EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,002 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays) Are we rolling? Oh, we are. We're up. Yeah, this is a, uh, (clears throat) Kill Cliff CBD, 25 milligrams of CBD, um, jalapeno pineapple.
- TRTiller Russell
Jalapeno pineapple's strong.
- JRJoe Rogan
Not bad, right?
- TRTiller Russell
I like it. It's good.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's called Flaming Joe. That's my face, bro.
- TRTiller Russell
(laughs) Then it's flaming.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hey, I love your fucking movies. I, I love the Seven Five, and uh, I really enjoyed Silk Road. It was really good. And it w- you did a great job of taking something that is a, a real story and laying it out in a movie format, where you only have like, a certain amount of time with actors. But even, the guy who played the bad cop, what is his name?
- TRTiller Russell
Jason Clarke. I love that guy.
- JRJoe Rogan
He's great. He, he's been in a bunch of things.
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I, I, I-
- TRTiller Russell
He was in Chappaquiddick. He was in First Man. He's been in a bunch of stuff, and he's just, he's a beast. Um, you know, it was so interesting, when I got there on set with him, and it's like, sort of, you know, day one, you don't know what you're getting into. And I'm r- and I was just standing there next to him, and I was like, "Dude, this guy is like a thoroughbred race horse, and he is at the Kentucky Derby."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
"I can't wait to see what this cat does," you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
He's so good as a bad guy.
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
He's such a-
- TRTiller Russell
And he, he, he's, he's game for it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
He's, he's intense. I've seen that guy in so many movies. He's just one of those guys, like you see him, and you're like, "Oh, that guy."
- TRTiller Russell
Well, you know, it's so funny when you're like, you know, I sat down ... So I had written the script for Silk Road several years ago. And you know, I have done all these documentaries. That's my background, right, which is kind of where you dive into the, you know, you do the deep dive on these, um, you know, crazy crime stories. That's my whole, that's my whole racket, you know, from Michael Dowd forward. And then, you, you know, go into the world suddenly going from the doc thing into the movie thing, and it's like, well, who are the people that are gonna inhabit this? So I sat down and I met with, you know, all these amazing actors, and you sort of are looking at, okay, what if it's this version of the movie? What if it's this kid? What if it's this, you know, what if it's this guy? And then suddenly, Jason Clarke, who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like, "Dude, I'm, I'm h- I'm hip to that. You know, I wanna do it."
- JRJoe Rogan
Is he playing a real guy?
- TRTiller Russell
He- it's a composite basically. What happened is there were a couple of corrupt law enforcement officers. There was a DEA guy. There was a Treasury guy. Um, and so what I had done is kind of combined them into that character because I've spent a lot of time in the documentaries hanging out with guys like that and, and also people who have relationships, long-term relationships with informants. So I was able to kind of take the work that I had done in the docs and put it into the movie so that it's drawn from real life, it's drawn from people I know, but it's, you know, kind of a hybrid between the two.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Yeah, it's, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along, you know, and, and condensing it without having too many different moving parts 'cause y- you got so much going on, you know?
- TRTiller Russell
Well, and i- and it's, w- with something like that, like, a, a story like this, there are the people that like ... I was one of the people that was fully geeked on this story. I remember th- the day after Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the San Francisco library, in, in the sci-fi section of the Glen Park Library. I was off shooting some crime doc or another. And I remember vividly opening the newspaper, and it just had kind of like the shadowy headlines of the story. It was like dark web, Bitcoin, you know, Dread Pirate Roberts, but we didn't ... None of this stuff was in the zeitgeist yet. We hadn't even like really heard of Bitcoin.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- TRTiller Russell
But I remember thinking like, "Man, there's a, like there's a story there." It's, maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a doc, but like, there's something. And I was just kind of fascinated from the get-go, and then obsessively tracking the story as new pieces of information would come out. And then eventually, there was this Rolling Stone, uh, reporter, this guy by the name of David Kushner, who's this brilliant writer and reporter, has like a nose for story and is able to get to people, and he had gotten to Ross Ulbricht's girlfriend in Austin, and, um, and then the family. And so he wrote this profile of Ross that was this very kind of relatable, humanist portrait. And suddenly when I read that piece, I was like, "Oh. Okay, now I can like connect with this guy in some fundamental, emotional way." But at the time, none of the stuff about the corrupt cops had broken. None of that stuff was in the public. Nothing had been reported on. And I think that the feds deliberately kept that information under wraps so as not to screw up the prosecution-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 15:00 – 30:00
But it was a…
- TRTiller Russell
injects it into the zeitgeist.
- JRJoe Rogan
But it was a thing before that, so it was reasonably successful before that, right? Like, people did know about it in terms of like the-
- TRTiller Russell
The people that were hip to it.
- JRJoe Rogan
... weirdo internet crowd.
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. They knew about it, but he didn't think that that was enough.
- TRTiller Russell
Well, and he had to go... Like, he went and like seeded the chat rooms and like said like, "Hey man, check this out." You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, right.
- TRTiller Russell
A- a- acting as if he was a user-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- TRTiller Russell
... and not the mastermind to it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
To like put bait in the water so the fish would hit it, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah, it's a, it's such a crazy story. And, um, I... Has it... What is the status of things like that now? Are, are, is there a more improved version of Silk Road now?
- TRTiller Russell
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Where you can do that and you don't get busted?
- TRTiller Russell
There were-
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm asking for a friend. (laughs)
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, the, the, the crazy thing is there were several iterations of Silk Road that happened. So like the feds came in, like seized it, and then all of a sudden like on, on the website, it was like seized by the FBI, you know, putting the word out as the, as the feds are kinda pissing on the territory. But then, I forget what amount of time, I've forgotten the details at this point, but some amount... Six months later or whatever, Silk Road 2.0 comes up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- TRTiller Russell
Then the feds shut that down. Then Silk Road 3.0 comes up. It's kinda like... I think, you know, the genie never goes back in the bottle. Once the technology is out there, it's going to, in some way or another, continue to persist.
- JRJoe Rogan
D- now, when the feds had shut it down, was this when Ross was running it?
- TRTiller Russell
When, when he... Basically, after Ross was busted, the feds went in and said, stamped the site that said, "Seized by the FBI."
- JRJoe Rogan
And then it reemerged?
- TRTiller Russell
And then it reemerged. And the whole thing, you know, his, you know, his, um, online avatar, you know, nom de guerre or whatever was Dread Pirate Roberts taken from The Princess Bride.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- TRTiller Russell
The idea being like, "Once I go away, there's gonna be a new Dread Pirate Roberts."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- TRTiller Russell
"Somebody else is gonna pick up the baton and run with it." And nobody quite knows, okay, who is it that inherited it? And there are those people who say, "Hey, this wasn't Ross that ordered these hits." You know, this was... Like, nobody knows who's behind the keys at the time anything has happened.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Hmm. …
- TRTiller Russell
you know, clemency or a pardon by somebody. Otherwise, you know, that kid's spending the rest of his life, you know, and, and... And I called his mother recently, who's, is in Austin, too, actually, about the same time. And I had not spoken with her beforehand, and I reached out, again, just in sort of human terms, and I said, you know, "How are you doing?" And she said, "I'm not doing too good, man. My kid's gonna die in prison." That was the opening words of the conversation.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- TRTiller Russell
And, and I just said, uh-... "Hey, if the tables were..." She's like, "Why are you calling me?" And I said, "Because if the tables were turned, I'd want somebody to call my mom too." You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Boof. Imagine. Jesus Christ. It's, um, it just seems that if the cops were corrupt, and if they were lying, and if they were stealing money, that should, it should have tainted the whole case. It should be grounds for some sort of a retrial. It should be grounds for a dismissal. It should be grounds for, you know, a reexamination of the case.
- TRTiller Russell
Well, but it goes back to your original point too, which is like, okay, if, if you have the intention to commit murder, if it really was him that did it, you know, have you crossed a fundamental line? Because I think-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
... you know, and to me, that's what, that's what makes all of these stories interesting is... Stories like this interesting, is, um, it's not clear-cut.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- TRTiller Russell
And, and it's not, you know, good guy, bad guy. You've got... It's, it's the, it's the gray area in between. To me, as a filmmaker, what, what is interesting is somebody that isn't wholly good, and isn't... or isn't wholly a gangster.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
It's somebody that's i- in between, and like, the forces of light are warring with the forces of darkness inside him, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, you did a great job of portraying him as very tortured by his decision, e- especially the one where he's, uh, seeing his girlfriend now hanging out with some other guy, and he's drunk, and, you know, makes a call. The, the whole thing was very believable, but how much of that was based on, uh, real accounts of what was going down, or how much of that was fiction?
- TRTiller Russell
I took almost everything... There was a lot more reporting about Ross, right? So there was a lot in the public record. We knew his childhood. He grew up in Austin. He was a Boy Scout, he was an Eagle Scout. Um, and he ends up getting a degree in physics. He goes to UTD. He, um... And so, there was a lot of information about him, and there was information in his own words. So, anywhere where I had that information, it was like, "Let's hue closely to that." And then I had his ex-girlfriend, right, who is there telling me... Because the, a big question I had for her early on is, "Okay, this libertarian ethos, this, this notion that, like, everybody has the right to do whatever they want, that this is America, right? If you wanna pop a pill, snort a d- line, do whatever, like, you have the ri- God-given right to do so. How much of that was legitimate, and how much of it was a mask that he's just wearing for, you know, for the site, for the public, to, you know, to sell it?" And she said, "This is exactly who this guy was. At his most basic, core level, was a believer in our individual rights and freedoms."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
And she would... You know, he'd sit there and argue with people in bars and say, "Hey," like, "this is our constitutional right." And so once I had that kind of piece of the character, and I knew, "Okay, that's what animates this guy in a basic sense," then it gave me something to kind of hook onto. And there's people that, you know, will... That don't like the politics, that will ar- you know, argue against that, and at the end of the day, my feeling is, it's not my job to pass a moral judgment. And even in the same way with Michael Dowd and the 7-5, it's not my job to tell you, "Hey, this is a good guy. This is a bad guy." It's, "Here's the story, here's the characters, here's the world. Make up your own mind." Hopefully people are arguing about it one way or another.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Uh, well, I'm sure they will. I mean, you definitely gave a lot of food for thought. It's such a complicated story. It really is. Because, you know, you see the guy entering into it with these intentions that are, um, you know, d- debatably very... They're, they're very American. It's a very... Like, the idea of freedom and the, the ability to do whatever-
- TRTiller Russell
It's core stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it really is. And then along the wind, just everything just goes so sour.
- TRTiller Russell
Well, and it happens so quickly. You know, one of the things that's crazy about that, that story is, from the time he unleashes the site until the time he's busted, it's less than two years, right? This guy's got an entire lifetime's worth of drama that happens-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
... to him in, you know, 18 months time, or whatever the numbers are.
- JRJoe Rogan
How much money did he make?
- TRTiller Russell
Well, you know, had he hang, hung onto the Bitcoin, with Bitcoin at 50,000 or whatever it is today, would be like an incalculable amount of money. It was tens of millions at the time.
- JRJoe Rogan
God. (exhales) And what did, what happened with all that Bitcoin?
- TRTiller Russell
It got, uh, confiscated and seized by the federal government.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the federal government owns it now?
- TRTiller Russell
Federal government seizes it and confiscates it, although there was just... I read in the news, and I don't know the details of this, but there was a bunch of, you know, significant amount of... Meaning like hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, missing Bitcoin. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
"US seizes one billion in Bitcoin linked to Silk Road site. The DOJ, uh, is suing for formal forfeiture of funds after tracking down the person holding them." And this is, uh, how long ago was this story?
- NANarrator
Uh, a couple... Just a couple-
- TRTiller Russell
Three months.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yeah. And that's kinda…
- JRJoe Rogan
or what it means to be on the internet or what it means to be a part of a, a thing that a bunch of people are gonna see.
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah. And that's kinda how we process these stories. It's like, why we're still fooling... Why, you know, why are people still watching the story of Richard Ramirez in The Night Stalker 35 years after that happened? And I think part of the reason why is, like, this is how we understand these stories, is by, like, telling them, retelling them, having the discussions about, like, what's the morality of Ross Ulbricht or using crime scene photos of Richard Ramirez. It's kind of this is the way we culturally process this stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
D- do you ever do a demographic breakdown of who watched? Like, does Netflix have a demogra- demographic breakdown of who watches those crime shows? 'Cause it's mostly women, isn't it?
- TRTiller Russell
The... Anecdotally, that's what everybody says.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
There was a funny bit on Saturday Night Live the other night that was like, you know, w- what, what do ladies do when they're home alone? You know, wait, wait, wait, you know. Then they, like, throw on the murder shows. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Why is that?
- TRTiller Russell
I don't know. It's a weird thing. And when we were making Night Stalker, there would, like... We would get to the, the point in the interview where it's finally, you know... I would ha- I would ask everybody, like, okay, so s- for some reason or another, this guy becomes, like, the Jim Morrison of serial killers, because, like, when he's paraded through the courtroom, all of a sudden, he's got these, like, groupies and fans, and they're sending him... And I had gotten access to all of the, like, naked pictures that the girls are sending in, you know, 'cause this author had written a book about him, had all this stuff. And I was like... And you always have to kind of ask that awkward question of, like, "So why does this guy become this sorta crazy sex symbol object of des- you know, obscure object of desire?" And it's always, like, kind of an... particularly with the, you know, the, the women who are being interviewed, but everybody, and nobody quite has an answer. Is it the bad boy thing? Is it the celebrity thing? But this is somebody that, like, you know, I think as one of the people said, this is somebody that would eat you for dinner, not, like... You know, there's no... It, it's craziness to have any attraction to it, but yet it exists, you know? This guy has, like, groupies and fans.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it's very common for murderers to get-
- TRTiller Russell
Hugely common.
- JRJoe Rogan
... especially murders of women to get all these propositions from women.
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's very strange.
- TRTiller Russell
Super strange.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, you know, I read something about that. No, you know who t-... Whitney Cummings was actually telling me about this. She said she, uh, she read that it was something that had to do with... There was, like, a, an evolutionary benefit to getting close to killers. Like, that... I think this is theoretical.
- TRTiller Russell
In what regard?
- JRJoe Rogan
That the idea of it's very hard to kill someone, and-
- TRTiller Russell
Once you have, like, human personal contact?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well-
- TRTiller Russell
Is that what you're saying?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, no, no, no, that the, the act of killing someone, that it's difficult to do, and that it requires, like, someone who is, uh, uh, uh, to be capable of taking another person's life. And to be close to that person means somehow or another you're protected by them, and that they're, they're willing to kill, and that this is, like, something that existed thousands and thousands of years ago in our DNA, this desire to be close to killers, because you were more likely to survive, 'cause there were so many killers. Like, if you went back in time, you know, a few thousand years ago, murder must have been, like, really common.... like, when, when people were sword fighting all the time and stabbing each other-
- TRTiller Russell
Dude, there's a cra- there's a crazy book on this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah?
- TRTiller Russell
Steven Pinker wrote this book called The Better Angels of Our Nature.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- TRTiller Russell
And what he does is he tracks over time kind of the nature of violence in humanity.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- TRTiller Russell
And he's like, "Okay, once upon a time, there's Cain and Abel, and Cain kills Abel. Like, the murder rate is like 50%. So actually, we've been trending up ever since then."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
And like, it literally looks at how, you know, over time, the incidence of, like, violence has actually, even though it doesn't seem like that, dramatically decreased in humanity.
- 1:00:00 – 1:13:18
Well, also, like, you,…
- JRJoe Rogan
on fire and stealing cars. Why the fuck are you busting people for pot?" But in his mind, that's the job.
- TRTiller Russell
Well, also, like, you, you know, he also risked his life doing that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
When he started out, like, that was the gig, right? It's like when you're a, you know, undercover cop that's carrying a gun and going in, doing a buy-bust to get the weed or whatever, literally every time you go to work-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- TRTiller Russell
... you're risking your life potentially.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
So these guys ... And that's like Jason Clarke's character in Silk Road, right? Like once ... They call these guys Jurassic Narcs. Once upon a time, they were door kickers. The job was like, go in there, get it done.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- TRTiller Russell
And they used to say, you know, "What kind of piece are you car- are you carrying? A cig, or what are you carrying?" You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- TRTiller Russell
And then, and then all of a sudden, the world changes and it's like, "Well, how much RAM is on your laptop?" And, like, these guys-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- TRTiller Russell
... are like Peckinpah characters. They're out of step with the world, man. You know, like, the game has changed and all they know is living by what they learned at the barrel of a gun.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
And suddenly the, like, culture doesn't care anymore. It's like, no, the, the d- the drug game is online now. And, like, knowing how to work informants or rouse somebody, it's like that shit's irrelevant.
- JRJoe Rogan
You did a great job of showing that conflict in the film too when the two guys were outside smoking a cigarette talking about that. You know, it's t- the ... It's a great version of a, a dramatic interpretation of real world events that are historically very significant because it means a lot to our world to-... when something like Silk Road comes along, and, uh, I never bought anything off of Silk Road. I don't even think I know anybody who bought anything off Silk Road, but I remember we were all watching it very carefully.
- TRTiller Russell
It changed the culture.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- TRTiller Russell
It changed the world, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
It was also, you know, uh, people would always ask you, man, "How do I get mushrooms?" Like, "Oh, you gotta fucking know somebody." And then someone would be like, "Or you go to Silk Road."
- TRTiller Russell
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you're like, "Ooh, it seems-"
- TRTiller Russell
How's that work?
- JRJoe Rogan
"... dangerous." Like, "What do you do? What do you do? How do you do that?" Do you know anybody who went on Silk Road and bought anything?
- NANarrator
I don't think so. I was just trying to think. I don't, I don't know. Mm, maybe. But not, yeah, I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, maybe I forgot somebody that bought, but-
- NANarrator
Don't know what they got. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... no one close to me. But it's, uh, it's a moment I won't forget. I rem- I don't, uh, I remember the Gaw- I, I believe I was aware of it before the Gawker article, but I remember reading the Gawker article going, "Whoa, this is crazy."
- TRTiller Russell
Yeah.
Episode duration: 3:15:47
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