Uh, Superintendent Dalmers, welcome. I hope you're prepared for an unforgettable lungeon.
Why is there strom out coming out of your ibncmire.
Oh, I didn't smoke. It's steam steamed from the steamed clams. We're having steam claims.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible. Welcome back. Good to see you, guys.
Good to see you.
I'm here too, guys, I know because I can see you. Good to see you, John and Adam. What high jinks are we getting up to today? Adam, you must have some cheese stories, right.
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Grafton Village Cheeses. Use code Adam twenty two for ten percent off your first order.
Do you know that main cheese that they were going to be selling in Israel? But apparently it doesn't translate into Hebrew very well, so they had to change the name when they were going to sell it, and Adam, do you know what the name they use for it is?
Oh?
No, no, So I'm selling it in Israel now, so they're calling it Cheeses of Nanzrith. The only thing sillier at this conversation is like the Simpsons.
Oh, it's funny you mentioned the Simpsons, because I think I'm the biggest Simpsons fan of all of us. I actually remember watching the very first episode live when it was on. Look Dad, it's Santa's little helper.
Oh, I keep him gob true, but.
He's a loser. Heat.
But that aic Heat.
The Simpson.
And years later I had the pleasure of working comedy and finding myself crossing paths with all the Simpsons writers and directors.
I think much more highly of you now because I'm a big fan of the Simpsons too.
I love the Simpsons very much, and I've tried to interest my son.
It just doesn't what he's turned to.
You onto the Celtics, But you can't turn him onto.
I can't turn them onto the Simpsons, not yet anyway.
So I can't say this for a fact, but I feel like the Simpsons invented the Easter Egg. And so if you watch The Simpsons and you want to watch the episode the second time or a third time, you're always finding these little visual jokes in the background and a sign. And it really became the thing where you pause and you put in slow motion because you want to pick up all these little jokes. But that's the perfect situation to think that you're seeing special messages that
aren't there just for comedy. Could you explain to me the conspiracy theory about the Simpsons we're about to discuss, as.
I understand it is that CIA has recruited Matt Groening and these writers as a way to either a telegraph its predictions of the future that it's making, or b it's to use this to somehow subvert American society.
I think people when they hear intelligence, they assume that it's a predictive agency collect the That's your job of the CIA is to go to the president say China's going to collapse next year and there's going to be who when in fact, as you and I know, intelligence isn't really about prediction, even with perfect information, it's impossible in this complex world to predict things. It's more about providing as much information to help policymakers make smart decisions.
And so the reason The Simpsons is the focus of this conspiracy theory is because The Simpsons has apparently predicted so many things, and so many important things that it stands out. But the most famous prediction was in a two thousand episode titled Bart to the Future. Bart thinks about the future, he envisions Lisa Simpson as president.
As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it? Secretary van Houghton, We're broke. The country has broke.
How can that be?
Well?
Remember when the last administration decided to invest in our nation's children?
Big mistake. This aired long before Trump was president. Obviously, see you guys ready for our guests, Bring them.
On I'm excited. I'm a big fan, so I'm excited to do it.
These guys are legends in the world of the Simpsons and comedy. David Silverman and Bill Oakley. Now, David Silverman has been a director and an executive producer of The Simpsons since the beginning.
Although we would say that the beginning those positions weren't really there, because if you go back to the beginning, beginning the Tracy Omens show, I was along with the weiss Archer, the two animators those titles were a mass a Bit by Bit later.
And Bill Oakley. He was a writer during what many people consider the golden age of the Simpsons, when a lot of the things were invented. His big claim to fame is steamed hams.
Superden and I hope you're ready for mouth watering hamburgers.
I thought we were having steamed clams.
No, I said, steamed hams. That's what I call hamburgers.
You call hamburgers steamed hams.
Yes, it's a regional dialect. What region upstate New York?
Really, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase steamed hams.
Oh, not a Utica No, it's an Albany expression.
The Simpsons is famous in many ways, both for predicting things that happened. What's the process when you're putting together a show and how do you come up with those kind of issues that might be considered predictive.
I think this all accidental. Are there usually things that strike somebody funny and they write it and we have a big laugh over it, and then sometimes they manifest as true and we go look at that. But it's not like we're sitting there like, Okay, let's get our boxer predictions and see which one we're going to insert in this episode. Now, that's not the way it works,
and oftentimes people forget that. What become quote unquote predictions were actually, if you will, low hanging fruit at the time, and I will point out the most famous one being Donald Trump. The Donald Trump prediction. First of all, we didn't actually represent Donald Trump physically on the show, as it was purported later when people sorted making stuff up about it. But it was around the year two thousand and most people don't remember, but Donald Trump at the
time was running for president. He was running for president on the extinct third party, what was it called the Liberty Party that ross Pero started again. We weren't there at a Ouiji board looking into the future. We were just making a joke.
So you guys are being accused of being CIA agents, which, by the way, is a tell that you're not right because we're CIA officers. Agents are like the guys that we hand although that's a possibility, And what does that say about our society that Homer Simpson is like the all knowing, omnipotent CIA predictor. And I'm not confirming nor denying that you guys are CIA.
It's a very complicated issue. I personally and many of us writers, especially from that era, have been accused of being part of the Skull and Bones, part of the Illuminati, or from the CIA, and only one of those is true. So but the thing is, it's like, there's a couple different things about why would the CIA want to have comedy writers on the payroll. I don't think we have a lot of a lot to offer the intelligence community. One of the things that we've been accused of is
telegraphing secret messages. Usually that's we're accused of that by people who are crazy, but we've also been accused and this most recently in that very tragic incident where that guy set himself on fire in front of the Trump trial.
I don't know if anybody read his manifesto, but there were several pages about the Simpsons in there, and the insidious nature of the Simpsons, which I believe he was accusing of demoralizing Americans giving up, and I guess that's more of a would be a long term operation to demoralize Americans into not revolting against big corporations and the status quo, which is that's a legitimate concern. And if we did that, it's probably just because we were We want to be funny.
I think the intelligent critity would be glad to have creative comedy writers just because you guys are interesting, creative and clever and funny.
Call me up then, Jesus, if you guys, if there's anybody at the intelligent community listening to this, you can send me a the DM on Instagram and you can sign me up.
I'll do it.
The one thing interesting is, as we see in politics, Americans don't even understand their system, and conspiracy theories often come from people who don't understand how things work, so they create some weird view of how they think it works. In fact, the CIA, it's an intelligence organization, but it's not an organization but prediction. Like, the point is not to predict what's going to happen in the future, because essentially the world's too complex and nobody can predict what's
going to happen in the future. Our job is to collect foreign information secrets that foreign governments are trying to keep hidden from us, that can help our policymakers make decisions.
But I do think there's one thing that you could predict that's very likely to happen, which is that everyone is going to get stupider. That's one of the things that has happened over the course of the past thirty years. For example, in an episode that my partner, when I say we throughout this, I mean my partner Josh Weinstein
and I. By the way, we're high school friends. We were in this episode called Margin Chains, and at the very end of the episode, the people of Springfield are given a statue of Jimmy Carter, which causes them to riot because he's the worst president ever and they hate him. And that doesn't sound so unbelievable, now, you know, I think there's a lot of towns in America where the populist would riot if they were a statue of Jimmy Carter were forced upon them. And at the time, it
was like, that's so stupid. I give you thirty ninth President, Jimmy Catta, Come on, bait History's greatest monster. We're making fun of people who are stupid and gullible, and unfortunately, I think a lot of the American populace is now as dumb as as the people of Springfield were thirty years ago. So that's part of what we were projecting.
And it's interesting because Bill, when I was even in high school, I was concerned with my fellow students because I thought a lot of them are you guys aren't too bright, and you guys aren't really paying attention. So I've been worried for ever since I was in high school of like, where are we heading intellectually in this country in terms of like people's education, and that we have at least one party who seems to be championing that because that sort of helps them.
Now, that could be a CIA operation, but the CIA is non harnessing, or isn't it now?
We actually are when we were on the inside. We never knew what people's political predilections were, and we stayed away from them. And it really didn't matter to us as long as it was legal and authorized and moral.
It was about protecting the American people, and we were focused overseas. Our job was to understand the countries and the politics of the countries we're in to try to help American policy makers be smarter about what they do. You guys, for whether you've met to or not. We're always focused on societal and cultural issues and things. And I think you can get a good sense of what America is like by watching.
Oh yeah, The Simpsons, David, and you'll probably know more about this than I with your travels. But The Simpsons is very popular in many other countries, and specifically, in my mind, Latin America and South America, where it's every fifth bar is a mose Bar ripoff and stuff like that. It's shown in Africa and some places. It's definitely in a lot of places in Europe.
It's immensely popular in England, France, Italy, Germany, Australia. So you have all my travels, you draw barred and like people are like very happy to meet you. Most people do see it as not only a parody of what a life is like in America, but that sort of modern existence, particularly in Europe, is pretty universal. It's very
well understood what we're doing. And they don't think of it as so much as they're looking at a window in America, but they look at it as a sort of reflection of themselves, even though they're not in America, because, as I say, Simpsons is mostly a parody or look at modern culture.
The Simpsons family structure and their lifestyle. He's really taken out of like sitcoms from nineteen fifty nine. It's Homer. As people repeatedly pointed out, Homer is a man with a high school education who has a five bedroom house and two cars and makes a fairly small amount of money, and so his financial situation is really more out of nineteen fifty nine than it is modern day. So if people are seeing America through that lens, what they're seeing is in America of sixty or seventy years ago.
Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and we're back. You guys did grow up around Washing DC. Bill, I know you went to Harvard and a part of the Lampoon and have been the people to often talk about that is having connections somehow of the Illuminati or to the National security State.
It's entirely possible that I am a sleeper agent and don't know it yet. It's been a long wait. But I did grow up in that whole world. As I told you guys before the show, my dad worked in the House and the Senate, and then he worked at the Department Energy for twenty years in the Atomic Energy Commission and did have a Q security clearance. I don't think I was used as part of some sort of experiment,
but I guess I don't. I'll never really know. And the other part is the Lampoon is definitely given way too much credit for being like a skull and bones type of skull and bones. But there's a conspiracy is that people keep hiring their friends from the Lampoon to write for TV shows, and that's really the conspiracy.
Also, by the way, this is touching on something else, because people talk about the predictions. I like to think that sometimes they're not predictions, but they're suggestions, and people take us up on them famously. I think maybe at one time Bob Igo was watching a Simpson episode, the one that posited the idea that Disney owned Fox and thought, well, it's not a bad idea, how much money we got.
The episode was titled When You Dish Upon a Star, and Ron Howard pitches a movie idea at to Homer and the studio that he's pitching to is twentieth Century Fox, a division of the Walt Disney Company. And it wasn't until almost twenty years later that actually happened, but it.
Was the beginning of the mergers, so it's not surprising. Someday they're all going to be It's gonna be one big giant company.
About the other ones that also are possibly people followed your suggestion Lady Gaga's halftime show Cypress Hill performing with the London Symphonia.
That now, that's an example of a suggestion, because that was just a joke about how preposterous it was that something like that would ever happen, and now it has really happened, and I'm it certainly wouldn't have happened without that joke.
Other bands have worked with orchestras. It's not like this is the first time's ever happened, but that certainly was a suggestion. But also yet, Lady Gaga was on our show. Okay, she was on our show. She saw the show. See Putney's thought, that's a good idea. I may they should fly in.
Could I ask about a few specific ones here before Biden and Kamala Harris were a team. There is a shot of them standing next to each other at the White House. Are you familiar with this one?
On the West Side story one. How I can tell you is because I directed that thing. All I can tell you is that I had about I don't know, forty seven people to put into a line, and I just put them into line randomly and just TikTok, and we have a lot of work to do and we have a deadline, and out the door it went. And as far as the order was, I mean, we probably put some Democrats together and Republicans together and something like that,
but that's as far as it went. Now, the idea that to say, hey see there, no, I'm sorry, that's a colossal coincidence. Sorry is, ladies and gentlemen, No conspiracies here.
I guess you could argue that after six thousand episodes, just the law of statistics, certain things would take place.
I would think so too. The thing that's really interesting are the sports prediction. Those are the ones that really do have is baffled. The other ones we can explain a little bit. But the sports predictions are pretty amazing.
I think most of them, almost all of the ones you're talking about came from George Meyer.
Who was That was the next thing I was going to say, who George.
Meyer has talked about it obviously, Now if anybody could get I don't know this for sure, but I'm fairly sure he's incredibly rich because of his ability to predict things, including gold, which I was told he invested silver. Okay, so yes it was silver, right, so he I believe silver investor. I don't want anybody to burglarize George's house after hearing this, so guys, they are be careful.
See.
But I think what happened was that he had he was he was a very savvy investor because he did have the ability. I don't know if he had the ability to predict, but he could certainly he got lucky a lot, especially in sports gambling as well in sports betting.
He was a very savvy sports handicapper. He told me something very interesting. He was factoring people's psychology of how much they wanted their team to win as a factor in setting the odds, and he worked that into his mathematical calculation on out event. Very deep, savvy thinker and again not a prognosticator, didn't have a flex capacitor, I think, just had a brain capacity.
I think also Sam was like that too, from what I heard. Sam Simon was one of the other creators of the show also was similar in that way. Is it a big sports fan better and so forth.
Both those guys were not only good big sports betters, but smart and successful sports betters because they understood what was going on when the games they were beating. Yeah, and George I think, was the one who was responsible for all those Super Bowl sharing predictions. And then of course it's just the accidental ones that we just for a joke decided to pair two teams together in a soccer match and oh my god, look they're in the World Cup.
If that episode aired twenty five years ago, you got twenty five chances for that particular pairing to show up, and you're going to get lucky one eventually.
Oh how brilliant are they are? They're right, one set of twenty five times.
Well, and you can also see things that clearly are just funny, but then it happens and it's not really a surprise, like the whole Siegfried and Roy being attacked by their tigers.
Like, yes, I can imagine that that was in my script just because it seems, yeah, that's the joke. That's the joke, and it eventually came true. What joke would you make to as a layman, there's a tiger trainer, What joke would you make when tiger trainer the tiger attacks him. That's the number one thing that occurs to you to make a joke about a tiger tracker.
It's any joke to make again, the low hanging.
Fruit nsay, listening to everybody's phone calls or whatever.
That was my point as a CIA guy, by and large, we try to keep things secret when we have secrets, right, it's the whole point of a secret. If we knew who was going to win the gold medal and curling, why we would investigate that, I don't know, but we wouldn't put it on a TV show with a huge audience, and not when we think we know a secret, Hey, we know that there is WMD in I Rock.
We generally tell people that.
And go prove it.
It's actually the other way around.
Just say it.
Yeah. I think a far more legitimate conspiracy theory is that we're having some sort of demoralizing effect on the nation as a whole. That would be more of a thing that it's true. Why would we Okay, I guess
there're two more legitimate. One is that we're telegraphing information to agents like those stations, those encoded number stations that you guys use, right, We're somehow broadcasting information to agents through encrypted material on our show or even non encrypted stuff like that nine to eleven poster, which has been
subject of so many theories. And the other thing is that more it's a more broad based thing, is that we're having some sort of cultural effect on the nation that some insidious large entity wants to take place.
Damn you guys for ruining our nation because you succeeded very well.
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not terrible just to put some funny shows on the air.
There you go. Let me ask, so, Bill, you mentioned a couple of about the nine to eleven poster. Can you give us a little background on that?
Yes, David, did you direct that episode? David went to those photos.
Though I took those photos. This is of course, before you had the resource of the Internet. I happened to be recording for the road El Dorado in New York. I was dispatched down to the World Trade Center to take as many photos as I could have got only the center and the locations, but the street across but no. Jim Rearden directed that episode very hilariously.
So this was an episode of The Simpsons that was the premiere of the ninth season. It was one of the last episodes of Josh and I produced and head wrote. And it's an episode where Barney drives Homer's car to New York and use it in the plaza of the World Trade Center, and Homer asked to go to New York. And the entire literally an entire act, if not two acts, if it take place at the World Trade Center. And so people obviously took note of that. But most importantly,
the conspiracy theory revolves around this poster. Is a newspaper ad, a full paid newspaper add that Bart shows off in Act one. It's like, how are going to get to New York? We can't afford to get to New York. He holds up a newspaper ad that says New York nine dollars on the bus line, and there's the nine and then there's a silhouette of the skyline of Manhattan including the two World Trade Centers, which does look when you see it like nine eleven, the nine dollars and the eleven.
I'd love to see New York. We could all go at the bus company's special supersitter fair nine books.
This one's on me.
And so the conspiracy theory goes that us, as members of the Skull and Bones Illuminati, et cetera, et cetera, we're broadcasting to our sleeper agents. Here's the target. Here is the date. They took it off the air for ten years, although now it's back, so it was an interesting thing.
I would mention that poster though, was not designed by the writers. We just did a drawing of it, and I don't know who designed it, but just had the nine dollars and just had a silhouette of the New York skyline as it was back in that day, and it was not like discussed back and forth. Probably we just probably just did it really quickly and it makes perfect sense.
It's exactly what you would do. That's one of the most prominent conspiracy theories there is that one, as well as the Trump one, and the other things like that and the Disney one are among the most most prominent.
But by the way, the other thing that really amused me about the Trump one is they took this thing that we did. We got it out very quickly. To our credit, we must have got that out in two weeks from the time that he went down, as John Stewart jokingly put it as stair Force one going down the escalator of the Trump Tower. We got the parody
out within two about two weeks later onto YouTube. But what happened was is some conspiracy theorist types took what we had done for that and posited the idea that we actually predicted not only him being that, but represented him going down the escalator at Trump Tower as that was in that episode. As if you look at that episode, you can clearly see that's not the case. But I would have to talk to people saying and they say, oh, no, that was in the episode. He said, no, it's not.
Well that episode was made or we're still in the four x three format and it's not done digitally. It was done still on cells and you can see texture now with AI. People ask me, is this true, because something else happened. I think it was like the disaster with the Francis Scott Keybridge. Yeah, somebody sent me this image and I said, this is a fake image that do anything even remotely.
But now using AI, you can generate almost any Simpsons scene in like about five minutes or less of any event that happened. And that was the Key Bridge one, David was the most recent and most egregious one because to the casual observer it really did look like a frame from The Simpsons of that bridge being hit by a giant boat. Many of them are funny, like one of it was about March vacuuming the law. March that
she's going to vacuum the lawns dirty. She's going to vacuum the lawn and so there's just all these frames of March using different models of vacuum cleaners to vacuum the lawn. It looks completely unbelievable and it made me really crack up. Anyway, So some people are using this technology for good for entertainment. Other people are using it
to get clicks and drive advertising. To The Guardian, there was a January sixth to one too with granz keeper Willie wearing that guy's buffalo hat or whatever that somebody made. That one was pretty obviously a fake.
There is an episode where there is an image of people storming the Capitol from a while back. The episode was called The Day the Violence Died nineteen ninety six.
What you're seeing in that episode is a parody of Schoolhouse Rock. If you remember school House Rock from the seventies, the episode the school House Rock, I'm just a bill, And there was true that at the end. First of all, it wasn't drawn in the Simpsons style. It was drawn in the sky style of Schoolhouse Rock. And at the end, it's true that other bills, other constitutional amendments were running up the stairs of the Capitol. But it didn't look
anything like the Simpsons. It looked like Schoolhouse Rock. And it wasn't people. It was amendments. Hey, who left all this garbage on the steps of Congress.
I'm not garbage, Amanamma to be yes, and I'm Emma Toby, and I'm hoping that the runna Berby.
Why can't we just make a law against flag.
Burning, because that law would be unconstitutional.
But if we changed the constitution, then we.
Could make all sorts of crazy laws.
Now you're catching on.
There's a couple of others you might know about Homer at the bat Season three not maddening one.
It's the sideburns, isn't it. I didn't really has embraced that joke to become part of his personalit. It's like the most famous thing about Don Mattically now.
The episode follows home in a softball team as they start to believe that they're lucky because of articular bat. This enrages of jealous mister Burns, who hires major league players. One of these players is Don Mattingly, who's benched for what mister Burns insists are unruly sideburns. A year later, during an actual game in nineteen ninety three, Yankees manager Stump Merrill points out that matting Lee did not cut his hair for the game, which leads to the player getting benched.
Originally, the joke was he had been benched prior. This was not a prediction. This is an event that happened by Steinbrenner that I think had benched him for his sideburns, somebody I didn't know, somebody.
I forget what Steinbrenner did that a number because you're not allowed to have facial hair.
Right, I'm not a sportsman, but I do know that was happened before hid. I believe that Jim Brierden explained it to me, and he thought it was a hilarious joke. He just thought it was the best joke. So the idea of that being predictioned is no, it's obviously a reference to something that happened prior to the episode.
There's a number of those, by the way, David, that that happened. The most recent one that occurred to me was that pandemic one where a lot of people thought we had predicted COVID in that episode, that Saint margin Change's episode, because when the fact, what we were referring to was the Hong Kong flu of nineteen sixty nine nineteen seventy when we did that, so it was the first time many people had heard of a pandemic, and they thought we had invented the idea of a pandemic,
which clearly we didn't. But that was another one.
Yeah, a referenced to a past event and then, Oh, but so this is a prediction. It's not laziness writing.
History repeats itself, and the show's been on so long that we're getting to the point where history is repeating itself over and over again, and we things that we referred to that we're old are now new again.
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute or two, and we're back season nine.
Lisa Sachs ninety seven. Marge holds up a children's book called Curious George and the Ebola Virus, three years before the two thousand Bola outbreak.
I wasn't involved in that episode, but I think that Abola was already a thing that people knew about, as with the flu. It's probably the first time a lot of people heard of that, and that thus they think the Simpsons predicted it rather than the Simpsons informed of its existence.
That's a thing you can think of. Also from the comedy point of view, the comedy writer he or she might just say, well, if you're going to have Curious George, n blank. It was probably one of those lists, right, Bill, because this is what we.
I think it was a book in al I think this was an al Gene's script for Lisa sex it was I think it was it was coming up as something that people knew that was scary and weird.
I was in.
Sudan in nineteen seventy nine and they had something called greed monkey Fever, which was renamed as a bowl, so it was like way back then as well.
Reruns are so important for the Simpsons, right, so you can see an old one and say, oh my god, they're talking about what we're doing today, and so it is in people's faces when it comes up.
We're getting closer to eight hundred episodes now, and after eight hundred episodes, there's going to be something that we just hit. I suspect has not as many episodes. The gun Smoke had a lot of episodes. Maybe that would have hit, but unfortunately took place in the Old West.
So that's what I think.
Also, this is the nature of the to be to talk about the show more broadly. So Simpsons is one of the few things that America shares as a cultural reference. The media landscape has been so fragmented into two gazillion different media inputs for everybody all day long, and everybody. Most people remember certain Simpsons episodes because they have seen them so many times. So it is one of the few things that binds American society together is a knowledge of certain moments.
In The Simpsons, Matt have the idea that here's a TV family that watches TV, and that was a great staring starting point because that allowed us to do a infinite number of parodies of TV. Because we're animated, we don't have to build a lot of sets. We just
dross stuff, So that's an advantage. What I'm getting at, though, is that after with this idea, and with this idea of this family observing current life and so forth, and talking about things and talking about futuristic things, yeah, we're going to stumble across things that kind of come true or make some sort of technological quote unquote prediction. Because that's the nature of the show, the nature of the writing. You can look at like other people in entertainment who've
written science fiction. Star Trek kind of predicted these things, these cell phone things. That's what happens when people dabble in being futurists. And after eight hundred episodes, as I said, we're gonna hit it a few times.
I recall being told I think by Mike and out we got there. We don't put in contemporary references unless there's this really good reason for it, because we want people to be watching the show twenty years from now and be able to get it.
Briefly, we had a in the Simpsons movie. We had a reference to Nixon as a joke, and.
Nixon's an evergreen topic. I'm going to say, gonna, I'm gonna double down on that. He's not dated, not quite because he took it out because it got no laugh.
It just got to a look from the audience. They're like, what, it's something they.
Didn't wrong audience, But they didn't have a different audience.
I hadn't.
It wasn't that I would say, Bill, it's nothing. They didn't get the joke that there was no passion behind it. Okay, well you know what I'm saying. I can see that you have to make the right joke about him that works, But there's nothing the emotional passion of like love eight of Nixon is gone, yes, right, any more than people have love hate for like I don't know Warrant.
People know him now, people who know from Futurama. That's where his that's where his legacy lives is in Futurama and other and the projects that I'm doing, my projects for Audible, I have a lot of Nixon in them because they're nineteen eighth their period pieces.
Bill also has a podcast, Space nineteen sixty nine, which is brilliant.
Thank you. I'll just plug this here. It's not so much a podcast as it is an audio book, and that's why it's but it's ten episodes available on audible dot com, starring the Tasha Leone. It takes place in a universe where Kennedy did not die from his wounds, but instead had a revelation that America had to expand into space as quickly as possible. And now I am writing the sequel, Space nineteen seventy two. Look for that in twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six. Hopefully you will.
You can help us promote the living crap out of Space nineteen seventy two when it comes out.
You guys have tried really hard to pretend you're not connected in some way to the intelligence community, and this of Kennedy now is just just sealed it.
So you guys get to ask one question each to CIA officers, truth.
Or dares you can ask more than one.
Wow, okay, just not the age go first.
Yeah, yeah, oh, where do you get those cool spy cars.
We didn't get cool spi cars. We were trained before you go over season, depending on where you do get at the training to learn how to like spin cars and smash them and break through ros backs and crash and burn and how to do reverse one eighties and
all that kind of stuff. That was like everybody loved doing that because of course you never got to do it after that in the field, and when you live overseas in a place where it's dangerous and you can't really bring a car, they oftentimes you'll get a car, but they're not fancy. They're meant We're meant to be boring.
And then in the background, that was the thing that always amused me up with these spy films, is I thought you guys were trying to blend in.
I have a question, and this may I want to make sure that nobody takes offense at this question, because it has been on my mind for years, and I know that this is a very sensitive topic and in fact, my partner are going to write a movie about it at one point, and everybody and it's more realistic than that. I'm sorry to say. We all know that the KGB, at least in fiction, had a lot of sexy female agents that would seduce men to get information out of them.
Does the CIA also have that or do they just have to hire local prostitutes or do they have men? Do they will tell me what you know?
So yeah, they call it swallows is the program that the KGB us and many of us who've been I served in Moscow and there's a number of people who traveled there and at night on your hotel door, you get knock on the door and they'll be a pretty girl or what have you. But in general not in general, no, we don't use sex because the goal for us is to recruit a spy, a source who knows what they're doing. They're motivated, they want to work for us, they want
to keep it secret for a long time. So what you want to do is recruit some guy in the Iranian Ministry of Defense who hates his boss or hates the system, and we continue to meet and they provide us insight, and they continue to move up over time, and they meet another CI officer and over time they become you know, the deputy head of the Iranian missile
program or whatever, and we have sources inside. And to do that you have to have people who trust you and have and developed trust between the US government and the CIA and the person. And so the problem with using any kind of blackmail, whether it be sex or any other kind of black mail, is the people want to get out of it or there law enforcement. Oftentimes they call them instead of calling them their sources or
their agents, it's it's a snitch or an informer. And oftentimes they will pressure people to provide information for a short period of time. Our job is to get for a long period of time to motivate to people. And so we found that using any kind of black mail is essentially doesn't work. There are times when someone who is working for US or helping us and the terrorism side comes to the States and they want something like this.
There's times when we can help them do that, but we're not doing that for We're not doing it for ourselves. We're not doing it to them.
Interesting the agency, we're paid to break the laws of other countries. Right every espionage organization its job is to break the laws of other countries, but not its own. Laws, so in CI, we can't break our own laws. True story on sex. There was a one agent. He was really important. So the agent comes to the US and he says, I want to get laid. I want to go to a prostitute. And the case Opster is handling him is, first of all, I don't know where to go.
Second of all, I don't want you to get sick or arrested. So he went to the FBI and said, is there a place he can go where he's not going to get arrested or beaten up? And I guess the FBI said that these are places that you'll probably be okay. But then he went to our lawyers, and our lawyers said, you can't give him money to engage in the legal activity.
It is illegal.
So what they finally worked out is basically says you can give him a bonus. So here's two hundred dollars and a pack of condoms. Right, here's a bonus for helping. Unofficially, this is where the FBI said you might go. But that's as far as we can go. We do have some weird, weird rules around, like sexual activity for CIA officers, so that we're not blackmailed, but by Larnche No, not by lunch. We don't do it, doesn't wort.
I just wanted to point out that how well Rocking and Bowwinkle presented.
I've seen not They're great. By the way, this is off the kill squad. Bill Scott told me this, Bill Scott Bowinkle. Bill Scott, who was the head writer and the voice of Bowinkle and several other voices, wonderful guys, something of a mentor to me. He told me the story of I don't know what he was doing in Russia or visiting Russia for, but the guy who was doing his passport saying wait you look on the cartoon show with Moosson's squirrel. Bill said.
All I could remember is that he had a long time getting his passport cleared for some reason. So apparently somebody did not like Boris Natasha Moosen squirrel.
So funny story.
So I was one of the guys who was on a horse chasing bin Laden in the early days, right growing up in the mountains, and we were looking for bin Laden and Zawahiri, right, the two guys running. So when I first went in to see the chief of station, and I was about to go up country to chase these guys. I said, so, chief, what are my orders? And he looked at me deadpan and said kill moose and squirrel.
Wow.
Official, we didn't kill moose or squirrel.
It was like we were unsuccessful, but we tried.
It was like, those are the orders. I just want to ask one more question too, because I'm still I'm very interested in the whole number station phenomenon. Do you have any knowledge of what the number stations are? Have you used them? Shortwave stations that have recordings of people just going like four five all day long.
It's it's still a very secure way to communicate, and so the Cubans still do that. That's using a one time pad. Spies have been able to use that for years and years. And the idea is you give people a pad of random sort of numbers. It's just a
code system. And so what happens is you send via shortwave radio some speaking goes on, I think goes on twenty four hours a day, someone just speaking, and then you give your source saying at certain times you go in and you listen to these numbers, say burno, and if you have the pad with numbers, when you go on and listen. You then put the numbers that the person is saying underneath and there's a thing called some
subtraction the numbers on your pad. You subtract the numbers that they gave you under them, and then that's the number of the letter that you need, and then that's how you put together a code. So the FBI they could know that there's Russian in Cuba and other spies here that are being communicated with, and they can hear the numbers on a radio, but they can't stop the radio. They don't know what the numbers mean. So it's an effective way to communicate.
There was a.
Conspiracy about that. It was like two thousand and three or something like that, that l Jazeera that it's Chiron's underneath that if if you read them correctly, that they were the same thing.
And it turned out.
That it was completely untrue.
Wow, conspiracy that was in all the newspapers. See how you looked at it, and it was debunked.
I'm going to take all this information and work it into my next meeting.
Please do really great to meet you, guys, great.
To meet you.
We'll see if we predict either of the future of the past or.
As we'd like to say in CIA five seven four three too much information.
Now.
There were a number of other predictions. In nineteen ninety nine, they predicted that the Rolling Stones would still be on tour.
And.
They're still live.
Is still amazing.
That librarians would be replaced by robots.
Legal pot in Canada, smartphones, smart watches, NSA listening to everybody.
The Greek financial crisis that was predicting in two thousand one. Yeah, faulty voter machines two thousand and eight, that was a Halloween Treehouse of Horror episode. I'll add that there are some predictions that haven't happened yet, that the Fox Network would become a hardcore sex channel, that Delta Burke and the actor who plays Major Dad would get divorced. That hasn't happened. They did predict Rocky seven. There was a Rocky seven, but they got the title wrong.
There was a Rocky seven.
There was a seventh movie in the Rocky franchise.
He who do you Fight?
It wasn't Rocky, it was the Creed.
I guess there's Creed, then there's Creed's kid. I guess we can call those connected.
If they could predict the future, they'd all be like freaking richer than they are.
It's like they'd know tou.
Yeah.
I got a feeling it worked out pretty well for them many.
I think they're doing okay well.
The Simpton's episode was fun, and I hope we can do that again. I'd hope Stern can find more cool Hollywood people for us to talk to you, because I'm getting sick of talking to you guys.
Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts