March 25, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:08:46
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Five, four, three, two... | |
| Hello, Billy. | ||
| We're live. | ||
| Yo, Joe. | ||
| What's going on, buddy? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| I watched a new documentary this morning in the gym. | ||
| Loved it. | ||
| It was fucking great. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I love your use of little kids. | ||
| I don't want to give away too much of it, but it's about the steroid scandal involving baseball and Alex Rodriguez. | ||
| But what was the choice to use little kids to play A-Rod and all the other key principles involved in the scandal? | ||
| Like, to use little actors. | ||
| What kids? | ||
| Oh, come on, fella. | ||
| You're just high, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| I was pretty sober. | ||
| It's the jam, yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| You now know the story because you've seen the doc. | ||
| And if people remember the Biogenesis steroid scandal, if not, the movie, I think, recaps it pretty well. | ||
| But the thing that struck me is that, like, all these guys acted like children. | ||
| They really did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to boot, so, you know, we've done some sports docs in the past. | ||
| We did, you know, some of the ESPN 30 for 30s, like the U. And when you do a sports doc, I mean... | ||
| I don't want to say it's easy, because making documentaries is a challenge, but sports docs are pretty paint-by-numbers. | ||
| It's like you interview some players, you interview some coaches, some journalists, they mention a bunch of games, and you show a bunch of game footage. | ||
| It's a pretty... | ||
| Straightforward process. | ||
| With this one, it's not about baseball. | ||
| It's baseball adjacent, I guess, but it's about shit that went down in nightclubs, in shady clinics with fake doctors, hotel rooms, bars, locker rooms. | ||
| So you've got a bunch of talking heads in your documentary, but then you've got nothing to cut to. | ||
| You've got no B-roll. | ||
| So I'm like, we're going to need to shoot recreations here, which is... | ||
| To me, I don't know. | ||
| It's like when you're doing non-fiction filmmaking, it's fake shit when you film recreation. | ||
| So it's like, I'm like, how do we do this in a creative way that's consistent with the tone of the movie, which was always called Screwball, meaning it was always like a farce, you know, like a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, Coen Brothers-esque sort of Florida fuckery farce. | ||
| And so we just wanted to keep in that mode. | ||
| So I'm watching the characters. | ||
| So we got Tony Bosch. | ||
| Who is the fake doctor and Porter Fisher who is the whistleblower who stole the medical records and started this whole thing. | ||
| They were then stolen from him and then sold to not the highest bidder but any bidder and every bidder they were sold to and they're talking and I'm noticing That they had like a very similar storytelling style. | ||
| Like for example, a guy will be like... | ||
| So I walk into his office and I say, I want my money. | ||
| And he says, I don't have your money. | ||
| And I said, well, you better get my money. | ||
| And he said, what are you going to do about it? | ||
| And I said, I'm going to break your net. | ||
| And I'm like, oh shit. | ||
| They're so vivid and in the moment and talking dialogue. | ||
| So we could drunk history this, right? | ||
| We could... | ||
| We can edit together the doc and then have the actors lip syncing the actual interview dialogue and all the actors will be eight years old. | ||
| And I don't know, like, I've always wanted to do it. | ||
| Like, way back, Spike Jonze, 1997, Biggie video, Sky's the Limit. | ||
| Biggie had just been murdered. | ||
| He was faced with this challenge of producing a posthumous video. | ||
| And so Spike Jonze was like, okay, we'll just do a straight up Classic Bad Boy Records circa 97 music video. | ||
| Cars, Versace, wardrobe, girls, mansion, hot tub, but they'll all be eight years old. | ||
| You got Baby Biggie, Baby Puffy, Baby Busta Rhymes, Baby Lil' Kim. | ||
| Yeah, it's brilliant. | ||
| And so I was like, what a great... | ||
| That was always kicking around since 97. And then I saw this off-Broadway musical about 10-ish years ago called A Very Merry Honor... | ||
| Let me try that one more time. | ||
| A very merry, unauthorized children's Scientology pageant. | ||
| Don't ask me to say it again. | ||
| I can't say it again. | ||
| So it's this wild musical, like very Bowie-esque score written by a couple of Yalies. | ||
| It's a Christmas pageant performed by elementary school kids, but instead of the story of Jesus, it's the story of L. Ron Hubbard. | ||
| All in like a school play with like, you know, paper mache like sets and construction paper costumes and props. | ||
| And I wanted to, I got together with one of the composers. | ||
| I said, listen, I'd like to get the rights to your musical and make a Scientology documentary using the kids and the musical as a framing device. | ||
| Because in those days, no one was making. | ||
| Now everybody makes Scientology documentaries. | ||
| In those days, nobody was doing it, particularly because the church is so litigious. | ||
| And so they had kind of left this musical alone. | ||
| So I thought, like, that might be a cool buffer. | ||
| Like, maybe if I make a documentary, it's a little light, you know, and it's like this children's musical. | ||
| But we intercut it with real documentary investigation, interviews, and that maybe we'll kind of get away with it. | ||
| Nobody wanted to make that movie, dude. | ||
| I mean, nobody. | ||
| I mean, doors were closing before I even knocked out, like, got to them. | ||
| And I kind of filed, again, filed that idea away in the back of my head. | ||
| And then a couple years ago, there was that funny viral video of, like, it was like a Scarface School play. | ||
| I don't know if it was like a bunch of little kids doing star faces like an elementary school play. | ||
| And I was like, this is such a, it's such a great device. | ||
| And the problem is you need to find something that it works for. | ||
| Like cocaine cow babies would not have been appropriate. | ||
| For example, a bunch of eight-year-old kids running around. | ||
| It's not Bugsy Malone, you know? | ||
| So it just like, it just like how the stars align. | ||
| We just like, I was like, this is, this is going to work here, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
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It works. | |
| It works great. | ||
| It's such a Crazy story. | ||
| I don't want to give too much of it away because I really want people to watch it. | ||
| I've talked about Cocaine Cowboys probably a hundred times in this podcast. | ||
| It's one of my all-time favorite documentaries. | ||
| This is a story that almost writes itself. | ||
| It's so bonkers. | ||
| And the fact that it all could have been avoided if one guy just paid another guy or just didn't try to rip him off. | ||
| For like four grand. | ||
| Yeah, like nothing. | ||
| Doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| And the guy, what a bizarro personality he was who would just tan every day and hang out at this doctor's office in the waiting room telling everybody how great it was. | ||
| Like, the whole thing is so strange. | ||
| Everybody remembers it as the A-Rod scandal. | ||
| The truth of the matter is that Alex Rodriguez was collateral damage in this whole thing. | ||
| It was not about him. | ||
| Don't tell Alex that. | ||
| But it's not about him. | ||
| It was really the career of the highest paid baseball player of all time. | ||
| Effectively ended over a $4,000 debt between this cocaine-addicted fake doctor and his fake tan-addicted steroid patient. | ||
| And it's like, that's why I said it's like a Florida fuckery story, straight up. | ||
| It's just like this classic, only in Miami, absurd farce. | ||
| Well, that's what you specialize in. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| You really do specialize in Florida fuckery. | ||
| I go to your Twitter feed all the time for current Florida fuckery. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's just... | |
| Yeah, it's distilled. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| It's pure. | ||
| It's 100% pure. | ||
| Uncut Florida fuckery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| And that's what this story is to me. | ||
| Because, like, Miami is just... | ||
| Well, I say the great thing about Miami is it's so close to the United States. | ||
| But, like, it's... | ||
| It's also like it's America's Casablanca. | ||
| Like, just people kind of flee to Miami from like all over the country and all over the world, usually leaving some kind of criminality in their wake. | ||
| And, you know, come here and kind of there and reinvent themselves, you know? | ||
| Like, it's just... | ||
| And then you have all of these criminals there who then kind of baking in the sun, you know, in this kind of multicultural fucking paella, you know, that we have. | ||
| And then they just like, and then they start putting their minds together and brainstorming and they hatch just the most inane schemes and scams. | ||
| Like that's our primary export from Miami is just schemes and scams. | ||
| Well, it's just so amazing that it's still a cocaine culture too. | ||
| After all these years, it still has a giant cocaine engine pumping out all this chaos. | ||
| We don't have any indigenous industry. | ||
| I mean, there's no factory where everybody goes to work and then 30 years later gets a watch. | ||
| There's no business there. | ||
| Carl Hyson says, all we produce in Florida is oranges and machine guns. | ||
| We don't make anything. | ||
| We sell the dream. | ||
| We sell the sunshine. | ||
| It's lies that came true. | ||
| And even more frightening is the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. | ||
| So it's like there's a lot of lessons to be gleaned from down there. | ||
| But it's basically at this point a real estate hustle and a money laundering capital. | ||
| So it's really no different than it ever was. | ||
| Everybody likes to tell me, oh, it's changed. | ||
| It's grown. | ||
| I'm like, just because you've built a bunch of shit doesn't mean we've grown. | ||
| And Miami is just like, Miami is one of the youngest cities in the country. | ||
| In your parlance, it would be about one person old or one One and a half people ago. | ||
| We're one of the youngest cities. | ||
| Barely 100. Just over 100. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I've said this before, but isn't there more banks per capita in Miami than anywhere else? | ||
| Well, there certainly was before the Great Recession, when a lot of them started shutting down. | ||
| But most of them have rebounded. | ||
| One of the clever things some of the real estate developers did was they opened their own bank. | ||
| Literally their own bank. | ||
| They had a bank where the entire board of the bank were all real estate developers, and over 90% of the loans the bank made was insider loans, just to the board. | ||
| And then, of course, they went belly up in the Great Recession, and what happened? | ||
| We bailed them out. | ||
| So it was all their own shit. | ||
| So you bailed out real estate salesmen. | ||
| Real estate who loaned themselves money that wound up being backed ultimately by us, by the taxpayers. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the old. | ||
| Remember, I mean, you hear that line all the time now that, like, you know, people used to rob the bank from the outside in. | ||
| Now it's from the inside out. | ||
| But none could be truer than that story. | ||
| And that's a Miami story. | ||
| And when the Great Recession happened, the FDIC had to open an office in Florida because we had more bank closures than any other state in the union. | ||
| Because we were like, you could go down there and you could buy a fucking mortgage for your dog at a drive-thru in Miami in the late 90s, early aughts. | ||
| And I remember interviewing a guy who were working on a project called Ponzi State about the state of Florida as a case study in the Great Recession years ago. | ||
| We never finished it, unfortunately. | ||
| But we're interviewing this guy. | ||
| And he says, you know, we were, and this is pre, like, Big Short. | ||
| Like, this is before anybody sort of knew a lot about this. | ||
| And he said, we were down here in Miami setting fires, and Wall Street was trying to read our smoke signals. | ||
| That's why I say, like, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. | ||
| Every time I go there, I always go, I forgot how fucking crazy this place is. | ||
| You really should have to have a passport. | ||
| But I love it. | ||
| I really do love it. | ||
| It's a crazy place to do stand-up. | ||
| I did this joke because I was doing a Netflix special, and I was doing it a couple months after I did this gig in Miami, and so I was using those yonder bags. | ||
| You know what those are where people have to put their cell phone into this magnetic bag? | ||
| You keep the phone, but you hold the phone in the... | ||
| If you want to use it, you just have to step outside. | ||
| They open up the bag and they give you your phone. | ||
| In every other city, it made for a better show because people just sat down and watched the show. | ||
| In Miami, it made for literally 40% of the crowd at any given time was getting up and going to the back and using their phone and coming back in. | ||
| They were just constantly moving around and... | ||
| You presume it was to use their phone. | ||
| They might have been powdering their noses. | ||
| They might have been, but it was because I had done gigs before where they didn't have the yonder bags, and this wasn't the problem. | ||
| But in Miami, everybody needed to use their phones. | ||
| They just kept getting up and coming back, and it was just chaos. | ||
| Well, it's also a selfish town. | ||
| Like, it's basically a town of assholes. | ||
| I mean, really. | ||
| And so, like, I always say that, I mean, it reflects in everything that we do, in the way that we behave, certainly in the way that we drive. | ||
| Like, believe it or not, like, people are so much more chill and calm here in traffic in LA. I swear to God. | ||
| And LA was famous for, like, road rage. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Created, invented road rage. | ||
| But, like, Miami is such a crazy, angry, weird place. | ||
| Because it's like, when push comes to shove, we're in Miami. | ||
| Chill the fuck out. | ||
| Like, it's all good. | ||
| It's a beautiful place. | ||
| And it's a shared experience. | ||
| The traffic sucks for all of us. | ||
| Just chill out. | ||
| And use your turn signal for crying out loud. | ||
| But that's why they call it... | ||
| My Emmy. | ||
| It's not our Emmy or your Emmy. | ||
| It's my fucking Emmy. | ||
| And stay out of my fucking Emmy. | ||
| It's just, I don't know. | ||
| But you seem to love it. | ||
| You seem to thrive. | ||
| Yeah, I can't really function anywhere else. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And it's so frustrating, too. | ||
| I'm a native Floridian and a lifelong Miami. | ||
| And for a while, I was pretty determined to leave behind a better Florida than the one I was born in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good luck. | |
| Fail. | ||
| Big fail, dude. | ||
| That culture is so inexorably connected to cocaine. | ||
| One of my best friends, Steve Graham, was an ophthalmologist. | ||
| He did his residency in Miami. | ||
| So he did his residency in emergency rooms in Miami. | ||
| And he was there in the 80s. | ||
| During the height, basically during when Cocaine Cowboys takes place. | ||
| And he saw everything. | ||
| He had all these pictures of bullet holes and skull fragments and people with light bulbs stuffed up their asses. | ||
| He said every day was just fucking chaos. | ||
| So we call it the Miami idea. | ||
| Everywhere else the light bulb goes off over your head. | ||
| In Miami we shove it right up our asses. | ||
| He said they had to pull a light bulb out of a guy's ass. | ||
| One of those ones that look like a Christmas tree? | ||
| Those curly ones? | ||
| This guy stuck a lightbulb up his ass and it broke in his ass. | ||
| At least he was concerned about the environment. | ||
| That's like one of those environmentally sound... | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| There was no environmentally sound lightbulbs in the 80s. | ||
| They were just thicker glass. | ||
| It felt like he could get it in his ass better. | ||
| That was the era to cut your teeth. | ||
| If you were a cop or a lawyer or a journalist or an ER doctor, I remember talking to an ER doctor once. | ||
| He tells me a story. | ||
| 1980, shortly after the Mariel Boatlift started, which I think everybody's kind of pop culture frame of reference for the Mariel Boatlift is Scarface. | ||
| Tony Montana was a Marielito. | ||
| That's the beginning of the movie when Castro is ranting and raving that he's flushing the toilets of Cuba onto the United States, specifically to Miami. | ||
| He was working at the trauma center at Jackson Memorial, our emergency room in Miami, and he said he got a Marielle refugee. | ||
| These guys would stand on the beach. | ||
| It looked like Havana in South Beach. | ||
| There's that coral seawall, and it had a really Havana vibe. | ||
| So they would chill mostly at these flop houses south of 5th Street in Miami Beach, where the cops would literally be leaving after a stabbing at one of these places. | ||
| And they'd be three blocks away. | ||
| They'd get a call to go back because now there was a shooting or something else. | ||
| They would be going there like all around the clock. | ||
| And they would just get in gunfights. | ||
| Like literally it would just be like someone would cheat at Domino's and they would just pull out a gun and one guy would shoot the other guy. | ||
| And so he has a Mariel refugee who comes in to the emergency room with a gunshot wound. | ||
| And he knew Spanish. | ||
| He was bilingual. | ||
| He said to the guy, he said, you're really lucky. | ||
| Because if this bullet had hit, you know, a few centimeters or whatever, this way, you would have died immediately. | ||
| You would have bled out right there on the scene. | ||
| Died instantly. | ||
| And guy splits. | ||
| A few days later, another Mariel refugee comes in with a gunshot wound in exactly the same spot where he had told the other guy that if he got hit there, he would have died. | ||
| Could never prove it, never was able to trace it back, but he was pretty well convinced that it was a revenge shooting. | ||
| For the other shooting, and the guy knew exactly where to shoot him and kill him because the doctor had told him where to do that. | ||
| But that was like every day in Miami. | ||
| The lady who cuts my hair, for Christ's sake, she said, Billy, I was so naive in those days. | ||
| I cut people's hair. | ||
| They come over, kiss her goodbye, and put a tip in her pocket. | ||
| And she'd go home, turn her pockets inside out, have our little crumbled bills and everything. | ||
| And one day she finds a little baggie of white powder. | ||
| That's something that one of her clients had slipped into her pocket as a tip. | ||
| And she said to her girlfriend, she says, what the hell is this? | ||
| And her friend said, oh shit, that's worth more than gold. | ||
| That's the best tip you got all day. | ||
| That little baggie. | ||
| That was just like the culture. | ||
| Imagine that anywhere else. | ||
| Imagine that in Nebraska. | ||
| Someone tipping you in cocaine. | ||
| People would be like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
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What the fuck are you doing? | |
| Listen, it's just like, like I said, it's like America's Casablanca. | ||
| There's no place like it. | ||
| It's such a strange place. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Everything is for sale. | ||
| Still. | ||
| And like I said, we are about a person old. | ||
| That's how far back Miami goes. | ||
| I was watching a video about the culture of renting supercars to people so they can pretend that it's their car. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Huge in Miami. | ||
| We got all these Brickellista thousandaires driving their rented fucking Lambos and blowing the engines out on South Beach because they don't know how to drive them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Just getting towed down the street. | |
| Listen, it's a fake it till you make it kind of town. | ||
| And there's nothing really to make there. | ||
| You can't really, other than a real estate hustle, money laundering, drugs, politics, being a corrupt politician, there's really no other way to make it in Miami. | ||
| There's not a real industry. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| There's a lot of professional fighters come out of Miami, that whole area, Coconut Grove. | ||
| A lot of aggression, a lot of poverty. | ||
| It's a third-world economy down there. | ||
| The disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the income gap is widest and getting wider in Miami-Dade County than just about any city in the country or any metropolitan area in the country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And that's why I said that Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. | ||
| If you want to know what challenges we'll face as a nation or calamities will befall us in the years to come, you need only look at Miami. | ||
| T.D. Allman called it the canary in the coal mine, the bellwether. | ||
| And so, you know, when the election was playing out, the cycle in 2016, I was like, you know, all my friends are just like, this can't, this Trump thing can't happen. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Florida elected, and in fact re-elected, Rick Scott to be governor. | ||
| He is the biggest Medicare fraudster in the history of the United States. | ||
| Everybody knows it. | ||
| Everybody's aware of it. | ||
| It's very well publicized. | ||
| We re-elected him. | ||
| We elected him twice as the top fucking executive in our state. | ||
| What makes you think that the United States of America wouldn't do that? | ||
| And I know it's fair to say... | ||
| If you're going to be the governor of a state, you should know a little something about the largest industry in the state. | ||
| Like, if you're going to be the governor of Michigan, you should have some familiarity with the automobile industry and manufacturing. | ||
| In Florida, if you're going to be the governor, arguably you should know something about our biggest industry. | ||
| I mean, you could argue that he's the most qualified man for the job. | ||
| Oh yeah, we got like... | ||
| Medicare fraud is one of the largest industries, has been for decades. | ||
| I mean, we have billions and billions of dollars in fraud that just comes out. | ||
|
unidentified
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How do they run it? | |
| So they run it. | ||
| So you'll go into like Little Havana or Hialeah, for example, in a municipality in Miami-Dade, and there'll be a little abuelita sitting behind a desk, half asleep. | ||
| And she'll be surrounded in this tiny little one-room office by little mailboxes. | ||
| You know, like P.O. boxes. | ||
| And a mailman comes in every day and just puts checks in the boxes. | ||
| And they're like... | ||
| In some cases, they've stolen social security numbers and, you know, stolen identities, basically. | ||
| And some cases, they're just old people who aren't aware that their mail is being forwarded to this location. | ||
| And they've just got they I think Miami for a while. | ||
| We had more Medicare payments for HIV and AIDS medication than every other part of the country combined. | ||
| And it's all just old people. | ||
| So it's like, you would have to assume that 100% of our elderly population suffered from HIV, had HIV, were HIV positive. | ||
| I mean, it's fucking impossible. | ||
| You had female patients getting penis pumps that were paid for by Medicare. | ||
| I didn't even know that Medicare covered that. | ||
| I gotta look into that. | ||
| But... | ||
| I didn't know that was a thing. | ||
| Thanks, Obama. | ||
| Did you watch the OxyContin Express? | ||
| I haven't seen it, no. | ||
| That's all about how they would have the pain management centers, and they were connected to the pharmacies. | ||
| You'd go to the doctor, hey, my back hurts. | ||
| You'd go, well, you need this. | ||
| Go right next door. | ||
| All they would prescribe was Oxy's. | ||
| Sometimes it wasn't even next door. | ||
| Sometimes it was like, go to that window. | ||
| Yeah, right next door. | ||
| They say, show the doctor your x-ray. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'd have to get your x-ray done somewhere else because they weren't doing it. | ||
| So you'd hand the doctor your x-ray. | ||
| He'd look at it and go, oh shit. | ||
| It was upside down. | ||
| He wouldn't even care. | ||
| He'd be like, oh yeah, oh shit. | ||
| You know what you need? | ||
| Go to that window over there and fill this prescription. | ||
| And we had more pill mills, they called them, in Broward County, which is the county just north of Miami-Dade, than we had McDonald's locations. | ||
| And there was literally, like, the Appalachian Trail. | ||
| They were coming down, they were stocking up on Oxy, and we were fueling a death epidemic, like, in Kentucky. | ||
| They were pulling over... | ||
| More cars with Florida plates than in-state plates up there because Floridians were like, well, shit, we can't let them have all the action. | ||
| We'll drive up and we'll export the shit. | ||
| And at the peak of the pill mill epidemic, the Oxy epidemic in Florida, seven people a day were dying, men, women, and children. | ||
| And we subsist from hustle to hustle. | ||
| You wonder, why didn't the government crack down on that shit? | ||
| Why didn't they regulate it? | ||
| Well, first, our governor, and we deal with this in screwball, is the biggest Medicare fraudster in the history of the country. | ||
| So he wasn't exactly, shall we say, vigilant or interested in cracking down on medical-related fraud. | ||
| How did he get away with it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Magic. | ||
| MAGA magic, I guess. | ||
| I mean, he... | ||
| Listen, he... | ||
| He got... | ||
| He pled the Fifth Amendment like 75 times in a videotaped deposition. | ||
| That was used in a campaign ad against him. | ||
| And Florida was like, we're good. | ||
| We're good with that. | ||
| Listen, white rich men kind of walk between the raindrops in this country, you know? | ||
| It's just a... | ||
| Well, sort of. | ||
| They got Kraft for getting a handjob. | ||
| That was Florida, too. | ||
| So stupid. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| Well, we were talking about, like, how does he not have a guy who can get him jerked off? | ||
| Like, there's probably a lot of gals out there that would like to make some money. | ||
| You don't have to go to a massage parlor. | ||
| The biggest bummer of it is, is now my massage parlor's closed down. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Where do I go now, is the problem. | ||
| Where do broke guys go? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the fact that they were filming you, too. | ||
| The whole thing is so strange. | ||
| And if there was human trafficking going on there, what were cops chilling there for like six months in some ongoing investigation? | ||
| Like, can you save these poor victims? | ||
| But human trafficking has become like this keyword. | ||
| It's like this new sort of like fear-mongering kind of a term to get everybody all up in arms. | ||
| And now they're kind of backtracking on that. | ||
| They're like, well, maybe... | ||
| It wasn't exactly human trafficking. | ||
| Maybe it was just more of a prostitution operation. | ||
| That was the whole reason why he was a horrible person, because he was contributing to these people that were essentially being sold for sex slavery. | ||
| Turns out that might have been a bit overblown. | ||
| No pun intended. | ||
| Of course, that's kind of how they have to sell it, right? | ||
| Otherwise, people are like, why are you wasting all this money on handjobs? | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because solving real crime is hard. | ||
| And dangerous. | ||
| And dangerous. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So you can go and pick somebody up for marijuana or getting a handjob, whatever, and you can look like you're being proactive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But solving a murder? | ||
| That's hard, man. | ||
| That's hard work. | ||
| Hard, dangerous, and, you know, if you go to a weird little Asian massage place and guys are coming out smiling like, hmm, You can start there. | ||
| Talk about low-hanging fruit. | ||
| No offense to Kraft. | ||
| It's probably this older fella. | ||
| There was a weird law in Hawaii where they were letting cops actually have sex with prostitutes. | ||
| To prove that they were prostitutes? | ||
| I think nearly half the states in the union have a law that allow police officers to have sex with people in custody. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| How do you make this shit up? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Well, it was consensual. | ||
| I was like, consensual? | ||
| They're in fucking handcuffs. | ||
| What do you mean it's consensual? | ||
| That's human trafficking, if you ask me. | ||
| Yeah, and obviously, they're going to try to make deals. | ||
| Hey, I'll suck your dick if you get me out of here. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| How is that consensual? | ||
| How's that legal? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy. | |
| It's the ultimate... | ||
| I mean, you talk about people holding power over people. | ||
| That's the ultimate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's kidnapping. | |
| Coerced consent. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is more than an employer doing that to an employee. | ||
| I mean, you're literally dangling their freedom. | ||
| Talk about an abuse of power. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| I just... | ||
| Look, I have all daughters. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I don't want anybody's daughter to be a prostitute. | ||
| But I'm also 100% in favor of people being able to do whatever the fuck they want. | ||
| And if someone's in a weird stage in their life where they'd rather jerk guys off than work at Denny's, who's anybody to stop them from doing that? | ||
| The only problem is the social stigma that's attached to it. | ||
| The actual act itself is beneficial. | ||
| The person gets something out of it. | ||
| Some people have a really hard time getting someone to have sex with them. | ||
| I don't see it that... | ||
| It's just a crazy thing that we regulate something that... | ||
| I mean, George Carlin had a great bit about it. | ||
| It's the only thing where it's illegal... | ||
| To make someone pay for it, but it's fine if it's free. | ||
| It literally doesn't make sense. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with sex, but there's something wrong with people paying for it. | ||
| And it's fine if you pay for it and then videotape it for distribution, because then that's porn. | ||
| I don't really... | ||
| First of all, it's a contract between two consenting adults. | ||
| If we're talking about... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| offer acceptance consideration as with anything else the stigma as you mentioned a lot of that is part and parcel of the prohibition the illegality of it is what brings the seediness it's what brings the danger right the Because it's forced underground, you introduce all of these elements that don't have to be there. | ||
| They could take place in clean environments. | ||
| Instead of in the black market and underground, it could take place where you can protect all the participants involved. | ||
| But it's been true of... | ||
| It's been true of prostitution, which they call, for a reason, the oldest profession. | ||
| The second we introduce the prohibition, it creates a level of danger and a threat to society that wouldn't exist if you're like, well, wait, what if you just let me smoke this? | ||
| What if you just let me drink this because I'm an adult making a responsible decision for myself? | ||
| What if you just let me engage in sexual activity with this person who is perfectly willing to do it in exchange for some remuneration? | ||
| Why should anybody give a shit about that? | ||
| Proven bad idea. | ||
| I mean, it's been proven for decade upon decade. | ||
| You go all the way back to the alcohol prohibition, to what's going on right now with the cartels. | ||
| I mean, how much would it fix if they made all drugs legal? | ||
| How much would it fix? | ||
| I mean, we'd have a real problem in the beginning with access, where there would be so much more access, you'd probably You know, you would lose people. | ||
| People would die in high-profile overdose cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think so. | |
| And then people would try to make a deal out of it. | ||
| You don't think that if cocaine was legal everywhere or meth? | ||
| People can get the drugs. | ||
| Right, but it's not that easy for a person. | ||
| Like, if you don't know anybody who's a criminal, like, say if you want to buy meth now. | ||
| I don't know where to buy meth. | ||
| I know a few Walmarts in Florida. | ||
| They make it in the bathroom. | ||
| I bet you do. | ||
| But that, again, that is Florida. | ||
| It's a different animal. | ||
| But like right now in America, I mean, I maybe could drum up some meth in a few days if I started asking. | ||
| But, you know, I would not have any idea who's an informant and who's going to rat me out. | ||
| But I think the stats show in states where marijuana has become legal, you don't see significant spikes in usage. | ||
| It's minimal. | ||
| Apparently there's some significant spikes in usage, but the problem is it correlates to a significant spike in population of the state. | ||
| A lot of people moved to Colorado just because of marijuana. | ||
| They moved to become a part of the business and because they just wanted to be free. | ||
| And then California... | ||
| We've had medical weed forever, and now we have legal, legal weed, and I don't think it's changed much here, but you do have... | ||
| There's some issues. | ||
| There's definitely... | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's beneficial in any way to sugarcoat the fact that having legal drugs makes people have more access to those drugs means maybe there's going to be a few people, whatever the number is, who do those drugs who wouldn't have had access to them without it. | ||
| I agree, but I think it's de minimis. | ||
| I think it's like... | ||
| And the number of Who's going to turn around and go, like, you know what I want to try that's legal now? | ||
| Meth. | ||
| My dentist doesn't recommend it, but I feel like I want... | ||
| Who the fuck's going to do that, really? | ||
| You say that, but how many fucking people are on Adderall? | ||
| And the only difference is the doctor is prescribing it to you. | ||
| That's really good shit. | ||
| That's why the president bumps it. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I hear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just saying. | |
| Do you think he does? | ||
| He's always sniffing and he always... | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| I don't think he's on cocaine. | ||
| No. | ||
| And I always describe to people who don't know what this is like. | ||
| People on cocaine start one sentence and then finish another. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what it's like talking to someone on cocaine or the president. | ||
| They just... | ||
| But I don't think he's on... | ||
| But he's always... | ||
| You always hear him with the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think he's like bumping Addie. | ||
| I don't know what else to... | ||
| I don't think he's bumping it, but I think he's definitely... | ||
| Well, he might be. | ||
| Why am I thinking he's not? | ||
| I mean, he's a wild man. | ||
| But he's definitely got accusations from his past about use of amphetamines. | ||
| There was a journalist that actually detailed the very Duane Reade pharmacy where he used to get this prescription diet medication there. | ||
| Air quotes, diet medication, which is fucking speed. | ||
| And look, the guy has an exorbitant amount of energy. | ||
| I mean, it's quite impressive for a man in his 70s who eats shit and doesn't exercise. | ||
| And he's always ready to go. | ||
| I mean, when he was campaigning, he didn't seem to ever get tired. | ||
| He would go and do these campaign events, and he would always be talking, and he'd be full of enthusiasm. | ||
| We're going to make America great again. | ||
| We're going to build that wall higher. | ||
| We're going to tell those Chinese, listen, motherfucker. | ||
| Like, he was... | ||
| I mean, it's an incredible amount of energy. | ||
| God bless him. | ||
| He's 70-some-odd years old. | ||
| It's amazing that you don't have to drug test him. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| But baseball players. | ||
| But baseball players. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, exactly. | |
| That's what I was going to say. | ||
| They're the guys we need to... | ||
| And what is Adderall if not a performance-enhancing drug? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Talk to journalists. | ||
| How many journalists will be totally honest about it? | ||
| They are fucking hooked on Adderall, and they are very productive with it. | ||
| Very productive. | ||
| I tried it once. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Somebody gave me some. | ||
| I didn't try it. | ||
| I just sat there and looked at it. | ||
| I go, I don't need that in my life. | ||
| I've been scared of coke. | ||
| I've never done coke. | ||
| I've never done Adderall. | ||
| I don't fuck with speed because I can't shut the fuck up already. | ||
| I'm like, that is not for me. | ||
| I need something that calms me down and makes me feel weird. | ||
| I feel like I'd be that guy who does it the first time and my heart explodes out of my chest. | ||
| You'd be scraping me off the roof with a shovel if I did. | ||
| Right, because you're so high energy. | ||
| Yeah, I was like, Jesus, I can't do that. | ||
| I'm worried that I would love it. | ||
| That's what I'm worried. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a good concern. | |
| I'm worried I would love it and I'd be like, okay, from here on out, it's all about me. | ||
| Which marijuana does the opposite to me. | ||
| Marijuana is like, we can all be cool together. | ||
| I finally tried pot. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I finally tried it. | |
| What happened? | ||
| I never tried it before, but I was actually... | ||
| Years ago, I was in Colorado, 420, backstage at a Snoop concert. | ||
| Oh, jeez, you have to try it. | ||
| I didn't have to, because I was second-hand stoned, dude. | ||
| Oh, so that's how you tried it. | ||
| It's like when I go to church with Coco, I mean, you're just hotboxed, you know? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Church with Coco, for people to understand what we're saying, Church of What's Happening Now podcast with Joey Diaz. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You're abbreviating. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I didn't mean that I actually went to a Santeria church and sacrificed a chicken. | ||
| Although, we have done that in Miami. | ||
| When he's down in Miami, all bets are off when Joey's down. | ||
| But I'm in the middle of a story on his podcast, and I fucking forgot the end of the story. | ||
| I told it, and I ended it. | ||
| And then only the next day did I go, I never told him the end of that story. | ||
| I fucking forgot it. | ||
| So someone says, Snoop wants to meet you. | ||
| He's in his dressing room. | ||
| Backstage at this concert. | ||
| So I go, fuck yeah, I'm gonna go meet Snoop. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| So I opened the door to this backstage area. | ||
| Dude, I can't see my hand in front of me. | ||
| I can't see my hand in front. | ||
| It is foggy. | ||
| I was like, windshield wipers in my fucking glass. | ||
| I can't see shit. | ||
| And I'm wandering down. | ||
| And I got maybe halfway down the hall. | ||
| And I was like, I can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't. | |
| I can't, I can't. | ||
| I turned around and I pulled it out the door. | ||
| I was like, ah, ah, you know, just panting on my hands and knees. | ||
| I was like, I can't do it. | ||
| So I couldn't go back to the next year, like two years later, I'm back in Colorado because everybody was making fun of me. | ||
| So they're like, you went to Colorado and didn't smoke? | ||
| They're like, that's like going to Italy and not eating pasta. | ||
| You know, I was like, okay, next time, next time. | ||
| So I go out and I try it. | ||
| And I was like, All I kept saying was, I wish I was drunk. | ||
| I wish I was drunk. | ||
| I wish I was drunk. | ||
| I just, I don't know. | ||
| It was like a bad, I just, it was so antisocial. | ||
| I felt so weird. | ||
| I felt so sort of introverted. | ||
| And I was unfortunately in like a, they had this pot smoking church. | ||
| In Denver. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like you go and you can just smoke pot and it's literally in this old church. | ||
| They got beautiful paintings on the wall. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's trippy. | ||
| And so I was there and I tried it and I was like... | ||
| How much did you smoke? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| Two hits? | ||
| Two, three. | ||
| Yeah, that's too much. | ||
| Is that too much? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a lightweight? | ||
| If I was your friend, and I am your friend, but if I was right next to you at the time, I'd say, a little baby hit, Billy. | ||
| Just a little baby hit. | ||
| Don't get crazy. | ||
| Just like this. | ||
| That's all I want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just... | |
| And then let's just relax. | ||
| Don't get crazy. | ||
| Don't take it when it comes back around again. | ||
| It's too goddamn strong today. | ||
| It's not what it used to be. | ||
| I was very recently in Austin, Texas. | ||
| And Texas still has regular weed. | ||
| It's very good weed, but it's regular weed. | ||
| You can smoke it and you're like, I'm here. | ||
| Everything's fine. | ||
| California no longer. | ||
| These motherfuckers right here, these little backwoods. | ||
| Jesus, that is not regular weed. | ||
| That's got a glass tip, and that will put you on the fucking moon. | ||
| Brian Callen had one hit of it last week. | ||
| He couldn't drive himself home. | ||
| Hours later, hours later, he was still here, hanging out. | ||
| He's still here now. | ||
| I'm awake! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm awake! | |
| He had to get my friend Brendan to come and get him. | ||
| He couldn't drive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's awesome. | |
| It's fucking strong, man. | ||
| But there's also different shit. | ||
| So next time I did it, I did something. | ||
| Someone said, you know what? | ||
| Maybe you should try something else. | ||
| Yeah, sativa versus indigo. | ||
| Yeah, I tried it. | ||
| Second time, laughed my ass. | ||
| I was with funny friends, and I had a fucking blast. | ||
| So I don't know what I did or shouldn't have done or should do or shouldn't do, but I had a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah, sativa is more, you're thinking more, you have a little bit more energy. | ||
| Indica crushes you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're just like, oh my god, I gotta go somewhere and lie down. | |
| I can't handle this. | ||
| But it's different for different people as well. | ||
| But I'll tell you, that Chick-fil-A tasted damn good that night. | ||
| Oh, it tastes way better, right? | ||
| Hate tastes great. | ||
| I gotta tell you, hate tastes great. | ||
| It's more ignorance than hate, but I see what you're saying. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I had to explain to my kids why it's closed on Sunday. | ||
| We're driving by. | ||
| How come no one's there? | ||
| I go, because it's the baby Jesus' day. | ||
| Okay, if you really want to celebrate the baby Jesus, though, let's hear me out. | ||
| I watch a lot of TBN because I'm a lunatic. | ||
| And I always wondered, if the Jews were on television all the time, if we were on television going like, send us money! | ||
| What would they say about us? | ||
| But for some reason, I don't know why, Jesus needs a lot of money. | ||
| Because we're always on TV now. | ||
| Telling you to send your money to Jesus, right? | ||
| So, I'm thinking, if you really want to do something for Jesus, Chick-fil-A, open on Sunday, And donate all of your revenue to Jesus, to churches. | ||
| Think of the money just the after church crowd alone. | ||
| Everybody would flock, no pun intended, right to the Chick-fil-A and stock up and they'd have all their money. | ||
| They can even have people volunteer to work those days and donate all your money to Jesus because he apparently needs, I don't know what he needs with it, but he needs a lot of money. | ||
| Well, I don't know if the Chick-fil-A guys, the people who own it, are of the same ilk as the Trinity Broadcast Network folks, because those TBN folks, I don't think you're being mean by saying they're shysters. | ||
| No, straight up. | ||
| Yeah, they're just stealing money from people. | ||
| I think that Chick-fil-A guy is a legitimately religious person who really truly believes that he's saving the world from gay folk marrying each other. | ||
| Yeah, it's not... | ||
| Maga, bro. | ||
| Maga. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maga, bro. | |
| It's not logical, but they make a goddamn good chicken sandwich. | ||
| They make a goddamn good... | ||
| It's quite tasty, man. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| Again, I think it's more ignorance than hate, but I feel you. | ||
| It doesn't rhyme. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just doesn't... | |
| Ignorance tastes great. | ||
| It doesn't rhyme, but like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And they have this lunatic on. | ||
| He's on all the time. | ||
| They're paid half-hour shows, but this Peter Popoff guy... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| With the fucking Miracle Springwater, the prosperity preachers. | ||
| Talk about a fucking bill of goods, man. | ||
| Sad. | ||
| You know, that guy Creflo Dollar, his name is fucking Creflo. | ||
| I'm guessing that's not his Christian name, but it's his evangelical name is Creflo Dollar. | ||
| I think he made that name up, right? | ||
| I would hope so. | ||
| That was the dude, you tweeted about him years ago, that was the dude who was out in the world getting donations because he needed to update Or upgrade his G4 to a G6. And I was like, G6 Christ. | ||
| This fucking, this guy. | ||
| It was going to say, I need to donate because I need to spread the gospel. | ||
| And so you need to give me money so that because my G4 just ain't cutting it anymore, I need to upgrade. | ||
| I wish he had gotten a 737 MAX 8, but that's just me. | ||
| It's just so amazing that that hustle still works. | ||
| The prosperity ones are so gross because they go after people that are so poor and destitute that they can't pay their bills, and they tell them, if you just send me money, God will pay you back tenfold. | ||
| And I know what you're saying. | ||
| You don't have any money, but you do. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You take that money. | ||
| You send it to Jesus, and Jesus will bring prosperity in your life. | ||
| And then they have all these folks that are giving testimonials about how I was down on my luck. | ||
| I didn't have money for rent. | ||
| I didn't have money for food. | ||
| But I knew that Jesus needed this money. | ||
| So I sent Jesus the money, and Jesus paid me back tenfold. | ||
| And now my life is filled with joy and prosperity. | ||
| Am I being hateful when I say that that is... | ||
| What religion preys on? | ||
| The weak, the poor, the people searching for answers? | ||
| Yeah, but I think for some people, there's like, I mean, this is older, wiser me, right? | ||
| When I was younger, I would agree with you 100%. | ||
| But I think at this point, I think there's some benefit to like having... | ||
| Community, and having this environment where everybody goes to be humbled, and everybody goes to agree that they're going to be good people that follow the ethics of Jesus, and you put a little money in the dish, and they have to keep the operation running. | ||
| I think there's a lot of churches that do a lot of good. | ||
| But I think for every one or two that do a lot of good, there's these motherfuckers that are just stealing money and driving Rolls Royces and living in giant fucking castles. | ||
| That Joel, whatever his name is, what's that guy's name? | ||
| Osteen in Houston. | ||
| That motherfucker, he owns a huge arena. | ||
| They do this show in the arena and he caught a rash of shit when he didn't let all the hurricane victims stay in his place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He was holed up in his $10 million mansion at the time. | ||
| I'd be amazed it was only $10 million. | ||
| Well, it's not his only property. | ||
| I mean, he has several houses. | ||
| It's just so distorted. | ||
| The whole idea of it all is so distorted. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of community churches that do a lot of good, where they provide people with comfort. | ||
| You know, it doesn't necessarily have to make any sense. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But it provides them with comfort. | ||
| I appreciate, like, I respect people of faith. | ||
| I think it must feel wonderful. | ||
| I don't know how it feels, but it must be wonderful to believe in something like that so devoutly, without any evidence, without any indication or proof whatsoever that what you so firmly believe in is true. | ||
| But it's the hypocrisy of it that I just can't abide by. | ||
| Right, like these prosperity guys. | ||
| Like the prosperity guys. | ||
| Like people who used to have... | ||
| Or claim to have some kind of holier-than-thou moral code that now think the pimp president's cool. | ||
| It's like, I get it, but your whole thing was that Bill Clinton was the biggest scumbag in the world, and he needed to be impeached and castrated. | ||
| But let's have some consistency. | ||
| It's hypocrisy that I can't abide by. | ||
| Let's have some consistency is all. | ||
| Well, particularly with Trump, because Trump was, and this is not a knock on him, but he was a lifelong Democrat. | ||
| I mean, he only really became a Republican when he thought about running for president. | ||
| Yeah, and he was an independent for a minute, then he was a Democrat again, then he was a Republican. | ||
| It's a pure hustle. | ||
| I mean, the glass has been cleaned and squeegeed, and you could see right through it. | ||
| That's why it works on the evangelicals. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's their whole... | ||
| He's like the pimp Joel Osteen. | ||
| He's like... | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| He found his hustle. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't want to be mean about this, but I think it's accurate. | ||
| There's a level of intellect that just subscribes to that kind of stuff that... | ||
| Like, I had a friend, she was in the Mormon church for a long time, and she left the church, but she was really honest about it. | ||
| She said, I have a problem that I'm susceptible to bullshit. | ||
| Because she grew up a fundamentalist. | ||
| And so she's susceptible to, you know, to, like, yoga-type people, like, oh, the crystals and the lights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Feel the light. | ||
| She's susceptible to all that shit. | ||
| And she would recognize her susceptibility, but she was being really honest about it. | ||
| She's like, I have a real problem. | ||
| I grew up believing something that doesn't make any sense, and I believed it wholeheartedly. | ||
| And she goes, and that sort of formulated a big part of how I ascertain what is accurate in the world. | ||
| So she's left with these, like... | ||
| Childlike skills of being able to discern what's bullshit and what's a hustle. | ||
| She's like a little kid. | ||
| I have a great amount of respect for people who grow up in a cult and who can make their way out of it. | ||
| I mean, can you imagine when you're a child and you're most impressionable and you're steeped in that? | ||
| That's all you know. | ||
| Like, you don't know that there's an alternate perspective and you're able to grow up and say, oh, wait. | ||
| There's a whole big world out there. | ||
| Maybe I'm not being told the truth. | ||
| That's incredibly powerful. | ||
| It's really hard, I think, to break with the only thinking that you've ever known in your life. | ||
| I think it's amazing. | ||
| It's probably one of the hardest things that a grown adult has to do is to recognize that the paradigm, this framework they've been living their life under is utter horseshit. | ||
| I mean, the Mormon one is so crazy, too. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| The results are great. | ||
| The people are so nice. | ||
| They're the nicest cult members of all time. | ||
| But then you go back and look at the actual framework of the religion itself. | ||
| You're like, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| He was 14? | ||
| You're like, hold on. | ||
| Joseph Smith was 14 in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus and only he could read them because he had a magic rock? | ||
| But, like, that's Judaism and Catholicism. | ||
| They're all crazy mythological horseshit. | ||
| But they know who the guy was. | ||
| Like, I mean, he's so recent. | ||
| Too recent. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, is that you know it's... | ||
| It's like Scientology. | ||
| It's like, well, we know it's a lie. | ||
| Scientology's even crazier. | ||
| Well, a science fiction writer... | ||
| Literally was a failed, a failed science fiction writer. | ||
| A terrible writer. | ||
| Terrible failed science fiction writer. | ||
| That motherfucker never made a second draft in his life. | ||
| And one day said, if you want to make real money, start a religion. | ||
| That is his greatest quote. | ||
| And did it. | ||
| God bless him. | ||
| Can't knock his hustle. | ||
| People want to buy into that. | ||
| What's amazing is that in 2019, it's still rocking. | ||
| In some way. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Even after all those documentaries, even after the Leah Remini show, all these things just... | ||
| They go out in the world, they tell everybody it's horseshit, and then a brand new Scientology Center opens in Miami. | ||
| I'm like, seriously? | ||
| Really? | ||
| We know. | ||
| A brand new one opened? | ||
| We already know. | ||
| Some people don't know. | ||
| The people who don't know are never gonna know. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| It's like you're going... | ||
| If you want to put in a money... | ||
| Some people have $100. | ||
| Some people have $5. | ||
| And this is like intellectually. | ||
| Some people have a lot of room to work with. | ||
| Some people don't. | ||
| Their brain doesn't work as good. | ||
| Just like some people have poor genetics when it comes to their ability to run fast, some people have really shitty brain development genetics. | ||
| Let me ask you this, because obviously you would have sympathy for someone who was taken advantage of or swindled or the victim of a con person. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| How much sympathy do you have for the gleefully ignorant? | ||
| Or the willfully ignorant? | ||
| Meaning, like, the information is there. | ||
| It's available. | ||
| Before I give Scientology my money, I could just, I don't know, Google it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How much sympathy do you have for, like, the willfully ignorant? | ||
| People who sort of... | ||
| It's like the fucking dude from Airplane. | ||
| They bought their tickets. | ||
| They knew what they were getting into. | ||
| I say, let them crash, you know? | ||
| Like... | ||
| Well, I'm a big fan of Willie D from the Ghetto Boys, and he has a quote that I always like to use. | ||
| You gotta let a hoe be a hoe. | ||
| And I think, in that sense, like, you gotta let dummies get fleeced. | ||
| It's just part of it. | ||
| And part of it is there for us to see. | ||
| Part of it is there for you to go, what? | ||
| They gave away all their money? | ||
| Aw, shit. | ||
| Like, there's something to that. | ||
| It benefits us. | ||
| Like, I'm not a fan of these videos where kids try to skateboard off the side of a building and they slip and fall and land on their head and everybody's like, oh, shit! | ||
| But... | ||
| But those videos serve a purpose. | ||
| And that purpose is not everybody gets to do the handstand on the side of the building and survive. | ||
| Some people fall and they land on their fucking head and they're never the same again. | ||
| And then they're left with like a third grader's IQ for the rest of their life. | ||
| That's real, man. | ||
| So it's George Carlin's bit about, you know, the kid who swallows the most marbles doesn't get to grow up and have kids of his own. | ||
| That's how it's supposed to work. | ||
| Yeah, unfortunately. | ||
| It sucks if it's your kid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| It's all of us are experiencing this life together. | ||
| And there's some folks that are just, they're going to do a shitty job of it. | ||
| And part of me thinks that, because there is no utopia, right? | ||
| There is no enlightened people. | ||
| There's no one civilization that's got it all nailed and everybody gets along together and everyone's totally fine with every single choice everybody makes. | ||
| You ever been to Waffle House? | ||
| I have. | ||
| That's a utopia. | ||
| It's close. | ||
| Depending on how drunk you are. | ||
| Because of that, I think we operate under this weird system where you've got to see the failures in order to recognize that failure is possible. | ||
| I think there's actual community benefit to people fucking up. | ||
| And there's some community benefit to people getting fleeced. | ||
| Listen, I always say that... | ||
| First of all, I don't believe anybody that says, any artist or anybody out in the world creating something and putting it out there for people to react to it. | ||
| I don't believe anyone who says they don't read their reviews or their own reviews. | ||
| I read all of the reviews and I read the bad ones twice. | ||
| Because that's where you learn the most. | ||
| They could be right, they could be wrong, but I feel like It's where you fuck up that you learn the most from it. | ||
| I feel like as a white man in America, all the time I have to keep myself in check the way you were describing earlier about how like, you know, what if you just come to realize that maybe the world isn't exactly the way you perceive it. | ||
| And that maybe there's a lot of other people who have very different experiences from the ones that you have. | ||
| And so maybe the reality of the world is different for those people. | ||
| And you can be a more enlightened person by being more empathetic and trying to understand those perspectives, trying to walk, you know, a mile in their shoes. | ||
| And I just feel like... | ||
| I've learned so much more from the mistakes that I've made and the failures that I've had, certainly, than any of the successes. | ||
| In my home, I have no... | ||
| I have movie posters, but they're like art. | ||
| They're other people's movies. | ||
| I have none of my own movie posters at home. | ||
| That's at the office. | ||
| That's not what home is for. | ||
| Except I had one for a while. | ||
| I had one poster of one of my movies... | ||
| That I hung in the bathroom over the toilet. | ||
| Because it was my least favorite. | ||
| And I just wanted to be reminded that that was the time I took a shit. | ||
| For the whole world to see. | ||
| And I hung it over. | ||
| It stayed there for a number of years. | ||
| It's not there anymore. | ||
| But I just... | ||
| I wanted to remind myself of it. | ||
| Well, you're a smart guy. | ||
| You take motivation and failures. | ||
| I mean, that's what failures are really good for. | ||
| When you fail at something, there's a benefit to that. | ||
| You go, God, that sucked. | ||
| I don't ever want to suck again. | ||
| Let me figure out a way to not suck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| I always say that about comics. | ||
| When we bomb, it's a terrible feeling, but it's the best opportunity for growth. | ||
| Because you realize, hey, I obviously didn't do a good job. | ||
| I need to figure out what the fuck I did wrong and batten down the hatches and get this ship right. | ||
| Because I can't experience that again. | ||
| I became a comedy fan in no small part because I have been to shows where I've seen some of the biggest, funniest guys bomb. | ||
| And I'm like, Jesus, short of being a soldier or a cop or like a stuntman, this is one of the most dangerous, self-destructive jobs. | ||
| Like, it requires such bravery and such strength of soul and thickness of skin that, like, I went fucking Vegas. | ||
| It's like 2000. And saw Carlin. | ||
| Big, beautiful room. | ||
| Sat, like, front row. | ||
| It was weird, because, like, the stage was like a wall. | ||
| Like, I was sitting against, like, the fucking stage. | ||
| And I had to look up, and, like, Carlin's shoe would, like, pass, like, right in front of my eyeball. | ||
| Just above my eyeline. | ||
| And... | ||
| He was doing material for one of his last specials, and it was the one, I think it might have been the second to last, he had that whole bit about, like, he doesn't believe in God, but, like, he believes in, like, shit that he can see and he's afraid of. | ||
| Like, The Sun or Joe Pesci. | ||
| Like, you know, that whole bit. | ||
| And he was in this big ol' God-fearing crowd there in Las Vegas, and they were not about this. | ||
| They were not about it. | ||
| Not one ioder. | ||
| Not one little bit. | ||
| And he's trucking back and forth doing it fucking crickets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Fucking crickets. | ||
| Packed house. | ||
| Sold out. | ||
| I'm the only one laughing in the room. | ||
| Just me. | ||
| In this giant room. | ||
| And I'm laughing my ass off. | ||
| And I'm all by myself. | ||
| And at some point I turned... | ||
| I stopped laughing long enough or took a breath to take a drink, right? | ||
| And I look down, and then I look back up at the stage, and Carlin is right there. | ||
| He's like hunched over with his head dangling off the stage. | ||
| And I look up, and I'm practically nose-to-nose with Carlin. | ||
| And he goes, thank you, sir. | ||
| And just walks away and keeps stalking the stage. | ||
| And I was like, oh my god. | ||
| And I was at the improv... | ||
| In Miami, when they had the one at the, remember, the Hard Rock? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| The Hard Rock, I guess they're redoing it or whatever. | ||
| That fucking place is deaf. | ||
| It's just, I was like, I was like, man, you know, they say, what do they say? | ||
| The Hard Rock's the floor, though, that's the Hollywood one, though. | ||
| Yeah, Hollywood, the Hollywood seminal. | ||
| That was actually pretty good. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it was. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| The bad one was Miami. | ||
| Oh, and the Grove. | ||
| Coconut Grove. | ||
| That was rough. | ||
| That was deaf. | ||
| Yeah, but the... | ||
| No, it was cool, but now it's gone. | ||
| They've bulldozed the whole fucking place. | ||
| They're supposed to be remodeling and rebuilding it. | ||
| The Seminole Hard Rock... | ||
| What's the saying? | ||
| In a casino, the house always wins. | ||
| I'm like, these Indian casinos are the only place where, like, the house never wins. | ||
| Because it doesn't matter how much money you lose there, we still, like, raped their women and stole their country. | ||
| So, like, the least you could do is, like, drop a little coin at the Indian casino. | ||
| And that's what I would do. | ||
| I'd go play. | ||
| That is the only place they have blackjack in South Florida. | ||
| So you can go there and play blackjack. | ||
| But they bulldoze the improv. | ||
| And I was there one night. | ||
| Gilbert Gottfried was there. | ||
| And I was literally the only person laughing. | ||
| But like in pain like I was in pain laughing and It was just brutal and like and I've been in these rooms were like these guys and and I was just like These are the funniest people that I know and it's happened time and time again And I've been to shows where they killed and I've been to shows where they died and I was like, this is amazing This is so amazing. | ||
| It's like the fact that Anybody gets back on stage after a night like that, it's remarkable to me. | ||
| I have such respect for that. | ||
| I always say that bombing is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother, but not really, because somewhere out there there's a guy who loves sucking a dick in front of his mother, and if you put another 999, he wouldn't be that sad. | ||
| But no one wants a bomb in front of their mother. | ||
| No one wants a bomb, period. | ||
| It's just terrible. | ||
| It's a ruthless experience. | ||
| It just rips you down and shreds all your self-worth. | ||
| Makes you feel terrible. | ||
| But, again, some of my best growth periods in my career have come after eating shit. | ||
| You spike. | ||
| Yeah, you realize. | ||
| You gotta go to work. | ||
| You can't be complacent. | ||
| And that's one of the things that fuels and motivates me to this day. | ||
| I'm terrified of bombing. | ||
| Anything I can use to make me work harder, I use. | ||
| The six years since I did my shittiest work have been, for me, artistically, creatively, the most productive. | ||
| And I feel... | ||
| Finally, after 20 years of making documentaries, that I might be doing my best work. | ||
| But it took that fucking long. | ||
| And it took basically almost six years from totally bombing for me to feel like I hit rock bottom and then have spiked better than before. | ||
| You've done some documentaries with some dangerous people in them. | ||
| You know, obviously, Griselda Blanco is probably one of the most dangerous people on Earth while she was alive. | ||
| And in this, you also touch on that. | ||
| I mean, a lot of these people are fucking sketchy folks, and you're exposing how stupid their activity were. | ||
| Does that ever creep you out? | ||
| Do you ever get nervous? | ||
| Because you're making these documentaries mocking these people, and rightly so, but... | ||
| It's not Cocaine Cowboys. | ||
| It wasn't really mocking. | ||
| It's more exposing. | ||
| But this one is like openly mocking. | ||
| This one's really good, man. | ||
| It's really funny. | ||
| And it comes out March 29th? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Friday. | ||
| And April 5th on VOD. Well, this one's tough because this is like a fresh wound for a lot of people. | ||
| It comes on Netflix? | ||
| No, VOD. No, I'm sorry. | ||
| Theaters March 29th, and VOD April 5th. | ||
| So like iTunes, Amazon, pay-per-view on your cable box. | ||
| What kind of release are you going to get in the theaters? | ||
| Starting off with 12 cities on Friday the 29th, and then, I mean... | ||
| Is it LA? Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| The Lemley Music Hall. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| And then, where else? | ||
| I think San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Orlando... | ||
| There's like 12 cities. | ||
| And then, I guess, depending on how well it does, it's being put out by Greenwich Entertainment, who just won the Oscar for Free Solo for Best Documentary. | ||
| So they know what they're doing. | ||
| And like I said, hopefully people will go see it. | ||
| Listen, it... | ||
| I hope it's a comedy. | ||
| I think it's a comedy. | ||
| It's a comedy. | ||
| We tried to make it a comedy. | ||
| I was laughing my ass off. | ||
| I was doing chin-ups and laughing. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| That fucking guy, the Tanner. | ||
| What's his name again? | ||
| Porter Fisher. | ||
| Porter. | ||
| That guy. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| I just imagine if you got one of those guys in your life and he's just stuck in your life. | ||
| Like, shit. | ||
| How do I get this fucking guy out of my life? | ||
| And the fact that he borrowed money from this guy... | ||
| Loan money. | ||
| Well, loan money to this guy. | ||
| Yeah, Porter loaned it to Tony. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Tony borrowed money from Porter and then didn't pay him, and that's what caused this whole thing. | ||
| Alex Rodriguez has got to be pulling his fucking hair out, going, what in the fuck? | ||
| And Alex was paying everybody. | ||
| So was MLB. I mean, everyone was running amok in Miami, like, just... | ||
| Hiring private investigators, running people down. | ||
| Alex Rodriguez, actually, this isn't in the documentary, but when these convicted felons stole the stolen documents from Porter Fisher, who had stolen the documents from Tony Bosch, they set him up in this whole... | ||
| It's so absurd. | ||
| It's a fucking tanning salon heist where they're like, hey, why don't you go in and try this new spray tan color? | ||
| It's Trumpian orange. | ||
| Go try it on. | ||
| And while he's in the fucking spray tan machine, they open his car and steal these documents, which have these client lists of all these famous baseball players, including the highest paid baseball player in the world, A-Rod. | ||
| And so they steal it, and then they turn around and sell these stolen documents. | ||
| To Major League Baseball. | ||
| For cash. | ||
| So MLB has this ragtag band of misfits, this internal FBI, like their own internal investigations division that they created after the Balco steroid scandal. | ||
| They're running amok. | ||
| They are seducing nurses, former nurses from Tony Bosch's clinics. | ||
| They are literally in diners. | ||
| With convicted felons handing over bags of cash from some MLB slush fund. | ||
| I don't imagine they were going to 1099 the guy and I don't know where this cash came from 125 grand and what they did was is that The felon who was doing it had a buddy at a neighboring table at this diner with his cell phone recording, video recording this transaction. | ||
| And then he turned around and went to A-Rod's camp and said, I'll sell you a video of me selling known stolen documents. | ||
| Everybody knew these documents were stolen. | ||
| So MLB's buying these stolen records, stolen evidence in the state of Florida Department of Health investigation for cash from a felon. | ||
| At some point he gets like freaked out and nervous and he deletes this video off the hard drive. | ||
| He winds up selling A-Rod a blank hard drive for six figures. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And A-Rod sends this hard drive. | ||
| A-Rod's people send this hard drive around the world to like data recovery services to try to get this video back. | ||
| So unfortunately the felon didn't get his second six figure payment because that was the first six figures were against the recovery of the data. | ||
| But he got like Two, three hundred grand to sell A-Rod a blank hard drive. | ||
| And A-Rod's dropping money on private investigators who were like having car chases through South Miami. | ||
| It was just totally crazy. | ||
| And it's like, I always say like, you come down to the swamp and roll around, you're going to get some mud on you. | ||
| So when MLB came down to To Miami, one of the guys, Jerome Hill, the former Baltimore cop turned Florida Department of Health investigator, he says unequivocally that Major League Baseball's investigators broke the law in the state of Florida and should have been prosecuted for it and held accountable for it and never were. | ||
| I mean, it's good to be a multi-billion dollar monopoly. | ||
| How old was A-Rod when the scandal broke? | ||
| A-Rod was definitely towards the end of his career. | ||
| And so, that's the interesting thing about... | ||
| Let's be real. | ||
| I don't give a shit about steroids in baseball. | ||
| And this era of steroids in baseball was not the same as the other... | ||
| You know, the Barry Bonds era of steroids in baseball. | ||
| These were not guys with necks the size of my waist or anything like that. | ||
| They were micro-dosing. | ||
| They were micro-dosing. | ||
| And it was HGH and testosterone. | ||
| And a lot of these guys... | ||
| I mean, listen, their livelihoods are contingent upon their physical performance. | ||
| And so you've got to play like, what is it, 162 games in 180 days. | ||
| It's the most physically grueling schedule of any of the professional sports. | ||
| And guys have always been looking for an edge. | ||
| In the 1950s, the Yankees were going out the Copacabana all fucking night. | ||
| Apparently there's an Adderall issue with baseball as well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| A disproportionate number of baseball players compared to the general population on Adderall. | ||
| That's why I said it's a performance enhancing drug. | ||
| But you had guys like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford and Billy Martin partying all night at the Copacabana. | ||
| They have to make a 1 p.m. | ||
| game, maybe even a doubleheader. | ||
| They're doing greenies. | ||
| They're doing amphetamines. | ||
| It's always been a part of baseball, finding that edge. | ||
| Now, you've got guys who are just looking to maybe recover a little faster, you know, from injuries or fatigue. | ||
| You're looking for guys who are looking to maintain peak performance for a longer period than their bodies might have otherwise allowed. | ||
| Is it that big of a deal? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| And it's a weird deal. | ||
| It's a weird thing that we have an issue with. | ||
| Look, if they did the same sort of stringent testing with NFL players, you'd find out that everyone's on steroids. | ||
| That's just a fact. | ||
| You don't get people that big. | ||
| And they do catch them every now and then. | ||
| But I feel like it's one of those things where you know how the drug cartels, they'll let some drug shipments get busted so that the other ones will get through? | ||
| I almost feel like that's what they do with NFL players who get caught. | ||
| Like, oh, look, we're testing. | ||
| We caught somebody. | ||
| Dude, that's what this was with A-Rod. | ||
| You know, Bud Selig is the steroid commissioner. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| That's the bottom line. | ||
| His tenure was marked by the famous, you know, home run derby. | ||
| Yeah, well, Mark Wire and Sammy Sosa. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, he... | ||
| Knowingly, I believe, exploited and profited from that era of baseball that really saved them after the 94-player strike. | ||
| Just look at the size of those guys. | ||
| Where they started. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, so many of them. | ||
| We literally morphed them in the documentary. | ||
| We morphed them from like a before and after. | ||
| Because they turn into fucking baseball monsters, smacking balls to Guantanamo, for Christ's sake. | ||
| You know what's interesting to me is that some people recovered from that stuff and some people did not. | ||
| Jose Canseco never recovered. | ||
| He never recovered in the public eye. | ||
| And that's why he's so pissed. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| When you're the pioneer in something, people really... | ||
| And dude, they had a street named after him in Miami, and they quietly took that shit down in the middle of the night after decades of naming that street for him. | ||
| He was just totally humiliated. | ||
| I think it's also because he ratted out a lot of guys. | ||
| But so did A-Rod. | ||
| A-Rod leaked names to try to distract or diffuse attention. | ||
| But he didn't put out a book. | ||
| Yeah, but like, it's the public nature of Canseco's book. | ||
| It's like, I don't know. | ||
| I'm just guessing. | ||
| But his book was like, his book turned out to be like the, Jose Canseco's book about stories turned out to be like the steel dossier of baseball. | ||
| It's like everybody thinks it's pissed and thinks it's a bunch of bullshit. | ||
| And then over time, it's slowly proven true. | ||
| And at the end, there's a pee tape. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that metaphor holds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, that is a good way of looking at it, too, right? | ||
| Because, like, think about the outrage when Clinton got his dick sucked by Monica Lewinsky and compare it to Donald Trump having at least two women that we know about where he paid off that he fucked. | ||
| And people are like, eh. | ||
| Ask the evangelicals where they stand on all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh. | |
| It was before the man found Christ. | ||
| That's what a lot of them say. | ||
| When did you find Christ? | ||
| I was watching a documentary where there was a guy who was some Christian guy who was saying, all of these accusations are before he was born because he was born in the eyes of Christ when he accepted Christ into his life. | ||
| When? | ||
| Well, I guess when he's running for president. | ||
| But that's when he paid off Stormy. | ||
| Like the night before the... | ||
| Yeah, but after that. | ||
| Then he became Jesus. | ||
| So after the election. | ||
| He paid off Stormy like when? | ||
| Like the day before the election. | ||
| I feel bad for her, too, because I feel like she thought she's going to go all in on this, and then she lost the court case against him, so she owes his legal fees. | ||
| $300,000. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Where the fuck is she going to get that? | ||
| And now she's trying to do stand-up. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a lot. | ||
| A lot of hand drops. | ||
| Enough about Robert Kraft. | ||
| She's trying to do stand-up. | ||
| No, she's not. | ||
| Yes, she is. | ||
| In Houston, Texas, they were calling her the Queen of Clapback. | ||
| The queen of the clap? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Clap back. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Clap back. | ||
| You say something bad about her, she's going to come after you even worse. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That clap back expression, like someone, Kim Kardashian claps back at the critics. | ||
| That is the dumbest. | ||
| I cannot wait for that one to fucking dry up and go away. | ||
| Not Kim Kardashian. | ||
| That expression. | ||
| Like, Twitter insult comic kind of shtick? | ||
| Well, it's just clapback. | ||
| They're calling it when someone has something to say about someone saying something about them. | ||
| That's clapping back. | ||
| Right, but how does that translate to Stormy Daniels doing stand-up? | ||
| How can you do stand-up out of clapbacks? | ||
| Well, they were calling her the queen of clapback. | ||
| She's going to do stand-up again. | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| Maybe she's hilarious. | ||
| I think she's going to take it seriously. | ||
| I mean, you never fucking know. | ||
| I mean, as a comic, I leave the door open for all possibilities. | ||
| But, I mean, it just means to me that she got this situation where she thought, she probably was told by everybody, look, hey, you're going to win this, he's going to pay you off, everyone's going to know that you told the truth, and people are going to pay for your interviews, and... | ||
| Man. | ||
| But this is America. | ||
| This is a broke supply and demand economy. | ||
| Like, if she can make more money... | ||
| Stand-up comedy is hard work. | ||
| If she can make more money just spinning on a pole... | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| Like, why... | ||
| Because she's probably got bad hips. | ||
| She's like in her 50s or something, isn't she? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think she's... | ||
| She's an older lady. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's got bad hips. | |
| But she's not young, man. | ||
| You know, she's not young. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How old is she? | ||
| She's only 40? | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Okay, I'm sorry, Stormy. | ||
| Don't clap back at me. | ||
| I thought she was older. | ||
| Hard life. | ||
| Ay, Dios mio. | ||
| As we say in Miami. | ||
| Yeah, hard life, bro. | ||
| But that thing is that everyone's so used to it now. | ||
| It's not that big a deal. | ||
| Even if a new accusation came out, people would be like, eh. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Remember the New York Times report about Trump where he was talking about his shady business dealings? | ||
| And they thought... | ||
| I mean, they spent years... | ||
| Career-ender. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Didn't do a damn thing. | ||
| In and out. | ||
| Just off his shoulder. | ||
| It's problematic. | ||
| And I'll tell you why. | ||
| Um... | ||
| It's what I call the new American values. | ||
| It's to me what I think screwball is about in the end, meaning like, yeah, it's fun and it's funny and it's a farce. | ||
| It's a romp. | ||
| You laugh. | ||
| But I think that there's a conversation to be had about what I call the new American values, which are lie, cheat and steal and get rich or get ahead and. | ||
| And these are values that we're teaching our children now. | ||
| Not honesty, integrity, tell the truth, do unto others as you'd have done to you, the golden rule. | ||
| We're now showing them be a bully. | ||
| Lie, cheat, and steal, and you could be the biggest, 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. | ||
| And I think this toxicity of the new American values is going to do damage to... | ||
| For generations. | ||
| And we're not going to be able to fully comprehend or understand or analyze the damage it's done for some time. | ||
| And it was like after Clinton. | ||
| Clinton redefined what sex meant. | ||
| And we were adults, you could laugh at it, but the truth is that he said oral sex wasn't sex. | ||
| And we saw the spike in sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers and young people, mostly... | ||
| Through oral sex because they said, oh, well, the president said... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Talk about a health... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was a legitimate public health crisis. | ||
| You saw, following the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you saw an increase in sexually transmitted diseases through oral sex amongst younger people because the president... | ||
| It's hard for us because we see the president right now as sort of a comic. | ||
| He's a reality show president. | ||
| We know it's bullshit. | ||
| But what do you tell kids? | ||
| This is the president of the United States? | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| Or was it because there was so much discussion about him getting his dick sucked that more people wanted to suck dicks and get their dick sucked? | ||
| I think without question, obviously, the size and scale of the coverage unquestionably got people horny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Legitimately! | ||
| But people... | ||
| For a while, people thought... | ||
| When I say people, I'm talking about younger people. | ||
| Developing minds, impressionable youths were under the impression that you could not get a sexually transmitted disease through something that wasn't sex. | ||
| And the president reset those values. | ||
| Just like this president, I feel, is recalibrating our values. | ||
| And I think that that's what's most... | ||
| I mean, other than the potential of nuclear war. | ||
| I think that is what... | ||
| Is most dangerous and what could cause the most long-term damage from this is these new American values. | ||
| Lie, cheat, and steal. | ||
| I was literally at a Q&A with one of the kids, the little kid, Brian Blanco, who plays Tony Bosch in the movie. | ||
| The lab coat and the hair. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| He found great kids. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| And so they're all great. | ||
| And he said, I was at a Q&A. And I was like, you know, what lessons do we learn from this movie? | ||
| And he, this is where I got this from. | ||
| He interrupted. | ||
| He's 10 years old. | ||
| And he's like, oh, I know, I know. | ||
| I'm like, Brian, you don't have to raise your hand. | ||
| It's your Q&A too, dude. | ||
| You're on the panel. | ||
| And he's like, lie, cheat, and steal, and to win. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| And I was like, oh, fuck. | ||
| This kid's 10 years old. | ||
| And I'm like, this is what he thinks... | ||
| The values of America are. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because in the documentary, one of the big things, the news clippings, is George Bush discussing steroids in baseball in 2004. Was it 2004? | ||
| State of the Union. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was talking about how it sends the wrong message. | ||
| That cheating in baseball sends the wrong message to the youth of America. | ||
| I thought that was silly at the time. | ||
| I was like, ah, what fucking message? | ||
| But the reality is those things do have a ripple effect. | ||
| And if you tell people that the way to become this superstar athlete is not just through hard work and dedication, but also through taking things that are illegal because they're going to pump you up and give you an edge on your competitors. | ||
| We're a shortcut society. | ||
| So we look for those tricks of the trade. | ||
| Always. | ||
| And we don't believe necessarily when people do achieve something naturally or via hard work. | ||
| We go, what did he do? | ||
| What did she do? | ||
| What did she really do? | ||
| Some of those shortcuts work, like Adderall, like steroids, they fucking work, man. | ||
| You know, the UFC has had a giant problem with them for a long time, and it was exacerbated by this time period in the early 2000s where they allowed people, I guess it wasn't quite the early 2000s, it was actually later in the 2000s, where they allowed people to take exogenous testosterone under therapeutic use exemptions. | ||
| They would call it TRT. And so this famous, like, the Vitor Belfort era, when he was on TRT, just started smashing people, because he looked so ridiculous. | ||
| He was so jacked. | ||
| And during that time period, they fell into this... | ||
| There was a sort of a really... | ||
| A piss-poor way of justifying it. | ||
| The justification was these people have low testosterone. | ||
| Low testosterone is a disease. | ||
| If we give them testosterone, they can perform better. | ||
| But the way around that was these guys were actually on steroids. | ||
| The steroids crashed their testosterone. | ||
| They'd go and get a test. | ||
| Look, my testosterone's low. | ||
| Like, yep, you need testosterone. | ||
| And then they would take steroids, you know, essentially. | ||
| Not steroids, but testosterone, which has, you know, similar effects. | ||
| And then, eventually, the UFC said, look, we fucked up. | ||
| We're going to go 180 degrees the other way and hire USADA. And we're going to crawl up everyone's ass with a microscope. | ||
| We're going to find out what the fuck is up. | ||
| And, man, bodies changed. | ||
| Careers crumbled. | ||
| I mean, we saw so many people get busted in the beginning. | ||
| So many people got caught. | ||
| And still getting it. | ||
| TJ Dillashaw just got caught, who's a Bantamweight champion. | ||
|
unidentified
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Just... | |
| Just relinquished his belt. | ||
| I don't know what he got caught for. | ||
| I don't know what the circumstances were. | ||
| Some people have been caught for accidental contamination because there's a lot of different supplements you could buy, even creatine, standard stuff that's totally legal to take, but they're contaminated because you're buying them from cheap sources. | ||
| They make them in China and what have you. | ||
| That was the problem with this biogenesis thing. | ||
| First of all, Tony Bosch, who wore a lab coat, had a stethoscope, called himself Dr. T, said Dr. Tony Bosch. | ||
| Well, he's a doctor in Belize. | ||
| Which I think I am, too. | ||
| I have to check my email. | ||
| You went to the same medical school as Dr. Pepper and Dr. Dre. | ||
| Well, I'm an ordained minister, just so you know. | ||
| I've actually married people. | ||
| That's legal. | ||
| I'm a legally ordained minister. | ||
| I got it online. | ||
| Tony Bosch, despite having attended what one of our interview subjects refers to as the Belize School of the Medical and Performing Arts, to get his doctorate, he was never a licensed physician in the United States, and yet he had legitimate... | ||
| Prescription pads and DEA numbers from doctors that he could then prescribe these drugs and in fact wanted to go one step further like we were talking about with the pill mills and actually sell them in-house to his clients and was buying them in the black market from some dude in a suburb of Miami making the shit in his garage. | ||
| So that's problematic. | ||
| Well, you know, here's one that's problematic that's kind of weird. | ||
| Doctors of chiropractic, like, you know, they don't go to medical school. | ||
| And some of them... | ||
| Check if this is true. | ||
| Can chiropractors write prescriptions? | ||
| I don't think that they can. | ||
| I think some of them can. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I think in some places they can write prescriptions. | ||
| Is that like in Tennessee? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Where is that a thing? | ||
| It says no. | ||
| It says they can't. | ||
| I guess some of them could be doctors, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I highly doubt it. | ||
| You need an adjustment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You alright? | |
| You feeling alright? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I went to a chiropractor once. | ||
| I've been to them. | ||
| Yeah, I thought they were real until I started reading about how it actually got... | ||
| And a lot of people out there that are chiropractors say, I do a lot of good for people. | ||
| I'm sure you do. | ||
| There's a lot of good therapies that chiropractors also offer. | ||
| So do churches do good for people. | ||
| But the actual evidence that manipulating people, especially your neck, that it does any good at all, there's none. | ||
| And it actually has killed people. | ||
| People have died from having their neck manipulated. | ||
| Well, I felt a lot lighter after the chiropractor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| By about $400, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they do a lot of shit. | ||
| Cold laser and massage and stuff that does work. | ||
| But if you look at the... | ||
| You know, it was invented by a guy who was a magnetic healer who was murdered by his own son. | ||
| His own son murdered him, ran over him with a car, and then took over the business. | ||
| Sounds like a Sondheim musical. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And it was all in like the 1800s. | ||
| And we've had it for so long that most people didn't look into it and say, well, what is this? | ||
| What is the science of this? | ||
| This guy thought that he could cure everything, including blindness, leukemia, cancer, from adjusting your back. | ||
| This was his premise was based on. | ||
| How's that going? | ||
| It came from a seance. | ||
| And now there's no more blindness or leukemia or it's all gone. | ||
| It's all gone, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's amazing. | |
| But there are still chiropractors that buy into that same idea that they can cure things. | ||
| That it's not just you're dealing with pain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And if they manipulate you, they can relieve pain. | ||
| No. | ||
| They can cure you of certain ailments because of your spine being aligned incorrectly. | ||
| They're going to adjust it. | ||
| It's popping you just like this. | ||
| Just like you do that with your fingers when you crack your knuckles. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's like a release of nitrogen or something. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure what causes the crack, but legitimately. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't see... | ||
| Do you see anything? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, maybe I'm wrong with them being able to write prescriptions. | ||
| I'll tell you that Tony Bosch could not write prescriptions, but he was doing it anyway, or irregardless, as we say in Miami. | ||
| Well, he had his dad doing it, right? | ||
| Irregardless. | ||
| Irregardless. | ||
| We say irregardless in Miami because we're illiterate, but I use it ironically, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Got it. | ||
| I think he might have swiped a pad from his doctor, from his father, who was a legitimate doctor. | ||
| So he was forging his dad's... | ||
| Yeah, and he had what they call medical directors. | ||
| That's part of these. | ||
| The whole anti-aging scheme really prospered in the state of Florida, as you can imagine. | ||
| And in no small part, because there's a lot of doctors who, from all over the country, retire to Florida. | ||
| But they are still medical doctors. | ||
| So you have guys like Tony Bosch, with an entrepreneurial spirit, who want to open up these anti-aging clinics, and they need what's called a medical director. | ||
| So they go to a legitimate doctor, and they say, hey, kind of rent us. | ||
| We'll put your name on the business. | ||
| You'll get a cut of the action. | ||
| And they're basically renting out their prescription pad and DEA number so that guys, you know, these other operators who, in this case, identify themselves falsely as doctors, can... | ||
| You know, exploit that power of the prescription pad. | ||
| And so that's what was happening here. | ||
| And more problematic, he started treating high school kids. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| And whose parents and baseball coaches had heard about him through word of mouth and brought these kids to him to get an advantage. | ||
| You know, we have a big immigrant community, obviously, in Miami. | ||
| We have a lot. | ||
| It's a huge baseball community. | ||
| You have people who are smuggled specifically into the country for the purpose of playing baseball and signing those big guaranteed contracts right out of high school. | ||
| And so you have parents and kids and coaches looking for every advantage who are going to this guy. | ||
| They weren't hearing about him in the high school locker room. | ||
| These were coaches and parents who were bringing their parents to. | ||
| You might say a guy who they presumed was a real doctor, but nonetheless looking to cheat to game the system. | ||
| And that's problematic. | ||
| When you have this guy who knows he knows he's not a doctor. | ||
| But he was a true believer in himself. | ||
| He really thought he was helping people. | ||
| And listen, the proof's in the pudding. | ||
| This guy could not exploit traditional advertising. | ||
| He wasn't doing billboards and TV ads. | ||
| He was strictly word of mouth. | ||
| So he had clients who were getting results, including nearly 100 cops who were referring their friends to his clinics. | ||
| So these parents came to him looking for help for their kids. | ||
| And those kids are victims. | ||
| Yeah, well that's for sure. | ||
| The last thing you want to do to a kid, especially one that doesn't have any sort of a real hormonal ailment, is to inject exogenous hormones into their body. | ||
| It just fucks their brain up, their emotions, their entire endocrine system crashes afterwards, it causes depressions, it leads to suicide in a lot of kids. | ||
| And depending on what you're doing to them, you could also be risking their offspring, potential future offspring. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, you could be killing their sperm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, you definitely can. | ||
| You have a disproportionate amount of, I mean, in the steroid use population of autism, childhood cancer, just horrible, horrible things that happen to the children of people who are on some of these drugs. | ||
| I think a lot of the folks that are looking at it in terms of a career in baseball or in any other sport where they could benefit, they go, hey, this is the price that I have to pay in order to excel at this extraordinary avenue for financial gain. | ||
| Well, Tony Bosch was treating Manny Ramirez when he was in Boston, and low testosterone, you know, he was getting on in the years, and Bosch started treating him, put him on a protocol, as he called it, take X amount of Y substance, etc., at this time each day, microdosing, as you said, so it wouldn't, in the event that they were randomly tested, it wouldn't be detected. | ||
| I don't know if that worked or not, or he was... | ||
| Giving them placebos on certain days. | ||
| I don't know what the scheme was. | ||
| But Manny starts to come back. | ||
| Again, I don't know if it was psychosomatic or he really was actually performing better. | ||
| And that's when he got his Dodgers deal. | ||
| What was that, like a $40 million deal? | ||
| Theoretically, thanks in no small part to this guy who was juicing him. | ||
| And then Manny gets busted, pisses dirty, after a surprise test before a game. | ||
| Because according to Bosch, he didn't take the micro dose on precisely the instructions, you know, that he had given him. | ||
| And so piss dirty. | ||
| And as a result of what you would assume was negative publicity from Manny getting busted and them connecting it to Tony Bosch in Miami, that was the word of mouth that got A-Rod's cousin to come to Bosch and say, hey, you should meet my cousin. | ||
| He's playing this game in Tampa. | ||
| Come up and meet him. | ||
| And it turns out that it's Alex Rodriguez. | ||
| It's just amazing that someone who made as much money as Alex Rodriguez has knuckleheads like that who can't see the future. | ||
| Because if I was his friend, I'd be like, hold on, hold on, hold on. | ||
| He's already been busted, dude. | ||
| Listen to me. | ||
| They're looking at him. | ||
| They're watching him. | ||
| In 09, yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, they weren't even. | ||
| They weren't even. | ||
| Listen, baseball is like everything else in American life now, including politics. | ||
| It's the WWE. When Bud Selig, the steroid commissioner, was on his way out the door, literally on the eve of retirement, and he's like, you know what? | ||
| I need to look like I'm doing something about this. | ||
| Because I got a great big fat asterisk by my name in the record books here, like all these players do in the steroid era. | ||
| I need to look like I did something on my way out the door. | ||
| So he calls his second-in-command Rob Manfred and says, let's do something about this. | ||
| And they go after the biggest scalp in the game, Alex Rodriguez. | ||
| And so when they needed Alex as the heel, that was the storyline. | ||
| So they nail Alex. | ||
| You know, the Vince McMahon of the Game Bud Sealy goes, oh, I took care of him, retires. | ||
| Rob Manfred, who was in charge of this whole botched, you know, quasi-legal operation, investigation, biogenesis, and Alex, gets the top gig and is now the commissioner of baseball. | ||
| And he goes, you know what would be a good storyline now? | ||
| What if I... Bring A-Rod and Pete Rose back as commentators. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And he did for a while. | ||
| A-Rod and Pete Rose were working together. | ||
| By the way, they were damn good. | ||
| They were damn good television, dude. | ||
| And as commentators, until Pete Rose got in trouble again, they axed him. | ||
| But now you've got Rob Manfred, who basically put it all on the line. | ||
| And A-Rod, who put it all on the line, fighting each other in this battle of the legacies with Bud Selig. | ||
| Now they're posing with J-Lo out at nightclubs and stuff because that's the new storyline. | ||
| The storyline, you know, one day you're the heel, the next day you're the hero. | ||
| Heel, hero. | ||
| It's like whatever, whatever. | ||
| And they're just selling everybody this bill of goods that this is all real. | ||
| Did he really have a picture that was him with Minotaur's body? | ||
| Centaur. | ||
| Centaur. | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| So this is, I don't know if this is apocryphal or real. | ||
| I know people who have been in the apartment and claim to have seen it. | ||
| The problem is I don't know if they're telling the truth or they're kind of fueling the apocryphal tale. | ||
| I want to believe. | ||
| I want to believe. | ||
| We all want to believe. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| We all want to believe. | ||
| So, I mean, spoiler alert, we fucking, we did it. | ||
| We put it in there with the little kid's face on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| Just hilarious. | ||
| The way you did it is hilarious. | ||
| The kid who plays A-Rod is fucking amazing. | ||
| It's the light eyes. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| I don't want to give too much of it away, but making the funny faces in Korra, it's like fucking hilarious. | ||
| I mean, it's so good. | ||
| I was just laughing. | ||
| I was like, this is so ridiculous. | ||
| And to know that this is all something that really happened. | ||
| And I have to tell you, we've been at this, making documentaries for like 20 years now, almost. | ||
| And so... | ||
| This is the most, as ridiculous and fucking absurd as this is, it is the most meticulously researched documentary we have ever done. | ||
| Why? | ||
| We're dealing with some very powerful litigious individuals and organizations. | ||
| So we knew we had to get this 100% right. | ||
| Not to mention the way we shot this on set, on location. | ||
| For 10 days, we had the playback on the set. | ||
| So we were committed to this dialogue, right? | ||
| And so we had to make sure... | ||
| We went and obtained transcripts that were never released publicly of sworn testimony in the case to be able to cross-check some of the stuff that we were told and we're going to put in the documentary. | ||
| And we just... | ||
| I mean, we actually shot at some of the actual locations in Miami where these real events took place. | ||
| The Fountain Blue, Live at the Fountain Blue Hotel, you know, the nightclub, the Sports Grill in South Miami, the Ritz Carlton, the Keebuskeen. | ||
| We actually took the kids there, put the facial hair on, put the fucking cop uniforms on and the pinstripes on, and we just filmed them all over town. | ||
| What's funny about it in Miami, no one looked twice at us. | ||
| No one thought anything of just us running around. | ||
| These little kids with beards and mustaches and gray hair and lab coats. | ||
| The fucking scene where they're looking for the blood in the nightclub where he lost the vial. | ||
| I'm like, what in the fuck? | ||
| The fact that he drew his blood in the bathroom and then lost the vial. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| It was so crazy. | ||
| I was just watching it, like, shaking my head, like, this is all real. | ||
| This is how this went down. | ||
| That guy was worth how many hundreds of millions of dollars? | ||
| Oh, over $400 million was his gross revenue, just in baseball. | ||
| And he just had knuckleheads. | ||
| I mean, the fact that he was, like, willing to keep this guy around him. | ||
| He grew up in Miami. | ||
| That's who you surround yourself with when you grow up. | ||
| In Miami. | ||
| And that scene was, I mean, that scene, we had like all those kids, like all the extra kids partying. | ||
| Shout out to my director of photography, B.G. Goldneck. | ||
| He did a hell of a job. | ||
| Like that was a complicated, complicated shoot. | ||
| It's a great documentary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| All your shit's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| I'm a big fan of all your stuff, but this one's particularly silly. | ||
| You should come down to Miami. | ||
| You should, we're doing, I'm almost embarrassed to say it. | ||
| I just mentioned it to you earlier. | ||
| We turn cocaine cowboys into a stage play. | ||
| Yeah, you were saying that before we started, and I'm like, what are you doing? | ||
| It's not a musical, but you should come down, and it's called Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy. | ||
| You might remember in the documentary, there was a hitman, Jorge Riviala, who he worked for La Madrina, the godmother of Griselda Blanco, and when we first started researching the doc in 2004, we We obtained a seven-volume, 1,300-page deposition that he gave. | ||
| And normally in a depot, You're like, the answer's like, yes, no, yes, no. | ||
| I don't remember, you know, don't recall. | ||
| This was like, he was a cooperating witness against Griselda in Miami-Dade County, state of Florida. | ||
| It was a three capital murder charges. | ||
| So three death penalties. | ||
| We're talking old Sparky cases and the electric chair. | ||
| And so he was a cooperating witness. | ||
| So it read like a monologue. | ||
| I'm reading it and going, I went to New World School of the Arts High School, which is where I studied theater, so I was reading a lot of plays, and I was like, oh shit, this would be like a great play. | ||
| And 15 years later, we turned it into Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy. | ||
| And you said it's kind of funny? | ||
| So, someone described it. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| Oh shit, yeah. | ||
| My producing partner, that's Yancey Arias from formerly, spoiler alert, he's not on the show anymore. | ||
| His character got into some trouble. | ||
| Queen of the South on USA. He's brilliant in the show. | ||
| And so my producing partner, David Sipkin, who co-produced Cocaine Cowboys and edited it with me, he's described it as a cross between Cocaine Cowboys and my Twitter feed. | ||
| That's how he described it. | ||
| It's a little reverent. | ||
| It's obviously a little absurd if you're going to put Cocaine Cowboys as a live theater event. | ||
| We acknowledge the absurdity of it and the surreal exploitation of it. | ||
| You know, the guy, Michelle Hausman, who's the director of the play at Miami New Drama at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach on Lincoln Road, he said, he said, why are we doing cocaine cowboys for the theater in 2019? | ||
| And I was like, it's a good question. | ||
| Because, like, it speaks to the relevance of, like, why do this now? | ||
| And I said, well, if you take away from the documentary, you take away the drugs and the money, it's really a story about Immigrants, children, and gun violence. | ||
| That's what it's about. | ||
| And what could be more relevant in the contemporary conversation than immigration, children, and gun violence. | ||
| And so ultimately, I wanted to make a story about the Miami of yesterday, but the America of today. | ||
| Like I said, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. | ||
| So here's a story about Miami in the 1980s, but it really... | ||
| Resembles the America of today. | ||
| And so to do that, we had to not make it totally fucking depressing and disturbing. | ||
| We injected a lot of humor and a lot of irreverence into it. | ||
| The woman, Zila Mendoza, who plays Griselda Blanco, also plays the state attorney. | ||
| So she has this dual role as sort of these dueling antagonists against Rivie, the hitman. | ||
| And it's just a, you know, I was writing it with a friend, Oren Squire, this great TV writer and playwright. | ||
| Why did you have one more and play both roles? | ||
| Because I felt that they were flip sides of the same coin. | ||
| I think the state attorney is an interesting character in Miami-Dade County. | ||
| Does she wear different clothes? | ||
| Oh yeah, she has different hair. | ||
| And in fact, the performances are so different and the voices are so different that Zila does. | ||
| Some people after the show would be like, oh my god, she was amazing. | ||
| Zila was amazing as Griselda Blanco. | ||
| Who's the actress that plays the state attorney? | ||
| Kathy. | ||
| And we're like, oh, we won't tell. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| The last time I heard of that being done effectively was Mars Attacks, when Jack Nicholson played the cowboy, but also played the president. | ||
| I like Mars Attacks. | ||
| Are these real underrated Tim Burton? | ||
| Hugely underrated. | ||
| Amazing score. | ||
| I don't know, especially now, I feel like it really holds up. | ||
| I still go, ah, ah. | ||
| I'll still do that every now and then, just talking about UFO-related things. | ||
| It was preposterous. | ||
| I love that movie. | ||
| It's a great movie. | ||
| Oh my god, they're crazy. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It holds up, man. | ||
| I watched it like two years ago. | ||
| It holds up. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| That's interesting, though, that you chose to use the same woman. | ||
| Did you think about that for a while? | ||
| Did you have another woman? | ||
| But you always wanted to do it from the beginning. | ||
| Yeah, always. | ||
| I have a strange relationship with the state attorney in Miami-Dade County. | ||
| She's been the state attorney for about 26 years now. | ||
| And, you know, when she was first elected, she was like the first Cuban state attorney in the state of Florida. | ||
| Very ambitious. | ||
| She's been the only state attorney we've had since Janet Reno left us for the Clinton administration. | ||
| That's how long she's been state attorney. | ||
| So now she has one of those records where you examine it and you say, okay, what's actually happening in this town? | ||
| When people say to me, like, why is Miami so... | ||
| Fucking corrupt. | ||
| Why does corruption grow greater and wider than fucking oranges in Miami? | ||
| And the reason is... | ||
| When you have the top cop in town does not effectively enforce public corruption laws and does not pursue public corruption, you have an area where it's just... | ||
| You set a message of impunity. | ||
| That's the bottom line. | ||
| No trouble arresting innocent young black kids on drug charges or whatever, but when it comes to enforcing public corruption, she's just... | ||
| Non-existent. | ||
| And so what happens is you have a... | ||
| And of course it's like the broken windows theory of crime. | ||
| If you allow petty corruption to go, eventually some of these politicians wind up literally in a closet at City Hall accepting bags full of money. | ||
| And the only thing we've been able to rely on to some extent is the feds coming in and trying to help, but you have a state attorney who... | ||
| Has never in her 26 years in office charged a police officer for non-duty killing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Despite a proliferation Of these incidents. | ||
| So it's not like it's, oh, it's not happening as often. | ||
| The incidents have exploded. | ||
| And the reason the incidents have exploded is because police know that they'll get away with it because Kathy will not prosecute them. | ||
| So the message that's being sent is a dangerous one. | ||
| And it has created a toxic effect with the relationship between, obviously, police and the citizens that they're supposed to be protecting and serving. | ||
| And it's created a very dangerous situation in the city. | ||
| And it's also created a situation where just like... | ||
| Mayor after mayor just gets away with pure fuckery, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| Yeah, and that's... | ||
| It's not a sexy answer. | ||
| People are always like, why is Miami so corrupt? | ||
| People want some sort of sexy answer, and I say, well, when the top cop is the same person for 26 years, you know, if you're looking at something... | ||
| If you want to know what's wrong in a community or with anything, you don't look at what changes. | ||
| I mean, mayors come and go, police chiefs come and go, commissioners come and go... | ||
| Killers come and go. | ||
| You know, criminals come and go. | ||
| You look at the constants. | ||
| You say, what's been the same here for 26 years? | ||
| That's got to be the problem. | ||
| And sure as shit, that's the problem. | ||
| So I wanted to make a statement about the state of Miami today and say that, you know, Also, Griselda Blanco was born in Colombia in a very difficult time in the history of that country during La Violencia, This brutal civil, brutal civil war between liberal and conservative parties that went on for like 20 years almost caused caused the horrific murders of like 200,000 people. | ||
| Some very brutal, some very public. | ||
| It's been reported that she, as a hobby with her friends and their youth, you just run around and just bury bodies that were just lying in the street or lying around. | ||
| Like that was just a hobby, something for the kids to do. | ||
| And so you grow up in that environment. | ||
| what we were saying earlier, like you grow up in a cult, you grow up in that environment, your psyche is fucked. | ||
| You know, you're not exactly born into money or power or wealth. | ||
| You know, your dad's not a judge. | ||
| You don't exactly have those benefits or opportunities. | ||
| And if you can try to make something of yourself, I mean, the problem, of course, is that Rizal de Blanco went into an illicit... | ||
| An illicit trade. | ||
| But a trade that a lot of people in Columbia were getting into from that era. | ||
| I wanted to have a discussion about... | ||
| A lot of the characters argue with each other in the play about how different everybody is. | ||
| And how Miami is like Game of Thrones and Paradise with slightly fewer dragons. | ||
| We just self-segregate and it becomes this battle of fiefdoms. | ||
| Because we're not multicultural. | ||
| We're very much... | ||
| I always say the common misconception about Miami is that we're a melting pot. | ||
| We are not a melting pot. | ||
| We are a TV dinner where sometimes the peas fall into the mashed potatoes. | ||
| We have our little kingdoms by flag, by nationality, very much so. | ||
| And so everybody's arguing about how we're different. | ||
| And the play sort of, when you walk away, you're like, okay, but this is a conversation about how we're all the same. | ||
| Some of us have different opportunities than others, and it's just a matter of what we're able to make of those opportunities. | ||
| That was sort of the comparison I was making. | ||
| Locally, it's a little scandalous, the fact that the same actress plays both of these very powerful women. | ||
| Because Kathy, the state attorney, is a very powerful, popular figure. | ||
| So because you've publicly stated that there's a reason, there's parallels between her and Griselda Bronco. | ||
| And let's say the portrayal is not the most flattering in the play. | ||
| Are you worried? | ||
| I think she gets a fair shake in the play, but Rivi, the character, through his commentary, comes down pretty hard on her. | ||
| I've been publicly very critical of her, I think, in a constructive way, publicly and via social media. | ||
| But, I mean... | ||
| 26 years and age almost 70. That is fascinating. | ||
| You've got to wonder if it's a spoken agreement or if this is just a known sort of this is just how she does business. | ||
| You don't have to worry. | ||
| I call it a conspiracy of convenience because not every conspiracy involves a bunch of rogues gallery at a Boardroom table in a dark, smoky room. | ||
| Talking about, okay, how are we going to conspire? | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| Conspiracies of convenience are just like people are in positions of power, and everybody just kind of wink, wink, nod, nod. | ||
| Everybody knows what they're supposed to do. | ||
| And you don't ruffle feathers, and you don't... | ||
| You don't fuck with conventional wisdom, and this is the way it's always been done, so this is the way we do it. | ||
| And everybody just kind of, you either fall in line, or they get rid of you, one way or another. | ||
| And so that's just the way fiefdoms operate. | ||
| It sounds like such an exhausting project to create a play out of that sort of horrific time in Miami's history. | ||
| It was fucking exhausting. | ||
| When you told me you were doing it, that's the first thing I thought of. | ||
| Being a lazy fuck, I'm like, oh, that's so much time. | ||
| It seems like so much time to do. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| This documentary racket is not very profitable, so I wanted to go where the real money is. | ||
| Theater. | ||
| Plays. | ||
| I'm going to be a playwright. | ||
| You're going to make your fortune, Billy. | ||
| And I said to my co-author, Orrin Squire, and the director, I was like, listen, this has to be a purely theatrical experience, too. | ||
| No projections, no archive news footage like we use in the document. | ||
| I'm like, in Miami, first of all, these days, if I just got to put my pants on to leave the house, that's a fucking hassle. | ||
| Meaning, like, if I can just... | ||
| When I'm home, if I can just chill, I want to just chill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So if I'm going to be like, okay, I got to go see a fucking play. | ||
| I'm like, so first thing I got to do is put my pants on. | ||
| All right? | ||
| So I put my pants on. | ||
| Then you got to get in the car. | ||
| You got to brave this traffic. | ||
| It's spring break on right now, Miami Beach. | ||
| It's out of control. | ||
| So you got to go to South Beach, go to the theater, Lincoln Road, and then, like... | ||
| Pay your hard-earned money to see this play, because plays are more expensive. | ||
| Tickets for plays are a lot pricier than a movie, right? | ||
| Or a Netflix subscription. | ||
| I'm like, I don't want people to be there like, what the hell? | ||
| I could have just stayed home and watched this shit on Netflix. | ||
| I want people to go like, holy shit. | ||
| And we're actually seeing that. | ||
| A really disproportionate number of people coming to the theater who have never been to a live play before. | ||
| Because of their interest in the subject matter, the title, Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy, or the documentary. | ||
| So people are coming, and they're rowdy, and they're interacting with the actors. | ||
| It's kind of fun, because we do a lot of breaking of the fourth wall, where Rivi talks to the crowd, or the cops talk to the crowd. | ||
| And so they're talking back, the audience, and they're... | ||
| And it's fun, and very, and funny, and I think pretty thought-provoking, particularly at the end. | ||
| And they just like, this audience is, we're like, oh shit, you can't duplicate this experience in any way. | ||
| You know that. | ||
| I mean, like, yeah. | ||
| I mean, watching comedy on Netflix is one thing. | ||
| Being in the room is a totally different energy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a different animal. | ||
| Yeah, it's a rush. | ||
| It's like, you know, it's like a drug. | ||
| How many seats? | ||
| This theater, 420. Oh, it's great. | ||
| 420, bro. | ||
| Fairly intimate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that's a good size for an intimate live show. | ||
| It's huge, and it's a beautiful... | ||
| It's like a historic theater in Miami Beach. | ||
| There's not a lot of... | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| The Colony Theater. | ||
| Okay, I know where that is. | ||
| On Lincoln Road. | ||
| It's that walking street. | ||
| You probably get... | ||
| Back when we had the Comedy Festival, you probably did it. | ||
| You were at the Fillmore, and you might have done the Colony. | ||
| Yeah, I did the Jackie Gleason Theater. | ||
| Yes, the Fillmore now, yeah. | ||
| I've done a few different places. | ||
| I don't remember all of them. | ||
| This is a smaller room for you, but it's a great, cool space. | ||
| It used to be an old movie theater, and my grandma used to go see movies there. | ||
| We don't preserve a lot of our history in Miami. | ||
| It's like I was saying earlier, we're such a young city, literally young, and we're like... | ||
| America's perpetual rebellious teenager. | ||
| We're like, everything new. | ||
| We have a transient population, a lack of institutional memory, and we're like, fuck history. | ||
| Let's just knock this down and build new. | ||
| Because that's the only way to create jobs. | ||
| Knocking shit down, redesigning it, rebuilding it, repopulating it, building it taller, creating more revenue. | ||
| Because we don't have a state income tax in Florida. | ||
| It's just constant hustle. | ||
| To have a place like that where it's like, oh, we're going to We're good to go. | ||
| The no income tax thing is very attractive to people. | ||
| People move to states that don't have income. | ||
| That's one thing that pulls people into Nevada. | ||
| Why do you think O.J. Simpson moved there? | ||
| I thought there was a law where they couldn't get his money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We have the homestead law. | ||
| You can't get the money. | ||
| You can't get the house. | ||
| It's a great place to sort of... | ||
| Hide assets. | ||
| I told you, like a third world country. | ||
| It's like a banana republic. | ||
| Yeah, because he lost the civil case. | ||
| A 30 plus million dollar judgment against him. | ||
| So he bought a fucking house in Florida. | ||
| Now, is he still there? | ||
| Oh, I don't think so. | ||
| I think he's in Vegas now. | ||
| I think they released him, but they were gonna... | ||
| I think he might be on paper, so I think he might have to stick around. | ||
| I'm not certain. | ||
| Because for a while, I think he was asking permission to go to Florida when he first got released, and the Attorney General of Florida was like, no thanks. | ||
| To be fair, though, she was a blonde woman, so she was scared. | ||
| Too soon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| It's no too soon with him. | ||
| He's one of the weirdest cases in all of American pop culture history. | ||
| I mean, he is one of the weirdest cases. | ||
| You know, there's a fantastic photo that someone made a meme of of Howard Cosell with Bruce Jenner on his one side and then O.J. Simpson on his other side and Howard Cosell saying, I've seen the future, you're not going to fucking believe this. | ||
| Because it is so goddamn crazy that one of the most famous and beloved people forget before that murder, beloved. | ||
| I mean, he was like The Rock. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| In a lot of ways. | ||
| Maybe even, well, I don't want to say more beloved. | ||
| The Rock's pretty beloved. | ||
| But that level. | ||
| I mean, endorsements, Hertz rental car ads, he was in movies. | ||
| People loved him. | ||
| Yeah, beloved personality. | ||
| In comedies, no less. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| The Naked Gun trilogy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| You know, and, well, it was inevitable he would wind up in Florida, of course. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| Just crazy. | ||
| This is something that, in the end, not to spoil it, you've been so kind to not spoil Screwball, but in the end, that's also part of the message, is the idea that, and why we use the children. | ||
| These athletes are heroes to these kids. | ||
| They look up to them. | ||
| These are supposedly role models. | ||
| And how many professional athletes do you know who you'd be like... | ||
| I want my kids to idolize this person. | ||
| Legitimately. | ||
| Legitimately. | ||
| Very few. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's where that whole lie, cheat, steal, to get ahead message, I think, is what we're teaching our children these days. | ||
| And that's the case with O.J. Simpson. | ||
| People idolize that guy. | ||
| So, did A-Rod retire? | ||
| Did he ever come back from this game? | ||
| I don't know anything about baseball. | ||
| For one season. | ||
| He did? | ||
| Yeah, for one season he came back. | ||
| Largest suspension in the history of the game. | ||
| But they reduced it, right? | ||
| They reduced it, but it remained the largest suspension. | ||
| So how many games? | ||
| Was it a year? | ||
| Ultimately, it was like 160. It was almost like basically a full season. | ||
| And the following season, he came back, played about another year. | ||
| You have to remember, he was injured for a while. | ||
| I think actually he might have been injured the following year and then came back the year after. | ||
| And then he retired. | ||
| And the Yankees made him like... | ||
| where he would mentor young players really can't make this shit up dude really yeah that is so interesting that he didn't become persona non grata like Jose Canseco did right it's I don't know how quite how to explain it and And listen, it's been one of the greatest, I think, reputation rebuilders. | ||
| Not even a rebuilder. | ||
| Remember, he was hated. | ||
| Yankees fans used to boo the guy. | ||
| He was not a beloved figure as a baseball player. | ||
| Now he's like, I mean, my mom knows him. | ||
| Who he is. | ||
| I mean, she calls him J-Lo's boyfriend, but the bottom line is she knows. | ||
| I think they're going to be studying. | ||
| This case study of image rehab is going to be studied for decades to come in PR classes. | ||
| Do you think it was calculated? | ||
| I think a lot of it was accidental. | ||
| But look at... | ||
| He's never even apologized or really admitted what he did. | ||
| He never went on the Mea culpa tour. | ||
| Poor Lance Armstrong did. | ||
| Did he test positive? | ||
| No, he never failed a test either. | ||
| Yeah, see that's part of it. | ||
| Like, he was on this shady doctor's dockets. | ||
| How the fuck did the doctor use the right name? | ||
| Like, that's what's so crazy. | ||
| Like, why did you use his name? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Why did you use A. Rodriguez? | ||
| How about use a pseudonym? | ||
| You have to remember, Tony was doing a lot of cocaine at the time. | ||
| And he was like in a fucking spiral his whole life was. | ||
| He was about to hit rock bottom while he was running this business. | ||
| And what's funny is, so his medical records, there was some file folders, but a lot of them were in... | ||
| Composition books. | ||
| Like just old school CVS. Like you used in the movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's why that's the icon. | ||
| He wrote in and he would scribble in. | ||
| So those would be his... | ||
| He'd write patient nicknames and dose... | ||
| And then some of it would just be like stream of consciousness, like middle school girl, like journal. | ||
| Like he would write his name in different fonts. | ||
| He would come up with different like business ideas and plans and... | ||
| And make signs, you know, for, like, his businesses and talk about motivational speaking ideas that he had. | ||
| And it was, like, it's a real journey, like, into his mind of a cocaine-addicted fake doctor in Miami, you know? | ||
| Which is an interesting journey, I gotta tell you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, like, he... | ||
| So, these composition books... | ||
| On some pages, there'd be, like, code names. | ||
| Like, you know, he had a guy that was, like, you know, that he'd name after cars or he'd name after, like, Miho or little Spanish words or things like that. | ||
| He had a player... | ||
| He bought him, like, he bought him an SUV of some kind. | ||
| So he, like, you know, he codenamed him, like, Tahoe or whatever the fucking car was, you know. | ||
| Another one was DUI because he'd just gotten a DUI. So that was, like... | ||
| But then, like, after a while, he just kind of abandoned it and then was, like... | ||
| A. Rodriguez or Alex Rodriguez. | ||
| By the way, there's a shit ton of Alex Rodriguez's in Miami. | ||
| But when you start seeing A-Rod in the books, it's kind of a tell. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| He just got sloppy, you know, like fucking drug addicts do. | ||
| What does that guy do now? | ||
| Well, he's five years off of cocaine, which is good. | ||
| He went to federal prison, and rightfully so for the kids, for the high school kids. | ||
| When the judge sentenced him specifically said, you know, it's one thing for consenting adults to engage in this behavior. | ||
| It's another thing for you to drag kids into this mess and potentially poison them. | ||
| So he went to federal prison. | ||
| Get this. | ||
| He winds up in a camp so it's like minimum security federal prison in Alabama and he winds up teaching in part a nutrition class to his fellow inmates He's in there with Jeff Skilling of Enron, who's teaching a business class to his fellow inmates, and Jesse Jackson Jr., who's teaching a political science and civics course to their fellow inmates. | ||
| They say prison's the best place to learn and that camp in Alabama. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| We're running out of money on this movie, and so, as you always do with movies, and so there's a couple scenes that we wanted to do that we ran out, we just couldn't do. | ||
| We had to cut them from the schedule. | ||
| So, one of them was an epilogue with all the kids in federal prison, like, jumpsuits, and, like, Tony teaching, and, like, a little baby Jesse Jackson Jr., a little baby Jeff Skilling from Enron, a little baby... | ||
| And another thing... | ||
| So, another thing Bosh was doing is he was... | ||
| Like, you see him at the beginning of the movie sitting at the bar at the Ritz-Carlton, Key Biscayne, and he's writing... | ||
| Little protocols on a fucking cocktail napkin for the bartenders on how to build muscle, how to lose weight. | ||
| So he was doing that in prison for inmates. | ||
| For like vitamins and supplements that they could buy in the commissary. | ||
| He would be like, hey, yo, Dr. T, I'm trying to build muscle mass. | ||
| And he'd be like, okay, here's the problem. | ||
| Go to the commissary, buy these vitamins or these supplements. | ||
| And there you take it this time. | ||
| Yo, Tony, I'm looking to lose weight. | ||
| What do I do? | ||
| And then guards started coming to him. | ||
| Like, hey, I'm looking at my wife wants to lose some weight. | ||
| Yeah, he'd give him protocols. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, so I mean, he's very, I told you, he's very much a true believer in In himself. | ||
| He's got a lot of faith in himself. | ||
| And he, for a while, was planning on opening a nutritional supplement business across the street from Marlins Park in Miami. | ||
| This is pretty recently. | ||
| It hasn't happened yet, but he's looking around for new opportunity. | ||
| And Miami is a land of new opportunity. | ||
| I told you this last time I saw you that It's an old saying that I love that 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. | ||
| It's not only a town of reinvention, it's just always been a sunny place for shady people. | ||
| I just always wanted to know what happens to a fake doctor who gets busted selling steroids to kids. | ||
| What does that guy do for a living afterwards? | ||
| I suspect now he's just sort of being subsidized by family and friends right now. | ||
| He does have kids and child support probably to make somehow. | ||
| I don't know exactly what he's up to. | ||
| I'll ask him the next time. | ||
| I'm going to see him this weekend at some Q&As. | ||
| Are you really? | ||
| Oh yeah, he does. | ||
| And he's quite funny. | ||
| He's quite sober-ish. | ||
| Ish? | ||
| Ish. | ||
| Well, I think he still drinks, but he doesn't do illicit drugs anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was bad for a while. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| That's always the bad decision-making route. | ||
| What's funny about this is that he... | ||
| So we caught him on his way into federal prison originally. | ||
| So in November of 2013, Alex was in the midst of the arbitration that we portray at the end of the movie. | ||
| In MLB's offices in Manhattan. | ||
| And we get a call from his publicist. | ||
| And his publicist says... | ||
| Alex is on a break from the arbitration. | ||
| And he's coming down to Miami. | ||
| He's got an office in Coral Gables, which is this very wealthy, affluent suburb adjacent to the city of Miami. | ||
| And it's actually the city where the University of Miami is located, where Alex Rodriguez Field is at UM on campus. | ||
| And so they said, listen, Alex would like to meet with you to talk about possibly doing some kind of tell-all documentary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| This is November 2013. So I'm like, yes, please. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I figured, like, this is a hush-hush meeting. | ||
| You know, we're going to do this on the down low at his office in Carl Gable's. | ||
| They say, meet us some weekday, high noon, at Hillstone Restaurant, which is the power lunch spot in that neighborhood. | ||
| The most prominent corner in the city. | ||
| Floor to ceiling windows, open kitchen, everybody from the street to the dishwasher can see everything going on in that dining room. | ||
| They want to meet us there at noon. | ||
| So I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| We go there, slammed, every seat taken, mob scene around the host stand, three, four deep at the bar. | ||
| They escort us down the center, me and my producer Alfred Spellman, right down the center aisle. | ||
| Parade us, practically. | ||
| And, you know, ESPN, in the 30 for 30s, they really fetishize the directors. | ||
| So, like, they have, like, video interviews with us, like, you know, in bumpers, like, every hour, like, little segments. | ||
| And so, people sometimes recognize me, usually in Miami, like, close to UM, because we did the UM interview. | ||
| So, if there was any place I was going to be recognized, it was two miles from the University of Miami. | ||
| And so, take us right down the middle. | ||
| And there, in the center booth, on this elevated platform around the back, is Alex Rodriguez holding court. | ||
| So, we literally have to step up on stage to join him. | ||
| And all eyes are on us in this place. | ||
| And... | ||
| I don't know what we kind of get introduced and I need like an icebreaker. | ||
| So I'm like, so who's going to call page six? | ||
| You or us? | ||
| Sure as shit. | ||
| Two weeks later, it was in page six. | ||
| And so we sit there and Alex didn't laugh. | ||
| The publicist laughed. | ||
| That's like a publicist joke, you know, I guess. | ||
| Because it was clear that we were there to be seen having this meeting. | ||
| It was so clear. | ||
| Why do you think they did that? | ||
| It was part of... | ||
| Alex's, when you said, was there a plan? | ||
| There was kind of a plan. | ||
| It was part of Alex's PR offensive or pushback against Major League Baseball. | ||
| And so we sat there with him for almost an hour and a half and he just lied. | ||
| Just lied to us. | ||
| The whole time. | ||
| And I didn't know that. | ||
| I'm not a... | ||
| About everything. | ||
| I never met Tony Bosch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is all... | |
| You look at my records. | ||
| My performance didn't improve after the time he claims to have been treating me. | ||
| I'm not a baseball fan. | ||
| I'm like you. | ||
| To me, I call it screensaver. | ||
| But my producing partner, Alfred, is a degenerate baseball fan. | ||
| He gets the fucking MLB.com package on his desk, on his iPad... | ||
| All day long during the season. | ||
| I'm just like... | ||
| I mean, I guess he does that instead of Ambien. | ||
| It's like less sleep-eating with baseball, I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So he's just like... | ||
| But he's a huge baseball fan. | ||
| And when I left, I was like, he made a lot of good points, Alex did. | ||
| Alfred's like... | ||
| Fucking lied about everything. | ||
| And I can't blame him. | ||
| He lied to everybody in those days. | ||
| I mean, he was desperately trying to salvage his career and his legacy. | ||
| And he allegedly lied to the DEA in a Queen for a Day meeting. | ||
| Who the fuck lies in a Queen for a Day meeting other than George Papadopoulos? | ||
| I mean, the whole point is you're supposed to tell the truth that they're not going to fuck with you. | ||
| But he allegedly did that. | ||
| What is a Queen for a Day meeting? | ||
| So Queen for a Day meeting with the feds, you get a letter for it. | ||
| They're like, we're investigating. | ||
| You're a witness in an investigation. | ||
| We understand you may have participated in some illegality or committed some crimes in the course of this larger investigation, but we're not after you. | ||
| We just want you to come in, feel comfortable and free to tell the truth to our investigators so that we can pursue our investigation accurately and fairly, and we will not Anything you say will not be held against you, essentially, in a court of law. | ||
| So you're queen for a day, they call it. | ||
| You get a letter, a queen for a day letter. | ||
| They actually call it that? | ||
| They call it queen for a day. | ||
| It's the thing the feds have. | ||
| And so Alex was free to just speak. | ||
| The only thing he can't do Is lie to a federal agent. | ||
| That is a crime. | ||
| And that is, in fact, I think what George Papadopoulos was ultimately... | ||
| He lied in his Queen for a Day meeting. | ||
| The whole point of a Queen for a Day meeting is to not lie. | ||
| Because you can't get in trouble, essentially, for any crimes that you admit there about the investigation. | ||
| So that was the allegations that he actually lied. | ||
| Listen, I'm a documentarian. | ||
| People lie to me for a living. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| Especially because they spelled my name right on page six and that shit was in bold. | ||
| I don't have the juice to make that happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex's publicist had the juice to make that happen. | |
| I was flattered that they'd write about me. | ||
| But you didn't think that he was lying? | ||
| I suspected he wasn't telling us the whole truth, but I thought he made some interesting points. | ||
| So, Alfred... | ||
| Alfred was a pitcher in high school. | ||
| North Miami Beach Senior High. | ||
| Go Chargers. | ||
| And Alfred had actually pitched against Alex Rodriguez. | ||
| This is like one of his only war stories from his baseball years in high school, right? | ||
| Is that Alex was a senior. | ||
| I think Alfred was going to some sort of Ron Frazier baseball camp out of UM. And they did this summer league game. | ||
| And Alfred is... | ||
| My eyes are glazing over telling this story. | ||
| But like Alfred's pitches against A-Rod. | ||
| Who was already a senior, already a beast. | ||
| Everybody knew this guy was going to go in the draft and be huge. | ||
| Everybody knew about that. | ||
| He had been the talk of the high school baseball community in Miami forever. | ||
| And so, Alfred pitched against him, and he held A-Rod to a triple. | ||
| Of course, A-Rod smacked the shit out of this ball, sailed away, but it was only a triple. | ||
| It was a rare not-home run for Alex. | ||
| So I thought... | ||
| Oh, we have, like, a funny personal anecdote. | ||
| Like, we can find some common ground here, right? | ||
| You're talking to someone who might be a potential interview subject, you know? | ||
| And so, I'm like, actually, Alex, you and Alfred have met before. | ||
| Alfred rolls his eyes, like, he's going to embarrass me and tell this dumb shit story. | ||
| So I tell out, like, isn't this funny? | ||
| Like, you guys... | ||
| And Alfred held you to a triple. | ||
| And he kind of looked at me like, you're looking at me right now. | ||
| He's just... | ||
| He was totally unamused and maybe looked even a little... | ||
| Hurt or offended. | ||
| This is the greatest baseball, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, the highest paid baseball player in history. | ||
| And here I'm just telling this cute story from like 20 years earlier or whatever. | ||
| And he seemed like, oh, he held me to a triple. | ||
| I'm like, how could you be upset about that? | ||
| You're one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| Like super winners. | ||
| But it's like, yeah, it's, that's why I left. | ||
| I was like, this guy's a really interesting character. | ||
| Like he's a complicated guy. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| He's a sensitive guy. | ||
| Like I was curious about him. | ||
| I was excited about the prospect of interviewing him. | ||
| And, man, they practically ghosted us out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| January of 2014, that's when they lowered, they reduced the suspension. | ||
| I started hitting up every month. | ||
| I started hitting up the publicist. | ||
| Yo, following up on that meeting. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because it's funny. | ||
| In the Page Six article, it mentioned he met with the 30 for 30 filmmakers, Billy Corbin, Alfred Spellman. | ||
| He's been shopping a book proposal to these publishers. | ||
| The book proposal thing was total bunk. | ||
| Literally not true. | ||
| The publishers are like... | ||
| We'd love to get one, but we haven't gotten a book proposal from A-Rod. | ||
| He really did have the meeting with us, but like... | ||
| So everything was just... | ||
| We were just kind of pawns in his game, which is cool. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Have they responded to this documentary? | ||
| Not exactly, but I... For like six or seven months, I'm emailing with the publicist. | ||
| And then it was clear that they weren't interested. | ||
| So... | ||
| And that became the tactic, by the way. | ||
| When you said, was there a strategy? | ||
| The strategy was to shut the fuck up. | ||
| And just... | ||
| Like you said, like with the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Big New York Times, big escandalo, escandalo, Expo Day. | |
| And then, maybe if we just, tomorrow, in this 24-hour news cycle, in this fucking, in this world of just being, us being hammered with bad news, you know, in 240 characters every nanosecond of every day, just, shit just passes. | ||
| And they just, they, they played it just so, so beautifully and brilliantly. | ||
| And then, almost a year later, we got a call from a friend of Tony Bosch. | ||
| You guys want to meet with Tony Bosch? | ||
| He wants to talk to you about doing a documentary. | ||
| We're like, hell yeah. | ||
| So we take the meeting. | ||
| Really interesting guy. | ||
| We meet with him several times over several months. | ||
| And then he says, listen, I want to do this interview. | ||
| He goes, I'm getting sentenced to prison tomorrow. | ||
| And we knew about that, you know, that the case was ongoing. | ||
| He said, but look, I expect the judge will give me 45 to 60 days to surrender to complete this drug rehab program I'm in. | ||
| And then I'm only going to get like a year and a half, two years in prison. | ||
| And so we could find a couple days before I have to surrender to do this interview. | ||
| And I'm like, dude... | ||
| Listen, let's see what happens tomorrow. | ||
| I was like, depending on how much time the judge gives you, you're going to prison one way or another. | ||
| Maybe you want to spend some time with your kids, get your affairs in order. | ||
| Let's make a decision tomorrow whether or not we're going to take two, three, four days out of your life for this. | ||
| Maybe we'll do it when you get out in a year and a half, two years. | ||
| Federal, you do at least 80% of your time, but then you can go to halfway house sometimes for a little bit at the end, six months or as long as a year. | ||
| So he... | ||
| He goes to court, the judge says, four years, and you have not 45 to 60 days to surrender, but 45 to 60 minutes to surrender. | ||
| Give me your, you know, take off your belt and your shoelaces and surrender to the BOP. And he did, and so we backburnered it again. | ||
| Then I got a fucking email from Tim Elfrank, who was the Woodward and Bernstein of the case. | ||
| He's the journalist who got the stolen records from Porter Fisher, the whistleblower, and blew the lid off the whole thing at the beginning of 2013. He says to me, Porter Fisher called me, and he's asking me for your number to discuss possibly doing a documentary with you. | ||
| And I was like, first of all, like, We sometimes don't make documentaries about things that... | ||
| We make documentaries about things that happened like 20, 30, 40 years ago. | ||
| This felt like it hadn't ripened yet. | ||
| Like it was still a fresh wound, you know? | ||
| Like people wouldn't be willing to talk. | ||
| Like you have to kind of wait for more time to pass, you know? | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| And I'm not a spiritual guy. | ||
| I don't really believe in the universe talking to me or anything. | ||
| But I thought, man, if ever someone was trying to tell us something, it was like, you got to make this documentary. | ||
| The three... | ||
| Primary players in this major baseball scandal all independently of each other contacted us within just over a year to talk about doing a documentary about it. | ||
| Alfred jokes that in Florida when you get out of Prison. | ||
| Your first call is to your mother. | ||
| Your second call is to raconteur to our company. | ||
| To talk about a documentary. | ||
| And Tony got out. | ||
| I hit up Tony. | ||
| I'm like, I'll come visit you in Alabama. | ||
| How much time did he have to do? | ||
| He wound up getting a sentence reduction. | ||
| He did just about two years. | ||
| And then he was in that camp in Alabama. | ||
| I wrote him. | ||
| I said, dude, I'm going to come up and visit you. | ||
| We can talk about this. | ||
| He said, I'll be in a halfway house in six months. | ||
| So let's just meet in Miami. | ||
| I was like, done. | ||
| And then when you meet You meet Tony and you see them, their interviews in the documentary, you realize like, well, Alex, this isn't even about Alex. | ||
| You know, it's like, this is about these guys in this crazy, you know, Carl Hyasson-esque, like Coen Brothers botched robbery-like story. | ||
| And so like, that was the story we wanted to tell. | ||
| And that was the Tony Porter part of the story. | ||
| Well, listen, dude. | ||
| You fucking nailed it. | ||
| It's a great documentary. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| I really enjoy all of them. | ||
| And just keep on fucking knocking it out of the park, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| A baseball metaphor. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| I really appreciate it, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Joe. | ||
| Give everybody your social media. | ||
| Tell people how to get a hold of you. | ||
| At Billy Corbin. | ||
| B-I-L-L-Y-C-O-R-B-E-N. I'm not the lead singer of Smashing Palcons. | ||
| And that's the same on Twitter and on Instagram? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| At Billy Corbin Instagram. | ||
| Same on Twitter. | ||
| Hit me up. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was great. |
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