Stuff You Should Know - How Safecracking Works

Episode Date: January 2, 2020

Burglars have come up with a whole range of ways to get into a safe. There’s lock manipulation – methodically testing the dial to coax the combination from it – and if that fails you can always blow it open with nitroglycerin. Both count as safecracking. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and there's guest producer Lowell.

Lowell, today. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. I over-annunciated Lowell's name because I didn't want anybody to perk up and be like, Noelle, I wanted the people who get perked up by Lowell to perk up. That's right, which is to say, the whole world.

And now that I think about it, I think Lowell has sat in once before. He has. And did we record two episodes? I don't know, but Lowell even got a shout out at a live show. That's right, so we have released an episode with Lowell. So this isn't as far as everyone's concerned. Yeah, that's a, I don't know if we ever told Lowell,

but yes, he got a shout out. Do we ever tell you that, Lowell? No, he's not answering. He knows what he's doing. Look at my thumb here, and you'll notice the double band aid. Right. I cut pretty deep into the tip of my thumb, slicing a bagel with a brand new sharp serrated knife.

And it's amazing how, like, how much not having the use of a thumb takes out of your life. Yes, man. I'm like, I can't believe just, because it really hurts, so I'm not using it, but everything from like unbuttoning my pants to... Butting your pants? Butting my pants.

I'm like, man, I usually just pop it off with my left thumb. But there's so many things that I'm not able to do, or have a struggle to do. And trust me, I'm not complaining generally about this as an affliction in life. Sure, sure. But just to point out, the deal with just one thumb, you really gotta rethink some things.

Yeah, it is crazy, because you hear those things, like you can't really walk if you're missing your pinky toe, or your big toe, or something like that. It's like, pfft, try me. That sounds like a wager to me. But when you injure yourself like that, you really find out just how true that kind of thing is. Yeah, and especially, of course,

texting has been maddening. Yes. To try in one thumb text. You need to just, now is the time to start using Siri to text. Well, I don't use Siri, but whatever, the little microphone button when I voice to text, or whatever.

Sure. It works pretty good. Yeah, but you can do, you can just say, Siri, send a text. I haven't tried this myself, but you just say the text, and then it sends a text text, rather than a voice recording. Oh, no, no, no.

When I say voice to text, I mean, I say it out loud, and it makes it into text. And you're using something other than Siri, huh? Well, I just hit the little microphone button. I gotta try that, because I know the microphone button that you're speaking of. Well, there's two.

There's one that you're talking about, where you can record a message, and then there's one when you go to type, in the very bottom. Oh, no, did you hear that? Sorry. Oh, this is so boring, everybody. I'm so sorry.

I can't even give this a thumbs down. No, you can, but it's incomplete. So, Chuck, we're talking about save cracking, obviously, today. Obviously. And there have been some really great save cracking movies. Movies that feature save cracking.

What's your favorite? A diehard is as far as save cracking goes, that had its own subplot, but that's not my favorite save cracking movie. Favorite save cracking movie is Bad Santa. Okay. So, you know what's funny, when I was looking over this list,

I got to diehard and I was like, there's no safe cracking in diehard. Is that right, really? It's its own thing. And no, I think because it's a vault, it temporarily tripped me up because I was thinking about small safes, but a vault is a large safe.

And then I felt like a dum-dum. No, don't. You can feel like a dum-dum for cutting your own thumb off. Oh, man, it was bad. But other than that, you're good. I immediately ran and showed it to my daughter because she's been obsessed lately with, I've been telling her stories of being injured as a child.

And I never broke bones, but I cut myself and had stitches a bunch of times. I would advise you to not come wood here. Yes, it's been a while, but she's constantly asking me, tell me about the times you got cut. And so finally, I had a real world experience. I ran in there and went,

look, look, this is what it looks like. Look at all that blood. What'd she do? Did she faint? No, she just kind of looked at it and was like, oh. Oh, okay, cool. She's going to be the same person to look up wounds later on on Google images.

But back to the safe cracking movies, I think, I mean, I'm a big fan of Ocean's 11, but boy, Sexy Beast is hard to beat. It's a great movie. I don't recall the safe cracking in it though. Is that what, what's his name? What's his name? I want to call him Edgar Winters,

obviously that's not it. Great, great guitarist. What is his name? Are you talking about Ben Kingsley? Are you talking about? Yes, Ben Kingsley, not Ray Winston. You might remember if I say this in a slight spoiler,

but I thought it was one of the more imaginative heist scenes ever filmed because it was underwater. Remember that? No, I don't. They flooded it as part of the, I think it's been a while, but I think it's part of disabling security. So they did the whole thing underwater,

which was really a twist I had not seen before. That's neat. I got to go back and see that movie then, because I remember it being good. Boy, it was great. Okay, so that's your best safe cracking movie. Maybe, I mean, I love that movie a lot. Okay, so we've got Sexy Beast and Bad Santa.

And Die Hard. With Die Hard is an honorable mention, that's right. So in each of these movies, they're actually probably fairly true to life, if I remember correctly. In Die Hard, they had a devil of a time getting through that safe. They were using industrial drills

to try to drill through the lock. In Bad Santa, he tried everything and finally managed to smack it open with a sledgehammer, at least the one scene that we were shown with him robbing the safe. And then obviously I don't remember Sexy Beast, but normally in like a movie, when you watch somebody cracking a safe,

they're like, you know, some pink panther-esque cat burglar who wears like black leather gloves and like twist the dial a few times with maybe like a stethoscope up to the safe. And then the safe comes open. There are actually a few people in the world who might be capable of something like that in that time. But if you expand that time to say an hour,

the number of people in the world who would be capable of doing something like that expands greatly. But there's still just crumbs among humanity as far as the number of people who could actually crack a safe like that is concerned. When it comes to safe cracking, most often it is the Billy Bob Thornton brute strength method

of hitting it with the sledgehammer. But that's kind of the range that safe cracking takes up, you know, from, you know, a master thief to a guy with a sledgehammer, safes are broken into in a number of different ways. That's right. And crumbs amongst humanity is also the best album by who? Crumbs amongst humanity.

Edgar winner? Sure. Okay. I also was reminded when you were talking about the ways to crack in, that great scene and out of sight when they finally find the safe just raise their pistols up to shoot at it. Oh, really?

I still have yet to see that movie. I just saw The Limey. Oh, that's right. Great movie, huh? That was great, man. Yeah, you were absolutely right. It was a very good movie. Yeah, I had a feeling you'd like that one.

You'd like out of sight too. Okay, I'm going to watch that one next, I promise. I'm not going to throw any turkeys your way. Please don't. I know you don't. I know you won't. I don't think you ever have. Although I've thrown a few your way.

Nah. It's all good. Surely I have. I take pride in the fact that I have. Well, I mean, one man's turkey is another man's great. They're like the troll hunter and stuff like that you've thrown my way. Troll hunter's great.

Yeah, see, some people might say it wasn't, but I tend to skew your way. Who doesn't like troll hunter? You've heard people who don't? Trolls. They're like, it's graphic and disturbing. Well, this is what I propose, Charles. Okay.

We have been a bit like a little black and white cartoon donkey swatting at flies with his tail in starting this one. So I propose that we take an ad break. Already? Yes, collect ourselves and come back to save cracking with guns blazing. All right, very controversial.

Let's do it. ["The Nineties"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, The Nineties called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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All right, you ready? So I was taking a poop this morning. Yes, I'm ready. And the first thing I want to say is, in this HowStuffWorks article, they talk about, and it makes a lot of sense, the one fundamental weakness of a safe is the fact that, you know, if you lose a combination or something happens,

you got to be able to get into it still. And therein lies the true weakness, is that you have to be able to get into it without knowing the combination. Right, like it has to be accessible to anybody who needs to get into it, which in some of those, anybody's can be burglars. So the fact that you can't just encase it in concrete

and hide it away from humanity, even crumbs of humanity, means that it is a vulnerable place to put your stuff. Yeah, but I was wondering, surely they could make a truly uncrackable safe with the sales caveat of like, hey man, you're buying this thing? If you lose the combination, you are screwed, but it is truly uncrackable.

I don't know. I mean, it sounds like from this article, like there's some way to get through to any safe, it's just degrees of difficulty. Because the other kind of thing about this whole thing is, like any safe is inherently vulnerable because people can get to it, but the longer you can make it take to crack a safe,

the longer the amount of time you can make it take, the less chance you have of actually being robbed. Like there might be some guy sitting in your house trying to crack your safe, but if you have a really good safe, he's either going to give up or spend enough time there that he gets caught. And either way, your stuff should be protected.

That seems to be what they're after when they make safes. Yeah, and you know what I did yesterday while I was researching this? Did you buy a safe? I bought a safe. It's something that I've been meaning to do for like two years. And finally, I just did it.

And the kind of safe that we're talking about here that a lot of people keep in their homes, if it's not like, you know, some people have gun safes and things like that, but is a fire safe? And that's basically like, let me put important documents or irreplaceable things in here.

They're generally pretty small and they keep your stuff safe from like flood and fire. It's a general idea. Then there are burglary safes, which don't keep your stuff safe from fire. In fact, if there's a fire, it will probably cook it. But that is a little harder to get into. What I, I mean, I got the,

ultimately I got the fire safe, but what they don't make, and I think, I don't know if it's a guy thing, but what I really wanted was one of those safes with like the little spinny wheel on the front of it. It looked like a super movie type safe. I think those are several price points beyond whatever safe you got.

I think those are really expensive safes. They are, and that's not what I need. So I was just like, no, just get the one that's like, whatever, I think it was a couple of hundred bucks. So yeah, you've got fire safes and you have burglary safes and they do two different things. And I was like, surely somebody's come up with a fire,

fire resistant, burglary resistant safe. And that apparently isn't the case. They're apparently still two different things, but there's also a certain degree to a fire resistant safe that makes it kind of a subsection of a fire resistant safe called a media safe, where your digital documents are going to be protected

in the amount of fire or in the event of a fire. Yeah, and I mentioned gun safes. Those are the closest to what I'm describing as in cool looking. Like they're kind of the tall things that look like you would find in an old timey bank with the big wheel that spins. And that's where you can put in like rifles

and stuff like that, not like the little handgun safe you might keep under your bed or whatever. Right. And then depending on the kind of safe you want, it'll be rated one way or another. If it's a fire safe, it will be rated for how many hours

it can withstand a certain amount of temperature, usually about the temperature of a house fire. And they also usually rate them so that they'll survive about a 20 to 30 foot drop as if the floorboards that are holding the safe up on the third story of the house have burned through and the safe falls all the way to the foundation. Or if you throw it out the window.

An active desperation. Yeah, that's another one too. A burglar safe isn't going to protect your stuff in the fire. Like you said, it's gonna cook it, but they're also rated for how difficult it is to penetrate. And there are a lot of things that manufacturers add to a burglar safe, which is iron clad, steel frame, steel bolted, usually multi-bolted. Like when you turn that lever, the handle

to open the safe, to unlock it, there's usually two, three, four, depending on how big the safe is, bolts that are holding it in place that you're releasing. And there's a lot of other like kind of bells and whistles that they add to safes to protect them from burglary. Yeah, you know what I was thinking too when I was, and we'll get to it later on,

but one of the methods is to get a blow a hole in it where you can get a screwdriver in there and take off parts from the interior. I love that method. I was like, rivets, well, I got screws in there. Right. This just seems like a no-brainer. It really does seem kind of,

surely there's people who have figured this stuff out by now, you know? I don't know, maybe we should, when this whole thing dries up, get into the safe design industry. I think we might, Clark and Brian. Great job for us, or safe cracking. Sure.

Okay, so with, we'll talk about some of the methods that manufacturers use to foil burglars, but there's one thing that's common to fire safes, burglar safes, just about any safe these days. And that's been a kind of a commonality for about the last 100 years. And that's the fact that basically all of them have combination locks.

Those wheels that you used to spin, like on your high school locker to open it, that's a combination lock. And it's the same thing, although you probably have a much tougher, much more sophisticated one on a burglar safe than you did on your high school locker. It's basically the same component.

And when you kind of get just even a rough grasp of how the combination lock works, you can get a better idea of how people break into those things too. Yeah, then there's a couple of different types that are categorized thrillingly as group one and group two. Group two is the kind you're most likely to find in someone's closet.

That's usually a three number combination, but it can be one, two, or three. I don't see how a one number combination really helps you much. No, even like 99 things you need to get in there. Exactly, that's true. But the group one locks, you can have up to six numbers in the combination.

And they are tougher to get into. They're sturdier and they have more wheels. And you're gonna hear us talk about wheels in the wheel pack. Each number on the combination is represented by a separate wheel. So if you have a six number lock, that means you have six wheels in that wheel pack. Right, exactly.

And so each of those wheels has a notch in it. And when you are doing the combination, left 13, right 57, you know, left 92. You just told us your combination. Right, it's not mine, believe me. When you get that combination right, what you've done is line up each of those wheels that are stacked behind one another

so that their notches all line up, which allows this thing called the fence to fall into that notch. And when the fence has fallen into that notch, it's no longer preventing the lever from moving. And when you can move the lever, you can open the bolt, which opens the safe. It sounds very easy and it's way easier

if you see like a diagram or a cutaway or a cross section of it. But it's really that. And I mean, they came up with combination locks about a hundred years ago and there have not been too many improvements on the general design of it. It was virtually a perfect locking design

as like right when they came up with it. Yeah, and it is kind of cool to look at a breakdown of the inside of one of these because if you're like me and you're fascinated by sort of simplistic mechanical designs, the combination lock is a great example of that. It really is, it really is. So just the number of wheels you have

is the number of numbers in that combo. And then that's really it, that's your combination lock. So one of the first things, if you're trying to get into, you ready to talk about breaking into these safes now? Yeah, I mean, with the caveat that this is, I mean, it's about to say it's illegal. Technically, it's probably not illegal to crack a safe, but it is illegal to steal something.

No. It's not illegal to steal something? Right, absolutely wrong. It's a free-for-all. It's like the purge for your stuff. I have seen that there are laws where if you are caught entering a house with safe cracking tools,

you're automatically accused of, it's the same charge as if you have successfully broken into and stolen contents from the safe. Yeah, I get that. Safe cracking, it's a separate crime. There's breaking and entering, larceny, burglary, and there's also safe cracking. So in addition to burglary and larceny

and breaking and entering, you'll get an additional safe cracking charge against you. And they used to be stiff. Apparently there was a guy who got something like 57 or 70 years for safe cracking and appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was cruel and unusual for a safe cracking beef,

which is I think the wording they used. But it's still like its own separate thing. People will get years in prison just for the safe cracking element of their charges. Yeah, I guess I think what I was saying was, it's not inherently illegal. Like if you and I bought a safe and we wanted to try and crack it for fun.

Right, right. That's not illegal. It's illegal to crack into someone else's safe without their tacit approval. Right, so then that actually brings up this whole other thing, Chuck. There's some of the people, a lot of the people who break into safes are professionals.

They're safe technicians. They're locksmiths. They're people who come to your aid when you have forgotten the combination. They're very frequently called in when somebody inherits an old safe that they don't have a combo for anymore. If a bank employee accidentally locks the vault

and they can't open it because it's a timed lock, but they need to get in there because it's still business hours. There's like safe technicians who will travel like around the country or the world who lead very, very interesting lives because they crack saves. And one of the things that they try to do

is to make it so that it's almost like they weren't even there. So the level of impact that they have on that safe, they try to keep to such a minimum that it just needs maybe minor repairs to bring it back to operating level again. Yeah, can we go ahead? I mean, that's a nice little setup.

I know I'm jumping ahead, but can we talk about Harry C. Miller for a minute? Yeah, let's. So we'll get to what, how he actually does this. But Harry Miller, he passed on in 1998 and he was an expert safe cracker. And basically the guy that came up with the, with the kind of thing that you see in the movies

when you crack a safe without using dynamite or plasma cutters or explosives or whatever. And he became the foremost genius and authority kind of worldwide for safe cracking such that he taught the FBI. He taught law enforcement officials. He was hired privately during World War II. He opened up a gold bullion chest for Chiang Hai Shek.

He, there was a dictator, Fulgencio Batista. He hired him to open safes that have been captured from Fidel Castro. Wow. During the Roosevelt administration, he was called to the White House to open a safe after the assassination of the guy who the only person who knew the combination.

Wow. So he had a really, like you were saying, a really exciting life. And he was the guy. He was known as Miller the Safe Man. And after a while, he was able to crack any safe within 20 minutes by manipulation, which like we said, is using your hands and your ears

and your eyeballs. Yeah. And he created eventually a manipulation proof lock, which was the first innovation in like 75 to 100 years in lock technology. Is that right? Yeah. And then he ended up and apparently in Kentucky,

and I think you and I should totally go to this place at some point, there's a museum that houses more than 12,000 locks that he's collected dating back to the 1300s. That's pretty awesome. You have those. Those are pretty cool. Like safe technicians and locks, guys,

they just collect safes and old locks and stuff like that. Yeah, this guy's collection is neat. So his legacy, Chuck, was, I mean, it's still alive and well, there was a guy named Jeff Sitar who died, I think last February. And he was the eight time winner of the Lockmasters International Safe Cracking Competition, which is basically like the world championship

of safe cracking. Yeah. Like he worked for the government too. There was like some ship in the Persian Gulf whose safe was locked and nobody could get in. They flew him out there. He was just like this master safe cracker. And I came across another guy that Joff Manna

interviewed in the Atlantic named Joff. Yeah. I'm sure he goes by Jeff, but I always pronounce it Joff. Anyway, his name is Charlie Santori. He's pretty cool. He's got like kind of this criminal swagger to him. Like he wears fedoras and stuff like that while he's cracking in the safes,

but he's like, you know, he's a safe cracker. He's on the up and up from what I understand out in LA. But there's a lot of like really interesting interviews with safe crackers out there that they'll all share information, but you can tell, and I figured this out in the research too, there's a lot of stuff they're not sharing.

It's really tough to go figure out how to crack a safe just without becoming part of like the inner circle of safe crackers from what I can tell, even with the information that's out there. And there's a lot of information out there. It's just, there's not a lot of it that's complete from what I can tell. Well, before we jump into lock manipulation,

which is the one that Harry Miller had perfected, we'll go sort of with the dumb dumb methods. When you get your safe, it's gonna have, it's called a tryout combination or basically the default combination that it comes with. And a lot of people don't reset this, even though they tell you, you really need to reset your combination.

Some people just don't do it and they are known combinations. So the first thing a safe cracker will try is that default combination. Cause you never know, you might have a 50-50 shot of that thing opening up without anything other than just twisting the old dial. Right, exactly.

And since so many of them are like industry standards, they'll just use, they'll try a few of them, maybe spend a couple of minutes just giving it a shot. And if it happens, awesome. There's also something called day locking, which is if you have a safe and you dial in the combination of the safe,

you can turn the lever and open the safe. You can also close the safe and close the lever without changing the combo again. So it's technically unlocked. You just have to open the lever to open the safe. And apparently a lot of people just kind of leave their safes that way. And if you're a burglar, step one,

even before you try some of those industry standards. Just try opening it. Combinations, try out combinations is, yeah, try the lever, just try that first. Yeah, cause I guess you don't wanna spin the thing at all cause that would reset it. Right, exactly. The other thing you can do is just look at the safe

and see if there's a sticky note on it with the safe combination because there are plenty of dum-dums who do that as well. I love that one too. Or scribbled on the wall nearby or something like that. Yeah, there's, even if you went to the trouble of hiding it, it's probably in the same room as the safe. And it's probably on some little scrap of paper

that you tried to make look as innocent as possible. But to a cab burglar or a safe cracker, they're going to be able to say, this is the combination of the safe. Thank you, Chump. Yeah, like it says, you know, they just scramble the word safe and it says off-safe combination.

Right, they use piglet. That'll trick them. So we're at the point where we're at lock manipulation. And this is the process of opening a safe without drilling it, without defacing it. This requires you to, this is what you see in the movies, but it doesn't go down like you see in the movies cause it takes a lot longer than it does in the movies.

Even Harry Miller, the most genius safe cracker of all time apparently, it took him like 20 minutes. In a movie, you don't have that kind of time. You got, they do that thing in like 30, 40 seconds. Right, they do. And so when you see like someone in a movie using like a stethoscope, that's actually kind of accurate.

That's not far off at least. So that's not entirely made up or anything like that, but it takes way longer like you were saying. And the reason why it takes way longer is cause you're actually graphing the different attempts you're making over say all hundred numbers of the dial. You're doing them two to three numbers at a time.

And you're going through this procedure back and forth to kind of find where possibly those slots and the wheels line up for each number. And because this takes so many attempts, so say just real quick, say there's like four wheels in a lock. That means that for every single one of those wheels, while you're trying to figure out the number,

over a hundred numbers, you're doing them in increments of two, right? And for each one of those increments of two, you're graphing down where you think the lever is. And this takes a tremendous amount of time. After you graph it, you have to go back and look to see where these dips are, where it seems like the levers are.

And then you start to narrow down where the number might be for each of those wheels. And then when you finally have it narrowed down, you have four different numbers that you're pretty sure are the numbers of the combination. You still don't know what order they go in. So you have to try every single combination of those four numbers left and right

until you finally hit the one that opens the safe. That is the standard. That's the one that Harry Miller came up with. That's the highest level of safe cracking. And even that takes a tremendous amount of time to be able to do that in 20 minutes is mind-boggling. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit it on the head and that what you're doing is narrowing it down

because while you are listening for clicks, just like in the movies, it's not like you turn something and you hear a click and you're like, well, that's the number. Let me go back left, click. Well, there's the other one because it's like anybody could do that. That's super easy.

And I can't believe that like the movie Going Public has been buying it for this long. This is all agreed to, you know? Yeah, it's kind of like that thing where, or like they don't have to reload the gun because no one wants to see them reload the gun. And I actually saw that there was a focus group done in like the 80s or something at the heyday

of like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. And the movie studios wanted to know if people wanted to see that. They were like, do you want realistic where they stop and reload or do you want them to just shoot a million bullets in a scene? And overwhelmingly people were responded

with a million bullets in a scene, please. Yeah. That is what we want to see. I generally don't care, but whenever there's a wheel gun revolver, I still find myself counting. And I try not to, and it doesn't like, it doesn't tick me off. And I'm like, that's not possible,

but I'm always gonna like six, seven, eight. Okay, all right, here we go. I thought you were talking about that wheel gun they had in Predator that Jesse Ventura had. Remember that one? Was it a Gatlin gun? Yeah, that was amazing. No, I just mean the standard revolver.

They're called wheel guns. I know what you're saying. I know. You were like, this Stallone movie is just completely unbelievable. Exactly, that was the only thing. But so it's the same thing. My point was, I'm sorry,

we got kind of far away from my point was that is a kind of boiled down simplified version of what they're doing. But rather than just hearing the click safe, you just have to find four clicks for this four number combination. And then you're in the safe. You have to go over this hundreds of times

to go over a graph and then go back and narrow it down X number of times depending on how many numbers there are in the combination. You have to try every combination of those numbers. So it's like a boiled down version of that. It's not entirely made up, but it's pretty far off from reality. Yeah, I mean, it's the movie version.

I think what would be fun to see, and I'm surprised no one's done this yet, is for someone to kind of, what's a nice way to say, take the piss. Take the piss, I believe. To take the piss out of a scene like that and have a non-safe cracker be like, here's your stethoscope.

It'll take like a minute, right? And for the person to say like, no, you got to graph this stuff out and you got to narrow it down. You've seen too many movies. That kind of thing. Right, exactly. Where's that scene? Yeah, that would be pretty great. I don't know, I'm waiting for it too.

We need one of the Zucker brothers to make it for us. Oh man, I miss those guys. So that's lock manipulation. That is the pinnacle of safe cracking because whether you're a safe technician or a cat burglar, you have basically left no trace. It's like you just came in and figured out through sight and sound in precise detail

what the combination of that safe was, and then you open the safe. You didn't beat it up, you didn't do anything. You are, even the cops consider you a master criminal and one of basically a dying or dead breed. That is a very, very small number of people, not just alive today, but in the history of crime who've done that.

Most people have looked at a safe and been like, let me just blow that open. Yeah, and I also thought lock manipulation before I read what that meant, I thought that might have been like emotional manipulation. Like you go to the lock and you're like, you probably can't even unlock yourself, can you?

That kind of thing. Yeah. Oh, you're clad in that. Yeah, and then the lock just opens. You're going on public link, man. Yeah, yeah, with a sad face. So safe manipulation is... Well, hold on, should we take another break?

Should we? I'm calling for the breaks today, baby. All right, let's do it. Let's do it. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, safe manipulation. We're back, everybody. Oh, yeah. Safe manipulation is sort of the gorilla method to the technicians method that we mentioned before. And there are many ways to manipulate a safe. And we'll get to some of the louder bang bang

types in a minute. But drilling is the kind you see a lot in movies. And it's a really common way to get into a safe. In a movie, you're generally working against a clock or something, but I don't think we point it out. A lot of times, you will just try and steal the safe and bring it back to your, you know, your villain's warehouse to do all the work there.

Your layer. Yeah, where you've got all the time in the world to drill into that thing. But that's generally what you're doing, you're drilling. And you've got a serious drill because they do make them very tough to get into. So you've either got like a diamond bit or something to try and drill through what's usually a cobalt plate that

is designed to keep you from drilling into it, or at least slow it down. Yeah, right. So like if you use a regular, you know, metal drill bit for drilling into metal, that cobalt plate will just eat those things up. Like you'll just never get through them. But if you have diamond tip or tungsten carbide

is another preferable tip. When you're drilling through it, if you have enough time and enough drills, because apparently the drill bits will outlast the drills when you're using them like this, you will eventually punch through that cobalt plate. And drilling is a pretty, I think drilling's actually the most widespread method of breaking into safes, whether you're a safe technician or a burglar.

Because it's precise, but at the same time, it doesn't require anywhere near the skills of lock manipulation. Yeah, and when you're drilling, there's a few different ways or places you can drill. You know, a common one and a pretty obvious one is to go right through that combination lock itself, right through the face of the lock.

And that's a pretty easy way to do it. But that's where that cobalt plate is. So you can also avoid that thing, and you can drill in above it at an angle, dodge the plate, I guess you've done your research if you're a safe cracker. You know how big that plate is probably. Yeah.

So you go in at an angle from the top, let's say, or I guess the bottom, and then you put in fiber optic camera called a boroscope, and you can just get these at a hardware store. It's not like any kind of specialty equipment. Sometimes they'll use medical devices like that. They stick in your bottom. They'll use those too.

Okay. I've just seen it out there. There's a guy who's actually a master safe cracker who has what are called penetration parties. Unfortunately named penetration parties. His name is Dave McOmey, and I believe he is the founder, or at least the guy who's running the show at the National Safe Cracker,

International Safe Cracker Support Forum. And he, at least one of these, he creates like a newsletter for the industry, like for real. And in the bottom, he sells two scope kits with light source and cases for $1,250. And they're medical grade arthroscopes. So, I mean, yes, at least some pros use the medical stuff.

I'm sure they haven't been in anyone's butt, although if they have been, I'll bet you can get them for a deep discount. So, he holds penetration parties and he has a drill bit newsletter called Just The Tip. Chuck, you have been on fire, my man, in Q4. All right, so what you're doing though, when you insert that camera is,

once you have drilled in from above at an angle, you put it in the camera, and then you can just see the whole mechanism from inside there and just line everything up, yeah. Yeah, yeah, rather than using a stethoscope and you're sight and sound, you're just watching to see where the levers are and twisting the thing until they line up

and there's your safe open, which is, that was news to me. I thought when you drilled into a safe, your point was to like destroy the locking mechanism. I didn't realize it was to see. You can also drill into the safe, sometimes they'll use multiple holes depending on how easy it is to get through. One for the arthoscope and one for,

I didn't realize this is gonna turn so sexual. One for the borescope and then one for like a punching rod, good Lord, and the punching rod will, you can manipulate the inside of the lock with the punching rod to like move the stuff around. That's right. While you're watching with your borescope. Good Lord.

Maybe your partner's watching, who knows? So there's also, oh man, what is happening? I don't know, but the walls are melting all of a sudden. So there's also another backup system because here's the deal. Every time you find a workaround to get into a safe, there's some manufacturer that's trying to destroy that workaround.

And there's something called a re-locker. And that is tripped when your drill bit breaks through some sort of indicator, like a piece of plastic or glass that you drill through. And once that thing is breached, it's gonna trigger an auxiliary locking device. And apparently this like completely locks you out to the point where you have to go to a locksmith

or a safe technician. Yeah, and the reason why is because it's, this locking device is unrelated to the combination lock. It's just like basically a booby trap. And then once it's tripped, you can't unlock it. You have to go in and drill and then manipulate the thing to open it back up. So it's kind of like a self-destruct mechanism

for the safe. And because it's not related to the combination lock, it's a separate independent lock, you can twist the combination all day long and know the combination. It's not gonna do anything. It's locked separately. And apparently not just cat burglars

and home owners accidentally tripped this thing. It's pretty frequently tripped by safe technicians too, who live in dread. I read on one safe technicians forum that at the very least, when you break the glass and trip the re-locker, you can relax because you know, the worst case scenario has now happened.

And then you have to dig your way out of it. Wow. Another drilling method is if you go in on the backside, you can drill a couple of holes. And this is the one we mentioned earlier where I thought rivets might come in handy. You put in the boroscope and then you have a really long screwdriver

and you just unscrew that cobalt plate. But again, I don't know why they would ever use a simple screw. So then you've got cobalt plates, re-lockers. I also saw a check that there was a trend early in the last century, where they would add either manufacturers would put them on or you could buy them

and put them on like aftermarket parts. A little like steel plate thing that you riveted onto the safe. And then inside the steel plate were extremely fragile glass vials that contained phosgene gas or incredibly potent tear gas. So that if you attacked a safe using a drill

or a hammer or tried to drop it or something like that, you'd break these vials of gas and would basically poison yourself. And you would run away from the safe as fast as possible. That's a great idea. Apparently it is a great idea. Or so it was for old timey days before they had laws. But as people kind of got wise to the dangerousness

of this whole thing, they started removing them. But every once in a while, you'll still find an old safe. And there is a legend, an urban legend among locksmiths and safe technicians that over the decades, this gas turns into nitroglycerin. And so it'll actually blow up if you break these vials. So more than one bomb squad has been called out when like a locksmith came upon one of these things

and believed this urban legend that he'd heard all these years. So this is probably nitroglycerin. And really, I mean, it was just phosgene gas, which is not good, but it certainly was an explosive like nitroglycerin. And it certainly hadn't spontaneously turned into it. Very interesting.

I thought so too. You know, I wondered if, I just thought about the rivet thing again. I wonder if that cobalt is so, I wonder if it's not rivetable. You know? You seem like a frog right now. You know what I mean though?

Maybe you can't rivet through that thing. I mean, if you can drill through it with diamond tip bits, you could rivet it, especially if you're the manufacturer, you totally could. They're just being lazy. Let's talk about some of the other things you see in movies sometimes, which are the use of torches.

Sometimes you will see something like an oxy acetylene torch. And those daddies can go up to 4,500 degrees. Useless. Useless, you think? Yeah, from what I saw, like a good burglar safe would resist that. Okay. So those were the old days?

Yes, or they were just never used. It might be like a movie kind of thing. Cause what I saw, it takes something like a thermal lance, which gets up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Those are pretty cool. Or they are very cool. Or get this, a plasma cutter,

which uses a current of electricity to convert highly compressed gas into plasma, which plasma is the fourth state of energy. And it gets apparently up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And we'll just cut right through a safe if you know what you're doing. But they're really hard to use. They're really dangerous.

And they require extensive training. Like if you're a plasma cutter guy, you're probably getting more than just the standard share of the loot for a safe job. Well, I feel like a fool now over here with my oxy acetylene torch. I know you've been going at it for a while. You're just like, just go make a crème brûlée, honey.

All right. Make a smoky gin and tonic. Ooh, yeah, exactly. So these plasma cutters and thermic lances, you can just, I mean, sometimes you're trying to cut the lockout. And sometimes you're just cutting a hole in there so you can reach in and get whatever you're trying to get.

Right, which I mean, that makes sense. But one of the things you have to be careful with is not accidentally burning all of the cash inside or something like that. It's delicate work. I've seen like you want to maybe cut the hinges off or something like that is a good way to do it. Yeah, or if you know what you're going for.

Like if you know there are just diamonds, if there's ice in that thing, you might be safe. Go for it. But also, I mean, if you know enough that you know the placement of the stuff in there, maybe you could cut the top off of the safe and know that there's nothing high up in it or cut the back off because there's nothing in the back.

It's all stuffed toward the front. Who knows? That's true. But it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility because one of the hallmarks of being a safecracker is research, not just researching the safe you're working on to know what you're dealing with, what safeguards and securities you're having to get around,

but also your mark, the person you're robbing, you wanna have done some sort of research on them so you can at the very least make educated guesses about what kind of behavior they're gonna engage in and putting stuff in their safe, where they would put it, how they would put it in there, what they would put in there, that kind of stuff. Maybe what the combination is

if they've actually changed the combination to something personal. Sure, is it diamonds? Is it bear bonds? Is it cougarans? Is it other things in movies that I've heard? Is it simoleons? You mentioned nitroglycerin earlier

and this is another thing that you can do. It's called a jam shot or a nitroglycerin or it's also called grease if you're in the industry. Yeah. And I didn't fully understand how this worked other than the fact that what you're essentially doing is blasting this thing. Yeah, you're just making like a little funnel out of soap

that you're adhering to like where the door and the safe come together, putting some nitroglycerin in it, putting a blasting cap in there and touching the wires together while you're very far away. You set off the blasting cap which sets off the nitroglycerin which blows the door off of the safe.

Which again, you want to make sure that there's just diamonds in there or something that can withstand this blast. Because you don't want to blow up the loot. That's not a good move for a burglar or a safe technician who's being called out to open a safe. If you blow the door off of your client safe and blow up everything inside,

you're probably not going to get paid that day. Yeah, I'm trying to picture a thief taking the time to break into what will be in my safe and finding my Ziploc bag of concert ticket stubs. Right. Which is fairly disappointed. I would suggest Chuck just to leave it a day locked. Yeah.

Yeah, because I mean, at the very least you'll have your safe still. They'll be like, this is useless, worthless stuff. And you'll say, not to me, Cap Burglar, now please leave my house. Yeah, I'm not even sure what we're going to do. I have a feeling it's going to be one of those things where everyone's like, you need a fire safe

and we're going to get it in our house and open it up. And then Emily and I are going to look at each other and say, well, what do we put in there? Well, you put things like, I don't know, like a tax documents maybe or just the most eye-bleedingly boring stuff you can think of. That's what a fire safe is for. It's just for basically like document storage.

I know, but I can't think of any document that's not electronic these days. Well, you can put those things on a thumb drive and then put the thumb drive in the fire safe too. Yeah, and I guess maybe, especially since, I mean, it's kind of mundane. But if you treasure memories and you have a ton of digital files

putting them on multiple thumb drives in a safe isn't a bad idea. Yeah, or if you have an extensive collection of precious memories, figurines, you want to keep those safe, put them in your fire safe. Are your little Holly hobbies? Exactly.

Most locks in this safe that I got is an electronic safe. So it has an electronic lock, which allows for far greater number of groupings and combinations. You can do things, some of them you can connect to an app to open it, some of them have like these electronic front door locks. You can have different combinations for different people.

You can lock people out. So a lot more variety and electronic lock safe. Right, so this is like represented this kind of new leap forward among safe cracking because they're like, oh, okay, we'll learn to deal with this. There's this, I love this. If you're a really good cat burglar,

you may break into the house the night or a couple of days before you plan to break in and rob the safe and put ultraviolet ink on stuff that you know the person will touch. And then you go back when you go to rob the house and use a black light and shine it on the computer keypad of the electronic lock. And you can see what numbers have been pushed.

And in doing so, you can just try the combination of say like those four, six, eight numbers and pop the safe right open. I love that one. That's just like 1980s computer hacker movie stuff. Yeah, I feel like I've seen that in like a mission impossible or something. Surely we have.

Where you shine a black light and you see like the thumb print or the fingerprint or whatever on the combination. That's been done. There's no way we haven't, but the idea that someone does that in real life is just, I mean, I tend not to respect criminals, but hats off to that one.

That's some real stick tuativeness. Okay. So is there anything else here? Oh yeah, there was this one at the very end. They say, don't try this at home. By the way, this article is written on how stuff works like you said, but it was written by a guy named Robert Valdez

who made maybe the most valiant effort I've seen at explaining in words how to manipulate locks. They're a really good job. It's just really hard to understand just reading it, but I would also shout out another site that went even deeper, like David Reese does. And they like really explain how to manipulate safes.

It's called Opening Safes by Manipulation by Gail Johnson on locksmithledger.com. And I mean, it's as detailed as I've seen for sure. So shout out to them. But at the end of this House of Works article, it says this is all very much illegal. Don't do this, especially for crime. That's correct, especially for crime.

Especially for crime, everybody. Well, that's it for safe cracking. I'm glad we did this one, Chuck. How about you? Yeah, me too. Fun movie stuff, lots of body humor. Yeah, he did get body. And since we said did get body, everybody,

that means it's time for Listener Man. Let me see here. This is some advice for Julia. Hey, guys, I've been a listener since summer of 2018. Another summer of love. That's right. Very nice.

About one year after I graduated college, Go Banana Slugs. So I think that's UC Santa Cruz, right? I think so. I began to flail around aimlessly searching for meaning and purpose. One thing I didn't have to flail for was love of learning, especially once I discovered your show. I really appreciate the work you do

in giving us listeners hundreds, thousands, question mark of episodes to listen to. Yeah, we're over a thousand. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you can call that thousands, though. Didn't it need to be at least 2,000? I don't know. Yeah, probably.

So we'll just say scores. Scores. I wanted to ask a question since you all seem like open-minded, knowledgeable people. What were some of the things you did after college, high school? Let's go ahead and answer each one of these. Wanted to talk.

Oh, OK. Well, I'll take this one. I've talked about it before, but I worked in the film industry for a while and then worked in marketing for a little while. And then eventually, it was a writer, like you, for How Stuff Works. Yep.

.com. So those are some of the things I did. Those are the dream job, getting hired like that. You know? Like we both wanted to be writers, and it was like, hey, you're professional writers now. I tried. How did you come to?

Hold on real quick, Chuck. Didn't you turn in a movie script as your writing sample? That's all I had. That is boss. And you got the job. Yeah, luckily, our boss is a screenwriter himself. So he was like, I'll take this. Yep, nice.

He turned it into his own movie. Yeah, he stole it. How did you come to find yourselves where you are now? Well, I think we discovered that. We got a job writing for the website, and our boss said, hey, why don't you try this podcasting thing?

Yeah. And boy, was that a great day in retrospect. It really was, because we didn't know what we were doing. But because no one knew what we were doing, we were able to kind of fly under the radar and just try it out, try new things. There weren't a lot of expectations or anything like that. And the next thing you know, people started listening to it.

So yeah, it was cool. Just kind of being able to do it on our own terms all these years. Agreed. Next question, did you ever feel like you would not find your place and your niche? Speaking for myself, I very much felt that way. Absolutely.

Although, I mean, the writing gig was cool, but it definitely wasn't like, all right, well, this is it for me forever. Right, and I think anybody who has ever been alive has gone through that point. You know, whether you drop out of school or whether you graduate with the PhD, it really doesn't matter.

There's like some point in your life where you have a crisis of confidence, either what am I going to do with the rest of my life, or have I been going down the wrong path this whole time and now I need to figure something else out. Everybody has that crisis, you know, usually multiple times throughout their life. So yeah, of course, we felt that way.

Everybody feels that way. And if you do feel that way, don't get discouraged. Like you come out of that little woods that you have to go through. Well, that kind of satisfies the last question from Julia, is any advice for my quarter-life crisis? I think that advice is great. And also, you know, if you are at your quarter-life crisis,

you've got a long way to go. So my advice is just don't stress too much now. Try some different things. You've got time. And you don't really feel that life clock ticking, at least I didn't, until I was in my 40s. It's true, but I remember being worried in the 20s, in the 30s, and everything too.

You always kind of have those times, you know? Yeah, but don't let it consume you. Try some stuff out. You don't have to be making forever decisions right now. And you might find yourself backing into an experience because you have tried out different things. Yeah, and even if you do have to make a forever decision, just know that very few decisions are irrevocable.

And even if it is irrevocable, if you remember the mantra to be kind, be kind, be kind, those are the three most important things in life, says Bertrand Russell, then you're probably not going to make a forever decision that's irrevocable and horrible at the same time, you know what I mean? I agree. That's great advice.

Look at you. Thanks, man. Thanks. She concludes with saying, thanks for your work on stuff you should know, Movie Crush. In the end of the world, my favorite three podcast, I can't wait to see you at SF Sketch Fest. That's from Julia.

Awesome. Thanks a lot, Julia. Good luck with your quarter-life crisis. It will pass. Don't worry about that. And if you're like Julia and you want to get in touch with us for advice or just to say hi or whatever, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com

and check out our social links there. And you can send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.