114: La Brea's Bone Count & Giant Pumpkins

Welcome and introductions

0:00Someone in the Spotify comments, which I read all of, by the way, said, if Tom managed to snipe one of Ella's jokes, does that mean that Ella finds Tom funny?

0:16Wait, what episode was that under? On the most recent one. That's brilliant. I'm going to have that framed. No! No! Hello, and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn anything and everything

0:55spooky.

1:00My name's Ella, and I am the undead student of the episode. Yay! Okay. And today I will not be bringing a topic, because I'm just learning. I'm learning along with you guys. It's a Halloween episode, even though it's the start of October. It starts now, baby. Yeah, it's spooky season. It's spooky month. You're getting it early. Today we're going to cover a science topic and a miscellaneous topic, both equally scary in their approach. My name's Tom, and today's spooky science topic is something that I've wanted to talk

1:34about for three years now. Oh my god. Because I went to a tourist destination in Los Angeles, not expecting much, and found one of the most macabre museums ever. So my spooky science question is, how many bones are in the La Brea Tar Pits? That's so... You don't do, like, kind of morbid topics very often, Tom. And this is delightful, and I'm so excited. How wonderful. I'm also... It's good to be back in the bone zone, baby. It's been a while. Yeah, we haven't been in the bone zone for so long.

2:05Eee eee. No. And we like that phrasing. I'm sticking with it. We love the bone zone. I love boning with my friends. Oh, no. That is very, very interesting, Tom. I am excited. This is very me. You're excited to get down in bone. I'm so excited.

2:23My name is Caroline, and this episode's spooky miscellaneous topic is giant vegetable growing. Yes. Yes. Yes! It's great, but is it spooky? There's quite a lot of giant pumpkin growing happening on the scene, so that's my link. Sorry, this is such a wonderful, spooky reversal also, though. I did have the thought, as I was writing some of my topics, I was like, my version of macabre is a lot of your guys' normal baseline.

2:56Normal, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. But what a wonderfully autumnal and Halloween-y topic. I'm excited. I'm excited. This is the treat. It's the trick and the treat, as it were.

Corrections and nuance

3:06Before we start, we have a Corrections Corner. Last episode, I mentioned Burke and Hare. I said they were body snatchers. That's not true. They were murderers. Yes! Yes! I completely forgot that. Don't disrespect their names. They were murderers. I mean, this is very on-brand for the Halloween episode. They murdered at least 16 people to sell them their bodies for medical... Sorry, no, it is objectively funny that Ella did use this to backdoor in her spooky backdoor.

3:42Sorry, that rules. Yeah, they murdered at least 16 people that they sold on for anatomical purposes. So, I don't know how I forgot that, but I did. I mean, because we were so body snatch focused that... Apologies for that.

4:03I also have a... It's not a Corrections Corner. It's a nuance zone. The nuance zone. It's so nuanced, I can't tell if it's a corner or just a flat wall. I like that this isn't a corner. I saw someone once in the Discord questioning how many corners does Lutz and Everything has? What shape is it? It's a circle, baby. So it's good not to have another corner. This is the zone in the middle. This is the nuance coffee table that sort of sits in the middle there. Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is also on my topic, where we talked about organ discovery,

4:38and we talked, we joked quite a lot about the period of time when not a lot of scientific discovery was happening. And yes, all of the stuff that we talked, like, discussed at length does stand, but there is some other nuance that I just wanted to touch on as well, which we had a great email from Anna come in about this. So thank you so much, Anna. Anna rightfully pointed out that actually a lot of medicinal work was happening, a lot of medicinal science was happening, but that, of course, it was women who were doing it. And therefore, there's actually not a lot of

5:12written record of the work that was happening at the time. They shouted out Hildegard of Bingen as a specific example, if anyone wants to dive further into this. So it's a really great point, Anna. Thank you for putting it out. Quick note from Editor Tom here that we've added a new channel to our Discord for folks to discuss the upcoming live shows. If you have any questions, plans, or just want to chat about the live shows, you can find the link to our Discord at let'slearneverything.com.

The La Brea bone count

5:39Today's spooky science topic is a question, and that is, what is La Brea's bone count? So, first of all, what's y'all's familiarity with bonin? Sorry, what's y'all's familiarity with the La Brea tar pits? Have you heard of it? I have. Yes. As I have expressed before, I like true crime sometimes. And this podcast called Criminal covers things that are tangentially related to crime as well. And one of the episodes, they talk about a diver who goes into the La Brea tar pits to, or who has before, to recover

6:09evidence of crimes. Oh, that's so cool. Not what we're going to be talking about. So I was familiar with that. People dump things in there because it's so hard to retrieve things. That's what I know about it. If that is the only way that bones are contributed to the tar pits, or if this is a more like a dinosaur thing you're going to get into, that's, I don't know. Are there like mammothy things going on in there? Like, I'm very curious. This is perfect. This is perfect. You guys know about it, but you might know less about

6:40what we're going to cover today. I'm less familiar with the more recent sort of, it's more recent kills, or it's more recent consumptions of bones. So we're talking old bones. So for those who don't know, located smack dab in downtown Los Angeles, California, there are a series of now pretty small tar pits. You know, most of the originals have been fairly cordoned off. And in fact, the big like scenic pits that most people have seen is actually leftover from mining in the 1800s. It's not like naturally forming, it turns

7:12out. But suffice to say, there are a handful of like pools of tar in downtown Los Angeles. And even growing up in New Jersey, I had heard of it as like a classic, almost like cheesy American landmark. You know, it's like Grand Canyon, giant ball of yarn, La Brea tar pits. It's it's kind of like the eternally burning tire fire in the Simpsons. Yeah. Yeah. And so I mostly went just when I visited LA for the first time, I was like, oh, I'll

7:43check it out. You know, like, and it's it's literally in the same complex as like LACMA, the art museum. So I was like, oh, I've always heard about it. I'll check it out. And then I walked in and I was greeted by this. This is my actual vacation photo. You can see all the images in this episode in the show notes or at let's learn everything dot com slash one fourteen. I love it when let's learn everything goes on a field trip. That's so many skulls. Oh, wow. Sure. Fuck it. You want to describe what this is? It's a wall. It's not the tar pits. You know, it's not like a big pit full of floating bones. That's what I

8:19was imagining. I was about to see. It's a wall of what looks like some kind of mammal skulls. It's the tops of their skulls exclusively. Where are the bottoms? I guess on the opposite wall. Yeah, yeah. There's lots. There must be hundreds there. Yeah. This is a wall of four hundred wolf skulls on display in the most fucking ominous way imagined. This is something straight out of like a Kubrick film. They're like backlit bright orange all lined

8:50up neatly in a row. Four hundred wolf skulls. It's sick. Unfortunately, Tom, this isn't macabre to me. I just think this is really cool. Yeah, it's really cool. I want it in my living room. No. Yeah. Again, this fucking rules. I want I want a backlit row of skulls in my living room. Right. Yes. Yes. And y'all, the rest of the museum really matches that vibe because in their glory days, the tar pits were a death trap. Yeah. Hell yeah. Let's go. And we have built a monument in reverence to them and it fucking rules. But to get there, we need to start at the beginning.

9:22And so we need to talk about the titular La Brea. Now, I know a lot of people already. Wait, do you know what La Brea means? No. This is the best fun fact. La Brea means the tar in Spanish. Oh, nice. Perfect. So when you say the La Brea tar pits, you're saying the the tar tar pits? I really enjoy that. And I will go and tell everybody that now. Oh, just you wait, Caroline. Advanced Penance will know it's not even technically a tar pit because it's not tar. It's technically an asphalt seep. What's the difference between an asphalt seep and a tar pit?

9:56Ella, we're going to get into it. It's actually part of what makes it so cool. But really what we should be calling it is the El Resumadero de Asfalto Asphalt Seep. So what is the difference?

The history of oil

10:08How did all this tar come about? Well, there is a simple one sentence answer I could give you. And then there is the almost entire topic within a topic I spent trying to untangle all the words in oil that I've always wanted to understand that are mired in industry lingo and US-UK differences. Good fucking Lord. I love it when a topic does this to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to split the difference. Hopefully we can find some middle ground between a topic on the history of asphalt and just the one sentence explainer. And weirdly, this story starts with,

10:38of all places, the sun 300 million years ago. Perfect. As so many stories do. As all great good stories technically do. Because at that time, plants were busy turning solar energy into organic compounds. And animals eating the plants were, in essence, doing the same but with more steps, right? Turning solar energy into the organic compounds of our body. But then... The fire nation attacked.

11:11Um... Most of that solid matter that life is made up of is, of course, carbon and hydrogen. But then, sadly, 300 million years ago, things die. Because they all do. This is the first of many deaths in this topic. Why? Why do they die? It can't just be like, things die. Just of natural causes. Just things die, yeah. Are you saying just like part of their life cycle, they die? Or there was like an extinction event or... No, it was just a normal dying. Okay, so things are dying. They're living and then they're dying. Yeah, I just had to break the news to some people that life dies. I know that's going to be rough for

11:46some people. Life dies. Say again? Nothing's fine. Cool. Can't wait to hear that in the edit and laugh. And when things die, all those molecules that they work so hard to make that they put energy into falls to the ground. And with enough time, the ground covers them and covers them until after millions of years, there is enough pressure and heat that those organic molecules break down and separate into this mess of like just barely recognizable hydrocarbons. You know, compounds that are

12:18carbons attached to hydrogens. And if hydrocarbons are good at one thing, it is burning and combusting and being a fuel. A, I don't know, fossil fuel, if you were. Wow. So old planty material turns into coal, like a hard coal. Small organisms like plankton and algae, when they degrade over this time, they turn into petroleum, liquid petroleum or crude oil. And then the sort of like gas, gaseous hydrocarbon-y vapors of all of these turn into

12:50natural gas. So you have coal, oil and gas. This is actually like a useful describer of all of this process. Yeah. I feel like I should have, I probably learned this like in school, but I didn't, I don't remember any of it. This will help me hold on to it. Yeah. It's, it's one of those things that like when you revisit it with like adult eyeballs and like you phrase it just slightly differently, it's like, oh, that is how that happened. And again, I spent so fucking long untangling this to be listenable because it's just such a... Wait, wait, wait, one second. What turns into gas? Just so I remember. This is just my...

13:22Oh, the, it's just like the hydrocarbon-y vapors of both coal and oil. Oh, okay. It's just sort of like the gaseous, the gaseous hydrocarbons. Because other hydrocarbons are like different or can be different lengths. And that means that they have different properties going on. Caroline, you are exactly right. And this is, this is the key insight that I feel like a lot of stuff doesn't touch on, but like finally made it click for me. Right. So I first have to say, um, coal, oil, gas. Long ago, the three nations lived in harmony

13:52until the fire nation attacked. There it is. Oh no, the person about in the spot of my comments was right.

14:00No, Ella, sorry. I didn't write that down. I didn't write that down. I was, I was one-upping yours. Sorry. I was, Ella, I was thinking you were funny. Don't worry. Oh, thank you. Now, so, so, so, so planty stuff turns into coal. Organisms like plankton and algae turn into petroleum or crude oil. Larger animals and stuff tends to decompose in a way that doesn't sort of like let them perfectly form this, this big biomass of, of potential carbon energy of hydrocarbons for, for any number of reasons. Scavengers can pick off stuff. It depends on the

14:35ecosystem. Immediately where I was like, but surely the earthworms are going to come along or the equivalent of, and like eat everything. Right. So actually it makes sense. Millions of years ago. And that was the reason a lot of this is aquatic stuff is like plankton and algae is because it's just like the perfect storm of like a whole ton of biomass that's just getting buried. Right. Yeah. So when people say like dinosaurs became oil. That's not true. Not true. Yeah. Good to know. Yeah. I feel like I do know that, but it's good to have it confirmed. Well, no, it's good to, good to hear this story sequentially

15:05and to think of it purely chemically. And I think again, Caroline, this is the key insight that like made this all click. So remember how I said crude oil is just now, when you think of it this way, it's just a fucking mess of hydrocarbons, right? It is, is made up of about 350 distinct kinds of hydrocarbons. That many. Wow. Which makes sense. Cause it is just like life crushed. Right. There's also about like 2% sulfur, less than 1% of nitrogen, oxygen, other trace elements, of course. And so refining oil is the process of not just

15:37stripping out those not useful bits, but also specific hydrocarbons that have different properties. Right. So one of the most pure versions is of course, gasoline or petrol, but this is also how we get a petroleum jelly. Oh, yes. That makes sense. Right. And again is, but the thing is like, I feel like every single time I look this up, it's like, oh, it's a by-product of petroleum. And I'm like, what does, what the fuck does that mean? But now it makes a little bit more sense. This does make a lot of sense because I was learning. So you know how the Strait of Hormuz has been blocked on and off for a while now that blockage

16:11because that they bring crude oil through has stopped a lot of supply chains. And I was surprised to learn about some of the supply chains that were blocked because of it. So condom manufacturing, manufacturing has, it's not late latex itself, but like the processing of it and like coating it in a certain oil and stuff and certain other aspects to make also medicine production uses crude oil derivatives as well. There was loads of stuff that was blocked by that supply chain that I was really surprised to learn about. And I was like, oh, wow, there's

16:44loads of stuff going on here. And it's so, it, cause like whenever we talk about oil, it's always gasoline. Right. And so I was always just like, how, how, how are these two possibly related? But when you think about it instead as like different kinds of hydrocarbons being filtered and some have different properties, it's like, okay, that makes a little bit of sense. The one that really clicked for me is, of course, this is also how you get paraffin wax. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is why like paraffin wax and whale blubber can both be used as candles because they're both just flammable hydrocarbons. Oh, okay. Yeah. That makes sense.

17:20So asphalt or bitumen is, is a very simple, like you don't have to refine it very much to get this, but what you do get is it's a very sticky hydrocarbon mix made from crude oil. Asphalt that you put on the road is technically asphalt mixed with concrete. They both have the same name. It's confusing. Right. That was the other thing that I was confused by was how does that become? Yeah. Okay. Whereas tar or pitch can be made from coal. And the important distinction though, especially is that you can actually make it now, like you can make it in the present with presents dead wood by just

17:56like heating it up a certain way. Okay. You don't need to make millions of years. Tar and asphalt are, the reason they're similar is because they're both sticky hydrocarbons. Um, and part of the reason I think we call it tar pits instead of asphalt pits is our history with tar goes back a lot farther as humans because we were using it like pine tar, wood tar was stuff to like seal boats and stuff like that. We used it all the time actually. And so that's part of the reason why I think we call it the tar pits instead of the asphalt pits. But for whatever reason, we're going to, we're stuck with it.

18:26And I'll probably call it that a few times in this script, but that's, um, all our oil words. Do we have any other, any other questions come to mind from my, uh, cut topic on the history of oil? No, no, no. This is great. There are so many British and UK differences also that pissed me the fuck off. I was like, God damn it. We have tarmac in the UK, which is a surface of version. You might have it in the US. Yes. I don't know. And I think that's asphalt. Tarmac is, is, is asphalt. Yeah.

18:58It's a bit too bad.

19:00This is what, another reason why I was like, okay, what are the words meaning here? Cause I'm like, yeah, it is very obfuscated. It's so confusing. Yes, exactly. But yeah, that's, uh, when you think about it from the chemistry perspective is, is pretty interesting. You know, I think I'm happy to say that our podcast official stance is that oil and fossil fuels fucking rule. They're so cool. What do you think about it? Okay. Unfortunately, technically correct. Don't milkshake duck fossil fuels for me, please. I just learned about them. What could have possibly happened with, oh no. Oh no. How many conflicts? It does what to the atmosphere? Now for all of human

Inside the tar pits

19:41history, oil coming up out of the ground has actually been a pretty common occurrence. This is like a strange, but technically true fact is that we have records of humans using crude oil since paleolithic times. Wow. Oh, that's so cool. Just not for cars, right? What for? As like, uh, bonding agents, like sometimes waterproof coatings for things. Uh, and we see this like literally cultures across the world from native Americans, ancient China, Africa, like everywhere. But if you're really, really, really, really lucky or really, really, really unlucky, the small seep of crude oil can

20:17become a pit. Wikipedia's list of tar pits only has nine of them. And as Alexis Mihailu wrote for the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, the idea of finding a new tar pit felt a bit like discovering a new species of elephants. There's no way we could have missed something so obvious, right? And the reason a tar pit is so obvious and so dangerous, aside from being just like bigger to step in, is that as the sun evaporates and degrades away the lighter compounds and impurity, it slowly naturally turns

20:48a puddle of crude oil into a much thicker asphalt, leaving behind a stagnant pool of imminent doom. I want to show you now my second favorite picture I took at La Brea. It's actually not a picture I took. This is one from their website because it's, it's just such a good angle.

21:10Oh no! Oh no! What a horrible thing to put there! It's really horrible. It's a giant sculpture of a mammoth half sinking in the tar pits while presumably it's, it's life partner and child watch from the shore. It's a wild! It's the like baby elephant reaching out its trunk. Also, this is one of the only like sculptures they have like this. That's wild! It's so good. And also like, I, like what must that have felt like to see your family on the

21:43shore just inches away and all you can do is struggle against an inky black void pulling you deeper and deeper down? Well kids, why don't we find out? As the museum states, quote, ever wonder what it was like for animals trying to escape from the tar in the park? Oh my god! Well, you don't have to get all gooey or become a part of our collections to experience this. Try your hand at our tar pull and see what it was like to be in the seeping asphalt's deathly grip. This is grim. I love it!

22:14That's a direct quote. Seeping asphalt's deathly grip. You don't have to become a part of our collections to find out. That is morbid. We've hit it. It rules. Fucking rules. It's so good. They have this like handle on a pneumatic tube that lets you like pull futilely against death and be like, wow, this is what it must have felt like. Is this an attraction for where you might take your children? Oh, this is like a staple of like Los Angeles public schools. My children will be, I will be taking them here for an early education on death.

22:48It's, it, that, that's also part of what kept happening in my brain is I was like, I think this actually is good and cool and rules, uh, for, for, for, for kids. Uh, I don't know, of course, of course, kids are going to eat this up. Are you kidding me? Kids are weird little guys. Oh my god. They would love that. Kids are freaks. They're freaks. Kids love death. Kids yearn for the tar pits.

23:09Oh, can we have that as our pin for the next bird for the tar pits? Kids yearn. Back in my day, we didn't have phones. We had a tar pit and we liked it.

23:24Back in my day, we just had a, we had an inky black void as a reminder of death and we liked it. Yeah. We've been going easy on kids with the, with the quicksand. We need to introduce the risks of tar pits to them at a young age. I did have a thought where I was like, this is like, this is like quicksand's much scarier evil cousin. Like they, oh, I almost forgot my best, my favorite part. Uh, this is 100% true. They have a, they have a t-shirt that they sell. It had a cartoon elephant in the tar pit and it says what happens in the La Brea tar pits stays in the La Brea tar pit.

23:55Oh my God. That's so good. That's genius. I want that so badly. Whoever wrote that, yeah, deserves a rose. That's genius. That's fucking genius. It's really good. That's so good. I just want to know they'll be like, oh, it's a living. It's a dying. Now, aside from inventing the tar pole, scientists have also investigated the biological impact of tar. As paleontologist Anna Holden put it, as little as four centimeters of tar could be enough to ensnare a large animal.

24:26That's just how absolutely gnarly it is. Um, when I was at the pits, there are some just like small pits off to the side court and off. And of course there's just like someone has a stick through the fence and like I went to, uh, I can, I think I might be able to play my reaction to pushing it for the first time. Here it is. Hold on. Oh, that's weird. It's just, it's just so fucking stick. It like, it's whatever you're thinking. It's, it's, oh. And according to Smithsonian Magazine, quote, animals trapped in the La Brea tar pits would

25:00take months to sink. Oh no. This is according to their article titled, animals trapped in the La Brea tar pits would take months to sink. Nice. Perfect. Honestly, Tom, I'm sorry I ever doubted you that this was a good Halloween topic because it's brim. Yeah, baby. Uh, I love when a fact is bonkers enough to be the headline. Like they didn't have to make up anything that could just state the fact and you'd be intrigued enough. And I do want to clarify. I want to clarify two things. One is that like the, the bones that

25:32we find aren't like floating at the bottom of a, of water and like a loose soup. They get pulled down deep, deep, deep, and sometimes harden into the asphalt and rock below. It's not like bone soup. Shame. I do also have to undercut the doom of the pits a little bit because they weren't killing hundreds or even dozens of animals per year. It likely happened in like bursts and periods. Like it would get especially deadly if it got like covered by leaves and water because then, you know, it doesn't look like anything.

26:03So why are there hundreds of wolf skulls then? That's a great question, Ella. Put a pin in it in one second. So, uh, if you like take the stats, it seems like amortized over per year. It only claims the life of one big animal every like three years or so, roughly. Um, it wasn't, it wasn't like a killer, killer trap. Um, I think also it could like ebb and flow. It could become smaller and larger given time and stuff like that. Also, it should be said that not all bones found in the pits were claimed by the pits or were a kill

26:34from the pits because they often accrue bones of already dead animals. Once again, as, as the La Brea Museum so poetically put it, sometimes a sloth lies dead for thousands of years before the asphalt can reach it. Other times it is the asphalt that traps the sloth. Either way, the sloth loses, but paleontologists win. It's like, yeah, your question is how many bones are in the La Brea tarpits, but I'm interested in what the kill count of the, what's the La Brea tarpits body count?

27:02I'm not interested in it boning. I need the body count. To now go back in favor of the La Brea tarpits, there's another cool factor pushing the bone count way up and pushing the body count way up. And that is the fact that when they say sloth there in that quote, they don't mean modern sloths. They do mean giant ground sloths. Ah, I love giant ground sloths. Which have been extinct for a while. And that's because La Brea has been around for 50,000 years. Oh, okay.

27:32Or since the end of the last ice age.

Fossils and the predator trap

27:35At the start, I did lie to you a little bit. The wall of skulls aren't just wolf skulls, they are dire wolf skulls. Dire wolf skulls? And they have over 3,600 dire wolf skulls recovered. Whoa. La Brea has the bones of saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, and mastodons, which I found out are different. American lions, and camels, which I didn't know was, I didn't know American camels were even a thing. Didn't know they made it that far. I know. Yeah. Yeah. You know, again, this is migrated across the land bridge, and then died off along with

28:07the mammoths and saber-tooth tigers and other around those times. But they were there, and I did not know. But by far, the funniest part is that for the longest time, we did not know this. As the museum writes, quote, the bones found associated with asphalt deposits were considered to be remains of domestic stock or other animals of the region. However, it was not until 1901 that the bones were, again, recognized as fossils of extinct animals by

28:39W.W. Orcut, a prominent Los Angeles geologist. Orcut, with fellow scientist F.M. Anderson, collected intermittently for about four years until they discovered a fossiliferous deposit that contained more bones than asphaltic matrix. So, more bones than asphalt. Wow. Ooh, that's cool. That's a collection. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, you know, Anderson, I was thinking this might be cows, but then I just stumbled upon whores beyond my comprehension. So, it might be something else. They literally

29:12could not stop running into bones. This is not a joke. Quote, early in 2006, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began construction of an underground parking garage at the west end of Hancock Park. Within the confines of the future structure, 16 previously unknown asphaltic fossil deposits were discovered, along with the skeleton of a near-complete Colombian mammoth. Wow! That's so cool. Are you going to talk about why fossils are preserved so well in the tar pits? I assume

29:44it's just because there's no bacteria living in there. There's no oxygen down there. There's no oxygen, so it's just like, or very little bacteria, obviously no oxygen, so it's like just... What is asphalt but, like, liquidy rock, right? And the sooner you get to rock, the better you preserve something. Yeah, yeah. So, rather than having to, like, erode away with time. Yeah. Right, yeah. There's no abrasion. It's just, you're in, your biomass deteriorates, and then once you're just bones, you slowly sink. It's a beautiful rapid gradient from surface to rock, right? It's asphalt.

30:15So, yeah, they literally could not stop running into bones, even when they did not want to, even when it was inconvenient. And so, what is the answer to our bone question? Any final guesses? I guess the era these animals that they found come from is the Pleistocene, right? Yes. It's the end of the last Ice Age, but yeah, the Pleistocene. I forgot you're an Eros girly, which means something different. Right. I'm actually an Epoch girly. Oh, wait. A t-shirt that just says the Epochs tour, and then it's just pictures of different

30:48fossils. Oh, that's good. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. This is good. This is good. That's good. Or just the, I mean, Eros is the Eons tour, and it's just two places. Because it's only two Eons. Oh, and then instead of the tour dates, it's like the years of the, when they happen, it's just like an actually useful shirt. Nice. That's good merch. That's ours. Caroline, you want to give a number? How many bones? Ooh, I mean, if you've said that there's 400 direwolf skulls.

31:18Oh, there's thousands of direwolf skulls. That's just on display. Oh my gosh. It's 400. How many species did they find there? Were there any humans, by the way, out of interest? Exactly one, actually. Oh. Oh. Ooh. I'm going to go with like 50,000. I was going to go 100,000. Over 1,000,000 bones. Whoa. Whoa. And when you count other specimens like invertebrates and plants, as they state, quote, the tar pits have given us more than 3.5 million fossil specimens, parentheses, and that's us being modest.

31:51That's crazy. Wow. That includes 660 different species. We are talking bats, birds, snakes, turtles, fish, and even one homo sapien, as you guessed, Ella. Do you know about this? I think I... Got a pretty intuitive name. Is it the La Brea man? It's the... Actually, it's the La Brea woman. Oh my god. Women can be fossils, too. It's 2026. Women can get trapped in a tar pit, too.

32:23Gosh. Sorry. It's 10,000 years ago. Women can be fossils, too. I think I had vaguely heard of this before. Yeah. But that's literally all I know, that there was potentially people there. I guess that it would be from a similar time from the animals, so in the tens of thousands of years ago. Yes. Roughly around 10,000 years ago. Yeah. Um, but it's not just how many bones that's fascinating. The most interesting thing is what kind of bones we found. Ooh. And this is the real question I was actually excited to ask you, too, that I think is the much more interesting question.

32:57There is a disproportionate number of bones of one type of animal found in the La Brea tar pits. Can you guess? Can we have a hint? It's a category of animal. Oh, oh. Um, think about it ecologically. What would the tar pits kill? I mean, land animals, probably. Things that walk on the land and are more likely to die on the land as well than get... I don't, I don't know. Between herbivores and carnivores, which do you think are more likely to be in the pits?

33:29I have reasons for both. I have reasons for both. I know. It's interesting, right? Are herbivores more likely to accidentally get chased into the pits? Are carnivores more likely to be running fast and not pay attention to where they're going? It's very interesting. So, according to UC Berkeley, 90% of the large animals found in La Brea are carnivores. Okay. Okay. That's a huge... That's, yeah. That's crazy. The theory is that, you know, a pack of dire wolves chases down one bison.

34:02They run it down. If they all get trapped in nature's glue trap, that's already a ratio of like five to one, right? But then on top of that, the carnivorous scavengers, especially, they go, Ooh, a meaty little treat hanging here just for me. I can't believe this dumb idiot just fell asleep dead standing up here. No, no, I'm in the tar pit. Don't tell me I stepped in naturally refined petroleum.

34:32And so the tar pits are referred to as, I'm not kidding, a predator trap. Chris Hansen, eat your heart out. They were actually originally going to set it. That's how they were going to do it is set it at the tar pits. You might be wondering why you've stepped in asphalt here. Very good. I did come across one paper that I loved that was titled, The Carnivorine Fauna of Rancho La Brea, Average or Aberrant? It's from 2012. And it's basically like, you know, the prevailing hypothesis is that La Brea is like uniquely

35:04full of carnivores. But we did a quantitative analysis of specimens around the area versus in the pit. And at first I was like, oh, fuck. Like, is this going to like disprove everything? And then their conclusion is like, oh, yeah, no, this place is fucked up. This place is chock full of bones. Oh, God. I just loved it. I really love a paper that like is like test the hypothesis. And I was like, yeah, no, it's really weird. Yeah, you guys are right. But now we have the numbers, which is great. I just wanted to shout that out.

35:35But it gets even more interesting than that, a little more nuanced. So in a 2009 study from Carbone et al., they showed evidence that it would be specifically social carnivores most found in the pit. Ah, that makes sense. The reason that they think this is very interesting. So their evidence for this is they conducted what are known as playback experiments, which is a term I had never heard before. I was like, oh, that's cute. What's that? Well, as they describe in the playbacks, sounds of dying herbivores combined with the sounds

36:07of lions and hyenas were used to attract carnivores for population estimation. So they said they set up like honeypots in comparable. So like the saber tooth tiger, you know, the closest cousin we can get are our other big cats in Africa. And so they set up sounds of dying animals trapped. Oh, to see if they would approach. What was interesting is specifically because so they intermingled it with the sounds of other animals, too. And social animals were much more likely because as a meta analysis describing their findings

36:42reads, quote, more social predators would be most capable of defending carcasses that were trapped prey from other predators and by extension were most likely to become trapped and preserved themselves. Oh, no. No, that's so sad. So like you have this unique phenomena of not just prey, but like prey that has to stand still, right? Because you can't bring it to your den. Yeah. So social animals are most likely to be like, OK, we have enough people. We can stay here. But then also. Yeah. Also, we lost Jerry.

37:13Sorry. And the best part is that the phrase they use to describe this phenomenon is carcass domination. Oh, my God. It's such a it's such a nuanced finding we can find about how things died in the pits. Like the fact that we can say not just carnivores, but specifically social carnivores. And of course, yeah, we find a lot of dire wolves. That's why I cannot stress enough how much cool shit there is to learn about this mass of bones, especially because of how well preserved they are. Caroline, you, of course, famously talked about dinosaur dental records.

37:45Yeah. Famous. And trying to piece together the details from what was fossilized. Well, in La Brea, as a paper from 2023 put it, nearly all of these osteological specimens preserve original collagen, which permits precise radiocarbon dating analysis. Like the shit you wish. There's one piece here. There was I literally took a picture of this plaque that says blowfly pupae in the marrow cavity of a condor bone shows that this animal decayed at the surface.

38:15Like there's so much detail preserved. You can say when the animal died, what animal laid its eggs in the bones and then it sunk and preserved. And then it sunk with those still inside it and preserved them. That's crazy. There is so much to say here. As paleontologist Larissa DeSantis put it, if you're going to study Pleistocene carnivores, you go to La Brea, which they should put on a shirt. But for me, my favorite fact, the most innocuous detail that like crystallized how metal all

38:51this was, and that is when the bones are extracted from deep rock and hardened asphalt, they have been sitting in the oil for so long that it has seeped and stained everything a dark brown. And it's like at first, oh, sure, that makes sense. But for some reason, that fact made me go, oh, right. This oil is the loose biological mess remains of organisms from millions of years ago that then trapped and killed an animal from 50,000 years ago, brought it down into itself, broke

39:28it down and is now seeping into its bones. There's this very alien. It's very like death colonizes death. Yeah. It's like when left to its own devices, the earth and the dead biomass becomes a death pit, like a literal death pit. Like it is death creating death. And it is also a staple of field trips of Los Angeles public schools. But there is there's one death at La Brea that I learned about as I was writing about this

40:00that happened a few months ago, and that is that the La Brea Tar Pits Museum right now is closed. Fortunately, it's for renovation, which is great. They haven't had one in 50 years. So fingers crossed, they add even more interactive ways to confront my mortality. Fingers crossed that they expand the wall to include all 3,600 wolves next time. Hell yeah. Do it, you cowards. You have them. I know you have them. And if you're in the area, you can still see some of their exterior things.

40:33It's literally in the same complex as a bunch of other stuff. So if you're nearby, check it out. But like, as the museum notes, quote, the science exploration and stories of the tar pits continue in spite of construction. And they really do mean that because more than a death pit and more than a museum, when you look up the La Brea Tar Pits on Wikipedia, like this is the first line. They say the La Brea Tar Pits are an active paleontological research site. At the old museum, you can actually see they have like a big glass window into the research area where you can see people working on it.

41:04I love it. I love the scientist zoo. It is, quotes, the only active paleontological research site in the world that is located in a major urban area. It's literally across the street from the Crunchyroll offices and the SAG-AFTRA offices. Like, I'm not kidding. That's so cool. As much as I've mentioned many old dates in this topic, I've also mentioned some like surprisingly recent years of discoveries of some of these papers that have turned this

41:35pit of death into a scientific gold mine. Now, we could, I could be sentimental. We could thank the scientist. Oh, we could thank, oh, humanity. But lest we forget who we really need to thank, I will end with a cheerful quote from the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, who put it, In Los Angeles, we can thank tiny organisms known as diatoms for dying in the Miocene, being cooked into oil, then moving upwards to entrap and preserve the remains of Pleistocene life.

42:05So say it with me. Thanks tiny organisms for dying in the Miocene, being cooked into oil, then moving upwards to entrap and preserve the remains of Pleistocene life. Is that the end, Tom? That's so lovely. That's so good. I love it. I also want to say, you're saying that the things that die kill other things, but actually I see it more as like, I see it in a slightly more positive way, I think, that all the things that are dead, regardless of how far they're separated by time, can come back together into

42:37like one thing. I like that. One killer topic. Instrumentality, as it were. Yeah, very Evangelion sort of melting. Yeah, exactly. It's like the end of Evangelion, the primordial soup. Yeah. Oh yeah, it is sort of a primordial soup line. I kind of like it. I like it. Return me. Look, when I die. Return me to the pits. Throw me in the fucking tar pits, guys. It is giving we're all stardust, but it's a little more. Yes. We're all tar pits. We're all the tar pits. We're all tar pits.

43:11You know what that is? That's the Jumbotron. The Jumprit. That's the Jumprit. That's the Jumprit. That's the Jumprit. You're sticking with that. Trumbojohn. Hmm. That's the Jumprit. The Jumprit. It's a Jumbotron. Yay! God damn it. Hold on. No, hold on. Let me create letstrandeverything.com slash Jumprit. All right. Anyway, continue.

43:42This Jumbotron from Michael, and it's from Summer. Ooh. And Summer says, I would love to hang out in the park with you, Michael. Oh my God! Yes! Yes! It's happened. It's happened. We did it! Oh my God! I'm so happy right now. Summer, Summer. Oh my God. Summer says, sorry that I was a few episodes of Ella Lee behind and ignored you for two weeks. How does Thursday sound?

44:13I hope it works for you because I cannot afford another Jumbotron.

44:18Can you please bring me a coffee too? You finish work before I do. Very efficient use of the message we love. Yeah. Yeah. Fit a lot in there. That's the smart way to do it. I mean, our episodes come out on a Thursday. So Michael, I hope you listen to this promptly so you can meet Summer today. With the coffee.

44:40Listeners, I got out of my chair. I was so excited. I'm so happy right now. This might be the first Jumbotron that becomes a TikTok clip.

44:49Thank you, Michael and Summer for committing to the bit. Yes. It means a lot to us. We appreciate it. And for supporting the show in doing so. Brilliant. Thank you. If you want to do an elaborate bit, congratulate someone, or just get a message out there, you can go to letsthearneverything.com slash Jumbotron or letsthearneverything.com slash Jumpert. Jumpert. Is that not what you said? Why is the R there? Don't make me feel crazy. What are you talking about? What are you talking about, Tom? Shut the fuck up. Freak. Shut up.

45:22Two minutes ago was a billion years ago.

Sponsors and messages

45:30Today's episode is sponsored by Babbel. Sorry, by Bubble? No. By Bible? No. By the Bible? By the Bible? Uh-uh, uh-uh. By the Bible? By Bagel? Please, please. By Boggle? Beetle. Sorry, Boggle. Sorry, I meant Boggle. Who got Beetle? How are you getting further away? Sorry, we're just exploring the space, Caroline. Well, how about exploring a language? Babbel helps you learn real-world conversations. It breaks down language barriers, like the one we're clearly having right now.

46:01No more feeling like an outsider. Or conversations that go sideways. Bubble. I did that one already. Uh, Blubber? Bubble. I guess I'll do this alone, then. Babbel is the language learning app- Quas-a? Quas-a? Bob-bubble. Babbel is the language learning app that gets you speaking from day one, with short lessons designed by more than 200 language experts. That's why it's sold more than 25 million subscriptions and carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Scandi TV shows.

46:32This is totally true, by the way. Particularly the Danish political drama Borgen. Scandi? Yes, which I- Scandinavian, which I watch all the time. I've actually re-watched it several times. And Babbel has helped me understand more of it than ever. Oh, ho, ho, ho. Which, in turn, I hope to eventually use to visit Copenhagen again. I went about eight years ago now, and I could speak no Danish at the time. And, to be fair, everyone there speaks English, and everyone's very kind, so they will speak to you. But it's- But it helps.

47:03It's nice. Even, especially in those situations, it helps to be able to- Yeah, exactly. I'd like to be able to show that I care. I enjoy learning languages in these sort of, like, intermediate environments. Like, it's helpful for these intermediate environments. Like you were saying, like, I love when you're watching shows with subtitles, and you know the language enough to, like, pick up some of the words still. Sometimes I'd be like, oh, I can recognize 30% this time. Or sometimes you'll even be like, that translation actually wasn't exactly how I would put it. And Babbel can help you with this stuff.

47:34Okay, so you did know what I was saying. Start learning a new language today with Babbel. Right now, listeners can save up to 60% off at babbel.com slash learn everything. That's babbel, B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash learn everything. All one word for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. You both knew? Paddle, paddle. Tabble, table, table. Oh, you're not, you're not even trying now. Cobble. Cable. Mom. Bob. Bob. Bobble. Babble. Booble. Booble. Oh, I actually said it babbled.

48:05Really? I knew we'd get there in the end. Hey, guess what, Sue the subway train? No, not that gross. I'm just trying to tell you I realized what Dr. Game Show is about. You know that part of any game show where you meet the contestants and it's only a 30-second conversation? At our podcast, it turns into two hours of small talk with listeners from around the world. Also, the games we play are the ones that they submitted. We have to play them no matter what.

48:35Oh, and Alex is here to help keep the pod running. Hey, I'm here too. Anyway, I like talking to silly billies and playing their weird games. Find it on MaximumFun.org. Dr. Game Show.

48:49Wonderful is a podcast where we talk about things we like. That's hard to sell in a promo like this, so we've enlisted the help of piano rock superstar Billy Joel to tell you about some of the topics we've covered. Take it away, real Billy Joel. Listen to Wonderful every Wednesday on MaximumFun.org.

49:30Or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, Real Billy Joel. No problem, Griffin.

Giant vegetable growing

49:36Hey, kids. You want to talk about some giant pumpkins? Because that's what I've got for you today. No, this is a predator trap. I just learned about these. My mum says not to talk to people who ask about giant pumpkins.

49:52Or bone counts. Yeah. My script actually just hard goes in. And you know what? I won't do that. No, no, no. Come on. Yeah. Let's do it. I was just going to say, it's surprising how much vegetables come up during Halloween times. I guess it's a tumnal. Vegetables are such a thing. It's the harvest season, right? Yeah. Part of the celebration. We've gone from tar pits to this, okay? Hell yeah.

50:22You guys like veg? No, I'm not even doing it. We're going to jump straight in.

50:31My tail begins. What's everyone's favorite vegetable? Do you like pumpkin? Asparagus is such a rogue one. No, it's not. It's not rogue or it's not your favorite? No, it's not rogue. An asparagus with like a hollandaise? No, I like just like a grilled... My name's Ella. Really? I like it when my pee smells funny. Well, first of all, not everyone has the gene that means that you can smell asparagus in your pee. Can I be honest? That's always been a weird thing. Whenever people talk about that, I go, ha ha ha, yeah, me too.

51:02I don't smell it. But also, okay, I have to tell a story quickly. Right. I'm glad we did this. This is good. I'm glad we did this. For some reason at parties, a question that frequently comes up is what is your... Stop, Neb, we stopped right there. We stopped right there. I don't care where this goes next. So, Caroline, go into your script.

51:24No, continue, continue. A question that often comes up is what is your favorite vegetable? I don't know why my friends ask each other this. And I say asparagus and every time someone goes, wow, that's a rogue choice. I'm like, what is a not rogue choice? They're like broccoli. And I'm like, yeah, a carrot. So I'm like, yeah, okay, fine. But what is wrong with asparagus? Asparagus is... I just don't get it. I don't get what everyone says. It's a rogue choice. It's a vegetable. I feel like it tastes too green. It's just so fiery.

51:54Well, yeah, exactly. So when you ask me what my favorite vegetable is, what you want is an ascribed list. You want something from the ascribed list of approved Caroline vegetables. Yes, I do. The documentary voiceover goes, little did they know, this would be what would ultimately tear the group apart.

52:12This is the beginning of the end. That's it. Tell us your favorite vegetables in the Discord. Yes. Actually, I am excited to see some pictures of enormous vegetables. Oh my gosh. Yes. I have plenty of pictures of giant vegetables for you today. Don't you worry. I can't wait for us to 10 times in this episode be like, and it's a big vegetable. Yeah. Our story begins with Henry David Thurow, who you might have heard of. Yeah. Yeah. The American essayist, philosopher. He has books and journals and all of this stuff amounting to like 20 volumes of works.

52:45He was a lifelong abolitionist, proto-anarchist, whose philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced political thinkings and actions from people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and in 1857, he grew a really large pumpkin. Never mind. I fucking love this. I fucking rule this. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. That's a great opening. Thank you. But most importantly. Yes. Of course. Naturally. His impact on the large vegetation world.

53:15Yes. Like unbounded. And when you look up the history of where giant vegetable growing began, his name is often floated around. Are you actually kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm so serious right now. I read multiple sources that were like, and we're going to start with Henry David Thurow. Yeah, Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, and Henry David Thurow was like, fuck that one big pumpkin. Yeah. There's like five English teachers that really liked that, I promise you. He, specifically in 1857, planted a variety of pumpkin.

53:48It was a French variety of pumpkin. It's called the Potiron Jean Gros de Paris, which literally translates to fat yellow Paris pumpkin, was what he was growing. That sounds like a bird name. It does, doesn't it? According to Smithsonian Magazine, he was astonished when one piece of fruit reached the grand total of 123.5 pounds, or 56 kilograms. He went on to say, who would have believed that there were a 310 pound of the fat yellow

54:21Paris pumpkin in the corner of my garden? He wrote this in the unfinished works of his titled Wild Fruits. I had no idea that this is where, I thought you were just doing like a little casual mention name drop, but this is actually, he was a big fan of fat yellow French pumpkins. And this really encapsulates the beginning of the novelty of giant pumpkins, especially in the States. Once again, the American pastime of bastardizing another thing and making it maximalist.

54:55Yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah.

54:59So yeah, as I said, giant pumpkins are becoming a bit of a novelty at this point. So in 1893, a guy called William Warnock took a 365 pound pumpkin to the Chicago World's Fair. Can you say that in metric? I'll convert it as the American. It'll be my job. 165 kilograms. Thank you. Big. Big. We have it in units of, we have it in an imperial metric and conversion for a kid.

55:28Although get ready to have bigger words ready, Ella, because I feel like it's only going to go up from here. Okay. Go from here. Anyway, it's Chicago World's Fair. To your left, you've got Tesla introducing alternating currents. To the right, there's Edison with direct current. They're battling it out at the moment. And then in the middle, there's this guy with a really big pumpkin. Okay. This is the vibe here. This is William Warnock now. William Warnock. Seven years later, he would enter his pumpkin into a Paris fair, and this entry weighed

56:05400 pounds. So that's 181 kilograms. Bigger. Bigger. By 1904, his pumpkins have reached a new record of 403 pounds, which is where the record would sit for the next 70 years. That's one of the best pictures you've painted, Caroline, is really putting into perspective that at the World's Fair, but I feel like you need that backbone of like, and also, here's a funny thing, you know? Here's a ridiculous thing that's just this novelty thing.

56:35And again, it's like, it's the 1800s. We're big on our novelty weird stuff at this point. Of course, it's just going to be a giant pumpkin knocking around too. Why wouldn't there be? No one could have known which of those three things you listed would have been the most important. It could have been pumpkins, but we could be talking on the pumpkin line right now. We're here talking about pumpkins. Electric pumpkin. We haven't talked about ACDC on this podcast before. So over in the UK, there is a different origin of giant vegetable growing. Oh, convergence evolution.

57:06Yeah. This starts in 1980, which it was in a pub in South Wales, where two guys, Mike Forty and George Williams, place a bet with each other who could grow the biggest onion and the biggest pumpkin. We don't know who won that bet, but what we do know is that they would continue having the same argument every single year to the point where the pumpkins couldn't fit through the door of the pub anymore. So they had to change location. We're going to need a bigger pub.

57:36Yeah. They literally had to take their pumpkin competition from a pub that had one single door to a pub that had two doors that could open at the same time to fit their pumpkins through. And it's interesting because the British one has, their version of the competition has layers, you know, to it. Is that an onion joke? Wow. Wow. I missed, I couldn't figure out where that was. I'm so sorry, Tom. You don't look so bashful on that one. I just realized I'm having, I'm having Halloween school energy.

58:09And I will say this is a very silly topic and I hope that you guys have silly vibes for this one because every single time I opened an article about this, I was having a bit of a giggle to myself. So this is a ridiculous topic. I'm aware of that. That's the history of giant vegetable growing in a nutshell right there. In a pumpkin shell. In a giant oniony shell. What are your familiarities with giant vegetable growing?

58:41None. Look, I've seen that. I know that it happens. You know that they can get big. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that it comes up like you're familiar with it, but I've never done, I've never taken the plunge as it were. Or even seen one in real life, I don't think. Oh no, me neither, actually, which is a great point.

Seeds and auctions

58:57The first thing that I want to talk about today is where you start when growing giant vegetables. Where would you both think to begin if you were to take the plunge and go into growing giant vegetables? This is a fun question. Seeds. The seeds from breeders. From breeders. I'm thinking a big plot of land. Oh, seed is probably more important. Seeds are definitely more important. Step one is acquiring your seeds and there are several online guides for growing giant vegetables that start here, emphasising the importance of choosing your seed well, and this can mean

59:30buying giant plant varieties if they exist, buying from growers who collect seeds from successful plants, or from growers who are deliberately cross-breeding successful plants to produce seeds. It's like horse racing. It's so like horse racing. It's so ridiculous. It's like very slow horse racing. It's absolutely ridiculous. When you said that, Tom, I was like, okay, and then Carole was like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's like horse racing. No, it's not.

1:00:00And you had to be like, shut the fuck up, you two. You're not making sense. I'm paying tuition for this fucking, do you have this class? I can't believe this. You're like, maybe my mom was right about liberal arts being bullshit. I knew I should be studying computer science. Now, there are two ends to your plant seed acquisition. At the lower end of it, it's really quite a community-oriented thing. So for a large amount of growers, seeds are shared between people, especially at events

1:00:33and competitions where like-minded people are all in one place. It's really lovely. One person on Facebook said about the UK Giant Vegetable Championships, which is held in Malvern. I love that that's a thing. It's a thing. They said, go with the best you have. A card, which is like your ribbon, isn't the be all and end all of Malvern. Meet and chat with fellow growers. Grab all of the advice and seed you can. It's akin to a dodgy drug deal with packets of seeds passed around with sleight of hand and

1:01:04knowing winks. And that quote really made me chuckle. And of course, there is the other end. The other end of giant seed acquisition is going to auction to buy your proven growers, basically. Yeah. So in 2013, this giant pumpkin made the news for how expensive the seeds of this giant pumpkin were, basically. This is in the UK. It feels really small fish. So it's a company called Thompson & Morgan, who's a gardening company in the UK.

1:01:38They bought a seed from this pumpkin at auction and they bought it for £168. So, you know, we've gone from... A single seed? A single seed was £168. This did make the UK news. The seed was taken from a pumpkin that was £2,009. So, £911, so 911 kilograms. So we have jumped from... Fuck me! That was the next step up in the scale. This is the next step up from big to fuck me. Say those... We're making an LLE ruler.

1:02:11Yeah. Say those numbers one more time, Caroline. I missed it because I got confused with pounds and pounds. £2,009 or 911 kilograms. We have gone from £400 to £2,009. Insane. In not a very long space of time at all. Managing director of Thompson & Morgan, who's called Paul Hansford, said, if you want to grow a really huge pumpkin, you need to start with a record-breaking, genetically proven premium seed. And if that doesn't sound inappropriate, nothing else in this episode will.

1:02:44That is a crazy laugh, Tom. I've never heard anything like that.

1:02:51That was my spooky laugh. If you want to get a big pumpkin, you've got to start with a big heart. Wow. Or, nowadays, £1,250. £1,250 because in 2016, Thompson & Morgan once again bought a seed from a giant pumpkin at that price at auction. Again, one seed. Sorry, price? £1,250 British pounds. Pumpkins. I just want to say, pumpkins make a lot of seeds.

1:03:24Yes, they do. And a pumpkin that big. Also, the idea of eating one of those as a delicacy. Sorry. You're going to have to keep clarifying because the pound and pound are getting too close, which they should not. It's approaching one-to-one. Yeah. According to autumnprairiepumpkins.com, the typical medium-carving pumpkin makes somewhere between 200 and 600 seeds. And they're selling one for over £1,000.

1:03:55What are they doing with the rest of the seeds? Holding onto it for themselves. Because the issue with a lot of these is that... You've got to invest in yourself, Ellen. You've got to invest in yourself. And here's the thing, is that there's no guarantee that this single seed will germinate. Of course not. Oh my God. Pumpkins have so many seeds. This is why pumpkins have so many seeds. This is why the growers are holding onto the majority of them for themselves, so that they can do a lot of plants and see how they all do. These people are crazy. They're buying one single seed. And I have a crazier story for you on top of this.

1:04:28And it isn't a pumpkin either. It's a different giant vegetable. It's a giant tomato, which these guys don't get as giant as the pumpkins do. This one specifically was £16. So that's about seven kilograms. Pretty, yeah, for a tomato. Would you like to see the picture of this tomato? Sure. Yes, please. Just for listeners' sake, I'm going to tell you what we're seeing in advance. It's a big tomato. Oh, no. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not.

1:04:59That is an eldritch abomination. We were wrong. That is a horror beyond man's comprehension. That's gross. It doesn't look like a tomato anymore. It looks cancerous, tumorous. That's such an interesting way of putting it, because fun fact, so tomatoes have to be fully connected in order for them to count towards the competition. And what happens with giant tomatoes is they're looking for genetically mutated flowers that actually have multiple flowers all connected to each other.

1:05:29So this is actually lots of single lobes of like, so what, if you broke this apart, there's actually lots of smaller tomatoes that are connected together. It looks like what you would think a radioactive tomato would look like. Yeah, yeah. Also, Caroline, don't worry. You got to something creepy. You did it. I did it. By accident, without even trying. It looks like a pumpkin almost, honestly. It really looks freaky, doesn't it? So yeah, there's this guy called Dan Sutherland, who very consistently grows tomatoes over 10 pounds,

1:06:01often hitting around 14 pounds. This is an image of just him with many of his tomatoes. The one in question, though, did weigh over 16 pounds, or over 7 kilograms. That's like a reasonable kettlebell. Yeah, yeah. Now, Sutherland doesn't often make his tomato seeds available to the general public. But last year, he decided to donate some seeds to the giant pumpkin commonwealth. I'm not kidding. That's a real thing. Hell yeah. And they decided that they were going to auction off one tomato seed

1:06:32from this tomato that weighed over 16 pounds. Sorry, couldn't you just reverse slightly? Maybe you'll talk about this. What the fuck is the giant pumpkin commonwealth? Don't you remember voting for that in the last election, Carolella? No, I do have a note about what they are, just in case somebody asked. It's a group who, according to their website, their mission cultivates the hobby of growing giant pumpkins and other giant fruits throughout the world

1:07:03by establishing standards and regulations that ensure quality of fruit, fairness of competition, recognition of achievement, fellowship and education for all participating growers and way-off sites. So these guys will collate a lot of the growing way-offs and things like that. They'll set standards for what you're looking for. So you know how I said, oh, you have to have a connected tomato. That'll be one of the rules that the giant pumpkin commonwealth will have established. Things like your fruit can't be split. I was just about to say the GPC.

1:07:35I have them written down as the GPC elsewhere in my script as well. If we all come up with the same joke, it's a bingo. Yeah. Anyway, this single seed from Sutherland's tomato ended up climbing up in price to $2,300 on the day. So just over £2,000. This was from two buyers that were fighting against it. At the last minute, Sutherland decided that he was going to donate a second seed to this. So both buyers happily went away with a seed each that they both paid $2,000 for.

1:08:07That's cute. Do we know if they got tomato plants from them? No, they were two anonymous buyers. So we do not know what happened. Damn, I really want to know. Chances are. I kind of like that. Yeah, chances are. Like if they got lucky, the seeds would have germinated. But there's no guarantee of even getting that. This story went quite viral online. There's been a real influx of people posting about their giant vegetable growing journeys on TikTok. So I've seen this story quite a few times. I did have to go and double check this by going through the GPC newsletter archive to find their newsletter about it.

1:08:40And I did find it. What a beautiful use of our time. And thank you. Truly, genuinely. Oh God. So if you want to start off with giant vegetable growing, either be willing to do something akin to a dodgy drug deal or have $2,000 spare to get your giant vegetable seed. Great. Cool. You've got that. And hopefully they've germinated. The next thing to do is get ready to invest a lot of time, energy and space into your vegetable growing. Oh boy.

1:09:11Giant tomatoes don't need a whole lot of space, but you might be interested in some of the kit that they will provide you if you want to grow giant vegetable, giant tomatoes, including specially made slings to make sure that your tomatoes don't pull the entire plant down whilst they're growing. That makes sense. It does, doesn't it? Tomato bras. If you want to grow something like a long marrow, you'll need trellises that stand at least eight feet tall to let the marrows hang. If you want to grow giant pumpkins, be prepared to dedicate a space at least four and a half

1:09:46meters by six meters or about 15 feet by 20 feet per plant. Oh my gosh. Although some sources say that you'll need at least an area of a thousand square foot to be growing giant pumpkins. You go to the plant store and then in the back, there's like the novelty giant versions of all these supplies that you need for the freaks.

Growing and cracking risks

1:10:07I love it.

Growing and cracking risks

1:10:08Your agricultural technique is really important too. And this is how the jump from like your 400 pound pumpkin to your 2000 pound pumpkin really happened is that we just knew more about how plants grew. Oh, cool. And this is like across agriculture in general, things like improvements to fertilizer and pest control and all of this sort of stuff. Making sure that your soil is stable and good quality, protecting them from frost is a really important part of this. Rain is good for most plants.

1:10:37It obviously provides the water that they need. But for giant plants, all of that water can cause growth spurts in your giant fruit or veg. If the plant, yeah, I know. If the plant then grows too quickly, it might split under its own weight and become disqualified from competition. Never would have thought of that. Yeah. So on top of everything, you've got to then cover your plants from the rain to make sure that they are not having growth spurts like that. Or consider having a backup plant on your main plant that can absorb some of that extra growth.

1:11:09Wow. Yeah. You might also want to consider moving to somewhere like Alaska.

1:11:17Pumpkins that are grown at higher latitudes apparently tend to do better and be larger just because they have longer daylight hours and cooler, shorter summer seasons to help manage those growth spurts. I'm just picturing that Alaska Airlines flight of someone going, oh, you're here for the birds? No, for the giant pumpkins. Your germination to harvest time will also be very, very long. Again, for giant pumpkins, the time from seedling to harvest is usually 130 to 140 days.

1:11:48For non-giant pumpkins, it's usually 90 to 120. So you are investing more time. Joe Atherton, who broke the world record in 2024 for the longest turnip, which was 15 feet and 10 inches or 4.8 inches. Oh, I'm not laughing anymore. I'm not laughing anymore. Oh, no. He also grew the longest... Alice got a head in her hands. Leads back. That's insane. I'm going to... I know you... I know I made fun of you before for like the idea of just looking at giant vegetables

1:12:19and pictures, but I do have to look at the turnip. Yeah. No, hold on to the turnip one because it comes up in a second. Okay, okay. He also grew the longest radish in 2024, which was 24 feet, 3 inches or 7 meters. Stop making me think of this.

1:12:38He says on Giant Vegetable Growing, you've got to be working on it 24-7. And if you're not doing it, you're thinking about it. This is ungodly. This shouldn't be allowed. Now, I would like to play a quick game called How Big's That Veg? I'm going to say vegetable to you. You have to tell me how either how long it is or how heavy it was. So, how long is the world record holding longest carrot?

1:13:09I was about to be like, how do I do with my hands? How far apart? But then I realized it might be more than that. Well, yeah, Caroline said 15 feet. Turnip, are you 15 feet? Can your arms go that wide?

1:13:23I love when a number is so preposterous it makes us angry.

1:13:29I'll say 20. I'm going on the big side as well, 20. Here's an image. This is also from Joe Atherton. This is in 2016. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I thought you might have feelings about this. This is again from the UK National Giant Vegetable Championship. That's right, what's happening here, Ella. We're a little disappointed. I'm really, really, really disappointed.

1:13:51I'm actually, this is a race the last five minutes of all the fuckery. All the goodwill they've built. That's bullshit. So, this is a carrot that's maybe like two, three feet long, but then trailing off of it is like a long route. Yeah. Is it a route? It's like a stringy route. Well, what is a carrot but a root, right? But a root, which is why it counts as all being carrots. But it's very, very thin and stringy where they actually, what we would consider the edible part of the carrot ends. Yes.

1:14:22And that's the same for what looks like a turnip and a radish next to it. Is that right? These are the same turnips and radishes that we were talking about just now. So, I'm, look, I'm really glad that he looks really happy. He does look really happy. But also, I'm really sad because I thought it was just going to be a really, like a pumpkin that feels like that's different because that's a... Yeah. Hey, you know what is really beautiful though, Ella? I did not expect us to leave this topic having strong opinions about different, various kinds of big vegetable competitions, but we clearly are.

1:14:54I'm so glad you... I'm so happy about this, I must admit. The answer was 20 foot 5 inches, but I feel like both of you are a bit upset about that. Yeah. So, we will move on. How heavy do you think the world's heaviest marrow or courgette is? Is that what a marrow is? Zucchini. Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Similar to a zucchini. I feel like this one could get pretty fucked up. If I get in weight, then this suggests to me that it is actually the substance of the

1:15:25vegetable itself, which makes me feel more excited about this. Uh-huh. I'll say like 30 pounds. Like 400 pounds.

1:15:35I laughed, but then I stopped because I'm scared. Ella. No. You are closer at 256 pounds. Yeah. Or 116 pounds. I was just thinking of the pumpkin. Like the biggest pumpkin we've heard of was like 2,000 pounds. So, would you like to see a photo of the heaviest marrow? Yes. Yes, Caroline. I have a picture. I have a better picture of some of them. Yeah. Here. This is what they look like. Oh, I wasn't far off. I jokingly sent a picture of some Elden Ring bosses.

1:16:07I wasn't far off. This thing's... Now this is the shit, Caroline. Now this is the shit. Is this what I wanted to see? It looks... It kind of looks like a giant pickle. Yeah. Because it's like very ridged. Again, cancerous looking. No, but more healthy than the tomatoes, I think. Certainly. It's the right shape. It still looks like a zucchini. This is the most like cartoonish you just stretched in Photoshop to enlarge. This might be my favorite so far. I like it. It's the size of a man. There is a man stood next to it and it is the same size as him, basically.

1:16:41Yeah. Wow. How heavy is the current world record holder for the world's largest pumpkin? You said 2,000 in 2024. It was 2,000 in 2013. So... Oh. Okay. I believe that enough tech could... Tech. Big pumpkin tech. I'll say 2,500. I'm going to go 3,000. Very close. It's 2,819 pounds. Oh, no! Nice. Yeah. I'm closer. That's all 1,278.7 kilograms.

1:17:13So... That's almost a 50% increase. That's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This one was grown by the Patton Brothers. It was set in 2025. It was confirmed by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. I'm happy to say this is what the giant pumpkin looks like. I apologize for the British flag in the background. I just realized Great Pumpkin Commonwealth sounds like a thing in Charlie Brown. Yeah. All right. The picture's loading. It's blurry. I don't see it. Oh, no. Or maybe it is blurry like this. It's like Cthulhu. It's trying to...

1:17:43We can't perceive it, actually. We can't conceive of the pumpkin.

1:17:48Ooh. Yeah, that's good stuff. Are they... Is it identical twins who have been growing this pumpkin? Yes, it is. It's identical twins. Is it actually? Yeah. It's so funny. I don't know why, but that just adds a certain je ne sais quoi to it. It has such a little quirk to it, doesn't it? It looks like it's deflated. It's like so... Ella. That's such a great point that it looks like that. Is this a factor in growing that it does that... Pumpkins are special little guys when it comes to giant vegetable growing. Okay. I just have to say, to describe it once more...

1:18:19Oh, yes. If it... Like, two people could use it as a sleeping bag comfortably. Not even a sleeping bag. Like, you could be... Fascinating that you should say that. We'll come back to that thought. What do you mean? I said that so many times today.

1:18:35You've had the same thoughts as me. You can't just say that.

1:18:39It does look like a deflated basketball that was enormous. I will say about these guys, this was set in 2025. This was set by people in the UK. But Americans have held onto the title for quite a while before these two. So this is a global thing, basically, of competing over giant pumpkins in particular. They are proudly holding the Union Jack, which is very funny. Yeah, it's a bit... Yeah. You know what? If that's what you're patriotic about... There are worse things. Yeah, there are so much worse things.

1:19:09Anyway, pumpkins are special little guys because they do have some fun genetic adaptations that make their aggressive size possible. And for reference, so for most giant vegetables, they tend to be about 10 times bigger from a weight perspective. This doesn't apply across the board. But giant pumpkins can be 100 times bigger, if not more, than the generic pumpkin. So the first thing to note about pumpkins is that there's something called an indeterminate plant, which means that they have indeterminate growth.

1:19:43So the growth is not... It's not terminated unless something external or environmental stops it. So like a frost will stop it. There are determinant plants that stop growing once they've had like... They've hit their genetically predetermined structure, basically. Pumpkins are theoretically boundless. Yeah, exactly. So for the pumpkin plant, if it needs more energy to grow, it will just put out another vine with leaves on it to encourage photosynthesis so that it can continue to grow. They're like dragons in Game of Thrones.

1:20:17They will grow as big as the space that they're held in. They have to be stopped. This is the truth. This is the horror of this. It's that theoretically a pumpkin could grow so big that it could sap all of the nutrients from which it lays. All of the worlds. It's nature's Dyson sphere. This is why growers will only have one fruit typically on the plant or maybe two to act as a growth support. It's because all of that energy from all of those vines can go into one plant and it'll just keep putting out vines.

1:20:54If that one fruit keeps growing bigger and bigger and bigger, then the plant will go, hey, we can keep growing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Let's put out another vine to support that. The auxiliary plant is also weirdly creepy to me because it's giving like Never Let Me Go, where you have like a clone of yourself that you use for your own well-being. Yeah, it's like having a smaller human attached to you to like sap its energy. It's sort of the opposite. It becomes this like, oh my God, I'm growing too quickly.

1:21:24I must sacrifice this other plant attached to me. It'll take my excess growth and therefore might kill itself in the process or split, basically. It's really metal. We're really finding the horror in this, which I'm enjoying. Yeah. The fact that it could explode from the excess growth and it protects you is ooh. Yeah. Freaky, right? This trick of having just one plant on the vine or having one plant and then like a sacrifice plant or fruit does work with other plants.

1:21:59Fruits as well. One article said that technically this would work for something like a peach tree. It could then produce one mega peach, but physics wouldn't necessarily be on your side. I mentioned the tomato slings earlier, but obviously the capacity of the plant to hold onto such a heavy fruit is a big limiting factor for a lot of other fruits that are growing for their size. For pumpkins, this isn't an issue because they're growing on the ground. So obviously if they're growing on the ground, then that means that all of that gravity is just sitting on the plant itself.

1:22:30We're not having to worry about the rest of the vines or anything like that. That's where you get your splooting though, or that weird pancaking. Sorry? Your splooting? Your pancake effect? Is that a technical term? No, that's just... Okay. Yeah.

1:22:43So it will start to sink from its own weight, but obviously that weight isn't going all onto the vines. So it's sort of a benefit. Jessica Savage, who's a botanist at the University of Minnesota, also actually wrote a paper on pumpkin size. And one of the other things that she... I know. It's so... It was 2016. What a time to be alive. She noted that the pumpkin skin is also beneficial for pumpkins getting so big. She says you wouldn't be able to get a really big fruit on something that's really soft because it would start to weigh itself down and it would start to break.

1:23:18So essentially the harder skin means that the cells can expand without as much of a risk as... Of like bursting open, basically. Yeah, literally bursting open. Hmm. Savage also said that the fruit's vascular system is literally, quote, super powered. This is what the 2016 paper was really focusing on. They compared other pumpkin varieties to giant pumpkins and they found that they had more phloem, which is the part of the vascular system that transports the sugar around. As she likens it to a highway, she said you can move the same amount on a small highway, but you're limited to how fast it happens.

1:23:54If you want to move a lot of resources more rapidly, you have to have more roads. And that's essentially what a giant pumpkin has, is more of these channels. I wouldn't have considered that would be a necessary thing to make a thing bigger. Yeah. But it makes perfect sense. Yeah. It's also something that a lot of other giant vegetables just don't have at all. So it sort of helps explain why they get so big. All of this raises the question of how big can they get? And that's okay, because mechanical engineer David Hu at the Georgia Institute of Technology actually did do a study on this.

1:24:32They put pumpkins in a vice-like instrument and basically subjected the fruits to pressure until they cracked. And this was used to sort of replicate in the impact of gravity on such a large fruit. Because if gravity is the only thing that's stopping them from getting bigger, then how much gravity can they take? It's like, what's the terminal velocity? Yeah. Yeah. What's the breaking point? They reckon that they could get up to 20,000 pounds.

1:25:00Way too big! It's too big! Way too big than what I thought! This is if the pumpkin had perfect, evenly sized thickness of walls all the way around. Of course, real pumpkins with warts, scars, dimples, all of this stuff, don't typically have the perfectly even shaped wall all the way around. Still, it could get pretty fucking big! But they can get pretty... Yeah. If you fluked it and managed to get something that was pretty close, they can get pretty fucking big.

1:25:33I love seeing in the waveform when I reacted to something. Now, preventing cracking is something that's really, really important in the giant vegetable growing community. Not just because you want your perfect vegetable to be presented at the way-offs, but also cracking leads to being excluded from the way-offs. Specifically to prevent cheating from happening in these competitions. Oh, could you, like, load it with water so it's heavier or something like that? Yes! Exactly!

1:26:03Okay, in 2011, one such controversy hit a village in Shropshire in the UK. A champion grower at an annual allotment association pumpkin competition claimed that he had grown 186 pounds of pumpkins. So actually not that crazy compared to the 2,000 pound pumpkins that we have seen. But what actually happened was that he filled the pumpkin with water, making it heavier, bagging a 50 British pound prize in the process of this.

1:26:35The culprit, Mr. Truss, said to the local paper, This kind of skullduggery goes on with everybody. I only did it for a bit of fun. Skullduggery. I've been doing it for about 10 years and won it four years in a row. I'm scuppered now. No one will believe I haven't cheated. There's one thing for sure, I won't get away with it again. And these are the kinds of stakes that I really enjoy about these controversies. Yeah! It's so, for $50, like... A 2020 article titled,

1:27:05We're Like Athletes, The Secret Lives of Vegetable Growers, listed ways that growers have been caught cheating at these sorts of competitions, including things like a man trying to pass off a shop-bought cantaloupe as his own. People injecting vegetables with water to increase their weight, onions filled with putty, and carrots with orange floor polish to disguise the fact that they were rotten. Oh! They're the lowest of the low, one grower is quoted saying. The lowest of the low!

1:27:36You don't want anything to do with them after that. Wow! Social pariahs! I guess in such a closed-knit community, pulling something like this and getting caught for it absolutely would have you excluded from it very, very quickly. It's such low stakes. It's just very... It's so low stakes. It's charming to hear. Small potatoes over big vegetables, as it were. Lovely. I got a quote from a guy called Gerald Short, who was the grower at an Oxfordshire event.

1:28:09He said, when I first saw giant vegetables, I thought the people who grew them must be absolutely nuts, which is fair. He went on to say, what are they doing growing these huge things? But then something got stuck in the nerdy side of me, and he went on to grow a 706 kilogram pumpkin in 2020. Wow! So, yeah, we're hitting those higher weights there. Another grower said, at first, it was to have some pumpkins around Halloween and to take pictures with the kids. I didn't want to go out and buy big pumpkins. However, he's gone on to say,

1:28:39every year, I still ask myself if I should grow giant pumpkins again. When I grew my 159 pound pumpkin in 1994, I got hooked. Then I wanted to grow a 500 pound pumpkin, 1,000, 1,500. Wow! And now 2,000 pounds is in sight for 2024. Wow! So I'll grow until I reach at least 2,000 pounds. And then he'll go further. And then he'll probably keep going. Yeah, absolutely. Until he hits that 20,000 pound limit. A few sources suggest that 10,000 growers will attempt to grow champion pumpkins this year,

1:29:10with several thousand people making it to official way-offs. For the rest of the giant veg game, it's really tough to know how many people get involved. But for a little bit of reference, at the UK National Giant Vegetable Championships in 2016, they had 169 official growers, entering 597 individual entries across 33 categories. So not a huge hobby. It's pretty niche. Yeah, it's very niche. Which makes me love it more. Which makes me love it so much more.

Regattas and chunking

1:29:37The final question that I had about all of this was, what do you do once you have a giant vegetable? I am very, very interested to hear this. Do they eat them? Ella, some people do eat them. Kevin Forty, who's the son of the guy from the pub bet that I mentioned right at the beginning. No way. He's continuing his father's giant vegetable growing passion. And he's become famous to a number of people in his local area for how many people each of his giant marrows is able to feed.

1:30:10He says that he shares them with friends and neighbours, takes them to local primary schools, works with counsellors, uses them to make up parcels in food banks and stuff like that. Oh, that's cute. Yay. He said each parcel of food has a slice of marrow on top. We used to compost them because people said they were inedible. But we are slowly dispelling that myth. One of my friend's mums made a marrow we gave her into a beautiful curry. So there you go. You could make it into a beautiful curry. I read a lot of stories about people eating their giant veg,

1:30:41giving them to farmers to feed their livestock. One of my favourite ones that I came across was this image, which you might have seen if it loads. There we go. Oh, is this a polar bear? That's a polar bear. His name's Henry. Oh, it's so cute. It's so cute. Just taking a big bite. Oh. It's a polar bear taking a big bite out of a giant pumpkin. He lives at a zoo in Northern Ontario. And this pumpkin was literally just donated

1:31:12by a local farmer to this zoo. And there are loads of similar images of elephants, of hippos, eating giant vegetables. It's so cute. For some reason, I really love the public education aspect of it. The public novelty of being a kid and being like, look at that fucking polar bear eating a giant pumpkin. That's amazing. Also, I really like this image that you can see all the way around where the polar bears tried to break into the pumpkin and not succeed in it. Yeah.

1:31:43It's like when you think of how an ant can eat a single giant, for a chocolate bar is the size of their body, but it's that for veg. Now, other options. Tom, you mentioned people getting in them. Yes. That is something that people can do. Put me in a giant pumpkin and throw me in the tar pit. Help!

1:32:03Let me confuse future anthropologists, please. We could try and do pumpkin regatta across the tar pits, as I've shown you in the photo I've just said. Oh my God, that's so fun. That rules. They're literally rowing in pumpkins. They're racing, I assume. Yeah, they are racing across. This is a water-based racing competition where competitors will row in giant pumpkins, often over a thousand pounds. This is amazing! They're all in Halloween costumes rowing in giant pumpkins.

1:32:34All dressed up. This is from the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta, which started in 2004 and is still going strong. About 25,000 people will go and watch this happen or take part over a weekend of festivities and five rounds of rowing. But this happens not just in the States, this happens over here in the UK as well. So if you have a giant pumpkin, maybe try hanging out in the water with it. If you don't want to sit in it, and if your pumpkin maybe wasn't that big, you could try throwing it instead.

1:33:04Pumpkin chunking is, of course, a past... I know you meant pumpkin chucking. No, I meant pumpkin chunking. Pumpkin chunking! Pumpkin chunking! Oh, hell yeah, pumpkin chunking. This is another autumn pastime, especially in the States, where you try and haul a pumpkin as far as possible using slingshots, catapults, trebuchets, air cannons, whatever mechanical means you want to use. There was a World Championship pumpkin chunking competition. Every time you say it, it's worse.

1:33:35I know. A.K.A. the WCPC. It was held in Delaware. It had been held from 1986 through to 2013, but it only happens sporadically now for two reasons. They can't get access to a stretch of land long enough to host the event. The pumpkins often travel miles. What? Sorry! Miles? No, that's not true. Over a mile of pumpkin chunking. And also, they struggled to get insurance for the event to continue.

1:34:06Wow. It's too dangerous. It's too dangerous. First of all, it really is pumpkin chunking. That's the Wikipedia article. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry for doubting you. It is. The longest one that was fired was almost just over one mile. Okay. And it was fired through a pneumatic air cannon. And it was a regular-sized pumpkin. A regular-sized pumpkin. There's a really lovely SciShow video from about 13 years ago that talks about pumpkin chunking and the physics of it. So that'll be in the show notes if you want to watch that.

1:34:38Now, look. Giant vegetable growing might not have the Gen Z buy-in or cool apps like birding does. Oh, give it like two years. You're so right. When I think about birdwatching, I think cool. Yeah. Don't think that for this. It's one nerd looking down on another nerd. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really... And we love all the nerds, just to be clear. Absolutely, yes. As a hobby, not super accessible, can get very expensive so very, very quickly has a tendency to go wrong. But as someone who... Someone who was very enthusiastic at The Guardian wrote,

1:35:09the appeal of growing these beasts is not hard to understand. Only the truly joyless would struggle to summon a smile at the sight of a marrow as big as a lawnmower or a cabbage as wide as a double bed. You know what? They're right. They're so right. Like, you have to be... You have to completely lack whimsy to not look... To not laugh. To not see a pumpkin that big and go, hell yeah. Yeah.

1:35:35And I've got to say, every article that I opened about this, it put a smile on my face. The sense of community is immense. The growers are really, really passionate. The controversy is incredibly funny. So yeah, I hope that this... Just put a smile on your faces because I had a lovely time. I'm researching this. I had a lovely time listening, Caroline. Thank you so much.

1:36:00What a... What a marvel.

Reviews and wrap up

1:36:06Guys!

Reviews and wrap up

1:36:07Guys, come over here. Quick, quick, quick, quick. Look at this. What is it? What's up? Look at this. Look what they've pulled from the La Lili... La Lili... L-L-E Tar Pits. Nice. The La L-L-E Tar Pits. La L-L-E Tar Pits. La L-L-E Tar Pits. La L-L-E Tar Pits. It's the world's largest review corner. Whoa! Whoa! Oh, it goes on for pages and pages and pages, but I'll cut it down. Double.

1:36:37A double reference. Wow. So seamless. Wow!

1:36:42It's review corner. Firstly, thanks, Ella, for that amazing introduction to review corner. Um, that's what they wrote.

1:36:50Didn't make it seem like I was saying that, which I love. I was introduced to these three from Lateral, and I'm so glad that I was. I have been binging every episode from episode one. You can tell that the hosts are genuine friends and can feel the love through the speakers. Let's hope for many more episodes. My commute to work wouldn't be the same without you. And that's from Michael Lumperson? What? That's their username. Michael Lumperson? Is someone... My long-lost brother?

1:37:18Another Lumperson? What? I just had to shout out love that username. Nice. Thanks, Michael. And it might just be their name. That's true. It could be their name, and we're just laughing at it. I'm so sorry, Michael. Sorry, Michael. Maybe they have an alternate universe problem where they're like, no, it's not Michael Lumperson. It's Lumperson. Yeah.

1:37:39Any plugs or shout-outs? Can I blow the jump print? Let me give it a try. I've always wanted to try to learn this instrument.

1:37:54You do it. Never mind. Forget it. Cut that. Cut that. You do it. You do it, L. You're much better. Sorry.

1:38:00It's the jump print. I don't know why you have to say the name of the instrument after you do it. Yeah. Interesting. We have another timely Jumbotron that we want to get in here. The message... We're reading this. We got sent this just for some reference. We got sent this Jumbotron while we were recording. While we were recording. This is all new to all of us. This message is from LLE Live Goer and it's for LLE Live Goers. Oh. Nice.

1:38:31When they say pub before or after the show, maybe Saturday evening or after Sunday show. Let's talk about it on Discord in general chat. That's very sweet. Brilliant.

1:38:44And in this section where they can add additional details, they said beer for host is on me. Well, we're with the Jumbotron. It sure is. Thank you. Aw, cute. Literally no other information which is very funny. Love that. Whoever sent that Jumbotron, let us know at the live show so we can thank you. Oh, yeah. And we will be around to hang out after the show, I believe. We'll have some time after the show in the Bedford. We will tell you at the venue before or after the live show

1:39:16what's going on. But yes, we will be around. Don't you worry about that. We're not so big that we're going to be swept away to be clear.

1:39:27Let's make a channel in our Discord for people to talk about the live shows. Any questions, plans, etc. That's probably a very good idea. That's a good idea. I'm going to shout out us. You can find all of our details over at letslearneverything.com including the link to our Discord server where I want to know have you seen any cool giant vegetables recently? Oh, hell yeah. Oh, the pics are going to rule. I want to see what bones you pulled out of the tar pit. And I want to say

1:39:58thank you to everyone on the Discord and who emailed us about birds in particular. We had a lot of bird pictures and we don't have time to reply to everything but I did look at them all and I absolutely loved them. We had someone email in I think today who was saying they were listening as they were bird watching got a jump scare and then sent us some pictures of what they'd seen and I loved it. It was so cute so thank you so much for that. Y'all are the best. So, today we have asked

1:40:29and answered the question how many bones are in the La Brea tar pits? We saw a lovely image of backlit direwolf skulls which is in the monument in reverence to a death trap. We learnt that 300 million years ago things died and made coal, oil and gas. We learnt that the mess of hydrocarbons becomes lots of different things like wax and jelly and condoms and asphalt. We learnt that you can experience the seeping

1:40:59asphalt's deathly grip in which it would take months to sink. We learnt about pockets of prehistoric Pleistocene bones giving us millions of bones. We heard about the predator trap starring Robert Pattinson. And we learnt let's say it all together now what happens in the La Brea tar pits stays in the La Brea tar pits. We learnt about giant vegetables the link here link to Halloween being pumpkins quote from Caroline

1:41:29the link is pumpkins.

1:41:33We learnt we learnt how a poet essayist and transcendentalist began the novelty of growing giant veg. We learnt about the giant vegetable community with their dodgy seed dealings and ridiculously expensive auctions. We learnt about beastly pumpkins and tumorous tomatoes. We learnt about the giant pumpkin commonwealth and that pumpkins grow best in Alaska. There were numbers that made us angry images that disappointed us but zucchini brought it all back.

1:42:04We learnt that pumpkins are special little guys theoretically boundless up to £20,000 and vascular super powered. We learnt about That's my ideal woman. Boundless and vascular. Boundless and vascular.

1:42:20Caroline. We learnt about pumpkin skullduggery and giant vegetable pariahs and we learnt about pumpkin chunking. Join us next time where we will learn about everything. Everything. Everything.

1:42:40Let's Learn Everything is a Maximum Fun podcast hosted and produced by Ella Hubber, Tom Lump and Caroline Roper with editing and music by the wonderful and talented Tom Lump. Do you guys have Halloween costumes? Anything you guys want to do? I'm not doing anything for Halloween this year. I am going to a Halloween party but I think I'm going to do something based on my short

1:43:11hair. I was thinking of me and Yono could go as Brittany and Justin Timberlake I'm just a Timberlake in an old denim. Oh my god. Because I've got like frosted tips right now. Oh that's so good. Oh my god.

1:43:30That's incredible. That's brilliant. Why we let Ella go first? Fuck. I have vowed to make no more plans in October after the week that we're going to be having.

1:43:43By the way I should ask are you guys free the week of October is it 11th? 12th? No. No. Busy. Sorry. Oh. Busy. Oh fuck. Oh I ruined. I promised them I would get you guys. Fuck. Caroline and I are doing a live show. Yeah. Two actually. Can I come? Can I come? Oh no they're sold out. Sorry.

1:44:10We've got people standing on the Sunday.

1:44:14If you show up and went outside maybe you can. Bring your merch we'll sign it. Bring your merch we'll sign it. Fuck you. Sorry.

1:44:27Maximum Fun. A worker owned network of artist owned shows supported directly by you.