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
Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 105 and I am your co-host Ben Radford. Along with me are…

Pascual Romero: Pascual Romero…

Celestia Ward:  and Celestia Ward.  Hey everybody.

BR: The Gang’s in Town!

0:00:37
CW: Hey everybody, the gang’s in town, the gang’s in town. We’re talking about the Satanic Panic just in time for the Halloween season.

0:00:45
BR: Yes, just to set out the outset, we’re not going to be covering all the aspects to it. There’s, as I think we touched on at the end of the last episode, the Satanic Panic has all sorts, just a plethora of skeptical angles. There’s false memories, there’s subliminal messages, there’s moral panics, mass hysteria, false accusations. I mean, it’s just this huge, scary, freaky, smorgasbord of skeptical stuff. So we’re not going to be going into too much of it. On this episode, we’re going to focus mostly on the pop culture aspects, including concerns about music and games and things like that. And later on, we’ll be talking about some of the moral panics and come back to that. So that’s setting the table for this episode.

0:01:43
PR: Yes, yes. So, is anyone skeptical of anything this week?

(MUSIC)

0:01:48
CW: As a matter of fact, I am. Something has popped up in my hometown that has really, you know, things set off your skeptical radar. This has set off my skeptical alarm bells and I’ve got to figure out what I can do in terms of activism to do something about this. You guys might remember we mentioned it on the podcast several months ago and it was big news in the skeptical community when Susan Gerbic and Mark Edward got written up by the New York Times.

BR: Yes.

PR: Oh yeah.

CW: For their sting on most specifically Thomas John, who I keep wanting to call John Thomas, like, you know, the slang for junk, the British slang for a gentleman’s private parts.

0:02:38
BR: But you’re going to take the high road, right? That’s good.

CW: But Thomas John is a psychic who has kind of popped up recently and and eaten up the spotlight and is performing all over the place and it looks like he’s coming to Caesars Palace here in Las Vegas and he’s going to be performing in January at a venue there that I quite like it’s it’s a longtime venue called Cleopatra’s Barge. I actually saw Puddles the Clown Puddles Pity Party out there just like earlier this year. And it’s a neat little venue. It kind of looks like a little boat and the little Caesars or the little Cleopatra bust kind of juts out into the hallway of Caesar’s Palace. And it’s been a longtime tradition to try and jump up and touch her boobs ever since I was a kid. We’ve been trying to do that. So it’s a long and storied venue. And he’s it with his reaching out and preying on widows and grieving people. So the good news is there was a write-up in the paper immediately by the RJ. The author of the article was a Twitter name, Johnny Katz, and his actual name is John Kastelometes. God, I hope I’m saying that right. Kastelometes or K-A-T-S-I-L-O-M-E-T-E-S. He wrote up a pretty long article in the RJ. And the good news is it wasn’t a rah rah, come get your fortune read. Let’s you know, let’s do some PR for Caesar’s Palace here. Right in the lead, it talks about Susan Gerbic and her sting operation and The New York Times. And this is why it helps to get press. This is why that article will have a lot of staying power. If you’re a journalist doing a web search for you know this new guy that has been booked, that’ll pop up, the New York Times will make your eye go right to it.

BR: Absolutely.

CW: So the first few paragraphs are all, in fact the title even, the title of this article is, Incoming Las Vegas Strip Headliner Thomas John Faces the Skeptics. It’s even got the word skeptic in the headline and that’s awesome. So Now obviously the best possible solution would be that the bad press ends up making Caesars Palace rethink whether or not they’re gonna hire this guy There’s no way to completely Deplatform every psychic out there. There’s always going to be people who want to give them money But I for one will be writing some letters to Caesars Palace some sternly worded letters and I’ve already been in touch with Vital Vegas, which is a Twitter feed that tends to be really on the forefront of getting insider news out about Las Vegas shows and entertainment and performers. And they’re kind of, sometimes they have a little bit of a gossipy angle to them, but they always seem to be right on the money with stuff. So I’ve actually already been tweeting back and forth with them. And they’re not happy about this either. They’re not exactly psychic believers and they had actually reposted Johnny Katz’s article saying, Yay! Thank you for calling out bullsh**ttery. Vegas is better than this. And I think Vegas is better than this too. I’m going to try and point out that Caesars Palace, this is not in your best interest because financially, it makes you look desperate. It makes the venue look like it’s about to fail. If you’ve come to the point where you’re hiring not a legit mentalist act but a grief vampire, somebody who is preying on people and pretending that they’re getting in touch with dead loved ones. This is not a legitimate act. This is not something Vegas should be putting in its marquee. So hopefully we’ll see, we have until January to try and change their mind about booking this fellow.

0:06:25
BR: Interesting. I hope that succeeds. My little bit of recent news, speaking of alleged psychics and grief vampires. Is I recently attended a performance by Teresa Caputo, the Long Island medium.

0:06:39
CW: The question everybody’s dying to ask is how was her hair?

BR: It was amazing. She she clearly she made a lot of money that night, given the number of the auditorium seats and the prices she was charging. So the hair was impressive. The performance was not so much. But I’ll save that for another show. But that was my recent thing I was skeptical of.

0:07:06
CW: Put a skeptic in an audience like that, and it’s just, it’s almost overwhelming how much your little radar goes off. And you gotta keep quiet about it. You can’t just stand up and say, you’re full of it. You’ve got to kind of just kind of go with the flow.

0:07:20
BR: Yeah, just well, it’s like when you and I attended the John Edward performance a couple of years back and we did a show on that, of course. And, you know, it’s like you’re there to to to study and see and react. You’re not there to necessarily cause disruption in that venue. I’ve certainly certainly the late Sylvia Brown was not happy with the disruptions that I and others caused for her, but that wasn’t inside the venue. That’s a different matter.

0:07:45
CW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually, that’s one of the things I’m going to point out to Caesar’s Palace is Sylvia Brown started getting booked at Excalibur. And Excalibur is a, you know, legitimate venue on the forefront of like the classier venues to discount rooms, not a place you go to on purpose kind of venue.

(MUSIC)

CW: All right, well, without further ado, Ben, you want to set the stage for us for the time we’re going to talk about long in the past, long way back in the folds of time, back to the 1980s?

0:08:25
BR: Yes, the 80s with some strains of the satanic panic that actually linger today, and we’ll touch on that later on.

(CLIP PLAYS)

0:08:48
If we might divert back to some of the movies that have been coming out like Star Wars and the Jedi, Return of the Jedi and so forth. What is this creature we’re looking at on our screen from… Well, this is Squid Head. He’s from Star Wars. And as you know, Star Wars told us that the Force would be with us. It… and of course, the Force is a word used by witches down through the centuries to describe the power they receive from Satan. Characters like Darth Vader, who look almost exactly like the ancient Norse god Odin, Odin and Obi-Wan Kenobi and there’s a form of witchcraft called Obi-Witchcraft in which Chanting Obi-Obi-Obi over and over again releases the power into the witches lives. You’re saying that these were actually taken this was taken from a Norse God who looks very much like it. It looks a lot like Darth Vader. I wish we could go back one slide and look at that Norse God but we can’t go backward on these? Okay. We’re looking at Yoda right now, and Yoda was called the Zen Master. Of course, this was based on Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhism says there’s one force in the world and it can be either used for good or evil. And Yoda’s called the Zen Master. He’s always seen with serpents around him or serpents around his neck. Yeah, look at the serpents around his neck there. He is a three-fingered, three-toed beast. So he has the two fingers and the thumb, which from my information means Satan is Lord.

(CLIP ENDS)

0:10:31
BR: Yeah, so let’s go back to the early 80s. Not all of us remember it. Well, all three of us do, but not all of our listeners might. This was a time before the internet. I know, crazy, right? Before internet, what is a PI?

0:10:52
CW: I know, I couldn’t just look up Pinterest to figure out how to cut strips out of my inside out sweatshirts and tie knots into them. I had to just wing it.

0:11:01
BR: You had to go to the library or ask that creepy kid down the block what he did. So, as you can tell from this discussion, some of the information is better spread and some of it isn’t? It would actually be interesting to see what would have happened had the satanic panic occurred as it did in the internet age. It could have been it could have been much worse, but it also could have There the opportunity to sort of talk back to it is also amplified as well. But so this is a time when these VCRS were new this new thing where you could actually watch a movie more than once. Just after you left the theater, you actually had the possibility of watching it again.

0:11:42
CW: And you did again and again and again and again.

BR: That’s right. That’s right.

CW: Especially especially if you were like 10 or 12.

0:11:48
BR: And you watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. There was this was also a time when Post-it notes were new. I know that many people think that Post-it notes have always been there, but no, they were they were new in the early 80s. CNN and wall to wall 24 hour coverage was also new. Walkmans were new as well and this ties in with some of the satanic panic because the Sony Walkmans were the first personal audio that were commercially available to people and they would play cassette tapes.

0:12:19
CW: Oh yeah, I never put that together but yeah, there was like this turning point where I got my first Walkman, and I could just literally listen to music 24 hours a day, and I did.

0:12:32
BR: And not just music, but your own music, right? Before this, you basically listened to whatever was on the radio at the time. But the availability of Walkmans as being personal audio devices gave – I mean, of course, there were stereos, but try putting a record player on your back and going somewhere. So the portability and the ease with which the teens of that age were listening to their own music. And of course, with headphones. Right? So adults nearby don’t necessarily know what they’re listening to. Is it something satanic? Is it is it Bob Denver? Who knows?

CW: And yeah, the parents are probably a little concerned that their kid is tuning them out all day by having these Walkman headphones on.

0:13:17
BR: Exactly. So this this sort of sets a stage. This was the Reagan era. First-class poachers stamps were 20 cents back in the day, five for a dollar. And so this, there was, you know, the Iran-Contra and, you know, the Falkland Islands War and all sorts of things were going on. You’ve got, of course, the emergence of Madonna and pop culture and pop music and these sorts of things. So all this was going on. So there are lots of social changes. And of course they didn’t automatically kick in once it was January 1st, you know, 1980. I mean, the decades are somewhat arbitrary in terms of, you know, obviously social trends, which is why some of the things we’ll be talking about today actually extended into the 1990s, even though they initially came out in the 80s. And in the previous episode, we talked about some of the phantom clown scares, which were part of this. And so all these sorts of things were going on, and tying this back into the season, the current season, of course, there’s the perpetual concerns about Satanism and Halloween. This has been a long-standing concern, and this ties in because the fear of many fundamentalist Christians is that young children will see these costumes, these witches and ogres and vampires and occult things, and become interested in Satanism and the occult and witchcraft. That’s their real fear. It’s not so much that little Susie is dressing up as a witch, it’s what does that really mean? What’s this going to lead to?

0:14:53
CW: Yeah, if any fundamentalist Christians, I’m sure we have many listening in our audience, want to just reassure themselves that these costumes of today will not lead anybody to Satan, Google the costumes of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, and those are horrifying. If those didn’t lead to widespread worshipping of Satan, then the the the Jedi’s and the My Little Ponies of today certainly will not.

BR: You would think so. So anyway, so this this is some of the context to the satanic path that we’re talking about, and it’s part of a longer, in fact, sort of timeless practice of moral guardians freaking out about what kids there are involved in, and in some cases, women. So, for example, you had Frederick Wortham in comics and Anthony Comstock in the 1890s.

0:15:48
CW: Seduction of the innocent, yeah.

0:15:51
BR: Seduction of the innocent, right. You had, and not just seduction of the innocent and the concerns about comic books, but also concerns about information about women’s health and taboo topics like menstruation and sex education. This is all part of the same fear that if you teach children just a little bit about it, that they’re going to suddenly become sex addicted, drug addled, depraved perverts.

0:16:18
CW: Well, in all fairness, menstrual cramps can drive you to worship the devil and become a drug-addled person. I will attest to that.

0:16:31
BR: Well, in part of this, a lot of it does go back to, and not to bash the fundamentalists, but I mean a lot of it does go back to the Bible, the Christian Bible. Exodus 22-18 specifically says, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And that passage is widely quoted among many fundamentalist Christians who say, look, this is the word of God saying that occult things, including witchcraft explicitly, are in bed with Satan. So there’s this, throughout these panics and things we’ll be talking about in this episode, there’s this notion of a gateway. There’s this notion of things that are superficially such as kids dressing up as Halloween or listening to a heavy metal song or whatever else or playing D&D for example. But you know the question is, well what if they become obsessed? What if they just take drugs and they’re doing these crazy things? And keep in mind, again this is part of a bigger tradition, so even today, as recently as a few years ago, there were concerns about Harry Potter books. You guys remember that?

0:17:41
CW: Oh yeah.

0:17:42
PR: Oh yeah.

0:17:43
BR: People are burning Harry Potter books because they’re concerned that young readers are going to be enveloped in this magical world.

0:17:52
CW: Yeah, in fact, you’re making me remember one of the most amusing things I found doing a quick bit of research for this is I found a chick tract from the 1980s.

BR: Yes, Jack Chick.

CW: Anybody who’s not familiar, the Chick tracts, it’s actually that time of year, there might be a house in your neighborhood that instead of giving out candy, gives these little kind of wannabe comic books that have a quick little black and white story in them about how Satan is bad and Jesus is good. And they’re put out by Jack Chick. And some people collect these. They’re kind of funny in their own little ironic way but they had one about D&D specifically and how this girl starts playing D&D and after she casts some fireball spells and plays for a few weeks with her friends then one of her friends is like, oh well you’re really taking to the D&D spells really well. Now let’s try some real witchcraft. You’re ready for that now. Like it’s a grooming method to get people into actual witchcraft.

0:19:00
BR: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s a perfect example. Underlying a lot of this is, well, it’s a conspiracy theory. I mean, that’s what this is about. It’s the concern that there is this vast unseen network of Satanists and drug users whose entire life mission is to corrupt America’s youth. There’s all these hidden organized groups and again, primarily Satanist as we’ll talk about in a bit. But more broadly, the concerns over gratuitous sex and violence, I mean, those came up recently with Game of Thrones, you know, there was the fear of influence about the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise and the idea that it would lead to skyrocketing rates of abuse in personal relationships. And even more recently, the Joker film, right? There was the concern that people watching the Joker film would be inspired to commit clown-caused mass shootings or something like that. And of course, none of these materialized. Like none of these concerns about violent video games or violent movies or sex and all these things. They were all this smoke and mirrors, all this Tempest in a teapot that never came to anything except of course to its victims. So anyway, that sort of set the stage for it. But keep in mind that, you know, during the 1980s, what was happening was that, as I mentioned, people were seeing signs of Satan and evil all around, even when of course it didn’t exist. One famous example was the Procter & Gamble logo. Do you remember that?

0:20:40
PR: I do recall that, yes.

0:20:41
CW: I have only vague memories, but I pulled up the Procter & Gamble logo. If listeners want to check it out, just Google Procter & Gamble logo Satanism and you’ll find it on there. It’s kind of this nice circular logo, really kind of old-timey looking, kind of reminds me of something you’d see stamped on something for the Sears and Roebuck’s catalog.

0:21:02
BR: Well, in fact, it was used since 1882.

0:21:06
CW: Yeah, it’s definitely dated.

0:21:09
BR: And a century later, 100 years later, in 1982, it was rumored to be an emblem of Satan. So Procter & Gamble who make all everything from toothpaste to deodorant to all sorts of household products was suddenly dealing with these rumors Again, this is pre online but rumors going around in the news media and elsewhere that they were somehow a satanic brand and so they ended up changing the logo was changed in 1985. And once again, you see this sort of pareidolia. We talked about this in previous episodes, where people see faces in clouds. They hear in EVPs or ghost hunters will hear what they think are sounds of ghosts telling them bits of information, get out or whatever it is. It’s Rorschach. People are seeing things. And so in this case, people were seeing 666 in the in the stylized markings in the figure’s beard in the Procter & Gamble logo. Again, none of this is there.

0:22:12
CW: Apparently, people were spreading and listening to rumors that the CEO of Procter & Gamble was associated with the Church of Satan and donated money to it. And I have a very interesting little side bit of information on the P&G logo that does add to the cornucopia of all this skeptical stuff. I have something involving MLMs. Apparently, a major competitor to Procter & Gamble was Amway. You remember we talked about them briefly in our MLM episode. Procter & Gamble was awarded about $19 million in a civil lawsuit against their competitor Amway after they reinvigorated some Satanism rumors in 1995 to harm Procter & Gamble.

BR: Wow, that’s dirty pool.

CW: So who’d have thought that an MLM company would play dirty.

0:23:17
BR: Well yeah, so this is the context, right? And keep in mind that the idea of Satan in pop culture, that certainly didn’t originate in the 1980s. You can go back and look at the William Peter Blatty novel The Exorcist in 71, made into a 1973 film, and later Amityville Horror, and of course we talked about this in the previous episode. But it all sort of congealed and it’s, I think in the public’s consciousness, it leapt from the silver screen to real life during that time as we entered the 80s. And again, this was around the time when there was, you know, biofeedback and there was, you know, astrology was kind of waning and you had acupuncture and alt-med coming up. And of course, one of the aspects was, as we mentioned before, Dungeons & Dragons. And I was an avid D&D player throughout much of high school, and I remember very, very well being up until 2 in the morning trying to make one more room for my dungeon, trying to figure out how I can, whether I can plausibly fit a red dragon in a 4′ x 4′ space, because I didn’t have enough graph paper. I didn’t really get the side-eye as far as I could tell. I mean I was pretty clearly not a Satanist as far as most of the local folks knew, but of course I was in a small town outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico and this was hardly a hotspot for the Satanic Panic, although it was going on elsewhere in the country. But you know it was one of the things where, as I mentioned, there’s this news trope of the good boy gone bad, right? The good student where, you know, there’s some kid who’s a straight-A student and he spends his days, you know, volunteering at the local church and helping little ladies across the street. And then two years later, he kills somebody in a convenience store robbery. Well, what happened, right? So everyone is wondering about that. And they comb through his stuff and they find, oh, my God, he he played Dungeons and Dragons. He he had he had a half elven paladin. Oh, my God. What is going on here?

0:25:25
CW: Ben, as a folklorist, did you ever look into the story of that guy who disappeared? James Dallas Egbert, the third. He was like a Michigan State University student.

BR: I don’t I don’t recall that. He was a freshman or sophomore in 1979 and he went missing and the media accounts of his disappearance really focused on the fact that he was in a fantasy role-playing game and he liked Dungeons and Dragons and they started speculating that he like got lost in his character and just wandered off and was doing who knows what in the tunnels underneath the school.

0:26:03
BR: Oh, I do vaguely…

0:26:05
BR: And apparently that was the basis of the novel that was written in 1981 by Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters, which became that movie with Tom Hanks.

0:26:16
BR: That’s right. OK, that’s what that was, right.

0:26:19
CW: Yeah. So, so, yes, it became like this actual fear, like you could have a nice young man going to Michigan State University and what might happen if he gets into D&D.

0:26:28
BR: Yeah, and that’s exactly the sort of the fear that you see. And that’s, you know, you saw this throughout the Satanic Panic, was, you know, the sort of like, well, maybe this one song is okay or maybe not. But really, the bigger issue is, you know, where do we go from here? And you know, where does this person go from here? And you know, you saw this, for example, in the Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine. He has a bit in the film about that, about the two Columbine shooters. They went bowling before they shot up the school. You’re going to blame bowling for the mass murder? I mean, you know, people are always looking for something to blame, and usually it’s the mass media that they jump to. And to be fair, there are times, but they’re very rare, when people do get so immersed in their fantasy world that they don’t stamp out of it. One example is the Slender Man stabbings. The two girls in Wisconsin nearly killed their 12-year-old friend. Both of them were essentially committed to mental institutions. But I mean, that’s a case where that’s it’s pretty clear that that actually was going on, that there just happened to be two very emotionally disturbed girls. So it does happen. It’s just very, very, very, very, very, very, very rare. So anyway, and amid all the concern about Dungeons and Dragons and comic books and this and that, you also had people, for example, Geraldo Rivera, who were putting out these really sensationalized TV specials. Rivera did a very famous one titled, Devil Worship, Exposing Satan’s Underground. It premiered on NBC on October 25th, 1988, and it was actually the most popular, or the most watched program as of that date.

0:28:25
CW: Wow.

0:28:26
BR: In television history, more people tuned into this crap.

PR: Also the most hilarious.

BR: Yeah, sadly, yeah.

PR: Unintentionally.

BR: Yeah, and so, you know, people can find the clip on YouTube and elsewhere, I won’t go into it too much, but as you can imagine, Rivera just spent this, I think it was two hours just constantly talking about there’s Satanists everywhere, and they’re abducting children, and they’re raping them and killing them, and just all this totally pseudoscientific stuff that often times had no basis in fact whatsoever. One particular person that he had on there, one of his experts, was a person named Dr. Rebecca Brown. And Dr. Brown actually turned out to be a defrocked physician named Ruth Bailey, who had her license taken away, and she contributed to several books that were published by Jack Chick Ministries.

0:29:22
CW: Oh!

0:29:23
PR: Yeah.

0:29:24
CW: It all circles back.

0:29:26
BR: It all circles back. And so her thing was that she believed, and again, was promoting this on Geraldo Rivera’s special to NBC audiences about how there’s all these so-called doorways to satanic power. And it wasn’t just heavy metal, there was also yoga, self-hypnosis, of course D&D, adultery, homosexuality, judo and karate. Take your pick, there’s so many doorways to Satan we had no idea. Anyway, so again, Geraldo is just sort of the most egregious example of this, but you have to keep in mind that…

0:30:11
CW: Do you guys remember when Geraldo seemed like legitimate news, like a real journalist? I mean, I don’t know if it’s just that I was young and I took him to be a real journalist or he actually had more cred in the business during the 80s. Help me out here. Do you guys remember ever thinking of Geraldo as like, that’s the Walter Cronkite of our age?

0:30:35
PR: Yeah, I remember.

0:30:36
BR: No, I’m not. I’m not that old. I’d probably have to be in my hundreds to know when Geraldo was credible.

PR: I think I recall him being like, like, there was a point where I recall him doing things like war correspondence type stuff in maybe the early 80s and then by the satanic panic time he was a full-fledged talk show host pretty much. But I do recall, at least I have a mental picture of him standing in front of a war-torn place reporting, but of course that could just be from the—

0:31:10
BR: A false memory.

0:31:11
CW: Yeah, exactly. I remember him breaking big stuff and I remember paying attention like this guy’s a news person and I can trust him. And I think after Al Capone’s vault, that’s kind of when I remember it flipping and like, oh, oh, no, this guy’s a joke.

0:31:24
BR: As I recall, Geraldo, eventually, this is decades later, as I recall, he eventually sort of owned up to his his his being a key part in fomenting the satanic panic and a lot of the injustices that were associated with that. And I think he put forth some sort of half-baked, half-apology about how, well, you know, he didn’t know any better at the time, and if he had to do it again, he wouldn’t have said that Satanists are out there trying to kill everybody, which for my money is a bit too little, a dollar late and a dollar short. But anyway, so this is the – I just want to make sure that listeners realize that this was not you know, this was this is part of an ongoing thing. This wasn’t just one special there was there were news reports about kids killing themselves after listening to rock music There’s these TV specials by Geraldo saying that Satanists are abducting children and killing them and eating babies There’s concerns about D&D there’s all these things were going on At the same time and this of course led to Tipper Gore and her famous concerns, the panel and bringing up, bringing a lot of musicians up and demanding they testify about how horrible and how unsafe their music was. And this led to the parental advisory stickers that we now see on pretty much everything.

0:32:41
CW: And those are still there, yeah.

0:32:43
PR: Yeah, and, you know, that was the PMRC who was responsible for putting those explicit labels on music. They were very much the enemies of the music scene at the time. In fact, bringing together a very wide sloth of musicians, in fact, like Dee Snider from Twisted Sister, Frank Zappa and John Denver, who all spoke at PMRC hearings in front of the Senate. So, you know, if it’s bad enough to bring those three together, it’s bad.

0:33:17
CW: I would pay good money to see them act in a buddy movie together.

0:33:21
PR: That would have been awesome. But we could do a whole episode on just that whole debacle. But what I’d like to kind of do is sort of go through a timeline of how the scare played into music and how the music industry was affected by it. To go back in time a little bit, I kind of want to start with when Satanism started kind of popping up in music. In kind of the modern music era, it sort of started with the blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who was a guy way back in the day. He put out some recordings in the late 30s that were that are considered legendary blues recordings, but there was a rumor about him having sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to achieve.

0:34:13
BR: That’s right, an old folklore story.

0:34:14
PR: Yeah, and so and of course that’s become kind of a quaint, you know, folklore as you said, since then, but at the time it was, you know, something that kind of, you know, because of the nature of the way news used to spread, it became a legend that some believed about him. But to go forward a little more, it was kind of the late 60s that you started seeing the motif pop up, where people were actually referencing Satan. And more specifically, we had people like Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan sort of weaving into the music scene a little bit. Famously, Sammy Davis Jr. was a person who joined that church, which is funny because, yeah, and many people who listened to him, obviously, were accusing lots of other bands of it, but at the same time, Sammy Davis Jr. was actually a friend of Anton LaVey’s.

0:35:09
CW: I did not know that. That’s not something that you hear about in Rat Pack history?

0:35:14
PR: Yeah, Sammy Davis Jr. was probably the most famous member of the Church of Satan at the time. And I don’t know if it was maybe his management or his agent or what, but it just seemed like it was very well downplayed, considering the way people got to be it by the 70s and the 80s. But to step forward a little bit, you know, you had the early versions of heavy metal. You had Black Sabbath, and there was a number of bands in the 70s that just adopted kind of the satanic themes and the sort of pagan themes and capitalized on the fact that parents were freaked out by it and teenagers loved freaking their parents out and so it just became a great marketing tool for these bands. But that all really wove right into the fear that started building with things like Dungeons and Dragons and the fantasy artwork that was, you know, some of the same artists that did the fantasy artwork for Dungeons and Dragons actually did covers for heavy metal bands in the 70s.

0:36:15
CW: Yeah, there was a lot of crossover that they kind of refer to the genre as like Conan and Cthulhu, you know, the barbarians and the muscly guys, you know, fighting in this fantasy realm with magic and swords and sorcerers. And then and then the Cthulhu dark, dark stuff that you’d find in Weird Tales. And and yeah, I’ve found a lot of reference to heavy metal musicians being inspired by this. In fact, if anybody wants to check out a 2015 song by Visigoth, it’s called The Dungeon Master.

0:36:50
PR: Nice. Yeah, you had guys like Frank Fazzetta doing Molly Hatchet covers.

BR: Yeah, think of Dio’s, you know, Last in Line and Holy Diver.

PR: Sure, yep. And these are all, you know, so it was very interwoven, so it was really primed for the panic to sort of bleed into, you know, from the gaming kind of subculture to the music subcultures or the more subcultural music. But by the 80s, it really started taking kind of a sinister turn. Now, back in the 60s, there’s this thing that this recording technique we call backmasking, which is just you reverse, you record something forward and you reverse it. Now, a lot of people, maybe more towards the 80s, started realizing you could say things backwards and then reverse them so that it sounded correct forward, but it had a weird sound to it. That was sort of an experimental thing that was really popularized by the Beatles. They put it in their album Revolver. Because of that kind of thing starting to happen, people started looking for it in places that it wasn’t. So you had, for instance, Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin has one of the biggest, most controversial references, which is not an actual thing, just more pareidolia. But people started believing that there was a part in the song where if you reversed it, it said something about sad Satan. I think it was, yeah, oh, here’s to my sweet Satan. And it was a very interesting kind of interpretation, which says really more about just priming people to hear something than what you can actually hear.

0:38:43
CW: Yeah, wow.

0:38:46
PR: And well, and you know, I think the technology had a lot to do with it too, because record players, it was very easy to reverse something, even if you just manually put your finger on it and rolled it back. And you could, you know, it was just easy to spot these things and find them and just sit there and listen to things backwards and come up with all kinds of things.

0:39:05
BR: Not so much with cassette tapes, though.

0:39:07
PR: No. Cassette tapes, it was a little harder. It was doable, but definitely not easy.

0:39:13
CW: This is sounding like a version of Ouija board or EVP hunting that you could do in your den in 1985.

0:39:20
PR: Yeah, oh yeah. And that’s pretty much where this all came from. But by the 80s it really became a little more serious because people were very convinced that these things were happening and that there was subliminal messaging throughout songs and just themes that were subliminally or backmasked into songs. And it got really tricky because there were bands who would do it on purpose. Pink Floyd in Empty Spaces had an entire secret message. It was very tongue-in-cheek. It said, congratulations, you have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink. Care of the funny farm.

CW: What a great Easter egg.

BR: To be fair, I think that you, I think you’re sort of sugarcoating this. I think if you really look carefully at the words there and you pulled out the individual letters, I bet you could rearrange the letters in those words to come up with something really sinister.

PR: You’re right.

BR: Yeah, I Think I’m a little concerned that you’re sugarcoating this but whatever

0:40:33
CW: And I I feel the need to point out since this whole satanic panic topic is such a cornucopia of many skeptical themes just the notion that subliminal messaging is the thing that would work like if you played somebody a backwards message of you should brush your teeth every day that they’ll actually start doing that You know, yeah.  Whether or not people can be manipulated by back masking or subliminal things that they can’t really register That’s a whole nother topic for another day.

0:41:06
PR: Yeah, and and and we will we will at least be talking a little bit about that right now, as a matter of fact, because what this all kind of culminated in was there’s a couple of very famous court cases that I want to talk about. By 1985, there was a suicide that was a teenager named John McCollum, and he killed himself and allegedly after listening to the Ozzy Osbourne song Suicide Solution. They alleged that a line in the song said Why try get the gun and shoot? Now that’s not at all what the song says, but they were interpreting it that way and this is back in a day where it was maybe a 50-50 that you’d get lyrics and liner notes in the metal world. You definitely didn’t get lyrics.

CW:  So it actually what he actually wasn’t say get a saying get a gun and try it’s like that famous that that book misheard Misheard song lyrics.

PR: Yeah. Yeah. Oh interesting. Yeah, so it really was just a complete mishearing of the lyric and Ozzy had to actually had to, you know, defend himself in court to explain what the line actually says. The get the gun and shoot line, and I’m not really sure how they heard it, but what it says is get the flaps out. And get the flaps out is actually a vulgar reference to a woman showing her genitalia.

0:42:39
BR: That’s like something Ozzy would say.

PR: Yeah. And in a song called Suicide Solution, so which you know, so the name of the song really ended up causing the most I think being the main cause for you know, thinking that that’s what it was about. But the reality it really wasn’t about that.

0:43:09
CW: Well, I mean in fairness. Have you heard Ozzy Osbourne talk?

0:43:12
PR: Yeah.

0:43:14
CW: I know, your honor, I know, your honor, that’s not what I say in this song. In this song, it was actually talking about a woman’s junk, bringing her junk out of her pants. That’s what it was talking about.

0:43:24
BR: Well, keep in mind that, I mean, the concerns about these, you know, ambiguous messages, as Pascual mentioned, it fits in perfectly, right? Because even the song Louie Louie by the Kingsmen, it was widely considered to be obscene. But the problem is no one knew what the hell they were saying. And it actually went to court, and it was determined that the lyrics to Louie Louie were not salacious or obscene because it was quote, unintelligible at any speed. So no one knew, so even the prosecutor had to admit they had no idea what the hell he was slurring about.

0:44:02
CW: So they it’s like an audio Rorschach test.

BR: Exactly.

CW: What do you think the lyrics are? You filthy pervert, you.

0:44:10
BR: Exactly.

PR: And that’s that’s a that’s a going theme with with these situations. And and so, yeah, that that case ultimately was thrown out on freedom of speech grounds. But just four years later, in 1990, Judas Priest ended up in the crosshairs. Another band.

0:44:31
CW: I remember that one. Yeah, that was right around high school.

0:44:34
PR: Very sensational case too. And it was a similar situation. There were a couple of young men. There was a 20-year-old named James Vance and an 18-year-old named Ray Belknap in Reno, Nevada, specifically Sparks, Nevada, if I recall correctly. In late 1985, they got intoxicated and went to a playground at a church in Reno. Belknap put a gun under his own chin, a shotgun, and he fired and died instantly. Then James Vance, he followed, put the gun to his face and somehow survived the gunshot wound with a severely disfigured face. He ended up passing away three years later after an overdose of methadone during his treatment for all this. It’s a really sad story, but Vance’s parents, there was an attorney named Ken McKenna that worked with them who was really a very aggressively kind of Satan-hunting type of attorney. And he alleged that there was a subliminal message in a song that they had listened to before they attempted to kill themselves. Now, an interesting thing about this story, and there’s actually a PBS documentary from the early 90s that covered it, but it missed this detail, which I thought was really interesting, was that when they originally made the complaint to the court, it was about a track called Hero’s End, and they tried to say that the band were saying that you could only be a hero if you killed yourself. But the correct lyric is, why do heroes have to die? So they actually changed their plea to point out subliminal messages on the album. So that already started very sketchy.

0:46:30
CW: Oh, yeah. They’re like, we have a foregone conclusion and we will change the evidence to fit.

0:46:37
PR: Yeah, yeah. And somehow still, I mean, I think just because of the climate around the Satanic Panic, it still just, you know, went through. And this is something we’ll see with – we may down the road cover some of the worst parts of the satanic panic, which are ritual abuse, and you’ll see some similar things happening with court cases there as well.

0:47:01
CW: Yeah, just the phrase you used there earlier where you said he was sort of a Satan hunter type of attorney. The fact that there were attorneys who you could categorize like that, kind of tells you a lot about the era.

0:47:13
PR: Yeah. And that so that trial went on for three weeks. The band had to get up on on the stand and defend themselves, specifically Rob Halford as the vocalist and lyricist. And they went through some of the I highly recommend looking up this story and seeing some of the court footage. There there are some just absurd court scenes with, you know, a guy sitting on the stand trying to point out where, you know, there’s these subliminal messages and then Rob Halford kind of countering by finding more absurd messages by reversing other parts of songs. And so, you know, he’s a brilliant guy, very, very intelligent man. And as actually you will find a lot of people in metal or look up the Dee Snyder video of him addressing the PMRC and he’s a very well spoken, incredibly intelligent man. But what happened was, you know, so Rob Halford is here showing, well, you know, here’s a here’s, yes, you think that what they had, what they had settled on for their case was that the word do it was in a song. The song they ended up settling on was the song Better by You, Better Than Me. What was happening was Ken McKenna was trying to point out that the words do it kept popping up in the song. To counter that, Rob Halford was like, well, here’s another song we put in backwards. He started dictating what you could hear and he’s like, may I have a peppermint please or something? And it sounded, it was like pretty convincing too the way he pointed it out and just to sort of show how easily you can be primed by this, by being told that’s what something is.

CW: Yeah, audio pareidolia really does seem like magic when you hear instances of it and you can’t unhear it. It sounds like words after that.

0:49:15
PR: Absolutely.

0:49:16
BR: What was that, the Yanni Laurel thing?

CW: That was similar.

PR: And that was one, when I broke it down, it had to do with some of the ends of the EQ that you were hearing. And that’s a very similar thing in these situations. Sometimes you’re just hearing these kind of false sounds that create consonants and sounds. This case, they actually were not able to defend it under free speech because the judge ruled that subliminal messages could not be protected by free speech. So it became a little more of an uphill battle than expected. Getting it to trial was a very questionable thing in the first place, but the fact that they got up there and fought it was really interesting, and it brought a lot of strange concepts to light, as in is subliminal messaging free speech, and how does that work? But ultimately, the case was dismissed with the finding that anything that was in the recording, if they actually existed, were not responsible for the suicides. So that was the important thing to kind of establish. However, the judge actually did believe there were subliminal messages in their music. He was convinced of it by the evidence, but he just said that he didn’t believe it was possible for someone to tell someone to kill themselves in subliminal messages. So it’s kind of an interesting thing because I don’t know if you would call it a great victory for the idea that people are putting subliminal messages in songs because it wasn’t ruled that that was the case. It was just ruled that he didn’t think it was something that was capable of causing someone to kill themselves.

BR: Yeah, I mean, I’ve researched subliminal advertising and subliminal messages before, sort of through the prism of psychology and and yeah, I mean it’s asically the and again, this is really a topic for a whole show, but basically the the premise itself is silly I mean, it’s it’s it’s certainly people process information subliminally all the time Just in our everyday, you know, the everyday courses of going through our lives and doing things. But that’s very, very different than saying that a commercial or a song lyric or something else is being perceived. And actually there’s a bit of a contradiction there because typically what we perceive, we’re aware of it. We know we’re listening to a song. We know we’re watching TV. We know we’re very conscious and in fact we’re attending to it. So the idea that there’s something subliminal that’s somehow getting past our consciousness and implanting itself in our brains to sort of hear the magic word to kill ourselves or to kill other people or to do things. I mean, this is out of Manchurian Candidate movie.

0:52:19
CW: I was just thinking Manchurian Candidate, yeah.

0:52:21
BR: There’s just, there’s no science to it. I mean, and that’s why particularly the concerns about subliminal advertising, for example, are just bogus. There was a guy who wrote a book titled Subliminall Seduction. I think it was a Brian Wilson Key. I had the book when I was a teenager and it had this – the book was a close-up of a glass of ice. The cover was this very sensational – do you see the horrible, you know, sexy images in this glass of ice? And it was just glasses of ice. It was sort of, you could sort of see forms in, you know, it was a black and white photo, I think. But it was just basically a shot of just a regular glass of ice. But, you know, if you look closely enough, you could maybe see, oh, that looks like a face or looks like a boob or whatever else. But it was all pseudoscience.

0:53:19
CW: Yeah, yeah. We’re definitely going to do an episode in the future about purported subliminal messaging and sometimes actual hidden little Easter eggs in children’s shows and songs and cartoons and such.

0:53:34
PR: Absolutely.

0:53:35
BR: Yes.

PR: So the but yeah to kind of get to the tail end of this we what ended up happening I mean that case you know it ended and I think in general people stopped pursuing legal action for things like this for the most part.

CW: That’s an inch that’s an interesting place to leave it in the public memory because from what you’re saying the judge was like, yeah, yeah, subliminal messaging is a thing, but you can’t sue over it. You can’t get damages. You can’t claim that it made you do something in a court of law.

0:54:11
PR: Yeah, yeah. So it’s a strange precedence. And as far as I know, it hasn’t really been challenged as of yet. And I mean, I doubt it will at this point. But I’d be interested to see how, you know, a court, especially a higher court, might have to handle something like that if it ever got that far.

0:54:32
BR: Well, the cases that I’ve seen in which people are – keep in mind that suicides are a traumatic event for everybody, of course, particularly the survivors and the family members. So there’s – any time that somebody, especially a young person, kills themselves, there’s a natural tendency to ask, why did this happen? We talked about this in the Blue Whale Game episode last year. Somebody is now dead and the family members want to find why did this happen, who’s to blame. Was it an online game they were playing? Was it some satanic movie they saw or some D&D or was it drugs or whatever was

0:55:16
CW: And yeah, and and seeking out justice against that Enemy, whatever it might be is kind of the only way that a person can think that they’re helping You know, they’re there they’re honoring the memory of their deceased loved one.

BR: Absolutely, and and you know what you what you find is that the cases in which another person is held responsible for a suicide are fairly uncommon. There was a case a year or two back where there was a young woman who very clearly encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself. There were text messages between the two of them and I think even audio recordings of her saying, do it, do it, do it. And he ended up killing himself. And she was put on. She was put on trial and found guilty.

0:56:02
CW: So actually, I think there’s another case just like that in the news. Like right now, I remember hearing something about it yesterday.

0:56:08
BR: Yeah. So, I mean, there so there are, you know, there are cases in which people can be considered legally culpable for another person’s suicide, but there there there cases in which the proximity and the involvement is much, much closer. It was somebody actually physically goading someone on who they knew was suicidal and knew was about to kill themselves And it wasn’t you know someone writing a lyric. Putting it on an album and out of 30 million people that listen to it two of them decided to kill themselves And their family blamed.

PR: Yeah, yeah, and and I recall to put a lighter note on that the Rob Halford had mentioned if I had any interest in putting subliminal messages in my record, I’d be putting in messages to buy seven more copies.

0:56:57
CW: Exactly, yeah.

0:56:59
PR: But there was sort of a Streisand effect to all of this, if you will, those of you familiar with that effect, meaning the more outspoken you are against something, the more it’s going to happen. And, um, and, uh, you know, there became kind of this just surge of overtly satanic bands. Now there had already been a few, but, but most of it was very theatrical and kind of goofy and, and that sort of black Sabbath cape wearing Satanism. But, um, we started getting bands that became more overtly and very aggressively satanic. And there was a band that still exists to this day, a band called Deicide, whose vocalist Glenn Benton, he actually has an inverted cross burned into his forehead. So he’s had a scar up there since the 80s.

0:57:59
CW: That is committing to the bit.

PR: Yeah, and he says that he is a Satan worshipper, not in the Church of Satan kind of tongue-in-cheek, sort of rebellious way, but in that he believes in an actual demon and, you know, worships it. You know, how true that is, I don’t know. I’ve met the guy a couple times. He’s a very strange person and I can’t tell you for sure how serious he is.

BR: And to be fair, you know a lot of strange people. Oh, I sure do. And I’ve you know, and being in that more extreme leg of metal, I’ve known many of these bands for a very long time. Some good friends of mine are or good friends of mine have been involved in a band called Morbid Angel, which is also a very overtly satanic band. Their songs are very much about Satan and about tearing down the church. And it’s very anti-Christian and anti-Abrahamic imagery and themes. And these bands actually had a great deal of success. As we covered back in episode nine, we had the rise of black metal in Northern Europe and the crazy things that happened there and church burnings and murders and all that. And those bands have solidified themselves as legendary bands in the metal world, well, not really despite all of that, but because of all of that.

0:59:27
CW: Pascual, you mentioned the ruling in the Judas Priest case, how the judge said, yeah, okay, subliminal messaging is a thing, but we can’t really prosecute for satanic messages. Do you think the metal world just kind of said, all right, wait till you see me now, kind of as a rush to make the most satanic messages possible and make it way more overt?

0:59:53
PR: I think that you might be able to make an argument for that, especially in the US, where you’re specifically talking about First Amendment rights and things like that. And the Florida death metal scene really saw its rise right about 1990 when that case happened. And that’s when some of the most overt satanic stuff really came out. I mean, before that, it was bands like Venom and Slayer who used pentagrams and occasionally inverted crosses and things but anytime you even ask them about it. They would say it was theatrical. They still do.

CW: What is Iron maidens mascot there Eddie. What is he supposed to be?

PR: He’s not a demon is he? No, he’s he’s a, from what I understand he is a reanimated corpse. Oh, okay. That’s fine. Then that’s that’s not So but there are some demonic tie-ins to some of their you know there’s they did an album number of the beast which obviously is a reference to Satan and You know those so they do have references, but they tend to be more of a fantasy oriented band than anything.

BR: Yeah, I sort of think of Ronnie James Dio and Dio stuff, and it’s all I mean I like do I saw him in concert and he’s about four feet tall. And it was a good show. But I mean, it’s so it’s obviously just, you know, just just bombastic, pseudo satanic, you take it for what it is. That’s that’s that’s what he does. You know, yeah.

PR: And so, you know, but but since that kind of rise of the very intense, satanic, kind of, you know, very intentional, angry satanism that they started injecting into music. It sort of died off a little. Most of the bands that were doing that may still have some of the themes, but I think the thing is, is kids nowadays are just like, so what? It’s just not that impressive anymore. Now when people think of that kind of satanism, they just think of, you know, nerdy kids in their basement playing D&D. And I mean, that’s who I was, that’s who we were when we were into all of that stuff, you know. And yeah, some of our friends were maybe a little more outwardly, you know, vandalizing and things like that, spray-painting pentagrams on stuff, but they were still the same kids as us. They were just maybe a little more unruly. But at the end of the day, I think it’s just like every big scary thing we do in music, it becomes silly after a while. I always like to think of back when Kiss was at the height of their career, people took that fairly seriously. I mean, not necessarily that they were anything evil, but just that that big theatrical show was a very cool thing. And then when you look back on it now you’re like that’s the ICP of their era.

1:02:52
CW: Yeah I don’t even have to look back at it there’s a there’s an act in Vegas that is a bunch of little people uh recreating Kiss.

PR: Oh yeah yeah I’ve heard of that.

CW: Little Kiss I think they’re called.

PR: That’s great.

BR: I wanted to see them one time and I they were not they were not performing. I was very disappointed.

CW: Well that’s too bad.

BR: Probably just a short run.

PR: Oh, Forward all your hate mail to Benjamin Benjamin Radford. Yeah

1:03:17
CW: All right, well that’s that’s a fascinating little tour I learned some stuff that I didn’t know before uh, pascal about the evolution of uh, of edgy satanic, uh themes in heavy metal and back before they were actually Flourishing as they did after the Judas Priest case there.

PR: Yeah.

CW: I suppose it’s a little harder to be super edgy by listening to satanic music when you can just pretty much up and join the Church of Satan online and be a card-carrying member these days.

1:03:51
PR: Yeah, I think that’s another great point. I mean, that’s another angle of it is that it’s just so accessible now. It’s not so esoteric, you know, it’s just a thing that a bunch of guys like, you can find them right online, you can find their Facebook page and they’re just like, you know, they might as well be Shriners today.

BR: Wow.

1:04:13
CW: I joined the Church of Satan and I got this awesome fez.

PR: You joke, but there are fezzes in Satanism.

CW: And I know they do charitable work too.

1:04:33
PR: God bless them, right?

1:04:34
CW: God bless the Satanists. Oh gosh.

1:04:37
BR: Or something.

1:04:38
CW: Oh, well, and I’d also like to give a shout out to one of my favorite cultural relics of the Satanic Panic, and that would be Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

1:04:50
PR: Oh, yes. She’s one of the best things to come out of it.

1:04:54
CW: And she really, it really did summarize the whole, you know, well, what could be making that happen? Oh, can I be Satan?

1:05:03
BR: Well, and so it sort of brings it back around to Halloween, right? And we talked briefly about how, you know, a lot of the fundamentalists who are concerned about the occult influences during Halloween, they get all in a buzz and all freaked out about Satan and witches and whatever else. And I know some witches and they’re pretty chill people. They don’t – their conception of what a witch is or what a pagan is or what a Satanist is is so far removed from what they actually do. I mean we talked about this before, but I mean, the modern day Satanists wouldn’t recognize the Christian Satan and devil. It’s a Christian creation. They don’t believe that. That’s your boogeyman. That’s not their boogeyman. So, anyway, it’s just funny.

1:05:54
CW: Yeah, the different conceptions of witchcraft could be a whole serioes. Because you’ve got the rumors that cause, you know, massive, you know, problems and death and endanger people in Africa. And then you’ve got the Sephora witchcraft line that was recently made available for purchase. And all the witches in America got upset because they didn’t think that their brand of religion should be sold in Sephora. And so there’s a wide spectrum of things that fall under the title witchcraft and that’s for another day.

1:06:29
BR: I’ll just wrap up with if people are interested in learning more about the sort of the folkloric aspects of Satanism, I can recommend two good books the first one is satanic panic the creation of a contemporary legend by Jeffrey Victor and The second is titled raising the Devil: Satanism new religions and the media by Bill Ellis.

1:06:52
CW: Ah, thanks, Bill.

1:06:53
PR: And I would definitely recommend, we recommended it back in Episode 9, but again, the book Lords of Chaos, that they somewhat recently made a movie out of. It covers quite a bit of that black metal side of it, but it also has a nice section on American Satanism and sort of the rise of death metal, as I was talking about, kind of as a knee-jerk response to the fear of Satan. To find that episode, look back for episode 9, Until the Light Takes Us. That’s when we covered the black metal murders in Norway and all the church burnings and stuff. So, that is basically the next step in the story we just told you. And so that episode is definitely worth a listen if you haven’t heard it before this one.

1:07:40
CW: Okay, and in the future, there might be more Satanic Panic episodes in our future, because as Ben has mentioned, as we all mentioned, it’s a cornucopia that just keeps on giving, full of skeptical lessons. There’s audio pareidolia, there’s the so-called repressed memories and remembered memories of horrific abuse that actually got people put in jail for long stretches of time. There’s some fairly depressing, horrific things that are associated with the Satanic Panic, but we wanted to talk to you about the cultural stuff and some of the heavy metal aspects and the fantasy art and the lighter side of the Satanic Panic, I guess you could say, and on the lighter side of festivals celebrating our dark lord, you guys have a great Halloween, okay?

1:08:29
PR: Absolutely.

BR: Bye. Bye.

CW: Take care

1:08:31
We would like to extend heartfelt. Thanks to our sponsor level patrons Amy Fruchauer Kelly. Dr Angela Mattke and Elizabeth Leggett if you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode Check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange every little bit helps us keep the lights on here and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends if you’re short on cash but want to provide

1:09:00
moral support remember to recommend us to a friend if you’re short on friends hey remember that each five-star review helps us get higher on the podcast charts squaring the strange is a production of two heads studio LLC of Two Heads Studio LLC, copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback, additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pastual Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sundin, and of course our listeners and patrons.

1:09:31
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 Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo