April 13, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:59:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Alex Winter. | ||
| Alright, we're live. | ||
| Nice to meet you, man. | ||
| You too. | ||
| I knew of you as an actor, and I knew of your work as a director, but I didn't know that you were into serious shit like this deep web documentary. | ||
| This is really fascinating. | ||
| I was watching it just before you got here, so it's all fresh and crackling in my mind. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| First of all, how'd you get involved in this? | ||
| Well, there's a couple things. | ||
| One is, first of all, it's great to be on the show. | ||
| I've been a big fan for a long time. | ||
| But I got online pretty heavily in the sort of late 80s, early 90s in what was known as the BBS Usenet era. | ||
| And in those days, I was really interested in sort of burgeoning online communities, people who were sort of the growth of Internet-based communities. | ||
| And in those days, you could get on and you would sort of create sort of clubs or groups or rooms, as they were called, with all kinds of like-minded people. | ||
| And then you started finding all kinds of stuff that was going on. | ||
| And it wasn't... | ||
| By any means, it's just illegal stuff. | ||
| It was sort of rarefied, specialized, whatever, politics, activism, people who are interested in drugs, people who are interested in sort of pushing boundaries in all these different ways. | ||
| And at that point, I discovered encryption, 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 it was also people who were selling drugs. | ||
| So I first encountered the drug, the online drug markets in probably 90, 91. That's when I first discovered encrypted email and sort of this whole notion of like people who really were building encryption technologies for a number of reasons. | ||
| And so I found that interesting. | ||
| And I spent some years working on the Napster story. | ||
| I made a doc about the rise and fall of Napster called Downloaded. | ||
| And I met Sean Fanning and Sean Parker back in 2000 when AFTER was being decimated, shot at by all sides. | ||
| And 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, cryptographers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Well, that was one of the things that I found interesting about the documentary initially, is that Silk Road wasn't necessary, and for folks who don't know what Silk Road is, Silk Road is this website that was taken down by the government because people were exchanging, buying, and selling illegal drugs from it, 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 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 true, and I think that's a very hard thing for people to understand. | ||
| Like you're saying, you got online at that point, and you started to see in those days, like in the late 90s, that communities were beginning to grow on the Internet, and they were really interesting. | ||
| I remember talking to Sean Fanning about this, that his biggest regret about the downfall of Napster was not that the service got taken online, but that the community got scattered. | ||
| 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 before them was really kind of cumbersome, the message boards you're talking about in the 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, where Napster 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 all these people 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, the community that was attached to it, what the idea was, I think, about all this file sharing stuff, My feeling on it and my feeling from being connected to the internet was like we're entering this entirely new era of Art of digital stuff digital creations where it's this is gonna be slippery You're not gonna be able to just like | ||
| you know this guy stole a thousand CDs and copied them We found his CD copier and we know you know that this guy's making illegal What are those? | ||
| Bootleg CDs. | ||
| I mean, you used to have those in New York City. | ||
| Sure, yeah, all the time. | ||
| VHS tapes of movies that had just come out. | ||
| This was a different thing. | ||
| This was like the actual digital, and everybody was like, oh, what do you do about that? | ||
| Like, oh, there's a program, and you could just download these things, and anybody could just upload them, and then download them? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It isn't black and white. | ||
| Their brains can't really handle it sometimes. | ||
| They want to go to one side 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. | ||
| Because 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. | ||
| 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, you know, it's mostly about putting nonviolent minority offenders in prison by the millions and it's killing people and it's not helping people who need help in the drug world. | ||
| It's You know, making the drug issues criminal and not about health. | ||
| And you got those people over there saying this is all good. | ||
| You got all this room in the middle with a slippery reality, which is just as you said, I agree with that perspective. | ||
| This is a really big moment in human history. | ||
| It's too big for most of us to wrap our heads around. | ||
| These are huge changes that are afoot. | ||
| 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 of this is their minds, their visions, their goals were way beyond that. | ||
| And we're still not in the future that those guys saw. | ||
| We're still kind of back in the back ends. | ||
| 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 because it's scary, right? | ||
| We probably will end up in a world in the next 10, 20, 30 years as drug laws become more relaxed and the mandatory minimums start getting lowered, where we do see legitimate online drug services are going to become... | ||
| 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... | ||
| It was a very messy sort of 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 is legal and as long as you can get a prescription for OxyContin, it's completely ridiculous to lock people up for mushrooms or to lock people up for popcorn. | ||
| Name your drug. | ||
| Pot being the most innocuous of all of them and changing daily as far as the way it's treated by law enforcement. | ||
| But I think the digital world that you're dealing with, like with Napster or with the Silk Road, Is this world of connectivity, and that's the big change. | ||
| It's not just the things that are being exchanged. | ||
| It's that people can talk to people. | ||
| The information can go so quickly now, and these communities can form, and they can say, yeah, I've always thought these laws are bullshit. | ||
| Explain to me why alcohol is legal and marijuana is not. | ||
| Explain to me why it's stealing to take a record that you paid for and share it with a bunch of people. | ||
| I had Paul Stanley on the podcast from Kiss, and he's a great guy. | ||
| I really enjoyed talking to him, but he's got this sort of really archaic idea of stealing. | ||
| You know, you didn't pay for it, it's stealing. | ||
| But your copy's still there. | ||
| You know, like, it's... | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| It's not like someone stole your car. | ||
| And they try to make that sort of comparison. | ||
| You know, if someone stole your car, they stole your car, right? | ||
| That was your car, and now they have it. | ||
| Well, if they just copied my car, why do I give a shit? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If you see someone driving on the 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? | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean, 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 very, very important reporter from a major publication 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, 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 the lid and go to the bathroom, or you may shoot up. | ||
| I don't know what you're doing in there, but that doesn't give me a right to take the door off your bathroom. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just about anonymity. | ||
| As human beings, we deserve privacy and anonymity. | ||
| It's a basic human right. | ||
| However, most people go deep web, bad. | ||
| They just go right there. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| It's filled with creeps. | ||
| It's filled 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, I 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 the walls of culture for this brief moment just completely came down. | ||
| And it's like, I didn't become a thief. | ||
| I buy lots of music and I continue to make 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. | ||
| 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 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 exorbitant rates. | ||
| I mean, that's really what happened, especially the record companies. | ||
| I mean, the record companies are notoriously shitty with the artists. | ||
| I mean, the contracts, and when you read them, you ever read the Courtney Love breakdown? | ||
| Yeah, I did, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you read that, you go, fuck, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What's the Jared Leto one, the documentary that he did? | ||
| Artifact. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| The documentary's called Artifact? | ||
| It's about his band and their battles. | ||
| It's a crazy, creepy fucking business that is losing its legs. | ||
| And they're scrambling along the way. | ||
| And I think that's one of the big pushbacks because of the commerce aspect of it. | ||
| But as far as the information aspect of it, what you brought up about the bathroom is a really good point because how come you can have a private club You could have a club where you and your friends go to play poker, whatever. | ||
| 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 the cops, are they going to fucking scan the door? | ||
| Are they going to put a bug inside the room to make sure you're not doing anything illegal? | ||
|
unidentified
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They have. | |
| It's called your cell phone. | ||
| I know, but isn't that amazing? | ||
| That's the same thing. | ||
| I mean, a physical room that you have that's a clubhouse, that's been going around since the beginning of time. | ||
| No one has a problem with that. | ||
| That's a normal part of human beings. | ||
| But a private digital room where your physical body isn't even there, that becomes problematic. | ||
| Yeah, and scarier than that, I think, is that now there's such a direct link between the physical space and the digital space, meaning the Supreme Court recently passed a law that doesn't allow officers to go into your cell phone without a warrant on a basic search and seizure, 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. | ||
| So, 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 4chan fappening where their photographs were taken off of the iCloud and sold on 4chan. | ||
| And it was, you 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? | ||
| I was like, this is 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 seems like to me that when the world becomes digital, and then digital information, those ones and zeros become accessible, we're going to get to a point in time where privacy seems ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's, it sounds so crazy because 20 years ago it was a hard photograph. | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
| It's on the cloud and you upload to it. | ||
| It's going to get weirder from there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With the new technology that we can't even predict, the 20-year-from-now technology. | ||
| But it's going to get more and more bizarre to the point where we're going to have to have a real restructuring of what we expect in terms of privacy, personal sovereignty. | ||
| What do you expect from your fellow citizens? | ||
| Because it's almost going to be like, you're going to have to trust me to not look at your shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because your shit is out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, so what we look at and what we don't, it's like, there are ways to have a bathroom door, but we need to be able to have them. | ||
| 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, what the dark net does is it provides technologies that allow you to have privacy and anonymity. | ||
| A lot of people are 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 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, 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 temporary. | ||
| I mean, when you're looking at 50 years from now, it's probably going to be hilarious when you look back on the idea that someone couldn't read your email. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| We're already... | ||
| The sad truth is we're there. | ||
| That's not... | ||
| The technology you're talking about is here right now. | ||
| I mean, your information is transparent to anyone with half an ability 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 fucking phone 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 storage and just store everything. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| We'll just store it all. | ||
| And if Alex starts talking shit, we'll just say, oh yeah, Alex, we'll check this out. | ||
| Look at all these big black dicks you've been looking at, son. | ||
| Wait a minute, how did you... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whatever they would like to get from you. | ||
| Yeah, and what's scary is that what we recently discovered, in the last week or so, there was the revelations that, you know, it's always been, the excuse has always been, you know, terrorism, the Patriot Act. | ||
| 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 kind of commonly known that a lot of the surveillance implementations that occurred because of the drug war. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that adorable? | ||
| The drug war is the thing. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| It's a mad money grab from privatized prisons, it's a mad money grab from the guard unions, the prison guard unions, from law enforcement, from all these people that profit off drugs being legal. | ||
| It has zero to do with public safety, zero to do with public health. | ||
| It's a lie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, the film goes into that in detail. | ||
| So, I mean, I totally agree with that. | ||
| And it isn't, you know, to say that we don't need things to be, you know, we don't need law enforcement, we don't need certain types of regulation, but the question is why? | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| You can no longer just steal people's shit because you pull 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? | ||
| They're like, oh, I was going to go buy a car. | ||
| Can you prove that? | ||
| We're going to take that. | ||
| You're going to have to prove that in court. | ||
| They could take that, and they were taking it, and they were using it to fund parties. | ||
| They bought a fucking margarita machine, which is so ironic. | ||
| They were serving drugs with money that they took from people who they suspected of selling drugs. | ||
| 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, law enforcement officer, because of this thing that's written down on this paper, you have the right to take this fellow human being and put them in a cage because they've decided to alter their consciousness in a way that we don't deem to be worthy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, it's a hell of a thing. | ||
| It's retarded. | ||
| As you said, it allows people to be arrested for all kinds of reasons, and that's not helpful even to people who need help who are on drugs. | ||
| And the parallel with the record industry is that they're addicted to that money. | ||
| 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 drugs in this country in that if marijuana was made legal, just marijuana, some ungodly number of drug arrests would no longer be necessary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Thousands of law enforcement officers all over the country out of a job. | ||
| And they don't want that. | ||
| Nobody wants that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they're addicted to it. | ||
| They're addicted to it. | ||
| And it's a mad scramble. | ||
| 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, fuck, that costs a lot of money. | ||
| And if you want to download that goddamn thing for free, and you're not going to go see it in the movie now, and they're not going to get your money, that to me seems a little bit unfair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just because you're dealing with something that requires some exorbitant amount of money. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But if you download Paul Stanley's solo album, you might want to go see him live. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, The Hobbit's not going to do a live show, you know, in Woodland Hills anytime soon. | ||
| Well, maybe that'll bring back, like, the ice capades, though, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| To them, it isn't about money. | ||
| I've always maintained that. | ||
| It's like This is really easy. | ||
| It's super convenient. | ||
| Why would I bend myself around to go wait for your window? | ||
| The Hobbit's going to come out when? | ||
| I live here. | ||
| I'm not going to get that. | ||
| 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 because I want it now. | ||
| It's like the windowing, the way in which consumers want their entertainment is changing because 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, because the ship has sailed. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of Game of Thrones, and I haven't seen the first episode of the new season, but somebody sent me a fucking tweet. | ||
| I don't know if you know, but the first five episodes have been leaked online. | ||
| Of course they have. | ||
| You motherfuckers! | ||
| How dare you! | ||
| But that's not going to hurt Game of Thrones. | ||
| I'm not going to not have HBO, but maybe somebody won't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's going to be shrinkage because of the change in technologies. | ||
| I mean, just like the car replaced the horse and buggy, just like refrigeration killed ice delivery. | ||
| It's not to be Pollyannish 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. | ||
| You know, 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. | ||
| This world is evolving, and we have to move with that world. | ||
| And it is going to be painful. | ||
| There are going to be casualties, 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? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Like, dude, my fucking sh- I'm making horseshoes, that's my shit! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody wants horseshoes anymore. | ||
| But that's a part of the evolution of culture. | ||
| Do you know how they fought cars? | ||
| The way they fought cars was the same way they're fighting the deep web and the records 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. | ||
| And they tried to use that as a way to prevent the automobile from becoming more popularized. | ||
| So 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 invention of the car was within a decade or two of that. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's the whole... | ||
| I mean, they were trying to keep people from drinking booze. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they were trying to say, look, no drugs, no nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a fucked up time that must have been. | ||
| People must have been so goddamn angry. | ||
| And look what came out of it. | ||
| Fucking Al Capone. | ||
| Organized crime. | ||
| The same shit we're seeing in Mexico right now. | ||
| 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, the money's big. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, and you look at it on paper. | ||
| Where's the loss? | ||
| Where's the benefit? | ||
| Like, where's the loss to society? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Organized crime! | ||
| That's the loss. | ||
| That's the number one. | ||
| All the murders and 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 it. | ||
| No, you're making it illegal, and you're creating an organized crime ring. | ||
| It's like, instantly, you're going to create that. | ||
| Yeah, and destroying economies, and I mean, the reverberations are huge all over the world. | ||
| Yeah, and the reverberations, I think, of just denying people freedom. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| A very deteriorating effect on human beings. | ||
| When another human being denies a person of any inalienable right. | ||
| Your right to sleep. | ||
| They keep waking you up in the middle of the night. | ||
| You're gonna get fucking furious. | ||
| They say you can't drink more than a glass of water a day. | ||
| Who the fuck 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 revolutionary. | ||
| 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 that's what I think is blowing people's minds. | ||
| Is that maybe this actually is reducing crime and violence 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, again, it's not to say these are all good. | ||
| It's not, to 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. | ||
| Like, I mean, how many people agree with people tattooing their face? | ||
| 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 probably go through the roof. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| There's no way to stop people from doing what they want to do and when you try it makes them This is a thing about human beings when you want us to not do something We ordinarily want to do it. | ||
| 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 know that 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, because there was no boys, and they were the forbidden fruit. | ||
| It's like 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... | ||
| Originally, the software that was used to power the deep web and 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 city. | ||
| It's an environment. | ||
| 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 a 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 dark. | ||
| Explain Tor. | ||
| Tor is a browser that anonymizes, meaning no one can track your IP address. | ||
| No one can see what sites you're visiting. | ||
| I use Tor to use Amazon, for instance, because it's really easy to get hacked online using a regular browser. | ||
| I don't want my credit card number Being plugged into a regular browser. | ||
| So I use Tor. | ||
| If I'm banking online, I use Tor. | ||
| Because 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.com. | ||
| They end with.onion. | ||
| TOR stands for the Onion Router. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, well, it'll be whatever it is. | ||
| It'll be like a stringofnumbers.onion. | ||
| To pull TOR down, you just go to, I think it's TOR.org or whatever. | ||
| You can get that from the clear net, the surface web. | ||
| And is that restricted? | ||
| No, it's totally legal. | ||
| I mean, again, a lot of people who use TOR, journalists use it, dissidents use it. | ||
| They're like rape counseling organizations that use it. | ||
| Like, okay, we're going to talk online. | ||
| Let's all pull down TOR, and then we can get on our forum. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know, in the poor hidden services and you can feel comfortable talking about being raped or whatever happens. | ||
| It's an anonymized corner of the internet. | ||
| And how does it work? | ||
| Well, I don't want to bore your audience, but it involves pretty intense math and a lot of the stuff grew out of the sort of early creators of the internet that were using cryptography and ways of bouncing I | ||
| think? | ||
| 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 mostly just code that doesn't need to be indexed by Google because it's a bunch of code. | ||
| And people figured out how to get down into that area and create an actual environment. | ||
| So they basically 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 using Google. | ||
| It never shows up in the surface web. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| 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 was harassing, say, 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. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Unless she's hanging out on the deep web with me in case what's she doing down there, you know what I mean? | ||
| But 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 because 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, then someone could harass someone on Facebook or something like that and you wouldn't be able to track it. | ||
| Yeah, this is where it gets into an interesting gray area because it's a little of both. | ||
| 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 mask your IP address. | ||
| You can use those every day. | ||
| A 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 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 a trackable world. | ||
| And at the end of the day, you usually contract somebody unless they're in a completely alternative space talking to someone else who has willingly joined that alternate space. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, they'd be saying, user XYDDD slash zero, you're a piece of shit. | ||
| If they found out who you were, though, do you have a randomized number? | ||
| Yeah, you create a username, and no one's going to know who you are in that space, and there's nothing connecting you to the surface. | ||
| But if you reveal who you are in that, then you'd have to get a new randomized number. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a username. | ||
| It would take you all three seconds to do that. | ||
| Yeah, that would be smart. | ||
| It's interesting, because we're kind of making the argument that you need some transparency online. | ||
| That 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 still maintain... | ||
| Steve Wozniak, you know, the great Apple computer genius, said, and I think he was talking about file sharing, you know, we're all, like, on this highway. | ||
| 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 us 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. | ||
| You figure out ways to police that. | ||
| And we're in the same boat. | ||
| Just like with Napster, people are trying to use old world ways of policing this new terrain. | ||
| It isn't to say 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 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. | ||
| Like you said, that's never going to happen. | ||
| It's never going to happen, and the g-force that's involved in this change, the change is so powerful and so rapid, you're going to have some screw-ups. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 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, you know, file sharing, but... | ||
| At least you don't think they do. | ||
| Well, actually, that's, yeah, that's completely nonsensical. | ||
| My older teen does all the time. | ||
| I keep talking to him about it. | ||
| But, yeah, he has a massive folder on his computer. | ||
|
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But it's mostly... | |
| I'm not going to shame him on the podcast. | ||
| But the reality of it is he loves buying music and he loves being part of the process with bands. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because 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 I can actually pay to help support the bands I like and still use the technology 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 that the disparity of income is probably never going to be the same again. | ||
| Unless it comes from live performances. | ||
| Well, we don't spend $20 on a CD with one good song on it ever again. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Oh, what a drag. | ||
| That's true, right? | ||
| There was always that thing. | ||
| Do you remember going to, was it Virgin? | ||
| They would have those listening booths? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the first time you would ever get a chance to listen to the whole show. | ||
| Shut that sucker down. | ||
| That probably did more for killing the record. | ||
| Was it Britney Spears? | ||
|
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What? | |
| Oh, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, like you would listen to the hit, and then you would listen to the other stuff. | ||
| I'm not buying this fucking thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was a big scam, right? | ||
| Look, I'm a huge Rolling Stones fan. | ||
| Huge Rolling Stones fan. | ||
| But, let's be honest, a good percentage of their songs suck a fat dick. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| If you go back and listen- After Some Girls. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Up to Some Girls, pretty much every track is gold, but after Some Girls. | ||
| There's some great fucking songs, but there's also some songs that you just go- Yeah, right would you guys get high and just slap this together when you're on coke like this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, probably but that you can't do that anymore. | ||
| Yeah, you can't now and then you're seeing like Bands are being forced into this position where you you're you're represented by your entire Piece of work. | ||
| Yeah, it's not just like a hit that you send out. | ||
| That's sort of bait and 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 golden age of music being mega profitable as a cultural moment. | ||
| You know, it was very brief, even in the annals of the record industry itself. | ||
| For most of the history of recorded music, it was about singles. | ||
| It wasn't about albums. | ||
| The artists 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 to 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 damn meddling kids and their computers came along. | ||
| That's interesting if you look at it, because file sharing really is like this blip, but record sales are the real blip. | ||
| I mean, out of the thousands of years of people creating music and musical art, look at this tiny brief window where people were selling these things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, Donny Einer in Downloaded talks about that quite, he had a really clear-eyed view of it because he really came up through, he was like the youngest president of Columbia, really amazing guy. | ||
| He had a very interesting perspective on the bubble, as it were, the other side of it. | ||
| What's the view of the movie business? | ||
| Has the movie business taken a big hit from file sharing? | ||
| I think the Game of Thrones thing has really been the question. | ||
| There was a lot of uproar about the amount of piracy that was going on, or the amount of file sharing that was going on around the Game of Thrones, and then at a certain point, HBO shifted position from... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, again, I'm not being glib. | ||
| It's not fun to lose lots of money when you're putting so much money and time into doing these works. | ||
| But it's being realistic that 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 are and some aren't. | ||
| HBO's CEO doesn't care that you are sharing your HBO Go password. | ||
|
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|
There you go. | |
| And that took some time. | ||
| I mean, he had the opposite viewpoint. | ||
| Look at that quote. | ||
| We're in the business of creating addicts. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Wow, good for you, you smart bastard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Richard Plepler. | ||
| Richard, go. | ||
| Go, Richard. | ||
| You go, boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just don't try saying his name ten times in a row quickly. | ||
| Smart fellow. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| And that's global. | ||
| Like, Game of Thrones is all over the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're going to get a lot. | ||
| 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 on the onus of business to figure out how to make a profit. | ||
| And that's what drives them crazy. | ||
| Because right now they're in a period where the consumers have taken back the power and they're scratching their heads going, oh shit, now what do we do? | ||
| We've got to figure out how to create a system where we can get maximum profit again. | ||
| They've taken a knock back. | ||
| 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 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 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 the 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 viral hit on YouTube, and you go, wow, this thing, like, that fucking 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 enjoy it. | ||
| My fucking six-year-old and my four-year-old go crazy. | ||
| Well, it's like Teletubbies. | ||
| It has some kind of weird primordial sort of trigger switch. | ||
| Well, it's a silly video. | ||
| It's silly and it's fun. | ||
| Yeah, the video is what works. | ||
| If you were a little kid, you would love to share that song. | ||
| I would, yeah, for sure. | ||
| But it's a perfect example in that that didn't require any promotional vehicle other than people enjoying it and sharing it with other people, and then it spread like wildfire. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And it used to be, look at that, oh my god, look at that number. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a billion. | ||
| Eight million, almost, yeah. | ||
| No, that's two billion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, I was looking at the wrong number. | ||
| I was looking at subscribers. | ||
| No, his subscribers are almost eight million. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But his number of views is two billion. | ||
| That's a billion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What the fuck? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| See, and that's all just viral. | ||
| Yeah, that's community. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Community. | |
| That's community. | ||
| That used to require, you used to have to have a radio station. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you used to have to be in bed with that radio station. | ||
| Yeah, the record company would put a gun to your head physically and make you play a single to give it that kind of juice. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Yeah, and they had these deals, these under-the-table deals with record companies where they would not play certain people because they were blackballed. | ||
|
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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 fucking everybody with this music just forcing it into your ears. | ||
| Yeah, they can't do that anymore No, that ship has definitely sailed. | ||
| And they're going to have to come up with alternative ways to get back to some degree of where they were. | ||
| And it may take time. | ||
| I actually believe they'll get there because people are very, very clever at figuring out how to make money. | ||
| Well, I think they will try, but 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. | ||
| Because music, the way it is now, one of the weird things about music now is there's no longer DJs anymore. | ||
| When I was a kid, there was all these radio DJs. | ||
| Do you remember that show WKRP in Cincinnati? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, of course. | |
| And a lot of that show was about these personalities. | ||
| Yeah, I grew up with those people. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| All the... | ||
| Popular DJs. | ||
| Yeah, like when I was a kid, it was Charles Laquadera in Boston, the big mattress in the morning. | ||
| Dave Sherman in New York. | ||
| Yeah, there's all these morning DJ guys. | ||
| And of course, the big one was always Howard Stern. | ||
| Morning, but he was, you know, he went from 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. | ||
| Those morning DJ guys, 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're being replaced by these weird program stations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's true. | ||
| The radio is really changing dramatically. | ||
| I mean, I think, you know, kind of what you're driving at is, like, curation. | ||
| This whole idea that people would curate, and you could go to a place and hear something. | ||
| That is evolving much more quickly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, we're sort of concentrating on one aspect of this issue, which is sort of file sharing and the digital reality of songs and things along those lines. | ||
| But the Silk Road story was a lot more about drugs and infiltration, and there was a lot going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was actually a political movement. | ||
| I mean, the Silk Road was, whether you agree with it or not, and the movie is not about taking a side as much as trying to show what it actually was, as opposed to what we heard about in the media. | ||
| It was a political movement. | ||
| I mean, it was a community that was put together with certain political ideals. | ||
| And they weren't all the same. | ||
| 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 were there for the community. | ||
| And that's, 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 was some weird shit that went down. | ||
| Now, first of all, some people had infiltrated this community, right? | ||
| Like law enforcement? | ||
| Oh, well, yeah, I mean, of course. | ||
| Law enforcement was there from day one. | ||
| From day one? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And how'd 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 I'm afraid in Ohio and I know to buy my drugs online, some cop somewhere is going to know. | ||
| And once one cop knows, they all know. | ||
| And it was on... | ||
| To credit the FBI and the DEA, they knew what was going on pretty early on, and they installed undercover operatives with fictitious user accounts. | ||
| It just turned out some of them were dirty. | ||
| That's what came out a couple weeks ago, was that two of the lead agents on the Silk Road case out of Baltimore, DEA agents in Secret Service, were extorting tons of money off the Silk Road and putting it into personal accounts. | ||
| You know, creating murder-for-hire entrapment schemes. | ||
| I mean, 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 are, you know, not on the up-and-up. | ||
| And this cop thing happened after that you had... | ||
| Got done finishing? | ||
| Well, it was revealed. | ||
| I actually knew something about it, but I was kind of gag-ordered in that it was a grand jury indictment investigation going on, so we weren't allowed to talk about it. | ||
| Ross Ulbrich'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 it came out after the trial. | ||
| I mean, I've now gone back and addressed it slightly in the movie, but, you know, it only has so much relevance because the film, again, isn't, you know, saying that the guys who built the Silk Road are heroes and that these guys are just bad. | ||
| The point is that you have all kinds of people 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 ones who went bad, they were probably like, there's nobody that could... | ||
| 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. | ||
| As I said earlier, everything that happens in the digital world tends to be very traceable on some level. | ||
| It's hard to be truly anonymous online. | ||
| You can do it, but you have to go through enormous lengths to remain truly anonymous on the internet. | ||
| One little slip And you're done. | ||
| And the thing about the internet is one friend of mine within the Silk Road said to me, he's like, the internet never forgets. | ||
| So you could make a slip five years ago, but if I'm a federal agent and I'm like winding my way through your fictitious user history and I get to that one slip, if that door has been opened once and the light's shown on your face, that's all they need is once. | ||
| 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 of dollars in Bitcoin. | ||
| Yeah, over a million. | ||
| Over a million dollars. | ||
| And they got caught. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How'd they get caught? | ||
| Well, it's not totally known because, to be fair, it was a sting operation from within the DEA and other agencies, so they're not completely telling everyone how they got caught. | ||
| They just noticed Mike's got a new boat. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| There was some of that. | ||
| There was people paying off their mortgages when they're only making $150 before taxes. | ||
| There were some dumb mistakes that got made. | ||
| There were accounts set up with a lot of money in them. | ||
| There were too many fictitious usernames that eventually, again, one tiny slip of one email account that you use to connect yourself to one. | ||
| That's the thing about the digital world. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Hmm. | |
| So, those guys got busted. | ||
| Were they involved in any of the cases that were... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And is that being looked at now as, like, potential corruption? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That maybe the cases are tainted and the indictments might be thrown out? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Oh, that's big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, there was also some murder for hire stuff that you were talking about. | ||
| Was it real murder for hire? | ||
| Well, we don't know. | ||
| See, here's the thing. | ||
| One of the agents that was arrested was the undercover 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 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. | ||
| And that turns out to not only be a cop, which we've known all along, but a dirty cop. | ||
| A cop who was stealing money and blackmailing people within the Silk Road. | ||
| So the murder for hire, there were no bodies that were... | ||
| There had been no murders. | ||
| There were no bodies that were ever found. | ||
| No one appears to have been hurt on any level. | ||
| And what we still don't totally know is whether anybody and who that was... | ||
| Actually, originally instigated those murders for hire. | ||
| Just to bring you up to speed quickly, the prosecution claimed they had a lot of hard evidence against Ross Albrecht. | ||
| They said they have his laptop. | ||
| They said on that laptop they found a journal that he wrote, which he clearly laid out what he did on the Silk Road the whole time. | ||
| They believe it attributes him to the Dread Pirate Roberts, who they showed Dread Pirate Roberts records saying, I want to take a hit out on this person. | ||
| I'm going to send you the X amount of Bitcoin. | ||
| 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 being charged with it. | ||
| He's only being charged primarily with drug 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 him being at the center of the website. | ||
| So it gets into transfer of intent, internet issues as well. | ||
| But no, he was being charged with creating a service that allowed the selling of millions of dollars worth of drugs to millions of people. | ||
| That seems so shifty. | ||
| 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 mean, I don't know, I don't have any personal information of people selling drugs through Facebook, but I gotta imagine someone has sent a Facebook message to someone saying, hey, you want to buy some Coke? | ||
| Well, yeah, the argument is this site was specifically created for selling illegal drugs. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Well, that's the claim. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, the defense's argument is twofold. | ||
| They say, A, you know, this person, 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 I mean, you can't deny that there was a big drug component to the Silk Road by its very nature. | ||
| It was a big... | ||
| The motivation of the Silk Road via the Dread Pirate Roberts writing was about removing harm and crime from the drug trade and helping to bring the drug war to an end. | ||
| But they also claim that the journal and all that stuff in the Bitcoin found on Ross's 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 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 appeal. | ||
| Prosecution said, that's nonsense, this stuff was all on his laptop. | ||
| 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 Maybe we'll find out more and maybe that will turn out to be the truth We we don't know what was he found guilty before it was revealed that there was these dirty. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh Yeah. | ||
| And they knew that this case existed and they didn't allow, like the lawyer, Ross's defense was trying to postpone the trial a couple months so that the grand jury investigation, the criminal charges they knew were going to drop the complaint, but they were not allowed to postpone the trial. | ||
| Well, that seems like a slam dunk. | ||
| If you can prove that these cops were using other people's usernames and they were hacking into people's accounts, that seems like right there. | ||
| You can't prove anybody did it. | ||
| That's a trial. | ||
| I'd like to see that trial. | ||
| My perspective on it is, I'm fine 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 fucking joke. | ||
| Because there's so much railroading going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially when there's an agenda like this to prosecute someone in an important case, a landmark case, they think is going to establish a precedent. | ||
| They will fuck you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's kind of how it is. | ||
| Yeah, they will fuck you, and that's what they did to this guy. | ||
| Now, this Dread Pirate Roberts character, what's his name? | ||
| Dread Pirate Roberts. | ||
| Oh, I mean, the guy that's accused of being... | ||
| What's the guy they think? | ||
| Ross Albrecht. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He didn't know anything about coding at all. | ||
| He was a physics major. | ||
| He put himself through two universities on full scholarship. | ||
| He had a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State. | ||
| Very bright. | ||
| 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 an economic simulation where he would combine Tor and Bitcoin to allow a marketplace to exist that would be free for everybody to use however they wanted to use it. | ||
| He claims he said he built it With the help of a lot of other people, because he doesn't really know how to code. | ||
| And he just let it run, and he was done. | ||
| And he moved on. | ||
| And that's what his family, his mom and dad, back him on that. | ||
| That's what his family claims. | ||
| Given being around him, because they're a very tight-knit family all this time, they were like, this was not someone who was on his laptop all the time. | ||
| I don't know how he could have been running almost a billion-dollar drug empire. | ||
| He wasn't that guy. | ||
| He wasn't the guy who just sat on his keyboard all the time. | ||
| So he claims he's not Dread Pirate Roberts. | ||
| Prosecution claims that he was. | ||
| And that was what that first trial was about. | ||
| What is their proof that he was? | ||
| They did find a journal on his laptop. | ||
| And the journal on his laptop is like, you know, today I'm setting up a Dread Pirate Roberts account. | ||
| Today I'm going to do this. | ||
| Who the fuck does that? | ||
| Who the fuck writes a journal on their laptop of all the shit they're going to do? | ||
| Today I will take over the world. | ||
| That's kind of how it was. | ||
| That seems so silly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's, you know, it's... | ||
| 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 wherever the truth lies, but to be in the courtroom and to hear all that and just think, okay... | ||
| If this is true, this is the most naive criminal mastermind in the history of... | ||
| Could you imagine? | ||
| Breaking Bad wouldn't have lasted half a season if they had made Walter White... | ||
| Today I will plant a bomb in the courthouse. | ||
| Today I'm going to blow up that bomb. | ||
|
unidentified
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And if you're reading this, don't tell anyone from law enforcement. | |
| 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 shit that these cops planted information and the fake hitman for hire shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really murky. | ||
| I mean, to be honest with you, the film goes to a certain degree into that stuff. | ||
| I'm very interested in looking at all the issues that the movie has raised, but I have to be careful how far I go into that material. | ||
| There's almost a whole other movie in it. | ||
| There really is, right? | ||
| I think there's a movie in people getting railroaded in trials, too. | ||
| 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 to 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When he was a legal medical provider by the law of the state of California. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's like, those are the people that are going to get caught up in the wheels of this transition. | ||
| You know, because in 10 years, 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. | ||
| You're not granted the right to a fair trial. | ||
| You're granted the right to a fair trial by the standard of the people who are trying you, who want very desperately to convict you. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Fair enough, fuck fair enough. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's like if there's very little narrow path that you're allowed to go down and you can't stray on either side of that path, and that path basically leads to your jail cell. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're not saying that he was involved in any of these transactions. | ||
| No. | ||
| And they can sentence him for a fucking... | ||
| He's up for life. | ||
| I think his minimum is 20 to 30 years minimum without parole. | ||
| And how long has he been in jail waiting for all this? | ||
| A year and a half. | ||
| Solitary confinement. | ||
| Christ. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And is there any hope? | ||
| You know, 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. | ||
| It just ended like, it was just, bam. | ||
| Prosecution said their piece, defense was about to, they got blocked, it was over. | ||
| They got blocked? | ||
| Yeah, you can watch the film, but basically they were, just like you just talked about with your friend, they were unable to call expert witnesses to talk about the complexities of Bitcoin and how Bitcoin wallets work and how you can hack into these. | ||
| It was all... | ||
| It 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. | ||
| 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 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 be sweaty and doing meth. | ||
| It'll be Robert Pattinson, you know, and he won't shave for a while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Making all sorts of terrible, evil choices. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Execute. | ||
| Enter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wasn't that like a thing? | ||
| Like, they were saying, like, at one point, they wanted to beat this guy up because he was going to talk, and then they decided to say, execute him instead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so they faked the murderer. | ||
| And they showed a photo of a body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 fucking 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, all to punish this fake person for stealing money that he stole. | ||
| Yes, and to go further, that person that was supposedly killed, who was one of the vendors on the Silk Road, was then arrested as being part of this sting operation for this drug deal that was put together by the crooked undercover cop who took all the money and is now, I mean, his life is over... | ||
| And he's had to turn over and become, you know, a witness. | ||
| He still, you know, has indictments pending. | ||
| They could throw him in jail at any point. | ||
| And he did nothing. | ||
| You know, he was part of the Silk Road, but this entire operation for which he was arrested was all constructed by a corrupt DEA agent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my. | |
| I guess in order to be an undercover DEA agent, you gotta have some ability to work in secrecy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But when people start working in secrecy, they get a little slimy. | ||
| They can go rogue. | ||
| Yeah, so you gotta keep an eye on those people. | ||
| I wonder if they can... | ||
| Put a percentage on what percentage of the transactions, exchanges, the conversations on Silk Road were about illegal activities and what were not. | ||
| Well, I've actually seen some pie charts, just because I have access to some of the metrics on this stuff. | ||
| That show how much was hard drugs. | ||
| Originally, the Silk Road had a very strict ethics code. | ||
| There was no child pornography allowed on Silk Road. | ||
| There was no counterfeit money allowed on Silk Road. | ||
| 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 it also grew harder as more law enforcement became involved in the undercover operations of Silk Road. | ||
| And there was a certain amount of A complicity between the increasing law enforcement presence on Silk Road and the severity of the drugs and that kind of activity. | ||
| And to be fair to law enforcement, that's often how they work anyway. | ||
| If they're going to infiltrate a cartel, they're going to start moving big amounts of heroin or whatever. | ||
| That's how they get in. | ||
| But it has to be looked at in terms of the corruption of the Silk Road itself. | ||
| It didn't start with those kinds of intentions. | ||
| 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 is that- The dark web is bad, privacy is bad, drugs are bad. | ||
| They're selling drugs. | ||
| This guy, Dread Pirate Roberts, a drug dealer. | ||
| Murder for hire. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Back to you, Bob. | ||
| That's what you're going to get. | ||
| Oh, what shady stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Anyway, here in Pasadena, 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 major newspaper who wanted to know what this thing was, and I talked to her for hours and explained in detail, and then when she wrote her thing, it was like, this thing's filled with criminals, and it's horrible, and these people are bad. | ||
| Wrap that chick out. | ||
| Wrap her out, man. | ||
| Who is it? | ||
| I'm not going to say. | ||
| What public What publication was it? | ||
| I can't say. | ||
| What does it rhyme with? | ||
| New York Times? | ||
| Crimes. | ||
| Oh, New York Times. | ||
| Look up the New York Times. | ||
| Find that article, Jamie. | ||
| Find it. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| Why are you so nice? | ||
| I would be the first. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| A person like that's a problem. | ||
| Pretending to be a reporter. | ||
| It's what we face. | ||
| I think that we face an inherent lack of understanding and a fear and a reactionary fear 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 Pollyanna-ish 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 shit going on with these undercover agents that were obviously doing things and implicating people in things that they had no involvement in, stealing money and blaming it on others, pretending to have a murder? | ||
| How could someone not see all the gray? | ||
| Because they don't want... | ||
| I don't think they want to. | ||
| The gray lady doesn't want to see the gray? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's outrageous. | ||
| I don't think they want to. | ||
| That is outrageous. | ||
| They don't want to, but why don't they want to? | ||
| Because they fucking suck as journalists. | ||
| And they should be removed and replaced with independent bloggers. | ||
| For real, man. | ||
| Until you get a Glenn Greenwald type character who doesn't have a stake in it and wants to tell the whole fucking story, what do you get? | ||
| And even, you know, he, who knows, man. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| This is goddamn confusing to me. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like, in a way, you have to, like, in order to understand it, you've got to really educate yourself. | ||
| There's a lot of moving parts. | ||
| There really are. | ||
| I mean, if you really, and most people, like, it's much easier just to demonize something and say, oh, it's bad. | ||
| And isn't this a situation where the Silk Road is essentially the Napster of the deep well? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And there's going to be some... | ||
| There already are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the toothpaste is well out of the tube. | ||
| It's proliferating now. | ||
| There's just hundreds of these drug markets online. | ||
| And they're... | ||
| We only say the names. | ||
| They're Kaiser Soze. | ||
| 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 target and shut down. | ||
| Then you had a bunch of copycats like Kazaa and all these other ones. | ||
| They were also a 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 system operates through... | ||
| The way it's coded, it works through every single user that's online. | ||
| There's nobody to target. | ||
| That's the 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. | ||
| You find the server, you seize the server, game over. | ||
| And they've done it over and over again for these copycat 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 camouflage, FedEx, and UPS packages. | ||
| 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, they're distributing through BitTorrent and they get caught... | ||
| This is mostly because they were one of the ones who were uploading them, right? | ||
| Yeah, they got tracked. | ||
| Or if you're like a really dumb 13-year-old and you're just pulling this stuff down on your browser and they find your internet service provider and they find your IP address and they connect that to a person whose broadband is sucking down ridiculous amounts of media every day, then they can find you that way too. | ||
| There's ways of tracking you that way. | ||
| Now, but if you're buying drugs on the internet, on an anonymous browser, in the darknet, with Bitcoin, and you've kept your anonymity tight working, it's very, very difficult to find you unless they literally pop you because the guy who sent you stuff, the packaging wasn't well camouflaged, and they go, 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 actually track. | ||
| You're not showing a signal. | ||
| You know that technology they have now where they drive by people's homes and they use a scanner and they can tell whether or not you're using massive amounts of electricity and they believe there's a grow house in the building. | ||
| Right, or they fly a plane over your house and check for infrared. | ||
| They've been doing that for pot farmers for decades. | ||
| Yeah, they broke into this guy's house who was a retired NSA agent. | ||
| Him and his wife were growing tomatoes in their basement, and they fucking locked him up, boots to the neck, the whole deal. | ||
| And they're like, oh, whoops, sorry. | ||
| You know, and this guy got a taste of what he's a part of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, look, hey, look at this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, 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 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 creating a crime on a level 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 pop somebody for almost anything. | ||
| And that's where this gets tricky. | ||
| When people are infiltrating your private life with the ability to either mistakenly or through a law that you may feel like what happened to your friend with the marijuana issue or what happened to the guy who just got shot. | ||
| 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, what I was getting at was that this signal doesn't exist, like a signal where you're passing by someone's house and you see all this electricity being used, all this heat being generated. | ||
| Okay, this is a grow house. | ||
| Well, if you're involved in one of these many now hundreds of different services, there's no signal No, 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 like look at this motherfucker Right now. | ||
| He's got a terabyte an hour. | ||
| Yeah banging into his house. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Right That's why law enforcement has been trying to break TOR. And what's been going on is that TOR, there's a conflict there, because TOR is still created and maintained by a lot of government agencies, or utilized, let's say, by a lot of government agencies who need TOR in order to communicate with each other. | ||
| 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 Office 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 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 like that and demonize the entire movement without looking at the nuances. | ||
| We're looking at the unbelievable complexity involved in In freedom and digital freedom and exchanging information online and even the complexities involved in the drug war. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because I guarantee you most intelligent people will not agree with it. | ||
| Even Republicans. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Yeah, it's a nonpartisan issue. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| People go, oh, they're just crazy libertarians. | ||
| I'm like, no, they're not. | ||
| They really aren't. | ||
| It's all stripes. | ||
| I mean, it's every kind of political configuration is involved in this movement on some level or another. | ||
| Who doesn't want privacy? | ||
| This documentary, where can people see it and when can people see it? | ||
| Well, we're touring festivals right now. | ||
| 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 going to be on Epix, the Epix Network, on premium cable. | ||
| I think it's regular cable, right? | ||
| Yeah, regular cable. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
| Well, Jim Norton, who is our buddy, who will be here on Wednesday, also has a special coming out on Epix. | ||
| So, fucking go Epix! | ||
| Yeah, Epix is awesome. | ||
| Was there anything... | ||
| It seems like to put such 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 downloaded was challenging too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Thankfully, these issues to me are not about technology. | ||
| They're about human nature and community. | ||
| So 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? | ||
| What's his name again? | ||
| Ross Ulbricht. | ||
| I have exclusive access to that family, the mom, the dad, their defense attorney. | ||
| I had access to Ross, but he's behind bars in a federal trial. | ||
| He couldn't be interviewed by me or 60 Minutes. | ||
| I was doing interviews with him via his parents, so they would give him questions. | ||
| He's very aware of the film. | ||
| They would give him questions, and then he would answer them for me. | ||
| In written form. | ||
| And in some cases, that was it. | ||
| So I was able to communicate with him that way and sort of get the information that I needed to. | ||
| But what is the rationale for not allowing him to talk? | ||
| I mean, he's a, you know, it's a big federal case, and they kept him under lock and key. | ||
| But isn't that insane? | ||
| It was chilling. | ||
| Yeah, I was expecting to go talk to him, like, you know, at a table in visitation or something. | ||
| None of that. | ||
| That's really disturbing to me. | ||
| Because you're not talking about a murderer. | ||
| 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 the prosecution looks at him, to be fair, is as all those things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They believe that the sort of anti-government, libertarian ethos that they believe he espoused to was very anarchistic and dangerous. | ||
| So they did view him as a major threat. | ||
| That's a slippery slope to say that an anti-government libertarian ethos is dangerous because, boy, there's a lot of fucking people you're going to have to lock up with that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| How about Rand Paul? | ||
| This motherfucker's running for president and that's his main platform. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Good luck with all that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, 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 I maintain that whatever the truth ends up being, and I really do hope we categorically get to the bottom of it at some point, in a way, and not to write him off at all, but in a way, regardless of Ross Ulbricht, I think that the idea of these anonymous marketplaces on the Internet with these communities, that is the greatest threat. | ||
| I think that's what poses the greatest threat. | ||
| Well, I think the internet itself is the greatest threat to the system that we have in place, and it's the biggest exposer of the shell game of the two-party system as well. | ||
| 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 fucking shell game. | ||
| You have the same corporations 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 shit that you would never want them to do. | ||
| 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 exposed. | ||
| It means we're exposed too, but it doesn't mean... | ||
| The upside is everything is exposed. | ||
| But we're not doing anything. | ||
| You're making documentaries. | ||
| I'm telling jokes. | ||
| But this... | ||
| This guy is losing a giant chunk of his life, and he's been in jail for a year and a half now. | ||
| Yeah, well he may lose his, he may get life. | ||
| He won't know in mid-May. | ||
| I mean, he may get life. | ||
| Fucking Christ. | ||
| And if he gets life, no one can talk to him. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, Chelsea Manning, the artist formerly known as Bradley Manning, now has Twitter, but how does she do that? | ||
| Yeah, I was actually wondering because I started following her a couple days ago. | ||
| There are certain people who do get, like Barrett Brown had access to email. | ||
| He had it recently revoked. | ||
| Why did he get it revoked? | ||
| They claimed that he was talking to a journalist. | ||
| They shouldn't have revoked it, in my opinion. | ||
| But he hasn't been treated fairly from the beginning. | ||
| That's another documentary. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But in Ross's case, it's very difficult to interview people who are sort of convicted of those kinds of charges. | ||
| They often get sent to pretty max-oriented facilities. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You can't talk to anybody. | ||
| You're in solitary confinement, which makes people go fucking crazy. | ||
| It certainly does, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's what they did with Chelsea Manning as well. | ||
| Naked, no clothes, locked in solitary for years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me that won't make you nuts. | ||
| It will. | ||
| It removes so much of what you are as a human being. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| All your personal freedom is gone, and this is legal, and this is morally acceptable, and this is a part of law. | ||
| I mean, that's insane. | ||
| That's fucking insane that they can do that to this guy. | ||
| So, when do they get to see whether or not they'll be able to appeal? | ||
| Well, appeals often can take about a year, 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. | ||
| Wow, that's pretty cool. | ||
| It's around the corner. | ||
| And then an appeal would occur, you know, sometime, hopefully this year or at some point early next year. | ||
| Well, that at least will give some... | ||
| Publicity to the premiere of your documentary, which is May 31st. | ||
| May 31st, yeah. | ||
| So that'll be a couple weeks out, so I'm sure the buzz will still be abound. | ||
| It really disturbs me, man. | ||
| I mean, it really gets me creeped out. | ||
| It disturbs me on a very personal level. | ||
| The idea that you could take some young person and do that to them and not let them speak. | ||
| Was he ever able to speak on his behalf? | ||
| Did he give a statement or anything? | ||
| No. | ||
| You have to be very careful about testifying, too. | ||
| It's a very tricky position to put yourself in. | ||
| So it'll be interesting to see what happens with the appeal process. | ||
| Are they hopeful? | ||
| They have to 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 say that it's a very... | ||
| they have a very steep hill to climb to get anywhere. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much did this bug you when you were doing this? | ||
| It got pretty depressing. | ||
| I stayed pretty neutral. | ||
| And again, as I say, I don't know the whole truth. | ||
| I just am very eager to either find out or to not make proclamations about things that I don't think have been proven, which doesn't seem to be stopping anybody else. | ||
| But... | ||
| There was a point when I was sitting in the federal trial and just watching them get blocked and blocked and blocked. | ||
| 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 said 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 year, 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... | ||
| The machinery and the way that it works. | ||
| It's very, very sad. | ||
| I mean, the whole case is, I find, extremely sad. | ||
| 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, it's mostly state level. | ||
| Mandatory minimums are starting to get reduced. | ||
| I mean, the world is moving slowly 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 grassroots movement that then attack things that are, you know, Byzantine, like the gay marriage laws or the marijuana laws or these things that are beginning to shift in our culture. | ||
| And I think that the net is absolutely a power there. | ||
| But there's a very big battle, you know. | ||
| Against that tide. | ||
| And that's largely at the federal level. | ||
| And so I think we have a long way to go before we're having conversations that are sane and balanced and nuanced about any of this stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that how you've been branded? | |
| Well, A, the movie hasn't come out yet, but I sort of comically caught some heat on Downloaded. | ||
| I don't think I talked enough about piracy for some people's liking. | ||
| On Downloaded? | ||
| Yeah, that was the Napster movie that I made. | ||
| And I think that people expected to have much more about how bad it was to pull down Metallica. | ||
| And I just was not that interested in that stuff. | ||
| And I think that if you don't follow the sort of, you know, standard narrative, you take some heat. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Like you said, I'm a guy who makes documentaries. | ||
| I'm not going to jail. | ||
| I'm not selling anything on the internet. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm objectively removed from that world. | ||
| But of course you take heat, because 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 disappointing, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They have this idea that it's good and evil in this world. | ||
| Good guys and bad guys. | ||
| Just catch the bad guys. | ||
| This is a freedom issue, 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. | ||
| Obviously, if the murders were faked, and it's quite possible, in fact likely, that no one ever wanted anybody murdered in the first place. | ||
| 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 fucking guy 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, to be clear, he's no longer in solitary. | ||
| 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 six weeks. | ||
| He's not been in solitary for the bulk of his confinement. | ||
| He's not like Chelsea Manning in that way. | ||
| He's been 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 system, what type of security do they have? | ||
| It's intense. | ||
| Oh, no, it's intense. | ||
| But is he locked up with murderers? | ||
| Yeah, he's in the general population. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| Yeah, he's done... | ||
| I mean, you know, again, not to exonerate him, but 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 may have done horrible other things that we, you know, we'll learn about more in detail at some point. | ||
| But what we know about what he has done. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He seems like a pretty goddamn cool guy. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That just drives me nuts, man. | ||
| When you were done with this, when you did the final edit and you stepped back and you, you know, you're done. | ||
| Now it's just about talking about it, promoting it. | ||
| And what does this leave you feeling when you make a documentary about something like this? | ||
| You go through withdrawal. | ||
| You know, I'm actually through it now because I've been done for a minute, but you go through a little withdrawal because I was living, eating, and sleeping in this world for almost two years, and I was dealing with a lot of people on all sides, on the law enforcement side, on the cyber side, his family, the whole thing. | ||
| You've got to go through withdrawal. | ||
| But part of me, and I said this, I was very blunt with Lynn, his mom, and I like being able to talk about it, so that's kind of the easy part. | ||
| That's kind of the why you do it part, right? | ||
| But I said to Lynn, I was like, you know, I really am glad I'm done. | ||
| It's like, you don't get to go home. | ||
| I've got a family and kids, and I get to go home, and I'm done. | ||
| You go outside, and you smell the air, and you get in your car, and you go about your day, and you take your kids to school, and I think... | ||
| 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 and 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 those are options anymore. | ||
| Yeah, and even if you're the family or whoever, your life is shattered, too. | ||
| I mean, Lynn doesn't get to get home and have a regular life anymore. | ||
| From now on, her son, her baby, is always going to be in a cage somewhere. | ||
| Was there any sympathy from people that you talked to, even off the record, in law enforcement? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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, 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, here's where we screwed up, here's where we're taking too much money, here's where this happened, here's where the technology fucked us, whatever it was. | ||
| On law enforcement, most of the law enforcement guys I talk to don't agree with this notion that there should be no encryption. | ||
| 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 warrantless search and seizure. | ||
| That makes no sense. | ||
| And, you know, so there's a lot of people caught up in the grays. | ||
| There's another guy I spoke to in the movie named Neil Franklin, who is the director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. | ||
| And Neil was a homicide major on the streets of Baltimore for 20 years and saw everything there was to see about the drug wars ravages. | ||
| And now his life, his work is about getting rid of the drug war from the officer side, from the DEA, FBI, DA side. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, there's fucking bars everywhere. | ||
| I mean, you just drive down the street everywhere you go, you can buy booze. | ||
| And those bars have parking lots. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People who pay taxes go to them. | ||
| It supports the economy. | ||
| The whole thing is bizarre. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I physically feel sick. | ||
| Yeah, it was sick-making. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| It was kind of dizzying. | ||
| You just thought, really? | ||
| It was like being in a Kafka novel. | ||
| You're like, really? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| We go home? | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| It almost makes sense when you hear about that judge in Pennsylvania that was sensing those kids for profit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you kind of get it now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, well, you guys are just used to doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that becomes just another step removed from the normal operating procedure. | ||
| Like, eh, what's the big deal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I need a pool. | ||
| What's the big deal? | ||
| I'd like to go on vacation and fuck some kid's life up. | ||
| Yeah, and there's also the general aspect of we need to punish the drug war. | ||
| We need to do it in a big way. | ||
| We need to do it in a public way. | ||
| We need to do it with maximum punishment, with extreme prejudice, as it were. | ||
| So you watch that machinery just at work, too. | ||
| They get to go back in front of the 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 back at the time there was one called Atlantis that had shown up. | ||
| Now there's tons of them, but this was in the early days. | ||
| And the journalist from Wired, Andy Greenberg, who's our everyman in the film who takes us through this world... | ||
| He was 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 disappeared. | ||
| Atlantis got popped and evaporated ages ago. | ||
| So the government came in and infiltrated it? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| It just disappeared. | ||
| What happens with a lot of these services is they'll extort people. | ||
| They'll collect all their money and then they'll just hightail it. | ||
| Oh, so the guys who own the service can be shady. | ||
| Yeah, completely. | ||
| That's what you think? | ||
| Yeah, that just happened with one called Evolution recently, and it happened with another one called Sheet Market, and it happens from time to time. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| How are they getting money? | ||
| What you do is you set up an account and get Bitcoin. | ||
| You can use Bitcoin. | ||
| Overstock.com takes Bitcoin. | ||
| You can use Bitcoin like PayPal. | ||
| And you set up an account, then you go to that site through Tor, 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 Bitcoin account, and you've got your account on this site, just like you have eBay. | ||
| So it's just like using PayPal 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 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. | ||
| There's ways to remove it from you even further. | ||
| It's called tumbling. | ||
| But basically, you pay using this Bitcoin code. | ||
| They get that transaction, they send you the drugs via, and often times now it works, they don't even know who you are, like it's done through a third party to separate you from the core site. | ||
| 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 another, the people that own the site are able to access the people who have membership on the site, their Bitcoin wallet. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So they just steal from them. | ||
| No, it doesn't work that way. | ||
| They don't have access to their Bitcoin wallet. | ||
| What they're doing is, 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? | ||
| Because you're connecting buyer to seller, right? | ||
| You give me money, 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. | ||
| I just 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You don't hand it over. | ||
| You just grab it and run. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| And then you shut down the site. | ||
| They shut the whole thing down. | ||
| And so is there a delay in transactions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, because you're taking a fee, so 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, is 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 direction it's currently going in. | ||
| So these people that did it, like for Atlantis or these other organizations, do they ever get caught or does everybody have to shut up because they were talking about illegal drugs in the first place? | ||
| Most of them don't get caught. | ||
| I mean, the interesting thing is there's a lot of, you know, full-blown, unsurprisingly, full-on cybercriminals out there, like these DEA agents that got caught. | ||
| 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 actually creating Bitcoin exchanges. | ||
| They were very technologically together. | ||
| So you have people like that 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, and they'll steal people's money. | ||
| It's the Wild West. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So now the way they're doing it is how? | ||
| Decentralized. | ||
| Decentralized. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what that is is basically there is no central point of control. | ||
| There's no central server. | ||
| So there is no guy in the middle. | ||
| It 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 was not created for drug use. | ||
| There may be drugs that end up getting selling. | ||
| Bazaar or Bazaar? | ||
| Bazaar. | ||
| 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, like what BitTorrent's trying to do. | ||
| There is, huh? | ||
| Yeah, if they wanted to create some kind of advertising model or legitimize themselves in other ways, there's ways to eventually create profit. | ||
| And they're also saying that not only are people using this for drugs, but they're also using this for illegal firearms and the distribution of illegal firearms. | ||
| That's really uncommon. | ||
| It's really hard to sell drugs on the dark net. | ||
| You mean guns? | ||
| Yeah, guns. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| It's very difficult given the way... | ||
| There's a number of issues, but given the difficulty of moving drugs or guns around through the postal system is extremely difficult. | ||
| The one thing that did happen on the Internet is what Cody Wilson was doing. | ||
| He created the 3D printed gun, which you may have heard of. | ||
| Cody's in my movie. | ||
| 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 specifically. | ||
| Screw your laws, right? | ||
| So that's the way that some of that stuff has happened online. | ||
| But the way Cody's technologies work is you're able to create one piece of a weapon that you could sort of build the rest of the weapon around. | ||
| So that's been a big thorn in people's sides as well. | ||
| Yeah, what he's done is very interesting because his... | ||
| Plans or whatever it is for the 3D gun 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 miller. | ||
| The next wave of his technology was actually selling the milling machine that would allow it to be metal. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| You just make it. | ||
| That seems like what's going to happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even with food? | ||
| Yeah, you can 3D print food. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, you get ingredients and you can literally make food. | ||
| Like, what kind of food? | ||
| All kinds of stuff, and it's gonna get more advanced all the time. | ||
| I mean, there's organic elements to this. | ||
| It's not just, like, plastic stuff. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Yeah, I remember when I was talking to Sean Fanning, the guy who created Napster, and I was talking to Sean about ten years ago. | ||
| This is ten years ago. | ||
| I was like, okay, what's the next big thing? | ||
| It was like, 3D printing. | ||
| He goes, people have no idea how much that's gonna change our culture once it really gets going. | ||
| It seems like it is. | ||
| It seems like when you buy a new iPhone, you're going to download the directions for the iPhone. | ||
| You won't even have to do that. | ||
| Yeah, you just stick the code and it'll just make it. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It seems like the real issue will be raw materials then at that point. | ||
| Yeah, I think the world is really, I mean, that's the thing I maintain is that that's why I get so frustrated by how slow we're dragging our feet with these changes. | ||
| It's like you said it earlier, the real changes are coming. | ||
| Like, things are really going to shift into high gear over the next 10, 20, 30 years with driverless cars and more advanced biotechnology. | ||
| I mean, things are really going to change. | ||
| They're so weird because 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. | ||
| Because everyone's used to just looking at their phone and checking their text messages, but Just 30 years ago, that wasn't even a dream. | ||
| No, completely. | ||
| The computer in your hand was unheard of. | ||
| It's all weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all weird and it's shifting, but what it is to be a person is going to be very different. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I just wonder how they're going to look back on things like this, like this Silk Road thing or Napster. | ||
| 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's the gray? | ||
| Where are the uneasy? | ||
| What's not the low-hanging fruit? | ||
| That's been my agenda in going after these stories, is like, what doesn't have easy answers? | ||
| Has it been really frustrating, though? | ||
| Especially 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 if I was me, I would be going crazy. | ||
| I mean, 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 not just one issue of a law being broken. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is not one issue of an underground marketplace of nefarious people doing dastardly deeds. | ||
| This is an aspect of human cultural evolution. | ||
| It's a little frustrating, but I also, like I said, a lot of the people that I interview Are more sensible than sometimes what the prevailing narrative is. | ||
| You do encounter people that just really have their heads planted in the sand. | ||
| They just don't want to think about things differently than the way they perceive them. | ||
| I actually encountered that a lot with the Napster story. | ||
| People were just adamantly, no, it was only about stealing. | ||
| No, it's not about something other than piracy. | ||
| And they just 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. | ||
| You know, I still think it's there's value in just telling the stories and shining a light on them and trying to provide some nuance and You know when I tour around with the festivals and we have these great Q&A's and people are really they either know more about it than I do or they know less or they're somewhere in the middle and Conversations start and I think that's really that's helpful on some level Well, 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 really actively pursuing it. | ||
| But the kids in their 20s, they're almost all in tune to it, at least the ones that are smart and aren't obsessed with Justin Bieber. | ||
| They're tuned in to what's going on here. | ||
| They literally 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 a fundamental level that they don't think... | ||
| That's the whole thing with the Napster thing, and it certainly works in the Silk Road case to some degree, is these people did not view themselves as criminals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But legally you were. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| But I'm being branded as one. | ||
| And I did not respond well to that. | ||
| I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| You know, like, 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. | ||
| Well, it was everybody. | ||
| I mean, it really was... | ||
| But he was 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 I 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 got put on K-Rock. | ||
| So he's like an artist and he's like, oh God, this version with the crappy drum track is on fucking K-Rock. | ||
| And his head exploded, right? | ||
| And that was his reaction. | ||
| It was like the pure artist's like, holy shit reaction. | ||
| Which I, as an artist, I get that. | ||
| And then he was like, we gotta lead a charge against these guys. | ||
| And he ran out. | ||
| And he looked back and nobody else had his back. | ||
| Nobody! | ||
| Like, all the other artists were like, yeah, none of them had the balls to give him some credit to come out and say, wait a minute, we need to have better discussions about this. | ||
| So they totally stuck his ass out in the forefront and then they ran. | ||
| Well, the fans felt like, you greedy fuck... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, you're a multi-millionaire and you're complaining that you're gonna lose some money off of this? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they just felt betrayed in a certain way. | ||
| Yeah, I think they did. | ||
| And I felt for him to the degree that as an artist, I felt like his reaction, whatever you want to say about the politics of it, his initial gut, oh my god reaction, would have been my, you know what I mean? | ||
| When you make something and it's in rough cut form or it's not, you know, the idea that like, that's out there, like someone's stuck in a movie theater at K-Rock, that makes your head, that's like you lose sleep on that kind of stuff at night. | ||
| 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 records you when you're on stage and then releases it on YouTube and then it gets downloaded by 100,000 people, you're like, that bit sucks. | ||
| That bit's a baby. | ||
| It's not done yet. | ||
| When I'm done, I'll put it on a fucking DVD. I'll put it on a comedy special. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the truth, though, as I think you've been saying, is that it isn't to brand them. | ||
| It's incumbent upon us to change the way we do business. | ||
| We can't just wag our finger at them and say, you, stop doing that. | ||
| Of course they're going to do it. | ||
| It's this amazing new technology that's communal and fast and democratized, and they're not going to stop doing it. | ||
| We have to change. | ||
| Yeah, it's going to be very weird when it hits whatever the next stage is. | ||
| Whatever the next stage is, because I'm imagining, with very little technological expertise, of course, how about zero? | ||
| I have none. | ||
| I'm a user. | ||
| Come on, you had a website in 98 with a message board. | ||
| That's way farther along than most people. | ||
| I hired somebody. | ||
| I don't even know what a message board is made of. | ||
| It might have been a cheese. | ||
| Yeah, you had the foresight to do it. | ||
| That's still different. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But my point being, if you try to imagine what the next stage is going to be, I would imagine that it would be something virtual. | ||
| And I'm imagining that what we're looking at now, when you're looking at a website even, when you're looking at message boards, when you're looking at Twitter, Facebook, social media, is akin to those boards that existed back in the day before... | ||
| Before there was a web. | ||
| Yeah, we're talking about like 93. Yeah, before the web. | ||
| What were those things called? | ||
| Like bulletin boards. | ||
| That's what I was talking about. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Screw off for a while. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If you check Twitter, anytime anything's going down, like anytime someone dies, I find out about it on Twitter before I ever see it on the news. | ||
| It seems like it's almost instantaneous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even more so than that, things like YouTube. | ||
| YouTube is very two-dimensional. | ||
| We look at it, 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 the way that's Progressing right now 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, 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 literally around the corner. | ||
| I mean, we're just only years away from driverless cars, not like decades away from driverless cars. | ||
| It's a very exciting time, but it's also very... | ||
| It's a challenging time. | ||
| That's the reason I make these stories. | ||
| It's not because I think, oh, this is so awesome. | ||
| I just want to pick up my camera and shoot all this awesome stuff. | ||
| It is challenging. | ||
| It's challenging morally, ethically. | ||
| It's challenging on all these levels. | ||
| That's part of why I think we need to be having conversations about this stuff that are more sane. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| I also think that as a giant super organism, the human race, what we really are, really, when you think about it, we're some sort of a giant super organism that works together to create these things and fund these things and push these things forward. | ||
| We're kind of just moving along Not considering the implications of what we're doing, but just continuing along the same path. | ||
| If you can't, if you step back and say, you know what, this virtual reality is just too fucked up, we should really stop and consider, well, guess what? | ||
| Sony's going to come along, and they're going to just take the fucking rug out from under you, and they're going to have a better thing that you're not... | ||
| They'll keep making Spider-Man reboots forever on your virtual reality. | ||
| You'll never be able to stop them. | ||
| Porn, which is at the forefront of all technology, that pushed HTML5 over Flash, PayPal, everything. | ||
| What they're going to do with that virtual reality stuff is going to be very, very, very bizarre. | ||
| You think you have a problem with people being addicted to porn now. | ||
| No one was addicted to literature porn. | ||
| Let me look at my Veritype 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, maybe things a little bit more interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then magazines came along, whoa, girly magazines that used to have to go hide. | ||
| Stick under your bed. | ||
| Yeah, used to hide Yeah, the screens got bigger. | ||
| It was very nice of them. | ||
| It's going to get very, very strange. | ||
| There's going to come some sort of a neural interface inside of our lifetime where you're going to be able to enter into worlds that have been created that seem indistinguishable from the world that we're currently in right now. | ||
| Yeah, there's no doubt. | ||
| That's within our lifetime. | ||
| And when that does happen, they look back on things like the Silk Road, this controversy, 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, and they may very likely be the thing that takes major cartels down in the long run. | ||
| Well, I was listening to this Radiolab podcast where they were talking about the placebo effect. | ||
| 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 various times where a placebo effect has worked and has not worked. | ||
| And one of the things that they said that was so incredible is that the reason why drugs work That every drug that works on the human mind works because there's a receptor. | ||
| There's a biological receptor in the brain. | ||
| So essentially, the brain produces all 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 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 gonna take you on a real live drug ride, and no drugs would be involved. | ||
| I mean, then what do you do with your drug war? | ||
| When all the drugs are produced by the mind, you're gonna 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? | ||
| 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 fucking 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. | ||
| 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, that needs to be decriminalized to a degree where they can actually get the help in a way that isn't stigmatized or they're not just felonized immediately. | ||
| So that's an issue as well that needs to get addressed. | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| And also the reason why people get addicted in the first place. | ||
| Just the trauma that people experience as young children that causes these receptors to open up, that causes these drug addiction processes to take place. | ||
| And you talk to people that have counseled folks that have massive drug problems and then understand how these genes get addressed. | ||
| It's all very, very complex. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| And who gets addicted and who doesn't get addicted? | ||
| A lot of that has to do with your response to childhood trauma. | ||
| That's hard for people to relate to. | ||
| That's hard for people to understand. | ||
| And genetics and the genetic disease component, and like there's no way to have a really thorough conversation about this stuff if it's just criminalized. | ||
| You can't just dragnet it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lock him up! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The world is at our doorstep every day now, and whether you like it or not is right there in front of you. | ||
| 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 right now. | ||
| I totally agree with that. | ||
| The people are just like, look, I've got to take this course because 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 to. | ||
| But the counter-narrative is the real issue. | ||
| The people that are burning their head in the sand and trying to shove your face in as well. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's really what it is, right? | ||
| 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, everything like that. | ||
| After it's on Epix for a little while, it'll be available everywhere. | ||
| And Alex is available on Twitter. | ||
| You can follow him. | ||
| It's ALXWinter on Twitter. | ||
| And is there anything else you want? | ||
| That's it, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's DeepWebTheMovie.com. | ||
| But you can sign up for our newsletter. | ||
| I sort of send out information and cool ancillary stuff. | ||
| Well, thank you so much, man. | ||
| Thanks for making this, too. | ||
| I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| I really appreciate the conversation. | ||
| All right, my friends. | ||
| We'll be back on Wednesday with Abby Martin and Jim Norton. | ||
| Until then, go fuck yourself, okay? | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Big kiss. |
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