021. miami: myth & reality, with andrew otazo

* this is an automated transcript, please excuse the typos

[00:00:00] Carmen: Hey Fryda. Hey Carmen, what's up today? We have special guests, Andrew Otazo, the man behind Miami creation myth. Welcome to they get easy

[00:00:13] Andrew: pleasure to Be here. Think you're having the work

[00:00:15] Fryda: that you do so interesting because it's not only funny, but it's also like definitely satirical and incredibly relatable.

And so. Sense of common identity. And yet as someone belonging to that identity also feel comfortable shitting on our own identity, which is nice.

[00:00:37] Andrew: So we got to do it. So Miami. Started off as a short story that I wrote on the way to Denver, Colorado in 2017 for my buddy's bachelor party. And the idea was that all these great civilizations across.

Whether it's the Norse or the Egyptians or the Han Chinese, or literally any civilization ever had their own mythic cycle, which is their own, God's their own goddesses, their own heroes, legends, et cetera. And I thought it would be a good idea since by me is so culturally unique in the world for the city to have its own mythic cycles, its own gods and goddesses.

So that's what I created, which is essentially like a parallel universe. Composed only of Miami-Dade county. So at the Broward county border, there's a giant chasm and no one knows what's on the other side might be Fort Lauderdale.

[00:01:31] Fryda: We'll find out, is this an alternate world? They're like,

[00:01:33] Andrew: yeah, it's based on my area, but it's definitely not.

I mean, it's that, that perspective of like, oh, Broward is so far away. It's 35 minutes away. Like eventually some of my characters go north of that gray chasm and the second you cross it, it's just like a frozen waste. It's not like it's not like Broward and Palm beach and then the rest of Florida. No, it's just like, there's nothing, there's a Tundra created this world and I populated with all sorts of different gods and goddesses.

So like the God of chiefs may is HFA and the God, the creator. His name is . He wakes up on the divine ping punk boom at the beginning of the universe. And his first word is literally going you all by gift video. And then

[00:02:14] Fryda: that was my grandfather's first words. I think

[00:02:17] Andrew: it's the holiest of all words. So, you know, So the sun rises above the horizon and, and he's like gave my daddy a, you know, I'm going to make a universe.

I can't wait, whatever. And then his mother burst down the celestial door of the universe and says, like, I don't own the electricity company trial light. By the time I was like, I'm done, I'm trying to create the universe. She's like, I don't give a crap. And she like takes off her Samuel, her chunk of that already to beat him.

So he has to turn off the sun, moved to different universe, started all over again. So that's how it starts. The first half of the book. There's like these standalone myths. How would the sun and the moon created, how did people come to Miami? And there are kingdoms that are established within Miami that are derived from the different communities here.

And they're literally like kingdoms with walls and completely separate from each other because Miami is more of a salad bowl than a melting pot. Really. And then, so the second half is the cafecito Odyssey where the hero twins might've been called Peter, both of whom are named after my grandmothers have to go around the different kingdoms of Miami to, to put together different constituent parts of.

Because the middle east has settled on the city and no one can do anything. And capacity does getting, there was probably not everybody. And so, yeah, that's, that's the book I wanted to publish the book I went, this is a different story, but like I went to a bunch of publishers and. Went through a lot of trouble.

And eventually I was like, you know what, I'm just going to publish it myself. So part of that for the last four years has been creating all these means and all these stories that you've seen on Instagram and on Facebook that are derived from Miami derive from drawn upon my Cuban American heritage. But I also try to represent different communities here and celebrate my community and I celebrate my city, but I have absolutely no problem pointing out the nastier sides of our culture and our outlook, specifically racism, misogyny, classism, and things like that, which are rampant.

[00:04:17] Carmen: We immediately connected with you when we first started to reach out and chat based off of this idea of this love, hate Miami relationship, where you, you leave and then you miss it and then you come back and you're like, oh my God, this is assessable. And then you also like, can't leave. And so you, you really understand that very delicate line.

And so tell us how you got there and how that maybe led you to write Miami creation.

[00:04:42] Andrew: I've been writing satire for a long, long time. And I would do a lot of political satire. Well, before I started Miami Korean. So that's always been in my, I dunno in my bloodstream, I guess, like every time I try to write anything, it turns into satire.

Like I can't help myself, I just have to do it. So in terms of my perspective on Miami, I think anyone who's lived here any meaningful amount of time knows that this is a city, absolutely full of contradictions. And the people who live here can hold these two outwardly disparate beliefs or perspectives on the city at the same time, one side, like I adore my.

Like absolutely adore this city. I love the nature. I love the people. I love the culture. I love the food. I feel at home here, I've lived in many different cities, so I've lived in Boston and DC and New York and south Paolo and monocyte is, and Miami is the only place in the world that I feel comfortable that I feel like I can be myself.

I don't need to explain myself to anyone. So there's that side of it. Right. And then there's a side of it. That's like, I am so incredibly frustrated with Miami all the time. I am very disappointed with Miami, with our, I guess, our political class and our lack of civic engagement. And then there's everyday things like the traffic is insane.

And just especially within the Latino community, there's a lot of just over racism and sexism and every ism in every sense of. Everywhere. I've seen it in my own family. Right. My grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, whatever, as well as my friends, the people I grew up with and just people on the street, like, so it's, it's everywhere and it's really disappointing.

And I feel like Miami could be much, much, much. And much better structured for the people that live here. And I'm very, very frustrated with the fact that it seems that the powers that be, are always concerned with meeting the needs or the expectations of outsiders who come here. And I say this as a son of refugees.

Right. But like people who smoke. And formed their own little enclaves, the professional classes in downtown Brickell that don't know a Goddamn thing about the city and certainly don't care. And you know, they, they pandered to those individuals and they don't give a flying fuck about everybody else living south or north or west.

It's all about people living in the east. So I hold those two at the same time. And that's what drives a lot of the. The work that I do creatively, you know, two weeks ago, I wrote another piece called non-racist Latino. Doesn't want his daughter to date a black man. Oh, I read that article. Yeah, it was a 500 word run-on sentence.

[00:07:22] Carmen: It was beautiful. And typical father fashion,

[00:07:25] Fryda: typical brother fashion. It was very recognizable in terms of the kinds of quote unquote concerns that came about. You said a couple of things around outsider. The kinds of interests that exist in, uh, in, let's say like the wealthier classes in Miami versus everyone else.

And I'd love to hear a little bit more about your take on what's going on in Miami right now, because we know that there's been a lot of movement around tech bros coming from California.

[00:07:51] Andrew: It's a continuation of what's been happening for decades. It's accelerated to an extent. And yeah, I do. I do shit on Miami tech a lot, but it's because it's an easy target to be perfectly honest.

A lot of the people that come in from outside or these tech bros from California and New York that are completely clueless. But to be perfectly honest, it's no different than the other professional sectors here in Miami. So whether it's finance or law or business consulting or whatever, The people that tend to come in to these sectors will form their own little enclaves and completely isolate themselves from the rest of Miami.

And I can't tell you how many times I've been to God-forbid a tech conference or like a chamber of commerce event or a networking function where I'm literally the only Miami there. And almost certainly the only Latino. And as soon as I tell people that they're losing their freaking minds, they're like, oh my God, you're from Miami.

I didn't know. You know, you people existed. And to me, what that tells me is that you are terrified of minorities. So, you know, that's, what's infuriating to me. The tech sector is an easy target because it has, I mean, Jesus Christ. It, it is. Constantly around the city and the hubris and the just lack of self-awareness are monumental.

And again, I don't want to be the guy that polices who gets to call themselves in Miami. And, you know, my parents are from Cuba. People are constantly coming in from all parts of the world, but if you don't make an. To learn about the cultures that surround you and the peoples that's around you and their history.

And actually try to involve yourself in the community outside of your tiny little, almost exclusively white professional clique, then you're not in Miami. You happen to reside in Miami. You happen to reside in Brickell almost certainly, or downtown, or maybe when wood or edge water. Those people. I have no time for them and I absolutely adore lampooning them.

Okay. So yeah, we're talking about tech, but what else has happened in Miami? I don't know at the same time. Okay. Again, these two contradictory feelings at the same time, I see a lot of civic engagement. I see a lot of people who really care about a whole range of issues from environmental to equal pay, to just organizing different communities from Al pad's a little Haiti to Overtown to have their voices heard.

And to bring them up to the level of their political class who tends to ignore them. So I'm very proud of that, but at the same time, I'm very well aware of the systemic obstacles placed in their way, by the powers that be here. Um,

[00:10:33] Carmen: what are the powers that be as you see them and how did we end up this?

[00:10:37] Andrew: Miami is a very new city. It's barely a hundred years old, tremendous percentage of the population isn't from Miami. They're usually, you know, born outside the country. I don't have the figures off the top of my head, but it is a sizable figure. And you know, even more, our first generations like myself or yourselves, Miami has always been a boom town, a boom and bust town.

There's been real estate speculation here forever. There's a long history. Uh, uh, shysters and snake oil salesmen went around and messing shit up for everybody. And I think that that combined with, I guess, a, the Latin American flavor of just like, Uh, well, you had didn't Bassett drug, boom. That's still ongoing, which is what builds our skyline and continues to, to fund all manner of businesses here and individuals, and you also have a sense of the political class is not accountable or.

Try to fix the problems of their constituents are just out there for themselves, which I see all the time. So those two kind of very sheisty, three flavors combined into like this real shit I screamed that everybody has to eat here. So, you know, I think that's the history. And then what was the second question?

How has it be? Okay, so in Miami-Dade county and the state of Florida on the municipal level and up to the state level, you do not have full-time legislature. Or in Miami commissioners, you have part-time and they make a stupidly low salary. I think it was like anywhere between 18 to 30 something thousand a year, which means that your average person, like, I can't go, I can't run for office.

You can run for office. Your listeners can run for office because chances are you working nine to five and you're a state legislator. You can't take three months off to go work in Tallahassee full-time and then come back. You can't be. Because again, unless you are independently wealthy and you can sustain or you own your own business and you can set your own hours.

You can't run for office here. It's impossible. You can't live like that. Who runs for office? The wealthy, exactly the wealthy and the extremely well-connected. And what do they do? They bounce around from position to position. You're a commissioner. You're a mayor. You're a fire chief. You go run for state house.

You come back and what do you do? You. Pension after pension, after pension, after pension and they just stack up and then you have all of this stuff. That's under the table. You have double dealings. Like the laws in Florida are extremely lax and the oversight is very loose. So you can have all sorts of conflicts of interests that you can legislate on.

Or you can zone, especially here in Miami Dade county, zoning is super important and get kickbacks. Our elected officials are constantly under investigation for something or other, regardless of what position they're in. It's people who are actually involved in the community who came up through maybe community organizing through grassroots movements, through civic engagement, they can't run and they can't implement any real changes.

It's just that. Elite monied class who circulates and they just keep on moving from one position to the next. And if it's not, then it's a Goddamn sons or, you know, their freaking wives or whomever in their family, you know, their sister, their brother, you know, they get it, they just squeak into office and they stay.

That's what's going on in my end, he politically

[00:14:08] Carmen: recently the mayor of Miami was specifically talking about taking his 401k and Bitcoin and also accepting his salary in Bitcoin. And I just kept thinking

[00:14:19] Fryda: like, oh my God, it's the salary that we're talking about. That isn't even cyclical.

[00:14:24] Carmen: Is it right?

And he's like, yeah, I'm able to do this because this is not what I use to pay my bills. And I remember like, it really is that clear and they're just so blatantly even saying it on, on air, just being like, yep. This is how it works.

[00:14:37] Andrew: Yeah. And I know journalists that are actually trying to track down how, like how much salaries taking into Bitcoin, not just him, but other individuals.

And it's all opaque. It's not public. You're going to have to do like a foyer request. And it's a real pain in the ass. You said

[00:14:52] Fryda: that Miami is a salad bowl, not a melting pot. Well, uh, um, excuse me, Andrew. I grew up being told that Miami was a melting pot and I grew up being told that Miami was a really diverse place.

[00:15:05] Andrew: Our communities are very, very, very divided, whether it's African-American Haitian-American Cuban-American I mean, within the Latino community, there's more mix. Right. But even socially, economically. Right. You know, if you grew up in coral Gables, chances are you don't hang out with people from. No. So that's why for me, personally, when I wrote this book, it was so important to incorporate as many of these voices as possible.

So Miami Christian myth was re in 11 languages and dialects, all the languages of Miami, Haitian, Creole, Jamaican, Patois, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Hebrew, Miccosukee, everything. And then now that I'm recording the audio book, our actors are members of these communities who actually helped me rewrite the chapter.

That I wrote on their community. So for example, for the chapter that I have on the Everglades and the Seminole tribe I reached out to her name is Cheyenne Kippenberger. She was miss Seminole USA and miss Indian world. First time ever as a Seminole was missing new worlds. And she actually helped me rewrite the whole.

I don't have a good visibility on Seminole culture and history. We incorporated entire section on the history of the black Seminoles, which were largely free black individuals who were escaping from the south and joined the Seminole tribe and fought with them and died with them. And so these individuals are also the ones that are acting in the audio book and the same thing with the Haitian-American section, you know, I reached out to members of the community and everybody who was involved gets a percentage of all the revenue produce from the audio books in perpetuity.

So they are very much like integral to the book. Right. But that is not how Miami operates. Like I can't tell it like that is, that is Miami. You can't tell the story of Miami through a Cuban American perspective, even though we're a large percent of the population, that's not the story of Miami cause Bahamians built.

For example, in the 19 teens and 1920s, you have all these different communities that have incorporated themselves into this larger polity and have given so much to our cultural, rich and sear that are completely ignored. So, you know, whether it's the building of straight-through Overtown, I mean, like right through it and just demolished an affluent African-American community.

That is absolutely integral to telling the story of Miami or, you know, the story of, of undocumented immigrants that are, uh, taking your fruits and vegetables out in homestead. That is absolutely part of Miami. If it weren't for them, you wouldn't have anything to eat here. Their stories are told because they're relegated to the margins and the powers that be here in Miami.

And I tell this in the, in the third chapter, which is how people came to Miami, essentially. And then behind them came all these different ways of Latinos Niigata Wednesdays, and as well as Colombians, Mexicans, Brazilians later, urgent times, and the scare the shit out of the white people, white people will move north and to Broward west Palm beach, got the hell out of Dodge.

And then the Latinos spearheaded by the Cubans moved right into their position. It was like, again, drawing upon Latin-American history. The. Uh, the socioeconomic pyramid pre independence from Spain, you had opinions who lies, which were the Spaniards from Spain, then be underneath them, the Creoles. And then, you know, you got sequentially more and more racist, you know, you had those Mestizos, Spanish caste system.

Exactly. So we did that. The Cuban showed up, the Latinas showed up, the white people left, you know, just like in Latin America, after independence, the pencil lattice left and the clearest whoop put themselves right at the top. That's what we did here. And the rest of the paramount is still there and it is completely segmented out.

It's completely isolated from each other. And in order to make meaningful connections with other committees, You know, you have to do this crazy thing, which is reach out and make yourself vulnerable.

[00:19:06] Fryda: Who's doing a good job of this. Are there any stories that will make us feel proud of Miami?

[00:19:13] Andrew: There's a lot to celebrate in Miami.

There's nothing like this place in the world, our art or architecture. If you as a tourist go to, I don't know, Bayfront and to Wynwood and to Miami beach, south beach specifically you'll think that Miami, oh God, what a vacuous superficial city. There's nothing here. Substance. That is bullshit. Go west, like go anywhere else that isn't, you know, along the coastline, I'm very, very proud of my Cuban culture and the larger Latino culture that I'm embedded in.

And all these other cultures that are our neighbors. We don't really talk to like again, getting some insight into the Seminole tribe has been fantastic, was incredible. They're the only the sun will try to Florida and I do the only native American tribe that was never a call. But the United States military, they still did not sign any peace treaty.

And there's incredible history and saying, you know, same thing goes with the Haitian American community. Same thing goes to the Brazilian American community, you know, just go into someone's house, go to a house party. It's amazing. Like people are dancing. Like the food is incredible. The conversations is fantastic.

And that's what I missed when I lived in Boston and lived in those frigid. Locales of both culturally and physically, I'm very, very proud of our cultural mosaic here and all the different patches that compose it. I'm thinking

[00:20:36] Fryda: Andrew, about your environmental work and about like the landscape of

[00:20:39] Andrew: Miami or physical infrastructure is horrendous in the city.

And it's not just the obvious things like public transportation. If everyone's taking public transportation like you do in New York, like, it doesn't matter who you are in New York, like you're taking the subway, but also when it comes to. Just the physical infrastructure of our sidewalks. For example, Miami is a very hot city, eight months out of the year, and our sidewalks don't have any shades.

Which means that it walking anywhere is completely out of the question. Nobody will walk. Yeah. It's dangerous because we don't have protect the sidewalks. They're not protected by medians. So any car that veers slightly off out of the lane, which happens all the time in the city, because no one here can drive.

That puts you in danger. So that means people don't get out and into different neighborhoods and meet different people, switching to environmental ism or the environment in general, to give your listeners a bit of a background. I have dedicated the last, I think, four years to removing 15,200 pounds of trash from our coastal ecosystems.

So that's mostly the mangroves, but it's also the ocean floor. I've always loved our natural landscape. And it is unfortunately a part of Miami that a lot of Miami's aren't exposed to and that they don't know very much about for a variety of reasons. We're literally surrounded by incredible natural beauty, whether it's Biscayne bay, national park, which is you have everything from Korea.

To seagrass beds, to mangroves and all these title ecosystems to the average plates for west, which are a globally unique ecosystem. They are incredible. Just don't go in their summer because you're going to hate yourself. So in 2019, I walked the Miami marathon carrying 35 pounds of mangroves. And it was awful.

And I do not suggest that anybody ever do that. It was horrible. We partner with Miami Waterkeeper to use that, to raise funds for them and to get visibility on this issue. And then the next year in 2020, I came back with a team of people that pulled this trash cart, 135 pounds of trash along the entire Miami marathon.

We got a front page story in the Herald and overheard two. So it was great. We raised over $30,000 for Miami water keeper. But my point being is that once you show people. The magnitude of the problem, they get it like immediately, it's not political. It doesn't break down by party or by community. They're just like, wow, this is awful.

We need to do something about it. And I've definitely seen growing sense of this is an issue that really needs to be fixed and more and more pressure being built. The Everglades

[00:23:21] Fryda: is our backyard, but. Go there in order to see it, it is not a winding natural landscape that is interspersed between our suburbs, but rather we're like encroaching on it.

And when we encroach on it, we turn it into cemented suburbs. Isn't it such a typical Miami. To go somewhere in the suburbs, it's really close to the Everglades and you see like iguanas and you see a bunch of animals because you just took over their natural landscape. I mean,

[00:23:51] Carmen: yeah. I woke up in the morning to a few crocodiles in my pool here and there.

Yeah. It's crazy. Cause they keep like expanding the urban boundary line and every time you think like they can't build anymore, they keep building back in 20. What was it? 20. 11 or 2010 around there. I worked with this photographer who, a Dutch photographer working on a piece about climate change. And so we ended up at Harvey Reuben's office, the clerk of city courts.

And because apparently at the time he was one of the only people who are doing anything about climate change. And by that, I mean, he put together. Of course, which meant like once a year and like drank. So in this man's office, I saw a photo that had been framed from Miami beach. It was kind of like an aerial photo and you could see the beach down below, and it had like five hotels.

And it was like from 1961 or something like that, like really early and the beach, the actual. So much thinner on the map than it used to be. And apparently a lot of the beach has been dredged up sand from off shore and brought back in to build the beach. Yeah. So much of Miami, a lot of it is kind of like what my mom would call like Mickey mouse.

Right? And she's telling this idea that you just force something to happen. And it's not really that high quality. And even if it was, it's going to fall apart anyway, because you're constantly writing

[00:25:06] Andrew: nature. People don't realize that Miami was wild and majority of Miami beach is actually built on these.

Pylons like think giant like tree trunks, essentially that were hammered into the bay. And then the were filled with dredged up muck from the bay when they were building all these different cuts going into the port of Miami. So Miami beach used to be connected to Fisher. It was one continuous island, which was itself connected to Virginia Key, which was connected to key this gain.

It was one long bear island. The water table has changed a lot, but it used to be that you had these, the Spaniards would stop by in Miami to get fresh water. And they wouldn't even, they wouldn't even have to land. There was these, they're the upwellings these massive upwellings of fresh water that would come directly out.

Hundreds of meters onto the ocean, that they could just put their casks and get fresh water out of. And the Miami river had rapids back in the day. So the, the Grove used to have these limestone clips that you could, they were be like 20, 25 feet tall, that you could jump directly into the bay, into the water.

And then what they did was they build these mansions on top of those cliffs and then filled in all the bay in front of those mentions. I heard this story about. One family that was just south of the Miami river. Their daughter fell in love with a guy whose family was just north of Miami river. And the families were like, no, no, no, no, no.

You're too far away. I think that's long

[00:26:38] Carmen: distance. We don't do that. Yo. That's like New York dating. Have you in Brooklyn. And I'd be like, I'm sorry, what you live in Queens. We can't do this. Nope,

[00:26:44] Fryda: Miami. And what we think of as Florida is just like one flat it's actually so incredibly boring to

[00:26:52] Carmen: stack.

[00:26:54] Fryda: To see that compared to like something like.

Rapid anything that deviated at all, it seems was just like filled in or worked into something more palatable.

[00:27:04] Carmen: This is why we can't have

[00:27:05] Fryda: nice

[00:27:05] Andrew: things. This is, yeah. So, so the way Southern Florida is built is it's kind of like a bowl all along the perimeter. You have, what's called the coastal Ridge and that's what our cities are built on.

That's what Miami is built on. And that's what for Waterdale Palm beach, et cetera. They're all built on these limestone ridges and the middle. You have the Everglades, which is the bottom of the. It's a river of grass. It's an incredible, like Southern flowing river. That's I think it's like 150 miles wide all flowing south.

And then you don't really get real elevation. So you get past like chubby up into Orlando and lake county and the new hot actual Hills. But. Yeah, this whole system right. Has been relatively fucked up. So first of all, the water that feeds into the Everglades comes from just north of lake Okeechobee, the Kissimmee river, all these different lakes that are up there, literally hundreds of lakes, and that's all flows into lake Okeechobee and there it gets messy.

Up by fertilizers, by herbicides, by pesticides. It's terrible, primarily from the agricultural sector, sugar cane specifically. And that's why you get these massive algae flows every spring summer when the lake overflows and they just let all this water out onto the east and west coast. And that just, it, everything dies and you have massive red and green algae that goes all around the state and kills everything.

So you have all that collecting there and gets through like go, goes into the Everglades. And then we built all these roads across the Everglades, Tamiami trail and all of these canals that redirect the water out into the ocean so that Southern Glades don't get the water that they need. And you got way too much water up.

And they're dying as a result, you have widespread die-offs down there and the whole ecosystem is built on that flow of water, which we have completely interrupted. Do any

[00:28:59] Carmen: of these details make their way into Miami creation

[00:29:02] Andrew: myth? Oh yeah, absolutely. I haven't written it yet. This is going to be, this is the first of three books that I plan to write for.

The third book is going to be the apocalypse. It's going to be a cycle, has to, you know, the north side, the Ragnar rock. Yes. There has to be the end of times we

[00:29:19] Carmen: have like a Tupac or something. I

[00:29:23] Andrew: don't know. Not yet. That'll be in there,

[00:29:26] Carmen: put it on the

[00:29:27] Fryda: list. You need to incorporate the great Chupacabra scare of 1995 lesson.

Those

[00:29:34] Carmen: images from Primerica, backdoor still

[00:29:36] Fryda: terrifying. Like all of those things where they were just. Spotted to like on this corner,

[00:29:46] Andrew: funny, you should mention that the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a story that talks about how, like now that everyone's quarantine and the streets are empty. That's where all of Miami's mythic animals come out and interact with.

So there's like a pack of two buck out at us. And then I drew upon all these

[00:30:03] Carmen: one. They have a whole family, they grew

[00:30:05] Fryda: up and got married. I always thought it was just one to buck out of like, just like one animal free to all of that in Puerto Rico. And non-American America

[00:30:13] Carmen: men, a nice little Tupac Alberta peer, and now they have a little to bug out a

[00:30:18] Andrew: family.

[00:30:21] Fryda: And you know what, it's been a while from now. Yeah. Like 20

[00:30:23] Andrew: years I drew up on all these. Creatures from, from all these Caribbean traditions and just jam them into downtown Miami when everybody is home, again, all these things that you would recognize that Coco was there, the hours was there, which is like more Dominican.

They got incorporated. They'll make us showing that anyway, that's my point. The end of times the apocalypse. So basically be climate change is how everything's going to end in the first chapter of the book. The gods I turned on, the creator creates a Matisse. Lacey's the goddess. I knew the appreciate that.

Yummy let the goddess in the sky, you Yunior the God of the. And UCL the God of the ocean and yeah, and then actually at bay comes in and spreads rumors and they all start fighting each other. And it just ruins the harmony of the universe.

There's this enmity between the different gods between the goddess of the sky and the ocean and the Everglades, and a constantly at war with each other. And you near the God of the earth is stuck in the middle. And he's trying to keep up. And eventually they're going to win out and they're just going to go to war with each other and that'll destroy Miami.

So, you know, no spoilers and spoiler alert, the apocalypse will be Miami's underwater.

[00:31:39] Carmen: And the mayor like basically creating his own little Noah's Ark with Bitcoin. Where can

[00:31:44] Fryda: people read? Yeah,

[00:31:45] Andrew: where's the. So if you go to Miami creation, myth.com, not only will you find all of my ridiculous stories on there.

Um, but you'll also find the first free chapter of the book, which is how the universe was created. And so right now we are just finishing up the narration of my immigration, the audio book, and we started to record the different actors in studio. Once the audio book is done, then we're going to put everything out on a kicker.

The audio book, the physical book and an e-book. And that's when people will be able to get the whole book

[00:32:21] Carmen: being one of those things that can be like a living text, right? Like it gets updated so often.

[00:32:26] Andrew: I'm really glad that you asked that question. So the, the next stage in this. Is to put out the book, right?

The following stage after that is to put out, like to add Foley effects and to add more production value into the audio and put it out as a podcast. Then after that, we would take that audio and we'd create animated TV series pilot for Miami creation myth, and then hope. And then we would pitch that to streaming services.

Very cool. But that is not the ultimate stage. I want to ultimately create kind of like an open online. Universe where anyone can take any aspect of biomimicry. And write their own stories. And if, you know, create their own gods, you know, trash the whole concept, if they want, like, you know, my own pen and make our own with their own gods or goddesses their own sources for everything so that it is very much so a living, breathing universe that is constantly changing, that has different aspects from different communities that doesn't have one Canon.

That's what I wanted to ultimately be. I love that. Well, hopefully it gives people a framework in order to tell their own stories, but also to, it will give people the opportunity to read the perspectives of different communities in the city and how they perceive their place within it. I think

[00:33:53] Fryda: that's lovely.

Yeah. So Andrew, at the end of every episode, we come out with a cubanismo. And so do you have a cubanismo or a Miami small that you.

[00:34:04] Andrew: I'll tell you one of my favorites. Volo como matias perez.

which, which means that someone just disappeared and you never saw them again. So like, you know, fell off the face of the map. And the origin of this is that there was a Portuguese balloonist in Cuba, in the 19th century who brought his hot air balloon to Cuba and went up and, you know, to go from it's skinny little island, the middle of Korea.

And got blown off into the Atlantic and nobody ever saw him again, his name was Martinez Perez. And the reason why I like this is because Cubans cannot let go of stupidity. If someone's stupid, they are going to shit on you for the rest of your life. And like literally 150 years later, people are still talking shit about my BS

[00:34:51] Fryda: Cubans definitely have a way of creating stories around anything that you do. Like you did one thing.

[00:34:59] Carmen: Never.

[00:35:00] Andrew: Yeah, never, ever, ever, never several generations later. We're still talking shit about them.

[00:35:07] Fryda: So basically translates to flew away, like Martinez Perez, the guy that flew away, you know?

[00:35:14] Andrew: Yeah. Never seen it ever again.

[00:35:17] Fryda: Thank you so much, Andrew, for sharing this story and also your approach to storytelling and your understanding of Miami with

[00:35:24] Carmen: yes. Thank you so much. This has been so fun. We are all in Miami right now, and it's really awesome. We're going to go have a great time after this, you know, before the apocalypse hits, you know, just

[00:35:39] Fryda: thank you all for joining us in this really fun episode. Special. Thanks to our. Catalina Lauren Gianni. Vidal, Christine D Derrick Ryan Jose, Susan House. Katherine Lauren Kaylee. Amati Kristen, Sarah Gardena, Jason, Josh, Yvette Kelis, and Jesse, you are amazing. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.

We are at take it easy. Pod, pod.com or go to our website. Take it easy. pod.com. We have a March store on our website and an empty crypto on open sea and we go live on Instagram every other week. Thank you so much, everyone. And take it easy.