On this week's episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, we're joined by the writer and director of the new movie Silk Road, Alex Blumberg. Alex talks about the making of the movie, how he got involved with the project, and what it takes to make a movie based on a true crime story like Silk Road. We also talk about how he came to write the script for the movie and the process of writing and directing it. And, of course, we talk about the story behind Silk Road and how it ties into the real-life story of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web website that served as the backbone of the internet's most popular drug marketplace, and how he was able to get to the bottom of one of the biggest true crime stories of the 20th century. Joe also talks about what it's like to work on a movie that's based on true crime, and why he thinks it's the perfect movie to make and why it's so perfect for the role of a bad cop in his new film. Silk Road is a must-see movie. If you haven't seen the movie yet, make sure to check it out! and don't miss out on the movie on Amazon Prime Video, where it's streaming now! The Dark Side of the Internet is streaming on Prime Video! Subscribe to our new streaming service, The Dark Web, wherever you get your favorite streaming services, starting on January 1st, 2019! Thanks for listening to this episode of the pod! Cheers, Joe and Alex! XOXO! -Jon and Alex - - The Dark Lord - This episode is a production of Gimlet.co/The Dark Web Junkies Podcast by the Dark Side Of Joe Rogans Podcast by day, by night, all day, by night? Thanks to Pale Fire and Pale Blue Moon by Night, by Nightly, all by Night Moon, by the Moon Moon by Moon Moon Moonflower in the dark side of the galaxy, by Moonflower? by the moon? - by the Milky Way, by The Moon? , and the Moon, and the moon, by Mars? ? , by the stars of the Moon? by the Mars Express? . by The Good Side of Mars? by Moon, the moon is a little more? and so much more!
00:00:37.000And you did a great job of taking something that is a real story and laying it out in a movie format where you only have a certain amount of time with actors.
00:00:48.000The guy who played the bad cop, what is his name?
00:00:57.000He's been in a bunch of stuff, and he's a beast.
00:01:00.000It was so interesting when I got there on set with him, and it's sort of day one, you don't know what you're getting into.
00:01:06.000And I was just standing there next to him, and I was like, dude, this guy is like a thoroughbred racehorse, and he is at the Kentucky Derby.
00:01:12.000I can't wait to see what this guy does.
00:01:48.000You know, go into the world, suddenly going from the doc thing into the movie thing, and it's like, well, who are the people that are going to inhabit this?
00:01:56.000So I sat down and I met with, you know, all these amazing actors, and you sort of are looking at, okay, what if it's this version of the movie?
00:02:18.000What happened is there were a couple of corrupt law enforcement officers.
00:02:21.000There was a DEA guy, there was a Treasury guy, and so what I had done is kind of combined them into that character because I've spent a lot of time in the documentaries hanging out with guys like that.
00:02:37.000And also people who have relationships, long-term relationships with informants.
00:02:42.000So I was able to kind of take the work that I had done in the docs and put it into the movie so that it's drawn from real life.
00:02:50.000It's drawn from people I know, but it's kind of a hybrid between the two.
00:02:54.000Yeah, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along and condensing it without having too many different moving parts.
00:03:18.000The day after Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the San Francisco Library, in the sci-fi section of the Glen Park Library, I was off shooting some crime doc or another, and I remember vividly opening the newspaper, and it just had kind of like the shadowy headlines of the story.
00:03:52.000And then obsessively tracking the story as new pieces of information would come out.
00:03:57.000And then eventually there was this Rolling Stone reporter, this guy by the name of David Kushner, who's this brilliant writer and reporter, has like a nose for story and is able to get to people.
00:04:08.000And he had gotten to Ross Ulbricht's girlfriend in Austin and then the family.
00:04:15.000And so he wrote this profile of Ross that was this very...
00:04:42.000Kept that information under wraps so as not to screw up the prosecution of Ross, right?
00:04:49.000But I was – knowing people in DEA, knowing people in U.S. Attorney's Office from making the 7-5, from making Operation Odessa, whatever, those guys would call me and they were like, man, there's a whole other amazing half of this story, which is the crooked cop side of the story.
00:05:04.000Suddenly when I saw that, I thought, okay, Now that's a movie because I can imagine these two sort of people.
00:05:12.000I always thought of it as almost like they're missiles on a collision course flying right at each other.
00:05:17.000And so suddenly when I had that in my head, I was like, I can make a movie out of that.
00:05:21.000The stuff with the corrupt cop's wife and daughter, was that fictionalized as well?
00:05:44.000I was like, I need to pour myself into this because there wasn't, you know, when you're making a doc, you're going out and you're harvesting people and you're harvesting information and you're harvesting photos, videos, news footage.
00:05:57.000This was like, there was a limited amount of information.
00:06:00.000And so then when the information ran out, it was like, okay, what am I going to pour in here?
00:06:05.000I can research it the way I would do a doc, but really, if I'm going to make this something that's True and authentic to me, I kind of poured myself into it.
00:07:34.000Yeah, it's basically like the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
00:07:38.000You go into Tor and it conceals usage and location.
00:07:42.000And he developed this Silk Road platform where you could buy all kinds of drugs and then ultimately you could buy guns as well and a lot of other illegal things.
00:07:58.000The way you portrayed him is really fascinating too, and I wonder how much of it is accurate, because you portrayed him as this sort of really intelligent, idealistic young man who ultimately believed that people should have the freedom to buy, sell, use, choose, whatever they like.
00:08:12.000And that the people who support Silk Road, that's how they felt.
00:08:16.000And people that are proponents Of a lot of these, particularly psychedelics, which I'm one of them, they like that.
00:08:24.000Like, yeah, who is a grown adult to tell another grown adult what they can and can't use?
00:08:30.000Wouldn't it be great if there were some online marketplace that was free from the tentacles of the American government and you could buy whatever you wanted?
00:08:56.000Yes, and his story, what fascinated me about his story was you have this guy that starts out as a very kind of naive, innocent guy.
00:09:07.000He's somebody who wants to make his mark in the world, wants to change the world, and goes into it with an open heart and good intentions.
00:09:16.000And there was a lot of information about him When I first sat down to write the script, he was locked up in MCC in New York, actually exactly where Michael Dowd from the 7-5 had been locked up years earlier, right?
00:09:30.000And so I sat down and I wrote him a letter.
00:09:35.000And he was in awaiting sentencing, I think, at the time.
00:09:38.000But I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access to him, right?
00:09:44.000Rightly so, because it would potentially screw up his defense.
00:09:47.000But I felt like, you know, I owe it to this guy in some fundamental sense if I'm going to tell his story to try to connect with him.
00:09:57.000And so I wrote him a letter, and I never heard back.
00:10:01.000But then he had left the This kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past.
00:10:08.000He had written all of these public posts on the Silk Road website as Dread Pirate Roberts where he's putting out his philosophy, his ethos, his convictions.
00:10:20.000And then at the same time, he had been secretly keeping a journal long before he had launched Silk Road all the way through it up until the bitter end.
00:10:29.000And so when he got busted, they confiscated his laptop.
00:10:32.000And when they opened up his laptop, they had all of his private journal entries.
00:10:37.000So there was the combination of his public postings as Dread Pirate Roberts and the diary entries as Ross Ulbricht.
00:10:44.000And so while I didn't have access to the guy, I had access to his words and who – I guess accidental self-portrait in some way or another.
00:10:56.000And so when we got into your question of how much of this is, you know, journalistically accurate.
00:11:04.000So every piece of voiceover in the movie that's spoken by Nick Robinson who plays Ross Ulbricht, all of that is either taken from the diary entries or taken from the public postings as Dread Pirate Roberts.
00:11:16.000And then all of the chat logs, all of the back and forth, the encrypted communications between You know, Nob and Dread Pirate Roberts.
00:11:23.000All of that stuff is taken from the documentary record.
00:11:25.000Because I felt like you have to be true to who this guy is, in some sense, spiritually, you know?
00:11:37.000I wrote him a letter, never heard back.
00:11:38.000But what ended up happening was his ex-girlfriend, who's here in Austin, Julia V., who's portrayed in the movie by the actress Alexandra Shipp, she became a consultant for it.
00:11:52.000When I was writing the script, and then when making the movie, because I felt like I needed somebody who knew this guy, who loved him, who had an intimate viewpoint on who he was.
00:12:04.000And so she became my kind of source and way in, in an emotional sense, right?
00:12:10.000How old was she when all was going down?
00:12:24.000So they're like young people knocking around Austin.
00:12:28.000And for her, I think it was, you know, what she had told me was, initially it was like he and I against the world, you know, inside the bubble.
00:12:37.000And then little by little, the Silk Road website became his masterpiece.
00:12:41.000And it was like everybody goes outside of the bubble except me and Silk Road.
00:12:46.000And so eventually she felt like she was in almost like a three-way relationship where it's like her, him, and the website.
00:12:51.000And eventually the website kind of eats him, you know?
00:12:55.000Well, you did a great job of portraying the obsession that he had with all the inner workings of the website and seeing it ramp up through the website's growth and development.
00:13:06.000Was it Gawker that made the article about it and then it just exploded?
00:15:48.000The crazy thing is there were several iterations of Silk Road that happened.
00:15:52.000So like the feds came in, like seized it, and then all of a sudden like on the website it was like seized by the FBI, you know, putting the word out as the feds are kind of pissing on the territory.
00:16:02.000But then, I forget what amount of time, I've forgotten the details at this point, but six months later or whatever, Silk Road 2.0 comes up.
00:18:22.000Did he deny that he called those hits?
00:18:24.000Well, not only did he deny it, but what happened was – so to back up a step, basically, the corrupt cop in the movie, the corrupt cop at a certain point sets out to bust Ross.
00:18:36.000And then at a certain point, he's like kind of getting cock-blocked by his superiors and whatever.
00:18:41.000And so he says, okay, I'm going to rip this kid off instead.
00:18:44.000If I can't bust him, I'm going to steal the money and I'm going to use it for my own purposes.
00:18:48.000But what ends up happening is, and all of that information, by the way, the fake murder of his employee and the photographs that were taken of it, all of that stuff is true.
00:19:39.000I mean, he seemed like the quintessential internet couch monster.
00:19:43.000Working with that guy was so fun, you know, because, again, we had information about the real guy, and what happened was, when that guy gets busted, when Chronic Pain gets busted, I think?
00:20:11.000And I'm like, ferret, dude, let's go ferret, you know?
00:20:14.000And then the other brilliant thing that Paul did was he said, you know, all of this, like, you know, all this online chatter where it's, you know, you're typing on the computer and then the other person types back.
00:20:24.000He's like, what if the dude's a mumbler?
00:20:26.000So he's kind of saying this shit out loud the whole time that he's talking and he starts talking to himself.
00:20:30.000So once he had the ferret and made the guy a mumbler, he had like the keys to the character.
00:22:11.000And I was sitting there watching the news waiting to see if he would.
00:22:14.000And I woke up the next day and I was like, man, I'm going to look it up.
00:22:19.000And so I went on to the Bureau of Prisons website and I typed in Ross's name and it comes up, you know, Tucson Penitentiary.
00:22:27.000And then it said, release date, colon, life.
00:22:32.000And it just like, it hit me, you know, this kid's 36 years old, he's 10 years younger than I am, and just staring down the barrel of that.
00:22:40.000And so I sat down, even though the movie's, you know, coming out or whatever at the time, and I decide, you know what, I owe this guy and some fun, like just human being, man to man.
00:22:50.000So I write him a letter and I said, listen, man, I've made this movie and this is my portrait of you and my portrait of your story and of Silk Road.
00:23:01.000But if you ever want to tell your version of the story in any form or fashion, you want to do it as a Rolling Stone interview, you want to do it as a documentary, you want to do it any way you want, you tell me and I will be there in person to sit down with you.
00:23:14.000Because I do feel like there's some kind of...
00:23:18.000I don't know, I guess like spiritual contract between me and him.
00:23:20.000Like when you enter into a story like this, you're in somebody else's life in a real way.
00:23:26.000Yeah, it's almost like we do need to hear his version of it, right?
00:23:51.000And who knows, you know, the way it was reported that he was closely considering it, but in the kind of last days of the, you know, chaotic into the administration or whatever, it didn't happen.
00:24:03.000But I was, you know, because no matter what you think of Ross's politics or what he did as a, you know, or Silk Road even, There is this thing where, like, I'm a believer in second chances, man.
00:24:17.000You know, I've screwed up a million things in my lifetime, and I feel like somebody like that hopefully has something to give the world, you know, and isn't thrown away.
00:24:28.000It's just crazy that they were offering him 10 years, and instead they gave him two life sentences plus 40 years with no possibility of parole.
00:24:40.000Well, I think in some way or another it was like this changed the drug war, right?
00:24:46.000It changed the way the drug game happened and it changed the way the drug war was fought.
00:24:51.000Suddenly it's like it's almost an existential threat to the drug war when it's not by busts and hand-to-hand and all the street stuff that we've seen since Nixon unleashes DEA. You know, in 73 or whatever the year is, suddenly it's, wait a minute,
00:25:07.000all happening online, anonymous, DHL, USPS, people are delivering it.
00:25:12.000Nobody even knows that they're carrying it.
00:25:13.000So it was like, it was an existential threat to the US government, to the DEA, to the drug war.
00:25:52.000He was ahead of the U.S. Attorney's Office.
00:25:54.000He had Chuck Schumer there, you know, calling for his head, and yet he continued to kind of game the system and beat him by just being nimble and being able to throw his laptop in his backpack and roll on to the next location.
00:26:05.000So maybe, you know, maybe he thought he'd be able to continue beating the system.
00:26:43.000He might not be running and he could be sending messages to someone, but it seems like he's running.
00:26:46.000Well, I think, you know, one of the things when I looked at the federal penitentiary where he's being held is you actually can, they give everybody access to the computers and to email periodically once you get on the list.
00:28:21.000Legitimately, if you were the prosecuting attorney and you knew that you had corrupt cops giving bad information and stealing money and you were an ethical person, you're supposed to release that information and it should taint the eyes of the jury.
00:28:39.000It should taint the eyes of the judge.
00:29:06.000Righteous cops, like the guy that investigated the Kiki Camarena murder, the murder of the D agent in 1985. And so I've spent my whole kind of professional life knocking around cops and prosecutors.
00:29:50.000I mean, that should be grounds for a retrial.
00:29:54.000It's now gone all the way through the system, and the only way he gets out is clemency or a pardon by somebody.
00:30:02.000Otherwise, that kid's spending the rest of his life...
00:30:05.000And I called his mother recently, in Austin too, actually, about the same time, and I had not spoken with her beforehand, and I reached out, again, just in sort of human terms, and I said, you know, how are you doing?
00:30:18.000And she said, I'm not doing too good, man.
00:30:56.000It should be grounds for a re-examination of the case.
00:31:00.000Well, but it goes back to your original point, too, which is like, okay, if you have the intention to commit murder, if it really was him that did it, have you crossed a fundamental line?
00:31:10.000Because I think, and to me, that's what makes all of these stories interesting, stories like this interesting, is it's not clear-cut.
00:31:21.000And it's not, you know, good guy, bad guy.
00:31:24.000You've got – it's the gray area in between.
00:31:26.000To me, as a filmmaker, what is interesting is somebody that isn't wholly good and isn't – or isn't wholly a gangster.
00:31:34.000It's somebody that's in between and, like, the forces of light are warring with the forces of darkness inside them, you know?
00:31:40.000You know, you did a great job of portraying him as very tortured by his decision, especially the one where he's seeing his girlfriend now hanging out with some other guy and he's drunk and, you know, makes a call.
00:32:22.000And so there was a lot of information about him and there was information in his own words.
00:32:27.000So anywhere where I had that information, it was like let's hew closely to that.
00:32:32.000And then I had his ex-girlfriend, right, who is there telling me – because a big question I had for her early on is, okay, this libertarian ethos, this notion that like everybody has the right to do whatever they want, This is America,
00:34:22.000You know, one of the things that's crazy about that story is from the time he unleashes the site until the time he's busted, it's less than two years, right?
00:34:30.000This guy's got an entire lifetime's worth of drama that happens to him in 18 months' time.
00:34:37.000Well, you know, had he hung on to the Bitcoin, with Bitcoin at 50,000 or whatever it is today, it would be like an incalculable amount of money.
00:34:51.000And what happened with all that Bitcoin?
00:34:54.000It got confiscated and seized by the federal government.
00:34:56.000So the federal government owns it now?
00:34:57.000Federal government seizes it and confiscates it, although there was just, I read in the news, and I don't know the details of this, but there was a bunch of, you know, significant amount of, meaning like hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, missing Bitcoin.
00:35:10.000U.S. seizes one billion in Bitcoin linked to Silk Road site.
00:35:15.000The DOJ is suing for formal forfeiture of funds after tracking down the person holding them.
00:35:23.000And this is, how long ago was this story?
00:35:52.000According to the information, Ross Ulbricht, now GL founder of Silk World, became aware of individual ex's online identity and threatened...
00:35:59.000Individual X for return of the cryptocurrency to Ulbricht.
00:36:04.000Individual X did not return the cryptocurrency but kept it and did not spend it.
00:36:08.000The complaint said, the complaint officially titled United States versus approximately 69,370 Bitcoin.
00:36:54.000Well, I mean, I think some of them it goes into, like, reinvestigations.
00:36:58.000And the way in the, like, Miami Vice days, when you, like, seize the Ferrari, then it becomes, like, the undercover, like, Ferrari, you know?
00:38:00.000For me, every single one of these true stories or based on a true story has a big moral question to it.
00:38:10.000When I'm making The Night Stalker for Netflix...
00:38:16.000The question is, okay, you've got all these brutal crime scene photos of people that are just essentially gutted and just the most horrible stuff ever.
00:38:25.000And so it becomes this question of, okay, how much of that stuff do you show the world?
00:38:32.000Or how much of it do you conceal because you want it to be a compelling show that people are able to watch?
00:38:38.000And so every single one of them has a big...
00:38:41.000Moral question where you're constantly kind of struggling with it.
00:38:44.000With Silk Road, you know, the hits is a big thing because, okay, there's no guarantee that it was necessarily him behind the keys ordering them.
00:38:54.000But at the same time, you know, a reasonable mind would assume, okay, you're the guy that's got the keys to the kingdom.
00:39:02.000Presumably it is you that makes this decision.
00:39:05.000But it's, you know, that's the thing with these crime stories and these true stories is...
00:39:11.000It constantly requires me to make moral judgments about what to include and what not to include.
00:39:17.000Yeah, that's what I would, particularly with that, well, I guess with Richard Ramirez and the Night Stalker, like, you've got bodies, they're real photos, you've got, you know, obviously real murders.
00:39:27.000My question is with him, if he said he didn't call for those hits, if you portrayed the DEA agent Creating a false account or hacking into his account in some way.
00:39:41.000What would be the method they could do that?
00:39:49.000He's doing it through an encrypted browser.
00:39:52.000How would it be possible for someone else to...
00:39:56.000Well, say he's got employees that are working with...
00:39:58.000I mean, theoretically, there are people that are co-conspirators, collaborators that have access to different things, and maybe it's not him that's actually typing it.
00:40:06.000I mean, I think most reasonable minds would conclude that was the decision, and that was the intent.
00:40:13.000But at the same time, you can't prove it, because that's the whole thing with the sort of anonymous internet, no accountability.
00:40:29.000It would have to be someone who had access to his laptop.
00:40:31.000Did they get a log from the laptop that showed that type, like the typed out words, like put the hit on that guy, however he said it, that that came from that laptop?
00:40:46.000Basically, what happened was they ended up – he uses – instead of using a local server, he uses like a server farm in Iceland so that as people – the feds are trying to track him, it's going to this weird-ass locale that's not tied to him geographically.
00:41:01.000So eventually the feds get access to the server farm in Iceland and they're able to...
00:41:06.000The simplified version of this is they open it up and they're looking at it in real time from the inside.
00:41:12.000So it's as if they're watching from his laptop but in another location.
00:42:59.000Here I am at the door of the hotel room suite where the agents faked my death.
00:43:06.000It's crazy the culture like this, right?
00:43:08.000Which is like people wanting to relive their thing.
00:43:11.000I remember very early on, one of the earliest jobs I had was I went out on the crab fishing boats in the Bering Sea doing what turned out to be deadliest catch once upon a time, right?
00:43:22.000And so I'm out there on these crab fishing boats and I'm thinking like, who's going to watch this shit?
00:43:26.000You know, sort of crabs pulled out of the ocean.
00:43:29.000And there was this kid on there that was like a young kid that had washed up in Alaska, you know, gotten tossed from the army, smoking dope or something.
00:43:36.000And he ends up in Alaska and he's on this boat and he starts telling me, man, I'm having nightmares that I'm going to like fall over this boat in the middle of the night.
00:43:45.000He's out there fishing in the middle of the night, throws one of the crab pots over, and the rope catches his leg, yanks his ass into the water, right?
00:43:53.000And the alarms start going off, and I go running out there in the middle of the night to see what the deal is.
00:43:58.000And my cameraman, who's with me at the time, is like, dude, we've got to help these guys.
00:44:02.000So he drops his camera, and he goes running out to help the other.
00:44:06.000And I'm kind of like, dude, my job is to film this shit.
00:44:10.000And so I reach down and I pick up the camera and I start shooting and I'm feeling like conflicted again that moral thing like okay should I be like helping or should I be filming this?
00:44:20.000And so they grab the kid and miraculously they save him and they pull him onto the deck and he's like shaking with cold you know because your heart gives out in like six minutes when you're in the water like that.
00:44:31.000And so I'm holding a camera with one hand and a knife with the other, and I'm cutting the guy's clothes off, right?
00:44:36.000And the kid slaps me, and he goes, it's all right, man.
00:44:52.000But it's so crazy that people are like that.
00:44:55.000Yeah, but people are so aware of what it means to be on television now, or what it means to be on the internet, or what it means to be a part of a thing that a bunch of people are going to see.
00:45:06.000And that's kind of how we process these stories.
00:45:08.000It's like why we're still fooling, you know, why are people still watching the story of Richard Ramirez and the Night Stalker 35 years after that happened?
00:45:16.000And I think part of the reason why is like this is how we understand these stories is by like telling them, retelling them, having the discussions about like what's the morality of Ross Ulbricht or using crime scene photos of Richard Ramirez.
00:45:30.000It's kind of this is the way we culturally process this stuff.
00:45:33.000Do you ever do a demographic breakdown of who watched, like does Netflix have a demographic breakdown of who watches those crime shows?
00:46:20.000All of the, like, naked pictures that the girls are sending in, you know, because this author had written a book about him, had all this stuff.
00:46:26.000And I was like – and you always have to kind of ask that awkward question of, like, so why does this guy become this sort of crazy sex symbol object of – you know, obscure object of desire?
00:46:38.000And it's always like kind of an – particularly with the women who are being interviewed, but everybody.
00:46:49.000But this is somebody that like – I think as one of the people said, this is somebody that would eat you for dinner, not like – there's no – it's craziness to have any attraction to it.
00:47:39.000The act of killing someone, that it's difficult to do, and that it requires someone to be capable of taking another person's life.
00:47:52.000And to be close to that person means somehow or another you're protected by them and that they're willing to kill and that this is like something that existed thousands and thousands of years ago in our DNA,
00:48:08.000this desire to be close to killers because you were more likely to survive because there were so many killers.
00:48:13.000Like if you went back in time, you know, a few thousand years ago, murder must have been like really common.
00:48:21.000When people were sword fighting all the time.
00:49:36.000Why do people look over the edge of a building and think about jumping?
00:49:39.000You know, like there's something about...
00:49:41.000We want to get up to the edge in some way or another, you know?
00:49:45.000There's something about death and murder and all those things that it's absolutely – and also anesthetized in our culture, which is real weird, right?
00:49:53.000Like, why is it okay for a movie to depict a hundred people dying, just murdered with bullets and just stabbed, and that's fine.
00:51:21.000But if they were CGI sex, I wonder if we're ever going to reach – because clearly our desire for whatever it is, depravity, whatever you want to call it, whether it's violence or sex or extreme things that we see in films, it's only getting – Greater,
00:51:39.000If you look at what was outrageous, like I watched The Shining the other night, and what was outrageous then in terms of like even violence is pretty fucking tame.
00:52:16.000Well, but it's also, like, when you think about depictions of sex, in a weird way, it's oftentimes, and I guess maybe the same thing is true with, like, horror movies, but it's like, the tease can be sexier than the actual sex.
00:52:29.000Or, like, Jaws, the shark, it's like, you're thinking the shark's coming, not actually seeing the shark is what's scary about it.
00:52:36.000You know, oftentimes what the mind can do.
00:52:38.000Yeah, we used to think that about violence, too, though.
00:52:57.000If you had Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the 1970s, they'd probably make it rated X. But, you know, there's those people that make the argument.
00:53:17.000Taking the ride without having to indulge it.
00:53:20.000That's the argument for violent video games.
00:53:23.000The argument against violent video games is that somehow or another makes people numb to the idea of killing people because you're killing people all the time in these virtual forms.
00:53:35.000But the argument for video games is that you get that out.
00:55:19.000And when we get back to Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht, when you see his story and you see what he – I mean, even if he did call for those murders – In a lot of people's eyes, like, what he was doing was stopping rats,
00:55:35.000stopping people from fucking up his thing, and that these people were, they were in the way of his idea of what the greater good is.
00:55:44.000Well, and, you know, he has the argument with his girlfriend in the movie, where she's like, dude, you're selling, like, crack on the site, you're selling meth on the site.
00:55:51.000And his point is, like, hey, if you were to go buy this on the street, there's not a rating system, there's not reviews, like...
00:55:57.000My operation is safer than like the old school drug dealers because there actually is some amount of accountability because it's all publicly posted.
00:56:51.000And became a guy who started using these drugs after he became a clinical researcher.
00:56:57.000He was basically a teetotaler until he was in his 30s.
00:57:00.000And then while he was doing clinical research on these drugs, he started realizing how much we've been sort of misinterpreting the effects or misrepresenting the effects, rather, and how people have these Ideas on what crack is,
00:57:17.000and a lot of it is based on racist prosecution policies.
00:57:22.000Because if you have crack versus coke, the difference in prosecution is fucking astronomical.
00:57:43.000Well, it's also weird, you know, we talk about the like cultural shifts, you know, and I always think about this, you know, having done several DEA stories, whether it's the last narc on Amazon, and I think of like hanging out with these, you know, DEA agents who'd like become my friends that are in it.
00:57:58.000Well, now all of a sudden, like, you're in California, like the weed store, there's more weed stores in California than there are Starbucks.
00:58:04.000Like, how weird must that be for these, like, DEA guys, these, like, old-school, kind of knock-around, like, warriors that dedicated their entire life to the war on drugs.
00:58:13.000And then it's like, and then they're like, maybe give me some edibles.
00:58:21.000It's like, you know, I wonder if you look at Silk Road 20 years from now and it seems like preposterous that he – or even now maybe, you know, that he gets double life sentences plus 40 without the possibility of parole, you know?
00:58:33.000And these guys that are the cops, they're not bad people either.
01:00:09.000When it started out, that was the gig, right?
01:00:11.000When you're an undercover cop that's carrying a gun and going in, doing a buy bus to get the weed or whatever, literally every time you go to work, You're risking your life, potentially.
01:00:22.000And that's like Jason Clarke's character in Silk Road, right?
01:00:28.000Once upon a time, they were door kickers.
01:00:30.000The job was like, go in there, get it done.
01:00:32.000And they used to say, you know, what kind of piece?
01:00:34.000Are you carrying a SIG or what are you carrying?
01:00:36.000And all of a sudden, the world changes and it's like, well, how much RAM is on your laptop?
01:00:40.000And like these guys are like Peckinpah characters.
01:00:42.000They're out of step with the world, man.
01:00:44.000You know, like the game has changed and all they know is living by what they learned at the barrel of a gun.
01:00:50.000And suddenly the like culture doesn't care anymore.
01:00:52.000It's like, no, the drug game is online now.
01:00:55.000And like knowing how to work informants or rouse somebody, it's like that shit's irrelevant.
01:00:59.000You did a great job of showing that conflict in the film too when the two guys were outside smoking a cigarette talking about that.
01:01:06.000It's a great version of a dramatic interpretation of real world events that are historically very significant because it means a lot to our world.
01:01:19.000When something like Silk Road comes along...
01:01:22.000And I never bought anything off of Silk Road.
01:01:25.000I don't even think I know anybody who bought anything off Silk Road.
01:01:28.000But I remember we were all watching it very carefully.
01:02:14.000And that's why it grew so fast, you know, from something that, like, nobody had heard of, and it's, like, just a dude with a laptop, till suddenly it's all over the globe, and, you know, people are doing...
01:02:24.000And to me, like, this story is a Frankenstein story, right?
01:02:27.000In the sense of this guy, this is his masterpiece.
01:02:30.000He's creating, like, what he wants to change the world, and suddenly the monster has him by the throat at the end of it, and is, like, squeezing, choking the life out of him.
01:02:39.000When he's visiting his sister and he reads a story about the kid on acid who jumped off the top of a building, is that all true?
01:02:46.000In fact, I had to call the dad to use the clip, right?
01:02:53.000Because there's all sorts of documentary footage scattered in there because I wanted it to be about the real stuff.
01:03:01.000And it was a complicated conversation with the dad where it's like, hey, man, I'm making this movie, but your son's story is an important piece of this, and I would like your blessing to include it.
01:03:11.000And so I understand the complex morality, like, okay, if that were me and I had lost my kid, I wouldn't be sitting here being like, hey, double life sentence plus 40 is too harsh for Ross.
01:03:22.000I'd be asking for his head, doesn't it?
01:05:36.000I mean, look, there's a lot of drugs that are super beneficial to people, pharmaceutical drugs, but sometimes people have adverse reactions and they die.
01:05:45.000I'm sure the people who make these medications feel horrible about it.
01:05:50.000That these reactions happen to people and they die because of their otherwise beneficial drugs.
01:06:15.000It's one of those uniquely complicated human issues that deals with personal freedom.
01:06:20.000And that's why I'm drawn to stories like this.
01:06:24.000Any of these stories that are morally complicated, maybe it's...
01:06:30.000People that criticize, you know, my work for, hey, this is somebody that's, you know, taking a real story and turning this into Gonzo Entertainment.
01:06:37.000But to me, you know, it's, okay, this is how we explore these stories, is by telling them, retelling them, talking about them, and not, you know, people are smart.
01:08:10.000Ultimately, what it's really about is this young man and his girlfriend and his friend and their creation of this thing that really changed the way people were able to access things that were illegal that people wanted.
01:09:44.000Definitely encapsulates what a crazy moment it was where this site gained momentum and started and like it showed like when he gets all the text messages in like he's blowing up yeah he's like holy shit what the and he's realizing like oh my god what have I done Yeah.
01:10:01.000It's weird, though, to read that tweet now, you know, Ross's tweet of like, okay, here I am 36 years ago.
01:10:07.000It's almost 10 years since I started this site.
01:10:10.000And, you know, I wonder what's going on.
01:10:13.000You know, I'd be curious one day, there was this amazing thing in the New York Times where they used to do watching Serpico with Serpico, where they go, you know, find like Frank Serpico, sit down with him and watch the movie and have the conversation.
01:10:26.000And, like, how interesting would it be to sit down now with Ross and watch Silk Road with him?
01:10:31.000Even if he hated it or even if he argued, hey, this is not right or whatever, what a fascinating conversation that would be.
01:10:37.000I'd love to be able to do that with him.
01:11:06.000You know, when you take a bullet through the head, I think you're probably forever looking over your shoulder, which is what happened to him.
01:11:47.000Yeah, basically at the end, he was going around reporting the police corruption that was kind of epidemic in the police department, according to him anyway.
01:11:58.000And so eventually he goes to respond to a call, and he goes through the door, and he's the first through the door, and you're expecting your backup to be there to get your back.
01:12:10.000And he goes through the door, and I think the door slams on his arm.
01:12:41.000I mean, cognitively, he seemed totally capable.
01:12:43.000I think it was, as I recall, I don't remember all the details, but I think it was like small caliber, didn't, you know, cause any sort of significant cognitive damage.
01:12:51.000You know, he ended up getting his detective shield when he's like lying in the hospital bed.
01:13:57.000Yeah, well, the interesting thing when he called me was, he's like, I was never sad, and I love the movie, and Sidney Lumet's a genius, but he said, I didn't like the movie.
01:14:05.000He's like, there was all sorts of stuff that didn't go into it, and he's like, I'd love to tell my version of this.
01:14:36.000And while he's still alive and can contribute to… Would you do it in a dramatic way or would you do it in a documentary style?
01:14:42.000Well, I think a dramatic version of it now because then you get the fun of like 1970s New York, like bygone era, you know, the city as it once was, you know?
01:14:53.000Now, that would be the place to do it at Netflix.
01:14:56.000Isn't it amazing how television used to be a place where people would go and their careers are falling apart and now it's the best way to tell a story?
01:15:26.000They tell these long stories and you just get completely glued to it.
01:15:31.000Particularly with Netflix because you binge watch Stranger Things.
01:15:36.000There's these shows that are just so much better than a movie.
01:15:40.000When you see a movie, it's like you realize you have to smush everything in to two hours or three hours or whatever you decided to make it.
01:15:47.000Well, audiences' viewing habits have changed, too.
01:15:51.000Once upon a time, it was like, give me two hours.
01:15:53.000I want to go to the theater and be done.
01:15:54.000Now, we're all stuck in our house all the time.
01:17:21.000Initially, if you looked at it on paper, it would have never made any sense.
01:17:23.000Like, oh, you're going to sometimes be high as fuck talking to comedians, sometimes talk to scientists, sometimes talk to mixed martial arts fighters, sometimes talk to physicists, sometimes talk to doctors and nutritionists.
01:18:01.000If I had three different lives to live simultaneously, I could fill them up easy.
01:18:06.000There's so many things that I would love to do that I just don't have the time to do.
01:18:10.000So for me to talk to all sorts of different people from different walks of lives, different specialties and different disciplines that they're involved in, I'm just a student of humans.
01:18:21.000I love the way people think and what they do and why they do it and what was going on while they're involved in something.
01:19:08.000My real enthusiasm and real curiosity.
01:19:12.000I'm fully there with you because at the end of the day, and it's equally true of something like Silk Road or making a doc, at the end of the day, people are fascinating.
01:19:24.000And if you will sit down and sort of Pay attention to them and ask them, hey man, what makes you tick?
01:19:33.000That's where these interests – and it's a similar job in many ways, right?
01:19:37.000Like me making a documentary is – I guess it's more polished and more produced and whatever.
01:19:42.000But at the end of the day, it's that fundamental thing of like, hey, who's sitting across from me and what makes them tick?
01:19:47.000Right, and the story of Michael Dowd, the way you depicted it in the 7-5 was so interesting because you get to see how this guy is a young, idealistic kid who becomes a cop, and then almost immediately, first day on the job, gets introduced to corruption.
01:20:10.000And what's so weird and fascinating about him is...
01:20:14.000He's still, you know, as I was saying to you earlier, he served 10 and a half years in the federal pen.
01:20:19.000And like being a cop in the federal pen and having to walk that yard alone, when I first met him, the story of how I got to him was fascinating.
01:20:31.000Once upon a time, these producers showed me this clip of him, and it was him being interviewed before the Mullen Commission.
01:20:37.000And the guy asked him, do you consider yourself a New York City cop or a criminal?
01:20:42.000And he leans over and he confers with his lawyer and he says, both.
01:20:46.000And as soon as I saw that clip, I was like, dude, who is this guy?
01:20:50.000And how do I get to him and how do I find his story?
01:20:55.000And what I was using at the time was...
01:20:58.000I have access to the software that the bounty hunters use.
01:21:00.000So if I get your name, your date of birth, I can get this kind of crazy matrix of data that's everywhere you've picked up a piece of mail, everywhere any known associates of yours.
01:21:11.000So I had gotten that for all these other people that were involved in the story.
01:21:14.000And I started sending out FedExes all over the country, right?
01:21:17.000So it was like, dude, I'm making this movie.
01:22:58.000He makes me go to the next station and I get off and he rolls up and I get in his car and he's just this full tilt maniac right out of a Scorsese movie.
01:23:07.000And he's like, alright, so what's the plan?
01:23:09.000And I'm like, dude, I want to know what it's like to be a corrupt cop where you're snorting lines off the dashboard and ripping and robbing through East New York.
01:24:12.000But the funny thing about somebody like that, and I have found this to be true of like several of these, you know, gangsters, is he's like a kid.
01:24:21.000He's like a big kid, you know, ten and a half years in the federal pen or whatever it is, and he's still kind of weirdly innocent.
01:24:47.000Ben Stiller in talks to direct Crooked Cop movie, The 7-5 for MGM. Well, how are they going to call it the 7-5 when you have a documentary called the 7-5?
01:24:58.000You know, the funny thing is we're sort of doing this with all these things at this point.
01:25:04.000I'm going to do the Operation Odessa, which was, I was telling you before, the story of this Russian gangster, Miami playboy, and Cuban narco.
01:25:16.000These guys who rip off the Kali cartel for $20 million trying to sell them a submarine, right?
01:25:21.000Explain that story, because that's crazy.
01:25:24.000They told them that they were going to sell them a submarine for $20 million.
01:25:32.000Okay, let me rewind, because the top of this was bonkers.
01:25:36.000So, at the time, some narc I know calls me and is like, dude, you want to hear the craziest drug war story ever?
01:25:42.000There's this Russian gangster, his name is Tarzan, he used to run his operation out of a titty bar in Miami, named after his favorite movie, Porky's, and he's locked up in a Panamanian prison, and he's got a Blackberry, do you want the number?
01:25:56.000And I'm like, bro, yes, I want the number.
01:26:34.000So I fly to Panama and I've got like 10 grand – no, just under 10 grand because if it's 10 grand, it's illegal.
01:26:41.000But if it's less than 10 grand, you can bring it, right?
01:26:44.000Because I know I'm going to have to like peel off bribes to get in the prison or whatever.
01:26:47.000And he's got this Russian attorney at the time.
01:26:50.000And the Russian attorney is like, okay, meet me outside of this prison, La Jolla prison outside of – hour and a half outside of Panama City.
01:26:59.000And you remember like – Field of dreams.
01:27:02.000This is like the inverse of that, dude, like field of nightmares, okay, this like stone fortress carved out of the jungle.
01:27:09.000And I roll up on this place, and there's this attorney, and he's standing out front, and I'm like, pay him a thousand bucks, and he's going to smuggle me into the prison or whatever.
01:27:18.000So I'm like, all right, man, what's the plan?
01:27:32.000And he's like, you give me $500, I'm gonna give $100 to the guard, the guard's gonna open it up, and you just go running across the yard.
01:27:40.000And when you get to the other side of the lower yard, there's gonna be a big steel door, and you push it open, and Tarzan's gonna be on the other side.
01:29:10.000And so I meet him and I'm like, dude, tell me the story.
01:29:14.000And he's like, I can't tell you the story because when you were sending me emails on the Blackberry, Russian intelligence intercepted it and they called the Russian mafia and they said, if I talk to you, they're going to kill me.
01:29:27.000And I'm like, bro, I just smuggled myself into a Panamanian prison.
01:29:30.000Like, you're going to tell me the fucking story.
01:29:33.000And so we kind of get into it in this prison.
01:34:28.000This guy goes ripping ass out of there at like 100 miles an hour.
01:34:31.000And as he's ripping along on the like Autobahn or whatever it is, yanks the e-brake, slams the car over to the side of the road, slaps me on the chest, and he's like, brother, you better be who you say you are, and this better be what you say it is, or we got a problem.
01:35:21.000So it's making sure it's not one of those kind of operations.
01:35:25.000So I end up spending a week with this dude and eventually he takes me to this hidden airplane hangar outside of the city and he opens it up and inside is a MiG fighter jet with $20 million in cash in the cockpit.
01:35:52.000So he proceeds and then he takes me into his like G5 or whatever it is and he proceeds to tell me the story of what really happened with the 20 million dollars in the submarine.
01:36:11.000Well, what happened was eventually his lawyers say, okay, we need to get him out for a week because we've got to prep his defense or whatever.
01:36:59.000So suddenly everything that once upon a time was owned by the state, like if you're the general and you like work at the airfield or at the place where the tanks are and suddenly there is no government, like you own those tanks.
01:37:13.000So basically suddenly everything was for sale and these guys were these like rock'em sock'em cowboy dudes that were like flying to Russia in the early days and being like, So is it possible?
01:37:22.000And they buy – first they buy choppers for the Kali cartel, right?
01:37:27.000They get like – so it's got a hook on it and it can pick up 5,000 kilos.
01:37:32.000So they're dropping the dope out to the cigarette boats from the jungle labs and they do it successfully.
01:37:38.000And so eventually the drug lords come to them and they're like, choppers are great, bro.
01:37:45.000Because, you know, you pack it full of submarine, you think about it, even if the submarine costs 20, 30 million dollars, one trip where it's packed with 5,000 kilos or whatever it is, you paid the whole thing off and made a profit.
01:37:56.000So these three guys get together and they're like, absolutely, we can get you the submarine.
01:38:01.000Only, like, two of them are, like, you know, really trying to get the submarine done.
01:38:05.000And they go and they shop, and there's pictures of them in the documentary.
01:40:09.000Well, it's like these dudes that live these crazy lives, they know at a certain point, what's the point of having lived it if nobody knows the story?
01:40:18.000And so that's the weird thing about the job, where you're like, Okay, I'm sitting there, and you're telling me the weirdest, most precious shit in your life, and yet it's going to be broadcast around the world.
01:40:29.000So now all those guys have gotten pinched, and they do the documentary.
01:40:33.000Eventually they all get busted for one thing or another.
01:41:24.000Like my phone rings and like you never know who it's going to be.
01:41:26.000How did you get involved in this world?
01:41:30.000So I grew up in Dallas, and my dad was in the DA's office that was depicted in Errol Morris' movie, The Thin Blue Line, right?
01:41:38.000So I grew up knocking around with, like, cops and prosecutors and crooks and whatever, and my dad would kind of drag me around to the, you know, to the courthouse, to the jail, to whatever, and I think his idea was, like, that I would be scared straight and not, you know, and instead I just, like, imprinted like a duck.
01:42:26.000But I end up getting an interview with him to do the...
01:42:29.000You know, to do a profile of him in the newspaper.
01:42:32.000And he's like, dude, I'm so tired of these interviews.
01:42:34.000You want to just go get a steak and a bottle of wine?
01:42:36.000And I'm like, dude, there's nothing in the world more I want to do than sit down with Errol Morris and get a steak and a bottle of wine.
01:42:41.000So we go up and have this, like, fantastic evening together.
01:42:44.000And at the end of it, he reaches over and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, you're either going to spend the rest of your life writing about people like me or you're going to go try your hand at this.
01:42:53.000And I literally called the newspaper the next day and I was like, I quit.
01:42:59.000And so then I just started like, you know, kind of, you know, knocking around.
01:43:03.000And then so then it became like, okay, these crime stories, you know, these, you know, once I do the 7-5 Operation Odessa, then like the crooks start finding me or the cops start finding me.
01:43:14.000So was the 7-5 the first thing that you did?
01:43:17.000I spent many years knocking around doing – I go on the Deadliest Catch thing.
01:43:22.000I do whatever, kind of learning how to do this, do stuff on cockfighting, on whatever.
01:43:28.000But the 7-5 was the first thing that kind of people began to like notice and pay attention to.
01:43:34.000And so then 7-5 becomes Operation Odessa and then kind of one crazy crime story after another.
01:43:42.000And to me, the weird thing is, like, it's all kind of the same movie.
01:43:45.000The 7-5 is Operation Odessa, is Silk Road, is The Last Narc, is Night Stalker.
01:43:50.000It's all just sort of portraits of cops and crooks and the, like, thin and porous border between the two.
01:43:58.000Isn't the Night Stalker at least slightly different because you're dealing with this rare aberration in human psychology where someone enjoys killing people?
01:44:09.000Someone gets a thrill out of other people's fear and pain because that was one of the things you talked about in the Night Stalker that he would get off on seeing the people terrified.
01:44:22.000Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm being simplistic.
01:44:25.000It's not like it's really all the same thing, but it's all related in some way or another.
01:44:29.000The thing about the Night Stalker was, I guess what happened with that is...
01:44:36.000I'm writing on a TV show at the time, and one of the other writers, Tim Walsh, buddy of mine, comes in and he's like, dude, I just sat down with the guy that worked the Night Stalker case, this like murder cop, and he's like, fascinating, and I think there's a documentary here.
01:44:47.000You want to go to dinner with this guy?
01:45:16.000As you get deeper and deeper into this, there's guys like that out there.
01:45:22.000I was talking to one of my security guys and he was saying at any point in time there's 12 to 24 active serial killers in the United States.
01:47:37.000And I never saw it, but I remember that story too, because it was like older guy, training the young shooter, just like the weird psychology of that.
01:47:46.000Also, the way they figured out how to do it, where they made like a sniper's den inside the back of a car, so he could lay down and shoot out the back trunk.
01:47:56.000And then just get in the front seat and drive away, and no one would ever suspect.
01:48:00.000When there was this whole kind of, like, it sounds weird to say, but like Lolita-like element to it, where it's like older dude manipulating younger person, traveling around the country doing it, you know, traveling around D.C. anyway, doing it.
01:48:15.000It was also another story where a crime happens, and then a series of crimes happen, and then people are just...
01:48:23.000Well, part of that is, and that's one of the things that I was trying to explore in the Night Stalker, is there's this weird relationship between the media and the cops, right?
01:48:33.000And everybody's trying to do their job.
01:48:35.000But from the media's perspective, it's, hey, we have to get the word out.
01:48:39.000If there's a predator that's out hunting people in the city, then the city has a right to know, and the citizens have a right to know.
01:48:46.000But from the cop's perspective, it's like, hey, if you're broadcasting key pieces of information, and in the case of the Night Stalker, the Night Stalker was clocking everything that showed up in the media and was changing his patterns based on that.
01:49:02.000And so once somebody had called 911, he was cutting phone cords.
01:49:06.000Once they found out that he was wearing his notorious Avia shoe print, and once that was made public in San Francisco, suddenly he threw the shoes away.
01:49:18.000And so the one clue that's tying him to all those things.
01:49:21.000And so there's this weird unholy connection between cops, media, killer that everybody's in some way participating in kind of stepping on each other trying to do the work.
01:49:34.000The Zodiac Killer was never caught, right?
01:50:33.000I mean the technology between phones and street cams and whatever else, it would be much harder to do it or the methodology would have to be different.
01:50:49.000It's such a weird mindset that all of a sudden someone becomes important by killing people.
01:50:55.000And so that was a big thing for me in doing the Night Stalker was...
01:51:02.000That story had this weird aftermath where suddenly when Ramirez is brought into court and paraded in front of the cameras, he becomes like the Jim Morrison of serial killers.
01:51:11.000Here's this guy in the sunglasses and the long hair and whatever, and he gets all those groupies.
01:51:16.000And so very early on with that, I was like, man, I don't want to be glorifying this guy.
01:51:23.000Not only is he doing these murders, but he's also like kidnapping and abusing children.
01:51:26.000And people don't know that piece of the story.
01:51:29.000So, like, this isn't about the psychology of Richard Ramirez.
01:51:32.000This is about, you know, these two cops and the victims and the weird people that have kind of brushes with the beast.
01:51:39.000And again, you know, some people criticize it, some people don't, because it's like, okay, tell me more about Richard Ramirez.
01:51:45.000Like, no, man, like, you don't, like, what's interesting to me is the human story.
01:51:48.000It's what you said, where it's like...
01:51:50.000I want to sit across from people and know what makes them tick.
01:51:55.000What's it like to be a murder cop that long, hot, harrowing summer?
01:51:59.000What's it like to lose a family member?
01:52:01.000What's it like to be a kid who's kidnapped by Richard Ramirez and then survive and live your whole life?
01:52:09.000So that was, you know, at the end of the day, all you have is, you know, I fly by such lights as they're given me, you know, and so that felt like the right way to tell the story.
01:52:20.000So did you have a reluctance of diving into the personality of Ramirez or somehow...
01:52:26.000I didn't want to glorify him because it's like it's that celebritization culture where suddenly like if you're famous, you're famous and you've got like fans and groupies.
01:52:36.000Well, I didn't want to fall into that crap with Ramirez.
01:52:52.000No, he was sent to San Quentin, sent to death row, and then ended up dying.
01:52:56.000This sort of strange, uneventful death ends up dying of cancer, I think pancreatic cancer, and kind of ends with a whimper rather than a bang.
01:53:06.000You know, it's just a strange sort of...
01:53:44.000His father is a cop and would drag him to the graveyard at night and like chain him up in the graveyard.
01:53:54.000And so he was abused and sort of messed with in a fundamental way as a kid.
01:54:01.000And then he's got supposedly this cousin, Cousin Mike, who was a Vietnam vet and He participated in butchery, My Lai-style massacres and whatever in Vietnam, took photos of it, murders and whatever,
01:54:17.000and came home and showed young Richard Ramirez these photos and supposedly trained him on how to kill in a particular way, combat style training with a knife and whatever else.
01:54:30.000So he gets, like, you know, he's abused.
01:55:21.000And that's why I guess I was trying to articulate before, which is all these things have these like major moral questions where it's like, okay, if I'm making a series that's about Richard Ramirez and suddenly this guy's face is on a poster,
01:55:37.000even if I don't put him in the show, you know, until episode four or whatever, am I contributing to that?
01:55:43.000Mythos and that celebritization of this guy.
01:55:46.000And so constantly you're asking yourself, like, I'm fascinated by this story.
01:55:52.000I want to share this story, but I don't want it to be cheap.
01:56:19.000I mean I had hundreds if not thousands of these crime scene photos of the actual crime scene photographer walking around after these murders taking pictures of the aftermath of it and it's really hard to look at.
01:56:30.000You don't wipe that stuff out of your consciousness once you see it.
01:56:33.000And so then the question becomes Okay, do you show people this so that they understand this is what it really looks like?
01:56:46.000This is what a real murder photo looks like.
01:56:49.000But you don't want that to be cheap and exploitative where you're getting eyeballs just by being gruesome.
01:56:54.000So there's a ton of moral questions in all of them.
01:56:58.000So when you prepare for something like this, when you know you're going to write an outline or you're going to sit down and create a series on something that's historical but really disturbing and very fucked up, do you sit alone by yourself and write out your thoughts?
01:57:19.000How do you decide how you're going to lay something like this out?
01:57:24.000Do you have a vision and ultimately did the vision morph over time or did you kind of create what you set out to create?
01:57:37.000It's like a little spark at the beginning where I don't know – I'm not sure why I'm fascinated, but for some reason I'm fascinated with Ross Ulbricht or for some reason I'm fascinated with the murder cop in The Night Stalker or for some reason I'm fascinated with Michael Dowd.
01:57:54.000And I don't know where the story is going to go, but I know something in me wants to dig in deeper.
01:58:01.000So some amount of time is just kind of sitting by yourself and kind of getting right with, okay, what do I want to say?
01:58:29.000And so then that happens and then at a certain point it's kind of like now everybody go away again and like let me think like, okay, what was that little spark that started this?
01:58:42.000And then always the story ends up taking a turn at some point.
01:58:47.000Like if you end up in a straight line from where you started, then I think you didn't learn anything.
01:58:53.000And the whole point I'm doing it is so that I will learn something along the way.
01:58:58.000So when there's some weird left field thing and I'm like, okay, I don't know why, but I have to go there.
01:59:03.000I always trust that instinct to go there and take the story wherever it takes me.
01:59:10.000Was there any dispute amongst the people that you – that are your confidants, the people that you do work with about how to handle this or what to cover?
01:59:19.000And there's dispute in a couple of ways.
01:59:21.000Basically, if you ask five people to tell the story of what happened at a dinner, all five people are going to tell you a completely different version of what happened.
01:59:30.000And so there's that layer of dispute because it never lines up.
01:59:35.000There's always discrepancies and there's always conflict.
01:59:37.000So at a certain point, then you're making decision, okay, which version of this story am I going to tell?
01:59:43.000Joe tells the top half of what it was like when we met at this podcast.
01:59:46.000At a certain point, I tell my experience of it.
01:59:49.000And then there's the symphony of collaborators that are around you.
01:59:53.000And somebody's like, man, that's cheap and grotesque.
01:59:55.000I don't know, you know, you're going too far with those murder photos.
01:59:59.000Somebody else is like, if you don't show those murder photos, then people can glorify this guy and think that it's exactly sticking people's nose in the horror of it that make it repugnant.
02:00:13.000So then it's like you're hearing all these conflicting, contrasting points of view.
02:01:10.000It's be the quiet center of the wheel.
02:01:12.000But you also have to be the guy who directs it in the direction that you think it should go if you think it's being led astray by all those other pieces of the wheel.
02:03:49.000It's an incredible story, which also, again, each of these stories, in some way or another, is like, it's a history of America, told through a couple of people's voices and experience.
02:04:00.000So I don't know what exactly that's going to be, but I know, like, yes, Snoop, I'm in, man.
02:04:05.000There's a story that happened yesterday, or the day before, of him, he was playing a video game, and apparently he got pissed off and stormed out of the video game, like...
02:04:15.000Streaming it online and kept the stream running for seven and a half hours before he realized that the stream was still running.
02:06:44.000So stories just kind of find their way to you now, like post 7-5?
02:06:49.000Pretty much, you know, whether it's Serpico or whether it's Snoop or, you know, I got this call one time, and this unfortunately hasn't, it couldn't happen, but I get this call one time from this guy called Chaz Williams, and he's like, man, I'm the greatest bank robber in American history.
02:07:07.000And, like, you're the only guy that can tell my story.
02:07:36.000I'm like, what do you mean, while you were in prison?
02:07:38.000He's like, I'm in prison in Milan, Michigan or whatever at the time, locked up for bank robbery.
02:07:43.000And they start to have a work release program.
02:07:47.000And so I'm locked up in the hole and I get hold of the like newsletter that the guards are passing around and it says, you know, work study release where if you enroll in college, you're an inmate, you can get a day pass to go attend college.
02:07:59.000So they start this, like, he and his crew start this, like, three-year-long con to be on good behavior so that they can get work release.
02:08:09.000You know, that is to say, you're locked up in prison for five years, but you're coming out to get a study, whatever, you know, English literature.
02:08:16.000And so you go out during the day, you get bussed out of the prison, you go to the college, you come back at night.
02:08:20.000And it's these, like, sort of sexy, badass, black bank robbers.
02:08:26.000And it's, like, kind of young, do-gooder, liberal, like, white girls that are trying to, like, get them out on their work release, right?
02:08:33.000And so he's like, so basically, we start doing this.
02:08:36.000And I'm like, okay, so they drop us off at school.
02:08:38.000And as soon as they drop us off at school, we slip out the back.
02:09:08.000And so they had run all of these bank robberies for a while and they had their master plan where they were going – they'd save the stash, all the cash that they had made in apartments and guns and all the tools of the trade.
02:09:21.000And they were going to buy a nightclub and it was going to be – I forget the name, some amazing name for the nightclub.
02:09:27.000But it was going to be when they got released, they'd take all the money from the bank robberies and open their nightclub.
02:09:33.000And then, as always happens, one of the crew ends up getting busted, rats him out, and literally right before they're supposed to get out and, you know, in the final job, they all get taken down.
02:09:45.000And so we started to develop this together.
02:09:47.000I was like, man, this is an amazing, like, what a crime story, you know?
02:10:29.000And so he would then record all these voice memos of telling me the story of his life and how he got...
02:10:35.000You know, radicalized from his father goes off and serves in World War II and is a war hero and comes home and then they go into the South and he starts walking into, you know, places, whatever, and people are calling him boy.
02:10:48.000And he's like, and as soon as I heard somebody calling my dad boy, I was like, fuck Uncle Sam, man.
02:11:21.000I think he had an aneurysm or something along those lines.
02:11:24.000So he became a bank robber and then he had this whole second act as like kind of hip-hop impresario because he had the ultimate street cred.
02:11:38.000He did a number of years, but he got out and sort of, you know, started the whole, started in the game, like broke 50 Cent and sort of became a promoter and like, you know, had Foxy Brown and this whole kind of second act because he had the ultimate street cred as the world's greatest bank robber for the hip-hop crowd.
02:11:55.000So he had this whole crazy second act.
02:11:57.000And I was so excited to tell that story.
02:12:00.000And then, you know, boom, he dropped dead.
02:12:09.000But it's an amazing story that I want to tell still, you know?
02:12:12.000That wouldn't be a bad podcast if you could do it like, you know, Wandry does those like really detailed podcasts with great editing and, you know, that tell stories.
02:12:22.000Like, have you ever heard the one on Aaron Hernandez?
02:12:27.000And it's so interesting how, you know, and like you were so at the forefront of this where...
02:12:33.000The world kind of caught up with the podcast thing, but it's amazing those long-form stories where people want to be told an amazing story by somebody that really knows it and kind of cares about it and will tell it Lovingly.
02:15:22.000Fighters, boxers, anybody, soldiers, people have experienced massive impacts and shocks.
02:15:31.000What that does to the mind is just irreparable, or if not irreparable, like some serious fucking damage that needs real care and understanding and cutting-edge medical assistance to try to help with.
02:15:48.000It makes me think of there's that crazy story in the like psychology textbooks.
02:15:54.000Who's like this guy who was a railroad worker and was this very kind of responsible, squared away guy and was going around and was, you know, tamping dynamite and the railroad ties.
02:16:05.000And at some point one explodes and it drives a railroad tie through his head all the way through his brain, frontal cortex or whatever.
02:17:05.000And he's still able to go to work, but now he doesn't want to show up, doesn't want to do what he do, and it completely changed his personality.
02:17:11.000And because of that, they started studying different parts of the brain, controlling different things.
02:18:45.000I knocked around with him for a minute, right?
02:18:48.000And I always thought that there was an amazing movie in him where it's The Life and Deaths of Gary Busey.
02:18:55.000So when he first started out his life, and it's been a while since I've thought about this, but he was the drummer for Leon Russell, and Leon Russell's first record is credited as like Teddy Jacketti.
02:21:52.000Completely naked, you know, other than the robe, holding the shotgun, wearing the moccasins.
02:21:56.000And as we're driving, he's driving on the left side of the road, like cars coming at us and shit, you know, and he's like, all right, pitch me the movie.
02:22:18.000And so we end up, you know, shooting a short film or something together and then eventually he calls me up and he's like, I gotta move out of the house.
02:22:28.000You know, can I move in with you and the kids?
02:22:30.000And I'm like, I don't think that's gonna work, man.
02:23:30.000And this long thing about the universe and about life and death and the spirits and entanglement with the cosmos and this crazy, long, run-on sentence.
02:23:43.000And at the end of it, I think I went, all right.
02:23:46.000And he goes, well, someday we'll talk in person.
02:23:48.000And then he hangs up the phone and that's it.
02:24:49.000Busey, you know, it was the single best advice from anybody I've ever gotten about being a director in terms of being the quiet center of the wheel.
02:24:57.000And to this day, I quote it, and it's like, man, I heard him.
02:25:00.000Well, the dude has been in some fucking amazing movies.
02:25:03.000I mean, before everything went south for him after the motorcycle accident, you got to go back to, like, Lethal Weapon.
02:28:33.000Well, the same thing with Roseanne Barr.
02:28:35.000Roseanne Barr, a student, walking across the street, someone's driving, they can't see because of the sunlight and the windshield, hit her in traffic, 15 years old.
02:28:45.000She spends the next nine months in a mental health institute.
02:29:58.000To me, you guys, the stand-up comics, you're the bravest people in the world.
02:30:02.000Because you are standing there in front of a room full of people, absolutely nothing, stone naked, with nothing but your wits in your game.
02:30:13.000But let's stop you right there, because that's not true at all.
02:30:21.000It's a different kind of vulnerability though because like it's one thing with like with the physical there is okay it's a scrap or it's a gunfight or it's a whatever.
02:30:33.000When you're walking into a room and you're just having to like capture people's imagination… That's an amazing thing.
02:32:01.000Like, Carlin would essentially write out his thoughts on things and, you know, some of the best writing, really, in terms of, like, social commentary.
02:32:12.000To this day, people are handing out clips of Carlin talking about some of the shit that's going down right now in our culture.
02:34:05.000You work backwards from the punchline.
02:34:07.000You try to figure out a way to make it work.
02:34:10.000And are you talking about, in that scenario, live, kind of in front of people, or are you talking about when you're rehearsing prior to going in?
02:34:19.000But what I do do is I listen to recordings of old sets, not old, like last week or last night or whatever, or I listen on the way home, and I do write.
02:34:28.000And when I write, I write in total silence.
02:34:30.000I just write, just me sitting in front of a laptop, just writing.
02:34:43.000I remember when Harvey Weinstein first got busted.
02:34:47.000I remember right away thinking that this is so fucked up.
02:34:52.000Especially because I have daughters, and if I ever found out that some fucking guy offered my daughter sex, some disgusting guy like Harvey Weinstein offered my daughter sex for a role, I would want to fuck him up.
02:35:10.000But if Harvina Weinstein came to my son with a solid contract, I'd be like, dude, you're gonna be Batman.
02:35:20.000And I went on stage with that idea, you know?
02:36:54.000And also, it's one of the best ways to add on to bits, because as you're listening to a bit, when you don't have to say it, and you're not writing it, as you're listening to it being performed in front of an audience, New ideas will pop in your head.
02:40:40.000Guys have gotten really far by never writing a goddamn thing down and never listening to a goddamn single set.
02:40:46.000They just perform enough and they get into the flow.
02:40:49.000And there's actually a school of thought, and it's a good school of thought, that maybe that's the best way to do it, just perform all the time and don't write anything down.
02:40:59.000Just perform almost every night of the week.
02:41:02.000That way it's just you're never out of shape.
02:41:15.000You learn techniques, and then you go apply them when you spar.
02:41:20.000But if you drill, you get way better, meaning you practice scenarios over and over again.
02:41:27.000Like if we were drilling an arm bar, I would put you in my guard, I would grab the back of your head, I would pinch down your forearm, shift my hips, catch the arm bar.
02:41:37.000And you would tap, and then I would do it over and over and over and over again.
02:41:40.000And then you would do it to me over and over and over and over again.
02:42:38.000You're just doing it, and you get better by doing it.
02:42:42.000And a lot of guys do just get really good just by doing it.
02:42:45.000But the guys that get really, really good, those guys review videos, they go over techniques, they drill constantly, and they put themselves in bad situations.
02:42:56.000All things that most people don't want to do.
02:42:59.000But that's the discipline and craft, I think, of anything, right?
02:43:02.000You can kind of wing it, you can improvise it, you can do the fun stuff, or you can sit there and like the grinders in any discipline, whether you're writing a screenplay, whether you're rolling jujitsu, it's like the grinders and taking the time to do that.
02:43:17.000That's what gives you the level of Polish and precision.
02:43:20.000It also, that's what gets, you get further ahead.
02:43:23.000That's what I've always told people about podcasts, too.
02:43:25.000You know, a lot of comics started out with me.
02:43:29.000We started doing podcasts at the same time, but I grind.
02:43:56.000Somebody, somewhere somebody had told me that you, or maybe it was on one of your shows, that you've kind of set up your life that many of the distractions are out of the way so that you can just come in and do this or do the comedy or, you know, so that it's, you have total focus and your time is not spent too long.
02:45:50.000Well, also, we live in a culture where everybody's multitasking all the time, and you're very rarely locked in, right?
02:45:57.000It's like, okay, I'm rolling calls while I'm driving, or I'm doing whatever, and I think that...
02:46:02.000To do anything well, it does take like the world drops away, man.
02:46:07.000When I'm sitting there like writing a screenplay or when I'm making a documentary, it's like everything disappears and you are in the tunnel.
02:46:14.000It's the only way to do it well because all this stuff is hard.
02:47:37.000Even when I watch them, unless the person is talking about something really riveting, where all I'm trying to do is just get questions, throw them to questions, and then listen to their response.
02:47:52.000But it's a very different kind of a conversation.
02:47:55.000What you just made me think of is I saw an interview, I think, with Errol Morris about how he makes those documentaries.
02:48:01.000And he said, my job is I'm a conversationalist.
02:48:04.000It's not just me asking a question, you answering it.
02:48:07.000It's like I'm locked in in a dialogue.
02:48:09.000And that's where the interesting thing happens is when it's a tennis match.
02:48:13.000You're hitting the ball back and forth, which I thought was interesting.
02:48:30.000I have obligations in terms of there's some information that I think I should probably cover and some things I should probably try to get them to talk about.
02:48:41.000There's subjects that I think if I could get to that point, it would be cool because I think that's a pretty interesting topic.
02:48:47.000But for the most part, it's just you let it play out.
02:48:51.000And it's one of those things, if you've been doing it long enough, you kind of get a sense while you're doing it of whether or not this is interesting or whether or not you're overbearing.
02:49:02.000It's taught me a lot about communication.
02:49:05.000How to hold a conversation, you know, and when you're being overbearing and when you're talking over people and how often people do that.
02:49:13.000How did you decide, how did you lock into the format that this has become and at what point, how much of it is deliberate and how much of it is you intuiting it and improvising and feeling your way?
02:50:18.000When someone sings, right, it's not just the lyrics of the songs.
02:50:21.000Okay, so fascinating how this applies to documentaries is, you know, people ask me, like, oh, how does the documentary thing work?
02:50:29.000And how it works is, as a director, really a lot of directing is long before you ever end up on set, long before you ever end up with a camera, there has to be this level of trust where, like, the person understands, hey, this person really gives a shit about my story and is really going to go to the end of the earth to tell this right.
02:50:48.000And then, on top of it, it's not, with documentaries, documentaries need a performance too.
02:50:55.000It's not just like, here's the facts of the story.
02:50:58.000It's, you gotta horse whisper people into like, okay, I'm ready.
02:51:02.000I mean, when I'm sitting there with Tarzan in Moscow, he's like, I'm not ready to be telling this story right now.
02:51:07.000We're needing to be drinking a little bit of vodka.
02:51:09.000You know, I may be needing blowjob right now.
02:51:12.000And so you recognize, okay, now's not the time to roll, because I can't force this.
02:51:17.000It's maneuver this Such that by the time you are ready, you're ready to pop and you're ready to tell these stories that you've been holding on to most of your life that maybe you should or maybe you shouldn't tell.
02:51:28.000But there's a real art to getting that person to the place where they're ready to sort of crack open and reveal what's in the middle.
02:51:39.000Yeah, I mean, you're making a piece of art, and you're doing it about facts, and with real people, and you're...
02:52:00.000And I've always thought about it that way, which is when I'm knocking around as a crime reporter in Berkeley or Oakland once upon a time, what I'm thinking is, yeah, I'm writing stories, I'm getting a job, I'm getting a paycheck, but really I'm gathering material.
02:52:15.000Cops talk in the precinct and what the rhythm is and what the bullshit and where the hustle is or what it's like when somebody's in jail and what the noises are so that as I sit down as a writer, I'm drawing on real authentic stuff.
02:52:27.000So they like completely cross pollinate with one another.
02:52:32.000And then, so that when I, by the time I sit down to write Silk Road, and I know, okay, Jason Clarke's character, I'm gonna composite two different people here, but I've spent a lot of time knocking around with narcs, and I know how they treat informants, and I know, you know, the dynamic between Daryl Britt Gibson and Jason Clarke when these guys are breaking each other's balls,
02:52:51.000and it's like, you know, a little bit, you know, weird power dynamics.
02:53:41.000I'm juggling so much at any given time.
02:53:44.000And it was what you said, where it was like, okay, I'm locked in right now.
02:53:47.000Right now I'm looking at this edit, and I've got 45 minutes, and I know I need to walk out of this room and tell the editor, tweak this, tweak this.
02:53:56.000This needs to be more dramatic and change the music cue.
02:53:59.000And I don't have time to do anything else, so I know the trains have to leave the station.
02:54:03.000And so what I had was, with The Last Narc, I had this amazing character in Hector Boreas, who was this old-school Jurassic Narc, door-kicker, gunfighter dude who was down there in Mexico working the Camarena murder for many years.
02:54:16.000And then I had Jason Clarke, who was going to be playing a DEA guy.
02:54:19.000And I was like, you know what I need to do?
02:54:20.000These two cats need to get a taco together.
02:54:44.000And so I was like, And it's Hector's belt buckle.
02:54:47.000And I'm like, that son of a bitch, dude.
02:57:20.000I mean, I remember, like, in seeing Dylan being interviewed, I think it was by Barbara Walters or something, and she's asking him, you know, like, how do you write this?
02:57:27.000He's like, I don't write them songs, they just fall down from the sky, you know?
02:57:30.000And so there's a thing where it's like, you are making yourself available to, and that's by showing up and doing the work.
02:57:38.000Like, if you look at any of those Bob Dylan documentaries, man, he's always sitting there behind a typewriter, writing songs, writing You know, however old he is right now, writing some of the most amazing stuff of his career.
02:57:48.000And that's because he's a worker and a grinder, so that when you're doing that, then it can come down, right?
02:57:54.000Something can be transmitted, I think.
03:00:08.000Well, and it is a product of, you know, any measure of success, it's that little whisper of, like, man, there's some wind in my sails.
03:00:17.000So, like, and in a weird way, I feel like I haven't even started working yet.
03:00:20.000Like, I'm just now starting to figure out, like, hey, like, I'm starting to know how to do this, and I'm starting to really, like, now I want to do something interesting.
03:00:46.000I mean, I'm committed to health and fitness just because that's something I enjoy and I like it.
03:00:52.000But also because when you have energy, you can put more energy into things.
03:00:58.000And as you get older, that energy wanes.
03:01:01.000And particularly wanes if you abuse your body, if you eat shitty food and you drink too much and you don't sleep right and you don't exercise.
03:01:09.000You don't have enough horsepower anymore to really squeeze out those magical moments, and I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of creative people, especially creative people that indulge in alcohol and drugs, they do their best work when they're younger because their body's more resilient,
03:01:28.000and there's more Or you hit a point where you get clean at a certain point.
03:01:36.000Suddenly Brad Pitt stops drinking and then turns in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
03:02:09.000Writing some of his best shit, being just a scumbag, trying to fuck everything that moves, getting his teeth kicked in in bar fights, and just going back and writing about it.
03:02:19.000But something was coming through, like God was coming through, or whatever it is, it's like he was able to...
03:05:38.000And depending upon where you find yourself in life when you listen to this, it can be really difficult to work your way out of the hole you're in.
03:07:11.000Like, I want you to be, like, with somebody you love and who loves you, and I want you to do something you love and just leave it on the field, man, the best you got.
03:07:19.000Yeah, and I guess in a lot of ways with children in particular, they learn by example.
03:07:24.000They learn by good example and bad example.
03:07:27.000Like a lot of people that I know that are clean and sober, the reason why they're clean and sober is because their parents were alcoholics or drug addicts and they don't want to have nothing to do with that shit.
03:07:54.000You know, and this is, these things that you learn from people that are doing what they want to do, there's like, there's traits that they share in common, and one of the big ones is focus and discipline.
03:08:07.000I don't think you can get anywhere without it, and it's hard to do, because there's a lot of times, like that Pressfield talks about in The War of Art, that resistance is strong.
03:08:17.000There's something about it, it's like you don't want to do the things that you know you should do.
03:09:05.000Because it puts you on, like, merely the act of committing it and putting it down sets your, like, that sets a plumb line for where you're going.
03:09:13.000You can make so much more progress that way than the people that just try to, like, wing it.
03:09:58.000And then when you have relaxation time, you enjoy it because you've earned it.
03:10:05.000Man, when Saturday rolls around and I can put my feet up and watch fights and just eat fucking potato chips and just kick back, I enjoy the shit out of it because I actually earned it.
03:10:19.000But man, if I haven't earned it, it feels terrible.
03:10:22.000Watching TV when you're fucking off and you're supposed to be doing other things, you feel like a loser.
03:11:29.000You've got to be bored sometimes, too.
03:11:32.000You can't always just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.
03:11:35.000No, because I think, like, at a certain point, with a lot of this work, it's what you were talking about with improvising when the stand-up comics come in.
03:11:42.000You do a lot of work, or what Hemingway used to say is he would write until he would get to, you know, knowing what the very next, the last sentence of the day was, he wouldn't write it.
03:11:51.000So then he would wake up in the morning and he would know what the first sentence was.
03:11:54.000Because then you're set and sail again.
03:11:57.000He has one of the best quotes ever that my friend Ari has on his laptop today.
03:12:01.000The first draft of everything is shit.
03:13:22.000The only reason why I'm even thinking about it now is because I know that the time is winding down and that just, you know, this is the schedule.
03:13:32.000When you think about upcoming projects, you've already got this nice body of work, all these really well done things that you can say, look, I've got these.