E80 - The Sōhei: The Warrior Monks

Part one of our three-part Halloween run. Tonight: the ring that, in legend, let a king put demons to work. Part 2 is cursed bloodlines. Part 3 is a queen of demons. Here is the odd thing we found first: the oldest book about Solomon, First Kings, has no ring and no demons in it. A wise king, a temple built by human hands, a visiting queen with hard questions, and a sad ending. So where does the ring come from? We walk it through the books that gave it to him, oldest to newest, and every one...

Here is a what-if, labelled as ours every time it speaks: what if some families, long before the witch hunts, really did carry something, passed down like a trait, and the hunts thinned it out? We take it to the sources, oldest first, with a date and a writer for every step, and we ask whether anything in the record is actually in the blood. Scripture gets its own room tonight. The Bible's accounts of God acting through His servants are not witchcraft, not talent and not genes, and our what-...

Ellie has a game for Halloween week. Three sentences about mummies: two are true and one is a lie. One: London chemists once sold ground-up mummy as medicine. Two: Victorian painters squeezed mummy out of a paint tube. Three: Tutankhamun's tomb carried a curse that killed the man who paid to open it. Which one would you bet your life is the lie? To find out, we travel the long way, oldest first. We start on the coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with the Chinchorro, whose oldest ...

Zero point eight one seconds: that is what a timer in Texas reportedly showed for a car going from a standstill to sixty. On the fifteenth of October, a Tesla Roadster with nobody inside hung upside down on a ramp, let go, rolled and landed on its wheels. Separately, it hopped a lineup of Teslas on bursts of compressed air. Most reports call it a hop. So if a car leaves the ground for a few seconds, is it flying? We sort what was shown on camera from what was said on stage and what is just t...

Every video about the national debt leans on the same scary word: owed. Almost none of them tell you to whom. So we followed the IOU. Who, exactly, does America owe forty trillion dollars to? We start with the number itself, as Treasury dates it: it crossed forty trillion in August, and the latest figure we pulled is for the seventh of October. Then we make it small, with a picture and some arithmetic of our own, a trip to the Moon about sixteen thousand times, and a famous clock that once r...