Speaker 1: Uh, Superintendent Dalmers, welcome. I hope you're prepared for an
Speaker 1: unforgettable lungeon.
Speaker 2: Why is there strom out coming out of your ibncmire.
Speaker 1: Oh, I didn't smoke. It's steam steamed from the steamed clams.
Speaker 1: We're having steam claims.
Speaker 3: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 4: I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
Speaker 4: living undercover all around the.
Speaker 5: World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA,
Speaker 5: I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 4: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 4: created conspiracies.
Speaker 5: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 5: weren't true.
Speaker 4: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 4: news almost every day.
Speaker 5: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 5: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mission Implausible. Welcome back. Good to see you, guys.
Speaker 2: Good to see you.
Speaker 5: I'm here too, guys, I know because I can see you.
Speaker 5: Good to see you, John and Adam. What high jinks
Speaker 5: are we getting up to today? Adam, you must have
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Speaker 5: Do you know that main cheese that they were going
Speaker 5: to be selling in Israel? But apparently it doesn't translate
Speaker 5: into Hebrew very well, so they had to change the
Speaker 5: name when they were going to sell it, and Adam,
Speaker 5: do you know what the name they use for it is?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 5: No, no, So I'm selling it in Israel now, so
Speaker 5: they're calling it Cheeses of Nanzrith. The only thing sillier
Speaker 5: at this conversation is like the Simpsons.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's funny you mentioned the Simpsons, because I think
Speaker 3: I'm the biggest Simpsons fan of all of us. I
Speaker 3: actually remember watching the very first episode live when it
Speaker 3: was on. Look Dad, it's Santa's little helper.
Speaker 7: Oh, I keep him gob true, but.
Speaker 1: He's a loser. Heat.
Speaker 3: But that aic Heat.
Speaker 6: The Simpson.
Speaker 3: And years later I had the pleasure of working comedy
Speaker 3: and finding myself crossing paths with all the Simpsons writers
Speaker 3: and directors.
Speaker 4: I think much more highly of you now because I'm
Speaker 4: a big fan of the Simpsons too.
Speaker 6: I love the Simpsons very much, and I've tried to
Speaker 6: interest my son.
Speaker 2: It just doesn't what he's turned to.
Speaker 4: You onto the Celtics, But you can't turn him onto.
Speaker 6: I can't turn them onto the Simpsons, not yet anyway.
Speaker 3: So I can't say this for a fact, but I
Speaker 3: feel like the Simpsons invented the Easter Egg. And so
Speaker 3: if you watch The Simpsons and you want to watch
Speaker 3: the episode the second time or a third time, you're
Speaker 3: always finding these little visual jokes in the background and
Speaker 3: a sign. And it really became the thing where you
Speaker 3: pause and you put in slow motion because you want
Speaker 3: to pick up all these little jokes. But that's the
Speaker 3: perfect situation to think that you're seeing special messages that
Speaker 3: aren't there just for comedy. Could you explain to me
Speaker 3: the conspiracy theory about the Simpsons we're about to discuss, as.
Speaker 5: I understand it is that CIA has recruited Matt Groening
Speaker 5: and these writers as a way to either a telegraph
Speaker 5: its predictions of the future that it's making, or b
Speaker 5: it's to use this to somehow subvert American society.
Speaker 4: I think people when they hear intelligence, they assume that
Speaker 4: it's a predictive agency collect the That's your job of
Speaker 4: the CIA is to go to the president say China's
Speaker 4: going to collapse next year and there's going to be
Speaker 4: who when in fact, as you and I know, intelligence
Speaker 4: isn't really about prediction, even with perfect information, it's impossible
Speaker 4: in this complex world to predict things. It's more about
Speaker 4: providing as much information to help policymakers make smart decisions.
Speaker 3: And so the reason The Simpsons is the focus of
Speaker 3: this conspiracy theory is because The Simpsons has apparently predicted
Speaker 3: so many things, and so many important things that it
Speaker 3: stands out. But the most famous prediction was in a
Speaker 3: two thousand episode titled Bart to the Future. Bart thinks
Speaker 3: about the future, he envisions Lisa Simpson as president.
Speaker 7: As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from
Speaker 7: President Trump. How bad is it? Secretary van Houghton, We're broke.
Speaker 7: The country has broke.
Speaker 2: How can that be?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 7: Remember when the last administration decided to invest in our
Speaker 7: nation's children?
Speaker 3: Big mistake. This aired long before Trump was president. Obviously,
Speaker 3: see you guys ready for our guests, Bring them.
Speaker 4: On I'm excited. I'm a big fan, so I'm excited
Speaker 4: to do it.
Speaker 3: These guys are legends in the world of the Simpsons
Speaker 3: and comedy. David Silverman and Bill Oakley. Now, David Silverman
Speaker 3: has been a director and an executive producer of The
Speaker 3: Simpsons since the beginning.
Speaker 8: Although we would say that the beginning those positions weren't
Speaker 8: really there, because if you go back to the beginning,
Speaker 8: beginning the Tracy Omens show, I was along with the
Speaker 8: weiss Archer, the two animators those titles were a mass
Speaker 8: a Bit by Bit later.
Speaker 3: And Bill Oakley. He was a writer during what many
Speaker 3: people consider the golden age of the Simpsons, when a
Speaker 3: lot of the things were invented. His big claim to
Speaker 3: fame is steamed hams.
Speaker 1: Superden and I hope you're ready for mouth watering hamburgers.
Speaker 2: I thought we were having steamed clams.
Speaker 1: No, I said, steamed hams. That's what I call hamburgers.
Speaker 2: You call hamburgers steamed hams.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's a regional dialect. What region upstate New York?
Speaker 4: Really, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use
Speaker 4: the phrase steamed hams.
Speaker 1: Oh, not a Utica No, it's an Albany expression.
Speaker 4: The Simpsons is famous in many ways, both for predicting
Speaker 4: things that happened. What's the process when you're putting together
Speaker 4: a show and how do you come up with those
Speaker 4: kind of issues that might be considered predictive.
Speaker 8: I think this all accidental. Are there usually things that
Speaker 8: strike somebody funny and they write it and we have
Speaker 8: a big laugh over it, and then sometimes they manifest
Speaker 8: as true and we go look at that. But it's
Speaker 8: not like we're sitting there like, Okay, let's get our
Speaker 8: boxer predictions and see which one we're going to insert
Speaker 8: in this episode. Now, that's not the way it works,
Speaker 8: and oftentimes people forget that. What become quote unquote predictions
Speaker 8: were actually, if you will, low hanging fruit at the time,
Speaker 8: and I will point out the most famous one being
Speaker 8: Donald Trump. The Donald Trump prediction. First of all, we
Speaker 8: didn't actually represent Donald Trump physically on the show, as
Speaker 8: it was purported later when people sorted making stuff up
Speaker 8: about it. But it was around the year two thousand
Speaker 8: and most people don't remember, but Donald Trump at the
Speaker 8: time was running for president. He was running for president
Speaker 8: on the extinct third party, what was it called the
Speaker 8: Liberty Party that ross Pero started again. We weren't there
Speaker 8: at a Ouiji board looking into the future. We were
Speaker 8: just making a joke.
Speaker 5: So you guys are being accused of being CIA agents, which,
Speaker 5: by the way, is a tell that you're not right
Speaker 5: because we're CIA officers. Agents are like the guys that
Speaker 5: we hand although that's a possibility, And what does that
Speaker 5: say about our society that Homer Simpson is like the
Speaker 5: all knowing, omnipotent CIA predictor. And I'm not confirming nor
Speaker 5: denying that you guys are CIA.
Speaker 2: It's a very complicated issue. I personally and many of
Speaker 2: us writers, especially from that era, have been accused of
Speaker 2: being part of the Skull and Bones, part of the Illuminati,
Speaker 2: or from the CIA, and only one of those is true.
Speaker 2: So but the thing is, it's like, there's a couple
Speaker 2: different things about why would the CIA want to have
Speaker 2: comedy writers on the payroll. I don't think we have
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot to offer the intelligence community.
Speaker 2: One of the things that we've been accused of is
Speaker 2: telegraphing secret messages. Usually that's we're accused of that by
Speaker 2: people who are crazy, but we've also been accused and
Speaker 2: this most recently in that very tragic incident where that
Speaker 2: guy set himself on fire in front of the Trump trial.
Speaker 2: I don't know if anybody read his manifesto, but there
Speaker 2: were several pages about the Simpsons in there, and the
Speaker 2: insidious nature of the Simpsons, which I believe he was
Speaker 2: accusing of demoralizing Americans giving up, and I guess that's
Speaker 2: more of a would be a long term operation to
Speaker 2: demoralize Americans into not revolting against big corporations and the
Speaker 2: status quo, which is that's a legitimate concern. And if
Speaker 2: we did that, it's probably just because we were We
Speaker 2: want to be funny.
Speaker 4: I think the intelligent critity would be glad to have
Speaker 4: creative comedy writers just because you guys are interesting, creative
Speaker 4: and clever and funny.
Speaker 2: Call me up then, Jesus, if you guys, if there's
Speaker 2: anybody at the intelligent community listening to this, you can
Speaker 2: send me a the DM on Instagram and you can
Speaker 2: sign me up.
Speaker 3: I'll do it.
Speaker 4: The one thing interesting is, as we see in politics,
Speaker 4: Americans don't even understand their system, and conspiracy theories often
Speaker 4: come from people who don't understand how things work, so
Speaker 4: they create some weird view of how they think it works.
Speaker 4: In fact, the CIA, it's an intelligence organization, but it's
Speaker 4: not an organization but prediction. Like, the point is not
Speaker 4: to predict what's going to happen in the future, because
Speaker 4: essentially the world's too complex and nobody can predict what's
Speaker 4: going to happen in the future. Our job is to
Speaker 4: collect foreign information secrets that foreign governments are trying to
Speaker 4: keep hidden from us, that can help our policymakers make decisions.
Speaker 2: But I do think there's one thing that you could
Speaker 2: predict that's very likely to happen, which is that everyone
Speaker 2: is going to get stupider. That's one of the things
Speaker 2: that has happened over the course of the past thirty years.
Speaker 2: For example, in an episode that my partner, when I
Speaker 2: say we throughout this, I mean my partner Josh Weinstein
Speaker 2: and I. By the way, we're high school friends. We
Speaker 2: were in this episode called Margin Chains, and at the
Speaker 2: very end of the episode, the people of Springfield are
Speaker 2: given a statue of Jimmy Carter, which causes them to
Speaker 2: riot because he's the worst president ever and they hate him.
Speaker 2: And that doesn't sound so unbelievable, now, you know, I
Speaker 2: think there's a lot of towns in America where the
Speaker 2: populist would riot if they were a statue of Jimmy
Speaker 2: Carter were forced upon them. And at the time, it
Speaker 2: was like, that's so stupid. I give you thirty ninth President,
Speaker 2: Jimmy Catta, Come on, bait History's greatest monster. We're making
Speaker 2: fun of people who are stupid and gullible, and unfortunately,
Speaker 2: I think a lot of the American populace is now
Speaker 2: as dumb as as the people of Springfield were thirty
Speaker 2: years ago. So that's part of what we were projecting.
Speaker 8: And it's interesting because Bill, when I was even in
Speaker 8: high school, I was concerned with my fellow students because
Speaker 8: I thought a lot of them are you guys aren't
Speaker 8: too bright, and you guys aren't really paying attention. So
Speaker 8: I've been worried for ever since I was in high
Speaker 8: school of like, where are we heading intellectually in this
Speaker 8: country in terms of like people's education, and that we
Speaker 8: have at least one party who seems to be championing
Speaker 8: that because that sort of helps them.
Speaker 2: Now, that could be a CIA operation, but the CIA
Speaker 2: is non harnessing, or isn't it now?
Speaker 5: We actually are when we were on the inside. We
Speaker 5: never knew what people's political predilections were, and we stayed
Speaker 5: away from them. And it really didn't matter to us
Speaker 5: as long as it was legal and authorized and moral.
Speaker 4: It was about protecting the American people, and we were
Speaker 4: focused overseas. Our job was to understand the countries and
Speaker 4: the politics of the countries we're in to try to
Speaker 4: help American policy makers be smarter about what they do.
Speaker 4: You guys, for whether you've met to or not. We're
Speaker 4: always focused on societal and cultural issues and things. And
Speaker 4: I think you can get a good sense of what
Speaker 4: America is like by watching.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, The Simpsons, David, and you'll probably know more
Speaker 2: about this than I with your travels. But The Simpsons
Speaker 2: is very popular in many other countries, and specifically, in
Speaker 2: my mind, Latin America and South America, where it's every
Speaker 2: fifth bar is a mose Bar ripoff and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: It's shown in Africa and some places. It's definitely in
Speaker 2: a lot of places in Europe.
Speaker 8: It's immensely popular in England, France, Italy, Germany, Australia. So
Speaker 8: you have all my travels, you draw barred and like
Speaker 8: people are like very happy to meet you. Most people
Speaker 8: do see it as not only a parody of what
Speaker 8: a life is like in America, but that sort of
Speaker 8: modern existence, particularly in Europe, is pretty universal. It's very
Speaker 8: well understood what we're doing. And they don't think of
Speaker 8: it as so much as they're looking at a window
Speaker 8: in America, but they look at it as a sort
Speaker 8: of reflection of themselves, even though they're not in America, because,
Speaker 8: as I say, Simpsons is mostly a parody or look
Speaker 8: at modern culture.
Speaker 2: The Simpsons family structure and their lifestyle. He's really taken
Speaker 2: out of like sitcoms from nineteen fifty nine. It's Homer.
Speaker 2: As people repeatedly pointed out, Homer is a man with
Speaker 2: a high school education who has a five bedroom house
Speaker 2: and two cars and makes a fairly small amount of money,
Speaker 2: and so his financial situation is really more out of
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty nine than it is modern day. So if
Speaker 2: people are seeing America through that lens, what they're seeing
Speaker 2: is in America of sixty or seventy years ago.
Speaker 4: Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4: You guys did grow up around Washing DC. Bill, I
Speaker 4: know you went to Harvard and a part of the
Speaker 4: Lampoon and have been the people to often talk about
Speaker 4: that is having connections somehow of the Illuminati or to
Speaker 4: the National security State.
Speaker 2: It's entirely possible that I am a sleeper agent and
Speaker 2: don't know it yet. It's been a long wait. But
Speaker 2: I did grow up in that whole world. As I
Speaker 2: told you guys before the show, my dad worked in
Speaker 2: the House and the Senate, and then he worked at
Speaker 2: the Department Energy for twenty years in the Atomic Energy
Speaker 2: Commission and did have a Q security clearance. I don't
Speaker 2: think I was used as part of some sort of experiment,
Speaker 2: but I guess I don't. I'll never really know. And
Speaker 2: the other part is the Lampoon is definitely given way
Speaker 2: too much credit for being like a skull and bones
Speaker 2: type of skull and bones. But there's a conspiracy is
Speaker 2: that people keep hiring their friends from the Lampoon to
Speaker 2: write for TV shows, and that's really the conspiracy.
Speaker 8: Also, by the way, this is touching on something else,
Speaker 8: because people talk about the predictions. I like to think
Speaker 8: that sometimes they're not predictions, but they're suggestions, and people
Speaker 8: take us up on them famously. I think maybe at
Speaker 8: one time Bob Igo was watching a Simpson episode, the
Speaker 8: one that posited the idea that Disney owned Fox and thought, well,
Speaker 8: it's not a bad idea, how much money we got.
Speaker 3: The episode was titled When You Dish Upon a Star,
Speaker 3: and Ron Howard pitches a movie idea at to Homer
Speaker 3: and the studio that he's pitching to is twentieth Century Fox,
Speaker 3: a division of the Walt Disney Company. And it wasn't
Speaker 3: until almost twenty years later that actually happened, but it.
Speaker 4: Was the beginning of the mergers, so it's not surprising.
Speaker 4: Someday they're all going to be It's gonna be one
Speaker 4: big giant company.
Speaker 3: About the other ones that also are possibly people followed
Speaker 3: your suggestion Lady Gaga's halftime show Cypress Hill performing with
Speaker 3: the London Symphonia.
Speaker 2: That now, that's an example of a suggestion, because that
Speaker 2: was just a joke about how preposterous it was that
Speaker 2: something like that would ever happen, and now it has
Speaker 2: really happened, and I'm it certainly wouldn't have happened without
Speaker 2: that joke.
Speaker 8: Other bands have worked with orchestras. It's not like this
Speaker 8: is the first time's ever happened, but that certainly was
Speaker 8: a suggestion. But also yet, Lady Gaga was on our show. Okay,
Speaker 8: she was on our show. She saw the show. See
Speaker 8: Putney's thought, that's a good idea. I may they should
Speaker 8: fly in.
Speaker 3: Could I ask about a few specific ones here before
Speaker 3: Biden and Kamala Harris were a team. There is a
Speaker 3: shot of them standing next to each other at the
Speaker 3: White House. Are you familiar with this one?
Speaker 8: On the West Side story one. How I can tell
Speaker 8: you is because I directed that thing. All I can
Speaker 8: tell you is that I had about I don't know,
Speaker 8: forty seven people to put into a line, and I
Speaker 8: just put them into line randomly and just TikTok, and
Speaker 8: we have a lot of work to do and we
Speaker 8: have a deadline, and out the door it went. And
Speaker 8: as far as the order was, I mean, we probably
Speaker 8: put some Democrats together and Republicans together and something like that,
Speaker 8: but that's as far as it went. Now, the idea
Speaker 8: that to say, hey see there, no, I'm sorry, that's
Speaker 8: a colossal coincidence. Sorry is, ladies and gentlemen, No conspiracies here.
Speaker 3: I guess you could argue that after six thousand episodes,
Speaker 3: just the law of statistics, certain things would take place.
Speaker 8: I would think so too. The thing that's really interesting
Speaker 8: are the sports prediction. Those are the ones that really
Speaker 8: do have is baffled. The other ones we can explain
Speaker 8: a little bit. But the sports predictions are pretty amazing.
Speaker 2: I think most of them, almost all of the ones
Speaker 2: you're talking about came from George Meyer.
Speaker 8: Who was That was the next thing I was going
Speaker 8: to say, who George.
Speaker 2: Meyer has talked about it obviously, Now if anybody could
Speaker 2: get I don't know this for sure, but I'm fairly
Speaker 2: sure he's incredibly rich because of his ability to predict things,
Speaker 2: including gold, which I was told he invested silver. Okay,
Speaker 2: so yes it was silver, right, so he I believe
Speaker 2: silver investor. I don't want anybody to burglarize George's house
Speaker 2: after hearing this, so guys, they are be careful.
Speaker 1: See.
Speaker 2: But I think what happened was that he had he
Speaker 2: was he was a very savvy investor because he did
Speaker 2: have the ability. I don't know if he had the
Speaker 2: ability to predict, but he could certainly he got lucky
Speaker 2: a lot, especially in sports gambling as well in sports betting.
Speaker 8: He was a very savvy sports handicapper. He told me
Speaker 8: something very interesting. He was factoring people's psychology of how
Speaker 8: much they wanted their team to win as a factor
Speaker 8: in setting the odds, and he worked that into his
Speaker 8: mathematical calculation on out event. Very deep, savvy thinker and
Speaker 8: again not a prognosticator, didn't have a flex capacitor, I think,
Speaker 8: just had a brain capacity.
Speaker 2: I think also Sam was like that too, from what
Speaker 2: I heard. Sam Simon was one of the other creators
Speaker 2: of the show also was similar in that way. Is
Speaker 2: it a big sports fan better and so forth.
Speaker 8: Both those guys were not only good big sports betters,
Speaker 8: but smart and successful sports betters because they understood what
Speaker 8: was going on when the games they were beating. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and George I think, was the one who was responsible
Speaker 8: for all those Super Bowl sharing predictions. And then of
Speaker 8: course it's just the accidental ones that we just for
Speaker 8: a joke decided to pair two teams together in a
Speaker 8: soccer match and oh my god, look they're in the
Speaker 8: World Cup.
Speaker 2: If that episode aired twenty five years ago, you got
Speaker 2: twenty five chances for that particular pairing to show up,
Speaker 2: and you're going to get lucky one eventually.
Speaker 8: Oh how brilliant are they are? They're right, one set
Speaker 8: of twenty five times.
Speaker 4: Well, and you can also see things that clearly are
Speaker 4: just funny, but then it happens and it's not really
Speaker 4: a surprise, like the whole Siegfried and Roy being attacked
Speaker 4: by their tigers.
Speaker 2: Like, yes, I can imagine that that was in my
Speaker 2: script just because it seems, yeah, that's the joke. That's
Speaker 2: the joke, and it eventually came true. What joke would
Speaker 2: you make to as a layman, there's a tiger trainer,
Speaker 2: What joke would you make when tiger trainer the tiger
Speaker 2: attacks him. That's the number one thing that occurs to
Speaker 2: you to make a joke about a tiger tracker.
Speaker 8: It's any joke to make again, the low hanging.
Speaker 4: Fruit nsay, listening to everybody's phone calls or whatever.
Speaker 5: That was my point as a CIA guy, by and large,
Speaker 5: we try to keep things secret when we have secrets, right,
Speaker 5: it's the whole point of a secret. If we knew
Speaker 5: who was going to win the gold medal and curling,
Speaker 5: why we would investigate that, I don't know, but we
Speaker 5: wouldn't put it on a TV show with a huge audience,
Speaker 5: and not when we think we know a secret, Hey,
Speaker 5: we know that there is WMD in I Rock.
Speaker 3: We generally tell people that.
Speaker 9: And go prove it.
Speaker 2: It's actually the other way around.
Speaker 9: Just say it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think a far more legitimate conspiracy theory is
Speaker 2: that we're having some sort of demoralizing effect on the
Speaker 2: nation as a whole. That would be more of a
Speaker 2: thing that it's true. Why would we Okay, I guess
Speaker 2: there're two more legitimate. One is that we're telegraphing information
Speaker 2: to agents like those stations, those encoded number stations that
Speaker 2: you guys use, right, We're somehow broadcasting information to agents
Speaker 2: through encrypted material on our show or even non encrypted
Speaker 2: stuff like that nine to eleven poster, which has been
Speaker 2: subject of so many theories. And the other thing is
Speaker 2: that more it's a more broad based thing, is that
Speaker 2: we're having some sort of cultural effect on the nation
Speaker 2: that some insidious large entity wants to take place.
Speaker 4: Damn you guys for ruining our nation because you succeeded
Speaker 4: very well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not terrible just to put
Speaker 8: some funny shows on the air.
Speaker 4: There you go. Let me ask, so, Bill, you mentioned
Speaker 4: a couple of about the nine to eleven poster. Can
Speaker 4: you give us a little background on that?
Speaker 2: Yes, David, did you direct that episode? David went to
Speaker 2: those photos.
Speaker 8: Though I took those photos. This is of course, before
Speaker 8: you had the resource of the Internet. I happened to
Speaker 8: be recording for the road El Dorado in New York.
Speaker 8: I was dispatched down to the World Trade Center to
Speaker 8: take as many photos as I could have got only
Speaker 8: the center and the locations, but the street across but no.
Speaker 8: Jim Rearden directed that episode very hilariously.
Speaker 2: So this was an episode of The Simpsons that was
Speaker 2: the premiere of the ninth season. It was one of
Speaker 2: the last episodes of Josh and I produced and head wrote.
Speaker 2: And it's an episode where Barney drives Homer's car to
Speaker 2: New York and use it in the plaza of the
Speaker 2: World Trade Center, and Homer asked to go to New York.
Speaker 2: And the entire literally an entire act, if not two acts,
Speaker 2: if it take place at the World Trade Center. And
Speaker 2: so people obviously took note of that. But most importantly,
Speaker 2: the conspiracy theory revolves around this poster. Is a newspaper ad,
Speaker 2: a full paid newspaper add that Bart shows off in
Speaker 2: Act one. It's like, how are going to get to
Speaker 2: New York? We can't afford to get to New York.
Speaker 2: He holds up a newspaper ad that says New York
Speaker 2: nine dollars on the bus line, and there's the nine
Speaker 2: and then there's a silhouette of the skyline of Manhattan
Speaker 2: including the two World Trade Centers, which does look when
Speaker 2: you see it like nine eleven, the nine dollars and
Speaker 2: the eleven.
Speaker 7: I'd love to see New York. We could all go
Speaker 7: at the bus company's special supersitter fair nine books.
Speaker 3: This one's on me.
Speaker 2: And so the conspiracy theory goes that us, as members
Speaker 2: of the Skull and Bones Illuminati, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: we're broadcasting to our sleeper agents. Here's the target. Here
Speaker 2: is the date. They took it off the air for
Speaker 2: ten years, although now it's back, so it was an
Speaker 2: interesting thing.
Speaker 8: I would mention that poster though, was not designed by
Speaker 8: the writers. We just did a drawing of it, and
Speaker 8: I don't know who designed it, but just had the
Speaker 8: nine dollars and just had a silhouette of the New
Speaker 8: York skyline as it was back in that day, and
Speaker 8: it was not like discussed back and forth. Probably we
Speaker 8: just probably just did it really quickly and it makes
Speaker 8: perfect sense.
Speaker 2: It's exactly what you would do. That's one of the
Speaker 2: most prominent conspiracy theories there is that one, as well
Speaker 2: as the Trump one, and the other things like that
Speaker 2: and the Disney one are among the most most prominent.
Speaker 8: But by the way, the other thing that really amused
Speaker 8: me about the Trump one is they took this thing
Speaker 8: that we did. We got it out very quickly. To
Speaker 8: our credit, we must have got that out in two
Speaker 8: weeks from the time that he went down, as John
Speaker 8: Stewart jokingly put it as stair Force one going down
Speaker 8: the escalator of the Trump Tower. We got the parody
Speaker 8: out within two about two weeks later onto YouTube. But
Speaker 8: what happened was is some conspiracy theorist types took what
Speaker 8: we had done for that and posited the idea that
Speaker 8: we actually predicted not only him being that, but represented
Speaker 8: him going down the escalator at Trump Tower as that
Speaker 8: was in that episode. As if you look at that episode,
Speaker 8: you can clearly see that's not the case. But I
Speaker 8: would have to talk to people saying and they say, oh, no,
Speaker 8: that was in the episode. He said, no, it's not.
Speaker 8: Well that episode was made or we're still in the
Speaker 8: four x three format and it's not done digitally. It
Speaker 8: was done still on cells and you can see texture
Speaker 8: now with AI. People ask me, is this true, because
Speaker 8: something else happened. I think it was like the disaster
Speaker 8: with the Francis Scott Keybridge. Yeah, somebody sent me this
Speaker 8: image and I said, this is a fake image that
Speaker 8: do anything even remotely.
Speaker 2: But now using AI, you can generate almost any Simpsons
Speaker 2: scene in like about five minutes or less of any
Speaker 2: event that happened. And that was the Key Bridge one,
Speaker 2: David was the most recent and most egregious one because
Speaker 2: to the casual observer it really did look like a
Speaker 2: frame from The Simpsons of that bridge being hit by
Speaker 2: a giant boat. Many of them are funny, like one
Speaker 2: of it was about March vacuuming the law. March that
Speaker 2: she's going to vacuum the lawns dirty. She's going to
Speaker 2: vacuum the lawn and so there's just all these frames
Speaker 2: of March using different models of vacuum cleaners to vacuum
Speaker 2: the lawn. It looks completely unbelievable and it made me
Speaker 2: really crack up. Anyway, So some people are using this
Speaker 2: technology for good for entertainment. Other people are using it
Speaker 2: to get clicks and drive advertising. To The Guardian, there
Speaker 2: was a January sixth to one too with granz keeper
Speaker 2: Willie wearing that guy's buffalo hat or whatever that somebody made.
Speaker 2: That one was pretty obviously a fake.
Speaker 3: There is an episode where there is an image of
Speaker 3: people storming the Capitol from a while back. The episode
Speaker 3: was called The Day the Violence Died nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: What you're seeing in that episode is a parody of
Speaker 2: Schoolhouse Rock. If you remember school House Rock from the seventies,
Speaker 2: the episode the school House Rock, I'm just a bill,
Speaker 2: And there was true that at the end. First of all,
Speaker 2: it wasn't drawn in the Simpsons style. It was drawn
Speaker 2: in the sky style of Schoolhouse Rock. And at the end,
Speaker 2: it's true that other bills, other constitutional amendments were running
Speaker 2: up the stairs of the Capitol. But it didn't look
Speaker 2: anything like the Simpsons. It looked like Schoolhouse Rock. And
Speaker 2: it wasn't people. It was amendments. Hey, who left all
Speaker 2: this garbage on the steps of Congress.
Speaker 3: I'm not garbage, Amanamma to be yes, and I'm Emma Toby,
Speaker 3: and I'm hoping that the runna Berby.
Speaker 2: Why can't we just make a law against flag.
Speaker 5: Burning, because that law would be unconstitutional.
Speaker 3: But if we changed the constitution, then we.
Speaker 7: Could make all sorts of crazy laws.
Speaker 2: Now you're catching on.
Speaker 3: There's a couple of others you might know about Homer
Speaker 3: at the bat Season three not maddening one.
Speaker 2: It's the sideburns, isn't it. I didn't really has embraced
Speaker 2: that joke to become part of his personalit. It's like
Speaker 2: the most famous thing about Don Mattically now.
Speaker 3: The episode follows home in a softball team as they
Speaker 3: start to believe that they're lucky because of articular bat.
Speaker 3: This enrages of jealous mister Burns, who hires major league players.
Speaker 3: One of these players is Don Mattingly, who's benched for
Speaker 3: what mister Burns insists are unruly sideburns. A year later,
Speaker 3: during an actual game in nineteen ninety three, Yankees manager
Speaker 3: Stump Merrill points out that matting Lee did not cut
Speaker 3: his hair for the game, which leads to the player
Speaker 3: getting benched.
Speaker 8: Originally, the joke was he had been benched prior. This
Speaker 8: was not a prediction. This is an event that happened
Speaker 8: by Steinbrenner that I think had benched him for his sideburns,
Speaker 8: somebody I didn't know, somebody.
Speaker 4: I forget what Steinbrenner did that a number because you're
Speaker 4: not allowed to have facial hair.
Speaker 8: Right, I'm not a sportsman, but I do know that
Speaker 8: was happened before hid. I believe that Jim Brierden explained
Speaker 8: it to me, and he thought it was a hilarious joke.
Speaker 8: He just thought it was the best joke. So the
Speaker 8: idea of that being predictioned is no, it's obviously a
Speaker 8: reference to something that happened prior to the episode.
Speaker 2: There's a number of those, by the way, David, that
Speaker 2: that happened. The most recent one that occurred to me
Speaker 2: was that pandemic one where a lot of people thought
Speaker 2: we had predicted COVID in that episode, that Saint margin
Speaker 2: Change's episode, because when the fact, what we were referring
Speaker 2: to was the Hong Kong flu of nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy when we did that, so it was the
Speaker 2: first time many people had heard of a pandemic, and
Speaker 2: they thought we had invented the idea of a pandemic,
Speaker 2: which clearly we didn't. But that was another one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a referenced to a past event and then, Oh,
Speaker 8: but so this is a prediction. It's not laziness writing.
Speaker 2: History repeats itself, and the show's been on so long
Speaker 2: that we're getting to the point where history is repeating
Speaker 2: itself over and over again, and we things that we
Speaker 2: referred to that we're old are now new again.
Speaker 5: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
Speaker 5: a minute or two, and we're back season nine.
Speaker 3: Lisa Sachs ninety seven. Marge holds up a children's book
Speaker 3: called Curious George and the Ebola Virus, three years before
Speaker 3: the two thousand Bola outbreak.
Speaker 2: I wasn't involved in that episode, but I think that
Speaker 2: Abola was already a thing that people knew about, as
Speaker 2: with the flu. It's probably the first time a lot
Speaker 2: of people heard of that, and that thus they think
Speaker 2: the Simpsons predicted it rather than the Simpsons informed of
Speaker 2: its existence.
Speaker 8: That's a thing you can think of. Also from the
Speaker 8: comedy point of view, the comedy writer he or she
Speaker 8: might just say, well, if you're going to have Curious George,
Speaker 8: n blank. It was probably one of those lists, right, Bill,
Speaker 8: because this is what we.
Speaker 2: I think it was a book in al I think
Speaker 2: this was an al Gene's script for Lisa sex it
Speaker 2: was I think it was it was coming up as
Speaker 2: something that people knew that was scary and weird.
Speaker 9: I was in.
Speaker 5: Sudan in nineteen seventy nine and they had something called
Speaker 5: greed monkey Fever, which was renamed as a bowl, so
Speaker 5: it was like way back then as well.
Speaker 4: Reruns are so important for the Simpsons, right, so you
Speaker 4: can see an old one and say, oh my god,
Speaker 4: they're talking about what we're doing today, and so it
Speaker 4: is in people's faces when it comes up.
Speaker 8: We're getting closer to eight hundred episodes now, and after
Speaker 8: eight hundred episodes, there's going to be something that we
Speaker 8: just hit. I suspect has not as many episodes. The
Speaker 8: gun Smoke had a lot of episodes. Maybe that would
Speaker 8: have hit, but unfortunately took place in the Old West.
Speaker 9: So that's what I think.
Speaker 2: Also, this is the nature of the to be to
Speaker 2: talk about the show more broadly. So Simpsons is one
Speaker 2: of the few things that America shares as a cultural reference.
Speaker 2: The media landscape has been so fragmented into two gazillion
Speaker 2: different media inputs for everybody all day long, and everybody.
Speaker 2: Most people remember certain Simpsons episodes because they have seen
Speaker 2: them so many times. So it is one of the
Speaker 2: few things that binds American society together is a knowledge
Speaker 2: of certain moments.
Speaker 8: In The Simpsons, Matt have the idea that here's a
Speaker 8: TV family that watches TV, and that was a great
Speaker 8: staring starting point because that allowed us to do a
Speaker 8: infinite number of parodies of TV. Because we're animated, we
Speaker 8: don't have to build a lot of sets. We just
Speaker 8: dross stuff, So that's an advantage. What I'm getting at, though,
Speaker 8: is that after with this idea, and with this idea
Speaker 8: of this family observing current life and so forth, and
Speaker 8: talking about things and talking about futuristic things, yeah, we're
Speaker 8: going to stumble across things that kind of come true
Speaker 8: or make some sort of technological quote unquote prediction. Because
Speaker 8: that's the nature of the show, the nature of the writing.
Speaker 8: You can look at like other people in entertainment who've
Speaker 8: written science fiction. Star Trek kind of predicted these things,
Speaker 8: these cell phone things. That's what happens when people dabble
Speaker 8: in being futurists. And after eight hundred episodes, as I said,
Speaker 8: we're gonna hit it a few times.
Speaker 2: I recall being told I think by Mike and out
Speaker 2: we got there. We don't put in contemporary references unless
Speaker 2: there's this really good reason for it, because we want
Speaker 2: people to be watching the show twenty years from now
Speaker 2: and be able to get it.
Speaker 8: Briefly, we had a in the Simpsons movie. We had
Speaker 8: a reference to Nixon as a joke, and.
Speaker 2: Nixon's an evergreen topic. I'm going to say, gonna, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna double down on that. He's not dated, not quite
Speaker 2: because he took it out because it got no laugh.
Speaker 8: It just got to a look from the audience. They're like, what,
Speaker 8: it's something they.
Speaker 2: Didn't wrong audience, But they didn't have a different audience.
Speaker 9: I hadn't.
Speaker 8: It wasn't that I would say, Bill, it's nothing. They
Speaker 8: didn't get the joke that there was no passion behind it. Okay,
Speaker 8: well you know what I'm saying. I can see that
Speaker 8: you have to make the right joke about him that works,
Speaker 8: But there's nothing the emotional passion of like love eight
Speaker 8: of Nixon is gone, yes, right, any more than people
Speaker 8: have love hate for like I don't know Warrant.
Speaker 2: People know him now, people who know from Futurama. That's
Speaker 2: where his that's where his legacy lives is in Futurama
Speaker 2: and other and the projects that I'm doing, my projects
Speaker 2: for Audible, I have a lot of Nixon in them
Speaker 2: because they're nineteen eighth their period pieces.
Speaker 3: Bill also has a podcast, Space nineteen sixty nine, which
Speaker 3: is brilliant.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I'll just plug this here. It's not so
Speaker 2: much a podcast as it is an audio book, and
Speaker 2: that's why it's but it's ten episodes available on audible
Speaker 2: dot com, starring the Tasha Leone. It takes place in
Speaker 2: a universe where Kennedy did not die from his wounds,
Speaker 2: but instead had a revelation that America had to expand
Speaker 2: into space as quickly as possible. And now I am
Speaker 2: writing the sequel, Space nineteen seventy two. Look for that
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six. Hopefully you will.
Speaker 2: You can help us promote the living crap out of
Speaker 2: Space nineteen seventy two when it comes out.
Speaker 4: You guys have tried really hard to pretend you're not
Speaker 4: connected in some way to the intelligence community, and this
Speaker 4: of Kennedy now is just just sealed it.
Speaker 5: So you guys get to ask one question each to
Speaker 5: CIA officers, truth.
Speaker 4: Or dares you can ask more than one.
Speaker 2: Wow, okay, just not the age go first.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, oh, where do you get those cool spy cars.
Speaker 4: We didn't get cool spi cars. We were trained before
Speaker 4: you go over season, depending on where you do get
Speaker 4: at the training to learn how to like spin cars
Speaker 4: and smash them and break through ros backs and crash
Speaker 4: and burn and how to do reverse one eighties and
Speaker 4: all that kind of stuff. That was like everybody loved
Speaker 4: doing that because of course you never got to do
Speaker 4: it after that in the field, and when you live
Speaker 4: overseas in a place where it's dangerous and you can't
Speaker 4: really bring a car, they oftentimes you'll get a car,
Speaker 4: but they're not fancy. They're meant We're meant to be boring.
Speaker 8: And then in the background, that was the thing that
Speaker 8: always amused me up with these spy films, is I
Speaker 8: thought you guys were trying to blend in.
Speaker 2: I have a question, and this may I want to
Speaker 2: make sure that nobody takes offense at this question, because
Speaker 2: it has been on my mind for years, and I
Speaker 2: know that this is a very sensitive topic and in fact,
Speaker 2: my partner are going to write a movie about it
Speaker 2: at one point, and everybody and it's more realistic than that.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to say. We all know that the KGB,
Speaker 2: at least in fiction, had a lot of sexy female
Speaker 2: agents that would seduce men to get information out of them.
Speaker 2: Does the CIA also have that or do they just
Speaker 2: have to hire local prostitutes or do they have men?
Speaker 2: Do they will tell me what you know?
Speaker 4: So yeah, they call it swallows is the program that
Speaker 4: the KGB us and many of us who've been I
Speaker 4: served in Moscow and there's a number of people who
Speaker 4: traveled there and at night on your hotel door, you
Speaker 4: get knock on the door and they'll be a pretty
Speaker 4: girl or what have you. But in general not in general, no,
Speaker 4: we don't use sex because the goal for us is
Speaker 4: to recruit a spy, a source who knows what they're doing.
Speaker 4: They're motivated, they want to work for us, they want
Speaker 4: to keep it secret for a long time. So what
Speaker 4: you want to do is recruit some guy in the
Speaker 4: Iranian Ministry of Defense who hates his boss or hates
Speaker 4: the system, and we continue to meet and they provide
Speaker 4: us insight, and they continue to move up over time,
Speaker 4: and they meet another CI officer and over time they
Speaker 4: become you know, the deputy head of the Iranian missile
Speaker 4: program or whatever, and we have sources inside. And to
Speaker 4: do that you have to have people who trust you
Speaker 4: and have and developed trust between the US government and
Speaker 4: the CIA and the person. And so the problem with
Speaker 4: using any kind of blackmail, whether it be sex or
Speaker 4: any other kind of black mail, is the people want
Speaker 4: to get out of it or there law enforcement. Oftentimes
Speaker 4: they call them instead of calling them their sources or
Speaker 4: their agents, it's it's a snitch or an informer. And
Speaker 4: oftentimes they will pressure people to provide information for a
Speaker 4: short period of time. Our job is to get for
Speaker 4: a long period of time to motivate to people. And
Speaker 4: so we found that using any kind of black mail
Speaker 4: is essentially doesn't work. There are times when someone who
Speaker 4: is working for US or helping us and the terrorism
Speaker 4: side comes to the States and they want something like this.
Speaker 4: There's times when we can help them do that, but
Speaker 4: we're not doing that for We're not doing it for ourselves.
Speaker 4: We're not doing it to them.
Speaker 5: Interesting the agency, we're paid to break the laws of
Speaker 5: other countries. Right every espionage organization its job is to
Speaker 5: break the laws of other countries, but not its own. Laws,
Speaker 5: so in CI, we can't break our own laws. True
Speaker 5: story on sex. There was a one agent. He was
Speaker 5: really important. So the agent comes to the US and
Speaker 5: he says, I want to get laid. I want to
Speaker 5: go to a prostitute. And the case Opster is handling
Speaker 5: him is, first of all, I don't know where to go.
Speaker 5: Second of all, I don't want you to get sick
Speaker 5: or arrested. So he went to the FBI and said,
Speaker 5: is there a place he can go where he's not
Speaker 5: going to get arrested or beaten up? And I guess
Speaker 5: the FBI said that these are places that you'll probably
Speaker 5: be okay. But then he went to our lawyers, and
Speaker 5: our lawyers said, you can't give him money to engage
Speaker 5: in the legal activity.
Speaker 9: It is illegal.
Speaker 5: So what they finally worked out is basically says you
Speaker 5: can give him a bonus. So here's two hundred dollars
Speaker 5: and a pack of condoms. Right, here's a bonus for helping. Unofficially,
Speaker 5: this is where the FBI said you might go. But
Speaker 5: that's as far as we can go. We do have
Speaker 5: some weird, weird rules around, like sexual activity for CIA officers,
Speaker 5: so that we're not blackmailed, but by Larnche No, not
Speaker 5: by lunch. We don't do it, doesn't wort.
Speaker 8: I just wanted to point out that how well Rocking
Speaker 8: and Bowwinkle presented.
Speaker 9: I've seen not They're great. By the way, this is
Speaker 9: off the kill squad. Bill Scott told me this, Bill
Speaker 9: Scott Bowinkle. Bill Scott, who was the head writer and
Speaker 9: the voice of Bowinkle and several other voices, wonderful guys,
Speaker 9: something of a mentor to me. He told me the
Speaker 9: story of I don't know what he was doing in
Speaker 9: Russia or visiting Russia for, but the guy who was
Speaker 9: doing his passport saying wait you look on the cartoon
Speaker 9: show with Moosson's squirrel. Bill said.
Speaker 8: All I could remember is that he had a long
Speaker 8: time getting his passport cleared for some reason. So apparently
Speaker 8: somebody did not like Boris Natasha Moosen squirrel.
Speaker 3: So funny story.
Speaker 5: So I was one of the guys who was on
Speaker 5: a horse chasing bin Laden in the early days, right
Speaker 5: growing up in the mountains, and we were looking for
Speaker 5: bin Laden and Zawahiri, right, the two guys running. So
Speaker 5: when I first went in to see the chief of station,
Speaker 5: and I was about to go up country to chase
Speaker 5: these guys. I said, so, chief, what are my orders?
Speaker 5: And he looked at me deadpan and said kill moose
Speaker 5: and squirrel.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 9: Official, we didn't kill moose or squirrel.
Speaker 10: It was like we were unsuccessful, but we tried.
Speaker 2: It was like, those are the orders. I just want
Speaker 2: to ask one more question too, because I'm still I'm
Speaker 2: very interested in the whole number station phenomenon. Do you
Speaker 2: have any knowledge of what the number stations are? Have
Speaker 2: you used them? Shortwave stations that have recordings of people
Speaker 2: just going like four five all day long.
Speaker 4: It's it's still a very secure way to communicate, and
Speaker 4: so the Cubans still do that. That's using a one
Speaker 4: time pad. Spies have been able to use that for
Speaker 4: years and years. And the idea is you give people
Speaker 4: a pad of random sort of numbers. It's just a
Speaker 4: code system. And so what happens is you send via
Speaker 4: shortwave radio some speaking goes on, I think goes on
Speaker 4: twenty four hours a day, someone just speaking, and then
Speaker 4: you give your source saying at certain times you go
Speaker 4: in and you listen to these numbers, say burno, and
Speaker 4: if you have the pad with numbers, when you go
Speaker 4: on and listen. You then put the numbers that the
Speaker 4: person is saying underneath and there's a thing called some
Speaker 4: subtraction the numbers on your pad. You subtract the numbers
Speaker 4: that they gave you under them, and then that's the
Speaker 4: number of the letter that you need, and then that's
Speaker 4: how you put together a code. So the FBI they
Speaker 4: could know that there's Russian in Cuba and other spies
Speaker 4: here that are being communicated with, and they can hear
Speaker 4: the numbers on a radio, but they can't stop the radio.
Speaker 4: They don't know what the numbers mean. So it's an
Speaker 4: effective way to communicate.
Speaker 2: There was a.
Speaker 5: Conspiracy about that. It was like two thousand and three
Speaker 5: or something like that, that l Jazeera that it's Chiron's
Speaker 5: underneath that if if you read them correctly, that they
Speaker 5: were the same thing.
Speaker 3: And it turned out.
Speaker 9: That it was completely untrue.
Speaker 5: Wow, conspiracy that was in all the newspapers. See how
Speaker 5: you looked at it, and it was debunked.
Speaker 8: I'm going to take all this information and work it
Speaker 8: into my next meeting.
Speaker 4: Please do really great to meet you, guys, great.
Speaker 9: To meet you.
Speaker 8: We'll see if we predict either of the future of
Speaker 8: the past or.
Speaker 10: As we'd like to say in CIA five seven four
Speaker 10: three too much information.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: There were a number of other predictions. In nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 3: they predicted that the Rolling Stones would still be on tour.
Speaker 8: And.
Speaker 2: They're still live.
Speaker 5: Is still amazing.
Speaker 3: That librarians would be replaced by robots.
Speaker 4: Legal pot in Canada, smartphones, smart watches, NSA listening to everybody.
Speaker 3: The Greek financial crisis that was predicting in two thousand one. Yeah,
Speaker 3: faulty voter machines two thousand and eight, that was a
Speaker 3: Halloween Treehouse of Horror episode. I'll add that there are
Speaker 3: some predictions that haven't happened yet, that the Fox Network
Speaker 3: would become a hardcore sex channel, that Delta Burke and
Speaker 3: the actor who plays Major Dad would get divorced. That
Speaker 3: hasn't happened. They did predict Rocky seven. There was a
Speaker 3: Rocky seven, but they got the title wrong.
Speaker 4: There was a Rocky seven.
Speaker 3: There was a seventh movie in the Rocky franchise.
Speaker 4: He who do you Fight?
Speaker 3: It wasn't Rocky, it was the Creed.
Speaker 4: I guess there's Creed, then there's Creed's kid. I guess
Speaker 4: we can call those connected.
Speaker 5: If they could predict the future, they'd all be like
Speaker 5: freaking richer than they are.
Speaker 4: It's like they'd know tou.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I got a feeling it worked out pretty well for
Speaker 3: them many.
Speaker 5: I think they're doing okay well.
Speaker 4: The Simpton's episode was fun, and I hope we can
Speaker 4: do that again. I'd hope Stern can find more cool
Speaker 4: Hollywood people for us to talk to you, because I'm
Speaker 4: getting sick of talking to you guys.
Speaker 3: Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
Speaker 3: and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Speaker 3: Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures
Speaker 3: for iHeart Podcasts