Ever wondered how a book gets made into a movie or how to host an amazing dinner party? Well, we're here to help you with our new podcast, Two Guys from Hollywood, I'm Alan Evans, literary agent and talent manager. And I'm Joey Santo's, columnist and celebrity chef.

We're going to be serving you a fresh perspective of the entertainment industry alongside our favorite celebrity guests. Of course, as we like to say, we don't dish. We serve. Two guys from Hollywood premieres January 12. Listen and follow on the radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you soon.

Hey, everyone, it's Michelle Williams, and I love being able to share my story with you on my podcast, checking in with Michelle Williams were my guests and I we get real as we share the ups and downs of our mental health journeys.

And I'd love for you to join me. Hey, it's going to be your church and your turn up. So listen to checking in with Michelle Williams every Tuesday, a part of the black effect on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'n m Josh Clark. There's Charles to be Chuck Brown over there. And Jerry's not here, but we're going to make it through somehow in this edition of Stuff You Should Know. I'm going to call this one Chuck the Ikarus edition because we made it through the Sun podcast, just hanging on by our fingernails before and through just an astounding act of hubris.

We're going to do another sun related episode.

Yeah, we talked about a lot of this stuff in the sun when. Yeah, we did, but I don't think we went anywhere near into this kind of detail, so I'm feeling OK about redoing this, doing something that that's like kind of a redo a little bit. OK, are you feeling OK? I'm feeling great. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that.

I don't know if I would say I'm feeling great, but that's good that you are at least.

So we're talking about the sun. Believe it or not. And we're talking about a specific thing on the sun called solar flares, which you may have heard of, but you may not know much about unless apparently you've already listened to our Sun episode. But we'll talk a little bit about solar flares. But one of the things that that I think is extraordinarily interesting about solar flares is they belong to a larger category called space weather. And I am just as jazzed as can be about the idea of space weather, aren't you not as just as you?

I don't think but I do think this is this is pretty neat stuff. And I'm glad we're getting a chance to make it more clear than we did before.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a good that's a good point. I'm sure we talked about this before, but it's probably extremely confusing. So, yeah, we're going to clear all that up. So space weather, especially stuff that comes from the sun, comes mostly from the surface of the atmosphere of the sun, which is extraordinarily active.

It's extraordinarily hot. So hot, Chuck, that the surface of the sun is made of plasma, which a lot of people consider the fourth state of matter. It's like a gas, but it's a special kind of gas that where the particles are is jazzed about being alive, as I am about the idea of space weather that's right there supercharged.

And when they are moving around, they create something called magnetic fields, not the band. The thing mean, even though it is a great band name and a great band, and they are going to you know, magnetic fields have their own effect on all these particles and what's going on up there.

Yeah, so the the energetic electrons that have been stripped from the atoms, creating electrons and ions which have a charge, they create magnetic fields and then the magnetic fields they create have an effect on them so that they tend to follow these magnetic field lines. But the stuff is so energetic and so hot that the magnetic fields that develop aren't like this kind of orderly lines that keep their distance, you know, nice and tidy, like you imagine, like a magnetic field to exist.

Like these things are like roiling, curling, twisting. It's just a big orgy of magnetism up there.

That's the only way to put it. I had no choice but to say it like that. Yeah.

And then, you know, this stuff is going on. It's called solar activity. And it depends on when you're observing the sun. It's going to be more or less active. There's a there's a cycle. It's called the solar cycle. That happens about every 11 years when the magnetic north and South Pole switch.

And within that cycle, there's something called a solar maximum, which is the period kind of where the biggest show is going on.

Yeah, there's also a solar minimum, but the solar maximum is we're in a solar cycle, 25 apparently, and the solar maximum is coming up on in 2025. That's very appropriately. And so as we're reaching the solar maximum, there's going to be a lot more of what people call sunspots by people. I mean astronomers, of course, and sunspots are these kind of darkish areas on the surface of the sun. They can be a little tiny dots.

They can be kind of big, but they look really, really small and they look dark. And the reason they look dark is because they're relatively cool compared to the rest of the surface that's around them. But even still, they're super duper hot and they're still pretty bright, comparatively speaking.

Yeah, like a sunspot is about 6500 degrees Fahrenheit because we're talking about the sun. So cool is a relative term here. Right. And as far as bright goes, it's about that's about ten times as bright as a full moon. So if you go out at night and a full moon and it kind of feels like a little cool daylight, a sun spot is about ten times brighter than that.

Right. So you shouldn't go looking at these things.

No, no. That's a really good thing to say, is like we're talking about a lot of stuff that's going to make you want to look at the sun. Don't do it. Just go online and look at pictures of this stuff on the sun or videos even. We have videos thanks to the good people at NASA, but the sunspots. So it really just goes to show you how hot and bright the surface of the sun is, that these things seem cool and dark by comparison and huge and they are really, really big.

So the width of them can get to be up to 30000 miles across, which is about the width of Neptune, which is huge. You're about four times the width of earth and still they look super dinky compared to the sun. The reason that these things are cooler, Chuck, is because they're spots of magnetism that are so strong that they keep the heat inside the sun from poking out right there. That's how strong the magnetic energy is in these areas.

Yeah, that's right.

And because they're magnets, they form in and little pairs like little buddies and they appear on the surface of the sun. And what we're actually looking at, if you can, like, go to NASA or whatever, like you said, and see a picture of a sunspot, what you're looking at is sort of like the two ends of if you think about these magnetic lines, they're these magnets and it's like a filament, like a rope. Just picture him twisted up, basically running beneath the sun surface.

And there are some really, really cool pictures and stuff. And then one end of this sunspot is positive, the other end is negative.

And it's they sort of act like rings of a tree a little bit as far as astronomers can observe these things.

The first sunspots of each cycle are in the middle attitudes. And then they start moving around during the cycle so they can kind of see where you are in the solar cycle by where and how many of these sunspots there are.

Yeah. So the more the closer to the solar maximum you are, the more sunspots they're going to be and the closer they're going to be to the equator. So they tell a lot about where where the sun is in its solar cycle. But the thing is, when these magnetic field lines, twists and in curve in turn, they actually can interact with other magnetic field lines. And when that happens, when they cross, kind of like the proton streams crossing and Ghostbusters, when that happens, something called the solar flare happens.

It's a it's an event on the sun. And it is such a huge, magnificently energetic event that it actually can affect Earth things on Earth because it's just so massive and such a huge release and sudden release of energy.

I had a Ghostbusters ref penciled in later on, if you believe that. Oh, I can't wait to hear it.

It's been a long time when we both have to really have one each.

Yeah, it has. And it's been a while since we listed dates by the years before since Ghostbusters came.

And mine has a date attached to it. And you'll just have to wait. I can't wait. What a great episode this is shaping up to be.

So these explosions, the magnetic fields are driving these explosions. And if, you know, if you're laypeople like us, it's you can either look at this as something this kind of simple to look at on its surface or if you really want to get into it, it's pretty complex and not easily understood. But the simple answer is because we're talking about magnetic fields, is that these adjacent fields are pointing in opposite directions and they basically wipe each other out and that releases all this magnetic energy and all that heat kind of everywhere that surrounds it.

It just goes spew, spew, spew energy, heat shooting at you from the sun, right? Sure. So people have figured this out. Finally, there has to do with, like, the lines of magnetism interacting with one another and annihilating one another. But there's a big mystery attached to this or there was for many, many years. And that is that. OK, so we understand magnetic annihilation. But to this point, we thought it took about 10000 years for two opposite magnetic fields to annihilate one another.

Well, we're talking about here these solar flares, they they annihilate one another and release all this energy in a matter of minutes, maybe an hour sometimes. So that doesn't quite jibe. And I think back in the 50s, some scientists started proposing a type of magnetic energy release called magnetic reconnection. And that is where magnetic field lines are so twisty, turny rathi and energetic that they can actually rip a field line like a magnetic field line, can rip apart and then reconnect with some neighbors.

When that happens. It's called magnetic reconnection. And they think that that is the kind of energetic release that would account for a solar flare.

Yeah. And this you know, this can cause all kinds of problems for things in space and for people on Earth even which we'll get to that stuff in more detail a little bit later. But the point is, these things are super hot.

They burst out to the sun's corona, which if you remember from our Sun Up episode, that's the outermost atmosphere of the sun. Rarefied gas is all over the place out there. And it has I mean, this is super, super hot stuff like normally. The temperature in the corona is about a few million degrees, Kelvin, but inside that flare, we're talking 10 to 20 million degrees, Kelvin, and we always like to think of things in terms of either Big Max or hydrogen bombs.

And in this case, it's got to be hydrogen bombs. The amount of energy released during a solar flare is about it's millions of 100 ton hydrogen bombs all at once.

Yeah, all at once. That's a really that's a really important point to, you know, and I feel like a real shmo for not having calculated that in Big Bang.

I don't know how calories that's got to calorie size. I know you could do calories.

Yeah, but what's a calorie of a solar flare? I don't know.

I didn't look and I feel like a jackass for not having looked. Well, they go down easy. I know that they do.

So they're big, huge releases of energy and they're their releases of radiation. They release radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum and that includes the visible light spectrum. So these things just turn into these enormously bright flares, which is where the name comes from. And we've figured out how to classify them. There's a classifying system for solar flares. That's a lot like the Richter scale in that there's class A, B, C, M, an X. That's not really like the Richter scale would like.

The Richter scale is that each of those classes is ten times more powerful than the previous class.

Yeah. So like an X is the highest that is ten times ten times an M, 100 times a C and then once you get to X, you know if they didn't go Y and Z, they just said, let's stick with X and then let's for sure and it sounds totally cool and then let's start attaching numbers to them so you can have, you know, X one, two, three, four and so on.

Yeah. And so, you know, each each of those letter grades has a one through nine scale, but X is so huge that X scale goes beyond nine.

And I think the biggest, the biggest one that they've ever caught so far that's ever been recorded burned out the sensors that were recording it. The sensors were overloaded at X twenty eight and they did some calculations after the fact and they figured out that there may have been an X 45 flare back on November 4th, 2003.

Yeah, this was a big deal. This was it was something called the Halloween storms of 2003, which is kind of a fun way. You know, it happened because it was in October and near Halloween. So all the astronomers got excited. And this one was a little bit weird because although it was near the solar maximum, it was two to three years after the peak. And it was they said NASA said it's generally a quiet period. So they got really, really excited.

There were 17 major flares in that Halloween storm. And it was, wow, that's something that is really going to get the white coats pretty charged up.

It totally is. I mean, an X 45. That's just astounding. And I did a little bit of of derivative calculation.

Technically, it would be a double a five five.

You know, that's a weird different numbers, too, though. I saw that the sensor cut out at 15 and the estimate was x 28. So. Huh, it's really hard. So NASA even had conflicting information.

I think we should point this out. You just set us up for see way that I wanted to include. So there's two things. There's a lot of disagreement on exactly what a solar flare is and the difference between that and coronal mass ejection, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And it's not necessarily a disagreement in astronomy. It's a disagreement among people who report on stuff like astronomy and don't fully understand what they're talking about. So we ran into that quite a bit.

So if we get something mixed up, please forgive us.

And then secondly, when we're talking about some of these incredible events in physics terms, people who are in the field of physics understand what they're talking about to one another, but they have a great reputation of not figuring out how to explain it to the rest of us. And so they'll put it in different terms. And so when you're researching this stuff, you're like, is this describing a different thing than this over here? Or is it just two different people describing the same thing two different ways because they're not describing it in the true physics way?

Because I wouldn't understand. So we ran into that a lot to do.

Yeah. And it's frustrating to literally see two different things, both from NASA dot gov right. On two different pages.

But, you know, who are we?

To call out NASA, I think we just did we'll call out space for sure, but the the the point is this all of that really underscores the fact that our understanding of the dynamics on the sun are still really early and premature and we're still figuring a lot of stuff out, including classifying the differences between solar flares and coronal mass ejection.

Yeah, and the light show in the you know, the fun that the astronomers had in the Halloween storms of 2003 was immense, no matter whether it was x 28 or x 45.

That's right. They party either way. They sure did.

They surely did check.

They had a little bit of peach schnapps and went to bed at 10, 30, toasted some a half a shot of brandy and then went to bed.

That's proven wrong. Nerds prove it wrong. I say we take a break and then come back and talk about those coronal mass ejection. Is that I teased? Sure. OK, we'll be right back, everybody.

Contact World is a technology and media company dedicated to improving public health because we're fed up with the way our country has ignored public health for so long.

Those days are over and our podcast is our opportunity to dive into hot topics that are relevant to your life, from contact tracing to vaccines to social and racial justice.

We may not have all the answers, but you deserve to know what goes on in your neighborhood and the decisions that affect you and your family's health. I'm Justin Beck. Join me and my co-host, Katherine and Deepti.

As we seek truth in health. Contact Worlds podcast is the voice of the people and your opportunity to improve public health and health equity. So subscribe to contact World and tell your friends, because we all deserve the right information, not misinformation. Visit contact Outworld. To learn more, listen to Contact World, the podcast on the radio, our Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Friends Dancing with the Stars, partners, and now podcast hosts Backstreet Boys, A.J. McLean and Cheryl Burke bring you pretty messed up.

The show talks about pretty much anything, everything. Love, life, drugs, sex, rock and roll, you name it. Pretty messed up. Doesn't hold back. It's a hot mess with the guidance, mentorship and watchful eye of their friend Rene Elizondo. We get pretty deep and we just talk about everything. Listen to pretty messed up on the on her radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, so I was saying that it's difficult sometimes to discern the difference between a solar flare, which is a huge burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum all at once, which, by the way, takes just a matter of minutes, eight minutes, to be exact, to reach Earth, because we're talking about carriers of the electromagnetic force which can travel at the speed of light. So it's, I guess, eight minutes, but at the speed of light from the sun.

Right. Right.

Coronal mass ejection. There's something different. Even though they seem to be associated with solar flares in a lot of cases, they also seem to be able to kind of stand on their own, too. Either way, they're impressive in their own right, for sure.

Yeah. I mean, I think if you were talking in terms of visual excitement, like a solar mass, I'm sorry, a coronal mass ejection is like a full on Grateful Dead concert, whereas a solar flare is like when John Mayer played with members of the Grateful Dead.

Oh, that's mean. I was going to say it's just an Instagram video lesson of John Mayer teaching you some Grateful Dead lick because you know.

Well, but so solar flares are more magnificent than that.

So, man, that's mean. Sorry, sorry. John Mayer, if you're listening. I'm not sorry, Josh. Sorry.

He, uh, he's a nice guy. He apparently has.

I've seen some stuff like of him teaching people how to play Grateful Dead guitar stuff. And it's really, really hard what he's doing. So sure.

My I had to do it right. So with me, I feel weird.

I just apologize to John Mayer on the stuff you should know. Episode about solar flares.

You didn't see that coming? No, it wasn't in my notes. So with coronal mass ejection, at least these these are not necessarily just bursts of of radiation like a solar flare is these they do have some radiation attached, but their big thing is particles, highly charged, super energetic particles that it shoots like buckshot toward the earth at incredible speeds.

I mean, they get they get accelerated very close to the speed of light, not the speed of light. And there's a big difference between the speed of light and close to the speed of light. So it takes about three or four days, usually for stuff that's shot out by a coronal mass ejection to reach Earth. But when these things go off on the sun, they're like you said, they're rather impressive.

Yeah, like if you were looking at this stuff in a park with a telescope and a high powered telescope, that is I don't think you could. Well, could you see any of that stuff with anything you have at home? And I've got a pretty good telescope, but it's for nighttime viewing only.

So with the I think you can see coronal mass ejection, I think solar flares your best with a radio telescope or an x ray telescope. But the x ray telescope would have to be outside of Earth's magnetosphere.

Do you have a telescope? Yeah.

OK, telescope. Oh, it's not a radio telescope. No, no, no. I just we've never talked we've never scoped it up in conversation. And I would be surprised if you didn't. But I'm glad to know you do. We do have one yet. So flares like if you were looking through an X-ray or a radio telescope at a solar flare, it'll look cool. It'll look like a flash of light. But those coronal mass ejection are really impressive.

Big eruptions. The height can be many times the size of the earth shooting out into space.

Like you said, they're kind of like a belch from the sun that actually releases part of the sun. It's like a bubble of plasma that's just enormous. Often billions and billions of tonnes in mass just coming right at the earth full of these incredibly charged particles. And they're so big, so massive. And the plasma that they're made of is so energetic that they actually have their own magnetic fields like the sun or the earth. So when they finally do come in contact with the planet, our planet, weird things start to happen because its own magnetic field and all of the charged particles within the plasma contact our own magnetosphere and then also our atmosphere, which is almost designed to to deter the worst effects of those things coming at us from the sun.

Yeah.

So our magnetosphere, that's our little first layer of protection. That would be like although I was about to say, like what kind this protective shield that maybe more like the ionosphere, but the magnetosphere is that first protection and it's going to kind of brush away as many of those charged particles, these protons that are shooting out as possible.

And because of solar. Wind, though. It's got a shape to it, the magnetosphere has like a sort of a compressed side that faces the sun, it's got a little dip near the poles of the earth where some really magnificent stuff is going to take place, as we'll see in a minute. And then it's got this tail in that flows out from the back. And the Earth's magnetic field is going to block these particles from most of the surface.

The sun's the solar wind is going to push them along toward that tail. And in that dip at the poles is where you're going to see these really brilliant auroras.

Yes, but the the magnetism, the magnetic energy from the coronal mass ejection can be so energetic that it can actually push on the sun's side the day side of the earth's magnetosphere, its closest to the sun, pushing it so much that it actually contorts the night side, the tailwind that trails off into space and presses it together so that when it comes together, the Earth's own magnetosphere becomes energetic and quivering. And then when it goes back to its normal energy state, it releases a bunch of energy in the form of light.

And when that happens, the auroras that tend to congregate at the poles can actually show up all over the planet, basically even very close to the equator.

Yeah, which is crazy. And we'll talk about some of the bigger ones and some of the surprising places they showed up. But so that's the magnetosphere I mentioned the ionosphere, that sort of a I guess, a secondary protection. That is another high layer of the Earth's atmosphere. And that's going to stop all the radiation because it's giving out a tremendous amount of radiation. And it's the ionosphere wasn't doing his job and it wasn't there. We would be in big, big trouble here.

Oh, yeah, we'd be toast.

I mean, like, these are incredibly energetic, fast traveling particles close to the speed of light. And they would just shoot right through the tissue in our bodies and do all sorts of damage because they would probably knock all sorts of electrons off of our atoms that make up our cells and our tissue. And we would either develop cancer over the long term or just drop dead from a big enough dose of this stuff. So thank goodness for the ionosphere. I mean, it saves us like John Mayer, Save the Grateful Dead just in case he's still listening.

There's like a percentage of our audience. It's like, yeah, man, preach. And there's a person. It is like, oh, my God, I have to turn this off. And then I'd say, the vast majority are like America. Exactly.

See the guy that dated Jen Aniston? Probably, yes.

So you get the magnetosphere, you get the ionosphere. And for the most part, these things are capable of absorbing the worst of the sun's belches and flare ups and everything under normal circumstances. But even even when it is protecting life on Earth, like us animals and the plants and the the plankton and, you know, the whales, that kind of stuff, life here on Earth, there are things that we humans have developed that can be affected by these this space weather by these geomagnetic storms.

Yeah, I guess. Should we talk about the the Carrington event? One of the most exciting events I thought was pretty exciting.

Yes, it's pretty good. So this is 1859. Like this kind of thing now is pretty magnificent. But I imagine 1859 astronomers were just really, really knocked out by something like this.

They said Xerces Beer. Yeah, exactly. This is sort of late summer, August, September, and a big solar storm. They later called the Carrington event became the strongest one on record. And this is named for a man named Richard Carrington.

He was an astronomer, one of England's best at the time. And he was in his observatory and he was hanging out. And it was a sunny day and he was working with his telescope. And he's projecting this image of the sun on a screen and drawing. There were cameras at the time, but I guess the most.

I don't know, accurate or efficient way to capture what he saw was to draw this stuff that he's observing and that's what he was doing on September 1st, 1859. Yeah.

And while he was drawing the stuff, he saw that some of these sunspots that he was he was mapping, I guess we started to grow really, really bright. And he got really excited because he'd been doing this for a while and this wasn't something he'd seen before. So he jumped up and he ran to get a friend who was going to witness the big mistake. Yeah, he said he was gone for a minute, tops. And when he came back, he found that these brilliant flashes of light had already started to weaken.

Can you imagine he was a little bummed about this, but he and he and his buddy still watch these flares, like go, you know, get lower and lower and then turn into pinpoint and then vanish. So what he saw, he was the first person to record a solar flare. No one had ever seen anything like it before. And that was that 11, 11, 23 a.m. it was it was done. It finished and then nothing there was it until the wee hours of the morning, later that night, the morning of the next day, later that night, which I always just find endlessly confusing, was that it took that long to know that it's the next that night is the next morning.

For some reason, it just breaks my brain every time I realize how sad that is to admit. Right.

Sure. Yeah. So in the wee hours, the skies put on a light show all over the earth, red, green, purple auroras, very brilliant, very exciting newspapers. You could like, read the newspaper at night. They saw this stuff in Hawaii, El Salvador, in the Bahamas.

They saw the Arauz in the Bahamas. That nuts. That is nuts. There were towns, neighboring towns that thought the that like Shelbyville was on fire. Springfield thought Shelbyville was on fire and vice versa. There were birds chirping because they thought it was dawn. There was a Brick Mason crew in South Carolina that got up. And, you know, they were like two beers in going to work when they realized that, hey, it's the middle of the night.

Right. And they looked at each other and said, man, this is one hundred and twenty five years before Ghostbusters.

Oh, nice. Very nice check.

Yeah, well it seemed kanzen because I premedical. Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you what, how about this, I'm going to give you a huge hearty surprised laugh and waited out the conversation before.

All right. Ready. And they all looked at each other two beers in and said Ghostbusters won't even come out for another hundred twenty five years.

Oh. Oh my God. I did not see that coming. Dude, how long has it been since we talked about. I don't know. That's perfect. And we'll just fix that on editing. That's great. Thanks, Chuck.

I need a need a couple of beers myself for them.

So one of the other things that really went haywire was the telegraph system, right? Yes. This is 1859 and the Telegraph saw that they were the the leading edge, not bleeding edge. You told me that that's totally wrong. The leading edge of technology of telecommunications at the time. And these telegraph lines depended on currents being sent over wires. And so those wires were overloaded by this geomagnetic storm. So much so that sparks were shooting off of the telegraph.

Operators were getting shocked and burned. The telegraph paper was catching on fire when it was nearby, took a million hits. It was very much like a movie. All this is happening all over the world at the same time. It's just crazy. It's very, very early morning of the next day after the that.

Right.

So one of the things that got me was they they they unplugged the batteries to these things, the telegraphs, and they found that the wires were still so energetic with electricity from the geomagnetic storm that they could still send telegraphs even though they had no power of their own. They were they were able to send telegrams over the telegraph line, even with a disconnected from the battery.

That's the fact of the show to me. Oh, that's amazing. Let me have that. I mean, they must have thought it was haunted or something.

I think you think so.

And it's also, you know, like, sure, the plug is unplugged and it's still working through, like, Xerces Behar's. It's crazy.

There's another thing to some telegraph operators couldn't send telegraphs even though the lines were active, because the the magnetism in these currents was so strong that the armature, the thing that they tap up and down was like fused to the plate beneath it. It was just the magnet. The magnetism was so strong it wouldn't move.

I thought you were going to say they thought it was possessed. So they probably left the room screaming. They did it says his beard. Oh, we get the third one in there, yeah, shall we take another break? Oh, almost. So so one other thing. Let's just wrap the Carrington event up real quick, OK? All right. So 10:00 a.m. the effects of this whole crazy event are done. And, you know, it gets talked about.

This is a worldwide event, but it's kind of like treated as a scientific anomaly. Right? People people understand what happened and what caused it, why it happened over the years as we learn more and more about solar flares and coronal mass ejection. But it didn't become apparent that this Carrington event was actually a harbinger of like real much bigger problems that could happen to us alive on Earth today until the 70s. And maybe we'll take a break. Chuck had come back and talk about how that could be problematic right after this.

Great.

Hey, everybody, I'm celebrity chef and columnist Joey Santo's, and I'm Alan Evans, a literary agent and talent manager here in Los Angeles. And we have a brand new podcast launching called Two Guys from Hollywood. Joey and I have been friends for more than 30 years. Let's just say we've been in the throes of Hollywood for a long time. And on our new podcast, we're going to be discussing a broad range of topics, including everything, Hollywood and pop culture.

We hope to give you a behind the scenes look at what really goes on in this town. And we're also going to be talking tips and tricks from our core knowledge, publishing, entertainment and cooking. Ever wondered how a book gets made into a movie or how to throw a dinner party at the last minute? We'll be digging into all of that and dancing with the friends and celebrity guests we've made on our journey. As we like to say, we don't dish.

We serve our podcast. Two Guys from Hollywood premieres January 12 on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcast. So we hope you will join us for two guys from Hollywood. We'll talk to you soon.

Ever wondered why there are two ways to spell doughnut's or why some people think you can find water underground just by wandering around with a stick? Believe it or not, this is stuff you should know. You know the podcast with over a billion listeners. It's now for your eyes so you can read it. Stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things covers everything from the origin of the Murphy bed to why people get lost, become the most interesting person you know.

Now at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold.

All right, so the world changed a lot between the Carrington event and the mid eighteen hundreds and in the 1970s when scientists had a much bigger handle on what this kind of thing meant. And in the 1970s, we were the whole world was very dependent on electric power. You might be surprised to learn. Right.

And they knew like, hey, if we had another Carrington event today, it could be a big deal because and we'll get to this later. But like, we got a lot of metal on this earth and we use the earth to ground everything basically with ground wires. And that creates a unique problem potentially if we had another event like this.

Yeah.

The fact that we chose to use the Earth as a ground to wear our grounding wires, go from our electrical components, tie into a metal rod that's driven into the earth so that whenever excess electricity is generated by electronics that we use, it gets distributed through the grounding wire to the earth where it dissipates. That makes all of our electronics vulnerable to a geomagnetic storm because in a geomagnetic storm, the ground itself can become magnetized.

And even more than that, Chuck, we've buried a lot of metal infrastructure from like pipes to cables to all sorts of metal stuff is snaking through the ground right now. And when the ground becomes magnetized in a geomagnetic storm, it can it can carry really powerful currents through all the infrastructure up through the grounds, through the grounding wires it into our electronic components, including things like power transformers, and overload them to the point where they fail catastrophically.

Yeah, and this this sort of happened in August 1972. There was a big, big solar flare that knocked out our long distance phone communication across Illinois. So that was just sort of an early example of like, hey, this can actually have a real effect here on Earth.

And that was that was a big one. It took, I think, about 15 hours to hit Earth, whereas it usually takes two to three days. Right. It also set off these we had it was during Vietnam, obviously, and we had magnetic mines in harbors around Vietnam. It exploded those. So I don't know if they were supposed to be, like, secretly there and if that was kind of like, oh, oops, sorry about that.

Or if they knew that they were there and they just went off.

But either way, that was a pretty scary scene. It was apparently it was a mystery for a long time until somebody finally figured out why those sea mines all went off. They connected to the to that coronal mass ejection, I believe.

Yeah, but you can imagine, like, all the damage that could occur, like even if you're just talking about the electrical grid, if it really blew out, it wouldn't be just like a blackout, like it would destroy parts of our electrical grid such that it would take it's not like, hey, let me go out and fix this over a few hours during a snowstorm.

It might take weeks or months or even up to a year if we had a big enough, like blast to the grid.

Yeah, because, I mean, it is by necessity, our electrical grid is interconnected. So if one part of it gets overloaded, that can overload other parts that are connected. And if you have a whole city without power for, let's say, Los Angeles went out of power for a month, what would happen? What would be the what would be the outcome of that? You couldn't do anything. And when you start thinking like that, you started thinking about, oh, my God, like think about all the stuff we do that requires electricity.

Everything we do requires electricity in some form or fashion. And so to be without electricity in a major city or multiple major cities for even a couple of weeks is just unthinkable. But that's that's the level of vulnerability we're at because of the way that our electrical components are set up because they're grounded.

Yeah. And not just like a chain reaction, apocalyptic kind of activity, but just monetary loss, like the economic and financial damage for the city of Los Angeles to be without power for a month would be astounding. Right.

So, you know, there's stuff they could do. They could they could fit some very critical transformers with resistors and capacitors. But these things are like hundreds of thousand dollars per transformer. So that's just too much money. So they're not doing that?

No, they're not. No wonder if it's going to be like some close call that makes everybody know, OK, we need to invest this in our infrastructure or, you know, are we going to figure out some other means of, you know, a backup system? I'm not sure that happens to like Topeka and then everyone says, hey, if this happened in Topeka and they lost, you know. Several hundred dollars, and that's really mean I was going to say, did you think do you think Topeka would you mean do you think that would convince anybody?

I don't know.

I'm so sorry, Topeka. But you get my point. If it happens somewhere sort of in a smaller area than the big cities might say, hey, that means it could happen to us, the people who really matter.

All right. The coastal elites would stroke their beards, talk their tongues. Yeah.

So so, yeah, there's there doesn't seem to be a lot of initiative right now to figure this out. And we're just kind of sitting ducks in a weird way. It's nothing. I don't think it's anything to lose sleep over, but it's really surprising. Like the more I dug into this, the more I was like, huh, this could kind of be a thing someday. And it's not just, you know, the the electrical grid here on Earth alone is what is all that would be affected by that.

The things we rely on out in space, like satellites, a bad enough geomagnetic storm could affect satellites and a lot of weight. So our GPS systems would be messed up. Or if you so if you use GPS for really important stuff like, say, landing an airplane, you could be in big trouble. And if you're also on planes, the high frequency radio communications, they used to stay in contact with the ground, especially when they're out over the ocean or something like that, that can be disrupted by a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection, too.

Yeah, or what about a satellite? Maybe that is I mean, there are thousands of satellites up there, but and, you know, if a radio satellite went out, it would be bad, but people could live. But what if it affected a satellite that's in charge of aiding in national defense? Things could get a little bit scary if those satellites were down or, you know, spacecraft, their spacecraft up there and they use satellites to help orient themselves and and keep themselves safe.

Yeah, there's an excess, although the ISIS supposedly is is protected, right? Yeah.

Yeah. The big threat to astronauts from coronal mass ejection and solar flares is when they're out on spacewalks, when they're doing like labor, say, outside the SS or something like that, just like here on Earth. If we didn't have the ionosphere or the magnetosphere, we would be in big trouble. Astronauts can be in big trouble. The ISIS orbits within the earth's magnetosphere, but it's beyond the Ionis. Yeah. So it should they are a little more exposed and isolated, shielded.

So they're not nearly as exposed, but out on a spacewalk. They if it were a really bad coronal mass ejection, they could be in a lot of trouble.

Yeah. Like Sandra.

What's her face in that movie exactly. What is s name? I can't remember. Sandra Bernhardt. No. Sandra Bullock. Sandra Bullock. Sandy Duncan. Sandra Bullock. Andrew Bullock. Yeah, right.

Sandra Bernhard in that movie Space Space Trit Space Craziness. Did you like that movie Gravity?

Uh, yeah, I thought it's pretty good if I've only seen it once. Um, I don't I don't know if I were to cast her necessarily, but it's fine.

Yeah. Or George Clooney. I don't think I would have cast either.

I mean, I had some issues.

I mean, it was magnificent looking movie, but, um, I think in the end I had some issues with the story in the script being like not good enough for how great of a movie it was trumped up to be.

Did was that the part of the guy who did The Revenant?

I think so, yeah.

So you, me and I went and saw The Revenant in Hawaii once we were on vacation because what else is there to do in Hawaii on vacation? But go see movies. And we saw The Revenant and this person next to us was there by himself and he was so upset by Tom Hardy's character and just how evil he was that this guy was like telling you he was the devil. He had his hand up at the screen and was praying against Tom Hardy, who was really affected by Tom Hardy's character, which made the movie like even more thrilling because we would look at the movie and every person reacting to the movie, too.

So it was something to see. Yeah, I saw that once as well. And I saw it on tour with you. Either it was either Phoenix or San Diego. We have to look at the dates, but I just remember there being palm trees.

I think it was San Diego maybe when we did a show at that spooky abandoned church.

Man, I'm convinced still to this day that that's the church from the Prince of Darkness that John Kerry.

Yeah, that was a weird show because that was the one I know you remember that guy said on the front row and shot the whole thing with a video camera and he looked like he was mad, too, like he was documenting evidence or something to use against us.

We both were like I think we were so caught off guard we didn't know what to say. Do we call this guy and say, sir, can you please put away your camera? Yeah. So we just soldiered on. Yeah, we were pinned down by the the unrelenting glare of the lens.

Then he went back to his apartment and showed it on TV to his roommate, who was the Tom Hardy guy. Right.

And that guy was like, these guys are the devil. I'm praying against them. Oh, man.

All right, so, yes, back to the show. Oh, yeah, where are we? Oh, here's the deal. We're talking about astronauts and satellite operations and GPS. This isn't stuff that we have just said. Well, this probably could happen. A lot of it is. But this actually has happened. We mentioned the thing in Illinois with the phone systems and then in the two thousand three, that CME that did disrupt satellites and that did disrupt high frequency radio communications that aviation relies on and that did black out a city in Sweden, Malmo.

Everyone says, no, not Marmo, yeah, is right. So that's the kind of thing can happen. It does happen and it's just never happened on such a massive scale. They figured out from looking at Arctic ice cores, apparently highly energetic particles leave remnants, not revenants remnants in nitrates frozen in the ice at the poles. And by examining these cause, they can see how bad or how often or how many solar flares have hit Earth in the past.

And they figured out that the Carrington event is like a 500 year solar flare.

And it happened about 150, 170 years ago. Hopefully we're in the clear. The key is we're still figuring out the dynamics of the sun and solar activity. So we're not exactly certain that maybe we're not due for a thousand year solar flare. We're just starting to figure this out. But we are figuring it out. That's step one. And we also actually have space weather forecasters here on Earth at NOAA and at the National Weather Service. There are people whose job it is, is to track solar activity and to predict things like coronal mass ejection and solar flares so that people can look like utility companies can maybe take steps to mitigate the worst effects eventually.

I think right now we've got like eight to ten minute heads up. So that's not enough. But as we understand it a little more, we'll have more warning time. And, you know, astronauts can plan their spacewalks when they're out doing stuff like building future space colonies. This is all going to come into play for that, too.

Yeah. So hopefully they can get that up to at least over an hour. That would help make sure.

So, again, it's nothing to lose sleep over. That's not the point of this episode. It's more just kind of like, gee whiz, this is this is amazing by his beard.

I've never heard of anything like this. The old fourth reference. Yeah, it's surprising. Fourth one did not see that coming. Did not you get anything else? I got nothing else. All right, everybody check that. He's got nothing else. So that's it for this episode, which means it's time for listener mail.

Oh, let me see here. I've actually got quite a few today, which is an abundance.

We've been getting more than usual, haven't we? Yeah, we've been getting good ones. All right. I'll choose this one. I'm going to call it Rush Girl.

Hey, guys, I've been a long time listener, but you have never but I've never had a reason to write until your recent Fort Knox episode. In it, you refer to the joke you had made about women not liking the Three Stooges.

By the way, I got a little grief for that and also support for that. Weirdly, uh, Chuck made the comment that it wasn't like he had something had said something true. But there like there being no women Rush fans, I immediately laugh because my future mother in law is the biggest Rush fan and love this lady. She and my fiance have a bond over this band. In contrast, I thought the band was made up just for the movie.

I love you, man.

Wow. Yeah. Megan did not know Rush was a real band.

She thought that was a fake band in a movie.

Megan, you have a whole world ready to open up to you. Yes, you do. Uh, I guess that they fit the trope.

According to my fiance, they call female Rush fans Getty Korn's, which sounds made up, but he swears it's true. Cattycorner, I don't get that.

But it's like a unicorn maybe. Oh, yeah, exactly. Or it could be candy corn. No, no.

I'm sure it's like the getting Getty Lee Unicorn mash up. I like that. I didn't get that until just now, so thank you. Sure.

At any rate, I can recognize the joke and I'm not coming after you for that. I just found it funny that all the stereotypical male bands you could have picked, you chose my mother in law's favorite. Thanks for all you do. Your podcast has gone a long way toward helping me destress after a day of teaching during covid. And that is from Megan Power. And Megan, thank you. And big ups to your mother in law for being a Ghetty corn.

Yeah, not to be confused. Candy corn. No. Well, if you want to be like Megan and let us know how we just totally blew your mind somehow or other, we love hearing that stuff. You can put it in an email and wrap it up, spend it on the bottom and send it off to Stuff podcast that I heart. Radio dot com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio is at the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Do you love all things geeky? Well, so do we. Join us, Jonathan Strickland and Ariel Kastin on the Large Hadron Collider podcast as we take on the geeky news of today and turn it into so bad. It's good quick bites of fanfic. Listen on the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Nearly 600 years after the invention of the printing press, the most important book in the history of the world has arrived, there might be overstating things, stuff you should know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

It will change your life forever.

Well, that's not necessarily true. Most scientists agree that stuff you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things is proof that time travel is possible because that is the only way to explain how a book this impressive was possibly made. Why that stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things will regrow hair, white your teeth and improve your love life.

That's just not at all. Right.

Well, the love life part, maybe if you find someone who thinks smart is sexy stuff, you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things available now at stuff you should know dotcom and everywhere you buy books.

Now, that is true.