Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of a new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you. Listen to Tosh Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime.

Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Cue Josh Trumpet. You know what that means, everybody? We are going back on tour again. We are hitting the road next year in January for our annual Pacific, Northwest, and Northern California swing. We will be at the Paramount Theater in Seattle on January 24th. Revolution Hall in Portland on the 25th, and our home away from home at San Francisco Sketchfest on January 26th.

Yeah, we'll be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater again, everybody.

A great place.

That's right. If you want tickets and information, you can go to linktree/sysk, and it's got all that jam. You can go to our website, stuffyshidknow. Com. It's got all that jam. We will see all of you guys in January with bells on.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. We're just moving slowly against one another, starting static in the slowest possible way.

Yeah, perhaps one day we'll be a mountain range.

Yeah, or a deep, deep trench.

All right, you get down there. I'll be up in the mountains.

All right. When I'm down there, I'll be like, Hello, how's the weather up there? Ha, ha, ha.

Jerry will be her nickname, will, C-Level Rowland.

Sea Level. Yeah, but we need to spell it with just the letter C. Right, Sea Level. That's more nicknaming.

That sounds mean all of a sudden.

C-level. Oh, I didn't mean it.

Like that. Yeah, Jerry is the sea level producer.

Right. Wow! That was just subconscious. Sorry, Jerry.

That's okay.

Since Jerry said that was okay, I say we just go ahead and move on because we're making all these plate tectonic jokes for a good reason, Chuck. We're going to talk today, in part, about plate tectonics.

That's right. But first, we're going to go back before that.

Yeah, so I included this. I coupled this together from a bunch of different stuff, including our old vulnerable HowStuffWork site, Net Geo, Live Science. I didn't go wrong there. Heritage Daily, good stuff. Great. U of Calgary. Yeah. The U stands for upwardly mobile.

Mobile of Calgary?

. And then Wundrium Daily, which I hadn't heard of before, but it's a cool little sight.

Is it a Wundrium?

On the daily.

On the daily?

Yeah, I cobbled this together and I wanted to put this in there about the idea of what people used to think of. I guess I'm fascinated with that lately because we just did a whole episode on what people used to think before the scientific method. I feel like we talked about something similar in another episode, and then now we've got this. But this to me is like, we're right on the precipice of essentially folklore and then scientific understanding. This is essentially like the dividing line, what we're looking at right here in this first little anecdote. Then the other reason I thought it was really significant is because I think Madam Blivatsky, who comes up in a second, she would play really well today. Everybody'd be like, What BS are you selling? I want to give you some of my money. She would be a featured, like goop contributor, basically.

Yes. You're talking about Helena Blivatsky, aka, Madam Blavatsky, the Russian occultist from the 1800s who was a member and co-founder, in fact, of the Theosophical Society. That sounds like it would play these days for sure.

For.

Sure. And something that, I keep wanting to say, Blatovsky, Blavatsky, was going on about back then was something called Limeria. And we'll get to how that came about in a second as well. But this is the idea that a lot of theosophists thought that, Hey, listen, religion is tried, science is tried, but nobody still here in the 19th century has fully explained how we got here and what's going on planet Earth. But I am able to because I am the great Lovatsky, and I have talent and insight into the times that came before.

Yeah, through Psychic gifts, right?

Yeah. So just drop your rubles in a bucket and I'll tell you.

Exactly. So she had, I think, multiple books, but one in particular that came out in 1888 called The Secret Doctrine. She talked about how there were seven root races. This is another thing people were very preoccupied with was where we came from. And the reason why is because just a couple of decades before Darwin had published on the Origin of the species, and it's really difficult to get across the revolution and understanding that book, Broad, right? And that made people fascinated. Wait, okay, well, where did we come from? If God just didn't go, boop, 7,000 years ago, where do we come from? Let's figure that out. Again, this was at a time when science was very much mish-mash with superstition, I guess. You could really get some play with the superstitious stuff. And that's exactly what Blavatsky was doing. She was saying, Check this out. This place called Lamaria, it's a lost continent. Everybody loves those. And it's where one of the three of seven root races came from.

Yeah, the third root race in which giant hermaphroditic egg laying humans, pre-sex organ humans, lived along with the dinosaurs. And everyone was like, Hey, sounds pretty good to me.

Sounds good. Take my money.

Yeah. It made me wonder, too, of some of this obsession with where we came from, too, because we'll learn later, other people talked about some of the original races. Was some of that rooted in things like horrors to come? We're the original people, so we're the ones who count?

Yeah, I think it definitely finds its roots in that era, that whole fascination at this time. Yes.

Okay, I thought so.

And also there's something that comes up in another episode we're going to talk about scientific romanticism, which I guess this is probably an example of. But that's like, yeah, not only are we uncovering this history in the deep past, we're uncovering my ethnicity's history in the deep past. All we're going to find is the most splendid, spectacular examples of how we're actually the survivors of a lost civilization that was even grander than anything we can understand now. That's another thing that people were pursuing. At the same time, so it's pop culture, but again, it's dressed up like it's following the same lines as science, but it's not really science. Fortunately, at the same time, there were legitimate scientists working. They were still following blind alleys to some way, which I want to press the pause button right here. I am in no way suggesting that science is done. Science is exactly perfect the way it is now. Yeah, there's still plenty of problems with it. There's still lots left to discover. And so by casting dispersions or shade at this situation back in the mid to late 19th century, I'm not insinuating that our current reality is vastly superior and perfect.

I'm just saying at this time, there were big problems with science and pop culture meshing.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that, but you've been clear where you are on that through the years, I think.

Hey, we get new listeners every episode, Dan. That's a good point.

That's a lot easier to say that than to say, Go back and listen to 16 years worth of stuff.

Right, or, Field a bunch of angry.

Emails, too. Yeah, we will never get those after you said that. Lamaria was not something that Blavatsky created. Lamaria has... Well, this will all tie into tectonic plates, believe it or not.

Yeah, just wait.

Just wait. It really does in a very neat way. It's spectacular. I love how you did this. But there was a British zoologist named Philip. I'm sorry, Philip? Philic is not a name that I know of.

Not any. Fallick is in there, but who would name their kid, Fallick?

Not Phillis. Gary Goldman, the great comedianian, has a great bit on Phyllis and that name being retired in 1933.

By the government. Gary Goldman, the rock and roll part.

Two guy? Gary Goldman, G-U-L-M-A-N, the great stand-up comedian. I got you. Anyway, Philip, not Phyllis nor Phyllic, Slatter or Slater, wrote an essay in 1864 called The Mammals of Madagascar. This one is funny when you think about how Madagascar so clearly fits off of where it broke off from Africa. But Slater didn't see that at the time. He really wondered like, Hey, I'm looking at Madagascar. It's just right off the Coast of Africa there, and they have all these dozens of species of Lemurs. Yet Africa and India don't only have a few species of Lemur. He was wrong about that even, which isn't the point. They didn't have any true Lemurs. But he was like, Why is Madagascar just loaded with all these Lemurs, and Africa so close has none? And he says, Here's what happened. There was a land bridge there, and it was once all connected. I'm going to call that big, great continent, Lemuria, after the Lemur.

Yeah, he really liked Lemurs a lot. Okay. This is a lost continent. It includes a land bridge. What Slater is doing here is what was all the scientific rage. It was like, Okay, again, we came from apes, animals evolved from other animals. Let's take that new worldview and figure out how that works. He couldn't figure out how similar species, got it out there eventually, could be separated by hundreds of miles of water. The best explanation that he thought was a land bridge that's just currently inundated with water. Like you said, he came up with Lemuria, and that got very quickly deposited into the pop culture. People like Blevatsky and others were like, Yep, Lamaria, and then let's add to it so we can get that goop money.

Yeah, and land bridges were the thing. We'll get to some more of this in a minute. But they weren't totally off in all of this stuff. They were on the right track for some of it, some a little bit more than others. There was, I think, a German biologist that you tracked down named Ernst Hekel. And he was like, Hey, listen, Lemuria was not only a thing, but that's where we all came from. That was a cradle of humanity. There were 12 varieties of men. Here we go with that stuff again. And we evolved from these ancient primates right there at this place that is now partially underwater.

Right. What's nuts about the whole thing, though, is that that actually has happened before. There actually is at least one, and I'm sure there's plenty. It's not a lost continent, but a lost pretty decent-sized bit of land that is now covered by water that once held people who lived there. It's called Doggerland. It's just so nuts that these guys were off in their interpretation of what they were seeing to explain species divergence. As we'll see fossil beds separated by an ocean, but they still match up on one Coast of Africa and one Coast of South America. All these things are trying to put together. They were on the right track trying to explain it, but they were just off a little bit. Yet at the same time, they were explaining stuff that they didn't actually know really existed, but did. Does that make sense in a really roundabout way?

Yeah, for sure. When something like Doggerland happens where this is the land that was around basically what we now know is the UK, and it connected to Europe. In 1931, a fisherman pulled up a barbed antler point, part of a weapon, basically, part of a harpoon that they were using 12,000 years ago, buried in Pete. They're like, Well, wait a minute. Pete isn't in the ocean. Pete's in the forest. Why would it be 25 miles out into the ocean? Then they started poking around more and more in the decade since. They're like, Oh, well, this used to all be land, and beneath the North Sea are canoes and burial sites and all kinds of other things that we can point to as pretty good proof that, yeah, this happens. There is land that used to be here that is now beneath the sea at different places on planet Earth.

I mean, like a lot of land, this land stretched out from all points. It surrounded the UK and stretched toward Europe, from Southern Scandinavia to Brittany in France. It was just connected and there were river beds and all sorts of animals to hunt. It was just really cool. Then over time, as the sea levels rose, it became inundated. Then there was a landslide, an undersea landslide that really inundated it. It was just lost to history because the people running around, they were running around there no less than 5,000 years ago, maybe seven. So everyone forgot about it. But one of the noteworthy things that I found just completely fascinating is H. G. H. T. Wells, to show off that he was, set an 1897 book called The Story of the Stone Age in exactly that place. He didn't call it Doggerland, but he set his story in this land that was now covered by water between the UK and Europe. It turned out about three or so decades later that he was confirmed.

H. T. Wells was a special human.

Yeah, pretty cool. He actually managed to combine the science and the speculation, speculativeness of the age. But he was never trying to say, This is real. This is a real book. He was like, This is fiction. It's awesome.

I like him for that. Didn't he write the original Invisible Man book?

I think so.

Yeah. I've been trying to watch some scary movies in October and now into November a bit. I watched that Invisible Man update from a few years ago with Elizabeth Moss that I had never seen before. Have you seen it?

No.

It's good.

Okay.

It's not the same story H. G. Wells put forward, but it's based, adapted from that story. It's actually really good and quite scary and has a great ending.

Okay.

Good to know. I recommend it.

Did you ever get around to watching the Ju-on-Origins miniseries?

No, you got to email me this stuff. I don't remember anything after I leave the studio. It's so scary.

You know the grudge that Sarah Michelle Geller was in in the 90s? Sure.

You do? I know the movie and I know it was based on an original Japanese film, right?

Right, called Ju-Won. Yeah. Somebody went back and made a prequels to the Japanese version. Oh, okay. That explains how everything got that way.

Why they got to scratch?

Yes. It is so scary that I will leave the light on from the family room to the bedroom as I'm going to bed and then turn it off remotely. I just won't turn it off and walk through the dark because that's scary. It's awesome.

Yeah, I didn't watch as many this year because Movie crush isn't around. I used to really heavily watch a lot of horror movies in October, but I only caught a few this year. I'd still enjoy being scared like that and being in another part of your house and having to navigate your way back in the dark. Even in my 50s, it's always scary and funny. Of course, I know that the supernatural being from the movie I just watched isn't in this hallway, but do I.

Really hear that? It could be. Exactly, I know.

All right, off topic. Let's take a break, A.

Sure, let's.

And we'll be right back.

Hi.

I'm Daniel Tosh, host of a new podcast called Tosh Show, brought to you by iHeart Podcast. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well, it seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you. But it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid 40s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olstein and Lance Bass. Those are words I hope I'd never have to say. Listen to Tosshowe on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. On this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president.

My dad thought of.

Jfk, screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us.

After the Cuban missile crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswalt isn't who they said he was. I was under the impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals, and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the Senior Executive Editor for Bloomberg Opinion. I'm your host for Cashcourse, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Every week on Cashcourse, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur. I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts in big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political, and social disruptions and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Cashcourse, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Listen to Cashcourse every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to learn about a.

Terrorist or an.

Call it pterodactyl? How to take a pergry-boop with all about fractals. Gang, gus, con. Until the hunt. The Hun. The Lizzie, Border, Murder, and the Cannibal runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explode. And just try. It's something you should know. It's something you should know. Word up, Jerry. All right, so when we broke, actually, we were talking about horror movies, but a little bit before that, I was talking some about how it's a little, not frustrating, but maybe funny that they didn't put together that Madagascar so clearly broke off from Africa, and fits very nicely if you just shove it back together right there in its spot. And as I was studying today, I have my light-up glove on my desk. And when you look at that thing, my medium, smart, eight-year-old daughter can say, Hey, Daddy, it looks like Africa could fit into South America, and it looks like all of these things could be puzzled together to form a larger supercontinent. I said medium smart, but she knows the word supercontinent.

That's pretty smart.

But it seems pretty obvious to us now. But it was all about land bridges back then, and this idea of supercontinent came about a little slower.

Yeah, because if you stand on any continent and just stand around and wait, you will not perceive that you're moving, even though you are moving. They were not aware of the fact that the continents moved. Of course, that wasn't what they went with. They went with land bridges. Again, it's a very sensible explanation. How did one thing get to another when it's covered by oceans? Well, there was land that used to be above the ocean, and they just migrated across. It's happened before. There's dog or land, there's the Bering Land Bridge, all that stuff. But the idea that the continents moved, that just was not around until another guy came along who we'll talk about in a second. But there was little inklings of this idea that just weren't... There was a light bulb that was just about to come on, but it just burns out right before it fully comes on. That's what was happening with the idea that the continents moved. And again, just to reiterate, the whole reason people are thinking about this stuff is because fossil beds suddenly take on new meaning if evolution and natural selection exists. Climateological evidence suddenly takes on new meaning.

Why species are similar but separated from one continent to another? It takes on significance. And so they're looking around the world with brand new fresh eyes and trying to answer these questions, and they were coming up with all these different meta-narratives. And on the way to the idea that we have now that the continents actually move and they actually formed one large super continent in the past, like I was saying, there were a few people who came along and almost had it.

Yeah, the idea of continental contraction was one pretty good idea and an alternate theory, pre-tectonic plate shifts. And that is that the Earth was a huge magma ball, which is true, and that as that thing cooled down over time, the land that it formed shrunk basically, as things might do when they cool, and the continents broke apart. So that was really headed toward the right idea until the end, basically.

Yeah, for sure.

Another thing that they had trouble explaining were things like mountains. I kid it around the beginning, one of us will be a mountain range. Yeah. They did have theories that parts of the Earth were breaking off from one another and could go underneath other parts, but they just hadn't quite arrived there until Alfred Wegener came along in 1912 and published a book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans, where he was like, Hey, wait a minute, everyone. This looks like a giant puzzle if you stand back and look at a map and you're just not standing back far enough. Get over on the other side of the room. And then everyone did, and they're like, Oh, wow, different. This helps explain things like you were talking about, why the Coast of Africa and the Coast of Brazil might share fossils, even though they're separated by such a vast ocean.

Yeah, or share species or all sorts of different explanations. It would go on to become considered a theory of everything for geology, for Earth science, in much the same way that our understanding of the atom explains quantum mechanics or vice versa. It was a really big deal that he came up with this, but it was not well received at first, as we'll see. He was not considered a genius in his time. People ridicule them, essentially. His whole idea was very quickly forgotten for several decades until he was pretty much proven right. But in that book, The Origin of the Continets and Oceans, he's saying not only did the continents move apart because they used to form this supercontinent called Pangea, all the land, they're still moving around today. And all the Victorians, and I'm sorry, these would be Edwardians maybe, were like, Nah, I've stood still for an hour at a stretch and I could not tell we were moving, so we're not moving. And he's like, No, really, trust me, the continents are still moving. It explains everything. How about earthquakes? They're like, Well, it's God putting his finger on Antarctica. He's like, No, it's actually these plates sliding against one another.

It's wrong. And they just went back and forth like this until Wegner died in 1930 in a blizzard.

Wow. Really shot right to the ending there.

Yeah.

So the other thing that was pretty brilliant was he was like, Well, not only... Maybe we can't stand back. There's no room big enough to where we can stand back and see how exactly that puzzle might fit. But what we can do, because under this theory of continental drift, we can look at the fossil record and look at different speciological phenomenon, and that is part of the puzzle as well. If we match up this place with that place, maybe in our mind's eye, we can envision how they used to fit together, even though it's not as tidy as Madagascar off the Coast of Africa.

It's so cool. He was a meteorologist and a geophysicist. He was a sharp dude. He took paleo-climateological data. I think there was a fern species that he was tracking. There was glacier coverage, I guess, evidence of old glacier coverage, and then species and fossils. And he would take all this and basically say, Okay, well, this fits here, and then this range now connects from India to North Africa. That explains that that would fit. And he figured out not only that the continents fit together, exactly how they would fit together, and not by geography, but by all of this evidence, all this data he had and pairing it up. He really did some amazing work. Again, people were just like, We don't believe what you're saying. Then in the '50s and '60s, apparently, as Nat Geo puts it, as we got more technologically advanced in warfare, we started to confirm Wagner's theories inadvertently. When they were trying to detect submarines using magnetometers or when they used seismographs to detect nuclear testing elsewhere in the world, these things actually inadvertently turned up evidence that, Oh, my gosh, the continents actually are moving and they're moving today, and Wegener was right.

Let's go dig them up and shake his hand.

Yeah, and not only that, but now we know that Pangea wasn't even... Pangea is just the most recent supercontinent. There were supercontinents before that, because before Pangea, there were obviously separate continents that came together to form Pangea. And those continents had broken off from the previous supercontinent that we call Penotia, that was about 600 million years ago. And there was one before that called Rodinia, who was that? Like a billion years ago. And Earth has had landmass for about three billion years. So if you're looking at this on that timeline, this is pretty quick movement. It's not to us today. What's it? Half an inch a year or something?

Roughly one and a half centimeters, something like that.

Yeah, that's cooking if you look at it on that timeline.

Exactly. So what we've arrived to today, Chuck, is called plate tectonics. And it's essentially so Wegener's theory was continental drift, that the continents drift. They were like, Well, how Wegener? He's like, Uh-uh. Well, finally, with plate tectonics, we've arrived at how. We still don't know exactly what the mechanism is, but what we figured out is that below the Earth's crust, below what's called the lissosphere, it's the crust and the uppermost mantle, the really thick, hard stuff that's about 60 miles or 100 kilometers thick. Take your choice. There's something called the esthenosphere, and it's like molten. It's viscous, it's liquidish, and it's separated from the lithosphere so that the lithosphere can move about on it. Yeah. Right?

It's like-It's like the oil.

Yes.

Sort of?

Exactly. Oil, ball bearings, WD-40, all mixed together. Yeah. That's what the lithosphere is moving around on. Now we know how it could happen. We still don't know exactly what creates the motion in the ocean, but we do know that this is what it's based on. One way or another, this is what it's based on. And it's possibly because of the convective currents coming from the center of Earth toward the outer crust and mantle.

Yeah. Johns Hopkins University, a few years ago in 2019 said this has been going on for about two and a half billion years, which tracks with the other super continents we were talking about. And I guess this was a professor from the University of Florida named Ray Russo, an associate professor that talked about the Earth being what you call the quote, Large-Scale Heat Engine. And like we talked about that just big, hot ball of magma. And so all this heat coming from all these different things throughout these hundreds of thousands and millions of years, heat's going to try to go from warm to cold. It's going to flow from a warm area to a cold area. And if the heat is on the interior of the Earth, it's going to try to move outward, and in fact, does towards the cold surface of the Earth.

Yeah, what's neat is the Earth still hasn't cooled off from when it was formed almost five billion years ago. It may have by now. I don't know if it would have or not. But the thing that keeps it going, that keeps it hot, is, well, leftover heat, radioactive decay of all these amazing atoms and elements that are in the core, they're under such intense pressure that they just create more heat and that creates more pressure and so on and so forth. Then you've got more and more radioactive decay. Then also just the compression, the gravitational compression is so great, it actually produces temperatures. That's some pressure right there, right? Yeah. All this heat is emanating, like you said, outward toward the colder surface. As it does, it carries the heat energy with it. As it gets toward the top, it starts to cool off. He goes, Oh, here I go back down, because the cooler stuff sinks. It's less dense, it's less buoyant than heat and the warm stuff that's coming up from the core. Then that stuff gets heated up and comes back up. What I've just described is a conductive current. It's the same thing that you get when you look at one of those awesome, see-through glass cookware pots from the early '80s when the water is bubbling.

That's a convective current. It's the same thing. It's a cycle. Yes. The bubbles of water are trying to get away from the heat source. They're rising. As they get toward the top, they cool and they come back down. That's exactly what they're saying is happening. They, being today scientists, is coming from the core, moving like that moves all the molten junk that's in that 400 miles of the stentosphere. As that's moving, they think that that is acting like some maybe conveyor belt or something that moves the plates around. So we know they move on the stentosphere, and they think the conductive currents are possibly the mechanism that actually moves them.

Yeah, and there's this other theory called slab pool. You were talking about those oceanic plates sinking to the less dense plates below them. And just think about when you're pulling a tablecloth off of a table, it's basically saying, Hey, the tablecloth is coming, but so is that dinner plate that's sitting on the tablecloth. You're coming with me. Right. And that's what slab pool is basically at point, I think, no, I said 0.5, 0.6 inches per year is the average speed. Although science isn't fully in agreement on if things are going faster now, if they're going slower, but they have figured out that things are still moving. And as these plates are close to each other, there's going to be three different ways which they're going to interact, and that's going to help cause planet Earth, basically. Divergent boundaries, obviously, are when they're diverging, when they're moving away from each other. And you're going to find earthquakes a lot along these areas. We've talked about this in Earthquakes and volcanoes and supervolcano, so it's a bit of a refresher.

Sure.

But that's a divergent boundary. The other two are convergent. That's obviously when things are going toward one another. And that's where you're going to get those mountain ranges. When two continents are going to hit one another, they're going to buckle up and either go up or down. So you're either going to get a mountain range or something like the Mariana trench on the ocean floor.

Right.

And then you have transformed plate boundaries, and that's when things are not moving away or toward each other. They're just generally happily side by side, going by one another very slowly saying, Hey, how are you doing? We might be cracking apart here and there as we touch one another, but we're not smashing against one another very slowly. And you're also going to find earthquakes here along these fault lines.

Yeah. I'd say we take a break because you mentioned volcanoes and earthquakes and all that happening. There's a lot of action that happens thanks to plate tectonics. In fact, it turns out that life actually may not be able to exist on earth were not for plate tectonics. They're that important.

Let's do it.

Hi.

I'm Daniel Tosh, host of a new podcast called Tosh Show, brought to you by iHeart Podcast. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well, it seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you. But it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid 40s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olstein and Lance Bass. Those are words I hope I'd never have to say. Listen to Tosshowe on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. On this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president.

My dad thought JFK.

Screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us.

After the Cuban missile crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswalt isn't who they said he was.

I was.

Under the impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Professional dancer Cheryl Burt, has been part of Dancing With the Stars since the very beginning. Twenty-six seasons of the Samba, the Roomba, and the Cha-CHA. Twenty-four partners, six finals, and two Mirroball trophies. She knows all the secrets, the behind-the-scene arguments, and the affairs, the flings, the and the fighting. It's time to tell all on her new podcast, Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans. We'll take you all the way back to season one and up through today for the dance floor drama like you wouldn't believe. Former partners, co-stars, friends, and frenemies will join Cheryl each week. Listen to Sex, Lies and Spray Tans on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to learn about a terrorist or an call it terradactyl? How to take a burglarymoving all about fractals. Dull, skank, gus, con. The tiller, the hunt. The Lizzie Border, murders, and the Cannibal Runs. I'm going to explain everything to your brain. Explode. Just Chuck. And Jack. There's stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry.

Okay, Chuck. One thing I wanted to mention is tectonic is a strange word, and it sounds super futuristic and technological. It's actually a very old medieval word that was used as what you would call a builder or a carpenter. Plate tectonics is the actual process of building earth. That's a really apt name for it because that's what's going on with plate tectonics. Because when all that magma starts to come up, it doesn't just move the plates. At places where there's a gap between the plates, that magma comes up and comes out. As it does and pools, it forms new rock, essentially new earth. Over the course of millions and millions and millions of years, that moves up and out and over and does all sorts of other cool things until it's eventually recycled back into magma, where it will be heated and eventually brought back up as new magma to form new continental crust. So tectonic is a really great word for this whole process.

Yeah, totally. And you were talking about, or I guess I was talking about the fact that we spoke about volcanoes and how they form in volcanoes and supervolcano. But as a refresher, these plates are causing... They're moving around. And when there's a break in the crust, that's basically like an event for all that hotness underneath and that lava to come out or to erupt. This is what I'm going to recommend my second movie of the day. I may have talked about it before, but the documentary, Fire of Love, is amazing. It's about volcanoes. It's about this couple, these volcano hunters.

Okay.

And it is one of the most amazing, some of the most amazing footage I've ever seen in my life is this 16-millimeter film footage that this couple shot years and years ago that this current documentarian has put together in the form of Fire of Love.

Okay.

You would love it.

All right, I'll check it out. Yeah. Is it even better footage than Joe getting spit out of the volcano that he just jumped in? And Joe versus the volcano? Because that was a pretty amazing sight.

It's pretty amazing. The Noah Pony Wooh in this one.

Okay, so I haven't seen that movie in a while. I hope it.

Holds up. It does.

Okay, so as I was saying, there's a lot of stuff that the plate tectonics do. In addition to volcanoes, you're like volcanoes, Big Whoop. Again, this is how new crust is formed. All that magma comes up out of these vents or even on land and forms new land or new undersea crust, right?

Yeah.

That also does all sorts of other things, too. When that magma comes up, it's bringing all sorts of minerals and elements and all sorts of crazy, super heated stuff that's really reactive and ready to just party, essentially, when it comes shooting out of these magma vents. Actually, I did not realize this, one of the things that under Sea Volcano are responsible for is balancing the ocean salinity. I never thought, where did the salt come from? It comes from the magma that's spitting out at the bottom of the ocean.

Yeah, and we came from there. It's no coincidence that our blood has about the same salinity as seawater.

Yeah.

Pretty cool. Then on land, those same openings down to the magma chambers below, what we typically think of as volcanoes, when they erupt, they create new land, too. They replenish land, they replenish soil over time. So yes, there's a direct connection between the volcanoes that are formed by plate boundaries and life on Earth. But it gets even more arcane than that.

Yeah, for sure. We mentioned earthquakes. It's also no coincidence that we're going to find... Earthquakes don't happen everywhere. They are clustered around these tectonic plate boundaries. And when they press together, when those plates move, and for them, it's a sudden movement, that energy has got to go somewhere, and that is what an earthquake is. We should do one on the fault lines, like the San Andreas Fault, maybe the most famous fault line.

I feel like The Rock did that. It's done.

That's funny. Thank you. What else? What about the rocks? The undersea rocks?

Remember when I said that they used to and probably still do have magnetometers undersea to detect submarines? Well, this is actually one reason they figured out that Wagner is right and that it's plate tectonics doing it. They inadvertently detected that if you go along the seafloor on either side of a ridge, you're going to find that your compass goes haywire.

Yeah.

The reason why is because as that magma comes up from the vent in the middle of the Undersea Ridge and spills out over, there's some minerals in there that actually clock the North Pole, right? The minerals and our Magna episode is really interesting. I went back and listened to it again. It's even more difficult than I remember trying to explain it. But just suffice to say that there's minerals that align themselves with the North Pole. In fact, when they become rock, they record where the North Pole was. Well, Earth's magnetic North Pole sometimes switches with the South Pole. It can wander throughout Earth and end up at the opposite side. And depending on when those rocks were formed from that undersea vent, it will record where that North Pole was. And so over the course of millions and millions of years, I think the poles flip every one to 300,000 years, something like that. Those new ridges that are created are going to get pushed further and further out from the vent so that if you went over them with a compass, you will see that they just keep flipping back and forth, marking each time that the North Pole changed direction.

Amazing.

I think so, too. They're like, Well, the only thing that explains this is that the continents are actually pushing apart. They're forming new continents that's coming out of the vent. As it pools, it's getting pushed apart by new stuff. Hence the plate tectonics theory seems pretty accurate.

Yeah, and it has an effect on the overall climate, too, because we tend to think when we think about plate tectonics, we think about the land masses that are moving. But that's also going to affect the shape of the ocean and very much did inform the shape of the ocean two and a half billion years ago, whenever all this stuff started, because it used to be, what did they call it? Not a SuperOcean, a...

Panthasia?

I can't remember. -i think it's Panthasia. I think it's a SuperOcean.

What? All the ocean.

Yeah, all the ocean. But the current shape, like what... I know what I'm about to say might sound silly. The current shape of the ocean prevents the equator and the poles from having wildly different temperatures. They have pretty wildly different temperatures, according to us, like humans walking around on the planet. But if it wasn't for the fact that the oceans ended up shaped in such a way where they are always supplying this warm, equatorial water toward those polar regions, the difference in temperature between the poles and the equator would be, I don't even know. It would be crazy how big that disparity would be.

It'd be a mess.

Yeah. It wouldn't be like, Oh, it's hot at the equator, and boy, it's super cold there. It would be, I wish somebody knew, what, hundreds of degrees?

I don't know, but I do know that really weird stuff happens along temperature gradients, so you would not want something like that. It would not be hospitable.

For us. Yeah, but all of the ocean currents, because of the way the oceans are shaped, because of the way the continents broke apart influences climate all over the place.

Yeah, it carries water from here to there. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Again, you can trace it all the way back to the movement of the plates. There's also carbon dioxide. The amount of CO2 that's in the atmosphere at any given point in time also serves as a global thermostat. If there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, it warms up. It's like what's going on right now. When there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, the water, sea levels rise. As the sea levels rise, rocks are weathered, and a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere gets sucked out of it into water to form limestone and essentially gets locked away from the atmosphere. As this happens over enough time, the atmosphere pools. As the atmosphere pools, sea levels lower again, and the opposite process starts to happen. Those rocks that are exposed now get weathered and that CO2 enters the atmosphere again. Then another way that the plate tectonics influence this is the stuff that gets formed into limestone, settles to the bottom of the ocean and it's just trapped. It's trapped CO2. But as it forms part of a plate that ends up back down into the core, into the asthenosphere and gets heated up and turned into magma again, when it comes out of the volcano, it brings all that CO2 with it, releasing into the atmosphere.

It's a really long... It's the carbon cycle. Over a really long geological time scales, it keeps the Earth from getting too warm or too cold. It's a thermostat. And again, without plate tectonics, this would not be possible, and we probably would not be here today talking about this.

Yeah, absolutely. If you're wondering if things are moving even that slowly, where might we be in a million years from now or something like that? That's a good question. And there are people that are studying exactly that. They're computer simulations, obviously, that scientists can run to see which way we're going and how fast we're going and what might bump into at what point. And they have estimated some things. They're good enough now to know and say out loud like, Hey, listen, and this is a guess still. We have no idea what's going to happen, really.

Don't hold us to this in.

A million years. In a million years or 100 million years. But they're saying what we think might happen is one day, just as there were previous supercontinents before Pangea, we will all be reunited again. And maybe that's when humanity really comes together. As one supercontinent in about 250 million years, and they've already renamed it Pangea Proxima, which I guess is just what they're approximating it will be like. There will be new mountain ranges. And in fact, they think once Africa eventually finishes going north and hits Europe, then that may be like if you think the Himalayas or something, where do you get a load of the mountain range that's coming in 100 million years.

Yeah, the rock needs to do a movie about that.

I mean, that's probably a development already.

Probably. I'm just waiting on the sag strike to finish.

Pangea Proxima. Yeah.

But the rock is going to get in the middle and hold both the.

Continents apart.

Keep it from happening.

You just sold the movie. Yeah. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. This is really fascinating. I mean, 0.6 inches a year doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're talking about plate tectonics, it's moving.

Yeah, a lot happens. Well, if you are jazzed by this, you can go search plate tectonics on the website howstuffworks. Com or anywhere on the internet, and it will bring up all sorts of neat little Earth Science lessons. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this don't listen to Us Because We're not vets. Because on the white dog poop short stuff, we talked about cooking your own dog food, which a lot of vets wrote in and said, Don't do that unless you really have it dialed in with a pet nutritionist. We talked about grain-free. I mentioned grain-free because one of our dogs required because of an autoimmune issue, Sweet Buckley. I was under the misinterpretation or the misunderstanding rather that that was just good for all dogs. They were like, no, grain-free can lead to cardiac abnormalities. Duh. We heard from lots of vets. This is from a very frustrated vet and stuff you should know, fan. This is all it says. Hey, guys, your white dog poop episode drove me bonkers. Pet nutrition is a hot topic, unfortunately. Not only should people not be getting advice from you, but there are a lot of people on the internet, a lot of quacks even that within their own industry, they're saying that you shouldn't listen to. Sure. Home-cooked diets are difficult to do. We see all sorts of medical abnormalities from unbalanced diets. It should be only done under the guidance of the veterinary nutritionist.

Please do not even look for random recipes online, even if they're written by a vet because of the quacks in our industry.

I want to just stick up for my wife here and be like, Yes, she's got that covered. She's not some dummy who just looks up random recipes on the internet.

Oh, are you guys making your own food?

Yeah, she cooks for MOMO quite a bit. Oh, okay. I think that's what they're responding to, is I mentioned that.

Yeah, I think you mentioned it. But one of my friends was doing that and I texted him right away and I was like, Hey, dude, stop cooking for your dog until you get it down.

Yeah, that's right. You should talk to a nutritionist. There's also nutrition info sites, legitimate sites that help you balance what you're cooking for your dog. But yes, random recipes on the internet are not a good idea unless you're cooking chicken, Diane, or something.

I think he was under the impression like, Hey, give them some fruits and veggies and protein and you're done. Right. And that's just not the case. No. And in fact, we're not one to buzzmarket too much. But this vet said balance. It is a great option if you're looking for legitimate recipes and formulations and supplements.

I think that's the one that Umi went and found initially.

Oh, sure it is.

Grain-free is also dangerous, has been linked to dilated cardiomyopathy, still a developing area of research, but grain sensitivity is super rare in dogs, and grain is fine for the vast majority of dogs. When you recommend a food, look for a food that is compliant with WSAVA guidelines. I think we can all agree these are pretty reasonable things to want in a pet food company. Most of the food on the shelf does not meet these standards, though, so people should talk to their vets. I'm thankful you didn't touch on raw food, which is trash, or the idea that vets are paid by big pet food because we're not. That is a frustrated vet. I'm not even going to say stuff you should know fan anymore.

I have to say, yeah, Yomi went online and got her WS VA certification over the course of many years. Heck, yeah. Yeah, she got it all covered, everybody.

Of course, you do in.

Your house. Do I sound defensive? Who is that for? They didn't even sign their name after all that? They dragged us like that and then didn't even sign their name?

They signed it as a frustrated vet, so I took that to me and that's how they wanted to.

Be addressed. I see. Well, what was their email address?

Dr. Quack@vet. Com.

Okay, thank you, Dr. Quack. I mean, frustrated vet, we appreciate that. We know that you are looking out for all the animal babies out there. Hats off to you for that. We would never accuse you of being owned by big pet food. No. That's just crazy talk. If you want to get in touch with us anonymously or otherwise and say, You guys stink. You stink to high heaven. We'd love to hear that thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast@ihartradio.

Com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of a new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you. Listen to Tosh Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. That's why we launched The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio that turns down the volume of it to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kasova. Each weekday, I dig into one important story and talk about why it matters. Listen to the big take on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.