The Architecture of Risk: From Denver Drayage to InsurTech Titan with Jim Heide

Before we get too far in, like, progressing your career, there was a story you were starting to tell me about a spill.

Is

that right? Yeah.

I think you were talking with Blythe, I think, about it or something, but there was a spill on 70 with U.S. Mint, and you were out there cleaning up pennies or punched out pennies.

I would love to hear that story a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tell this to Blythe.

Yeah, so the mint worked pretty much as I described for all of the normal coins, your dimes, your nickels, your quarters, dollars, half dollars.

But pennies came to us already blanked.

So we would have to take these big boxes and dump them into these funnels.

And it looked like it was a large blue funnel that sat on kind of a rack.

And they were not real, about 3,500 pounds, if I remember correctly, each of these.

And then we would load 13 of them onto a truck.

And then that would run down to the mint.

The mint would grab the funnel, drop it into the mint machine and do its thing.

The problem with the funnels was they're very top-heavy, high center of gravity, because down below them was just empty space for the chute, the way they worked.

And where we were, we were over off of Havana and I-70, and... to get onto the I-70 from Havana, you have what we call in New Jersey a jug handle.

So it was a pretty tight curve to get on.

And we had a new driver that was taking this run and was going a little too fast around that curve.

By the time he got onto I-70, the truck was already leaning and then just continued to fall onto its side, and doors popped open, and pennies spilled everywhere.

So it was up to you to clean it all up.

Yeah, so I grabbed every able body I could.

We went out there with shovels and boxes and started shoveling pennies.

So, yeah, it was – I think the spill happened around – Three or four in the afternoon.

It was later in the afternoon, just before rush hour, conveniently.