In the early 2000’s, a group of artists were evicted from their home to make space for a shopping centre parking lot in Providence, Rhode Island. They were sad to lose their lodgings, and angry to see all the city's residential properties being converted into commercial ones. This inspired them to run an experiment to find out whether a commercial property, like a shopping centre, could also be used as a residential space. Initially the plan was to try to live in the Providence Place mall for a ...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Have you heard about that time a tiger shark regurgitated a human arm in the Coogee Aquarium? It was the afternoon of April 26th, 1935, when the largest shark ever in captivity (we’re calling her Shirley) spewed up a full human arm in front of a dozen witnesses. The arm bore a distinctive tattoo & was identified as belonging to a known Sydney criminal named Jimmy. There are lots of twists & turns in this story & even a high speed boat chase, but how Jimmy's arm ended up in Shirley’s ...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr
After the hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, the airspace over the USA was closed, and all planes were forced to land. 38 of the 5,000 planes in the air at that time, carrying 7,000 passengers from all over the world, were diverted to the tiny town of Gander in the far-eastern corner of Newfoundland, Canada. The town’s population instantly doubled, and for the next 5 days locals (Newfies) volunteered to work around the clock to feed, clothe and provide customise...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 9 min
It's possibly the most iconic conspiracy theory, it’s one of the originals. The Illuminati are believed to be a shadowy organisation of wealthy, powerful people (or giant shape shifting lizards, depending who you talk to) who control all the world’s governments, industries and banks. You’ve probably at least heard of it. But you might be surprised to know the Illuminati was a real secret society started by a German law professor in the 1770s who maybe got a little carried away smoking joints in ...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 1 min
In the 1980s Cleveland Ohio was known as 'The Mistake on the Lake’. The city was famous for its high crime rate, high unemployment rate, & a toxic river so polluted it literally caught fire every few months. It was certainly not a destination for tourists, and citizens were moving away from the city at a rapid rate. City officials decided enough was enough & tried to rebrand Cleveland as a vibrant, thriving, exciting location by hosting a fun, spectacular attempt to win themselves a Guin...
Sep 02, 2022•45 min
On an ordinary morning in 1980’s Maryland, 17-year-old Larry Swartz and his 9-year-old sister Annie called 9-11 to report that their parents had been killed at their family home. When police arrived, they found their mum, Kay, stripped naked on the front lawn with stab wounds to her neck and their dad, Bob, in their home office having been stabbed 17 times. There were no signs of a break in and nothing was missing from the home, so police turned their attention to the family as suspects: Larry, ...
Aug 29, 2022•21 min
In 1978, eligible bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw appeared on the American reality TV program Dating Game to try and find her perfect match. Cheryl picked Bachelor #1, Rodney Alcala, who was known for his passion for photography, skydiving and riding his motorcycle. Unbeknownst to Cheryl, she picked a man who’d spent the past 10 years brutally murdering women and girls all over the United States. Jacob shares the story with guest host and reality TV connoisseur Adam Densten. This episode was brough...
Aug 28, 2022•18 min
In September 1977, an American Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson went missing from his London church. When he returned three days later he claimed he’d been kidnapped by his ex-girlfriend, Joyce McKinney, tied to a bed and forced to have sex with her until she fell pregnant. Her story? They were in love and she was trying to rescue him from (what she believed was) the cult of Mormonism. Join Jacob and co-host Veronica Milsom as they follow the story including the salacious headlines, fake wi...
Aug 25, 2022•29 min
In Julie d’Aubigny's short life she enjoyed affairs with men and women, joined (and destroyed) a convent, performed in the Paris Opera, defeated men in duels and got away with it. It's a Just The Gist classic from 2020 chock-full of gender dynamics, snuff boxes and periods. We'll be back with new stories and special guest hosts next week. We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there’s this: A comprehensive written account of the life of La Maupin with good footnotes that help provide c...
Aug 19, 2022•53 min
He was the hero security guard who found a bomb before it exploded at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, leading to hundreds of lives being saved. He was celebrated across the world, interviewed on every TV show, appeared on the cover of every newspaper. Until… Richard Jewell was accused of planting the bomb himself, and things took a turn very, very quickly. Skip straight to the story: approx 14:17 We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more there’s this: Watch the Clint Eastwood movie “Richard Jew...
Aug 12, 2022•58 min
Before Lou Pearlman and Backstreet Boys, before Britney Spears and her parents… there was Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis. The managers of massive stars ripping them off for their talent and controlling every little thing about them is nothing new, but few people know it happened to Elvis. In fact, few people know much about Elvis Presley’s manager at all, except that Colonel Tom Parker had a weird accent and - oh, he probably murdered someone. Skip straight to the story: 6:25 We give you Just The ...
Aug 04, 2022•49 min
The woman who told the world the truth about the Watergate scandal before anyone else, but her story sounded so crazy that nobody believed her. Now a major TV series starring Julia Roberts called 'Gaslit', Martha Mitchell was the wife of an important man in President Nixon's administration, which meant she knew too much, and the White House wanted to shut her up. But Martha was right about everything, and the way she was treated ended up in psychologists naming 'The Martha Mitchell Effect' after...
Jul 28, 2022•37 min
Rosie is back, and it's been so long that she's collected a Breakin' Nooz BONANZA. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jul 24, 2022•1 hr 12 min
On August 4th, 1986, it was discovered that the most expensive painting in Australia, 'The Weeping Woman’ by Pablo Picasso, was missing from the National Gallery of Victoria's collection. Turned out it had been abducted by a cheeky new organisation no-one had ever heard of: the "Australian Cultural Terrorists” (the A.C.T) who were holding the painting ransom. Their demands? Increase funding to the arts, or the painting would be incinerated. Was this really a crime? Or was it more of an act of pr...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 23 min
In 1692, in the small colonial village of Salem, Massachusetts, two young girls started experiencing bizarre, convulsive fits. The doctor’s diagnosis? Witchcraft. Over the course of a few months, as more villagers experienced similar strange symptoms, people started accusing their friends and neighbours of practicing black magic. Paranoia spread throughout Salem, and over the following 15 months of mass hysteria more than 200 people were accused, 20 people were executed and 5 people died in pris...
Jul 08, 2022•1 hr 26 min
In August 1990, in the badlands of South Dakota, recreational fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson stumbled across some huge fossilised bones lodged into the side of a cliff. While they spent 17 days digging the fossils out of the rock, Susan and her team of fossil hunters realised they'd unearthed the world's largest and most complete T-Rex skeleton. They named the specimen Sue, and soon a decade-long battle began over who owned the bones: the people who discovered Sue? The landowner whose property ...
Jul 01, 2022•1 hr 7 min
The right to a safe abortion has been taken away from millions of people in the United States. In light of Roe v Wade being overturned last week, we wanted to share the story of Rosie's abortions. Solidarity protests are happening around Australia this week. Find one here: https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/roe-v-wade-australia-protest/ These article include links to places you can donate: https://jezebel.com/where-to-donate-abortion-access-roe-v-wade-1849053167 https://www.businessinsider.com/organ...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 1 min
In March 2008, young couple Julian Buchwald & Carolynne Watson went on a picnic in the Victorian bush and didn't come home. They spent the next week battling exhaustion and exposure to try and find their way out of the bush with only a sleeping bag and a jar of peanut butter to keep them going. When they stumbled out of the bush a week later with a wild story of hostage and kidnapping, it didn't take police to figure out who was behind it. Jacob shares the story with guest host Zara McDonald...
Jun 24, 2022•51 min
On a summer afternoon in 2003, a man named Brian Wells walked into a bank in Pennsylvania with a bomb strapped to his neck & calmly demanded $250,000. Within the hour, the bomb exploded, Brian was dead, and investigators spent the next decade trying to figure out who was responsible. The investigation revealed a frozen body in a freezer, an impossible-to-solve scavenger hunt, and a convoluted web of co-conspirators who all died before revealing the truth of what really happened. Jacob ...
Jun 17, 2022•1 hr 17 min
The story of Bhagwan Rajneesh, the Indian guru who established a movement/sex cult that tried to take over the state of Oregon, USA in the 1980s. Bhagwan, his right hand woman Sheela, and their thousands of followers descended on a quiet rural community & proceeded to build their own city-sized commune, complete with its own roads, airport and enough space to house the cult's loyal followers (mostly white, middle class, Western hippies).The group were so determined to build & protect the...
Jun 14, 2022•1 hr 6 min
In 1964, a Welsh teenager named Brian Robson found himself working a job he hated in a country he hated even more: Australia. He couldn't afford the plane ticket home, so he first tried smuggling himself out of the country by boat, & when that didn’t work, he had himself sealed inside a wooden crate and sent as cargo from Melbourne to the UK. What he thought would be an easy 48-hour journey turned into a five day ordeal which almost killed him. Jacob shares the story with guest host Ja...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Jacob shares with Caleb the unbelievable story of the de Védrines family: an aristocratic French family who were convinced by a local social climber, Thierry Tilly, that their lives were at risk by Freemasons who were not only trying to kill them, but destroy the entire world order. The only way to save themselves? Follow the absurd instructions of Tilly. What started as an innocuous friendship between one de Védrines and Tilly turned into more than a decade worth of manipulation t...
May 27, 2022•1 hr 36 min
Presenting one of our most frequently sugGISTed stories: the 17-year-old German teenager who survived a plane crash & an 11 day trek through the jungle. On Christmas Eve, 1971, Juliane Koepcke was on a plane flying over the Amazon. Half-way into the one hour flight, the plane flew into a tropical storm, was struck by lightning and split in half. Juliane was sucked out of the plane and fell more than 3km back to earth, landing alone in the rainforest…alive and barely injured. Juliane t...
May 20, 2022•46 min
Ten years ago, ‘Salvator Mundi’ was unveiled to the world, its owners insisting it was a long lost Leonardo Da Vinci painting (as in...the guy who painted the Mona Lisa). It sold at auction for $450 million, making history as the most expensive piece of art ever purchased. But what most people don’t know is, this precious ‘historical’ painting had been found in a garage and bought in a small U.S town for $1100, before being extensively ‘restored’ by an e...
May 06, 2022•1 hr 23 min
In 2016, 34-year-old Sherri Papini vanished while out jogging. Insisting she must have been ‘taken’, Sherri’s husband Keith Papini organised massive search efforts and wept in TV interviews about wanting her home. And after three weeks, much to the shock of police, Sherri reappeared. Found wandering along the side of a freeway with a chain around her waist, battered, bruised and emaciated with her hair chopped off, Sherri said she’d been abducted by two ‘Hispanic wo...
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 19 min
We've dug into the archives to bring you one of our favourite scam stories: Rudy Kurniawan aka the guy who tricked rich idiots into spending MILLIONS of dollars on his homemade wine. There are people in this world who spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on wine - sometimes on a single bottle. These wine 'experts' say they can taste the difference between a fancy bottle and a sack of goon, but... Rudy definitely proved they can't. He made a bunch of wine in his kitchen, slapped some ...
Apr 22, 2022•1 hr 4 min
We're bringing you two stories for the price of one this week: Rosie reveals the "sensual" relationship between a 23-year-old woman named Mary and a dolphin named Peter and Jacob shares about the North Carolina hillbillies who stole 17 million dollars and almost got away with it...but decided to blow it on minivans and Mexican holidays instead. Skip straight to the stories: approx 9:50 for The Hillbilly Heist and 41:10 for Mary & Peter We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, t...
Apr 15, 2022•58 min
Remember how we said we’re a weekly-ish podcast? New studio episodes are coming soon (we promise!) but this week we’re republishing one of favourites from 2020: the OG Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff who stole up to 100 billion dollars through his fraudulent investment company. Bernie would tell his clients he was investing their money into super successful stocks (and show them the fake statements to prove it) but he was actually funnelling it all into his own bank account to fund his l...
Apr 08, 2022•42 min
It's our latest LIVE show! Two stories for ya - the greatest (albeit brief) love story of our time, Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson AND Jacob gives Just The Gist of Count Viktor Lustig, one of the best scammers who ever lived. Skip straight to the stories: approx 9:17 We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's this: Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson: https://www.insider.com/ariana-grande-pete-davidson-relationship-timeline-2018-6 https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a39283246/ari...
Apr 01, 2022•54 min
Coming to ya live from Sydney with TWO whole stories! Skip straight to the stories: approx 15:36 We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's this: Whoopi Goldberg and the movie she was forced to make: Theodore Rex How Did This Get Made 'oral history' of Theodore Rex: https://www.slashfilm.com/539540/theodore-rex/ Some articles: https://decider.com/2021/10/07/whoopi-goldberg-regrets-theodore-rex/ https://www.ranker.com/list/the-weird-story-behind-theodore-rex-whoopi-goldberg-movie/ja...
Mar 25, 2022•59 min
