Billy and Joe discuss Alex Rodriguez and the use of little kids in the new documentary, "S.I.A.R.E.S. (Scientology and Statues in the Making) and how they got their start in the entertainment industry. They also discuss Spike Jon Favreau's new film, "Screwball" and how he got to where he is today. Also, Billy and Joe talk about how they came up with the idea for the new movie and why they wanted to use little kids to play A-Rod and the other key players in the scandal. And, of course, they talk about why they think the movie should be turned into a TV show. You won't want to miss it! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Used w/ permission from the creator of the music used in the movie "Solo" and "Scooby-Doo" by Sisyphus and Friends. Art: Macklemore and Morgan Freeman. Cover art by Jeffree Star. Editor: John Rocha. Fact checking by Alex Blumberg. Mixing by Ian Dorsch. Special thanks to Mike Carrier and Mark Phillips. Thank you to my good friend and former co-worker, Billie Eilish. of the podcast "A Very Merry Honor" for the cover art for the song "The Little Kids" by A Very Merry Orphan's "A Christmas Pageant" by the band A Very Merry Honor. and the band "Little Kids" and the amazing music used to make the music for the music in the song was written and produced by DJ Khalees and edited by David Friesen "Avengers' "Avery's Song" and our thanks to the late, very Merry Honor's "The Boy" by Mark's band "The Good Lady" by The Good Lady. are a very merry, very merry and we hope you enjoy this song is a very Merry, Merry, Very Merry, A Very merry, A Merry, Thank you for listening to this song and we'll see you in the next episode of the show we're going to send you back to the next one, we'll be back next week for the next show we'll get back to you next week, we're coming to you in a week or the next week.
00:01:02.000And to boot, so, you know, we've done some sports docs in the past.
00:01:06.000We did, you know, some of the ESPN 30 for 30s, like the U. And when you do a sports doc, I mean...
00:01:13.000I don't want to say it's easy, because making documentaries is a challenge, but sports docs are pretty paint-by-numbers.
00:01:20.000It'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.
00:01:32.000With this one, it's not about baseball.
00:01:34.000It's baseball adjacent, I guess, but it's about shit that went down in nightclubs, in shady clinics with fake doctors, hotel rooms, bars, locker rooms.
00:01:45.000So you've got a bunch of talking heads in your documentary, but then you've got nothing to cut to.
00:01:58.000It's like when you're doing non-fiction filmmaking, it's fake shit when you film recreation.
00:02:03.000So it's like, I'm like, how do we do this in a creative way that's consistent with the tone of the movie, which was always called Screwball, meaning it was always like a farce, you know, like a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, Coen Brothers-esque sort of Florida fuckery farce.
00:02:19.000And so we just wanted to keep in that mode.
00:02:26.000Who is the fake doctor and Porter Fisher who is the whistleblower who stole the medical records and started this whole thing.
00:02:34.000They 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.
00:02:47.000Like for example, a guy will be like...
00:02:49.000So I walk into his office and I say, I want my money.
00:03:09.000We can edit together the doc and then have the actors lip syncing the actual interview dialogue and all the actors will be eight years old.
00:03:17.000And I don't know, like, I've always wanted to do it.
00:03:21.000Like, way back, Spike Jonze, 1997, Biggie video, Sky's the Limit.
00:05:10.000You know, and it's like this children's musical, but we intercut it with real documentary investigation, interviews, and that maybe we'll kind of get away with it.
00:05:19.000Nobody wanted to make that movie, dude.
00:06:35.000And 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.
00:07:53.000It's also like it's America's Casablanca.
00:07:56.000Like, 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.
00:08:06.000And, you know, come here and kind of there and reinvent themselves, you know?
00:09:38.000Barely 100. Just over 100. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I've said this before, but isn't there more banks per capita in Miami than anywhere else?
00:09:46.000Well, there certainly was before the Great Recession, when a lot of them started shutting down.
00:10:01.000They 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.
00:10:12.000And then, of course, they went belly up in the Great Recession, and what happened?
00:10:44.000The FDIC had to open an office in Florida because we had more bank closures than any other state in the union.
00:10:51.000Because 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.
00:11:00.000And I remember interviewing a guy who were working on a project called Ponzi State about the state of Florida as a case study in the Great Recession years ago.
00:11:44.000I did this joke because I was doing a Netflix special, and I was doing it a couple months after I did this gig in Miami, and so I was using those yonder bags.
00:11:53.000You know what those are where people have to put their cell phone into this magnetic Yeah.
00:12:18.000They were just constantly moving around.
00:12:20.000You presume it was to use their phone.
00:12:22.000They might have been powdering their noses.
00:12:23.000They might have been, but it was because I had done gigs before where they didn't have the yonder bags, and this wasn't the problem.
00:12:31.000But in Miami, everybody needed to use their phones.
00:12:33.000They just kept getting up and coming back, and it was just chaos.
00:12:41.000And 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.
00:12:49.000Like, believe it or not, like, people are so much more chill and calm here in traffic in LA. I swear to God.
00:12:54.000And LA was famous for, like, road rage.
00:15:05.0001980, shortly after the Mariel Boatlift started, which I think everybody's kind of pop culture frame of reference for the Mariel Boatlift is Scarface.
00:15:15.000That's the beginning of the movie when Castro is ranting and raving that he's flushing the toilets of Cuba onto the United States, specifically to Miami.
00:15:25.000He was working at the trauma center at Jackson Memorial, our emergency room in Miami, and he said he got a Marielle refugee.
00:15:40.000There's that coral seawall, and it had a really Havana vibe.
00:15:43.000So they would chill mostly at these flop houses south of 5th Street in Miami Beach, where the cops would literally be leaving after a stabbing at one of these places.
00:16:05.000Like literally it would just be like someone would cheat at Domino's and they would just pull out a gun and one guy would shoot the other guy.
00:16:10.000And so he has a Mariel refugee who comes in to the emergency room with a gunshot wound.
00:16:31.000A few days later, another Mariel refugee comes in with a gunshot wound in exactly the same spot where he had told the other guy that if he got hit there, he would have died.
00:16:41.000Could never prove it, never was able to trace it back, but he was pretty well convinced that it was a revenge shooting.
00:16:48.000For 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.
00:18:08.000We got all these Brickellista thousandaires driving their rented fucking Lambos and blowing the engines out on South Beach because they don't know how to drive them.
00:18:22.000Listen, it's a fake it till you make it kind of town.
00:18:24.000And there's nothing really to make there.
00:18:26.000You can't really, other than a real estate hustle, money laundering, drugs, politics, being a corrupt politician, there's really no other way to make it in Miami.
00:18:37.000There's a lot of professional fighters come out of Miami, that whole area, Coconut Grove.
00:18:42.000A lot of aggression, a lot of poverty.
00:18:44.000It's a third-world economy down there.
00:18:48.000The disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the income gap is widest and getting wider in Miami-Dade County than just about any city in the country or any metropolitan area in the country.
00:19:00.000And that's why I said that Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
00:19:03.000If you want to know what challenges we'll face as a nation or calamities will befall us in the years to come, you need only look at Miami.
00:19:12.000T.D. Allman called it the canary in the coal mine, the bellwether.
00:19:15.000And so, you know, when the election was playing out, the cycle in 2016, I was like, you know, all my friends are just like, this can't, this Trump thing can't happen.
00:20:25.000So you'll go into like Little Havana or Hialeah, for example, in a municipality in Miami-Dade, and there'll be a little abuelita sitting behind a desk, half asleep.
00:20:37.000And she'll be surrounded in this tiny little one-room office by little mailboxes.
00:22:14.000Go to that window over there and fill this prescription.
00:22:17.000And we had more pill mills, they called them, in Broward County, which is the county just north of Miami-Dade, than we had McDonald's locations.
00:22:26.000And there was literally, like, the Appalachian Trail.
00:22:29.000They were coming down, they were stocking up on Oxy, and we were fueling a death epidemic, like, in Kentucky.
00:22:40.000More 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.
00:22:47.000We'll drive up and we'll export the shit.
00:22:49.000And at the peak of the pill mill epidemic, the Oxy epidemic in Florida, seven people a day were dying, men, women, and children.
00:24:32.000Maybe it was just more of a prostitution operation.
00:24:34.000That 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.
00:24:40.000Turns out that might have been a bit overblown.
00:25:07.000Hard, dangerous, and, you know, if you go to a weird little Asian massage place and guys are coming out smiling like, hmm, You can start there.
00:26:23.000I don't want anybody's daughter to be a prostitute.
00:26:25.000But I'm also 100% in favor of people being able to do whatever the fuck they want.
00:26:32.000And 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?
00:26:39.000The only problem is the social stigma that's attached to it.
00:29:05.000I mean, we'd have a real problem in the beginning with access, where there would be so much more access, you'd probably You know, you would lose people.
00:29:15.000People would die in high-profile overdose cases.
00:30:29.000I mean, I don't think it's beneficial in any way to sugarcoat the fact that having legal drugs makes people have more access to those drugs means maybe there's going to be a few people, whatever the number is, who do those drugs who wouldn't have had access to them without it.
00:38:13.000Telling you to send your money to Jesus, right?
00:38:15.000So, 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.
00:38:26.000Think of the money just the after church crowd alone.
00:38:29.000Everybody would flock, no pun intended, right to the Chick-fil-A and stock up and they'd have all their money.
00:38:35.000They can even have people volunteer to work those days and donate all your money to Jesus because he apparently needs, I don't know what he needs with it, but he needs a lot of money.
00:38:45.000Well, 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.
00:39:00.000Yeah, they're just stealing money from people.
00:39:03.000I think that Chick-fil-A guy is a legitimately religious person who really truly believes that he's saving the world from gay folk marrying each other.
00:39:57.000That was the dude, you tweeted about him years ago, that was the dude who was out in the world getting donations because he needed to update Or upgrade his G4 to a G6. And I was like, G6 Christ.
00:40:13.000It was going to say, I need to donate because I need to spread the gospel.
00:40:16.000And so you need to give me money so that because my G4 just ain't cutting it anymore, I need to upgrade.
00:40:22.000I wish he had gotten a 737 MAX 8, but that's just me.
00:40:26.000It's just so amazing that that hustle still works.
00:40:29.000The 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.
00:41:11.000The weak, the poor, the people searching for answers?
00:41:16.000Yeah, but I think for some people, there's like, I mean, this is older, wiser me, right?
00:41:21.000When I was younger, I would agree with you 100%.
00:41:22.000But I think at this point, I think there's some benefit to like having...
00:41:29.000Community, and having this environment where everybody goes to be humbled, and everybody goes to agree that they're going to be good people that follow the ethics of Jesus, and you put a little money in the dish, and they have to keep the operation running.
00:41:44.000I think there's a lot of churches that do a lot of good.
00:41:46.000But I think for every one or two that do a lot of good, there's these motherfuckers that are just stealing money and driving Rolls Royces and living in giant fucking castles.
00:41:59.000That Joel, whatever his name is, what's that guy's name?
00:42:45.000I don't know how it feels, but it must be wonderful to believe in something like that so devoutly, without any evidence, without any indication or proof whatsoever that what you so firmly believe in is true.
00:42:58.000But it's the hypocrisy of it that I just can't abide by.
00:43:09.000Or claim to have some kind of holier-than-thou moral code that now think the pimp president's cool.
00:43:16.000It's like, I get it, but your whole thing was that Bill Clinton was the biggest scumbag in the world, and he needed to be impeached and castrated.
00:45:41.000It's probably one of the hardest things that a grown adult has to do is to recognize that the paradigm, this framework they've been living their life under is utter horseshit.
00:45:51.000I mean, the Mormon one is so crazy, too.
00:46:10.000Joseph 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?
00:46:20.000But, like, that's Judaism and Catholicism.
00:46:23.000They're all crazy mythological horseshit.
00:47:39.000Just like some people have poor genetics when it comes to their ability to run fast, some people have really shitty brain development genetics.
00:47:47.000Let me ask you this, because obviously you would have sympathy for someone who was taken advantage of or swindled or the victim of a con person.
00:48:47.000Like, 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!
00:49:39.000There'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.
00:49:55.000Because 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.
00:50:04.000I think there's actual community benefit to people fucking up.
00:50:08.000And there's some community benefit to people getting fleeced.
00:50:14.000First 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.
00:50:23.000I don't believe anyone who says they don't read their reviews or their own reviews.
00:50:26.000I read all of the reviews and I read the bad ones twice.
00:50:32.000Because that's where you learn the most.
00:50:34.000They could be right, they could be wrong, but I feel like It's where you fuck up that you learn the most from it.
00:50:45.000I 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.
00:50:56.000And that maybe there's a lot of other people who have very different experiences from the ones that you have.
00:51:00.000And so maybe the reality of the world is different for those people.
00:51:03.000And you can be a more enlightened person by being more empathetic and trying to understand those perspectives, trying to walk, you know, a mile in their shoes.
00:53:15.000He was doing material for one of his last specials, and it was the one, I think it might have been the second to last, he had that whole bit about, like, he doesn't believe in God, but, like, he believes in, like, shit that he can see and he's afraid of.
00:55:31.000And I was literally the only person laughing.
00:55:34.000But like in pain like I was in pain laughing and It was just brutal and like and I've been in these rooms were like these guys and and I was just like These are the funniest people that I know and it's happened time and time again And I've been to shows where they killed and I've been to shows where they died and I was like,
00:56:07.000I 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.
00:56:22.000But no one wants a bomb in front of their mother.
00:58:49.000And then, I guess, depending on how well it does, it's being put out by Greenwich Entertainment, who just won the Oscar for Free Solo for Best Documentary.
00:59:44.000So was MLB. I mean, everyone was running amok in Miami, like, just...
00:59:49.000Hiring private investigators, running people down.
00:59:52.000Alex Rodriguez, actually, this isn't in the documentary, but when these convicted felons stole the stolen documents from Porter Fisher, who had stolen the documents from Tony Bosch, they set him up in this whole...
01:00:17.000And 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.
01:00:30.000And so they steal it, and then they turn around and sell these stolen documents.
01:00:39.000So MLB has this ragtag band of misfits, this internal FBI, like their own internal investigations division that they created after the Balco steroid scandal.
01:01:00.000With convicted felons handing over bags of cash from some MLB slush fund.
01:01:05.000I 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,
01:01:56.000A-Rod's people send this hard drive around the world to like data recovery services to try to get this video back.
01:02:02.000So unfortunately the felon didn't get his second six figure payment because that was the first six figures were against the recovery of the data.
01:02:11.000But he got like Two, three hundred grand to sell A-Rod a blank hard drive.
01:02:16.000And A-Rod's dropping money on private investigators who were like having car chases through South Miami.
01:02:24.000And it's like, I always say like, you come down to the swamp and roll around, you're going to get some mud on you.
01:02:30.000So when MLB came down to To Miami, one of the guys, Jerome Hill, the former Baltimore cop turned Florida Department of Health investigator, he says unequivocally that Major League Baseball's investigators broke the law in the state of Florida and should have been prosecuted for it and held accountable for it and never were.
01:02:51.000I mean, it's good to be a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
01:02:54.000How old was A-Rod when the scandal broke?
01:02:56.000A-Rod was definitely towards the end of his career.
01:02:59.000And so, that's the interesting thing about...
01:04:42.000And they do catch them every now and then.
01:04:44.000But I feel like it's one of those things where you know how the drug cartels, they'll let some drug shipments get busted so that the other ones will get through?
01:04:53.000I almost feel like that's what they do with NFL players who get caught.
01:05:56.000When you're the pioneer in something, people really...
01:05:59.000And dude, they had a street named after him in Miami, and they quietly took that shit down in the middle of the night after decades of naming that street for him.
01:06:24.000But 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.
01:06:32.000It's like everybody thinks it's pissed and thinks it's a bunch of bullshit.
01:06:34.000And then over time, it's slowly proven true.
01:06:40.000Well, that is a good way of looking at it, too, right?
01:06:43.000Because, like, think about the outrage when Clinton got his dick sucked by Monica Lewinsky and compare it to Donald Trump having at least two women that we know about where he paid off that he fucked.
01:07:03.000I 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.
01:07:34.000I feel bad for her, too, because I feel like she thought she's going to go all in on this, and then she lost the court case against him, so she owes his legal fees.
01:08:44.000I mean, as a comic, I leave the door open for all possibilities.
01:08:50.000But, I mean, it just means to me that she got this situation where she thought, she probably was told by everybody, look, hey, you're going to win this, he's going to pay you off, everyone's going to know that you told the truth, and people are going to pay for your interviews, and...
01:11:51.000It was a legitimate public health crisis.
01:11:55.000You saw, following the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you saw an increase in sexually transmitted diseases through oral sex amongst younger people because the president...
01:12:06.000It's hard for us because we see the president right now as sort of a comic.
01:12:19.000Or 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?
01:12:25.000I think without question, obviously, the size and scale of the coverage unquestionably got people horny.
01:12:39.000When I say people, I'm talking about younger people.
01:12:41.000Developing minds, impressionable youths were under the impression that you could not get a sexually transmitted disease through something that wasn't sex.
01:13:50.000Well, it's interesting because in the documentary, one of the big things, the news clippings, is George Bush discussing steroids in baseball in 2004. Was it 2004?
01:14:17.000But the reality is those things do have a ripple effect.
01:14:20.000And 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.
01:14:49.000Some of those shortcuts work, like Adderall, like steroids, they fucking work, man.
01:14:55.000You 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.
01:15:15.000They 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.
01:16:32.000I don't know what the circumstances were.
01:16:33.000Some people have been caught for accidental contamination because there's a lot of different supplements you could buy, even creatine, standard stuff that's totally legal to take, but they're contaminated because you're buying them from cheap sources.
01:16:47.000They make them in China and what have you.
01:16:49.000That was the problem with this biogenesis thing.
01:16:51.000First of all, Tony Bosch, who wore a lab coat, had a stethoscope, called himself Dr. T, said Dr. Tony Bosch.
01:17:17.000Tony 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...
01:17:33.000Prescription 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.
01:20:51.000So you have guys like Tony Bosch, with an entrepreneurial spirit, who want to open up these anti-aging clinics, and they need what's called a medical director.
01:21:00.000So they go to a legitimate doctor, and they say, hey, kind of rent us.
01:21:07.000And 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...
01:21:19.000You know, exploit that power of the prescription pad.
01:21:22.000And so that's what was happening here.
01:21:24.000And more problematic, he started treating high school kids.
01:22:40.000The 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.
01:22:48.000It 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.
01:22:58.000And depending on what you're doing to them, you could also be risking their offspring, potential future offspring.
01:23:07.000You have a disproportionate amount of, I mean, in the steroid use population of autism, childhood cancer, just horrible, horrible things that happen to the children of people who are on some of these drugs.
01:23:20.000I think a lot of the folks that are looking at it in terms of a career in baseball or in any other sport where they could benefit, they go, hey, this is the price that I have to pay in order to excel at this extraordinary avenue for financial gain.
01:23:37.000Well, Tony Bosch was treating Manny Ramirez when he was in Boston, and low testosterone, you know, he was getting on in the years, and Bosch started treating him, put him on a protocol, as he called it, take X amount of Y substance,
01:23:56.000etc., at this time each day, microdosing, as you said, so it wouldn't, in the event that they were randomly tested, it wouldn't be detected.
01:24:03.000I don't know if that worked or not, or he was...
01:25:22.000Listen, baseball is like everything else in American life now, including politics.
01:25:26.000It's the WWE. When Bud Selig, the steroid commissioner, was on his way out the door, literally on the eve of retirement, and he's like, you know what?
01:25:35.000I need to look like I'm doing something about this.
01:25:38.000Because I got a great big fat asterisk by my name in the record books here, like all these players do in the steroid era.
01:25:44.000I need to look like I did something on my way out the door.
01:25:48.000So he calls his second-in-command Rob Manfred and says, let's do something about this.
01:25:53.000And they go after the biggest scalp in the game, Alex Rodriguez.
01:25:57.000And so when they needed Alex as the heel, that was the storyline.
01:26:06.000You know, the Vince McMahon of the Game Bud Sealy goes, oh, I took care of him, retires.
01:26:11.000Rob Manfred, who was in charge of this whole botched, you know, quasi-legal operation, investigation, biogenesis, and Alex, gets the top gig and is now the commissioner of baseball.
01:26:24.000And he goes, you know what would be a good storyline now?
01:26:28.000What if I... Bring A-Rod and Pete Rose back as commentators.
01:28:42.000We went and obtained transcripts that were never released publicly of sworn testimony in the case to be able to cross-check some of the stuff that we were told and we're going to put in the documentary.
01:30:25.000We turn cocaine cowboys into a stage play.
01:30:29.000Yeah, you were saying that before we started, and I'm like, what are you doing?
01:30:34.000It's not a musical, but you should come down, and it's called Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy.
01:30:40.000You might remember in the documentary, there was a hitman, Jorge Riviala, who he worked for La Madrina, the godmother of Griselda Blanco, and when we first started researching the doc in 2004, we We obtained a seven-volume,
01:31:26.000I'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.
01:31:36.000And 15 years later, we turned it into Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy.
01:31:56.000Queen of the South on USA. He's brilliant in the show.
01:32:01.000And so my producing partner, David Sipkin, who co-produced Cocaine Cowboys and edited it with me, he's described it as a cross between Cocaine Cowboys and my Twitter feed.
01:32:16.000It's obviously a little absurd if you're going to put Cocaine Cowboys as a live theater event.
01:32:21.000We acknowledge the absurdity of it and the surreal exploitation of it.
01:32:29.000You know, the guy, Michelle Hausman, who's the director of the play at Miami New Drama at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach on Lincoln Road, he said, he said, why are we doing cocaine cowboys for the theater in 2019?
01:32:45.000Because, like, it speaks to the relevance of, like, why do this now?
01:32:48.000And 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.
01:34:21.000The last time I heard of that being done effectively was Mars Attacks, when Jack Nicholson played the cowboy, but also played the president.
01:35:57.000When 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...
01:36:11.000No trouble arresting innocent young black kids on drug charges or whatever, but when it comes to enforcing public corruption, she's just...
01:36:26.000And of course it's like the broken windows theory of crime.
01:36:29.000If you allow petty corruption to go, eventually some of these politicians wind up literally in a closet at City Hall accepting bags full of money.
01:36:41.000And 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...
01:36:48.000Has never in her 26 years in office charged a police officer for non-duty killing.
01:37:03.000And the reason the incidents have exploded is because police know that they'll get away with it because Kathy will not prosecute them.
01:37:09.000So the message that's being sent is a dangerous one.
01:37:12.000And it has created a toxic effect with the relationship between, obviously, police and the citizens that they're supposed to be protecting and serving.
01:37:20.000And it's created a very dangerous situation in the city.
01:37:24.000And it's also created a situation where just like...
01:37:28.000Mayor after mayor just gets away with pure fuckery, you know?
01:37:36.000People are always like, why is Miami so corrupt?
01:37:38.000People 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...
01:37:45.000If you want to know what's wrong in a community or with anything, you don't look at what changes.
01:37:50.000I mean, mayors come and go, police chiefs come and go, commissioners come and go...
01:38:07.000So 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,
01:38:23.000this brutal civil war between liberal and conservative parties that went on for like 20 years almost.
01:41:11.000I call it a conspiracy of convenience because not every conspiracy involves a bunch of rogues gallery at a Boardroom table in a dark, smoky room.
01:41:23.000Talking about, okay, how are we going to conspire?
01:46:44.000Because for a while, I think he was asking permission to go to Florida when he first got released, and the Attorney General of Florida was like, no thanks.
01:46:50.000To be fair, though, she was a blonde woman, so she was scared.
01:46:59.000He's one of the weirdest cases in all of American pop culture history.
01:47:04.000I mean, he is one of the weirdest cases.
01:47:06.000You know, there's a fantastic photo that someone made a meme of of Howard Cosell with Bruce Jenner on his one side and then O.J. Simpson on his other side and Howard Cosell saying, I've seen the future, you're not going to fucking believe this.
01:47:24.000Because it is so goddamn crazy that one of the most famous and beloved people forget before that murder, beloved.
01:48:03.000This is something that, in the end, not to spoil it, you've been so kind to not spoil Screwball, but in the end, that's also part of the message, is the idea that, and why we use the children.
01:48:16.000These athletes are heroes to these kids.
01:51:44.000On some pages, there'd be, like, code names.
01:51:46.000Like, you know, he had a guy that was, like, you know, that he'd name after cars or he'd name after, like, Miho or little Spanish words or things like that.
01:52:55.000He winds up in a camp so it's like minimum security federal prison in Alabama and he winds up teaching in part a nutrition class to his fellow inmates He's in there with Jeff Skilling of Enron,
01:53:13.000who'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.
01:53:23.000They say prison's the best place to learn and that camp in Alabama.
01:53:30.000We're running out of money on this movie, and so, as you always do with movies, and so there's a couple scenes that we wanted to do that we ran out, we just couldn't do.
01:53:40.000So, 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...
01:54:55.000It hasn't happened yet, but he's looking around for new opportunity.
01:55:00.000And Miami is a land of new opportunity.
01:55:03.000I told you this last time I saw you that It's an old saying that I love that LA is where you go when you want to be somebody, New York is where you go when you are somebody, and Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.
01:55:15.000It's not only a town of reinvention, it's just always been a sunny place for shady people.
01:55:20.000I just always wanted to know what happens to a fake doctor who gets busted selling steroids to kids.
01:55:26.000What does that guy do for a living afterwards?
01:55:30.000I suspect now he's just sort of being subsidized by family and friends right now.
01:55:35.000He does have kids and child support probably to make somehow.
02:00:15.000We 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.
02:00:25.000We just want you to come in, feel comfortable and free to tell the truth to our investigators so that we can pursue our investigation accurately and fairly, and we will not Anything you say will not be held against you, essentially, in a court of law.
02:00:41.000So you're queen for a day, they call it.
02:00:42.000You get a letter, a queen for a day letter.
02:04:29.000Like you said, like with the president.
02:04:31.000Big New York Times, big escandalo, escandalo, Expo Day.
02:04:35.000And 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.
02:04:48.000And they just, they, they played it just so, so beautifully and brilliantly.
02:04:52.000And then, almost a year later, we got a call from a friend of Tony Bosch.
02:04:57.000You guys want to meet with Tony Bosch?
02:04:58.000He wants to talk to you about doing a documentary.
02:05:36.000Listen, let's see what happens tomorrow.
02:05:38.000I was like, depending on how much time the judge gives you, you're going to prison one way or another.
02:05:43.000Maybe you want to spend some time with your kids, get your affairs in order.
02:05:46.000Let's make a decision tomorrow whether or not we're going to take two, three, four days out of your life for this.
02:05:52.000Maybe we'll do it when you get out in a year and a half, two years.
02:05:55.000Federal, you do at least 80% of your time, but then you can go to halfway house sometimes for a little bit at the end, six months or as long as a year.
02:06:04.000He 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.
02:06:15.000Give me your, you know, take off your belt and your shoelaces and surrender to the BOP. And he did, and so we backburnered it again.
02:06:23.000Then I got a fucking email from Tim Elfrank, who was the Woodward and Bernstein of the case.
02:06:27.000He'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.
02:06:41.000And I was like, first of all, like, We sometimes don't make documentaries about things that...
02:06:48.000We make documentaries about things that happened like 20, 30, 40 years ago.
02:07:14.000Primary 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.
02:07:25.000Alfred jokes that in Florida when you get out of Prison.
02:07:53.000And then when you meet You meet Tony and you see them, their interviews in the documentary, you realize like, well, Alex, this isn't even about Alex.
02:08:01.000You know, it's like, this is about these guys in this crazy, you know, Carl Hyasson-esque, like Coen Brothers botched robbery-like story.
02:08:10.000And so like, that was the story we wanted to tell.
02:08:12.000And that was the Tony Porter part of the story.