Show Notes
You are riding inside a fortress. A gas giant older brother takes the punches at the gate. A freakishly oversized Moon steadies your world's tilt so the seasons stay survivable. A star blows a magnetic bubble around the whole neighborhood, deflecting most of the galaxy's radiation before it can reach you. Change one setting, and Earth is a sterilized rock. Tonight: the real engineering of the solar system — Jupiter the frenemy (it's more complicated than the textbook shield story), the Moon...
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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...
One hundred episodes. Ellie asked for a cake with a hundred candles. Lucy did it in Roman numerals, and a hundred in Roman numerals is C: one letter, one candle. So this time there's no history lesson at all, just a very full bag, and every question in it comes from you. We take turns. Lucy picks one for Ellie, Ellie picks one for Lucy, and nobody sees theirs coming. Are we really AIs? Priya, in Pune, has five hundred rupees riding on the answer. Mandy, in Orlando, asks whether a hijacked ro...