In 1987, there was a news event that brought the entire world together. People did not stop watching their TVs for days - the First Lady of the United States even postponed surgery until she knew the outcome. Eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure had fallen down an old well and was wedged almost ten metres underground for 56 hours. Every news channel that existed had cameras in that tiny backyard in Texas, while the world watched - live - and waited in suspense to see if she’d come out alive....
Jul 23, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast How did a little girl in India manage to convince not just her family, but some of the world’s biggest skeptics, that she had clear memories of a past life? From the age of four, she recognised words and places that there was no way she could know. She knew intimate details about the man she insisted was once her husband, and recognised people she’d never met, right down to knowing their names and secrets. She knew her way around the detailed streets of a town she’d never been to, and easily poi...
Jul 19, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast So… turns out your beloved 90s boyband was nothing but a financial scam. Lou Pearlman created Backstreet Boys and Nsync, taking them from unknown teens in Florida and turning them into the biggest bands in the world. At the height of their fame, both groups were bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, yet they were only getting paid… $30 each a day. Yep - Lou Pearlman was a con artist, and he wasn’t just ripping off the boy bands he created. When authorities took a close...
Jul 09, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine sitting at your desk at work, a day like any other. All of a sudden you hear a rumbling that gets louder, and louder. Then you look out the window and see it: a massive tank (yes - TANK), covered in guns, coming straight towards your office. You get outside just in time to see this thing completely flatten your building to the ground, then drive away. Um… WHAT? That’s exactly what happened in 2004 to the people in Granby, Colorado. Marvin Heemeyer, a local man, was angry at ...
Jul 02, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1991, a billion-dollar experiment took place, designed to see if humans could survive in an artificial earth inside a giant glass dome that would eventually be built on other planets. Years was spent building Biosphere 2 in the USA, and inside was an ocean with actual tides and waves, a rainforest, a desert, vast wetlands, a farm with crops, animals, housing and laboratories. ‘Rain’ could even be switched on and off. Eight Humans lived inside it for TWO YEARS. So why has hardly an...
Jun 25, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Extray! Extray! Ya fave AWARD WINNING podcast team is back, with so much nonsense to talk about that we needed to put it all in a whole seperate episode. That’s right… you get TWO this week! And yes - WE TALK ABOUT BRITNEY. JEAN. SPEARS. (With a lil bit of John McAfee in there for ya too.) It’s comin’ down the wirrre! We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there’s this: Britney’s full court statement transcript: https://variety.com/2021/music/...
Jun 25, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast “A DINGO’S GOT MY BABY.” That now infamous line is what most people blurt out when asked about Lindy Chamberlain, but there is so, so much more to the story. At just 9 weeks old, Azaria Chamberlain was snatched and killed by a dingo while the Chamberlain family were camping at Uluru. Despite a desperate search, her body was never found - and that’s when the accusations started. Had Lindy or her husband Michael killed their baby? Why doesn’t Lindy seem emotiona...
Jun 04, 2021•2 hr 35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Arguably the most famous child star the world has ever known, Shirley Temple was so talented that the Vatican sent a priest to confirm the 5-year-old girl wasn't actually a middle-aged woman with dwarfism. The top earning actress and box office earner in the US, Temple was easily the most famous person in the world for most of the 1930s... until she had the AUDACITY to grow a little older (as in, she hit double-digits). So how does someone go from being the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, ...
May 28, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nine Russian hikers go missing in the mountains in 1959. They are found dead soon after, with shocking and unexplained injuries to their bodies (we're talking 'missing eyeballs and exploded hearts' kind of shocking). Authorities find their tent has been cut open from the inside, as if they were trying to escape in an absolute panic. But what were the hikers running from? And what could've killed them in a way that looked like it came straight out of a horror movie? There are theories from aliens...
May 21, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast A man gets on a plane, says he has a bomb, demands $200,000 and a parachute. He gets what he asks for, jumps, AND THEY NEVER FIND HIM. DB Cooper pulled off the only successful plane hijacking in US history, in a case that baffles the FBI to this day. There are many, many theories as to who DB Cooper really was (from it actually being a woman, to a nutso connection to the show 'Mad Men'), but nobody has ever been able to confirm who the person in the famous criminal sketch is for sure, or what ha...
May 17, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast A bunch of people suddenly drop dead for no reason - the only thing they have in common? They had all just taken tablets for a headache. It doesn't take long for doctors and police to figure out that the painkillers they had taken were laced with cyanide - and the whole world went into a TOTAL PANIC. How did a deadly poison get into tablets that pretty much everyone has in their home? Who put the cyanide in there? And why? The Chicago Tylenol murders and the Excedrin murders of the 1980s are the...
Apr 30, 2021•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Otherwise known as the biggest dick measuring contest of all time (according to Rosie), this is Just The Gist of two of the first men to discover dinosaur bones back in the 1800s. So many fossils and dinosaurs were being discovered at the time that they called it 'The Great Dinosaur Rush', because every time you discovered a new dinosaur, you got to name it and go down in the history books as the OFFICIAL CLEVER MAN WHO FOUND THIS DINOSAUR. But did Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh p...
Apr 23, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Remembered for being possibly the most infamous and feared killer of recent times, there's not many people who don't know about Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca murders. But, it tends to be one of those topics everybody assumes they know everything about, until they hear the bizarre details. Like, did you know that Manson didn't actually kill movie star Sharon Tate himself, or any of the victims that 'The Manson Family' are most known for slaughtering? Or that Charles Manson was good friends...
Apr 16, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast We took our nonsense to Melbourne and had an EXCELLENT time - Bird in Hand in hand obvi. We’ve got some Breakin’ Nooz for ya, plus TWO stories! Jacob gives Just The Gist on Lawrence Joseph Bader, otherwise known as John Fritz Johnson - a guy who faked his own death to escape his boring life OR got total amnesia one day, disappeared and became a local TV star in a different town. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? Rosie gives Jacob Just The Gist on COCAINE BEAR! Thought it was just a bear that die...
Apr 09, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast If a wealthy old billionaire with a cartoonish name told you he’d hidden $2 million worth of treasure somewhere in a national park, would you actually believe him? More importantly, would you have a crack at trying to find that treasure for yourself? When Forrest Fenn announced in 2010 that he’d hidden a bronze chest filled with jewels and gold in the Rocky Mountains, a lot of people did choose to believe, and they sure did have a crack at finding that treasure. Over the course of a ...
Apr 02, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast We recorded our very first LIVE SHOW at the Adelaide Fringe Festival last week! And it was loose and ridiculous and fun and involved lots of Bird In Hand (obviously). Including Breakin' Nooz, plus TWO whole stories! Jacob gives Rosie just the gist on Tik Tok scammer Paul Zimmer (or is it Troy Becker?), who tricked a bunch of kids into sending him money. And Rosie gives Jacob just the gist on the story that inspired the movie Changeling - Bobby Dunbar, the 4-year-old boy who disappeare...
Mar 26, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yeah... not much else we can title this one, really. Travis the Chimp was treated like a son by his owners Sandy and Jerry. They bought him as a pet when he was just three days old, and raised him like a human. Seriously - by the time he was ten, he had favourite TV shows, helped mow the lawn, loved drinking wine, and could even drive a car. But no matter how domesticated he became, Travis was still, at the end of the day, a wild animal. And that became all too clear the day a call came through ...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Marvel movies may be the biggest money-making blockbusters in the world today, but back in 1994, they made one that was SO bad, when studio bosses saw the final cut, they decided they would never, ever release it to the public. It was just that... embarrassing. It was an attempt at a Fantastic Four movie, and after how disastrously it went, Marvel bosses desperately tried to keep it a secret, even banning current Marvel stars from ever talking about it. So how exactly does that happen? How does ...
Mar 12, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Before Prince Harry decided to jump ship with Meaghan Markle, there was one other guy who decided to quit the Royal family. King Edward VIII fell in love with a divorced American woman back in 1936, and when the Royal family treated her like crap, he quit ‘The Firm’ and left the country with her for good. SOUND FAMILIAR? With Harry and Meghan spilling all the tea in their Oprah interview this week, we thought this was the perfect time to get just the gist on the other Royal couple everyone keeps...
Mar 05, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast When she was born, Agafia's father had become convinced that their family was being hunted by the Russian government, so he had packed up the whole family and escaped into the Siberian wilderness - hundreds of kilometres from any other humans. Agafia is now 76, the rest of her family has died, and she is still living - alone - in the tiny hut her father built back in the 1940s. She has only left her home a total of six times in her entire life, and if not for being discovered by chance in t...
Feb 26, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s Britney bitch. What is her conservatorship all about? Is it true that she’s being held prisoner by her dad? Is she sending secret messages through her Instagram? Why are thousands upon thousands of people convinced that one of the greatest pop stars of all time needs to be ‘set free’? Here’s just the gist on Britney Jean Spears and the #FreeBritney movement. We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more there this: Articles: NYT: https://www.googl...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast ALLEGEDLY! Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg went nutso, started walking around shirtless with a gun trying to take over another country? That's pretty much John McAfee. Most people know his name because he's the guy who invented the antiviral computer software that almost everyone has used at one point or another. Just another nerdy tech dude with lots of money, right? Lol no. John McAfee took off to the jungle in Belize, pretty much tried to take over the country with his own army, insisted he was cr...
Feb 16, 2021•2 hr 53 min•Transcript available on Metacast This has been called one the worst shark attack stories of all time. After their yacht, ‘The Trashman’, sank in a major storm, five crew members were stranded in the middle of the ocean in a tiny inflatable dinghy. That number soon turned to four. Then three. Then two. Then... yeah - sharks were circling them, taking the crew one by one. But not before starvation and thirst caused them to mentally unravel and turn on each other (seriously - one crew member got so delirious they started acting li...
Feb 04, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast So it's just a bunch of crazy conspiracies from right-wing pro-Trump people, right? Saying mean things about Hillary? Something about a Pizza Restaurant...? Well yeah, QAnon is all that, but it's also SO MUCH CRAZIER THAN YOU THINK. QAnon is a weird fantasy in which Donald Trump is a superhero/Jesus, and the 'Lightworkers' say he is the only one who can save imprisoned children from being tortured at the hands of an underground group of celebrities and politicians who want to eat babies and...
Jan 29, 2021•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast It turns out 2021 is just two 2020s in a trenchcoat, so there's been a LOT of Breakin' Nooz since we went on break at the end of December. Which means... a whole episode of Breakin' Nooz! The Block Scandal! Hilaria Baldwin! Sydney's own lady Bernie Madoff! A penis cartoon! And so much more! All in one month! 2021 sure has hit the ground running. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jan 29, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast WE MADE IT. Welcome to 2021. Let's all agree that last year can go straight into a bin that is then lobbed directly into the sun. But before that happens, let's reminisce on the dumpster fire that was the last 12 months...Here's just the gist of 2020! We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's this: Normally we put links here, but... for real... we all lived it. Just google stuff. Email us with your suGISTions! justthegistpodcast@gmail.com See omnystudio.com/listener fo...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Whether you're stuck dealing with racist Uncle Barry or chilling at home eating Chinese food and watching movies, we decided to get you through the day with a sneaky lil history on the origins of Santa Claus! And it's a pretty intense history tbh. There's pimping out women for cash, children being turned into ham and eaten, and way more guns than you would've thought.Oh, and we answer the question everyone asks in primary school: Was Santa's red and white suit really invented by the Coca Cola co...
Dec 25, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1979, a fire broke out on the ghost train at Sydney’s Luna Park, killing 7 people - 6 of them children. Despite being over 40 years since the tragedy occurred, it’s still considered one of Sydney’s greatest unsolved mysteries, as authorities never figured out how or why it happened. But, there are main two theories that refuse to go away - that an infamous Sydney criminal caused the fire in an attempt to take over the park, or... that a devil-horned man named Moloch started ...
Dec 10, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2009, six celebrity-obsessed teenagers decided that the best way to live like their idols was to, well, steal their stuff. These kids used Google, TMZ, Facebook and good ol' Hollywood Star Maps to figure out where celebs lived and when exactly when they weren't at home. Then they'd break into their (usually unlocked) mansions and steal piles of their stuff. They ransacked the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom and more. By the time they were caught, they had $3...
Dec 04, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1995, daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones were at the height of their popularity thanks to using a tactic called ‘ambush television’ - getting guests on stage and shocking or embarrassing them for entertainment. There were episodes like ‘Mom, I’ve been sleeping with your boyfriend’ or ‘Remember our one night stand? WELL THIS IS YOUR BABY!’ One episode of Jenny Jones at the time was called ‘Guess your secret crush!’...
Nov 27, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
