We all know what an earthquake is but what’s actually happening deep inside the Earth when the ground starts to shake. Earthquake Geologist Dr. Wendy Bohon studies earthquakes. We talk the science behind earthquakes, earthquakes myths and what Hollywood gets wrong. Then, it’s Hummers and Cybertrucks vs. Pintos and Jeeps as we countdown the Top 5 Most Ridiculous Cars.
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Interview with Earthquake Geologist Dr. Wendy Bohon
Speaker 1 0:00
Nick, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant Coming up in this episode earthquakes and ridiculous cars,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 0:21
the longer the fault and the deeper the fault, the larger the magnitude of the earthquake. And so we have been looking for these precursors for a really long time, and we haven't found it. We also have not seen a larger damaging earthquake, really damaging in a really long time. And so I think people's idea of what could happen is a little bit skewed. I want to
Speaker 1 0:44
thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So I want to get right to our first guest. This is earthquake geologist, Dr Wendy Bohan, so I know what an earthquake is, but I don't actually understand what's happening, like the ground is shaking, but what's really kind of going on down there?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 1:11
That's a great question. And usually when we think of earthquakes, what we think of is that ground shaking and its impacts, but what's happening. Let's zoom out so the surface of the Earth has these big tectonic plates that are moving around very slowly. The places where they come together are the places where we have earthquakes. So that's the big driver of earthquakes, that motion is causing differences in the direction that the plates are moving right, and so those are rocks, and rocks will break. So as these plates are moving, they're causing stress and strain to build up inside those rocks. And eventually you're going to overcome the strength of the rocks, and they're going to break. When they break, they send out energy waves in all directions. That system, those energy waves are the shaking that we feel
Speaker 1 2:02
when I kind of imagine it, using my hands an example. You got this plate going this way and this plate going this way, just to simplify it, but when it shakes, does the whole plate like move or departs of the stuff? I
Dr. Wendy Bohon 2:15
love these questions. So the way it usually works, and this is kind of something people maybe don't know. Rocks actually are kind of elastic. They'll bend a little bit before they break. So you have these giant plates that are moving, okay, the places where they come together, you can think of them as being stuck. And so as they're moving, they're deforming, and eventually they're going to break, and it's going to snap so that they're sort of meeting the motion of the rest of the plate. So we think about, you know, these plates have moved, say, nine feet since the last earthquake. So we have nine feet of motion that has to be taken up in the next earthquake. And so when it breaks, it'll move nine feet so that the stuck part will catch up with the rest of it.
Speaker 1 2:58
Is it fairly like uniform as it spreads across, or as this energy moves across, it hits this pocket of ground and does this. It hits this pocket of ground, but there's rocks there, and it does this.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 3:10
So what we feel during an earthquake is controlled by different things. So the first thing is the magnitude, which is the amount of energy that's released during an earthquake, and that's controlled in part by the length of the fault that moves and the depth of the fault that moves. So it's a three dimensional surface below the ground, kind of like you have your hands together and you slide them. That would be like the rocks sliding over that whole surface. And so the longer the fault and the deeper the fault, the larger the magnitude of the earthquake, the larger the magnitude of the earthquake, the more energy that's released, and the more shaking people will feel. The second thing that controls what you feel is your distance away from the part of the fault that broke. And so this makes intuitive sense, right? If you're closer to where the fault broke, you're going to feel more shaking. If you're farther away, you're going to feel less shaking. And that's not just map distance. That's also about how deep the earthquake was. So if you have a really deep earthquake, like if it's you know, 300 kilometers below the surface, the closest people and our infrastructure is 300 kilometers away. But if you have a shallow earthquake, say, eight kilometers below the surface, now people in infrastructure are much closer. The third thing that controls what we feel is our local rock and soil conditions, and that's sort of what you are getting at. So soft sand and soil will shake harder and for a longer period of time than bedrock in equivalent distance away. And you can imagine this like you have a bowl full of jell O and you have a piece of granite, and they're both strapped down to a table, and now you shake the table, the jell O is going to shape harder than the granite, right? It's going to almost like, catch the waves, and they'll reverberate around in there. The earth is kind of like that. Does
Speaker 1 4:54
it help to be softer in any way? In the sense of like, okay, this is going to shake more. More, but because there's more give in it, you're going to be a little bit more, okay,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 5:04
no, the softer the soft sands and soils have multiple issues that can happen. The first is that you're going to have amplification of shaking. You're going to shake harder and longer. The second thing is, soft sand and soils and a high water table can cause something called liquefaction, which is a secondary effect of earthquake shaking, and that's where the water gets pushed up towards the surface, which causes all the little grains of sand and dirt to be pushed apart. It increases the pore pressure, which causes the surface of the ground to lose strength. That can mean that it spreads. It can crack. It can cause these sort of sand boils water flowing up towards the surface, but it can also cause an effect, sort of like quick sand. So if you have a structure, like a building on top of it, the foundation of the building can actually sink into the ground, because the ground has lost its strength.
Speaker 1 5:56
These plates are they pretty delicate in the sense that it doesn't take much for them to break even, though we're talking about geological time scales, or they like, man, if you break these or they shift, that's a really big deal.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 6:14
It's a big deal. So where you are in Seattle, you are along the junction between the Pacific Plate, no, sorry, the North American plate, which is what most of North America is on, and the Juan de Fuca plate, which is a little small plate that is getting shoved down underneath the North American plate in a subduction zone. That's what those are called. And the subduction zone actually can create the largest earthquakes on earth because you have a lot of area of the fault that can break right in order to break the ground has to be brittle. But if you subduct it, stick it too far inside the Earth, it starts to get warm, so sort of like a chocolate chip cookie that you pull out of the oven when they're nice and hot, they're gooey, and they just bend. Once they're cool, they break so cold, rock breaks hot. Rock doesn't so it's still cold as it's going down, so you have lots of surface area, so you have larger magnitude earthquakes right in the Pacific Northwest. It's interesting because you can have earthquakes in multiple places, right as this plates going down and it bends, you can have earthquakes as a result of that bending inside that plate. You can have earthquakes along the interface between the two plates. And as this plate is pushing down, it's pushing the other one up. And anytime you cause rocks to bend and cause them to break, is
Speaker 1 7:31
there any way to con to kind of quantify the amount of energy that we're talking about? Because in my mind, like the earth is moving, I can't even imagine what that takes to do that. So
Dr. Wendy Bohon 7:45
we can quantify the amount of energy that's released in earthquakes. Usually we do it like using atomic bombs as the the other corollary, we can measure how much the ground is moving using GNSS or GPS stations. So we can tell how much the plates have moved and how quickly they're moving. And we know that places where the plates are moving more quickly are storing up stress and strain, you know, more quickly. And so those are the places that are most likely to have earthquakes. So the plates that are moving the fastest are the ones that tend to have the most earthquakes.
Speaker 1 8:19
Did all the plates operate relatively the same way, or is every single one a different interaction and a different circumstance? Or is it kind of like there's this type that goes this way and there's this type that goes that way? Or is it like every single one is going to be different?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 8:36
There are three main types of plate boundaries, ways that the plates can come together. They can come together converge. And that's when you get subduction zones, or you get big mountains like the Himalayas, they can pull apart. That's a divergent boundary. That's what's happening along the Mid Atlantic Ridge, for instance. And you can have them sliding past each other. Those are transformer stripe slip boundaries. Most famous striped slip fault is the San Andreas fault that runs along most of the length of California. So those are the three main ways that the plates can come together. But all of those have differences, and we spend a lot of time looking for similarities and differences in these different fault systems to try and say, Okay, we know this one behaves this way. Can we take that information and apply it to this fault, so that we can learn more and be more prepared about what that fault might do
Speaker 1 9:25
on a scale of like one to 10, one being the lowest, 10 being the highest. Where do you think we are in kind of our knowledge of earthquakes right now,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 9:33
it's a hard question. We have a lot to learn, but we also know a lot. I would say we're like six to a seven. But you know, geologic time is tough, right? Because our human timescale, our whole existence of our species, is just a blip on the radar compared to the time scale over which earthquakes and plate tectonics works. So we have to take the observations that we have now and try and apply. Them into the future while having only a very murky idea of the past. If
Speaker 1 10:04
you have, like, once an earthquake happens, does it fundamentally kind of reset the whole system? Like, okay, we know an earthquake generally happens just in this area every 200 years. But then the earthquake happens. Are you dealing with an entirely different set of circumstances, or is it just kind of, it happened and it's going to be more of the same as we move forward.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 10:26
It's it's more of the second. So the fault over the time frames that we're looking at it, so, you know, hundreds of years, 1000s of years, 10s of 1000s of years, is going to behave fundamentally the same way, the way we think of it, is kind of this characteristic earthquake model. And there's argument about whether or not that's appropriate. And the idea is that you have that stress and strain that builds up until you, you know, overload the system too much, then you have an earthquake, and that sort of puts it back at zero, and then it slowly starts to build up through time, and then it'll go again, and then it builds up through time, and then it'll go again. That's not necessarily what we see, and it's not that simple, because every time there's an earthquake on a nearby fault, it changes the stress inside the crust on the other faults that are around it, and so in some places, that will reduce the stress and strain, and in other places, it'll make it more pronounced and make that fault more likely to fail. So trying to figure out how the stress field inside the Earth is changing. And we also don't know after an earthquake whether or not it's released all of the built up stress, you know, maybe it's sort of like a tea kettle, and you just let a little bit of steam off, and then it's still pretty close to going again. So we're making assumptions that what we see now is the way it's always been and the way it's going to be in the future. And it's difficult to test that.
Speaker 1 11:45
How come we can't predict them? Oh,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 11:49
that's a good question. So in order to predict an earthquake, we have to assume that there is something that happens before the earthquake that we can observe and measure a precursor to that earthquake. And not only does a precursor have to exist and we have to be able to measure it, it has to happen before just about every earthquake, right? And so we have been looking for these precursors for a really long time, and we haven't found it. In fact, we drilled down into the San Andreas Fault, in an area where there's a lot of micro seismicity, or really small earthquakes, and we instrumented that whole area deep in the earth to try and catch something that happened before these earthquakes. Is there a change in electricity? Is there a change in pore pressure? Is there a change in heat flow? Is there any kind of change we can measure, and we didn't find anything. Now, does that mean it doesn't exist? I don't know. So is it that we don't have sensitive, sensitive enough instruments? Could be. Could it be that we don't know what we're looking for? Could be, but maybe it doesn't exist. And so in that case, how are we going to predict something when there's no way to know that it's coming?
Speaker 1 12:56
Do you think, but people are generally prepared, like, how seriously? How serious do we as people, as governments, as society, like really take these things?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 13:06
That's a hard question. There's a lot of things that require our attention as individuals, as families, as communities, as governments, right? There's there's a lot of things happening that we need to deal with every day. Earthquakes are just one of them, and because earthquakes don't happen very often. They tend to fall towards the bottom of the list, but they also are really impactful when they do happen, I would say overall, people on the West Coast of the US are relatively earthquake aware. They have a good idea of what to do. They have a relatively good idea of what it might look like to have a big earthquake. And at least in California, there's enough reminders that we live in earthquake country, people are feeling shaking, you know, pretty regularly, small shaking, but it's like, Oh, that's right. Maybe I need to go and get more water. That's right. Maybe I need to make sure that I have extra dog and cat food, just in case something happens in the supply chains are interrupted. So could we be more prepared? Absolutely, do we still have a lot of work to do. Yes, we do, but we have made a lot of strides. We also have not seen a larger damaging earthquake, really damaging in a really long time. And so I think people's idea of what could happen is a little bit skewed,
Speaker 1 14:21
skewed in the sense that we don't think it's going to be as bad, or it's going to be worse.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 14:26
It's it falls in two camps, right? So, on the one hand, you have the people that watch things like San Andreas with the rock, and they think that it's going to be tidal waves swamping San Francisco and large, you know, huge chunks of the city, you're going to be like, capsizing, like the Titanic, not going to be like that. But then other people are, like, especially California, like, I lived through Northridge, it would be fine. And I'm like, Whoa. Northridge was not a big earthquake
Speaker 1 14:53
for the for the on the Richter scale, like, what was Northridge? It was a 6.7 so that's what would you consider to be like? What. People like yourself, like, okay, that's big,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 15:01
anything over a six, especially if it's somewhere like the LA basin San Francisco, under Seattle, I'm going, Ooh, there's going to be some impacts from that, probably not catastrophic, but there may be some injuries from, you know, especially unreinforced masonry, the like brick facades or brick buildings. Those bricks do not withstand earthquake shaking very well, and so they'll fall, chimneys will fall, things like that, and people can be injured, and that's important. Once you get into like a six and a half, we start to worry. Once it's a seven, that's bad news, especially if it's in a populated area. But like, California had a magnitude 7.1 in 2019 out in the desert, and there were some, some smaller towns that were impacted in significant ways. But a seven, you know, near Los Angeles and San Diego would be a much bigger deal and have a lot more of a societal impact. So we have these sort of internal clocks about location and magnitude in terms of how damaging we're expecting it to be.
Speaker 1 16:02
I'm going to ask you the question that I'm going to regret asking. Like, I said, I live in Seattle, and they're expecting, like, this is going to be like, a nine and it's going to be really bad. Is it going to be like, Oh man, that's going to be really bad.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 16:17
Oh no. So, you know, the subduction zone earthquakes are interesting. Remember, we were talking about how the length of the fault and the depth of the fault impacts the magnitude. Yeah, you get a magnitude nine earthquake. You are rupturing a fault that is like 1000 kilometers long. And so if you think about faults like zippers, because they don't just break all at once, they unzip like a zipper. They start at a point deep inside the earth called the hypocenter, and we can think of that like the actual zipper. And a smaller earthquake would be like unzipping your pants just and it's done, and it produces shaking the whole time that it's happening, but then it's over. Imagine now unzipping a sleeping bag, and how long that takes, and the whole time that fault is unzipping, it's causing shaking to happen, right? And so you have really a lot of energy that's being released. You have the possibility for really high amounts of shaking and long duration shaking. Those earthquakes, the shaking will last minutes, not seconds. And so high levels of shaking for long periods of time. You have population centers nearby. And the other thing is that subduction zone earthquakes like that can also cause tsunamis, because they can cause the sea floor to move upward, and that lifts up the water column above it, the water column then flows out in all directions, and that's the tsunami. So not only do you have this high level of shaking. You also may have secondary effects, like tsunamis that are going to cause additional damage. It's
Speaker 1 17:47
a big deal, right? Like, and I know that for my family, we have stockpiles. We've got food, we've got water. We keep radios in our backpacks for the kids. Like, okay, you got to be ready. Like, where are you going to be? Yeah, on the radio. Get on the little handheld thing and, like, click on, where are you, those kind of stuff. But, like, can you balance, if you live in one of these environments, like, can you balance the idea of just, like, but you can still live a totally normal life? Yeah, absolutely. Is there any place in the world that you would say, like, Oh, you, you can't, kind of live a totally normal life in that area.
Unknown Speaker 18:23
No, are
Speaker 1 18:24
you ready for some harder slash? Listener submitted questions? Yeah, man, oh, okay. So I know the the Richter scale goes in magnitudes, but I don't, like, I can't really quantify that in my head. So, like, how much stronger is a seven than a six or a four than a three, right?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 18:43
First point, we don't really use the Richter scale anymore. Matter of semantics. We use something that's like loosely based on the Richter scale, called the moment magnitude scale. And it doesn't really matter. It's just sort of a interesting thing. It incorporates more information that we have now that Richter didn't have 100 years ago. So let's think about it in terms of spaghetti. I am a pasta fan. Okay, yes, let's imagine that you have one strand of spaghetti, okay. How hard is it to break that? Let's say that's a magnitude five. All right, a magnitude six is 32 times larger. So that would be like taking a serving size of spaghetti, and imagine breaking a serving size of spaghetti. A magnitude seven would be 32 times larger than a magnitude six. So that's 32 times 32 which is 1024 strands of spaghetti, which is like this. That's several boxes full of spaghetti. Imagine trying to break that all right, and then a magnitude eight would be somewhere around 33,000
Speaker 1 19:42
strands. Oh, so it's like it's not even the same world. Why do animals seem to know what's up?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 19:51
I get that question a lot. There's always been a lot of interest in whether or not animals can predict earthquakes, and by and large, they can. On what usually happens. So especially if you're kind of farther away from the earthquake, you'll feel the P wave first. That's the first wave that arrives. And it can be really subtle. So I think animals are more in tune with their environment, and will recognize the P wave as being something outside of their sort of normal routine, and so they'll react, and then a few seconds later, you'll start to feel the shaking from the S waves. But the earthquake has already started. Where you are, right? The shaking has already been felt. And so it's just that we're not as a tune, or we may think, Oh, that was a car driving by, or there's a branch falling on the roof, or whatever. We just kind of ignore it, but the animals do not ignore it.
Speaker 1 20:39
What do you think is the most for you. Like, what's the most interesting earthquake that's happened?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 20:43
It's sort of a series of earthquakes that started several years ago. So, like, there was the Paula earthquake, and then recently the Myanmar earthquake. Those earthquakes were interesting because they were doing something that we didn't really realize earthquakes could do, which is go super sheer. So it's almost like, you know, the rocks are breaking, the zipper is unzipping. And as it's unzipping, the seismic waves are traveling out, and they travel at certain speeds. Occasionally, the like the actual breaking of the earth will get out in front of the seismic waves. It breaks faster than we think it should be able to break it defies our expectations. And anytime something defies our expectations or is unusual, that's when we all go, what's happening here? Because that's an opportunity to learn more about the whole system, how the earth works, how earthquakes work, and so it's, you know, those moments of what that I really love.
Speaker 1 21:47
Do earthquakes ever happen in places that you don't expect them to happen in the sense that, okay, like, maybe there hasn't been one for 500 years, or whatever, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but there is a history there. Like, is it ever just totally unexpected? Like, we don't know where that could have came from?
Dr. Wendy Bohon 22:07
Yes. So, you know, we have a good idea, in broad strokes, of how the earth works, and we know that most earthquakes happen around the boundaries of the tectonic plates, and so we're kind of always expecting earthquakes in those places. And we can see the GPS, we can see that there's fast plate motion, there's stress and strain building up. And we're like, okay, these are places that are likely to have earthquakes, but there is something called intraplate earthquakes, earthquakes that happen on the insides of tectonic plates, away from the edges, like in the center of the US or along the east coast. The other thing about those earthquakes, if we're just say, talking about the US, you know, you have a lot of sand and silt, a lot of sediment has built up through time. And so often, the faults aren't exposed at the surface, so we don't really know that they're there. We don't know where they are. And they don't have earthquakes very often, because they're not building up stress and strain very quickly. And so when there are earthquakes in those places, they can take us by surprise. Additionally, the rocks on the east coast and in the Midwest are kind of different than the rocks on the West Coast, and so earthquakes on the East Coast and Midwest are usually felt over about a 10 times broader area than earthquakes of the same size on the West Coast, just because those rocks are old, cold and dense, so they transmit the seismic waves really well. So those earthquakes are always interesting, like the magnitude 5.8 in mineral Virginia in 2011 who knew that was coming? Nobody, and everybody was like, what's happening? Like, what's going on? Because you just wouldn't expect it was
Speaker 1 23:43
that the last time that you were kind of like, Wait, where did this happen? No,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 23:47
there was a magnitude. And now I can't remember, was it a 4.8 something like that in New Jersey, and I was at that time right outside of DC in Maryland, and I'm sitting, you know, like reading budget before doing something very dry, and I felt S wave arrive. And I was like, that was an earthquake. Oh my god, that was an earthquake. And then I felt or sorry, I felt the P wave arrive, and then I felt the S waves arrive. You know, we're all looking around at I was undignified, like I jumped up. I was like, that was an earthquake. Oh my god. But then I'm like, Oh no, because I know that there was a long time between the P wave and the S wave, which meant that the earthquake was pretty far away from me. And my first thought was, oh my god, that must have been a huge earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone in Missouri. Like, hugely devastating. So I'm looking at the data, and I'm looking at seismometers around that area, and there was not really anything. So I'm like, where else? And I'm like, Oh no, Charleston, South Carolina, because they had a huge earthquake in the 1800s that destroyed a lot of Charleston. So then I'm like, Oh God, Charleston. My best friend was a so I'm looking nothing. I. You could see the earthquake waves, but it clearly was not the earthquake source. And I'm like, Where in the world did this Earth Week happen? And I was like, I guess, look to the north, and it was in New Jersey. That was like, Huh? I wasn't expecting that anywhere can be earthquake country.
Speaker 1 25:21
Yeah, I would have thought that there was those places like, oh no. That just doesn't happen here, you know, like you're in the middle of the dinner plate. You're not falling off the edge. So
Dr. Wendy Bohon 25:28
exactly, I I've actually started doing a video series called earthquakes in all 50 US states, just to point out that, like most states have had earthquakes, and they're really cool and interesting, and, you know, kind of a curiosity, but it's also important for people that live outside of plate boundaries and expect earthquakes to be able to recognize them and know that that could be a problem, because, you know, on the east coast, rate of 5.8 did a lot of damage, because We don't build on the East Coast for earthquakes. People are not prepared. They don't know what to do. And so while their overall hazard from earthquakes may be low, they have a pretty high risk when an earthquake happens because they're not prepared. And so, you know, just making sure that people have that on their radar is something that they need to be aware of and know what to do when it happens, I think is really important, yeah.
Speaker 1 26:21
Like, I used to live in Kansas, and if I earthquake hit in Kansas, I'd be like, What the hell was that? I would have no idea. Wow, that could have possibly been but Kansas has had some big ones, I think so.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 26:31
Those are induced earthquakes. They're caused by people. For the most part,
Speaker 1 26:37
we can cause earthquakes that fracking. It's sort
Dr. Wendy Bohon 26:40
of fracking. So yeah, when, when companies that are looking for hydrocarbons, they can do the fracking right, which is where they take water and a slurry of other material, and they inject it into the ground, which breaks the rocks apart, which allows them to pull out whatever hydrocarbon they're trying to get out. But once that's gotten out, and that can cause small earthquakes, usually not very problematic, or usually even felt. They pull that out, but then they have all this wastewater, the waste material that's not what they want. And so they will do something called injection. So very deep, deep down inside of the ground, beyond where aquifers may be, or anything that really impacts us. They'll inject this water. The problem is sometimes that can kind of change the pressures down there or even lubricate faults, which can then cause earthquakes. And so it's this wastewater injection that tends to lead to these larger earthquakes in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, places like that. I would
Speaker 1 27:39
not have thought that was something that we were capable of doing. We can't get it twisted
Dr. Wendy Bohon 27:43
right? Because it's not like we could cause earthquakes on the San Andreas so that we don't have a bigger earthquake. That's not really how it works. It's more we can accidentally cause earthquakes that can sometimes be of moderate magnitude.
Speaker 1 27:58
Let me annoy you. How do you feel about the Yellowstone super volcano caldera thing? Is that real? No, I mean, no,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 28:09
so was it a super volcano at one time? Sure. Has it had a lot of really, really large eruptions throughout its millions and millions and millions of years? Yes. Is it something that I worry about now? Absolutely not for a couple reasons. The magma chamber underneath there is not like large and active and ready to explode at any time, right? There's a high level of heat flow there, which is what causes all the beautiful geysers and the springs and the things that it's so well known for. It has a lot of earthquakes. It's in a tectonically active area, and there is a lot of hot water fluid flow moving around under the surface. Is there the possibility of an eruption there? Sure. Would it destroy humanity? No. Also, Yellowstone is extremely well instrumented and really well studied, and so whenever anything is happening or changing there, you can check, you know, the the scientists put all the information out there. Everything is available to the public. So it's not like people are hiding anything, you know, you can go and check there are reports that go out all the time about what's happening at Yellowstone and, you know, all of the other US volcanos. So, no, I don't worry. But I worry about a lot of things. Yellowstone is not one of
Speaker 1 29:25
them. Is there a place like where people such as yourselves are like, Oh, that's where we're all looking.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 29:33
I flew into, sorry, I flew into, I know. It's, I know. And I was like, wow, Rainier is right there, and it is covered with snow, again, Rainier is well instrumented. All of these volcanoes are well instrumented. And were there to be a change, you know, people would know it's most likely that we would be able to see changes in the volcano, both in its size and shape. And there's something called. Like volcanic earthquakes. So as magma and superheated gasses are moving towards the surface, they cause the rocks to break and cracks to vibrate, and we detect those with seismometers. And so if those earthquakes start getting more and more shallow and closer and closer to the surface, we can say we got to do something. So it's not like it would really sneak up on us. So since we were talking about volcanoes. But in terms of earthquakes, I worry about Cascadia. I worry about a lot of the thrust faults underneath big population centers like LA the Compton thrust, the point Hills thrust. And, of course, you know the San Andreas the southern San Andreas the Hayward in Northern California. Those are all faults that have earthquakes relatively geologically frequently, and they're near big population centers, and the earthquakes that they can have could cause significant amounts of damage. I worry a lot about the North Anatolian fault in Turkey that runs underneath Istanbul. You know, the Alpine Fault New Zealand. There's a lot of faults in China that are helping to accommodate, you know, India slamming into Eurasia, and there's a huge population centers, you know, that are at risk from from earthquakes on those kinds of faults.
Speaker 1 31:14
So, do other planets have earthquakes? They
Dr. Wendy Bohon 31:19
sort of, we don't call them earthquakes, because they're not on Earth. We have Moon quakes and we have Marsquakes that have been measured. So a few years ago, NASA put a seismometer on Mars. This is the NASA InSight mission, and they detected lots of different Mars quakes, including pretty large Mars quakes, the equivalent of, like, a magnitude five. So we're caused by different things than we have on Earth, because neither one of those have plate tectonics. And so what you're seeing is a lot of thermal expansion and contraction, and, you know, rocks breaking because of that. But
Speaker 1 31:59
that's something that, for some reason fascinates me is, like, was there a discussion about, like, wait a minute, we can't call it an earthquake. If it's on Mars, we have to call it a Mars quake. I mean, I'm sure there probably
Dr. Wendy Bohon 32:09
was. I could just see that it's really, it's really kind of interesting, because, you know, they didn't put the seismometer on Mars and go to all that trouble just to see if they were happening. You can use seismic waves, almost like, you know, you just like an ultrasound to look at a baby in somebody's belly. You can use seismic waves kind of the same way to look at the interiors of planets and understand how the planet is built, how it's put together. And that, if you're looking at the Earth compared to Mars, compared to the moon, that tells us something about the evolution of the rocky bodies in the solar system. And so, you know, it's all kind of connected to this bigger picture. How can we use science and data in ways to understand not just the one thing we're looking at, the Mars plate, the earthquake, the moon quake, but also larger things about planetary you know, planetary structure and the evolution of our solar system. And like, it kind of gets philosophical. Best
Speaker 1 33:03
Movie about earthquakes, worst movie about earthquakes in the sense of, like, oh, that depicts what a big one would actually probably be. Like,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 33:10
I don't know that I've ever really seen a good one about them. There's lots of bad ones. So San Andreas, really bad. 10.5 really bad. I would say San Andreas is one of the worst. Even, even in the trailer, there's a guy that goes, we're talking about the Earth opening up. People would feel it all the way to the East Coast. And I'm like, Wow, so many wrong things in one sentence. How'd you manage?
Speaker 1 33:42
But you can't go above it is the 10 even possible? No,
Dr. Wendy Bohon 33:45
we don't have any, remember the logarithmic scale, right? We don't have any faults on earth that are long enough, deep, enough, big enough to create a magnitude 10. The largest earthquake that's ever been recorded, and is probably pretty close to the upper threshold is a 9.5 so there was a 9.5 earthquake in Chile, off the coast of Chile, in 1960 that's about the limit. And I mean, for goodness sake, it doesn't need to be bigger. That was enormous earthquake.
Speaker 1 34:11
Is there anything you think that we missed? Or what's kind of where can people find you to learn more that kind of stuff? Yeah.
Dr. Wendy Bohon 34:17
So to find me, I am. Dr Wendy rocks across all social media, blue sky, tick tock, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, find me there continuing to work on my earthquakes in all 50 states. Videos and I usually do, I try and put out something after interesting earthquakes or large kind of international earthquakes, to help people understand what happened and also what to expect, because earthquakes can be really scary. They happen without warning, and I don't want people to be afraid of the wrong things. You know, don't be scared. Be prepared. It's important to take whatever fear you may have and turn it into agency, turn it into action, and do something that can be. And meaningful and manageable for you and your family and your community. So that's sort of my goals, how we can decrease our vulnerability and improve our resilience.
Speaker 1 35:08
I want to thank Wendy so much for joining us. If you want to connect with her, we have linked to her on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube, and we've also included her information in the episode description. And if you want to see more of this interview, the YouTube version will be live on april 24 at 12:30pm Pacific. Okay, now let's bring in John Scholl and get to the pointless part of the show. What household chore are you most efficient at? Like, you've got this chore down. You have a system. You could do it efficiently. You're organized, uh,
Speaker 2 35:55
probably cleaning, cleaning like messes up in rooms. I'm very good at picking up messes and putting things away. Okay?
Speaker 1 36:05
For me, it would be edging a yard. I have a great system to edge a yard. I know where to start. I know how to angle it so that I can minimize the amount of extra walking. There's no frivolous time when it comes to edging a yard. I've got it completely down.
Speaker 2 36:21
Okay, go ahead, tell us about your mower, about how you've had it for three decades, and blah, blah, blah. I'm
Speaker 1 36:26
a decent mower. I would say that I'm only at about 70 to 75% efficiency when it comes to mowing the yard, but I'm at, I would never say 100 because there's always room for improvements. But I'm at about 95% efficiency when it comes to edging my yard, there's, I don't know how to make my I don't know how to make it better.
Speaker 2 36:46
I mean, we've had people come out and give us quotes on like our, you know, backyard, and they talked about, you know, mowing and edging and things. Think it depends. Think it depends on on your yard size, your availability, how
Speaker 1 37:00
comfortable you are making terrible excuses.
Speaker 2 37:05
I'm I'm just saying I think there's a lot more people that pay for yard services than you, you know, and you're probably offending half our viewers,
Speaker 1 37:11
okay, well, then they should be offended. There's a difference. But I I'm offended that people would be paying people to mow their yard. You do that yourself, unless, as long as you are physically able, you as a man, should be mowing your own yard.
Speaker 2 37:27
I don't disagree with you. That's why I, not only do I mow my own yard now, but I also cut down my own trees. Oh,
Speaker 1 37:34
I've done that. That didn't work out very well. I think that you should, that's that's a thing where I think that probably you should actually be hiring someone to do especially if we're talking about a tree that's like over 15 feet. You probably shouldn't be doing that.
Speaker 2 37:47
If we did like a top five power tools to use list, a stump grinder would be on my top five for sure.
Speaker 1 37:56
Oh, see, I don't see the point grinding out. I'm not getting into this with you. What do
John Shull 38:01
you think of my basement?
Speaker 1 38:02
It looks like crap. Actually, you see, I can't see it behind your big head.
Speaker 2 38:09
I do have a giant head. When during football, I they had to have a special helmet that they saved for me every year because I had one of the biggest heads on the football team. Wow.
Speaker 1 38:18
Even like, what did they call you? How did that feel going up there? And, like, Coach, I need the big head helmet.
Speaker 2 38:28
I mean, it wasn't bad because I also had the biggest, you know, jock strap, too, 4x baby.
Speaker 1 38:37
That's a lot, sure. What if you had the small what have you had the biggest head and the smallest wiener? It's like I've got the biggest helmet and the smallest jock strap.
Speaker 2 38:46
Feel like those two things kind of go together every now and again. Yeah, we do.
Speaker 1 38:51
So I pulled the audience about what their most efficient household chore was. 32% said cleaning. 17% said laundry, 31% said outside work, and 21% said paying bills. I would think that I would have been better by now at doing the laundry, but I can never really get it quite organized, like I never really know exactly where to start. Ideally, I would like to start with the shirts, because that's the hardest thing to fold, and then move into the lower body and end with the socks, because that seems to be the that's the funnest part to fold is the socks. No,
John Shull 39:27
that's the worst part, is socks.
Nick VinZant 39:31
Oh, that's the easiest. You just match the socks that look alike. Yeah. Listen,
Speaker 2 39:34
you have children, just like I do. Who knows which sock is, what with them? How many T shirts? How many T shirts you have?
Speaker 1 39:43
Two Oh, I probably got, like, how many T shirts do I have versus how many do I wear? I probably have 10, and wear seven of them.
John Shull 39:49
No way you only have 10 shirts.
Speaker 1 39:52
Why would I need more than 10 shirts? There's only seven days in a week. Didn't
Speaker 2 39:55
your family ever get you just a t shirt from Disney or. Any, any place,
Speaker 1 40:02
yeah, and then I'd get rid of them and donate them to Goodwill. I don't, there's no. My life is about efficiency right now. I don't have any extraneous, extraneous, extraneous, I don't have any, like, extra fluff things. If it's not being used, it's gone
Speaker 2 40:22
fluffy. All right, oh, I got rid of my wife. Oh, I'm sorry you too. Huh? That's
Speaker 1 40:28
such you have to do, man, you gotta get them out of there. They're not, they're not doing the job you gotta get
Speaker 2 40:31
rid of, yeah? All right, let's go plenty of women out there. All right, uh, shout outs. Let's see. We'll start with Carmen Doyle. Oh, Doyle rules, that's an underrated line.
Speaker 1 40:44
Is that a man or a woman? I guess that? Is there any man named Carmen? No, no, definitely
Speaker 2 40:49
not. Uh, Jeff board, Xavier Goodwin, uh, Jared Davis, Jacob, hurtful. Do you think he hurts a lot Kendra, julette, Ayanna Addison, Justina, Isabella, Delamar, duhan,
Speaker 1 41:13
I used to know a guy named Delmar. Pray, that's almond. That's Delmar. Pray, Brendan
Speaker 2 41:19
O'Leary, uh, Cassius Winston, that's a, like, a good CAS Don't,
Speaker 1 41:25
don't hear a lot of Cassie says that's a, that's a relatively new one. Yeah, that's a, that's a
Speaker 2 41:31
good one. And then Eli amarizo, congratulations. Thanks for hearing a lot of Eli's. Either I'm okay with an Eli, thanks for keeping us around another week. Alright, couple things here. This is a pretty straightforward question that you're I know you're going to just shoot down as soon as I say it, and I don't really want to say it, but I had a long conversation this weekend with someone about it. So here it is, do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? No, not even a little bit.
Nick VinZant 42:03
Not a no.
Speaker 2 42:05
All right, good talk. Do you believe? Do you believe in Bigfoot?
Speaker 1 42:11
No, I don't believe in any of that stuff. Do
Speaker 2 42:14
you believe in ghosts? No, well, you're no fun.
Nick VinZant 42:21
I just, I'm sorry, I believe in things that are real.
Speaker 2 42:23
I mean, so I also don't believe. But this person was trying to make me believe. And I for a half second, I'm like, Alright, I guess I could see how maybe, like, Bigfoots are reclusive animal. You know, it's not a person, right? It's an animal. I don't know, but, but no one's ever actually photographed it like, for real. So, yeah,
Speaker 1 42:43
because the only way, okay, maybe ghosts, ghosts, I'll give you a little bit of a leeway. Like, okay, yeah, there's probably some stuff out there that people can't explain, but when it turns into comes to any of those kind of, like, Bigfoot or the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster. Like, no, they don't exist. Because there has to be more than one of them. Like, they have to repopulate. And in order to have that kind of a population, there doesn't need to just be one of them. There probably needs to be, like, hundreds of them. And that just doesn't exist, right? Like, if you believe in those kind of things, you're basically saying that you don't know anything about how the animal world works.
Speaker 2 43:21
I mean, I I just learned this week and how birds procreate. So that's where I am.
Speaker 1 43:28
Well, how did you you didn't like how I was wondering, like that they did. It doesn't
Speaker 2 43:33
it seem like it's a difficult thing, if you're a bird, to have sex with another bird. I'd feel like that's difficult.
Speaker 1 43:41
I mean, I would think it'd be hard for two elephants to have sex, like they're no because they're designed for it, right? Like it would be really difficult for you to do it, but it's not really difficult for two birds, like they're designed to, like those puzzle pieces go together
Speaker 2 43:56
anyways. Uh, let's see. Ryan Gosling is going to be the new face of the Star Wars franchise, apparently. So apparently, he's going to be in a movie star wars. Obviously, that is five years after Star Wars Episode Nine. It's not it's going to be its own standalone movie, but it's going to be part of the Star Wars universe
Speaker 1 44:24
I have. I am a big believer in the idea that an actor should only be in one movie. I mean, not really, but I think that actors should only be in like one movie, especially if it's a big franchise like that, and it should be a new actor every time they do something like that, because otherwise you just see all like the leftovers from the other movies that they've been in, right?
Speaker 2 44:49
It's just funny to me, like the career progression of some people never would have thought Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds, any of those kind of actors would have stuck. Around the guy that's married to Kristen Bell. Oh, he's not a big movie star, Dax, I mean, but he, I would consider him still a like a a minus actor, no, or at least an enter on the entertainment level. If you say Dax Shepard, most people know who he is. I
Speaker 1 45:21
mean, if I have to think about it, and like, if you have to introduce him as somebody else's husband, then no,
Speaker 2 45:31
I mean, I don't, I don't disagree with you. Anyways, let's see. So I feel like every every month, there's a different TV show that's leading the way, right? Like, you know, it's the flavor of the month, like, The Last of Us is going to be the show that takes us through the summer, right? Like, we all agree on that.
Nick VinZant 45:51
I can't, but it's too scary.
Speaker 2 45:55
If Have you ever seen black mirror? No, too scary. Yeah, somebody had told me to watch that. And now I'm kind of talking to everybody out there, not to you, but the first episode without, of the series, without kind of giving anything away, it's, it's like, holy shit. I mean, it is, it is what it is, wild.
Speaker 1 46:16
Oh, I don't want to, I don't want to watch any TV show that has anything to do with real life or things that could happen in real life. That's why I watch like cartoons, manga, not manga. I'll watch cartoons. There's a difference between manga, anime and cartoons. I watch cartoons, and sometimes anime. But I don't, I mean, one piece that's a little bit different, it's high class anime, is what I would say. I'm not watching like there's some intense anime. I'm not watching that, but that's why I don't want to, I don't want to watch any shows that have anything to do with real life.
Speaker 2 46:55
So I had, I had these, I had these jumbled but I actually brought up the Gosling thing because I really wanted to talk about Haley. Joel Osment, okay, apparently, he was arrested over the weekend, and I'm not, I'm not saying this to be funny, though I'm kind of smiling, but I'm not. I'm just because I'm happy, because I'm here with you. Okay? But apparently, while he was being arrested, he called an officer, a Nazi, like First off, I couldn't really tell you much of anything that he's done since Star Wars. I know. Yeah, he had one rule, like, that's not
Nick VinZant 47:30
Haley, dude. Is that Haley? Joel Osment,
Speaker 2 47:35
oh no, kid, isn't he? Yeah, that's the story. Is the Star Wars Kid, isn't he shit?
Speaker 1 47:42
Yeah, I don't know. I guess
Speaker 2 47:46
the same, I don't know. They're all the same to me.
Speaker 1 47:49
I mean, like a drunk person did stupid things, like, yeah, that's what they do. Okay, if you
Speaker 2 47:54
were a professional wrestler, would you be a heel or a face? A heel being a bad guy and a face being a good guy.
Speaker 1 48:02
Oh, I'd want to be the bad guy. I always feel like the bad guy is more fun. I generally always root for the bad guys. To be honest with you,
Speaker 2 48:11
I don't think you would be a bad guy. I say this because I will have my in ring debut.
Nick VinZant 48:19
What are you doing? You're going wrestling,
Speaker 2 48:21
of superior Championship Wrestling. I am,
Nick VinZant 48:30
I am, go on, go off.
Speaker 2 48:34
So as you, as you, as most of you that follow the show, know, I work in TV, and one of our anchor reporters, is really involved in the wrestling scene, and he is involved to the point where he's, he's like a regular of their Federation, right? Okay, okay, so they're giving him a storyline for like a year. Oh, and he's bringing me on. I'm going to start at his I'm gonna start us as bodyguard.
Speaker 1 49:03
You're the wrestlers bodyguard. How does that make sense? Like, Isn't he supposed to be the tougher one? Like, well,
Speaker 2 49:09
sure, but like, you know he, he's gonna have, he's gonna come out with, he's gonna come out, he's gonna have, like, me, he's gonna have, like, a hair stylist. Like, he's gonna play the odds. Wow. And it's going to be fantastic, and I get to live my dream. And good for you. I'm, I'm, I don't think I've been more excited for something in a long time than than this moment. Is
Nick VinZant 49:33
there going to be video of this?
Speaker 2 49:35
I have, I told a couple of my other friends in addition to you, and they plan on packing the the, it's at a skate park here in Metro, Detroit.
Speaker 1 49:44
It's at a skate park, like indoor or outdoor, indoor, okay, okay,
Speaker 2 49:51
they're going to pack it and, and, yeah, I'm sure there will be video that, oh my god. What are you going
Speaker 1 49:56
to be introduced as? You're going to go by your real name. You're going to come up with something. It. You're gonna be Big John.
Speaker 2 50:01
So apparently I don't I'm just the bodyguard for now, but there are plans to incorporate me into like a real rumble.
Speaker 1 50:09
Wow. Are you gonna do some training? Are you just gonna go out there, wing it and hurt yourself? You're gonna hurt yourself, but then you're gonna
Speaker 2 50:19
only thing my wife said to me was, John, you can't do it. You're going to get hurt, but,
Speaker 1 50:24
oh, you have to. That'll be the best in your life. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2 50:28
even care if it's like a broken arm where it's bent backwards, like, Oh no, you're going
Nick VinZant 50:32
to get you're going to get hurt more. NAD,
Speaker 2 50:37
yeah, I'm quite excited. So anyways, I'm sure everyone's bored by this or really excited for me, oh, I
Speaker 1 50:42
can't wait. I This is big news for you. This is your dream coming true. This
Speaker 2 50:46
is, this is like, I'm already thinking about, like, how I can try to further this and like, get on. Yeah,
Speaker 1 50:52
you're gonna jinx it. Are you gonna jinx it? What are the chances right now that you what are the chances that you blow it?
John Shull 50:59
Zero. I am booked. I am there.
Speaker 1 51:02
Oh, no, I know why, nobody. No, I know that you're into it. I know that you're into it. That's the problem. You gotta back up a little bit. You're too into it, right? Like you gotta, you gotta back it off a little bit. You gotta play it a little bit cool. I'm
Speaker 2 51:20
I'm fucking, I mean, let's I, like, I I've never gotten like, a, like, a suit tailored. I mean, I have, but like, I'm looking into, like, getting a three piece and, like, the
Speaker 1 51:32
body, you can't be the bodyguard in the suit. You got to be ready for action.
Speaker 2 51:36
Yeah. But like, how badass would it be if, like, I was in like, you know, like a tailored suit. I put a little steroids in my forearms and lather them with baby oil so they shine real nice and look real big. That
Speaker 1 51:50
works. But anyway, no, see, this is what I mean you got you can't. You have to do what the character would be doing, not what you want to do, like you want to take it to the way that you want to do it, and wear a three piece suit. But the bodyguard is not going to be wearing a three piece suit. He's the bodyguard. Well, he's got
Speaker 2 52:04
to be. Maybe at some point we could have his name's Brandon. We could have Brandon on he could, you know, tell you, and we could have a fun little chat. I don't know could be fun. Okay,
Speaker 1 52:14
I'm interested. I'm interested. I'm not going to commit to it, but I'm interested, willing to hear more. You
Speaker 2 52:20
don't commit to anything, yeah, what else here?
Nick VinZant 52:24
Wiggle room. Break a woman.
Speaker 2 52:27
So in light of our top five, I have a car question for you.
Nick VinZant 52:32
Okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 2 52:34
do you know it says a two parter? First off, could you change your oil and how many? How many, how what's the percentage of people of today's world you think can change their own oil? Okay,
Speaker 1 52:48
I think that I could change my own oil, but when it comes down to actually be able, able to do it, I would say it's probably 5050, but I think that I can do it, but I think realistically, you have to say 5050, I certainly wouldn't be able to do it efficiently, and it would take me a while. But I also think that with stuff like that, you can figure it out, like I know how to change a tire. I know how to take out the battery and put in a new battery, like some of the most basic stuff. I would say 10% of people can change their own oil.
Speaker 2 53:23
Damn. That's way lower than I thought. I thought I was going to say 50%
Speaker 1 53:27
could do it. Oh, do you have an answer?
Speaker 2 53:32
No. I mean, I don't know. I didn't. Oh, you're just making it up. Oh, no, I was asking you, like, just throwing it out there. I
Nick VinZant 53:37
don't know. Let me see if I was hoping that you had an actual answer.
Speaker 2 53:39
No, I, you know, I don't do any actual research. Oh,
Speaker 1 53:43
yeah, right, right, right. I know. I know. I know. No, I would think it's very low. I would think in terms of that can actually do it, maybe 25% I would say that, like, okay, so half the population, arguably, is men. Half of them could probably actually do it. So I would say 25%
John Shull 54:06
and are you? Are you looking up the I
Speaker 1 54:10
mean, there's not really an answer. Studies suggest that around 70 to 80% of people have changed their own oil at least once. That's absolutely not true, unless maybe it was like part of a class. That's no way 80% of people have changed their oil at least one time. I hate these AI interview overviews because they got to be completely wrong. Do you think 80% of people have changed their own oil?
Speaker 2 54:35
No, not at all. Not at all, not one day. 80% of the cars on the on the planet are are? You know, can have oil their oil changed
Speaker 1 54:46
50. Okay, okay, here we go. Of all the age groups, Gen Z is the most likely, with 55% of people saying they did their own oil changes, followed by Millennials at 49% and. Apparent. Okay, I guess it's a lot more common than I would have thought. I don't know anybody who changes their own oil, not a single person, man, and I'm not like a rich person by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, I'm solidly middle class, but I don't know anybody who changed their own oil?
Speaker 2 55:23
Man, I know one. Okay, two people. So, okay, all right. Well, well, with that, maybe we should just put her into fifth gear and let's get on
Speaker 1 55:32
live. Oh, okay, so our top five is top five most ridiculous cars. They're just ridiculous. Like, why would anybody buy that car? So, number five, I'm
Speaker 2 55:45
gonna start off with the Volkswagen Bug.
Speaker 1 55:50
Oh, I can't agree with you on that one. I think that that car is has nostalgia. I think that that car was like a great car when it came out, like, people really liked that car. It has a lot of nostalgia. People like it. I can't agree with you on that one at all.
Speaker 2 56:06
You're gonna see a commonality with my top five, I think as we move on. So my number
Speaker 1 56:12
five is a Jeep. I think the only reason that you buy a Jeep is to say that you own a jeep. It's a totally like worthless vehicle. It's not good at anything that it actually does, like it gets poor gas mileage, it's loud, it's dangerous, it's not really practical for everyday use. The only reason to get a Jeep is to say that you own a jeep. That's it. It's purely about saying that you own a jeep.
Speaker 2 56:39
I mean, I've never had a jeep, obviously. But, I mean, I feel like they're more efficient than getting a gigantic pickup truck,
Speaker 1 56:48
oh, but at least the pickup truck can be used for the intended purpose that you want it to use, like a jeep. You're probably not really going anywhere that you couldn't take any other car, like, Oh no, I really need a Jeep for this, it has to specifically be a jeep. No, it doesn't. You could probably take a whole bunch of cars that way that are much more practical and much better of a car.
John Shull 57:11
Four is going to be very
Nick VinZant 57:14
controversial. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
John Shull 57:18
Minerva. Four is a Vespa.
Nick VinZant 57:21
It's not a car.
John Shull 57:23
What's a mode of transportation? You can get it. But
Speaker 1 57:26
this was specifically cars, you but you can
John Shull 57:29
get a license plate for it. It's a it's a car. It's
Nick VinZant 57:32
you can get that, okay, a motorcycle, too,
Speaker 2 57:34
which is technically a car because it drives. No, it's
Speaker 1 57:38
not technically a car. It's literally not technically a car, it's technically a motor vehicle. It's not an automobile, it's a motorcycle, like a Vespa is not a car, it's a scooter,
John Shull 57:51
yeah, but a scooter is right? You
Speaker 1 57:52
googled it and got the answer that it wasn't. Is a motorcycle, a car? No, you don't need Google and the internet to know that.
Speaker 2 58:00
But you know what? Fuck it. I don't care. Your Vespa still sucks. Have
Speaker 1 58:03
a Vespa. My number four is the PT Cruiser. It looks like an Easter basket. Do you want to drive a car that looks like an Easter basket? Like, oh, that's, that's what I want, the PT Cruiser.
John Shull 58:16
No, nobody does.
Nick VinZant 58:19
Nobody wants that car.
Speaker 2 58:21
It's kind of like, so my number three is kind of along those lines, and I think they might have been made by the same company. Mine is a Dodge Viper.
Nick VinZant 58:31
I've been in a Dodge Viper. It was actually really cool.
Speaker 2 58:33
Like they were, they were, they were, you know, advertised as, like, the definitive sports car that every man can buy until you actually got in one and realized they were gigantic piles of shit and were terrible cars to look at and be in. Oh, I
Speaker 1 58:52
think that creditor car. I'm gonna go ahead and have to disagree with you on your list again, because if I remember correctly, maybe you could do some research on this, but I believe that the Dodge Viper is credited with kind of revitalizing the Dodge brand. Back at a certain time, it was really like the Corvette or the Mustang of its time, and it really revitalized the Dodge brand. Gave it a kind of a look. Look at this car, the Dodge Viper was pretty cool looking.
Speaker 2 59:19
I feel like, if it was, I feel like, if it's worth a shit, it would still be in production.
Nick VinZant 59:24
Oh, is it not?
Speaker 2 59:26
No, they stopped. They stopped making them in like, 2010 or nine, and then had, like, what, two years of running them again. And we're like, yeah, no one's buying these piles of shit. Oh, well, I'd rather drive the Wiener mobile than that thing.
Speaker 1 59:44
Speaking of speaking of driving the Wiener mobile, my number three is the Infinity QX 70. You may have to look this up, but the Infinity QX 70 looks more like a sad we. Than any car I've ever seen. Anytime I see that car, I'm like, that looks like a sad, shriveled wiener. Look at it. It looks like a sad wiener. What's it called? Again, infinity, QX, 70. If you see one on the street, you're like, that looks like a sad Wiener, exactly.
Speaker 2 1:00:25
That is so bad, it looks like a sad Wiener, doesn't it? Yeah, it looks like a shriveled up dick. That is, that is not good. That's
Speaker 1 1:00:32
one of the worst cars I've ever seen, right? Like, you made that. It looks terrible. Okay, okay,
Speaker 2 1:00:38
okay. Yeah. That is my number two. And this is just clearly a personal decision, but I think the biggest waste of manufacturing space and anything to ever come off of an assembly line is the Hummer.
Speaker 1 1:00:54
Oh, my number two is also a Hummer. Why would you ever buy that
Speaker 2 1:01:00
car? I mean, yeah, I I have 40 reasons, but I'll say three of them. One, it's way too big. It's a gas guzzling super hooker. I've been in one, and I think we went 30 miles and went through a quarter tank of gas, like they're clearly not made for, you know, city driving or long distance driving in three I was really shocked by the amount of non space in the vehicle you think you're going to get into this big, spacey square box. And it wasn't what I thought it was at all.
Speaker 1 1:01:36
A Hummer is a car that is designed to do nothing you actually need a car to do. Yeah, without a doubt, this is not good for anything I'm actually going to do with it, and it costs a lot of money.
Speaker 2 1:01:50
It's not practical, like, it's not, you know, they don't even, I guess the thing is, is I'm okay with a vehicle being not practical, like a Lamborghini, right? Like, right. Like, a Corvette, like, you can't drive those in the north all year round. Like, but like, they look cool, they serve some kind of purpose other than military use. I have no idea what humors are, are used for. Like, I have no idea.
Speaker 1 1:02:14
And I knew somebody who I worked with who was making about the same amount of money that I did and he drove a Hummer, and I just thought, wow, why would you spend that percentage of your income on that? Like you just wasted a significant amount of your money on that?
John Shull 1:02:34
Was it? Pete cage? No, it's a guy named,
Speaker 1 1:02:37
I actually don't even know his name. Don't be smart, alright?
Speaker 2 1:02:41
My I have a feeling our number one might be the same. Now it's not. My number one is any kind of, like, smart car, like, you know, like the, like, the mini cars, like the the little cars,
Speaker 1 1:02:55
oh, I don't think that you're really, like, factoring in what the person is using them for, though, like, if you're just using that just to commute long distances, then it's a perfectly good car,
Speaker 2 1:03:08
no equal tree in a a smart car, like for sake.
Speaker 1 1:03:13
But that's what they're not using it for, that they're not buying a two feet but you're not buying it for that purpose. You're buying it like
John Shull 1:03:21
Vespa. Okay, they all suck. Okay. I
Speaker 1 1:03:24
think you just have again. I think you just have a thing against efficiency. I think that's your problem. Your real your your real problem is efficiency and practicality.
Speaker 2 1:03:34
My real problems with you. What's your number one? My number one
Speaker 1 1:03:38
is the cyber truck. The Cyber truck is the stupidest car that I have ever seen. Even if you put aside all of the things that have happened in the last couple last couple of months, that is still the stupidest piece of junk looking thing that I've ever seen. Like, I don't understand how anyone could look at a cyber truck and be like, that's for me, that looks like a good vehicle for what I'm going to do with it.
Speaker 2 1:04:04
So I've never been in one. But, I mean, the practicality of it is, I mean, I think it's, I don't think it should be number one. It should be on your top five, number one, though. I mean, listen, I've you take away the last couple of months. I have no idea what they're really doing, like, no idea what they're for. I mean, they're not even really a truck, right?
Speaker 1 1:04:25
It's, yeah, it's something that doesn't serve any of the purposes that you want it to serve. And that's one of the strangest looking that has to be, probably, in comparison to other cars, the strangest looking vehicle in proportion to other cars. It's like somebody guessed the future wrong, like this is the future, and they guessed it completely wrong. Okay, that's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode of Profoundly Pointless I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, leave us a quick review. We really appreciate it. We're. Really helps us out and let us know what you think is just the most ridiculous car. Maybe a cyber truck is prisoner of the moment, but to me, that just looks ridiculous. Like why would you ever buy that? But I guess I also felt the same way about the Hummer and the PT Cruiser. So let us know what you think is the most ridiculous looking car you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
