May 16, 2019 • 49 mins
Some guys have all the luck, some guys have all the pain. So said Rod Stewart. And if this list is any indication, “guys” is gender neutral. Listen to this episode as Chuck and Josh cover some instances of amazingly bad fortune, most of it true!
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 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
over there. And this is the Stuff you should Know
about people who have really bad luck? Nine of them. Yeah,
(00:25):
we can't. I don't think we've ever done a full
top ten list? Have we? That that that should be
our last episode. Yeah, it's like stuff you should know,
its ten biggest regrets. Right, that's a great idea. Yeah,
that'll be the last one. All right, let's write that down.
There's no we don't have ten regrets. Yeah. I guess
we couldn't do a full time Actually, we could probably
(00:46):
come up with ten. No, we couldn't. Vid con number one.
That's a big one. This intro is definitely up there
to number two. We're on our way, all right, Um,
how are you feeling pretty good? I'm great? You feel lucky? Punk,
I'm a pretty lucky person. I will say that I
(01:07):
would agree with that good fortune. My friends have called
me the rabbit's foot over the years. Yeah, that's why
they're I was rubbing you. But that's that's mainly for
narrowly escaping trouble more than anything. How about a story
chuck lay it on us? Oh just I mean I was.
I was very famous among my group of friends for
(01:27):
getting pulled over by police and not getting tickets. I mean,
at one point it was it had literally happened like
fourteen times in a row or something over a span
of like ten or twelve years. It happened a lot
that I never and I didn't get my first ticket
until geez, probably my thirties, mid thirties. How did you
(01:48):
have what happened? Did you talk your way out of it?
Or yeah, you know what you do? Man? And my
brother always gets a ticket and he's much nicer than
I am. But you just got to be as humble, humble, humble, humble,
humble as you can be, and if you show the
slightest bit of attitude, then that police officer, in my experience,
(02:08):
will delight in writing you that ticket. I mean, even
it's if it's a sideways look and I basically just
throw myselves at the mercy of the court on the
side of the road. I'm like, I'm so sorry, officer,
I you were you should have pulled me over. You
did the right thing. I was wrong, and I'm sorry.
There's no excuse here's I was gonna eat these French fries.
(02:31):
But you should take them. You're the hero here. Think
they're always a little disarmed and they're like, oh, oh okay,
well I guess I can let you off of the warning.
I don't know. That's been my experience. All right, there's
chuck advice right there. So you get out of fourteen tickets?
So did you forget to the last fifteen time? Did
you forget? Did you sneer call them a pig? What? No?
I think it was just one of those things where
(02:52):
like they were writing the ticket even before I had
a chance to do my little song and dance, and
they brought me the ticket and I was kind of like, well,
wait a minute, don't you know who who I am?
I'm the guy that gets out of tickets. Oh? I
thought you were gonna say, I'm Chuck from stuff. You
should know that means nothing. That's how you that's how
you get out of them these days, buddy. Well, um,
we're talking today about some people who have very bad luck.
(03:15):
And you know, like a lot of these lists usually
are just like uh no to this one. No to
that one. No, this is wrong. Um. I think we
tried to do a list once where like, oh man,
I can't remember which one it was, but like every
single entry was just like just false. Right. That's only
the case with like three of these this time, which
(03:36):
I'm pretty that's not a bad batting average, realistical. Yeah,
and some of these are. The word luck kind of
bothers me sometimes because as is the case, We'll go
ahead and get to the first one, Ron Wayne, who
was one of the original three partners of Apple Computers.
That's not bad luck. Ron Wayne made a board business decision.
Have you. Uh, that's a good point. Have you ever
(03:58):
heard of Ron Wayne before? Know you? No? I haven't,
And had I heard his name, I would have been like,
he sounds like porn actor, but he's not a peorgn actor.
Oh no, that was That was another guy. I can't
say his real name though. Uh who, I demand that
you say it. I'll tell you off Mike, Okay. So, um,
(04:18):
he turns out this guy was not a pornography actor.
He was one of the three founders of Apple and
as far as I had known to this point, there
were two founders of Apple. Turns out there were three
at the beginning for like the first twelve days. Yeah,
so go back to nine seventy six in our way
back machine and Nerdy Little Jobs and Nerdy Little Wassniak
(04:41):
are young guys uh in their twenties and they had
this great uh they didn't know it at the time.
Well they may have known it or suspected, but this
this great vision for the future. But they were kind
of kids and they didn't have any experience. So they
looked to a guy named Ron Wayne who was in
his forty uh to come in and kind of help
(05:03):
what they called with adult supervision, because I mean they
were programmers from Atari, but yeah, they didn't have the
actual business sense or whatever, and it was just a
party job at the time, I believe so. But I
had no idea how Tari produced Apple though, did you.
Oh yeah, I did a bunch of Atari research stuff
for my tech stuff guest but oh, okay, cool, Yeah,
(05:26):
we did a history of Atari two parter. Oh, speaking
of guest spots man, let me just also give a
shot out real quick. Sorry to interrupt this little entry,
but I was on um our good friend John go
Forths and our new friend Brent's podcast Hysteria fifty one recently. Yeah,
we talked about the family Paradox for like an hour
and it was awesome. So go check that out Hysteria
(05:48):
fifty one. Go check out that out. Okay, so plug
out right. So we're in ninety six uhs and Jobs
have recruited one one Wayne, Ron Wayne to be the
adult in the room to help with engineering documentation. And
it was actually Ron Wayne who uh who drafted the
(06:09):
very first Apple contract and said, you know, this is
what they agreed on. He did make it up, which
said how much everyone is going to get He got
ten percent two jobs and wasasniakst And he even created
the first Apple logo, which was not the logo we
know and loved now. It was a It was like
a woodcut um style thing of Isaac Newton under the
(06:32):
Apple tree. Not that sounds terrible. Yeah, I disagree. I
think it sounds ugly. So um Ron Wayne the while
he was there, he very quickly was like, I don't
know if this is my kind of place. I thought
it was a good idea. I like what these guys
are doing, but this company in a garage. Steve Jobs
keeps taking acid during the middle of business hours. Um
(06:55):
did he really? Yeah? Wow, Steve Jobs thought he was
pretty cool from what I understand. Um he Uh, Ron
Wayne was like, I don't I don't think I fit
in here. Also, apparently he was worried that he was
going to have to pony up for you know, whatever
business debts they incurred. I think that was a big deal.
(07:15):
And he was like, all right, I'm out. I'm out.
Because he was an adult and he was like I've
got a house and like I'm a real adult human,
Like they're gonna turn to me certainly when they do. So.
He he cashed out in in twelve days, twelve days
after they established their contract, and the contract um was
kept by Ron Wayne. Actually we'll get to that in
a second. But he cashed out for twenty three hundred
(07:37):
dollars two d thirty thousand, you say, no, two thousand,
three hundred, which is still today worse less than like
ten grand um. And he didn't even get it all
at once. He got eight hundred right then, and then
uh he agreed to take fifteen hundred later. And that
was nineteen seventies six, And in nineteen eighty Apple went
public and everybody involved came an instant millionaire, and years
(08:02):
later it hit the trillion dollar mark for valuation, and
all the while, Ron Wayne got to watch this company
grow and grow and grow and realized that he'd sold
off ten percent of the steak in the company for Yeah,
and apparently if he had held all those stocks, uh,
he'd be worth close to a hundred billion dollars. So
(08:25):
he he takes issue with that. He said, he probably
lost out on tens of millions. Yeah, I mean, I
guess it depends on what like you can't since you
can't go back and do it all over again like
Eddie Money says, Uh. I guess there's always the thing
of like well yeah, but he always maintains I would
have gotten out after that before the big cash in anyway, probably,
(08:49):
so I don't like to look at it. Is that
sort of a loss, is what he tells himself basically,
or else I would have gone totally insane a long
time ago. Yeah, but he did apparently. Uh. He wrote
a Facebook essay and said, I probably that would have
been around in nineteen eighty and gotten some pretty good change,
and and I think regrets it. Yeah, he said, had
(09:09):
he known that, and everybody was going to become a
millionaire in four years. He definitely would have hung in there,
but he just it's hindsight, you know. Yeah, and the
cherry on top here is pretty interesting though. He said
he kept that contract, that very first Apple contract that
he drew up, and he kept it and he auctioned
it off in the early nineties four how much five
(09:31):
hundred somoleans five dollars and when what happened not bad.
It was just a piece of paper he had hanging around.
Somebody turned around and auctioned it off years later in
two thousand and eleven four almost one point six million.
Poor Ron Wayne. Now that one's bad luck. I wonder
(09:54):
what he did though with his life. He wrote essays
on Facebook. I mean I Betty did okay, Yeah, I
guess so. I mean Steve jobs okay, but I doubt
if you, like you know, got a got a low wage,
hourly paying job. I don't know. He became Eddie Money's
tour manager. Things worked out then, right, And every time
(10:17):
any money saying I want to go back in tear
down Ron Wayne's face. So, um, I think we should
move on. We're gonna leave Ron Wayne because my hat also,
we should definitely tip our heads to anyone who faced
adversity like this and was like as happens and has
(10:38):
had tipped to Ron Wayne for that one. Um and
Hodges did not have that kind of experience. She is
the only, person, as far as anyone knows, the only
human being in the history and recorded history of humanity
to have been hit by a meteor Right, I'm laughing
and I shouldn't. Um. Well, actually she didn't get that hurt,
(11:03):
so that's why I feel okay laughing. It's not like
it fell on her head and killed her. It's November
thirty in Alabama and eight point five pound a meteorite,
uh came through her roof, bounced off of a radio
and hit her in the hip. Yeah. It makes you
wonder like if if she had been you know, where
(11:24):
the radio was, and this wasn't like a bounced like
uh ricochet, Yeah, a ricochet. I mean, how much worse
would things have been? Yeah? Probably dead. There's a I
saw a picture I'm Reddit of her, just randomly. We
had already picked this episode and started researching, and I
saw a picture of her bruise on Reddit and it was, um,
(11:45):
pretty nasty, pretty nasty, little bruise, but that was about
as bad as it got physically. Um. So, she was
laying on the couch, a meteorite came through her roof,
hit her radio, hit her, and um she became almost
immediately a media sensation because word got out very quickly
(12:05):
that a woman had been struck by a meteorite, probably
the first and only person ever. Yeah, and and that's
super rare. Like, it's rare. It's rare for a meteorite
to fall just in an urban area where people live
or suburban area where people live. Can say, I don't
know if I would call Alabama urban. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's just not usual like usually meteorites, you know,
(12:27):
there's a lot of water on Earth. Usually they'll just
land in the ocean somewhere. Um So it's big news
if a meteorite hits anywhere near people, much less hitting
a person. Right. There's a meteorologist named Michael Reynolds who
told National Geographic get this. He said, you have a
better chance of being hit by a tornado, bolt of
(12:49):
lightning and a hurricane at the same time than you
do a meteorite. I'm not sure how he actually quantified that,
but that's one of the better quotes I've read in
a while. Yeah, and this is where it gets this
is just so America in USA is there was a
court battle between her and her landlord because her landlord
(13:09):
was like, that's my space rock because it's my house
and she and and Hodges is like, no, that's my
space rock because it hit me and the hip. And
they went to court and Hodges actually won and got
to keep that uh sadly ultimately valueless meteorite. Yes, she's
(13:29):
she's settled. Actually, she ended up paying the landlord five
bucks for the right to the rock. But by the
time this was finally settled two years later, they found
out that nobody cared any longer. There was old news,
so nobody wanted to buy the meteor right. And you
might think, well, okay, it's not clear that anyone would
(13:50):
ever wanted to buy the meteor right to begin with.
Not true. They have a neighbor just down the road
who had just the tiniest little piece of that space
rock and sold it. At the time, this thing was
a big media sensation and was able to buy a
new house and a new car from the proceeds. So
the Hodges were like clearly we've got the space rock.
(14:11):
We're gonna cash in. We're gonna buy the state of
Alabama with the proceeds. But two years later it was
totally valueless, and Um and Hodges actually had a just
just kept taking turns for the worst and ended up
dying in a nursing home at age forty nine after
having a nervous breakdown from the the whole ordeal. Yeah,
(14:32):
it's very sad, um, but that meteorite is on display
at the Alabama Museum of Natural History. And I hope
that there is at least a small plaquard that memorializes her.
Surely there is, right, I would, I would hope so, yeah,
which that that would be a nice thing after a
string of bad luck. That's pretty bad luck. Should we
(14:53):
take a break? I think we should. All right, We're
gonna take a break and talk about the unluckiest person
in the music industry right at of this Chuck, Chuck.
(15:26):
I have a tad bit of anxiety because beats No,
No No. I have anxiety about this one just because
it's so rotten and rough. I feel so bad for
this guy. Well, here's the thing. Before the break, I
called former First Beatles drummer, not former first, but former
(15:47):
and first Beetles drummer Pete Best, the unluckiest man of music.
He's been called that. Uh, that's not true either. Pete
Best didn't have bad luck. Pete Best didn't have good chops.
Oh is that what it was? Yeah? So okay, wells okay,
that's totally different. I thought it was. I I didn't
think it was bad luck necessarily obviously didn't jibe with
(16:09):
the group. But I thought maybe it was like he
had to walk around being like I have a terrible
personality and that's why I'm not a Beatle or whatever.
Now we'll we'll get to that. So let's go back
in time. Pete bess Uh in the very early days
of the Beatles in the nineteen fifties when they were
known as the Quarryman Um. His mom. He was a
drummer and his mom had the he owned something called
(16:32):
the Kasbak Coffee Club in Liverpool, and she was she
was cool and she was very like ahead of her
time as far as um the Liverpool music scene very
much out in front of it. So it's the kind
of deal where like well, pizza drummer and his mom
owns a place where we can play. So he's in
(16:55):
the band, and it's good because now we got a
place where we can gig and we got a drummer
that that can play. Okay, he's handsome. That was a
big part of it, was he Yeah, that was a
big thing over the years. What that that was rumored
that he was kicked out because Paul said he was
too handsome and he didn't want any competition. Are you
Is he still around? Yeah, he's alive. Okay, well I'm
(17:17):
not gonna say the next part then, so um, he
he was enough. So I guess at the time the
Beatles by by the time Pete Best was kind of
brought on, he wasn't like officially brought on as as
like the Beatles Beatles as we think of them today,
where there was like four of them. There was like
a rotating bunch of drummers, and Pete Best was one
(17:40):
of those drummers, right, Yeah, but he played, I mean
he was he kind of It was sort of like
when I rotated and stuff. You should know early on
a little bit like there was still a rotation going
for a short time and I think and then everyone
else just went away, like Pete best played like eighty
something gigs with the Beatles pre Hamburg, I think, okay,
(18:01):
And then they took him to Hamburg, which apparently was
a big, big turning point for everybody. They paid eighty
shows a week in Hamburg. I saw a great quote. Um,
they said that, So in Hamburg is where the Beatles
like really started to become like the Beatles, like, are
they coalesced into a band? I saw that they arrived
wearing lilac sports jackets and trousers and left wearing black
(18:22):
leather jackets and jeans. That's where they learned sex, drugs
and rock and roll. Yeah, Pete Bess wasn't into the
drugs though, like the other three guys, so that was
a problem. Sure, that's a buzz kill when the one
guy in the room is just sitting there staring at
you judge. Yeah, well I would. I mean, that's kind
of a buzz kill, I would guess, right, Yeah, yeah, probably.
(18:45):
So I think they were all like doing speed back then.
Oh sure, because they were playing literally like six or
seven shows at night. Were they really playing that many? Oh?
It was ridiculous? Wow? Yeah, So, um, he was in
a group called the Black Jack's before that though, went
to Hamburg, Hamburg with the Beatles, and then right after
(19:05):
that the Beatles go back to England in Nino and
they were just about to go into the studio to
record their first singles for E M. I and UH.
Legendary manager Brian Epstein called up and said, sorry, bloke,
the boys want you out and it's already been arranged, yeah,
meaning like don't even bother it's done, which is sad
(19:29):
um and Pete Best took it pretty hard, from what
I understand for horrible. In a horrible twist of iron,
he ended up working at the unemployment office, but working
there now, hanging out there. Um and by this time
like he had made a name for himself around Liverpool
as as a musician in a beatle. Um. The reason
why he's called the Unluckiest man of music is not
(19:51):
because he was a Beatle at one point in time,
but that he was a Beatle at one point in
time and was kicked out of the band a few
weeks before the Beatles blew up, and um, it almost
makes you wonder like did they blow up because they
moved on to Ringo or was it like that was
just bad timing? Well, I mean, here's the deal. Uh.
(20:12):
There are interviews out there with both Um John and Paul.
There has always been the rumor, like I said that
Pete's handsomeness threatened the band. Um that is not true.
Paul was on record of saying, like, you know, it's
just something that happens. Early in the days of bands
like ring we were just really struck by how great
Ringo was. Pete Best sat out one gig because he
(20:36):
was sick or something, Ringo sat in and they were
all just like wow, like they all felt it, and
it was just sort of that magic happening where they're like,
oh boy, I know what's got to happen. Um John,
for his part, said, you know, it had nothing to
do with his looks. He said he was just kind
of a crap drummer. I mean he was. John was
not the nicest guy in the world. So he really
(20:57):
kind of threw through it all on the table and
was like he wasn't a good drummer. He just wasn't.
He was a good first drummer, and clearly it was
time to move on from him. Uh. And it was
mainly because his mom owned a place where we could play.
Not very nice gotcha. No, but I mean that doesn't
make him unlucky. No, he didn't have the chops, and
you know he, I mean, he's he's reckoned with it.
(21:19):
I saw an article from last year where he was
like he never spoke to the other three guys again,
and he was like, yeah, I mean and Paul, I'd
love to sit down and like have a scotch and
talk about it. And he's like, the doors open. Oh really, Yeah.
I don't know if Paul's going to do that though,
maybe not. Uh. He was on Howard Stern. Paul was
and Howard was like, are you ever just gonna write
(21:41):
him a check just out of guilt? He's just like, no, no, No.
He did get royalties though later on when the Beatles
anthology came out, because that included stuff from Pete Best,
so he ended up getting some money. He made out. Okay, Yeah,
I think the lesson here is don't ever get Yeah,
(22:01):
that's the key, everybody, that's right. So we're gonna go
from nineteen sixties Liverpool too over to the New Orleans
area where they have hurricanes. Supposedly they have a hurricane
party every time the wind blows have heard, but they
actually do have legitimate hurricanes, and those hurricanes can do
(22:22):
a lot of damage, as we saw in two thousand
and five with Hurricane Katrina. By the time Hurricane Katrina
rolled around, a woman named Melanie Martinez was on her
fourth house having been destroyed by a hurricane. Um previously
George one and n and Betsy in nineteen sixty five
(22:45):
had destroyed her house by the time Katrina came around.
But after Katrina, everybody really learned their lesson. They're like, Okay,
we've been taking this way too instusition ly, like we
need to really actually like protect New Orleans from flooding
from hurricanes. And so the federal government stepped in, the
government Louisiana stepped in, and they really fortified New Orleans
(23:08):
so that years later, seven years later actually to the
day of Katrina making landfall, when Isaac made landfall, New
Orleans held up. It was a pretty big hurricane, but
it weathered. New Orleans weathered it. Unfortunately. In little tiny
town of Bathwaite, just a little south of New Orleans,
which I thought south of New Orleans was like the
(23:29):
Caribbean or the Gulf. I guess um. There's a little
town called Bathway they did not fortify this town, and
it just so happened that there's where Melanie Martinez built
another house that proved to be her fifth one that
was destroyed by a hurricane. Yeah, this is truly bad luck. Um.
Granted all of those houses were in the same floodplain,
(23:51):
but it's like it's not like everybody's house was destroyed
every time. Like, this was truly bad luck to have
five houses lost, and this last one before Isaac, she
was selected for an A and E reality show, Hideous Houses,
got a twenty dollar makeover, brand new kitchen, new appliances,
in a new sewing room. Uh. And apparently that episode
(24:16):
air just a few weeks before Isaac came around. Destroyed
that house too. And you know when they asked her
in two thousand and twelve, like why do you keep
building here? You know, it's like everyone else, She's like,
it's this is my home. It's like I want to
live where I was born and raised and this is
my home. Yeah. Can you imagine what that phone calls like,
It's like, hey, I'm a producer with Hideous Houses, and
(24:38):
your house has been selected to be on Hideous Houses.
She probably applied and how it works. No, I think
they just go scout your house and it's really like, no,
I'm sure you apply that. I think it carries from
show to show. So for that last time, with Hurricane
Isaac in two twelve, she and her husband and their
pets and um, Melanie Martinez is elderly mom barely escaped
(25:03):
with their life. They had to hammer through their roof.
They were trapped in the attic with the floodwaters rising.
They had to hammer a hole into the roof and
climb out where they were rescued. Yeah. Man, I mean,
she's at least they got out. They did. But even so,
the thing that makes it really bad luck real quick, chuck,
is that Melanie Martinez said she would never have stayed
around for that hurricane. She because of her elderly mother.
(25:26):
She she she wouldn't have risked her her health. Um, they
got stuck there because her van broke down. Well, but
she got out, okay there, you know, I mean she
couldn't save the house. So it's true. It's very sad,
all right. So this next one is this is pretty
remarkable whenever I hear about people that are and I've
(25:49):
heard stories like this over the years where people were
had the bad luck to be in UH various places
where like terrorist attacks have happened more than once. UH.
And this couple, this British couple, Jason Cairn's Lawrence and
his partner Jenny, they had this happened three times. UH.
(26:09):
They were in New York City on nine eleven on
a just a regular holiday there, so that's number one. UM.
A few years after that, they went vacationing in UH
in their very own London in July two thousand five,
and just a day into that trip was when the
(26:29):
suicide bombers attacked the London Underground, which was horrific. They
don't think they're in the underground at the time, but
I imagine at this point they're like, all right, what's
going on here. A few years after that, in two
thousand and eight, they're like, all right, we're gonna get
out of town again and this time we're going to Mumbai,
India and another terrorist attack when the Luxury hotel was
(26:54):
was attacked in the railway station and a hundred and
seventy four people died there. They were all three of those,
all three the three biggest terrorist attacks I guess in
the West, in the in the twenty one century. They
were there for yeah, the deadliest ones at least, and
they thankfully survived all three of those. But I imagine
(27:14):
after those three trips they're probably not going on vacation
very much anymore. They built a pool in their backyard
and they're like, this is what we're doing from now on. Man,
I can't imagine. I really can't either tell you the truth.
Should we take a break. Let's take a break, and
we're gonna come back and talk about some more hard
luck cases after this. Okay, okay, Chuck, So this one,
(28:02):
I can't quite put my finger on whether this is
whether Alexander Graham Bell is a no good thief or not.
I don't know, because I think I saw some more
recent stuff and I think that his image has been
a little more reformed. Well we'll get to that. But
if you're in Italy and you're a little kid and
(28:22):
you are taught who invented the telephone, they do not
teach you that it was Alexander Graham Bell. As a
matter of fact, they may spit when they say they
name Alexander Graham Bell because they very much believed that
Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea for the telephone from
Antonio Maucci, who was an Italian inventor who seemed to
(28:44):
have invented something very telephone like, um, at least a
few years before Alexander Graham Bell supposedly invented his. Yeah,
he actually filed a patent preliminary patent that is in
the US, five years before Bell, for what he called
the tele trophone though, which is a much better name
than telephone. Do you think so? I would love it
(29:06):
if people were like, can I borrow your teletrophone? Oh,
let me see your troll bro let's see there? Right?
I love that so um Antonio Miucci, Uh, he definitely
realized that you could send sound over electrically activated copper
wires back in like the eighteen thirties. He knew this
(29:27):
um and he started kind of messing around with it
in one at one time he created basically a telephone
between his workshop and his his wife's bedroom because his
wife had been stricken with some sort of paralysis and
to be able to communicate with her without having to
go in and check out her all the time, he
basically rigged up a telephone. This was in the I
(29:50):
think the eighteen eighteen sixties, Um in New York, right,
Um and even debuted this invention to the press. But
he didn't speak English, and the English speaking press in
New York didn't speak Italian, so it was really just
covered by the Italian press. But this guy in in
eighteen sixty gave a demonstration of his telephone and Um again.
(30:13):
It wasn't until eighteen seventy six at Alexander Graham Bell
got his patent, and like you said, Meyuchi, he filed
the preliminary patent and I looked into this. You know
what those are. So the preliminary patent is basically this.
You pay a much lower fee to basically put a
hold on your invention. You say, this thing is coming.
If anybody else starts sniffing around with their own invention,
(30:35):
you let me know, and then the patent office will
give you will give you three months to file a
formal patent, which is again more expensive. So the the
idea is that Meyuchi didn't have enough money to file
a full patent, so he placed a preliminary patent and
didn't have enough money to renew it. You have to
renew it annually. And Alexander Graham Bell swooped in. Yeah,
(30:59):
and here's the thing I thought, Well, I mean, there
have been plenty of inventions where people working in a
vacuum came up with a similar idea with similar technology.
But Miyuchi actually shared a space with Bell. And that's
when I was like, uh, okay, it's not a good
look for Bell for sure. Yeah, And then I did
(31:20):
a little more research. I was like, did Alexander Graham
Bell steal the telephone? And this was this is not news?
And I saw an article that was like, yes, he
stole it from Elisha Gray and I was like, who, Well,
he's the one who supposedly went to the patent office
the same day, within hours of Bell, to file a
patent on the phone and lost out. Yea, So there
are several people that claimed that Bell it was not
(31:43):
his original idea. Well. Mayucci actually sued Bella and the
case made it all the way to the Supreme Court,
but then Mayuchi died before it was resolved and they
threw the case out. Very sad, but the House of
Representatives in two thousand two voted on a resolution to
say yes, Antonio Meuci is the inventor of the telephone
(32:05):
as far as we in the US are concerned. Um,
what I saw, what I referred to earlier, that that
I was wondering if his image had been reformed. He
has his extensive notes about his invention that he would
have had to have falsified and that apparently have been
scrutinized by historians. So if he was a fraud, he
(32:25):
was a really methodical frauds. Well, that's one of the
complaints with Elisha Gray is that the uh, the sketches
were like virtually identical to Graze. Yeah, so you know, wow,
well we I think we need to do at least
the short stuff in Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, I think
that could be a full EPI okay EPI, yes, full
(32:49):
EpiPen right in your thigh, all right, like the time
you got stung by that be you remember that was harrowing?
All right? So this one's uh, this one is actually
kind of fun, um because I like it when the
bad luck isn't like super like devastating to someone's life
and that they kind of roll with it, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah, Costas Mitzo Takas definitely rolls with it. Yeah,
(33:12):
not nothing bad happened here. Uh. There's a an annual
lottery in Spain that dates back to eighteen twelve called
El Gordo. It's a Christmas lottery and it's a big,
big They call it El Gordos the Fat one because
it's a big, big, fat payout and it's a very,
very much a tradition in Spain. And in two thousand eleven,
(33:34):
the jackpot was at the time the biggest ever, close
to a billion dollars nine fifty million bucks. And there's
this little town called a Sodetto and people in this town.
Is that Italian? Huh? No, I didn't say Soday it
though it was close. No, that's just a little flair.
So in Sodetto, residents there would pull money together sometimes
(33:58):
by their lottery tickets because it costs twenty six bucks apiece.
It's not like going down and buying like the I
don't even know how much blotto costs in America. Is
in like a dollar? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh. We did
a lot of episode back in the day, didn't we.
I think we talked about El Gordo in the lot
of episode because I think I recognized the name. Yeah, yeah,
(34:19):
El Gordo. Um. So the tickets were twenty six bucks
at least in two thousand eleven. And this town pulls
their money together. Seventy different families all chipped in because
times were tough and they didn't spring for their own ticket,
and they won. They did win. Um, this town of
(34:40):
like simple farmers whose backs were kind of up against
the wall from the economic downturn you referenced. Apparently they
were also experiencing a prolonged drought. To everybody's a little
tents overnight, had all of their money troubles just go away? Um,
every single household in the town one minimum of a
(35:01):
hundred and thirty U s. Dollars a hundred thirty thousand,
I'm sorry, up to millions, right, like if they bought
like full full chunks of the tickets um from this lotto.
And so all these people like rode their tractors into
town on Christmas Day to celebrate that they had all
just won the lottery, all except one guy, Costas Mitsotakas,
(35:24):
whose house was not visited by the people selling the
lottery tickets for the town fundraiser and who didn't buy
a ticket as a result. Right, he lived a little
bit on the outskirts of town um with a woman,
his romantic partner at the time, and she actually bought
in and one a hundred thousand American dollars. No, I
(35:45):
guess it was a hundred thousand euros Okay, so yeah,
it was about a hundred and thirty thousand American dollars. Yeah,
So she won and he did not. They're not together now.
I don't know if that had anything to do with it.
I'm not saying it does. I think they had already
split up, okay, but at any rate, he didn't win
any money. But he's a filmmaker, and he was like,
(36:07):
his quote was, it was really a gift from heaven,
as if someone had given me the perfect script. So
he decided to make a documentary about this town and
about this loto in and about these villagers who apparently
did not change their way as much. They all still
lived very simply, and they all still shared, how you know,
like lots of family in the single house, and it
(36:30):
was really kind of heartwarming. And I read an article
from just like a year and a half ago where
he was supposedly finishing it up, but then I never
saw anything about the actual documentary, so I don't know
if it was ever released or finished. Fully. I also
read that he made out okay. He'd been trying to
sell his property there for a while, but because of
(36:51):
the economic downturn, he couldn't get rid of it. And
right after somebody bought it from him. Well that's good,
hopefully at full l asking price, you know. Yeah, And
he seems like a guy. He was kind of like,
you know, I didn't buy a ticket. Yeah, what are
you gonna do? Make a film about it? I guess
as happens. That's right. So hat tip to uh Costas
Mitsotakas too. That's right. Um, so chuck, we're moving along.
(37:14):
We're going from Spain to right here in Atlanta. Yeah.
Do you remember the Olympics. I do, because I was
on a road trip out west, my friend and I.
That's when we took our like two and a half
month trip and then Volkswagen van and we're like, we're
getting out of Atlanta for the Olympics. You did not
miss much. Yeah, I remember everybody in Atlanta who owned
(37:37):
a business sunk tons of cash into their business to
revamp it for Olympic fever, and no one left downtown, nobody.
They just stayed downtown. But one of the other things
about the Olympics, aside from like one of the most
mediocre maybe actually just outright bad opening ceremonies, pretty bad.
(37:57):
Just remember being on the road and and a cheap
hotel room in New Mexico and seeing uh, stainless steel
pickup trucks and I was just like, oh my god,
what's going on. That's so Atlanta, that's hot landa right there. Um.
In addition to that, the Olympics is also remembered as
(38:19):
the Centennial Olympics, is a hundred years after the first
modern Olympic Games. But really more than anything, it's remember
for the Olympic Park bombing, which is a huge deal.
And this is I mean it was memorable because it
was a big deal like that, this was an act
of domestic terrorism here in the United States and it
was at the Olympics, and it actually could have been
(38:43):
way worse than it was. One one poor woman from
I believe Albany or Leesburg, Georgia died. Um I think
a cameraman from Turkey died from a heart attack running
to the scene. But like a hundred people were injured.
But right before that bomb went off, it was a
forty pound pipe bomb filled with um screws and nails
and all sorts of projectiles. Um. There are a lot
(39:05):
of people standing around it watching a concert by Jack
MC and the heart attack at like one am in
Olympic Park. Um. And had they not been moved by
a security guard named Richard Jewell, surely more people would
have died. Yeah. So Jewel sees this backpack again. This
is now a backpack on the ground. Like everyone would
(39:27):
be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's that thing doing there?
See something? Say something, see something, say something? Yeah, ninety six.
It was just a year after the Oklahoma City bombing.
It wasn't like this was on everyone's mind at the time.
And uh, Jewel said, hey, I think we should get
out of here. There's a backpack on the ground. Something
smells fishy um. And I don't think he meant there
(39:48):
was literal fish in the backpack. Sorry. That was terrible.
And he got people out of there and alerted authorities
and they started clearing the area pretty heavily and very quickly.
Richard Jewels on the news as a local hero, national hero. Yeah,
national hero, and uh, everything was going great until all
(40:09):
the next day he was looked at as a person
of interest. Like the next day, apparently the a j
C got a scoop from the Atlanta p D that
the FEDS and everybody were starting to wonder if Richard
Jewel wasn't the type of guy who would plan a
bomb in order to put himself in a position of
being a hero. Yeah, they were like, he fits the profile.
(40:32):
I remember all that stuff going down. Yeah, And it's
crazy how you can see somebody differently when people like
paining him a certain way, you know, and like, like
he just looked like he had that mustache. What's he
hiding with that mustache? Or his eyes are a little beady,
aren't they? And he had been charged with um impersonating officers,
so he's clearly like I want to be cop kind
of thing, and um he looked really bad. And then
(40:54):
finally in October, the FBI was like, Richard Jewel, now
now we cleared him. He's not a he's not a
person of interest. It was surely somebody else. But by
this time, Richard Jewell's name had been drugged through the
mud associated with a major act of terrorism at the
Olympics in the United States. UM for months before he
was cleared, and it was the damage was was very
(41:16):
much done. Yeah, of course everyone knows the real bomber
was Eric Rudolph uh And again, you know, those four
months were really rough on Jewel and his family. And
even after he was cleared in October, it's like like
everyone knew he was cleared, but it's still one of
those things where like it's attached to his name, you know. Oh, yeah,
(41:37):
he entered. He went from the suspect phase to the
late night talk show monologue joke phase. Yeah, that's not
a good transition. It isn't very Sadly he died in
two thousand and just the young age of forty four
from complications of diabetes. Yep, so he had it rough.
He got like a settlement from CNN in New York
Times for I guess over zealous and unfounded reporting maybe,
(41:59):
but um it was it was. He did not have
like a great last part of his life, all right,
the last one folks breaking news. Josh emails me about
thirty minutes where we record or so and said, by
the way, the number one guy on the list is
(42:20):
a fraud. I said he maybe a fraud. I thought
you said he was a fraud. I'm trying to see
you away here. Okay, Sorry, it's not proven that he's
a fraud, because well, well let's just get into all this. Okay, Yeah,
what's his name? Selac, front A Selac, everywhere else I
saw at F A, R and E. I don't know
(42:41):
what to believe anymore. I know, we've just lost touch
with reality. Charles So he has been dubbed the luckiest
man in the world for supposedly surviving seven brushes with death,
ranging from a train going into an icy river, two
cars going off of cliffs again into icy rivers. Uh,
(43:02):
cars catching on fire, cars plunging off of cliffs, like
so much stuff that you're like, can this be true?
Especially the plane crash that went down where he supposedly
was sucked out of a door and landed on a haystack. Yeah,
before the plane crashed. Is this real? So here's the thing.
(43:24):
All of the starts in um I believe two thousand five.
He buys a lottery ticket, wins like a million dollar
or a million euro lottery and that happened. That definitely happened.
And he was interviewed by the Scotsman the newspaper the
Scotsman and in this article he's like, Oh, you think
it's lucky that I won a million dollars, let me
(43:46):
tell you about some of the unlucky things that have
happened to me. And he starts reeling off these stories
of like just narrowly escaping death, and the Scotsman's like, wow,
that's fantastic. We're gonna print this, And the Scotsman printed it,
and all of a sudden and started getting picked up
by other news outlets, another news outlets, another news outlets,
and then finally and one of these articles there was
(44:07):
a commenter um who identified himself as Friday Selec's son,
who said, hey, um, not one single journalist has ever
independently verified a single one of these stories. This guy
is actually my father and he has always wanted to
be famous, so when he was interviewed for winning the lottery,
he saw his chance and he made all of this up. Well,
(44:30):
if it was an internet comment or, it must be
true exactly. That's why I was c o A because
it's like, is that the only place you found that? Yes,
but the point remains correct. It has never been and
none of it has ever been independently verified so it's
not entirely it's it's entirely possible that there he wasn't
(44:50):
on um any plane or in in a bus accident,
or that his car crash. It's not verified that he
has been. It hasn't been clearly shown that he hasn't been.
It's just this guy makes a really good point that
this dude who everybody says is the luckiest man in
the world, it's possibly made it all up. How can
we not get to the bottom of this? M What
(45:12):
do you mean? Well, I mean we found out the
world is flat and that they fake the moon landing
through research. Why can't we find out what happened with
Frande Selak like you and me specifically or immediate? Surely
this you could find this out right? Yeah, I guess
you could. I think no one's going to the trouble
of doing it. It's a good story that everybody likes.
(45:33):
It's not really hurting anything for him to be lying
and for the lie to be perpetuated. Um, it's more
just this is kind of laziness among journalism, I guess,
including us, because I didn't go get to the bottom
of it. I didn't go independently verify any of his claims. Well,
I did see an article that uh. Is that where
(45:55):
you saw it at all? That's interesting dot com? No,
I didn't see it on there, don't worry. I don't
remember where I saw the article of the look go ahead. Well,
there was an article that talked about the fact that
UM that mentioned the comment or whatever and the doubts. Yeah,
I think that's become kind of thing because there was
a viral um, a viral uh video that UM that
(46:20):
made the rounds that was really really interesting, UM because
it's just this cute little animation of this guy's story
in his life. And UM, I guess I saw the
thing about him being being a possible hoax on BBC.
So if you put BBC together and all that's interesting,
you have legitimate fact. Right. And I apologize for looking
(46:44):
at my phone right now, but I'm doing a real
time investigation. And apparently some people have googled and these
plane crashes and things aren't documented, so it sounds like
it might be it might be false names. I don't know, Okay,
but even still, it's a great story. I mean, just
the fact that this guy made up all of this
(47:05):
load of bs during an interview it's pretty la. It's
one of the great improv comedians of all time. Right,
it's a good way to end things too, don't you think. Well,
thanks for joining us, everybody. Thanks for putting on your
smoking jacket and your house slippers, um, putting on a
nice um Berry white record, and uh, relaxing with us.
(47:28):
I hope you feel relaxed. Now, do you feel relaxed?
Chuckers and Jerry does obviously, Jesus I know. Um. Well,
if you want to know more about the unluckiest people
in the world, just go look at stuff on the internet,
may or may not be true. Who really cares? Right? Uh?
And since I said that it's time for a listener mail,
I'm going to call this one a sort of an
(47:49):
older one that I forgot about. So apologies to Jessica
Breslyn because I told her I would read this a
month ago. Hey, guys, love the recent episode on rape
Kits that wanted to make a tiny correction about how
the Golden State Killer was called. Although there was a
time that the Golden State Killers DNA was part of
the backlog, the DNA had actually been identified and linked
to his crimes since the nineties. The problem was they
(48:11):
had no person to compare it to. This change in
two thousand eighteen when they compared it to DNA submitted
to a familial DNA base. When a relative submitted their
DNA to the familiar DNA site, they were able to
see that the DNA was related and from there were
able to narrow down their suspects to two likely family members.
After narrowing it down to those two, they're able to
(48:32):
identify their suspect collect a sample of his DNA to
compare it to the Golden State killers. However, still good
proof on my testing backlog. KITS is still so important. Uh.
You never know what sort of technological breakthroughs will help
law enforcement catch the perpetrators even when you don't have
a suspect. I love the podcast, guys, appreciate all the
hard work and keeping entertaining and respectful even when it's
(48:55):
such sensitive subject matter. And that is Jessica Breslin. I
guess that I was going up there at the end,
wasn't I? Yes, indeed you did go up there, Chuck.
It was kind of a nice little flourish. Well. Thanks
a lot, Jessica. We appreciate the email, um and if
you sorry, for being a month later and reading it.
That was all chuck um. And if you want to
get in touch with this, like Jessica did Um, you
(49:18):
can go to stuff you Should Know dot com check
out our social links. You can in touch with us
that way, or you can send us a good old
fashioned email to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios
How stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(49:39):
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
over there. And this is the Stuff you should Know
about people who have really bad luck? Nine of them. Yeah,
(00:25):
we can't. I don't think we've ever done a full
top ten list? Have we? That that that should be
our last episode. Yeah, it's like stuff you should know,
its ten biggest regrets. Right, that's a great idea. Yeah,
that'll be the last one. All right, let's write that down.
There's no we don't have ten regrets. Yeah. I guess
we couldn't do a full time Actually, we could probably
(00:46):
come up with ten. No, we couldn't. Vid con number one.
That's a big one. This intro is definitely up there
to number two. We're on our way, all right, Um,
how are you feeling pretty good? I'm great? You feel lucky? Punk,
I'm a pretty lucky person. I will say that I
(01:07):
would agree with that good fortune. My friends have called
me the rabbit's foot over the years. Yeah, that's why
they're I was rubbing you. But that's that's mainly for
narrowly escaping trouble more than anything. How about a story
chuck lay it on us? Oh just I mean I was.
I was very famous among my group of friends for
(01:27):
getting pulled over by police and not getting tickets. I mean,
at one point it was it had literally happened like
fourteen times in a row or something over a span
of like ten or twelve years. It happened a lot
that I never and I didn't get my first ticket
until geez, probably my thirties, mid thirties. How did you
(01:48):
have what happened? Did you talk your way out of it?
Or yeah, you know what you do? Man? And my
brother always gets a ticket and he's much nicer than
I am. But you just got to be as humble, humble, humble, humble,
humble as you can be, and if you show the
slightest bit of attitude, then that police officer, in my experience,
(02:08):
will delight in writing you that ticket. I mean, even
it's if it's a sideways look and I basically just
throw myselves at the mercy of the court on the
side of the road. I'm like, I'm so sorry, officer,
I you were you should have pulled me over. You
did the right thing. I was wrong, and I'm sorry.
There's no excuse here's I was gonna eat these French fries.
(02:31):
But you should take them. You're the hero here. Think
they're always a little disarmed and they're like, oh, oh okay,
well I guess I can let you off of the warning.
I don't know. That's been my experience. All right, there's
chuck advice right there. So you get out of fourteen tickets?
So did you forget to the last fifteen time? Did
you forget? Did you sneer call them a pig? What? No?
I think it was just one of those things where
(02:52):
like they were writing the ticket even before I had
a chance to do my little song and dance, and
they brought me the ticket and I was kind of like, well,
wait a minute, don't you know who who I am?
I'm the guy that gets out of tickets. Oh? I
thought you were gonna say, I'm Chuck from stuff. You
should know that means nothing. That's how you that's how
you get out of them these days, buddy. Well, um,
we're talking today about some people who have very bad luck.
(03:15):
And you know, like a lot of these lists usually
are just like uh no to this one. No to
that one. No, this is wrong. Um. I think we
tried to do a list once where like, oh man,
I can't remember which one it was, but like every
single entry was just like just false. Right. That's only
the case with like three of these this time, which
(03:36):
I'm pretty that's not a bad batting average, realistical. Yeah,
and some of these are. The word luck kind of
bothers me sometimes because as is the case, We'll go
ahead and get to the first one, Ron Wayne, who
was one of the original three partners of Apple Computers.
That's not bad luck. Ron Wayne made a board business decision.
Have you. Uh, that's a good point. Have you ever
(03:58):
heard of Ron Wayne before? Know you? No? I haven't,
And had I heard his name, I would have been like,
he sounds like porn actor, but he's not a peorgn actor.
Oh no, that was That was another guy. I can't
say his real name though. Uh who, I demand that
you say it. I'll tell you off Mike, Okay. So, um,
(04:18):
he turns out this guy was not a pornography actor.
He was one of the three founders of Apple and
as far as I had known to this point, there
were two founders of Apple. Turns out there were three
at the beginning for like the first twelve days. Yeah,
so go back to nine seventy six in our way
back machine and Nerdy Little Jobs and Nerdy Little Wassniak
(04:41):
are young guys uh in their twenties and they had
this great uh they didn't know it at the time.
Well they may have known it or suspected, but this
this great vision for the future. But they were kind
of kids and they didn't have any experience. So they
looked to a guy named Ron Wayne who was in
his forty uh to come in and kind of help
(05:03):
what they called with adult supervision, because I mean they
were programmers from Atari, but yeah, they didn't have the
actual business sense or whatever, and it was just a
party job at the time, I believe so. But I
had no idea how Tari produced Apple though, did you.
Oh yeah, I did a bunch of Atari research stuff
for my tech stuff guest but oh, okay, cool, Yeah,
(05:26):
we did a history of Atari two parter. Oh, speaking
of guest spots man, let me just also give a
shot out real quick. Sorry to interrupt this little entry,
but I was on um our good friend John go
Forths and our new friend Brent's podcast Hysteria fifty one recently. Yeah,
we talked about the family Paradox for like an hour
and it was awesome. So go check that out Hysteria
(05:48):
fifty one. Go check out that out. Okay, so plug
out right. So we're in ninety six uhs and Jobs
have recruited one one Wayne, Ron Wayne to be the
adult in the room to help with engineering documentation. And
it was actually Ron Wayne who uh who drafted the
(06:09):
very first Apple contract and said, you know, this is
what they agreed on. He did make it up, which
said how much everyone is going to get He got
ten percent two jobs and wasasniakst And he even created
the first Apple logo, which was not the logo we
know and loved now. It was a It was like
a woodcut um style thing of Isaac Newton under the
(06:32):
Apple tree. Not that sounds terrible. Yeah, I disagree. I
think it sounds ugly. So um Ron Wayne the while
he was there, he very quickly was like, I don't
know if this is my kind of place. I thought
it was a good idea. I like what these guys
are doing, but this company in a garage. Steve Jobs
keeps taking acid during the middle of business hours. Um
(06:55):
did he really? Yeah? Wow, Steve Jobs thought he was
pretty cool from what I understand. Um he Uh, Ron
Wayne was like, I don't I don't think I fit
in here. Also, apparently he was worried that he was
going to have to pony up for you know, whatever
business debts they incurred. I think that was a big deal.
(07:15):
And he was like, all right, I'm out. I'm out.
Because he was an adult and he was like I've
got a house and like I'm a real adult human,
Like they're gonna turn to me certainly when they do. So.
He he cashed out in in twelve days, twelve days
after they established their contract, and the contract um was
kept by Ron Wayne. Actually we'll get to that in
a second. But he cashed out for twenty three hundred
(07:37):
dollars two d thirty thousand, you say, no, two thousand,
three hundred, which is still today worse less than like
ten grand um. And he didn't even get it all
at once. He got eight hundred right then, and then
uh he agreed to take fifteen hundred later. And that
was nineteen seventies six, And in nineteen eighty Apple went
public and everybody involved came an instant millionaire, and years
(08:02):
later it hit the trillion dollar mark for valuation, and
all the while, Ron Wayne got to watch this company
grow and grow and grow and realized that he'd sold
off ten percent of the steak in the company for Yeah,
and apparently if he had held all those stocks, uh,
he'd be worth close to a hundred billion dollars. So
(08:25):
he he takes issue with that. He said, he probably
lost out on tens of millions. Yeah, I mean, I
guess it depends on what like you can't since you
can't go back and do it all over again like
Eddie Money says, Uh. I guess there's always the thing
of like well yeah, but he always maintains I would
have gotten out after that before the big cash in anyway, probably,
(08:49):
so I don't like to look at it. Is that
sort of a loss, is what he tells himself basically,
or else I would have gone totally insane a long
time ago. Yeah, but he did apparently. Uh. He wrote
a Facebook essay and said, I probably that would have
been around in nineteen eighty and gotten some pretty good change,
and and I think regrets it. Yeah, he said, had
(09:09):
he known that, and everybody was going to become a
millionaire in four years. He definitely would have hung in there,
but he just it's hindsight, you know. Yeah, and the
cherry on top here is pretty interesting though. He said
he kept that contract, that very first Apple contract that
he drew up, and he kept it and he auctioned
it off in the early nineties four how much five
(09:31):
hundred somoleans five dollars and when what happened not bad.
It was just a piece of paper he had hanging around.
Somebody turned around and auctioned it off years later in
two thousand and eleven four almost one point six million.
Poor Ron Wayne. Now that one's bad luck. I wonder
(09:54):
what he did though with his life. He wrote essays
on Facebook. I mean I Betty did okay, Yeah, I
guess so. I mean Steve jobs okay, but I doubt
if you, like you know, got a got a low wage,
hourly paying job. I don't know. He became Eddie Money's
tour manager. Things worked out then, right, And every time
(10:17):
any money saying I want to go back in tear
down Ron Wayne's face. So, um, I think we should
move on. We're gonna leave Ron Wayne because my hat also,
we should definitely tip our heads to anyone who faced
adversity like this and was like as happens and has
(10:38):
had tipped to Ron Wayne for that one. Um and
Hodges did not have that kind of experience. She is
the only, person, as far as anyone knows, the only
human being in the history and recorded history of humanity
to have been hit by a meteor Right, I'm laughing
and I shouldn't. Um. Well, actually she didn't get that hurt,
(11:03):
so that's why I feel okay laughing. It's not like
it fell on her head and killed her. It's November
thirty in Alabama and eight point five pound a meteorite,
uh came through her roof, bounced off of a radio
and hit her in the hip. Yeah. It makes you
wonder like if if she had been you know, where
(11:24):
the radio was, and this wasn't like a bounced like
uh ricochet, Yeah, a ricochet. I mean, how much worse
would things have been? Yeah? Probably dead. There's a I
saw a picture I'm Reddit of her, just randomly. We
had already picked this episode and started researching, and I
saw a picture of her bruise on Reddit and it was, um,
(11:45):
pretty nasty, pretty nasty, little bruise, but that was about
as bad as it got physically. Um. So, she was
laying on the couch, a meteorite came through her roof,
hit her radio, hit her, and um she became almost
immediately a media sensation because word got out very quickly
(12:05):
that a woman had been struck by a meteorite, probably
the first and only person ever. Yeah, and and that's
super rare. Like, it's rare. It's rare for a meteorite
to fall just in an urban area where people live
or suburban area where people live. Can say, I don't
know if I would call Alabama urban. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's just not usual like usually meteorites, you know,
(12:27):
there's a lot of water on Earth. Usually they'll just
land in the ocean somewhere. Um So it's big news
if a meteorite hits anywhere near people, much less hitting
a person. Right. There's a meteorologist named Michael Reynolds who
told National Geographic get this. He said, you have a
better chance of being hit by a tornado, bolt of
(12:49):
lightning and a hurricane at the same time than you
do a meteorite. I'm not sure how he actually quantified that,
but that's one of the better quotes I've read in
a while. Yeah, and this is where it gets this
is just so America in USA is there was a
court battle between her and her landlord because her landlord
(13:09):
was like, that's my space rock because it's my house
and she and and Hodges is like, no, that's my
space rock because it hit me and the hip. And
they went to court and Hodges actually won and got
to keep that uh sadly ultimately valueless meteorite. Yes, she's
(13:29):
she's settled. Actually, she ended up paying the landlord five
bucks for the right to the rock. But by the
time this was finally settled two years later, they found
out that nobody cared any longer. There was old news,
so nobody wanted to buy the meteor right. And you
might think, well, okay, it's not clear that anyone would
(13:50):
ever wanted to buy the meteor right to begin with.
Not true. They have a neighbor just down the road
who had just the tiniest little piece of that space
rock and sold it. At the time, this thing was
a big media sensation and was able to buy a
new house and a new car from the proceeds. So
the Hodges were like clearly we've got the space rock.
(14:11):
We're gonna cash in. We're gonna buy the state of
Alabama with the proceeds. But two years later it was
totally valueless, and Um and Hodges actually had a just
just kept taking turns for the worst and ended up
dying in a nursing home at age forty nine after
having a nervous breakdown from the the whole ordeal. Yeah,
(14:32):
it's very sad, um, but that meteorite is on display
at the Alabama Museum of Natural History. And I hope
that there is at least a small plaquard that memorializes her.
Surely there is, right, I would, I would hope so, yeah,
which that that would be a nice thing after a
string of bad luck. That's pretty bad luck. Should we
(14:53):
take a break? I think we should. All right, We're
gonna take a break and talk about the unluckiest person
in the music industry right at of this Chuck, Chuck.
(15:26):
I have a tad bit of anxiety because beats No,
No No. I have anxiety about this one just because
it's so rotten and rough. I feel so bad for
this guy. Well, here's the thing. Before the break, I
called former First Beatles drummer, not former first, but former
(15:47):
and first Beetles drummer Pete Best, the unluckiest man of music.
He's been called that. Uh, that's not true either. Pete
Best didn't have bad luck. Pete Best didn't have good chops.
Oh is that what it was? Yeah? So okay, wells okay,
that's totally different. I thought it was. I I didn't
think it was bad luck necessarily obviously didn't jibe with
(16:09):
the group. But I thought maybe it was like he
had to walk around being like I have a terrible
personality and that's why I'm not a Beatle or whatever.
Now we'll we'll get to that. So let's go back
in time. Pete bess Uh in the very early days
of the Beatles in the nineteen fifties when they were
known as the Quarryman Um. His mom. He was a
drummer and his mom had the he owned something called
(16:32):
the Kasbak Coffee Club in Liverpool, and she was she
was cool and she was very like ahead of her
time as far as um the Liverpool music scene very
much out in front of it. So it's the kind
of deal where like well, pizza drummer and his mom
owns a place where we can play. So he's in
(16:55):
the band, and it's good because now we got a
place where we can gig and we got a drummer
that that can play. Okay, he's handsome. That was a
big part of it, was he Yeah, that was a
big thing over the years. What that that was rumored
that he was kicked out because Paul said he was
too handsome and he didn't want any competition. Are you
Is he still around? Yeah, he's alive. Okay, well I'm
(17:17):
not gonna say the next part then, so um, he
he was enough. So I guess at the time the
Beatles by by the time Pete Best was kind of
brought on, he wasn't like officially brought on as as
like the Beatles Beatles as we think of them today,
where there was like four of them. There was like
a rotating bunch of drummers, and Pete Best was one
(17:40):
of those drummers, right, Yeah, but he played, I mean
he was he kind of It was sort of like
when I rotated and stuff. You should know early on
a little bit like there was still a rotation going
for a short time and I think and then everyone
else just went away, like Pete best played like eighty
something gigs with the Beatles pre Hamburg, I think, okay,
(18:01):
And then they took him to Hamburg, which apparently was
a big, big turning point for everybody. They paid eighty
shows a week in Hamburg. I saw a great quote. Um,
they said that, So in Hamburg is where the Beatles
like really started to become like the Beatles, like, are
they coalesced into a band? I saw that they arrived
wearing lilac sports jackets and trousers and left wearing black
(18:22):
leather jackets and jeans. That's where they learned sex, drugs
and rock and roll. Yeah, Pete Bess wasn't into the
drugs though, like the other three guys, so that was
a problem. Sure, that's a buzz kill when the one
guy in the room is just sitting there staring at
you judge. Yeah, well I would. I mean, that's kind
of a buzz kill, I would guess, right, Yeah, yeah, probably.
(18:45):
So I think they were all like doing speed back then.
Oh sure, because they were playing literally like six or
seven shows at night. Were they really playing that many? Oh?
It was ridiculous? Wow? Yeah, So, um, he was in
a group called the Black Jack's before that though, went
to Hamburg, Hamburg with the Beatles, and then right after
(19:05):
that the Beatles go back to England in Nino and
they were just about to go into the studio to
record their first singles for E M. I and UH.
Legendary manager Brian Epstein called up and said, sorry, bloke,
the boys want you out and it's already been arranged, yeah,
meaning like don't even bother it's done, which is sad
(19:29):
um and Pete Best took it pretty hard, from what
I understand for horrible. In a horrible twist of iron,
he ended up working at the unemployment office, but working
there now, hanging out there. Um and by this time
like he had made a name for himself around Liverpool
as as a musician in a beatle. Um. The reason
why he's called the Unluckiest man of music is not
(19:51):
because he was a Beatle at one point in time,
but that he was a Beatle at one point in
time and was kicked out of the band a few
weeks before the Beatles blew up, and um, it almost
makes you wonder like did they blow up because they
moved on to Ringo or was it like that was
just bad timing? Well, I mean, here's the deal. Uh.
(20:12):
There are interviews out there with both Um John and Paul.
There has always been the rumor, like I said that
Pete's handsomeness threatened the band. Um that is not true.
Paul was on record of saying, like, you know, it's
just something that happens. Early in the days of bands
like ring we were just really struck by how great
Ringo was. Pete Best sat out one gig because he
(20:36):
was sick or something, Ringo sat in and they were
all just like wow, like they all felt it, and
it was just sort of that magic happening where they're like,
oh boy, I know what's got to happen. Um John,
for his part, said, you know, it had nothing to
do with his looks. He said he was just kind
of a crap drummer. I mean he was. John was
not the nicest guy in the world. So he really
(20:57):
kind of threw through it all on the table and
was like he wasn't a good drummer. He just wasn't.
He was a good first drummer, and clearly it was
time to move on from him. Uh. And it was
mainly because his mom owned a place where we could play.
Not very nice gotcha. No, but I mean that doesn't
make him unlucky. No, he didn't have the chops, and
you know he, I mean, he's he's reckoned with it.
(21:19):
I saw an article from last year where he was
like he never spoke to the other three guys again,
and he was like, yeah, I mean and Paul, I'd
love to sit down and like have a scotch and
talk about it. And he's like, the doors open. Oh really, Yeah.
I don't know if Paul's going to do that though,
maybe not. Uh. He was on Howard Stern. Paul was
and Howard was like, are you ever just gonna write
(21:41):
him a check just out of guilt? He's just like, no, no, No.
He did get royalties though later on when the Beatles
anthology came out, because that included stuff from Pete Best,
so he ended up getting some money. He made out. Okay, Yeah,
I think the lesson here is don't ever get Yeah,
(22:01):
that's the key, everybody, that's right. So we're gonna go
from nineteen sixties Liverpool too over to the New Orleans
area where they have hurricanes. Supposedly they have a hurricane
party every time the wind blows have heard, but they
actually do have legitimate hurricanes, and those hurricanes can do
(22:22):
a lot of damage, as we saw in two thousand
and five with Hurricane Katrina. By the time Hurricane Katrina
rolled around, a woman named Melanie Martinez was on her
fourth house having been destroyed by a hurricane. Um previously
George one and n and Betsy in nineteen sixty five
(22:45):
had destroyed her house by the time Katrina came around.
But after Katrina, everybody really learned their lesson. They're like, Okay,
we've been taking this way too instusition ly, like we
need to really actually like protect New Orleans from flooding
from hurricanes. And so the federal government stepped in, the
government Louisiana stepped in, and they really fortified New Orleans
(23:08):
so that years later, seven years later actually to the
day of Katrina making landfall, when Isaac made landfall, New
Orleans held up. It was a pretty big hurricane, but
it weathered. New Orleans weathered it. Unfortunately. In little tiny
town of Bathwaite, just a little south of New Orleans,
which I thought south of New Orleans was like the
(23:29):
Caribbean or the Gulf. I guess um. There's a little
town called Bathway they did not fortify this town, and
it just so happened that there's where Melanie Martinez built
another house that proved to be her fifth one that
was destroyed by a hurricane. Yeah, this is truly bad luck. Um.
Granted all of those houses were in the same floodplain,
(23:51):
but it's like it's not like everybody's house was destroyed
every time. Like, this was truly bad luck to have
five houses lost, and this last one before Isaac, she
was selected for an A and E reality show, Hideous Houses,
got a twenty dollar makeover, brand new kitchen, new appliances,
in a new sewing room. Uh. And apparently that episode
(24:16):
air just a few weeks before Isaac came around. Destroyed
that house too. And you know when they asked her
in two thousand and twelve, like why do you keep
building here? You know, it's like everyone else, She's like,
it's this is my home. It's like I want to
live where I was born and raised and this is
my home. Yeah. Can you imagine what that phone calls like,
It's like, hey, I'm a producer with Hideous Houses, and
(24:38):
your house has been selected to be on Hideous Houses.
She probably applied and how it works. No, I think
they just go scout your house and it's really like, no,
I'm sure you apply that. I think it carries from
show to show. So for that last time, with Hurricane
Isaac in two twelve, she and her husband and their
pets and um, Melanie Martinez is elderly mom barely escaped
(25:03):
with their life. They had to hammer through their roof.
They were trapped in the attic with the floodwaters rising.
They had to hammer a hole into the roof and
climb out where they were rescued. Yeah. Man, I mean,
she's at least they got out. They did. But even so,
the thing that makes it really bad luck real quick, chuck,
is that Melanie Martinez said she would never have stayed
around for that hurricane. She because of her elderly mother.
(25:26):
She she she wouldn't have risked her her health. Um, they
got stuck there because her van broke down. Well, but
she got out, okay there, you know, I mean she
couldn't save the house. So it's true. It's very sad,
all right. So this next one is this is pretty
remarkable whenever I hear about people that are and I've
(25:49):
heard stories like this over the years where people were
had the bad luck to be in UH various places
where like terrorist attacks have happened more than once. UH.
And this couple, this British couple, Jason Cairn's Lawrence and
his partner Jenny, they had this happened three times. UH.
(26:09):
They were in New York City on nine eleven on
a just a regular holiday there, so that's number one. UM.
A few years after that, they went vacationing in UH
in their very own London in July two thousand five,
and just a day into that trip was when the
(26:29):
suicide bombers attacked the London Underground, which was horrific. They
don't think they're in the underground at the time, but
I imagine at this point they're like, all right, what's
going on here. A few years after that, in two
thousand and eight, they're like, all right, we're gonna get
out of town again and this time we're going to Mumbai,
India and another terrorist attack when the Luxury hotel was
(26:54):
was attacked in the railway station and a hundred and
seventy four people died there. They were all three of those,
all three the three biggest terrorist attacks I guess in
the West, in the in the twenty one century. They
were there for yeah, the deadliest ones at least, and
they thankfully survived all three of those. But I imagine
(27:14):
after those three trips they're probably not going on vacation
very much anymore. They built a pool in their backyard
and they're like, this is what we're doing from now on. Man,
I can't imagine. I really can't either tell you the truth.
Should we take a break. Let's take a break, and
we're gonna come back and talk about some more hard
luck cases after this. Okay, okay, Chuck, So this one,
(28:02):
I can't quite put my finger on whether this is
whether Alexander Graham Bell is a no good thief or not.
I don't know, because I think I saw some more
recent stuff and I think that his image has been
a little more reformed. Well we'll get to that. But
if you're in Italy and you're a little kid and
(28:22):
you are taught who invented the telephone, they do not
teach you that it was Alexander Graham Bell. As a
matter of fact, they may spit when they say they
name Alexander Graham Bell because they very much believed that
Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea for the telephone from
Antonio Maucci, who was an Italian inventor who seemed to
(28:44):
have invented something very telephone like, um, at least a
few years before Alexander Graham Bell supposedly invented his. Yeah,
he actually filed a patent preliminary patent that is in
the US, five years before Bell, for what he called
the tele trophone though, which is a much better name
than telephone. Do you think so? I would love it
(29:06):
if people were like, can I borrow your teletrophone? Oh,
let me see your troll bro let's see there? Right?
I love that so um Antonio Miucci, Uh, he definitely
realized that you could send sound over electrically activated copper
wires back in like the eighteen thirties. He knew this
(29:27):
um and he started kind of messing around with it
in one at one time he created basically a telephone
between his workshop and his his wife's bedroom because his
wife had been stricken with some sort of paralysis and
to be able to communicate with her without having to
go in and check out her all the time, he
basically rigged up a telephone. This was in the I
(29:50):
think the eighteen eighteen sixties, Um in New York, right,
Um and even debuted this invention to the press. But
he didn't speak English, and the English speaking press in
New York didn't speak Italian, so it was really just
covered by the Italian press. But this guy in in
eighteen sixty gave a demonstration of his telephone and Um again.
(30:13):
It wasn't until eighteen seventy six at Alexander Graham Bell
got his patent, and like you said, Meyuchi, he filed
the preliminary patent and I looked into this. You know
what those are. So the preliminary patent is basically this.
You pay a much lower fee to basically put a
hold on your invention. You say, this thing is coming.
If anybody else starts sniffing around with their own invention,
(30:35):
you let me know, and then the patent office will
give you will give you three months to file a
formal patent, which is again more expensive. So the the
idea is that Meyuchi didn't have enough money to file
a full patent, so he placed a preliminary patent and
didn't have enough money to renew it. You have to
renew it annually. And Alexander Graham Bell swooped in. Yeah,
(30:59):
and here's the thing I thought, Well, I mean, there
have been plenty of inventions where people working in a
vacuum came up with a similar idea with similar technology.
But Miyuchi actually shared a space with Bell. And that's
when I was like, uh, okay, it's not a good
look for Bell for sure. Yeah, And then I did
(31:20):
a little more research. I was like, did Alexander Graham
Bell steal the telephone? And this was this is not news?
And I saw an article that was like, yes, he
stole it from Elisha Gray and I was like, who, Well,
he's the one who supposedly went to the patent office
the same day, within hours of Bell, to file a
patent on the phone and lost out. Yea, So there
are several people that claimed that Bell it was not
(31:43):
his original idea. Well. Mayucci actually sued Bella and the
case made it all the way to the Supreme Court,
but then Mayuchi died before it was resolved and they
threw the case out. Very sad, but the House of
Representatives in two thousand two voted on a resolution to
say yes, Antonio Meuci is the inventor of the telephone
(32:05):
as far as we in the US are concerned. Um,
what I saw, what I referred to earlier, that that
I was wondering if his image had been reformed. He
has his extensive notes about his invention that he would
have had to have falsified and that apparently have been
scrutinized by historians. So if he was a fraud, he
(32:25):
was a really methodical frauds. Well, that's one of the
complaints with Elisha Gray is that the uh, the sketches
were like virtually identical to Graze. Yeah, so you know, wow,
well we I think we need to do at least
the short stuff in Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, I think
that could be a full EPI okay EPI, yes, full
(32:49):
EpiPen right in your thigh, all right, like the time
you got stung by that be you remember that was harrowing?
All right? So this one's uh, this one is actually
kind of fun, um because I like it when the
bad luck isn't like super like devastating to someone's life
and that they kind of roll with it, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah, Costas Mitzo Takas definitely rolls with it. Yeah,
(33:12):
not nothing bad happened here. Uh. There's a an annual
lottery in Spain that dates back to eighteen twelve called
El Gordo. It's a Christmas lottery and it's a big,
big They call it El Gordos the Fat one because
it's a big, big, fat payout and it's a very,
very much a tradition in Spain. And in two thousand eleven,
(33:34):
the jackpot was at the time the biggest ever, close
to a billion dollars nine fifty million bucks. And there's
this little town called a Sodetto and people in this town.
Is that Italian? Huh? No, I didn't say Soday it
though it was close. No, that's just a little flair.
So in Sodetto, residents there would pull money together sometimes
(33:58):
by their lottery tickets because it costs twenty six bucks apiece.
It's not like going down and buying like the I
don't even know how much blotto costs in America. Is
in like a dollar? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh. We did
a lot of episode back in the day, didn't we.
I think we talked about El Gordo in the lot
of episode because I think I recognized the name. Yeah, yeah,
(34:19):
El Gordo. Um. So the tickets were twenty six bucks
at least in two thousand eleven. And this town pulls
their money together. Seventy different families all chipped in because
times were tough and they didn't spring for their own ticket,
and they won. They did win. Um, this town of
(34:40):
like simple farmers whose backs were kind of up against
the wall from the economic downturn you referenced. Apparently they
were also experiencing a prolonged drought. To everybody's a little
tents overnight, had all of their money troubles just go away? Um,
every single household in the town one minimum of a
(35:01):
hundred and thirty U s. Dollars a hundred thirty thousand,
I'm sorry, up to millions, right, like if they bought
like full full chunks of the tickets um from this lotto.
And so all these people like rode their tractors into
town on Christmas Day to celebrate that they had all
just won the lottery, all except one guy, Costas Mitsotakas,
(35:24):
whose house was not visited by the people selling the
lottery tickets for the town fundraiser and who didn't buy
a ticket as a result. Right, he lived a little
bit on the outskirts of town um with a woman,
his romantic partner at the time, and she actually bought
in and one a hundred thousand American dollars. No, I
(35:45):
guess it was a hundred thousand euros Okay, so yeah,
it was about a hundred and thirty thousand American dollars. Yeah,
So she won and he did not. They're not together now.
I don't know if that had anything to do with it.
I'm not saying it does. I think they had already
split up, okay, but at any rate, he didn't win
any money. But he's a filmmaker, and he was like,
(36:07):
his quote was, it was really a gift from heaven,
as if someone had given me the perfect script. So
he decided to make a documentary about this town and
about this loto in and about these villagers who apparently
did not change their way as much. They all still
lived very simply, and they all still shared, how you know,
like lots of family in the single house, and it
(36:30):
was really kind of heartwarming. And I read an article
from just like a year and a half ago where
he was supposedly finishing it up, but then I never
saw anything about the actual documentary, so I don't know
if it was ever released or finished. Fully. I also
read that he made out okay. He'd been trying to
sell his property there for a while, but because of
(36:51):
the economic downturn, he couldn't get rid of it. And
right after somebody bought it from him. Well that's good,
hopefully at full l asking price, you know. Yeah, And
he seems like a guy. He was kind of like,
you know, I didn't buy a ticket. Yeah, what are
you gonna do? Make a film about it? I guess
as happens. That's right. So hat tip to uh Costas
Mitsotakas too. That's right. Um, so chuck, we're moving along.
(37:14):
We're going from Spain to right here in Atlanta. Yeah.
Do you remember the Olympics. I do, because I was
on a road trip out west, my friend and I.
That's when we took our like two and a half
month trip and then Volkswagen van and we're like, we're
getting out of Atlanta for the Olympics. You did not
miss much. Yeah, I remember everybody in Atlanta who owned
(37:37):
a business sunk tons of cash into their business to
revamp it for Olympic fever, and no one left downtown, nobody.
They just stayed downtown. But one of the other things
about the Olympics, aside from like one of the most
mediocre maybe actually just outright bad opening ceremonies, pretty bad.
(37:57):
Just remember being on the road and and a cheap
hotel room in New Mexico and seeing uh, stainless steel
pickup trucks and I was just like, oh my god,
what's going on. That's so Atlanta, that's hot landa right there. Um.
In addition to that, the Olympics is also remembered as
(38:19):
the Centennial Olympics, is a hundred years after the first
modern Olympic Games. But really more than anything, it's remember
for the Olympic Park bombing, which is a huge deal.
And this is I mean it was memorable because it
was a big deal like that, this was an act
of domestic terrorism here in the United States and it
was at the Olympics, and it actually could have been
(38:43):
way worse than it was. One one poor woman from
I believe Albany or Leesburg, Georgia died. Um I think
a cameraman from Turkey died from a heart attack running
to the scene. But like a hundred people were injured.
But right before that bomb went off, it was a
forty pound pipe bomb filled with um screws and nails
and all sorts of projectiles. Um. There are a lot
(39:05):
of people standing around it watching a concert by Jack
MC and the heart attack at like one am in
Olympic Park. Um. And had they not been moved by
a security guard named Richard Jewell, surely more people would
have died. Yeah. So Jewel sees this backpack again. This
is now a backpack on the ground. Like everyone would
(39:27):
be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's that thing doing there?
See something? Say something, see something, say something? Yeah, ninety six.
It was just a year after the Oklahoma City bombing.
It wasn't like this was on everyone's mind at the time.
And uh, Jewel said, hey, I think we should get
out of here. There's a backpack on the ground. Something
smells fishy um. And I don't think he meant there
(39:48):
was literal fish in the backpack. Sorry. That was terrible.
And he got people out of there and alerted authorities
and they started clearing the area pretty heavily and very quickly.
Richard Jewels on the news as a local hero, national hero. Yeah,
national hero, and uh, everything was going great until all
(40:09):
the next day he was looked at as a person
of interest. Like the next day, apparently the a j
C got a scoop from the Atlanta p D that
the FEDS and everybody were starting to wonder if Richard
Jewel wasn't the type of guy who would plan a
bomb in order to put himself in a position of
being a hero. Yeah, they were like, he fits the profile.
(40:32):
I remember all that stuff going down. Yeah, And it's
crazy how you can see somebody differently when people like
paining him a certain way, you know, and like, like
he just looked like he had that mustache. What's he
hiding with that mustache? Or his eyes are a little beady,
aren't they? And he had been charged with um impersonating officers,
so he's clearly like I want to be cop kind
of thing, and um he looked really bad. And then
(40:54):
finally in October, the FBI was like, Richard Jewel, now
now we cleared him. He's not a he's not a
person of interest. It was surely somebody else. But by
this time, Richard Jewell's name had been drugged through the
mud associated with a major act of terrorism at the
Olympics in the United States. UM for months before he
was cleared, and it was the damage was was very
(41:16):
much done. Yeah, of course everyone knows the real bomber
was Eric Rudolph uh And again, you know, those four
months were really rough on Jewel and his family. And
even after he was cleared in October, it's like like
everyone knew he was cleared, but it's still one of
those things where like it's attached to his name, you know. Oh, yeah,
(41:37):
he entered. He went from the suspect phase to the
late night talk show monologue joke phase. Yeah, that's not
a good transition. It isn't very Sadly he died in
two thousand and just the young age of forty four
from complications of diabetes. Yep, so he had it rough.
He got like a settlement from CNN in New York
Times for I guess over zealous and unfounded reporting maybe,
(41:59):
but um it was it was. He did not have
like a great last part of his life, all right,
the last one folks breaking news. Josh emails me about
thirty minutes where we record or so and said, by
the way, the number one guy on the list is
(42:20):
a fraud. I said he maybe a fraud. I thought
you said he was a fraud. I'm trying to see
you away here. Okay, Sorry, it's not proven that he's
a fraud, because well, well let's just get into all this. Okay, Yeah,
what's his name? Selac, front A Selac, everywhere else I
saw at F A, R and E. I don't know
(42:41):
what to believe anymore. I know, we've just lost touch
with reality. Charles So he has been dubbed the luckiest
man in the world for supposedly surviving seven brushes with death,
ranging from a train going into an icy river, two
cars going off of cliffs again into icy rivers. Uh,
(43:02):
cars catching on fire, cars plunging off of cliffs, like
so much stuff that you're like, can this be true?
Especially the plane crash that went down where he supposedly
was sucked out of a door and landed on a haystack. Yeah,
before the plane crashed. Is this real? So here's the thing.
(43:24):
All of the starts in um I believe two thousand five.
He buys a lottery ticket, wins like a million dollar
or a million euro lottery and that happened. That definitely happened.
And he was interviewed by the Scotsman the newspaper the
Scotsman and in this article he's like, Oh, you think
it's lucky that I won a million dollars, let me
(43:46):
tell you about some of the unlucky things that have
happened to me. And he starts reeling off these stories
of like just narrowly escaping death, and the Scotsman's like, wow,
that's fantastic. We're gonna print this, And the Scotsman printed it,
and all of a sudden and started getting picked up
by other news outlets, another news outlets, another news outlets,
and then finally and one of these articles there was
(44:07):
a commenter um who identified himself as Friday Selec's son,
who said, hey, um, not one single journalist has ever
independently verified a single one of these stories. This guy
is actually my father and he has always wanted to
be famous, so when he was interviewed for winning the lottery,
he saw his chance and he made all of this up. Well,
(44:30):
if it was an internet comment or, it must be
true exactly. That's why I was c o A because
it's like, is that the only place you found that? Yes,
but the point remains correct. It has never been and
none of it has ever been independently verified so it's
not entirely it's it's entirely possible that there he wasn't
(44:50):
on um any plane or in in a bus accident,
or that his car crash. It's not verified that he
has been. It hasn't been clearly shown that he hasn't been.
It's just this guy makes a really good point that
this dude who everybody says is the luckiest man in
the world, it's possibly made it all up. How can
we not get to the bottom of this? M What
(45:12):
do you mean? Well, I mean we found out the
world is flat and that they fake the moon landing
through research. Why can't we find out what happened with
Frande Selak like you and me specifically or immediate? Surely
this you could find this out right? Yeah, I guess
you could. I think no one's going to the trouble
of doing it. It's a good story that everybody likes.
(45:33):
It's not really hurting anything for him to be lying
and for the lie to be perpetuated. Um, it's more
just this is kind of laziness among journalism, I guess,
including us, because I didn't go get to the bottom
of it. I didn't go independently verify any of his claims. Well,
I did see an article that uh. Is that where
(45:55):
you saw it at all? That's interesting dot com? No,
I didn't see it on there, don't worry. I don't
remember where I saw the article of the look go ahead. Well,
there was an article that talked about the fact that
UM that mentioned the comment or whatever and the doubts. Yeah,
I think that's become kind of thing because there was
a viral um, a viral uh video that UM that
(46:20):
made the rounds that was really really interesting, UM because
it's just this cute little animation of this guy's story
in his life. And UM, I guess I saw the
thing about him being being a possible hoax on BBC.
So if you put BBC together and all that's interesting,
you have legitimate fact. Right. And I apologize for looking
(46:44):
at my phone right now, but I'm doing a real
time investigation. And apparently some people have googled and these
plane crashes and things aren't documented, so it sounds like
it might be it might be false names. I don't know, Okay,
but even still, it's a great story. I mean, just
the fact that this guy made up all of this
(47:05):
load of bs during an interview it's pretty la. It's
one of the great improv comedians of all time. Right,
it's a good way to end things too, don't you think. Well,
thanks for joining us, everybody. Thanks for putting on your
smoking jacket and your house slippers, um, putting on a
nice um Berry white record, and uh, relaxing with us.
(47:28):
I hope you feel relaxed. Now, do you feel relaxed?
Chuckers and Jerry does obviously, Jesus I know. Um. Well,
if you want to know more about the unluckiest people
in the world, just go look at stuff on the internet,
may or may not be true. Who really cares? Right? Uh?
And since I said that it's time for a listener mail,
I'm going to call this one a sort of an
(47:49):
older one that I forgot about. So apologies to Jessica
Breslyn because I told her I would read this a
month ago. Hey, guys, love the recent episode on rape
Kits that wanted to make a tiny correction about how
the Golden State Killer was called. Although there was a
time that the Golden State Killers DNA was part of
the backlog, the DNA had actually been identified and linked
to his crimes since the nineties. The problem was they
(48:11):
had no person to compare it to. This change in
two thousand eighteen when they compared it to DNA submitted
to a familial DNA base. When a relative submitted their
DNA to the familiar DNA site, they were able to
see that the DNA was related and from there were
able to narrow down their suspects to two likely family members.
After narrowing it down to those two, they're able to
(48:32):
identify their suspect collect a sample of his DNA to
compare it to the Golden State killers. However, still good
proof on my testing backlog. KITS is still so important. Uh.
You never know what sort of technological breakthroughs will help
law enforcement catch the perpetrators even when you don't have
a suspect. I love the podcast, guys, appreciate all the
hard work and keeping entertaining and respectful even when it's
(48:55):
such sensitive subject matter. And that is Jessica Breslin. I
guess that I was going up there at the end,
wasn't I? Yes, indeed you did go up there, Chuck.
It was kind of a nice little flourish. Well. Thanks
a lot, Jessica. We appreciate the email, um and if
you sorry, for being a month later and reading it.
That was all chuck um. And if you want to
get in touch with this, like Jessica did Um, you
(49:18):
can go to stuff you Should Know dot com check
out our social links. You can in touch with us
that way, or you can send us a good old
fashioned email to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios
How stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(49:39):
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
Show Links
Order Our BookRSSStoreSYSK ArmyAboutPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Death, Sex & Money
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
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.