The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1614 - Tiller Russell

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

00:00:14.000 Are we rolling?

00:00:15.000 Oh, we are.

00:00:16.000 We're up.

00:00:17.000 Yeah, this is a Kill Cliff CBD, 25 milligrams of CBD, jalapeno pineapple.

00:00:24.000 Jalapeno pineapple.

00:00:25.000 Strong.

00:00:26.000 Not bad, right?

00:00:26.000 I like it.

00:00:26.000 It's called Flaming Joe.

00:00:27.000 That's my face, bro.

00:00:29.000 And it's flaming. 1.00

00:00:30.000 Hey, I love your fucking movies. 0.99

00:00:31.000 I love The 7-5, and I really enjoyed Silk Road. 1.00

00:00:36.000 It was really good.

00:00:37.000 And 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.

00:00:48.000 The guy who played the bad cop, what is his name?

00:00:50.000 Jason Clarke.

00:00:51.000 I love that guy.

00:00:51.000 He's great.

00:00:52.000 He's been in a bunch of things.

00:00:54.000 He was in Chappaquiddick.

00:00:55.000 He was in First Man.

00:00:57.000 He's been in a bunch of stuff, and he's a beast.

00:01:00.000 It 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.

00:01:06.000 And 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.

00:01:12.000 I can't wait to see what this guy does.

00:01:14.000 He's so good as a bad guy.

00:01:16.000 Yeah.

00:01:17.000 And he's game for it.

00:01:19.000 Yeah.

00:01:20.000 Yeah, he's intense.

00:01:21.000 I've seen that guy in so many movies.

00:01:23.000 He's just one of those guys, like, you see him and you're like, oh, that guy.

00:01:27.000 Well, you know, it's so funny when you're like, you know, I sat down...

00:01:30.000 So I had written the script for Silk Road several years ago.

00:01:34.000 And, you know, I have done all these documentaries.

00:01:36.000 That's my background, right?

00:01:38.000 Which is kind of where you dive into the...

00:01:39.000 You know, you do the deep dive on these, you know, crazy crime stories.

00:01:43.000 That's my whole racket, you know, from Michael Dowd forward.

00:01:47.000 And then you...

00:01:48.000 You 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?

00:01:56.000 So 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?

00:02:04.000 What if it's this kid?

00:02:05.000 What if it's this, you know, what if it's this guy?

00:02:07.000 And then suddenly, Jason Clarke, who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like, dude, I'm hip to that.

00:02:13.000 You know, I want to do it.

00:02:14.000 Is he playing a real guy?

00:02:16.000 It's a composite, basically.

00:02:18.000 What happened is there were a couple of corrupt law enforcement officers.

00:02:21.000 There 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.

00:02:37.000 And also people who have relationships, long-term relationships with informants.

00:02:42.000 So 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.

00:02:50.000 It's drawn from people I know, but it's kind of a hybrid between the two.

00:02:54.000 Yeah, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along and condensing it without having too many different moving parts.

00:03:04.000 Because you've got so much going on.

00:03:07.000 Well, and with something like that, a story like this, there are the people that...

00:03:13.000 I was one of the people that was fully geeked on this story.

00:03:16.000 I remember...

00:03:18.000 The 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.

00:03:33.000 It was like dark web, Bitcoin.

00:03:36.000 I think?

00:03:52.000 And then obsessively tracking the story as new pieces of information would come out.

00:03:57.000 And 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.

00:04:08.000 And he had gotten to Ross Ulbricht's girlfriend in Austin and then the family.

00:04:15.000 And so he wrote this profile of Ross that was this very...

00:04:25.000 I think?

00:04:42.000 Kept that information under wraps so as not to screw up the prosecution of Ross, right?

00:04:49.000 But 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.

00:05:04.000 Suddenly when I saw that, I thought, okay, Now that's a movie because I can imagine these two sort of people.

00:05:12.000 I always thought of it as almost like they're missiles on a collision course flying right at each other.

00:05:17.000 And so suddenly when I had that in my head, I was like, I can make a movie out of that.

00:05:21.000 The stuff with the corrupt cop's wife and daughter, was that fictionalized as well?

00:05:27.000 Yeah.

00:05:27.000 Yeah, so it's interesting.

00:05:29.000 At a certain point, I remember on set and kind of going up to it, people were like, okay, so what's factual and what's fictional?

00:05:38.000 What's factual and what's fictional?

00:05:39.000 And I... At a certain point...

00:05:44.000 I 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.

00:05:57.000 This was like, there was a limited amount of information.

00:06:00.000 And so then when the information ran out, it was like, okay, what am I going to pour in here?

00:06:05.000 I 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.

00:06:14.000 So that's what I ended up doing.

00:06:16.000 So when you say poured yourself into it, did you create this story with the daughter that needed the money for school?

00:06:24.000 Yeah.

00:06:25.000 I mean, what it is, is it's a combination.

00:06:28.000 So there was a limited amount of information.

00:06:31.000 This guy, one of these cops had family members, had a background where he was Jacked up in Puerto Rico and sort of thrown off track.

00:06:41.000 So I took the pieces that were in the public record that were in Rolling Stone articles or in the Wired article or whatever.

00:06:48.000 And then I was like, okay, I'm going to put my own biography into this.

00:06:54.000 I'm going to put, you know, maybe my relationship with my daughter or my relationship with my wife.

00:06:59.000 And so kind of build out from what's there with a personal story to it.

00:07:05.000 Is that a difficult thing to do?

00:07:08.000 Do you tiptoe through that?

00:07:11.000 Because here you are...

00:07:12.000 You have this story, right?

00:07:13.000 The story for folks who don't know.

00:07:15.000 We should probably let them know what the story is if they don't know.

00:07:17.000 The story of Silk Road is a spectacular story because...

00:07:22.000 He created this marketplace through the dark web using Tor and encryption.

00:07:30.000 And Tor is an encrypted browser.

00:07:34.000 Yeah, it's basically like the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.

00:07:38.000 You go into Tor and it conceals usage and location.

00:07:42.000 And 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.

00:07:55.000 And his...

00:07:58.000 The 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.

00:08:12.000 And that the people who support Silk Road, that's how they felt.

00:08:16.000 And people that are proponents Of a lot of these, particularly psychedelics, which I'm one of them, they like that.

00:08:24.000 Like, yeah, who is a grown adult to tell another grown adult what they can and can't use?

00:08:30.000 Wouldn'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?

00:08:38.000 Well, there was, and he created it.

00:08:39.000 And it's...

00:08:42.000 In the sense that it's an important American story.

00:08:47.000 It's an important internet story.

00:08:49.000 It's an important worldwide story.

00:08:50.000 But then you're also adding fiction.

00:08:53.000 Well, it's...

00:08:56.000 Yes, 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.

00:09:07.000 He'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.

00:09:16.000 And 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?

00:09:30.000 And so I sat down and I wrote him a letter.

00:09:35.000 And he was in awaiting sentencing, I think, at the time.

00:09:38.000 But I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access to him, right?

00:09:44.000 Rightly so, because it would potentially screw up his defense.

00:09:47.000 But 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.

00:09:54.000 And I'm a doc guy.

00:09:55.000 That's my process, you know?

00:09:57.000 And so I wrote him a letter, and I never heard back.

00:10:01.000 But then he had left the This kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past.

00:10:08.000 He 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.

00:10:20.000 And 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.

00:10:29.000 And so when he got busted, they confiscated his laptop.

00:10:32.000 And when they opened up his laptop, they had all of his private journal entries.

00:10:37.000 So there was the combination of his public postings as Dread Pirate Roberts and the diary entries as Ross Ulbricht.

00:10:44.000 And 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.

00:10:56.000 And so when we got into your question of how much of this is, you know, journalistically accurate.

00:11:04.000 So 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.

00:11:16.000 And then all of the chat logs, all of the back and forth, the encrypted communications between You know, Nob and Dread Pirate Roberts.

00:11:23.000 All of that stuff is taken from the documentary record.

00:11:25.000 Because I felt like you have to be true to who this guy is, in some sense, spiritually, you know?

00:11:31.000 Yeah.

00:11:32.000 Did you communicate with him at all?

00:11:33.000 No.

00:11:34.000 So what happened was – so I couldn't.

00:11:37.000 I couldn't get to him.

00:11:37.000 I wrote him a letter, never heard back.

00:11:38.000 But 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.

00:11:52.000 When 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.

00:12:04.000 And so she became my kind of source and way in, in an emotional sense, right?

00:12:10.000 How old was she when all was going down?

00:12:12.000 20s, you know, in her 20s.

00:12:14.000 And what year is this?

00:12:15.000 It's basically 2011 to 2013. And so, you know, is she in college?

00:12:22.000 Is she just out of college?

00:12:23.000 Just out, right?

00:12:24.000 So they're like young people knocking around Austin.

00:12:28.000 And 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.

00:12:37.000 And then little by little, the Silk Road website became his masterpiece.

00:12:41.000 And it was like everybody goes outside of the bubble except me and Silk Road.

00:12:46.000 And so eventually she felt like she was in almost like a three-way relationship where it's like her, him, and the website.

00:12:51.000 And eventually the website kind of eats him, you know?

00:12:54.000 Yeah.

00:12:55.000 Well, 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.

00:13:06.000 Was it Gawker that made the article about it and then it just exploded?

00:13:11.000 I remember that article.

00:13:12.000 I remember it very clearly.

00:13:13.000 Like when you showed the image of that article, I remember going, wow, I remember that article.

00:13:17.000 Yeah, because it like – and I think that that is true of many of these people that are the kind of disruptor innovators.

00:13:27.000 You have to – You have to get into the zeitgeist in some fundamental way.

00:13:34.000 So Gawker was the way that broadcast this to the world.

00:13:38.000 Hey man, Silk Road's out there.

00:13:39.000 The mailman is your dope dealer and he's not even hip to it.

00:13:42.000 I wonder what would have happened if he didn't contact Gawker.

00:13:45.000 I wonder how it would have grown.

00:13:48.000 Obviously it would have eventually grown and become huge, but I wonder how much longer it would have taken.

00:13:55.000 I don't know.

00:13:55.000 It's a fascinating question, but I think you always need the megaphone, right?

00:13:59.000 I mean, in a way, your show is the megaphone.

00:14:03.000 In some ways, it's the transmission of a thing to an audience and to a public.

00:14:09.000 That's how they connect to it.

00:14:11.000 Because you have to be pretty sophisticated.

00:14:15.000 And that was the thing that he was struggling with initially, is like, okay, I've got this amazing thing.

00:14:19.000 I'm using Tor, so you don't know who it is.

00:14:21.000 I'm using Bitcoin.

00:14:22.000 And nobody knew what the hell Bitcoin was at the time either, right?

00:14:25.000 It's because of this story that we all know of Bitcoin.

00:14:28.000 This is what put Bitcoin in the zeitgeist.

00:14:30.000 But basically, he had this like...

00:14:33.000 As many of these great ideas are, relatively simple one, which was Tor plus Bitcoin means encrypted transactions can't be traced.

00:14:44.000 Anybody can get anything, anytime, from anywhere, from anyone they want.

00:14:49.000 And so it unleashed it to the world, but then it was like, okay, but nobody knows about this.

00:14:55.000 How are we going to sort of broadcast it?

00:14:57.000 And the gawker piece is the thing that injects it into the zeitgeist.

00:15:01.000 But it was a thing before that, so it was reasonably successful before that, right?

00:15:07.000 Like, people did know about it in terms of, like, the weirdo internet crowd.

00:15:12.000 Yeah.

00:15:13.000 They knew about it, but he didn't think that that was enough.

00:15:15.000 Well, and he had to go, like, he went and, like, seated the chat rooms and, like, said, like, hey, man, check this out, you know?

00:15:21.000 Right, right.

00:15:22.000 Acting as if he was a user and not the mastermind to it, to, like, put bait in the water so the fish would hit it, you know?

00:15:27.000 Yeah.

00:15:28.000 Yeah, it's such a crazy story.

00:15:33.000 What is the status of things like that now?

00:15:37.000 Is there a more improved version of Silk Road now where you can do that and you don't get busted?

00:15:45.000 I'm asking for a friend.

00:15:46.000 Exactly, exactly.

00:15:48.000 The crazy thing is there were several iterations of Silk Road that happened.

00:15:52.000 So 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.

00:16:02.000 But 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.

00:16:09.000 Then the feds shut that down.

00:16:11.000 Then Silk Road 3.0 comes up.

00:16:13.000 It's kind of like, I think, the genie never goes back in the bottle.

00:16:17.000 Once the technology is out there, it's going to, in some way or another, continue to persist.

00:16:23.000 Now, when the feds had shut it down, was this when Ross was running it?

00:16:28.000 Basically, after Ross was busted, the feds went in and stamped the site that said, seized by the FBI. And then it re-emerged.

00:16:36.000 And then it re-emerged.

00:16:37.000 And the whole thing, his online avatar, nom de guerre or whatever, was Dread Pirate Roberts, taken from The Prince's Bride.

00:16:47.000 The idea being like, once I go away, there's going to be a new Dread Pirate Roberts.

00:16:51.000 Somebody else is going to pick up the...

00:16:54.000 And nobody quite knows, okay, who is it that inherited it?

00:16:59.000 And there are those people who say, hey, this wasn't Ross that ordered these hits.

00:17:03.000 You know, this was – like nobody knows who's behind the keys at the time anything has happened.

00:17:07.000 So there are those people who completely deny – you know, his family completely denies the culpability.

00:17:12.000 And who knows?

00:17:12.000 We'll never know.

00:17:13.000 That is a problem when you're dealing with corrupt cops too, right?

00:17:16.000 Like they literally could have faked him doing that.

00:17:20.000 We don't know.

00:17:21.000 Has he denied that he called hits?

00:17:23.000 We should explain to people that haven't seen the film.

00:17:26.000 Spoiler alert.

00:17:27.000 It goes off the rails for Ross, for young Ross.

00:17:30.000 And at one point in time, the guy he's working with gets busted and rats him out.

00:17:39.000 And then the cops are using that guy's account and communicating with him.

00:17:44.000 And he orders a hit on that guy.

00:17:46.000 Yeah.

00:18:05.000 I think?

00:18:21.000 We don't know, though.

00:18:22.000 Did he deny that he called those hits?

00:18:24.000 Well, 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.

00:18:36.000 And then at a certain point, he's like kind of getting cock-blocked by his superiors and whatever.

00:18:41.000 And so he says, okay, I'm going to rip this kid off instead. 0.89

00:18:44.000 If I can't bust him, I'm going to steal the money and I'm going to use it for my own purposes.

00:18:48.000 But 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. 0.55

00:18:58.000 That's all in the real story.

00:19:00.000 And as we're shooting the movie, we have access to the actual faked murder photos.

00:19:04.000 What does it look like?

00:19:05.000 Is it available online?

00:19:07.000 Can we see it?

00:19:07.000 Yeah, it's available online.

00:19:08.000 Oh, we need to see that right now.

00:19:10.000 See if you can find the...

00:19:11.000 Curtis Clark Green murder photos, fake murder photos.

00:19:15.000 What was his online name?

00:19:18.000 Chronic pain, appropriately enough. 0.59

00:19:21.000 Did he look like that guy, the fat guy with the Crocs?

00:19:23.000 He does, and I love that.

00:19:24.000 That actor is amazing.

00:19:26.000 He was in...

00:19:27.000 Eastwood put him in Richard Jewell, and he was in Spike Lee's last movie.

00:19:33.000 He's one of those guys...

00:19:34.000 Didn't he pray Richard Jewell?

00:19:35.000 Yeah, he played Richard Jewell, and he's fantastic.

00:19:38.000 He's really good.

00:19:39.000 I mean, he seemed like the quintessential internet couch monster.

00:19:43.000 Working 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?

00:20:09.000 What if we give him a ferret instead?

00:20:11.000 And I'm like, ferret, dude, let's go ferret, you know?

00:20:14.000 And 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.

00:20:24.000 He's like, what if the dude's a mumbler? 1.00

00:20:26.000 So he's kind of saying this shit out loud the whole time that he's talking and he starts talking to himself. 0.99

00:20:30.000 So once he had the ferret and made the guy a mumbler, he had like the keys to the character. 0.99

00:20:35.000 Yeah, he nailed it.

00:20:36.000 It was great.

00:20:37.000 Everything.

00:20:38.000 Down to the fanny pack.

00:20:39.000 It was beautiful.

00:20:41.000 So the dialogue between...

00:20:43.000 All the dialogue that you show on screen was actually real dialogue.

00:20:47.000 Yeah.

00:20:48.000 So in the movie, you have Ross calling for this guy's murder.

00:20:54.000 Yeah.

00:20:55.000 Did you struggle with that at all?

00:20:58.000 If Ross says he never did that and he believed...

00:21:01.000 What was his theory?

00:21:04.000 Well, I think...

00:21:06.000 Okay, so there's a couple of important points.

00:21:08.000 One is the feds never charged him with attempted murder.

00:21:12.000 Ross ended up getting sentenced to two life sentences...

00:21:17.000 Plus 40 years without the possibility of parole.

00:21:20.000 And this is a crazy fact, which is considerably harsher than what El Chapo was sentenced to, right?

00:21:27.000 Jesus Christ.

00:21:27.000 And so they really, you know, they threw the book at this guy and buried him.

00:21:33.000 Did they offer a plea?

00:21:35.000 He was offered a deal at a certain point and he turned it down.

00:21:39.000 What was the deal?

00:21:39.000 I think it was 10 years.

00:21:41.000 Jesus Christ, kid!

00:21:42.000 I know.

00:21:43.000 So this is a crazy story.

00:21:46.000 So starting out with, you had asked me if I had reached out to him.

00:21:50.000 So I reached out to him when he was locked up in MCC New York awaiting sentencing.

00:21:54.000 And then all the way through, the case was working its way through the appeals process.

00:22:02.000 And then finally, he was hoping that Trump was going to pardon him.

00:22:05.000 And there was a big kind of hullabaloo, okay, is Trump going to pardon him on his last day in office?

00:22:10.000 And he didn't.

00:22:11.000 And I was sitting there watching the news waiting to see if he would.

00:22:14.000 And I woke up the next day and I was like, man, I'm going to look it up.

00:22:19.000 And 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.

00:22:27.000 And then it said, release date, colon, life.

00:22:32.000 And 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.

00:22:40.000 And 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.

00:22:50.000 So 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.

00:22:59.000 And it's coming out into the world.

00:23:01.000 But 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.

00:23:14.000 Because I do feel like there's some kind of...

00:23:18.000 I don't know, I guess like spiritual contract between me and him.

00:23:20.000 Like when you enter into a story like this, you're in somebody else's life in a real way.

00:23:26.000 Yeah, it's almost like we do need to hear his version of it, right?

00:23:32.000 And we don't.

00:23:35.000 Especially when you're dealing with lawyers in a court case where it's...

00:23:39.000 You know, they're withholding some testimony if they think it'd be detrimental to his case or, you know, once all said and done.

00:23:47.000 I wonder why Trump didn't pardon him.

00:23:50.000 I don't know.

00:23:51.000 And 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.

00:24:03.000 But 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.

00:24:17.000 You 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.

00:24:28.000 It'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.

00:24:36.000 Like, why?

00:24:39.000 It's such a disparity.

00:24:40.000 Well, I think in some way or another it was like this changed the drug war, right?

00:24:46.000 It changed the way the drug game happened and it changed the way the drug war was fought.

00:24:51.000 Suddenly 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,

00:25:07.000 all happening online, anonymous, DHL, USPS, people are delivering it.

00:25:12.000 Nobody even knows that they're carrying it.

00:25:13.000 So it was like, it was an existential threat to the US government, to the DEA, to the drug war.

00:25:20.000 And so he got the book thrown at him.

00:25:23.000 Crazy.

00:25:24.000 So what was the motivation for offering him 10 years as a plea?

00:25:29.000 I don't know.

00:25:30.000 And I wonder, looking back on it, it's always kind of hindsight is 20-20, but he had been beating the system for a long time, right?

00:25:39.000 He was like one dude with a laptop that unleashed this thing that kind of metastasized and went over the whole world.

00:25:48.000 And he was winning for a while.

00:25:50.000 He was ahead of the feds.

00:25:52.000 He was ahead of the U.S. Attorney's Office.

00:25:54.000 He 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.

00:26:05.000 So maybe, you know, maybe he thought he'd be able to continue beating the system.

00:26:09.000 I don't know.

00:26:10.000 God, it just...

00:26:11.000 I mean, I just...

00:26:14.000 He'd be out.

00:26:15.000 He'd be out.

00:26:16.000 He'd be out now.

00:26:17.000 Full ten years later.

00:26:19.000 Well, and the crazy thing, you know...

00:26:20.000 He tweeted this two hours ago.

00:26:21.000 Kind of convenient timing.

00:26:23.000 I put Silk Road on the tour network about ten years ago.

00:26:27.000 I've been thinking about what was going through the mind of my 26-year-old self back then in 2011. So much has changed.

00:26:35.000 If only I could turn back time.

00:26:37.000 Wow.

00:26:37.000 So he's got a Twitter account?

00:26:39.000 He tweets a lot recently about meditation.

00:26:42.000 How does he have a Twitter account?

00:26:43.000 He might not be running and he could be sending messages to someone, but it seems like he's running.

00:26:46.000 Well, 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. 0.99

00:27:02.000 Fuck. 0.98

00:27:03.000 But it's heavy, right? 1.00

00:27:04.000 Yeah, it's heavy, but I wish I could know whether or not he actually called for murder.

00:27:11.000 That's the difference.

00:27:13.000 Therein lies the difference, right?

00:27:14.000 Well, let me argue that point with you, because at a certain point...

00:27:19.000 You know, you can make the argument, this is entrapment.

00:27:21.000 This is somebody saying, hey, this guy's ripping you off.

00:27:24.000 All of it was a hustle.

00:27:25.000 Like what the feds were doing was a hustle.

00:27:28.000 And so it's again putting bait in the water.

00:27:30.000 Hey, this guy's ripping you off. 1.00

00:27:31.000 Hey, do you want to kill him? 1.00

00:27:33.000 And sort of encouraging him and entrapping him to do so. 0.99

00:27:37.000 Eventually he says yes, you know, or arguably he says yes, right?

00:27:42.000 If it's him, he says yes.

00:27:43.000 If it wasn't him and somebody else is running it, who knows?

00:27:46.000 But like, And this is the way the feds often prosecute cases, right?

00:27:51.000 It's like you're putting bait in the water, encouraging the person to do it.

00:27:54.000 Then his intention, arguably, is, yes, I want to do it.

00:27:59.000 But at the same time, the murder wasn't real.

00:28:02.000 The whole thing was a hustle.

00:28:03.000 Yeah, but if he did call for the murder and he thought it was real, then he called for a second murder.

00:28:10.000 I mean, he's literally calling for hits, if it's real.

00:28:14.000 If it's real.

00:28:15.000 If it's real.

00:28:16.000 If he really did.

00:28:17.000 The problem is, there's two problems.

00:28:21.000 Legitimately, 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.

00:28:39.000 It should taint the eyes of the judge.

00:28:41.000 It should taint their case.

00:28:44.000 It should weaken their case.

00:28:46.000 But they're not going to do that.

00:28:47.000 And none of that was disclosed at his trial.

00:28:50.000 All of that was deliberately concealed so that they could, you know, hammer him in the prosecution.

00:28:55.000 And look, I'm a strong, like, law enforcement guy, right?

00:28:57.000 Like, in the sense of, you know, I have made a bunch of documentaries that are about cops.

00:29:02.000 Some of them are corrupt cops, like Michael Dowd.

00:29:05.000 Some of them are...

00:29:06.000 Righteous 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.

00:29:19.000 And I'm a believer in the...

00:29:24.000 You know, the justice system, we need it to work.

00:29:27.000 Yeah, as am I. I'm just...

00:29:29.000 Cops are just like everybody else.

00:29:31.000 There's good ones and there's bad ones.

00:29:33.000 And unfortunately, with cops, there's a lot of bad ones.

00:29:36.000 And it's terrible for the good ones.

00:29:38.000 When you see a story like this, though, and you know that the police officers that were involved were corrupt, and one of them...

00:29:46.000 Did one of them go to jail or did two of them go to jail?

00:29:48.000 Both of them.

00:29:48.000 Two of them went to jail.

00:29:50.000 I mean, that should be grounds for a retrial.

00:29:54.000 It's now gone all the way through the system, and the only way he gets out is clemency or a pardon by somebody.

00:30:02.000 Otherwise, that kid's spending the rest of his life...

00:30:05.000 And 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?

00:30:18.000 And she said, I'm not doing too good, man.

00:30:20.000 My kid's gonna die in prison.

00:30:21.000 That was the opening words of the conversation.

00:30:24.000 And I just said, hey, if the tables were...

00:30:29.000 She's like, why are you calling me?

00:30:30.000 And I said, because if the tables were turned, I'd want somebody to call my mom too.

00:30:38.000 Imagine.

00:30:40.000 Jesus Christ.

00:30:44.000 It just seems that if the cops were corrupt and if they were lying and if they were stealing money, it should have tainted the whole case.

00:30:51.000 It should be grounds for some sort of a retrial.

00:30:54.000 It should be grounds for a dismissal.

00:30:56.000 It should be grounds for a re-examination of the case.

00:31:00.000 Well, 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?

00:31:10.000 Because I think, and to me, that's what makes all of these stories interesting, stories like this interesting, is it's not clear-cut.

00:31:21.000 And it's not, you know, good guy, bad guy.

00:31:24.000 You've got – it's the gray area in between.

00:31:26.000 To me, as a filmmaker, what is interesting is somebody that isn't wholly good and isn't – or isn't wholly a gangster.

00:31:34.000 It's somebody that's in between and, like, the forces of light are warring with the forces of darkness inside them, you know?

00:31:40.000 You 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.

00:31:52.000 The whole thing was very believable.

00:31:56.000 But how much of that was based on real accounts of what was going down or how much of that was fiction?

00:32:05.000 I took almost everything.

00:32:06.000 There was a lot more reporting about Ross, right?

00:32:08.000 So there was a lot in the public record.

00:32:10.000 We knew his childhood.

00:32:11.000 He grew up in Austin.

00:32:12.000 He was a Boy Scout.

00:32:13.000 He was an Eagle Scout.

00:32:16.000 And he ends up getting a degree in physics.

00:32:19.000 He goes to UTD. He...

00:32:22.000 And so there was a lot of information about him and there was information in his own words.

00:32:27.000 So anywhere where I had that information, it was like let's hew closely to that.

00:32:32.000 And 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,

00:32:47.000 right?

00:32:48.000 If you want to pop a pill, snort a line, do whatever, like you have the God-given right to do so.

00:32:53.000 How much of that was legitimate and how much of it was a mask that he's just wearing for the site, for the public to sell it?

00:33:01.000 And she said, this is exactly who this guy was.

00:33:04.000 At his most basic core level was a believer in our individual rights and freedoms.

00:33:10.000 And he'd sit there and argue with people in bars and say, hey, this is our constitutional right.

00:33:16.000 And so once I had that kind of piece of the character and I knew, okay, That's what animates this guy in a basic sense.

00:33:25.000 Then it gave me something to kind of hook onto.

00:33:27.000 And there's people that don't like the politics, that will argue against that.

00:33:31.000 And at the end of the day, my feeling is it's not my job to pass a moral judgment.

00:33:37.000 Even in the same way with Michael Dowd and the 7-5, it's not my job to tell you, hey, this is a good guy, this is a bad guy.

00:33:44.000 It's, here's the story, here's the characters, here's the world.

00:33:47.000 Make up your own mind.

00:33:48.000 Hopefully people are arguing about it one way or another.

00:33:52.000 Yeah, well, I'm sure they will.

00:33:54.000 I mean, you definitely gave a lot of food for thought.

00:33:57.000 It's such a complicated story.

00:33:59.000 It really is.

00:34:00.000 Because, you know, you see the guy entering into it with these intentions that are...

00:34:07.000 You know, debatably very...

00:34:09.000 They're very American.

00:34:12.000 The idea of freedom and the ability to do whatever...

00:34:15.000 It's core stuff.

00:34:15.000 Yeah, it really is.

00:34:16.000 And then along the line, everything just goes so sour.

00:34:20.000 Well, and it happens so quickly.

00:34:22.000 You 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?

00:34:30.000 This guy's got an entire lifetime's worth of drama that happens to him in 18 months' time.

00:34:36.000 How much money did he make?

00:34:37.000 Well, 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.

00:34:45.000 It was tens of millions at the time.

00:34:47.000 God.

00:34:51.000 And what happened with all that Bitcoin?

00:34:54.000 It got confiscated and seized by the federal government.

00:34:56.000 So the federal government owns it now?

00:34:57.000 Federal 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.

00:35:10.000 U.S. seizes one billion in Bitcoin linked to Silk Road site.

00:35:15.000 The DOJ is suing for formal forfeiture of funds after tracking down the person holding them.

00:35:23.000 And this is, how long ago was this story?

00:35:25.000 Three months.

00:35:26.000 November 6th.

00:35:28.000 Wow.

00:35:29.000 Isn't that funny?

00:35:29.000 Look at that little thing.

00:35:30.000 This article is more than three months old.

00:35:32.000 That's how crazy the time is today.

00:35:35.000 Yeah.

00:35:35.000 Three months old.

00:35:36.000 Bro, that's a fucking million years ago. 0.99

00:35:39.000 Three months? 0.99

00:35:39.000 Well, time got particularly weird on us over the past year in the pandemic, too. 0.99

00:35:43.000 Oh, yeah.

00:35:44.000 But that particularly is strange, that they have that little thing, to let you know, this is not new.

00:35:50.000 Waving the flag.

00:35:51.000 Yeah.

00:35:52.000 According to the information, Ross Ulbricht, now GL founder of Silk World, became aware of individual ex's online identity and threatened...

00:35:59.000 Individual X for return of the cryptocurrency to Ulbricht.

00:36:04.000 Individual X did not return the cryptocurrency but kept it and did not spend it.

00:36:08.000 The complaint said, the complaint officially titled United States versus approximately 69,370 Bitcoin. 0.99

00:36:20.000 Holy shit! 1.00

00:36:22.000 Holy shit! 1.00

00:36:24.000 That's so much money! 1.00

00:36:26.000 Serious chunk of money.

00:36:26.000 Requires the DOJ to prove in court that the seized cryptocurrency is subject to forfeiture, meaning it is the proceeds of a criminal act.

00:36:36.000 Wow.

00:36:38.000 Hmm.

00:36:38.000 What would they do with that money?

00:36:40.000 Where does that go?

00:36:41.000 I think it goes into further investigations.

00:36:46.000 Nancy Pelosi's hair fund.

00:36:48.000 Exactly.

00:36:48.000 There it goes.

00:36:51.000 These motherfuckers. 1.00

00:36:53.000 Where's that money go? 1.00

00:36:54.000 Well, I mean, I think some of them it goes into, like, reinvestigations.

00:36:58.000 And the way in the, like, Miami Vice days, when you, like, seize the Ferrari, then it becomes, like, the undercover, like, Ferrari, you know?

00:37:03.000 $3.5 billion today.

00:37:05.000 Oh! 0.60

00:37:07.000 So, a billion three months ago and $3.5 billion today.

00:37:11.000 Hey, hang on to it for a little bit.

00:37:12.000 See what happens. 1.00

00:37:13.000 Fucking Christ. 1.00

00:37:15.000 That's nuts. 1.00

00:37:17.000 Um...

00:37:19.000 That is really nuts.

00:37:20.000 That's so much money.

00:37:22.000 So much money.

00:37:27.000 Wow.

00:37:29.000 So they take it all from him.

00:37:32.000 He's got a public defender, I'm sure, right?

00:37:34.000 No, he's got his attorneys that are representing him.

00:37:39.000 Does his family mortgage their house or something like that?

00:37:41.000 Presumably, right?

00:37:42.000 It's got to be astronomically expensive.

00:37:47.000 It's a sad story, man.

00:37:49.000 Did you struggle with whether or not to portray him as being the guy who called for the hits since he said he never did it?

00:37:59.000 I struggle with...

00:38:00.000 For me, every single one of these true stories or based on a true story has a big moral question to it.

00:38:10.000 When I'm making The Night Stalker for Netflix...

00:38:16.000 The 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.

00:38:25.000 And so it becomes this question of, okay, how much of that stuff do you show the world?

00:38:32.000 Or how much of it do you conceal because you want it to be a compelling show that people are able to watch?

00:38:38.000 And so every single one of them has a big...

00:38:41.000 Moral question where you're constantly kind of struggling with it.

00:38:44.000 With 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.

00:38:54.000 But at the same time, you know, a reasonable mind would assume, okay, you're the guy that's got the keys to the kingdom.

00:39:00.000 You're broadcasting everything else.

00:39:02.000 Presumably it is you that makes this decision.

00:39:05.000 But it's, you know, that's the thing with these crime stories and these true stories is...

00:39:11.000 It constantly requires me to make moral judgments about what to include and what not to include.

00:39:17.000 Yeah, 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.

00:39:27.000 My 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.

00:39:41.000 What would be the method they could do that?

00:39:43.000 Like if it wasn't him that did it.

00:39:46.000 See, he's using an encrypted website.

00:39:49.000 He's doing it through an encrypted browser.

00:39:52.000 How would it be possible for someone else to...

00:39:56.000 Well, say he's got employees that are working with...

00:39:58.000 I 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.

00:40:06.000 I mean, I think most reasonable minds would conclude that was the decision, and that was the intent.

00:40:13.000 But at the same time, you can't prove it, because that's the whole thing with the sort of anonymous internet, no accountability.

00:40:20.000 Who knows, man?

00:40:21.000 Yeah.

00:40:22.000 You know?

00:40:22.000 So yeah, it's a big...

00:40:24.000 So it would have to be an employee.

00:40:26.000 It would have to be someone on site.

00:40:29.000 It would have to be someone who had access to his laptop.

00:40:31.000 Did 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?

00:40:46.000 Yeah.

00:40:46.000 Basically, 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.

00:41:01.000 So eventually the feds get access to the server farm in Iceland and they're able to...

00:41:06.000 The simplified version of this is they open it up and they're looking at it in real time from the inside.

00:41:12.000 So it's as if they're watching from his laptop but in another location.

00:41:16.000 How did they do that?

00:41:18.000 Because he had made a coding error very early on because he taught himself all this.

00:41:24.000 Like this guy wasn't a trained...

00:41:27.000 You know, coder.

00:41:28.000 He taught himself all of this, like, in his own time, looking stuff up on, you know, YouTube and whatever, the dark web and wherever else.

00:41:34.000 And so he had made an early coding error and had left his email address somewhere, rossulbricht at gmail.com.

00:41:42.000 Oh, no!

00:41:43.000 And that one little breadcrumb very early on led to the IP address that he ends up getting busted for.

00:41:49.000 Because even though you make those mistakes and you go back and cover it up, it's...

00:41:53.000 It's still out there.

00:41:54.000 And, like, forensically, as they sort of recover and rebuild it, they catch that mistake.

00:41:59.000 And that's what ends up bringing him down in the end.

00:42:00.000 Oh, my goodness.

00:42:02.000 I finally found that photo.

00:42:03.000 Yeah?

00:42:03.000 It took forever.

00:42:04.000 But that's it, I guess.

00:42:06.000 So that's the photo of...

00:42:08.000 That's the fake murder, right?

00:42:10.000 Yeah, that guy looks so close to the guy that you guys...

00:42:13.000 They had to play.

00:42:14.000 So there's the fake murder with him.

00:42:16.000 There's the chihuahua.

00:42:17.000 The soup coming out of his mouth.

00:42:19.000 Yeah.

00:42:20.000 Yeah.

00:42:21.000 And then that's him.

00:42:22.000 That's one of the real DEA guys there at the bottom there.

00:42:26.000 All hail Nob, you see that picture.

00:42:28.000 So that guy with the hat on in the lower left?

00:42:31.000 Yeah, that's one of the two DEA guys, exactly.

00:42:34.000 The actor you got portrayed him so well.

00:42:40.000 Wow.

00:42:41.000 Well, that's the thing with those undercover guys, right?

00:42:43.000 Where's that guy now?

00:42:44.000 He's out and he's actually a huge advocate of Ross, you know, wanting to get him...

00:42:51.000 Even though Ross wanted him dead?

00:42:52.000 Even though Ross wanted him dead, he's now sort of a big supporter of him and wants him granted clemency or pardon.

00:42:58.000 Look at this.

00:42:59.000 Here I am at the door of the hotel room suite where the agents faked my death.

00:43:06.000 It's crazy the culture like this, right?

00:43:08.000 Which is like people wanting to relive their thing.

00:43:11.000 I 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? 0.99

00:43:22.000 And so I'm out there on these crab fishing boats and I'm thinking like, who's going to watch this shit? 0.95

00:43:26.000 You know, sort of crabs pulled out of the ocean. 0.99

00:43:28.000 Who cares?

00:43:29.000 And 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.

00:43:36.000 And 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.

00:43:44.000 And eventually... 0.98

00:43:45.000 He'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?

00:43:53.000 And the alarms start going off, and I go running out there in the middle of the night to see what the deal is.

00:43:58.000 And my cameraman, who's with me at the time, is like, dude, we've got to help these guys.

00:44:01.000 We've got to rescue that kid.

00:44:02.000 So he drops his camera, and he goes running out to help the other. 0.99

00:44:06.000 And I'm kind of like, dude, my job is to film this shit. 0.98

00:44:10.000 And 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? 0.97

00:44:20.000 And 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.

00:44:31.000 And 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?

00:44:36.000 And the kid slaps me, and he goes, it's all right, man.

00:44:39.000 Just film it.

00:44:40.000 And I'm thinking, like, what world do we live in?

00:44:43.000 It's insane, right?

00:44:45.000 And then that's the moment that ends up being like, okay, now we've got a TV show.

00:44:50.000 Let's turn it into Deadliest Catch.

00:44:52.000 But it's so crazy that people are like that.

00:44:55.000 Yeah, 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.

00:45:05.000 Yeah.

00:45:06.000 And that's kind of how we process these stories.

00:45:08.000 It'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?

00:45:16.000 And 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.

00:45:30.000 It's kind of this is the way we culturally process this stuff.

00:45:33.000 Do you ever do a demographic breakdown of who watched, like does Netflix have a demographic breakdown of who watches those crime shows?

00:45:42.000 Because it's mostly women, isn't it? 1.00

00:45:44.000 Anecdotally, that's what everybody says.

00:45:45.000 There was a funny bit on Saturday Night Live the other night that was like, you know, what do ladies do when they're home alone? 0.52

00:45:51.000 You know, wait, wait, wait, you know, then they like throw on the murder shows.

00:45:54.000 Yeah.

00:45:54.000 Yeah, why is that?

00:45:55.000 I don't know.

00:45:55.000 It's a weird thing.

00:45:56.000 And when we were making Night Stalker, we would get to the point in the interview where it's finally...

00:46:03.000 I would ask everybody, like, okay, so for some reason or another, this guy becomes like the Jim Morrison of serial killers.

00:46:10.000 Because when he's paraded through the courtroom, all of a sudden he's got these groupies and fans.

00:46:17.000 And they're sending him...

00:46:18.000 And I had gotten access to...

00:46:20.000 All 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.

00:46:26.000 And 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?

00:46:38.000 And it's always like kind of an – particularly with the women who are being interviewed, but everybody.

00:46:44.000 And nobody quite has an answer.

00:46:46.000 Is it the bad boy thing?

00:46:48.000 Is it the celebrity thing?

00:46:49.000 But 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.

00:46:59.000 But yet it exists.

00:47:00.000 This guy has like groupies and fans.

00:47:02.000 And it's very common for murderers to get, especially murderers of women, to get all these propositions from women.

00:47:10.000 Yeah.

00:47:11.000 Very strange.

00:47:12.000 Super strange.

00:47:13.000 And, you know, I read something about that.

00:47:16.000 No, you know, Whitney Cummings was actually telling me about this.

00:47:18.000 She said, she read that it was something that had to do with, there was like an evolutionary benefit to getting close to killers.

00:47:28.000 Yeah.

00:47:28.000 I think this is theoretical.

00:47:31.000 In what regard?

00:47:31.000 That the idea of it's very hard to kill someone.

00:47:35.000 Once you have human personal contact?

00:47:38.000 Is that what you're saying?

00:47:39.000 No, no, no.

00:47:39.000 The act of killing someone, that it's difficult to do, and that it requires someone to be capable of taking another person's life.

00:47:52.000 And 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,

00:48:08.000 this desire to be close to killers because you were more likely to survive because there were so many killers.

00:48:13.000 Like if you went back in time, you know, a few thousand years ago, murder must have been like really common.

00:48:21.000 When people were sword fighting all the time.

00:48:23.000 Dude, there's a crazy book on this.

00:48:25.000 Steven Pinker wrote this book called The Better Angels of Our Nature.

00:48:29.000 And what he does is he tracks over time the nature of violence in humanity.

00:48:35.000 And he's like, okay, once upon a time, there's Cain and Abel, and Cain kills Abel.

00:48:40.000 The murder rate is like 50%.

00:48:42.000 So actually, we've been trending up ever since then.

00:48:46.000 And it literally looks at how...

00:48:48.000 Over time, the incidence of violence has actually, even though it doesn't seem like that, dramatically decreased in humanity.

00:48:55.000 It does seem like that.

00:48:56.000 It does seem like that.

00:48:58.000 I think we just focus on the instances of violence because we have mass media.

00:49:03.000 Right.

00:49:04.000 And it's fascinating.

00:49:05.000 Yeah.

00:49:05.000 And if it bleeds, it leads.

00:49:07.000 But why is that?

00:49:09.000 That's something that making...

00:49:11.000 The Night Stalker or even making Silk Road, it's like, why are we fascinated by the underworld?

00:49:18.000 You know, the sort of like the worst things that people do to each other.

00:49:22.000 Like, what is it?

00:49:23.000 You know, and you're participating in it.

00:49:25.000 I'm participating in it.

00:49:26.000 Anytime we're watching it, making it or whatever.

00:49:29.000 You know, we are all in some way complicit in that.

00:49:32.000 Well, there's the lure of the abyss too, right?

00:49:35.000 Why is that?

00:49:36.000 Why do people look over the edge of a building and think about jumping?

00:49:39.000 You know, like there's something about...

00:49:41.000 We want to get up to the edge in some way or another, you know?

00:49:45.000 There'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?

00:49:53.000 Like, why is it okay for a movie to depict a hundred people dying, just murdered with bullets and just stabbed, and that's fine.

00:50:03.000 Like John Wick, perfect example.

00:50:06.000 How many people does he kill?

00:50:08.000 And he's the hero. 1.00

00:50:09.000 He's killing everybody. 1.00

00:50:10.000 But if you fuck someone and you actually saw it, you'd be like, this movie's a piece of shit. 1.00

00:50:15.000 This is terrible. 1.00

00:50:17.000 I can't believe you showed me penetration. 0.93

00:50:20.000 That's strange.

00:50:20.000 It's super strange.

00:50:22.000 We're totally fine with violence.

00:50:25.000 Which is the worst thing that could happen.

00:50:27.000 But if we actually saw real sex in a movie like that, we would be outraged.

00:50:32.000 Yeah.

00:50:33.000 It's whatever those moral lines are.

00:50:35.000 You know, violence is inherently cinematic.

00:50:37.000 Like if you look back like the earliest days of like the movies, like it's one of the most cinematic things there is.

00:50:43.000 And so I think there was an interview with David Cronenberg or something.

00:50:46.000 They're like, what is it with like sex and violence in the movies?

00:50:49.000 He's like, it's bacon and eggs, man.

00:50:50.000 They go together.

00:50:51.000 I wonder if there's going to be a time where CGI pornography in a film is acceptable.

00:50:59.000 Or VR, like you put on the headset.

00:51:01.000 Well, they have that, but what I'm saying is pornography in an action movie, but you know it's not really the people having sex.

00:51:08.000 One of the reasons why we like an action movie like John Wick is we know nobody died, so you don't feel bad. 0.97

00:51:15.000 But if they actually did fuck, you're like, hey, this is crazy. 0.97

00:51:18.000 These are two people actually having sex. 0.99

00:51:20.000 You hit the tripwire.

00:51:21.000 But 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,

00:51:39.000 right? 0.80

00:51:39.000 If 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. 0.80

00:51:50.000 Yeah. 0.77

00:51:57.000 We're good to go.

00:52:16.000 Well, 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.

00:52:29.000 Or, 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.

00:52:36.000 You know, oftentimes what the mind can do.

00:52:38.000 Yeah, we used to think that about violence, too, though.

00:52:41.000 But now that's not the case. 0.99

00:52:43.000 Now if you watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that is a fucking crazy violent movie. 0.99

00:52:49.000 Like, crazy violent. 1.00

00:52:52.000 And we're okay with it.

00:52:53.000 We're good with that.

00:52:55.000 And if that movie existed...

00:52:57.000 If 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.

00:53:03.000 The reason why we...

00:53:05.000 Is because we're not indulging in the violence ourselves.

00:53:08.000 Because we are trending away from the murder rate of 50%.

00:53:14.000 It's our way of vicariously...

00:53:17.000 Taking the ride without having to indulge it.

00:53:20.000 That's the argument for violent video games.

00:53:23.000 The 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.

00:53:35.000 But the argument for video games is that you get that out.

00:53:39.000 You get it out of your system.

00:53:41.000 There's a lot of weird psychology when it comes to things that you're seeing in a film or in a game or any sort of media depiction.

00:53:50.000 What's entertainment and what isn't, and why are we doing it and consuming it?

00:53:54.000 And why are we upset at some things that people like and not upset about other things that people like?

00:54:02.000 We're upset at some versions.

00:54:04.000 But those also change over time.

00:54:06.000 It's like you said, you have Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the 1970s, that movie's rated X. The meter changes.

00:54:15.000 It does, too.

00:54:16.000 Try listening to N.W.A. Listen to that now, and you're like, Jesus Christ.

00:54:22.000 What are they saying?

00:54:23.000 This is crazy. 1.00

00:54:24.000 They're talking about killing prostitutes. 1.00

00:54:26.000 That it's a positive thing. 0.98

00:54:30.000 If you listen to that and imagine that being in a movie and that those guys are the heroes, you'd be like, what?

00:54:38.000 What is this?

00:54:41.000 But is that people getting it out of their system?

00:54:43.000 I don't know.

00:54:44.000 It's a fascinating question.

00:54:45.000 It is a fascinating question.

00:54:46.000 I don't know there's any answer to it.

00:54:47.000 Well, it's fantasy.

00:54:49.000 It's fiction.

00:54:50.000 And that's always been the argument for gangster rap.

00:54:52.000 It's always been the argument for gangster movies, violent movies, criminal movies.

00:54:57.000 Which is also kind of a cornerstone to America, right?

00:55:01.000 Yeah.

00:55:01.000 The American outlaw, that's a cornerstone of the culture, from Billy the Kid through The Godfather and Goodfellas and whatever.

00:55:08.000 Sure.

00:55:08.000 That's how we...

00:55:09.000 That is an American phenomenon.

00:55:11.000 And so all of this is in keeping with, you know, it's a cornerstone of the country in some way or another.

00:55:19.000 It is.

00:55:19.000 And 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,

00:55:35.000 stopping 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. 0.82

00:55:44.000 Well, 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.

00:55:51.000 And 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...

00:55:57.000 My operation is safer than like the old school drug dealers because there actually is some amount of accountability because it's all publicly posted.

00:56:05.000 It's Amazon.

00:56:05.000 It's eBay.

00:56:06.000 There's also a great misunderstanding and a great amount of ignorance when it comes to drugs themselves.

00:56:13.000 There's a guy named Dr. Carl Hart who was recently on my podcast, has been on in the past, who wrote a book called Drugs for Grown Ups.

00:56:22.000 Yeah, I think I saw it on the way in, yeah.

00:56:24.000 Yeah, and essentially he says, crack is coke. 0.99

00:56:28.000 It's the same goddamn thing. 0.99

00:56:29.000 It's the same effects. 1.00

00:56:31.000 He's like, I've had meth.

00:56:32.000 He's like, it's just an amphetamine.

00:56:34.000 He's like, the idea we put these things in our mind, like these are horrific things.

00:56:39.000 Here's the line, right.

00:56:39.000 He's like, you know, he's like, ketamine is PCP. It's the same thing.

00:56:44.000 And he's a chemist.

00:56:46.000 I mean, he's a PhD.

00:56:47.000 He's a guy who really understands this.

00:56:49.000 Right, this is science.

00:56:49.000 Yeah, he's a clinical researcher.

00:56:51.000 And became a guy who started using these drugs after he became a clinical researcher.

00:56:57.000 He was basically a teetotaler until he was in his 30s.

00:57:00.000 And 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,

00:57:17.000 and a lot of it is based on racist prosecution policies. 0.91

00:57:22.000 Because if you have crack versus coke, the difference in prosecution is fucking astronomical. 0.98

00:57:29.000 Right. 0.99

00:57:29.000 It's really crazy. 0.99

00:57:30.000 Yeah, and one's the ghetto street drug, and one's the Wall Street drug. 0.73

00:57:35.000 Exactly.

00:57:35.000 And he said, but the effect is the same.

00:57:39.000 It's the same drug.

00:57:43.000 Well, 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.

00:57:58.000 Well, 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.

00:58:04.000 Like, 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.

00:58:13.000 And then it's like, and then they're like, maybe give me some edibles.

00:58:16.000 You know what I mean?

00:58:17.000 Like, it's a crazy, these cultural shifts are so radical.

00:58:20.000 In our time.

00:58:21.000 It'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?

00:58:33.000 And these guys that are the cops, they're not bad people either. 0.98

00:58:37.000 That's what's fucked. 0.99

00:58:38.000 It's like the culture – Is bad. 0.99

00:58:42.000 Like, the culture of law enforcement in terms of, like, prosecuting people for marijuana.

00:58:46.000 It's just...

00:58:46.000 It's bad.

00:58:47.000 It's a bad setup.

00:58:48.000 And they get pushed into this box because this is what their job is.

00:58:53.000 Like, if you're working at Dairy Queen, your job is to make the ice cream, go in a circle, and you hand it to people. 0.99

00:58:58.000 That's your fucking job, right? 0.99

00:59:00.000 You might hate swirly ice cream, but that's your job. 1.00

00:59:03.000 If you're a cop and they tell you you're supposed to bust people for pot, that's your job.

00:59:08.000 And...

00:59:09.000 When things change, these guys have this totally mixed signal. 0.99

00:59:12.000 Some cops are like, look, it's stupid to bust people for pot. 0.97

00:59:15.000 But other cops, they had it in their head. 1.00

00:59:17.000 No, pot is fucking... 1.00

00:59:19.000 I bust people when they have pot. 1.00

00:59:21.000 That's what I do.

00:59:22.000 It's the job.

00:59:23.000 Yeah, that's the job.

00:59:24.000 That's how I get a collar.

00:59:26.000 That's what I do.

00:59:27.000 There was a guy that I used to do jujitsu with who was a cop who knew I was a pothead.

00:59:31.000 And it was hilarious because I had a medical prescription for pot.

00:59:37.000 And he used to just joke around about it. 0.99

00:59:40.000 I'll still fucking bust people for pot. 1.00

00:59:42.000 I go, why? 0.99

00:59:43.000 His friend Mark.

00:59:44.000 Shout out to Mark.

00:59:45.000 He's still out there.

00:59:47.000 He'd be like... 1.00

00:59:48.000 He goes, it's fucking what I do, man. 1.00

00:59:51.000 I bust people for pot. 1.00

00:59:52.000 We were all joking around about it.

00:59:53.000 I'm like, what's wrong with you, man?

00:59:55.000 Why are you busting people for pot?

00:59:56.000 Think about all these people out there that are robbing people and lighting houses on fire and stealing cars. 0.99

01:00:01.000 Why the fuck are you busting people for pot? 0.99

01:00:03.000 But in his mind... 1.00

01:00:04.000 That's the job.

01:00:06.000 He also risked his life doing that.

01:00:09.000 When it started out, that was the gig, right?

01:00:11.000 When 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.

01:00:22.000 And that's like Jason Clarke's character in Silk Road, right?

01:00:26.000 They call these guys Jurassic Narcs.

01:00:28.000 Once upon a time, they were door kickers.

01:00:30.000 The job was like, go in there, get it done.

01:00:32.000 And they used to say, you know, what kind of piece?

01:00:34.000 Are you carrying a SIG or what are you carrying?

01:00:36.000 And all of a sudden, the world changes and it's like, well, how much RAM is on your laptop?

01:00:40.000 And like these guys are like Peckinpah characters.

01:00:42.000 They're out of step with the world, man.

01:00:44.000 You know, like the game has changed and all they know is living by what they learned at the barrel of a gun.

01:00:50.000 And suddenly the like culture doesn't care anymore.

01:00:52.000 It's like, no, the drug game is online now. 0.99

01:00:55.000 And like knowing how to work informants or rouse somebody, it's like that shit's irrelevant. 0.93

01:00:59.000 You did a great job of showing that conflict in the film too when the two guys were outside smoking a cigarette talking about that. 0.82

01:01:06.000 It'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.

01:01:19.000 When something like Silk Road comes along...

01:01:22.000 And I never bought anything off of Silk Road.

01:01:25.000 I don't even think I know anybody who bought anything off Silk Road.

01:01:28.000 But I remember we were all watching it very carefully.

01:01:31.000 It changed the culture.

01:01:32.000 It changed the world, you know?

01:01:33.000 It was also, you know, people would always ask you, man, how do I get mushrooms? 0.94

01:01:38.000 Like, ah, you gotta fucking know somebody. 0.70

01:01:40.000 And then someone would be like, or you go to Silk Road. 0.99

01:01:43.000 Right.

01:01:43.000 And you're like, oh.

01:01:45.000 How's that work?

01:01:46.000 It seems dangerous.

01:01:46.000 Like, what do you do?

01:01:48.000 How do you do that?

01:01:49.000 Do you know anybody who went on Silk Road and bought anything?

01:01:51.000 I don't think so.

01:01:51.000 I was trying to think.

01:01:52.000 I don't know.

01:01:54.000 Maybe?

01:01:55.000 Yeah, maybe I forgot somebody, but no one close to me.

01:02:01.000 But it's a moment I won't forget.

01:02:05.000 I believe I was aware of it before the Gawker article, but I remember reading the Gawker article going, Whoa!

01:02:11.000 This is crazy.

01:02:12.000 And then it blows up.

01:02:14.000 And 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...

01:02:24.000 And to me, like, this story is a Frankenstein story, right?

01:02:27.000 In the sense of this guy, this is his masterpiece.

01:02:30.000 He'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.

01:02:39.000 When 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? 0.79

01:02:45.000 That's all true.

01:02:46.000 In fact, I had to call the dad to use the clip, right?

01:02:53.000 Because there's all sorts of documentary footage scattered in there because I wanted it to be about the real stuff.

01:03:01.000 And 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.

01:03:11.000 And 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.

01:03:22.000 I'd be asking for his head, doesn't it?

01:03:24.000 And I'm deeply empathetic to that.

01:03:26.000 At the same time...

01:03:27.000 You know, it's like the question you asked.

01:03:29.000 Okay, well, you know, is that fair?

01:03:33.000 And like, does this kid deserve another shot?

01:03:35.000 I don't know.

01:03:36.000 It's like, I don't have the answer to it.

01:03:38.000 I guess I have the question.

01:03:39.000 I don't have the answer.

01:03:40.000 It is.

01:03:42.000 Well, the thing is, you can't make someone responsible for someone doing acid and jumping off a roof.

01:03:49.000 If you are the type of person that wants to do acid, it's your responsibility to...

01:03:57.000 It's like, you can't say that you're responsible for someone who kills himself because you sold them a razor blade.

01:04:05.000 You know, you didn't sell them a razor blade so they could kill themselves. 0.65

01:04:08.000 You sold them a razor blade so you could shave your face. 0.70

01:04:10.000 That's what a razor blade's for.

01:04:12.000 You can use a razor blade to cut your wrists, but are you responsible for someone cutting their wrists with a razor blade?

01:04:17.000 You're not, right?

01:04:18.000 Gillette's not responsible if someone buys a razor and slices their wrist.

01:04:22.000 Well, and this is even one step more than that in the sense of it's not Ross sitting there with like a pile of acid.

01:04:27.000 All he's doing is like the guy that wants to sell the acid, the guy that wants to buy it.

01:04:31.000 I'm just creating the forum for everybody to do that.

01:04:34.000 Yeah, and it's a very unusual situation when someone takes acid and jumps off a roof.

01:04:39.000 You know, it's super unfortunate.

01:04:41.000 It's terrible.

01:04:42.000 It's a horrible tragedy, but it's not what's intended.

01:04:45.000 What's intended is for you to have a self-exploratory, psychological...

01:04:50.000 Inner voyage.

01:04:51.000 Yeah.

01:04:52.000 You're supposed to do a deep dive into this psychedelic trip that's created by LSD. That's what you're supposed to do.

01:05:00.000 And for this kid to take it and jump off a roof, it's horrible.

01:05:04.000 But...

01:05:05.000 You know, I don't think he's responsible for that.

01:05:07.000 I don't think anybody's responsible for that.

01:05:09.000 But does it still weigh on your conscience?

01:05:11.000 You know what I mean?

01:05:12.000 I think it probably...

01:05:13.000 It should.

01:05:13.000 It would, you know?

01:05:15.000 Yeah, it should.

01:05:16.000 Of course.

01:05:16.000 It should.

01:05:17.000 If you're a guy who created that platform.

01:05:20.000 But if you're dealing with how many people were using Silk Road at the time...

01:05:24.000 I don't know what the total users are, but a lot.

01:05:27.000 I mean, if you look at the transactions and the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, a ton of people.

01:05:32.000 Yeah, so let's say a million people.

01:05:34.000 Let's say millions.

01:05:35.000 Who knows?

01:05:36.000 I 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.

01:05:45.000 I'm sure the people who make these medications feel horrible about it.

01:05:50.000 That these reactions happen to people and they die because of their otherwise beneficial drugs.

01:05:59.000 What do you do?

01:06:00.000 Do you arrest them?

01:06:01.000 Do you close everything down because someone has a weird biology that interacts strangely with some medication?

01:06:08.000 You don't.

01:06:09.000 What do you do if someone takes acid and jumps off a roof?

01:06:13.000 It's complicated, right?

01:06:15.000 It's one of those uniquely complicated human issues that deals with personal freedom.

01:06:20.000 And that's why I'm drawn to stories like this.

01:06:24.000 Any of these stories that are morally complicated, maybe it's...

01:06:30.000 People 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.

01:06:37.000 But 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.

01:06:46.000 They can make up their own minds.

01:06:47.000 Do you think it's Gonzo Entertainment, though?

01:06:49.000 I don't, I think that's unfair.

01:06:51.000 I think you certainly gave dramatic interpretations of things to order to move the storyline along.

01:06:58.000 But I didn't find it offensive.

01:07:01.000 Gonzo, to me, is Hunter S. Thompson's work.

01:07:04.000 He's a man.

01:07:06.000 I love that guy.

01:07:08.000 Was it Ed Muskie that he said he was on Ibogaine?

01:07:13.000 He goes, yeah, there was a rumor going around that he was on Ibogaine, and I knew about it because I started that rumor. 0.97

01:07:19.000 He would just write wild shit about a witch doctor from Brazil coming to meet him on the campaign trail because he was hooked on this. 0.98

01:07:28.000 Hypogain is not even something people are addicted to. 0.99

01:07:30.000 This is even more hilarious.

01:07:32.000 But he wandered into the middle of the story in a way that nobody had done that.

01:07:35.000 But when he was doing it, it was suddenly like, okay, it's not just out there.

01:07:39.000 Dude, I am the story. 0.68

01:07:41.000 And my crazy and gonzo is what's defining it. 0.96

01:07:43.000 And ironically, he was on acid and coke. 0.62

01:07:46.000 Right.

01:07:46.000 At the cop convention.

01:07:48.000 Yeah.

01:07:48.000 I mean, it's...

01:07:49.000 So calling what you did gonzo journalism, I don't think that's fair.

01:07:54.000 I think what you did is a great way of getting a story out there.

01:07:59.000 And, you know, yeah, the wife and the daughter that needed money for the school and everything is a little complicated.

01:08:05.000 And making it one guy instead of two corrupt cops is kind of complicated.

01:08:09.000 But...

01:08:10.000 Ultimately, 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.

01:08:27.000 That grown adults wanted to get.

01:08:30.000 Maybe not even grown adults, right?

01:08:31.000 That was also part of the problem.

01:08:34.000 It's hard to regulate. 0.99

01:08:35.000 A fucking 12-year-old with a good understanding of the internet could get a hold of a gun, right? 0.99

01:08:41.000 Can get a hold of anything, yeah. 1.00

01:08:43.000 When did it become guns?

01:08:47.000 There was another site that he kind of kicked into it.

01:08:50.000 And to him, this was all part of the...

01:08:53.000 Hey, this is constitutionally protected.

01:08:56.000 This is your right to do so.

01:08:58.000 You want guns?

01:08:59.000 You want dope?

01:08:59.000 You want whatever?

01:09:00.000 This is your right to choose, and it's up to you to be responsible.

01:09:04.000 But for many people, and for his girlfriend, it was like, dude, this is the line.

01:09:08.000 Like, hey, I thought you wanted to change the world for good, and now, you know...

01:09:12.000 But change the world for good.

01:09:13.000 Did they really think that?

01:09:15.000 I mean, by selling drugs?

01:09:17.000 You know, I mean, you know, there you go.

01:09:19.000 It might change the world for good.

01:09:20.000 I mean, it's possible.

01:09:22.000 Make a mark anyway.

01:09:23.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:09:24.000 Make a mark.

01:09:25.000 And I think that he did go into it with...

01:09:30.000 And he did make a mark, for better or worse.

01:09:33.000 Well, we're talking about him right now.

01:09:34.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:09:35.000 He made a mark.

01:09:36.000 And I think your film does justice to that.

01:09:39.000 I really do.

01:09:40.000 I think it...

01:09:44.000 Definitely 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.

01:10:01.000 It's weird, though, to read that tweet now, you know, Ross's tweet of like, okay, here I am 36 years ago.

01:10:07.000 It's almost 10 years since I started this site.

01:10:10.000 And, you know, I wonder what's going on.

01:10:13.000 You 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.

01:10:26.000 And, like, how interesting would it be to sit down now with Ross and watch Silk Road with him?

01:10:31.000 Even if he hated it or even if he argued, hey, this is not right or whatever, what a fascinating conversation that would be.

01:10:37.000 I'd love to be able to do that with him. 1.00

01:10:39.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:10:39.000 Come on, Biden. 1.00

01:10:42.000 Let him out, bro.

01:10:44.000 Let him out.

01:10:44.000 He could do it.

01:10:46.000 He could?

01:10:46.000 Yeah, he probably would.

01:10:48.000 He'd have much more of a chance of Trump doing it than Biden doing it.

01:10:52.000 Speaking of Serpico, Serpico looked me up.

01:10:56.000 Serpico found me after The 7-5 came out.

01:10:59.000 Really?

01:10:59.000 He's still alive?

01:11:00.000 Still alive.

01:11:01.000 Where is he?

01:11:01.000 Still in hiding.

01:11:02.000 He's in hiding?

01:11:04.000 I mean, he's...

01:11:05.000 What cops want to kill him now?

01:11:06.000 You 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.

01:11:11.000 Oh, he got shot in the head?

01:11:12.000 Got shot in the head.

01:11:14.000 Really?

01:11:14.000 Yeah.

01:11:14.000 I didn't know that.

01:11:15.000 Yeah, so at the end of it, I haven't seen that movie in so long.

01:11:18.000 It's really interesting to read, and it was such a crazy call to get.

01:11:20.000 So the 7-5 comes out, and he calls me, and he's like, yo, this is Serpico.

01:11:24.000 And I'm like, Serpico, Serpico?

01:11:26.000 And he's like, Yeah, this is Serpico.

01:11:28.000 I just wanted to say, which that movie showed, nothing's changed, man.

01:11:32.000 Nothing's changed.

01:11:33.000 And it was so weird to get the call.

01:11:35.000 And it made me want to go back and, you know, kind of re-explore Serpico's story.

01:11:42.000 You know?

01:11:44.000 So how did he get shot in the head?

01:11:46.000 By another cop?

01:11:47.000 Yeah, 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.

01:11:58.000 And 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.

01:12:10.000 And he goes through the door, and I think the door slams on his arm.

01:12:14.000 And all of a sudden he turns around.

01:12:16.000 There's no backup. 0.84

01:12:16.000 Bang, he gets shot in the head. 0.84

01:12:18.000 And that's his exit from working.

01:12:21.000 Wow.

01:12:21.000 It's a crazy story.

01:12:22.000 And yet he's still completely lucid and a very sharp guy.

01:12:28.000 And Pacino nailed him because I was sitting there talking on the phone.

01:12:31.000 He sounded exactly like Pacino in the movie.

01:12:33.000 Wow.

01:12:34.000 It was really interesting.

01:12:35.000 What was the effects of the bullet hitting his head?

01:12:40.000 I don't know.

01:12:41.000 I mean, cognitively, he seemed totally capable.

01:12:43.000 I 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.

01:12:51.000 You know, he ended up getting his detective shield when he's like lying in the hospital bed.

01:12:56.000 Jamie's got something there.

01:12:57.000 Severed an auditory nerve, leaving him deaf in one ear.

01:13:00.000 He's since severed chronic pain from bullet fragments lodged in his brain.

01:13:06.000 Is there photos?

01:13:08.000 Just of him.

01:13:09.000 Let me see what he looks like.

01:13:11.000 The real dude.

01:13:13.000 He looks like Pacino.

01:13:14.000 He looks like Pacino, right?

01:13:16.000 Pacino nailed him.

01:13:17.000 He sounds just like him.

01:13:18.000 Wow.

01:13:19.000 Does it say the caliber of weapon?

01:13:23.000 Oh, this was just briefly mentioned, the thing.

01:13:26.000 Let me go through here.

01:13:29.000 I'd love to go back.

01:13:30.000 22. 22, yeah.

01:13:31.000 22LR pistol.

01:13:32.000 Yeah.

01:13:33.000 Just below his eye.

01:13:34.000 Yeah, wow.

01:13:35.000 Not hanging in his jaw. 1.00

01:13:36.000 Fuck! 1.00

01:13:37.000 Fired back. 1.00

01:13:38.000 He fired back?

01:13:39.000 Yeah.

01:13:40.000 Jesus.

01:13:41.000 That'd be an interesting one to revisit all these years later.

01:13:44.000 You know, it's like, I'm imagining the 10-part Netflix series that retells the Serpico story now, but slower and more detailed.

01:13:53.000 Oh, yeah.

01:13:53.000 That'd be awesome, right?

01:13:54.000 Dude, you should do it.

01:13:55.000 Do you think you'd work with it?

01:13:57.000 Yeah, 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.

01:14:05.000 He'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.

01:14:11.000 That didn't go into it?

01:14:13.000 In what way?

01:14:14.000 Like, more details?

01:14:15.000 I guess it's more detail.

01:14:16.000 I mean, inherently...

01:14:17.000 That's just how it is, right?

01:14:18.000 That is how it is.

01:14:18.000 I mean, having just done this with Silk Road, like, okay, there's elements that you move around and things that you fictionalize.

01:14:23.000 Also, you only have so much time.

01:14:25.000 Well, that's why I'm imagining the, like, ten-part series of Serpico, where you go into the whole thing and the world and the culture.

01:14:32.000 And what a great part for somebody.

01:14:35.000 It'd be a fun one to do.

01:14:36.000 And 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?

01:14:42.000 Well, 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?

01:14:52.000 That's true.

01:14:53.000 Yeah.

01:14:53.000 Now, that would be the place to do it at Netflix.

01:14:56.000 Isn'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?

01:15:04.000 It literally is the best.

01:15:06.000 Like when you look at...

01:15:07.000 Whether it's Netflix or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, some of the best drama that we've ever seen has been Ozark, rather.

01:15:20.000 I mean, think about these...

01:15:22.000 One after The Wire, one after another.

01:15:23.000 Oh, my God.

01:15:24.000 There's so many of them.

01:15:26.000 They tell these long stories and you just get completely glued to it.

01:15:31.000 Particularly with Netflix because you binge watch Stranger Things.

01:15:36.000 There's these shows that are just so much better than a movie.

01:15:40.000 When 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.

01:15:47.000 Well, audiences' viewing habits have changed, too.

01:15:51.000 Once upon a time, it was like, give me two hours.

01:15:53.000 I want to go to the theater and be done.

01:15:54.000 Now, we're all stuck in our house all the time.

01:15:56.000 It's like, give me another episode.

01:15:58.000 I'm going to crack through three or four more of those.

01:16:00.000 Well, that's the problem when you get into...

01:16:01.000 Well, that's the beautiful thing about Netflix, too, is they release them all in a giant chunk.

01:16:05.000 So you can really tear through it.

01:16:07.000 Yeah, you can binge. 0.99

01:16:09.000 But it's a fucking tremendous waste of time, too. 0.97

01:16:13.000 You know, something to do. 0.94

01:16:15.000 What about, would you ever go back to TV? No, I don't think so.

01:16:19.000 I like this.

01:16:20.000 I'm busy.

01:16:21.000 I'm busy and I'm happy.

01:16:24.000 I like what I'm doing.

01:16:26.000 I love watching television, but I would never go back to a game show again.

01:16:32.000 Well, never.

01:16:33.000 Who knows?

01:16:34.000 One day I might just decide that it's fun.

01:16:36.000 But I don't think so.

01:16:38.000 I think this is better.

01:16:41.000 This is more, like, to me it's more interesting because I can kind of choose who I talk to.

01:16:48.000 I want to talk to the people that I'm really, like, with you.

01:16:50.000 I love your movie and I really love The 7-5 too.

01:16:55.000 But I just, the subject matter of creating these films and documentaries, to me it's fascinating.

01:17:01.000 And it's...

01:17:02.000 Fun to talk to.

01:17:03.000 I love talking to all kinds of different people.

01:17:07.000 And the beautiful thing about a podcast is there's no real structure.

01:17:10.000 I don't have to...

01:17:12.000 You can follow it wherever it goes.

01:17:13.000 And I don't have to...

01:17:15.000 There's no rule like you can only talk to these kind of people.

01:17:18.000 There's no rules.

01:17:21.000 Initially, if you looked at it on paper, it would have never made any sense. 0.87

01:17:23.000 Like, 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. 0.96

01:17:38.000 No, it doesn't make any sense. 0.97

01:17:40.000 But was it sort of, like, what led you on the path that got you here?

01:17:44.000 Was it systematic?

01:17:45.000 Was it intuition?

01:17:46.000 Was it, like, kind of, I mean, that is a crazy mixture of people that you're having on.

01:17:50.000 Yeah.

01:17:52.000 The fact that there's no one telling me what to do, that's what led me to it, was just interesting to me.

01:17:56.000 Like, I have a lot of interests.

01:18:00.000 I have varied interests.

01:18:01.000 If I had three different lives to live simultaneously, I could fill them up easy.

01:18:06.000 There's so many things that I would love to do that I just don't have the time to do.

01:18:10.000 So 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.

01:18:21.000 I 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.

01:18:28.000 To me, that's ultimately incredibly fascinating.

01:18:31.000 So I just interviewed. 0.98

01:18:33.000 In the beginning, there was no stakes because nobody gave a fuck. 0.98

01:18:35.000 Nobody was listening. 0.97

01:18:36.000 So I was like, whoever I could get to talk to me was like, great.

01:18:39.000 But you didn't change.

01:18:40.000 I mean, I think that's why it has continued because it's still like freeform and it's rambling.

01:18:46.000 It's wherever you want to follow it.

01:18:48.000 That's where it goes.

01:18:48.000 And I think people are hungry for that, man.

01:18:50.000 I think people like legitimate, genuine conversations, right?

01:18:55.000 Where you know that someone doesn't have an agenda.

01:18:57.000 They're not pretending to be someone they're not.

01:18:59.000 They're just...

01:19:00.000 Real curiosity is very contagious.

01:19:03.000 Real enthusiasm is also very contagious.

01:19:05.000 And that's what I base what I do on.

01:19:08.000 My real enthusiasm and real curiosity.

01:19:12.000 I'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.

01:19:24.000 And if you will sit down and sort of Pay attention to them and ask them, hey man, what makes you tick?

01:19:30.000 Why did you do this?

01:19:33.000 That's where these interests – and it's a similar job in many ways, right?

01:19:37.000 Like me making a documentary is – I guess it's more polished and more produced and whatever.

01:19:42.000 But 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?

01:19:47.000 Right, 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.

01:20:03.000 Just full-scale corruption.

01:20:05.000 It was murder, right? 1.00

01:20:06.000 Like they threw somebody off a fucking balcony or something? 0.99

01:20:08.000 Yeah, I mean, that dude... 0.97

01:20:10.000 And what's so weird and fascinating about him is...

01:20:14.000 He's still, you know, as I was saying to you earlier, he served 10 and a half years in the federal pen.

01:20:19.000 And 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.

01:20:30.000 So...

01:20:31.000 Once upon a time, these producers showed me this clip of him, and it was him being interviewed before the Mullen Commission.

01:20:37.000 And the guy asked him, do you consider yourself a New York City cop or a criminal?

01:20:42.000 And he leans over and he confers with his lawyer and he says, both.

01:20:46.000 And as soon as I saw that clip, I was like, dude, who is this guy?

01:20:50.000 And how do I get to him and how do I find his story?

01:20:55.000 And what I was using at the time was...

01:20:58.000 I have access to the software that the bounty hunters use.

01:21:00.000 So 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.

01:21:11.000 So I had gotten that for all these other people that were involved in the story.

01:21:14.000 And I started sending out FedExes all over the country, right?

01:21:17.000 So it was like, dude, I'm making this movie.

01:21:19.000 Everybody else is already in it.

01:21:21.000 If you want to say your piece, I'll meet you for, you know, a beer or lunch or whatever.

01:21:26.000 Anytime, anyplace, I'll be there. 1.00

01:21:28.000 And it was complete bullshit. 0.99

01:21:29.000 I didn't have anybody else at all. 0.99

01:21:31.000 But I sent them all over, you know, hundreds of FedExes all over the country.

01:21:34.000 So people started calling and they're like, yo, is Mikey hip to this?

01:21:38.000 Is Mikey blessed this?

01:21:39.000 And I could not find out anywhere, right?

01:21:41.000 Try as I might.

01:21:42.000 And I'm looking through the data and I'm like, where the hell is this guy?

01:21:45.000 Because he had fallen into the crack of right when the digital era had begun.

01:21:50.000 So there was no digital footprint for the guy.

01:21:52.000 And so there were no known addresses.

01:21:55.000 There were some known associates, but everybody's like, no, Dow's not here.

01:21:58.000 And then eventually there was this one name on there, and it was a woman doctor. 0.98

01:22:02.000 And I picked up the phone, and I called, and I thought, like, what the hell?

01:22:06.000 What's the likelihood she does this?

01:22:08.000 And she answers the phone, and I said, yeah, was Mikey there?

01:22:12.000 And she puts him on.

01:22:13.000 And Dow is like...

01:22:15.000 Yeah, this is Michael Dowd.

01:22:16.000 What do you want?

01:22:17.000 And I told him the same thing.

01:22:19.000 I said, dude, you pick the time and place.

01:22:21.000 Anywhere in America, I'll be there. 0.99

01:22:24.000 And if you think I'm full of shit, if you think I'm not the guy to tell your story, then you walk away. 0.99

01:22:29.000 And he said, all right, tomorrow. 1.00

01:22:32.000 Meet me on Long Island.

01:22:33.000 And I'm in L.A. or whatever at the time.

01:22:35.000 So I jump on a plane, fly out there, and I go out and get on the L.I.E., and I'm going out to Hop Hog, wherever it was. 0.99

01:22:41.000 I don't even remember at this point.

01:22:42.000 And I go to get off the train station.

01:22:45.000 You know, you go to get off at whatever stop he tells me.

01:22:48.000 And I get off, and he says, now get back on the train.

01:22:50.000 And he makes me go up to the next location, controlling the meat, you know, as cops do.

01:22:54.000 It's like a drug deal.

01:22:55.000 You know, you're controlling the meat, the circumstances or whatever.

01:22:58.000 Yeah.

01:22:58.000 He 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.

01:23:07.000 And he's like, alright, so what's the plan?

01:23:08.000 What do you want to do?

01:23:09.000 And 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.

01:23:17.000 And he's like...

01:23:17.000 All right, I'll tell you.

01:23:18.000 I'll get the crew together.

01:23:19.000 And so away we went.

01:23:21.000 How many years had he been out of jail when you met him?

01:23:24.000 I don't remember at the time.

01:23:25.000 Not too long, but long enough that he was...

01:23:28.000 And the crazy thing is, he told me this story recently.

01:23:31.000 He said, the night they got busted in Suffolk County, They're in the back of the paddy wagon.

01:23:36.000 And as they're getting hauled away, they're like, so who's going to play me in the movie?

01:23:41.000 That was the question.

01:23:42.000 You know what I mean?

01:23:42.000 Like, they want to know at the time.

01:23:44.000 And it's like all these guys, you know?

01:23:46.000 When he's getting dragged away, he's thinking that.

01:23:48.000 Oh, my God.

01:23:50.000 Yeah, well, I guess he probably recognized it's a big story.

01:23:54.000 It was crazy.

01:23:55.000 I mean, when you're on the New York Post and it says the dirtiest cop ever, you know it's a story.

01:24:00.000 Yeah, he's a character.

01:24:02.000 His Instagram, we were talking about his Instagram, too.

01:24:04.000 That's hilarious, too.

01:24:07.000 Nonstop.

01:24:07.000 So it's him with girls in bikinis hanging out in Florida.

01:24:10.000 You know?

01:24:11.000 He's rocking that.

01:24:12.000 But 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.

01:24:21.000 He'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.

01:24:29.000 You know what I mean?

01:24:30.000 He's still like enthusiastic and like, okay, you got a gun, you got a schematic, let's go rob the bank, you know?

01:24:37.000 You find his Instagram?

01:24:38.000 Yeah, it's private though, so...

01:24:39.000 Oh! 0.60

01:24:40.000 Is it really?

01:24:41.000 That's interesting.

01:24:42.000 He must have got busted.

01:24:43.000 I've got some strange photos on my phone.

01:24:46.000 You can be sure.

01:24:47.000 Ben 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?

01:24:57.000 Well, it's the remake of it.

01:24:58.000 You know, the funny thing is we're sort of doing this with all these things at this point.

01:25:04.000 I'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. 0.66

01:25:16.000 These guys who rip off the Kali cartel for $20 million trying to sell them a submarine, right? 0.97

01:25:21.000 Explain that story, because that's crazy.

01:25:24.000 They told them that they were going to sell them a submarine for $20 million.

01:25:30.000 Did they have a submarine?

01:25:32.000 Okay, let me rewind, because the top of this was bonkers.

01:25:36.000 So, at the time, some narc I know calls me and is like, dude, you want to hear the craziest drug war story ever?

01:25:42.000 There'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? 0.91

01:25:56.000 And I'm like, bro, yes, I want the number.

01:25:59.000 What year is this?

01:26:00.000 This is, you know, ten years ago or something.

01:26:01.000 Seven or eight years ago.

01:26:02.000 I don't even remember at this point.

01:26:03.000 So I get the number.

01:26:04.000 So you had a Blackberry in jail?

01:26:05.000 It's got a Blackberry in this Panamanian prison.

01:26:08.000 And I'm like, you know, dial the number, right?

01:26:10.000 Some people don't even know what a Blackberry is.

01:26:12.000 It's a phone.

01:26:13.000 It's a phone.

01:26:13.000 It's one of the first phones that had a keyboard on it.

01:26:17.000 So I call this number, right? 0.71

01:26:18.000 And he's like, Russian gangster. 0.75

01:26:20.000 He's like, hello, this is Tarzan.

01:26:21.000 What do you want?

01:26:22.000 And I'm like, dude, tell me about the submarine.

01:26:25.000 Like, what is this story, you know?

01:26:26.000 And he's like, I cannot talk about this on the phone.

01:26:30.000 You have to come down to Panama, come inside prison, and I will tell you a story.

01:26:34.000 Wow!

01:26:34.000 So 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.

01:26:41.000 But if it's less than 10 grand, you can bring it, right?

01:26:44.000 Because I know I'm going to have to like peel off bribes to get in the prison or whatever.

01:26:47.000 And he's got this Russian attorney at the time.

01:26:50.000 And 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.

01:26:57.000 So I go out there, dude.

01:26:59.000 And you remember like – Field of dreams.

01:27:02.000 This is like the inverse of that, dude, like field of nightmares, okay, this like stone fortress carved out of the jungle.

01:27:09.000 And 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.

01:27:18.000 So I'm like, all right, man, what's the plan?

01:27:20.000 And he's like, okay.

01:27:22.000 Here's the plan.

01:27:23.000 You give me $500.

01:27:25.000 This American attorney?

01:27:27.000 He's Panamanian, because he lives in Panama, right?

01:27:30.000 But he speaks Russian and whatever.

01:27:32.000 And 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.

01:27:40.000 And 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. 1.00

01:27:47.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:27:48.000 And I'm like, bro, That's the worst fucking plan I've ever heard in my life. 1.00

01:27:54.000 And so he's like, you want to see Tarzan, right? 0.99

01:27:57.000 You flew all the way to Panama.

01:27:59.000 Because I was like, I knew this was going to be a bonkers caper.

01:28:03.000 Oh my God.

01:28:04.000 And so I'm sitting there.

01:28:05.000 And here's the crazy thing about this prison.

01:28:07.000 This prison is like Mad Max beyond Thunderdome.

01:28:10.000 There's like dead dudes in wheelbarrows moving them out.

01:28:13.000 Because what happens is the guards go home at 5 p.m.

01:28:17.000 and it's inmate rule at night.

01:28:18.000 So they just like murder each other in chaos and whatever.

01:28:21.000 And I'm like...

01:28:22.000 Looking around the, like, lower yard, and the convicts are out playing soccer or whatever, and I'm like, dude, I've come this far.

01:28:28.000 Like, I want to meet this guy, Tarzan.

01:28:29.000 So you saw them rolling bodies out?

01:28:31.000 Rolling bodies out, just like it's cordwood and, like, wheelbarrows, you know?

01:28:34.000 And I'm kind of like, I'm not sure how bright of an idea this is, but I've come this far.

01:28:38.000 So I go to the guard and I'm like, here's $50, bro.

01:28:41.000 I'll give you the other $50 when I get back out.

01:28:45.000 So this guy opens the gate and pulls it open and he's like, run like hell.

01:28:51.000 Don't look back.

01:28:52.000 When you hit the steel door, push. 1.00

01:28:54.000 So my dumb ass goes sprinting across the lower yard, convicts, heads whipping at me. 1.00

01:28:59.000 I get to the other side. 1.00

01:29:01.000 I push the door open and there's Tarzan.

01:29:03.000 He's like, what?

01:29:04.000 Welcome to Panama. 0.94

01:29:05.000 I can't believe you came. 1.00

01:29:06.000 You're very stupid or you got great big balls, you know? 1.00

01:29:09.000 Oh my God. 1.00

01:29:10.000 And so I meet him and I'm like, dude, tell me the story.

01:29:14.000 And 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.

01:29:27.000 And I'm like, bro, I just smuggled myself into a Panamanian prison. 0.99

01:29:30.000 Like, you're going to tell me the fucking story. 0.99

01:29:33.000 And so we kind of get into it in this prison. 1.00

01:29:36.000 Stupidly. 1.00

01:29:36.000 I mean, this guy could like squash me like a bug, you know. 1.00

01:29:38.000 But I'm like pissed off because I've like come this far or whatever.

01:29:41.000 How are you planning on getting out? 0.89

01:29:43.000 Because it's like it's just – they're just crooks, you know what I mean?

01:29:46.000 So it's just like you pay people, the guy's going to get you back out.

01:29:48.000 But you have money on you.

01:29:49.000 I have some money on me.

01:29:50.000 Some's with the crew.

01:29:51.000 I got the camera crew or whatever there, right?

01:29:53.000 So I'm going to pay them when I get out.

01:29:55.000 So Tarzan and I get in this like pissing match.

01:29:58.000 Pissing match argument at the time.

01:29:59.000 And I'm like, bro, here's the deal.

01:30:01.000 I'm flying back to LA. I'm going to get my 300, you know, thread count sheets and go to sleep for the night.

01:30:06.000 And your ass is going to die in this Panamanian prison. 1.00

01:30:08.000 And you're a damn fool for not telling me this story because I'm going to get your thing out. 1.00

01:30:12.000 And he's like, you know, tells me to piss off or whatever. 1.00

01:30:16.000 Many years go by.

01:30:17.000 So you leave.

01:30:18.000 So I leave.

01:30:19.000 And he won't tell me.

01:30:20.000 So years go by, right?

01:30:22.000 And then I'm out promoting the 7-5 when the 7-5 comes out.

01:30:26.000 And I get an email that says, jailbreak, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.

01:30:32.000 I open the email, and I'm like, what is this?

01:30:34.000 And he's like, I escaped from Panama, I traveled to Cuba, and I catch boat, and now I'm back in Russia.

01:30:40.000 If you will come to Russia and meet me in Moscow, now I will tell you the story.

01:30:44.000 So I call my producers from the 7-5, and I'm like...

01:30:48.000 Bro, can you get a million bucks in a week?

01:30:50.000 Because I got like five weeks off.

01:30:51.000 Tarzan's ready to tell the story.

01:30:53.000 He's like, let me make a call.

01:30:54.000 Eli Holtzman makes a phone call and he calls me back.

01:30:57.000 He's like, alright dude, I got the money.

01:30:59.000 Dice are hot.

01:31:00.000 Go.

01:31:01.000 So I fly to Moscow with the crew and show up and he starts telling the story.

01:31:08.000 So what the story is, is it's the story of three best friends.

01:31:11.000 It's him, Tarzan.

01:31:13.000 It's his best friend Juan Almeida, who's like Miami playboy, car dealer, sells exotic boats, whatever.

01:31:19.000 And a third guy, who's this Cuban narco. 0.94

01:31:21.000 And what these guys have done is they have sold a submarine to the Kali drug cartel for $20 million.

01:31:31.000 It all got busted.

01:31:32.000 So they end up in federal pens and whatever else.

01:31:35.000 And I'm like, so what is the true story?

01:31:38.000 So I'm sitting there and I'm shooting with Tarzan in Moscow.

01:31:42.000 And one of the guys has been a federal fugitive his entire life.

01:31:48.000 Fed's been looking for this guy for like 30 years.

01:31:51.000 That's the Cuban narco. 0.94

01:31:52.000 And he's been flying around the world, sending postcards to the U.S. Marshals.

01:31:56.000 Like, haha, you're never going to catch me, right?

01:31:59.000 And this guy spends $100,000 a month on getting new identities, real documents.

01:32:04.000 That's like operating costs.

01:32:05.000 So he's getting new passports and whatever so he can stay ahead of him.

01:32:09.000 And what he'll do is, as he's traveling around the world, I get on a plane.

01:32:13.000 I sit down next to you.

01:32:14.000 Who are you?

01:32:14.000 Are you Joe Rogan?

01:32:15.000 Good to meet you, whatever.

01:32:16.000 And this is pre-internet days.

01:32:18.000 So then he takes his passport, he goes into the bathroom in the thing, changes the name to Joe Rogan, His passport.

01:32:26.000 Make sure that I'm ahead of you when I walk out so that I enter the country.

01:32:30.000 I got on as Tony Yester.

01:32:32.000 When I get out on the other side, I'm Joe Rogan.

01:32:34.000 I'm in the line ahead of you.

01:32:35.000 So I've changed identities on the plane anytime he goes anywhere.

01:32:39.000 And then you get jammed up because they're like, no, dude, Joe Rogan, he just entered a few minutes ago.

01:32:43.000 So this guy, nobody could ever find this guy, right?

01:32:46.000 So I keep asking everybody, like, Can I find, like Tony Yester, will this guy talk to us?

01:32:50.000 And they're like, bro, never in a million years is this guy going to talk to you.

01:32:54.000 So I'm sitting there in Moscow, and I get a text on WhatsApp.

01:32:58.000 And it says, you've talked to the waiters.

01:33:02.000 If you want to know what really happened to the submarine, come talk to the chef.

01:33:06.000 Meet me in Africa tomorrow for a cup of coffee, and I'll tell you the rest of the story. 0.99

01:33:11.000 No shit. 0.99

01:33:12.000 So I get on the phone. 1.00

01:33:13.000 I'm in Moscow, Four Seasons or whatever.

01:33:16.000 I call the producers and I'm like, change of plans.

01:33:19.000 I'm going to Africa and they're like, are you out of your mind, bro?

01:33:23.000 And I'm like, listen, have 20 grand in cash when I get there because we're going to have to creep around, pay people off.

01:33:31.000 I don't know what the deal is.

01:33:33.000 Fly to Africa. 0.99

01:33:34.000 When I get into Africa, I walk into the lobby of this Hotel.

01:33:39.000 And I walk in, and it's like thick-necked MMA fighter-looking dudes, right?

01:33:46.000 Like wearing Armani suits and stuff, but these are not like business travelers.

01:33:50.000 You know, this is like a crew.

01:33:52.000 And I'm like, this looks a little gnarly.

01:33:55.000 Walk up into my room, and I walk into the hotel room.

01:33:58.000 And as soon as I walk in, the phone rings.

01:34:00.000 I pick it up, and the voice says, downstairs, five minutes, Porsche Cayenne. 0.96

01:34:06.000 And I'm like, holy shit, this is the dude.

01:34:09.000 So I take my location on the iPhone and I share it with, you know, producers, cameraman or whatever.

01:34:15.000 Like, dude, if I disappear, like, go to where the last place you saw the dot.

01:34:19.000 So I walk downstairs.

01:34:22.000 And I go out, up rolls Porsche Cayenne.

01:34:24.000 Here's this international fugitive.

01:34:26.000 Door swings open.

01:34:27.000 I get in the car. 0.86

01:34:28.000 This guy goes ripping ass out of there at like 100 miles an hour.

01:34:31.000 And 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. 0.65

01:34:47.000 And I'm like, it is!

01:34:49.000 I am!

01:34:50.000 It's cool!

01:34:51.000 So I end up spending like a week with this dude.

01:34:53.000 And eventually...

01:34:54.000 But by then, you'd already done the 7-5.

01:34:56.000 I'd done the 7-5.

01:34:57.000 So why doesn't he just Google a picture of your face?

01:34:59.000 Because it's like, these guys...

01:35:02.000 It's not like Google...

01:35:03.000 It's like, okay, are you still hustling me for the DEA? Is this like, there's a $20 million bounty on this guy?

01:35:09.000 Or whatever the...

01:35:10.000 Right, but he had to know what you look like, right?

01:35:12.000 Right.

01:35:13.000 But the point is...

01:35:15.000 It's like Sean Penn goes to interview El Chapo and El Chapo gets pinched afterwards.

01:35:19.000 You know what I mean?

01:35:21.000 So it's making sure it's not one of those kind of operations.

01:35:25.000 So 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.

01:35:40.000 And he's like, here's the deal.

01:35:41.000 I'm a pilot.

01:35:43.000 That's my bailout plane and that's my goat bag. 0.99

01:35:46.000 You understand how this works?

01:35:49.000 And I'm like, I think so.

01:35:52.000 So 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.

01:36:01.000 Whoa.

01:36:02.000 It was crazy.

01:36:03.000 It was insane.

01:36:04.000 So like making these things can be a caper.

01:36:06.000 So the Russian cat who escapes from Panama.

01:36:09.000 Tarzan.

01:36:09.000 How did he do that?

01:36:11.000 Well, 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.

01:36:19.000 Well, he goes to get out.

01:36:22.000 He goes to his lawyers.

01:36:23.000 He's like, dude, I'm booking it.

01:36:24.000 I'm making a run for it.

01:36:25.000 So they jump a river into Costa Rica, run through Costa Rica, catch a boat from Costa Rica to Cuba.

01:36:32.000 And when he gets to Cuba, the Cubans repatriate him to Moscow.

01:36:35.000 Wow. 0.99

01:36:36.000 And just hauled ass and ran. 1.00

01:36:38.000 And the Panamanians are like, eh. 1.00

01:36:39.000 Well, he ain't going back to Panama anytime soon, right?

01:36:42.000 Yeah.

01:36:42.000 Well, that's okay.

01:36:44.000 Or maybe he is.

01:36:44.000 Yeah.

01:36:45.000 Jesus Christ.

01:36:46.000 So, they tell you the story about selling this...

01:36:51.000 Was there a real sub?

01:36:52.000 There was a real sub.

01:36:53.000 So, these guys end up going...

01:36:54.000 So, here's the backdrop to this is...

01:36:57.000 It's the fall of the Soviet Union.

01:36:59.000 So 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.

01:37:11.000 You own that airfield.

01:37:13.000 So 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?

01:37:22.000 And they buy – first they buy choppers for the Kali cartel, right? 0.95

01:37:27.000 They get like – so it's got a hook on it and it can pick up 5,000 kilos.

01:37:32.000 So they're dropping the dope out to the cigarette boats from the jungle labs and they do it successfully. 1.00

01:37:38.000 And so eventually the drug lords come to them and they're like, choppers are great, bro.

01:37:43.000 Like can we get a submarine?

01:37:45.000 Because, 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.

01:37:56.000 So these three guys get together and they're like, absolutely, we can get you the submarine.

01:38:01.000 Only, like, two of them are, like, you know, really trying to get the submarine done.

01:38:05.000 And they go and they shop, and there's pictures of them in the documentary.

01:38:07.000 Like, you'll see them.

01:38:08.000 They're, like, shopping for a submarine, like you're shopping for shoes at Ross Dress for Less, right?

01:38:12.000 Where does one buy a submarine?

01:38:14.000 From the, like, you know, hidden the Black Sea military fleet.

01:38:18.000 That's it.

01:38:18.000 That's the submarine, right?

01:38:19.000 Imagine getting that fucking thing. 0.99

01:38:21.000 So that's Tarzan, right? 1.00

01:38:22.000 That's Tarzan on the left?

01:38:23.000 That's Tarzan on the left.

01:38:24.000 He lives like Tarzan!

01:38:25.000 Ha ha ha ha! 1.00

01:38:26.000 How big is that fucking guy? 1.00

01:38:28.000 He's big, dude. 1.00

01:38:29.000 Look at the width on him.

01:38:30.000 He'll crush you like a bug, right?

01:38:35.000 That's him in his Miami days, rocking the glasses and whatever.

01:38:38.000 Look at the hair!

01:38:39.000 Oh my god.

01:38:41.000 Go back to that other picture. 1.00

01:38:43.000 Look how wide that fucking dude is. 1.00

01:38:46.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:38:47.000 He's no joke.

01:38:49.000 Giant hands, too.

01:38:50.000 Yeah.

01:38:51.000 It's like 200 pounds of meat.

01:38:53.000 He hits you in the forehead like you're dropping, dude.

01:38:55.000 So this is one of the...

01:38:57.000 Was there more than one subject?

01:38:59.000 Well, they wouldn't shop submarines at the secret naval base, right?

01:39:02.000 So they go to the secret naval base and there's available subs you could buy? 0.99

01:39:07.000 Basically, if you got enough money and you got the right bullshit. 0.99

01:39:09.000 He's rushing. 0.99

01:39:10.000 He walks in.

01:39:11.000 He's like, hey, we're doing this. 0.84

01:39:12.000 So he bullshits these guys.

01:39:14.000 And he's intending to do it.

01:39:15.000 Well, his buddy, meanwhile, the super badass narco that's hiding around the world is like... 1.00

01:39:20.000 These idiots. 1.00

01:39:21.000 You can't sell a submarine. 1.00

01:39:22.000 Like, NATO's going to blow it up the second it, you know, sails out from under. 1.00

01:39:26.000 But like, these morons want to give me $20 million? 1.00

01:39:29.000 I'm going to take it, dude. 1.00

01:39:30.000 And I have no compunction about it.

01:39:31.000 So he takes the $20 million and he vanishes without a trace.

01:39:34.000 And nobody had seen him since then, so he'd been on the run for all those years.

01:39:38.000 U.S. Marshals looking for him, DEA looking for him, and presumably the Kali cartel because he ripped these guys off for $20 million.

01:39:45.000 So that's the dude who calls me and says, meet me in Africa for a cup of coffee. 0.99

01:39:49.000 Holy shit. 0.98

01:39:51.000 But why would he want to tell you about all this? 1.00

01:39:54.000 Because it's like all movie stars want to be gangsters and all gangsters want to be movie stars.

01:39:59.000 Oh, God.

01:40:01.000 Oh, that's so weird.

01:40:05.000 Wow, it's almost like a serial killer.

01:40:07.000 They want to get caught.

01:40:09.000 Well, 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?

01:40:18.000 Right, right. 0.84

01:40:18.000 And 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. 0.84

01:40:29.000 So now all those guys have gotten pinched, and they do the documentary. 0.70

01:40:33.000 Eventually they all get busted for one thing or another.

01:40:35.000 Is that documentary out now?

01:40:36.000 It's on Netflix.

01:40:37.000 I have not seen it.

01:40:38.000 Have you seen it?

01:40:39.000 I've seen it on the...

01:40:41.000 I want to leave right now and go watch it. 1.00

01:40:44.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:40:45.000 It's a trip. 1.00

01:40:46.000 It's a trip.

01:40:51.000 The picture of it is hilarious.

01:40:53.000 Oh my god, I can't wait to watch it.

01:40:55.000 So this was how I got off on this to begin with is you're like, okay, which of these, you know, documentary, whatever.

01:41:02.000 Now we're going to remake that as a feature film because it's like it's great parts for like actors and stuff.

01:41:07.000 Yeah.

01:41:07.000 Oh my god.

01:41:09.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:41:09.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:41:12.000 There's some people out there, man. 1.00

01:41:14.000 Well, and like you and I are both like nutcase magnets.

01:41:18.000 You know what I mean?

01:41:18.000 Like they sort of are like me anyway.

01:41:20.000 You get like normal, you know, fascinating whatever people.

01:41:23.000 I get the nutcases.

01:41:24.000 Like my phone rings and like you never know who it's going to be.

01:41:26.000 How did you get involved in this world?

01:41:30.000 So 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?

01:41:38.000 So 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.

01:41:54.000 I'm like, these are my people, bro!

01:41:56.000 That's so weird.

01:41:57.000 And so I end up, um...

01:42:00.000 Years later, I'm not qualified to do anything, whatever.

01:42:04.000 But I end up kind of talking my way into a job at a newspaper.

01:42:07.000 And I'm like, look, I can hang out with cops and I can hang out with crooks.

01:42:10.000 And I'm like, I don't scare easy.

01:42:11.000 So let me write the crime beat.

01:42:14.000 So I start doing that.

01:42:15.000 And then eventually, weirdly enough, I cross paths with Errol Morris again.

01:42:21.000 He wouldn't even remember this.

01:42:23.000 For him, it's just another night on the tour.

01:42:25.000 And I'm like, walk-on part.

01:42:26.000 But I end up getting an interview with him to do the...

01:42:29.000 You know, to do a profile of him in the newspaper.

01:42:32.000 And he's like, dude, I'm so tired of these interviews.

01:42:34.000 You want to just go get a steak and a bottle of wine?

01:42:36.000 And 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.

01:42:41.000 So we go up and have this, like, fantastic evening together.

01:42:44.000 And 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.

01:42:53.000 And I literally called the newspaper the next day and I was like, I quit.

01:42:57.000 You know?

01:42:59.000 And so then I just started like, you know, kind of, you know, knocking around.

01:43:03.000 And 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.

01:43:14.000 So was the 7-5 the first thing that you did?

01:43:17.000 I spent many years knocking around doing – I go on the Deadliest Catch thing.

01:43:22.000 I do whatever, kind of learning how to do this, do stuff on cockfighting, on whatever.

01:43:28.000 But the 7-5 was the first thing that kind of people began to like notice and pay attention to.

01:43:34.000 And so then 7-5 becomes Operation Odessa and then kind of one crazy crime story after another.

01:43:42.000 And to me, the weird thing is, like, it's all kind of the same movie.

01:43:45.000 The 7-5 is Operation Odessa, is Silk Road, is The Last Narc, is Night Stalker.

01:43:50.000 It's all just sort of portraits of cops and crooks and the, like, thin and porous border between the two.

01:43:58.000 Isn't the Night Stalker at least slightly different because you're dealing with this rare aberration in human psychology where someone enjoys killing people?

01:44:09.000 Someone 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.

01:44:20.000 It was power.

01:44:21.000 Yeah.

01:44:22.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm being simplistic.

01:44:25.000 It's not like it's really all the same thing, but it's all related in some way or another.

01:44:29.000 The thing about the Night Stalker was, I guess what happened with that is...

01:44:36.000 I'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.

01:44:47.000 You want to go to dinner with this guy?

01:44:49.000 And so my answer is always like, yes.

01:44:52.000 Like, I want the Blackberry number, and I want to go to dinner. 0.51

01:44:54.000 Like, if there's a lunatic out there, like, then I want to go.

01:44:56.000 Just think about what happened from getting that Blackberry number. 0.98

01:44:59.000 God, that is so nuts.

01:45:02.000 And so you get involved in this...

01:45:05.000 I would imagine that it's deeply disturbing the more you dig into a story like the Richard Ramirez story.

01:45:15.000 It's dark.

01:45:16.000 As you get deeper and deeper into this, there's guys like that out there.

01:45:22.000 I 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.

01:45:30.000 And it makes you go, what?

01:45:32.000 Wait, how many?

01:45:33.000 I know, it's crazy.

01:45:34.000 It's crazy.

01:45:36.000 I was talking to a cop once and he said, if people kill people, like say if you kill a business partner, you're going to get caught. 0.74

01:45:43.000 You know, you guys have a dispute, you kill them, you're going to get caught.

01:45:46.000 He goes, but if you just walk into a gas station and shoot a guy in the head, nobody knows. 0.99

01:45:52.000 Nobody knows. 0.55

01:45:53.000 You know, that was Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer.

01:45:56.000 Yeah, it was brilliant.

01:45:57.000 Do you remember that?

01:45:57.000 Yeah, yeah, very vividly.

01:45:58.000 Which is apparently kind of bullshit. 1.00

01:46:01.000 Because Henry Lee Lucas was apparently full of shit. 1.00

01:46:04.000 He was just a nut. 1.00

01:46:06.000 Narcissist, talking to be talking. 0.94

01:46:08.000 And the cops would go, you know, there was this murder in 1982. Oh, I did that.

01:46:14.000 That was me, right.

01:46:15.000 Yeah, so they had pinned like 62 murders on him at one point in time.

01:46:19.000 But it's highly unlikely that he actually killed all those people. 0.99

01:46:23.000 Liars and sociopaths.

01:46:24.000 I mean the crazy thing about the Ramirez thing was – and I think why it flipped people out so much is there was no pattern to it. 0.99

01:46:34.000 It was men. 0.70

01:46:34.000 It was women. 0.70

01:46:35.000 It was children.

01:46:36.000 Some of them were like murdered with a gun.

01:46:39.000 Some of them with a knife.

01:46:40.000 Some of them with a hammer.

01:46:41.000 So it was like completely random.

01:46:58.000 Right.

01:46:59.000 Yeah.

01:47:05.000 Yeah, there's also a thing that happens, right?

01:47:08.000 Like, there was that guy in New York, Son of Sam, remember that?

01:47:13.000 Yeah, Spike Lee did a great movie.

01:47:14.000 Yeah, it grips the entire area, because everybody now is aware that this guy is on the loose.

01:47:23.000 Another one I remember, do you remember the DC sniper?

01:47:26.000 Yeah, that's an amazing story.

01:47:28.000 Malvo, Lee Malvo.

01:47:29.000 Did anybody ever make a film on that?

01:47:31.000 I think that they did a feature film of it.

01:47:34.000 I'm so curious.

01:47:37.000 And 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.

01:47:46.000 Also, 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.

01:47:56.000 And then just get in the front seat and drive away, and no one would ever suspect.

01:48:00.000 When 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.

01:48:12.000 It was just a weird, crazy story.

01:48:14.000 Yeah, it was very crazy.

01:48:15.000 It was also another story where a crime happens, and then a series of crimes happen, and then people are just...

01:48:23.000 Well, 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?

01:48:33.000 And everybody's trying to do their job.

01:48:34.000 Nobody's doing anything wrong.

01:48:35.000 But from the media's perspective, it's, hey, we have to get the word out.

01:48:39.000 If 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.

01:48:46.000 But 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.

01:49:01.000 Right?

01:49:02.000 And so once somebody had called 911, he was cutting phone cords.

01:49:06.000 Once 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.

01:49:18.000 And so the one clue that's tying him to all those things.

01:49:21.000 And 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.

01:49:34.000 The Zodiac Killer was never caught, right?

01:49:37.000 Right, correct.

01:49:38.000 That's a weird one, right?

01:49:39.000 Really weird one.

01:49:40.000 And I love that movie because with that movie, they didn't make it easy and tidy.

01:49:47.000 It kept going.

01:49:49.000 The story never ended.

01:49:50.000 You have the obsessive reporter played by Gyllenhaal.

01:49:53.000 And they followed the weirdness of that story and didn't try to...

01:49:57.000 It was just brilliantly made.

01:49:59.000 Fincher's a genius.

01:50:00.000 Yeah, I remember that movie now.

01:50:02.000 I was trying to remember how it...

01:50:05.000 When that...

01:50:07.000 What year was the Zodiac Killer?

01:50:10.000 Like, what year did it start?

01:50:11.000 I forget.

01:50:12.000 I forget the details of it.

01:50:13.000 60s and 70s, it says.

01:50:15.000 Late 60s, early 70s.

01:50:16.000 And how many murders were...

01:50:18.000 They think that got...

01:50:20.000 They had it narrowed down to a few people.

01:50:22.000 And one of them...

01:50:24.000 At least one of them's dead, right?

01:50:25.000 Yeah.

01:50:28.000 It's just crazy that someone can get away with something like that for a long time.

01:50:31.000 I think it would be much harder now.

01:50:33.000 I 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.

01:50:44.000 Yeah.

01:50:45.000 But it still happens, man.

01:50:48.000 Yeah.

01:50:49.000 It's such a weird mindset that all of a sudden someone becomes important by killing people.

01:50:55.000 And so that was a big thing for me in doing the Night Stalker was...

01:51:02.000 That 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.

01:51:11.000 Here's this guy in the sunglasses and the long hair and whatever, and he gets all those groupies.

01:51:16.000 And so very early on with that, I was like, man, I don't want to be glorifying this guy.

01:51:22.000 This is somebody that's out.

01:51:23.000 Not only is he doing these murders, but he's also like kidnapping and abusing children.

01:51:26.000 And people don't know that piece of the story.

01:51:29.000 So, like, this isn't about the psychology of Richard Ramirez.

01:51:32.000 This is about, you know, these two cops and the victims and the weird people that have kind of brushes with the beast.

01:51:39.000 And again, you know, some people criticize it, some people don't, because it's like, okay, tell me more about Richard Ramirez.

01:51:45.000 Like, no, man, like, you don't, like, what's interesting to me is the human story.

01:51:48.000 It's what you said, where it's like...

01:51:50.000 I want to sit across from people and know what makes them tick.

01:51:55.000 What's it like to be a murder cop that long, hot, harrowing summer?

01:51:59.000 What's it like to lose a family member?

01:52:01.000 What's it like to be a kid who's kidnapped by Richard Ramirez and then survive and live your whole life?

01:52:09.000 So 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.

01:52:20.000 So did you have a reluctance of diving into the personality of Ramirez or somehow...

01:52:26.000 I 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. 0.69

01:52:36.000 Well, I didn't want to fall into that crap with Ramirez. 0.87

01:52:39.000 Because it exists already anyway. 0.98

01:52:42.000 And yes, I'm curious, like, what is it that makes somebody like that do what they do?

01:52:51.000 Was he executed?

01:52:52.000 No, he was sent to San Quentin, sent to death row, and then ended up dying.

01:52:56.000 This 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.

01:53:06.000 You know, it's just a strange sort of...

01:53:09.000 Into that story.

01:53:12.000 One thing, it's like...

01:53:14.000 Trying to back-engineer how a person like that is created.

01:53:21.000 Like, how does someone like that...

01:53:24.000 Well, here's some tidbits that I had heard.

01:53:29.000 And this stuff is not in, you know, obviously not in the Netflix series.

01:53:32.000 Some of it we're doing a sort of after the doc podcast thing on.

01:53:36.000 Some of it we're going to hopefully remake it as a narrative series.

01:53:40.000 But like...

01:53:41.000 What happened was he's in El Paso.

01:53:44.000 His father is a cop and would drag him to the graveyard at night and like chain him up in the graveyard.

01:53:54.000 And so he was abused and sort of messed with in a fundamental way as a kid.

01:54:01.000 And 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,

01:54:17.000 and 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.

01:54:30.000 So he gets, like, you know, he's abused. 0.74

01:54:33.000 He's sexually molested.

01:54:34.000 He's locked up in the graveyard. 1.00

01:54:36.000 He's got this psycho cousin. 0.82

01:54:37.000 And all of this becomes this crazy cocktail. 1.00

01:54:40.000 He's a thief. 0.96

01:54:41.000 They call him Five Finger Richie. 0.98

01:54:42.000 And then eventually he washes up in L.A. And he's shooting dope.

01:54:47.000 And he's out of his mind and begins to get a taste for it.

01:54:53.000 You know, it's the...

01:54:56.000 For him, it was when I see the fear in your eyes, when you flinch, that's what gave him the sexual charge.

01:55:03.000 And so he starts doing this and just ripping and marauding his way through Los Angeles.

01:55:08.000 But I didn't want the series to be like a platform for that, for his justifying or explaining it in some way or another.

01:55:16.000 Did you struggle with that at all?

01:55:18.000 Like trying to...

01:55:20.000 It's like, yes.

01:55:21.000 And 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,

01:55:37.000 even if I don't put him in the show, you know, until episode four or whatever, am I contributing to that?

01:55:43.000 Mythos and that celebritization of this guy.

01:55:46.000 And so constantly you're asking yourself, like, I'm fascinated by this story.

01:55:52.000 I want to share this story, but I don't want it to be cheap.

01:55:55.000 I don't want it to be exploitative.

01:55:57.000 I don't want it to be...

01:56:00.000 I want it to be thoughtless.

01:56:01.000 I want it to be complicated and nuanced.

01:56:03.000 And so as we make them, we're watching, re-watching, ah, changing this.

01:56:08.000 I don't like...

01:56:09.000 This is maybe...

01:56:10.000 This is too gruesome.

01:56:11.000 This is too glorifying.

01:56:12.000 And with the crime scene photos, that was another question where it's like...

01:56:18.000 It's rough to look at those.

01:56:19.000 I 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.

01:56:30.000 You don't wipe that stuff out of your consciousness once you see it.

01:56:33.000 And so then the question becomes Okay, do you show people this so that they understand this is what it really looks like?

01:56:43.000 And it's horrifying.

01:56:44.000 So there is no glorifying this.

01:56:46.000 This is what a real murder photo looks like.

01:56:49.000 But you don't want that to be cheap and exploitative where you're getting eyeballs just by being gruesome.

01:56:54.000 So there's a ton of moral questions in all of them.

01:56:58.000 So 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?

01:57:19.000 How do you decide how you're going to lay something like this out?

01:57:24.000 Do you have a vision and ultimately did the vision morph over time or did you kind of create what you set out to create?

01:57:34.000 Great question.

01:57:37.000 It'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.

01:57:54.000 And I don't know where the story is going to go, but I know something in me wants to dig in deeper.

01:58:01.000 So some amount of time is just kind of sitting by yourself and kind of getting right with, okay, what do I want to say?

01:58:07.000 Why does this matter?

01:58:08.000 How do I do it?

01:58:09.000 And then I have a wonderful group of people that I work with year in, year out all the time, have on all these films for many years.

01:58:17.000 And I'm a believer in surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and better than you at what they do and talk it through.

01:58:25.000 Pitch it out.

01:58:26.000 Say, this is what I'm thinking.

01:58:27.000 What about this?

01:58:27.000 Poke holes in it.

01:58:28.000 Make it better.

01:58:29.000 And 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?

01:58:40.000 How do I stay true to that?

01:58:42.000 And then always the story ends up taking a turn at some point.

01:58:47.000 Like if you end up in a straight line from where you started, then I think you didn't learn anything.

01:58:53.000 And the whole point I'm doing it is so that I will learn something along the way.

01:58:58.000 So when there's some weird left field thing and I'm like, okay, I don't know why, but I have to go there.

01:59:03.000 I always trust that instinct to go there and take the story wherever it takes me.

01:59:10.000 Was 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?

01:59:18.000 There's always dispute.

01:59:19.000 And there's dispute in a couple of ways.

01:59:21.000 Basically, 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.

01:59:30.000 And so there's that layer of dispute because it never lines up.

01:59:35.000 There's always discrepancies and there's always conflict.

01:59:37.000 So at a certain point, then you're making decision, okay, which version of this story am I going to tell?

01:59:43.000 Joe tells the top half of what it was like when we met at this podcast.

01:59:46.000 At a certain point, I tell my experience of it.

01:59:49.000 And then there's the symphony of collaborators that are around you.

01:59:53.000 And somebody's like, man, that's cheap and grotesque.

01:59:55.000 I don't know, you know, you're going too far with those murder photos.

01:59:59.000 Somebody 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.

02:00:13.000 So then it's like you're hearing all these conflicting, contrasting points of view.

02:00:19.000 Weird story.

02:00:21.000 I was knocking around with Gary Busey once upon a time. 0.99

02:00:23.000 Who's a stone lunatic. 0.99

02:00:28.000 Became a stone lunatic. 1.00

02:00:29.000 Became a stone lunatic. 0.99

02:00:30.000 After the motorcycle accident. 0.95

02:00:33.000 And that's a whole fascinating story in its own right.

02:00:36.000 But basically what Busey said to me is he said, here's the deal, man.

02:00:40.000 On a movie set, everybody is a spoke in the wheel. 0.98

02:00:44.000 And the only thing they care about is their spoke.

02:00:47.000 The camera department cares about what it looks like on camera.

02:00:50.000 The actor cares about his performance.

02:00:53.000 The production designer cares about what the production design is.

02:00:57.000 Your job is to shut up and be the quiet center of the wheel and make sure the wheel turns.

02:01:03.000 And I've never forgotten it.

02:01:04.000 It was profound advice.

02:01:07.000 And I return to that again and again.

02:01:10.000 It's be the quiet center of the wheel.

02:01:12.000 But 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.

02:01:24.000 Yeah.

02:01:24.000 And sometimes you push it.

02:01:26.000 And sometimes you have to yell.

02:01:29.000 Sometimes you have to cajole.

02:01:30.000 Sometimes you have to beg.

02:01:32.000 Sometimes you have to lie and hustle.

02:01:33.000 But at the end of the day, there's always a point where you have to just be quiet.

02:01:38.000 And it will tell you what it wants to be.

02:01:41.000 If you'll sit there with it and be quiet, it'll tell you what it wants to be. 0.99

02:01:46.000 One of the things about what you do that's very fortunate is there's a never-ending supply of fucked-up stories. 0.99

02:01:53.000 There really is. 0.98

02:01:55.000 You could just keep going.

02:01:57.000 You could get into Griselda Blanco.

02:02:01.000 There's a hundred different versions of every single topic, whether it's serial killer, bad cop, drug dealer, smuggler.

02:02:14.000 And those stories now increasingly find me...

02:02:18.000 You know, I got a call a couple weeks ago.

02:02:23.000 Snoop called me.

02:02:24.000 And he's like...

02:02:25.000 The Snoop?

02:02:26.000 The Snoop dog?

02:02:27.000 Right, the Snoop.

02:02:28.000 It's like super weird and surreal.

02:02:30.000 Out of nowhere.

02:02:31.000 Out of nowhere.

02:02:31.000 Do you know each other?

02:02:33.000 Don't know him.

02:02:34.000 So how did you know it was really Snoop?

02:02:36.000 His producing partner calls and is like, listen, man, Snoop is a fan.

02:02:41.000 Yeah.

02:02:41.000 And I'm like, say that again?

02:02:43.000 What?

02:02:43.000 You know?

02:02:43.000 And she's like, Snoop wants you to get on the phone with him.

02:02:46.000 And I'm like, I'd love to, you know?

02:02:49.000 So, phone rings one day, and it's Snoop. 0.97

02:02:52.000 And he's like, yo, man, I seen that nice dog, and it scared the motherfucking shit out of me. 0.88

02:02:57.000 And I said, whoever made that, they need to be in charge of my visuals. 0.82

02:03:00.000 So, what you got for me, Till?

02:03:02.000 And I was like...

02:03:04.000 Charge your visuals.

02:03:05.000 And I thought, like, amazing call to get.

02:03:08.000 And, like, yes, Snoop, I don't know what the project is, but, like, 100%, I am there and I want to tell your story.

02:03:14.000 Because I could tell artist to artist that he was there ready to, like, he's like, I want to do the very best work of my life right now.

02:03:23.000 And I want to tell my story in a profound, big way on a big canvas.

02:03:28.000 The story of him...

02:03:29.000 In his rap career, making it...

02:03:32.000 And I don't know.

02:03:32.000 We'll see where it goes.

02:03:34.000 But it was instantaneously and categorically like, do I want the Blackberry number?

02:03:39.000 Do I want to be in with Snoop?

02:03:40.000 Like, yes, I do.

02:03:41.000 100%.

02:03:41.000 His story's nuts.

02:03:43.000 Up to the murder trial and...

02:03:46.000 You know, everything.

02:03:47.000 Death Row Records, everything.

02:03:49.000 It'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.

02:04:00.000 So I don't know what exactly that's going to be, but I know, like, yes, Snoop, I'm in, man.

02:04:05.000 There'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...

02:04:15.000 Streaming it online and kept the stream running for seven and a half hours before he realized that the stream was still running.

02:04:23.000 He just rage quit, you know.

02:04:25.000 People rage quit.

02:04:26.000 Yes, they do. 1.00

02:04:27.000 Video games will fuck with your head. 0.99

02:04:28.000 Snoop Dogg left Twitch live streaming for seven hours after he rage quit Madden. 1.00

02:04:32.000 Awesome.

02:04:33.000 Awesome.

02:04:35.000 And I think the title of his stream was something about chilling.

02:04:42.000 Yeah.

02:04:43.000 Oh, there's a video of it? 1.00

02:04:44.000 Fuck! 1.00

02:04:51.000 Everybody understands this. 1.00

02:04:53.000 It's universal, dude.

02:04:56.000 Everybody understands this.

02:04:58.000 Look at him.

02:04:59.000 Furious. 1.00

02:05:00.000 Fuck this shit! 1.00

02:05:02.000 He came in this fucking room and everything went fucking bad. 1.00

02:05:05.000 Fuck this shit, man. 1.00

02:05:08.000 He doesn't know that people are watching! 1.00

02:05:12.000 And he's playing Roller Coaster of Love!

02:05:16.000 I cannot wait to work with this guy, dude.

02:05:18.000 I don't know where it goes, but I am so in, man.

02:05:22.000 I'm so fascinated to find out.

02:05:24.000 He's a national treasure.

02:05:25.000 And it's going to be funny, because he's hilarious.

02:05:29.000 My friend Chris McGuire was working with him when he did that show with Martha Stewart, which was a genius show.

02:05:37.000 Amazing.

02:05:37.000 How about remixing that?

02:05:39.000 Him and Martha Stewart together, and it worked!

02:05:42.000 It's so worked.

02:05:44.000 The two of them together was hilarious.

02:05:46.000 It's such a great idea.

02:05:48.000 And they're pals to this day, right?

02:05:50.000 Yes, they're homies. 1.00

02:05:51.000 He's good friends with my friend Tony Hinchcliffe, too.

02:05:54.000 Tony worked with him on his roast.

02:05:57.000 It's like he gets these calls every now and then from Snoop.

02:06:01.000 Every now and then he gets a phone call from Snoop.

02:06:04.000 I'm just like, I'm so curious.

02:06:06.000 And that's a great one where it's like, man, I have no idea where the project will go.

02:06:11.000 Yeah.

02:06:11.000 But like, man, let's take Snoop to Broadway.

02:06:14.000 You know what I mean?

02:06:14.000 Oh, he's doing that thing with Burt now, right?

02:06:16.000 Yeah, they're on that show.

02:06:17.000 I was going to say Burt's friend of them, too, in that big show or something.

02:06:19.000 Go Big Show. 0.99

02:06:20.000 Yeah, I couldn't answer the phone once, but I got a fucking... 0.95

02:06:22.000 I was in the middle of hanging out with my kid, and I got a FaceTime call from Burt, and I was like, I can't answer this right now. 0.91

02:06:29.000 And it turned out he was Burt with Snoop. 0.99

02:06:31.000 I'm like, shit! 1.00

02:06:32.000 Yeah, they're on the show. 1.00

02:06:33.000 Yeah.

02:06:34.000 What is this called?

02:06:35.000 It's a talent show.

02:06:36.000 Oh, it's a talent show.

02:06:38.000 There you go.

02:06:39.000 Well, there you go.

02:06:41.000 Yeah, he's a national treasure.

02:06:44.000 So stories just kind of find their way to you now, like post 7-5?

02:06:49.000 Pretty 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.

02:07:07.000 And, like, you're the only guy that can tell my story.

02:07:09.000 And I'm like, let's go to lunch.

02:07:12.000 So we go to, like, Soho House in Malibu or whatever.

02:07:15.000 And I said, so what's your story, man?

02:07:18.000 And he's like, let me tell you something.

02:07:20.000 Jesse James robbed 12 trains, robbed 12 banks, and three of them were trains.

02:07:24.000 And he goes through the history of, like, famous bank robbers we know.

02:07:28.000 He's like, man, I robbed 60 banks, 15 of them, while I was in prison.

02:07:34.000 I'm like, come again?

02:07:36.000 I'm like, what do you mean, while you were in prison?

02:07:38.000 He's like, I'm in prison in Milan, Michigan or whatever at the time, locked up for bank robbery.

02:07:43.000 And they start to have a work release program.

02:07:47.000 And 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.

02:07:59.000 So 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.

02:08:09.000 You 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.

02:08:16.000 And so you go out during the day, you get bussed out of the prison, you go to the college, you come back at night. 0.83

02:08:20.000 And it's these, like, sort of sexy, badass, black bank robbers. 0.99

02:08:26.000 And 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? 1.00

02:08:33.000 And so he's like, so basically, we start doing this.

02:08:36.000 And I'm like, okay, so they drop us off at school.

02:08:38.000 And as soon as they drop us off at school, we slip out the back.

02:08:41.000 We go rob banks during the day.

02:08:44.000 We take the money.

02:08:45.000 We get a stash house.

02:08:47.000 We get girlfriends.

02:08:48.000 We get jewelry.

02:08:49.000 We get whatever.

02:08:50.000 We're back by 5 o'clock in pickup.

02:08:52.000 We go back into the penitentiary at night.

02:08:55.000 We spend the night in the joint.

02:08:58.000 And we start robbing banks.

02:09:00.000 And the FBI is looking at this and they're like, man, this has got to be Chaz Williams.

02:09:03.000 But it can't be Chaz Williams because Chaz Williams locked up for bank robbery.

02:09:06.000 How can he be doing these?

02:09:08.000 And 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.

02:09:21.000 And they were going to buy a nightclub and it was going to be – I forget the name, some amazing name for the nightclub.

02:09:26.000 I forget the name of it.

02:09:27.000 But it was going to be when they got released, they'd take all the money from the bank robberies and open their nightclub.

02:09:33.000 And 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.

02:09:45.000 And so we started to develop this together.

02:09:47.000 I was like, man, this is an amazing, like, what a crime story, you know?

02:09:52.000 And so developing it...

02:09:57.000 Because a lot of this is about trust, right?

02:09:59.000 You're getting people to tell you these stories that kind of shouldn't be told in some way or another.

02:10:07.000 And so in this case, I was like, listen, I'm going to send you a question.

02:10:11.000 I'm going to write a voice memo, speak a voice memo, and I'm going to send it to you at night.

02:10:15.000 And just like, I'm going to ask you questions I'm curious.

02:10:17.000 Like, what's it like to be like black in America?

02:10:20.000 What's it like to, you know, why do you decide to rob your first bank?

02:10:23.000 How old are you?

02:10:24.000 Whatever the questions are.

02:10:25.000 Whatever you want to say, nothing's off limits.

02:10:27.000 Anything you want to say.

02:10:29.000 And so he would then record all these voice memos of telling me the story of his life and how he got...

02:10:35.000 You 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. 0.99

02:10:48.000 And he's like, and as soon as I heard somebody calling my dad boy, I was like, fuck Uncle Sam, man. 0.99

02:10:53.000 American dream, I'm gonna steal mine. 0.99

02:10:55.000 And in that moment, I decide I'm gonna become a bank robber and get my piece of the American dream.

02:11:00.000 So I'm like, this is an amazing story, right?

02:11:03.000 And then right as we go out to do it, he ends up going to see his son in Florida and drops dead after an airplane trip.

02:11:10.000 And so I never got to tell the story.

02:11:13.000 And I'm sitting on all these amazing voice memos.

02:11:16.000 How old was he when he died?

02:11:19.000 60s, maybe?

02:11:20.000 Just a heart attack?

02:11:21.000 Yeah.

02:11:21.000 I think he had an aneurysm or something along those lines.

02:11:24.000 So 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.

02:11:33.000 There he is, Chaz Williams.

02:11:34.000 Amazing guy.

02:11:35.000 How much time did he wind up doing?

02:11:38.000 He 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.

02:11:55.000 So he had this whole crazy second act.

02:11:57.000 And I was so excited to tell that story.

02:12:00.000 And then, you know, boom, he dropped dead.

02:12:02.000 Maybe I do it as a plot.

02:12:03.000 Do you remember the material?

02:12:04.000 Well, I have all his voice memos, so it's like maybe we do a podcast or maybe we do...

02:12:08.000 I don't know.

02:12:09.000 But it's an amazing story that I want to tell still, you know?

02:12:12.000 That 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.

02:12:22.000 Like, have you ever heard the one on Aaron Hernandez?

02:12:25.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

02:12:26.000 Crazy, right?

02:12:27.000 And it's so interesting how, you know, and like you were so at the forefront of this where...

02:12:33.000 The 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.

02:12:50.000 It's like this show, right?

02:12:51.000 What you do is you're curious to meet people.

02:12:54.000 So you sit down with, okay, who do I want to know?

02:12:56.000 And like what makes them tick?

02:12:57.000 And I think why people hook into you is the same reason that why people hook into the Aaron Hernandez thing.

02:13:04.000 Because it's like, give me a fascinating character who I don't quite know what's going to come out of his mouth.

02:13:09.000 And let him tell me a story.

02:13:11.000 Show me your curiosity and fascination about something.

02:13:15.000 And everybody can vicariously enjoy it.

02:13:18.000 Yeah, I don't think too much about why this thing works.

02:13:22.000 It just works.

02:13:23.000 Because I think I'd fuck it up. 0.95

02:13:23.000 Right. 0.95

02:13:24.000 I'd probably start leaning towards that direction or something like that.

02:13:28.000 I just keep doing it.

02:13:29.000 And I'm sure it's changed, too, over time.

02:13:31.000 But what I do is so different than what, like, the Aaron Hernandez thing is.

02:13:36.000 Or another one is great, the dropout.

02:13:38.000 That's the one on the lady, Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos.

02:13:43.000 That's a fascinating one.

02:13:44.000 Amazing story.

02:13:45.000 Because it's like, that's a different company that produced that, I believe.

02:13:47.000 But that's one where you just like, you hear the whole story unfold, you know, like, what a perfect combination of factors, you know?

02:13:56.000 Everybody wants a female genius who's some, you know, self-made billionaire tech guy. 1.00

02:14:03.000 Giant who figured it all out. 1.00

02:14:06.000 But meanwhile, it's just a fucking con artist. 1.00

02:14:07.000 Just a hustle, man. 1.00

02:14:08.000 And the best part about it is the fake voice.

02:14:11.000 Right.

02:14:11.000 It's my favorite thing.

02:14:12.000 When I listen to her talk now, I can't un-hear that fake voice.

02:14:17.000 Can't un-ring that bell.

02:14:18.000 And when you find out that it's a fake voice, like from the other people, like, no, that's a fake voice.

02:14:22.000 Like, she doesn't talk like that.

02:14:23.000 Well, she's talking like this, like a guy.

02:14:25.000 Like, she figured out that that's, like, part of this character that she created.

02:14:30.000 Black turtleneck, dresses like Steve Jobs...

02:14:33.000 The genius of the hustle. 1.00

02:14:34.000 Goddamn people are weird. 1.00

02:14:36.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:14:37.000 It's so fascinating.

02:14:39.000 The Aaron Hernandez story is more sad to me than weird because I know too much about brain damage.

02:14:46.000 I know too much about it from fighters.

02:14:48.000 I know too much about it from personal experience with people and my own, getting hit in the head.

02:14:54.000 I think there's something about that...

02:14:56.000 When you find out that when they do the autopsy on Aaron Hernandez, they find out it's like some of the...

02:15:00.000 And he died, I believe, at 28. So the worst CTE they've ever seen.

02:15:05.000 Like, a guy in his 20s.

02:15:07.000 Yeah.

02:15:07.000 You know, and you realize...

02:15:08.000 Trauma.

02:15:08.000 Blood force trauma.

02:15:09.000 100%.

02:15:09.000 And this is probably what's responsible for a lot of his behavior.

02:15:13.000 And also abuse and also, you know, a lot of other shit that factors in there. 0.98

02:15:18.000 But, you know, football players... 0.97

02:15:22.000 Fighters, boxers, anybody, soldiers, people have experienced massive impacts and shocks. 0.87

02:15:31.000 What 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. 0.51

02:15:48.000 It makes me think of there's that crazy story in the like psychology textbooks. 0.96

02:15:52.000 You know the story of Phineas Gage?

02:15:54.000 No.

02:15:54.000 Who'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.

02:16:05.000 And at some point one explodes and it drives a railroad tie through his head all the way through his brain, frontal cortex or whatever.

02:16:12.000 Sure.

02:16:12.000 He survives.

02:16:14.000 They pull it out and no seeming damage to him.

02:16:17.000 But what it had done was it had given him this very basic brain trauma where it changed him the rest of his life.

02:16:23.000 He didn't seem like he was off, but suddenly he was like a boozer and an abuser and whatever.

02:16:29.000 And it totally changed the trajectory of the rest of his life.

02:16:31.000 And it was actually the beginning of how they began to study brain trauma and what the impacts to different parts of the brain were.

02:16:39.000 It's a crazy story of Phineas Gage.

02:16:42.000 Is that how it went through?

02:16:44.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

02:16:45.000 What year was this? 1.00

02:16:48.000 Looks old as fuck. 1.00

02:16:49.000 Show me that picture of him. 1.00

02:16:51.000 He's got one eye now.

02:16:54.000 Oh, it is.

02:16:57.000 That's the thing that went through his head.

02:16:59.000 Blow that picture up. 1.00

02:17:01.000 What in the fuck, man? 1.00

02:17:02.000 That went through his whole brain? 1.00

02:17:04.000 And didn't kill him.

02:17:05.000 And 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.

02:17:11.000 And because of that, they started studying different parts of the brain, controlling different things.

02:17:16.000 Look how big that thing is. 0.95

02:17:18.000 That went through his whole head? 1.00

02:17:20.000 Holy shit! 1.00

02:17:22.000 Look at that. 1.00

02:17:22.000 All the way through the brain. 1.00

02:17:24.000 Holy shit! 1.00

02:17:25.000 And the skull. 1.00

02:17:26.000 I mean, out the top of the skull.

02:17:27.000 It's bonkers, right?

02:17:27.000 It's so big!

02:17:30.000 Oh, look at the home!

02:17:32.000 That's insane! 1.00

02:17:34.000 That is fucking insane. 1.00

02:17:37.000 That didn't kill him. 1.00

02:17:41.000 Yeah, or even impair him other than to make him...

02:17:44.000 He should have been a fighter.

02:17:45.000 That guy probably would have taken a hell of a punch. 0.61

02:17:47.000 You know?

02:17:48.000 Some people are just extra durable.

02:17:51.000 Yeah, that's nuts.

02:17:52.000 Oh, look at the photo, the x-ray photo.

02:17:55.000 That one down there of the image of representing what it must have been like.

02:18:00.000 Oh, so it completely fractured his skull, too.

02:18:03.000 Oh, Jesus Christ. 1.00

02:18:06.000 Fuck. 1.00

02:18:08.000 Wow. 1.00

02:18:08.000 Bonkers. 1.00

02:18:09.000 Yeah, completely.

02:18:10.000 Oh, look at the picture of him before and after, Jamie, right there.

02:18:15.000 Yeah.

02:18:17.000 Changed, like, down to the very look in his eye, right?

02:18:19.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:18:20.000 Well, it made him fucking crazy. 0.99

02:18:22.000 You know, that's the story of Sam Kinison. 0.99

02:18:25.000 Not a rod through the brain, but...

02:18:27.000 And also Roseanne Barr.

02:18:29.000 And Busey.

02:18:30.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:18:31.000 And Busey.

02:18:32.000 Busey changed his face.

02:18:34.000 Like, changed the shape of his head.

02:18:36.000 Like, one eye is higher than the other eye after that accident.

02:18:39.000 Motorcycle accident with no helmet on.

02:18:41.000 Hit a curb.

02:18:43.000 Well, he's been clinically dead.

02:18:45.000 I knocked around with him for a minute, right?

02:18:48.000 And I always thought that there was an amazing movie in him where it's The Life and Deaths of Gary Busey.

02:18:55.000 So 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.

02:19:06.000 Which was actually like Gary Busey.

02:19:09.000 So Busey has these crazy different lives that he lives.

02:19:13.000 And then there's eventually the motorcycle accident.

02:19:16.000 And he's pronounced clinically dead several times over the course of his life.

02:19:20.000 And it changes who he is.

02:19:21.000 Several times?

02:19:22.000 Multiple times.

02:19:23.000 And I always thought like how weird.

02:19:25.000 Because he's a character.

02:19:28.000 I wanted to work with him once upon a time.

02:19:30.000 And it was like when I was first getting started out.

02:19:32.000 And I was working in this production company in Malibu.

02:19:35.000 And there was a dentist upstairs, right?

02:19:37.000 It was like the dentist to the like stars or whatever.

02:19:40.000 And I was like, man, I think that was like Gary Busey coming in there.

02:19:44.000 So I went and told the woman that ran the office. 0.85

02:19:47.000 I was like, listen, man, next time Busey comes in, you let me know because I'm going to go like buttonhole him when he comes out.

02:19:52.000 I want to pitch him a project or whatever.

02:19:54.000 And she's like, all right, you're on your own.

02:19:56.000 So Busey comes in to get his teeth fixed.

02:19:58.000 And she calls me.

02:19:59.000 She's like, all right, Busey's here.

02:20:01.000 So I come running out and I'm like...

02:20:02.000 Gary, I'm Tiller Russell.

02:20:04.000 I want whatever the hell I wanted to want.

02:20:06.000 And he looks at me with those intense killer eyes.

02:20:10.000 And he reaches down and he takes a piece of paper and he scratches his address on it.

02:20:14.000 And he hands me the address.

02:20:15.000 And he's like, tomorrow, 5 o'clock, you'll be at this address.

02:20:20.000 And I'm like, all right.

02:20:22.000 So I drive over and it's in the Pacific Palisades and I get to this house. 0.99

02:20:26.000 And the house is like beat to shit. 0.96

02:20:28.000 The door buttons popped out and it looks like there's bullet holes in the door or whatever. 0.97

02:20:34.000 And I'm like, this is going to be a weird one.

02:20:36.000 So I knock on the door and nothing.

02:20:39.000 I don't hear anything.

02:20:40.000 Fine.

02:20:40.000 Knock even harder on the door.

02:20:42.000 Third time, finally I'm like, screw it, man.

02:20:45.000 This guy asked me to come over here. 0.84

02:20:46.000 I want to talk to him.

02:20:47.000 I want to see if I can get him to do this movie.

02:20:48.000 So I reach up to the door and the door handle clicks open and I push the door open and the door swings open.

02:20:54.000 And I look back and there on the balcony is Busey. 1.00

02:20:57.000 And he's in a robe, buck-ass naked, with his cock hanging down. 1.00

02:21:01.000 And he's got moccasins all the way up to the top of his knees. 1.00

02:21:06.000 And he's holding a shotgun.

02:21:09.000 And he looks at me and he locks eyes with him.

02:21:11.000 And I'm like, dude, this is it.

02:21:12.000 This is how you die. 1.00

02:21:13.000 Like Gary Busey picks up the 12-gauge and blasts your head off. 0.99

02:21:16.000 And he waves and he's like, come in here! 0.51

02:21:18.000 Come in here! 1.00

02:21:18.000 Look at my cock. 1.00

02:21:19.000 So I'm like, all right. 0.99

02:21:21.000 So I close the door behind me and I go in and I go out to the balcony and he's like, and he's pointing out, he's like, there's a fire.

02:21:28.000 You see the smoke?

02:21:29.000 You see the smoke?

02:21:30.000 There's a fire in the Malibu Hills.

02:21:31.000 What do you think we should do about it?

02:21:33.000 I'm like, we're not firemen.

02:21:35.000 I don't think we should do anything.

02:21:37.000 Let's leave it to the professionals.

02:21:38.000 And he's like, no, we got to go investigate this.

02:21:40.000 This could be a problem.

02:21:41.000 Get in the car. 0.99

02:21:41.000 So we run out and he jumps into his car, his Mercedes, like black Mercedes, you know, just beat to shit like the house. 0.99

02:21:50.000 And he's driving. 0.99

02:21:52.000 Completely naked, you know, other than the robe, holding the shotgun, wearing the moccasins. 0.98

02:21:56.000 And 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. 0.88

02:22:02.000 What do you want to do? 0.92

02:22:02.000 As we're like driving up to the fire. 0.92

02:22:04.000 And I'm like, you know, trying to like pitch him the movie.

02:22:07.000 But because of that, we end up kind of knocking around together for a minute.

02:22:12.000 What year is this?

02:22:13.000 20 years ago or something, right?

02:22:15.000 I mean, you know, 15 years ago.

02:22:18.000 And 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.

02:22:28.000 You know, can I move in with you and the kids?

02:22:30.000 And I'm like, I don't think that's gonna work, man.

02:22:33.000 You know?

02:22:34.000 Like, I love you, Gary, but...

02:22:35.000 I have to move out of the house.

02:22:36.000 Can I move in with you and your kids?

02:22:38.000 And so, you know, that didn't happen.

02:22:40.000 And it's been a hot minute since I've seen him.

02:22:42.000 He's probably, you know, probably strangled me if he ever got hold of me again.

02:22:44.000 But I always thought, like, that's another guy that's, like, he's lived literally lifetimes and deaths over the course of his life.

02:22:51.000 So how has he died clinically?

02:22:53.000 How has he been clinically...

02:22:53.000 Well, one was the car wreck.

02:22:54.000 One was, like, I forget...

02:22:56.000 The motorcycle accident.

02:22:57.000 I mean, I'm sorry.

02:22:58.000 The motorcycle accident.

02:23:00.000 I don't know.

02:23:01.000 I don't remember what the other ones were, but multiple times he told me.

02:23:04.000 So there's ones before that?

02:23:06.000 Before the motorcycle accident?

02:23:08.000 I don't remember the details.

02:23:09.000 I just know he told me multiple times.

02:23:10.000 The problem is, after the motorcycle accident, everything's real squirrely.

02:23:13.000 It's hard to understand.

02:23:15.000 I spoke with him on the phone once, because Alex Jones was hanging out with him, and Alex Jones called me up.

02:23:20.000 He goes, Joe, Gary Busey wants to talk to you.

02:23:23.000 I go, what?

02:23:24.000 And he puts Gary Busey on.

02:23:26.000 And I didn't talk to Gary Busey.

02:23:28.000 Gary Busey talked at me.

02:23:30.000 And 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.

02:23:43.000 And at the end of it, I think I went, all right.

02:23:46.000 And he goes, well, someday we'll talk in person.

02:23:48.000 And then he hangs up the phone and that's it.

02:23:50.000 I'll tell you what, though.

02:23:51.000 The weird thing is, you know, and I joke about it, but it was the single best cocaine overdose.

02:23:58.000 1995 cocaine overdose.

02:24:00.000 Wow.

02:24:03.000 Surgery to remove a cancerous plum-sized tumor in his sinus cavity.

02:24:08.000 Oh, my God.

02:24:13.000 Woo! 0.99

02:24:14.000 Oh, he was in his second season of Celebrity Rehab. 1.00

02:24:18.000 Remember that fucking show? 1.00

02:24:19.000 God damn, what an irresponsible show. 1.00

02:24:22.000 Stan Hope had a great bit about it. 1.00

02:24:25.000 That fucking show was so ridiculous. 1.00

02:24:28.000 Take a bunch of people that are literally at the low point of their life and then exploit them. 1.00

02:24:33.000 Light a fuse.

02:24:34.000 Pretend you're just helping them.

02:24:36.000 Right.

02:24:36.000 We're just rehab.

02:24:38.000 And put it on TV. Yeah.

02:24:40.000 This is about rehab.

02:24:41.000 This is about getting you healthy again. 1.00

02:24:45.000 Fuck that show. 1.00

02:24:46.000 That show was so ridiculous. 1.00

02:24:48.000 I'll tell you what, though. 0.95

02:24:49.000 Busey, 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.

02:24:57.000 And to this day, I quote it, and it's like, man, I heard him. 0.98

02:25:00.000 Well, the dude has been in some fucking amazing movies. 0.65

02:25:03.000 I mean, before everything went south for him after the motorcycle accident, you got to go back to, like, Lethal Weapon. 0.97

02:25:08.000 He was sensational.

02:25:09.000 One of the great fight scenes ever in the movie.

02:25:11.000 That last fight scene in the rain with Mel.

02:25:13.000 It's the first time people figure out a triangle.

02:25:15.000 Nobody ever saw a triangle before that.

02:25:16.000 It's because, you know, Mel Gibson had been training with the Gracies. 1.00

02:25:21.000 Interesting.

02:25:22.000 I didn't know that.

02:25:22.000 Yeah.

02:25:23.000 I think it was Horian Gracie was the one who trained him for that film.

02:25:30.000 No one had never seen anybody throw a triangle on somebody in a movie before.

02:25:34.000 Such a great fight scene.

02:25:35.000 In the rain, in the mud.

02:25:37.000 And I want to say that's like 89 or 90?

02:25:41.000 87?

02:25:42.000 Wow!

02:25:43.000 That's crazy!

02:25:45.000 So you're talking about a film that was a solid six years before the UFC. It's amazing, man.

02:25:52.000 So the UFC is in 93. No one had any idea what Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was.

02:25:57.000 Look at this fucking movie. 0.99

02:25:59.000 And they go at it. 1.00

02:26:02.000 So he scissor-sweeps him to the ground.

02:26:05.000 It turns into this wild, crazy slugfest in the rain.

02:26:11.000 Cops come.

02:26:11.000 Look at that.

02:26:13.000 Fucking crazy. 0.99

02:26:15.000 I remember this movie. 0.99

02:26:16.000 This is a great movie, too.

02:26:18.000 Great movie.

02:26:20.000 And they're letting him duke it out.

02:26:22.000 See if you get to the part where he gets him in a triangle.

02:26:25.000 It's the very end of the fight, right?

02:26:26.000 Yeah, it's a crazy scene in a movie, man.

02:26:28.000 Like, you've never seen...

02:26:29.000 Oh, that's right.

02:26:30.000 I forgot how long this fight goes on.

02:26:32.000 It's a five-minute scene.

02:26:34.000 They had sticks and coubatons, and he whacks them with that.

02:26:38.000 Mutual combat.

02:26:39.000 Yeah.

02:26:40.000 You know what's great about it?

02:26:42.000 It's ugly and raw the way a fight is.

02:26:44.000 There it is.

02:26:45.000 There's a triangle.

02:26:47.000 The first time you've ever seen this in a film.

02:26:49.000 Nobody ever scissored someone with their legs. 0.98

02:26:52.000 It's a shitty triangle, though, by the way. 0.99

02:26:55.000 Terrible technique.

02:26:56.000 If I was Horian, I'd be like, my friend, you have to cinch this.

02:27:00.000 Grab the ankle.

02:27:01.000 Pull it tight.

02:27:02.000 He's got them there, though.

02:27:03.000 That's pretty good.

02:27:04.000 Towards the end, I don't like where his foot is.

02:27:08.000 It's okay.

02:27:09.000 It's supposed to be about four or five inches higher under the knee.

02:27:12.000 But, you know, good enough.

02:27:14.000 Got a lot of people curious.

02:27:15.000 Like, is that real?

02:27:16.000 Can you do that to somebody?

02:27:18.000 Great fight scene, man. 1.00

02:27:19.000 Fuck, great movie, man. 1.00

02:27:20.000 Great movie. 1.00

02:27:21.000 But he played such a good psycho.

02:27:24.000 Well, and then you go all the way back, like Big Wednesday, the surfing movie, like John Milius did.

02:27:29.000 How about the Buddy Holly story?

02:27:30.000 The Buddy Holly story is amazing.

02:27:32.000 Yeah, he played Buddy Holly.

02:27:33.000 So good.

02:27:34.000 Yeah, no, but Gary Busey was a beast.

02:27:36.000 He's a tremendous actor.

02:27:38.000 And there's something about someone who's stared at death and also just...

02:27:42.000 Gone so far with coke that they died. 0.92

02:27:45.000 To the other side.

02:27:46.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:27:47.000 Like those crossover dudes that have just...

02:27:50.000 They've peered through the curtain.

02:27:52.000 Yikes! 1.00

02:27:54.000 Shut it and came back over.

02:27:55.000 There's something about people that have partied that hard that they just make...

02:28:00.000 There's a certain maniacal aspect to their performances that's so believable.

02:28:06.000 So committed.

02:28:07.000 You know?

02:28:07.000 Yeah.

02:28:07.000 So committed.

02:28:09.000 Yeah, like guys who party, like really fucking party. 1.00

02:28:13.000 So what was the Kinison story? 0.99

02:28:15.000 You started to tell the Kinison story.

02:28:16.000 Oh, got hit by a car when he was a kid.

02:28:18.000 And his brother Bill says there's two different versions of Sam. 0.99

02:28:21.000 There's Sam when he was young, he was like a normal kid, and then he gets hit by a car and becomes a fucking maniac. 0.99

02:28:26.000 Like, bad head injury. 0.99

02:28:27.000 And just completely impulsive, wild, reckless.

02:28:32.000 Phineas Gage.

02:28:33.000 Yeah.

02:28:33.000 Well, the same thing with Roseanne Barr.

02:28:35.000 Roseanne 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.

02:28:45.000 She spends the next nine months in a mental health institute.

02:28:48.000 She gets locked up in an asylum.

02:28:51.000 Yeah.

02:28:51.000 Can't count anymore.

02:28:52.000 Was a straight-A student in math.

02:28:54.000 Now can't count.

02:28:55.000 Like, her brain's completely frazzled and becomes this wild, crazy, impulsive comic, much like Kinison, you know?

02:29:03.000 And those two are, in my money, for my money, they're in the top 20 of the greatest stand-ups of all time.

02:29:11.000 100%.

02:29:12.000 100%.

02:29:12.000 Especially, like...

02:29:16.000 Yeah.

02:29:25.000 Yeah.

02:29:34.000 Just like a wild woman. 0.74

02:29:36.000 One of the very first in terms of her style, the way she did comedy. 0.91

02:29:42.000 And she was a straight up killer, man. 0.89

02:29:45.000 If you ever got a chance to see her live in her heyday, she was a monster. 1.00

02:29:49.000 She would destroy. 0.88

02:29:50.000 And that wild impulsiveness, a lot of that I think came from her head injury.

02:29:57.000 You know, it's crazy.

02:29:58.000 To me, you guys, the stand-up comics, you're the bravest people in the world.

02:30:02.000 Because you are standing there in front of a room full of people, absolutely nothing, stone naked, with nothing but your wits in your game.

02:30:13.000 But let's stop you right there, because that's not true at all.

02:30:16.000 Cops are braver.

02:30:18.000 Firefighters are braver.

02:30:19.000 Soldiers are most certainly braver.

02:30:21.000 It'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.

02:30:33.000 When you're walking into a room and you're just having to like capture people's imagination… That's an amazing thing.

02:30:40.000 That's voodoo, dude. 0.93

02:30:41.000 That's something coming out of somebody to be able to do that.

02:30:43.000 It's a thing that you get better with over time, though, and it actually gets easier.

02:30:47.000 That's one of the things Joey Diaz says the best.

02:30:49.000 He goes, it's the hardest, easiest thing you'll ever do.

02:30:53.000 What does that mean?

02:30:54.000 Because it's really fucking hard, but once you get good at it, it's really easy. 0.99

02:30:58.000 Like, Joey Diaz would get high as fuck, walk on stage, and murder a room. 0.99

02:31:04.000 Like, he didn't think twice about what he was gonna say. 0.99

02:31:07.000 He didn't worry about it.

02:31:09.000 He had bits in his head that he could go to, but he would just be free.

02:31:13.000 And he would go on stage and just destroy.

02:31:15.000 And then he'd get out, hang around for a bit, high-five a couple of people, give them hugs, and get in his car and drive away.

02:31:21.000 I mean...

02:31:22.000 I don't even understand that because it's like improvisational jazz or something.

02:31:26.000 Yeah, there's a lot of jazz to it.

02:31:28.000 There's a lot of jazz to it.

02:31:29.000 That's why a lot of comics like being obliterated on stage because that's kind of how you create.

02:31:35.000 Well, you've got to create it a bunch of different ways.

02:31:38.000 You don't have to.

02:31:39.000 People do it different ways.

02:31:41.000 Some people, they write notes down on napkins and they have a rough outline.

02:31:45.000 Some people write out a monologue and they go on stage and they just kind of perform it.

02:31:48.000 Like, Carlin did that.

02:31:50.000 Kind of performed it pretty much the way he wrote it.

02:31:53.000 Rehearsed prior to coming in or just roughed out?

02:31:56.000 I don't know.

02:31:57.000 I don't know if he rehearsed it, but he certainly memorized it.

02:32:00.000 He had a monologue.

02:32:01.000 Like, Carlin would essentially write out his thoughts on things and, you know, some of the best writing, really, in terms of, like, social commentary. 0.97

02:32:12.000 To this day, people are handing out clips of Carlin talking about some of the shit that's going down right now in our culture. 0.90

02:32:19.000 But he had his way of doing it. 0.97

02:32:21.000 And then there's some guys that just write completely on stage.

02:32:25.000 They just have ideas and they go and flush them out on stage and then they keep going up.

02:32:29.000 They go up in different clubs and they flush it out further.

02:32:31.000 And they don't write anything down.

02:32:32.000 They do it sort of like Jay-Z does rap.

02:32:35.000 Jay-Z doesn't write any of his lyrics down.

02:32:37.000 He just memorizes them.

02:32:39.000 He makes them up.

02:32:46.000 Right.

02:32:51.000 Right.

02:32:52.000 Right.

02:33:02.000 But how often, like, when you're going in unrehearsed, improvisational like that, is it a bust?

02:33:10.000 Do you not connect?

02:33:11.000 Do you lose your way?

02:33:12.000 All the time.

02:33:13.000 Yeah, if you want to improvise.

02:33:14.000 I think what most of us do is you improvise as like a hammock in between two poles.

02:33:23.000 So you have a pole, like the pole's like a foundation pole.

02:33:26.000 You have a bit that you know works.

02:33:29.000 This is rock solid.

02:33:30.000 So you can come back to it.

02:33:31.000 So you do this.

02:33:32.000 Bang, bang, bang. 0.89

02:33:33.000 You get the audience confidence. 1.00

02:33:34.000 And then you try some new shit on them. 0.99

02:33:36.000 You give it a shot. 1.00

02:33:37.000 And maybe it's a dip.

02:33:39.000 And maybe it's solid.

02:33:40.000 You never know.

02:33:41.000 There's been moments where I've created bits...

02:33:45.000 For whatever reason, just work right out of the gate.

02:33:48.000 And then there's other ones where you're like, God, I should abandon this.

02:33:51.000 But you don't want to.

02:33:52.000 You're like, God, I know there's some way to do this.

02:33:54.000 I have this idea that I think is viable.

02:33:57.000 I just don't know exactly how to do it.

02:34:00.000 And then you'll experiment and you'll twist and you'll turn.

02:34:02.000 And sometimes you start it backwards.

02:34:05.000 You work backwards from the punchline.

02:34:07.000 You try to figure out a way to make it work.

02:34:10.000 And 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?

02:34:17.000 Well, I don't rehearse, ever.

02:34:19.000 But 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.

02:34:28.000 And when I write, I write in total silence.

02:34:30.000 I just write, just me sitting in front of a laptop, just writing.

02:34:34.000 And then I have...

02:34:43.000 I remember when Harvey Weinstein first got busted. 0.99

02:34:47.000 I remember right away thinking that this is so fucked up. 1.00

02:34:52.000 Especially 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. 1.00

02:35:10.000 But if Harvina Weinstein came to my son with a solid contract, I'd be like, dude, you're gonna be Batman. 1.00

02:35:20.000 And I went on stage with that idea, you know?

02:35:27.000 And I just ran with it.

02:35:29.000 I went on stage literally the day he got arrested.

02:35:32.000 Or the day, you know, the story broke and he was in trouble. 0.99

02:35:35.000 Whatever the fuck happened to him. 0.96

02:35:37.000 I don't remember how it all went down. 0.99

02:35:38.000 But that day, I went on stage with it, thinking about it.

02:35:42.000 It's so ballsy, though, man.

02:35:44.000 To me, it's just like you're walking a tightrope in front of a room full of people with a notion and a hunch.

02:35:50.000 That one I knew. 0.99

02:35:51.000 Sometimes you write some shit down. 0.99

02:35:53.000 It's like, that's gonna pop. 0.99

02:35:54.000 I'm like, dude, you're gonna be Batman.

02:35:56.000 I'm like, that's gonna...

02:35:58.000 And it was literally the day of, so everybody knew, and I opened with it.

02:36:02.000 I walked on stage, that was the first thing I said.

02:36:05.000 So how much in stand-up do you have to be kind of tuned up?

02:36:09.000 Is it something where doing it all the time keeps you polished to go out there?

02:36:13.000 Oh yeah, yeah.

02:36:13.000 100%?

02:36:14.000 Yeah, I'm totally out of shape now.

02:36:15.000 I have to get myself in shape when I do shows.

02:36:18.000 Like I was doing these shows with Dave Chappelle.

02:36:20.000 We were doing a Stubbs barbecue as an amphitheater, and we were doing a residency in town.

02:36:26.000 And what we did was COVID test the entire crowd, and then we'd go out.

02:36:31.000 But what I had to do for that is very different than any other show.

02:36:34.000 So what I had to do for that is I would sit for hours and go over my material, and then I would listen to recordings.

02:36:41.000 And so I listen to recordings of sets.

02:36:44.000 I have on my phone hundreds and hundreds of sets, because that's kind of how I review stuff.

02:36:50.000 There's many different steps.

02:36:51.000 That's your rewrite process, sort of.

02:36:53.000 Yeah, 100%.

02:36:54.000 And 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.

02:37:08.000 Like, oh, but what about...

02:37:09.000 I could say this.

02:37:10.000 Or maybe I could take it that way.

02:37:12.000 It's like the amount of...

02:37:14.000 There's no substitute for actually performing, for doing sets.

02:37:19.000 But I think listening to a set is worth about 40% of doing a set.

02:37:24.000 Interesting.

02:37:25.000 Not 100%, but 40%.

02:37:26.000 So you've got to listen to a bunch of sets.

02:37:28.000 And then you can kind of get yourself back into where you are.

02:37:31.000 And then writing out the material is good for about 10%.

02:37:36.000 So, like, there's a whole series of things that I do.

02:37:40.000 And I started doing that before shows, especially when I started doing arenas.

02:37:43.000 Like, I started doing arenas.

02:37:45.000 Like, you're doing, like, 15,000 people, 20,000 people.

02:37:47.000 It's weird.

02:37:48.000 That's nuts.

02:37:49.000 That's crazy, dude.

02:37:50.000 That's unfathomable to me.

02:37:51.000 So that, I started writing bits out.

02:37:55.000 I would literally, like, write bits out for hours.

02:37:58.000 So I'd get in my hotel room and I'd write the bits out. 0.94

02:38:02.000 But that way they're fucking cemented in my head. 0.62

02:38:05.000 And then there's a freedom of that where you could just be completely loose. 0.96

02:38:09.000 You don't ever want to be thinking about what you're going to say.

02:38:12.000 You want to be in the moment.

02:38:14.000 So you've cooked it in the writing process in that scenario.

02:38:16.000 You've done enough writing the bits that you've got it locked in so you can still be loose then.

02:38:21.000 Yeah, so my notebook is not really a notebook.

02:38:23.000 It's a notebook, but I don't write in my notebook in terms of new ideas.

02:38:27.000 The notebook is really the ideas I already have written down over and over and over again.

02:38:32.000 If you read my notebook, it's like Jack Nicholson, The Shining.

02:38:36.000 All work, no play makes Jack a dull boy.

02:38:38.000 I'm really writing bits over and over again, page after page.

02:38:42.000 Yeah, I'm just getting them burned into my head, like that moment.

02:38:46.000 But the writing process on a computer is very different.

02:38:49.000 That's just...

02:38:53.000 I do it in Scrivener, and I do it in a bunch of different forms.

02:39:01.000 I just get bored, so I write it in...

02:39:03.000 There's a thing called Write Room.

02:39:06.000 I like to use that, too.

02:39:07.000 When I use a Mac, I use that.

02:39:09.000 But most of the time, I write on a Windows PC, because I find like...

02:39:13.000 Think pads.

02:39:13.000 They have better keyboards.

02:39:14.000 So I don't have to think about where my fingers are going.

02:39:17.000 It just sort of flows and it lets me get into a mind state better.

02:39:20.000 But there's a lot of different...

02:39:21.000 But doing these shows now because of COVID, I don't perform every night anymore.

02:39:27.000 And there's no comedy store anymore.

02:39:28.000 It's completely closed down.

02:39:30.000 So I'm out here in Austin and there's a few places to perform.

02:39:34.000 It's a little irresponsible to do shows and promote them with no audience testing.

02:39:41.000 Right.

02:39:42.000 We're coming, though.

02:39:43.000 We're coming toward the light.

02:39:45.000 Yeah, it's close.

02:39:46.000 We're getting close.

02:39:47.000 So when everything gets popping again, I know I can get ready again.

02:39:53.000 I know I can do it.

02:39:54.000 And how much do you share that methodology with your colleagues?

02:39:58.000 How much do you shop talk with these others?

02:40:00.000 All the time.

02:40:01.000 Everybody does it different.

02:40:02.000 I think one thing that separates some folks from others is work ethic.

02:40:07.000 Some people don't have a good work ethic.

02:40:09.000 Like some guys just are not good at writing.

02:40:12.000 They don't like to sit down and write. 0.86

02:40:14.000 Because comics in general tend to be sort of fuck-ups. 0.83

02:40:19.000 Not in a bad way. 0.92

02:40:20.000 I mean, that's why you became a comic. 1.00

02:40:22.000 You fucked off at work or you fucked off at school and you're impulsive and kind of wild and crazy. 1.00

02:40:28.000 To make people laugh. 1.00

02:40:28.000 That's not the type of person who sits down and disciplines himself. 1.00

02:40:31.000 So it's like you have to kind of be a hybrid.

02:40:33.000 You have to be a hybrid of someone who's disciplined just to squeeze the most out.

02:40:38.000 You don't have to. 0.99

02:40:40.000 Guys have gotten really far by never writing a goddamn thing down and never listening to a goddamn single set. 0.99

02:40:46.000 They just perform enough and they get into the flow. 0.98

02:40:49.000 And 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.

02:40:59.000 Just perform almost every night of the week.

02:41:02.000 That way it's just you're never out of shape.

02:41:04.000 It's always burned in your mind.

02:41:06.000 But I come from this school of thoughts of, like, with martial arts.

02:41:11.000 Martial arts, you can, like, with jujitsu.

02:41:14.000 Jujitsu's a good example.

02:41:15.000 You learn techniques, and then you go apply them when you spar.

02:41:20.000 But if you drill, you get way better, meaning you practice scenarios over and over again.

02:41:27.000 Like 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.

02:41:37.000 And you would tap, and then I would do it over and over and over and over again.

02:41:40.000 And then you would do it to me over and over and over and over again.

02:41:44.000 And then I'd do it to you. 1.00

02:41:45.000 And it's fucking boring. 0.99

02:41:46.000 But it makes it instinctual and reflexive. 0.99

02:41:49.000 It makes all the difference in the world.

02:41:51.000 The biggest jump that I ever made in my jiu-jitsu was drilling.

02:41:56.000 I learned when I was a blue belt to drill, and I got way better because of that.

02:42:02.000 It made a giant difference.

02:42:04.000 Within a course of six months, I jumped up several notches, 100% because of drilling.

02:42:10.000 I became much more successful.

02:42:12.000 And so you're saying the application of that to comedy then?

02:42:15.000 Yes, is the writing part.

02:42:16.000 It's just sitting down and going over the material and drilling it into your head and then listening to the sets.

02:42:20.000 It's really kind of the same thing.

02:42:22.000 It's like that's what you don't want to do.

02:42:24.000 What you want to do in jujitsu is you want to go out there and roll.

02:42:27.000 Rolling is sparring.

02:42:28.000 Like you and I would slap hands and then we would just practice on each other.

02:42:34.000 It's fun.

02:42:34.000 It's fun to do.

02:42:35.000 It's like a real live video game.

02:42:37.000 Yeah.

02:42:37.000 It's just exciting.

02:42:38.000 You're just doing it, and you get better by doing it.

02:42:42.000 And a lot of guys do just get really good just by doing it.

02:42:45.000 But 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.

02:42:56.000 All things that most people don't want to do.

02:42:59.000 But that's the discipline and craft, I think, of anything, right?

02:43:02.000 You 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.

02:43:17.000 That's what gives you the level of Polish and precision.

02:43:20.000 It also, that's what gets, you get further ahead.

02:43:23.000 That's what I've always told people about podcasts, too.

02:43:25.000 You know, a lot of comics started out with me.

02:43:29.000 We started doing podcasts at the same time, but I grind.

02:43:33.000 Like, I do a lot of them.

02:43:35.000 And they're like, why do you do a lot of them?

02:43:37.000 I go, first of all, because there's a lot of cool people to talk to.

02:43:40.000 And second of all, because that's how you get people addicted.

02:43:42.000 Right.

02:43:43.000 You don't get people addicted with one a month.

02:43:45.000 Right.

02:43:45.000 You gotta drop them all the time.

02:43:46.000 Yeah, you drop four a week.

02:43:47.000 And they're like, four? 1.00

02:43:48.000 Fuck that. 1.00

02:43:49.000 That's like a job. 1.00

02:43:50.000 I'm like, yeah, it's a job.

02:43:51.000 You gotta work.

02:43:53.000 I like working.

02:43:54.000 I like it.

02:43:55.000 I have a question for you.

02:43:56.000 Somebody, 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. 0.98

02:44:15.000 Chasing bullshit. 0.97

02:44:16.000 Is that true? 0.99

02:44:17.000 I mean, how much have you got your operation dialed at this point so that you're just doing what you do all the time?

02:44:24.000 Well, I have modes, right?

02:44:25.000 So, like, I have workout mode.

02:44:28.000 And workout mode, you know, I don't...

02:44:31.000 I might look at my phone if I'm lifting weights, because if I'm lifting weights, I take a lot of time in between sets, right?

02:44:37.000 But like, say if I'm hitting the bag, or if I'm doing jujitsu, or doing something, some endurance-based thing, I just do it.

02:44:45.000 That's mode.

02:44:46.000 If I'm doing yoga, right?

02:44:48.000 That's yoga mode.

02:44:49.000 I just do that.

02:44:51.000 That's it.

02:44:52.000 So it's one thing at a time, fully focused, is what you're saying.

02:44:55.000 100%.

02:44:55.000 And when it's done, it's done.

02:44:57.000 But then I can go, like if I'm doing stand-up, When I work on stand-up, if I'm working on writing, or if I'm working on...

02:45:04.000 When you're doing stand-up on stage, it's the ultimate, right?

02:45:07.000 Because you can't think of anything else.

02:45:09.000 You're not multitasking.

02:45:10.000 You're just doing stand-up.

02:45:12.000 And so the same is true with jiu-jitsu.

02:45:15.000 If you're sparring in jiu-jitsu and you're thinking about other things, you're going to get strangled.

02:45:19.000 You have to be completely focused on what you're doing.

02:45:21.000 And that's how I like to...

02:45:23.000 If I'm doing a podcast, my phone goes on silent, I push it.

02:45:26.000 I see people doing podcasts and they're checking their phone while they're doing a podcast. 0.99

02:45:30.000 I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? 0.96

02:45:31.000 Yeah, you're not locked in. 0.99

02:45:32.000 Like, what are you doing?

02:45:33.000 Don't do that.

02:45:34.000 And I've been guilty of that over the years.

02:45:37.000 I stopped a long time ago looking at my phone during shows, but...

02:45:43.000 You lose something if you're not paying attention to what you're doing.

02:45:49.000 You lose focus.

02:45:50.000 Well, also, we live in a culture where everybody's multitasking all the time, and you're very rarely locked in, right?

02:45:57.000 It's like, okay, I'm rolling calls while I'm driving, or I'm doing whatever, and I think that...

02:46:02.000 To do anything well, it does take like the world drops away, man.

02:46:07.000 When 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.

02:46:14.000 It's the only way to do it well because all this stuff is hard.

02:46:18.000 Yeah.

02:46:19.000 And I think especially when you're doing a podcast, if you're not locked in, people can tell.

02:46:25.000 It's drifty.

02:46:25.000 Yeah.

02:46:27.000 Well, they also can tell that you're...

02:46:29.000 Like, they're listening to the tennis match.

02:46:32.000 They're listening to the boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop.

02:46:35.000 They're listening to the wrestling match.

02:46:37.000 They're listening to the conversation.

02:46:39.000 If it's not...

02:46:41.000 If I'm not paying attention to you, if I'm just talking, that becomes evident.

02:46:46.000 If you're just not listening to me, it becomes...

02:46:48.000 But when there's a dance, there's a nice dance, that's when it's enjoyable.

02:46:53.000 And it's difficult to achieve.

02:46:54.000 And you don't always achieve that dance with everybody.

02:46:57.000 Sometimes it's like you dance and then I dance.

02:47:00.000 And some people, it's just how you converse with them.

02:47:02.000 And then you have to kind of...

02:47:03.000 It makes it more awkward because you're starting and restarting.

02:47:06.000 That's the real problem with Zoom calls.

02:47:08.000 That's why I stopped doing these Zoom videos...

02:47:10.000 They're just too weird.

02:47:12.000 Yeah.

02:47:12.000 You can't get a rhythm.

02:47:13.000 Yeah.

02:47:14.000 The person's not there.

02:47:15.000 But sometimes you can with someone that you know really well.

02:47:18.000 And you're doing this...

02:47:19.000 Like I did one recently with my friend Ari.

02:47:22.000 And I've known him forever.

02:47:23.000 We're so close.

02:47:24.000 It's easy.

02:47:25.000 I can talk to him.

02:47:27.000 We just know each other.

02:47:28.000 It's easy to do.

02:47:30.000 But for most of the time, they're like, you talk, I talk.

02:47:34.000 You talk, I talk.

02:47:35.000 It's just...

02:47:36.000 It doesn't feel good.

02:47:37.000 Even 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.

02:47:52.000 But it's a very different kind of a conversation.

02:47:55.000 What you just made me think of is I saw an interview, I think, with Errol Morris about how he makes those documentaries.

02:48:01.000 And he said, my job is I'm a conversationalist.

02:48:04.000 It's not just me asking a question, you answering it.

02:48:07.000 It's like I'm locked in in a dialogue.

02:48:09.000 And that's where the interesting thing happens is when it's a tennis match.

02:48:13.000 You're hitting the ball back and forth, which I thought was interesting.

02:48:16.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:48:17.000 People call a podcast an interview.

02:48:19.000 I don't really interview people.

02:48:21.000 I have interviewed people.

02:48:23.000 There have been some people that I interviewed.

02:48:25.000 But most of the time, I'm talking to people.

02:48:28.000 I just record it.

02:48:30.000 I 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.

02:48:41.000 There'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.

02:48:47.000 But for the most part, it's just you let it play out.

02:48:51.000 And 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.

02:49:02.000 It's taught me a lot about communication.

02:49:04.000 It's taught me a lot about...

02:49:05.000 How 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.

02:49:13.000 How 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?

02:49:25.000 Most of it is intuiting.

02:49:28.000 That's a good word.

02:49:29.000 Intuiting?

02:49:30.000 Is that how you say it?

02:49:31.000 Most of it is intuition.

02:49:33.000 And most of it is just learned lessons over time.

02:49:39.000 But it's also, you know, I've listened to some podcasts that I did in the past and I didn't like things.

02:49:46.000 Just like listening to a set.

02:49:48.000 And you don't like certain aspects of it.

02:49:50.000 So you learn how to not do it the wrong way.

02:49:53.000 There's a skill to it.

02:49:55.000 It's also, conversations, they're not just the information that's being relayed.

02:50:02.000 It's the sound.

02:50:03.000 It's the way people talk.

02:50:05.000 It's the pace.

02:50:06.000 It's the...

02:50:07.000 Rhythm.

02:50:08.000 Yeah, there's a thing going on.

02:50:10.000 You know, like, stand-up comedy is not just the writing.

02:50:14.000 It's also the way you deliver it.

02:50:16.000 It's the same thing with music.

02:50:18.000 When someone sings, right, it's not just the lyrics of the songs.

02:50:21.000 Okay, so fascinating how this applies to documentaries is, you know, people ask me, like, oh, how does the documentary thing work? 0.55

02:50:29.000 And 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.

02:50:48.000 And then, on top of it, it's not, with documentaries, documentaries need a performance too.

02:50:55.000 It's not just like, here's the facts of the story.

02:50:58.000 It's, you gotta horse whisper people into like, okay, I'm ready.

02:51:02.000 I mean, when I'm sitting there with Tarzan in Moscow, he's like, I'm not ready to be telling this story right now.

02:51:07.000 We're needing to be drinking a little bit of vodka. 0.97

02:51:09.000 You know, I may be needing blowjob right now. 0.99

02:51:11.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

02:51:11.000 Or whatever. 0.99

02:51:12.000 And so you recognize, okay, now's not the time to roll, because I can't force this.

02:51:17.000 It'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.

02:51:28.000 But 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.

02:51:39.000 Yeah, I mean, you're making a piece of art, and you're doing it about facts, and with real people, and you're...

02:51:47.000 That's why, is there a...

02:51:48.000 Like, what's more satisfying to you, doing that, doing like the 7-5, or doing something like Silk Road, where it's...

02:51:57.000 I always want to do both.

02:52:00.000 And 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.

02:52:13.000 I'm listening to the way...

02:52:15.000 Cops 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.

02:52:27.000 So they like completely cross pollinate with one another. 0.67

02:52:31.000 You know?

02:52:32.000 And 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,

02:52:51.000 and it's like, you know, a little bit, you know, weird power dynamics.

02:52:55.000 Like, I know those guys.

02:52:56.000 I've spent time with them.

02:52:57.000 And also, We're good to go.

02:53:12.000 Tell these guys whatever you can gain.

02:53:14.000 And with smart actors, you put them in that position and they'll steal the little materials.

02:53:20.000 Like at the time that I was making Silk Road, it was this crazy experience because I had three projects that were going simultaneously.

02:53:27.000 I was doing Night Stalker for Netflix.

02:53:30.000 I was doing The Last Narc about the Kiki Camarena murder in 1985. And I was doing Silk Road at the same time.

02:53:37.000 And I thought, man, how am I going to survive this?

02:53:40.000 This is so complicated.

02:53:41.000 I'm juggling so much at any given time.

02:53:44.000 And it was what you said, where it was like, okay, I'm locked in right now.

02:53:47.000 Right 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.

02:53:55.000 This joke's not working.

02:53:56.000 This needs to be more dramatic and change the music cue.

02:53:59.000 And I don't have time to do anything else, so I know the trains have to leave the station.

02:54:03.000 And 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.

02:54:16.000 And then I had Jason Clarke, who was going to be playing a DEA guy.

02:54:19.000 And I was like, you know what I need to do?

02:54:20.000 These two cats need to get a taco together. 1.00

02:54:44.000 And so I was like, And it's Hector's belt buckle. 1.00

02:54:47.000 And I'm like, that son of a bitch, dude. 1.00

02:54:49.000 That's so smart. 1.00

02:54:50.000 He stole that from Hector because that's like a street thing.

02:54:53.000 Whereas, you know, I'm the rooster, man.

02:54:55.000 You know, and he had that on his buckle.

02:54:56.000 And I thought, that's a really smart, that's a smart actor, you know?

02:55:01.000 What you're talking about, about the way you do things, about the way you lock into things, that's discipline.

02:55:10.000 That's hard for people.

02:55:11.000 Have you ever read Steven Pressfield's The War of Art?

02:55:15.000 No.

02:55:15.000 It's a really good book about that in particular.

02:55:19.000 I used to keep a stack of them and I used to hand them out to people.

02:55:22.000 When I did the podcast, the early days of the podcast, I literally had like 10 of them in the room.

02:55:27.000 I bought a bunch of them.

02:55:29.000 Because it's a small book.

02:55:30.000 It's easy to read.

02:55:31.000 But it's about...

02:55:32.000 A lot of it details his own personal journey with dealing with what he calls resistance.

02:55:39.000 And resistance being this... 0.99

02:55:41.000 The urge to fuck off and not do the work. 1.00

02:55:45.000 The procrastination. 1.00

02:55:47.000 Just get distracted.

02:55:49.000 Like...

02:55:49.000 Like, Louis C.K., when he writes, his computer doesn't connect to the internet.

02:55:53.000 He can't connect.

02:55:54.000 He has a computer that he writes on that doesn't go online.

02:55:57.000 So the email doesn't come.

02:55:58.000 The text doesn't come.

02:55:59.000 You can't look at porn.

02:56:00.000 You can't look at what's the new cool car that's out.

02:56:03.000 He just writes.

02:56:05.000 And Steven Pressfield wrote about...

02:56:10.000 Resistance being this thing that you have that keeps you from doing the work.

02:56:16.000 This thing that distracts people.

02:56:18.000 And he has a name for it.

02:56:19.000 He calls it resistance.

02:56:20.000 And he also has a name for the muse.

02:56:23.000 What he calls the muse.

02:56:25.000 Not a name for it.

02:56:26.000 This term.

02:56:27.000 This discussion of this thing as a real...

02:56:32.000 Like a real entity that you sit down and you do the work and you sit down like a professional.

02:56:39.000 Like you have a very rigid time that you're going to do this and you have no distractions.

02:56:43.000 And if you do that, and if you do that enough, the muse will entertain you.

02:56:49.000 The muse will show up.

02:56:50.000 If you are a professional and you really do...

02:56:53.000 Have the focus and the discipline and call upon the muse and do your due diligence.

02:56:58.000 The muse will reward you.

02:57:01.000 And he talks about it like it's a real thing.

02:57:04.000 And it's really interesting because if you treat it like it's a real thing, it does work.

02:57:09.000 I don't think there's really a ghost out there that's bringing you these ideas.

02:57:14.000 But if you treat it like there's a ghost out there that's bringing you these ideas...

02:57:19.000 Well, there may be.

02:57:20.000 I 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?

02:57:27.000 He's like, I don't write them songs, they just fall down from the sky, you know?

02:57:30.000 And 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.

02:57:38.000 Like, 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.

02:57:48.000 And that's because he's a worker and a grinder, so that when you're doing that, then it can come down, right?

02:57:54.000 Something can be transmitted, I think.

02:57:56.000 I believe that.

02:57:56.000 I believe that, too.

02:57:57.000 I don't know what it is.

02:57:59.000 What's Pressfield's background?

02:58:00.000 He's a writer.

02:58:01.000 He's a screenwriter, author.

02:58:03.000 But what's interesting is he was kind of a failure for a lot of his life, and then around 40, Figured it out. 0.99

02:58:11.000 Got his shit together and wrote some amazing shit. 0.99

02:58:16.000 Legend of Bagger Vance. 1.00

02:58:17.000 Wrote a bunch of different books.

02:58:20.000 Books on...

02:58:21.000 What did he write books on?

02:58:23.000 Was it the Romans? 0.96

02:58:25.000 The Greeks? 0.99

02:58:27.000 He wrote a bunch of different shit, but I haven't read any of it. 0.99

02:58:31.000 I know it's well respected and regarded, but that's right. 0.98

02:58:36.000 But The War of Art is...

02:58:39.000 I will definitely get hip to that, because I'm always interested in...

02:58:47.000 The ones who get somewhere, I mean, you get those out-of-the-box geniuses who do something at 18 years old or 22, whatever.

02:58:54.000 But most of the people that are getting to work are the people that just keep showing up.

02:58:59.000 I've got my teeth kicked in 7,000 times, but I just keep showing up because it's like, man, I don't know what else to do.

02:59:06.000 I love it.

02:59:07.000 So if you've got to kick my teeth out every now and then, I'm still coming back for more.

02:59:10.000 But it's also that you know there's a way to do this better than how you've done it.

02:59:15.000 It's like everyone who's done anything in life where you've had some success, and some success is the spark, right?

02:59:23.000 It's like that's the thing with stand-up comedy.

02:59:24.000 Have you gotten any laughs?

02:59:26.000 Like, if you've never gotten any laughs, maybe you should quit.

02:59:28.000 But if you've gotten some laughs, like every now and then you say a joke, like, ba-ba-ba, and they, you know, like...

02:59:34.000 But if Harvina Weinstein, and then everybody laughs, like, oh my god, I hit a spark.

02:59:39.000 There's something there.

02:59:40.000 And you realize it, and the audience, but then you fail.

02:59:45.000 Then you stumble.

02:59:46.000 Like, well, what was it that you nailed?

02:59:48.000 How do you get back there?

02:59:50.000 And then you figure out how to do it better.

02:59:53.000 You review your failures, and from them, you figure out where you turned wrong and went off the cliff.

03:00:00.000 You know, how do you stay on the road?

03:00:02.000 How do you accelerate?

03:00:04.000 How do you avoid all the cones?

03:00:06.000 Like, how do you do it right?

03:00:08.000 Well, 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.

03:00:17.000 So, like, and in a weird way, I feel like I haven't even started working yet.

03:00:20.000 Like, 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.

03:00:29.000 Yeah.

03:00:30.000 Well, some people, there's a certain point in time where they lose energy.

03:00:34.000 And I don't know what it is.

03:00:36.000 And I suspect that some of it is physical.

03:00:38.000 Some of it has to do with age and it has to do with health.

03:00:41.000 Well, you lose vitality and you lose your ability to be enthusiastic about things.

03:00:45.000 And that's one of the...

03:00:46.000 I mean, I'm committed to health and fitness just because that's something I enjoy and I like it.

03:00:52.000 But also because when you have energy, you can put more energy into things.

03:00:58.000 And as you get older, that energy wanes.

03:01:01.000 And 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.

03:01:09.000 You 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,

03:01:28.000 and there's more Or you hit a point where you get clean at a certain point.

03:01:36.000 Suddenly Brad Pitt stops drinking and then turns in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

03:01:43.000 But Brad Pitt never did any bad work.

03:01:45.000 Yeah, he was always great. 0.92

03:01:46.000 I could watch that guy take a piss and it'd be fascinating. 0.78

03:01:49.000 He's a hard one to...

03:01:51.000 No, but I just mean like that's somebody that yes, the work was amazing early and like I can't wait to like that forever.

03:01:57.000 That guy's just getting more better and more interesting and more amazing.

03:02:01.000 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

03:02:03.000 For sure.

03:02:04.000 But then you got guys like Bukowski.

03:02:05.000 Drink to the Grave.

03:02:07.000 Merrily, all the way, baby! 1.00

03:02:09.000 Writing 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. 1.00

03:02:19.000 But something was coming through, like God was coming through, or whatever it is, it's like he was able to... 1.00

03:02:26.000 To capture it.

03:02:27.000 You know what it was coming through with, I think, with Bukowski?

03:02:30.000 I've been listening to a lot of him lately.

03:02:31.000 His authenticity.

03:02:33.000 That's who that guy was.

03:02:35.000 Warts and all.

03:02:36.000 Flaws.

03:02:37.000 Poem after poem.

03:02:38.000 Word after word.

03:02:39.000 Just super real.

03:02:40.000 Yeah.

03:02:41.000 And raw.

03:02:42.000 And also, really lived a terrible life before he became a successful poet. 0.99

03:02:48.000 Not a terrible life, but just an unfulfilling, shitty post office. 0.99

03:02:52.000 Post office, man. 0.99

03:02:53.000 Yeah. 1.00

03:02:53.000 And was told by his parents, like, you're never going to amount to shit. 1.00

03:02:56.000 You don't have any talent. 1.00

03:02:57.000 This is a waste of time.

03:02:59.000 Yeah.

03:02:59.000 Well, it's like Orson Welles said, man, better late than early, you know?

03:03:03.000 Yes.

03:03:04.000 Yeah, better late than early.

03:03:05.000 And then there's guys like that, too, that they let you know, like, hey, there's no real roadmap.

03:03:11.000 Everybody's got their own path.

03:03:13.000 This guy's path is not the same path as Thoreau.

03:03:19.000 And they're never replicable.

03:03:21.000 I'm always fascinated because it's like, okay, how did you get here?

03:03:25.000 And you learn something, but you're never going to walk that same path.

03:03:29.000 But you do learn something by how people got to where they got.

03:03:32.000 You also carry them with you.

03:03:35.000 I don't think I'm an individual.

03:03:38.000 I think I'm an accumulation of all the people that I've ever met and all the experiences that I've ever had.

03:03:43.000 And it's one of the things about this podcast that has been insanely rewarding for me is that I can talk to so many different people.

03:03:52.000 And I can have these.

03:03:53.000 How many times do you even get a chance to talk to Sure.

03:04:06.000 Sure.

03:04:08.000 Sure. 1.00

03:04:17.000 I have random shit in my head. 0.99

03:04:20.000 I'll have a conversation with someone and I'll go, well, that's actually because of this. 1.00

03:04:23.000 And then they'll go, how the fuck do you even know that? 0.74

03:04:25.000 I had a conversation with this scientist and he explained it all to me and I just remembered that part. 0.60

03:04:30.000 Well, and the weird thing is...

03:04:32.000 It's also this – and I never thought about it before like this – but you're also providing this record of humanity, right?

03:04:39.000 This is like all of us are struggling with, hey, this is my experience of the world.

03:04:43.000 This is my record.

03:04:44.000 This is what I know.

03:04:45.000 And you're having this parade of people come through here and everybody's giving you like, hey, man, this is what I got.

03:04:51.000 This is what I learned.

03:04:52.000 This is what I think is funny or whatever it is.

03:04:54.000 And your work has been this document of like what people have to give.

03:05:00.000 Yeah, and there's certain key components that we'll show you.

03:05:08.000 There's certain key things that you kind of have.

03:05:12.000 What do we all want?

03:05:14.000 We all want to be happy.

03:05:16.000 We all want to be successful.

03:05:18.000 We all want to be fulfilled.

03:05:19.000 We all want love.

03:05:21.000 How do you get those things?

03:05:23.000 Well, to be happy, first of all, you've got to be happy with what you're doing.

03:05:26.000 And that means happy with what you're doing in terms of who are you having relationships with?

03:05:31.000 Who are you having friendships with?

03:05:33.000 What are you doing for a living?

03:05:35.000 These are not easy questions.

03:05:37.000 These are not easy solutions.

03:05:38.000 And 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.

03:05:48.000 But there's a way.

03:05:50.000 You've got to figure out the way.

03:05:51.000 The way might take you 10 years or it might take you 10 days.

03:05:55.000 Everybody's got a different way.

03:05:57.000 That's big.

03:06:00.000 You want to be happy.

03:06:01.000 You've got to figure out what you enjoy doing.

03:06:04.000 Maybe you enjoy doing a lot of things, but you've got to pick one of those. 0.99

03:06:07.000 And whatever that thing is, you gotta pour yourself into that fucking thing. 0.98

03:06:12.000 You can't leave any stone unturned. 0.99

03:06:15.000 You can't leave any page unturned.

03:06:17.000 You gotta put it in.

03:06:20.000 You gotta put that time in.

03:06:21.000 You have to.

03:06:22.000 If you don't, you'll have regret.

03:06:24.000 And that's one of the saddest things.

03:06:26.000 You can have mistakes.

03:06:27.000 You can feel bad about failures.

03:06:31.000 Those are good for you.

03:06:32.000 But you can't have regret for not putting in the work.

03:06:35.000 Because if you have that, then you realize you could have been something.

03:06:39.000 You could have been something.

03:06:40.000 You could have been happy.

03:06:41.000 You could have been successful.

03:06:42.000 You could have been fulfilled.

03:06:44.000 You could have been inspired.

03:06:46.000 But instead, you slept in.

03:06:48.000 As you were saying that, it just struck me.

03:06:51.000 It's almost like the ultimate parenting advice, right?

03:06:54.000 It's like sort of what you're telling your kid, which is find something you love, man.

03:06:58.000 Like whatever it is, and go all in on that.

03:07:01.000 I mean, it's that and find somebody who loves you, who you love.

03:07:05.000 Like those are the two things.

03:07:06.000 As a dad, like...

03:07:08.000 You know what I want?

03:07:09.000 Forget all that success.

03:07:10.000 Forget money.

03:07:11.000 Like, 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.

03:07:19.000 Yeah, and I guess in a lot of ways with children in particular, they learn by example.

03:07:24.000 They learn by good example and bad example. 0.99

03:07:27.000 Like 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. 0.99

03:07:36.000 They see the failures. 0.99

03:07:37.000 A lot of people whose parents just were excuse makers and always negative, they don't tolerate that shit at all. 0.99

03:07:43.000 They're super positive and they're disciplined and they get after it. 0.99

03:07:46.000 And the reason why they do that is because they saw that...

03:07:49.000 The other side of it. 0.99

03:07:50.000 Yeah, they saw the fucking pitfalls of that kind of thinking and behavior. 0.99

03:07:54.000 Yeah. 0.98

03:07:54.000 You 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. 0.98

03:08:07.000 I 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.

03:08:17.000 There's something about it, it's like you don't want to do the things that you know you should do.

03:08:22.000 Right.

03:08:22.000 Well, it's boring and it's repetitive.

03:08:24.000 It's, you know, you're sitting there in the batting cage and you're hitting off the tee when you're a major leaguer.

03:08:28.000 But, like, those are the guys that are the ones that are winning the batting title, that are still hitting off the tee, you know?

03:08:33.000 Yeah, it's with everything, man.

03:08:36.000 It's with running.

03:08:39.000 It's with yoga.

03:08:40.000 It's with writing.

03:08:42.000 You've got to force yourself into action.

03:08:45.000 And one of the best ways, I've found, is to write down a list of what you're going to do today.

03:08:51.000 Write it down.

03:08:52.000 Like, and make it in advance.

03:08:54.000 It's best to make it before you go to bed.

03:08:56.000 Like, tomorrow, Tuesday morning, I am going to get up and I'm going to do this for an hour and I'm going to do that for an hour. 0.98

03:09:02.000 And fucking check that list. 0.96

03:09:05.000 Because 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. 0.99

03:09:13.000 You can make so much more progress that way than the people that just try to, like, wing it.

03:09:17.000 You can wing it.

03:09:18.000 You can get a lot of places winging it.

03:09:20.000 I got pretty far in life winging it.

03:09:21.000 I winged it and half-assed it and sort of slopped it out and improvised it for like a long time.

03:09:27.000 And then at a certain point it was like, man, this stuff is so hard.

03:09:30.000 It's so competitive.

03:09:31.000 People would give anything to do this that if you want to make a contribution, it's got to be tight.

03:09:37.000 Yeah.

03:09:38.000 I started realizing that when things were important, then I was going by a schedule.

03:09:43.000 I'm like, why don't I go by a schedule all the time?

03:09:46.000 When things would be important, like something was big that I was working towards, then I'd be on a schedule.

03:09:53.000 But then I'd realize, why don't I just do that all the time for things?

03:09:57.000 That's how you get ahead.

03:09:58.000 And then when you have relaxation time, you enjoy it because you've earned it. 0.98

03:10:05.000 Man, 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. 0.94

03:10:19.000 But man, if I haven't earned it, it feels terrible. 1.00

03:10:22.000 Watching TV when you're fucking off and you're supposed to be doing other things, you feel like a loser. 0.99

03:10:27.000 Well, people want to work. 0.99

03:10:29.000 Work is a force that gives us meaning.

03:10:33.000 And so you know your time has been well spent. 0.98

03:10:35.000 If you're busting your ass, then that is time well spent. 0.98

03:10:40.000 And I think one of the challenges for me is I have a hard time spinning down and then chilling out because I'm a grinder. 0.99

03:10:46.000 I just wake up and grind, grind, grind.

03:10:47.000 But you have to like...

03:10:49.000 Refresh and you have to chill and you gotta watch the fights and eat potato chips and chill out or you can't do good work all the time.

03:10:55.000 My wife has taught me that.

03:10:57.000 My wife has taught me how to go on vacations.

03:10:59.000 I never used to go on vacations because I used to think of going on vacations as like, I travel for work. 0.99

03:11:04.000 I'm not going to travel somewhere and fuck that. 0.97

03:11:07.000 But then I realized like there's real value in going somewhere and just shutting off. 1.00

03:11:11.000 Just drinking margaritas and laying on the beach and don't do a fucking thing. 0.98

03:11:16.000 Unless you want to do a thing. 0.98

03:11:17.000 Like, hey, let's throw a frisbee or let's jump in the ocean or let's get on a boat.

03:11:22.000 Or let's go for a hike. 0.93

03:11:24.000 Let's fucking go walk through the woods. 0.99

03:11:27.000 But just shut off sometimes. 0.99

03:11:29.000 You've got to be bored sometimes, too.

03:11:32.000 You can't always just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.

03:11:35.000 No, 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.

03:11:42.000 You 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.

03:11:51.000 So then he would wake up in the morning and he would know what the first sentence was.

03:11:54.000 Because then you're set and sail again.

03:11:57.000 He has one of the best quotes ever that my friend Ari has on his laptop today. 0.99

03:12:01.000 The first draft of everything is shit. 0.99

03:12:05.000 It's true, right? 1.00

03:12:06.000 It's so good.

03:12:07.000 It's true.

03:12:08.000 It's just letting you know, man.

03:12:09.000 Just get it out.

03:12:10.000 Get it out.

03:12:10.000 And it's also...

03:12:11.000 It's a momentum builder, right? 1.00

03:12:13.000 Just to understand that the first draft is shit. 0.99

03:12:16.000 Just get that first draft out and then start working on it. 0.98

03:12:18.000 So I got a question for you.

03:12:20.000 The podcast for you starts as a hobby, sideline.

03:12:25.000 It's not a job.

03:12:26.000 It's something you're doing that's...

03:12:36.000 I don't know.

03:12:40.000 It's gradual.

03:12:42.000 It just sort of gradually happens.

03:12:44.000 But even now, it's just a part of my life. 0.94

03:12:47.000 There's a lot of shit I'm looking forward to doing. 0.84

03:12:49.000 I know this podcast is basically over. 0.99

03:12:51.000 We're three hours in. 0.99

03:12:52.000 I got a lot of shit to do. 0.99

03:12:54.000 I'm thinking about it right now. 0.99

03:12:56.000 I'm thinking about, I didn't work out today.

03:12:59.000 I'm thinking about what I'm going to do when I work out.

03:13:01.000 I'm not going to work out until 9 o'clock.

03:13:03.000 Because that's when the kids go to bed.

03:13:04.000 So I've got ideas on that.

03:13:06.000 So I've got writing I've got to do.

03:13:08.000 I'm not going to do that until after that.

03:13:10.000 So I'm not going to go to bed until like 1. So I have all these things that I have to get in the sauna tonight.

03:13:14.000 I have a lot of shit to do. 0.94

03:13:16.000 But we were locked in for a minute there when the world falls away and none of that stuff matters, right? 0.99

03:13:21.000 No.

03:13:22.000 And that's when you're in it.

03:13:22.000 The 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.

03:13:30.000 We've done the work.

03:13:32.000 When 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.

03:13:47.000 These are here.

03:13:48.000 When you look at a project, do you think of your past work and think that it has to measure up to that?

03:13:56.000 Do you just concentrate on what it is and just pour yourself into it?

03:14:01.000 Do you look at your past body?

03:14:02.000 Does it have any impact on what you're planning on doing?

03:14:06.000 I don't want to repeat anything, right?

03:14:07.000 I don't like – there's a point at which it's I could keep doing the same thing over and over again.

03:14:14.000 And in some ways Hollywood wants you to do that because it's like, okay, we know you're in this lane.

03:14:19.000 Just keep doing this and make money.

03:14:21.000 But I – I think it's...

03:14:49.000 Staying open and letting the world bring you the thing.

03:14:53.000 Staying open and letting the world bring you the thing.

03:14:56.000 And then your world of making films about bizarre humans, it's a never-ending supply.

03:15:03.000 It's a carnival.

03:15:04.000 Life is a carnival.

03:15:05.000 And the crazies get my number one way or another.

03:15:08.000 And God bless them because this is what I have to give.

03:15:13.000 This is my record of humanity, so it's the best I can do.

03:15:16.000 Well, you're fulfilled, right?

03:15:18.000 You're doing what you're supposed to be doing.

03:15:20.000 That's all a person could ask for in life.

03:15:22.000 Doing what you're supposed to be doing.

03:15:25.000 That's right.

03:15:26.000 Let's wrap it up with that.

03:15:27.000 Done.

03:15:27.000 Beautiful.

03:15:27.000 Thank you, sir.

03:15:28.000 Excellent, man.

03:15:28.000 Appreciate you, brother.

03:15:29.000 Appreciate you.

03:15:29.000 Thank you very much.

03:15:30.000 Excellent.

03:15:30.000 Goodbye, ladies and gentlemen, non-binary folks.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 03, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1614 - Tiller Russell

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript