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Hi, I'm Arturo Castro. You might know me from movies like Weird, The Al Yankovic Story
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or Roadhouse maybe, or that time I played a taste bud in that one commercial about toffee
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Or maybe you listened to my podcast, Greatest Escapes. And today I'm going to be dropping
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some amazing facts about some of history's most incredible escapes. So let's get started
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Okay, great. Violet Jessup, who survived the sinking of both the Titanic and one of its
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sister ships, the Britannic, didn't know how to swim. Thankfully, she didn't get on the cousin
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ship, the Britannic. Honestly, the marketing department for the Starline ships could have
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been improved. Which greatest escape subject would you most like to meet in real life? Not to keep it
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on brand, but Violet Jetsa. I want to ask a few questions. Mainly, why did you get in another ship
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No, but she also seemed like such an empathetic person. First of all, she was smart enough to
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bring a silk sheet because she knew she could be cold. Second of all, she was all about helping
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other passengers. In 1960, British burglar Zoe Brogel escaped from London's Holloway Prison
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Her boyfriend reportedly used a metal ladder on the outside to drop a rope ladder over the 25-foot
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wall for her to climb. So there were a lot of ladders involved. What I've learned from these
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escapes and telling about Greatest Escapes is that the significant others are always like so
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down to help people, whether it's like learning how to pilot a helicopter or like bringing a ladder
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What's your ideal getaway car? That's a good question. You know, I just shot this movie called Matchbox and I'm
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riding a Triumph motorcycle I think a motorcycle is the best way to get around because you can go between cars you look cool doing it it kind of hard to have a description of you because you went by so fast They just be able to say something like oh I don know he seemed devil
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may care-ish you know. World War I aviator Gunter Plüschow, I can't say the name without going
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Gunter, was the only German POW during the entire world war to successfully escape from England to
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Germany. He scaled two barbed wire fences at a camp in Derbyshire, that's the only proper way to
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say that, before walking 15 miles to a port where he climbed up the rope moorings of a ship. He
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stowed away and returned to mainland Europe. One of the things about Gunther is that he, his nickname
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was the dragon, which to this day I firmly believe he gave himself and just forced other people to
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call him and I would love to be in the room where he was like trying to spread that rumor
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about himself like yeah you hear this guy Gunter yeah he's the dragon if you had to live off grid
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after an escape where would you go a friend of mine has this farm in North Carolina and I realized
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that my only marketable skill in the apocalypse is like tap dancing and so hopefully my friend
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Mitch will let me trade entertainment for actual survival skills when the time comes Henry Box
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Brown freed himself from slavery in 1849 by having friends ship him from Virginia to Pennsylvania
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in a wooden crate. It was three feet long, two feet wide, and 2.5 feet deep
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The trip took 27 hours. The resilience of the human spirit. That something I learned over and over again during the podcast that I do I have nothing but admiration for that who your dream guest for greatest escapes huh unfortunately we couldn have him anymore
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but anthony bourdain there was something about anthony bourdain and the way that he lived through
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the world and explored the world and the kindness with which he explored other cultures during a
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1991 operation to extract swelunker emily davis mobley from cosbad caverns lechuguilla cave
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she and her rescuers had jokingly wished for underground pizza delivery. Mobley was handed a pizza soon after emerging from the cave
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What a pleasant surprise finding the exact thing you wished for as soon as you leave the cave
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Well, besides the actual thing you wished for, which was to see your family again
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Holy macaroni. Which escape covered in your podcast would you most like to see as a movie
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I mean, Michel Vallure, I believe I am pronouncing this correctly, who escaped from a French prison, Lisson
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when his wife landed a helicopter in the prison yard. He started throwing fake grenades at the guards to keep them at bay
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And the fake grenades were basically tangerines painted black. That's all it was
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How silly the guards must have felt when they realized that it was a delicious citrusy fruit that kept them at bay
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In 1942, four men escaped Auschwitz by impersonating Nazi officers. They stole uniforms and rode through the prison gates in a car
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I just visited Auschwitz for the first time in my life. So one of the things I learned is that out of the prisoners that escaped, the ones that
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were the most successful were the ones that had ties to Poland or their surroundings
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because then they could communicate with people to hide them You know you got to remember that Jewish people were brought from places as far long as Greece right And so if you in Auschwitz and you from Greece and you don speak you know what I mean Like even if you escaped a lot of the surrounding areas were Nazi officers And then
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after that, where do you go and how do you explain yourself to them? So I'm always happy to hear
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about escapees and successful ones. Your podcast covers a wide range of history from Elizabethan
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era to the wild west and beyond which historical time period have you most enjoyed exploring
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i mean the elizabethan era sounds nuts i mean guys let's just like hey i i have a bit of a
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headache and some dude calling himself a doctor goes i got it let me just bleed you until all the
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bad bleeding stops and the good bleeding begin you know what i mean i would like to say something
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about the tortured devices you know that stretching one i can't remember what it's called but i saw
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this meme that said for a brief second that one torture device must feel amazing and it's so true
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just like for one second you're like oh my god that's fantastic wait wait wait stop the bronx
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zoo once housed a platypus named penelope who seemingly escaped from an enclosure to avoid the
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continued amorous advances of a male named cecil she disappeared in august 1957 and to this day
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nobody knows where she went i think it's time you guys knew come on out penelope we have her right
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here it's crazy yeah she made it all the way to los angeles seeking greener pastures i'm arturo
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castro and please check out my podcast wherever you get your podcasts you know tell everybody you
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know cold call your ex-boss and be like hey i know we haven't talked in a while but arturo castro
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has a podcast this has been amazing facts with mental floss thank you so much for watching bye
