Rogan is a writer, podcaster, and podcaster based out of Miami, Florida. In this episode, we talk about how he got to where he is now, why he loves living in Miami, and what it's like to be a writer and a podcaster here in Los Angeles. We also talk about why he doesn't like LA and why he thinks it's better than any other city he's ever lived in, and why it's a great place to be if you don't have a wife. We also discuss why he's not a fan of LA, and how he thinks Miami is a better city than LA. And we talk a little bit about his new t-shirt that he's working on. Pre-order it here! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used w/ permission. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe, review, and tell a friend about it! I'll be looking out for you in the next episode. Timestamps: 3:00 - What do you like about this episode? 4:30 - What's your favorite part of the show? 5: What does it mean to you? 6: How do you feel about the city you're in? 7:40 - What is your favorite place in LA? 8:20 - Is it a good place to live? 9: Is it good or bad? 11:00 12: What are your favorite city? 13:00 | What are you looking for? 15:00 Is it better than a good city to live in Miami? 16:40 | What is the best place to work? 17:30 | What's the worst place to go to? 18:00 Are you looking forward to going to be in LA or not? 19:00 Do you like it? 21:00 What is a good day? 22:00 Does it feel like you're going to have a good time? 23: Is there a better place to start a new job? 24:00 Can you have it all? 25:00 How much money? 26:00 Should you care about the quality of your life? 27:00 Who do you want to be there?
00:00:24.000I realize it doesn't matter how much of my life I spend tweeting, and at this point it's been a significant percent.
00:00:31.000And I've got a cool little following, but for what I dedicate and put into it, I don't know that the ROI is quite there, especially when I can just sit back on my ass and my phone just blows up when they go, Dude, are you listening to Rogan?
00:00:44.000He's talking about cocaine cowboys again.
00:02:15.000It's the fucking homeless guy and pretty woman.
00:02:17.000Screaming on Hollywood Boulevard like that's this like that's this town to me it like it just it's it's sad to me Miami is like I think Tony Montana said it best You know it's just a great big pussy waiting to be fucked a great big pussy Miami is the city of the future and always will be you know there's just like endless Opportunity there,
00:02:37.000but it never quite gets to that that level that the famous saying is that like LA is where you go when you want to be somebody.
00:02:44.000New York is where you go when you are somebody.
00:02:46.000And Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.
00:02:49.000And that's the thesis of all of our work, in a way.
00:02:53.000That's the motto of our company, of Raconteur.
00:02:56.000It's too long to put on a t-shirt, but that's the message.
00:05:36.000The guy's putting in the work and why devalue somebody who's actually an accomplished artist and say, like, well, his art isn't worth as much as somebody else's art.
00:06:12.000No offense to his handlers, but you're surrounded by awful people.
00:06:16.000Those are the people who are supposed to keep you in check and give you some perspective on your place in the universe, which is always smaller than you think.
00:06:42.000I was a jury foreman in a criminal case in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, and it was an armed robbery case.
00:06:48.000And I... Tweet it, because that's what I do.
00:06:51.000I didn't tweet about the case, but I did my usual shit of just kind of observations of the courthouse.
00:06:55.000I noticed that it was named for this guy, Richard Gerstein, who was a state attorney who had rumored ties to Meyer Lansky, later represented Pee Wee Herman in his indecent exposure case in Florida, you know, when he was jerking off in the adult theater.
00:09:44.000I don't think he has anything to keep him in check, which is why he thinks it's funny to go on stage and interrupt people's performances or acceptance speeches.
00:10:09.000And this idea that you're going to have this one big moment where everybody dresses up like a penguin and you all get together and pretend this is our night to shine.
00:10:17.000Tom Ford's got to make a living too, dude.
00:11:18.000What we were talking about before about what's wrong with this town, and this is probably the last time we should get into it because this is such a tired subject, but...
00:11:27.000The idea that people who didn't get enough attention when they were young, so they developed this hole in their soul, they need to fill up with other people's attention, they come here, and then they seek validation through auditioning, which is one of the most ridiculous processes ever.
00:11:43.000I mean, the idea that you're going to be in line with a bunch of other people hoping to get picked, and if you do get picked, you're like, yes, yes, it's me!
00:11:51.000And then you're the one who's going to get out there, and then the camera's on you, and they put makeup on you, and they make you pretty, and the perfect lighting, It's all...
00:12:02.000You can get through that with some sense of what you're trying to do in the first place which is like trying to create something cool that people enjoy and then some sense of humility where you kind of understand that that's in the greater spectrum of the universe it's really not that significant what it is is it gets a lot of attention because we're confused and media confuses people and the idea of the one the alpha with the light on them and the one who has the microphone and the one who has the voice and That this somehow or another makes you special.
00:12:33.000Well, there's two things I have to say about that.
00:12:35.000The first of which is that I'm going to put it out there.
00:12:38.000I don't talk about it that much, but I'm going to put it out there because I think step one in the program is admitting that you have a problem.
00:13:09.000The second thing I want to say, which I probably shouldn't talk about, because you mentioned it when you were talking about the casting process and how completely toxic that is in terms of creating anything of substance.
00:13:29.000To develop a dramatic series about cocaine cowboys about, I think, eight years ago now with Brookheimer Television, Michael Bay, and Warner Horizons.
00:14:05.000You can't get a word in edgewise, really, on a conference call.
00:14:08.000I'm listening to this call, and I'm looking at the calendar, and it says, JBTV development call.
00:14:14.000And I'm staring at the word, and it loses its meaning.
00:14:16.000So I kind of, you know, the voices turn into, you know, peanuts, you know, adults.
00:14:20.000And I open a new tab in my browser, and I go to dictionary.com.
00:14:25.000I probably should have gone to urbandictionary.com, but I go to dictionary.com, and I look up the word development.
00:14:29.000And I realize, looking at the definition...
00:14:32.000That the development process in film and television and entertainment is the antithesis of the definition of the word development, which infers progress, evolution, and it's the exact opposite of that.
00:14:45.000If it doesn't stifle progress, it We're good to go.
00:15:30.000This whole scripted thing where you bring in three writers and you pay them untold amounts of money and they're from Santa Monica with nannies and they're going to write for the Miami drug scene in the late 70s.
00:15:47.000And in terms of our warped values and media manipulating our priorities, nothing breaks my heart more Then when I tweet something important that's going on in the world, and it gets like two retweets or whatever,
00:16:03.000and then you tweet something about Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber or Kanye West or Bruce Jenner, God forbid, and It gets 1,200 retweets.
00:16:14.000Or some crazy Florida man story that gets 10,000 retweets.
00:16:18.000And it breaks my heart because I'm just like, I'm contributing to the distraction here, is what I feel like.
00:16:27.000It's like, but something about, you know, the lack of accountability in politics or the public sector or, you know, the dramatic increase in police brutality and the prison population as the crime rate drops precipitously.
00:16:41.000All these things that we should kind of be concerned about as a people.
00:16:44.000And I just realized, I was like, maybe I need to take my own advice and, like, the fact that we're all so insignificant and so small and this time is so fleeting...
00:16:51.000Why not just have a good time while we're here?
00:16:53.000We're not actually going to change anything for the better.
00:17:48.000Rick Scott, the least popular governor in the history of anything anywhere, gets 47% of the vote in four more years to destroy the state of Florida.
00:18:02.000Too many old people in your state, their idea of what marijuana is is just completely fucked by propaganda.
00:18:09.000But now our elected officials, fortunately, are kind of realizing that, like, wait a second, if you look at the district results for Amendment 2, they're going, well, shit, my constituents want this.
00:18:19.000So now you do have some local politicians who are trying to, and state politicians, who are trying to introduce bills now that will bring medical marijuana to the state of Florida, because what they're trying to do is beat 2016, where not only is it a presidential election,
00:18:34.000so turnout in Florida could be as much as, I don't know, 12%.
00:19:11.000Like you said, the elderly population, which is really what helped kill, I think, recreational marijuana here, or the expansion of marijuana laws in California.
00:19:23.000People weren't, I think, getting out...
00:19:25.000Not getting out the vote, per se, but they weren't convincing the elderly population, who, by the way, probably need marijuana even more than I do.
00:20:03.000There's nothing else I could possibly think of that you could do where you could say, like, overnight we could just create...
00:20:09.000An epic industry that not only hurts no one but helps millions of people and more importantly decriminalizes a class of people in this country that we have needlessly spent untold millions of dollars to deprive them of life,
00:20:44.000Untold millions of dollars in tax revenue that would be unavailable otherwise.
00:20:48.000And most likely the same amount of people are smoking weed, which just lets you know that this is just really an inefficient use of public resources.
00:20:56.000It's an inefficient use of a commodity, which is a natural commodity that's a part of life.
00:21:02.000I mean, marijuana is a goddamn plant that's been used for thousands of years.
00:21:05.000In Florida, we had a pill mill crisis.
00:22:13.000Yeah, and the city of Miami is just one small city among the 34 in Miami-Dade County.
00:22:18.000And in fact, Dade County, get this, it used to be called Dade County or Metro-Dade County, in 97...
00:22:23.000We rebranded, we voted to change the name of the town.
00:22:26.000Like, where else other than, like, Bombay and Mumbai?
00:22:29.000Like, you think of a place that, like, changes the name.
00:22:32.000We rebranded it to Miami-Dade County to borrow, essentially, the most famous brand that we have, which is the most famous city in the area.
00:22:39.000And so, one of these cities, these 34 municipalities, we have 34 municipalities, and I think...
00:22:45.000To be fair, there's still 30 of them who haven't had their mayor arrested yet in the last two years.
00:23:12.000It'll never happen, because South Florida's revenue is what...
00:23:17.000Finance is Tallahassee, which is the state capital, which is in the panhandle in northern Florida.
00:23:21.000So that'll never happen because they live off the fat of our land and our tourism trade.
00:23:26.000So that'll never happen, but it's a great idea when you look at the politics, when you look at the demographics and the thought process, we are very much two different states.
00:23:39.000So South Florida is more democratic, it's more liberal.
00:24:17.000You see a little bit of this 305 till I die, this kind of like, you know, this spirit of like, the spirit of like...
00:24:23.000This ownership of belonging, which I keep hoping is going to manifest itself in people driving better and using their turn signals and being nicer to each other.
00:24:29.000I keep trying to say, it's not my Emmy or your Emmy.
00:25:27.000Yeah, similar looking people and we stick to our own.
00:25:30.000So in Miami, you know, you have the Jewish neighborhood, you have a Haitian neighborhood, you have an African American neighborhood, you have a Cuban neighborhood, a Cuban neighborhood, a Cuban neighborhood, a Cuban neighborhood.
00:25:39.000You have, then like I was saying, in Miami Beach even, you have Venezuela, Brazilian neighborhood.
00:25:45.000They don't, you know, even the South Americans, which...
00:25:48.000The thing they hate the most is being called Latin or Hispanic.
00:25:51.000They're very prideful and nationalistic people.
00:25:53.000They want to be associated with their nation.
00:25:56.000You can't get into an argument with anybody in Miami until you see what flag is hanging from the rearview mirror.
00:26:00.000Because, God forbid, dude, you should call an Argentinian a Venezuelan, a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Cuban, a Brazilian, or any of them a Mexican.
00:26:10.000They all hate Mexicans for some reason.
00:26:34.000Which is kind of the inspiration of Cooking Cowboys was like, that year were, like, all of the chemicals just mixed together and shit just exploded.
00:26:43.000There's that tension in Miami constantly that I think just makes it an exciting place, particularly when anybody outside of Miami, they think there's only one hotel, the Colony, on Ocean Drive.
00:26:55.000Because wherever you are in Miami, all you know is 15 blocks of Ocean Drive.
00:27:02.000Miami Dolphins games, or like the Orange Bowl game, which is at Joe Robbie Stadium, right now Sun Life Stadium, in Miami Gardens, one of the most dangerous municipalities in Miami, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world is Miami Gardens.
00:27:40.000T.D. Allman had a book called City of the Future about Miami.
00:27:45.000They say that the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow.
00:27:48.000And if you want to know what shit is going to go down in America...
00:27:51.000What calamities are going to befall this country in like the next 20 years or so?
00:27:56.000You look at what's going on in Miami or Florida, that is the barometer of whether it's the drug trade, immigration, what we're dealing with now with the browning of America, if you will, the Hispanicizing of America, and the pushback.
00:30:09.000There are Cuban kids growing up now who don't want to never get to see Cuba before they die, like a lot of their grandparents and great-grandparents never got to go back.
00:30:17.000So the sentiment was very different from Circa Elian Gonzalez.
00:30:21.000That was like the last gasp of, you know, Right-wing exile politics was really the Elian Gonzalez fiasco and so this this was a little bit calmer but like I landed I was like I just landed in a whole new world like it was an incredible and and whether you agree with policies or not it's kind of cool to see when you're hyper aware that like history is happening in your lifetime and before your eyes and that's what Miami was like in the 1980s and growing up we were even aware of it when I was most aware of it as a kid was the money
00:30:53.000We lived in this working class Jewish neighborhood in North Miami Beach and everybody was doing good.
00:30:59.000They weren't in the drug business per se, but this is the best, is the most successful case study in history for Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics theory.
00:31:07.000Because there was so much cash in Miami and it trickled down to everyone.
00:31:13.000Whatever business you were in, You were making more cash.
00:32:28.000And it's true that if you took a $20 bill or denomination of 20 or above cash in Miami and tested it, there were traces of cocaine on almost every single bill in Miami.
00:32:42.000It's an amazing time, and your documentary really captures it so brilliantly.
00:32:47.000When you highlighted that one graduating class of the police academy, that every single guy either went to jail or was murdered, every single one.
00:33:00.000I mean, that's an amazing moment in human history, where you just get to see...
00:33:06.000Essentially, it's a version of what's going on in Mexico right now.
00:33:10.000And it's actually a version, interestingly, of what's going on in the United States in terms of hiring practices and better screening people in law enforcement and people in the public sector in general.
00:33:21.000Because what happened there is that you didn't have...
00:33:25.000Good people who became cops and then the power went to their head and they became corrupt or anything like that.
00:33:31.000You had gangsters, straight up thugs, who decided, well, where better to apply my trade than hiding behind a badge?
00:33:42.000So these weren't like, these were bad guys who, it became, we had a, what happened was there was a federal judge, there was a consent decree.
00:33:50.000A federal judge, it was a civil rights action, a federal judge looked at the demographics, the changing demographics of Miami, and said, basically 100% of the Miami Police Department was white.
00:34:02.000And they said, you need a police force that better represents the community that they're policing.
00:34:08.000And so it was a federal judge who just waved his magic pen and said, hire more black officers, hire far more Hispanic officers so you have a police force that reflects the community.
00:34:24.000And what happened, I hate to say it, but it's true, they kept reducing the standards.
00:35:02.000I think you've got guys who are sort of naturally aggressive.
00:35:04.000You have a steroid epidemic in the police departments that the unions have completely precluded municipalities from being able to test officers.
00:35:14.000I think you have, again, an epidemic that affects a certain minority or percentage of officers and departments, but it's still an issue that you don't want guys like that with the ability to deprive people of life, liberty, and property.
00:35:27.000Yeah, the steroid thing is absolutely legit.
00:35:30.000I got pulled over by a dude who looked like Ronnie Coleman, who, by the way, was a police officer.
00:35:35.000Ronnie Coleman, who was Mr. Olympia, was a police officer.
00:36:35.000You better not bust people for drugs, motherfucker, because you're on a ton of them.
00:36:41.000Steroids, call them drugs or hormones or whatever you want to call them.
00:36:45.000The idea, and I've talked to guys in martial arts that say, I have to be prepared because the people that I'm running into out on the street, I'm running into really bad guys and I want to be enhanced.
00:36:59.000I'm not that familiar with it, but like The research, I understand, it fucks with your mind.
00:37:06.000Like, your temper, your anger, your obviously- Most definitely.
00:37:47.000But my point being is that I assume that some of these guys, you could take a small amount of steroids and probably it would help you recover.
00:37:58.000But the problem with those guys is they can never get off of it.
00:38:02.000Like Joey Diaz has a friend that's been on steroids since 1987. A-Rod?
00:39:07.000There's a real issue that we're all, as the mixed martial arts community, sort of coming to grips with now.
00:39:13.000But as a police officer, I think being calm and having a sense of peacefulness, of being able to diffuse situations, that was my thing about the Trayvon Martin thing.
00:39:30.000When everybody was talking about George Zimmerman and The people that were supporting Zimmerman, they were like, you know, hey, George Zimmerman got attacked, and George Zimmerman, I'm like, okay, here's the problem with that.
00:39:39.000George Zimmerman was a fucking moron, first of all, first and foremost.
00:39:43.000He wanted to be a cop, they wouldn't let him be a cop, which is fucking bad, which means you gotta be a real moron, you know, because I've met some morons that are cops, you know?
00:39:52.000Most cops I meet are great folks, but we all know a few idiots that became cops.
00:39:57.000This guy was too fucking stupid to be one of those idiots.
00:40:00.000You know, they were like, you're too dumb.
00:41:11.000Yeah, and he gets out of the car, and this kid was on the phone with this girl, and he's like, there's some dude following me.
00:41:17.000He's in his car, he's getting out of his car, and she was worried for him.
00:41:21.000As it turns out, he was a creepy dude with a gun who was stalking this kid who was walking back to his dad's house with an iced tea and Skittles, for crying out loud.
00:41:29.000I actually wasn't aware that he didn't have an outfit, which is more ridiculous.
00:41:32.000No, he's like a volunteer neighborhood watchman guy.
00:43:11.000That changes the entire dynamic of this thing?
00:43:13.000Well, there was a girl that was hanging around the Comedy Store way back in the day that actually said that to one of my friends.
00:43:18.000She was a porn star, and she said, you know, he, he, somehow they got into this conversation, and she said, you can fuck me as long as you have a camera in the room.
00:44:01.000And second of all, they're just creating crime that wouldn't otherwise exist unless this cop dressed as a hooker was standing on the corner.
00:44:08.000They've actually passed laws in certain states that make it legal for cops to have sex with prostitutes.
00:44:23.000Why would anybody think that there's two legal systems here in this country?
00:44:27.000I wanna make sure that none of these whores are out there sucking dicks, so I'm gonna go get my dick sucked just to ensure she knows I'm legit.
00:44:35.000I'm pretty sure, by the way, a contract is offer acceptance and consideration.
00:44:42.000I don't know that you actually have to deliver on it in order to say the contract, you know, this is an illegal contract that you've entered into, you're under arrest.
00:44:49.000I can't imagine that that's necessary to go into court and say, no, no, your honor, she's really a hooker.
00:45:01.000Well, my friend got busted in a sting operation in New York, and he was flirting with these girls, and one of them said something like, you want to party or something like that?
00:45:27.000I mean, he was a drunk guy coming out of a bar flirting with some girls that he didn't know were cops, and they were manipulating the language in order to get him to say that.
00:45:37.000Like, he was just being a silly goose.
00:45:39.000He was just being a silly guy trying to make—he's a comic, so he's just trying to make these girls laugh like, $10,000!
00:47:16.000On the day of the Zimmerman verdict...
00:47:21.000There was a picture that had been on the internet for some time from like Trayvon Martin's 11th birthday or something like that where his parents or whomever got him a birthday cake with the U logo.
00:47:50.000I'm going to post this picture to the Facebook page.
00:47:55.000And I can't tell you how all social media hell broke loose in that community.
00:48:00.000And I would venture to say that you could write papers on the state of America's race relations based solely on the comments from that image.
00:48:34.000First of all, that's not what he looked like.
00:48:38.000When, you know, when he was killed, and they post, like, one of those fake pictures of, like, some rapper that, like, people claimed was Trayvon, and, like, things that were debunked, you know, via scopes and otherwise, like, you know, months or years earlier, and just, like, the craziness that ensued,
00:48:54.000and I'm like, hey, listen, you find a picture of, uh...
00:48:58.000George Zimmerman in a U sweater or whatever, I'll post that too.
00:49:14.000Yeah, usually I sort of put a break in it because there's like air in between, but like, yeah, but like, yeah, that's how you throw up the U. So, essentially, but let me get to the point here.
00:49:23.000Essentially, it was white people who were being racist against Trayvon Martin and were upset that you were posting this image of him with this U-cake.
00:49:31.000No one was objectively looking at the facts of the situation.
00:49:34.000They saw a black kid in a hoodie, and right away it was Thug who got what was coming to him.
00:50:34.000About this young girl being kidnapped and raped and abused and beaten within an inch of her life, and then he says, now imagine she's white.
00:50:41.000Meaning, like, just take the same set of facts and put your kid there.
00:51:00.000Well, my point was initially when we started talking about this is that he's so socially unskilled that another guy who maybe was a good cop or another guy who was good with people would have seen this young kid walking and said, how you doing, brother?
00:51:25.000I mean, how many of those exchanges between two human beings could vary radically depending on the social skills of the person that's quote-unquote in a position of power?
00:51:36.000And that's an issue with what we were talking about earlier with steroids distorting people's aggression, distorting people's perception of danger or of their power over a situation or What's just and what's ethical?
00:51:51.000Law enforcement officers are allegedly trained to de-escalate.
00:51:57.000Too often we're seeing these stories, thanks to the internet, of situations where calling the police turns an otherwise benign situation potentially deadly.
00:52:08.000Because even if these are isolated incidents...
00:52:11.000The proliferation of them and our exposure to them now, thanks to the internet, is creating an environment where kids are actually feeling like, maybe I shouldn't call the police.
00:52:26.000But I started to lose a lot of, like, when I say friends, I mean, you know, social media friends, friends in quotes, friends and followers on Twitter.
00:52:34.000And I finally just, like, after the verdict, I was like, listen...
00:52:37.000It's all good if you unfollow me for my Trayvon Zimmerman tweets.
00:52:42.000If Zimmerman had unfollowed Trayvon, we wouldn't even be fucking talking about this.
00:52:55.000This fucking kid getting on top of him and beating his fucking ass, and then he shoots him.
00:52:59.000You know, I just wish someone had taught Trayvon a little better, and he could have put that fucker to sleep before he ever got the gun out.
00:55:57.000Jumped out of the car and opened fire.
00:55:58.000See what's more disturbing to me is the fact that you have a trend where You have a version of events perpetuated by the police, which is usually always the first story you ever read.
00:56:08.000It's a press release or the statement from the police.
00:56:11.000So, it's never innocent until proven guilty.
00:56:13.000It's like, we're charging this guy or we arrested this guy.
00:56:15.000I've had friends that were arrested for resisting arrest that didn't do a goddamn thing.
00:58:44.000They take all their cash, all of it, take all their marijuana, all of it, and they say, we are going to process your case, and then they do nothing.
00:59:00.000But they take that money, and then because these guys don't want to go after that money to try to get it back, because then the DEA comes at them even harder, they lose that money.
00:59:08.000And they have to pay to fight to get that money back.
00:59:10.000Well, probably as much in legal fees as was stolen in the first place, so it'll cancel each other out.
00:59:15.000Yeah, and it's not like you could sue the DEA to get your legal fees paid.
01:01:07.000These are rash generalizations, and they're based on this premise that anybody could actually do that job correctly, which I think is wrong.
01:01:16.000The public sector, as far as I'm concerned, should be held to a higher standard of accountability, not a lower or no accountability.
01:01:22.000And if you are going to have the power and the authority to deprive people of life, liberty, and property, you need to be held to a higher standard.
01:01:29.000And the lack of accountability that police officers see happen all over the country feeds this mental idea that you might...
01:01:38.000That might be a mental deficiency, might be a form of PTSD, that you might actually believe that you're above the law, that the laws don't apply to you, because as you said, only in the most extreme and extraordinary cases are police officers ever prosecuted.
01:01:52.000And I don't think there needs to be a, or there should be any kind of referendum or any kind of, I don't know, like...
01:02:03.000An idea that there's a certain number of police officers that need to be...
01:02:19.000For the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
01:02:22.000And so when I think of race riots, you think of Detroit or Watts or Rodney King.
01:02:27.000But Miami was the race riot capital of America in the 1980s.
01:02:33.000We had no less than three incidents, all involving police officers, mostly white and Hispanic police officers, shooting and killing, or in the case of the first one, beating to death.
01:02:47.000And they all resulted in horrific race riots.
01:02:52.000Some neighborhoods in Miami have never fully recovered from the 1980 riots.
01:02:56.000You still see empty, undeveloped, entire city blocks that were burned down.
01:03:01.000During those 1980 riots that people have not come back and reinvested in those African-American communities.
01:03:08.000And we had that in 1980, 83, and 89. When the eyes of the world were on Miami for the Super Bowl, it was supposed to be, oh, we get all this good publicity.
01:03:59.000You, for a short period of time, went back to actually being someone who withholds the peace, or enforces the peace, or keeps the peace, and then from there, they went back to being revenue collectors.
01:04:11.000Because that's what the fuck is really Policing for profit, absolutely.
01:04:14.000When that kid, Eric Garner, that gentleman, which kid, he's older, that guy got dragged to the ground and choked, didn't have any loose cigarettes on him, wasn't selling anything, and people are like, oh, that guy had 30 different prior arrests, and oh, he resisted arrest.
01:04:30.000When you take a fucking innocent person and you violate their rights and you grab them around the neck and throw them to the ground, that should have never happened in the first place, and the only reason it happened, because of taxes.
01:04:48.000And even if he were, which is to say that he was facing the death penalty for whatever he was being accused of, that's not how we carry out justice in this country.
01:04:56.000You don't get choked to death on the street like an animal.
01:06:14.000We have this chapter 119, these public record laws.
01:06:16.000We call them sunshine laws, where everything's in the sunshine.
01:06:18.000Doesn't quite always work that way in Florida, but a sunny place for shady people and all that.
01:06:23.000But he just does public record requests nonstop, and so people start leaking stuff to him before he even requests it.
01:06:29.000And he got an email that this, like, third shift, this overnight shift in Little Haiti neighborhood...
01:06:36.000That the city of Miami police's arrest quota.
01:06:39.000They actually had, from like the shift sergeant, send out an email with quotas that included arrest quotas, meaning that each officer had to arrest, effectuate an arrest for what he didn't specify, but they had a minimum number of arrests they had to perform during a shift.
01:07:02.000What would happen in this country if the entire country, if all 350 million people agreed, okay, even you fucking hardcore criminals, no one's going to do anything wrong for a month.
01:07:56.000Every time I try to lay off what's right or wrong, I get right back on Twitter and I'm like, this shit's wrong and people need to know about it.
01:08:12.000It goes back to this sense of self-worth.
01:08:15.000I think we all have, by and large, this sense of self-worth and preservation, which might very well be off the charts, but I think actually makes us a little bit more civilized, because it's like, well, I have too much to lose.
01:08:26.000Maybe I'm not going to just rape, rob, and murder.
01:08:41.000One of the issues that we have with the internet is that, you know, you have a real issue with people stalking, harassing, trolling people, being vicious to people.
01:08:50.000Strangers too, like people that don't even know.
01:08:52.000Because there's no social consequences.
01:08:57.000If you're looking at a person and you take a person and you show them a picture of them with 15 dicks in their mouth, which, by the way, I'm not really talking about that because that's usually pretty funny.
01:09:05.000There's a lot of pictures of me with dicks in my mouth.
01:09:07.000I've never once tried to take them off the internet.
01:10:45.000I call them sad, lonely Twitter trolls.
01:10:47.000Facebook is a little bit better because with Facebook, you can click on the person's profile and you see, oh, this is Mike Jones from blah, blah, blah street.
01:11:07.000I think that this, we're in a stage of almost an adolescent stage of interactivity where what we're experiencing now is just, it's a weird like bridge between total connectivity.
01:11:23.000The complete absence of any form of privacy is on the way.
01:11:32.000Somebody might come up with something and they'll say, look, this one thing that we're going to implement is going to be unbelievable as far as exchanging information, as far as our knowledge base.
01:11:42.000The actual IQ of human beings is going to double within weeks.
01:11:45.000We're going to change the world, but no more privacy.
01:11:49.000And you think we're in like the learning curve?
01:11:52.000We are essentially, we're driving around in Model A's, but one day someone's gonna invent a fucking 911 GT3. And you know, if you went back and took time when Henry Ford's driving around in a stupid fucking shitty car, you know...
01:12:08.000And you pulled up beside him in a Mustang Shelby GT500 and go, check this shit out.
01:12:36.000I just think of how much the world has changed.
01:12:39.000We're working on a doc about 9-11 right now, and it's been like 14 years, which is incredible, because it seems like such a modern historical event, but it seems like just yesterday, and when you consider how much the world has changed,
01:12:54.000particularly technologically, there was no Twitter.
01:13:17.000And I think, like, what you're talking about on your website where all these people are getting upset and, you know, the Trayvon Martin thing and people are interacting and it's racism and all this.
01:13:27.000All that stuff, I think, is a byproduct of the monkey DNA that we still carry around in our bodies.
01:13:35.000And I think we're on our way to transcending that in some very strange way where it's not going to matter what part of the world you're from.
01:14:29.000More so within the last few years than ever before.
01:14:32.000And, you know, you've seen ridiculous things, though, like...
01:14:35.000The social justice warriors, these really weird white people that are trying so hard to get black people to love them that they just go out of their way to just be outrageously progressive to the point where they're actually prejudiced against other white people.
01:14:52.000I mean, I've seen some ridiculous shit where I saw this one guy who was quoting about Osama bin Laden saying that I will never celebrate someone's death You know, even if they were a horrible person, you know,
01:15:08.000and then the same guy quoted about Christopher Hitchens, you know, good riddance.
01:15:19.000But what he is is the uber version of the social justice warrior, the unfuckable white dude trying so hard to To get women and black people to love him because he just is completely insubstantial in any real form in the normal context of our culture.
01:15:36.000I find thinking about race so much is kind of racist.
01:15:41.000So the more progressive you get about these issues, the more you're thinking about sensitivity.
01:15:46.000I think that's an overcorrection, to say the least.
01:16:01.000That trend, that like, what was that, like the late 90s, early zeroes, when like hip-hop was peaking, they did a black, there was the Black Honeymooners, I don't remember, there was the Black Airplane, was Soulplane.
01:16:54.000The tanning of America, one nation under hip-hop.
01:16:57.000As long as there's no blackface involved.
01:16:59.000And it was a book called The Tanning of America, written by a guy named Steve Stout, who was a major duty guy in the record business and is now a bigwig in the marketing and advertising world.
01:17:11.000And his thesis was that hip-hop culture...
01:17:16.000Led to the election of the first black president.
01:17:18.000The idea that a generation of Americans that grew up immersed with the music, the fashion, how it infiltrated the Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the consumer goods sector, and we just grew up immersed in this culture,
01:17:50.000I think it was actually, the venue was called The Black House.
01:17:54.000And it was an event that sort of celebrated the African American cinema and culture that was going on at Sundance.
01:17:59.000And so we're going to do like this panel discussion because the movie wasn't done yet.
01:18:04.000We're going there and someone had said to me, for the first time, we've been working on this project for almost two years, or a year and a half, and someone said to me for the first time, like, particularly, I guess they were concerned about that environment, the Black House, which turned out to be a fantastic experience,
01:18:19.000but they said, well, what if somebody says, like, well, why are you guys doing it?
01:18:25.000You know, you two, like, white Jewish dudes from Miami.
01:18:28.000Why are you guys doing this documentary?
01:18:33.000And the thought had never crossed my mind.
01:19:14.000And then I'm like, and what if somebody else brings it up publicly or asks me about it or what the hell am I going to say or what the hell am I going to do?
01:20:08.000A little white Jewish guy, like me, was responsible for the first all-black sitcoms on television.
01:20:16.000Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times, All in the Family, which really brought the discussion of race to mainstream television in the way stand-up comics were doing it, obviously well before that, but said, we're going to go on network television and have serious conversations about politics and race and poverty in this country.
01:22:36.000Has these very modest houses on a pretty reasonably sized lot.
01:22:41.000So you have a little house and you have a nice size yard.
01:22:45.000And so Dada 5000, Daphir Harris, he's this guy who actually, there's a video of him, a YouTube video that we use in the movie, of him benching in his mom's yard there in prime.
01:22:58.000He's bench pressing and Team Kimbo comes rolling by and sees this guy, this beast, and is like, I'm going to fight Ray Mercer in Atlantic City.
01:23:49.000He KO'd him so viciously with this one punch.
01:23:52.000I mean, he was one within the first 15-20 seconds of the fight.
01:23:56.000Just hit him flush on the chin and knocked him dead.
01:23:59.000So you're seeing that in a legal sanctioned environment where the fighters had checkups, they were weighed in, there's a doctor, an ambulance.
01:24:06.000A lot of these are on Indian reservations and stuff.
01:24:09.000Well, imagine it in a fucking backyard.
01:24:31.000The vast majority of the community is below the poverty level.
01:24:37.000Unemployment is like a third higher than the national average.
01:24:40.000And you basically have a community with very little hope and very little opportunity.
01:24:44.000You've criminalized a vast majority of the male population so they can't get work.
01:24:49.000And they think that their best hope Is to fight in these illegal, unsanctioned, bare-knuckle backyard brawls, upload the footage to YouTube, and hopefully get discovered by a professional MMA promoter or trainer, and try to go pro.
01:25:31.000I'm thinking that's old in the world of the average age.
01:25:35.000Heavyweights tend to age better, but he fought at 205, I believe, in the UFC. I think there's something going on with heavyweights where your body takes longer to learn how to move all that mass.
01:25:51.000If I had a look at it that way, lighter weight fighters also rely much more on speed and reflexes.
01:25:57.000I think as you get larger, you tend to rely more on skills and more on It's just sort of an understanding of what your body can and can't do.
01:26:06.000They have smaller gas tanks, just undeniably.
01:26:10.000There's no way a heavyweight, unless you're Cain Velasquez, who's really a fucking freak of nature, can fight at the same sort of a pace that a lighter weight guy can.
01:26:18.000So the UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez is one of the most unique athletes I've ever seen.
01:26:30.000Kane, who is an amazing fighter and one of the, I think, he might, is a good argument, he might be the best heavyweight of all time, but his body keeps breaking.
01:26:39.000He keeps blowing out knees and shoulders.
01:26:41.000It's because he's so mentally tough and he's so driven and focused and so intense and dedicated that he pushes through injuries.
01:26:50.000You know, when you push through injuries, what happens is they just break further.
01:26:53.000You know, I mean, you can't push through a knee injury.
01:26:56.000What you're doing is, yeah, you gotta get surgery or you gotta heal or you gotta figure out a way To recuperate the scenario or alter your training so that this doesn't happen in the future.
01:27:06.000But they're all just so fucking tough, man, which is what made them great wrestlers in the first place and what allowed them to transition into MMA. But Kane has this insane gas tank where he just doesn't get fucking tired.
01:27:17.000He just overwhelms guys because he's got so much fucking cardio.
01:27:27.000Different people have different, like, natural VO2 maxes.
01:27:30.000It's just, it's one of those things like some people have more fast twitch muscle fiber, some people have thicker bones, some people have more, they can just, especially for some reason it seems like Mexicans in particular have very good cardio.
01:27:43.000I mean, it could conceivably be that a lot of Mexican folks come from really hard-working environments, and they've been forced to work labor jobs, like a lot of them, especially second, third generation, whose parents had an arduous trek to get over here from Mexico.
01:27:59.000It could be mental, it could be just more mentally tough, or it could be some physiological aspect.
01:28:05.000But my point is that he's a rarity in that his gas tank is just insane.
01:28:10.000Most heavyweights, as they get older, they kind of learn how to pace themselves better.
01:29:58.000Whenever I hear about people doing shit for money or for a paycheck, I was just like, listen.
01:30:02.000I did Cocaine Cowboys 2, Hustlin' with the Godmother.
01:30:05.000I directed a movie called Cocaine Cowboys 2, Hustlin', not even Hustlin', Hustlin' with an apostrophe at the end of it, with the Godmother.
01:32:34.000But she didn't like other dogs, because if other dogs came near her, she felt like it was a competition for love.
01:32:38.000Like, if you came near another dog, that other dog was going to get that love.
01:32:43.000So she would get upset at that dog for stealing love from her, and she would try to attack it.
01:32:47.000So I loved her equally, even though she was an idiot, you know?
01:32:51.000But it wasn't her fault that she was an idiot, you know?
01:32:54.000I realized from then on I would never get a dog that's not a puppy.
01:32:58.000You gotta raise them from the time they're puppies because then you don't have any phobias or weirdness.
01:33:04.000You get a chance to raise them around people and raise them around other dogs and socialize them and it's an important aspect of humans just like it's an important aspect of any other animal that's in our culture.
01:33:17.000So, you know, you can love your fucking shitty kids just as much as you love your good kids because it's partly your fault that they're shitty.
01:33:39.000I think there's nature versus nurture, but I think that...
01:33:42.000Because there are people who endure...
01:33:45.000What I would consider and many other people consider intolerable stress and abuse and don't become psychotic assholes.
01:33:53.000And then there are people who are raised in the most loving and nurturing and permissive and enabling environments and become deranged lunatics.
01:34:05.000I think those people that become deranged lunatics, they probably didn't get the attention that they deserved, or they probably didn't get the...
01:34:10.000Look, raising a human being is not as simple as just sending the kids to school and talking to them in bed at night.
01:34:34.000It's like you were talking about the chemical makeup of a fighter and how different bones and different bodies respond differently to different stimulus and depending on your size and your shape and your training and your steroids or whatever.
01:34:49.000You're born with a certain chemical balance and I'm not saying that can't shift or change with time but I think there are certain inclinations that we are born with.
01:34:58.000Good or bad that cannot be rectified by a proper or positive upbringing.
01:36:35.000I just don't buy that unless you have some like real issue, like a real brain issue, where there's like some part of the mind It develops decay or there's a tumor, there's an injury, there's something where there's a disconnect,
01:37:28.000You're saying that some people, no matter what you do, no matter how much effort you put in, how much love you give these kids, and how much you expose them to different environments, you give them different tasks and different learning opportunities, they're still going to be shitheads.
01:38:37.000But I'm saying it's also possible that they have mental defects.
01:38:39.000That's all I'm really talking about, which is what you've already said, which is that there are people who are wired, is what I'm saying, to propensities to violence, to be short-fused.
01:39:10.000Well, it's this world, though, where, and you're going to get on me about this, too, because I don't have kids, but it's this world where everybody's looking for an answer for why their kid's an asshole, for why their kid's acting out, for why their kid is too sensitive, for why their kid...
01:39:21.000And everybody needs a diagnosis, and or a drug that can help...
01:39:50.000My friend Lainey, her and her boyfriend found these fucking cats underneath the house, and this cat had given birth to these cats, and she was giving away kittens.
01:39:58.000Again, I have to take in strays, so I took this fucking stray in, and this crazy fucking cat was in my house.
01:40:04.000And learning from feral cats, you realize, like, oh, okay.
01:40:17.000And that is the case with human beings.
01:40:20.000You develop a certain amount of pathways in your mind, in your intellect, In the way you comprehend the world, in the way you interact with your environment, that's based upon the dangers that you've been exposed to, based upon the input that you've had.
01:40:37.000And once those pathways are defined in a very violent and negative way, or whether you've been ignored, or whether you've been spoiled to the point where you could scream at the help and yell at the housekeepers and everybody bows down in front of you because you're a Rockefeller or something along those lines,
01:41:54.000Some people get 5 miles in, they're like, I can't fucking do this.
01:41:57.000And for whatever reason, they decide to take a nap.
01:41:59.000They decide to sit on the side of the highway and stop.
01:42:01.000Some people, they decide, you know what, my mom was a prostitute, my dad was a junkie, and I am not going to be like that.
01:42:09.000I'm going to learn and I'm never going to have a drink.
01:42:11.000I have a friend who's a great guy and his grandmother used to lock him in his fucking room and lock the door and leave him there for the weekend so she could get drunk.
01:42:40.000It's because when he was a kid, he was exposed to this horrible situation.
01:42:44.000But other people could have been exposed to that and become a serial killer.
01:42:47.000Other people could have been exposed to the same situation Right, that's what I'm saying because they're predisposed to being good or bad people.
01:44:02.000Most likely what you're seeing is people that do not want to take responsibility for the fact they did a shitty job of developing a human being.
01:44:09.000That might be by and large true, but you do have...
01:44:11.000But schizophrenia is a legitimate mental defect.
01:44:17.000I don't believe you're raised to become...
01:44:19.000Yeah, but we're talking about diseases.
01:44:51.000But what I'm saying is that there are people who have a predisposition towards certain behavior and there are people who may or may not be raised right.
01:46:22.000Their son is fucked up, man, and they're smart, but they don't have the time, and they're not around the kid all the time, and the kid's terrified, and he fucking screams in the middle of the night all the time.
01:48:58.000Who would be like, oh, I want to go to work and leave my three children in the care of some other person who is not responsible for them in the absolute way that I would be responsible.
01:49:17.000But you also had an example of a perfectly well-adjusted, outstanding citizen and upright citizen and human being who came from a horrible environment and overcame that.
01:49:51.000What I'm saying is there's a direct response to this guy living this horrible life as a child to him saying, I am not going to be like that anymore.
01:49:59.000I'm going to make sure I don't do drugs.
01:50:02.000And this is because he lived in this horrible environment where he saw the direct effects of someone being an alcoholic and ignoring their children.
01:50:08.000He learned what not to do instead of what to do.
01:50:10.000But he's still a shitty parent, you know?
01:50:16.000It's a very complex issue, raising children.
01:50:18.000And it's an issue where people conveniently, intelligent people, conveniently like to skirt the responsibility of what it is to raise their children.
01:50:39.000And when I do that, I'm going to hang out with them, and I'm going to play, and we're going to have a good time, and we're going to talk about stuff, and I think it's a responsibility that a parent has.
01:50:49.000I think people evolve toward that, not only in terms of becoming a parent and your priorities change, but as I get older, I can sense that happening.
01:51:06.000I mean, it allows us to become successful to the point where we have less stress, you have a nice home, you have food on the table, you can take care of your needs.
01:51:13.000But when it gets past a certain point, you know, my friend Brian Callen said it best.
01:51:17.000He said, you want to be successful enough where you don't worry about what it costs to go out to dinner.
01:51:22.000He goes, after that, it's all bullshit.
01:51:47.000At a certain point in time, you trap yourself with your own ambition, and you get yourself into a situation where you realize, oh, this is not the smart way to do this.
01:51:58.000I've just been caught up in this zero-sum game, this idea that you have to continue to grow.
01:52:36.000What if this is the least important meeting of our careers?
01:52:40.000And it dawned on me, it's like, it's something kind of outside of our, it's in the entertainment industry, but it's kind of outside of our core competency as nonfiction filmmakers, and it certainly would advance us in the industry, but I was just like, if nothing comes of it, or it doesn't go well,
01:52:56.000this most important meeting of our careers...
01:58:32.000I was a kid who finally got the respect that we would sit around in a circle and they'd be passing the joint and they would just pass it like around me.
01:58:38.000You know, they would know not to even...
01:59:01.000I thought it was supposed to be like this chill high, like this mellow high.
01:59:03.000Timothy Leary had a great expression about weed, not about weed, rather, about LSD, that LSD induces states of paranoia and psychosis in people that have never tried it.
01:59:17.000Like, that people are terrified of LSD and, you know, just like...
01:59:21.000I mean, like, I felt if I did Coke, you'd have to scrape me off the fucking ceiling with a shovel or, like, a rake or something, because I would just, like...
02:00:25.000You know, the cannabinoid receptors are like, what the fuck is this?
02:00:28.000You know, it's like the same argument against artificial sweeteners, but to a much more heightened level because the way it's interacting with your mind is, you know...
02:00:37.000I just think, again, I think it's traces, marijuana prohibition is like traces of this kind of like racism we were talking about earlier, this idea that you can't get past it.
02:00:46.000If you objectively analyze, we're talking about Trayvon Zimmerman, if you just objectively analyze the facts of the situation, there's really only one reality there.
02:00:55.000And it's incredible to me how people, how race gets in the way of blocking things.
02:00:59.000Their access to that reality, but it's the same thing with marijuana prohibition.
02:01:02.000It's a plant that grows out of the earth that is less dangerous than poison ivy, which is legal.
02:01:23.000Not them, but, like, these pharmaceutical companies who are creating poison.
02:01:26.000Toxic chemicals that people, because a doctor writes you a prescription for it, gleefully hand it to their wives, their kids, their parents.
02:01:35.000Like, that is a mindset that's, like, ingrained in us as a result of just, like, a life of propaganda and just mind-fucking.
02:01:46.000I mean, it's literally just brainwashing that you could think, oh...
02:01:50.000This plant that grows out of the ground, you shouldn't roll that and smoke it.
02:01:55.000We do it with cigars, we do it with cigarettes.
02:01:56.000But, as soon as you start adding crazy shit to it, like nicotine or chemicals, that makes it legal?
02:02:07.000Alcohol is one of the most devastating drugs.
02:02:09.000But why are people okay with it, by and large?
02:02:12.000Well, it's because people are okay with culture.
02:02:14.000When culture is firmly established and you grow up in that environment, it seems normal to put a fucking plate in your lips and stretch your lips out.
02:02:22.000It seems normal to put a bone through your nose.
02:02:25.000Because all the elders, they have the scarification on their face.
02:02:47.000They had the snow day out east with the blizzard a couple weeks ago.
02:02:51.000And so instead of sitting around, dicking around at home, because it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone thought it was going to be, they decided instead of watching TV or playing video games, or I don't know, smoking the pot, they said, let's grab a couple shovels, go door to door, and make five bucks and offer to clean people's,
02:03:48.000Jersey is a state where people can't even pump their own gas, for crying out loud.
02:03:52.000Does it say the cops' name so we can say it on the air?
02:03:55.000Police Chief Michael Giannone told MyJerseyCentral.com the two teens were not arrested or issued a ticket, but were stopped because the town was in a so-called state of emergency in advance of the coming storm.
02:04:09.000Shut the fuck up, emergency, you pussy.
02:04:44.000You could go around the neighborhood as a Good Samaritan, shovel everybody out, but the cops wouldn't have a problem with that.
02:04:49.000If you're not giving the government, like I said, if you're not paying the government 25 cents to make a dime, because how much are these kids going to make that they could go out and spend, I don't know, $300 on a permit so that for one day, on a snow day when they're not at school, they could go around and make five bucks a driveway?
02:05:03.000I think cops should investigate really hot women that date these old, decrepit old men that are barely alive, and they drive around in Rolls Royces and shit.
02:05:12.000You should be like, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
02:06:12.000The Seminoles would never confirm this, but there was a rumor that they actually sent a witch doctor or something to kind of de-poltergeist or whatever the room.
02:06:23.000And then they completely redid the room, changed the number.
02:07:31.000But what's interesting is that now, and this might go to your earlier point, that it's affluenza, there are no Native Americans that work at these casinos anymore.
02:07:43.000They sit at home, get the check, Every month from the revenue.
02:07:48.000And now they're hiring white boys to wrestle alligators and do all the Indian cultural, Native American, rather cultural shit.
02:07:55.000And there's no Indians in an Indian casino anymore.
02:07:59.000They're all just kind of living off the fat of the land and getting their checks and not incentivized to motivate or do anything.
02:08:06.000And you see higher rates of alcoholism, of drug abuse, and they're just sitting around getting checks and a lot of them are dying.
02:08:15.000Well, that's always been an issue on Native American reservations, right?
02:08:24.000I mean, it's like essentially they were wiped out except for a few survivors who were then forced to assimilate in this new, strange culture and then made aware of it painfully every step of the way when you're growing up that you were the loser in this cultural genocide attack.
02:08:42.000Seminoles are unconquered, they always were.
02:09:07.000I work at that club every time I'm down there.
02:09:09.000I prefer that club over the bigger one in West Palm, which I get more money at.
02:09:13.000It's like a more intimate environment.
02:09:15.000I go there and I sacrifice a little money and I have a better time sometimes.
02:09:19.000My girlfriend was doing a project for school a few months ago, and it was about the...
02:09:24.000Appropriation of Native American culture and how it's one of the few races where it's still okay.
02:09:31.000It's a whole Redskins phenomenon, you know, like how it's still okay to be racist and to create kind of like minstrel-esque images of them.
02:10:06.000Because that's an honorable, I mean, that's like, you're being proud of what these people were at their finest or at their most noble and powerful.
02:10:15.000People still get offended I'm offended by the mascot tree, though.
02:12:19.000Look, you could still have the same exact team, the same exact athletes, the same exact pride, and just let's get together and have a contest to come up with a new name.
02:12:28.000And you would get people that would be so happy about that.
02:12:31.000And the publicity from that contest alone.
02:12:33.000I'm sorry, but we're going to keep it out of tradition and because our fans aren't offended by it.
02:15:22.000We were actually doing Cocaine Cowboys 2, hustling with the godmother in Oakland, in Brookfield Village.
02:15:28.000And I had to drive the equipment truck back and return the equipment at the end of that shoot.
02:15:34.000So I'm driving in this great big truck with, I don't know, untold thousands of dollars worth of equipment that I've got to return to this house.
02:16:26.000And I think they were just coming out of the 60s with that transition where, in terms of censorship, Where you could start pushing the envelope in the 60s.
02:16:36.000By the 70s, there was no envelope anymore in just mainstream cinema.
02:17:14.000You know, it's like, they're fun, but, you know, it's a fun movie to watch, but it doesn't give you a feeling like you're actually watching something that could actually be taking place.
02:18:04.000We did this doc called Raw Deal, A Question of Consent.
02:18:07.000And Raw Deal was just our working title.
02:18:09.000And it was about the alleged rape of a stripper at the Delta Chi fraternity house at the University of Florida in Gainesville in the spring of 99. And the entire night's events were captured on two video cameras.
02:18:20.000And so we used the video footage and then we interviewed the stripper and we interviewed some of the fraternity men.
02:18:25.000So the thing about the footage is that it was placed in the public record.
02:18:29.000I was talking about these very liberal public record laws we have in Florida.
02:18:32.000So it was placed in the public record and it became like the cause celeb in Gainesville.
02:18:54.000Well, they were in the Ocala National Forest, which you might be familiar with, and they were doing a Big Brother, Little Brother pledge event.
02:19:18.000So we go to Edinburgh and all the questions, which is kind of interesting because most of the questions in America were about this controversy, which I'll get into in a minute, but almost all the questions in Edinburgh We're about what the hell the Greek system is.
02:21:03.000So the second videotape doesn't show that much more.
02:21:06.000It just shows alternate angles of the same action rather than...
02:21:10.000So what happens is there's now a misdemeanor filing a false police report case against this woman.
02:21:15.000And as a result, the media says, well, we want to see that this is evidence in a criminal case.
02:21:20.000Her lawyer argues that under rape shield laws that her identity should be protected and this videotape footage should be protected because it depicts a rape.
02:21:27.000A judge viewed the footage and says, this ain't no rape.
02:21:31.000And they release the footage to the public.
02:21:33.000And there's a backlog at the state attorney's office and the clerk of courts there.
02:21:37.000Because they're like making copies of the videotape and sending it to people.
02:21:41.000So in Gainesville, if you were the first person on your block to get the tape...
02:23:24.000I only heard about it from these guys.
02:23:25.000And I'm like, two reasonable, educated, similar demo guys watch the same footage and diametrically disagree about whether or not they witnessed a consensual or non-consensual sex act.
02:23:37.000And I'm like, we gotta see this footage.
02:23:38.000So in a sense, it's kind of analogous to this Trayvon Martin thing in sort of a way, but you actually have a video.
02:24:16.000What I think is that you have one of the most oft-committed, least reported crimes in the history of man.
02:24:22.000Most of these crimes, as they say, are not like the masked man in the bushes.
02:24:27.000Stranger rape makes up the minority of rape.
02:24:30.000It's mostly acquaintance or date rape.
02:24:33.000What I think though is that you have a world where we expect videotaped footage to tell an objective truth.
02:24:39.000To say, here's the surveillance video, there's the guy robbing the store, let's go find him, case closed.
02:24:44.000When you have a crime like this that exists Predominantly in the minds of the alleged victim and alleged perpetrator, it's almost impossible to determine because not all...
02:24:56.000What she claims is like, this wasn't a Hollywood rape.
02:25:00.000This wasn't me kicking and screaming and crying going, no, [...
02:25:07.000And she comes from a world where we spoke to a rape crisis counselor whose office was near strip clubs, like close to a lot of strip clubs in Florida, and he...
02:25:15.000Found a lot of professional girls, so to speak, who would come in, and they're always trying to maintain a line.
02:28:35.000The woman went to dance at all of these houses, leaving her two children, who are black, at home with a babysitter or with her mother or something like that.
02:29:20.000I, over the course of working on the movie, I changed my mind several times.
02:29:24.000Over the course of watching the movie, and as you live life and get more life experience, because people come to this movie with their own baggage.
02:29:29.000I've seen, I've had Q&A's where women get up to the microphone and say, I've never said this before.
02:29:34.000I was the victim of a rape on campus and start talking.
02:29:37.000It can be a very cathartic experience.
02:30:52.000And then there's also the reality that a lot of rapes go unreported because women are ashamed of what happened and they would rather just ignore it.
02:30:59.000And because they're going to be accused of false reporting and their entire past and sexual experience is going to be brought to bear.
02:31:05.000There's a lot, and there's also, you also have to take into consideration a lot of false rape claims.
02:31:09.000The guys get convicted, and it's never proven that it's a false rape claim.
02:32:04.000But, you know, the rape thing, as far as like, you know, I think there's way more rape than there is falsely accused, you know, false rape claims.
02:32:14.000Yeah, well, and in the spirit of justice, in the spirit of, you know, let...
02:32:19.000Let ten guilty men go free than one innocent man spend a moment being deprived of his liberty.
02:33:15.000We have a society that I think unfortunately discourages women from reporting, from coming forward.
02:33:21.000And I think that that's a serious problem because in crimes like this, a lot of the people who commit them continue to commit them.
02:33:31.000The rate of recidivism, I think, is such that if they're not being reported, you're going to see more victims, unfortunately.
02:33:38.000Well, there's also, without a doubt, there's people that For whatever reason, they don't look at other people as being equal to them, you know, and that that is what allows someone to rape someone.
02:33:56.000She goes to Santa Fe Community College as opposed to like, you know, the flagship state school that like the quote rich out of town kids, you know, go to and they treat her like The way they speak to her.
02:34:12.000And it's a similar phenomenon in the Duke Lacrosse case, is that that woman was black, but here this woman who was white in this Raw Deal case, but had black children.
02:34:23.000I think, what's the famous line from Bullworth?
02:34:27.000White people have more in common with black people than they do with rich people.
02:34:31.000Meaning, the division is not so much black and white.
02:34:35.000That's kind of a, that's a flashy object to divide us.
02:34:41.000And the poor people get treated like shit no matter what color they are.
02:34:44.000Well, also people in that position, people that are strippers, you know, because it's looked down upon as like a seedy career choice of losers.
02:35:08.000You're dealing with developing minds, and 18-year-old kids that are drunk, they really shouldn't be drunk.
02:35:13.000They don't know what the fuck they're doing, and on top of that, they've probably been raised by assholes, you know?
02:35:18.000I mean, there's a good percentage of people who are assholes, and these kids, drunk, in some fucking thing, feeding off of each other, gang mentality, which is a real- Gang mentality is fucking terrifying, man.
02:35:48.000What's going on in the brain when that's happening?
02:35:51.000It speaks to our weird, the way that human beings imitate our atmospheres, which is like a big part of what we were talking about earlier about culture.
02:35:59.000You get stuck in certain cultures and cultures where violence is accepted and violence, like if you live in the Congo, you know, and you're in a tribe and there's a warlord, you know, and you're seeing people shot and killed all the time.
02:36:16.000Yeah, I mean, it's just, that's their environment.
02:36:19.000I have to ask you this, because I mean, you've talked about it a zillion times, but like America's gun culture, that's what everybody says.
02:36:24.000America's propensity towards violence and proliferation of violence, and you don't see this in other country because you don't see the quantity.
02:36:40.000The celebration in video games, celebration in...
02:36:43.000All those things are unquestionably influences.
02:36:47.000However, if you look at the actual numbers of people that have guns, which is fucking staggering, and the actual crimes committed by those guns, it's very small.
02:37:11.000You know, I wrote that this country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem.
02:37:19.000And I think that there's a real reality when it comes to guns and shooters and mental issues and also the number of people that are involved in mass shootings that are on psychoactive drugs, antipsychotics, antidepressions.
02:37:36.000But correlation does not equal causation, right?
02:37:39.000So you don't know if those people are crazy already, and they're giving them drugs to try to treat them, and maybe they would be better off.
02:37:45.000Maybe it's getting off those drugs, which is often the case, coming down off those drugs.
02:38:14.000You have to have a permit to shovel snow.
02:38:16.000I'm a nice person, so I'm not going to go out and shoot people, but I found it incredibly disturbing that all they needed to know was that I wasn't a criminal, I didn't commit any violent crimes, and that's it.
02:38:27.000And truth be told, if you were a criminal and went on the street to get it, it would be even easier than you walked into it, because they don't want your driver's license if you're buying it on the street.
02:38:33.000Especially in this country at this point, the numbers.
02:39:53.000There's people that are legitimately worried, for good reason, that a lot of people have this knee-jerk reaction when any sort of violent crime goes down to take all the guns away from the people.
02:40:02.000But I don't think that, I don't know, maybe having to take a shooting course is an impediment to your exercising of that right.
02:40:09.000I've got family in Delaware, and they grew up in gun culture, in hunting culture, and they're some of the most responsible, coolest, best people.
02:40:19.000Guns have been completely demystified for them.
02:41:10.000Do you remember that instance in North Hollywood years back when those guys put on bulletproof vests and had all these crazy guns and they robbed a bank?
02:41:25.000I was doing news radio at the time, and we all went into the break room, and we're all watching it on this television, and we were all just like freaking the fuck out.
02:42:54.000With their six shooters, by the way, because that's what they were carrying in Miami in 1979, and they flipped the fuck out.
02:43:02.000And there was a- every time someone saw a Ford Econoline van, like, on the streets, people were calling 911, the cops wouldn't show- like, they didn't know what the hell to do, because they knew that the fear was, you're gonna pull one of these over, the back's gonna open up, and they're just gonna empty,
02:43:29.000CENTAC was a central tactical unit that was made up of multiple local and federal agencies that would work together.
02:43:37.000This history of which traces back to the Untouchables.
02:43:39.000Because that was like, we're going to take the best of the local guys and the best of the federal guys and put them together towards a kind of common, very specific, goal-oriented mission and end.
02:43:49.000And so you had these guys who got together, because originally they were called the, it's in Reloaded, the Special Homicide Investigative Team.
02:43:58.000Or as they call themselves, the Shit Squad.
02:44:31.000And when he was showing us these images that he had saved from guys with light bulbs up their asses.
02:44:39.000If you were in the trauma industry, the medical business, the law enforcement business, the homicide business, the journalism business, Miami was the place to be.
02:45:04.000You had all of these hardened criminals.
02:45:07.000Ejected from QB. The rate of rape on Miami Beach quadrupled in months.
02:45:12.000I mean, they were raping little old Jewish ladies, Holocaust survivors, who made it out of Germany but could not survive the Mariel boatlift in Miami.
02:45:18.000And they all went to Miami Beach because it was a slum and because it reminded them of Havana.
02:46:10.000And his belief always was, he never could prove it, but that the guy he had told basically where to shoot the other guy, that this was a retribution shooting for the other guy who had been shot.
02:46:19.000But that was just par for the course in Miami.
02:46:22.000The girl who cuts my hair, a lady who cuts my hair, you know how you get your hair cut, you say goodbye, you put the tip in the pocket, so she would go home at night in the 80s and she'd turn her pockets inside out to get all the folded bills and this and that.
02:46:34.000One day she finds a little baggie With white powder in it.
02:46:38.000That one of the ladies just say, kissed her goodbye and slipped it in her pocket as a tip.