The Joe Rogan Experience - #1271 - Billy Corben

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

Billy Corben is a documentary producer and director, best known for his films “Cocaine Cowboys ” & “Cocaine Cowboys 2″ and also “Broke” & “The U” for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. His latest film "Screwball" releases in theaters on March 29, and VOD will be available on April 5.

5, 4, 3, 2... kids i don't want to give away too much of it uh 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 play use little actors what kids oh come on fella you're just you're just high dude oh I was pretty sober. It's the gym, 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. The thing that struck me is that, like, all these guys acted like children. They really did.

Yeah. And to boot, so, you know,'ve done some some sports docs in the past we did you know some of the espn 30 for 30s like the u and um when you do a sports doc i mean i don't want to say it's it's easy because it's you know making documentaries is a challenge but sports docs are pretty like 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 you know like it's a pretty straightforward process with this one it's not about baseball it's baseball adjacent i guess but like it's about

shit that went down in nightclubs in shady clinics with fake doctors hotel rooms bars locker rooms so you got a bunch of guys talking heads in your documentary but then you got you got nothing to cut to you got no b-roll so i'm like we're gonna need to shoot recrease you know recreations here right which is which is to me i don't know it's like when you're doing non-fiction filmmaking it's fake shit when you when you film recreations so it's like i'm like how do we do this in a creative way that 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 hyacinth or elmore leonard coen brothers

sort of florida fuckery farce and so we just wanted to keep in that in that mode so i'm watching the characters so we got tony bosh who is the fake doctor and porter fisher who was the whistleblower who stole the medical records and 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 guy I'll 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 neck and I'm like oh shit, they're so vivid and in the moment and talk in dialogue. So we could drunk history this, right? We could 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 Jones, 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 Jones was like, okay, we, 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 10-ish years ago called a very merry on let me try that one more time a very merry unauthorized children's scientology pageant i don't ask me to say it again i can't say it again um so it's just it's this wild musical like very bowie-esque score written by a couple of Yalies.

It's like it's a 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 with like in like a school play with like, you know, paper mache like sets and and 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 like 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

that's a little light you know and it's like this children's musical but we intercut it with real real documentary investigation interviews and um that maybe we'll kind of get away with it nobody wanted to make that movie dude nobody i mean doors were closing before i even knocked out like got to them um and i kind of filed again filed that idea away in the back of my head and then um 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 scar faces like an elementary school play and i was like this is a, it's such a great device. And the problem is you need to find something that it works for.

Like, 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 it works. It works great. And it's such a crazy story.

Well, I don't want to give too much of it away because I really want people to watch it. Because, I mean, I've talked about cocaine cowboys probably a hundred times in this podcast. It's one of my all-time favorite documentaries. But this is a story that almost writes itself. It's so bonkers. 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. Like that's everybody remembers it as like the A-Rod or A-Roid scandal, you know, and the truth of the matter is that Alex Rodriguez was collateral damage. Yes. In this whole thing. Yeah. It was not about him. Don't tell Alex that, but it's not about him.

whole thing yeah it was not about him don't tell alex that but it's not about him you know it's it it was really the highest the career of the highest paid baseball player of all time effectively ended over a four thousand dollar debt between this cocaine addicted fake doctor and his fake tan addicted steroid patient and it's like that's what i And it's like, that's what I said. It's like a Florida fuckery story straight up. It's just like this classic only in Miami, absurd farce. And that's what you specialize in. You really do specialize in Florida fuckery. I go to your Twitter feed all the time for current Florida fuckery.

It's just, it's yeah, it's distilled. It's just like, it's pure. It's a hundred percent Florida fuckery. Yeah. It's just,

it's, and that's what this story is% uncut florida fuckery yeah it's just it's 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 putting their 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 there's no business there it's carl hyacinth says all we produce in florida is oranges and machine guns we don't we don't make anything that we sell the dream we sell the sunshine you know it's lies that came true yeah you know and so 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 of money 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 right and miami is just like miami is one of the youngest cities in the country in in your parlance it would be about one person old or one and a half people ago like one and a half people ago you know like it's just we're the we're one of the youngest cities um barely a hundred just over a hundred you know 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, certainly there certainly was before the, you know, the the 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 so you bailed out real estate salesmen real estate who loaned themselves money that is wound up being backed ultimately by us by the taxpayers yeah i mean that's the old remember that i mean you hear that line all the time now that like you know um the people used to rob the bank from the outside in now it's

yeah now it's from the inside out but no none could be truer than 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 like 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 this is pre like big short like this before anybody sort of knew a lot about this. And he said, we were down here inami 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 it is such every time i go there i always go i forgot how fucking crazy this place is you really should have to have a passport it's it's but i love it i really do love it it's a crazy place to do stand-up you know i i, I did this job 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.

You presume it was to use their phone. They might have been powdering their noses. They might have been, but it was, you know, 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, just 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 like la like created invented road rage but like miami it's 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 like 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 and just but that's why they i say that's why they call it miami it's not our amy or your amy it's my fucking ammy and stay out of my fucking ammy it's just i don't know you seem to love it you seem to thrive yeah i can't really function anywhere else uh that doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense it's and it's so frustrating too i was

you know i'm a native floridian and a lifelong miami and i for a while i was i was pretty determined um to like leave behind a better flor Florida than the one I was born in. Fail. Big fail, dude. You gotta give up, man. 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. No Miami idea.

Everywhere else a 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 light bulb 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 good light bulbs.

I don't think it is. There was no environmentally sound light bulbs 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 at the beginning of the movie when, you know, Castro is ranting and raving that he's flushing the toilets of Cuba onto the United States, specifically to Miami. And so he was working at the uh the

trauma center jackson memorial our emergency room in miami and he said he got a mariel refugee these guys would stand on the beach they would um it looked like havana in south beach you know like there's that like coral seawall and it's just like it had a really havana vibe so they would go they would chill mostly at these flop houses south of fifth street in miami beach where like the cops would literally just they would 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 a all around the clock and so and they would just get in gunfights like literally would just be like

they someone would cheat at dominoes and they would just pull out a gun and one guy would shoot the other guy and so he has a mario refugee who comes in to the emergency room with a gunshot wound and he knew spanish he was bilingual he said to the guy 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 mario 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 you know you you she's i cut people's hair you know they come over kiss her goodbye and put a tip in her in her pocket you know, they come over, kiss her goodbye and put a tip in her pocket, you know, 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 goes, what the hell is this? And her friend said, oh shit, that's worth more than gold. That's the best tip you got. You got all day, that little baggie but that was just like the culture and it's and it's i mean it's not imagine that anywhere else like imagine that in like nebraska someone tipping you in cocaine people would be like what what the what do you what the fuck are you doing listen it's just like like i said it's like america's casablanca 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. Yeah. Everybody, everything is for sale. Still. Nothing, you know, 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

huge in miami yeah yeah we got all these brickle brickle east a thousandaires you know driving their rented fucking lambos yeah you know and blowing the engines out on south beach because they don't know how to drive them you know just getting towed down the street it's just listen it's a fake until 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 there's not a real industry no not at all there's a lot of professional fighters come out of uh miami about that whole area coconut grove and a lot of aggression a lot of poverty it's a 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 any metropolitan area in the country wow so 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 at miami td allman called it the canary in the coal mine the bellwether and so you know when 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, 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 reelected 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 reelected him. Okay, we elected him twice as the top fucking executive in our state like what makes you think that the united states of america wouldn't do that and i know it's fair to say like you know if you're gonna be the governor of a state you should know a little something about

the largest industry in the state like you're gonna be the governor of michigan you should have some familiarity with the automobile industry and manufacturing and in florida if you're going to be the governor arguably you should know something about our biggest industry which is medicare fraud basically i mean you could argue that he's the most qualified man for the job oh yeah we got like medicare fraud is has 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 so they run it so you'll go into like little havana or hialeah for example in uh a municipality in 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 po 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 um uh social security numbers and and you know uh stolen identities basically in 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 uh 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 a hundred percent of our elderly population suffered from hiv and hiv where hiv positive i mean it's fucking impossible you had female patients getting penis pumps that were paid for by medicare i don't even know that medicare covered that i gotta look into that but uh but i know that was a thing

well thanks obama but did you watch the oxycontin express did you see i haven't seen it now but 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. And you'd just go right. 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'd 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 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 go oh shit it was upside down he wouldn't he wouldn't even care 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 then 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 but 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 does he get away with it? Magic. MAGA magic, I guess. I mean, listen, he pled the Fifth Amendment like 75 times in a videotape deposition that was used in a campaign ad against him.

And Florida was like, we're good. We're good with that. And he just, I don't listen. White rich men kind of walk between the raindrops in this country. You know, it's just a,

well, sort of, they got craft for getting a hand job. That was Florida too. So stupid. It's crazy. It's cool. Well, we were. They got Kraft for getting a hand job. That was Florida, too. So stupid. It's crazy. It's cool. We were talking about it.

How does he not have a guy who can get him jerked off? 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 now my massage parlor is closed down. That's the problem. Where do I go now? That's the problem. Where do broke guys go?

Well, the fact that they were filming you too like so the whole thing is so strange and and if there was human trafficking going on there what were what were cops chilling there for like six months in some ongoing investigation like can you save these poor victims yeah 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 oh human trafficking maybe it was just more 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 block overblown but 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 hand jobs? 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 hand job, whatever. And you can look like you're being proactive. But solving a murder? that's hard, man. That's hard work. Hard, dangerous, and if you go to a weird little Asian massage place and guys are coming out smiling, you're like, hmm, you can start there.

Talking about low-hanging fruit. No offense to Kraft. It's probably his older fellow. Starts hanging. There was a weird law in Hawaii where they were letting cops actually have sex with prostitutes. Like, 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? I can't make that. 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? Like, what? That's human trafficking, if you ask me. I mean. Well, 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. It's crazy. It's the ultimate,

I mean, you talk about people holding power over people. That's the ultimate. 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 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 it's beneficial.

The person gets something out of it. I mean, some people have a really hard time getting someone to have sex with them. You know, I don't see it. 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. Like, 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. First of all, it's a contract between two consenting adults. If we're talking about small government deregulation, let's allow two consenting adults to engage in a contractual relationship. 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.

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. They could take place instead of in the black market and underground, it could take place in a, where you can protect all the participants involved. And it's, but it's been true of liquor it's been true of marijuana it's been true of uh prostitution which they call for a reason the oldest profession yeah um 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? It's so puritanical. It's so archaic. It's so archaic. It's such a dumb, 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? 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 people there would be so much more access you'd probably you know you would lose people people would die in high profile overdose cases and then people would try to make a deal out of it you don't think that if cocaine was legal everywhere that no meth people can get the drugs right but it's not that easy for a person like if you don't think that if cocaine was legal everywhere, that 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 uh you know i would not have any idea who's an informant and who's gonna rat me out but i think the stats show in states where marijuana has become legal you don't see significant spikes in usage apparently there's there's there's some significant spikes in, but the problem is it correlates to a significant spike in population in 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 there's some issues there's 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 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 but i agree but i think it's de minimis i think it's like i think and 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. Yes. And the number of people,

who's going to turn around and go, you know what I want to try that's legal now? Meth. Meth. Yeah. My dentist doesn't recommend it, but I feel like I want, who the fuck's going to do that? You say that,

but how many fucking people are on Adderall? And the only difference is, the doctor's prescribing it that's really good shit that's why the president bumps it yeah that's what i hear just saying do you think he does he's always sniffing and he always well here's the i don't think he's on cocaine so no and i always describe to people who don't 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.

But I don't think he's on – but he's always – you always hear him with the – I think he's like bumping Addy. 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 saying he's not? I mean, he's a wild man. But he's definitely got accusations from his past about use of amphetamines. got accusations from his past about use of amphetamines there was uh there was a journalist that actually detailed the very duane reed pharmacy where he used to get this prescription diet medication there air quotes diet medication which is fucking speed right 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 yeah his diet 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 gonna make america great again we're gonna build that wall higher we're gonna tell those chinese listen motherfucker like he was i mean it's an incredible amount of energy god bless him he's like 70 some odd years old it's amazing that you don't have to drug test him it's amazing you get drug players right baseball players exactly that's what i'm gonna say they're the guys we need to and what i mean what is that all if not a performance enhancing

drug a hundred percent 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. And 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 it makes me feel weird i feel like i'd be that guy who like does it the first time and my heart explodes out of my chest you'd be like scraping me off the roof with a shovel you know if i did right because you're so high

energy yeah i was like jesus i'm worried that i would love it that's what i'm concerned i'm worried i would love it and i'd be like okay from here on out it's all about me you know which marijuana does the opposite to me marijuana is like we could all be cool together you know i finally tried pot yeah i finally tried it what happened i never i never i never tried it before but you know i was i was actually um years ago i was in colorado 420 backstage at a snoop concert oh geez you have to try it i didn't have to because i was second hand stone oh it's like so that's how you tried it it's like it's like when when i go to church with coco i mean i you're just getting just hot boxed you know like i literally was people's church with coco for people to understand what

we're saying church of what's happening Happening Now podcast with Joey Diaz. That's right. You're abbreviating. Right. I didn't mean that I actually went to like a Santeria church and sacrificed a chicken. Although we have done that in Miami. When he's out of Miami, all bets are off when Joey's down. But like, I'm in the middle of a story on his podcast and I fucking forgot the end of

the story. I literally, I told it and I like ended it. And then only the next day did I go, I never told him the end of the story i literally i told it and i like ended it and then only the next day did i go i never told in the end of that story i fucking forgot it but so someone says uh snoop 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. 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. And I got maybe halfway down the hall. And I was like, I can't, I can't, I can't. I turned around and I bolted out the door. I was like,

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. And everybody was making fun of me. Cause 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 kept saying was I wish I was drunk I wish I was drunk I wish I was just I don't know it was like a bad I just it was so anti-social I felt so weird I felt so sort of introverted and I was unfortunately in like a they have 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

Well 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 Just And then let's just relax Don't get crazy Don't take it When it comes back around again It's too It's too god damn strong today

It's not what it used to be I was in Very recently In Austin, Texas And Texas still has regular weed It's very good weed But it's regular weed like you can smoke it and you're like I'm here everything's fine California no longer these motherfuckers right

here these little backwoods that 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 yeah he's still here now i'm awake i'm awake yeah he had to get uh my friend brendan to come and get him yeah he couldn't drive it's awesome it's fucking strong 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 indica yeah i tried it second time laughed my ass i was with funny friends okay 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 it was i had a lot of fun yeah sativa is more um you're thinking more it's a little bit you have a little bit more energy indica crushes you you're just like oh my god i gotta go somewhere and lie down i can't handle this it's it's but it's different for different people as well but i'll tell you that chick-fil-a tastes damn good that's way better right hate tastes great i gotta tell you hate tastes great i mean it's more ignorance than hate but i see what you're saying yeah 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 they're always on TV 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. Yeah. 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 could 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.

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 like 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. MAGA, bro. It's not logical, but they make a goddamn good chicken sandwich. They make a goddamn good chicken sandwich. It's quite tasty. Hate tastes great, man.

I'm telling you. Again, I think it's more ignorance than hate, but I feel you. It doesn't rhyme. It just doesn't. Ignorance tastes great. It doesn't rhyme. But like, I don't know. And they had this lunatic on.

He's on all the time. They're paid half hour shows, but this Peter Popoff guy 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 kind of 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 yeah 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 yeah and so you need to give me money so that because my g4 just ain't cutting it anymore i need to upgrade i was i wish 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? Well, not all religion.

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 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 you know they have to keep the operation running and there's a lot 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.

Hypocrites. Just hypocrites. Giant fucking castles. You know, like that Joel, whatever his name is. What's that guy's name? Osteen. Yeah, that guy. That motherfucker, he owns a huge

arena. They do the show and he caught a rash of shit when he didn't let all the hurricane victims stay in his place. He was holed up in his $10 million mansion at the time. I'd be amazed if it was only $10 million. It's not his only property.

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. It doesn't necessarily have to make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. But it provides them with comfort. I appreciate. I respect people of faith.

I think it must feel wonderful i don't know how it feels but i 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 yeah like the prosperity guys like people who used to have a or claim to have some kind of holier-than-thou moral code that now think like the pimp president's cool it's like i get it but like but your whole thing was like that bill clinton was the biggest scumbag in the world right and he needed to be impeached

and castrated and but like 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, 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 he's like the pimp joel osteen like he's like that's what it is well he found his hustle yeah and i don't want to be mean about this but i think it's accurate that there's 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 yoga type people.

Like, oh, the crystals and the lights. 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 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 grew up in a cult and who can make their way out of it i mean can you imagine when you're a child yeah you're most impressionable and and you're steeped in that that's all you know like you don't know that there is an alternate perspective and and you're able to grow up and say oh wait there's a whole big yeah 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 one of the probably one of the hardest things that a grown adult has to do is to recognize that the paradigm this this this

Framework they've been living their life under is all the utter horseshit It's like I mean the Mormon one is so crazy too It's like the the results are great. The people are so nice. Yeah, they're the nicest cult members of all times 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. I mean, he's Judaism and Catholicism. It's all, they're all crazy mythological horseshit. But they know who the guy was. Like, I mean, he's so recent. Too recent. It's too, well, that's the thing is that you know, it's like Scientology. It's like, well, we know it's a lie.

Scientology is even crazy. 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 the if you want to make real money start a religion yeah that is his greatest quote yeah and then did it and then god bless him can't knock his hustle people want to buy into that what's amazing how are your 2019 it's still rocking in some way i mean it is Even after all those documentaries

Even after the Leah Remini show Yeah All these things just They go out in the world They tell everybody it's horse shit 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 know If you want to put in a money like some people have a hundred dollars some people have five dollars and this is like intellectually some people have a lot of room to work with some people don't they just 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 is taken advantage of or swindled or the victim of a con person. 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 who sort of it's it's like the fucking dude from my 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 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 oh shit like there's something to that it's 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 right some people fall and they land on their fucking head and they're never the same again yeah 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 but it's all of us are experiencing this life together and there's some folks that are just they're gonna 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. I don't know. 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

you just it's where you fuck up that like you you learn the most from it and and i think 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 sure and you can be a more enlightened person by being more empathetic and trying to understand those perspectives, trying to walk a mile in their shoes. And I just feel like I've learned so much more from the mistakes that I've made, the failures that I've had, certainly than any of the successes. I have in my home, I have no I have movie posters, but they're like art.

They're other people's movies. You know, I have none of my own movie posters at home. That's, that's, that's at the office. That's not what home is for, you know, 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 every like that that was the time I took a shit, you know, like for the whole world to see.

And I hung it over. It's either for a number of years it's not there anymore but like i just i just i wanted to remind myself of it you know 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 there's a benefit to that and that you you go god that sucked i don't ever want to suck again like let me figure out a way to not suck like i always say that with about comics like when we bomb that is it's a terrible feeling but it's the best opportunity for growth because you realize like hey i 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's it requires such bravery and such strength of soul and thickness of skin that like i went fucking vegas just like 2000 um 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 shoe would like pass

like right in front of my eyeball like just above my my eyeline and he was doing material for one of his last specials and it was the one i think might might have been the second to last he had that whole bit about like he doesn't believe in god 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 old God fearing crowd there in Las Vegas. And they were not about this. They were not about it. Not one odor, not one little bit. And he's trucking back and forth doing it. trucking back and forth doing it fucking crickets 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 and my ass off and i'm all by myself and i'm at some point i turned i i stopped laughing long enough i took a breath to take a drink right and i looked out And then I look back up at the stage, and Carlin is right there. He's, like, hunched over with his head, like, 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 keep stalking the set the stage and i was like oh my god and i saw i was at the improv um uh at miami when they when they had the one at the remember the the hard rock yeah the hard rock i guess they're redoing it or whatever that fucking place is death it's just i was like i was like man uh 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 oh yeah it was good the bad one was miami the miami oh in the grove coconut grove that was that was rough yeah but but the but no it was cool but then now

it's got like they bulldoze the whole fucking place they're supposed to be remodeling and rebuilding it the seminal hard rock like it's like i always say you know what's the saying that like um uh 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 rape 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 they that was the only place that is the only place they have blackjack uh in south florida so you can go there and play blackjack but they bulldoze the improv and i was there one night gilbert godfrey 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 where 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 in these rooms where 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. And it's like the, if the fact that anybody gets back on stage after that, after a night like that is just, it's remarkable to me. I have nothing.

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 mother no one wants a bomb period it's just terrible it's a ruthless experience it's um it's it just uh rips you down and 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 it's just you spike you realize

you go to 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 so i'll just i keep it's anything i can use to make me work harder i use the six years since i did my shittiest work have been like for me artistically creatively uh the most productive and like i i feel finally um after 20 years of making documentaries that i might be doing like my best work like but it took that fucking long and it took basically almost six years from totally bombing you know for me to feel like i i hit rock bottom and then have spiked you know better than better than before you've done some documentaries with some dangerous people in them you know obviously grizelda blanco is probably one

of the most dangerous people on earth while she was alive um and in this you also touch on that i mean there's you're a lot of these people are fucking sketchy folks and you're exposing how stupid their activity were does that does that ever creep you out ever get nervous like because you're making these documentaries mocking these people and you know rightly so but it's uh not cocaine cowboys wasn't really mocking it's more exposing but this one is like openly mocking this one's really good man it's not cocaine cowboys. We're really mocking is 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. Yeah. And April 5th on VOD. Yeah. And well, this one's, this one's tough because this is like a fresh wound for a lot of people. Netflix March 20th? No, VOD.

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. At 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 uh it's being put out by greenwich entertainment who just won the oscar for free solo for best documentary um so they know what they're doing and and uh like i said hopefully people will go see it and listen i hope it's a comedy i think it's a comedy it's a comedy we tried 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. You're like, shit, how do I get this fucking guy out of my life? And the fact that he borrowed money from this guy and then did 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 it is alex rodriguez has got to be pulling his fucking hair out going what in the fuck and 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 um when these convicted felons stole the stolen documents from porter fisher who had stolen the documents from tony bosh they set him up in this whole it's so absurd it's fucking tanning salon heist where they're like hey why don't you go in and try this new spray tan color it's it's trumpian orange go 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. 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 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 that was the first six figures were against the recovery of the debt 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 um it was

just totally crazy and it's like i always say like you come down to the swamp and roll around you're gonna get some mud on you so when mlb came down to to miami one of the guys jerome hill the the former baltimore cop turned uh florida department of health investigator he he says unequivocally that major league baseball's investigators broke the law in 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, because let's be real, I don't give a shit about steroids in baseball.

So that's the interesting thing about, because 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, you know, kind of era of steroids in baseball. These were not guys, you know, 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 their their livelihoods are contingent upon their physical performance yes and so you got to play like what is it 162 games in 180 days it's the most physically grueling schedule of any of the uh 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 okay there's an Adderall issue with baseball as well. Absolutely. A disproportionate number of baseball players compared to the general population are on Adderall. That's why I said

it's a performance- Of course. 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 is baseball's finding that edge now you got guys who are just looking to maybe recover a little faster you know who from from injuries or fatigue you're looking for guys who um are 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 like you know how the drug cartels they'll let some drug drug shipments get busted so that the other ones will get through i almost feel like that's what they do with with nfl players to get caught like oh look we're testing we caught somebody dude that's what that's what this was with a rodRod. Bud Selig is the steroid commissioner, full stop. That's the bottom line. His tenure was marked by the famous home run derby. Yeah, well, Mark Warr and Sammy Sosa.

Absolutely. So he knowingly, I believe, exploited and profited from that era of baseball that really saved them after the 94 players 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 does and that's why he's so pissed like that's why the and it's fucked up when you're the pioneer in something people really and dude they had a street named after him in in miami yeah and they quietly took that shit down in the middle of the night after decades of naming that street. 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 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 p-tape yes i think that therefore holds well that's that is a good way of looking at it, too, right? Because 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.

It was before the man found Christ. That's what a lot of them say. When did he 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? I guess when he was running for president but that's when he paid off Stormy like the night before the yeah but after that then he became jesus after so after that paid off stormy like when when the day before the election i feel bad for her too because i feel like she thought like this

is gonna go all in on this and then she lost the court case against him so she owes his legal fees 300 grand this is crazy like where the fuck is she gonna get that and now she's trying to do stand-up yeah i mean it's gonna that's a lot a lot of hand jobs um she's you know enough about robert craft she's trying to do stand-up i think no she's not yes she is in houston texas they were calling her the queen of clap back that is queen of the clap no no clap back oh okay you know like clap? No, no, no. Clap back. Oh, okay. You know, like clap back. If 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. Like 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 but it's just clap back 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 clap backs well they were calling her the queen of clap back that she's gonna do stand-up again i mean who knows maybe she's hilarious maybe she's gonna take it seriously i mean you never fucking know i mean as a comic i 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 gonna win this he's gonna pay you off you're gonna everyone's gonna know that you told the truth and people are gonna to pay for your interviews. And man. But this is America.

These are 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 spending on a pole. Yeah. But like why? Cause she's got probably got bad hips. She's like in her fifties or something.

Isn't she? I don't know. I think she's, she's an older lady. But she's not young, man. You know, she's not young. 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. That's what you say in Miami. Yeah, hard life as we say in Miami hard life bro but that thing is that we everyone's so used to it now it's like not that big a deal

it's like even if a new accusation came out people would be like like remember the New York Times report about Trump where he was talking about shady business dealings and they thought 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 the new american values it's to me what 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 uh 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 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 um we're now showing them be a bully um lie cheat and steal and you could be the biggest uh 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 toxic toxicity of the new american values is going to do damage 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 who could laugh at it, but the truth is that he said oral sex wasn't sex. Right. Okay? And we saw the spike in sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers and young people, mostly through oral sex, because they said, oh president said really that absolutely yeah and that talk about a health yeah it was it was a legitimate public health crisis you you saw following the clinton

lowensky 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 is sort of a comic you know as he's sort of it's it's you know 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 uh the size and scale of the coverage yeah unquestionably got people horny well legitimately but people people for a while people thought when i say people i'm talking about younger people um developing minds

impressionable youths were under the impression that you could not get a sexually transmitted disease through something that wasn't sex and and the president reset those values just like this president i feel is re-calibrating our values and and i think that that's 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'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 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 and 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 and 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 those tricks of the trade you know always and we 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?

The problem is 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 that during that time period they they fell into this there was a sort of a a really a piss poor way of justifying it that 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 100 degrees the other 180 degrees the other way and hire usada and we're going to 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 a tj dillashaw just got caught who's a bantamweight champion just just relinquished his belt for some i don't know what he got caught for i don't know what the circumstances were and some people have been caught for um accidental contamination because there's a lot of different supplements you could buy even creatine like standard stuff that's totally legal to take but they 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 is first of all tony bosh who wore a lab coat

had a stethoscope hilarious called himself dr t yeah had said dr tony bosh he's a doctor in belize which i think i am too i have to check my. He went to the same medical school as Dr. Pepper and Dr. Dre. Well, I'm a ordained minister, just so you know. I've actually married people. That's legal. Yeah, 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.

Like, where is that a thing? Says no. Says they can't. I guess some of them could be doctors, though. No. Highly doubt it. You need an adjustment? You're right.

You're feeling right. No. I don't. Ever. How about that? I went to a chiropractor 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 but the 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 i felt a lot lighter after the chiropractor by about four hundred dollars actually when i 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. 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 cancer. It's all gone. 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. 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 that's it's the same thing it's like a release of nitrogen or something i don't 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 about them being able to write prescriptions. I'll tell you that Tony Bosch could not write prescriptions, but he was doing it. Exactly. 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. 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 called medical directors. That's part of these. The whole anti-aging scheme really prospered in the state of Florida, as you can imagine.

scheme really prospered in the state of florida as you can imagine and um 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 bosh entrepreneurial uh 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 uh 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

um you know we have a big immigrant community obviously in in miami we have a lot it's a huge baseball community um you have people who are smuggled specifically into the country for the purpose of playing baseball uh and signing those big guaranteed contracts right out of high school and so you have parents and kids and coaches looking for every advantage we're going to this guy um you know 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 you know to gain 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 just 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 help for their kids um and those kids are are victims yeah well that's for sure this is 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 yeah yeah you definitely can you have a disproportionate amount of i mean in the steroid use population of um autism childhood cancer just horrible horrible things that happen to the the children of people who are 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 was getting on in the years, and Bosch started treating him, put him on a protocol, as he called it, take the, you know, that they were randomly tested, that 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, 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 in theoretically, thanks in no small part to this guy who was you know who was juicing him and that's and then manny gets busted pisses dirty after a surprise test before a game because according to bosh 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 the what you would assume was negative publicity from manny getting busted and them connecting it to tony bosh in miami that was the word of mouth that got a rod's cousin to come to bosh and say hey you should meet my cousin he's playing this game in tampa i'll come up and 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. Okay, 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, you know, in the record books here, like all these players do the stero steroid era i need to look like i did something on my way out the door so he calls a second in command rob manfred and says let's do let's do something about this and they go after the biggest scalp you can in

the game alex rodriguez yeah and so when they needed alex as the heel that was the storyline yeah okay so they nail alex all right um you know the vince mcmahon of the game bud seeley 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 and alex gets the 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 gee 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. You know, one day you're the heel, the next day you're the hero hero hero it's like whatever whatever and and and they're just selling everybody this this bill of goods that this is all real you know you really have a picture that was him with a 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. That's the problem. We all want to believe. Spoiler alert, we did it. We put it in there with the little kid's face on it. Amazing.

Just hilarious. The way you did it is hilarious. The kid who plays A-Rod is a fucking amazing. It's the light eyes. He's amazing. Well, it's just his, like, when he's, I don't want to give too much of a way, but making the funny faces in court, 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 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 uh 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 live at the fountain blue hotel you know the nightclub the sports grill in south miami the ritz carlton kibiskeen 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 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 the fucking scene where they're looking for the blood in the nightclub we 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 like 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 how much oh four over 400 million was his gross uh 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 when you grow up

in miami and that scene was a i mean that, we had like all those kids, like all the extra kids partying. Shout out to my director of photography, BG Goldneck. He did a hell of a job. Like that was a complicated, complicated shoot. It's a great documentary. All your shit's great.

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 turned cocaine cowboys into a stage play yeah you were saying that before we started and i'm like what are you doing it's how you should come it's not a musical okay come down and and it's called confessions of a cocaine cowboy you might remember in the documentary um there was a hitman jorge riviola who he worked for la madrina the godmother grizelda blanco and um when we first started researching the doc in 2004 we obtained a seven volume 1300 page deposition that he gave and normally in a depo you're like the answer is 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 in 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 wasating witness. So it read like a monologue. It read like a, 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, Davidkin described it who uh co-produced cocaine cowboys and edited edited it with me he described it as a cross between cocaine cowboys and my twitter feed that's how he that's how he described it so like it's a little irreverent um it's obviously a little absurd if you're going to put kind of cocaine cowboys as a live theater event so we kind of acknowledge the absurdity of it um and the business the the surreal exploitation of it and you know the guy michelle hausman who's the the director of the play at miami new drama at the colony theater in miami beach on lincoln road he said um he said

why are we doing cocaine cowboys for the theater in 2019 and 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. Why did you have one of them play both roles? Because I felt that they were flip sides of the same coin. I think the state attorney is an interesting character. Does she wear different clothes? Oh yeah, she changed and has different hair. And in fact, the performances are so different and the voices are so different than zilla does some people after the show would

be like oh my god she was amazing zilla was amazing as uh as uh grizelda blanco who's the actress that plays the state attorney kathy and we're like oh we won't tell we're like 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. It's great. At least real underrated Tim Burton. Hugely underrated.

Amazing score. I don't know. Especially now, I feel like it really holds up. I still go, ick, ick. I'll still do that every now and then just talking about ufo related things preposterous it's just i love that movie nobody very few people love it i love oh my god they're crazy it's great it holds up man you know i watched it like two years ago it holds up it's amazing it's it's wonderful it really is that, 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 when she was first elected, she was 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 you know why why does corruption grow you know greater and wider than fucking oranges in 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 send a message of impunity that's the bottom line you know no trouble arresting innocent young

black kids on drug charges or whatever but like when it comes to enforcing public corruption she's just non-existent and so what happens is is you you have a and of course it's like the broken windows theory of crime if you allow petty corruption to to 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 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 serving and it's it's created a very dangerous you know situation uh in the city and and it's also created a situation where just like mayor after mayor just gets away with pure fuckery you know oh god yeah and that's that's it's not a sexy answer people always like why is miami so corrupt and 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 uh liberal and conservative parties that went on for like 20 years almost caused caused the horrific murders of like 200 000 people um 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 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 so we're saying earlier like you're 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 risalda blanco went into a an illicit an illicit trade but a trade that a lot of people in columbia were getting into from that era um it's just i wanted to have a discussion about a lot of the characters argue

with each other in the play about how different everybody is it's like that and how miami is like game of thrones and paradise with slightly fewer dragons you know like we just self-segregate and it becomes this battle of fiefdoms and and um because we're not like we're not multicultural we're very much segregated like 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 you know we have our little kingdoms you know by by flag by nationality very much so um and so everybody's arguing about how we're different and the place sort of when you walk away you're like okay but this is a conversation about how we're all the same and some of us have different opportunities than the than than others and it's just a matter

of what we're able to make of those of those opportunities and that was sort of the comparison i was making by because it's a little locally it's a little scandalous the fact that the same actress plays both of these these very powerful how How so? 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, people don't shake. Yeah, I mean, you know. But that is fascinating. You've got to wonder if it's a spoken agreement or if this is just a known sort of just, 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, you know, a rogues gallery at a boardroom table in a dark smoky room. You know, it's talking about, okay okay how are we going to conspire i don't know what you're going to do so 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 right and you don't ruffle feathers and you don't you don't fuck with conventional wisdom and uh this is the way it's always 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. How could how could i like when you told

me you were doing it that's the first thing i thought of well being a lazy fuck i'm like oh that's so much time you know that seems like so much time to do i don't want to do that you know there's there's it's like this documentary racket is not very profitable so i wanted to go where the real money is theater plays i'm gonna play right you're gonna make your fortune billy so and i said to my co-author oran squire and the director i was like listen i was like this has to be a purely theatrical experience too no no projections no archive like news footage like we use in the document i'm like if 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 could just when i'm home if i can just chill i want to just chill right so if i'm gonna be like okay i gotta go see a fucking play i'm like so first thing i had 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 and so or a netflix subscription so you're going 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 on netflix i want people to go like holy, 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. We're seeing a really disproportionate number of people coming to the theater who have never been to like 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 like 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 in there and it's fun and and very and and funny and and uh i think pretty thought-provoking particularly at the end and um they just like uh this audience is is we're like oh shit you can't duplicate this experience in any way. You know that.

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 a drug. How many seats? This year, 420. Oh, it's great.

420, bro. It's fairly intimate. Oh. But that's a good size for an intimate live show. It's huge. 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. Oh, 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. Yes. The Fillmore now. Yeah. Um, I don't, I've done, I've done a few different places.

I don't remember all of them. This is a smaller room for you, but like, it's a great, cool space. It used to be an old movie theater. 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, like we're such a young city, literally young. And we're like, um america's perpetual rebellious teenager we're like everything new we don't like 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 like 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 so it's just like

just constant hustle so to have a place like that where it's like oh we're gonna take a deep breath and say this is a cool spot there's no venues like this in town it's been here for almost 100 years like let's preserve it you know let's preserve the original architecture let's preserve some of the the old there's like this old carving of like pelicans like this really creepy like old school deco art they just preserved it it's really it's like the perfect environment to do a show that's like by miami for miami yeah 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 nevada pulls people into nevada why do you think oj simpson moved there yeah like there was a law where they couldn't get his money move to states that don't have income. That's one thing that pulls Nevada, 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. Right, we have the homestead law. You can't get the money. You can't get the house. It's a great place to hide assets. I told you, it's like a third world country. It's like a banana republic. Yeah yeah because he got he lost the civil case

a 30 plus million dollar judgment against him so he bought a fucking house in florida now he is he still there oh i don't think so i think he's in vegas now i think i think he 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 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. So, too soon? 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 in all of american pop culture history i mean he is one of the weirdest cases i you know there's a fantastic photo that someone made a meme of howard cosell with bruce jenner on his one side and then oj simpson on his other side and howard cosell saying i've seen the future you're not gonna 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 right in a lot

of ways maybe even 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. Absolutely. People loved him. Yeah, beloved personality. In comedies, no less. Yes, yes. The Naked Gun Trilogy.

Yes. You know, and, well, it was inevitable he would wind up in Florida, of course. But like. Crazy. Just crazy. And this is something that, in the end, not to spoil it you've been so so kind to not spoil screwball uh but in the end that's also part of the 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 would be like i want my kids to idolize this this person like legitimately like legitimately very few sure so it's like that's the and that's where that whole sort of like lie cheat steal to get ahead message, I think, is what we're teaching our children these days. And that's the case with like O.J. Simpson. It's like this kid. 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. He got the largest suspension in the history of the game. But they reduced it, right? They reduced it, but it remained the largest suspension. So history of the game but they reduced it right they reduced it but it remained the largest so how many games was it a year ultimately it was like 160 it was almost like a basically a full season and the following season he came back played about another

year after 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 um he retired and the yankees made him like they gave him like a front office job where he would mentor young players really you can't make this shit up dude really yeah but that 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 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 like he was not a beloved figure as a baseball player now he's like i mean my mom knows right who he is i mean she calls him

jlo's boyfriend but she knows the bottom line is she knows like he this i mean i think they're going to be studying this case study of like image rehab is going to be studied for like decades to come in like pr classes calculated i think it was a lot of it was accidental but but like look at he's never even apologized or really admitted what he did he never went on like the maya culpa tour like lance armstrong poor lance armstrong test positive no he never failed to 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 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

well you have to remember tony was doing a lot of cocaine at the time. Right. And he was like in a fucking spiral his whole life was. Right. 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.

Yeah. So that's why that's the icon. he wrote in and he would scribble and so those would be his but 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 and talk about motivational speaking ideas that he had and it was like it's a real journey like into into his mind of a cocaine addicted fake doctor in miami which is an interesting journey i gotta tell you right um but like he uh 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 name after like mijo 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 the fucking car was you know another one was dui because he'd just gotten a dui so that was like the good 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 is in miami but when you start seeing a rod yeah in the books it's kind of a kind of a tell you know a little bit jesus christ he just got sloppy you know like fucking drug addicts what does that guy do now

um well he's five five years off uh off of cocaine which is good he went to federal prison and rightfully so for the kids for the high school kids that he uh yeah 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 um and potentially poison them um so he went to federal prison get this he winds up in a camp so it's like minimum security federal prison uh 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 to learn and uh that camp in alabama so we actually so one of my you know we were running out of money on this movie and so as you always do with movies and 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 Bosch was doing is he was like you see him at the beginning of the movie sitting at the bar at the Ritz Carlton. Keep a skein.

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 like he'd be like hey yo dr t i want to i want to i'm trying to build muscle mass and he'd be like okay here here's the go go to the commissary buy these vitamins or these supplements and there you take it this time that yo tony i'm looking to lose to lose weight. What do I do? And he'd give him, and then guards started coming to him like, Hey, I'm looking, you know, my wife wants to lose some weight or what? Yeah. He'd give him protocols. Yeah. So, I mean, he's very, I told you, he's very much a true believer in himself. Um, he's got a lot of faith, uh, in, in himself. And and he for a while was planning on opening a nutritional supplement business across the street from marlins park jesus in my in miami post or

no yeah like this is pretty recently it hasn't happened yet but like he's looking around for new for new opportunity and miami is a is a land of of new opportunity i told you this last time i saw you that there'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 just, it's not only a town of reinvention. It's like, 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. He goes to these Q&As? 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. And that was bad for a while. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah.

Well, that's always the bad decision-making route. What's funny about this is that he... So we caught him like on his way into federal prison originally. So in November of 2013, Alex was in the midst of the arbitration that you see at the end, you know, 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, you know, Alex is on a break from his publicist and his publicist says, yo, 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 just like 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. 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 Gables. Carl Gables, 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 escorted us down the center, me and my producer, Alfred Spellman,

right down the center aisle, parade us practically. And 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 little segments and so people sometimes recognize me usually in miami like close to um because we did the um you know doc so if there's any play 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 and we literally so we literally have to like step up on stage to join him and like 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 gonna call page six you or us sure as shit two weeks later it was in page six and so we sit there and um alex didn't laugh the publicist laughed that's like a publicist joke you know yes so um because it was clear that we were there to be seen having this meeting yeah it was so clear why do you think they did that it was 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 like uh pr offensive or pushback against major league baseball and so um we sat there with him for almost an hour and a half and he just lied

just lied to us um the whole time and i didn't know that i'm not a about everything i never met tony bosh this is all but you look at my records i you know i 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 they i call it screensaver all right i i 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. You know, 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, whatever, 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, 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.

And so, I don't know. It's the thing the feds have. And so, Alex was free to just speak. The only thing you 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 they are about the investigation. So that was the allegations, that he actually lied. So I, listen, I'm a documentarian. People lie to me for a living. I'm fine with that. Especially because they spelled my name right in page six and that shit was in bold. I don't have the juice to make that happen. Alex's publicist had the juice to make that happen alex's alex's publicist had the juice to make to make that

happen i was flattered um that that they you know write about me but like um 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 and alfred so alfred had 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 uh baseball camp at a UM and they did the summer league game and Alfred is is I'm my eyes are glazing over telling the

story but like alfred alfred's pitches against a rod and who was already a senior already a beast everybody knew this guy was gonna was gonna 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 a funny, personal anecdote. 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 gonna embarrass me and tell this dumb shit story so i tell out like isn't this funny like you guys but 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. Oh, wow. 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.

Super winners. But it's like, yeah, it 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 like 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 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, like you said, like with the president, big New York Times, big escandalo, escandalo, expo de. 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 bosh you guys want to meet with tony bosh he wants to talk to you about doing a documentary 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, like, you're going to prison one way or another, like maybe you want to spend some time with your kids, get your affairs in order. Let's make a decision tomorrow whether or not you're going to prison one way or another like 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 right into an you know in a year and a half years federal you do at least 80 percent of your time but then you go to halfway house sometimes for a little bit at the end um six months or as long as a year. So 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. 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 Elfrink, 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 and i alfred jokes that um in florida when you get out of prison your first call is to your mother your second call is to raconteur to our company you know 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 gonna come up and visit you we 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 porter and 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 to tell and that was the Tony Porter part of the story well listen dude you fucking

nailed it it's a great documentary I really enjoyed it like I really enjoy all of them and uh 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. Yeah, at Billy Corbin. B-I-L-L-Y-C-O-R-B-E-N. I'm not the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins. And that's the same on Twitter and on Instagram. At Billy Corbin, Instagram. Same on Twitter. Hit me up.

Beautiful. Thanks, brother. Thank you. That was great. Thank you.