Joe Rogan - Why Florida is Crazy w/Billy Corben

I don't want to give too much of it away because I really want people to watch it because I mean I've talked about cocaine cowboys probably a hundred times in this podcast. It's one of my all-time favorite podcasts. Thank you. Oh, excuse me, all-time favorite documentaries. But this is a story that almost writes itself. It's so bonkers. And the fact that it all could have been avoided if one guy just paid another guy or just didn't try to rip him off. For like four grand. Yeah, like nothing. It doesn't make any sense. It's fucking crazy. And the guy, what a bizarro personality he was who would just tan every day and hang out at this doctor's office in the waiting room telling everybody how great it was. Like the whole thing is so strange. Like that's everybody remembers it is like the A-Rod or A-roid scandal, you know, and the truth of the matter is that Alex Rodriguez was collateral damage in this whole thing. Yeah, it was not about him. Don't tell Alex that, but it's not about him. You know, it's it. It was really the highest the career of the highest paid baseball player of all time effectively ended over a four thousand dollar debt between this cocaine addicted fake doctor and his fake tan addicted steroid patient. And it's like that's why I said it's like a Florida fuckery story straight up. It's just like this classic only in Miami absurd farce. And that's what you specialize in. Sort of really do. You specialize in Florida fuckery. I go to your Twitter feed all the time for current Florida fuckery. It's just it's yeah, it's distilled. It's just like it's pure. It's 100 percent Florida fuckery. Yeah, it's just it's and that's what this story is to me because like Miami is just well, I say the great thing about Miami is it's so close to the United States. But like it's it's also like it's America's Casablanca like just people kind of flee to Miami from like all over the country. And all over the world usually leaving some kind of criminality in their wake and you know come here and kind of there and reinvent themselves. You know like it's just and then you have all of these criminals there who then kind of baking in the sun, you know, in this kind of multicultural fucking paella, you know that we have. And then they just like and then they start putting their their minds together and brainstorming and they hatch just the most inane schemes and scams like that's our primary export from Miami is just scheming. Well, it's just so amazing that it's still a cocaine culture to after all these years. It's still has a giant cocaine engine pumping out all this chaos. We don't have any indigenous industry. I mean, there's no factory where everybody goes to work and then 30 years later gets a watch. There's no there's no business there. It's Carl Hyerson says all we produce in Florida is oranges and machine guns. We don't we don't make anything that we sell the dream. We sell the sunshine, you know, it's lies that came true. Yeah, you know, and so and even more frightening is the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. So it's like there's a lot of lessons to be gleaned from down there, but it's basically at this point of money a real estate hustle and a money laundering capital. So it's really no different than it ever was everybody likes to tell me. Oh, it's changed. It's grown. I'm like just because you've built a bunch of shit doesn't mean we've grown right and Miami is just like Miami is one of the youngest cities. In the country in your parlance would be about one person old or one and a half people ago like one and a half people ago, you know, like we're the we're one of the youngest cities barely a hundred just over a hundred. You know, correct me if I'm wrong because I've said this before but isn't there more banks per capita in Miami than anywhere else? Well, certainly there certainly was before the you know, the the the Great Recession when a lot of them started shutting down, but most of them have rebounded. One of the clever things some of the real estate developers did was they opened their own bank, literally their own bank. They had a bank where the entire board of the bank were all real estate developers and over 90% of the loans the bank made was insider loans just to the board. And then of course, they went belly up in the Great Recession. And what happened? We bailed them out. So it was all their own. So you bailed out real estate salesman real estate who loaned themselves. Money that is wound up being backed ultimately by us by the taxpayers. Yeah, I mean, that's the old member. I mean, you hear that line all the time now that like, you know, the people used to rob the bank from the outside in now, it's now it's from the inside out. But no none could be truer than than that story. And that's a Miami story. And when the Great Recession happened, the FDIC had to open an office in Florida because we had more bank closures than any other state in the union because we were like you could go down there. I mean, you could buy a fucking mortgage for your dog at a drive-through in Miami in the in like the the late 90s early aughts. And I remember interviewing a guy who were doing it working on a project called Ponzi State about the state of Florida as like a case study in the Great Recession years ago. We never finished it, unfortunately. But we're interviewing this guy and he says, you know, we were this is pre like big short like this before anybody sort of knew a lot about this. And he said, we were down here in Miami setting fires and Wall Street was trying to read our smoke signals. That's why I say like the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. It is every time I go there, I always go, I forgot how fucking crazy this place is. You really should have to have a passport. It's I love it. I really do love it. It's a crazy place to do stand up. You know, I did this job because I was doing a Netflix special and I was doing it a couple months after I did this gig in Miami. And so I was using those yonder bags. You know what those are where people have to put their cell phone into this magnetic bag. You keep the phone, but you hold the phone in the if you want to use it, you just have to step outside. They open up the bag and they give you your phone in every other city. It made for a better show because people just sat down and watch the show in Miami. It made for literally 40% of the crowd at any given time was getting up and going to the back and using their phone and coming back in. They were just constantly moving around and presume it was to use their phone. They might be powdering their noses. They might have been, but it was, you know, there was because I had done gigs before that where they didn't have the yonder bags and this wasn't the problem. But in Miami, just everybody needed to use their phones. They just kept getting up and coming back and it was just chaos. Well, it's also a selfish town. Like it's it's a basically a town of assholes. I mean, really. And and so like I always say that I mean, it reflects in everything that we do in the way that we behave, certainly in the way that we drive. Like, believe it or not, like people are so much more chill and calm here in traffic in L.A., I swear to God. And L.A. was famous for like road rage. Yeah, L.A. like created invented road rage. But like Miami, it's such a crazy, angry, weird place because it's like when push comes to shove, we're in Miami. Chill the fuck out. Like it's all good. It's a beautiful place like and it's a shared experience. The traffic sucks for all of us. Just chill out and use your turn signal for crying out loud and just. But that's why I say that's why they call it Miami. It's not our Emmy or your Emmy. It's my fucking Emmy and stay out of my fucking Emmy. It's just I don't know. You seem to love it. You seem to thrive. Yeah, I can't really function anywhere else. Doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. It's and it's so frustrating, too. I was you know, I'm a native Floridian and a lifelong Miami and I for a while I was I was pretty determined to like leave behind a better Florida than the one I was I was born in. Fail. That culture is so inexorably connected to cocaine. One of my best friends Steve Graham was an ophthalmologist. He did his residency in Miami. So he did his residency in emergency rooms in Miami and he was there in the 80s during like the height basically during when cocaine cowboys takes place and he saw everything just he mean he had all these pictures of bullet holes and skull fragments and people with light bulbs stuffed up their asses and just he said every day was just fucking chaos. So we call Miami idea everywhere else the light bulb goes off over your head in Miami. We shove it right up our asses. He said they had to pull a light bulb out of a guy's ass in one of those ones that look like a Christmas tree those curly ones. This guy stuck a light bulb up his ass and it broke in his ass. At least he was concerned about the environment. That's like one of those environmentally like sound like good. It is. There was no environment only sound like the times in the 80s. They were just thicker glass like it felt like he could get it in his ass better. Like that was the era to cut your teeth. If you were a cop or a lawyer journalist or an ER doctor, I remember talking to an ER doctor once he tells me a story 1980 shortly after the Mario boatlift started which I think everybody's kind of pop culture frame of reference for the Mario boatlift is Scarface. Tony Montana was a Mario Leto. That's the beginning of the movie when you know Castro is ranting and raving that he's flushing the toilets of Cuba onto the United States specifically to Miami. And so he was working at the the trauma center Jackson Memorial our emergency room in Miami and he said he got a Mariel refugee. These guys would stand on the beach. They would it looked like Havana in South Beach. You know, like there's that like coral seawall and it's just like it had a really Havana vibe. So they would go they would chill mostly at these flop houses south of 5th Street in Miami Beach where like the cops would literally just they would be leaving after a stabbing at one of these places and they'd be three blocks away. They get a call to go back because now there was a shooting or something else. It would be going there like a all around the clock and so and they would just get in gunfights like literally would just be like they someone would cheat at Domino's and they would just pull out a gun and one guy would shoot the other guy. And so he has a Mariel refugee who comes in to the emergency room with a gunshot wound and he knew Spanish. He was bilingual. He said to the guy said you're really lucky because if this bullet had hit, you know, a few centimeters or whatever this way you would have died immediately would have bled out right there on the scene died instantly and guy splits a few days later. Another Mariel refugee comes in with a gunshot wound in exactly the same spot where he had told the other guy that if he got hit there, he would have died could never prove it never was able to trace it back, but he was pretty well convinced that it was a revenge shooting. The other shooting and the guy knew exactly where to shoot him and kill him because the doctor had told him where to do that, but that was like every day in Miami. The lady who cuts my hair for Christ's sake, she said, Billy, I was so naive in those days. You know, you she died cut people's hair. You know, they come over kiss her goodbye and put a tip in her in her pocket, you know, and she'd go home turn her pockets inside out, have our little crumbled bills and everything. And one day she finds a little baggie of white powder. That's something that one of her clients had slipped into her pocket as a tip. And she said to her girlfriend, she's what the hell is this? And her friend said, oh, shit, that's worth more than gold. That's the best tip you got you got all day. That little baggie. That was just like the culture. And it's and it's I mean, it's not that's not anywhere else. I can imagine that in like Nebraska. Someone tipping you in cocaine. People would be like, what? What the what the fuck are you doing? Listen, it's just like, like I said, it's like America's Casablanca. It's just no place like it. Yeah, it's such a strange place. Yeah, everybody. And everything is for sale still nothing, you know, and like I said, we are about a person old. That's how far back Miami goes. So I was watching a video about the culture of renting super cars to people so they can pretend that it's their car. Huge in Miami. Yeah. Yeah. We got all these brickel brickely's to thousand heirs, you know, driving their rented fucking lambos. Yeah, you know, and blowing the engines out on South Beach because they don't know how to drive them. You know, just getting towed down the street is just listen. It's a fake it till you make it kind of town and there's nothing really to make there. You can't really other than a real estate hustle money laundering drugs politics being a crop politician. There's really no other way to make it. It's not a real industry. No, not at all. There's a lot of professional fighters come out of Miami about that whole area. Coconut Grove and a lot of aggression, a lot of poverty. It's a third world economy down there. The disparity between the haves and the have nots. The income gap is widest and getting wider in Miami-Dade County than just about any city in the country or any metropolitan area in the country. Wow. So and that's why I said that Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. If you want to know what challenges will face as a nation or calamities will befall us in the years to come. You need only look at at Miami TD Allman called it the canary in the coal mine the Bellwether. And so, you know, when the election was playing out the cycle in 2016, I was like it all my friends are just like this can this Trump thing can't happen. I was like hang on. I was like Florida elected and in fact reelected Rick Scott to be governor. He is the biggest Medicare fraudster in the history of the United States. Everybody knows it. Everybody's aware of it. Very well publicized. We've we reelected him. Okay, we elected him twice as the top fucking executive in our state. Like what makes you think that the United States of America wouldn't do that and I know it's fair to say like, you know, if you're going to be the governor of a state, you should know a little something about the largest industry in the state like you're gonna be the governor of Michigan. You should have some familiarity with the automobile industry and manufacturing and in Florida if you're going to be the governor, arguably you should know something about our biggest industry, which is Medicare fraud facing. I mean you could argue that he's the most qualified man for the job. Oh, yeah, we got like Medicare fraud is one of the largest industries has been for decades. I mean we have billions and billions of dollars in fraud that just comes out. So they run it so you'll go into like little Havana or Hialeah, for example in a municipality and in Miami-Dade and there'll be a little abuelita sitting behind a desk half asleep and she'll be surrounded in this tiny little one-room office by little mailboxes, you know, like PO boxes and a mailman comes in every day and just puts checks in the boxes and they're like in some cases they've stolen social security numbers and you know stolen identities basically and some cases they're just old people who aren't aware that their mail is being forwarded to this location and they've just got they I think Miami for a while we had more Medicare payments for HIV and AIDS medication than every other part of the country combined and it's all just old people. So it's like you'd have to assume that a hundred percent of our elderly population suffered from HIV and HIV where HIV positive. I mean it's fucking impossible. You had female patients getting penis pumps that were paid for by I didn't even know that Medicare covered that I got to look into that but I didn't know that was a thing. Well, thanks Obama. But you watch the OxyContin Express. Did you see that? I didn't see any. No, but that's all about how they would have the pain management centers and they were connected to the pharmacies. You'd go to the doctor. Hey my back hurts. You go. Well, you need this go right next door and you just go right. All they would prescribe was oxies and sometimes it wasn't even next door. Sometimes it was like go to that window. Yeah, right next door. They say show the doctor your x-ray. Yeah, you have to get your x-ray done somewhere else because they weren't doing it. So you can hand the doctor your x-ray. He look at it. Oh shit. It was upside down. He wouldn't even care to be like, oh yeah. Oh shit. You know what you need? Go to that window over there and fill this prescription and we had more pill mills. They called them in Broward County, which is the County just north of Miami-Dade then we had McDonald's locations and there was literally like the Appalachian Trail. They were coming down. They were stocking up on oxy and we were fueling a death epidemic like in Kentucky. But they're pulling over more cars with Florida plates than in-state plates up there because Floridians were like, well shit, we can't let them have all the action. We'll drive up and we'll export the shit and at the peak of the pill mill epidemic, the oxy epidemic in Florida, seven people a day were dying men, women and children and and we subsist from hustle to hustle. You wonder why did the government crack down on that shit? Why didn't they regulate it? Well first our governor and we deal with this in screwball is the biggest Medicare frauds turn the history of the country. So he wasn't exactly shall we say vigilant or interested in cracking down on medical related. How does he get away with it? Magic, Maga magic, I guess. I mean he listen, he he got he pled the Fifth Amendment like 75 times in a videotape deposition. That was used in a campaign ad against him and Florida was like, we're good. We're good with that. And he just listen white rich men kind of walk between the raindrops in this country.