Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Question and Answers: Volume 1

Episode Date: November 6, 2022

For over two years and 850 episodes, I have been providing you with daily podcasts on a wide assortment of topics.  Now, for the first time, I’m letting you take over the show by answering whatever questions you might have had about anything and everything, including Everything Everywhere. Prepare to enjoy answers to questions provided by listeners of the show, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast. Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over two years and 850 episodes, I've been providing you with daily podcasts on a wide assortment of topics. Now, for the first time, I'm letting you take over the show by answering whatever questions you might have had about anything and everything, including Everything Everywhere. So, prepare to enjoy answers to questions provided by listeners of this show on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. Ever since I first started the show, I wanted to do a question and answer episodes. And I finally got around to it. I went on the new Facebook group, asked people what questions they had that they would like me to answer, and I got a whole bunch of them. So with that, here we go. And if I should butcher any of your names, I am apologizing beforehand.

The first questions come from Lillian Casamacima. She asks many of the standard bio questions. How old are you? Where were you born? Do you have any siblings? What languages do you speak? And would you ever go on the amazing race? I am 53 years old. I was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is also the birthplace of Harry Houdini and

Willem Defoe. I have one brother. And the only language I speak fluently is English. but I do speak a whole lot of bits and pieces of other languages that I've picked up along the way. And would I ever go on The Amazing Race? Probably not because I've met a whole bunch of people who have been in reality TV shows, and none of them really have a good experience. The next question comes from Michael Malaki, and he basically asks, I feel like we know you, but we don't really know you. I know you're a well-traveled individual,

but how did you become so well-traveled? Well, the truth is, I wasn't very well-traveled for most of my life. Growing up, I never even saw saltwater until I was 21 years old. In 1998, I sold an internet company that I had, and in 1999, the company I sold it to sent me on a trip around the world to talk to all their offices. It was a three-week whirlwind trip, and I visited Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, and London. And it was the first time that I had ever really been anywhere outside of North America. I didn't really know what I wanted to do after I sold my company, and in 2007, I sold my home, and set out to travel around the world for a year. And that one year kind of ended up becoming a decade. I never really stopped, and I just kept traveling. To date, I have been to 129 U.N. member states

and 203 places on the Traveler Century Club list. And the Traveler Century Club list basically includes things like Antarctica, Puerto Rico, Gibraltar, and a lot of other places that wouldn't be considered a country, but are destinations that you can visit. I visited every state in the United States twice. I've been to every Canadian province three times. I've been to every state in Australia, every state in South Africa, every state in Germany. So it's not just visiting places and checking off a box. When I visited somewhere, I tend to really visit it a lot. And I've also almost been to every national park in the United States as well. And I would have actually completed the list if it wasn't for the pandemic and starting this podcast. The next question comes from

Amy Elizabeth Morrison. She asks, has anyone ever challenged you with an obscure topic to see what you could do with it. The answer to that is, yes. If you go back to my episode on randomness, that actually came from a suggestion from my college roommate, Sean. Sean was one of my partners on the college bowl team, as well as on our collegiate debate team, which actually was really good, and he was also a competitor on Jeopardy. And one day he snarkly suggested just doing something random, so I did the episode on randomness. One of the reasons I was confident I could do an episode on randomness is because when I was in college, I did a senior project on pseudo-random numbers. And I've also just sort of had an interest in how computers deal with

randomness and real-life random number generators. Andrew Francis asks, where is the first place you went that you thought your life was at risk? I would only say that's happened a couple of times. The first time was back in 2007 when I was in Taipei. I met a person who lived there and they showed me around and it just so happened to have been the National Day for Taiwan. At the end of the day we went to a fireworks display and there was this incredible crush of people. It was just this throng of people all trying to get a better view of the fireworks. And the only thing that kept going through my head were those disasters you always hear about in stadiums where people are stampeded to death. So we kind of got out of there, which was extremely difficult to do.

And the other time I thought my life was kind of at risk was in 2010 when I was in Bangkok when the redshirt protests were happening. There was one day when the protesters, and there were hundreds of thousands of them in Bangkok at the time, were going to do a protest at the Prime Minister's house by dumping human blood on it. It turns out the Prime Minister's house was only a few blocks away from where I was staying. So I figured I had to check it out. So I brought my camera with me and spent the better part of a couple of hours standing between hundreds of cops in riot gear and thousands of angry protesters. And I got some of the best photos I've ever taken in my life. I didn't think the odds of something happening to me were that great, maybe like 10%,

but just given the fact that I was between these two groups that didn't like each other, if things were to fall apart and given where I was located, I could be caught in the line of fire. Phil Ulet asks, what are your favorite information sources? For folks who want to do quick internet searches on obscure topics, what sites do you recommend? Is there a plan to organize your Everything Everywhere catalog into a wiki-like info tool? The first thing I would say is if you go to my website, Everything Dash Everywhere right now, I publish all of the scripts for every show, so you can do a search on them right now. I have had recommendations from people for lumping shows together, so I could do one page

that just lumps together all the shows on Roman history, another that lumps together the shows on geography, so things like that. But I'm probably not going to do that until I'm able to hire some help. For the last two years, I've been doing absolutely everything on the show by myself, and my top priority is always getting a new show out every day. As for information sources, the genesis of a show could come from many different things. It could be a book I read years ago. It could be something I encountered on my travels or even a documentary I watched.

Specific information sources are always going to differ for every topic. So, for example, I recently did one on horses in World War II. Many of the sources came from horse websites, either people who were hobbyists about horses or were doing horse breeding. and that's probably something I would never use for any other topic, but it just so happened to come up for the topic of horses. So the answer is it really kind of depends. There will usually be a Wikipedia entry for most of the topics that I do episodes on. The problem is Wikipedia can be really hit or miss, and by that I'm not usually referring to the accuracy of the information. Some Wikipedia entries are far too long and provide far too much information. What I'm really looking for is an overview of the topic and a summary.

Other Wikipedia entries are far too short, and they don't provide enough information. Also, there are usually interesting facts or anecdotes which simply aren't going to be found in a given Wikipedia article, so you always have to look beyond that in order to find the really good stuff. Alex N.C. asks, what strategies do you implement in your daily research that could be useful to current students? He also asks, what strategies did you find helped you navigate the course load and material in university? As for your second question about what helped me when I went to college, that is very different than what people are going to do today because when I went to college, there was no internet. In both college and high school, I was an extremely competitive academic debater.

In fact, when I was in college, I placed in the top ten of the national tournament. One of the things that people don't realize about academic debate is that it is primarily a research activity, not a speaking activity, although speaking is obviously very important. It was through speech and debate that I was able to blow through a lot of lot of my classes in college because I had already been exposed to so many different things. Researching them was really easy. I could probably talk for hours on this subject, but I think there's a huge difference between actually learning something and having knowledge versus studying in school for grades, because they're two completely different things. And there's a lot

of people that get very good grades who don't actually develop any long-term knowledge about the things they studied for. Seth Louvierre asked, do you have a favorite episode or place that you visited. I don't really have a favorite episode. They're all my children and I love them equally. As far as the favorite place I visited, this is the one question I probably get asked more than anything else. And the answer to that is also the same. There really isn't a favorite place. But the answer I give most people, rather than going into some long diatribe about why there can't be a favorite place, is I usually just say South Georgia Island. And the reason I say it is because almost nobody has been to South Georgia Island, it is an amazing place, and it's really hard to get to.

South Georgia Island is located above Antarctica between Africa and South America. The only way to get there is by ship, and it gets maybe a few thousand visitors every year, and almost all of those are on the way to Antarctica. Almost everyone I know that has gone to South Georgia says it's one of their most favorite places in the world. And who am I to argue with that? Matthew Williams asked, when was the first restaurant started? Why did people decide to leave their homes to get food? That is probably worthy of its own episode, and I've actually been.

put it down on my master list of future topics. If you remember back to my episode on Life in Ancient Rome, in the ruins of Pompeii, we found places called thermopoleums, which were basically just small food stands. They served bread and soup, and maybe you could get a little bit of wine. These were designed for lower class people who didn't have servants to cook food for them, and who also lived in densely crowded buildings called insulas. Because they couldn't cook food in their apartment building, they would go and eat at these stands which were open to the public. So these would probably be what you would call the first restaurants. These probably existed in Rome and other cities as well, so it's hard to pinpoint when the first

ones came about, but they almost certainly came about due to urbanization and the inability for people to cook at home. The final question comes from Amy Elizabeth Morrison again, who asks, Who is Thor Thompson? It's an epic name I hear daily, and I've made up stories in my head. Well, let me tell you some, Amy. I'll tell you who Thor Thompson is. Thor Thompson is the only person ever to beat a brick wall in tennis. Thor Thompson can look directly into the sun because the sun will be damaged if it looks directly at Thor Thompson. The tears of Thor Thompson can cure cancer. Unfortunately, Thor Thompson has never cried. Thor Thompson wears cowboy boots made out of real cowboys. That is who Thor Thompson is.

If you would like to ask a question for the next question and answer episode, whenever that might be, just join the community over on Facebook or on the Discord server. When I'm ready to do the next episode, I will solicit you for your questions. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener is Zach from Greshamorgan on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, part of my morning routine.

I've been a part of the Completionist Club for the last several months. I wake up in the morning craving the podcast and I'm never disappointed, even on reruns. My one suggestion is when referencing another podcast from before, can you please reference the episode number? Your backlog is large enough now that having a number to reference would be significantly easier if I wanted to go back and listen to the reference work. Thanks for all your hard work. Thanks, Zach.

While there are, in theory, episode numbers under the hood, I've never really used them because I didn't want people to think that they had to listen in any particular order. That being said, if you wanted to find something from a past episode, there are a few ways to do it. The easiest is just to visit my website, Everything-everwhere.com. There, I publish all of the scripts for all of my episodes. You can do a regular search on keywords to find what you're looking for, or you can just go to the main page with all of the episodes listed and just search on show titles. Another way to do it would be to use an app called Fathom. They're a search engine for podcasts. They do a transcription,

of every episode of my show, and when you do a search, it'll bring up an audio clip from that segment of the show where what you're looking for was mentioned. Those methods aside, here is what I will do from now on. When I reference a past episode, I will put a link directly to the webpage for that episode right in the show notes. And that way, you won't even have to search for anything at all. Remember, if you leave a review or send a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show. Also, if you want to ask a question for the next Q&A episode, make sure to join the Facebook group. Just search for everything everywhere daily on Facebook

or click on the link in the show notes.