Director Alex Winter joins me to talk about his new documentary, "Deep Web: The Dark Web's Dark Side of the Internet." We talk about how he got involved with the project, how he came to make it, and why he thinks it's one of the most important documentaries of the 21st century. We also talk about the Silk Road website and how it changed the way we think about drugs and the dark web, and how he thinks about the legacy of Napster and the rise and fall of the internet as a whole. And we talk about what it means to be a "deep web" filmmaker and what it's like to make a documentary about the deep web. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve watched the film. If you haven t watched the movie or haven't watched the documentary, you ll want to skip to about 20 minutes into the description at the end of the episode. This episode is not for the faint hearted or the faint-hearted. If you re looking for a deep web documentary, this is the episode for you. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's a good listen, and if you like deep web documentaries, you'll definitely want to make sure to check out the Netflix documentary "Deep web: The Deep Web's Deep Side Of The Internet" on Amazon Prime Video. if you haven't already watched Deep web: Dark Web: Deep Web. You'll get a discount code for a copy of Deep Web: "Deeper Web" at checkout to get 20% off the final episode of Deep web, which includes a free copy of the film "The Dark Webstore, and a discount on the movie "Deepweb: The Internet's Deepest Side." at checkout at Amazon Prime and Vimeo. The Deepweb's Deepweb: Deep web's Deep Web is the Dark Side Of the Internet is the Deepest End of the Deep Web, where you'll get access to all sorts of deep web tools, tips, tips and tricks, including deep web access, and much more! to watch Deep Web-related resources, including Deep web Deep Web Deep Web tools, deep web tips, and so much more. Enjoyed this episode and share it on your social media platforms? Subscribe to Deepweb is a must-listeners! to get exclusive access to deep web content, and get exclusive behind-the-scenes access to Deep web episodes, and more.
00:00:04.000I knew of you as an actor, and I knew of your work as a director, but I didn't know that you were into serious shit like this deep web documentary.
00:00:28.000But I got online pretty heavily in the sort of late 80s, early 90s in what was known as the BBS Usenet era.
00:00:38.000And in those days, I was really interested in sort of burgeoning online communities, people who were sort of the growth of Internet-based communities.
00:00:48.000And in those days, you could get on and you would sort of create sort of clubs or groups or rooms, as they were called, with all kinds of like-minded people.
00:00:57.000And then you started finding all kinds of stuff that was going on.
00:01:01.000By any means, it's just illegal stuff.
00:01:03.000It was sort of rarefied, specialized, whatever, politics, activism, people who are interested in drugs, people who are interested in sort of pushing boundaries in all these different ways.
00:01:15.000And at that point, I discovered encryption, people who were using the Internet for anonymity and privacy.
00:01:22.000Parts of like, you know, self-help groups or like rape counseling, any number of things.
00:01:26.000But it was also people who were selling drugs.
00:01:28.000So I first encountered the drug, the online drug markets in probably 90, 91. That's when I first discovered encrypted email and sort of this whole notion of like people who really were building encryption technologies for a number of reasons.
00:01:44.000And I spent some years working on the Napster story.
00:01:48.000I made a doc about the rise and fall of Napster called Downloaded.
00:01:52.000And I met Sean Fanning and Sean Parker back in 2000 when AFTER was being decimated, shot at by all sides.
00:02:00.000And I set out about telling their story.
00:02:02.000That took me a while to get done and made.
00:02:05.000But I'd met a lot of people in the technology sector working on that movie, both in kind of the public face of technology and the sort of privacy anonymity side, the sort of hackers, activists, cryptographers.
00:02:20.000Well, that was one of the things that I found interesting about the documentary initially, is that Silk Road wasn't necessary, and for folks who don't know what Silk Road is, Silk Road is this website that was taken down by the government because people were exchanging,
00:02:38.000buying, and selling illegal drugs from it, amongst other things that are illegal.
00:02:43.000But it was more of a community, it seems, than anything.
00:02:48.000I've had a message board on my website since 1998 and it's got millions of posts and it's just this weird community of like-minded odd human beings and a lot of really fascinating intelligent human beings and I've had some really great exchanges and interactions with them and What I really got from what they were saying in the documentary was like the community that they had created Was in many ways like better than any community any of them knew in real life.
00:03:18.000So it was much more than just Drugs are being sold there.
00:03:22.000It's like if drugs were being sold there It was a small part of what that thing was all about Yeah, I think that's true, and I think that's a very hard thing for people to understand.
00:03:34.000Like you're saying, you got online at that point, and you started to see in those days, like in the late 90s, that communities were beginning to grow on the Internet, and they were really interesting.
00:03:46.000I remember talking to Sean Fanning about this, that his biggest regret about the downfall of Napster was not that the service got taken online, but that the community got scattered.
00:04:35.000The Silk Road, in this case, you have a manifesto, because you had all these people who built and created the thing who were writing all these manifestos.
00:04:43.000So it was very evident that the Silk Road was created for this political kind of movement, this communal movement, that that was its agenda.
00:04:51.000The Napster thing is interesting because Napster, although it was a file sharing program, the community that was attached to it, what the idea was, I think, about all this file sharing stuff, My feeling on it and my feeling from being connected to the internet was like we're entering this entirely new era of Art of digital stuff digital creations where it's this is gonna be slippery You're not gonna be able to just like
00:05:21.000you know this guy stole a thousand CDs and copied them We found his CD copier and we know you know that this guy's making illegal What are those?
00:06:20.000This is flouting the law and all this stuff.
00:06:21.000You got one side, the predominant side over there.
00:06:24.000You got the other side, the radical alternative to that would be to say, yeah, but the drug war is a complete failure.
00:06:31.000It's been four decades of destructive, you know, it's mostly about putting nonviolent minority offenders in prison by the millions and it's killing people and it's not helping people who need help in the drug world.
00:06:43.000It's You know, making the drug issues criminal and not about health.
00:06:48.000And you got those people over there saying this is all good.
00:06:51.000You got all this room in the middle with a slippery reality, which is just as you said, I agree with that perspective.
00:06:57.000This is a really big moment in human history.
00:07:01.000It's too big for most of us to wrap our heads around.
00:07:03.000These are huge changes that are afoot.
00:07:05.000What Napster represented wasn't a couple of kids who wanted to create piracy.
00:07:09.000Whether you can accept that reality or not, it's true.
00:07:13.000You may feel like the end result of what they did caused X, Y, and Z. But the reality of this is their minds, their visions, their goals were way beyond that.
00:07:24.000And we're still not in the future that those guys saw.
00:07:27.000We're still kind of back in the back ends.
00:07:29.000Look at what we're seeing with Tidal and other service.
00:07:32.000People are still trying to wrench the world back to where it was before Napster.
00:07:37.000They're still trying to sort of undo the changes that have happened because it's scary, right?
00:07:42.000We probably will end up in a world in the next 10, 20, 30 years as drug laws become more relaxed and the mandatory minimums start getting lowered, where we do see legitimate online drug services are going to become...
00:08:14.000I mean, I'm one of the ones that thinks that there should be no drug laws.
00:08:17.000I think as long as alcohol is legal and as long as you can get a prescription for OxyContin, it's completely ridiculous to lock people up for mushrooms or to lock people up for popcorn.
00:08:29.000Pot being the most innocuous of all of them and changing daily as far as the way it's treated by law enforcement.
00:08:37.000But I think the digital world that you're dealing with, like with Napster or with the Silk Road, Is this world of connectivity, and that's the big change.
00:08:51.000It's not just the things that are being exchanged.
00:08:58.000The information can go so quickly now, and these communities can form, and they can say, yeah, I've always thought these laws are bullshit.
00:09:06.000Explain to me why alcohol is legal and marijuana is not.
00:09:09.000Explain to me why it's stealing to take a record that you paid for and share it with a bunch of people.
00:09:17.000I had Paul Stanley on the podcast from Kiss, and he's a great guy.
00:09:21.000I really enjoyed talking to him, but he's got this sort of really archaic idea of stealing.
00:09:27.000You know, you didn't pay for it, it's stealing.
00:10:17.000And I spent a really long time trying to explain to her how the deep web worked and why it was, like, no different than the door on your bathroom.
00:10:23.000Like, just because there's an area of the internet that's private and anonymous doesn't mean it's bad.
00:10:28.000Just like, you're not bad because you go to the bathroom and you close the door.
00:10:31.000Now, when you close the door to your bathroom, you may open the lid and go to the bathroom, or you may shoot up.
00:10:36.000I don't know what you're doing in there, but that doesn't give me a right to take the door off your bathroom.
00:11:26.000Because it was so democratized, I was like going back like I had like stopped liking Bob Dylan like a long I just was like thought Dylan was kind of overrated or something and then because of Napster I just could listen to anything so easily that my own judgment kind of dissipated and I found myself reconnecting to stuff that I hadn't really appreciated so the point is is no it wasn't bad but it did Certainly ramp ahead of existing laws and businesses that are still trying to catch up,
00:11:52.000and the reality is we need new business models that work with these new technologies that doesn't make those technologies bad.
00:11:59.000Well, everybody got addicted to selling that music at exorbitant rates.
00:12:03.000I mean, that's really what happened, especially the record companies.
00:12:06.000I mean, the record companies are notoriously shitty with the artists.
00:12:10.000I mean, the contracts, and when you read them, you ever read the Courtney Love breakdown?
00:12:35.000And I think that's one of the big pushbacks because of the commerce aspect of it.
00:12:42.000But as far as the information aspect of it, what you brought up about the bathroom is a really good point because how come you can have a private club You could have a club where you and your friends go to play poker, whatever.
00:12:55.000You rent out an office somewhere, and it's yours.
00:12:58.000You lock the door, you bring in booze, you have fun, you play the music you like to listen to, and you guys have a good time.
00:13:04.000Does the cops, are they going to fucking scan the door?
00:13:08.000Are they going to put a bug inside the room to make sure you're not doing anything illegal?
00:13:27.000But a private digital room where your physical body isn't even there, that becomes problematic.
00:13:33.000Yeah, and scarier than that, I think, is that now there's such a direct link between the physical space and the digital space, meaning the Supreme Court recently passed a law that doesn't allow officers to go into your cell phone without a warrant on a basic search and seizure,
00:14:03.000So, of course, there has to be, you know, technologies in place that keep you protected and private.
00:14:09.000And look what happened to those actresses, you know, that were exploited through the 4chan fappening where their photographs were taken off of the iCloud and sold on 4chan.
00:14:18.000And it was, you know, extremely intimate pictures.
00:14:21.000And people say to me, this, you know, one journalist I was talking to who was trying to wrap her head around it said, well, what if I get hacked?
00:14:27.000I was like, this is what you don't understand.
00:14:31.000It's just a question of whether someone decides to exploit it or not.
00:14:34.000You know, your social security number, your medical records, your life is out there.
00:14:38.000So we need to be able to be protected.
00:14:40.000And right now, there's this battle to remove protections.
00:14:43.000And what we need to be doing is actually implementing more protections.
00:14:47.000It seems like to me that when the world becomes digital, and then digital information, those ones and zeros become accessible, we're going to get to a point in time where privacy seems ridiculous.
00:15:21.000With the new technology that we can't even predict, the 20-year-from-now technology.
00:15:27.000But it's going to get more and more bizarre to the point where we're going to have to have a real restructuring of what we expect in terms of privacy, personal sovereignty.
00:15:38.000What do you expect from your fellow citizens?
00:15:43.000Because it's almost going to be like, you're going to have to trust me to not look at your shit.
00:16:35.000And that privacy, again, is probably temporary.
00:16:38.000I mean, when you're looking at 50 years from now, it's probably going to be hilarious when you look back on the idea that someone couldn't read your email.
00:17:03.000All of that stuff is accessible to anybody who's halfway interested in using it.
00:17:07.000And that was one of the really disturbing things that was revealed during the whole Edward Snowden incident, was that the government is not just able to tap into your stuff and check in on you.
00:17:18.000Hey, this Alex guy, he seems a little shifty.
00:17:22.000I think he might be involved in some nefarious activities.
00:17:25.000No, let's just download everyone's fucking phone numbers and everyone's emails and everyone's voicemails and constantly monitor everything all the time.
00:17:35.000And by the way, let's build a huge facility in Utah that consists of hundreds of trillions of terabytes of storage and just store everything.
00:17:55.000And they go, and they download all your stuff, and they present it to you, and they say, look, you know, you have a choice.
00:18:01.000Either we can make this public, or we can, you know, fill in the blank.
00:18:05.000Whatever they would like to get from you.
00:18:07.000Yeah, and what's scary is that what we recently discovered, in the last week or so, there was the revelations that, you know, it's always been, the excuse has always been, you know, terrorism, the Patriot Act.
00:18:17.000It's always been, since 9-11, we have to do this because...
00:18:21.000And what was revealed is they've been doing this long before 9-11.
00:18:24.000It was mostly because of the drug war.
00:18:26.000So it's kind of commonly known that a lot of the surveillance implementations that occurred because of the drug war.
00:18:58.000It's a mad money grab from privatized prisons, it's a mad money grab from the guard unions, the prison guard unions, from law enforcement, from all these people that profit off drugs being legal.
00:19:10.000It has zero to do with public safety, zero to do with public health.
00:19:16.000I mean, the film goes into that in detail.
00:19:18.000So, I mean, I totally agree with that.
00:19:21.000And it isn't, you know, to say that we don't need things to be, you know, we don't need law enforcement, we don't need certain types of regulation, but the question is why?
00:19:27.000Why do we need them and what purpose are they serving and making sure that they serve an accurate purpose?
00:19:31.000But when they're primarily being used to felonize minorities and fill prisons for profit, then you've got something that probably needs to be changed.
00:19:40.000I mean, and there's There's also some talk recently, and I know some states have recently passed this, where asset forfeiture laws are being rescinded.
00:19:50.000You can no longer just steal people's shit because you pull them over.
00:19:54.000If they pull you over and say, what if you were going to buy a car somewhere?
00:19:58.000And they pull you over and they go, Alex, what are you doing with $5,000 cash?
00:20:02.000They're like, oh, I was going to go buy a car.
00:20:32.000But it's just, if you give people law, like if you write things down on paper, like you, law enforcement officer, because of this thing that's written down on this paper, you have the right to take this fellow human being and put them in a cage because they've decided to alter their consciousness in a way that we don't deem to be worthy.
00:20:56.000As you said, it allows people to be arrested for all kinds of reasons, and that's not helpful even to people who need help who are on drugs.
00:21:05.000And the parallel with the record industry is that they're addicted to that money.
00:21:11.000They are addicted to taking that money from people.
00:21:15.000They're addicted to the private prisons are addicted to it.
00:21:18.000The law enforcement officers are addicted.
00:21:20.000There's a real issue with drugs in this country in that if marijuana was made legal, just marijuana, some ungodly number of drug arrests would no longer be necessary.
00:22:00.000If you want to make a movie like The Hobbit, fuck, that costs a lot of money.
00:22:03.000And if you want to download that goddamn thing for free, and you're not going to go see it in the movie now, and they're not going to get your money, that to me seems a little bit unfair.
00:22:12.000Just because you're dealing with something that requires some exorbitant amount of money.
00:22:17.000And once you see it at home, on your television, if you can download it and play it on your TV, there's really no reason to go to the movies.
00:22:39.000But, I mean, it's true, except for I still maintain, like you said earlier, that pleasant or unpleasant, we're in a transitional period.
00:22:45.000And the consumer, you can't brand the consumer as being sort of morally repellent or thieves because they are using a technology that gives them what they want the way they want it.
00:25:52.000When you have a desire that people have, undeniable desire to alter their consciousness, and you have a method that everyone's aware of, but then you deny them access to that method, someone's going to provide it.
00:26:17.000All the murders and the craziness and the chaos.
00:26:20.000That comes from, not from businesses that you can regulate and understand and look at their profits and see what their practices are and decide whether or not you want to boycott this company as opposed to that company, which behaves more ethically.
00:26:35.000This company is organic, and this company is self-sustaining, and look at it.
00:26:39.000No, you're making it illegal, and you're creating an organized crime ring.
00:26:46.000It's like, instantly, you're going to create that.
00:26:47.000Yeah, and destroying economies, and I mean, the reverberations are huge all over the world.
00:26:52.000Yeah, and the reverberations, I think, of just denying people freedom.
00:27:27.000And if they're exchanging drugs and, you know, they're selling, buying and selling drugs, like, well, that's a minor consequence of freedom.
00:27:39.000It also means that people are trying to find new ways to do something that is going to be easier for them or more done in a more healthy, functional way than the current way that exists.
00:27:48.000And that's what I think is blowing people's minds.
00:27:50.000Is that maybe this actually is reducing crime and violence in the street trade.
00:27:54.000Maybe it is causing a problem for the cartels.
00:27:56.000Maybe it is making it easier for someone who has a habit to be in a community that may be able to help them as opposed to throw them in jail.
00:28:02.000I mean, again, it's not to say these are all good.
00:28:05.000It's not, to me, a black and white issue.
00:28:34.000There's no way to stop people from doing what they want to do and when you try it makes them This is a thing about human beings when you want us to not do something We ordinarily want to do it.
00:28:46.000That's why Catholic school girls were always so ridiculously promiscuous, right?
00:28:51.000Why because they're always told like don't don't go anywhere near boys know that I can't wait to get near boys!
00:28:57.000Like, I have a friend who went to Catholic school, she was just talking about it yesterday.
00:29:00.000She was like, everybody in my class was boy crazy, because there was no boys, and they were the forbidden fruit.
00:29:06.000It's like everything their parents were trying to protect them from, they were just ramping it up.
00:29:35.000If you look at it under a terrarium, it's just this place.
00:29:37.000Now, in any city, you're going to have all kinds of good stuff going on, and you're going to have bad stuff going on, and you're going to have everything in between.
00:31:35.000Well, I don't want to bore your audience, but it involves pretty intense math and a lot of the stuff grew out of the sort of early creators of the internet that were using cryptography and ways of bouncing I
00:32:55.000And then Tor was developed over the last 15 years or so.
00:32:58.000But there are other ways to get into that area as well that are growing.
00:33:02.000So the problem with that would be, of course, if someone was harassing, say, an ex-girlfriend or something like that, sending someone threatening messages, you couldn't track it.
00:33:13.000Yeah, but you couldn't, if you could, because if I'm sending my ex-girlfriend hidden messages, I'd have to be sending them to her on the surface web or she wouldn't see them.
00:33:37.000Because if it was like Chrome, if Chrome had these type of capabilities, then someone could harass someone on Facebook or something like that and you wouldn't be able to track it.
00:33:45.000Yeah, this is where it gets into an interesting gray area because it's a little of both.
00:33:51.000We are going to be building, there are going to be browser technologies that do randomize your location.
00:33:56.000There's already VPN sort of virtual networks that mask your IP address.
00:34:04.000And again, they're not doing that so they can hide for doing contraband.
00:34:07.000They're doing that to prevent being hacked most of the time.
00:34:10.000And that already will sort of preclude people from knowing exactly what computer you sent something from.
00:34:15.000But, you know, in general, it's pretty easy to trace.
00:34:18.000The digital world is a trackable world.
00:34:21.000And at the end of the day, you usually contract somebody unless they're in a completely alternative space talking to someone else who has willingly joined that alternate space.
00:34:32.000So if you were a member of one of these communities and you joined up, someone could harass you then and there's really not a lot you could do.
00:34:40.000Yeah, they'd be saying, user XYDDD slash zero, you're a piece of shit.
00:34:45.000If they found out who you were, though, do you have a randomized number?
00:34:50.000Yeah, you create a username, and no one's going to know who you are in that space, and there's nothing connecting you to the surface.
00:34:56.000But if you reveal who you are in that, then you'd have to get a new randomized number.
00:35:23.000Steve Wozniak, you know, the great Apple computer genius, said, and I think he was talking about file sharing, you know, we're all, like, on this highway.
00:35:32.000And the highway has all of these lanes on it.
00:36:22.000There's no easy answer, but we need to come up with new laws that affect how we convene in the space, not just say, nobody can get on this highway.
00:36:30.000Like you said, that's never going to happen.
00:36:32.000It's never going to happen, and the g-force that's involved in this change, the change is so powerful and so rapid, you're going to have some screw-ups.
00:38:45.000Up to Some Girls, pretty much every track is gold, but after Some Girls.
00:38:48.000There's some great fucking songs, but there's also some songs that you just go- Yeah, right would you guys get high and just slap this together when you're on coke like this?
00:38:58.000Yeah, probably but that you can't do that anymore.
00:39:01.000Yeah, you can't now and then you're seeing like Bands are being forced into this position where you you're you're represented by your entire Piece of work.
00:39:12.000Yeah, it's not just like a hit that you send out.
00:39:44.000You know, it was a very short period of time, historically, actually, where you had this, like, 20 million sellers, 40 million, these units being moved to these enormous numbers.
00:39:53.000That was never going to last, and it wasn't necessarily even an organic thing anyway.
00:39:57.000And again, it's not to condone what happened.
00:39:59.000It's just to say that sometimes we lose perspective and think it was always like this until those damn meddling kids and their computers came along.
00:40:07.000That's interesting if you look at it, because file sharing really is like this blip, but record sales are the real blip.
00:40:16.000I mean, out of the thousands of years of people creating music and musical art, look at this tiny brief window where people were selling these things.
00:40:26.000And even at that amount of money, we're talking about probably no more than 25 years.
00:40:29.000I mean, it's a really small window, even within the record industry's history.
00:40:32.000That's fascinating when you think about it that way.
00:40:35.000Now, Donny Einer in Downloaded talks about that quite, he had a really clear-eyed view of it because he really came up through, he was like the youngest president of Columbia, really amazing guy.
00:40:43.000He had a very interesting perspective on the bubble, as it were, the other side of it.
00:40:49.000What's the view of the movie business?
00:40:52.000Has the movie business taken a big hit from file sharing?
00:40:58.000I think the Game of Thrones thing has really been the question.
00:41:01.000There was a lot of uproar about the amount of piracy that was going on, or the amount of file sharing that was going on around the Game of Thrones, and then at a certain point, HBO shifted position from...
00:41:11.000Saying, this is really terrible and you're all criminals, to wait a minute, you guys all really love what we have.
00:41:16.000This is becoming the most popular show on TV. Let's figure out how to get it to you.
00:41:21.000And they started coming up with alternatives like HBO Go.
00:41:24.000To me, that's really the right way to look at it.
00:41:26.000And I know, again, I'm not being glib.
00:41:28.000It's not fun to lose lots of money when you're putting so much money and time into doing these works.
00:41:34.000But it's being realistic that People all over the world, they want their content at the same time.
00:42:38.000Because right now they're in a period where the consumers have taken back the power and they're scratching their heads going, oh shit, now what do we do?
00:42:44.000We've got to figure out how to create a system where we can get maximum profit again.
00:42:50.000But what I don't respond to well is when they retaliate against their consumers and go, it's your fault that we got knocked back.
00:42:58.000You guys are criminals and this is bad and we have to educate you.
00:43:02.000That you need to give us profit again.
00:43:03.000No, I mean, we have to educate you that this is wrong.
00:43:06.000I mean, their motive is purely profit-based, so I get that it's a drag, but it's up to you to figure out a way to make a profit out of what you're doing.
00:43:13.000They also don't have a stranglehold on the promotional aspect anymore.
00:43:19.000Because of the Internet and because of, like, YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and people sharing links, a band can become really popular really quickly.
00:43:28.000Like, someone could pass something along, and then it becomes a viral hit on YouTube, and you go, wow, this thing, like, that fucking Gangnam Style, right?
00:44:06.000But it's a perfect example in that that didn't require any promotional vehicle other than people enjoying it and sharing it with other people, and then it spread like wildfire.
00:44:56.000Yeah, and they had these deals, these under-the-table deals with record companies where they would not play certain people because they were blackballed.
00:45:08.000Yeah, and just the day they were in control They had the power and the record companies being these huge organizations with a massive amount of money behind them They were able to sort of create stars and there was a lot of artificial stars that they created just by Mouth fucking everybody with this music just forcing it into your ears.
00:45:29.000Yeah, they can't do that anymore No, that ship has definitely sailed.
00:45:34.000And they're going to have to come up with alternative ways to get back to some degree of where they were.
00:47:06.000I think that's been the next phase of digital music, is now we're finding more curation online, whether it's through Spotify or other services, Pitchfork.
00:47:18.000And what's cool about the internet is that you can pull, like, the best rock critics together, the best whatever kind of music you like, and you can aggregate that or sort of compile it through Spotify or some service and just check out what they want.
00:47:31.000You know, you can choose who your DJ is, in a way.
00:47:47.000Yeah, the notion of gatekeepers has changed a lot, and most of the gatekeepers that existed are no longer gatekeepers.
00:47:52.000Well, we're sort of concentrating on one aspect of this issue, which is sort of file sharing and the digital reality of songs and things along those lines.
00:48:04.000But the Silk Road story was a lot more about drugs and infiltration, and there was a lot going on.
00:48:13.000Yeah, it was actually a political movement.
00:48:15.000I mean, the Silk Road was, whether you agree with it or not, and the movie is not about taking a side as much as trying to show what it actually was, as opposed to what we heard about in the media.
00:49:08.000I mean, of course, if you see that there's a market online that's selling heroin, you know, via the Postal Service, and you're in any number of three-letter law enforcement agencies, you're going to be showing up.
00:49:35.000To credit the FBI and the DEA, they knew what was going on pretty early on, and they installed undercover operatives with fictitious user accounts.
00:49:44.000It just turned out some of them were dirty.
00:49:47.000That's what came out a couple weeks ago, was that two of the lead agents on the Silk Road case out of Baltimore, DEA agents in Secret Service, were extorting tons of money off the Silk Road and putting it into personal accounts.
00:50:03.000I mean, they were kind of off the rails.
00:50:05.000But, of course, when you're dealing with, you know, alternative communities that are that radical, of course there are going to be bad things that happen, and of course there's going to be things that are, you know, not on the up-and-up.
00:50:17.000And this cop thing happened after that you had...
00:50:22.000I actually knew something about it, but I was kind of gag-ordered in that it was a grand jury indictment investigation going on, so we weren't allowed to talk about it.
00:50:32.000Ross Ulbrich's defense attorney wasn't allowed to bring it up in the trial.
00:50:35.000I knew that something was going on involving rogue agents.
00:50:38.000I didn't know exactly what it was, but I kind of put two and two together that that's what it was.
00:50:45.000I mean, I've now gone back and addressed it slightly in the movie, but, you know, it only has so much relevance because the film, again, isn't, you know, saying that the guys who built the Silk Road are heroes and that these guys are just bad.
00:50:57.000The point is that you have all kinds of people mixed up in things like this, good and bad.
00:51:01.000There are plenty of good law enforcement agents, just like there were rogue ones.
00:51:05.000There are plenty of good people on the Silk Road, just like there were bad ones.
00:51:08.000And there was probably the ones who went bad, they were probably like, there's nobody that could...
00:51:16.000Yeah, I think that you can get a false sense of security that if you're using an anonymous browser, if you're using a fictitious username, if you're using a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that doesn't have your name attached to it, you can have this false sense of security that you're untouchable.
00:51:33.000As I said earlier, everything that happens in the digital world tends to be very traceable on some level.
00:51:39.000It's hard to be truly anonymous online.
00:51:43.000You can do it, but you have to go through enormous lengths to remain truly anonymous on the internet.
00:51:51.000And the thing about the internet is one friend of mine within the Silk Road said to me, he's like, the internet never forgets.
00:51:58.000So you could make a slip five years ago, but if I'm a federal agent and I'm like winding my way through your fictitious user history and I get to that one slip, if that door has been opened once and the light's shown on your face, that's all they need is once.
00:52:12.000And whether that's law enforcement or a hacker or anybody, if there's a vulnerability, they're going to get in.
00:52:17.000So these guys who were the bad undercover agents, they had diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin.
00:52:29.000Well, it's not totally known because, to be fair, it was a sting operation from within the DEA and other agencies, so they're not completely telling everyone how they got caught.
00:52:38.000They just noticed Mike's got a new boat.
00:52:43.000There was people paying off their mortgages when they're only making $150 before taxes.
00:52:47.000There were some dumb mistakes that got made.
00:52:50.000There were accounts set up with a lot of money in them.
00:52:52.000There were too many fictitious usernames that eventually, again, one tiny slip of one email account that you use to connect yourself to one.
00:53:02.000That's the thing about the digital world.
00:53:38.000One of the agents that was arrested was the undercover who was sort of at the heart of that first murder for hire sting.
00:53:46.000So he basically actually framed somebody else in the Silk Road, said that person stole money, when actually he was the one who took the money.
00:53:53.000And said, we should do, you know, instigated doing something to that person who was just one of the vendors on the Silk Road.
00:53:59.000And that turns out to not only be a cop, which we've known all along, but a dirty cop.
00:54:03.000A cop who was stealing money and blackmailing people within the Silk Road.
00:54:07.000So the murder for hire, there were no bodies that were...
00:54:33.000They said on that laptop they found a journal that he wrote, which he clearly laid out what he did on the Silk Road the whole time.
00:54:41.000They believe it attributes him to the Dread Pirate Roberts, who they showed Dread Pirate Roberts records saying, I want to take a hit out on this person.
00:54:49.000I'm going to send you the X amount of Bitcoin.
00:55:46.000I mean, I don't know, I don't have any personal information of people selling drugs through Facebook, but I gotta imagine someone has sent a Facebook message to someone saying, hey, you want to buy some Coke?
00:55:57.000Well, yeah, the argument is this site was specifically created for selling illegal drugs.
00:56:09.000You know, the defense's argument is twofold.
00:56:11.000They say, A, you know, this person, the Dread Pirate Roberts, wasn't even selling drugs.
00:56:17.000They were just, you know, the creator of this politically oriented freedom, you know, dark website, and people could do whatever they wanted to on it.
00:56:25.000And he was anti-drug war, and I mean, you can't deny that there was a big drug component to the Silk Road by its very nature.
00:56:31.000The motivation of the Silk Road via the Dread Pirate Roberts writing was about removing harm and crime from the drug trade and helping to bring the drug war to an end.
00:56:42.000But they also claim that the journal and all that stuff in the Bitcoin found on Ross's computer aren't his.
00:56:48.000They claim that he was hacked and that the whole Silk Road was filled with All kinds of people, like these murky DEA agents that were, you know, using other people's usernames and accounts, which they were, that the internet world is so hard to pin down once you get behind fictitious usernames that they're saying that none of this stuff was actually his.
00:57:10.000And that's what they're taking into an appeal.
00:57:13.000Like, they feel so strongly about that they're moving forward with appeal.
00:57:16.000Prosecution said, that's nonsense, this stuff was all on his laptop.
00:57:40.000And they knew that this case existed and they didn't allow, like the lawyer, Ross's defense was trying to postpone the trial a couple months so that the grand jury investigation, the criminal charges they knew were going to drop the complaint, but they were not allowed to postpone the trial.
00:57:56.000If you can prove that these cops were using other people's usernames and they were hacking into people's accounts, that seems like right there.
00:58:27.000Especially when there's an agenda like this to prosecute someone in an important case, a landmark case, they think is going to establish a precedent.
00:59:18.000He admitted to creating the Silk Road.
00:59:21.000He said he did it to create an economic simulation where he would combine Tor and Bitcoin to allow a marketplace to exist that would be free for everybody to use however they wanted to use it.
00:59:31.000He claims he said he built it With the help of a lot of other people, because he doesn't really know how to code.
00:59:36.000And he just let it run, and he was done.
00:59:44.000Given being around him, because they're a very tight-knit family all this time, they were like, this was not someone who was on his laptop all the time.
00:59:50.000I don't know how he could have been running almost a billion-dollar drug empire.
01:00:29.000Again, I would love to see, like, I went to the trial thinking, okay, now we're going to see what happened, right?
01:00:34.000And I would love to see the defense really have time to sort of talk through their end and have expert witnesses and get into the nitty-gritty of it.
01:00:41.000Because, I mean, I would side with wherever the truth lies, but to be in the courtroom and to hear all that and just think, okay...
01:00:47.000If this is true, this is the most naive criminal mastermind in the history of...
01:01:14.000The idea that they didn't plant that on his laptop when you're dealing with all this other shit that these cops planted information and the fake hitman for hire shit.
01:01:38.000I think there's a movie in people getting railroaded in trials, too.
01:01:44.000I have a friend who went to jail for growing medical marijuana that was legal in California.
01:01:53.000And when he went to jail, because the federal government tried him, the federal government doesn't even recognize medical marijuana, so they refused to even allow him to say the term medical marijuana.
01:02:04.000They also refused to allow into court the fact that it was passed into law in California.
01:02:57.000It's like if there's very little narrow path that you're allowed to go down and you can't stray on either side of that path, and that path basically leads to your jail cell.
01:03:04.000So they can't prove that this guy actually sold any drugs, but because he created this forum that allowed other people to do it.
01:03:13.000They're not saying that he was involved in any of these transactions.
01:03:51.000Yeah, you can watch the film, but basically they were, just like you just talked about with your friend, they were unable to call expert witnesses to talk about the complexities of Bitcoin and how Bitcoin wallets work and how you can hack into these.
01:04:22.000And the other problem that I have is that, you know, the media...
01:04:27.000For the most part, just sort of swallows the party line.
01:04:29.000Like, we're going to see Silk Road movies, and they're all going to be...
01:04:32.000They're going to totally just take the prosecutorial position, and they're going to be, you know, news reports and movies and TV shows, and they're all going to be this roguish hacker kid who tried to kill people on the Internet.
01:04:45.000And, again, I maintain, I know a fair amount about this case, that we don't totally know what happened.
01:04:51.000In the movie, he'll probably be sweaty and doing meth.
01:04:54.000It'll be Robert Pattinson, you know, and he won't shave for a while.
01:05:05.000Like, they were saying, like, at one point, they wanted to beat this guy up because he was going to talk, and then they decided to say, execute him instead.
01:05:37.000Sets up a fake murder for hire, then does a fake murder, has a fake body, all to punish this fake person for stealing money that he stole.
01:05:49.000Yes, and to go further, that person that was supposedly killed, who was one of the vendors on the Silk Road, was then arrested as being part of this sting operation for this drug deal that was put together by the crooked undercover cop who took all the money and is now,
01:06:42.000Put a percentage on what percentage of the transactions, exchanges, the conversations on Silk Road were about illegal activities and what were not.
01:06:52.000Well, I've actually seen some pie charts, just because I have access to some of the metrics on this stuff.
01:07:01.000Originally, the Silk Road had a very strict ethics code.
01:07:04.000There was no child pornography allowed on Silk Road.
01:07:06.000There was no counterfeit money allowed on Silk Road.
01:07:10.000When Silk Road started, it was mostly softer drugs.
01:07:13.000It was mostly mushrooms, marijuana, things like that.
01:07:15.000It grew harder as the Silk Road went along.
01:07:18.000But it also grew harder as more law enforcement became involved in the undercover operations of Silk Road.
01:07:24.000And there was a certain amount of A complicity between the increasing law enforcement presence on Silk Road and the severity of the drugs and that kind of activity.
01:07:36.000And to be fair to law enforcement, that's often how they work anyway.
01:07:39.000If they're going to infiltrate a cartel, they're going to start moving big amounts of heroin or whatever.
01:08:17.000Anyway, here in Pasadena, there was a Mickey Mouse parade today.
01:08:21.000Yeah, I mean, as I said, I spent several hours when I was at South By talking to a reporter from a major newspaper who wanted to know what this thing was, and I talked to her for hours and explained in detail, and then when she wrote her thing, it was like, this thing's filled with criminals, and it's horrible, and these people are bad.
01:08:59.000I think that we face an inherent lack of understanding and a fear and a reactionary fear around technologies.
01:09:05.000I think a lot of the story that's being told about new technologies is automatically criminalizing or demonizing it.
01:09:10.000And then when you tell stories that sort of sit in the middle, you're accused of being sort of Pollyanna-ish and saying, oh, it's all good.
01:09:18.000We're saying this is what's going on, whether you like it or not.
01:09:20.000Let's at least examine it for what it is.
01:09:23.000Well, how could anybody who watches your documentary, or at least listens to this conversation on this podcast, not think that there's a bunch of twisted shit going on with these undercover agents that were obviously doing things and implicating people in things that they had no involvement in, stealing money and blaming it on others,
01:11:40.000It's just going to grow and grow and grow.
01:11:42.000Because the technology works, and because, as you said, there's a demand.
01:11:46.000So the real issue is going to be the delivery of these illegal substances.
01:11:51.000Like, you're having a hard address that these things get delivered to.
01:11:55.000Yeah, but they come through camouflage, FedEx, and UPS packages.
01:11:59.000And these people know what they're doing and they know how to game the postal system.
01:12:02.000I mean, I've talked to a bunch of dealers who are using these online services and they're very, very good at working the postal system.
01:12:07.000So, like, when you hear about kids getting popped for having, you know, 500 movies on their hard drive, they're distributing through BitTorrent and they get caught...
01:12:20.000This is mostly because they were one of the ones who were uploading them, right?
01:12:28.000Or if you're like a really dumb 13-year-old and you're just pulling this stuff down on your browser and they find your internet service provider and they find your IP address and they connect that to a person whose broadband is sucking down ridiculous amounts of media every day,
01:12:45.000There's ways of tracking you that way.
01:12:47.000Now, but if you're buying drugs on the internet, on an anonymous browser, in the darknet, with Bitcoin, and you've kept your anonymity tight working, it's very, very difficult to find you unless they literally pop you because the guy who sent you stuff, the packaging wasn't well camouflaged, and they go,
01:14:22.000When people are infiltrating your private life with the ability to either mistakenly or through a law that you may feel like what happened to your friend with the marijuana issue or what happened to the guy who just got shot.
01:14:36.000In the Carolinas who had a broken taillight, which isn't even against the law and isn't really even a reason to legally stop somebody and he didn't have a prior and he didn't have a warrant.
01:14:43.000You know, that's the world we live in where these mistakes can happen and where things can go very, very wrong for people and you have to have some protections against that.
01:14:51.000Yeah, what I was getting at was that this signal doesn't exist, like a signal where you're passing by someone's house and you see all this electricity being used, all this heat being generated.
01:15:23.000That's why law enforcement has been trying to break TOR. And what's been going on is that TOR, there's a conflict there, because TOR is still created and maintained by a lot of government agencies, or utilized, let's say, by a lot of government agencies who need TOR in order to communicate with each other.
01:15:40.000I mean, NSA, a lot of different agencies need TOR to communicate privately.
01:15:43.000But then on the same floor of a law enforcement building, you may have some guy in Office A who's working to help make TOR stronger.
01:15:50.000Four doors down, you've got somebody in the same building on the same floor Trying to break TOR. So you have this huge conflict of interest going on where they don't even really know what to do with it.
01:15:58.000And the people who want to break TOR want to break it for the reason you just said.
01:16:03.000How do we find these people, even if TOR is mostly being used for good purposes, unless we demonize the whole thing?
01:16:09.000And that's when I get my hackles up when people just say, this whole world is bad.
01:16:14.000They're just saying that because it's just easier just to throw a kind of a blanket over this entire world and go, well, now we know where all the bad people are.
01:16:20.000They're everybody who are using Tor, which is like saying anybody who's got a bathroom door is bad.
01:16:24.000It's so irresponsible to just demonize the entire Silk Road like that and demonize the entire movement without looking at the nuances.
01:16:34.000We're looking at the unbelievable complexity involved in In freedom and digital freedom and exchanging information online and even the complexities involved in the drug war.
01:16:46.000The idea that just because it's a law that you shouldn't examine that law very closely and using your own personal morals and ethics, apply them to that law and tell me whether or not this law is just.
01:19:59.000No, but the way the prosecution looks at him, to be fair, is as all those things.
01:20:04.000They believe that Ross intended to have people killed, whether those murders happened or not.
01:20:09.000They believe that he made a lot of money off of the Silk Road via Bitcoin.
01:20:14.000They believe that the sort of anti-government, libertarian ethos that they believe he espoused to was very anarchistic and dangerous.
01:20:22.000So they did view him as a major threat.
01:20:25.000That's a slippery slope to say that an anti-government libertarian ethos is dangerous because, boy, there's a lot of fucking people you're going to have to lock up with that.
01:20:40.000You know, the guy running for government office, the top government office, has a dad who's pretty goddamn libertarian for being a Republican.
01:20:49.000And I maintain that whatever the truth ends up being, and I really do hope we categorically get to the bottom of it at some point, in a way, and not to write him off at all, but in a way, regardless of Ross Ulbricht, I think that the idea of these anonymous marketplaces on the Internet with these communities,
01:21:10.000I think that's what poses the greatest threat.
01:21:13.000Well, I think the internet itself is the greatest threat to the system that we have in place, and it's the biggest exposer of the shell game of the two-party system as well.
01:21:24.000It's not viable, and because it's not viable, the data just keeps getting examined and examined and examined by so many people, and they keep coming to the same conclusion.
01:25:22.000And again, as I say, I don't know the whole truth.
01:25:25.000I just am very eager to either find out or to not make proclamations about things that I don't think have been proven, which doesn't seem to be stopping anybody else.
01:25:52.000I mean, I said to Ross's mom, you know, later that day, I was like, I don't know how...
01:25:57.000I mean, I've always wondered how you've survived the last year, but, like, I barely made it through this week, and it's not my son in jail.
01:26:04.000And even if he's guilty of everything, just on a pure emotional level, just to watch...
01:26:09.000The machinery and the way that it works.
01:26:45.000And I think that the Internet has actually been really helpful in sort of creating grassroots movement that then attack things that are, you know, Byzantine, like the gay marriage laws or the marijuana laws or these things that are beginning to shift in our culture.
01:26:59.000And I think that the net is absolutely a power there.
01:27:03.000But there's a very big battle, you know.
01:27:20.000You go out into the world and you say things about this world that aren't completely party line and you're just branded as being a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot.
01:28:49.000Obviously, if the murders were faked, and it's quite possible, in fact likely, that no one ever wanted anybody murdered in the first place.
01:28:59.000This guy just was setting the whole thing up to cover up the fact that he stole all this money.
01:30:40.000You know, I'm actually through it now because I've been done for a minute, but you go through a little withdrawal because I was living, eating, and sleeping in this world for almost two years, and I was dealing with a lot of people on all sides, on the law enforcement side, on the cyber side,
01:31:00.000But part of me, and I said this, I was very blunt with Lynn, his mom, and I like being able to talk about it, so that's kind of the easy part.
01:31:07.000That's kind of the why you do it part, right?
01:31:10.000But I said to Lynn, I was like, you know, I really am glad I'm done.
01:31:18.000I've got a family and kids, and I get to go home, and I'm done.
01:31:23.000You go outside, and you smell the air, and you get in your car, and you go about your day, and you take your kids to school, and I think...
01:31:30.000You know, I just, I don't, I am done with that world.
01:31:33.000Well, that's this really scary part about the threat of keeping in line, is that they can remove that from you.
01:31:39.000They can take that right away from you to just drive right now and go, go get a burrito.
01:31:45.000I want to drive down the street to the Mexican restaurant.
01:32:25.000Most of the label guys I talked to were really clear-eyed and smart and had a really good view of, like, here's where we screwed up, here's where we're taking too much money, here's where this happened, here's where the technology fucked us, whatever it was.
01:32:36.000On law enforcement, most of the law enforcement guys I talk to don't agree with this notion that there should be no encryption.
01:32:41.000It's like, yes, it's going to make our job harder, but yes, you have a right to privacy.
01:32:46.000No, we should not have warrantless search and seizure.
01:32:50.000And, you know, so there's a lot of people caught up in the grays.
01:32:53.000There's another guy I spoke to in the movie named Neil Franklin, who is the director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
01:33:01.000And Neil was a homicide major on the streets of Baltimore for 20 years and saw everything there was to see about the drug wars ravages.
01:33:07.000And now his life, his work is about getting rid of the drug war from the officer side, from the DEA, FBI, DA side.
01:33:17.000I just feel like in the future it's going to be looked back the same way prohibition was.
01:33:21.000It's just going to be looked back at like some ridiculous part of our history that we should have been intelligent enough to realize it was a foolhardy pursuit and now we've abandoned it.
01:34:42.000We need to do it with maximum punishment, with extreme prejudice, as it were.
01:34:47.000So you watch that machinery just at work, too.
01:34:50.000They get to go back in front of the TV cameras and go, we have another big drug war trophy.
01:34:54.000And this Dread Pirate Roberts character, he started, whether it's this guy Ross or not, he started talking because there's another competing sort of deep web service.
01:35:07.000Yeah, well back at the time there was one called Atlantis that had shown up.
01:35:13.000Now there's tons of them, but this was in the early days.
01:35:16.000And the journalist from Wired, Andy Greenberg, who's our everyman in the film who takes us through this world...
01:35:24.000He was the first person to interview, really the only person to interview Dread Pirate Roberts.
01:35:29.000And that's how he got the interview, was just by saying, look, I'll cover these other guys.
01:35:32.000And Dread Pirate Roberts knew that the Silk Road needed more exposure in order to get more customers, so he talked.
01:36:03.000Yeah, that just happened with one called Evolution recently, and it happened with another one called Sheet Market, and it happens from time to time.
01:36:20.000And you set up an account, then you go to that site through Tor, through some other way into the darknet.
01:36:26.000You set up a username and an account, just like you do with eBay, right?
01:36:30.000And now you have a Bitcoin account, and you've got your account on this site, just like you have eBay.
01:36:35.000So it's just like using PayPal to pay for your eBay purchases, you're using Bitcoin to pay for your online services.
01:36:42.000And they have access somehow or another to your Bitcoin?
01:36:45.000Yeah, because Bitcoin is anonymous in the sense that you can set up a Bitcoin address, but all they're getting is the code for your Bitcoin, and it gets removed.
01:36:54.000There's ways to remove it from you even further.
01:36:57.000But basically, you pay using this Bitcoin code.
01:37:01.000They get that transaction, they send you the drugs via, and often times now it works, they don't even know who you are, like it's done through a third party to separate you from the core site.
01:37:13.000So there's ways of keeping it, you know, they basically, it's like an escrow account or something.
01:37:17.000There's ways of creating barriers between you and them.
01:37:20.000So somehow or another, the people that own the site are able to access the people who have membership on the site, their Bitcoin wallet.
01:38:09.000Yeah, because you're taking a fee, so there's that whole aspect.
01:38:12.000So people are creating decentralized systems now that are not about that, that don't even have fee-based structures, where that won't be possible.
01:38:19.000Where basically all I've done, it's more like BitTorrent, is all I've done is created this service.
01:38:27.000The Bitcoin sort of travels from one area through directly to that buyer.
01:38:31.000There's nobody in the middle that can take the money and run.
01:38:34.000And that's the direction it's currently going in.
01:38:36.000So these people that did it, like for Atlantis or these other organizations, do they ever get caught or does everybody have to shut up because they were talking about illegal drugs in the first place?
01:38:45.000I mean, the interesting thing is there's a lot of, you know, full-blown, unsurprisingly, full-on cybercriminals out there, like these DEA agents that got caught.
01:38:52.000They were actually, or this singular DEA agent, singular, Secret Service guy.
01:38:56.000You know, they were very sophisticated.
01:38:58.000They were more sophisticated than some of the guys who created these sites.
01:40:07.000Yeah, if they wanted to create some kind of advertising model or legitimize themselves in other ways, there's ways to eventually create profit.
01:40:14.000And they're also saying that not only are people using this for drugs, but they're also using this for illegal firearms and the distribution of illegal firearms.
01:41:00.000So that's the way that some of that stuff has happened online.
01:41:04.000But the way Cody's technologies work is you're able to create one piece of a weapon that you could sort of build the rest of the weapon around.
01:41:12.000So that's been a big thorn in people's sides as well.
01:41:17.000Yeah, what he's done is very interesting because his...
01:41:22.000Plans or whatever it is for the 3D gun you could download.
01:41:27.000Hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded this and traded it back and forth.
01:41:32.000And if you have a 3D printer, all you have to do is enter that information in and it can build you this gun.
01:42:48.000It seems like the real issue will be raw materials then at that point.
01:42:51.000Yeah, I think the world is really, I mean, that's the thing I maintain is that that's why I get so frustrated by how slow we're dragging our feet with these changes.
01:42:58.000It's like you said it earlier, the real changes are coming.
01:43:00.000Like, things are really going to shift into high gear over the next 10, 20, 30 years with driverless cars and more advanced biotechnology.
01:43:08.000I mean, things are really going to change.
01:43:10.000They're so weird because we're in the middle of it.
01:43:13.000I think it's so difficult to gain a really objective perspective while you're in the middle of it.
01:43:19.000Because everyone's used to just looking at their phone and checking their text messages, but Just 30 years ago, that wasn't even a dream.
01:43:38.000I just wonder how they're going to look back on things like this, like this Silk Road thing or Napster.
01:43:43.000You've really kind of captured with both of these documentaries, with downloaded and with this deep web documentary, you really kind of captured...
01:44:40.000This is not one issue of an underground marketplace of nefarious people doing dastardly deeds.
01:44:47.000This is an aspect of human cultural evolution.
01:44:52.000It's a little frustrating, but I also, like I said, a lot of the people that I interview Are more sensible than sometimes what the prevailing narrative is.
01:45:03.000You do encounter people that just really have their heads planted in the sand.
01:45:08.000They just don't want to think about things differently than the way they perceive them.
01:45:12.000I actually encountered that a lot with the Napster story.
01:45:15.000People were just adamantly, no, it was only about stealing.
01:45:18.000No, it's not about something other than piracy.
01:45:22.000And I think that we're still there with the Napster issue.
01:45:25.000I think people still just cannot get their heads around what actually happened.
01:45:29.000You know, I still think it's there's value in just telling the stories and shining a light on them and trying to provide some nuance and You know when I tour around with the festivals and we have these great Q&A's and people are really they either know more about it than I do or they know less or they're somewhere in the middle and Conversations start and I think that's really that's helpful on some level Well,
01:45:51.000I mean, if you're talking to people that are in their 50s, they're going to be less in tune than people in their 40s who are less in tune, unless they're really actively pursuing it.
01:45:58.000But the kids in their 20s, they're almost all in tune to it, at least the ones that are smart and aren't obsessed with Justin Bieber.
01:46:05.000They're tuned in to what's going on here.
01:46:08.000They literally are a part of a generation that will go down as being the first generation that grew up entirely with the Internet.
01:46:17.000Yeah, and these are people who are utilizing these technologies at such a fundamental level that they don't think...
01:46:22.000That's the whole thing with the Napster thing, and it certainly works in the Silk Road case to some degree, is these people did not view themselves as criminals.
01:47:40.000Like, all the other artists were like, yeah, none of them had the balls to give him some credit to come out and say, wait a minute, we need to have better discussions about this.
01:47:48.000So they totally stuck his ass out in the forefront and then they ran.
01:47:52.000Well, the fans felt like, you greedy fuck...
01:48:05.000And I felt for him to the degree that as an artist, I felt like his reaction, whatever you want to say about the politics of it, his initial gut, oh my god reaction, would have been my, you know what I mean?
01:48:14.000When you make something and it's in rough cut form or it's not, you know, the idea that like, that's out there, like someone's stuck in a movie theater at K-Rock, that makes your head, that's like you lose sleep on that kind of stuff at night.
01:48:23.000Yeah, comics have this with YouTube with bits.
01:48:26.000Like if you're working on a new bit and someone shows up at a comedy club and records you when you're on stage and then releases it on YouTube and then it gets downloaded by 100,000 people, you're like, that bit sucks.
01:49:37.000But my point being, if you try to imagine what the next stage is going to be, I would imagine that it would be something virtual.
01:49:47.000And I'm imagining that what we're looking at now, when you're looking at a website even, when you're looking at message boards, when you're looking at Twitter, Facebook, social media, is akin to those boards that existed back in the day before...
01:50:21.000Those are looked at as a joke now when you can get, you know, New York Times will give you instant messages on your phone to let you know when there's alerts, when anything's happening.
01:50:32.000If you check Twitter, anytime anything's going down, like anytime someone dies, I find out about it on Twitter before I ever see it on the news.
01:50:39.000It seems like it's almost instantaneous.
01:51:59.000I also think that as a giant super organism, the human race, what we really are, really, when you think about it, we're some sort of a giant super organism that works together to create these things and fund these things and push these things forward.
01:52:16.000We're kind of just moving along Not considering the implications of what we're doing, but just continuing along the same path.
01:52:25.000If you can't, if you step back and say, you know what, this virtual reality is just too fucked up, we should really stop and consider, well, guess what?
01:52:33.000Sony's going to come along, and they're going to just take the fucking rug out from under you, and they're going to have a better thing that you're not...
01:52:38.000They'll keep making Spider-Man reboots forever on your virtual reality.
01:53:47.000There's going to come some sort of a neural interface inside of our lifetime where you're going to be able to enter into worlds that have been created that seem indistinguishable from the world that we're currently in right now.
01:54:10.000I mean, I think that the idea, I think online drug markets are going to be ubiquitous, and they may very likely be the thing that takes major cartels down in the long run.
01:54:18.000Well, I was listening to this Radiolab podcast where they were talking about the placebo effect.
01:54:25.000I think that might be the name of the podcast for anyone who's interested.
01:54:30.000But they were talking about the various times where a placebo effect has worked and has not worked.
01:54:36.000And one of the things that they said that was so incredible is that the reason why drugs work That every drug that works on the human mind works because there's a receptor.
01:54:50.000There's a biological receptor in the brain.
01:54:53.000So essentially, the brain produces all these effects, just not reliably.
01:54:59.000Opioid effects, opiate effects, cannabis effects, all these different drugs.
01:55:04.000We know the brain produces various chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, psychedelic chemicals.
01:55:12.000If they can figure out how to do, with no drugs, something, some virtual thing, something, some chip that just stimulates those aspects of your brain and produces those feelings of euphoria, love, hate, Loss,
01:55:28.000sadness, and does so inside of a virtual world.
01:55:32.000I mean, they're gonna take you on a real live drug ride, and no drugs would be involved.
01:55:39.000I mean, then what do you do with your drug war?
01:55:41.000When all the drugs are produced by the mind, you're gonna stop people from producing endogenous chemicals that the brain naturally produces?
01:55:49.000I mean, you're already doing that with movies.
01:55:51.000What do you think the adrenaline effect you get from a crazy thriller is?
01:56:17.000I think that is going to have an impact.
01:56:18.000And I think that, you know, the other issue that I think is important is just like, you know, for those people that do need help, that needs to be decriminalized to a degree where they can actually get the help in a way that isn't stigmatized or they're not just felonized immediately.
01:56:31.000So that's an issue as well that needs to get addressed.
01:56:36.000And also the reason why people get addicted in the first place.
01:56:39.000Just the trauma that people experience as young children that causes these receptors to open up, that causes these drug addiction processes to take place.
01:56:51.000And you talk to people that have counseled folks that have massive drug problems and then understand how these genes get addressed.
01:57:13.000And genetics and the genetic disease component, and like there's no way to have a really thorough conversation about this stuff if it's just criminalized.