Glenn Beck and his good friends Pat Gray and Stu Bergeer join me to discuss the Biden Debates and the possibility of our society being wiped off the planet by solar flares. Also, we talk about the tragic death of a young man who abandoned his job as a burger flipper to pursue his dream of becoming a professional cyclist.
00:06:31.320So, 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.
00:06:39.360But generally speaking, the baby boom comes from established couples.
00:07:54.880Have we suddenly, you're telling me, with all the logic 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 nobody had a job because all the men that returned,
00:08:21.400they just were, they just didn't think about it, the people who built America were just like, you know, we're going to have a baby, I don't really care.
00:08:30.340I don't know, it's a totally different thing, though, right?
00:08:32.600Like, you had a long period of downturn and devastation that seemed like a big victory, right?
00:08:39.480Like, 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.
00:08:57.340All these people are like, I don't want to bring a child into a world like this.
00:09:02.740I 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.
00:09:54.660Also declines in France, Italy, Spain, and some Asian countries, including Japan and South Korea, which already had low birth rates, saw further declines.
00:10:05.160The world will weep when the Western world falls.
00:10:09.500They have no idea what the Judeo-Christian Western world has done for humanity.
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00:12:52.400Okay, I'm sorry to play such a fool here, but I have not been watching TV or anything because I can't.
00:13:02.400And honestly, I just can't listen to it because it's driving me out of my mind.
00:13:06.520Can you guys tell me what's happening with the Trump trial now?
00:13:09.420Well, 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.
00:13:16.740Michael Cohen was testifying yesterday, and he continues, I believe, today.
00:13:21.880They'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,
00:13:29.240which really has run the gamut of every possible opinion you could have on Donald Trump,
00:13:33.680from 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.
00:13:44.260That's kind of the Michael Cohen approach.
00:13:47.080Whatever benefits Michael Cohen at the time, it's important to note that what benefits him at the time right now is to be very calm and balanced and give, you know,
00:13:55.880very respectful testimony in front of the court.
00:13:59.640Of course, every major media, you know, institution is just lapping this up as if he is a credible witness,
00:14:06.740when really there couldn't be one that is less credible.
00:14:10.640Was there a tape that came out yesterday that?
00:28:02.900So, when I was probably 25 years old, I read this great book, and I have no idea if it's scientifically sound or not.
00:28:11.020But it talked about a catastrophic polar shift that the crust of the Earth, that some of the continents may have moved.
00:28:21.880And their theory was that Atlantis was Antarctica, et cetera, et cetera.
00:28:26.800But what fascinated me, and I know you're a religious guy, when it comes to, you know, end times, it says, and the stars will fall.
00:28:36.380Well, the only way that I could think of in God's, you know, magnificent math to make it look like stars fall would be some sort of a shift in the continents.
00:28:51.780As we would look up, we would be moving, but it would look like the stars are falling.
00:28:57.700Have you ever thought of that, or is that nonsense?
00:28:59.800Well, the continents move very rapidly.
00:29:31.980In fact, that text says the sun, moon, and stars dim by one-third.
00:29:36.840And that dimming would happen if you were surrounded by smoke.
00:29:40.740You 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.
00:29:56.460Hugh, so tell me all of the stuff on the Aurora, the lights that we're looking at.
00:30:06.500There 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 a massive, I think we had a, I don't even know, an X5 solar flare yesterday.
00:30:33.680In 1859, there was a huge solar flare that struck the Earth and knocked out telegraph systems.
00:30:41.820If 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.
00:30:54.820And that would be catastrophic, because today we're very dependent on electricity.
00:31:06.040So, 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.
00:31:41.080I mean, they were close to the geomagnetic pole, so they took the most damage, and it was $11 billion of damage.
00:31:49.440But they now have a surge protector on it, so it's protected.
00:31:55.060But 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.
00:36:51.140So, you know, there's a lot of subtlety in the way these things are measured.
00:36:56.060When 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.
00:38:33.040We don't know, and we won't know anything about it until it's back in view.
00:38:37.680So 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.
00:38:51.560And there's, for some reason, nobody wants to do it.
00:38:58.120I've never been able to answer that question.
00:39:00.440It 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.
00:39:16.100And the one that really gets me is I can't figure out who would profit from us remaining vulnerable.
00:39:24.720It 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 piece of debt.
00:39:54.440But 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.
00:40:09.720And the problem with them frying is not only does that take the grid down, but these transformers are not something that you, it's not a commodity.
00:41:49.000In 1859, an astronomer named Carrington noticed flaring activity from sunspots.
00:41:57.180It was correlated to auroras and a spectacular breakdown of the electrical systems of Earth, which at the time basically meant the telegraph system.
00:42:12.100What 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.
00:42:36.140So, because the Earth was not a highly electrical place at the time, that was a highly manageable, though interesting, event.
00:42:48.240The 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.
00:43:00.040Everything from the distribution of food and water to communications, all of our lives have electrical components.
00:43:08.920And what's worse, they're not even just electrical anymore.
00:43:11.960They're electronic, which means they're highly sensitive.
00:43:14.380So, a solar storm that is like the Carrington event of 1859 would create catastrophic disruption of our systems.
00:43:26.200And 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.
00:43:36.180Is there anything that the individual can do?
00:43:38.160Like, I have, you know, my own power source and everything else, I'm, you know, off the grid.
00:43:45.920Is there something, like, can you, EMP proof, is that enough for this?
00:43:52.800Well, it depends, because the significance of the EMP ranges.
00:44:00.460So, there's probably nothing you could do about an absolute worst case scenario, but there are many scenarios that are far less dire.
00:44:14.660And what one discovers when you try to prepare for such things is that you should probably ignore the absolute worst case,
00:44:26.800because you could spend every dollar you have and every hour you have trying to make yourself safe from it, and you probably wouldn't.
00:44:47.560Do you have a plan to establish communications with the people who are, you know, let's say within 100 miles of you, your friends and family,
00:44:59.160who you would gather with in such a circumstance?
00:45:15.420And 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.
00:45:28.940That spent fuel has to be actively cooled to keep it from catching fire.
00:45:37.040Once 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 cask.
00:45:45.980And a dry cask does not require active cooling.
00:45:48.280But 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.
00:46:06.740If 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.
00:46:21.900So 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.
00:46:31.000And from the point of view, I know when people hear this kind of information, they panic.