By that afternoon he is standing on the same Humvee giving his company the speech, then leading them through a cleared lane in the minefield at the Iraq border. What's waiting on the other side isn't the enemy. It's the desert: a hard crust over powder as fine as talcum, and once you stop, you're stuck.

This is 2003, Part 2. The march north.

In the dark he marks Bedouin trails with chem lights and drives straight into a camp full of camels, hanging glow sticks on the tent lines while the family comes out to watch. A yellow light blinks on and off in the distance: two young soldiers alone with a broken-down heavy hauler, waiting for somebody to come along. A box truck packed front to back with bags of ice gets stuck for good, and somewhere out there a Bedouin family woke up to a running freezer. He hasn't slept in days, and he looks at his own driver and asks, "Who are you?"

Then a fuel leak that turns out to be something else entirely. A sandstorm that comes in like a wall ten stories high with lightning inside it, turns 4:30 in the afternoon pitch black, and leaves the world looking like Mars. His supply sergeant crawls along the commo wire to find a tent. And on the morning of March 23, at the head of a traffic jam thousands of vehicles long, someone tells him happy anniversary. It's his first.

He closes with the advice a battalion commander gave his leaders at RAMS: things are going to go wrong. Stop, take a deep breath, say a prayer, and then go do what you've got to do.

Also this week: Sally the tortoise breaks through the barricade, Terry's fishing trip comes home with 15 perch (and a bag somebody else left in the freezer), and the mailbag has an Alomar ball signed in purple ink, a referee from the college boxing match, and a review from a soldier who served with Jeremy in 2003.

Audio note: you'll hear a burst of static a couple of times in this episode. It's in the recording, not your speakers. Sorry about that.

Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

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A Most Unpredictable Life: Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

It isn't there. The next day he walks down again, and it is — and he remembers how happy that made his mom. Weeks later the family is out of the house on Church Street, and he's the new kid in Wooster, halfway through third grade, in Apartment B of a house split in two.

This is 1983. A move, a new school, and a year he remembers as happy.

On his first day at the new school he gets two notes from three girls. "Do you like me? Check yes or no." He checks yes. "So I committed day one." A stranger in an orange hat knocks on the door and asks if he plays baseball, and drives him to every practice. His best friend Leon's dad works at Frito-Lay, the house is full of snacks, and there's a ColecoVision. Kick the can every night in the alley. The first time he ever hears rap music is from the back seat of Leon's big brother's green car.

And one small metal square, sewn onto his swim trunks. Families on welfare got a free pool pass — and the pass also worked on the city bus. So all summer, a nine-year-old rides the bus around Wooster by himself, looking at the big houses, buying Mad magazine at City News, spending his arcade tokens next to the theater where he saw Superman III with his brother.

Jeremy brought a prop this week: a real food stamp. "As soon as I saw this, it brought back…"

There's a Fiat that only starts if a nine-year-old pops the clutch on the way down the hill. A giant Easter basket hidden behind the TV. His first fish, which he wants to put back in the lake. And one more move before Christmas — to a new apartment he thought was high class — and a plan: Mom's boyfriend is going to Florida to get things ready, and they're all going to follow.

"I don't remember being unhappy."

Terry's 1983: a band director with a church of twenty people, a year of substitute teaching everything from first grade to calculus — "I don't give hall passes, so don't ask me" — and a wedding receiving line where his brother introduces him to a girl named Kelly, and for the first time in his life he can't say a word. He married her three years later.

Also this week: Crystal sends a "Best Lewis Ever" shirt, the bingo card gets easier (and now has trivia), and Terry sings "Every Breath You Take."

Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

A sand berm somebody had pushed up with a bulldozer. Concertina wire around it. A few tents, two of them knocked over and lying on the ground. A pallet of cots. It is dark, and the instruction is: take a cot, find a tent, go to sleep.

In the morning they walk to the wire and look out, and there is still nothing. "We're just out in the middle of nowhere." And Jeremy — a 29-year-old captain with 180 soldiers coming behind him — says the line that explains most of his life: "It's always wild how I end up in these spots where we're just the first ones there."

This is 2003, part one of three. It ends on the first night of the war.

In between: a colonel at the port setting up a paper easel who says "just be patient with us, we're trying to figure things out" — "it's like that example of building the airplane in flight." The fuel math, which turns out not to be about fuel at all: you can carry every gallon you need and still fail, because refueling a brigade in under an hour is a problem about nozzles. Ten 500-gallon bladders strapped to the tops of trailers. A platoon sergeant and a lieutenant out on the sand with a stopwatch, running the same drill until the trucks knew where to line up in the dark.

A cousin who knocks on the door of the command post — 3-7 Cav has rolled in and nobody told him. A photograph on the wall of an Air Force medical tent that turns out to be a guy he went to college with: "Really? Yeah, that's my husband." A wrestling title, self-awarded, undefeated, disputed on air.

And the dining facility burning to the ground in minutes, because of what they spray on the tents to waterproof them. A cook running up in tears: Sergeant Joseph went back in. He thought people were still inside. Everyone was out. And in the ashes, on the table they'd been using as an altar since the first sergeant started holding services there — the Bible, open, untouched.

Then the last night. Jeremy asleep on the hood of his Humvee against the flat windshield. A sound like an F-15 tearing overhead. Less than five hundred metres away, missiles going up. He thinks they're Patriots intercepting a scud.

They aren't. They're outbound.

Terry's week: the seventh grandchild arrives, and a woman at a bar shows him photographs of her dog's output arranged into every letter of the alphabet. She wants to publish a children's book. He told her it was a terrible idea. Jeremy pointed out she'd probably make a lot of money.

Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

The dorm basement had activity rooms nobody used. They pushed the couches back, somebody agreed to referee, and the two of them went at each other bare knuckles, three rounds, no gloves. One rule: no takedowns.

Which is the whole problem. Jeremy is a wrestler. Take a man to the ground and put him in a choke and it's over — "100% of the time. I never had a problem with that." Standing up, punching, with his one advantage ruled out, he figures it out fast. They bloodied each other's faces and stopped when they'd had enough. Nobody won. "I'm never going to sign up for a bare-knuckle match again, because you're just going to get punched in the face."

They called it founding the UFC. It had, in fact, already been founded.

That's the junior year at Illinois Tech. Also in it: two guys down the hall who ran an actual bar out of their dorm room — posted hours, monthly membership dues, custom glassware with a ship's wheel on it, and beds engineered to fold flat against the ceiling so you walked in and there were none. "The bar is open." Scott and Phil's Bar and Grill. Nobody ever worked out where the grill was.

Turning 21 at 11:50 at night and getting carded in downtown Chicago: "Look at your watch." An electric car built from a bag of parts and a pegboard, second place by a fraction of a second. Captaining the Ranger Challenge B team as a first-year competitor, taking events off his own school's A team, and finishing one and two in the whole state of Illinois. A summer at Mansfield Plumbing, where the whole town said they "worked at the pottery" — and he still has the metal shavings in his hands.

And a best friend who spent that year as an extra in The Shawshank Redemption, shot up the road at the Mansfield Reformatory, for minimum wage and a hot lunch.

Terry's 1994: the fourth baby arrives on October 24th, one day before their eighth anniversary. Three in diapers at once. A three-year-old who sat her parents down and formally requested a baby sister. A father-in-law who opened a conversation with "I think my daughter is done having children." And a life-size cardboard Omar Vizquel that his wife put up in their bedroom — which ended up in the closet for fifteen years, and came down the day Terry found lipstick on it.

Two things we asked on air and actually want answers to. If you're a guitar player: tell us what that fanned-fretboard, slap-and-harmonics style is called. The kid at O'Nellie's was unbelievable and we don't know what to call what he was doing. And if you ever got served at Scott and Phil's Bar and Grill, we know you're out there — find us and say so.

Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

This is the year he corrected a lieutenant colonel for not saluting him — thirty minutes after leaving a meeting about enforcing salutes — and then laughed about it, which did not help. The year he and Lorrie moved into a garden-level apartment in a Savannah mansion that turned out to be genuinely haunted: banging in an empty hallway upstairs, a door that opened on its own, smoke rising above a lamp, and one night, a woman's face beside the bed. The year he cancelled his honeymoon over a deployment date that kept moving. And the year he signed one piece of paper releasing a staff sergeant from a stop-loss so the man could follow his wife to Korea — which is how that sergeant came to be home in Georgia on leave the day he won $150 million.

Along the way: a company that nearly mutinied when he jumped them into the deepest woods on Fort Stewart, a full-bird colonel who opened the wrong vehicle door at the worst possible moment, fifteen soldiers crammed into a van singing Hootie and the Blowfish, a saber arch, a brother who was carried home from River Street and immediately ran back downtown, and a Christmas spent playing the same video game for three days straight before an announcement that changed everything.

Terry's 2002: four kids, two in the marching band, and a 16-year-old who came home and said he'd like to take a girl to a dance — right after they'd finished reading a book together about not doing that.

Also in this one: an argument about Ohio State that takes three minutes and a live Google search to settle, a bobblehead Terry built himself out of scrap wood and ballpoint pen springs, a mailbag message from the woman who introduced Terry's parents to each other seventy years ago, and the house at 104 West Gaston Street — built in 1856, where an infantry unit received its colors before marching off to war, and where a company commander would live 141 years later, getting ready to do the same thing.

603rd Aviation Support Battalion: if you were there, say so in the comments. And help us name Terry's bobblehead — best name wins merch.

A Most Unpredictable Life is the true story of Jeremy Lewis's life, told one year at a time, with co-host Terry Lewis (no relation). New episodes every Wednesday.

His roommate Bob says, "You ought to just become a metallurgical materials engineer." So Jeremy registers for every single class Bob is taking — same schedule, same classes, all of it — and only afterwards finds out you are not allowed to change your major that way. Then Bob transfers to Kentucky.

The major stayed. Bob left.

Before that, there is a $500 Cutlass Sierra that throws a rod outside Milwaukee with a truck full of Bob's furniture in it, and a father Jeremy had met twice who drives hours through the dark to get two college kids home. The car got signed over to the tow operator. That's what it was worth — exactly one tow.

And then Terry runs out of gas at midnight in the hills of Tennessee with his wife and three sleeping children in the van, walks a hundred steps up the shoulder, and gets picked up by a minibus full of singing retired people who buy him a gas can. His wife never saw them. To this day he thinks they were angels.

Also in this one: the midnight breakfast before finals, and the bagel that started a food fight that outlived him — by senior year the school posted guards. Pennying a senior cadet into his room so he'd miss PT. A manila folder full of shaving cream slid under a door. Smoked fish hidden under a mattress for a week. Four PCs, a coil of IPX cable and a Christmas break spent playing the first networked DOOM three weeks after it existed. And an entire day spent unscrewing a peephole with a racquetball, feeding a rope through it, and fishing for the door handle with a coat hanger while a crowd gathered in the hallway — a method the floor was still using at his ten-year reunion, until the school gave up and glued the peepholes shut.

Plus: Michael Jordan announces his retirement, and the press conference is held in the gym at Jeremy's tiny engineering college. A fight song made of trig functions. A summer on the rock pile at Diamonite, bagging seventy-five-pound sacks and being told to stop breaking the records.

Who's the person who showed up for you when they didn't have to? Not family — somebody who had no reason to. Tell us in the comments on YouTube, or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

And the one we still can't close: does anybody remember the High Noon Saloon in Shreve, Ohio? Or Timbo's KISS photos — his wife has them, and we are still waiting.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

Elle has been standing about four feet away from this entire podcast since before it existed. She is the best server at the place where we play pickleball every week, she has listened to us plan these episodes out loud across a table for months, and it turns out her story is considerably better than ours.

She was born in Addis Ababa. She came to Los Angeles at five, to Ohio at eight, and graduated from Westerville South at seventeen. Her name means Almighty God. She has three daughters, five years apart, and she raised the first one alone after the girl's father died.

And about an hour in, she tells us what happened on a drive back from Michigan when she was five months pregnant — a traffic stop, a car that wasn't hers, and a man who let her be arrested rather than say a word.

they can go home, then it's mine."

She spent four days in a jail cell. He spent six years in one, and never admitted it was his.

Also in this one: the real reason half of Smash Park thinks Jeremy owns the building, which is not the tipping. Why the karaoke crowd calls him Jerome. Terry quitting the swim team at fifteen because a girl named Betty Bell beat his butterfly time. A decapitated Woody Hayes bobblehead, a Jesus bobblehead, and a book that came out four days before we recorded. The Ark of the Covenant, and where it actually is. A ten-year-old with 2.3 million unread notifications who has built her whole following out of roasting her mother. And two people at the same table discovering they both grew up in houses where the food stamps got hidden from the cashier.

Plus the line the whole episode turns on, which is hers, not ours: there's strength in the struggle.

Elle is @elsh_a_day. She has an audience considerably bigger than ours and she came and sat with us anyway. Go follow her.

Who's the person in your life whose story should be a podcast? Tell us in the comments on YouTube, or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

Next week the DeLorean goes back to 1993 — Chicago, sophomore year, and a car that does not survive the trip.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com

The book — The Birth of the Sentients: https://amostunpredictablelife.com/book/

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

The cul-de-sac is French for the bottom of the sack. The snipe hunt is run with paper grocery sacks. Terry's college roommate is from a town called Intercourse, Pennsylvania. And in the men's room of the High Noon Saloon, a five-year-old does something that stops the entire bar.

"Who pooped in the urinal?"

Nobody confessed. The night was over.

But the thing you need to stay for is what happens forty minutes later, when Terry admits that at forty-five years old, in a very nice high school, he did something worse — on purpose — and then told his children about it in the car.

Also in this one: a grandmother who drank her coffee out of a saucer with her pinky up, kept a pet groundhog and fed it out of an ice cream cone. A davenport with plastic on it that you stuck to. A snipe hunt in a cut cornfield at dusk that took six months and a brother to explain. Miss Lemon, first grade, tall and blonde, who taught Jeremy to read and then watched him knock a full glass of milk across a dinner table. The milk crate, the walk-in refrigerator, and twenty-one chocolate milks. A t-ball catcher whose only job was putting the ball on the tee, and who wandered off mid-game because there was a sandbox. And a note in Mom's handwriting, carried down to the Quick Check: please give Jeremy, my son, a pack of Winstons. Seventy-five cents.

Plus: Doc Stone's roadkill stew, an Ohio State roommate with a pet quail named Bob White, and the Lewis family word for a crush.

Where's the strangest place you've ever gone to the bathroom? And what do you remember about your grandma's house — the plastic on the furniture, the things you weren't allowed to touch? Tell us in the comments on YouTube, or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show.

Does anybody remember the High Noon Saloon in Shreve, Ohio? It's gone, and there is no trace of it anywhere online. If you were ever in it, we want to hear from you.

Next week is episode ten, so the DeLorean doesn't go anywhere new. We're pulling over. Nine episodes in, four lives in one, and we're not doing it alone.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

Except Tesla didn't find him. He'd been calling them for eleven years.

His 2005 Army email password was "TeslaRoadster." In 2008 he told a friend on Facebook to buy a Roadster. In 2010, in a plywood building in northern Afghanistan, he walked out of his office holding a Wired magazine with Elon Musk on the cover and told a room full of day-trading lieutenants: this is the stock you should be buying.

None of them listened. There is still a text thread.

Then on December 8, 2016, a LinkedIn message arrived — and this is the story of what eleven years of asking looks like when somebody finally picks up.

Also in this one: Terry wins a radio call-in contest and ends up at the San Diego Comic-Con watching the Star Trek premiere on an outdoor IMAX with the San Diego Symphony playing the score live. Jeremy runs a job hunt like a recon mission — ten LinkedIn profiles a day, every day, for seven months. Eleven interviews in one weekend at Fremont. An offer accepted in a used-tire lot outside San Francisco. Day one: Autopilot on, hands off, FaceTiming his dad from the freeway. And then the Tesla Regional Manager spends his first six months driving the Mid-Atlantic in a Honda Civic.

Plus: the Cavs come back from 3-1 and the Indians blow 3-1 in the same Ohio year, a customer accuses Jeremy of laughing at him, a job candidate confesses to smoking in the parking lot, and one casual sentence to his boss in December — "if anything ever opens up in Ohio" — creates a region that didn't exist.

Ever reinvented yourself completely — walked away from twenty years of something? Tell us in the comments on YouTube, or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show, and we reply to everyone.

Next week the DeLorean goes back to 1981. Jeremy is seven years old in Shreve, Ohio, and one of his little brothers does something in the men's room of the High Noon Saloon that the entire bar is still talking about.

Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife

Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com

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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.

One day it's every piece of furniture they own, sitting out on the front lawn — because his little brother found a lighter, lit the bathroom curtains, and then shut the door and went back to watch Romper Room. The cat is the one who raises the alarm. His brothers watch the fire trucks pull up from their classroom window next door and slowly realize whose house it is.

A few weeks later he opens that same door and Space Invaders is glowing on the Zenith.

Terry's 1980: sophomore into junior year at Ohio State learning every instrument in the band room, the first summer he didn't go home, and the night his own house caught fire when he was ten — and the family dog woke everybody up.

Also in this episode: the Halloween witch that looked exactly like Mom standing in the doorway. Four words every Lewis boy knew. A backyard hosed into a mud slide, and a hand that came out of the dark. A babysitter who turned off every light in the house — and the push pins that ended her. And the music box they broke, glued back together, and got away with for years.

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▶️ Catch up from Episode 1 so you don't miss how the story connects.

#AMostUnpredictableLife #Podcast #Savannah #ArmyLife #2001 #StorytellingPodcast #Veteran #lovestory

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New episodes of A Most Unpredictable Life release weekly. Keep turning the pages.

Keywords: life story podcast, family history, adoption story, 1970s nostalgia, Cedar Point, Ohio history, overcoming adversity, generational story, personal growth, resilience, storytelling podcast, Bicentennial, true life stories, inspirational podcast #podcast #lifestory #familyhistory #adoption #1970s #nostalgia #ohio #cedarpoint #storytelling #resilience #inspiration #truestory #newpodcast #generational #mostunpredictablelife

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Welcome to Episode 1 of A Most Unpredictable Life — where Jeremy Lewis goes back to 1992, the year his classmates voted him Most Unpredictable and unknowingly named this entire podcast.

What does it look like to be sleeping on a lawn chair at 17, paying your own electric bill, with no roadmap — and earn a full-ride scholarship worth over $100,000 that same year? It looks like packing everything into a $500 car with no working windshield wipers and driving six hours alone to Chicago at 4 in the morning to start a brand new chapter.

From cruising Claremont Avenue in a '65 Mustang with the three amigos, to pulling into a Chicago parking lot and meeting a stranger who became a lifelong friend — 1992 was the year the story got going. If life has thrown you curveballs and you're figuring it out as you go — this one's for you. Keep turning the pages.

Keywords: inspirational podcast, life story, overcoming adversity, ROTC scholarship, Army veteran, 1990s nostalgia, true life stories, personal growth, resilience, coming of age, motivation, success story

#podcast #inspiration #lifestory #motivation #resilience #armyveteran #1990s #nostalgia #successstory #overcomingadversity #newpodcast #truestory

This is why we called it A Most Unpredictable Life.

Episode 1 drops Wednesday. 🎙️

#AMostUnpredictableLife #newpodcast #podcast #ohio #storytelling