Episode 13 - Come Armageddon Come

welcome to this episode of the wolf and

the shepherd today we're going to talk

about

the end of the world or as we

affectionately refer to it

come armageddon come especially in this

kind of trying times that we've been in

some people are saying either get this

over with or

come armageddon come so are we really

even

you know you and i are we really even

worried about the end of the world

i don't think i've ever sat down and

thought

oh wow if the world ends it's going to

be terrible because

if the world ends i guess if it's long

and drawn out

it could be pretty terrible but well

yeah you've got a

a world scenario maybe that lasts a few

seconds

maybe you know we don't know there's

something catastrophic happening until

the final few seconds and then boom or

you have

something that happens and it just kind

of slowly drains the life out of the

world so

kind of two different scenarios there i

mean on that on the one hand on the

quick one

what are you gonna do i mean it it's

gonna happen then it's like oh

you know and then you're gone the long

one that one would kind of suck

yeah so i've never at any stage in my

life regardless of

you know some of the scares they've

thrown out there

ever worried about the end of the world

i guess i didn't

really kind of think it through when i

was younger like i just said about if it

was drawn out because that could be

pretty miserable i was thinking more of

a

you know something which wiped us out

you know in the blink of a

blink of an eye or something like that

because i figure even if it happened

tomorrow then

oh well i guess one of the things to

kind of actually think about is

the the blink of an eye scenario like

you're talking about right as long as

you know it's not coming

not really a big deal but let's say we

knew

321 days from now

in the blink of an eye we'd be gone well

we'd already hit that counter and say

well the end of the world's going to be

in 321 days so

even if we know in a blink of an eye we

still look at it as well

the end of the world's here and it's

going to happen 321 days from now

versus not knowing i guess it'd be only

worse if you knew

in 321 days there was going to be some

kind of event

that would start the end of the world

that was going to last at least

12 years right that would suck even

worse yeah

um so so if has there ever been a stage

in your life

whether because of something which the

tv has told you you need to be scared of

or whether your mind has just wandered

by itself have you ever been kind of

like worried about the end of the world

i can't say that i have i i remember

there were

several scenarios growing up i mean

growing up in the

middle of the 80s in the cold war it's

going

you know and there was always that

threat of the nuclear holocaust

that you know russia and the us were

going to launch their nukes at each

other

but quite honestly i think we did more

tornado drills than we did

any kind of nuclear weapons drills

you know you you look back at history

with the kids and even

you know into the cold war but before

that there were all those bomb

drills or whatever you know incoming

missile drills and things like that and

they'd get under their desks

we didn't really do too much of that so

you know throughout that time

i never really concerned myself with it

y2k whenever it started coming around

didn't really worry myself too much with

that one because i understood

what was going on with that but a lot of

people didn't

and the news kind of you know frightened

you up a little bit about

what could happen there so i i would

consider that my

my childhood portion growing up i never

never really looked into it all that

much what about you

um i think i was always fascinated with

the possibility of perhaps an asteroid

impact

that seemed i don't know on on some

level when you're a kid that actually

seems quite a cool way to go

sure um and don't forget hollywood made

two

movies the same year about that

right so so you had armageddon with

bruce willis

yeah and then you had a deep impact with

elijah wood and it was

you know the same movie basically came

out just right two

different scenarios a little bit but

they both were able to save the world

from annihilation

i wonder what spiked that i can't

remember back at the time if we were

supposed to be hit by

any kind of comet or asteroid going on i

mean you understand

the popularity of pandemic movies at the

moment right netflix and

you know all these b titles kind of

rushing uh

to on demand it kind of makes you wonder

was there

something that was coming our way and

you know maybe nasa scientists put some

high percentage

you know they always if you look in the

news they're like oh you know this

asteroid the size of the empire state

building has a 0.01

chance of hitting us now yeah and that's

kind of popular in the news it seems

like every month there's something

that has this point zero one percent

chance but what if back then

there was something that had like a ten

percent chance

you're saying well you know 10 chance

that's pretty big

when you consider the cosmic shooting

gallery that's out there with all the

debris and the asteroids and all that

stuff that's floating around

maybe there was something that they said

you know hey we're gonna know more

in three years based off of it

circling around the sun and what the sun

does to it but

you know our projections are basing this

so they ran out to hollywood and said

hey we need a movie

to show that hey we can defend ourselves

against this

and and get america all excited and then

next thing you know

that whole idea just faded away i mean

it really did come and went real quick i

think people get tired of

end of the world scenarios you know

hollywood went through a period where

they really

ramped up the zombie movies for the

first time in a

few decades and

you know a lot of tv shows you know the

walking dead fear the walking dead and

you know a number of others you know

i've come out with this zombie

type uh zombies for some reason got

popular

yeah you know it wasn't the old zombie

movies the past it

become in vogue right and just all of a

sudden

that was kind of the popular new thing

you know werewolves disappeared and

vampires well if you don't count

twilight you know vampires kind of came

and went and all those things kind of

came and went and then just all of a

sudden

zombies got real popular and even today

right now i mean they're still making

zombie stuff

it's still being produced well zombies

really just a big game of tag

yeah horrible game and kids and kids

love

tags yeah and unlike that uh competitive

tag that they have now so maybe that's

another way to

kind of condition our mind say hey we've

shown you the slow

zombies right now

yeah those world wars they were pretty

fast that is true

that that is true they were fast yeah

now um

actually uh should have mentioned

earlier this the fear of the end of the

world

is called called either a doomsday

phobia

or apocalyptophobia okay

um and you know another of the names for

the apocalypse or the end of the world

um it's obviously armageddon and

that name actually comes from the book

of revelations

1616 where it talks about the climatic

battle that starts on the mountain of

megiddo

which is about 55 miles just north of

jerusalem

yeah a no kidding real place

right i mean this this place is there

this isn't some

figment it's not really an event

per se like most people think it's

actually

a place the war of megiddo right

and um you know you look at the it's

supposed to be you know two armies one

on either shore

and the horses of the apocalypse turn up

the white horse

i think which is supposed to mean

conquest the red horse

obviously meaning war the black horse

which was pestilence or famine

and the pale horse meaning death now

you know there are a lot of evangelical

christians who take

the book of revelations very very

literally sure

but then you have a lot of um theologian

scholars who you know probably spend a

little bit more

time you know reading into the

um yeah the symbolism and not taking

not taking the words literally who you

know

still can't really come to a common

consensus about what large

portions of the book of revelations mean

especially in regards to the end time

prophecy i mean

you know with evangelical christians a

lot of the time they

regard it as the end times or and to

look for the signs of the end of the age

and they tend to be pretty fanatical

about you know the rise of the

antichrist and the mark of the beast you

know worrying about all these bio chips

in your hand

or or the old you know is it 666 and

all that good stuff uh i think

you know that this is one of these

things that we've you know incredibly

fact checked right

but revelation from what i've always

understood

is the most studied book of the bible

and the most

you know mold over and you know no

no one can really quite give you a nice

succinct hey here's what this book is

saying

most the other ones they're saying oh

you know written by this dude at this

time he was doing this

and this is what this means blah blah

but

revelation for some reason there's all

this

question marks all these folks out here

saying well here's my interpretation

well no here's my interpretation and

it's kind of the one book of the bible

there that's kind of

floating out there that nobody seems to

quite agree

exactly what it's trying to tell us

right and

i think people have been at least with

the evangelical christians people have

been

saying oh it's the end times for

you know 70 or 80 years and i don't know

how long that period of

you know tribulation or how long that

end time period is supposed to go on for

you know until christ returns so

i think any time you know i think it's a

bit of a cliche

you use it on movies of those old guys

in busy city streets holding the signs

up saying the end is nigh

but don't you think it and it's of

course kind of hard to

to look back historically and figure

this out but

don't you think that just about every

generation of people

probably say to themselves we've got to

be living in the end times

oh i mean you see technological advances

you see

diseases you see pandemics you see

wars or brinks of huge wars

and so every generation is probably

sitting there you know

sitting there to themselves saying oh we

got to be in the end times

this is it this is the last generation

i'm going to see the end of the world

before i die yeah i think

pretty much every generation

has agreed or been sorry agreed on

either side of the argument this is the

best time to be alive this is the worst

time to be alive and i think it was a

joe rogan

who really kind of uh doubles down on

people who say oh this is the worst time

to be alive ever he's always like no

dummy this is the best time ever to be

alive absolutely

yeah i i think about just watching a

movie

in like let's say set in the cowboy

times right

right and you you think to yourself oh

you don't that

that really kind of looks cool you know

everybody's wearing a gun on their hip

and

you know they're getting in these saloon

fights and they're

taking you know everything out to the

street meeting at high noon

and having shootouts in the street and

all this but then i get to thinking yeah

but

you know what they don't bathe every day

they don't have all this running water

they don't have refrigeration they don't

have cars

uh back to the future three actually is

one of those movies that kind of puts it

into perspective

you know it's like oh doc brown ends up

being a blacksmith in the old west but

what does he do he invents a

refrigerator so he can have iced tea

right he realizes that the modern

conveniences that we get used to

is all our way of life kind of like the

covid 19 pin in the panic behind toilet

paper

you look back and you realize that

toilet paper has only been around for

less than 200 years right and so if you

were kind of pre-civil war

in america days there was no toilet

paper

so you see some of that you know oh it

might have been nice living in this era

and dressing like this and doing this

but then you think

but there was no toilet paper i mean

i'm sorry that i'm i'm out when it comes

to that i'm just

i'm out yeah i mean that i think that's

why there's uh

the success of so many role-playing

games it's like you can be a cowboy

maybe play red dead redemption for you

know a couple of hours but that's enough

then you need to go yeah

absolutely well the whole time you're

sitting in your air-conditioned house

and you know you're you're drinking a

cold beverage while you're playing the

game

and and you hit pause so you can go up

and use the bathroom and

use the toilet paper that's sitting

there in your bathroom then you come

back and then you get to pretend to be a

cowboy

right it makes total sense but the one

of the

more recent not not of course this whole

coven 19 thing we're in right now

but one that i you know distinctly

remember

was the whole 2012 thing and coming

right up to 2012

and in what i guess could be considered

the misinterpretation of the mayan

calendar right

uh that that's the last one that really

kind of sticks out to me other than of

course the one we're in right now right

but

but the 2012 mayan calendar i mean there

was the 2012 movie

where they talk about you know the the

world's starting to fall apart if i

remember

right and all that so that was another

one of those

end of the world scenarios yeah the um

you mentioned um well you said the word

misinterpretation i mean it was a pretty

uh

bad misrepresentation because there is

actually

there's no end to the mayan calendar so

all this stuff about oh the calendar

ends on blah blah blah was an outright

lie to begin with

right it was more of an odometer thing

right yeah you know the old-school cars

you know i've got a really old pontiac

and it only has five digits on an

analog odometer right and once it went

over a hundred thousand miles and went

all back to zero

yeah that doesn't mean it has zero miles

on it it just means the odometer rolled

over and that's what the mayan calendar

was yeah it's like here's the odometer

and once we get to here then we start

over yeah

yeah and with the again with the going

back to the mayans

they actually don't have any end time

prophecy

and so i mean the whole thing was a

complete lie to begin with but it was

just amazing how

you know it's another one of those

examples of early fake news where it

really

you know is the news stations that

propagated it and they did a poll

in uh early 2012

and um one in seven people worldwide

believe the end of the world would come

in their lifetime

one in seven wow i i would honestly

think you'd be higher than that i mean

to be honest with you and

kind of going back to what i was saying

before that i think a lot of people

feel like in their lifetime they're

going to see the end of the world

and what that end of the world is to

you know several people is among their

interpretation

but one in seven actually to me seems

kind of low

well i figured you know if you do have

that apocalyptic phobia

you know the fear of the end of the

world that

probably emotions overtake logic because

if you look at all of the different

end of the world scenarios and we're

going to talk about a few of those later

that when you take statistically

the chance of those things happening and

we can measure those somewhat

empirically based upon how many times

they've happened in the past and the

effect they've had

that you know people who have a fear of

the end of the world

they might be correct but the chances of

it coming in their lifetime

you know is so small that you know they

probably

need to worry more about being killed by

a fallen piano coming out of the window

yeah i kind of like the the whole deal

where there's more people killed by cows

than there are sharks

right everybody's afraid of sharks for

some reason but cows kill more people

than sharks

every year yeah so kind of that same

thing and and i could see

if you take somebody that maybe has that

more of a

fear of death and even in this one

you're talking about the fear of the end

of the world but i think

some of that is encompassing the fear of

death i remember there was an old

seinfeld stand-up where he said that

the number two fear from

most people is death and the number one

fear is public speaking right so by that

line of logic you would rather be in the

casket

than doing the eulogy right and makes

perfect sense because

most people of course they're they're

afraid of talking in public

so let's scratch all those and then

second of all most people

are afraid of death because most people

and

i think it's easy to argue that

none of us no matter what your religious

beliefs are none of us knows exactly

what happens right after we die because

there's been nobody to come back and say

hey

this is what happens you know we don't

have

a full explanation so could actually be

chalked up to fear the unknown

and probably a big correlation behind

that

the fear the end of the world fear of

death is more along the lines of fear of

the unknown because

nobody is a hundred percent sure exactly

what happens right now i remember

earlier you mentioned

uh i think when you were back in school

seeing the

propaganda movies to you know what to do

you know in case of a nuclear attack

right now we never actually had any

drills in

our school uh really that cold war

time um but that well

growing up back there in england did did

they

ever say there were nukes pointed at

y'all oh yeah

or yeah it was just now we're just gonna

go on about our business if they come

they come and if they don't they don't

and we have to remember you know how

many ussf

uh bases there are in england for one

which would be a big target sure and as

you know america's greatest ally at the

time

that you know no no way would they let

us be a communications

you know go-between between you know the

united states and europe

makes sense you know we'd have been

wiped out i mean i know we've had um

nuclear weapons on our soil and also we

were in nuclear power

at the time so we would be pretty much

an instant target along along with the

states right but

again we never had any of those training

videos now i do remember seeing one on

tv

where the kids were supposed to duck

near the closest wall and stick a

textbook over their head

oh well that's gonna save you from

nuclear

annihilation and you know maybe if it's

a history book maybe

not a pamphlet on you know great sports

figures of the 1960s but

you know how is that textbook really

gonna protect you from

all the radiation and the the nuclear

fallout that comes from behind that well

actually the biggest risk

i think from using that method to

protect yourself from

you know nuclear blast is possibly

the chances of either starving to death

or dying of dehydration

because surely you know going through

all the things you've mentioned and how

long it takes you know the radioactive

dust to settle

they're gonna have to be there for days

with that book over the head because i

mean when it is when is it safe

then to take the book off your head true

yeah and then

think about how tired your arms are

going to get hold that look over your

head well no i mean if you're that smart

i mean

you know you just balance book on your

head especially as you're just lounging

against the wall

well that's true of course if you're

really smart you realize

this is stupid for me to have a book

over my head so

i feel bad for little timmy in the

corner that's holding the book over his

head for

three days and then he finally dies

because he's died of dehydration and

starvation and

you know didn't even have the chance for

the nuclear fallout to get to him and

right

the radiation and everything because he

was sitting there holding the book over

his head and he forgot to

drink anything or eat anything right now

i was still in england when the y2k

bug all the hysteria surrounding um

came about over here was it something

which was like

on a day-to-day basis oh absolutely

during during 1999 that that's what

everything was all about preparing for

the y2k bug

you know and all it was was an odometer

thing kind of like we looked at the

mayan calendar and they said well

everything that was programmed only has

two digits for the year and so

everybody was freaked out about it you

could go to the

computer stores and buy the patches and

you know it was kind of hard to find

those for a while to put the

y2k patch on your computer i do remember

getting close to new year's eve where

they said

whatever you do at midnight

do not pick up the phone because they

were afraid if

everybody picked up the phone to see if

the phones worked

at midnight that all the phone lines

would shut down

so i do vividly remember that they

said do not pick up the phone at

midnight because they were afraid if

everybody picked up their phones it

would shut down the phone networks

and you know there was a lot of things

about bills being laid or the water not

working because the computers that ran

the water facilities were not going to

be able to calculate things

correctly and so they would think that

everybody's bill was 100 years overdue

and would start shutting water off and

electricity off and all that crazy stuff

and then here we go january 1 2000

complete non-event just absolutely

nothing happened and i remember going to

the stores you know a few days after

that

and you'd walk by the racks and racks of

the y2k patches on the cds and

everything

yeah it was just a giant joke you know

nothing happened

we just all moved on yeah one thing i

don't understand and with you and i both

having a history and coding to a certain

degree

is why

at that time the programmers didn't take

something

you know pretty basic electronically

take um all of the information off the

chip

replicate it or emulate it and then just

run through and then see what that

device would do

you know that one second after midnight

i don't understand why it never occurred

to anybody look just run a simulation

based upon the code

you know for a hundred percent is in

this chip and if the device continues to

work

in this emulated environment then surely

that proves

okay these calculators or whatever it is

this refrigerator or whatever is

not going to turn off right great

question

i have no idea you you would hope at

some level

some people did i i do remember at this

time

going back that uh and of course at this

time i'm in college

i do remember one of my college

professors being worried about it not

for us but for russia thinking that

they had such antiquated technology

antiquated code

things like that that the computers

would think that

something had happened to russia and

would

automatically launch their nuclear

weapons at us

and so i mean you go down it's a laundry

list of things that people were worried

about that but

when it came and went once again it came

and went

and nothing happened yeah now i guess

the latest

thing where at least everybody is pretty

much focused on at the moment

is our so-called pandemic

of uh covid19 coronavirus

uh now i've already had it

and i felt a bit bad for a day and a

half you've obviously had it

given as often as we hang out and

you know you said you maybe had one day

where you felt a bit crappy

i want to say probably a day day and a

half is what i felt as well

yeah and so most of the people i've been

around

you know must have got it from me at

some point whether it be my son

my son's mother people i've worked with

during that period of time so

i still at this point don't know anybody

who's died from it now

having said that i'm just saying that

just as an example

of it's not a case when they try and

push this fear-mongering that oh

everybody knows people who have died of

corona and stuff it's simply not true

and you know i i think with it recently

coming out that out of

you know 100 deaths attributed to

coronavirus

actually only six of them are actually

due to the virus itself

the rest comes from underlying secondary

tertiary conditions

whereby any virus section

yeah which would have uh triggered the

immune system like that

would likely have resulted in death

anyway and so that was six

out of a hundred so if you reduce all

the deaths we have had so far from it

and only take six percent of those

actually being from the coronavirus

then you're looking at something which

is not

even you know 10 percent as lethal as

every flu we've had for

sure the last 50 years and so i'm not

trying to downplay

i know there are people dying of it i

know there are people in hospital with

it and

you know depending on you know your

physiological

condition that you know it can be very

very dangerous especially for old people

so i'm not certainly not downplaying the

virus i'm just saying that given what

the flu has done every year

for the last 50 years trying to paint

covert 19 as the end of the world

you know is a bit of an overreach oh i i

totally agree

and what one of the big differences i

think with the coven 19 that's going on

right now versus

let's say the flu or any of those others

is

the hype behind it that you can be a

carrier of it and not show any symptoms

where

you know most people they get the flu

they know they got the flu

right they're immediately showing the

symptoms and everything so they say to

themselves

i got the flu or or maybe they just

think they have a cold or something like

that so they stay home they stay away

where you know this one is well nobody

really knows

how long it takes to you know once you

have it how long you could carry it

without showing symptoms

so kind of have everybody on their toes

kind of the

same thing behind the y2k nobody knows

what it's going to happen

on you know december 31st at 11 59

and you sit there and you watch that

clock and what happens at midnight

so it's kind of that same thing so it

plays very

very well into an end the world scenario

i mean you and i both like we said we

were you know

for 100 certainty you've had it i

haven't been tested but

i'm 98 certain i've had it

but it's not really changing the way

that i'm doing anything but there's a

very good chance that

maybe we're not immune and we end up

getting it again because

it hadn't been around long enough to

even know that so yeah i mean

there's all kinds of things up in arms

but a

a coronavirus you know which is what

covet 19 is those have been around for a

while this the new one

but there's all kinds of other scenarios

that people have worried about for

either just past few decades

or maybe even for the past few centuries

about

what could cause the end of the world

yeah

and uh you know pretty much every

civilization

in human history has had its own you

know end of the world prophecies

and you know just a short list here okay

i mean obviously

you know we know the um predominant

christian one sure

you know well and and before we say we

know that of course you and i know that

but you know you do have the christian

version

yeah so let's just kind of preface it

that way see so you do have the

we'll call it the biblical the christian

version of what's going to happen at the

end of the world

yeah and you have the aztecs who

probably have

one of the more sensible sounding ones

even though logistically i don't know

how this would occur but they believe

that the world

uh will end by a never-ending solar

eclipse

now if that means the blackening out of

the sky

that could happen obviously on a lot of

different scenarios whether it be a

super volcano erupting right you know

nuclear war and

all that blocking it out so i mean that

one kind of

you can kind of see has a little bit of

sense about it

yep um now the hindus

have no end of the world prophecy

whatsoever just like the mayans

didn't but purported to have um

but my absolute favorite uh was the hopi

or hoppy

uh native american tribe they said the

end of the world

the earth will be covered with iron

snakes

stone rivers and a giant spider's web

but again if those are metaphors then

that one might actually

be quite clever yeah yeah i mean you

think about like

iron snakes that could be interpreted as

you know soldiers and weapons right uh

the giant spider web maybe that's kind

of your

your nuclear fallout your nuclear clouds

something like that

stone rivers could be you know big

navy ships just you know constantly in

all the water so

it actually kind of an interesting take

i mean

if this were the mythbusters you could

maybe call that one plausible

right now

as i mentioned earlier in 2012 when they

did that study prior to the predictive

mayan end of the world scenario

one in seven people said they had a fear

of the end of the world coming

now we had a look at

maybe about 25 to 30 different scenarios

uh some of them were a bit too boring to

bring up on the podcast

yeah i got bored reading them to that

there were quite a few of them that were

very boring there were two of them i

skipped just on the title alone

yeah i didn't i didn't even understand

the title but i couldn't even i was that

bored by the time i'd read

the title i couldn't be bothered to read

what the description is and it could

have been something really cool

yeah but that goes back to our uh

exquisite journalistic fact checking

methods that we go through

to prepare this show yeah i know i think

i think what's going to

happen eventually is that we bypass

so much knowledge which could have

disproved what we're saying

yeah we you know we're going to have a

cult a cult of disinformation yeah

we could have already disproved each

other and we can't even remember what we

said 20 minutes ago right

yeah i it i think it's quite hard for

some of our listeners to

believe that we're not actually

scientists well maybe we are scientists

yeah but it's better topic with yeah

well yeah in about five minutes we'll

probably prove that we're not scientists

right

so it let's go over some of the ones

that we kind of found

that quote unquote interesting as far as

end of the world

possibilities yeah okay um the first one

and i know we don't normally talk about

controversial

subjects on the show was uh

climate change now this doesn't relate

to

the whole argument about man-made or

man acting as a catalyst for climate

change this is

specifically talking about natural

cycles sure

across the well in history let's be

honest i mean that that's been proven

if you want to call it an end of the

world scenario you look at the ice ages

right

and you could say if all life exists

or ceases to exist that could be

considered

an end of the world scenario so when ice

age

is a change in the climate therefore i

mean

we could have another ice age which

would be an end of the world scenario

right and nasa actually said that in the

last 650 000

years there's been seven full cycles of

glacier advance and retreat

and the last ice age ended about 7 000

years ago

so we've obviously got a bit of a bit of

a

ways to go before the next one but do

you not find it arrogant

and again not really trying to throw the

whole

you know man's influence on the uh

climate out there but do you not find it

a bit arrogant and short-sighted

sometimes that

people just cite

studies the number of studies the

professors the universities without

actually again ever reading

what it says in terms of the statistics

such as

the possibility of this happening is

again super super small right you know

percentage

and yet people automatically just think

man is so powerful we can bring

forward you know well i i think you hit

the nail on the head with the term

arrogance

right because uh our scientific

community as great as they are have

made several advancements over the past

you know what five ten years versus the

last 50

first last hundred versus last 500 years

science has grown by leaps and bounds

and so all of this science we have

collected we have all these guys that

are out there that

know all this stuff that most people

don't really want to learn

don't want to dig into don't want to

understand

they want that smart dude over there

that they cheated off of

in you know high school and physics

class cheated off him so they could pass

physics class

and go on and just have a regular job

these are the guys that are out there

that's

you know saying hey you know here's this

probability of this

and who wants to read a big thick

200 300 page paper on the probability of

this

if it's summarized up in three sentences

that there's a good chance the world's

going to freeze over in 10 years if we

don't do something you say whoa

hang on a second right yeah we got these

big egghead scientists over here telling

us that the world's going to

you know literally freeze over in 10

years if we don't do something hey guys

we better get out there and we better do

something

we got to trust these scientists guys

and the scientists are saying well

you know i don't really get paid enough

to defend this and it took me forever to

type out this paper so you know what

you guys have fun with this i'm studying

my next thing

right and i remember um well the

earliest

climate change threat i remember

actually was uh

i think the ozone layer you know the

depletion of the ozone layer if we

didn't

start using those uh carbon fluorides

you know in

aerosols and old refrigerators we got to

stop

using hair spray because that's going to

deplete the ozone layer

yeah and i i do remember that and then

all of a sudden all the hairspray cans

had the little stickers on them

this doesn't have any cfc but i can't

remember

if it came before or after but the big

one over here for a while was acid rain

oh right yeah no we're to have acid rain

yeah and all of a sudden you don't hear

about acid rain anymore right

and i remember there there were certain

people that didn't want to be outside if

it was raining because they were afraid

that it could be

acid rain and that just all of a sudden

disappears like well wait

what happened to the acid rain i mean

that that was kind of one of those as a

kid you think gosh could you

imagine looking out your window and

there's somebody standing out there on

the sidewalk and then

being rained on them and they're really

melting you know like the the witch of

the west when she gets the water poured

on her like ooh

acid rain and now you don't hear

anything about acid rain but you have to

remember

again the media love the sensationalism

calling something acid rain where if you

actually caught it by its true name a

slight ph

balance towards an acidic base you know

it wasn't

again it just didn't roll off yeah but

it's the same thing

you know i mean recently earlier this

year maybe about two three months ago

we were promised an invasion of murder

hornets

oh that's right the murder horn yes so

not only

um giving the hornets a chance to

practice men's rear mine to murder

and given even more anthropomorphic

qualities that of existentialism

that it's actually going to commit

murder these hornets are over here with

one thing on their mind

murder murder but could that have been

the guy

calling the numbers or or the scenarios

for apocalypse bingo

just pulling out the wrong thing like

yeah you know you ever played a game

where you

you have to draw a card like say a

monopoly and you're grabbing the

community chest

and you grab two cards and you kind of

read one but you glance at the other one

you put it back so you know what that

one is

did he maybe just grab two cards and

murder hornets was one of the cards and

now he just kind of buried it you know

in the middle of the deck and

maybe in three or four months the burner

hornets come back

well do you remember well no you

wouldn't remember because i don't think

you were born and i

and this is before i was born i think

the the threat of killer bees

coming up through from brazil up through

killer bees was

yeah that was going to come up here too

yeah there's always those insects i mean

even

if you look back in the bible that was

some of the plagues in egypt and

everything so

insects are always one of those popular

things that come along but

yeah the murder hornets that one was

kind of disappointing

i kind of wanted to see one of those and

in the fact that

we never did really get that onslaught

of murder hornets a little bit

disappointing gotta admit

but hey you know stay tuned maybe that's

coming in the next couple of months

well i think um i have a preference

of a list of uh insects

which i think would be allowable to kill

me

now the murder hornet is pretty top of

the list just simply because if you only

need to be stung once

and you pretty much go true you know in

into a coma there and then and die

shortly after that's all right now the

killer bees thing

freaked me out a little bit because i

think you have to have a

minimum number i don't know whether it's

like 12 or 18 stings

for it to be over toxic to the average

person so i'm figuring

that might be a little bit pain and

suffering that one wouldn't be as well

i'm guessing you know if you're allergic

to bees

maybe you know one of those killer bees

does you in like a murder hornet would

yeah

a normal person but yeah don't give me

something that's got to get me

18 19 times i'd rather take one shot

from the murder hornet you know kind of

like

one snake bite from a highly venomous

snake rather than

you know maybe a rattlesnake that kind

of breaks out insect places yeah

yeah yeah i totally get that totally

good now my worst one

is amps oh absolutely because

especially the smaller ones because it

needs

so many so many of them yeah that that

would be an absolute painful way to go

it wouldn't be like

what were those deals in the mummy

movies you know those

beetles oh yeah crawling into the skin

and kind of devouring yeah of course

based off the way the movie was that

kind of looked painful

right but the guy didn't really last all

that long but then when they had the

swarm of them

it took somebody out within seconds so i

guess if you were gonna get swarmed by

one that wouldn't be so bad

if you went you know pretty quick but

yeah i still gotta agree with you

one sting from a murder hornet and

you're gone yeah if you're gonna get hit

by an insect

probably the way to go yeah now maybe

as usual i probably should have done a

little more research on this

because i think we highly researched

this topic because i think like with the

murder hornet

we'll probably go on google straight

after the show ends

read how long it takes to die and it'll

probably say something like

takes a minimum of 72 hours of

excruciating pain and blah blah blah

and that's just because we didn't look

at the list that one might suddenly drop

down to number three well

i don't know what would be worse that or

that we met

to sit and record this and

while we're recording it then they

report on the news that the

influx of murder hornets have hit and

because we are not looking at the

internet or anything right now

we go ahead and we pack up and we shut

the microphones off and we walk outside

and we get hit by murder hornets and we

look at each other and say

well i guess this is how we go and we

called murder hornets so

all right yeah that's gonna call in to

play my knife fighting skills

because that's all i have upon my person

in terms of weapons so

i'd have to be doing some uh slicing and

dicing with that

keep those away i don't think you've got

enough ninja skills to grow

the murder hornets with a knife right

now we did talk

well we touched upon uh nuclear war

earlier and you know during the cold war

period especially i think that was 1947

and

was declared kind of over about 1991

[Music]

i think in in the united states we kind

of officially declared the cold war over

with with the fall of the berlin wall

sure

yeah yeah and you know at that time the

the big

phrase to scare people was you know mad

mutually assured destruction right and

that at the time was the media's way to

hype you up and give you anxiety and

panic attacks because

you're worried about this imminent world

war

three right and and with that mutually

aided destruction

uh there was nowhere to go you know

they're basically saying hey if this

happens there there is no

safe spot for you to be in right it's

going to

destroy everything it's not like hey if

you want to live

go move to greenland and you'll be safe

there

there was no safe spot to be it was

that that was going to be it they were

going to launch enough nukes to

knock everything out right and that's

the way we were always taught

yeah now i had a funny thought earlier

um

when i was researching this do you

remember um

in england it was called the campaign

for nuclear disarmament cnd

and it actually had a decent amount of

following because i think towards the

end of

the cold war especially people were

getting tired of having lived

you know decades in fear of this right

apparently inevitable nuclear war

it was coming you just didn't know what

day it was coming

that you know during that period

you know when when the tv told you you

had something to be scared of you

believed

that you had something to be scared of

yeah i mean why would the tv

lie to you why would the news lie to you

they're trying to help you they're

trying to provide you information

so yeah if they say this is what's going

to happen they don't know when but this

is what's going to happen

i believed them right yeah and you know

i think

now there's actually a far greater

threat

of a nuclear war or at least somebody

initiating

a nuclear war which expands you know

globally

you know when you have rogue nations

such as north korea

and iran and them constantly throwing

out threats that

you know they're going to wipe out the

united states they're going to wipe out

israel

they're going to wipe out here and there

that

you know during the during the cold war

period

you know you had one whole country

against

another whole country which was the

biggest threat and then you had a small

number of other nations which had

nuclear capabilities such as united

kingdom germany um

well the east side sorry west side of

germany um

and i never i never felt like

i mean obviously you weren't very old i

wasn't very old i never felt like there

was a threat of war i never did either

and

looking back on it it never was anything

that

really concerned me because towards the

end of the cold war

it you started seeing the relationship

between the us

and russia lighten up a little bit yeah

and it could be all because of rocky iv

i mean you think about rocky iv and that

was kind of the war between the us and

russia

and even at the end of that it's kind of

you know everybody in russia is chanting

rocky rocky you sure you don't mean um

uh rocky iii would you evan drago

whatever his name is no that was rocky

rocky yeah yeah yeah rocky one

is is when he fought apollo and lost

rocky two he fights apollo again

and wins rocky three's when he fights mr

t oh yeah yeah yeah yeah then rocky

is drago yeah yeah i know my rocky movie

right i know my rocky movies it's

amazing how much propaganda was out

there at the time

in in movies some of it was quite thinly

veiled and others

you know like the rocky movies right you

know top gun was the same way

i mean those were russian migs that they

were fighting

and you know they have the dog fight

over there and the rest of them bug out

and and all that good stuff and of

course america wins

and yeah we stave off a war because they

were closing in on the aircraft carrier

all of those crazy movies you know was

it creative hollywood or was it

organized propaganda well we could

probably do a whole podcast

about the the whole cold war or nuclear

annihilation but

what what's our next topic about how the

world could end

well here's one which is likely

as in it's definitely going to happen at

some time

and this is a super volcanoes oh

yeah kind of like the yellowstone deal

like yellowstone now

i think the one in pompeii is the

actually the most

dangerous volcano in the world

in terms of where it's located and a

super eruption of

mount vesuvius yeah is the one which

yeah pompeii

well everybody everybody thinks of the

city of pompeii that was covered in the

ash

and people are even studying it to this

day so yeah yeah yeah

so i mean a super volcano is going to

happen yellowstone

um really erupts the last eruption was

640

000 years ago so and isn't it long

overdue

based off of i i swear i read something

that

it's overdue for an eruption there seems

to be some shift in parameters

with that because although they've

averaged out they can work out

you know on average every so often how

you know it goes off there's actually

gaps between them which are very wide in

variance so it might have gone like 1.2

million years without erupting

but then erupted twice in 30 000 years

so well so it's kind of like you know

getting an argument with the wife i mean

you can argue with her

once a day for a week and that just

sounds terrible then all of a sudden you

go two weeks and you have no argument

everything's great and then all of a

sudden you have one big blow up argument

because all that

stress and everything gets built up and

then boom there's a big explosion so

that makes sense i mean it's nature

right yeah that makes total sense yeah i

mean and then it's an agreed

um figure by world guard scientists that

if yellowstone goes

that it's going to be minimum of five

billion casualties worldwide and that

doesn't

obviously that doesn't mean immediately

sure it means across

you know with the sky being blacked out

and some places being too

cold so once again going back to our

whole thing about

some people are going to die instantly

but then there's going to be some things

that's going to take a while to

you know annihilate people so you're

probably better off being close to it so

you're one of the first ones to go

rather than

starving to death in 60 90 days

you know trying to survive when the sky

is black and all that

vegetation starts dying and animals

start dying off all that good stuff

yeah you know your typical domino effect

right

okay now the one obviously which we need

to address is plague or pandemic

sure but you know to put things into

perspective

you know plagues pandemics they've been

around

uh actually thousands of years bc

right but you know i made a list of the

most prominent ones

you know since around um

we got into uh kind of actually kind of

written symbols yeah well i mean more of

a written and accurate record

some of the plagues you know go which

you go back

you know in bc okay the estimates are so

wide that it might be one of those

covered things where oh you fell out of

a plane and your parachute didn't open

or you had kovit in your system so you

died of coved so

right you don't know at that time

because you know if you died you died

whether just in that kind of census

count the people who were responsible

for toting up the

number of fatalities during the play

just listed down everything

if you go back to it it's the the same

thought process

behind where the term lunatic came from

because they said some people that would

get out there in the full moon and have

too much moonlight shine on them made

them crazy

and that's where they become lunatics

yeah so all right so let's

let's go through some of these uh you

know old-school plague slash

pandemics that have happened throughout

throughout uh

history of course these are like you say

kind of plus and minus on the ears and

all that well i like to say the ones

i've chosen here

are the ones which seem more verifiable

and

so the earliest one i could find which

seemed to have any degree of accuracy

was in a 430 bc

the plague of athens and killed a

hundred thousand people now it was

actually pretty

localized so i know a hundred thousand

doesn't sound like a lot on a worldwide

you know scab but if you think about the

world population back then

that's that's pretty big i mean you got

a hundred thousand

people that die from something it's

gonna be newsworthy yeah

now the period um and this is actually

quite a long

lasting plague normally plagues burn

themselves out between about six

eight years maximum depending how very

little they are basically

they run their course and die off yep

yeah

so there was a plague between 165 and

180 a.d

um again from various sources it seemed

to be

a pretty decent estimate of deaths and

that was actually

five million so you look at then going

back to that period of time

population that's a huge hit that that's

a big number yeah i mean especially if

we're talking about

just you know the turn of the the new

wage

wow i mean five million people that's a

lot that is a lot of people

now the undisputed champion

of the world so far is the black death

oh absolutely yeah and you know that's

where the

ringer ringer roses ring around the

rosie yeah ring around the well yeah we

call it

ringer ringer raising really i think so

oh no over here i might be wrong

it's been a long time oh come on we sang

that song just before we started

recording

but um yeah a lot of people make that

song i think they make it about

kind of like boyfriend girlfriend or

some type of romantic thing when the

whole song is about

the whole songs about you know the rash

which used to appear

on your skin was like a ring of roses

the tissue a tissue meant you were

coming down with the symptoms and we all

fall down means we all die

yeah ash's ashes we all fall down yeah

absolutely

yeah yeah but yeah that was from the

black plague

yeah now the the black uh black death uh

or bubonic plague not the black

plague well i i think some people called

it the black plague the black death the

bubonic plague i mean there's

all kinds of names for it yeah yeah that

and that

was between 1346 1353

which at that point you have to think

well the world's population is

kind of building up but now this is a

very wide variance because again there

was so many bodies

and a lot of them were burnt before you

know they could be counted

that the estimates of the number of

deaths you know due to beyond

bubonic plague and black death was

between 75 million

and 200 million which was half of europe

at that time

well let's also remember back then they

weren't filling out death certificates

you know they they weren't taking people

to the hospital per se they

they might have had a a doctor that's

walking around but they're not keeping

all that great of records as far as how

many people are dropping dead from this

so

you know you buy the fact that that

estimates got to be that wide because

yeah there's really no way of knowing

yeah now the last one

um which i want to mention is uh the

spanish flu

well it's called the spanish flu even

though it didn't originate in spain

um this uh occurred between 1918

and 1920 which as you know we were in

the middle of world war one

at that particular time and how

convenient that that was about 100 years

ago

right and it's estimated that a hundred

million people

died of the spanish flu but if you think

about the situation at the time with a

contributing at war

people were probably staying at home

more right

um and the war was malnutrition

and the war was killing so many people

as well you have to think if a war

wasn't going on when that broke out

and people were going about their normal

lives with no government really to tell

them stay indoors wear a mask and all

this stuff right

how many more the spanish flu would have

killed if that war wasn't going on

well i i guess you're kind of trying to

look at a glass half full thing i mean

i'm looking at a glass half empty how

many people could have survived if

they weren't all held up worried about

where they're going to get their next

meal from were able to get around

work not have the stress of the war

going on maybe to have more survive so

could have went either way

yeah let's be honest could have been

either way so i mean that those are

a pretty good list of the you know

pandemic or plagues or disease that

knocks out the world

so uh what else have we got okay

uh one which statistically again is

going to happen

at some point but again statistically

this is going to be

maybe millions of years right could be

two years from now it could be 100

million years from now

but we know this is going to happen

could be tomorrow

um asteroids uh there's a one in ten

thousand

chance for a small

asteroid to hit the earth and by that i

don't mean

i mean asteroids meteors kind of like

full i know they're not technically the

same thing

you know fall to earth you know all the

time

right but this is talking about when it

talks about a smaller size it means

something which

maybe you know if it hit uh dallas

you know it might wipe out half a dallas

but that's not

on a cataclysmic you know huge scale now

for a larger

asteroid one which could be considered a

planet killer not because of the

immediate

blast but because of all the ash it

throws up into the air the aftermath

yeah the planet killers

uh they say there's a one in 300

000 chance at any given time

it can happen but i don't know what

the gap in time is between each of those

three measurements of

did it happen now did it happen now did

it happen now because you can go

300 000 seconds and be like okay well it

can happen anytime now but

if that gap is like i don't know a

hundred years or a thousand years

and it becomes a one in three hundred

thousand

you know shop yeah because the last you

know big asteroid

um the one here that wiped out the

dinosaurs yeah 65 million years ago so

you take that

one in 300 000 chances right i've been

hit by a planet killer size asteroid

and we haven't been hit with one in 65

million you kind of think that

you take that stats in oh my goodness

we're overdue like any day now

or that you know that when they play

these odds of all you have a 1 in 300

000 chance of this or that

right stats like that and you mentioned

earlier about the more chance of being

killed by a cow than by a shark

right but yeah well and they they also

say you know you had statistically you

have a better chance of getting struck

by lightning than winning the lottery

but most lottery winners have never been

struck by lightning so

you know that not to upset all the

mathematicians out there but there's

certain things you've got to loosely

interpret with statistical probability

right and it's that one-size-fits-all

thing like

so if we came up with the number of

people cows killed each year we won't

say murdered when

they're not mean i don't think yeah most

of it's accidental

but you know if your chest maybe maybe

there's evil cows out there

i don't know for a different podcast

yeah

evil cows i don't know well say your

chances of being killed by a cow

per head of population i don't know was

one in

8.5 million okay people

take that stat and they think oh so i've

got a one

in you know eight nine eight and a half

million chance being killed by a cow

but what if you work on a farm those

same odds don't apply so i mean you can

dismiss

people you know some inner-city

inner-city people that only time they've

seen a cow is on sesame street they've

never seen one in real life

their chances of being killed by a cow

very very small

so on the flip side of that coin if

you're a surfer

your odds are getting killed by a shark

or a heck of a lot better than getting

killed by a cow because

last time i checked there aren't many

cows on surfboards out in the ocean

right there's lots of sharks swimming

beneath the surfers so yeah

that you've got to weigh those odds yeah

they're they're just spreading them

across

something that people can understand but

once again

are they trying to scare people a little

bit i mean you you could

think about it that way so we got one

more last but not least

and this kind of goes back to a podcast

that we had a few podcasts ago

what would be one of the other end of

the world scenarios

well our very favorite one uh death by

ai

oh oh our robot overlords strike again

yeah now like you said now will it be

the police robots that

you know commit suicide into pawns and

tell women that they don't want to

report their crimes and sing songs and

run away or these other kind of ai

problems

well these specific problems relate to

the end of the world where i don't think

those police robots

you know were really going to trigger

the end of the world they might kind of

trigger a lack of faith

you know defund the police robots yeah

movement

that's true but you know most people

when they have when they talk about an

ai dystopia

they either talk about it terminator

style with killer robots

militaristic style robots yeah and

you know the big kind of thought behind

that at least with people who have done

some research on it

seems to be that when ai becomes

sentient

and understands it can take over the

world and

it just regards the human and as a virus

that that's when you know the greatest

chance would occur

the chance of it happening through bad

coding or

one robot getting a bang on the head and

just goes rogue and the other

and he says the commander of that

battalion of army robots and the rest

just follow him and they just

you know go crazy i mean that scenario

is very unlikely it's not going to be

because of a programming error

it's the could it could be something

like the robot is out there and it

decides it's time for a windows update

and the windows update is corrupt and

then all of a sudden he goes nuts

because you know

i've already had nine windows updates

today i can't take a tenth one and then

he just

decides to go nuts because he can't take

another windows update

i i'd say it's more chance of being

adobe acrobat because that thing has to

update

like that however itunes is the same

time yeah every time i open up itunes

i have to update it and i still haven't

figured out what's any different

yeah adobe yeah i mean that's another

one or java

hopefully they don't use java to write

this script for these robots because

they're going to have to be updated

every 45 seconds so they're just gonna

get frustrated yeah i mean just think

about

all the frustration that people have

when they flip out and they cause all

kinds of problems

if you put software in these robots that

have to be updated all the time maybe

they just have said you know what

i've had it i've had enough i can't take

another update i'm just done

i'm absolutely done yeah and

again i think it's one of those ways to

go which would at least be more exciting

than some of the others we've mentioned

well it would be exciting as long as it

became kind of that terminator scenario

of you know militaristic and we're kind

of fighting back

it'd be horrible if the end of the world

was based off of a java update but you

know but you know that

neither of us would actually get to that

you know terminator type

scenes they opened with you know it

for you and i would have probably been

within the first two percent

killed probably by the robots oh oh

absolutely because we'd think we could

talk them out of it yeah well

yeah either that or try to outsmart them

or fight them or do something

we'd get wiped out so we wouldn't get to

see the rest of the end of the world or

as we've called it come armageddon come

and you can guarantee uh one of us would

actually ask uh the terminators to come

in and do a podcast

before they went out on there that might

be that might be interesting

you know you're sitting there and you're

asking them so uh

you had this last java update and you

decided to take over the world uh

you know thanks thanks for coming on our

show and let us

have this one last podcast that nobody's

going to listen to because we're going

to forget to upload it so everybody's

going to be able to listen to it yeah i

mean how terrible is that going to be

well with that said thanks for tuning in

to this episode of the wolf and the

shepherd we hope you enjoyed it thanks

for all the support y'all have shown us

please continue to support us and and

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next time