July 31, 2024 • 40 mins
Two Simpsons legends explore the theory that The Simpsons either predicts the future or causes the future, perhaps in cahoots with the CIA. Then they ask John & Jerry inside-CIA questions they always wanted to know.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Uh, Superintendent Dalmers, welcome. I hope you're prepared for an
unforgettable lungeon.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Why is there strom out coming out of your ibncmire.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Oh, I didn't smoke. It's steam steamed from the steamed clams.
We're having steam claims.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 4 (00:17):
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
living undercover all around the.
Speaker 5 (00:22):
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA,
I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
created conspiracies.
Speaker 5 (00:32):
In our operations. We got people to believe things that
weren't true.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
news almost every day.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Welcome to Mission Implausible. Welcome back. Good to see you, guys.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Good to see you.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 6 (01:05):
Vermont is a hotbed of Cheese Innovation and Cheddar Innovation,
and my good friends at Grafton Village Cheese have just
created the first cow sheep milk hybrid cheddar.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Grafton Village Cheeses. Use code Adam twenty two for ten
percent off your first order.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
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?
Speaker 7 (01:37):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (01:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
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.
Speaker 7 (01:59):
Oh, I keep him gob true, but.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
He's a loser. Heat.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
But that aic Heat.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
The Simpson.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
And years later I had the pleasure of working comedy
and finding myself crossing paths with all the Simpsons writers
and directors.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I think much more highly of you now because I'm
a big fan of the Simpsons too.
Speaker 6 (02:23):
I love the Simpsons very much, and I've tried to
interest my son.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
It just doesn't what he's turned to.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
You onto the Celtics, But you can't turn him onto.
Speaker 6 (02:31):
I can't turn them onto the Simpsons, not yet anyway.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
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
(02:57):
aren't there just for comedy. Could you explain to me
the conspiracy theory about the Simpsons we're about to discuss, as.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
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
(03:43):
providing as much information to help policymakers make smart decisions.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 7 (04:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
How can that be?
Speaker 5 (04:21):
Well?
Speaker 7 (04:21):
Remember when the last administration decided to invest in our
nation's children?
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Big mistake. This aired long before Trump was president. Obviously,
see you guys ready for our guests, Bring them.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
On I'm excited. I'm a big fan, so I'm excited
to do it.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
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.
Speaker 8 (04:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Superden and I hope you're ready for mouth watering hamburgers.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I thought we were having steamed clams.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
No, I said, steamed hams. That's what I call hamburgers.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
You call hamburgers steamed hams.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yes, it's a regional dialect. What region upstate New York?
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Really, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use
the phrase steamed hams.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Oh, not a Utica No, it's an Albany expression.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
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.
Speaker 8 (05:46):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:35):
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.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
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
(07:09):
denying that you guys are CIA.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:54):
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
(08:14):
want to be funny.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
I think the intelligent critity would be glad to have
creative comedy writers just because you guys are interesting, creative
and clever and funny.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
I'll do it.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
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
(09:24):
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
(09:54):
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.
Speaker 8 (10:05):
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
(10:27):
that because that sort of helps them.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Now, that could be a CIA operation, but the CIA
is non harnessing, or isn't it now?
Speaker 5 (10:34):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
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.
Speaker 8 (11:22):
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
(11:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
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
(12:21):
is in America of sixty or seventy years ago.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
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
(12:44):
the National security State.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
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
(13:08):
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.
Speaker 8 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
About the other ones that also are possibly people followed
your suggestion Lady Gaga's halftime show Cypress Hill performing with
the London Symphonia.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
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.
Speaker 8 (14:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
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?
Speaker 8 (14:51):
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
(15:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
I guess you could argue that after six thousand episodes,
just the law of statistics, certain things would take place.
Speaker 8 (15:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I think most of them, almost all of the ones
you're talking about came from George Meyer.
Speaker 8 (15:46):
Who was That was the next thing I was going
to say, who George.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
See.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:23):
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,
(16:45):
just had a brain capacity.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:57):
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
(17:18):
World Cup.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
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.
Speaker 8 (17:27):
Oh how brilliant are they are? They're right, one set
of twenty five times.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 8 (17:57):
It's any joke to make again, the low hanging.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Fruit nsay, listening to everybody's phone calls or whatever.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
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,
(18:24):
we know that there is WMD in I Rock.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
We generally tell people that.
Speaker 9 (18:28):
And go prove it.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's actually the other way around.
Speaker 9 (18:31):
Just say it.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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
(18:53):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
Damn you guys for ruining our nation because you succeeded
very well.
Speaker 8 (19:16):
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not terrible just to put
some funny shows on the air.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yes, David, did you direct that episode? David went to
those photos.
Speaker 8 (19:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
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,
(20:14):
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
(20:36):
the eleven.
Speaker 7 (20:36):
I'd love to see New York. We could all go
at the bus company's special supersitter fair nine books.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
This one's on me.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
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.
Speaker 8 (20:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
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.
Speaker 8 (21:28):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
with the Francis Scott Keybridge. Yeah, somebody sent me this
image and I said, this is a fake image that
do anything even remotely.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
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
(23:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
I'm not garbage, Amanamma to be yes, and I'm Emma Toby,
and I'm hoping that the runna Berby.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Why can't we just make a law against flag.
Speaker 5 (24:22):
Burning, because that law would be unconstitutional.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
But if we changed the constitution, then we.
Speaker 7 (24:28):
Could make all sorts of crazy laws.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Now you're catching on.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
There's a couple of others you might know about Homer
at the bat Season three not maddening one.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
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
(25:06):
his hair for the game, which leads to the player
getting benched.
Speaker 8 (25:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
I forget what Steinbrenner did that a number because you're
not allowed to have facial hair.
Speaker 8 (25:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
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
(26:03):
they thought we had invented the idea of a pandemic,
which clearly we didn't. But that was another one.
Speaker 8 (26:08):
Yeah, a referenced to a past event and then, Oh,
but so this is a prediction. It's not laziness writing.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
a minute or two, and we're back season nine.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
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.
Speaker 8 (27:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
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.
Speaker 9 (27:23):
I was in.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
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.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
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.
Speaker 9 (27:55):
So that's what I think.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
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
(28:18):
few things that binds American society together is a knowledge
of certain moments.
Speaker 8 (28:23):
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
(28:44):
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,
(29:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
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.
Speaker 8 (29:26):
Briefly, we had a in the Simpsons movie. We had
a reference to Nixon as a joke, and.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
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.
Speaker 8 (29:40):
It just got to a look from the audience. They're like, what,
it's something they.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Didn't wrong audience, But they didn't have a different audience.
Speaker 9 (29:46):
I hadn't.
Speaker 8 (29:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Bill also has a podcast, Space nineteen sixty nine, which
is brilliant.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
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
(30:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
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.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
So you guys get to ask one question each to
CIA officers, truth.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Or dares you can ask more than one.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Wow, okay, just not the age go first.
Speaker 8 (31:06):
Yeah, yeah, oh, where do you get those cool spy cars.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
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
(31:30):
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.
Speaker 8 (31:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
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
(32:08):
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?
Speaker 4 (32:20):
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
(32:41):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
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
(34:20):
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
(34:40):
our lawyers said, you can't give him money to engage
in the legal activity.
Speaker 9 (34:45):
It is illegal.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
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
(35:08):
by lunch. We don't do it, doesn't wort.
Speaker 8 (35:11):
I just wanted to point out that how well Rocking
and Bowwinkle presented.
Speaker 9 (35:17):
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
(35:38):
show with Moosson's squirrel. Bill said.
Speaker 8 (35:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
So funny story.
Speaker 5 (35:54):
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
(36:15):
and squirrel.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Wow.
Speaker 9 (36:20):
Official, we didn't kill moose or squirrel.
Speaker 10 (36:23):
It was like we were unsuccessful, but we tried.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
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
(37:03):
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
(37:24):
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.
(37:46):
They don't know what the numbers mean. So it's an
effective way to communicate.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
There was a.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
And it turned out.
Speaker 9 (38:04):
That it was completely untrue.
Speaker 5 (38:05):
Wow, conspiracy that was in all the newspapers. See how
you looked at it, and it was debunked.
Speaker 8 (38:11):
I'm going to take all this information and work it
into my next meeting.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Please do really great to meet you, guys, great.
Speaker 9 (38:19):
To meet you.
Speaker 8 (38:20):
We'll see if we predict either of the future of
the past or.
Speaker 10 (38:22):
As we'd like to say in CIA five seven four
three too much information.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Now.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
There were a number of other predictions. In nineteen ninety nine,
they predicted that the Rolling Stones would still be on tour.
Speaker 8 (38:46):
And.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
They're still live.
Speaker 5 (38:49):
Is still amazing.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
That librarians would be replaced by robots.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
Legal pot in Canada, smartphones, smart watches, NSA listening to everybody.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
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
(39:19):
hasn't happened. They did predict Rocky seven. There was a
Rocky seven, but they got the title wrong.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
There was a Rocky seven.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
There was a seventh movie in the Rocky franchise.
Speaker 4 (39:29):
He who do you Fight?
Speaker 3 (39:30):
It wasn't Rocky, it was the Creed.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
I guess there's Creed, then there's Creed's kid. I guess
we can call those connected.
Speaker 5 (39:37):
If they could predict the future, they'd all be like
freaking richer than they are.
Speaker 4 (39:40):
It's like they'd know tou.
Speaker 8 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
I got a feeling it worked out pretty well for
them many.
Speaker 5 (39:46):
I think they're doing okay well.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
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
Uh, Superintendent Dalmers, welcome. I hope you're prepared for an
unforgettable lungeon.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Why is there strom out coming out of your ibncmire.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Oh, I didn't smoke. It's steam steamed from the steamed clams.
We're having steam claims.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 4 (00:17):
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
living undercover all around the.
Speaker 5 (00:22):
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA,
I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
created conspiracies.
Speaker 5 (00:32):
In our operations. We got people to believe things that
weren't true.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
news almost every day.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Welcome to Mission Implausible. Welcome back. Good to see you, guys.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Good to see you.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 6 (01:05):
Vermont is a hotbed of Cheese Innovation and Cheddar Innovation,
and my good friends at Grafton Village Cheese have just
created the first cow sheep milk hybrid cheddar.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Grafton Village Cheeses. Use code Adam twenty two for ten
percent off your first order.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
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?
Speaker 7 (01:37):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (01:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
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.
Speaker 7 (01:59):
Oh, I keep him gob true, but.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
He's a loser. Heat.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
But that aic Heat.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
The Simpson.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
And years later I had the pleasure of working comedy
and finding myself crossing paths with all the Simpsons writers
and directors.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I think much more highly of you now because I'm
a big fan of the Simpsons too.
Speaker 6 (02:23):
I love the Simpsons very much, and I've tried to
interest my son.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
It just doesn't what he's turned to.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
You onto the Celtics, But you can't turn him onto.
Speaker 6 (02:31):
I can't turn them onto the Simpsons, not yet anyway.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
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
(02:57):
aren't there just for comedy. Could you explain to me
the conspiracy theory about the Simpsons we're about to discuss, as.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
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
(03:43):
providing as much information to help policymakers make smart decisions.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 7 (04:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
How can that be?
Speaker 5 (04:21):
Well?
Speaker 7 (04:21):
Remember when the last administration decided to invest in our
nation's children?
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Big mistake. This aired long before Trump was president. Obviously,
see you guys ready for our guests, Bring them.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
On I'm excited. I'm a big fan, so I'm excited
to do it.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
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.
Speaker 8 (04:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Superden and I hope you're ready for mouth watering hamburgers.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I thought we were having steamed clams.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
No, I said, steamed hams. That's what I call hamburgers.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
You call hamburgers steamed hams.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yes, it's a regional dialect. What region upstate New York?
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Really, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use
the phrase steamed hams.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Oh, not a Utica No, it's an Albany expression.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
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.
Speaker 8 (05:46):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:35):
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.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
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
(07:09):
denying that you guys are CIA.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:54):
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
(08:14):
want to be funny.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
I think the intelligent critity would be glad to have
creative comedy writers just because you guys are interesting, creative
and clever and funny.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
I'll do it.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
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
(09:24):
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
(09:54):
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.
Speaker 8 (10:05):
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
(10:27):
that because that sort of helps them.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Now, that could be a CIA operation, but the CIA
is non harnessing, or isn't it now?
Speaker 5 (10:34):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
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.
Speaker 8 (11:22):
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
(11:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
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
(12:21):
is in America of sixty or seventy years ago.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
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
(12:44):
the National security State.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
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
(13:08):
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.
Speaker 8 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
About the other ones that also are possibly people followed
your suggestion Lady Gaga's halftime show Cypress Hill performing with
the London Symphonia.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
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.
Speaker 8 (14:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
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?
Speaker 8 (14:51):
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
(15:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
I guess you could argue that after six thousand episodes,
just the law of statistics, certain things would take place.
Speaker 8 (15:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I think most of them, almost all of the ones
you're talking about came from George Meyer.
Speaker 8 (15:46):
Who was That was the next thing I was going
to say, who George.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
See.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:23):
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,
(16:45):
just had a brain capacity.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:57):
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
(17:18):
World Cup.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
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.
Speaker 8 (17:27):
Oh how brilliant are they are? They're right, one set
of twenty five times.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 8 (17:57):
It's any joke to make again, the low hanging.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Fruit nsay, listening to everybody's phone calls or whatever.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
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,
(18:24):
we know that there is WMD in I Rock.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
We generally tell people that.
Speaker 9 (18:28):
And go prove it.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's actually the other way around.
Speaker 9 (18:31):
Just say it.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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
(18:53):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
Damn you guys for ruining our nation because you succeeded
very well.
Speaker 8 (19:16):
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not terrible just to put
some funny shows on the air.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yes, David, did you direct that episode? David went to
those photos.
Speaker 8 (19:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
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,
(20:14):
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
(20:36):
the eleven.
Speaker 7 (20:36):
I'd love to see New York. We could all go
at the bus company's special supersitter fair nine books.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
This one's on me.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
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.
Speaker 8 (20:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
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.
Speaker 8 (21:28):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
with the Francis Scott Keybridge. Yeah, somebody sent me this
image and I said, this is a fake image that
do anything even remotely.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
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
(23:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
I'm not garbage, Amanamma to be yes, and I'm Emma Toby,
and I'm hoping that the runna Berby.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Why can't we just make a law against flag.
Speaker 5 (24:22):
Burning, because that law would be unconstitutional.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
But if we changed the constitution, then we.
Speaker 7 (24:28):
Could make all sorts of crazy laws.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Now you're catching on.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
There's a couple of others you might know about Homer
at the bat Season three not maddening one.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
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
(25:06):
his hair for the game, which leads to the player
getting benched.
Speaker 8 (25:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
I forget what Steinbrenner did that a number because you're
not allowed to have facial hair.
Speaker 8 (25:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
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
(26:03):
they thought we had invented the idea of a pandemic,
which clearly we didn't. But that was another one.
Speaker 8 (26:08):
Yeah, a referenced to a past event and then, Oh,
but so this is a prediction. It's not laziness writing.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
a minute or two, and we're back season nine.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
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.
Speaker 8 (27:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
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.
Speaker 9 (27:23):
I was in.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
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.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
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.
Speaker 9 (27:55):
So that's what I think.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
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
(28:18):
few things that binds American society together is a knowledge
of certain moments.
Speaker 8 (28:23):
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
(28:44):
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,
(29:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
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.
Speaker 8 (29:26):
Briefly, we had a in the Simpsons movie. We had
a reference to Nixon as a joke, and.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
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.
Speaker 8 (29:40):
It just got to a look from the audience. They're like, what,
it's something they.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Didn't wrong audience, But they didn't have a different audience.
Speaker 9 (29:46):
I hadn't.
Speaker 8 (29:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Bill also has a podcast, Space nineteen sixty nine, which
is brilliant.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
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
(30:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
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.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
So you guys get to ask one question each to
CIA officers, truth.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Or dares you can ask more than one.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Wow, okay, just not the age go first.
Speaker 8 (31:06):
Yeah, yeah, oh, where do you get those cool spy cars.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
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
(31:30):
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.
Speaker 8 (31:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
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
(32:08):
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?
Speaker 4 (32:20):
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
(32:41):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
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
(34:20):
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
(34:40):
our lawyers said, you can't give him money to engage
in the legal activity.
Speaker 9 (34:45):
It is illegal.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
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
(35:08):
by lunch. We don't do it, doesn't wort.
Speaker 8 (35:11):
I just wanted to point out that how well Rocking
and Bowwinkle presented.
Speaker 9 (35:17):
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
(35:38):
show with Moosson's squirrel. Bill said.
Speaker 8 (35:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
So funny story.
Speaker 5 (35:54):
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
(36:15):
and squirrel.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Wow.
Speaker 9 (36:20):
Official, we didn't kill moose or squirrel.
Speaker 10 (36:23):
It was like we were unsuccessful, but we tried.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
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
(37:03):
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
(37:24):
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.
(37:46):
They don't know what the numbers mean. So it's an
effective way to communicate.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
There was a.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
And it turned out.
Speaker 9 (38:04):
That it was completely untrue.
Speaker 5 (38:05):
Wow, conspiracy that was in all the newspapers. See how
you looked at it, and it was debunked.
Speaker 8 (38:11):
I'm going to take all this information and work it
into my next meeting.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Please do really great to meet you, guys, great.
Speaker 9 (38:19):
To meet you.
Speaker 8 (38:20):
We'll see if we predict either of the future of
the past or.
Speaker 10 (38:22):
As we'd like to say in CIA five seven four
three too much information.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Now.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
There were a number of other predictions. In nineteen ninety nine,
they predicted that the Rolling Stones would still be on tour.
Speaker 8 (38:46):
And.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
They're still live.
Speaker 5 (38:49):
Is still amazing.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
That librarians would be replaced by robots.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
Legal pot in Canada, smartphones, smart watches, NSA listening to everybody.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
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
(39:19):
hasn't happened. They did predict Rocky seven. There was a
Rocky seven, but they got the title wrong.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
There was a Rocky seven.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
There was a seventh movie in the Rocky franchise.
Speaker 4 (39:29):
He who do you Fight?
Speaker 3 (39:30):
It wasn't Rocky, it was the Creed.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
I guess there's Creed, then there's Creed's kid. I guess
we can call those connected.
Speaker 5 (39:37):
If they could predict the future, they'd all be like
freaking richer than they are.
Speaker 4 (39:40):
It's like they'd know tou.
Speaker 8 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
I got a feeling it worked out pretty well for
them many.
Speaker 5 (39:46):
I think they're doing okay well.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
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
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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