January 25, 2025 • 13 mins
A.J. was recently a guest on the excellent podcast "Mission Implausible," hosted by former high-level CIA operatives John Sipher and Jerry O'Shea. Here is part of their conversation about puzzles and spy craft. Check out the full episode and subscribe to Mission Implausible on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!
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"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas.
Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.
The show is produced by Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown of Roulette Productions.
Our Chief Puzzle Officer is Greg Pliska. Our associate producer is Andrea Schoenberg.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello, puzzlers. We have a special bonus episode for you
this Saturday. It is with two former CIA operatives, John
Cipher and Jerry O'shay. You might remember that they were
guests on The Puzzler a few days ago and they
solved a CIA related puzzle. Well. In addition to hosting them,
(00:24):
I was also a guest on their podcast, Mission Implausible,
which is a great podcast. So I thought I would
put some of our conversation here, namely the part about
the overlap between spying and puzzles. But here's our chat
about puzzles and spying. You'll hear about CIA code words,
(00:44):
about QAnon. You'll hear one theory on the inspiration of
the phrase double seven. There are other theories out there,
but this is a fun one. By the way, my
friend John Stern is a producer of Mission Implausible, so
thank you John for making this happen. John wrote comedy
pieces for me way back when I was an editor
(01:07):
at Esquire magazine. He also produces hilarious shows such as
Wet Hot American Summer Ten Years Later and the Bachelor
parody Burning Love, which I love. So check those out
and enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'shay.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in
high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
This is Mission implausible. Welcome back to Mission Implausible. Our
producer John Stern is here with us, and he's going
to introduce our guests.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Yeah. Sometimes Adam Davidson brings on one of his friends
and everyone's very impressed, everyone meaning Jerry.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
But today I.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Am bringing on someone who he is going to blow
all of Adam's guests away. He actually is one of
my favorite people.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
His same is AJ Jacobs.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
He's had a number of what I believe John Stewart
called method writing books. Do you remember Aj, when you
were writing The Year of Living Biblically? You met me
for lunch on the Upper West Side. I didn't know
you were writing the book, and you showed up in
a white robe, long beard, long hair, and barefoot.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
I commit to the bit.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
That's right. He also has a very fun and fascinated
book called The Puzzler and his podcast called The Puzzler,
and his most recent book is The Year of Living
Constitutionally aj as is. His want was living the Constitution
in practical terms. Aj When you got a cold, did
you get like leeches to be bled? Is that what
you did? Well?
Speaker 5 (02:57):
First of all, I just want to say thank you
for that lovely introduction and thanks for having me on
the show. I love the show. Yes, I did try
to order leeches and my wife put a cabash on it.
I also when I went to the dermatologists and had
to have a mole removed, I did request no no anesthetic,
no anesthetic, and she said for insurance reasons she couldn't.
(03:19):
So that's my excuse for why I never did blood
letting or the tobacco smoke enema, which was a very
cutting edge and popular medical procedure of the day where
they would literally blow smoke up your butt. That's where
the phrase comes from.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Most likely did insurance cover it then, But what was
the insurance situation they had for the founders caret quid
Ben Franklin is considered to have started some insurance like thing,
but I don't know if that was covered.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
So Agent getting into the weird intersection between puzzles and
codes and espionage and conspiracy theories. I'm going to throw
a story at you. This hass to do with espionage
and it has to do with codes. It is one
of my favorite so I've been looking for an excuse
to use it. So let's go back to the fifteen twenties.
(04:06):
Elizabeth the Second is she's Queen of England and she
has a spymaster, a guy by the name of John
d Dee, and he goes around Europe collecting intelligence for
the Queen. Now d is a puzzle master like you,
and he's also very big into numerology, and he's decided
(04:28):
that he should be represented by the number seven. It
was his lucky number, and when he would write to
the Queen, it was for her eyes only, so he
would put zero zero, one for each eye, and then
he would actually put in like a little eyeball, a
little dot, and then number seven so she would know
(04:49):
it was for her eyes only, and it was from
number seven, So he was the first seven and when
she responded to him, she didn't write out Queen Eliza
Zabeth Mayjesty Rex. She just wrote M and so this
is where from out of Cambridge, this is where seven
(05:09):
comes from it.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
I love this story. First of all, why didn't I
interview you for my book? This is fantastic. So here's
another one. World War two saw some interesting overlaps between
puzzles and spying. The Telegraph newspaper in England in nineteen
forty one, I believe, printed a very hard They love
(05:31):
in England. They love their super tricky wordplaye crosswords. They're
harder than in America. No offense to America. And they
printed one and they said, if you solve this in
less than twelve minutes, get in touch. And it turned
out that it was a recruiting tool for what would
(05:51):
become the Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and his codebreakers
helped win US World War two by solving the Nazi
Enigma code. So this is sort of like, are you
good enough to be a codebreaker? And I'll give you
one example, just to give you an example of how
tricky these were. They're almost like dad jokes on steroids.
(06:12):
They're like a clue for seventeen across in this famous
puzzle was is this town ready for a flood? Question?
Mark is this town ready for a flood? And it's
six letters, it starts with N. So the way to
think about what do you think about when you think
of a flood? What comes to mind? What's the most
(06:32):
famous flood ever?
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Noah? Noah?
Speaker 3 (06:35):
And what did he use?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
What did he use?
Speaker 4 (06:38):
An arc?
Speaker 5 (06:39):
So if you're ready for a flood, you don't want
an old arc, you want a newer Newark. So that's
the kind of level of wordplay that they were going for.
So I love that. And there was weirdly a sequel
to that because the Telegraph was involved in another spy
puzzle incident at the end of World War Two. They
(07:00):
printed these crosswords and the crosswords had in them the
answers included words like oh, Maha and Utah and neptune
and mulberry. And someone noticed this and those were secret
code words used by the Allies during D Day and
they freaked out and they said, oh my god, there
(07:23):
is a leak in the crossword puzzle. And they arrested
this nerdy schoolmaster who had written the crosswords and they
grilled them. But it turned out most people think it
was a weird coincidence, because those coincidences do happen. But whatever,
the British Spy Service got involved and arrested this poor
(07:44):
guy and it turned out.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Hey, Jake, you seem to be pretty supportive of nerdy
puzzle guys.
Speaker 5 (07:49):
Yes, I am very pro nerdy puzzle people. I think
more nerdy puzzle people would make the world a better place.
And I'll defend that, not physically because I'm nerdy.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
So well. Here in the US, our short of first
code breaking organization who I was tied to the Army,
and it was in a building near where I'm living
now in northern Virginia, near Washington. It's now the State
Department's Preparation and Training school. And of course in the
United States now the main sort of code breaking organization
is at the NSSA, the National Security Agency.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
In my book, I did actually go to Langley to
the headquarters of the CIA to see one of the
great unsolved puzzles of all time right there at the
headquarters of the CIA, cryptos.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Sam quick question, did you go to the Dunkin Donuts
or did you go to the Starbucks? That's how we
divide people there. Yeah, and which are you tribes Duncan Donuts,
I'm Duncan Okay good, and adds Starbucks.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
When they say what name do you want? You can't
give them your real name, right if you're under cover,
you got to give them a fake name.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
And the barista does have to get security clearances.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
It was the weekend, so I actually did not get
to do either. But as you know, Cryptos is this
sculpture that was coming in nineteen eighty eight to spruce
up the CIA headquarters. And it was done by a
sculptor named Jim Sandborn in collaboration with a cryptographer who
used to work at the CIA. And it contains like
(09:15):
hundreds of these characters, these letters, and they are a code,
and some of the code has been broken, but not
all of it. There's one section at the end that
has not been broken. And there are thousands, literally thousands
of people whose passion, whose hobby is to try to
break Cryptos number four, as it's called. And I'm on
(09:37):
this bulletin board where every day I get like ten
emails about, Oh, I think I got it. It's the
wind Talkers, that's the It's actually no, it's from Moby Dick.
All these crazy theories, and of course none of them
are right yet. So yeah, I just visited it, but
you worked there. So what was it like from the inside,
having this mysterious sculpture.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
We have different tribes inside it, the CIA, and so
John and I were like the operators, right, we handle spies,
we recruit spies, and quite frankly, we just look at
it and go.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
We're the knuckle draggers, that's right.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
But there we do hear people who are like the
science and technology guys and the code guys, and like
they're in there looking at it, and we're like, basically,
it's beyond us. We don't even truck.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Yeah, it was certainly beyond me. But what I found
interesting about it, First of all, I loved going to
the CIA because getting vetted for it was a hilarious
and crazy long process. And then when I announced on
the board that I was going to visit in person,
they got all excited and they're like, look and see
(10:45):
what the color of the grass is on this section?
Is the water in the whirlpool? Which way is it
going clockwise or counterclockwise? Are the bolts in any particular?
So they had all of these ideas and to me.
Crypto's is a very good example of a phenomenon that
is related to both puzzles and conspiracies, and that is apenia.
(11:10):
And appenia is our tendency to find patterns where there
are no patterns, to find signal in the noise. So
if you see Jesus's face on a piece of French toast,
that's apaphenia, or maybe not, maybe as who knows, maybe
it is a miracle, but it is at the heart
of so much conspiracy. You're seeing all of these connections
(11:33):
that aren't there. You see, oh, the word CP in
these emails. That doesn't stand for cheese pizza. They're not
ordering cheese pizza. That's child pornography. And that was literally
one of the big breaks that QAnon came up with.
And I think as humans were built to see patterns,
which was good from an evolutionary standpoint. When there was
(11:55):
a rustle in the grass, you wanted to believe that
it was a snake because the cost of being mistaken
was pretty minimal, whereas the cost of being mistaken the
other way. You thought it was win but it was
really a snake that is costly, that'll get you killed.
So we have this tendency to apophenia, but now in
(12:16):
the age of social media, not a good thing. It's
where we get QAnon and all because we're seeing all
of these connections that don't exist. And my theory is
that puzzles are a safe outlet for your apathenia because
there is an actual connection and you can find it,
but it's not going to inspire you to storm the capitol.
(12:38):
It is a puzzle and it is for fun, and
it also teaches you how to be wary of apafenia
because you have to be very open minded and say
you give me as much evidence as you want, doesn't matter.
I am still going to stick with this crazy hypothesis.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
If you want to hear the entire Mission Implausible episode,
and there are other episodes, please subscribe to the Mission
Implausible feed and of course we'll meet you here tomorrow
for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzlingly
Hello, puzzlers. We have a special bonus episode for you
this Saturday. It is with two former CIA operatives, John
Cipher and Jerry O'shay. You might remember that they were
guests on The Puzzler a few days ago and they
solved a CIA related puzzle. Well. In addition to hosting them,
(00:24):
I was also a guest on their podcast, Mission Implausible,
which is a great podcast. So I thought I would
put some of our conversation here, namely the part about
the overlap between spying and puzzles. But here's our chat
about puzzles and spying. You'll hear about CIA code words,
(00:44):
about QAnon. You'll hear one theory on the inspiration of
the phrase double seven. There are other theories out there,
but this is a fun one. By the way, my
friend John Stern is a producer of Mission Implausible, so
thank you John for making this happen. John wrote comedy
pieces for me way back when I was an editor
(01:07):
at Esquire magazine. He also produces hilarious shows such as
Wet Hot American Summer Ten Years Later and the Bachelor
parody Burning Love, which I love. So check those out
and enjoy.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'shay.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in
high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
This is Mission implausible. Welcome back to Mission Implausible. Our
producer John Stern is here with us, and he's going
to introduce our guests.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Yeah. Sometimes Adam Davidson brings on one of his friends
and everyone's very impressed, everyone meaning Jerry.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
But today I.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Am bringing on someone who he is going to blow
all of Adam's guests away. He actually is one of
my favorite people.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
His same is AJ Jacobs.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
He's had a number of what I believe John Stewart
called method writing books. Do you remember Aj, when you
were writing The Year of Living Biblically? You met me
for lunch on the Upper West Side. I didn't know
you were writing the book, and you showed up in
a white robe, long beard, long hair, and barefoot.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
I commit to the bit.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
That's right. He also has a very fun and fascinated
book called The Puzzler and his podcast called The Puzzler,
and his most recent book is The Year of Living
Constitutionally aj as is. His want was living the Constitution
in practical terms. Aj When you got a cold, did
you get like leeches to be bled? Is that what
you did? Well?
Speaker 5 (02:57):
First of all, I just want to say thank you
for that lovely introduction and thanks for having me on
the show. I love the show. Yes, I did try
to order leeches and my wife put a cabash on it.
I also when I went to the dermatologists and had
to have a mole removed, I did request no no anesthetic,
no anesthetic, and she said for insurance reasons she couldn't.
(03:19):
So that's my excuse for why I never did blood
letting or the tobacco smoke enema, which was a very
cutting edge and popular medical procedure of the day where
they would literally blow smoke up your butt. That's where
the phrase comes from.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Most likely did insurance cover it then, But what was
the insurance situation they had for the founders caret quid
Ben Franklin is considered to have started some insurance like thing,
but I don't know if that was covered.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
So Agent getting into the weird intersection between puzzles and
codes and espionage and conspiracy theories. I'm going to throw
a story at you. This hass to do with espionage
and it has to do with codes. It is one
of my favorite so I've been looking for an excuse
to use it. So let's go back to the fifteen twenties.
(04:06):
Elizabeth the Second is she's Queen of England and she
has a spymaster, a guy by the name of John
d Dee, and he goes around Europe collecting intelligence for
the Queen. Now d is a puzzle master like you,
and he's also very big into numerology, and he's decided
(04:28):
that he should be represented by the number seven. It
was his lucky number, and when he would write to
the Queen, it was for her eyes only, so he
would put zero zero, one for each eye, and then
he would actually put in like a little eyeball, a
little dot, and then number seven so she would know
(04:49):
it was for her eyes only, and it was from
number seven, So he was the first seven and when
she responded to him, she didn't write out Queen Eliza
Zabeth Mayjesty Rex. She just wrote M and so this
is where from out of Cambridge, this is where seven
(05:09):
comes from it.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
I love this story. First of all, why didn't I
interview you for my book? This is fantastic. So here's
another one. World War two saw some interesting overlaps between
puzzles and spying. The Telegraph newspaper in England in nineteen
forty one, I believe, printed a very hard They love
(05:31):
in England. They love their super tricky wordplaye crosswords. They're
harder than in America. No offense to America. And they
printed one and they said, if you solve this in
less than twelve minutes, get in touch. And it turned
out that it was a recruiting tool for what would
(05:51):
become the Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and his codebreakers
helped win US World War two by solving the Nazi
Enigma code. So this is sort of like, are you
good enough to be a codebreaker? And I'll give you
one example, just to give you an example of how
tricky these were. They're almost like dad jokes on steroids.
(06:12):
They're like a clue for seventeen across in this famous
puzzle was is this town ready for a flood? Question?
Mark is this town ready for a flood? And it's
six letters, it starts with N. So the way to
think about what do you think about when you think
of a flood? What comes to mind? What's the most
(06:32):
famous flood ever?
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Noah? Noah?
Speaker 3 (06:35):
And what did he use?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
What did he use?
Speaker 4 (06:38):
An arc?
Speaker 5 (06:39):
So if you're ready for a flood, you don't want
an old arc, you want a newer Newark. So that's
the kind of level of wordplay that they were going for.
So I love that. And there was weirdly a sequel
to that because the Telegraph was involved in another spy
puzzle incident at the end of World War Two. They
(07:00):
printed these crosswords and the crosswords had in them the
answers included words like oh, Maha and Utah and neptune
and mulberry. And someone noticed this and those were secret
code words used by the Allies during D Day and
they freaked out and they said, oh my god, there
(07:23):
is a leak in the crossword puzzle. And they arrested
this nerdy schoolmaster who had written the crosswords and they
grilled them. But it turned out most people think it
was a weird coincidence, because those coincidences do happen. But whatever,
the British Spy Service got involved and arrested this poor
(07:44):
guy and it turned out.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Hey, Jake, you seem to be pretty supportive of nerdy
puzzle guys.
Speaker 5 (07:49):
Yes, I am very pro nerdy puzzle people. I think
more nerdy puzzle people would make the world a better place.
And I'll defend that, not physically because I'm nerdy.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
So well. Here in the US, our short of first
code breaking organization who I was tied to the Army,
and it was in a building near where I'm living
now in northern Virginia, near Washington. It's now the State
Department's Preparation and Training school. And of course in the
United States now the main sort of code breaking organization
is at the NSSA, the National Security Agency.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
In my book, I did actually go to Langley to
the headquarters of the CIA to see one of the
great unsolved puzzles of all time right there at the
headquarters of the CIA, cryptos.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Sam quick question, did you go to the Dunkin Donuts
or did you go to the Starbucks? That's how we
divide people there. Yeah, and which are you tribes Duncan Donuts,
I'm Duncan Okay good, and adds Starbucks.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
When they say what name do you want? You can't
give them your real name, right if you're under cover,
you got to give them a fake name.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
And the barista does have to get security clearances.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
It was the weekend, so I actually did not get
to do either. But as you know, Cryptos is this
sculpture that was coming in nineteen eighty eight to spruce
up the CIA headquarters. And it was done by a
sculptor named Jim Sandborn in collaboration with a cryptographer who
used to work at the CIA. And it contains like
(09:15):
hundreds of these characters, these letters, and they are a code,
and some of the code has been broken, but not
all of it. There's one section at the end that
has not been broken. And there are thousands, literally thousands
of people whose passion, whose hobby is to try to
break Cryptos number four, as it's called. And I'm on
(09:37):
this bulletin board where every day I get like ten
emails about, Oh, I think I got it. It's the
wind Talkers, that's the It's actually no, it's from Moby Dick.
All these crazy theories, and of course none of them
are right yet. So yeah, I just visited it, but
you worked there. So what was it like from the inside,
having this mysterious sculpture.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
We have different tribes inside it, the CIA, and so
John and I were like the operators, right, we handle spies,
we recruit spies, and quite frankly, we just look at
it and go.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
We're the knuckle draggers, that's right.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
But there we do hear people who are like the
science and technology guys and the code guys, and like
they're in there looking at it, and we're like, basically,
it's beyond us. We don't even truck.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Yeah, it was certainly beyond me. But what I found
interesting about it, First of all, I loved going to
the CIA because getting vetted for it was a hilarious
and crazy long process. And then when I announced on
the board that I was going to visit in person,
they got all excited and they're like, look and see
(10:45):
what the color of the grass is on this section?
Is the water in the whirlpool? Which way is it
going clockwise or counterclockwise? Are the bolts in any particular?
So they had all of these ideas and to me.
Crypto's is a very good example of a phenomenon that
is related to both puzzles and conspiracies, and that is apenia.
(11:10):
And appenia is our tendency to find patterns where there
are no patterns, to find signal in the noise. So
if you see Jesus's face on a piece of French toast,
that's apaphenia, or maybe not, maybe as who knows, maybe
it is a miracle, but it is at the heart
of so much conspiracy. You're seeing all of these connections
(11:33):
that aren't there. You see, oh, the word CP in
these emails. That doesn't stand for cheese pizza. They're not
ordering cheese pizza. That's child pornography. And that was literally
one of the big breaks that QAnon came up with.
And I think as humans were built to see patterns,
which was good from an evolutionary standpoint. When there was
(11:55):
a rustle in the grass, you wanted to believe that
it was a snake because the cost of being mistaken
was pretty minimal, whereas the cost of being mistaken the
other way. You thought it was win but it was
really a snake that is costly, that'll get you killed.
So we have this tendency to apophenia, but now in
(12:16):
the age of social media, not a good thing. It's
where we get QAnon and all because we're seeing all
of these connections that don't exist. And my theory is
that puzzles are a safe outlet for your apathenia because
there is an actual connection and you can find it,
but it's not going to inspire you to storm the capitol.
(12:38):
It is a puzzle and it is for fun, and
it also teaches you how to be wary of apafenia
because you have to be very open minded and say
you give me as much evidence as you want, doesn't matter.
I am still going to stick with this crazy hypothesis.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
If you want to hear the entire Mission Implausible episode,
and there are other episodes, please subscribe to the Mission
Implausible feed and of course we'll meet you here tomorrow
for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzlingly
Hosts And Creators
Greg Pliska
A.J. Jacobs
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