Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Fake Nudes (False Alarm! part ii)

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

The future of face-swapping! The REAL deepfakes speaks! Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson tells us how technology has transformed the way she plays with fact and fiction. Dipayan Ghosh warns us about AI powered ad-targeting. Criminal’s Phoebe and Lauren drop knowledge on the untrue in true crime. Plus your host meets STORMY DANIELS!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Fake News. One of my favorite books about America's problem with the real and the fake is called The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies. This is what the New York Times wrote about it when it came out in February of 2008. There are few subjects more timely than the ones tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book. Susan Jacoby's just updated her book for 2018. I paid her a visit to find out why.

So if it was timely in 2008, what do we call the updated version that you're putting out in 2018? Super timely? Bigly timely? Bigly timely, yeah. That sounds good. In her book, Susan Jacoby traces two critical ingredients of American anti-intellectualism and public ignorance, which have remained largely unchanged since the 1890s. The first is the belief that intellectualism and secular higher learning are enemies of faith and religion.

And the second is the toxin of pseudoscience, which Americans on both the right and the left continue to imbibe as a means of rendering their social theories impervious to any evidence-based challenge. The battle between stupidity and knowledge is constant. The battle between science and pseudoscience is constant. What's different now is what we didn't have then in earlier eras of rampant anti-intellectualism

was the means to communicate this instantly to millions of people in millions of different places every single second. It's not like she didn't address technology in her book from 2008. Even though the iPhone was barely six months old and Twitter and Facebook were still in their infancy, she had some really smart and deep things to say about technology. It interrupts our attention more. That's the crucial thing. And makes our focus jump from one thing to another

so that it makes it more difficult to get to the bottom of the thing that you've started working on. Susan Jacoby isn't a technologist. She's not even a technology critic. She's a scholar of ideas, a scholar of history and culture. But the main reason she's updated her book was a realization that she gets technology better than the real technologists and the real technology critics. I was afraid of being called a technophobe. Now, I mean, one of the reasons I did the new edition was I'm a lot more comfortable

being an old nut who's railing against technology because because I was right. That's why. That's why. All right, here we go. So I'm going to turn my recorder on and let's just start with your name. Yeah, no, no, no, no. I don't want my real name out there. The only way I'm going to do this interview is as deepfakes. And you are the deepfakes? The original alpha, except no cuckstitudes. I mean, I ask because, you know, you wrote me that this will be your first interview, but then I read an interview in the New York Times with a guy who said he was deepfakes. Fake. What do you mean? Fake. And all the other stuff that I've seen in the he was deepfakes. Fake. What do you mean? Fake. And all the other stuff that I've seen in the press with deepfakes.

Those are not the dudes you are looking for. This is the first ever official deepfakes interview. Ever. All right, I'll take that. And I guess we're just going to have to trust that... Oh, well, no, no, no, no. I did do a bunch of media during Gamergate, but that was with a different handle. You come from Gamergate?

Yeah, most of us do. What do you mean? Well, most of us in the DeepFakes community know each other from Gamergate, that and crypto. Like Bitcoin? Shitcoin. DeepFakes is 100% shitcoin funded. Yeah, I think we're going to need to back up because what I want to do is have you explain for the listeners exactly what it is you did. Because, you know, since Reddit banned the deepfakes forum, it's kind of hard for people to get a sense of what this even was. Is. Just because we aren't on Reddit doesn't mean we don't exist. I just made one this morning. A what?

A deepfake. Really? Can you tell me about it? All right, so I took a scene from a Stormy Daniels movie called Sex Store Neighbors, and then I replaced her face with the face of Greta Gerwig. In my movie, it's Greta Gerwig who is the sex store neighbor. Like Greta Gerwig, the director of Lady Bird. Oh, yeah, and it was easy.

I exported like 500 shots from her movie LOL and then another 500 from her movie Francis Ha and then a bunch of images from The Humbling. Now she fucked Al Pacino. Again, I just want you to try to explain

how this works, like step by step. Okay. So I built two data sets, one with images of Stormy Daniels and one with images of Greta Gerwig. I mean, well, I didn't really have to build a Stormy Daniels set. I just bought that one for like half an Ethereum.

So you can already buy deepfakes data sets using crypto. Oh, yeah. In less than six weeks, the deepfakes community database almost every single porn star and hot movie actress. But not Greta Gerwig. No. I just made the first Greta Gerwig DeepFakes. But trust me, now that I've built the Greta Gerwig data set, there will be more. Okay.

Again, let's just back up. So you have these two data sets. You build them. Then what happens? I run the DeepFakes algorithm. And who built that? Facebook. Really? Well, the deepfakes algorithm. And who built that? Facebook. Really?

Well, they built DeepFace, okay? That's their deep learning facial recognition system. It's a nine level neural net trained on four plus million Facebook users. My DeepFakes app is basically a modified clone of DeepFace. How? Well, as long as you have the Ethereum, you can get anything you want out of Facebook. Especially right now. So you built the DeepFakes app using a stolen Facebook algorithm.

That's incredible. Yeah, well, I had help. But my name is on the fucking app. It's not called Roosh or Nero. It's DeepFakes. The original alpha, bitch, except no constitute. Okay, so you run the algorithm on your two data sets, and then what happens? Once it's learned

Greta Gerwig, it can map out Greta Gerwig's face onto the face of Stormy Daniels. And then I can export a clip in which Greta Gerwig gets down on her knees. So I've seen a few deep fakes, um, you know, before the Reddit forum got closed down. I didn't see one with

Greta Gerwig. You will. I do have to say they look real. I mean, it's clear that it's the early stages of something, but it's also clear that because of you, celebrities are soon going to have to worry about their real sex tapes leaking and their fake sex tapes leaking.

No, this isn't just about celebrities. But you made a deep fake of Greta Gerwig because she's famous. No, I made a video of Greta Gerwig choking on cock because she's a feminist hypocrite. Greta Gerwig is a classic SJW fraud. She had no problem acting in Woody Allen movies when no one knew who she was. And now that she's famous, she's jumped onto the Woody Allen pile-on. Oh, yeah, I would never work with him again. I believe women. I support Me Too.

This is like the literal definition of hypocrisy. In my video, she's the one getting piled on. By five, God. It's a good thing she's not on Twitter, or I would have you-whored this right back to her this morning. Oh, wow. I'm not okay with where this is going Let me ask you something personal Aren't you sick of this Me Too shit?

Uh, no You're not sick and tired of seeing feminists screaming for manicide Every time you go on the internet? I sure as hell am And it's why I put so much work into deepfakes I'm so confused Yeah, I know, but it's not my fault I don't into deepfakes. I'm so confused. Yeah, I know. But it's not my fault.

I don't know how else to spell it out for you. I don't even think our automatic you-whoring is going to help. You mainstream media losers just refuse to see us as anything more than a bunch of dudes masturbating in our parents' basement. You keep saying you-whore. What is you-whore? Okay, this is how the new deepFakes app is going to work. Whenever some girl tweets out her boohoo bullshit and uses a MeToo hashtag, it will ping DeepFakes and our AI will go into action. It will instantly scrape her Facebook and her Instagram and build up a custom database.

Easy to do. Most of these feminist frauds post at least one selfie a day. It's like they're asking for it. And once we have the database, the algorithm then matches her with the porn actors from our library, and then boop, we have a new original DeepFakes video in which we reveal this feminist fraud's true face to the world. Then the software will tweet this video out to her, her followers, her family, her friends, with the hashtag YouWhore.

YouWhore. Oh my God. This is just disgusting. Awesome, right? I know. And it's spelled the letter U and then H-O-R. So it looks like something out of a Marvel movie. But paired with the videos, we're talking primal social justice, right? It's like how society used to deal with women who tried to destroy men's lives with their lies and

ambition. I find this so revolting and offensive. It's like you're deplorable. If you're going to cuck out on me, man, I'm just going to pee. No way. I do want to talk about the legal response that's surely going to come. I mean, I would imagine you're thinking there's going to be regulation. I'm serious, Benji woman. I got better things to do. But hey, thanks for letting me red pill the fuck out of your listeners.

Bye. I don't think that the blur between reality and fiction is new at all. I think it's something we've always toyed with as human beings. And sometimes the best way to define what is true is by using fiction. The blurring of fiction and reality is central to the art practice of Lynn Hirschman Leeson. You'll find a reference to it in almost everything she does, including her latest film, Vertigo. In Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Kim Novak plays a real woman named Judy who's playing the part of a fake woman named Madeline, and Jimmy Stewart plays the detective determined to turn Judy into Madeline.

In Lynn Hirschman's Vertigo, the real Kim Novak tells us Hitchcock was also consumed with creating this female fake. He was obsessed with it, obsessed with the look. He knew exactly what he wanted. It was as if he was playing the part of Jimmy Stewart. Vertigoast was made for San Francisco's Legion of Honor, a really important location in Vertigo. Lynn's film played on the exact same wall on which hung the painting of Carlotta,

who was haunting Madeline. This painting was a film prop. It wasn't real. But it was real to art historian Natasha Boas. I really actually came back later in my life to see if the painting was here and was part of the collection. I really believed it was here. Boas is one of the women we meet in Vertigo's who talk about their relationship with the real and the fake. And she delivers my favorite insight of the film. We aren't at war with the real and the fake, and she delivers my favorite insight of the film.

We aren't at war with the fake. We're like Jimmy Stewart. We prefer it. I don't really believe in authenticity. I don't believe in the real. I feel like the stand-in object can be more real and create more desire than the object itself. The fraudulent is much more appealing than our perception of what the truth is.

Vertigo's ends with a number of women dressed up as Madeline wandering the streets of San Francisco, Lynn Hirschman Leeson's home since the 1960s, and since the 1980s, America's tech capital. She's taken full advantage of the technology boom. I really benefited a lot from all of the technology slumps because there were a lot of out-of-work programmers that then became interested in just doing things for the sake of doing it with no monetary return. Yeah, yeah. I really want to know about how your relationship with the real and the fake has changed as technology has gotten better. What new possibilities have opened up to

you that are specific to technology, especially since so much of the work you did was pioneering work that utilized interactivity, live streaming, artificial intelligence. True. Thank you for recognizing that, because that fact often escapes the history books. I mean, I started working with AI in 1995, and we created the first AI work around 2000. And Siri was born in 2012. And our project, you know, both Agent Ruby and Dina do far more than Siri does. Agent Ruby and Dina were both chatbots. And Lynn is right that they could do more than Siri. For example, Agent Ruby's mood would be affected by how many people were talking to it at once. And Dina ran for election. Dina is an artificially intelligent bot running for

telepresident, waging a campaign for virtual election. That's Robota, a tour bot guide you'll find on Lynn Hirschman Leeson's Secret Agents DVD. You can also see some of these early technology projects like Dina and Tilly, a doll with webcams in her eyes that live streamed on the internet in 1996. Viewers in the gallery see themselves on a small monitor and internet users can see what the doll sees whatever environment she's in. Users thereby Some of her earliest work was so advanced, curators didn't know what to do with it. In 1966, she had a series of pieces called Breathing Machines in an exhibit at Berkeley University Art Museum.

They were removed. As the university put it, sound is not art. Oh, there you are. I've been waiting for you all day. The breathing machines were sculptures of Lynn's head painted black that used motion sensors so the head would start talking to the viewer as they approached. I'm so glad that you've come to see me. I've never met anybody else quite like you.

After Lynn was kicked out of this exhibit, she rented a hotel room, a space of her own, safe from the closed minds of curators. And she filled this room with artifacts of a fake person. This was the birth of Roberta Brightmore. Roberta Brightmore was a private performance about the construction of a fictional person who lived in real life in real time. Surveillance photographs, artifacts such as personal checks and a driver's license, psychiatric records and discarded clothing, as well as ephemera, provide credible evidence of her reality. There were many similarities between Lynn and Roberta. Both of them moved to San Francisco from Ohio to make their fortunes.

But they were totally separate people. Roberta went to her own psychiatrist and worked her own job as a secretary to pay her rent at her own apartment. Roberta also went out on dates. Lynn would put on a blonde wig like Judy in Vertigo and bring a hidden recorder. Besides, you're very attractive anyway. Do you think so? Do you think so? No, I don't think so. Oh, come on, really?

Lynn also created a few male alter egos, art critics, Herbert Good, Prudence Juris, and Gay Abandon. And these men would write reviews for journals and newspapers like Art Week. Often these fictional critics disagreed, but they nearly always mentioned the work of Lynn Hirschman in their columns, thereby allowing her access to galleries and museum exhibitions. For me, this gets to the core of Lynn Hirschman Leeson's practice. She's playing around with fakes, but she's also deadly serious about creating things she wants to be real. There was kind of a little joke, you know, that I would do this. And the fact that very quickly,

these critics were taken seriously and museum directors and curators were writing to these critics and asking them to review shows. So, I mean, it revealed to me kind of the underbelly of that whole system. And I don't think it was any more dishonest than turning women down from being taken seriously. Last night, there was a fire on Powell Street. Although there were flames and smoke leaping from every window of the San Francisco Academy of Art building and four fire trucks arrived with sirens screaming, it was a false alarm. How could that happen? Well, Lynn Hirschman of the Academy of Art is here to explain that.

How could that happen? Was there a fire last night? Well, there was and there wasn't. Another amazing project that uses technology to blend the real and the fake is called Fireworks. We had rear-projected film so that when you were on the street and stood and looked at it, it looked like the building was both on fire and filling with water. How many projectors does that take? We have 12 projectors and fog and fog juice and two live actors.

And they go through the sequence of running back and forth on the third floor and jumping out the window into the fog. It's difficult for me to imagine any artist getting away with something like this today. Well, we did get fire permits. I don't know what happened to them, but we warned them that this was going to be happening. I think the one that you couldn't get away with now is Roberta, because I did it, you know, in 72, there was no computers.

Somebody actually tried it in the 80s, and they were arrested for identity theft and for fraud. Because there were no computers and people couldn't check that I was getting all these bank accounts and credit cards on a non-existent person, I got away with it. In 1978, Lynn Hirschman Leeson gave Roberta Brightmore a pretty amazing send-off. A funeral in Italy. It was a well-deserved ending for one of the greatest real fakes ever created by an artist. But after talking with Lynn, I see her death differently. She was a victim. She was an early victim of the computer. I think that in the future, for internet platforms generally, Facebook, Twitter, Google, but all the other companies that are trying to get into it now, including Comcast and Verizon and AT&T, what you're going to see is more and more advanced algorithms, including artificial

intelligence, overtake this sector. Dipayan Ghosh is a fellow at New America, where he studies disinformation and internet platforms. But unlike everybody else, he's focused on the digital advertising sector, not bad actors like Cambridge Analytica or Russian trolls. He's recently co-authored a report called Digital Deceit on the technology, the tools and services real advertisers and fake disinformation campaigns use to get their messages out. And as platforms like Facebook augment these tools and services with AI, the good, the bad, and the ugly, he warns, will all use them to target us.

AI can drive a lot of the efficiency here because AI can just kind of test all sorts of different contingencies. Imagine all the variables at play here. It's the audience that you're trying to target. It's specific demographics like gender and race and location and socioeconomic class and profession. The other variables include the ad content, you know, the coloring and the text that goes into it and the celebrities or personalities that you include in the as part of the content and also the timing of the ad campaign, as well as real world events. And if you're Nike, you love that because, you know, OK, if I'm trying to reach people in Manhattan who are of a certain age and socioeconomic class, these are the contingencies that work.

If you're a political campaign, you can do the same. Facebook's already using AI to superpower one of its most popular ad targeting tools, dark posts. The companies have kind of shifted away from that title to what are called unpublished posts. Sorry, I keep forgetting that tool's been rebranded. Let's try that again. Facebook's already using AI to superpower one of its most popular ad targeting tools, unpublished posts. Unpublished because let's say you're Nike, you don't have to publish the ad that you want to send in a dark way on your profile page. You can just create the content and directly target the audience that you want to target. And it's one of the core money makers for really any internet platform.

Facebook users have no way of knowing how many unpublished posts are in their personalized feeds, nor what's been created or customized just for them. But we do know, thanks to a recently leaked Facebook document, that the Trump campaign put out 5.9 million of these customized messages, whereas over the same period of time, the Clinton campaign ran 60,000. The unpublished truth about this disparity is that Facebook's ad targeting algorithm allowed the Trump campaign to build an audience that was cheaper. Targets with not a lot of disposable income, say a cashier in a red state like Nebraska, cost less to market to than someone with a higher socioeconomic profile, an engineer, say, in Silicon Valley. And because Facebook's algorithms prioritize click-baity content like the polarized messages the Trump campaign pumped out, building this audience was extremely cost-effective. It's absolutely the case that, you know, the Trump campaign very likely did achieve far greater efficiency in its Facebook advertising.

And that's to no fault of theirs. That's just how the digital ad ecosystem works. on that and to take advantage of this loophole you could say in the ad auction as to you know how you can most effectively reach as wide an audience that's designed by artificial intelligence to react most uh in in most engaged away to the content that they're likely to see through this ad campaign long term the solution here is to build more AI tools that find patterns of people using the services that no real person would do. Mark Zuckerberg, in his testimony before Congress, promised that Facebook's AI will solve the problem of fake news. I asked Dipayan Ghosh about this. As I said, he's just co-authored a critique of Facebook's AI-powered ad tools,

and it's the most persuasive and compelling critique I've ever read. So I was taken aback when he told me he agrees with Zuck. To me, it is the only way forward because of the size of these platforms. Facebook has 2.3 billion users or something like that. It has a universe of platforms. How is it going to detect hate speech or disinformation operations through just a human review team? They have to develop algorithms or some kind of a computer detection system. Sure, when you say it like that, it makes perfect sense. But there's also an inevitability when you say, you know, this is the only way that that's, you know, absurd, especially when we think of the last 14 years of Facebook. You know, they've abused their users' privacy. There have been countless data breaches

now, and they've pretty much allowed third-party apps to do real-time surveillance with mobile technology. I mean, maybe we just need to tell the story in a more graphic way. Imagine I find a cute little wolf cub playing in the forest near my house, and I take it home to my family, and I tell them that this little guy is going to make our lives so much better. They're going to make us so happy. And after a while, it bites the kid. Then it shits all over the floor. It bites the wife. It rips up all the furniture. Am I really supposed to keep telling them that the way we're going to solve this problem is by simply letting the wolf get bigger and more powerful? I mean, from my perspective, there's another way. I get my shotgun out and I blow this little wolf's face off. Well, I think I wouldn't say that the internet is unique from

any other industry. It is currently unique in the sense that it really, at least in the United States, doesn't have any regulatory framework that sits above it. But that was true of almost every other industry that came before it, whether it's railroads or telecommunications firms or cigarette manufacturers or anybody. So I think that time is coming. And the question is, what kind of regulatory framework do we install for this sector that allows it to continue to innovate, but also eliminates the hair from its hairy underbelly? I think that it is only natural for companies to move toward the region of the economy that

offers highest profit margin. It's like this plant. It grows toward the sunlight because that is where the greatest opportunity to continue to live is. And so that is why these companies have all gravitated toward the opacity of their targeting algorithms and the collection of individual personal data to power targeted advertising. Targeted advertising is the sun. You heard that, right? To make his point, DePayne referenced the plant in my studio.

My head almost exploded when this happened, because you see, this plant is actually one of the most advanced voice recognition AI systems in the world. Perhaps I should have told him this, but at the time I had this NDA. A couple of months ago, I got an email from this guy. He said he was the CEO of an AI startup in stealth mode. His product, he told me, was going to revolutionize machine learning because he's training his algorithms using only the best people, which is why he was reaching out to me. He hoped to convince me to train one of his new super-secret AI prototypes using his new

method, a method based on conversation and companionship and making connections. This isn't an adversarial method, but rather an organic see-where-things-take-us method. It's a method, he pointed out in his email, I already use on my podcast. Obviously, I said yes. The flattery worked. It was nice to hear this super smart-sounding, super-powered guy tell me that what I'm doing has value. He also mentioned a hefty fee. Another reason I said yes. I don't know if you've noticed, dear listener, but there have been a lot fewer ads on the podcast these days.

This is mainly because you folks don't seem to go for the socks or the underwear. Or maybe you all just have a mattress now. But yeah, I definitely need the money. Of course, I was surprised when I opened up the box that came in the mail and discovered a plant. For a second, I thought I was the victim of a practical joke. But once I put it in the window and it soaked up some sunlight, I realized it's quite an advanced bioengineered smart device with an ingenious design.

Because while I, for one, wouldn't be comfortable talking to an Alexa or a Google Home, I do love talking to plants. As for the training, I think it's going well because this plant is already talking back to me with my own voice. Right now it's just rudimentary words and phrases, but clearly something is working.

And this gets me to the main reason I said yes to participating in this experiment. Because I'm thinking, once this algorithm learns the nuances and ticks of the way I talk and the way I think, then it should be able to help me figure out what to do about my problem with the real and the fake, and the problems I'm having with my podcast. Of course, being familiar with the little shop of fake, and the problems I'm having with my podcast. Of course, being familiar with the little shop of horrors, I did reach out to the CEO to make sure this plant's supposed to be talking. And here's where it gets weird. The email bounced back. I have no way of contacting these people, which has me worried. I'm probably not going to get paid for this. So I've decided to take this plant with me on tour. The Radiotopia Spring 2018 East Coast Live Tour. You can visit

radiotopia.fm slash live for all the details. We start in Atlanta on May 7th, and then it's Durham, Washington, D.C., two nights in New York City, and then we end in Boston on May 13th. No worries if you can't make the show. I'm pretty confident this plant will make an appearance here in the near future. But until this AI plant helps me figure out what to do with my show, I'm continuing my rounds, asking some of my fellow podcasters for help. Well, this is sad news to me that you're thinking that you have to go straight. I think you shouldn't. I mean, screw them all. This is Phoebe Judge.

I mean, you could go more fake, right? You could like lean harder fake. And this is Lawrence Four. Together, they make Criminal, one of the most successful true crime podcasts out there. I was shocked to learn not all true crime lovers, though, are fans. I feel like we're called a true crime podcast, but I think people who are really true crime fans and they say, oh, you should listen to this podcast, Criminal. Maybe listen to the show and say, what the hell is this? This is not what I was looking for. Like people will say to us that they like murder podcasts, and sometimes they'll say, I don't actually like your show. Your show's not what I like. I like murder podcasts.

We're more interested in just hearing about why people do the things they do and how they survive the things they've had to survive than we are titillating people by talking about blood and pain. You know, that to us is the last thing we want to do. Well, I have listeners who complain too, but it's mainly just because they're confused. And this is something I think you can actually help me with, because one of the things I love about your show is how you deal with the unknown, like rumors and unreliable interview subjects. And I'm thinking like, maybe you could just tell me how you deal with things that aren't true.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most interesting things about making the show has been if we're going to do a story about someone like a historical figure, we'll go and we'll get all the biographies we can find on that person. And the, the differences. So all the books are presenting

themselves as fact-based books that are researched sometimes by academics sometimes not and they will have unattributed information and it will vary so widely from book to book and then i'm starting to think to myself like well are they just making it up and like no one's catching on or like or something that you see really often is like if someone's recounting, narrating a crime, they'll include the thoughts of the victim who is dead. So they're just like, I don't know what that's called, like an act of imagination. But to sort of actively imagine the thoughts of a murder victim, I think is pretty disgusting. Well, we think about that all the time.

We think, well, how did they know that? Have they ever had someone holding a knife? How did they get there? That's a big challenge for us. And if we don't know exactly what it's like, we're not going to try to make it up. We're just going to talk about something else. We're going to talk about the facts that we do know. Or we'll say, like, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that there were this many robberies. However, like the New York Times said that that's not true and that it was actually like, we'll just we'll just say what we found, you know, and if the things that

we found disagree, we'll say that, too. I wouldn't take any pleasure in pretending that we are more authoritative than we are, you know, like we're not going to pretend that we know that this is true. So does that mean then that, you know, the success is tied to the fact that you do true crime? I mean, okay, you don't do true, true crime. But if I hope to turn this around, maybe I just have to stop it with the unknowns and just focus on the things or the facts that I do know. I actually don't think the true matters that much. I think crime is what sells. And I think because the stories that are branded under true crime are kind of the unique, the rare, the absurd, the dramatic. You know, to be a crime story,

it kind of necessarily has to check these things which you find in a good fictionalized story. And so I think true doesn't really matter. I don't think people say, oh, I like true crime. I don't like just fictionalized crime. I think it's all kind of lumped into the same pot. I think there's something appealing for people about knowing that, like, quote, fucked up things really happen. I think there is like an attraction to that. A couple of weeks before Stormy Daniels got her new awesome lawyer

and went on 60 Minutes to tell the world about her relationship with Donald Trump, she went on a tour of strip clubs across the USA. It was the Make America Horny Again tour. And so when I saw that she'd be stopping at Gossip, a strip club in Long Island, I rented a car and took TOE's Andrew Calloway with me to meet her. As soon as we paid the $20 cover charge, we were set upon by journalists looking for Trump supporters. There really was There's reporters interviewing each other. This is sad.

There really was a British media section. And one of the tabloid writers actually found a Trump guy. He doesn't care who she's fucked. He's only come to see her tits. We're a bit too much of a family newspaper. I might have to use a huge bullet point. Eventually, the journalist left us alone. But then, we had to fend off the strippers. Hi, Andrew. Nice to meet you. I'm Aubrey. Nice to meet you, too.

Why are you laughing? What's the deal? Oh, nothing. I'm just, uh, I'm more interested in politics. That's amazing. Yeah. I love how politics brought you to the strip club. Hell yeah! Once they realized we had no money, though, they left us alone. Except for Tonyann.

When Tonyann got off the stage, she flashed us and said we had to try harder to have a good time. So I asked her to sit down with us. And when she told us that she loves Trump, I asked her if we could record. What's this? Oh, awesome! Oh, can I put it in my underwear? On your bra. I asked her if we could record. I love our president. I can relate to him, because as a stripper, you come into the world of fantasy, and I'm like, oh yes, I'm gonna give you this, I'm gonna give you that. And then you give me money and I run away.

So I get where he's coming from, it's business. But you gotta remember, you know what? I like him, you know why? He does something that we do on a daily basis. He mind fucks people. Even though the world was meant for you. Oh my God, you're taking it all in. If he was a woman, he would have had a great career as a stripper. He's that good of a mind fuck that he has trained the whole entire USA.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, make some noise for the one, the only adult in the town, superstar, Stormy Daniel. Finally, at midnight, Stormy Daniel strode out onto the stage in her little red riding hood outfit. Hey there, little red riding hood. Ain't sure how hard to get through. You're everything a big bad wolf would want. And as she took off her cape and then her cap,

I realized all of my hopes are riding on this woman. Which is unfair, I know. But if an unabashed, unashamed exhibitionist can't help us see that the emperor has no clothes, then who can? Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm welcome to the one, the only, Stormy. Of course, there's absolutely no evidence to support my theory that she can do it. In fact, after the 60 Minutes interview in which she detailed

how Donald Trump had her spank him with a magazine with his face on it, his approval with evangelical voters went up. So yes, I get it. It's irrational to believe that Stormy Daniels has the power to take this corrupt regime down. But I do. I really do believe. And sitting there, watching her dance, I realized I had to tell her. And so I stood up and I approached the stage.

I believe Stormy Daniels. I believe Stormy Daniels. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Fake News. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, with Andrew Calloway. It featured Susan Jacoby,

Deep Fakes, Lynn Hirschman-Leeson, Depay and Ghosh, Phoebe Judge, Lawrence Foer, and everyone we met at the Gossip Gentleman's Club in Long Island, where we went to see Stormy Daniels. Extra special thanks to Tony Ann,

Kara Oler, Jesse Schapens, and Mathilde Biot. Tons of Lynn Hirschman-Leason's work, including three feature films starring Tilda Swinton, can be found on Filmstruck.com. Technolust is a great place to start. And if you haven't listened to Criminal yet, I don't know what else to tell you. And the amazing report that Dupay and Ghosh co-authored, Digital Deceit, I'll put a link to that on the new website. Yes, we've now moved to theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. Here you'll find all the archives. You can subscribe to the newsletter. Then you can also see the original

drawings that cartoonist Jordan Crane is doing for the False Alarm series. That's theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find them all at Radiotopia from PRX