#633 - Alex Winter

Alex Winter. Alright, we're live. Nice to meet you, man. You too. I knew of you as an actor, and I knew of your work as a director, but I didn't know that you were into serious shit like this deep web documentary. This is really fascinating. I was watching it just before you got here, so it's all fresh and crackling in my mind.

Cool. First of all, how did 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.

And in those days, I was really interested in sort of burgeoning online communities, people who were sort of the growth of Internet-based communities. And in those days, you could get on and you would sort of create sort of clubs or groups or rooms, as they were called, with all kinds of like-minded people.

And then you started finding all kinds of stuff that was going on. And it wasn't, by any means, 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.

And at that point, I discovered encryption, people who were using the Internet for anonymity and privacy. Some of them were like parts of like, you know, self-help groups or like rape counseling, any number of things. But it was also people who were selling drugs.

So I first encountered the drug, the online drug markets in probably 90, 91. That's when I first discovered encrypted 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 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.