Every October in the Northern Hemisphere, leaves on the trees turn color and fall to the ground.
While the leaves turn from green to the bright colors of autumn, listeners' green questions are also transformed into colorful answers.
Stay tuned for volume number 23 of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Every October in the Northern Hemisphere, leaves on the trees turn color and fall to the ground. While the leaves turn from green to the bright colors of autumn, listeners' green questions are also transformed into colorful answers. Stay tuned for volume number 23 of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. [Music] This episode is sponsored by Nerd Wallet. [Nerd Wallet] When it comes to general knowledge and history, you know I've got you covered. But who do you turn to when you need smart financial decisions? If your answer is Nerd Wallet, then you're absolutely right. And if it's not, let me change your mind. The nerds at Nerd Wallet have spent thousands of hours researching and reviewing over 1,300 financial products. And they have the tools you need to make smarter financial decisions. Looking for a credit card? Go beyond the basic comparisons, filter for features that matter to you, and read in-depth reviews. Ready to choose a high-yield savings account? Get access to exclusive deals and compare rates, bonuses and more. How something? View today's top mortgage rates for your home suite home. Make the nerd your go-to resource for smart financial decisions. Head to nerdwallet.com/learnmore. Nerd Wallet, Finance Smarter. Disclosure, Nerd Wallet Compare Incorporated NMLS1617539. Shopify doesn't just meet you where you are. We meet you where you're going. Shopify is the only commerce platform relentlessly focused on one thing and one thing only. Commerce. We challenge the status quo so that your business can do bigger, better, and focus on building what's next so that you're always moving further, faster. For enterprise brands that believe there's a better way, there's Shopify. Learn more at Shopify.com/enterprise. Let's get right into it with the first question. Walt from the Discord server asks, "If you were suddenly teleported back in time to the year zero and appointed to a position of power in any society, how far do you think your current knowledge could advance society? Could you spark the Industrial Revolution?" Well, Walt, putting aside the fact that there was never a year zero, the answer to your question is no. I don't think I or anyone else could spark an Industrial Revolution. Maybe at best I could speed things along such that it would take place a few centuries earlier, but it certainly could not happen within my lifetime. Telling people 2,000 years ago about the modern world would be the equivalent of telling them science-fiction stories, and I just don't think you can jump people that far ahead. Let's take, for example, the steam engine. To make a working steam engine, you first and foremost need fuel. Wood simply would not work as a fuel. It doesn't have a high enough energy density, and within the span of a few years, or at best a few decades, you will have chopped down all the forests around you. The Industrial Revolution didn't take off until coal started to be mined as a fuel source. The other thing you need for an industrial economy would be some sort of organized advanced civilization. Returning to year one, we find such organized civilizations in China, India, Persia, and Rome. Of those, Rome had very little in the way of coal deposits. The biggest deposits in Europe were just outside of the borders of the Roman Empire in Germany. Later, they conquered Britain, where there was also coal, but being on an island would have made it difficult to use. Likewise, there was very little coal in Persia or even in India. China, however, has lots of coal, and it would have been the best chance of an Industrial Revolution 2,000 years ago. Just to get things started, I think you would need to introduce mathematics and science before you could introduce engineering. To do that, you'd first need to introduce mathematical symbols, and probably the base 10 system of numbers, and maybe Indo-Arabic numbers as well, to really speed along mathematics. You'd also have to teach people that the world is made of atoms and the germ theory of disease, as well as generally trying to convince the intelligentsia of the period of the scientific method. To convince people of all that, you'd probably have to demonstrate that these things work. You need to create tools such as lenses and simple inventions that could be used immediately by people so that they would believe you. Maybe, if you could pull that off, and there's no guarantee you could, you might be able to light a spark that would catch fire several generations after you. The next question comes from Kreshers from the Discord server, who asks, Gary, you said when you decided to travel the world you sold your house and bought a camera you didn't know how to use. Then the pandemic ended your traveling phase. So, do you now live in a house again? Do you rent a department? Or do you live in the back of a van by the side of the highway with a microphone and an internet connection? Well, Kreshers, I actually had an apartment for about three years before the pandemic that I used as a home base between my travels. After a decade on the road, I had gotten burned out, so I got a place that I could go between trips. And I was still on the road for about half of every year at that point. Today, I still have an apartment. I rent instead of own because I don't want to get stuck with a long-term mortgage should I want to move somewhere else. I'll most certainly be traveling again at some point, but it won't be traveling full time and living on the road like I did in the past. I'll probably stay somewhere for three to six months before moving on to somewhere else. Courtney Classen asks, can computers think? And what does it truly mean to think? My answer to this is no. Computers, even advanced AI, cannot think as humans do. Moreover, it is my opinion that no silicon-based machine can ever really think. We can create machines that can ape intelligence, but they are simply providing an output for a given input. All computers, as they are designed today, are based on Boolean logic. They're rapidly undergoing a series of steps in executing a program. If you put in the exact same inputs, you will get the exact same outputs. You can add randomness to the inputs to change the output, but the process is fundamentally the same. People are impressed with how large language models can answer questions, but no AI ever asks questions. It doesn't know if it's wrong, it doesn't care if it's wrong, and it can't adapt and learn to correct itself if it is wrong. There's no will, there's no desire. Anything that could be done with an integrated circuit could, in theory, be done with transistors, vacuum tubes, or even on paper. It would be many, many orders of magnitude slower and very inefficient, but it could be done in theory. Computers and AI will continue to get more impressive, but it doesn't indicate true thought. I know there are a lot of people who disagree with my views on this, but I think it's a fundamental limitation of anything that is digital. Jason Scott asks, "Have you traced your family genealogy and traveled to any of the destinations where they're from?" Well, Jason, I've spent a lot of time on Ancestry.com, which has a lot of resources. I've been able to trace all but two of my ancestors back five generations, and that would be my great, great, great grandparents. They mostly came from Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. However, I have one great, great grandmother that had a totally different ancestry. Her ancestors were largely English and Scottish. Some of her ancestors were very early arrivals living in the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts with the pilgrims. Through her lineage, I've been able to link myself to King Robert II of Scotland. He is my 20th great-grandfather. And that might sound impressive, but it really isn't. When you go back 20 generations, you have two to the power of 20 ancestors just from that generation, or 1,048,576 20th ancestors. Going the other way, King Robert II probably has millions, maybe tens of millions, of descendants. For the majority of my ancestors, there's a huge black hole of information around the time of the Thirty Years War, which ravaged Northern Europe. Many churches were burned, and the birth, death, and marriage records were all destroyed with them. As for visiting the places they came from, I've actually come very close in the Netherlands and Belgium, but I never made the trip to that village. No, NATO Ramirez asks, "When you were traveling the world at your peak, what camera gear did you use?" Well, I started using a Nikon D200, which was the top-of-the-line crop sensor camera at that time from Nikon. I then upgraded to a D300S, which was also a crop sensor camera when it came out. I waited for years for an icon to come out with an upgrade, and they never did. Meanwhile, Sony had become a leader in camera innovation. I eventually just completely switched over to Sony and to full-frame cameras all at once. The reason for the switch is that my biggest challenge doing travel photography was low light. I couldn't use a flash in the vast majority of situations, like if you're taking a picture in a cathedral, so I needed a camera that performed well in low light. I currently have a Sony A7R2, which is a bit old at this point, but I haven't really done much photography since I started the podcast. I normally only carried three lenses with me when traveling, a super zoom, a wide-angle lens, and a 50mm F2 lens. I also have a 600mm lens that I use for wildlife photography, but I normally didn't travel with that as it was so large. Shana Hellem asks, "We're very impressed by the fact that you've completed three National Park Passport books. We're currently trying to complete our first book. What is your secret to visiting each one?" Well, Shana, just to be clear, I have three National Park Passport books. They're not necessarily filled. I purchased three because I had a couple of trips where I forgot mine, and I just bought a new one. That being said, I have been to 226 of the 431 units in the National Park System. Of the 63 sites that have been given a National Park designation, I've been to Albert VI. The ones I haven't been to are New River Gorge, Big Bend, Virgin Islands, Channel Islands, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia. The remaining six are actually not that hard to visit. It's just a matter of making it a priority and doing it. My plan was to do it in 2020, but the pandemic kind of got in the way of that. Tom Allen asks, "Would the recent surge in disinformation have your research efforts gotten harder?" The answer is, no, not really. It's primarily due to the nature of this podcast. I deal with subjects that are historical or scientific usually, and for they are, for the most part, immune from organized misinformation campaigns. Most misinformation campaigns are conducted for a purpose. They want to sway public opinion about some current issue or policy. As most of the topics I do episodes on have little bearing on current events, it isn't something that really affects me or the research. Enonary asks, "Where and when did the concept of playing sports to make a living start?" I've been meaning to know the answer ever since I've learned that the first person ever to win at the Olympics was a cook. Now, of course, I've done my research, but I think would make an interesting topic. Well, I don't know if it's possible to know who the first person was, but I would say that the first people to make a profession out of competitive sports were probably Roman charioteers. In a previous episode, I covered the life of Gaius Apaleus Diocles. He was the most successful chariot racer in Roman history and became one of the wealthiest men in Rome as a result. Martin Hanley asks, "What would you tell a high school junior or senior about choosing a college?" Four-year, two-year, trade school, military, go straight to work, take a gap year or crash on the parents' basement and play video games. Well, Martin, the advice you give will obviously totally depend on the person that you are giving the advice to. Given the cost of college nowadays, the potential debt burden, I wouldn't go into college lightly. People often say that you'll make more money if you have a college degree, and that's largely true. However, it overlooks all the people who went to college and didn't graduate, yet were still stuck with all of that debt. And that is a very large percentage of the people who actually went to college. So, I honestly wouldn't recommend college unless you are sure that you are a good enough student to graduate in four years or less. I also don't think that college is wise if you don't know what you want to do. It is a very expensive attempt to figure things out. I recommend traveling for a year as it is much cheaper than college, and you will learn a lot more about yourself. The one bit of advice I always give people who are starting out is that if you want to ensure long-term success in life, it's to be great at something, and it almost doesn't even matter what it is. Many skills don't even require a formal education. The editors behind the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once won the Academy Award for Editing, and they learned how to do it on YouTube. Playing video games in your parents' basement isn't just a waste. It shows a lack of ambition. There's nothing wrong with playing video games per se, but the time spent in the basement doing that could just as easily be spent self-studying and actually learning a skill. I've made massive career shifts several times in my life, and each time I threw myself into whatever the new thing I was doing. Sometimes it took a few years of study before I could claim any sort of mastery, but that's what's required. David Woolley asks, "With four years of the podcast and climbing and all the fact-checking research and editing, have you ever thought about scaling down to Everything Everywhere Weekly?" I'm always amazed at the amount of work and effort that goes into each and every episode. Well, David, the short answer is no. The entire premise and format of this podcast is that it is a short-form daily show. Yes, it's a lot of work, but I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing. Four years isn't that long in the big scheme of things, and after a thousand episodes, I think I got down a pretty good system for doing this. And I know I've mentioned it for a long time, but the plan is to eventually hire someone to help out. Getting help will be a much more sustainable solution rather than changing the entire podcast. And the last question comes from Ja Teng, who asks, "What kind of music do you enjoy listening to the most, and what is your favorite instrument, and why?" Well, I mostly listen to classical music and more often than not, contemporary classical music. Usually composers like Philip Glass and Max Richter, but also some newer composers like the Polish musician Hani Arani. That being said, I have an extremely eclectic taste in music. I have an enormous playlist on Spotify where I dump anything that I like. In there, you will find everything from big band to hip hop to jazz to country to rock and everything in between. The only thing in common with all the songs is that it's something I like. As for my favorite instrument, well, that would have to be the pipe organ, because you have to respect any instrument that makes you come to it. That wraps up the questions for this month. If you'd like to ask a question next month, make sure to join the Facebook group or the Discord server. Links to both of which can be found in the show notes. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Keever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily Merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the completionist club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to Everything are in the show notes. [BLANK_AUDIO]
