We talk to the guy who knows Silicon Valley’s darkest secrets

**Nick Bilton** (0:00)
I've got Steve Jobs' stories, I've got Jack Dorsey's stories, I've got Ross Ulbricht's stories, you name it, I got them.

**Shaan Puri** (0:14)
All right, Sam has been telling me about a book for probably 10 years in a row. And I finally got around to reading it this year, and the book is American Kingpin. It's a story of the Silk Road, of Ross Ulbricht, who created it, grew it to great prominence, ended up going to jail, what we thought was for life, and then he just got pardoned by Trump. And so Sam just reread the book. I read it this year. We both love this thing. It's a page-turner. And the author, Nick Bilton, not only wrote that, but he wrote Hatching Twitter and a bunch of other stuff. Fascinating guy. And he's here with us today on MFM, so let's do it.

**Sam Parr** (0:49)
Nick, what's going on? We wanted to talk about all types of stuff. We want to talk about storytelling. We want to talk about things that you researched that didn't make the book. We want to talk about the OG stories of Silicon Valley because you've been covering this stuff forever. But you're one of the three people who we've had on the pod that I'm nervous to talk to, and I stayed up all night reading everything about you.

**Nick Bilton** (1:09)
Don't be nervous. This is exciting. This is fun. It's going to be great. We're going to tell some crazy stories. I've got Steve Jobs' stories. I've got Jack Dorsey's stories. I've got Russ Ulbricht's stories. You name it. I got them.

**Sam Parr** (1:21)
Of all those people, have you become friends or admire any of them? Or are you like a strictly like a journalist who doesn't cross the barrier?

**Nick Bilton** (1:30)
Well, that's a great question. I feel like we should save. I should save that answer because I've got such great stories about all these people, about Bezos, everyone, where, you know, there are some that I have become friends with and then unfriends with, and some I'm still kind of friends with. But let's save that for when we get into the hatching Twitter, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey territory of this pod.

**Sam Parr** (1:57)
This is not your typical marketing software ad. And the reason it's not is because HubSpot isn't typical. It's marketing made easy. Turn one piece of content into assets for every single channel, convert leads in no time and get a crystal clear view of your campaign performance. HubSpot can do all of that and get results fast, just like doubling your leads in 12 months fast. Visit hubspot.com/marketers to get started for free. I was listening to an episode with David Perrell. It was all on writing. And you talk about like what makes a great story. And this sounds like a like a backhanded compliment. I think that your writing is amazing. Your storytelling is amazing. I think you just happened to pick the best story of all time with the Silk Road. Like it was like set up to win.

**Nick Bilton** (2:44)
Well, I think, I mean, let me just tell you how I came to the story. So, I was a reporter at the New York Times and in Silicon Valley covering tech. I was writing about Apple and Facebook and Twitter.
And I don't even know how to describe this moment in time. You know, it was like 2008, 2009 It was, you know, right after the bubble had popped, the second bubble. And it was again, once again, this no-fly zone, you know, to be in Silicon Valley to do startups and whatnot. And I started covering these companies that were not, there was the idea of one of them being a trillion-dollar company was just, it was ridiculous. That would never happen. And I would spend time with Steve Jobs and Bezos and Zuck and Dorsey and all these guys. And I wrote the Twitter book, which we can talk about in this incredible backstories to that and people trying to kill the project and so on and so forth. But I'd finished the Twitter book and the Twitter book had done really, really well. And I was looking for a new book.
And I couldn't, you know, I really, I love writing books. It's one of my favorite forms of writing to do. And I heard about this guy who had started the Silk Road, who had been arrested at this little public library. There was like four blocks from my house. And I knew the library, I knew this and I knew the area and I also knew the Silk Road. And so I wrote a piece for the New York Times about it. It's like a short piece. And then I was like, maybe there's a book in this. And as I started to dig further and further, it just felt undeniable. It was just an unbelievable story of this kid who, I say kid because he was very young at the time, but he grew up in Austin. He was incredibly smart, 1600s on his SATs, studied astrophysics, went off to one of the best schools, and then had this libertarian idealism to him that is no different to like Travis Kalanick when he's building Uber and all these other people in Silicon Valley. And he decides that drugs should be legal and the government should not be able to tell you what you can and cannot put in your body. And the only reason that the drugs lead to these, to deaths and murder and so on and so forth is because the government has so much control over it. And so he takes the Onion browser, which is the secret browser that you can, where the dark web exists. And then he takes Bitcoin, which both kind of come along around the same time. And he creates this proof of concept, which is this website called the Silk Road. And then next thing you know, he's making millions and millions and millions of dollars a day as the biggest drug dealer on the internet.