The Joe Rogan Experience - April 13, 2015


Joe Rogan Experience #633 - Alex Winter

Topics
drug laws changes surveillance drug war Mandy Mooney grab windowing file sharing highway changes mistakes Silk Road drug transactions and law enforcement involvement mainstream news narrative undercover agents and journalism decentralized drug markets Ross Chelsea Manning sentencing drug war prohibition 3D printing technology advances childhood trauma and addiction genetics
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Alex Winter
Mentioned
Napster Bitcoin Ross Ulbricht Alex Winter Dread Pirate Roberts Richard Plepler Sean Fanning Open Bazaar Lynn Neil Franklin Paul Stanley Jim Norton Bob Dylan Chrome Fucking Al Capone Charles Laquadera Robert Pattinson Glenn Greenwald Britney Spears Andy Greenberg and 32 more
Joe Rogan Experience - Fight Companion - April 11, 2015 (Part 2) Joe Rogan Experience #634 - Abby Martin

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 59 minutes

Words per minute

193.68

Word count

23,132

Sentence count

2,065

Harmful content

Misogyny

15

sentences flagged

Toxicity

250

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Director Alex Winter joins me to talk about his new documentary, "Deep Web: The Dark Web's Dark Side of the Internet." We talk about how he got involved with the project, how he came to make it, and why he thinks it's one of the most important documentaries of the 21st century. We also talk about the Silk Road website and how it changed the way we think about drugs and the dark web, and how he thinks about the legacy of Napster and the rise and fall of the internet as a whole. And we talk about what it means to be a "deep web" filmmaker and what it's like to make a documentary about the deep web. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve watched the film. If you haven t watched the movie or haven't watched the documentary, you ll want to skip to about 20 minutes into the description at the end of the episode. This episode is not for the faint hearted or the faint-hearted. If you re looking for a deep web documentary, this is the episode for you. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's a good listen, and if you like deep web documentaries, you'll definitely want to make sure to check out the Netflix documentary "Deep web: The Deep Web's Deep Side Of The Internet" on Amazon Prime Video. if you haven't already watched Deep web: Dark Web: Deep Web. You'll get a discount code for a copy of Deep Web: "Deeper Web" at checkout to get 20% off the final episode of Deep web, which includes a free copy of the film "The Dark Webstore, and a discount on the movie "Deepweb: The Internet's Deepest Side." at checkout at Amazon Prime and Vimeo. The Deepweb's Deepweb: Deep web's Deep Web is the Dark Side Of the Internet is the Deepest End of the Deep Web, where you'll get access to all sorts of deep web tools, tips, tips and tricks, including deep web access, and much more! to watch Deep Web-related resources, including Deep web Deep Web Deep Web tools, deep web tips, and so much more. Enjoyed this episode and share it on your social media platforms? Subscribe to Deepweb is a must-listeners! to get exclusive access to deep web content, and get exclusive behind-the-scenes access to Deep web episodes, and more.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Alex Winter.
00:00:01.000 Alright, we're live.
00:00:02.000 Nice to meet you, man.
00:00:03.000 You too. 0.96
00:00:04.000 I knew of you as an actor, and I knew of your work as a director, but I didn't know that you were into serious shit like this deep web documentary. 0.96
00:00:13.000 This is really fascinating. 0.80
00:00:15.000 I was watching it just before you got here, so it's all fresh and crackling in my mind.
00:00:19.000 Cool.
00:00:20.000 First of all, how'd you get involved in this?
00:00:23.000 Well, there's a couple things.
00:00:24.000 One is, first of all, it's great to be on the show.
00:00:26.000 I've been a big fan for a long time.
00:00:28.000 But I got online pretty heavily in the sort of late 80s, early 90s in what was known as the BBS Usenet era.
00:00:38.000 And in those days, I was really interested in sort of burgeoning online communities, people who were sort of the growth of Internet-based communities.
00:00:48.000 And in those days, you could get on and you would sort of create sort of clubs or groups or rooms, as they were called, with all kinds of like-minded people.
00:00:57.000 And then you started finding all kinds of stuff that was going on.
00:01:00.000 And it wasn't...
00:01:01.000 By any means, it's just illegal stuff.
00:01:03.000 It was sort of rarefied, specialized, whatever, politics, activism, people who are interested in drugs, people who are interested in sort of pushing boundaries in all these different ways.
00:01:15.000 And at that point, I discovered encryption, people who were using the Internet for anonymity and privacy.
00:01:21.000 Some of them were like...
00:01:22.000 Parts of like, you know, self-help groups or like rape counseling, any number of things.
00:01:26.000 But it was also people who were selling drugs.
00:01:28.000 So I first encountered the drug, the online drug markets in probably 90, 91. That's when I first discovered encrypted email and sort of this whole notion of like people who really were building encryption technologies for a number of reasons.
00:01:42.000 And so I found that interesting.
00:01:44.000 And I spent some years working on the Napster story.
00:01:48.000 I made a doc about the rise and fall of Napster called Downloaded.
00:01:52.000 And I met Sean Fanning and Sean Parker back in 2000 when AFTER was being decimated, shot at by all sides.
00:02:00.000 And I set out about telling their story.
00:02:02.000 That took me a while to get done and made.
00:02:05.000 But I'd met a lot of people in the technology sector working on that movie, both in kind of the public face of technology and the sort of privacy anonymity side, the sort of hackers, activists, cryptographers.
00:02:20.000 So...
00:02:20.000 Well, that was one of the things that I found interesting about the documentary initially, is that Silk Road wasn't necessary, and for folks who don't know what Silk Road is, Silk Road is this website that was taken down by the government because people were exchanging,
00:02:38.000 buying, and selling illegal drugs from it, amongst other things that are illegal.
00:02:43.000 But it was more of a community, it seems, than anything.
00:02:48.000 I've had a message board on my website since 1998 and it's got millions of posts and it's just this weird community of like-minded odd human beings and a lot of really fascinating intelligent human beings and I've had some really great exchanges and interactions with them and What I really got from what they were saying in the documentary was like the community that they had created Was in many ways like better than any community any of them knew in real life.
00:03:18.000 So it was much more than just Drugs are being sold there.
00:03:21.000 We have to shut it down.
00:03:22.000 It's like if drugs were being sold there It was a small part of what that thing was all about Yeah, I think that's true, and I think that's a very hard thing for people to understand.
00:03:34.000 Like you're saying, you got online at that point, and you started to see in those days, like in the late 90s, that communities were beginning to grow on the Internet, and they were really interesting.
00:03:46.000 I remember talking to Sean Fanning about this, that his biggest regret about the downfall of Napster was not that the service got taken online, but that the community got scattered.
00:03:54.000 You know, because it was this...
00:03:55.000 When I discovered Napster in 99, what blew my mind about it wasn't about...
00:03:59.000 I mean, music was interesting, but it wasn't about the music.
00:04:02.000 It was about the community.
00:04:03.000 It was like meeting all these people.
00:04:04.000 We were communicating in real time.
00:04:06.000 What had changed before them was really kind of cumbersome, the message boards you're talking about in the late 90s.
00:04:12.000 Now I'm like in real time with some guy in Russia, China, Germany, whatever.
00:04:17.000 And they're in my hard drive.
00:04:18.000 I'm in their hard drive.
00:04:19.000 It just got kicked to this whole other level.
00:04:21.000 And then you're talking about 100 million people on the Internet at once.
00:04:24.000 A lot of people didn't look at Napster as a community, and they still don't.
00:04:27.000 They just can't get past the piracy issue in their minds, where Napster wasn't created for file sharing.
00:04:34.000 It was created to build community.
00:04:35.000 The Silk Road, in this case, you have a manifesto, because you had all these people who built and created the thing who were writing all these manifestos.
00:04:43.000 So it was very evident that the Silk Road was created for this political kind of movement, this communal movement, that that was its agenda.
00:04:51.000 The Napster thing is interesting because Napster, although it was a file sharing program, the community that was attached to it, what the idea was, I think, about all this file sharing stuff, My feeling on it and my feeling from being connected to the internet was like we're entering this entirely new era of Art of digital stuff digital creations where it's this is gonna be slippery You're not gonna be able to just like
00:05:21.000 you know this guy stole a thousand CDs and copied them We found his CD copier and we know you know that this guy's making illegal What are those?
00:05:34.000 Bootleg CDs.
00:05:35.000 I mean, you used to have those in New York City.
00:05:37.000 Sure, yeah, all the time.
00:05:38.000 VHS tapes of movies that had just come out.
00:05:42.000 This was a different thing.
00:05:43.000 This was like the actual digital, and everybody was like, oh, what do you do about that?
00:05:47.000 Like, oh, there's a program, and you could just download these things, and anybody could just upload them, and then download them?
00:05:55.000 How are you going to stop that?
00:05:56.000 Yeah, it's impossible.
00:05:57.000 And it's true that it's slippery.
00:05:58.000 And that's why I like telling these stories.
00:06:00.000 It isn't black and white.
00:06:01.000 Their brains can't really handle it sometimes.
00:06:03.000 They want to go to one side of the issue in the way they see it in their mind or the other.
00:06:08.000 And they don't have, for whatever reason, the capacity to stay in the gray in the middle.
00:06:12.000 And the stories are always about what's going on in the gray.
00:06:15.000 Because the Silk Road is the same thing.
00:06:17.000 You know, you can say this is really bad.
00:06:19.000 This is drugs online.
00:06:20.000 This is flouting the law and all this stuff.
00:06:21.000 You got one side, the predominant side over there.
00:06:24.000 You got the other side, the radical alternative to that would be to say, yeah, but the drug war is a complete failure.
00:06:31.000 It's been four decades of destructive, you know, it's mostly about putting nonviolent minority offenders in prison by the millions and it's killing people and it's not helping people who need help in the drug world. 0.88
00:06:43.000 It's You know, making the drug issues criminal and not about health.
00:06:48.000 And you got those people over there saying this is all good.
00:06:51.000 You got all this room in the middle with a slippery reality, which is just as you said, I agree with that perspective.
00:06:57.000 This is a really big moment in human history.
00:07:01.000 It's too big for most of us to wrap our heads around.
00:07:03.000 These are huge changes that are afoot.
00:07:05.000 What Napster represented wasn't a couple of kids who wanted to create piracy.
00:07:09.000 Whether you can accept that reality or not, it's true.
00:07:12.000 You may not like it.
00:07:13.000 You may feel like the end result of what they did caused X, Y, and Z. But the reality of this is their minds, their visions, their goals were way beyond that.
00:07:24.000 And we're still not in the future that those guys saw.
00:07:27.000 We're still kind of back in the back ends.
00:07:29.000 Look at what we're seeing with Tidal and other service.
00:07:32.000 People are still trying to wrench the world back to where it was before Napster.
00:07:37.000 They're still trying to sort of undo the changes that have happened because it's scary, right?
00:07:42.000 We probably will end up in a world in the next 10, 20, 30 years as drug laws become more relaxed and the mandatory minimums start getting lowered, where we do see legitimate online drug services are going to become...
00:07:54.000 They're not going to go away.
00:07:55.000 They're going to stick around just like, you know, file sharing didn't go anywhere.
00:07:58.000 And my guess is that it probably will be somewhat the norm down the road.
00:08:03.000 And we'll look back at this time and go, wow, this thing we thought was so hardcore actually...
00:08:07.000 It was a very messy sort of movement towards where we needed to get to or towards the future.
00:08:12.000 Well, towards freedom.
00:08:14.000 I mean, I'm one of the ones that thinks that there should be no drug laws.
00:08:17.000 I think as long as alcohol is legal and as long as you can get a prescription for OxyContin, it's completely ridiculous to lock people up for mushrooms or to lock people up for popcorn.
00:08:27.000 Name your drug.
00:08:29.000 Pot being the most innocuous of all of them and changing daily as far as the way it's treated by law enforcement.
00:08:37.000 But I think the digital world that you're dealing with, like with Napster or with the Silk Road, Is this world of connectivity, and that's the big change.
00:08:51.000 It's not just the things that are being exchanged.
00:08:55.000 It's that people can talk to people. 0.99
00:08:58.000 The information can go so quickly now, and these communities can form, and they can say, yeah, I've always thought these laws are bullshit. 0.97
00:09:06.000 Explain to me why alcohol is legal and marijuana is not. 0.77
00:09:09.000 Explain to me why it's stealing to take a record that you paid for and share it with a bunch of people.
00:09:17.000 I had Paul Stanley on the podcast from Kiss, and he's a great guy.
00:09:21.000 I really enjoyed talking to him, but he's got this sort of really archaic idea of stealing.
00:09:27.000 You know, you didn't pay for it, it's stealing.
00:09:30.000 But your copy's still there.
00:09:33.000 You know, like, it's...
00:09:35.000 It's a different thing.
00:09:36.000 It's not like someone stole your car.
00:09:38.000 And they try to make that sort of comparison.
00:09:41.000 You know, if someone stole your car, they stole your car, right?
00:09:43.000 That was your car, and now they have it. 0.99
00:09:46.000 Well, if they just copied my car, why do I give a shit? 0.99
00:09:48.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99
00:09:49.000 You know what I mean?
00:09:50.000 If you see someone driving on the street and say, I love that car.
00:09:53.000 Let me just press a button, and my 3D computer, or my 3D printer, makes an exact duplicate of that car.
00:09:59.000 Does that somehow or another diminish My car?
00:10:03.000 I don't...
00:10:17.000 And I spent a really long time trying to explain to her how the deep web worked and why it was, like, no different than the door on your bathroom.
00:10:23.000 Like, just because there's an area of the internet that's private and anonymous doesn't mean it's bad.
00:10:28.000 Just like, you're not bad because you go to the bathroom and you close the door.
00:10:31.000 Now, when you close the door to your bathroom, you may open the lid and go to the bathroom, or you may shoot up.
00:10:36.000 I don't know what you're doing in there, but that doesn't give me a right to take the door off your bathroom. 0.80
00:10:40.000 It's a good point.
00:11:04.000 I don't.
00:11:05.000 It was one of the greatest moments of my life that the walls of culture for this brief moment just completely came down.
00:11:11.000 And it's like, I didn't become a thief.
00:11:13.000 I buy lots of music and I continue to make a lot of purchases.
00:11:18.000 But it was an incredible time.
00:11:20.000 You were getting music you could never hear anywhere else, stuff that wasn't recorded.
00:11:24.000 I was turning people on to stuff.
00:11:26.000 Because it was so democratized, I was like going back like I had like stopped liking Bob Dylan like a long I just was like thought Dylan was kind of overrated or something and then because of Napster I just could listen to anything so easily that my own judgment kind of dissipated and I found myself reconnecting to stuff that I hadn't really appreciated so the point is is no it wasn't bad but it did Certainly ramp ahead of existing laws and businesses that are still trying to catch up,
00:11:52.000 and the reality is we need new business models that work with these new technologies that doesn't make those technologies bad.
00:11:59.000 Well, everybody got addicted to selling that music at exorbitant rates.
00:12:03.000 I mean, that's really what happened, especially the record companies. 0.87
00:12:06.000 I mean, the record companies are notoriously shitty with the artists.
00:12:10.000 I mean, the contracts, and when you read them, you ever read the Courtney Love breakdown?
00:12:14.000 Yeah, I did, yeah.
00:12:15.000 Yeah, it's great.
00:12:15.000 It's amazing.
00:12:16.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:12:16.000 And if you read that, you go, fuck, man. 1.00
00:12:19.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:12:19.000 What's the Jared Leto one, the documentary that he did? 1.00
00:12:23.000 Artifact.
00:12:23.000 What's it called?
00:12:24.000 The documentary's called Artifact?
00:12:26.000 It's about his band and their battles. 0.99
00:12:28.000 It's a crazy, creepy fucking business that is losing its legs. 1.00
00:12:32.000 And they're scrambling along the way. 1.00
00:12:35.000 And I think that's one of the big pushbacks because of the commerce aspect of it.
00:12:42.000 But as far as the information aspect of it, what you brought up about the bathroom is a really good point because how come you can have a private club You could have a club where you and your friends go to play poker, whatever.
00:12:55.000 You rent out an office somewhere, and it's yours.
00:12:58.000 You lock the door, you bring in booze, you have fun, you play the music you like to listen to, and you guys have a good time. 0.95
00:13:04.000 Does the cops, are they going to fucking scan the door? 0.85
00:13:08.000 Are they going to put a bug inside the room to make sure you're not doing anything illegal? 0.98
00:13:12.000 They have.
00:13:12.000 It's called your cell phone.
00:13:13.000 I know, but isn't that amazing?
00:13:15.000 That's the same thing.
00:13:16.000 I mean, a physical room that you have that's a clubhouse, that's been going around since the beginning of time.
00:13:24.000 No one has a problem with that.
00:13:25.000 That's a normal part of human beings.
00:13:27.000 But a private digital room where your physical body isn't even there, that becomes problematic.
00:13:33.000 Yeah, and scarier than that, I think, is that now there's such a direct link between the physical space and the digital space, meaning the Supreme Court recently passed a law that doesn't allow officers to go into your cell phone without a warrant on a basic search and seizure,
00:13:50.000 right?
00:13:51.000 So, your cell phone, think about what that connects to.
00:13:53.000 That connects to your bank account, it connects to your medical records, it connects to photographs of your wife, your kids, whatever.
00:14:00.000 I mean, that's not your digital life.
00:14:02.000 That's just your life, period.
00:14:03.000 So, of course, there has to be, you know, technologies in place that keep you protected and private.
00:14:09.000 And look what happened to those actresses, you know, that were exploited through the 4chan fappening where their photographs were taken off of the iCloud and sold on 4chan.
00:14:18.000 And it was, you know, extremely intimate pictures.
00:14:21.000 And people say to me, this, you know, one journalist I was talking to who was trying to wrap her head around it said, well, what if I get hacked?
00:14:27.000 I was like, this is what you don't understand.
00:14:28.000 You've already been hacked.
00:14:29.000 All your information is out there.
00:14:31.000 It's just a question of whether someone decides to exploit it or not.
00:14:34.000 You know, your social security number, your medical records, your life is out there.
00:14:38.000 So we need to be able to be protected.
00:14:40.000 And right now, there's this battle to remove protections.
00:14:43.000 And what we need to be doing is actually implementing more protections.
00:14:47.000 It seems like to me that when the world becomes digital, and then digital information, those ones and zeros become accessible, we're going to get to a point in time where privacy seems ridiculous.
00:15:03.000 Yeah.
00:15:03.000 And that's, it sounds so crazy because 20 years ago it was a hard photograph.
00:15:09.000 Yeah.
00:15:09.000 You know, someone had to come over your house to look at your photo album.
00:15:12.000 And now your photo album isn't even in your phone.
00:15:15.000 It's on the cloud and you upload to it.
00:15:19.000 It's going to get weirder from there.
00:15:21.000 Yeah.
00:15:21.000 With the new technology that we can't even predict, the 20-year-from-now technology.
00:15:27.000 But it's going to get more and more bizarre to the point where we're going to have to have a real restructuring of what we expect in terms of privacy, personal sovereignty.
00:15:38.000 What do you expect from your fellow citizens? 1.00
00:15:43.000 Because it's almost going to be like, you're going to have to trust me to not look at your shit. 1.00
00:15:48.000 Right. 1.00
00:15:49.000 Exactly. 1.00
00:15:49.000 Because your shit is out there. 1.00
00:15:51.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:15:51.000 You know, so what we look at and what we don't, it's like, there are ways to have a bathroom door, but we need to be able to have them. 1.00
00:15:58.000 We need to be able to have encryption that's baked into our email, that's baked into our browsers.
00:16:03.000 There has to be, basically, we need to go dark.
00:16:06.000 You know, what the dark net does is it provides technologies that allow you to have privacy and anonymity.
00:16:11.000 A lot of people are trying to break those walls down and say they're bad.
00:16:15.000 The truth is we actually need more of that.
00:16:17.000 We need that to be pervasive.
00:16:18.000 We need your browser to automatically anonymize so it can't be so easily tracked.
00:16:23.000 And we're not just talking about the government.
00:16:24.000 We're talking about hackers.
00:16:25.000 We're talking about people who will steal your stuff and sell it or use it against you in some way.
00:16:29.000 So, again, it isn't some, you know, giant anti-government thing.
00:16:33.000 It's a basic right to privacy issue.
00:16:35.000 And that privacy, again, is probably temporary.
00:16:38.000 I mean, when you're looking at 50 years from now, it's probably going to be hilarious when you look back on the idea that someone couldn't read your email.
00:16:46.000 Yeah.
00:16:46.000 And you know what?
00:16:47.000 We're already...
00:16:48.000 The sad truth is we're there.
00:16:50.000 That's not...
00:16:50.000 The technology you're talking about is here right now.
00:16:53.000 I mean, your information is transparent to anyone with half an ability to handle technologies.
00:17:00.000 Your laptop, your phone...
00:17:03.000 All of that stuff is accessible to anybody who's halfway interested in using it.
00:17:07.000 And that was one of the really disturbing things that was revealed during the whole Edward Snowden incident, was that the government is not just able to tap into your stuff and check in on you.
00:17:18.000 Hey, this Alex guy, he seems a little shifty.
00:17:22.000 I think he might be involved in some nefarious activities.
00:17:24.000 Let's look into him. 0.98
00:17:25.000 No, let's just download everyone's fucking phone numbers and everyone's emails and everyone's voicemails and constantly monitor everything all the time. 0.96
00:17:35.000 And by the way, let's build a huge facility in Utah that consists of hundreds of trillions of terabytes of storage and just store everything. 1.00
00:17:44.000 Fuck it. 0.99
00:17:45.000 We'll just store it all. 1.00
00:17:46.000 And if Alex starts talking shit, we'll just say, oh yeah, Alex, we'll check this out. 1.00
00:17:50.000 Look at all these big black dicks you've been looking at, son. 1.00
00:17:52.000 Wait a minute, how did you... 0.99
00:17:55.000 And they go, and they download all your stuff, and they present it to you, and they say, look, you know, you have a choice.
00:18:01.000 Either we can make this public, or we can, you know, fill in the blank.
00:18:05.000 Whatever they would like to get from you.
00:18:07.000 Yeah, and what's scary is that what we recently discovered, in the last week or so, there was the revelations that, you know, it's always been, the excuse has always been, you know, terrorism, the Patriot Act.
00:18:17.000 It's always been, since 9-11, we have to do this because...
00:18:21.000 And what was revealed is they've been doing this long before 9-11.
00:18:24.000 It was mostly because of the drug war.
00:18:26.000 So it's kind of commonly known that a lot of the surveillance implementations that occurred because of the drug war.
00:18:33.000 Yeah, isn't that adorable?
00:18:36.000 The drug war is the thing.
00:18:38.000 And it's...
00:18:39.000 This whole drug war is such a joke because there's not a war on drugs.
00:18:43.000 It's a lie.
00:18:44.000 It's a flat-out lie.
00:18:46.000 There's no war on drugs.
00:18:47.000 There never will be a war on drugs.
00:18:49.000 There will always be drugs.
00:18:51.000 There's not a war.
00:18:52.000 There's a war on some drugs.
00:18:54.000 And it's not even a war.
00:18:55.000 It's a mad money grab.
00:18:58.000 It's a mad money grab from privatized prisons, it's a mad money grab from the guard unions, the prison guard unions, from law enforcement, from all these people that profit off drugs being legal.
00:19:10.000 It has zero to do with public safety, zero to do with public health.
00:19:15.000 It's a lie.
00:19:16.000 Yeah.
00:19:16.000 I mean, the film goes into that in detail.
00:19:18.000 So, I mean, I totally agree with that.
00:19:21.000 And it isn't, you know, to say that we don't need things to be, you know, we don't need law enforcement, we don't need certain types of regulation, but the question is why?
00:19:27.000 Why do we need them and what purpose are they serving and making sure that they serve an accurate purpose?
00:19:31.000 But when they're primarily being used to felonize minorities and fill prisons for profit, then you've got something that probably needs to be changed.
00:19:39.000 Without a doubt.
00:19:40.000 I mean, and there's There's also some talk recently, and I know some states have recently passed this, where asset forfeiture laws are being rescinded. 0.97
00:19:50.000 You can no longer just steal people's shit because you pull them over. 0.95
00:19:54.000 If they pull you over and say, what if you were going to buy a car somewhere? 0.99
00:19:58.000 And they pull you over and they go, Alex, what are you doing with $5,000 cash?
00:20:02.000 They're like, oh, I was going to go buy a car.
00:20:04.000 Can you prove that?
00:20:05.000 We're going to take that.
00:20:06.000 You're going to have to prove that in court.
00:20:07.000 They could take that, and they were taking it, and they were using it to fund parties. 0.99
00:20:12.000 They bought a fucking margarita machine, which is so ironic. 0.98
00:20:15.000 They were serving drugs with money that they took from people who they suspected of selling drugs. 1.00
00:20:24.000 They just were selling this.
00:20:25.000 They were just dealing with the sanctioned drugs at their party, the sanctioned margaritas.
00:20:29.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:20:30.000 Human nature. 1.00
00:20:31.000 Disgusting. 1.00
00:20:32.000 I know. 0.55
00:20:32.000 But it's just, if you give people law, like if you write things down on paper, like you, law enforcement officer, because of this thing that's written down on this paper, you have the right to take this fellow human being and put them in a cage because they've decided to alter their consciousness in a way that we don't deem to be worthy. 0.55
00:20:53.000 Right.
00:20:54.000 Yeah, it's a hell of a thing. 0.99
00:20:55.000 It's retarded. 1.00
00:20:56.000 As you said, it allows people to be arrested for all kinds of reasons, and that's not helpful even to people who need help who are on drugs.
00:21:05.000 And the parallel with the record industry is that they're addicted to that money.
00:21:11.000 They are addicted to taking that money from people.
00:21:15.000 They're addicted to the private prisons are addicted to it.
00:21:18.000 The law enforcement officers are addicted.
00:21:20.000 There's a real issue with drugs in this country in that if marijuana was made legal, just marijuana, some ungodly number of drug arrests would no longer be necessary.
00:21:30.000 That's right.
00:21:33.000 Thousands of law enforcement officers all over the country out of a job.
00:21:36.000 And they don't want that.
00:21:38.000 Nobody wants that.
00:21:39.000 Look, there's a way to do it where they would be put into a better position in society.
00:21:44.000 But it wouldn't be locking people up for a plant.
00:21:47.000 And they're addicted to it.
00:21:49.000 They're addicted to it.
00:21:50.000 And it's a mad scramble.
00:21:51.000 It's not the same situation as what's going on with the record industry.
00:21:55.000 The record industry makes far less sense to me than the movie industry.
00:21:59.000 The movie industry makes sense. 0.99
00:22:00.000 If you want to make a movie like The Hobbit, fuck, that costs a lot of money. 0.98
00:22:03.000 And if you want to download that goddamn thing for free, and you're not going to go see it in the movie now, and they're not going to get your money, that to me seems a little bit unfair. 0.99
00:22:12.000 Yeah. 0.96
00:22:12.000 Just because you're dealing with something that requires some exorbitant amount of money. 0.96
00:22:17.000 And once you see it at home, on your television, if you can download it and play it on your TV, there's really no reason to go to the movies.
00:22:24.000 Right.
00:22:24.000 But if you download Paul Stanley's solo album, you might want to go see him live.
00:22:29.000 Yeah.
00:22:30.000 You know, The Hobbit's not going to do a live show, you know, in Woodland Hills anytime soon.
00:22:34.000 Well, maybe that'll bring back, like, the ice capades, though, you know.
00:22:37.000 Yeah.
00:22:37.000 We'll get that stuff going again.
00:22:39.000 But, I mean, it's true, except for I still maintain, like you said earlier, that pleasant or unpleasant, we're in a transitional period.
00:22:45.000 And the consumer, you can't brand the consumer as being sort of morally repellent or thieves because they are using a technology that gives them what they want the way they want it.
00:22:57.000 To them, it isn't about money.
00:22:59.000 I've always maintained that.
00:23:00.000 It's like This is really easy.
00:23:02.000 It's super convenient.
00:23:03.000 Why would I bend myself around to go wait for your window?
00:23:07.000 The Hobbit's going to come out when?
00:23:09.000 I live here.
00:23:10.000 I'm not going to get that.
00:23:10.000 All my friends have seen it over there and I can't see it here.
00:23:12.000 It's like, no, I'm going to circumvent that because I want it now.
00:23:15.000 It's like the windowing, the way in which consumers want their entertainment is changing because of the way technology works.
00:23:21.000 No matter what that does to your business model, you have to change your business model to fit what the consumer wants.
00:23:26.000 You can't You can't just keep branding them pirates and just staying in the old way of doing things, because the ship has sailed. 0.97
00:23:32.000 I'm a huge fan of Game of Thrones, and I haven't seen the first episode of the new season, but somebody sent me a fucking tweet. 0.61
00:23:40.000 I don't know if you know, but the first five episodes have been leaked online. 0.94
00:23:43.000 Of course they have. 1.00
00:23:44.000 You motherfuckers! 1.00
00:23:46.000 How dare you! 1.00
00:23:47.000 But that's not going to hurt Game of Thrones.
00:23:50.000 I'm not going to not have HBO, but maybe somebody won't.
00:23:54.000 Yeah.
00:23:55.000 There's going to be shrinkage because of the change in technologies.
00:23:58.000 I mean, just like the car replaced the horse and buggy, just like refrigeration killed ice delivery.
00:24:06.000 It's not to be Pollyannish and say this is all great for everybody.
00:24:09.000 It's just to be realistic and say the ship has sailed.
00:24:11.000 Technology is changing the world in all these ways.
00:24:14.000 One of them happens to be the way we listen to music.
00:24:17.000 You know, it's like that's just the fact of the way we live.
00:24:20.000 We can't look at our society and blame them all for being pirates.
00:24:24.000 This world is evolving, and we have to move with that world.
00:24:28.000 And it is going to be painful.
00:24:29.000 There are going to be casualties, but we will come out okay on the other side.
00:24:33.000 That's how- it's always been that way.
00:24:35.000 I mean, can you imagine how pissed off the blacksmiths were when cars came along?
00:24:38.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:24:38.000 Like, dude, my fucking sh- I'm making horseshoes, that's my shit! 1.00
00:24:42.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:24:42.000 Nobody wants horseshoes anymore. 1.00
00:24:43.000 But that's a part of the evolution of culture.
00:24:47.000 Do you know how they fought cars?
00:24:48.000 The way they fought cars was the same way they're fighting the deep web and the records and Napster.
00:24:55.000 They said that cars are bad because you can't see what's in the trunk and you can be used to move contraband across state lines.
00:25:03.000 And they tried to use that as a way to prevent the automobile from becoming more popularized.
00:25:08.000 So it's always the same argument.
00:25:10.000 You're going to do something very bad with that.
00:25:12.000 You can't have it.
00:25:12.000 And of course, that was probably going on during Prohibition.
00:25:16.000 Of course.
00:25:16.000 Because the invention of the car was within a decade or two of that.
00:25:20.000 Yeah.
00:25:21.000 Yeah, that's the whole...
00:25:22.000 I mean, they were trying to keep people from drinking booze.
00:25:24.000 Yeah.
00:25:25.000 I mean, they were trying to say, look, no drugs, no nothing.
00:25:28.000 Yeah. 0.99
00:25:29.000 What a fucked up time that must have been. 0.99
00:25:32.000 People must have been so goddamn angry. 0.99
00:25:34.000 And look what came out of it. 1.00
00:25:35.000 Fucking Al Capone. 1.00
00:25:37.000 Organized crime. 1.00
00:25:37.000 The same shit we're seeing in Mexico right now. 1.00
00:25:39.000 The cartels. 1.00
00:25:40.000 All of it comes about...
00:25:42.000 It's like, at what point in time do these dummies not look at history and go, look, this is going to happen.
00:25:48.000 History's going to repeat itself.
00:25:49.000 When you create a vacuum, it will be filled.
00:25:52.000 Yeah.
00:25:52.000 When you have a desire that people have, undeniable desire to alter their consciousness, and you have a method that everyone's aware of, but then you deny them access to that method, someone's going to provide it.
00:26:03.000 For sure.
00:26:03.000 They're going to step in.
00:26:04.000 Yeah, the money's big.
00:26:05.000 Yeah, it's just, and you look at it on paper.
00:26:08.000 Where's the loss?
00:26:09.000 Where's the benefit?
00:26:10.000 Like, where's the loss to society?
00:26:13.000 Yeah.
00:26:14.000 Organized crime!
00:26:15.000 That's the loss.
00:26:16.000 That's the number one.
00:26:17.000 All the murders and the craziness and the chaos.
00:26:20.000 That comes from, not from businesses that you can regulate and understand and look at their profits and see what their practices are and decide whether or not you want to boycott this company as opposed to that company, which behaves more ethically.
00:26:35.000 This company is organic, and this company is self-sustaining, and look at it.
00:26:39.000 No, you're making it illegal, and you're creating an organized crime ring.
00:26:46.000 It's like, instantly, you're going to create that.
00:26:47.000 Yeah, and destroying economies, and I mean, the reverberations are huge all over the world.
00:26:52.000 Yeah, and the reverberations, I think, of just denying people freedom.
00:26:57.000 It's a...
00:26:58.000 A very deteriorating effect on human beings.
00:27:02.000 When another human being denies a person of any inalienable right.
00:27:08.000 Your right to sleep.
00:27:09.000 They keep waking you up in the middle of the night. 0.99
00:27:11.000 You're gonna get fucking furious. 0.95
00:27:13.000 They say you can't drink more than a glass of water a day. 1.00
00:27:15.000 Who the fuck are you? 0.99
00:27:16.000 There's just this thing that people have when someone tries to keep them from doing something that doesn't make any sense. 1.00
00:27:21.000 Totally.
00:27:22.000 And talking in private on a website is one of those things.
00:27:26.000 Yeah.
00:27:27.000 And if they're exchanging drugs and, you know, they're selling, buying and selling drugs, like, well, that's a minor consequence of freedom.
00:27:37.000 Yeah.
00:27:38.000 And it's also revolutionary.
00:27:39.000 It also means that people are trying to find new ways to do something that is going to be easier for them or more done in a more healthy, functional way than the current way that exists.
00:27:48.000 And that's what I think is blowing people's minds.
00:27:50.000 Is that maybe this actually is reducing crime and violence in the street trade.
00:27:54.000 Maybe it is causing a problem for the cartels.
00:27:56.000 Maybe it is making it easier for someone who has a habit to be in a community that may be able to help them as opposed to throw them in jail.
00:28:02.000 I mean, again, it's not to say these are all good.
00:28:05.000 It's not, to me, a black and white issue.
00:28:07.000 But there is just a lot of gray here.
00:28:10.000 There's always going to be.
00:28:11.000 And that's just a part of being a human being.
00:28:14.000 You know, you give people freedom, they're going to do things that you might not necessarily agree with.
00:28:21.000 Like, I mean, how many people agree with people tattooing their face?
00:28:25.000 You know, a lot of people think that's a terrible choice.
00:28:27.000 But if you make it illegal, you'll probably, the number of people tattooing their face will probably go through the roof.
00:28:33.000 For sure.
00:28:34.000 There's no way to stop people from doing what they want to do and when you try it makes them This is a thing about human beings when you want us to not do something We ordinarily want to do it. 0.93
00:28:46.000 That's why Catholic school girls were always so ridiculously promiscuous, right? 1.00
00:28:51.000 Why because they're always told like don't don't go anywhere near boys know that I can't wait to get near boys! 0.94
00:28:57.000 Like, I have a friend who went to Catholic school, she was just talking about it yesterday.
00:29:00.000 She was like, everybody in my class was boy crazy, because there was no boys, and they were the forbidden fruit.
00:29:06.000 It's like everything their parents were trying to protect them from, they were just ramping it up.
00:29:11.000 Yeah, totally.
00:29:13.000 Yeah, there's your motivator.
00:29:14.000 So, this was created...
00:29:18.000 Originally, the software that was used to power the deep web and Silk Road was all initially used or created for good.
00:29:30.000 Yeah, and it's still largely used for good.
00:29:32.000 Again, you have to think about it like a city.
00:29:34.000 It's an environment.
00:29:35.000 If you look at it under a terrarium, it's just this place.
00:29:37.000 Now, in any city, you're going to have all kinds of good stuff going on, and you're going to have bad stuff going on, and you're going to have everything in between.
00:29:44.000 It's a It's literally just a place.
00:29:45.000 It gets demonized, but it's no different than any other environment.
00:29:49.000 It's just a privacy-oriented environment.
00:29:51.000 It was created by the Navy.
00:29:53.000 Tor was, anyway.
00:29:54.000 That's one way into the dark.
00:29:55.000 Explain Tor.
00:29:56.000 Tor is a browser that anonymizes, meaning no one can track your IP address.
00:30:03.000 No one can see what sites you're visiting.
00:30:06.000 I use Tor to use Amazon, for instance, because it's really easy to get hacked online using a regular browser.
00:30:12.000 I don't want my credit card number Being plugged into a regular browser.
00:30:15.000 So I use Tor.
00:30:16.000 If I'm banking online, I use Tor.
00:30:18.000 Because it anonymizes...
00:30:19.000 It runs through a network that doesn't allow people to track what you're inputting into it.
00:30:24.000 It doesn't know where you are.
00:30:25.000 And is Tor a program or a browser?
00:30:27.000 Tor is a browser, but then it goes further than that.
00:30:29.000 Tor also has a component called Tor Hidden Services.
00:30:33.000 And that is actually a kind of a separate internet that operates within the darknet.
00:30:37.000 And the Tor Hidden Services don't end with.com.
00:30:41.000 They end with.onion.
00:30:43.000 TOR stands for the Onion Router.
00:30:45.000 It was created by the Navy primarily to be used for agents to communicate with each other anonymously.
00:30:50.000 I mean, the NSA uses it.
00:30:52.000 Law enforcement uses it.
00:30:53.000 So it's always been used largely for good to this day.
00:30:56.000 It's still used by a lot of government agencies to this day.
00:30:58.000 So it's T-O-R dot onion?
00:31:00.000 Yeah, well, it'll be whatever it is.
00:31:02.000 It'll be like a stringofnumbers.onion.
00:31:04.000 To pull TOR down, you just go to, I think it's TOR.org or whatever.
00:31:07.000 You can get that from the clear net, the surface web.
00:31:10.000 And is that restricted?
00:31:12.000 No, it's totally legal.
00:31:13.000 I mean, again, a lot of people who use TOR, journalists use it, dissidents use it.
00:31:17.000 They're like rape counseling organizations that use it. 0.98
00:31:20.000 Like, okay, we're going to talk online.
00:31:23.000 Let's all pull down TOR, and then we can get on our forum.
00:31:25.000 Yeah.
00:31:26.000 You know, in the poor hidden services and you can feel comfortable talking about being raped or whatever happens.
00:31:31.000 It's an anonymized corner of the internet.
00:31:34.000 And how does it work?
00:31:35.000 Well, I don't want to bore your audience, but it involves pretty intense math and a lot of the stuff grew out of the sort of early creators of the internet that were using cryptography and ways of bouncing I
00:32:08.000 think?
00:32:12.000 The hidden service is actually operating within an area of the internet called the deep web.
00:32:17.000 And the deep web is just like everything online that isn't indexed.
00:32:21.000 It's basically like looking under the hood of your car.
00:32:23.000 It's just all the junk online, like banks communicating crap to each other.
00:32:28.000 It's mostly just code that doesn't need to be indexed by Google because it's a bunch of code.
00:32:33.000 And people figured out how to get down into that area and create an actual environment.
00:32:38.000 So they basically have built space within the deep web that you can use, you can access through Tor.
00:32:45.000 So it's unindexed, so you can't find it by using Google.
00:32:48.000 It never shows up in the surface web.
00:32:51.000 Whoa.
00:32:52.000 It's pretty interesting.
00:32:53.000 And it's been there forever.
00:32:54.000 It's just been growing over time.
00:32:55.000 And then Tor was developed over the last 15 years or so.
00:32:58.000 But there are other ways to get into that area as well that are growing.
00:33:02.000 So the problem with that would be, of course, if someone was harassing, say, an ex-girlfriend or something like that, sending someone threatening messages, you couldn't track it.
00:33:13.000 Yeah, but you couldn't, if you could, because if I'm sending my ex-girlfriend hidden messages, I'd have to be sending them to her on the surface web or she wouldn't see them.
00:33:21.000 You know what I mean?
00:33:21.000 Unless she's hanging out on the deep web with me in case what's she doing down there, you know what I mean?
00:33:25.000 But if I send an email to her through my Tor browser to her email address, you're going to...
00:33:31.000 You can track me through her email address because she's in the clear.
00:33:34.000 But that's why it always has to be an alternative then.
00:33:36.000 Precisely.
00:33:37.000 Because if it was like Chrome, if Chrome had these type of capabilities, then someone could harass someone on Facebook or something like that and you wouldn't be able to track it.
00:33:45.000 Yeah, this is where it gets into an interesting gray area because it's a little of both.
00:33:51.000 We are going to be building, there are going to be browser technologies that do randomize your location.
00:33:56.000 There's already VPN sort of virtual networks that mask your IP address.
00:34:01.000 You can use those every day.
00:34:02.000 A lot of people do.
00:34:04.000 And again, they're not doing that so they can hide for doing contraband.
00:34:07.000 They're doing that to prevent being hacked most of the time.
00:34:10.000 And that already will sort of preclude people from knowing exactly what computer you sent something from.
00:34:15.000 But, you know, in general, it's pretty easy to trace.
00:34:18.000 The digital world is a trackable world.
00:34:21.000 And at the end of the day, you usually contract somebody unless they're in a completely alternative space talking to someone else who has willingly joined that alternate space.
00:34:30.000 Then all bets are kind of off.
00:34:32.000 So if you were a member of one of these communities and you joined up, someone could harass you then and there's really not a lot you could do. 1.00
00:34:40.000 Yeah, they'd be saying, user XYDDD slash zero, you're a piece of shit. 0.98
00:34:45.000 If they found out who you were, though, do you have a randomized number? 0.99
00:34:50.000 Yeah, you create a username, and no one's going to know who you are in that space, and there's nothing connecting you to the surface.
00:34:56.000 But if you reveal who you are in that, then you'd have to get a new randomized number.
00:35:01.000 Yeah, it's like a username.
00:35:03.000 It would take you all three seconds to do that.
00:35:06.000 Yeah, that would be smart.
00:35:08.000 It's interesting, because we're kind of making the argument that you need some transparency online.
00:35:14.000 That you kind of have to be traceable to a certain extent.
00:35:19.000 And that's what we're making the argument.
00:35:21.000 Yeah, yes and no, though.
00:35:22.000 I still maintain...
00:35:23.000 Steve Wozniak, you know, the great Apple computer genius, said, and I think he was talking about file sharing, you know, we're all, like, on this highway.
00:35:32.000 And the highway has all of these lanes on it.
00:35:34.000 And we're all moving along.
00:35:35.000 And just like on a regular highway, most of us during the day aren't like shooting each other and driving each other off the road.
00:35:40.000 The highway tends to function day in day out with millions of people on it just fine, even with the road rage.
00:35:46.000 It's fine.
00:35:47.000 There may be one or two bad apples that do something that's really crazy or dangerous, but you don't shut the entire highway down.
00:35:55.000 We're good to go.
00:36:20.000 It's going to be a bumpy ride.
00:36:22.000 There's no easy answer, but we need to come up with new laws that affect how we convene in the space, not just say, nobody can get on this highway.
00:36:30.000 Like you said, that's never going to happen.
00:36:32.000 It's never going to happen, and the g-force that's involved in this change, the change is so powerful and so rapid, you're going to have some screw-ups.
00:36:41.000 For sure.
00:36:41.000 There's no way around it.
00:36:42.000 It's going so fast, and we're going to stumble.
00:36:45.000 We have to.
00:36:46.000 There's no way it's going to be smooth.
00:36:48.000 Yeah, we're going to go backwards.
00:36:49.000 We're going to make mistakes.
00:36:50.000 I mean, you know, I don't fault my kids when they're, like, listening to music on YouTube.
00:36:53.000 I mean, we're kind of past the days of...
00:36:55.000 My kids don't, like, use BitTorrent for, you know, file sharing, but...
00:37:01.000 At least you don't think they do.
00:37:02.000 Well, actually, that's, yeah, that's completely nonsensical.
00:37:05.000 My older teen does all the time.
00:37:06.000 I keep talking to him about it.
00:37:07.000 But, yeah, he has a massive folder on his computer.
00:37:11.000 But it's mostly...
00:37:11.000 I'm not going to shame him on the podcast.
00:37:15.000 But the reality of it is he loves buying music and he loves being part of the process with bands.
00:37:22.000 There almost was a middle generation that just went hog wild on just file sharing all their music.
00:37:28.000 But most people like being part of the...
00:37:31.000 That's why we have currency.
00:37:33.000 That's why we have money and we exchange.
00:37:34.000 Because it's like a human need.
00:37:36.000 So I think that a lot of this stuff will iron itself out over time.
00:37:39.000 I hate to, but it will.
00:37:40.000 I mean, a lot of people will be like, oh, here's how we monetize the music.
00:37:43.000 Oh, here's how I can actually pay to help support the bands I like and still use the technology I like and we'll be okay.
00:37:50.000 I think time is actually going to fix a lot of this, but we're definitely in a crazy wild west right now.
00:37:55.000 Yeah, I agree.
00:37:56.000 I just think that the disparity of income is probably never going to be the same again.
00:38:02.000 Unless it comes from live performances.
00:38:03.000 Well, we don't spend $20 on a CD with one good song on it ever again.
00:38:06.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:38:07.000 Oh, what a drag. 0.99
00:38:09.000 That's true, right?
00:38:10.000 There was always that thing.
00:38:12.000 Do you remember going to, was it Virgin?
00:38:14.000 They would have those listening booths?
00:38:16.000 Yeah.
00:38:16.000 That was the first time you would ever get a chance to listen to the whole show.
00:38:19.000 Shut that sucker down. 1.00
00:38:21.000 That probably did more for killing the record. 1.00
00:38:22.000 Was it Britney Spears?
00:38:23.000 What?
00:38:24.000 Oh, man.
00:38:26.000 Yeah.
00:38:26.000 Yeah, like you would listen to the hit, and then you would listen to the other stuff.
00:38:29.000 I'm not buying this fucking thing. 1.00
00:38:32.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:38:32.000 Yeah, that was a big scam, right? 1.00
00:38:34.000 Look, I'm a huge Rolling Stones fan.
00:38:36.000 Huge Rolling Stones fan. 1.00
00:38:38.000 But, let's be honest, a good percentage of their songs suck a fat dick. 1.00
00:38:43.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:38:43.000 If you go back and listen- After Some Girls. 1.00
00:38:45.000 Yeah.
00:38:45.000 Up to Some Girls, pretty much every track is gold, but after Some Girls.
00:38:48.000 There's some great fucking songs, but there's also some songs that you just go- Yeah, right would you guys get high and just slap this together when you're on coke like this? 0.98
00:38:57.000 Yes. 0.99
00:38:58.000 Yeah, probably but that you can't do that anymore.
00:39:01.000 Yeah, you can't now and then you're seeing like Bands are being forced into this position where you you're you're represented by your entire Piece of work.
00:39:12.000 Yeah, it's not just like a hit that you send out.
00:39:15.000 That's sort of bait and Yeah. 0.84
00:39:18.000 To get you to buy the CD that's been sort of loosely slapped together with shitty songs. 0.98
00:39:23.000 Totally. 0.90
00:39:23.000 I mean, it's a cultural... 0.90
00:39:24.000 You can also look at the golden age of music being mega profitable as a cultural moment.
00:39:31.000 You know, it was very brief, even in the annals of the record industry itself.
00:39:35.000 For most of the history of recorded music, it was about singles.
00:39:39.000 It wasn't about albums.
00:39:40.000 The artists only made their money by touring.
00:39:43.000 Yeah.
00:39:44.000 You know, it was a very short period of time, historically, actually, where you had this, like, 20 million sellers, 40 million, these units being moved to these enormous numbers.
00:39:53.000 That was never going to last, and it wasn't necessarily even an organic thing anyway.
00:39:57.000 And again, it's not to condone what happened. 0.99
00:39:59.000 It's just to say that sometimes we lose perspective and think it was always like this until those damn meddling kids and their computers came along. 0.96
00:40:07.000 That's interesting if you look at it, because file sharing really is like this blip, but record sales are the real blip. 0.97
00:40:16.000 I mean, out of the thousands of years of people creating music and musical art, look at this tiny brief window where people were selling these things.
00:40:26.000 And even at that amount of money, we're talking about probably no more than 25 years.
00:40:29.000 I mean, it's a really small window, even within the record industry's history.
00:40:32.000 That's fascinating when you think about it that way.
00:40:35.000 Now, Donny Einer in Downloaded talks about that quite, he had a really clear-eyed view of it because he really came up through, he was like the youngest president of Columbia, really amazing guy.
00:40:43.000 He had a very interesting perspective on the bubble, as it were, the other side of it.
00:40:49.000 What's the view of the movie business?
00:40:52.000 Has the movie business taken a big hit from file sharing?
00:40:58.000 I think the Game of Thrones thing has really been the question.
00:41:01.000 There was a lot of uproar about the amount of piracy that was going on, or the amount of file sharing that was going on around the Game of Thrones, and then at a certain point, HBO shifted position from...
00:41:11.000 Saying, this is really terrible and you're all criminals, to wait a minute, you guys all really love what we have.
00:41:16.000 This is becoming the most popular show on TV. Let's figure out how to get it to you.
00:41:21.000 And they started coming up with alternatives like HBO Go.
00:41:24.000 To me, that's really the right way to look at it.
00:41:26.000 And I know, again, I'm not being glib.
00:41:28.000 It's not fun to lose lots of money when you're putting so much money and time into doing these works.
00:41:34.000 But it's being realistic that People all over the world, they want their content at the same time.
00:41:38.000 They want it a certain way.
00:41:40.000 It isn't going to change.
00:41:41.000 So I think people have to change with the times.
00:41:43.000 And some are and some aren't.
00:41:45.000 HBO's CEO doesn't care that you are sharing your HBO Go password.
00:41:49.000 There you go.
00:41:49.000 And that took some time.
00:41:50.000 I mean, he had the opposite viewpoint.
00:41:52.000 Look at that quote.
00:41:53.000 We're in the business of creating addicts.
00:41:55.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:41:56.000 Wow, good for you, you smart bastard. 1.00
00:41:58.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:41:59.000 Richard Plepler.
00:42:01.000 Richard, go.
00:42:03.000 Go, Richard.
00:42:04.000 You go, boy.
00:42:05.000 Yeah.
00:42:06.000 Just don't try saying his name ten times in a row quickly.
00:42:09.000 Smart fellow.
00:42:10.000 Yeah.
00:42:10.000 And that's smart.
00:42:11.000 Because, like, there's 350 goddamn million people in this country. 0.90
00:42:15.000 If you can get 350 million people to watch your show, that's amazing. 0.96
00:42:18.000 And that's global.
00:42:19.000 Like, Game of Thrones is all over the world.
00:42:21.000 Yeah.
00:42:21.000 You're going to get a lot.
00:42:23.000 But that's a show that requires an exorbitant amount of money to create.
00:42:27.000 The special effects are crazy and huge and the production is enormous.
00:42:32.000 The reality of it is that it's always been on the onus of business to figure out how to make a profit.
00:42:36.000 And that's what drives them crazy. 0.99
00:42:38.000 Because right now they're in a period where the consumers have taken back the power and they're scratching their heads going, oh shit, now what do we do? 0.99
00:42:44.000 We've got to figure out how to create a system where we can get maximum profit again. 0.97
00:42:48.000 They've taken a knock back.
00:42:50.000 But what I don't respond to well is when they retaliate against their consumers and go, it's your fault that we got knocked back.
00:42:58.000 You guys are criminals and this is bad and we have to educate you.
00:43:02.000 That you need to give us profit again. 0.98
00:43:03.000 No, I mean, we have to educate you that this is wrong.
00:43:06.000 I mean, their motive is purely profit-based, so I get that it's a drag, but it's up to you to figure out a way to make a profit out of what you're doing.
00:43:13.000 They also don't have a stranglehold on the promotional aspect anymore.
00:43:19.000 Because of the Internet and because of, like, YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and people sharing links, a band can become really popular really quickly. 0.67
00:43:28.000 Like, someone could pass something along, and then it becomes a viral hit on YouTube, and you go, wow, this thing, like, that fucking Gangnam Style, right?
00:43:37.000 That's a perfect example.
00:43:38.000 The greatest song ever written.
00:43:39.000 That song did not get, that did not get popular because it was on the radio.
00:43:43.000 Or because it was good, you know?
00:43:47.000 Some people enjoy it.
00:43:48.000 I know, that's true.
00:43:49.000 Many millions of people enjoy it. 1.00
00:43:50.000 My fucking six-year-old and my four-year-old go crazy. 1.00
00:43:54.000 Well, it's like Teletubbies. 1.00
00:43:55.000 It has some kind of weird primordial sort of trigger switch. 0.96
00:43:58.000 Well, it's a silly video. 0.97
00:44:01.000 It's silly and it's fun. 0.94
00:44:02.000 Yeah, the video is what works.
00:44:03.000 If you were a little kid, you would love to share that song.
00:44:05.000 I would, yeah, for sure.
00:44:06.000 But it's a perfect example in that that didn't require any promotional vehicle other than people enjoying it and sharing it with other people, and then it spread like wildfire.
00:44:16.000 Totally.
00:44:16.000 And it used to be, look at that, oh my god, look at that number.
00:44:20.000 Yeah.
00:44:20.000 That's a billion.
00:44:21.000 Eight million, almost, yeah.
00:44:22.000 No, that's two billion.
00:44:24.000 Yeah.
00:44:24.000 Oh, I was looking at the wrong number.
00:44:26.000 I was looking at subscribers.
00:44:27.000 No, his subscribers are almost eight million.
00:44:29.000 Right.
00:44:30.000 But his number of views is two billion.
00:44:33.000 That's a billion.
00:44:34.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:44:35.000 What the fuck? 1.00
00:44:36.000 That's crazy. 1.00
00:44:37.000 See, and that's all just viral.
00:44:40.000 Yeah, that's community.
00:44:40.000 Community.
00:44:40.000 That's community.
00:44:41.000 That used to require, you used to have to have a radio station.
00:44:46.000 Yeah.
00:44:47.000 And you used to have to be in bed with that radio station.
00:44:50.000 Yeah, the record company would put a gun to your head physically and make you play a single to give it that kind of juice.
00:44:55.000 That's true.
00:44:56.000 Yeah, and they had these deals, these under-the-table deals with record companies where they would not play certain people because they were blackballed.
00:45:04.000 Right.
00:45:05.000 That was a real issue with certain bands.
00:45:07.000 Yeah, payola. 0.91
00:45:08.000 Yeah, and just the day they were in control They had the power and the record companies being these huge organizations with a massive amount of money behind them They were able to sort of create stars and there was a lot of artificial stars that they created just by Mouth fucking everybody with this music just forcing it into your ears.
00:45:29.000 Yeah, they can't do that anymore No, that ship has definitely sailed.
00:45:34.000 And they're going to have to come up with alternative ways to get back to some degree of where they were.
00:45:38.000 And it may take time.
00:45:38.000 I actually believe they'll get there because people are very, very clever at figuring out how to make money.
00:45:42.000 Well, I think they will try, but I do not believe they will.
00:45:46.000 I think that music will always be big, but I think the era of record companies having the kind of influence they used to.
00:45:51.000 Yeah, having the face of it be the same, I agree.
00:45:54.000 It's going to be something else, we just don't know what that is yet.
00:45:56.000 Because music, the way it is now, one of the weird things about music now is there's no longer DJs anymore.
00:46:04.000 When I was a kid, there was all these radio DJs.
00:46:09.000 Do you remember that show WKRP in Cincinnati?
00:46:12.000 Sure, of course.
00:46:12.000 And a lot of that show was about these personalities.
00:46:14.000 Yeah, I grew up with those people.
00:46:16.000 Sure.
00:46:16.000 All the...
00:46:17.000 Popular DJs.
00:46:18.000 Yeah, like when I was a kid, it was Charles Laquadera in Boston, the big mattress in the morning.
00:46:23.000 Dave Sherman in New York.
00:46:24.000 Yeah, there's all these morning DJ guys.
00:46:26.000 And of course, the big one was always Howard Stern.
00:46:29.000 Morning, but he was, you know, he went from music originally and then just went to straight talk.
00:46:33.000 Probably the first guy ever to do that on FM, the way he did it.
00:46:37.000 But those guys don't even exist anymore.
00:46:39.000 Yeah.
00:46:40.000 Those morning DJ guys, they have a tiny window where they're allowed to talk.
00:46:45.000 Yeah.
00:46:45.000 And, you know, there's not that many of them anymore, and they're dying.
00:46:49.000 They're just disappearing.
00:46:50.000 Yeah.
00:46:50.000 They're being replaced by these weird program stations.
00:46:54.000 Yeah.
00:46:55.000 No, it's true.
00:46:55.000 The radio is really changing dramatically.
00:46:57.000 I mean, I think, you know, kind of what you're driving at is, like, curation.
00:47:00.000 This whole idea that people would curate, and you could go to a place and hear something.
00:47:04.000 That is evolving much more quickly.
00:47:06.000 I think that's been the next phase of digital music, is now we're finding more curation online, whether it's through Spotify or other services, Pitchfork.
00:47:14.000 Right.
00:47:14.000 You know, where you can go, oh, I want to get certain kinds of music.
00:47:17.000 I'm going to go here.
00:47:18.000 And what's cool about the internet is that you can pull, like, the best rock critics together, the best whatever kind of music you like, and you can aggregate that or sort of compile it through Spotify or some service and just check out what they want.
00:47:31.000 You know, you can choose who your DJ is, in a way.
00:47:34.000 Right.
00:47:34.000 And that's what a DJ used to be.
00:47:36.000 Like, a DJ was kind of an artist, in a way.
00:47:39.000 For sure.
00:47:39.000 Because a DJ would turn you on to some stuff that you'd never heard before.
00:47:43.000 Yeah.
00:47:43.000 They would have the ability to play what they wanted to play.
00:47:46.000 Yeah.
00:47:47.000 Yeah, the notion of gatekeepers has changed a lot, and most of the gatekeepers that existed are no longer gatekeepers.
00:47:52.000 Well, we're sort of concentrating on one aspect of this issue, which is sort of file sharing and the digital reality of songs and things along those lines.
00:48:04.000 But the Silk Road story was a lot more about drugs and infiltration, and there was a lot going on.
00:48:13.000 Yeah.
00:48:13.000 Yeah, it was actually a political movement.
00:48:15.000 I mean, the Silk Road was, whether you agree with it or not, and the movie is not about taking a side as much as trying to show what it actually was, as opposed to what we heard about in the media.
00:48:25.000 It was a political movement.
00:48:26.000 I mean, it was a community that was put together with certain political ideals.
00:48:32.000 And they weren't all the same.
00:48:34.000 Some of them were libertarian.
00:48:35.000 Some of them were hardcore left-wing people, more socialist-oriented.
00:48:39.000 Some of them were in the middle.
00:48:40.000 But what unified them was this desire to have individual freedom and privacy and anonymity.
00:48:46.000 And there was a lot of people in that community.
00:48:48.000 And a lot of people were there for the community.
00:48:50.000 And that's, I think, a very threatening thing, as well as being an interesting moment in time. 0.98
00:48:55.000 A lot of people were there for the community, but there was some weird shit that went down. 0.95
00:49:00.000 Now, first of all, some people had infiltrated this community, right? 0.97
00:49:03.000 Like law enforcement?
00:49:04.000 Oh, well, yeah, I mean, of course.
00:49:05.000 Law enforcement was there from day one.
00:49:06.000 From day one?
00:49:07.000 Yeah, law enforcement.
00:49:08.000 I mean, of course, if you see that there's a market online that's selling heroin, you know, via the Postal Service, and you're in any number of three-letter law enforcement agencies, you're going to be showing up.
00:49:18.000 And how'd they find out about it?
00:49:20.000 Well, I mean, in order to sell drugs, you have to advertise.
00:49:22.000 So it sort of went out on the wire enough to enough people.
00:49:25.000 So if I'm afraid in Ohio and I know to buy my drugs online, some cop somewhere is going to know.
00:49:31.000 And once one cop knows, they all know.
00:49:33.000 And it was on...
00:49:35.000 To credit the FBI and the DEA, they knew what was going on pretty early on, and they installed undercover operatives with fictitious user accounts.
00:49:44.000 It just turned out some of them were dirty.
00:49:47.000 That's what came out a couple weeks ago, was that two of the lead agents on the Silk Road case out of Baltimore, DEA agents in Secret Service, were extorting tons of money off the Silk Road and putting it into personal accounts.
00:50:00.000 You know, creating murder-for-hire entrapment schemes.
00:50:03.000 I mean, they were kind of off the rails.
00:50:05.000 But, of course, when you're dealing with, you know, alternative communities that are that radical, of course there are going to be bad things that happen, and of course there's going to be things that are, you know, not on the up-and-up.
00:50:17.000 And this cop thing happened after that you had...
00:50:20.000 Got done finishing?
00:50:21.000 Well, it was revealed.
00:50:22.000 I actually knew something about it, but I was kind of gag-ordered in that it was a grand jury indictment investigation going on, so we weren't allowed to talk about it.
00:50:32.000 Ross Ulbrich's defense attorney wasn't allowed to bring it up in the trial.
00:50:35.000 I knew that something was going on involving rogue agents.
00:50:38.000 I didn't know exactly what it was, but I kind of put two and two together that that's what it was.
00:50:42.000 But it came out after the trial.
00:50:45.000 I mean, I've now gone back and addressed it slightly in the movie, but, you know, it only has so much relevance because the film, again, isn't, you know, saying that the guys who built the Silk Road are heroes and that these guys are just bad.
00:50:57.000 The point is that you have all kinds of people mixed up in things like this, good and bad.
00:51:01.000 There are plenty of good law enforcement agents, just like there were rogue ones.
00:51:05.000 There are plenty of good people on the Silk Road, just like there were bad ones.
00:51:08.000 And there was probably the ones who went bad, they were probably like, there's nobody that could...
00:51:16.000 Yeah, I think that you can get a false sense of security that if you're using an anonymous browser, if you're using a fictitious username, if you're using a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that doesn't have your name attached to it, you can have this false sense of security that you're untouchable.
00:51:33.000 As I said earlier, everything that happens in the digital world tends to be very traceable on some level.
00:51:39.000 It's hard to be truly anonymous online.
00:51:43.000 You can do it, but you have to go through enormous lengths to remain truly anonymous on the internet.
00:51:49.000 One little slip And you're done.
00:51:51.000 And the thing about the internet is one friend of mine within the Silk Road said to me, he's like, the internet never forgets.
00:51:58.000 So you could make a slip five years ago, but if I'm a federal agent and I'm like winding my way through your fictitious user history and I get to that one slip, if that door has been opened once and the light's shown on your face, that's all they need is once.
00:52:12.000 And whether that's law enforcement or a hacker or anybody, if there's a vulnerability, they're going to get in.
00:52:17.000 So these guys who were the bad undercover agents, they had diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin.
00:52:23.000 Yeah, over a million.
00:52:25.000 Over a million dollars.
00:52:26.000 And they got caught.
00:52:27.000 Yeah.
00:52:28.000 How'd they get caught?
00:52:29.000 Well, it's not totally known because, to be fair, it was a sting operation from within the DEA and other agencies, so they're not completely telling everyone how they got caught.
00:52:38.000 They just noticed Mike's got a new boat.
00:52:40.000 What's going on?
00:52:41.000 There was some of that.
00:52:43.000 There was people paying off their mortgages when they're only making $150 before taxes. 0.97
00:52:47.000 There were some dumb mistakes that got made.
00:52:50.000 There were accounts set up with a lot of money in them. 0.96
00:52:52.000 There were too many fictitious usernames that eventually, again, one tiny slip of one email account that you use to connect yourself to one.
00:53:02.000 That's the thing about the digital world.
00:53:03.000 It's like a flowchart.
00:53:04.000 You can just sit and look at it and go, oh, it went from here to here to here, and then that's it.
00:53:09.000 Hmm.
00:53:10.000 So, those guys got busted.
00:53:13.000 Were they involved in any of the cases that were...
00:53:17.000 Oh, yeah.
00:53:18.000 And is that being looked at now as, like, potential corruption?
00:53:22.000 Yeah.
00:53:22.000 That maybe the cases are tainted and the indictments might be thrown out?
00:53:26.000 Totally.
00:53:27.000 Oh, that's big.
00:53:28.000 Yeah.
00:53:29.000 Now, there was also some murder for hire stuff that you were talking about.
00:53:33.000 Was it real murder for hire?
00:53:35.000 Well, we don't know.
00:53:36.000 See, here's the thing.
00:53:38.000 One of the agents that was arrested was the undercover who was sort of at the heart of that first murder for hire sting.
00:53:46.000 So he basically actually framed somebody else in the Silk Road, said that person stole money, when actually he was the one who took the money.
00:53:53.000 And said, we should do, you know, instigated doing something to that person who was just one of the vendors on the Silk Road.
00:53:59.000 And that turns out to not only be a cop, which we've known all along, but a dirty cop.
00:54:03.000 A cop who was stealing money and blackmailing people within the Silk Road.
00:54:07.000 So the murder for hire, there were no bodies that were...
00:54:10.000 There had been no murders.
00:54:12.000 There were no bodies that were ever found.
00:54:14.000 No one appears to have been hurt on any level.
00:54:17.000 And what we still don't totally know is whether anybody and who that was...
00:54:22.000 Actually, originally instigated those murders for hire.
00:54:26.000 Just to bring you up to speed quickly, the prosecution claimed they had a lot of hard evidence against Ross Albrecht.
00:54:32.000 They said they have his laptop.
00:54:33.000 They said on that laptop they found a journal that he wrote, which he clearly laid out what he did on the Silk Road the whole time.
00:54:41.000 They believe it attributes him to the Dread Pirate Roberts, who they showed Dread Pirate Roberts records saying, I want to take a hit out on this person.
00:54:49.000 I'm going to send you the X amount of Bitcoin.
00:54:52.000 So they're saying, here's Ross's journal.
00:54:54.000 It's on his laptop.
00:54:55.000 It's talking about murders for hire.
00:54:57.000 But the other thing you have to keep in mind is two things.
00:54:59.000 One is he wasn't charged with murder.
00:55:02.000 That was not an indictment.
00:55:03.000 That was even part of his case.
00:55:05.000 They didn't charge him for murder.
00:55:06.000 They just talked about it.
00:55:08.000 They didn't have to prove it because he wasn't being charged with it.
00:55:10.000 He's only being charged primarily with drug kingpin, conspiracy, and hacking charges, which carry potentially life in prison.
00:55:18.000 Now, the drug conspiracy charges, was it directly related to him distributing drugs?
00:55:24.000 No, it was him being at the center of the website.
00:55:27.000 So it gets into transfer of intent, internet issues as well.
00:55:30.000 But no, he was being charged with creating a service that allowed the selling of millions of dollars worth of drugs to millions of people.
00:55:40.000 That seems so shifty.
00:55:41.000 It's like, as far as charging someone for that, because in that case, can't you charge Twitter?
00:55:45.000 Can't you charge Facebook?
00:55:46.000 I mean, I don't know, I don't have any personal information of people selling drugs through Facebook, but I gotta imagine someone has sent a Facebook message to someone saying, hey, you want to buy some Coke?
00:55:57.000 Well, yeah, the argument is this site was specifically created for selling illegal drugs.
00:56:06.000 Was it?
00:56:07.000 Well, that's the claim.
00:56:08.000 Right.
00:56:09.000 You know, the defense's argument is twofold.
00:56:11.000 They say, A, you know, this person, the Dread Pirate Roberts, wasn't even selling drugs.
00:56:17.000 They were just, you know, the creator of this politically oriented freedom, you know, dark website, and people could do whatever they wanted to on it.
00:56:25.000 And he was anti-drug war, and I mean, you can't deny that there was a big drug component to the Silk Road by its very nature.
00:56:30.000 It was a big...
00:56:31.000 The motivation of the Silk Road via the Dread Pirate Roberts writing was about removing harm and crime from the drug trade and helping to bring the drug war to an end.
00:56:42.000 But they also claim that the journal and all that stuff in the Bitcoin found on Ross's computer aren't his.
00:56:48.000 They claim that he was hacked and that the whole Silk Road was filled with All kinds of people, like these murky DEA agents that were, you know, using other people's usernames and accounts, which they were, that the internet world is so hard to pin down once you get behind fictitious usernames that they're saying that none of this stuff was actually his.
00:57:10.000 And that's what they're taking into an appeal.
00:57:13.000 Like, they feel so strongly about that they're moving forward with appeal.
00:57:16.000 Prosecution said, that's nonsense, this stuff was all on his laptop.
00:57:23.000 Yes.
00:57:39.000 Yeah.
00:57:40.000 And they knew that this case existed and they didn't allow, like the lawyer, Ross's defense was trying to postpone the trial a couple months so that the grand jury investigation, the criminal charges they knew were going to drop the complaint, but they were not allowed to postpone the trial.
00:57:55.000 Well, that seems like a slam dunk.
00:57:56.000 If you can prove that these cops were using other people's usernames and they were hacking into people's accounts, that seems like right there.
00:58:04.000 You can't prove anybody did it.
00:58:07.000 That's a trial.
00:58:07.000 I'd like to see that trial.
00:58:09.000 My perspective on it is, I'm fine with whatever the truth turns out to be.
00:58:13.000 I would just love to see both sides have their day.
00:58:16.000 And I was at that trial, and the defense did not have a day.
00:58:19.000 That's always how it is, though, man. 0.99
00:58:21.000 I mean, the idea that you get a fair trial is such a fucking joke. 0.97
00:58:24.000 Because there's so much railroading going on. 0.98
00:58:27.000 Yeah.
00:58:27.000 Especially when there's an agenda like this to prosecute someone in an important case, a landmark case, they think is going to establish a precedent.
00:58:36.000 They will fuck you. 1.00
00:58:38.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:58:38.000 That's kind of how it is. 1.00
00:58:40.000 Yeah, they will fuck you, and that's what they did to this guy. 0.99
00:58:43.000 Now, this Dread Pirate Roberts character, what's his name? 1.00
00:58:46.000 Dread Pirate Roberts.
00:58:47.000 Oh, I mean, the guy that's accused of being...
00:58:50.000 What's the guy they think?
00:58:51.000 Ross Albrecht.
00:58:52.000 And he's denying that he was Dread Pirate Roberts?
00:58:54.000 Yeah, he's saying...
00:58:55.000 Here's what we know about him.
00:58:56.000 We know that he had these, like, hardcore libertarian values.
00:58:59.000 He wasn't a hacker.
00:59:00.000 He wasn't a computer guy.
00:59:01.000 He didn't know anything about coding at all.
00:59:04.000 He was a physics major.
00:59:06.000 He put himself through two universities on full scholarship.
00:59:10.000 He had a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State.
00:59:13.000 Very bright.
00:59:15.000 We know that he had hardcore libertarian politics.
00:59:17.000 We know that much.
00:59:18.000 He admitted to creating the Silk Road.
00:59:21.000 He said he did it to create an economic simulation where he would combine Tor and Bitcoin to allow a marketplace to exist that would be free for everybody to use however they wanted to use it.
00:59:31.000 He claims he said he built it With the help of a lot of other people, because he doesn't really know how to code.
00:59:36.000 And he just let it run, and he was done.
00:59:38.000 And he moved on.
00:59:39.000 And that's what his family, his mom and dad, back him on that.
00:59:42.000 That's what his family claims.
00:59:44.000 Given being around him, because they're a very tight-knit family all this time, they were like, this was not someone who was on his laptop all the time.
00:59:50.000 I don't know how he could have been running almost a billion-dollar drug empire.
00:59:56.000 He wasn't that guy.
00:59:58.000 He wasn't the guy who just sat on his keyboard all the time.
01:00:02.000 So he claims he's not Dread Pirate Roberts.
01:00:03.000 Prosecution claims that he was.
01:00:05.000 And that was what that first trial was about.
01:00:08.000 What is their proof that he was?
01:00:10.000 They did find a journal on his laptop.
01:00:12.000 And the journal on his laptop is like, you know, today I'm setting up a Dread Pirate Roberts account.
01:00:16.000 Today I'm going to do this. 0.99
01:00:17.000 Who the fuck does that? 1.00
01:00:18.000 Who the fuck writes a journal on their laptop of all the shit they're going to do? 1.00
01:00:22.000 Today I will take over the world. 1.00
01:00:24.000 That's kind of how it was. 0.97
01:00:25.000 That seems so silly. 0.67
01:00:26.000 Yeah.
01:00:27.000 I mean, it's, you know, it's...
01:00:29.000 Again, I would love to see, like, I went to the trial thinking, okay, now we're going to see what happened, right?
01:00:34.000 And I would love to see the defense really have time to sort of talk through their end and have expert witnesses and get into the nitty-gritty of it.
01:00:41.000 Because, I mean, I would side with wherever the truth lies, but to be in the courtroom and to hear all that and just think, okay...
01:00:47.000 If this is true, this is the most naive criminal mastermind in the history of...
01:00:53.000 Could you imagine?
01:00:54.000 Breaking Bad wouldn't have lasted half a season if they had made Walter White...
01:00:59.000 Today I will plant a bomb in the courthouse. 0.99
01:01:02.000 Today I'm going to blow up that bomb. 0.99
01:01:04.000 And if you're reading this, don't tell anyone from law enforcement. 0.70
01:01:07.000 Yeah, it's not like he knows a lot about computers and that his computer could be hacked into or anything.
01:01:13.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:01:13.000 That's so stupid. 1.00
01:01:14.000 The idea that they didn't plant that on his laptop when you're dealing with all this other shit that these cops planted information and the fake hitman for hire shit. 1.00
01:01:23.000 Yeah. 0.98
01:01:23.000 It's really murky. 0.98
01:01:25.000 I mean, to be honest with you, the film goes to a certain degree into that stuff.
01:01:28.000 I'm very interested in looking at all the issues that the movie has raised, but I have to be careful how far I go into that material.
01:01:34.000 There's almost a whole other movie in it.
01:01:36.000 There really is, right?
01:01:38.000 I think there's a movie in people getting railroaded in trials, too.
01:01:44.000 I have a friend who went to jail for growing medical marijuana that was legal in California.
01:01:53.000 And when he went to jail, because the federal government tried him, the federal government doesn't even recognize medical marijuana, so they refused to even allow him to say the term medical marijuana.
01:02:04.000 They also refused to allow into court the fact that it was passed into law in California.
01:02:11.000 You could not bring that up at all.
01:02:13.000 Because it was irrelevant.
01:02:14.000 This is a state issue.
01:02:16.000 We're talking about a federal issue.
01:02:18.000 It's totally irrelevant.
01:02:19.000 So this guy went to jail for drug trafficking.
01:02:22.000 When he was a legal medical provider by the law of the state of California.
01:02:27.000 Yeah.
01:02:27.000 And that's like, those are the people that are going to get caught up in the wheels of this transition.
01:02:32.000 You know, because in 10 years, that's going to be unheard of.
01:02:35.000 Yeah.
01:02:35.000 It's so tragic.
01:02:36.000 I mean, it's creepy.
01:02:38.000 It's creepy that they can do that, and they can keep you from communicating all the facts of the case.
01:02:43.000 You're not granted the right to a fair trial.
01:02:46.000 You're granted the right to a fair trial by the standard of the people who are trying you, who want very desperately to convict you.
01:02:54.000 Correct.
01:02:54.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:02:55.000 Fair enough, fuck fair enough. 0.99
01:02:56.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.98
01:02:57.000 It's like if there's very little narrow path that you're allowed to go down and you can't stray on either side of that path, and that path basically leads to your jail cell.
01:03:04.000 So they can't prove that this guy actually sold any drugs, but because he created this forum that allowed other people to do it.
01:03:13.000 They're not saying that he was involved in any of these transactions.
01:03:16.000 No. 1.00
01:03:17.000 And they can sentence him for a fucking... 1.00
01:03:19.000 He's up for life. 1.00
01:03:20.000 I think his minimum is 20 to 30 years minimum without parole.
01:03:25.000 And how long has he been in jail waiting for all this?
01:03:27.000 A year and a half.
01:03:28.000 Solitary confinement.
01:03:29.000 Christ.
01:03:30.000 Oh my God.
01:03:32.000 Yeah.
01:03:33.000 And is there any hope?
01:03:36.000 You know, I really just hope to see the other side talk.
01:03:41.000 You know what I mean?
01:03:42.000 That's the part that was very chilling and frustrating when I was in the courtroom.
01:03:45.000 It just ended like, it was just, bam.
01:03:47.000 Prosecution said their piece, defense was about to, they got blocked, it was over.
01:03:50.000 They got blocked?
01:03:51.000 Yeah, you can watch the film, but basically they were, just like you just talked about with your friend, they were unable to call expert witnesses to talk about the complexities of Bitcoin and how Bitcoin wallets work and how you can hack into these.
01:04:06.000 It was all...
01:04:07.000 It was very much only one side.
01:04:10.000 And look, let's say at the end of the day, it turned out that that side is right.
01:04:13.000 I just don't know.
01:04:14.000 Like, we don't know.
01:04:15.000 Because we never heard the other side talk.
01:04:17.000 So I would very much like to see the defense have its day.
01:04:21.000 And if you come all the way around...
01:04:22.000 And the other problem that I have is that, you know, the media...
01:04:27.000 For the most part, just sort of swallows the party line.
01:04:29.000 Like, we're going to see Silk Road movies, and they're all going to be...
01:04:32.000 They're going to totally just take the prosecutorial position, and they're going to be, you know, news reports and movies and TV shows, and they're all going to be this roguish hacker kid who tried to kill people on the Internet.
01:04:45.000 And, again, I maintain, I know a fair amount about this case, that we don't totally know what happened.
01:04:51.000 In the movie, he'll probably be sweaty and doing meth.
01:04:54.000 It'll be Robert Pattinson, you know, and he won't shave for a while.
01:04:58.000 Yeah.
01:04:59.000 Making all sorts of terrible, evil choices.
01:05:01.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:05:02.000 Execute. 0.52
01:05:02.000 Enter. 0.52
01:05:03.000 Yeah.
01:05:04.000 Wasn't that like a thing?
01:05:05.000 Like, they were saying, like, at one point, they wanted to beat this guy up because he was going to talk, and then they decided to say, execute him instead.
01:05:14.000 Yeah.
01:05:14.000 And so they faked the murderer.
01:05:16.000 And they showed a photo of a body.
01:05:18.000 Yeah.
01:05:18.000 Well, who did all that?
01:05:19.000 The person who did that was the undercover agent who turns out to be corrupt.
01:05:23.000 Oh, my God.
01:05:24.000 And he's the one who stole the money that they were trying to allegedly execute this person for stealing.
01:05:29.000 This guy had stolen the money. 1.00
01:05:30.000 What a fucking tangled web! 1.00
01:05:33.000 It is. 1.00
01:05:34.000 Oh, my God.
01:05:35.000 So this guy...
01:05:37.000 Sets up a fake murder for hire, then does a fake murder, has a fake body, all to punish this fake person for stealing money that he stole.
01:05:49.000 Yes, and to go further, that person that was supposedly killed, who was one of the vendors on the Silk Road, was then arrested as being part of this sting operation for this drug deal that was put together by the crooked undercover cop who took all the money and is now,
01:06:04.000 I mean, his life is over...
01:06:06.000 And he's had to turn over and become, you know, a witness.
01:06:09.000 He still, you know, has indictments pending.
01:06:12.000 They could throw him in jail at any point.
01:06:14.000 And he did nothing.
01:06:16.000 You know, he was part of the Silk Road, but this entire operation for which he was arrested was all constructed by a corrupt DEA agent.
01:06:24.000 Oh, my.
01:06:26.000 I guess in order to be an undercover DEA agent, you gotta have some ability to work in secrecy.
01:06:33.000 Yeah.
01:06:34.000 But when people start working in secrecy, they get a little slimy.
01:06:38.000 They can go rogue.
01:06:38.000 Yeah, so you gotta keep an eye on those people.
01:06:40.000 I wonder if they can...
01:06:42.000 Put a percentage on what percentage of the transactions, exchanges, the conversations on Silk Road were about illegal activities and what were not.
01:06:52.000 Well, I've actually seen some pie charts, just because I have access to some of the metrics on this stuff.
01:06:59.000 That show how much was hard drugs. 0.98
01:07:01.000 Originally, the Silk Road had a very strict ethics code.
01:07:04.000 There was no child pornography allowed on Silk Road.
01:07:06.000 There was no counterfeit money allowed on Silk Road.
01:07:10.000 When Silk Road started, it was mostly softer drugs.
01:07:13.000 It was mostly mushrooms, marijuana, things like that.
01:07:15.000 It grew harder as the Silk Road went along.
01:07:18.000 But it also grew harder as more law enforcement became involved in the undercover operations of Silk Road.
01:07:24.000 And there was a certain amount of A complicity between the increasing law enforcement presence on Silk Road and the severity of the drugs and that kind of activity.
01:07:36.000 And to be fair to law enforcement, that's often how they work anyway.
01:07:39.000 If they're going to infiltrate a cartel, they're going to start moving big amounts of heroin or whatever.
01:07:44.000 That's how they get in.
01:07:46.000 But it has to be looked at in terms of the corruption of the Silk Road itself.
01:07:52.000 It didn't start with those kinds of intentions.
01:07:55.000 What a twisted web.
01:07:57.000 What a twisted web.
01:07:59.000 And unfortunately, if people don't watch your documentary, what are they going to get?
01:08:04.000 The mainstream news narrative is that- The dark web is bad, privacy is bad, drugs are bad.
01:08:09.000 They're selling drugs.
01:08:10.000 This guy, Dread Pirate Roberts, a drug dealer. 0.91
01:08:12.000 Murder for hire. 0.96
01:08:13.000 That's it. 0.94
01:08:14.000 Back to you, Bob.
01:08:15.000 That's what you're going to get.
01:08:16.000 Oh, what shady stuff.
01:08:17.000 Yeah.
01:08:17.000 Anyway, here in Pasadena, there was a Mickey Mouse parade today.
01:08:21.000 Yeah, I mean, as I said, I spent several hours when I was at South By talking to a reporter from a major newspaper who wanted to know what this thing was, and I talked to her for hours and explained in detail, and then when she wrote her thing, it was like, this thing's filled with criminals, and it's horrible, and these people are bad. 0.98
01:08:34.000 Wrap that chick out. 1.00
01:08:35.000 Wrap her out, man. 0.80
01:08:36.000 Who is it?
01:08:36.000 I'm not going to say.
01:08:37.000 What public What publication was it?
01:08:39.000 I can't say.
01:08:39.000 What does it rhyme with?
01:08:41.000 New York Times?
01:08:42.000 Crimes.
01:08:43.000 Oh, New York Times.
01:08:45.000 Look up the New York Times.
01:08:46.000 Find that article, Jamie.
01:08:48.000 Find it. 1.00
01:08:50.000 That's bullshit. 1.00
01:08:51.000 Why are you so nice? 1.00
01:08:53.000 I would be the first.
01:08:54.000 That's a problem.
01:08:55.000 A person like that's a problem.
01:08:57.000 Pretending to be a reporter.
01:08:58.000 It's what we face.
01:08:59.000 I think that we face an inherent lack of understanding and a fear and a reactionary fear around technologies.
01:09:05.000 I think a lot of the story that's being told about new technologies is automatically criminalizing or demonizing it.
01:09:10.000 And then when you tell stories that sort of sit in the middle, you're accused of being sort of Pollyanna-ish and saying, oh, it's all good.
01:09:16.000 It's like, no, we're not saying that.
01:09:18.000 We're saying this is what's going on, whether you like it or not.
01:09:20.000 Let's at least examine it for what it is. 0.94
01:09:23.000 Well, how could anybody who watches your documentary, or at least listens to this conversation on this podcast, not think that there's a bunch of twisted shit going on with these undercover agents that were obviously doing things and implicating people in things that they had no involvement in, stealing money and blaming it on others, 0.95
01:09:41.000 pretending to have a murder? 0.97
01:09:43.000 How could someone not see all the gray?
01:09:44.000 Because they don't want...
01:09:45.000 I don't think they want to.
01:09:46.000 The gray lady doesn't want to see the gray? 1.00
01:09:48.000 Yeah.
01:09:49.000 That's outrageous.
01:09:50.000 I don't think they want to.
01:09:52.000 That is outrageous.
01:09:52.000 They don't want to, but why don't they want to?
01:09:54.000 Because they fucking suck as journalists. 1.00
01:09:56.000 And they should be removed and replaced with independent bloggers. 1.00
01:10:01.000 For real, man. 0.98
01:10:02.000 Until you get a Glenn Greenwald type character who doesn't have a stake in it and wants to tell the whole fucking story, what do you get? 0.95
01:10:11.000 And even, you know, he, who knows, man. 1.00
01:10:14.000 Fuck. 1.00
01:10:15.000 This is goddamn confusing to me. 1.00
01:10:18.000 Yeah, and it's like, in a way, you have to, like, in order to understand it, you've got to really educate yourself. 0.84
01:10:22.000 There's a lot of moving parts.
01:10:24.000 There really are.
01:10:25.000 I mean, if you really, and most people, like, it's much easier just to demonize something and say, oh, it's bad.
01:10:29.000 And isn't this a situation where the Silk Road is essentially the Napster of the deep well?
01:10:34.000 100%.
01:10:35.000 And there's going to be some...
01:10:36.000 There already are.
01:10:37.000 Yeah.
01:10:37.000 I mean, the toothpaste is well out of the tube.
01:10:40.000 It's proliferating now.
01:10:42.000 There's just hundreds of these drug markets online.
01:10:44.000 And they're...
01:10:45.000 We only say the names.
01:10:47.000 They're Kaiser Soze.
01:10:48.000 Yeah, and they're using decentralized technologies, which means there's no...
01:10:51.000 Exactly what happened with Napster.
01:10:52.000 Napster was a central database, so it was easy to target and shut down.
01:10:56.000 Then you had a bunch of copycats like Kazaa and all these other ones.
01:10:58.000 They were also a central database, and they were easy to shut down.
01:11:01.000 Then BitTorrent came along, and it was decentralized.
01:11:03.000 And what that means is there is no central server.
01:11:06.000 The system operates through...
01:11:09.000 The way it's coded, it works through every single user that's online.
01:11:13.000 There's nobody to target.
01:11:14.000 That's the reason BitTorrent never went away, right?
01:11:17.000 And that's what's happening in the drug markets now.
01:11:18.000 As you started with these central server markets, they get clobbered.
01:11:22.000 You find the server, you seize the server, game over.
01:11:26.000 And they've done it over and over again for these copycat drug markets.
01:11:29.000 But now decentralized markets are beginning to proliferate.
01:11:32.000 You can't shut those down.
01:11:34.000 It's very, very difficult.
01:11:35.000 And there's going to be...
01:11:36.000 There are already hundreds and hundreds of them all over the world.
01:11:39.000 There are going to be thousands.
01:11:40.000 It's just going to grow and grow and grow.
01:11:42.000 Because the technology works, and because, as you said, there's a demand.
01:11:46.000 So the real issue is going to be the delivery of these illegal substances.
01:11:51.000 Like, you're having a hard address that these things get delivered to.
01:11:55.000 Yeah, but they come through camouflage, FedEx, and UPS packages.
01:11:59.000 And these people know what they're doing and they know how to game the postal system.
01:12:02.000 I mean, I've talked to a bunch of dealers who are using these online services and they're very, very good at working the postal system.
01:12:07.000 So, like, when you hear about kids getting popped for having, you know, 500 movies on their hard drive, they're distributing through BitTorrent and they get caught...
01:12:20.000 This is mostly because they were one of the ones who were uploading them, right?
01:12:26.000 Yeah, they got tracked.
01:12:28.000 Or if you're like a really dumb 13-year-old and you're just pulling this stuff down on your browser and they find your internet service provider and they find your IP address and they connect that to a person whose broadband is sucking down ridiculous amounts of media every day,
01:12:43.000 then they can find you that way too. 0.94
01:12:45.000 There's ways of tracking you that way.
01:12:47.000 Now, but if you're buying drugs on the internet, on an anonymous browser, in the darknet, with Bitcoin, and you've kept your anonymity tight working, it's very, very difficult to find you unless they literally pop you because the guy who sent you stuff, the packaging wasn't well camouflaged, and they go,
01:13:02.000 oh, look at this.
01:13:03.000 Let's find out where that's going, and they trace it back to its address, and they pop you.
01:13:07.000 Otherwise, it's very hard to actually track.
01:13:09.000 You're not showing a signal.
01:13:11.000 Right.
01:13:30.000 Yeah, they broke into this guy's house, who was a retired NSA agent. 0.97
01:13:36.000 Him and his wife were growing tomatoes in their basement, and they fucking locked him up, boots to the neck, the whole deal. 0.81
01:13:43.000 And they're like, oh, whoops, sorry. 0.95
01:13:46.000 You know, and this guy got a taste of what he's a part of.
01:13:49.000 Right.
01:13:49.000 Like, look, hey, look at this.
01:13:51.000 Yeah.
01:13:52.000 Well, that's the problem.
01:13:53.000 As you said before, when they're, you know, my argument when people say, well, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
01:13:58.000 The problem is a lot of mistakes get made, A. B. Of course, I should have privacy whether I have something to hide or not.
01:14:05.000 It's none of your business what I'm doing, unless to a certain degree I'm creating a crime on a level that should be enforced.
01:14:11.000 But there are so many laws.
01:14:13.000 There are thousands and thousands of laws and they get very, very tangled.
01:14:17.000 And it's very easy to pop somebody for almost anything.
01:14:20.000 And that's where this gets tricky.
01:14:22.000 When people are infiltrating your private life with the ability to either mistakenly or through a law that you may feel like what happened to your friend with the marijuana issue or what happened to the guy who just got shot.
01:14:36.000 In the Carolinas who had a broken taillight, which isn't even against the law and isn't really even a reason to legally stop somebody and he didn't have a prior and he didn't have a warrant.
01:14:43.000 You know, that's the world we live in where these mistakes can happen and where things can go very, very wrong for people and you have to have some protections against that.
01:14:51.000 Yeah, what I was getting at was that this signal doesn't exist, like a signal where you're passing by someone's house and you see all this electricity being used, all this heat being generated.
01:15:00.000 Okay, this is a grow house.
01:15:02.000 Well, if you're...
01:15:12.000 Right.
01:15:18.000 Right.
01:15:19.000 Right.
01:15:23.000 That's why law enforcement has been trying to break TOR. And what's been going on is that TOR, there's a conflict there, because TOR is still created and maintained by a lot of government agencies, or utilized, let's say, by a lot of government agencies who need TOR in order to communicate with each other.
01:15:40.000 I mean, NSA, a lot of different agencies need TOR to communicate privately.
01:15:43.000 But then on the same floor of a law enforcement building, you may have some guy in Office A who's working to help make TOR stronger.
01:15:50.000 Four doors down, you've got somebody in the same building on the same floor Trying to break TOR. So you have this huge conflict of interest going on where they don't even really know what to do with it.
01:15:58.000 And the people who want to break TOR want to break it for the reason you just said.
01:16:01.000 How else do we identify?
01:16:03.000 How do we find these people, even if TOR is mostly being used for good purposes, unless we demonize the whole thing?
01:16:09.000 And that's when I get my hackles up when people just say, this whole world is bad.
01:16:14.000 They're just saying that because it's just easier just to throw a kind of a blanket over this entire world and go, well, now we know where all the bad people are.
01:16:20.000 They're everybody who are using Tor, which is like saying anybody who's got a bathroom door is bad.
01:16:24.000 It's so irresponsible to just demonize the entire Silk Road like that and demonize the entire movement without looking at the nuances.
01:16:34.000 We're looking at the unbelievable complexity involved in In freedom and digital freedom and exchanging information online and even the complexities involved in the drug war.
01:16:46.000 The idea that just because it's a law that you shouldn't examine that law very closely and using your own personal morals and ethics, apply them to that law and tell me whether or not this law is just.
01:16:58.000 Yeah.
01:16:59.000 Because I guarantee you most intelligent people will not agree with it.
01:17:02.000 Even Republicans.
01:17:03.000 Completely.
01:17:04.000 Yeah, it's a nonpartisan issue.
01:17:05.000 It really is. 0.93
01:17:06.000 People go, oh, they're just crazy libertarians. 0.65
01:17:08.000 I'm like, no, they're not. 0.88
01:17:09.000 They really aren't.
01:17:09.000 It's all stripes.
01:17:10.000 I mean, it's every kind of political configuration is involved in this movement on some level or another.
01:17:16.000 Who doesn't want privacy?
01:17:17.000 This documentary, where can people see it and when can people see it?
01:17:21.000 Well, we're touring festivals right now.
01:17:23.000 We just did South By, and we're doing festivals.
01:17:25.000 So if you go to deepwebthemovie.com, you can see which festivals we're coming up on.
01:17:30.000 But the movie is going to be on Epix, the Epix Network, on premium cable.
01:17:34.000 I think it's regular cable, right?
01:17:35.000 Yeah, regular cable.
01:17:36.000 Yeah, so it'll be on Epix on May 31st.
01:17:39.000 You can see it there, and then it will be out all over after that.
01:17:43.000 Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, everywhere.
01:17:46.000 Well, Jim Norton, who is our buddy, who will be here on Wednesday, also has a special coming out on Epix. 0.98
01:17:52.000 So, fucking go Epix! 0.96
01:17:53.000 Yeah, Epix is awesome. 0.99
01:17:55.000 Was there anything...
01:17:57.000 It seems like to put such an intense and complex issue into a 90-minute piece...
01:18:04.000 It seems like it would be really hard to edit.
01:18:06.000 Yeah, it was really challenging and downloaded was challenging too.
01:18:10.000 You have to really pick your battles, you know, and also you have to decide what is it most important for the audience to understand.
01:18:15.000 That's the way I come at them.
01:18:17.000 It's like there are very core issues that matter here.
01:18:20.000 You don't need to understand how Bitcoin works.
01:18:21.000 You don't need to understand how Tor works.
01:18:25.000 Thankfully, these issues to me are not about technology.
01:18:27.000 They're about human nature and community.
01:18:30.000 So you always stress the sort of human side.
01:18:33.000 What is the motivation?
01:18:34.000 Why did they start this thing?
01:18:35.000 Who are they?
01:18:36.000 What are their ideals?
01:18:37.000 What kind of community do they want to create?
01:18:39.000 And that you can convey to somebody in 90 minutes.
01:18:42.000 Did you have a chance to talk to this dude that's in solitary?
01:18:45.000 What's his name again?
01:18:46.000 Ross Ulbricht.
01:18:47.000 I have exclusive access to that family, the mom, the dad, their defense attorney.
01:18:52.000 I had access to Ross, but he's behind bars in a federal trial.
01:18:56.000 He couldn't be interviewed by me or 60 Minutes.
01:18:58.000 I was doing interviews with him via his parents, so they would give him questions.
01:19:03.000 He's very aware of the film.
01:19:05.000 They would give him questions, and then he would answer them for me.
01:19:10.000 In written form.
01:19:12.000 And in some cases, that was it.
01:19:16.000 So I was able to communicate with him that way and sort of get the information that I needed to.
01:19:22.000 But what is the rationale for not allowing him to talk?
01:19:26.000 I mean, he's a, you know, it's a big federal case, and they kept him under lock and key.
01:19:32.000 But isn't that insane?
01:19:34.000 It was chilling.
01:19:35.000 Yeah, I was expecting to go talk to him, like, you know, at a table in visitation or something.
01:19:40.000 None of that.
01:19:41.000 That's really disturbing to me.
01:19:43.000 Because you're not talking about a murderer.
01:19:45.000 You're not talking about a guy who was even contemplating murder.
01:19:49.000 You're not talking about a guy who stole a ton of money.
01:19:51.000 You're not talking about a guy who wrecked the government, who was planning anarchy, wanted to blow up the federal courthouse.
01:19:58.000 You're not talking about that.
01:19:59.000 No, but the way the prosecution looks at him, to be fair, is as all those things.
01:20:04.000 They believe that Ross intended to have people killed, whether those murders happened or not.
01:20:09.000 They believe that he made a lot of money off of the Silk Road via Bitcoin.
01:20:14.000 They believe that the sort of anti-government, libertarian ethos that they believe he espoused to was very anarchistic and dangerous.
01:20:22.000 So they did view him as a major threat. 0.98
01:20:25.000 That's a slippery slope to say that an anti-government libertarian ethos is dangerous because, boy, there's a lot of fucking people you're going to have to lock up with that. 0.99
01:20:33.000 I know. 0.99
01:20:34.000 How about Rand Paul? 0.99
01:20:35.000 This motherfucker's running for president and that's his main platform. 0.99
01:20:38.000 I know. 1.00
01:20:38.000 Good luck with all that. 1.00
01:20:40.000 Yeah. 0.96
01:20:40.000 You know, the guy running for government office, the top government office, has a dad who's pretty goddamn libertarian for being a Republican. 0.96
01:20:48.000 Yeah, yeah, no, it's true.
01:20:49.000 And I maintain that whatever the truth ends up being, and I really do hope we categorically get to the bottom of it at some point, in a way, and not to write him off at all, but in a way, regardless of Ross Ulbricht, I think that the idea of these anonymous marketplaces on the Internet with these communities,
01:21:08.000 that is the greatest threat.
01:21:10.000 I think that's what poses the greatest threat.
01:21:13.000 Well, I think the internet itself is the greatest threat to the system that we have in place, and it's the biggest exposer of the shell game of the two-party system as well.
01:21:24.000 It's not viable, and because it's not viable, the data just keeps getting examined and examined and examined by so many people, and they keep coming to the same conclusion. 0.98
01:21:33.000 This is a fucking shell game. 0.78
01:21:35.000 You have the same corporations that are supporting the same people. 1.00
01:21:39.000 They get into office.
01:21:40.000 They never do what they said they were going to do. 1.00
01:21:41.000 And they do a bunch of shit that you would never want them to do. 0.99
01:21:44.000 So it's the same thing over and over again. 1.00
01:21:46.000 And I think that ultimately that's going to be their demise.
01:21:49.000 Their demise is going to be their unwillingness to accept the new digital reality.
01:21:53.000 Yeah, that they're exposed.
01:21:54.000 Everything is exposed.
01:21:55.000 It means we're exposed too, but it doesn't mean...
01:21:57.000 The upside is everything is exposed.
01:21:59.000 But we're not doing anything.
01:22:00.000 You're making documentaries.
01:22:01.000 I'm telling jokes.
01:22:02.000 But this...
01:22:03.000 This guy is losing a giant chunk of his life, and he's been in jail for a year and a half now.
01:22:09.000 Yeah, well he may lose his, he may get life.
01:22:10.000 He won't know in mid-May.
01:22:12.000 I mean, he may get life. 0.99
01:22:13.000 Fucking Christ. 0.99
01:22:14.000 And if he gets life, no one can talk to him. 1.00
01:22:16.000 No.
01:22:17.000 Like, Chelsea Manning, the artist formerly known as Bradley Manning, now has Twitter, but how does she do that?
01:22:24.000 Yeah, I was actually wondering because I started following her a couple days ago.
01:22:28.000 There are certain people who do get, like Barrett Brown had access to email.
01:22:32.000 He had it recently revoked.
01:22:34.000 Why did he get it revoked?
01:22:35.000 They claimed that he was talking to a journalist.
01:22:38.000 They shouldn't have revoked it, in my opinion.
01:22:40.000 But he hasn't been treated fairly from the beginning.
01:22:44.000 That's another documentary.
01:22:45.000 Right.
01:22:46.000 But in Ross's case, it's very difficult to interview people who are sort of convicted of those kinds of charges.
01:22:56.000 They often get sent to pretty max-oriented facilities.
01:23:00.000 But I'm still working on it.
01:23:01.000 I'm still hoping to get an interview with him.
01:23:03.000 It's basically a civilized form of a Siberian gulag. 0.59
01:23:06.000 Yeah.
01:23:07.000 I mean, it's like you're just locking you away and throwing the key.
01:23:10.000 They're just not throwing away the key, and they're locking you away.
01:23:13.000 Yeah.
01:23:14.000 You can't talk to anybody. 0.99
01:23:15.000 You're in solitary confinement, which makes people go fucking crazy. 0.98
01:23:19.000 It certainly does, yeah. 0.98
01:23:20.000 I mean, that's what they did with Chelsea Manning as well. 0.87
01:23:22.000 Naked, no clothes, locked in solitary for years.
01:23:26.000 Yeah. 0.98
01:23:26.000 Tell me that won't make you nuts. 0.98
01:23:28.000 It will.
01:23:29.000 It removes so much of what you are as a human being.
01:23:33.000 Completely.
01:23:33.000 All your personal freedom is gone, and this is legal, and this is morally acceptable, and this is a part of law.
01:23:44.000 I mean, that's insane. 0.97
01:23:45.000 That's fucking insane that they can do that to this guy. 0.90
01:23:49.000 So, when do they get to see whether or not they'll be able to appeal? 0.98
01:23:54.000 Well, appeals often can take about a year, the process of sort of dealing with the appellate court.
01:23:59.000 So he's going to get sent there, I believe, and again, you know, that might change, but currently he's going to be sentenced on May 15th.
01:24:06.000 Wow, that's pretty cool.
01:24:07.000 It's around the corner.
01:24:08.000 And then an appeal would occur, you know, sometime, hopefully this year or at some point early next year.
01:24:13.000 Well, that at least will give some...
01:24:17.000 Publicity to the premiere of your documentary, which is May 31st.
01:24:21.000 May 31st, yeah.
01:24:22.000 So that'll be a couple weeks out, so I'm sure the buzz will still be abound.
01:24:27.000 It really disturbs me, man.
01:24:29.000 I mean, it really gets me creeped out.
01:24:31.000 It disturbs me on a very personal level.
01:24:34.000 The idea that you could take some young person and do that to them and not let them speak.
01:24:41.000 Was he ever able to speak on his behalf?
01:24:44.000 Did he give a statement or anything?
01:24:46.000 No.
01:24:46.000 You have to be very careful about testifying, too.
01:24:49.000 It's a very tricky position to put yourself in.
01:24:52.000 So it'll be interesting to see what happens with the appeal process.
01:24:57.000 Are they hopeful?
01:24:58.000 They have to be.
01:24:59.000 What else can you be but hopeful?
01:25:02.000 But legal analysts, when they look at it from an objective standpoint, people that don't have a vested interest in success or failure...
01:25:07.000 They say that it's a very...
01:25:08.000 they have a very steep hill to climb to get anywhere. 1.00
01:25:12.000 Fuck. 1.00
01:25:13.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:25:14.000 How much did this bug you when you were doing this?
01:25:17.000 It got pretty depressing.
01:25:19.000 I stayed pretty neutral.
01:25:22.000 And again, as I say, I don't know the whole truth.
01:25:25.000 I just am very eager to either find out or to not make proclamations about things that I don't think have been proven, which doesn't seem to be stopping anybody else.
01:25:34.000 But...
01:25:36.000 There was a point when I was sitting in the federal trial and just watching them get blocked and blocked and blocked.
01:25:41.000 And everyone in that room just wanted to hear at least something from the other side.
01:25:46.000 And, you know, at the point at which I suddenly realized that was it.
01:25:49.000 The trial was over.
01:25:50.000 It was very...
01:25:52.000 I mean, I said to Ross's mom, you know, later that day, I was like, I don't know how...
01:25:57.000 I mean, I've always wondered how you've survived the last year, but, like, I barely made it through this week, and it's not my son in jail.
01:26:04.000 And even if he's guilty of everything, just on a pure emotional level, just to watch...
01:26:09.000 The machinery and the way that it works.
01:26:13.000 It's very, very sad.
01:26:15.000 I mean, the whole case is, I find, extremely sad.
01:26:18.000 Whatever the truth turns out to be, just on a basic human level, it was a pretty emotional experience.
01:26:23.000 And is there any...
01:26:30.000 Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, a few things are going on.
01:26:32.000 As you know, it's mostly state level.
01:26:34.000 Mandatory minimums are starting to get reduced.
01:26:36.000 I mean, the world is moving slowly beyond this prohibition.
01:26:43.000 Right.
01:26:43.000 And I think that we're getting there.
01:26:45.000 And I think that the Internet has actually been really helpful in sort of creating grassroots movement that then attack things that are, you know, Byzantine, like the gay marriage laws or the marijuana laws or these things that are beginning to shift in our culture. 0.55
01:26:59.000 And I think that the net is absolutely a power there.
01:27:03.000 But there's a very big battle, you know.
01:27:06.000 Against that tide.
01:27:08.000 And that's largely at the federal level.
01:27:10.000 And so I think we have a long way to go before we're having conversations that are sane and balanced and nuanced about any of this stuff.
01:27:19.000 It's very black and white.
01:27:20.000 You go out into the world and you say things about this world that aren't completely party line and you're just branded as being a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot.
01:27:28.000 Is that how you've been branded?
01:27:31.000 Well, A, the movie hasn't come out yet, but I sort of comically caught some heat on Downloaded.
01:27:35.000 I don't think I talked enough about piracy for some people's liking.
01:27:38.000 On Downloaded?
01:27:39.000 Yeah, that was the Napster movie that I made.
01:27:41.000 And I think that people expected to have much more about how bad it was to pull down Metallica.
01:27:47.000 And I just was not that interested in that stuff.
01:27:51.000 And I think that if you don't follow the sort of, you know, standard narrative, you take some heat.
01:27:58.000 I don't care.
01:27:59.000 Like you said, I'm a guy who makes documentaries.
01:28:00.000 I'm not going to jail.
01:28:01.000 I'm not selling anything on the internet.
01:28:03.000 You know what I mean?
01:28:04.000 I'm objectively removed from that world.
01:28:07.000 But of course you take heat, because people get really pissed off at the idea...
01:28:11.000 That you're not just saying, you know, hiding bad, piracy bad, drugs bad.
01:28:16.000 You know, it's just you have to just take that party line, like that reporter I talked to.
01:28:20.000 And it's just, it's disappointing, but that's the prevailing narrative.
01:28:23.000 And it's not just the narrative from the right.
01:28:25.000 You get that from the left.
01:28:26.000 You get it from the center.
01:28:27.000 Everyone just sort of marches in line.
01:28:30.000 Yeah, they watched Dragnet when they were kids.
01:28:33.000 Yeah.
01:28:33.000 They have this idea that it's good and evil in this world.
01:28:36.000 Good guys and bad guys.
01:28:37.000 Just catch the bad guys.
01:28:38.000 This is a freedom issue, in my opinion.
01:28:40.000 If you look at the worst thing that happened, people distributed drugs to each other that wanted those drugs.
01:28:48.000 That's the worst thing that happened.
01:28:49.000 Obviously, if the murders were faked, and it's quite possible, in fact likely, that no one ever wanted anybody murdered in the first place.
01:28:59.000 This guy just was setting the whole thing up to cover up the fact that he stole all this money.
01:29:03.000 It's like, where's the crime?
01:29:04.000 Where's the crime that you're protecting the world from? 0.99
01:29:07.000 That you've got this fucking guy locked up in jail? 0.98
01:29:09.000 And is a part of the reason why they're able to keep him in solitary the murder for hire? 0.99
01:29:14.000 Yeah, to be clear, he's no longer in solitary.
01:29:17.000 When they first caught him, and it's not uncommon, it's called the shoe, he was put into the shoe, which is a solitary confinement.
01:29:23.000 It's a nasty sort of environment to be in.
01:29:26.000 He was in solitary for six weeks.
01:29:27.000 He's not been in solitary for the bulk of his confinement.
01:29:30.000 He's not like Chelsea Manning in that way.
01:29:32.000 He's been in a holding prison in Brooklyn for over a year.
01:29:36.000 He did some solitary in Oakland, and then he did some solitary in New York.
01:29:41.000 He's been primarily part of the regular prison system.
01:29:44.000 And in the regular prison system, what type of security do they have?
01:29:48.000 It's intense.
01:29:49.000 Oh, no, it's intense.
01:29:51.000 But is he locked up with murderers?
01:29:52.000 Yeah, he's in the general population. 1.00
01:29:56.000 Fuck! 1.00
01:29:56.000 Yeah, he's done... 1.00
01:29:57.000 I mean, you know, again, not to exonerate him, but he's been a pretty interesting inmate.
01:30:02.000 He's been teaching, like, physics and yoga in prison.
01:30:05.000 He's been teaching math and helping the guys with their GEDs.
01:30:08.000 Like, you know, again, like...
01:30:10.000 This is just who he is.
01:30:11.000 He may have done horrible other things that we, you know, we'll learn about more in detail at some point.
01:30:16.000 But what we know about what he has done.
01:30:18.000 Exactly.
01:30:19.000 He seems like a pretty goddamn cool guy.
01:30:20.000 He's an interesting guy.
01:30:21.000 Yeah.
01:30:22.000 That just drives me nuts, man.
01:30:23.000 When you were done with this, when you did the final edit and you stepped back and you, you know, you're done.
01:30:31.000 Now it's just about talking about it, promoting it.
01:30:34.000 And what does this leave you feeling when you make a documentary about something like this?
01:30:39.000 You go through withdrawal.
01:30:40.000 You know, I'm actually through it now because I've been done for a minute, but you go through a little withdrawal because I was living, eating, and sleeping in this world for almost two years, and I was dealing with a lot of people on all sides, on the law enforcement side, on the cyber side,
01:30:56.000 his family, the whole thing.
01:30:58.000 You've got to go through withdrawal.
01:31:00.000 But part of me, and I said this, I was very blunt with Lynn, his mom, and I like being able to talk about it, so that's kind of the easy part.
01:31:07.000 That's kind of the why you do it part, right?
01:31:10.000 But I said to Lynn, I was like, you know, I really am glad I'm done.
01:31:15.000 It's like, you don't get to go home.
01:31:18.000 I've got a family and kids, and I get to go home, and I'm done.
01:31:23.000 You go outside, and you smell the air, and you get in your car, and you go about your day, and you take your kids to school, and I think...
01:31:30.000 You know, I just, I don't, I am done with that world.
01:31:33.000 Well, that's this really scary part about the threat of keeping in line, is that they can remove that from you.
01:31:39.000 They can take that right away from you to just drive right now and go, go get a burrito.
01:31:45.000 I want to drive down the street to the Mexican restaurant.
01:31:47.000 I want to, you know, do this.
01:31:49.000 I want to go to Big Bear and just take a day off.
01:31:51.000 You can't do that.
01:31:52.000 None of those are options anymore.
01:31:54.000 Yeah, and even if you're the family or whoever, your life is shattered, too.
01:32:00.000 I mean, Lynn doesn't get to get home and have a regular life anymore. 1.00
01:32:02.000 From now on, her son, her baby, is always going to be in a cage somewhere.
01:32:07.000 Was there any sympathy from people that you talked to, even off the record, in law enforcement?
01:32:12.000 Yeah.
01:32:13.000 Oh, sure.
01:32:13.000 Yeah, absolutely.
01:32:14.000 I mean, a lot of the law enforcement people that I spoke to, and some of whom are in the movie, were really...
01:32:20.000 The same thing I went through with Napster with the labels.
01:32:22.000 It's like, again, to me, it's not black and white.
01:32:24.000 It's not good guys and bad guys.
01:32:25.000 Most of the label guys I talked to were really clear-eyed and smart and had a really good view of, like, here's where we screwed up, here's where we're taking too much money, here's where this happened, here's where the technology fucked us, whatever it was.
01:32:36.000 On law enforcement, most of the law enforcement guys I talk to don't agree with this notion that there should be no encryption.
01:32:41.000 It's like, yes, it's going to make our job harder, but yes, you have a right to privacy.
01:32:46.000 No, we should not have warrantless search and seizure.
01:32:48.000 That makes no sense.
01:32:50.000 And, you know, so there's a lot of people caught up in the grays. 0.96
01:32:53.000 There's another guy I spoke to in the movie named Neil Franklin, who is the director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
01:33:01.000 And Neil was a homicide major on the streets of Baltimore for 20 years and saw everything there was to see about the drug wars ravages.
01:33:07.000 And now his life, his work is about getting rid of the drug war from the officer side, from the DEA, FBI, DA side.
01:33:17.000 I just feel like in the future it's going to be looked back the same way prohibition was.
01:33:21.000 It's just going to be looked back at like some ridiculous part of our history that we should have been intelligent enough to realize it was a foolhardy pursuit and now we've abandoned it. 0.99
01:33:30.000 You know, there's fucking bars everywhere. 0.98
01:33:33.000 I mean, you just drive down the street everywhere you go, you can buy booze. 0.99
01:33:36.000 And those bars have parking lots. 1.00
01:33:37.000 Yeah.
01:33:38.000 People who pay taxes go to them.
01:33:40.000 It supports the economy.
01:33:42.000 The whole thing is bizarre.
01:33:44.000 It's such a weird thing when you look at our culture and you look at these just glaring flaws in how we operate.
01:33:53.000 And the justice system, in this respect, is one of those glaring flaws.
01:33:57.000 When you tell me about that trial, it makes me sick.
01:34:00.000 I physically feel sick.
01:34:02.000 Yeah, it was sick-making.
01:34:03.000 It really was.
01:34:04.000 It was kind of dizzying.
01:34:05.000 You just thought, really?
01:34:06.000 It was like being in a Kafka novel.
01:34:07.000 You're like, really?
01:34:08.000 That's it?
01:34:09.000 We go home?
01:34:10.000 It makes no sense.
01:34:11.000 It almost makes sense when you hear about that judge in Pennsylvania that was sensing those kids for profit.
01:34:17.000 Yeah.
01:34:17.000 Like, you kind of get it now.
01:34:18.000 Yeah.
01:34:19.000 Like, well, you guys are just used to doing this.
01:34:21.000 Yeah.
01:34:21.000 And that becomes just another step removed from the normal operating procedure.
01:34:26.000 Like, eh, what's the big deal?
01:34:27.000 Yeah.
01:34:28.000 I need a pool.
01:34:30.000 What's the big deal? 1.00
01:34:31.000 I'd like to go on vacation and fuck some kid's life up. 1.00
01:34:34.000 Yeah, and there's also the general aspect of we need to punish the drug war. 1.00
01:34:39.000 We need to do it in a big way.
01:34:40.000 We need to do it in a public way.
01:34:42.000 We need to do it with maximum punishment, with extreme prejudice, as it were.
01:34:47.000 So you watch that machinery just at work, too.
01:34:50.000 They get to go back in front of the TV cameras and go, we have another big drug war trophy.
01:34:54.000 And this Dread Pirate Roberts character, he started, whether it's this guy Ross or not, he started talking because there's another competing sort of deep web service.
01:35:07.000 Yeah, well back at the time there was one called Atlantis that had shown up.
01:35:13.000 Now there's tons of them, but this was in the early days.
01:35:16.000 And the journalist from Wired, Andy Greenberg, who's our everyman in the film who takes us through this world...
01:35:24.000 He was the first person to interview, really the only person to interview Dread Pirate Roberts.
01:35:29.000 And that's how he got the interview, was just by saying, look, I'll cover these other guys.
01:35:32.000 And Dread Pirate Roberts knew that the Silk Road needed more exposure in order to get more customers, so he talked.
01:35:38.000 Wow.
01:35:38.000 And so no one from Atlantis ever got popped.
01:35:41.000 Atlantis disappeared.
01:35:43.000 Atlantis got popped and evaporated ages ago.
01:35:46.000 So the government came in and infiltrated it?
01:35:48.000 We don't know.
01:35:48.000 It just disappeared.
01:35:51.000 What happens with a lot of these services is they'll extort people.
01:35:56.000 They'll collect all their money and then they'll just hightail it.
01:35:59.000 Oh, so the guys who own the service can be shady.
01:36:01.000 Yeah, completely.
01:36:03.000 That's what you think?
01:36:03.000 Yeah, that just happened with one called Evolution recently, and it happened with another one called Sheet Market, and it happens from time to time.
01:36:09.000 I'm confused.
01:36:10.000 How are they getting money?
01:36:12.000 What you do is you set up an account and get Bitcoin.
01:36:15.000 You can use Bitcoin.
01:36:17.000 Overstock.com takes Bitcoin.
01:36:18.000 You can use Bitcoin like PayPal.
01:36:20.000 And you set up an account, then you go to that site through Tor, through some other way into the darknet.
01:36:26.000 You set up a username and an account, just like you do with eBay, right?
01:36:30.000 And now you have a Bitcoin account, and you've got your account on this site, just like you have eBay.
01:36:35.000 So it's just like using PayPal to pay for your eBay purchases, you're using Bitcoin to pay for your online services.
01:36:42.000 And they have access somehow or another to your Bitcoin?
01:36:45.000 Yeah, because Bitcoin is anonymous in the sense that you can set up a Bitcoin address, but all they're getting is the code for your Bitcoin, and it gets removed.
01:36:54.000 There's ways to remove it from you even further.
01:36:56.000 It's called tumbling.
01:36:57.000 But basically, you pay using this Bitcoin code.
01:37:01.000 They get that transaction, they send you the drugs via, and often times now it works, they don't even know who you are, like it's done through a third party to separate you from the core site.
01:37:13.000 So there's ways of keeping it, you know, they basically, it's like an escrow account or something.
01:37:17.000 There's ways of creating barriers between you and them.
01:37:20.000 So somehow or another, the people that own the site are able to access the people who have membership on the site, their Bitcoin wallet.
01:37:28.000 Exactly.
01:37:29.000 So they just steal from them.
01:37:30.000 No, it doesn't work that way.
01:37:31.000 They don't have access to their Bitcoin wallet.
01:37:32.000 What they're doing is, let's say we're buying lots of stuff on your site.
01:37:37.000 All these different people are buying stuff on your site.
01:37:39.000 You're the middleman, right?
01:37:40.000 Because you're connecting buyer to seller, right?
01:37:43.000 You give me money, just like Amazon, that I'm supposed to give to the seller.
01:37:47.000 I wait until that money collects, collects, collects, collects, and then I just close up shop. 0.92
01:37:52.000 I just cut both of you guys off.
01:37:54.000 Buyer and seller, bye-bye.
01:37:55.000 I've got all the cash that's sitting here in the middle.
01:37:57.000 So you're the third-party middleman that's supposed to hand it over.
01:38:00.000 Exactly.
01:38:00.000 You don't hand it over.
01:38:01.000 You just grab it and run.
01:38:02.000 Precisely.
01:38:03.000 And then you shut down the site.
01:38:04.000 They shut the whole thing down.
01:38:04.000 And so is there a delay in transactions?
01:38:07.000 Correct.
01:38:08.000 Exactly.
01:38:09.000 Yeah, because you're taking a fee, so there's that whole aspect.
01:38:12.000 So people are creating decentralized systems now that are not about that, that don't even have fee-based structures, where that won't be possible.
01:38:19.000 Where basically all I've done, it's more like BitTorrent, is all I've done is created this service.
01:38:24.000 I put it out in the world.
01:38:25.000 It's decentralized.
01:38:26.000 There is no middleman.
01:38:27.000 The Bitcoin sort of travels from one area through directly to that buyer.
01:38:31.000 There's nobody in the middle that can take the money and run.
01:38:34.000 And that's the direction it's currently going in.
01:38:36.000 So these people that did it, like for Atlantis or these other organizations, do they ever get caught or does everybody have to shut up because they were talking about illegal drugs in the first place?
01:38:44.000 Most of them don't get caught.
01:38:45.000 I mean, the interesting thing is there's a lot of, you know, full-blown, unsurprisingly, full-on cybercriminals out there, like these DEA agents that got caught.
01:38:52.000 They were actually, or this singular DEA agent, singular, Secret Service guy.
01:38:56.000 You know, they were very sophisticated.
01:38:58.000 They were more sophisticated than some of the guys who created these sites.
01:39:01.000 They knew how to use Bitcoin.
01:39:02.000 They were actually creating Bitcoin exchanges.
01:39:05.000 They were very technologically together.
01:39:08.000 So you have people like that on the cyber side as well, who are like hackers and really know how to manipulate these technologies.
01:39:15.000 They've been in the game a long time.
01:39:17.000 And they'll create fictitious users, they'll create markets, they'll buy their time, and they'll steal people's money.
01:39:22.000 It's the Wild West.
01:39:24.000 Wow.
01:39:25.000 So now the way they're doing it is how?
01:39:29.000 Decentralized.
01:39:29.000 Decentralized.
01:39:30.000 Yeah.
01:39:30.000 So what that is is basically there is no central point of control.
01:39:33.000 There's no central server.
01:39:34.000 So there is no guy in the middle.
01:39:37.000 It means there's no profit either.
01:39:39.000 There's no one taking a fee.
01:39:40.000 It's really egalitarian.
01:39:42.000 There's one technology that's on the rise now called Open Bazaar.
01:39:46.000 And this was not created for drug use.
01:39:48.000 There may be drugs that end up getting selling.
01:39:50.000 Bazaar or Bazaar?
01:39:51.000 Bazaar.
01:39:52.000 Bazaar?
01:39:52.000 Open Bazaar.
01:39:53.000 And Open Bazaar is, you can buy shoes there.
01:39:56.000 You can buy whatever, but it's decentralized.
01:39:58.000 There's no central point of control.
01:40:00.000 So it's not a profit-based entity in that way.
01:40:03.000 Eventually, if they wanted to create like some kind of, like what BitTorrent's trying to do.
01:40:07.000 There is, huh?
01:40:07.000 Yeah, if they wanted to create some kind of advertising model or legitimize themselves in other ways, there's ways to eventually create profit.
01:40:14.000 And they're also saying that not only are people using this for drugs, but they're also using this for illegal firearms and the distribution of illegal firearms.
01:40:22.000 That's really uncommon.
01:40:24.000 It's really hard to sell drugs on the dark net.
01:40:27.000 You mean guns?
01:40:28.000 Yeah, guns.
01:40:29.000 I'm sorry.
01:40:30.000 It's very difficult given the way...
01:40:33.000 There's a number of issues, but given the difficulty of moving drugs or guns around...
01:40:39.000 We're good to go.
01:40:56.000 Technology is allowing people to do whatever they want.
01:40:58.000 Screw your laws, right?
01:41:00.000 So that's the way that some of that stuff has happened online.
01:41:04.000 But the way Cody's technologies work is you're able to create one piece of a weapon that you could sort of build the rest of the weapon around.
01:41:12.000 So that's been a big thorn in people's sides as well.
01:41:17.000 Yeah, what he's done is very interesting because his...
01:41:22.000 Plans or whatever it is for the 3D gun you could download.
01:41:27.000 Hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded this and traded it back and forth.
01:41:32.000 And if you have a 3D printer, all you have to do is enter that information in and it can build you this gun.
01:41:39.000 Yeah.
01:41:40.000 I mean, you need a miller.
01:41:41.000 The next wave of his technology was actually selling the milling machine that would allow it to be metal.
01:41:48.000 So it's definitely...
01:41:50.000 He's a very provocative guy.
01:41:52.000 Well, it seems like that's kind of where we're going as human beings with technology.
01:41:57.000 And this is not stores where you have to go and pick something up, but you just print it.
01:42:02.000 You just make it.
01:42:03.000 That seems like what's going to happen.
01:42:05.000 Yeah.
01:42:06.000 Even with food?
01:42:07.000 Yeah, you can 3D print food.
01:42:08.000 Whoa.
01:42:09.000 Yeah, you get ingredients and you can literally make food.
01:42:12.000 Like, what kind of food?
01:42:13.000 All kinds of stuff, and it's gonna get more advanced all the time.
01:42:16.000 I mean, there's organic elements to this.
01:42:18.000 It's not just, like, plastic stuff.
01:42:20.000 It's so strange.
01:42:21.000 Yeah, I remember when I was talking to Sean Fanning, the guy who created Napster, and I was talking to Sean about ten years ago.
01:42:25.000 This is ten years ago.
01:42:27.000 I was like, okay, what's the next big thing?
01:42:29.000 It was like, 3D printing.
01:42:31.000 He goes, people have no idea how much that's gonna change our culture once it really gets going.
01:42:36.000 It seems like it is.
01:42:37.000 It seems like when you buy a new iPhone, you're going to download the directions for the iPhone.
01:42:42.000 You won't even have to do that.
01:42:43.000 Yeah, you just stick the code and it'll just make it.
01:42:46.000 Jesus Christ.
01:42:48.000 It seems like the real issue will be raw materials then at that point.
01:42:51.000 Yeah, I think the world is really, I mean, that's the thing I maintain is that that's why I get so frustrated by how slow we're dragging our feet with these changes.
01:42:58.000 It's like you said it earlier, the real changes are coming.
01:43:00.000 Like, things are really going to shift into high gear over the next 10, 20, 30 years with driverless cars and more advanced biotechnology.
01:43:08.000 I mean, things are really going to change.
01:43:10.000 They're so weird because we're in the middle of it.
01:43:13.000 I think it's so difficult to gain a really objective perspective while you're in the middle of it.
01:43:19.000 Because everyone's used to just looking at their phone and checking their text messages, but Just 30 years ago, that wasn't even a dream.
01:43:27.000 No, completely.
01:43:27.000 The computer in your hand was unheard of.
01:43:30.000 It's all weird.
01:43:31.000 Yeah.
01:43:32.000 It's all weird and it's shifting, but what it is to be a person is going to be very different.
01:43:36.000 It is, yeah.
01:43:37.000 It is.
01:43:38.000 I just wonder how they're going to look back on things like this, like this Silk Road thing or Napster.
01:43:43.000 You've really kind of captured with both of these documentaries, with downloaded and with this deep web documentary, you really kind of captured...
01:43:51.000 Two very pivotal blips, culturally.
01:43:55.000 Yeah, that's been my interest, is like, where's the gray?
01:43:57.000 Where are the uneasy?
01:43:59.000 What's not the low-hanging fruit?
01:44:01.000 That's been my agenda in going after these stories, is like, what doesn't have easy answers?
01:44:09.000 Has it been really frustrating, though?
01:44:10.000 Especially this New York Times person that you don't want to name?
01:44:14.000 We'll find her.
01:44:16.000 Or him, whoever they are.
01:44:19.000 You said it was her.
01:44:20.000 Too late.
01:44:21.000 I just think that if I was me, I would be going crazy.
01:44:27.000 I mean, it would just keep me up at night.
01:44:28.000 I would be like, how is it that someone could not understand that this is so complex?
01:44:35.000 That this is not just one issue of a law being broken.
01:44:39.000 Right.
01:44:40.000 This is not one issue of an underground marketplace of nefarious people doing dastardly deeds.
01:44:47.000 This is an aspect of human cultural evolution.
01:44:52.000 It's a little frustrating, but I also, like I said, a lot of the people that I interview Are more sensible than sometimes what the prevailing narrative is.
01:45:03.000 You do encounter people that just really have their heads planted in the sand.
01:45:08.000 They just don't want to think about things differently than the way they perceive them.
01:45:12.000 I actually encountered that a lot with the Napster story.
01:45:15.000 People were just adamantly, no, it was only about stealing.
01:45:18.000 No, it's not about something other than piracy.
01:45:20.000 And they just could not see it.
01:45:22.000 And I think that we're still there with the Napster issue.
01:45:25.000 I think people still just cannot get their heads around what actually happened.
01:45:29.000 You know, I still think it's there's value in just telling the stories and shining a light on them and trying to provide some nuance and You know when I tour around with the festivals and we have these great Q&A's and people are really they either know more about it than I do or they know less or they're somewhere in the middle and Conversations start and I think that's really that's helpful on some level Well,
01:45:49.000 it's a generational issue as well.
01:45:51.000 I mean, if you're talking to people that are in their 50s, they're going to be less in tune than people in their 40s who are less in tune, unless they're really actively pursuing it.
01:45:58.000 But the kids in their 20s, they're almost all in tune to it, at least the ones that are smart and aren't obsessed with Justin Bieber.
01:46:05.000 They're tuned in to what's going on here.
01:46:08.000 They literally are a part of a generation that will go down as being the first generation that grew up entirely with the Internet.
01:46:17.000 Yeah, and these are people who are utilizing these technologies at such a fundamental level that they don't think...
01:46:22.000 That's the whole thing with the Napster thing, and it certainly works in the Silk Road case to some degree, is these people did not view themselves as criminals.
01:46:28.000 That was the pushback.
01:46:30.000 And it happened to me.
01:46:31.000 I was using Napster, and suddenly we were all being branded as pirates, and I kind of was like, wait a minute, I know I'm not a pirate.
01:46:37.000 So it's like, I know I'm not a criminal.
01:46:38.000 But legally you were.
01:46:39.000 Right, exactly.
01:46:40.000 But I'm being branded as one.
01:46:41.000 And I did not respond well to that.
01:46:42.000 I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa.
01:46:43.000 You know, like, don't leap to calling me that.
01:46:46.000 And then you're branding an entire generation of, like, your new consumers.
01:46:50.000 You're branding them as criminals.
01:46:52.000 Like, how is that going to help you or your cause in the end?
01:46:55.000 Well, that was the Lars Ulrich thing.
01:46:57.000 Well, it was everybody.
01:46:58.000 I mean, it really was...
01:46:59.000 But he was really, because he was a really wealthy guy and the head of a...
01:47:02.000 Well, he stuck his neck out.
01:47:02.000 I mean, the thing about Lars, and I actually have sympathy for Lars.
01:47:05.000 I feel like with Lars...
01:47:07.000 What happened with Lars was he was like, you know, he had his song, you know, put out on Napster before they had finished it.
01:47:15.000 It was I Disappear.
01:47:16.000 And then it got put on K-Rock. 0.99
01:47:17.000 So he's like an artist and he's like, oh God, this version with the crappy drum track is on fucking K-Rock. 0.99
01:47:23.000 And his head exploded, right? 0.98
01:47:25.000 And that was his reaction. 1.00
01:47:27.000 It was like the pure artist's like, holy shit reaction. 0.99
01:47:29.000 Which I, as an artist, I get that. 0.99
01:47:31.000 And then he was like, we gotta lead a charge against these guys.
01:47:34.000 And he ran out.
01:47:35.000 And he looked back and nobody else had his back.
01:47:39.000 Nobody! 0.69
01:47:40.000 Like, all the other artists were like, yeah, none of them had the balls to give him some credit to come out and say, wait a minute, we need to have better discussions about this. 0.98
01:47:48.000 So they totally stuck his ass out in the forefront and then they ran. 1.00
01:47:52.000 Well, the fans felt like, you greedy fuck... 1.00
01:47:56.000 Right. 1.00
01:47:56.000 Like, you're a multi-millionaire and you're complaining that you're gonna lose some money off of this? 1.00
01:48:01.000 Right.
01:48:02.000 And they just felt betrayed in a certain way.
01:48:04.000 Yeah, I think they did.
01:48:05.000 And I felt for him to the degree that as an artist, I felt like his reaction, whatever you want to say about the politics of it, his initial gut, oh my god reaction, would have been my, you know what I mean?
01:48:14.000 When you make something and it's in rough cut form or it's not, you know, the idea that like, that's out there, like someone's stuck in a movie theater at K-Rock, that makes your head, that's like you lose sleep on that kind of stuff at night.
01:48:23.000 Yeah, comics have this with YouTube with bits.
01:48:26.000 Like if you're working on a new bit and someone shows up at a comedy club and records you when you're on stage and then releases it on YouTube and then it gets downloaded by 100,000 people, you're like, that bit sucks.
01:48:37.000 That bit's a baby.
01:48:40.000 It's not done yet. 0.99
01:48:41.000 When I'm done, I'll put it on a fucking DVD. I'll put it on a comedy special. 0.99
01:48:45.000 Right.
01:48:46.000 And the truth, though, as I think you've been saying, is that it isn't to brand them.
01:48:51.000 It's incumbent upon us to change the way we do business.
01:48:54.000 We can't just wag our finger at them and say, you, stop doing that.
01:48:58.000 Of course they're going to do it.
01:48:59.000 It's this amazing new technology that's communal and fast and democratized, and they're not going to stop doing it.
01:49:06.000 We have to change.
01:49:08.000 Yeah, it's going to be very weird when it hits whatever the next stage is.
01:49:15.000 Whatever the next stage is, because I'm imagining, with very little technological expertise, of course, how about zero?
01:49:22.000 I have none.
01:49:23.000 I'm a user.
01:49:24.000 Come on, you had a website in 98 with a message board.
01:49:27.000 That's way farther along than most people.
01:49:29.000 I hired somebody.
01:49:30.000 I don't even know what a message board is made of.
01:49:32.000 It might have been a cheese.
01:49:33.000 Yeah, you had the foresight to do it.
01:49:35.000 That's still different.
01:49:36.000 Well, maybe.
01:49:37.000 Okay.
01:49:37.000 But my point being, if you try to imagine what the next stage is going to be, I would imagine that it would be something virtual.
01:49:47.000 And I'm imagining that what we're looking at now, when you're looking at a website even, when you're looking at message boards, when you're looking at Twitter, Facebook, social media, is akin to those boards that existed back in the day before...
01:50:06.000 Before there was a web.
01:50:07.000 Yeah, we're talking about like 93. Yeah, before the web.
01:50:09.000 What were those things called?
01:50:10.000 Like bulletin boards.
01:50:11.000 That's what I was talking about.
01:50:12.000 The Usenet and the BBS era.
01:50:14.000 Yeah, you'd have to log on.
01:50:15.000 It would take you an hour.
01:50:16.000 You'd go there and check to see if anybody left anything there.
01:50:19.000 Yeah.
01:50:20.000 Screw off for a while.
01:50:21.000 Those are looked at as a joke now when you can get, you know, New York Times will give you instant messages on your phone to let you know when there's alerts, when anything's happening.
01:50:32.000 If you check Twitter, anytime anything's going down, like anytime someone dies, I find out about it on Twitter before I ever see it on the news.
01:50:39.000 It seems like it's almost instantaneous.
01:50:41.000 Yeah.
01:50:42.000 Even more so than that, things like YouTube.
01:50:45.000 YouTube is very two-dimensional.
01:50:47.000 We look at it, it's awesome.
01:50:49.000 You can watch stuff on it, you know, or, you know, even HBO Go.
01:50:55.000 Any of these things where you're seeing things online, it's very two-dimensional.
01:50:59.000 I think virtual is going to be the next step.
01:51:02.000 This Oculus Rift type technology and the way that's Progressing right now is kind of frightening.
01:51:10.000 It's really getting unbelievably realistic.
01:51:13.000 It is, yeah.
01:51:14.000 Yeah, it's getting super advanced.
01:51:15.000 And the fluidity, the ability to use it, like how that stuff can get projected and how that's going to...
01:51:20.000 I mean, things are going to change across the board in a lot of ways.
01:51:23.000 And like driverless cars, certain things that are going to cause huge changes are literally around the corner.
01:51:28.000 I mean, we're just only years away from driverless cars, not like decades away from driverless cars.
01:51:34.000 It's a very exciting time, but it's also very...
01:51:37.000 It's a challenging time.
01:51:39.000 That's the reason I make these stories.
01:51:41.000 It's not because I think, oh, this is so awesome.
01:51:43.000 I just want to pick up my camera and shoot all this awesome stuff.
01:51:46.000 It is challenging.
01:51:47.000 It's challenging morally, ethically.
01:51:49.000 It's challenging on all these levels.
01:51:51.000 That's part of why I think we need to be having conversations about this stuff that are more sane.
01:51:56.000 Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
01:51:59.000 I also think that as a giant super organism, the human race, what we really are, really, when you think about it, we're some sort of a giant super organism that works together to create these things and fund these things and push these things forward.
01:52:16.000 We're kind of just moving along Not considering the implications of what we're doing, but just continuing along the same path.
01:52:25.000 If you can't, if you step back and say, you know what, this virtual reality is just too fucked up, we should really stop and consider, well, guess what? 0.95
01:52:33.000 Sony's going to come along, and they're going to just take the fucking rug out from under you, and they're going to have a better thing that you're not... 0.95
01:52:38.000 They'll keep making Spider-Man reboots forever on your virtual reality. 0.93
01:52:42.000 You'll never be able to stop them.
01:52:44.000 Porn, which is at the forefront of all technology, that pushed HTML5 over Flash, PayPal, everything.
01:52:52.000 What they're going to do with that virtual reality stuff is going to be very, very, very bizarre.
01:52:58.000 You think you have a problem with people being addicted to porn now.
01:53:02.000 No one was addicted to literature porn.
01:53:06.000 Let me look at my Veritype on my stereograph.
01:53:10.000 When they had those books that people had to write by hand, nobody was addicted to beating off to those things.
01:53:16.000 I mean, God, how many of them even were there?
01:53:19.000 Yeah.
01:53:19.000 And then the printing press came along, oh, maybe things a little bit more interesting.
01:53:23.000 Yeah.
01:53:23.000 And then magazines came along, whoa, girly magazines that used to have to go hide.
01:53:28.000 Stick under your bed.
01:53:29.000 Yeah, used to hide Yeah, the screens got bigger.
01:53:43.000 It was very nice of them.
01:53:45.000 It's going to get very, very strange.
01:53:47.000 There's going to come some sort of a neural interface inside of our lifetime where you're going to be able to enter into worlds that have been created that seem indistinguishable from the world that we're currently in right now.
01:53:59.000 Yeah, there's no doubt.
01:54:01.000 That's within our lifetime.
01:54:03.000 And when that does happen, they look back on things like the Silk Road, this controversy, it's going to seem so preposterous.
01:54:09.000 So primitive, yeah.
01:54:10.000 I mean, I think that the idea, I think online drug markets are going to be ubiquitous, and they may very likely be the thing that takes major cartels down in the long run.
01:54:18.000 Well, I was listening to this Radiolab podcast where they were talking about the placebo effect.
01:54:25.000 I think that might be the name of the podcast for anyone who's interested.
01:54:28.000 I think it's just called placebo.
01:54:30.000 But they were talking about the various times where a placebo effect has worked and has not worked.
01:54:36.000 And one of the things that they said that was so incredible is that the reason why drugs work That every drug that works on the human mind works because there's a receptor.
01:54:50.000 There's a biological receptor in the brain.
01:54:53.000 So essentially, the brain produces all these effects, just not reliably.
01:54:59.000 Opioid effects, opiate effects, cannabis effects, all these different drugs.
01:55:04.000 We know the brain produces various chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, psychedelic chemicals.
01:55:10.000 Your brain produces all these things.
01:55:12.000 If they can figure out how to do, with no drugs, something, some virtual thing, something, some chip that just stimulates those aspects of your brain and produces those feelings of euphoria, love, hate, Loss,
01:55:28.000 sadness, and does so inside of a virtual world.
01:55:32.000 I mean, they're gonna take you on a real live drug ride, and no drugs would be involved.
01:55:39.000 I mean, then what do you do with your drug war?
01:55:41.000 When all the drugs are produced by the mind, you're gonna stop people from producing endogenous chemicals that the brain naturally produces?
01:55:49.000 I mean, you're already doing that with movies.
01:55:51.000 What do you think the adrenaline effect you get from a crazy thriller is?
01:55:54.000 Why are people into horror movies?
01:55:56.000 It's not because they have no effect on you.
01:55:59.000 They're producing drugs. 0.99
01:56:00.000 When you watch Jason, he's coming up behind somebody, he's got the fucking machete. 1.00
01:56:04.000 You're scared? 1.00
01:56:05.000 You're scared of those movies?
01:56:07.000 That's a drug.
01:56:08.000 They're giving you drugs.
01:56:10.000 It's just they're making you produce it with your own mind.
01:56:14.000 It's going to happen in a very bizarre way.
01:56:17.000 It is.
01:56:17.000 I think that is going to have an impact.
01:56:18.000 And I think that, you know, the other issue that I think is important is just like, you know, for those people that do need help, that needs to be decriminalized to a degree where they can actually get the help in a way that isn't stigmatized or they're not just felonized immediately.
01:56:31.000 So that's an issue as well that needs to get addressed.
01:56:34.000 Oh, 100%.
01:56:36.000 And also the reason why people get addicted in the first place.
01:56:39.000 Just the trauma that people experience as young children that causes these receptors to open up, that causes these drug addiction processes to take place.
01:56:51.000 And you talk to people that have counseled folks that have massive drug problems and then understand how these genes get addressed.
01:57:01.000 It's all very, very complex.
01:57:02.000 It is, yeah.
01:57:03.000 And who gets addicted and who doesn't get addicted?
01:57:05.000 A lot of that has to do with your response to childhood trauma.
01:57:10.000 That's hard for people to relate to.
01:57:12.000 That's hard for people to understand.
01:57:13.000 And genetics and the genetic disease component, and like there's no way to have a really thorough conversation about this stuff if it's just criminalized.
01:57:20.000 You can't just dragnet it.
01:57:22.000 Yeah.
01:57:22.000 Lock him up!
01:57:23.000 Yeah.
01:57:24.000 You can't do that.
01:57:26.000 It's just like we have this simplistic view of the world, and that view is being challenged constantly by facts.
01:57:33.000 Yeah.
01:57:34.000 Constantly by data.
01:57:35.000 And there's some people that, like you said, want to bury their head in the sand.
01:57:39.000 They don't want to look at it.
01:57:40.000 Yeah.
01:57:40.000 They don't want to, because it doesn't fit the narrative.
01:57:43.000 Yeah, and that's getting harder and harder to do in any corner, even like geopolitics.
01:57:46.000 The world is at our doorstep every day now, and whether you like it or not is right there in front of you.
01:57:51.000 It also seems like people are doing that because it's easier to live that way, because you can't know everything about everything.
01:58:00.000 There's too much going on right now.
01:58:02.000 I totally agree with that.
01:58:03.000 The people are just like, look, I've got to take this course because what are you asking me to do?
01:58:07.000 You're asking me to veer off and really, do I really want to know about cryptography?
01:58:10.000 Do I really want to know about how this stuff works?
01:58:12.000 You know, it's like you don't have to, provided you're not taking a counter-narrative that's causing harm somewhere down the line.
01:58:19.000 Yeah, you don't have to.
01:58:20.000 You really don't have to.
01:58:21.000 But the counter-narrative is the real issue.
01:58:23.000 The people that are burning their head in the sand and trying to shove your face in as well.
01:58:27.000 Exactly.
01:58:28.000 That's really what it is, right?
01:58:29.000 Yeah, that's the problem.
01:58:31.000 Well, Alex, thank you very much.
01:58:32.000 I really, really appreciated this conversation, and I really appreciate your documentary, Deep Web.
01:58:37.000 It's on Epix on May 31st.
01:58:39.000 Will it eventually be available?
01:58:41.000 Yeah, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, everything like that.
01:58:43.000 After it's on Epix for a little while, it'll be available everywhere.
01:58:46.000 And Alex is available on Twitter.
01:58:49.000 You can follow him.
01:58:50.000 It's ALXWinter on Twitter.
01:58:53.000 And is there anything else you want?
01:58:55.000 That's it, man.
01:58:56.000 Yeah, it's DeepWebTheMovie.com.
01:58:59.000 But you can sign up for our newsletter.
01:59:01.000 I sort of send out information and cool ancillary stuff.
01:59:03.000 Well, thank you so much, man.
01:59:05.000 Thanks for making this, too.
01:59:06.000 I really, really appreciate it.
01:59:06.000 I really appreciate the conversation.
01:59:08.000 All right, my friends.
01:59:09.000 We'll be back on Wednesday with Abby Martin and Jim Norton. 1.00
01:59:13.000 Until then, go fuck yourself, okay? 1.00
01:59:14.000 Bye-bye. 1.00
01:59:15.000 Big kiss.
01:59:23.000 We're good to go.