“I could take care of diapers — there’s a lot of things that could be taken care of really really easily,” Lindsay says in a video posted online that show’s him standing behind a stack of cash before the fiery stunt. “It’s shocking to see this much money, but in a couple minutes, none of this will exist anymore.”

The video shows Lindsay and Summers shovelling bills into an incinerator at a local pet crematorium as British recording artist Ellie Goulding’s single “Burn” plays in the background. Pet Heaven Crematorium & Funeral Chapel Ltd. called the hosts after hearing about the contest and offered to provide a safe place to cremate the banknotes.

Lindsay said he suspects some listeners doubted the station would have gone ahead with the stunt, and dared them to do it. And he said there is likely an element that relishes chaos, that wants to “watch the world burn,” borrowing a line from the Batman film The Dark Knight.

“We were trying something as the ultimate social experiment, not expecting it to finish this way, but putting it out there just in case and knowing full well that we would have to go through with it if that was the case,” Lindsay said. “And at the end of the day 54% decided they would watch it burn.”

But not everyone bought buying the explanation.

“Why would you even make an option for burning it?” Calgary resident Cori Lee Miller wrote on Facebook. “‘It’s totally cool because it’s not illegal’ isn’t a great come back either.”