Just The Gist

In 1987, there was a news event that brought the entire world together. People did not stop watching their TVs for days - the First Lady of the United States even postponed surgery until she knew the outcome. Eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure had fallen down an old well and was wedged almost ten metres underground for 60 hours. Every news channel that existed had cameras in that tiny backyard in Texas, while the world watched - live - and waited in suspense to see if she’d come out alive.
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CW: This episode contains a brief mention of suicide. If you need, please contact (Australia):
Lifeline (24 hours: 13 11 14)
13YARN - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Crisis Support (24 hours: 13 92 76)
Blue Knot Helpline (1300 657 380)
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We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's Breakin' Nooz, JTG After Show AND Bonus eps! You can access them by joining the Gistener Club via the Just The Gist Patreon or Apple Premium Subscriptions.

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Just The Gist is a Just The Network production. Executive Producer and Host: Rosie Waterland | Senior Producer and Editor: James Joseph | Producer: Kate Leaver | Additional production support: Hayley Staveley | Acast Legends: Guy Scott-Wilson and Simon McDermott | Production Assistant: Pocket
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Thank you, as always, for Gistening. Now go say something impressive at a dinner party.
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‘Baby Jessica on the 30-year anniversary of her rescue from a well: Her life as a wife and mom’ (People Magazine 2017): https://people.com/human-interest/baby-jessica-on-the-30-year-anniversary-of-her-rescue-from-a-well-her-life-as-a-wife-and-mom/

‘Baby Jessica’s Rescue From a Well Capped Off a Terrifying Week in US History’ (Time Magazine 2017): https://time.com/4980689/baby-jessica-30th-anniversary/?amp=true

1987 archive footage of Jessica McClure being rescued (Film Archives NYC 2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afSChsWNcbQ

‘Baby Jessica rescued from a well as the world watches’ (History 2011, updated 2025): https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/October-16/baby-jessica-rescued-from-a-well-as-the-world-watches

‘Helping to pull little Jessica McClure from a Texas well made firefighter Robert O’Donnell a star. But the limelight soon turned to darkness.’ (Los Angeles Times 1995): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-24-mn-5474-story.html

‘Death on the CNN Curve’ (The New York Times Magazine 1995): https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/23/magazine/death-on-the-cnn-curve.html

Baby Jessica (Jessica McClure) wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_Jessica_McClure
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Being sucked out of a plane mid-air. Swimming away after his train crashed into a river. Being hit by a bus and walking away from a (different!) bus crash. His car swerving off the road and plummeting off the side of a cliff.Two separate car explosions. Over the course of his life, Frane Selak survived every single one of these accidents. "You could look at it two ways," Selak said in an interview. "I was either the unluckiest man in the world, or the luckiest. I preferred to believe the latter." This is Just The Gist (MINI) of the unluckiest, luckiest man to ever live (so he says...) Frano 'Frane' Selak.
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We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's Breakin' Nooz, JTG After Show AND Bonus eps! You can access them by joining the Gistener Club via the Just The Gist Patreon or Apple Premium Subscriptions.

Watch Just The Gist episodes on Youtube @JustTheGistPodcast

Follow Just The Gist on Instagram and TikTok @JustTheGistPodcast

Follow Rosie in all the places at @RosieWaterland

Want to give us a SuGISTion? Tell Rosie to stop singing so much? Email us at [email protected]

Just The Gist is a Just The Network production. Executive Producer and Host: Rosie Waterland | Senior Producer and Editor: James Joseph | Producer: Kate Leaver | Additional production support: Hayley Staveley | Acast Legends: Guy Scott-Wilson and Simon McDermott | Production Assistant: Pocket

Don't forget to follow and give us 5 stars, which means something apparently!

Thank you, as always, for Gistening. Now go say something impressive at a dinner party.
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'The Seven Unbelievable Survival Stories of Frane Selak' (All That's Interesting 2024): https://allthatsinteresting.com/frane-selak

'Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World?' (Ripley's 2018): https://web.archive.org/web/20211205143729/https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/unluckiest-man/

'#BBCtrending: Is the 'world's luckiest man' being exploited?' (BBC News 2014): https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-27414609

'Frano Selak, world's luckiest man' gives away his lottery fortune' (The Telegraph 2010): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7721985/Frano-Selak-worlds-luckiest-man-gives-away-his-lottery-fortune.html

'Doritos googles up unlikely spokesperson' (Ad Age 2004) https://adage.com/article/the-world-ad-age-global-news-data/doritos-googles-spokesman/99131/
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In 1978, 909 people lined up, drank poison, and died. More than 300 of them were children.
For decades, it was described as the largest mass suicide in modern history, and it remained the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9/11.
But was it really a mass suicide, or mass murder?
Jonestown was founded by Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple, a racially integrated American church that preached equality, socialism, and community care. By the time the world learned its name, 909 men, women, and children had consumed a cyanide-laced drink in a remote settlement in Guyana — while armed guards stood watch.
Some believed. Some resisted. Many were too young to choose. But all became part of what the world now shorthand calls “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
This is just the gist of The Jonestown Massacre.
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We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's Breakin' Nooz, JTG After Show AND Bonus eps! You can access them by joining the Gistener Club via the Just The Gist Patreon or Apple Premium Subscriptions.
Watch Just The Gist episodes on YouTube @JustTheGistPodcast
Follow Just The Gist on Instagram @JustTheGistPodcast and TikTok @JustTheGistPodcast
Follow Rosie in all the places at @RosieWaterland
Want to give us a SuGISTion? Tell Rosie to stop singing so much? Email us at [email protected]
Just The Gist is a Just The Network production. Executive Producer and Host: Rosie Waterland | Senior Producer and Editor: James Joseph | Producer: Kate Leaver | Additional production support: Hayley Staveley | Acast Legends: Guy Scott-Wilson and Simon McDermott | Production Assistant: Pocket
Don't forget to follow and give us 5 stars, which means something apparently!
Thank you, as always, for Gistening. Now go say something impressive at a dinner party.
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Doco: ‘Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown’ (2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYIUjavwqVo
Doco: ‘Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple’ (2006)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S_d1eVv0E8
TV Movie: ‘Jonestown: Paradise Lost’ (2007)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLh7W5r4zS8
Book: ‘Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown’ (1982) by David Chidester
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/835279.Salvation_and_Suicide
Book: ‘The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple’ (2018) by Jeff Guinn
https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/The-Road-to-Jonestown/Jeff-Guinn/9781476763835
Casefile Podcast: ‘Jonestown’ (Three-Part Series)
https://casefilepodcast.com/case-60-jonestown-part-1/
Wikipedia: Jim Jones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones

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Alysa Liu just won Olympic gold for a figure skating routine that has already gone down in history. People are saying she changed the stuffy world of competitive skating forever. But just four years earlier, she had quit the sport entirely - and was thrilled at the thought of never skating again. So how does someone go from Olympic retirement at 16… to gold at the Milan Winter Olympics?

Alysa Liu started skating at five, was a prodigy by ten, and was winning national titles before she was tall enough to climb onto the podium. Then, at 16, she shocked the figure skating world by saying: I’m done. She didn’t want her whole life to be medals, pressure and expectations anymore.

Two years later though, she decided to make a comeback - but only on her terms. No chasing quadruple jumps for points. No extreme dieting. No giving up college or friends. She picked her own music, her own choreography, her own identity on the ice. She wasn’t chasing gold. She was chasing joy.

And she skated better than ever.

This is a story about Olympic pressure, burnout, retirement and comeback, mental health, and what it means to insist on being yourself in a sport built on control. It’s also about how a 20-year-old seems to understand life, boundaries and happiness better than most of us.

This is Just The Gist of US figure skater Alysa Liu.
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We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's Breakin' Nooz, JTG After Show AND Bonus eps! You can access them by joining the Gistener Club via the Just The Gist Patreon or Apple Premium Subscriptions.
Watch Just The Gist episodes on Youtube @JustTheGistPodcast
Follow Just The Gist on Instagram and TikTok @JustTheGistPodcast
Follow Rosie in all the places at @RosieWaterland
Want to give us a SuGISTion? Tell Rosie to stop singing so much? Email us at [email protected]
Just The Gist is a Just The Network production. Executive Producer and Host: Rosie Waterland | Senior Producer and Editor: James Joseph | Producer: Kate Leaver | Additional production support: Hayley Staveley | Acast Legends: Guy Scott-Wilson and Simon McDermott | Production Assistant: Pocket
Don't forget to follow and give us 5 stars, which means something apparently!
Thank you, as always, for Gistening. Now go say something impressive at a dinner party.
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https://www.nbcsports.com/olympics/news/alysa-liu-figure-skating-comeback

https://www.nbcsports.com/olympics/news/alysa-liu-retires-figure-skating

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/alysa-liu-hair-style-medal-olympics?_sp=faec963a-590f-48a4-9136-550d5ff5111e.1771905534964

https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/alysa-liu-champion-who-cant-stop-smiling
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In 1997, a little film starring Nicholas Cage premiered in theatres called CON AIR. It was a huge blockbuster, helped massively by having a hit song to go along with it, called ‘How Do I Live’. But there were actually TWO versions of ‘How Do I Live’ released at the same time. Singers Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes both released their own version of exactly the same song, on exactly the same day, but only one was officially part of the movie Con Air, and most people, to this day, don’t realise which version they were listening to back in 1997. In fact, most people don’t realise that both versions of the song were nominated for a Grammy, but only one took out the prize. And only one went down in history as a record-breaking phenomenon.
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We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's Breakin' Nooz, JTG After Show AND Bonus eps! You can access them by joining the Gistener Club via the Just The Gist Patreon or Apple Premium Subscriptions.
Watch Just The Gist episodes on Youtube @JustTheGistPodcast
Follow Just The Gist on Instagram and TikTok @JustTheGistPodcast
Follow Rosie in all the places at @RosieWaterland
Want to give us a SuGISTion? Tell Rosie to stop singing so much? Email us at [email protected]
Just The Gist is a Just The Network production. Executive Producer and Host: Rosie Waterland | Senior Producer and Editor: James Joseph | Producer: Kate Leaver | Additional production support: Hayley Staveley | Acast Legends: Guy Scott-Wilson and Simon McDermott | Production Assistant: Pocket
Don't forget to follow and give us 5 stars, which means something apparently!
Thank you, as always, for Gistening. Now go say something impressive at a dinner party.
.
https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/diane-warren-leann-rimes-how-do-i-live-billboard-moment-8528199/

https://medium.com/@cherriebalictar/how-do-i-live-leann-rimes-vs-trisha-yearwood-what-really-happened-64550eed6508

https://americansongwriter.com/on-this-day-in-1997-leann-rimes-and-trisha-yearwood-simultaneously-release-different-versions-of-the-same-song/

https://americansongwriter.com/leann-rimes-reflects-on-having-her-song-rejected-by-hollywood-at-15-years-old-and-how-it-still-made-history/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbwuRKpfmCA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Do_I_Live

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/flashback-leann-rimes-trisha-yearwood-make-awkward-grammy-history-167853/

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.chicagotribune.com/1997/09/05/yearwoods-on-the-rise-after-winning-song-war-with-leann-rimes/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dFeYsl8Dsr0

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/live-long-and-prosper-1044103/

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/90s/1997/Billboard-1997-06-07.pdf
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