January 6, 2022 • 56 mins
Are there really entire towns created as 'decoys'? Why are parents being billed for foster care? What exactly is the national debt, and how is it different from an individual's debt? All this and more in this week's Listener Mail.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer,
Alexa's code named dot Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. It is one of our
favorite times of the week, folks. This is where we
(00:47):
get to hear from you, the very best part of
this show. Now it's two congratulations, as we said earlier
this week, to everyone who survived to listen to T today. Yeah,
I go to you and uh we not Noel and
Doc and I spent uh spend a lot of time
(01:09):
weading through correspondence, talking to people on you know, on
a telephone, talking to people on email. Thanks to everybody
who reached out on social media. Big shout out to
Stephanie who wished us marry Christmas on Christmas. Yes, Yes,
big shout out, big big shout out. Also, huge shout
(01:30):
out to Sweet Miller Action on Etsy. It is a
page where you can get all of your metal work
home to core needs met and the blink of an eye.
A lovely listener who runs this page, UM sent us
all some really really cool do dads for Christmas. Um.
I ended up with a lovely nightlight that looks like
(01:51):
an acoustic bass, like an upright basse. Uh. You also
sent us these little little gelatinous slappy hands that are
fun for the whole family, for for kids any age
and adults too. Yes Miller, Yes, exactly what did you
guys get? I have a goat. Well then I'm very
excited about and a bass cliff. Now I I have
(02:13):
some stuff and thank you. Yes Miller, Yes, I have
some stuff from the one and only the legend sweet
Miller action. But he and I are actually in a
bit of a tiff, so yes Miller, Yes, if you're listening,
I do insist on. I do insist on paying you
for some stuff. You're too kind, too kind. We've gotten
(02:36):
like this is at this point I think it's safe
for us to say, Um. For for us, this is
more than a job. This is more than a just
a show like we have. UM. I read a very
interesting paper on what's called paras social relationships. Paras social
relationship is a phrase that described going somewhere with as
(03:01):
I promise A Para social relationship is a phrase that
describes the feeling humans experience when you, like you listen
to a musician and think this person gets me. They
must know my life. I feel a cloud atlas moment,
(03:23):
I feel like I am related to this person. This
happens also when you read poetry, or you read any
any work of art, you see a sculpture, etcetera. And
Paris social relationships spiked. The experience of having these spiked
during the pandemic, and it's very important for us to
(03:45):
establish to you listening now that for us it isn't
quite paras social relationship. We've we have actual friends now
listen to show we've got like uh I, you know,
we we haven't done a lot of the war stories
of maybe angry emails we get, but even those folks
(04:07):
end up being our our friends at the end of
the day. It's it's nuts we are We are so fortunate,
and with that we're going to share with you some
really bizarre and disturbing things that your fellow listeners have
hitped us too, because we we don't know about a
(04:30):
lot of this unless someone brings it up. So it's
a it's a huge part of the show. No not
I I suggest I suggest we start with we start
with this voicemail because you have been in the trenches,
my friend, and we we learned so much amazing stuff
(04:53):
from the people who call in. Our fellow conspiracy realists
will drop us a line and say, you know, there's
this weird ass pyramid out here in the middle of nowhere.
What's going on? I love this. This is how we
found out about the mystery of the church's chicken. Someone
someone hipped us to a mystery fast food joy and
(05:16):
now there is what is this matter? There's a I'm
looking at your notes here, there's a quote big ass
decoy near Richmond, near Richmond, Virginia. Yes, that is correct.
Before we jump into this message, shout out to Ed
who put us onto the book. The moon is a
harsh mistress that I think maybe we've talked about before
(05:40):
in the past. Robert Heinlein Heinlein, heinl Yeah, great book.
In that he discusses essentially a guss gun or a
rail gun that launches humans to the Moon totally forgot
about it. Thank you Ed for reminding us of that
house keeping up. Let's all three of us code named
(06:03):
Doc if you want to get in as well, Let's
all all four of us just continually shout out people
in this episode if we can. Oh, yeah, I'm just
doing it because I would listen to so many and
I don't think we're ever going to cover these, uh,
but do two more really fast and we'll get it.
So thank you AD for putting us back onto that.
Also shout out to brockness Monster who learned the lesson.
(06:23):
You should listen to the full episode before you call in, uh,
because brock, you know what you did. You know you
learned that lesson has to do with paratroopering cats in
a recent episode that we did. And lastly, quick shout
out to Amara, who sent us a message about berries
and cream. If you know what berries and cream is at? Lad, Yes,
(06:52):
my kids turned me onto that man and she has
she actually has a haircut right now that sort of
resembles the berries and cream Lad and uh and kids
in school all sort of big punt of her and
call the berries because he doesn't like him very much
because he's uh peep behind the curtain because we're kind
of Glen Garry Glenn Ross in the strange enterprise of
ours our no as you know, our Ride or Die.
(07:16):
The one and only Mr Matt Frederick created a fiction
anthology show Halloween Base called Thirteen Days of Halloween, and
then the first season of that, I wrote an episode
about an unfortunate situation at a gas station. It's entirely
inspired by that berries and cream commercial. So that's right
(07:41):
on our incredible that's right, And you'll have to listen
to the whole first season to figure out which episode
it was. I'm just kidding. It's called the Attic. You
can look it up. It's really all those stories, all
those stories are good. Uh there is my only note
on those stories. I love the audio fictions three D.
(08:02):
It's done with our good friend Alex Williams. It's done
with pal Aaron Manky. Um god, we haven't even gotten
to the first thing. But the only the only note
I would have on Thirteen Days is that I think
my pal Lowell Brown is an amazing voice actor. Probably no,
what was its cream? Prison cream? You're hind the little
(08:26):
lad who loves berries and cream? Yeah, yeah, you're definitely
hired season three, look for it and Halloween contractually obligated
to bring it to you. In the slapping sounds, I
don't do those. I just do the voice. We have
to do the We'll get a folly guy for that.
We have to. We have to. We should do this,
(08:47):
we should here we go, all right, This first message
comes from Roscoe. This is going to be a short one. Roscoe.
You'll see why. But let's listen to what you said. Yeah,
my name is Roscoe. But twenty years ago I moved
to Richmond, Virginia, and a short time later heard about
(09:09):
something odd, a decoy city that was built about twenty
miles east of the city of Richmond. It was intended
to be a decoy in case of a nighttime bombing
run by an enemy coming in from the Atlantic Ocean.
(09:30):
And it was not full scale, but it was very large,
and it was a small scale version of downtown Richmond,
complete with lighting. I've never looked into it a whole lot,
but I think your talk of interesting structures made me
(09:50):
think of this. Thank you all right, well, thank you Roscoe.
My goodness, just the kind of thing that really butters
our bread. It is now I think I think it.
I think it forces people to to conjure images of
us as anthropomorphic slices of bread. Butter Ben and I
(10:14):
both at that moment Um Roscoe looked at each other
and did like our Um. We have an upcoming episode
of of our other show, Ridiculous History, Uh, that deals
with a time when a very clever and forward thinking
engineer came up with the idea to build a small
model of the city of Paris, uh, complete with lights
(10:36):
and all to evade bombings raids, so they would be
they would think they were bombing actual Paris, but it
was just a little farther away, and it was like
it was not scale model. It was like smaller, but
they would shut off all the real lights right then
in actual Paris, and then the bombers would potentially confuse
the model for the real deal. Yeah, exactly. This was
(10:56):
during World War One, so no one had the access
to intel or you know, satellite visibility that is so
common today. Uh. This oh Man, Matt Yes, emailed it.
Butter are bread. This reminds me of that time when
we were we were trying to figure out if Rob
(11:20):
Shrub and Dan Harmon, who were like they're very close friends,
I guess, but we were trying to figure out if
they were mad at each other when we were on
harm in Town and Dan said something like we we
were being very positive, nerdy people and we were saying
nice things about everybody. And Dan was like, no, no,
(11:42):
find grease him up. Exact liked Roscoe's greasing us up.
So look, I got bad. I got good news, bad news,
and bad news. I'm not sure how we're gonna make
this happen. But first, the bad news is Roscoe. I
could find nothing on a mock version of Richmond or
(12:03):
any other town in Virginia in that area. I couldn't.
I couldn't find it um and maybe I just haven't
searched the correct terms. Maybe I was just I failed.
But what I did find is a decoy air base
that was constructed for real, uh fairly close to an
(12:24):
airport in Richmond, in Henriiko County. And that's how you
say it. By the way, I thought it was Henrico,
but it's Henriiko County. And you can do a little
searching search for this and you can find an air
in Space magazine article titled in ninety two, the Army
built a decoy airfield in Virginia to fool the Lutwaffe.
(12:47):
So very similar to the story you guys are covering
the Luftwaffa. As a German boy, I must the record straight, Yes,
the Lufaffa and Henriko County. So um, this one is
a little different, very interesting concept. Uh. The U. S.
(13:10):
Military went in there. They basically just took over some
land that was just forest and they cleared some of
it to make it look exactly like an airfield that
was nearby. It was a smaller airfield that was being
converted into something for the U. S. Army, and so
in order to protect it, they wanted to have this, uh,
(13:32):
this air field, like you said, with lights, with fox structures,
with fake airplanes, with all like shrubs cut in the
form of airplanes, and all kinds of things like yes, yes,
like it's pretty incredible. I would encourage you guys both
(13:52):
to look up that air and space. I linked it
in the dock there. If you want to look at it.
You can actually see an image of it from space
or from the sky, and you can tell that if
you flew over this thing, if it's night and it's
very dark in the surrounding areas. But this thing is
lit up. It looks like an airfield with targets that
you would bomb. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff. What's interesting
(14:16):
in Roscoe is that this is an historically precedented I
think this works very well. There was during World War Two,
I believe there were there was a proliferation of things
called starfish sites. These these were built. These were supposed
(14:36):
to look like burning cities, British burning cities in the night,
so that German bombers during the blitz would be distracted
and wouldn't actually hit their intended target. The world is
full of facades, you know, and this is another example
(15:01):
of one. If anything, Matt, do we know the level
of preservation or the level of current use for this
decoy site. Well, if you go to this is kind
of a weird site. It's the wag w a g
dot net. You can find someone. I don't know that
(15:22):
I can even tell you who. It's written by Jake
Smith in two thousand three visited the site and took
some pictures and wrote up something in here titled Lost
City Found. And you can see some images of the
site and what it looks like now, it's just not
really a thing anymore. It's just kind of wilderness with
(15:43):
a random fire hydrant every once in a while, with
some remnants of gutters and fences and like again, some
of the faux buildings. I think there's even a water
tower that can be found on that area. I want
to give everybody just a couple other things to search
for if you want to Bird Airfield to b y
r D Airfield is the thing that this folks, this
(16:05):
faux air field was made to look like, and that
was very close by. That's what got turned into the
army air base in I'm getting some of this information
from Henryko dot us. That's h E N R I
c O dot us. They've got a small little right
up on it, and you can actually see an image
of the historic marker that's on place there. It was
(16:29):
titled or you could look it up as ELKO tracked
E L K O T R A C T, so
you can also search that to learn more about this. Um.
I don't know ben that you guys, there's all kinds
of information that you can look up once you start
down the rabbit hole of this place about other places,
like you're talking about ben and all like other decoy sites.
(16:52):
We're talking during the Pacific War World War two. Uh,
we're talking about German cities and sites that were made
to look, you know, look real, but they were fake.
And if a real bombing raid was occurring, you just
shut down all the lights in the place that's going
to get bombed or would get bombed, and you turn
them all on in the other place. And here's guys,
(17:14):
the US Army actually stationed people at this fake site
to just live there on base, in these huts, and
they had them do things around the fake base like
they were real, like made to look like they're working
on the planes that aren't actually there, so that if
if there is any spy plane or anyone checking out
(17:35):
the area, they would say, oh, yeah, the freaking air
bases right there. Look. You can tell I love the idea.
You know, in um I guess In in improv and
other stage pursuits, they call that object work, which is
we're you just sort of pantomiming doing stuff. I love
this idea. Man, this concept. It may may seem silly
(18:01):
if you are lucky enough to have not been in
a situation where you needed this sort of strategy or tactic.
But this concept is a tremendously powerful example of information
warfare when you think about it, we are we are
altering hearts and minds when we are building fake cities,
(18:24):
and we still we did. Uh, we did an earlier
episode on places where you Can't go, but we have
never except for our our one adventure in New York,
we have never covered We've never covered entirely fake or
decoy cities. And they're still around, by the way, just
(18:46):
earlier this week, Matt, you had mentioned the problems with
real estate collapses, right and the very indus strange news
when we started predicting stuff, and uh, you know it's
no well, it's no secret outside of China that there
are vast conturbations that are almost entirely empty by hook
(19:09):
or by crook, Decoy cities, decoy places are going to
remain a real thing, Roscoe. Big question for you? What
is that? That's the question? Sorry? Yeah, conturbation is a
conturbation is just a fancy word for like a metro area. Okay,
(19:29):
cool now and something I love it. Well, So like
there there are almost entirely I don't know if you would,
I don't know what criteria we would use to decide
whether or not these are fake. But there are. You know,
there are a lot of abandoned places in the world,
(19:51):
even even now with such a large human population. Roscoe,
big question for you, did you get in? Are you
gonna go in? Don't do it? If it's anything. What's
that company we just talked about with the pyramid that
steel case, but then they it got turned into something
(20:13):
else and quick. Just to that point, been shouting out
the person that I can't remember your name, but you
called in and told us about your experience going on
I n L property out there in Idaho and near
the National Laboratories. I think that's what you said. I
might be wrong, but shout out to you because you
know you called in and you said something is just
getting muddled in my brain. Now, thank you. I'm gonna
(20:35):
listen to it again, all right, Roscoe, Thank you so
much for calling us and leaving us that message. We
will be right back with more messages from you. And
we're back with more messages from you. That's right. You
out there, whomever you are, uh, specifically you Jasper who
(20:58):
wrote in with a bit of a head v story. Um,
it's it's very interesting, though, I think it's worth knowing about.
Jasper writes with an email titled parents are build for
their children's foster care. Hi guys, today I came across
this article from NPR links to the article on NPR
that was heard on All Things Considered. States send kids
(21:19):
to foster care, and their parents the bill often one
too big to pay. I never knew that when a
family is able to be reunited to conflicting federal laws
and a number of state laws allow the parents to
be billed for the cost of fostering children. A failure
or inability to pay the bill, which can be tens
of thousands of dollars, goes onto their credit scores and
(21:41):
can result in difficulty securing housing, loss of licenses and permits,
garnished wages, and losing their children again. Uh. In addition
to the bill, in some cases, the money owed is
subject to interest. You better believe I'm writing to my representatives,
but I was hoping you could look into this and
mentioned it on a Listener mail episode. It definitely seems
like something they don't want you to know about. Foster care.
(22:03):
Take care jasper Um. This story just came out a
couple of days ago, actually yesterday today being recording this,
UM and I certainly was not aware of this either.
And you know, the story highlights the case of a
woman named Daisy Hallman Um who moved into a trailer
(22:23):
that had an extra room to rent after she had
separated from her husband. We know that can be a
costly and stressful situation, you know, for the man or
the woman or we either partner in a in a
divorce or separation. Not to mention the kids. Um, she
and her three kids have been moving from place to
place day with family. UM and now they found this
place that they could rent a room in a trailer.
(22:45):
And not two weeks after staying there, the address was
rated by police who found drugs and drug paraphernale there. Um.
She was not the target, she was at work, She
had no drugs found on her, and she was not charged.
But Child Protective Services in the county where this took place,
(23:05):
Right County, Minnesota, placed her kids, UH fifteen and ten,
two daughters and a son aged nine, into foster care,
pulled them away from from their mom during it was
already a horrible time. I mean, I can't imagine. It
just seems utterly cruel and inhuman because the officials determined
(23:26):
that she had left her children an unsafe place. Maybe
there's some truth to that, but it just seems very, very,
very extreme. Uh. So they were in foster care for
twenty months. Uh and when they returned, she got a
bill for a whopping nineteen thousand, five hundred and thirty
dollars and seven cents and seven cents. Uh. And apparently
(23:50):
this is super common in every single state because there
are these two federal laws that kind of contradict each other,
one that um instructs child welfare agencies to make reuniting
families their first priority, and the other that is forty
years old on the books that says states should charge
(24:13):
parents for the cost of childcare. And this is a
great example of just like you know, I mean, most
of these antiquated laws that stay on the books are
things that are silly and funny to talk about, like
spitting in public as illegal or you know, swearing in
the presence of a lady. But this is the kind
of antiquated law that absolutely is causing people absurd, uh
(24:35):
damaging problems. You know, Um, I just can't imagine if
you're already struggling to get on your feet. This is
like the equivalent of like debtors prison, you know, or
something like that. Where but also in the first place,
it wasn't even something that was her fault. She found
herself in a situation that was desperate. She made a
desperate move, and maybe it was had some poor judgment
in terms of like the safety of the type of
(24:57):
place where they were staying, but also maybe it was
the only SI that she had. And it seems really
cruel to penalize her for that, especially when she's just
getting back on her feet, and that's that's an amount
of money that would be difficult for most people to
come up with on the fly let alone, if they're
compounding it with interest. I mean, I just think this
is just unconsfortable. Well, we still haven't done our Foster
(25:21):
Home Industry episode. We we talked about this a while back,
and we received some very personal accounts from a lot
of our fellow listeners, and of course I want to
thank everybody who took the time to write in, because
it had to be harrowing to sort of relive those experiences.
(25:42):
If you have been in the foster system on any level,
in any sort of role. You are well aware of
the problems with the system, with the infrastructure of it.
There are you know, there there are blue function as
foster parents entirely for the financial aspect, and they're really
(26:05):
they're really, really amazing foster parents who want to make
the world a little bit less efficient place for a kid.
And that is commendable. That is one of the most
amazing things you can do is to be a parent
figure for a young human. But with this, no Jasper,
(26:26):
I don't think a lot of people are talking about
this because it's it's a crime that and I will
say it's a crime, like what degree of incompetence or
legal oversight do we have to reach? What's the threshold
before we say this is criminal? Like these are these
are the some of the most disadvantaged people, these parents, right,
(26:49):
like you said, most people don't have twenty grand they
can just pay on demand. And secondly, these folks are
not going to buy and large have the money to
pursue a legal challenge to this, and where where does
my My question is where does the money go? Like
(27:10):
if if this family, because it's a family, it's not
just the mom. If this family pays twenty grand Does
that go to the foster parents, Does they go to
like admin fees? Do they ticket Master? It is there
like a list of like all these small incidental things. Well,
it's also the kind of thing that you would think
(27:30):
of almost like in terms of like a exorbitant hospital
bill for someone that doesn't have insurance, like you can
usually negotiate it down, you know. And I don't know
if this is like iron clad, if you're getting an
itemized list. I mean it did say in the NPR
piece that some of these charges were like their individual
charges first anywhere from twenty five dollars to over a
(27:51):
thousand dollars a month um. That add up and the
longer that the kids are in the foster care, the
the you know, the more that bill adds up. And
this is a ninety eight word bill. Yep, that that
is correct, Matt. How does this hit you, man? Well, first,
it hits me in the fields when it comes to
the investigators, the journalists that actually are looking into this
(28:15):
and telling this story, specifically Joseph Shapiro, Teresa Wilts, and
Jessica Piper, like, thank you for covering this story and
for doing an entire investigation on it. Um, this is
the kind of thing that needs to be talked about.
And what what's really hitting me is what you're you guys,
are mentioning already here the concept of twenty thou dollars
(28:35):
being charged uh to a mom who is trying to
support her family and do what's right for them. But
she's having made these decisions. And I believe she's the
person who's saying she was living on ten thousand dollars
a year within this piece. And you know, if you
imagine charging someone who makes ten thousand dollars a year
twenty tho dollars, you're not going to get that back
(28:57):
anytime soon because of what you need to spend that
money on, which is a very small amount of money,
ten thousand dollars and you're gonna charge twice that to somebody.
And how long were they in care Matt again twenty months,
so a little less than two years. Oh, I was wrong, guys.
(29:18):
According to the nprpiece, it was eighty percent of the
families that showed up in the data as they were
looking into this at Trish scoff Emmer Uh of the
families had incomes of less than ten grand a year.
That tracks but I'm just wondering, like, this is this
is for the care for three children, um, over the
(29:41):
course of a little over a year or was it
roughly two years? Is a little less than two years?
And so what does what does that breakdown to per month?
Thousand a month if you round up? Well, okay, this
big devil's advocate here, And I still don't think this
is right. A thousand a month for three kids. That
made that far off from reality, you know, um, being
(30:02):
a being a dad. Just I'm just saying like, yeah,
and and and where is that money is supposed to
come from? You know, I think there should obviously be
a deal worked out in some way, you know, But
it's like she's also obviously also during this time, is
she able to work? She is probably able to work.
But still, yeah, that's wild. Um, it's it's it's a
(30:23):
tough it's a tough position. You try and charge uh,
you know, a family, your mom or dad, whoever makes
that little money, try and charge him that much money.
You're not going to get it back, at least anytime soon.
So I don't understand how this could all be a
profitable thing for the state or you know, for whoever
is actually what agency is getting money paid back. They
(30:44):
must have to them on payment plans like they do
with the exorbit in hospital bill too. I mean they
have to charnish. Well, that would be one way to
do it. Well, let me see this. Let me point
this out. So if someone these are this is a
federal law, but they're also state level regulations, policies and laws.
If someone is in the foster care system, it should
(31:09):
not be a for profit system. And this is Please folks,
please do not mistake us as somehow quote unquote defending
deadbeat parents. That's not what we're doing at all. But
what I'm pointing out here is that if you are
listening to this, we're in the United States, you are
(31:31):
already paying to help these people. In theory, the system
of taxation means that we're all sort of in a club, right,
and we pay our dues. And when we all pay
our dues, I don't think that's ever happened. But if
we all pay our dues in theory, then we are
(31:52):
creating an infrastructure to address these sorts of problems. The
goal is not to punish people, right that it shouldn't
be the goal. The goal is to help these kids
have a decent shot at a good life. That is
why civilizations exist. Uh, the like, I know, it's probably
(32:18):
it was probably great for the Reagan administration, right, just
it was probably great for optics and votes to say, hey,
make these bad parents pay their fair share. But I
guarante MCTE you Ronald Reagan did not personally meet every
parent who had to have their kid in the foster system.
(32:39):
Didn't know what he was talking about. Wasn't that also
in the era of like this kind of perceived like
the welfare Queen and all of that garbage that was
created like as a absolute dog whistle racist Uh you
know tactic. In my opinion, I think in many people's opinions, well,
I get the I get the idea, you know, I
under stand the idea that people should be personally and
(33:05):
fishly responsible. I get it. I'm also establishing that the
goal is the goal should maybe not be to punish people,
however their life may have played out or however it's
playing out. The goal should be to help people. And
the idea that you would find someone at the most
(33:27):
vulnerable point in their lives and say, if you want
to see your kids, give us twenty grand is unconscionable.
It's it's very strange. It's it's at the like, regardless
of political opinions, it's very much a flaw in a
system like like Matt, like you were saying ten dollars
(33:48):
a year, so that's two years worth of someone's entire livelihood.
Instead of taking twenty dollars, what about giving twenty dollars
to the kids as like a trust fund thing or
to help them, help help them be able to enter
college without falling into the debt trap of student warrants. Yeah,
(34:09):
it is crazy. You pay for an apartment, like for
a couple of months so that there is a safe
place for those kids to be. And you know this,
this kind of thing wouldn't happen in the first place.
But you know, instead you're gonna garnish their wages and
you know they'll even take away your licenses. They'll take
your driver's license away. What do you think that does
(34:29):
to the ability of someone who doesn't make much money
to be able to make any money. It's as afficious cycle.
I like I've mentioned this on the show before, but
like I've been to jail all of one time. It
was for an unpaid um speeding ticket or something that
I got in an area where it was kind of
in the middle of nowhere and you had to mail
in your payment. They didn't have computer option. Uh, And
(34:49):
so I got to do a little fender bender and
my ticket had not shown up as paid, and so
my license had a suspended and I had some kind
of bench warrants. So I got got taken to jail,
and there was this dude and then the cell that
I was in who had been there for a week
because he had because he you know, he got in there.
He got in there for failure to pitch out support.
And what happens when you come to bet, you go
to jail for a week, you lose your job and
(35:12):
makes it where you can't paitch out support or get
out of jail. Well, people who have not been involved
with the us IS incarceration system maybe unfamiliar with this adage,
but it's often said, and it's unfortunately true in this country. Uh,
jail easy to get in, hard as hell to get out.
(35:34):
It's true because it's not a it's it's not a
rehabilitative program, right, And this this is part of a
bigger problem we had actually behind the scenes, we were
working on a week. You're gonna have a very depressing
week with us in the future, folks, where we talk
(35:55):
about the incarceration system. I saw Matts, Matt, I saw
your play there. Yeah, it's gonna be uh, it's gonna
be a downer, but it is important at this point,
you know. Um, Again, it's tough to navigate because the
people who are getting harmed the most by this are
(36:15):
the children. But they're being harmed in a way that
will ultimately harm society, you know what I mean. Like
every of course, nobody likes paying taxes, which is why
the very wealthy getaway with not paying taxes. But those
taxes go to something. There is a reason. It's the constant.
(36:38):
I don't know why it's a hot take to say
that if you have the power of three hundred twenty
million plus honestly smart people. I don't know why it's
a hot take to say that this society would do better,
you know what I mean, Like, why twenty dollars, that's
(37:01):
the price they're putting on on the future of the kid,
on the future of these three kids and their families,
And that just seems like something future historians will think
is so ridiculous because these kids have had a good life.
Well yeah, they could have, but humans were very into
this coupon system we had at the time, and we
(37:23):
needed we needed to exchange the coupons. Oh my god,
I said it was going to be positive while we
were recording. Sorry, guys, well that's a little tough. You're right,
And I mean, like, I don't know where that tax
money goes, and I know where it goes in theory
what I've about it before on the show. It certainly
doesn't go to fixing roads in my neighborhood and like
literally anything functional that I can benefit from in my
(37:44):
day to day. And maybe that's overseeing the case a
little bit, but I sure would love for it to
go to helping people out that actually need help. So
hot taker, no, I think we're on the same page
about that. Um So, let's turn the page to an
ad break and then we'll come back with one last
piece of mail from you. And we have returned. We
(38:12):
have not returned unaccompanied. We're going to have a deep
conversation about foster care and the industry as it stands.
We would love your help and your input, so don't
forget to hit us up. We'll tell you how to
reach us at the end of the show. But right
now we have to welcome our final guests on today's
(38:34):
Listener Mail, and that is Steve. Steve, you asked the
question that I have. I think Matt Noel doc I
don't know about you, but definitely me. I think we've
all asked this question at some point. Just to give
you some context without spoiling it, this is one of
(38:57):
those phrases you hear thrown around all the time and
mainstream news with economic or political pundits who are talking
in very authoritative seeming terms. Here is what Steve wrote,
national debt question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark.
That's four question marks for everybody. Keep the count at home, Steve.
(39:20):
Here's what he said, So just listen to Petro dollars
one oh one, great taste, Steve. I think that episode
holds up. Steve says, when you guys brought up what
would happen when the world decided that America wasn't the
superpower anymore and stopped using the US dollars the current currency.
It got me thinking about our national debt. How the
(39:41):
f do we even owe? And how would we default
to or who would we default to? Is it as
made up as currency value? Maybe you guys covered it
and I can't find it. I don't watch the old
YouTube stuff. Oh you're in for retreat, Steve, but I
listen all the time to the podcast. If you did
(40:02):
already cover national debt true or false? Could you point
me in the right direction of the show? You guys
help me feel sane when surrounded by my family. The
national debt. It's one of those phrases like, oh, the economy, oh,
the national debt. Whichever political party is in power will
(40:26):
have incredibly convenient opinions on the national debt, you know,
will will have Like usually here in the US, the
national debt is kind of a football that people pass
around to lend credence to their current goals or arguments.
(40:48):
So like any time there is a Democratic president, you're
going to see a lot of Republican representatives in Congress
saying that the debt is the number one thing and
sort of holding the financial future of the country hostage
to get what they want. And this is not a
hit piece on the Republican side, because the Democratic Party
(41:11):
does the same thing, and they will continue to do
so because this is a functionally a two party system, right,
So I wanted to open this up you guys first
before we explore this national debt. Have you have you
ever had the same question that Steve had, like who
(41:32):
do we owe? I feel like we've talked about this before,
but I think it's one of those topics that I
put out of my mind because it's almost like it
was so made up that I didn't need to keep
it in. Uh. But I'm hanging out over on us
debt clock dot org because I remember going here before
(41:53):
where it's just counting up everything, and right now, our
national debt stands at twenty nine trillion, three hundred and
seventies seven billion, eight hundred and sixty eight million, and no,
eight and sixty nine million. There you. Oh, let's divide
that by person. So this is the population. Let's just
(42:15):
you know, let's let's let let's take a per capita.
I'll tell you, per per capita, it's eight thousand, a
little over eighty eight thousand. Per taxpayer, it's two hundred
and thirty Okay, Okay, I got you. But let's just
call it eight eight grand because that'll be hilarious for
all of our fellow conspiracy willists who don't live in
(42:37):
the US, We're all almost ninety grand in the whole
just for hanging out in our weird club. And uh,
it's nuts, because you know, the idea of debt powers
the world, the powers the economy, which is the dominant
religion of this age. Shout out to our earlier episode.
(42:58):
Is economy a religion? Spoiler? It is? So when we
when we think about debt, we often think about it
in a personal level. Right, I owe Matt twenty dollars,
or like Noel says, I gotta pay the you know,
(43:18):
the electricity bill or something. National. Yeah, national debt is
not like that. It is not like student loans. It's
not like credit card debt. And it might surprise you
Steve to learn that there are answers to some of
these questions. That Debt clock map brought up. I think
is an excellent resource. But I also like to just
(43:40):
pull on our House of works DNA real quick and
and do uh, let's call it, like explain like I'm
five national debt. Right. So it sounds weird when you
hear the news, when you hear some pundit saying like oh,
the trade deficit or the US is so in debt,
and you think, like to oom, the country with the
(44:01):
world's most powerful military, the country that on its own
could destroy the planet, is stressing about money, right, It
seems counterintuitive, but here's what's going on. The US national debt.
The majority of it is technically owe to the public,
(44:23):
to the citizen rate of the US. This is where
things like bonds come in. You'll buy a bond or
you'll buy a security, and it's backed by the United
States government. So you're essentially you're entering a contract where
you say, Okay, I'm going to give you some money,
Uncle Sam, and Uncle Sam says, I'm good for it.
(44:44):
I give you the money back. Let's a little bit
of you know, a little bit of a cherry on
top to make it worth your time. It's just gonna
take me ten to thirty years because because you know
that's how large organizations work, then your freelancer and the
audience knows what a nightmare invoices can be sometimes. And
it seems like the bigger an organization, uh, the more
(45:07):
lax they are on paying on time. But anyway, you
get this, so you buy this bond and the government
debt then is kind of like it's not quite the
same thing, but it's kind of like a it's almost
like a stock, right you you are getting dividends. The
interest rates from those bonds are pretty low. We're talking
(45:28):
like three percent or so. And the question is why
would you do this? Inflation goes up at a predictable
rate over time, right, So why would you why would
you buy this kind of bond? Why why would you say, okay, America,
give me an iou. It's because you are guaranteed to
(45:52):
get that interest. It's a smaller rate of interest, but
it's actual money instead of potential profit. And the U.
S Government has, in their defense, always paid up with
this stuff. So it's consistent, it's predictable, it's a safe place, right,
(46:12):
even if it's not the most profitable. So most of
this stuff being called national debt is owed to the
US public, but a lot of it is owed to
other branches of the US government, and yes, some a
big portion of it is owed to other countries. The
thing is going back to our example of like me
(46:35):
oing Matt twenty dollars or Noal needing to pay the
electricity bill. We don't get to print our own money
other than ben bucks, which are still you know, kind
of the newer bitcoin. I would say, the US, when
it owes money, can print money. It can, it can
put its finger on the scale through things like quantitative
(46:57):
easing and so on. So you'll you'll hear a lot.
The reason this stuff sounds so abstract sometimes and so
weird is because it is abstract ultimately, right, Like there's
you're never going to hear a politician saying something like, um,
(47:18):
we have to bend the knee to Goldman's sacks. Right,
You're not going to hear that because it's bad optics.
But if you look back historically in things like the
Lincoln administration during the Civil War, the guy was in
the trenches fighting with private banks over interest rates, like
(47:39):
the like, national debt is a real thing, but you
need to think of it more like a stock. It's
consistently uh, it's a consistently paying out investment. And we
will even hear the argument that happened. Debt is healthy
because it keeps the whole Ponzi scheme of capitalism running. Well,
(48:03):
you're welcome, right, And the US is paying this back
also constantly on like on the same scale. You know,
a few years back, I think we were all surprised
to learn that Germany had finally paid off its fines
(48:23):
for World War Two, which was nuts. But this, this
does happen. The main thing after remember is that national
debt is not the same as your personal debt. It
also is a debt owed by an organization that can
(48:43):
literally create money if it wants to, which calls into question,
you know, the calls into the question of the credibility
of the whole house of cards, our house of dollars.
And then secondly, you need to remember that this is
highly politicized. There's a lot of political theater behind this.
(49:04):
It's it's such a convenient boogeyman to raid. We know,
we have clearly established people much more intelligent than us
have clearly established the economy is not the people, right.
That's why you can have the world's largest economy in
the same country with the highest incarceration rates. That's why
(49:25):
you can have people illiterate, you can have people starving,
you can have people dying from preventable disease, easily preventable
disease while Wall Street is doing gangbusters in the fourth
quarter or whatever. I'm sorry, thank you for letting me
Ted talk. I mean, even even Scully is back there
(49:45):
like rolling your eyes. Sorry, guys. Well, hey, I found
something through the story that's related back to one of
my predictions. Ben. Within the U S Debt clock dot
org system, you can find us home Pricing and Sales
and they've got a handy little thing here that gives
you new home median sale price and it shows it
(50:06):
to you from two thousand six until two thousand twenty one.
And if you look back, you can see that the
housing crisis that occurred, you know, two two thousand throughout there,
and you can see how there's a ridiculous jump from
a new home median sale price in the year of
(50:29):
two d and eighty eight thousand dollars two in two
thousand twenty one, four hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars.
The median sale price of a house jumps up that
much in one year's time. And uh, it just shows
you that there's a bubble. Boys, the whole thing, the
(50:51):
house of cards you're mentioning, it's just waiting to go
Papa there you go, okay, okay, you guys should be
Uh there's like a sound effects men, you know, like
for the old timey radio plays to the fully work. Yeah, yeah,
uh so, this I think is an episode in the making.
(51:12):
The national debt is something that you here talked about
often in the US, especially during times of political change,
but you also hear it in many, many other countries
because of the international banking system, because of the whole
practice of the capital e economy. But are big takeaway
Steve for you before we call it a day, is this.
(51:36):
If you're looking for a big bad enemy that the
US owes tons and tons of money too, it is
the US public. They are the main folks that Uncle
Sam needs to needs to pay up. And uh there
are also a course foreign investors there for government's people
are trading debt back and forth through their treasuries. Investing
(51:59):
in US treasuries is a deliberate strategy for foreign powers,
including places like Russia and China. And the reason this is,
I don't want to get too in the weeds, but
the reason this works so well is because if you
are if you are a country, right and you have
your own currency, then one of the things you're really
(52:21):
concerned about is how how valuable your currency is relative
to other currencies like, Make no mistake, there are people
in corporations that you would never associate with this. Like there,
I would not be surprised if there's someone who works
at Coca Cola and their entire job is to just
(52:43):
like move money around in the currency market. Right, is
the one gonna improve over the dollar or the British
pound or the euro. Let's try to move that around
and make a percentage. Countries don't always want their money
to be the most quote unquote expensive money. It actually
(53:03):
can help them, especially their country without the devil's deal
of the petro dollar, like the US has. A weaker
currency can help a country. It's it's deeper than a
light bill, folks. It's crazy, crazy stuff. But Steve, this
is a question that has been on my mind as well.
(53:24):
I think it's been on all our minds. It's something
that we have to do a future episode on. So
thank you Steve, thank you Roscoe, thank you Jasper. We
are on the case. We're diving into this stuff, and
we're diving into two Can you believe we made it? Guys?
We just did our first listener mail of the new year.
(53:46):
Yes that is fake? Wow? Well yeah, um decoy City
and Virginia. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. That is real, is
a real thing. Sorry, I wanted to jump into old
prospect Or voice when we were talking about some of
(54:07):
these listeners that wrote to us. Oh, Jasper and Roscoe
right to us with all the information, and Steve too,
good old Steve with coming through with the information. Mm
hmmm uh. And if you want to join us on
this merry misadventure, this strange enterprise of the show, we
(54:29):
would love to have you on board. If you want
to take a page from Roscoe, Jasper and Steve's book
or there take a take a gold nugget from their claim.
Where are we going with the Prospector think? Okay, now
that checks out all right? Well, if you want to
talk to us, The point is we can't wait to
hear from you. We try to be easy to find online,
oh boy or we ever on the internet. You can
(54:52):
find us in the usual places of note, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
We exist under the handle at conspiracy Stuff. You can
also find us on Instagram at the handle at Conspiracy
Stuff Show. If you want to use your mouth in
your phone, you can contact us that way. Three st
d w y t K Wow on the fly can
(55:17):
get out of my head. Dude, that's exactly st d
w y t K. That's our number. Give us a call. Please.
You don't have to do it in Limerick or whatever
the heck that was. Give yourself a cool nickname. You've
got three minutes. Tell us whatever you'd like. We'd love
to hear from you. Please let us know if we
can use your voice and message on one of these
(55:38):
listener mail episodes. Uh, that's really Those are the only
rules other than that, no rules. If you don't want
to use your phone to contact us with your voice,
you can instead put some things into an electronic message
and send it via email. We are conspiracy at iHeart
radio dot com. M m H. Stuff they don't want
(56:15):
you to know. Is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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 I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer,
Alexa's code named dot Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. It is one of our
favorite times of the week, folks. This is where we
(00:47):
get to hear from you, the very best part of
this show. Now it's two congratulations, as we said earlier
this week, to everyone who survived to listen to T today. Yeah,
I go to you and uh we not Noel and
Doc and I spent uh spend a lot of time
(01:09):
weading through correspondence, talking to people on you know, on
a telephone, talking to people on email. Thanks to everybody
who reached out on social media. Big shout out to
Stephanie who wished us marry Christmas on Christmas. Yes, Yes,
big shout out, big big shout out. Also, huge shout
(01:30):
out to Sweet Miller Action on Etsy. It is a
page where you can get all of your metal work
home to core needs met and the blink of an eye.
A lovely listener who runs this page, UM sent us
all some really really cool do dads for Christmas. Um.
I ended up with a lovely nightlight that looks like
(01:51):
an acoustic bass, like an upright basse. Uh. You also
sent us these little little gelatinous slappy hands that are
fun for the whole family, for for kids any age
and adults too. Yes Miller, Yes, exactly what did you
guys get? I have a goat. Well then I'm very
excited about and a bass cliff. Now I I have
(02:13):
some stuff and thank you. Yes Miller, Yes, I have
some stuff from the one and only the legend sweet
Miller action. But he and I are actually in a
bit of a tiff, so yes Miller, Yes, if you're listening,
I do insist on. I do insist on paying you
for some stuff. You're too kind, too kind. We've gotten
(02:36):
like this is at this point I think it's safe
for us to say, Um. For for us, this is
more than a job. This is more than a just
a show like we have. UM. I read a very
interesting paper on what's called paras social relationships. Paras social
relationship is a phrase that described going somewhere with as
(03:01):
I promise A Para social relationship is a phrase that
describes the feeling humans experience when you, like you listen
to a musician and think this person gets me. They
must know my life. I feel a cloud atlas moment,
(03:23):
I feel like I am related to this person. This
happens also when you read poetry, or you read any
any work of art, you see a sculpture, etcetera. And
Paris social relationships spiked. The experience of having these spiked
during the pandemic, and it's very important for us to
(03:45):
establish to you listening now that for us it isn't
quite paras social relationship. We've we have actual friends now
listen to show we've got like uh I, you know,
we we haven't done a lot of the war stories
of maybe angry emails we get, but even those folks
(04:07):
end up being our our friends at the end of
the day. It's it's nuts we are We are so fortunate,
and with that we're going to share with you some
really bizarre and disturbing things that your fellow listeners have
hitped us too, because we we don't know about a
(04:30):
lot of this unless someone brings it up. So it's
a it's a huge part of the show. No not
I I suggest I suggest we start with we start
with this voicemail because you have been in the trenches,
my friend, and we we learned so much amazing stuff
(04:53):
from the people who call in. Our fellow conspiracy realists
will drop us a line and say, you know, there's
this weird ass pyramid out here in the middle of nowhere.
What's going on? I love this. This is how we
found out about the mystery of the church's chicken. Someone
someone hipped us to a mystery fast food joy and
(05:16):
now there is what is this matter? There's a I'm
looking at your notes here, there's a quote big ass
decoy near Richmond, near Richmond, Virginia. Yes, that is correct.
Before we jump into this message, shout out to Ed
who put us onto the book. The moon is a
harsh mistress that I think maybe we've talked about before
(05:40):
in the past. Robert Heinlein Heinlein, heinl Yeah, great book.
In that he discusses essentially a guss gun or a
rail gun that launches humans to the Moon totally forgot
about it. Thank you Ed for reminding us of that
house keeping up. Let's all three of us code named
(06:03):
Doc if you want to get in as well, Let's
all all four of us just continually shout out people
in this episode if we can. Oh, yeah, I'm just
doing it because I would listen to so many and
I don't think we're ever going to cover these, uh,
but do two more really fast and we'll get it.
So thank you AD for putting us back onto that.
Also shout out to brockness Monster who learned the lesson.
(06:23):
You should listen to the full episode before you call in, uh,
because brock, you know what you did. You know you
learned that lesson has to do with paratroopering cats in
a recent episode that we did. And lastly, quick shout
out to Amara, who sent us a message about berries
and cream. If you know what berries and cream is at? Lad, Yes,
(06:52):
my kids turned me onto that man and she has
she actually has a haircut right now that sort of
resembles the berries and cream Lad and uh and kids
in school all sort of big punt of her and
call the berries because he doesn't like him very much
because he's uh peep behind the curtain because we're kind
of Glen Garry Glenn Ross in the strange enterprise of
ours our no as you know, our Ride or Die.
(07:16):
The one and only Mr Matt Frederick created a fiction
anthology show Halloween Base called Thirteen Days of Halloween, and
then the first season of that, I wrote an episode
about an unfortunate situation at a gas station. It's entirely
inspired by that berries and cream commercial. So that's right
(07:41):
on our incredible that's right, And you'll have to listen
to the whole first season to figure out which episode
it was. I'm just kidding. It's called the Attic. You
can look it up. It's really all those stories, all
those stories are good. Uh there is my only note
on those stories. I love the audio fictions three D.
(08:02):
It's done with our good friend Alex Williams. It's done
with pal Aaron Manky. Um god, we haven't even gotten
to the first thing. But the only the only note
I would have on Thirteen Days is that I think
my pal Lowell Brown is an amazing voice actor. Probably no,
what was its cream? Prison cream? You're hind the little
(08:26):
lad who loves berries and cream? Yeah, yeah, you're definitely
hired season three, look for it and Halloween contractually obligated
to bring it to you. In the slapping sounds, I
don't do those. I just do the voice. We have
to do the We'll get a folly guy for that.
We have to. We have to. We should do this,
(08:47):
we should here we go, all right, This first message
comes from Roscoe. This is going to be a short one. Roscoe.
You'll see why. But let's listen to what you said. Yeah,
my name is Roscoe. But twenty years ago I moved
to Richmond, Virginia, and a short time later heard about
(09:09):
something odd, a decoy city that was built about twenty
miles east of the city of Richmond. It was intended
to be a decoy in case of a nighttime bombing
run by an enemy coming in from the Atlantic Ocean.
(09:30):
And it was not full scale, but it was very large,
and it was a small scale version of downtown Richmond,
complete with lighting. I've never looked into it a whole lot,
but I think your talk of interesting structures made me
(09:50):
think of this. Thank you all right, well, thank you Roscoe.
My goodness, just the kind of thing that really butters
our bread. It is now I think I think it.
I think it forces people to to conjure images of
us as anthropomorphic slices of bread. Butter Ben and I
(10:14):
both at that moment Um Roscoe looked at each other
and did like our Um. We have an upcoming episode
of of our other show, Ridiculous History, Uh, that deals
with a time when a very clever and forward thinking
engineer came up with the idea to build a small
model of the city of Paris, uh, complete with lights
(10:36):
and all to evade bombings raids, so they would be
they would think they were bombing actual Paris, but it
was just a little farther away, and it was like
it was not scale model. It was like smaller, but
they would shut off all the real lights right then
in actual Paris, and then the bombers would potentially confuse
the model for the real deal. Yeah, exactly. This was
(10:56):
during World War One, so no one had the access
to intel or you know, satellite visibility that is so
common today. Uh. This oh Man, Matt Yes, emailed it.
Butter are bread. This reminds me of that time when
we were we were trying to figure out if Rob
(11:20):
Shrub and Dan Harmon, who were like they're very close friends,
I guess, but we were trying to figure out if
they were mad at each other when we were on
harm in Town and Dan said something like we we
were being very positive, nerdy people and we were saying
nice things about everybody. And Dan was like, no, no,
(11:42):
find grease him up. Exact liked Roscoe's greasing us up.
So look, I got bad. I got good news, bad news,
and bad news. I'm not sure how we're gonna make
this happen. But first, the bad news is Roscoe. I
could find nothing on a mock version of Richmond or
(12:03):
any other town in Virginia in that area. I couldn't.
I couldn't find it um and maybe I just haven't
searched the correct terms. Maybe I was just I failed.
But what I did find is a decoy air base
that was constructed for real, uh fairly close to an
(12:24):
airport in Richmond, in Henriiko County. And that's how you
say it. By the way, I thought it was Henrico,
but it's Henriiko County. And you can do a little
searching search for this and you can find an air
in Space magazine article titled in ninety two, the Army
built a decoy airfield in Virginia to fool the Lutwaffe.
(12:47):
So very similar to the story you guys are covering
the Luftwaffa. As a German boy, I must the record straight, Yes,
the Lufaffa and Henriko County. So um, this one is
a little different, very interesting concept. Uh. The U. S.
(13:10):
Military went in there. They basically just took over some
land that was just forest and they cleared some of
it to make it look exactly like an airfield that
was nearby. It was a smaller airfield that was being
converted into something for the U. S. Army, and so
in order to protect it, they wanted to have this, uh,
(13:32):
this air field, like you said, with lights, with fox structures,
with fake airplanes, with all like shrubs cut in the
form of airplanes, and all kinds of things like yes, yes,
like it's pretty incredible. I would encourage you guys both
(13:52):
to look up that air and space. I linked it
in the dock there. If you want to look at it.
You can actually see an image of it from space
or from the sky, and you can tell that if
you flew over this thing, if it's night and it's
very dark in the surrounding areas. But this thing is
lit up. It looks like an airfield with targets that
you would bomb. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff. What's interesting
(14:16):
in Roscoe is that this is an historically precedented I
think this works very well. There was during World War Two,
I believe there were there was a proliferation of things
called starfish sites. These these were built. These were supposed
(14:36):
to look like burning cities, British burning cities in the night,
so that German bombers during the blitz would be distracted
and wouldn't actually hit their intended target. The world is
full of facades, you know, and this is another example
(15:01):
of one. If anything, Matt, do we know the level
of preservation or the level of current use for this
decoy site. Well, if you go to this is kind
of a weird site. It's the wag w a g
dot net. You can find someone. I don't know that
(15:22):
I can even tell you who. It's written by Jake
Smith in two thousand three visited the site and took
some pictures and wrote up something in here titled Lost
City Found. And you can see some images of the
site and what it looks like now, it's just not
really a thing anymore. It's just kind of wilderness with
(15:43):
a random fire hydrant every once in a while, with
some remnants of gutters and fences and like again, some
of the faux buildings. I think there's even a water
tower that can be found on that area. I want
to give everybody just a couple other things to search
for if you want to Bird Airfield to b y
r D Airfield is the thing that this folks, this
(16:05):
faux air field was made to look like, and that
was very close by. That's what got turned into the
army air base in I'm getting some of this information
from Henryko dot us. That's h E N R I
c O dot us. They've got a small little right
up on it, and you can actually see an image
of the historic marker that's on place there. It was
(16:29):
titled or you could look it up as ELKO tracked
E L K O T R A C T, so
you can also search that to learn more about this. Um.
I don't know ben that you guys, there's all kinds
of information that you can look up once you start
down the rabbit hole of this place about other places,
like you're talking about ben and all like other decoy sites.
(16:52):
We're talking during the Pacific War World War two. Uh,
we're talking about German cities and sites that were made
to look, you know, look real, but they were fake.
And if a real bombing raid was occurring, you just
shut down all the lights in the place that's going
to get bombed or would get bombed, and you turn
them all on in the other place. And here's guys,
(17:14):
the US Army actually stationed people at this fake site
to just live there on base, in these huts, and
they had them do things around the fake base like
they were real, like made to look like they're working
on the planes that aren't actually there, so that if
if there is any spy plane or anyone checking out
(17:35):
the area, they would say, oh, yeah, the freaking air
bases right there. Look. You can tell I love the idea.
You know, in um I guess In in improv and
other stage pursuits, they call that object work, which is
we're you just sort of pantomiming doing stuff. I love
this idea. Man, this concept. It may may seem silly
(18:01):
if you are lucky enough to have not been in
a situation where you needed this sort of strategy or tactic.
But this concept is a tremendously powerful example of information
warfare when you think about it, we are we are
altering hearts and minds when we are building fake cities,
(18:24):
and we still we did. Uh, we did an earlier
episode on places where you Can't go, but we have
never except for our our one adventure in New York,
we have never covered We've never covered entirely fake or
decoy cities. And they're still around, by the way, just
(18:46):
earlier this week, Matt, you had mentioned the problems with
real estate collapses, right and the very indus strange news
when we started predicting stuff, and uh, you know it's
no well, it's no secret outside of China that there
are vast conturbations that are almost entirely empty by hook
(19:09):
or by crook, Decoy cities, decoy places are going to
remain a real thing, Roscoe. Big question for you? What
is that? That's the question? Sorry? Yeah, conturbation is a
conturbation is just a fancy word for like a metro area. Okay,
(19:29):
cool now and something I love it. Well, So like
there there are almost entirely I don't know if you would,
I don't know what criteria we would use to decide
whether or not these are fake. But there are. You know,
there are a lot of abandoned places in the world,
(19:51):
even even now with such a large human population. Roscoe,
big question for you, did you get in? Are you
gonna go in? Don't do it? If it's anything. What's
that company we just talked about with the pyramid that
steel case, but then they it got turned into something
(20:13):
else and quick. Just to that point, been shouting out
the person that I can't remember your name, but you
called in and told us about your experience going on
I n L property out there in Idaho and near
the National Laboratories. I think that's what you said. I
might be wrong, but shout out to you because you
know you called in and you said something is just
getting muddled in my brain. Now, thank you. I'm gonna
(20:35):
listen to it again, all right, Roscoe, Thank you so
much for calling us and leaving us that message. We
will be right back with more messages from you. And
we're back with more messages from you. That's right. You
out there, whomever you are, uh, specifically you Jasper who
(20:58):
wrote in with a bit of a head v story. Um,
it's it's very interesting, though, I think it's worth knowing about.
Jasper writes with an email titled parents are build for
their children's foster care. Hi guys, today I came across
this article from NPR links to the article on NPR
that was heard on All Things Considered. States send kids
(21:19):
to foster care, and their parents the bill often one
too big to pay. I never knew that when a
family is able to be reunited to conflicting federal laws
and a number of state laws allow the parents to
be billed for the cost of fostering children. A failure
or inability to pay the bill, which can be tens
of thousands of dollars, goes onto their credit scores and
(21:41):
can result in difficulty securing housing, loss of licenses and permits,
garnished wages, and losing their children again. Uh. In addition
to the bill, in some cases, the money owed is
subject to interest. You better believe I'm writing to my representatives,
but I was hoping you could look into this and
mentioned it on a Listener mail episode. It definitely seems
like something they don't want you to know about. Foster care.
(22:03):
Take care jasper Um. This story just came out a
couple of days ago, actually yesterday today being recording this,
UM and I certainly was not aware of this either.
And you know, the story highlights the case of a
woman named Daisy Hallman Um who moved into a trailer
(22:23):
that had an extra room to rent after she had
separated from her husband. We know that can be a
costly and stressful situation, you know, for the man or
the woman or we either partner in a in a
divorce or separation. Not to mention the kids. Um, she
and her three kids have been moving from place to
place day with family. UM and now they found this
place that they could rent a room in a trailer.
(22:45):
And not two weeks after staying there, the address was
rated by police who found drugs and drug paraphernale there. Um.
She was not the target, she was at work, She
had no drugs found on her, and she was not charged.
But Child Protective Services in the county where this took place,
(23:05):
Right County, Minnesota, placed her kids, UH fifteen and ten,
two daughters and a son aged nine, into foster care,
pulled them away from from their mom during it was
already a horrible time. I mean, I can't imagine. It
just seems utterly cruel and inhuman because the officials determined
(23:26):
that she had left her children an unsafe place. Maybe
there's some truth to that, but it just seems very, very,
very extreme. Uh. So they were in foster care for
twenty months. Uh and when they returned, she got a
bill for a whopping nineteen thousand, five hundred and thirty
dollars and seven cents and seven cents. Uh. And apparently
(23:50):
this is super common in every single state because there
are these two federal laws that kind of contradict each other,
one that um instructs child welfare agencies to make reuniting
families their first priority, and the other that is forty
years old on the books that says states should charge
(24:13):
parents for the cost of childcare. And this is a
great example of just like you know, I mean, most
of these antiquated laws that stay on the books are
things that are silly and funny to talk about, like
spitting in public as illegal or you know, swearing in
the presence of a lady. But this is the kind
of antiquated law that absolutely is causing people absurd, uh
(24:35):
damaging problems. You know, Um, I just can't imagine if
you're already struggling to get on your feet. This is
like the equivalent of like debtors prison, you know, or
something like that. Where but also in the first place,
it wasn't even something that was her fault. She found
herself in a situation that was desperate. She made a
desperate move, and maybe it was had some poor judgment
in terms of like the safety of the type of
(24:57):
place where they were staying, but also maybe it was
the only SI that she had. And it seems really
cruel to penalize her for that, especially when she's just
getting back on her feet, and that's that's an amount
of money that would be difficult for most people to
come up with on the fly let alone, if they're
compounding it with interest. I mean, I just think this
is just unconsfortable. Well, we still haven't done our Foster
(25:21):
Home Industry episode. We we talked about this a while back,
and we received some very personal accounts from a lot
of our fellow listeners, and of course I want to
thank everybody who took the time to write in, because
it had to be harrowing to sort of relive those experiences.
(25:42):
If you have been in the foster system on any level,
in any sort of role. You are well aware of
the problems with the system, with the infrastructure of it.
There are you know, there there are blue function as
foster parents entirely for the financial aspect, and they're really
(26:05):
they're really, really amazing foster parents who want to make
the world a little bit less efficient place for a kid.
And that is commendable. That is one of the most
amazing things you can do is to be a parent
figure for a young human. But with this, no Jasper,
(26:26):
I don't think a lot of people are talking about
this because it's it's a crime that and I will
say it's a crime, like what degree of incompetence or
legal oversight do we have to reach? What's the threshold
before we say this is criminal? Like these are these
are the some of the most disadvantaged people, these parents, right,
(26:49):
like you said, most people don't have twenty grand they
can just pay on demand. And secondly, these folks are
not going to buy and large have the money to
pursue a legal challenge to this, and where where does
my My question is where does the money go? Like
(27:10):
if if this family, because it's a family, it's not
just the mom. If this family pays twenty grand Does
that go to the foster parents, Does they go to
like admin fees? Do they ticket Master? It is there
like a list of like all these small incidental things. Well,
it's also the kind of thing that you would think
(27:30):
of almost like in terms of like a exorbitant hospital
bill for someone that doesn't have insurance, like you can
usually negotiate it down, you know. And I don't know
if this is like iron clad, if you're getting an
itemized list. I mean it did say in the NPR
piece that some of these charges were like their individual
charges first anywhere from twenty five dollars to over a
(27:51):
thousand dollars a month um. That add up and the
longer that the kids are in the foster care, the
the you know, the more that bill adds up. And
this is a ninety eight word bill. Yep, that that
is correct, Matt. How does this hit you, man? Well, first,
it hits me in the fields when it comes to
the investigators, the journalists that actually are looking into this
(28:15):
and telling this story, specifically Joseph Shapiro, Teresa Wilts, and
Jessica Piper, like, thank you for covering this story and
for doing an entire investigation on it. Um, this is
the kind of thing that needs to be talked about.
And what what's really hitting me is what you're you guys,
are mentioning already here the concept of twenty thou dollars
(28:35):
being charged uh to a mom who is trying to
support her family and do what's right for them. But
she's having made these decisions. And I believe she's the
person who's saying she was living on ten thousand dollars
a year within this piece. And you know, if you
imagine charging someone who makes ten thousand dollars a year
twenty tho dollars, you're not going to get that back
(28:57):
anytime soon because of what you need to spend that
money on, which is a very small amount of money,
ten thousand dollars and you're gonna charge twice that to somebody.
And how long were they in care Matt again twenty months,
so a little less than two years. Oh, I was wrong, guys.
(29:18):
According to the nprpiece, it was eighty percent of the
families that showed up in the data as they were
looking into this at Trish scoff Emmer Uh of the
families had incomes of less than ten grand a year.
That tracks but I'm just wondering, like, this is this
is for the care for three children, um, over the
(29:41):
course of a little over a year or was it
roughly two years? Is a little less than two years?
And so what does what does that breakdown to per month?
Thousand a month if you round up? Well, okay, this
big devil's advocate here, And I still don't think this
is right. A thousand a month for three kids. That
made that far off from reality, you know, um, being
(30:02):
a being a dad. Just I'm just saying like, yeah,
and and and where is that money is supposed to
come from? You know, I think there should obviously be
a deal worked out in some way, you know, But
it's like she's also obviously also during this time, is
she able to work? She is probably able to work.
But still, yeah, that's wild. Um, it's it's it's a
(30:23):
tough it's a tough position. You try and charge uh,
you know, a family, your mom or dad, whoever makes
that little money, try and charge him that much money.
You're not going to get it back, at least anytime soon.
So I don't understand how this could all be a
profitable thing for the state or you know, for whoever
is actually what agency is getting money paid back. They
(30:44):
must have to them on payment plans like they do
with the exorbit in hospital bill too. I mean they
have to charnish. Well, that would be one way to
do it. Well, let me see this. Let me point
this out. So if someone these are this is a
federal law, but they're also state level regulations, policies and laws.
If someone is in the foster care system, it should
(31:09):
not be a for profit system. And this is Please folks,
please do not mistake us as somehow quote unquote defending
deadbeat parents. That's not what we're doing at all. But
what I'm pointing out here is that if you are
listening to this, we're in the United States, you are
(31:31):
already paying to help these people. In theory, the system
of taxation means that we're all sort of in a club, right,
and we pay our dues. And when we all pay
our dues, I don't think that's ever happened. But if
we all pay our dues in theory, then we are
(31:52):
creating an infrastructure to address these sorts of problems. The
goal is not to punish people, right that it shouldn't
be the goal. The goal is to help these kids
have a decent shot at a good life. That is
why civilizations exist. Uh, the like, I know, it's probably
(32:18):
it was probably great for the Reagan administration, right, just
it was probably great for optics and votes to say, hey,
make these bad parents pay their fair share. But I
guarante MCTE you Ronald Reagan did not personally meet every
parent who had to have their kid in the foster system.
(32:39):
Didn't know what he was talking about. Wasn't that also
in the era of like this kind of perceived like
the welfare Queen and all of that garbage that was
created like as a absolute dog whistle racist Uh you
know tactic. In my opinion, I think in many people's opinions, well,
I get the I get the idea, you know, I
under stand the idea that people should be personally and
(33:05):
fishly responsible. I get it. I'm also establishing that the
goal is the goal should maybe not be to punish people,
however their life may have played out or however it's
playing out. The goal should be to help people. And
the idea that you would find someone at the most
(33:27):
vulnerable point in their lives and say, if you want
to see your kids, give us twenty grand is unconscionable.
It's it's very strange. It's it's at the like, regardless
of political opinions, it's very much a flaw in a
system like like Matt, like you were saying ten dollars
(33:48):
a year, so that's two years worth of someone's entire livelihood.
Instead of taking twenty dollars, what about giving twenty dollars
to the kids as like a trust fund thing or
to help them, help help them be able to enter
college without falling into the debt trap of student warrants. Yeah,
(34:09):
it is crazy. You pay for an apartment, like for
a couple of months so that there is a safe
place for those kids to be. And you know this,
this kind of thing wouldn't happen in the first place.
But you know, instead you're gonna garnish their wages and
you know they'll even take away your licenses. They'll take
your driver's license away. What do you think that does
(34:29):
to the ability of someone who doesn't make much money
to be able to make any money. It's as afficious cycle.
I like I've mentioned this on the show before, but
like I've been to jail all of one time. It
was for an unpaid um speeding ticket or something that
I got in an area where it was kind of
in the middle of nowhere and you had to mail
in your payment. They didn't have computer option. Uh, And
(34:49):
so I got to do a little fender bender and
my ticket had not shown up as paid, and so
my license had a suspended and I had some kind
of bench warrants. So I got got taken to jail,
and there was this dude and then the cell that
I was in who had been there for a week
because he had because he you know, he got in there.
He got in there for failure to pitch out support.
And what happens when you come to bet, you go
to jail for a week, you lose your job and
(35:12):
makes it where you can't paitch out support or get
out of jail. Well, people who have not been involved
with the us IS incarceration system maybe unfamiliar with this adage,
but it's often said, and it's unfortunately true in this country. Uh,
jail easy to get in, hard as hell to get out.
(35:34):
It's true because it's not a it's it's not a
rehabilitative program, right, And this this is part of a
bigger problem we had actually behind the scenes, we were
working on a week. You're gonna have a very depressing
week with us in the future, folks, where we talk
(35:55):
about the incarceration system. I saw Matts, Matt, I saw
your play there. Yeah, it's gonna be uh, it's gonna
be a downer, but it is important at this point,
you know. Um, Again, it's tough to navigate because the
people who are getting harmed the most by this are
(36:15):
the children. But they're being harmed in a way that
will ultimately harm society, you know what I mean. Like
every of course, nobody likes paying taxes, which is why
the very wealthy getaway with not paying taxes. But those
taxes go to something. There is a reason. It's the constant.
(36:38):
I don't know why it's a hot take to say
that if you have the power of three hundred twenty
million plus honestly smart people. I don't know why it's
a hot take to say that this society would do better,
you know what I mean, Like, why twenty dollars, that's
(37:01):
the price they're putting on on the future of the kid,
on the future of these three kids and their families,
And that just seems like something future historians will think
is so ridiculous because these kids have had a good life.
Well yeah, they could have, but humans were very into
this coupon system we had at the time, and we
(37:23):
needed we needed to exchange the coupons. Oh my god,
I said it was going to be positive while we
were recording. Sorry, guys, well that's a little tough. You're right,
And I mean, like, I don't know where that tax
money goes, and I know where it goes in theory
what I've about it before on the show. It certainly
doesn't go to fixing roads in my neighborhood and like
literally anything functional that I can benefit from in my
(37:44):
day to day. And maybe that's overseeing the case a
little bit, but I sure would love for it to
go to helping people out that actually need help. So
hot taker, no, I think we're on the same page
about that. Um So, let's turn the page to an
ad break and then we'll come back with one last
piece of mail from you. And we have returned. We
(38:12):
have not returned unaccompanied. We're going to have a deep
conversation about foster care and the industry as it stands.
We would love your help and your input, so don't
forget to hit us up. We'll tell you how to
reach us at the end of the show. But right
now we have to welcome our final guests on today's
(38:34):
Listener Mail, and that is Steve. Steve, you asked the
question that I have. I think Matt Noel doc I
don't know about you, but definitely me. I think we've
all asked this question at some point. Just to give
you some context without spoiling it, this is one of
(38:57):
those phrases you hear thrown around all the time and
mainstream news with economic or political pundits who are talking
in very authoritative seeming terms. Here is what Steve wrote,
national debt question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark.
That's four question marks for everybody. Keep the count at home, Steve.
(39:20):
Here's what he said, So just listen to Petro dollars
one oh one, great taste, Steve. I think that episode
holds up. Steve says, when you guys brought up what
would happen when the world decided that America wasn't the
superpower anymore and stopped using the US dollars the current currency.
It got me thinking about our national debt. How the
(39:41):
f do we even owe? And how would we default
to or who would we default to? Is it as
made up as currency value? Maybe you guys covered it
and I can't find it. I don't watch the old
YouTube stuff. Oh you're in for retreat, Steve, but I
listen all the time to the podcast. If you did
(40:02):
already cover national debt true or false? Could you point
me in the right direction of the show? You guys
help me feel sane when surrounded by my family. The
national debt. It's one of those phrases like, oh, the economy, oh,
the national debt. Whichever political party is in power will
(40:26):
have incredibly convenient opinions on the national debt, you know,
will will have Like usually here in the US, the
national debt is kind of a football that people pass
around to lend credence to their current goals or arguments.
(40:48):
So like any time there is a Democratic president, you're
going to see a lot of Republican representatives in Congress
saying that the debt is the number one thing and
sort of holding the financial future of the country hostage
to get what they want. And this is not a
hit piece on the Republican side, because the Democratic Party
(41:11):
does the same thing, and they will continue to do
so because this is a functionally a two party system, right,
So I wanted to open this up you guys first
before we explore this national debt. Have you have you
ever had the same question that Steve had, like who
(41:32):
do we owe? I feel like we've talked about this before,
but I think it's one of those topics that I
put out of my mind because it's almost like it
was so made up that I didn't need to keep
it in. Uh. But I'm hanging out over on us
debt clock dot org because I remember going here before
(41:53):
where it's just counting up everything, and right now, our
national debt stands at twenty nine trillion, three hundred and
seventies seven billion, eight hundred and sixty eight million, and no,
eight and sixty nine million. There you. Oh, let's divide
that by person. So this is the population. Let's just
(42:15):
you know, let's let's let let's take a per capita.
I'll tell you, per per capita, it's eight thousand, a
little over eighty eight thousand. Per taxpayer, it's two hundred
and thirty Okay, Okay, I got you. But let's just
call it eight eight grand because that'll be hilarious for
all of our fellow conspiracy willists who don't live in
(42:37):
the US, We're all almost ninety grand in the whole
just for hanging out in our weird club. And uh,
it's nuts, because you know, the idea of debt powers
the world, the powers the economy, which is the dominant
religion of this age. Shout out to our earlier episode.
(42:58):
Is economy a religion? Spoiler? It is? So when we
when we think about debt, we often think about it
in a personal level. Right, I owe Matt twenty dollars,
or like Noel says, I gotta pay the you know,
(43:18):
the electricity bill or something. National. Yeah, national debt is
not like that. It is not like student loans. It's
not like credit card debt. And it might surprise you
Steve to learn that there are answers to some of
these questions. That Debt clock map brought up. I think
is an excellent resource. But I also like to just
(43:40):
pull on our House of works DNA real quick and
and do uh, let's call it, like explain like I'm
five national debt. Right. So it sounds weird when you
hear the news, when you hear some pundit saying like oh,
the trade deficit or the US is so in debt,
and you think, like to oom, the country with the
(44:01):
world's most powerful military, the country that on its own
could destroy the planet, is stressing about money, right, It
seems counterintuitive, but here's what's going on. The US national debt.
The majority of it is technically owe to the public,
(44:23):
to the citizen rate of the US. This is where
things like bonds come in. You'll buy a bond or
you'll buy a security, and it's backed by the United
States government. So you're essentially you're entering a contract where
you say, Okay, I'm going to give you some money,
Uncle Sam, and Uncle Sam says, I'm good for it.
(44:44):
I give you the money back. Let's a little bit
of you know, a little bit of a cherry on
top to make it worth your time. It's just gonna
take me ten to thirty years because because you know
that's how large organizations work, then your freelancer and the
audience knows what a nightmare invoices can be sometimes. And
it seems like the bigger an organization, uh, the more
(45:07):
lax they are on paying on time. But anyway, you
get this, so you buy this bond and the government
debt then is kind of like it's not quite the
same thing, but it's kind of like a it's almost
like a stock, right you you are getting dividends. The
interest rates from those bonds are pretty low. We're talking
(45:28):
like three percent or so. And the question is why
would you do this? Inflation goes up at a predictable
rate over time, right, So why would you why would
you buy this kind of bond? Why why would you say, okay, America,
give me an iou. It's because you are guaranteed to
(45:52):
get that interest. It's a smaller rate of interest, but
it's actual money instead of potential profit. And the U.
S Government has, in their defense, always paid up with
this stuff. So it's consistent, it's predictable, it's a safe place, right,
(46:12):
even if it's not the most profitable. So most of
this stuff being called national debt is owed to the
US public, but a lot of it is owed to
other branches of the US government, and yes, some a
big portion of it is owed to other countries. The
thing is going back to our example of like me
(46:35):
oing Matt twenty dollars or Noal needing to pay the
electricity bill. We don't get to print our own money
other than ben bucks, which are still you know, kind
of the newer bitcoin. I would say, the US, when
it owes money, can print money. It can, it can
put its finger on the scale through things like quantitative
(46:57):
easing and so on. So you'll you'll hear a lot.
The reason this stuff sounds so abstract sometimes and so
weird is because it is abstract ultimately, right, Like there's
you're never going to hear a politician saying something like, um,
(47:18):
we have to bend the knee to Goldman's sacks. Right,
You're not going to hear that because it's bad optics.
But if you look back historically in things like the
Lincoln administration during the Civil War, the guy was in
the trenches fighting with private banks over interest rates, like
(47:39):
the like, national debt is a real thing, but you
need to think of it more like a stock. It's
consistently uh, it's a consistently paying out investment. And we
will even hear the argument that happened. Debt is healthy
because it keeps the whole Ponzi scheme of capitalism running. Well,
(48:03):
you're welcome, right, And the US is paying this back
also constantly on like on the same scale. You know,
a few years back, I think we were all surprised
to learn that Germany had finally paid off its fines
(48:23):
for World War Two, which was nuts. But this, this
does happen. The main thing after remember is that national
debt is not the same as your personal debt. It
also is a debt owed by an organization that can
(48:43):
literally create money if it wants to, which calls into question,
you know, the calls into the question of the credibility
of the whole house of cards, our house of dollars.
And then secondly, you need to remember that this is
highly politicized. There's a lot of political theater behind this.
(49:04):
It's it's such a convenient boogeyman to raid. We know,
we have clearly established people much more intelligent than us
have clearly established the economy is not the people, right.
That's why you can have the world's largest economy in
the same country with the highest incarceration rates. That's why
(49:25):
you can have people illiterate, you can have people starving,
you can have people dying from preventable disease, easily preventable
disease while Wall Street is doing gangbusters in the fourth
quarter or whatever. I'm sorry, thank you for letting me
Ted talk. I mean, even even Scully is back there
(49:45):
like rolling your eyes. Sorry, guys. Well, hey, I found
something through the story that's related back to one of
my predictions. Ben. Within the U S Debt clock dot
org system, you can find us home Pricing and Sales
and they've got a handy little thing here that gives
you new home median sale price and it shows it
(50:06):
to you from two thousand six until two thousand twenty one.
And if you look back, you can see that the
housing crisis that occurred, you know, two two thousand throughout there,
and you can see how there's a ridiculous jump from
a new home median sale price in the year of
(50:29):
two d and eighty eight thousand dollars two in two
thousand twenty one, four hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars.
The median sale price of a house jumps up that
much in one year's time. And uh, it just shows
you that there's a bubble. Boys, the whole thing, the
(50:51):
house of cards you're mentioning, it's just waiting to go
Papa there you go, okay, okay, you guys should be
Uh there's like a sound effects men, you know, like
for the old timey radio plays to the fully work. Yeah, yeah,
uh so, this I think is an episode in the making.
(51:12):
The national debt is something that you here talked about
often in the US, especially during times of political change,
but you also hear it in many, many other countries
because of the international banking system, because of the whole
practice of the capital e economy. But are big takeaway
Steve for you before we call it a day, is this.
(51:36):
If you're looking for a big bad enemy that the
US owes tons and tons of money too, it is
the US public. They are the main folks that Uncle
Sam needs to needs to pay up. And uh there
are also a course foreign investors there for government's people
are trading debt back and forth through their treasuries. Investing
(51:59):
in US treasuries is a deliberate strategy for foreign powers,
including places like Russia and China. And the reason this is,
I don't want to get too in the weeds, but
the reason this works so well is because if you
are if you are a country, right and you have
your own currency, then one of the things you're really
(52:21):
concerned about is how how valuable your currency is relative
to other currencies like, Make no mistake, there are people
in corporations that you would never associate with this. Like there,
I would not be surprised if there's someone who works
at Coca Cola and their entire job is to just
(52:43):
like move money around in the currency market. Right, is
the one gonna improve over the dollar or the British
pound or the euro. Let's try to move that around
and make a percentage. Countries don't always want their money
to be the most quote unquote expensive money. It actually
(53:03):
can help them, especially their country without the devil's deal
of the petro dollar, like the US has. A weaker
currency can help a country. It's it's deeper than a
light bill, folks. It's crazy, crazy stuff. But Steve, this
is a question that has been on my mind as well.
(53:24):
I think it's been on all our minds. It's something
that we have to do a future episode on. So
thank you Steve, thank you Roscoe, thank you Jasper. We
are on the case. We're diving into this stuff, and
we're diving into two Can you believe we made it? Guys?
We just did our first listener mail of the new year.
(53:46):
Yes that is fake? Wow? Well yeah, um decoy City
and Virginia. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. That is real, is
a real thing. Sorry, I wanted to jump into old
prospect Or voice when we were talking about some of
(54:07):
these listeners that wrote to us. Oh, Jasper and Roscoe
right to us with all the information, and Steve too,
good old Steve with coming through with the information. Mm
hmmm uh. And if you want to join us on
this merry misadventure, this strange enterprise of the show, we
(54:29):
would love to have you on board. If you want
to take a page from Roscoe, Jasper and Steve's book
or there take a take a gold nugget from their claim.
Where are we going with the Prospector think? Okay, now
that checks out all right? Well, if you want to
talk to us, The point is we can't wait to
hear from you. We try to be easy to find online,
oh boy or we ever on the internet. You can
(54:52):
find us in the usual places of note, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
We exist under the handle at conspiracy Stuff. You can
also find us on Instagram at the handle at Conspiracy
Stuff Show. If you want to use your mouth in
your phone, you can contact us that way. Three st
d w y t K Wow on the fly can
(55:17):
get out of my head. Dude, that's exactly st d
w y t K. That's our number. Give us a call. Please.
You don't have to do it in Limerick or whatever
the heck that was. Give yourself a cool nickname. You've
got three minutes. Tell us whatever you'd like. We'd love
to hear from you. Please let us know if we
can use your voice and message on one of these
(55:38):
listener mail episodes. Uh, that's really Those are the only
rules other than that, no rules. If you don't want
to use your phone to contact us with your voice,
you can instead put some things into an electronic message
and send it via email. We are conspiracy at iHeart
radio dot com. M m H. Stuff they don't want
(56:15):
you to know. Is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.