A Curse on You

Hey, true weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute. And thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards. And we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category. And that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks. Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

There are more than five and a half billion people on the Internet now. Five and a half billion voices screaming into the digital void. Almost 64% of Earth's population is on social media. More than a billion websites are out there, even though most of those are nothing more than digital ghost towns now. The overwhelming majority of people on this planet access the Internet via mobile phone.

Are we just chug-a-lugging all of the collected knowledge of humanity while we wait in the dentist's office or Jiffy Lube? No, we're playing games, checking email, watching YouTube videos, scrolling social media, saying hateful things to and about each other. In just three months in 2024, Meta flagged over 16 million hateful posts.

The artist, formerly known as Twitter, clocked 66 million complaints about hateful content. Most of that doesn't even include the personal nastiness directed at people's relatives, coworkers, and neighbors. Are humans worse than we've ever, ever been? Also, no. Humans have always found ways to be absolutely terrible to each other.

Like in ancient Greece, where there was no Internet. Instead, there were curse tablets. Curses. That kind of sound like what your real wound-up uncle posts on Facebook. Curses etched on lead tablets no bigger than a playing card. Curses like this one. Cast your hate upon Phanagora and Demetrios, and their tavern, and their property, and their possessions.

I will bind my enemy, Demetrios and Phanagora, in blood and in ashes, with all the dead. Wow, well today we'd call that a really negative Google review. But once upon a time, people believed in the power of magic to solve their problems. And then they got a small beam of light, and then... True. Weird. Stuff. Poor Fanagora and Demetrios having their tavern cursed like that.

Were they guilty of a crappy pour? Stiffing the band? Probably not. It's more likely that the competition, another tavern keeper, hired the curse writer to rain misery down on a business rival. The little lead tablet cursing Fanagora and Demetrios was found in 2003 in a grave near the port of Athens. The body in that grave was a young woman's.

Though it's likely that she had no beef with the tavern being cursed, and probably nothing to do with any of it. See, in order for the curse to do its job, it had to make its way to the gods of the underworld. Hades, Persephone, Thanatos, that crew. The kingdom of the dead where apparently no one could rest in peace because the place was a kind of fulfillment center for the rants and revenges and all around pissy fury of the living.

Since the underworld was underground, it only made sense to expedite delivery of the curses by getting it to the gods as quickly as possible. And an open grave offered an easy shortcut to the underworld. Curse tablets got chucked into graves on the regular and almost never had anything to do with the deceased. If a grave wasn't an option, curse tablets could be dropped down wells or into cisterns or even sneaked into a nearby temple.

One of the more unique curse tablets ever found is in the Princeton University Art Museum. It's unique for the simple reason that the person being cursed was, of all things, a greengrocer. Oh, thunder and lightning hurling aye yo. Strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer. As you struck the chariot of the pharaoh, so strike Babylas' offensiveness.

Impossible to know what Babylas the greengrocer had done to deserve being so terribly cursed. Was it another grocer trying to hurt the competition? Was the man selling moldy grapes? Because this is harsh. But that was the way of it back then. Back when magic wasn't in conflict with religion. Back when magic was just part of getting through the day.

Hey, if you're wondering why the ancients scrawled their hexes onto sheets of lead, the answer is simple. Ancient Greece was richer than rich, thanks to all its silver mines. And lead is a byproduct of silver mining. So the Republic was up to its eyeballs in lead. Cheap, plentiful, and best of all, reusable. Which is why nearly any citizen could afford to commission a curse tablet any time a fellow citizen had it coming.

Not quite as cheap and easy as it is for us to throw down proclamations on Facebook. But certainly doable. The practitioners of ancient magic, whether it was Greece or Rome, were in the spell business. The word bind or binding basically meant attaching an outcome to the target of the spell. The outcome might be a good one.

Love or success or victory. But it was just as likely to be a terrible outcome. Sickness, poverty, death. These spells were written down because the written word has always had power for humans. Whether the spell was etched onto a lead tablet, inscribed on a scroll, or engraved in precious metal on an amulet, people took their magic seriously.

Archaeologists have found piles of ancient Roman curse tablets in digs around the United Kingdom. If you're an animal lover and what sane decent human being isn't, you'll appreciate this one. Decentilus, who commissioned the curse, was enraged at three individuals named Varianus, Peregrina, and Sabininus. They had apparently harmed his animal.

So the curse writer called upon the god Mercury, guide of souls to the underworld. I ask that you drive them to the greatest death and do not allow them health or sleep unless they redeem from you what they have administered to me. Okay then, get him Decilinus. I don't have any love for people who abuse animals either.

Now, not all curses were this dire. Sure, many called for the complete and total destruction of an individual, their household, and all of their future descendants. But lots of curses wanted to just serve up a little punishment. And here's an interesting thing. Curses and magic were like morally neutral and totally legal.

You were absolutely free to lay a curse on everyone and anyone just so long as the outcome of your curse didn't result in a crime. Which meant you could throw every curse in the book at that poor green grocer. But if he died as a result, you might be facing murder charges. If that's confusing, here's a way to think about it that's bound to sound familiar.

Curses don't kill people. People kill people. And so it went for centuries. People using magic to influence outcomes and events to weaken their adversaries in exact revenge. Then, here comes the Renaissance. Magic in the 15th and 16th centuries became less about casting curses, less about the fairies and fantasies of the medieval age, and more about the discovery of hidden secret knowledge.

Magic became mystical, serious, and even dangerous. This was the age of alchemy, the transformation of matter through magical means, lead into gold and all that, divination, astrology, the mysteries of the occult. This was Renaissance magic. A Renaissance magician you've heard of for sure is Nostradamus, the French seer whose cryptic prophecies are still widely circulating.

So much so that long dead Nostradamus is pretty much a staple of 20th and 21st century basic cable. Magic had to do battle with science in the Renaissance. But the two ultimately came to a weird sort of truce. Science owned the territory of reason and magic got everything that science couldn't explain. It was understood that even a brilliant mathematician like John Dee who argued that math was the basis of every damn thing, it was understood that he could also pursue his research into talking with the angels and there was no conflict and nothing to be embarrassed about.

So real quick John Dee story. In 1587, he was told by a famous medium named Edward Kelly that the angel Uriel had informed him, Edward, that he and John Dee were to share all of their possessions including their wives. What could poor John Dee do but obey? This was a celestial command. On May 22nd, 1587, John Dee wrote in his diary that he and Edward Kelly swapped wives as ordered.

When Mrs. Dee gave birth nine months later to a son, the couple christened the boy Theodore and John Dee raised the child as his own. This is going out to anyone who thinks that the people of the past were made of high octane virtue and always behaved with modest good sense because, oh no, they did not. Anyhow, there was this one Renaissance magician whose name became immortal even if his work is a little on the obscure side.

His name was Johann Georg Faust. He was known as an alchemist, an astrologer, a con artist, and a heretic. We probably know him best as the inspiration for the term Faustian bargain. That's because Johann Georg Faust learned the hard way that you simply cannot do business with the devil, that you can't outmaneuver the devil, which is why selling your soul always turns out to be the worst deal any human can make, but we fall for it every time because the devil has a way of making a person feel like the smartest in the room.

When you're dealing with a folk legend like Johann Georg Faust, separating the truth from the tale is almost impossibly hard. For starters, it's not like they kept great records 500 or 600 years ago, and there was more than one dude named Johann Georg Faust at the time, but in the year 1506, a magician, an astrologer named Faust, appears on the record in the town of Gainhausen.

Got him! And with that, you can follow him all over Germany for the next three decades. Sometimes he's an astrologer. Sometimes he's a physician. He was billed as a magician and as a philosopher. He was called a liar and a fraud and a blasphemer. Looks like we found our guy. Dr. Faust earned a degree in divinity from Heidelberg University because remember, religion and magic weren't in opposition.

Many Renaissance-era magicians blended Christian beliefs into their mystical worldview, but Dr. Faust was also a necromancer, a practitioner of black magic. Necromancy is the communication with the dead, you know, summoning spirits and ghosts and apparitions, in order to foretell the future of the living. Divination with an assist from the dead.

All the ancient cultures engaged in some form of necromancy. The Greeks and Romans did, and before them the Babylonians, the Egyptians, all the bigs. It was rooted in the belief in an immortal soul that transcends death. Necromancers in the church had this in common. The catch was, the church believed that what the necromancer could summon forth had nothing to do with the immortal soul.

Necromancy, said the church, could only conjure demons disguised as spirits. Early Christians were warned in the 1st and 2nd centuries to beware of demons representing themselves as the souls of the departed. But the practice of necromancy was widespread in the pagan world, and people are often slow to let go of their beliefs and traditions.

Even Christian converts were like, Yeah, I'm on board, but every once in a while I might consult the spirits just for funsies. Now the church cracked down and made all sorts of very severe laws and proclamations against the rank superstition of pagan magic and divination. Not surprisingly, this wasn't super effective, and necromancy survived right through the Dark Ages and even enjoyed a bit of a glow-up in the Renaissance.

That was thanks to an Italian artist named Benvenuto Cellini. What a dude he was. Sculptor, duelist, best buddies with Michelangelo, a brute to women, a lousy son, violent and vengeful, and also a dabbler in necromancy. He was forever in trouble, exiled from his home in Florence again and again, because he kept killing people.

Cellini made the acquaintance of a priest from Sicily, and it became clear very quickly that both men were deeply into the occult. Now I know, I know. A priest breaking the rules and just doing as he pleases? Can you even imagine? Here's a fun little Cellini story. So he and the Sicilian priest, each bringing along an assistant, arranged for a little black magic night on the empty grounds of the Roman Colosseum.

An enormous magic circle was drawn on the ground, and all four men entered. Each was responsible for a different component of the ritual. The fire, the herbs, the sacred pentacle, the invocation of the magic words. In no time at all, the Colosseum filled with spirits. The huge structure was almost completely packed with apparitions of the dead.

Beseech the spirits, Cellini, the priest urged. Make of them your request. So, Benvenuto Cellini asked this legion of spirits to help him hook back up with a Sicilian woman named Vangelica that he had a real thing for. The spirits, disappointed perhaps to have been dragged across the veil between worlds for this horny Italian sculptor, maintained a dignified silence.

No problem, said Cellini. This was amazing. We should totally do this again. And so they did. The next time, the priest told Cellini to be sure to bring along a young virgin boy. Cellini happened to have one handy, a 12-year-old who worked in a shop. So the child was told to hold the pentacle and obey the priest's instructions, to serve as an oracle, to speak for the dead.

The priest intoned the words to summon forth the spirits. And this time, there were even more than before, standing room only at the Roman Colosseum. Make your request, Cellini, the priest said. But be careful, for these are the most powerful and dangerous spirits of all. So, once again, Cellini was like, Yeah, about Angelica, where are we with that whole situation?

The spirits rolled their eyes. Well, not really, I just made that up. But they did seem a little exasperated as they spoke through the priest, saying, That poor virginal kid, though, he was having a whole different experience. He could see the hordes of the dead, clearly in spirit form, but each the size of a regular man.

Looming behind the spirit crowd, four giants drawing ever closer to the magic circle. The boy closed his eyes tight in fear, and when he dared to open them, he beheld a terrifying vision. The Colosseum engulfed in flames. He nearly fainted from fright, causing the priest to spring into action. What happened next? You can hardly believe it.

Ordered by the priest, the assistants raced to fling a basket of asafoetida herb into the fire to banish the spirits. One of the poor men was so frightened that he literally crapped himself, loudly. This, according to Cellini, sent the dead flying and gave the living a good laugh, which helped morale quite a bit, as humor so often does.

But the child had the gift of sight now and was weak with fear as he alone could see the two spirits who followed the men home. Spirits that scampered across rooftops and skittered across the ground. That night, all four men reported that they dreamed of demons and devils. Shockingly, or maybe not so much, the spirits kept their word.

One month later, a wild turn of events led to Cellini finding himself in Naples, reunited at last with the smoking hot Angelica. So yeah, with results like that, it didn't seem to matter to people that the church had condemned necromancy. Meanwhile, over in Germany, birthplace of Dr. Faust, magic and necromancy were having a moment, thanks in large part to a man named Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.

He went by Agrippa, so we'll call him that too. While studying at the University of Cologne, Agrippa became interested in the occult. That interest followed him to Paris, where he became part of a secret society engaged in the practice of magic. In 1533, he published the first complete edition of a work called Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

The three books he was referring to were the three kinds of magic, elemental, celestial, and intellectual. He covered everything from astrology to numerology. He explored the roots of these magical practices and wrote about alchemy and scrying. That's a form of divination that involves gazing into something in hopes of getting a message or a prophecy.

You know, like crystal balls, mirrors, the pensive at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The three books became hugely influential and not just in Agrippa's lifetime, but for the next 500 years. It's not an easy read. The language is super archaic and flowery, but it has its delightful moments, like this one from chapter 41, titled Of Sorceries and Their Power.

Some women sorceresses that were so versed in these kind of arts that by giving cheese to men, they could presently turn them into working cattle. And the work being done restored them into men again. Girl, can you even imagine how handy this kind of spell might be? And then there's this bit in chapter 60 on spirits taking up residence in the bodies of the living.

So great also they say the power of melancholy is, that by its force, celestial spirits also are sometimes drawn into men's bodies by whose presence and instinct antiquity testifies men have been made drunk and spake most wonderful things. I don't want to argue with an ancient German magician, but it's been my experience that melancholy men do not, in fact, speak the most wonderful things.

But what do I know? All the cheese I've fed to men over the course of my life and not one has turned into a cow? Clearly, I do not possess the ancient magic. And maybe Johann Georg Faust didn't have it either. Because if he did, why would he need to sell his soul to the devil? Faust was what they called an itinerant magician, bouncing from one place to the next.

In 1520, he hung around the town of Bamberg doing horoscopes. His customers included the local bishop. He tried his luck in the city of Ingolstadt, but was banished before he could properly set up shop. Next stop, Nuremberg. But he was denied entrance to the city by a low-ranking politician who very snottily described him as the, quote, great necromancer and sodomite.

As many detractors as Faust had, there were fans and supporters, eminent scholars who called him respectable, knowledgeable, and a good physician. But all the praise in the world is gonna have a tough time competing with the cloven-hooved one, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, his own bad self. Even though Faust is credited with writing many grimoires or books of magic, his alleged dealings with the devil were told after his death, were told by others, and then were immortalized by the playwright Christopher Marlowe and later by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Sometime around 1540 or 1541, no one's entirely certain, there was an explosion at a hotel in the town of Staufen am Breisgau. The story goes that Dr. Faust was slammed in the middle of an alchemical experiment gone wrong when he was killed. When the flames were extinguished and the dust settled, Faust's body was found in the wreckage, grievously mutilated, said his enemies.

Horrible, unbearable to witness. Proof, they said, that the devil himself was displeased with Dr. Faust. Again, I don't want to argue with ancient German magicians, but it does seem likely that getting blown to bits would leave a person grievously mutilated, whether the devil showed up or not. But that was the story, and it took off.

It might have just been a sensational tale that eventually ran its course and was forgotten, but a theologian named Johann Gast got a hold of it and wouldn't let go. In 1548, Johann Gast told a story of meeting up with Dr. Faust in Switzerland. Faust, he said, was traveling with a dog and a horse. Absolutely nothing peculiar about that, right?

Except, Gast said, that dog was known to occasionally transform into a servant, which is mind-blowing to those of us who are more used to the magical transformation where we become a servant to the dog, but I digress. Not only was Faust touring the countryside with an enchanted dog servant, he produced a strange bird from his bag and ordered the cook to prepare it.

Gast didn't go into any more detail on that particular poultry, but in those days, it took very, very little to make an accusation of dark magic stick. Now that he had everyone's attention, Gast went in for the big finish. He wrote that the death of Dr. Faust had been most dreadful. More, even in death, Faust defied every attempt to restore his soul to the light.

The body, said Johann Gast, would turn its face to the earth no matter how many times it was repositioned on its back. He made this declaration with casual confidence as though a corpse refusing to cooperate wasn't the freakiest and biggest part of the story. Different times, I guess. Stories like this about the magician Faust and his dalliances with the Prince of Darkness must have sold books because just a few years later, here comes a man named Johann's Monolith.

If you're wondering if there are any men in Germany at this time that weren't named Johann, the answer to that is no. I think it was a law. Everyone was named Johann. Johann's Monolith says, I happen to know that it was Dr. Faust who used magic to intervene on behalf of the German Emperor in his noble fight against Italy.

Italy was involved in eight different wars in the 63-year span of time between 1494 and 1569. You pretty much have to be a magician to sort it all out. Here's the big takeaway. Those wars represent the beginning of modern warfare like handguns and artillery and officers who actually knew how to read. Johann's Monolith also swore that Dr. Faust had used his magic to fly while in Venice and it would have worked too had the devil himself not slapped Faust right out of the sky.

So you can see by this point, it had become nearly impossible to separate the truth about Dr. Faust from the legends being told. It seemed like everyone had a story, like the elderly man in Wittenberg who tried and tried to convert Faust into a God-fearing man. Faust wasn't interested and, as the legend goes, sent a lesser devil to the man's bedchamber to frighten him into silence.

This devil strolled around the room and grunted like a pig. But the old man wasn't scared. He had the power of his faith which gave him the confidence to mock the devil. What a fine voice you have. You are singing like an angel who was not allowed to remain in heaven because he wanted to be God's equal and was thus thrust out for his pride and now wanders through people's houses in the form of a sow.

Bold play, but effective because this junior-level devil swiftly retreated and complained at Dr. Faust about the disrespect. There was the tale of Faust's book of hell's charms. It was kept in a church in Zellerfeld, Germany. The book was said to be mortally dangerous. It had to be secured by an iron chain so that no one even accidentally looked at its pages.

Why? A person could die just by trying to read it. In order to survive the book, it had to be read forward and backward. Reading it forward summoned the devil. The only way to make him leave was to then read it backward. Can't do that? Hugh just became the devil's plaything. And as for how Dr. Faust had fallen in league with the devil, that was the best legend of all.

The story was published in 1587. Aroused in Faust was a desire to commune with the devil. Having made he necessary evil preparations, he repaired one night to a crossroads in the Spessor forest near Wittenberg. Between nine and ten o'clock, he described certain circles with his staff and thus conjured up the devil. Feigning anger at having being summoned against his will, the devil arrived in the midst of a great storm.

After the winds and lightning had subsided, the devil asked Dr. Faustus to reveal his will, to which the scholar replied that he was willing to enter into a pact. The devil, for his part, would agree to serve Dr. Faustus as long as he should live, to provide Dr. Faustus with whatever information he might request and never to utter an untruth to Dr. Faustus.

The devil agreed to these particulars on the condition that Dr. Faustus would promise at the expiration of 24 years to surrender his body and soul to the devil, to confirm the pact with a signature written in his own blood and to renounce his Christian faith. Having reached an agreement, the pact was drawn up and Dr. Faustus formalized it with his own blood.

And there it is, the Faustian bargain, the world itself for your soul. Such a bargain for the devil. Henceforth, Dr. Faustus' life was filled with comfort and luxury, but marked by excess and perversion. Everything was within his grasp, elegant clothing, fine wines, sumptuous food, beautiful women, even Helen of Troy and the concubines from the Turkish Sultan's harem.

He became the most famous astrologer in the land for his horoscopes never failed. No longer limited by earthly constraints, he traveled from the depths of hell to the most distant stars. He amazed his students and fellow scholars with his knowledge of heaven and earth. And he did, as you now know. He was famous, renowned, even feared.

However, for all his fame and fortune, Dr. Faustus could not revoke the 24-year limit to the devil's indenture. Finally, recognizing the folly of his ways, he grew ever more melancholy. He bequeathed his worldly goods to his young apprentice, a student named Christoph Wagner from the University of Wittenberg. 24 years seems like such a long time, but those years flew by for Dr. Faust, just as they do for all of us.

Even the devil has no power to stop time. Shortly after midnight, on the last day of the 24th year, the students, who had assembled at the home of the ailing Dr. Faustus, heard a great commotion. First came the sounds of a ferocious storm, and then the shouts, first terrifyingly loud, then ever weaker from their mentor.

When the devil comes to collect his due, you'd best be ready to face your fate alone. At daybreak, they ventured into his room. Bloodstains were everywhere. Bits of brain clung to the walls. Here, they discovered an eye. There, a few teeth. Outside, they found the corpse, its members still twitching, lying on a manure pile.

The devil is the best salesman there ever was. The weak and the greedy are no match for that silver tongue. When the devil leans in close and whispers that he craves what you crave, desires what you desire, and hates what you hate, suddenly, and maybe for the very first time, you feel that you're finally going to get everything you dream of, everything you deserve.

Faust's horrible death thus taught them the lesson that had escaped their master during his lifetime, to hold fast to the ways of God and to reject the devil and all his temptations. This should have been the end of the doomed Faust, but a legend this good is hard to kill. It was whispered that Faust had a plan to beat the devil at his own game.

As that last day of the 24th year began fading into twilight, Faust summoned a servant telling the man, After I have died, cut my body into small pieces, put everything into a tub, and press it all firmly together. Well, that sounds horrific. The servant was also ordered to close every window and every shutter tightly.

Heat the stove to glowing hot and place the tub containing my remains behind it for three days. The smell of that? Unimaginable. I forbid you from entering the room until three days have passed. The servant obeyed, which is not surprising. Who'd want to go in? But ever fearful of the great magician, even in death, the servant timidly approached the door on the fourth day.

Slowly he cracked it open and peered in. There, emerging from the tub of blood and bone and organs, was none other than the head and upper torso of Dr. Faust, who waved cheerfully to the servant as he climbed out of the tub intact and whole. The legend doesn't bother to say what the servant made of this, but we can probably, you know, guess.

Of all the things in this world and the worlds beyond that the great Renaissance magician Dr. Johann Georg Faust dreamed of, there was one thing he could never, ever have imagined. This was a man who trifled with kings and schemed with commoners and dared to try to play the devil at his own game. But here's something he didn't see coming.

The great magician who sold his soul for wisdom, power, fame, riches, and pleasure, who was torn from limb to limb by the prince of darkness had no notion that one day he would be known not for his genius, but for an inspirational quote slapped on coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and whimsical painted wooden signs. Whatever you do or dream you can do, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Goethe said that a tragedy. Goethe also said, A one-man inspirational quote machine. And Goethe didn't even have to sell his soul to do it. But pity the poor Dr. Faust. His cubicle in hell must be covered with stuff like this. Think about that the next time you're tempted to sell your soul.

I curse you! Live! Love! Next time on True Weird Stuff. Gonna need you to take off all your clothes, sail to a deserted island, forsake women and technology and books and eat nothing but coconut for the rest of your days. It's the coconut cult on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode.

Wendy Tonetti, Thom Tonetti, and Don Morgan. Sherry, I, you know, the thing about this is these are, all of these things are cultural references that we hear all the time. But I never really knew the story until you just told it. Oh, the story of Faust selling his soul? The Faust part of it, yeah. It's fascinating. Let me slap my mic as much as I can.

We don't have enough technical problems. It's fascinating because I don't think, I don't think 99.9% of the population knows when they're standing in like, what's that store? Hobby Lobby maybe? Michaels? And they're going, do we want the, do we want the to the world you might be one person sign for the kitchen? That it comes from this play that's about this renaissance magician who sold his soul to the devil and then came back to life after boiling for three days in a pot.

Like, no one knows that, right? Nobody knows that. No, I didn't. I certainly didn't know the story. And I didn't know the end of the story that you told. I didn't know that at all. This is one of those, so like let's start at the beginning. These ancient curse tablets, they still have, these have been found. It's really wonderful.

And lead was reusable. You could roll it, flatten it, and then etch new curses into it. But because people threw them into open graves and wells and cisterns to get them to the underworld quicker, a bunch of them have survived. And what's amazing about that is because those curse tablets survived, we have an understanding in the year, well, it's 2025 now, in the year 2025 that people treated magical curses the way we treat bad Yelp reviews and snarky comments on social media.

I mean, they were cursing people for giving them a crappy pour at the tavern. Like that was some, that was some, yeah. So that's like super fun to think about that people haven't really changed all that much, you know? We just have not changed. No, but I guess the genius who came up with the curse tablet, he ended up on a big expensive boat flying with his mistress going off to the high seas because, you know, darn, I wish you would have come up with the idea of the curse tablet.

I mean, it's just genius. And then moving on to the next chunk, I think that, you know, we're living in such, we're living in such bizarre times and I want to thank the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for flipping us into an alternate universe. Check out that episode, Welcome to the Multiverse. We're living in such interesting times because we are weird, we are rapidly and weirdly descending into a kind of religious superstition that does resemble the medieval period in some ways.

Like, so when we talk about how in the Renaissance, magic and science were like shotgun road buddies. They were not in opposition. Today, you know, there are people who feel that just checking your horoscope is an act of like, you know, demonic behavior. It's been a long time and by a long time, I do mean centuries since that kind of, that particular flavor of superstition has been so loud in the public space.

So we're just, we're going through some strange times right now and it's interesting to think about the ways that science and magic were considered complementary. Like, what science couldn't answer, magic explained. And what magic couldn't account for, maybe science could explain. And so you get these figures in the Renaissance where they were astronomers, which is not the same thing as an astrologer, okay?

An astrologer does astrology and an astronomer studies the heavenly bodies, the stars and planets and whatnot. But you would have like, chemists and astronomers and physicians who were also magicians. Now today, that would be a hard pill for most people to swallow. Like, if your primary care doctor was also an alchemist or a magician of some kind, you probably wouldn't appreciate that.

So can I, can I, can I deviate just for a minute? I am related to a German magician. Bet you weren't expecting to hear that today. This is exciting. How far back? So not, not this far back. So when, so my mother had like a great uncle who was from Germany and what he did for a living was, he was a magician. And she said, when we went to the funeral, they put his top hat and his cane on the casket that he used in his act.

Look at you. You come from a long line of show business professionals. That is, that is a quirky detail. The idea is they put that on his casket. So Max, here's, I guess my question is, because the word magician meant something different in the past than it does today. Sure. Was your uncle also like a scientist or a doctor, or some sort of intellectual?

No. I think he was sawing women in half and pulling rabbits out of his hat. I don't think there was any of that. So you think he was more like a modern magician? Yes, sure. He was more like that. But when you talk about the magicians and the scientists from this time, the idea that there was a blurry line between the two is not really all that surprising because at one time it all seemed like magic until you were able to start to explain it.

So there are people that are dealt in the same arena all that time just because up until then it all seemed like magic until there were explanations for it. And so the line kept on getting moved the more that they explained, the more they got into the magic. That's actually still true. Like what we can't account for, we consider magic or paranormal, right?

Supernatural. So back then there were so many things in the natural world that were not understood and those would be attributed to magic. So a tsunami, for example, in the ancient world would be the gods of the sea were furious over some slight or offense and punished the people of the land with a tsunami. Because they couldn't understand how if you think about a tsunami, there you are and the ocean is calm and maybe even flat and then here comes a wall of water the size of a skyscraper, right?

Out of seemingly nowhere. So that was the god Poseidon or Triton or whoever they would, whatever the local deity was. But then here comes science and science says, no, that's not an angry sea god. This is what causes or triggers a tsunami. And you can look at it like hundreds of things in the natural world alone that used to be credited to magic that are now science.

It's still true today. So back in December when there was all that drama over drones in the skies above New Jersey because people didn't know what those drones were or who was responsible for them and there were all sorts of crazy stories. They're the size of cars. They fly completely silent. They defy the laws of gravity, right?

The drones were imbued with magic. The idea that maybe they were coming from another intelligence, another dimension, another planet. One report was they come, they seemingly appear from nowhere above the ocean and then make their way toward land which had people saying, well, they live in the ocean in some underwater alien base.

And you know what? Maybe they do, right? Maybe they do. But where in the absence of knowledge, of empirical data and knowing, it's part of the beauty and wonder of humanity that we fill in those blanks with magic. It's interesting about the story of Faust because it seems like that story gets updated every once in a while and one of the more modern day versions of that was a blues guitarist named Robert Johnson.

Have you ever heard of him? Yeah, tell that story. Isn't there a famous song that was written about this? Well, what was interesting in the story you told, this happened at a crossroads. For Robert Johnson, it happened at the intersection of U.S. routes 49 and 61 in Mississippi. And so Robert had no ability with the guitar.

He sold his soul to the devil and he came back with this amazing mastery of the guitar, a blues technique that no one had ever seen before and the exchange for that was he ended up dying at the age of 27. So he could have it up until that point in his life. When he was killed, this part I'm unsure of, but it seemed to me he was killed by a man because he was fooling around with the man's wife because he was so irresistible.

In addition to this blues technique he had, he was irresistible to women as well. So isn't it fascinating? Like on the one hand, maybe this man couldn't play a lick of guitar, had no talent, no riz whatsoever, sold his soul to the devil and he becomes legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. Or what if he had all the talent and charisma in the world and he just needed a lucky break and he got his lucky break and then he got an unlucky break and died.

It's in the not knowing, the human brain, we don't like not knowing. Nature abhors a vacuum and humanity abhors an unsolved mystery. So what do we do? We step in and we make the story magical or paranormal. And the crossroad thing, so in the Hammersmith ghost episode that we did last fall, they used to in the United Kingdom about 200 years ago and they stopped doing it about 200 years ago.

They did it up until then. If a person took their own life and died by suicide, they would bury the bodies at a crossroad. The idea of a crossroad is so powerful. If you remember the episode we did on the legends of the pines, where did they capture these piney outlaws and bury them on busy roads at crossroads so that they would never know a moment's peace.

There's like this weird symbolism that you can trace all the way back, this power that we give, this idea of you're at the crossroads. And it's super symbolic, you know, because a crossroads is a place where you get to make a decision. I mean, look at the Robert Frost poem, two roads diverged and the wood and I took the one less traveled by.

Right? Right. It's this idea that when we come to these physical places, we get to make metaphysical sometimes decisions. So it's so interesting. So Robert Frost, he says, he said at some point, he says, I got to tell you, people have taken this, this poem. He says, I kind of did it with rolling my eyes. Like I took the one less.

It was the road not taken. I took the one less traveled and it's made all the difference. It kind of screws up the idea that we have of that poem. But anyhow, I know the fact that he was like, this was dreck. I can't believe you people like this. So you mentioned it, that Faust traveled with the dog who would turn into his servant.

Yeah. So what, what would be great about this is if I could take Mojo and go, all right, Mojo, your turn. Yeah. You know, I'm sorry. Yeah. Okay. Now here's what I need. I need you to run some errands and go out and get some takeout. All right. I need you to do that. All right, buddy. Today's your day tomorrow. I'll take care of you.

And I'll even pick up your poop after you poop in a bag. Here's, here's what you can take away from that, Max. We've been the dog servant for so long that even back then, the way to, the way to get people's attention would be no, no, the dog is his servant. And people went, oh, the devil must be involved. Yeah. So, um, we don't, we don't really throw curses anymore.

I mean, I, every once in a while, you'll read a story in the New York post about some, uh, sorceress or sorcerer, like in the Bronx. You know what I'm talking about? Who bilks people out of all this money and promises to throw curses on their enemies. And then there was a bunch of that. We had a run of that in the nineties.

I have no idea why we had a bunch of, uh, black magic practitioners getting busted. It, I guess it still happens, but we don't really do this anymore. So Sherry, I, I can't remember exactly what happened, whether I hadn't done a school project and I said I did or what the story was. I was like, maybe in about third grade, you know, I'm going to a Catholic school.

So we got a lot of God and a lot of devil and a lot of Jesus. And we've got a lot going on. Right. And I was in a pickle because I didn't want to admit that I actually hadn't done it. So I remember I went to the bathroom and I prayed to whoever would help me. And guess what? I got out of it. So there was a part of me as a child who believed that somehow maybe I had made a deal with the devil and what was going to happen in my life because of that.

How long did you carry that? I'll bet I carried that into high school. I'll bet I carried that into high school because this is not the kind of thing that you either want to say in confession or talk to anybody about. In fact, I, you may be the first person I've ever talked to about it because at some point along the line, I sort of resolved in my own head that I was a kid and I just was afraid of the consequences.

And that was all that was going on. When you, when you summoned an entity to get you out of this assignment, did you literally just whatever's out there? I'll take it. I said, whatever's out there, I'll take it. And I got out of it. So because of that, there was a part inside of me that always felt like the devil's going to come for his due.

The devil's going to come for his due at some point along the line. And so I ended up talking to a priest about it. And he said, the only thing I'm going to say about this is he said, don't do that again. Don't fall with the devil. Well, he's not wrong. And, and also Max, now none of us are business people, right? None of us are like really good at, you know, business-y things.

But let me just say as your friend, if you're going to sell your soul to the devil or any demon, you need to get more out of it than a pass on your homework. Just for future reference. Right. I probably needed to, but Sherry, if it's the most important thing in your life at that moment, I mean, there was nothing more important to me at that moment than that, then, you know, so I don't, I don't remember how I got out of it, but I do remember that I did.

And then I had this concern about, oh my God, you know, and I carried that. How old are you? When you said you were in third grade, you're like eight, nine. So I'm a nine year old carrying the weight that I somehow have sold my soul to the devil. So here's what I'm wondering. Ooh, Max, here's what I'm wondering. If that experience wasn't somehow influential in your later decision to go to seminary school, like if you had learned at eight years old that prayer works, but you've got to be careful who you ask for what prayer works and maybe you need to save your sold soul by becoming a priest.

What do you think? I think because I wanted to be a priest since I was, since I could talk, I want to, I want to, I told people I wanted to be a priest. I believe that this deal is might be the reason that I left the seminary school. I'm not sure. Oh wow. But, uh, so kids, can you imagine the kind of weird guilt that you have going on?

Cause you can't tell anybody. I'm not telling my best friends. Hey, I'm adamant to deal with the devil. I'm not talking to my parents about it. Oh, Max, you're sure as hell not bringing that news home. Oh, Frank, Frank, what's he done now? A deal with the devil. It's always something with this kid. Listen up, Mr. When the devil comes to collect, I'm not going to clean this up for you.

Sherry, the moment that all of this transpire is so crystal clear in my memory. I can see the hallway. I can see the bathroom. I can see the school. I can see it all. Wow. You know, this is the thing. Like you, you sincerely and with a pure heart invoked the powers beyond to get you out of your homework. And that's, I mean, wow.

So I think that it could be that God said, step aside. I've got this. God was like, is that the sweetened kid? Is that the little sweet boy? Let me handle this. Oh, the kid's mother is always on my case about something. I got this. I'll head into the bathroom. Wow. Who's his mother? Oh yeah. Let's cut this kid a break.

Fran. Let's cut this kid a break. If we give this kid to the devil, she'll follow him into hell and nobody needs that. Give him back. So since you had this really powerful experience, I noticed that you didn't question the priest. Uh, Chalini, the assistance, the Virgin shop boy going in and doing all this wild stuff in the Roman Coliseum with spirits and flames and apparitions.

You just took that like, oh yeah, well that happened. for sure. I'm sure that happened. What's, what's fun about that. Um, so, oh God, Chalini, what a piece of work he was. But what's fun, what's fun about that is that story that was shared was like, like corroborated by all the witnesses present. So did they all lie?

Did they all, that's my question to you. Did they all lie? Yeah, I don't believe it. I really don't believe it. No, you don't believe that they successfully summoned enough to fill the Coliseum unless they did some sort of, uh, a trick, a trick of light or smoke or something. That poor, that poor kid, that kid was probably traumatized.

He probably was looking for a bathroom to go to so he can make it. I'm going to deal with somebody to get out of the situation. speaking of, I tried to be delicate about it because you know, some people are sensitive to certain kinds of, yeah. Incidents and information. But if the assistant had not shared himself and scared the demons away, we used to work with a guy that had that power.

I can tell you that right now. Oh yeah, we did. Oh yeah, we did. The paint, the paint would peel from the bathroom because of him. That's how bad it was. Did the devil said he won't leave? Can somebody go get what's his name? Yeah, I'll never forget. Sherry went in there one morning and she says, my God, what do you have to eat to make a smell like that?

And I said, I think it's hay. I think it was. It was livestock food. Um, so, anybody listening to this? Oh my God, I'm so sorry. They're sorry for us. Like boy, these two, they need to get out. Um, the, that was such an interesting little detail on that story because it was so, um, it was so human, wasn't it? Yeah. Like here we are.

We're in the Coliseum in the middle of the night with our magic circle and our virginal boy. And we've invoked the spirits. We brought down the ancient magic, but it's this humble, like imperative of the body that gets them out of trouble. Like that, which feels very Renaissance II because the Renaissance was at such a time of like the greatest in art and the most base physical human impulses at the same time.

And that's what makes that to me such a great little, um, tail from the Renaissance. Man, people really knew how to have a good time before TV and the internet. If you called me up now, yeah. If you called me up now and said, Hey, listen, um, you want to come? We're going to do some necromancy, um, down at the stadium where the team plays.

We're going to do some necromancy, maybe some in the devil, just, kind of play it by ear, see what happens. We'll know. Cause I'm trying to get caught up on silo on Apple TV. Like I have other things to do. Right. But back then, you know, you had to fill the team somehow. The new season of slow horses is coming out. Go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, there's stuff to do. So the, so interestingly enough, the four giants that the, the boy saw the shopkeeper boy. So remember the stadium, the Roman Coliseum is filled with apparitions and this child is seeing flames overtaking the place and four giants. Um, apparently there are some angels that manifest as giants in this plane.

And there's all sorts of people that have reported, um, heard that before. Yeah. Reported encounters. I knew a woman, she's gone now, but she was, um, she, she was fascinated by angels, uh, books about angels, biblical scripture about angels, the idea of angels. She was just fascinated by angels. And just by sheer chance, she was on vacation and she and her husband went to Sedona, Arizona.

And there are all these people in Sedona. It's, it's really like a, it's a cool place. Very, you know, sort of new agey and metaphysical and hippie and all that. So there are all these people in Sedona that do different kinds of readings, right? Everything from tarot and psychic to more, you know, sort of metaphysical, spiritual things.

And so Joanne went to, um, a spirit reader, I guess was the job title. And what she came, the story she came back with was fascinating. This woman told Joanne that her youngest son had as his guardian angel, an angel named Metatron. If I'm, which I know sounds like something from the transformers, but it's actually a name.

And I know nothing about this. So if you know more about this, reach out and let us know. I'm just telling you what, what Joanne was told by this spirit guide in Sedona, that her youngest had as his guardian angel, Metatron, who was enormous. Like, it was like this child was being followed around by the empire state building.

And that this child had this particular angel because this child was in this world for some purpose that would unfold much, much later in his life. Now, if somebody tells you that about your kid, your mind is going to be just the tiniest bit blown unless you're, unless you're just so skeptical and cynical and whatever.

And I never forgot that because the idea of an angel, the size of a skyscraper following through the world. Yeah. So as I, as I was thinking about the Chalini story, which so it's like funny because they're doing this crazy thing in the middle of the night at the Coliseum. And then the servant craps his pants and scares the demons away.

Right. That's a funny story. But inside that funny story is that 12 year old boy's vision of these four towering gigantic figures made of light, which made me think of that giant angel that, you know, Joanne was told about. I had never heard this with the, the giant angels before. That's fascinating. We're going to do, I've been working on it for a long time.

It's such, I mean, I've been working on this episode probably for eight months on and off now. The, the biblical giants, the Nephilim and the, you know, the fallen angels and all that. There's so many, there's such an interesting convergence between references to the Nephilim in scripture and then some archeological findings that make you go, hmm.

And there's a man and I need, my friend Stacy, who does voice work for us here on True Word Stuff. My friend Stacy knows a man who is, has devoted his entire life to traveling the world, searching for proof of the, these Nephilim who came to earth, who fell from the heavens and had children with human women. It's an amazing story.

We'll get to it. It's so complicated. It's been challenging to write because there's so much and yeah, it's, it's overwhelming and because it deals with scriptural and biblical things, I always try to be extra careful because I don't want to offend people of faith or, you know, upset them or scare them. Like, I don't want to say, I found this thing in the Bible and I can show you historically that it's true or not true because I can't do that.

And I don't want anyone to think I'm making fun of their beliefs. I'm not. So I try to be extra careful when we're in that content area. May I point out if giant angels are having children with women on this earth, what hope is there for human men? You know, I mean the competition, I mean, good Lord, there are some, the, so, oh gosh, to have more time.

We have other jobs besides this. It's so hard. It's hard to have enough time because I want to do, I'm working on an episode about some of the lost books of the Bible, like the book of Enoch, which is one of the more famous ones, the Gnostic Gospels. Like there's, there's some really fascinating stuff just to think about.

There is no danger in thinking you will not hurt yourself thinking. Sometimes I feel like I, CERN threw us into a timeline where people are, are afraid that if they think too hard, or if they think about things that might challenge their beliefs, that they'll get sick and die. But, but you won't thinking, thinking can't hurt you.

And there's a lot to think about. And there's a lot of connections to be made across time and space between things that we can now prove. Like, do you remember this was a couple of months ago? They, archaeologists found really compelling evidence that points to a real Noah's Do you remember when that was all over the newsfeed?

Yeah. I think it was in Turkey. Yeah. Stuff like that. There's no crime in thinking yet. We don't have thought crime yet. And it's not going to hurt you, right? You're not going to have like explosive diarrhea and increased risk of infection just from thinking, but people get really emotional and defensive and activated when they think you're challenging their faith or their beliefs or what have you.

So that is what made me pay extra attention to the story of Chalini and the Sicilian priest. And I don't know who Angelica was, but that babe must have been something because Chalini, Chalini literally can ask the, whatever showed up at the Coliseum, the gods, the devils can ask for anything. And what does he want? He wants to get with Angelica.

So all I could think about when I was reading these Chalini stories was, oh, a giant towering figure made of light. I've seen that before. And maybe that little boy of all the people involved that night, he's the only one that you can really go, here's a true innocent. He's a 12 year old kid. he's, he has no, he doesn't fancy himself a magician or a priest or anything.

He's just a 12 year old boy who works as an assistant in Chalini's studio. So I gave him a lot of, I gave his report a lot of credence. Cause I thought, yeah, there's something really here with what this kid says he saw. And what do we know? Right? We don't. What do we know? You know how I feel about David Copperfield.

I don't hate him as much as the Puritans, but I, I dislike him strongly. David Copperfield, the magician, the magician, not the Dickens character. Thanks for clarifying that. I know. Cause people are listening to go and poor David Copperfield, the orphan, this bitch is really something. no. I love David Copperfield, the Oregon, I, I don't like David Copperfield, the magician.

I never have. Never have. If, if you know, that's our idea of magic now when it's really what he is, what a lot of magicians, modern magicians are, are illusionists, right? Right. Isn't David Copperfield, the one that made the statue of Liberty disappear? Something like putting the audience on a rotating thing. The, and the illusion is so entertaining.

Or maybe that was David Blaine. I can't keep my magical David separate. But there's, the illusion is so beautiful. And like, if you watch fool us, the Penn and Teller show, there's so much artistry and beauty in magic. But these people in the Renaissance, they were, they were not trying to get residencies in Vegas. They were trying to tamper with the realms of heaven and hell.

It's a completely different definition. So, so what do you think? Do you believe, what do you believe? What do you not believe? You know, I, I believe that there are, there are all kinds of things that are possible. I think what we believe in has a lot to do with what we've seen for ourselves and what our own experience has been up to this time in our lives.

And I think that there are an awful lot of things that I keep on learning that I wouldn't have believed before that. I believe now. So do I believe that there's a dark power? I don't want to fool with him. so, like you, you know, when you're a product of Catholic school, you're not even really good with a Ouija board at a sleepover.

Right. If there's one thing, at least for our, our era of Catholic school, I don't know what happens in Catholic school now. I suspect it may not be as fun. I mean, I don't think that they make kids. When I was in first grade, they used this to make us memorize the Baltimore Catechism. It was who made you? God made you.

Why did God make you? It was like, it was half this, you know, you had to, you had to repeat all this stuff. It was, it was crazy. When I think about it now, I think it's kind of crazy. We, well, they were really big on memorization and skills that nobody seems to teach anymore. Like diagramming sentences. Like I can diagram the hell out of a sentence and I have never needed to, not even one time.

I use algebra and geometry a lot because it, okay. Just if you're trying to figure out what size couch you can fit in your living room and get through your front door, that's, that's geometry right there. So much of like your, everything you do with numbers and money is algebra. But Max, when was the last time someone said to you, Mr, take a seat and find the gerund.

When was the last time anybody asked you about a dangling participle, right? Right. Or a predicate, like all that stuff. A subordinate clause. Yeah. That's Santa's little helper. I'm sorry. But, um, I do believe, that there is a great and powerful evil force. And some days I think it's somewhere out there, but most days I think it lives inside the human heart.

I think that we, we are, we carry the potential for great goodness and great evil. And we are so vulnerable to that bad deal at the crossroads because the dark side is just delicious and more fun for a lot of people. I will tell you what a therapist told me one time. And she said, we all have a dark side. We all have a part of ourselves.

That's insanely selfish. And that we do have that dark side. She said, it's how you react to the fact that you have discovered that about yourself. That really is. It determines how you will move forward in your life. And hasn't that been your experience when you think about people that you've known over the course of your life?

Yeah, I would say yes. Yeah. Now, if you've known someone who really was always dark and doesn't seem to have much in the way of redeeming qualities, um, it's, it's a little easier to believe that maybe there is some external darkness as well that we're vulnerable to. I believe there is. And I will take the advice from the priest that says, don't fool with it.

Uh, just because I don't, it's like, I don't want to get too deep into it. I don't want to fool with it. I don't want to rouse something, but I think, you know, even if that something is inside yourself, what's that expression? Be careful about staring into the abyss because you'll find it staring back. I mean, our human history, like is loaded with teachings that have been passed down for years and centuries kind of advising other humans on how to be careful of protecting their souls.

I, I, I think that it's all about what it, whatever you end up feeding in your life. I believe my personal experience is I lived a part of my life in an incredibly selfish way and was trying to do things differently. And I think that when you try to do things differently and take different actions that it snowballs on itself and you end up becoming whatever it is you're fertilizing and watering, whatever part of that that you are, which is why it's very important to not walk around with resentments and anger and grudges and all that sort of stuff and letting go of that stuff because you're watering that and you're feeding the dark part of your nature.

And when you let go of that stuff, then you finally have room for that other stuff to grow in there because it can't grow as long as that stuff's in there. You know, you're making me think like we watched the Wolf of Wall Street again. I saw it in the movie theaters when it first came out. That's the movie about Jordan Peterson.

Well, Jordan Belfort, Jordan Belfort. Yeah, Jordan, Jordan Peterson's another dude, another bro, Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. And Jonah Hill is in that. And Margot Robbie is amazing in that. And the actress who plays, who stars in The Penguin, Kristen Mulatto, is also in that. She plays Leonardo DiCaprio's first wife.

It's a really wonderful movie. And one of the things it does, well, it's a wonderful movie about terrible people doing awful things. OK, so let me be clear. It's a really unpleasant movie about unpleasant people. Really well done. But one of the things that you really see in that movie is what greed, what greed and easy wealth do.

Like to your point about what you fertilize, Jonah Hill's character is kind of a chucklehead. But you give him some money and some power and he's completely a demon, right? Right. He goes full, he goes so ham onto the dark side. And that's what he's fertilizing and that's what he's getting. And so I agree with you. I agree with you 100%.

I do think there are people that are born bad. Well, I'm with you there. I don't think we all, I don't think we all start in the same place. I think people, I don't, I just don't think we do. Born bad. And I'm not even talking about, you know, like the BTK killer, my own father, apparently from his earliest moments in this world, there was, he was enveloped in, in darkness.

Like his family, his sister feared him. Like, I don't even know how my poor mother got vacuumed up in this, but I think he was born bad. I can't, I mean, I can't think of any real redeeming qualities or any attempt at redemption on his part. So I'm, it's not like I'm just over here saying, this famous person is bad or maybe you're bad.

Oh no, we got badness baked right into my family tree. I do think some people are born bad. And then I think some of us just want something so much. Looking at you, Robert Johnson, you just want it so much. You just feel like you'll die if you can't have it. Yeah. I don't think I want anything that much. You? No, no, not at this point in my life.

No, maybe I did at one time. Maybe I wanted, I wanted things that I thought would make me complete or happy. And then I came to realize that those things wouldn't have, even if I had accomplished them or achieved them. Matthew Perry is a great example of that. Somebody who wanted something so bad and committed himself to it.

And then I'm not saying he's an evil person. That's not what I'm saying, but I guess the point is that you can want something so bad, but why do you want it? If you think that's going to make you happy or make you complete, you're going to find out that you'd be sorely disappointed. I really want it. I want it more from my radio career.

I did. And I mean, I had a good, I've had a good career. I've had a very interesting career. No, blah, blah, blah, blah. I want it more. But, um, the devil, uh, met me at the crossroads and said, Sherry, did you want more from your radio career? And I was like, yes, devil. I definitely want more from my radio career. I am so tired of these, this shock locker room mentality and these assholes making stupid decisions and destroying people's lives.

I want more from my radio career. And the devil said, you're not even willing to be polite to management. You're not ready to sell your soul to me. You can't even play nice. You can't even play nice at the station. Get out of here, girl. You are not. You don't have what it takes to sell it, to humble yourself to Satan and sell your soul.

And so, um, that's my story as to why my career didn't go better because I wasn't willing to. It's almost all to the devil with the crossroads. And can you imagine anything less worth your soul than a successful radio career? Oh God. At least, at least Robert Johnson's a legend, right? Yeah. We're talking about it. So yeah.

Even the devil's like, I don't see it. Okay. That's it for this episode of True Weird Stuff. Join us next week. We have a double whammy for you next week. we're going to pay a visit to a beautiful deserted island in the Pacific. Oh, it's paradise. It's paradise. And, and it's occupied by one person. Joining is not one.

I'm sorry. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. And that one person is the leader of his very own coconut cult. And joining us for the postmortem on that episode on that episode is Don Morgan, who voices a lot of the characters that we do on True Weird Stuff. And he's fascinating all by himself in real life. And we thought it would be kind of cool for everybody to meet him.

Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to have him join us for the postmortem to talk about the coconut king. And I cannot wait for y'all to hear this story because it's just wild. It is wild what mischief humans get up to in the sunshine without our pants. And that wraps up. This is our first. This is our first episode of the new year.

And this is also happy second birthday to True Weird Stuff. Yes, we launched. We launched this time in 2022. Yep. So thanks for hanging with us. We don't even know how many episodes we've done because that would require counting. But I've got to look at that because I know we're coming up on 100 here before too long. Let's try to remember and celebrate our 100th episode somehow.

OK, let's see how we're going to celebrate. We're going to celebrate. Let's at least try to notice it when it happens. But yes, there's a big milestone for us. So thank you for being a True Weird Stuff listener and being with us here as we look at our second year of telling you strange but true stories. Have a good one.

We'll see you next week. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Seaton. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025. Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.