A Most Unpredictable Life

It's 1984. Jeremy is in fourth grade, and his family is moving on up to the nicest place he has ever lived.

The Hothem Apartments, on the north side of Wooster. His mom's boyfriend Jeff has gone ahead to Florida, and Jeff's sister Lori lives in the basement. Welfare covers three people, and when his other three brothers visit, there are seven to feed. At Kean Elementary, Mrs. Dreibelbis decides he is the smartest kid in the world. She hangs his Garfield drawing at the front of the room and puts him on the computer at recess, where...

Twenty episodes in, and the guy who pooped in the urinal is finally sitting at the table.

Every tenth episode we stop the clock and bring somebody in. This time it's Jeremy's brother Bryan and his fiancee Crystal, which makes three Lewises and a future Lewis in one living room. It's also Halloween, so Jeremy spends the whole episode as Jeremy Slay, a character of his own invention.

Bryan settles Episode 9 himself. He was four or five, both stalls were taken, and somebody told him to use the one on the wall. "I did a...

It's April 2003, and this is the last of three episodes on the year Jeremy went to war. Part one ended on the first night. Part two ended at Objective Rams. This one goes all the way to Baghdad, and then all the way home.

They leave a bag of fuel in the desert with a note on it for whoever comes next. They swing through the Karbala Gap. Then the convoy rolls into what was still called Saddam International Airport, past a blown-up airliner on the runway. A TV news anchor hands Jeremy a satellite phone to...

In 2018 Jeremy moves his family back to Ohio to run a brand new Tesla region, the Great Lakes. Two months later they pull into a church parking lot at 10:15 for a 10:30 service that started at 10. They search for any church nearby that starts at 10:30. The pastor of that one is Terry.

This is the episode where the two hosts tell how they met, each from his own side of the front door.

Then Tesla, 2018 and 2019. Riding in Model 3 number 29, a few weeks after the first ones rolled out. Opening Richmond with the governor of Virginia...

It is March 20, 2003. A company commander is trying to sleep on the hood of his Humvee when missiles rip into the sky less than a kilometer away.

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...

It is the winter of 1983 in Shreve, Ohio. A nine-year-old is walking through the snow to the post office to see if the check came.

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...

It is January 2003. The buses stop in the northern Kuwaiti desert, and there is nothing there.

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 be...

It is 1994. A guy on the floor says he could take Jeremy in a straight fight. So everyone goes downstairs.

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 on...

2002. Jeremy is a brand-new captain with 130 soldiers, a wedding in ten weeks, and a war nobody will give him a date for.

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...

It is 1993. Jeremy is nineteen, living on the second floor of a dorm in Chicago, and he is about to choose the career he will keep for thirty years by copying another guy's class schedule.

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...

Ten episodes in, we stopped moving through time and did something different. We brought somebody else's life to the table.

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...

It is 1981. Jeremy is seven years old, one of five boys at 281 Church Street in Shreve, Ohio, and the whole year runs on one word: sack.

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...

Twenty years in the Army. Five deployments in ten years. A Lieutenant Colonel with a wife and four kids — and in 2016 Jeremy did the most unpredictable thing he'd ever done. He took the uniform off and went to go sell a car.

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 an...

Jeremy is six years old, in half-day kindergarten, living in a three-bedroom house on Church Street in Shreve, Ohio with four brothers, his mom, and his stepdad Keith. The school is close enough to see from the front yard. And every day at noon he opens that front door with no idea what's on the other side of it.

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. Th...

September 11, 2001. Jeremy is seven days into a new unit, waiting to take command — boots half-laced in front of the TV as the second plane hits. This is Part Two of 2001: the day America was attacked, what it means to stand in front of 130 soldiers and say "it's not if, it's when" — and how the same year still managed to end with a piece of charcoal in a Christmas stocking and a Tiffany ring in Jeremy's pocket. Terry's side of the year: planting a brand-new church in Lewis Center ("we almost named it the Dam Church"), a Survivor sermon series with...

Savannah, 2001. Jeremy is 27, a brand-new Army captain, and about to have the best year of his life — a downtown townhome full of brothers, a handshake with a sitting president, and a phone call introduction to the woman he'd marry nine months later. This is Part One: FOUNTAINS OF LOVE In this episode of A Most Unpredictable Life, Jeremy and Terry go back to 2001 — the year Jeremy landed at Fort Stewart with the 87th, decided he'd rather be a "regular" at every little pub in Savannah than a guy at the club, led the logistics for President Bush's visit, and fina...

It's 1978. Terry is 18, graduating from Sandusky Perkins High School, guessing weights at Cedar Point, and marching down the ramp as an alternate in The Best Damn Band in the Land — during Woody Hayes' final, infamous season. Jeremy is five years old at 281 Church Street in Shreve, Ohio, in a house with five boys, a rusted Fiat you could see the road through, and — for a few days — a wanted bank robber named Louie Stackhouse sleeping under the same roof. This episode has it all: the Blizzard of '78 (and the nine-hour drive to Maryland that Terry's mom sent him on to...

n this episode of A Most Unpredictable Life, Jeremy's back from a wedding in Maryland and a trip to Virginia to watch his son Noah graduate from Coast Guard EM 'A' School and earn his promotion to EM3. Terry's back from ten days in Greece with Kelly for their 40th anniversary — including two and a half hours in an Athens airport security line where he made friends with people from Israel, Barcelona, and Georgia. Then the Delorean points forward: freshman year at Illinois Tech, December 1992 through the summer of 1993. Smashing Pumpkins, the BMG Music Club, Jurassic Park, and the bi...

In Episode 2 of A Most Unpredictable Life, the roles flip. Jeremy Lewis was born in 1973 — so this time it's co-host Terry Lewis in the hot seat, walking us through an era Jeremy was too young to remember and his own teenage years working at Cedar Point. But this episode goes deeper than nostalgia. Jeremy traces the story all the way back to its real beginning — his mother, Karin. Adopted, she lost her adopted father at four years old, grew up playing with neighborhood girls who turned out to be her own biological sisters, and didn't learn the truth until she...

Most Likely to Succeed? Nope. Most Athletic? Not even close. Most Unpredictable? Now THAT one they got right.

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 C...

He didn't get Most Likely to Succeed. He got something better.

This is why we called it A Most Unpredictable Life.

Episode 1 drops Wednesday. 🎙️

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