Alex Heard, former New York Times Magazine editor and Wired contributor, explores millennial doomsday subcultures in Apocalypse Pretty Soon—from Jerry Falwell’s Christian premillennialists (claiming the Antichrist is a Jewish male) to fringe survivalists like the Concerned Christians arrested in Jerusalem for plotting a gunfight. Heard also investigates Earth changes theories, including Nevada’s alleged asteroid-induced submersion, and contrasts them with Hopi elders’ irreversible warnings. Meanwhile, calls reveal military secrecy around a Corpus Christi meteorite, a NORAD UFO sighting (35-yard diameter, 8.7 seconds), and Y2K bank compliance doubts despite system failures, hinting at systemic vulnerabilities or self-fulfilling prophecies amid technological and environmental anxieties. [Automatically generated summary]
But the question is, we should watch them, I think.
Don't you very carefully, these people doing the rewriting and making all the money, you want to sort of profile them and see if they're buying generators, buying country homes up in the mountains, and doing other things that might be a little tip-off as to what's coming.
Let me tell you, I had an expert on the power grid on a few nights ago, but discounting his guest appearance, I opened the line to power company employees.
And I bet you I had no less than 10 calls from power company employees who said, guess what?
Our bosses, our management, they're all going out and buying generators and putting solar power in.
My gut feeling, I tend to believe that there could be some problems, but I definitely do not believe there's going to be some kind of riots in the streets and doomsday scenarios.
I think the worst thing you might see, again, this is just my feeling at this point.
If you look at an area that has a big ice storm and the power goes out for a few days or a few weeks, I don't see how much of anything could be worse than that.
People that go through that really suffer.
You remember the Quebec and New York State ice storm last year?
Y2K is in a slightly different category in that if it went off, you might or might not have a reasonable expectation that it was going to be on again soon.
And I guess there's also the worry that, you know, when it goes off in one sector because of a storm, the other parts of the grid can help that area get back up to speed.
Right, and when you mention the title, it is kind of meant to be a funny title, and I think the book is funny.
But I do want to make clear to people so they don't get the wrong idea.
This isn't one of those books where I go out and just make fun of everybody.
I think we've already seen a lot of that when millennial ideas come up.
I spent several years working on this and what I tried to do is I was interested in American subcultures that in some way touch on the millennium or utopian visions of the future.
Anything having to do with the idea that the existing order is in for a big surprise, a big change and that there's going to be a transformation that will either be violent or it may be peaceful, but in some way.
Right.
That's the ambulance.
In some way, we're in for a major transformation.
So that includes various completely different types of groups who would never see eye to eye on much of anything.
The major ones would be Christian pre-millennialists, the kind of people who talk about what Jerry Falwell was.
Right, and the other part of that that was, I think, raised eyebrows was his statement that he's sure the Antichrist is a male, which seems logical, and that he's certainly a Jewish male.
And there are also a lot of people who think they're the two witnesses described in the book of Revelation, which is another sort of dangerous thing to believe.
No, I have decided I know that this year the press is going to paint me into that corner, and so I'm making it easy for them.
And last week I got a black cape with MM for Millennium Master on it, and I had a crown, and I'm going to even get a fancier outfit, and I'm going to submit this so the press, when they start writing these stories about how I'm this one who's going to usher in something horrible.
Well, one of the things I try to talk about in this book, and I think it's kind of important for people to keep in mind, the only time we seem to hear about millennial groups are when people do something naughty.
You know, the most recent are this group called Concerned Christians who were thrown out of Israel for an alleged plot to start a gunfight in the year 2000.
It's a group based in Denver headed by a man named Monty Kim Miller, who he and his followers disappeared from Denver last fall, and then they started turning up in Jerusalem.
And over the holidays, 14 of the group were arrested, and the allegation was that they were plotting to start a, you know, go on a rampage in the streets of Jerusalem with guns, which in some way would supposedly hasten the return of Christ.
I mean, you can't go five feet without seeing people with automatic weapons, so it would seem to me that what they would bring about would be their immediate demise.
I mean, as you point out, there is prophecy laid out very carefully in the Bible, and there's every reason to believe that one day, though it is said no man shall know that day, it's going to come true.
I don't necessarily believe that, but I was interested in kind of running my basic skepticism about these things against the experience of being around these people and learning what is it really like when this is the driving force in your life.
And I found it to be very educational.
It taught me a lot about the fact that just, you know, simple binary skepticism about these things, in other words, the sort of skeptical inquirer view that if it's not science and if it's not reason as we define it, then it's bad.
I don't really believe that, and I especially don't believe it.
All right, back now to Alex Hurd of Wired Magazine, and just prior to that, the New York Times magazine.
And here's a facts for you.
It says, hi, Art.
Over the weekend, I linked from your website and visited the Apocalypse Pretty Soon site.
I immediately laughed at the name, but my mood went from wired to tired.
The popular print and broadcast media has been much too eager to broadly label anyone who predicts problems within the next few years, including Y2K, as millennial loonies.
So you might want to comment on that.
Now, 60 Minutes did a big piece on Y2K, and I thought it was quite serious.
Well, I cover, you know, we cover anything to do with Silicon Valley, computers, culture related to that, including music, books.
And right now I'm editing a couple of articles about Y2K, an article about the science writer James Glick, an article about extreme candy.
I don't know if you ever heard that term, but kids' candy these days is getting weirder and hotter.
I don't know if you remember cinnamon toothpicks when you were a kid, but the thing now is super sour candy that is so sour you can barely stand to have it in your mouth.
We're going to have a convene a panel of test kids with the most extreme candy we can get our hands on from various manufacturers and see what they can take.
And one of the first things I fell into, I was at a conservative political action conference, and I ran into a guy giving out pamphlets about starting your own country because you're dissatisfied with the existing order.
And what happened was, at that conference, a man was selling a book that I had never heard of called "How to Start Your Own Country" by a writer in Virginia named Erwin Strauss, who had done a wonderful history of all the attempts he had heard about to do this.
And there were several in the 60s and 70s that were very elaborate and even got as far as people dumping tons of sand on atolls in the Pacific.
Yeah.
And I ended up, what I wanted to find was a current project.
This was a few years ago.
And I ran into a group out in Los Angeles, a libertarian group, and they called themselves the New Island Creation Consortium.
And their plan was to use coral accrete process, which is a way to build hard structures using seawater and electric current.
And they would use this and build a floating island that would be near the equator in the South Pacific.
And I went out and spent time with these guys, and I decided within 30 minutes that they would never do anything.
Some of the other groups I talked about, I spent time with a UFO group in Southern California who their religion sounds a lot like Heaven's Gate, but it doesn't have a dark side like that.
And I spent time with people who want to live forever, and you may know a couple of them.
Not specifically, but I know, you know, there's a science side of this, and I've interviewed some pretty sharp people who say that, look, if we can make it the next 30 or 40 years, it may be possible not only to stop your aging, but to even regress yourself.
There are people who believe now, Alex, that there are people out there who have in the past discovered the secret to longevity and have been alive for hundreds of years, but do so in a very undercover way, immortals, if you will.
I met several people who are in this sort of strange period where they believe these things will happen someday, but they're obviously not available yet.
So they're doing all these things that people think they can do now to increase their longevity enough so that they might hang on until these scientific miracles occur.
That means things like injecting DHEA and human growth hormone.
And of course, I spent time with cryonics people.
And some of it seemed harmless, and some of it was a little upsetting.
I was with a group of researchers in Southern California who were doing experiments on dogs, live animal experiments, to try to figure out ways to preserve the brain after death.
And years ago, he wrote a, and I'll explain how this connects to White.
Years ago, Fleming wrote a, he's actually a lawyer and a patent attorney.
And a few years ago, it occurred to him that he, again, this will sound crazy, but he was completely serious.
He decided that one day it might be scientifically possible to keep a severed head alive on a cabinet or a console.
Oh, yes.
And so he took it on himself to write up a patent application.
And his idea in doing this was to block anyone from doing this kind of research.
Right.
Well, when he was researching it, people hear that and they go, well, that's crazy.
Why would anybody do anything like that?
Chet Fleming looked into it and as you have already mentioned, found that there had been experiments in which dog heads had been severed and monkey heads had been severed.
Who would you think would be the prime candidate of all the people in the world that should be maintained for one reason or another, who would you see maintained in such a way?
Well, I don't know, but I'd mention that Chet Fleming thought of that very question, also wrote a novel that was never published that attempts to set up that exact situation.
And in his case, he wrote about a governor of Texas who was a politician who was so great and virtuous that he's not like anybody.
It's like if you threw Gandhi and Martin Luther King together and added a few other good people to get this guy.
You know, while we laugh, the darker side of this really, really is that they're on the edge of...
And if we can think about it, Alex, there's a pretty good chance that some private lab somewhere in the deep dark nighttime is doing something like this.
I asked Chet Fleming about that, and I said, did you ever get any weird calls in the middle of the night?
And he said he was called one time by someone who swore to him that he had seen military records that said severed head experiments had been conducted during the French war in Indochina.
It's the only thing that lets me do this kind of thing.
I mean, my wife opens an envelope.
Here's one of the better ghost photographs we've ever received.
Poof, here it is.
Incredible.
Jeff, thank you.
Keith already has it.
Now, it may not be up yet.
It'll be a few minutes, but in a few minutes, we'll have it posted for all of you.
And I just, so that all of the people out there who will say, oh, it's a manipulated computer file, won't do that.
I have a copy of the 35mm photograph that I have scanned.
And I've just held that up to my studio camera.
So you might know.
Now, it's not to say that photographs cannot be manipulated, but I don't think this is.
At any rate, one thing's for sure, it's not a computer file.
It's a 35mm photograph.
And if you doubt that, go look at my webcam, and then Keith will notify me when it's up.
I would imagine nearly any minute.
And I'm telling you, this is one really, really good ghost photograph.
Really good.
So it'll be up in minutes.
Also up, by the way, is the version of the book, online book, by Joseph Firmage.
Keith has translated it and put it up on our website because we've got a lot of, you know, we've really got a lot of bandwidth, it says here in fine print.
They use something called Hemi-Sync, which is a sort of a tape that you play that gets you in sync with the ability to move to different dimensions, really.
You're on a bed and you have headphones on and then the tapes are playing as completely dark in there or as close as you can get.
And, you know, it was definitely a shift from reality.
And there were times during trying those tapes where I felt like in college I went to a couple of parties where medical students had swiped some nitrous oxide.
Okay, well, once you get to the main site, all you do is reload the page because it probably just got there.
Under the latest news and site editions, which is the very first thing you come to as you get below the photograph, you'll see ghost photo received and scanned by art.
Well, on the earth changes, I spent a lot of time, that was one of the other groups that I learned about long ago.
I was at a New Age Expo in New York, and a guy who I've lost track of named Matthew Stener was giving a lecture about the earth changes, and everything he talked about I'd never heard before, and he showed the map that Lori Toy produced.
Well, when she was here, I give a lot of credence to Lori Toy.
I don't ignore her.
She's a very serious person.
I mean, here's a housewife who had a vision, who saw a future world, who sold everything she had, put it all on the line with her kids, and went out and published this map.
I mean, it's an amazing story when you hear Lori tell it.
And so I thought about it a whole lot when I had her on the air, but in an average 24-hour day, how much time do I spend thinking about it?
I mean, in her case, I remember telling me, it was back in 1978, and she believed that four beings in white robes appeared to her in a dream and rolled out these maps showing the Earth changes.
And I know I keep returning to that, but I do think most people think if they're not into this stuff, they think there has to be a catch, like that she's probably doing that because she's trying to make a lot of money.
And anyway, on the Earth Changes front, as soon as I heard about it, I kind of got a just what I wanted was to see someone's survival shelter because I quickly ascertained that for some people this was taken so seriously that they felt they needed to dig like an underground shelter or a survival pod in the Appalachian somewhere.
So I kind of spent a few years off and on trying to find someone who would let me see their home away from home.
And I finally did see one.
But again, through those years, and especially with a lot of help from Byron and Annie Kirkwood, I attended their Earth Festival in Texas a few years ago.
Again, I learned that I was being a little bit too literal.
It's not just about survivalism for some people who believe in it.
As you know, there's a spiritual side to it.
And you'll find that some people don't really literally believe that those changes are going to happen.
I mean, they believe they could, but they're more attuned to the idea that if people just change enough that we can ward this off.
There's another line of thought that would say, as I have said, that like the piston aircraft going across the Pacific, the little red light comes on saying point of no return.
And I spend a lot of time in the middle talking about how someone skeptical like me, I nonetheless keep a big file of news clips that seem to kind of dovetail with what earth changes people are saying.
It is, and I guess Lorena McKinnett's music is a good background for what I'm about to do.
I told you I got a photograph.
Oh, man, what a photograph.
Now, so that you might know, it's a real 35-millimeter photograph.
As a matter of fact, let me see if I can read the back of it.
With a Kodak stamp on it, processed by Kodak.
I scanned the photograph when my wife brought it in all of, I guess, about 35 minutes ago, got it over to Keith, who got it up on the website right away.
This is easily in the top three ghost photographs I've ever, ever seen.
And this comes from Jeff Burden in Canton, I guess it's Canton, Michigan.
And I called him up, and I afraid I woke him up, but I couldn't resist.
Well, first off, it's a really interesting picture because of the fact that we took it on a road that has been rumors around here in the Detroit area as being haunted.
well it easily goes down in I was extremely scared by it, and I'm like, I was just sitting at home by my computer one day, and I was like, well, let me just send this to Art and see what he thinks about it.
Something that might interest you, kind of the anti-account is by the late Anatoly Bukhriev, who was also up there and came in for a lot of criticism in Krakaur's book.
Yeah, and Bukhriv ended up dying on a different mountain subsequently.
But there was a good article done on Salon magazine, the online publication, that talked about how the controversy over who is right and who is wrong is still playing out.
That was published last year, but people could still read it on.
Krakauer almost died, it sounds like, the way he describes it, but he managed to get back down to a base camp.
It was just a terrible thing.
But, you know, the moral of the story is in the old days, people who made those kind of climbs, every single person who did it was someone who had been climbing for an entire life.
And they had the skills to do every aspect of what was required.
What's different now is that people who are in incredible shape but aren't necessarily that experienced as climbers can get on an expedition to a mountain like that.
Here's somebody who just sent me something from ABC News that just cleared ABC News entitled Oceans Health Linked to Ours.
It says, for thousands of years, humans have regarded oceans of the world mostly apart from our own terrestrial lives.
But in recent decades, it's become increasingly clear the oceans are changing, at least in part, as a result of human activity.
Stunning new discoveries and revolutionary new insights about the connections between the ocean and human life have begun to sweep away complacency about the state of the sea.
So they're saying virtually, in fact it says it in the article, if the oceans are in trouble, so are we.
Well, guess what?
We've got fish with visteria.
We've got coral reefs that are dying at a rate that would scare the hell out of you if you heard about it.
We've got things going on in the oceans and fish where they ought not be.
We've got temperatures in the ocean that ought not be.
A lot's going on in the ocean right now, and not much of it is very good.
Obviously, the scientists would never go, yeah, yeah, we agree with that prophecy.
But that's what I explore in this Outside Magazine article.
I try to look at the ways, you know, okay, stripping that aside, putting that aside, what are some things that are really going on that people should be worried about?
And, you know, you can't laugh off a lot of the news about the planet in recent years.
And if you think something can be done, tell me what it is, because we've got a world full of nations who want what we've got.
And if they get it, then we're absolutely out of the ballpark, I'm telling you.
I mean, what we're doing right now is bad enough, but you go around and look at the rest of the nations that want a car, that want a house, that want all the basic luxuries and comforts that we have.
Well, I try to remain more optimistic than that, but I can see why people feel kind of depressed sometimes.
But, you know, we'll just have to see.
Now, one interesting experience I had when I wrote about earth changes, I participated in a workshop.
This may have been the strangest thing I did, called the Council of All Beings.
Have you ever heard of that?
no sir well the idea behind it And they tried to develop a ritual to let them, in a kind of a religious, spiritual way, let them work out the anger and fear they're fearing about all these changes that people are observing the planet.
It's a good idea.
It was kind of bizarre because what you end up doing, you spend a weekend pretending that you're an animal or an entity.
It has Native American themes.
You pretend you're a nature entity or an animal or a bird, and you are speaking for that entity, telling mankind everything that it's doing wrong, and really, you know, cursing mankind out to let it know, let us all know that this has to stop.
And the purpose of it, I think, is kind of to induce a sort of catheter.
It'll be a good thing if science really comes through on its promises to pull our fat out of the fire.
and maybe it will there's no denying the fact that it it may do that and we may turn a lot of this around but When you talk about the quickening, is there a way out?
That was a book that came out a few years ago, and it's similar in some ways to what we were talking about earlier, these libertarian free nation ideas.
But Savage is an interesting guy based in Colorado who wrote this much more grandiose tract about not just colonizing the oceans, but low orbit and then the moon.
And, you know, I guess I'm kind of smart alecky sometimes, but these stories are also presented seriously.
And I'm really trying to, what I spend a lot of time doing is trying to figure out where do these ideas come from and why are they so important to people.
And, you know, so there's a lot of historical research.
Like, anytime I enter a specific subculture, I try to read the books that the people involved have read and try to figure out the sources of the beliefs.
And as I'm sure you know, you always find out that they go back much further.
People tend to think these things are popping up in the 90s or that they all came from the 60s.
I mean, I think we're heading for a future where you can dial up a lot of performances and moods and behaviors with drugs that will be, you know, this time around, it seems like most of them will be pharmaceuticals that are available rather than banned substances.
My view is, though, that anytime anything is good or makes somebody feel too good or gives them too much of an escape, society automatically passes laws against it.
I have, yeah, I do have a, I have to say, I love your show, Art.
I'm ever so slightly addicted.
And, Alex, I really enjoy your magazine.
And I was wondering, regarding the oceans, this is one thing I learned ages ago when I was taking oceanography and marine biology, that most of the air we, in fact, breathe comes from the ocean.
And that, you know, killing the ocean, we are killing ourselves, shooting ourselves in the foot as it is.
And that was just one comment.
The other was, do you see any correlations between the roaring 20s and the way people were kicking it up and living it big and to now, where it seems like everybody is very carefree, times are very good, the stock market fluctuates extremely.
I guess the only major difference I would point out is that people in the 20s were coming out of World War I and having survived that, it seemed like they had a pretty good excuse to live a little.
And we've been doing it, you know, the 80s to me are very similar to the 90s.
There was a lot of growth and boom and that collapsed pretty well in 87, but then it's come right back.
I guess maybe you're suggesting we're heading for a big fall.
Alex, I don't know if you've done much investigation into the world of poltergeist and ghosts.
God, I'm glad I got that ghost picture tonight.
Man, what a photo.
Anyway, teenage girls, young teenage girls, seem particularly likely to produce in their particular area, their own area, the area surrounding them, polargeists.
And then I went down to this ranch and there's this thing and something...
What was it?
It was a meteorite.
But anyways, okay, I'm going to get to the point.
By the time we went over there to see, it's our mom.
It's our mom's friend who owns a ranch anyways.
And we got on a truck and drove back there and come to find out that there were some military vehicles that pulled up and they told us to get out of here.
We can't take pictures or nothing.
And I just want to know why is the government trying to hide a meteorite?
And I don't have anything to say about that other than you can see when you look at the history of something like free energy research or it's called perpetual motion machines.
And Reich was treated in ways that I think almost anyone, whatever you thought of his ideas, he got some rough handling when he ran against the FDA, ran up against them.
And he was thrown in jail and his books were basically banned.
It's the kind of thing that a lot of people who are only interested in First Amendment issues and civil liberties were upset about that.
And so there was a case where he had ideas that were forbidden, whether they were right or wrong.
He was come down on pretty hard.
And so you can't, if someone, if I run into a free energy inventor now and I did, who said, I can't talk about this invention in public because I'll be killed, I don't really believe that, but I see why somebody might feel that way.
But, you know, the inventors of these alleged machines also die like the rest of us.
And whenever somebody who makes a claim like that dies, I think that the people who believe these things automatically attach, you know, some sort of meaning, hidden meaning to their death.
You know, I mean, you'll hear it, massive heart attack.
Let's say that you were an inventor and you did invent something that would allow every American home to disconnect the power lines, be completely independent of the power company and say, screw you, we've got our own power more than we need.
In fact, would you like to buy some back?
Some device like that.
You invented that.
Now, we've got Alex Heard, who's got his box on one side, and on the other side, we have every large oil consortium worth gazillions of dollars whose entire profit would be threatened.
Now, can you in your mind imagine the possibility that somewhere along the line there, one of those companies wouldn't think two seconds about having you put down into the middle of whatever the next concrete stadium built is in some new city for a franchise expansion or something?
I can imagine that, but let me suggest one other thing based on something I reported on one time.
There was an inventor from Japan named Nakamats, who, right about the time of the end of the Gulf War, he came to Maryland and he claimed that he had invented a motor that ran on water called the Norex.
Oh, yeah.
And he was hosted by Bob and Zoe Hieronymus, who you may have heard of.
I keep asking for, look, just bring me an over-unity toy.
Any little thing that hops around and puts the energizer bunny on his back with four in the air, you know, bring me something like that, and I'll jump on the bandwagon.
But that being said, it is true, I think, that there's so much money behind what we have now that would they hesitate to squish you like a bug if you really did have something?
I mean, if you think about how much of the brain is actually used, but it's a pretty, you know, to believe that that's happening requires pretty convincing evidence.
The prophecy I've tended to really study a lot is because of my millennial interest, is just trying to understand the complicated details of Christian prophecy and New Age prophecy.
Scallion is hard to dismiss, really, really, really hard to dismiss.
Now, the toughest thing about prophecy is date, any dating.
Prophets, even Casey, even Nostradamus, all got a lot of dates wrong.
But the prophecies did seem to occur in many, many cases.
Gordon Scallion is a, you know, if you've really done an interview, he's a very sincere, you know, if there's the real McCoy, that's Gordon Scallion, in my opinion.
Again, we talked about the visionary experiences that people had.
I've heard him describe that a couple of times, and it seems totally authentic.
I mean, he had an experience.
Whatever it was, it was real to him, and it may have been real.
See, I don't try to pretend that I could walk in and disprove something that someone believes.
The main thing I look, as far as I'm concerned, anything is fine as long as people aren't exploiting people for taking away their money or exploiting them for guilt and trying to manipulate them.
As long as you're not talking about crimes against other people, anything anybody wants to believe is fine with me.
Now, I have this neat microphone that allows me to stand up, so I'm standing up right now, and I'm going over and I'm looking at this beautiful, beautiful award I have on the wall.
It was given to me by the Council for Media Integrity.
It's entitled the Snuffed Candle Award, and it shows this little snuffed candle.
It says, presented to Art Bell, Coast to Coast Am, for encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience as genuine, contributing to the public's lack of understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry.
Halfway through the show, he suddenly admitted, you know, I mean, here he was representing why I was given this award, and he had to admit he had never even once, not once, listened to the program.
Kaboom.
I mean, that sort of intellectually blew him up.
He'd never heard the program.
And nevertheless, there he was representing why I should receive this award for these terrible things, for doing science in, for still thinking the earth is flat or whatever.
And he'd never heard the show.
But these are the debunkers.
These are the people at the other end of the extreme.
Now those guys also produce a lot of decent work because sometimes there are hoaxes and there are things that people are doing to try to defraud people.
And, you know, on your end of things, I think it's important to try to sift through some of these claims and be aware when that's going on, if at all possible.
Because in a free market of ideas, where anything goes, that's fine.
But there is room for rip-offs.
And I found that, I felt that when I was looking into free energy, that that Stanley Meyer person I mentioned earlier.
And when it comes to claims of that sort, I don't know.
you know you you listen people uh...
now if they're if they're suddenly lining up investors Yeah, for something like a salted gold mine or something like that, you know, some scam like that.
I mean, a lot of us, you know, some of these areas of science are almost like the information that's being talked about is almost inscrutable to most of us.
You get into these areas of physics where you start talking about quantum mechanics.
So, some of these free energy people start throwing those terms around and they're basically throwing dust in people's eyes.
And in a situation like that, skeptical types can actually do a lot of good because they can explain at least why they think that some of these claims are impossible.
But then, as I said, there's another group which are debunkers, which actively go after everything, whether there's substance for going after it or not.
And they attack all of that stuff as totally improbable, ridiculous, and so forth, rip-offs and pseudoscience and a bunch of bunk.
In other words, they cannot imagine for one second there could be a ghost or a poltergeist or anything else.
It's a little hard to be analytical when you have spent a lifetime with being told one thing and knowing another.
For instance, since I've returned to the United States in the last five months, I have been called, and these are from people walking down the street, people where I go into a store.
They have called me the Antichrist.
They have called my son and I at different times computer-like and very intelligent.
I am 36 years old and I could pass for a teenager.
My son and I will be walking down the street and people believe that we are brothers, not father and son.
Aren't people in Tennessee asking themselves what are high-class, when I say high-class, I mean category four or five tornadoes doing in western Tennessee?
unidentified
Yeah, well, a lot of people I talked to today were kind of concerned about it.
Of course, we haven't seen anything like this here.
I talked to my mom about it today.
She says about 40 years, and it destroyed her house when she was a kid.
And that was back at about the 14th or 15th of January, about 40 years ago.
And since then, I haven't ever seen it, but it was pretty crazy.
A lot of businesses down here in Columbia, that's Murray County, that was where one of the hardest was hit, and a lot of businesses were tore up, and Texacos were blown over and stuff, and it was a pretty big mess.
I don't know for sure whether it's a short-term cyclical change or a long-term profound change, but I'm a weather watcher and I have never in all my life seen weather like we've had over the last about 18 months.
Here's all these chocolate cupcakes, and the remnants of which are all there, and there's my cupcake sitting there, and she wouldn't give it to me because I got there late.
Later in the morning news, all there was was they had an object appear over NORAD.
They said it was probably just a low-flying plane.
There was nothing, you know, a typical news media story.
Well, I happen to know for a fact that from the Air Force base that is located here, there were several, several airplanes dispatched to intercept or, I guess, to see what it was.
There's a group of people in America that I think would be laughing their heads off because they're not going to care about anything that happens with the Y2Ks, the Amish.
Now, I don't know whose fault it is, and I don't care, but something has changed.
It may be the Internet, the fact that so many people are tying up lines for such a long time on the Internet.
And there's speculation that kind of goes alongside with the Mason thing, that the phone companies are angry about not getting per-minute charges, which is the latest rumor on the Internet, for local calls.
And they're going to let this get worse and worse until they get their way.
Anyway, my um it's a question and a um comment uh for Alex.
Um out here on Mr. KBC show one morning, he had a computer geek on who was saying that the whole thing the majority of the Y2K panic is way overblown.
And he was speculating that the majority of it is more along the lines of, you know, not so much a scam as it is just money making.
You know, a lot of people try to cash in on it.
And if you look in, I don't know if you've seen this, last week's Time magazine, they had a whole, the cover story was Y2K.
And it talked about the same thing.
All of these people who have, you know, there's just, you know, scads of books all of a sudden have come out.
Oh, yeah.
The people who do, like, you know, I don't know about the company that you advertise, but, you know, a lot of these companies with storable food, you know, that are all of a sudden just, you know, popping up.
They said, then let me fill you in a little bit, all right?
Mike Wallace or whoever it was, went to a bank and he said, look, is it possible that in 2000, because of the bug, and the bank manager said, look, what can happen is you might put a deposit in your bank and it will register as zero and you'll write a check against it and that check will bounce higher Nakai.
He said, yeah, that's possible.
unidentified
Well, you know what?
There was a news story out here locally on one of the main networks, one of the, you know, Channel 9 or whatever it is.
And they were talking to, oh, it was network.
I take the bad.
It was Channel 2.
They were doing a thing on banks, and they said that all of the banks they interviewed said they're all Y2K compliant so far.
And one of the big ones they talked about was Sandlaw.
And they said that they, you know, the guy says ATMs, yes.
Deposits, yes.
Everything, you know, and they said majority of these banks are claiming now to be compliant.
And the problem that you're talking about with the busy signals and the fast busies and the all-circuits busies is actually a combination of a bunch of different things.
Primarily, though, the problem is a long-distance problem and not a local problem.
And you touched on a couple of the things.
It is in part the internet.
It is in part additional callers, more people accessing it through new phone lines.
All right, let me tell you what AT ⁇ T told me when I called them, all right?
They said, at the end of the all circuits are busy, do you get something that sounds like 7023K or something like that?
And I've heard that before.
That comes from your long-distance carry on.
I said, no, I don't hear anything like that.
She said, well, then it's Nevada Bell.
unidentified
Well, see, the thing is, when your call is processed, it goes to a switching station.
And different phone companies have different switches.
And the problem is, it's much like a computer network system in that there are bottlenecks.
And different phone companies use different types of switches.
And depending on where you are in the country, they might have one switch in one part of the country and a different switch in a different part of the country.
It's not all the same thing.
And what complicates that fact even more is nowadays there's over 2,000 different long-distance phone companies and with the legislation that passed back in 96 allowing equal access, companies like AT ⁇ T and Nevada Bell and MCI and all the other companies have to allow access and sell time to a lot of these Mickey Mouse companies.
So they not only have their own traffic to worry about now, but they also have these prepaid calling card companies and Bob's phone company and so on and so forth.
And so at certain times it really peeks out their switches.
Not to mention now that they're also getting the local service.
It's probably until they develop some new technology going to be a continuing problem in certain parts of the country.
Well, all I know is when I was a kid it never happened.
unidentified
Yeah, and that's actually part of the question I was going to talk to Alex about.
And it's been a real pleasure listening to him because he's much of the same mind as me and that I've been listening to your show for a little while now.
And I take a lot of the things I hear on here with a grain of salt in that.
Alex, CNN ran a little stat the other day, you know, one of their little factoids, that said that 47% of the American people are concerned enough that they will draw extra cash out of the bank for Y2K.
47%.
Now, if 47% really did do that, I'm not sure the banks would have enough cash.
But back to the question, Y2K, as far as setting aside the technical aspects of it, it is definitely a very hot area for people with millennial beliefs, as I'm sure you know.
And it is going to cause a lot of panic.
I have no idea how much, but I have noticed, as I look at the groups of people I know the most about, almost all of them have taken Y2K and sort of worked it into their beliefs.
So Christian premillennialists will take it and say, yeah, yeah, this is what we were talking about.
I just saw an online paper someone wrote today explaining how Y2K was predicted in the Bible.
To them, it's just another sign that we're heading for a period of chaos.
And then, of course, people on the far right, who we haven't really talked about much, they're all over it because they had run out of things to do with their survival gear.
My friend hooked up a device onto his car, and there's no exhaust coming out, and the tailpipe is cold to the touch, and it increases his gas mileage like 30%.
My guess is it's more of a matter of competition and growth.
The telecommunications industry is a growing industry, and it's probably growing faster right now than it normally grows.
When systems like this grow, they have to continually add additional circuits annually probably.
And I'd say the competitiveness, if they add additional circuits, it cuts the bottom line.
In other words, there has to be a balance between how many extra circuits you have out there ready for somebody to use and how much profit you put on the bottom line.
Because those circuits don't get used all the time.
Well, I hear there's going to be a vote in the House in the next couple weeks about something about local line charges per minute when you're on the Internet.
unidentified
I'd say the Internet has a lot to do with it because the typical, I got a feeling, see, the typical talking long-distance call probably only lasts maybe two to three minutes.
That's where that theory breaks down because you're only calling your local phone company, and then you're accessing some guy who's an IP in a town, and he's got like a big T1 or T3 connection, whatever.
unidentified
Right, but there's even once a long-distance call is established, there has to be four-wire circuit C's between point A and point B for the duration of that call.
All long-distance calls are four-wire circuits.
In other words, the talking path in one direction is on a pair of wires.