#346 - The $450 Million Da Vinci Conspiracy & CIA Psyops Behind Modern Art | Giampiero Ambrosi

Summary

Danny Jones Podcast #346

The $450 Million Da Vinci Conspiracy & CIA Psyops Behind Modern Art
Guest: Giampiero Ambrosi
Date: November 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this eye-opening episode, host Danny Jones talks with investigative journalist and documentary producer Giampiero Ambrosi. Together, they explore the shadowy world of high-value art forgeries, elaborate art heists, royal scandals, and the CIA’s covert influence on the rise of modern art during the Cold War. Ambrosi shares first-hand stories from his years embedded with art forgers, and the incredible true crime saga of billionaire James Stunt’s failed $450 million art scam involving Prince Charles’ charitable foundation. They also dive into the intersection of technology, provenance, and power in art authentication, and discuss broader cultural and political implications—culminating in a deep exploration of how art, money, and influence have always been entwined.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Ambrosi Entered the World of Art Forgery

• Ambrosi’s early career as a journalist in Japan's economic bubble led to investigations of the surge in fake European art bought by newly wealthy Japanese collectors (00:39).
• He met master American art forger Tony Tetro, who eventually shared his archives and secrets after they developed mutual trust (02:00).

2. The Anatomy of a $450 Million Art Scam

• James Stunt, a flamboyant British billionaire, commissioned Tony Tetro forgeries to outfit his LA mansion—and later became embroiled in a complex scheme involving Prince Charles’ Dumfries House (03:51).
• Stunt attempted to launder and inflate the value of art—including outright fakes—by “lending” works worth hundreds of millions (on paper) to the British royal collection, and then using those loans as collateral for vast loans from high-end art lenders (09:18, 36:32).
• Forgers don’t usually copy existing works; rather, they creatively invent “lost” paintings that plausibly fit into known gaps in artists’ catalogs, supported by forged provenance (06:03).

3. Exposing the Royal Collection Scandal

• Ambrosi’s reporting revealed that several forgeries made it into Prince Charles’ collection, aided by close royal associates who skipped basic due diligence (12:36).
• After resistance and stonewalling from the palace ("never complain, never explain" policy), media exposure finally forced royal acknowledgment:
  • "Pages one to five...the entire first five pages of the newspaper, of the largest circulation Sunday newspaper in the UK is this story." (21:53)

4. Art as the Ultimate Financial Instrument

• Art's subjective value lets the ultra-wealthy launder money, park wealth “offshore” in tax-free freeports, and manufacture value for collateral or tax write-offs (26:51, 39:09).
• "It's kind of the last wild west financial instrument." (29:54)
• "[Art] is printed out of thin air...an immaterial kind of thing. Does the market have comparables?...Now you have $10 million worth of tax write-off." (32:41)

5. The “Lost Leonardo” and the Power of Opinion

• Deep dive into the controversial authentication of the “Salvator Mundi,” the $450 million Leonardo painting: Is it genuine, or did restoration and big money conjure up a legend?
  • "If you take a painting and you restore it to the extent where you've repainted a whole bunch of it...of course it looks like Leonardo, you just painted it to look like Leonardo." (41:59)

6. The CIA, Modern Art, and Cultural Warfare

• CIA used modern art—especially Abstract Expressionism—as a cultural psyop against Soviet realism, covertly funding museums, galleries, and the promotion of artists like Pollock.
  • "They set up all of these foundations...really CIA fronts to support gallery shows and symposiums..." (89:54)
• Authenticating a possible CIA-linked Pollock painting involved not just investigating provenance, but cutting-edge scientific analysis (paint matching, radiocarbon dating, spectral analysis) (94:11).

7. Technology & the End of Traditional Forgery

• Advances in analysis (like AI, Raman spectroscopy, and database cross-referencing) have nearly ended the era of forgery as practiced by past masters like Tetro (73:35).
• Still, institutional gatekeeping by foundations (sometimes with financial conflicts of interest) can override even hard scientific authentication (97:51).
• “Despite having all the scientific data you have—good luck...if the experts with connoisseurship, their eye, don’t like it.” (97:54)

8. Cultural & Economic Reflections on Art

• The interplay of wealth, power, and art throughout history—from the Catholic Church’s commissions in the Renaissance to today’s oligarchs and hedge funders (107:08).
• The market for contemporary art is often driven by manufactured demand and financial utility rather than genuine appreciation (49:10).
• Notable comparison to modern phenomena like NFTs, crypto, and wild speculative assets (51:13).

9. Media, Social Media, & the Battle for Truth

• Discussion of media liability, algorithmic radicalization, Section 230, and how social media now drives information disorder, echoing the weaponized propaganda of earlier eras (134:06).
• "If you make playground equipment, you're not off the hook for any liability. Why do [social media companies] deserve it?" (138:06)
• Comparison of new “culture wars” (social media, influencer economy) with old CIA “soft power” ops (116:14).

10. Human Aspects: The Making of a Forger

• Tony Tetro’s origin story: learning the ropes from an unscrupulous dealer, developing genuine artistic mastery, and the blurred lines between “emulation” and “forgery.”
• For many, art forgers are folk-hero figures, exposing the insecurity and elitism of the art world (52:51).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scam’s mechanics:

  "He wanted $161 million. And the plan all along was I just walk away from it. They keep the collateral. It's not worth anything… I did the total sum… and it was probably worth… $2 million."
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 37:16

• On fundraising modern art as a Cold War weapon:

  "The CIA wanted to counter… Soviet realism with an art form that would appeal… Abstract impressionism… paintings that are so free, they don't even have to mean anything."
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 87:45

• On expert opinion vs. science:

  "Despite having all the… scientific data you have. Good luck…If the experts… don’t like it, good luck.”
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 97:54

• On freeports:

  "Most people who buy important… $50 million… art never have them… just go to the Freeport… it's just like any other financial asset… like crypto…"
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 39:22

• On public's love for forgers:

  "The art forger is kind of seen as… kind of a Robin Hood figure… because it is really sort of getting back at these wealthy people and experts."
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 52:51

• On AI and art:

  "Neural networks… with 99.99% accuracy, determine whether something was drawn by Egon Schiele… that's one of the reasons why it is so difficult for somebody like Tony to do what he did now."
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 101:37

• On social media & radicalization:

  "We are in a terrible situation where it's very difficult to deal with any problems because… we are so unable to find a non-radicalized middle ground… [it] is algorithmic… purely pushed by an algorithm which is based upon creating dopamine hits and, and views."
  — Giampiero Ambrosi 145:25

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Important Timestamps

• Early forgeries & Tony Tetro origin: 00:39-07:49
• The Royal Collection caper / Prince Charles' charity scam: 09:12-13:14
• Busts, media exposure, and palace response: 15:17-21:53
• Art's role in financial crime / Money laundering: 26:06-39:09
• 'Lost Leonardo' debate, restoration, value creation: 41:02-46:23
• CIA & MoMA, Cold War art diplomacy & Pollock: 85:15-93:48
• Scientific authentication & AI in art: 94:09-101:37
• Social Media, Section 230 & media liability: 134:06-148:56
• On forgers as folk heroes: 52:51
• How the Renaissance became the art capital: 107:06-111:07

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Further Reading / Where to Find Ambrosi's Work

• Book: Con Artist (co-authored with Tony Tetro)
• Documentaries: Bad Influence (Netflix), upcoming The Royal Stunt
• Website: Giampiero.com

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Tone & Style

• Conversational, witty, with deep historical insight and plenty of real-world crime drama.
• Balanced skepticism toward authority and institutions with genuine appreciation for art’s ingenuity.
• Both host and guest maintain an irreverent, searching tone—often skeptical of power, institutions, and received wisdom, but fascinated with the world’s mysteries.

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For Listeners

If you love probing the intersection of money, culture, power, and deception—or want to hear wild stories of royals, billionaires, and the underbelly of the global art market—this episode is riveting. It’s also packed with lessons about critical thinking, the dangers of unchecked institutions, and the ever-evolving rules of value and authenticity in a world shaped by both human creativity and machination.

Transcript

[Danny]

Foreign. This whole world of modern art is wild. I've been diving into it, like, for the past year now. Pretty deep. And ever. I. I got inspired by that lost Leonardo documentary, which was fascinating. And then I recently have been reading up on all of the history of, like, covert operations during the Cold War to fund the modern art world. And. And your documentary is fascinating. So. So explain how you got into. Into that whole world and what your book and the documentary are about.

[John Pierro]

Sure. Remind me to. Remind me to tell you about the. The CIA thing, because I'm doing a big project on a Pollock from that program.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So I'll tell you about that. But I was doing, you know, I started as a kind of a cub reporter for Japanese TV in the 90s. And during that time, the Japanese economy had a bubble economy. And so there was just money everywhere. Real estate was going crazy in central Tokyo. And it turned out that, you know, you know, like, lots of bubbles. There was a lot of shady business going on. And one of the things that was happening, the Japanese had just started getting really interested in European art, had all this money. They were able to start buying European art that they hadn't really been able to afford or weren't that interested in. And it turns out that they were getting a lot of fake art, you know, because they were, you know, relatively unsophisticated buyers. And so you had these giant real estate deals in, you know, in Tokyo, underwritten by art. You know, $50 million work of art. A lot of it was fake, right? And so we started looking into this, and they said, hey, there's this guy called Tony Tetro, who's this huge art forger in America. He's in jail now, but when he gets out. When he gets out, go look him up. And so I did some investigation, and I kind of found a lead. And I ended up meeting Tony. And it was kind of funny because we met at this kind of swanky place in Newport. And he had all these people around. You know, he was smoking cigars. Everybody knew him. He had a bunch of cronies around him. He was talking about all his Ferraris and stuff. But the reality was that he was broke on his ass. And he was living in a motel next. His room was literally next door to a Chinese restaurant. And he walked across the street, you know, because he was really kind of down and out. But somehow we had. We had hit it off. And within a couple of months, he gave me pretty much all of his stuff related to art. He just gave me boxes of Stuff. He was like, I like you, I like what you're doing and knock yourself out. So that's really how it started. And then over the years, I would hear more and more and more about Tony. He'd kind of open up more and more about everything that happened. And it ended up that I knew him for like 20 years, something years. And so I really, I kind of. It was funny because he would start to tell a story and he just gotta jump, here, you tell it, you know, you know better than I do. I just. I kind of knew everything. I knew where all the bodies were buried and all that stuff. So, you know, Fast forward to 2000, 2019. Well, 2017, really. He started doing some work for this, you know, crazy, coked up billionaire guy named James Stunt. I started doing some work for him and, you know, he started telling me about it and I was like, well, this is. This is weird. Who's this guy? What's he doing? You know? And Tony said, well, I'm doing like 10 or 12 things for him. You know, he wants to put him in this mansion. He had the biggest mansion in California.

[Danny]

It used to be James Stunt.

[John Pierro]

James Stunt. It used to be called Candyland. And Aaron Spelling, the producer, built this house for his wife, Candy. And it was this huge mega mansion. And Stunt married the heiress of the Formula one fortune, Bernie Eccleston. He married the daughter. And so he got all this money, they bought this house and now he calls it Stunt Manor, you know, because he was a little bit of a, you know, narcissist. So anyway, he, you know, as far as Tony's concerned, he wants this artwork, you know, Picasso, a Van Dyke, this or that, for his house. Well, these guys get to be, you know, these guys get to be friends and, you know, they talk at night. Stunts up all night, you know, doing drugs and stuff. He's awake. Calls Tony in LA, because stunt @ this time is back in London. Calls Tony in LA and they talk about art, cars, women, whatever. And so Stunt says, hey, I want you to come to London. Well, Tony goes to London and he shows up and Stunt is kind of on a bender. So he's up all night and then he sleeps all day. So Tony's just hanging around by himself. And I mean, Stunt's nowhere to be seen. So Tony is going to the British Museum with the, you know, with the bodyguards, take him to the pub and, like, showing him a good time because he doesn't know what else to do. So anyway, he comes down one day and he's at the table by himself. And there are these papers there. And he's like, what's this? Because he's got nothing better to do. Nobody's there, he's by himself. Starts looking at him. And on these papers, which are some kind of legal contract, some kind of contract that has something to do with a place called Dumfries House, he sees paintings. And the thing with Tony is these paintings are unique, individual paintings. They're not copies. So 99 of people think that forgers copy paintings. They don't copy paintings because if you copied a painting, you'd just be like, it's fake. The real ones at moma, you know.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So it's a work that an artist might have done maybe in the style of. For a certain time period, using the color palette and subjects of a certain time. Right. So it's an individual new painting. Painting that you create sort of a backstory. Here's why this exists.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

Here's how this just showed up out of nowhere, like the. The lost Leonardo, for example. Right. Here's an excuse for why this exists.

[Danny]

Yeah. And isn't it with typical pieces of art like this that there's a historical chain of custody that's written about and you can, like, you can corroborate it with other literature that goes back into however long ago?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, that. That's. That's a great point. So, you know, there are a lot of people who can paint perfectly. Okay. You can go get a perfect copy of something. There's a village in China that everybody there works making exact copies of master works. So you can get that. Right. However, what Tony's genius was that he is extremely passionate about the backstory of the art, the details, the minutia. So there's a great example which I talk about in the book, and in a 17th, or let's say 18th century expert book about Rembrandt engravings, There's a footnote, page 78, there's a little footnote, and it says, hey, so and so said that there was a drawing of this. And so and so says that there's not a drawing of this. Nobody's sure. Well, that's really all you need to now go, hey, I'm going to make that maybe drawing exist. I'm going to bring it into being. So, of course, you have to execute it perfectly with all the right materials and all the right technique and the period and everything. So.

[Danny]

Wow.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So then now you've created a new piece that never existed or maybe existed, but is lost, and you have the back history supporting why it exists.

[Danny]

Yeah, but how does he know that somebody doesn't have that already existing in like a private collection?

[John Pierro]

I mean it's, it's a risk you take, but you assume like, you know, it's been 350 years. If, if it's going to show up, it would have shown up, you know, so, so Tony, you know, going back to the, the, the loan that he saw, so he could see that these paintings on the contracts, they're mine. They're absolutely mine. These are new paintings that I made. They're my subject. They're mine. Why the, why are they on this document that is going to Dumfries House? Some royal Scottish thing. So he goes, this sounds a little fishy to me. He takes out his cell phone and takes three pictures. Right when he gets back to la, he goes, hey, jump Euro. You know, I was just in London and this funny thing happened. Take a look at these pictures. What do you think? And I look at him and I go, very fishy. They're loans to Dum Free's house. And Tony had told me it was like Prince Andrew or something like that of the British royal family. But Dumfries house.

[Danny]

So this, this billionaire guy on a bender was loaning money, was loaning artworks.

[John Pierro]

Loaning artwork to Prince Charles into his royal collection. And so I go, well, the is going on here. And he had mentioned something to Tony. He had something said something about like, I'm gonna do a loan and I'm gonna get all this money, but I'm not gonna have to pay it back.

[Danny]

So he explained this whole thing, Tony.

[John Pierro]

He didn't explain, he just kind of mentioned, he just kind of briefly mentioned, like, this thing is gonna kind of happen and I could make a bunch of money on it.

[Danny]

Got it.

[John Pierro]

And Tony's like, well it doesn't make any sense to me and whatever. So he shows it to me and goes, what do you think? And, and I go, okay, well, Dumfries house is Prince Charles, a future king of England's headquarters of his charitable, of his charitable foundation. It's in Scotland. He's got all this art in it and everything. And I'm like, okay, well why is he lending money that doesn't make it. Or why is he lending art to this thing? And how do you make money off it? Doesn't make sense. And the first thing that I saw was these artworks had crazy values, like $50 million for a Picasso that Tony had made.

[Danny]

And he was claiming these were originals, claiming they're original.

[John Pierro]

He's like, I'm lending.

[Danny]

Even the Prince Picasso prints can be worth lots of money, right?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, Prince can be worth. But, you know, not like that. I mean, this.

[Danny]

Not $50 million.

[John Pierro]

$50 million is an oil on canvas major piece, right? So it's a major piece that's going to this foundation. He lent it, right. And go, what's going on? I look at it and I go, well, this is clearly, there's something fishy here. They're not just fooling the people at Dumfries House. There's something fishy here because, for example, the Picasso said that it was verified by the Wildenstein Institute. Wildenstein Institute only exclusively looks at French impressionists. So they'll look at Renoir and stuff. They would never look at a Picasso. They would never verify a Picasso. They just don't. That's. That's somebody else, right? So I go, there's no, no expert could have looked at this and accepted a provenance like that, an authentication like that. Then there was a Monet, you know, the famous water lilies, right?

[Danny]

Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[John Pierro]

So these, these famous water lilies, there's a major water lily. It's worth. I forget what it was exactly. Now in the contract, 30 million, something like that. And it has a date of 18 I want to make. It's been a while, but let's say 1890. And I'm like, well, that could never pass muster either. Because that garden where the water lilies are and that Monet built specifically so that he could paint these paintings wasn't built until 10 years later. So you're like, you wouldn't even have to be an expert to go like, this is bullshit. And it's really like a pretty bad, you know, it's pretty bad mistake. So this told me this did not go to the curatorial staff. Nobody really looked at this. Nobody really went, what are these things? This went to somewhere else Interesting. Yeah. And so these contracts were signed with a guy called Michael Fawcett. Michael Fawcett was Prince Charles right hand man. Like literally his right hand man. When Prince Charles broke his arm, he was putting the royal toothpaste.

[Danny]

Sounds familiar.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, he's putting the royal toothpaste on the royal toothbrush. I mean, he is as close as you can get. Somehow he's in this scheme with stunt. I can't prove it, right, but he's in the scheme with stunt. So I look at this and I go, there's a big story, you know, 300 million pounds. $300 million worth of art going into the Prince's collection. The former or the, the future king of England, the future owner of the royal collection. You know, one of the greatest art collections in the world is full of fake art. What's going on here?

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[John Pierro]

So I was at the time exploring making a documentary with Keith Davidson, Academy nominated director. And I said, hey look, I have this idea and he just looks at me and goes, prove it. I go, not sure how to do that. But I said no problem. Which you know, is a huge task because A, this kind of stuff is just very hard to prove.

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

And B, the royal family has this culture of secrecy around them where their motto is never complained and never explain. So if something happens, you don't bitch about it, you just ignore it. No comment, not going to happen. Nothing's ever going to happen. So I'm thinking, well, how am I going to go prove this?

[Danny]

Never complain, never explain.

[John Pierro]

Never complain, never explain.

[Danny]

So that sounds about right. If you want to. Going back to Prince Andrew's interview about Jeffrey Epstein, that makes perfect sense.

[John Pierro]

And you know, they have, they have teams and you know, intelligence apparatus and stuff around them that just, they quash everything. So I think, how am I going to do this? But you know, it's a pretty Pretty good adventure. And so I started out, I mean, I thought, this, this is a big story and it's super exciting and I'm really interested in it and I'm just going to go for it. So on my own dime, I just said, I'm going to. I'm going to go try to do this. And we first contacted James Stunt and we said, hey, James, we're doing a thing. You know, it's about art. There was. There was some newspaper article that just said, hey, this guy is friendly with James, with Prince Charles, and lends him stuff and gives him gifts. What's a deal? So I called him up and I said, hey, you know, I'm interested in doing a documentary about great art collectors. And I know that you've, you know, lent stuff to Prince Charles. Could we talk? He was polite, you know, and he said, well, let me think about it. And then he just was like, no. He'd only given one print interview, had never been on camera doing interviews, had never done any press, so he just didn't want to do anything. And so I thought, well, all right, how's this going to happen? You know, how am I going to figure this out? And then so. So I thought, well, okay, I'm going to send somebody to Dumfries House. I'm going to sneak them in and I'm going to have them look around because mostly 18th century portraiture. Are they going to have some Picassos or whatever?

[Danny]

Who's dumphy again?

[John Pierro]

Dumfries House is the headquarters where the stuff was lent to.

[Danny]

Oh, got it.

[John Pierro]

So I said, I'm going to sneak somebody in there, take a look around. Do we see these paintings? Well, of course they went up there. They didn't see anything. So I'm like, wow, that's not good, you know, because now I'm thinking, did this ever happen? Was this just a scheme that never went anywhere? Did they pull out at the last minute? So we thought, well, what if we went to James Stunt's house or his office where he keeps his collection? If it's on the walls, it means it didn't happen. He didn't actually lend them. So no story. The hard part is getting in there. Right, right. So during this time, he was in a feud with the press in the UK because they were reporting on he was having trouble with money laundering and stuff there. He'd been charged. Yeah, he'd been charged with money laundering. And so the press was reporting on me. Hated the press. And so he would go on social media every day. Go on YouTube and, you know, have these hour long kind of coke fueled rants.

[Danny]

Wow.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, about.

[Danny]

Is this still on YouTube?

[John Pierro]

No, it's pulled down. In fact, I. For two years, I got up every morning at 5. He got kicked off YouTube. So then he was on Instagram and he was doing, he was doing lives and stuff and they would disappear after 24 hours. So every morning for two years, I'd get up at 5 in the morning and record his lives. You know, I'd capture him on my phone.

[Danny]

He would wake up the next day and regret doing it and delete it or.

[John Pierro]

No, well, no, they just last 24 hours.

[Danny]

Oh, gotcha. Right.

[John Pierro]

So. So I'd have to grab them and now they're all deleted. So I think I'm the only person who, who has, you know, the James stunt collection in my archives. So. But anyway, he would go on social media and one of the crazy things that he was saying was like, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna do a polygraph test. I'm gonna have a polygrapher come, I'm gonna have it filmed and I'm gonna prove that all this stuff that the press is saying about me is a lie. It's a lie. So I contacted him, we contacted him and I said, hey, we'll come film the polygraph and we'll put it out there if you let us come film your art collection. And he goes, I'm shocked. I was amazed. He goes, great idea. And so there you go. So now we had our way in to go look at his art collection. And so for two days, I actually used to, as I was saying before, used to work with Japanese tv. So I had a colleague of mine, you know, be the crew because I couldn't really go in because if I go in, he finds out who I am. You could kind of reverse engineer that I was connected to Tony Tetro, that I'd written some stuff about him. And so if he knew that you.

[Danny]

Knew Tony, that wouldn't be good.

[John Pierro]

He would. This, you know, this smells. This smells bad. But anyway, so we went for two days. We filmed in his house and office and we didn't see any of the works. So we thought, aha. I think they actually went to Dum Free's house and it was wild because this, you know, my crew was in there and he's showing, showing him around for two days. He's pointing out like another Tony Tetro fake. And he's going, yeah, I bought this at Sotheby's. I think I paid a Million dollars for it. Isn't it great? And all this stuff. And I'm like, he knew that the.

[Danny]

Tony Tetra made them.

[John Pierro]

Oh, yeah.

[Danny]

And he was just lying to these people.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, he bought them. I have millions of emails. I have all the emails with, you know, they're discussing the specific work of art and, you know, their emails with images of the work. And he's going, oh, yeah, do it like this, maybe like that, put the stamp on it and all this other stuff. And he's sitting there talking about how, yeah, I, you know, bought this at Sotheby's real thing. Oh, I'm so great. You know, I know a lot about art and all this kind of stuff. Yes. So, you know, we get back and I'm like, I think we got something, you know, and I'm pretty excited. And I had a contact through someone. I had a contact who's a senior figure in MI6, which is foreign intelligence in the UK, like James Bond kind of thing. And he was an old guy and I said to him, I said, hey, I think this is going on. Do you know people in the palace who could verify this or who I could talk to? And he came back with this amazing email and the person wrote back to him, somebody like the right hand, you know, people in the palace wrote back and they said, fawcett stunts right hand guy, who I think was involved faucet the palace, the firm, meaning the palace, the firm know about this. Faucet will have gotten a rocket, meaning Fawcett would have just been blasted for this. And Jumpier will find all doors closed, meaning never complain and never explain. So we're going to pretend none of this happened. We're just going to pretend none of this happened. It's going to go away. You can't prove it. Those paintings are going to be gone. It's over. So we thought, fuck that, you know, we're not going to just let it go like this. So we had made contact with some of the press in the UK and we said, look, we have this story, can prove it all. I have millions of documents, I have all this stuff, I've done all this work, I can show you that this has happened. You publish it. And they go, because I wanted to force the hand of the palace, I wanted them to have to acknowledge it, right? And so on the Mail on Sunday, you know, we kind of worked the story up with them and they proved it up and they went to Prince Charles's people and they had to acknowledge it. And they came Back, and they said, we acknowledge it happened. It's extremely regrettable. And, you know, we were in London at the time, and the editor called me up and he said, hey, tomorrow morning, check the paper. Pages one to five, check in there. Okay? So I'm like, all right, there's gonna be an article somewhere between page one and page five. I look, it's literally the entire first five pages of the newspaper, of the largest circulation Sunday newspaper in the UK is this story. And I mean, it's huge headlines, fake art hits Prince Charles and all this stuff. So at that point, you know, we knew. We knew we had it. And when you do. When you do something like that, suddenly, I mean, you. I'm sure, know this from. When you, you know, do something about a story, people come out of the woodwork, and now there's all kinds of stuff that you can find out. And, you know, the, the, the. The. The first thing that happened is I was able to find more of his collection. And what I originally thought was that, all right, he got four Tony fakes in there. I still didn't know exactly what he was doing. I'm like, okay, he got four Tony. Is he like, are they gonna lose them or burn them and then claim insurance? You know, now you've just made, I don't know, 15, 20 million from some fake works of art that got stolen or burned or whatever.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[John Pierro]

That's what I thought. But then I looked at. I got all these other documents, and one of the things that I got was the assessment of his entire collection. And I'm like, all right, this guy's got Renoirs, Monet's, Picasso's. In. In the loan, there were 17 paintings. Four of them were Tony Tetra paintings. So these other paintings, like Van Dyke and stuff like that, like, very important paintings. I thought, okay, well, those are real. He fluffed it up with some Tony fakes, doubled the value. Okay. He kind of, you know, plumped it up a little. But the reality was, when I looked at his whole collection, they were like kind of middling paintings. 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand. I think there was one that was maybe like 350 grand. That's a lot of money. But, you know, compared to the rest of this work, it's peanuts.

[Danny]

And what were the four of Tony's?

[John Pierro]

What were they? Supposedly there was a Chagall, a Picasso. Picasso, a Dali, and a Monet. Right, so that was worth 150 million? Just that. God, Right. Yeah, it's a lot of money. It's a ton of money. But I'm still thinking, well, what is he doing? And this doesn't make sense that he has these. You know, he's really got kind of cheap paintings. And a lot of the paintings were what's called, like, followers. Studio Circle followers. So you and I today could go buy a follower of Rembrandt. Rembrandt's probably the most expensive painting painter in the world. Rembrandt, Caravaggio. Hundred millions of dollars, right? $100 million.

[Danny]

I didn't know that. Yeah, I thought Picasso was the most expensive.

[John Pierro]

The probably most expensive modern, modern painter. But, you know, old masters, like. Like those guys. I mean, extremely, extremely expensive. So you could go buy a Studio or Circle or Follower. Not studio for Rembrandt, but Circle or Follower. And what does that mean? That just means somebody who was around at the time, they liked Rembrandt, maybe they saw his paintings, they knew that he was great. They'd paint some of his painting, you know, same time, same time.

[Danny]

Maybe a student or something later.

[John Pierro]

Could be a student. Could be a. You know, just somebody who's kind of around the milieu.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

I mean, you're interested in films. You could be a. You know, you could be a. A follower of Martin Scorsese, you know.

[Danny]

Okay.

[John Pierro]

You have nothing to do with him except for the fact that you.

[Danny]

I'm a fan.

[John Pierro]

You're a fan.

[Danny]

Okay. Got it.

[John Pierro]

So anyway, you and I could go buy one for ten grand right now, if it's real. Let's say it's ten million of Van Dyke Van Dyking by for ten. Ten grand? Six, seven, eight million if it's real. Well, what's the difference between Circle and By the Hand of the Master? Mostly somebody's opinion. Right, right. So. So I'm gonna get to it in a minute, but.

[Danny]

So what happens is, opinions can be paid for.

[John Pierro]

You're a wise man. So what happens is Stunt had all these Studio Circle followers, and he would go online and he'd talk about, like, yeah, I'm really great at finding sleepers. Well, what's a sleeper? A sleeper is a painting that's been attributed as Studio Circle or Follower, but it's really by the hand of the master and.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So at the same time, what I found was Stunt had put together a PowerPoint presentation. He got a financial advisory in London called W. Coleman to put this thing together. And it was a little PowerPoint presentation. It had the Tony paintings and it had 13 other paintings. And it said, the Stunt Collection at Dumfries House and It was a presentation. Well, what's the presentation for? Well, what he was doing. Well, so he's got these paintings that. He's got these Van Dykes in there, okay? He's got Tony's paintings, got these Van Dykes. And if they're real, they're worth another 150 million or whatever. But all of these, all of these paintings, I mean, we figured out that all of these paintings were actually studio, circle and Follower, that he had gotten one guy who was the former director of the museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I mean a big time director, and was the deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, one of the most important galleries in the world. He was a deputy director. And this guy is buddies with Stunt, right? He's buddies with Stunt and Somehow he's written 14 letters for him saying, hey, remember that painting that you bought as a circle at Sotheby's or Christie's for 10 grand? Well, I've looked at it and it's really by the hand of so and so. It's really by the hand of Van Dyke. It's worth, you know, 10 million, right? Now, you find one of those paintings in a generation, it's a big deal, right? It's a big deal to find what you thought was a $10,000 painting. It's worth 10 million. He's found 14 of them from one collector, verified by one expert. How's that possible? It's not possible. Right, right. And we found this letter. You know, we took a picture of this letter of Stunt, it said, from Prince Charles. It said, oh, James, it was so such a sad thing that you couldn't be there when Malcolm Rogers, this expert, showed up with your paintings at Dumfries house to show them to me and to lend them to me. It's so wonderful of you to do this kind of stuff. You go, why is Malcolm Rogers, this eminent director, hanging out with this, you know, crazy cokehead who smokes crack on his social media and does his crazy stuff? Why is he hanging out with him? Well, he's getting something out of this thing, you know. So when I called him up, I said, hey, you know, there's a painting that you had. It's in the catalog, Resonator. There's a Van Dyck painting that you had, and it was a copy in the catalog. It's a copy owned by Malcolm Rogers. Well, how did James Stunt end up with it? And he goes, oh, well, he traded me another painting for it. And I go, that's interesting. Well, what painting was it? And he goes, it's none of your business. And that's kind of one of the things, you know, one of the reasons why people like art, people with a lot of money like art, is because it's. It's not because they love art. A lot of them do love art, but it's not just because they love art. But it's kind of the last wild west financial instrument so you can buy a painting. So my theory is there's no record of this. There's no nothing. It's just, I give you a painting, you give me a painting. Great. It's a gift to you. Gift to me. Everybody's happy, right? So the painting I give you could be worth a dollar, and the painting you give me could be worth $10 million. Now you've just given me $10 million, but there's no record of it anywhere. There's no financial catalog. There's no nothing. You know, this is a great way to just like, transfer money, launder money. That's why people use. So you see a lot of financial transactions. Why do rich people. Why do they even care about art? Why. Why would you. Isn't it stupid to pay $50 million for it? Can't be worth that much money. Well, it is as a financial instrument, right? Because now you can. You can, for example, buy a piece of modern art. You go, well, how the did somebody pay $10 million for that banana taped to a wall? Right? Did you see the banana tape to the wall? Okay, yeah, right? So you go, well, how is that possible? I go, okay, well, now you buy that paint. You. You take that painting. All right, let's say, I don't know, you buy for 2 million. Somebody says, well, it's worth 10 million. Now you lend it to an institution. Now you have $8 million of, you know, kind of like charitable donation on your books. Nobody really knows what it's worth. You can kind of make it up.

[Danny]

It was printed out of thin air.

[John Pierro]

It's an immaterial kind of thing. Does the market has no comparable to that. You say it's worth 10. Is it really? I don't know. But now you have $10 million worth of tax write off, right? And that's one of the things that people do with art. So it's used in all of these transactions.

[Danny]

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[John Pierro]

So what did Stunt do? You know, Stunt took this fake art and this inflated art, this art that was student follower, whatever, bundled it all, all up into this $300 million thing, lent it to Prince Charles. Now what does he do? Now he goes out to special art lenders. Right.

[Danny]

So it's a 350 million dollar catalog of art.

[John Pierro]

Yes.

[Danny]

That he loans.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

To Prince Charles. And when you say he loans that $350 million worth of art to Prince Charles, what is he getting in return? The tax write off.

[John Pierro]

Here's the thing. So now here's a tip for if you're an evil dude or if you're, you know, somebody doing funky stuff, pay the people who work for you because they know everything.

[Danny]

Right?

[John Pierro]

So I located this guy who was the, the driver and bodyguard. This is a huge former Lithuanian, former bass, professional basketball player who was their bodyguard. And he would hang out downstairs. Yeah. And Stunt and his guy would be upstairs doing whatever they were doing. And they'd send an email down to this guy and they'd say, hey, can you print this document out and then bring it upstairs and then email them. So this guy who was not paid by Stunt, had a treasure trove of Everything. And what it turned out was that, you know, I met the guy and we, you know, got to know each other and he sort of opened up about this stuff and gave me these things. But what it turns out happening is that stunt had this collection hits now at the ro. It's Prince Charles's royal collection. So it's like absolutely above suspicion. Right. I mean, there is no better provenance than it is in the royal collection. Right. And all of these experts have said it's good.

[Danny]

Right, Right.

[John Pierro]

Because he also made a bunch of fake letters and it's all this other stuff. But now he goes out to specialized art lenders in New York because there are people who will lend on your art. You go, I'm gonna let. I'm gonna give you my Picasso as collateral. You lend me half the value. If I don't pay you back, you keep the art.

[Danny]

Like a pawn shop?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, pretty much. High class pawn shop with, you know, blue chip art. Right. Nothing more blue chip than it's in the Prince's collection. Prince Charles has it right now. Lend me the money, of course. So he wanted $161 million. And the plan all along was I just walk away from it. They keep the collateral. It's not worth anything, you know. Right.

[Danny]

It's a fake, right?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, it's all I did the. I did the total sum of what that art was really worth. And it was probably worth charitably $2 million. So you're getting 161 million off of 2 million collateral. It's a pretty good deal. You walk away. That's it. Wow. Yes.

[Danny]

This guy's a billionaire and he's trying to.

[John Pierro]

Well, you know, his wife was a billionaires.

[Danny]

Uh huh.

[John Pierro]

He was wealthy, but not in that category. But he spent money like, you know, like it was going out of style.

[Danny]

Was his wife still alive or no?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, yeah. They got divorced. So when they got divorced, suddenly he's like, you know, the gravy train is over. So I got to find.

[Danny]

Didn't get a great settlement on the divorce.

[John Pierro]

No, no. And, and went through it quick. I mean the. Some of the sources were telling me, you know, he'd go out and there'd be drugs and champagne and stuff, you know, 100 grand a night, easy, you know, that's.

[Danny]

Jesus Christ, that's pretty.

[John Pierro]

You go through money pretty quick at that clip.

[Danny]

That's insane. And they also have. I forget which movie I was, I was watching a movie where they had basically like this offshore vault of where people would keep artwork there like people would go there, make transactions and something to do with it being like out of like a certain country's territory or jurisdiction.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Made away like a tax loophole or something.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, they're called Freeports.

[Danny]

Freeports.

[John Pierro]

And. Yeah. So they're literally basically like extra, Extra territorial zones at airports. Usually.

[Danny]

At airports, yes.

[John Pierro]

So the most famous one is in Geneva and that's, you know, that kind of figures in that whole story. You were talking about the lost Leonardo, which I have some interesting thoughts on too.

[Danny]

Was that in the Los Leonardo documentary? Those.

[John Pierro]

I believe so.

[Danny]

Okay.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So Eve Bouvier, who was the guy who bought the Leonardo for the Russian, he made his fortune with that Freeport.

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So there. So a lot of, A lot of people who buy important, you know, fifty million dollar pieces of art never have them. They kind of just go to the Freeport or stay in the Freeport. They don't pay taxes on them. They don't actually import them into their homes or into their possession. They just leave them there. So it's really like a. I mean it's like any other financial asset. It's like crypto or whatever. You don't see, you don't have it. It's just kind of in this place.

[Danny]

It stays at this airport. That's so strange.

[John Pierro]

Dude. I don't know if you ever saw. There was this film and I can't remember the name, but it involves a guy crashing a big plane into one of these.

[Danny]

That's what I was thinking about. Yeah, I can't remember the name of that movie though. It was a freaking amazing film.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So they have all this state of the art fire suppression. Like they can evacuate all of the oxygen in like two seconds. And everything locks and everything is like, you know, biometric.

[Danny]

Steve, you gotta find that movie, bro. Find the movie where they. There's a. There's a huge firefight in one of these airport Freeport vaults where there's like all this, like modern art and all this crazy stuff. But. Yeah, no, that's, that's. It's such a wild thing. And the lost Leonardo. The. Eventually. So that. That piece, the Salvatore Mundi, which was allegedly. They. They thought that that was basically drawn by one of Leonardo's students or something like this. And that lady went to go restore it. She stripped a bunch of stuff off it and then basically repainted like 90 of it. And long story short, it ended up in the yacht of Mohammed bin Salman, the Prince of Saudi Arabia.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

For like a half a billion dollars.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I mean, the.

[Danny]

Really.

[John Pierro]

There's a lot of interesting things about that. And, you know, everybody has their opinion, and I will say I am not an expert at all, and I'm just kind of, you know, observing and giving what I sort of think is plausible. But a lot of people think that. That it is actually real. Tony Tetra, the art forger, thinks it's real.

[Danny]

Does he really?

[John Pierro]

Yeah. Martin Kemp, who is the foremost Leonardo expert, I think, thinks it's real, or think there's very good chance that it's Martin Kent Kemp. Kemp, yeah. But, you know, I'm not sure. And what I. What I do find interesting, like what you. What you say is correct. So if you take a painting and you restore it to the extent where you've repainted a whole bunch of it. Well, yeah, of course it looks like Leonardo, because you just painted it to look like Leonardo.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

I mean, so. So I don't know. I'm not saying that's what happened. Her name is Diane Modestini, and, you know, she's very well regarded. And. And I don't know anything about this from an expert perspective, but I'll just say, you know, you do have to ask the question, like, if it's been so extensively repainted, I mean, how can. What can you really say about the painting? You know, somebody like Kemp or Tetro will say that, you know, there are hallmarks of the work that definitely make it that. But the other thing here is, you know, so it was $450 million. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. And what the film gets into, which I thought was really interesting, was great, you know, great piece of. Of work, was. There's a lot of pressure with that kind of money that can be brought to bear when really all you're talking about is opinions, Right? I mean, would $450 million get you to say that Steve's the greatest guy who ever lived? It might make me say that. You know, Tenant.

[Danny]

That was the movie. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. This was such a good scene. Play with no audio so you don't get copywritten. Make it small. Yeah. This was. Was this a Christopher Nolan movie?

[John Pierro]

I don't remember.

[Danny]

It was.

[John Pierro]

Right?

[Danny]

Yep. Yeah. Fast forward to, like, halfway through where they're in that. Where they're in that vault. Yeah, there it is. Oh, so they can, like, suck all the oxygen out of it.

[John Pierro]

They. They suck the oxygen out and they pump it with, so.

[Danny]

Oh, wow. Look at that, dude.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So here they are, stealing works kind of in the nick of time. While all this stuff.

[Danny]

Is that. So you are the real ones. Can they suck the oxygen out of. Is that real? I wonder, like, if someone's trying to rob it or whatever. They can just, like, lock the doors and, like, make you black out.

[John Pierro]

I'm pretty sure. Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah. This was wild. And this was a wild scene.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So the, the Leonardo. I mean, when there's that much money at stake, there's a lot of pressure that can be brought to bear.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So what I thought was really interesting about that film was that all of these efforts, once MBS had bought the painting, there was a lot of pressure put by the Saudi government on the French government to make that thing be real. So if you remember, there was this whole thing about, like, you know, they're talking about as the male Mona Lisa. The most famous painting in the world is the Mona Lisa.

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

Well, this thing, we're now going to make it be the male Mona Lisa. So they were trying to get the Louvre to show the piece now next to the Mona Lisa. Right. And legitimize it.

[Danny]

And who was trying to do this? Muhammad bin Salman.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. Because now he owns it. So he's like, all right, well, now I'm going to make this really valuable.

[Danny]

Just having that documented being there would be extremely valuable.

[John Pierro]

Yes. Because that's. And that's what happens with a lot of pieces. Like, sometimes someone, if someone has a questionable painting, they might lend it to a museum, you know, under really favorable terms. Why? Because they wanted to have that stamp. This was in the, you know, this was in MoMA. Right. So now you've just added value. But anyway, so he's trying to add this value. And what they did was they came to the Louvre and the Louvre said, no, I think they printed. They had a book printed up, and then they pulled it and they were going to put it in there, and then they pulled it because they had doubts. So MBS says to the French government, hey, listen, we would consider it a great favor if maybe suggested to the Louvre that this thing be shown next to the Mona Lisa. Right? And then they said, and by the way, you know, we are building this huge city in the desert, and why wouldn't a French company get that contract? Right? You know, let's. Let's see if we can't do something here. That's kind of what the, what the film talks about.

[Danny]

And that's, I mean, that's the way the whole world works, man.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. And that's what, you know, you think that Art is kind of like some, some blue blood kind of specialty pursuit for people with really high sensibilities. And it is, and it is. And they're very genuine and passionate people in art. But there's a whole other part of it. The market is a different animal altogether. I mean, that's really people, a lot of people who don't know much or care much about art for art's sake, you know, use it as a useful, as a useful financial instrument.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You know?

[Danny]

Right. Yeah. Would art, would this modern art be what it is culturally if it wasn't for the billionaires, the stunt type fellas, or the MBS's, or the Pope, or the Popes for that matter? Like with the Sistine Chapel, you know?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. Look, art has all. Always has to have patrons. I mean, the great art of the past had patrons.

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

You know, you had cardinal, the Vatican. Just every, every church In Italy has 12 master paintings. You know, somebody paid for those. You know, there were great patrons at the turn of the century. You know, industrialist tycoons and stuff were building museums. You know, Carnegie and all that kind of stuff. They're building museums, so there's always patrons. But I think it's kind of reached a different level now. And a lot of that is because they're just. There really aren't that many ways to transact that are not very traceable or that are really subjective. Right. I mean, it's kind of hard to. It's kind of hard. You can't carry around $50 million in gold. You can't. It's a huge amount. You can roll up a little painting, carry it around across borders, you're fleeing a country or whatever. Hey, you got this thing. So there's that kind of utility. Um, but also, you know, with like, know your client regulations and money laundering regulations and stuff like that, it's just a lot harder to do funky transactions. You know, with art it's so subjective that it's really easy to do. You know, you can make, you can make 50 million become 80 million. You can make 20 million become 50 million with the stroke of a pen. And it's all subjective. I mean, they're really. People talk about comparables and stuff, but I mean, like I said, you know, who's really gonna. If somebody pays for it, then that's what it's worth.

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

You know.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So you don't know.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

That's one of, that's one of the reasons why it's, why it's Used so much now. And you know, there's so like, I don't know how many people, I mean, how many people really experience or value art in their daily lives, like modern art in their daily lives? Not that much for it to have those kind of values. So a lot of it is about kind of like manufacturing demand. You know, some, some guy gets plucked out of obscurity and you know, a gallery represents him, puts all their money behind it and stuff. So you have, you really do have like a lot of kind of manufactured value which then the bottom drops out a lot of times. I was just reading, I can't remember who the artist was, but somebody who, you know, five, six years ago. The paintings are worth eight, $10 million. Why? Because I don't know. Freeze said it was at the time. Yeah. Now, you know, it's a couple, you know, 50 grand or something like that. So that, that happens a lot more.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

Seems to me.

[Danny]

And then like how rare it is too. Right. Like there's only, like if there's one of, one of these things of this famous artist that existed in, you know, medieval times that, that obviously for people obviously of, of a certain financial class are, is going to be super valuable. It's kind of like diamonds, right. It's kind of like a weird thing or gold, like diamonds and gold. It's a weird thing that humans are, are obsessed with. And the value can go up and down and you can trade on it. And it's like, you know, and, and things like this are, they're just like naturally, they naturally attract scam artists and con artists. And it's the same thing that you've seen with the rise of crypto and NFTs and these NFTs especially. You've seen so many people get caught up in these crazy NFT scams where they like, pump up the value in the beginning, give them all out, sell them all out to their people, and they like pull all the money out and the thing just goes nowhere. And then none of these people even get in trouble.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's totally true. I mean, one thing with art and forgers that I find really interesting is that, you know, unlike some other scams where it's just like crypto or whatever, you know, you steal wallets or you have some fake token that isn't worth anything, but you can convince people that it's worth something for a while. The art forger is kind of seen as almost like a, kind of like a Robin Hood figure or kind of like an anti authority figure. Right. Because you have this whole world that's created to tell you as a non expert, the whole world is built up to look like this is really expensive, this is really elite, this is really classy. You don't get it. The experts get it. Here's why it's worth all this money, but you don't get it. Right. And the art forger sort of says, well that's. And I can prove that it's because I'll make a piece that's fake and you'll talk about how great it is and how you know, this could only be the great so and so because of this and that. And then you go, well no, I made it. So you know, what you're saying is bullshit and you don't know what you're talking about. So it's really kind of exposing the emperor's clothes. And I think people really like that and respond to that. That you know, and that's why I think people like. It's a little bit of a folk hero. Why there's so many films about art forgers or why it's always an interesting story for people when art forgery happens.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

Because it punctures this whole world of.

[Danny]

And it's, it's interesting. I like it better than the crypto stuff because the crypto stuff it's. You have just normal everyday folks who are getting scammed.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

With the art forgers it's not usually the case. Right. Like you're dealing with billionaires and like big institutions and like.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I mean ultimately lots of, lots of people get hurt. But you know, I, but really, I mean. Yeah.

[Danny]

You're absolutely not dealing with people who are living to paycheck. To paycheck.

[John Pierro]

And like you're absolutely right. I mean if some rich, if some rich guy pays $10 million for a piece, it turns out to be fake. I mean, is he going to be out on the street? I doubt it.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So. So you're kind of okay with it. But yeah. And I mean, and that's like. It's interesting because Tony always says that when he got busted that I think it was CNN or somebody did a documentary and he was in some kind of bar that he hung out with, you know, hung out in. And he had, they happened to have the VHS and, and he was sitting there and the bartender said, hey, let's see your vhs. And he's like, nah, nobody's gonna be interested in this. Somebody's gonna be interested in this, you know. But they put it on, he said, you know, and this was kind of like a blue collar, you know, beer and sawdust kind of bar. And he said that it was just like you could hear a pin drop. And everybody kind of loved it, you know, because it is really sort of getting back at these, you know, rich people and experts and all that kind of stuff.

[Danny]

So, yeah, the snobs.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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[John Pierro]

Yeah, you mean. Well, he got busted in 1989.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[John Pierro]

In 1989, he got busted and he. Because somebody wore a wire on him. One of the. One of the guys. So the interesting thing about Tony is that Tony never really fooled anybody with his paintings. Never fooled anybody. The dealers in Beverly Hills galleries and everywhere else would come to him and say, hey, Tony, make me. I need a Picasso. I need some Dolly, I need some Miro. And they knew they could get him from him, so they'd come to him, and then they were the ones selling him. Selling. Selling the paintings. Right. So one of those guys got busted and wore a wire.

[Danny]

Ratted on him.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, rat on him. And Tony, who's this Italian American guy from kind of a. A mob town in upstate New York, said, you know, it is Ingrained in the DNA of every Italian kid from Fulton, New York, that you never rat. The only time you rat is never. That's what he said. But. So this guy wore a wire. He ended up pleading and actually got off pretty easily. He. He did a year.

[Danny]

That's kind of an amazing picture.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

So Tony only did a year.

[John Pierro]

He only did a year because he had gone. He had been through like five years of trial. So I think the judge kind of had had mercy on him. And, you know, it was. It was debatable who was really at fault on a lot of these things. So I think they went a little. A little easy on him.

[Danny]

You know, it's kind of cool. You know, his story is kind of cool.

[John Pierro]

And.

[Danny]

I can imagine his paintings. A Tony Tetro Picasso could be worth a lot of money now.

[John Pierro]

You know, I mean, that's what he does now. So when he got out of jail, he went. He went clean because he was like. This time I got off fairly easy.

[Danny]

He went legit.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to be here again. So he, you know, he would paint. That's why he ended up painting these paintings for Stunt. So, you know, before that, he had another very wealthy client, tech billionaire in Texas, who, you know, had a bunch of mansions and stuff. And he, I think, painted 99 paintings for him.

[Danny]

Jesus.

[John Pierro]

So, you know, there's a very good living to be made making plausible forgeries, emulations for people who wanted to have art in their house. You know, some people want to have, like, maybe they have a piece, maybe it's in the Freeport. Maybe they want to put it on their wall.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You know, but they don't want to pull the thing out of insurance. They don't want to insure it. They don't want to worry about it.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So I get a Tony Tetro and.

[Danny]

Whatever happened to Stunt?

[John Pierro]

Stunt was on trial. I mean, this was a big problem for our documentary. So our documentary is still not released.

[Danny]

I know.

[John Pierro]

Because of him. Yes, because the reason it's not released is because when after we released the. The. The story to the press, Covid hit, so we couldn't film for a year. That's when I wrote the book Con Artist about Tony. And when we kind of came back online, Stunt was then on trial for money laundering. The biggest money laundering trial in British history. Yeah. And it was him and four co defendants. So while he was on trial, we could not release the film. There are very, very, very stringent laws in the UK about contempt of court. So while someone's on trial, we could not.

[Danny]

Even if it's in America.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, well, technically, we probably could have shown it in America, possibly, but the studio chose not to.

[Danny]

Okay. Oh, you're working with the studio.

[John Pierro]

Right. So this trial took forever. Finally, the trial came back. Guilty or innocent, didn't matter to us. Right. Because we. The trial would be over. We could show the right. Well, what happened? The jury came back hung and the Crown Prosecution Service said, we're going to retry him, and we're going to retry him in two years. So two and a half years later, which was just, you know, a few months ago, the trial finally ended.

[Danny]

And where's he at?

[John Pierro]

Stunt was acquitted. All of his co. Conspiracy, all of his associates were found guilty. The banks who were involved were all fined, had huge, hefty fines. And he walked.

[Danny]

No.

[John Pierro]

Yes way. Correct. And the attempted fraud. The alleged attempted fraud with the art was never prosecuted because the. The lenders never consummated the loan. And so they just said, forget it, we'll let it go. So stunts walking around free as a bird.

[Danny]

Probably not rolling as hard as it used to be.

[John Pierro]

Nope. Nope.

[Danny]

Is this him on the right?

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

He looks kind of young there.

[John Pierro]

That. That was a young.

[Danny]

That was an older photo.

[John Pierro]

And the one on the left is as he looks.

[Danny]

The one on the left looks like he's had a little bit too much plastic surgery.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I think there were some problems with.

[Danny]

The septum, the deviated septum. He had to get a new nose or find a better way to get the coke in his body.

[John Pierro]

Jeez. And I say that because he would go, you know, he would go on his social media and say, yeah, it was the. I mean, the social media was unbelievable.

[Danny]

I can imagine.

[John Pierro]

It's unbelievable. He's, you know, you'll see it in the film. But, you know, he gets on there and he goes like, do I love cocaine? Yeah, I love it. Do I shag prostitutes? Yeah. Do I sleep with royalty? Yes, I do. You know, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, he's like sitting there. In one shot, he's sitting there and he's smoking a, you know, a foil thing off of a bottle and he's going, like, I'm just sitting here, kicking it, chilling, smoke some crack and listening to Sensei add some NWA gangster rap. As you do.

[Danny]

As one does.

[John Pierro]

Yes, one does.

[Danny]

As a billionaire does.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of his Persona. And as a guy who didn't earn.

[Danny]

Any of the money that he has. No, he, he got it all out of the divorce from his super rich wife.

[John Pierro]

Well, yeah. Yes and no. I mean his, his father, it's interesting because his father was a self made man from Brixton which is, you know, a middle class, working class part of London. You know, made it big, made his fortune, sent James to a fancy school which, it's funny, I mean, he's actually a pretty funny guy. He said the students there were like cream rich and thick. Thick meaning dumb. But you know, so he kind of, that's the milieu that he ended up in. And then when he married, you know, so he was wealthy but when he married Petra, it was like a completely, you know, completely different stratosphere, you know, so they had like a, I don't know, 15 million dollar wedding at this castle in, in Italy and you know, the Black Eyed Peas helicoptered in to play and.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

Stuff like that. And then they bought this house, they had all this stuff in London. He used to drive around London in a cavalcade of cars. So you know, he'd go to Sotheby's or whatever. He'd be in this carbon fiber Lambert Lamborghini. He'd have rolls on both sides and then all that surrounded by Land Rovers and that's how he'd pull up at Sotheby's or where to go get a pack of cigarettes or whatever. So, so that's what he used to do. And now that those days, those days are over, I think, wow.

[Danny]

Yeah, there's something, there's a, there's a connection between just like an absurd amount of wealth and degeneracy with people where like, I don't think it's, I don't think it's good for people to, to have that much, you know, like there, there's like a, there's a sweet spot.

[John Pierro]

Right.

[Danny]

And when you get a little bit too far, depending on your psychology, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people can handle it. Right. But a majority of people cannot handle that kind of wealth.

[John Pierro]

I mean, I think it'd be hard. You've, you've, you know, done your own stuff. I mean, you've achieved things. I've achieved stuff. You know, you got to, you know, there's some value to be said for you got to wake up, you got to work hard, you got to be there. This may or may not work. You got to be able to take the risk. You know, you got to work really hard.

[Danny]

Yeah, I mean that builds some of the best people I know most interesting, fun people I know spent most of their lives poor.

[John Pierro]

Sure.

[Danny]

You know.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta come up.

[Danny]

You know, But I can, you know, the funny, the interesting thing is I can equal. I could say the most up degenerates I've met are also poor. You know, like, but also rich. You know, like, I know some very degenerate rich people. So the spectrum is broad. You can't just, you can't just paint. Broad brush.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Over that.

[John Pierro]

But yeah, I mean this, this guy is a really, he's a really interesting character because I think like, you know, I think that he genuinely wanted to. He mentions kind of like being cast in this new world, you know, and he was around Petra's friends who were all wealthy, very wealthy people and people who knew like a lot about art and knew about all these things. And I think he was kind of thrust into that and felt like, oh, well, I wanna, I want to prove myself or I want to show that I know about something. And I think his initial. And one of his earliest friends and dealers, art dealers, said that, you know, he. In the beginning it seemed like he had a genuine kind of like passion for art, you know.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

But then sort of saw the various uses or the various ways that you could, you know, you could do things with art that were less than, you know, right on the up and up. And you know, even some, somebody like Tony, like. So when Tony started out, he, he loves, he's very passionate about, about art and very passionate in a kind of like artisans way. Like he wants to know how did he do this or look at how he did that. How did, how did he mix that color and do it in such a light texture and all those kinds of things? And you know, he went into the world, he got his girlfriend pregnant at 16 and became a father.

[Danny]

Tony.

[John Pierro]

Yes. So he's like, okay, I gotta go make a living. He was selling furniture and, you know, was being a milkman and all this. And he's like, I can't do this.

[Danny]

For the rest of my life.

[John Pierro]

So on the weekends he would do these paintings. You know, he'd go to an art fair or whatever and people would go like, I'll give you 20 bucks for this Monet or whatever they did. Worked on for three months.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

And you know, so then he read this book. One day he's at the supermarket. He's just sitting there bored, you know, and he looks over and he sees this book. It's real colorful and it has a Modigliani on It. He picks it up. It's like. It's called fake. It was about this famous art forger called Elmir Dori. And he opens it up and he's just, like, entranced. And he goes home, and he just, like, basically reads it through the night. It's about this art forger and how he did it. And he just goes, I could do this. I'm going to do this. So he just does it, you know, and it's really interesting because he brings the painting to. He brings a drawing. It was a Modigliani drawing. And he brings it to this guy and he goes, yeah. You know, he's like 20, 22 years old, and he brings it to this guy, and he says, my grandfather is getting rid of all his stuff so it doesn't end up in probate. You know, he's about to die. And I think this thing is worth some money. What do you think? And the guy goes. You know, he has this, like, European accent, and he's like, well, you know, perhaps it's worth, you know, I don't know, maybe I can give you $1,600, you know? And he's like, oh, okay. And inside he's like, that's more money than he's ever had. You know, it's like five times his rent. He's like, okay. So he takes it. He's out of there. And he said. He was like. It was like floating on clouds, you know? Know? And he's like, it's going to work. Like, this is my whole new life. He gets home, the phone's ringing, and this guy founds. Found out that it was fake from somebody else, long story. But finds out it's fake. And now he's like, you. You think you're going to sell me a fagazi? You're going to work for me now? And he's like, the whole European thing was. The whole European thing was fake. And he's just this fake guy, you know, and he's like, all right, you're going to have to work for me now. And so he makes him. He makes him make fakes for him for the next couple of years. And that's how Tony learned to become an art forger was through his apprenticeship with this guy who, you know, was just selling these things out at his auction house, you know, and he made him be a shill at his auction. So, you know. Yeah, yeah, they'd be having an auction or something. Okay, you raise your paddle and you bid. Bid everything up. Yeah, but that's how he learned to do this, you know, that's so wild. So you see that, you know, there are, there are legitimate people in the art world, lots of them, and truly passionate, knowledgeable people. But there are also a lot of people who, you know, it's pretty easy to cut some corners.

[Danny]

Is there a specific time period when the majority of these super valuable pieces of art were created? Because I don't have like a, I don't have a, A good understanding of, like when Picasso, da Vinci and some of these others were like, like when, like, what was the one that you were saying was the most most valuable?

[John Pierro]

Like, Caravaggio.

[Danny]

Caravaggio. And then was Rembrandt one of them? You were saying, you were saying earlier was that. Was this all like, enlightenment, mid middle 1600, 1700s. 16, 1700s. And then I think Da Vinci was like 14.

[John Pierro]

14, 15. Yeah. So you had like Renaissance, but there's. So there's a whole, there's a whole spectrum. There are important and valuable antiquities, you know, Greek and Roman antiquities and stuff like that.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

Then you have really, like, how far.

[Danny]

Back did these paintings go? Like, how far back do they survive?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, you, you have, you have stuff, valuable objects from, you know, B.C. era, but in terms of, like, real, like oil on canvas, oil on wood, European painting, you know, the. Really the 1300s, 1400s, the Renaissance is the peak. So that's when you have, you know, Michelangelo and da Vinci and, you know, Pantormo, Parmigianino. All these people. Yeah, right. And then you have Baroque, Caravaggio. You know, you have like the Dutch painters, Rembrandt and all these people. Then you get into, you know, impressionist paintings, which are in the late 1800s. Then you get into modern, modern painting in the 1900s. Somebody like Picasso, early periods, you know, tens and twenties, and then, you know, all the way into the seventies. I don't remember exactly when he passed away, but some, something like. Like that. But so there's a whole spectrum of valuable painting.

[Danny]

You know, we had a guy in here who was a forensic pathologist a couple months ago, and he was. Do you remember the painting, Steve? He. He was basically, he tracked a painting, a painting that was done. I don't, I don't remember the date, but it was done with the remains of one of the French king's hearts. Somebody bought the heart of one of the French kings, and they took the heart and they ground a part of it up into paint, and they used the shades of red in this painting to paint with his heart. So this guy did in a forensic analysis of the painting to make sure it was real and put under the microscope, did all the stuff that forensic pathologists do and he could find the, the muscle fibers of this king's heart in the red pigments of this painting. It was an insane. Okay, it was Louis. What? Whatever that is. X IV. Yeah, Louis, the 15th heart to make paint. Scroll down to the first paragraph so we can just like explain to people. Yeah. The 17th century French monarch was called the Sun King, but his heart ended up in a shadowy setting. According to the most. According to the most celebrated forensic scientist and Fl. France, fragments of Louis XV's heart was ground up by a second rate artist to make the color called mummy brown for the use in painting now hidden in the basement of a small museum in the Paris region. I love that they call him a second rate artist. Crazy man.

[John Pierro]

I mean, it's really interesting because especially with, with forgery. So you know, you can, you can do 4 degrees of any of those periods. Right. It's harder to do with old paintings just because you have old materials. Right. So you have to get those original materials.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

Forgery, as Tony used to do it, is no longer really possible. It's pretty much impossible because there's so much technology that you can bring to bear now.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

Okay, so when in the past when they wanted to make a pigment for blue, they would take lapis lazuli, which is a stone, and they would grind it up into fine powder and they would emulsify it in oil, linseed oil, lilac oil, whatever, oils. And that's what your paint is basically, powders in oil. Okay. That's what an oil painting is. Well, now they can tell did that in the past that lapis lazuli came from one mine in Afghanistan and it would get traded all the way over to Europe. And so therefore it was extremely expensive. It wasn't used that much, but it came from this one mine. You could identify it. Well, now you have a database of all these materials. So you can look at a painting. Let's say the painting says, oh, it's a 1420 painting with this blue in it. Well, you can look at the blue and you go, well, you know what? That lapis lazuli comes from a mine that's in Peru. So there's no way that it could have been real. Right. It's lapis lazuli. It's good, but it can't be real because it's from a mine that was in Peru before the discovery of The New World by Europe. Right. So it couldn't have been. That material could not have been in that painting. So there's all of this stuff that you can do with technology now that makes that kind of artist forgery almost impossible. Like, I'm working and I'll. And I'll tell you about this. This Pollock thing that I'm working on now, which ties into this. The. The CIA. The. The CIA operation. But, you know, you can look at a piece of wood and you can tell exactly what date that was, right? You can tell. Did that piece of wood come from a forest in Poland, or did it come from A four, as it did a lot like in the Renaissance and stuff? Did it come from a forest in Washington state? Even if it's an ancient piece of wood, there's no way that that could have made it into a painting like that. So you can just tell a lot more now that makes this kind of stuff impossible. And then there's, you know, database and just the existence of interconnectedness of the Internet. You can just have access to databases and stuff that weren't possible before. Tony says it in the past, he was able to just kind of say, like, well, where'd you get this painting? Oh, it's. It's from an Italian family who wishes not to be named. And they go, oh, well, there's a dead end. So I guess, right. We'll never know. And you get away with it.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, totally. You know, this whole. There's a whole parallel world that exists to this in ancient texts. I had this Dead Sea Scrolls expert on here, and. And he was explaining a very similar situation where this guy was buying these Dead Sea Scrolls and. And he lit. This guy had to like, do some crazy Mission Impossible where he had to go pick him up from this person and then like, and take him across France or something, wherever they were, to this. This place where they were going to analyze them and all this stuff. And they ended up. This guy paid millions of dollars for these fragments and they found out that they were fake. And they have, like, specific ways of figuring. I mean, these weren't like any kind of. Like, they weren't using AI or anything like that. They were like, very rudimentary ways of detecting it under a microscope, like saying, like, if this. This paper or this animal skin has like, indent indentations or like tears in the actual fiber itself and the ink goes over that perfectly, you know, that it was written on it after the degradation of it, versus, like, you know, normally you would look at the Text. And you would see that, like, the actual ink had been impacted by that degradation of the actual paper or the animal skin. So, like, there's all these interesting ways of detecting it. And another thing that throws a whole. Another monkey wrench into the ancient text stuff is you have countries and cultures that are incentivized to make sure these are real because it props up their whole religious belief. So, like. And then you. And that goes along with the billionaires, too, who are, like, very devout in their religious faith or whatever it is. They want that this needs to be real and from this time period, or else that kind of, like, kicks a leg out of my whole fundamental belief in God or whatever their belief is.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And I mean, that. That's. That kind of. I mean, what would you call, I guess, like, institutional support for something.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

You know, exists in the art world, too. You know, there's. If you. If you put paintings under black light, you can see the new paint. It kind of glows, Right. So people say, like, if you went through. If you went through a museum with a black light, I mean, the whole thing would just start glowing, you know, because there's been so much restoration, all that kind of stuff. And at a certain point, you kind of go, like, look, this thing's been in the collection for a couple hundred years. You know, it's an important painting. There's no reason to not believe it or whatever. Yeah.

[Danny]

I mean, leave it alone.

[John Pierro]

We'll leave it alone.

[Danny]

I've been to the Louvre. If I went, when I looked at the Mona Lisa, I would have no clue if I was looking at the real one or the print of it, you know, And I bet you 99.9% of people wouldn't either.

[John Pierro]

Well, so that's. I mean, that's a really interesting topic, too, because you go like, you know, what is the value of art? And there's all this philosophy at the turn of the century when. When people started being able to take really good photographs, Right. Because before, paintings were the only means by which you could make a real likeness of someone. I want to remember this person. I want to commemorate this person. I want to laud them, right. I want a big monumental painting of their likeness. We had to have a painting. You couldn't do a poster. You weren't going to take a photo, Right. So the re. So one of the values of art was how realistically could you reproduce what someone looked like for hundreds of years until the Impressionists and stuff, that's what mattered now. You get a photograph and go, whatever. I can just take a picture of this person. I don't need your painting. So you go, what's the value of this work of art? And there was this famous thing called the art in the age of mechanical reproduction. And the idea was that, okay, well, if there's no, like, utility, I'm not using this just to show me what a person looked like. What's the value of art? And one of the things that they say is that it's like a relic. It becomes like a relic. Like a piece of the cross or the. The road Saint. Yeah, exactly. Or Michael Jordan's sneaker. Right. That's a relic. And so is that what the art is worth? And if it's worth that, is it. You know, how does that change everything? And. And also, you know, how does that incentivize people to really believe that it's real?

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

You know, like, you get an autograph. I mean, I don't. I. I'm. I'm a soccer guy, and I have some autographs from guys, you know, that, like, gave me their autograph.

[Danny]

But you usually take a picture of them while they're signing it.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. Is it any different than just anything? I mean, you know, I don't know. What is. It is. They touched it. I mean, what's the value? You got to ask yourself that.

[Danny]

Yeah, I don't know. It's. It's hard to rationalize it. Right. But it's a. It's a weird thing that's wired into a.

[John Pierro]

To us. Yeah.

[Danny]

You know, it's like, wired into our DNA that these types of, like, rarities or. Or the older something gets, the more valuable it is or, like, the more rare or gold. Like, why is gold more valuable than anything else? Like, it's so weird.

[John Pierro]

I refused to buy a diamond ring for my wife. I was just like. And she doesn't care. She's. She's. She makes jewelry and stuff, and she didn't care either. But it's like, yeah, I mean, this.

[Danny]

Was such a racket.

[John Pierro]

Yes, it is. It was manufactured. And, you know, there's a lot of history about this, how it's manufactured demand, you know, that didn't exist until, I mean, somewhat existed, but not like. Like today. And I think similar things happened with art, you know, as well, and the art market.

[Danny]

I had this friend who collects these ancient Egyptian vases. I don't know if you've ever seen these or heard of these. These were found underneath a lot. Most of them are found underneath The Step Pyramid in Egypt. This is a 3D print remake. But they found these and they're made of granite and they're like, wow, like that's pretty precise. Like they, and they were dated to 4000 BC, so 5000 years ago and so pre dynastic granite vases. And they were like, you know, according to all of the Egyptologists and all of the archaeologists and the historians, those people in that time they were using pounding stones and. Right. So like that's one of the hardest stones on earth. It looks pretty symmetrical to the naked eye. Let's take it to like a, one of these aerospace places and get a light scanner on it and see how accurate it really is. They did that, they got, they did CT scans on it, you name it, the whole bit. And they found out that they were perfectly symmetrical from top to bottom within the deviation of less than a human hair, basically. If you wanted to recreate that out of granite today, you would need to do that on a computer or a CNC machine. It would have to be 3D printed on CAD. Right. So like it's, there's this huge rift now in like in historians and, and Egyptologists of people like claiming they're trying to deny this, that they're that perfect and let they, they put all those files out on the, like on the Internet for the public to look at and scrutinize and no one's debunked it. But like there's a, a certain sect of archaeologists and Egyptologists, older ones, who were like, just like purposely trying to pretend it doesn't exist because it sort of like destroys the whole timeline of humanity and especially in Egypt. The whole timeline of Egypt?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean there's, I think that there's a, there's a resistance in any field when expertise is, is questions. I look, I am a, I am a, a big stickler for evidence that can be repeatable and you know, documentary evidence and all that kind of stuff. That said, that said there is always an orthodoxy that kind of is resistant. I mean, I think it's incumbent upon everybody, journalists and everybody alike to you have to do the work and you have to prove stuff and not just kind of like, oh, you know, small or what ifs or small inferences. I mean it doesn't. Right, you like, you got to prove it. You got to prove it. But if you do prove it, there is still a lot of, a lot of resistance. So I'm doing this work now as mentioned, that Pollock piece, I don't know if you want to get into it or.

[Danny]

Oh, hell yeah.

[John Pierro]

Okay. All right. So I. You think we take a break? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[Danny]

We'll be right back. All right, so let's jump back into the show. We're back. We were going to talk about Pollock and the CIA.

[John Pierro]

Sure. So you. You know a little bit about this topic, it sounds like. But some of it is, I think, overblown. And some of it, that some people make a little too much out of it. That's my personal opinion. But so I started looking at this because. Because of my book Con Artist, and because of the James stunt investigation. I have been contacted by some collectors who will say, look, I'm thinking about buying this piece. Or, you know, I've been introduced to this piece. What do you think? You know, use your investigative chops or whatever and see. See what you can find out about this thing. Does it seem real or does it seem, you know, potentially fake? So a person brought to me a Pollock, purported Pollock, not in the catalog. There are a lot of fake Pollocks out there. There are a lot of really bad fakes. There are some pretty good ones, but. So he brought me this Pollock that had been in Switzerland, and it came out of Switzerland. It had a provenance behind it that it showed up in Switzerland in the early 50s, mid-50s. It had been in some prominent families in Switzerland. And it had some marks on it from the US Consulate and a couple of people. So I started looking at this and, you know, what. What could this thing be? And, you know, it turns out that in the post war period, the, you know, there was a Cold War on. And it was really for the hearts and minds of people.

[Danny]

Propaganda war.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, exactly. It was a propaganda war. And some of the main propaganda war was being fought for the hearts and minds of intellectuals. So, you know, the Soviet Union was saying, like, look what Western democracies wrought. You know, so what we need is a world where the artist is working for the greater society and is doing basically like a political act, which is for the people. And so what Americans wanted to show was like, no, really, our method is the best, whereby we let people be very free.

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

And you just can do whatever you want. You can be a leftist, you can be on the right, you can do whatever. But our society says we get better, richer, smarter, happier when we give people freedom. And so the CIA wanted to counter kind of like, you know, Soviet realism with an art form that would appeal to these people. And they looked at abstract impressionism, expressionism, like what Jackson Pollock was doing. And they're like, well, here's this artist. He's a leftist. He's kind of a cowboy kind of guy. You know, he's from Wyoming. He's a big drinker, masculine guy. And he does these paintings that are so free, they don't even have to mean anything. They don't represent anything. They're not impressionists. These are not. Here's an impressionistic view of a landscape. They're just like pure expression.

[Danny]

Can you find a photo of Jackson Pollock, Steve? I've never actually looked at a photo of him.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, he's from Wyoming originally and was, you know, kind of like a cowboy kind of guy before he came to.

[Danny]

That's interesting.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, he was like a. He drank too much. But I mean, he died because most.

[Danny]

Of the best artists.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, but you know, he was like, like a, a heavy drinking, masculine, tough guy sort of, sort of vibe. And so they thought, okay, well, you know, we need to push these paintings. And their initial steps at kind of pushing modernism were really terrible and ham fisted. And there were all these senators who came out and said like, hey, your taxpayers bought this crap. Your taxpayers bought these crappy paintings, brought them around and stuff. So the CIA said, hey, if we're going to do this, we're going to have to do this kind of on the, on the down low. And what they did was they set up all of these foundations and stuff that were really CIA fronts to support gallery shows and symposiums and magazines and newspapers and stuff. Like famously the Paris Review was a CAA front and founded by these things and what I found. So anyway, I started doing a lot of research about this particular Pollock painting. And I went and looked in The Archives of MoMA and Crystal Bridges and at the Pollock foundation out in Long island and stuff. And you know, you kind of. I kind of started looking at all of the communications between all of these people and I mean, there isn't anything that crazy nefarious in my mind here. But you know, they just kind of, they just kind of started pushing this as much as they could, but without really kind of telling anybody that it was the, the government that was behind this stuff. And what was really interesting to me.

[Danny]

Was because these people were fundamentally against the government and the wars and everything that was going on.

[John Pierro]

Yes. So you could, you could kind of show like somebody like Jackson Pollock. He's a leftist, he's, you know, he's a guy who.

[Danny]

Anti CIA probably.

[John Pierro]

Yes, yes. And so you could, you could use him. And I don't think he was in on this And I don't think there was any big, you know, hey, guys. Okay, Jackson, we're calling you in for a meeting. And this is what we're gonna do. It wasn't like that at all.

[Danny]

He'd be a useful idiot. Yes, as I am. As we all are.

[John Pierro]

But what was kind of interesting was if you look at all of the people who founded the Museum of Modern Art. And the foundations that were related to them. Almost all of them were wartime intelligence operatives. So, you know, they were intellectuals. They were not out there, you know, trudging with guns through trenches. They were fighting a cultural war during the war and afterwards. And they just kind of kept doing that as they went forward. So the Museum of Modern Art formed what was called the International Program Program. And that International Program sort of took money. And funneled it into these different organizations. That then put on shows by Pollock. So what I ended up. When. What I ended up finding with my painting that I was looking at was, you know, there's a pretty plausible case for this being one of those paintings that ended up going over to Europe. And then ended up through Switzerland through the console. So they were using governmental agencies, like the consoles and stuff. To put these things. To put these shows on to receive the paintings. And, you know, there are, like, letters where somebody's like, hey, I want to know the price of these paintings that were in this show. And they're like, well, why don't you just ask the consulate? So it was very much kind of like this governmental, you know, like, why does the consulate have the prices of these Jackson Pollock paintings. That appeared in the show in Paris? And it's because they were kind of, you know, using. Using this soft power stuff. So I don't. I don't think it's a big cloak and dagger, you know, spy kind of situation. But I think it's just another one of these kind of soft power governmental things. Things. But what I found, I mean, the thing's kind of interesting is there is a very plausible case for this painting. And I, as a person who likes evidence, goes, that's great. I can make up a story about anything. But now let's go take a look at this. At the actual. What paint is there? Is this wood from the period? Is this paint real? You know, because one thing that's cool about Jackson Pollock is that somebody had the bright idea. Because he painted on the floor. He had just unstretched canvas, just cloth on the floor. And he would drip paint on the floor and use sticks and things to kind of Spatter, paint and whatever. The studio has all kinds of paint on the floor.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So a few years ago, somebody went, took samples of all that paint and did what's called on the floor. Yeah.

[Danny]

Oh, his. All that studio is still intact.

[John Pierro]

Yes.

[Danny]

Wow.

[John Pierro]

Yes. So they went, they took all those paint samples and they did what's called Raman spectroscopy. It's an imaging thing that gives you basically signatures of elements.

[Danny]

So you can go chemical makeup or whatever.

[John Pierro]

Correct. So you can go, okay, well, this paint in this painting that I'm looking at has the exact same paint as the paint that's on the studio floor. And they also did that analysis on a couple of known Pollock paintings. So one of them is called Alchemy 1A. Yeah.

[Danny]

That's wild, dude.

[John Pierro]

So you can, you can do that. So I have been working with a, a well known university laboratory that does, you know, kind of Nobel level research. Not related at all to art. Because I wanted to go to. I wanted to go to a place that did not deal with art because. For a lot of reasons.

[Danny]

Yes.

[John Pierro]

One of them being that, you know, it's my impression that you can in some places buy the result you want. So I didn't want to have any bias or any, you know, kind of previous knowledge or any, you know, these people don't care about this. It's. It's an art thing. It's interesting to them, but it's not what they do. So they can look at it in a dispassionate way. And at every, much to my surprise, at every step, it kind of keeps going forward. Yes, it matches the paint. Does the blue match? Yeah, the blue matches. Does the red mat? Yeah, the red matches. It matches the floor and it matches Alchemy 1A or whatever. And so you keep going forward and then, you know, you do this radiocarbon dating. Yeah. So. And the thing that's interesting about radiocarbon dating is that because there was a lot of nuclear testing starting in the late 50s and into the 60s, there's a very specific signature from that blast of stuff that was, you know, it's not present in stuff that started that, that came earlier.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[John Pierro]

So if you find, if you do radiocarbon and you're looking for isotope 14, carbon 14. If you're looking for carbon 14 and it's not there, then it probably predates. And then they stopped at anything.

[Danny]

Yeah, like any, Anything Mo.

[John Pierro]

Most stuff, I, I think, wow. Again, no expert, but you can do it on paint, you can do it on linen, you can do it on, on the Wood of the stretcher bars and stuff. But what's also interesting is that you can. Because they then stopped testing. It kind of died off. Right. So depending on where that level of carbon 14 is, you can sort of say, well, I think that's probably 1962 to 1964. In our case, the painting is, you know, supposedly from 48, 49. So if you find evidence of lots of nuclear testing, couldn't have been right, because that would have been after. So it's really interesting that you can do all of these things, you know, whereas before you would just kind of say, as an expert, yes or no, now you can actually do all of these things, which are, you know, kind of irrefutable science. So I went and I did all the stuff that I know about, and, you know, yes, this kind of makes sense. Here's all this evidence. Here's notes saying that these paintings were sent from Switzerland, from France to Switzerland, they were sent to the consulate, and all this kind of stuff that gets you somewhere there. Right. But then when you really look at the paint, all that other stuff, that's, you know, that's kind of where the rubber hits the road. But. But. And here's art. Here's where art is interesting. A lot of people will tell you, like, that's all well and good. That's fine. However, if the experts with connoisseurship, their eye don't like it, good luck, you know, Good.

[Danny]

Really?

[John Pierro]

Just. Yeah. Despite having all the.

[Danny]

No matter how much scientific data you have.

[John Pierro]

Good. You know, good luck.

[Danny]

You have to have the people connected to the institutions.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And the nod.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. And also because I think part of that is, you know, I think it's good to have like. Like, all of it. All of it. But I think there's also some reluctance on the part of some institutions to say, like, yes, okay, you. You did not use us in any part of this, or you did not sort of get our okay. So therefore, we are withholding it. And then there's a lot of other stuff, like famously the. The Warhol Foundation. How can I say this without getting sued? There. There are foundations, not necessarily the Warhol foundation, but there are foundations that are charged with verifying on authenticating paintings. So you'll give them a painting and you sign a paper which says, hey, you give us this painting. You want us to authenticate. If we don't think it's real, you authorize us to destroy it, and you got to sign that. If you don't sign that, they won't even look at it. So, you know, it's a little bit of a risk to take. And there is very often, you know, controversy about. About this stuff. So there are foundations where the people who make up the foundation may never have been close to the artist. They maybe own a bunch of the work, but they didn't know the artist. They weren't around during the artist's time or just at the very end of the artist's life. And they're refusing to authenticate stuff by people who are collaborators of the artist or, you know, worked with them or were around. And they go, yeah, I had. This painting was given to me by so and so. And it's 100% looks real, everything real. But they don't like it because, well, we own all these pieces. And if now there's a whole bunch of work coming from here, it devalues our stuff. So there's a lot of. There's a lot of funny business.

[Danny]

So If I pay $100,000 for a Jackson Pollock painting and I want to send it to the Jackson Pollock Institute for them to verify if it's real or not, I have to sign a piece of paper that says if they determine it's not real, they can destroy it.

[John Pierro]

I don't think Jackson Pollock. Well, there is no Jackson Pollock Foundation.

[Danny]

Well, like, this is like. But yeah, for any artist. Like Chagall, for sure.

[John Pierro]

Chagall for sure.

[Danny]

Really?

[John Pierro]

You send it to. Yeah, you send a committee. Chagall. You have to sign a paper that says, if we feel it's not real, we will destroy it. And you have to be okay with that. Oh, my God.

[Danny]

Imagine the level of corruption that goes on with that.

[John Pierro]

Well, yeah. I mean. Yeah, I. I don't know. I don't know that there is any. But there could be. There might be. You know, there is that potential.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

You know, I don't know that there is, but yeah.

[Danny]

Somebody was explaining to me how there was a. You know, this gets into the whole. The thing about, like, how you were explaining earlier when there is, like, extreme utility and doing a photo or a portrait of somebody because you can't take photos, the person who can do it, the most accurate, that would be the most valuable piece of artwork. But now, like, there is no utility in something like that. Right. Like, it's with. Especially with AI and there was a. I think it was a Warhol documentary where they literally had an AI narrate the whole documentary as if it was Andy Warhol in his voice.

[John Pierro]

Yes. Yes.

[Danny]

That's creepy.

[John Pierro]

That's correct. And I Mean, there's a whole bunch of. There's a whole bunch of other, other AI work that's happening now so you can train. There were two examples that I know about that were pretty interesting. And the first one was there's an artist called Egon Schiele, Austrian artist in the early 1900s. These beautiful pencil drawings. Really, really amazing artist. But they trained a neural network to look at. There wasn't even a very big number of his drawings, but they trained it to look at these drawings. And then it could, with 99.99 accuracy, determine whether something was drawn by Egon Schiele or not by the pressure on the pencil. The different, I mean, a million different sort of like, inputs. So it could do that. And that's, you know, one of the other reasons why it is so difficult for somebody like Tony to do what he did now. I mean, he says that's over.

[Danny]

Well, it's, it's. And also in today's day and age, there's also no more who are the Picassos or the Pollocks of now. Right? Like there. That doesn't seem to exist anymore.

[John Pierro]

I mean, there, there are definitely contemporary artists that you and I have never heard of that.

[Danny]

In that in a hundred years, people are going to be like, oh, my God, like that.

[John Pierro]

I mean, that's hard to say.

[Danny]

But during this time when AI was ubiquitous, like, how much more difficult is that going to be?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's hard to say. So there's a, There's a bunch of, of. Of attention that's being paid now to what can we do to make sure that the holes and gaps of the past don't exist anymore. So there are companies that, you know, allow you to put DNA in a, in a painting or, you know, microchip and catalog paintings from the second they were born to whatever. So there's all kinds of stuff, you know, blockchain certification for stuff like that. So that happens. You know, there are definitely artists that you and I have never heard of who are huge, huge names if you, you know, if you are in that world that we don't know about and they're painting and stuff, is worth millions of dollars. Which of those are going to last, you know, beyond their lifetime? I don't know. Beyond two or three lifetimes. I don't know either. But there's another interesting AI thing that I read about, which was amazing, and that is there is an AI that can kind of look at oil painting. Most of some oil painting, like, you know, Dali had Very thin, almost transparent painting style. But, you know, some is thick and they just kind of glob it on and stuff. But these AIs can look at like a 3D map of the painting. And it's so good that with, you know, certain painters that it has been trained on, you can kind of start to tell the difference between brushstrokes by the student and brushstrokes by the master. So a lot of. In the, in the Renaissance and even later in the Baroque period, you would have a studio. So you'd go to the, to the master and you'd say, hey, I want a painting of my wife, the Duchess of whatever. And he'd say, great. And he'd have 10 paintings going at the same time. And he'd kind of sketch it out, draw the composition, and then the students would paint in the costume and the legs and stuff. And the master would do the hands, which are very hard to do, and the face. So this AI can tell the difference between the various strokes, which is, you know, pretty amazing. There's just so much you can do now that it's, it's quite, quite difficult to, to really tell the difference or, or to really, you know, fool full, full technology. All the chemical analysis, all the, you know, spectroscopic analysis and everything. You just, you know.

[Danny]

Yeah. I wonder, like, why was the Renaissance the period of time when we had the most like, insane amount of art coming out? Not just art, like architecture, all these cathedrals that were built, like, it just seems like an absorbent amount of creativity was coming out during that time. And like, you know, people were creating stuff.

[John Pierro]

Not.

[Danny]

I mean, I'm, I'm guessing that people were doing this stuff not just as like a thing for a return on investment. They weren't doing this because it was gonna make them money. They were creating this stuff because something else was going on in society that was promoting like just a crazy amount of creativity, you know, like, whether it was it the climate, I mean, I'm sure like the climate, the, the economy, like the, the religious culture that was going on. I'm sure there were so many elements that were contributing to that, but it's just interesting how that period in history is just known.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

For so much amazing art.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I mean, the, the very short answer is the church and the Counter Reformation. So you had the church vastly wealthy, who wanted to, you know, the, the, the Reformation said, hey, you can have a personal one on one relationship with God through your own reading of the Bible. And the Catholic Church said, well, yeah, that's all good. But, you know, there also needs to be a hierarchy and we are the institution on earth which is, you know, kind of mediating between the two. So they wanted to, you know, bring these stories to the common person through the church, through pain. They wanted to illustrate it. Here's the story of St. Matthew. And there were, you know, you could make the argument that essentially these were comic books, graphic novels of their time for people to look at. And there was a tremendous, tremendous amount of money available to do this. And you know, in the, in our, in the book Con Artists, Con Artists that I wrote with Tony, you know, he talks a lot about how Caravaggio is his favorite artist. But like when Caravaggio came to Rome, it was like Hollywood was in the 50s or whatever. It's like every artist, every person, everybody who wanted to be a director went to la, went to Hollywood. Yeah, everybody who wanted to be an architect or an artist or a sculptor or whatever went to Rome, you know, because that's where all the commissions were coming from, from the church. You know, they were building, building these massive cathedrals, building churches, decorating them, chapels.

[Danny]

Right, right, yeah. And I think Leonardo da Vinci, he was also like, if I remember correctly, he was doing all kinds of things like developing things for war, like weapons and stuff for war and stuff like this and like being commissioned to do stuff like. I mean, I guess a lot of it was just, he was just trying to, to feed himself.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean they like some Da Vinci. I'm not as familiar with his life because, you know, I want to stress that I'm not a great art expert.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

But I do know, you know, a little bit. But yes, I mean he was. Some people would argue that he was a, an engineer first and an artist after, you know, so he famously came up with designs for like helicopter screws and you know, flying machines and different catapults and instruments of war, like you say. And so, you know, when I talked to Tony, Tony always says, you know, that he was just fat as a boy, just fascinated with the notebooks of Da Vinci and was actually more interested in Da Vinci the engineer than da Vinci the artist, because he wasn't actually a very prolific artist. He worked really, really, really slowly. So it take him years to make paintings, you know, months and months and months to make paintings. Whereas Caravaggio would make like literally a painting in a day. Because when he first came to Rome he was, you know, like any, like imagine a 22 year old person going to Hollywood because they want to be a Director? Yeah, same kind of thing. And so he got, you know, he got a job painting essentially like tourist postcards, you know, and he'd have to paint like these heads.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

One in a day, or fruit. His job was to paint fruit, you know, still lives. And so he'd do one in a day and that's how he would, you know, he'd make a, I don't know, a penny or whatever.

[Danny]

Wow.

[John Pierro]

And he lived. He lived with this guy, Monsignor Del Monte, and he called him Monsignor Salad because he said that all he ever fed him was salad.

[Danny]

Really?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, it was just like he was the literal starving artist. But that's what, you know, that was the climate of the Renaissance. And that points out, that kind of points out, you know, that for everything that we say about, you know, the evils of the art market and, you know, all this stuff, you must have patrons, you must have people who are interested in having art and want to pay for it or feel it's important enough in their lives that it's a priority for them to spend money on. Otherwise, you know, no, no art.

[Danny]

Yeah, you know, I mean, you have.

[John Pierro]

That, you have the. You have to have the person who's commissioning stuff.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You know.

[Danny]

Right. Yeah, it is, it is really interesting how it's evolved, you know, especially like what we were talking about with the Cold War and, and art and. And these. And the CIA trying to, through, like, second and third hand people fund these artists and prop up this industry of art, of modern art and to just basically like, show that, hey, we're all about liberty and creativity and openness and like, we're so much better than the Soviet Union. And like, yeah, there was no, like, victims or anything. They weren't like kidnapping and torturing people. They were just spending taxpayer dollars on trying to drive culture and show how much better we. And that was during the whole, like, McCarthy area too. Right.

[John Pierro]

So, like, I mean, that's why they had. That's why they had to use the CIA, because they had. They had the first couple of shows. I forget what it was called. It was called advancing American art or something like that. And they bought all of these paintings from famous artists of the time.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

And they put them out there and then everybody came out and said, like this. This is like, modern art is all communistic. This is all garbage. Look at what. Look. And Harry Truman famously said, if that's art, then I'm a hot and taught.

[Danny]

Right, right, right.

[John Pierro]

So, you know, but. But, you know, you think about this like Every. Everything that happens. Everything that happens basically starts with an idea. I mean, go like, well, books don't matter, you know, and all this kind of stuff. Well, they do because everything starts with ideas. And that exchange of ideas is what makes, like, real world changes happen or things happen, you know, so art of its time and, you know, depending on how you define art, I mean, what's the art of today? I mean, I don't, I don't know what, what you think, but, you know, is it a painting? Probably not. You know, is it a TikTok video? Maybe. Is it, you know, music? Probably. Is it a little video? Yeah, probably. You know, is it a meme? Yes. You know, that's really the art of today. And think about how many ideas and how much our world has changed because of ideas that we're, you know, that we're exchanging. So art doesn't necessarily. It doesn't look like it used to in the past.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You know, so what, what is happening now as art is probably not even what we recognize.

[Danny]

Well, it's interesting how it's. How it's today. It seems like it's more of. It's more of like people copying things that other successful people have already done with art, right? Like, they'll, they'll. They'll see a model and say, I can copy this and do this in maybe a little bit of a different way. It's a successful model. It makes a lot of money. Maybe it'll make me famous. I can do this and put my own spin on it or whatever. It's less like unique, new, super creative. Right? It's more of like copy and paste nowadays.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, that, that's true because it's possible to do that, you know, But I mean, I think that that kind of. I don't know, call it inspiration, if you want, or call it straight up copying. I mean, there are, I mean, the great old masters would, you know, there's always this. This. There's always this. I don't know if it's an argument, but discussion. Who's the greatest painter? Was Oil painter. Was it Caravaggio or was it Rembrandt? You know, well, maybe it's Rembrandt, but there could have been no Rembrandt without Caravaggio.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You know, and there's all kinds of examples of. I mean, look at any, any period people happen to be doing stuff that kind of looks very similar. It's just the way it is, you know, there are ideas in the air. Oh, I saw him do that, Let me, let me try that too or whatever. You know, it's kind of the way it is. It is true now that though, like, I mean, you can sample a hook out of a song, which you weren't able to do in the past, but you sample it, you just stick it in your song. Yes, that's what drives your song. And then you do some other crap on top of it. But you know, really what drives your song is that sample or, you know, whatever. That was not possible before. It's not possible to cut in piece.

[Danny]

We had this guy, this gentleman on the other day, Mike Benz, who was explaining to us he was, he used to work for the State Department in the cyber division. And he was explaining to us how the State Department, basically, like the State Department was the department in the United States that will do all the things that this is too dirty for the CIA to do. And he was explaining how they were basically doing the same thing you're explaining with the modern art movement during the Cold War with music in like the last 10, 20 to 30 years. And they were doing this thing called music diplomacy where they were like funding musicians, funding artists, funding music festivals in different countries to overthrow governments or to like push political agendas all over the world was crazy with jazz. I think one of the original ones was jazz. I think what he was explaining was like, maybe this was like even during the Cold War when I think it was like Stalin was trying to say that like America and the west were super racist. Right? So we came in and we funded this jazz diplomacy, right, to show that no, we, we're not like, we have all this jazz and all this stuff, all these black musicians all over the place and it's kind of the same thing.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I, I, I think so too. And I mean it, it makes, it makes total sense. It's, you know, famously in the 50s, Khrushchev came to America. You know, Soviet ruler Khrushchev came to America and he was shown around and saw like a Western, you know, the kitchen of the future or whatever. And it's just mind blowing, you know, so if you have all of these things like, hey, for young people who are going to affect the most change anyway, now they're really into rock and roll. How are you going to keep those people interested in, you know, Soviet realism or whatever when you got the Beatles, you know, so whatever, whatever that thing is. But I mean, art has that, art has that ability and it has all always had that ability. And you know, I think one of the, one of the Difficult things in dealing with art is that the experience of most art is off putting. You know, how many people really look forward to going to a museum? You know, how many people really look forward to that? And part of that is just, my.

[Danny]

Mom'S the only one I know.

[John Pierro]

I mean, I was just talking to somebody else and they were like, they're a great outdoors person and they're like, you know, we went climbing in Italy and they're like, the only thing is I don't want to go to, I don't want to go to any museums. And I kind of get that because there's this kind of like overwhelming solemnity to a lot of it or just like, I don't get it. So, you know, so it's easy to.

[Danny]

Sort of look aspect to it all.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. And it's really easy to look at it and go like, I don't really see how this applies to my life.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You know, I don't see how this applies to my life. When, whereas, you know, when you look at art as kind of like all the music and ideas and imagery and stuff that we see every day, you know, then you see it as, as part of your life. And I think that's kind of one of the things, like I, I, I'm, I'm not super interested in the, like late Warhol when it's just like, here's a bunch of, you know, here's a bunch of pictures of Liz Taylor. Here's 100 images of Liz Taylor or Chairman Ma or whatever. But, you know, if you read his early notebooks and stuff, I mean, it's super fascinating. And what he was saying, which nobody understood at the time, like, what does that even mean? Everybody's famous in the future. Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. What does that mean? We know what it means now. I mean, that's social media, right? You know, that was 40, that was 50 years before social media. That's amazing. You know, so it's, it's, it's really kind of about like, how does, how do the ideas, the imagery, the media, music, the ways that people think kind of influence your life? You know, I think that's what art is. It might not look like it used, it might not be a piece of.

[Danny]

Canvas on a, on a. Yeah, it's, I think it's cool because it's like taking a time machine back, you know, and seeing like, you know, what, what, like you said, like, what was going through people's minds back then? How are they thinking? What was it like? Just to be in like that museum surrounded by all this ancient shape is like. It's weird. It gives you a. It's like. It's not just seeing it. It's this sort of like a feeling you get, you know what I mean, where it's. It's kind of a. A feeling you don't forget when you get to experience some sort of history like that and a little glimpse into the past.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, And I had. I had one of the, like this really great art experience in a way that I had in a long time and in a museum. I was at the Getty center, not the villa, I was at the Getty center. And I was there, like, I was there. I took somebody for their birthday to this cafe to hang out. It's a nice place to stay. But I said, well, let's run up and go look at a couple of paintings. And usually, you know, you sort of walk through and I like that, or I look at a few things. But I stopped and I looked at this Monet haystack, these famous haystack paintings. And I kind of looked at it. I started looking. I started looking at it and it turned into. I mean, it sounds goofy, but it turned into, you know, like those magic eye paintings. Yeah, it kind of had this magic eye effect.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[John Pierro]

And I was like, wow. So this, this was kind of like how using. Yeah. Using Impressionism, he had found a way to show how light, you know, a flat surface could become 3D, and not just. Not just in kind of like straight line perspective, you know, like Renaissance paintings, but how this impressionistic thing could. Could make this thing become a 3D real thing. And that's, you know, that's amazing for the time, you know, we. We kind of become blind to these things because we see it all the time. We have all kinds of imagery and effects and optical illusions and things. But that to me was like, truly, wow. Truly an amazing thing.

[Danny]

That is fascinating. I read this thing about Picasso about how he was so good at purvey, about of like, he was really good.

[John Pierro]

At.

[Danny]

Displaying depth because allegedly he could only see in 2D. So allegedly, like he had. I don't know if this is for sure, but allegedly he had like one eye that went really far out and he couldn't see depth very good.

[John Pierro]

No.

[Danny]

So he relied on a lot on light and shadows and things to discern depth. And he was really good at translating this into a canvas, into turning something that was 2D into something 3D. What is this? AI? Yes. Picasso's right eye showed signs of strabismus, a condition of misaligned eyes with poor depth perception. So because he had poor depth, he couldn't see space. He had to figure out ways to get through the world using light and shadows and shapes to discern depth. And he was like, that's a fascinating thing about how he was able to.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Make his paintings. And this is also true with, with filmmakers, too. There's this famous documentarian named Errol Morris who has the same issue, and he's does these incredible. He has this incredible way of doing cinematography. He even invented this thing called the interrotron during his documentaries where the person's looking straight down the barrel of the camera. So instead of, like, sitting to the side and having the person look off camera, they looked straight on the barrel. He would put this. This mirror in front of his face so they could see his face, they would talk to him, but somehow it would, like, reflect into the lens. So, like, they're looking straight on the barrel camera. So, like, it's just weird. It's just interesting to hear how, like, certain people's, like, disabilities or, or shortcomings can translate into, like, something incredible in art. Yeah, there it is. There's the interron right there.

[John Pierro]

Interron. I love it. I love it. I mean, you know, you're a documentary guy. You know, it's always like, one of these things where if you're doing the interview, you always have to, like, stand right next to the camera. You have to tell the person, like, look, look, in my. It's never quite, quite there. So I like that. I didn't know about that.

[Danny]

Yeah, it's always, like. It's always interesting to me when, when somebody can come along and, like, innovate a new way of creating something, like a new. A new medium. Not necessarily a new medium, but a new way to like, like, like an example would be like podcasting how, like, Joe Rogan basically was the first one. I mean, to have the idea to have two people just sit down and talk uninterrupted, unedited, for hours and put it out there. And who knew it would be like, the number one thing that everyone listens to in the world.

[John Pierro]

Like, incredible.

[Danny]

Anyone during that time would say, no, you have to make it more entertaining. You have to start out with like a, A, a, A hook that grabs people. And, you know, it has to be shorter. You're going to lose people's attention. But, like, no, it just blew that out of the water.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Picasso was, was interesting too, because, you know, you can always. You. You can think about how the great artists just have kind of a different way of looking as they bring a new way of looking at something. And so I think that, you know, what you described about his eyes and stuff kind of tied into a bigger cultural thing at the time too, or a bigger discovery at the time. So, you know, science and philosophy thinking about like, you know, other, other dimensions or the fact of looking at something changes something and subatomic particles and all that kind of stuff. So cubism is really like, hey, when you're looking at something, you're looking at it from every direction at the same time, you know. And so I think that his way of looking probably like allowed him to see that in a way that he might not. Have. Might not have seen, might not have appreciated.

[Danny]

Yeah, in. In another.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. And it's an idea that had like greater resonance or whatever.

[Danny]

But yeah, yeah, man, it's super fascinating. What, what you did another documentary that was on Netflix that was about social media and kids Influencer kids. Can you explain what that was about?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, that was called Bad Influence and it was a documentary that was directed by Jenna Rocher and Keith Davidson and they did a great job. I produced was this look at a particular social media influencer, huge social media influencer called Piper Raquel, kind of a kid fluencer. And what it sort of looked at was, you know, you think that there's this world that's it's for kids, it's harmless, it's just harmless fun. But what you really start to see is that this is a world that is not kid friendly, that has a lot of problems inherent in it. I mean, I personally think that social media media is a huge, huge problem, not just for kids, but for everybody today. I think it's completely messed up our information environment and there's horrible information hygiene because of it. But so this, this was a bunch of. Piper Raquel had a squad of kids with her. They all kind of joined together and they would make prank video videos and all this kind of stuff. And their mother, Piper's mother, Tiffany Raquel, was kind of the momager of all these kids. And so it's really a story of abuse. You know, these kids were made to work all the time. They were kind of pitted against each other. They received no schooling and, you know, it's just, just this kind of like almost cult like world in which these, these children fell. And again, you know, it's one of these situations where you have that kind of money, like, you know, a 11 year old kid making, you know, a couple hundred grand a month.

[Danny]

What?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean there's, there's, there are a lot of incentives that kind of go awry. So I, I mean I do, I do think that generally speaking, the, I think generally speaking, social media is a terrible thing for children. I think that it is largely, can be largely unhealthy for adults, adults who can't mediate. But for kids, I mean, you know, it's undeniable that it is designed to be addictive. You know, that's just undeniable. It is unpoliced largely. And while many of the companies claim that they have the safety of children at heart or that they have, you know, dedicated safety teams and all this stuff, the reality is that anytime that safety or mental health butts up against, you know, the need to have viewers and you know, time spent on site, that always wins out and please shareholders. Yeah, I mean it always, it always wins out. So for example, you know, one of the most. This is crazy to me. I have an 11 year old daughter who does no screen time except for like on the weekend, you know, we'll watch some movies.

[Danny]

Wow.

[John Pierro]

And it's funny because that is, you know, that's sort of a radical thing.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

But then I look at it and go like, you know, I mean really, if you understood what's going on, most parents would think like, oh yeah, that that makes sense. I mean, you wouldn't give your kids cigarettes. You know, not giving your kids cigarettes is not a radical thing. I think not giving your kids. Social media. Media is similar. So anyway, there's this very popular game called Roblox.

[Danny]

Oh yeah, Roblox.

[John Pierro]

Roblox is for those who don't know, is essentially, you know, a, a user generated content. Everybody makes like little environments that you can run around and in your avatar and you buy merch and whatever. Kids as young as I think, I don't remember this exactly, But I think it's 13ish. And you know, anybody who wants to get in can get in pretty easily. You know, you have nine, ten year old kids in some of these environments. One of the most popular environments is public restroom. So you know, imagine what happens in a public restroom in a club or whatever. You know, that's all the kind of stuff that takes place in these, in these places. And there are, I mean many, many, many. I mean, I don't know if it's hundred but dozens, dozens of cases of grooming. You know, where some, where it's, it's been described as a Pedophile paradise. And everybody, every time I mention this to a, you know, fellow parent, oh yeah, my kid's on Roblox. And I go, oh really? And they go, yeah, actually my kid, you know, somebody was trying to groom my kid on it. Like it's so rife, it's unbelievable. And there are, you know, dozens of cases where somebody, you know, sets up like Jeffrey Epstein Island There, there were, I think they've kind of specifically taken those out. But Jeffrey Epstein island, where kids are running around in this Roblox thing and they're, you know, getting kids to compromise themselves some way or, you know, they're kind of meeting through this and then take them off line, you know, to, or take them off site to another private messaging thing. Right. And then they'll want to come meet him and all this stuff. And it's like many, many examples of this happening.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

And if you ask the company, the company's like, oh no, we take safety very seriously. And the question is like, I'm not sure that's true. And you know, I think that is just repeated over and over and over again. You know, like one of the main ways that kids buy drugs now is just on social media. That's like the number one way to buy drugs. Yeah, yeah. So that, that Roblox example there is repeated many, many, many times. There are many cases that are being adjudicated right now. There's, I, I believe there's a class action lawsuit that's being formed. And you know, it's, it's kind of the same thing with, with all of the social media sites where, you know, they, they kind of almost like a blanket immunity.

[Danny]

Yeah. Section 240 or 230.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. So I, I helped start an early Internet travel company that then became part of TripAdvisor. So we're one of the first ones. And I remember at the time, you know, we were kind of grappling with, well, how do you deal with user generated content? Right. Who's responsible for it? What if somebody uses a picture that's copyrighted? What do you do? And what ended up happening was that the law basically just said you are a utility, you can do more or less what you want. It's the onus is on someone to report, Right. And then you have to deal with it. So for example, if somebody used copyrighted imagery, okay. The photographer has to come in and go through a really onerous project to get your, to get you to remove that information. And let's say somebody took 500 photos. Well, I'm a photographer. Can I really spend all that time to go through this whole process of filling out 500 separate forms, you know, to show you that these things have been copyright, you know, have violated my copyright. Now repeat that 500 times. Right. How are you going to, how are you going to deal with that? So, you know, what I used to do is I'd say if somebody showed me that I just nuke the account, I just be like, good, you, you did a copyright violation. You're out of here. You know, I wouldn't make the person go through all those, all those hoops. And similarly with social media, because it's treated like a utility, despite the fact that somebody like Twitter, you know, very openly shapes the content. I mean, the algorithm is pushing stuff to you.

[Danny]

Right?

[John Pierro]

These are the top stories. You should look at this. You should look at this. If you're interested in this, you're going to be interested in that. Let me push this to you. Push that to you. They still have no real liability for any of the stuff that they, that they're showing. So, you know, you have this information environment where unsafe stuff or, you know, like really radicalizing stuff is out there and there's no repercussions because these guys are shielded.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So personally, I think it would be fairly easy to deal with that. You know, why, you know, regardless of how you feel about this, but why is Fox no longer reporting that Dominion voting machines were compromised in previous election? Because they got sued for a billion dollars.

[Danny]

Right, right, right.

[John Pierro]

That stuff is all over social media. And, you know, there are trends and they push it and, you know, they're making money off of that content, you know, and lots of it. But there's really no repercussion against that because their claim is, oh, well, it's not me who's publishing it, it's individuals. It's individuals.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

However you are now shaping this, you're pushing it. You know, the thing is, you have to.

[Danny]

Right. The, the thing is you have to prove that they are specifically institutionally pushing specific narratives or specific, specific stories. Because.

[John Pierro]

Correct.

[Danny]

The ultimate way for that to work is you would have all of the people who exist on the social media platforms dependent on how many followers they have would have equal, equal exposure to their content and to their stories. They push out. The problem with, in my view, this, this section 230, blanket, blanket immunity to lawsuits is that they can put their finger on the scale and nobody knows about it.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

You know, and the argument against is like, why, you know, why should social Media companies get. Lie. Get off the hook for any sort of liability. When, you know, if I make playground equipment, you're not off the hook for any kind of liability. Why do they, why do they deserve. I get it. And the other side of the coin is if they didn't have this, they would probably go out of business.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, personally, I, I think it would probably be fine. I mean, as it currently exists, I think it would be fine. And I think there's a really interesting, there's a really interesting kind of legal framework that's being developed. There's a lot of, kind of youth groups and stuff. There's one called design it for us, you know, who's, Whose theory is. Look, this is just product. This is just a product liability case. In the same way that if you make a car that explodes, if you make cigarettes that are marketed at children, you know, you can't do that. This is very specifically marketed to addict us. This is very specifically marketed negligent. There is a negligence in the way that it allows inappropriate interactions to happen and stuff like that. So, for example, you know, I'm not sure with the current status of every one of the social media thing, but, you know, default that you're, you know, that your messaging is open, you know, things like that. So most, most social media, the default is anybody can contact you, let's say. Right. Whereas it should be like nobody can contact you unless, you know, parental intervention happens. Right. You know.

[Danny]

Right. So or, or another argument that people make is that there shouldn't be any anonymity on social media. Like it should be you, your name connected to your Social Security number, whatever it is. So that if you do do any, anything out of line, you are punished for it.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, that, that seems a little too far for me. And I kind of feel like, well, everybody's like, well, that'll change everything. Or this.

[Danny]

Well, are you going to be out there screaming obscenities at people and, and being, you know, a complete asshole to everybody online if everybody knows who you are?

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I, Yeah, I mean, yeah, but the thing is, this kind of already exists. This is not like some crazy notion. The crazy notion is the opposite, whereby, hey, you get a blanket immunity. Like, wait a minute, how did that happen? Because you could make this. It already works for media. I know when I make a documentary, I make a spreadsheet. With every claim, every claim I make, I make a spreadsheet and I go, here's source one, here's source two, and here's source three, and then claim number two. And I mean that spreadsheets long, and that's a hard process to do, but that's kind of the hoop that I have to jump through, you know, to show to, to really kind of like, shore up all my claims. And if I can't defend my claim, I'm not going to make it, you know, so that's kind of what I have to go through. And similarly, you know, media, if New York Times publishes something, you go, well, it's a columnist. Well, sorry, that's your columnist. You published it in your platform. You are liable in the same way that, you know, I'm sure you could have a, a method by which you could say, like, for example, the Dominion story. All right, X, you are pushing this to people. We've, we've shown that this has no merit yet. You're pushing this to people in your algorithm. Okay, so either stop pushing it in the algorithm. Right. Remove it from whatever.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

Or face some of the liability.

[Danny]

Right, but do we know that there. Is it. Is it a fact? Do we know that X or Twitter is giving that Dominion story more favorable push in the algorithm? Are they pushing it any more than other stuff? And shouldn't people be allowed to talk about whether that's, whether it's fake, real, a lie, propaganda? Shouldn't all speech on these things have equal push or equal availability to see. Right. Instead of like, can you prove that they're pushing that more than the alternate story? Because I agree with you that that's wrong. But, like, conversely, it should be a place where bad ideas should have just as much reach as good ideas. Ideas should have.

[John Pierro]

Yes and no. In, in my opinion. I mean, this is all just our opinion, right? In my opinion, of course, you should be able to have your idea. I should be able to talk to you about, you know, lawful ideas. I shouldn't be able to say like, hey, you and I are going to murder Steve. Right, but although you may want to sometimes, but, you know, yeah, you can, you can have that conversation, you know, of course you can. But the difference is, you know, should you amplify that? Can you amplify that? You know, that's, that's my, that's my way of looking. And that's. It's fairly practical, Right. If there's three guys with no followers talking about it, okay, it's not a problem. Don't worry about it. Right.

[Danny]

Well, the thing is, isn't that a slippery slope when you have the platform deciding what should be squashed? Or what should be amplified when you're giving them that power.

[John Pierro]

But I don't think, I don't think the platform, the platform. First of all, the platforms are private companies. They're private companies.

[Danny]

Totally.

[John Pierro]

Okay. So like when we had our website, which was a huge community, Right. Of user generated content, I could remove you anytime I wanted to just because you were a jerk, you were unkind, you were using copyrighted imagery, you used copyrighted text. I could do that.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

So they can do that. And that's, you know, that's the prerogative of a private company. Okay. Should they do it or how do they do it? I think is kind of like to me, to my mind, slightly more difficult than dealing with the media. I mean, we already have, I mean we have libel lawsuits, right? All the time. We know what that means, we know what that looks like. We know how that's adjudicated. You know, it's not some great giant unknown. We already know how to do it. Just kind of do that, you know, Because I think the downside is so much worse. I mean, I really think that we are in a terrible situation where it's very difficult to deal with any problems because of the fact that we are so unable to find a non radicalized middle ground on anything.

[Danny]

So there's a, there's, that's the biggest problem right there. You just nailed, you just nailed that the people, the, the, the ideas that get the most attention on social media are the most extreme, extreme ones.

[John Pierro]

And that's algorithmic. Yeah, that is algorithmic. That is, that is purely pushed by an algorithm which is based upon creating dopamine hits and, and views.

[Danny]

Yeah, you're not going to grow your followers by having a nuanced middle of the road opinion.

[John Pierro]

Exactly, exactly. So there is, I don't know if you've ever heard of the, the Doomsday Clock. The Doomsday Clock was created in the 80s by the, an organization of atomic scientists. And it was a metaphor for talking about how, how much in danger were we of nuclear apocalypse.

[Danny]

Oh yes.

[John Pierro]

So they go, it's 11:59 and 58 seconds. And they would occasionally sort of. Yeah, so there you go. So it's very close. And right now it's, it's like basically any moment we're gonna have a nuclear apocalypse, but they have also started.

[Danny]

So right now in 2025, they think it's a high probability that we're gonna.

[John Pierro]

Have a nuclear 89 seconds to midnight. Again, it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for saying like, you know, midnight is nuclear apocalypse. So they're saying we are very close. Metaphor.

[Danny]

They're not necessarily saying like thermonuclear bombs.

[John Pierro]

No, no, no.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

They're saying it's a metaphor for the danger we have of nuclear apocalypse happening. So it's not going to happen in 89 seconds. But in this metaphor, we're very close and we have a very high level of danger. So I talked to one of the chief scientists there and they've, they've expanded to some other areas like climate change, you know, political instability and stuff. And one of the things that they talk about is information hygiene or information environment. You know, how bad is the information that we get now? You know, when every single sort of like crazy.

[Danny]

You turn that off. I'm freezing my ass off, dude. That thing is, that thing is freezing me. Or just turn it down a little bit.

[John Pierro]

When, when every single piece of information is disagreed upon in the most radical terms, you cannot solve any of these problems. Right. So we talked to them and they, they just basically said unless we solve. And you know, they were very specific specifically talking about X, because that was just part of the conversation. But, but when, when you can't have the discussion or there is no viable objective fact anywhere, you can't solve any of this. And so therefore, to me, it seems to me that the greatest problem that we face today and the greatest opportunity for positive change is to kind of just like pull back from that, you know, and, and you know, it's not like before social media, we still had freedom of expression, we still had the ability to get ideas out. You know, we did not have giant psyops operations from foreign governments in every single person's brain at all times, which is happening today. Well, maybe we did.

[Danny]

I mean, well, we had four major news outlets. Yeah, right.

[John Pierro]

Yep.

[Danny]

And we know for a fact that there were CIA operations to manipulate the media and everyone was getting their information from four mainstream outlets. So it was so much easier to propagandize people and so discourse and narrative.

[John Pierro]

True, true.

[Danny]

Which, which I'm not saying to your point, for a stable society, maybe that's the better way to do it.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, like, but I'm not even saying return to that. What I'm saying is let a thousand flowers bloom, let them all bloom, but just have them sort of operate under the same terms of, you know, you can't just say anything about anybody anytime you want with total impunity. You know, you can't say that you are a vampire, you know, eating children in the basement of a pizza establishment, you know, without facing some controversy. And you can't, you can't boost that, you know, as the number one topic of your thing without facing some, you know, can you prove it? Great. Report away. I mean, that's reporting. Report away, you know.

[Danny]

Yeah. And the question also goes to, like, what can they suppress? Like, what kind of information can we suppress? And look, that was one of the biggest controversies which I think was the catalyst to this stuff starting to go downhill at an exponential rate, was during COVID Yeah. Because we had social media companies censoring all kinds of things on Covid people, Doctors getting kicked off social media, losing their livelihood for saying, hey, that's not. This is not the same thing I'm seeing in my practice. You know, like, people questioning getting kicked off for questioning vaccines. Like, like, that's. Can you see how that could go the wrong way very, very quickly when you have the people and the people who are funding these companies and I mean, even mainstream media, media companies, like, incentivized to take people off that aren't going with the financial incentive, that might not be the right thing for the people, you know, and there's, there's, there's this great account on X. I wish I remember what the guy's name was. But I'm sure you've seen these videos. There's videos where they've stitched together newscasts from all these local news sites during the COVID area era. And after all these local news stations. I'm sorry, where they're literally saying the same lines verbatim.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Like you want to talk about pushing a narrative like. Well, like, is this just a coincidence that these people are using the exact same words, like eight words in a row, talking about certain things? Like, that's, that's insane.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

So I don't know if this is it, Steve. No, there was something on X that was, it was. They were talking about, on all different topics, like on topics regarding war, regarding bid, regarding elections and all this stuff.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely danger of, you know, group think. There's definitely dangers of, you know, narratives being pushed if you have a, a small, small number of outlets. So again, I mean, I'm saying have as many as you want.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

Just have them also be liable, you know, for the same standards.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[John Pierro]

You know, because we're, we're pretending that this is just a guy saying some stuff, but it's not, it's not a guy saying some stuff. This is now the main source of news. It's algorithmically manipulated. It's, you know, it's.

[Danny]

Is this it here? See, you can hear it. Give it some volume. They were going to get to it. All right, this isn't the video. Yeah, no, I see what you're saying, actually. And, and this, this gentleman that we had on the other day, too, was also laying out all of these companies that they were funded by the State Department, AI companies creating this spider web, this algorithmic spider web of keywords. And they had, like, literally, like, there was like, video conferences of people that were a part of these think tanks, these government think tanks, talking about how we need to censor these narratives. Anyone who discusses 19, discusses Pfizer or Moderna or anything like this, like, take these people down, suppress their accounts. And they had these like. And, and it covered all kinds of topics. This crazy spiderweb. And this was funded by the State Department, CIA, DoD, to literally clamp down on speech on the Internet. And, like, this isn't the type of stuff that's like, protect your kids or like the. Stop the crazy person from breaking into your house or burning down your house, whatever. This is where. This is the type of topic where the only purpose of it is to protect institutions. Right. And to protect the profits of, of large companies.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I mean, again, I think. Yes, you're, you're right. That there is, you know, there is potential to push narratives or suppress narratives. Right. So my thing is we're just in a place where we can't have. We can't have problem solving. It's basically impossible. Just, you know, like those scientists were saying, you know, we can't really solve anything because all we do is like, it's 100 this way and it's 100 this way. There's no in between. We can't meet anywhere. So, I mean, I think there's already. There's already a. A structure that works. You know, the news media already works. You can report on anything you want so long as you have some support for it. Or, or you kind of face, you know, you face repercussions in a court of law. I mean, that's. That just works. You're going to say this. Okay. I mean, I can't say that you're. I can't go. I can't go and publish to the world that you are a file. I can, but then I am liable.

[Danny]

For repercussions, of course.

[John Pierro]

So in the same, in the same.

[Danny]

Way, you are not the platform. Correct, Right.

[John Pierro]

Correct. But on a platform, you know, I could have a million AI bots put it out there, I could push that.

[Danny]

Yep. And as countries do.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. And I'm not liable in any way, you know, Whereas if you said like, hey, just so you know, I'm going to sue you for this because it's untrue, you must remove it or face repercussions.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

I mean, that just seems like a natural and normal process that happens in the real world today.

[Danny]

There is a process on YouTube where this is very easy to do and I've been a part of it.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And where if somebody does do this, steals your material or posts abusive content or things that you believe are untrue, there's a button right there on the YouTube video where you can report it to YouTube. It sends direct. YouTube stays out of it. It's directly between you and the. Create that creator where you type up a little paragraph on what you think happened that gets sent directly to the person who published it. And they have something like 20 days to either remove the content or. And if they don't do it, then you basically have to like file a lawsuit against them and get. And that the stuff gets taken down. And then when the courts determine the outcome, they notify YouTube and then YouTube will make a determination on that.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's really, it's really a case of the stakes. Right. So in this case, YouTube has zero stake. Your person probably has zero stake as well. Right. Because they've got 20 days. For 20 days this material could go viral. And then.

[Danny]

Okay, I'll take it goes down for that. That 20 day period's down.

[John Pierro]

Okay. So. Yeah, I mean, I. Look, I think that there are, probably, there are probably structures, I think demonstrably they're, you know, incredibly in, in ineffective right now. I mean, I think we can kind of assume that. But to me it's, it's the biggest challenge that we are facing. And the, the documentary that we did, you know, bad Influence was kind of one, one view into, you know, what one part of that world kind of looks like. And you know, there was this really interesting thing like, so these are. This was a girl who at the beginning was, I want to say, 10 years old when she started, you know, and now, I mean this is like you can see the algorithm pushing the behavior and the content. So as she got a little bit older, everything became more sexual because it gets more. So at 16, you know, she is now on you. She was kind of demonetized by YouTube, but then she's on a thing called Brand army was on A thing called Brand Army. And Brand army was unbelievable to me because in order to be a creator on Brand army, you could be 13. Okay? So you can be 13 and be a creator. You must be 18 to be a consumer. So de facto you have adults consuming. Yes. Consuming minor content. Right. And this minor content took the form of, in the case of Piper, you know, private subscriber only, hot tub shoots. You know, this is a, like a 16 year old girl, you know, all kinds of bikini shoots, all this kind of stuff. You could DM this person all this stuff. And I go, how is this possible? You know, how is this okay? And some, you know, somehow is this still their policy? I think that they, I, you know, when I talked, when I talked to the, to the founder, the CEO, he sort of said, yeah, it's just, it's such a big pain for us. We're going to stop accepting this. But really it was kind of like it just felt like really it was just more hassle than it was worth. Was.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

He was telling me, right, it's more hassle than he was worth. But I mean that's the, that's the kind of thing where you sort of go like, how, how is this. Okay, how is this not better? No. How is this not better known? How is this sort of, you know, just sliding by?

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's crazy. That, that should absolutely.

[John Pierro]

But, but it be allowed. And I think that that's pretty much how for kids anyway. I mean, let's leave adults aside for now, but for kids, that is the world that, you know, is social media.

[Danny]

And it's crazy too, just the culture that we live in, because you have the most children today, young kids say when you ask them what they want to do when they grow up, they want to be a YouTuber or a tick tocker or something like this.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I mean, and I tell parents, and the thing is that parents, even well intentioned parents, you know, don't realize as they go, well, that's a kids. Oh, that's kids, right? That's YouTube kids or that's whatever, that's a kid's game. And you know, but anything that has messaging, I go, here's what you just did. You gave your kid a phone, you published their private phone number on the Internet and you allowed anybody, anywhere in the world who wants to, to have private conversations with them. Would you be okay with that? I doubt it.

[Danny]

No, I mean, I doubt. Yeah.

[John Pierro]

So that's, that's kind of what you've allowed, you know, and It's a very difficult thing. It's a very difficult thing is you got kids, you know, it's a very difficult thing to say to your kid. You know, everybody in my class has a phone. Sorry, you're not going to get a phone.

[Danny]

Right.

[John Pierro]

You can have a. You know, there's this thing called tin can. I don't know if you've seen it. It's basically a WI fi version of a landline. So you can't text, you can't surf the Internet, you can't do anything other than make phone calls. So you want to talk to your friends. Awesome. Be my guest. Call your friend, chat whatever you want. That's it. That's what I did when I was growing up. That's right, you did when you were growing up.

[Danny]

Right? Yeah. I would be lucky to have a pager when I was growing up.

[John Pierro]

So.

[Danny]

It's a crazy, scary world that we're living in and it's moving at an exponential speed. It seems like it's just this. The, the speed of the technological advancement is just at a. Is just going faster and faster and faster every year. I feel like I just Learned about these LLMs a year ago and now it's just like they've taken over. They're taking over industries, they're taking over movies.

[John Pierro]

Yeah. I mean, people ask, ask me all the time, well, what do you think would say I going to do to, you know, documentaries or film in general? And I, you know, I don't know what you think, but to me it seems like we're going to be in a world not in the very distant future where instead of going like, oh, I want to watch that film. You're going to say, okay, it's Tuesday night. I got. I want to watch a, you know, 63 minute film in five minutes. Well, no, I want to watch. I want to watch a 63 minute film film. It's going to have Scarlet Joe Hansen in it. It's going to be a romantic comedy. It takes place in Portland. It's going to be about. It's going to involve a dog and there's going to be some, you know, misunderstanding about identity.

[Danny]

Yeah, go.

[John Pierro]

You know.

[Danny]

Oh, my God.

[John Pierro]

That's what. So you and me, man, we're.

[Danny]

It's crazy. Have you seen the music stuff? The, the covers of different bands where they turn them into soul music? No, you haven't seen this. Oh, my God. Steve, pull up the, Pull up. The soul cover band that covers, like metal bands. There's, there's a Metallica One. There's like, a Limp Bizkit one. They basically. They cover, like, all the. You could plug in this guy. There's these people on YouTube who are plugging in specific, like, modern songs and then turning them into, like, soul jazz covers.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And they are fantastic. Like, if I had never heard that song before, I would have thought, like, this would have been, like, a top hit done by, like, real people. It's indistinguishable from. From reality.

[John Pierro]

Yeah, I mean, I personally think that. I mean, not exactly, but the Matrix, like, version of a future is. Is not, you know, it's not science fiction. It's feasible and pretty plausible.

[Danny]

Yeah, I hope so, man. Well, listen, man, thank you for coming and doing this stuff and. And talking and explaining all this up to me that the art stuff is fantastic. Oh, yeah. Here. Here's the. Let's play. Play Master of Puppets.

[John Pierro]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[Danny]

There's no views on this. There's a lot of these soul cover bands.

[John Pierro]

In the passion play.

[Danny]

Crumbling away Go, like, halfway into the song.

[John Pierro]

Go farther in your life burns faster Obey your master, Master, master master of pits I'm pulling your strings Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams Blinded by.

[Danny]

Me you can't see it's pretty incredible, isn't it?

[John Pierro]

Unbelievable. And you're right, it is.

[Danny]

I mean, I would never know that.

[John Pierro]

That came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere.

[Danny]

It's wild.

[John Pierro]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Tell people where they can find more your work. Get your books or listen or watch your documentaries. All that stuff.

[John Pierro]

Sure. The book is called Khan Slash artist, Con artist. And it's. It's published by Hachette. You find it pretty much anywhere. And if you look up my name, John Pierro.com G I A M P I E R O dot com, you'll see more of the stuff that I'm working on. Bad Influence was out on Netflix. The Royal stunt documentary should be out sometime soon.

[Danny]

I'm looking forward to it, man. We'll link it all below. And thanks again for your time.

[John Pierro]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Danny]

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[John Pierro]

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[Danny]

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