Best of the Program | Guests: Hugh Ross & Bret Weinstein | 5/15/24

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Welcome to the podcast.

Quite an adventure today.

Glenn joins us as well as Pat Gray and myself.

And we were talking about all sorts of different things, including the fact that Joe Biden kind of proposed a debate out of nowhere, seemingly trying to dissolve the Commission on Presidential Debates, which by the end of the show he succeeded in.

Both

we have now two debates.

We'll give you the details as we go through this.

Also, we talked about how our society might be wiped off the planet due to solar flares.

So it was really, we hit the

entire spectrum.

Today, it's all coming up on the podcast.

It was a sad day, it really was, when the little McDonald's down the street lost their best burger flipper.

I mean, it was a real tragedy, but young Brayden, he was moving up in the world.

He ditched his wagon to a distant star and and would ride his way on to fame and fortune.

No burger flipping for me anymore, said Braden, shaking the dust off the fryolator grease from his shoes as he ambled to the parking lot towards his bicycle.

From now on, I'm going to be a real estate agent.

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Now back to the podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

I want to say hello to my good friends Pat Gray and Stu Bergeer, who

for some reason have been with me now for almost 30 years.

No one can explain it.

No explanation?

No, it's really

science is looking into it, but I don't know if we'll ever find the answer to it.

We've got a couple of things going on.

By the way, the reason why they're with me today is I had eye surgery and still I'm not really able to

everything's a little fuzzy.

So,

you know, I usually get the stories wrong and the names wrong, but in the next few, for a couple more days, probably it would be a very bad idea just to fly solo.

Anyway, there's a couple of things I want to talk about today.

One, we have a couple of experts on, I think next hour, Stu, correct me if I'm wrong, I've been really concerned about the

magnetic field of Earth and the solar flares.

Yesterday afternoon, we had one of the biggest solar flares

happen again.

It was like an, I don't remember, X5,

which is a severe

solar flare.

It wasn't aimed at the Earth, and so we, you know, we're not going to be affected by that, but we're at the peak of solar activity.

Our magnetic field north and south poles are moving

at the

rate of, I think, 40 miles a year, which is extraordinary.

And there's a lot of things going on, and we're going to try to figure out what we should worry about and what we shouldn't worry about.

That's coming up, I think, next hour.

Also, I want to get into the Trump

trial.

It looks like it's really falling apart.

We'll get into that.

But I was listening to Pat this morning as I was getting ready for the program, and Pat was talking about

this new study from, I don't know, University of Colorado, and I think UCLA, Pat, right?

Yep.

And Pat, you have a show of your own?

I do.

Now, when does that occur?

Where would I find something like that?

If it was immediately before this show, live.

6.28 Central, so it's 7 to 9 Eastern.

Or anytime and anywhere you get your podcast.

Wow, that's

almost like a promo, though.

Almost.

Might have to be a bit of a drink.

But I charge you for that.

No, it wasn't a promo, but it was almost like one.

Oh, okay, okay.

I'll almost charge you.

But they say social distancing and a few other measures,

like lockdowns and school closures, that saved 800,000 lives.

Now,

do you believe that?

Wow.

Wow.

May I just say, if we could have, if we could have saved 800,000 lives by the lockdowns and the distancing, imagine if Obama were president and we could save 800,000 jobs at the same time.

Oh, the old created or saved thing from Barack Obama said.

800,000 lives created or saved.

Well, if you're going to put created, I think it's 800 million at that point because

yes, yes.

800 million people were either created or saved

during the social distancing.

Isn't it crazy we haven't had, well, I don't think we have.

I've never heard about it we didn't have a baby boom did we we didn't have a covid baby boom not really

yeah isn't that interesting you're locked in your house for a year and you're like nah Not interested.

No, what can I binge on Netflix?

That's what we were worried about.

Tiger King.

We were in the Tiger King period and that was not firing people up.

That is amazing.

By the way, I don't know how just knowing the physics of how life is created.

I don't know that social distancing is necessarily the thing that would bring people

i don't know like it seems like the farther you are apart the more difficult it is you had a lot of people who were you know living together and and married and everything else and they were you know i understand after two years you're like

you're right right at the beginning yeah right at the beginning we should have had a boom

That's interesting.

I do remember people predicting that, but I don't remember seeing the research.

Neither that ever happened.

Yeah.

Yeah, that ever turned out.

I mean, obviously, all the dating kind of went away for a while.

So you lost a lot of those just out-of-wedlock, whimsical babies that may have come.

Okay.

I was going to say, I don't know if you know this.

Dating doesn't cause pregnancy.

It does lead to the thing that does, Glenn.

Yes, it does.

Yes, it does.

Often.

Yeah.

But I mean, if you're not...

you're not finding a new partner, if you happen to be alone, I mean, certainly that could be a little bit of a factor.

But generally speaking, the baby boom comes from established couples.

Yes.

The other thing is that,

you know, they said that the

measures they took before the vaccine are what saved all these lives.

And then the vaccine came in and saved more lives.

No, it didn't.

Did it?

Yeah, it didn't.

People still died.

Everybody got it anyway.

We were told that if you got the vaccine, you weren't going to get COVID.

And that turned out to be a complete and total lie.

And people got it anyway.

So I don't know that any of the measures they took actually.

Let him have it, Stu.

Let him have it.

Go.

Go ahead, Stu.

I know, Stu.

No, I'm just going to tell you, no COVID baby boom, no widespread baby boom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fact, many countries experience a significant decline in birth rates.

How is that

possible?

How is that the distancing?

We have

a few explanations, if you'd like to hear them.

Yes, I do.

Okay.

Economic uncertainty was one one of them.

People not wanting to have more kids because they were worried that the economy was going to fall apart.

Maybe understandable.

Health concerns.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Have we suddenly, you're telling me, with all the illogic that is happening in the world today, where everybody is just dumb as a rock,

You're telling me they were like, I don't know, financially, when people came back from World War II and the whole world was destroyed and unemployment was through the roof because everybody, nobody had a job because all the men that returned, they just were,

they just didn't think about it.

The people who built America were just like, you know what, we're going to have a baby.

I don't really care.

I don't know.

It's a totally different thing, though, right?

Like, you had a long period of downturn and devastation that seemed like a big victory, right?

Like, you know,

it's a different vibe than we were relatively,

you know,

prosperous and all of a sudden everything just evaporated overnight and it was a short period of time, right?

Like it was a, you know, I mean, how long did that really last?

Can I tell you what I, what I really think this is?

All these people are like, I don't want to bring a child into a world like this.

I just can't imagine with all of the things going on, I could bring a child into a world like this with global warming and all of these things with conservatives.

I can't do it.

With Trump as president, how could we bring more babies into this world?

Exactly right.

There's some of that.

They talk about also social restrictions, health concerns, delayed marriages and relationships, and access to family planning services.

Oh, that's an important one right there.

If you can go to Planned Parenthood, then they can prevent you from having children.

That much is true.

That's true.

Yeah, you know, we want to have a baby.

We went to Planned Parenthood, and

they cut the baby out of her for some reason.

We were just going for help.

By the way, the United States birth rate declined by about 4% in 2020.

Wow.

Which is incredible.

Also, declines in France, Italy, Spain, and some Asian companies and countries, including Japan and South Korea, which already had low birth rates, saw further declines.

The world will weep when the Western world falls.

The world will,

they have no idea what the Judeo-Christian Western world has done for humanity.

And when it's gone, they will weep.

They're going to be sorry.

They're going to be sorry.

And right now, you know, you're talking about

rates of reproducing.

We're below replacement right now.

Are we significant?

Did we just hit another milestone?

We're significantly behind.

Childbearing women are having 1.6

children per family.

Man, I hope that's the best.

The replacement is 2.1.

We're half a percentage point under it.

When you have that 0.6 baby,

I hope it's the head and the arms.

I know.

You know, it would be horrible.

And I hope they're all attached.

You know, you at least get the full body.

Could we get the 1.6

and take the 0.6 from one person and the 0.6 from another and sew them together?

Because they'd be super people then.

I don't know if they've tried that, but they should.

They should.

Because then you'd have 1.2 as an individual, which would be great.

All right, let me take a quick break here.

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10 seconds, station ID.

Okay, I'm sorry I was to play such a fool here, but I have not been

watching TV or anything because I can't.

And honestly, I just can't listen to it because it's driving me out of my mind.

Can you guys tell me what's happening with the Trump trial now?

Well, he's been a very bad boy, and I have him in front of a court to try to see how bad he's been.

Michael Cohen was testifying yesterday, and he continues, I believe, today.

They're trying to basically show that he's not a credible person, highlighting all of the things he said about Donald Trump in the past, which really has run the gamut of every possible opinion you could have on Donald Trump, from the greatest man of all time who should be king of the universe for eternity, all the way down to he's the worst person of all time and should be taken out back.

That's kind of

the Michael Cohen approach.

Whatever benefits Michael Cohen at the time, and it's important to note that what benefits him at the time right now is to be very calm and balanced and give

very respectful testimony in front of the court.

Of course, every major media

institution is just lapping this up as if he is a credible witness when really there couldn't be one that is less credible.

Was there a tape that came out yesterday?

Well, it's that secret tape where

it's not new.

It's not new.

Yeah, and we know what's in it.

And it's never been very incriminating in my mind.

I don't think it proves the defense, the prosecutor's

statements at all.

It doesn't seem to back up what they're trying to prove about Trump.

You know what's amazing is this is how rigged this thing is.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but the judge,

I believe, denied the former federal election commission chairman to testify to show that this was not a campaign expense.

Right.

That's true.

They wanted an expert witness to come in and say, hey, this is not a campaign finance violation.

Someone who's an expert in that field, they denied that as a potential witness.

Now, it's awesome.

But he wasn't really an expert.

He was just a chairman.

Right, right, right.

Okay.

All right.

Now, it's interesting because they...

They haven't actually said that it's a campaign finance violation.

To remind people who may have been bored out of their mind about this, they basically have to tie what they say is a crime to another crime to get over the hump of making it a felony, number one, and number two, getting over the statute of limitations.

So they have to say crime A, which is this records violation, is tied to crime B, but they won't tell us what crime B is.

They're insinuating it has something to do with campaign finance, but of course they haven't actually said that.

So it's almost, you can't defend yourself against a claim that hasn't actually been brought.

This is so Declaration of Independence, isn't it?

I mean, this is just like everything that's in the Declaration of Independence that the king was doing.

You're like,

I think they're doing that to Donald Trump.

How do you defend yourself about something that you don't even know what the crime is?

Yeah.

Well, it's impossible, and that's the point, right?

Right.

That's what they want.

So,

the jurors,

what do you think they're thinking?

Hopefully there's somebody there that's just not a New Yorker.

I hate the guy.

Yeah.

Which is what Michael Cohen is all about.

We do have some of the highlights from his testimony, if you can call it that.

Some of what he said yesterday.

Cut one.

They say I'm Mr.

Trump's pit bull, that I am his

right-hand man.

And I care about Mr.

Trump.

This is what he was saying.

Mr.

Trump truly cares about America.

He loves this country.

He cares about the American people.

He knows what it's going to take to fix it.

But one thing, Donald Trump is, he's a compassionate man.

I've been saying that to you since the day that he made the announcement.

He will ultimately go down in history as the greatest president.

Now, in a plot twist worthy of Shakespeare, the fixer has flipped.

I am done with the lying.

I am done being loyal.

to President Trump.

My loyalty to Mr.

Trump has cost me everything.

My family's happiness, friendships, my law license, my company, my livelihood, my honor, my reputation.

He is a racist.

Oh, wow.

He's a racist.

He's a con man.

And he is a cheat.

And the guy is a narcissistic sociopath who doesn't care about anyone.

This is the most embarrassing thing that I have ever seen a U.S.

or a former U.S.

president ever do.

It's actually even embarrassing for the former guy himself.

So Ben Franklin had a saying a long time ago that we're all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

Well, I'm talking about, yep, yours truly, Donald the dope.

How dangerous Donald Trump truly means

legitimately could be.

Don't take my word for it.

I want you to Google it.

To all of your listeners, Brian.

And I want you to understand, this is not my words.

These are the words of the deranged former president who said if

he wins the presidency the first thing he's going to do yeah is he's going to rewrite the constitution oh he comes out

gosh unreal courtroom unreal and

goes right into that little cage which is where he belongs in a cage like an animal okay on and on and on and on just a few of the things he said over the years uh first of all obviously when he was a shill for donald trump and now he's the biggest hater on the the planet.

He had no credibility in either timeframe, by the way.

And he's so unlikable.

Have you ever seen a person less likable than him?

Or less of a connection to the English language?

Sure.

I don't understand.

He is just like.

Yours truly, somebody else.

More unlikable.

Yeah, I think anybody in the Cuomo family.

Ah, okay.

You're preaching my language right there, but

you know, I mean, I like it.

I like where you're going there.

The Cuomo family.

By the way, Cohen was in direct contact with Chris Cuomo throughout all of this stuff.

And, you know, going back all the way to 2016.

In fact, some of the texts that came out in the trial, this is sort of a side point, but he was texting Chris Cuomo to figure out a way out of the Access Hollywood tape going back all the way back to those days.

So

a little connection there that we didn't necessarily know about.

CNN does business in an interesting way now, don't they?

Yeah, they do.

But like Cohen has no crazy.

I mean,

anything anything that he says that you don't have multiple other witnesses to is just completely worthless.

I mean, the man who has no credibility.

Yeah, you'd have to have more than one witness.

But if you are somebody who hates Donald Trump, you could so easily just say, oh, he was lying back then, but he's telling the truth.

I mean, he had to do what he had to do.

He wanted a job.

He was, you know, a good guy trying in there to stop Donald Trump.

And, you know, he just couldn't take it anymore.

I mean, that's the kind of games we play now.

Instead of saying,

I don't know when you were lying.

You were lying when you're lying now.

I don't know.

Hopefully the jury will come to that conclusion.

Yes.

But we'll see.

We'll see.

I mean, they certainly should.

This all seems to be working in Trump's favor right now.

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Now back to the podcast.

Hugh Ross, astrophysicist.

He is also the founder of Reasons to Believe and senior scholar.

He's an amazing guy.

He's been on with us before.

I did a podcast a few weeks ago with him.

He found Christ.

He found God

through

looking at the stars.

An astrophysicist is somebody who looks deep into the past

and tries to see what the,

you know, what

creation was, what was happening millions of years ago.

Hugh, thank you so much for being on the program.

Oh, my pleasure.

So there was something that, and

I've been reading stuff about this for, I don't know, 30 years.

It's always fascinated me.

But

I'm not a scientist or anything like it.

And so I have such a base understanding of it.

Last week,

we had a major solar flare.

Solar flares can affect, like an EMP, can affect our power grid if they're bad enough.

And we're also going through a time period where while the sun is at its peak activity right now, our magnetic field is weak because our poles are drifting at about 40 miles per year, which is pretty extraordinary, isn't it?

Yeah, the pole shift is moving.

It's quite a bit faster than it was the previous century, but it's not out of the ordinary.

And so

when you do get a reversal of the magnetic pole, you do get rapid motion.

We're nowhere near that degree of rapid motion yet.

And that could be a thousand years, right?

I mean, rapid for the Earth could be a thousand years from now.

Yes, it could even be a million years from now.

And there have been hundreds of pole reversals in the past, and none of them have done serious damage to life.

But it is true that when you approach

a pole reversal, the magnetic field weakens.

And our magnetic field has been weakening by about 6% per century.

But again, that's not out of the ordinary.

Our magnetic field always varies, either goes down slowly or up slowly.

Right now, it's going down slowly.

And may actually turn around and start to go up a little bit.

So the variation of the magnetic field, the movement of the magnetic pole, none of that's out of the ordinary.

On the other hand, we can't rule out the possibility we're heading towards a magnetic reversal.

So, what does that mean?

The North Pole becomes the South Pole?

Yes.

Well, what actually happens is the, you can think of the Earth's magnetic field like a bar magnet with a north and south pole.

That's called a dipole field.

What happens is when the magnetic field begins to weaken, it transitions from being a dipole to being a multipole, where you've got more than two poles.

And that could last for a period of, say, a century or two or thousands of years.

Then it flips around and it then becomes north and south.

But what was north is now south.

What is south is now north.

What does that do?

I mean,

that whole shift,

what, you know, and let's use a thousand-year timetable because we don't know.

Could it happen quickly, first of all?

It could happen quickly, but that's rare.

Usually, it's a rather slow, gradual onset.

And I mean,

physicists are watching this to see what's happening.

But right now, we're not seeing anything that's really outstanding or out of the ordinary.

Okay, so

what happens as it starts?

I assume they drift and they're not connected per se, because I think the solar the South Pole is actually moving slower than the North, but as they go towards like east and west, right?

Well, right now

it's moved past the North Pole,

the axis.

It used to be in northern Canada and over the past 150 years it's moved a little bit past the North Pole and it could switch and go east and west instead of north and south.

You know, physicists have been mapping this polar wandering of the magnetic pole for quite some time.

There's been over 100 reversals in the past history of the Earth.

And we do know that the magnetic field weakens when it happens, weakens by about a factor of 10.

But even a factor of 10 weakening is not devastating to life.

We can't document a single extinction of a species during a magnetic reversal.

But it could impact health.

I mean, when you've got a weaker magnetic field, you've got more cosmic radiation coming in.

It's like if you live in Denver, you get exposed to more cosmic radiation, and your average lifespan gets lessened by three months.

And is that because of all the progressive laws that are there?

Well, it could be.

No, you do get a few more cosmic rays if you live at high elevation.

But hey,

healthier lifestyles that might counteract it.

I know that we are,

they've had to adjust the GPS system.

And is that because of the poles shifting?

Well, you do have to adjust the clocks because the Earth is very slowly spinning down.

So, you know,

every New Year's, physicists celebrate New Year's Day by adjusting all their atomic clocks by a few microseconds, but that's all it is.

Just a few microseconds.

So, but okay, but I've heard that it used to be

anyway,

the end of the story is that they're now adjusting them every six months.

Is that true?

Well, that's true.

I mean, and we're going to have a new set of GPS satellites that'll know where you are to within one or two centimeters, in which case they're going to have to be making even more frequent adjustments.

But the adjustments are tiny.

So when I was probably 25 years old,

I read this great book, and I have no idea if it's scientifically sound or not, but it talked about a catastrophic polar shift that the crust of the earth, that some of the continents may have moved.

And their theory was that Atlantis was Antarctica, etc., etc.

But what fascinated me, and I know you're a religious guy, when it comes to

end times, it says, and the stars will fall.

The only way that I could think of, in God's

magnificent math, to make it look like stars fall would be some sort of a

shift in the continents as if we would look up, we would be moving, but it would look like the stars are falling.

Have you ever thought of that?

Nonsense.

Well, if the continents move very rapidly, it will wipe out all life.

And so the continents move by a few centimeters per year.

So I don't think that's what's happening.

The word there for star in Greek is aster, aster, and that could include meteors.

So maybe the stars falling is referring to a meteor shower.

Okay.

Or it could be referring to the stars dimming in light, like if there is widespread forests and grass fires, that would cause all the stars.

In fact, that text says the sun, moon, and stars dim by one-third.

And that dimming would happen if you were surrounded by smoke.

You know,

we're talking to Dr.

Hugh Ross, and the thing I don't like about this interview is he's so smart, he makes me look like an idiot, which nobody usually does, but I usually do that on my own.

Hugh,

so tell me

all of the stuff on the

Aurora, the lights that we're looking at.

There is...

I've read a lot, and I don't know if this is true, that because of the magnetic field and if we have have a massive, I think we had a, I don't even know, an X five solar flare yesterday.

It was not headed in our direction.

That that kind of stuff could

blank out everything.

It's like an EMP.

Yeah, that could happen.

In 1859, there was a huge solar flare that struck the earth and knocked out telegraph systems.

If that were to happen today, it could knock out most of the world's power grids.

And that would mean you'd be without electricity, not just for a few hours, but for weeks, months, maybe even years.

And that would be catastrophic because today we're very dependent on electricity.

Think of refrigeration.

You got no refrigeration.

What does that do to your food supply?

Right.

So.

And that kind of a flare happens about once every one or two hundred years.

But hey, it happened in 1859.

And I've written a book making the point it would be wise for us to protect our power grids.

Amen.

There is one that's protected, and that's in Quebec.

And it got knocked out in 1989 by a flare like the one that happened, you know, just this past Friday.

But that's the only protected power grid in the world.

In the world?

Yeah, I mean, they were close to the geomagnetic pole, so they took the most damage.

And it was $11 billion of damage.

But they now have a surge protector on it, so it's protected.

But if we were to get a flare like we had in 1859, the damage to the U.S.

alone would be over $2 trillion,

and you would have millions of people dying.

Jeez.

The sun is reversing its poles as well, but that happens like every 11 years?

Yes, we're at solar maximum right now.

Every 11 years, you get more flaring activity, more sunspots.

And so, yeah, for the next year, we can expect to see more aurora displays like we had last Friday.

And hopefully, we're not going to get a flare hitting us like what happened in 1859.

Yeah.

The when does the sun start to go into solar minimum?

It'll start start going into solar minimum in about a couple of years.

I mean, it's an 11-year cycle.

And so for about a two-year period, you're at maximum, and then you head towards minimum, and then we go back to maximum again.

And is there any correlation in your mind between the solar activity and maximum and minimum and global warming?

No, there's really no connection between what's happening with the sun.

The sun is getting brighter, but it's going to be a few million years before you notice the difference.

So, even if the sun is very active, it doesn't affect our temperatures or anything.

It has no effect.

What's happening here on Earth is what you got to watch, not what's going on in the sun.

You're listening to the best of Glenbeck.

Check out the full show podcast to listen to the rest of this interview.

Welcome to the Glenbeck program.

I read a great article late last week by Brett Weinstein.

He's an evolutionary biologist.

He's the co-host of Dark Horse

and

he was writing about the solar flares.

Hey, look at the pretty lights in the sky.

And he,

thank God, was one of them that actually said, hey, yeah, those pretty lights can put out all of our lights.

What are we thinking?

Brett, welcome to the program.

How are you?

I'm well.

It's good to be with you, Glenn.

Thank you.

Wasn't it yesterday, didn't we,

wasn't there a solar flare yesterday that was, I don't know, X6, or I don't even understand the classifications, but it was a big one.

They said it was the 17th largest on record, but it wasn't headed our way.

It was an X8.8, which makes it larger than all of the storms that we took last week or over the weekend combined,

it was a very large flare.

And the dynamics work this way.

The sunspots are actually rotating around the sun.

And there was a very large, very active cluster that fired seven blasts of plasma at us.

And what happened yesterday happened from that same sunspot group as it was rotating away from the Earth-facing side of the Sun.

So a lot of plasma came off the Sun, but it will not hit the Earth.

What would an X

of all can you explain X 8.8?

Yeah,

it's a non-linear scale that measures

the

essentially the hazard from the solar flare

ejections.

It's like a Richter scale.

It doesn't go 1, 2, 3, 4.

Its magnitude is

been compressed so that it can cover a much wider range of events.

And X is the most dangerous, right?

There are different categories, but once you get into the X category, that's really bad.

Yeah, that's really bad.

Now, there's a lot of uncertainty in any given flare and coronal mass ejection, the amount of material that's flung off.

If you had a photograph of an explosion, it'd be very hard to predict who in the crowd was going to be hit by shrapnel.

And the Earth is sort of

in that condition.

We orbit around the Sun.

Coronal mass ejections happen all the time.

Mostly they miss us.

Sometimes they hit us, but most of the energy and plasma does not.

Sometimes they hit us square on.

It's a roll of the dice every time.

So

when we have a mass ejection from the sun and it's headed our way, this is akin to

a global EMP?

Yes, it can be.

It could be.

It can be.

So, you know, there's a lot of subtlety in the way these things are measured.

When we have a flare, there's an immediate burst of electromagnetic energy, x-rays, radio waves, microwaves, that sort of thing, that hits the Earth just like light does in about eight minutes.

It travels at the speed of light.

And then there is plasma, which which is not always ejected during these flares, but often is.

And that takes days to travel the distance between the sun and the earth.

And so it's that second cat.

Both things are important.

The x-rays can knock out communications almost immediately on the earth, on the sun-facing side of the earth.

But it's these coronal mass ejections of plasma that threaten to take out the grid.

But they last for days.

Like we, we, I think we're out of this last solar storm that hit us over the weekend, but it took days, did it not?

Well, it did, but it was the result of a series of coronal mass ejections emerging from the same highly active, large group of sunspots that happened to release

these plasma bursts while they were facing the Earth.

So it's now just about rotated out of view, and it released this last largest burst

right as it was on the horizon.

It may not survive to point back at Earth again.

We won't know for another two weeks as it's on the far side of the sun rotating around.

It may disintegrate.

It may return.

It could be less active.

It might be more active.

We don't know, and we won't know anything about it until it's back in view.

So

this is the most perplexing thing I have ever seen because it's in the range, I think, of about $10 billion

to protect our infrastructure.

And there's, for some reason, nobody wants to do it.

Why?

I've never been able to answer that question.

It is, if you understand the risk we are taking,

the

threats that we have prioritized above this one,

the relatively small amount of money it would take to make us much safer.

And the one that really gets me is I can't figure out

who would profit from us remaining vulnerable.

It seems to me that essentially

everyone on earth would benefit from fixing this problem, and nobody would notice the small increase in required revenue necessary.

to cover a large

is that estimate that I gave you, is that accurate or close?

uh you know it's a little hard to say because there's a question about what exactly you're going to do nothing will make us perfectly safe right but hardening the grid which is largely a matter of

making the transformers on which the grid depends robust so that they don't fry during one of these solar storms.

And the problem with them frying is not only does that take the grid down, but these these transformers are not something that you it's not a commodity.

You have to order them, and they take something like a year, up to three years, to be delivered.

So it's bad enough if you lose one.

But if the Earth suddenly needed many of them,

who knows how long the wait would be.

And many of us believe it's likely the lights would simply not come back on over large segments of a continent or worse.

So this is one of those low probability problems, but massively high impact.

I I can't think of something that is a higher impact than

a solar flare that knocks the Earth's

electricity grid down.

Yeah, I think this is as dangerous as nuclear war, but I do want to correct one thing you said.

It's low probability in any individual instance.

It is actually extremely high probability on the scale of decades.

Over a decade, we take something like one in eight chance of a large piece of the grid going down in

an unrecoverable way.

That's enough to create chaos.

And why we would take a one in eight risk every decade is hard to fathom.

Last week, how close was that?

Can you explain the Carrington event for anybody who doesn't know?

And

I mean,

it hasn't happened in 150 years or whatever.

I mean, it sounds like we could be due for one again.

Can you explain that?

Sure.

In 1859, an astronomer named Carrington noticed flaring activity from sunspots.

It was correlated to auroras and

a spectacular breakdown of the electrical systems of Earth, which at the time basically meant the telegraph system.

What happened with the telegraph system is that the solar storm induced currents in the wires that were enough to shock operators sitting at their desks, start fires, and in fact, allow people to send messages, though the grid was not energized because the energy that had been induced by the solar storm was sufficient to transmit.

So, because the Earth was not a highly electrical place at the time,

that was a highly manageable though interesting event

the problem is if that happens again and really it's not an if it's a when we now live on a planet in which everything depends on electricity everything from the distribution of food and water to communications All of our lives have electrical components.

And what's worse, they're not even just electrical anymore.

They're electronic, which means they're highly sensitive.

So a solar storm that is like the Carrington event of 1859 would create catastrophic disruption of our systems.

And while, as I said before, we can't be perfectly safe.

We could be a great deal safer than we are.

And there is very little movement in that direction.

Is there anything that the individual can do?

Like, I have, you know, my own, my own power source and everything else.

I'm, you know, off the grid.

Is there something like, can you, EMP proof, is that enough for this?

Well,

it depends because the significance of the EMP

ranges.

So there's probably nothing you could do about an absolute worst-case scenario, but there are many scenarios that are

far less dire.

And

what one discovers when you try to prepare for such things is that you should probably

ignore the absolute worst case because you could spend every dollar you have and every hour you have trying to make yourself safe from it, and you probably wouldn't.

So it's not worth it.

But the much more likely scenarios involve things that you can do.

You know, how many?

Can you go a month?

If the grid were to go down,

that's a good start can you go a year do you have a

plan to establish communications with the people who are you know let's say within a hundred miles of you your friends and family

who you would gather with in such a circumstance all those things are worth doing but the primary thing

would require us to act collectively.

We need to harden the grid, and I would argue we have compounded the danger of a grid failure with the way we have treated our nuclear reactors and the spent fuel that sits in the fuel pools.

That spent fuel has to be actively cooled to keep it from catching fire.

Oh, geez.

Once it's been in those pools for something like five years, the rods can be removed and they can be put in what's called a dry dry cask.

And a dry cask does not require active cooling.

But it's expensive to do.

And so there's been resistance to moving that fuel into these stable containers, which means that if the grid were to go down, all nuclear powers require active electrical inputs to keep them from melting down.

If you were to get a meltdown,

you would lose control of the nuclear material in these reactors, and that would include all of the decades of spent fuel that's accumulated in the fuel pools.

So

we could greatly reduce that hazard by simply taking the stuff that is cool enough to put in a dry cask and getting it there as quickly as possible.

And from the point of view, I know when people hear this kind of information, they panic.

That's not the right reaction.

We have been running this risk and getting lucky for many decades.

We are probably going to get through

this

11-year solar maximum.

What I would do, if it were mine to say, is I would focus on being prepared for the next solar maximum in something like 11 years, so that when that one comes, we are in a much better position to endure whatever the sun throws at us.

Brett, I thank you.

I felt your article last week was really eye-opening, and thank you for briefing everybody on that.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Thanks so much, Glenda.

Thank you.

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