transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Caffeine doesn't have any kind of effect on me anymore.
Speaker 2:
[00:02] I get fucked up drinking bubble tea sometimes. Like, I get wired. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:
[00:07] I wish, I wish. I just drank a kind of monster, but not to get energy from it, just to maintain my baseline, otherwise I get a headache.
Speaker 2:
[00:17] As an Advil.
Speaker 3:
[00:18] That sounds healthy.
Speaker 1:
[00:21] There's a monster, monster truck that comes around Cardiff like once a month.
Speaker 2:
[00:26] What the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 3:
[00:27] It's the most Welsh thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 1:
[00:29] It hands out three monsters and it's always outside my work. Everyone always texts me, all my colleagues like Ella the monster truck is outside. I'm like, oh no.
Speaker 2:
[00:39] That's Ella. That's a lot. Oh boy, howdy.
Speaker 3:
[00:46] Oof.
Speaker 1:
[00:48] Oof.
Speaker 3:
[00:50] That's some great Ella lore.
Speaker 1:
[00:52] Thank you. I always reveal some new weird Ella lore.
Speaker 2:
[00:57] Like a beautiful endless onion.
Speaker 3:
[01:12] Hello, and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn anything and everything interesting. Everything, everything interesting. As always, we are going to be covering a science topic, and then a miscellaneous topic. I am going to be doing neither of those things because I am the student, and I do not have a notebook ready. I've just realized I'm panicking. Oh no.
Speaker 2:
[01:35] I came to class without a pencil and notebook.
Speaker 3:
[01:38] This is my worst nightmare.
Speaker 1:
[01:39] And what's your name, Caroline?
Speaker 3:
[01:41] Oh my god. My name is Caroline.
Speaker 2:
[01:44] Hello. And thank you for putting your name on your assignment because that is 5% of the grade.
Speaker 1:
[01:52] My name is Ella. And today's science topic, and I'm going to ask Caroline and Tom not to pretend like they don't know what this is because I've told them because I was so nervous about it that I had to run it by them, which is something we rarely ever do on the show. But today's science topic is the Anthropocene. Okay, react a bit.
Speaker 2:
[02:15] Oh my god. Give me a second. I know we've literally covered quote unquote everything, but is this like the almost one of the biggest topics?
Speaker 3:
[02:23] The broadest thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[02:25] It's super broad.
Speaker 2:
[02:26] Hey, so what do you mean the Anthropocene?
Speaker 3:
[02:29] Like what?
Speaker 1:
[02:31] Well, that's what the topic is about.
Speaker 3:
[02:33] Okay. I'm confused, but excited.
Speaker 2:
[02:37] I truly, yeah, I'm very curious where this is going to go.
Speaker 3:
[02:40] Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:
[02:41] My name's Tom and today's miscellaneous topic is just as all-encompassing and serious as Ella's. Yeah. But first, I just need to move this giant tray of wine glasses out of the way. Oh no, a banana peel. Whoa. Wait, hold on. Shit. Hold on. Fuck. Wait. Wait, no, wrong. Hold on. Sorry. Wrong one. Wait, wait. Hold on. Where is it? Fuck. Hold on. Okay. Fuck. Sorry. I can't find it. It's somewhere in here. It's sound effects. We're talking about sound effects.
Speaker 1:
[03:14] Wow. Oh, that is fun. That's fun. I feel like that's a very Tom topic and like niche, but probably has a very surprising depth to it.
Speaker 2:
[03:23] I thought I did this mostly selfishly because I was like, I'll get to play a bunch of sound effects. But then there was some like really, really fun stories, like really well.
Speaker 3:
[03:31] Are we going to get to talk about that one scream that comes up in like every single movie?
Speaker 2:
[03:37] It obligatory has to come up, but Caroline, there's going to be a lot more interesting stuff. You're going to get some niche, niche knowledge.
Speaker 3:
[03:43] Oh, brilliant. Nice. Before we go into either of those two topics though, there is something else that we do need to talk about, which arguably far more important. I'm so sorry, guys.
Speaker 2:
[03:54] Than the Anthropocene.
Speaker 1:
[03:55] Than the Anthropocene, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[03:56] Why would Ella bring out such a absolute banger of a topic?
Speaker 3:
[04:00] Such a banger, that is because it's the Max Fun Drive!
Speaker 1:
[04:08] Crazy, crazy.
Speaker 2:
[04:08] Caroline, what is the Maximum Fun Drive?
Speaker 3:
[04:10] Oh my goodness, it's the time of year where we say a huge thank you to Max Fun members by giving you gifts and bonus content, but also the time that we remind our listeners that we can only make this show thanks to our members, thanks to supporters of Maximum Fun. You, that's right, you listening, can support the show. You, right there. Yeah, I'm pointing with my pen.
Speaker 2:
[04:33] You, Evelyn.
Speaker 3:
[04:35] You, John.
Speaker 2:
[04:36] You, Jerry Rogers.
Speaker 1:
[04:39] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[04:40] Grace, I've seen you and I'm telling you that you can become a member for as little as $5 a month as well.
Speaker 1:
[04:47] You, Hugo Artis.
Speaker 2:
[04:49] Farhad, you thought you didn't have a white passing name? You thought you would be exempt from this? Nope, I had a friend named Farhad growing up. Farhad, you got to be a member.
Speaker 3:
[05:00] We will talk about the Max Fun Drive and what it means to become a member in a little bit, as well as what bonus stuff you can get, all the exciting things. But if you're already convinced, if Grace, listening to this, that was enough for you, then you can go to letslearneverything.com to find out more.
Speaker 2:
[05:18] Classic Grace.
Speaker 1:
[05:19] Please, Charlie, we need your help, we need your support. How many random names can we say throughout this?
Speaker 3:
[05:24] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[05:25] Hopefully one of them will listen.
Speaker 2:
[05:27] Yeah, so we got the reports back and you guys did great, really big in the Charlie and Grace demographic. Please, I don't know what you guys, the targeted marketing is working.
Speaker 1:
[05:39] Today's science topic is the Anthropocene, or sometimes called the Anthropocene, depending on where you're from. I'm going to say Anthropocene because that's just how I naturally say it.
Speaker 3:
[05:49] That's the correct way.
Speaker 2:
[05:50] Anthropocene.
Speaker 1:
[05:52] Anthropocene. I need you to buckle in for this topic because it's going to be a long one.
Speaker 2:
[05:59] Okay. Okay. Here we go.
Speaker 3:
[06:02] Cool.
Speaker 2:
[06:02] You locked the doors. The doors are locked.
Speaker 3:
[06:04] Help me, Tom.
Speaker 1:
[06:07] Tom, in the start, you asked, what do you mean the Anthropocene? And it's a good question because I do feel like people throw around the word Anthropocene a lot in media and in like Popsci. But what really is it? I mean, to put it very basically, the Anthropocene is a span of geological time marking a period where human activity has become the dominant influence on Earth's climate and environment. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:
[06:35] Wow. That was fast. I guess we could back to sound effects.
Speaker 1:
[06:38] Unbuckle. There's a lot to say about this. So we've said this before, but the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years of that, only a tiny fraction of Earth's history. Is it possible that we could have had such an impact on the planet to harken in a new geological age in such a short space of time? Well, maybe, yeah. And we probably did it in an even tinier fraction of the time we've been here. We're just that damn good or bad.
Speaker 3:
[07:12] Good is a word, isn't it?
Speaker 2:
[07:14] Adding a valence that I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[07:16] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[07:17] I am curious if the, I don't know if you know what, like when is the name self-centered or is it like, did someone come up with it because of like, they studied it from a geographic first perspective. Does that make sense? You know what I mean? Is it like, did the Pope be like, we are humans and beautiful and we are the Anthropocene? Or was it like a scientist?
Speaker 1:
[07:36] It's such a good question. That is a great fucking question. We are going to get into the details of that because, because the answer to the question like, who says we're in the Anthropocene? What is the Anthropocene? Are we in the Anthropocene? It's not very straightforward. And I thought it would be, it's not. It's one of the reasons this topic is so long. But the other reason is because there's so much information before this to bring together. Because this is a geology topic, my first ever.
Speaker 3:
[08:07] Yeah!
Speaker 1:
[08:09] Wow!
Speaker 3:
[08:10] Congratulations! Jump scare!
Speaker 1:
[08:12] Rocks! So let's get our rocks off. I mean, let's rock on.
Speaker 3:
[08:16] Wow.
Speaker 1:
[08:17] I mean, let's rock on. Yeah, that's what I mean. We have to start with the basics. Do you guys know how geologists divide up the history of the earth?
Speaker 3:
[08:30] No.
Speaker 1:
[08:30] Not at all.
Speaker 2:
[08:31] Like layers in the sediment?
Speaker 1:
[08:33] Yeah. That's it. This is called the geological time scale. It's a very complex system, which uses lots of types of evidence, particularly stuff is preserved in rock layers or strata. So these are horizontal sheets of sedimentary rock, which is formed by accumulation and compaction of sediment, sand, mud, shells, you know, over time.
Speaker 2:
[08:56] I can imagine things like the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs out, like there would be a very clear change in the layer.
Speaker 1:
[09:03] Not because of the...
Speaker 2:
[09:04] Oh, ice ages, ice ages also.
Speaker 1:
[09:06] Ice ages leave very clear evidence. Geologists will use things like field observations, look at physical characteristics of rocks and see the order in which the sediments were deposited. They will use the presence of certain fossils, because animals and plants evolve and become extinct at different times. They will use radiometric dating, particularly of the volcanic ash layers between the sedimentary layers.
Speaker 3:
[09:28] Interesting. That's really cool.
Speaker 1:
[09:31] It's also not all rock. You can study things like gases trapped in ice sheets. And there's also something called paleomagnetism, which is the study of Earth's ancient magnetic field preserved in different materials. This is very, seems so cool. I don't get into that, but it's very, very cool.
Speaker 2:
[09:48] Sorry, the idea of studying ancient gases makes me so anxious. I'm sure there's like lots of procedure, but the idea that like you crack it open and you're like, get it, get it, get it before it gets to this, get a balloon, get a balloon.
Speaker 1:
[09:59] I think it's mostly boring into ice and then sampling.
Speaker 2:
[10:04] I think it's quite interesting, Ella.
Speaker 1:
[10:06] Hey, hey, hey, hey. I'm not going to get into detail with all of that. I'll just say that by accumulating and analyzing all of this data, geologists have constructed a pretty detailed timeline describing the Earth's geological history. So I want you guys to take a look at this bad boy.
Speaker 3:
[10:25] Ooh, that's so many colors. Wow.
Speaker 2:
[10:29] Oh, gosh.
Speaker 1:
[10:30] Can you attempt to describe this for the listeners?
Speaker 2:
[10:34] Yeah, I feared we would reach this point. And I was very curious how Ella was going to make this feel OK.
Speaker 1:
[10:41] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[10:43] So we are looking at a chart of, I guess, the time span of the planet Earth with both its multicolored, there's like different subcategories. It doesn't even fit on one continuous bar. It has to be split up into multiple.
Speaker 3:
[11:01] Yeah, it's like four bars.
Speaker 2:
[11:04] It looks like a Pokemon type chart, like which types are strong against others.
Speaker 3:
[11:09] And there are like overarching labels that are then split into more and more specific labels going along as well.
Speaker 1:
[11:18] Yeah, that's a key point. This is a hierarchy. So, what we're looking at is the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. This is the standardized guide to Earth's geological history. The International Commission on Stratigraphy decides what is on here. And these are geological time scales that you're looking at. Each column is a different span of geological time. And each one is labeled with two different units, apart from the biggest one, which is the same.
Speaker 2:
[11:50] Uh-huh. Why?
Speaker 1:
[11:51] So it's chronostratigraphic and geochronologic units. Okay?
Speaker 2:
[11:56] Shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1:
[11:57] Right.
Speaker 2:
[11:59] Kindly shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1:
[12:01] According to the Geological Timescale Foundation, chronostratigraphic units are bodies of rocks, layered or unlayered, that were formed during a specific interval of geological time. The units of geological time during which chronostratigraphic units were formed are called geochronological units, geochronologic units. So one is the layers of rocks and the other is the actual time period.
Speaker 3:
[12:26] Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:
[12:28] Okay. That does make sense. That does. And they map one to one, but they are different things.
Speaker 1:
[12:33] Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[12:34] Okay. That does actually make sense.
Speaker 1:
[12:35] For the sake of ease, I'm just going to be using the geochronologic units because they're the things people talk about the most. But I wanted to clarify, less some nerd brackets complementary came at me. So there is, as I said, this hierarchy in the columns. They nestle within each other. You see that there's like very ones that go on for much, much longer than others. And then within that, you get a few smaller ones. Then within the smaller ones, you get smaller ones and smaller ones. And from largest to smallest, it goes thusly, eons of which there are only four, Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic. These range from hundreds of millions to billions of years.
Speaker 3:
[13:15] Wow. Okay.
Speaker 1:
[13:16] And within that, we have eras of which there are 10, about 65 to 300 million years in duration. Then we have, within that, we have periods. There are about 22 of those, tens of millions of years. Then we have epochs, 37 of those in total, tens of thousands to tens of millions of years. Then ages, 96 of those, thousands to tens of millions of years.
Speaker 3:
[13:38] Nice, okay.
Speaker 2:
[13:39] Eons, eras, periods, epochs, ages. E-E-P-E-P-A.
Speaker 3:
[13:45] And I feel like epoch is the place where I'm seeing words that I recognize the most.
Speaker 1:
[13:51] Yes, yeah. And generally, epochs and periods in this will be the most familiar to you. A period there, we have like the Cambrian, for example.
Speaker 2:
[13:59] Ah, a classic.
Speaker 1:
[14:01] So everything from eras down has a like surprisingly specific lower boundary. So the rough beginning of that time interval, that's where these, the distinctions between them are made. And this is agreed upon by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. So lower boundaries use a reference point called Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point or GSSP.
Speaker 2:
[14:24] Jesus Christ, Ella, sorry.
Speaker 1:
[14:26] It's called a GSSP. Well, this is a physical place. The GSSP is a physical place that you can go and visit. And sometimes there will be a little plaque there indicating that this is the GSSP for that boundary.
Speaker 3:
[14:38] No way!
Speaker 1:
[14:39] Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 3:
[14:40] That is delightful. I love that.
Speaker 2:
[14:43] It's like, you are here, parentheses, temporally.
Speaker 3:
[14:46] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[14:47] Like you are. This is when you are.
Speaker 1:
[14:49] Wow. So if you'll allow me, this is one of the reasons this topic got so big is because I've written a little Cambrian period tangent here, which will both please me and help me understand how we define geological spans of time.
Speaker 2:
[15:03] Okay, fantastic.
Speaker 1:
[15:04] Okay, the GSSP, this marker, this reference point for the boundary between the Cambrian and Ordovician periods is at Greenpoint Grossmourne National Park in Newfoundland, Canada. So basically, in this park, at this very specific location, there's a kind of rocky outcrop on a beach, and it has, you can see these beautiful, clearly distinct rock layers, and you could pinpoint almost the exact layer, it shifts from Cambrian to Ordovician, which was 405.4 plus or minus 1.9 million years ago.
Speaker 2:
[15:39] Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:
[15:41] About 480 million years ago, there was a shift from the Cambrian period to the Ordovician period.
Speaker 2:
[15:46] Isn't it amazing we live in a period of time where we can know that? So many people probably saw that rock and was like, oh, cool stripes. And it's like, hey guys, this is the geological time scales.
Speaker 1:
[16:00] Science, man. Hell of a drug. So there's within the GSSP you'll have like a primary marker, a secondary marker, maybe a tertiary one, definitely always a primary. The primary marker of the start of the Ordovician is the first appearance of God, my God saying this word.
Speaker 3:
[16:19] I'm so excited.
Speaker 1:
[16:21] It's the first appearance of Lapotonathus. Lapotonathus Fluctivegus. It's a conodent, it's something called a conodent. It's an extinct group of marine jawless vertebrates.
Speaker 2:
[16:34] It's a fish.
Speaker 3:
[16:35] Fun, it's a little guy.
Speaker 1:
[16:36] It's not a fish. It's not a fish. You have to understand that this is a period when everything was in the ocean.
Speaker 3:
[16:44] There was no other fish.
Speaker 2:
[16:47] I did need that. I did need that context.
Speaker 1:
[16:50] It's not that this species appearing or being present defines the difference between these two periods, but that its appearance is just a marker from one to the other. Okay.
Speaker 2:
[17:01] Cool.
Speaker 3:
[17:02] Okay, I get that. It's not the fact that this thing is there that makes it different. It's just because it's there that helps us see it, visualize it as different.
Speaker 1:
[17:11] This thing is only there at this point.
Speaker 2:
[17:13] Oh.
Speaker 1:
[17:14] It only starts appearing when the Cambrian changes into the Ordovician.
Speaker 3:
[17:17] Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[17:18] That's really good context. So you're not saying it's important. It's just visually marked.
Speaker 1:
[17:22] It's not like, it's part of a much larger sum of things that define these two things from each other.
Speaker 2:
[17:29] Right, right, right, right. Just cool, because it's not like what was like the dominant predator. We're not biological. We're strictly geological. It's just whose bones were the best preserved or most clear to us.
Speaker 1:
[17:38] That's actually a really good point.
Speaker 2:
[17:39] That was really cool.
Speaker 1:
[17:40] Now I have a bit of a soft spot for the Cambrian period because it's named after my beloved country of residence. I don't know if you knew this.
Speaker 2:
[17:48] Wait, what?
Speaker 1:
[17:48] Yeah, it's named after Cambria, which is the Latinised form of Cymru, which is the Welsh word for Wales.
Speaker 2:
[17:55] What the fuck?
Speaker 3:
[17:56] I did not know that.
Speaker 1:
[17:57] So the preceding Ordovician and Silurian periods are also named after Wales for two ancient Celtic tribes called the Ordovici and the Siluris. And that's just because the people who first described the rock layers from these periods did so from rocks in Wales.
Speaker 3:
[18:15] Nice. Okay.
Speaker 1:
[18:15] I just think that's me. I just wanted to let you know.
Speaker 2:
[18:17] Yeah, I had absolutely no idea. For me, they were just fun, silly, almost mythological words.
Speaker 1:
[18:24] A lot of different geological timespans are named after places that these rocks were discovered first. But what actually distinguishes the Cambrian as its own period? This is from 538 MA or million years ago to 485 MA.
Speaker 2:
[18:39] Well, I know that it's known as the Cambrian explosion, right? Exactly.
Speaker 1:
[18:44] That's a big important thing. The Cambrian explosion is actually an event, not its own period of time. It's an event that happened itself over a long period of time. But it was a pivotal evolutionary event, the Cambrian explosion. It's not entirely clear why, but a likely increase in dissolved oxygen in the ocean led to a sudden, massive diversification of life and the first appearance, importantly, of hard shelled fossils. One of the most significant sites for Cambrian fossils is the Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park in British Columbia, Canada. Have you heard of this? No. Amazing, amazing place. Okay. I thought you guys would know all this because I knew a lot of this already.
Speaker 2:
[19:30] This is nuts, Ella. This is absolutely nuts.
Speaker 1:
[19:32] So during the Cambrian, as I said, all life as we know of at the time was in the sea. The land is barren. So with fossils, this normally means an animal dies, it settles at the bottom of the body of water, and it slowly becomes covered with sediment over time. So what happens is a lot of detail is lost in the fossil because the animal is decaying. But this is different at the Burgess Shale, where many organisms lived in underwater mud banks. So sometimes sediment from the land, which was very dry because there was no life up there, it was very prone to erosion, it would slide into the sea and form mudslides, which really quickly buried the living organisms.
Speaker 2:
[20:18] It just casts it.
Speaker 1:
[20:20] Yeah, exactly. They died instantly and they were immediately preserved or almost immediately. So this means that the fossils here are very detailed compared to a lot of other fossils. You can see exoskeletons, of course, but also you can see limbs sometimes and rarely even the contents of their guts and muscles.
Speaker 2:
[20:39] Holy shit.
Speaker 3:
[20:39] That's so cool.
Speaker 2:
[20:41] From the Cambrian?
Speaker 1:
[20:42] Yes.
Speaker 3:
[20:44] And I guess that then helps us understand what other potential, like, vegetal life could have existed at that time, if we could have a little look at what's inside their stomachs and stuff.
Speaker 1:
[20:52] Yeah, what they're eating.
Speaker 2:
[20:54] Yeah. Ella had to one up dinosaurs. She was like, oh, you want something old as shit? Get good.
Speaker 1:
[21:02] I will tell you about some of the stuff there, because there's just like some weird and wonderful life preserved in the Burgess Sale. There's about 120 genuses, which is the step above species. So of course you have many genuses. No, it's genera, I should say, genera of the wildly successful trilobites.
Speaker 2:
[21:23] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[21:24] About 15% of the genera at the Burgess Sale are trilobites. They were very successful.
Speaker 2:
[21:30] Whether you like it or not, this is the ideal body plane.
Speaker 1:
[21:33] Yeah. This is what an alpha male looks like. One of my favorites there is something called Opabinia. It has five stalked eyes and a single grasping claw protruding from its front end. One?
Speaker 2:
[21:49] What the? This is so wrong.
Speaker 1:
[21:51] What do you mean one?
Speaker 2:
[21:52] All of this is wrong. An odd number of eyes and one arm. And an odd number of...
Speaker 3:
[21:57] Yeah. What? Hell.
Speaker 1:
[22:00] This is related to the ancestors of modern arthropods.
Speaker 2:
[22:04] Claw machines. Oh.
Speaker 1:
[22:08] And there's also something called Hallucigenia, which was named because people were like, what the fuck is this?
Speaker 3:
[22:15] Can I Google a picture?
Speaker 1:
[22:17] Yeah, please Google.
Speaker 2:
[22:18] Holy shit.
Speaker 1:
[22:19] It has like a worm-like body and it has rows of tentacles along its back.
Speaker 2:
[22:25] I actually hate... I actually... I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1:
[22:29] I had to pull back. I mean, those are artist's renditions of it, but it's like worm-like tentacles on its back and it has like seven or eight pairs of spiny legs, which ended claws.
Speaker 3:
[22:38] I was just going to say I hate it, but actually there's one website which gives like a human scale for me. And to be fair, this little guy, he do be quite small though, and that does make me feel a lot better.
Speaker 1:
[22:51] Things were generally quite small around this time. There were some bigger things.
Speaker 2:
[22:55] I'm not kidding. This is, I think, the most visceral reaction I've had to an image on this podcast yet, like genuinely. I actually, we will play the tape back and maybe we'll pause the clip. I actually had to turn away.
Speaker 3:
[23:08] I really like him. No, I'm being convinced.
Speaker 2:
[23:11] And you know what sucks is that, like, you even, you literally warned us. You literally were like, hey, people saw this and said it was fucked up. And I went, how bad could it be?
Speaker 1:
[23:19] I like it.
Speaker 3:
[23:20] I love this little guy. All of the artists' renditions are great.
Speaker 2:
[23:24] Yeah. It's growing on me. The art of renditions fuck with me. The fossil's really cute. The fossil is very cute.
Speaker 1:
[23:30] Look at Opabinia while we're here then as well. This is, Opabinia is my fave. It just looks so dumb.
Speaker 2:
[23:36] I do like, now this friend, this is an alien. This is straight up an alien. I like this friend.
Speaker 3:
[23:41] He's friend shaped. He does have just a single claw, doesn't he?
Speaker 1:
[23:45] Wow. The actual fossil is so cool as well. You can really see that.
Speaker 3:
[23:50] Stunning. You can see the little grabbers right on the end of the claw. That's great.
Speaker 1:
[23:56] It's so well preserved. This is the power of the Burgess sale. It's also strange and alien and fantastic.
Speaker 2:
[24:04] Yeah, it's so funny to judge this, Caroline, because it's like this is like literally the first animals and you can't judge. It's like, I haven't even started, it's not fair.
Speaker 1:
[24:15] I could go on. There's lots more to talk about, but there are like because there are like tens of thousands of fossils at the Burgess sale. But the point is, this is my favorite part of the Anthropocene, Ella, you're right.
Speaker 3:
[24:24] This is so cool.
Speaker 1:
[24:26] The point of this, this is a really good marker of the result of the Cambrian explosion. This radiation of wonderful, complex animal life, a rapid evolution of body plan innovation and diversification, which resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla aka multi-cellular animals. The Cambrian explosion itself lasted from around 13 to 25 million years. But it's the eruption of life and what came afterwards, and how that shapes the world, that is an important feature of the Cambrian period that really defines it. But it's also defined by, it had a generally warm climate. All of the animals were in the ocean, like I said, and most of the landmass was in the Southern Hemisphere at the time.
Speaker 3:
[25:15] I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:
[25:16] That's wild, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[25:17] So these things are the things that define the Cambrian. But let's get more specific with it, okay?
Speaker 2:
[25:23] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[25:24] Within the Cambrian, we have four epochs, okay? Let's take a look at the last two, the Meilingian Epoch and the Forongian Epoch. These are both named after their GSSP sites, which are in different mountain ranges in China. So that's where you can see where it roughly starts. Right. But what distinguishes them from one another? Any guesses? It's so weird and specific.
Speaker 2:
[25:50] That's very, yeah, your grin is scary. Because I'm like, what would make you that happy?
Speaker 1:
[25:56] I mean, there's a lot of things, but the thing that is so often is really obvious in the fossil record.
Speaker 2:
[26:02] Is this a specific animal?
Speaker 3:
[26:03] Is it like the rise of worms or something?
Speaker 1:
[26:07] No, man. It's trilobites, baby. Oh, we love.
Speaker 4:
[26:11] We love.
Speaker 2:
[26:12] When the trilobite gang rolls in, that's when you know you're in this epoch, baby.
Speaker 1:
[26:18] These epochs are dominated by different kinds of trilobites. Trilobites are generally really good markers or like index fossils of epochs in the Cambrian and later.
Speaker 2:
[26:29] Index fossils.
Speaker 1:
[26:29] Because there were thousands of species and they were very diverse. They had a really widespread global distribution and they are really dominant in the fossil record because their exoskeletons fossilize so easy so that they're really helpful for telling where we are in any period. Because of this, they're very frequently the markers at GSSP reference points for the start of new epochs.
Speaker 2:
[26:55] It's just so, it just keeps blowing my mind that like we are using these, you keep using these words as like helpful and useful or it's just like, oh, and you just take a left at the origin of all multicellular life, and then if you see when this part goes, and it's like a grad student, like, oh, that's so helpful, is just wild.
Speaker 1:
[27:18] Now, one thing I think people don't know as well about the Cambrian is that as well as an explosion of life, it is also marked by a lot of extinction events.
Speaker 3:
[27:28] Interesting, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[27:30] Easy come, easy go.
Speaker 1:
[27:31] You get all this new life competing for space, for a niche, in an ocean that is changing, in oxygen, in temperature, and not everything is going to be successful. So the change from the second to the third epoch, so into the Mialangian at around 506 MA, is mostly defined by the first major trilobite extinction.
Speaker 3:
[27:55] Oh, that's so cool.
Speaker 1:
[27:58] So that in particular, the fossil records show that two families, whole families of trilobites, are not present from the start of the Mialangian epoch. So I want to get some context here. A current order that we have is Carnivora. And under that includes multiple families, but it includes Canidae, so all dogs, wolves, foxes, and the family Felidae, so all cats, big and small. It would be like, right now, all dogs and cats going extinct.
Speaker 3:
[28:29] Wow, what an image. That's helpful.
Speaker 1:
[28:32] Wow. It's a significant shift in the biodiversity within the ocean, right? Aside from this big trilobite shift, the Mielungian epoch is also defined by its graptolites.
Speaker 3:
[28:45] Graptolites?
Speaker 1:
[28:46] Oh, let me tell you about graptolites. I love these guys, man. I love them so much. They're a kind of colonial zooplankton that lived in a protein-based tube.
Speaker 2:
[28:57] Caroline, sorry, are you having the same realization I'm having as you're laughing? Is that this topic isn't so long because the time period is long, but because Ella found a million detours.
Speaker 3:
[29:09] Ella's just like, I love this little guy, and this little guy, I love him, and this little guy, and this little guy.
Speaker 1:
[29:15] I have no idea how much I cut from this as well.
Speaker 2:
[29:19] Oh my fucking god.
Speaker 1:
[29:22] I love this little guy, I love this little guy. Here is a picture of some graptolites. Oh, wonderful.
Speaker 2:
[29:32] Oh, I love these.
Speaker 1:
[29:34] Do you want to describe them? This is their tube. You can't actually see them because they were too organic.
Speaker 3:
[29:39] They're too fleshy. It's like a long U shape or almost like a V shape. And then it's got like a serrated edge on the inside of the wine glass, basically.
Speaker 1:
[29:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[29:51] It's cool as hell.
Speaker 3:
[29:52] It's really cool. It kind of gives the energy of like something somebody would have on their wallpaper in like the 80s. You know, I kind of want to decorate my whole home with this.
Speaker 1:
[30:00] I like that you guys, so if a fossil can be boring, this is a boring fossil.
Speaker 3:
[30:07] We've reacted really positively, didn't we?
Speaker 1:
[30:09] I love them too.
Speaker 2:
[30:10] I like it.
Speaker 1:
[30:11] It's because it's simply by virtue of them being fucking everywhere. Okay. I have some right here.
Speaker 2:
[30:19] Are you fucking kidding me?
Speaker 1:
[30:20] You can't really see it.
Speaker 2:
[30:21] Are you actually fucking kidding me?
Speaker 1:
[30:22] Yeah, you can kind of see it there. There was this one at the bottom. Oh, yes, you can.
Speaker 2:
[30:26] Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:
[30:27] These ones I have are about 450 million years old, which is in the Ordovician period when they were much more abundant. But they were around in the Cambrian. And because they're so abundant, they are again very good index fossils. Basically, geologists typically just use them to date the rocks they are found in rather than it being like a new species of graptolite.
Speaker 2:
[30:44] Right.
Speaker 1:
[30:44] Although sometimes that is important because by the Meolingian epoch, benthic graptolites, benthic meaning something that dwells near the bottom of a body of water, these had a really wide spread distribution. And the animals of the Burgess Shale are also alive during this epoch. The trilobite diversity does radiate again, other life radiates. And then another extinction event happens.
Speaker 2:
[31:07] Another one.
Speaker 3:
[31:09] And another one.
Speaker 1:
[31:10] And the peak of this coincides with the boundary between the Meolingian and the Forongian epochs, the last two epochs in the Cambrian period.
Speaker 2:
[31:19] Sorry, Ella, can you get that one more time and say, and another extinction event happened.
Speaker 1:
[31:26] And then another extinction event happens. Great, thanks.
Speaker 3:
[31:32] Wow. That was lovely.
Speaker 2:
[31:33] I'm going to leave that delay in.
Speaker 1:
[31:35] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[31:36] Great.
Speaker 1:
[31:38] Okay, so basically what happens is something called the Spice occurred.
Speaker 2:
[31:43] Shut the fuck up.
Speaker 3:
[31:44] And not like in a dune way, like in a, like, what?
Speaker 1:
[31:48] Around 497 to 494 million years ago, it means the, the Steptoean positive carbon isotope excursion, the Spice. What, from what I can gather, this is basically a change in the isotopes of carbon available in the ocean. And we know this because, of course, you can measure carbon isotopes in rock pretty well. She says making it sound way simpler than it actually is. And the shift caused huge oxygen depletion in certain parts of the ocean, which in turn caused a loss of 45% of species diversity.
Speaker 3:
[32:26] That's a lot!
Speaker 1:
[32:28] Not just trilobites, but pretty huge hit for trilobites as well. Many, many species went extinct.
Speaker 2:
[32:33] I love these trilobites asides because you're like, and how's my home team doing?
Speaker 1:
[32:38] There were so many of them.
Speaker 2:
[32:39] Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Speaker 1:
[32:40] Life bounces back over this epoch, as it does throughout all of history.
Speaker 2:
[32:46] Oh, Caroline, no spoilers, but I hope they make it. I hope life makes it.
Speaker 1:
[32:51] But you get this general shift away from bottom-dwelling benthic life towards more swimming animals. So while the Mealingian was very bottom-dwelling, we're now going up.
Speaker 2:
[33:01] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[33:03] It's a new type of marine ecosystem. You're getting more vertical than horizontal. Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[33:08] Holy shit.
Speaker 1:
[33:09] So this is one of the distinctions between what distinguishes these two epochs. So what have we learned from this class? Not the specifics of the epochs, but how do we distinguish geological timespans from one another?
Speaker 2:
[33:22] Yes, right. The GSSPs, these markers.
Speaker 3:
[33:26] Those big things happening are what overall define, like, extinction event happens because of something, like because of a change in carbon isotope is the thing that actually dictates what that period is, right?
Speaker 1:
[33:41] The event doesn't necessarily dictate it. How things are changing that cause the event or what happens after the event. So basically, as you descend the hierarchy down from eons to era to period to epoch, you're becoming more specific about what is in the wrong record. You're looking for, like, finer scale changes in climate and species. So epochs often see significant distinct shifts in biodiversity. So radiations and or extinctions are mass, but not like the level you would see before a period change, which is like a mass extinction.
Speaker 2:
[34:15] Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1:
[34:17] You also get changes in the biosphere, so the ecosystems containing life from the bottom of the ocean to the air, where things are, what is living where. There's also reasonably large scale changes in climate, atmospheric gases, sea temperature. And the key to all of this, to formalizing an epoch, is that these signs have to be preserved in the geological record. Rock, ice, sediment.
Speaker 2:
[34:42] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[34:42] And as you said, Tom, you have to have a global stratotype section and point, a GSSP, as a reference for the lower boundary or a rough start of that epoch.
Speaker 2:
[34:52] It has to leave a record in the rock.
Speaker 1:
[34:54] It has to leave a record in the rock, and you have to have a rough start point. Right.
Speaker 2:
[34:58] Gotcha.
Speaker 1:
[34:58] In the Cambrian, the primary markers at GSSP sites are all fossils of animals, but a fossil doesn't have to be the primary marker, it can be something else. Okay.
Speaker 2:
[35:09] I see now what's happening, Caroline, which is that the Cambrian is a chef's kiss.
Speaker 1:
[35:14] Yeah, really. I mean, it's not even perfect. There are epops within the Cambrian that haven't even been named yet because they are... Whoa, what? We still haven't found the appropriate place for their GSSP. I'm telling you all of this, as you've surmised, Tom, because the Anthropocene is an epoch. Could I have just told you that last bit? Well, yes, but that's not as fun.
Speaker 3:
[35:43] You couldn't have told us about Trilobites at the same time.
Speaker 1:
[35:46] Exactly.
Speaker 3:
[35:47] You have.
Speaker 1:
[35:48] Now, halfway through my script, let's talk about the Anthropocene.
Speaker 2:
[35:53] Name title drop. The title screen appears halfway through the fucking episode.
Speaker 1:
[35:58] Have you ever watched a TV show where they put the title screen at the end of the first episode? And I'm like, oh, you think you're so good.
Speaker 3:
[36:05] You think you're so clever.
Speaker 2:
[36:07] The way fucking Invincible does it, where they play it when he says the name. Oh, I love the Invincible title screen.
Speaker 1:
[36:13] Okay. Oh, wait, we have to talk about the Holocene first. Sorry.
Speaker 2:
[36:17] I'm going to strangle you.
Speaker 1:
[36:21] This is a lot shorter of a tangent. Well, it's not even a tangent. You do need to know it. The Holocene epoch began around 11,700 years ago. It is in the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era of the Panerozoic eon. Its GSSP is in a borehole of the Central Greenland ice sheet. There are no fossils to mark it, but it does show a sharp decline of deuterium or heavy hydrogen present. Basically, what this shows is the earth was starting to warm up after a glacial period, an ice age. So the epoch before, the Pleistocene, was defined by repeated cycles of ice ages. But the Holocene doesn't have that. It's generally warm and stable. The fantastical megafauna of the Pleistocene are gone. You don't have any more giant ground sloths which dug massive tunnels in South America. You don't have any woolly rhinos or 3,000 kilogram marsupials called diptrotodon. Okay? You just have your bog standard sloths and rhinos and koalas.
Speaker 3:
[37:26] What is the point?
Speaker 2:
[37:29] I love sloths. Fuck you, sloths are great.
Speaker 1:
[37:31] The Holocene has also seen all of humanity's recorded history so far. Recorded history because 11,700 years. We should probably then finally talk about the Anthropocene.
Speaker 3:
[37:44] Nice.
Speaker 1:
[37:44] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[37:45] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[37:45] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[37:46] Okay. Wait, wait. Okay. So, so wait, is the Anthropocene an epoch?
Speaker 1:
[37:52] Is it, Tom? Let's talk about this.
Speaker 2:
[37:54] This is sort of, because I have also heard the Holocene defined as our current.
Speaker 1:
[38:00] We're getting there.
Speaker 2:
[38:02] Okay. Because I was like, yeah, I remember. And also, I don't have to give it away. As we look at this chart, the most recent epoch is the Holocene. Like that's the top, at the very top. It's also a great Bon Iver song anyway.
Speaker 1:
[38:14] Yes, it is. So the idea that humans have had a significant effect on the Earth's geology has been floating around since like the late 1800s. We've been thinking about it for a while.
Speaker 3:
[38:24] That long? Wow.
Speaker 1:
[38:25] It wasn't popularized until the early 2000s. So there's this atmospheric chemist called Paul Crutzen, which many geologists today will kind of like look at as, he's the guy who started the Anthropocene chat. He didn't single-handedly start the Anthropocene. He came up with the term Anthropocene. Apparently, on the spot at a scientific meeting in 2000. And he suggested this could actually be a new geological epoch. There were decades of evidence gathering and debate. And in 2024, the International Commission on Stratigraphy and its parent body voted against formally declaring the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit. Oh, wha- So no, we are not in the Anthropocene. We are in the Holocene. End of topic. Thank you. Woo!
Speaker 2:
[39:15] No, sorry. No, no, no.
Speaker 1:
[39:16] No, that was it.
Speaker 2:
[39:17] I have-
Speaker 1:
[39:17] Sorry, that was it.
Speaker 2:
[39:19] I have so many questions. Okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Let me get these years straight. Because I assumed it was a different time period. When did he suggest this?
Speaker 1:
[39:30] 2000.
Speaker 2:
[39:31] What the fuck? Okay. I didn't know it was that recent. And then in 2024, which is even more recent, it was rejected. After this podcast started, it was rejected.
Speaker 3:
[39:42] Yes. That's a horrifying thought and I don't like that.
Speaker 2:
[39:46] So if you had covered this earlier, we would have had to move up a quarter.
Speaker 1:
[39:50] It still would have been a pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:
[39:52] I know. It's just so interesting because I thought we were going to... God damn it. I'm seeing now what's happening. Because I thought we were going to cover the Anthropocene. In fact, we're going to cover the early 2000s. It sounds like the 24 years from 2000 to 2024.
Speaker 1:
[40:08] We are going to cover the Anthropocene, the signs of the Anthropocene. Don't worry. But we are also going to cover what is happening here. Basically, why was this rejected? So I'm not going to make a habit of this. I don't think it's good to, but because this is the Maximum Fun Drive episode, I did reach out to someone for this.
Speaker 3:
[40:26] Nice.
Speaker 1:
[40:27] A geologist and a paleontologist called Professor Jan Zalasiewicz. He is a leading expert in this area.
Speaker 2:
[40:35] Holy shit.
Speaker 1:
[40:36] And here is what I asked him. In your opinion, are we in the Anthropocene epoch?
Speaker 4:
[40:42] Yes. If you will allow me two words, definitely yes.
Speaker 1:
[40:45] Excellent. Jan, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2:
[40:49] Motherfucker!
Speaker 1:
[40:52] Thanks, Jan.
Speaker 2:
[40:52] God damn it.
Speaker 1:
[40:56] As your expert, Jan won an IG Nobel Prize in 2023 for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. It's because wetting the surface causes fossils and minerals to stand out better. So, you know, he has the authority to talk about the Anthropocene.
Speaker 3:
[41:11] Good science right there.
Speaker 2:
[41:12] Oh my God.
Speaker 1:
[41:14] Oh, okay. He is also the chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, an interdisciplinary research group established by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2008 to try and determine the reality of the Anthropocene as a geological time unit.
Speaker 3:
[41:29] I mean, I care more about the IG Nobel, but that's still impressive.
Speaker 1:
[41:34] So by 2016, the AWG had more or less said, yes, the Anthropocene is a real epoch, but as we heard, the ICS ultimately disagreed. Okay.
Speaker 3:
[41:46] Interesting.
Speaker 2:
[41:47] Ella, my favorite gift on this podcast, a dispute between two heavily acronymised organisations.
Speaker 1:
[41:57] This isn't over, so let's dig into it. We know empirically that the climate is unstable, the earth is warming, life is changing, and that it is humans who are causing all of that.
Speaker 3:
[42:11] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[42:11] But that in itself is not enough to declare a new human-defined epoch. We need to see changes, as we discussed, in the geological record.
Speaker 2:
[42:20] In the rocks.
Speaker 1:
[42:21] Or ice, whatever.
Speaker 2:
[42:23] Ice is rocks.
Speaker 3:
[42:23] Is this plastic in the rocks?
Speaker 1:
[42:27] Oh, I was about to say, what do you think we're looking for in the geological record?
Speaker 2:
[42:31] I wonder, because I know plastic is obvious, on the human time scale is crazy, but on the geological time scale, is it? Is it that significant?
Speaker 3:
[42:38] I think it's there.
Speaker 1:
[42:39] Yeah, the plastic is an interesting one.
Speaker 3:
[42:41] But in terms of like other stuff, I mean, an increase in...
Speaker 2:
[42:45] Skeletons that are dabbing.
Speaker 1:
[42:47] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[42:48] And you think plastic hasn't hit the... You think plastic isn't there geologically, but you think dabbing is, is what I'm hearing from you Tom.
Speaker 2:
[42:56] No, I think the anthropological and geological significance of dabbing is far superior.
Speaker 1:
[43:00] The GSSP will be someone dabbing.
Speaker 2:
[43:02] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[43:05] Okay. I won't make you go on unless you have something Caroline. No, you're good.
Speaker 3:
[43:09] I was just thinking about like the rise in carbon in the atmosphere has that impacted...
Speaker 1:
[43:14] This is a pretty big one.
Speaker 3:
[43:16] Nice.
Speaker 2:
[43:18] Nuclear bomb tests.
Speaker 1:
[43:19] Yeah. I know that's an important one too.
Speaker 2:
[43:21] Oh, dabbing? I said dabbing. I'm sorry. Continue.
Speaker 1:
[43:26] Okay. There is a bunch of stuff here and I'm just going to go into detail about like two of them starting with the most glaring thing, Caroline, you said it, it's climate change and it's carbon dioxide. For like 15 millennia, atmospheric carbon dioxide has remained pretty steady. We got a few blips, normally from like gases coming out of the ocean, but when you hit the 20th century, damn, like it's crazy. If you look at a graph, it's insane. If you look at a graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is like measured in PPM particles per million, so it's just like the number of molecules per one million molecules of dry air, you start, like it starts to gradually rise in the mid 1800s. When you reach the 1950s, it's like almost a vertical line up. Wow. So in 2024, we were at 427 PPM, which is a 50% increase over what had been steadily for 10,000 years. This can be hard to grasp, like what that means, but in a 2020 article called Old and New Patterns of the Anthropocene by Jan Zalasiewicz, he said, the extra human-produced carbon dioxide weighs about a trillion metric tons. That's about the same as 150,000 great pyramids of Khufu hanging in the air above us. Considered as a pure layer of gas around the earth, it is about a meter thick and so waist-high to an adult, but already over the head of a small child and is now thickening at about a millimetre of fortnight. It will, at current rates, keep up with or outpace the growth of that child.
Speaker 3:
[45:04] Ha! Ha!
Speaker 2:
[45:06] Fuck!
Speaker 3:
[45:06] I don't like that. I don't like that at all.
Speaker 1:
[45:09] It's a very, very stark image. We know why this is. Of course, no surprises. It's burning fossil fuels. But the question is, is it in the geological record? I won't make you guess. It is.
Speaker 2:
[45:23] That makes sense. Knowing what other things have made it to the record, I feel like.
Speaker 1:
[45:28] Where do you think you find this record?
Speaker 2:
[45:30] Good question. Is ice easier to...
Speaker 3:
[45:33] I was going to guess ice.
Speaker 2:
[45:35] More layers are...
Speaker 1:
[45:36] Yes. Yeah, that's exactly it. So the Antarctic ice sheet is our best archive for historical carbon dioxide levels. You get like fossilized air bubbles trapped in because you get an annual new layer of ice.
Speaker 3:
[45:48] Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:
[45:49] And so you get this kind of snapshot of what the atmosphere was like within the ice layers. Our post-industrial carbon CO2 levels are very clearly in the Antarctic ice sheet. Fossil fuel combustion has also increased the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotopes, which can be seen in things like tree rings as well.
Speaker 3:
[46:07] Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:
[46:08] So this change in carbon has led to significant warming of the planet and more than 1.5 degrees Celsius global increase compared to pre-industrial levels, which can also be calculated in oxygen isotopes found in Greenland ice cores. You can see warming this way. Proponents for the Anthropocene do consider these clear geological markers for a new epoch, okay?
Speaker 3:
[46:31] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[46:31] But this is where I want to bring the other side of the argument in.
Speaker 2:
[46:35] Okay. Because now I'm back on board. It's in the record.
Speaker 3:
[46:39] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[46:40] We have another Jan, Jan Piotrowski. He's a geologist at Aarhus University.
Speaker 2:
[46:45] The Jan Wars.
Speaker 3:
[46:45] It's the Jan Wars.
Speaker 1:
[46:47] He's a geologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. In 2024, he was one of the people who voted against the proposal to establish Anthropocene as a new epoch.
Speaker 3:
[46:56] Ella, are you going to have an audio of you interviewing this guy and asking him and him just going no. And if I get two words, definitely no.
Speaker 1:
[47:06] Asking Jan Zalasiewicz and being like, you have one word. To this very prominent geologist was very funny. No, I didn't antivirus. I did email him, but he didn't go back to me. That's not to say that he wouldn't want to.
Speaker 2:
[47:22] You actually wanted to do this? you, god damn it. Oh, that's even funnier.
Speaker 1:
[47:27] It might have just been lost.
Speaker 2:
[47:28] I can't believe you actually.
Speaker 1:
[47:29] Jan did an interview in 2024 shortly after the vote. And in it, he argues that the changes we are seeing now are not enough to justify a new epoch. Quote, the end of the last ice age, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Holocene, was marked by environmental changes that were significantly greater than those that would have marked the beginning of the Anthropocene. For example, the temperature rose by one degrees Celsius per decade in Wales 15,000 years ago. 11,700 years ago in Greenland, a warming of seven degrees occurred in just 50 years. These rates of changes are greater than those our planet has experienced since. So instead, he argues that the Anthropocene should be described as a geological event.
Speaker 3:
[48:13] Okay, interesting.
Speaker 1:
[48:14] So an event being something like biological explosion, the Great Oxidation.
Speaker 2:
[48:20] The Cambrian explosion.
Speaker 3:
[48:21] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[48:21] These are also established in stratigraphy, but they are not new time periods. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[48:28] Sure. Okay.
Speaker 1:
[48:30] It's a geological event that causes significant changes at different times in different locations, but it accumulates into major transformation over time. That's a geological event. Fine. Okay. This is where I'll bring Jan Zalasiewicz back. I did actually talk to him, obviously. Okay, good. I guess I'm just going to say yes. He obviously does not believe that the Anthropocene is just an event, and this is why.
Speaker 4:
[48:57] The event is not simply a relabeling, but it's a reconceptualizing of the Anthropocene. The event means taking all of human impacts, going back thousands of years, even 50,000 years, to when we started killing off the mammoths and the woolly rhinos, and calling that the Anthropocene. That is a completely different idea to the idea that we've been developing in the Anthropocene Working Group, which is that the Anthropocene is a very recent change from general stability that humans have lived through for thousands of years, hundreds of generations in climate, in the biosphere and so on. There's no realistic way back to the world of the Holocene, back to the world that our grandparents and great grandparents and great great great great grandparents lived in.
Speaker 1:
[49:52] Okay. Does that make sense? He's saying, yes, things in the past may have changed just as much, but we're not going back now. Yeah, you know, can we justify the extremes that we are going through right now are connected to humans 10,000, 1000, or even 100 years ago. Can we ever go back to that? Jan does not believe so. That's our first point. The other area I want to explore in a bit more depth is life and extinction. The general consensus is that there have been five major mass extinctions in Earth's history.
Speaker 3:
[50:26] Interesting.
Speaker 1:
[50:28] There is an actual threshold for a mass extinction that is generally used. Seventy-five percent of the world species being lost in less than 2.8 million years.
Speaker 3:
[50:37] That's so... That makes what's happening now feel very mass extinction-y.
Speaker 1:
[50:44] Well, the last mass extinction meeting the criteria was 66 million years ago. It's the thing that caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. It was the meteor. It was the meteor.
Speaker 3:
[50:55] TM.
Speaker 1:
[50:57] Four of these extinct mass extinction events sit at the boundaries between geological periods, the one above an epoch, Ordovician, Silurian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene. This makes sense as extinctions like mass extinctions or big extinction events that we've talked about fundamentally change ecosystems and evolutionary trajectories. They change the planet. Today, many scientists argue that we are currently going through or will soon go through a sixth mass extinction of our own creation. But many disagree. There is conflicting data. There was a 2022 study which surveyed over 3,000 experts, and it estimated around 30% of species have been threatened or driven to extinction, with it projected to increase over time. On a 2.8 million year like threshold, like time span to be, we could get there, right? But then there was this 2025 study that got a lot of press. It reported that there was no plausible scenario that will reach 75% species loss, that the reporting hasn't been accurate. We're losing a lot of species from...
Speaker 2:
[52:00] We're projecting the graph of trying to be like in 2.8.
Speaker 1:
[52:03] Yeah, so a lot of these species are lost are island species, which are more likely to be threatened due to climate change versus other species which are inland or in different climates. I'm not going to go over that data. It did seem reasonably sound. The papers and the show notes.
Speaker 2:
[52:19] But it's a complicated metric.
Speaker 1:
[52:21] It's very complicated.
Speaker 2:
[52:22] We've debated what is a species and then being like...
Speaker 1:
[52:26] A sixth mass extinction would certainly be a reason for a new epoch, if not a new period entirely. It's just not possible to say definitively at this time. But I should take... To be clear, even the scientists who do not believe that we are approaching a mass extinction acknowledge that there is a tremendous rate of species decline. No one's saying that this isn't a problem.
Speaker 3:
[52:44] Right, yeah, that's a good thing to clarify.
Speaker 2:
[52:46] Are you having this too, Caroline, this sort of creeping thing of like, does it matter what we call this where we draw this line?
Speaker 3:
[52:56] The place that I'm going to right now is that it's really difficult to label these things whilst we're actively going through them.
Speaker 1:
[53:04] Keep hold of that thought, Caroline.
Speaker 3:
[53:06] Okay, wonderful, cool.
Speaker 1:
[53:08] But yeah, this species decline could be a sign of the Anthropocene. A really good, or not good, but you get me, example of this is insect populations. I've seen data anywhere from like 40 to 75% decline in insect populations globally over the past 30 years.
Speaker 2:
[53:24] And you think that's good.
Speaker 1:
[53:26] Yeah, wow. I love it. But the funny thing about insects is that they're really-
Speaker 2:
[53:33] You think it's funny?
Speaker 1:
[53:34] God. Wow. They're really difficult to study geologically. Insects and paleontology-
Speaker 2:
[53:41] Ain't got bones, baby.
Speaker 1:
[53:42] Yeah, they don't go well together. They're really frail, the insect bodies. They disintegrate. They do not transfer well into the fossil record. And so having them in the geological record is really, it's just not very common. We do have some insects from older time periods, but they're never an abundant fossil. So even though they're the canary in the coalmine for this mass extinction, we can't rely on them in geological terms.
Speaker 2:
[54:12] Fascinating.
Speaker 1:
[54:13] And there is a flip side as well to this rapidly changing ecosystem. Not everyone is a loser. There are a lot more of us than there ever have been before.
Speaker 2:
[54:26] And we are an animal.
Speaker 1:
[54:30] Humans now make up about a third of the mass of large vertebrates on the planet. And the remaining two thirds, mostly, is almost entirely made out of the things we eat. Cows, pigs, most of all chickens.
Speaker 2:
[54:45] Oh yeah?
Speaker 3:
[54:46] Wow, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[54:47] 30 billion chickens in the world.
Speaker 2:
[54:49] Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:
[54:51] All other birds in the world combined, okay? And what is interesting about these is that they are distinct from chickens a hundred years ago, because we have bred them to be monstrously overgrown, as Jan put it in his article.
Speaker 3:
[55:06] Which Jan was this?
Speaker 1:
[55:07] Jan Zalasiewicz.
Speaker 2:
[55:10] The iguan or not the iguan?
Speaker 1:
[55:11] The iguan.
Speaker 2:
[55:13] Okay. So, you know, T-Rex in the Triassic makes a wish on a shooting star that says, I wish to be the most abundant species in the future. And then, you know, a monkey's paw curls and it's like...
Speaker 1:
[55:28] So when our bones fossilize, and the bones of our giant chickens fossilize, they're going to be the GSSP. It will be a significant shift in the fossil record from a hundred to two hundred years ago. It will be really clear.
Speaker 2:
[55:41] All those chicken wings, all those.
Speaker 1:
[55:43] Well, there will just be so much of it that you cannot ignore that that's in the fossil record.
Speaker 2:
[55:48] Jesus fucking Christ.
Speaker 1:
[55:49] But there's a potential problem with using this as a mark of the Anthropocene. It hasn't happened yet. Bones take thousands or millions of years to fossilize. They are not part of the geological record yet. And Jan Piotrowski argues that deciding a new epoch should be based on mature geological data rather than predictions.
Speaker 2:
[56:12] Yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 1:
[56:13] He said, if the Anthropocene started recently, then its future impact is based on predictions and not on available geological data. Consequently, its status should be confirmed by future generations of geologists.
Speaker 2:
[56:28] I see both sides. I really see both sides of this.
Speaker 3:
[56:30] Yeah, it's tough.
Speaker 1:
[56:32] I asked Jan Zalasiewicz about this idea. So should we wait until things are clearer in the record before labeling a new epoch?
Speaker 2:
[56:39] Damn, Ella, you're getting the real questions.
Speaker 4:
[56:41] The answer to that is things have already changed. So we already have more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We already have a very substantially changed biosphere. By extinctions and by mass species invasions between every continent and every ocean, we already have thousands of different kinds of novel materials, new pollutants as we call them, from plastics to pesticides to the forever chemicals and so on. There are just so many of them and they are so pervasive around the earth. These are already part of the earth's geology. The Anthropocene will carry on changing, but the changes are already here and very obviously once one begins the analyses to check them out.
Speaker 1:
[57:32] There are some really clear things in the geological record already, like when we talk about carbon, but then the things that Jan Piotrowski would say are predictions are not to Jan Zalasiewicz because to him it's already written because it's so overwhelmingly prevalent. It will be there when we look in a thousand years, in ten thousand years.
Speaker 2:
[57:51] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[57:52] And then I think it's just like, is it, it's not that something's changing, it's like, is it a geological event or is it a new epoch? I guess is the sort of point that I'm stuck at is like, how can you say that it's not an event when we haven't got to the end of it yet?
Speaker 1:
[58:06] Yeah, you know, that's a really, really good point. There's also this argument that even if we change our ways and we don't leave as much of a mark on the planet and we are not as visible in the geological record, we are still going to have a clear long-term geological effect. So Jan Zalasiewicz gave me a really interesting example of that.
Speaker 4:
[58:27] It's now pretty much certain, I think, beyond reasonable doubt, we have postponed the next ice age, because once you start putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it takes many thousands of years for it to slowly come out of the atmosphere, back into the land and into the oceans by natural processes. The current research suggests we've put back the next ice age by at least 50,000 years.
Speaker 1:
[58:52] 50,000 years pushing back the next ice age is what the research says. Obviously, we can't know until it happens, but the research is pretty clear. That's a very clear sign that we have irrevocably changed the Earth's geology.
Speaker 2:
[59:05] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[59:07] But again, we don't know. For the sake of time, I'm not going to go into any more depth on more signs of the Anthropocene, but there are more. There are many more. I will quickly rattle for you a few more examples, which Jan mentioned previously. The plastic pollution, Caroline, you brought that up.
Speaker 2:
[59:24] Nice one, Caroline.
Speaker 1:
[59:25] Estimates vary, but around 10 million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year. Although previous estimates put the breakdown of something like a water bottle around 450 years, new research suggests plastic contaminants could remain in sediments for millions of years.
Speaker 2:
[59:41] That's the time scale, baby.
Speaker 1:
[59:43] There is also some signs that some plastic is already fossilizing. Another sign is, as you said, Tom, the result of nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2:
[59:51] Oh.
Speaker 1:
[59:52] You dabbed to that.
Speaker 2:
[59:53] Sorry. For listeners, I dabbed.
Speaker 3:
[59:55] You like nuclear weapons, Tom?
Speaker 2:
[60:00] Don't clip me dabbing at nuclear weapons!
Speaker 1:
[60:04] Carbon-14 from nuclear weapon test is absolutely everywhere. You can learn more about that in Tom's topic on radiocarbon dating. We also have aluminum is a surprisingly big one.
Speaker 2:
[60:15] What?
Speaker 1:
[60:15] We have made hundreds of millions of tons of aluminum.
Speaker 2:
[60:19] What?
Speaker 1:
[60:20] Aluminum for the Americans. We have also extracted a lot of other metals from rocks. You're going to be able to see that.
Speaker 2:
[60:26] Oh, fascinating. Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 1:
[60:30] We have done complete landscape changes, mass deforestation, mass farming, mining, and we have fertilizers, which we've put massive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil. So here we have some very fresh markers of the Anthropocene and many more predicted markers, okay? But there is another thing an epoch needs to be formalized. Can you remember what this is?
Speaker 3:
[60:55] A GSSP?
Speaker 1:
[60:57] It needs a start date, roughly. Sometimes the actual GSSP location is not formalized for a long time, but the rough start date is normally, you know, you need that to define when an epoch is. So there have been a few proposals for the Anthropocene GSSP, or the start date at least, I should say. You want to guess? It's quite precise.
Speaker 2:
[61:21] Like metal tools? Or I'm like, that's like alloys? Certain alloys form and try to think like, what's the marker would be a marker of the Anthropocene potentially? Or is it more later? Is it the like industrial revolution?
Speaker 1:
[61:34] Yeah, it's way more recent than that.
Speaker 2:
[61:36] Oh, OK.
Speaker 1:
[61:36] Because like the things we're talking about, these mass changes in plastic and carbon, these are recent things.
Speaker 3:
[61:43] You said 1950 earlier, so I'm going to go 1950.
Speaker 1:
[61:47] Great, great guess. So there have been a few proposals. The British Industrial Revolution in the 18th century is one because it kickstarted our reliance on fossil fuels. Some people do go a bit further back. They say when humans began farming 10,000 years ago.
Speaker 2:
[62:01] See, that's why I was thinking like that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:
[62:03] That's not a super popular one, but people have suggested it. But in 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group proposed a very specific start date, 1952. The primary GSSP was proposed to be Crawford Lake in Canada, where the sediments contain very clear spikes in two isotopes of Plutonium. And this is due to the first hydrogen bomb test. This is called Ivy Mike. I mentioned it before. This is where two super heavy elements were discovered, Einsteinium and Fermium.
Speaker 2:
[62:38] Is this the one they flew a plane through?
Speaker 1:
[62:40] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[62:40] Holy shit. No, yeah, sorry. Didn't expect that to make a comeback cameo.
Speaker 1:
[62:45] So this is what the GSSP is. The start date doesn't just reflect nuclear weapons testing, but something called the Great Acceleration. And this is how Jan Zalasiewicz described it to me.
Speaker 4:
[62:57] The Great Acceleration is the planetary effect of what we've called the Great Post-World War II Boom, when there was a surge in population, in industrialisation, in globalisation, new kinds of technology, new powers, because we suddenly started using much more power, fossil fuel power, nuclear power, then came in. And the effects of this were so great on the atmosphere, on climate, on biology, on the geography and chemistry of the Earth, that it literally changed the planet and therefore it became the basis for the Anthropocene.
Speaker 1:
[63:35] Makes sense? Yeah. Big change, very fast. Makes sense, interesting.
Speaker 2:
[63:39] It is crazy to have a specific year. Yeah, very specific. There was a most popular album at the start of, that can mark the start of the Anthropocene.
Speaker 1:
[63:48] Oh my God. So the Anthropocene's biggest hater, Jan Piotrowski, obviously does not consider this a good starting point for the Anthropocene. He said, there are geological traces of human presence well before the proposed start date of the Anthropocene, beginning of agriculture, settlements of the America, industrial revolution, et cetera. The Anthropocene cannot be precisely defined because it began at different times and in different places on Earth. What's more, the proposed date, 1952, makes no sense as humanity's impact on the Earth goes back much further than that. This would make the Second World War pre-Anthropocene. I think the argument that you can't precisely pinpoint it because human industrial acceleration has happened at different times around the world. It happened in 1952 for a good chunk of the Western world, but like there were many other places where that isn't necessarily the case. So I asked Zalasiewicz about it because I did think this was an interesting point.
Speaker 2:
[64:46] Damn, you're pressing these questions. Wow.
Speaker 4:
[64:49] That criticism of precision or the lack of it can be applied to every geological boundary through all of geological time. The world changes in a complicated way. Even when the meteorite hit that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, the effects of that took days, weeks, months, years to spread around the earth. With the Anthropocene, I think we have here the second sharpest change in earth history that we know of. Because not only do we have the plutonium signal, which is as sharp as that of the meteorite impact, but we also have so many other things changing within years and decades of that. So by geological comparisons with older time units, it is very sharp and very easy to trace. It's not absolutely perfect, but then there is no geological boundary anywhere that is absolutely perfect.
Speaker 2:
[65:49] Fair point.
Speaker 3:
[65:49] I love that he was like, yeah, but the meteorite didn't impact everything at the same time, so there.
Speaker 1:
[65:55] I mean, it's a fair argument.
Speaker 4:
[65:57] It's such a fair argument, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[65:59] When you get so stuck on the nitty gritty details like that, it can be prohibitive at times.
Speaker 1:
[66:05] And so Jan kind of implied there that this is not the first time in geological research history that there has been debate over dividing geological time units. There is a level of subjectivity to defining boundaries like this. It is humans putting their specific human perspective on a really huge, complex system of earth based on, in the past at least, confusing and incomplete records. The argument here is that these are very good and clear records. And the International Commission on Stratigraphy are constantly updating their International Chronostratigraphic Chart that I showed you before to incorporate new evidence. The dates are often amended on that. So even if, for example, they were to put the GSSP at Lake Crawford in 1952, that could be changed to a different time or place if better evidence was found. Still, the argument that different times, different places, different industrial, I do think is interesting, maybe too precise. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is where a third voice enters the chat, Earl Ellis, a professor of geography. Not Jan, it's not a third Jan, Earl Ellis.
Speaker 2:
[67:12] Did you try to find a third Jan that supported this?
Speaker 1:
[67:15] He's a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. From what I can tell, Earl does believe in the Anthropocene. In fact, he was a member of the Anthropocene Working Group until 2023, when he published a letter titled, Why I resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group. That's talking.
Speaker 3:
[67:37] Let's go.
Speaker 1:
[67:39] It's a little bit of scientific drama. I will read directly from his letter. Recent efforts to promote the group's final GSSP and site proposal have now established, beyond doubt, there is no longer any place for broader perspectives on anthropocene definition within the AWG. The group exists only to promote a single, narrow perspective and differing views are no longer acceptable. Damn. I clearly no longer have any useful role in the group. Whoa! To define the Anthropocene as a shallow band of sediment in a single lake is an esoteric academic matter. But dividing Earth's human transformation into two parts, pre and post 1950, does real damage by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth's unfolding social-environmental crisis. Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet? The political ramifications of such a misleading and scientifically inaccurate betrayal are clearly profound and regressive. Perhaps AWG's break in Earth history will simply be ignored outside stratigraphy, but this is undoubtedly neither AWG's goal nor it is the way AWG's narrative is being interpreted across the public media.
Speaker 2:
[68:50] I like that last one. Wow.
Speaker 1:
[68:52] That's kind of spicy.
Speaker 2:
[68:54] And did you ask Jan about this email?
Speaker 1:
[68:58] I read I did.
Speaker 2:
[69:02] Can you, I'm, Caroline, I'm so glad we have Ella on the podcast because neither of us would ever be so bold as to.
Speaker 1:
[69:10] I didn't ask him about the letter specifically.
Speaker 3:
[69:13] I asked him about the letter. So what do you think about what Earl said? Tell me more.
Speaker 1:
[69:16] I thought maybe that would be pushing it because he obviously knows this guy.
Speaker 2:
[69:19] Of course, of course.
Speaker 1:
[69:20] I asked him about the specifics of one of the things Earl said because I thought that it was kind of compelling that like, oh, other planetary changes prior to 1950, not enough, you know? Are we ignoring this kind of like colonial nations doing quite a lot of damage to the planet before 1950 when the rest of the world started to get on board? He is what Jan Zalasiewicz said.
Speaker 4:
[69:43] The Holocene Epoch, still formally the epoch that we're living in, has been separated off from all of the earlier times of the ice ages because, you know, it is full of human signals. You know, there is a big archaeological record, a record of deforestation and so on, extending back to all of that time. We're perfectly aware of that. But the point of the Anthropocene is that there's been a big change from those conditions of the Holocene when there was much human activity, many humans living on Earth and thriving and changing things, but effectively leaving the Earth more or less the same in its fundamental conditions of climate, sea level and a broadly continuous biology and biosphere. The point of the Anthropocene, it is changing from those human influenced conditions to one where the Earth has been transformed irreversibly.
Speaker 1:
[70:41] So basically what you're saying is that yes, the Holocene is already defined as a period with human activity.
Speaker 2:
[70:47] Yes, I can see, sure.
Speaker 1:
[70:49] But now we have reached a point of irreversible change.
Speaker 3:
[70:53] We're in phase two.
Speaker 1:
[70:54] Yeah, it's phase two human-anthro-boogaloo. He basically claims that we had not had this irreversible change before this point or around this point. I don't know enough to say either way. But Earl Ellis also makes the really interesting point in this letter that despite this being a scientific endeavor on its face, putting such a hard date on the start of the Anthropocene has political implications.
Speaker 3:
[71:18] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[71:19] I feel like that's been a looming undercurrent of this whole thing is wherefore this, like what, why, and you, because we've been mentioning clearly climate change, plastics, nuclear war, all deeply political things, right?
Speaker 1:
[71:36] Yeah, I mean, the term Anthropocene is part of popular culture. You guys have both heard it.
Speaker 3:
[71:40] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[71:40] But you know, there's so much new to you here. It's part of social science. It can be really hard to disentangle science from opinion in this space. It can make it really sticky and confusing. Are we like putting some kind of moral blame on people at this time versus people at this time, particularly when it comes to something like a start date?
Speaker 2:
[72:01] Yeah. Another famous thing that happens all the time in science is once a name is used, sometimes you've just got to stick with it because it's being used so much, right? What will happen with the vitamin name?
Speaker 1:
[72:11] Well, this is why Jan Zalasiewicz says that the label Anthropocene is actually quite important to define.
Speaker 4:
[72:18] In the long term, we still think it is useful to formalize the Anthropocene because that means we fix and stabilize its meaning and the concept itself. So it doesn't mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people.
Speaker 2:
[72:34] Yeah, I can understand as much as we can debate. It's like you got to pick someone's got to pick someone's got to pick a thing.
Speaker 1:
[72:44] Right. And God, you feel exactly how I felt when I when I was writing this, I don't envy anyone here. I wrote so much more than this towards the end. I was just like, there's no I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[72:56] Yeah, you are not going to be the one to think about this smartly enough to.
Speaker 3:
[73:03] Yeah, you know, I keep flip-flopping between like wanting it to be a purely scientific endeavor that isn't influenced by the politics of it. And then being like, but the politics are forever entwined into what is happening and therefore it can't be separated. And then going back the other way again, I just rocks are political. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[73:23] It's funny, because like the geological signs that we see on are there and they're real. But then trying to interpret that into something becomes maybe political. I think at the end of this, I am leaning more towards like this, we're in the Anthropocene, but I also don't have a horse in this race. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:
[73:44] Also, yeah, open to any other research and science that actually comes out of it.
Speaker 1:
[73:49] And that's one of the good things that comes out of the people in the Anthropocene Working Group, they're still going and they're still looking for signs. And that is actually quite helpful in understanding how we are affecting the Earth. That is a very important and useful part of this, regardless of formalizing an epoch.
Speaker 2:
[74:05] Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:
[74:06] Okay, that brings us to the end. Finally. God damn.
Speaker 2:
[74:10] I mean, this topic has been maybe one of our best collections of the changes that humans... Like, really, it's been the greatest hits of plastic, which we've talked about, the nuclear bombs, which we've talked about, climate change, which we've talked about, like it is really a good collation of humanity's effect.
Speaker 1:
[74:27] I'll do my tiny outro. Nice. Is defining the Anthropocene in 1952 reductive? Is it too early to define it at all? Will we have a lasting impact on this earth on a massive geological time scale? I don't know. But are we having a real and significant impact on this earth and its geology right now? And is this the longest topic I've ever done? Yeah, yeah, the truth is true. Are we in the Anthropocene epoch formally? Still no. Let's see what happens.
Speaker 2:
[75:00] Let's see. Let's see what happens.
Speaker 4:
[75:03] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[75:04] Well done, Ella. My goodness.
Speaker 1:
[75:07] The sweat off my brow.
Speaker 4:
[75:08] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[75:08] Not at all what I thought this was going to be about, right? Caroline, I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[75:13] What did you think it was going to be?
Speaker 2:
[75:15] I thought we were going to be like, let's talk about cavemen. And let's talk about when humans did farming.
Speaker 1:
[75:20] I'm glad then actually that it wasn't what you thought because that shows that this term Anthropocene is so like wrapped up in so much like pop culture and pop-sci and that kind of thing that it is actually not very clear to people.
Speaker 2:
[75:36] Did you know about this debate, Caroline? I had no idea.
Speaker 3:
[75:38] No, I had no clue about it at all. Yeah. And really enjoyed hearing actual scientists talk about each side of it. That was delightful.
Speaker 1:
[75:47] I should say, I believe these people will respect each other professionally and there is no bad blood that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2:
[75:54] Totally. What's that meme where it's like all the different voices and then they line up for one line. It's like there's argument, argument, and then it's like, but also fuck climate change anyway. It's clear that there's agreement and consensus there. It's interesting. I think at times this borders on pedantry that starts to lose me. But at the same time, it is important work that does need to be, someone needs to do the pedantry at times. I'm glad people are thinking about it. This pedantry does clearly have big, wide-ranging impacts and it does make you think about some of the most important stuff in science, which is wild, and also so many parts of it. It really was, yeah, our greatest hits of a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:
[76:40] It's a real journey we just went on together, guys.
Speaker 3:
[76:42] That is a real journey.
Speaker 1:
[76:43] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[76:44] Thank you.
Speaker 1:
[76:45] You're so welcome.
Speaker 2:
[76:46] I mean, well, I think we can confidently say we're definitely on Jan's team.
Speaker 1:
[76:52] Very good. Yeah, I got to say a big thank you to Jan Zalasiewicz for that. And I do respect and re-interested by a lot of his points, and he's done great research. So, yeah, yeah, nice.
Speaker 3:
[77:07] Did you know that you can directly support the show by becoming a Maximum Fun member? Did you know that, guys? Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 1:
[77:14] I did know that, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[77:15] I did, because I've been a Maximum Fun member since 2017.
Speaker 3:
[77:20] Whoa, that's crazy. If it's something that you're thinking about doing, becoming a Maximum Fun member, then now is the time to do it. And I'll tell you why in a little bit.
Speaker 2:
[77:31] We'll wait. We'll take a pause. Go, go for it.
Speaker 1:
[77:33] Go, join now.
Speaker 2:
[77:34] Do it right now, hold on.
Speaker 3:
[77:35] Yeah, right now?
Speaker 1:
[77:36] Where do you do it, Caroline?
Speaker 3:
[77:38] Abraham, if you go to letslearneverything.com, there'll be details there. Or you can go to maximumfun.org/join for more information about memberships. Max Fun memberships are the reason why shows on the Max Fun Network are able to be made. It's the reason why our show, the one you're listening to right now, is able to be made. I don't know if everybody knows this, but Maximum Fun is a worker-owned cooperative, which means that we own our show. The people who work for Maximum Fun own the network as well. I don't know about you guys, I personally love this. One of the reasons why I love being with Max Fun, why we've stayed with Max Fun for such a long time, we own the show, we can do what we want with the show.
Speaker 2:
[78:23] In a world that is so dominated by platforms and middlemen, where I feel like every year it's like, now these two are actually owned by one company and it's like, where your membership is always of dubious quality to like Disney or HBO, it's like, where the fuck is this going? Are the creators seeing any of this?
Speaker 3:
[78:44] Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
[78:46] We directly see your membership. There is like an inherent risk in this for us in the sense of like, we rely on you guys, you know, we don't, it's not the network isn't paying us money for just making the podcast. We need people like you to support us to carry on. So if you like the show and you want it to carry on, this is a really good time to show that support.
Speaker 2:
[79:09] And why is now the best time?
Speaker 3:
[79:11] It's because it's the max fun drive. So when you become a member, obviously you get a lot of bonus content, but there are other perks that come with that membership, which we'll talk about at the end of this show. I know, right? But as you sort of mentioned, when you become a member, you can pick which shows you listen to, and most of that money goes to those shows directly. The rest goes to max fun to pay for things like Upkeep.
Speaker 2:
[79:37] Which goes directly to the workers who own it.
Speaker 3:
[79:39] Yeah, exactly. The wages to the lovely workers. All of your money basically goes to people who either make shows or who are essential in supporting those shows running as well as they do.
Speaker 1:
[79:49] And what's the minimum amount you can pay a month, Caroline?
Speaker 3:
[79:53] Thank you so much for asking that, Ella.
Speaker 2:
[79:54] What an organic question, Ella Hubber, co-host of Let's Learn Everything.
Speaker 1:
[79:59] I wasn't even given that as a prompt.
Speaker 3:
[80:01] No, it's perfect. Max fun memberships start at $5 a month and they go up from there with different levels of membership getting different rewards, especially if you join now during the max fun drive. Oh, and the rewards are good.
Speaker 1:
[80:16] They're juicy, juicy, juicy. You're going to hear about them. Stick around for juicy, juicy, juicy.
Speaker 2:
[80:21] I hope our keychain isn't juicy.
Speaker 3:
[80:24] It's so wet. There are other ways you can support as well.
Speaker 2:
[80:30] They kept sending us designs and we were like, can you make it juicy?
Speaker 3:
[80:32] More juicy, actually. There are other ways you can support as well. Obviously, we would love to see people being new members, but you can also upgrade your membership to a different level or you can boost your membership as well. If you don't want to go all the way up to a new level, you can do other things too. You can pre-pay for a whole year. So if you don't like the monthly payment options, you can pay for the whole year. You can buy this as a gift. So if you listen to this show with somebody else, you can buy it as a gift for them.
Speaker 2:
[81:01] I think that's relatively new, gift membership. I could be wrong.
Speaker 3:
[81:04] It is relatively new.
Speaker 1:
[81:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[81:05] That's so fun.
Speaker 3:
[81:06] Obviously, not everyone who listens to the show can give $5 and we totally understand that. But if you're one of the people who does like the show and can, not only does it help us, help other podcasts on the MaxFun Network, the workers who work for MaxFun, but it also means that other people can continue listening to the show as well.
Speaker 1:
[81:27] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[81:28] I'm sorry. I'm finding myself being genuinely convinced. I was already convinced but I was like, damn, Caroline's got a really good point. You're making the world better for other people.
Speaker 3:
[81:36] Thank you guys. If my really good spiel has worked on you at home, you can head over to letslearneverything.com/join to become a member this Max Fun Drive. Do it before the 1st of May. Get in there, get your rewards.
Speaker 2:
[81:52] Thank you for helping us make this gosh dang podcast. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. Good sound effects.
Speaker 1:
[82:02] Boom. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:
[82:05] Are we going to get a chance to do our favorite sound effects?
Speaker 1:
[82:08] Well, it's one of my favorites.
Speaker 2:
[82:09] Yeah, let's talk about it. Sure.
Speaker 1:
[82:11] Booyoyoyoyoying.
Speaker 3:
[82:12] Nice. Solid one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[82:16] Anyone who has listened to the show for long enough has probably heard my excessive use of sound effects in the edits from our journey to the center of the Earth, the Halloween and holiday themes, blowing up a car recently, like in MythBusters. The Let's Learn Everything edit folder is a junk drawer full of one-off bits that sometimes took hours to craft. And I love sound effects and I believe you guys do too. So, classic, good old question. What's y'all's familiarity with sound effects?
Speaker 1:
[82:47] Such a weird question to ask. Like, I've heard them.
Speaker 2:
[82:50] I know. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[82:50] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[82:51] A huge fan. Huge fan. I like their early work.
Speaker 3:
[82:56] As soon as you say sound effects, my brain immediately goes to the people who do audio to go over films. And then I just have the image of people with coconuts.
Speaker 1:
[83:05] Like, oh, yeah, Foley, that's specific. I do SFX for my job. I put a lot of I saw a lot of sound effects. There's this really great website for those who are interested.
Speaker 2:
[83:17] freesound.org.
Speaker 1:
[83:18] Yes, it is. Yeah. freesound.org, where you can get lots of like copyright free sound effects for the people who have made themselves love that place. Love it.
Speaker 2:
[83:27] It'll come back at the end. Oh, we're going to talk a bit about it.
Speaker 1:
[83:30] Also, you can get really specific stuff because I work and I work and make science programs. I'm like, I need the chirping of this one cricket from like Madagascar. Can I get that? Sometimes not, but sometimes, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[83:44] Wikimedia Commons also has a great bunch of stuff, especially for some of the sciency stuff because it's more about like informative sounds rather than Foley sounds. So there's a lot of sound effects sounds. But yeah, about you Caroline.
Speaker 3:
[83:59] I'm really saddened to say that my day job is mostly me writing policy and implementing strategy for like environment stuff.
Speaker 2:
[84:07] So when something's bored, don't you pull out your soundboard and go, me me me me me me me me me. When someone, you do the sad trombone, you go, wha wha wha wha wha.
Speaker 3:
[84:21] Another banger. Yeah. Otherwise, genuinely, like I like every now and then would go and try and find like the sound of the cocky for a frog video on TikTok. And that would be about it.
Speaker 2:
[84:33] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[84:33] So.
Speaker 2:
[84:34] But Caroline, you are in the right headspace because your reaction to me doing a sound effect was like, oh, that's a good one. I do know that one, which is good, because that's how we're going to start thinking about these.
Speaker 1:
[84:44] What Tom's going to do now is just play a list of sound effects. Do you know this one?
Speaker 2:
[84:49] Do you know this one?
Speaker 1:
[84:50] Oh, that one's good.
Speaker 2:
[84:51] That one's good.
Speaker 3:
[84:51] I want to tell you how this one got recorded. I can do that. Are you going to tell us who's the creator of certain sound effects?
Speaker 2:
[84:59] Oh, that's so exciting. There's a lot of good stuff. But I'll of course say I have a long history with sound effects. I remember it like it was yesterday. Sorry, my neighbors, sorry, practicing harp. Sure, I'm recording the podcast. Stop your harp practice. Sound effects are fascinating. They can emphasize a joke. For example, that's what she said. Sorry, that was the slip and fall sound I was trying to find earlier. Fuck. Okay, that's what it was. But that clip actually perfectly shows what a sound effect can be because it can be literal like the breaking glass or symbolic like the slipping sound. Do you guys know what that sound is?
Speaker 1:
[85:42] No.
Speaker 3:
[85:43] Like whistle sound? Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[85:45] Is it one of those whistles that you pull down?
Speaker 2:
[85:47] No. Okay, some places say it is. It's actually not. Yeah, I had to think because I was just like, what is that? What is it? Because in my mind, that's just the slip sound, right? But like, of course, banana peels don't make that sound. It is a whistle with a fan in it, which is why when you blow into the pitch, it changes. It's called a siren whistle. It is mostly used for sound effects, but it can also be used to produce the sound of a siren. But aside from being comedic, sound effects can be used to emphasize important moments. But they can also be used to deceive, because of course, that's not the sound of a bald eagle.
Speaker 1:
[86:25] Well, I already knew this because they don't make a lot of sound.
Speaker 2:
[86:29] Yes, this is a red-tailed hawk. But have you guys heard what a real bald eagle sounds like? You're not wrong. It's like actually fucked up. Caroline, have you heard it?
Speaker 1:
[86:39] No. It's so cute.
Speaker 2:
[86:43] Yeah. It's a seagull. It's literally like a seagull.
Speaker 1:
[86:46] I don't think it sounds like a seagull. It sounds quite chirpy to me.
Speaker 3:
[86:50] It's in the middle of like a chirpy bird and a seagull.
Speaker 2:
[86:53] I'm going to put the video in the show notes. While I was watching it, I literally was like, wait, when is it going to make the sound? Because there's some bird in the distance that's injured. This audio comes from the Alaska Raptor Center. For all of these reasons, I think sound effects are fascinating. In the digital meme era, they are everywhere from the Vine Boom to the Zoomer.
Speaker 1:
[87:20] I like that one.
Speaker 2:
[87:22] That one's good. That one has a good niche.
Speaker 1:
[87:24] This is what I want to say. I feel like in the era of podcasts, like a soundboard with lots of sound effects on is so... I like it. I know that started earlier with radio shows that were crazy and made them constantly all the time, but it's carried through to more of an art now. I think it's more of an art.
Speaker 2:
[87:43] Yeah. Well, even YouTube videos are filled with those sound effects. You watch a... It's become part of the language even there, which is amazing. But what made me want to talk about this topic actually wasn't any of the recent sound effects. It was a specific fascination of mine that I've always wanted to talk about. It's a bit of sound effect history that isn't always covered, and we will get to that. Speaking of which, I will also say this was one of the hardest histories to try to research. The search results are so often filled with just the sounds and not the history of the sound. Like you'll find a million MP3s for a sound, and you're like, no, I want to know about it. I don't want to use it. Also, so much information is just like a single sentence in like a broader piece about something more important. And I say this for two reasons. Firstly, to complain. My life is very hard. Secondly, to underscore that so often, sound effects are about their function more than their history, right? They are a commodity more than a story or an art. Unlike music, sound effects primarily accompany other art, right? Whether that's music, theater, radio, like they are an auxiliary thing. But at the same time, they are an art in and of itself. And there are some obviously wild stories we can learn when we do treat it like an art. So let's get into it. So it is of course hard to tell when the first sound effects were made. After all, a human body itself is able to produce a lot of sounds. This was very fun to think about. Technically, ancient Mesopotamians had all the capacity to beatbox.
Speaker 1:
[89:27] Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:
[89:29] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[89:30] We don't know if they were. We don't know if they were or weren't either.
Speaker 2:
[89:32] We don't know if they were. Someone could have been like, hey, this is weird, but what if I went like... And someone's like, what are you doing? What are those? I don't know. He's ahead of his time. Now, we do have stories of thunder machines made for plays in ancient Greece. Wow.
Speaker 1:
[89:52] Like a piece of metal.
Speaker 2:
[89:53] There were some that were metals and that's called a thunder sheet.
Speaker 1:
[89:56] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[89:56] But there were others that were like, apparatuses that you would turn that dropped balls onto leather hides.
Speaker 1:
[90:03] Oh, that's fun. I did a high school play, We Will Rock You, with the Queen songs in.
Speaker 2:
[90:12] The Jukebox musical.
Speaker 1:
[90:13] Yeah. And I was holding a thunder sheet. And that's why I got to shake it. It hadn't been taped down the side. So I cut my hand wide open on stage. I was bleeding all over this sheet. And I was just like, okay, let's go.
Speaker 2:
[90:28] Sorry. So funny to think of the like, you know, be shredding so hard on your instrument, you bleed and you did it for a thunder sheet.
Speaker 1:
[90:36] Shredding so hard on my thunder sheet last night, guys.
Speaker 2:
[90:40] And that's metal, baby.
Speaker 1:
[90:42] Wow. Hey.
Speaker 2:
[90:43] Now, there is some debate on the veracity of some of these machines. Like there's stories about them. There's like diagrams. There was actually a really great deep dive that will be in the show notes called, did the classical Athenian theater have a thunder machine? The answer is maybe, because we don't have any surviving things. But what is certain is that the earliest solid signs of sound effect history come from plays.
Speaker 3:
[91:07] Of course, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[91:09] By the time Shakespeare's works are being performed in the early 1600s, we have plenty of records and even some existing artifacts of sound effects. Like the Athenians, there were thunder machines, dropping these balls, metal balls, sometimes cannon balls into bowls or dishes, sloshed water to mimic waves. One really cool piece we have intact, they found a bird whistle in a theater from that time that was probably used to make bird sounds. And what's coincidentally amazing is that this century is like actually huge for sound effects because at the exact same time as Shakespeare's boom on the opposite side of the planet, there is another form of theater that is burgeoning. And while the English craft was innovating realistic sounds, in Japan, they were working on a much more symbolic form of sound effect known as suke in kabuki theater, which you may have heard when I play this clip.
Speaker 1:
[92:18] That's from, of course, that's from Kabuki. That makes so much sense. It sounds very like, I have a little bit of familiarity with Kabuki.
Speaker 2:
[92:26] Well, and the thing is, so that specific clip, I think, is relatively recent, but it has become a meme of sorts. Like you see it in Japanese video games, in anime, to use that sound effect. But what's so fascinating, again, is that it's purely symbolic. Like it's not replicating something, it's meant to accentuate something. And, you know, it's just so cool. So, suke is the sound effect here, and it's being made by a set of wooden blocks called hiyoshigi. So, and while, you know, wooden blocks are in some ways a percussion instrument, you see them in plenty of instruments and in music, when they are used to create suke, they are very much a sound effect and an important one. As the Japan Arts Council writes, most of the suke that aim to emphasize movements are suke struck in time with an actor's mie poses. So they're literally, you do the pose and you make the sound effect to accentuate the pose changer, which is a big part of kabuki. And much like the like Western like, but um, or the whistle we just heard for slipping, again, it's cultural and symbolic, which I find really cool that sound effects can be like this.
Speaker 1:
[93:38] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[93:38] As the Japan Arts Council goes on, they are, quote, emphasizing sounds, including the light sounds that express when a character drops something on stage, and the repeated, bata bata bata sound used when a character is running. And they can be used to, I think that's specifically the one we just heard is, emphasizes like a tense moment or like a very important moment.
Speaker 1:
[93:59] I'm sure I heard it used in non-theater media to emphasize tenseness. Maybe even outside of Japanese media as well. I think it's been transplanted.
Speaker 3:
[94:08] There's a game on the Switch called Dave the Diver, which has got that sound effect in it whenever the guy makes sushi. Oh, cool!
Speaker 2:
[94:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah! But it dates back to the 1600s, like in Kabuki theater. Yeah, it's nuts. It's really cool. And also, it makes me really think about it because it's like, I'm sure there are plenty of Western sound effects that we don't realize are cultural, like the slipping sound, where it's like someone could hear that and be like, what was that supposed to mean? Versus we are conditioned. I just think that's so interesting.
Speaker 1:
[94:42] That's a very good point.
Speaker 3:
[94:43] If you took all of the history and context away from it, it would be a meaningless sound. But because of all of that history there, it actually has got a very, it's got a significance that we all understand, but people from outside of our culture might not. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[94:57] For like the slipping sound, yes. But like you hear that Kabuki sound and you're like, that sounds tense. Like maybe I've been trying for that through like watching a lot of horror, but like it feels tense to me as a sound, which is why they use that sound, which is why it works.
Speaker 2:
[95:12] Yeah, I think there's, yeah, definitely. There's a spectrum where there is sort of a acoustic elements of it that are, you're right, like it's like the Kikiboba, right? Like they're sharp.
Speaker 3:
[95:21] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[95:24] And the increasing rate of it, like, yeah, you're right. There are elements that are deeper. But yeah, it's just it's just interesting to see these develop. But where sound effects really started to evolve into something closer to where we see it today is something that Ella mentioned. It is when theater moved from the stage to the ears with radio, because, of course, you don't have as many visual cues and you need to rely more on sounds. In 1951, Robert Turnbull wrote the book A Guide to Sound Effects. There's a free pdf of it, I'll be in the show. And in it, he points the origin of radio sound effects. He points to a specific one, a 1921 broadcast of the World Series from the station WJZ out of Newark, New Jersey. Jersey represent. You know, maybe there are others, but I'm going to stick with the Jersey one. So this World Series, huge moment to tune into. This is Babe Ruth playing for the Yankees at his prime. Like it is a huge World Series. And so the only problem for WJZ is the World Series was taking place across the river in New York City and they were in New Jersey. And so to pretend like he was there, the announcer Thomas Cohen got people to stand outside the studio pretending to be the crowd and he would give them a signal to cheer. And he would snap matches into the microphone to make it sound like the baseball bat crack.
Speaker 1:
[97:00] That's so good. That's great.
Speaker 2:
[97:04] Something so funny about being in Jersey and just being like, fuck, let's just do this. It'll be fine.
Speaker 1:
[97:08] I love that. I love that. There's just a quick anecdote. The building I work in, there's a radio theatre where people do radio plays. And I've been in there and it's so great to see how they, it's not like sound effects and like, you know, very like specifically putting something up to the mic, but they have different surfaces all throughout the studio so that when characters are walking up to each other, it sounds like authentically they're outside, they're inside. There is a small, a really small room. So if they're in a small space, the sound is more muffled.
Speaker 3:
[97:43] Oh, that's so clever.
Speaker 2:
[97:45] So do they like move the shoes on the surface or something?
Speaker 1:
[97:47] No, no, no, the actors walk.
Speaker 3:
[97:48] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[97:49] They'll walk across and they'll go to their mic, for example. There's also a bed in there because your voice sounds different when you're lying up and when you're standing down. So if the character is supposed to be lying down, they make them lie down. Wow, that's great. And there's an old rotary phone in there that still rings so that they can get the line sounding right and the ring sounding right.
Speaker 2:
[98:06] Oh my god. Okay, well, so it's interesting what's survived, Ella, because you're talking about these things that are primarily for specific things or to change the voice, which you can't pre-record. But in the pre-pre-recorded era, you had people making these sound effects live on the radio. And so as you evolve from a box of matchsticks, you eventually start getting rooms full of sound-making equipment as we enter the 1920s and 30s. I have found so many photographs that will be in the show notes of these sound effect rooms. They're delightful. They look like Dr. Seuss' garage. I'll send you guys some pictures right now.
Speaker 3:
[98:49] Oh, they're all so compact as well.
Speaker 1:
[98:51] I love this. There's so much crap. The bells, lots of bells, wind, aeroplane. They labeled those things what they actually are. I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[99:02] One of them literally is a bathtub and a pile of rocks.
Speaker 1:
[99:06] Some radio plays still do this. Not quite to this level of elaboration, but like this room I was telling you about, they still had props in there for some live radio stuff.
Speaker 2:
[99:16] And especially when it needs to be like really dynamic and react to the people. This one is one of my favorites because it looks like a medieval torture display at a museum. But it is in fact the sound effects of CBS in New York in 1930.
Speaker 1:
[99:34] There's chains, there's lots of metal things, bells, so many bells.
Speaker 3:
[99:38] All the bells, yeah!
Speaker 2:
[99:40] A big one I saw was devices to mimic the sound of boots on the ground during wartime reporting. A bunch of wooden dowels hanging from strings that you would like, you know, wave. Just to be like, blum, blum, blum. But this time period was a little short lived because by around the 1940s, the demand for sound effects was met with the advancing technologies of the time, of course, recorded sound. And so we would begin our transition to modern sound effect days where you have libraries of sounds at your fingertips. But of course, we're not going to make that jump just yet because like all histories, there is my favorite thing to find on this podcast, a forgotten awkward middle era where we were transitioning from live to recording. Because of course, it wasn't simple.
Speaker 1:
[100:32] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[100:32] Because in this era, you see one of my favorite things, vinyl record sound effects like this one.
Speaker 3:
[100:39] No way.
Speaker 2:
[100:40] What? Which are one of my favorite things to collect. This is the niche love I mentioned at the top.
Speaker 3:
[100:46] This is Sound Effects Volume 2.
Speaker 2:
[100:50] This one's mostly trains.
Speaker 1:
[100:54] Volume 2 as well. I wish I knew you like this stuff. I was in a record store a couple of months ago and I found an early BBC version of these.
Speaker 3:
[101:02] Oh, cool.
Speaker 1:
[101:04] It was like a bunch of different test ones as well. And I was like, who would buy this? Me!
Speaker 2:
[101:14] If your record store is cool and expensive enough, listener, I implore you, they might have a sound effect section and they will likely be like a dollar. I genuinely, when I was visiting Amoeba Records in LA, I literally had to stop because I was like, I cannot fit these in my locker. It's so stupid. You don't need these. But yeah, there was a period where the medium for sound effects were vinyl records.
Speaker 1:
[101:41] Wow. So strange.
Speaker 2:
[101:43] Just funny to think about, but makes perfect sense. And Bill Corrigan wrote an amazing entry on this niche for the Library of Congress. Basically, a radio station found a bunch of these forgotten ones abandoned in their studio and they donated them. And it's just such a great glimpse into a weird slice of sound effect history. He talks about one of the big names in sound effect records was Gennett. And as he tells the story, quote, During the Great Depression, when the label's musical production has slowed a bit, Gennett Jr. sustained the business through sound effects. He and Joe Gayer ran a recording studio out of a converted truck traveling the country in search of fascinating sounds.
Speaker 3:
[102:29] Which is amazing.
Speaker 2:
[102:31] What do you mean you survived the Great Depression by traveling America recording sounds? That rules! That's the history I'm fucking talking about.
Speaker 1:
[102:42] That's nuts. Sorry, I'm just like, I'm just perplexed by this idea of vinyl record sounds. Because I'm like imagining being, you're on the, you're alive on the radio and you want to like play a clap sound effect. And you put it and you like, you put the needle on and you go and it goes, and then it accidentally plays like the end of the satire goes boing, boing, boing.
Speaker 2:
[103:04] That is literally what I'm going to talk about next. There's the art of recording these sounds, right? Like so again, they would record them on these big reel to reel electric tape. And they would do, you know, as they were traveling, they'd do things from like bird calls, crowds, trains, airplanes, but also the functional mundane things like this one, which is an actual clip from one of their records I'm going to play right now. Just picking up and putting down the phone.
Speaker 3:
[103:37] Fair enough.
Speaker 1:
[103:39] Yeah, great.
Speaker 3:
[103:40] Someone needs that.
Speaker 2:
[103:41] But of course, like you said, Ella, there is an art to playing them. They had literally a two turntable set up like a goddamn DJ, and you would have to cue them. And if you look, I have one of these sound effect records. I don't know if you can see the grooves are. Oh, yeah. There's a big gap between the grooves.
Speaker 1:
[103:59] Oh, very good. Yeah, that's smart.
Speaker 2:
[104:01] But there is an art to cueing them and like fading in and fading out. You literally have the two turntable set up like a DJ. Also, so you can play two at the same time, you can read one in, one out. This is my favorite niche fact. And it's just like, what a bespoke thing. They had turntables with two heads. So you could read two sounds from one disc.
Speaker 3:
[104:24] Oh, that's so cool.
Speaker 2:
[104:25] It's like, why would you ever... So like, for example, like, let's say you want to make the crowd sound extra big. You could play two different crowds from the same disc at the same time.
Speaker 3:
[104:35] Wow, that's cool.
Speaker 2:
[104:38] It's just like, what a specific device that will never be relevant again.
Speaker 1:
[104:43] That sounds like something like the Beatles would try and use for an experimental single.
Speaker 2:
[104:49] But I also, it's so, the DJs that I just love imagining, they have that one headphone on, it's like, oomph, oomph, oomph, oomph, oomph, one, two, three, let the beat drop.
Speaker 1:
[104:59] Oh, I like that one.
Speaker 2:
[105:01] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[105:02] That's good ASMR.
Speaker 3:
[105:03] What is that?
Speaker 1:
[105:05] Something shaking in a dice shaking.
Speaker 3:
[105:06] I was just swirling around like frozen peas or something.
Speaker 1:
[105:10] No.
Speaker 2:
[105:10] It's pouring iced tea.
Speaker 3:
[105:12] Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:
[105:14] I liked it. Sorry, you were trying to, your bit was really funny, but we really liked the sound. But you were too interested.
Speaker 3:
[105:19] I was just like, what is that sound?
Speaker 2:
[105:21] No, that's great. I love the idea that you guys are so sound effect pills. You're like, no, that's actually quite interesting.
Speaker 1:
[105:25] What was that?
Speaker 2:
[105:27] Yeah, I'm so glad you guys found that as interesting. Again, this is what made me get into the topic in the first place. I was like, it's so weird. It's so weird. Also, what's great is there are so many existing artifacts of this time that you can just get for a doll. It's my other favorite thing. When I found that quote about how they were like, well, Great Depression hit, I guess let's hop in the car and record sounds. I was like, this is a topic. That was my gem. I was like, okay, whatever happens, I have that. And of course, from there, as Recording Technology Advanced, we entered the recorded era. And then of course, Foley in movies. I didn't know this. A Foley artistry, I think, especially in movies, is a whole other thing that some of this encompasses. Did you guys know? Do you know why they're called Foley artists?
Speaker 1:
[106:11] Oh, I did know this, and now I can't remember. Go on, do it.
Speaker 2:
[106:15] Literally, a guy named Jack Foley who just did it a lot.
Speaker 1:
[106:18] Maybe, actually, I thought it was something else. Well, fine.
Speaker 2:
[106:21] Yeah, no. And there's a great Answer in Progress video about specifically Foley in movies and stuff like that. And by definition, Foley is specifically just realistic sound effects. So it's sort of a subset within the broader topic of sound effects.
Speaker 1:
[106:39] I've watched many Foley artists doing stuff in videos because it's just so fun to watch. And also, especially for horror movies, Foley is so fun. And like someone's like, so I got this overly ripe watermelon and I'm just going to go inside of it for this bit where this man's getting his brain smashed in. I'm like, yeah, let's go.
Speaker 3:
[107:05] And they take it so beautifully, seriously as well.
Speaker 1:
[107:09] It is serious. It's like, it's mad Foley. It sounds like makes a film shit.
Speaker 3:
[107:15] Yeah, it's like it is the seriousness that it deserves. Whilst you're watching it as an outsider, it is delightful. It's just wonderful.
Speaker 1:
[107:23] It's very delightful.
Speaker 3:
[107:23] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[107:24] In fact, I too love the distinction between what a sound looks like and sounds like. And so, why don't we play a little game?
Speaker 1:
[107:33] Yay!
Speaker 2:
[107:35] So as we enter the recorded era, we are where we are today. We have sounds that not just people at the time could hear, but we can hear also. And we are going to. And to highlight how wild they are, we are going to play this little game. I am going to show you guys a picture of a sound making device or apparatus or a ripe watermelon.
Speaker 1:
[107:55] Oh, that's fun.
Speaker 2:
[107:55] And you will describe the image and then try to tell me what sound it is trying to imitate. Here is picture number one.
Speaker 1:
[108:04] Okay. Wow, it's a very ominous looking man holding either a concrete ball or a metal ball and then like a plank or a post of some sort over like suspended, which I imagine, I don't know, maybe he's going to smash it into it or maybe he's just going to rub it against it.
Speaker 3:
[108:22] Or is he just going to like, yeah. Or is he just going to roll it down that thing?
Speaker 1:
[108:27] Can you tell us what he's going to do with it?
Speaker 2:
[108:29] Caroline is right. There's a trough there.
Speaker 1:
[108:32] Oh, I see. Sorry, there's a, yeah, okay. The trough is going to roll it down the trough. I guess it depends on what the ball is made of, that what it's going to end up sounding like. It's a wooden trough, wooden ball and a wooden trough. He's going to roll the ball down the trough. What's that going to sound like?
Speaker 3:
[108:46] I mean, all I can hear is a wooden ball going down a thing.
Speaker 2:
[108:50] Well, if I told you it's a sound we've mentioned.
Speaker 3:
[108:52] Oh, shoot. OK.
Speaker 1:
[108:54] Is it thunder?
Speaker 2:
[108:55] It's the eagle. Ella, you are right. This is not just a thunder machine, but an early thunder machine used in specifically. This one is housed in the Bristol Old Vic, which opened in 1766.
Speaker 1:
[109:14] Very cool.
Speaker 2:
[109:15] And this.
Speaker 1:
[109:16] I've been there.
Speaker 2:
[109:16] Thunder machine. Oh, yeah. This thunder machine was recently revived in 2016 for a production of King Lear, which is why we have a recording of what it sounds like. This audio comes from the BBC.
Speaker 1:
[109:39] It's not like... It's quite undramatic of thunder.
Speaker 3:
[109:44] It's more the rumbling, isn't it?
Speaker 1:
[109:46] You do multiple balls at once.
Speaker 2:
[109:49] Well, no, that is what it sounds like, but that's what it sounds like when you're up in...
Speaker 3:
[109:54] Next to it.
Speaker 2:
[109:55] Next to it, because this is placed in the rafters of the theatre.
Speaker 1:
[109:59] Right, right.
Speaker 2:
[110:00] It's above the theatre, and so when you're sitting down, this is what it sounds like.
Speaker 1:
[110:07] Wow.
Speaker 2:
[110:07] That's good.
Speaker 3:
[110:08] Oh, that's so good.
Speaker 2:
[110:10] It's really good.
Speaker 3:
[110:11] That's so accurate.
Speaker 1:
[110:14] That's lovely. It's very nice.
Speaker 3:
[110:16] I kind of want to just sit in the theatre and just let somebody do that for like an hour.
Speaker 2:
[110:21] You know?
Speaker 3:
[110:22] I'd pay for that.
Speaker 2:
[110:23] In fact, you know, it's so good. You're not the only ones who thought it was an exceptionally good thunder. So because previously the best method for making thunder was tossing metal balls in a wooden bowl, as a poet from 1727 wrote, the old way of making thunder and mustard were the same. You beat them in a bowl.
Speaker 3:
[110:46] Nice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[110:47] But some people, like playwright John Dennis, pioneered this new way of rolling these balls that are now, again, installed in the Theatre of the Bristol Old Vic because they're so effective. But it wasn't all balls and roses for Dennis.
Speaker 4:
[111:01] Nice.
Speaker 2:
[111:02] As the story goes, John Dennis apparently went to a theatre that had previously rejected his plays and found that they were using his machine.
Speaker 4:
[111:11] The cheek of it.
Speaker 2:
[111:13] He is alleged to have said, Siddeth, that is my thunder.
Speaker 1:
[111:18] Okay, nice.
Speaker 2:
[111:19] And this story gets repeated and retold because, of course, drama people love drama until it transforms such that a century later, they're still telling this story. And the quote has evolved to now be, they will not let my play run, but they will steal my thunder.
Speaker 1:
[111:38] Oh my god! Oh my god!
Speaker 3:
[111:42] That's where that comes from?
Speaker 2:
[111:44] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[111:45] That's so good, Tom!
Speaker 2:
[111:48] Yeah. I'm so glad you guys didn't catch it. Yeah. I was so worried one of you guys was going to be like, oh, they really stole his... Oh my god.
Speaker 1:
[111:58] That's fantastic. I love that.
Speaker 2:
[112:00] I will say Pascal Trager did, it'll be in the show notes, did a great breakdown of the etymology, because it's so fucking funny, because again, it's like so many histories of English playwrights keep telling this story, which really solidifies the idea that this is where it comes from, because everyone keeps saying, oh, and then he said, how dare you, that's my thunder, and then it keeps evolving until it becomes, yeah, Steal My Thunder, sound effect history, fucking rules. All right, next image. Describe what this is and what sound you think it is trying to imitate.
Speaker 3:
[112:33] I mean, surely.
Speaker 1:
[112:36] I mean, it's two guys, they're destroying the windows of a car, of an old timey car.
Speaker 3:
[112:43] Yeah, yeah, this is like, what, 1930? And like, one of them's got a rock in his hand, the other one seems to have a comically, like a pole, and they are going for it on the windows.
Speaker 2:
[112:55] Like a Donkey Kong hammer.
Speaker 3:
[112:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all I can imagine is that this is the sound effect for smashing up a car.
Speaker 2:
[113:03] Caroline, you're 100% right. Sometimes the sound is just the sound. I just thought this was hilarious. As the radiohistorian.org put it, when the Empire Builders script called for a car to be destroyed, NBC lifted a jalopy onto the roof of Chicago's merchandise smart building and beat on it in front of a live microphone.
Speaker 3:
[113:24] Nice.
Speaker 1:
[113:25] I'm sure there was a cheaper way to do that.
Speaker 3:
[113:28] That's where my brain went.
Speaker 2:
[113:29] Then lifting a car on a roof. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[113:31] They just wanted to do this. Let's be real.
Speaker 2:
[113:33] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[113:34] Rage rooms didn't exist in the 1930s, so they had to do this instead.
Speaker 2:
[113:38] Yeah, they're like, listen, I know an ex whose car we can use. I mean someone's car we can use. All right, on to the next one. That one was a joke, but here is a real one.
Speaker 1:
[113:48] Ooh, it's tight writer. Yeah. It looks a bit like the keys of a typewriter.
Speaker 2:
[113:54] Yeah, can you describe this for people?
Speaker 1:
[113:55] I can't describe this, Tom. What do you want us to describe here?
Speaker 3:
[114:01] At the front, it's very like typewriter-y buttons. There's like four rows of colors, but then the inside is, it's a lot of like strips of metal, all seeming to be connected to each other. Maybe if you push one of the buttons, it moves a piece of metal, which then...
Speaker 2:
[114:17] It looks like a loom almost.
Speaker 3:
[114:18] It does, but then it always looks a bit like piano-y with like...
Speaker 2:
[114:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[114:24] Like if you, it looks like if you push something, something will then hit against something and it will make a sound basically.
Speaker 2:
[114:29] Not quite right.
Speaker 3:
[114:30] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[114:31] Do you guys want to hear what this sounds like?
Speaker 1:
[114:32] Yes, please. It was a train, is it? No, it's an audience clapping.
Speaker 2:
[114:44] Sure is, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[114:46] No way!
Speaker 2:
[114:47] This is one of the earliest canned laughter machines.
Speaker 3:
[114:51] Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1:
[114:54] How does it do it?
Speaker 2:
[114:55] This is a famous one. This is Charles Douglas' Laugh Box, L-A-F-F. So in the 1950s, Douglas takes some tape recordings of the laughter from the Red Skelton show because it featured a segment that was a pantomime. And so you just heard the audience laughter. He then took these tapes, really cleverly looped them, and then made an apparatus out of typewriter parts himself that let him cue, play, speed up, and adjust the volumes of these tracks to create these realistic sounds that didn't sound like you were just dropping a needle onto last track number one. As Professor of Television Studies, Jeremy Butler, told ABC, Douglas basically did all of the laughs that you hear in the 1960s and early 1970s on American TV, all of them.
Speaker 3:
[115:48] That's so cool.
Speaker 2:
[115:49] And he had this monopoly in part because he was very secretive of his device. As Butler goes on to say, if something went wrong, because it was a weirdly complicated thing that he slapped together, he wouldn't even let people see what was inside the box. If he had to work on it, he would roll it into the men's room, make his adjustments where people couldn't see it, and then he would roll it back out. He was very secretive about it.
Speaker 1:
[116:14] Well, good. Yeah. Be secretive.
Speaker 2:
[116:16] Yeah. If you got it, don't let someone steal your laughter. But yeah, this is one of the early laugh track machines.
Speaker 1:
[116:23] That's so cool.
Speaker 3:
[116:24] That's great.
Speaker 2:
[116:25] Next image. What sound does this make?
Speaker 3:
[116:29] Oh yes, that's just a man. It's just a man.
Speaker 1:
[116:33] Does the leaf have anything to do with it?
Speaker 3:
[116:34] But he is holding some leaves, isn't he?
Speaker 1:
[116:36] Does the leaf have anything to do with it, Tom?
Speaker 2:
[116:38] No.
Speaker 3:
[116:38] Oh, he's just holding it.
Speaker 1:
[116:40] It's the man. The man makes the sounds. This isn't really a game, is it? It's just you showing us things that we can't possibly guess.
Speaker 2:
[116:49] Some of these you got? Some of these you got? You got the thunder, Caroline got the car.
Speaker 1:
[116:53] Yeah, these last two. There is no way. There is no way.
Speaker 3:
[116:56] Um, did he make...
Speaker 1:
[116:59] This is Wilhelm and he did his scream.
Speaker 2:
[117:03] John Wilhelm.
Speaker 3:
[117:06] What could it possibly be? It's going to be the most random thing.
Speaker 2:
[117:10] Well, let's, let's hear it.
Speaker 4:
[117:13] Man getting bit by an alligator and he screams. Do it out, for me. Okay, right in the...
Speaker 1:
[117:21] Wait, it is. The first one you did up here was much better.
Speaker 4:
[117:28] Oh! Not an owl, a real scream thing.
Speaker 3:
[117:34] There it is. There he is.
Speaker 1:
[117:38] It is the Wilhelm scream. I was right. It is. Fine, fine. It was a good game and I win.
Speaker 2:
[117:47] An excellent game, some would say. It's so, it's comically, like it's like a fake scene in a biopic movie. It's like, go a little higher, a little higher, and then he just does the sound.
Speaker 3:
[118:00] I also love that the instruction is a man getting bitten by an alligator, specifically. Yeah, I did not know that.
Speaker 2:
[118:07] Well, and it also, it points to a detail that some people might not know, which is that the sound wasn't recorded on set. It was recorded as a pack of, as a bunch of sound effects.
Speaker 4:
[118:18] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[118:19] I just have to say about The Wilhelm Scream, which obviously appears in pretty much every film known to man at this point. I hate that. I like the sound. I like the sound. I think, and I think it's nice that people are paying homage to all the cinema. Yeah. But there are some really serious films it's in. And I'm like, why have you put this in? It takes you out completely. Stop it.
Speaker 2:
[118:45] Yeah. I think things like the early Star Wars' I think those are perfect because they're so campy.
Speaker 3:
[118:50] It's stunning.
Speaker 1:
[118:52] There's stuff that's in, campy stuff, whatever. Perfect. There's just some things. I'm like, why did you put that in here?
Speaker 2:
[118:58] So this is the... The things we're not 100% sure, but we believe that the picture I showed you is Cheb Woolley who voiced that sound. Yeah, it's just such a...
Speaker 1:
[119:09] That was a great clip though.
Speaker 2:
[119:12] It's amazing. Yeah, it's like finding a clip, but it's like Paul McCartney being like, I beat you guys in that game. We're a couple of Beatles if you could say. It's so comically... Yeah, I love it. All right. Next image. Here we go. This is bullshit again. Sorry, guys. Just preempting.
Speaker 1:
[119:32] Okay, cool. So I mean, it's just a close up of like some kind of graphics card or something like that. Some kind of chip. That's it. Man, what do you want me to say? It's a bit circuitry.
Speaker 2:
[119:44] A little computer chip.
Speaker 1:
[119:45] There we go.
Speaker 3:
[119:45] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[119:46] What famous sound effect could this have made?
Speaker 1:
[119:48] I don't know. R2D2.
Speaker 3:
[119:50] It doesn't like buzz or something like that, does it?
Speaker 2:
[119:54] It does kind of.
Speaker 1:
[119:55] Can I tell you guys, it's very interesting you guys are still in the movie headspace because this is what the sound is.
Speaker 2:
[120:02] This is why I went buzz. My brain was like, because my brain was like, oh, is it like phones had a motor in them to make the vibrate? And I was like, is it like a handheld device thing?
Speaker 3:
[120:14] Is this Pac-Man?
Speaker 2:
[120:16] But this is Pac-Man's Wacka Wackas.
Speaker 1:
[120:18] This is the Namco Waveform Sound Generator. And I was so excited to talk about this because of exactly what you're thinking about, Caroline, which is how do you make sounds in a video game? Because, so, right? What is so fucking cool about video game sound effects, and I had to stop myself not making a whole topic about this, but what I find so fascinating about early video game sound effects is that we are coming off of the heels of like a century of radio and movie sound effects, but early video game sound effects basically had to start from scratch because you can't just play a recording yet because an MP3 file might be 24 kilobytes, but the entirety of Pac-Man is 24 kilobytes. So you can't, we're not at the era yet where you can load a sound digitally. And to your point, Caroline, they didn't have a tiny piano inside the machine. They didn't have a tiny, like you said, like a motor to make a sound. They were generating waves, waveforms, because that's the simplest sounds you can make with a computer. So for example, right, the palette that these sound designers had to work with were extremely limited. They were basically, I have some examples. They were a sine wave, a square wave, a saw wave, and then a noise wave, which is just randomly going up and down.
Speaker 2:
[121:46] It sounds like, right.
Speaker 1:
[121:48] You can change the pitch of them, but that's all you have to make the entire sound of the music and the sound effects of Mario or Pac-Man. And the way that they use them is, I think, so clever. And I think it's especially interesting for sound effects, because for music, it's like, oh, you change the pitch. How do you make a sound, right? And I will show you, because I recreated the Pac-Man sound from waves. Nice. But yeah, so these are the simplest mathematical waveforms that take up the least amount of memory. So how do you turn these tones into sounds? You combine them in very clever ways. So we'll start with a simple way, just makes a tone. It's making a C. Then we cut the high and low frequencies. This is where it gets interesting. We are going to take another wave that is oscillating at a different rate and have that change the width of the first wave. So we're basically like multiplying them together.
Speaker 3:
[122:48] Oh yeah, I'm not following.
Speaker 1:
[122:51] All this is two waves. One wave changes the shape of the second wave.
Speaker 3:
[122:55] Wow.
Speaker 2:
[122:55] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[122:56] So it sounds like this. You can hear it. Listen.
Speaker 2:
[123:03] Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:
[123:04] Oh, because it's like coming in and out of... Fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine. Okay.
Speaker 1:
[123:08] So it turns it from a continuous sound to a beating sound. So the way I think about it is like if you think about like all the knobs on the synthesizer, it's you have one wave controlling the knob forward and back.
Speaker 3:
[123:21] Uh-huh. Okay.
Speaker 1:
[123:22] So instead of doing a manual going like one, one, one, one, one, you have another waveform affect that at a constant rate.
Speaker 3:
[123:29] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[123:29] Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:
[123:30] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[123:30] It's a little complicated.
Speaker 3:
[123:31] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[123:31] As much as it needs to. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[123:33] Then you have another wave affect the pitch, modulate the pitch.
Speaker 2:
[123:38] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[123:38] And what you get is sounds like this. There you go. Then you have the Waka Waka Waka.
Speaker 3:
[123:55] This is literally what Yono, my partner is doing, you know, in his bedroom when he plays with the synthesizers. Like this is like, he's like just messing around with some knobs and he's like, oh, look, this makes it like this. He actually does, he talks about this shit all the time. He's like, oh, this is a sine wave and this is a saw wave. And I'm like, I don't know what you're going on about.
Speaker 1:
[124:18] Yeah, but what's wild is that from these basic building blocks, like these atoms, you have created one of the most iconic sound effects.
Speaker 2:
[124:29] And it is very simple.
Speaker 3:
[124:32] The Pac-Man sound effect is very iconic, but it seems like quite simple compared to maybe more recognizable sound effects if they were doing jumping. I know that jumping sound isn't recognizable, but it is what we associate with jumping.
Speaker 1:
[124:45] I think the jumping sound is extremely big. It's just a pitch going up.
Speaker 3:
[124:50] You're right. For those, yeah. What about Donkey Kong with things like crash, like a crashing sound? That seems like it would be quite hard to do.
Speaker 1:
[125:00] That's where noise comes in. If you, instead of using a sine wave to generate the waveform, if you use a random number generator, it sounds like shh, which is static. Then you change the pitch of that, you modulate, you start with these building blocks and you can create surprisingly. The reason I chose the Pac-Man sound is because, unlike even a coin thing is like, but that's just pitch. But the Pac-Man is so iconic, it's created an onomatopoeia. There's Waka Waka Waka.
Speaker 3:
[125:28] Yeah. You're right. You're right. It's funny, though, because it is actually all quite simple, but just like cleverly used. I'm going to go to an arcade and play some of these because like just to hear them.
Speaker 1:
[125:38] Yeah, they're amazing. And they're so clever. And again, like with the beauty of sound effects is like, if it works, you don't even think about it. You're just like, oh, that's the sound of the Pac. He's opening his mouth up and down. Of course he makes that sound. But not to be outdone for our final one, around the same time as this Pac-Man sound was being made in the digital world, an analog recording was being made that was equally famous, if not more so. And I will show you an image of what was making that sound right here.
Speaker 3:
[126:10] Sorry, what? It's a film projector. It's a film projector. What? Sorry, we should say what we think the sound is coming from a film projector.
Speaker 1:
[126:20] What sound effect does this make?
Speaker 2:
[126:22] A film projector sound.
Speaker 3:
[126:24] Like a whirring or a...
Speaker 2:
[126:26] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[126:27] It's lower. Specifically, it's an idling film projector.
Speaker 2:
[126:32] I don't know.
Speaker 3:
[126:33] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[126:33] Maybe you will have heard the sound. Let's see.
Speaker 4:
[126:37] An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
Speaker 2:
[126:42] How does a lightsaber sound come from that? What?
Speaker 3:
[126:47] It's just like the hum of the electronics. Like, turned up, basically?
Speaker 1:
[126:52] There's an extra addition that's added to it, but it starts with a film projector. This is the lightsaber.
Speaker 3:
[127:00] I mean, I love that Star Wars, like the original Star Wars, is very like, not just sound effects, but like the ingenuity with which they made everything was just like fantastic.
Speaker 1:
[127:11] There is a, it'll be in the show notes, highly recommend watching because it's incredible. Ben Burtt, who was the sound designer, did a ton of the sounds, has a great interview all about Star Wars sound effects, and he talks about making the lightsaber sound, and it is just so fucking cool. And he also thinks it's cool as hell, which he says, quote, It's the very first sound I made for the series. For some reason, after I read the script, even though my assignment was to find a voice for Chewbacca in R2, maybe come up with some laser guns and other things, the lightsaber fascinated me. And he says, Ralph McQuarrie had done these concept arts of what a lightsaber looked like, and it just inspired him. He was like, he said, I could hear it when I saw the painting. And again, it's so cool because like Kabuki and like Pac-Man, this is not a natural sound. This is the creation of a new sound, which is so cool. So at the time, Burtt was a film grad student at USC. And again, the sound he used was the hum of an idling projector, which is something he was very familiar with because he spent all the time working with reels. But to really add what he called the sparkling, he combined it with another sound that he found completely by accident. So he was moving a microphone across the room, and he passed in front of an old TV, a CRT, and it picked up some of the signal coming from the TV, and that adds that fuzzy, the sparkliness. He described, it's so great in the interview, he describes it, he has a smile on his face, and he goes, that was a great buzz. He knows it when he hears it. He was like, wait, play that again. And boy, howdy, yeah. But there's a cherry on top because there's one final step to the lightsaber sound that makes it iconic. It's maybe the most iconic part of the sound. It's the thing that children for decades have imitated on the playground. It's the whoosh.
Speaker 3:
[129:14] Yeah. Love the whoosh. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[129:19] It's what makes it feel like it's actually in the room, like makes it feel like it's real and moving in space. Do you know how they accomplish that?
Speaker 3:
[129:26] No idea.
Speaker 1:
[129:27] I'm going to send you guys a picture because we have a picture. He had the idle hum, he put it on a speaker, and then he took a microphone and waved it around the speaker like a laxative.
Speaker 2:
[129:40] That's great fun. Yeah, that makes sense. I like that.
Speaker 1:
[129:43] You can see a video of him swinging it. Really swinging it because that's how you get that like Doppler effect.
Speaker 2:
[129:50] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[129:50] It's amazing. Now, I truly had to stop myself because there are so many sound effects stories, which is wild because they are supposed to be invisible, right? It feels like you're learning a magic trick, seeing how it's done, like the clever math of early video game sounds, the Burtt swinging his microphone like a lightsaber. But even more than the trick, there's a story behind them, right? Like if you look carefully enough, there are these thumb prints of the human that recorded them, that are still left behind. The Library of Congress article that I talked about earlier put it best, this like duality of it being both like a lie and the truth at the same time. They write, what is fascinating to us about these records is the way that they serve as documentary field recordings of particular times and places, even as they were used to help create the fictional sound worlds of radio. You can hear the sounds of a hog calling contest at the Fayette County Free Fair, while Major Records 5055 has the sounds of the Coney Island carousels. Some are more mysterious in their sources and some are themselves sonic fictions. One record features imitations of mice and coyotes produced by a Ford assembly line compressed air hoist. It's like both a trick and the truth at the same time. And I just think that's the... But the other reason I love sound effects is something that you very briefly touched on at the start, Ella, is that while in the past I've told stories of people angry that their thunder was stolen or fearful of their coveted laughter machine, in the digital age there is such a community of archiving sounds, sharing creative comments or public domain sounds. Now, anyone can make a sound effect. And a website that I have been going to since I was in high school is freesound.org.
Speaker 3:
[131:55] Yay.
Speaker 1:
[131:56] And it is exactly what it sounds like, a place where people upload and share sound effects for free. Freesound is run by the Music Technology Group and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Speaker 3:
[132:12] Nailed it.
Speaker 1:
[132:13] When I was writing this, it was actually down for a few days because I think the university had some internet issues.
Speaker 3:
[132:18] Oh no.
Speaker 1:
[132:19] But what's amazing is that even though they are made by ordinary people and given out for free, sometimes they are used for big things. They made news when one sound was used in the movie Children of Men.
Speaker 3:
[132:31] Wow.
Speaker 1:
[132:33] And they are credited in the credit.
Speaker 3:
[132:34] That's awesome.
Speaker 1:
[132:37] It is a file called MailFeesLoudScream.aiff and it sounds like this.
Speaker 2:
[132:43] Oh my goodness. I mean, where else are you going to find a sound like that?
Speaker 1:
[132:53] Theus, it's a Dutch name. And so the description is Theus screams very loud, torture sounds.
Speaker 2:
[132:59] Nice.
Speaker 1:
[133:00] And I love the Freesound community has no nepotism bias. This sound has a four out of five star rank.
Speaker 2:
[133:06] Nice.
Speaker 3:
[133:07] They're like, yeah, it's good enough for that movie, but not for me.
Speaker 2:
[133:10] It's fine.
Speaker 1:
[133:11] There's like some dead space at the star. I don't know why. It clips a little. But after it was used in Children of Men, fortunately, the uploader added to the description a little history. He writes, the sample, Maeltheus Loud Scream, was recorded back in the days Than Von Nispen TP studied biology in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and in his free time participated in projects where sound effects or film music were needed. The sample was recorded late 2001 in his student apartment for some special effects for an interactive theater play, in which Than helped with sound effects and Foley for short animations. This time, a lot of screams were needed as special effects sounds for some fake torturing device within the play. Theus, a friend of Than's, showed the person who was doing some voiceover screaming sessions how to do it. So that's why there's currently only one Theus sample in the collection. So it was used as a demonstrating sample, it wasn't even meant to be the final thing. Apparently it turned out to be sort of a unique and lucky shot. The sample was recorded at 44.1 kHz with a Shure SM58 microphone and with a Theratac EWS88 MT sound card. Love audio nerds. When Than learned to know the Freesound project, he thought that maybe other people could also use this sample and other scream samples in their work or projects. And so finally it ended up in the movie Children of End. And I could not have written a more perfect encapsulation of the things I love about this. Again, like the Wilhelm Scream, it's a famous scream. It was made for a play. The history of sound effects in plays, it all comes back together. But more importantly, I feel like the sound effects by regular people are so emblematic of what I love about sound effects. There's such a history that's like a tiny glimpse into their world. This is someone's dorm room in the Netherlands, right? There's also something so really poetically humble and empathetic about recording sound effects. Really all it is, is just carefully and creatively observing your world and then thinking, oh, maybe someone might have a use for this. I'll record it.
Speaker 3:
[135:22] Yeah, your interest has really rubbed off of me here, Tom. I think I was already interested in the free sound library and just the breadth with which people explore. Like, their world and just get like random things. It's like this man, you know, there is like a sound effect of like, this is me in my garden, recording the sheep barring in the... And I'm like, yeah, okay, good. That could be useful.
Speaker 1:
[135:51] Yeah, you were like, again, it's like someone, hey, someone could use this, and which is so beautiful. And again, it's that duality where it's like, use this as a generic sound, but also I recorded this on like a Sunday afternoon with my children or something, right? Like, where it's like, oh, yeah, it's a glimpse. Like there's, I just love it. There's something there that's more than just a goofy sound.
Speaker 2:
[136:15] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[136:17] Guys, if you look very carefully at this, this rock layer, you can see the GSSP.
Speaker 1:
[136:23] Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[136:24] The marks, the marks, the really sharp divide between BRC and ARC before review corner and after review corner.
Speaker 2:
[136:37] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[136:38] And if you look even closer, you can see a review.
Speaker 2:
[136:43] Is this a geological event or is this the marquage of a new epoch? I just need to understand that.
Speaker 1:
[136:49] This time stamped podcast episode is the marker. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:
[136:54] It's actually an eon. It's actually an eon. This is how significant the change is.
Speaker 1:
[136:58] Wow. Well, and thank you for this perfectly preserved review from KansasStuck, who says, I'm so sorry, Tom. I've been listening to this podcast for almost a year now and I've loved every minute of it. The most recent episode featuring Sage was especially amazing. It was afterward when I saw the announcement for it on her YouTube channel that I realized I'd never seen any of your faces. And I feel like I have to issue a formal apology for imagining Tom as white this whole time. I feel insane. The only thing I can do to make up for this error is by donating to the Max Fun Drive for LLE.
Speaker 3:
[137:30] Nice. Nice. Please do.
Speaker 1:
[137:33] Can I tell you what concerns me is I've definitely made some jokes that are not okay if I was so funny. So, listeners, if you have also made that mistake, well, there's only one thing you can do. Be a Max Fun member or if you want to support the show. And also-
Speaker 3:
[137:50] Wait, wait, wait. If you've ever- I've got a few more. If you've ever referred to Caroline as she, her.
Speaker 2:
[137:55] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[137:57] Join us if you become a Max Fun member.
Speaker 1:
[137:59] And you know what? If you have never seen our faces, but would like to, you can this Sunday. We're doing a live stream.
Speaker 4:
[138:06] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[138:08] It's just one of the many cool things happening during the Max Fun Drive. Caroline, one of the cool stuff we got going on.
Speaker 2:
[138:15] When you become a member of Maximum Fun, you get access to all of our bonus content, as well as the bonus content of every other podcast on the network, which is pretty great.
Speaker 1:
[138:24] It's- My brother, my brother, and me has like decades of stuff. It's great.
Speaker 2:
[138:29] So much stuff. And actually, we are growing quite a catalog now.
Speaker 1:
[138:33] Oh, yeah. It's all our stuff from the Patreon days for people who have listened.
Speaker 2:
[138:36] All of that is there now.
Speaker 1:
[138:38] Who have only heard the old episodes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[138:40] Uh-huh. So that includes things like our improv lesson, rats one and two, recording Caroline's song.
Speaker 3:
[138:49] And three. Did we do three rats?
Speaker 2:
[138:51] Did we do three rats?
Speaker 1:
[138:52] We technic two part two, yes, we did three.
Speaker 2:
[138:55] We did two, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[138:56] Oh, um, relevant to sound effects, you have us, it's a niche one in our library, but we have us recording sound effects. Oh, we do. Like two years ago, I think we did that for Max One Borders.
Speaker 2:
[139:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's also last year's Boko, which was our game show, which was super fun.
Speaker 1:
[139:15] That was so fun.
Speaker 2:
[139:16] And then this year's Maximum Fun Drive bonus content was god, it was so good.
Speaker 3:
[139:22] Oh, it's so good.
Speaker 1:
[139:24] It's genuinely, it's some of the loudest. I had to do so much audio fixing for how loud you were laughing.
Speaker 3:
[139:30] Absolutely cackling. When we got to the end of the recording and Ellen was like, Ellen from just the zoo of us joined us on this. It was like my face hurts because we were just laughing so much.
Speaker 1:
[139:41] For people who are already Max Fun members, congratulations. Here's part two. So quick. For people who don't know there's a part two. Hey, we got two for you.
Speaker 2:
[139:49] It's there, baby.
Speaker 1:
[139:50] It's a double feature.
Speaker 2:
[139:51] We could be seeing more of each other this year and we can, but that is up to our listeners. For every 200 new upgrading or boosting members we get during Max Fun Drive, we will do another episode of ETC over the next 12 months. So if you want more bonus content and you're up for becoming a new member, that is one way that you can ensure that that happens. You will also get other stuff for becoming a member. So if you become a member for $5, you get all of our bonus content. If you become a member for $10, you can get our Max Fun Drive exclusive keychain. Tom, do you want to tell us a bit more about that?
Speaker 3:
[140:28] He's a cutie little cutie.
Speaker 1:
[140:30] This is the first time, I think this is the very first time, that Max Fun for their bonus product is doing keychains, which are so cute, so handy.
Speaker 3:
[140:37] We've gone classic with it because we're just like, this is us, this B.
Speaker 1:
[140:42] Yeah. What better little guy to hang around your keys than the LLEB?
Speaker 3:
[140:50] I can't wait for it.
Speaker 2:
[140:50] I'm so excited.
Speaker 3:
[140:51] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[140:52] Very holdable little shape. It's very cute.
Speaker 2:
[140:54] He's lovely.
Speaker 3:
[140:56] Yeah. She, also she.
Speaker 2:
[140:58] Oh, she.
Speaker 3:
[140:58] Well, it's a B.
Speaker 2:
[140:59] I like it.
Speaker 1:
[141:00] Ellie, Ellie, the LLEB.
Speaker 2:
[141:04] Anyway, you can get all of that and more by becoming a member or by upgrading or boosting your membership. You can find out more at letslearneverything.com.
Speaker 3:
[141:15] And as always, your support means everything to us, for those people who are already members who will become members. It's really, really just vital to what we do.
Speaker 2:
[141:29] Yeah, we could not do this without you. So thank you all so much for supporting us, thinking about supporting us, coming along with us on this journey of podcasting. If you can't become a member, don't worry. There are other ways that you can get more content from us.
Speaker 1:
[141:44] For example, we're doing a live stream on Sunday, April 26th at noon Eastern time in the US or 5pm BST. Wow, great Caroline. Also, your voice sounded really cool there.
Speaker 2:
[141:58] Thank you.
Speaker 1:
[142:00] We will be playing games. Caroline finally has Animal Crossing, so I think we will always do that as a tradition.
Speaker 3:
[142:08] We're going to do Metazoo. I can't remember how I did the word. The word for Animal Kingdoms.
Speaker 1:
[142:15] GeoGuessers.
Speaker 3:
[142:17] I love GeoGuessers.
Speaker 1:
[142:20] It's going to be a good time. We'll see if we can get friends of the show to pop by. But of course, my favorite part is at the end of the stream, we always play games with MaxFun members. So if you become a new Upgrading Boosting member, you'll be able to play games like Fibbage with us, which is a perfect...
Speaker 3:
[142:36] People are so much better than us at these games.
Speaker 1:
[142:39] And that's what the thing is, because of course they are listeners of the podcast. They are too good at the fun fact game.
Speaker 2:
[142:44] How dare you be better than us at this?
Speaker 1:
[142:47] It's one of my favorite things. It's a way to come together to celebrate and to thank you all for making the show possible. The reason me and Ella and Caroline last year and the year before that, the reason we pull out all the stops is because this is the time of the year where we say thank you. Thank you for making this thing.
Speaker 2:
[143:06] We appreciate you.
Speaker 1:
[143:06] It really is neat. It's cool.
Speaker 3:
[143:09] It's neat. It's so neat.
Speaker 1:
[143:10] It's just all of us coming together to make this possible. I just think it's neat.
Speaker 3:
[143:15] Okay, we need to bring this long-ass episode to a close. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
[143:21] So, on this episode, we have learnt about the Anthropocene.
Speaker 3:
[143:26] Oof. Roblox oof. I know.
Speaker 2:
[143:31] The geological period that humans have impacted. We had a little tangent to the Cambrian period, where we got to talk about trilobites, and trilobites again. I have trilobites written down several times here, Ella.
Speaker 1:
[143:48] As they should be.
Speaker 2:
[143:50] We learnt about the Spice as well, and not in a June way.
Speaker 3:
[143:53] We learnt about trilobites.
Speaker 2:
[143:56] We talked about how climate and species can be used to help define those periods, and how these things have to be preserved in the geological record. Talked about the Holocene, which is where we are right now, if you agree with the...
Speaker 3:
[144:12] Or are we?
Speaker 2:
[144:13] Because some people think that we are in the Anthropocene, however, in 2024 we voted against it. Some people don't agree with that view though, including one of the Jans, but not both of them. We talked about things like carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and potentially being in a sixth mass extinction, and how these could be defining features, but we just don't know. We have not figured it out yet, and it might be quite a while until we do. We also talked about sound effects. They can be both symbolic and quite literal. We talked about early examples of sound effects, like the thunder machine in ancient Greece. We talked about Suke in Kabuki. We talked about how radio was where the real rise in sound effects happened. Oh yes, and then how in 1940, this demand was met with recorded sound for the first time. We went on a small tangent about the vinyl sound effects and how Tom collects these. I love knowing that about you, Tom.
Speaker 3:
[145:09] What a wonderful bit of lore.
Speaker 2:
[145:11] Then we played a bit of a game as well, where we looked at things like the thunder machine, canned laughter, the Wilhelm scream, the Pac-Man sounds, and how video games had to basically start from scratch. All of this encapsulating the humanness of sound effects, which are an essential form of artistry. And you can join us next time where we will learn about everything!
Speaker 3:
[145:42] Let's Learn Everything! is a Maximum Fun podcast hosted and produced by Ella Hubber, Tom Lum and Caroline Roper with editing and music by the wonderful and talented Tom Lum. You know what, I always did wonder if people thought you were white, even though your name is Lum. I was like, someone's definitely, people definitely think that.
Speaker 1:
[146:04] They can think, but I think back to all the people was just like, God, Tom talks way too flagrantly about the Chinese. I was like, Oh God.
Speaker 4:
[146:17] Maximum Fun, a worker owned network of artist owned shows, supported directly by you.