Joe Rogan and Billy Corben examine Florida’s COVID-19 surge, with August 2021 hitting 13 school employees and police officers dead in Miami-Dade alone, while debates rage over vaccine efficacy versus treatments like ivermectin—despite FDA approval of monoclonal antibodies. They trace Miami’s economic and social decay to the 1980s cocaine boom, where kingpins like Griselda Blanco fueled violence, and later to cronyism, like the Champlain Towers collapse and $800M bridges shielding corrupt officials. Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys series reveals how drug money distorted growth, mirroring today’s wealth inequality: 60% of Miamians can’t afford to live there. Social media’s propaganda role—from Cold War KGB tactics to QAnon stoking polarization—exposes deeper fractures, with capitalism’s corruption now its biggest threat than communism ever was. [Automatically generated summary]
I think no less than 20 police officers in the state of Florida die.
We had a 10-day period in which we had a police officer a day dying of COVID. If you go to the Officer Down Memorial page, the executive director there, a sergeant from Fairfax, Virginia, says that by the end of the pandemic, It will overtake the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 as the single deadliest incident in the history of United States law enforcement.
I mean, if I told you that there's a killer out there in Florida killing a cop a day, there'd be fucking martial law.
There'd be tanks in the streets.
There'd be guys in tactical gear and assault rifles, rightfully so.
And there is.
And it's COVID-19.
And these people are interacting with the public, of course, to boot.
Yeah, but the answer, you know, the COVID-19 for the last two years is the Single largest cause of death for law enforcement officers, more so than all other causes combined.
I was looking at something today that was showing the deaths in Florida per capita versus the deaths in California per capita when it was age-adjusted.
And Florida had less deaths.
When it was age-adjusted, when they looked at it in comparative to how old people die normally anyway.
It's very unusual for a 27-year-old person with good health care, someone who's been taken care of, to die from COVID. It's very, very statistically unusual.
If you are interacting with the general public the way police officers are during a pandemic, they should have access to the best healthcare possible, especially if they're infected.
I mean, if you're gonna ask these people to protect you, you should absolutely protect them.
Like I said, it's a human tragedy, you know, what's happening.
But I think that it starts with...
Listen, I'm a...
I'm a documentarian, so I'm a natural-born skeptic.
But I'm also pro-fact.
Because what we do as cultural anthropologists, which is effectively what documentarians are, is we apply the scientific method, right?
We make observations, we ask questions, we develop hypotheses, we collect data, we experiment, we analyze that data, and we draw conclusions.
With the best information we have at the time.
I don't know how all of these police officers were...
We're treated.
I know they died and I know that many of them were not were not in fact statistically most of them were not vaccinated.
I don't have access to their you know to their private health information.
I just know that the the treatment is not a replacement for your ability to prophylactically prevent Whether it's a placement or not, we know for sure that being vaccinated can protect you.
It can protect you from, you know, the odds of you dying once vaccinated are much lower.
We know all that.
That's a fact.
But we also know there are a lot of treatments available that are not being utilized for people once they get infected.
For whatever reason they have their vaccine hesitation, for whatever reason they don't want to do it, there's a lot of treatment that's available that's not discussed.
Some of those things treat symptoms, and some of those things are effective against the virus.
That's the other thing as well.
Monoclonal antibodies have emergency use authorization by the FDA. I think that's because they are probably the most effective thing that's available right now.
And again, I'm a natural-born skeptic, so I look at everything sideways.
I've been testing negative for, what, a year and a half, and I have to think, you know, in Florida, that I came into contact with it or I was sick and didn't know it, I was asymptomatic.
So I'm skeptical of these, although in Florida we literally have tents at the side of the road.
They know that the man who created it won the Nobel Prize for its use in humans in 2015. They know that it's used for yellow fever and dengue fever and has antiviral properties.
They know that.
They know that it's used for river blindness.
They know that it's been used for over 40 years.
They know that.
So when they say horse paste and a horse dewormer, they're not saying it because they want people to not take horse dewormer.
They're saying it to ridicule this particular medication.
You and I are not doctors, so if we're going to get real specific about this and we start pulling up links, this is going to be a long conversation about COVID and ivermectin and...
I know a little bit about it because of my experiences with it and discussing with doctors, but it's not as cut and dry as anybody wants to pretend it is.
And one of the reasons why Merck is talking about it is they're developing their own antiviral medication, and it's a generic now, which means anybody can make it.
So ivermectin can literally be made by any pharmaceutical company.
There's a lot of complicated shit behind the scenes, and as a skeptic, maybe you should look at it from that perspective as well.
Because the, what was it, the Japanese, the Tokyo, what was that, the Tokyo Medical Organization that is traditionally very conservative, just adopted ivermectin use last week and just talked about the efficacy of it.
There's studies of it that have come out of India, there's studies of it that have come out of other places.
There's the frontline critical COVID care workers who have been administering it before there was a vaccine and had very positive effects using it.
It's very complicated, and I don't think we should just dismiss their work, particularly when we don't know that much about it.
If you go to the Critical Care COVID Workers website, they detail, there's a long list of studies that they've shown ivermectin to be effective in preventing death and preventing hospitalization.
See, this is a thing where you and I are arguing about some shit we don't really have expertise in.
Yeah, you went into police officers and more people dying of COVID. Well, you asked me about the state's response to the pandemic.
I was just going to talk to you about the preposterous nature of your state that you love so much.
You're a defender of Florida in its most ridiculousness.
And one of the things that I want to talk to, because I haven't talked to you since the pandemic started, last time I talked to you was Screwball, right?
I'm a Florida native, you know, and a lifelong Miamian, and I think the petrifying thing that I've learned through the years, and it's not my theory...
T.D. Allman called Miami the city of the future.
And effectively, the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow.
And more importantly, the Miami of today.
More specifically, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
So if you want to know what challenges we'll face or calamities will befall us as a nation in the years or even decades to come, you need only look at the canary in the coal mine, which is South Florida.
That's why the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
It's really the corruption, dysfunction, and nonstop construction.
That's really what it is.
It's this anything-goes, Wild West kind of mentality.
Because, you know, I said this before on the show, you know, 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 always been a sunny place for shady people.
The Florida man phenomenon, it's just like, you know, if you have...
It's not New England.
It's not what's your name, who's your daddy.
Everyone's Nouveau Riche in Miami.
So no one cares where your money came from.
As long as the booze is flowing and everybody's dancing, the music's going, nobody gives a shit.
I mean, back when that was a business, like you could sell tens of millions of albums.
Everybody went to Miami.
Eric Clapton was one of the first.
Jimmy Buffett, the Bee Gees, the Eagles, Crosby, Stills, Nash& Young, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, and they were doing...
All those records that we all still know today from the 70s.
They recorded, mixed, or mastered at least in part.
Glenn Frey and Don Henley wrote the lyrics to Hotel California in a rented mansion on Miami Beach.
That had been the love nest of Howard Hughes and Ava Gardner.
Winston Churchill used it as a winter home.
And the Watergate burglars and Howard Hunt used it as well.
And then Stephen Stills used it.
He was hanging out there with like Shel Silverstein.
It was like a weird scene.
And then eventually the Eagles came down to do Hotel California and wrote the lyrics.
They locked themselves, these two guys, in a fucking room.
And the housekeeper left sandwiches and...
And drinks at the door because the door was closed.
And they came down in bathrobes one day with legal pads, yellow legal pads, and said, we have it.
We have the lyrics.
And so everybody, and it was a communal scene too.
It's kind of like your place with the, you know, everybody just sort of like stops by.
People stop by to get, it was like that because you had all these artists.
In every room like so there was pickup basketball games outside you drive up and there'd be the Bee Gees playing the Allman Brothers playing Eric Clapton in a pickup basketball game and they to this day Criteria Studios they have an a wooden upright piano and the rumor has it one day there was an artist I won't mention the name was playing and had a baggie of cocaine on the top of the piano and he was playing and the baggie fell Open.
Fell.
Boom.
Puff a smoke on the keys of the piano.
Appropriately.
And he grabbed the bag and salvaged what he could.
And then for the next several months, the people at the studio who worked at it would stick a straw between the keys on the piano and try to...
Mostly dust, they were probably snorting, but, like, would just try to salvage whatever they could from there.
So the joke was that...
They had a line item on the bills.
Because that's the thing.
They were away from the watchful eyes and ears of the labels, which were all based in New York and L.A. So they would go to Miami and no one knew what the fuck was going on.
I didn't have publicists or producers or executives from the recording studios.
So they would send them bills to pay for the studio time.
There'd be a line item for cocaine.
But you couldn't say cocaine.
Cocaine and I think by the way cocaine was at that time was probably part of the appeal of bringing the artists to Miami to be fair probably right but it was under the the category of piano tuning Was the cocaine.
So you get, like, some, you know, someone at, you know, accounts at a record label call up and say, hey, I have a question about this invoice.
There's $5,000 here for piano tuning, but there's only one ballad on the album.
So what's with all this fucking piano tuning?
There was an act.
Oh, God, I'm not going to say it, but there was a band who came down in the 80s to record a Criteria.
And then they came down again in the 90s.
And the guy who runs the studio, Trevor, his mom was the manager before him.
So he was a little kid running around this scene.
If you can imagine a little kid in Miami in the 70s running around this scene.
This is an incredible place.
Aretha Franklin did the Respect record at Criteria.
James Brown did I Feel Good, recorded that song at Criteria.
It's a really historic place.
And so...
This band comes in and he says to the lead singer, he says, hey listen, I don't know if you remember, you were down here 15 years ago, whatever, back in the late 70s, early 80s, doing this record.
And the singer says, I have no memory of that whatsoever, except for one thing.
He said, one night apparently, we were done recording here, and someone took us into the neighborhood, it's like in a residential kind of area, into the neighborhood, to this woman's house.
And she brought out a brick of cocaine, an entire kilo of cocaine.
He said, I'd never seen that before.
She put it down on the coffee table.
We're sitting on the couch.
She put it down.
This is a big band.
She put it down on the coffee table.
She cut it open.
And all I remember from my entire experience in Miami is the smell of that entire kilo of cocaine.
Like just what it feels like when an entire kilo of cocaine is opened up.
But then somewhere in the 2000s, it seemed to kick up again.
And it's like people forget.
It's like a group of people ruin their entire lives with coke.
And then, I don't know if you know about this, what's going on right now in LA, but there was a terrible tragedy amongst these comedians where four comedians at a party overdosed.
Yeah, and they're getting cocaine that's laced with fentanyl.
And one of them survived, and she's in the ICU now, and she started to talk again and text people and stuff, so she seems like she's going to make it.
Yeah, that's a silly thing, because people with nausea, people with anything, any kind of wasting disease, any cancer, people that are dealing with chemotherapy, it is a godsend.
There's a thing called NAD, and we tried to come up with how you say it the other day, but what it does is it actually lengthens your telomeres.
It's something that you take in an intravenous form, and it's super good for your body.
It's...
It's one of the rare things that you take that you do it in IV form and like almost immediately afterwards you feel great.
But this stuff is brutal to take and it usually takes about two hours in a drip because you want to take it very slowly.
Because when you take it fast, it's the most unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling in your stomach.
Unless you're high.
When you smoke weed, I turn that thing up full crank, and I go through a full bag in 10 minutes, and I'm telling you, I barely feel it.
And when I was doing that, I was like, oh, well, this is probably the nausea-preventing aspect that chemo patients enjoy, and people with AIDS, people that have a really hard time eating food.
I think most people, even who participate in the prohibition, which has been the, incidentally, the deadliest thing about marijuana, has been the prohibition.
Peter Gation bought this, this Canadian guy bought this place and turned it into a nightclub.
And it was the club kids scene.
It was all that.
And, of course, then the rise of ecstasy.
And then in this doc, we talk about how MDMA was a useful and effective tool that therapists were using online.
Particularly like marriage therapy, people open up.
They got more honest.
It was like a truth serum.
And we got in touch with their feelings.
And it was a viable, not only was it a viable medicine, but it was something that doctors were availing themselves of in treatment.
And then the DEA suddenly and unilaterally classifies it as a As a controlled substance.
And all of a sudden it went from potentially a viable...
So this wasn't an act of Congress.
This was an unelected bureaucratic organization who said, well, you know, the war on drugs is kind of winding down.
We need a new line item, right?
We need a new budget.
We need hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the scourge of this new party drug.
The kids and the discos.
It's killing the kids.
And so they just suddenly created a new villain overnight, which costs us billions and ultimately trillions of dollars to fight, which was a very real drug.
And when doctors are controlling it, administering it at a medical level, it's one thing.
You got a bunch of guys making pills in their condos.
Well, at least MAPS has started to use MDMA therapy to help people with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.
And this is something that's going on right now.
And there's federally approved studies.
So because of the good work that MAPS has done, And showing that a lot of these people with these traumatic experiences, people that have been assaulted, abused, sexual assault, they can have an amazing relief from MDMA therapy.
And so because of that, we have a real good chance of reintroducing MDMA because of MAPS. As a therapeutic use medicine, really.
Which is really what it is.
I mean, obviously, it's a party drug.
Obviously, it's great.
It makes people feel good.
But there's some amazing therapeutic uses for it.
Particularly for soldiers and, again, people with traumatic experiences.
It's what's been so frustrating about the medical marijuana fucking...
It's just like Trek it's just like it's this never-ending saga in Florida is that like I remember when I went so I didn't smoke pot until I was what I tried I was like 37 years old.
And then when I was 30 years old, a buddy of mine, he was a musician, my friend Eddie Bravo, he's a musician, jiu-jitsu guy, and he's like, dude, it helps me creatively.
I love it.
I was like, really?
I just thought it made you stupid.
I thought it was just a thing that made people dumb.
So we smoked pot and went to Dairy Queen.
And like, oh my god.
Baskin-Robbins.
That's where we went.
Baskin-Robbins.
I remember I had a hot fudge sundae.
And I remember eating the hot fudge with the nuts and the vanilla ice cream.
You have to realize that gummies is a different thing because THC is what happens when you smoke it.
But when you eat it, It's processed by your liver and it produces 11-hydroxy metabolite.
It's much more psychoactive.
It's like four to five times more psychoactive than THC. So it's way more powerful.
That's why a lot of people when they eat marijuana, they think they got dosed.
Because it is essentially a psychedelic.
And when you take high dose...
High dose edibles with an isolation tank is as wild as any mushroom trip I've ever done.
It's really crazy.
You see crazy visuals like fucking pyramids and UFOs and these...
Cartoonish neon figures that are mating.
I remember I took a really strong edible once and got on a flight and it was one of the craziest experiences of my life.
All I did was close my eyes and curl up in a position.
I had a window seat so it was like my head was up against the window and my eyes were closed and the whole flight I was watching these animated neon characters breed.
They were like having sex and making all these other animated characters and then it was like this weird sort of fractal effect and it was...
Like, write drunk, edit sober is great because you can take out the self-indulgent stuff and the chaos and sort of whittle it into a more conducive form for human consumption.
But there's something about writing high where you find the funny.
It's not like write drunk, edit sober.
When you edit high, you're literally editing for giggles.
You're looking for—and you'll find pathways that are funny.
I think George had it—well, obviously, George is one of the all-time greats.
And he had a great method.
I've used that method, but I also use the get high as fuck method and write.
It's a great method, too.
I like to do that late at night because, you know, I have family, I have children.
I can't be getting high during the day when my kids are in the house.
So what I do is I wait until everyone's asleep and then I get barbecued.
And then usually after a show, like I'll come home from a show at like 1230 at night and I'll just sit in front of the keyboard and just start mashing ideas.
I've never, I've never, I mean, I've written work drunk before, but I just like, I don't know, it's kind of in my line of work, I guess, a little more important to have your wits about you.
Yeah, but it's, it is, there's a, it's a tool, you know, it's, it's, you can use it correctly and you can get a lot out of it or you can start abusing it, you know, it's, I'm a giant fan of Stephen King, and Stephen King's book on writing is one of my favorite books on the creative process.
It's a great book.
But one of the things that comes out of that book is, first of all, his thankfulness of his sobriety, his love for his family, and how he realized he could have lost it all, because he was really off the rails crazy and doing pounds of blow and fucking drinking cases of beer every night while I was writing.
And then trying to pick up the pieces and start writing again.
It's great.
It's a fantastic book.
It's really good.
But the things that struck me is like, man, when he was off the rails, he wrote some good shit.
It's like that kind of stuff.
When you go back and you read The Shining, I mean, The Shining was about an author that was losing his fucking mind in a haunted house.
And in a lot of ways, that was probably what was happening to Stephen King with the cocaine and the alcohol and, you know, and he's writing this crazy shit while he's battling his own literal deeds.
And I got to town, my girl at the time, and I saw Carlin's name on a marquee.
And I was like, well, that settles that.
I got on the phone, and I was like, Carlin tickets.
And my grandpa knew some high roller at that hotel.
I forget which hotel it was.
And they got us front row.
And so it was like a comedy club.
It's a cabaret-style room, but it was with a table...
You know perpendicular to the stage, you know, and we were sitting like the fucking stage was right here and then Carlin was like right up here and so He was doing that bit about because he was I was actually obviously trying out material for his HBO next day, which which was the the God bit the I don't believe in God I believe in Joe Pesci I believe in the Sun God,
but he's doing this whole God riff which was clearly still I think working on at the time and so I'm hysterically laughing And I'm realizing that other than Carlin's voice, the only thing I'm hearing is my laughter.
And I literally turned, because I became self-conscious about it.
And I turn around.
You can imagine the shot from my POV. I kind of pan the room and I look at these people, these just good God-fearing Americans who just were not about Carlin dissing the big guy or the big girl.
And they're just like stone...
It's like the audience of the producers watching Springtime for Hitler.
They're just like...
Fucking appalled.
And so I sweep the room.
I come back.
And I look up here.
And George Carlin's nose is right here.
And he's bending down off the stage at me.
And we're practically nose-toed.
And he goes, Thank you, sir.
Because I'm the only motherfucker laughing in the room.
He goes, thank you, sir.
And then stalks back off the state.
And I was just like, oh my god.
And I watched George Carlin bomb.
And one of the funniest human beings to ever exist in this universe.
And probably one of the smartest human beings as well, I'd say.
Which was an added bonus that he was so fucking funny.
I saw Carlin bomb in New Hampshire in 1988 or 89. Somewhere around then.
He went through a rough patch where I don't know what was going on but I was a big fan of his before this and then during this there was a few albums I remember because George would put out an HBO special every year.
And what he would do differently than other comedians is he would write it all out and then he would bring legal paper on stage and he would have the script for what he was doing and he had no problem like having the notes on a stool and he would go over it.
And he had this one routine that he was trying to close with, and it just was bombing.
And it was basically fuck everything.
It was fuck Israel, fuck comedy clubs, fuck God, fuck the church.
It was like, he was going through this whole thing, and it just...
Wasn't working just didn't resonate and I remember thinking wow that's this is weird like I'm watching because I brought my roommates and my roommates were kind of unsophisticated at the time It's to put it mildly and they're like what is this is fucking terrible and You know we drove all the way to New Hampshire to watch George Carlin bomb I feel like that's always the way, when you recommend somebody like to watch something or see a show, it's always the worst episode that's gonna be on, because they're like, you have no taste.
This is when I was just either thinking about doing stand-up or starting to do stand-up.
It was in that range.
So I was an evangelist.
I was like, you gotta see this guy.
Oh my god, Dom Herrera's the funniest guy that's ever lived.
Come see this guy with me.
So I was dragging my friends with me to these comedy clubs, and some of them were brutes.
Some of my friends that I knew at the time from my martial arts days were crazy people.
They had no artistic sophistication whatsoever.
You had to beat them over the head with the jokes or they weren't going to get it.
And there was a lot of value in that, too, because you get to watch comedy with people that were not comedy fans.
I got to see, like, how, like, sort of subtle stuff just didn't hit them at all.
Ironic stuff.
You know, it was interesting to see, but I'd taken them to see everybody.
And when I took them all the way to fucking New Hampshire to see George Carlin, he bombed.
You go to Colorado, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to try some local whiskey.
And I'm like, which one of those is a Colorado?
And they're like, all of them.
They're all made.
Miami, we don't have, like, we make a rum, and now we have some micro brewers.
We don't make a lot of shit, you know?
So, we had a locally brewed beer and stone crabs at Captain Jim's for the show, and talked, and then they stopped shooting, and we just sat there for, like, another hour just chilling, because we didn't do much eating on camera, and then just eating and talking, and it was unforgettable.
I mean, really, whatever business you were in, especially in those days.
You were in law enforcement, you were a lawyer, a prosecutor, a doctor, and you name it.
That was the place that you wanted.
A journalist, God knows, that was where you wanted to ply your trade.
I know a...
Pardon me, a guy was working as an ER doctor, Jackson, at the trauma center in 1980. The Mariel boatlift had just happened.
You remember, this is how Scarface opens.
Oh, okay.
Castro opens up the Mariel Harbor and sends, allows people to leave.
And he empties the prisons, the mental institutions, the hospitals, and just, he said, I flush the toilet of Cuba.
On to the United States.
And it created a real crisis.
I mean, four counties in South Florida nearly got bankrupt because you're absorbing 150 refugees, some small percentage of which are, you know, dangerous people.
And you don't know who they are.
Yeah, you can't weed them out.
But then you have to absorb the infirm and the sick and the young and people who don't have, you know, health care or housing or food.
And so Miami Beach looks a lot like...
Like Havana, like the seawall, you know, like the seawall and the malecone.
It's like, it's so a lot of, and at that time, it was just like it was in Scarface.
It was like, it was like 75% plus Jewish, a lot of Holocaust survivors, literally just God's waiting room, they called it, just playing out the rest of their lives.
Inefficiencies on Ocean Drive, flop houses that would like $125 a week.
Maybe.
That was high.
Like, that's what you could live in Miami Beach for.
So people on fixed incomes, you know, social security, elderly, retired.
And then it attracted a lot of the Marielitas, particularly the criminal element.
And there were places where, like, the Miami Beach Police Department would just literally just drive around the block because they'd keep getting calls to go to this.
Oh, this guy just got shot.
This guy just got stabbed.
And it was over dumb shit.
It was Wild West shit.
It was like over a Domino's game, you know?
And so one day, this trauma surgeon is working at the ER. And in comes a Mariel refugee with a gunshot wound.
And he says to the guy, he's bilingual, he says, tells him Spanish, he says, listen, you're very lucky.
He said, if you had been shot, you know, just millimeters this way, it would have hit a vital organ, you would have bled out, you would have been dead before you even got here.
Saves the guy, guy goes on his way.
Days later, he gets another guy, another patient, a Marial refugee, with a gunshot wound in exactly the same place he told the other guy.
That if he got shot there, he would die.
And this guy died.
And he could never prove it, but he always believed that that was a retaliation shooting for the first guy that he had in there.
But that happened...
People have stories like that for fucking days.
It was the number one mayor's jewelers in South Florida, number one seller of Rolex watches.
The Mutiny Hotel, which we talk about in several docs, which was the inspiration for the Babylon Club and Scarface.
They were the number one seller of Dom Perignon.
They had to, like, convert hotel rooms into refrigerated walk-in units for the Dom Perignon because they could not keep it in stock.
They also filled the tubs.
The Mutiny Girls would fill the tubs in the rooms with the Dom Perignon as well so they could bill the customers.
So that was part of where the supply was going.
But that was a different kind of party depending on what you were willing to pay.
But Miami is just one of those places.
In that era, you know, when it became America's Casablanca.
I mean, look, our number one in two industries at that time, still today, early 1980s Miami.
Number two was tourism, generating upwards of about $7 billion a year into the Miami-Dade economy.
Number one, I should say legitimate industry, was real estate, generating about $9 billion a year into the economy in Miami.
The drug trade at the time was estimated to bring in upwards of $12 billion a year into our local economy.
So what you're saying is our number one business...
Was an illicit trade, was the illegal drug trade, the money laundering.
And I will tell you, I believe it to be the only case study, I should say the only successful case study, of Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics.
It's the only time it worked was in the drug boom in Miami.
Because banditos rob a bank and they ride on into the next town, right?
And they spend their ill-gotten gains.
They stayed in Miami.
They kept that money in Miami.
So that trickled down from the kingpins to banks, into real estate, into people who were not in the illicit trade, but just...
I'll give you an example.
Somebody...
Yeah.
And maybe do some grunt work do some you knew a drug smuggler which was not uncommon in Miami Everybody knew a drug smuggler Marco Rubio spent a summer living in a cocaine stash house that belonged to his to his brother-in-law really?
In Miami, we're all guilty by geography.
We're all complicit by just virtue of proximity to colorful characters.
Mark Rubin was like 14. He wasn't in the drug trade, but his brother-in-law was a major cocaine trafficker, and they lived in West Kendall in Miami-Dade, southwest Miami-Dade, in a cocaine stash house for a summer.
That's like a rite of passage, like a quinceanera or bar mitzvah.
In Miami, like, I spent the summer in my brother-in-law's cocaine stash house by Marco Rubio.
Must have made a really interesting paper for high school, what I did with my summer vacation.
But that's just like, that's Miami.
We're all touched by this.
And so let's say you say to your buddy, hey, listen, I want to come out and just help you unload a plane, right?
Grunt work, physical labor.
The guy says, I'll give you $10,000 to come out, cash, tax-free.
Come on.
So here's a guy, not really in the drug business, just comes out to do some manual labor, gets $10,000 cash.
This is a guy probably making in those days about $15,000 a year on the books.
Taxable income.
But he's getting $10,000, let's say once a month, cash in Miami.
So he's got $120,000 cash.
Where?
Stash somewhere?
Where do you even put it?
Cash became like a real liability because it was just, it's so bulky and annoying.
People are putting it in walls and burying it and banks are charging you a vig to deposit cash because they had no fucking place to put it.
And so, but you have $120,000 so people spent it.
It went into Everything and that was the thing if you weren't addicted to cocaine in Miami You were addicted to that that money and that's that's the legacy too is that Hustle is you know the tech hub hustle.
It's just the new cocaine.
It's just the new Hollywood East never happened It's just the new modern art hub never happened.
It's just it's a hustle We just we have to subsist that way because we don't have any other any other industry Well, it also it it's the center of flossing in the country Right?
A lot of these older power plants, apparently, I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but when I talk to people that are physicists, they've said that nuclear power plants can be made today and be made far more efficiently, and they're actually very good for the environment in terms of what you put in versus what gets out, but the older ones.
Like, when they made them in the 60s and the 70s, he's like, they're a real problem.
And we saw it with Fukushima.
Because when the backup generator went down, and they realized, oh, we're fucked.
Like, this thing's gonna melt down, and there's no way to stop it.
And now we have a perpetually contaminated area that will be like this way for eons.
There's actually this hilarious, terrible, I can't even call it a B movie, it's like a Z movie.
It was executive produced by some Colombian drug traffickers to launder their money through this movie.
It's called Island Claws.
And it's about a nuclear incident that creates these aggressive, gigantic crabs that are attacking South Florida.
And they shot it in Virginia.
They shot it all over Miami.
And that's the thing, too.
I'm not saying that everything in Miami is money laundering.
But everything in Miami is basically money laundering.
I mean, what else do we do there?
I mean, Willie and Sal, Los Muchachos, the boys from Cocaine Cowboys, the Kings of Miami, they helped to start a bank with some of their high school buddies from Miami High, appropriately Miami High.
They helped start a bank.
Expressly for the purpose of drug money laundering.
Sunshine State Bank.
It was a drug money laundering bank.
Everybody knew it.
It was founded by...
It was expressly for that purpose.
And they had a guy...
This is funny.
From a deleted scene.
They had a guy, an attorney, named Juan Acosta.
He was very popular, let's say, among Miami's nouveau riche of the late 70s and early 80s.
The sudden millionaires and billionaires that we had cropping up.
I mean, Willie and Sal were accused by the government of smuggling over 75 tons of cocaine worth over $2 billion, with a B. And that was only what the government thought they knew about.
So you can imagine.
Their co-conspirators said, one of them says in the documentary, I think it was more like 175 tons.
These guys spent $25 million on their defense in their first trial.
But these guys had this lawyer to set up their offshore companies to kind of conceal their ill-gotten gains.
Money laundering.
He would set up these foreign companies, particularly in Panama, which was at the time a drug trafficking and laundering friendly state.
In fact, we raided it because of that.
And so they needed a man on the ground in country to be on the corporate documents, right, as an officer, as their treasurer.
So this guy Guillermo Indara appears on all of these corporate documents as an officer in these shell companies for drug money laundering.
Then the United States of America goes and invades Panama under the guise of the war on drugs, ostensibly because Manuel Noriega, the president, was an enabler of drug trafficking, was a drug money launderer.
And so we had to take him out.
We brought him actually to Miami, to the Southern District of Florida to go on trial for this.
If you go to Netflix's YouTube page, you can see it there.
Why'd you take that out?
Like I should have called I should have called this instead of Kings of Miami could all the cocaine Cowboys We've got hours of this shit.
I mean because like there's no and and All the crazy shit that's in the movie and some people listen I say that's tantamount to malpractice cutting Cutting that out of the documentary, but you just have to it's just time you just have to and you're crafting a thing listen the pressure of building a six-part You need, listen, I'm always looking for the button, right?
I'm doing an interview with someone.
What's the last line, right?
You want to leave them on a high.
What's the last line?
What's the last line?
Here I need fucking, I need six of them.
Buttons, cliffhangers, some way to get people.
I take that seriously.
I think we've all seen documentary series.
That were eight hours or ten hours and should have been three.
It's this the ones I that I feel click like that I know are like gonna work because you don't always know you come in with the best of intentions and after you work on something for 12 years You can't see the forest for the trees.
I mean right You know and so you do your best and then you just you know send it out into the world and listen it's not up to me I always say the measure of a successful filmmaker It's not money or critical acclaim or awards.
It's that you get to work again.
So I serve at the pleasure of an audience.
And if we get the eyeballs, we get to make another one.
And so with this one, I just...
When they start to...
I know this sounds weird, but when they start to sing to me is when I know they work.
I think some of our best documentaries are musicals.
Like, they just...
They sing.
They just move.
So, my composer on this, Carlos Jose Alvarez, actually the...
The soundtrack drops on Spotify and all the streaming services, finally.
It's amazing.
And I said to him, I said, listen, I want it all rooted in Afro-Cuban beats and rhythms and salsa music.
Like, I don't care if it's a suspense scene or an action scene, I want it all to feel like, be unapologetically Miami, you know, and Cuban-American.
And just, I wanted to sweat that.
I said, I want you to picture this.
Somebody sitting in bed, You know, their feet.
And this is my feet.
I'm sitting in bed watching this documentary for fucking six hours.
There's four and a half hours.
Six parts.
I want their foot to be tapping the entire time.
Just keep time.
You know, just like keep the rhythm.
Like, let there be like...
And that's the thing.
Like, there's a show.
Like, you want there to be a rhythm and a cadence and you want the audience to fall into that, right?
I mean, I don't take the audience's time for granted.
We have a finite amount of time between now and the day we die.
If you're going to give me four and a half hours of that, I'm going to entertain you.
Yeah, there's going to be investigative journalism in there.
Sometimes we call our work, Buddy Todd calls it, a Trojan horse.
You know, you think it's one thing, but you're getting a little bit bonus.
You kind of tempt the audience with the sugar, and then you feed them some broccoli in there too.
Because I think that that's, as a documentary filmmaker, especially now, with the ubiquity, and there's so many documentaries, there's so much content.
If you believe in karma, and she was actually, you know, she was killed by a motorcycle assassin, which, you know, one guy in the front driving, one guy in the back with an automatic or semi-automatic weapon, and that was actually a methodology that she is credited with importing.
That lady's a particularly powerful example of what's possible when people start selling cocaine and making millions of dollars and develop that sort of psychopathic, murderous, you know, advancement at any cost mentality.
It's a business that, if you're doing that, and it's so crazy in the first place that you're making so much money off of this illegal stuff that everybody wants.
I mean, it lends itself to sort of chaotic brutality.
Like, if you want to talk about the success of the war on drugs, I mean, now the drug is as ubiquitous, just as pure, if not more so, and cheaper than it ever was before.
And that's not because demand's down, it's because supply is ample.
And so, they always treated it like a real business.
I mean, like these guys in Kings of Miami, they called it the company.
You work for the company.
They had a headquarters.
They had an opera.
They had ledgers.
They had books.
They had records, which turned out to bite him in the ass in the end.
Spoiler alert.
No, you're not there yet.
But like meticulous records.
And they treated it like a Fortune 500 company.
They were CEOs of this multi-billion dollar multinational corporation.
Happened in Columbia, happened in Miami, there are people who, but their careers were not long, and they were not as lucrative, because that's the thing that makes William Sal so unique, is that the average career I would guesstimate In the United States for a cocaine trafficker in that time period was not more than five years.
We've been documenting all these YouTube channels where people hunt them with, like, bowfishing rigs, and they're killing these five-foot-long iguanas in residential areas.
But this, we didn't know about this until it was, you know, literally too late.
Particularly for those 98 people who died at the Champlain Tower South.
Collapse in Surfside.
But Alexia Echevarria, she's the beautiful blonde.
She's known as the Cuban Barbie from the Real Housewives of Miami.
She's the guy that fell in love with Peggy Rosello, who is like the Henry Hill of their operation.
He was a 12-year-old kid who his older sister married Tabby Falcone, one of the boys.
So he's now family.
He's a brother-in-law of the kings of Miami, or the future kings of Miami.
He's the 12-year-old kid washing the cars and making more money on a weekend doing that than his dad.
You know, this hard-working, you know, Cuban exile.
But these kids surrounded by these, at the time, kind of lower-end drug dealers who were about to blow up, but giving them $100, $200 cash, you know, to wash a car.
And so he grows up steeped in that.
He has this sort of, like, you know, you grow up, Miami, like I said, we're guilty by geography.
If you grow up in that time and place, people were becoming millionaires overnight.
You must, like, that's the American dream to you.
You're like, oh, the streets are paved with gold.
This is the opportunity I'm talking about.
And there was kind of a warped idea, I think, of what all that was.
I'm not making excuses, but just Miami was a different, Miami is a different place, and it was a seriously different place back there.
Everybody was involved in this industry, or everybody knew someone who was involved in this industry, and in some way or another, everybody benefited from this industry.
And so Alexia...
Is at this club, Club New, 1987. It was one of the first big nightclubs, popular nightclubs in South Beach.
And she's there and Peggy wants to get with her.
Jose Canseco is in VIP. He wants to get with her because Miami.
That's like the most 1987 Miami thing you can imagine.
VIP at this nightclub and you're in a love triangle with a drug dealer and Jose Canseco.
She didn't know he was a drug dealer yet.
But they wind up, she winds up hooking up with Peggy.
And she starts hanging out for the first time at his apartment on the ocean.
Beautiful, like, blinged out place on the fifth floor of this luxury condo.
And they hang out at the beach and they're swimming and then they go to bed and in the middle of the night, two o'clock in the morning, he gets a call.
And he says, yo, I gotta split.
But you could stay here.
She thought for sure, he's got a wife, he's got a girlfriend, I'm not gonna fucking chill here with this guy.
Fuck this.
And so it turns out he had to go pick up a load.
They had a shipment of cocaine that was coming in.
She didn't know that.
But here's the thing, and this is not in the documentary.
That apartment was on the fifth floor of the Champlain Tower South.
And true to form, if you were building a luxury condo in the late 70s, early 80s, your market, in no small part, would have been to drug smugglers.
And so that's the apartment that they're hanging out.
And I realized when I was in Los Angeles delivering the series to Netflix, and the tragedy happened in Surfside, I was like, Champlain Tower South?
That sounds familiar to me.
And we looked it up and that's where, yeah, that's where, that was his love nest, his Miami, Peggy's Miami Beach love nest that he took Alexia to.
You know, a buddy of mine, Jim DeFede, who's in the documentary, he's the journalist that we interview.
He's the only guy that really covered these guys in an extensive way.
He didn't write a book about it, but he wrote, like, feature cover stories for the Miami New Times.
And it was the only way these guys...
To this day, there's not a book that you can go out and get to learn anything about these guys.
And so...
He said, listen, I'm always trying to push for accountability, for transparency, for better government, always trying to encourage people to vote better.
It's an uphill battle.
Florida today is the America of tomorrow.
But the reality is that...
I want there to be a better Florida.
I want to leave behind a better Florida than the one I was born in.
I don't even know if Florida's going to be intact.
It's going to be the same geological area than the one I was born in by the time I die.
But the reality is that, I remember Jim telling me one day, because he's a political reporter especially, he says, Billy, just remember, I think you're good.
You're a guy who's sitting on a diamond mine that's a mile long.
Like, I don't think you have to worry.
You have a hammer, a chisel, like, how much work can you do?
There's so many stories.
I don't think that's an issue.
But do you think it's possible that the influx of people from New York that just wanted to get the fuck out of New York and moved to Florida and moved to a lot of other places, from a lot of other places, do you think in any way that might benefit Florida?
I'm always stunned that people move into those high rises.
Because I'm like, if you are in a hurricane and you're experiencing 100 plus mile an hour winds, I would imagine that 81st floor is the last place I'd want to be.
Not only are there old buildings that are suspect, that are not being well-maintained, that have, like I said, water coming at them from literally everywhere.
But the...
Listen, we have like a...
We have a third world government and fourth world infrastructure in Miami.
And needless to say, if someone said to you, Hey Joe, we're doing a stress test.
You want to stand under the bridge?
Just like Ivermectin, just say nay.
See what I did there?
Netflix publicist is like, Billy, shut the fuck up.
Six people crushed to death.
Nobody held responsible.
Nobody held accountable.
Why?
Because the mayor, Carlos Jimenez, now Congressman Carlos Jimenez, his wife's cousin, It owns the company, that's the contractor.
It employed both of his sons at various times.
Marco Rubio is a major benefactor, or I should say beneficiary.
Rick Scott, what happened was while bodies were still trapped in the rubble, You had Marco Rubio, the senator from the state of Florida, working as their public crisis manager.
Like, doing press saying, like, this is a good company, these are good, you know, good God-fearing Republicans.
And our mayor, our county mayor at the time, Carlos Jimenez, calling, who was on a junket in Hong Kong, calling in saying, it couldn't have been MCM, it couldn't have been these people.
These people just got a $70 million contract at the Miami International Airport, a new one.
Well, first and foremost, I mean the separation between the haves and the have-nots.
I mean, Miami has, maybe second only to the San Francisco metro area, it is one of the greatest income and wealth gaps in the country.
We'll see swamp favelas in our lifetime.
You know, we'll see people who are in the service trade in Miami but can't afford the cost of living.
In fact, the United Way has an Alice report where they say 60%, nearly 60%, like 59% and change, of Miami-Dade County residents cannot afford To live in Miami-Dade County and most of those people have at least one job so these are not this is the working poor people with one two three four jobs who cannot afford the cost of living the education the transportation in Miami-Dade that's the first thing is that that is the wealth gap in the income gap and that is going to become ubiquitous I think nationwide certainly
the challenges of of sea level rise and climate change and climate change gentrification I think also though The way the government works this sort of the kleptocracy It used to be a narco kleptocracy like Venezuela now.
It's just a kleptocracy where a group of very rich very influential private business people Essentially run cronies Into and that's gonna be that's and all of this is being exacerbated by the pandemic because you got a bunch of people sitting at school board meetings going why the fuck do I need to put up with this shit and I'm just here to try to help kids.
Like, I don't need to put up with this.
Fuck this.
Who's going to take their place?
The crazy people yelling at the microphone at them are going to become the next school board members.
And this is what we've seen in Florida.
It's a plan to privatize, subsidize, brutalize.
So first you privatize bridges, industries, highways, schools with charter schools and private schools.
You subsidize them with tax dollars.
And when I say brutalize, I mean that because they're private entities, they may not be subject to the sunshine laws, public records laws, accountability and transparency that a public institution is supposed to follow.
So you don't even know.
We have charter schools.
one of the number number one charter school um states in the country we're also the number one chart a place for closing down charter schools i mean they hire child molesters they hire they have no standards they have no you know and they're all we have a guy who sits in the florida legislature on the education committee his day job he works for the largest charter school company in the state of florida So what do you think he's doing about public education?
He's misappropriating our tax dollars into his boss's hands.
That's literally what he's doing every legislative session.
He's a lobbyist, effectively, with a major cryptocurrency, digital asset, and blockchain practice, which is where a lot of the money is coming from.
The new new rich money is coming from in Miami.
So he has two private sector jobs.
Working for the richest people in town while he's the mayor of one of the poorest cities in America.
And here's the rub.
Because he's an attorney, he claims that his client list is privileged.
It's attorney-client privilege, which means that he has a secret client list, which it could be a minefield of conflicts of interest with his public position as mayor, but we're not allowed to know what they are.
Just trust me, there's no conflicts.
And of course there's conflicts, because I see him go out every day.
As a cheerleader for some of the...
Lobbying for some of the richest, most powerful people in town.
Selling out his constituents.
At the expense of his constituents.
The guys raised $4 million to run for re-election unopposed in a city of 450,000 people.
What does he need for...
Yeah.
$4 million.
Yeah.
And that's where his power lies, by the way.
By charter, he doesn't really have a lot of power.
Mayor Postalita, Francis Suarez, he doesn't have a lot of power, but he...
Is there any bright lights on the horizon in that whole area?
I mean, is any of this, like, newfound capital, newfound people immigrating, I won't say immigrating to Miami, moving to Miami, is any of it beneficial?
Theoretically, it's supposed to help our community.
It's supposed to uplift the country.
If you're moving to a place, because ultimately you want to avoid paying taxes, You're not necessarily going to have the interest of community in mind.
So we're not necessarily seeing people who are interested in investing in Miami in a way that's going to be productive for the people there now.
What it's going to do is it's going to make it more expensive for the people who live there.
They're going to have to...
Move away.
I don't know who is going to wind up being...
Again, that's why I say we wind up with swamp favelas.
Tent cities and things where people are stealing electricity and water.
We're already seeing it.
Downtown Miami, everybody complains about L.A. Same thing in Miami.
Under the overpasses, the tent cities, we have entire blocks and stretches in and around downtown Miami of tent cities.
The homelessness problem is a serious problem.
Basically, what they're starting to do is just kind of like Do sweeps?
I can't remember any tents in California more than a decade ago.
If you go back two decades ago, I definitely can't remember them.
I don't think they existed.
I don't think what happened, but my concern is that no one seems to have a fix for it.
I mean, Austin has done a good job recently of getting them off of some of the major cities and then moving them into hotels and they've purchased hotels and motels for these folks.
But, I mean, when you're dealing with a place like Austin, you're only dealing with a million people and a couple thousand homeless people.
When you're dealing with something like Miami or Los Angeles or San Francisco, you're dealing with staggering numbers.
And there's very little incentives to create affordable housing or to do what they've done here, which is to buy up properties and start to provide housing for people.
There's very little incentive for it.
Listen, we're a community with a...
With a transient population and a lack of institutional memory.
And the pandemic is actually, remarkably, the pandemic helped Miami skip a bust cycle.
We exist in these booms and bust cycles.
We were on the real estate property values.
We were on a downturn.
Shit was going to collapse probably in 2020 or 2021. The pandemic saved Miami.
It spared us that real heavy bus cycle.
Instead, houses are more expensive than they ever were before.
Demand is through the roof.
It just makes it unaffordable, of course, for any of us who already live there.
You know, the problem is I'm doing these arena shows, so I'm in the round, and I get off stage, and I've got to go through thousands of people screaming at me and high-fiving.
Abso-fucking- My fear is that these variants are going to continue to get more and more aggressive, and we're going to be dealing with something completely different three years from now, two years from now.
And more of them can happen.
I had a meeting once with the CDC in Galveston.
We did a show down there, and me and Duncan were talking to this guy, and we were talking essentially about bioweapons, about someone making a disease.
And he said, that's a concern.
He said, but that's not my concern.
He goes, my concern is nature.
My concern is that something jumps from livestock to human beings and just runs right through us.
There's an interview from 1985. 85, 86 is a KGB agent and he's breaking down how you destroy America and he's saying you don't destroy America with weapons he goes you destroy it by slowly enforcing propaganda and getting the students to first of all getting them to endorse Marxist principles and ideology and I
mean, you're like, holy fuck, that's exactly what happened.
Did they engineer this?
Did they engineer the collapse of our higher learning institutions?
Unless you worked there and if you did you had to go to the police department and get an ID badge.
They literally took your fingerprints and you had to be tagged.
You had to have a fucking number.
So Muhammad Ali could fight in Miami Beach.
He could not stay in Miami Beach.
Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., they could perform in Miami Beach.
They couldn't even at the hotels, but they could not stay at the hotels.
They had to go back over the causeway to Overtown, which had a vibrant, you know, we saw the movie one night in Miami on it.
They had like it was a vibrant nightlife because you had because you had the greatest performers in the world performing in Miami Beach and then being forced into this neighborhood where they they had after parties and after clubs.
And like so you had this vibrant culture in Overtown in Miami because of segregation as Jim Crow.
We had a black beach in Virginia Key.
Black people were not allowed on the beach in Miami Beach.
We're talking about through the 60s or 70s.
This is very recent...
History.
So what I'm saying is, is that like, you know, if you have a fault line and you can just drop, you know, you can just drop, you know, like you don't have to attack it with a nuclear weapon.
That world of foreign instigated propaganda and division is really fascinating.
I had this woman on the podcast named Renee DiResta and she had thoroughly researched the Internet Research Agency in Russia, which just does that.
It's basically a farm That all they do all day long is create pages and memes and work on these pages and develop these memes that are shared amongst like QAnon supporters and just a lot of crazy people and a lot of like divisive ideologies online and they're constantly stoking the fires and she goes, some of them are so clever too.
It's really interesting because some of these memes and she said she had to look through hundreds of thousands, some of them are hilarious.
And they're made in Russia.
They're made in Russia so people can share them in America and that these will stoke division.
Like, do unto others as you'd have done to you, right?
The rising tide raises all ships, to use a sea-level rise metaphor.
But like, now, we talked about this with Screwball.
Like, the new American values are like, fuck everybody else.
Lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead for me and mine.
And when you start to circle the wagons that way...
You're gonna cause trouble.
In Miami, it's as simple as the way we drive.
We treat each other like assholes.
We're doing the way.
Yeah, but this is a shared experience.
You're not going to get anywhere any faster by cutting me off.
User turn signal.
I'm not a psychic.
Let's all play by the same rules and we'll all be cool.
Why treat each other like shit?
We're all pretty happy here.
Let's just chill out.
My bad joke is, well, it's not called your Emmy or our Emmy.
It's my fucking Emmy.
I'm like, why do we treat each other that way?
Why can't we just learn that this is a shared experience?
Listen, I feel that way about, you know, when people say, you know, my driver over here today was like, listen, she's like, the, you know, the ICUs are full.
She's like, so if I get into a car accident and I need a bed, she's like, that does affect me.
So people who are getting sick...
I don't want a cop a day dying in Florida.
I don't want people to die for no fucking reason.
Did you hear that polio is killing one police officer a day in Florida?
No, because it doesn't fucking happen.
There's no polio anymore.
It's one of the six vaccines that, you know, all your kids need in the Miami-Dade public schools.
Like, there's a way to realize that, like, these states are united.
We are United States.
We are literally all of us fighting the same battle every day for our families to have a better life, to hopefully, you know, millennials, so the first generation, millennials.
The earning potential, the student debt, the availability of jobs, of 401ks, of retirement.
They're a 1099 generation.
They're a freelance generation.
Gone are the opportunities that provided for the baby boomers after the greatest generation fought a war to create the most extraordinary and robust economy in the world.
I mean, they're the first generation of Americans since the Great Depression to not have it better than the previous generation.
That's a doc I've always talked about doing.
Call it the...
The worst generation.
How baby boomers fucked up America.
And the slogan would be, greatness skips a generation.
That's what it would be.
They had every opportunity.
They had jobs.
They had mortgages.
They had credit.
They had education.
Affordable educations.
And the millennials are just kind of like living at home.
And I don't think it's because they suck.
I don't think that's enough.
I think that it's not because Time Magazine called them the people of the year.
Remember when there was that mirror on the cover of Time Magazine?
I don't think they got full of that.
I think there are just fewer opportunities systemically in this country for that gender, for subs and future generation and post-millennials as well.
I just I think that there's not the opportunity necessarily available in a in a fair system also.
You know, where it's a real meritocracy.
It's what I always liked about sports, you know, is that it was as close to a pure meritocracy as we get.
Well, you take referees out of the equation sometimes.
But I just mean that, like, if you are the best in a sport, if you are the best athlete, if you are the best conditioned and the best trained, you are going to rise to the top.
So I think corruption plays a very big part in that.
I think people who are already at the top exert so much influence that it becomes harder.
I mean, metaphorically speaking, if you look at Main Street America and you look at the mom and pop businesses that shut down when the big box store opens down the street, it could be as simple as that kind of image.
But I think it gets much more Complicated.
You know, when you have people who, when you have a stacked, you're playing effectively with a stacked deck.
Does that mean there's no such thing as successful entrepreneurism?
Of course not.
But I'm saying that it's much more challenging, I think, in this economy and this environment than it ever was before.
A lack of people saying, like, my experiences are not necessarily your experiences.
The world may treat...
Your life experience may be different.
The world may treat you differently as a result of no power of your own.
Whether it's your gender, the color of your skin, whatever it may be.
To just say, like, listen, I don't know everything...
About all people.
All I could do is listen and pay attention and kind of realize that, oh, like, yeah, you know, the world does kind of treat me different winning the genetic lottery and being born a white man in America.
Life's pretty good.
You know, it's tough to complain.
There are opportunities for me.
There are, you know, I can be entrepreneurial and creative and clever and get ahead in a way that maybe other people don't necessarily have those doors open to them.
And just an understanding of that in and of itself, I think, Makes your community better, makes your family better, makes people safer and healthier.
It's saying that I'm going to acknowledge that you...
By the way, some people can't even acknowledge when people are going through the same experiences that they're going through.
There are some immigrants who are anti-immigration.
We have that in Miami, who say they don't see their experiences in the experiences of Central Americans, for example.
We have that in Miami.
It's very profound.
The Cuban exile experience is not very different, but there's a compassion gap when they see people suffering in Central America trying to escape oppression and crime and corruption and close the borders.
And it's like, I get it.
There are concerns about the borders, but we can also at least say that, wait a second.
These people have suffered.
You've suffered.
America provided violence.
You know, the people of your country with exile, with opportunity, with freedom.
Everybody wants a piece of that.
And who can blame them?
So at least we can say, like, well, how do you say close the door behind me?
I think that, you know, a lot of people give you a lot of shit for what you say.
I don't think they give you a lot of credit for what you don't say.
And what you do on this show more than talk is listen.
And I think that that's...
I'm different when I'm on this side of the mic or the camera than when I'm interviewing somebody.
Which is what I do for a living.
Intellectual curiosity is my business.
It's what keeps you going.
Like wanting to meet interesting people and learn different shit.
Like I said, I'm a natural skeptic, so I'm always asking questions.
But I am pro-fact.
And I think the fact is that people look at other people in the world and just...
Either they don't like them because they're the same, they don't like them because they are different, and I just, I feel like there's a way to say, like, it's cool if they're different, but like, why can't we, uh, why can't we just, uh, uh, not, why can't we just not hate because of that?
I think what people are concerned about is teaching children that they're inherently racist, they're inherently biased, instead of teaching people love and compassion.
So their fear is that you're putting people in this position when they're very young where they already feel guilty.
They feel like they did something wrong and that they're responsible for things that they have no say in whatsoever, especially young children, and that maybe there's a better approach to it.
They're also worried about grifters.
They're also worried about people that latch on to these socially conscious, socially progressive movements that have good intentions overall, but yet these people are using these platforms for their own personal gain and profit, which there are quite a few people like that.
And there's quite a few movements like that, and there's quite a few authors that have written books that have capitalized on these movements in this very Personally profitable way, and you can see what they're doing.
They're grifters.
They would have found something else, but they found critical race theory, and it's a very complicated and divisive conversation to have in 2021. But that happens with everything.
With this infecting the way their children get educated, and that they're indoctrinated into these These philosophies, these ideas that they think are ideologies, rigid ideologies, that can't be debated or discussed.
Because if you disagree with them, then you're a racist, you're a bad person.
Even if you're not, if you just think, like, hey, I don't think that this is something that we should be teaching children, that they're inherently biased and racist.
But I don't think that's what children are being teaching.
You know that conversation you can have that conversation in in college and you should be able to freely Defeat those kinds of issues, but I think - but I think what people what you're saying is it's not just grifters But there's people on the side on the side of the issue who don't want to teach Racism don't want to teach that there is that there are institutionally places in this country where people who don't look and sound like you are simply treated different and I just think that that's a reality for a lot of people.
And I don't think there's any reason to not tell a kid, like, but they're not different from you.
They're, you know, they're people who may have some different experiences, but want the same things as you, might have the same hopes and dreams as you.
And I mean, that's what we should be teaching kids.
I think we're looking at it through different filters, but I think ultimately we have the same perspective on it and that there is a reality of racism and there's also a reality and you have an ability to mold children and you can do it in a positive way and you can teach children.
But my concern is that teaching children that they're already guilty is a very dangerous step.
But teaching children that compassion is incredibly valuable and that we are all the same ultimately and that the differences are our strengths and that they're fascinating and they're amazing and that the fact that one of the great things about this country is like you can't really point out an American Because we're everything.
We really are everything.
It is one of the great experiments in immigration.
The problem is I've seen videos of people have leaked out of classes where teachers are teaching these things to children that they're responsible for.
The sins of their ancestors and that this is something that's inherently a part of who they are and I think There's a way to teach the positive aspects of what we're talking about.
There's a way to teach compassion There's a way to teach open-mindedness and this sort of Understanding of the strength of the fact that we're all so different and unique.
It's kind of why I feel guilty sometimes when I share, you know, viral videos of fuckery, you know, in Florida.
It's like, some of these things are just anomalies, you know what I mean?
They're just, but thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones, and we can kind of take this, I don't think, I don't know that crazier shit's happening now, so much as it is we're all more aware, you know, aware of it.
Right, and I don't know that that's healthy, per se.
I appreciate the transparency, and I like having the information, but I think that when you have, to borrow your term, grifters, who are exploiting an opportunity, it's good to catch them, but I think then it provides ammunition to vilify an entire area of study, or an entire movement.
I mean, it's kind of what you were saying about some of the treatments.
uh the viable uh treatments for for uh uh covet 19 i think it's the same thing it's like you had this and again i don't think there's a bunch of people going out to the you know to the uh horse feed shop or whatever get i don't i think that happened like once you know what i mean like it's one one dude you know but like it becomes the go-to example it's kind of the same thing here it's like there's one person abusing uh
I'm not abusing their authority or their platform as an educator, which I think that there's probably more than one person doing that in myriad ways.
But I'm saying I don't think that that is necessarily a fair cross-section of how things are being taught and applied.
I'm a product of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, graduate of the University of Miami.
I'm basically a functioning illiterate, let's be honest about it.
The reality is I was taught pretty well, all things concerned.
I don't think I came from a broken system.
I don't know what the hell is going on right now in the public school system.
I know a lot of people are yelling and screaming about masks, which has nothing to do with the education of their children.
I know a lot of people are pulling their kids out of school and going to private schools and charter schools, which is only going to help expedite the collapse of the public school system, which I think is a bummer because, like I said, I'm a product of it.
And there's a real problem in this country when we don't value one of the most important things.
That a child ever encounters, which is their education.
We don't value it.
We don't value it to the point where we don't want a radical change of it.
One of the things that we realized through this pandemic when they started introducing these stimulus packages and started propping up corporations and boosting them to the tune of untold fucking billions of dollars.
Is that they have the ability to allocate resources in a way that benefits corporations.
But they don't seem to be able to do that to disenfranchised communities.
They don't seem to be able to do that to places that have been historically poor.
And historically, you know, talk about these people that have experienced redline laws.
And people that, you know, are still, they have the echoes of Jim Crow still in their community.
They still have the same poor neighborhoods.
Same crime-ridden neighborhoods, and no one's done anything to fix it.
Yeah, it's a major problem in this country that it never gets addressed.
And when, you know, they talk about rebuilding places overseas and nation building, like the amount of allocation of resources that have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just think about that.
Think about what could have been done in the United States.
Like when you heard about Halliburton getting these no-bid contracts for untold billions of dollars to do work in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because you make an exceptionally good point, which is what I was getting.
When you say why the Florida of today or the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow, it's just like when I hear, and I hear a lot of this in Miami, it's a lot of this propaganda which helps to swing the county and swing the state.
You know, there is no...
There is no communist threat to the United States.
The greatest threat to capitalism, for example, is cronyism.
That is the greatest threat.
That corruption is what taints the system.
I see that in the bridge collapse.
Why isn't anybody in trouble?
They call it the friends and family program.
Friends and family plan in Miami.
And we have that everywhere.
And that manifests itself to the tune of trillions of dollars in war.
That's the greatest threat, is the kleptocracy.
That's the greatest threat.
There's no communist threat.
This is always going to be a democracy.
It's always going to be a capital...
Well, I hope it's going to be a democracy.
But capitalism is not threatened by communism or socialism.
Capitalism is threatened by cronyism.
That's the threat.
Because it perverts what capitalism...
Exactly what we're talking about.
The cream rises to the top.
You work hard, you get ahead.
This generation will have it better than their parents did.
That's being perverted.
By toxic, it's crony capitalism.
And then it's kleptocracy and then we're just fucked.
And then you're just either on the inside of it or you're on the outside of it.
You don't see Louis Farrakhan speaking in the Democratic National Convention.
The Democrats have time and again, even in the 2016 election, which was clearly the outsider election, to your point, clearly the Republicans were like, we're flushing the toilet on the Tea Party.
We're flushing the toilet on the Bush political crime family in China.
We're done with Jeb.
We're done with Marco.
We're done with Ted Cruz.
We're done.
We want this outsider.
Okay?
Democrats didn't quite read the room.
They nominated probably...
I wouldn't even call her a centrist.
I would say Hillary Clinton was right of center.
And it's like when the coach goes for the two-point conversion.
If they make it, the coach is a genius.
If they fuck it up, he gets second-guessed for the rest of his life.
Blindly for that job based on the on the resumes a leader of the free world Essentially the head of the United States of America There's a lot involved in people's choices and a big one is trust trust and whether or not they like the person and They just did not trust the whole Clinton family.
They did not like Hillary Clinton There was a lot of people that had this feeling about her that she was this icky Insider.
That she was a part of this whole system that had not served us.
And that was corruption-laced and deeply entwined and big businesses and special interest groups.
And Donald Trump wisely positioned himself as this guy who didn't give a fuck and was going to drain the swamp and crooked Hillary's going to get kicked out.
A vote against instability and insanity and people who said, only in third world authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorships do we listen and think about the leader of the country all the time.
I want to go to work and not fucking think about what the president is tweeting or doing.
But do you think that there's a time where something becomes so big that it no longer is simply a private business?
And then it becomes a town square.
It becomes almost like a utility.
That you could argue that people deserve their right to be heard, and this is a platform that has a reach that's unprecedented in American history, that there's a thing that people can plug into and instantaneously reach millions and millions and millions of people.
The question is, like, did he abuse it?
I don't want to say coerced, but did he help instigate the attack on the Capitol on January 6th?
Did using his Twitter account and using his social media presence ultimately endanger people?
That was the real question, whether or not someone should be banned from social media for expressing themselves.
Well, I think that, I don't know if your suggestion is to nationalize effectively, or regulate, or in this case, over-regulate, or apply laws and rules that apply only to the government to a private corporation.
I mean, listen, you can say whatever you want on your platform, on your show.
No one can tell.
And you can invite or not invite guests that Right, but I could be kicked off of YouTube.
And then you have women like Jen Psaki, who's the press secretary for the White House, who says that if you get banned from one platform, you should be banned from all platforms, which is very convenient for them if they can get someone banned that's a critic of the United States government.
No, I thought it was a ridiculous thing for someone to say, especially someone who's a White House press secretary.
Look, I'm in the fence on this, in a way, in that I don't think...
I don't think it's wise to have someone who is in a great position of power who's outwardly calling for some sort of a violent movement or a violent attack.
And that can happen, right?
Let's forget about the January 6th thing and let's imagine that some senator or some politician is calling for people to aggressively assume Control of a building or take control of a place.
That's a dangerous, dangerous megaphone to use, right?
And in that situation, I think we have to be really careful about how we allow people to use Any kind of platform, right?
Whether it's a social media platform or whatever the fuck it is.
In that case, I think that's where your argument can...
That's where there's the argument about Trump and the Capitol Hill attack.
That's where it gets real squirrely with me.
But other than that...
I feel like the answer to bad speech is better speech.
The answer is robust debate.
The answer is people that are intelligent, articulate, and convincing making far better points.
But I think that, again, you as the private business owner, as a restaurant owner or whatever it is, have to make a decision about that guy acting a fool at that table over there.
I could probably refuse you service for any reason, but the reality is if you come in and you don't act a fool in my place, it's a private bill.
Again, if they come on Twitter and they don't violate Twitter's rules, I don't like it.
I don't want, I don't like their, I don't follow them.
I don't like their message.
I don't particularly want their message on the platform, which is I could leave the platform myself in protest, for example, because there are a lot of, but the reality is I just, I block them out.
They don't exist in my timeline.
But the bottom line is that the private business owner needs some autonomy, needs some ability to say, I control this space.
But then I think you have to look at the nuances of this, meaning why were these, why were the people, why was each account banned?
What I'm saying is if you're going to incite violence, I don't really care who you're, if you're a fanatic, I don't really give a fuck if you're left or right or whatever.
Right, but as a proponent of free speech, which I'm sure you are, you know that it gets slippery when people have the ability to silence their critics or silence their opposition, silence people that have differing opinions.
And when you're dealing with a small business, like a restaurant, I understand it, but you're dealing with something like Twitter, where you have access to untold millions and millions of people.
It seems like we have to have a very nuanced perspective on this.
We have to really take into consideration the ripple effect of any decision that gets made in terms of silencing voices.
Because I think it can all come back and bite us in the ass.
I think it's an amazing ability that we have that's unprecedented to express ourselves and to explore ideas.
Unfortunately, Twitter is used by a lot of fucking dummies.
And a lot of it is just hate and insults, which is normal.
It's standard for the internet, right?
People dunking on people.
It's all normal stuff.
But there's also...
It's a portal for information.
And it's an amazing portal for information.
But we've got to be real careful about silencing voices just because you disagree with them.
We talked yesterday on the podcast about Unity 2020. That was a website that Brett Weinstein had put together, developing a plausible third-party candidate.
And the people that they wanted to use were...
Someone very good from the left and very good from the right.
The concept was Tulsi Gabbard with Dan Crenshaw, the two of them together, maybe something along those lines.
And Twitter banned that account.
They banned the Unity 2020 account because they thought that Trump was so dangerous, they didn't want any sort of potential Ross Perot type situation where some very charismatic third party moves in and takes votes away from the opposition and then Trump gets into office.
So they banned it.
And they banned it under false pretenses.
They said that they were using some sort of a bot to accelerate the use of hashtags, which is not true.
And they did an internal investigation that proved it wasn't true.
But there's this sort of subjective censorship that's available to them.
Where they can just decide.
They can have, what do they call it, their trust and safety commission or some shit.
They can just decide, this is, we think this is, should get, and you got a bunch of woke kids that are pushing these buttons and making these decisions.
And it gets slippery.
It gets really slippery.
And I think there's inconvenient things that you're going to see.
And there's going to be people that are saying things you disagree with.
And there's going to be people saying things and arguing things that you think are just outright fucking stupid.
But I think they have to be able to argue those things.
I think they have to be able to say those things.
Otherwise, we don't have a robust debate-based form of communication.
And if we don't do that, then we don't know who's right and who's wrong.
We just know who gets silenced.
And a lot of times when people get silenced, it actually winds up making them look like a martyr.
You say, you can come here and play, but you gotta...
You know, the house rules.
This is what they are.
So then it just becomes a question of when should the government...
Which also, talk about a slippery slope, the government should come in and effectively regulate...
Listen, we've already said we don't like the idea of the government regulating that if you get banned on one platform, you automatically get banned on all of them.
When we're talking about this lack of compassion, I think we also have to have this...
We have to have more compassion by other people's perspectives and viewpoints because there's this real...
Especially today, the polarization in this country is so extreme.
That there is this instant demonization of anybody who holds opposing viewpoints politically, especially.
And I think that's very dangerous for us.
It's not healthy, it's not wise, and it doesn't make for good community.
Like, you can have a neighbor...
Who's a hardcore right-wing person, and he could be a good friend.
You can have a neighbor who's a hardcore socialist, and he could be a good friend.
You can have good friends that maybe you don't necessarily share their opinions, but you have a certain amount of decency and a certain amount of just love that you approach these people with.
And we can get along better in this way.
This is one of the worst things about social media and Twitter is that we're not communicating in a manner where we're seeing each other.
Because it seems like the people that are more sensitive to the mask thing tend to be Democrats, and the people that are more, I'm going to live my life with freedom, they want the mask.
And if there's a way to reopen schools, which everybody wants, and the price to pay is your kids wear a mask for, like...
If that's what it takes to get the economy going, to get childcare, to get kids out of the house, to get...
What's the big fucking deal?
And by the way, sometimes the rules don't make sense.
There's a lot of rules that don't make sense.
And by the way, God forbid...
God forbid...
It might actually help somebody or save somebody or someone didn't get...
We don't know for sure, but if, God forbid, that's the worst that can happen is that you have an annoying mask on for a few minutes and you don't get somebody else sick.
I don't know if it stops people from getting sick.
I've heard arguments in both ways and I've also seen a video where there was a doctor who was explaining that the reason why he wears a mask is during surgery and it's to stop things from getting into the wound.
And he said, I'm going to show you what it looks like when you vape and you blow the vape out of a mask.
Have you ever seen this video?
Yes.
Crazy.
Like, it all goes through.
And he's like, vape particles are so much larger than viral particles.
He's like, it's not really stopping anything.
It's making you feel better.
And I'm like, okay, it's illogical.
But, like, until this shit is over, it makes sense that people at least want you to wear it or think it's a good idea to wear it because it makes it seem like you care.
Yeah, maybe it's enough of a viral load so you'll barely get sick versus get really sick.
Like, who the fuck knows?
But I wish there was a better solution.
I wish there was something more logical, like fucking advanced HEPA filters that suck all the bad shit out of the air, you know, so you know that if you go into an indoor location, you're in fact safer than you would be anywhere else.
That's one of the things that they say that's actually pretty good about airline travel, is that the filtration systems in airline travel are pretty substantial.
I enjoyed the beginning of the pandemic because it just made me closer to my family, spent more time with them, just spent a lot of time just hanging out at the house.
We watched movies, watched a lot of Netflix.
It wasn't that bad, but then after a while, it just started to grate and grind.
By the way, not that I had less time, but I didn't make...
I'm calling myself out.
I didn't make the time.
I didn't prioritize it in a way where it's like, okay, yeah, I gotta be on set at 7 a.m.
or 8 a.m., but I'm gonna wake up at 5, you know what I mean, to get the workout.
Like, you have to do that.
I'd rather...
Because I went to sleep late last night, I'd rather sleep in and then go right to set.
So, yeah, so it was just time.
We became busier.
I mean, we're working on, you know...
Four documentaries at the same time now.
Gone are the days where I can spend 12 years on a doc like we did The Kings of Miami or we go one project at a time.
Now, listen, I mean, it's a golden era.
You said it.
It's a golden age of nonfiction content.
And so, like, we, you know, like, docs are the thing when you think about it.
I mean, listen, I don't know.
Netflix wants to be talking about their business.
But, you know, a 10-episode season of The Crown on Netflix costs $100 million.
It's $10 million an episode.
Docs cost less.
Meaning, and if they rate and people watch it and love it, as much so as some of the scripted and premium big budget shit, then it's a bargain for them.
It's great for us because we have work.
It's a bargain for them because they don't have to pay $10 million an hour, you know, an episode.
I don't know if they still do this, but I noticed this back in the early days of their originals.
Orange is the New Black, House of Cards.
I don't think David Fincher knew what kind of numbers House of Cards were getting.
I don't think they'd tell you anything.
But here's what they did that was so brilliant.
Let's say the show, the new season, was launching on a Tuesday.
On Monday, they would announce...
That it's already been picked up for a new season.
So that's two brilliant things.
Number one, you've just made a contract with your audience.
That if you invest 10 hours on this thing, there's going to be more of it next year.
So do it.
And then, if you're a cast and crew, what do you care what the numbers are?
All you care about the numbers is that you have a job.
You got picked up for next year.
So now they don't even care about the job.
And of course, you can't use the numbers to renegotiate your...
Right, of course.
And what do you care at that point?
You're like, I got a new season.
I got a job next year.
That's all you care about is you get picked up, right?
That's why the numbers matter.
And so if you've already been picked up, what do you care?
They're so good.
And people just watch.
You know what happens?
So on the first Cocaine Cowboys...
It took like three or four years for it to become like a thing, I feel.
So first, in 2006, it blew up in the bootleg market.
And here's the thing.
Every window was a different demographic that saw it and got exposed to it.
So the first one was like a younger urban audience with the bootlegs.
Then there was legit DVD, which was like Amazon, Best Buy, Netflix, Red Envelope.
Remember the old school days of the DVDs?
Yeah, it blew up there.
Then it went on Showtime.
Then it went on CNBC. Then it was one of the first docs on Netflix's streaming service when they first launched the streaming service.
But every one of those...
Windows opened up like the the show to a totally different Demo, you know by time it gets to CNBC. That's not young urban, you know That's a different very different audience So it's just like it but it took that many years for it to kind of for me basically to get into ubers and You know someone would say hey, where you from?
I say Miami you ever see cocaine Cowboys?
We're like you knew like when it comes back when when when your tweet comes back to you You know when it kind of goes around the world and people are like are sending you your own meme, you know, you're like, oh, that's cool But it took years but like Kings of Miami Boom.
They flick a switch, baby.
It's on 190 countries and 30 different languages and everybody is just seeing it.