The Culture War - Tim Pool - October 24, 2026


＂This Could END THE WORLD＂ The Coming Solar Storm Apocalypse

Fired To Frontman： How Shane Gillis TOOK OVER Comedy NEW EVIDENCE Of Reincarnation Drops, THIS IS GETTING CRAZY

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

140.95

Word count

2,189

Sentence count

185


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says good luck.
00:00:05.360 Odoo brings your business together on a single platform. From sales and accounting to inventory
00:00:09.700 and marketing. Visit odoo.com to book a demo. It's odoo.com. January 19th, 2026. Cloud of
00:00:19.240 superheated plasma slams into the earth at roughly a thousand miles per second.
00:00:25.780 NOAA rates the radiation storm that comes with it an S4.
00:00:30.780 That's one step below the top of the scale.
00:00:33.960 Geomagnetic storm hits G4, severe, the second biggest in more than 20 years.
00:00:40.860 In New Zealand, engineers record the largest electrical current ever induced in the power grid by a solar storm.
00:00:48.760 And almost nobody noticed.
00:00:50.940 The lights stayed on.
00:00:52.500 People posted pictures of the northern lights and went to bed.
00:00:55.980 But here's what should keep you up at night.
00:00:58.720 Scientists say there is a storm out there that is far, far bigger than that one.
00:01:04.280 It has hit this planet before.
00:01:06.840 It will hit us again.
00:01:09.000 And the last time it happened, didn't have a power grid, satellites, or the internet.
00:01:14.660 Online, some people say it will end civilization.
00:01:18.620 Some say the government already knows the date.
00:01:21.900 And the scientists? Their answer is less dramatic, and in some ways, more unsettling.
00:01:27.780 This is the solar storm that could destroy the world.
00:01:34.020 The sun is not a calm, steady light bulb.
00:01:37.220 It's a churning ball of plasma wrapped in tangled magnetic fields.
00:01:42.060 Every so often, those fields snap.
00:01:45.040 When they do, you get two things.
00:01:47.160 A solar flare is a blast of light and radiation that reaches Earth in about eight minutes.
00:01:53.980 Ronal mass ejection, or CME, is the big one.
00:01:58.220 That's billions of tons of magnetized plasma curled into space.
00:02:03.580 If it's aimed at us, it usually arrives in one to three days.
00:02:08.560 When a CME hits Earth's magnetic field, it shakes it.
00:02:12.800 And a shaking magnetic field does something very specific.
00:02:15.960 It drives electric currents through anything long and conductive, power lines, pipelines, undersea cables.
00:02:25.580 The sun runs on a roughly 11-year cycle.
00:02:29.080 Right now, we're in solar cycle 25.
00:02:32.340 And in late 2024, NASA and NOAA announced that the sun had reached solar maximum, the most active phase of the cycle.
00:02:42.700 And that's where this story starts getting interesting.
00:02:49.100 On the morning of September 1st, 1859, British astronomer named Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots
00:02:56.940 when he saw two brilliant beads of white light flare up on the surface of the sun.
00:03:02.500 It was the first solar flare anyone had ever recorded.
00:03:06.300 About 17 and a half hours later, the CME hit.
00:03:10.920 Normal one takes days.
00:03:13.120 This one crossed 93 million miles in less than one day.
00:03:18.660 Followed is the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history.
00:03:23.780 The northern lights were seen as far south as Cuba, Hawaii, and even southern Mexico.
00:03:30.460 People in some places reportedly got up thinking it was dawn.
00:03:34.000 And then there's the telegraph, the Internet of 1859.
00:03:38.040 Across Europe and North America, telegraph systems failed.
00:03:43.380 Some operators got electric shocks and telegraph equipment threw sparks.
00:03:48.840 Some operators unplugged their batteries entirely and kept sending messages using nothing but the current the storm was pumping into the wires.
00:03:58.220 One line between Boston and Portland, Maine reportedly ran like that for about two hours.
00:04:05.180 That was 1859.
00:04:07.220 The most advanced electrical technology on Earth was a telegraph key.
00:04:11.700 Now imagine that same storm hitting the world we have today.
00:04:17.860 We don't have to imagine all of it, because we've had warning shots.
00:04:23.060 March 13th, 1989.
00:04:25.660 Powerful geomagnetic storm hit Quebec.
00:04:28.520 In less than 90 seconds, the hydro-Quebec grid collapsed,
00:04:32.360 and millions of people lost power for nine hours in the middle of a Canadian winter.
00:04:38.720 That storm was big, but nowhere near Carrington.
00:04:42.780 Then came July 23, 2012.
00:04:45.960 The sun fired off a massive CME, and according to NASA,
00:04:50.660 it was at least as strong as the 1859 Carrington event.
00:04:55.820 It missed us, crossed Earth's orbit at a point the Earth had passed about a week earlier.
00:05:02.420 Physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado said that if it had hit, we would
00:05:08.260 still be picking up the pieces.
00:05:10.940 Around the same time, researcher Pete Riley calculated the odds of a Carrington-class
00:05:15.940 storm hitting Earth over the following decade.
00:05:19.100 His estimate was about 12%.
00:05:21.140 And then there's 2022, when SpaceX launched 49 Starlink satellites into a storm NOAA
00:05:29.780 called minor.
00:05:30.860 It wasn't a big storm, but it heated and swelled the upper atmosphere just enough to drag them down, and 38 of those satellites burned up.
00:05:41.960 That, again, was just a minor storm.
00:05:47.600 So what happens if a Carrington-class storm hits us now?
00:05:52.480 Start with the power grid.
00:05:54.220 Those storm-driven currents flow into big, high-voltage transformers and can overheat them.
00:05:59.720 And these are not parts you pick up at Home Depot.
00:06:03.880 They're custom built.
00:06:05.420 They weigh hundreds of tons.
00:06:07.080 And right now, according to analysts at PwC, the lead time for high capacity units can be as long as four years.
00:06:17.200 The U.S. is heavily dependent on imports to build them.
00:06:20.460 In 2013, Lloyd's of London, the insurance market whose entire business is pricing disasters, studied a Carrington-scale storm hitting North America.
00:06:31.000 It estimated 20 to 40 million Americans could lose power for anywhere from several weeks to one to two years, with economic costs between $0.6 trillion and $2.6 trillion.
00:06:45.620 Now think about what runs on power. Water pumps. Fuel pumps. Refrigeration for food and medicine.
00:06:55.060 Hospitals. Cell towers. The trucks that restock grocery stores run on diesel, pumped with electricity.
00:07:03.480 And then there are satellites. In May of 2024, Gannon's storm became the first G5 extreme storm since 2003.
00:07:12.700 About half of all satellites in low Earth orbit, thousands of them, had to adjust their orbits at once.
00:07:20.680 It was the largest satellite migration on record.
00:07:24.000 GPS accuracy degraded so badly that some farms using self-steering tractors stopped planting.
00:07:30.900 And then the Internet.
00:07:31.720 In 2021, computer scientist Sangeetha Abdu-Jothi of UC Irvine warned that the repeaters strung
00:07:41.040 along undersea internet cables are vulnerable.
00:07:44.260 One, and you can lose the whole cable for weeks or months.
00:07:48.840 She called the risk an internet apocalypse.
00:07:52.540 So, will a solar storm destroy the world?
00:07:56.120 Planet will be fine.
00:07:57.200 The question is whether the world we built on top of it will be.
00:08:02.500 But let's be real.
00:08:03.920 People say the world is ending.
00:08:06.100 Don't mean that Earth is going to explode.
00:08:09.760 They mean civilization as we know it could stop.
00:08:13.920 We might survive.
00:08:15.560 What would we do without modern technologies and no ancient knowledge?
00:08:23.320 So here's why people are paying attention right now.
00:08:25.980 First, the sun is waking up. In 2008, solar activity hit its lowest level on record,
00:08:32.380 and scientists expected a long, quiet stretch. It didn't happen. In September 2025, a NASA study
00:08:39.660 led by Jamie Jasinski found that solar wind activity has been rising ever since. His words?
00:08:46.640 The sun is slowly waking up. Second, the storms have been getting real. May 2024 was the strongest
00:08:54.360 storm in two decades, with the northern lights visible across the southern U.S. Then, January
00:09:01.200 2026 delivered that S-4 radiation storm and the record current in New Zealand's grid.
00:09:08.880 Earth's own shield has a weak spot. October 2025, the European Space Agency reported that the South
00:09:16.260 Atlantic anomaly, patch where Earth's magnetic field is weaker, has grown since 2014 by an area
00:09:23.500 nearly half the size of continental Europe.
00:09:27.000 Satellites passing through it take more radiation
00:09:29.640 and are more likely to malfunction.
00:09:32.840 Fourth, the trees are telling us something.
00:09:36.100 Scientists studying ancient tree rings
00:09:38.100 have found spikes of radiation from enormous solar events
00:09:41.480 called Miyake events, going back thousands of years,
00:09:45.780 including one in 774 AD.
00:09:49.440 A Macari University piece this August
00:09:51.820 said a full Miyake event would need to be about 10 times bigger than Carrington,
00:09:57.620 and they seem to happen roughly every 2,000 years. But researchers have also found smaller events
00:10:04.580 several times stronger than Carrington. One 2026 study estimates those come about once every 200
00:10:12.640 years. The last Carrington-level storm was 167 years ago. And as I'm recording this,
00:10:20.100 A large, complex sunspot region called AR4551 has been firing off flares.
00:10:27.480 Nothing catastrophic, but the sun isn't done in this cycle.
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00:10:34.960 Your spreadsheet says good luck.
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00:10:46.540 now if you spend only a few minutes online you will find very different versions of the story
00:10:55.560 biggest one is the micro nova ben davidson the space weather guy argued for years that roughly
00:11:02.900 every 12 000 years the sun unleashes a massive outburst that wrecks the planet flips the magnetic
00:11:09.440 poles and resets civilization and he said we are due for one versions of the theory have gone viral
00:11:16.180 claiming it could wipe out most of humanity.
00:11:19.500 And then there's the CIA document.
00:11:22.100 In 2023, videos spread claiming a declassified CIA file
00:11:26.320 explained how the world will end in a poll shift.
00:11:30.000 The file is real, on the CIA's website.
00:11:33.540 But what's inside is mostly excerpts from a book called The Adam and Eve Story,
00:11:37.960 published in 1963 by a writer named Chan Thomas.
00:11:42.140 It wasn't with the CIA.
00:11:43.900 Fact checkers found it was released through routine declassification.
00:11:47.540 The CIA did not write it.
00:11:49.260 Make sure you check out last week's video that broke down all of the claims
00:11:53.340 from Chan Thomas and the Adam and Eve story.
00:11:57.140 Now, others claim the government is using the threat as a cover.
00:12:00.180 In 2023, a viral post said NASA was warning of an internet apocalypse
00:12:04.460 so elites could carry out the Great Reset.
00:12:08.200 Everyone was offline.
00:12:09.940 Bullet of Fact rated that false.
00:12:11.520 The phrase comes from the UC Irvine study, not from NASA, but many people online who find these fact checkers to be peddlers of controlled misinformation don't believe it.
00:12:25.760 This year, a post claimed a secret NASA program called Project Anchor predicted the Earth would lose gravity for seven seconds on August 12th, 2026.
00:12:35.420 NASA said that was nonsense.
00:12:37.480 August 12th came and went, and I can't speak for you guys, but I stayed firmly on the ground,
00:12:43.640 as did everyone and everything around me.
00:12:46.660 No sign of lost gravity.
00:12:50.540 So here's the thing.
00:12:51.800 Conspiracy theories usually grow around something real.
00:12:54.780 People don't trust the institutions telling them everything's fine.
00:12:57.840 And the scientists themselves admit a big storm is a matter of when, not if.
00:13:02.400 So it's not crazy to ask questions.
00:13:04.640 It's just that the answers in those viral videos don't always add up.
00:13:08.740 With that being said, I'll give a shout out to Ben Davidson,
00:13:11.480 who's always been very pragmatic and spot on when I've interviewed him.
00:13:18.240 So what do the people who actually study this think?
00:13:21.280 First, a solar storm is not going to sterilize the planet.
00:13:24.680 Even the biggest storms are stopped by Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere.
00:13:28.720 Scientists point out that the magnetic pole reversals
00:13:31.220 are driven by Earth's core, not the sun.
00:13:33.680 and they take thousands of years, not an afternoon. Second, the threat to our infrastructure is real,
00:13:39.380 and it's serious. That's why insurers price it in. It's why NASA and NOAA watch the sun around
00:13:46.040 the clock, and why federal regulators now require utilities to plan for geomagnetic disturbances.
00:13:52.520 Third, we're better prepared than we were. We now get hours to days of warning before a CME hits.
00:13:59.180 In May of 2024, Hydro-Quebec, the same utility that went dark in 1989, prepared and reported no outages.
00:14:07.360 New Zealand's grid operator pulled some lines out of service ahead of the storm to protect them.
00:14:12.320 Better prepared doesn't mean prepared.
00:14:14.920 The transformers still take years to replace.
00:14:17.700 Our satellites, our GPS, our banking, our phones, and our food supply all depend on systems that didn't exist the last time the sun really let loose.
00:14:26.260 So back to the question.
00:14:27.900 Will a solar storm destroy the world?
00:14:31.460 Probably not.
00:14:32.780 The Earth has taken bigger hits than Carrington for billions of years, and it's still here.
00:14:37.860 But the world of 1859 shrugged off the biggest storm in recorded history
00:14:42.280 because there wasn't much to break.
00:14:44.500 Our world is different.
00:14:46.460 We've wired everything we depend on into one giant antenna,
00:14:50.120 and we've pointed it at the sun.
00:14:52.600 The next big one is coming.
00:14:54.320 nobody knows when
00:14:55.660 the only real question is whether we're ready
00:14:58.520 when it does
00:14:59.680 thanks for hanging out and watching this special
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