The Story of Black Market Kingpin Ross Ulbricht + Sam Does an AMA

it created these dopamine brushes where like it sucked it sucked it sucked and then like one of our articles got like a million views and i got so pumped alright sean's not here it's so ben and i are doing this ben producer ben what's up what's up how are you doing tim so this episode is kind of special because i've got people who asked us questions okay should we should we do something yes okay i'll read them okay and all as you're answering them i'll go pick up some of the new ones in case anyone has responded with more stuff on twitter so first one is pretty open pretty generic what do you wanna learn more about in two thousand twenty two in two thousand twenty two i wanna learn more about how to get popular on youtube that's what i'm gonna do and in two thousand twenty two i'm gonna take more adventures wanna do more trips so that's what i'm gonna figure out do you have an answer i do but i actually just wanted to follow on the youtube thing you are self profess wanna be fitness influencer is like that a part of it are you also trying to learn instagram like where's your head out with the i wanna vlog i i wanna keep a diary of my life i think it'd be fun to look back in fifty years and say yeah like you could see for a period of my life that's all in video and i could watch it and see how i behaved i think that'd be really exciting so that's why i wanna do it that's interesting that's oh ahead yours i was just gonna say like i'm pretty much laser focused on my podcast right now and i'm growing it but the other thing that i'm like super interested in and i think is gonna be a big space for the crypto type people going forward is this idea of like startup up cities autonomous cities like kind of building a new way of living from the ground up and people are doing interesting stuff there with there's something called prosper that you've talked about that like deal is just trying to build down somewhere in central america there's p i've talked to those guys a little bit there there's some interesting things going on and i i would like to learn more about that and see what's happening in that scene what are some business related or what what's an idea and trend that you think is over hyped i'll go first i think it's well hop how about this i'm actually gonna say what i think is it's under height because that's what also part the question you know what i think is under height recycling i think it's i think current ways of recycling are over height so did you know that the most most of the you know how like you have a blu in at your home yeah that's bullshit it all gets thrown away and burned they don't almost all of it like the the vast majority like ninety percent of that gets burned and they don't use it the only reason we do that is because it makes us feel good and so we're okay buying more shit and that was and that i believe that this whole recycling thing was it was made popular by a lot of plastic like like big plastic the plastic lob and that's bullshit so i think recycling is over height i think making it actually work is under height i'm very very bullish on that and it's something that i think about all the time i think that's a good one i actually did it i used to work in consulting in the previous life and i i worked on a big project with a waste services provider one of the big ones here in the us and i can tell you that you are absolutely correct about what you do am yes how much how much of it is just thrown away here's the thing the big waste services providers and there are two here in the us they they try to recycle yeah the thing is you actually have to be like really good with your recycling of like you have to wash out your milk carton you know you have to like take out all of the styrofoam that is even the there's little pieces like but then you need like five different bins you need like a plastic one plastic two plastic three glass a glass b now in some areas they will sort it for you right but anyway it's extremely costly it's not energy efficient so it's take it like costs a lot of energy to recycle this stuff so it's like is it worth it from a carbon standpoint anyway and then most of it it's just not worth it because people aren't that good about sorting out their stuff and throwing me way the right way so anyway you you're right about that but i do think there is an interesting space for people who do recycling like if people are willing to confront the fact that it doesn't work then hey can we do some recycling stuff that does work like can we recycle in a different way i think it's an interesting space i always say i'm i always say it should be reduced reuse that's just end there don't care it just reduce reuse yeah i think it's like i think it's tragic that i ordered something from amazon and i get all that packaging it it hurts me i'm like i'm why why is it hurts me just because this is inefficient but it's like i just took this from the environment when i didn't need to yeah yeah absolutely the one i'll say that i think it's over hyped is i don't think it's over hyped but i do think that you know the hype cycle where it goes way up and then you have the trough resolution and then it comes kinda back up i think we're right at like the top of the initial hype cycle for crypto we're gonna hit like a big like the solution period where a lot of people are gonna leave the space and then it will find its footing and find some legitimate uses a few years from now but i think that the the current fe cannot continue forever i think i agree i agree let's answer alright so you're you're twenty million by thirty goal what was the process to come to that number so this person basically when i was like twenty one or nineteen i forget i i said a goal where i wanted to have twenty million dollars liquid by age thirty and the reason why i created that goal was i basically asked a bunch of rich people how much they spend each month and it ranged from like ten thousand to a hundred thousand a month but this one guy whose life i really liked i think he said he said sixty thousand dollars and then a lot of like i went through a lot of monte carlo simulations and what it shows is if you spend only three percent of your net worth per year you will never run out of money and your principal will continue to grow so sixty thousand dollars times twelve is seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars and then three percent of twenty million is around that so three percent times twenty million is six hundred thousand dollars so it's a little bit less and so i i thought twenty million was a nice number because it was close to that sixty thousand dollars a month number and a lot of people think you could spend three point five so that's what that that number changed a little because a lot of people say it's three point five some people say four i budgeted for three and i don't spend anywhere near that i think i spend like eighteen thousand dollars a month do you worry at all about sort of these black swan scenarios of like inflation is bad right now at fifteen percent what if it goes like really out of control do you prepare at all for catastrophic scenarios like that no like the vast majority of my net worth is in large publicly traded companies and real estate no if i'm bullish on america therefore i don't plan on its demise alright do you have another one you wanna do or you want me to go you can go alright how about this one i was just yeah that's what i was gonna ask too okay what what are you most proud of when it comes to my first million to this day when people say they listen to it i'm like really why so i'm i'm shocked that anyone even listens to it whenever i get i get recognized on the street weekly and that is the most proud so i was gonna bring this up but we talked about ross and he said i wanna i want someone to bring up silk grow to me and why i want them to not know that it was me i've heard people talk about it or reference it and they didn't know i was there or i say who i am i'll say i'm sam they don't know anything but then i'll say like oh my last name is par and they go oh wait you're from the podcast i love it and so that is when i'm most proud is when strangers or people i don't know say that they listen i'm most proud of that can i tell a story that i was gonna tell off the top of the show and i forgot it relates to what you just said so i i told you like a little bit about this but we didn't ama together about podcasting i was talking about how to take over the world and a little bit about my first million you were most talking about my first million so we're talking about the group of a number of people on trends about podcasting and just at the beginning the the host the the moderator asked their to type in where they were from and one person said alexandria virginia which is where i live so i just sent him a quick dm and i said hey you're also in alexandria you subscribe to trends you're probably my kind of person let's go get lunch sometime this person said person will call him john not gonna share identity quickly john says yeah sounds great i'll dm you on twitter let's go get one sometime the next day i'm flying to where i am now utah which is where my in laws live and we get on the plane and i'm there with my wife and with my daughter who's won and so we had aisle and a middle seat and so this guy gets on he has a window or no we had a a middle and a window yeah we had a middle a window and his guy had the aisle so i say to the guy hey would you mind taking the window seat so that we're not always crawling over you to to go use aisle to walk my daughter around and the guy says sure no problem and super nice about it so we all sit down and he turns to me and goes i'm sorry are you ben wilson and i immediately felt cool first time anyone's ever said me and i said yeah and he said i'm john like i'm the guy that you messaged yesterday on that ama and we were sitting next to each other in the same row on this airplane so sonya is my first time being recognized and just like one of the most insane coincidence i've ever hadn't happened what did he say so he's a huge fan we talked to just about like what he's got going on he had a bunch of questions with the podcast about what i'm doing but he's he's an he's a really cool guy it's really interesting when you when that happens because you you're like wait you're you're smarter than me you listen to our podcast what the fuck why it is wild yeah let's let's wrap up at number six and seven how's that yeah sounds good what's the most fun you've ever had in your professional career and why i don't know what's yours i've got two answers one is one time i worked for a start that did like event management technology like they did sort of the software backbone for ces if you know what that is but so i would just go around i a single time go around to a bunch of different like major conferences and events and that was just like really fun from a fun standpoint of just like being in different cities all over the world and was just like being on vacation all the time while i was working i really like that that's good mine was when i first started the hustle and i was the only employee blogging and trying to game reddit it and get all the traffic was the most fun i had because i it created these dopamine brushes where like it sucked it sucked it sucked and then one of our articles got like a million views and i got so pumped and so that was the most fun where i was like just writing every single day in order to get views i think that was the most fun okay should we go with finish up with number seven yeah so i your cursor is over so you gotta read it oh sorry name couple of celebrities or high profile business people you'd feel genuinely nervous about meeting i was when i at tim ferris i was a little nervous but i'm not nervous anymore i would say when we had andrew hub in aerial h hawaii on the podcast those two folks i was more nervous to talk to than anyone else i will i would absolutely say with ariel you definitely were for like days and weeks in advance i didn't notice so much with andrew but i i definitely believe you yeah and i don't know i i i haven't met as many rich and famous powerful people as you so i you know my list is long like a lot of people all of them that's my answer no we haven't we've had like some famous people reach out and say they like so like when sean sean's not buddies with hassan hassan i like that wasn't that was a big deal for me like some or like we've had a handful of like famous people reach out and say they listen like really famous like tier one after famous and i found that to be incredibly under overwhelming when i met lance i'm armstrong so basically i grew up cycling and i'm a massive lance armstrong fan and one day i get this email and it's a picture of our office in austin and we had like a sign on the window and it said hey that's so cool i didn't realize you guys were in austin and the gmail sender said lance armstrong and he signed it just like l and i hit reply and i go i don't believe your lance i'm armstrong here's my phone number call me to prove it and i get a call and he goes hey man what's going on it's lance and it was lance art armstrong i was like what like in my mind of like the top tenth famous people i could meet he was like in the top three i was a huge lance fan or still am and he goes what's up dude i was like nothing you but like i was so shocked and eventually i we just talk on the phone and he goes you wanna come over like yeah i would like to come over you goes cool come over for breakfast next week so i fly out there and hang out with them and now we're friendly and we've hung out and got to dinner a couple of times and i still am nervous around him that's super wild it was it's a crazy crate it that was the craziest like the celebrity style moment were you nervous to meet rob at deer deck at all no not at all that's interesting i didn't even didn't wanna do that podcast i was like why we gonna talk to rob like he just a skateboard like he doesn't do anything interesting and then on the podcast as he totally blew my mind but at first i said why are we talking to rob d like he doesn't do any interesting business stuff yeah alright something interesting happened recently so there's this guy named ross ul am i saying that right you think i think so it could be but i think it's well ross we're gonna come ross mostly he not allegedly but this is the fact there's a lot of alleged going on here but this is the fact that i'm gonna say he started this thing called silk road and about eight years ago i believe three thousand days ago and i i say three thousand days for a certain reason three thousand days ago he was arrested and sent to prison for life and basically silk road got famous because they had something like if you do like today's dollar it basically made bitcoin popular because it was like ebay for drugs and something like ten billion dollars went through it in only two years and he since he started it and he was allegedly hired a bunch of murder for hires and for the screen silk road and for the murder for hires he was sentenced to life in prison and he tweeted out the other day basically this really cool status and whether you think he's a murderer well he didn't actually murder anyone but whether you think he tried to kill people or not and he's a bad guy or not it's incredibly interesting content of him tweeting about being in prison and he somehow has access to twitter and he is able to talk about it and then he has a medium like a blog where he's he blogs about death and prison and it's incredibly fascinating so because he just tweeted this as on december seventeenth he tweeted today is my three three thousand day in prison at this point i feel numb to it i forgotten what freedom feels like but when i let myself feel like i am today i just feel pain in a deep longing to be part of the world again so like this like super deep stuff today what i wanted to do was with bed tell the story of ross explain why this story is incredibly interesting and almost like what we can learn from business and leadership about it and we're gonna try and like make an argument like we'll try to dissect the arguments of is he guilty or is he not guilty and i wanna preface this podcast that's worth a few things the first finding unbiased information on this topic has been incredibly hard it's been incredibly hard because the people who don't who are ross side are like these bitcoin bros who love bitcoin and they're incredibly passionate about it and then of course there's his family who isn't who who who says he didn't do what he's accused of and finding information has been hard and also the third maybe biggest reason is there was a ton of corruption in this case where a lot of police officers or a lot of detectives were arrested because there was so much corruption in this case so i wanna say that like we're using research that is likely biased and i think i'm biased about the situation i had a strong opinion about it so i'll try i think what we should try to do is say what's fact and what's not although might be hard i think it's a little i don't know where you kinda came out on it for me it was like really easy to put myself in ross shoes so i found myself naturally drifting towards opinions that exon him and i had to kinda check myself because i want him to be innocent if that makes sense one hundred percent and that's what i have at the bottom of this of our show is for us to to talk about like what our opinion is and one of my points is it's easy for guys like you and i you know white dudes who have our good intention and who i have access to the internet and like imagine ourselves because that's what this guy at ross which we're gonna to talk about he looked he was like a tall good looking guy and it's easy for us to imagine that were just like him but like when i when i live in san francisco there was these guatemala islands on the corner and they would sell heroin the people on the street and i was so angry at them i'm like man these kinda should be arrested what the hell and i caught myself thinking like well ross do it and i'm like no that's fucking racism like you gotta like it's gotta be the same either the way you just because he's like this like inter just because he's doing on the internet you know what i mean so anyway we'll talk about that so let's start start with the background do you wanna go first ben sure so he starts in in year old stopping grounds he starts in austin he was kind of a science guy in college he studied i wanna say it was something like neuroscience or something like that but what was more of a science guy before he decides that he wants to go down more of the business road and so has this kind of flash of an idea and he he kept a diary which turned out to be not a great idea for him if you keep a diary keep the bad stuff out keep yourself covered but he wrote down basically everything in his diary he wrote quote the idea was to create a website where people could buy anything and honestly with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them he'd been studying the technology for a while but needed a business model and strategy so he kinda goes into his bunker i read like think from his girlfriend at the time that said he became increasingly withdrawn and was just like in his room twenty four seven programming coming up with the business model coming up with his whole thing for what would become silk road and silk road is this essentially a marketplace where you could buy or sell anything initially they do end up putting some restrictions on it like no child porn you had other stuff written there what else could you not do on silk road no fake degrees and no counterfeit goods but there is times where that those rules kinda got blurred because someone was like shall we have cyanide pretty much the only reason people use cyanide for for killing themselves or killing other people should we allow that and they ended up allowing so there was a little bit of gray area of what they allowed and what they didn't allow and before he started the silk road he had an online business called good wagon where he sold books and it didn't go so hot like the peak it made in revenue was like ten grand and one month and so his profit was very little and at the at the beginning of two thousand eleven in that same diary he wrote well basically he he he basically admits everything so about starting it so he goes in two thousand eleven i am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what i have ever experienced before silk road is going to become a phenomenon phenomenon i can never say that word and at least one person will tell me about it unknowingly or unknowingly that i am its creator and so he talks about that and even in his linkedin his linkedin says that what did it say where'd did it go oh sorry his linkedin he wrote i wanna use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of corey i can't ever say that word together or what's wrong with me use how many read this for me ben use economic theory as a mean to abolish the use of core i can't coercion here all origin on his linkedin page ross wrote that he wanted to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind so he's basically like acknowledging all this and so what he does is he learns how to program i believe he just used like the most basic coding languages ever and builds this website on this thing called to to is basically it's it's basically a different version of of chrome so it's a web browser it was developed in the early two thousands by the us navy because they wanted a away for officials who are in north korea or in china to be able to use the internet and not be tracked and so they created this browser and so i remember when i was a little younger when silk road was round i downloaded tour and i went to the silk roads website and you had to like type in this like we all these weird numbers in order to find it and it popped up and it was amazing like it it was like i couldn't believe it this was a thing and ninety nine percent of well i don't know if it's ninety nine percent but most people who used it were using it to buy weed essentially so like there was all this stuff around the edges but the research that they have done shows that people were generally going to it to buy small amounts of weed not like big drug dealers but just kind of people like sam who were like oh cool you can buy anything on here i will buy weed i never bought anything on it just for the record hustle we did an article we did an article all about this and and i had friends that bought rita from it and they were like kinda squares they were like not people they i didn't know that they were like they they don't fit in your head they're not like a drug user or you know but they bought rita and adderall on the silk road and i used to go to it i never bought anything from it but i would go it just like i can't believe this is a thing and right when it launched he basically grew some in the book the american king pin he they said that he grew mushrooms and put it on the website in order to get the initial sales and then he somehow ga found it like just a few months after starting it create created an article about it on go dot com which at the time was one the most popular sites in the web and that's kinda when it blew up and he you know you mentioned his kind of early comment about like manifesting the growth of this thing he also comes up around this time with his mon so the system admin who we now know to be ross wrote who is silk road i am silk road the market the person that enterprise everything i need a name and then he said my new name is dread pirate roberts which do you know where dread pirate roberts comes from a little bit but tell me it's from the princess bride so it's the the kind of the main character wesley goes and and gets kidnapped by the dr pirate roberts and then later it turns out he is the dread pirate roberts and that dread pirate roberts is actually like more of a position and so once one pirate dies someone else becomes dread pirate roberts and that needs important because that's like the whole crux of the case which is are there many people doing this for just one right so in the name is seated this idea that there could be many people who are dread pirate roberts it like kind of hints at that having said that there is don't know if you wanna go through it but there's like pretty compelling evidence that he was at least the main person who was dr pirate roberts let's let's do that but just not yet let's first get i wanna set the background for finish up we'll wrap up with what silk road was and like ross background so around this time this was in february of two thousand twelve so we're about i think a year after launch he starts blogging on the silk road and you can go and read some of his writing his writing is very good he's a very his character this character of ross and this character of dread pirate roberts it's very romantic and it creates like a cult of personality and he writes things about how we need to stop funding the state with our tax dollars and direct our productive energies into the black market and it says money is powerful and it's gonna take power to affect the changes i wanna see and it's all about how like people need to have their own rights to decide what they wanna do with their bodies things like this like very traditional libertarian things traditional what's it called the austrian school of economics it's like a a way of thinking it's very libertarian and he even writes we what we are doing will have rip effects for generations to come like he uses these words that are like he sounds like a a dictator where and you wanna get behind them and he sounds like he's furthering this like romantic and admirable cause and in some ways i am i'm on board with that because i am on board at bitcoin but the idea of like you know we don't wanna be controlled by a central bank things like that i'm on board with it and he does a really good job of using that language it's amazing to to go back and look at it with the amount of value that was flowing through silk road at the time because bitcoin hadn't had its moment yet the way it has now and so you can go back and look at the amount that flowed into dread pie roberts wallet and if you just held it it's now worth like five billion dollars or more or more yeah yeah so yeah so this it's it's booming as you said go picks it up there there's a lot of money flowing through it and after only two years of doing this he gets arrested and the way that it gets arrested is is is pretty amazing so basically in like two thousand and ten he writes into a forum stack stack overflow a popular the development forum form developer form and he goes how do i connect to a tour hidden service using the curl and ph p and then he he lists his website as ross ul at gmail and so he's like he posts that which that in itself isn't interesting but what they noticed is that immediately after posting that he changes his username from his name ross sole to frosty and the reason that's also interesting is the very time the very time anyone used the word or reference the silk road it was for a username in a forum called the sc dot org and frosty that username he writes something like hey has anyone seen this cool new thing called silk road where you can buy and sell anything anonymously so he post that and then in another thread using frosty that same username he posts something saying like i'm working on this site that helps people sell anything i need help dm me if interested you know he he says something like that and so that's actually how they like catch him and they noticed that this guy ross previously he had gotten in a little bit of trouble because homeland security opened a package a few months prior and they found like twenty different fake ids all with his picture and different addresses on there and they went to his home and they busted them and he said he bought him them like as a gag and so he actually got away with it he didn't get in trouble but they go this is kind of interesting the guy has a little bit of a background and they end up like stalking all his social profiles and they noticed that he's talking a lot of libertarian stuff on his linkedin he says what he does and is what i said earlier about very libertarian vibe he watches a ton of libertarian and bitcoin related videos on youtube and comments on them and that's basically how they catch him and so what they do is they find out that he lives in glen park and i a story about that because glenn park is where i live he lived right down the street for me when he was arrested they found out that he goes lives in glen park and the police stake out his house and the what they're able to do is they're able to track him because throughout this process which i'm gonna talk about and undercover agent an agent went undercover and be defended him in basically became an employee of silk road additionally they had arrested other employees of the silk road and i'm gonna tell you how in a minute and they were having conversations with ross because about the whole time and what they noticed when they were tracking him in glen park they noticed that when dp is saying he's gonna get off the computer so when and he tells his employees like hey guys i'm done for the day and closes his computer they notice that ross goes out for a walk and so they'll just be able to catch like okay whenever dp logs off ross is out walking around and so what they do is they go to the library because ross goes to library he works out of the live the library this library was basically like eight houses up from my house and he goes to the library and he logs them to his computer and what the investigators do is they have two of their guys go behind him ross is sitting at a table with his computer open working on the silk road they have two investigators go behind him and kind of act like two homeless people getting in a fight and ross turns his back to his computer to see what's going on and someone swoop in and grabs the laptop from out of them and then another person tackle them and they rush the laptop down to the van waiting outside and they take screenshots of it and then they down the the data and he was logged in to the silk road admin account and everything that they ever want is there and they could easily see how much bitcoin he had they could see everything and at the time he had a hundred and forty four thousand bitcoin which added peak sixty k it's like eight point five billion dollars that he had and so they caught all of this and when they logged on to the computer they find his diary where he's like logging all of this interesting stuff going on he's got like a a it an escape plan about what he's gonna do if he gets caught i mean it's just all there yeah and it wasn't just so they have this physical tail on him and they're able to like using this kind of shoe leather approach connect him to drip out roberts but they also had did you read how many federal agents they had in trading silk road no do you wanna guess i don't know if fifty that's really close to sixty that sixty federal agents who were on there doing like fake sales or or fake buys and buses and a lot of them weren't even talking to each other right right and and a couple of them and this will come into it later we're like pocket money were we're essentially like when they were busting people they were just like well no one really understands bitcoin so if it just ends up in my wallet it's fine and one of ends up going to prison for that so well let's let's talk about that in two seconds so but first ross is arrested for doing that and everyone shocked and i'm gonna i'll tell a story about that it's two seconds but everyone's shocked and eventually after a very short amount of time he goes on trial and he gets locked up and he they find him guilty and the judge sends sentences him to like two life terms plus forty years and so the verdict and then they they appeal it and they go to the supreme court and they just say nope we're all we're holding this up so at this point very very very very likely he is in there forever and nothing will ever happen and now like this is where a lot of the drama begins and the reason why a lot of the drama begins is because there's a lot of debate over whether there was multiple people as dread pirate roberts and the debate is if there is multiple people did he commit the hits so throughout this process there was four or five different times where someone emailed him like an employee and try to blackmail i'm saying things like or they would steal money from him or they would say i'm gonna reveal your identity if you don't give me blank and so ross hired someone or dr pirate roberts hired someone to go and kill these four or five people but the person he hired was an fbi agent and they went to the people's house and they knocked in the door and they go bitch we know you're up to no good we're supposed to kill you you better cooperate with us and they take fake pictures of them killing these people and in exchange the people spill the beans on everything they know and that's how they get access to be able to track him so well yeah no so to he was never convicted of this in fact he was never even charged with putting out these hits and that's because they probably didn't that didn't have very solid case it was gonna be very difficult to prove that he was actually the one that did it but it really seems like the reason they wanted to put him away for so long was because they were pretty sure that he did it they just couldn't prove it the judge says basically i need to make an example out of you she goes we need to put an example that anyone who creates the silk road to this is what's gonna happen and the prosecution actually told the judge we want twenty years and she goes no no we're doing life and they gave them life which is wild and they never actually pursued the murder charges because or the murder for higher charges but she does say in her reasoning for the sentencing that she takes that into account and she assumes that he does it which i don't know like anything i don't know much about the law i don't know if that's considered kosher or not but that's what happened it's it seems legally suspect to me that's something that you were not convicted of could count towards your sentencing yeah i don't know i i i i do think so okay do we wanna jump into some of the implications of this and some of our conclusions so one thing i will say that scares me a little bit is essentially he's being put away for life for something that they couldn't prove he did like well that what i believe the charge was a bunch of drug charges but then there's this if i'm not mistaken there's this thing called the king pin the king pin act something like that we're basically in the forties and fifties they were trying to arrest these guys like a capo and they're like shit all we can get them for is like tax evasion but we know they murdered people and so they created this act that basically says that they can put these guys behind prison for a long time even if they they don't know that they did it but they know that they hit were were involved in so many things correct and so i i guess how you feel about that is gonna determine a lot about how you feel about this that crimes that they can't get them for they just like you said they kinda add up these tax evasion charges until they say alright well we we couldn't get you for murder but you're gonna be life behind bars anyways for tax evasion it's it's pretty wild and let me tell you a quick story and then we're gonna go into like let's let's have an argument about why we think he's not the one and why we do think he is the one and i will try hard of dub both but so i've told the story to you ben a couple times i've still on the podcast but since we're talking about it already i'll bring it up so around two thousand and twelve i went to a party in san francisco and i was single at the time and i saw this girl and i was flirting with this girl and this very charismatic tall guy comes in and kinda steals the girl from me and i wasn't like mad you know we were just flirting but i was in awe of him like i was charmed by his energy he was like nice enough and he was good looking and confident and he stole her and i like looked up who this guy was after for the party and i was like oh his james ross o'brien or and i looked him up on linkedin and i wouldn't we weren't friends but we had that one run and he lived on someone told me he lived on the street for me and glen park and if you're in san francisco glenn park was a neighborhood that's a little bit more family oriented and so if you're young pretty much no other young people live out there and i was one the young guys and so i heard he live there i was like oh that's i gotta a holler this guy one day well i i see that there was a big commotion at the library in glen park i lived on the street from the library and i would hang out there and i look online and it's this guy i knew ross had been arrested and it was four starting silk road and i was in awe i'm like oh my god and so we went online i and went and found all the pictures we had together at that party and we i took screenshots of all of them and then we had to delete all of them because you know we everyone was nervous we're like so after this party when you look him up like what did what did people think what was the public face of what he was doing like what did you think he did who did you think he he had so i think his linkedin like the description said what it set up there i think it also said that he was a currency trader or some type of like currency i i don't know anything about that world of finance but it made it it it was interesting bitcoin wasn't that popular at the time and in fact the day after i told my friend billy i go billy my this dude i know was arrested for silk road your dad likes bitcoin right billy his dad was tim draper who eventually goes on to buy the bitcoin he i think he was a billionaire already but he bought the bitcoin that ross was arrested with because they the government auction it off and that bitcoin is like worth like five billion dollars and he bought it from the government for like twenty million or something like that and i go billy what this is crazy and he goes yeah my my dad's and at the time he didn't know that his dad was gonna buy it but he was like yeah my dad like loves bitcoin he thinks it's like the future and i was like alright that sounds cool i don't know anything about it but if this is just too gonna be true like i gotta like you're telling me you think it's gonna be popular and i the guy got arrested i'm just gonna buy some and that's how i bought it and and i bought bitcoin for my family that year for christmas so you're if you're were attaching a percentage chance to it what do you think the chances are that he was the one who put out the hits for hire seventy percent so you think he probably did but you're not totally sure so yeah let's get into it so there's the problem with this case is that there's a large amount of information out there that's really good for both sides and it's really hard to know who to trust and so i don't know i what's not bait is that he started it the point is like when did he give it up and so let me explain to you why i think it's suspect so he had this friend named richard richard bates and rich he tried to recruit richard to come work at a silk road when he first started it and richard's like no i'm not of that man that's illegal eventually ross wrote to him and said alright i sold the site but in the diary he wrote i've been lying to my friends and telling them when i sold it so that has happened a a a bunch of different times and it's hard what and what we forgot to mention was throughout this case there's like three or four different fbi agents or like dea agents who are convicted and go to prison because they started talking with ross and getting into bitcoin and they eventually like started feeding him information about what the feds were doing and they started stealing bitcoin and they were locked up and sent a prison for this and so there's a massive amount of corruption going on here but you could say and his parents say because there was so much corruption we can't trust the entire case i actually think there can be corruption and it can also be true for example o j simpson mark fu i think planted that glove so you know the the if it don't fit you must quit they were they found this glove in o j simpson thing and but they're were like why is his glove here and like i think mark fu planted it because he was racist but also o j killed that lady right you know what i i think a conspiracy can exist and also the guy's guilty yeah i think so one of the big points of of debate is did anyone else have access to j pirate roberts it seems clear that other people at least at times a few other admins did have access but there probably weren't multiple dp if that makes sense like he was dr pirate roberts but maybe some other people had limited access for a short amount of time the other like question is did once the fbi and the dea had access to his laptop and had access to dr pirate roberts it's could they go back and edit messages in order to make them support their case essentially and he argued that they did and there are some people who were involved with with silk road who basically say yeah i went back and looked at my messages after the fbi had access us to ross laptop and like my old messages are totally whack i didn't say any of that stuff now they might have reason to say that stuff anyway but that that is an argument yes but there's things like that which make me question it and then there's things like that so listen to this this is a post that ross wrote there's been more than one occasion where i've wanted to quit without getting into details the stress of being dp is sometimes overwhelming what keeps me going is the understanding that what we are doing here is more is more than ends more than my more important than just my insignificant little life i believe what we are doing will have rip effects throughout many generations there's gonna be a shift in how human beings organized and relate to another one one another i've have gone through the mental of this i've gone through the mental exercise of spending a lifetime in prison and dying for this cause i've let the fear pass through me with and with clarity commit myself fully to the mission and values outlined in the silk road charter so he writes things like that and i think so are you just you're lying to all of us well and a little bit it's like if you believed in something that strongly in what he's saying is like this glorious revolution then would you would you be willing to kill for something that's that important and definitely yeah i mean it sounds like the kinda rhetoric that maybe maybe so let's talk about some more evidence that shows that he that he didn't do this so there's no doubt he admitted that there's this great website called free ross and i'm not saying i actually agree with it but if it's called free ross and then they have a post called like the true story and they someone on the on his team wrote all the this really long blog post and that has all evidence citing everything that they said and basically in that ross has admitted he goes yeah i started it but i handed it over someone a hacker came to me and he said like i figured out how your site works i'm gonna get into it because of this error you made otherwise you should just sell it to me and so he does or that's what he they say the story is he sells it to the guy who started mount go do you know what his name is i'm looking i'm trying to look it up right now so he sells us to the guy basically mount go in two thousand and twelve and was in two thousand eleven two thousand ten was coinbase based but back then eventually this guy though gets locked up and goes to prison because mount got gets gets hacked and he kinda knew about it and so he's kind of a fucking crook i mean this guy's a crook hard core but what the police say in the fed say they say that silk road was registered on a domain service owned by this guy and that most of the transactions that were were working with silk road went through mount go and it made sense for the mount go ceo to wanna own silk rope because it increased the price of bitcoin and made them more valuable and so that's a huge accusation here mark ke is yes the is the name so that's what a lot of people so a lot of people think well he actually wasn't it and then they they go well why did why was ross on on silk road when he got arrested they say because this guy hired ross as a freelancer after he's sold it for help and multiple people had access to it and so they say yeah he was helping him run silk road when he got arrested but he's not the guy who ordered the the murder for hire or did a lot of the other stuff yeah i read i met a guy the other day who lost twenty million dollars in the mount go hack she and that guy the mount go guy he's a french guy he spent time in prison for doing a bunch of bad stuff in japan so i think that guy s it it is sort of a just so story though that like oh yeah i was totally out of it but i was doing this one last freelancing gig you guys happened to catch me at the exact moment when i just happened to log in for one last time just to help this guy out it is it does stretch c agility a little bit it does but there's so many things in the story and we're only touching about a little bit of it the there's a book called american ping king pin there's so much stuff in this story though that is like it's hard to believe is true but it is in fact true like basically when ross started this in two thousand ten eleven he was like a happy go luck ish like oh you know i'm down on my luck i'm gonna try this and then within eighteen months you see his tone changed to like being this like dom we're gonna take over the world and further this caused type of guy and this is just like i mean this is it's a movie just how this guy could do it any he add the good looks and the charisma so it's hard to know what to believe because there's a lot of unbelievable stuff it's true yeah exactly and also add to the fact that by virtue of what he's trying to do most of it is secretive by design so it is like hard to unravel and unpack what is true what is not because there's intentionally obscure and and so i don't and then add that it is just so weird though to me that like multiple federal agents multiple multiple federal agents on this case get arrested and do and do time do hard time for corruption and one guy story one guy who did it i think his name was karl force i think he got sentenced to seventy six months so like what's that like six years he basically you can go and read his chats and i think that he like fell in love with ross and this idea like like fell in love with the idea of like this this mission and he would he would say like dude you're gonna get arrested i'm gonna get fired from this i'm gonna for this i think that like he at first he wanted to make money but because this is such a romantic like idea of over overthrow the government and like the little guys are winning and we're doing this all and we're the down go they all bonded together and it was when i was reading this i was like i wish i was part of this and so i understand so this guy knob he that was his username carl forces username on silk road he just did it for fun and just a learn and then he realized like he got into it so i think it was a combination of greed so he eventually stole from people of greed but also i think that they just got caught up in the into classification of all this because when you're doing something feels like there's no consequences when you're building something online it's like well this is just fake like there's no consequences yeah so let's talk about how big this was so the silk road even though it had a massive impact on bitcoin and society and things like that it was only around i think for two years and so and let me see if i have some stats so between there was a period between may and july where one point two million messages were sent on the platform when he was arrested he had a hundred and forty four thousand bitcoin which at its peak is like eight point five billion dollars and keep in mind he was only it's like ebay you only take like a ten percent fee so that's like not including the that's not the transactional volume so in two thousand and thirteen they say that it was doing more than seven million in income so dp the that was his his his annual revenue or his aunt so there's with these businesses there's gross merchandise revenue like or total transaction volume which is like if your rebates how much goods are going through but then there's like how much the actual company makes because they only take percent fee and his ten percent fee added up at the time he was making seven million dollars of coin and if you if you bring that out to today's prices that means he was making around five billion dollars a year already in year two and there's a bunch of interesting things about this the first is that he was doing all remotely without knowing the identity of his coworkers so eventually hires like freelancers but they and he like makes him do certain things like sent them his their id and stuff like that and but he had like a team and he didn't know it at all who they were and it was all remotely that's incredibly interesting they built something that big that fast that that way and second he didn't know how to code he was learning to code as he was going yeah that is that is kind of mind blowing it is interesting that he's able to do it with this remote team that he never met but like half of them ended up trying to ex right yes yeah so maybe a cautionary tale there in terms of who you work with why like you well sure but it was a productive working relationship other than that huge thing so if it's like a thing where there's like where it's like well no like we're you're we're selling like bottles of soda like i can call the police on you like it sound like i'm afraid to call the police on you about this thing totally the numbers by the way so in terms of no this is like dea estimates so they say one point two billion dollars worth of illegal drug transactions to place is that at the time of bitcoin price in two thousand thirteen yes not current day price that is at the time price so then i i think bitcoin when he was arrested was worth around eighty or ninety dollars and at its peak it was sixty thousand so so what's that you multiply it by six thousand yeah it's a lot of money a lot a lot of money in in today's value so one point two billion dollars forty six million of that is marijuana seventeen point four is cocaine eight point nine is heroin then how much billion death one point two billion in in time money total moved oh my gosh i can't even my calculator i'm like struggling to even like it's hard to even read those numbers it's basically like seven hundred and eighty billion dollars that's wild it's crazy right it's crazy like the the how big this is i would love to see some numbers i don't know if you have i don't have them of like of what percentage of bitcoin transactions back then and even up till now took place on silk road it's crazy so the reason why they suspected it was mount go was when they started it accounted for like seventy five percent of mount go business so let's talk about why this story is so fascinating so the first reason is like there's just like a lot of like drug sex and rock and roll like this is like we're we're into that no problem in admitting it the second reason is that for a lot of like white and nerdy tech internet guys of which both of us are that this guy ross is incredibly relatable we look at them and we're like oh i could see myself doing that maybe not going that far but like i it i in in some regard i would say we're en of him we're like oh my man he had the courage to like do this epic thing because it doesn't seem like there's any bad consequences to what he was doing even though it's not realistic but that's how it feels and it's also like it tug on your hearts strings a little bit of to look at a guy who you're like yeah he's kinda like me and he's never gonna breathe the free breath again for the rest of his life like it's just hard to digest that that like because look let's take for granted that he did calling these hits right like it feels like someone who just really got caught up and got really carried away and i know like we both had to check ourselves like that's not really an excuse that's not fair that's incredibly unfair it's incredibly unfair to to people other people who do get put away for these kinds of things but it is like easy to to relate to and to excuse if you're someone us who who has an easy time putting yourself in issues another reason why this story is incredibly interesting and it's this is the part that hurts which is that it feels like ross life is like a wasted life so this guy was like kind of i wouldn't say it was a genius but he created something amazing and it only lasted two years and now he's in prison forever and it's just like a total waste that's why i feel angry about this i'm like man guy was so smart yet had it going for what the fuck man now we can't do anything yeah and also i feel like his life is a little bit of a waste and silk road is a little bit of a waste like you know obviously some really terrible stuff happened on it i think and i don't know how much i agree with like hardcore heroin and stuff moving but like at the same time i don't know if you're if you are someone who's has a little bit of a libertarian street you're kinda like well shouldn't there be room for something where people can like do stuff outside of the all seeing eye of of the government you know so i went through the same battle as well i can concern myself to be aligned with a lot of libertarian stuff and i realized i'm not a true libertarian because i don't want drugs to be legal and if i don't want them to be legal in real life like i live in san francisco and i would see these guys shooting heroin all the time i found a dead body at my office once i'd i ever tell you that no so i was at my office i got in early at like eight thirty and there's oftentimes people sleeping at our door and i would nudge them with my foot i like hey can you you gotta move please i got my employees are coming you can't lay in our doorway and i did that and the person was i did at this time the person was dead from drugs and we would see shit like that all the time i live in soma and i would see the drug dealers they were allowed to be there i knew who they were i could tell you who they were i know i knew a little bit of the background i would like here i'm talking and i was so angry at them i was like these guys are the worst for our society they're only hurting people this is not good and i so that's when i changed i was like i don't want heroin to be legal i don't want this to be legal this is not good and i was so mad at these guys and then i found myself romantic romanticized ross so much and i had to check myself and say this is wrong it's it's wrong on both sides if if i don't like these these these gang bang selling this shit i can't also think that ross is innocent or shouldn't shouldn't suffer yeah absolutely i get what you're saying i mean i'm not a true libertarian either but i don't know i it's just like i can't even think of a specific use case for it but just the idea of there should be a place that isn't owned does that make sense appeals yeah yeah yeah i agree that that's why well that's another reason why we like him so much is because we like his intentions were interesting yes so you did your research for a little while what is your opinion on if he's guilty or not well on a bunch of different stuff there's actually a lot that i want your opinion nine okay so we we we you you believe that he started it obviously he admitted that do you think that he was running at the entire time yes so then that means you think that he ordered those hits i do i maintain that there's possibility that that no that that at least the chat logs were massage in order to make it look more open and shut man i like i think that a person would do that the problem that i have with a lot of conspiracies is when many people are involved in something keeping a secret is impossible keeping a secret is very very very hard if there's three or four people involved particularly government official government officials it seems like keeping that type of secret is so freaking hard so if that did happen there had to be more people involved and did did there though i mean i guess like would one person risk their career just multiple people did that's the thing you know mobile did they did to make money yes most of them yeah what do you have to gain by changing this just a guy goes to jail i don't care about him the person that much well you gotta realize though that for some of these prosecutors and for some of these agents like this is a career making thing but like i'm the guy who busted ross and sent them to jail drug king pin billions of dollars worth of transactions like you're you're kinda made right after that right so yes i do think they had something to gain from it a little i don't know i don't know that i would assign a more than fifty percent chance of that actually happened but i think i like to maintain like a a thirty to forty percent chance that maybe something like that coulda could happen do you think that he deserves life in jail no well if it i don't know i guess yeah if he did try to call hits on people multiple times then yes someone who does that does deserve to does deserve life in jail yeah i guess so the reason why i'm a little suspect if at first i thought that's fair but then i realized no one died no one actually died and for murder a lot of murder for hires particularly if if no one dies they don't get life because you you know they get twenty years and so it is crazy that he got life and there's also a lot of cases i listen to a ton of crime stuff where people actually kill someone and they don't get life and they are can get out after twenty five years and so you have to ask and i've spent time and prisons working with a lot of people i've met inmates who killed their mom or killed their killed someone in their family killed their wife and they get out after twenty years because they've proven that they're rehab and when they did it they were like a young ish and they're like we think you could deserve a second chance did you read the chat logs at all well there so that's another thing about this case is there's like so many chat logs like it there's like thousands and thousands of pages so which ones i've been talking about specifically the ones where he he supposedly orders the the murder for hire yeah who was pretty cal about it yes but the other side who i believe did turn out to be a federal agent is that correct yeah is like kind of drawing him into it a little bit like a little bit yeah of like man this is such a problem i wish there was a way for it to not be a problem you know and is like definitely trying to move him in that direction i i think ross says like let's just beat them up and the guy replies with i don't know if that was gonna do i don't know if that's gonna solve this yes which is like pretty shady especially if you think that's a federal agent like ma'am why are you trying to bait this kid into ordering a hit so my opinion is i think that there's so the thinking about like trials though like you have to you have to paint a picture of a shadow of a doubt i have a shadow of a doubt but i think that it's likely that it was him i do think that he deserves time in prison ten to twenty years just for the drug charges and for creating silk road but i think it's kind of bullshit that that the judge sentence him for the murder for hire or cook that into account without actually trying him for it so i think that's a little nonsense so i my opinion is yeah he's totally guilty just like wow much stuff is it guilty of and in my opinion it's enough to get ten to twenty but if they wanted to do life they really should have they had to charge him with a murder for hire improve that it was it happened yeah do you think so it's like early two thousand twelve it's like right in the middle of silk road gh gang bus do you think that there is any and there are sixty dea agents in trading it they're on his case they're like monitoring his house do you think there's anything that he could have done to have either like gone legit somehow and like turned it into a marketplace for things that were maybe questionable but not totally illegal or is there a way he could've have just remained undetected and and outs the feds i think there's a world where he could have gotten away with it if he bailed i think he could have bailed and gotten a man like there's a lot of examples like white bulge you know white bulge yeah he was basically lead the character that robert d n is a rep d n in the departed what's is jack nicholas jack nicholson which yeah yeah that's right he the gangster in boston he got enough loot he got like the equivalent of like fifteen million dollars and he goes i'm out and he left boston and he moved to santa monica and he lived there relatively peacefully for like thirty years and then he was arrested when he was like ninety and i think there's a world where like ross could have done something like that where he could live for a little while maybe the rest of his life undetected if he just stayed with a low profile but i think a guy like him and myself included i'd rather probably die than like shut up forever yeah is is there a way he do you think he could've have like kept it running from some small island in the caribbean or off the coast of africa or something like that well aren't there still sites like this are there i don't think the the also is i'm pretty sure there's nothing at that scale i don't know i haven't actually researched it but but for where for the hustle we had a guy talk about using medicinal lsd to help him with his depression and we did an article where he just showed how he buys it online and i actually saw him by it and it was on a a a competitor well i i think a lot of this is changing just in that the the drug war or the idea of a drug war has taken a hit and so a lot of people are less gun h about enforcing this kind of stuff and so there are a lot of places now where you can you i i don't lsd that probably does have to be pretty black market but there's some like gray market stuff where you can buy rooms and and other kinda lighter psychedelics yeah for sure and it might be illegal i mean you could take ketamine and you can go to a doctor and get ketamine in new york in know a few other states i believe so yeah it's an interesting story and another interesting thing is that his girlfriend i she still lives in in austin so she's a major part of the book that i took a lot of information from call from called american king pin she i think her name is vivian and you could follow her on instagram she's like this beautiful black lady deborah she kinda looks like my wife to be honest and you could like follow her on instagram and it's really cool because if you read the book or learn about him you the you can go and use web archive and see pictures on instagram and on facebook and things like that that like it's what the author's is describing and so you can like kinda track this journey and you're like oh man here he is see they're under the golden gate bridge they took that picture there like there she is and you could still it followers i think she just got engaged i follow her on in lin instagram before anyone thinks that sam is being conceded because you literally did just say she's super hot she looks like my wife the first time i saw that picture of of of her with ross i i did go is that sarah like she does look a lot like your wife yes yeah if she does i actually don't know what race this lady is but she's definitely i bet she's mix half white half black that's what my my wife is and it does look like her from afar and it's cool you could see all these pictures of them together it what a crazy story so i don't know where do we go from here don't do drugs don't sell drugs that's our official advice don't start a marketplace where people can buy and sell drugs yeah it it it's an it's a fascinating story the book of american king pin have you read that no i haven't read it it's the greatest book i've ever read it's a it's the number one best book i've ever read it like i was so impacted by it like it's it's a story that sucks you in i couldn't set it down it's amazing it's so good so read that and that's that i wonder if people are gonna like these the style of episode i i i think they will i think it's kinda cool turns out yeah that was great alright is that the pod i think the bot