Stuff You Should Know - How the Secret Service Works

Episode Date: September 14, 2017

The U.S. Secret Service began after a mandate from President Lincoln called for a service to combat counterfeiters. Since then, they have become more well known as the agency that guards and protects the president and the first family, along with that of former presidents. Learn all about the ins and outs of the this not so secret service in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland.

And that makes this Stuff You Should Know, a continuing law enforcement saga. This has gotta be it. You say that every time. I don't think this is it. Well, this is one of my picks, and I stressed up until like an hour ago that we had done this, even though I looked like 20 times.

Yeah, no, I thought that too when I first saw it, but the article's so new, there's no way we did. And then I think what it was, Chuck, was probably the counter-fitting episode. Yeah, you're probably right. I bet that one really crossed over a lot. I think you're right. We did do a good one for everybody

who's not familiar on counter-fitting. I don't remember exactly when, but go check it out, because it was good. And the reason why the two things would have crossed over is because when most people think of Chuck, the Secret Service, which we're talking about today, they think of dudes, big dudes in suits, dark suits, sunglasses, got the wire in their ear.

Every once in a while, they put their finger to the ear to look cool, you know? Oh, I thought that's just if they had earwax building up. Maybe so, that's the other ear. And that they're usually running alongside the president as he or eventually she is driving down the road, right? Yeah, sure. But the Secret Service is tasked

with doing way more than that. And that's actually protecting the president or the vice president or the first lady or certain other people. That's actually secondary to their main role. And that role actually came decades after the Secret Service was first established. Yeah, I mean, I think secondary,

I took issue in the article when I read that, but I think secondary in terms of allocated personnel. Right. But for sure, primary and importance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, I think protecting the president's life is more important than catching counterfeiters.

Right, but a much, much smaller allocation of people. Yeah. Are actually on that protection force. Yeah, and I think that's, I get the impression that that's the glamorous assignment. Oh yeah, baby. You know, like protecting the president specifically is probably pretty plumb.

But that, again, that's not what the bulk of people in the Secret Service are doing at any given point in time. All right, so should we go back in time a bit? Yeah. To the close of the Civil War, the American Civil War specifically. And this was in 1865 and very, with a great deal of heaping irony.

I did not know this. This may be the fact of the show. President Abraham Lincoln officially signed the legislation to create the Secret Service the evening that he was killed dead. Yes, that day. Right, he signed it and then went to the Ford Theater, I believe.

Yeah, so ironic in one sense that, you know, obviously you can't look at that and say, you know, it has no irony whatsoever. But not ironic when you look at what he was signing at the time, which was not, hey, we need somebody to protect presidents. Cause that didn't come along until, well, 1894, just like less than 30 years later.

Is that right? 29, yeah. Informal protection started with Grover Cleveland, but after McKinley's assassination in 1901 was when they said, hey, maybe we need to really just codify this agency. And I'll tell you about irony. It turns out that when McKinley was assassinated,

there were three Secret Service agents flanking him at the time. Yeah, I read up about that one. That's one I wasn't too familiar with. I wasn't either, but it was pretty fascinating. Anarchist, right? Say again. It was an anarchist, correct?

Yeah, an anarchist in Buffalo, New York, who said, who came for the assassination and stayed for the hot wings. I also read about Garfield. Garfield didn't get any mention in here. He was, he definitely served to make the Secret Service kind of become part of presidential protection in that he was the second of three sitting presidents

to be assassinated technically while the Secret Service was in existence. So when that assassination plot against Grover Cleveland was uncovered, they were like, all right, all right, we really need to do something about this. Yeah, I think we should cover assassination and assassination attempts in full

because they're just far more than I thought. Like once I was looking into this, I forgot that Clinton had a couple of not so serious attempts. The one guy that shot at the White House and then the other dude tried to fly, stole a Cessna, remember that and tried to fly it into the White House. I forgot about that. And both of them, by all accounts,

were assassination attempts, just, I would call them clumsy at best. I think that's fair, yeah. But yeah, there've been a lot more than I thought, so maybe we should just knock that out one day. Let's do it. I can't believe we haven't already. No, no, it's bizarre.

But today, if we're talking Secret Service, just by the numbers, about 6,500 people work there. About 3,200 of those are special agents. Another 1,300 are what's called uniform division officers. And then a couple of thousand plus and change of admin types, tech support, just people who keep the agency running. Yeah, and apparently there have been women there

since 1971. Yeah. So I thought it was somewhat progressive. And then as of today, there's the first outsider in the 100 year history, or no, in about 100 years. I guess there have been outsiders previously. But the first non-secret service agent to rise to director level has been appointed by Trump,

actually, a guy named Tex. Yeah. Tex Al's. General, former Marine Corps General, Randolph Tex Al's. Is it Al's? Al's, Al's. Alice. Alice is another way to say it.

And you mentioned women, and of course, very famously, Julia Pearson briefly led the agency when Obama was in there. But as we'll see later on, there were quite a number of kind of things that happened in a row that were very embarrassing for the Secret Service Agency. So she forced out or resigned for kind of what's the difference?

I think what's the difference is the impression I have. Okay. So I think her tenure kind of coincided. She kind of takes the brunt from what I understand of the blame for something that was part of a culture that has long been around. Yeah, for sure.

As part of the Secret Service. And apparently, one of the big problems is that it is in a thoroughly understaffed executive branch agency. Yes. Like the people who are tasked with protecting the president and the president's family and the vice president, the vice president's family,

they are thoroughly overworked. And they also have a longstanding party culture too. And as a result, you have a lot of burnout. Yeah. And very low morale. Apparently Chuck, there was a survey done of 305 federal agencies in 2016 and the Secret Service rated dead last for employee satisfaction.

Yeah. I mean, that says it all. They're not somewhere in the middle. They were number 305. Right. So apparently at the time of the survey, they were operating with 500 fewer people than they were authorized to hire.

So it's clearly an overworked department. Yes, very much so. Apparently they've added several people. Yeah, several hundred. Yeah, like seven, I think, 700 people. Yeah, 700, 800 people in 2017. And I think that's partially because they just were woefully understaffed and partially

because the current president has more family than past presidents for sure. Right. More adult children and their kids and more travel going on to weekend places all over the country. So that's just going to require more staffing. Right.

Which is probably good. They needed to hire up anyway. So you want to talk history, Chuck, history of the service? I know we kind of went back to 1865. So let's stay there. We've been doing all this from 1865 the whole time, it turns out. That's right.

So the reason why the Secret Service was initially created was to combat counterfeiting, right? And I think we said in our counterfeiting episode, there was just a ton of counterfeit bank notes and circulation in the States at the time. Because if you were a banker, if you were just some guy who had a bunch of money and could gain the trust of people,

you could issue your own currency there for a while. So it was really easy to print money at the time. Yeah, this stat here is hard to believe, but 30 to 50% of all the money was fake. All the money. That's just ridiculous. Yeah. So Lincoln knew that was a problem,

started up the service in 1865. And just a couple of years after that said, you know what, why don't we expand your duties to like fraud, smuggling, mail robbery and stuff like that. And we'll stick around for some of the older stuff. But since then, it's just sort of been expanded. It seems like a lot to me to include other things, but I don't know how the government runs sometimes

as far as like, well, we need someone to monitor like phishing scams online. So it seems like the secret service is kind of like, oh, let's just give it to them. But I'm sure that's not correct, you know? I thought the designation of stuff was pretty odd as well, for sure. But that is kind of how it's gone.

As long as it has to do with law enforcement, the secret service feels pretty good about giving a crack at it. Yeah, for sure. So besides the counterfeiting and all that stuff today, not only do they have to protect the president and vice president, they have to protect their families, all the former presidents.

And there are a lot more living former presidents now, which is another reason they need more people. It's medical science's fault. All the spouses, all the children under 16, when you're a candidate running for president, like a major one, I doubt if, well, I'm not gonna make fun of anyone on the campaign trail.

That's probably true to that. I don't know if Jeb Bush had a detail, or actually he may have. Jeb Bush is probably born with the detail. Yeah, because he's linked twice over to the presidency. Yeah. But not where it counted. And then all the spouses, foreign heads of state

while they visit, and basically, from what I gather, they can be assigned to protect anyone at any time if someone thinks it's necessary. So I think you're right about that last part, that if a president says, hey, I want you guys to protect this person while they're here, that's fine. But from what I saw, I think it was a New York Times rundown

based on budgets, they seem to say, no, it's basically like the Secret Service protects the president, the vice president, their families, former presidents, that kind of thing. And that things like a foreign head of state would be covered by the diplomatic security service of the state department. And that there's a ton of other federal security agencies

that are running around Washington that people confuse for the Secret Service. But the Secret Service, their mission is actually pretty narrow as far as protection goes. Yeah, and I imagine they all are in touch with one another too, just to make sure everyone's butts are covered. They're probably like, hey, how far can you pee?

Oh, no, let's see how far you can pee. Or they like, we got a lot of dignitaries coming in and you guys got over at Secret Service and all we have left is Ronnie. And you don't want Ronnie guarding anybody. No, he's good with fishing scams and that's it. So the other thing that kind of surprised me is big events. They're these things called national special security

events. And they're under Department of Homeland Security now. So this can cover things like the Super Bowl. If there are enough important people at an event like this, then the Secret Service might be there. Yeah, which I mean, makes sense. And I'm sure like the local law enforcement just loves the Secret Service coming in and bossing them around.

Oh, sure. You know? Yeah. But they do because it's the Super Bowl, aka the big game. That's right. And then you were saying also it seemed like, give it to the Secret Service whenever you look at their history.

A couple of good examples of that are the Treasury Police. Yeah. The Revenuers basically got folded into the Secret Service in I think 1937. And they took over the White House Police Force in 1930. Right. So there's a lot of law enforcement underneath the title of Secret Service.

Yeah, another thing that I had never even heard of, electronic crimes, task forces. Yeah, I think that's kind of new. Yeah, the ECTFs. And this is after 9-11 in the Patriot Act. And they said, hey, you know what? We need to create these ECTFs basically to prevent attacks on America through cybercrime.

Yeah. So these are, I think there are, what, 39 of them all over America and Europe working together with other countries, other financial crimes, task forces. And this is the stuff that doesn't get any of the glory. You know, it's all supposed to be pretty, this is kind of hush-hush to begin with. I think unless it goes wrong.

Right. But they seem to, I looked into it, they seem to kind of focus on forensics, like going over computers or devices for evidence or whatever. Oh, OK. They investigate data breaches and network intrusions. They do cyber intelligence. So I guess they gather intelligence from networks,

but also from like some of those devices they're doing forensic work on. It's probably some of the more important work being done, to be honest. It really is. They're basically tasked with guarding the financial sector of the US. And I assume probably some of foreign countries,

especially in Europe, too. But then they're also doing real low-level stuff, too, like credit card theft, identity theft. So they're basically anything, any crime that can be done using a computer or a computer network, they seem to be fighting with the ECTFs. Yeah. Should we take a break?

Yeah, let's. All right, let's do that, and we're going to talk a little bit about the sexiest assignment of them all, the PPD. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio

app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, you said we would hear about the sexiest position of them all. What is that? The PPD, the Presidential Protection Division. So this is the one that everyone thinks of as Secret Service, when you see Ronald Reagan being covered up and shoved in the back of a limo.

Or when Jerry Ford moved to Springfield. Yeah. Or like you mentioned, jogging alongside the limousine. Yeah, or jogging alongside a tubby, bloke, Bill Clinton. Yeah, or riding horseback alongside Ronald Reagan. Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot he used to do that sometimes. That's one of the things this article points out,

is you got to take up the hobbies of the president. And Clinton very famously trotted along various wooded paths. And then Reagan would have the Secret Service round up union organizers, and then he'd ride over them with his horse. Well, apparently, there's a lot of horseback riding that goes on. But Reagan's was pretty intense.

Like he was a real horse guy. The guy was a cowboy. He was a movie cowboy come to life. Yeah, so apparently, you had to really learn to ride if you were on Reagan's team. I got you. You know, it's not just like trotting along like Clinton probably liked to do.

Right, yeah. Do you remember that Saturday Night Live, when Clinton was first elected, and it was Phil Hartman playing him? Oh, yeah. He was out jogging, and he just he kept stopping into McDonald's on his jogging route. That was a big joke.

But wouldn't you, as a Secret Service agent, want to just be like, you know, it'd be a lot safer and easier for everybody if you just hit the treadmill? Yeah, right, and watch television? Sure. As your main hobby? Right. Well, I think that's kind of going on now.

Yeah, I guess so. All right, so this is the one that you talked about having a really high burnout rate because it's, well, first of all, there's the stress of I can die and I'm willing to die on my job. Yeah, and apparently, there's like this. Did you hear that there's a myth that they have to take an oath to take a bullet for the president?

I had never heard that as specifically an oath. Right. And I was glad to know that that was true or untrue. Right, it was untrue. Yes, there is no such oath, right? No, it's apparently if you are a Secret Service agent, you just know that that might be part of the job. And when you show up that day, you're willing to do it.

Correct. It's supposedly. But beyond all the stresses of dying on the job like that, the schedule itself is just really tough. And I've seen a lot of different breakdowns of the on and off schedules. So I don't know if this one is the gospel truth. But the one in our article, at least,

says two weeks of a day shift, two weeks of a midnight shift, two weeks of an evening shift, and then two weeks of training. So I guess training is just continuous. Yeah, what's weird, though, is I had seen at least back in the 60s, training was code for fill out these forms that say you did all this physical fitness. So if there was like, if there was two weeks of training, it seems like it's almost like, I don't know if it is anymore,

but that would have been like a two week break. Which frankly, I don't really blame them for that kind of schedule. Yeah, they undergo the same training regimen as Major League Baseball Empires. But the thing is, Chuck, is it's like, if you're tasked with protecting the president, everyone knows, like any organizational psychologist,

anybody can tell you that when you do different shift work, you're going to mentally suffer profoundly, right? So why are we putting the people who are protecting the president and the first lady and the vice president, why are we putting them through that kind of mental torture that doesn't make any sense? Is it really just a staffing thing?

Well, I mean, what's the answer then? Someone's got to take the midnight shift. Sure, but that person should be like, you got the midnight shift for a year. Oh, just so they can get used to it. Yeah, so your sleep pattern can change, and then you could be like, when you rotate out to the day shift or the morning shift or whatever,

you might have a two week transition period or so. Who knows? Maybe you get two weeks off or something in between. I don't know, but there's got to be a better way than this. This just is grueling. Well, I do know too that permanent midnight shifts can lead to weirdness. Oh, yeah.

That's what they did with Ronnie. Right. That's why Ronnie's so unreliable, because on the fourth month of his midnight shift, things got strange. Yeah, he got kind of pasty. I shouldn't have said Ronnie, because now everyone's going to think I'm thinking Reagan.

No. Everybody knows we call him a gipper. So if you are on to that detail of the sitting president, you're the cream of the crop of the PPD. Yeah, which is kind of a double-edged sword, because you want somebody with a lot of experience who's proven himself or herself over the years. But at the same time, you're also

starting to run up against age and slower reflexes. And so if you look at some of the agents who are around the president, you're going to see somebody who's probably in their 40s, if not over 40. And that's just, if you could have a guy or a girl who's like 27, 30 even, they're probably going to be faster on the draw than that 40-year-old, 45-year-old.

But they also might not know to notice certain things that the 45-year-old would. Right, because they're on Snapchat. Exactly. They're like, LOL, president just fell over for some reason. BRB, he needs help. If you can still be on the PPD, though, and not actually be on the detail of protecting the president

in that moment, like if you can be on the PPD and be on the assessment team, like any sort of, well, first of all, anyone who's ever made a threat on the president in any way, whether it's Twitter or like a letter that shows up at the White House, they are thoroughly investigated in person. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah, for sure. Oh, I hadn't realized that. And any kind of advanced work they have to do, like if the president's traveling, which happens all the time, there's always some sort of advanced intelligence going on about where the president's going, the town, if they're visiting a restaurant,

if they're staying in a hotel. All kinds of background checks are going on with every employee that works there. Yeah, and if the president follows a bit of a pattern, like going to the same place, like a winter White House or a Western White House or something like that, like that place is covered, it's checked out, it's probably guarded all the time.

So they'll do advance once and then maybe update it here or there. But what poses the real headache in nightmare for the Secret Service is when they're going to places they haven't been before or haven't been in a while. And so they've got to do all of this incredible analysis and planning.

They've got to figure out, OK, well, this is the route the president's going to take through the hotel. And then if this happens, then here's the escape route. If an incident happens, in the next corridor, here's the escape route. Here are two alternate routes to the original route. And look, there's a pretty good place for a sniper to be. So we need to keep our eyes up there.

If there's a fire, we need to leave here. That's just like one place. And then like you said, they also do background checks too, so that any employee, apparently, who has any kind of criminal record at, say, like a hotel, that the president's going to be staying in, they're not allowed to work while the president's there. Which is like half the staff of every hotel.

I would guess that that could be kind of problematic for some hotels, you know? Not to say that they're staff of criminals, but at the very least drug offenders. Well, it's said even like, yeah, minor stuff. Like they're going to say, you tell Ronnie to stay home. And the manager would be like, I thought Ronnie was with you. And then Ronnie's like, wow.

And the press's enter and the financial system collapses. The president, if they stay in a hotel, they will own three floors of that hotel in full. The one the president is on, the one above it, and the one below it. And apparently it's, I read one little insider thing on when the president stays at a hotel

that they normally don't. It's just a nightmare for the hotel. Yeah. In every way. Yep. And for the people who were staying there, especially if it was sudden. Yeah, true.

Because you don't have a reservation there anymore. True. Like TS, sorry. What else could you do? You could be on the video, in the video department of the PPD, because they film all this stuff. The PPD AV club.

Basically, every motorcade is filmed, or videoed, obviously. I say filmed because I'm old. Right. Any time the president's traveling like that, all this stuff is on tape. Again, not on tape. It's all on reels or reels.

Because like there's a pruder film, like you need to have this stuff in case of an attack or an assassination attempt, so you can rewind and watch the crowd. Right. It's just handy. But it's kind of reactive, whereas like the advanced people are proactive

in trying to prevent an incident from ever taking place, right? Yeah. Did you mention the details that are specific to like people who are permanently guarded? No. So if you're a secret service agent, you might be assigned to like a field office.

And if the president comes to your state, you might be called up to go work what's called a standing position, which is literally just standing around, right? So if it's a hotel room, this article uses a pretty good example. If it's a hotel that the president's staying at, the advanced team who goes right before the president

arrives with the president will say, clear the stairwell, checked it for anything, cleared it, and then you come in and you stand there and make sure nothing changes to that stairwell. No one else comes in, no one drops anything off. There's nothing like that. That's your job right then. That's probably a pretty common assignment

for somebody who works protection in the secret service, right? Yeah. But if you are protecting, say, the first lady, you're going to be part of a detail that is a crew of people whose job it is to protect the first lady. And they get to be pretty close apparently,

or it can happen, I guess. You mean emotionally? Yeah. Romantically? No, emotionally. Surprise, that hadn't been a rom-com yet. It's like three's company, but in the White House. But it's funny you're mentioning that stairway detail.

Like, that's literally the worst job. You can get as a PA on a film set. Yeah, that's pretty bad. It's called lockup, where you're like three blocks away, just saying, no, sir, you can't go around this corner. Right, and there's always a guy like me who's like, you can't legally keep me from walking on the sidewalks, public sidewalk, jerk.

I was the worst lockup guy when I was a PA because I would always just be like, all right, you're totally right. Yeah, it's a free country. People say, took you looking through again. I'm like, dude, what am I going to do? Like physically restrain somebody? I always felt so bad when we were shooting our TV show.

Yeah. When people were redirected from their normal path, you know? Well, look at the bright side. You didn't have to feel bad for too long. No, that's true. There's also the food detail. Even in the White House, with the very much trusted White House cooking staff,

there's someone in the kitchen from Secret Service watching over that stuff. Yeah, making sure Sven didn't have any kind of break and is now trying to poison the president. Correct. Apparently if you want to order a pizza though, as the president, like literally I don't want the White House pizza.

I want the pizza from whatever. Right. You can do that, but they say that they send it to a different address. They send it to the Naval Observatory usually. Oh yeah? Just to kind of throw them off the scent. Seems smart, but certainly not foolproof.

No. You know? But I guess- Especially now that you just told everybody. I guess it couldn't poison every pizza going to the Naval Observatory though, because they would be outed. I don't know.

Like some evil organization like Spectre probably could. Yeah, that's true. Good point. This is a pretty- Is that a good point? I think so. Okay. It's a pretty expensive process too in 2017.

The fiscal year that is $750 million on just protective operations, which is about half of its overall budget. Yeah. Which is, you know, I mean, it's worth it obviously, but that's a lot of dough going toward the very smallest thing that you do. When half your money is spent on that,

then you're going to run out of money. Right, yeah, and they did actually. The fiscal year goes, we're recording actually before the end of the 2017 fiscal year. But the Secret Service said, we're going to run out of money like right around the end of the fiscal year,

and we still have three more months of operations that we have to do. So what do you want to do? You know? Sure. And apparently there was also, I was reading in the Washington Post about a dispute over money,

about actually terms of a lease when the Secret Service tried to run out office space and headquarters in Trump Tower, that the Trump Organization said, you should go find office space elsewhere because they couldn't come to terms on a lease somehow. And so the Secret Service moved down to a trailer on the sidewalk in front of Trump Tower.

Wow. Which I guess they found out that they burned through all their money and they were like, you guys go to a trailer on the sidewalk. Yeah, that's probably the most expensive property in the world that has a trailer on their front lawn. Yeah.

It's pretty funny. And we should mention, we joked about the dark glasses, those actually do serve a function. They're not just trying to look cool, they're trying to keep their eyes hidden for what they're looking at. Yeah.

You know? What was that one agent's name and... Taxi driver? No. In the line of fire? No. No, it has nothing to do with Secret Service. Matrix, the Matrix.

Oh. Oh, the... Agent Smith, right? Oh, the main bad guy? I think so. Yeah. I thought he did a good job rocking the glasses and everything.

Literally had nothing to do with anything, but him looking cool in glasses. Right. Okay. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do. I think I just threw us off. We probably should and regroup.

We're learning stuff with Joshua and Sharves. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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We talked a little bit about other stuff that the Secret Service gets down on. Counterfeiting, mail fraud, those are some throwbacks. But then they've got the whole new cyber crime thing with like fishing and stuff like that. Yeah. But they also have, to combat this crime, they've accrued some pretty cool stuff over the years,

not the least of which is an ink library. Yeah, this I think is, for me, the coolest part of this show. So this article says 9,500 types of ink. I saw 11,400. That's believable. Yeah. So the idea is they literally have collected, since the 1920s, what they think is every kind of ink

and every kind of pen that has ever been made. Yeah. That's the goal, at least. So they can use that. I think when BIC makes a new pen, they will send them their ink and stuff. Otherwise, they have to collect it. And this is too, I didn't like, if they ever get a letter

about any kind of crime that is under their purview, they have a database to compare it to. Right. And not just with things like ransom notes and threatening letters. Apparently, they'll use that kind of stuff for if somebody's forged a baseball signed by Babe Ruth or something like that.

Oh, interesting. If it's a really high profile crime that has to do with ink, they'll freelance for somebody. Interesting. Yeah. And they use gas chromatography. It's not just like, this one looks black. Oh, this one's black.

I figured out who did it. But apparently, if you're a field agent going around the world, the ink library guys will ask you to grab some pens while you're in Cartagena. Oh, really? Yeah. It's like a standing request. They also have an information database for handwriting too.

The forensic information system for handwriting database or fish. Yeah. Decent acronym. Yes. See, yeah, but it breaks our one rule of acronyming, which is just kind of forgetting about another word so it looks cooler. Right, yeah.

Then fished. Right, right, exactly. Or it could be the fish database, I guess. Oh, no, that's true. So this is basically just a handwriting database. And I imagine there's a lot of overlap here with FBI and CIA, don't you think? What else?

94, they added providing evidence and assistance to missing and exploited children. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. And their big bag, though, was really counterfeiting and bank fraud. In 2016, they executed more than 2,100 arrests for stuff like that and recovered a lot of money every year too, right?

Yeah, there was one bust in 2016 in Lima, Peru, where they recovered like $3 million in counterfeit US dollars and 50,000 counterfeit euros. Not bad. Which I think was their biggest single bust to date. It's a lot of moolah. It is. A lot of fake moolah.

So what if Josh wants to be in the Secret Service? I don't think that's going to work out for me. Well, it's too late, first of all. Yeah, you have to be between 21 and 37. You have to do a PP screen. Yeah. They don't want you to have any visible tattoos or piercings, which I imagine is probably getting harder and harder

these days. Yeah, it's probably not a good look to have the presidential detail guy having those big earring gauges. So what those are called? Gauge, yeah. You know, one of those big two-inters. Can you fit a hot dog through it?

Yes, I can. You're hired. No tattoos or piercings. What else? You got to pass that polygraph. You got to take a physical. Got to get that Secret Service top security clearance. What can it take?

Geez, nine months to get that? Yeah, and I looked into that, depending on what level of security you're looking for. It says nine months here, but I saw they could do it in like 60 days. But depending on how thorough they go, like they're either going to go back five years or 10 years into your past.

Oh, wow. They're going to interview your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends, your pastor, whoever. And they're going to ask them all sorts of personal questions like, is this guy a freak? You know what I mean? Like a freak freak? Does he like to get wasted?

Does he love America? What country does he like as much of not more than America? Just stuff like that. Like seriously, they're going to look into what your foreign preferences are. You know, Ronnie, he was always going on about Spain. Yep. Couldn't get enough.

That explains it. His whole catchphrase was, oh, lay. So if you go through all that, you take a written test. You have an interview. If you pass all that junk, then you are sent to lovely Glencoe, Georgia, right here in our home state to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center for 10 weeks of training.

This is down near the Georgia coast, where it's hot and humid and muggy. Yeah, but if you want some good shrimp, it's a good place to train. I imagine so. So 10 weeks of hardcore training, then an 18-week course at a place called the James S. Rowley Center in Beltsville, Maryland.

This is basically Camp X. Yeah, kind of, the Special Agent Basic Training Center. Yeah, and that's the one where it's probably, I mean, they teach you how to shoot guns. I'm sure you already know it at this point. Sure. I doubt if it's like, I never held one of these. What does this trigger do?

Emergency medicine, that's a big one. I saw that they travel with the president with a full supply of the president's blood, which makes sense and never really thought about that. Like, as many leaders are as in the president right then? I don't know. I mean, it said, they said what they're trained in what's called 10-minute medicine, which

is they never want to have the president more than 10 minutes away from a trauma center. And not only that, when the president's traveling, they have an agent at the nearest hospital already who has gone through the operating room and emergency staff. Oh, yeah. So they have these bags of blood if a transfusion is needed.

And basically, in just that 10 minutes, they need to be able to keep the president alive. Yeah. Which was a big deal when Reagan was shot. Yeah, you want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean, he was shot in the chest. It was bad. Yeah, by John Hinckley Jr., right?

Yeah, or as our articles just says, a crazed assassin. Yeah, I thought that was really weird. Maybe the author was like, I'm not putting his name in print. I'm not giving him any press. It definitely seemed weird to not say who it was. And Hinckley was trying to impress Jody Foster so that she would fall in love with them, and they could move into the White House if I remember correctly, right?

Yeah. So to do that, he had to get Reagan out of the way. And Reagan was coming out of the Washington Hilton Hotel he'd just given a speech. This is in, I think, January of 1981. It was early in 1981. And Hinckley walked up and just shot him at least twice. I think he got him once in the shoulder

and then once in the chest. I might be confusing it with another assassination. He definitely got him in the chest, like you said. And there was this agent named Jerry Parr, who was, I think, like 50 at the time. And he immediately threw, I think he threw his coat over Reagan, threw Reagan into the limo and landed on him and shut the door and told the limo driver to drive.

And Reagan was like, I think you broke one of my ribs, throw me into the limo. Did you know that? And he said, that's the bullet, sir. Right. But yeah, that's when Parr was like, oh, you got hit. So he told the limo to go to the hospital instead of the White House.

Yeah, I think he had blood coming out of his mouth, which was the surefire telltale sign that he had, though it was a lung punctured, apparently, when you're bleeding from the mouth. And so he knew, no, no, no, we need to go straight to the hospital and not to whatever medical staff we have at the White House. Yeah.

Saved his life. He did. He actually became convinced from what I saw that he had been chosen by God to save Reagan's life. And he became like a pastor after that. Oh, yeah? Interesting. Well, speaking of limos, the driver of that limo

is trained. I mean, the presidential limo is bulletproof, flat tire proof, as bombproof as it can be. And the driver is trained as like a trained stunt driver. Right. And it's a secret service driver, right? Yeah, and they need to be able to. They're trained to do those super cool looking 180 moves

to get the heck out of there, to drive backwards at high speeds, and all the other stuff that you see stuntmen, stunt drivers do, these secret service limo drivers can do. So on the other end of the spectrum, speaking of limo drivers from the Secret Service is JFK's assassination. Right. I read this in this article.

Didn't even mention that, right? It's like in the Secret Service successes and failures. That's not mentioned. It's a failure. No, not even mentioned at all. Yeah. So I read this article on it from Vanity Fair that was called Could the Secret Service of Save JFK?

Go read it. Totally worthwhile read. Yeah. But they, apparently the Secret Service guys, not all of them, but a handful of them, were out partying like all night, the night before, into the morning, and showed up after three, four, maybe five hours of sleep in some cases, ready for duty.

And if you look at it through that lens, apparently, you can see how, yeah, it looks a lot like being hung over, and maybe even still a little drunk, definitely affected their responses. And one of the guys was the limo driver who really took it personally immediately that he had failed. But he did. He didn't swerve.

He didn't speed up. He just tapped the brake a little bit. And actually, if anything, gave Lee Harvey Oswald a clear second fatal shot. Oh, wow. And they think that it was because of the culture of drinking and partying that was just endemic at the time, and that it actually led to JFK's potential.

Potentially, his life could have been saved, is what the article says. Obviously, he could have died from the neck wound, but they didn't do enough in retrospect to protect against that second fatal shot that definitely did it. Wow. Yeah, it's worth reading, man.

Well, I mean, you talk about the party atmosphere, and I think early on, some listeners might have thought you were kidding around. But that's really the case, apparently. And it probably has a lot to do with just how understaffed and overworked they are, that they kind of unwind. They have been known to unwind in pretty epic fashion. And recently, in the last five or six years,

have been some pretty high-profile blemishes on the agency, one in 2012, when a bunch of agents, 175 of them went to Columbia before an Obama visit, and 12 of them were caught taking prostitutes back to their hotel. And apparently, the same kind of thing happened the year before in El Salvador. And then, wasn't there another kind of big party bust

or something? Yeah, Amsterdam. Oh, right, of course. Yeah, there were three agents who were found, passed out drunk, one of them in the hallway of the hotel that the president was staying at the floor below. And they got sent home and put on leave for that. And that came right on the heels, well,

two years later, after the first scandal in 2012. And that was on the heels of Oscar Ortega Hernandez shooting at the White House in 2011. Do you know why? Why he did that? Yeah. Well, I mean, he claimed he was Jesus. I hadn't had a chance to look up on that one,

and I just didn't know what his motive was. Yeah, I mean, by all accounts, I think he was mentally ill. Sure. He claimed he made a video for Oprah Winfrey incident to her claiming he was Jesus. And it's funny, if you look at the guy, he looks like Jesus. Oh, really? Well, I mean, whatever your conception of Jesus is,

I don't know. But the classic Jesus figure that you see a lot, the guy looked a lot like him. Gotcha. Like more than you do, let's say. I could see that. Most people do look more like Jesus than me. But he fired a semi-automatic weapon rifle

at the White House, quite a few shots. And this was just kind of bungled. The investigation was bungled. They had no clue what was happening, what was going on. It took four full days to realize that he actually hit the White House. And that's when a housekeeper said, there's broken glass and cement on the floor in here.

Remember, Michelle Obama was really upset. I can imagine. That this happened. They weren't home at the time. But I think one of the daughters was. And this is after the same thing had happened in the Clinton administration. Yeah, I don't remember that at all, the Clinton one.

Yeah, that was another guy that just shot at the White House, basically. Yeah, which I mean. I think he did it from the street. But this guy actually got through. Oh, wait, was this one from the street, too? I think it was from the fence. OK, but no, the guy that got through was the guy with the knife.

Yes, made it through several lines of security through the fence and made it all the way to the North Portico, which is basically the front door of the White House. Right. With a knife before he was finally apprehended. Said he was caught sprinting toward the front door with a knife. But yeah, that was.

And again, the Capitol or the White House police are part of the Secret Service, too. And these are the people who look like paramilitary police officers patrolling the White House. They're part of the Secret Service police. Wow. So yeah, there were a bunch of controversies that rocked the place, which is why some people are like,

oh, it might be good that this Marine Corps colonel who has no connection to the Secret Service is coming in, maybe bring in a fresh perspective. Yeah. Because I guess there was a study that found that it was an insular culture that has historically been resistant to change as the congressional investigation. So who knows?

Yeah. But they've done a lot of good, too. Agreed. Can't just don't want to just end on the controversies, but man, there have been some doozies. You got anything else? Yeah, I got just a couple of more little things. If you look up like coolest Secret Service secrets,

there's just an abundance of articles from mental floss to breeder's digest. And I compiled a couple of these. And we've gone over most of them, but this one I thought was neat. Secret Service isn't actually in the Oval Office most times. Like inside the room, they're right outside. But they have installed weight-sensitive pressure

pads throughout the Oval Office so they know where the president is at all times. Oh, wow. That sounds like it's made up, but it's supposedly true. I could see that. When the president delivers the State of the Union, they hold one member of the cabinet behind Hidden at Mount Weather in case someone bombs the entire thing.

That's like that show designated survivor that I've never seen. Never? What is that? It's like a key for Sutherland show, where he's like a cabinet member who I think that very thing happened. And there was a bombing, and it killed everybody,

and now he's president. That's all I know. What else? The headquarters of Secret Service in Washington DC does not have trash cans anywhere near it on the sidewalk, because you know, put a bomb in there. Apparently Reagan carried a gun, his own gun. I believe that.

He carried a.38 in his briefcase. And apparently Vice President Bush didn't even know about it. Wow, really? That's what it says. He found out the hard way. And then? When he crossed Ronnie in some policy.

Yeah, President Ronnie, not. Oh, yeah, the Gipper. Yeah, not Secret Service, Ronnie. When he crossed the Gipper. And then finally, apparently the code word for when there's a big private investigation going on at the White House, they're renovating a room. So the first family gets out of the house,

and they don't really know what's going on. And so it said, over the years, whenever you hear like Clinton Obama renovated the treaty room, Clinton renovated room, Bush renovated the briefing room, Clinton's was the music room. Apparently those were all private investigations going on. I don't understand. Well, I mean, I guess they just,

they need to set up shop in the White House and to even not alert the first family that that's going on. They'll quote, renovate, unquote, a room. Gotcha, wow. That sounds a little hinky to me though. It does, like I would guess that the president is surprised at just about everything that's going on, including investigation.

Yeah, there may be some more clarity on that that someone will know and email us about. Where'd that come from? Readers digest? No, I think that one, well, boo, that was HuffPo. Oh, was it? Bunch of commies. Yeah, really.

They'll say anything to make the president look bad. Yeah. People don't take it seriously, okay. You got anything else now? No, sir. Okay, well, if you want to know more about the Secret Service, go check out this article on How Stuff Works.

And since I said go check it out, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this one of two on Satanism that we're gonna read. I wanted to thank you guys for the Satanism episode. I myself am a Satanist and a member of the Satanic Temple. I appreciate you voicing my faith in objective and fair manner,

but I do take issue with you calling us hippies. Feel your summation of the various TST programs and that's the Satanic Temple. To accurately represent much of what we strive to do, but I wish you had taken the time to go over our core beliefs like you did the church of Satan. And then he sent them to me, so I'll just read them.

And he said, here's a fiver for each of you. Oh, I wish. One should strive to actual compassion and empathy towards all creatures. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit. Should prevail over laws and institutions. One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone.

The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. Belief should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should never care to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs. That's a good one. Yeah.

People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm. And finally, every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. Pretty good ones. Yeah, so he said the takeaway basically is,

what we try and reflect is a focus on scientific inquiry, nobility in action and thought, and respect for oneself and others. And he closes out by saying, hail Satan. Hail Satan. And his name is Caleb Teratuta, sorry. But I thought it was Caleb Tarantula. And I was like, that's a great name for a Satanist.

Yeah, like Peter Grimmore. If you wanna get in touch with us like Caleb did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh M. Clark and at S.Y.S.K. podcast on Twitter. You can hang out with Chuck at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook.com or at Facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.housestuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web,

stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Welcome to the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.