axe to bear.
Randy was notoriously thrifty, though, which he apparently learned from his father, who is known professionally as the miser.
Uh, in oh, you mean like gambling?
He was a gambler, like he was a car sharp.
He, he like had the first dollar he ever made, like cheap, cheap, cheap.
Uh, people used to make fun of him.
Um, and so I think he was Randy was kind of smart with his money, not so much because he was for because the secret to being successful, I think, or generating money is you don't spend the money while you're making the money, you save the money for when you can't make the money for whatever reason, you can't make that money anymore.
Because usually that kind of largesse doesn't last forever.
So the secret is hold on to it, live modestly.
Or what was the line Bart Scott told me that Steve Bashir taught him?
He said, You can live like a king for a day or live like a prince forever.
So if you can find a comfortable lifestyle that you can maintain with the money you're generating during your peak revenue generating years, then you can be set for life.
If you start balling and spending like a baller, you're going to find a way.
Even with $50 million or $200 million, you'll find a way to live paycheck to paycheck.
And maybe even get yourself in debt, as a lot of these guys do.
And with a lot of these slimy money managers and finance people that exist out here that just make a living off ripping off athletes that are making a lot of money too, it just makes it 10 times harder.
But enough about Florida.
Even parents.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no.
Everybody, listen, nobody knows how much money you and I make.
It doesn't get published in the fucking newspaper.
These guys, their salaries, Are online.
I mean, the sports pages are filled with, you know, just as many dollar signs as they are statistics, you know, like, you know, like people are interested in that.
Can you imagine if you work in an office, if anybody works in an office anymore, where everybody knows how much money everybody else is making, how tense, you know, that would be?
That's what sports is like.
It's intense.
And so what does that do?
That puts a target on your back from everybody on the outside, and everybody's there.
With their handout or to take advantage of you.
Financial Literacy for Athletes00:10:30
I know a guy who is a.
So the NFLPA, the Players Association, the union, has a list of what they call like certified financial advisors.
And really all that means is you gave the union like two grand.
They did a background, a cursory background check on you, and they put your name on their website.
Problem is, the players who go there looking for financial advisors think that these guys are somehow approved.
You know, by the union.
That's not the case.
So I know a guy who went to a mixer, a cocktail hour in a city, not in Florida, but it was, I think it was in Texas.
And he, it was a mixer for NFL PA certified financial advisors, kind of meet, greet, trade notes, talk about clients.
He said every single person, almost to a man and woman, in that cocktail hour, all they were talking about.
Is how dumb their clients are and how to take advantage of them.
Okay.
And he said, I left that room.
I took my name off the website because I, and I never looked at it, guys.
I never wanted to be associated with any of those people again.
They were basically, he felt like just a room full of predators, you know, trying to take advantage of these guys.
Here's the thing about athletes there is a misconception that they are stupid.
They are not stupid.
They are smart about what they're smart about, like all of us, right?
We know what we know.
And we maybe, if we're lucky, we know what we don't know.
But many of us don't know what we don't know.
And that's the problem.
Listen, you go try to learn a playbook in the NFL and then go execute that in 3D while a bunch of guys are coming at you trying to murder you.
All right.
Like you have to have a little bit of smarts to figure that out.
They don't know financial, they're not financially literate.
That's not their fault.
Most Americans out of college aren't financially literate.
And let's be real when these guys are in college, no one is telling them that their priority needs to be on financial literacy.
They're saying, You know, take underwater basket weaving and go learn the playbook is what their priorities are.
So, you know, and they're telling them they're good at this one thing and they focus on that one thing.
But, and that becomes a problem when they discover that they have to pay their taxes, which they, you know, they don't know anything about.
And it's, you know, I think that's why Broke as a 30 for 30 really hit the zeitgeist at that moment.
You had LeBron and D Wade and Michael Vick and Magic Johnson tweeting like, everybody needs to turn this on right now.
Because it was, I think, to this day, the only 30 for 30 that was like a call to action where you could say, Oh, this is a real problem happening every day.
And the most heartening thing about it was obviously it's cool to have LeBron tweeting about your movie, but even cooler were the two athletes who were tweeting about it because they were like, my favorite tweets, like, I'm not going to be in broke part two.
Like, they took pride in, like, smart is the new stupid as far as spending money was concerned.
You know, like, I don't need to go buy a five thousand dollar suit, I'm gonna put that away for my kids for college, you know, or you know, so I and I think that that was that was not to say that people aren't still going broke, but I think a lot of it was like a scared straight thing.
You know, it was like a lot of people woke up to the reality that this isn't going to last forever and they need to set themselves up for their futures.
Right.
The Antonio Brown story really resonates well with me because he was like recently.
If people aren't familiar with him, he's now wide receiver for the Bucs.
Well, he's unsigned right now, but he played for the Bucs last year and he was with the Steelers before that.
And he had this crazy mental breakdown at the end of his career after playing with the Steelers.
He was drafted by the Steelers.
He was like the number one receiver in the NFL.
And then a bunch of jealousy and ego clashes happened on the team.
And he had a big falling out, a bunch of Twitter fights, and everyone hated him.
And there was like this, like, Threats of abuse and people saying that he raped a girl, one of his trainers.
And then he just like his whole life sort of like spiraled out of control.
And I think he lives in Miami.
He's certainly in Florida.
And everybody, everybody was throwing in their two cents on how much of an idiot he is, how he doesn't know respect, how, you know, this, that, and the third.
And The way, the thing that they're not seeing is that this guy is a kid.
He's like, I don't know how old he was at the time.
He was like 28 years old, 27 years old.
The dude had tens of millions of dollars.
He was making like, I think, I could be wrong, but $30 million a year.
He's one of the highest paid receivers.
And since he was a kid, 10 years old probably, younger than that, in Miami, all he knew was playing football from 10 years old to now 28 years old.
And somewhere in that time frame, he made tens of millions of dollars.
The kid has no experience in the real world.
All he knows is working out, training, and playing football games.
How can you expect this kid to have some sort of moral compass?
You know what I mean?
Or for the most part, all NFL players.
Like I experience with people like my extended family and people I know around here, everyone loves to get riled up about how can they take a knee?
How dare they do that and disrespect the flag in our country when, like, Dude, like these people, first of all, take politics out of it.
I don't expect any of those people to know anything about American history.
They grew up playing football, like that's their job.
And for you now to impose all these morals on them just because they're pro football players and they've been super successful and earned all this money, it's just so hypocritical and bizarre.
I'm trying to go back in my head and count all the cans of worms you just opened.
Sorry.
Over the last 90 seconds, dude, there's just worms crawling every.
That wasn't a very well formulated thought.
I apologize.
No, no, it was a lot of well formulated thoughts, but I will say that, listen, there's no excuse for abuse.
If Antonio Brown, if there are victims of this man, that needs to be investigated and vetted and figured out, and there has to be consequences for that.
I think a lot of people get through traumatic childhoods and success without.
Resorting to abuse.
So, you know, I don't know enough about that to, you know, to pass judgment on him, but that's the reality.
There's no excuse for abuse.
And the reality is, though, you are correct in that when you experience a sudden wealth event, it is an extremely disorienting experience.
You know, and that's not just for professional athletes, it's for you, you hear about lottery winners who go crazy andor broke, or, you know, people who experience, in most cases, even inherited wealth.
Does not survive past the second generation, much past, if at all, past the second generation.
It's because the people who experience sudden wealth events don't know how to deal with it, either financially, emotionally, psychologically.
We talked about having the target on your back.
It can be an extremely soul crushing and traumatizing experience.
We all say, oh, boo hoo, these millionaires or whatever.
But until you walk a mile in another person's shoes, it's tough to be empathetic.
And I'll tell you, I know more than one guy, more than one professional athlete, some of whom said it on camera, some of whom said it off camera, that.
They love being bankrupt.
They said the phone doesn't ring anymore.
I can relax.
I'm not paying all these bills that I don't even know who they're for or what they're for.
You know, like, you know, once people think you're broke or you file for bankruptcy, which, you know, doesn't necessarily mean you're broke, but you have, you know, you're looking for bankruptcy protection because of your debts.
Like they just think I know one professional football player who's like, who took his last like $10 million or something and made like a kamikaze investment.
Like they made the least liquid investment they could possibly make.
Pardon me, they didn't lose the money, but they put it someplace where they basically knew it's going to be inaccessible for like 20 years, maybe, you know.
And like they did it on purpose.
They did it so that their family and their friends and, you know, and unscrupulous business people would stop preying on them.
And so they could have a moment's peace.
So it's, you know, it's again, none of us have had that kind of money.
So we don't understand what it's like to have to deal with that.
But it's, you know, People who come from nothing and suddenly have it all, it's a real shock to the system.
And there is no little to no training.
Yeah, the players' associations and unions have some classes or whatever.
The agents can be helpful.
Some of them aren't so helpful.
Colleges don't seem to give a shit, even though they know that a subset, and it's a small subset, but a tiny percentage of this population of student athletes are going to go on to.
You know, experience great wealth and success, and they don't really effectively, while they're exploiting their unpaid labor, they don't really effectively prepare them for a future of financial largesse.
And so, that's that.
And if you want to get into the anthem thing, we could get into the anthem thing.
Yeah.
But I don't know which cans of words.
Sorry.
There's so many cans flopping around, janking around in my head right now.
I don't even know which one to open.
But, I listen, I will say that, you know, I think it's not surprising to learn that a great deal of the members of a volunteer military come from, you know, come from low income families.
You know, we have a place where a lot of low income people are protecting the rest of the country in the military.
Trauma in Dangerous Jobs00:08:58
So I think you'd be surprised.
I think a lot of professional athletes, because many of them come from, you know, come from, you know, financially struggling.
Families or backgrounds or communities, I think a lot of them have connections to people in law enforcement or to people in the military, in their family, amongst their family and friends.
So I think that there is a genuine, if not respect, certainly understanding or empathy there.
I also think that, again, if you look at the intent and Colin Kaepernick's intent, he consulted with a friend in the military to say what is the most respectful way to silently and peacefully protest.
Because I think that's become the thing.
There's no more patriotic expression than.
Speaking truth to power and protesting your government as protected under the First Amendment of our Constitution.
There's nothing more patriotic than that.
That is what the military is fighting for to protect our, to preserve and protect the Constitution and our way of life.
And that is embodied in the ability of the people.
I don't care what your ideology is, the ability of the people to peacefully protest the actions of our government.
And whether you're concerned about, if you're concerned about the Second Amendment and being able to defend your.
Home from the tyranny of a big government, then you certainly need to protect the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.
Because, by the way, if you look in the Constitution, the word police never appears, but the press does.
That is a constitutionally protected occupation.
You have to respect the ability of people to not just own guns to protect themselves from the tyranny of their government, but to respect and defend the ability of people to peacefully protest.
Against the tyranny of their own government.
And when you see, I think this is an issue that should really unite the left and the right.
When you see law enforcement officers sworn to protect and defend, participating on video in extrajudicial killings, when you talk about due process, that is not due process.
Police officers are not judge, jury, and executioner.
That shouldn't work for anybody.
I don't care what color you are, what ideology, that's not how it should work.
Okay?
And if you don't know the difference between a gun and a taser, you probably shouldn't.
Be a law enforcement officer.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't really want to get the whole issue with cops killing people is just like it's such a difficult conversation for me to have.
I feel like I have it all the time, or just with people I know.
I also feel like it's an easy conversation to have.
And my confusion is how difficult it is because, again, conservatives and liberals alike should be able to come together on the fact that we don't want the government, okay, to have agents with the power to deprive us of life, liberty, and property.
Without any due process, without any accountability, without any.
I think that should be something you want to talk about big government versus small government and government tyranny.
It does not get any more tyrannical than local law enforcement turning on its own people.
How about local law enforcement turning on our military?
That man who was on his way from work, that lieutenant who was on his way from work at a military base, who was attacked, who was assaulted, battered, and tasered, and I'm sorry, pepper sprayed.
By police officers for crying out loud, in his military uniform for crying out loud.
I mean, where is the respect for a military now?
You want to take a knee now to protest police abuse of predominantly people of color, not entirely people of color, but predominantly and disproportionately, most importantly, people of color.
You know, you see all these videos with armed white people, people who drive their car with police officers holding on to the door of the hood, who wind up being taken into custody.
Peacefully.
I'm not suggesting that those people should be shot and killed, those white people should be shot and killed by police, but why is it, you know, disproportionately does that occur in the case of people of color?
Listen, you and I are white men in America having this conversation.
You know, we kind of won the genetic lottery.
We have a lot of, you know, when people look at you, they're making judgment calls about you.
You could be a white man with a shaved head and tattoos on your neck.
People are judging you.
You could be Asian.
You could be the first thing people see is what you look like, right?
What color, what pigmentation your skin are, what shape your eyes or your face might be.
And they're judging you based on that.
What's the song in Avenue Q?
Everyone's a little bit racist.
It's because it's the first thing we see.
And so we certainly, anybody who says, I don't see color, unless you're colorblind, like we all see color and we all make certain, we have preconceived notions about people, for better or worse, probably for worse based on that.
And so it definitely, at least subconsciously, impacts the way we interact and treat people.
And if people aren't willing to admit that, I think that that's just bizarre to me.
It's surreal.
Well, I feel like the biggest comparison I can make is just to like Navy SEALs.
Navy SEALs, when you want to be a Navy SEAL, you have to go through buds.
You have to spend, you know, all these years going through this grueling training that if it doesn't break you or doesn't kill you, then you can be a Navy SEAL.
You know, the opposite of that is a prison guard.
If you're tired working at 7 Eleven, it doesn't take much work to go be a prison guard.
You could be a security guard for a week at a club and it won't be, it's not a very hard process to become a prison guard.
I talked to a lot of prisoners on this show, ex prisoners, and They talk about the people that are prison guards.
They hate their lives.
They hate their jobs.
They're miserable doing what they do.
There's no prison guard in this country that thoroughly loves their job and is passionate about being a prison guard.
I think the next step above that is probably by and large a cop.
And there just has to be I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is, but I feel like there just has to be a lot more that goes into being a cop, someone who has the power to end somebody's life, or somebody who has the power to decide whether you live and die.
Listen, prison guards, that is a tough, shitty job.
Oh, yeah.
And somebody's got to do it, you know?
And it's just, it's extremely dangerous.
It's extremely stressful.
I don't think they're, I think it's probably far more dangerous than being a police officer on the street, just statistically.
I mean, like, you are, oh, I think so.
I mean, being a police officer isn't even one of the top 10 or 20 most dangerous jobs in America.
I mean, Window washers are much higher up on that list of deadly jobs.
I think construction workers are too.
But as far as sheer stress is concerned, I mean, being in a prison, being essentially locked in a prison with potentially violent criminals, I just can't imagine, if not more dangerous, certainly a more stressful environment, psychologically stressful.
And I think probably, I don't know what the average salaries are, but I think.
Law enforcement officers are probably better compensated also than prison guards.
And prison guards should probably get hazard pay for a gig like that.
And to your point, perhaps more thorough training and psychological training as well.
I think that, to open up another can of worms, I think PTSD is probably one of the most ubiquitous but rarely diagnosed maladies, probably in the history of the world.
People don't want to admit.
That they are suffering from what they perceive as sort of a mental deficiency or a mental disease.
But, like, a lot of people suffer from it, sometimes from what we might consider minor incidents.
But can you imagine what some prison guards and police officers see?
Some trauma surgeons see every day.
I mean, like, there's probably a lot of people out there suffering, veterans, certainly.
I mean, what they see and who just suffer in silence and self medicate.
And I mean, look at the suicide rate of veterans.
I mean, it's just, it feels like something that, if not fixable, is at least treatable.
And we need to do better.
I think at that for people who are in truly dangerous and traumatic jobs like these.
Entertainment Personas and Beef00:15:23
Yeah, and I think the media makes it worse too, because the media just kind of like puts it out there, puts its own spin on it, puts a clickbait headline on it, and just tries to create outrage and clicks.
You know what I mean?
It's just, it's like.
I think we're all guilty of that.
Oh, yeah, I'm definitely guilty of it.
I think you were in a, if we're, listen, we didn't, you know, we didn't make, we didn't, you know, we didn't invent the game.
You know, we're just playing like, if we're in a click based world, it becomes, it doesn't feel a little exploitative.
Does it feel like it's not healing divisions in this country?
Guilty is charged.
I think it's fair to say.
Extreme partisanship is good for business, but not good for the country.
I think we can probably all agree on that.
By good for business, I mean almost all businesses.
I'm talking about the political fundraising business, right?
The lobbying business, the political ad business, which of course, Goes to the social media business because that's all ad, you know, an ad revenue generated business model.
Whether it's the media business, the podcast business, there's a lot more attention and clicks and money and potential revenue in the extremes and in the partisanship than there is in the, you know, no one's going to see us talk, singing, you know, Kumbaya for two hours on this podcast.
They're going to see us, you know, try to debate.
Big ideas from different sides of things.
Did you see the latest shit with Kevin Durant and Michael Rappaport?
How it blew up?
Like the DMs?
Yeah, he exposed his DMs and he was talking.
Michael Rappaport's like, go help the kids in Brownsville, you piece of shit.
And then all the talks, the sports talk shows like Undisputed and all them, they're all talking about it.
Even had Michael Rappaport on there.
And Michael Rappaport even kind of called himself out.
He was just like, look, he's like, yeah, I've been in Hollywood my whole life.
I've never, he's the king of shit talk, but he can't handle the shit talk.
Yeah, I've been on Kevin Durant.
Yeah, Robert's a funny guy.
I've been on his podcast.
We had a really good time.
Have you really?
Yeah, yeah.
That's hilarious, man.
He's a funny motherfucker.
He's hilarious and a nice guy.
It doesn't surprise me that he wound up calling himself out because, like, you know, you have to have a little self awareness in this game.
And can we all agree that sometimes social media gets out of hand?
I mean, can we all agree that sometimes.
You know, we don't converse.
First of all, it's no place for nuance, number one, in 280 characters or whatever, even a thread.
It's no place for nuance and shit escalates quick and everybody, it becomes a game of one upsmanship rather than an opportunity to find common ground and actually, you know, have a productive, you know, discourse or debate on something.
I think that's problematic, you know.
But good for Rappaport for just saying, like, you know, For having some fun with it.
Because, like, you know, there's a lot of times where I like, you know, you go for the easy yo mama joke because you're sitting on the couch and, like, who's this asshole tweeting at me about, you know, stupid shit, you know, with the name and these, you know, fucking number salad afterward, you know, like, who is this, you know?
But, like, sometimes I wish that, you know, I would bite my fingers or be a little bit more productive and constructive, but sometimes you can't.
Sometimes people are just dicks.
Yeah.
Well, Rappaport, I mean, he roasts.
Everybody on his social media, he posts shit every single day on his Twitter and his Instagram, roasting the shit out of people.
That's hilarious.
You know, that's it.
It is hilarious.
He's great at it.
He's great.
That's a tremendous fucking talent he has.
Actually, I have a theory.
It's kind of a funny way, brings it back to Savage.
But like, so I have a theory that what we've seen over like the last 20 years with the hyper extreme partisanship, basically everything in America, whether it's politics, whether it's Major League Baseball, whether it's, uh, I mean, you name it, podcast, Twitter, everything has become the WWE.
It's all like sports entertainment, political entertainment, social justice entertainment, whatever it is, it's like, and some people I think are playing characters or, you know, they have personas that they're kind of putting out there.
I'm kind of one person.
I don't have a lot of, like, sometimes I'm a little more aggressive on social media, but otherwise it's just an extension of myself.
I think some people are very, very different.
People than they are on, say, Twitter, Fox News, a podcast, whatever, than they are in real life.
And that's the WWE.
What is it about?
You go on Fox News, you're cutting a promo, right?
Like those Democrats, you know, like.
Right, right.
You're looking for storylines and narratives.
You're looking, and what's better than a heel turn?
What's better than, you know, when a face, you know, when a good guy becomes a villain or vice versa?
Those are some of the biggest.
So some of those are some of the best.
Uh, storylines in professional wrestling, so I think a lot of this has become that storyline, you know, beef generated, uh, hip hop.
I think probably can get some credit for the you know, beef is good for business, uh, uh, world, uh, when it doesn't you know turn into something more violent.
But like to me, it's it's all WWE.
When we made Screwball, which is about Alex Rodriguez and the biogenesis steroid scandal in Miami, I learned that quick because everybody's like, because it ends, of course, like A Rod is like ostracized, right?
He goes from like one of the highest paid, the highest paid baseball player in history to like.
This cheater, this liar.
He gets the biggest suspension of all time, loses tens of millions of dollars in the process, and then retires.
And he's kind of back in a ceremonial position on the Yankees, mentoring young players.
He's back on broadcasts.
And there he is posing with Manfred, the commissioner of MLB, who tried to ostracize.
I mean, they went at it like this David and Goliath, or almost Goliath versus Goliath kind of battle.
Of the legacies with Bud Sealing, the former commissioner, Rod Manford, who actually was Sealing's right hand man who oversaw the entire investigation against A Rod.
It was a pretty shady investigation, by the way.
You know, well, that's the thing.
You come down to Florida, you come down to the swamp, you're going to get a little mud on you.
You know, like that's just, you roll around with us, you know, swamp creatures down here, you're going to get some mud.
But, you know, what was interesting is that, you know, we end with like, again, their arms around each other, like all is well.
And everybody said, like, how did that happen?
Like, how did, you know, and I said, listen, I said it's twofold.
First of all, it's the new American values.
The new American, we used to teach our kids honesty, integrity, the golden rule do unto others, right, as you'd have done unto you.
Somehow it became the message we sent our kids it's every man, woman, and child for themselves.
Lie, cheat, and steal, or do whatever you have to do to get ahead.
And that's like, and that seems to be the message, you know?
Lie, cheat, and steal, and you could be the highest paid baseball player of all time.
Lie, cheat, and steal, and you could be the commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Lie, cheat, and steal, and you two kids can be president of the United States.
I don't think that's a good message.
Message for generations of youth that are growing up and will grow up now.
But more importantly, what A Rod did was the heel turn, the face turn.
He was the heel, and now he was the hero.
He was the babyface.
And so, Rod Manford is the new commissioner of baseball at that time, the Vince McMahon of the operation.
He's no dummy.
He knows which side his bread's buttered on.
He says, hey, let's bring A Rod into the fold.
If nothing else, it'll be good television, right?
It'll be a good storyline.
The blogosphere will explode.
Ratings will go up, and that's ultimately the goal, right?
Is more money, more eyeballs, more money, more clicks, to your point, you know?
And so I think that's what's happened.
Everything has become the WWE.
Instead of, you know, instead of politics, instead of social media, instead of even maybe journalism, it's now entertainment, right?
Sports entertainment.
Now, entertainment is the second word you almost have to put after everything.
So, what's Rappaport doing?
To his credit, he's a comedian for crying and an actor.
Like, he's not a, you know, to, to, He's not a political commentator.
He's not running for office or seeking the public trust.
He's an entertainer.
And all things considered, that was pretty entertaining.
I need to fill in the blank.
I didn't get the end of that story with him and Durant, but I mean, I thought what I know about it was pretty funny.
Yeah, I don't know.
A lot of people say that it was, or I've heard a couple people say that it could have been him trying to distract everybody from the fact that he sued Barstool Sports for defamation of character, because that looked like the ultimate pussy move.
Because, okay, so he worked for Barstool for a while as a sports commentator, and Barstool fired him, and then he talked some shit about Dave Portnoy, the guy who runs Barstool, the president of Barstool.
And then Dave Portnoy, who's like the face of Barstool Sports, released a t shirt with Rapaport's face depicted as a clown with like a herpes on his chin.
And Raport. sued Barstool for defamation of character.
So now you have the king of shit talk who roasts everybody on social media, says the worst, most foul shit about you and your mother on social media, whoever it might be.
That dude has no boundaries.
Suing somebody for defamation of character for a clown t-shirt?
That didn't look good.
And then literally the next day is when the Kevin Durant beef drop came out.
So I thought that was pretty interesting.
You didn't hear anything about the barstool stuff?
Now that you mention it, I think I might have.
I just didn't do a deep dive.
Listen, again, sports entertainment, blog, even the lawsuit sounds like fun.
You know what I mean?
It's like, I don't know, the whole thing just plays like television or drama or comedy or tragedy, depending on how you look at it.
Mel Brooks' definition of what's the difference between tragedy and comedy.
Tragedy is when I trip and fall and break my face.
Comedy is when you trip and fall and break your face.
You know?
So I don't know.
But again, everything you just described to me sounds like the WWE.
You know what I mean?
You're totally right about that.
Yeah.
About everything being the WWE.
In a way, what we were talking about with the Hulk and Randy beef, where kind of like it all spills outside the ring and the line starts to blur between the kind of persona and entertainment versus real life.
Or, you know, like how does this, how does sort of like, Twitter beef.
How does Tweef kind of like spill out into litigation?
Like, I mean, I don't know.
Listen, it's the reason why you and I still have jobs.
It's the reason why there's podcasts.
There's a lot of shit to talk about.
There's a lot of shit to make documentaries about.
Well, I try to stay away from like the interpersonal drama on social media between people.
I stay away from that, like the plague.
But I don't know.
It's interesting that you bring up like someone's, you know, their internet persona or Who they are online, kind of like spilling over to real life, is exactly what we're talking about with WWE and Randy and Hulk.
It reminds me of Skip Bayless on Undisputed, how he's like the guy who hates LeBron.
Like, that dude is such a fucking piece of shit the way he talks about LeBron.
He's such a dick.
And it's so fucking biased.
Like, no matter what it is, he's just playing.
I feel like he's playing this character of like the guy who hates LeBron and props up everybody else who competes against LeBron.
And I personally think that it could have been something that he maybe did when he was on ESPN and it worked.
And then he just leaned into it and then it just sort of like bled into his real life.
And maybe it's now, maybe that's who he really is now.
We were talking about Lanny, Lanny Papo, who is Randy Savage, you know, Macho Man's brother.
And Lanny has a story that he tells.
I think it's in the doc.
You know, when, first of all, we went out as far and wide as we could to find.
Any video we could, even an early, early, early promo with Randy's original voice, his real voice.
It was a pain in the ass, but I think we finally dug one up and it's definitely a different voice.
And what Lanny says is that when Randy, he was working on it, he came to Lanny for advice.
He was working on his voice, part of his persona to help connect.
And so when he nailed it, Lanny says very melodramatically, he said, after that moment, I never heard my brother's real voice ever again.
Really?
Ever again.
He was just permanently that character in that voice.
And many people say that Randy Savage's life outside the ring very much mirrored the drama.
In and around the ring, you know, on camera, let's say.
He was, you know, he was a man perpetually set to 11 on the dial, you know, just like, you know, full steam ahead.
And we interviewed Dan Soder for the documentary, who is hilarious.
He's an actor, degenerate wrestling fan.
And, you know, he has this great bit at the end.
I wonder if it made the final cut because it was a little edgy.
You know, he talks about how, like, you know, I'll be more sensitive about it, but he does it in a very tasteful and funny way, but it's edgy.
But how, like, the way Randy went out was like the most macho man Randy Savage way to go out.
It was like his final, you know, his final sort of dramatic moment.
And Dan uses wrestling terms, which I'm not entirely familiar with, but, you know, it was a really interesting point that for a man who lived full throttle, like, this was like, you know, the most macho man way of like ending a match, you know, or ending, you know, or fading out.
Randy Savage Macho Exit00:02:49
Um, and it's not untrue, yeah.
When you're revved up to 11 like that all the time, I mean, you got to be burning the candle at both ends, you're not going to last that long.
And I think wrestling is a sport kind of, I don't know if it's unique to wrestling or what the comparative stats are to other sports, but it is a sport that seems to have a pretty significant number of early.
Deaths, you know, a pretty tragic Miss Elizabeth is one she was 40.
What was she like at her early to mid 40s when she passed?
And like you see a lot of it's wrestling seems to have a lot of those tragedies.
What kind of drugs do you think Randy was on like during matches?
What kind of shit do you think he took?
I mean, he had to be on some sort of fucking speed or cocaine or well, I mean, back in the like the 90s, late 80s, 90s drug trends are cyclical.
So I think that they were into what.
The population was into.
So I don't know that Randy did cocaine in the 80s, but he lived in Florida in the 80s and was making money and was partying hard.
And, like, you know, I think some of those guys have been a little more candid about their drug use and abuse.
But, you know, certainly, you know, I think it's not surprising to learn that there were steroids.
You know, involved, you know, performance enhancement drugs involved.
We get into that later on in the doc.
Again, I haven't seen the final cut, so I don't know what did or didn't make the cut.
After it comes out, I'm happy to, and if I watch it, I'm happy to tell you all the shit, whether the deleted scenes are or whatever.
But, you know, in the 90s, we interviewed Gorgeous George, his ex girlfriend in the 90s, who he dated pretty steadily.
After Miss Elizabeth, and they lived together in the Tampa Bay area.
And she tells us that Randy's pouch belt always had ecstasy in it.
That makes sense.
They did a lot of in the 90s.
They did a lot of rolling.
And she said there was at least one occasion on WCW.
I think we tried to get some footage where they were rolling on air, for sure.
They had some pretty wild experiences.
Like they would go out on the beach in St. Pete and do ecstasy.
And I'm like, it's got to be a thousand degrees.
Frozen Time in Tampa Bay00:06:58
You know, if you're, you know, like first of all, you're out in the Florida sun.
And second, you're doing ecstasy.
And she goes, yeah, we got really warm and we went out into the water.
And there were these guys on the water who were screaming and yelling and waving at us.
And we were screaming and yelling and waving back.
And then Randy got pissed because.
Randy thought these guys were like flirting with Gorgeous George, and he was always very jealous.
And so he finally said, Well, fuck this.
And he storms out of the water and is like, What the fuck are you guys trying to get my girls' attention?
Which is ridiculous because he's out there with them, you know, but he was sometimes irrational and he was rolling.
Let's be, you know, real.
So, and they're like, no, dude, there was a school of sharks.
That's why we all came out of the water and they were trying to get their attention to get the fuck out of the water because they were swimming in a school of like sharks.
Are we allowed to talk about your project with George Jorge?
I can't.
Not at all.
Can't.
No, not yet.
Not yet.
I'm on embargo.
I'm embargoed, dude.
Sorry.
Okay, we won't say anything more.
We won't say anything more.
Yeah, you got to promise me once 100,000 people watch this, you promise me you're going to come and do this in person when this whole pandemic thing glazes over.
I might even get a haircut if 100,000 people watch this.
Okay.
You don't need to cut the hair.
The hair looks good.
Oh, God bless you.
The hair looks good.
You keep the hair, but you got to promise that you'll come here and do one in person because you're the Florida filmmaker.
I feel like we have like a little niche here.
Like, we are like the Florida man podcast.
Dude, any excuse I can come up and get a fake Cuban sandwich in Tampa?
There's some legit Cuban food in Tampa, bro.
I know.
I'm just fucking around.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Cuban sandwich wars between Tampa and Miami.
No, I'm not.
It's the real thing.
So in Tampa, a lot of people argue about where the Cuban sandwich was invented.
Key West, Miami, Tampa.
Tampa has a lot of pride in its Cuban sandwiches, as does certainly Miami, as you can imagine.
But a lot of Cuban migrants and immigrants first started to settle in the Tampa area.
And so in Tampa, though, they put Genoa salami on the Cuban sandwiches.
Miami, there's no, it's the Swiss cheese, the ham, the pork, the pickles.
The mustard, sometimes mayo on the top.
In Tampa, it's all that plus salami.
And there's a lot of friction about the Cuban sandwich wars between.
You can't have salami on a Cuban sandwich.
Well, that's what Tampa does.
You know, because salami, of course, comes from famously from Genoa, Cuba.
No, there's no such thing.
So, you know, this is a serious.
Google it.
Tampa, Miami, Cuban sandwich.
It's a real thing.
I am on the front line of that.
Have you ever been to Cuba?
No, I haven't, regrettably.
But it's kind of like Miami.
Yeah, pretty much the same thing as Miami, except it's been frozen in time from what I hear from people that have been there.
Yeah, but what do they say about the great thing about Miami?
It's so close to the United States.
I've had a lot of guys on this show who lived through the Miami 80s.
The cocaine wars, where it was just people dying left and right, you know, more.
I think what was the one of the crazy things about your documentary that really hit me was the amount of deaths that were in Miami.
There was a crazy statistic about the people that died in Miami during like a certain like that decade.
Yeah.
Well, not only did did you know homicides peak in about 82, 83 in the city of Miami, but you had an overflow of bodies.
Um, and you had Burger King, who's headquartered in Miami, uh, donated refrigerated trucks.
To the morgue so that they could store, literally stack dead bodies up.
And in that era, there was a year in the early 1980s where upwards of 25% of the bodies at the Dade County Medical Examiner's Office had wounds from automatic gunfire.
So they were essentially killed by machine gunfire, 25% of the corpses.
I mean, you had 1980 was a crazy year because you had this like perfect storm of.
The drug wars, the Mariel boat lift, which people who've seen Scarface know what the Mariel boat lift was.
And then you had these riots that broke out after an all white jury acquitted white police officers from Miami, but the case was in Tampa because they got a change of venue because of how high the emotions were down here.
They had beaten a black motorcyclist, an insurance salesman, to death.
At the side of the road, and then tried to cover it up.
And they were tried and acquitted in Tampa.
And Miami burned.
18 people were killed.
There was, geez, like a billion dollars in damage.
There are some blocks, this is 1980, and there are some neighborhoods and some blocks in those neighborhoods that have never been redeveloped since they were burned down in those demonstrations in 1980.
Arthur McDuffie was his name.
They were known as the McDuffie Riots or the McDuffie Demonstrations.
And they.
So, Miami in 1980 was insane.
And you had a lot of the people who came over during the Mariel boat lift.
Castro famously emptied his prisons and his hospitals and his mental institutions in Cuba and shipped everyone over to Miami.
It nearly bankrupted the four southern counties of Florida Monroe, Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach because there was just no resources.
Can you imagine getting 150,000 people, many of whom, Needed food, shelter, medicine, the kids need school, healthcare.
I mean, like, it was an insane, and this all happened in less than six months.
Suddenly, 150,000 new people, all, you know, as a burden on public resources.
And so, you know, long story, even longer, I heard, I remember I said everybody in this town who was alive in that era has a story, you know?
Mariel Boatlift Aftermath00:15:11
Some of them have several stories, but any line of work you were in, certainly a lawyer, Um, a cop, a journalist, they have great, but everybody.
So, I knew a guy, a doctor who worked as a trauma surgeon at Jackson Memorial, which is our like ER, our big city like trauma center.
It's where all, you know, uh, where all major trauma uh, uh, cases go in the city.
Um, one night he's working in the ER and he gets a Marielito who was a Mariel refugee, uh, who was in Miami Beach and got into, you know, some kind of fucking shootout over whatever.
Um, and uh, he He was shot in a certain spot on his body.
I can't remember where, but the doctor, who's bilingual, said to him in Spanish, he said, Listen, you're very lucky.
If that wound, if that bullet had hit you just like a few millimeters or centimeters over here, you would have bled out like right at the scene.
You never would have made it to the hospital.
Several days later, another Marielle refugee comes into the ER while he's working.
With a gunshot wound in exactly the same spot where he told the other guy that if you get shot there, you'll die.
And the guy bled out and died.
He can't prove it.
He doesn't know it, but he was almost positive that that was a retaliatory shooting and murder for the previous patient that he had seen.
I smile.
It's not funny, but it's fucked up.
But it's like this kind of shit happened all the time in that era.
So you get a guy like George, Jorge, who just lived an extraordinary life.
And all I will say is certainly a life worth making a documentary about.
So, George Valdez, who came on my podcast, I saw his story.
I saw that he did like one podcast before I had him on here, and he lives in Orlando.
And I was a little bit skeptical of him.
I'm not going to lie before I met him in person.
And then he pulled up to my podcast in a fucking Rolls Royce ghost.
He pulled up to my studio driving a ghost with his son.
I was like, what the fuck?
So, you stashed all your money, obviously.
Like, you had money left over.
When you went to prison, like, or did he like?
I was like, How did you make all this back?
No, I'm pretty sure.
Like, listen, I don't know that he had no money, but you know, he was living large, and so you know, it's like we talked about, you know, broke kids experiencing a sudden wealth event.
This kid was barely in his 20s, and he's making tens of millions of dollars a month for crying out loud.
So, believe me, he found, I'm sure, exciting ways to squander it.
Um, and also, you know, a lot of these guys literally buried it or gave it to friends.
There was just too much cash, like, literally, too.
Physically, there was no place to put the money after a while.
So, a lot of it, I think he lost, but he came out, you know, he got a master's.
He's very proud of, you know, his education and he became an entrepreneur and he started some businesses and he sold some businesses, legitimate, legitimate businesses.
And I think he built himself, you know, I think he felt like I was a kid in Miami during the cocaine boom.
I felt it.
He was already like working in his account as an accountant.
I think he was working at the Federal Reserve Bank.
Like, he was on a different path in life.
You know, and he knows that now.
And he made a choice at the time to go for that easy money.
And a lot of it he made, but then he paid quite a dear price.
He went to prison three times, if you include Panama, which was a horrific and torturous, literally torturous and traumatizing experience for him.
And then went to federal prison twice in the States because he got out and fucked up again, you know, went right back into the business.
And then he made a decision.
He found God and he said, I clearly chose the wrong path because I can be rich and successful and fulfilled if I do something legitimate.
I can be.
In a lot of ways, people were sort of guilty by geography.
You have to realize that if you were a young kid, especially a young immigrant kid, coming to America with the mythology that you grew up with, the American dream, right?
And you come to America and a bunch of your friends and people you know and kids in the neighborhood.
Are in this business and they are rolling.
That must be what you think the American dream is.
You know what I mean?
Like you're talking about athletes young and making money.
Like, what do they know?
What do these kids know?
They know the American dream and they see everybody around them driving Rolls Royces and driving Porsches and driving Mercedes.
And they go, oh, this is the American dream.
You come to America, you smuggle or you sell Coke or whatever, and you're a millionaire.
That's what happens, you know?
So I think that they had a warped view of it.
But again, young kids.
When you're in Miami, it was Miami.
We don't have any indigenous industry, you know.
Um, most of Florida doesn't.
We're a factory town.
We sell the sun.
We sell the Florida dream.
We sell tourism and development and real estate growth.
Growth is our hustle in the state of Florida, you know?
And so that's what, you know, you see these guys do, all these other kids.
And there was literally pockets, you know, and subsets and subcultures within communities where everybody you knew was in some way involved in the business.
And so a lot of kids fell into that.
That's not to make excuses, but just to sort of understand the perspective in the moment.
And listen, you know, He was scared straight.
George got a couple wake up calls and literally found God and converted and decided that there was a way that I can be just as successful and happy and fulfilled doing it legitimately.
And that's what I think he bought him that the car you saw.
Not some of his earlier cars or planes, but certainly I hope the car that you saw was legitimate.
No, you're totally right.
The geography thing, the right place and the right time.
If you were in South Florida, anywhere in South Florida during that time, There's a damn good chance that you were involved in that world somehow.
Like, I had Manny Puig.
You're familiar with who Manny Puig is, the wild boy, wild guy who does all the fucking wrestles, alligators, and sharks.
He, I had no idea, but he went to prison for some, for being involved in that world, like smuggling some shit through Florida, like a minor thing.
But he was in prison in North Florida for a couple of years.
And I had no fucking clue, but he happened to be living in South Florida during that time.
Listen, Mickey Monday, the smuggler who we interviewed for Cooking Cowboys, the first one, back in an era when if you were making $13,000, $15,000 a year, that was an income.
You're talking about late 70s, early 80s, right?
So he'd have friends who'd come out, say, once a month.
Packages, you know, bundles of coke off a plane, throwing it into a car, a truck, whatever.
Manual labor for one night a month, let's say.
Maybe twice a month if they were super busy, but let's just, for the sake of the math, let's do one night a month.
He would pay those guys $5,000 cash for that one night of work.
Okay.
So that means that some guy making $13,000 a year, $15,000 a year on the books, As a tax paying citizen, he has an extra $60,000 cash, tax free off the books, kicking around that year.
And that's only if he works one night a month.
And he's not even in the drug business.
This guy just came out to do manual labor for one night.
I mean, that's why I said the trickle down economics, that's how that happened.
So the lowest guy in the totem pole is making like four times his legit salary a year.
In cash, tax free, just doing this.
So, like, you can imagine how much, you know, the guys actually moving the product were making.
So, my question is this someone comes to you and says, Hey, I'll give you five grand, you know, a buddy of yours.
Come out, just help us unload.
And some of the guys did it just for fun, just to tell their kids someday, like, I was a pirate, you know what I mean?
Like, just for the story.
But some guys did it on the regular and they made a shit ton of money and they did not do that right now for that amount of money.
They did not buy drugs.
They did not sell drugs.
They did not smuggle drugs.
They just did some math.
They moved a bundle of this to the.
Bundle of this to the, and that's not to say they wouldn't have gotten busted, but you know, you get my point in their head just to rationalize.
Fuck it.
I'm going to go out for one night a month.
Like you said, in 2021 dollars, you would leap at that opportunity and you would rationalize it.
You'd say, I'm not in the drug business.
I'm not selling drugs.
I'm not buying drugs.
I'm not smuggling drugs.
I'll just go out and do some manual labor for one day.
Hell yeah.
For an extra $60,000?
Again, I'm not making excuses.
But I think it's hard, you know, when you're judging somebody and their lifestyle and the decisions they've made in their lives, it's hard when you're not in the moment.
You know, I'm trying to be as vivid as I can about it to say, like, nobody was living your life or my life or anybody else.
They were living their own life at a really surreal and dynamic and transitional time and unique time in an American city.
The worst part about that, though, is that those were the guys that were getting popped more than anybody.
Those were the guys that were getting arrested and going to prison, not the fucking guys at the top making the billions of dollars.
It was the pawns of the operation.
They worked their way to the kingpins of that era eventually.
But of course, that, along with the war on drugs in general, is a fucking myth.
Because we were all told that when Pablo Escobar was killed by the DE, well, that was it, right?
We won.
We won the war on drugs.
It's just like, come on.
Like, you know, I mean, today, I don't know post pandemic, but pre pandemic, you know, cocaine was, I think, cheaper and potentially more pure than it has ever been in history.
And so, really?
Yeah.
And so, what does that tell you about like supply and demand?
It means there's ample supply, which has driven the cost down.
And it's, you know, they're not stepping on it.
I mean, I guess, depending on your dealer, they're not stepping on it as much.
And you can get, you know, you, you, What I'm saying is, if the free market teaches us anything, it's that it means that I don't think demand has gone down.
I think it's because I think that supply is ample.
And that is a failure of the so called war on drugs.
I, believe it or not, have never done cocaine.
I've never done ecstasy.
I never smoked pot till about, I tried it, I think, for the first time in 2017 when I was in Denver, Colorado.
Um, where it's legal, um, and uh, you're not gonna believe this, or maybe you will believe this.
I just got a missed call from George Valdez.
Did you really?
Yeah, that's hilarious.
Yeah, but um, so uh, I think he also said, I don't remember, did he say?
I think he's also told me, I could be wrong, but you can verify this.
He told me he's never tried cocaine either.
Yeah, listen, a lot of a lot of guys in in the sort of the the upper echelons of that world were not.
Big users.
I think a lot of them, it was a product that they sold.
It was not necessarily something that they, you know, it could have been widgets, you know, like, you know, in George's case, it started off as bananas.
He was a banana importer and a banana transporter, you know, like that was his product.
So it didn't matter to them.
They weren't necessarily fans.
They were, you know, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the CEO of McDonald's doesn't eat McDonald's every day, you know, like, in fact, probably because it's arguably deadlier than cocaine, I would think.
But, you know, Uh, to everyone who is shoving McDonald's in their mouth but won't get a vaccine, um, like, what are you putting in your body?
You know, I love me.
Hey, I love McDonald's coffee, bro.
I drink McDonald's coffee almost every day.
They have the best coffee.
Dude, but I live in Miami.
We have Cuban coffee, and you live in Tampa.
Cuban coffee is the greatest fucking coffee, full stop.
That's it.
I agree.
I totally agree.
Like, I don't know how I'd be conscious right now without it.
Well, going back to the cocaine thing, Adderall is the new cocaine.
Everybody does Adderall now.
Well, that's been going on for a while, but that's like the new thing.
It's a performance enhancing drug.
And it's funny, like, there's a.
The percentage of, I think, major league baseball players that have waivers to use Adderall because they're on their doctor's recommendation is like disproportionate to the general population.
Meaning, like, apparently a lot of baseball players have ADHD, which, by the way, watching baseball gives me ADHD, so I don't blame them.
But, like, what I'm saying is that, like, that's a performance enhancing drug, you know?
Like, it totally is, you know?
Well, it's mental performance, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
But listen, if, if, If your kid doesn't get into Harvard and another kid on Adderall gets into Harvard, is that cheating?
It's a performance enhancing drug, right?
I don't know.
I think it's an interesting argument.
I do know one of my favorite onion headlines of all time was Adderall receives honorary degree from Harvard Law, which really speaks because how do you get through Harvard Law, I guess, without.
Without bumping those addies, right?
Right.
Well, it's interesting.
Like saying a lot of people that I know, especially young people that do cocaine regularly, really shocked me.
It shocked me just as much the amount of people that do Adderall daily, every single day.
Like I was talking to a girl, my wife's friend, and she said she's been prescribed Adderall since she was 12, taking it every day of her life.
Politics of Marijuana Legalization00:15:19
Right.
It's fucking poison.
It's a narcotic.
It's a controlled substance, for fuck's sake.
And who the fuck came up with the.
I mean, what a great.
Propaganda sales pitch to say Adderall cures ADHD, or if ADHD is even a real thing, do they just come up with that to sell Adderall?
I, first of all, part of the reason why I never tried cocaine is not simply the illegality.
Well, I think the expense was probably it was cost prohibitive.
I don't know how, I think you had a bunch of rich friends in Tampa who could afford cocaine.
I guess it's cheaper now than it was when I was, you know, when I was a kid.
But like, you know, I also, I'm like you, like you don't strike me as a guy who needs cocaine.
I guess nobody needs cocaine, but like I'm sort of, You know, I'm a caffeine cowboy.
That's my drug of choice.
And I didn't start drinking until I was 21 years old.
That's what a straight ROI was.
Now, I've been making up for lost time, mind you, but, you know, and I got to think, when I tried pot, I didn't like it at all.
Really?
Yeah.
The first, like, I kept saying, I'd rather be drunk.
I'd rather be drunk.
I'd rather be drunk.
Didn't slip you a couple milligrams when you hung out with them?
I didn't like this at all.
And I remember saying, You know what I said to my cousin, who was one of the first medical marijuana entrepreneurs out west, out in Colorado, got one of the earliest licenses, became, as you can imagine, extremely successful.
I said to him, when I tried it with him from one of his dispensaries, when it went wreck, I said, This will never catch on.
That's what I said to him.
This will never catch on.
This is in 2017.
I said, This shit will never catch on.
No one's going to do that.
But I will tell you this.
Went to Chick fil A.
And I was like, oh, I kind of get it.
Like, because that shit tasted good, man.
I mean, oh, yeah.
You smoked, you went there?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
But I don't know.
I just like what I met someone.
I remember being in New York years ago, many years ago, probably about 15 or so years ago, and having a conversation with a woman.
And I was like, what is happening?
She is all over the place.
And I said it to someone.
I was like, what is she okay?
Like, this is, they're like, oh, you know, she's, she just went into the bathroom.
She's high as fuck.
And I was like, holy shit.
And that's when I realized I describe it this way.
When people are on cocaine, they start one sentence and they finish another.
Yes.
And you and I are already like, you know, have personal, like, you're right.
They would like have to scrape us off the roof with a fucking shovel if we did cocaine.
Like, we would just, You know, we'd be like Len biased.
Our faces would explode.
Like, if we fucking did cut, like, what would I do with that?
Where would I put that?
You know, I don't even, and that scared me.
Like, I thought, oh, my heart's just going to explode out of my chest if I tried.
And I've never been particularly curious about it either.
And I think part of the reason is, and maybe this is part of the reason why I only smoked in Colorado from like a legit dispensary.
Like, down here in Miami, who the fuck knows what they're cutting this shit with?
I mean, you take ecstasy.
God only knows what this.
What this anonymous person in a, you know, like you could be, you could be fucking, you got, you be detergent.
If you're lucky, it's baby powder, but it could be detergent, fentanyl.
Like it's just, there's just, there's so much crazy shit out there.
There's so many entrepreneurial hustlers who are trying to say, you know, who are trying to, you know, maximize their profits that they'll cut anything in there.
That's scary to me.
Like not knowing what the fuck I just bought from some stranger in a dark club for, I don't know.
Yeah, no, it's for sure.
And, you know, obviously legalizing it makes it so much more, or making it illegal just makes it 10 times more dangerous.
Oh, dangerous.
Not only the substance, it brings in everything that prohibition brings in.
It brings in the criminality, it brings in the money laundering, it brings in, of course, yeah, like no regulation on the ingredients.
And so, no, there's no, listen, there's no question about it.
The only, and it's the only way also to effectively.
Create that many new jobs and a new multi billion dollar industry overnight.
And I think statistically, we know from as marijuana, both medical and recreational, is legalized, there's no statistical jump in the number of people who use it.
Meaning, people who want marijuana, who want to use marijuana, are not being deterred by prohibition.
They're still finding a way to get it, regardless or irregardless, as we say in Miami.
But like, so when you legalize it, it's not like suddenly.
Everybody who's never done pod or does it rushes out to try it or do it all that.
Like, are there going to be a few people who will say, oh, now maybe I'll try, but they're not going to, if that's not a huge number and they don't become regular customers or users, it just doesn't make any sense why.
And again, this is sort of another one of those issues that I think should really unite the left and right, the conservatives, which is like, why does the government care if I inhale?
A plant that grows out of the earth that is less dangerous than poison ivy.
What does the government care about that?
Legalize it, tax it, regulate it, make it safer, create jobs.
Dude, I got so pissed when I went to Colorado.
When I tried it, I went to a, what do they call it, cannabis cup, right?
So I go and I go on a cannabis tour of these dispensaries, the grows, I go to the event, the cannabis cup event, and I'm furious because all of this industry, this whole industry and everything that it represents, the marijuana industry for starters, these should all be Florida businesses.
And I was angry because I'm like, We deserve this in our economy.
Like, and the governor, all the governors, they go to the opening of a Wawa with giant scissors to cut a ribbon that creates what?
Listen, I love Wawa, but what does that create?
30 new jobs, 40 new jobs?
You want to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and a multi billion dollar industry with the stroke of a pen as a governor?
Okay.
You're full of shit if you're a small government job creating.
Tax cutting.
There is no better way to create jobs, create revenue, which can, by the way, reduce our taxes because you'll be making it, you'll be getting it out of the pot, you know, than opening up Florida without any of these bullshit, you know, insider trading kind of restrictions on license.
Open it up legitimately, regulate it legitimately, tax it legitimately, and let's get back to work.
What is the one biggest thing that's in the way of making that happen in Florida?
Do you know?
Republicans.
I mean, you can't just say, I mean, Republicans in general?
Yes.
I can't, you know why I can say, because the Republicans have controlled the state legislature for over 20 years.
And so that's the short answer.
The Democrats are all in.
Are there no Republican states that have legal marijuana?
You're asking, no, you asked me about Florida.
Right.
The Republicans are the problem.
I mean, that's, it's their, they can do whatever they want.
In the legislature, they're busy giving tax cuts to corporations.
They're not busy fixing the unemployment website, which we all know we've spent over $100 million of our money to create a broken unemployment website.
They're not doing anything that's creating any jobs or new industry.
It's up to them.
They control the state of Florida, meaning if the Republicans are on board, shit gets done.
If they're not, it doesn't.
I thought I heard, I could be wrong, but I thought I heard DeSantis was on board to make it recreational and something else was in the way.
Like some sort of lobby, you know, some sort of, I don't know what it was.
The Republican legislature can pass whatever it wants.
The Democrats have zero power in the Florida legislature.
That's a fact.
That's been true for over 20 years.
They want to pass stand your ground laws.
They want to gut our Chapter 119 sunshine laws to limit access to public records that belong to us and that we pay for.
They do whatever they want to pass.
They want to legalize, open up medical marijuana without the onerous.
Ridiculously onerous restrictions that we that that listen, we all voted.
When do 60 plus percent of Floridians agree on anything for Christ's sake?
We voted to legalize marijuana, we voted to allow convicted felons who do their time and uh were non violent to get the right to uh to restore the right to vote again.
We vote on this, and then the Republican legislature, by the way, we can say the legislature is the problem, but look at how they vote.
The Republicans are in charge, and if they want to open it up, they could they can do it.
I would hope.
That they would do it.
So you'd have to ask them what are the barriers to entry there?
If DeSantis is so interested in it, if he'll sign the bill and not veto it, then what's stopping the Republican legislature?
When I say Republican legislature, they are in control.
The Democrats are irrelevant 100%.
They are a non entity in the state of Florida since Jeb Bush basically was elected governor in what, 98.
So the Democrats don't count.
Their votes don't count in the Florida legislature.
Okay.
Like, you know, they just don't.
If you want to pass bills, you caucus with Republicans.
Those Republicans, man, why can't we get past Republican Democrat?
Why can't we get past these stupid labels that have to go one?
Yeah, I'm gonna everything's got to be binary, it's ridiculous, it's stupid, and it doesn't get anything done for if you're just an American citizen, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat, nothing is getting done for you because of the WWE match, right?
Because of this political theater, um, and and this poly, and which by the way, doesn't make a lick.
Of sense because you would not walk into an ice cream parlor that had any less than 20 or 30 flavors to choose from.
You're only going to get one or two of them, but you were Americans.
Bigger is better.
We like the options, right?
Why do we accept two political parties?
Why is that a thing?
I like it.
It makes absolutely no sense to me.
And of course, there's no better way to create partisanship than drawing one line and say, pick a side.
Like it's just, it's gross.
And most importantly, it doesn't get anything done.
For any of us.
But listen, they fundraise like a motherfucker.
I gotta tell you.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, every time, every time they, the crazier shit you say, the more divisive you are, the more you stake a claim, you know, to an extreme position, money floods into yokel races and to, you know, local congresspeople.
Like it floods in from all over the country or the world.
If you go on TV and say some crazy shit, it just does.
Oh, my God.
It's like we're sitting on a speeding bullet.
We don't know where it's going, where it's gonna land.
It's fucking crazy, man.
Short answer is we're fucked.
But what we have to do is we have to stop, we have to start electing better people, point blank.
That's not a bipartisan statement.
We need to start electing better people, which means that we need to go into our communities and find good people and encourage them to run.
Because usually it's the shittiest people who are running for office, you know, and it becomes a best of the worst competition, you know?
I think the silver lining with the internet is that that's going to help that happen.
It's going to help us be able to.
Fine.
And you know what I mean?
You could be a piece of shit and run for office and no one knows anything about you.
You can hide the skeletons in your closet, but with the internet, not necessarily.
But that's the problem.
It's like the WWE.
People love a villain.
Their action figures, their merch sells better.
It's entertainment.
Yeah, look at Trump, man.
Listen, I see just as many Decepticon logo shirts as I do Autobot shirts.
You know what I mean?
So people like the villains.
And then when you get into that, That level of partisanship, you have to defend your team.
Listen, people, all due respect to Tampa, people will defend Tom Brady cheating or not just because you're on his team.
But it's not just about winning and losing.
It is about how you play the game, especially in politics.
Politics is not sports.
You know, we need to judge people.
It's not just like the Republicans have got to win or the Democrats have got to win.
If Democrats do bad shit, Democrats got to call them out.
If Republicans do bad shit, Republicans have to call them out.
There needs to be objective truth.
We all need to be able to agree on a certain set of facts.
And that's the biggest problem this kind of post fact, alternate fact era.
We all need to agree that there's a line between right and wrong.
There are things that we can all agree are crimes or not crimes.
There are things we can agree that the sky is blue right now, or it is raining or it is not raining outside.
We have to be able to agree on a certain, but if we cannot even agree on a basic set of givens in this theorem, we're just totally, totally fucked.
So that's the problem is that, like, you have to say, it doesn't matter what crimes a Republican has committed or a Democrat has committed, I'm going to support them and completely warp my entire set of ideology politically, morally, ethically to defend this person because they're on my team.
It's like, fuck that.
No, it's not throwing them under the bus.
It's saying, we expect better of our people.
We expect better of our elected officials and our public officials.
We expect better of our leaders.
Like, it doesn't matter.
What party affiliation you have.
You need to just, you see bullshit, you got to call it out.
Right.
Yeah.
No, everybody's entitled to their own facts.
It's ridiculous.
You can't, we can't function in a world like that.
That's, that's impossible.
You can have a different, we can have different opinions.
We can say we, we agree on the problems, but we have different ways to, to arrive at solutions.
We can't say the facts are different.
Billy Corbin Twitter Confusion00:01:35
We can't do that because then, If we don't exist in these United States, if we're not at least united in a reality, and then we can disagree and debate and vote on how to solve these issues and these challenges, instead we just get caught up in the WrestleMania.
Well, I want to respect your time, Billy.
We've been going for two hours.
I know you said you had a two hour cutoff and tell our listeners and our viewers where they can find all your stuff and follow you and whatnot.
Yeah, everybody was thinking, I didn't realize the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins had that much hair.
My name is.
Billy Corbin, C O R B E N.
And you can find me at Billy Corbin, again, C O R B E N on Twitter and Instagram.
CocaineCowboys.com is our company, Rack and Tour's website.
Yeah, I get a lot of.
So, Billy Corgan actually, I don't know if he was like an early investor or early adopter to Twitter, but he got at Billy on Twitter.
So he's at Billy.
And so when people start to enter, I guess, at B I L L Y C O R, like looking for Billy Corgan, they don't realize that it's just at Billy.
So, I guess it auto fills my name in.
And so I get tweets for Billy Corgan all the time.
And people are upset about impact wrestling shit or on Sundays, back when he was involved in wrestling, I was getting funny tweets about that.
So it's Billy Corbin, at Billy Corbin, C O R B E N, on Twitter and Instagram and cokingcowboys.com.