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Q So if you want to find out more about Sky, you just go to Sky Dorahy and search for Sky Queue. Hello, are you Perpetual Emmet's? Welcome to The Blind Bye podcast. Before we begin this week, I think we're going to start off with a little poem because there was a poem that was submitted by Irish Singer-Songwriter Krista Barg centers in last week's show. And it's going to read this out first to kind of to relax all and set the scene.

So this poem is called The Cliffs of Ma'aden Head by Chris Debark. Ought to be on the cliffs of Melon Head, October 1987, with your suitcase full of chewing gum, bare chest and excited winter winds from Greenland clipped the waves like ancient ships. Don't swallow the chewing gum. You would say it gets stuck in your gut and farms a hard lump. And I laugh at the Atlantic void and stuff my face with more, my jaws aching, chomping with gusto, too much chewing gum in my mouth.

If they could only see me now. The spearmint saliva rising up to burn my eyes fully tumescent with my mouth full of chewing gum. Thank you, Chris Berg, for that lovely piece of poetry there. So welcome, everybody, this week. Welcome to the there's some new listeners that have come over from my parents on the Adam Boxton podcast to get new listeners from that. What's the crack? How are you getting on? And new listeners. I always suggest go back and listen to some previous podcasts, listen to some of the earlier ones.

Establish yourself within the law of this universe. Learn what a podcast HOAGUE is, which is the goal of this particular podcast to provide what I refer to as the podcast Hoague, which. It's a state of calm concentration that's only a podcast can offer, and traditional media these days fails to offer what I call the podcast HOAGUE. When you listen to a podcast and you like it and it gives you that warm feeling of concentration and escapism. That's the podcast Hoague.

You don't get it from TV, you don't get it from radio. You get it on a podcast that you enjoy, which I think it's partly because of the the slow, unedited, conversational nature of what a podcast is, the fact that podcasts are rough around the edges, that it has bits floating in it, you know, but also. The fact that when you listen to a podcast, it's not like on TV, but it's being fed dear, if you're listening to a podcast, it means you made a real conscious choice.

You used your own agency to seek this out and you've made choices. And that makes the experience more engaging in a way that TV and radio just doesn't over radio can do it occasionally, but only on Sunday nights for some reason. So this week's podcast. This week's podcast is kind of a meditation. It's not a full heartache, it's a meditation, it's a meditation on a team which contains heartaches within it. So I'm very passionate about art, as you know, I adore art.

I spend a lot of time learning about art, reading art, looking at art. And last week I was just glancing through Renaissance painters and truly lesser known Renaissance painters, hoping that I would find some painter that I wasn't familiar with that I enjoy. And it's a bit like I don't know, it's like when I listen to fucking disco music. Tried and true every every genre, every. I always say this man, we think that. You know, music is music was class in the 70s, music was class in the 80s, painting was brilliant in the Renaissance and it's easy for us to it's easy to say things like that, because the fact is cream rises to the top.

When you look back at any genre, music, painting, whatever the best stuff is, what survives. And then we can have rose tinted glasses over an entire era of art. But that's not how it works. Art requires failure in order for success to exist, but the failures kind of get forgotten. So I searched through. Mediocrity and failure, hope, unless there's a and uncut gem in there that hasn't been found. So while I was doing this, I came across a kind of unremarkable 16th century Italian renaissance painter called Francesco Basilar and not about Francisco's work.

It's not it's not bad. It's just it's it's background. It's it's a background painting. It doesn't it's not a Leonardo. There's no the soul isn't in there. It's just it's a fine painting. Both. I was looking at it, and it's just it's two men, two women, and they're holding a child, and then you look at it and you go, all right, it's obviously religious. OK, well, she's Mary. She's Mary Magdalene.

I don't know how the two lads are. And then I look at the name of the painting. It's called The Circumcision of Christ. And then you're like, oh, fuck, it's baby Jesus. And he's about to get circumcised. This painting from the 16th Century by Francisco Pizarro is about the circumcision of Christ. And then I'm taken aback because now I'm thinking about Christ, Dick. And the thing is like. When I was being taught religious education, like, you know, Christ's penis doesn't come into us, that and that the concept that here's the son of God, but yes, when he was a baby, this caught his foreskin off.

And I was like, wow, I'm thinking about Christ, Dick. How strange, how strange, I've never been asked to think about that now, boss Francisco Beslow in the 16th century is like yet here's a painting and it's the baby Christ about to get circumcised. And then I went because he was circumcised. Christ was was Jewish, you know, he was born a Jewish person and Jewish people, circumcision is part of the tradition of Judaism and I walk away from it, then I walk away from it again, an unremarkable painting.

But like, that's a bombshell, you can't you can't just fucking. Can't just learn about Christ my entire life, and then this Francesco Pessotto is like telling me about Christ getting circumcised so I can't leave alone. And later on in the day, I'm like, I need to find out about Christ getting circumcised. Now, that's what I need to do with the rest of my day. I need to find out about Christ circumcision and what it said in the Bible about it and what happened.

So I did. And fuck me. It's a little bit of a saga. And images of the baby Christ getting circumcised are preparing for circumcision. Is it quite frequent? The medieval art? And the whole shtick is, is this. In our Leterme, the middle medieval times. Like relics were a huge thing, relics were a massive thing, now a relic is. The body part of like a saint or an apostle or even an item in their clothing, which is kept in a box and is said to have religious properties, so relics, but a fucking huge deal.

You still haven't it? Like fuckin white friar church up in Dublin's got the shriveled, dried heart of Saint Valentine in an ornate box, you know, but relics were a big deal. Now relics associated with Christ were the biggest deal of all. Like if if Christ touched something in his life or if he wore clothes or if anything he was physically associated with. This thing was then passed around as a fucking relic, like the Holy Grail. Like the wars that were fought trying to search for the Holy Grail, the fucking Crusades and the Holy Grail was I think it's the cop that Christ had put his wine or blood into on the first ever Holy Communion.

That's the Holy Grail and the shit that was fucking that kicked off in the Middle Ages to find this Holy Grail. There was the Shroud of Turin. There was supposedly the original piece of the cross. All this stuff, relics associated with Christ himself were. They were commodified, they were very the most valuable things within medieval European society were relics associated with Christ but Christ's foreskin. Kind of presented a unique situation because the thing is with Christ, whatever, about something he touched, right, whatever about the Holy Grail or a piece of the cross or the shroud that he was draped in when he died, foreskin is his actual body.

Right. And you're talking about a religion here, which is all about eating his body and drinking his blood through bread. So. Christ's foreskin was a fucking big deal as a relic, OK, but it created problems for the Catholic Church because. Christ ascended to heaven, so the thing is right, if Christ died and then magically ascended to heaven, like physically left this earth and went to heaven, then why would he leave a bit of his dick behind to get me?

And that was the big discussion. If Christ ascended to heaven, why would he leave? Why then wouldn't the flap of skin from his dick not also fly into heaven? And then why are there relics of his foreskin being passed around Europe in the Middle Ages? If Christ truly ascended, it created a real problem, right? In fact, there were several. Foreskins floating around medieval Europe as relics with various people claiming that this is the authentic foreskin of Christ.

The most authentic foreskin of Christ would have been in the year 800 Charlemagne, the king of king of France, claimed that he was visited by an angel in the night who gave him Christ's foreskin. And then Charlemagne give this foreskin as a gift to possibly or the third. This is like like the Charlamagne of France and the public or the third these days are like billionaires today. Like last week, it was Kim Kardashians birthday. And as a present, Kanye West had a hologram made of her late father giving her a message, and that was the billionaire present.

I'm going to make a hologram of your dad and he's going to give you a message, Kim. And that's my gift to you, because I'm a billionaire and so are you. If this was a thousand years ago, he'd be given a kreiss foreskin, that it became Kardashian birthday gift. That's what we're talking about here. The most prized item in the world is the foreskin of a fucking a dead carpenter from the Iron Age. So popular. Was there an 800?

And he's like, I've got Christ's foreskin and fucking king. Charlemagne gave it to me. This is the foreskin. But what happens is all these other competing foreskins emerge all over Europe with different monasteries are different kings saying, no, I've got the real fucking foreskin of Christ and I created real created real problems. And I'm talking. I'm talking going on for centuries, like centuries of problems in the 12th century, the monks of San Giovanni asked Pope innocent third to try and authenticate their foreskin.

He wouldn't do it until the 5th 1400's. There was a group of monks in France and they were like, we've got the real fucking foreskin, nobody, because they claim that their foreskin was bleeding. So they were rocking up to Paul Clement in the 1507. We have we've got a foreskin of Christ and it's bleeding. And again, throughout the centuries, it created real problems for the church because they're like. It even even if I know you have all these multiple foreskins, but the thing is, this creates real problems for us because Christ ascended to fucking heaven, Christ ascended to heaven.

So why would he leave his foreskin behind? So then eventually in the 17th century, so this is Charlemagne presents Pope Leo in the 8th century with a foreskin and it takes nearly a thousand years. For the fucking Catholic Church to arrive at an answer that they're happy with. So this theologian called Leo Ateliers, right? He sat down and had a good think about the foreskin conundrum and what he basically said was that Ladds all right, there's about 10 foreskins belonging to Christ in different monasteries all around Europe.

Here's the crack. None of them are real. None of them they're are fake. And then people go, why? Why we can with this is the real foreskin. And he goes, no, I'll tell you why they're fake because. And this is real. This is this is what the Catholic this is what a theologian said. I'll tell you what happened. Let's. Christ ascended into heaven, therefore his foreskin went way to pot because the foreskin was detached, that part because people are gone then.

All right, OK, so so if Christ cut his foreskin taken off when he was a baby, but then he died when he was Partito. Like, when did the foreskin ascend into heaven? Did it just lie around Earth for 32 years and then fly into fucking space and rejoin his dick? Because that's the thing, that's what you're thinking when Christ died, did the foreskin rejoin his dick up in heaven? And the theologian was like, no, no, no, no, no, here's what happened.

Christ died.

The foreskin hung around for 32 years on art, but when Christ died, the foreskin ascended as well. But it became the rings of Saturn. And that was the official Catholic Church position, Christ's foreskin ascended into heaven and it became the rings of Saturn. And if you're listening to this going, that's a lot of blaspheming you're doing, they're blind by not not I'm telling history here, I'm telling history. This is what they said. But of course.

Like that didn't quieten down. The chatter around the foreskin, around the relic, people weren't just willing to walk away from it now because. You know, this is all bullshit. It's like religion is bullshit, religion like religion is the it's just power structures.

That's all that shit made up by humans. So it's sort of an innate fallibility. So when when the when the charge if there's rival foreskins, OK, all around Europe and there's different monasteries that have this relic. Think of it from a human point of view. If you are the monastery that has the relic. That has Christ foreskin, what does that do to your monastery? What does that do if if your monastery is in a town, what does that do to the local economy?

Relics brought tourism relics more of serious economic importance if you've got a decent enough relic. Then, you know, the church will fund, like the central church would put more funds into your parish, you might get a better you might get a fucking cathedral. Now, if a bishop, what happens if you've got a bishop? All of a sudden you become a city. Now you've a city. A relic can do that. A relic could do that to a medieval place.

It could go from a tiny little a monastery. What a few gaffes and a few people living around it to within a few hundred years being a city and a relic could pull in that type of interest. So this was a big deal like in Ireland. What we used to do was we used to have moving statues. So in the early 20th century in Ireland, a lot of schoolchildren would claim that a statue of Holy Mary cried or moved, and then the bishops would announce we've got moving statues and then this would stimulate the economy in Ireland.

All this tourism would come in. The world's media would focus on Ireland as, oh, my God, they're statues are moving. Then we joined the EU and we replaced moving statues with a lower corporate tax rate. So in the religion of economics, we say Ireland. Now, our relic is we you don't have to pay any tax. If you're a multinational corporation, you don't have to pay tax. And then you've got Apple and Pfizer men, Pfizer down in Karkh.

You've got Google up in Dublin. Because that's like that's our Reilich, that's how important Relix were, it's like Irelands law, and they don't have to pay any taxes. Its corporate tax rate of 12 percent, they're effectively paying less than one percent. And that's the power of a relic. That's what the equivalent of that would have been in medieval times. If you had a relic in your monastery, you not literally the the church saying your foreskin isn't real.

That's not Christ's foreskin. That would be like the EU going to Ireland and saying you're going to have to start taxing the the big multinational companies, the companies that are working in Ireland that have their corporate headquarters in Ireland because they only have to pay 12 percent corporation tax, are effectively zero corporation tax. Imagine the EU said no more. They have to pay tax. That would be the size of that decision. That's what it would do economically, except it's about Christ's sake.

So now you're left with all these monasteries all over Europe who are like, we have a piece of Christ's body. They're not just going to give that up. They're not going to give that up and go. Oh, sorry about that, lads. No, no, no. We don't know whose foreskin this is. All right. I'm just I'm after traveling a good distance now to come and see the foreskin. Where is it? It's actually the rings of Saturn.

It's actually the rings of Saturn, yeah, we were wrong about that, and we don't know how long it's old, it's someone's don't know who owns it, like they're not going to do that. And they didn't do it because, like I said, it's economics. It's fucking economics. That decision means that 10 different monasteries, ten different towns, ten different local economies now lose value. So the foreskin debate continued on until eventually the 20th century started getting very, very embarrassing because as society enters Maydan.

Conversations around the relic of a force can start start to look more and more fucking ridiculous. So the charge then by the 20th century. The force, you don't even mention the fucking foreskin, if a monastery mentioned or claimed they had a foreskin, it was you. They were threatened with excommunication and most of the foreskins were destroyed. But the one foreskin that that they always felt not this is the real one, the one going back to 800 that King Charlemagne gave to Pope Leo on the 18th birthday of Christ.

That was the one with the like, no, this is the real one, but the charterer mad, embarrassed about it. So this foreskin, that fucking Pompilio Charlamagne one, this ended up right in this this little weird small village in Italy called Calcutta. And Calcutta is strange because all the house is beautiful and all the houses in Kolkata are like built like almost like medieval skyscrapers on the side of a cliff. OK, it's a weird looking place.

And the foreskin ended up there. And of course, Calcutta then saw quite a lot of tourism because people are coming to visit this foreskin relic in Calcutta. But in the end, like I think the 1950s or something like not the 1930s.

People started to not live in Calcutta anymore because the buildings were on the side of these cliffs and it was deemed as unsafe to leave, buildings were falling down. Right. So people stopped visiting there and people stop living in there, but the foreskin was still there and then even stranger. A lot of happies, so Calcutta now is like a hippie commune for some reason, all these hippies, like 1960s hippies, started turning up to Canada and start and hippie communes.

Their displays for the fucking foreskin is. But anyway, sometime sometime around sometime in the 20th century, the local priest in Calcutta who would have been the custodian of the original foreskin, it with the foreskin was getting too hot and the charts were threatening him with excommunication. So he had the foreskin hidden in a shoebox in his own house. And then and this is the big conspiracy in fuckin night in 1983. Somebody broke into that at that priest's house, Fotomat Langone broke into his house and stole the foreskin.

Right. And finally the foreskin disappeared and the priest had to publicly declare, Ladds, I'm not going to display the holy relic of Christ's foreskin anymore. I can't. It was robbed. It was robbed from my house. It's gone. And the charts were like, finally, the rest of what we managed to get rid of all the other foreskins, they've been destroyed centuries of work. The last one is fucking gone. And then. This bishop writes, a bishop on his fucking deathbed, a bishop on his deathbed in Italy.

Kind of gave a few hints that it was it was the charge, it was the fuckin Vatican, the Vatican sent secret agents to this Italian priest's home in Calcutta and they stole the foreskin. And the foreskin is hidden away in the Vatican vaults as this really embarrassing relic. And the real foreskin is the rings of Saturn. Still, I don't know. I don't know what their position on that is. You know, have they rolled that back because that theologian said it in the 17th century, that the foreskin is the rings of Saturn?

Have they rolled that back? I don't know. Freudian slip. Roll that back. Fucking hell. So the podcast is in this week's podcast isn't about the foreskin. Christ, like I said, it's a meditation. I think it's a meditation this week on authenticity. Because the thing is, with all those different foreskins. Every single person who there were several relics of Christ's foreskin at the origin of all of them are someone who knows it's fake. Every one of those foreskins was fake.

You don't just find no one found a foreskin and was like, I think this is Christ's. Somebody throughout the course of centuries basically said, everyone's looking for fucking Christ's foreskin. I'm going to I'm going to fake it.

Unless, you know, someone literally a thousand years ago hung on the cross for skin. This there are fake someone fake this. And I want to talk about the nature of what is fake, what drives people to fake things. And something came to my attention, it's a few articles, but a main one that I saw dated September 25th, twenty nineteen. Last year, right, and it's a website called Slate, Dotcom and Slate is a pretty big American political website, a reliable journalistic source.

And the headline of the article is there's a video going around that no one's really talking about. What makes it most unreal is how believable it is. And the video is the Trump Donald Trump tape. If you don't know what this is, when Donald Trump won the election in 2016 and became the president of America and there was this dossier was released which pointed, which suggested Russian collusion in Trump becoming president, undermining U.S. democracy. Part, that there was a suggestion that Russia had what's called kompromat compromising material and Donald Trump specifically the dossier, says that Trump in 2013 stared at the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Russia.

And in this, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama had previously stayed and slept in this bed at the presidential suite in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow. And while Trump was there, quote unquote, he employed a number of prostitutes to perform a golden shower show in front of him. So and the FSB, which is like the the Russian Secret Service, they recorded, they basically have a video, a tape, 25 second tape that shows Donald Trump in the Ritz Carlton Hotel with two sex workers pissing on a bed in front of him, and that Russia are using this tape as blackmail against Donald Trump.

Right. And most people have heard of the tape. It's one of those things that when it broke in in 2018, when people found out about it, it's one of those ones that just made the world's jaw drop like it was up there with David Cameron following a pig. It's like you're telling me that the president of America, there's a there's a tape that exists of a sex workers person on a fucking bed in Russia are using it to blackmail him with one of those moments where everyone's jaw just fucking dropped.

So I found this article in Sleigh's, which is an incredibly basically the tape emerged online in. 25Th of September 2019, and this Slate article says the tape is real, but it's fake. And it's an incredibly detailed article that shows clips of this pretape. And its screen grabs of a hotel room, Trump is sitting in the corner, there's two naked women on the bed, the person on the bed and I read a little bit of the article.

There exists a video online that considering the subject matter, astoundingly few people have seen. It begins in media. Media raise in a chair at the foot of a bed sits the unmistakable figure of Donald Trump is offering what seems to be instructions to to near nude women on the bed, one of whom is bottomless and standing over the other who appears to be lying on her side. I myself first became aware of it on January 25th when I got a screenshot of a D.M. ad received on Twitter.

It goes on to say, where did this tape come from? When I clicked on the link, I was expecting to see some sort of overlayed terribly acted parody piano, maybe with a guy in an off kilter Trump wig talking to women with fake Russian accents. Instead, I got bleary, claustrophobic shadows. The clip is punctuated with jerky, sporadic. Zoom's making it hard to get a sense of what it is you're viewing. What you're watching is not video of the thing itself, but what appears to be a hand-held recording of a screen that is playing the video of the thing itself.

There's no sound and no indication of what or who else might be in the room with the screen. You're seeing second hand. And it's a really, really long article that goes into incredible detail, trying to figure out this Trump tape. They try and look at, you know, videos of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. They look at images of Trump. Was that a Miss Russia pageant? I believe that night they look at images of Trump on the night to try and see is the Trump in the hotel room wearing the same clothes that all checks out.

Then even more interesting that the the video was hosted on a site called Peterburg, and they had access to the IP addresses that were looking at it. And that's when it got really interesting. It's like this piece of tape went up. First off, it went online. It was it lasted about two hours on websites and then was immediately taken down. And then it ended up on a psychopathic tape dog. And they looked at the IP addresses of who was looking at it.

And they found addresses to the Aerospace Corporation, Swedish Tax Administration, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the U.K. Ministry of Agriculture, the United States Antarctic Program, Lockheed Martin and Halliburton had seen this this tape. But this Slate article and there's loads of other articles and it's. Last year, they can't tell, look, is this fucking the real tape or not? What if I told you I made it? I made the video, the video and this article of the peace tape of Donald Trump in the Ritz Carlton Hotel, I made it.

I made the Donald Trump tape that they're talking about in that article that all those other ones are talking about. I'll tell you how I did it right after the Macarena was going to have a cliffhanger and you're going to hear a musical instrument. Now, it's a shaker because some adverts are going to be inserted right here.

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So in that space, you had a digital advert, whatever the fuck an advert was, it was targeted at you with the algorithm and this podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page Patriot dot com forward slash the Blind by podcast. All right. This podcast is my full time job. It's my sole source of income. The Patriot allows me to to be a full time artist. It's as simple as that. I'm a full time artist now because for the first time in my almost 20 year career, I've got a regular source of income.

I know where my money's coming from because of the patrons of this podcast. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. If you are listening to this podcast, just ask yourself, would you buy me a pint or a cup of coffee if you met me? Am I entertaining you enough for just that? Will you can via the Patreon page. And if you can't afford it, you don't have to.

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An advertiser came along and was like, we want to advertise on your podcast. And I took a look at it and I said, I don't like what you're selling. I don't want to do these ads. I think it would change the tone of the podcast. And I was able to say, no, your grind, your grind, because I'm in the position to do it and I'm glad I'm in that fucking position. So thank you to all the fucking patrons as well.

And look at plug it every week because people come and go. So I have to. All right. But thank you to everyone who is a patron of the podcast. It makes a massive difference to my life. And this podcast is a I love doing this fucking podcast. I love it to bits, but it's also a massive amount of work to do it. So just pay me for the work I'm doing. It's all I'm asking. Follow me on Twitch.

Twitch that TV forward, slash the blame by podcast. All right. I'm on Twitch three times a week. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at about eight thirty pm making live music, having crack. Alright, so Twitch and patriae on dotcom forward slash the blame podcast. Now I made the Donald Trump ISTEP. I made the Donald Trump misstep. All right, get listen to this.

This is Donald Trump in the Ritz Hotel in Russia, observing some ladies doing pieces on each other.

It's not a class, you know that, because this is a segment of the pigs and also because it doesn't look quite right.

It doesn't look quite right because we are in the BBC three budget. We just had a green screen, Aladdin, a wig and two women. We got off an extras website. In fact, we only had a meeting room because we couldn't afford a green screen studio. But it's close. If we can make this on a laptop out of cardboard and pitstick, I can governments do what can rich people do? How will we know what's right? We created that Donald Trump video because we knew it would go viral because it's the Donald Trump patent and everybody is searching for it.

We couldn't understand why no one had done it before until we went to put it off.

Nobody would show it, even though we broke no rules, nobody, not porn sites, not even sites that show people being beheaded for fun. Everywhere it was taken down in two shakes of a land, instead, it turns out you can do anything except Donald Trump, who's taken it down. Is it the CIA or is it the Russians?

For fuck's sake, this is David Icke.

Shit like you know what, like a proper studio. At least I don't want to be doing this type of stuff. Can I get a back?

So that there was an excerpt from my BBC series, Blind by Undestroyed The World and. Yet the episode is called How the Internet Killed Reality, and we made the Donald Trump tape as the section was on, deep facts about the danger would have been made around 2018, that the danger of today's society when you can't fully verify what's real and what's not because of technology and because of the undermining of throat with terms like fake nose. So. We kind of just said, let's let's fuckin.

And it was it was BBC, so it was difficult. But it's like let's make let's literally to a fuckin tee find out. Exactly what the presidential suite in the Ritz Carlton looked like, find out as much detail as humanly possible and put a lot of effort into making the most authentic look at Donald Trump's tape that you can imagine making decisions such as, you know, if the tape did leak, what would it look like? It would probably be, you know, videotaped on a screen, from a phone, all these little considerations.

And the intention was before the TV show or TV show goes live, put it out there, just fucking put it out there. And like the amount of lawyers we had to go through and BBC to get this to get it approved or put it out there, see what happens, see if it goes viral, if it does go viral, if it causes hassle. You just fucking announced that you made it. But we did. We put it out.

And it just got deleted everywhere, like within hours, I'm like on the worst websites you can imagine where I mentioned there on websites that that regularly show beheadings and ISIS videos and terrible stuff, whoever the fuck. The Trump tape that was not staying online on any website, they wanted to havingness and. This article exists from Slate Dockum. This big American Arctica, who managed to they managed to get their hands on the tape that we made, but the article is still up there.

The article is still there and they haven't figured out that it was us that made it and the BBC series it aired like this time last year. You can still see it. It's on the BBC player playing by undestroyed. There's four episodes of it. And but the Slate article and all the other pieces of journalism that try to decide whether this tape was read or not, they still haven't traced it back to this BBC series that went out. I even follow the journalist who wrote the article.

I even I had been following her on Twitter at the time even, and we made it as a piece of art. I'm you know, I'm an artist, I'm interested in hyperreality, I'm interested in deep fakes, I want to make art that has actual impact as opposed to as opposed to making the tape as something that gets shown in a fucking art gallery, which I don't I'm not into the traditional artistic spaces I would rather do art through. Entertainment channels to democratize it and reach to have it to be socially engaged, rather than sticking within a gallery where all you're doing is showing the tape to a lot of other folk and artists.

But it's it's it's an example of I'd call it hyperreal, hyperreal, a modern art. It's. Like an artistic intervention. That you do in an environment whereby you really can't tell what's real and what's not real or who to trust or who not to trust, and the Christ foreskin thing reminded me of it. But another kind of från to this story, which I found really fucking strange, is and because this was this is I don't know what I call it, synchronistic, so.

Around the time that we would have been making that Trump tape. I was also writing my second book of short stories and what I find fucking really what I'm what I'm most happy with as as we say. But this is an art project. That Slate article is this really, really long, detailed article that tries to deconstruct a piece of footage that's potentially dangerous to try and see, you know, right down to the detail. Is this real or is this not?

And I have a short story in my book that I would have been writing while making the tape. But before the Slate article came out, I wrote a story in my book story is called The Skin Method. And I wrote the story in this procedural analytical style. The story is about. A tape emerges of. Gabriel Byrne and Benicio Del Toro on the set of The Usual Suspects, and it's a tape that emerges in a fictional universe, a tape that emerges that shows Gabriel Byrne.

Snark and bags of his own skin, because he claims that he's able to save bags of his own skin from when he was a child and create a system, restore points in his body like a computer can. And this tape leaks of Gabriel Barnham beneath Benicio Del Toro sniff and bags their own skin when their children talking about being able to create system, restore points and be immortal. And this tape leaks in my fictional universe and then creates a cult of people in Eastern Europe who skin the skins of children and snort their skin to get eternal youth.

And I wrote the short story as as an academic or journalistic article that is deconstructing and deciding what is the footage is real or not. And the irony is the fuckin short story. I wrote that Slate article that's written about a piece of work I made is near identical to the short story I wrote, except about two different pieces of footage. I read the opening paragraph of my short story, which is fictional. On the 6th of December 2001, a video surfaced on the Deep Web Forum Online Party uploaded by a user named archive.

The video appears to depict Irish actor Gabriel Byrne engaged in a conversation with Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro. The footage is presented as a clandestine recording barn in Del Toro. Speak to each other for six minutes and 42 seconds. The video was initially uploaded with the title The Skin Method, due to Ban's consistent use of this phrase throughout. The footage appeared on the surface web in 2011 and the Romanian website Sitrick Mundane, with added subtitles in Romanian, Albanian and Ukrainian Annon subtitled version, appeared on the English language forum Reddit later that month.

So basically I wrote a short story. That predicted real events that would that would happen in my life six months later. I saw that the short story I wrote, so I was I obviously wrote the short story at the same time that we were making the Trump tape. So like I'm writing a book and making a TV series at the same time. And the themes around hyper reality and deep fixed that I'm exploring with this idea for the Trump tape are now also inspiring this short story.

I now consider the short story about Gabriel Byrne, the Trump tape and the article written by Slate. I consider it all now to be part of the same piece of work. Essentially, I and a team of people made a deep fake video which went onto the Internet and caused great debate, which then caused a serious analytical journalistic article to be written deconstructing this video. But then six months previously told us, I wrote a short story about a fictional deep fake video and the short story was a journalistic deconstruction of the deep fake video, which is a near identical in tone to the real article that appeared in Slate.

And they are now all part of the one unit of piece of art, true hyper reality. How could you get more hyperreal than that? It's like life imitating art, but it's like it's as if the life was willed into existence by the art. I tell you why I'm excited by it. As an artist, I did my master's degree in 2015 and my master's degree was in socially engaged art, which is basically how can I as an artist create art that isn't in galleries, that isn't in the traditional areas that art cars, but instead, how can I create art in the public through public forums whereby the goal of it is to break down the boundaries of artist and observer for art to become truly participatory.

So now we no longer just have. The Trump tape that we made, a short story that I wrote. It's now become a piece of hyper real performance art. Right, as a hyperreal performance art, where the journalist Ashley Fineberg, who wrote that article for Slate, she essentially finished my short story without being prompted, she wrote. A deconstructive article about a piece of deep fake footage that I made, which would work as a part to are fit in perfectly with a short story I wrote.

So now it's a piece of performance art where the boundary between artist and observer doesn't exist. Through hyperreality, I don't. Am I going to fucking A.R.T. Pheno, but. I'm excited by it. It feels like a whole piece of art now what it feels like one piece of work. You know, and I'm just very happy with this, but what I'm describing there, like that's not necessarily new within the art world in particular. And before I go, I want to talk about just one or two instances in art historically where hoaxes, hoaxes have been used to cause that's a hoax, me making a fake paste type of trump and putting it out there as if it's real.

And then you are essentially testing what it is, is, is you make this deep, fake, hyper real piece of art to test. Whether. Journalists can tell whether it's read or not, it's a test on reality, it's a test on our faith and what is real and what isn't. So the hoax is is testing to create the art in in 1910 race in the SAT on the independence in Independent. And I'm not going to pretend I can pronounce French the independent salon in Paris.

This painting a marriage right in 1910, now in 1910 would have been the start of expressionist painting. So painting in 1910 in the salons of Paris, it would start to get an abstract. By which I mean, if you listen to any of my earlier painting podcasts, you know what I'm on about. But paintings around 1910. A painting of a fucking flower didn't look like a flower. They were trying to express the flower ness of it and expression was what it was about exaggerated colors, exaggerated shapes, abstraction.

So this painting ends up in a gallery. And again, I'm not going to pronounce it French, but it translates to sunset over the Adriatic and it was by an artist called Wakame Rafael Banali, J.R. Berlinale from Genoa in Italy. Right. And Byron Ali was a member of. What was called the excessive movement of painters and the painting to me, like it looks like it looks like an expression is painting almost one that's in the genre of folk wisdom, which is like a very bright, almost childlike style of painting.

And this painting, anyway, got released into the gallery system, the critics fucking loved it. They thought it was absolutely fantastic. One person offered 400 francs for the painting, which was a lot of money at the time. And it would have been deemed a success. It would have been deemed. You know, a contemporary of the expressionist paintings that were being made at the time. But the artist didn't exist. J.R. Berlinale didn't exist, the painting was made by a donkey with a paintbrush tied to its tail.

The donkey's name was Lola. And what had happened is that a writer and critical role in Douglas. Was basically like. How do these critics know what what art is good or whether it's bad, how do they know? How are they deciding? If this expressionist artist is a genius and this expressionist artist isn't, let's fucking play a trick on him, let's play a hoax. So they tied a paintbrush to a donkey's tail, put a fancy name on the painting and fool the critics to keep them on their toes.

And it was seen as a joke at the time, because this is 1910, so that's like seven years before the Dada movement, the birth of postmodernism. That was when Marcel Duchamp now they say it wasn't Duchamp anymore. It was actually a number of people helping him, a female artist who he rubbed his idea from. But the part of postmodernism is said when, quote unquote, Marcel Duchamp put a toilet in a gallery and called it art.

Put this donkey business predates that by seven years. And the art there, the art isn't. So the donkey painted a painting with its tail. The painting isn't the art. The painting isn't the art, the painting is the the act of participation, the painting is the reaction of the critics to the art in the context of what is good and what is bad art. It stop becoming a painting and now it's become a performance piece and absurdist intervention.

But I don't think it was recognized as that at the time because it was too hard, it's too ahead of its time as 1910 that there was another seven years. Another example of this in visual arts in 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York raised. They were exhibiting the work of Vincent Van Gough, and it was the first time in America that the day's big a collection of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings were being shown in America. It was a very big deal.

And Van Gough is an incredible painter. Van Gough is an unbelievable, incredibly fuckin important artist. Right. But the thing is, with Van Gaffer's, there's a romanticism about him. And stories of Van Gogh's life became more important than the art. It became sensationalized in particular like this, a self portrait of Angoff, where his head is in a scarf because famously with Vincent van Gogh. Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail because I could do a full podcast on Vangard, but.

Van Gough had had pretty bad mental health issues. He also suffered from epilepsy as a result that he had to take 18th century epilepsy medicine, which is going to be pretty fucking harsh. Vanguard chopped off his own ear. He chopped off his own ear and in a brothel and he gave it to a sex worker, right. And when you say Vincent Van Gough, to most people, that's what they say. They'd be familiar with one or two paintings.

But in 1935 in New York, that's all anyone give a fuck about. They're showing the paintings in MoMA of the fella who chopped his fucking ear off and gave it to a prostitute. And that's what everyone was saying. So when they opened the fucking gallery. Crowds, mad fucking crowds, but then are the protesters in New York who actually cared about painting and wanted to see the paintings of Van Gough, and we're really looking forward to actually seeing a Van Gogh painting because this is 1935.

You don't have color prints. You can't just open up a magazine or go on the Internet and see a Van Gough. It's like you got to see this fucking thing in person to fully appreciate it. So are the art hipsters. We're having difficulty getting into the gallery because the gallery was full of people who weren't interested in the paintings, but. Were sensationalistic, attracted to the idea that here's this artist who chopped his ear off in a brothel and that's all they cared about.

So the art hipsters were going apeshit. They're like, I can't look at my Van Gough. I can't admire revenge of all these Philistines only care about his ear. So want absolute over our tipster who couldn't deal with the fact that all these people were feeding off the gallery has this bright idea. So he goes, if these people only care about Van Gogh's ear and don't care about the paintings, I'm going to prove it. So he went to a different part of the museum and he snuck in and he stuck a box on the wall.

And what he did is he got like a shriveled a shriveled piece of of dried beef and made something that looked a bit like an ear and in the in the gallery near the Van Gogh exhibition, but not in it. He put on the wall this dried piece of beef and beside us a placard that read this is the ear of which Vincent Van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress, a French prostitute, December 24th, 1888.

And then all of a sudden, that's all the crowd give a fuck about, they are gathered around this dried piece of beef, staring at us, thinking that it's Vincent Van Gogh's ear. Well, this whole country was free to now admire all the beautiful paintings of Van Gough without anyone else giving a shit about them because they are now staring at the at the beef, staring at the at the ear. The fake fucking the fake Christ foreskin in the corner, and he would have viewed that as a prank.

But again, I wouldn't I'd call it that's that's a piece of performance art, that's participatory performance art. The art isn't the beef, it's not the ear, it's not the Vanguard paintings. The art becomes the reaction of the people to it. It's performance art now. And the line between artist and observer is truly blurred and it's participatory, socially engaged art. The audience now become they now participate in this durational piece of art that is an object based.

The air isn't the object. The paintings aren't the object. The act of participating becomes the art that's socially engaged art. So that's all I have time for this week. I don't want to be back next week. I think we're long overdue a mental health podcast that we. The last few podcasts have been like historical are speaking about art or weird facts, and I haven't checked them, which I haven't checked in emotionally around mental health or something in a while.

So I'd have to think this week about maybe what I could do next week around that. All right. In the meantime, mind yourselves. Be compassionate towards yourself. Be compassionate towards other people. All right. And that's all you can ask yourself. Sound. That's all you can ask yourself. And Ordoñez, don't be worrying about what people are thinking about you. None of that shit. All right. If you lead your day with integrity, you treat people with respect, then you've got to be worrying about.

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