Lucy: 0:06

Literally, my first memory is of an earthquake. When I was two years old here in Southern California, and it's just my mother gathering up us kids and getting us to go into the hallway away from the windows, and she covered us with her body. So it was a very distinct memory.

Dan: 0:23

Lucy Jones is a seismologist who's devoted her career to trying to understand and prepare for earthquakes, which means that when one hits, she drops everything to respond. One night, Lucy was sitting outside their home with her husband, who's also a seismologist, and her son Niels and a few of his friends were there too.

Lucy: 0:46

Yeah. It was about 9 o'clock at night and and an earthquake happened. Strong enough that we all looked at each other but it's over in a few seconds. And my husband and I stood up."Okay Niels, you're gonna lock up, right? Cause we needed to go to work." And this friend of his had been friend from junior high. I always wondered what happened in this house when an earthquake happened.

Dan: 1:08

The San Andreas Fault, the most famous fault line in America, runs through Southern California where Lucy lives. The fault line actually figures into her own family's history.

Lucy: 1:19

My great great grandparents are literally buried in the San Andreas Fault. They settled in Eastern California, a place called Banning, and the cemetery was put into the fault because it's a really easy place to dig because the ground's all broken up. Right? They didn't know it was the San Andreas Fault when they put in the cemetery, but the fault had created a bench, so it was elevated, looks over the valley, nice place to, you know, people would go to cemeteries and have picnics at the graveside, you know, it was a thing that was done back then. So it was this beautiful location looking over the valley with really easy soft soil to dig into.

Dan: 2:08

I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like To Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a daycare owner, an aircraft carrier commander, an archaeologist. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Lucy Jones what it's like to be a seismologist. We'll talk about where Los Angeles is going to be in five million years, what she does when an earthquake happens, and we'll hear all the things that are supposed to happen in the seconds after a city gets warning that an earthquake is coming. Stay with us. When the magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake happened off the coast of Russia in July 2025, Lucy Jones got a ping about it on her watch.

Lucy: 3:00

The US Geological Survey monitors earthquakes worldwide. They receive feeds from seismic stations around the world. They process it automatically, and anybody can subscribe to the earthquake notification system. You tell them, I wanna see everything above magnitude five or magnitude eight or whatever it is in some location. I subscribe to five and a half worldwide and magnitude threes in the United States. And I get an earthquake notification most days, probably several a day at that level.

Dan: 3:32

Is that right?

Lucy: 3:33

Yeah.

Dan: 3:34

And so you're just frequently looking at your Apple Watch to see, like, what's rolling in. It's just like checking the news for you.

Lucy: 3:40

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Because you never know which one's gonna turn interesting.

Dan: 3:45

Right.

Lucy: 3:45

Wait a minute. Wait, it says eight and a half. Are you kidding me?

Dan: 3:48

So, yeah, walk us through what happened when you got that alert on your watch. Like, what happened next?

Lucy: 3:53

I go to my computer and look at what's really there. And go to the USGS website and saw that there was a tsunami warning. And actually, probably before I even got to that, I started getting phone calls asking for interviews.

Dan: 4:08

Oh, really?

Lucy: 4:09

Yeah.

Dan: 4:09

So you're you're in a lot of reporters' Rolodexes of "this is the earthquake expert".

Lucy: 4:13

Yes. Unfortunately. One time when I was still working for the US Geological Survey, I got a phone call at, like, four in the morning. Tell us about the earthquake. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm waking up.

Dan: 4:28

How many earthquakes have you personally experienced?

Lucy: 4:31

If you wanna say really big ones, maybe a half a dozen. I mean, there's Northridge and Landers and Hector Mine and Whittier Narrows and Sierra Madre and Upland. All of those are ones that I felt strongly.

Dan: 4:45

And what are your emotions during an earthquake? Like, are you scared like everybody else? Are you fascinated because you know the science? Or

Lucy: 4:52

Depends how strong the shaking is.

Dan: 4:54

Yeah.

Lucy: 4:55

Right? I do when I feel an earthquake begin, I start counting because there's quite a bit of information you can get from how long the waves last. So when an earthquake happens, it generates different types of motions in the ground, and those travel out as waves. And there's two different types of waves that get going. There's a compression wave that travels faster, and then there's a shear wave where it's like twisting the ground that's larger and where most of the damage comes from. And they're literally called "P" and "S" waves for primary and secondary because the compression wave travels faster. If you feel both of them and you have the time between them, you know how far away you are. It's just like, you know, how thunder and lightning, you can tell how far away the lightning is.

Dan: 5:40

Right.

Lucy: 5:40

Right?

Dan: 5:41

Mhmm.

Lucy: 5:41

And it's, what, five seconds per mile for thunder and lightning? It's five miles per second for the earthquake waves. So if I feel it and I start counting and I get three seconds and then I feel a bigger wave, I know I'm 15 miles away from where the earthquake began.

Dan: 5:57

Wow. Could you walk us through a memory that you have of some particular earthquake and like how it unfolded for you?

Lucy: 6:05

Okay. Well, alright. The Landers earthquake, which is a magnitude 7.3 in the desert east of California in 1992. It was at four-fifty in the morning. I was awake because I had a very small child who had woken me up to nurse, and I'm lying in bed with my baby, And I feel it starting. I didn't get the "P" wave in that sense. At least I wasn't awake enough to it. So I start counting, and then the "S" wave, the strong shaking, went on for thirty seconds. And the duration of that strong shaking tells you the magnitude. Like I said, a bigger earthquake happens over a longer piece of fault, and you start at an epicenter, and you have to rupture down the fault. And it ruptures down the fault at about two miles a second on average. So if it lasted for thirty seconds, I know the fault's about 60 miles long, and that's gonna be over magnitude seven.

Dan: 6:57

Were you scared for your baby or no?

Lucy: 7:00

Well, alright. The other part is if that's a magnitude seven and nothing fell down in my house, it must be pretty far away.

Dan: 7:08

Okay.

Lucy: 7:09

Right? So it was strong shaking. I mean, it was really noticeable shaking. No question that it was going on, but I knew it was a long ways away.

Dan: 7:17

Yeah.

Lucy: 7:17

And in fact, we'd been having earthquakes out in that location. So that was my guess was where it was, and that was right. And then it was get up and get to work and call my aunt to come over and pick up the kids. And it was, and actually, we had some good friends nearby and, you know, hey, can Sven come and stay with Robin? Cool. Okay.

Dan: 7:35

You you wrote something in your book, The Big Ones, that absolutely blew my mind. Because I think in my mind, earthquakes are things that are rare. And here's what you wrote, "The seismic network that measures earthquakes in Southern California has an alarm built into it that goes off if no earthquake has been recorded for twelve hours because that must mean there's a malfunction in the recording system. Since it was put into effect in the 1990s, Southern California has never gone more than twelve hours without an earthquake."

Lucy: 8:08

Right.

Dan: 8:10

How many people do you think realize that?

Lucy: 8:13

The nerds who follow the earthquake web pages now. Right? Before we had the web, it would have been much more surprising. Now you can you can go in and see that. And the big issue is that the large ones are much rarer than the small ones.

Dan: 8:28

Yeah. So it's sort of like there's a pyramid where what's happening all the time are the little baby ones that you wouldn't feel in the absence of some kind of instruments to look at.

Lucy: 8:37

Right. And in fact, it's a pretty standard relationship that for every, say, magnitude six that you have, you have 10 magnitude fives and a 100 magnitude fours and a thousand magnitude threes and 10,000 magnitude twos.

Dan: 8:51

Oh, I had no idea it was that beautiful of a symmetry. That's interesting.

Lucy: 8:55

Yeah. And especially because why should base 10 matter? But overall, it's very, very strong. It applies to every group of earthquakes you ever find.

Dan: 9:05

Why do you think you were drawn to earthquakes?

Lucy: 9:09

I wasn't immediately. Right? I was a physics major all through college. Physicists are sort of snobs. You know, it's the best science, the hardest science, and that "rocks for jocks" stuff. It's you know, geology is too easy or something. And I met a geophysicist when I was, in my sophomore year who... "Why do you want to go and be a physicist and build bombs? If you're a geophysicist, you can play in the mountains and get paid for it." And got me interested enough to take my first geology class. And I was hooked within a week. The textbook, 900 pages, I ended up reading in the first week because it was so interesting. I couldn't put it down. And I like the math, and I really liked wave theory in physics. Maybe partly, I also am a musician, and, you know, the overlap between those has always been fascinating. You could actually teach a lot about how earthquakes happen by using a violin.

Dan: 10:08

What do you mean by that?

Lucy: 10:10

When you a string player pulls a bow across a string, it's causing a bunch of little earthquakes, basically little stick slip motions where the rosin on the hairs pulls at the string and sets up a vibration. And what you're doing is trying to get a a feedback loop where you carefully manage how you do the bow so as to generate those waves in a coherent pattern.

Dan: 10:37

That is so incredibly interesting.

Lucy: 10:40

But each one of those little stick slip events is the same thing that goes on on a fault. You have friction that's pulling on it until it's released and it releases waves. But also the way the waves travel, and the fact that a longer fault produces lower frequency waves, just like a longer string produces a lower note.

Dan: 11:02

Woah.

Lucy: 11:03

And so all of the faults produce high frequency motion, but the long period motions only happen on the really big earthquakes. So our really tall buildings are affected differently by the really big earthquakes.

Dan: 11:15

So earthquakes are a kind of music?

Lucy: 11:18

They are. It's not... We think of it as beautiful music instead of noise when the frequencies line up and you have a harmonic interaction between them. And the earthquakes generate a wide range of frequencies and therefore don't sound like what we think of as music. But the generation of the waves are very similar.

Dan: 11:55

Hey, folks. Dan here. I'm ready for another casting call. So here are three very common jobs that we're interested in. Plumber, delivery driver and executive assistant or secretary. I bet you know someone from one of those three categories. Before we get flooded with responses though, let me remind you what makes a perfect guest for the show. Somebody who loves their work and have been doing it a long time, at least seven or eight years, more is even better. And also, and this is the hard part, they're a great talker. So your plumber might be amazing at fixing things, but that doesn't guarantee they'll be a good podcast talker. Are they fun? Are they chatty? Reflective? Do they tell stories? If you think you know someone great, send us a note. Our email address is jobs@whatitslike.com. Now back to the show. For years, the holy grail for seismologists was to try to predict large earthquakes. But, over time, many of them, including Lucy, came to believe that useful predictions were impossible. And she started wondering...

Lucy: 13:20

Why do you want me to predict it anyway? Would you rather have two hours to get out of a building or a building that doesn't fall down in the first place?

Dan: 13:27

Right.

Lucy: 13:28

Right? So I ended up moving in my own career away from prediction, which still looks to me to be impossible, to prevention. It isn't just like we have to sit and wait for the earthquake to happen. We know what's going to happen. We can't predict the time, but we can predict just about everything else, like where the damage is gonna be and which buildings are gonna suffer and the distribution of the shaking. Let's use that information to build a better city in the first place. So I migrated and started working more with emergency managers. We created scenarios of what the big earthquake would really be like. So when they're planning for the earthquake, they're planning for the right thing. And I actually got to the point, I spent one year at Los Angeles City Hall working with the mayor and his team to develop a seismic resilience plan to try and get buildings retrofitted that we knew were gonna fall down, start really modifying our water system so we don't lose all our water after the earthquake.

Dan: 14:26

I'll tell you what I'm amazed by is mankind has a really bad track record of putting resources towards low probability events as we all experience with COVID. I mean, there was exactly zero people who were read into pandemics who were surprised that a coronavirus spread worldwide or proved deadly. People have been thinking about that for years and years and years, but it's hard to get political will to prepare for it and earthquakes are exactly the same. It's like, the mayor of Los Angeles has a 100 emergencies that are happening today and you come in and you're like, hey, a big one could happen, well, when's it gonna happen? We don't know, could be tomorrow. Could be twenty years from now. How did you manage to get forward movement given that prospect?

Lucy: 15:14

Well, okay. There was a couple of things. One of them was recognizing when that when I was asked what the probability of the earthquake was, I said, it's a 100%. Just give me enough time.

Dan: 15:24

Mhmm.

Lucy: 15:25

And just because we don't know when, we do know if. It's not if. It's when.

Dan: 15:30

And why do we just give us a little bit of, you know, middle school science. Why do we know it's a 100%? Like, what's going on out there?

Lucy: 15:37

Plate tectonics. Right?

Dan: 15:39

Mhmm.

Lucy: 15:39

We can measure that the Pacific Ocean is moving towards Alaska at about five centimeters, about two inches a year. And where that plate comes up against the North American plate along the San Andreas Fault, the motion is zero. Right? So we are storing energy. And plate tectonics isn't stopping. Eventually, Los Angeles is gonna end up at Alaska.

Dan: 16:03

Eventually, Los Angeles is gonna end up at Alaska.

Lucy: 16:07

Yeah.

Dan: 16:07

Wow.

Lucy: 16:08

We will become a suburb of San Francisco in about five million years.

Dan: 16:13

That's that's incredible.

Lucy: 16:15

Geologists think in different time scales.

Dan: 16:18

I guess so.

Lucy: 16:19

Right? And and so we developed all these probabilities, like long term probabilities of earthquakes because that's what the engineers wanted for deciding when is it worthwhile to add the extra strength in a building.

Dan: 16:30

Mhmm.

Lucy: 16:31

But it's not the way most people think.

Dan: 16:34

Yeah.

Lucy: 16:34

And when we communicated that way, we fed into the uncertainty which made it easier to ignore the issue.

Dan: 16:41

So what Lucy and her colleagues did was conjure a specific scenario to try to bring all those probabilities to life. Because when an earthquake happens, its effects are not abstract at all. Take that fault line.

Lucy: 16:57

You can't have an earthquake without the fault literally one side moving with respect to the other. And Los Angeles will be 20 to 30 feet closer to San Francisco after the earthquake than it is now. And that slip happens at the San Andreas Fault. So everything that crosses the San Andreas Fault will also move 20 or 30 feet. And those include all of the water lines coming into Southern California. You know, we get most of our water from outside. And that wasn't being planned for, and so part of creating the scenario was to make it easy for people to see what the consequences were. So I had that whole study, and we'd made movies, YouTube video on, taking you through what it is and other types of materials to help people understand it, and I could use that when I went to city hall. Actually, the talk that I gave hundreds of times in that year, I called "Imagine America Without Los Angeles".

Dan: 17:56

Mhmm.

Lucy: 17:57

With the idea that we could make this city uninhabitable. And if we choose to do nothing, that's where we will eventually at some point be. And here's the things we can do to change it. And so it a critical part of this was discovering there's a whole field of psychology called risk perception, where they study what makes us afraid of something. And it's interesting because earthquakes, because people are so afraid of dying in them. Right? It triggers a lot of these primitive emotional things. It's uncertain. You don't know when it's gonna happen. You can't see it coming. All of those make us more afraid of it. So earthquakes particularly trigger our emotional life safety fears.

Dan: 18:38

Mhmm.

Lucy: 18:38

But we don't trigger fears about the economic damage because that's just too dry. So when scientists have tried to communicate about a risk, we've gotten afraid from data. So we just think we have to give people more data. But in fact, for most people, they make these sort of decisions or get the emotional engagement through stories.

Dan: 18:59

Boy, you're speaking my language here. This is like one recurring theme in my books is that information is not enough to spark change.

Lucy: 19:06

That's absolutely right. Yep. And you need to have emotional commitment to it. So with the earthquake, we created this scenario. We turned it into a story, and we literally the public version of what's called the story that Southern Californians are writing to help people engage with it emotionally.

Dan: 19:26

Can I ask about some of the scientific tools of the trade? Like, earlier when you were talking about LA moving toward Alaska at a rate of, you know, five inches a year, how do we know that? Like, what what instruments or what technology do you rely on to make those kinds of estimates?

Lucy: 19:44

Originally, this is what, like, a surveyor would do. Right? That's measuring exactly where the ground is. And the whole field has changed over the last several decades so that it's now almost all I think all of it is based off of GPS data.

Dan: 19:59

Really?

Lucy: 20:00

Yeah. So you think of the GPS in your phone, right, it can tell you where you are within, I don't know, 50 feet or something.

Dan: 20:07

Mhmm.

Lucy: 20:08

If you hook it into a geodetic grade monument, something that's really, really stable in the ground, and record continuously for a year, you can average out the noise, and you can see the trend. So this is actually something that the USGS developed here in Southern California in the nineties. It's now pretty much worldwide. We have networks of permanent GPS stations that monitor that strain.

Dan: 20:33

That is so cool.

Lucy: 20:35

It is really cool. You can see, you know, millimeters per year of motion with these really high grade recordings.

Dan: 20:42

And what are the tools that you use to measure seismic waves?

Lucy: 20:47

Seismometers. So the very first ones were literally a pendulum so that you would the ground starts moving and the pendulum tends to say where it is.

Dan: 20:56

Can you picture that? So imagine a sturdy frame. It's bolted into the ground so that when the ground shakes, the frame shakes with it. But then there's a pendulum hanging inside that lags behind the shaking, almost like when you're holding a bobble head in your hand and the base moves with your hand and then the head kind of bobbles around on its own. So scientists would put a pen on the end of that pendulum to draw shaky marks on pieces of paper and the bigger the wiggles, the bigger the quake. So just, you know, conceptually, where do you want to put seismometers?

Lucy: 21:36

See, here's the problem. You wanna put them where the earthquakes are, but you don't know where the earthquakes are so you don't know where to put them. We now like, here in Southern California, we have a network of several 100 of them that are in permanently. And we used to keep them away from people because then the ground was quieter. People make a lot of noise, a lot of seismic noise. Trains and trucks, terrible. But then we realized we were recording them where people were not. And we really if we want to understand what happens to buildings, we need to have them where they are. And now we both put them in urban areas. We put them in buildings, and then we also put them in quiet sites. And after an earthquake happens, you'll often deploy extra sensors because we now know where the earthquakes are going to be. There are going to be aftershocks. It's the only time we know when where the earthquakes are going to be.

Dan: 22:24

Are there seismometers, like, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean? Like, how do you how do you measure activity in the oceans?

Lucy: 22:32

Ocean bottom seismometry is doable. It's expensive, and it's hard to keep the stations working. So, OBSs, ocean bottom seismometers, usually are only deployed for special things. Lucy: It's expensive, and it's hard to keep the stations working. So, OBSs, ocean bottom seismometers, usually are only deployed for special things. There are stations in Antarctica that all of the big Antarctic research stations have a seismic station at them. Essentially, every island that we can has some sort of station on it. There's a lot of different research things at islands. Island stations are noisy. The waves pounding on the island create noise, but we put them out where wherever we can. One of the big advances in seismology that allowed plate tectonics to happen was the development of the worldwide seismic network, which was created and funded by the US government to monitor the nuclear test ban treaty. But that data was freely available and, you know, put on microfilm, and different universities had libraries of them, and it was a revolution in seismology.

Dan: 23:34

So the government created a network to make sure nobody was breaking the treaty and, like, secretly blowing up atomic bombs or nuclear bombs, and then seismologists figured out, hey, wait a second, we can use this data for something else.

Lucy: 23:48

Yeah, right. In fact, there's a whole part of seismology that's called discrimination seismology, which is how to discriminate a bomb from an earthquake.

Dan: 23:55

How to discriminate a bomb from an earthquake? This is so interesting. It's so many twists and turns I just never would have seen coming. These days, seismologists aren't using pendulums and paper anymore. It's all digital data with real time reporting, which was a huge breakthrough in the field.

Lucy: 24:11

So now we have an earthquake in Southern California. Within a minute or so, we have an estimate of the epicenter location and the magnitude. And it all goes up on the web, and it can go to your phone if you want it to. But that all began in the nineties. It was the very first time we had those real time locations. And then now because we have real time, we recognize that if you get that real time information really real time, really, really quickly, which requires really good telemetry and processing, you can get the information that the earthquake's begun within a second or two.

Dan: 24:50

Mhmm.

Lucy: 24:50

And you send that out to everybody, it'll get to a lot of the people before the earthquake waves themselves get to them.

Dan: 24:56

Oh, really? Oh, wow.

Lucy: 24:57

And we call that earthquake early warning.

Dan: 25:00

And what do you meaning policymakers, business leaders, public health experts, whatever, what are the first five things they've got to do and the second they figure out, okay, it's coming?

Lucy: 25:11

Well, we're still working on that, right? Because most of those policymakers are still having to figure out that we've got it. We can look at what's happened, and Japan was the first one to put it in. There's not much decisions you make at that point.

Dan: 25:23

Okay.

Lucy: 25:24

As an individual, you get that message. The best thing you can do is get yourself under your desk and securely settled where things aren't gonna fall on you. But if you are a surgeon, you could have an alarm rung where you take the knife out of the patient's chest.

Dan: 25:39

Oh, yeah.

Lucy: 25:40

Right? You get the dentist to take the drill out of your mouth.

Dan: 25:43

Mhmm.

Lucy: 25:44

Right? There are buildings in Japan that take this information and modify the strength of the building in real time to handle what's coming through. Yeah. And there's a lot of automatic things that you could do, like hook up pressure valves on gas lines that are crossing faults and turn off the flow of the petroleum product before the fault moves and ruptures the pipe.

Dan: 26:11

And what about trains, subways, like, do you shut them down?

Lucy: 26:16

Yes. That's in place both here in California and in Japan. Japan had it the earliest. So stop the trains. If you're within 50 miles of where you think it's gonna be going. Because what's the downside? You you know, your train's a few minutes late.

Dan: 26:30

Right.

Lucy: 26:30

The upside could be not derailing the train. And, Disneyland has actually been using the information.

Dan: 26:36

Really?

Lucy: 26:36

They don't like to talk about it because, right, you don't wanna talk about earthquakes along with the happiest place on Earth. But they have setups to stop the roller coasters.

Dan: 26:45

Oh, wow.

Lucy: 26:46

Yeah.

Dan: 26:47

Like automatically or just like quick warnings to the ride operators?

Lucy: 26:51

I think it's automatic because once you put in the human element of making the decision to respond, you slow things down.

Dan: 26:59

So Lucy, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What's the most insulting thing you could say about a seismologist's work?

Lucy: 27:11

Personally? "There really wasn't enough data to say that."

Dan: 27:17

You're out over your skis.

Lucy: 27:19

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Dan: 27:21

Has anybody ever said that to you?

Lucy: 27:23

No. I tend to be pretty fanatic about making sure I have experimental support for what I'm doing. I mean, I'm not as innovative and think coming up with as much, new theories, but I don't like getting above my skis. I'm a pretty nervous skier.

Dan: 27:41

What is a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Lucy: 27:46

An early warning signal. We ended up developing a particular sound. We actually worked with, some psychologists about how to make the warning sound that comes off, and it'll ring in the lab when we started an earthquake early warning signal. You know? So we're recording that the earthquake's on the way.

Dan: 28:03

And it's a distinctive sound.

Lucy: 28:05

Yeah. We made it a distinctive sound, and it was like, don't make it an alarm klaxon. We don't wanna increase fear at this point when there's an emotional reaction to having that discordant noise. So it's harmonic but not melodic. So a a more pleasant sound but a distinctive sequence of notes.

Dan: 28:25

Okay. So our producer Matt tracked down the sound from NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, and I just wanna say we learned from YouTube comments that there are people for whom this sound brings back a really traumatic memory because of a catastrophic experience with an earthquake. So if you'd rather not hear this sound, just skip ahead right now fifteen seconds. Shifting gears, here's a quick glimpse behind the podcast curtain. So often at the end of an interview with a guest, I'll ask an open ended question just to make sure we've gotten to everything that they wanted to. So I asked Lucy, is there anything that you feel like I should have asked about her that's important to capture, you know, a sense of the job? Because I've certainly got the time if you do.

Lucy: 29:24

I guess I feel like there's an aspect of it that we didn't talk about, but it's actually true of every research scientist, which is that we get to focus at a level that few people get to do. When our son went into graduate school, there was some point in his he was like, "Mom, they're paying me just to read and think." And I'm like, "Yes, dear. Now you understand why both your father and I are research scientists." You know, you get to work on one problem for six months.

Dan: 29:55

Yeah.

Lucy: 29:56

When I became a manager, I then had to work on six problems in one day. Right? And it was it was disorienting to be pulled out of that intense focus. And there's something really special about research science that you get to focus, but also the result is you learn something that nobody else knew that was not understood before you figured it out. And that is one of the most satisfying things there is.

Dan: 30:32

Lucy Jones is a seismologist in Southern California. She's also a musician and she composed the piece you're hearing now. We'll link to it in the show notes. I loved having this episode back to back with the previous one, Executive Chef, because I think they make such a compelling compare and contrast story. At one level, these jobs could not be more different. The executive chef role, as we heard, requires a nonstop juggling act of multitasking and delegation and detail wrangling. The seismologist role is more about sustained focus. Lucy said you could work one problem for six months. The executive chef role is more stressful and physical than the seismologist role. But what struck me was the similarities in their story, the family connection. Lucy's first memory is of her mom sheltering her for an earthquake and her great-great-grandparents were buried in the San Andreas Fault. Meanwhile, the executive chef Cindy, her father was a butcher and her mom was a cook. Both of them discovered their lifelong profession early in their adult lives. Cindy in an apprenticeship in a restaurant and Lucy in a class. It was love at first sight for both of them. Both of them consider their profession core to their identity and in a way they both pushed for more agency in their work as they gained experience. So for Cindy, the chef, that took the form of owning her own restaurant, more control, more influence. For Lucy, that took the form of not just passively studying earthquakes, but actively preparing for them, prodding politicians to take action. I love finding these hidden similarities, these patterns, what links an executive chef with a seismologist. Crafting realistic quake scenarios that influence policy, timing "P" and "S" waves to gauge distance, studying the patterns and the data, and partnering with cities to harden the infrastructure against calamity. Folks, that's what it's like to be a seismologist. A shout out to recent Spotify commenters, Sumant, Courtney Mc, Mina45, Molly, JBeard, and ImListeningToMusic. Thank you all. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.