Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1271 - Billy Corben
Uploaded: 2019-03-26T01:31:26.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1271 - Billy Corben' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1271 - Billy Corben' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1271 - Billy Corben

five four three two
hello billy we're live yo joe what's going on buddy how you doing i watched a
new documentary
this morning in the gym loved it it was great it's crazy i love your use of
little kids i don't
want to give away too much of it uh but it's about the steroid scandal
involving baseball and alex
rodriguez but what was the choice to use little kids to play a-rod and all the
other key principles
involved in the scandal like to play use little actors what kids oh come on
fella you're just
you're just high dude oh i was pretty sober it's the gym yeah um so you you now
know the stories
you've seen the doc and if people remember the biogenesis steroid scandal if
not the movie i think
recaps it pretty pretty well but the thing that struck me is that like all
these guys acted like
children they really did yeah and and to boot so you know we've done some some
sports docs in the past
we did you know some of the espn 30 for 30s like the u and um when you do a
sports doc i mean i don't
want to say it's it's easy because it's you know making documentaries is a
challenge but sports docs
are pretty like paint by numbers it's like you interview some players you
interview some coaches
some journalists they mention a bunch of games and you show a bunch of game
footage you know like
it's a pretty straightforward process uh with this one it's not about baseball
it's baseball adjacent
i guess but like it's about that went down in nightclubs in shady clinics with
fake doctors hotel rooms bars
locker rooms so you got a bunch of guys talking heads in your documentary but
then you got you got
nothing to cut to you got no b-roll so i'm like we're gonna need to shoot recrease
you know recreations
here right which is which is to me i i don't know it's like when you're doing
non-fiction filmmaking
it's fake i mean if when you film recreation so it's like i'm like how do we do
this in a creative
way that that's consistent with the tone of the movie which was always called
screwball meaning it was
always like a farce you know like a carl hyacin or elmore leonard cohen
brothers-esque sort of florida
fuckery farce and so we just wanted to keep in that in that mode so i'm
watching the characters so we got
tony bosch uh who is the fake doctor and porter fisher who was the whistleblower
who stole the medical
records and and started this whole thing they were then stolen from him and
then sold to not the highest
bidder but any bidder and every bidder they were sold to and they're talking
and i'm noticing
that they had like a very similar storytelling style like for example guy will
be like so i walk into
his office and i say i want my money and he says i don't have your money and i
said well you better get
my money and he said what are you gonna do about it and i said i'm gonna break
your net and i'm like oh
shit they they're so vivid and in the moment and and and talking dialogue so we
could drunk history this
right we could we could edit together the doc and then have the actors lip-syncing
the actual
interview dialogue and all the actors will be eight years old and and i i don't
know like i i've always
wanted to do it like way back uh spike jones 1997 biggie video sky's the limit
biggie had just been
murdered he was faced with this challenge of producing a posthumous video and
so spike jones was like
okay we'll just do a straight up classic bad boy records circa 97 music video
cars versace wardrobe
girls mansion hot tub but they'll all be eight years old you got baby biggie
baby puffy baby buster rhymes
baby little kid yeah it's brilliant and so i was like what a great that was
always kicking around
since since 97 and then i saw this off-broadway musical about 10 10-ish years
ago called a very
merry honor let me try that one more time a very merry unauthorized children's
scientology pageant
i don't ask me to say it again i can't say it again um so it's this it's this
wild musical
like very bowie-esque score written by a couple yalees like it's like it's a it's
a christmas pageant
performed by elementary school kids but instead of the story of jesus it's the
story of l ron hubbard
all with like in like a school play with like you know paper mache like sets
and and and construction
paper costumes and props and i wanted to i got together with one of the
composers i said listen
i'd like to get the rights to your musical and make a scientology documentary
using the kids and
the musical as a framing device because in those days no one was making now
everybody makes scientology
documentaries in those days nobody was doing it particularly because like the
church is so litigious
and so they had kind of left this musical alone so i thought like that might be
a cool buffer like
maybe if i make a documentary it's a little light you know and it's like this
children's musical but we
intercut it with real a real documentary investigation interviews and um that
maybe we'll kind of get away
with it nobody wanted to make that movie dude i mean nobody i mean doors were
closing before i even knocked
out like got to them um and i kind of filed again filed that idea away in the
back of my head and then
um a couple years ago there was that funny viral video of like it was like a
scarface
school play i don't know if it was like a bunch of little kids doing scar faces
like an elementary
school play and i was like this is such a it's such a great device and and the
problem is you need to
find something that it works for like like cocaine cow babies would not have
been appropriate right for
example a bunch of eight-year-old kids running around um it's not bugsy malone
you know so
um it just like it just like how the stars align we just like i was like this
is this is going to
work here i think it works it works great and it's such a crazy story and the
fact well i don't want
to give too much of it away because i really want people to watch it because i
mean i've i've talked
about cocaine cowboys probably a hundred times in this podcast it's one of my
all-time favorite podcast
excuse me all-time favorite documentaries but this is this is a story that
almost writes itself
it's so bonkers that 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 like four grand yeah like nothing doesn't
make any sense it's
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 aroid scandal you know
and and the truth of the
matter is that alex rodriguez was collateral damage yes 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 story straight up it's just
like this classic only
in miami absurd farce and the fact that's what you specialize in you really do
specialize in florida
i go to your twitter feed all the time for current florida it's just it's yeah
it's distilled it's just
like it's pure it's a hundred 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 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 schemes and scams well it's
just so amazing that
it's still a cocaine culture too after all these years it 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 hyacin
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 a 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 doesn't mean
we've grown right and miami is
just like miami is one of the youngest cities in the country in in your parlance
it would be about one
person old or one and a half people ago like one and a half people ago you know
like it's just we're
one of the youngest cities um 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 um before the you know the the uh the great
recession when a lot of them
started shutting down but most of them have rebounded uh 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 oh 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 remember that i mean you hear that line all the time
now that like
you know um the people used to rob the bank from the outside in now it's yeah
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 uh in the union because we were like you could go down there i mean you
could buy a
mortgage for your dog at a drive-thru in miami in the in like the the late 90s
early aughts and
um i remember interviewing a guy um we're doing working on a project called ponzi
state uh about
the state of florida as like a a case study in the great recession years ago we
never finished it
unfortunately but we're interviewing this guy and he says um 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 such every time i go there i always
go i forgot how
fucking crazy this place is hey you really should have to have a passport it's
it's but i love it
i really do love it it's a crazy place to do stand up you know i i i did this
joke because i was
doing a netflix special and i was doing it a couple months after i did this gig
in miami and so
i was using those yonder bags 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
pho