Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1614 - Tiller Russell
Uploaded: 2021-03-03T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1614 - Tiller Russell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1614 - Tiller Russell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1614 - Tiller Russell

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Are we rolling?
Oh, we are.
We're up.
Yeah, this is a Kill Cliff CBD, 25 milligrams of CBD, jalapeno pineapple.
Jalapeno pineapple, strong.
Not bad, right?
I like it.
It's called Flaming Joe.
That's my face, bro.
Then it's flaming.
Hey, I love your fucking movies.
I love the 7-5, and I really enjoyed Silk Road.
It was really good.
And you did a great job of taking something that is a real story and laying it
out in a
movie format where you only have a certain amount of time with actors.
But even the guy who played the bad cop, what is his name?
Jason Clarke.
I love that guy.
He's great.
He's been in a bunch of things.
He was in Chappaquiddick.
He was in First Man.
He's been in a bunch of stuff, and he's a beast.
You know, it was so interesting.
When I got there on set with him, and it's like sort of day one, you don't know
what you're
getting into.
And I was just standing there next to him, and I was like, dude, this guy is
like a thoroughbred
racehorse, and he is at the Kentucky Derby.
I can't wait to see what this cat does.
He's so good as a bad guy.
Yeah.
And he's game for it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
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, 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 going to 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 Clark, who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like,
dude, I'm hip
to that.
You know, I want to do it.
Is he playing a real guy?
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.
And so what I had done is kind of combine them into that character, because I've
spent a
lot of time in the documentaries hanging out with guys like that.
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.
Yeah, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along, you know, and condensing
it without
having too many different moving parts, because you've got so much going on.
Well, and it was something like that, like 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 the day after Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the San Francisco
library, in the sci-fi
section of the Glenn 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 the stuff was in the zeitgeist yet.
We hadn't even like really heard of Bitcoin.
But I remember thinking like, man, there's 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 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 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 of Ross.
But I was knowing people in DEA, knowing people in U.S. Attorney from U.S.
Attorney's Office
from making the 7-5, from making Operation Odessa, whatever.
Those guys would call me and they were like, man, there's a whole nother
amazing half of
this story, which is the crooked cop side of the story.
Suddenly when I saw that, I thought, okay, now that's a movie.
Because I can imagine these two sort of people, you know, I always thought of
it, it's almost
like they're missiles on a collision course flying right at each other, you
know?
And so suddenly when I had that in my head, I was like, I can make a movie out
of that.
The stuff with the corrupt cop's wife and daughter, was that fictionalized as
well?
Yeah, so it's interesting, you know, at a certain point, I remember like on set
and kind of going
up to it, people were like, okay, so what's factual and what's, you know,
fictional?
What's factual and what's fictional?
And I, at a certain point, I was like, I need to pour myself into this because
there wasn't,
you know, when you're making a doc, you're going out and you're harvesting
people
and you're harvesting information and you're harvesting photos, videos, news
footage.
This was like, there was a limited amount of information.
And so then when the information ran out, it was like, okay, what am I going to
pour in
here?
I can research it the way I would do a doc, but really, if I'm going to make
this something
that's true and authentic to me, I kind of poured myself into it.
So that's what I ended up doing, you know?
So when you say poured yourself into it, did you create this story with the
daughter that
needed the money for school?
Yeah.
Um, I mean, what it is, is it's a combination.
So there was a limited amount of information.
This guy, one of these cops had family members, had, um, you know, a background
where he was
jacked up in Puerto Rico and sort of thrown off track.
So I took the pieces that were in the public record that were in Rolling Stone
articles or
in the Wired article or whatever.
And then I was like, okay, I'm going to put my own biography into this.
I'm going to put, you know, maybe my relationship with my daughter or my
relationship with my
wife.
And so kind of build out from what's there with a, with a personal story to it.
Is that a difficult thing to do?
Like, do you, do you tiptoe through that?
Because here you are, you have this story, right?
The story for folks who don't know, we should probably let them know what the
story is.
If they don't know.
The story of Silk Road is a spectacular story because he created this
marketplace through
the dark web with, uh, you know, using Tor and encryption where, and, and Tor
is a browser.
Um, it's an encrypted browser.
Yeah.
It's basically like, it's, it's like the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
You know, you go into Tor and, and it conceals usage and location.
And he developed this Silk Road platform where you could buy all kinds of drugs.
And then ultimately it, you could buy guns as well.
And, and a lot of other illegal things.
And his, the way you portrayed him is really fascinating too.
And I wonder how much of it is accurate because you portrayed him as this sort
of really intelligent,
idealistic young man who ultimately believed that people should have the
freedom to buy,
sell, use, choose whatever they like.
And that the people who support Silk Road, that's how they felt.
And people that are proponents of a lot of these, uh, particularly psychedelics,
which I'm one of
them, like, they liked that.
Like, like, yeah, what, who, who is a grown adult to tell another grown adult
what they can, can't use?
Wouldn't it be great if there were some online marketplace that was free from
the tentacles
of the American government and you could buy whatever you wanted?
Well, there was, and he created it.
And it's, uh, it's very, in, in, in the sense that it's, it's an important
American story.
It's an important internet story.
It's an important worldwide story.
But then you're also adding fiction.
Well, it's, it's, um, yes.
And his story, what fascinated me about his story was you have this guy that
starts out as a very
kind of naive, innocent guy.
He's somebody who wants to make his mark in the world, wants to change the
world and goes into it
with an open heart and good intentions.
And there was a lot of information about him.
When I first sat down to write the script, there was, he was locked up in MCC,
New York, actually,
exactly where Michael Dowd from the seven, five had been locked up years
earlier.
Right. And so I sat down and I wrote, um, I wrote him a letter and he was in
awaiting sentencing,
I think at the time, but I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access
to him.
Right. For rightly so, because it would potentially screw up his defense.
But I felt like, you know, I owe it to this guy in some fundamental sense,
if I'm going to tell his story to try to connect with him. And I'm a doc guy,
that's my process,
you know? And so I wrote him a letter and I never heard back. And, but then he
had left this
kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past, you know, he had written
all of these public posts
on the Silk Road website as Dread Pirate Roberts, where he's putting out his
philosophy, his ethos,
his, you know, convictions. And then at the same time, he had been secretly
keeping a journal
long before he had launched Silk Road, all the way through it, up until the
bitter end.
And so when he got busted, they confiscated his laptop. And when they opened up
his laptop,
they had all of his private journal entries. So there was the combination of
his public postings
as Dread Pirate Roberts and the diary entries as Ross Ulbricht. And so while I
didn't have access to
the guy, I had access to his words and who, you know, his, I guess, accidental
self-portrait in
some way or another. And so when we got into, and you're at, to your question
of, of how much of this
is, you know, journalistically accurate. So every piece of voiceover in the
movie that's, that's spoken
by Nick Robinson, who plays Ross Ulbricht, all of that is either taken from the
diary entries
or taken from the public postings as Dread Pirate Roberts. And then all of the
chat logs,
all of the back and forth, the encrypted communications between, you know,
Knob and Dread Pirate Roberts, all of that stuff is taken from the documentary
record.
Because I felt like you have to be true to who this guy is in some sense,
spiritually, you know?
Yeah. Did you communicate with him at all?
No. So what happened was, I, so I couldn't, I couldn't get to, you know, I
wrote him a letter,
never heard back. But what ended up happening was his ex-girlfriend, who's an
Austin, who's here in
Austin, Julia V, who's portrayed in the movie by the actor, actress Alexandra
Shipp, she became a
consultant for it. When I was writing the script, and then when making the
movie, because I felt like I
needed somebody who knew this guy, who loved him, who had an intimate viewpoint
on who he was. And so
she became my kind of source and way in, in an emotional sense, right?
How old was she when all it was going down?
20s, you know, in her 20s. I mean, and that's, and that's kind of...
What year is this?
That's basically 2011 to 2013.
And so, you know, sh