Billy Corben critiques Miami’s rise over LA, contrasting child actor success with Hollywood’s fame obsession, while dissecting systemic failures—like police quotas (e.g., Eric Garner’s arrest) and unions shielding officers from accountability. His Dogfight doc (March 12) explores West Perrine’s underground MMA culture, where fighters like Kimbo Slice and Dada 5000 defied poverty through raw talent, exposing how marginalization fuels violence. Corben argues nature predisposes some to aggression but insists nurture—parental neglect, socioeconomic traps, and media glorification—amplifies it, citing Miami’s post-Mariel chaos (Holocaust survivor rapes, drug-war brutality) and the Raw Deal case’s racial bias in consent disputes. Rogan agrees, linking gun violence to education gaps, not ownership, while Corben counters with mandatory safety courses, framing responsible weapon handling as a cultural shift. Ultimately, their discussion reveals how systemic flaws—from policing to parenting—perpetuate cycles of violence, even in "well-armed" societies. [Automatically generated summary]
I realize it doesn't matter how much of my life I spend tweeting, and at this point it's been a significant percent.
And I've got a cool little following, but for what I dedicate and put into it, I don't know that the ROI is quite there, especially when I can just sit back on my ass and my phone just blows up when they go, Dude, are you listening to Rogan?
He's talking about cocaine cowboys again.
It's like, I don't have to tweet.
I was like...
Just let Joe take care of it.
Seriously, the feedback that I get and the love that I get from people, your audience, your listenership is just off the charts.
My Twitter metrics dwarf in comparison to your listeners just hitting me up.
Open a bookstore anywhere and you'll starve to death, actually.
Now, maybe a Kindle store, but like, I... I get it.
This town, which has been, incidentally, nothing but good to me my whole life.
Los Angeles, I mean.
Like, broken hearts fuel the power grid and tears come out of the faucets.
Like, I land at LAX, I turn into Raymond fucking Chandler all of a sudden.
I just, like, I get really sad here.
I don't know what it is.
It's the fucking homeless guy and pretty woman.
Screaming on Hollywood Boulevard like that's this like that's this town to me it like it just it's it's sad to me Miami is like I think Tony Montana said it best You know it's just a great big pussy waiting to be fucked a great big pussy Miami is the city of the future and always will be you know there's just like endless Opportunity there, but it never quite gets to that that level that the famous saying is that like LA is where you go when you want to be somebody.
New York is where you go when you are somebody.
And Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.
And that's the thesis of all of our work, in a way.
That's the motto of our company, of Raconteur.
It's too long to put on a t-shirt, but that's the message.
And that manifested itself with this Kanye Beck thing.
It's like...
Beck, I mean, you can't really ask for a more gifted musician or songwriter.
As far as, like, artistry is concerned, you could be subjective about it.
You could say you like him, you don't like him, but the guy's an artist.
I mean, legitimately, he puts in the work.
He writes everything.
He plays every frag and instrument on his album.
So it's like...
The guy's putting in the work and why devalue somebody who's actually an accomplished artist and say, like, well, his art isn't worth as much as somebody else's art.
No offense to his handlers, but you're surrounded by awful people.
Those are the people who are supposed to keep you in check and give you some perspective on your place in the universe, which is always smaller than you think.
Jewish people, we have our families to both, like, blow up our heads and also put us right back in our place.
I remember I got into some trouble a couple years ago.
I was on a jury.
I was a jury foreman in a criminal case in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, and it was an armed robbery case.
And I... Tweet it, because that's what I do.
I didn't tweet about the case, but I did my usual shit of just kind of observations of the courthouse.
I noticed that it was named for this guy, Richard Gerstein, who was a state attorney who had rumored ties to Meyer Lansky, later represented Pee Wee Herman in his indecent exposure case in Florida, you know, when he was jerking off in the adult theater.
And just things like that.
I could see from the window in the jury pool room, I was like, how appropriate that the view from the jury room in the criminal courthouse is one of the greatest crimes perpetuated on the people of Miami-Dade, which was the Marlins Park, the publicly financed sports welfare boondoggle of Miami Marlins Stadium, baseball park.
Well, yeah, I mean, having someone in your life to keep you in check like that is important.
Or having something.
I don't think he has anything to keep him in check, which is why he thinks it's funny to go on stage and interrupt people's performances or acceptance speeches.
And this idea that you're going to have this one big moment where everybody dresses up like a penguin and you all get together and pretend this is our night to shine.
What we were talking about before about what's wrong with this town, and this is probably the last time we should get into it because this is such a tired subject, but...
The idea that people who didn't get enough attention when they were young, so they developed this hole in their soul, they need to fill up with other people's attention, they come here, and then they seek validation through auditioning, which is one of the most ridiculous processes ever.
I mean, the idea that you're going to be in line with a bunch of other people hoping to get picked, and if you do get picked, you're like, yes, yes, it's me!
I'm going to be the one!
And then you're the one who's going to get out there, and then the camera's on you, and they put makeup on you, and they make you pretty, and the perfect lighting, It's all...
It's this weird thing.
And if you're lucky...
You can get through that with some sense of what you're trying to do in the first place which is like trying to create something cool that people enjoy and then some sense of humility where you kind of understand that that's in the greater spectrum of the universe it's really not that significant what it is is it gets a lot of attention because we're confused and media confuses people and the idea of the one the alpha with the light on them and the one who has the microphone and the one who has the voice and That this somehow or another makes you special.
And before I retired at 15 or whatever it was, but like it...
First of all, I wish there was a different...
Other than child actor, which immediately evokes images of liquor store robberies, drug overdoses, and child molestation.
But that's what I was.
The second thing I want to say, which I probably shouldn't talk about, because you mentioned it when you were talking about the casting process and how completely toxic that is in terms of creating anything of substance.
And it's not just...
It's this development process.
We option the rights...
To develop a dramatic series about cocaine cowboys about, I think, eight years ago now with Brookheimer Television, Michael Bay, and Warner Horizons.
And we have been developing the show.
Developing.
Development.
Developing.
You know when you say a word so much or you look at it so often it loses its meaning and you kind of have to...
What is it?
This word means something?
Development?
So we're on a call, Wendell.
This is already years ago.
It was years into development and years ago already.
That's how long we've been developing this.
We're on a conference call.
You can't get a word in edgewise, really, on a conference call.
I'm listening to this call, and I'm looking at the calendar, and it says, JBTV development call.
And I'm staring at the word, and it loses its meaning.
So I kind of, you know, the voices turn into, you know, peanuts, you know, adults.
And I open a new tab in my browser, and I go to dictionary.com.
I probably should have gone to urbandictionary.com, but I go to dictionary.com, and I look up the word development.
And I realize, looking at the definition...
That the development process in film and television and entertainment is the antithesis of the definition of the word development, which infers progress, evolution, and it's the exact opposite of that.
If it doesn't stifle progress, it actually has a reverse effect.
It's like de-evolution.
It's like undevelopment or de-development.
I don't know what the term is, but it's a total misnomer, this idea of developing.
Because we want to make a documentary.
We get an idea or someone comes to us or we have access to a cool person or a great story.
And I got two partners – It's me and two guys.
One guy I've known so long, our parents used to bathe us together.
I mean, we were sophomores in high school.
That was weird.
But like, no, we were nursery school.
I know the guy literally since nursery school.
Our other partner, Alfred Spellman.
I know him from television production middle school.
So we look at each other and we go, does this sound like a cool idea?
Yeah?
Let's do it.
That's our development in the nonfiction world.
This whole scripted thing where you bring in three writers and you pay them untold amounts of money and they're from Santa Monica with nannies and they're going to write for the Miami drug scene in the late 70s.
You're like, what is going on here?
How is this progress?
How are we developing anything here?
And in terms of our warped values and media manipulating our priorities, nothing breaks my heart more Then when I tweet something important that's going on in the world, and it gets like two retweets or whatever, and then you tweet something about Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber or Kanye West or Bruce Jenner, God forbid, and It gets 1,200 retweets.
Or some crazy Florida man story that gets 10,000 retweets.
And it breaks my heart because I'm just like, I'm contributing to the distraction here, is what I feel like.
But it really frustrates me.
It's like, but something about, you know, the lack of accountability in politics or the public sector or, you know, the dramatic increase in police brutality and the prison population as the crime rate drops precipitously.
All these things that we should kind of be concerned about as a people.
And I just realized, I was like, maybe I need to take my own advice and, like, the fact that we're all so insignificant and so small and this time is so fleeting...
Why not just have a good time while we're here?
We're not actually going to change anything for the better.
It's like that saying...
What's it saying?
It's like, I want to have less corruption or more participation in it or something like...
It's like, as I get older, I feel like, well, where am I getting here?
I'm not actually going to effectuate any positive change, maybe a little bit of awareness in my corner of the Twitterverse, but...
Don't I just need to do something for myself or my family?
And I can't do that.
There's a moral compass that just won't let me compromise my values.
But now our elected officials, fortunately, are kind of realizing that, like, wait a second, if you look at the district results for Amendment 2, they're going, well, shit, my constituents want this.
So now you do have some local politicians who are trying to, and state politicians, who are trying to introduce bills now that will bring medical marijuana to the state of Florida, because what they're trying to do is beat 2016, where not only is it a presidential election, so turnout in Florida could be as much as, I don't know, 12%.
So the special interest money really goes towards mobilizing People who are already, in a way, like-minded.
Like you said, the elderly population, which is really what helped kill, I think, recreational marijuana here, or the expansion of marijuana laws in California.
It was...
You weren't quite there yet.
People weren't, I think, getting out...
Not getting out the vote per se, but they weren't convincing the elderly population, who by the way probably need marijuana even more than I do, just in terms of their maladies.
It probably would do more for them, and certainly in Florida do more for them.
But some of them are still on that hippie drug thing.
Or any politician or anybody in this country do in the single stroke of a pen that would create the kind of economy that that brings.
How do you create jobs, you know, that many jobs and that kind of revenue in one fell swoop.
That marijuana can bring.
There's nothing else I could possibly think of that you could do where you could say, like, overnight we could just create...
An epic industry that not only hurts no one but helps millions of people and more importantly decriminalizes a class of people in this country that we have needlessly spent untold millions of dollars to deprive them of life, liberty and property.
It'll never happen, because South Florida's revenue is what...
Finance is Tallahassee, which is the state capital, which is in the panhandle in northern Florida.
So that'll never happen because they live off the fat of our land and our tourism trade.
So that'll never happen, but it's a great idea when you look at the politics, when you look at the demographics and the thought process, we are very much two different states.
Ever since Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, they took a hard right.
I mean, there are Cubans who have not voted Democrat since Kennedy.
Wow.
But you're seeing now a new generation, third and fourth generation Cubans who are now being actually born in Miami.
You see this trend changing.
Miami used to go to Miami and you say...
Really, anywhere in Florida.
I'd say, where are you from?
And even if people were there for 60 years, they'd go, Cuba, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York.
No one was from Miami.
That's changing now.
You see a little bit of this 305 till I die, this kind of like, you know, this spirit of like, the spirit of like...
This ownership of belonging, which I keep hoping is going to manifest itself in people driving better and using their turn signals and being nicer to each other.
I keep trying to say, it's not my Emmy or your Emmy.
It's our Emmy.
This is a collective experience here, people.
We're in this together.
Let's just be nicer to each other, but it's not working.
Yeah, similar looking people and we stick to our own.
So in Miami, you know, you have the Jewish neighborhood, you have a Haitian neighborhood, you have an African American neighborhood, you have a Cuban neighborhood, a Cuban neighborhood, a Cuban neighborhood, a Cuban neighborhood.
You have, then like I was saying, in Miami Beach even, you have Venezuela, Brazilian neighborhood.
They don't, you know, even the South Americans, which...
The thing they hate the most is being called Latin or Hispanic.
They're very prideful and nationalistic people.
They want to be associated with their nation.
You can't get into an argument with anybody in Miami until you see what flag is hanging from the rearview mirror.
Because, God forbid, dude, you should call an Argentinian a Venezuelan, a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Cuban, a Brazilian, or any of them a Mexican.
And I like that kind of incendiary mix of people, you know?
And, like, 1980 was like...
Which is kind of the inspiration of Cooking Cowboys was like, that year were, like, all of the chemicals just mixed together and shit just exploded.
And that's...
There's that tension in Miami constantly that I think just makes it an exciting place, particularly when anybody outside of Miami, they think there's only one hotel, the Colony, on Ocean Drive.
Because wherever you are in Miami, all you know is 15 blocks of Ocean Drive.
And even when you watch...
Miami Dolphins games, or like the Orange Bowl game, which is at Joe Robbie Stadium, right now Sun Life Stadium, in Miami Gardens, one of the most dangerous municipalities in Miami, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world is Miami Gardens.
That's where the stadium's located.
They'll crossfade from the game to the blimp aerial of the stadium, and then they'll crossfade to Ocean Drive, as if that's right outside.
It's 18 miles away.
From the stadium.
But that's what people associate with Miami.
Most of Miami is third-world-ian.
I mean, Miami-Dade County has, I think, only the second greatest disparity in income gap of any major county in the country.
We are...
T.D. Allman had a book called City of the Future about Miami.
They say that the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow.
And if you want to know what shit is going to go down in America...
What calamities are going to befall this country in like the next 20 years or so?
You look at what's going on in Miami or Florida, that is the barometer of whether it's the drug trade, immigration, what we're dealing with now with the browning of America, if you will, the Hispanicizing of America, and the pushback.
We've been through all of that shit.
Medicare, fraud, you name it, we have experienced it already in Miami or in the greater Florida area.
I mean, gay people got married in Alabama this week.
It's a new world, man.
The internet.
It's kind of fantastic.
When I was traveling, we were on set of this pilot in Puerto Rico.
And while I was on the plane, there was no internet on this flight because we're coming from Puerto Rico for whatever reason.
And so as soon as I landed, Obama had announced the new Cuba policy.
And I landed in Miami.
While this was going on in the air, and no one really knew exactly how Miami was going to react.
The truth is, a lot of the hardline, older, conservative Cubans have died off.
The demographic is changing.
There are Cuban kids growing up now who don't want to never get to see Cuba before they die, like a lot of their grandparents and great-grandparents never got to go back.
So the sentiment was very different from Circa Elian Gonzalez.
That was like the last gasp of, you know, Right-wing exile politics was really the Elian Gonzalez fiasco and so this this was a little bit calmer but like I landed I was like I just landed in a whole new world like it was an incredible and and whether you agree with policies or not it's kind of cool to see when you're hyper aware that like history is happening in your lifetime and before your eyes and that's what Miami was like in the 1980s and growing up we were even aware of it when I was most aware of it as a kid was the money
We lived in this working class Jewish neighborhood in North Miami Beach and everybody was doing good.
They weren't in the drug business per se, but this is the best, is the most successful case study in history for Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics theory.
Because there was so much cash in Miami and it trickled down to everyone.
Whatever business you were in, You were making more cash.
Yeah, and you've heard the stats from the movie about...
You know, the branch of the Federal Reserve in Miami had a cash surplus of more money than all the branches combined in the country.
There was just more cash in Miami.
Nobody had any place to put it.
What you saw in Scarface, when banks were charging a vig to deposit cash...
That was true.
They had no place to put cash.
There was just too much cash.
And it's true that if you took a $20 bill or denomination of 20 or above cash in Miami and tested it, there were traces of cocaine on almost every single bill in Miami.
And it's actually a version, interestingly, of what's going on in the United States in terms of hiring practices and better screening people in law enforcement and people in the public sector in general.
Because what happened there is that you didn't have...
Good people who became cops and then the power went to their head and they became corrupt or anything like that.
You had gangsters, straight up thugs, who decided, well, where better to apply my trade than hiding behind a badge?
So these weren't like, these were bad guys who, it became, we had a, what happened was there was a federal judge, there was a consent decree.
A federal judge, it was a civil rights action, a federal judge looked at the demographics, the changing demographics of Miami, and said, basically 100% of the Miami Police Department was white.
And they said, you need a police force that better represents the community that they're policing.
And so it was a federal judge who just waved his magic pen and said, hire more black officers, hire far more Hispanic officers so you have a police force that reflects the community.
And what happened, I hate to say it, but it's true, they kept reducing the standards.
For hiring.
And that's what happened.
Is that they wound up with guys who were like, wait, I'm on the streets.
I'm a straight up gangster.
But the Miami police are hiring.
Like, that's what happened.
So, really, the system worked in a way in that they weeded out the worst of them.
And that's, I think it's a little bit opposite.
I think, by and large, you have a lot of good cops now.
But the problem is that they're not sufficiently screening in the hiring process to say...
I think you've got guys who are sort of naturally aggressive.
You have a steroid epidemic in the police departments that the unions have completely precluded municipalities from being able to test officers.
I think you have, again, an epidemic that affects a certain minority or percentage of officers and departments, but it's still an issue that you don't want guys like that with the ability to deprive people of life, liberty, and property.
And you would have to be lifting weights literally all day.
I mean, and you could probably maintain that amount of mass for a couple years and then everything would break.
I mean, it's just, it doesn't happen in nature.
And I looked at this dude, I'm like, you are going to fucking, you're going to enforce laws?
Hello, glass house.
You better not bust people for drugs, motherfucker, because you're on a ton of them.
Steroids, call them drugs or hormones or whatever you want to call them.
The idea, and I've talked to guys in martial arts that say, I have to be prepared because the people that I'm running into out on the street, I'm running into really bad guys and I want to be enhanced.
I think you could probably take a little bit, and it would probably help you recover, and you'd be alright.
But most definitely, if you take a lot, like this cop that pulled me over, he had to be on all kinds of shit.
That's gonna fuck with your temper.
I mean, you essentially become a different thing.
We were kind of discussing this yesterday because there's an epidemic of steroids in the UFC. I mean, a true epidemic.
And not just the UFC, but MMA in general.
There's been some high-level guys that have tested positive in other organizations.
And even guys that swore they never took anything and would mock other people who took performance-enhancing drugs.
And they got popped.
So there's...
There's a real issue that we're all, as the mixed martial arts community, sort of coming to grips with now.
But as a police officer, I think being calm and having a sense of peacefulness, of being able to diffuse situations, that was my thing about the Trayvon Martin thing.
When everybody was talking about George Zimmerman and The people that were supporting Zimmerman, they were like, you know, hey, George Zimmerman got attacked, and George Zimmerman, I'm like, okay, here's the problem with that.
George Zimmerman was a fucking moron, first of all, first and foremost.
He wanted to be a cop, they wouldn't let him be a cop, which is fucking bad, which means you gotta be a real moron, you know, because I've met some morons that are cops, you know?
Most cops I meet are great folks, but we all know a few idiots that became cops.
This guy was too fucking stupid to be one of those idiots.
You know, they were like, you're too dumb.
You can't be a cop.
So they give him this job as this community patrol guy, right?
And, second of all, he let this kid, this young kid, was kicking his fucking ass.
This young kid got on top of him, was beating his head off the curb, like, okay, how'd that happen?
Do you not know how to fight at all?
If you don't know how to fight at all, how the fuck are you a cop?
Yeah, and he gets out of the car, and this kid was on the phone with this girl, and he's like, there's some dude following me.
He's in his car, he's getting out of his car, and she was worried for him.
As it turns out, he was a creepy dude with a gun who was stalking this kid who was walking back to his dad's house with an iced tea and Skittles, for crying out loud.
Well, there was a girl that was hanging around the Comedy Store way back in the day that actually said that to one of my friends.
She was a porn star, and she said, you know, he, he, somehow they got into this conversation, and she said, you can fuck me as long as you have a camera in the room.
I'm pretty sure, by the way, a contract is offer acceptance and consideration.
I don't know that you actually have to deliver on it in order to say the contract, you know, this is an illegal contract that you've entered into, you're under arrest.
I can't imagine that that's necessary to go into court and say, no, no, your honor, she's really a hooker.
Well, my friend got busted in a sting operation in New York, and he was flirting with these girls, and one of them said something like, you want to party or something like that?
I mean, he was a drunk guy coming out of a bar flirting with some girls that he didn't know were cops, and they were manipulating the language in order to get him to say that.
Like, he was just being a silly goose.
He was just being a silly guy trying to make—he's a comic, so he's just trying to make these girls laugh like, $10,000!
Like, saying $10,000!
Who the fuck is going to pay a street walker $10,000?
Who even comes up with that on their first offer?
I mean, for $10,000, you can fuck a famous porn star for $10,000.
When I say troll the page, we're kind of like the New York Post of UM football fan pages.
We're like the tabloid.
We don't just post the press releases that come out of the athletic department.
We'll post whatever that's kind of peripherally involved in Miami football or pop culture surrounding Miami football.
Snoop throws up the U in a music video.
Shit like that.
On the day of the Zimmerman verdict...
There was a picture that had been on the internet for some time from like Trayvon Martin's 11th birthday or something like that where his parents or whomever got him a birthday cake with the U logo.
He was apparently a Hurricanes fan.
You know he's a South Florida kid and so it was him smiling 11 year old kid and his UM happy birthday cake.
Great.
So I was just like, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm not going to say a word.
I'm going to post this picture to the Facebook page.
And I can't tell you how all social media hell broke loose in that community.
And I would venture to say that you could write papers on the state of America's race relations based solely on the comments from that image.
It was one of the most disturbing...
Just exchanges about America and race and crime that I have just ever seen in my life.
It was so disturbing.
And I just left it there.
It was kind of like a Rorschach.
And people were writing private messages like, I'm unfriending or unliking this page.
Why don't you post a picture?
First of all, that's not what he looked like.
When, you know, when he was killed, and they post, like, one of those fake pictures of, like, some rapper that, like, people claimed was Trayvon, and, like, things that were debunked, you know, via scopes and otherwise, like, you know, months or years earlier, and just, like, the craziness that ensued, and I'm like, hey, listen, you find a picture of, uh...
George Zimmerman in a U sweater or whatever, I'll post that too.
I mean, like, what do you want?
This is...
It was just...
Because I posted pictures of Barack Obama throwing up the U and then Mitt Romney was campaigning and he threw up the U. Didn't you like...
Yeah, usually I sort of put a break in it because there's like air in between, but like, yeah, but like, yeah, that's how you throw up the U. So, essentially, but let me get to the point here.
Well, my point was initially when we started talking about this is that he's so socially unskilled that another guy who maybe was a good cop or another guy who was good with people would have seen this young kid walking and said, how you doing, brother?
I mean, how many of those exchanges between two human beings could vary radically depending on the social skills of the person that's quote-unquote in a position of power?
And that's an issue with what we were talking about earlier with steroids distorting people's aggression, distorting people's perception of danger or of their power over a situation or What's just and what's ethical?
Too often we're seeing these stories, thanks to the internet, of situations where calling the police turns an otherwise benign situation potentially deadly.
And that's a frightening thought.
Because even if these are isolated incidents...
The proliferation of them and our exposure to them now, thanks to the internet, is creating an environment where kids are actually feeling like, maybe I shouldn't call the police.
Maybe that's not what I should do.
And you shouldn't ever feel that way, you know?
You shouldn't have that feeling.
But I started to lose a lot of, like, when I say friends, I mean, you know, social media friends, friends in quotes, friends and followers on Twitter.
And I finally just, like, after the verdict, I was like, listen...
It's all good if you unfollow me for my Trayvon Zimmerman tweets.
If Zimmerman had unfollowed Trayvon, we wouldn't even be fucking talking about this.
See what's more disturbing to me is the fact that you have a trend where You have a version of events perpetuated by the police, which is usually always the first story you ever read.
It's a press release or the statement from the police.
So, it's never innocent until proven guilty.
It's like, we're charging this guy or we arrested this guy.
But they take that money, and then because these guys don't want to go after that money to try to get it back, because then the DEA comes at them even harder, they lose that money.
The public sector, as far as I'm concerned, should be held to a higher standard of accountability, not a lower or no accountability.
And if you are going to have the power and the authority to deprive people of life, liberty, and property, you need to be held to a higher standard.
And the lack of accountability that police officers see happen all over the country feeds this mental idea that you might...
You might very well be right.
That might be a mental deficiency, might be a form of PTSD, that you might actually believe that you're above the law, that the laws don't apply to you, because as you said, only in the most extreme and extraordinary cases are police officers ever prosecuted.
And I don't think there needs to be a, or there should be any kind of referendum or any kind of, I don't know, like...
An idea that there's a certain number of police officers that need to be...
Of course not.
When someone commits a crime, I don't care if they're black, white, or blue, okay?
There doesn't need to be a quota.
There just needs to be justice equally applied.
And that's the problem.
You know, in Miami, in the 1980s, people...
I mean, you think, if I was here...
For the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
And so when I think of race riots, you think of Detroit or Watts or Rodney King.
But Miami was the race riot capital of America in the 1980s.
We had no less than three incidents, all involving police officers, mostly white and Hispanic police officers, shooting and killing, or in the case of the first one, beating to death.
Unarmed black men.
And they all resulted in horrific race riots.
Some neighborhoods in Miami have never fully recovered from the 1980 riots.
You still see empty, undeveloped, entire city blocks that were burned down.
During those 1980 riots that people have not come back and reinvested in those African-American communities.
And we had that in 1980, 83, and 89. When the eyes of the world were on Miami for the Super Bowl, it was supposed to be, oh, we get all this good publicity.
We're having this world-class event.
The city was burning because of an officer who had first been...
Convicted if I'm not mistaken and then it was overturned on appeal and he went free and We rioted.
You, for a short period of time, went back to actually being someone who withholds the peace, or enforces the peace, or keeps the peace, and then from there, they went back to being revenue collectors.
Because that's what the fuck is really Policing for profit, absolutely.
When that kid, Eric Garner, that gentleman, which kid, he's older, that guy got dragged to the ground and choked, didn't have any loose cigarettes on him, wasn't selling anything, and people are like, oh, that guy had 30 different prior arrests, and oh, he resisted arrest.
That's not resisting arrest.
When you take a fucking innocent person and you violate their rights and you grab them around the neck and throw them to the ground, that should have never happened in the first place, and the only reason it happened, because of taxes.
You have to remember, he's never been accused of a capital crime.
He wasn't committing a capital crime.
And even if he were, which is to say that he was facing the death penalty for whatever he was being accused of, that's not how we carry out justice in this country.
You don't get choked to death on the street like an animal.
An organization, a great local blog, Crespo Graham in Miami, who does a lot...
He's, like, obsessed.
We have this chapter 119, these public record laws.
We call them sunshine laws, where everything's in the sunshine.
Doesn't quite always work that way in Florida, but a sunny place for shady people and all that.
But he just does public record requests nonstop, and so people start leaking stuff to him before he even requests it.
And he got an email that this, like, third shift, this overnight shift in Little Haiti neighborhood...
That the city of Miami police's arrest quota.
They actually had, from like the shift sergeant, send out an email with quotas that included arrest quotas, meaning that each officer had to arrest, effectuate an arrest for what he didn't specify, but they had a minimum number of arrests they had to perform during a shift.
What would happen in this country if the entire country, if all 350 million people agreed, okay, even you fucking hardcore criminals, no one's going to do anything wrong for a month.
Just one month.
The system would shut down.
Yeah, the opposite of the purge.
For one month, no one's going to speed, no one's going to steal, no one's going to do anything wrong.
I think about what Hitchens, rest in peace, always used to say about the necessity of religion to keep us From becoming savages.
We know right from wrong.
We have internal moral compass.
I said earlier, I'm like, God, I wish I could be corrupt so I could make more money and take care of my family better.
But I can't do it.
Every time I try to lay off what's right or wrong, I get right back on Twitter and I'm like, this shit's wrong and people need to know about it.
And it's the same thing there.
It's like, without the Ten Commandments, Would we just start raping and robbing and murdering?
I don't think we would do that.
It goes back to this sense of self-worth.
I think we all have, by and large, this sense of self-worth and preservation, which might very well be off the charts, but I think actually makes us a little bit more civilized, because it's like, well, I have too much to lose.
Maybe I'm not going to just rape, rob, and murder.
One of the issues that we have with the internet is that, you know, you have a real issue with people stalking, harassing, trolling people, being vicious to people.
If you're looking at a person and you take a person and you show them a picture of them with 15 dicks in their mouth, which, by the way, I'm not really talking about that because that's usually pretty funny.
There's a lot of pictures of me with dicks in my mouth.
I've never once tried to take them off the internet.
I think they're hilarious.
It doesn't bother me.
But for some people, it's genuinely upsetting, especially women that find pictures of them attached to- I'm googling right now.
Facebook is a little bit better because with Facebook, you can click on the person's profile and you see, oh, this is Mike Jones from blah, blah, blah street.
Yeah, I mean that does become a real issue with social interaction, but I think it's a temporary hiccup.
I really do.
I think that this, we're in a stage of almost an adolescent stage of interactivity where what we're experiencing now is just, it's a weird like bridge between total connectivity.
The complete absence of any form of privacy is on the way.
It might be a hundred years from now.
It might be 30. It might be in our lifetime.
It may be a couple months from now.
Somebody might come up with something and they'll say, look, this one thing that we're going to implement is going to be unbelievable as far as exchanging information, as far as our knowledge base.
The actual IQ of human beings is going to double within weeks.
We're going to change the world, but no more privacy.
We are essentially, we're driving around in Model A's, but one day someone's gonna invent a fucking 911 GT3. And you know, if you went back and took time when Henry Ford's driving around in a stupid fucking shitty car, you know...
And you pulled up beside him in a Mustang Shelby GT500 and go, check this shit out.
We're working on a doc about 9-11 right now, and it's been like 14 years, which is incredible, because it seems like such a modern historical event, but it seems like just yesterday, and when you consider how much the world has changed, particularly technologically, there was no Twitter.
And I think, like, what you're talking about on your website where all these people are getting upset and, you know, the Trayvon Martin thing and people are interacting and it's racism and all this.
All that stuff, I think, is a byproduct of the monkey DNA that we still carry around in our bodies.
And I think we're on our way to transcending that in some very strange way where it's not going to matter what part of the world you're from.
It's not going to matter.
It's all that.
One of the things we've seen Do you really believe that?
Yep.
These people getting married in Alabama, the way the world is changing, that I believe is 100% because of the internet.
I believe that wholeheartedly.
And that's one of the things that encourages me.
And I feel like this trend, like today, no one could try to bring back slavery today.
But in 1870, 1865, 1860, these were real arguments.
These are real arguments where people are saying we should be able to keep slaves.
That's a fucking blink of an eye, man.
That is not that long ago.
You're talking about 150 years.
That ain't shit.
That's not shit, historically.
I mean, that's so recent.
And more so now than ever before.
More so within the last few years than ever before.
And, you know, you've seen ridiculous things, though, like...
The social justice warriors, these really weird white people that are trying so hard to get black people to love them that they just go out of their way to just be outrageously progressive to the point where they're actually prejudiced against other white people.
They go so far left to become right.
I mean, I've seen some ridiculous shit where I saw this one guy who was quoting about Osama bin Laden saying that I will never celebrate someone's death You know, even if they were a horrible person, you know, and then the same guy quoted about Christopher Hitchens, you know, good riddance.
He was a misogynist and a warmonger.
Like, okay, fuckhead.
You can't have it both ways.
But what he is is the uber version of the social justice warrior, the unfuckable white dude trying so hard to To get women and black people to love him because he just is completely insubstantial in any real form in the normal context of our culture.
That trend, that like, what was that, like the late 90s, early zeroes, when like hip-hop was peaking, they did a black, there was the Black Honeymooners, I don't remember, there was the Black Airplane, was Soulplane.
And it was a book called The Tanning of America, written by a guy named Steve Stout, who was a major duty guy in the record business and is now a bigwig in the marketing and advertising world.
And his thesis was that hip-hop culture...
Led to the election of the first black president.
The idea that a generation of Americans that grew up immersed with the music, the fashion, how it infiltrated the Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the consumer goods sector, and we just grew up immersed in this culture, it tanned the mental complexion.
Of Americans and made it okay or even cool to vote for the first black president.
And so we had four hours to kind of prove this thesis.
And we go to Sundance last year.
I think it was actually, the venue was called The Black House.
And it was an event that sort of celebrated the African American cinema and culture that was going on at Sundance.
And so we're going to do like this panel discussion because the movie wasn't done yet.
We're going there and someone had said to me, for the first time, we've been working on this project for almost two years, or a year and a half, and someone said to me for the first time, like, particularly, I guess they were concerned about that environment, the Black House, which turned out to be a fantastic experience, but they said, well, what if somebody says, like, well, why are you guys doing it?
You know, you two, like, white Jewish dudes from Miami.
And then I'm like, and what if somebody else brings it up publicly or asks me about it or what the hell am I going to say or what the hell am I going to do?
A little white Jewish guy, like me, was responsible for the first all-black sitcoms on television.
Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times, All in the Family, which really brought the discussion of race to mainstream television in the way stand-up comics were doing it, obviously well before that, but said, we're going to go on network television and have serious conversations about politics and race and poverty in this country.
White Jewish guy.
And then you look at Russell.
Russell Simmons teams up with?
Rick Rubin, a white Jewish guy at NYU. You look at all these sort of relationships that helped.
We interviewed Brett Ratner, white Jewish kid from Miami Beach, who loved hip-hop.
Because hip-hop wasn't just urban music.
It was youth culture music.
And that's why I captured the generation of kids who didn't want to listen to what their parents were listening to.
And it wasn't rock and roll anymore.
It became hip-hop or rap music at the time.
And the second thing was, Steve Stout, to his credit, When we walked in the room to meet with him, he didn't know we were white.
He knew we did cocaine cowboys.
He knew we did the U. He knew the work.
And he respected and liked the work.
So he's like, oh, I want to work with those guys who did this shit that I like and respect.
It wasn't like, oh wait, they're white?
So to his credit, he never thought about it either.
So it's like, why should I start thinking about it?
I'm dealing with the same thing right now with dogfight.
Because he became the role model for a new generation of young people in Miami to literally try to fight their way to a better life.
And there's this neighborhood, which is right where Kimbo came from and would fight in the backyards, called West Perrine.
So this is 22 miles southwest of South Beach.
So when you think Miami...
Most people default, like I said, to Ocean Drive.
This is 22 miles southwest of that.
This is in an area that I call a suburban ghetto.
And I say that because when you think of ghetto or an urban neighborhood, you think of vertical.
You know, people stacked in projects.
You know, on top of each other, next to each other.
But Perrine...
Has these very modest houses on a pretty reasonably sized lot.
So you have a little house and you have a nice size yard.
And so Dada 5000, Daphir Harris, he's this guy who actually, there's a video of him, a YouTube video that we use in the movie, of him benching in his mom's yard there in prime.
650 pounds he benches.
And...
He's bench pressing and Team Kimbo comes rolling by and sees this guy, this beast, and is like, I'm going to fight Ray Mercer in Atlantic City.
Why don't you roll with us?
So for a year, Dada is on...
The fucking jet, you know, going around the world with Team Kimbo.
The vast majority of the community is below the poverty level.
Unemployment is like a third higher than the national average.
And you basically have a community with very little hope and very little opportunity.
You've criminalized a vast majority of the male population so they can't get work.
And they think that their best hope Is to fight in these illegal, unsanctioned, bare-knuckle backyard brawls, upload the footage to YouTube, and hopefully get discovered by a professional MMA promoter or trainer, and try to go pro.
Heavyweights tend to age better, but he fought at 205, I believe, in the UFC. I think there's something going on with heavyweights where your body takes longer to learn how to move all that mass.
If I had a look at it that way, lighter weight fighters also rely much more on speed and reflexes.
I think as you get larger, you tend to rely more on skills and more on It's just sort of an understanding of what your body can and can't do.
They have smaller gas tanks, just undeniably.
There's no way a heavyweight, unless you're Cain Velasquez, who's really a fucking freak of nature, can fight at the same sort of a pace that a lighter weight guy can.
So the UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez is one of the most unique athletes I've ever seen.
Well, not him in his case, no, because he's all fucked up.
I mean...
Kane, who is an amazing fighter and one of the, I think, he might, is a good argument, he might be the best heavyweight of all time, but his body keeps breaking.
He keeps blowing out knees and shoulders.
It's because he's so mentally tough and he's so driven and focused and so intense and dedicated that he pushes through injuries.
And you can't fucking do that.
You know, when you push through injuries, what happens is they just break further.
You know, I mean, you can't push through a knee injury.
What you're doing is, yeah, you gotta get surgery or you gotta heal or you gotta figure out a way To recuperate the scenario or alter your training so that this doesn't happen in the future.
But they're all just so fucking tough, man, which is what made them great wrestlers in the first place and what allowed them to transition into MMA. But Kane has this insane gas tank where he just doesn't get fucking tired.
He just overwhelms guys because he's got so much fucking cardio.
And a lot of it is probably natural.
Like, his body...
Different people have different, like, natural VO2 maxes.
It's just, it's one of those things like some people have more fast twitch muscle fiber, some people have thicker bones, some people have more, they can just, especially for some reason it seems like Mexicans in particular have very good cardio.
It's really common.
I mean, it could conceivably be that a lot of Mexican folks come from really hard-working environments, and they've been forced to work labor jobs, like a lot of them, especially second, third generation, whose parents had an arduous trek to get over here from Mexico.
It could be mental, it could be just more mentally tough, or it could be some physiological aspect.
But my point is that he's a rarity in that his gas tank is just insane.
Most heavyweights, as they get older, they kind of learn how to pace themselves better.
They learn their skills.
They learn how to be more efficient with their movement.
Like Vladimir Klitschko, who is just unstoppable as the heavyweight champion in boxing.
I want to say he's 39 years old.
Which is, I mean, he's coming into his own now.
I mean, when he was younger, he went through a streak where he got stopped.
I think two fights in a row, he got KO'd and, you know, wasn't looking good for him.
And now he's like, you know, all these years later, he's like unstoppable.
Yeah, he's 38 right now.
And he's, you know, he hasn't lost like 10 fucking years.
I had a dog that killed one of my other dogs, and I loved the dog that she killed, but I loved her just as much, and it was very sad.
I mean, obviously I should have loved the dog that got killed more, because she wasn't a cunt.
She wasn't an asshole that was, you know, out there killing the other dogs.
But this dog was a sweetie, and I picked her up at the pound, and she lived at the pound.
She was in one of those no-kill shelters for like eight months, and...
When I was young, man, I had a real problem.
It was hard to talk about, I guess.
Where I felt like...
I always had this need to help strays.
And I think I had this need to help strays because I felt like a stray.
And when I would see a dog in a pound...
I bought a cat from a fucking pet store because it hissed at me.
Because I felt like this poor fucking cat.
Scared of me.
You don't have to be scared of me.
I love you.
And I felt that way about this dog, this poor dog.
I used to call her Squeaky because when I picked her up, she couldn't even talk.
She couldn't bark because she had barked so much so often in this pound that her voice was gone.
So when she was barking in the pound, she'd be like...
It was like this squeaky noise.
And I was like, what the fuck is wrong with her voice?
And I realized, oh my god, she's barking all day and she doesn't have a voice anymore.
And then when I took her home and took care of her, she eventually got her voice back and she barked like a normal dog.
But that dog fucking loved people, man.
She loved people.
She was so happy to be out of that.
But she didn't like other dogs, because if other dogs came near her, she felt like it was a competition for love.
Like, if you came near another dog, that other dog was going to get that love.
So she would get upset at that dog for stealing love from her, and she would try to attack it.
So I loved her equally, even though she was an idiot, you know?
But it wasn't her fault that she was an idiot, you know?
I realized from then on I would never get a dog that's not a puppy.
You gotta raise them from the time they're puppies because then you don't have any phobias or weirdness.
You get a chance to raise them around people and raise them around other dogs and socialize them and it's an important aspect of humans just like it's an important aspect of any other animal that's in our culture.
So, you know, you can love your fucking shitty kids just as much as you love your good kids because it's partly your fault that they're shitty.
People learn different ways and people absorb the lessons they learn in different ways.
It's like you were talking about the chemical makeup of a fighter and how different bones and different bodies respond differently to different stimulus and depending on your size and your shape and your training and your steroids or whatever.
I think that's true of a human.
You're born with a certain chemical balance and I'm not saying that can't shift or change with time but I think there are certain inclinations that we are born with.
Good or bad that cannot be rectified by a proper or positive upbringing.
When you have a really terrible person, that terrible person is not treated with love.
Almost universally.
I just don't buy that unless you have some like real issue, like a real brain issue, where there's like some part of the mind It develops decay or there's a tumor, there's an injury, there's something where there's a disconnect, two very critical processes.
Unless that's the case, like, you don't make a monster accidentally.
You're saying that some people, no matter what you do, no matter how much effort you put in, how much love you give these kids, and how much you expose them to different environments, you give them different tasks and different learning opportunities, they're still going to be shitheads.
But I'm saying it's also possible that they have mental defects.
That's all I'm really talking about, which is what you've already said, which is that there are people who are wired, is what I'm saying, to propensities to violence, to be short-fused.
Well, it's this world, though, where, and you're going to get on me about this, too, because I don't have kids, but it's this world where everybody's looking for an answer for why their kid's an asshole, for why their kid's acting out, for why their kid is too sensitive, for why their kid...
And everybody needs a diagnosis, and or a drug that can help...
Fix them.
Everybody needs to know, like, oh, I'm not fucking up.
My kid actually has some, you know, invented malady.
My friend Lainey, her and her boyfriend found these fucking cats underneath the house, and this cat had given birth to these cats, and she was giving away kittens.
Again, I have to take in strays, so I took this fucking stray in, and this crazy fucking cat was in my house.
And learning from feral cats, you realize, like, oh, okay.
Like, this cat is already fucked.
By the time I got to it, it was X amount of months old or whatever.
There was no fixing this fucking thing.
It was already fucked.
And that is the case with human beings.
You develop a certain amount of pathways in your mind, in your intellect, In the way you comprehend the world, in the way you interact with your environment, that's based upon the dangers that you've been exposed to, based upon the input that you've had.
And once those pathways are defined in a very violent and negative way, or whether you've been ignored, or whether you've been spoiled to the point where you could scream at the help and yell at the housekeepers and everybody bows down in front of you because you're a Rockefeller or something along those lines, the affluenza aspect of it.
When you get to a certain point, those pathways are so established in the mind that it's insanely difficult to change that.
So when you're coming along, you're saying, like, hey, you know, I need a pill to fix my kid.
No, you didn't pay attention to them enough.
Like, a child needs constant attention.
Babies need to have a mother around them all the time, a father around them all the time.
They need input.
They need to try to develop an understanding of their world, and a lot of people don't do that.
They pass their kid off to the fucking nanny.
They don't pay attention to it when it cries in the crib.
And they wonder why their kid gets fucked up when they're working 17 hours a day and they never see the kid.
And they're like, I don't have any fucking time to deal with this kid.
Just because you can, because it can be done, doesn't mean everyone's going to do it.
Not everyone's going to finish a fucking marathon.
Just because people start running.
Some people run 100 miles.
They do that ultra marathon.
Some people get 5 miles in, they're like, I can't fucking do this.
And for whatever reason, they decide to take a nap.
They decide to sit on the side of the highway and stop.
Some people, they decide, you know what, my mom was a prostitute, my dad was a junkie, and I am not going to be like that.
I'm going to learn and I'm never going to have a drink.
I have a friend who's a great guy and his grandmother used to lock him in his fucking room and lock the door and leave him there for the weekend so she could get drunk.
His mom was never there.
His parents were never there.
And this fucking guy, to this day, won't touch alcohol.
But what I'm saying is that there are people who have a predisposition towards certain behavior and there are people who may or may not be raised right.
I think we're confusing...
The two issues.
I think ultimately we might actually be saying the same thing in one way or another.
But I'm talking about legitimate defects in individuals.
Most certainly there are legitimate defects in certain individuals.
Most certainly.
But I think that a lot of what we're dealing with as a culture, as a community is...
If you look at people in indigenous cultures, they're constantly around their children.
They spend all this time with their children, and you see far less instances of mental issues.
You see far less mental diseases.
You see far less issues of depression and the sort of existential angst that we exhibit almost like more frequently than not in our culture.
And I think a lot of that has to do with the developmental process of a child is not just misunderstood, but is ignored and is treated in a way where it's very irresponsible the way a lot of people raise children.
I have two friends that are very nice folks and they both work insanely difficult jobs where they're gone all day long and their kids are starting to be fucked up.
And we've been friends with them for a long time.
So I've known their kids since they were little.
They've got a kid.
I mean, I can't be too specific about it or I'll be – but – I'm sure you're that.
Their son is fucked up, man, and they're smart, but they don't have the time, and they're not around the kid all the time, and the kid's terrified, and he fucking screams in the middle of the night all the time.
They're never home.
They have nannies to take care of them, and the kids are really confused.
And these people have long hours.
They work long hours.
And I don't see that changing.
And I see their kids coming out of this in a very fucked up way.
And I'm watching it happen from the beginning to where they are now.
To the point where me and my family, we're kind of avoiding them now.
We don't want to hang out with them because their kids are starting to be disturbed.
They're acting aggressive towards other kids in some sort of a weird way.
There need to be around their parents.
It's not normal.
It's like they're drowning.
They need air and their parents are air.
It's like they cling to them.
They hold on to them.
They're scared of everything.
And what it is, is these kids are not being nurtured correctly.
Because it's not natural in the wild as a human being, as an organism.
It's not natural to be away from your parents for 16 hours of every day.
It's not.
It's not natural to see your parents just as you go to bed and as you wake up.
That's fucking crazy.
But that is the norm for a lot of these people that want their cake and they want to eat it too.
They want to have a career and also have children.
You know, I know a woman who is a fucking huge executive at a major company.
And this crazy lady has three kids, and they're all nuts.
Their fucking kids are nuts.
You know why?
Because mommy barely exists.
Mommy exists in their life for ten minutes a day.
That's nuts, man.
That's nuts for a three-year-old.
And they don't know what mommy is.
They're not a rounder.
You're supposed to be a rounder hours and hours.
It's supposed to be cuddled and nurtured and you play with them and you teach them about life.
You teach them how to talk and how to count.
And then I have another friend and his wife doesn't work at all.
And the kid is three.
It can already count to a thousand.
It already knows how to spell his name and spell words.
Because why?
Because the mom's interacting with the kid all day long.
And this kid is happy and I'm seeing the direct...
Effect of people nurturing their kid and developing their kid as a project, mentoring their kid.
The same way you would mentor someone about how to do martial arts.
The same way you would mentor someone about how to write or how to do mathematics.
A parent who would have this human being that is born of them that would not want to engage at that level.
You know what I mean?
Who would be like, oh, I want to go to work and leave my three children in the care of some other person who is not responsible for them in the absolute way that I would be responsible.
I can't even fathom that mentality.
So I'm not trying to get parents...
Off the hook with this theory.
But you also had an example of a perfectly well-adjusted, outstanding citizen and upright citizen and human being who came from a horrible environment and overcame that.
And it's an issue where people conveniently, intelligent people, conveniently like to skirt the responsibility of what it is to raise their children.
And I see it from friends.
I see it from friends that work long hours.
And it's one of the reasons why I choose to work much fewer hours than I could.
I want to be around.
I'm leaving from here.
I'm going to go pick up my kid.
And when I do that, I'm going to hang out with them, and I'm going to play, and we're going to have a good time, and we're going to talk about stuff, and I think it's a responsibility that a parent has.
I mean, it allows us to become successful to the point where we have less stress, you have a nice home, you have food on the table, you can take care of your needs.
But when it gets past a certain point, you know, my friend Brian Callen said it best.
He said, you want to be successful enough where you don't worry about what it costs to go out to dinner.
He goes, after that, it's all bullshit.
And he's right.
I mean, once, you know, you can have a nice meal and you don't worry about food.
You don't worry about having a roof over your head.
You don't have to live in a dangerous neighborhood.
You can afford to live in an area where you know that your family and your loved ones are safe.
Other than that, it's all bullshit.
Well, you have a bigger house and then a bigger, and now you have a castle.
Now you own an island.
Come on.
It's all more money, more problems.
Biggie said it right.
You know?
At a certain point in time, you trap yourself with your own ambition, and you get yourself into a situation where you realize, oh, this is not the smart way to do this.
I've just been caught up in this zero-sum game, this idea that you have to continue to grow.
We're coming out to LA. Once a year, we make the pilgrimage.
Otherwise, we work and live in Miami.
And we're coming out to LA. And it's like...
We had a meeting.
And it's like...
This is...
On the one hand, it's like...
This is the most important meeting of our careers.
And then I thought about it...
Because I like to do this sometimes.
Just kind of flip something on its head and go 180 degrees.
And say, what if my belief is the exact...
What if the reality is the exact opposite of my belief?
So I said...
What if this is the least important meeting of our careers?
And it dawned on me, it's like, it's something kind of outside of our, it's in the entertainment industry, but it's kind of outside of our core competency as nonfiction filmmakers, and it certainly would advance us in the industry, but I was just like, if nothing comes of it, or it doesn't go well, this most important meeting of our careers...
We go home.
We go back to work making our documentaries.
I have very little to complain about.
I don't have to worry about where my next meal is going to come from or if I'm going to have a roof over my head.
I still got to work.
But we'll just keep doing what we've always been doing and we're pretty happy.
We're pretty happy in life.
What more do I actually...
I'd love to be able to support my parents a little bit.
There's little things like that.
But beyond that, it's just like, so what happens if this most important meeting doesn't go well?
Life is still pretty good.
I don't have that much to...
To complain about all things.
So I don't know if that's a product of being...
And 10 years ago, I would have been like, oh shit, this is it.
Everything's riding on this.
And now I'm kind of like, well, but what if it doesn't go well?
I went to an arts high school, and this is the mid-90s, early to mid-90s.
So, you know, drug trends, I find, like, nostalgia trends are cyclical.
Like, there's certain perennials.
Like, pot's always popular.
But, like, in the mid-90s, it was back to, like, 60s drugs again.
People were doing, my friends were doing like psychedelics.
They were doing acid, shrooms.
Good for them.
Ecstasy was like in a similar genre, so MDMA was on the rise then.
High school kids couldn't afford cocaine, but that wasn't as popular as it later became in the aughts, you know, in the zeros again.
That trend was coming around.
But like, um...
I was just never curious to kind of alter my mind.
My partners and I started our first company when we were sophomores in high school.
So I was like working.
I was like sort of goal oriented.
And then I was like, I was raised to believe that like, you go to school and then you go to college, you know, and you go to college.
I think it was my junior year in high school.
I had friends who were seniors.
And for the first time in my life, I learned that not everybody goes to college.
That was the first time I knew that.
Because I was just raised to believe that that's just the natural course of life.
I had friends who were, like I said, we were in arts high school.
We were going to go, I'm going to New York and I'm going to be a dancer.
And I'm going to go to LA. And I was like, for college?
And they're like...
No, no, no.
I'm gonna get an apartment with some friends.
That was like a foreign concept to me.
So I was like the straight arrow guy.
I was a kid who finally got the respect that we would sit around in a circle and they'd be passing the joint and they would just pass it like around me.
Timothy Leary had a great expression about weed, not about weed, rather, about LSD, that LSD induces states of paranoia and psychosis in people that have never tried it.
Like, that people are terrified of LSD and, you know, just like...
I mean, like, I felt if I did Coke, you'd have to scrape me off the fucking ceiling with a shovel or, like, a rake or something, because I would just, like...
I would just, like, be crazy.
Like, this is how I am normally, you know, with some caffeine.
I just...
I was always...
I wasn't afraid.
I was always just like, I'm not going to have a positive reaction to this.
And I don't know that the prohibition has ever been a deterrent, because obviously drugs are quite...
You don't even know what you're ingesting in your lungs.
Your body doesn't know what to do with it.
It's alien.
You know, the cannabinoid receptors are like, what the fuck is this?
You know, it's like the same argument against artificial sweeteners, but to a much more heightened level because the way it's interacting with your mind is, you know...
I just think, again, I think it's traces, marijuana prohibition is like traces of this kind of like racism we were talking about earlier, this idea that you can't get past it.
If you objectively analyze, we're talking about Trayvon Zimmerman, if you just objectively analyze the facts of the situation, there's really only one reality there.
And it's incredible to me how people, how race gets in the way of blocking things.
Their access to that reality, but it's the same thing with marijuana prohibition.
It's a plant that grows out of the earth that is less dangerous than poison ivy, which is legal.
They had the snow day out east with the blizzard a couple weeks ago.
And so instead of sitting around, dicking around at home, because it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone thought it was going to be, they decided instead of watching TV or playing video games, or I don't know, smoking the pot, they said, let's grab a couple shovels, go door to door, and make five bucks and offer to clean people's, you know, driveways.
And the cops came.
Because they got complaints that kids were knocking on doors or whatever, I guess, and stopped the kids.
Does it say the cops' name so we can say it on the air?
Police Chief Michael Giannone told MyJerseyCentral.com the two teens were not arrested or issued a ticket, but were stopped because the town was in a so-called state of emergency in advance of the coming storm.
If you're not giving the government, like I said, if you're not paying the government 25 cents to make a dime, because how much are these kids going to make that they could go out and spend, I don't know, $300 on a permit so that for one day, on a snow day when they're not at school, they could go around and make five bucks a driveway?
I think cops should investigate really hot women that date these old, decrepit old men that are barely alive, and they drive around in Rolls Royces and shit.
The Seminoles would never confirm this, but there was a rumor that they actually sent a witch doctor or something to kind of de-poltergeist or whatever the room.
And then they completely redid the room, changed the number.
I always say the Indian casinos, the famous saying is, the house always wins.
The Indian casino is the only casino where the house never wins.
Because no matter how much money you lose, we still rape their women and stole their country.
So it's like, call it reparations, sit down at the one-armed bandit and lose some money for crying out loud.
Yeah.
But what's interesting is that now, and this might go to your earlier point, that it's affluenza, there are no Native Americans that work at these casinos anymore.
They sit at home, get the check, Every month from the revenue.
And now they're hiring white boys to wrestle alligators and do all the Indian cultural, Native American, rather cultural shit.
And there's no Indians in an Indian casino anymore.
They're all just kind of living off the fat of the land and getting their checks and not incentivized to motivate or do anything.
And you see higher rates of alcoholism, of drug abuse, and they're just sitting around getting checks and a lot of them are dying.
Well, that's always been an issue on Native American reservations, right?
Alcoholism, drug abuse, depression.
I mean, their culture was stolen.
I mean, it's like essentially they were wiped out except for a few survivors who were then forced to assimilate in this new, strange culture and then made aware of it painfully every step of the way when you're growing up that you were the loser in this cultural genocide attack.
Look, you could still have the same exact team, the same exact athletes, the same exact pride, and just let's get together and have a contest to come up with a new name.
And you would get people that would be so happy about that.
And I think they were just coming out of the 60s with that transition where, in terms of censorship, Where you could start pushing the envelope in the 60s.
By the 70s, there was no envelope anymore in just mainstream cinema.
You could do practically anything.
And they did.
And that wasn't just in terms of sex and violence, but in terms of the reality and the grittiness of the stories and the characters.
It's like the people that are in it, they're great actors.
It feels real.
There's some Dirty Harry moments where you're like, go ahead, make my day.
I'm like, come on.
Fuck out of here, crazy asshole.
You know, it's like, they're fun, but, you know, it's a fun movie to watch, but it doesn't give you a feeling like you're actually watching something that could actually be taking place.
We did this doc called Raw Deal, A Question of Consent.
And Raw Deal was just our working title.
And it was about the alleged rape of a stripper at the Delta Chi fraternity house at the University of Florida in Gainesville in the spring of 99. And the entire night's events were captured on two video cameras.
And so we used the video footage and then we interviewed the stripper and we interviewed some of the fraternity men.
So the thing about the footage is that it was placed in the public record.
I was talking about these very liberal public record laws we have in Florida.
So it was placed in the public record and it became like the cause celeb in Gainesville.
We premiered at Sundance Film Festival and then later went to the Edinburgh Film Festival.
It's like the Sundance of Europe.
So we go to Edinburgh and all the questions, which is kind of interesting because most of the questions in America were about this controversy, which I'll get into in a minute, but almost all the questions in Edinburgh We're about what the hell the Greek system is.
They don't have it there.
So they were completely...
This was like a total...
It was like a Nat Geo doc for them.
They were like, what is this...
What is fraternities?
And I'm like the least qualified person to be at...
To be talking about that.
I think when you go to the University of Miami, which I did...
And I was a Miami guy.
Like, you don't need to...
For social interaction, you don't need a club.
Like you might need to do in Gainesville or Tallahassee or these college towns.
These insulated college towns where the social environment is very kind of restricted.
So they're hazing these kids or whatever this ritual.
The big brother, little brother pledge ritual out in the forest.
They go back to the fraternity house, to the common area, and they have two strippers that they hired to come and perform.
One of the strippers leaves after the show.
one of the strippers goes back for a private party with some of the fraternity men come the dawn she goes running to a neighboring fraternity house her grandmother was actually a house mom of one of the she thought this was the house that her grandmother worked at it wasn't but she's wearing nothing but a t-shirt that belonged to one of the fraternity men coming up to about her belly button and banging on the door of this neighboring house saying that she had been raped and she told the university police department that they had videotaped it and they go and get the videotaped footage and spoiler alert
watch one of the two videotapes and arrest the stripper for filing a false police report based on the videotaped footage and as a result of that One of the two videotapes.
The second videotape, as it turns out, was just coverage of...
It was like A cam, B cam.
So the second videotape doesn't show that much more.
It just shows alternate angles of the same action rather than...
So what happens is there's now a misdemeanor filing a false police report case against this woman.
And as a result, the media says, well, we want to see that this is evidence in a criminal case.
Her lawyer argues that under rape shield laws that her identity should be protected and this videotape footage should be protected because it depicts a rape.
A judge viewed the footage and says, this ain't no rape.
And they release the footage to the public.
And there's a backlog at the state attorney's office and the clerk of courts there.
Because they're like making copies of the videotape and sending it to people.
So in Gainesville, if you were the first person on your block to get the tape...
What they call the rape tape.
You'd have a kegger.
People would invite friends over to their house.
Because you were the first person to get it and everybody wanted to see it.
So what happens is like...
Growing up in Miami, you got friends, of course, who go to Gainesville, go to Tallahassee, go to the two major state schools.
Of course, only in Florida do our two flagship state schools were they both targets of major serial killers.
Ted Bundy in Tallahassee and Danny Rowling in University of Florida.
Only in Florida.
And...
So we hear from friends.
So I'll never forget this as long as I live.
We hear from one of our friends.
And we grew up same neighborhood.
I say that same upbringing, white, middle class Jewish kids.
I say that to say we had similar kind of life experiences.
And come at things with a not dissimilar worldview.
So they said, did you hear?
This is like summer of 99 by now.
And they're like, did you hear about this case with Delta Chi and the stripper and the videotape?
I said, yeah, yeah.
I read about it.
And they're like, I just saw the videotape at a friend's house.
I was like, well, what happened?
And my friend's like, he's like, it was disgusting.
What they do to this poor woman, like, I haven't been able to eat or sleep for days.
It's horrible what they put her through, how they talk to her, how they put her down, how they hold her down.
She's kicking and trying to get away.
And I can't believe they haven't arrested these guys.
And it's just, I'm just completely distraught over it.
And I'm like, two reasonable, educated, similar demo guys watch the same footage and diametrically disagree about whether or not they witnessed a consensual or non-consensual sex act.
What I think is that you have one of the most oft-committed, least reported crimes in the history of man.
Most of these crimes, as they say, are not like the masked man in the bushes.
Stranger rape makes up the minority of rape.
It's mostly acquaintance or date rape.
What I think though is that you have a world where we expect videotaped footage to tell an objective truth.
To say, here's the surveillance video, there's the guy robbing the store, let's go find him, case closed.
When you have a crime like this that exists Predominantly in the minds of the alleged victim and alleged perpetrator, it's almost impossible to determine because not all...
What she claimed is like, this wasn't a Hollywood rape.
This wasn't me kicking and screaming and crying going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
She was a professional stripper.
She had been most of her life.
And she comes from a world where we spoke to a rape crisis counselor whose office was near strip clubs, like close to a lot of strip clubs in Florida, and he...
Found a lot of professional girls, so to speak, who would come in, and they're always trying to maintain a line.
You know, this is what...
Ever got a lap dance, like, here are the rules.
I can touch you, you can...
And then over the course of the thing, depending on how much money is spent, the lines get blurred.
There are certain things, there are certain compromises that are made.
And so what happens here is that...
Over the course of a long night, she had danced at like three or four plays.
This was like her third or fourth show, last one of the night.
Well, I'm reading the police report, which is like a 70-page police report on a misdemeanor filing a false police report.
It's a police report against her, the case against the woman for filing a false police report.
And the woman who wrote it, the detective, I thought it revealed more about her than anybody else.
But there's one phrase I'll never forget in all of these pages.
She writes...
The woman went to dance at all of these houses, leaving her two children, who are black, at home with a babysitter or with her mother or something like that.
And I was like...
Just those three words.
And I was like...
She had been married to her ex-husband who was a black man.
They had two children together.
And I was like, what?
How in the world?
Well, you lived in Alachua County.
I don't know if that means something to people there.
Well, there's also, without a doubt, there's people that For whatever reason, they don't look at other people as being equal to them, you know, and that that is what allows someone to rape someone.
She goes to Santa Fe Community College as opposed to like, you know, the flagship state school that like the quote rich out of town kids, you know, go to and they treat her like The way they speak to her.
The way they speak to her.
And it's a similar phenomenon in the Duke Lacrosse case, is that that woman was black, but here this woman who was white in this Raw Deal case, but had black children.
I think, what's the famous line from Bullworth?
White people have more in common with black people than they do with rich people.
Meaning, the division is not so much black and white.
That's kind of a, that's a flashy object to divide us.
You know, so you're allowed to treat her like shit.
And then she's in a fraternity, which is not even a protected environment like an actual strip club.
And you're dealing with people that are drunk and their judgment's all fucked up because of that.
And then, you know, who knows?
Plus...
You're dealing with developing minds, and 18-year-old kids that are drunk, they really shouldn't be drunk.
They don't know what the fuck they're doing, and on top of that, they've probably been raised by assholes, you know?
I mean, there's a good percentage of people who are assholes, and these kids, drunk, in some fucking thing, feeding off of each other, gang mentality, which is a real- Gang mentality is fucking terrifying, man.
Gang mentality that you see in riots.
Gang mentality that you see in behavior that you would never see.
It speaks to our weird, the way that human beings imitate our atmospheres, which is like a big part of what we were talking about earlier about culture.
You get stuck in certain cultures and cultures where violence is accepted and violence, like if you live in the Congo, you know, and you're in a tribe and there's a warlord, you know, and you're seeing people shot and killed all the time.
Life has no value.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, that's their environment.
However, if you look at the actual numbers of people that have guns, which is fucking staggering, and the actual crimes committed by those guns, it's very small.
Which is undeniable, and that's something that people don't like to bring up when they bring up a Newtown massacre or something.
Where you have massacres, I believe those are issues of mental health without a doubt.
Absolutely.
You know, I wrote that this country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem.
And I think that there's a real reality when it comes to guns and shooters and mental issues and also the number of people that are involved in mass shootings that are on psychoactive drugs, antipsychotics, antidepressions.
I'm a nice person, so I'm not going to go out and shoot people, but I found it incredibly disturbing that all they needed to know was that I wasn't a criminal, I didn't commit any violent crimes, and that's it.
And truth be told, if you were a criminal and went on the street to get it, it would be even easier than you walked into it, because they don't want your driver's license if you're buying it on the street.
The issue is necessarily that there's a lot of guns.
The issue to me is we most certainly need a better education program when it comes to the ability to acquire a gun.
The fact that you have to go through this, you know, difficult taxing process to get a car.
But I think people are afraid that like, you know, like they say that owning a car is a privilege, only a gun is a right.
It's a right that's in the bill.
You know what I mean?
That's all.
It's in the Bill of Rights.
It's the Second Amendment of the Constitution.
It says the right to bear arms.
There's people that are legitimately worried, for good reason, that a lot of people have this knee-jerk reaction when any sort of violent crime goes down to take all the guns away from the people.
And oftentimes that is true, but the aberration, the person who is not polite and decides to take out the fact that they have...
Do you remember that instance in North Hollywood years back when those guys put on bulletproof vests and had all these crazy guns and they robbed a bank?
I was doing news radio at the time, and we all went into the break room, and we're all watching it on this television, and we were all just like freaking the fuck out.
Like, this is real.
This isn't a movie.
We're watching a shootout between the cops and these insane people with massive firepower.
And those types of scenarios, although incredibly rare, are really legitimately frightening to people for a good reason.
You remember the war wagon at the Dadeland Mall shooting in July of 79 that we opened Cocaine Cowboys with.
Cops show up at this scene.
They have guns on the ground.
And to Buchanan, the reporter said, they called them the Dixie Cup generation.
They would shoot a gun until it was empty and then just drop it on the floor and pull out another gun and shoot that.
And there were Mac 11s and there were handguns and pistols and automatic pistols.
And there was shell casings for every single gun on the ground.
They left the guns on the ground.
And then they took off on foot and they abandoned this war wagon, which was this converted Ford Econoline van that had stenciled on the side, happy time party supply and a phone number.
And then on the other side it said, happy supply time and a different phone number on the other side.
Not really good with the incognito thing here.
And in the back they had flak jackets that they had kind of wallpapered it with so that they had reinforced bulletproof armor.
With their six shooters, by the way, because that's what they were carrying in Miami in 1979, and they flipped the fuck out.
And there was a- every time someone saw a Ford Econoline van, like, on the streets, people were calling 911, the cops wouldn't show- like, they didn't know what the hell to do, because they knew that the fear was, you're gonna pull one of these over, the back's gonna open up, and they're just gonna empty, empty on you.
And before you can even grab your pop-pop-pop gun, And that was when they started to put together the CENTAC 26. There you go.
There's the back of it right there.
And they put together this...
CENTAC was a central tactical unit that was made up of multiple local and federal agencies that would work together.
This history of which traces back to the Untouchables.
Because that was like, we're going to take the best of the local guys and the best of the federal guys and put them together towards a kind of common, very specific, goal-oriented mission and end.
And so you had these guys who got together, because originally they were called the, it's in Reloaded, the Special Homicide Investigative Team.
Or as they call themselves, the Shit Squad.
Special Homicide Investigative Team.
And they had to deal with all the Wando's that were turning up.
If you were in the trauma industry, the medical business, the law enforcement business, the homicide business, the journalism business, Miami was the place to be.
One day, a Marielito comes in with a gunshot wound.
And the doctor says to him, In Spanish, he said, you're a very lucky man.
Had the bullet struck you a centimeter or so over here, you would have bled out and died on the scene in minutes, if not seconds.
The guy gets discharged, leaves the hospital.
Within days, he gets another Mariel gunshot victim with a wound in exactly the same spot he told the other guy about.
And that guy died.
And his belief always was, he never could prove it, but that the guy he had told basically where to shoot the other guy, that this was a retribution shooting for the other guy who had been shot.
But that was just par for the course in Miami.
The girl who cuts my hair, a lady who cuts my hair, you know how you get your hair cut, you say goodbye, you put the tip in the pocket, so she would go home at night in the 80s and she'd turn her pockets inside out to get all the folded bills and this and that.
One day she finds a little baggie With white powder in it.
That one of the ladies just say, kissed her goodbye and slipped it in her pocket as a tip.
And she said, I was so naive.
I said to my friend, what the hell is this?
And she said, what it is is worth more than the tip that you would have gotten from the same ladies.