The friendly grandfather in the white suit beaming from buckets of chicken is one of the great masterpieces of corporate sanitation. The real Harlan Sanders was a seventh-grade dropout, a lawyer who destroyed his career by brawling with his own client in court, and a man who got into a deadly shootout over a highway sign.

This episode unpacks the wild, failure-ridden biography behind the mascot, a study in almost pathological resilience. We track how a man bankrupted again and again, bypassed by an interstate at 65, invented the modern fast-food franchise model out of pure desperation, then watched the corporate machine he hated turn him into a hallucinatory pop-culture icon.

• How a childhood of foraging and cooking at age seven built the foundational skill behind his recipe
• The deadly turf war and shootout that eliminated ...