Stuff You Should Know - How the La Brea Tar Pits Work

Episode Date: June 24, 2014

It's surprising that a few 12-feet-deep pools of asphalt have proven to be one of the most significant troves of Pleistocene fossils, but the La Brea Tar Pits, located in the heart of Los Angeles, are giving science a clear picture of a puzzling time. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

attention bachelor nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen

crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to stuff you should know from house of works.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there making our lives difficult and so that as usual means it's time for stuff you should know. That's right. Yes. How are you my friend? I'm good. Good. Yeah. You look well. Healthy. I feel a little tubby but yeah. Oh yeah. I'm okay. That just means you've been living right. That's my motto. That's

sugar cookies. Yeah. Which I like. Yeah. Gotta have sugar cookies sometimes. So I leave for LA in the morning where the home of the La Brea Tarpets. I didn't realize that you're doing the intro. Or should I call it Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Riena de Los Angeles. One us. I think it's hard to hear that. Los Angeles without thinking. It really is. Yeah. But yes that was the original name of Los Angeles Chuck. Did you know that before this? Yeah. I did not. Sure. That's a mouthful. I can see why everybody just calls it Los Angeles or if you're really hip LA. Yeah. Or if you're a jackass city of angels. No one says that. That's like the people say hot Lana. Yeah. Some people say that. You can get a magnet still that

says hot Lana. Yeah. Well no one in it or from Atlanta says that. That's a total outsider thing. You don't think they make Atlanta magnets in Atlanta? Yeah. But they sell them at the airport. Right. Atlanta people selling it. Hot land. That's like saying Nevada instead of Nevada. Is that really how it's supposed to be pronounced Nevada? Yeah. Man you don't hear everyone every time you don't see those emails from angry Nevadans. Nevadians. After a while they just kind of all become a blur. Yeah. We get taken the test for that. And I said you know what everyone outside Nevada says Nevada. I hate to break it to you. Yeah. Like everybody. And they say you know what everyone outside Atlanta says hot Lana. I don't think they say that. Some people do but no. I

don't I don't hold a grudge against you if you say it. I just pretend you aren't there. Okay. You know. You just ignore. Hot Lana. So that was my intro. That was a good one man. I think you should do one and people should vote. Here is mine. Chuck. Uh huh. Have you ever been to Los Angeles? I have. You used to live there didn't you? Yeah. And you've been to the little Bray of Tarpets obviously. Bunch of times. Surely. I've been once. You mean I went to LACMA. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea. It was like right there. Mid Wilshire. Miracle Mile. It's like you walk out the back entrance into a Japanese garden at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA. Yeah. And you just keep walking a little further and all of a sudden there's a huge mastodon. Yeah.

And then you go into the museum that time forgot. It was closed while we were there and I'm really sad especially after reading this article. The Page Museum is what it's called. Are they up? Did they update it? I think they might have updated it. No, no, no. I mean like it was closed for the day. Oh. Like we spent all of our time in LACMA and then came out. Gotcha. It was closed for the day. But I think they may have updated it. I think they did very recently. Since I left because when I went in when I was living there in late 2000 or late 90s early 2000s it was delightfully old. Yeah. Well, it was opened in 77. Yeah. It looked pretty untouched. Yeah. Mechanical mastodons inside that were all like clunky and... Oh, no. I'm really mad that we

missed it. We got to go back. Yeah. It's pretty neat. The herky-jerky mastodons. Yeah. Maybe you could just tell they were old. Yeah. Not in the ways that mastodons are supposed to be old. No, from the 70s. Yeah, exactly. I get you. So no, I haven't been to the Page Museum but I have been to the tar pits themselves. It's neat. And tar pits actually is a misnomer. Yeah. They're actually, they should be called asphalt pits or bitumen pits because tar is derived from coal and these pits are derived from petroleum. Yeah. So there's the fact of the podcast, sadly. Is it the fact of the podcast? Yeah. The crude oil seeps up through fissures in the earth's crust and then some of that evaporates and that leaves behind that tar. Asphalt. Asphalt. But let's go

back even further than that. These tar pits, the La Brea tar pits, which are basically for anybody who hasn't been there, if you're walking around the grounds of the tar pits, there's just basically black ponds that look like they have oil slicks on top of them. Then when you look a little closer, you're like, oh, it's all oil. Yeah. Every once in a while, there's a bubble coming up here there. Quite a bit. And again, there's like a huge mastodon coming out like a model. Yeah. Coming out of the one of the pits. It's pretty cool. Well, not quite coming out, but trying to. Right. He's never going to come out. He'll never make it. If that played out as a film, he would not make it out. Right. And that's the whole reason that the tar pits are even have fences and a plastic

mastodon in the first place because many, many millions of years ago, Los Angeles was under water. There was a lot of aquatic life that lived and died in that area and went to the bottom. And over time, we're compressed into the fossil fuel petroleum. Fossil fuel. Yes. Yeah. And then as the ice age came and the waters receded and were locked into glaciers up north, that land became drier. And as a result, like you said, that bitumen started coming up through fissures in the ground and has been ever since. Those are the La Brea tar pits. That's right. And in those pits, we're talking about the Pleistocene epoch, which is about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. Yeah. And the neat thing is, except for a handful, well, more than a handful, but except for some of these

huge land mammals that they found, a lot of the animals are the same as they are now. And this was the last time we had major climate cooling. So studying these fossils can, like we can learn more about our climate from studying these things than I don't know what. I was half with those sentences like, wait a minute, I don't know what part two is. But yeah, I think you made the point. Yeah. But that's how they, you know, you can learn a lot from future climates by studying past climates. Right, exactly. And that's one of the things that they're doing now. There's kind of a second wind that's going on at the La Brea tar pits. The first wind came about, we should say, since the La Brea tar pits made their first debut about 40,000 years ago, it's been, they've been

successfully trapping animals of all sorts. And not just animals, but plant life too. Yeah, mostly carnivores though. Yes. And there's a reason that there's mostly carnivores. They figured it out because there is a disproportionate amount of carnivores in the La Brea tar pits. Yeah, 90%. Yeah, which is way more than there were carnivores proportionately speaking. Yeah. During the Pleistocene epoch, specifically this last 40,000 year era, and they think they have it figured out why. Well, it makes total sense. Animal gets stuck in tar pit. Bigger animal comes along and wants to eat that animal. Right. It gets stuck in tar pit. And maybe even a bigger animal wants to eat both of those. It gets stuck in tar pit. Yeah. Well, plus also a lot of carnivores hunt

in packs. Sure. So if they're like, well, this stupid mastodon can't get out of this black pond, yeah, I'm going in after them. Right. Let's all go in after them. Everybody gets stuck. That's pretty much it. Yeah. That's why there's more carnivores. It's why they're disproportionately represented. Yeah, it's actually, I said he talking about the mastodon outside the fake one. I believe it's, if I remember correctly, a mama. Oh yeah, there's babies somewhere. And there's babies like on the shore. Yeah. And the mama is trapped and it's really kind of sad. It is. It's what they picked there. But I guess that was the realism of the Pleistocene epoch. Yeah. It was mommy goes hunting and doesn't come back. That's right. It's like Bambi. Yeah. And

you can, I think I've told this story before I was shooting there once on a TV commercial and I was far away from the, uh, the large pools and I was standing there and I looked down and there was a little two foot diameter pool of tar right by my feet. They're all over the place. Yeah. I mean, they're not all walled up and fenced off and it was bubbling. Uh, you know what that is, by the way? It's methane, I guess. Yeah. From bacteria they found out. Sure. So that was only like five or six years ago that they learned that and they discovered like 200 new kind of bacteria. That's neat. Petroleum loving bacteria. Yeah. That's great. And that it's still burping even in these tiny little puddles. Yeah. And the, the, even the big

puddles are only about 12 feet deep. Yeah. It's just like four meters, something like that for our non-Liberian friends. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, the, the tar pits have been just trapping animals. Like you said, even there's lots of recent animals in it. They found, they still find cattle bones. Rodney Dangerfield. Yeah. He was found in there. Apparently there was a Los Angeles, um, police department scuba diver that dove into the pits to retrieve evidence for a cold murder case. Oh yeah. And was successful apparently. But he said like, I've dived all over the place looking for evidence. He said that was the craziest dive I've ever made. He went in the tar? Yes. How? He scuba dived in the tar pit. Wow. Yeah. The, the article I read wasn't really, um,

big on detail. They wouldn't even say what evidence he was looking for. It must be less dense as you go because the tar that I've seen, it's like, I mean, it's like road tar. It's so thick. Right. Like I don't see how you could move. I would think scuba diver gets trapped. I think it's probably more dense toward the bottom. And if you're a mastodon, you're like, is this probably quick sandy? And this guy was probably avoiding the bottom. Plus I'm sure there are a lot of people like pulling him out. Yeah. I think that bad Rob Lowe movie, they, he did a bear to body in there. Yeah. I mean, it's what was, what was that bad, bad influence, bad influence, bad behavior, familiar, bad something, bad movie. Yeah.

That was probably pretty bad. This is before Rob Lowe had his big comeback. Right. This is the post sex tape years. Oh yeah. When he was just trying to hang in there, trying to hang in there. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't make it back Rob Lowe, but they got all kinds of like saber two tigers and dire wolves and like original, original native horses to North America that don't exist anymore. Yeah. Um, there used to be horses here. There used to be camels and they're not like the European horses that everyone thinks are horses here. You're focusing on the horses. There used to be camels here. I know. Uh, and like you said, saber two tigers, they found about, um, 4,000 of those dire wolves. They found about 2,000 dire wolves so far. Um, and then, uh, they also found

something called the American lion. This thing was the coolest animal in North America ever. Right. Yeah. They got up to eight feet long, four feet at the haunches. Yeah. Um, they weighed something like up to 775 pounds, which is 350 kilograms. These are giant mammals. They were about 25% larger than an African lion. Yeah. They were huge. If they wanted you dead, you were dead. Not like these lions these days. Right. They're lazy. Yeah. This American lion would have just taken your head clean off. Yeah. And Bert, all sorts of, uh, flightless, uh, predator or flightless, uh, flying predators in the sky. Yeah. Um, they're in the tar apparently so far. They found 660 species, 59 mammal species, 135 bird species, tons of everything from like mollusks

to, um, the new bacteria you're talking about. The laboratory targets have been so vital in providing a picture of, um, the, of life during the late Paleozoic. Yeah. That the error, the, the time period from 300,000 years ago to the end of the, um, not Paleozoic, did I say that? Yeah. I meant Pleistocene. Yeah. So the 300,000 years to the end of the Pleistocene is called the Rancho Librayan, all one word, land mammal age. Yeah. They renamed it for all this activity, right? Yeah. Like that's how important these little pits of bitumen are. And we'll talk about how all of this was discovered in just a moment. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new

podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to

Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, if these are basically pools of a bubbling crude, sticky asphalt, how did a bone ever get pulled out of it? Well, because of progress, my friend, in the fact that Los Angeles was not going to, sorry, Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Varellena de Los Angeles. Why? That's the dictionary. It was bound to be developed because of the weather there and the beautiful Pacific Coast. So, progress. People came along and started making a city there and it's such a volatile area. They realized, hey, this is dangerous, this area right here. So, let's start drilling for oil. Yeah. And it was, I think, the Hancock family of Hancock Park fame, which is right there as well.

I'm more of a MacArthur Park person. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Wow. It's a good song. Oh, okay. I thought you meant you just like scoring cheap drugs and someone leaving a cake out in the rain? Yeah, MacArthur Park's not the greatest area. No, but it's a, it was a good song. Yeah. But Hancock Park, boy. Is that nice? Well, sure. Yeah. I say that like it should be obvious. Yeah. It is nice. Okay. So, we're talking about progress. Yes. The Hancock family in 1870 started drilling for oil. Right. And they basically, the pits have been used since by Paleo Indians for things like waterproofing canoes and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, that stuff, you want to patch a hole in a canoe. Sure. You can do a lot worse.

Then asphalt. Yeah. Because that was before, what's that, like a numerical tape that they make? It's like one of those products you see on TV type things. The only one I'm familiar with is that spray that the guy on the clear plexiglass boat with the holes drilled in. Yeah. That's good stuff. But we don't buzz market here. No, because we don't remember the names of anything. That's true. But back then, this tar, man, I mean, that was like, that was magic to the Native American. And it's just sitting there. Just don't get too close. And then when the Spaniards came in and started using that area for cattle wrestling, they used it also for waterproofing for their roofs. They also used it as fuel.

And then once the Hancock family started digging for oil, they kind of left the tar pits alone. But as far back as 1875, a guy named William Denton was the first person to describe a fossil taken from the library of tar pits. Somebody gave him a saber tooth tiger tooth, canine tooth. And then inspired him. It did. And so the nascent natural history museum from Los Angeles contacted the Hancock family and said, Hey, why don't you let us start tooling around there? And they let them starting in 1901. They were allowed to basically do some kind of random, small, misguided excavation. Yeah, they were only concerned about the big daddy bones. Well, that came in the 30s. In the 30s when they started like really digging the pits. I thought 1913 is when they started

their first full scale. You're right. I'm sorry. They also did in the 30s too. Well, from 1913 till now. Right. Okay. So in 1913, they started digging pits around the library of tar pits, further pits, 96 of them in total. Yeah, they had to dig down to these. There weren't just big natural pools of black tar because people would have seen that previously and be like, Hey, what's up with all that stuff? Right. So they, they would dig down, remove all the bones. And like you said, they were really only interested in the big ones. So they kind of discarded and left alone a lot of the bird bones and plant fossils and all that stuff is boring. And the other thing they didn't do was catalog the bones together. So they basically just threw them all into piles.

And there's a picture on the Page Museum's website of one of the early lead excavators. Yeah. Just surrounded by like boxes and boxes of bones. I'm sure they were like, what do we do with all this stuff? Yeah, they found something like a million or so, a million and a half bones, I think. Yeah, they dug 96 pits in total and well, we'll talk about the new progress. But before the new progress, they had close to four million fossils. And that sounds like a lot, but they said you only have to get like once every 10 years, some big animal. Well, yeah, that was another thing too. They're like, well, that doesn't make any sense in 40,000 years. How could you have, you know, four million bones?

I think it makes perfect sense. They were saying, well, yeah, if you do the math, I think if you have 30 or 10 animals stranded every decade, it would account for it. Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't more than that. Yeah, you know, because I mean animals wandering to tar pits. Yeah, they might also get smart and avoid tar pits. When? When they see their mommy go in and not come out. I guess so, you know, because those little baby mastodons didn't look like they were going in after her. No, they were out of there. They went to the beach. They went to MacArthur Park. Score. That's right. All right. So I said they dug 96 pits, not all of them bore fruit.

Quite a few of them did. And pit number was a 91 was noted for the bounty of fossils it provided. It's always the fifth to last one. Isn't that the same? It's always the fifth to the last. And they, for about 40 years, they really concentrated on pit 91. I don't think they're digging there right now, although they may have started again. I think they're hot and heavy on project 23. Should we go ahead and go to project 23? We'll get to project 23 in a second. Let's do a message break real quick. Okay. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do

you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace the way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so let's talk about Project

23. Yeah, I think Project 23 started in 2006 and that was basically a plan to continue digging and find more fossils and take better care with the small guys to get a more complete fossil record. And they call it 23 because they did a, well this whole thing started because LACMA wanted to build a parking garage. An underground parking garage. Yeah, which you can't do unless around that area because it's so volatile without getting some help from archaeologists. And so they ended up digging 23 just big chunks of land essentially in these crates. Yeah, have you ever seen, you know, if you buy a fully grown tree from a nursery, it comes in a huge box, huge wooden planter. Have you ever seen them like that? That's what

they used. Yeah, well, and much larger even and some of them capable of like close to 60 tons of soil and tar and bones or whatever else is in there. And that's why they called it Project 23 because there's 23 of them. Yeah, and this was 2006 so they're using much more sophisticated techniques than they were using even in the 60s when they were really hitting pit 91 hard. That sounded so stupid. Please forgive me everyone, but they're using sophisticated techniques and they had the luxury of coming at these deposits from the side or from underneath. Sure. Rather than having to go down through the tar pits from above. Yeah. So they really scored a lot of like just a trove of deposits of bones, including a woolly mammoth named Zed. Yeah, 80% of them.

Yeah, it was a Colombian woolly mammoth that was the most intact skeleton ever found of a Colombian woolly mammoth. Yeah, and the woolly mammoths you see reconstructed at the Page Museum or they were, like you said, they used to just put all the bones together. So those were bones made up of all kinds of woolly mammoths. That is all Zed, or 80% of them is all Zed. And they named him Zed in honor of zero, the British way of saying zero. Yeah. And the reason they named him zero is because he represents basically like a new start in understanding of not only that species, but all of the life around the era. Yeah, patient zero. Pretty much. And the cool thing is I mean, I like all the campiness of the Page Museum, but one of the really neat parts about it is

they have what they call the fishbowl. They have a the room where they're doing this work is all glass. And you can walk through and see all the skeletons that they put together and all the funny old dated woolly mammoths that are going, ah, yeah, you can pound on the glass and go nerds to the scientists. We can do that at the very end of it. You can that they're in there brushing in brushing and they have microscopes and all sorts of neat little tools that scientists use. Oh, you want to wait to the end anyway, so you can run off right after you say that. Yeah. And they're recording all the stuff. It's very detailed. They're there. What they're doing is they're getting a fossil record from that time like they didn't have before because they were

lazy in the 1913 and on. Right. So one of the reasons why they're looking for this fossil record is because this is a particularly curious time period that the Lebrea tarpits encapsulated literally. Yeah. For humans evolved. Well, that's remember with the early Americans. Yeah. The debate over that. This is around that time. There was something called the late Pleistocene extinction. There were a lot, you'll notice a lot of animals, large animals that used to be in North America that aren't any longer. There's no camels. There's no indigenous American horse any longer. Yeah. There's no American lion and all of these animals, these what are called megafauna started dying off at about the same time in North America. Yeah. And scientists aren't really sure why. And I think

that's one of the reasons they're so excited about Zed is they're hoping he can kind of tell him. And there's three competing or combination hypotheses for what caused this extinction. Well, humans killed them. That's one. Yeah. That humans either overhunted all of them or overhunted a keystone species like mastodons that led to collapse of the ecosystem as a whole. That doesn't seem likely to me. I know the timeline suggests that, but I think that's correlation. Okay. That's just my opinion. The other one is climate change itself did that. This is the end of an ice age. Yeah. Temperatures were rising, sea levels were rising. It's possible that a lot of these species just couldn't possibly adapt, possibly because they were large, because this

late Pleistocene extinction was mostly among mammals or animals 100 pounds or more. Yeah. And then the third one is something called hyper disease, any highly infectious disease possibly introduced by man and then transferred from man to animal. I wonder if they found human bones in the tar pits at all. I don't know. I haven't heard about that. Yeah. I didn't come across anything like that either. You think they would have made pretty big hay about that kind of thing? Yeah. Actually, Josh, I did something we rarely do and I just looked it up mid-show and they did find a human skull called the La Brea woman, evidently. Oh. Like early on in 1914 and I think that's the only human bones that they've ever found. Wow. So there you have it.

There you have it. Do they have an idea like when she lived? Approximately 10,000 years. Wow. So she was like between 25 and 30. That is neat. So she was old. Supposedly that's a fallacy. Yeah. Once they had a high infant mortality rate back then, which skewed that average life expectancy downward, but once you survived infancy, you could expect to live to a nice ripe old age. But anyway, it's possible that Zed will give us an idea of what the heck happened at the late Pleistocene extinction. Yeah. Because North America in particular had a peculiarly large die off. Like it happened elsewhere in roughly the same time in other continents, but in North America it was big massive. So what happened? Maybe the humans killed them all. Maybe I'm wrong.

Ask Zed. Well, not necessarily, but there were humans in other places too where the extinction wasn't nearly as pronounced. Maybe they were vegetarians. So go to the La Brea tarpets. Yeah. Go see Zed with his 10 foot long tusks. It's an LA institution. Yeah. If you were just fan of movies, they've shot all kinds of movies in there. Rob Lowe movie. Yeah. The great movie Miracle Mile. Yeah. Anthony Edwards, did you ever see that? No. You should check that out. That's a little known cult classic about nuclear war and the last like 24 hours before the bomb is supposed to hit LA. Really? And it all takes place at the Miracle Mile area. There's scenes in the tarpets and there's a diner there right on Wilshire that I think Johnny's diner that's not even

opening more, but they just keep it there because they filmed so many movies there. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Highly recommended by me. Nice. Well, I will see your Miracle Mile. Yeah. Very 80s though. Like get ready for that synthesizer score. I've got one for you. Have you ever seen Night of the Comet? Oh, dude. I love Night of the Comet. That's a good one too. Nothing to do with nuclear bombs or LA, but that's great. Super 80s too. Yeah. I love that movie. There you have it. Oh, I was behind Anthony Edwards at the Rally to Restore Sanity. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm thinking the right guy, right? The guy from Top Gun. Yeah, and ER. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. And Miracle Mile. Revenge of the Nerds. Oh, well, sure. Yeah. I don't remember his name,

that one, but it was, that was his best role, I think. We saw the, I don't know if you saw him, but when we were in LA for that TV show that we had. What? Remember when they brought us out for the press weekend thing? I can't remember what that's called, but we... The Junket. Yeah. There's a Junket. It's a Junket. The two Revenge of the Booger and the Carrotine guy were both there promoting their new show. And they walked by me and I was like, holy cow, that's two-thirds of the Revenge of the Nerds gang. Yeah. I remember you saying that. Yeah, I was pretty excited. I felt like I missed out. That's all right. Not seeing them. It really wasn't a big deal. And we're, Matt Damon and Michael Douglas there, too. Yeah. Promoting the Liberace movie. Yeah.

I remember seeing them and going, what are they doing together? And that is what our TV show has to do with behind the candelabra. If you want to know about more amazing connections, you can check us out on social media. We're all over the place. We're on Twitter, at S.Y.S.K. Podcast. We're on Instagram and Pinterest. We're on Facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to StuffPodcast at howstuffworks.com, the triumphant return of that URL. And if you want to know more about the La Brea Tarpits, I did this totally out of order. What is wrong with me today? You got a case of the Mondays. Weird. It's Wednesday. Anyway, I guess we'll leave it in, huh? Sure. No sense in recording

something in error over again. Well, and since no one ever knows how to get in touch with us, it's clear that most people tune out by this time anyway. Right. Okay. Well, anyway, if you want to know more about the La Brea Tarpits, type that in the search bar at howstuffworks.com, and that will bring up this listener mail. Amnesia Expert is what I'm going to call this. We called out for amnesia experts and we got one. Or she says, I sort of am. Her name is Maya. She's a PhD student working on her dissertation in neuroscience. She said, my work focuses on spatial working memory and our lab actually models human amnesia and rats. While there were a few things that were nitpicky, nitpickily wrong, I most wanted to write in about your discussion of

short term and working memory. While in the podcast, he stated that there were two separate things. They were two separate things in that working memory forms a bridge between STM and LTM. In fact, the term short term memory is no longer really used in the memory field. Working memory now encompasses what used to be referred to as short term. The working part is in reference to the fact that these items can be remembered as long as a brain works at rehashing the information, like say repeating it to yourself, rather than for a certain arbitrary period of time. That's why they use a Clydesdale to represent working memory. There's also competing theories about the actual limits of working memory, but our lab believes and has shown that it is capacity

dependent that the traditional idea of seven items really holds true for simple things like numbers or letters. In fact, the more complicated the information, the fewer items your working memory can hold. That is amazing. For example, why you can easily remember the 10 digits by repeating it in your head. You could only remember one or two faces using the same strategy. So that is from Maya, and good luck on your PhD studies. Thanks for correcting us too. Maybe it would have held a little more weight if they come after you got your PhD, but we appreciate you writing in either way. If you want to be derided by me or Chuck on listener mail, or if you want to just correct us, we appreciate that in all seriousness. You can write to us, as I said before,

stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and while you're on the computer, you might as well check out our beautiful, luxurious home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.