From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They called me Bed. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We are going global, folks, we are several of us are recording remotely this evening, and the news has not stopped. In fact, there is so much strange news that I almost wish just restart that Daily show from a while back. We are going to learn about a bizarre and for some people with
Synastasia upsetting heist. We're gonna learn about a big bang type explosion. And we also we just wanted to give a brief shout out before we begin to anybody who's heard the story of the off duty pilot up north who had taken some magic mushrooms and attempted to shut down the engines of a plane mid air, please remember that if you become a psychonaut. If you engage in hallucinogens, always have a buddy with you. Practice the buddy system.
Don't do anything stupid, and don't put yourself in a situation where you could put other people in danger.
Dane.
I saw this other drug related story that was just the headline was very misleading. It was like man takes forty thousand bills of MDMA and survived live to tell the tale. But it meant like over the course of his life, which is still a lot that's insane.
But it was little misleading.
And there's that other guy. We were talking about this briefly off air as a nice segue. There was another guy speaking of pills Nolan who threatened a Florida pharmacy quite recently. He came in and he said he was robbing them for drugs, and the most notable thing was he said, I need all of your viagra And so we're wondering whether he's going to sell them or, as Matt said, whether he had some just sick weekend plans.
Yeah, that was in Orlando. His name was Thomas Muse. He was twenty three years.
Old, and there's a great article for that. I saw it on Wiowen News, So shout up to the editor there, Trisha Theck you can learn more about him. It's just you know that kind of news where you have viagra or drug like that that always grabs a headline. But I think it sets us up for one of the biggest story We're going to talk about this evening.
Yes, and today's story is coming to us from various sources. I'm actually reading from Dailymail, dot co dot UK, which is not always my favorite place to get a story. But seeing as most of this similar information is included in places like CBS, Local, NBC Reporting, Reuters, we're pulling from this one because it kind of put all of
the same information into one place. So here is the headline, America's pharmacy deserts, write AID, CVS and Walgreens will shut more than fifteen hundred stores due to crime and competition. Like when you hear that. First of all, these are three of the primary pharmacy chains that exist within the United States, the ones that if you walk down the street you probably see them. And these are also the same companies that run stores like Dwayne Reid in New
York City, which is included in these lists. When it comes to stores that are going to be show So these are the pharmacies, and the very end of that headline there is leaving millions without access to healthcare, and in your mind and our minds, we have to figure out how do we compare and equate pharmacies as a standalone business to healthcare?
Right?
Are those the same thing? Are you? How are they related? And is it just drugs at a pharmacy nowadays or is it other types of healthcare that you can get at these places.
Sometimes they have those like blood pressure cuff machines, and there's always you know, you can get a free flu shot and stuff like that. So it does feel like an access issue at least in those respects, But I'm not sure.
About the s. This is interesting.
Well, absolutely a pharmacist also is there to help you understand what the effects of the drugs are and you know how to administer them correctly, how many you actually need, what things to be aware of when you're taking specific drugs. Right, It is a part of healthcare. It's not just a place you go to pick up your cough medicine or whatever when you get sick. So this story feels like a very big deal because there are again the pharmacy. I don't know about you guys. The pharmacy is one
of the places I go to regularly. It's like, go to a store to procure food, right, some kind of edible provisions, place to probably gas up my vehicle very often, and then a pharmacy when I need to get drugs. And often there's a pharmacy within a place that you'd go to get food, but not every time, right, And so it means it's kind of an important established place
to visit in my neighborhood. And I'm just imagining now that with fifteen hundred stores being closed very soon from these major outlets, there are going to be holes in the places throughout the United States where you can actually go to one, or pharmacy deserts as they're calling them. Do you guys go to your pharmacies at all?
Absolutely?
I mean I live in an area that could you know, could be considered potential for this kind of thing, you know, in terms of food deserts and now pharmacy desert It's like my partner and I always joke the man, I wish they'd do something other than like open a new gas station. Or a liquor store, you know, because you know, even the closest grocery store is not particularly walk walking distance.
It would take a.
While, and then you know, lugging all those groceries back is not really realistic.
So the Walgreens is the.
Closest walkable place that I can go to get some mild provisions, you know, or like cat litter or whatever my aunt you know, like you said, get my medication filled.
Oh yeah, Well, one of the primary reasons that that stuff is available at pharmacies is because that's how they make their money. Because if imagine if you walk into a store and all they had is account where you can go to it and fill your prescriptions, that business isn't going to make a ton of money right just doing that. They are paying pharmacists to be there to fill the prescriptions, to have that knowledge, to do all that high wage.
That's a you know, that's like yeah, borderline doctor's wage. It's very you know, it's a serious expenditure for those companies.
So one could also say it is similar to the profit model of gas stations, and it can be surprising the people when you travel to other countries that have a different approach to healthcare, you could say they care about your health. In some other countries, you will walk into a pharmacy and all they sell are pharmaceutical substances, just like you go to a gas station in another country and all they sell is gas and maybe some
stuff for cars. But gas stations and pharmacies in the US make the bulk of their profit off the other stuff. And they've got a guaranteed audience in this States because sixty six percent of all adults in the US currently use some prescription drug. That's from the Health Policy Institute.
Oh and surely in those other countries you're talking about, been there subsidized by the government, which is what allows them to exist in that more bare bones form. But I mean bare bones, you know, in the good way. They've got all the medicine you need, but they don't need to sell candy and wine and you know, hot pockets.
Yeah, and they have to sell that stuff at a crazy markup compared to other places that you would buy it, just just to break even, right, or well theoretically to make profits at you know, your Walgreens that's on the corner somewhere in you know here in Buford or something, but those profits that they once knew are going away and because of that or they're not growing at the
same rate. Right, That's one of the major problems we've seen just in basically capitalist society over the past what twenty five years that we've been paying attention to it.
Even if a company is making profits, if those profits aren't rising at a certain angle, right, then shareholders don't care, and people think the business is failing and they lose confidence, sell the stocks, and then those companies go down, generally get purchased by other companies or go under and have to declare bankruptcy because that's just the way this capitalism thing works. So jumping back to Daily Mail, the story was written October twenty third by Rachel Bowman and here we go.
Right.
AID said it will close one hundred and fifty of its twenty one hundred US stores after they filed Chapter eleven bankruptcy earlier this month. And Da da da DA. By the way, they're dealing with lawsuits that are tied directly to the opioid crisis, so they're having to pay out tons and tons of cash because of their part. Right, I wasn't just the manufacturers making the opioids. It was also the pharmacies given all opioids out to everybody, which is not great.
We were just following orders, literally filling orders.
Well, everybody's making money, hands over feet when there's a really popular drug, right, any drug, just like the ozepic thing we were talking about, the whatever was I forget the other names of those weight loss drugs. Anytime there's drugs, everybody's winning when it, you know, in the supply chain, basically like a really popular drug.
Would you say that this this accelerates given that the US population is aging. I guess you could say other developed countries too.
Oh.
Absolutely, all the problems are accelerated because of the aging acceleration that's occurring. Right. We talked about the problems with accessibility, being able to drive to a place that's kind of close or walk to a place that's kind of close. Now, imagine if you're somebody who is, you know, quite a bit older than us, and you have a hard time walking, but you don't have access to a vehicle, how do
you actually get ten miles to your nearest CVS or whatever. Thankfully, there are alternatives that exist now where you can have pharmaceuticals shipped to you through a bunch of different like startup RX stores that do that kind of thing. But it's not the same. I don't think as like being able to go to a pharmacy to pick up that one prescription you need plus whatever other things you might need.
You know, as a if you're someone who's diabetic, all of the other pieces of equipment that come with that with having type two diabetes or something. It's not just one prescription thing that you get. So just to jump back here, CVS, another giant chain is closing it stores on nine hundred stores by the end of twenty twenty four.
That is ten percent of all their shops. And oh what was the other one, guys, Walgreen is going to shutter one hundred and fifty stores by the summer of twenty twenty four.
Is part of this due to online pharmacies.
Online pharmacies is one component, right, because they are taking away quite a bit of business or they're an actual competitor. Now, for a while, it was all startup stuff. Some people were using it, trying it out, the early adopters, right, But now pharmacies that are online or that will just ship stuff to you, they are becoming it's almost like Spotify to Apple podcasts in our little center of the world. Does that make sense.
Absolutely?
Yeah, So you hear all this stuff, it's not that crazy. That's like ten percent of each of these major chains. But still, when you know you add it all up, fifteen hundred pharmacies individually, when they're spread out in the way that they are, it's going to put it's going to make pharmacy deserts pocketed throughout the United States. It's not just going to be in one place in one region. It's just I wanted to signal this to everybody because it does feel like a bigger problem that we haven't
seen the full consequences of yet. But it's on the way, you know.
I will add though, I mean, like you know, in the neighborhood where I live, I mean there is some crime, and these stores are often run on skeleton crews, you know, where there's like maybe two people that are staffing the place and then they have a security guard. And I've seen the places have windows smashed and you know, all kinds of things like that. And it's part part of
the nature of some parts of the country. You're going to have places maybe that are like lower income areas that do rely on places like that, but they also are become targets because there isn't much else around, and a place like that, you know, with a pretty wide variety of things that you can steal, it could be considered a target. So then it becomes a cost I guess basis analysis, what's the word like a cost cost I guess cost benefit analysis for these big companies where
it's like they're not thinking about who they're serving. They're just saying, oh, we've got these stories that are costing us more than they're making us. So but it's not like it's inherently racist or something. I don't mean, I'm not like trying to defend the giant corporations, but it does feel like it's sort of a pickle.
Kind of right.
I would add to that that the you know, there's also there are also standing policies in a lot of parts of the US and specific wherein lease aren't going to take action against certain shoplifting under a under a certain financial threshold. It might be like stealing under five hundred dollars worth of stuff, et cetera. And that means that you don't really have a legal mechanism to recoup your cost or to combat what do they call it, the business.
Shrinkage, shrinkage breakage?
Right, we gotta love a corporate euphemism. But then also as the population continues to age, and as people are relying increasingly on not just a monthly supplement but daily substances, when they to your point, Matt, when someone cannot when there is no place for a person to walk, maybe they don't Like a lot of people, especially elderly, they may be living near or below the poverty line, which means that they may not have the wherewithal to even
have an internet connection to order from an online pharmacy. All to say that I agree with you, this problem will continue, this will accelerate, Which is why in any election, and it doesn't make sense sometimes if you're a younger person, But in any election, regardless of who is running or what their affiliation is, they're going to have at least one big plank of their platform be something about medicare.
Sure, Oh yeah, oh for sure, red meat for the olds. Just to finish right here, guys, on that safety thing, that concept of pharmacies being stolen from Quite often in that same daily mail article. They cite Capital One research that estimates overall pharmacies within the US had lost eighty six point six billion dollars to retail theft over the course of twenty twenty two. So one year eighty six point six billion dollars worth of retail theft. That sounds
insane to me. That doesn't sound right to me, but that is at least what is being cited here, and the same group is estimating that by twenty twenty five that number loss money loss to retail theft will be over one hundred and fifteen billion dollars. Now that's all pharmacies across all of the US, but still that's an astronomical amount of money to be lost over theft. Somehow, if it helps.
You know, not all of it, but at least part of that can be explained by the markup you refer to earlier.
That you know that makes a lot of sense, Like potential profits versus what they actually paid for the drugs to get them to sell them. That makes sense. That actually makes a lot of sense. Okay, guys, well there's more here. Just be aware of it. Maybe check out what's going on with the drug stores near you. Just who you know, you have an awareness of stuff that's gonna be there and stuff that's going to be gone. All right, that's all. Will be right back after a word from our sponsor, and we've.
Returned with another piece of strange news. This one's more like that gift from Tim and Eric of the Wareheim with the black turtleneck on doing the ball.
Thing over it. So that's what this one is.
It Also, we talked a little bit before we started recording today with super producer Alexis code named Dot Holliday Jackson about various space related games we're playing. Then you
and Alexis are on that Starfield tip. I am currently I don't know cold on that one due to a lack of Xbox, but I've gotten the next best thing, which I think might even be in some ways its own thing that's better and it certain ways and obviously different is Noman Sky, which involves a lot of space mining, and I think Starfield does too, literally shooting like lasers at space rocks and sucking up all of the crazy elements that they shoot out and then using those to
craft your whatever hermetic seals or whatever weird little thing you need to make your spaceship upgrades. But that ain't for nothing that we're talking about space rocks and stars being full of this kind of good goodness, things like palladium, you know, like radioactive elements. This is all what they say made of star stuff, you know, gold, platinum, uranium. I said palladium. I didn't see that one listed, but I think that probably who knows, there's probably some palladium
out there. I feel like that one's come up with my scanner a time or two. But we're talking about a different kind of scanner today. A big old eyeball pointed at space called the James Web Telescope, the James Web Space Telescope more precisely JWST for short, which is a very powerful, the most powerful in fact, space observatory ever launched.
And I'm sorry it's not pointed at space. It's in space.
And then we're looking, we're able to you know, I guess that's beaming you know, data back to NASA. On March seventh of this year, that very telescope detected a ginormous explosion in deep deep space that is referred to as a gamma ray burst. This burst lit up the sky millions of light years away for about two hundred seconds.
And following this observation.
Astronomers working on the project we're able to, you know, look at some of the aftermath of that burst, which they're referring to the burst as GRB two three zero three zero seven A, which is very sexy sounding, but I believe that's the code for a gamma ray burst. I imagine that's what gr Yes, that's what GRB stands for. Scientists very quickly realized, and I'm by the way, reporting on this as usual good quality stuff from Motherboard, this
one by Becky Ferreira. I believe we've we've cited her quite a few times on this space related stuff. That seems to be her beat. Scientists pretty quickly realized, well, I don't know, a couple of days I think it took for them. We'll get to the details in a minute. That GRB twenty three three seven A was in fact more than a million times brighter than every single star in the entire Milky Way galaxy combined, and this would make it the second brightest gamma ray burst ever to
be observed. More interesting, it's already interesting enough. Also interestingly, it contains signatures. These are like I guess, various gas expulsions or whatever it might be light. I think there's things like color shifts and lots of different ones. I'm again no space scientist here. Astronomer would be I guess the more appropriate name. But some of these signatures suggested that it was something called a killo nova, which sounds scary, guys.
It sounds like it's like killer nova, but it's a kilo kilo nova. And this is a collision between two hyper dense objects, which we've also talked about a good bit and known as neutron stars. And this particular killing nova took place eight million light years from.
Our little blue dot called Earth.
And most of these types of events, these kill a nova burs only last a couple of seconds, but as you'll recall, this one lasted two hundred seconds three minutes, which is a very unusual. And only was it the brightest it is it's, I believe, or one of the brightest. No, the brightest, it is probably one of the longest, I believe. That's what I'm gathering from the report and also from the study published in the journal Nature on.
Wednesday of last week. So pretty cool stuff.
Again, let off this talking about space material you know, stuff that's ejected by these types of events, and that is what they observed. In addition to those other things. They observed that this well, actually, let's let's go ahead and quote the expert here, Andrew Levin, an astrophysicist from Redbound University who was leading this team. He had a couple of really interesting things to say about what this
could mean in terms of these materials. This process or a process that was gun I suppose by this collision is something called nucleosynthesis.
I love who I said. That is that what it is?
That's what he says, it is. It's a cool word. And I'm just going to go ahead and quote the Vice article really quickly. By observing the burst with JWST, the researchers were able to show that GRB twenty three oh three oh seven A belongs to a class of long duration gamma ray bursts associated with compact object mergers, and demonstrate that these events play a central role in heavy element nucleosynthesis across the universe.
This is really interesting. NOL correct me if I'm wrong. Aren't gamma ray bursts one of the things that were listed on Josh's existential Threats show like as one of the things that could just end life on.
Earth, yeah, or turn everybody into incredible hulks at the very least.
Even before that show, I think we all Josh as well, we all kind of learned about it and our how stuff work stays. Yes, scary thing about a gamma ray burst is that if one of those hits the place it there, it travels so quickly and the human methods of detecting it are such that we wouldn't know until it was way too late, Like that Drake album. If you're reading this, it's too late, which is Drake is clearly writing about gamma ray burst and.
The sciences on the side.
But if one of these was aimed at us from no matter how far away in the universe, from what angle, if it ended up crossing the path of Earth, that would pretty much mean game over man, right.
I think the best way to put it is, while not absolutely ending life on Earth, while we're not one hundred percent sure it would do that, just the radiation would absolutely wallop the ozone layer and other parts of the atmosphere, so things would get very bad, very very quickly for the majority of living creatures. Maybe deep in the ocean you're a little more protected. Maybe if you've got a billionaire bunker, you can survive until your servants
overthrow and eat you. But other yeah, gamma ray burst very very dangerous, and I don't think we know a bunch about their frequency really well.
Well, scientists refer to gamma ray bursts and their effects on the ozone layer as being more than fifty gazillion trillion hairspray cans. I'm just joking, that's not true. I don't even know if that's a real number. I'm sure it is, But this guy live on the head of the study. I'm just gonna read this quote and then we can we can wreck this one up. This has been a fast moving, sometimes challenging, and also utterly fantastic experience to work on. It has been a little like
a cosmic murder mystery who done it? Of what caused this gamma ray burst. It has taken a lot of piecing together by an amazing group of people working on the various bits of data, and of course on building models that can explain it. Although it was very bright,
it hasn't been a simple thing to understand. For example, it took us a day and a half to really locate where the burst was in the sky, another few days to see a color change that told us it was probably a Kilan nova, and then we had to wait for it to move into the bit of the sky where jwst could actually see it. In the end, it all came together, but there was a lot of
work and a bit of luck in that happening. To give a bit of a handle in the discussion and the collaboration, we have a dedicated slack channel and from the first object, good to know that these slack over there too. And from the observations to the paper submission roughly three months later, there were about nine thousand messages on it.
The most.
You know, I've been hitting at this, but I just want to list it and then we can move on the kinds of elements that are produced by a thing like this, And Ben, you got it right. I mean, I think I jokingly sad a big bang type event. There are probably several of these. You know, this big bang created these elements and this one created I mean, it's sort of like a reductive thing.
I think it's to think of one big bang creating all life in one go.
It's usually a team effort. But when stars die, they shoot out materials like carbon, phosphorus or oxygen.
And what remnants of dead.
Stars like supernovas do when they collide and Kilanov events, they make their own particular kind of offering of these elemental materials, things like like I said at the top, gold, platinum, and uranium, and then the article of finishes. In this way, the materials that make up stars, planets, and all life on Earth is primarily made of the remains of our ancient stellar elders in one way or another.
Wow beautiful, there's a poetry to that. It really is.
Yeah, And I just I don't know, like this zone's a little science y y and see, but I think this is the kind of stuff that we imagine a lot.
And it's so cool.
They know that we have people that are way smarter than us that are out there putting some real bones around, you know, things that have only ever been able to be described in kind of more fantastical ways or in science fiction or even in like certain religious beliefs.
I mean, this is like the stuff of gods. It's very fascinating to me.
Yeah, but don't be so hard on yourself look on like for instance, you know, they put the time in the studying, right, and they're very smart. And if you if if you were working on James Webb Space telescope for the for the length of time that we've been podcasting, you'd be you'd be in articles like this.
Man back to.
Solid b in physical science, you know, I did, okay, But yeah, Matt, did you have any anything else to add in addition to it to what Ben said.
I think it's fascinating that JWST can even make some or I guess they made a calculation after they measured how bright the model, probably like millions of times brighter than all of the stars.
Those nine thousand slack messages it took them to get to that number.
Yeah, well, but that's just unfathomable to me, just that it needs that something could be that bright, right.
We can't even look at our little sun without going blind, you know, I mean, and that thing's far enough super you know, it's it is unfathomable.
That is exactly the right word for it.
Oh and we've got a we've got an old series on YouTube about the construction of the James Webb Space telescope from house Stuff works. Very very fortunate to travel up there with Holly Fry from Stuff you missed in history class, who is a fellow fan of astronautics and
space exploration. So you can see, you can see some talks that we have about the construction of the thing and some of the explanations we receive that very very well done, very lucid explanations from incredibly brilliant people like doctor Mather I believe a descendant of the New England Mathers. Yeah, he's able. He's way more chill than Cotton countries. He is able to explain. It's the mark of something that I think we all agree is the is the true
indicator of this kind of brilliance. You can take these incredibly complex ideas and break them down through analogy into clear, understandable explanations. So if you want to learn more about the James Web space to Les's scope, check that out. That thing makes I was gonna say it makes the Hubble look like trash, but I shouldn't. The Hubble's amazing too. It's just the James Web is like the PS five to the Hubbles PS one.
Yeah. Absolutely, as long as it's not an Xbox because my feeling.
But yeah, the last I'm just gonna wrap this up with one final quote from from Levon or Levin. He says, ultimately, we would like to dissect the Kilino vi plural and enough detail to pick apart all the different elements that form there and know how much of each element there is. If we can do this, we can test if they make some, most, or all of the heavy elements we see around us, and we will finally be able to
say where every element in the periodic table is made. Cool, so that let's take a quick break, hear a word from our sponsor, and come back with one more piece of strange news.
And we have returned, by way of segue from the cosmic to the earthly. The estimated cost of the James Web Space telescope, I think was ballpark ten billion, ten billion dollars, right, So how much would that be if you paid it in dimes? The that's the question I'm not quite mathing. Of course, they're like ten dives to a dollar. A hundred billion dollars is a trillion dimes,
So anyway, it's a lot of dimes. And I don't know about most people, especially in the States, but I think a lot of US, at least in my experience, are increasingly increasingly consider denominations of coins somewhat irrelevant, you know, like a nickel doesn't buy anything. The US government actually loses money printing pennies, and previous episodes, we agreed that they should all follow the lead of Canada and abolish the pinny. But when's the last time you guys used a dime and a transaction?
I can't even recall, not possible.
They're probably all stuck to the bottom of my cup holder in my Honda Fit.
I was at the coming fair recently with my son, and we bought something with five dollars, and then I had a little bit of change left over, and then I paid for something at another stall, and I actually used a dime, a nickel and a quarter.
The system works.
Oh yeah, but that's the only time I think I've done that in years years.
Yeah.
And part of that, of course, is just the rising cost of living. Part of that is the fact that more and more people, especially post COVID well we're not really post COVID, but especially after the first two years of the pandemic, people increasingly used cash list transactions and money soon will be less and less of a physical artifact and more and more of a digital thing, which makes it an idea, which makes it ephemeral and coined to manipulate. No, what's that?
It's gone, man, It's going to be the way that the future broke digital currency.
Nice so here it's going to be the new laser disc. So the story stood out. I thought this would just be a fun one to explore together because it involves a heist, and who doesn't love a good heist? I mean law enforcement obviously, but other than law enforcement, who doesn't love a good heist?
People who own things, right, not the love it spectators love it.
Heisted not so much.
I wonder if there's a statute of limitations to how far after the Great Train Robbery could people call it the Great train Robbery? At first? At first it was just a terrible thing. So let's go to the New York Times, a great article by Mike Ives, and there were four men who were in a high screw and these bright light bulbs got together and stole two million dimes from the truck. Now, first question, why why steal dimes?
That feels like it feels like a perfect setup for the low key or the low life kind of crimes that we always talk about, like what's the best one? Stamp fraud?
Why would you?
Yeah?
Theft?
Yeah? Yeah right, that's thirty three nickels a piece? Boys?
But is the thought that nobody's checking serial numbers on these dimes anymore?
Right?
Where I get that job? That sounds like fun? You gotta yea the fine glass you're there? Like writing in the ledger.
That probably is a great icebreaker for a first date or something, you know what I mean, I'm sorting. I'm sort of the king of dimes, you know. But so there are immediate questions. The first one, why would somebody bother with this heist in a world where a physical dime is less and less important? Are they going to melt them down for their components? Probably not, that's unprofitable. It turns out, here's here's what we think happened. They
probably didn't know exactly what was in the truck. We'll give you the We'll give you the timeline to set this up. In April of this year, a truck driver was leaving the US Mint in Philadelphia with just beat me here, doc a ton of dimes, like an entire semi truck full of dimes. And the driver was going
to Miami. If you are a long haul driver, and we've got a lot of fellow conspiracy realists in the crowd tonight, who are you know that driving from Philly to Miami means you're going to stop somewhere along the way, hopefully. And so this driver is doing everything by the book, pulls into a parking lot to sleep on the evening April thirteenth, and during the night, four guys in this high stcrew that have been working for a while, and we'll get to them, they made off with about a
third of the dimes. They popped the top or popped the back of the truck and they just started taking all the dimes they could. Altogether, we're talking about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of dimes that weighs about six tons. If you were ever in a very weird.
Time to say, you could get killed by that, just like they unload barry. First of all, it would make an amazing sound as if crushed your bones.
Good lord, I.
Don't want to jump too far ahead, ban but like were these these things were just loose dimes, right, These are in some kind of big containers or something. So do they even know their dimes exactly?
They did? They knew there was a truck that was vulnerable. This was this was kind of like a This crew seemed to be really into mystery boxes and.
Surprise, disappointing hall Ever, and.
Weirdly enough, I don't know if we want to call them pros, though I do think they made the bulk of their income off off heisting. They had previously stolen from a bunch of tractor trailers. They'd open it one time and it's a bunch of crab legs and they're like, we're crab men now. And then they would take shrimp, meat, beer, they got liquor, which has a huge profit margin, right, And they quickly realized that they could not make off with all the dimes. They could only get some of
the dimes. So they got about third of them, and that that averages out to total two hundred and thirty four thousand, five hundred dollars all in dimes.
Good haul, But how are you going to fence that?
My guy?
Yeah, So here, guys, there are four dudes from Philly and no offense to our good friends in Philadelphia, Philip conspiracy realists. But you know they're very Philadelphia dudes. And there's a guy we'll name them. There's Rakim Savage, Ronald Byrd, Heneith Palmer, and Malik Palmer and right now they've been The reason the story is in the news is because first off, it's ridiculous to steal that many dimes.
Uh.
Secondly, they're they've gone to court. They're facing charges of robbery, theft of government money, and conspiracy. This is a this is a sad thing to get a felony for, and they they probably are going to end up in a prisoner's dilemma situation, splitting against each other to get a better deal dropping a dime, dropping a dime, dropping a dime.
And the hall that they took out of that six tons, it weighed over eleven thousand pounds, which is about as much as too empty shipping containers that you see on a on a rail line. And the next day, here's how people first found out about the crime. Like before the driver wakes up the next day, there are thousands of dimes scattered across the ground in the Walmart parking lot where this guy went to sleep.
It's like people just picking up fistfuls of them, you know, in the which.
I feel bad saying it because who doesn't love free money? But I wouldn't touch it.
I don't like to have you ever tried to pick up a dime. It's hard enough to pick up a penny. It's like to get you gotta have nails to even get that thing up off the ground.
I think most people don't pick up pennies anymore. I'm gonna be honest with you, because pennies are so dirty. Oh gosh, they're so dirty covered in that's part of the printing process. Actually, So they've got a they've got a reputation at the mint. Uh, we say with great affection, because there is there is a franchise of the Federal Mint in Atlanta, Georgia. You can still get a tour if you go in advance. They have heard all your jokes about free samples, so just don't do it. Don't
ruin their afternoon again. So these guys were also despite the fact that they had committed several very successful heists, they were all.
Again free samples. That's fine, that's clever.
No, I guess not not to them, not anymore.
The first to me, I thought it was.
Oh they do I know the one in DC. At least they would give you for a time, I think it was DC. They would give you samples, free samples. But they were like bags of the destroyed paper currency that have been run through a super high end shredder.
There you go, use it to pack your nick knacks when you move.
Yeah, and they're like one dollar bills shredded up. So it just it doesn't spoiler's a.
Time putting them back together. It could be done. It could with enough moxie.
It would obviously look Frankenstein, you know what I mean, just finding the serial number for one alone. Anyway, these guys, unfortunately for them, they weren't super buttoned up. They had shared links with each other to things like money weight calculator. And then they started trying to cash in the dimes at different banks, thousands of dollars worth of dimes, one in some in Pennsylvania, some in coinstar machines in Baltimore areas supermarkets. Have you guys ever used Coinstar?
I think absolutely, And you know what happens a lot of the time. The dimes, since they're small and sort of like the smallest of coin. They'll often get rejected and like like sent back because if they're like edge, they got a little bit of a rough edge or something. I found more often than not, I think I'm past my coinstar days.
But there was a time when.
I would just rely on you know, okay, it's time to go coinstar diving, and I would find that a lot of times you'd get these rough looking dimes in the rejected shoot.
Yeah, it's also a fun place to find foreign currency too, from the coinstar days. But but coinstart, Look, if you're considering getting into the dime thievery business, first, just so you know you're better than that. We know, the three of us know you have so much more potential. You can still so much more successful things. But that's probably that's probably not the best way to end that one.
But is this a victimless crime? Though, Ben? Is this a victimless crime?
I would I would argue it depends on the truck driver. Right, as far as we know it was, it was more like burglary than robbery. The guy's life wasn't threatened. But you could say, I don't know, you could say it's a victimless crime, right, because the United States Federal ment Is is a big corporation essentially.
But yeah, I just watched Heat.
Is why I ask because, like you know, in Heat, when they rob the bank, they say your money is safe.
Ladies and gentlemen like this does not affect you. The government as your money insurance. So just don't do anything stupid. You are not going to be affected by this.
Yeah, which is you know, the Heat gang has really good people's skills as well. I always like that about them. But here's the other issue. If you are in a situation like that, what you need to realize is that coinstar is a terrible fence. Coinstar takes a pretty big percentage of the coins you put in. I think it's what like twelve percent something like that.
It's a convenience fee there, I mean, because I think technically you could take all this stuff to the bank and have it rolled. Yeah, but I mean no, I just who wants to inconvenience a human like that? I would just rather pay the vague and have a machine do a half assed job for me, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, And also you if you go to a bank, any financial institution, then you have to here's why they didn't just go to one place and say, we've got all of the dimes, right, like that guy was asking for all of the viagra. If you if you cash that out over a certain amounts, you're going to trip
some regulations and your stuff will be reported. So they were smart and that they were trying to distribute this, but they were also, I guess, increasingly desperate because banks communicate with each other and only it's relatively rare for someone to have that many dimes, and it's even more extraordinary for multiple people in relatively close areas to have
that many. So the largest receipt, this is how the New York Times article concludes, But the largest receipt that the court knows about is for nine hundred and four dimes, which equaled nine hundred and ninety dollars and forty four cents because they threw in four pennies. So on the way to the bank, they must have passed four pennies and picked them up.
Yeah, you know, that was an accident. They didn't just end up in there somehow.
Come on, I don't know, maybe that's like the guy's lucky lottery numbers or something. I'm not sure, but I have to also ask how often these kind of tractor trailer robberies occur If you know somebody who works in shipping, or if you yourself or a trucker, then, without sounding cynical, I think it's highly likely that you know someone who makes money off stuff that falls off the back. You know what I mean, Like, how often do you guys think tractor trailers get heisted?
It's got to be pretty often, right, I remember hearing stories about that, I won't say where from some people I know about large numbers of things that would show up at a location that all fell off the truck and basically all of the family and friends and everybody had these new things because they all fell off the truck. I've heard that before.
But yeah, shrinkage mm hmmm. Yeah. And then you know, you think about I remember, Matt, we were reading for an unrelated thing long ago about cargo shipping and just how many in inclement weather, just how many cargo ships will lose entire containers, right, And sometimes it's crab legs. Sometimes it's you know, rubber ducks, which that's a true story that helped oceanographers immensely well.
And sometimes they literally fly off the side of ships, right, which was the craziest thing to learn.
Yeah, exactly, and it's an accepted part of the business. With that, I think there is a good story in here for a future episode about about hidden heist and just how often they may occur. So we'd love some help from you, fellow conspiracy realists and the shipping, logistics, transit and trucking industries. Let us know the stuff those shipping companies don't want you to know, especially about crime. Lot lizard stories are fine too, but we want to
focus on the heist primarily. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in let us know your strange news around the world. Please join us later this week we're going to be exploring some more stuff they don't want you to know. We're also going to we're going to share some of the stories from our fellow conspiracy realist and our upcoming listener mail segment. We'd love for you to be a part of it. That's all well and good, you might say, but how do I get in contact with you?
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Rock Best Monster.
Yes, Rock's great, Brock. We're not psychic. Those those undersea cables are just super juicy targets.
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