Alex Winter

00:00Wix Winter. All right, we're live. Nice to meet you, man. You too. Um I knew of you as an actor and I knew of your work as a director. Mhm. But I didn't know that you were into serious like this deep web documentary. This is really fascinating. I was watching it just before you got here. So it's all fresh and crackling in my mind. Cool. And um first of all, how'd you get involved in this? Uh well, it was a couple things. One is first of all, it's great to be on the show. Been a big fan for a long time. But uh I uh got online pretty heavily in the sort of late '80s, early '90s in in what was known as the BBS Usenet era. And in those days you I was really interested in the sort of burgeoning online communities. People who were the sort of the growth of of internet-based communities. And in those days you could get on and you would sort of create sort of

00:53clubs or groups or rooms as they were called with all kinds of like-minded people. And then you started finding all kinds of stuff that was going on. Uh and it wasn't by any means just illegal stuff. It was just it was sort of rarefied, specialized, whatever. Politics, activism, people who were interested in drugs, people who were interested in sort of, you know, pushing boundaries in all these different ways. And at that point I discovered encryption. Uh people who were using the internet for anonymity and privacy. Some of them were like parts of like, you know, self-help groups or like rape counseling. Any number of things. But there was also people who were selling drugs. So I first encountered the drug the online drug markets in probably '90, '91. Um that's when I first discovered encrypted emails, sort of this whole notion of like uh people who really were

01:39building encryption technologies for a number of reasons. And so I found that interesting. And I spent some uh years working on the Napster story. I made a doc about the rise and fall of Napster called Downloaded. Uh and I met Fanning Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker back in 2000 when Napster was being decimated, shot at by all sides. And uh I set out about telling their story. That took me a while to get done and made. 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, crypto cryptographers. So. Well, that was one of the things that I found interesting about the documentary initially is that it wasn't it 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

02:34government because people were exchanging, buying and selling illegal drugs from it and amongst other things that are illegal. But it was more of a community it seems than anything. I've had a message board on my website since 1998. And it's got millions of posts and it's it's 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. So it was much more than just drugs are being sold there, we have to shut it down. 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 I think

03:30that's true and I think that that's a very hard thing for people to understand. You know, and if you're not I mean like you're saying, you got online at that point um 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. And like I remember talking to Shawn 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. You know, because it was this when I discovered Napster in '99, what blew my mind about it wasn't about I mean music was interesting but it wasn't about the music. It was about the community. It was like meeting all these people. We were communicating in real time. What had changed what before then was really kind of cumbersome, the message boards you're talking about in

04:12the late '90s. Now I'm like in real time with some guy in Russia, China, Germany, whatever and they're in my hard drive, I'm in their hard drive. It just got kicked to this whole other level. And then you're talking about 100 million people on the internet at once. A lot of people didn't look at Napster as a community and they still don't. They just can't get past the piracy issue in their minds. Uh what do you mean it Napster wasn't wasn't created for file sharing. It was created to build community. The Silk Road in this case you have a manifesto because you had like all these people who who built and created the thing who were writing all these manifestos. 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. The Napster thing is interesting because Napster although it was a file sharing program

04:58the community that was attached to it what the idea was I I I think about all of this file sharing stuff. My feeling on it and my feeling from being connected to the internet was like we are entering this entirely new era of art, of digital stuff, digital creations where it's this is going to be slippery. You're not going to be able to just like, 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 you know, what were those bootleg CDs. I mean that we used to have those in New York City. Sure, yeah, all the time. VHS tapes, you know, of movies that had just come out and Yeah. This was a different thing. This is like the actual digital and everybody was like, oh, what do you do about that? Like, oh, there's a a program and you could just download these things and anybody could just upload them and then

05:54download them. And they're like, how are you going to stop that? Yeah, it's impossible and it's true that it's slippery and that's why I like telling these stories is it isn't black and white. People have their brains can't really handle it sometimes. They they just they want to go to one side of the of the issue in the way they see it in their mind or the other and they don't have for whatever reason the capacity to stay in the gray in the middle. And the stories are always about what's going on in the gray cuz the Silk Road is the same thing. You know, you can say this is really bad, this is drugs online, this is flouting the law and all this stuff. That's you got one side, the predominant side over there. You got the other side, the radical alternative to that would be to say, yeah, but the drug war is a complete failure. It's been four decades of destructive

06:34you 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. It's, you know, making the drug issues criminal and not about health. Um and you got those people over there who are saying this is all good. You got all this room in the middle with the slippery reality which is just as you said. I I agree with that perspective. This is a really big moment in human history, right? It's too big for most of us to wrap our heads around. These are huge changes that are afoot. You know, what what Napster represented wasn't a couple of kids who wanted to create piracy. Whether you can accept that reality or not, it's true. You may not like it. You may feel like the end result of what they did caused X, Y, and Z. But the reality is is their their minds, their their visions, their goals

07:22were way beyond that. And we're still not in the future that those guys saw. We're still kind of back in the back end. Look at what we're seeing with Tidal and other service. People are still trying to wrench the world back to where it was before Napster. They're still trying to sort of undo the changes that have happened cuz it's scary, right? But we probably will end up in a world in the next 10, 20, 30 years as drug laws become more relaxed in the mandatory minimums start getting lowered where we do see online legitimate online drug services are going to become they're not going to go away. They're going to stick around just like, you know, file sharing didn't go anywhere. And my guess is that it probably will be somewhat the norm down the road and we'll look back at this time and go, wow, this thing we thought was so hardcore actually was a very messy sort

08:09of movement towards where we needed to get to or towards the future. Well, towards freedom. I mean I'm one of the ones that thinks that there should be no drug laws. I think as long as alcohol's 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 pot or what what name your drug. Right. Pot being the most innocuous of all of them and changing daily as far as the the way it's the way it's treated by law enforcement. But I think the digital world that you're you're dealing with like with Napster or with with the Silk Road is this world of connectivity and that's the big change. It's it's not just the the things that are being exchanged. It's the it's the that people can talk to people. The the information can go so quickly now. Yeah. And these communities can form and they can say, yeah, I've

09:04I've always thought these laws are Like explain to me why alcohol's legal and marijuana's not. Explain to me why it's stealing to take a record that you paid for and share it with a bunch of people. It's I had Paul Stanley on the podcast from Kiss. And he's a great guy. I I really enjoyed talking to him. But he's got this sort of really archaic idea of stealing. Yeah. You know, you didn't pay for it, it's stealing. But it's your your copy's still there. Yeah. You know, like it's it's a different thing. It's not like someone stole your car. Right. Like and they try to make that that sort of comparison. You know, if someone stole your car, they stole your car, right? That's that's that was your car and now they have it. Well, if they just copied my car, why do I give a Yeah, exactly. you know what I mean? If you just press a button If you see someone driving on

09:52the street and say, I love that car. Let me just press a button and my 3D computer or my 3D printer makes an exact duplicate of that car. Does that somehow or another diminish my car? I don't It's scary territory, right? I mean, people people don't understand the technology. They don't agree with the movements, you know, I think that people look at technology. I had a long talk with a a a very very important reporter from a major publication that I don't want to name. 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. Like just because there's an area of the internet that's private and anonymous, doesn't mean it's bad. Just like if you're not bad because you go to the bathroom and you close the door. Now, when you close the door to your bathroom, you may open

10:33the lid and go to the bathroom or you may shoot up. I don't know what you're doing in there. Right. doesn't give me a right to take the door off your bathroom. You know what I mean? It's just about anonymity. We as human beings, we deserve privacy and anonymity. It's a basic human right. However, most people go deep web bad. Yeah. go right there. It's just it's bad. It's filled with creeps. It's filled with child with pedophiles and drug dealers and it's all bad and we should shut it down. And with Napster, we saw the same thing where to this day people are still like, "Oh, I'm really really feel guilty that I downloaded that album." It's like, "I don't." It was one of the greatest moments of my life that that the walls of culture for this brief moment just completely came down. And it's like I didn't become a thief. I've you know, I buy lots of music and you know, I continue to to

11:17make a lot of purchases. But it was an incredible time. You were getting music you could never hear anywhere else. Stuff that wasn't recorded. You know, I was turning people on to stuff 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 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. And the reality is we need new business models that work with these new technologies. That doesn't make those technologies bad. Well, everybody got addicted to selling that music at

12:02exorbitant rates. I mean, that's really what happened. Especially the the record companies. I mean, the record companies are notoriously shitty with the artists. I mean, the the contracts and when you read them, you ever read the Courtney Love breakdown of the record yeah, it's great. Yeah. And if you you read that, you go, "Fuck, man." Or what's the Jared Leto one that the documentary that he did? Artifact. What's it called? Artifact. The the documentary's called Artifact. Yeah. It's about his band and their battles. great. It's it's a crazy creepy business that is losing its legs. Yeah. And they're scrambling along the way. And I think that that's one of the big pushes pushes the big pushbacks because of the commerce aspect of it. Right. 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

12:50club? Like you could have a club where you you and your friends go to play poker. Whatever. You rent out an office somewhere and it's yours. 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. Does is everyone Does the cops Are they going to scan the door? Are they going to put a bug inside the room to make sure you're not doing anything They have. It's It's called your cell phone. I know, but isn't that amazing? Like like that's the same thing. I mean, a physical room. Yeah. A physical room that you have that's a clubhouse that's been going around since the beginning of time. Yeah. No one has a problem with that. That's a normal part of human beings. But a a private digital room where your physical body isn't even there, Yeah. that becomes problematic. Yeah, and scarier than that I think it is that,

13:35you know, the now there's such a a such a direct link between the physical space and the digital space. Meaning, you know, the the Supreme Court recently passed a law that doesn't allow officers to uh go into your cell phone without a warrant on a search a basic search and seizure, right? So, your cell phone, think about what that connects to. That connects to your bank account. It connects to your medical records. It connects to photographs of your wife, your kids, whatever. I mean, that's not your digital life. That's just your life, period. Mhm. So, of course you you of course there has to be, you know, technologies in place that keep you protected and private. And look what happened to those actresses, you know, that were exploited through the the 4chan fappening where their their photographs were taken off of the iCloud and sold on 4chan and it was

14:19you know, extremely intimate pictures. 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?" Like this what you don't understand. You've already been hacked. All your information is out there. It's just a question of whether someone decides to exploit it or not. You know, your social security number, your medical records, your life is out there. So, we need to be able to be protected. And right now there's this battle to remove protections. And what we need to be doing is actually implementing more protections. It It seems like to me that when the world becomes digital and then digital information the the the those ones and zeros become accessible, we're going to get to a point in time where privacy seems ridiculous. Yeah. And that's it sounds so crazy because 20 years ago, it

15:07was a hard photograph. Yeah. You know, someone had to come over your house to look at your photo album. And now your photo album isn't even in your phone. Yeah. It's on the cloud and you upload to it. It's like we're and it's going to get weirder from there. With the new technology that we don't even we can't even predict the 20 year from now technology. Mhm. But it's going to get more and more bizarre to the point where we're going to have a we're going to have to have a real restructuring of what we expect in terms of privacy, personal sovereignty. What you know, what do you expect from your fellow citizens? Yeah. Because we're going to I mean, it's almost going to be like you're going to have to trust me to not look at your Right. Exactly. Cuz your your is out there. Yeah. You know, so what we look at and what we don't. It's like it's and we need there

15:54are ways to have a bathroom door. But we need to be able to have them. We need to be able to have encryption that's baked into our email, that's baked into our browsers. There has to be Basically, we need to go dark. You know, the what the darknet does is it provides technologies that allow you to have privacy and anonymity. A lot of people trying to break those walls down and say they're bad. The truth is we actually need more of that. We need that to be pervasive. We need we need your browser to automatically anonymize so it can't be so easily tracked. And we're not just talking about the government. We're talking about hackers. We're talking about people who will steal your stuff and sell it or use it against you in some way. So, it again, it isn't some, you know, giant anti-government thing. It's a basic right to privacy issue. And that privacy again is probably

16:38temporary. I mean, when when when you're looking at 50 years from now, it's probably going to be hilarious to look back on the idea that someone couldn't read your email. Yeah. And you know what? We're already the the the sad truth is we're there that's not the technology you're talking about is here right now. I mean, your your information is transparent to anyone with half a an ability to to handle technologies. Your laptop, your phone, all of that stuff is accessible to anybody who's halfway interested in using it. 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. Hey, this Alex guy, he seems a little shifty. I think he might be involved in some nefarious activities. Let's look into him. No, let's just download everyone's

17:28phone numbers and everyone's emails and everyone's voicemails and constantly monitor everything all the time. And by the way, let's build a huge facility in Utah that consists of hundreds of trillions of terabytes of of storage and just store everything. it. We'll just store it all. And if Alex starts talking we'll just say, "Oh, yeah, Alex? Well, check this out. We Look at all these big black dicks you've been looking at, son." And we'll just go to How did you Hey, I'm a doing it. 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. Either we can make this public or we can, you know, fill in the blank." You know, whatever they would like to get from you. Yeah, and what's scary is that what we recently discovered the last week or so, there was the the revelations that, you know, it's always

18:13been uh the excuse has always been, you know, terrorism, the Patriot Act. It's always been since 9/11 we have to do this because. And what was revealed is they've been doing this long before 9/11. It was mostly because of the drug war. So, it's it's kind of commonly known that a lot of the surveillance implementations that occurred occurred because of the drug war. Yeah, isn't that adorable? It's the drug war is the thing. And it's it's this whole drug war is such a joke because there's not a war on drugs. It's a lie. It's a flat out lie. There's no war on drugs. There never will be a war on drugs. There will always be drugs. There's not a war. There's a war on some drugs. And it's not even a war. It's a mad money grab. Right. 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

19:08people that profit off drugs being legal. Yeah. zero to do with public safety. Zero to do with public health. It's a lie. Yeah. I mean, the film goes into that in detail. So, uh I mean, I I totally agree with that. And it 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 why do we need them and what purpose are they serving? And making sure that they serve an accurate purpose. But when they're primarily being used to felonize minorities and and fill prisons for profit, then you've got something that probably needs to be changed. Without a doubt. 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. Like you you can no longer just steal people's because you

19:53pull them over. If they pull you over and say, "What if you were going to buy a car somewhere and they pull you over and they go, 'Alex, what are you doing with $5,000 cash?'" And you're like, "Oh, I was going to go buy a car." And you "Can you prove that? We're going to take that. You're going to have to prove that in court." And they could take that and they were taking it and they were using it to fund parties. They bought a margarita machine, which is so ironic. Yeah. They they were ser- serving drugs with money that they took from people who they suspected of selling drugs. Yeah. They just were selling this they were just dealing with the sanctioned drugs at their party. The sanctioned margaritas. Yeah. Yeah. Human nature. Disgusting. I know. But it's just if you give people law, like if you write things down on paper, like you a you law enforcement officer, because of this

20:42thing that's written down 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. Right. Yeah. It's a hell of a thing. It's Yeah. But you know, as you said, it allows, you know, people to be arrested for all kinds of reasons and that's that's not helpful even to people who need help who are on drugs. And the parallel with the record industry is that they're addicted to that money. Mhm. They are addicted to taking that money from people. They're addicted to the private prisons are addicted to it. The law enforcement officers are addicted. There's a real issue with 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. And that would make thousands of law

21:34enforcement officers all over the country out of a job. Yeah. And they don't want that. Nobody wants I mean, look, there's a way to do it where they would be put into a better position in society, but it wouldn't be locking people up for a plant. Right. Yep. Exactly. to it. They're addicted to it. And it's a mad scramble. I mean, it's not the same situation as what's going on with the record industry. The record industry makes far less sense to me than the movie industry. The movie industry makes sense. If you want to make a movie like The Hobbit, that talk that cost a lot of money. You know, and if you want to download that god damn thing for free and you're not going to go to see in the movie now and they're not going to get your money. That to me seems a little bit unfair. Just cuz you're dealing with something that requires some exorbitant amount of

22:16money. 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. Right. But if you download Paul Stanley's solo album, you might want to go see him live. Yeah. The you know, The Hobbit's not going to do a live show. Yeah. In Woodland Hills anytime soon. Well, maybe they'll bring back like the ice capades though, you know, we'll get that stuff going again. 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 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. It isn't just It isn't to them it isn't about money. I've always maintained that. It's like, this is really easy. It's super convenient. This

23:03is Why would I bend myself around to go like wait for your window? Like The Hobbit's going to come out when? Right. You know, I live here. I'm not going to get that like all my friends have seen it over there and I can't see it here. It's like, no, I'm going to circumvent that cuz I want it now. It's like the the windowing the way in which consumers want their entertainment is changing cuz of the way technology works. No matter what that does to your business model, you have to change your business model to fit what the consumer wants. You can't You can't just keep branding them pirates and just staying in the old way of doing things cuz the the ship has sailed. I'm a huge fan of Game Game of Thrones and I haven't seen the new the first episode of the new season, but somebody sent me a tweet. I don't know if you know, but the first five episodes have been leaked online. You

23:46How dare you? And but that's not going to hurt Game of Thrones. I'm not going to not have HBO, but maybe somebody won't. Yeah. That's there's all there was going to be shrinkage because of the change in technologies. I mean, just like there just like the car replaced the horse and buggy, just like refrigeration killed, you know, ice delivery. It's like the it or there is it's it's not to be Pollyannaish and say this is all great for everybody. It's just to be realistic and say the ship has sailed. Technology is changing the world in all these ways. One of them happens to be the way we listen to music. Yeah. It's like that's just the fact of the way we live. We can't look at our society and blame them all for being pirates. The these this this world is evolving and we have to move with the that world. And it is going to be painful. There are going to be

24:30casualties, but we will come out okay on the other side. That's how It's always been that way. I mean, can you imagine how pissed off the blacksmiths were when cars came along? Like, dude, my I'm making horseshoes. That's my Nobody wants horseshoes anymore. But that's a part of the evolution of of culture. how they fought cars? The way they fought cars was the same way they're fighting the the deep web and and the records and the and Napster. 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. Wow. tried to use that as a way to prevent the automobile from becoming more popularized. So it's al- it's always the same argument. You're going to do something very bad with that. You can't have it. And of course that was probably going on during prohibition. Of course. Because the the invention of the car was

25:18within a decade or two of that. So yeah, that's the whole I mean, they were they were trying to keep people from drinking booze. They I mean, they were trying to say, "Look, no drugs, no nothing." Yeah. What a up time that must have been. Ooh, people must have been so god damn angry. And look what came out of it. Al Capone. Organized crime. The same we're seeing in Mexico right now. Exactly. The cartels. All of it comes about It's like at what point in time do these dummies not look at history and go look this is going to happen. History's going to repeat itself. When you create a vacuum, it will be filled. Yeah. 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. For sure. They're going to step in. Yeah. Yeah, the money's big.

26:05Yeah, it's just and and you but you look at it on paper. Where's the loss? Where's the benefit? Like what what what errors the loss to society? Yeah. Organized crime. That's the loss. That's the number one. All the murders and the the craziness and the chaos. 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. This company is organic and this company is self-sustaining and look at the No, it's you're you're you're making it illegal and you're creating a organized crime ring. It's like instantly you're going to create that. destroying economies and I mean, the you know, the reverberations are huge all over the world. Yeah, and the reverberations I think of just denying people freedom. There's

26:57there's it it's a a very deteriorating effect on human beings. When another human being denies a person of any inalienable right. Your your right to sleep. They keep waking you up in the middle of the night. You get you're going to get furious. They say you can't drink more than a glass of water a day. Who the are you? There's just this thing that people have when someone tries to keep them from doing something that doesn't make any sense. Totally. And talking in private on a website is one of those things. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And it's also evolutionary. 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. And

27:48that's what I think is blowing people's minds. Cuz that maybe this actually is reducing crime and violence in in the street trade. Maybe it is causing a problem for the cartels. 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. I mean, it's it's there's it's again, it's not to say these are all good. It's me a black and white issue, but there is just a lot of gray here. There's always going to be. And that's just a part of being a human being. You know, you give people freedom, they're going to do things that you might not necessarily agree with. Yeah. I mean, how many people agree with people tattooing their face? Yeah. You know, a lot of people think that's a terrible choice. But if you make it illegal, you'll probably the number of people tattooing their face will

28:32probably go through the roof. For sure. This this no way to stop people from doing what they want to do. And when you try, it makes them this is a a thing about human beings. When you want us to not do something we ordinarily want to do it. That's why Catholic school girls were always so ridiculously promiscuous. Right. Why? Because they're always told like, "Don't don't go anywhere near boys." And they're like, "I can't wait to get near boys." Like I have a friend who went to Catholic school. She was just talking about it yesterday. She was like, "Everybody in my class was boy crazy cuz there was no boys and they were the forbidden fruit." Right. Yep. everything their parents were trying to protect them from, they were just ramping it up. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, there's your motivator. So this was created um originally the software that was used to to power the deep web the deep web and

29:24and Silk Road was all initially used or created for good. Yeah, and it's still largely used for good. Again, you have to think about it like a like a city. It's an environment. Like if you look at it under a terrarium, it's just this place. 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. It's literally just a place. It gets demonized, but it's no different than any other environment. It's just a privacy-oriented environment. It was created by the Navy. Tor was, anyway. That's one way into the Well, explain Tor. Tor is a browser that anonymizes, meaning you don't No one can track your your IP address. No one can see what sites you're visiting. I use Tor like you use Amazon, for instance, because it's really easy to get hacked online using a regular browser. I don't want my

30:12credit card number being plugged into a regular browser, so I use Tor. If I'm a banking online, I use Tor, cuz it anonymizes it runs through a network that doesn't allow people to track what you're inputting into it. It doesn't know where you are. And is Tor a program or a browser? Tor is a browser, but then it goes further than that. Tor also has a component called Tor hidden services, and that is actually a kind of a separate internet that operates within the darknet. And the Tor hidden services don't end with dot com, they end with dot dot onion. Tor is Tor stands for the onion router. And it was created by the Navy primarily to be used for agents to communicate with each other anonymously. I mean, the NSA uses it, law enforcement uses it. So, it's always been used largely for good to this day. It's still used by a lot of government agencies to this day. So, it's t o r dot onion?

31:00Yeah, yeah, well, it'll be whatever it is. It'll be like a string of numbers dot onion. To get to pull Tor down, you just go to I think it's tor.org or whatever. You can get that from the clearnet, the surface web. And is that restricted? No, it's totally legal. I mean, it's again, it's used A lot of people who use Tor, journalists use it, dissidents use it. There are like, you know, rape counseling organizations that use it. Like, "Okay, we're going to do We're going to talk online. Let's all pull down Tor, and then we can get on our forum, you know, in the Tor hidden services, and you can feel comfortable talking about being raped or whatever happens." It's It's an anonymized corner of the internet. And how does it work? Well, I don't want to bore your your audience, but but the it's it involves pretty intense math and a lot of the stuff grew out of the

31:45the sort of early creators of the internet that were using cryptography and ways of bouncing or rerouting. It's very similar to peer-to-peer technology, where your signal or your input gets rerouted and bounced around a bunch of others, so it gets scrambled, and then it it'll find itself on some other end having gone through a bunch of other routers, right? So, that's how the the the sort of surface browser area works. The The hidden service is actually operating within an area of the internet called the deep web. And the deep web is just like everything online that isn't indexed. It's basically like looking under the hood of your car. It's just all the junk online, like banks communicating crap to each other. It's just mostly just just code, right? That doesn't need to be indexed by Google, cuz it's a bunch of code. And people figured out how to get down into that

32:36area and create an actual environment. So, they basically have have built space within the deep web that you can use You can access through Tor. So, it's unindexed, so you can't find it by by using Google. It never shows up in the surface web. Wow. It's pretty interesting, and it's been there forever. It's just been growing over time. And then Tor was developed over the last 15 years or so. But there are other ways to get into that area as well that are growing. So, the problem with that would be, of course, if someone say like if someone was harassing, say an an ex-girlfriend or something like that, sending someone threatening messages, you couldn't track it. 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. Um You know what I mean?

33:21Unless she's hanging out in the deep web with me, in which case what's what's she doing down there? You know what I mean? But if like if I send an email to her through my Tor browser to her email address, you're going to You can track me through her email address, cuz she's in the clear. But that's why it always has to be an alternative then. Precisely. Because if it was like Chrome, if Chrome had these type of capabilities Right. then someone could harass someone on Facebook or something like that, and you wouldn't be able to track it. Yeah, but there We are going to get to This is where it gets into an interesting gray area, because it's a little of both. There we We are going to be building There are going to be browser technologies that do randomize your location. There's already VPN sort of virtual networks that that mask your IP address. You can use those every day.

34:02A lot of people do. And again, they're not doing that so they can hide for doing contraband, they're doing that to prevent being hacked most of the time. And that already will will sort of preclude people from knowing exactly what computer you sent something from. But, you know, in general, it's pretty easy to trace The digital world is is a trackable world. And if that's at the end of the day, you usually can track somebody unless they're in a completely alternative space talking to someone else who has willingly joined that alternate space. Then all bets are kind of off. 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 about it. be saying, "User x y d d slash zero, you're a piece of shit." If they found out who you were, though. Do you have a randomized number?

34:49Yeah, you you create a username, and and no one's going to know who you are in that space, and there's nothing connecting you to the surface. But if you reveal who you are in that, then you'd have to get a new randomized number. Yeah, which would take It's like a username. It would take you all of 3 seconds to do that. Hm. That's Yeah, that would be smart. It's It's interesting cuz we're kind of making the argument that you need some transparency online. That you you kind of have to be traceable to a certain extent. And that's what we're making the argument. Yeah, yes and no, though. I I still maintain Steve Wozniak, you know, the the great Apple computer genius said, and I think he was talking about file sharing. You know, we're all like on this highway. And the highway has all of these lanes on it. And we're all moving along, and just like on a regular highway, most of

35:37us during the day aren't like shooting each other and driving each other off the road. The highway tends to function day in day out with millions of people on it just fine. Even with the road rage, it's fine. 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. Right. You figure out ways to police that. And we're in the same boat. Like, just like with Napster, people are trying to use old world ways of policing this new terrain. It isn't to say that we should have no that it should be completely private and there should be no transparency. It's to say, "Hey guys, there's a massive human revolution going on right now, or an evolution, or a cultural change, whatever you want to call it. This move from the industrial age to the technological or digital age, it's not going to be

36:20It's going to be a bumpy ride. 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." That's never Like you said, that's never going to happen. It's never going to happen, and the GeForce that's involved in this change, the change is so powerful and so rapid you're going to have some screw-ups. There's no way around it. It's going so fast, and we're going to stumble. We have to. There's no way it's going to be smooth. Yeah, we're going to go backwards, we're going to make mistakes. I mean, you know, I don't fault my kids when they're like listening to music on YouTube. I mean, we're kind of past the days of My kids don't like use BitTorrent for for um for you know, file sharing, but You don't You don't think they do? Well, actually, that's Yeah, that's completely nonsensical. My my older teen

37:05does all the time. I keep talking to him about it. But yeah, he's a massive folder on his computer. But it's mostly Yeah, I'm not going to I'm not going to shame him on the Yeah, I don't with you, dude. the podcast. But uh But the reality of it is he he loves buying music, and he loves, you know, being part of the process with bands. Like, a lot of And but they've like there almost was a middle generation that just went hog wild on just file sharing all their music. But most people like being part of the That's why we have currency. That's why we have money, and we exchange, cuz it's like a human need. So, I think that a lot of this stuff will iron itself out over time. I hate to But it will. I mean, a lot of people will be like, "Oh, here's how we monetize the music. Oh, here's how how I can actually pay to help support the bands I like, and I'll still use the

37:48technology I like, and we'll be okay." I think time is actually going to fix a lot of this, but we're definitely in a crazy wild west right now. Yeah, I agree. I just think think that the disparity of income is probably never going to be the same again. Unless it comes from spend $20 on a CD with one good song on it, every What a drag. That's true, right? There was always that thing. Do you remember going to Was it Virgin that would they would have those listening booths? That was the first time you would ever get a chance to listen to the whole thing. sucker down. That probably did more for killing the record. Was it Britney Spears? What What What What? Oh, man. Yeah, like you would listen to the hit, and then you'd listen to the other stuff and go, "I'm not buying this thing." Yeah. Yeah, that that was a big scam, right? Like, look, I'm a huge Rolling Stones fan. Huge Rolling Stones

38:37fan. But let's be honest, a good percentage of their songs suck a fat dick. Yeah. Up to Some Girls. Yeah. Some Girls, pretty much every track is gold. But after Some Girls There's some great songs, but there's also some songs that you just go, "Oh, all right. What did you guys get high and just slap this together when you're on coke?" Like, this is Yes. Yeah, probably. But they you can't do that anymore. You can't. No. 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. Yeah. It's not just like a hit that you send out that's sort of bait Yeah. to get you to buy the CD that's been sort of loosely slapped together with shitty songs. Totally. I mean, it's a cultural You can also look at the the golden age of music being mega profitable as a cultural moment. You know, it was very brief,

39:33even in the annals of of the record industry itself. Most for most of the history of recorded music, it was about singles, it wasn't about albums. It was the The artist only made their money by touring. Yeah. 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 at these enormous numbers. That was never going to last and it wasn't necessarily even an organic thing anyway. And again, it's not to condone what happened. It's just to say that sometimes we lose perspective and think it was always like this until those those damn meddling kids and their computers came along. Yeah. That's interesting you say because like file sharing really is like this like blip, but record sales are the real blip. Yeah. I mean out of the thousands of years of people creating music and musical art,

40:21Yeah. look at this tiny brief window where people were selling these things and And even at that amount of money, we're talking about probably no more than 25 years. I mean, it's a really small window even within the record industry's history. That's fascinating when you think about it that way. No, Donny Ienner in in downloaded talks about that quite a he had a really clear eyed view of it cuz he really came up through he was like the youngest president of Columbia. Really amazing guy. Just had a very interesting perspective on on the bubble as it were. The side the other side of it. What is the what's the view of the music or the movie business? Have the has the movie business taken a big hit from file sharing? Um I mean it did it you know the I think the Game of Thrones thing is is really been the question. Um you know, there was a lot of uproar about

41:03the amount of piracy that was going on and the amount of file sharing that was going on around the Game of Thrones and then at a certain point HBO sort of changed shifted position from saying this is really terrible and you're all criminals to wait a minute, you guys all really love what we have. This is becoming the most popular show on TV. Let's figure out how to get it to you. You know, and they started coming up with alternatives like HBO Go. To me, that's really the right way to look at it. And I know it's again, I'm not being glib. It's not fun to lose lots of money when you're when you're putting so much you know, money and time into doing these works. But it's being realistic that you know, people all over the world they want their content at the same time. They want it a certain way. It isn't going to change. So I think people have to change with the times and some

41:43are and some aren't. HBO CEO doesn't care that you are sharing your HBO Go password. You can do that. that took a that took some time. I mean, he had the opposite viewpoint. Look at that that quote, "We're in the business of creating addicts." Yeah. Wow, good for you, you smart bastard. Yeah. Richard Plepler Richard go up. Go Richard. You go boy. Yeah. Yeah, that's uh Don't say it. Try saying his name 10 times real quickly. Smart fellow. Yeah. That's and that's smart because like there's 350 goddamn million people in this country. If you can get 350 million people to watch your show, that's amazing. global. Like Game of Thrones is all over the world. So you're going to get a lot. Yeah. But that's a show that requires an exorbitant amount of money to create. The special effects are crazy and huge and the production is enormous. The reality of it is that it's always been

42:33on the onus of business to figure out how to make a profit. And that's what drives them crazy. Cuz right now they're in a period where the consumers have taken back the power and they're scratching their heads going, "Oh Now what do we do? We've got to figure out how to create a system where we can get maximum profit again." They've they've taken a knockback. 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. You guys are criminals and we're going to this is bad and we have to educate you that you need to give us profit again." No, I mean we have to educate you that this is wrong. I mean, their motive is purely profit based. So I get that it's a drag, but you it's up to you to figure out a way to make a profit out of what you're doing. They also don't have a stranglehold on

43:17the promotional aspect anymore 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. Like someone could pass something along and then it becomes a a viral hit on YouTube and you go, "Wow, this thing like that Gangnam Style, right?" That's a perfect example. The greatest song ever written. That song did not get That did not get popular because it was on the radio. Or because it was good, you know. Some people enjoy it. I know. That's true. Many millions of people My 6-year-old and my 4-year-old go crazy when that Teletubbies. It has some kind of weird primordial sort of trigger switch that you know. Yeah. Well, it's a silly video. It's silly and it's fun. is what works, yeah. If you were a little kid, you would love the out of that song. For sure. But the perfect

44:07it's a perfect example in that like that didn't require any promotional vehicle other than people enjoying it and sharing it with other people and then it spread like wildfire. Totally. And it used to be Look at that. Oh my god. Look at that number. That's up almost yeah. No, that's 2 billion. Yeah. Oh, I was looking at the wrong number. I was looking at subscribers. No, his subscribers are almost 8 million, but his number of views is 2 billion. That's a billion. Yeah. What the That's crazy. See, and that's all Yeah. just viral. Yeah, that's community. That's community. That used to require you used to have to have a radio station. Yeah. Used to have a and you used to have to be in bed with that radio station. record company would put a gun to your head physically and then make you play a single to give it that kind of juice. That's true. Yeah, and they had these deals these

44:59under the table deals with record companies where they would not pay play certain people because they were blackballed. Right. That was a real issue with certain bands. Yeah. Payola, 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 everybody with this music. Just forcing it into your ears. Yeah. They can't do that anymore. No, that's the that's that ship is definitely sailed. And they're going to have to come up with alternative ways to to get back to some degree of where they were. And it may take time. I actually believe they'll get there cuz people are very very clever at figuring out how to make money. Well, I think they will try,

45:44but I do not believe they will. I think that music will always be big, but I think the era of record companies having the kind of influence they used to. Yeah, having the face of it be the same. I agree. It's going to be something else. We just don't know what that is yet. Yeah, because music the way it is now, one of the weird things about music now is there's no longer DJs anymore. Mhm. Do you know what I mean? When I was a kid, there was like you know, there was all these radio DJs. Do you remember that show WKRP in Cincinnati? And a lot of that show was about these personalities. grew up with those people. Sure. All the popular DJs. Yeah, like when I was a kid, it was Charles Laquidara in Boston, the the big mattress in the morning. in New York. Yeah, there was all these morning DJ guys. And of course the the big one was always Howard Stern. Morning, but he was you know, he went

46:30from music originally and then just went to straight talk. Probably the first guy ever to do that on FM the way he did it. But those guys don't even exist anymore. Yeah. They don't those morning DJ guys, they they they have a tiny window where they're allowed to talk. Yeah. And you know, there's not that many of them anymore and they're dying. They're just disappearing. They're being replaced by these weird program stations. Yeah. No, it's true. The radio is is really changing dramatically. I mean, I think you know, kind of what you're driving at is like curation. This whole idea that that that people would curate and you could go to a place and hear some That is evolving much more quickly. Like 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. Right.

47:15You know, where you can go, "Oh, I want to get certain kinds of music. I'm going to go here." 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. You know, you can choose who your DJ is in a way. Right. And that's what a DJ used to be. Like a DJ was kind of an artist in a way. For sure. Because a DJ would turn you on to some stuff that you'd never heard before. They would they would have the ability to play what they wanted to play. Yeah. Yeah, the notion of gatekeepers has changed a lot and most of the gatekeepers that existed are no longer gatekeepers. Well, then we're we're sort of concentrating on one aspect of this issue which is sort of file sharing and and the digital reality

48:01of of songs and things along those lines. But this the Silk Road story was a lot more about drugs and infiltration Yeah. and there was a lot going on. Yeah. Yeah, there was it was actually a political movement. I mean, the 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. Um it was a political movement. I mean, it was a community that was that was put together with certain political ideals and they weren't all the same. That's the the some of them were libertarian, some of them were hardcore left wing people, more socialist oriented. Some of them were in the middle, but what unified them was this desire to have individual freedom and privacy and anonymity. And there was a lot of people in that community. And a lot of people

48:49were there for the community. And that's a very I think a very threatening thing as well as being an interesting moment in time. A lot of people were there for the community, but there there was some weird that went down. Now first of all, some people had infiltrated this community, right? Like law enforcement yeah. I mean, of course. Law enforcement was there from day one. I mean, they were Yeah, law enforcement 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 at that. And how did they find out about it? Well, I mean, in order to sell drugs, you have to advertise. So it sort of went out on the wire enough to enough people. So if like if if I'm afraid in Ohio and I know to buy my drugs on online, some cop somewhere is going to

49:31know. And once one cop knows, they all know. And it was on you know, to do to credit the FBI and the DEA, they knew what was going on, you know, pretty early on, and they installed undercover operatives with, you know, fictitious user accounts. It just turned out some of them were dirty. Um you know, that's what came out a couple weeks ago was that two of the lead agents um on the Silk Road case out of Baltimore, DEA agents and Secret Service were were extorting tons of money off the Silk Road and putting it into personal accounts and, you know, creating murder-for-hire entrapment schemes. I mean, it was they were kind of off the rails, 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 that are, you know, uh not on the

50:16up and up. And this cop thing happened after that you had got done finishing Well, it was it was revealed. Um I actually knew some something about it, but I was it was like you I was kind of gag ordered in that it wasn't it was a grand jury indictment um investigation going on, so we weren't allowed to talk about it. The uh Ross Ulbricht's defense attorney wasn't allowed to bring it up in the trial. I knew that something was going on involving rogue agents. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I kind of put two and two together that that's what it was. But, um you know, it came out uh after the trial. I mean, I have I've now gone back and addressed it slightly in the movie, but, you know, it only has so much relevance cuz 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. The point is that you have all kinds of

50:59people mixed up in things like this, good and bad. There are plenty of good law enforcement agents just like there were rogue ones. There are plenty of good people on the Silk Road just like there were bad ones. And there was probably the the ones who went bad, they're probably like, "There is nobody that could figure out what I'm doing here. This is all craziness under Yeah. this web thing." 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, which, you know, as I said earlier, you know, everything that happens in the digital world tends to be very traceable on some level. It's it's hard to be truly anonymous online.

51:42You have to go through You can do it, but you have to go through enormous, you know, lengths to to remain truly anonymous on the internet. One little slip and you're done. And you can The thing about the internet is one friend of mine within the Silk Road um said to me, he's like, "The internet never forgets." So, you could make a slip 5 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, you're if that door has been opened once and the light shown on your face, that's all they need is once. And whether that's law enforcement or a hacker or anybody, if there's a vulnerability, they're going to get in. So, these guys who were the bad undercover agents, they had diverted hundreds of thousands dollars in Bitcoin, Yeah, nearly over a million. Over a million dollars. And they got caught.

52:27Yeah. How'd they get caught? They um well, it's not totally known because to be fair, it was an under it was a sting operation from within on the DEA, another agency, so they're not completely telling everyone how they got caught, but they noticed Mike's got a new boat. What's going on? There was there was some of that. There was like people paying off their mortgages when they're only making 150 before taxes. There were There were some dumb mistakes that got made. There were accounts set up with a lot of money in them. There were too many user fictitious usernames, you know, that eventually again, one tiny slip of one email account that you used to connect yourself to one, it's it's that's the thing about the digital world is you can it's like a flowchart you can just sit and look at it and go, "Oh, it went from here to here to here." And then that's it.

53:10So, those guys got busted. Um were they involved in any of the cases that were Oh, yeah. And is that being looked at now as like potential corruption that maybe the cases are tainted and their indictments might be thrown out? Totally. Oh, that's big. Yeah. Now, the there was also some murder-for-hire stuff you were talking about. Now, was it real murder-for-hire or Well, we don't know. See, here's the thing is is one of the agents that was arrested was the was the undercover um who was sort of at the heart of that first murder-for-hire sting. So, he basically actually framed somebody else in the Silk Road, said that person stole money, when actually he was the one who's who took the money, and said we should do, you know, instigated doing something to that person who was just one of the vendors on the Silk Road. Now, that turns out to not only be a cop, which we've known all along, but a

54:02dirty cop. A cop who was who was stealing money and blackmailing people within the Silk Road. So, the the murder-for-hire, there were no bodies that were there were no there have been no murders. There were no bodies that were ever found uh no one appears to have been hurt um on any level. And what we still don't totally know is whether anybody and who that was um actually originally instigated those murders-for-hire. The just to to bring you up to speed quickly, the the prosecution claimed they had a lot of hard evidence against Ross Ulbricht. They said they have his laptop. They said on that laptop they found a journal that he wrote that in which he clearly laid out what he did on the Silk Road the whole time. They believe it it attributes him to the Dread Pirate Roberts, who they showed uh Dread Pirate Roberts' record saying, "I want to take a hit out on this person. I'm going to

54:49send you the X amount of Bitcoin." Um so, they're saying, "Here's Ross's journal. It's on his laptop. It's talking about murders-for-hire." But the other thing you have to keep in mind is two things. One is he wasn't charged with murder. That was not an indictment that was even part of his case. They didn't charge him for murder. They just talked about it. They didn't have to prove it because he wasn't kingpin conspiracy and hacking charges, which carry potentially life in prison. Now, the drug conspiracy charges was it directly related to him distributing drugs? No, it was it was him being at the center of the website, so that gets into transfer of intent internet issues as well, but no, he was he was being charged with creating a service that allowed the the selling of of, you know, millions of dollars worth of drugs to millions of people. That seems so

55:40shifty. It's like as far as charging someone for that, because in that case, can't you charge Twitter? Can't you charge Facebook? I I mean, I don't know of any I don't have any personal information of people selling drugs through Facebook, but I got to imagine someone has sent a Facebook message to someone saying, "Hey, you want to buy some coke?" Well, yeah, the ar- the argument The argument is this this site was specifically created for selling illegal um drugs. The ar- the the um defense Well, that's the claim. Right. You know, um the defense's argument is twofold. They say, "A, um you know, this person uh the Dread Pirate Roberts wasn't even selling drugs. 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, and he was anti-drug war." And, you mean, you

56:27can't deny that there was a big drug component to the Silk Road by its very nature. It was a big the sort of the the motivation of the Silk Road via the Dread Pirate Roberts' writing was about removing harm and crime from the drug drug trade and and helping to bring the drug war to an end. But they also claim that the journal and all that stuff in the Bitcoin found on Ross's uh computer aren't his. 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 um uh uh hard to pin down once you get behind fictitious usernames, that they're saying that none of this stuff was actually his. And that's what they're taking into an appeal. Like, they feel so strongly about that they're moving forward with

57:15an appeal. Prosecution said that's nonsense. This stuff was all on his on his laptop. And in the current trial that just ended, the jury sided with the prosecution, and Ross was found guilty on all seven counts. He's being sentenced in a few weeks, but they are moving to an appeal. And and maybe we'll find out more, and maybe that will turn out to be the truth. We we don't know. W- Was he found guilty before it was revealed that there was these dirty cops? Oh. Yeah. They and they did and they knew that this case existed, and they didn't allow like the the the lawyer Ross's defense was trying to postpone the trial a couple months so that the the grand jury investigation, the criminal charges they knew were going to drop, the complaint, um but they were not allowed to postpone the trial. Well, that seems like a slam dunk. If you can prove that these cops were using

57:58other people's usernames and they were hacking into people's accounts, and that that seems like right there. Like, you you can't prove anybody That's a trial I would certainly I'd like to see that trial. Like, my perspective on it is is is I'm fine with it with whatever the truth turns out to be. I would just love to see both sides have their day. And I was at that trial, and the defense did not have a day. That's always how it is though, man. I mean, the idea that you get a fair trial is such a joke, because there's so much railroading going on, especially when there's an agenda like this to prosecute someone in a in a in an important case, a landmark case. They think it's going to establish a precedent, they will you. Yeah. That's uh kind of how it is. Yeah, they will you, and that's what they did to this guy. Now, this Dread Pirate Roberts character, what's his name?

58:46Dread Pirate Roberts. Oh, I mean, the guy that they accused Yeah. What's the guy they think Ross Ulbricht is. Yeah. And he's denying that he was Dread Pirate Roberts? Yeah, he's saying here's what we know about him. We know that he had these like hardcore libertarian values. He wasn't a hacker. He wasn't a computer guy. Didn't know anything about coding at all. Um he was a physics major, you know, he was a he put himself through two universities on full scholarship. He had a a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State. Very bright. Um we know that he had hardcore libertarian politics. We know that much. He admitted to creating the Silk Road. He said he did it to create it like 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 they to use it. He claims he said he built it

59:33with the help of a lot of other people cuz he doesn't really know how to code and he just let it run and he took it and he was done and he moved on. And that's what his family, his mom and dad back him on that and that's what the his family claims. They given being around him cuz they're very tight-knit family all this time, they were like, this was not someone who was on his laptop all the time. I don't know how he could have been running a, you know, a almost a billion-dollar drug empire. Um he wasn't, you know, that guy. He wasn't the guy that sat on his on his keyboard all the time. Um so he claims he's not Dread Pirate Roberts. Prosecution claims that he was and and uh and that was what that first trial was about. What is their proof that he was? Um they did find a journal on his laptop. And the journal on his laptop is like, you know, today I'm setting up a

60:15Dread Pirate Roberts account. Today I'm going to do this. Today does that? Who writes a journal on their laptop of all the they're going to do that today I will take over the world. of how it was. No, that seems so silly. Yeah, I mean it's it's, you know, it and again, I would love to see like I went to the trial thinking, okay, now we're going to see what happened, right? 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 because I mean I would side with where the wherever the truth lies, but but to be in the courtroom and to hear all that and just think, okay, if this is true, this is like the most naive, you know, criminal mastermind in the history of Could you imagine I mean Breaking Bad wouldn't lasted like wouldn't have lasted a half a season if they had made

60:58Walter White like, you know, so Today I will plant a bomb in the courthouse. Today I'm going to blow up that bomb. Yeah, and if you're reading this, don't tell anyone from law enforcement. You know, Yeah, it's not like he knows a lot about computers and that his computer could be hacked into or anything. Yeah. That's so stupid. The idea that they didn't plant that on his laptop when you're dealing with all this other that these cops planted information and the fake hitman for hire Yeah, it's it's really murky. I mean, to be honest with you, the film goes to, you know, to certain degree into that stuff. I'm I'm very interested in looking at all the issues that the movies raised, but I have to be careful how far I go into that material. You know, there's almost a whole other movie in it. There really is, right? Yeah, there's a whole I think there's a movie in in guys getting railroaded

61:43in trials, too. Yeah. You know, where it makes it look like I have a friend who went to jail for growing medical marijuana that was legal in California. 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 say the term medical marijuana. They also refused to allow into court the fact that it was passed into law in California. You could not bring that up at all Yeah. because it was irrelevant. This is a state issue. We're talking about a federal issue. It's totally irrelevant. So this guy went to jail for drug trafficking Right. when he was a legal medical provider by the law of the state of California. Yeah. Yeah, and that's like those are the people that are going to get going to get caught up in the wheels of of this transition. You know, cuz in 10

62:33years that's going to be unheard of. Yeah. It's so tragic. I mean, It's creepy. It's creepy that they can do that and they can keep you from communicating all the facts of the case. Yeah. It's you're you're not granted the right to a fair trial. You're granted the right to a fair fair trial by the standard of the people who are trying you who want very desperately to convict you. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, it's not Fair enough, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like if there's a 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. 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. Like they're not saying that he was involved in any of these transactions. No. And they're they can sentence him for a He's up for life. Cuz I think

63:21his minimum is the is 30 20 to 30 years minimum without parole. And how long has he been in jail waiting for all this? and a half. Solitary confinement, the whole bit. least. Oh my god. Yeah. And is any is there any hope? Um you know, I hope that they get in a I really just hope to see the other side talk. You know what I mean? That's the part that was very chilling and frustrating when I was in the courtroom was just like it just ended like it was just bam. Prosecution said their peace, defense was about to, they got blocked, it was over. They got blocked? How so? can you can watch the film, but basically they were they were just like you just talked about with your friend, they were unable to they were unable to call expert witnesses to talk about the complexities of Bitcoin and how, you know, Bitcoin wallets work and how you can hack into these. It was all

64:07it was very much only one side and look, let's say at the end of the day it turned out that that side is right. We just I just don't know. Like we don't know because we never heard the other side talk. So I would very much like to see the defense have its day. And if you come all the way around and the other problem that I have is that you know, the media for the most part just sort of swallows the party line. Like we're going to we're going to see Silk Road movies and they're all going to be 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 and again, I maintain I know a fair amount about this case that we don't totally know what happened. In the movie he'll probably sweaty and doing math and he'll

64:54It'll be Robert Pattinson, you know, and he won't have, you know, shaved for a while and yeah. Making all such terrible evil choices execute enter Yeah. Wasn't that like a thing like he they were they were saying like at one point they were they wanted to beat this guy up because he was going to talk and then they decided to say execute him instead. Yeah, and so they faked the murder and they showed a photo of a body. Well, who did all that? The person who did that was the undercover agent who turns out to be corrupt. Oh my god. And he's the one who stole the money that they were trying to allegedly execute this person for stealing. This guy had stolen the money. What a tangled web. It is. Oh my god. So this guy sets up a fake murder for hire, then does a fake murder, has a fake body Yeah. all to punish this fake person for stealing money Yeah. that he stole. Yes,

65:49and 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 for this drug deal that was put together by the crooked undercover cop who took all the money and is now who's I mean his life is over and he's had to turn over and become, you know, a witness. He's still, you know, has indictments pending. They could throw him in jail at any point. I mean, it's And he did nothing. You know, he was part of the Silk Road, but he this entire operation for which he was arrested was all constructed by a corrupt DEA agent. Oh my god. I guess in order to be an undercover DEA agent, you got to have some ability to work in secrecy. Yeah. But when people start working in secrecy, they get a little slimy. They can go rogue. Yeah. So you got to keep an eye on those people. I wonder if

66:41they could put put a percentage on what percentage of the transactions, exchanges, the the conversations on Silk Road were about illegal activities and what were not. Well, I've actually seen some pie charts just cuz I have access to some of the metrics on this stuff. That show like how much was hard drug. Like originally, you know, the Silk Road had a very strict ethics code. There was like there was no child pornography allowed on Silk Road. There were no counterfeit there was no counterfeit money allowed on Silk Road. Um it when Silk Road started, it was mostly softer drugs. It was mostly mushrooms, marijuana, things like that. It grew harder as the Silk Road went along, but also grew harder as more law enforcement became involved in um the undercover operations of Silk Road. And there is a certain amount of a complicity between the sort of the increasing law

67:30enforcement presence on Silk Road and the severity of the drugs and the and that kind of activity. So I mean, and that's just I mean, and to be fair to law enforcement, that's often how they work anyway, right? I mean, if they're going to infiltrate a cartel, they're going to start moving big amounts of heroin or whatever. I mean, that's how they get in, so it's not but it has to be looked at in terms of the corruption of the Silk Road itself. Um it didn't start with those kinds of intentions. God, what a twisted web. What a twisted web and unfortunately, if people don't watch your documentary, what are they going to get? The mainstream news narrative The dark web is bad, privacy is bad, drugs are bad. This guy, Dread Pirate Roberts, a drug dealer. Yeah. Murder for hire. That's it. Back to you, Bob. That's what you're going to get. Oh, what shady stuff. Anyway, here in

68:18Pasadena, there was a Mickey Mouse parade today. Yeah, I mean, as I said, I spent several hours when I was at South by talking to a reporter from a 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 is filled with criminals and it's horrible and these people are bad. chick out. Rat her out, man. Who is it? I can't not going to say. What what publication was it? say. What does it rhyme with? Uh you know, Crimes. Oh, New York Times. So look up the New York to find that article, Jamie. Find it. You know, it's it's That's It's an Why are you so nice? Why you so nice? You want I would be the first that would That's a problem. A person like that's a problem. Like you're pretending to be a reporter. It's what we face. I think that we face an inherent lack of understanding and a

69:02fear and a reactionary fear around these around technologies. I think a lot of the story that's being told about new technologies is automatically criminalizing or demonizing it. And then when you tell stories that sort of sit in the middle, you're accused of being sort of Pollyannaish and saying, oh, it's all good. It's like, no, we're not saying that. We're saying, this is what's going on whether you like it or not. Let's at least examine it for what it is. 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 going on with these undercover agents that were obviously doing things and implicating people in things that they had no involvement in, stealing drug or stealing money and blaming it on others, pretending to have a murder. How could someone not see all

69:44the gray? Cuz they don't want I don't I don't think they want to. The gray lady doesn't want to see the gray? That's outrageous. I don't think they want to do. You know. They don't want to, but why don't they want to? Cuz they suck as journalists. Yeah. And they should be removed and replaced with independent bloggers. Yeah. For real, man. Unless you you you know, until you get a a Glenn Greenwald type character who doesn't have a stake in it and wants to tell the whole story, Yeah. what do you get? And even you know, he who knows, man. Yeah. This is This is god damn confusing to me. Yeah, and it's like in a way you have to like in order to understand it, you got to really educate yourself. There's a lot of moving parts. They really are. I mean, if you really And then most people like it's much easier just to demonize something and say, "Oh, it's bad." And isn't this a situation

70:30where the Silk Road is essentially the Napster of the deep web? 100%. And there's going to be some are. Yeah. It's over I mean, the the the toothpaste is well out of the tube. These There's There's proliferating now. There's just hundreds of these drug markets on the And they're We won't say the names. Yeah. They're Keyser Söze. Yeah, and they're using decentralized technologies, which means there's no exactly what happened with Napster. Napster was a central database, so it was easy to to target and shut down. Then you had a bunch of copycats like Kazaa and all these other ones. They were also central database and they were easy to shut down. Then BitTorrent came along and it was decentralized. And what that means is there is no central server. The The system operates through the way it's it's coded, it works through every single user that's online. There's nobody to target. That's

71:14the reason BitTorrent never went away. Right? And that's what's happening in the drug markets now. As you started with these central server markets, they get clobbered. They you find the server, you you seize the server, game over. They've done it over and over again for these copycat uh drug markets. But now decentralized markets are beginning to proliferate. You can't shut those down. It's very, very difficult. And there's going to be There are already hundreds and hundreds of them all over the world. There are going to be thousands. It's just going to grow and grow and grow because the technology works and because as you said, there's a demand. So, the real issue is going to be the delivery of these illegal substances. Like you're having a hard address that these things get delivered to. Yeah, but they come through They come through you know, camouflaged FedEx and UPS

71:58packages. And these people know what they're doing and they know how to game the postal system. 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. So, like when you hear about kids getting popped for having, you know, 500 movies on their hard drive that they're distributing through BitTorrent and they get caught, this is mostly because they were one of the ones who were uploading them. Yeah, they got tracked. I mean, you're if you're if or if you're like a really dumb 13-year-old and you're just pulling this stuff down on your browser and you know, they find your internet service provider and they find your IP address and they connect that to person who's whose broadband is sucking down ridiculous amounts of media every day, then they can find you that way, too. There's ways of tracking you that way.

72:46Now, 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 you're the guy who sent you stuff, the packaging wasn't well camouflaged and they go, "Oh, look at this. Let's find out where that's going." And they trace it back to its address and they pop you. Otherwise, it's very hard to attach to you. sending a You're not showing a signal. Like you know that technology they have now where they drive by people's homes and they um they use a scanner and they can tell whether or not you're using massive amounts of electricity and they believe you're there's a grow house in the building. fly a plane over your your house and check for infrared. They've been doing that for pot farmers for for decades.

73:30Yeah, they broke into this guy's house who was a retired NSA agent. Uh him and his wife were growing tomatoes in their basement. They locked him up, boots to the neck, the whole deal. And then they're like, "Oh, whoops. Sorry." And you know, and this guy got a taste of what he's a part of. Like, "Look, hey, look at this." Yeah. Well, that's that's the problem. 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." The problem is a lot of mistakes get made, A. B. Of course, I I should have privacy whether I have something to hide or not. It's none of your business what I'm doing unless to a certain degree I'm I'm creating a crime on a level that that should be enforced. But there are so many laws. There are thousands and thousands of laws and they get very, very tangled. And it's very easy to to

74:18pop somebody for almost anything. And that's where this gets tricky. When people are 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 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. 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. Yeah, my what I was getting at was that this signal doesn't exist like a signal where you're like passing by someone's house and you see all this electricity being used, all this heat being generated. Okay, this is

75:01a grow house. Well, if you're involved in one of these many now hundreds of different services, there's no signal. There's no downloads. Like if you're a guy who's downloading massive amounts of media, they look at your your the amount of data that's going through your computer every day. They're like, "Look at this Right. Now, he's got a terabyte an hour banging into his house. What's happening? That's why law enforcement has been trying to break Tor. And the what's been going on is that is that Tor has There's a conflict there because Tor is is still created and maintained by a lot of government agencies and or utilized, let's say, by a lot of government agencies who need Tor in order to communicate with each other. I mean, NSA, a lot of different agencies need Tor to communicate privately. But then on the same floor of a law enforcement building, you may have some guy in

75:47office A who's working to help make Tor stronger, 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. And the people who want to break Tor want to break it for the reason you just said. How else do we identify? How do we find these people even if Tor is mostly being used for good purposes? Unless we demonize the whole thing. And that's when I get my my hackles up when people just say this whole world is bad. 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. They're everybody who are using Tor." Which is like saying anybody who's got a bathroom door is bad. It's so irresponsible to just demonize the entire Silk Road

76:30like that and demonize the entire movement without looking at the nuances, looking at the the unbelievable complexity involved in freedom and digital freedom and exchanging information online and even the complexities involved in the drug war. I mean, the 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. Yeah, cuz I I guarantee you most intelligent people will not agree with it. Even Republicans. Completely. Yeah, it's a non-partisan issue. It really is. It isn't like people go, "Oh, they're just crazy libertarians." And like, "No, they're not. They really aren't." It's all stripes. I mean, it's every different every kind of political configuration is is involved in this movement on some level or another. Cuz who doesn't want privacy?

77:18This This documentary, where can people see it and when can people see it? Um well, we're touring festivals right now all over the We just did South by and we're doing festivals. So, if you go to deepwebthemovie.com, you can see which festivals we're coming up on. But the movie is is going to be on Epix, the Epix network on premium cable. I think it's regular cable, right? So, so it'll be on Epix on May 31st. You can see it there and then it will be out all over after that. Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, everywhere. And well, Ed Norton, who is our buddy, will be here on Wednesday, also has a special coming out on Epix. So, go Epix. is awesome. Um was there anything This it seems like to put a such a an intense and complex issue into a 90-minute piece, it seems like it would be really hard to edit. Yeah, it was really challenging and and download it was challenging,

78:09too. 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. That's the way I come at them. It's like there are very core issues that matter here. You don't need to understand how Bitcoin works. You don't need to understand how Tor works. What needs You need to understand Thankfully, the these issues to me are not about technology. They're about They're about human nature and community. So, I you always stress the sort of human side. What is the motivation? Why did they start this thing? Who are they? What are their ideals? What kind of community do they want to create? And that you can convey to somebody in 90 minutes. Did you have a chance to talk to this dude that's in solitary? Did you have What's his name again? Ross Ulbricht. I mean, I I have exclusive access to to that family, the

78:50mom, the dad, their defense attorney. I had access to Ross, but he's, you know, behind bars in a federal trial. He couldn't be interviewed by me or 60 Minutes. I was doing interviews with him via his his parents. So, they would give him questions. Like he's very aware of the film. He would they would give him questions um and then he would answer them for me. Um in written form. And uh you know, and in some cases, you know, that was it in written form. Um but uh so, I was able to communicate with him that way and sort of get, you know, the information that I needed to. But what what is the rationale for not allowing him to talk? I mean, he's he's a, you know, it's a big federal case and they they they kept him under lock and key. But isn't that insane? It was pretty It was It was chilling. Yeah, I was expecting to go talk to him like, you know, at a

79:38table and visit visitation or something. None of that. But that's that's really disturbing to me cuz you're not talking about a murderer. Yeah. You're not talking about a guy who was even contemplating murder. You're not talking about a guy who stole a ton of money. You're not talking about a guy who wrecked the government, who was planning anarchy, wanted to blow up the federal courthouse. You're not talking about that. No, but the way that they you know, the way the prosecution looks at him, to be fair, is as all those things. They believe that they believe that Ross intended to have people killed whether those murders happened or not. They believe that he made a lot of money off of the Silk Road via Bitcoin. Um they believe that, you know, the sort of anti-government, libertarian ethos that they believe he espoused to was very anarchistic and dangerous. So, you know,

80:23they did view him as a as a major threat. That's a slippery slope to say that an anti-government libertarian ethos is is dangerous because why? There's a lot of people you're going to have to lock up with that. How about Rand Paul? This motherfucker's running for president. Yeah. main platform. I know. Good luck with all that. Yeah. the guy running for government office, the top government office, has a dad who's pretty goddamn libertarian for being a Republican. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true. And and I, you know, I maintain that that whatever the truth ends up being, um and I really do hope we we categorically get to the bottom of it at some point. Uh in a way, you know, and not to write him off at all, but in a way regardless of Ross Ulbricht, I think that you know, the the idea of these an anonymous marketplaces on the internet with with these communities, that is the greatest

81:10threat. I think that's what poses the greatest threat. Well, I think the internet itself is is the greatest threat to the system that we have in place. And it's the the biggest exposure of the shell game of the two-party system, as well. Yeah. It's not 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. This is a shell game. Yeah. You have the same corporations that are that are supporting the same people. They get into office. They never do what they said they were going to do. And they do a bunch of that you would never want them to do. Yeah. So, it's the same thing over and over again. And I think that ultimately that's going to be their demise. Their demise is going to be their unwillingness to accept the new digital reality. Yeah. That they're exposed. Everything is

81:55exposed. It means we're exposed too, but it does mean every that the upside is everything is exposed. Well, we're not doing anything. You're making documentaries. I'm telling jokes. Yeah. But this this guy is losing a giant chunk of his life and he's in been been in jail for a year and a half now. Yeah, well, he may lose his He may get life. We won't know until mid-May. I mean, he may get life. Christ. And if he gets life, no one can talk to him. No. Like Chelsea Manning, the artist formerly known as Bradley Manning. Yeah. Now has a Twitter, but how does she do that? Yeah, I was actually wondering cuz I started following her a couple days ago. I'm not until you can There are certain people who do get like Barrett Brown um had he access to email. He had recently revoked. So, they will clamp he get it revoked? claimed that he was talking to a journalist and

82:38it's all they shouldn't have revoked it in my opinion, but um he hasn't been treated fairly from the beginning, but that's another documentary. Right. Um but uh it's in Ross's case, um it's very difficult to interview people under that who are sort of convicted of those kinds of charges. They often get sent to pretty max-oriented facilities, um but I'm still working on it. I'm still hoping to get an interview with him. It's basically a civilized form of a Siberian gulag. Yeah. I mean, it's like you're just locking you away and throwing the key. They're just not throwing away the key and they're locking you away. Yeah. You can't talk to anybody. You're you're in solitary confinement, which makes people go crazy. does. Yeah. I mean, that's what they did with Chelsea Manning, as well. Naked, no clothes, locked in solitary for years. Tell me that won't make you nuts. And it

83:28will. It it removes so much of what you are as a human being. Completely. All your personal freedom is gone. Mhm. And this is legal and this is morally acceptable and this is this is a part of law. I mean, that's insane. That's insane that they can do that to this guy. So, when is his when do they get to see whether or not they'll be able to appeal? Well, appeals often can take about a year, um the process of sort of dealing with the appellate court. 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. Um and pretty cool. It's around the corner. And then an appeal would occur, you know, sometime hopefully this year or or at some point early next year. Well, that'll at least um that will give some publicity to the premiere of your documentary, which is May 31st. May 31st, yeah.

84:22So, that'll be a couple weeks out. So, that I'm sure the buzz will still be abound. But it's it's really disturbs me, man. I mean, it really it gets me creeped out. It it disturbs me in a very personal level. Just the the idea that you could take some young person and do that to them and and not let them speak. That's the Was he ever able to speak on his behalf? Did he get give a statement or anything? No, you have to you have to be very careful about testifying, too. You know, it's it's a very tricky position to put yourself in. So, um you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens with the appeal process. Are they hopeful? They have to be. What else can you be? What else can you be but hopeful? But legal analysts, when they look at it from an objective standpoint, people that don't have a vested interest in success or failure. They they say that it's a very They have

85:09a very steep hill to climb to get anywhere. Yeah. Okay. There's How much did this bug you when you were doing this? I mean, this It got pretty depressing. I mean, there was a point I stayed pretty neutral. Um and again, as I say, I don't know the whole truth. I just am very eager to 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, but um there was a point when I was sitting in the federal trial and and just watching them get blocked and blocked and blocked and and everyone in that room just wanted to hear at least something from the other side. And you know, at the point at which I suddenly realized that was it, the trial was over, it was very I mean, I I said to to Ross's mom, you know, later that day, I was like, I don't know how I mean, I've always wondered how you've survived the last

86:00year, but like I barely made it through this week and it's not my son in jail. And even if he's guilty of everything, just on a pure emotional level, just to watch, you know, the machinery and the way that it works and and uh it was just very it's very very sad. I mean, the whole the whole case is I find extremely sad. What Whatever the truth turns out to be, just on a basic human level, it was a pretty emotional experience. And is there any movement whatsoever to try to reform this kind of railroading of people? Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, a few things are going on. As you know, that it's mostly state level. Mandatory minimums are are starting to get reduced. I mean, the world the world is moving slowly towards beyond this prohibition, right? And I think that we're getting there. And I think that the internet has actually been really helpful in sort of creating

86:48grassroots 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. And I think that the net is absolutely a power there. Um but there's a very big battle, you know, against that tide um and that's largely at the federal level. And I so I think we have a long way to go before we're having um conversations that are sane and balanced and nuanced about any of this stuff. It's very black and white. 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. And Is that how you've been branded? No, I mean, not as I think well, A, the movie hasn't come out yet, but you know, I I sort of comically caught some heat on Downloaded as I I don't think I

87:36talked enough about piracy for some people's liking. On on Downloaded? Yeah, and that was the Napster movie that I made. And I think that people, you know, they expected to have a much more about like how bad it was to to pull down Metallica. And I was just was not that interested in that stuff. Um and I think that that if you don't follow the sort of, you know, standard narrative, um you take some heat. I don't care. I like you said, I'm a guy who makes documentaries. I have I'm not going to jail. I'm not selling anything on the internet. You know what I mean? I'm I'm I'm objectively removed from that world, but of course you take heat cuz people get really pissed off at the idea that you're not just saying, you know, hiding bad, piracy bad, drugs bad, you know, it's just you have to just take that party line like that reporter I talked to. And it's just it's

88:21disappointing, but that's the prevailing narrative. And it's not just the narrative from the right. You get that from the left. You get it from the center. Everyone just sort of marches in line. Yeah, they watched Dragnet when they were kids. They have this idea that there's good and evil in this world. and bad guys. Just catch the bad guys. This is a freedom issue, in in my opinion. If you look at the worst thing that happened, people distributed drugs to each other that wanted those drugs. That's the worst thing that happened. Uh obviously, if the the murders were faked and it's quite possible, in fact, likely that no one ever wanted anybody murdered in the first place. This guy just was setting the whole thing up to cover up the fact that he stole all this money. It's like, where's the crime? Where's the crime that you're protecting the world from? That you've got this

89:08guy locked up in jail. And is a part of the reason why they're able to keep him in solitary, the murder for hire? Yeah, he's on To to clear, he was he's no longer in solitary. He was in so 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. It's a nasty sort of environment to be in. He was in solitary for 6 weeks. He has not been in solitary for the bulk of his confinement. I was kidding. He's not like Chelsea Manning in that way. He's been in in a holding prison in Brooklyn for over a year. He did some solitary in Oakland and then he did some solitary in New York. He's been primarily part of the regular prison system. And in the regular prison prison system, what type of security does do they have? It's it's intense. Oh, no, it's it's intense. But is he locked up with murderers or is he

89:53Yeah, he's in he's in the general he's in the general population. done I mean, you know, again, you know, not to exonerate him, but he's he's been a pretty interesting inmate. He's been teaching like physics and yoga in prison. He's been teaching math and helping the guys with their GEDs. Like, you know, again, like this is just who he is. He he may have done horrible other things that we, you know, will learn about more in detail at some point, but But what we know about what he has done Exactly. he seems like a pretty god damn cool guy. guy. Yeah. That just drives me nuts, man. How do you when you when you were done with this, when you did the final edit and you step back and you you, you know, you're done. Now it's just about talking it about it, promoting it and what does this leave you feeling when you make a documentary about something like this? Uh you go through withdrawal.

90:41You know, I'm I'm actually through it now cuz I've been done for a minute, but um you go through a little withdrawal because it's it I was I was living, eating and sleeping this world for almost 2 years and and as, you know, I was dealing with a lot of people on all sides, on the law enforcement side, on the, you know, the cyber side, the whole his family, the whole thing. You got to go through withdrawal. Um but part of me and I said this to I was very blunt with Lynn, his mom, um and I'd like being able to talk about it. So, that's kind of the easy part cuz that's kind of the why you do it part, right? Um but I said to Lynn, I was like, you know, I I really am glad I'm done, you know, it's like I get to go you don't get to go home, you know, I I got a family and kids and like I get to go home and I'm done and it's a very you I really, you know, you go outside and you smell the

91:26air and you get in your car and you go about your day and you take your kids to school and I think, you know, I just I don't I am done with that world. Well, that's this really scary part about the threat of keeping in line is that they can remove that from you. They can take that right away from you to just drive right now. You can go go get a burrito. I want to drive down the street to the Mexican restaurant. I want to, you know, do this. I want to go to Big Bear and just take a day off. You can't do that. None of that none of those are options anymore. Yeah, and even if you're, you know, even if you're the family or whoever, you know, your life is shattered, too. I mean, Lynn doesn't get to get home and have a regular life anymore, you know. on her son, her baby is always going to be in a cage somewhere. Yeah. Was there any sympathy from people that

92:09you talked to even off the record in law enforcement that Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Um I mean, a lot of the law enforcement people that I spoke to and some of whom are in the movie were really the same thing I went through with Napster with the labels. It's like to me like again to me it's not black and white. It's not good guys and bad guys. Most of the label guys I talked to were really clear-eyed and smart and had a really good view of like a we here's where we screwed up. Here's where we taking too much money. Here's where this happened. Here's where the technology us. Whatever it was. On law enforcement most of the law enforcement guys I talked to don't agree with this notion that there should be no encryption. They're like of course it's like yes, it's going to make our job harder, but yes, you have a right to privacy. No, we should not have

92:47warrantless search and seizure. That make that makes no sense and you know, the so there is there's a lot of people caught up in the grays. There's another guy I spoke to in the movie uh named Neil Franklin who is the director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. And Neil was a homicide major on the streets of Baltimore for 20 years and saw everything there was to see about the drug war's ravages and now his life is work is about getting rid of the drug war as from the officer side, from the DEA, FBI, DA side. So, I just feel like in the future it's going to be looked back the same way prohibition was. 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. Yeah. Now there's bars everywhere. I mean, you just drive

93:33down the street everywhere you go you can buy booze. And those those bars have parking lots. Yeah. People who pay taxes go to them. Yeah. It supports the economy. Yeah. The whole thing is bizarre. It's just it's such a weird thing when you look at our culture and you look at these just glaring flaws in how we operate. And the justice system in this respect is one of those glaring flaws. When you tell me about that trial, it makes me sick. Like I physically feel sick. Yeah, it was sick-making. It really was. You just It was kind of dizzying. You just thought, really? It was like being in a Kafka novel. You're like, really? That's it? That's where we go home? It makes no sense. It almost makes sense when you hear about that judge in Pennsyl- Pennsylvania that was sentencing those kids for profit. Like you kind of get it now. Like, oh well, you guys are just

94:20used to doing this. And that becomes just another step removed from the normal operating procedure. Like, what's the big deal? Yeah. I'm I'm going to I need a pool. Yeah. What's the big deal? I'd like to go on vacation and some kids' life up. Yeah, well, and there's also the general aspect of like we need, you know, to punish the drug war. We need to do it in a big way. We need to do it we need to do it in a public way, you know, we need to do it with maximum punishment with a, you know, extreme prejudice as it were. So, there's that. You watch that machinery just at work, too. They get to go back in front of the TV TV cameras and go, "We have another big drug war trophy." 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. Yeah, well, there back at the time there was there

95:10was another there was one called Atlantis that had shown up that was used Now there's tons of them, but this was in the early days and you know, the the journalist from Wired the journalist from Wired, Andy Greenberg, who's sort of the main kind of, you know, he's our everyman in the film who takes us through this world. Um he was the only the first person to interview really the only person to interview Dread Pirate Roberts and that's how he got the interview was just by saying, "Look, I'll cover these other guys." And Dread Pirate Roberts knew that the Silk Road needed more exposure in order to get more customers. So, he talked. Wow. And so no one from Atlantis ever got popped. Atlantis got completely Atlantis disappeared. Atlantis got popped and evaporated ages ago. So, the government came in and infiltrated them? Just it just it just it disappeared.

95:50Like a lot of what happens to a lot of these services is is they'll just take all the they'll extort people. They'll they'll collect all their money and then they'll they'll just high tail it. Oh, so the guys who own the service can be shady. Yeah, oh completely. Yeah, that that happens that just happened with one called Evolution recently and it happened with another one called Sheep Market and it happens from time to time. I'm confused. Where how are they getting money? Um it's what you do is you you set up a an account get Bitcoin. You can use Bitcoin, you know, overstock.com takes Bitcoin. You can use Bitcoin like PayPal. Sure. Um and you set up an account then you go to that site via through Tor or through some other way into the darknet. You set up a username and an account just like you do with eBay, right? And now you have a a Bitcoin account and

96:32you've got your account on this site just like you have eBay. So, it's just like using PayPal to to pay for your eBay purchases, you're using Bitcoin to pay for your online services. And they have access somehow or another to your Bitcoin? Yeah, because Bitcoin is 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. Like there's ways to remove it from you even further. It's called tumbling. But basically you you pay using this Bitcoin code, they get that transaction, they send you the drugs via and often times now it works there's they don't even know who you are. Like it's done through a third party to separate you from the core site. So, there's ways of keeping it you know, they basically it's like an escrow account or something. There's ways of creating barriers between you and them. So, somehow or

97:26another the people that own the site are able to access the people who have membership on the site their Bitcoin wallet. What they're doing is let's say we're buying let's say we're buying lots of stuff on your site. All these different people are buying stuff on your site. You're the middleman, right? Cuz you're connecting buyer to seller, right? You give me money for me just like Amazon that I'm supposed to give to the seller. I wait until that money collects collects collects collects and then I just close up shop. Um cut both of you guys off. Buyer and seller, bye-bye. I've got all the cash that's sitting here in the middle. So, you're the third party middleman that's supposed to hand it over and you don't hand it over. You just grab it and run. Precisely. And then you shut down the site. whole thing down. And so is there a delay in transaction? Correct. Exactly. So, they Yeah, cuz

98:10you're taking a fee. So, there's there's that whole aspect. 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. Where basically all I've done it's more like BitTorrent. It's all I've done is created this service. I put it out in the world. It's decentralized. There is no middleman. The Bitcoin sort of travels from one area through directly to that buyer. There's nobody in the middle that can take the money and run. And that's the the direction it's currently going in. So, these people that did it like for Atlantis or these other organi- did did they ever get caught or does everybody have to shut up because they were talking about illegal drugs in the first place? of them don't get caught. I mean, the interesting thing is there's a lot of, you know, full-blown unsurprisingly

98:48full-on cybercriminals out there. Like these DEA agents that that got caught. They were actually or this singular DEA agent, singular Secret Service guy. You know, they were very sophisticated. They were more sophisticated than some of the guys who created these sites. They knew how to use Bitcoin. They were creating they were actually creating Bitcoin exchanges. They were very technologically together. So, you have people like that um on the cyber side as well who are like hackers and really know how to manipulate these technologies. They've been in the game a long time and they'll create fictitious users, they'll create markets, they'll buy their time, then they'll steal people's money. It's the wild west. Wow. So, now the way they're doing it is how? Decentralized. Yeah, so what that is is you basically there is no central point of control, there's no central server. So, there is

99:35no guy in the middle who's hold that means there's no profit either, there's no one taking a fee. It's really egalitarian. There's one technology that's on the rise now called Open Bazaar and this is not was not created for drug use. There may be drugs that end up getting sell on Bazaar or Buzzard. Bazaar. Open Bazaar and Open Bazaar is you can buy shoes there, you can buy whatever, but it's decentralized, there's no central point of control. So, it's not a profit based entity in that way. Eventually, if they wanted to create like some kind of app like what BitTorrent's trying to do. There is, huh? Yeah, if they wanted to create some kind of advertising model or legitimize himself in other ways, there's ways to eventually create profit. So, and they're also saying that not only are people using this for drugs, but they're also using this for illegal firearms and

100:21the distribution of illegal firearms. That's really uncommon. The the it's really hard to sell drugs on the dark on the dark net. People have tried Yeah, guns, I'm sorry. It's it's very difficult given the way there's a a number of issues, but given the difficulty of moving moving drugs guns around through the postal system is extremely difficult. The one thing that did happen on the internet is what Cody Wilson was doing and he created the 3D printed gun, which you may have heard of. Cody's in my movie and and Cody again is coming from a purely political perspective. He is just trying to say, "Look, technology is allowing people to do whatever they want, screw your laws, right?" So, that's the way that that some of that stuff has happened online, but the way Cody used technologies work is you're able to create one piece of a weapon that you could sort of build the

101:10rest of the weapon around. Um, so that's been a big thorn in in people's sides as well. Yeah, he what he's done is very interesting because his plans or the whatever it is for the 3D gun that you could download, hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded this and traded it back and forth. And if you have a 3D printer, all you have to do is enter that information in and it can build you this gun. Yeah. I mean, you need a mill or you need like some he's the the next wave of his technology was actually selling the milling machine that would allow it to be metal. Um, so it's it's definitely he's a very provocative guy. Well, it seems like that's kind of where we're going as human beings with technology and this is not stores where you have to go and pick something up, but you just print it. make it. I mean, that seems like what's going to happen. Yeah. Even with food?

102:07can 3D print food. Woah. Yeah, you get ingredients and you can literally make food. Like what kind of food? All kinds of stuff and it's just going to get more advanced all the time. I mean, there's organic elements to this, it's not just like plastic stuff. So, it's so strange. Yeah, I remember when I was talking to Shawn Fanning, the guy who created Napster. I was talking to Shawn about 10 years ago. This is 10 years ago. I was like, "Okay, what's the next big thing?" He was like, "3D printing." He goes, "People have no idea how much that's going to change our culture once it really gets going." It seems like it is. It seems like that's you when you buy a new iPhone, you're going to you're going to download the directions for the iPhone. won't even have to do that. Yeah, you just stick the code in your it'll just make it, you know? Jesus Christ. It seems like the the real issue would

102:49be raw materials then at that point. 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. It's like you said it earlier, the real changes are coming. Like the things are really going to shift into high gear over the next 10, 20, 30 years with driverless cars and more advanced bio technology. I mean, things are really going to change. They're so weird because we're we're in the middle of it. I think it's so difficult to gain a really objective perspective while you're in the middle of it cuz 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. No, completely. The computer in your hand was unheard of. It's all weird. It's all weird and it's shifting like but what it is to be a person is going

103:35to be very different. yeah. It is. I just wonder how they're going to look back on things like this like this Silk Road thing or Napster. Well, you've you've really kind of captured with both of these documentaries with Downloaded and with this Deep Web documentary, you really kind of captured two very pivotal blips culturally. Yeah, that's been my interest is like where is the gray? Where are the where are the uneasy? Where you know, what's not the low-hanging fruit? Like that's what's been interest that's what I've been that's been my agenda in in going after these stories is like what are what doesn't have easy answers? Has it been really frustrating though like especially like this New York Times person that you don't want to name? We'll find her. Or him, whoever they are. You said it was her. Too late. I just think that it's if I was me, I would be going crazy. I

104:27mean, it would just keep me up at night. I would be like, "How is it that someone could not understand that this is so complex? That this is this is not just one issue of a law being broken. This is not one issue of an underground marketplace of nefarious people doing dastardly deeds. This is an aspect of human cultural evolution. Yeah. It is it's a little frustrating, but I you know, I also like I said a lot of the people that I interview are more sensible than sometimes what the prevailing narrative is, you know? You do encounter people that are just really have their their their heads planted in the sand that just don't want to think about things differently than the way they perceive them. I actually encounter that a lot with the Napster story where people were just adamantly, "No, it was only about stealing. No, it's not about something other than

105:20piracy." They just could not could not see it and I think that we're still there with the Napster issue. I think people still just cannot get their heads around what actually happened, but 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 conversation start and I think that's really that's helpful on some level. Well, it's a generational issue as well. 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 like really actively pursuing it, but the kids in their 20s they're almost all in tune to at least the ones

106:02that are smart aren't obsessed with Justin Bieber. They're tuned in to what's going on here that they literally all are a part of a generation that will go down as being the first generation that grew up entirely with the internet. Yeah, and these are people who are utilizing these technologies at such such a fundamental level that they don't think of that's the whole thing with the Napster thing and I and it certainly works in the Silk Road case to some degree is these people did not view themselves as criminals. That was the that was the pushback and it happened to me. 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." So, it's like I know I'm not a criminal. Right, exactly, but I'm being branded as one and I did not respond well to that. I thought, "Woah, woah, woah, you know,

106:44like don't don't leap to calling me that." And then you're branding an entire generation of like your new consumers, you're branding them as criminals. Like how is that going to help you or your cause in the end? Well, that was the Lars Ulrich thing where he really really because he was a really wealthy guy and the head of a Well, he stuck his neck out. I mean, the thing about Lars and and actually have sympathy for Lars. I feel like with Lars 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. It was I Disappear and then it was it got put on KROQ. So, he's like an artist and he's like, "Oh god, this version with the crappy drum track is on KROQ." Oh my and his head exploded, right? And that's that was his reaction was like the pure artist like holy reaction, which I as an artist

107:31I get that. And then he was like, "We got to lead a charge against these guys." And he ran out and he looked back and nobody else was at his back. Nobody. Like all the other artists were like, "Yeah, none of them had the balls to to give him some credit to to come out and say, 'Wait a minute, we need to have better discussions about this.'" So, they totally stuck his ass out in the forefront and then they ran. Well, the fans felt like, "You greedy Like you're a multi-millionaire and you're complaining that you're going to lose some money off of this." Right. And they just felt betrayed and stuff like that. they I think they did and I and I felt for him to the degree that as an artist I feel like his reaction, whatever you want to say about the politics of it, his initial gut oh my god reaction is would have been my you know what I mean? When you make something and it's in

108:16rough cut form or it's not you know, the idea that like that's out there like someone's stuck in a movie theater KROQ. That makes your head that's like you lose sleep on that kind of stuff at night. Yeah, comics have this with YouTube with bits. Like if you're working on a new bit and someone shows up at a comedy club and and records you when you're on stage and then releases it on YouTube and then it gets downloaded by 100,000 people like that bit sucks. It's not that bit's a baby. It's not you know, you can't it's not done yet. When I when I'm done, I'll put it on a DVD. I'll put it on a comedy special. Right. And and the the truth though is is I think you've been saying is that it isn't to brand them it's like you have it's incumbent upon us to change the way we do business. Like we can't say you can't we can't just wag our finger at them and say, "You, stop doing that." Of

108:58course they're going to do it. It's this amazing new technology that that's you know, communal and fast and democratized and they're not going to stop doing it. We have to change. Yeah, it's it's going to be very weird when it hits whatever the next stage is. Whatever the next stage is cuz I'm I'm I'm imagining with very little technological expertise, of course. Well, how about zero? Have Have none. I just I'm a user. you had a website in '98 with a message board. That's That's way farther along than most people. I hired somebody. I don't even know what what a message board is made of. I might have made it out of cheese. Yeah, you had the foresight to do it. That's still different. Well, maybe. Okay. But, my my point being we if you try to imagine what the next stage is going to be, I would imagine that it would be something virtual. And I'm I'm imagining that what the what

109:49we'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 those boards that existed back in the day before there was any like real like in Before there was a web. Yeah, we're talking like '93. Yeah, before the web. Yeah, what were those things called? They were like bulletin boards. Usenet and the BBS era. Yeah, you'd have to log on. It would take you an hour. You'd go there and check to see if anybody left anything there. And then you'd have to screw off for a while. And That was it. 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. Yeah. You check Twitter anytime anything's going down. Like anytime someone dies or anything, I find

110:37out about it on Twitter before I ever see it on the news. It seems like it's almost instantaneous. Yeah. The but even more so than that, things like YouTube. YouTube is very two-dimensional. We look at it, it's it's awesome. You can watch stuff on it, you know, or, you know, even HBO Go. Any of these things where you're seeing things online, it's very two-dimensional. I think virtual is going to be the next step. This Oculus Rift type technology and progressing right now Mhm. is is kind of frightening. It's really getting unbelievably realistic. It is, yeah. Yeah, it's getting super advanced. And the fluidity, the ability to use it, like how that stuff can get projected and how that's going to I mean, there things are going to change across the board in a lot of ways. And like driverless cars, certain things that are going to cause huge changes are

111:27are literally around the corner. I mean, that's we're just only we're years away from driverless cars, not like decades away from driverless cars. It's a very exciting time, but it's also very woof, like Jesus. It's a challenging time. I mean, that's the reason I make these stories. It's not cuz I think, "Oh, this is so awesome." You know, I just want to like pick up my camera and shoot all this awesome stuff. You know, it is challenging. It's challenging morally, ethically. It's challenging on all these levels. It is That's part of why I think we need to be having conversations about this stuff that have that are more sane. Yeah, I I couldn't agree more. I also think that as as a a giant superorganism, the human race which what we really are, really. You think about it, we're some sort of a giant superorganism organism that works together to create these things and fund these things and

112:14push these things forward. We we're kind of just moving along not considering the implications of what we're doing, but just continuing along the same path. Like No, if you can't If you would step back and say, "You know what? This virtual reality is just too up. We should really stop and consider." Well, guess what? Sony's going to come along and they're going to Right. take the rug out from under you. They're going to have a better thing than you making Spider-Man reboots forever on your virtual reality. You'll never be able to stop them. Well, porn, which is at the forefront of all technology. That that that pushes that pushed HTML5 over Flash and PayPal, everything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what they're going to do with that virtual reality stuff is going to be very very very bizarre. I know. And you're going to have a You think you have a problem with people being

113:00addicted to porn now? I mean, no one was addicted to literature porn. Right. You know, they'd look at my veratype on my on my stereograph. When they had those books that people had to write by hand. Nobody was addicted to beating off to those things. I mean, God, how many of them even were there? Yeah. And then the printing press came along. Oh, made things a little bit more interesting. Yeah. And then magazines came along. Woah, girly magazines. You used to have to Yeah, stick under your bed. Yeah, you used to have to hide them and squirrel them away like nuts. I know. And then it became VHS tapes. Woah. And then DVDs. What? And then online. Uh-oh. And then it became you could get it on your phone. When iPhones came along Yeah. The screens got bigger. It was very nice of them. Yeah. It's going to get very very strange. Yeah. You There's going to come some

113:48sort 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? Yeah, there's no doubt. There's no doubt that And that's that's within our lifetime. And when that does happen they look back on things like the Silk Road and its controversies. It's going to seem so preposterous. So primitive. Yeah. I mean, I think that the idea I think online drug markets are going to be ubiquitous. They and they may very likely be the thing that takes major cartels down in the long run. Well, I was listening to this uh Radiolab podcast. They were talking about the placebo effect. Mhm. I think that might be the name of the podcast for anyone who's interested. I think it's just called placebo. But, they were talking about the the various times where placebo effect has worked

114:35and has not worked. And one of the things that they said that was so incredible is that like your the the reason why drugs work that every drug that works on the human mind works because there's a receptor. There's a biological receptor in the brain. So, essentially, the brain produces all of these effects, just not reliably. Opioid effects, opiate effects, cannabis effects, all these different drugs. We know the brain produces various chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, psychedelic chemicals. Your brain produces all of these things. 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, sadness, and does so inside of a virtual world. I mean, they're going to take you on a real-life drug ride and no drugs will be involved. I mean, then

115:40then what do you do with your drug war when all the drugs are produced by the mind? You're going to stop people from producing endogenous chemicals that the brain naturally produces? I mean, you're already doing that with movies. What do you think the adrenaline effect you get from a crazy thriller is? What Why are people into horror movies? It's not because they have no effect on you. They're producing drugs. When you watch Jason, he's coming up behind somebody, he's got the machete. You're scared? You're scared of those movies? That's a drug. They're giving you drugs. It's just they're making you produce it with your own mind. Mhm. Yeah. It's going to happen in a very bizarre way. It is. I think that is going to have an impact. 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, there there needs to

116:25be 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. So, that's an issue as well that I think needs to get addressed. Oh, with a 100% and also the reason why people get addicted in the first place. Just They trauma that people experience as young children that causes these receptors to open up. That causes these drug addiction processes to to take place. And you talk to people that have counseled folks that have massive drug problems and then understand where how these genes get addressed. And it's it's all very very complex. yeah. And who gets addicted and who doesn't get addicted? A lot of that has to do with your response to childhood trauma. Mhm. That's hard for people to relate to. That's hard for people to understand. and the genetic disease component and

117:15and like there's no way to have a really thorough conversation about this stuff if it's just criminalized. You can't just dragnet it. Yeah. Lock them up. Yeah. Lock them up, Danno. You can't do that. It's just like we have this simplistic view of the world. And that view is being challenged constantly by facts. Yeah. Constantly by data. And there's some people that, like you said, want to bury their head in the sand. They don't want to look at it. Yeah. They don't want to because it doesn't fit the narrative. Yeah, and that's getting harder and harder to do in any corner, even like geopolitics. Like every the world is at our doorstep every day now. And whether you like it or not is right there in front of you. So. It also seems like people are doing that because it's easier to live that way because you can't know everything about everything. There's too much going on

118:01right now. I totally agree with that. The people are just like, "Look, I've got to take this course cuz what are What are you asking me to do? You're asking me to veer off and really Do I really want to know about cryptography? Do I really want to know about how this stuff works?" 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. Yeah, you don't have to. You really don't have But, the counter narrative is a real issue. The people that are burying their head in the sand and trying to shove your face in as well. Yeah, exactly. That's really what it is, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's the problem. Well, Alex, thank you very much. I really really appreciated this conversation. And I really appreciate your documentary, Deep Web. It's on Epix on May 31st. Will it eventually be available Yeah, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix,

118:42everything like that after it'll after it's on Netflix on Epix for a little while, it'll be available everywhere. And Alex is available on Twitter. You can follow him. It's a l x winter on Twitter. And uh is there anything else you want people to know? man. Yeah, it's deepwebthemovie.com. But, you know, you You sign up for a newsletter. I sort of send out information and cool ancillary stuff. Well, thank you so much, man. Thanks Thanks for making this, too. I really really appreciate it. I really appreciate the conversation. Yeah. All right, my friends. We'll be back on Wednesday with Abby Martin and Jim Norton. Until then, go yourself, okay? Bye-bye. Big kiss. Yeah, chair, too. Not like Yeah, I was I was sitting there thinking like I'm so