October 22, 2022 • 50 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 classic episode as Chuck and Josh cover some instances of amazingly bad fortune, most of it true!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and in this week's s Y
s K Select, I chose our listical episode on cases
of people with really bad luck. And as we explained,
we're being pretty broad with the concept of luck here,
but I'm hoping you'll forgive us and enjoy the episode anyway,
because it's pretty interesting and entertaining. It's terestaining. Welcome to
(00:25):
Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. And this is
stuff you should know about people who have really bad
luck to nine of them. Yeah, we can't. I don't
(00:49):
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. It as 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 come up with ten. No,
(01:11):
we couldn't. Vidcan number one. That's a big one. This
intro is definitely up there. To number two. See we're
on our way al right, Um, how are you feeling
pretty good? I'm great. Do you feel lucky? Punk, I'm
a pretty lucky person, and I will say that I
would agree with that fortune. My friends have called me
(01:34):
the rabbit's foot over the years. Yep, that's why they
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
getting pulled over by police and not getting tickets. I mean,
(01:54):
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
have what happened? Did you talk your way out of it?
Or yeah? You know what you do? Man? And my
(02:16):
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,
will delight in writing you that ticket. I mean, even
it's if it's a sideways look and I basically just
(02:38):
throw myselves at the mercy of the court on the
side of the road. I'm like, I'm so sorry, officer,
I you are 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,
but you should take them. You're the hero here. I
think they're always a little disarmed and they're like, oh ohoh, okay,
(02:59):
well I guess I can letch 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
like they were writing the ticket even before I had
a chance to do my little song and dance, and
(03:20):
they brought me the ticket, and I was kind of like, well,
wait a minute, don't you know 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.
And you know, like a lot of these lists usually
(03:41):
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
I'm pretty that's not a bad batting average for realistical Yeah,
(04:02):
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
heard of Ron Wayne before? No? You No, I haven't,
(04:25):
And had I heard his name, I would have been like,
he sounds like porn actor, but he's not a porn actor.
Oh no, that was that was another guy. I can't
say his real name though, who I demand that you
say it. I'll tell you off Mike. Okay. So um.
He turns out this guy was not a pornography actor.
(04:46):
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 six and way Back Machine and
Nerdy Little Jobs and Nerdy Little Wozniak. Our young guys
(05:06):
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 forties, uh,
to come in and kind of help what they called
(05:27):
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 TORII
produced Apple though, did you? Oh? Yeah, I did a
bunch of Atari research stuff for my tech stuff guest
(05:48):
spot Oh okay, cool, Yeah, 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 and go Forth and our new
friend Brent's podcast Hysteria fifty one recently and nice. Yeah,
we talked about the Fermi paradox for like an hour
(06:09):
and it was awesome. So go check that out, Hysteria
fifty one, and go check out that out. Okay, so
plug out right. So we're in nix uh ws and
Jobs have recruited one Won 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
(06:32):
the 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 Wosniacs. 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
(06:55):
the 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.
(07:18):
Um did he really? Yeah? Steve Jobs thought he was
pretty cool from what I understand. Um he Uh. Ron
Wayne was like, I 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. And he was like, all right, I'm out.
(07:40):
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 dollars two d and thirty thousand, you say, no,
(08:03):
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 seventy six, and in n Apple went
public and everybody involved became an instant millionaire, and years
(08:25):
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
hundred bucks. Yeah, and apparently if he had held all
those stocks, uh, he'd be worth close to a hundred
(08:47):
billion dollars. So 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
(09:11):
in anyway, probably, 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,
(09:32):
he said, had he known that and everybody's 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
(09:53):
much five hundred somoleans five dollars and which 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.
(10:14):
Poor Ron Wayne. Now that one's bad luck. I wonder
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
(10:36):
tour manager. Things worked out then, right, And every time
any Money saying I want to go back into her
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 happened, yeah, and
(11:01):
has had tipped to Ron Wayiam 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 meteorite. I'm laughing
and I shouldn't. Um. Well, actually she didn't get that hurt,
(11:26):
so that's why I feel okay laughing. It's not like
it fell on her head and killed her. It's November
thirty four 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
(11:47):
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 edit 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,
(12:08):
pretty nasty, pretty nicety, 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
(12:28):
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 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, there's
(12:51):
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 pee, 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 lightning, and hurricane
(13:13):
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 was like, that's
(13:33):
my space rock because it's my house and she and
and Hodges was 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 she's settled. Actually,
(13:54):
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 meteorite. And you might think, well, okay,
it's not clear that anyone would ever wanted to buy
(14:14):
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, We're gonna cash in. We're
(14:36):
gonna buy the state of Alabama with the proceeds. But
two years later it was totally valueless, and Um and
Hodges actually had 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. It's very sad, um, but that meteorite
(14:59):
is on display at the l bam A Museum of
Natural History, and I hope that there is at least
a small placard 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 take a break? I
think we should? All right, We're gonna take a break
(15:19):
and talk about the unluckiest person in the music industry
right after this change. Chuck, Chuck, I have a tad
(15:51):
bit of anxiety the Beatles. 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 and first Beatles drummer Pete Best
(16:12):
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 the group. But
(16:34):
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, well 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 the Kasbak Coffee
(16:56):
Club in Liverpool. Cool and she was, she was 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 the band and it's good
(17:20):
because now we got a place where we can dig
and we got a drummer that's that can play okay,
and 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 not going to say the
(17:41):
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 him today, where there was like
four of them, there was like a rotating bunch of drummers,
(18:02):
and Pete Best was one 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
(18:22):
pre Hamburg, I think, okay, and then they took him
to Hamburg, which apparently was a big, big turning point
for everybody. They play like 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 they coalesced into a band.
I saw that they arrived wearing Lilacs, sport jackets and
(18:43):
trousers and left wearing black leather jackets and jeans. That's
where they learned sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yeah,
Pete Best 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.
(19:04):
I mean that's kind of a buzz kill, I would guess, right, Yeah,
yeah probably 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 Blackjacks before that though,
went to Hamburg, Hamburg with the Beatles, and then right
(19:28):
after that the Beatles go back to England in two
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
(19:53):
um and Pete Best took it pretty hard, from what
I understand for horrible and a horrible twist of iron.
He ended up working at the Unemployment in 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
(20:14):
not 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,
(20:36):
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 is 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
(20:59):
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
(21:20):
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.
(21:43):
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 me and Paul would
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
(22:04):
him a check just out of guilt? What 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. Hey, he made out. Okay,
I think the lesson here is don't ever get sick. Yeah,
(22:25):
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
(22:45):
a lot of damage, as we saw in two thousand
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 her Urricane um Previously George one
and Betsy in nineteen sixty had destroyed her house by
(23:10):
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 le like, we need to really actually
like protect New Orleans from flooding from hurricanes. And so
the federal government stepped in, the government in Louisiana stepped
in and they really fortified New Orleans so that years later,
(23:32):
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 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 Caribbean or the Gulf. I guess, um,
(23:55):
there's a little town called Bathwaite. They did not fortify
this town, and it just so happened that there's where
Melanie Martinez builds. 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, but it's like it's not
(24:16):
like everybody's house was destroyed every time. Like, this was
truly bad luck to have five houses lost. Uh. 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 aired just a
(24:40):
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'm 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 your house has
(25:02):
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, I'm sure you
apply now that I think 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,
(25:25):
barely escaped 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 meane 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 because of her
(25:49):
elderly mother. She wouldn't have risked her her health. Um,
they got stuck there because her van broke down. Well
but she got out, okay, they yeah, 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
(26:12):
and I've 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.
(26:32):
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
(26:53):
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 was
(27:17):
attacked in the railway station and a hundred and seventy
four people died there. They were all three of those three,
the three biggest terrorist attacks I guess in the West
in the in the century. They were there for, yeah,
the deadliest ones at least, and they thankfully survived all
three of those. But I imagine after those three trips
(27:39):
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, Chuck, okay, chuck. So this one, I
(28:25):
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
(28:45):
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 Else stole the idea for the telephone from
Antonio Miucci, who was an Italian inventor who seemed to
(29:07):
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 trophon, though, which is a much better name
than telephone. Do you think so? I would love it
(29:30):
if people were like, can I borrow your teletrophono? Let
me see your troll bro, let's see there? Right? I
love that so um Antonio Meucci. Uh, he definitely realized
that you could send sound over electrically activated copper wires
back in like the eighteen thirties. He knew this um
(29:51):
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 think
(30:13):
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.
(30:36):
It wasn't until eighteen seventy six at Alexander Graham Bell
got his patent and like you said Meucci, he fouled
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,
(30:59):
you let me oh, 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 Miyuchi 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,
(31:22):
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 Miyugi actually shared a space with Bells. That's when
I was like, uh, okay, it's not a good look
for Bell for sure. Yeah, And then I did a
(31:43):
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
(32:07):
his original idea. Well, Mayucci actually sued Bell and the
case made it all the way to the Supreme Court,
but then Mayucci 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 Mayuci is the inventor of the telephone as far
(32:28):
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 had his extensive
notes about his invention that he would have had to
have falsified, and that apparently had been scrutinized by historians.
So if he was a fraud, he was a really
(32:50):
methodical frauds. Well, that's one of the complaints with Elisha
Gray is that the the sketches were like virtually identical
to Graze. Oh really 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, full EPI, Yes, full
(33:12):
EpiPen right in your thigh, all right, like the time
you got stung by that be 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.
(33:35):
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,
(33:57):
the jackpot was at the time the biggest ever, close
to a billion dollars 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
(34:21):
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't like a dollar? Yeah, 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,
(34:42):
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 one they did win. Um, this town of
(35:03):
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 a minimum of
(35:24):
a hundred and thirty U S. Dollars a d 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,
(35:47):
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
(36:09):
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. Uh, 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
(36:30):
he was like, 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 win 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,
(36:52):
and it 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
(37:14):
because of 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 lasking 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.
(37:34):
Um so chuck, we're moving along. We're going from Spain
to right here in Atlanta. Yeah. Do you remember the
nineties 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 in
the Volkswagen van and we're like, we're getting out of
Atlanta for the Olympics. You did not miss much. Yeah,
(37:58):
I remember everybody in Atlanta who owned 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. Just remember being
(38:22):
on the road and in 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 the
(38:42):
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 that was memorable because it was
a big deal like that, this was an act of
tomestic terrorism here in the United States and it was
at the Olympics, and it actually could have been way
(39:06):
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 of
(39:29):
people standing around it watching a concert by Jack McK
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 Jewels sees this backpack again. This is now a
backpack on the ground. Like everyone would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
(39:51):
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 one'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 was literal fish in the backpack. Sorry,
(40:16):
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 of the next day
he was looked at as a person of interest. Like
(40:36):
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. I remember all
that stuff going down. Yeah, And it's crazy how you
(40:59):
can see somebody differ finally 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 in person agian officers.
So he's clearly like I want to be cop kind
of thing, and um he looked really bad. And then
finally in October, the FBI was like, Richard Jewel, now
(41:21):
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 Jewel'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
much done. Yeah, of course everyone knows the real bomber
(41:43):
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,
he entered he went from the suspect phase to the
late night talk show monologue joke phase. Yeah, that's not
(42:06):
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,
but um it was it was he did not have
(42:27):
like a great last part of his life, all right,
the last one folks breaking news. Josh emails me about
thirty minutes before we recorder so and said, by the way,
the number one guy on the list is a fraud.
I said he maybe a fraud. I thought you said
he was a fraud. I'm trying to see away here. Okay, sorry,
(42:50):
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 front, a slack front everywhere else I saw
at F, A, R and E. I don't know what
to believe anymore. I know, we've just lost touch with reality.
Charles So He has been dubbed the luckiest man in
(43:11):
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, cars
catching on fire, cars plunging off of cliffs, like so
(43:31):
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. That is this real it? So
here's the thing. All of the starts in um, I
believe two thousand five. He buys a lottery ticket, wins
(43:54):
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 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,
(44:18):
and the Scotsman's like, wow, that's fantastic. We're going to
print this. And the Scotsman printed it, and all of
a sudden it started getting picked up by other news outlets,
another news outlets, another news outlets, and then finally and
one of these articles there was 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
(44:41):
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, if
it was an internet commenter, 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
(45:02):
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 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
(45:23):
just this guy makes a really good point that this
dude who everybody says is the luckiest man in the world,
it's possible he made it all up. How can we
not get to the bottom of this? What 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 found out what happened with Frande Selac like you
(45:46):
and me specifically or immediately 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. It's not really hurting
anything for him to be lying and for the lie
to be perpetuated. Um. It's more just it's this kind
of laziness among journalism, I guess, including us, because I
(46:10):
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 you saw it?
All that's interesting dot com? No, I didn't see it
on there. I don't w 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,
(46:33):
I think that's become kind of thing because there was
a viral um, a viral uh video that um that
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
(46:55):
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
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
(47:20):
it might be uh, it might be false claims. 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 load of bs during an interview. It's
pretty layers one of the great improv comedians of all time. Right,
it's a good way to end things too, don't you
think so? Well? Thanks for joining us, everybody. Thanks for
(47:41):
putting on your smoking jacket and your house slippers, um,
putting on a nice um Berry white record, and uh,
relaxing with us. I hope you feel relaxed. Now, do
you feel relaxed? Chuckers? I do, and Jerry does obviously,
Jesus I know. Um, Well, if you want to know
more about the unluckiest people in the world, just go
(48:02):
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 older one
that I forgot about so Apologies to Jessica Breslin because
I told her I would read this a month ago. Hey, guys,
love the recent episode on rape Kits, but wanted to
(48:23):
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 crime since
the nineties. The problem was they 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,
(48:46):
they were able to see that the DNA was related,
and from there were able to narrow down their suspects
to too likely family members. After narrowing it down to
those two, they're able to identify their suspect collect a
sample of his DNA to compare it to the Golden
State Killers. However, still good proof of my testing. Backlog
kits is still so important. Uh. You never know what
(49:06):
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 keep
you entertaining and respectful even when it's such sensitive subject matter.
And that is Jessica Breslin. I guess I just said
I was going up there at the end, wasn't I? Yes,
indeed you did go up there, Chuck. It was kind
(49:28):
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 can go to
stuff you Should Know dot com, check out our social
links can touch with this that way, or you can
send us a good old fashioned email to stuff podcast
(49:50):
at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m
(50:11):
hm
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and in this week's s Y
s K Select, I chose our listical episode on cases
of people with really bad luck. And as we explained,
we're being pretty broad with the concept of luck here,
but I'm hoping you'll forgive us and enjoy the episode anyway,
because it's pretty interesting and entertaining. It's terestaining. Welcome to
(00:25):
Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. And this is
stuff you should know about people who have really bad
luck to nine of them. Yeah, we can't. I don't
(00:49):
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. It as 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 come up with ten. No,
(01:11):
we couldn't. Vidcan number one. That's a big one. This
intro is definitely up there. To number two. See we're
on our way al right, Um, how are you feeling
pretty good? I'm great. Do you feel lucky? Punk, I'm
a pretty lucky person, and I will say that I
would agree with that fortune. My friends have called me
(01:34):
the rabbit's foot over the years. Yep, that's why they
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
getting pulled over by police and not getting tickets. I mean,
(01:54):
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
have what happened? Did you talk your way out of it?
Or yeah? You know what you do? Man? And my
(02:16):
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,
will delight in writing you that ticket. I mean, even
it's if it's a sideways look and I basically just
(02:38):
throw myselves at the mercy of the court on the
side of the road. I'm like, I'm so sorry, officer,
I you are 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,
but you should take them. You're the hero here. I
think they're always a little disarmed and they're like, oh ohoh, okay,
(02:59):
well I guess I can letch 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
like they were writing the ticket even before I had
a chance to do my little song and dance, and
(03:20):
they brought me the ticket, and I was kind of like, well,
wait a minute, don't you know 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.
And you know, like a lot of these lists usually
(03:41):
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
I'm pretty that's not a bad batting average for realistical Yeah,
(04:02):
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
heard of Ron Wayne before? No? You No, I haven't,
(04:25):
And had I heard his name, I would have been like,
he sounds like porn actor, but he's not a porn actor.
Oh no, that was that was another guy. I can't
say his real name though, who I demand that you
say it. I'll tell you off Mike. Okay. So um.
He turns out this guy was not a pornography actor.
(04:46):
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 six and way Back Machine and
Nerdy Little Jobs and Nerdy Little Wozniak. Our young guys
(05:06):
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 forties, uh,
to come in and kind of help what they called
(05:27):
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 TORII
produced Apple though, did you? Oh? Yeah, I did a
bunch of Atari research stuff for my tech stuff guest
(05:48):
spot Oh okay, cool, Yeah, 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 and go Forth and our new
friend Brent's podcast Hysteria fifty one recently and nice. Yeah,
we talked about the Fermi paradox for like an hour
(06:09):
and it was awesome. So go check that out, Hysteria
fifty one, and go check out that out. Okay, so
plug out right. So we're in nix uh ws and
Jobs have recruited one Won 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
(06:32):
the 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 Wosniacs. 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
(06:55):
the 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.
(07:18):
Um did he really? Yeah? Steve Jobs thought he was
pretty cool from what I understand. Um he Uh. Ron
Wayne was like, I 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. And he was like, all right, I'm out.
(07:40):
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 dollars two d and thirty thousand, you say, no,
(08:03):
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 seventy six, and in n Apple went
public and everybody involved became an instant millionaire, and years
(08:25):
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
hundred bucks. Yeah, and apparently if he had held all
those stocks, uh, he'd be worth close to a hundred
(08:47):
billion dollars. So 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
(09:11):
in anyway, probably, 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,
(09:32):
he said, had he known that and everybody's 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
(09:53):
much five hundred somoleans five dollars and which 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.
(10:14):
Poor Ron Wayne. Now that one's bad luck. I wonder
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
(10:36):
tour manager. Things worked out then, right, And every time
any Money saying I want to go back into her
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 happened, yeah, and
(11:01):
has had tipped to Ron Wayiam 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 meteorite. I'm laughing
and I shouldn't. Um. Well, actually she didn't get that hurt,
(11:26):
so that's why I feel okay laughing. It's not like
it fell on her head and killed her. It's November
thirty four 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
(11:47):
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 edit 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,
(12:08):
pretty nasty, pretty nicety, 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
(12:28):
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 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, there's
(12:51):
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 pee, 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 lightning, and hurricane
(13:13):
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 was like, that's
(13:33):
my space rock because it's my house and she and
and Hodges was 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 she's settled. Actually,
(13:54):
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 meteorite. And you might think, well, okay,
it's not clear that anyone would ever wanted to buy
(14:14):
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, We're gonna cash in. We're
(14:36):
gonna buy the state of Alabama with the proceeds. But
two years later it was totally valueless, and Um and
Hodges actually had 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. It's very sad, um, but that meteorite
(14:59):
is on display at the l bam A Museum of
Natural History, and I hope that there is at least
a small placard 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 take a break? I
think we should? All right, We're gonna take a break
(15:19):
and talk about the unluckiest person in the music industry
right after this change. Chuck, Chuck, I have a tad
(15:51):
bit of anxiety the Beatles. 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 and first Beatles drummer Pete Best
(16:12):
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 the group. But
(16:34):
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, well 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 the Kasbak Coffee
(16:56):
Club in Liverpool. Cool and she was, she was 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 the band and it's good
(17:20):
because now we got a place where we can dig
and we got a drummer that's that can play okay,
and 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 not going to say the
(17:41):
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 him today, where there was like
four of them, there was like a rotating bunch of drummers,
(18:02):
and Pete Best was one 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
(18:22):
pre Hamburg, I think, okay, and then they took him
to Hamburg, which apparently was a big, big turning point
for everybody. They play like 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 they coalesced into a band.
I saw that they arrived wearing Lilacs, sport jackets and
(18:43):
trousers and left wearing black leather jackets and jeans. That's
where they learned sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yeah,
Pete Best 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.
(19:04):
I mean that's kind of a buzz kill, I would guess, right, Yeah,
yeah probably 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 Blackjacks before that though,
went to Hamburg, Hamburg with the Beatles, and then right
(19:28):
after that the Beatles go back to England in two
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
(19:53):
um and Pete Best took it pretty hard, from what
I understand for horrible and a horrible twist of iron.
He ended up working at the Unemployment in 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
(20:14):
not 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,
(20:36):
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 is 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
(20:59):
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
(21:20):
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.
(21:43):
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 me and Paul would
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
(22:04):
him a check just out of guilt? What 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. Hey, he made out. Okay,
I think the lesson here is don't ever get sick. Yeah,
(22:25):
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
(22:45):
a lot of damage, as we saw in two thousand
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 her Urricane um Previously George one
and Betsy in nineteen sixty had destroyed her house by
(23:10):
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 le like, we need to really actually
like protect New Orleans from flooding from hurricanes. And so
the federal government stepped in, the government in Louisiana stepped
in and they really fortified New Orleans so that years later,
(23:32):
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 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 Caribbean or the Gulf. I guess, um,
(23:55):
there's a little town called Bathwaite. They did not fortify
this town, and it just so happened that there's where
Melanie Martinez builds. 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, but it's like it's not
(24:16):
like everybody's house was destroyed every time. Like, this was
truly bad luck to have five houses lost. Uh. 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 aired just a
(24:40):
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'm 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 your house has
(25:02):
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, I'm sure you
apply now that I think 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,
(25:25):
barely escaped 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 meane 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 because of her
(25:49):
elderly mother. She wouldn't have risked her her health. Um,
they got stuck there because her van broke down. Well
but she got out, okay, they yeah, 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
(26:12):
and I've 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.
(26:32):
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
(26:53):
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 was
(27:17):
attacked in the railway station and a hundred and seventy
four people died there. They were all three of those three,
the three biggest terrorist attacks I guess in the West
in the in the century. They were there for, yeah,
the deadliest ones at least, and they thankfully survived all
three of those. But I imagine after those three trips
(27:39):
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, Chuck, okay, chuck. So this one, I
(28:25):
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
(28:45):
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 Else stole the idea for the telephone from
Antonio Miucci, who was an Italian inventor who seemed to
(29:07):
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 trophon, though, which is a much better name
than telephone. Do you think so? I would love it
(29:30):
if people were like, can I borrow your teletrophono? Let
me see your troll bro, let's see there? Right? I
love that so um Antonio Meucci. Uh, he definitely realized
that you could send sound over electrically activated copper wires
back in like the eighteen thirties. He knew this um
(29:51):
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 think
(30:13):
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.
(30:36):
It wasn't until eighteen seventy six at Alexander Graham Bell
got his patent and like you said Meucci, he fouled
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,
(30:59):
you let me oh, 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 Miyuchi 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,
(31:22):
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 Miyugi actually shared a space with Bells. That's when
I was like, uh, okay, it's not a good look
for Bell for sure. Yeah, And then I did a
(31:43):
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
(32:07):
his original idea. Well, Mayucci actually sued Bell and the
case made it all the way to the Supreme Court,
but then Mayucci 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 Mayuci is the inventor of the telephone as far
(32:28):
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 had his extensive
notes about his invention that he would have had to
have falsified, and that apparently had been scrutinized by historians.
So if he was a fraud, he was a really
(32:50):
methodical frauds. Well, that's one of the complaints with Elisha
Gray is that the the sketches were like virtually identical
to Graze. Oh really 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, full EPI, Yes, full
(33:12):
EpiPen right in your thigh, all right, like the time
you got stung by that be 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.
(33:35):
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,
(33:57):
the jackpot was at the time the biggest ever, close
to a billion dollars 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
(34:21):
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't like a dollar? Yeah, 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,
(34:42):
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 one they did win. Um, this town of
(35:03):
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 a minimum of
(35:24):
a hundred and thirty U S. Dollars a d 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,
(35:47):
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
(36:09):
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. Uh, 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
(36:30):
he was like, 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 win 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,
(36:52):
and it 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
(37:14):
because of 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 lasking 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.
(37:34):
Um so chuck, we're moving along. We're going from Spain
to right here in Atlanta. Yeah. Do you remember the
nineties 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 in
the Volkswagen van and we're like, we're getting out of
Atlanta for the Olympics. You did not miss much. Yeah,
(37:58):
I remember everybody in Atlanta who owned 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. Just remember being
(38:22):
on the road and in 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 the
(38:42):
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 that was memorable because it was
a big deal like that, this was an act of
tomestic terrorism here in the United States and it was
at the Olympics, and it actually could have been way
(39:06):
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 of
(39:29):
people standing around it watching a concert by Jack McK
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 Jewels sees this backpack again. This is now a
backpack on the ground. Like everyone would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
(39:51):
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 one'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 was literal fish in the backpack. Sorry,
(40:16):
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 of the next day
he was looked at as a person of interest. Like
(40:36):
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. I remember all
that stuff going down. Yeah, And it's crazy how you
(40:59):
can see somebody differ finally 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 in person agian officers.
So he's clearly like I want to be cop kind
of thing, and um he looked really bad. And then
finally in October, the FBI was like, Richard Jewel, now
(41:21):
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 Jewel'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
much done. Yeah, of course everyone knows the real bomber
(41:43):
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,
he entered he went from the suspect phase to the
late night talk show monologue joke phase. Yeah, that's not
(42:06):
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,
but um it was it was he did not have
(42:27):
like a great last part of his life, all right,
the last one folks breaking news. Josh emails me about
thirty minutes before we recorder so and said, by the way,
the number one guy on the list is a fraud.
I said he maybe a fraud. I thought you said
he was a fraud. I'm trying to see away here. Okay, sorry,
(42:50):
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 front, a slack front everywhere else I saw
at F, A, R and E. I don't know what
to believe anymore. I know, we've just lost touch with reality.
Charles So He has been dubbed the luckiest man in
(43:11):
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, cars
catching on fire, cars plunging off of cliffs, like so
(43:31):
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. That is this real it? So
here's the thing. All of the starts in um, I
believe two thousand five. He buys a lottery ticket, wins
(43:54):
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 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,
(44:18):
and the Scotsman's like, wow, that's fantastic. We're going to
print this. And the Scotsman printed it, and all of
a sudden it started getting picked up by other news outlets,
another news outlets, another news outlets, and then finally and
one of these articles there was 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
(44:41):
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, if
it was an internet commenter, 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
(45:02):
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 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
(45:23):
just this guy makes a really good point that this
dude who everybody says is the luckiest man in the world,
it's possible he made it all up. How can we
not get to the bottom of this? What 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 found out what happened with Frande Selac like you
(45:46):
and me specifically or immediately 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. It's not really hurting
anything for him to be lying and for the lie
to be perpetuated. Um. It's more just it's this kind
of laziness among journalism, I guess, including us, because I
(46:10):
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 you saw it?
All that's interesting dot com? No, I didn't see it
on there. I don't w 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,
(46:33):
I think that's become kind of thing because there was
a viral um, a viral uh video that um that
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
(46:55):
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
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
(47:20):
it might be uh, it might be false claims. 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 load of bs during an interview. It's
pretty layers one of the great improv comedians of all time. Right,
it's a good way to end things too, don't you
think so? Well? Thanks for joining us, everybody. Thanks for
(47:41):
putting on your smoking jacket and your house slippers, um,
putting on a nice um Berry white record, and uh,
relaxing with us. I hope you feel relaxed. Now, do
you feel relaxed? Chuckers? I do, and Jerry does obviously,
Jesus I know. Um, Well, if you want to know
more about the unluckiest people in the world, just go
(48:02):
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 older one
that I forgot about so Apologies to Jessica Breslin because
I told her I would read this a month ago. Hey, guys,
love the recent episode on rape Kits, but wanted to
(48:23):
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 crime since
the nineties. The problem was they 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,
(48:46):
they were able to see that the DNA was related,
and from there were able to narrow down their suspects
to too likely family members. After narrowing it down to
those two, they're able to identify their suspect collect a
sample of his DNA to compare it to the Golden
State Killers. However, still good proof of my testing. Backlog
kits is still so important. Uh. You never know what
(49:06):
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 keep
you entertaining and respectful even when it's such sensitive subject matter.
And that is Jessica Breslin. I guess I just said
I was going up there at the end, wasn't I? Yes,
indeed you did go up there, Chuck. It was kind
(49:28):
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 can go to
stuff you Should Know dot com, check out our social
links can touch with this that way, or you can
send us a good old fashioned email to stuff podcast
(49:50):
at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m
(50:11):
hm
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
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