Interview with Nick Bilton, author of new book about The Silk Road, American Kingpin

In this week's Cool Tools Show podcast, Kevin Kelly and I interviewed Nick Bilton. Nick is a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of three books, including Hatching Twitter and his latest, American Kingpin, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Silk Road and the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Here's a bit from the interview:

Mark: I feel, in a lot of ways, the story of the Dread Pirate Roberts, aka Ross Ulbricht, is kind of like Breaking Bad.

Nick: Yeah, it's a kid who was the sweetest, nicest kid, who decided to build this website where you could buy and sell drugs, because he believed they should be legal and it spiraled out of control. Next thing you know he's running an empire that's making hundreds of millions of dollars, and ordering hits on people from the Internet, and selling guns and drugs and you name it in between.

Mark: And every three letter acronym government agency after him and competing with each other to get him.

Nick: Yeah, every single one. IRS, DHS, HSI, FBI, you name it.

Kevin: Sounds like a movie.

Mark: Yes. More than one of those agencies going rogue too. It's got everything. The way you tell it too, it's like a novel. The amount of research you must've put into this is incredible, because the conversations you have, there's stuff ... Kevin and I were saying, we follow this story, but it's like your other book, Hatching Twitter, it's being there ...

Nick: It's interesting because I think that some of the most successful technologists talk about how they don't want you to think about how the technology actually works. Apple, of course, has been amazing at that. For somebody like me who writes narrative non-fiction, I don't want you to think about where the reporting came from, I just want you to understand the story. But there are certain times, of course, where you're like, "Woah, how did they figure this out?"

It's definitely a wild, wild tale. I think, just one other little thing that you mentioned, it is like Breaking Bad. One of the funnest parts of the story is when Ross Ulbricht is growing magic mushrooms to sell on his website, he actually was really into Breaking Bad at the time, and he would wait for the mushroom stuff to cure and the gypsum and all that stuff to do its thing, and he would be sitting in there watching Walter White become Heisenberg in the middle of that.

Mark: Wow. Oh my God. Yeah and Walter becoming Heisenberg, Ulbricht becoming Dread Pirate Roberts, the parallels are uncanny. (more…)