Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 13

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

Obituary for Thor Thompsen. https://falconerfuneralhome.com/tribute/details/324826/Thor-Thomsen/obituary.html Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   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 Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As I approached the bridge, the old bridgekeeper said to me, Who would cross the bridge of death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he sees. Okay, I replied. Then he said, what is the name of your podcast? Everything everywhere daily, I said. Then he asked me, how long is the average episode? About 10 to 12 minutes I answered.

And finally he asked me, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? And I told him the answer to that would have to be in the 13th installment of questions and answers 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 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 ThruLine podcast from NPR.

The first question comes from Jason Pinkus, who asks, How many episodes are there? As a daily listener, I love the series and enjoy the encore episodes as well, but I was curious how many new episodes exist. The episode today is 1242, which I think means you have done this for 1,242 days. So, Jason, as of this episode that I am recording, this is episode 1,245. Removing all of the encore episodes, there have been 1,049 unique episodes of the show. And that includes episodes like this, which are a question and answer. episodes. Nowadays, as you've probably noticed, I do about two encore episodes a week, which allows

me to keep a somewhat sane schedule. It does not ever mean that I've done this for 1,245 consecutive days. And that is because in September of 2020, I actually had to move. And for a period of one week when not many people were listening to the show at that time, I didn't post anything. So as of the day I'm recording this, the first episode came out 1,254 days ago. And I should add, just as an aside, I've never had anybody complain about the encore episodes, simply because statistically, I know that most people haven't listened to them, just looking at the numbers, and even if you have listened to it, because there's been over a thousand episodes of the show so far, it always helps to get a refresher.

Stephen Hulcran asks, can you discuss why the Magi brought gold, frankincense, and myrr? And did they? Where did this story come from? Well, Stephen, I did an entire episode on Frankencents and Mur, and the short answer basically is they were worth a lot of money at that time. Frankencents and Mur were used as incense and perfume, and they were basically luxury goods. The story comes from the Book of Matthew in the Bible, which is the only one of the four gospels that actually mentions the Magi. And finally, did they actually do it? Well, that depends if you believe the story of the book of Matthew. If you were to make a trip to the store right now, or even go on vacation for a couple of weeks,

what evidence of the trip would exist 2,000 years from now? Other than potentially writing something down and having documentation, that would really be the only way of knowing if it ever took place. So the question of did it happen is entirely dependent upon your trustworthiness of the Book of Matthew. And just as an aside, the Cathedral of Cologne, Germany, claims to have the remains of all three of the wise men. That is the holy relic upon which the cathedral was built. John Hingham asks,

It seems listener reviews have ceased in the last few months. Is that just my imagination? No, John, it is not your imagination. And it's due to a couple things. The first is that these things come in waves. The show will get shared out on some social platform or be mentioned somewhere, and then a whole bunch of people will start listening at once,

followed by a whole bunch of reviews. The second thing is that I've now gotten into the habit of recording my show at the end of the day, which means I kind of want to get it done and go to bed. So I oftentimes will skip on doing the review part just because I want to be finished. Chuck Ferraro asks a similar question. I've not seen many comments about the Completionist Club lately. Has it gone out of style or is it just my Facebook feed? I think it has to do with the fact that as the show continues and there are more and more episodes,

it's becoming harder and harder to join the completion. When the Completionist Club was first created, there were only a couple hundred episodes, and it was entirely possible to become a completionist club member after listening to the show for just a few weeks. So going forward, I expect becoming a member of the Completionist Club to become more and more of an elite thing. Ajai Samuel asks, Hey, Gary, what jobs do you see as the future, given the rise of AI, potentially replacing many roles?

Well, if I knew the answer to that, I probably wouldn't be podcasting. I'd probably be running a hedge fund or a venture capitalist firm or something. That being said, there has been a trend over the last several decades, with the rise of both computers and the internet, of knowledge workers. If you look back to a movie from the 1950s, you'll see scenes where entire floors of a building are taken up with people sitting at desks who would do things like filing, processing paper, or doing bookkeeping. All of that today has been automated.

It's been automated for years with computers and spreadsheets, and databases. So I think what you're going to be seeing going forward with AI is the elimination of some other kind of knowledge worker busy work jobs where people don't really have to do it. So one of the things that I think will probably happen is a shift from bits back to atoms, meaning people doing things in the real world. This may mean a shift into skilled trade, such as plumbers and electricians. And I don't know if you've had to hire a plumber or an electrician lately, but it costs a lot of money. And the reason is because so few people wanted to go into these trades that the few people that did have been able to capitalize on it

greatly. And this would also include things such as personal services or basically anything that requires a human that can't be done by a computer. But who knows, maybe we'll end up with robot plumbers and electricians. Graham McIntosh asks, is Die Hard a Christmas film? Yes or no? you're probably not going to like my answer, but my answer is very similar to is a tomato, a fruit, or a vegetable. A tomato is a fruit served as a vegetable. Die Hard is not a Christmas film, but it is set at Christmas. And I think the way you look at it is, if the film was not set at Christmas, would it fundamentally be the same film? And the answer is, yes.

If John McCain wasn't going to a Christmas party, it could have been a retirement party or some other sort of party. It didn't have to be Christmas, and Christmas has nothing to do with it. Die Hard would be categorized as an action film. Another film that's very similar to this would be a Lion in Winter, one of my favorite films that I've mentioned before. In this, Eleanor Vakwitaine and Henry II joined the family together for Christmas. Christmas is just a plot device to get the family together. It could have been a funeral, it could have been a wedding, it could have been a baptism.

Anything could have been used as a plot device to get the family together. So, like Die Hard, a lion in winter is, a film that takes place at Christmas, but is not a Christmas film. It's a historical drama. Amy Elizabeth Morrison asks, In your travels across America, I'm sure you've run into a few roadside attractions. Personally, I've been to the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri. That made me pull off the interstate. You explore roadside attractions as you come upon them. If so, what's been your favorite? Is this an American thing or worldwide?

Amy, for the most part, as far as I can tell, this is pretty much an American thing. Maybe somewhat in Canada too. And that's because we have a very young country and much of our infrastructure was built around cars. So once cars existed, people built roadside attractions to try to get people to stop and visit and spend money. The European equivalent of a roadside attraction probably would have been something like religious relics from the Middle Ages, something to get people to come to their city as pilgrims. My favorite roadside attraction would probably be Wall Drug in Wall South Dakota. Wall Drug is a complete tourist track. but it works. Decades ago, they would put signs all over the United States indicating the

number of miles to wall drug, and they even appeared in some places in Europe, piquing people's interest as to what it was. In reality, it started out as a simple drugstore in a small town outside of the Black Hills of South Dakota, but now it's become a big thing. Jackson Scoville asks, you've talked about being in debate in the past as well as having to listen at double speed. What's the fastest you can talk? I've been curious. A regular episode, for example, going your fastest, how long would it be? Well, Jackson, you clearly have some knowledge of academic debate who have even asked this question in the first place. And for those of you who don't know, academic debate, for the most part, is a bunch of people talking at very high speeds.

And the reason for this is because each speech has a set amount of time. So if you think it's going to be someone getting up and giving a narration and trying to act really dramatic, that is not it at all. So when I did college debate, and in high school debate, for that matter, you have two positions on affirmative and negative. and I was a first affirmative and a second negative. As a first affirmative, the first speech of the debate, you basically just read it. It's very simple. The first affirmative rebuttal, however, only had five minutes to refute 15 minutes of argumentation, so you had to talk very fast and be extremely efficient.

So I haven't talked like that in decades ever since I left debate. There's been no reason to. But the average debater talking at those speeds is somewhere north of 300 words per minute. So I calculated if I was talking at a moment. If I was talking at about 340 words per minute, I could read an entire episode that was 2,000 words long in approximately 5 minutes and 50 seconds. And because I already have people complaining that I speak too fast,

I don't think that I'm going to be doing that. Nathan from over on the Discord server, and yes, I have a Discord server, it's in the show notes, asks if smallpox escaped from the lab, how long would it take to become a pandemic, and how long would it take us to have vaccines rolled out around the world? Are we better prepared for this post-COVID? Well, for starters, Nathan, this already happened.

In 1978, the last case of smallpox in the world was actually a case of this escaping from a lab in Britain, and a woman actually died. And if you remember back to my smallpox episode, I talked about this. In this case, it was limited to one person and it didn't spread. Now, the difference between smallpox and COVID is that smallpox is far more deadly and led to contagious, whereas COVID was more contagious, but less deadly. The other big difference is we really know smallpox pretty well because it's been around for centuries. And if you have smallpox, you know that you have smallpox. If you remember when COVID first came out, one of the first things they talked about was that it was a novel coronavirus and the novel part meaning it was brand new.

We had never experienced it before. So there was a lot of things and there's still a lot of things that we don't know about how it's transmitted and how it worked. So in the case of smallpox, if it were to be leaked from a lab, I don't think it would lead to a pandemic, and even if we were to catch it, we know how to handle smallpox. After all, it was the first disease that we actually eradicated from the face of the earth. That being said, what if it did get released? One of the problems is that most of the population of humanity right now

does not have a resistance to smallpox. If you are over the age of 50, then it's possible that you may have gotten the smallpox vaccine when you were a child. And I actually got the smallpox vaccine. But if you're under that age, they stopped giving the vaccine because at that point the disease had been eradicated. So most people on the planet are the immunological equivalent of people in the new world when Europeans arrived. So if it ever did get out of the lab, it could be a huge problem. But I think the odds of that happening are extremely, extremely low. Fabian from the Discord server asks,

Are there any podcasting platforms you like better than others because it's less of a hassle for you or better supported to do so? The answer, Fabian, is that it really doesn't matter to me. Podcasting is an open platform, which means that when I publish a new episode, it updates a file known as a RSS feed, which means really simple syndication, that can be read by any number of podcast players.

So from your end, it doesn't really make a difference to me how you listen to the podcast. You can listen to it on various apps such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify, which is how most people listen, or you could even listen to it on a website. It's really all the same. Now, that being said, there are some new podcast apps that are coming out, which have new features that are being deployed in RSS feeds. So if you ever wanted to check those out, you go to new podcast apps.com and check out some of the newer players that support these advanced features. Max asks, how many daily listeners do you get? Is this pretty consistent day-to-day or does it vary a lot based on the topic?

Currently, I get about 30 to 40,000 downloads of the podcast today. And when I started this show, I assumed that there would be variation based on the topic. And I get a lot of people that tell me, well, you should find out what are the most popular episodes and then do more of those. The truth is, there's very little variation in downloads based on topics. That's something I thought would exist when I first started the show, but it actually doesn't. I think this is due to the fact that the premise. of the show is about learning something new every day and the fact that every day you're going to get something new different in random.

Anecdotally, when people tell me what their favorite episode is, it's always something different. So, yeah, there's very little variation based on topic. Vlad Sonder asks, how long does it usually take you to do the research for each topic? That's a very difficult question to answer because the research can go back years. I may have first learned about a topic when I was traveling or even before that, and there are certain topics that I'm sort of kind of researching right now. I do it a little bit here and there eventually want to do. And there are some episodes which quite frankly have taken a couple

years to put together because it didn't really know how I wanted to do a take on the topic. That being said, it usually takes me about six to eight hours nowadays to put together an episode. Our final question comes from Kyle who asks, have you thought of doing a more in-depth deep dive on topics? Maybe something as a weekly or monthly extra. Perhaps as a an extra for people on Patreon or something. Kyle, that's a good idea, but right now I have my hands full just putting out a show every day. Every day, I am basically doing a 2,000-word term paper that has to be done in a single day. And if you've ever had to do that for school, you probably know how difficult it is.

And as of right now, this is still a one-person operation, so I don't have any help in the researching or writing department. I would like to do something like that in the future, but so long as it's just me putting out daily episodes, I don't think that doing something even longer and more in-depth is going to be in the cards. That's all the questions for this month. If you have a question for next month, just join the community over on Facebook or on the Discord server. And when I put out a call to questions, you can just ask it there. There are links to both locations in the show notes. I have some sad news to pass along. For those of you who have been listening to this podcast

for a while, you probably recognize the name Thor Thompson. Thor was one of the first Patreon on supporters of the show at both the executive and associate producer levels, and as such, I read his name at the end of hundreds of episodes. In September, I received an email from Thor indicating he was going to step back from sponsoring the show for personal reasons, but that he continued to be a regular listener. He gave no reasons, but I certainly understood and thanked him for being the show's biggest supporter. I recently received an email from Thor's wife, Kristen, that Thor had passed away on October 21st.

In addition to being a husband and a father, Thor was a veteran of the Marine Corps and served in Operation Desert Storm in the early 90s. Like all of us, he was a passionately curious person who enjoyed sharing what he learned with everyone else. I would like to extend my condolences to Thor's family, and also once again reiterate my thanks for all the support that Thor provided to myself and to this podcast. If you'd like to learn more about Thor Thompson, I placed a link to his obituary in the show notes.