Joe Rogan Experience #1271 - Billy Corben

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   5, 4, 3, 2...…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:01

      5, 4, 3, 2... Hello, Billy. We're live.

   2. BCBilly Corben0:11

      Yo, Joe.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      What's going on buddy?

   4. BCBilly Corben0:12

      How you doing?

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      I watched your new documentary this morning in the gym. Loved it. It was fucking great.

   6. BCBilly Corben0:18

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:18

      It's crazy. I love your use of little kids. I, I don't wanna give away too much of it, uh, but it's about the steroid scandal involving baseball and Alex Rodriguez, but what, what was the choice to use little kids to play Arod and all the other key principles involved in the scandal, like to, to play, use little actors?

   8. BCBilly Corben0:39

      What kids?

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:40

      Oh, come on, fella.

   10. BCBilly Corben0:41

       You're just, (laughs) you're just high, dude.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:42

       Oh.

   12. BCBilly Corben0:43

       No. (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       I was pretty sober.

   14. BCBilly Corben0:44

       (laughs) It's the gym, yeah. Um, so you, you now know the story because 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.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       (laughs)

   16. BCBilly Corben1:00

       They really did.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:01

       Yeah.

   18. BCBilly Corben1:02

       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, uh, I don't wanna say it's, it's easy 'cause it's, you know, making documentaries i- 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-

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:31

       Yeah.

   20. BCBilly Corben1:32

       ... with this one, it's not about baseball. It's, it's baseball adjacent, I guess-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:36

       Right.

   22. BCBilly Corben1:36

       ... but, like, it's about shit that went down in nightclubs, in shady clinics with fake doctors, hotel rooms, bars, locker rooms. So you got a bunch of guy- 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 recrees, you know, recreations here."

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:55

       Right.

   24. BCBilly Corben1:55

       Which is, which is, to me, I, (sighs) I don't know. It's like when you're doing nonfiction filmmaking, it's fake shit when y- when you film recreations. 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 Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, Cohen brothers-esque-

   25. JRJoe Rogan2:17

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   26. BCBilly Corben2:17

       ... sort of Florida fuckery farce.

   27. JRJoe Rogan2:19

       Yeah.

   28. BCBilly Corben2:19

       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 was 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 neck." 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-

   29. JRJoe Rogan3:09

       (laughs)

   30. BCBilly Corben3:09

       ... 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.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. …

   1. BCBilly Corben15:00

      or a lawyer-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      Yeah.

   3. BCBilly Corben15:00

      ... or a journalist or an ER doctor ... I remember talking to an E- ER doctor once. He tells me a story. 1980, shortly after the Mariel boatlift started, which I think everybody's kind of pop culture frame of reference for the Mariel boatlift is Scarface. Tony Montana was a Marielito. 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, um, so he was working at the, uh, the, uh, trauma center at Jackson Memorial, our emergency room, a- in Miami. And he said he got a Mariel refugee. These guys would stand on the beach. They would ... Um, 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 flophouses 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'd get a call to go back, 'cause now there was a shooting or something else. They would be going there, like, a- all- around the clock. And so ... M- and they would just get in gunfights. Like, literally would just be like they'd ... Someone would cheat at dominoes 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, he said, "You're really lucky, 'cause if this bullet had hit, you know, a few centimeters or whatever this way, you would've died immediately. You would've 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've died. Could never prove it, never was able to trace it back, but he was pretty well convinced that it was a revenge shooting-

   4. JRJoe Rogan16:48

      Oh, wow.

   5. BCBilly Corben16:48

      ... for the other shooting, and the guy knew exactly where to shoot him and kill him, because the doctor had told him-

   6. JRJoe Rogan16:54

      Oh.

   7. BCBilly Corben16:54

      ... where to do that. But that was like every day in Miami. Th- the lady who cuts my hair, for Christ's sake. She said, "Billy, I was so naive in those days." You know, you, you ... She's ... I 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 baggy of white powder that someone, one of her clients had slipped into her pocket as a tip. And she said to her girlfriend, she goes, "What? What the hell is this?" And her friend said, "Oh shit, that's worth more than gold. That's the best tip you got (laughs) you got all day." (laughs) That little baggy. But that was just, like, the culture, and it's, and it's ... I mean, it's not that-

   8. JRJoe Rogan17:31

      Imagine that anywhere else. Like, ima- imagine that in, like, Nebraska, someone tipping you in cocaine. People would be like, "What?"

   9. BCBilly Corben17:38

      (laughs)

   10. JRJoe Rogan17:39

       "Uh, what the f- What are you ... What the fuck are you doing?"

   11. BCBilly Corben17:43

       ... listen, it's just like, like I said, it's like America's Casablanca. It's just like-

   12. JRJoe Rogan17:47

       There's no place like it.

   13. BCBilly Corben17:48

       No.

   14. JRJoe Rogan17:48

       It's such a strange place.

   15. BCBilly Corben17:49

       Yeah. Everybody is-

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:50

       It's so strange.

   17. BCBilly Corben17:50

       ... everything is for sale, still.

   18. JRJoe Rogan17:53

       Yeah.

   19. BCBilly Corben17:53

       Nothing, you know, and, and like I said, we are about a person old. That's how-

   20. JRJoe Rogan17:57

       Mm.

   21. BCBilly Corben17:57

       ... far back Miami goes.

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:59

       I was watching a video about, um, the culture of renting super cars to people so that they can pretend that it's their car.

   23. BCBilly Corben18:07

       Huge in Miami.

   24. JRJoe Rogan18:08

       Yeah.

   25. BCBilly Corben18:08

       Yeah. We got all these Brickell, Brickelleast 1000aires, you know, driving their rented fucking Lambos.

   26. JRJoe Rogan18:13

       Yeah.

   27. BCBilly Corben18:14

       You know, and blowing the engines out on South Beach because they don't know how to drive them. (laughs)

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:17

       (laughs)

   29. BCBilly Corben18:18

       So they're just getting towed down the street. It's just... (laughs) Listen, it's a fake until 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 corrupt politician, there's really no other way to make it-

   30. JRJoe Rogan18:34

       There's not a real industry.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Apparently there's, there's a,…

   1. BCBilly Corben30:00

      in usage. Uh, it's minimal.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:01

      Apparently there's, there's a, there's some significant spikes in usage, but the problem is it correlates to a significant spike in population of the state.

   3. BCBilly Corben30:10

      Right.

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:10

      Like, a lot of people moved to Colorado just because of marijuana.

   5. BCBilly Corben30:13

      Right.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:13

      They moved to become a part of the business and because they just wanted to be free, you know. And then California, we've had medical weed forever, and now we have legal, legal weed. And, you know, it's, I don't think it's changed much here. But you do have, there's, there's some, there's some issues.

   7. BCBilly Corben30:28

      (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan30:28

      There's, there's definitely ... I mean, I don't think it's beneficial in any way to sugarcoat the fact that having legal drugs makes people have more access to those drugs. Mean- means maybe there's gonna be a few people, whatever the number is, who do those drugs, who wouldn't have had access to them without it.

   9. BCBilly Corben30:44

      I, but I agree, but I think it's de minimis.

   10. JRJoe Rogan30:47

       Yes.

   11. BCBilly Corben30:47

       I think it's like, I think ... A- and the number of people who could ... Who's gonna turn around and go like, "You know what I wanna try that's legal now?" Meth.

   12. JRJoe Rogan30:53

       Meth. Yeah.

   13. BCBilly Corben30:54

       My dentist doesn't recommend it, but I feel like it. Who the fuck's gonna do that, really?

   14. JRJoe Rogan30:57

       You say that, but how many fucking people are on Adderall? And the only difference is-

   15. BCBilly Corben31:03

       Yeah, that's good shit.

   16. JRJoe Rogan31:03

       ... the doctor is prescribing it to you.

   17. BCBilly Corben31:05

       That's really good shit.

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:06

       Yeah.

   19. BCBilly Corben31:06

       That's why the president pumps it.

   20. JRJoe Rogan31:07

       Yeah. That's what I hear.

   21. BCBilly Corben31:07

       Just saying.

   22. JRJoe Rogan31:08

       The, do you think he does?

   23. BCBilly Corben31:09

       (sniffs) He's always sniffing, and he always ... Well, here's the ... I don't think he's on cocaine, so-

   24. JRJoe Rogan31:13

       No.

   25. BCBilly Corben31:13

       And, and I always ascribe to people who don't, (laughs) who don't know what this is like, people on cocaine start one sentence and then finish another.

   26. JRJoe Rogan31:22

       Right. (laughs)

   27. BCBilly Corben31:22

       That's what it's like talking to some, someone on cocaine, or the president.

   28. JRJoe Rogan31:25

       Mm-hmm.

   29. BCBilly Corben31:25

       They just, but I don't think he's on bl- And, but he's always, you always hear him with the-

   30. JRJoe Rogan31:29

       Yeah.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   I have a great…

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      childlike skills of, of being able to discern what's bullshit and what's a hustle. She's like a little kid.

   2. BCBilly Corben45:08

      I have a great amount of respect for people who grow up in a cult and-

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:11

      (laughs)

   4. BCBilly Corben45:13

      ... who can m- make their way out of it.

   5. JRJoe Rogan45:14

      Mm.

   6. BCBilly Corben45:14

      I mean, can you imagine when you're a child-

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:16

      Yeah.

   8. BCBilly Corben45:17

      ... that you're most impressionable and, and you're steeped in that.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:20

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BCBilly Corben45:20

       That's all you know.

   11. JRJoe Rogan45:21

       Yeah.

   12. BCBilly Corben45:21

       Like, you don't know that there is an alternate perspective and, uh, and you're able to grow up and say, "Oh, wait, there's a whole big-

   13. JRJoe Rogan45:30

       Yeah.

   14. BCBilly Corben45:31

       ... world out there, maybe I'm not being told the truth." Uh, that's incredibly powerful.

   15. JRJoe Rogan45:34

       It is.

   16. BCBilly Corben45:35

       It's really hard, I think-

   17. JRJoe Rogan45:36

       Oh, yeah.

   18. BCBilly Corben45:36

       ... for, to break with the only thinking that you've ever known in your life. I think it's amazing.

   19. JRJoe Rogan45:41

       It's one of the ha- Probably one of the hardest things that a grown adult has to do, is to recognize that the paradigm, this, this, this framework they've been living their life under is utt- utter horseshit. And it's like... I mean, the Mormon one is so crazy too, 'cause it's like, the f- the results are great, the people are so nice.

   20. BCBilly Corben45:59

       Yeah. (laughs)

   21. JRJoe Rogan46:00

       Like, they're the nicest cult members of all time.

   22. BCBilly Corben46:02

       That's true. (laughs)

   23. JRJoe Rogan46:02

       But then you go back and look at the actual framework of the religion itself, you're like, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, he was 14?" You're like, "Hold on, Joseph Smith was 14 in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus, and only he could read 'em, 'cause he had a magic rock?"

   24. BCBilly Corben46:20

       But like, that's Judaism and Catholicism. It's all, they're all-

   25. JRJoe Rogan46:24

       Yeah, but the guy-

   26. BCBilly Corben46:24

       ... crazy mythological horseshit.

   27. JRJoe Rogan46:26

       But they know who the guy was. Like, I mean, he's so recent.

   28. BCBilly Corben46:29

       Too re- It's too... Well, that's the thing, is that-

   29. JRJoe Rogan46:31

       Yeah.

   30. BCBilly Corben46:31

       ... you know it's a l- It's like Scientology, it's like-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:09:06

   Ugh. …

   1. BCBilly Corben1:00:00

      (laughs) documents from Porter Fisher, who had stolen the documents from Tony Bosh, they set him up in this whole-... it's so-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:08

      Ugh.

   3. BCBilly Corben1:00:08

      It's so absurd. It's a fucking tanning salon heist-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:11

      Yeah.

   5. BCBilly Corben1:00:11

      ... where they're like, "Hey, why don't you go in and try this new spray tan color?"

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:15

      (laughs)

   7. BCBilly Corben1:00:15

      "It's Trumpian Orange."

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:16

      (laughs)

   9. BCBilly Corben1:00:17

      "Go s- go try it on." And while he's in the fucking spray tan machine-

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:21

       Ugh.

   11. BCBilly Corben1:00:21

       ... they w- open his car and steal these documents, which ha- have these client lists of all these famous-

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:00:26

       Yeah.

   13. BCBilly Corben1:00:27

       ... baseball players, including the highest paid baseball player in the world, A-Rod. And so, they steal it and then they turn around and sell these stolen documents to Major League Baseball for cash. So MLB has this ragtag band of misfits, these, this internal FBI, like their own internal investigations division that they created after the BALCO, uh, steroid scandal. They're running amok. They are seducing nurses, former nurses from Tony Bosch's clinics. They are literally in diners with convicted felons, handing over bags of cash from some MLB slush fund. I don't imagine they were gonna 1099 the guy. And I don't know where this cash came from, 125 grand. And what they did was is that the felon who was doing it had a buddy at a neighboring table at this diner with his cellphone recording, video recording this transaction. And then he turned around and went to A-Rod's camp and said, "I'll sell you a video of me selling known stolen documents." Everybody knew these documents were stolen. So MLB is buying these stolen records, stolen evidence in the State of Florida Department of Health investigation, for cash from a felon. At some point, he gets like freaked out and nervous and he deletes this video off the hard drive. He winds up selling A-Rod a blank hard drive for six figures, okay? And A-Rod sends this hard drive, A-Rod's people send this hard drive around the world to like data recovery services-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:01

       Oh, geez.

   15. BCBilly Corben1:02:01

       ... to try to get this video back. So n- unfortunately, the felon didn't get his second six-figure payment because that was s- that was, the first six figures were against-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:02:10

       Right.

   17. BCBilly Corben1:02:10

       ... the recovery of the da- but he got like two, 300 grand-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:02:13

       Oh.

   19. BCBilly Corben1:02:13

       ... to sell A-Rod a blank-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:02:15

       Oh.

   21. BCBilly Corben1:02:15

       ... hard drive.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:02:16

       (laughs)

   23. BCBilly Corben1:02:16

       And A-Rod's dropping money on private investigators who are like having car chases through South Miami, um, it was just totally crazy. And, and (laughs) it's like, I always say like, you come down to the swamp and roll around, you're gonna get some mud on you.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:02:30

       Mm.

   25. BCBilly Corben1:02:30

       So when MLB came down to, to Miami, one of the guy, Jerome Hill, the, the former Baltimore cop turned, uh, Florida Department of Health investigator, he, he says unequivocally that Major League Baseball's investigators broke the law in the State of Florida and should have been prosecuted for it and held accountable for it and never-

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:02:50

       (exhales)

   27. BCBilly Corben1:02:50

       ... and never were. I mean, it's good to be a multi-billion dollar monopoly, yes.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:02:54

       Well, how old was A-Rod when the scandal broke?

   29. BCBilly Corben1:02:57

       A-Rod was definitely towards the end of his career.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:02:59

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Episode duration: 2:08:49