In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with a good friend of mine to talk about how Florida is one of the most dangerous places in the entire country for first responders and law enforcement officers. Florida has had more deaths of first responders than any other state in the last two years, and it s all happening in Florida. Is it because Florida is more dangerous than other places, or is it because it s more open for business and pro-business? I ll tell you what, it s a Ponzi scheme. Florida sells the sunshine, we sell the sunshine. And that just means we have to knock down the old stuff, build it taller, and build it bigger, so we can attract more new shit. It s a business model that relies solely on outside things, not outside things. And it s not coming in the next day, so next day we gotta figure out how to pay Florida back. Don t say Florida never gave us anything. Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast where I talk about what s going on in the world, what s happening in the real world, and why Florida is the worst place in the country for law enforcement and first responders, and how it s going to pay back what it s given to them in the worst way possible. I hope you enjoy this episode, and tweet me what you think of it! Tweet me if you like it and tell a friend about it :) or share it on Insta: to let me know what you thought of it. I lllllllll, I ll ll llll lllll ll lll llll talk about it! XOXO! XOXOXO XO - - - Tim - Jack - Jake - Tom - Ben - Jay - Matt - John - Chad - Joe - Mike - Evan - David - Chris - Paul - Andrew - Jason - Matthew - Kevin - James - Jeff - Brian ( ) - Brad - Michael - Justin - Dan & more - Adam - Josh - Will . , - Daniel - Jon - Nick - Ian - Jordan - Gorms - Christian - Kieran - Is it a good one? - Patrick : Jake
00:01:20.000One in five COVID deaths in the United States occurred in Florida.
00:01:24.000Now it's almost as many as one in four COVID deaths in the United States are occurring in Florida.
00:01:29.000We've had 13 Miami-Dade County Public Schools employees die of COVID. That includes teachers, bus drivers, people die of COVID since mid-August.
00:01:41.000I think no less than 20 police officers in the state of Florida die.
00:01:44.000We had a 10-day period in which we had a police officer a day dying of COVID. If you go to the Officer Down Memorial page, the executive director there, a sergeant from Fairfax, Virginia, says that by the end of the pandemic,
00:02:04.000It will overtake the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 as the single deadliest incident in the history of United States law enforcement.
00:02:13.000I mean, if I told you that there's a killer out there in Florida killing a cop a day, there'd be fucking martial law.
00:02:59.000Yeah, but the answer, you know, the COVID-19 for the last two years is the Single largest cause of death for law enforcement officers, more so than all other causes combined.
00:03:13.000That's crazy when you think about the amount of violence and the amount of crime that takes place.
00:04:35.000I was looking at something today that was showing the deaths in Florida per capita versus the deaths in California per capita when it was age-adjusted.
00:05:44.000And it's particularly problematic when you have public-facing people like law enforcement officers who are interacting.
00:05:50.000They can come to your window to write a Write a traffic ticket, and that could be a death sentence.
00:05:55.000It's very unusual for a 27-year-old person with good health care, someone who's been taken care of, to die from COVID. It's very, very statistically unusual.
00:06:57.000I don't know if that's true because we don't know what they're doing.
00:07:00.000When you say it doesn't matter how you treat them, if they treat them with monoclonal antibodies in particular early on in their infection...
00:07:35.000I think some people don't know what to do.
00:07:37.000And they're basically sent home and told to take Tylenol.
00:07:40.000If they have poor health care, they're getting bad advice and they're getting bad health care once they're infected.
00:07:46.000I think there's a lot of people who don't have access to quality healthcare.
00:07:49.000There's a lot of people who don't have access to healthcare, period.
00:07:51.000If you're a cop, that should be paramount.
00:07:55.000If you are interacting with the general public the way police officers are during a pandemic, they should have access to the best healthcare possible, especially if they're infected.
00:08:05.000I mean, if you're gonna ask these people to protect you, you should absolutely protect them.
00:08:27.000Because what we do as cultural anthropologists, which is effectively what documentarians are, is we apply the scientific method, right?
00:08:34.000We make observations, we ask questions, we develop hypotheses, we collect data, we experiment, we analyze that data, and we draw conclusions.
00:08:41.000With the best information we have at the time.
00:08:44.000I don't know how all of these police officers were...
00:08:48.000I know they died and I know that many of them were not were not in fact statistically most of them were not vaccinated.
00:08:56.000I don't have access to their you know to their private health information.
00:08:59.000I just know that the the treatment is not a replacement for your ability to prophylactically prevent Whether it's a placement or not, we know for sure that being vaccinated can protect you.
00:09:15.000And it can protect you from hospitalization.
00:09:18.000It can protect you from, you know, the odds of you dying once vaccinated are much lower.
00:09:26.000But we also know there are a lot of treatments available that are not being utilized for people once they get infected.
00:09:32.000For whatever reason they have their vaccine hesitation, for whatever reason they don't want to do it, there's a lot of treatment that's available that's not discussed.
00:09:42.000And I think monoclonal antibodies are among the best.
00:10:23.000Monoclonal antibodies have emergency use authorization by the FDA. I think that's because they are probably the most effective thing that's available right now.
00:10:33.000And again, I'm a natural-born skeptic, so I look at everything sideways.
00:10:37.000I've been testing negative for, what, a year and a half, and I have to think, you know, in Florida, that I came into contact with it or I was sick and didn't know it, I was asymptomatic.
00:10:47.000So I'm skeptical of these, although in Florida we literally have tents at the side of the road.
00:11:01.000There's so many places for testing, but so few places for treatment.
00:11:05.000Wouldn't you think that they would set up places that could provide monoclonal antibodies and make them publicly available, like really obvious?
00:12:06.000They know that the man who created it won the Nobel Prize for its use in humans in 2015. They know that it's used for yellow fever and dengue fever and has antiviral properties.
00:12:21.000So when they say horse paste and a horse dewormer, they're not saying it because they want people to not take horse dewormer.
00:12:28.000They're saying it to ridicule this particular medication.
00:12:31.000I think they have an obligation to inform people that aren't informed, that are literally going down to feed stores, which by the way is anecdotal.
00:13:06.000Monoclonal antibodies, Regeneron, has emergency use authorization.
00:13:10.000But the reality is, first and foremost...
00:13:12.000You and I are not doctors, so if we're going to get real specific about this and we start pulling up links, this is going to be a long conversation about COVID and ivermectin and...
00:13:22.000I know a little bit about it because of my experiences with it and discussing with doctors, but it's not as cut and dry as anybody wants to pretend it is.
00:13:29.000And one of the reasons why Merck is talking about it is they're developing their own antiviral medication, and it's a generic now, which means anybody can make it.
00:13:39.000So ivermectin can literally be made by any pharmaceutical company.
00:13:43.000There's a lot of complicated shit behind the scenes, and as a skeptic, maybe you should look at it from that perspective as well.
00:13:49.000Because the, what was it, the Japanese, the Tokyo, what was that, the Tokyo Medical Organization that is traditionally very conservative, just adopted ivermectin use last week and just talked about the efficacy of it.
00:14:04.000There's studies of it that have come out of India, there's studies of it that have come out of other places.
00:14:08.000There's the frontline critical COVID care workers who have been administering it before there was a vaccine and had very positive effects using it.
00:14:17.000It's very complicated, and I don't think we should just dismiss their work, particularly when we don't know that much about it.
00:15:09.000There's a lot of studies on ivermectin.
00:15:12.000If you go to the Critical Care COVID Workers website, they detail, there's a long list of studies that they've shown ivermectin to be effective in preventing death and preventing hospitalization.
00:15:24.000See, this is a thing where you and I are arguing about some shit we don't really have expertise in.
00:15:42.000Yeah, you went into police officers and more people dying of COVID. Well, you asked me about the state's response to the pandemic.
00:15:48.000I was just going to talk to you about the preposterous nature of your state that you love so much.
00:15:53.000You're a defender of Florida in its most ridiculousness.
00:15:57.000And one of the things that I want to talk to, because I haven't talked to you since the pandemic started, last time I talked to you was Screwball, right?
00:16:06.000Yeah, it was right before the shit hit the fan.
00:16:08.000That was the last time we talked, and we were talking about that documentary.
00:16:11.000And then, when all this happened, and so much of the wackiness and the controversies coming out of Florida, like, you embrace the chaos of Florida.
00:16:21.000Yeah, Florida fuckery is our genre, and it's also our top export, I think, as well.
00:16:26.000It's really what we provide the rest of them.
00:16:28.000But for you, and you, I mean, look about how much your work is about Florida.
00:16:33.000The Cooking Cowboy series, you know, all the stuff on A-Rod, like all the...
00:16:43.000I'm a Florida native, you know, and a lifelong Miamian, and I think the petrifying thing that I've learned through the years, and it's not my theory...
00:16:50.000T.D. Allman called Miami the city of the future.
00:16:53.000And effectively, the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow.
00:16:57.000And more importantly, the Miami of today.
00:17:00.000More specifically, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
00:17:03.000So if you want to know what challenges we'll face or calamities will befall us as a nation in the years or even decades to come, you need only look at the canary in the coal mine, which is South Florida.
00:17:14.000Do you think that's because it's very vulnerable to climate change, first of all, right?
00:17:19.000There's estimates about how long Miami can last.
00:18:56.000We're still in hurricane season, which means rain exacerbates it.
00:18:59.000Inclement weather can, we're totally fucked when it rains on top of the king ties.
00:19:03.000But this is just like a day, like you just, if you were in a low-lying area or waterfront or oceanfront, bayfront, that's just what, sunny day.
00:19:11.000It's perfectly, it could be perfectly beautiful, and you could have as much as 12 inches above the highest high tide.
00:19:18.000So it's just an unusual level of the ocean.
00:19:44.000So the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a kind of futuristic, post-apocalyptic, you know, after the flood, well, pre-flood, kind of a wall.
00:19:54.000And Miami said, no gracias, no thank you.
00:20:34.000It's this anything-goes, Wild West kind of mentality.
00:20:37.000Because, you know, I said this before on the show, you know, LA is where you go when you want to be somebody, New York is where you go when you are somebody, and Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.
00:20:47.000It's always been a sunny place for shady people.
00:20:49.000The Florida man phenomenon, it's just like, you know, if you have...
00:22:43.000And so everybody, and it was a communal scene too.
00:22:47.000It's kind of like your place with the, you know, everybody just sort of like stops by.
00:22:51.000People stop by to get, it was like that because you had all these artists.
00:22:56.000In every room like so there was pickup basketball games outside you drive up and there'd be the Bee Gees playing the Allman Brothers playing Eric Clapton in a pickup basketball game and they to this day Criteria Studios they have an a wooden upright piano and the rumor has it one day there was an artist I won't mention the name was playing and had a baggie of cocaine on the top of the piano and he was playing and the baggie fell Open.
00:23:25.000And he grabbed the bag and salvaged what he could.
00:23:27.000And then for the next several months, the people at the studio who worked at it would stick a straw between the keys on the piano and try to...
00:23:35.000Mostly dust, they were probably snorting, but, like, would just try to salvage whatever they could from there.
00:23:48.000They were away from the watchful eyes and ears of the labels, which were all based in New York and L.A. So they would go to Miami and no one knew what the fuck was going on.
00:23:56.000I didn't have publicists or producers or executives from the recording studios.
00:24:01.000So they would send them bills to pay for the studio time.
00:24:07.000Cocaine and I think by the way cocaine was at that time was probably part of the appeal of bringing the artists to Miami to be fair probably right but it was under the the category of piano tuning Was the cocaine.
00:24:19.000So you get, like, some, you know, someone at, you know, accounts at a record label call up and say, hey, I have a question about this invoice.
00:24:27.000There's $5,000 here for piano tuning, but there's only one ballad on the album.
00:24:32.000So what's with all this fucking piano tuning?
00:25:03.000This band comes in and he says to the lead singer, he says, hey listen, I don't know if you remember, you were down here 15 years ago, whatever, back in the late 70s, early 80s, doing this record.
00:25:12.000And the singer says, I have no memory of that whatsoever, except for one thing.
00:25:21.000He said, one night apparently, we were done recording here, and someone took us into the neighborhood, it's like in a residential kind of area, into the neighborhood, to this woman's house.
00:25:32.000And she brought out a brick of cocaine, an entire kilo of cocaine.
00:27:45.000It's like a group of people ruin their entire lives with coke.
00:27:48.000And then, I don't know if you know about this, what's going on right now in LA, but there was a terrible tragedy amongst these comedians where four comedians at a party overdosed.
00:27:57.000Yeah, and they're getting cocaine that's laced with fentanyl.
00:28:02.000And one of them survived, and she's in the ICU now, and she started to talk again and text people and stuff, so she seems like she's going to make it.
00:29:24.000He's still blocking the legalization of medical marijuana, which 70-plus percent of Floridians voted in favor of, so.
00:29:29.000Yeah, that's a silly thing, because people with nausea, people with anything, any kind of wasting disease, any cancer, people that are dealing with chemotherapy, it is a godsend.
00:29:41.000There's a thing called NAD, and we tried to come up with how you say it the other day, but what it does is it actually lengthens your telomeres.
00:29:50.000It's something that you take in an intravenous form, and it's super good for your body.
00:30:21.000When you smoke weed, I turn that thing up full crank, and I go through a full bag in 10 minutes, and I'm telling you, I barely feel it.
00:30:28.000And when I was doing that, I was like, oh, well, this is probably the nausea-preventing aspect that chemo patients enjoy, and people with AIDS, people that have a really hard time eating food.
00:30:42.000There's something about marijuana and nausea.
00:30:49.000I think most people, even who participate in the prohibition, which has been the, incidentally, the deadliest thing about marijuana, has been the prohibition.
00:31:24.000And you want to enter into some sort of deal or contract with a certified marijuana dealer or a dispensary or a cocaine dealer, for that matter.
00:32:03.000All that nonsense that got into people's heads while people all around you are doing sanctioned, government-approved drugs that are killing people.
00:34:30.000So because of the good work that MAPS has done, And showing that a lot of these people with these traumatic experiences, people that have been assaulted, abused, sexual assault, they can have an amazing relief from MDMA therapy.
00:34:47.000And so because of that, we have a real good chance of reintroducing MDMA because of MAPS. As a therapeutic use medicine, really.
00:35:14.000It's what's been so frustrating about the medical marijuana fucking...
00:35:21.000It's just like Trek it's just like it's this never-ending saga in Florida is that like I remember when I went so I didn't smoke pot until I was what I tried I was like 37 years old.
00:37:24.000I had not been a pot smoker my whole life.
00:37:26.000I had maybe smoked pot a handful of times.
00:37:28.000And then when I was 30 years old, a buddy of mine, he was a musician, my friend Eddie Bravo, he's a musician, jiu-jitsu guy, and he's like, dude, it helps me creatively.
00:39:15.000You see crazy visuals like fucking pyramids and UFOs and these...
00:39:23.000Cartoonish neon figures that are mating.
00:39:25.000I remember I took a really strong edible once and got on a flight and it was one of the craziest experiences of my life.
00:39:31.000All I did was close my eyes and curl up in a position.
00:39:34.000I had a window seat so it was like my head was up against the window and my eyes were closed and the whole flight I was watching these animated neon characters breed.
00:39:44.000They were like having sex and making all these other animated characters and then it was like this weird sort of fractal effect and it was...
00:40:34.000Like, write drunk, edit sober is great because you can take out the self-indulgent stuff and the chaos and sort of whittle it into a more conducive form for human consumption.
00:40:46.000But there's something about writing high where you find the funny.
00:40:50.000It's not like write drunk, edit sober.
00:40:54.000When you edit high, you're literally editing for giggles.
00:40:59.000You're looking for—and you'll find pathways that are funny.
00:41:03.000I think George had it—well, obviously, George is one of the all-time greats.
00:41:14.000I like to do that late at night because, you know, I have family, I have children.
00:41:18.000I can't be getting high during the day when my kids are in the house.
00:41:21.000So what I do is I wait until everyone's asleep and then I get barbecued.
00:41:24.000And then usually after a show, like I'll come home from a show at like 1230 at night and I'll just sit in front of the keyboard and just start mashing ideas.
00:41:34.000I've never, I've never, I mean, I've written work drunk before, but I just like, I don't know, it's kind of in my line of work, I guess, a little more important to have your wits about you.
00:41:43.000Yeah, but it's, it is, there's a, it's a tool, you know, it's, it's, you can use it correctly and you can get a lot out of it or you can start abusing it, you know, it's, I'm a giant fan of Stephen King, and Stephen King's book on writing is one of my favorite books on the creative process.
00:42:01.000But one of the things that comes out of that book is, first of all, his thankfulness of his sobriety, his love for his family, and how he realized he could have lost it all, because he was really off the rails crazy and doing pounds of blow and fucking drinking cases of beer every night while I was writing.
00:43:23.000Incredibly, he found his early success and how rewarding it was and how chaotic it was and overwhelming and how he couldn't believe it was real.
00:43:32.000And then it's also about his demons and struggles.
00:43:35.000And then it's also about recovery from getting hit by a fucking bus or a van rather.
00:43:58.000When you go back and you read The Shining, I mean, The Shining was about an author that was losing his fucking mind in a haunted house.
00:44:07.000And in a lot of ways, that was probably what was happening to Stephen King with the cocaine and the alcohol and, you know, and he's writing this crazy shit while he's battling his own literal deeds.
00:45:56.000It's a cabaret-style room, but it was with a table...
00:46:01.000You know perpendicular to the stage, you know, and we were sitting like the fucking stage was right here and then Carlin was like right up here and so He was doing that bit about because he was I was actually obviously trying out material for his HBO next day, which which was the the God bit the I don't believe in God I believe in Joe Pesci I believe in the Sun God,
00:46:20.000but he's doing this whole God riff which was clearly still I think working on at the time and so I'm hysterically laughing And I'm realizing that other than Carlin's voice, the only thing I'm hearing is my laughter.
00:46:51.000You can imagine the shot from my POV. I kind of pan the room and I look at these people, these just good God-fearing Americans who just were not about Carlin dissing the big guy or the big girl.
00:47:40.000And one of the funniest human beings to ever exist in this universe.
00:47:44.000And probably one of the smartest human beings as well, I'd say.
00:47:48.000Which was an added bonus that he was so fucking funny.
00:47:51.000I saw Carlin bomb in New Hampshire in 1988 or 89. Somewhere around then.
00:47:58.000He went through a rough patch where I don't know what was going on but I was a big fan of his before this and then during this there was a few albums I remember because George would put out an HBO special every year.
00:48:15.000And what he would do differently than other comedians is he would write it all out and then he would bring legal paper on stage and he would have the script for what he was doing and he had no problem like having the notes on a stool and he would go over it.
00:48:32.000And he had this one routine that he was trying to close with, and it just was bombing.
00:48:39.000It was fuck Israel, fuck comedy clubs, fuck God, fuck the church.
00:48:45.000It was like, he was going through this whole thing, and it just...
00:48:48.000Wasn't working just didn't resonate and I remember thinking wow that's this is weird like I'm watching because I brought my roommates and my roommates were kind of unsophisticated at the time It's to put it mildly and they're like what is this is fucking terrible and You know we drove all the way to New Hampshire to watch George Carlin bomb I feel like that's always the way,
00:49:09.000when you recommend somebody like to watch something or see a show, it's always the worst episode that's gonna be on, because they're like, you have no taste.
00:49:16.000This is when I was just either thinking about doing stand-up or starting to do stand-up.
00:56:48.000Miami, we don't have, like, we make a rum, and now we have some micro brewers.
00:56:52.000We don't make a lot of shit, you know?
00:56:55.000So, we had a locally brewed beer and stone crabs at Captain Jim's for the show, and talked, and then they stopped shooting, and we just sat there for, like, another hour just chilling, because we didn't do much eating on camera,
00:57:10.000and then just eating and talking, and it was unforgettable.
00:57:14.000You have to know that Cocaine Cowboys is without doubt one of the top five greatest documentaries of all time.
00:59:07.000I mean, four counties in South Florida nearly got bankrupt because you're absorbing 150 refugees, some small percentage of which are, you know, dangerous people.
00:59:21.000But then you have to absorb the infirm and the sick and the young and people who don't have, you know, health care or housing or food.
00:59:28.000And so Miami Beach looks a lot like...
00:59:32.000Like Havana, like the seawall, you know, like the seawall and the malecone.
00:59:36.000It's like, it's so a lot of, and at that time, it was just like it was in Scarface.
00:59:39.000It was like, it was like 75% plus Jewish, a lot of Holocaust survivors, literally just God's waiting room, they called it, just playing out the rest of their lives.
00:59:49.000Inefficiencies on Ocean Drive, flop houses that would like $125 a week.
00:59:56.000Like, that's what you could live in Miami Beach for.
00:59:58.000So people on fixed incomes, you know, social security, elderly, retired.
01:00:02.000And then it attracted a lot of the Marielitas, particularly the criminal element.
01:00:06.000And there were places where, like, the Miami Beach Police Department would just literally just drive around the block because they'd keep getting calls to go to this.
01:00:16.000It was like over a Domino's game, you know?
01:00:18.000And so one day, this trauma surgeon is working at the ER. And in comes a Mariel refugee with a gunshot wound.
01:00:27.000And he says to the guy, he's bilingual, he says, tells him Spanish, he says, listen, you're very lucky.
01:00:31.000He said, if you had been shot, you know, just millimeters this way, it would have hit a vital organ, you would have bled out, you would have been dead before you even got here.
01:01:29.000The Mutiny Girls would fill the tubs in the rooms with the Dom Perignon as well so they could bill the customers.
01:01:35.000So that was part of where the supply was going.
01:01:38.000But that was a different kind of party depending on what you were willing to pay.
01:01:40.000But Miami is just one of those places.
01:01:42.000In that era, you know, when it became America's Casablanca.
01:01:44.000I mean, look, our number one in two industries at that time, still today, early 1980s Miami.
01:01:50.000Number two was tourism, generating upwards of about $7 billion a year into the Miami-Dade economy.
01:01:57.000Number one, I should say legitimate industry, was real estate, generating about $9 billion a year into the economy in Miami.
01:02:03.000The drug trade at the time was estimated to bring in upwards of $12 billion a year into our local economy.
01:02:10.000So what you're saying is our number one business...
01:02:13.000Was an illicit trade, was the illegal drug trade, the money laundering.
01:02:16.000And I will tell you, I believe it to be the only case study, I should say the only successful case study, of Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics.
01:02:25.000It's the only time it worked was in the drug boom in Miami.
01:02:29.000Because banditos rob a bank and they ride on into the next town, right?
01:02:33.000And they spend their ill-gotten gains.
01:03:06.000In Miami, we're all guilty by geography.
01:03:09.000We're all complicit by just virtue of proximity to colorful characters.
01:03:14.000Mark Rubin was like 14. He wasn't in the drug trade, but his brother-in-law was a major cocaine trafficker, and they lived in West Kendall in Miami-Dade, southwest Miami-Dade, in a cocaine stash house for a summer.
01:03:25.000That's like a rite of passage, like a quinceanera or bar mitzvah.
01:03:28.000In Miami, like, I spent the summer in my brother-in-law's cocaine stash house by Marco Rubio.
01:03:33.000Must have made a really interesting paper for high school, what I did with my summer vacation.
01:04:14.000Cash became like a real liability because it was just, it's so bulky and annoying.
01:04:19.000People are putting it in walls and burying it and banks are charging you a vig to deposit cash because they had no fucking place to put it.
01:04:27.000And so, but you have $120,000 so people spent it.
01:04:30.000It went into Everything and that was the thing if you weren't addicted to cocaine in Miami You were addicted to that that money and that's that's the legacy too is that Hustle is you know the tech hub hustle.
01:04:43.000It's just the new Hollywood East never happened It's just the new modern art hub never happened.
01:04:50.000It's just it's a hustle We just we have to subsist that way because we don't have any other any other industry Well, it also it it's the center of flossing in the country Right?
01:05:00.000If you think about people that are just driving Lamborghinis and wearing giant rope chains, you think about Miami.
01:07:19.000If you're going to fake it until you make it at Turkey Point at the nuclear power plant, you've got problems.
01:07:24.000Are you going to make nuclear cowboys?
01:07:26.000Listen, I hope to live long enough to start growing a tail and the alligators don't start turning into Godzilla or whatever.
01:07:35.000A lot of these older power plants, apparently, I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but when I talk to people that are physicists, they've said that nuclear power plants can be made today and be made far more efficiently, and they're actually very good for the environment in terms of what you put in versus what gets out,
01:09:00.000I mean, Willie and Sal, Los Muchachos, the boys from Cocaine Cowboys, the Kings of Miami, they helped to start a bank with some of their high school buddies from Miami High, appropriately Miami High.
01:09:30.000They had a guy, an attorney, named Juan Acosta.
01:09:33.000He was very popular, let's say, among Miami's nouveau riche of the late 70s and early 80s.
01:09:39.000The sudden millionaires and billionaires that we had cropping up.
01:09:42.000I mean, Willie and Sal were accused by the government of smuggling over 75 tons of cocaine worth over $2 billion, with a B. And that was only what the government thought they knew about.
01:11:14.000Guillermo Indara, the drug money launderer, who was listed in the documents of all these cocaine traffickers, who was their money launderer in Panama.
01:11:26.000The United States makes him the president of Panama.
01:11:28.000That's a deleted scene, by the way, from our documentary.
01:11:39.000Like I should have called I should have called this instead of Kings of Miami could all the cocaine Cowboys We've got hours of this shit.
01:11:45.000I mean because like there's no and and All the crazy shit that's in the movie and some people listen I say that's tantamount to malpractice cutting Cutting that out of the documentary, but you just have to it's just time you just have to and you're crafting a thing listen the pressure of building a six-part You need,
01:12:03.000listen, I'm always looking for the button, right?
01:12:57.000Have you ever thought about going back and making a director's cut with the four hours and doing it with Netflix or something along those lines?
01:14:12.000It's this the ones I that I feel click like that I know are like gonna work because you don't always know you come in with the best of intentions and after you work on something for 12 years You can't see the forest for the trees.
01:14:22.000I mean right You know and so you do your best and then you just you know send it out into the world and listen it's not up to me I always say the measure of a successful filmmaker It's not money or critical acclaim or awards.
01:15:08.000And I said to him, I said, listen, I want it all rooted in Afro-Cuban beats and rhythms and salsa music.
01:15:14.000Like, I don't care if it's a suspense scene or an action scene, I want it all to feel like, be unapologetically Miami, you know, and Cuban-American.
01:15:44.000Like, you want there to be a rhythm and a cadence and you want the audience to fall into that, right?
01:15:50.000I mean, I don't take the audience's time for granted.
01:15:53.000We have a finite amount of time between now and the day we die.
01:15:56.000If you're going to give me four and a half hours of that, I'm going to entertain you.
01:15:59.000Yeah, there's going to be investigative journalism in there.
01:16:03.000Sometimes we call our work, Buddy Todd calls it, a Trojan horse.
01:16:09.000You know, you think it's one thing, but you're getting a little bit bonus.
01:16:14.000You kind of tempt the audience with the sugar, and then you feed them some broccoli in there too.
01:16:20.000Because I think that that's, as a documentary filmmaker, especially now, with the ubiquity, and there's so many documentaries, there's so much content.
01:16:28.000This is the golden age of documentaries.
01:19:45.000If you believe in karma, and she was actually, you know, she was killed by a motorcycle assassin, which, you know, one guy in the front driving, one guy in the back with an automatic or semi-automatic weapon, and that was actually a methodology that she is credited with importing.
01:20:16.000That lady's a particularly powerful example of what's possible when people start selling cocaine and making millions of dollars and develop that sort of psychopathic, murderous, you know, advancement at any cost mentality.
01:20:32.000Well, you're also a woman in a cocaine cowboys, B-O-Y-S, in a hyper-masculine world.
01:20:41.000And you're in a trade where it was a consignment business.
01:20:44.000And back in Miami at that time, kilos were going for as much as $50,000.
01:20:50.000So you give someone, you know, she's a wholesaler, gives you four kilos, says go out and...
01:21:36.000Yeah, and probably a little bit of getting high on her own supply there at the end.
01:21:41.000It's a business that, if you're doing that, and it's so crazy in the first place that you're making so much money off of this illegal stuff that everybody wants.
01:21:50.000I mean, it lends itself to sort of chaotic brutality.
01:21:54.000Like, if you want to talk about the success of the war on drugs, I mean, now the drug is as ubiquitous, just as pure, if not more so, and cheaper than it ever was before.
01:22:03.000And that's not because demand's down, it's because supply is ample.
01:22:06.000And so, they always treated it like a real business.
01:22:10.000I mean, like these guys in Kings of Miami, they called it the company.
01:22:52.000Happened in Columbia, happened in Miami, there are people who, but their careers were not long, and they were not as lucrative, because that's the thing that makes William Sal so unique, is that the average career I would guesstimate In the United States for a cocaine trafficker in that time period was not more than five years.
01:23:12.000Slightly longer than an NFL player's career.
01:24:57.000They're going to learn how to open doors, Joe.
01:24:59.000They're going to learn how to fucking open doors like the raptors did.
01:25:01.000We've been documenting all these YouTube channels where people hunt them with, like, bowfishing rigs, and they're killing these five-foot-long iguanas in residential areas.
01:25:26.000No, he does not, because he doesn't cap, because they're on the, they usually roll into the canal.
01:25:30.000He doesn't actually, because he goes over a fence, you know, like Lee Harvey Oswald style, you know, kind of like grassy knoll, I should say.
01:27:03.000He's a brother-in-law of the kings of Miami, or the future kings of Miami.
01:27:07.000He's the 12-year-old kid washing the cars and making more money on a weekend doing that than his dad.
01:27:13.000You know, this hard-working, you know, Cuban exile.
01:27:16.000But these kids surrounded by these, at the time, kind of lower-end drug dealers who were about to blow up, but giving them $100, $200 cash, you know, to wash a car.
01:27:27.000He has this sort of, like, you know, you grow up, Miami, like I said, we're guilty by geography.
01:27:31.000If you grow up in that time and place, people were becoming millionaires overnight.
01:27:36.000You must, like, that's the American dream to you.
01:27:38.000You're like, oh, the streets are paved with gold.
01:27:39.000This is the opportunity I'm talking about.
01:27:41.000And there was kind of a warped idea, I think, of what all that was.
01:27:44.000I'm not making excuses, but just Miami was a different, Miami is a different place, and it was a seriously different place back there.
01:27:52.000Everybody was involved in this industry, or everybody knew someone who was involved in this industry, and in some way or another, everybody benefited from this industry.
01:28:00.000Is at this club, Club New, 1987. It was one of the first big nightclubs, popular nightclubs in South Beach.
01:28:07.000And she's there and Peggy wants to get with her.
01:28:12.000Jose Canseco is in VIP. He wants to get with her because Miami.
01:28:15.000That's like the most 1987 Miami thing you can imagine.
01:28:18.000VIP at this nightclub and you're in a love triangle with a drug dealer and Jose Canseco.
01:28:22.000She didn't know he was a drug dealer yet.
01:28:24.000But they wind up, she winds up hooking up with Peggy.
01:28:27.000And she starts hanging out for the first time at his apartment on the ocean.
01:28:32.000Beautiful, like, blinged out place on the fifth floor of this luxury condo.
01:28:36.000And they hang out at the beach and they're swimming and then they go to bed and in the middle of the night, two o'clock in the morning, he gets a call.
01:28:59.000But here's the thing, and this is not in the documentary.
01:29:02.000That apartment was on the fifth floor of the Champlain Tower South.
01:29:07.000And true to form, if you were building a luxury condo in the late 70s, early 80s, your market, in no small part, would have been to drug smugglers.
01:29:16.000And so that's the apartment that they're hanging out.
01:29:19.000And I realized when I was in Los Angeles delivering the series to Netflix, and the tragedy happened in Surfside, I was like, Champlain Tower South?
01:29:31.000And we looked it up and that's where, yeah, that's where, that was his love nest, his Miami, Peggy's Miami Beach love nest that he took Alexia to.
01:30:27.000He said, listen, I'm always trying to push for accountability, for transparency, for better government, always trying to encourage people to vote better.
01:30:45.000I want to leave behind a better Florida than the one I was born in.
01:30:48.000I don't even know if Florida's going to be intact.
01:30:51.000It's going to be the same geological area than the one I was born in by the time I die.
01:30:55.000But the reality is that, I remember Jim telling me one day, because he's a political reporter especially, he says, Billy, just remember, I think you're good.
01:31:29.000But do you think it's possible that the influx of people from New York that just wanted to get the fuck out of New York and moved to Florida and moved to a lot of other places, from a lot of other places, do you think in any way that might benefit Florida?
01:33:07.000I'm always stunned that people move into those high rises.
01:33:10.000Because I'm like, if you are in a hurricane and you're experiencing 100 plus mile an hour winds, I would imagine that 81st floor is the last place I'd want to be.
01:33:23.000I'm going to say something that like, oh, I'm going to get shit for this.
01:33:28.000Joe's like, oh, they're not going to give me shit for something I say this podcast.
01:33:43.000Are there some buildings that are suspect?
01:33:44.000Not only are there old buildings that are suspect, that are not being well-maintained, that have, like I said, water coming at them from literally everywhere.
01:34:27.000Three or four of the deadliest infrastructure failures and collapses in the United States in the last ten years have happened in Miami-Dade County.
01:34:43.000One county in the entire country has had the majority of deadly infrastructure failures and building collapses.
01:34:51.000We had a bridge That they were stress testing.
01:34:56.000They had traffic open underneath it while they were stress testing this brand new bridge.
01:36:40.000Because the mayor, Carlos Jimenez, now Congressman Carlos Jimenez, his wife's cousin, It owns the company, that's the contractor.
01:36:49.000It employed both of his sons at various times.
01:36:53.000Marco Rubio is a major benefactor, or I should say beneficiary.
01:36:58.000Rick Scott, what happened was while bodies were still trapped in the rubble, You had Marco Rubio, the senator from the state of Florida, working as their public crisis manager.
01:37:09.000Like, doing press saying, like, this is a good company, these are good, you know, good God-fearing Republicans.
01:37:15.000And our mayor, our county mayor at the time, Carlos Jimenez, calling, who was on a junket in Hong Kong, calling in saying, it couldn't have been MCM, it couldn't have been these people.
01:37:26.000These people just got a $70 million contract at the Miami International Airport, a new one.
01:39:29.000But when you say that Miami is like the rest of the United States in the future, what else do you mean other than the problem with climate control?
01:39:39.000Well, first and foremost, I mean the separation between the haves and the have-nots.
01:39:43.000I mean, Miami has, maybe second only to the San Francisco metro area, it is one of the greatest income and wealth gaps in the country.
01:39:55.000We'll see swamp favelas in our lifetime.
01:39:57.000You know, we'll see people who are in the service trade in Miami but can't afford the cost of living.
01:40:02.000In fact, the United Way has an Alice report where they say 60%, nearly 60%, like 59% and change, of Miami-Dade County residents cannot afford To live in Miami-Dade County and most of those people have at least one job so these are not this is the working poor people with one two three four jobs who cannot afford the cost of living the education the transportation in Miami-Dade that's the first thing is that that is the wealth gap in the income gap and that is going to become ubiquitous I think nationwide certainly
01:40:33.000the challenges of of sea level rise and climate change and climate change gentrification I think also though The way the government works this sort of the kleptocracy It used to be a narco kleptocracy like Venezuela now.
01:40:49.000It's just a kleptocracy where a group of very rich very influential private business people Essentially run cronies Into and that's gonna be that's and all of this is being exacerbated by the pandemic because you got a bunch of people sitting at school board meetings going why the fuck do I need to put up with this shit and I'm just here to try to help kids.
01:41:14.000Like, I don't need to put up with this.
01:41:40.000And when I say brutalize, I mean that because they're private entities, they may not be subject to the sunshine laws, public records laws, accountability and transparency that a public institution is supposed to follow.
01:43:00.000He's a lobbyist, effectively, with a major cryptocurrency, digital asset, and blockchain practice, which is where a lot of the money is coming from.
01:43:09.000The new new rich money is coming from in Miami.
01:43:25.000Because he's an attorney, he claims that his client list is privileged.
01:43:30.000It's attorney-client privilege, which means that he has a secret client list, which it could be a minefield of conflicts of interest with his public position as mayor, but we're not allowed to know what they are.
01:45:03.000Is there any bright lights on the horizon in that whole area?
01:45:08.000I mean, is any of this, like, newfound capital, newfound people immigrating, I won't say immigrating to Miami, moving to Miami, is any of it beneficial?
01:45:20.000None of us like taxes, but we all, we pay them.
01:45:32.000If you're moving to a place, because ultimately you want to avoid paying taxes, You're not necessarily going to have the interest of community in mind.
01:45:44.000So we're not necessarily seeing people who are interested in investing in Miami in a way that's going to be productive for the people there now.
01:45:53.000What it's going to do is it's going to make it more expensive for the people who live there.
01:47:01.000I don't think what happened, but my concern is that no one seems to have a fix for it.
01:47:06.000I mean, Austin has done a good job recently of getting them off of some of the major cities and then moving them into hotels and they've purchased hotels and motels for these folks.
01:47:18.000But, I mean, when you're dealing with a place like Austin, you're only dealing with a million people and a couple thousand homeless people.
01:47:24.000When you're dealing with something like Miami or Los Angeles or San Francisco, you're dealing with staggering numbers.
01:47:31.000And there's very little incentives to create affordable housing or to do what they've done here, which is to buy up properties and start to provide housing for people.
01:51:40.000You know, the problem is I'm doing these arena shows, so I'm in the round, and I get off stage, and I've got to go through thousands of people screaming at me and high-fiving.
01:53:18.000Your doctor says, listen, take this as prescribed, and it will help these symptoms, or it'll help the virus.
01:53:23.000Abso-fucking- My fear is that these variants are going to continue to get more and more aggressive, and we're going to be dealing with something completely different three years from now, two years from now.
01:53:36.000I had a meeting once with the CDC in Galveston.
01:53:40.000We did a show down there, and me and Duncan were talking to this guy, and we were talking essentially about bioweapons, about someone making a disease.
01:54:45.000There's an interview from 1985. 85, 86 is a KGB agent and he's breaking down how you destroy America and he's saying you don't destroy America with weapons he goes you destroy it by slowly enforcing propaganda and getting the students to first of all getting them to endorse Marxist principles and ideology and I
01:55:28.000mean, you're like, holy fuck, that's exactly what happened.
01:56:11.000But, you know, it used to be, you know, Florida was like America's Red penis with a blue foreskin that everybody wished we could circumcise.
01:58:50.000So what I'm saying is, is that like, you know, if you have a fault line and you can just drop, you know, you can just drop, you know, like you don't have to attack it with a nuclear weapon.
01:59:07.000And so we're just, you know, people are just constantly ready to be at each other's throats.
01:59:12.000And so it's very easy to exploit that.
01:59:14.000That world of foreign instigated propaganda and division is really fascinating.
01:59:19.000I had this woman on the podcast named Renee DiResta and she had thoroughly researched the Internet Research Agency in Russia, which just does that.
01:59:30.000It's basically a farm That all they do all day long is create pages and memes and work on these pages and develop these memes that are shared amongst like QAnon supporters and just a lot of crazy people and a lot of like divisive ideologies online and they're constantly stoking the fires and she goes,
01:59:57.000It's really interesting because some of these memes and she said she had to look through hundreds of thousands, some of them are hilarious.
02:02:05.000I'm like, why do we treat each other that way?
02:02:07.000Why can't we just learn that this is a shared experience?
02:02:10.000Listen, I feel that way about, you know, when people say, you know, my driver over here today was like, listen, she's like, the, you know, the ICUs are full.
02:02:21.000She's like, so if I get into a car accident and I need a bed, she's like, that does affect me.
02:02:55.000We are literally all of us fighting the same battle every day for our families to have a better life, to hopefully, you know, millennials, so the first generation, millennials.
02:03:08.000To have it shittier than the previous generation.
02:03:32.000Gone are the opportunities that provided for the baby boomers after the greatest generation fought a war to create the most extraordinary and robust economy in the world.
02:03:42.000I mean, they're the first generation of Americans since the Great Depression to not have it better than the previous generation.
02:03:49.000That's a doc I've always talked about doing.
02:04:26.000I think there are just fewer opportunities systemically in this country for that gender, for subs and future generation and post-millennials as well.
02:04:36.000I just I think that there's not the opportunity necessarily available in a in a fair system also.
02:04:43.000You know, where it's a real meritocracy.
02:04:45.000It's what I always liked about sports, you know, is that it was as close to a pure meritocracy as we get.
02:04:52.000Well, you take referees out of the equation sometimes.
02:04:55.000But I just mean that, like, if you are the best in a sport, if you are the best athlete, if you are the best conditioned and the best trained, you are going to rise to the top.
02:05:04.000And you don't feel that that's the case with most businesses today?
02:05:18.000So I think corruption plays a very big part in that.
02:05:21.000I think people who are already at the top exert so much influence that it becomes harder.
02:05:26.000I mean, metaphorically speaking, if you look at Main Street America and you look at the mom and pop businesses that shut down when the big box store opens down the street, it could be as simple as that kind of image.
02:05:37.000But I think it gets much more Complicated.
02:05:40.000You know, when you have people who, when you have a stacked, you're playing effectively with a stacked deck.
02:05:46.000Does that mean there's no such thing as successful entrepreneurism?
02:06:24.000All I could do is listen and pay attention and kind of realize that, oh, like, yeah, you know, the world does kind of treat me different winning the genetic lottery and being born a white man in America.
02:06:39.000There are, you know, I can be entrepreneurial and creative and clever and get ahead in a way that maybe other people don't necessarily have those doors open to them.
02:06:48.000And just an understanding of that in and of itself, I think, Makes your community better, makes your family better, makes people safer and healthier.
02:06:57.000How is it related to a compassion gap?
02:07:01.000It's having compassion for other people.
02:07:02.000It's saying that I'm going to acknowledge that you...
02:07:08.000By the way, some people can't even acknowledge when people are going through the same experiences that they're going through.
02:07:13.000There are some immigrants who are anti-immigration.
02:07:18.000We have that in Miami, who say they don't see their experiences in the experiences of Central Americans, for example.
02:07:29.000The Cuban exile experience is not very different, but there's a compassion gap when they see people suffering in Central America trying to escape oppression and crime and corruption and close the borders.
02:09:41.000And I think the fact is that people look at other people in the world and just...
02:09:47.000Either they don't like them because they're the same, they don't like them because they are different, and I just, I feel like there's a way to say, like, it's cool if they're different, but like, why can't we, uh, why can't we just, uh, uh, not, why can't we just not hate because of that?
02:11:27.000There are elements of it that are present in terms of teaching compassion, teaching diversity, teaching that this was a...
02:11:37.000I think what people are concerned about is teaching children that they're inherently racist, they're inherently biased, instead of teaching people love and compassion.
02:11:47.000So their fear is that you're putting people in this position when they're very young where they already feel guilty.
02:11:54.000They feel like they did something wrong and that they're responsible for things that they have no say in whatsoever, especially young children, and that maybe there's a better approach to it.
02:12:06.000They're also worried about people that latch on to these socially conscious, socially progressive movements that have good intentions overall, but yet these people are using these platforms for their own personal gain and profit, which there are quite a few people like that.
02:12:23.000And there's quite a few movements like that, and there's quite a few authors that have written books that have capitalized on these movements in this very Personally profitable way, and you can see what they're doing.
02:12:36.000They would have found something else, but they found critical race theory, and it's a very complicated and divisive conversation to have in 2021. But that happens with everything.
02:12:46.000There's always going to be opportunists and grifters, especially in pure movements, because those are the places that you can exploit.
02:12:53.000With this infecting the way their children get educated, and that they're indoctrinated into these These philosophies, these ideas that they think are ideologies, rigid ideologies, that can't be debated or discussed.
02:13:08.000Because if you disagree with them, then you're a racist, you're a bad person.
02:13:12.000Even if you're not, if you just think, like, hey, I don't think that this is something that we should be teaching children, that they're inherently biased and racist.
02:13:19.000But I don't think that's what children are being teaching.
02:13:22.000They are being taught that in some places.
02:13:38.000Racism, who don't want to teach that there is, that there are institutionally places in this country where people who don't look and sound like you are simply treated different.
02:13:48.000I just think that that's a reality for a lot of people.
02:13:50.000And I don't think there's any reason to not tell a kid, like, but they're not different from you.
02:13:55.000They're, you know, they're people who may have some different experiences, but want the same things as you, might have the same hopes and dreams as you.
02:14:02.000And I mean, that's what we should be teaching kids.
02:14:04.000I think we're looking at it through different filters, but I think ultimately we have the same perspective on it and that there is a reality of racism and there's also a reality and you have an ability to mold children and you can do it in a positive way and you can teach children.
02:14:22.000But my concern is that teaching children that they're already guilty is a very dangerous step.
02:14:28.000But teaching children that compassion is incredibly valuable and that we are all the same ultimately and that the differences are our strengths and that they're fascinating and they're amazing and that the fact that one of the great things about this country is like you can't really point out an American Because we're everything.
02:15:17.000The problem is I've seen videos of people have leaked out of classes where teachers are teaching these things to children that they're responsible for.
02:15:25.000The sins of their ancestors and that this is something that's inherently a part of who they are and I think There's a way to teach the positive aspects of what we're talking about.
02:15:36.000There's a way to teach compassion There's a way to teach open-mindedness and this sort of Understanding of the strength of the fact that we're all so different and unique.
02:15:47.000I think those anecdotal Examples, though.
02:15:50.000It's kind of why I feel guilty sometimes when I share, you know, viral videos of fuckery, you know, in Florida.
02:15:55.000It's like, some of these things are just anomalies, you know what I mean?
02:15:58.000They're just, but thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones, and we can kind of take this, I don't think, I don't know that crazier shit's happening now, so much as it is we're all more aware, you know, aware of it.
02:16:10.000Right, and I don't know that that's healthy, per se.
02:16:13.000I appreciate the transparency, and I like having the information, but I think that when you have, to borrow your term, grifters, who are exploiting an opportunity, it's good to catch them, but I think then it provides ammunition to vilify an entire area of study,
02:17:00.000I'm not abusing their authority or their platform as an educator, which I think that there's probably more than one person doing that in myriad ways.
02:17:07.000But I'm saying I don't think that that is necessarily a fair cross-section of how things are being taught and applied.
02:17:17.000I'm a product of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, graduate of the University of Miami.
02:17:23.000I'm basically a functioning illiterate, let's be honest about it.
02:17:27.000The reality is I was taught pretty well, all things concerned.
02:17:31.000I don't think I came from a broken system.
02:17:34.000I don't know what the hell is going on right now in the public school system.
02:17:40.000I know a lot of people are yelling and screaming about masks, which has nothing to do with the education of their children.
02:17:45.000I know a lot of people are pulling their kids out of school and going to private schools and charter schools, which is only going to help expedite the collapse of the public school system, which I think is a bummer because, like I said, I'm a product of it.
02:18:12.000We don't value it to the point where we don't want a radical change of it.
02:18:16.000One of the things that we realized through this pandemic when they started introducing these stimulus packages and started propping up corporations and boosting them to the tune of untold fucking billions of dollars.
02:18:28.000Is that they have the ability to allocate resources in a way that benefits corporations.
02:18:34.000But they don't seem to be able to do that to disenfranchised communities.
02:18:37.000They don't seem to be able to do that to places that have been historically poor.
02:18:42.000And historically, you know, talk about these people that have experienced redline laws.
02:18:47.000And people that, you know, are still, they have the echoes of Jim Crow still in their community.
02:18:53.000They still have the same poor neighborhoods.
02:18:55.000Same crime-ridden neighborhoods, and no one's done anything to fix it.
02:18:58.000Well, remember, when you take from the poor and give to the rich, that's capitalism.
02:19:01.000When you take from the rich and give to the poor, that's socialism, remember.
02:20:07.000Yeah, it's a major problem in this country that it never gets addressed.
02:20:12.000And when, you know, they talk about rebuilding places overseas and nation building, like the amount of allocation of resources that have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan.
02:21:38.000Because you make an exceptionally good point, which is what I was getting.
02:21:41.000When you say why the Florida of today or the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow, it's just like when I hear, and I hear a lot of this in Miami, it's a lot of this propaganda which helps to swing the county and swing the state.
02:24:20.000You don't see Louis Farrakhan speaking in the Democratic National Convention.
02:24:23.000The Democrats have time and again, even in the 2016 election, which was clearly the outsider election, to your point, clearly the Republicans were like, we're flushing the toilet on the Tea Party.
02:24:35.000We're flushing the toilet on the Bush political crime family in China.
02:25:42.000Blindly for that job based on the on the resumes a leader of the free world Essentially the head of the United States of America There's a lot involved in people's choices and a big one is trust trust and whether or not they like the person and They just did not trust the whole Clinton family.
02:26:03.000They did not like Hillary Clinton There was a lot of people that had this feeling about her that she was this icky Insider.
02:26:12.000That she was a part of this whole system that had not served us.
02:26:17.000And that was corruption-laced and deeply entwined and big businesses and special interest groups.
02:26:25.000And Donald Trump wisely positioned himself as this guy who didn't give a fuck and was going to drain the swamp and crooked Hillary's going to get kicked out.
02:26:35.000But that corrupt system is what enabled and benefited to Donald Trump.
02:27:36.000A vote against instability and insanity and people who said, only in third world authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorships do we listen and think about the leader of the country all the time.
02:27:49.000I want to go to work and not fucking think about what the president is tweeting or doing.
02:28:39.000That you could argue that people deserve their right to be heard, and this is a platform that has a reach that's unprecedented in American history, that there's a thing that people can plug into and instantaneously reach millions and millions and millions of people.
02:28:57.000The question is, like, did he abuse it?
02:29:03.000I don't want to say coerced, but did he help instigate the attack on the Capitol on January 6th?
02:29:11.000Did using his Twitter account and using his social media presence ultimately endanger people?
02:29:18.000That was the real question, whether or not someone should be banned from social media for expressing themselves.
02:29:25.000Well, I think that, I don't know if your suggestion is to nationalize effectively, or regulate, or in this case, over-regulate, or apply laws and rules that apply only to the government to a private corporation.
02:29:39.000I mean, listen, you can say whatever you want on your platform, on your show.
02:30:09.000But this is a platform like Twitter, where you have hundreds and hundreds of millions of users.
02:30:16.000I don't know how many, maybe billions.
02:30:20.000It's so big, you can make an argument that it's like a utility more than it is like a private company.
02:30:25.000But if YouTube did that to you, you'd go to Spotify.
02:30:28.000What I'm saying is you'd have the platform.
02:30:31.000There's no thing other than Twitter like that.
02:30:34.000And then you have women like Jen Psaki, who's the press secretary for the White House, who says that if you get banned from one platform, you should be banned from all platforms, which is very convenient for them if they can get someone banned that's a critic of the United States government.
02:30:50.000Oh, I don't think that should be the case.
02:31:04.000Why should Twitter be able to decide for Facebook?
02:31:08.000Facebook has their own terms and their own conditions, and you have to follow their rules.
02:31:12.000No, I thought it was a ridiculous thing for someone to say, especially someone who's a White House press secretary.
02:31:17.000Look, I'm in the fence on this, in a way, in that I don't think...
02:31:23.000I don't think it's wise to have someone who is in a great position of power who's outwardly calling for some sort of a violent movement or a violent attack.
02:31:38.000Let's forget about the January 6th thing and let's imagine that some senator or some politician is calling for people to aggressively assume Control of a building or take control of a place.
02:31:56.000That's a dangerous, dangerous megaphone to use, right?
02:32:01.000And in that situation, I think we have to be really careful about how we allow people to use Any kind of platform, right?
02:32:10.000Whether it's a social media platform or whatever the fuck it is.
02:32:13.000In that case, I think that's where your argument can...
02:32:18.000That's where there's the argument about Trump and the Capitol Hill attack.
02:32:22.000That's where it gets real squirrely with me.
02:32:49.000But I think that, again, you as the private business owner, as a restaurant owner or whatever it is, have to make a decision about that guy acting a fool at that table over there.
02:33:50.000I could probably refuse you service for any reason, but the reality is if you come in and you don't act a fool in my place, it's a private bill.
02:33:59.000Again, if they come on Twitter and they don't violate Twitter's rules, I don't like it.
02:34:03.000I don't want, I don't like their, I don't follow them.
02:34:08.000I don't particularly want their message on the platform, which is I could leave the platform myself in protest, for example, because there are a lot of, but the reality is I just, I block them out.
02:34:30.000I understand Twitter's not a restaurant.
02:34:31.000The problem people have is that it's enforced almost down an ideological division.
02:34:38.000It's like very rock-solid, enforced in a left-wing manner.
02:34:43.000And that right-wing people are much more likely to be banned and censored.
02:34:49.000But then I think you have to look at the nuances of this, meaning why were these, why were the people, why was each account banned?
02:34:55.000What I'm saying is if you're going to incite violence, I don't really care who you're, if you're a fanatic, I don't really give a fuck if you're left or right or whatever.
02:35:03.000Right, but as a proponent of free speech, which I'm sure you are, you know that it gets slippery when people have the ability to silence their critics or silence their opposition, silence people that have differing opinions.
02:35:19.000And when you're dealing with a small business, like a restaurant, I understand it, but you're dealing with something like Twitter, where you have access to untold millions and millions of people.
02:35:32.000It seems like we have to have a very nuanced perspective on this.
02:35:37.000We have to really take into consideration the ripple effect of any decision that gets made in terms of silencing voices.
02:35:45.000Because I think it can all come back and bite us in the ass.
02:35:50.000I think it's an amazing ability that we have that's unprecedented to express ourselves and to explore ideas.
02:35:58.000Unfortunately, Twitter is used by a lot of fucking dummies.
02:36:01.000And a lot of it is just hate and insults, which is normal.
02:36:06.000It's standard for the internet, right?
02:36:31.000We talked yesterday on the podcast about Unity 2020. That was a website that Brett Weinstein had put together, developing a plausible third-party candidate.
02:36:43.000And the people that they wanted to use were...
02:36:45.000Someone very good from the left and very good from the right.
02:36:48.000The concept was Tulsi Gabbard with Dan Crenshaw, the two of them together, maybe something along those lines.
02:36:56.000They banned the Unity 2020 account because they thought that Trump was so dangerous, they didn't want any sort of potential Ross Perot type situation where some very charismatic third party moves in and takes votes away from the opposition and then Trump gets into office.
02:37:36.000They can have, what do they call it, their trust and safety commission or some shit.
02:37:39.000They can just decide, this is, we think this is, should get, and you got a bunch of woke kids that are pushing these buttons and making these decisions.
02:39:12.000So then it just becomes a question of when should the government...
02:39:15.000Which also, talk about a slippery slope, the government should come in and effectively regulate...
02:39:20.000Listen, we've already said we don't like the idea of the government regulating that if you get banned on one platform, you automatically get banned on all of them.
02:40:32.000Who's a hardcore right-wing person, and he could be a good friend.
02:40:36.000You can have a neighbor who's a hardcore socialist, and he could be a good friend.
02:40:40.000You can have good friends that maybe you don't necessarily share their opinions, but you have a certain amount of decency and a certain amount of just love that you approach these people with.
02:40:56.000And we can get along better in this way.
02:40:58.000This is one of the worst things about social media and Twitter is that we're not communicating in a manner where we're seeing each other.
02:43:37.000Because it seems like the people that are more sensitive to the mask thing tend to be Democrats, and the people that are more, I'm going to live my life with freedom, they want the mask.
02:45:43.000It might actually help somebody or save somebody or someone didn't get...
02:45:49.000We don't know for sure, but if, God forbid, that's the worst that can happen is that you have an annoying mask on for a few minutes and you don't get somebody else sick.
02:46:01.000I don't know if it stops people from getting sick.
02:46:03.000I've heard arguments in both ways and I've also seen a video where there was a doctor who was explaining that the reason why he wears a mask is during surgery and it's to stop things from getting into the wound.
02:46:14.000And he said, I'm going to show you what it looks like when you vape and you blow the vape out of a mask.
02:46:35.000But, like, until this shit is over, it makes sense that people at least want you to wear it or think it's a good idea to wear it because it makes it seem like you care.
02:47:01.000But I wish there was a better solution.
02:47:06.000I wish there was something more logical, like fucking advanced HEPA filters that suck all the bad shit out of the air, you know, so you know that if you go into an indoor location, you're in fact safer than you would be anywhere else.
02:47:18.000That's one of the things that they say that's actually pretty good about airline travel, is that the filtration systems in airline travel are pretty substantial.
02:47:27.000But I will tell you, I used to get sick almost every time I flew on a fucking plane.
02:49:56.000I gotta be honest, the beginning I enjoyed.
02:49:58.000I enjoyed the beginning of the pandemic because it just made me closer to my family, spent more time with them, just spent a lot of time just hanging out at the house.
02:50:06.000We watched movies, watched a lot of Netflix.
02:50:08.000It wasn't that bad, but then after a while, it just started to grate and grind.
02:51:51.000Meaning, and if they rate and people watch it and love it, as much so as some of the scripted and premium big budget shit, then it's a bargain for them.
02:52:00.000It's great for us because we have work.
02:52:01.000It's a bargain for them because they don't have to pay $10 million an hour, you know, an episode.
02:52:05.000Boy, the fucking convergence happened perfect for Tiger King, didn't it?
02:57:28.000Windows opened up like the the show to a totally different Demo, you know by time it gets to CNBC. That's not young urban, you know That's a different very different audience So it's just like it but it took that many years for it to kind of for me basically to get into ubers and You know someone would say hey, where you from?
02:57:43.000I say Miami you ever see cocaine Cowboys?
02:57:45.000We're like you knew like when it comes back when when when your tweet comes back to you You know when it kind of goes around the world and people are like are sending you your own meme, you know, you're like, oh, that's cool But it took years but like Kings of Miami Boom.