From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined with our guest super producer Max the Free Train Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Back when we started doing a strange news program on stuff they don't want you to know, fellow conspiracy realists, we kind of assumed a lot of things would happen.
But like many of us playing along at home, it's safe to say we didn't predict every plot twist that has occurred as of late, most notably when just let everybody know this is common knowledge by now by the time you hear this, the current US President Joe Biden has announced that he will not be seeking reelection, And I think this seemed to come as a surprise to a lot of people, but we kind of heard it might be in the wind well before the trigger was pulled.
First time in seventy years, something like that over fifty at least. I forget the last president who did it, but it was.
It wasn't Joe Biden. This is his first time doing it exactly.
It's a very rare thing to be done. I mean, you know, we think of politics in so many ways as like it has the potential to be very self serving. So it's pretty rare for someone to step aside for
the quote unquote greater good. You know, usually people stick around for what they consider the greater good instead of like bowing out gracefully, which whatever your politics is, you kind of got to give it to him for that, I think, unless you want to spin it as like a he's a quitter, which seems you know, reductive.
Or the coup conspiracy which is currently going on.
Or he's just the hold and finally realized, Ah, dang it, I gotta throw in the towel.
You kind of have to. You can't say I don't have meetings after eight pm if you're the president, that's true.
Yeah, what if I just got improved my golf swigs? I could you know, PvP Donald Trump on the golf course.
If what if we just made sure our global cybersecurity software wasn't a roll of the dice. What if we made sure our fine art was indeed the real McCoy. We're going to cover all those stories and more after a quick word from our sponsors. Do you think they are? Are they skippity? There's gonna be a skibbity movie coming out. Paramount's working on it.
Oh jeez, and we've returned. All right. Guys, You remember the old blue screen of death.
It seems so quaint by today's standards, doesn't it.
But it was a serious problem, and it happened at the upper echelons of industries pretty often, you know, like ite's annoying on your home computer. But we also have to realize in evenings past the blue screen of death make an appearance at NASA. Yeah, your favorite Wall Street firm. So this was very much a big deal.
Well, yeah, blue screens of death have always been a big deal. I recall a time when I was working in a restaurant and the point of service machine gave the old blue screen of death, and that meant we couldn't send anything back to the kitchen. We couldn't put anything through to get a check. We had to then switch over to the hand checks or you know, the old actual checks.
Yeah. Yeah, well we.
Didn't have to do that this restaurant. It was a little weird because it was members only. You'd given whatever. But what we had to go to is write everything down manually and hand it to the kitchen, which was very weird.
I mean, at least you weren't so addicted to technology that you couldn't pivot in a time of crisis. Nowadays, there's so many folks that like don't even have a backup plan. You know, businesses that can't when their pos goes down, they go down, they can't do anything.
Looking at you, cashless stores, you to applaud you, looking at you, yep, I'm looking at you while I am also clapping Yeah, good job, support you. But also.
Eyes hon Okay, So, well, if we're gonna talk about a little thing that's kind of boring, but it affected a ton of people and it may lead to other things in the future and or give us a hint a glimpse at what is to come. So on the morning of Friday, July nineteenth, a massive wave of computer outages swept across the planet, not just one country, not just one region, across the planet. It caused thousands of flight cancelations and even many, many, many more flight delays.
It caused the stalling out and or ceasing of all kinds of internal and external networked computer systems across all kinds of industries. We're talking banks not good, stock exchanges, eh, government organizations also probably not good. And hospitals look really not good. Well, what was happening? Why were the computers not working? What was it a network issue? Was it a DDoS attack?
No?
No, no, no no no no no. Many, many, many users of many many Microsoft Windows machines got that old, dreaded blue screen and they couldn't do anything about it. And it's for a ridiculous reason. There is a company that I didn't know much about. I think I've heard of it a couple times because I have a few friends who were in cybersecurity, but I didn't know any details about this until this story or to this ordeal occurred.
There's a company called crowd Strike. That's CROWDSTRIKEE. That's one word, one phrase. This is a cyber security firm. It provides get this cloud workload protection and things like threat intelligence and cyber attack response services. It costs around fifty dollars per machine to have this installed if you want to use it as let's say, a Delta or a north
side hospital. So for every outlet machine, you got to dish out fifty bucks to make sure that network and that particular machine, that node of your network is safe. And what they did is they ran a simple update. Have you guys ever have Spersky or Norton or any of those, and you get the updated what do they call the updated anti virus? I don't know protocols or the They just update the ones that they're they're actively searching.
For just the software.
Sure, and I guess not to be snooty or anything, but I've been on a Mac for so long that I've largely put those days Mega behind me, and I kind of forgot how insidious those little updates and pop ups and things that you just never click through and just now consistently just pop up on your screen like it's sort of like a thing of the past for me. You guys too, I'm sure I know you guys are largely Mac users as well, But if I'm not mistaken, Mac was completely unaffected by this.
As of everything I've read machines that are running on different operating systems were not affected. This was specifically a
basically a boot up error that occurred. So you may or may not know this, but when Windows based machines boot up through their operating system, they've run through a whole bunch of stuff, a whole bunch of diagnostics, a whole bunch of processes, and one of those when you've got this specific crowd Strike software loaded onto a machine that loads up in tandem or like as your machine is booting up right.
Startup items sometimes what they're referred to.
I guess, yes, and if it doesn't boot up correctly or if there's an error in the code of the CrowdStrike software, then your machine says, uh, oh, something's wrong. We can't go any further in the boot up process. And that's what happened. That's all that happened.
But this was eggs in all the same proverbial basket kind of situation.
Yes, the reason why it was such a big deal is because this specific company, with their specific software and hardware setups, is so ubiquitous across major players in all of these different economic sectors.
How long has this company been around? Like I mean, I guess it's just sort of like it's not that sexy. So maybe if you're not in it, it's not something that you'd be thinking about. But like a long time. I mean, it seems for it to be this you know, lockdown or entrenched in the industry, you would.
Have to be I believe twenty eleven. Okay, Well, also, I think we were talking about this briefly off air. The name is CrowdStrike, but that seems like a weird name for a company that does this sort of thing. But in twenty eleven is pretty old in the tech game, right, that's enough time to be pretty well established this morning a decade, right.
Yeah, they've been looking at cybersecurity threats for a long time. They probably have individuals who have that specific learning, right, individual learning, and they've also got collective learning for a long time, which is great for a company that does this kind of stuff. It's weird how potentially some small piece of code they got slipped into an update ended up causing an error, or a little piece of code got deleted accident, and then cause this whole thing. There's
a news story. We'll give you a couple of new stories because it's been all over the place. But NBC News has a story titled crowd strike update that caused global outage lightly skipped checks experts say, which is just saying some piece of faulty code within this article, by the way, some piece of faulty code got entered into that update, and then it caused havoc because everybody is now it's not like I guess, let's think about it
this way, guys. In our company, we used to have an entire IT department of a couple of human beings who knew how all of our networks and our computers worked, and they were in the office every day, and if we had an issue, we would go to that human being. They would diagnose the problem and fix it.
Think about also, our crew was great conversation as well.
Oh yeah, great conversation, but they were they had expertise and they were on hand. Right, that's huge right nowadays, if you're talking about a giant enterprise company, some fortune five hundred company, your IT department you may have an internal one, but largely those are getting outsourced, and it's
probably not on premises. Wherever you're working, there's no IT department in your office likely, which is scary in these kind of situations, because I imagine if you're at the I don't want to say, imagine you're at the American Airlines kiosks at the airport, okay, yeah, and we are your workers there who are designed to be forward facing for the customer. You help customers come in, check their bags, get on their flight.
Right.
Sure, you probably don't know the IT systems for all those kiosks sitting around, and if every single one of them goes down, what do you do besides start making phone calls, trying to send emails, maybe on your work phone if you've got one or whatever, just trying to get somebody, some other person to say, uh oh, here's what's wrong. We can fix it.
Yeah, do a quick reboot. I'm sure. Can you imagine the countless numbers of restarts that occurred on Friday?
If anyone's ever seen The It Crowd, which is a delightful show about sort of like The Office, a British show about an IT department, the big recurring jokes. Have you tried turning it off and back on again? Yep?
Yeah. So let's just get to a couple more specifics here. The thing that went wrong is called Falcon sensor. It's a piece of software that CrowdStrike makes. It is the basically anti virus software of their suite. So it is the thing that gets updated with new viruses to defend against, new ways to protect specific machines and networks and it.
So this thing is like Norton and other stuff all smashed into one kind of right, Like it's a multi service, multi function platform for business.
My understanding of CrowdStrike is that it is mostly pieces of software, suites of software, and then individual human beings or I guess large crowds of human beings that work for them to fix problems, like they offer ransomware protection, cloud detection and response, all kinds of various attacks that are potentially going to be coming towards your network or machines.
They will handle it and they're super good. By the way, lest we let this this current pickle when we find ourselves in make it sound like they're a bunch of gunderheads, we do. Yeah, we need to remember they were. They were kind of with us all the way through different explorations of stuff. They don't want you to know. The cyber attacks against the DNC a few years back, the Sony pictures hack that was a weird one. Cloud strike
or CrowdStrike excuse me? Is the is the go to entity in the West for investigations of this sort, So they are about that life.
Yes, and let me get it right. They are at least in their website a cloud native platform, so that protects against all kinds of stuff. Very cool. I'm not intelligent enough to understand all of it, but they do cool smart stuff. There was just an error here and it caused a ton of problems, a ton of potential. There was a problem. I don't know if you guys
saw the stories. There's a problem with the organ donation list because all of the machines that run that stuff went down, so they there were massive delays with that.
Well.
I think some of the hospital stuff got taken care of pretty quickly. There was obviously a prioritization of what needs to get fixed and in this case, guys, because there were banks and stock markets involved, Yes, I guess which one was pushed up to the top.
Also, I think it was the current rating or idea is that there will be losses. That quote should not exceed ten billion dollars. This is gonna be rough for insurance companies. They're gonna be ramifications and it's is it not ironic? And knowell that the faulty thing, the Falcon software you mentioned earlier that created this kerfuffle and these vulnerabilities and these crashes, it itself is a vulnerability sensor, right, M Like, it's.
All this stuff is designed to protect against this stuff, but caused by outside of it.
Turns out it was the cops who robbed the bank.
The call was coming from inside the house.
Yeah, but it just stinks because if you imagine, you know an author or someone who's putting together an entire book and you make one tiny mistake on page two seventy one, and that one mistake causes every book to just catch on fire. Woops. Just something like the teenious little mistake that some person made accidentally, and then it's.
That's how compiling code works. I think that's an excelle I know, which.
Is that you mentioned kind of the prioritization of like fixing this stuff. Obviously, situations where human lives are at stake would be prioritized, one would hope, before the banks and stock markets would is to say exactly, but I would hazard to guess that the situation that got pushed lowest on the priority list where the airline kerfuffles, because
that's just inconvenience. And I had a friend who just got back literally a day and a half ago after being log jammed out in California and then Dallas, and it was like a home alone type situation getting home for Christmas, and he was just absolutely without you know, a remedy, and he was just you know, just biting his time, spinning his wheels until he finally got home.
And I don't know if you've seen any of the footage of like luggage carousels with like all the luggage got lost and then all of a sudden it was found all at the same time when things went back online, and it's just like, it looks like a refugee type situation. It's insane.
And of this many of those folks as well. I got a lot of folks on the road here. And Delta got a special attention from the current administration due to the absolute pandemonium, like flights grounded. As you said, Matt, flight's delayed. And if you're hearing this, and by God, if you were affected by this, we hope you're home safe or you started a new life at the airport, no judge.
Hey, there you go, and you can do that at.
That movie the terminal, you know where you just like I live at the airport.
Find a way into that Delta private club and just make yourself at home. I'm telling you.
It's not Look, it's we can go the next time we're on the road together. It's okay. It's a lot more like a it's like a corporate golden corral. That's exactly what I was, like, a corporate gold.
Amazing. But my buddy was absolutely, you know, the quintessential victim of this. I don't know if you guys saw any of animated gifts of all of the flights that were the flight paths. There were a few that were making the round where it was just all of these
crazy intersecting flight paths. And that part could have been dangerous because I guess air traffic control was potentially you know, you mentioned groundings, probably could have potentially caused mid air collisions if there hadn't been you know, some quick thinkers.
Atc infrastructures hanging by a thread anyhow. And one interesting thing about those infographics that came out is initially a few of them purported to show a twelve hour time window of flight stoppage, but it published before twelve hours had passed, So we always have to think critically that's true about that?
I think, yeah, I think what it was hinting at those still, yes.
One and there were real ones. You probably saw the accurate ones. But yeah, the Delta lounges are great. We should go.
So guys, before we get out of here and head to Delta's sky Captain, it's called the Skyline Skycaptain.
In the world of lounge.
You have to talk about this. Crowd Strike is number one when it comes to end point security for you know, a big, big company.
The tagline it's pretty cure.
Well they are, that's what they are. They're like the name in endpoint security. If you're a huge enterprise company, fortune five or five hundred company, the.
Google is the search engine for most people. Yes, it's on that level.
The number two company for endpoint security is Microsoft. Those two companies are is what caused the problem, the Microsoft operating system and the endpoint security of CrowdStrike. So like, if you're a huge enterprise, one and two just gave you massive issues, right, eight point five million Microsoft Windows
machines got hit. So we're looking at the problem of one company like a Google, like a crowd strike in this example, like whatever huge company that spans across the globe and has its little tendrils in all of the various machines that run stuff. We're looking at another one of these problems where that situation becomes untenable in a major issue, because one company's problem becomes everybody's problem, right, And I do have a feeling we're gonna see even
more of this. These kinds of issues have been ramping up and occurring more frequently, and I think it's just gonna get.
Worse because monopolization is bad.
But did we mention though that the one airline I believe that was unaffected was Southwest because they're still running Windows three point one.
Yeah, isn't that nice? But then they had funny that's really great. But then they had a plane fly about one hundred and seventy five feet above the water before it landed this week and it wasn't supposed to do that.
Was that related?
The unrelated, unrelate related that happened on July twenty first. I think they're reporting out of kron dot Com.
Also July twenty first hottest day ever on record. So far, this has been good news, bad news.
Yeah, yeah, the name of this segment. Yes.
And on July twenty second, the self professed wolfever B and B was sentenced to four years. Hey, don't get sentenced for four years for stuff like that, guy. We'll be right back with more strange news.
And we have returned. There is great news I'm so glad to share with everybody who's been wondering why aren't more sharks on cocaine? Recently we learned that sharks off the coast of Brazil have been testing positive for cocaine. And this is something that maybe gets little misreported, but you guys know, I love the stories like the Farrell super Pigs and the you know, cocaine bears, the super Orca marauders, stuff like that, which we'll come into play
in a later listener mail program. So there was this study that got published July twenty second and day we're talking about in just a moment ago found all of the Brazilian sharp nose sharks that were tested for biological possession of cocaine turned out to test positive. Data concentration as much as one hundred times higher than previously reported for any other aquatic creatures. Getting a lot of this
from Sky News thanks to the journalist Dylan Donnelley. This is one of those stories that goes viral just because we know an executive producer somewhere is going to say, guys, they call us producers, but we're really more disruptors. Shark Nato, cocaine shark cocaine bear. I'm telling you, guys, the film is on the way. That's the conspiratorial aspect of this, in my opinion.
What do you think My theory is that some writer has the idea and then, because of the laws of the universe, that then has to become an actual thing. I think that's what's happening nowadays, right right.
The causation of fiction in fact, have become reversed, just like the polls.
Yep, somebody has an idea and now it's here.
I wish I could remember this guy's name, but I went to the comedy store in LA not too long ago and saw this old school He's like part of a multi comic bill, old school comedian wearing like the rumpled suit and everything. He had apparently been there since the place opened, and he made a joke about a recent news story about a boat full of cocaine that washed up on a beach in Malibu and said, man, I bet all those turtles, which is they had their
straws back. Yeah, it was that kind of joke. It was that kind of one miner comic, but just reminded me of this story.
And we know that the primary reason this is happening. It's similar to the studies that found all the cocaine residue on euro banknotes and in the water of certain Italian towns. It's not because someone had a bunch of spare cocaine and decided to party with sharks, although I'm sure that has happened at some point, probably in the nineteen seventies or eighties. It's because of the massive jump in the cocaine trade. The methods are getting increasingly sophisticated.
We've heard the great stories about the homemade submarines, which are objectively impressive. There is a high rate of attrition baked into the drug game in general, up to an including killing people obviously, so what seems to have most likely happened is that there were multiple massive losses of cocaine that got ejected as authorities arrived, or got misplaced
or got shenanigan in some other way. And what I think is fascinating about this is this kind of research allows us to conduct forensics and get a look at how much of this stuff is actually making it to the US or another destination point versus how much is
being just lopped out into the ocean. Because you know, let's practice empathy and understand they're very intelligent maritime creatures now who are saying the neighborhood is going to hell because of all the petroleum products, the microplastics, the and now the cocaine. You know what I mean. I wish they could move, but they can't.
Isn't that a thing though? Where like municipal like study or I think there was a scientific study into various municipal water supplies and how much or sewage I think that's what it was. It was like how common it was for there to be high levels of addictive drugs found in like common sewage. I think it was pertaining to like converting that gray water into usable water and
doing so. There was like a study of like how much things like cocaine were found in that it's just interesting how much of that stuff just makes it into the water supply.
Like yeah, like the study we mentioned in Italy too. And I don't want to sound like we're disparing gene the good folks of Venice or Genoa or what have you.
Guys, have we considered the idea that maybe the sharks saw that the cops are coming and they just did all the cocaine.
I think that's exactly what happened. I believe that now.
Okay, why they always got to keep moving, that's whether circling around.
Have you met sharks, they're already intense. I feel like they could be involved in those situations. But I also saw an orca recently, a grandmother orca. Absolutely mop a great white shark. Move it on. We want to hear We'll ask you about this in a in a future program. But what do you We want to hear what you think the most dangerous large non human animals are on the planet, Like who is the apex apex predator?
Ben? Could you PvP a great white shark on cocaine?
Which, because you're still okay, okay, if I'm still called sober, then I guess it depends on the depth of the water fair enough, you know what I mean, it's like three feet.
Then I think there's a fighting chance.
That would be what would be considered a handicap in your favor, right, Yeah, yeah.
Which I would need. But there's already a handicap because you know, we have the thumbs and we're smarter. But the main thing is we would have to if we were in that situation, we would have to have that have that bout decided pretty soon. Because shout out to our previous episode on Great Disasters Waiting to happen, Yellowstone just laid a nasty, nasty one. I'm sorry yesterday.
Yeah, there's some reason that's visual because I'm thinking of like the sulfuric smell of like grow old faithful, and I'm just picturing that like Yellowstone as an entity, like took a dump kind of.
Yeah, it took a squirty part what we know. This was reported by Associated Press out there in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the Yellowstone National Park guys Are system had an enormous surprise eruption just yesterday as we record and people in the area. It was big enough that people in the area had to run for safety. This thing was sprayed and it grew in front of them. It was beginning
to rain very hot water and debris. People were also trying to figure out how safe a distance they could get before they turned around, almost like the old biblical story of pillars of salt, and so they found themselves gathered under these huge clouds of steam. Now, why are we reporting this? No injuries that we know of so far. However, this hearkens back to the Yellowstone super eruption, super hydrothermic eruption that people have been predicting since far before the
existence of this show. And I've got to ask you, guys, do you remember that episode?
Yeah?
Uh yeah, I remember early on talking about the caldera, learning what that word was, learning how afraid I am of that thing that word represents. Yeah.
The thing is, if there was a Yellowstone super volcanic or hydrothermic eruption, I think super volcanics best way to say it. If it were to occur, this would be an absolutely catastrophic event for a large swath of the
US and Canada. The last one happened seventy thousand years ago, a number that I think we reference in our episode all those years back However, the boffins who study this are pretty certain that Yellowstone is due to erupt again, kind of like how you know if a faucet is continually running in a glass into a glass of water, you have to empty the glass at some point or
to overflow. I don't know. I'm thinking if there's a time I'm in history where someone would say, also super volcanic eruption in addition to all the other stuff, I think it's this time.
Yep, pile it on, guys, just now. I gotta worry about volcanic eruptions.
I'm just you know, maybe the guys that will send us a note and say, you dudes were cool to me in that last episode. Don't go to Yellowstone, don't come to school tomorrow. Oh god, yeah, that got dark. Oh yeah, well let's keep Let's keep getting darker than because they said, I want to found so much stuff.
I wanted to cavalcade of these of these stories. Uh. Even if we don't travel out to Yellowstone and we stay at home, we could be in trouble because of a new nifty uh robodog that has been designed by the Department of Homeland Security. The neo robot is capable of delivering mo bile DDoS attacks and jamming home networks and disabling devices, and is specifically built to do this during police raids. What could go wrong?
And that's intense that they've got a robot that can do that now, because we talked not long ago in one of one of these episodes about home invaders who could shut down like Wi Fi networks, right, and they make handheld things, but you have to be a human being trying to get into a place holding one of these things generally. Now that it's on, is it a remote controlled dog or is it like an autonomous dog robot thing?
It doesn't have wires, Okay, it does look like it could be remote controlled. I imagine there is. It might be like a bomb drone, you know what I mean, or the robots that get sent in to dismantle or diffuse bombs. In that there would be somebody perhaps controlling it to a degree. We don't know how much autonomy it would have,
but we do know. The primary calculus for this is it comes from a case when a person suspected of child sexual abuse used his doorbell camera to see FBI agents at his front door serving a search warrant, and so with that information from his you know, from his cloud connected doorbell camera, essentially he opened fire on the agents and he killed two of them and injured three more So, the idea here, the proposition which I would argue is valid, is that this will help save people's lives.
But then there's the other side of it, because this is the United States, which means that if you were getting up to something untoward, you could use this to make sure that your actions had far less of a chance of ever surfacing in court or an investigation. You know, you an'll have to turn off a body camera, you can turn off a house yay.
Wow, yeah, really good for a serial killer too.
Yeah, because you know, the question is then how long will it the technology? How long will it take for someone to build this on their own?
Right, It's just a more elaborate version of the old cutting the power, cutting the phone line thing. It's just like a much more all encompassing version of that trope.
That, Yeah, I see. I think it's an escalation because even if you cut the power in the you know, the proverbial phone lines or the internet cable, ninety plus percent of people are still going to have some sort of wireless device that will allow them to contact the outside world and foil whatever you're trying to accomplish. Whether that is very very good or very very bad, I don't know. I hate to be one of those both
sides entities. I feel like this, this thing which is built using the quadruped unmanned ground vehicle or fugouve uh, I feel like it's inevitable, but I feel like things are going to go wrong with it? Is that alarmist? What do you think?
No? I mean, we know that when certain technologies or capabilities exists in the I guess you could call it law enforcement sector, they usually find their way into the hands of the public sector, you know, whether it be something like radar detectors or you know, certain types of surveillance gear. You know, usually there becomes like some sort of version of it that trickles its way into being able to be purchased and utilized by anyone.
And I still can't buy an M wrap, you know what I mean?
I wish you could, dude, I.
Think we would look sick in an M wrap.
The You know, the one thing about this is that it cannot affect wired devices, So even if you cut the power. If you had a battery backup system and wired cameras or something, it couldn't affect that, which is a good and terrible thing, because I feel like people who are getting up to terrible stuff may already be thinking about that, because there's less chance for those systems to get leaked or be snooped on by a neighbor or something.
Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I always think back to the pretty terrible John Carpenter movie Escape from La. Spoiler alert for a very bad and decades old movie, see Escape from New York. Escape from La sucks. It's worth watching if only to see how bad it is.
But snake has an eye patch.
Man, he has an eye patch. Yeah, that's this thing. But Escape from La just isn't very good. It's got some of the it's got this scene where he's like surfing and it's the worst CG kind of green screen looking thing you'll ever see in your life. But there is a pretty cool plot device that stuck with me when I was a kid or into my adulthood after seeing it in the theaters when it was originally out. Is this idea that, through some sort of crazy network
of satellites. And again, this technology is absurd. They could like make batteries stop working. They could wirelessly basically set humanity back into the dark ages. I always think about that whenever I hear about, you know, the new technology that can you know, wirelessly turn things off, or can wirelessly you know, invade your home.
Run Yeah it also you know, it turns out in general that a lot of films based in LA about La end up not being that great. I'm just gonna leave that point there. I don't want to make anybody too angry the manufacturer of the neo dog or or a good yeah well yeah, LA Confidential is good, but the majority of them, I think, well, anyway, I don't want to mess I don't want to anger the producers in the big wigs of the world, because I don't want to end up like that top Russian economist who
died after falling out of a window. Another demonstration, Yeah, eighty two years old. You can check out the full story, which is there's a short reference to it now that you can find in Western outlets like Newsweek, Valentino Bondarenko. And the most interesting thing is, I would say to look at the growing list of Russians who have fallen out of windows since Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine.
I would say scientists need to take heed and just stay away from windows. Yeah.
Yeah. If someone offers to walk you to a window, say no. Treat it like a secondary location. Yeah, get a closer look and shout out to the XCIA agent who, in a total rookie move, just appears to have turned on turned for South Korea intelligence. For the price of designer handbags. You can find that story. It's all the key words you need. The power is yours. We're going to pause for a word from our sponsors and we'll be back with one more piece of strange news.
And we returned with one final piece of strange news. Ben I really enjoyed that grab bag. By the way, some lighter stuff in there definitely cut a little dark. I'm gonna turn it back to the lighter side, I think, I hope. With a story out of Wellington, New Zealand. We're talking about art. There is a museum called the Mona which is in Tasmania. It is the museum of
Old and New Art. It recently revealed that the paintings featured in a very controversial exhibition that were purported to be by Picasso were in fact by the curator of this exhibition, a woman by the name of Kersha Kashey. This was after some inquiries from the Picasso administration, which is in France. They go about the business of making sure that art that is on display that is purported to be by Picasso is in fact by Picasso, among other things.
And being like treated appropriately, treated appropriately.
Or the appropriate amount of you know, respect that is due the genius Pablo Picasso. And I am a pretty big Picasso fan. I remember a time where it was like I could do that, yeah, but but did you? And also Picasso was in fact a classically trained painter. He just created an aesthetic and a style that has been emulated.
You know. Now he's a person, horrible, not a good dude, but very talented artist. I had the same experience over when I've seen picasso early earlier work, Like he he got to god mode level before he got to the stuff that people might object to artistically, the price, let's call it.
But he was also fabulous at political at just creating these politically charged like Guernica and just you know, just absolutely these striking images that can evoke all kinds of emotion just through shape and form and flow and anyway, big fan. But this exhibition was inherently almost like a work of performance art, and it took a couple of years for the Pacasto administration to even get wind of it. But let's talk a little bit about what the exhibition
was in the first place. These supposed Picasso paintings have been on display for more than three years in the ladies restroom, the Lady's lounge, as they referred to it, of the Mona.
As Pablo would have wanted, As Pablo would.
Have want, wasn't that lounge created specifically?
Though?
Well no, no, no, hear me out. Okay, there's more to the story. So I believe what they're referred to is the lady's lounge is actually the restroom. This was after an exhibit was curated by by this woman that I'm talking about, who works at the museum, and I believe her husband actually owns the museum or is like the you know, the top official at this Mona museum. It was part of an exhibit that was in the museum proper originally that was intended to be for women's
eyes only, so men were not allowed. They were denied admittance to this exhibit, which included these again supposed Picasso paintings in addition to some other works. They weren't named, but they were supposedly supposed. They were supposed to be from other highly regarded artists, and in the pieces that I've found, I haven't seen direct reference to who those
artists were meant to have been. But essentially what happened was this created a more or less gender war type situation where men were objecting to the fact that they could not get in to see these supposed, very rare and valuable works of art, and this led to a lawsuit, and that is what led to the paintings and the
exhibition being moved into the women's restroom. And apparently at the hearing that took place as a result of this kerfuffle, Kashelle, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that it's k A E. C H E L E. And a kind of coterie of other women who were involved in this basically attended in protests simultaneously or synchronously crossing and uncrossing their legs at various points of the hearing and then they kind of marched out in solidarity. Let's hear a little bit
more about this hearing. So the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal held essentially a hearing. I'm not quite sure about the exact details of what terms are used in Australian litigation or Australian civil service versus over here, but the proceedings were overseen by a gentleman by the name of Deputy President Richard Gruber, and he had this to say about the art exhibition. The participation by visitors in the process of being permitted or refused entry is part of
the artwork itself. I'm just going to quote from this appiece. I think it's a little confusing. Gruber ruled that the man who made the initial complaint had suffered a disadvantage. He wrote in the decision that found the exhibition to be discriminatory in part because the artworks in the ladies Lounge, which is what it was originally called before they moved it to the restrooms. Just want to clear that up
here real quick, were so valuable. Cashelley had described them to the hearing as a carefully curated selection of paintings by the world's leading artists, including two paintings that spectacularly demonstrate Picasso's genius. The tribunal ordered the Museum Mona to stop refusing men entry, and Gruber also gave the group of women who attended a hard time for those actions that I was describing to you earlier. They were being disrespectful.
One woman, he said, this is weird, was pointedly reading feminist texts for shame. Bizarre, and he also lambassad the group for leaving the tribunal in a slow march led by Ms Caschelley to the sounds of a Robert Palmer song. I wonder which Robert Palmer song? It was addicted to love? Maybe I don't know. It's hard to say, and really quickly it's a little confusing. I apologize if I got this detail wrong. They didn't move the exhibit to a
women's restroom. It continued to be referred to as the ladies lounge, and Kashelle actually brought in a working commode and installed it into the space for all intents and purposes, converting this gallery space to a women's restroom, and allowed them to continue to refuse men's entry to the exhibition. And I don't know. In some of the reporting that I read, it made it sound like you literally moved
it to the women's restroom. And also because this had been in place for I believe it's been three years before this news story came out. Because of the entry of the Picasso administration, I was maybe thinking, like, they just hung these in the women's restroom, so my mistake there. Apparently one of them, though for this entire time, was
accidentally hung upside down. And there's a pretty funny quote from the curator again of this exhibit, when she admitted very recently that she in fact had painted these pieces herself. She said, I imagined that a Picasso scholar, or maybe it's a Picasso fan, or maybe just someone who googles things would visit the Ladies Lounge and see that the painting was upside down and expose me on social media. But that didn't happen.
Yeah, I've got I got to say, though, the ruling there is very interesting to me. The idea of a piece of art being defined in part by the experience of seeing it or being denied from seeing it, that that concept is really fascinating to me. But also it reminds me a bit of fellow conspiracy realists. Part of personal anecdote tell us more importantly if you have experience
with this. But it reminds me of some literary shows that I've seen here and abroad in Atlanta, most particularly an event called Blue Stockings, and they would they would have shows where everybody could go, and then they would also have shows that were women or female identified only. And there were a few people in the crowd about the temerity to get upset about that. I don't know.
I mean the idea that you would you tell me, you guys, the idea that you would choose this as the hill to die on to say that I as a dude and being discriminated against.
I guess the reason that I described you as sort of a work of performance art is And I think you're right about the judges really. But the most interesting part of the rerling to me was the fact that he said it was the value of the art that made it unfair to not permit men to come and see it, and the fact that the art was fully counterfeit.
That was part of the whole point, you know, I don't think she was kind of being sneaky and trying to make it sort of seem like they were legit, but a lot of the literature around it and the way it was promoted it was very tongue in cheek, and she never actually said they were by Pacasta said they represented the genius of Picasso, and they're certainly in the style of Picasso, which, as I sort of mentioned at the top, without knowing his background or appreciating, you know,
the way he particularly is able to do this stuff, you could fool probably some layman into thinking this is a Picasso because the style can be copied and has been copied, you know, ad nauseum. So that to me was the whole point. And I got to wonder if, with the way they acted in the tribunal, that was part of it too. I think it's pretty genius. Larger game, yeah, I think it's kind of very seven, you know, very like it was all planned out ahead and we played
right into our hands. Not to compare women with serial killer.
I definitely yeah, again, I'm definitely not mad at it. And as I mentioned at the top, you know, Picasso is really cool in terms of the visual art. Check out the Prado if you ever get a chance and you're out that way. One of the one of the things that I could say, having read, uh read a bunch of old stuff about Picasso in the bat in the I was going to say, in the back of the.
Day but in the day rooms.
Famous bastard.
Yeah, yeah, Like I said, it's a terrible person. But I think he I like to think he would enjoy this kind of uh disobedience towards the system, right, this sort of discordinated discordianism, I think would speak to him.
Completely agree.
He would hit on the women doing it one.
Hundred and I completely agree. And I will just wrap this up by saying that we now have her from the Picasso administration and they apparently are not seeking any kind of you know, retribution or you know, doing anything to try to you know, harm this woman financially or the institution. Let me see if I can find the quote. Here we go. Family of Pablo Picasso chooses not to take action against Tasmania's Mona for Kirsha Kshelly faked artwork.
This from an Australian news agency. I believe AMP dot ABC dot net dot au. The family of artists Pablo Picasso has chosen not to take action against Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art after sending it a letter challenging its exhibition of several fake paintings that were falsely
portrayed as Picasso's. It was this letter from the Picasso administration that prompted her to come clean after three years of these paintings being on display, It says, the Picasso estate, through Picasso Administration, recently contacted Mona over the exhibition of several works by Picasso whose nature seemed doubtful. Mona immediately responded, expressing its regrets and declaring it was ready to take
the paintings down. While we can only regret the situation in the current overexposure, we believe that this matter is now closed. We also specify that we in no way hold this against the museum itself nor the artists. The urgency of creation sometimes makes us forget that there are principles of law protecting the interests of authors, which applied to everyone. Mistakes are also part of learning, and we have no doubt that Mona will make sure to call
on authors when necessary in the future. I think that is a very thoughtful and level headed response in the spirit of the work. If not the life and negative actions of Publo Picasso.
Well, also that administration had to uh. The Picasso administration has famously really up to their diplomacy game because they had to make peace with some pretty serious disagreements between family members or descendants of Picasso's estate, so they they can. It's also national thread the needle day while we're recording, so they are very good at threading the needle.
Ah, very nice guys. I think I have an answer to the question Ben that you posed a little earlier, like why when and why would you get upset about something like this where you are not admitted?
Right?
I think in my head the scenario is every person that walks through the door to something pays the same price for admission, but because of the intrinsic properties of some of the people who pay that admission price, they don't get to experience the entirety of whatever it is they paid for. I think that's messed up, thought out right, and I think anybody would have a problem with that, no matter what the thing is that's being pointed at and saying you can't because of this.
But you know you're saying with admission to the me is the improper you should have access to everything that everyone else if paying that admission has access.
Well, I'm saying that is a general situation, right, So if I don't know how much it costs to go into this museum, it might be donation kind of thing, like the High Museum here in Atlanta or place.
Something like that. Most most are meant Yeah, and if it is that, actually a lot of modern a lot of modern art museums do have a hefty price tag, though sometimes.
Well, I don't know that those specifics. I'm just saying I think that's the situation where you do get upset and you're like, ah, that's kind of messed up, because then it is like you're singling people out basically.
You know, which would be different from the example of say creating ah as it's called a safe space for people. It would be. But this argument then becomes moot, largely because these are not the real McCoy picassos, you know, and that and that that ruling seems to depend on the idea of fame or prominence in the discourse of visual art. But I stand with your point. I think that's beautifully recent and highly astute. There.
I saw a thing recently that reminded me of this. It was like a pr kind of I guess, pop up sort of happening thing that Payless Shoes did in Los Angeles where they created a storefront and called it Plessi and had all of these like celebrity influencers show up and had all of these Payless shoes behind glass and had them all priced at like six seven hundred dollars and they sold a ton of them, only to
reveal at the end that it was all Payless shoes. Now, one could argue that some influencer who was taken in by this and perhaps embarrassed, could come out and say that was messed up, but they were sort of the trap was laid for them and it was meant to prove a point. So I got to wonder, like, is there a room for litigation in a situation like that?
Where is it false advertising? I guess Payless gave them all their money back, So I got to wonder, like, what is the lynch pin of what makes something, you know, I guess, actionable in that way versus not when there is deception involved.
Yeah, it depends on a couple of other things. Because then from a legal perspective, you could also ask what about those taste tests where they say, actually, you know Lucciano like the Saturday Night Live sketches. Obviously, actually Luciano's is not a real Italian restaurant. You've been eating Domino's pasta or whatever. Yeah, it's not to beat you to death, but the idea there is maybe going in through like deception, really hinges on the concept of expectation, right, those are
the two sides of the coin. So if you expect to see a pacasto and someone's actively telling you that you are, and it is not a fact Picasso, perhaps you would have legal grounds. But if you have a taste test to go to an Italian restaurant you've never heard of, and you sign a bunch of stuff that you don't read, then you have removed, you have indemnified the tricksters. So I think it's a really interesting question. Be great to hear from a legal beagle in the crowd about this.
I think it also, at the end of the day, depended largely on whether people are good sports about it or not. You know, like it was only one complaint, it would seem that led to this tribunal, and that's probably all it takes. But I would argue that the women responsible for curating this event probably appreciated the fact that it led to that, and they were able to do their kind of escalation of the protest by you know, doing all of these kind of very obvious actions during
the tribunal to protest even that. So I think it's neat. I think it's kind of iconoclastic and a bit badass. So I just thought i'd bring it up. But I think that's about the gist of that one yo.
And the gist continues. The jig is up, but the gist continues.
There we go. I don't know.
We'll work shop it.
Folks.
Thank you so much as always for tuning in. We can't wait to hear from you your opinions about this, the nature of art, the nature of CrowdStrike, whether or not you could PvP a shark. What's the largest land animal you could PvP? This will be important later in the meantime. Let us know these answers and just anything else that's on your mind. Reach out in the darkness. You try to be easy to find online.
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