Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0510: Anti-trivia: The biggest cities in the world

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

This “anti-trivia” episode lists the biggest cities in the world in order of population. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 510, and introducing the Anti-Trivia Show. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day, and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today begins an 11-part series that we're doing on anti-trivia. This is going to be a little mini-series that we do on the show for a couple of weeks while I'm traveling, and perhaps we'll bring this back a little bit later if you guys like it. Just let me know at timothyatmasterofmemory.com. Really quickly, what anti-trivia is is intended to be the opposite of trivia. By definition,

trivia is something that's frivolous or unimportant. So if somebody teaches you little random facts that don't really have any importance in the real world, for me, anti-trivia is about taking those facts and going, well, what's the important stuff related to those facts? Can we zoom out from that, look at the bigger picture, and find the things that are truly important? And today's trivia fact that I'm going to base the episode on is actually something that you might consider to be a pretty important fact And today's trivia fact that I'm going to base the episode on is actually something that you might consider to be a pretty important fact, not necessarily trivia. That fact is that Russia is the largest country, so to speak, with over 10% of the world's landmass.

That's an enormous amount of land. But the reality is that actually Russia is largely uninhabitable. So a lot of that land isn't cultivatable and really isn't very friendly to, you know, human life or really any type of life. The fact is that Russia is considered a European country, not an Asian country, or at least has been for, you know, a great part of history. And the reason for that is that the center of the Russian government and so on is really on the west edge of Russia in Europe. So we're talking about things like Moscow and St. Petersburg, where a lot of the concentration of the population of Russia is. Now, if it surprises you to hear that Russia is a European country, not an Asian country. Just look at any of the past, let's say, wars or really any major events of history from the last few hundred years. Russia has always been considered one of the great Western powers or one of the great powers in Europe, whereas things like China, India, and so on were really distant and not really in the

picture. The Russian government was generally closely related to the government of Germany and England and so on. And this is where we're kind of tuning into what is truly important. I mean, what makes Russian a European country? Well, that's the fact that the people and the culture are all over there on the west edge. So let's think about Moscow and St. Petersburg. Those are cities or concentrations of people. So let's look at the bigger question now related to that. Where are people concentrated around the world?

What I'm suggesting is that a more relevant fact than landmass is really where people are. So what I'm going to present in this episode really quickly is a list of the most populous cities in the world. So where are people concentrated, human beings, in the cities around the world? So I'm going to list the largest cities proper, and I'm going to list the top 15 by population. It's a little difficult to define cities, so you'll have to look up what cities proper means if you want to figure out why I'm not listing Tokyo as number one, for example, even though Tokyo is arguably the largest metropolitan area.

If you just define a city by what is commonly considered a city proper, that's the definition that I'm going by here. And it's interesting to point out that Russia's first city is actually at number 11, and the U.S.'s first city is at number 22, if that gives you any perspective. So let's go down the list. First we have Shanghai, which is a Chinese city, of course, and it has over 24 million people. Next, we have Beijing, another city in China, at over 21 million people, actually closer to 22 million people. Next is Lagos, Nigeria, with 21 million people. Then we have Delhi, India, at almost 17 million people. Next, another Chinese city, Tianjin at 15 million people.

And then we have Karachi, Pakistan at 15 million people. Then we have 14 million people in Istanbul, Turkey. There's a well-known city. And then, of course, Tokyo has 13 million people. That's obviously in Japan. Then another Chinese city, 13 million people in Guangzhou. So that's a Chinese city, 13 million people. Then Mumbai, India, formerly known as Bombay, with over 12 million people. We have 12 million people in Russia, so that's our number 11. And then Sao Paulo is the first one in the Americas that we come to with 12 million people. And then back to China, we have Shenzhen with 10 million people. And then in Indonesia, we have Jakarta with 10 million people. And then we have Seoul, South Korea, with 10 million people. So those are all the cities in the world with over 10 million people. You'll notice that New York City wasn't on the list because it doesn't have that many as a city proper. And even London wasn't on the list.

So we're not talking about, you know, centers of commerce or anything like that. We're looking at raw human population. So there you go. There's your introduction to anti-trivia. Let's take a trivial fact that's not necessarily as important as people think it is, and then zoom out and go, what's really important here? Or what numbers can we look at and get to the essence of things? In the next anti-trivia episode, we'll be looking at the largest wars in the world by number of deaths. And you might be very surprised in contextualizing the death tolls of the different wars around the world throughout history. Let me know what you thought of this anti-trivia episode, and there'll be 10 more coming at

you in the next several days. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll be back at you again soon.