Gadgetory

my name is Joseph gordon-levitt I'm an actor and a movie coming out called Snowden the government knows that we have these documents now I run a production company called hitRECord you can come work with us it's back in 2005 that first started hit record with my brother and that is my introduction to myself I always loved science fiction whenever they would go out on missions you know when they would leave the starship enterprise and walk around on a planet they be walking around with little computers they're like reading things or they have their Maps or their sensors or stuff on this little machine and I remember thinking myself back then like oh man it'd be so cool if I could walk around with a little device that I could just hold in my hand and like learn things from it and lo and behold this is what happened when Oliver Stone first called me and he asked me to play Edward Snowden in his movie first of all I was just flattered and honored because I grew up loving Oliver Stone movies but then I was like oh man you know the truth is I don't really know that much about Edward Snowden and so I looked into it and will tell you two things that I found really interesting one is there was this congressional hearing in 2013 and a director of national intelligence named James clapper testified before Congress and he swore to tell the truth does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans no sir he was lying no one can prove he was lying because no one had any evidence that he was lying until later that year Snowden provided that evidence one other thing that I learned that that really surprised me was a government conducted an investigation and found that these mass surveillance programs had not actually helped stop any terrorism when I went to meet him in Moscow I found someone who is just really down to earth really actually quite warm and very thoughtful and who really really cared a lot about his country I was really more approaching as an actor and and I haven't actually met him I think I'd be doing a lot more guessing it record is the name of this company that i started a number of years ago now you know like a lot of times on the internet you'll see people saying hey look what I made here's here's my video or here's my photo or here's my song and on hit record it's less about here's what I made and more like hey let's all make things together and we turn the fruits of our collective labour into productions and then when those productions can make money we pay the contributing artists mr. Snowden contributed to one of our projects on a record called are you there democracy it's me the internet and it's a whole bunch of videos about people sort of talking about how technology impacts democracy he's sort of become a symbol of how technology is misused and it was cool to hear him speak more optimistically and say like but I actually think that technology could make the future a better place and here's watch really proud of the stuff that we made together it's a lot of fun for me I I love it you