The Red String Board Conspiracy

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In 2006, Aki Peretz was working as a counterterrorism analyst at the CIA when he was called in about an alarming report.

We received some intelligence that suggested that something really big was going to happen in London sometime in the summertime.

but they couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

Aki became one of many people working to comprehend a massive plot.

Imagine if you're given a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't get the top and you don't get all the pieces.

In fact, you only get some of the pieces and you get none of the edge pieces.

And the pieces keep changing, and people keep throwing new pieces into the mix, which may or may not be important.

Agents from across the NSA, CIA, the UK, and Pakistan went into overdrive, scrambling to put it all together in a matter of months, which turned out to be just in time.

Al-Qaeda came very, very, very close to blowing up several airplanes over the Atlantic over a two-hour period.

Police believed the plan was just weeks away from fruition when they launched the operation to arrest their main suspects.

Their goal?

To kill at least 2,000 people.

And they almost got away with it.

Aki wrote about how the conspiracy was unraveled in his 2021 book, Disruption, Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History.

By the time it was published, he'd left the CIA and become an associate research scientist at the University of Maryland while continuing to work on and write about national security activities, including at the Defense Department.

And then in 2022, he came across something that gave him pause.

And it was coming from inside the FBI itself.

When I saw that, I was like, I have to write something.

What he saw was a series of images and videos posted on the agency's website as part of a new recruitment campaign.

To sell the idea of joining the FBI.

You know, fight terrorism, fight bad guys in this country, do really cool stuff.

The ads show agents photographing crime scenes, standing in front of banks of high-tech equipment, peering into laboratory microscopes.

But Aki was struck by one image in particular.

It's a youngish man in the middle of the frame.

It's this darkened room.

And he's, I guess he's deep into an investigation, trying to take notes.

And behind him are

Polaroid photos and maps all connected by pieces of string and it's all stuck on a wall.

He had seen this kind of thing before.

A lot.

Every time you see a TV show which has a team of detectives or spies or whoever who needs to unravel some sort of nefarious criminal enterprise, you'll always see this

board somewhere on the wall full of pictures, maps, photos all tied together by string and for some reason it's always red.

They appear in thrillers, police procedurals, true crime adaptations, kids' shows, even in Lego sets of police stations.

It's one of these ubiquitous things that you see all the time now.

And now Aki was seeing it directly on the FBI's website.

And the more I look at it,

I've been in and out of government for 20 years.

I've never actually seen red string in any office supply cabinet.

I've never seen it.

Why would we have string?

In all his years of counterintelligence investigations and national security work, had Aki somehow missed the part that involved string and Polaroid pictures and printouts?

The part that required a wall where investigators amassed all the information in one place, stepped back and studied it.

Were these boards useful, or was something else afoot?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

I'm sure you can picture the kind of boards we've been talking about, even though they go by many names.

Pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls.

I personally think of them as walls of crazy.

And in today's episode, we're going to let them drive us a bit bananas.

Because we started with the simple questions.

where do these things come from who uses them what are they good for how did they get to be everywhere and soon we had a lot of string on the board revealing a you guessed it unusual pattern people say the truth is stranger than fiction but these boards show us what can happen when fiction starts to teach us how to organize fact

so today on decoder ring how did we get tangled up in string stringboards?

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Often in TV shows or movies, when an investigator has to to get to the bottom of something murky and hidden, they enlist the help of a passionate wonk, a self-made expert who has taken it upon themselves to listen to all the underground chatter and obsessively document everything.

And a real-life figure like this exists for pinboards.

A guy so passionate and obsessive about them, he has done everything but build one for himself.

I try to avoid making my own.

I feel like that's collecting them is one move.

Sean Gilmore teaches in the English department at the University of Illinois.

And in the 2010s, he started to notice these boards popping up in movies, video games, comics, and TV shows that he was consuming.

So the platonic ideal is the red string board, in which a series of news articles or clippings or various forms of notes are all connected with actual string or yarn around push pins.

And I just saw so many of them at once that I was like, somebody should start keeping track of them.

Soon after, Sean spotted one in a video game he was playing called Sleeping Dogs.

You have a detective and he walks into the police department.

I'm hoping that you can bring something more to our investigation.

I understand, sir.

And it has a classic red string connected conspiracy board of heads of the various crime organizations with little post-it notes next to all of them.

I was like, yep, that's a good example.

Did you pause while you were playing and take a screenshot?

Yep.

Yeah, I'm that kind of dork where I like paused and was like, we should start documenting them right here.

So Sean created a Tumblr and posted the screenshot to it.

And then he kept on grabbing and posting more, like the boards he found in Mindhunter and Godzilla and Stranger Things.

The answer to what happened to your friend, it's up here somewhere, I assure you that I just gotta connect the right dots.

Once his friends and colleagues caught wind of what he was doing, they started alerting him about other examples too.

I didn't think there would be so many, to be honest.

I kind of thought at the beginning there were probably like a couple hundred of these things.

Yeah, how many do you have now?

I'm like at like 1200 or something.

Since we spoke, that number has grown to 1300, hosted not on Tumblr anymore, but on Sean's own website.

And his collection is expansive.

It includes images of any board on which someone is trying to collect complex information.

By using string and pushpins or newspaper cutouts and glue, or even just drawing lines and boxes and circles on a whiteboard.

And when you affix all these images to the proverbial wall, you start to see some patterns.

And one that jumps out, imagine it circled in red marker, is that on a fundamental level, these boards can signify two different things,

two diametrically opposed things.

Some are supposed to be vehicles of insight, but others are supposed to be manifestations of craziness.

They exist on a spectrum from sanity to madness.

And starting at one extreme, you have what you might call the obsessive wall.

Where a character is truly invested in another character, for example, for stalker reasons, for potential murder reasons, whether it's, you know, in someone's locker because they hate the prom queen, or whether it's in someone's, you know, dressing room because they're obsessed with their star.

I have posters, playbills, and a closet jam-packed with photographs covering every stage of your magnificent career.

In my mind, those are like cutouts of the same person.

Cutouts of the same person, often in a kind of surveillance fashion that someone might have taken of the person.

But you get a real material quality.

Like someone went into their art and craft box to make this thing happen.

And I feel like those are so often like the reveal that something horrible is happening.

Yeah, and it's probably unstoppable.

This kind of wall is not an attempt to comprehend some larger plot.

It signifies nothing but the obsession and derangement of its creator.

But on the other end of the spectrum, you have walls that are meant to be taken seriously as legitimate investigatory tools used by intelligence agencies or police departments to solve crimes.

We might call these evidence boards or investigation walls.

They have a really kind of more rigid structure in some sense.

If it's an official one like in an office with the FBI or the police looking at it, it's on a whiteboard and it has like clean ruled lines or something that someone has done with their erase marker or has put up the tape or whatever they've done tied to tangible evidence, often news clippings, photographs, documents from government sources.

It's like something big is going on.

Here are the parts.

First thing is we need the names of all front companies, limited partnerships, LLCs.

Start with the the nightclub, which Barksell owns.

And on a board like that, then theoretically, like all the information is supposed to make sense, at least like in the world of the show.

Right.

This is the literal conspiracy.

So you have your walls of pure crazy and your walls of ostensible reason.

But the majority of pin boards lie somewhere in between, in the ambiguous middle, where they're the work of a person who is unusually obsessed.

And maybe that's to productive ends, Or maybe it's not.

You can think of these as the unofficial investigation, investigation wall.

This is when the detective goes to the motel because they've been kicked out by their wife or by the squad and now they're putting together the real case.

Right.

Or perhaps like questing family member or monomaniacally focused lawyer, like someone who is not going to let the case rest.

Right.

I think that this is our man with the scars on his face.

I don't know who he is.

I don't know where he is.

I don't know where this whole thing fucking starts, but it ends with him.

In this kind, it's like they're kind of letting their freak flag fly and it's like up to you in the audience to be like, are they like crazy and like this is disturbing or are they just obsessed, but they're right?

Yes, very much.

Do you know?

How fucking crazy that sounds?

It's like you've been alone too long.

That's what it's there for.

We can't zoom in and understand some detail from what they're presenting to us, but we definitely understand where this character is narratively.

This is maybe the primary virtue of all of these boards.

They are character revealing.

Just one can tell you if someone is crazy, scary, single-minded, diligent, brilliant, or all of the above, and it can do it in just a few seconds.

This is their secondary virtue, how economical they are.

They communicate that investigations take time and effort while also allowing us to skip didactic explanations and boring legwork.

No wonder Hollywood loves these boards so much.

No wonder they borrowed them from the real world and ran with them.

Except,

did they borrow them from the real world?

Acuparrots couldn't imagine they took them from people actually solving crimes.

I used to work at CIA and we would have to link bad guys to phones, to emails, to various places they've been.

And it's really, really difficult to figure this out.

And so we use pretty complex link chart analysis software to determine who did what to whom.

That software could ingest millions of pieces of information and did not involve pushpins, string, polaroids, or printed out web articles.

So when he saw the FBI itself using a board of photos connected by red string in that recruitment ad, he was skeptical.

But then he started to second guess himself.

The more I thought about it, I thought, maybe, maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe we actually do use it in the government.

I didn't want to be held hostage by my own personal experience.

So I thought, I'm going to figure this out.

And so I contacted a dozen different people throughout FBI, CIA, other places, NSA.

I asked people who had been working since the 70s.

So now we're talking about 40 years of information.

What did you say to them?

Like, what did you, you email?

Like, what was the ask?

It was literally, I'm writing about this stringboard theory.

Do you have an opinion about this?

And I reached out to people who did major crimes.

I talked to people who work on China.

I worked on people who worked on counterintelligence, people who are now out of the government so they can talk about these things a little bit more freely.

And I said, have you ever done this?

Have you ever made this under any circumstance?

So what, I mean, what did people say to you when you asked them about it?

They all said, we've never actually used it.

It's never been a thing.

I talked to the chief of staff, to the CIA director at one point, and he said something along the lines of, I do not know from whence this came.

And this is a guy who's been in the business for 40 years.

I talked to FBI special agents and they said the only corkboards we ever used were for Chinese menus for lunch.

And the closest I ever really got to was an old FBI special agent who said that he was looking into a fire in the 70s.

He tried for a little bit on a wall, just a little bit, like just literally writing on a blackboard.

And then somebody else came by and said, like, let's professionalize this piece of junk you're doing.

To be fair, Aki did find that there are a couple of very loose historical precedents.

Old military operations and airplane flight plans marked with a few pushbins on a literal map.

And then there's the work of a certain former U.S.

attorney.

If it comes from anywhere, it comes from Rudy Giuliani, of all people, when he was doing a lot of mafia prosecutions in New York City.

This is a great day for law enforcement, but this is a bad day, probably the worst for the mafia.

When he announced the indictments of the heads of the five families, he stood literally in front of a gigantic link chart and showing like how the bosses are connected to each other and their sub-bosses, et cetera.

So it was just like their headshots, essentially.

I mean, it's almost like a family tree or it's like an org chart.

The attack is at the top level, the middle level, and the lower level.

And we are doing everything that we can to identify, indict, and convict the capos, the soldiers, and the associates of the mafia as well.

But even in this case, these boards were merely visual aids, a tidy shorthand to help convey information to the public.

They were never used for any actual investigating.

And for someone like Aki, who understands firsthand the complications of intelligence investigations, like the al-Qaeda plot he worked on and wrote about, it's easy to see why.

Thinking back when I actually worked on the real operation, it would be terrible to use in an actual investigation.

Like a stringboard wall would have been totally insufficient to the task.

Well, number one is that remember that if you're in an active investigation, you're constantly getting new information all the time.

And so to have a physical thing on the wall where you have to move spring around.

I don't know if you've ever made an art project where you're constantly having to change it every couple of days.

It's basically impossible.

I mean, if somebody pulls out a pin or pulls out a photo, it could, in theory, that could really mess up your case.

It's sort of actually a weirdly simplistic way of being like, how are these things connected?

You're like, what does the red string mean?

Like, that it doesn't actually convey as much information as it sort of seems like it does.

Oh, yeah.

It falls apart almost immediately if you think about it for more than 20 seconds.

I mean,

let's say you're going after a bad suspect.

Who cares what he looks like?

All you need is a name and his phone number, and are you tracking the guy?

So it makes no sense.

All this visual stuff, when in reality, if you're actually trying to make a case against somebody, you just, just the facts, ma'am.

Law enforcement doesn't need to gather around a wall of visual stuff to solve a case.

But you know who does need and expect visual stuff to understand what's going on?

TV and movie audiences.

So there's a reason neither Aki nor any of his colleagues have encountered these stringboards.

They aren't useful for investigations.

They're useful as set design.

The FBI in making a recruitment ad wasn't leaning on imagery used by law enforcement.

It was borrowing a Hollywood invention.

And so Aki could only laugh.

Because they, of all people, it's like, guys, you know you don't use this.

Please, these boards are not real.

They're not real at all.

But if Hollywood is responsible for spreading the fiction of the stringboard, well, how did Hollywood do it?

The more you pick at this story, the more you realize that nobody really knows what the answer truly is.

When we come back, we try to unwind the red string all the way to its center.

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So, stringboards do not come out of real law enforcement investigations, they come out of fiction.

But how exactly?

In the spirit of our subject, we're going to get a little obsessive as we answer this question.

And to help us pin every pin, we've enlisted the help of another expert, a kind of forensic analyst of crazy walls.

And walls of crazy is a good term for them because they are often externalized spaces for some brain fog that is spit on these walls.

Dr.

Ann Ganzert is a scholar based in Germany and the author of a book called Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television.

She got caught in this spider's web herself in 2009 while watching the short-lived cult sci-fi show Flash Forward.

Where they solve a time travel-like conundrum.

So everyone saw the future, but did they see the same future?

I mean, are these accounts consistent?

Well, they certainly seem to be.

They tried to reconstruct a mental time jump that all of humanity had experienced.

And they do all of this with the help of a pin board.

Those people, the places I saw on the board, they were part of this puzzle.

Mosaic.

Look, I'm certain of it.

Once she noticed this board, she couldn't stop noticing others or dissecting them.

She wasn't thinking about them from a crime-solving perspective, but from a narrative one.

And narratively, she realized they are doing something very straightforward.

They're just a diagram for the viewer.

If I put two things next to each other and draw a line between them, most people will understand these things are somehow connected, right?

And there's actually a long history of cinematic diagrams conveying crucial narrative information.

These walls develop out of another type of wall, which is the heist plan.

Manholes on the corner.

You drop into the manhole at 1145, make your way up the back stairs and jump the alarm system.

Any questions?

You have the map of the casino and then you have all the moving parts.

That way of visualizing information within the filmic image is super old.

That's nothing new.

Every war movie has that.

Every bank robbery movie has that.

But what they don't have is string.

In these early examples, the visualizations tend to be outlines on chalkboards or lines scribbled on maps.

So I asked Sean Gilmore about the earliest appearance of string that he's been able to document.

It comes in 1962.

So in Dr.

No, the first James Bond movie, there's actually one of these in a very early scene where someone just walks in and there's a strategy map and it's got some pink string on it.

W6N Kingston, Jamaica, broke in contact, sir, just after they came up on routine transmission.

Well, keep trying.

Let me know as soon as I come up against it.

But in the film, this yarn-filled map on a back wall of MI6 headquarters remains remains unremarked upon and unexplained.

It's just a piece of set decoration.

And there's no conspiracy thing added to it.

If this was the first instance, its impact was minimal.

The few examples Sean's found from the 60s and 70s are even more insignificant.

I found one in a movie called Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot from 1976.

We have organized and financed an expedition to search this unexplored area in hopes of capturing a Sasquatch.

The map has like two little red pieces of string labels.

I was like, really?

A mockumentary about Bigfoot aside, this means that throughout the 1970s, the era of post-Watergate paranoia, when Hollywood put out a whole cycle of conspiracy thrillers like the conversation, the parallax view, and three days of the condor, there was nearly a stringboard in sight.

It's not until the very end of the decade when we finally get the first known instance of what we'd recognize as a classic stringboard.

It's an org chart in the 1979 BBC adaptation of John LeCarre's espionage novel, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.

There's a document in the center of a corkboard with photographs of the actors playing each of the characters connected by red ribbon, and they're pinned down by actual silver pins.

Look at them.

Percy Allenine, Director of Operations, Tinker.

Bill Hayden, Head of Personnel, Taylor.

Roy Bland, Head of Iron Curtain Networks, Soldier.

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy was something of a masterpiece theater sensation when it aired in the late 1970s.

And while it contained a prominent and genuine stringboard, it's hard to say how much direct influence it had.

The idea was out there now, but its progress was relatively slow.

Over the next couple decades, variants sporadically began appearing in movies: obsessive walls and the howling and in the line of fire, evidence boards and the silence of the lambs and 12 monkeys.

And in real life, an actual serial killer was found to have what he called a wall of spiders in his house, a chart of names on paper scraps and post-its connected by pink and blue wool.

But even so, well into the 1990s, stringboards were far from ubiquitous on screen, even in the places you'd most imagine them to be.

So there's a bunch of those where you would expect it, but it wasn't a thing yet.

X-Files is a great example.

No one, no government agency has jurisdiction over the truth.

Yes, even in the X-Files, the definitive conspiracy show, save for a brief background shot in the pilot episode, there are no stringboards.

Not in the entire 90s run of the original series.

Yeah, wrong time.

The real inflection point for the stringboard didn't arrive in the 20th century at all.

It comes in late 2001, after the conspiratorial 1970s, after the X-Files popularized conspiracies of all kinds, and just as 9-11 Truthers were beginning investigations of their own.

And the thing that really establishes these walls in our visual vocabularies is the Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind.

What exactly is it that you would like me to do?

What distinguishes you is that you are, quite simply, the best natural code breaker I have ever seen.

A Beautiful Mind is a biopic of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who has convinced himself and everyone who knows him that he has been tasked by the government with a secret mission to decode a Soviet plot.

I'm attempting to isolate patent reoccurrences within periodicals over time.

But after Nash is institutionalized, his wife takes a look at his work.

I want to see what John's been working on.

Alicia, you know, you can't go in his office.

You know, it's classified, Alicia.

Stopped.

What she finds is shocking to her and to the audience.

Oh my God.

All four walls are covered with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and number sequences.

There's so much material, it's pasted onto the window frames.

And packed over all of it are webs of different colored string.

Is this all he's been doing every day?

Cutting out magazines?

The top secret assignment John had been working on.

It was a hallucination.

All the time the audience thought John was cracking a code, he was really constructing a wall of crazy.

A Beautiful Mind was a box office hit and one best picture.

But maybe most importantly for our purposes, the string board in it was absolutely central.

Unlike most that had come before, it's not unobtrusively in the background.

It's one of the movie's big reveals.

And in addition to commanding a lot of attention, it did something else too.

It explicitly connected the stringboard to a character caught between genius and madness.

The real-life John Nash did suffer from schizophrenia and hallucinations, but they manifested in ways that were not so visually gripping.

The conspiracy walls in the film were an invention of the filmmakers, a way to convey his mental illness cinematically.

He wasn't one of the serial killers, stalkers, and creeps who made obsessive walls, nor one of the orderly law enforcement officers who put together org chart-like investigation boards.

He was in between.

A man making a conspiracy board we're not quite sure is tethered to reality.

And I do realize that my behavior must have appeared insane.

That's okay.

I think the Russians feel my profile is too high.

That's why they simply just don't do away with me.

And it's immediately after this point that such boards begin to wildly proliferate.

In the decade that follows A Beautiful Mind, they appear in, among other things, Memento, Saw, Final Destination 2, Fringe, The Incredible Hulk, and the number 23.

Check this out.

My birthday, 2-3, driver's license, social security number, everything.

You can't be serious.

They're They're in Dollhouse, Dexter, Monk, ISPY, Gothica, State of Play, Sahara, X-Men First Class, The Good Wife, and Girl with the Dragon tattoo.

And when the X-Files got rebooted in the 2010s, guess what?

Suddenly, they had stringboards too.

It's true, Scully, I've lost the plot.

I can't find the hidden connections between things anymore.

The world has become too crazy for even my conspiratorial powers.

You're getting walls that go far beyond background props or one-off reveals.

They're becoming recurring, intrinsic parts of the narrative of entire series.

And visually, they are increasingly ornate.

In one episode of the show Castle, the investigators discover that an erratic character has constructed a 3D stringboard.

What the hell?

Like with the threads crisscrossing an entire room.

Tax riots.

European economic collection.

Iran invades Iraq.

And as these elaborate, visually inventive walls are becoming ubiquitous, something strange is starting to happen.

These compelling images of questionable sanity start to edge out the relatively understated, straightforward org chart and seep into our images of real

police work.

Investigators in Sherlock, True Detective, Bones, Breaking Bad, Person of Interest, Elementary are all now turning to elaborate elaborate evidence boards to solve crimes.

Have a look at this.

He put himself in the perfect position to steal the files from Miss White and later find a murderer open shore.

And this is despite the fact that anything more than a cursory look will reveal.

These boards don't make a whole lot of sense.

Exactly.

I feel like not understanding them is a key logic to the whole thing is they can't be super comprehensible.

They seem as though they are explanatory, but the material part, even if if you were to pause any one of these screens, makes very little sense.

But just because they don't make sense

doesn't mean they aren't hard to make.

I find that to be kind of the most interesting thing to sort of think about on a meta level, which is that the production design people have to replicate the effort that the character was supposed to be going through.

They have to actually spend all that time making it.

When we come back, Stringboard Construction 101.

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Go to audible.com slash prophecy two, that's the number two, to start listening today.

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So we've talked about where these walls come from, but now I want to turn to how they get made.

They are, as has been mentioned, arts and crafts projects, and someone has to get to crafting.

And we're going to begin with the someone who helped put together maybe the most famous wall of all.

You never think that's going to become a meme.

And look what happened.

We're talking about this, you know, almost 18 years later.

Scott Cobb has worked as a production designer on a ton of projects, shows like Lost, Arrested Development, 13 Reasons Why, and he's had to make conspiracy boards on several occasions.

But none have had the impact of one he made for a 2008 episode of the sitcom, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Yeah, I think this is the one that everybody remembers.

In the episode, the character Charlie, an unhinged man-child with authority issues, decides he needs health insurance.

So he takes a job at a nondescript corporate office working in the mailroom, where he quickly descends into madness, becoming convinced that something is afoot.

I stumbled onto a major company conspiracy, Mac.

How about that for stress?

And I got a paper trail to prove it.

Check this out.

And the camera pans to the rest of the set and behind you is this massive wall of like madness behind it.

Take a look at this, it's covered with mail, scores of opened letters and images affixed to the wall and connected by bright red lines.

Pepe Sylvia, this name keeps coming up over and over again.

Every day, Pepe's mail is getting sent back to me.

Pepe Sylvia, Pepe, Sylvia.

I look for the mail.

Well, this whole box is Pepe Sylvia.

So I go up to Pepe's office.

And what do I find out, man?

What do I find out?

I didn't use no Pepe Sylvia.

The man does not exist.

Okay, so I decided to do it.

It was an explosion of thought coming out of Charlie's mind in his kind of like psychotic manic sort of way.

The thing thing is, Charlie is totally wrong.

Despite his documentation, there is no conspiracy.

Not only do all of these people exist, but they have been asking for their mail on a daily basis.

It's all they're talking about up there.

Jesus.

The whole thing is a joke, a parody, a send-up of conspiratorial thinking and the stringboards that go with it.

So for the scene, Scott was tasked with making a board that would riff on all the other boards that had already become a cliché.

One of the creative spring boards was A Beautiful Mind.

You know, that was one that had a very specific kind of look about it.

Were there physical elements you knew you had to have?

Absolutely.

The push pins, you know, circling things and say, this is it, you know, whatever that is.

Red string, you know, and there's obviously like visual reasons why red string has been used kind of across the board, no pun intended, because you're using images printed on paper or photographs or things like it.

And then you want something bright to connect the pieces without a blurring in the camera lens so red is a good choice for that as scott talked about what went into making this particular string board it became clear that even though the board itself was part of a meta joke building it was no joking matter these walls require so much granular detailed material you have to get a little obsessive to pull one off So in terms of the mail you see on the walls, like even though you don't really get a close-up or see it, if somebody were to stop the screen and look at it, it would actually mean something.

You know, so we'd write termination letters or some like letter to the president complaining about the bathrooms, you know, it's all part of playing out the joke.

And I knock on her door and I say, Carol!

Carol, I gotta talk to you about Pepe.

And when I open the door, what do I find?

There's not a single goddamn desk in that office.

There is no Carol in a jar.

This whole scene is just a minute or two, and the conspiracy board itself is only on camera for a few seconds.

But it's had a long afterlife.

A screenshot of it has become an omnipresent internet meme.

It shows Charlie smoking and mid-wild gesticulation, his hair a mess.

He's standing in front of the mailroom stringboard, which also has the name Pepe Silvia scrawled on it in large black handwriting.

This has become the image to send when you're deep in the weeds or someone else's, and maybe

you all need to get out.

Like so many memes, and maybe even like the wall of crazy itself, it's an image we didn't know we needed until it arrived, but that now seems essential.

You can say so much with just this picture of Charlie, one that captures both the appeal, the absurdity, the humor, the danger, the feeling of being unhealthily obsessed with something.

You've lost your mind.

You've lost your goddamn mind, Charlie.

In its way, the always sunny meme raised the bar for all the stringboards that have come after it.

It announced that they had become a universally recognizable visual trope, something you could spoof, which makes it even more of a design challenge when a serious show decides to use it anyway.

Like Homeland, starring Claire Daines as Carrie Matheson, a brilliant but mentally unstable CIA officer.

I got a mood disorder, okay?

I looked it up, Carrie.

Clazepine's an antipsychotic.

I'm dealing with it.

I've been dealing with it since I was 22.

Homeland called for so many versions of evidence boards over its run that on set they got their own name.

Oh, there's no doubt they became the carry wall.

Oh, script's got a carry wall in it.

As a production designer, John Kretschmer was in charge of the art department and designing the sets and overall look of the show.

If I were very egotistical about it, I'd say anything that's not an actor is my responsibility.

But I'm not.

That's going in.

That's going in, John.

From the beginning, it was clear John had his work cut out for him.

The premise of the series is that Carrie suspects a decorated Marine and prisoner of war may have been turned by a terrorist organization during his time in captivity.

I thought that once I had some proof,

even suggesting that Sergeant Brody is what you think he is.

No.

So she starts assembling evidence to make her case.

That evidence would go on a wall, and not just any wall.

This first Carrie wall needed to reveal a key piece of information to Carrie's colleagues and the audience, but it also needed to capture Carrie's bipolar condition, her mental state.

So that was really the goal here.

Maybe for the first time, a visualization of Carrie's disorder.

Like Scott Cobb, John began in the expected place.

A lot of times you'll bring up a reference, the beautiful mind.

And almost always they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but not that, you know,

because it became so iconic.

But it is a starting point.

And then you learn really what they want.

Helpfully for him, the episode's writer, Meredith Steam, already had a clear vision developing in her head.

She had a family member with dysmanic depressive disorder that plagued Carrie.

And so she was very, very exact about what she wanted.

She gave me a doodle.

John showed me the original doodle that Meredith had sent to him.

Okay, we see what Meredith, it looks like she...

did this in her sketchbook using black pen and you know felt tip markers and it's basically loosely laid out as columns, about seven or eight columns, and it kind of looks like post-its.

And they're all overlapped and they're kind of collaged.

And most strikingly, each column of post-its is coded a different color, running in order of the visual spectrum, like a rainbow.

So you kind of start with red on the left and you go to orange and then you fade into yellow.

The colors were meant to demonstrate Carrie's unique ability to suss out patterns other people just couldn't see.

That was the whole point.

This wasn't to be artsy.

It was meant to be a window into her mind.

From there, John took Meredith's scribble and fleshed it out, developing it into a detailed 3D rendering of the wall, which was now even more cluttered and featured in addition to post-its, printouts, and news articles stabbed to the board.

And then they actually had to go and make it.

It's all hands on deck.

You know, we had to provide, probably, as I recall, at least 300 documents.

300 meaningful documents that the writers need to approve.

And with copyright laws the way they are, anything graphic, we pretty much have to build it ourselves from scratch, including the photography.

You know, photographs aren't free.

So you're like going out and like, just like someone on your team is like taking all the photographs you need.

It's a problem.

You know, I think

there's one item.

There's funny, there's one item.

This is a classic.

The script said, Carrie finds the clue in a wedding album.

So guess what?

We have to produce a wedding and photograph it.

We had two cast members.

We had to spend a whole weekend getting them married.

Reception all the way through to the first dance just for the darn wedding album.

I mean, that's one line on the script.

Like, how long does it take to make a wall?

Like, how long does it take to do one of these?

Well, I can tell you is 10 days because that's all we get to prep an episode.

10 days to write all the copy, take all the photographs, pen all the post-its, print and approve all of it, and then get all that stuff to set for the set dressers and prop teams and writers and Claire Danes herself to assemble it.

It finally made it to air on December 11th, 2011.

This is red and blue.

It's not red or blue.

In the episode, Carrie is mid-mania and chaotically scribbling all over the evidence with colored markers.

This whole box is dogs, really.

But her mentor Saul is able to look at what appears to be just chaos

and decode the pattern within.

Do you understand?

It's a timeline.

Yes.

The finished product is striking.

One of the most memorable images from the entire show.

A rainbow pinboard.

I think it looks just like my concept.

When this episode of Homeland aired, I was something of a stam.

For personal and professional reasons, I was following the series very closely.

And this particular conspiracy wall is one that jumps into my mind whenever I think about them.

But now I think it should jump into your mind too.

It's an example of how the two competing aspects of the pinboard can be made to add up.

This particular rainbow wall is both an obsessive wall, a manifestation of Carrie's mania, and an investigation board.

In her instability, she's figured the whole plot out.

It's Carrie's very madness that makes her so exceptional at her job.

And this wall is the visual proof.

Unlike in A Beautiful Mind, where it's the wall that showed us that John Nash was unreliable, it's this wall that shows us Carrie is totally reliable, even if she's not fully sane.

And it's walls like Carrie's that have proliferated in movies and TV.

Walls that suggest the best way to get to reason

is through conspiracy.

And it's exactly this notion that has started to spread into the real world.

People have begun to misidentify the usefulness of the stringboard.

Instead of understanding them as visually compelling narrative shorthand, they have absorbed the idea that evidence boards really work.

I mean, the FBI itself in that ad is telling us this is the case.

And so we've incorporated these boards into our lives.

Sometimes it's harmless.

What's Pinterest or a vision board but a benign variant on a wall of crazy?

But sometimes it's not.

This looks like just a ball of yarn, but you can check these threads out and you can see that this is real.

These handful of elites are running everything.

They're very popular amongst the QAnon people as various ways to explain all of the deep state elements that are all really tied together for them.

Sean Sean Gilmore again.

It's almost like almost abstract art at some point where it's just a series of all these connecting lines because they have to prove that every conspiracy is tagged into every part of the deep state.

I mean everything from the Vatican, the House of Sawd into Citibank into Harvard into social media, you know, because they own stock in these and it's all traceable.

But they're using this trope that is fundamentally not about making real logic out of the thing.

But now people can actually use it and supposedly make meaning from that stuff.

I'll take Sean one further.

I think because we're so used to seeing images like this in fiction and knowing that they are supposed to be full of decodable and comprehensive information, that the stringboard alone has come to have a kind of gravitas.

If you can put all those things in one place,

maybe they are connected.

And that's what's the beautiful, beautiful or nefarious part of this shorthand.

Okie parrots again.

You can just show it, it looks authoritative, and it looks from the outset like it's actually something worth examining.

So almost like the first reaction is like, whoa, there's a lot there.

Yeah, there's a ton.

There's a ton here.

Wow.

Look at all these like photos and links and boxes and so forth.

But if you look, if you examine it a little closely and say how you make that assertion, it falls apart really fast.

Life is imitating art, even though art isn't actually useful for life.

even though art might be distorting life.

The best way to analyze real complex information has nothing to do with how artfully it can get tacked to a board.

Even if our particular conspiratorial cultural moment keeps providing us with more and more occasions to show off our ability to do exactly that.

Has it slowed down?

You get more all the time?

You get more all the time.

Do you foresee a day when it will slow down?

Like it can't be infinite.

Like it's not like...

Have you met culture?

Culture might be infinite.

I don't know.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

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This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, our supervising producer.

It was edited by me.

We produced Decodering with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman.

Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Sean Gilmore's narrative string theory project can be found on the website The Vault of Culture.

And you can read Aki Peretz's original article about stringboards on Slate.

We'll link to them both on our show page.

We'd like to thank our listener, John DeZal, who suggested stringboards as a topic.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

You can also call us now at our new Decodering hotline.

The number is 347-460-7281.

We love to hear from you guys and we appreciate all of your suggestions.

We'll see you in two weeks.

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