← Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Questions and Answers: Volume 34
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September is upon us. It means going back to school in the autumnal equinox. Days get shorter in the north and longer in the south. The name September means seventh, even though it's actually now the ninth month of the year. But most importantly, it's the time when you have questions and I have answers. Stay tuned for the 34th installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Quince. I've been telling you about Quince for quite a while now, but perhaps it still hasn't sunk in for some of you just how affordable Quince can be. I went to their website and checked out several prices. A woman's Mongolian cashmere tee, which costs up to $175 from other retailers is available for just $44.90 on quints. A men's comfort stretch trench coat that goes as high as $498 on other sites costs only $99.90on Quinn's. A European linen chambray fitted sheet set that will run you $270 at competitors can be purchased for only $85.90 on Quince. These are serious discounts on high end luxury items and they can do this by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen. Quince gives you luxury prices without the markup, passing the savings on to you. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.com daily for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I-N-E.com daily free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com daily this episode is sponsored by Fiji Water. You've probably heard of Fiji Water and have seen it in stores. Well, Fiji Water really is from the islands of Fiji drop by drop. Fiji Water is filtered through volcanic rock 1,600 miles away from the nearest continent and all its pollution protected and preserved naturally from external elements. In this process, it collects a unique profile of electrolytes and minerals, resulting in more than double the electrolytes as the other top two premium bottled water brands, giving Fiji Water its smooth taste. Fiji Water's electrolytes are 100% natural and this water even has a perfectly balanced pH of 7.7. I've recently been trying to reduce my consumption of diet soda and I've found Fiji Water to be a great alternative. Visit your local retailer to pick up some Fiji Water today for your next backyard party, beach day hike or even your home office. Fiji Water is earth's finest water. Let's jump right into the first question and I'm going to start off by addressing a question that many of you asked, so I'm just going to answer you all at once. Collectively, you asked what my thoughts were on the recent Micah Parsons trade. And for those of you who do not follow the NFL or perhaps live in a country that doesn't have American football, let me briefly explain what happened. The Dallas Cowboys traded their star defensive end Micah Parsons to the Green Bay packers in exchange for two first round draft picks in 2026 and 2027. Along with longtime Packer defensive tackle Kenny Clark, Parsons subsequently signed the largest non quarterback contract in NFL history for four years. To put it bluntly, this is huge. This is easily the biggest trade in Packer history. I asked several longtime Packer fans. I know what first came to mind when they heard the news and every single one of them said the exact same thing. Reggie White In 1993, Reggie signed as a free agent with the Green Bay packers and was a huge part of their super bowl championship in 1997. Reggie was the best defensive player in the league at the time and went on to win the Defensive Player of the Year award with the Packers. The other player that came to mind was Charles Woodson. He signed with the packers in 2006 and helped Green Bay win a Super bowl as well, and also won a Defensive Player of the Year award with the Packers. Micah Parsons is arguably the top defensive player in the NFL right now, and if he's not, he is most certainly in the top three. He is in the prime of his career and absent injuries, he is poised to have his peak seasons with the Packers. So far he is on a trajectory to become a member of the hall of Fame. Teams almost never ever trade such players at this point in their career. Moreover, the packers got him for a steal. Kenny Clark had a great career with the packers, but he's 30 and had his worst season last year. Two first round picks won't mean much given that they almost certainly are going to be picks in the mid to high 20s, which are nearly second round picks at that point. Micah Parsons perfectly fills the biggest hole on the packers roster and does so in the absolute best way possible. I've been watching a lot of videos about the trade over the last few days and the reaction to the trade has been almost unanimous that this is one of the worst trades in history for the Cowboys. Time will tell the real impact of the trade, but we'll have an idea in Week 1 when the packers play the Lions. I don't think they're a shoo in to win the super bowl this year, but I do think their odds went up considerably Jordan from the Discord server asks, I've been slowly making my way through old episodes trying to join the completionist club, and In May of 2021 you mentioned approaching 500,000 downloads. How many are you up to now? Or are there any other listenership statistics that you can share? Well, yes, Jordan, in fact, I just posted about it on my personal Facebook profile and on my Instagram account. But the show just passed 50 million downloads. Assuming that each episode is on average 12 minutes long, that means that there has been a total of 1,141 years of content which has been downloaded. If you took all 50 million downloads and played them all one after another at normal speed, you would have had to have started in the year 884 to have finished them today. Every month the show currently gets approximately 1.5 million downloads, which is about 35 years worth of content. Assuming there is no growth in the show, which I hope isn't the case, that means in just about two years you would have had to have started around the year one Jesus Chan asks hi Gary, Greetings from South Texas. After hearing your recent episode on Francisco Macias Naguma and based on current events, I am struck by how many times in history people have followed leaders who turned out to be disastrous dictators. Why do humans continue to follow such figures despite so many examples of the harm they cause? Is it human psychology, social pressure, or something else at play? I don't want to believe that people are really that foolish, but it seems hard to explain well. Jesus, most people are not following dictators, they are stuck with dictators. The path in which dictators can come to power can be different. Some are popularly elected and then become corrupt over time. Some come to power through a military coup. Some are revolutionary leaders who lose sight of what the original goals of the revolution were about. However, once they become dictators, most of them stay in power through similar means. Staying in power does not require broad based popular support. People aren't stupid. Most of them hate the leaders of their countries. Dictators stay in power by creating a small class of people who benefit from their rule. They are given positions of power and prestige. They are often corrupt and the blind eye is turned towards their corruption. They're allowed to enrich themselves, although not as much as the leader. After a while, the leader and a small group of supporters stay in power for survival. They know that if they loosen their grip on power, everything could fall apart quickly. And this is exactly what happened to Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and most recently Bashar al Assad in Assyria. One of the things that often brings down a regime is that the dictator threatens someone close to them in their inner circle. And that is what happened in Equatorial Guinea. When dictatorships fall, they often collapse quickly, either through a popular uprising or a military coup. All it takes is a general who thinks that he's going to get put up against a firing squad and decides to take action first. Richard Short asks, when did prehistory end and history begin? Well, this is a relatively straightforward question to answer. History began with the invention of writing and the recording of history before recorded history. Most of what we know is inferred from archaeological evidence. We might know generally how someone lived, but we don't know their names or even what a people might have called themselves. So the answer is writing. Alex Borelli asks, what's a place you visited that you've discovered doesn't match the popular perception of being dangerous, unfriendly people, etc. Well, Alex, there are a lot of places that fit this bill. What most people know about a place comes from the news. And the only thing the news reports on is bad news. Most people don't realize that life goes on in most places. And the day to day reality for most people isn't the worst thing that they see on tv. The further away people get from a place, the less they know about it and the more they tend to paint with a broad brush. I remember when there was an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and people were canceling vacations to Cape Town because they both happen to be in Africa. Sierra Leone is actually closer to London than it is to Cape Town, but people don't bother to see with that level of nuance. They just lump all of Africa together. Many countries with high murder rates, like Honduras, actually just have high murder rates in one city. And even then, just some neighborhoods of that one city, the rest of the country doesn't reflect this high crime rate. We don't paint with such a broad brush. The more we know about a place, if you live in a big city, you probably know that there are neighborhoods you shouldn't go to, even if they happen to be near where you live. Richard Cruz asks, what are some science fiction themes that are now considered engineering challenges versus theoretical ones? What is the concept of an engineering challenge in this context? Well, Richard, an engineering challenge is a problem where we devise a way to accomplish something and even if it is enormously difficult or expensive. For example, could we send a manned mission to Mars? We probably do have the technology to do this right now. A great deal of thought has been given to the problem, and we've sent numerous robots to the planet. Sending humans would be an engineering challenge. Sending a probe to the closest star would be a significantly more challenging engineering task. You'd probably need a brand new type of propulsion, such as a nuclear rocket or a solar sailor. We've never used these methods of propulsion before, but we have an idea of how they could work. We'd also need to figure out how to send messages back to Earth. Something like Star Trek teleportation or traveling via wormholes has only the vaguest theoretical explanations. We aren't really even sure that it's possible, especially at large scales. We would have no idea even where to begin with a project like this. We're now past the days of early space exploration. What SpaceX and other companies are now doing is just trying to reduce costs. It's working on perfecting the engineering, no longer trying to prove the validity of space flight in theory. Kelly kernsbrockington asks, in your travels, is there any place you went where you got sick, either from food or the weather? Yeah, I got really bad food poisoning when I was in Kuala Lumpur and I think I got it at a Kenny Rogers Roasters. Beyond that, I've been pretty fortunate. I avoided getting sick for the most part. My theory is that constant exposure to new microbes in different places strengthened my immune system. I think I'd be more liable to get sick today if I were to travel than I was 10 years ago. Kristin Buttlap asks, this is selfish, but I'm getting to explore Wisconsin a bit in October. If you could go anywhere else besides McFleshman's, it's on the list. Where would you go? I've only been to Milwaukee and will be leaving from there. Well, the state has different regions. In the south, it's a lot of prairie. I would recommend visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's studio at Taliesin. In the southwest, along the Mississippi river is an area known as the Driftless Region. It has lots of beautiful bluffs and there's been talk of making it a national park, but I doubt if that will ever happen. Door county, which is the thumb on the eastern side of the state, is the most visited area. It shouldn't be too bad in October, and you should have great color in the trees. I'd also recommend going up north and visiting the North Woods. There are thousands of lakes up there and it's mostly coniferous forest. I'd go all the way north and try to visit Apostle Island's National Lakeshore in Lake Superior. Robert Casey asks, you seem to do a lot of episodes that involve Roman history. Do you have any special interest in Roman history? Is this something that you've studied? What book would you recommend? Is a good short history of Rome that's also enjoyable to read? Well, Robert, there are several reasons for doing episodes on Roman history. Rome had an outsized impact on the development of the Western world, and perhaps more importantly, we simply know more about it than other ancient cultures. Even though the vast majority of what was written in ancient Rome is gone, what survived has given us a rich history of the period, more so than any other culture. We have Caesar's Commentaries, which are perhaps the oldest and most complete first person accounts of a leader in the ancient world. My knowledge of Roman history came from my own independent reading. If you're interested, a good place to start would be Mary Beard's 2015 book A History of Ancient Rome. However, there are many, many books going back hundreds of years, including translations of original texts that you can read, most of which are online for free. Edward Gibbons the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in the late 18th century, is in the public domain and you can get a print version cheap on Amazon. The final question comes from Kevin o' Keefe, who How should we be educating our students today to prepare them for a future where a machine will write for them and think for them? This is a seismic shift that our society hasn't figured out yet yet. There have been technical advances like the simple Calculator, where we did not need to do long division ourselves. But when you take away the rigor of thinking for yourself and allow a machine to do that for you, how prepared will our children be for the future? Well, I think that the jury on AI is still out. To be sure, it can do some incredible things, but lately I've been hearing a lot of where do we go from here? Talk surrounding it. That being said, regardless of where it takes us, there is going to be a lot of disruption and some of it is already happening. I actually have a lot to say on the subject of AI in learning, and I'm actually working on a book on the future of learning, but don't anyone hold your breath. It'll take a while to finish and publish what you've probably heard of AI in Learning so far has been students giving an assignment to a large language model and then having it complete the assignment or write a full paper. Clearly this makes no sense and nobody is learning anything. To prevent this from happening in the future, we are going to have to change how we teach. Our current educational system is not designed to teach children in the best way possible. It is designed to teach children at scale. It isn't for teaching one person, it is for teaching hundreds or thousands of people. Many of the things that we think of as staples of the educational system, such as written tests and papers, are all things that can be evaluated and graded en masse. I think that there is enormous potential for AI to actually be the teacher, or more accurately, the tutor. One on one instruction has proven to be, hands down, the best way for people to learn. The problem is you can't really do that in a school with hundreds or thousands of kids. It would require hundreds or thousands of teachers. Try something for yourself. Go to a site like ChatGPT and tell it that you want it to tutor you in some subject. Pick something that you don't know very well if you think you aren't good at math and have it teach you exponents or logarithms. It will go through things step by step and feel free to ask it. Questions like you're a five year old if you don't understand will go at your pace and at your level of understanding because there's no other level. When working one on one, how do we evaluate progress in such a way that we can be sure that AI isn't doing all the work? One solution would be to require tests or essays to be done on paper or on devices that are not connected to the Internet. And some places are doing this already. Another way would be to treat the classroom like a martial arts dojo. To advance to the next level, you have to demonstrate your ability to the master or a panel of masters, AKA teachers. You would have to prove to them live via questions and answers that you're competent and know the subject matter. Because if you talk to someone and ask questions, you can quickly tell if they know what they're talking about or not. There might be other ways of doing this as well, but what they will all have in common is that it will require a rethinking of how we currently do things. There's a whole lot more to be said on this subject, but the short of it is the way we've done things is gonna have to change. That concludes this month's Q and A episode if you want to leave a question for next month's show, you'll have to join the Facebook group or the Discord server, because that is where I announce it. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show Notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.