Click each image to enlarge.

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So…  let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 80. And if you’re hearing my voice right now, which I hope you are, this is Pascual. I’m back for the second time in a few weeks. Celestia and Ben, how are you guys doing?

Celestia Ward: Hey, you stayed away so long just because when you came back, you wanted to hear us hoot and holler and be excited for you each and every time.

PR: Yeah, I think that it’s my plan to make people more excited about me.

0:01:07
CW: Okay, well, this episode, we are going to be talking with our friend Erik Kristopher Christopher Myers, who is still enjoying his success with Butterfly Kisses, a wonderful movie that trots out a lot of urban legend stuff and questions about documentary filmmaking and the found footage genre. And if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s all over the charts on Amazon.com. I think it shot up to number one in its category. But we’re going to be talking with him about Harold Camping and Doomsday Prophecies. Ben, you know quite a lot about that sort of stuff, right?

0:01:42
BR: Yeah, I wrote about Camping on several occasions, at least twice that I can think of when he was making his apocalyptic predictions. And that was always a fun topic to tackle, you know, from an end-time skeptical perspective. So I wrote some about him during his heyday, as it were.

0:02:01
CW: Cool. Look forward to really dissecting it with Erik because Erik also has some unique perspectives on the whole Harold camping phenomenon from a couple decades ago.

0:02:11
PR: So Celestia, what are you skeptical of this week?

(MUSIC)

0:02:15
CW: Well, I actually have a story that I don’t know if I’m skeptical of it. It definitely happened. But a friend of the show and a friend of mine named Lar DeSouza, he’s a Canadian cartoonist of some repute. He does a couple of web comics. Least I Could Do is a pretty famous one. But Lar sent me a interesting story about a placenta. Have you guys heard anything about a placenta making the news lately?

0:02:53
PR: No, I have not heard anything of note about a placenta lately.

0:02:58
BR: My Google alerts don’t include placenta.

0:03:01
CW: Well, having given birth fairly recently, people are now sending me stuff that’s placenta related. So thank you, Lars. There was a bit of a panic caused by a placenta up north. It made the news in Canada just this past week in the town of Mississaugua up in Ontario. In a place that couldn’t possibly sound more Canadian, the Sugar Maple Woods Park, police found a placenta, a free-roaming placenta, just in the woods. And it had a few birth instruments still kind of clamped onto it. And this caused a little bit of a stir when a guy came upon this walking his dog. Now, Ben, I know it’s a pet peeve of yours when psychics and other practicers of Wu waste police time and end up causing a big stir for nothing because they had a dream or something and then you have a lot of wasted man hours. But this was a whole new level. The police immediately had to mobilize. They set up a command unit there. They brought in a drone. They fanned out with canine units looking for some desperate woman in the woods who had just delivered by herself or possibly an abandoned newborn in the woods in need of help. And I mean, it’s a human organ. The guy stumbled upon a human organ in the woods. It’s not really typical to find organs lying around like that. So, I mean, if one of my organs was found in the woods, I would hope there’d at least be some sort of cursory search to find the rest of me.

0:04:33
BR: Or at least some bit on TMZ or something.

0:04:35
CW: Yes. Celestia left one of her organs at the club again. Oh, my God. Well, it turned it turns out that this placenta had been placed there by a woman who, because of holistic reasons kept it in her freezer, but decided after a year to offer it to nature. She specifically wanted to offer it to a coyote that she had seen in the park there as a way of giving it back. She figured the coyote could eat it for lunch or something.

0:05:08
BR: Who doesn’t want a thawing placenta?

0:05:10
CW: Well, yes, she actually…

PR: I mean, it’s fresh.

CW: Well, she described it as although it was a year old, she said it was kind of semi thawed out because I guess they were moving houses. And so the freezer got turned off. And she said so it was kind of it was the consistency of a slug…

BR: I’m liking the story less and less as you as this goes.

0:05:31
CW: So the mother, 27 year old Natasha does Gupta, who works as a life coach gave a long interview to Global News explaining the misunderstanding. It was interesting, she kind of flopped back and forth on the one hand saying she really didn’t want any publicity about this but then she explained at great lengths about how you can encapsulate it and eat it that way and some people eat it for health reasons and then there’s this and that. She’s clearly up on all the different things you can do with a placenta. She thought it would be really, really natural to let the coyote eat it, but she also seemed to understand that it was a biohazard. She was like, I just kind of shook it out of the plastic bag because I didn’t want to touch it.

0:06:16
BR: But it’s natural.

0:06:17
CW: It’s natural. Well, as you may or may not know, placentas are very bacteria friendly. There’s a lot of bacterial contamination with a placenta because it starts decomposing like right after the baby comes out.

BR: So she very well may have killed a coyote and poisoned it.

0:06:40
CW: Maybe, I don’t know. Well the coyote never got to it. This guy and his dog found it first.

BR: Well we don’t know that. He may have started nibbling on it and went off to die somewhere.

0:06:51
CW: Well, she seemed to be aware that it was a biohazard, because when she was describing it she didn’t touch it. But then she said, and then I took the plastic bag right to recycling. And it’s like, oh no, don’t put a biohazard bag with placenta guts in the recycling bin. That’s not a good idea. I mean, you’re supposed to wash out your spaghetti sauce jars before you recycle them and you’re going to put placenta juice in the recycling bin? Don’t do that. Anyway, so that was my little exciting story concerning a placenta in the woods.

PR: That’s pretty impressive. And it’s, I think that, I mean, you know, it’s your placenta, do what you want with it, but the thing that kind of bothers me sometimes with all the woo around placentas is that there are some very important and medically relevant reasons to do certain things with placentas while in the hospital, like donate the umbilical blood and then the placenta itself can be…

CW: Or preserve it, yeah.

PR: Yeah, and there’s a lot of, you know, there are reasons to either, well, there’s a good reason to donate it if nothing else. So, you know, if you’re just going to freeze it and then throw it in the woods a year later, you know, it’s just, seems like kind of a waste and also just a really weird thing to have to explain.

0:08:21
BR: So as creepy as this was, was it illegal or anything or whatever happened with that?

CW: Well, her mother-in-law, I believe, saw it on the news and contacted her and she got in touch with authorities right away and called off the manhunt and said that she was okay, the baby’s okay, the placenta is a year old and she just put it there. And she said the police treated her with the utmost of respect, they didn’t act like she was crazy or a super hippie or something, maybe they thought that they were Canadian. Yeah, they were very Canadian about it. And no charges were pressed. And and she was not required to pay any fines or anything for mobilizing a bunch of police officers for an entire day.

0:09:02
PR: Was she required to say sorry?

CW: I’m sure she did anyway. It was Canada. So thank you, Lar, for that wonderful story. I appreciate you bringing it to our attention.

(MUSIC)

0:09:13
BR: All right, welcome back to Squaring the Strange. We have with me, we have a special guest, Erik Kristopher Myers.

EM: Hi, it’s special to be back on the show.

0:09:22
CW: Hey, Eric. Now you’re here to talk about something perhaps even scarier than urban legends and monsters that show up when you blink too much. We’re going to talk about sort of a doomsday fellow, somebody that you have a particular fascination for. Why don’t you introduce this mysterious gentleman you’re going to talk about?

EM: I am going to be talking about one of my favorite human beings in the history of anything. He was named Harold Egbert Camping, which is just a fantastic name. I wish I could come up with something like that.

CW: Egbert!

BR: You can totally use that name in one of your movies.

0:10:11
EM: You know, I think I might have to. But yeah, Camping was a radio broadcaster and he rose to notoriety and some would say infamy when he predicted the end of the world as being May 21st of 2011. And as far as I know, it was the only doomsday claim that ever made international headlines and had intense media response. And spoil alert, we’re all still here. But the fallout was pretty catastrophic, not only for Camping, but for his followers who bought into his message.

0:10:52
CW: Well, yeah, I was just doing a quick little review and it seems like he had an incredible reach because of the incredible amounts of funds he was able to raise and well, people he was able to fleece to buy all this publicity. It’s not like he had a better angle on it than everybody else. He just had everybody’s money.

0:11:13
EM: Yeah, and you know, that’s what separates him from, you know, someone like say Jim Baker. Camping wasn’t there to try to fleece people out of money so that he could funnel it into his personal endeavors like buying boats and makeup for his wife. Camping absolutely 100% believed in what he said and all of the money that he managed to raise went into promoting his message. And, you know, that was in the process of acquiring additional radio stations and billboards that went up all over the country and all sorts of outreach in order to warn people that the end was nigh.

0:11:58
CW: There was a Vox article I read about him where the author interviewed somebody who had worked with him, this guy named Matt Tutter, and he complained that Harold Camping spent money like there was no tomorrow. I don’t know if he realized what a pun he had just made.

0:12:14
BR: Well, you know, I remember the camping story. I wrote about it for, I think it was Discovery News. One of the little quirks, and we’ll get into this later, that always struck me as odd was, you know, there’s billboards and ads and all these sorts of things. And my question was always, and what do you want us to do about it? I mean, I understand it’s really important, you get the message out, there’s the whole zealous proselytizing aspect of, you know, not just Roman Catholics, but many religions in general. And it’s like, okay, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say the world’s gonna end in three weeks. What exactly, what are we doing here? Do I not pay my visa bills? Do I go out and see butterfly kisses before I die? What are we supposed to do with this information?

0:13:10
CW: He wants you to get right with God, Ben. The more people that understand that there’s a deadline, will change their ways and ask for forgiveness just in the nick of time.

0:13:22
EM: Well now, actually that’s not true because according to Camping, free will didn’t exist.

0:13:28
CW: Oh, that’s right. He was more along the lines of the Calvinists, wasn’t he?

EM: Absolutely. So only the chosen elect were going to be able to achieve heaven, everyone else was going to, there was going to be a Thanos snap, you know, you were going to wink out of existence. So as a result of that, there was nothing you could do. And so, that is absolutely…

0:13:52
BR: It’s so important to me to tell the entire world, there’s nothing you can do about it, but just FYI.

0:13:55
CW: That puts a whole different spin on it. I no longer see him as having any sort of, you know, noble reasoning here. It’s simply that he wants to go nanny nanny boo-boo. I know that you don’t and you know…

0:14:08
EM: I mean his big thing was that if you were among the 3% that was going to go to heaven and it was only 3% You were good. But if you were the other 97 there was absolutely nothing that you could do There was no way that through good works or you know devotion to the religious principles that you were going to be able to reverse your situation. He did kind of, you know, step back on that a little bit when he began claiming that as of 1988, which is, you know, a whole other story because he brought numerology to a degree into his biblical study, but according to him in 1988 God had started what he called a harvest of souls and God was now deciding to increase the number of people that were going to be saved on May 21st of 2011. But still, the numbers were so low, you were likely doomed.

0:15:04
CW: Wow.

0:15:05
BR: Just playing the numbers, it sounds like a weird version of Pascal’s Wager. Exactly. Not Pascual our co-host, but the other one. Well, you know, I’ve always had a fascination with the apocalypse and end times, and, you know, my personal favorite prophet was a hen that lived in the English towns of Leeds in 1806. Apparently, this is a true story, apparently there was a hen that began laying eggs on which the phrase, Christ is coming, was written.

0:15:37
CW: Oh!

BR: Yeah, and as you can imagine this was you know even back in in 1806 this was big news. People started coming from miles around to see what other messages were coming out of this hen. People became convinced that doomsday was was at hand until a local skeptic, a curious fellow, actually watched one of the prophetic eggs being laid and discovered that there was some some chicanery afoot. You can probably guess where this is going. Someone had actually scribbled the message onto the egg and returned it from once it came. I’m sure the hen was none to amused either.

0:16:15
CW: You’re not talking about the nest. You’re talking about the actual hen hole.

0:16:19
BR: Yes. Oh, that poor bird. Well, it was it may be a poor bird. We’re still talking about that poor bird centuries later. So that that little hoax, the little prophet hoax made it famous.

EM: You got to suffer for your fame. Absolutely.

BR: Exactly.

CW: But yeah, there’s a whole list of doomsday prophets on Wikipedia, over 150 of them, including including Jim Jones, of course, Charles Manson. What’s his name? Pat Robertson, who I’m stunned is still around and kicking. Embarrassing sensible Christians since 1982, I think.

0:16:58
CW: Yep. Tons of different… Louis Farrakhan actually is listed about saying that there’s going to be a war of Armageddon, which is the final war, all sorts of…

BR: You know, he had a UFO sighting.

0:17:10
CW: Did he?

0:17:11
BR: Yep. Louis Farrakhan did, yeah. Yeah. I mean, typically what you find is that there are sort of two different categories of these apocalyptic notions. The first one is the sort of more animistic or naturalistic versions. These are when you have, you know, the blood moon or eclipses or, you know, some sort of catastrophe that’s certainly localized or maybe even global that people are freaking out about and they’re sort of, you know, people have always looked to the heavens to look for signs that the gods are angry and people aren’t doing the right thing, too many people are masturbating, people aren’t keeping the Sabbath holy, whatever it is, and so people look to numerology and these things like that. And then, of course, the second kind, the kind we’re focusing on today, is more scriptural, typically monotheistic religions. I don’t think there’s a lot of sort of doomsday prophecies among Buddhists, for example, and Shintoists. They tend to be sort of focused around the monotheistic religions and so that’s always one handy way to look at it. You know, the US specifically has a long history of prophets, I was going to say false prophets, although so far they’re false. Who knows, one of them may be right one of these days. Probably one of the best known was a New England farmer named William Miller. Like Harold Camping and many before him, he spent a lot of time reading the Bible and he concluded that he alone had the wisdom to figure out something that apparently had escaped everyone else’s knowledge. He realized, or he said he realized, that the world was going to end sometime between March 21st, 1833 and March 21st 1844.

0:18:51
CW: It’s a pretty good spread, yeah.

0:18:52
BR: Yeah, it’s a pretty good, you know, it’s easier than one day, right? Give yourself even odds on that one. And keep in mind, this is, you know, only a century after the Lee 10 was popping out scriptural eggs. So who knows? And so, eventually thousands of people were coming to him and listening to him. He preached and published enough, and eventually he settled on April 23, 1843. He’s like, okay, well let me narrow this down, because people are like, hey dude, when exactly is it going to end? April 23rd. All right, cool. So the Millerites, as they became known, were just sure that he was right, because of course he was the self-professed prophet. Many of his followers sold or gave away or burned their possessions. There’s stories of people just, you know, torturing their own house, which seems to be like, you know, just an off chance that this guy’s wrong. Maybe you should hold on… whatever, right? And April 23rd came and went without any notable global apocalypse. So Jesus did not show up as promised.

0:19:53
CW: He has a way of doing that.

0:19:55
BR: Yeah, you know, he just seems to have gotten lost along the way. And eventually the group disbanded. They sort of became disillusioned with the false predictions. And some of them later formed what later became the Seventh-Day Adventists.

EM: You know, it’s interesting because whether it’s Miller or it’s, you know, the poor belabored hen from Leeds, you know, or Harold Camping, it’s one of these situations where whoever the prophet is, or in the case of the hen, whoever owns the prophet, they possess a truth that is specific to them. And, you know, one of the central tenets of faith is that you can’t question. And if you show any sort of doubt, then you are not worthy of your eternal reward or whatever that might be. And so these people wield this great power and it becomes a cult-like atmosphere, wherein you have to reject any other sort of scriptural teaching or biblical belief system and buy in completely to what this person is telling you because no one else is going to back that up. The truth is specific to this individual.

BR: Well the thing that always struck me is is one of the phrases you hear is the devil can cite scripture for his own purposes. Anybody can cite whatever scripture they want but what’s curious to me is that you know if you look at Matthew 24, 36, it says very clearly, it says, of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angel of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only. And so it’s, I mean, the Bible is known for being somewhat opaque about many things. That sentence is pretty clear. It’s saying precisely that nobody knows when Jesus is going to return. I mean, if you’re looking for a Bible verse. This is this is among the more clear ones.

0:21:47
EM: And that’s commonly What’s thrown up to refute these sorts of claims, but then you know you have these individuals who are positing these alternative truths and they are coming up with their own sets of proofs to counter that.

CW:  Well that yes for every one thing that the Bible does claim there are usually three things that claim something completely different in another part of the Bible. It seems that how seriously a doomsday prediction is taken really depends on how charismatic the leader is. One of the things that this former co-worker of Harold Camping’s said was that Camping carried this whole thing himself and he had a very seductive voice and having listened to a snippet of video with him. I don’t know if I’d go as seductive, but he was like 91 when he was in the snippet that I saw. But, you know, tell us your experience with listening to I mean, he had a radio show and everything. What what brought you to this peculiar fandom of Harold Camping? And what can you tell us about his personality that led to his success?

0:22:50
EM: Well, what happened with me was in 2006, I was a reporter and a producer for XM Radio. And prior to the buyout by Sirius, our headquarters was located in Washington, DC, and I live in Baltimore. So I was starting at the bottom of the ladder. I was working overnight shifts, and I was driving from Baltimore to DC and back again at very odd off hours. And being a big fan of talk radio, specifically on some, you know, somewhat fringy subjects, I was dial chasing and I stumbled upon this station called Family Radio, specifically a program called Open Forum, and Open Forum was a call-in show that was hosted by Harold Camping, and callers were encouraged to dial in and ask all sorts of questions pertaining to faith, or sex, or marriage, or the family unit, or scripture. And what attracted me to this show on the first listen, because it, you know, if it was just some sort of standard radio ministry, that wasn’t going to hold my attention for very long. But the callers were divided between people who were either praising Camping and his particular message that he was delivering, or those who were calling in to call him a false prophet and tear him apart.

0:24:26
BR: Interesting.

0:24:27
CW: He allowed that. He allowed calls like that to make it in.

0:24:30
EM: He allowed the calls to make it in. And I think a lot of people would call up and they would tell whoever the producer was that they were going to ask something that was not what they were going to ask. And he had this fantastic way of talking over people and ultimately hanging up on them without ever losing his cool, without ever raising his voice. He just put people to bed and I fell immediately in love with it when I realized that the reason people were calling and saying that he was a false prophet and that he was a heretic was that Camping had stated that through a combination of biblical study and like I said numerology he had exhaustive research to support this claim. Not a lot of it made sense to me or to anyone else, but it was so fascinating that I became obsessed with this show. And particularly as we led into 2011 and all of the coverage started happening, I was just rubbing my hands together and waiting to see what would happen when the world did not end and how he was going to respond to that.

0:25:40
CW: That is quite a cliffhanger.

0:25:41
EM: It was the best kind of cliffhanger. It was fantastic.

0:25:44
BR: Yeah, I remember the lead up to it and in my line of work, I mean, they come and go. Obviously, as you guys know, it’s sort of like, oh, it’s Thursday already. But you’re right, I mean, campings, predictions, and particularly, you know, international news. That always baffled me and I’m glad that you gave us some insight into that. I hadn’t spent years or months or much time actually listening to, because I didn’t need to. I mean, his message is pretty clear, but I hadn’t understood the appeal even to skeptics.

0:26:14
EM: It was, I mean, it was really, really exciting. It was one of those things that every week I was looking forward to it. It was like, you know, Tuesday, Blu-rays come out, and Wednesday, comic books come out, and Thursday’s open for them. It was really exciting, particularly as the more notoriety that he was gaining, the calls were very passionate, whether they were for or against his message. And it was just an opportunity to see something play out that normally we would read about a lot of these, you know, sort of doomsday prophets or what have you after the fact. But this was happening on the stage for anyone to witness as it was occurring. And then it took a turn for the extra weird as callers were calling in to talk about donating their life savings to Family Radio, selling their homes, quitting their jobs, all in preparation for the apocalypse. And they were very sincere about it. And that was one of the things that ultimately made headlines because there were many, many people who did so and lost everything as a result. There were families who were calling in wanting to know how they should tell their children that it was known the day of their judgment and that the world was going to end on this specific day. How do I approach my child about this? And camping would counsel them to sit their kids down and say, you’re gonna die, all your friends are gonna die, your school’s gonna explode, there are gonna be tsunamis and earthquakes and graves are going to open and corpses are gonna be spat out. Tell your kids, prepare them for this. Give them that knowledge.

0:28:06
BR: It’ll be a wacky fun time, kids.

0:28:08
EM: Now, it would be funny if you didn’t realize that there were people out there who bought into this completely and were doing these horrible, horrible things to ultimately destroy their lives and emotionally compromise their families to say nothing of financially and logistically in my research I came across a couple examples that were connected to to the the camping prophecy.

0:28:35
BR: There was a California woman named Lynn Benedetto Who heard the message and she she became convinced exactly as you just said Erik that that they were they’re all gonna die And she didn’t want her children to suffer. She had two daughters who were 11 and 14 and she forced them to lie on a bed and she cut their throats with a box cutter. And she tried to kill herself, although the police arrested them and all three of them thankfully survived. There was a guy in Taiwan, as I recall, who killed himself ahead of the rapture by jumping out of a building because again he’s sure that the rapture was going to come and that it was going to be so horrible that they didn’t want to live through it. As I recall the story, there had been some recent earthquakes and tsunamis around that time. So, it’s another example of where there are, independent of this Camping theology of doomsday and all this, if you tell people to look for signs around you, there will be earthquakes, there will be wars breaking out, there will be this and that. And if you put that in people’s heads, then it goes back to confirmation bias. You start selectively paying attention to these things. And sure enough, you can easily get yourself in the frame of mind that you’re seeing apparent confirmation of these things. And so I’m glad we’re sort of highlighting the fact that these apocalyptic visions can have deadly consequences. It’s one thing for us to sort of sit back and say, oh, that was so silly. You know, they burn their stuff, they gave it away, another failed prediction. But there are real world consequences, and people get hurt and people get killed.

0:30:15
CW: Well, yeah, even without the physical damage of having somebody’s throat cut with a box cutter, just the psychological damage of, oh, here’s how you sit your kids down and tell them everybody they know is going to die. That’s staggeringly cruel. And reading about the reach that Camping had, it seems like his open forum, rather his family radio reached a lot of people. There was like a wide variety of people. All types of backgrounds, all types of races, and all types of educational levels. There are actually a lot of engineers and people who were into numbers that got on the boat here with Harold Camping and sent money in. Now, he never really called himself a cult leader. As you said, he didn’t take this money and funnel it into a mansion for himself or airplanes and boats and everything. He didn’t gather a harem for himself, but would you, Erik, would you consider him a cult leader nonetheless?

0:31:18
EM: I would absolutely consider him that, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that Camping was very, very interested in the history of Scripture and being able to validate the presumed inerrancy in the Bible as much as he was interested in speaking its message and What he ended up doing and what actually started his walk down this path because initially you have to understand that Camping was a member of the Christian Reformed Church and he teamed up with some conservative Presbyterians and Bible Baptist groups to purchase an FM station in San Francisco and start family radio and Ultimately it expanded and as you said, you know, it was broadcast by 2011 on more than 150 stations It was translated into foreign languages all over the world. Thanks to the advent of the Internet and camping established family radio as being very very Traditional in its message that it was speaking They had a very strict policy of rejecting any sort of outsource programming that taught what he considered to be extra biblical revelation, meaning, you know, alternative readings of the Bible. But things took a turn in the 1970s when, using his background as a civil engineer, he devised what he called the biblical calendar of history. And it’s very, very intense in terms of devising this calendar, he was able to pinpoint what he believed were exact dates in biblical history. That then in turn allowed him to start thinking about dates and occurrences that had not yet come to pass. So obviously the end of the world. And the first thing that he announced, his first message that sort of in my opinion put him in a position as a cult leader Was what he called the end of the church age and what that was was according to camping God had fled the churches and these were buildings that were unclean as a result of the sins of man man no longer a gateway to salvation. Anyone who was teaching or preaching or counseling or whatever was a false prophet. And he had very specific reasons for believing this, which again come down to numerology and a reading of the Bible. And because the church age had ended, he told his followers, stop attending church, stop tithing, all of those monies should come to Family Radio. Here is why I believe the church age has ended. I am the only one who understands that it has ended and why and what is coming next. And so mine is the sole voice of authority in this. He was very, very quick not to give himself any sort of title or to claim any sort of spiritual authority. But by that same token, if you say, Hey, look, I’m the only one that knows the truth and here’s why, and can spout out a lot of scripture along with numbers and dates and all sorts of fun stuff like that, that’s going to just go over most people’s heads. There are people who will buy into that. And he more or less encouraged them to build a wall and to reject any outside interpretation. And of course, where it went from the end of the church age was the beginning of the end of the world.

0:35:06
CW: There are some dangerous hobbies you can get into, you know, rock climbing, bow hunting, but it seems like the most dangerous hobby is starting to make your own calendar. Don’t do that. Don’t. If you see your kid getting into calendar making, don’t let them do that.

0:35:21
BR: Well, it’s interesting to learn about the numerology aspect to camping theology. I was unaware of that. It reminds me of, for example, the Bible Code by Michael Drosnin, which has been conclusively debunked by local skeptic Dave Thomas and other people. I think there was even a sequel, The Bible Code Part 2 or something, where he just has this notion that if you run computer programs and you pick every 16th letter and you just keep running it and running it and running it, that eventually you’ll find these hidden messages that God put in there that are prophetic and telling about, you know, essentially sort of Nostradamus in the digital version. But it’s interesting to sort of see that sort of blend of Christian scripture and numerology sort of all blended together. And I think, I suspect that that sort of blend of theology and for lack of a better term, hard science. I mean, numerology is of course not science, but it’s numbers. And there’s a, yeah, there’s a grudging respect for numbers, right? The numbers add up, two plus two is four. You can’t deny these sorts of things and so the idea that you can somehow like prove, and I’m throwing scare quotes around here even though you can’t see them, something mathematically and numerologically has a lot of appeal to people.

0:36:34
CW: Well, apocalypse thinking in general seems to have appeal to people and the fact that Camping came on the scene right around the time when the internet had taken hold and he could get a worldwide audience just by going out on the airwaves kind of worries me for the next time this happens because I mean look at Wikipedia there’s a hundred and fifty some odd people that have predicted the end of the world. Camping is not going to be the last one and the next time the message might get out even more we might have even more dangerous repercussions.

0:37:14
EM: The interesting thing about camping was that because Family Radio was started in 1958, he had decades and decades to gain his followers. And it wasn’t just the open forum show, he had pre-recorded messages that he delivered, much time to build a loyal audience that was, you know, as the name would suggest, you know, comprised of families who would grow up listening to this. And he did not announce the end of the Church Age and the beginning of the Tribulation, being the period immediately preceding the Day of Judgment, until 1988. 1988 was was supposedly the year that the church age was over and that anyone who was listening to family radio that attended a church should sever ties immediately. So again, that’s 30 years to build that audience. It wasn’t like he was somebody who just came along with a crazy idea. He was somebody who was, if you buy into religion and it makes sense to you and you don’t consider talking snakes to be crazy his message made perfect sense and was in harmony with traditional Christian values and then he began to very very slowly Veer away, and so it was a gradual thing. So it’s definitely a gradual thing.

BR: So remind me Eric was that – Didn’t he make other predictions previously as I recall?

EM: He did. His original prediction was that the world was going to end on September 6th of 1994.

BR: That’s right.

EM: And he wrote a book about this and it was published after he had also published his biblical calendar of history book. And so he laid out all of these proofs for why the world would end in 1994, but he built sort of an escape hatch into his premise and he said if it’s not 1994 then here are the reasons why it will be definitively 2011 if it’s not this it’s definitely going to be that unless it’s nice exactly a nice long gap in there also and then of course September of 1994 came and went and we’re all still here and it did not gain gain the sort of mainstream traction that the second prediction would However, the first prediction was you know, the first erroneous prediction was constantly Used as a counter-argument Against his 2011 prediction. Well, you were wrong the first time You you said it was going to happen then it didn’t happen then to which he would say yes But I always said if it wasn’t then it was this second date. That didn’t seem to deter him at all and again he used scripture and he used his calendar to give reasons for why it was definitively May 21st of 2011 and he never he never wavered. It’s interesting you know every every few years I get sent a plea to read someone’s manifesto and it’s usually sort of a theory of everything, either they are proving that God exists or proving that God is actually a race of aliens or proving that we are all a universal consciousness in a vat or something like that. I always sort of dread opening those emails because on one hand, I have seen enough of them that I can tell where this is going and I am not being trolled, I am certain of that.

0:40:49
BR: These are sincere people who have spent years, and in some cases decades, on their own little theory of everything and, you know, piecing it all together. And it’s always, you know, well, in order, it’s the emails themselves are usually a page or two. And then it’s like, well, to really understand what I’m saying, please open up and read this 32 megabyte PDF with diagrams and charts. You know, I know what I’m saying sounds crazy, but if you just read everything, then you’ll get it. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. I did that the first couple and it’s just pages and pages and pages. It reminds me of Blavatsky and Theosophy and just some of the really turgid, impenetrable, mystical stuff where it’s just this apparently sincere but just unanchored in reality. To be honest, it makes me sad because, you know, these are people who they’re just so sure that they’ve figured everything out and they know when the world is going to end or they can prove that God is real and part of everybody. And I just look at the sea of words and the ideas and I just think, good God, I mean, the time that went into this is scary.

0:42:02
EM: People can talk themselves into anything. And when you have a charismatic leader who comes along, that’s when it becomes dangerous because there are leaders and there are followers. And leaders usually are unwavering in whatever their stance is, and followers are looking to somebody to lead. And it can be harmful and destructive.

0:42:25
CW: Well, now, what happened with the followers and with the leader Camping after the final days passed?

0:42:34
EM: Well, May 21st, 2011 comes along and in the buildup, camping had taken more than $100 million from various listener donations. And he had erected billboards in cities all over the world. There were people who were independently of Family Radio buying ad space, putting signs up on park benches. Family Radio was sending out mobile caravans to drive through major metropolitan areas with loudspeakers announcing that the world was about to end and having volunteers canvassing the streets and handing out tracts. And I actually saw some in Baltimore and it was extreme people watching for me. But at any rate, you know, this was turning into a frenzy, a small frenzy. And when May 21st happened, nothing happened. And I think most of the people on earth were sort of sitting there like me and, you know, tapping their foot and just excited to see what camping’s next move would be. But instead, he went to ground for about 48 hours and Family Radio closed their headquarters with a sign up in the window saying, the office is closed. We’re sorry we missed you. And they were continuing their regular programming, except Open Forum, which usually ran in repeats over the weekend, which was when this was happening, had been curiously pulled from their programming. And when Camping finally addressed the press, he came out of his home the day after the non-event to reporters all over his lawn, and he just said, I’m flabbergasted. I need some time to think about this. And the following day, the 23rd, he had a very, very irregular episode of Open Forum where he did not take any calls, but rather turned it into a press conference and took questions from the press, at which time he said, well, you know, I thought about it and I’ve balanced the numbers and what I’ve come up with is it did happen. It’s just it was an invisible judgment day and that it was spiritual rather than physical, but don’t worry October 21st the world is still going to end and his callers Continued to call in they many of them again were absolutely behind him and saying oh well, you know, okay, so the tsunamis didn’t happen and the earthquakes didn’t happen at 6 p.m. Local time, but we still believe what you’re saying you maybe, you know misread the signs But by that same token, we’re still following you and we’re still behind you. What was very very upsetting to witness were the people who were devastated by the failed prediction who were calling in or who were giving interviews in newspapers and magazines and could not get their heads around it. I mean it was like they had just stumbled out of a car accident I quit my job. I sold my home. I’ve been living in a tent I told my kids that the world was gonna end I kid I cut my kids throat with a box cutter I mean there were people who were devastated by this and Camping three weeks later had a heart attack.

0:46:05
CW: Oh.

0:46:06
EM: But, you know, he returned to the airwaves afterward. He was a very, very different man. He changed his stance in the weeks and months leading up to October 21st, stating that maybe the world would end on October 21st. However, he did not give any of the money that he had solicited back because according to him, we’re not at the end of the earth yet. So what’s the point in giving it back? But when October 21st came and nothing happened, one by one stations all over began selling off. Camping stepped down from his position at family radio and family radio went very, very quiet and camping was not heard from again until he died two years later.

0:46:51
BR: Interesting, I remember there was a book titled 5-5-2000, Ice, the Ultimate Disaster, by a guy named Richard Noone. And the 5-5-2000 refers to May 5th, 2000, when according to this guy Noone, N-O-O-N-E, there was gonna be a planetary alignment that was certain to create this whole cataclysm. And it was interesting, because I talked to astronomers who had said, no, there will be this alignment, more or less, but this has happened before and the polar ice caps didn’t flip and do things like that.

0:47:26
EM: But the question is, was the alignment supposed to happen at noon?

BR: Exactly. You have to wonder. And so, you know, on my bookshelf, I have maybe a dozen or so books on the apocalypse and failed apocalypse and I’ve got probably half dozen which are just people who are claiming that for example in year 2000 The world’s gonna end this guy talking about how Obama was the Antichrist and because of his presidency He was gonna bring about death and destruction that came and went as you guys know in the case of 552000, I contacted Mr. Noone through his website and I asked him if he might be available for an interview on 562000, just on the off chance that it didn’t happen and he sort of demurred and said that well, he would have to check his schedule.

0:48:22
CW: What else did he have scheduled for that day?

0:48:24
BR: I didn’t ask but his book, 552000, is currently available at Amazon.com for $1.26. I’m sure it’s worth every penny, so check it out.

0:48:32
EM: I know what I’m reading next. Fantastic.

0:48:37
BR: Well, you know, the whole question of the psychology of doomsday is a fascinating topic and of course we could do a whole show on that at some point. But probably the most famous study was done by a guy named Fessinger. He wrote a book called When Prophecy Fails in 1956. And he and several other people had examined a small apocalyptic cult led by a woman named Dorothy Martin. And Martin had claimed, and again, the timing is interesting because again this was in the 50s and there’s a UFO cult angle to this, of course, with Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947 and the Roswell crash in 47. So there’s a lot of UFOs and aliens and sort of new agey stuff in the cultural air and she drew upon this. And Martin claimed that she received messages from the Guardians. These Guardians were a bunch of superior alien beings, because they’re always superior, because why would they be superior?

0:49:40
CW: They were more like Asgardians then.

0:49:42
BR: Yes, that’s exactly right. Assgardians, yes.

0:49:45
CW: No, no, no. Asgardians.

0:49:47
BR: Oh, I thought that was… Okay, my bad. My bad. And so, like many people of a certain bent, I’ll just leave it at that, she believed that she was chosen. And this is, of course, a common theme among UFO contactees and abductees. And even, frankly, among many people who report encounters with monsters such as Bigfoot and Champ and creatures like that. They sort of feel like they alone have been chosen to receive the wisdom and to be given the gift of a sighting. And so there’s a really interesting angle of sort of feeling special and feeling like you’ve been chosen to bring a message forth to the world.

0:50:31
CW: It’s nice to be special.

0:50:33
BR: It is nice to be special. And Dorothy unfortunately passed along some bad news from the Guardians, because you know not everything is cool up there in the 80s or wherever it was, that there was going to be a worldwide flood on December 21st, 1954.

0:50:48
CW: At least she got to feel special about it. You know, that kind of takes the sting off of learning about worldwide destruction. At least you know you were the special one to find out about it.

0:50:55
BR: Right, and until you’re the ass that got it wrong. And that’s exactly what happened here. So what happened is really interesting studies. So Fessinger and a couple of our psychologists were sort of not embedded in this cult, but they were observing the cult and dealing with them and sort of had access to them. And so when once this prediction was made, they got to know the members and they were saying, how do you feel about this? What’s going on? And so it’s really in-depth study of the psychology of the believers. And when doomsday came and went, as of course it did, she claimed that, well, you know, the world has been spared because the forces of good and light won out. And that she actually took credit. She and her group took credit because they said, well, the Guardians said that there would be a worldwide flood and destroy everything, but because we spread the message and we prayed and we were worried about it and we opened up our hearts, that we let everybody know about it and somehow that global knowledge and the knowledge that there was this impending doom, the Guardian decided to give us another chance or something like that. And there are a couple outcomes of the study. One of them was that a lot of the believers, much as Eric mentioned with camping, they just doubled down. It wasn’t like, oh, well, hey, maybe Dorothy’s smoking something. It’s like, hey, maybe the Guardians are messing with her. Maybe she just got it wrong. Maybe she misheard something. You can always rationalize the way that the errors. Many of them were just all the more enchanted with her beliefs, exactly like Camping was.

0:52:37
EM: Yeah, it’s tough if you’re going to be trying to deal with something that’s finite with a hard out because the odds are very good that while you might be held up by your believers and maybe held up very high, there is an ending. It’s not something that is likely to play out. It’s not something like, you know, say Albert Bender who went the other way with UFOs and introduced the idea of men in black where we don’t have a very, you know, a specific sort of concept behind that. It’s left ambiguous and it that allows it to permeate and force to continue to talk about it when you start ending, you know talking about the end of the world or something like that you’re dealing with a very very short amount of time in which to to work and that window will close.

0:53:26
CW: Yeah, Ben this this psychologist you were mentioning Festinger is it was he the same guy who came up with cognitive dissonance as a concept?

BR: Yeah, exactly. That was sort of one of the takeaways and one of the earliest sort of high-profile examples of cognitive dissonance in which in order to reduce cognitive dissonance and sort of save face because you’ve invested so much, in some cases, you’ve invested your life, you’ve invested your family’s home, you’ve invested, you know, you’ve given your money away, whatever it is you’ve done, because you’re so invested emotionally and personally and financially in other ways, you want to reduce that cognitive dissonance. You don’t wanna feel like you’ve been fooled. It’s like so tied to your ego. Like only a stupid person would follow a false doomsday prophet, Therefore, I- Therefore, you know – I’m not stupid, yeah.

0:54:15
CW: Yeah, exactly. Only stupid person would follow this doomsday prophet, but I’m not stupid, therefore the prophet must have just been mistaken and we’re gonna wait for the next end of the world.

0:54:27
EM: There’s gotta be a way for all this to be true, yeah.

0:54:31
BR: Yeah, it’s self-delusion, you start trying to patch holes in logic. It’s a very slippery slope.

0:54:38
CW: Yeah, I think doomsday cults and the repercussions of people following them, they’ve gotta be one of the saddest failures of skepticism in individual people and hopefully humanity will get better and better as days go on and we’ll have fewer and fewer instances of this happening.

0:54:58
EM: Or the world will just end.

0:54:59
CW: Or the world will just end.

0:55:00
BR: Celestia, you brought up the question of whether we’re going to see more of this and unfortunately I think that we are. One of the interesting aspects of these modern day apocalyptic prophets is that they have the mass media. People have been predicting the end of the world for millennia. So there’s nothing unique about that. What is unique and part of the reason that apocalyptic visions and prophets seem especially powerful and influential these days is a combination of two things. One is, as Erik mentioned with camping, is the mass media. Centuries ago, if you had some prophet who read the Bible again and suddenly had a revelation about when the world was going to end or whatever else, they might tell their friends, they might form a small group somewhere. If it’s past the time with Gutenberg and the press, they might publish a pamphlet or something. But it wouldn’t really spread that far. But these days, with the Internet and mass media and everything else, any crank, Alex Jones, Camping and so on, has a voice. And anybody with an internet connection can have their views put out there for mass consumption. And, of course, it’s all packaged into books and magazines and videos and seminars and audio tapes and websites. And, I mean, once you start looking into the whole doomsday apocalyptic vision. I mean, it’s a whole cottage industry. That’s one of the fascinating things about it. But one thing that’s really emerged over the past couple of decades is not just the mass media, but also the way that people such as Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, LaHaye is the co-author of the Left Behind series. One of the, I was gonna say brilliant things, but it’s brilliant from a marketing point of view. It’s not brilliant from a skeptical point of view. They made their prophetic doomsday predictions relevant to the general public by claiming to find parallels between the current world and the end times. This is something that hadn’t been done before. Previously, centuries ago, when someone would talk about the end is nigh and doomsday or whatever else, all they had to point to was their visions, rightly or wrongly, and the Bible and quoting passages which people may or may not believe. But what happened over the past couple of decades, and this is especially true of Hal Lindsay who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth and other books. I think he’s still alive if I’m not mistaken. But one smart move on their part was they said, okay, don’t just take my word for it. I mean, you know, buy my seminars, buy my books, see me on TV, come to my workshops, but look around you. The evidence is there if you look for it. And they say, look at the war in the Middle East. We’ve got suicides, we’ve got earthquakes, we’ve got tsunamis, we’ve got Chernobyl blowing up. We have all these sorts of, and so they would point to indisputably bad tragedies and disasters in the natural world and point and say, that’s what the Bible says right there. I predicted this. I told you about this. And so that sort of gives an external validation in their mind.

0:58:17
CW: So like every episode of global news turns into just a buffet of confirmation bias.

0:58:25
EM: Absolutely.

0:58:26
CW: That’s depressing.

0:58:27
BR: Well, it’s, you know, again, it’s sort of, in many ways, it’s identical to the process by which people who believe in Nostradamus continue to claim that, you know, he made his predictions. I mean, they, it’s exactly the same process. They say, well, you know, if you read this obscure quatrain written in old French, you know, centuries ago, it talked about 9-11. If you read it, if in this way, it’s talking about Hitler’s talking about Obama. And so there and that that’s a that’s a hook because again, people sort of see what’s going on in everyday world. Say, oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way. Well, no, you shouldn’t think about the way because that’s not the right way to think about it.

0:59:03
EM: Or it’s like reading the Old Testament and saying this is talking about Jesus.

CW: Yeah, people are very good at finding patterns. We’re extremely attuned to it.

0:59:11
BR: Yes, indeed. Speaking somewhat tangentially about Doomsday Predictions, do you guys want to hear about the time that I got Mormon hate mail?

0:59:19
CW: Oh, always.

0:59:20
EM: Absolutely. Absolutely.

0:59:22
CW: Because they’re such vile people and it’s really easy to get their goat and just have them lose their temper.

0:59:28
BR: The Mormons are just among the most sweetest. They’re just the wholesome thing. Let me just clarify that when I say Mormon hate mail, their version of hate is more like a disgusted glance for anyone else.

0:59:43
CW: Yes, I hope people got my sarcasm there. I live in a very, I live in a very, there’s a lot of Mormons peppered around Las Vegas and they are the nicest people you can run into.

0:59:52
BR: Yeah, so their version of hate mail is like, excuse me sir, you got something wrong.

0:59:57
CW: That sounds like a skeptic.

0:59:59
BR: Here’s the short version of it. In 2009, I wrote a piece for LifeScience.com about doomsdays and apocalyptic beliefs. I covered, I think it was a dozen different failed doomsdays, including the mill rights we mentioned earlier and some of the other ones. I also mentioned that the founder of the Mormon Church had wrongly predicted a doomsday.

1:00:21
CW: Joseph Smith predicted a doomsday?

1:00:24
BR: Yes, he did.

1:00:26
CW: I did not know that.

1:00:28
BR: Well, if you bring this up with many Mormons, you will get looked askanced. You will get looked at askance-edly or something. I’ll read you the offending sentence. This is the sentence that got me several pieces of what might be blithely referred to as Mormon hate mail. Quote.

CW: You overturned the beehive, you.

1:00:48
BR: I did! Ooh! Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, called a meeting of his church leaders in February 1835 to tell them that he had spoken to God recently, and during their conversation he learned that Jesus would return within the next 56 years, after which the end times would begin promptly. My source for that, in case you’re wondering, hey, where did Ben get this? We can go to a piece written by Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 130, 14-17. And it’s pretty short, I’ll just read it to you. Quote, I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following, Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man, that is Jesus, therefore let this suffice and trouble me no more on this matter. I was left thus without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing or whether I should die and thus see his face. I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time.” Of course scripture is known for being somewhat ambiguous and that’s kind of what it does, but in this case I think it’s actually pretty clear what it says. So I’ll just read you very quickly one email I got from a Mormon named Corey. He said, please check your facts. There’s never been a Mormon Armageddon prophecy. You’re confusing this with the Church of Christ and other faiths that began in that time period, many of which have several end dates. Please consult with official church sites when gathering information. It is the first rule of journalism, go to the source.

1:02:28
CW: Yeah, don’t go to Joseph Smith when you want to quote Joseph Smith.

1:02:33
BR: So, I again, trying to summon all the diplomacy that I usually muster when dealing with Mormons, I said, hello, Corey. Actually, perhaps you should check your facts and reread the passages, especially this one. Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art 85 years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man. Therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.” It’s pretty clear that Joseph Smith is being told by God that he shall see Jesus before he turns 85. Unless you’re saying that God didn’t know whether Smith would die before then.

1:03:06
EM: Please tell me that you signed that letter saying, therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.

1:03:13
BR: Oh! Oh, oh wow. Of all the times when you wish you had had a zinger, I wish I had you here with me, Eric. That would have been beautiful. Tell you what, if I… Next time.

1:03:25
EM: Next time.

1:03:26
BR: And the chances are, I’m going to say 50-50, that at some point I will get another angry letter from a Mormon, because I’ve been a writer for 20-some years. People will read something that I wrote on the internet, it could have been last week, it could have been 30 years ago, and they’ll get indignant about it, and they will email me right away to tell me that I’m wrong about something. Often I have no idea what they’re talking about. So there’s a decent chance that someone will, out of the blue, call me on it. So anyway…

1:03:56
CW: It’ll probably be named Corey, too.

1:03:58
BR: It probably will be.

1:04:00
CW: Let this suffice, Corey.

1:04:02
BR: So anyway, not to offend any Mormons, again, I like Mormons. I saw your play, The Book of Mormon, beautiful stuff. And so I have nothing but respect. And if I’m mistaken and I’ve misread what Joseph Smith said, it’s pretty clear to me, but if I’ve misunderstood this, that is you think that maybe God didn’t know when Smith would die, which would be weird for an omniscient God, but whatever. If I have this wrong, please do go ahead and send emails.

1:04:30
CW: Well, before we get all the floods of Mormon hate mail that I’m sure that will bring in, as far as you two go, would you want to know if there actually was an apocalypse coming? Because I mean, there’s all sorts of apocalypses. We could have a supernova in the nearby region of our galaxy, and we’re all screwed. Would you want to know if there was an end time coming in our lifetimes?

1:04:54
EM: I think only if it has the Dungeons and Dragons sort of quality to it. You know, I like the pomp and grandeur.

BR: It’s got to be impressive, right?

EM: Yeah, you know, there’s an almighty being who’s going to flood the earth and, you know, he’s a pissed off parent and you get to go to your room and you get to come hang out with me. I did have an incredible moment on May 21st, 2011, and I was so anxious to hear what would happen with Camping’s Prediction. I was in downtown Baltimore. I was in the Inner Harbor, and it was a beautiful day. It was just blue skies. I didn’t have to wear a jacket. It was wonderful. I’m walking along, and I’m thinking to myself if this is the day of judgment. This is this is the perfect weather. This is exactly how you want it to be so that then suddenly you know that the skies will darken and the lightning and the blood All that fun stuff, and I glanced up at the sky And I literally stopped in my tracks because I saw letters beginning to appear in the sky I I could not believe what I was seeing and there was that half moment where I thought, did I get it wrong?

1:06:06
CW: Oh!

1:06:07
EM: Did I get it wrong? Is it really happening? And it took me a moment, but then I realized there was an airplane. It was skywriting, whether by serendipity or they were doing this specifically because they were in on the joke that today was the day of judgment. judgment, but all of us were able to behold the message that you too could save 15% or more on auto insurance.

1:06:34
CW: Ah, okay.

EM: And I probably look like a madman because I stood there laughing. So yes, I would love for something fantastical like that to happen.

BR: Here’s what we should do. The next time that there is a predicted doomsday, and as we all know, there will be next time, maybe next month, maybe next year, but soon, we should all pitch in and get a Skywriter over Los Angeles to write, you know, you’re doomed, or just sort of like, you know, God, you know, I’m on my way, dash Jesus, or just something just to troll them, why not?

1:07:09
CW: You’re suggesting-

1:07:10
EM: Let’s do it, let’s set it up.

CW: Like a gigantic version of a tweet.

BR: Exactly, exactly.

CW: You’re all gonna die. Sad.

BR: Well, you know, I agree with you. I mean, I’ve thought about this, because apparently I have nothing better to do. I would actually be comfortable with the world ending anytime now. And I’m being totally serious here. It’s not a very politic thing to say, but if I could know for certain that the world was actually ending, that is, it’s not just me, you know, having a stroke, it’s not just North Korea deciding to take out New Mexico, but like this is in fact the end of the world. If I could somehow know that I would like to see that I would, I would find that interesting from an intellectual point of view. I mean, I would, I would miss my cat. I’d miss this podcast. Uh, there’s people that owe me money. There’s people that owe me apologies that I’ll never never get anyway. But I would just on an intellectual level, I would love to experience something that nobody before me had experienced, even if that’s the end of the world.

1:08:15
EM: Are we talking like a sudden event or are we talking, you know, five months of tsunamis and earthquakes and corpses being thrown out of graves. I mean, is this something where you would love the beauty of the experience, but it was momentary or a short in duration sort of event? Or would you be willing to take it all in stride knowing, eh, it’s going to be five or six months, but it’ll be over after that?

1:08:47
BR: I think I’d be fine either way. Honestly, my first, and this is going to sound weird, but that’s what I do, my first, if I could know for certain that this is the beginning of cataclysm, as horrible as it is, the body is coming out of the graves, what have you, but in 60 days or 70 days or whatever, if I could somehow be certain that this is in fact the end of the world, I would want to experience and see as much as possible. In fact, I would want to make a documentary. I’d be like, this is fascinating. This is so cool. It’s like, Erik, let’s go make a documentary. But then I’d be like, who are we going to show this to? But no, I would want to sort of give my thoughts on it and, you know, oh, here’s this is part four of the, I don’t know, I would just, it’s the same reason that I’ve said that, for example, if I was the first person to be killed by a Bigfoot or killed by a chupacabra or a ghost or something, and I could prove that, that somehow after my death people would like, wow, chupacabras are real, Bemner’s wrong, buy his book anyway, but wow, if my death and my experiencing that would actually solve this global mystery, If I could be the first person to die by these mysterious ways, and it could be proven conclusively, I’d be okay with that.

EM: Your concept sounds like the ultimate found footage film. It was framed as being watched by aliens on another planet, as having been a record kept by one guy with no hair in the final days on Earth.

1:10:25
BR: I love it. Let’s do it.

1:10:26
CW: Well you guys are both very differently composed than I am. I have an enduring love of consciousness, not just my own but other people’s, and it sometimes gives me heart palpitations at night knowing that eventually the universe will succumb to a heat death, and that’s not anytime soon. So I would rather there not be an end of the world.

1:10:47
BR: Well no, I would rather there wouldn’t be. I’m just saying those those are the conditions under which I’d be OK with it.

CW: Oh, OK. I’m not trying to bring it about. I’m not I’m not doing the Trump thing.

1:10:56
BR: I’m just I’m just trying to say, you know, when I’m OK with it, that’s all.

1:11:02
CW: Yeah. Well, if it has to happen, I wouldn’t mind watching the fireworks. It’s probably going to be pretty. And of course, you know, there’s the old restaurant at the end of the universe option with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe we can do that. We’ll see.

1:11:15
EM: Awesome. So long and thanks for all the fish.

1:11:17
CW: Well, Eric, so long and thanks for all the Harold Camping.

1:11:21
EM: Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for making the mistake of having me back. I appreciate it.

BR: No, this has been awesome, man. It’s interesting hearing somebody who had a first, sort of a first-person seat at the whole thing. I mean, he didn’t come onto my radar until much later. So, Much later, so it’s fascinating hearing somebody sort of you know about him as it went along and sort of keeping a skeptical on it. So that’s uh, that’s that’s really cool Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

EM: It’s just cool sharing it with people who think that it’s cool at the time I got a lot of really bizarre looks as I talked about this in the years leading up to it. But yeah, yeah It was awesome.

BR: Well, we we want to have you back. There’s other other cool topics that we’re all interested in and have some expertise in. So let’s pencil something in your calendar and we’ll bring you back. If you’re not too busy accepting awards for Butterfly Kisses.

EM: Ah, no, this is more fun.

1:12:14
CW: As long as the world has not ended yet, yes.

1:12:16
EM: And when it does, we’ll make the ultimate found footage film.

1:12:19
BR: We’ll do that.

1:12:20
CW: There we go, all right.

1:12:21
PR: We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in Strange Studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

1:13:03
BR: So thanks for joining us for the Harold Camping episode and all that apocalyptic weirdness.

1:13:08
CW: Yeah, and thanks for talking about all the other little apocalyptic blips that have happened before him. Now, Erik had mentioned that you guys were joking about making the apocalypse into a documentary. If it ever did happen, you guys would film it and it would be the ultimate found footage thing that some aliens could watch eventually. It occurred to me recently that there was a brilliant bit of found footage describing the end of the world that was in fact found by aliens and watched and it actually involved a bald guy a rather erudite authoritative and dare I say sexy bald guy and no it wasn’t you Ben I’m talking about Jean-Luc Picard.

1:13:48
BR: Oh okay.

CW: Season 5 episode 25 of Star Trek the Next Generation it’s one of the fan favorites the inner light it does exactly that and Trekkies who know which episode I’m talking about. They know what I mean when I say it actually takes found footage to a whole new level. And those who don’t understand, go ahead and check it out. It’s got a great little flute song. It might make you cry a little. It’s really good.

1:14:12
BR: Very cool.

1:14:13
CW: But yeah, but so apocalypse is all around. They definitely permeate our whole cultural awareness. We’re always kind of secretly hoping we’ll be around for the end of it all. Now, speaking of the end of it all, we’ve come to the end of this episode, but what do we have on tap for next time, guys?

PR: Well, next week we’re going to be talking about kids and woo and the very interesting and exciting world that is now that this is a two-thirds parent run show. So, yes, I thought it would be kind of cool to jump into and, you know, kind of use our perspectives on that to try to kind of walk through that minefield.

CW: Yeah, and it can be a minefield because I mean there’s some real dangers when when kids are exposed to woo It can be the most well-meaning woo in the world but you got kids that have died from it and you’ve got you’ve got kids that grow up and there it can be very resentful Of some of the really wrong stuff that has been introduced to them at a young age.

PR: Absolutely.

CW: So yeah, there’s a lot of tricky, sticky wickets we can talk about, and we look forward to discussing that with you in two weeks. All right, so that about does it for this week. Until next time, we’ll see you. Take care. Bye-bye. Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2018.

1:15:33
Theme music by shriek back additional music by memory keytard and feathered and pascual romero Additional support provided by Ashley Romero Robert Sundin and of course our listeners and patrons The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of squaring the strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of squaring the strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions Of two heads studio Cronos creative Center for inquiry our advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo