Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is The Most Important Invention In Human History? (ft. Ryan North)

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

We discuss the most fundamentally important inventions in human history. Featuring Ryan North. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Goods. stuff listen to the good stuff podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast so sometimes when i look around me i'm amazed at how many tech devices i have in my life i mean of course i have a laptop i have a telephone you know i have a tv this kind of stuff but just all around me in my kitchen is a bunch of stuff that my grandparents and their grandparents wouldn't

even recognize. Your grandparents didn't have the George Foreman grill. What do you mean? That's right. The Panini maker. I mean, it's a fundamental element of human society now. How did people live so long without Panini? Where would we be without Paninis? It's baffling to me. It's baffling. You know, I just feel like so many elements of my life rely on inventions that have appeared fairly recently, which means that my life is completely different from the life of my grandparents and their grandparents. Yeah. I guess maybe one way to think about it is look around you and think which technology, if it wasn't there, would make my life totally different. Yeah. And I think the most important invention might not be something

that you notice when you just look around you. It might not be something that throws itself in your face every single day of your life. It could be something you use every day and not even think about it. Are you talking about the toilet? Maybe I'm using it right now. Please. This podcast. the studio and into the toilet. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And this is our podcast, the greatest invention in the universe.

The podcast called... It's called Daniel and Jorge Invent the Universe. Invent the new title for the podcast. on the spot. Now, the podcast is called Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. In which we take

everything in the universe and we explain to you how it was invented or discovered or at least understood in a way that you can possibly understand it and explain it to somebody else

and then you can tell them about the awesome podcast you heard it on. And maybe using this knowledge, you can go out there and invent new things. That's right. And give us

1% of all your royalties. That's right. By listening, you are implicitly signing a contract. That's right. We need terms and conditions on this podcast, yeah. So welcome to our podcast, everyone.

And the topic today is... What is the most important invention in human history? Yeah, of all the things that have been invented to make life easier, more fun, maybe more violent, what do you think is the one invention that has had the most impact on human civilization or the human condition? That's right. And you might be tempted to think about. something which is very immediate like well I use my phone every day and so the

iPhone is a very impactful invention but think a little deeper I mean think about the thing which if we didn't have it would change human history and so I think that's I'm tipping my hand here that's my definition for what's the most important invention is the invention with without which human history would be markedly different and I love thinking about the way the history could have been different yeah I mean let's talk about that when you say what's the most important invention what do you mean and so for you it's about changing history, like the invention that marked the point in time at which humanity could have gone left or

right. Exactly. And some of these inventions, they really come from like moments of inspiration or, or, you know, just accidents. You know, somebody accidentally invent something in the lab. They're trying to make a better peanut butter sandwich, but they actually invent a laser gun or something, right? And this kind of thing happens all the time and it changes the course of human history. And so I wonder sometimes, like, if that person had been sick that day or gotten a car accident or decided to become an artist instead of an engineer, how human history could have been different. And so there are these moments, these pivot points in history where I feel like if things hadn't gotten a certain way, the whole future could have been dramatically different. And inventions are one of those. And so I like to think about if you had deleted one person from history or distracted them in the right moment, things could have been very different.

Yeah, like talk about a butterfly flick. Like if a butterfly had flown in front of Einstein, just as he was about to come up with, you know, the idea of relativity or quantum physics, he could have been distracted and not come up with it. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And there's lots of real examples. You know, for example, Isaac Newton, genius in human history, right? Change the way we think. Invented lots of important stuff, physics, gravity, calculus, all this stuff. His family was sheep herders, right? And the only reason he actually got an education was because his father died and his mother remarried. somebody who insisted he'd go and get an education, maybe just to get young Isaac out of the house, right? And so if Isaac hadn't been sent to school, he never would have become this staggering genius in human history. Yeah, or even more sort of crazy is supposedly he came up

with the idea of universal gravitation when an apple hit him, right? I think that's probably 99.99% mythology. But let's go with it. Let's say that's true. Yeah, but, you know, what would have happened if instead of an apple it would have been in orange. You know, we could have had a totally different science. We could, the theory of universal juice instead, right?

Orange, you glad, it was an apple. Who invented the first pun, anyway? Somebody's got to get credit for that one. Yeah, that definitely changed human history. I think that is the most important. And for the worst. Yeah. So I'm not an expert in history of technology,

and I'm guessing that Jorge, you are not either. And so for this particular topic, we decided to reach out to somebody we know who is an expert who has thought really deeply about these topics. So this is a good friend of mine. His name is Ryan North. So Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Great. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. My name is Ryan North. I write a webcomic called Dinister Comics. I'm doing that for 15 years. And on top of that, I do nonfiction writing. I write The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics. And my new book is called How to Embed Everything, a Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler. And it proceeds from the premise that if you are in the future, you've rented a time machine, you go back in time, and your time machine breaks.

Here's how you fix things. Here's how you rebuild civilization from scratch in any time period in Earth's history. So it's sort of a nonfiction book with a fictional candy coating on the outside, which is the time travel part of it. I get to call it my nonfiction time travel book, which I'm very happy about. Yeah. And was it inspired because you made? met a stranded time traveler and thought, how am I going to help this person? I have no comment on that.

Are you the time travelers? Totally, yes. I always thought of you as a man from the future, Ryan. So is that true? Maybe that's your secret. This is your way to disclosing it to the world. Again, I don't want to confirm what to know anything. You've got to get some mystery, right?

Keep them guessing. I was really interested in the book because it reminded me of when I was a kid, I was totally enamored by that game, a civilization, which I'm guessing you also played, right? And in civilization, for those of you haven't played, you have to basically reinvent civilization, and you have to do it in order. And for me, it was the first education

where somebody had taken down a lot of humanity's breakthroughs, and said, well, what would you need to reinvent the combustion engine? What do you need this? And for that, you need this, and for that, you need this, all the way back to numbers and writing and this kind of stuff. So it was really fun to see this sort of detailed breakdown. And what made me think about, like, which are the inventions in human history

that most catalyzed technological progress from which most changed the future. So that's what we wanted to sort of focus on in today's podcast episode is this sort of broader question, what is the most important invention in human history? And before we talk to you about it, since obviously you've thought deeply about this

to write your book, we went and asked a bunch of people on the street who hadn't had a chance to think about it at all and asked them what they thought was the most important invention in human history just from the top of their heads. Here's what they had to say. Fire.

Fire. If I call the wheel, and I mention, I would say that. All right, thanks. Light bulb? No, the wheel. The wheel. The wheel. The concept of evolution.

Is that what you happen to be studying right now? Yeah. I was surprised how often fire showed up. Yeah, fire was a popular one, fire in the wheel, yeah? So that surprised you, how come? Yeah. And I can see why they went for fire, but I feel like it kind of dodges a question a little bit

because it's a pre-human invention, yeah. Wow. So fire predates humanity. Homo erectus was using fire, and they're not us. I mean, they're humans, they're Homo, but they're not Homo sapiens. So, wait, we can't claim credit for fire. We can't claim credit. Homo sapiens did not invent fire.

They might have stolen it or reinvented it, but they didn't first invent it. It was Homo erectus. I think you've just undermined like a core tenant in the belief a lot of people have about their own species. A lot of people went to fires. Like, this is the defining thing about human. This is what makes us who we are. This is what makes us human, yeah. You just decued it from the list.

Wow, that's pretty tough, man. Okay, so we eliminate fire then from the list of important inventions because we didn't invent it. Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, so people said fire. They also tend to go with for the wheel, right? The wheel's a pretty common one. Yeah.

The wheel is also embarrassing, though. The wheel is embarrassing? Why is that? Well, we had the wheel for thousands of thousands of years, but we used it for pottery on the side as a pottery wheel. so it's again like if you want for transportation it took us thousands of years to flip it over on its side and that's what we think about the wheel we think about movement transportation but we use it to make pottery for a really long time no is that true yes yes the wheel for transport comes well after the wheel for

pottery nobody thought to put it on the side i want to talk about that some more but first let's take a quick break a foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

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the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this is something you come back to a lot in the book, is that you say, we had everything we needed, and if you just knew what to do, you could skip 1,000 years or 100,000 years, you could accomplish something in an afternoon, right? Yeah. And I get that. That's like a really fun fantasy to imagine fast-forwarding human progress.

But I wonder sometimes how true that is. Like, let's take the question of language, right? In your book, you lay down language is like a pretty critical cornerstone of human technology. I completely agree. But do you think that going back like 50,000 years to skeletal identical humans, if you went back that you could teach English, for example,

to a group of two-year-old, you know, modern humans from 50,000 years ago and that they would learn it and develop and turn into, you know, English speakers? I do. And the reason to have that loophole there is that you said two-year-olds, which is great because it's very hard, maybe impossible for humans to learn a language after puberty. It's also really an ethical to test to run experiments on it. But in cases of feral children, people spend their lives trying to teach them to talk

and maybe they learn it a little bit, but they're never communicated, they don't really use it. And so if you're traveling back, you know, 100,000 years, 50,000. years and you want to start rebuilding civilization. I would recommend don't necessarily chat up the cavemen, the cave women, but maybe talk to their kids, maybe steal some babies if you're going to do it that way. So you're going on record for his baby stealing right here? I don't want to go on record for fully endorsing baby stealing, but in terms of just pure efficiency of civilization building, directing your efforts towards the cave babies will get you much better results. And there's a huge question mark here, right? Because you mentioned

how we have these skeletally identical humans, like anatomically modern humans, so people whose skeletons look like ours. And those show up around 200,000 BCE. And then behaviorally modern humans show up, humans that act like us, that behave like us, that decorate their bodies, bury the dead, that sort of thing, show up around 50,000 BCE.

There's this huge gap of what took us along, what made us finally take that leap from anatomically modern to behaviorally modern. and we don't for sure know because it's very hard to death none of these things fossilized are preserved but one of the theories and what I go with in the book is it was the mention of language it was the mention of talking to each other that let us make that leap forth

let us finally become fully human and so that's the technology I would say it's the most important one for us language because it allows us to have not just to talk to each other but to like have ideas that can survive the death of the host that's so important. Absolutely. Language is definitely important. But the

supposition there is that somehow we had the capacity for it, but didn't invent it for 150,000 years, right? Yeah. But is it, there are other ways you might imagine it could have gone, right? It could be that most of us didn't have the capacity for it. And then a few brains, you know, mutated, evolved

or whatever, to develop an additional capacity, which allowed for the creation of it. And then then, of course, it would be a rapid selection effect. So you can imagine that after the capacity for language evolved, it might have been developed and then spread very rapidly. Sure, but that requires a change to the brain to sort of evolve in us. And without needing to suppose that, we can just suppose someone invented language. And then the question is, well, why did it take us so long? And language is a really hard thing to invent.

Because imagine you're trying to, you have to be sort of this, in my head I call him caveman Einstein, who has to not only come up with the idea of language, the idea of expressing thoughts in words, but instantiate that idea. And it's still completely useless unless you're also smart enough to teach someone else how to use it all within a single lifetime. Like, it's not easy to be that first person who's coming up with the technology of language who's inventing language. And I think you can point to that and say, yeah, that might take a long time to have all those things line up as they would need to be for this to have any practical use. Right. And I think it touches on this other issue, which is a lot of these foundational inventions,

people who are listening might think, what, that's crazy. It's just so obvious. And a lot of these things are so foundational. They're deeply embedded in the way we think that it's impossible to imagine life without them, which is why, frankly, they're so difficult to invent, right? I mean, because they completely transform the way you think and then become deeply ingrained in your thought process it's hard to imagine how to get there when you don't have it. I've spent years trying to picture thinking

without words. Like how do you... Well, I'm talking to two cartoonists here, right? You guys are experts at thinking without words, right? But we're taking words and putting them into pictures, but it's still the process seems very, very language-based. But one examples I love touching on that is the idea of, if you have a time machine,

you could take one of those children born 50,000 BCE, take them to the modern world, adopt them, raise them as a modern child and they'll be like any other human on the planet they'll be as smart and creative and clever and fun and loving as any other human because they're standing

on the shoulders of giants. They're having 50,000 years worth of technological process for free. They get to have language. They get to learn how to read and write. They get to be in a community and it seems almost like you're breaking a rule, right, to have this literal cave person and have them be

indistinguished from modern person just by changing the environment in which they're raised. But that's what these inventions do for us. They change the nature of who and what we are in a way that makes it hard to imagine what is like without it. And that's the kind of thing that makes me wonder what's in the future. Like, if there were in the past, these sort of trivial but transformational inventions, math, language, et cetera, are there ones that remain? You know, will in 100,000 years people look back and think, how come Ryan North didn't think of, you know, blah, blah, blah, some transformational but basic way of living and thinking

that exploded our capacity for technology and life. I mean, do you think that there are those sort of transformations left? Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I believe so. The punchline of this is, you know, we could have met all the stuff and we didn't and look how blind we were not to see that. How could we have been so stupid?

But if there are all these inventions and all these points in history, we can point to that and say, yeah, we didn't see this until later. It stands the reason that there may be that right now. There's probably still some of this, I call it the low-hanging fruit of civilization, that we could invent an art and just aren't seen yet. And I think that's really optimistic. I don't think that makes us feel stupid.

That makes me feel excited. Like that's what are we missing that's out there right now? There's still really cool stuff that we can all come up with. So is that your choice, Ryan, for the most important invention in human history, language? Yeah. I think it's foundational. I think it's consequential. I think it's transformational.

And also, I'm kind of cheating because it's actually two inventions. I'm rolling reading and writing together into one there, just calling it language. So how do you define language? You mean like the idea of words or just communicating? Because people, I'm sure, communicated with grunt or hand signals, right? Yeah, but that's not language. So the example I would give is, let's say I draw three pictures. I draw a picture of a cool dog and a picture of a skateboard and a picture of a thumbs up.

And those symbols can be interpreted. You can go, he's saying a cool dog in a skateboard is good. Or maybe I'm saying, I saw a cool dog in a skateboard and I gave it a thumbs up because I love cool dogs on skateboard. But there's ambiguity there. And what language is is something that works to eliminate ambiguity. So when we're communicating now, because I'm using words with precise meanings, they're not perfect, but they try to be precise, so that we can communicate quickly and clear with having to go back and clarify all the time. And so, yeah, you can communicate with crunch.

You can communicate with hugs. You can communicate with longing glances across a dance floor. But for precision communication, you need language. And that's what I'm calling the technology. So it's kind of like the idea of somebody at some point says, hey, guys, this is crazy. We should have rules that define. But those glances across the dance floors are, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So it's the invention of rules that everyone would agree to communicate ideas. Yes, with an asterisk. Because one of the craziest proofs I read when I was doing computational linguistics was, this person was making the argument that one of the neat things about language that is almost unique is that it evolves so quickly. You look at the way English was spoken 100 years ago, already it sounds ancient, or at least odd. You go back to three, four, you go back to Shakespeare 400 years ago and it's hard to understand, right? So why is it changed so quickly? It's based on rules. Rules are what make language work clearly. Why have these rules seem to change so often. That seems like a failure. And the argument this paper was making, which I love, was that the reason language evolves so quickly is because language is really hard to learn, which is true. But actually, it's impossible to learn. And we never actually learn the language our parents are speaking. We learn an approximation of it that allows us to communicate. But all the edges are fuzzy. And so since we have all these places where we don't actually

know what the rule is, that allows language to change so quickly and to evolve generationally so fast, which I love. I love to do that, you know, language is not just hard. It's impossible, and you will never learn the language your parents are speaking. It just can't be done. Well, it's certainly true that parents just don't understand, so maybe that's the reason. That's right. I forgot you're a computational linguist, right? That was your education. Yeah, I did a master's in computational linguistics. So that's a bit suspicious that a computational linguist thinks language is the greatest invention ever. You know, like me saying cartoons are the most important invention ever.

It's only a tiny bit self-centered. Also, it's a bit of a dark view because it suggests that the greatest accomplishment in human history is thousands of years ago, and we haven't really done anything since, which matches up. But we're still using it, right? It's allowed us to do everything else. So that's why I say it's so foundational, is that it is what unlocks everything. Because you can be the smartest person in the world without language. You're trapped in your own head, and you're having these amazing, world-changing thoughts and can't communicate them in a way that's clear.

You're not going to communicate, you know, relativity through grunts and glances. You need language that. You need mathematics for that. So I think it's fascinating what you're saying because I was going to make exactly the same argument to make a different point. I was going to use the same argument to suggest that math and science were the most important inventions in the industry, but for exactly the same reasons. And this is from a scientist. I feel like you guys are maybe a little biased in your selections here. I feel like until we had mathematics, all we had was language, which is frankly kind of clumsy when you want to communicate very clearly and precisely.

And I remember learning math and learning logic and feeling like, finally, here we have effectively a language for very clearly and precisely communicating ideas, ideas which are too fuzzy in English to communicate clearly. But is mathematical language just another language? Do you know what I mean? Like, is that a sub-invention of language? In the book, I cheat, because I'm saying now language is a language. most important invention. The book I actually give five. I say written language, spoken language, scientific method, calorie surplus. So again, having extra food so you can worry about other things and where your next meal is coming from. And the last one I call non-sucky numbers, which is basically

a number system that permits mathematics to happen in a productive way. So one of the reasons the ancient Romans didn't get that far with math is they had these Roman numerals, which are just incredibly clumsy to operate with. You have to do math where you know what number you're looking at. I'm not going to sit here and argue that math isn't important because I have it on paper. I think it is important. But I will say, and this is maybe dodgy. But I personally, Ryan North, think that mathematics, and correct me from wrong, but I feel like mathematics can be a creative expression in the same way that language can,

only with more rules. Is that wrong? Is that romanticizing it? Or am I incorrect? The romanticization of mathematics. while. I'm not sure it's possible to romanticize math. No, I think that's fair. But I would also make a similar argument, you know, for science, like in terms of helping us develop technologies or helping us understand the world or communicating clearly with each other what we know and what we

don't know, it's always amazing to me that took so long for people to come up with a scientific method, you know, or even to come up with the idea of empiricism. Like, you have an idea, let's actually check if it works before we accept it in the canon of ideas, right? Yeah. You know, one of my favorite examples when I teach introductory physics is the comparison between Aristotelian physics and Galilean physics. You know, like Aristotle thousands of years ago said, oh, things just move because it's in the way of things to move.

And Galileo was like, let's check. And turns out in an afternoon, he disproved all of Aristotle, right? And there's an example of somebody actually making huge progress in an afternoon based on a single simple idea. But why did it take thousands of years before people realized, wow, science is actually only useful when you compare it to what's actually happening in the real world. But once you have that idea, of course, then you have this enormous flowering of technology and advancement. So it seems to me like, yeah, language is important, math is important, but in some sense, science is a really strong contender for the most important because we've had it

the shortest amount of time, but it's led to perhaps the greatest transformations in the way we live. Well, here's an interesting question. So you, Ryan, think language is the greatest invention ever. And Danny, you think math and science are the greatest inventions ever. Do you think that we're done? Can you foresee a possibility that there's an invention in our future that could maybe overtake these two things to be the greatest invention ever? So one of the reasons my book is structured the way it is where it has this invention of time machines and then you go back and you're doing time tourism and you get trapped in the past is that I, I, feel like if you invented time travel, then you're done. That's the last invention that ever needs to

be invented because any problem you encounter, you go to the future, see how they solve it, bring the solution back with you. The second you invent time travel, you've invented all other inventions it's possible for humans to invent. Boom, which proves that time travel is impossible. Or it proves that that could be, that would surpass language and science in my estimation. All other inventions on mass beats everything else for sure. What do you think, Daniel? I think that for that to work, you'd have to invent time travel,

which would violate causality, which is what you need in order to be able to steal inventions from the future that haven't been made yet, which is basically just science fiction. And we already invented that. So that's what I think about that. Wow.

What do you think, Daniel, would be, what do you think could be something we might invent in the future that could totally revolutionize things even more? That's impossible to comprehend. Like I, you know, if I knew that, then I would invent it, right? All of these inventions, the really the transformational ones that, and I love the way Ryan pointed this out in this book, all these inventions, if you just knew what the invention was, then you have invented it, right? It's like having the password, right?

All you need to know is the password and the door is open. Some of these inventions like, you know, steel, how do you, even if you went back and told somebody how to smelt steel, it's not like they could do that that afternoon. and they have to build a whole industrial base, et cetera, et cetera. But these really transformational ones, it's just knowing the idea is the invention. So, Jorge, it's not like I have the next human transformational invention already in my head and just haven't shared it with anybody. And I was waiting for this podcast to reveal it.

But if I did, I would totally roll it out right now. Can you imagine? Let's take a quick break. Our IHeart Radio Music Festival, Presented by Capital One is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas. September 19th and 20th. On your feet. Streaming live only on Hulu.

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Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro.

And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

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I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also wonder, like, if you could go back in time and you're talking a 50,000-year-old dude and you're, like, excited to share with them the ideas you have and the technology that you can use to transform his and her world.

I wonder if they might think, you know what, we're good. I got my roving mammals, I can eat, you know, hunter, I gather, you know, carve sticks every once in a while, we bang rocks together around the campfire. Life's not bad, you know? Yeah, that's the thing that we kind of forget is that in times of plenty, the hunting and gathering and lifestyle is a fabulous lifestyle. It's like you're lazing around. It doesn't take all day to hunt and gather. You have lots of free time. Just chill out, do whatever you want. Food's plenty. Who would give that up? Farming sucks. Farming is slept. backbreaking labor in a field. It's a lot of work. But what it gets you is reliable food so that when the times of plenty run out for hunting gathering, you don't starve

and suffer catastrophic population collapse because you have resources. You're in one place. You can build infrastructure. You can start building buildings that you don't have to pick up and carry with you. It's where civilization begins

when you stop moving around every time things get hard. So, yeah, I can see if you arrive in a time where it's very easy to find food, it's going to be hard to convince people to join the farm and work for you or work with you. But one of the arguments for that that I found was someone was pointing out that it's very hard to produce alcohol

in a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Because you're moving all the time. And so if you want to have a beer, you need a civilization for that. And that might be one of the things that induces people to come and help out on the farm. Yeah, my other fear for time-traveling, Ryan, is that you go back in time with all these crazy ideas,

you're just going to get branded a witch and killed. Like, you know, there's sort of a social barrier to convincing people to join your, let's transform humanity movement. But you're right, maybe beer is the answer to that problem. All right, I only have one more question for you, which is sort of a multiverse question. To me, the history of human invention seems sort of chaotic.

You know, if somebody had this idea, Somebody had that idea, sort of came together here and there. Have you thought about sort of the 1,000 parallel universes where you run the human experiment? And how many of them do you think we would end up after this amount of time at roughly the same place? Like, do we always end up stumbling into the same things in roughly the same order? Or are there these moments when human technology could have shifted dramatically and gone down a different path and done things more rapidly? Do you think those thousand different parallel universes have similarities? all totally different. I think that's no layers, but I think they're markedly different.

Like, when you have these huge expanse of time, which we could have met something and didn't, all you need is that one person to invent it. You remove Isaac Newton from our history, and we have a very different history of thought of mathematics, right? Perhaps, but, you know, maybe Liebnitz would have invented everything Isaac Newton didn't think of, right? There could have just been like, it could have been an idea of the time that somebody was going to invent because the pieces were there. And that does show up. We look at the invention of radio, and there are a bunch of people independently coming with radio at about the same time, because the pieces were in place.

there are certainly moments where sort of things are in the air and everyone's moving towards this one invention and radio's an example of that. But there's other examples where it didn't have to be that way. The stethoscope is a fun one. The first stethoscope was just a rolled-up tube of paper to isolate and listen to a sound. And we had paper since 300 BCE. It was invented in 1816 CE by a male heterosexual doctor who had a busty female patient and didn't want to press his ear to her chest, because that was too erotic an experience for him. So he rolled up a tube of paper to leave some room for Jesus and listened through that and accidentally discovered that this isolates and clarifies the sound.

So that's one of the few examples I could find where someone actually progressed science by being too horny to do their job properly. And that guy could have shown up at any point in history, right? And also prove that boobs are useful for something. All right, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Ryan, for entertaining all of our amateurish thoughts on a topic in which you are an expert.

Thank you. I think they're great questions. I love talking about this stuff. I wrote a book about it. I love talking about it so much. It's called How to Invent Everything, a survival guide for the stranded time traveler. And you can get it at how to invent everything.com. Well, I think that Ryan, who has a history of studying language, thinks that language is the most important thing invented in human history.

And me as a scientist, I think math and science is the most important thing invented in human history. Yeah, I found that a little suspicious, like you guys said, all these great reasons why your team should win. That's right. And, you know, there's a trend there because when I was asking people on the street what they thought the greatest invention in human history was, most of them talked about what they happen have been reading. You know, so students studying evolution said evolution, a student studying the atomic theory, said atomic theory. A student on a scooter said, the wheel. I think it's just a hard question to answer because it's so broad and so big. people freeze up a little bit and then they think about it from their perspective and there's a lesson

there you know that we all see the world from our own perspective well you know it sort of happened to me too when I was asked this question when I had to think about it I just kind of looked around me you know like I didn't think internally through the history of human civilization I just kind of looked around me and I thought try to think what would be you thought banana I could not live without bananas yeah it's what makes everything else possible come on it's what got monkeys out of the trees, if you think about it, or onto trees. Up into the trees, exactly. But yeah, you sort of have that instinct to look around you and to try to gauge impact that way.

Like, what all around me would not be here without, if it hadn't been invented? That's right. And I think the lessons there is that we can all see only a tiny bit of the fabric of human history, right? And so it's very difficult to say anything in general because human history is this incredible mosaic of billions of people's experiences. And all we can do is speak for ourselves. I mean, I know historians try their best to weave these broader stories about what has happened in humanity. But I always feel like so much of actual human experience is just brushed under the rug when they try to do that. And so I think none of us can really speak for all of humanity.

We can only speak for ourselves. What is the most important invention that has affected your life? I think that's really the question of the podcast. Or, you know, maybe points to the idea that the more you know about something, the more fascinating it becomes. Do you know what I mean? like Ryan has studied linguistics for a long time and so he just knows so much about it and how it's connected to everything. So from his point of view, it's like the most important thing. It's the hub of all things. And like you've studied science and physics for a long time. And so you've

seen how it's kind of sort of connected to everything else and how it's nothing would be possible without it. And so you see it as the most fascinating, most important thing. And so maybe it's just all sort of connected to itself. And it's just that the more you know about something, the more more you think it's crucial to the structure of human history. So why didn't you argue for comics to be the most important invention in human history since you spent 20 years studying it, right? I totally agree that things as you study them, anything can become interesting. You can find a puzzle anywhere, right? Like you can go into a deep dive about like a cup, you know? Like if humans hadn't invented

the cup, what would happen? There would be a lot more injuries in baseball. Oh, wait, no, you're talking about a different kind of cup. Sorry. but you know what do you know what I mean like you can go in a deep dive on anything and see how it's all connected to the greatest moments in history and civilization right like without a cub or any kind of vessel to hold water maybe we wouldn't you know been able to you know leave the watering hole and start building villages and things like that all right so maybe we should leave that as a challenge to our listeners choose some trivial item in human life and challenge us to spend an entire podcast drill down and discovering what's fascinating about toenail clippers or glad rap or whatever it is in your life. Send it to us at feedback at danielanhorpe.com. Or write us as at jockstrap at danielandhorpe. That's right. And thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.

If you enjoyed it, tune in next time or check out our book called We Have No Idea, an illustrated guide to the unknown universe. See you next time. Thanks for listening. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.

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