Name: The Craziness of Miami with Billy Corben
Uploaded: 2021-09-14T19:07:33.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Craziness of Miami with Billy Corben' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-09-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Craziness of Miami with Billy Corben' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-09-14. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan experience
And 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?
Like how long ago was that? Oh, yeah, what 2019? Yeah, it was right before the
shit hit the fan
That was the last time we talked and we were talking about that documentary and
then when all this happened
And so much of the wackiness and that you know the controversy is coming out of
Florida
Like you embrace the chaos of Florida. Yeah, Florida fuckery is our genre and
it's our also our top
Export I think is as well. It's really what we provide the rest of but for you
And you I mean look about how much your work is about Florida
The cooking cowboy series, you know all the stuff on a rod like although there's
there's so much of your your work
The petrifying I'm a Florida native, you know in a lifelong Miami and I think
the petrifying thing that I've learned through the years
and it's not my theory
TD Allman called Miami the city of the future and
effectively the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow and
More importantly the Miami of today more specifically the Miami of today is the
America of tomorrow
so if you want to know what?
Challenges will 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 which is South Florida? Do you think that's because of it's very
vulnerable to climate change?
First of all right like there's there's estimates about how long Miami can last
yeah, they're not good
Yeah, they don't get them. They think you got about two decades, right?
Isn't that the the current thought? I'm a renter. Let me put you that way
I've lived there my whole life. I don't own property in Miami
It's probably a good move. I'm not bullish
It does it seems like it's gonna go underwater, right?
Yeah, it'll definitely be underwater. It's just a question of when
It's all like they're like the the ground itself is very porous. Is that
correct? Yeah, I mean, you know, we had
Reclaimed wetlands. That's Miami Beach. That's where Champlain Towers is
reclaim wetlands. What does that mean?
It was fucking mangroves swamps. Yes swamp and that we reclaimed which means we
filled it in and there's still porous limestone underneath that
Champlain Towers only had water coming at it from the front the back above and
below but other than that it was totally dry
This is the tower that collapsed. Collapsed. Yeah, just battered. We're getting
battered. They were on that porous limestone
Yeah, yeah built on reclaimed wetlands and so I'll tell you right now as we
speak. This is the
The king tides you know the king tides are no they happen every September
October and November not the entire time, but there's like a week here a
weekend there for those three months
It is what we call sunny day flooding
So it has to do with the tides it has to do with the this the distance between
the sun and the moon and the earth
And it floods in the sunlight it we can get as much as 12 inches
12 inches above the
Highest high tide of the year so it just it's not from rain. It's not now. Here's
the problem
We're still in hurricane season, which means rain exacerbates it inclement
weather can we're totally fucked when it rains on top of the king tides
But 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, but it's perfectly it could be perfectly beautiful
and you could have as much as 12 inches
Above the highest high tide. So it's just an unusual level of the ocean. Yeah,
it's just a quirk of of the tides
It happens every year off and on for three months
Yeah, that's in in the dicks. We call it sunny day flooding. That's a thing
that we have there
I mean, you know, Miami we make it rain, but we now we have sunny sunny day
flooding is a thing
And there's nothing they can do like New Orleans like put up some sort of a
Some sort of a wall damn so the the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a kind of
futuristic post-apocalyptic
You know after the flood well pre-flood kind of a wall and Miami said no
gracias. No, thank you
We don't want that. Well, we'll we'll fend for ourselves
Did they say no because it was too expensive or did they say no because no the
Army Corps of Engineers?
I think was good. I think it was me federally funded
They just didn't want this unsightly unseemly kind of a wall in our beautiful
town
And but what they did want is they wanted a signature bridge. We're building
like this 800 million dollar bridge that we don't need
That's but it's it's super it's super pretty as we say in Miami. It's super
pretty and somebody probably got a good deal
Oh, yeah, you better believe the contractors. That's the thing. That's why the
Miami of today is the America of tomorrow
It's really the corruption dysfunction and non-stop construction. That's really
what it is
It's this anything goes wild west kind of mentality because 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
It's always been a sunny place for shady people the Florida man phenomenon. It's
just like, you know, we just
If you have it's not New England. It's not what's your name? Who's your daddy?
Everyone's nouveau riche in Miami
So no one cares where your money came from as long as the booze is flowing and
everybody's dancing the music's going
Nobody gives a shit and it's always been that place. It's always been that
party place you were you were telling me before about how during
It was it the 70s the 80s these recording artists would go down to Miami
Yeah, like listen
Miami is just it's America's Casablanca, you know, and so some of the biggest
records of all time
I mean back when that was a business like you could sell tens of millions of
albums
Everybody went to Miami Eric Clapton was one of the first Jimmy Buffett
The Bee Gees the Eagles Crosby stills Nash and Young
the Allman Brothers Fleetwood Mac and they were doing all those records that we
all still know today from the 70s they recorded
Mixed or mastered at least in part
Glenn Frey and Don Henley wrote the lyrics to Hotel California in a rented
mansion on Miami Beach
We're we're it had that had been the love nest um of Howard Hughes and Ava Gardner
Winston Churchill used it as a winter home and
The Watergate burglars and Howard Hunt used it as well and then
Stephen stills used it he was hanging out there with like shell Silverstein
they were it was like a weird scene and then
Eventually the Eagles came down to do Hotel California and wrote the lyrics
they locked themselves these two guys in a fucking room and they just the housekeeper
left
Sandwiches and and drinks at the door because the door was closed and they came
down in bathrobes one day with with legal pads yellow legal pads and
Said we have it we have we have we have the lyrics and so everybody every and
it was a communal scene, too
It's kind of like your place with the you know, but it's sort of like stops by
Yeah
People stop by to get it was like that because you had all these artists in
every
Route like so there was pickup basketball games outside you'd 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 haven't 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 fell boom puff of smoke on the keys of the piano
Appropriately and he grabbed the bag and salvage what he could and then for the
next several months
The people at the studio who worked at it would stick a straw between the keys
On the on the piano and try to say mostly dust they were probably snorty, but
like we're just trying to salvage whatever they could for there
so the the joke was that um
they had a line item on the
The bills that because that's the thing they were away from the watchful eyes
and ears of the labels
Which were all based in New York and LA so they would go to Miami and no one
knew what the fuck was going
I didn't have publicists or producers from or executives rather from from the
recording studio
So they would send them bills to pay for the studio time there'd be a line item
for cocaine, but you couldn't say
cocaine
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 was the cooking so you get like some you know someone at you know accounts
and a record label call up and say hey
I have a question about this this invoice
Um, it's it's there's five thousand dollars here for piano tuning
But there's only one ballot on the album
So what's with all this fucking piano tuning you have there's there was an act?
Oh god. I'm not gonna say it
But there was a band who came down in the 80s to record a criteria
And then they came down again in the 90s and the guy who runs the studio Trevor
his mom was the manager before him
So he was a little kid running around this scene
If you can imagine a little kid Miami in the 70s running around this scene this
incredible place aretha Franklin did the respect record at criteria
James Brown did I feel good recorded that song at criteria. It's a really
historic place and so
He this band comes in and he says 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 this record and the singer
says I
Have no memory of that
whatsoever except for one thing he
He 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 and she brought out a brick of cocaine an entire kilo of cocaine
He said I'd never seen that before she put it down on the coffee till we're
sitting on the couch
She put it down on like this is a big band
They put it she put it down on the coffee table. She cut it open and
All I remember from my entire experience in Miami is the smell of that entire
kilo of cocaine like just what it feels like when an entire
that like an entire kilo of cocaine is opened up
Before you and it hits and it hits you have you ever done coke never me neither
never but hearing that I want to sniff
I just want to take away for that I want to know what that's like
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