00:00 The hosts discuss their experiences with earthquakes in Los Angeles and how they never felt one while living there.

03:23 Alfred Wegener, a German astronomer, proposed the theory of continental drift in 1915, suggesting that all continents were once connected in a supercontinent called Pangaea and have since been drifting apart.

07:12 Continental drift theory explains various geological phenomena, including volcanoes, plate tectonics, and earthquakes, with 1.5 million people dying from earthquake-related activity in the last 100 years alone.

10:30 When two tectonic plates meet, they can either move apart, slide against each other, or one plate can go underneath the other, and these interactions create faults, which are the main cause of earthquakes.

13:48 Fault zones are areas with multiple faults, and when one fault slips and triggers movement, it can cause a series of earthquakes along connected faults.

17:22 Surface waves, also known as L waves, cause the most damage during an earthquake because they move the earth up and down like a wave in the ocean.

20:44 The Richter scale measures the wave amplitude of seismic energy during an earthquake, with anything below a three generally not getting much attention, but anything seven and above being serious business, such as the 1960 Chile earthquake which had a magnitude of 9.5 and caused immense devastation and loss of life.

24:22 The hosts discuss personal anecdotes and building construction standards related to earthquakes before concluding the episode.

27:55 The hosts discuss sleep paralysis and encourage listeners to send podcast ideas to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.