SPYSCAPE Spy Museum New York Tour With Ian Oldaker!

Podcast Episode

SPYSCAPE Spy Museum New York Tour With Ian Oldaker!

Join Dan and Tom - as Dan details the fascinating SPYSCAPE Spy Museum in New York City and interviews Ian Oldaker, the museum GM, as they tour the museum.

Join Dan and Tom – as Dan details the fascinating SPYSCAPE Spy Museum in New York City and interviews Ian Oldaker, the museum GM, as they tour the museum.   This is an interactive museum, not just exhibits, with lots of real spy gadgets, an Enigma machine . . . and an Aston Martin from Goldeneye!  And you can test your spy skills in 7 different galleries!

Fun stuff – take a listen now!  And Subscribe (follow) our channel, Cracking the Code of Spy Movies to get the latest!  It’s FREE!

Related Video:

Video: You can view our video tour of SPYSCAPE here

Related Content

SPYSCAPE Museum Website: https://spyscape.com

Dan Silvestri:                      00:01                     You’ve seen a lot of spies in action in your favorite spy movies. Have you ever pictured yourself as one? Ah, now you can discover your inner spy skills at the SPYSCAPE museum in New York City, which we just toured. This is Tom Pizzato and Dan Silvestri. Join us as we’re Cracking the Code of Spy Movies. Check us out on our website  spymovienavigator.com — the worldwide community of spy movie fans — spy movie, podcasts, videos, discussions, and more. Please subscribe to our show through your favorite podcast app.

Dan Silvestri:                      00:33                     I just came back from New York City. My daughter ran the New York City Marathon there three weeks after she ran the Chicago marathon. It’s a lot of running and so we were in New York City and of course, the event was the marathon, but, I escaped to the SPYSCAPE museum for a couple of hours and had some fun there. But in the meantime, after the marathon, we went to Ellis Island. I had never been to Ellis Island. Yeah, it is impressive and intimidating if you were coming into this country. I think they were like, I think it was maybe the 1890s to 1954 they were coming through there. If you were coming from, if you were coming into the United States from the East, you more than likely were coming through Ellis Island.

Tom Pizzato:                      01:17                     My Nonno, my grandfather, came in through there in 1916.

Dan Silvestri:                      01:20                     Yeah,  my grandfather came in 1910. So the Monday after the marathon we went to Ellis Island and we looked up my grandfather in the 1910s and there was a guy there helping us. I think his name was John. And he was helping us and he said, yeah, your grandfather and two other people were supposed to be on the ship Florida in 1910 but their, their line, their entries are lined out.

Dan Silvestri:                      01:44                     So they missed that ship or they canceled it and they got on another ship. So they got on another ship and he’s like, okay. And we’re looking up the names and there are all kinds of crazy names. His name was Giovanni Silvestri. So there were a couple of Giovanni Silvestri’s. He was from our Arnara, Italy and there were a couple of people from Arnara, Italy there, but there was one that was spelled all kinds of crazy names. His name was Giovani Batiste Silvestri so there is one, that’s like C I O G. dot. Batisto something: Batigo, that’s what it was: Batigo.  He said: click that. That’s probably because they wrote down whatever they thought they heard. So we clicked that and it is him. And he says, Oh yeah, he came in from 1910 he actually stayed with, it looks like a cousin, Luigi. And I said, do we know where he stayed: the address?

Dan Silvestri:                      02:37                     And he says, yeah, it looks like it’s 144 or 146 on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. So that’s cool. How much you can get off of that database there. It’s amazing what they have. And this guy was really helpful. And so my daughter and I take the train that night and we walked through Chinatown first, which you get off, you’re like in another world: when you get off to the train.

Tom Pizzato:                      03:02                     Yeah, Chinatown is right there.

Dan Silvestri:                      03:03                     Yeah. It’s like wow. And a couple of blocks later, it’s Little Italy, which is much smaller now than it used to be. So my daughter and I are looking around and we’re looking at the buildings. We’re right there on Mulberry Street. One of these buildings is the building. My grandfather stayed in more than likely. So, we’re looking at the one, it was 144: there was a Christmas store or something and it didn’t look that old.

Dan Silvestri:                      03:23                     You know, he came in 1910. So it was like, my daughter says let’s go into the bakery-cafe and we’ll ask. So we go in and we ask,

Tom Pizzato:                      03:32                     Did you get a cannoli there? They’ve got great cannolis there,

Dan Silvestri:                      03:34                     Well, I’ll tell you about that. Uh, so we, we talked to the lady there, the waitress, and she’s like, Hey, come on. She comes out on the street with us. We’re walking up and down the street with her. It’s just like, this is like a movie already. And she said, ah, you know, I really don’t know and there’s another guy in there might be able to help us. And so she goes back in and gets the guy and he comes out. He said, “Yeah, what’s up? What’s going on out here?”  I said, well, looking for the building. My grandfather came to live in for a few weeks or whatever before he moved to Chicago.

Dan Silvestri:                      04:04                     After he got here from Italy in 1910. He said: “what’s the address?
I think it was 140 we walk outside and there’s, he said, now 144 he says that building was built 65 years ago. He said it cannot be that building. The guy across streets yelling at, “Hey, how did you know that building was built 65 years ago?” He said: “cause that’s, that’s when I was born.”  And it was, well, what was it before that? He said “I don’t know what it was before that. I wasn’t born.” This is just like a movie. You can’t write this stuff.

Tom Pizzato:                      04:32                     You’ve got to love characters. That’s awesome.

Dan Silvestri:                      04:33                     So he’s like, no, this is the building. It’s 146 so we actually had the electronic copies now from Ellis Island on my phone because we read registered. So we’re looking it up and it’s like, no, that’s the one that’s a six, that’s not a four.

Dan Silvestri:                      04:47                    And the 146 building is standing in front of us. There’s a restaurant on the first floor. It was closed at the time cause a fire. So he said, this is the building your grandfather within this building was built in 1900 and this restaurant opened in 1902. It’s like Holy geez. So I’m thinking this is pretty cool. So I took a bunch of pictures of the building and everything else, which is kinda neat to find this kind of thing. And then he was really nice. Uh, but he, but he was talking a little bit about that and he said, where you guys from, I said Chicago and he mentioned some Italian restaurant in Chicago or whatever. And he said you know that they, I said, yeah, we know that place. I know that place. I grew up in that neighborhood and I actually went to school with the kids who were running the restaurant now, and he said, “get outta here.” He actually said something a little more,

Tom Pizzato:                      05:33                     Let’s just say fuggedaboutit.

Dan Silvestri:                      05:35                     He said, I’m calling right now. So we’re standing in front of the building in New York City and Mulberry street in front of the building. My grandfather was, and he’s calling this guy. He’s, Hey, I’m standing here with a guy from Chicago. He says, he knows you. I’m going to put him on the phone. So, he puts me on the phone. We talked a little bit and he said, Oh, those are my cousins.

Tom Pizzato:                      06:00                     It’s a small world man. It really is.

Dan Silvestri:                      06:02                     Anyway, of course, that was one of the highlights of the trip other than the marathon and SPYSCAPE. Uh, that was, that was wild. So we, we did go in and buy some cookies and we did have a cannoli.

Tom Pizzato:                      06:13                     They have good cannoli.

Dan Silvestri:                      06:14                     The cannoli was good. He said: “you want a cannoli?” I said, “yeah, I want a cannoli.” He said: “You want me to wrap it up?” I said, no, I’m going to eat it right in front of you and I want to tell you what I think. He’s like, “okay, go ahead.” I said, “Hey, that’s a damn good cannoli.” Then we bought cookies. My daughter says we’ll have a dozen cookies. He said, well, we don’t sell them by the dozen. We’d sell them by the pound. He said, you tell me what you want and I find the right box.

Dan Silvestri:                      06:35                     We put it in the box and we weigh it. It’s like, okay, I’ll take two of those. Two of those. He goes and gets a box. Okay, and then my daughter says, Oh, I want to of the black and white cookies cause New York’s famous for black and white cookies. He goes, “I gotta get another box. Too small now.” He puts all the cookies in the other box. And then he holds it up. He says to my daughter: “You want to try one of the black and white cookies now?” And she says to him: “don’t you want to weigh it first?” He’s roaring. He’s like: “Oh, that’s good.” Anyway. That was fun. It was a good time.

Tom Pizzato:                      07:12                     All right Dan, so we’ve heard about your exploits trying to find where your Nonno is from. You also went to the SPYSCAPE museum when you were there. Tell us about that. That means it’s time for The Smartest Spy in the Room.

Dan Silvestri:                      07:25                     Yeah. We’re going to cut to some of the clips that we’ve recorded while we were there and here we go.

Female Voice:                    07:36                     We are all being watched as we move through our daily lives. Being watched and analyzed in ways previously unimaginable.

Dan Silvestri:                      07:49                     All right. We’re at the SPYSCAPE museum in New York City with Ian Oldaker, the general manager of SPYSCAPE. This is a cool, cool museum. This isn’t like a regular museum. Ian, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what’s, what’s happening here.

Ian Oldaker:                       08:02                     You gave a great lead-in it’s a different type of museum where a contemporary museum, a brand new innovative brand that really looks at, um, skills of a spy and how each person has those types of skills and can discover them on their own. All of our, all of our exhibitry, tries to take you on a personal journey where we expose you and teach you new things that you didn’t even know you had and how those things might be applicable in the spy world.

Dan Silvestri:                      08:28                     Okay. So this museum, you’re actually doing stuff here. You’re coming here, you’re not just looking at exhibits here. You’re actually going to participate in some spy stuff.

Ian Oldaker:                       08:36                     That’s correct. This is a 100% interactive museum. So we’re taking you through seven different galleries of interactive exhibitions and testing your abilities just like you would be tested in the spy world.

Dan Silvestri:                      08:49                     Wow. Now I read a little bit about you had some people helping you design this; psychologists and a British Intelligence person.

Ian Oldaker:                       08:58                     That’s right. We’ve had a great team contributing to the overall methodology of our profiling system. And one of those was a former head of training from MI6. So, we’ve had some actual spies involved in creating this experience.

Dan Silvestri:                      09:14                     How much better can you get than that? Huh? Come on. That’s cool. All right. So tell us what the, you told us a little bit about the approach. So what are the kinds of things you can do here? I mean, what things will these spies when we get spies from all over the world coming here, what are they going to do when they’re in here?

Ian Oldaker:                       09:29                     So our galleries are set up with seven different themes and each theme is a different spy skill. And we start with encryption. So in the first gallery, you’re going to be testing your cipher skills and you’re deciphering skills. In the second gallery we look at deception and you literally are going to learn how to lie and spot liars, Third gallery, we look at surveillance and your ability to look at a surveillance room wear a headset answer, questions, and your powers of observation are really tested. Then we look at hacking and we look at three types of hacking, gray hat, white hat, black hat. And we sort of give you an overview of the different worlds and the roles in hacking. And then we take you into the special operations area.

Ian Oldaker:                       10:14                     And, we actually have a laser tunnel as our special operations challenge. We test your agility and your quickness and your ability to negotiate around lasers. And then we take you to the intelligence gallery and show you a more traditional approach with a lot of objects that are used in the intelligence world.

Dan Silvestri:                      10:34                     Okay. So those are real objects that are used?

Ian Oldaker:                       10:36                     Absolutely, yeah.

Dan Silvestri:                      10:37                     We’re going to share some little secrets.

Dan Silvestri:                      10:39                     Sure. You get to see some of them: some great things like, you know, around the corner telescopes, nickels with secret compartments, things like that.

Dan Silvestri:                      10:49                     It’s very cool. And all that stuff’s really real stuff. I mean, I’ve read a lot of books on this stuff and there were even in World War II there were a lot of these kinds of things around.

Ian Oldaker:                       10:57                     Great gadgets and fantastic spy stories. Each gallery that teaches you a spy skill also has a true-life spy story that accompanies it. For instance, our first gallery is encryption. Not only do you learn about your skills and your ability in ciphering and deciphering, you learn about Alan Turing and the effort to break the Enigma Machine.

Dan Silvestri:                      11:16                     Ah, The Imitation Game. That’s correct. And that’s all true. Allen Turing. I think that the original computers if I’m not mistaken, were called Turing machines.

Ian Oldaker:                       11:25                     That’s right. So we have one of the props from The Imitation Game called a bombe, with an “e” at the end. And that’s one of the computer machines that was used to break the Enigma codes.

Dan Silvestri:                      11:37                     So how many people feel really bad when they walk out here and they fail all these tests. Are they doing pretty good?

Ian Oldaker:                       11:42                     There’s no right or wrong. Everything basically puts you in a range where you find out how your personality, your skills would measure up in the spy world. And we basically assign you one of 10 different archetypes. The profiling system looks at your scores as you go through all the galleries and then matches those scores with an archetype. And the archetypes can be a spymaster. They can be counter-intelligence officers, special operations officers, or hackers.

Dan Silvestri:                      12:10                     Just like real life. That’s pretty cool. Now, Ian, I’m sure you did this, you ran through this. How did you do?

Ian Oldaker:                       12:18                     I’ve done it a few times, so I typically get surveillance officer over and over again. I.

Dan Silvestri:                      12:25                     Is that a safer job than being a spy on the street or something?

Ian Oldaker:                       12:30                     It is a spy on the street. Just a different type of street spy.

Dan Silvestri:                      12:33                     So what are the, what’s the toughest thing you would say of all the galleries? What’s the toughest thing to do here?

Ian Oldaker:                       12:40                     I don’t know if it’s the toughest, but every one of them has their own challenges and every one of them presents it based upon your personality presents a tougher or a less tough challenge based upon who you are. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to go for, is to really identify for people what their strengths are. People do love the laser tunnels though the special operations challenge. That’s just a great experience. A fun thing to do.

Dan Silvestri:                      13:03                     You’ve seen that kind of thing and some of the spy movies like Mission: impossible. So that was pretty cool.

Ian Oldaker:                       13:08                     Indiana Jones and Entrapment are popular references that we get about it.

Dan Silvestri:                      13:11                     Ah, there you go. So, how many spies a year would you say come through here?

Ian Oldaker:                       13:18                     If they’re good spies. They’re not telling us. I have no idea, but we’ve had a few. As I said, a great team with some actual experts in the field contributed to everything here. So it’s been a pleasure to have them stop by.

Dan Silvestri:                      13:30                     Yeah, I think we read somewhere you really gain insights into your own personality here. Like you were saying, doing these different tests, it’s a little different for everybody. So what kind of insights can you really gain? When you walk out of here and you’ve done all these things and you’ve been successful at some of them, maybe some better than others. What kind of insights in your own personality and the kinds of things you could do in your life happen here?

Ian Oldaker:                       13:55                     I’ll give you two examples. Some of it is just how to approach cybersecurity and your own personal safety with the privacy of your data. Who’s looking at your data and how you might be a little safer and guard your data. And the other thing is something as simple as our lie detection challenge. You might learn something about how to spot a liar, like whether they have a quivering lip or they’re touching their face. You never know in a conversation, you might spot that in somebody who’s telling you something and think about it a little bit differently.

Dan Silvestri:                      14:24                     All right, so this is all cool stuff. Yeah. All right, that’s nice. No, what’s the next step for you guys here? You’ve got what, eight galleries, you said?

Ian Oldaker:                       14:32                     Oh, we’ve got seven galleries.

Dan Silvestri:                      14:34                     So what’s next for SPYSCAPE?

Ian Oldaker:                       14:34                     Well, SPYSCAPE is going to be a global brand and we are hoping to expand into many more cities with many more SPYSCAPEs all over the world. We also have a lot of digital products on our website. Right now we have cybersecurity Academy training. We also have, you know different educational opportunities on our website. We have a great space for events here every now and then as well. So, you know, we’re looking to bring a lot of our message out to as many people as possible.

Dan Silvestri:                      15:02                     So you do corporate team building and things like that to here?

Ian Oldaker:                       15:05                     Great point and it, is a wonderful experience for corporate team building. We have a product dedicated just for that. So we encourage all companies to look us up and, and, bring their staff here, cause competing against each other and finding out who’s good at laser tunnels and spotting liars. It’s a great thing for the workplace.

Dan Silvestri:                      15:23                     Excellent. So, who’s the most famous person? Can you tell, come on. This is a spy place. You can’t tell, right?

Ian Oldaker:                       15:32                     We’ve had a few. Yeah, we’ve had some, some people in business, we’ve had a few politicians come through. We’ve had a couple of different, different celebrities come through just as visitors who wanted to do a sort of stay off the grid a little bit. But we’ve had a really great turnout so far. We’ve been open for about 18 months and it’s been fantastic.

Dan Silvestri:                      15:54                     Great. That’s fantastic. So, if people from all over the world want to get ahold of you, Ian, how did they find SPYSCAPE?

Ian Oldaker:                       16:02                     Well, SPYSCAPE.com is our website and has all the information for ticketing and visiting this location. But it also has information about, as I said, our Academy and a lot of our other digital experiences.

Dan Silvestri:                      16:12                     All right. Thanks a lot. That was fantastic.

Ian Oldaker:                       16:14                     It was my pleasure.

Dan Silvestri:                      16:14                     I’m going to take a look around here and see how well I can do.

Dan Silvestri:                      16:20                     All right. We’re walking into the first gallery and I’m gonna test myself here. If I don’t do well, I’m not gonna tell ya. But here we go. It looks like this is the encryption gallery.

Ian Oldaker:                       16:33                     Yes. This is an Enigma machine.

Dan Silvestri:                      16:33                     All right, well that looks like the original Enigma machine they captured from a U-boat. I believe that looks cool. That’s, that’s nice. I like it. It is a very cool room. What are the age groups of people coming in through here Ian?

Ian Oldaker:                       16:53                     It’s been all over the place. It’s specifically designed for anyone from about nine or 11 up. But we’ve been all over. Families have come in with kids, have a great time. Like you see this kid over here and then, lots of adults find it kind of like a playground.

Dan Silvestri:                      17:13                     I know. Yeah. This is an adult’s playground. This is fascinating. Very cool stuff. All right. Here we got a, it looks like a.

Ian Oldaker:                       17:24                     It’s an Enigma that was thrown in a German lake to destroy it and then it was fished out.

Dan Silvestri:                      17:29                     It was a real one. This is cool. We’re looking at a real enigma machine. It’s all rusted out and everything else. And just to see this kind of thing and the role, this thing played in World War II is amazing. And here’s one sitting right here at the SPYSCAPE museum. Very cool. Very cool

Ian Oldaker:                       17:51                     This story. It’s really about Robert Hansen.

Dan Silvestri:                      17:53                     Robert Hanson. We’re in the deception room. Ha. Special assistant to assistant director in charge of the information assurance division. That’s a good title.

Dan Silvestri:                      18:07                     So, this is going to be a challenge. What are we looking at here Ian? We’re, we’ve got.

Ian Oldaker:                       18:20                     These are old lie detection kits. Polygraph kits.

Dan Silvestri:                      18:26                     Yeah. Did any of these polygraph kits really work?

Ian Oldaker:                       18:31                     In my estimation or in their actuality? Yeah, I believe the legalese, they’re not excepted into trials.

Dan Silvestri:                      18:39                     But somehow or another, they did give you an inclination as to what was really happening on the thing. So yeah, I think so.

Ian Oldaker:                       18:46                     People have been using them for a while.

Dan Silvestri:                      18:46                     This is cool. So these are all different kinds of light detector machines.

Ian Oldaker:                       18:56                     Yes, you see the evolution from the older ones.

Dan Silvestri:                      18:58                     Yeah. Right. I remember the little squiggly line ones.

Dan Silvestri:                      19:07                     And so what can we do? What can somebody do in this room?

Ian Oldaker:                       19:10                     This gallery is all about spotting liars and the best way to do that as in our deception challenge.

Dan Silvestri:                      19:16                     All right, let’s try that. Just to do it. Alright, let’s, let’s try the deception.

Ian Oldaker:                       19:24                     pull and go right in.

Dan Silvestri:                      19:25                     Oh, we got to go in. Oh my God.

Ian Oldaker:                       19:29                     You’re on your own in here.

Dan Silvestri:                      19:29                     Geez. All right. I’m in a little room here. I got to take a picture. I’m in a little room here. I’m scanning my ID bracelet. Here I go. I’m scanning it. Do you want to scan it there? I think I got it. Yeah.

Deception Voice:              19:49                     Welcome to Deception. Place your finger on the sensor in front of you and look at the center of the screen.

Dan Silvestri:                      19:56                     All right. I am. This is pretty wild.

Deception Voice:              20:04                     for the following questions. You must lie. Ready?

Dan Silvestri:                      20:08                     Yeah.

Deception Voice:              20:09                     When did you last visit the spy museum?

Dan Silvestri:                      20:12                     22 years ago.

Deception Voice:              20:15                     What’s your earliest memory?

Dan Silvestri:                      20:17                     Uh, yesterday.

Deception Voice:              20:20                     Have you ever been to space? What did you like about it?

Dan Silvestri:                      20:22                     Oh, just twice. Yes. I liked it because it was far away.

Deception Voice:              20:27                     Now remove your finger from the sensor. Analyzing results. Smiling or laughing can suggest you feel nervous or uncomfortable about the question you’ve been asked. Lying can often be stressful and people tend to blink more when they’re stressed. Before we begin the next part, here are some other signs of lying: Pursed lips. This is Anna. The FBI has her in for questioning. She’ll be presented with a series of suspects and asked if she knows any of them. After each answer. Press red. If you think she lied, press green. If you think she told the truth.

Questioner:                        21:12                     Look very carefully at this individual.

Anna:                                    21:22                     I don’t think that I know this person. No, no. I’ve never met him. Never.

Questioner:                        21:31                     What about this person?

Deception Voice:              21:36                     So when did Anna lie? Here are the answers.

Dan Silvestri:                      21:40                     Let’s see how did. Alright. I didn’t do too well.

Deception Voice:              21:43                     You’re too trusting or too suspicious.

Dan Silvestri:                      21:46                     We’re in the Surveillance Room.

Ian Oldaker:                       21:49                     When you use RFID.

Dan Silvestri:                      21:50                     All right, let’s try that.

Ian Oldaker:                       21:52                     You’ll need this on first so I’ve got to add, add even more equipment to you.

Dan Silvestri:                      21:56                     All right, thank you.

Ian Oldaker:                       21:58                     And it’s basically going to be voice recognition asking you questions about what you see up here.

Dan Silvestri:                      22:02                     All right, so now I got to look around and make sure I’m paying attention. So, I’m going to turn the mic off for now. Not to embarrass myself further. All right, here we go.

Dan Silvestri:                      22:18                     Sure. We will

Dan Silvestri:                      22:21                     Camera 21

Dan Silvestri:                      22:25                     yes.

Dan Silvestri:                      22:31                     All right. We’re in the Hacking Room. This is kind of cool.

Dan Silvestri:                      22:45                     We’re in a Bond Room here. Very cool. We’re going to check out the Bond exhibit here. There is Q flipping the plates valid in all countries. Three plates. Very cool. We’re going to continue. I got into the Bond stuff. Ah, there we are: the DB 5. This is cool. All right. We’re looking at the DB 5. This looks, this looks like a real DB 5.

Female Voice:                    23:50                     It is a real DB five.

Dan Silvestri:                      23:52                     I gotta take some pictures of that. Thank you very much.

Female Voice:                    23:56                     You’re Welcome.

Dan Silvestri:                      23:56                     Yeah. This is the real DB 5 from GoldenEye, one of the two surviving cars. One of them was smashed up pretty much in the movie. This one survived production and SPYSCAPE museum here in New York bought this DB 5 from GoldenEye for about $2.6 million it looks like from an auction. So this pretty cool actually looking at the car, looking at, I know we’ve seen photos of Pierce Brosnan leaning against the right headlight and so on. I’m standing right there. This is, this is great. This is one of the best, of course, iconic cars of James Bond and they have one here at the spy museum. One of the highlights of the Bond exhibit here.

Dan Silvestri:                      24:42                     Great stuff. Ian mentioned the Special Operations Room. This is kind of fun. This is where the laser tunnel is. And I tried it out. Of course, I wasn’t recording as I was doing it because you have to actually maneuver over lasers. Like if you’ve seen the movie Entrapment or Mission: Impossible. These are movies that use these laser kinds of tunnels where they’re protecting a particular device or machine or intelligence or data. And so this one you get to actually do it and see how well you do. I did okay (laughs). But this is one of the highlight galleries, so definitely make sure you spend some time here in the Special Operations Room and the laser tunnel. Great stuff. Fun, fun, fun. I finished up my tour of the SPYSCAPE museum by running through the Intelligence Gallery. That is pretty cool cause they got real spy stuff there like Ian mentioned. Different kinds of, of things like buttons that you could hide microfilm in and different kinds of real gadgets that came from the real spy world. So that’s really one of the fun galleries to look around for real stuff. And then lastly, you go to your debriefing and then you put your tag in again, you log in with your bracelet and you get your debriefing and your classification. So all of this is just fun stuff. It’s a great place. I would highly recommend coming to SPYSCAPE Museum in New York City. It’s a lot of fun. It’s interactive, it’s constant fun the whole time you’re here. We talked to a bunch of people that really liked it and I would say check it out. SPYSCAPE museum, spyscape.com New York City: Spy Movie Navigator loves it. Remember at the SPYSCAPE museum, it’s all about YOU.

Dan Silvestri:                      26:45                     So, come here and figure it all out

Female Voice:                    26:47                     and determine what kind of spy you’d be.

Music:                                   26:47

Tom Pizzato:                      26:57                     Dan, there were a couple of things you talked about that were really cool. I mean, I love the concept that they’ve got a DB 5. I mean that’s just so cool to be able to see that. But there were a couple of things from the spy stuff that I really thought I want to see that Enigma machine. That played such an important part in our history and Alan Turing was so important. We both come from the computer industry and there’s equivalent to the Nobel prize is the Turing Award. It’s a $1 million award to somebody from their contributions to computer science and it’s named after this guy.

Dan Silvestri:                      27:28                     They had a mock-up of the Alan Turing machine too from The Imitation Game.

Tom Pizzato:                      27:33                     Oh really? Yeah. I’ve got to see that. And I really want to get to that Intelligence Gallery that you’re talking about where they had like the coins where you would hide things and stuff because.

Dan Silvestri:                      27:43                     Yeah, this was real stuff that they really use.

Tom Pizzato:                      27:45                     That brought me back to the first few Bond movies where Sean Connery’s Bond was actually using stuff like the briefcase and From Russia With Love where they had the stuff hidden in there. That’s the kind of thing I imagine I’m going to see when I go into that Intelligence Gallery and that’s like real spy stuff.

Dan Silvestri:                      28:00                     Yeah, you’re seeing real stuff.

Tom Pizzato:                      28:01                     that they brought in the movies that I think they’ve gotten a little away from and I’d like to see brought back in more. Because that’s really kind of the sneaky stuff. It’s kinda cool. But then I’ve got to see that in that Enigma machine.

Dan Silvestri:                      28:14                     The Enigma machine was cool though, especially the one they had there that was, it was literally retrieved from a lake so it’s all rusted out.

Tom Pizzato:                      28:22                     That thing and Alan Turing were so important to our history. I’m so bummed. My daughter went to New York University. So she did her four years there and now she left New York and went elsewhere for grad school and she left a couple of months before they opened up SPYSCAPE. So I’m going to have to get back to New York now to see that, to see this museum,

Dan Silvestri:                      28:41                     I would highly recommend it to everybody traveling to New York. If you’re interested in spy movies and spy stuff, check out the SPYSCAPE museum. It’s fun.

Dan Silvestri:                      28:52                     So thanks for joining us as we continue Cracking the Code of Spy Movies. We had a great time at SPYSCAPE. This is Dan Silvestri and Tom Pizzato from spymovienavigator.com — spy movie, podcasts, videos, discussions, and more. Please subscribe to our show through your favorite podcast app.

 

 


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