Name: Joe Rogan Experience #633 - Alex Winter
Uploaded: 2015-04-14T00:04:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #633 - Alex Winter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-04-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #633 - Alex Winter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-04-14. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #633 - Alex Winter

Netflix winter. All right, 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, it was a couple
things. 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 late 80s, early 90s in what
was known as the BBS Usenet era. In those days, I was really interested in burgeoning
online communities, people who were 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 just illegal stuff. It was just 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.
Some of them were like parts of like 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 emails, 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 Fanning, Sean Fanning and Sean Parker back in 2000 when Napster 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.
So. Well, that was one of the things that I found interesting about the
documentary initially is that it wasn't it's Silk Road wasn't necessary 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.
And amongst other things that are illegal. But it was more of a community, it
seems, than anything. I've had a message board on my website since 1998. And it's
got millions of posts. And it's just this weird community of like minded, odd
human beings and a lot of really fascinating, intelligent human beings.
And I've had some really great exchanges and interactions with them. And what I
really got from what they were saying in the documentary was like the community
that they had created was in many ways like better than any community any of
them knew in real life.
So it was much more than just drugs are being sold there. We have to shut it
down. It's like if drugs were being sold there, it was a small part of what
that thing was all about.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's true. And I think that that's a very hard
thing for people to understand, you know, and if you're not, I mean, like you're
saying, you got online at that point.
And you started to see in those days, like in the late 90s, that the
communities are beginning to grow on the Internet. And they were really
interesting.
And like 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 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 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 were to mean Napster
wasn't wasn't created for file sharing was created to build community.
The Silk Road in this case, you have a manifesto because you had like 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 are entering this entirely new era of art, of digital stuff, digital
creations, where this is going to be slippery.
You're not going to be able to just like, you know, this guy stole a thousand
CDs and copied them.
We found his CD copier and we know, you know, that this guy's making illegal,
you know, what are those bootleg CDs.
I mean, you used to have those in New York City.
Sure, yeah, all the time.
VHS tapes, you know, of movies that had just come out.
Yeah.
This was a different thing.
Yeah.
This was like the actual digital and then 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 is it isn't black and white.
People have, 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've got one side, the predominant side over there.
You've 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've got those people over there who are saying this is all good.
You've 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, right?
It's too big for most of us to wrap our heads around.
These are huge changes that are afoot, you know.
But what Napster represented wasn't a couple of kids who wanted to create piracy.
Whether you can accept that reality or not, it's true.
You may not like it.
You may feel like the end result of what they did caused X, Y, and Z.
But the reality is, is their 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?
But 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 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 pot or what -- 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 the -- that people can talk to people. The information can go so quickly
now.
Yeah.
And these communities can form and they can say, yeah, I've always thought
these laws are bullshit.
Like, 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.
It's -- I had Paul Stanley on the podcast from KISS.
Yeah.
And he's a great guy. I really enjoyed talking to him.
But he's got this sort of really archaic idea of stealing.
Yeah.
You know, you didn't pay for it. It's stealing.
Yeah.
But it's -- your copy's still there.
Yeah.
You know, like, it's -- it's a different thing.
Yeah.
It's not like someone stole your car.
Right.
Like, and they try to make that -- that sort of comparison.
Yes.
You know, if someone stole your car, they stole your car, right?
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?
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
If you just press a button -- if you see someone driving on the street and say,
"I love that car."
Yeah.
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 -- 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.
Right.
But that doesn't give me a right to take the door off your bathroom.
That's a good point.
You know what I mean?
It's just about anonymity.
We -- as human beings, we deserve privacy and anonymity.
It's a basic human right.
However, most people go deep web -- bad.
They just go right there.
It's just -- it's bad.
It's filled with creeps.
It's filled with child -- with pedophiles and drug dealers.
And it's all bad and we should shut it down.
And with Napster, we saw the same thing, where to this day, people are still
like,
"Ah, 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 do