Stuff You Should Know - Evel Knievel Part II

Episode Date: August 11, 2016

In today's episode, we cover part two of our Evel Knievel suite. The man, the myth, the legend. Check in and listen to the latter stages of Evel's career as the world's most legendary daredevil. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

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

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry, and this is part two

of the Evil Can Evil saga, the sequel. Yeah, who knew? We genuinely didn't know. Yeah, we kind of, that's why we didn't set it up as part one of two, because we got into it, and we're like, dude, this thing can't be an hour and a half long. No.

I guess it could, but. No. We found our sweet spot is not an hour and a half of content. We did a one parter on Isaac Newton, but a two parter on Evil Can Evil. All right, so where we left off, we'll just get right into it, huh? Yep.

Evil Can Evil had just completed the Caesars Palace jump. Completing it with his head, and smashed pelvis. Yeah, and by the way, he was in a coma for 29 days after that crash. These were not light injuries. No, we left out a very important point, right? When he went and did that jump, on his way out to the jump area,

he took a hundred bucks, put it on the blackjack table, promptly lost, hit the bar, did a shot of wild turkey, and went out and jumped. Apparently with two showgirls, one under each arm. Right, in head box. That was his style. He lived hard, because he was from the hard land of Butte, Montana.

Right, so he lands, right? And he didn't land on his bike. Like, I can't remember what stuck, but something stuck, I guess his back tire, was it? It was usually his back tire that gave him the trouble. He always almost made it, like you were saying. Yeah. Something, I think it was his back tire,

trying to visualize the crash, but his handlebars just get pulled right out of his hands, because the bike bucked down. Well, and it's just such an impact with that 300 pound bike, he just couldn't hold on. Right, and so once he didn't have the handlebars anymore, he didn't have control, and he goes flying off. Oh, it's tough to watch.

It is tough to watch. Especially in slow motion, which is how I saw it. Yeah, it's the only way to see it. So he has finished this jump with his head, like you said, and his star is bigger than ever. Like, because of this crash, he's more famous than ever. He's making 25 grand per performance by 1968. And it was after the Caesars jump,

where he first starts to plant the seed to the press that he wants to jump the Grand Canyon. Yeah. For some reason, I have a feeling this just came out of his mouth. Like, what's the biggest thing I can think of? Sure. But he started a genuine, seemingly genuine attempt

to get permission from the National Park Service to do this Grand Canyon jump over the years. He needed permission from, I think it was the Interior Department, and they were like, no, absolutely not. And he said, why? Yeah. And they were like, we really have to tell you why

you can't have permission to jump that. But he did keep it up. It was a drum that he beat like, almost constantly during interviews. He would say like, you know, come in one day I'm gonna be able to jump the Grand Canyon. That's gonna be my next big trick. And then in the meantime,

he would set up these other exhibitions. Yeah. And Chuck, you said he was making 25 grand of performance. He was doing a performance a week for a while there. Oh yeah, I mean, he was rich. He was a wealthy man at this point. In 1971, in January on the eighth and ninth,

he broke two records. He sold out the Houston Astrodome twice over. Wow. Two shows in a row. He sold out the Astrodome in 1971, which was a record. And then in February, he broke an actual jump record by jumping 19 cars on that Harley XR750. That's pretty impressive.

It's funny when I'm looking at my liner notes on this, because sometimes I'll just put kind of what's going on. So it reminds me. It just says, jump crash, jump crash, jump crash. That's hilarious. Over and over and over. But that's what I'm saying. Like he would, he crashed a lot.

Yeah, he did. The Pepsi truck one, it turns out it was 13 Pepsi trucks. Yeah. He crashed that one. That one, it wasn't necessarily his fault. Like he had a fairly short run-up distance and it went pavement, grass pavement, not ideal. Yeah, again, he didn't really think through,

I don't know if he didn't think through. Or he didn't have people thinking it through on his behalf. Yeah, well, he would just do whatever, like I said earlier, like, well, this is how much room I have. Not like, well, maybe I don't have enough room. Right, maybe this is a bad idea. Well, I said I'd do it.

So if I die, oh well. Well, and his famous quote he always said was, it's not about crashing, you know, it's about getting up and trying it again. You know, it's kind of a trite saying. It's direct from success through a positive mental attitude. Yeah, probably so, his favorite book. So the Grand Canyon thing is building steam

in some ways as far as leaking it to the press, but the government is still like, no, you can't do that. Little boys all over the country are, I think his one quote was, little boys want to be like me, men want to be me, and women want to be with me. Just FYI. Yeah, he definitely thought a lot of himself.

So finally, officially the U.S. Department of Interior said, I'm denying you airspace over the Grand Canyon, this is not gonna happen. Please stop calling us. Yes, yeah. So what does he do? Well, he apparently was on a plane ride and he was over Idaho,

and noticed that there was a pretty good sized canyon that was formed by the Snake River around. What's that down there? That looks like a canyon. Yeah. I'll jump that. There's more than one canyon in the U.S. And he decided to go check it out.

Outside of Twin Falls, Idaho, he found a little area that was just perfectly wide. There was enough run-up on either side for him to try to jump it. Well, he didn't need much run-up. And he, well, he didn't know at the time, he thought he was gonna use a motorcycle. Did he really?

Yeah, he did. A rocket cycle. And he, most importantly though, it was privately owned. Yeah. So he didn't need permission from any kind of government agency. Exactly. He did, actually.

He had to get permission from the local, I think the county, to register the vehicle. Is that it? Uh-huh. And they registered it as an airplane, even though it was actually a rocket, a steam-powered rocket. Yeah, he leased 300 acres for 35 grand and said, September 72, it's going down.

ABC Sports said, we're not gonna pay whatever you're asking. So he said, fine, remember how this worked out last time. Yeah. I'm gonna hire Bob Aram, who was a boxing promoter. He still is, I think. Yeah, his name sounded familiar. Unless he's passed away, but he was.

For top-ranked productions, he said, all right, you handle the filming and we'll do this new fangled thing called Close Circuit TV, show it in movie theaters. Well, we're all gonna get rich. Hardest subcontractor and actually got engineers for this. And they built that X-1 sky cycle, which like you said, I'd forgotten.

It was gonna be a rocket motorcycle, a rocket-powered motorcycle. And they built it and tested it and it went right down, a mile down into the river. And he said, maybe we should just do it like a straight-up rocket. Yeah. And this dude, this engineer,

so we hired an engineer named Doug Malawiki. And Doug Malawiki subcontracted the actual design and construction out to another aeronautics engineer. His name is Robert, I can't figure out how to say this guy's last name. It's spelled like Truex. I think it's Truex. Truex, not Tro.

Yeah, I think I remember the documentary, it was Robert Truex. Okay, so Robert Truex was the guy who actually designed and I believe built the rocket, the steam-powered rocket. Yeah, the X-2. That Eva Knievel used to jump the Snake River Canyon, right? Yeah. And as you'll see, it didn't go according to plan.

So this guy's son is the one who is behind this jump that's being done by Eddie Braun in September because he wants to vindicate his father that this thing would have made it, had this parachute net deployed and kept him from making it. So he's like, he wants to show that this would have worked and that his dad who's had lots of scorn heaped on him over the years,

including publicly by Eva Knievel that it was all quite unfair. Well, we're getting something in a minute which makes him seem like a bigger jerk even. But things are going well. Well, that's not exactly true. September 8th, 1974, it's gonna go down. This thing had turned into the party of the century. Like a hippie Hell's Angels biker party.

A huge one. And this is like Twin Falls, Idaho is not like a hippie biker town. It was like a normal God fearing country town. And all of a sudden thousands of hippie biker weirdo druggies show up and start partying in town. Yeah, they were hammered. They were drunk.

They were high on grass. Setting fires to stuff. Setting fires. It was completely out of hand. They had no idea it was gonna attract this many people and became like a three day party. Right. Did you say grass?

Yeah, they were high on grass. It was 1972 terms. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, gotcha. Now it's a weed probably. Herb, the herb. Nugs. So it's a huge party.

It's like wood stock. People are drunk out of their minds. Yeah. High on the grass. Yeah. I bet you there's some LSD going around. Maybe even. Maybe some Benny's.

And on this documentary I saw there was a real fear they had a temporary fencing put up to keep people away. Cause the lip of the canyon is just a straight drop. Right. A mile down. Yeah, so they have this temporary fencing and we'll talk about the jump in a second,

but when it actually goes down, they bum rush this thing. Cause you couldn't see what was going on. I know dude. And there was a real fear that there were going to be mass deaths. Like lemmings. Yeah.

Where people would get shoved off the lip of this canyon cause the people up front would just run and stop. Right. And then 5,000 people behind them. I don't even know how many people, there was more than 5,000 even I think. Yeah. But yeah, that they were just gonna be like hundreds

and hundreds of people shoved unwillingly to their death. Yeah. I guess more like the three stooges than lemmings. I mean, that could have happened. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at pictures, I saw a video of this and there's just people like just looking over the ledge.

Yeah. I don't know how I did neither. It's like you just describing it scares me. You got a little shudder. So here's what happens. Evil can evil is not feeling good about this. He literally goes to his family in the trailer and says goodbye and they interviewed his family

and they were like, this sucked. Like we really thought we were saying goodbye to our father forever. Like we thought he was gonna die that day. No like PT Barnum BS going on. Right. Like we thought we were gonna see his death in front of our face.

So he goes off and the promoter apparently was like, had these armed guards. He said that they looked like they were there for the crowd control. He said they were there to make sure he got in that rocket. He said because I was not gonna let this not go down with that scene going on there. So he gets in, they do the countdown.

This steam rocket goes off. It was built from I think the fuel tank of a jet. Yeah. It's like a little one man rocket. Yeah. And they like superheated this water. I think like 500 degrees to create this blast of steam. It takes off and almost immediately the parachute

is deployed, which provides drag and it did not get very far. No, but apparently if you look at the initial trajectory, it was right on target, which is why the engineer's son is like, it would have worked. It will work if the parachute doesn't deploy. And in the engineer's defense, the promoter and evil Knievel said, we're not testing this.

We already spent a bunch of money on that X2 cycle or the X1 rocket cycle. So just make it right. So they had one parachute, they didn't test it. And when he did this jump, it was the jump as well as the only test that they'd done, right? So the parachute did deploy, but they think that had it not deployed,

he totally would have made it. But the parachute did deploy. So he didn't make this jump and started drifting, luckily attached to a parachute, into a mile deep canyon. The thing is, I can't believe they did this. They had him harnessed in, his jumpsuit was like strapped to the seat of his thing.

So he had no way of getting out. He needed help to get out. And apparently there's no one waiting in the canyon down below to help get him out. They were all on the other side of the canyon. So had he landed in the river, he would have drowned because he had no way of getting out. Luckily he landed within feet of the river.

So it goes a mile down, drifting slowly, totally up in the air. It's like a Plinko chip at this point. No one knows where it's gonna land. And he landed within a few feet of the water so that he survived. Amazing. Yeah, you know how I teased you and said

there's a little tidbit that makes him seem like a jerk. There is speculation that evil can evil pull that shoot. Oh really? Because he didn't think he was gonna make this thing. And he might not have thought he was gonna make it to begin with and it was all just a big publicity stunt. And he knew that he could pull that shoot as soon as he took off and float safely down.

Wow. So in the documentary they talk about a little bit, I saw another VH1, what's the butt? Behind the evil? Yeah, something like that. Where he was, or true Hollywood story I think, E Network and he, they talk about it in there too. They were like, his hand was on that lever.

Like he was the one responsible for pulling that thing because they entered the engineer and he was like, I don't know how this thing, like it shouldn't have deployed. Like he was getting all the scorn. Well, yeah. He couldn't figure out how it deployed. And evil, can evil even call them an idiot? He's like, I never liked that engineer.

He was an idiot. So that does make it way worse. Cause apparently also the engineer was very surprised to hear this because they were good friends. They'd become good friends over the course of this project. Now he's publicly calling them an idiot. Yeah, I think he took that secret to his grave. So we'll never know.

But there was definitely speculation that he never intended to make that jump. I had not heard that. Yeah, which is pretty remarkable. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back because believe it or not, he kept jumping. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

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

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Josh, Snake River Canyon is in the books. It is. And apparently he made like $6 million from that joke. Oh, really? Yeah, that's what he personally netted. And then spend it like in the next three weeks on diamonds. Yeah, because.

Like, yeah, we'll talk more about that later. All right, so now we move forward a few years. He's in between 72 and 75, does plenty of other jumps and had plenty of other hospital stays. And then in May, 1975, in front of, once again, ABC's wide world of sports, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. You watched.

Was that still around when you were around? No, I watched the Laugh Olympics. Wide world of sports is like the biggest thing on TV on Sundays. Yeah, no, it was, I think it was on. It just never caught my fancy. Man, it was so great. The weekend, seriously, it was just all about cartoons with me. Yeah.

You know, like there was that point. Cartoons would start at like seven in the morning and then go to like 10, 30, 11 sometimes. Yeah. And then like non-cartoons would start and just be like. That's when you take a nap and put this on TV. You said, and then I'd nap till prime time. Right.

So in 75, he says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do the biggest jump in my career in England. World renowned jumper at this point. I can go to London, England. Yeah, because again, not just like he's on the wide world of sports and he's known for the Snake River Canyon jump and like the Caesars Pals.

There's the stunt cycle toy was the largest selling toy of Christmas 1973. Yeah, he made a ton of money off that. Atari had a stunt cycle like video console in 1976. Oh, yeah. There were action figures. There's a whole action figure line by Ideal. He was making mad cash from just being a daredevil.

Yeah, ads. He was a pitch man. He was making money hand over fist. And like we say, over and over, spending it. And he was huge. He was just a huge star. It's such a 70s thing to be a star for being a daredevil. Yeah.

Yeah, it beats the 2010s thing of just being a star for being famous. No, agreed. You know, at least this guy was doing something. Yeah, did Kim Kardashian ever put her life on the line? No. That's what I want to see. Being Paris Hilton's assistant, probably,

but she survived it. Oh, she was her assistant? That's where she started out. Really? Well, what do you mean started out? She started out as a rich kid in Brentwood. She did, but she wasn't a celebrity by any means until, well, until that sex tape.

But I think she was Paris Hilton's assistant at the time that came out. That's weird. Yeah, it is weird. You know, Paris Hilton has my same eye affliction, the ptosis. You, Paris Hilton, Forest Whitaker. Tom York. Oh, yeah, he's got it too, huh?

Yeah, I might get that fixed one day. I don't think you should. It adds a tremendous amount of character. I don't know. It's easy to say when you don't have a droopy eyelid. I think you should keep that vestigial tail right? Yeah. That's character.

Yeah, I like it when you wag it. We'll see. What it's doing is it's inhibiting my vision somewhat. Well, then I could see that. You know, not a ton, but like when I lift my eyelid up all the way, I'm like, oh, I can see 15% more of the room. There's the sky. Yeah.

Anyway, that's my issue. In Paris. In Paris. So in 1975, he's at Wembley Stadium, sold out Wembley Stadium in London, England, and he's going to jump. Did you say how many people that is? Well, this says 90,000.

The other article said 70. Either way, that's a bunch. Between 70 and 90,000, let's say. I don't think we could sell that, sell out Wembley. No, but we sold out two shows in London. So they clearly have a Jones for. American Americans making asses of themselves. So he jumps these AEC Merlin buses.

These are not the double-deckers, but they're still buses. And it's a big jump. It's, I believe, his biggest to date. And he crashes, of course, breaks his back. Broke his back. Yeah. And in the very famous footage told Frank Gifford, I came in walking.

I went out walking, because Frank Gifford's like, get this guy, stretcher. Right. He's broken his back. And Evil's like, I'm walking out. And he did. He did. He wasn't smart, but he did it.

Yeah. Then he goes to another huge jump at King's Island Theme Park in Ohio. I've been there. I bet. Is it still around? I don't know, but I've been there. I went when I was a kid.

It's clearly, where is it? You know, I don't know. I was always a passenger. I have no idea what part of Ohio it's in. But it's clearly second banana to. Cedar Point. To Cedar Point. Pretty much everything is.

And the world is second banana to Cedar Point. Yeah, no, this is a, your parents hate you. So they take you to King's Island instead of Cedar Point. Gotcha. Yeah. So he makes this jump at Cedar Point at King's Island. And it is, at the time, the highest rated event in wild, wild, wide, it's a tough one.

Wide world of sports history. Still. Still? Yeah. I guess so, the show's not around. Right. Yeah. 163 feet successful jump.

I don't think he even crashed on this one. Yeah. This is an all around good one for him. Yeah. You got the buses. It's at King's Island. Successful. Set a record.

Highest rated. Everything's coming up bases on this one. It is coming up bases. And he says he's retiring. Yeah. Yep, he started to say that a lot starting with this jump. After just about every jump, he'd be like, that's it. I'm done.

I'm never going to do it again. And then he would do it again. And actually, I believe he retired after, yeah, he retired after Wimbley. Oh, OK. That's the famous line was, I remember now, he crashed spectacularly, grabbed the mic, and told the stadium that you are the last people in the world

who will ever see me jump. I will never, ever, ever, ever jump again I am through. And then five months later, he jumped to King's Island. And then retired after that one. Right. Then he retired after that one. He did another one shortly after that at the Kingdom in Seattle. Actually, it was a year after that when he retired again.

That one, that was like Tyson's last fight. Like he jumped seven Greyhound buses. And I guess the crowd was fine with it. But he apologized for it being not so great. For not being risky enough. Yeah. And so he retired again. And then he came back again.

That's right. And this time, he was channeling the fawns. Oh, yeah. He was going to jump a tank of sharks. He's going to literally jump the shark. Yeah. And he did. Well, he didn't.

1977 in Chicago, he saw Jaws, the movie, and said, just like, he kind of reminds me of my dad a little bit. My dad has this weird, if he would have had a ton of money, he would have had this kind of weird excess. Yeah. Crazy ideas. Like the bomb shelter after the day after.

Yeah. I was like, these dudes of this generation, though, something, they were all crazy. Yeah. They still hadn't, they didn't get movies yet. Yeah. I think that's what it was. So he says he's going to jump a bit of sharks, put it on TV,

and during rehearsal, he has a really bad crash and actually severely injured a cameraman. Yeah, the guy lost his eye. Yeah. And I guess that was a really big deal that evil can even. Yeah. He was like, can't come back from that one. Nope.

So did he not do the actual jump? No, I think he called it off. Had I been the cameraman, I would have been like, so I just lost my eye for nothing. Yeah, he's like, get in that shark tank. Yeah. At least do the jump. Yeah.

And apparently he sat on that footage for almost 20 years and then there was finally a documentary, not the one I saw, but another one where he allowed that footage to be shown. And then he did retire. See, now this is smart. I am sure the camera operator was like, oh, you couldn't have retired before you took my eye out. Yeah, not a week earlier.

But that was the one where he finally is like, I'm done. And he had a great quote. It was a professional supposed to know when he has jumped far enough. Good quote. It is a pretty good quote. And like you said, it wasn't just the Seattle jump that he started doing less risky jumps toward the end,

period, that were like, I guess he lost his nerve, maybe after Boise or Twin Falls to Sneak River. Maybe. Because it seems like that's where about it changed. Things changed. Although, no, I guess it would have been Wembley because you got to have a lot of nerve to try that. Yeah.

So maybe after he broke his back, he was like. Probably. Who knows? All right, well, let's take another break here. And we'll wrap it up with a little bit more on his private life and all those broken bones. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know.

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

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Broken bones, Josh. You know the old rumor that he broke every bone in his body? Yeah. Not true. No. But he does hold a record for most broken bones.

He does? Oh, yeah, man. Because he said he's broken 35 bones. OK. That didn't seem like a record. 35 bones, 433 fractures of those 35 bones. Oh, OK. Gotcha, gotcha.

And I believe both of those are records, as far as Guinness is concerned. Well, when you look, his own website has a neat little chart where the injuries are broken up into fractured, broken, broken and replaced, and broken multiple times. The other one that I'm curious about is crushed. Like he crushed his pelvis.

Is that an actual medical term? You see it very frequently. What has to take place for a bone to be considered crushed? My interpretation of that, which is completely made up, is that it's fractured so severely it goes beyond multiple fractures. It can't put Humpty back together again? Into just crushed.

Into powder, a fine powder? That's what comes to mind. I'm sure that's not what happens. But I think of a big pile of sawdust in his butt. But if you look at his injury list, it's skull, nose, teeth, jaw, left and right clavicle, sternum, upper vertebrae, right arm, left arm, all ribs, pelvis three times, coccyx, both wrists,

hip and ball socket, lower vertebrae, femur. Five times he broke his femur. Can you believe that? Yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. Right knee, right shin, both ankles, toes. It looks like his left, below his femur on his left leg, he was virtually unscathed. Weird.

Isn't that weird? Yeah. No left shin, no left. He must have just said both ankles. Typically fallen in a certain fashion. Maybe. You know, this is. Ass over apple cart, I think is what they call it.

These are his bones too. This isn't taking into account the coma he was in and the multiple concussions he suffered. Yeah, and I think he, there was like internal bleeding and things like that along the way too. And as a result of this, there was, there were rumors that still stand, although I couldn't find much in the way of substantiation of him,

that he was, he took drugs himself. Probably painkillers. Apparently his good friends were like he ate them like candy. Yeah. While grandstanding against drugs. So that was a really big part of what he was doing. And one of the reasons why he did become a role model to a whole generation of young boys was he,

he had set himself up like that. He would at the, at the beginning of every show, he would basically do like a, a don't do drugs message. Yeah. Stay in school, keep your word. And these were what, what he considered as his core values. Yeah. Right.

So, yeah, the idea that like he was doing drugs himself, it's, I, I have the impression if he was, it was a very much an Elvis interpretation. Like these aren't drugs, my doctor gave them to me. Right. I'm completely hooked on them, but I got them from the doctor. I need them for pain.

Right. Bad. Not like he was like hitting like bumps of coke or something before he was, you know, hitting the ramp. Yeah. He was a bad drinker too. Huge, huge drink, lots of wild turkey. Yeah. He, at one point he said he probably drank

about a fifth of whiskey a day with beer chasers in between. That's a lot. Yeah. Especially when you're trying to control a motorcycle jumping 163 feet over some Greyhound buses. Well, I don't think he would do those jumps wasted or anything, but he would like to probably drink afterward. He would take his traditional shot of wild turkey before.

Okay. To steal the nerves. So you think he did it straight? Yeah. I don't think he was jump, drinking, drunk, jumping. I'm very curious. You think? Yeah. But a lot of the stuff, a lot of the dirt

that we know about Evil Caneville came out in a book by his former publish, publishes, named Shelly Saltman. Yeah. That was a big deal in the documentary. So I think after the Snake River Jump in 1974, Saltman published a book about the jump and it was an authorized book. Yeah. But Saltman decided to point out that working,

working for Evil Caneville, a day spent working for Evil Caneville was like spending three hours at the dentist without Novocaine. Yeah. That he, he said that he abused, he was abusive towards his family. Yeah. That he was totally hooked on drugs and drank

and was immoral and all this other stuff. Just completely hung out all the guy's dirty laundry. Yeah. May or may not have made up rumors. Well, and this is when he could still lead kind of a private life. Right. You know about this stuff now, but it's not like today,

like if you're in carousing women and bars, there's 10 people filming you with a cell phone. Right. And like within minutes, it's like out on the internet. No, this is like, it took a tell-all biography for this kind of stuff to get out, right? So Evil Caneville goes and finds the guy and attacks him with a baseball bat.

Yeah. And he had two broken arms at the time. Yeah. If Evil Caneville did. Oh, he did. He like left the hospital with two broken arms and said, give me that bat and attacks his former good friend.

Okay. Like really badly. Well, he broke, yeah. He shattered one of his arms. The guy had his arm up to defend himself and that arm got shattered. Yeah. And this was where everything really went off the rails.

Yeah. He did six months for that. Six months in jail. And this is at a time when his stars as high as it could have possibly been. Yeah. Remember he had those action figures of ideal days making so much money?

Yep. Going to prison actually voided his contract with them. So he lost all of his licensing fees from that. And that was a huge source of his income at the time. Yeah. That him being in prison, he had started this daredevil craze and there were lots of people nipping at his heels.

Him going to jail opened up this huge vacuum to where every daredevil in the world was trying to fill it now. Yeah. There was actually this guy that House of Works recently ran a great article on called The Human Fly. And his star rose because he was trying to fill this void left by evil Knievel when he was in prison.

So we're going to do a show on him too, right? We've got to. Yeah. But so I won't say anything more. Okay. But it was a big deal. This is where things like really went downhill for him. But his son said, I read an interview

with his son in the Guardian, his oldest son Kelly, who I think is kind of the executor of his estate and everything. He said that this definitely was where it went downhill, but his dad's life never circled the drain or anything like that. Right. He didn't just go completely overboard or off the rails,

despite the fact that the family lost all their finances within a few years. Yeah. He had to pay Shelley Saltman $12 million. Well, he didn't pay him a cent. Oh, he didn't? No. Yeah, he was ordered to.

Yeah, there was a lot of, like all the money just went away. Yeah. The reason he had to serve his full sentence, he probably would not have had the judge not found out that in his prison work release program, he was being chauffeured in a limousine convertible back and forth and arranged for other inmates to get limousine transportation for their work release.

Oh, yeah. So the judge didn't think that was very funny. Yeah. You're going to serve your whole sentence. So he did six months. Did the full six months. And like you said, his beyond just losing money for the licensing, everything kind of went south

for him after that in life. His star fate was fading. It was not a great time to attack someone with a baseball bat, you know? It wasn't like early in his career, he might have survived something like that. It's not like 1940s or 50s butte Montana. Yeah, but people were kind of losing interest a bit.

Well, yeah, he very wisely kind of faded back into the woodwork a lot. He had already stopped doing stunts, but he was still doing public appearances, but more as like a motivational speaker or something like that. This was where he really began to retire. Yeah, he made his own movie in 1977

called Viva Conevil with Gene Kelly, sadly. And... Wait, why? That Gene Kelly was in this. Gene Kelly's great. I know, it's sad for Gene Kelly. Oh, gosh. He was in this garbage movie.

I see, I see, okay. Lauren Hutton was in it and... And she's great too. Evil Can Evil played himself as Evil Can Evil, and he was bad. And the plot was that he foiled Mexican drug traffickers, right? Yeah, I mean, it kind of opens...

I mean, it was clearly him saying like, this is a story I want to tell. Like it opens with him like rescuing an orphan on his motorcycle out of a bad orphanage and like riding him out of there. And then he foils crimes and... Forcing the orphan to make knockoff wallets? Yeah, and that, you know, he even charms,

I think the thing in the review I read said he, quote, eventually charms the feminist reporter assigned to him, which is Lauren Hutton. Really? Oh yeah. So he was one of those like, you know, what are you ladies, you writing a bad article on me? Watch this.

I'll charm the socks off of you. Right. Pants off. It's worth watching a bit of that, or at least the trailer on online. I would definitely, I'd watch that movie for sure. I want to see the George Hamilton movie of him. George Hamilton as Evil Can Evil?

I'm sure even George Hamilton was like me. Well, McConaughey for years was going to do a movie. He would have been perfect, I think. He kind of had that look a little bit. Hey man. And the swagger. Yeah. Pants off.

Pants off. But now I think that movie's been trying to be made for so many years now. It is currently Darren Aronofsky directing Channing Tatum as Evil Can Evil. Really? So we'll see. Okay.

I like Channing Tatum. I do too, but he's just got this vulnerability that I don't think even he's aware of that he brings to every role. And I don't think it belongs anywhere near Evil Can Evil. Well, that's true. Cause he was like McConaughey would have been perfect. I think he would have.

But Channing Tatum, he's one of those guys that did not want to like, but then it turned out like he was a pretty good actor and funny and sort of self-deprecating despite his looks. So I was like, I guess I do like this guy. Yeah. I got nothing against him. I just don't think he'd be a good Evil Can Evil.

Yeah, may hear you. Well, he's an actor though. He's an actor. He doesn't have to personify the role. Yeah, I guess if George Hamilton did it, Channing Tatum can do it. I think I've told this story before. One of my good friends said that he saw George Hamilton

on The Tonight Show in the seventies and Hamilton said that he never wore the same pair of socks twice. He always wore a brand new pair of socks. And my friend was like eight years old and he was just thought that was the most. He's so rich. Yeah, like exotic, wonderful thing of all time.

And he still thinks about George, I almost said Alexander Hamilton, of George Hamilton when he gets new socks and put some on him. That's funny. Nice. So, Can Evil ended up being married twice. His first wife, Linda, 38 years.

She hung in through the thick and thin. He divorced and then married a woman named Crystal Kennedy in 1999 for two years. They were married. Yeah, but apparently they'd been together for a very long time. And so, he was like, While he was previously married.

I believe so. Yeah. I saw her described as his long time partner. Yeah, like she helped him after, during his illness and it was a sad thing at the end for his family and friends to see him that way. Right, well, apparently when they were married for two years, they divorced and then reconciled

and then lived together as friends but unmarried. They never remarried, but they stayed very close. Gotcha. And he eventually died of, well, what was it exactly? He died oddly enough of diabetes. Okay. Well, he had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

So, I believe he actually had a heart condition is what it sounds like. No, a lung condition, a breathing problem. And I guess the impression that I have is that he just had just worn his body down. Yeah. But it wasn't like he broke a bone or slipped on a banana peel

or something like you'd expect, you know? Yeah, and his, when, in any of the documentaries his friends and family talked about how sad it is when you see someone that lived a life like he did to be so sick and I think he converted to Christianity late in life and sort of. Yeah, he was baptized publicly. Yeah, tried to come clean about not having done

the right thing a lot of times and, you know, kind of the classic story, deathbed regrets. Gotcha. But he became, I mean, he was a legend. He's an American legend for sure. Yeah, he was buried in Butte in 2007. And one kind of cool thing that happened, he very much, they call him like the godfather

of the X games because he kind of inspired all that stuff. And they brought him back to the X games before he died and paid tribute to him. And it was kind of cool seeing all these kids that were like, you know, like you're the dude. Right. You are evil, kind of evil. Oh, he got to experience that?

Yeah, because he was kind of broke at this point and not doing well. And he saw all these people kind of paying homage to him and saying like, you're the reason all this is here. That's cool. And I'm sure he was probably like, well, can I get a cut of it? All right.

You just said I was the reason. Right. You know, I get my lawyer on the phone. His very famous, mostly white and red and blue jumpsuit. I've never heard anyone say it that way. And his motorcycle are in the Smithsonian. Yeah. Good old white, blue and red.

Right. That's how true patriots say it. That's right. If you want to know more about Evil Can Evil, you can't because there's nothing more to know because we said everything. But in just in case you can type those words in the search bar of your favorite search engine,

you know, we'll bring up some really interesting stuff. And since I said search engine, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this differential equations. Hey guys, big fan. It's really excited on the latest show on chaos theory. Maybe the most relevant episode in my line of work thus far I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering

at Auburn University. Boo. Boo. And I'm currently instructing a class on system dynamics and controls. I can't believe you mentioned differential equations. Been harping on my students on the importance of the diff EQ. But it is a hard sell.

It's not hard to believe, my friend. Even more relevant was your decision on deterministic systems. Whereas my work deals primarily with determinism's evil relative stochastic systems, randomness, my field of research involves state estimation which put crudely is the practice of applying statistics to make a best guess of a system's state,

i.e. position, temperature, pressure, et cetera. Obviously. The beauty of estimation lies in its ability to use knowledge of a measurement's uncertainty or even the uncertainty in the initial condition for producing an optimal estimate. Anyway, I could go on and on and just wanna say great show, great episode, great podcast.

A side note was the Isaac Cream Newton bit, a nod to Wu-Tang Clan. No. As in cash rules everything around me, C-R-E-A-M, cream. Get the money. Get the money, dollar bills, bills, y'all. Dollar, dollar bills, y'all. Right.

That's from Dan. Dan's multi-talented. Yeah. He's into Wu-Tang and mechanical engineering. Yeah, at Auburn. And he's doing it all. Yeah. Living the dream.

Like Kennebel, Kennebel style. Thanks a lot, Dan. We appreciate that. If you wanna get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can join us on Instagram at SYSK Podcast too. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast

at howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

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