The month of June comes from the Latin word unius, which is derived from the Roman goddess Juno. Juno was the queen of the Roman gods and was the goddess of marriage, love, and childbirth. But despite her domestic association, she was often depicted as ready for battle, holding a shield and a spear. While there is absolutely no evidence to support it whatsoever, I think Juno might have also been the Roman goddess of questions and answers.
Stay tuned for the June installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. You know, when I started this podcast, it felt like I had to become 10 people overnight. Producer, editor, marketer, designer. It was a lot. And I kept thinking, I wish I had someone in my corner to help me figure this out. That's why I love... today's sponsor shopify it's like having a built-in business partner
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Economics is everywhere, and everything, fueling our lives, even when we least expect it. If you're a fan of Everything Everywhere Daily and are curious to learn something new and exciting about economics every week, I recommend you listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR.
What I like about Planet Money is that I can get an update on the week's financial news in about 30 minutes. Stories like the adoption of stablecoins or the price of eggs. From the job market to the stock market to prices at the supermarket. planet money is here to help explain it all the planet money hosts go to great lengths to help explain the economy they've done things like shot a satellite into space started a record label made a comic book and shorted the entire stock market
all to help you better understand the world around you. Tune in to Planet Money every week for entertaining stories and insights about how money shapes our world, stories that can't be found anywhere else. Listen now to Planet Money from NPR. Let's jump right into the first question. Alice Johnson asks, you talk a lot about good emperors and bad emperors. You allude to what you consider a good leader. Could you expound?
Keeps people safe, prosperous, oversees justice to a broad segment of his people, unity, the goodwill of the people. Something else? Alice, this is an excellent question. The bad emperors, I think, are very easy to identify. They were often crazy, cruel, and hedonistic. They spent an incredible amount of money on themselves, on palaces and parties, and they delusionally referred to themselves as gods or gladiators. And they often met out barbaric punishments for the most trivial things.
Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, and Elagabalus checked most of those boxes. The good emperors were mostly the opposite. They were rational, reasonable, and fair. For the most part, they kept the empire at peace, or at least defended it from invasion along the frontiers. And for the most part, they didn't expand the empire very much, as most of that had already been done by the time they came to power.
The good emperors tended to have longer reigns, and many of the more forgettable emperors had rather short ones. While good and bad are obviously subjective. Most historians largely agree on who the good and who the bad emperors of Rome were.
Given your origins in a relatively safe country when it comes to food and water, I'm curious how you have fared throughout your extensive travels with the food and water in those exotic countries. Did you experience food allergies or poisoning in your travels? And what advice would you give travelers visiting countries where the standard food and water could prove a bit dangerous for those who have overly westernized digestive systems?
this is something I never worried about or even gave much thought to during my travels. I've met hundreds of other extreme travelers and I don't recall the topic even coming up in that community. The only time this would be an issue... is if you are drinking unfiltered water directly from the tap which is something i never did if you drink bottled water or beer or wine or soda this really isn't much of a problem
No matter where you travel to, I've read that your gut microbiome will change within 48 hours of arriving somewhere. To be sure, some places will affect you more than others but I think there's actually some truth to this. Because I traveled so frequently, I believe that my body was more adapted to such changes, and as such I was rarely affected by food or water issues.
The only time that I can think of where I had food poisoning was in Kuala Lumpur after I ate at a Kenny Rogers roaster. I'm not going to say that my experiences will be like everyone else's. but it was never something I gave much thought to or had to. Chip Thomas asks, At the end of each episode, you're always careful to give your production staff credit. You are well known for doing your own writing and research. What's left in production? Editing? Uploading?
Well, Chip, the short answer is the show producers are just people who support the show at the highest tier on Patreon. They do not play an active role in the production of the show. As of right now... I do everything on every episode and I have done so since the very first episode. I very much appreciate my producers, but just as in Hollywood, they're the money people. Dan Last asked me,
I found this podcast through the Amateur Traveler podcast a few years back. It sounds like you and Chris know each other professionally, but are you friends in real life? How did he meet? Keep up the great work. Dan from Cleveland, Ohio. Yes, Dan, I've known Chris for quite a while. We were co-hosts of a podcast called This Week in Travel for about 11 years. And I've lost count of the number of countries that we've met each other in.
I first met Chris when I started listening to The Amateur Traveler when I was traveling. I contacted him and was a guest on the show for the very first time when I talked about Micronesia. And I recorded that show from an internet cafe in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. We met each other in person for the first time at a travel blog conference in 2009 in Chicago. And I recently had the pleasure of inducting Chris into the Podcasting Hall of Fame earlier this year in Florida. Will Raber asks,
Have you considered adding video to your podcasts? Well, well, yes. In fact, I considered it before I even released the first episode of this podcast. However, given that I am hosting a daily show, to produce video, I'd need to hire someone to handle the video production. What I'm doing right now is already a full-time job and there really isn't time for me to add that to my plate.
And quite frankly, I know nothing about video. There are a host of reasons why I gave the audio podcast priority. YouTube takes a much larger cut of revenue, and you constantly have to be adapting to the YouTube algorithm. And that's on top of all the extra work that video requires. So maybe I'll launch something someday, but that day is not here yet. Nick Hallfelder asks, with all the places to live and complete freedom to choose where,
why did you choose to come back to your hometown in Wisconsin? That's a very good question, Nick. I was actually living in Minneapolis as early as 2020. I had also been living in the Twin Cities for years before I started traveling as that's where I had attended college and launched several businesses. I considered many places to live. And one of the conclusions I came to was that large cities...
are for the most part, just not worth it anymore. Cities played an important function for thousands of years. There were many trades that were much easier to ply if you were around a lot of people. As the world industrialized, jobs were available in factories, which required a lot of people living in proximity. In some industries, you just had to live in a certain area to take part in it. If you wanted to be in the motion picture business, you had to live in Los Angeles, California.
If you wanted to work in publishing or finance, you pretty much had to live in New York City. Technically, the internet and socially the pandemic changed everything. We can just as easily communicate remotely now as we can in person. The city I live in isn't huge. It has about 80,000 people. But it isn't tiny either. We have multiple restaurants of almost every type of cuisine you can think of at a quality level that is on par with what I've experienced in cities all over the world.
I have a fiber internet connection. There is an Amazon fulfillment center right on the edge of town. So I'm hard-pressed to think of anything that I'm lacking by living here. While I'm not losing much, I'm gaining a great deal. Prices here are significantly less. I'd pay about 5 to 10 times more for a similar apartment to the one I live in if I lived in a place like New York City. There's very little in the way of traffic. Crime is low.
Where I live, there is almost no threat of natural disasters. There are no hurricanes or earthquakes. I can't recall there ever being a forest fire. The river I live right on has never flooded in recorded history and probably never will, given that it has two large bodies of water on either end with dams that can control the flow. Tornadoes aren't even that frequent here.
In the event of a drought, there are 15,000 lakes in Wisconsin with two great lakes that surround the state. People think of the cold right away, but the dirty secret is it really doesn't get that cold. Temperatures can occasionally drop below zero Fahrenheit, but in most winters it never does and 20 degrees Fahrenheit is more normal. I also don't think that this is just a me thing.
The cost of living in major urban areas in almost every developed country around the world has skyrocketed. And this has happened precisely at the same time when the benefits and reasons for living in large cities have largely decreased. mostly due to the spread of the internet. And now that Starlink is up and running, the number of places that have become viable has increased even more. Well, first, let me congratulate Katie.
I do not recall anyone from Thailand being in the completionist club, so she very well might be the first. The key to being successful in academic debate is preparation. In American debate, this often involves a lot of research. But no matter what type of debate you do, you need to anticipate what your opponent is going to say in response before the debate round ever even starts. This usually is not too difficult to do.
Whatever the topic is that you're debating, there's probably a body of literature where people have spelled out their opposition to whatever argument you are making. For example, let's say there are five generally accepted arguments against whatever you're advocating. You then need to prepare your responses to all five of those arguments well in advance. In this respect, debate is a lot like chess. You make your move, your opponent makes their move, and then you respond to their move, and so on.
It's entirely possible that you will encounter an argument that you weren't prepared for. In that case, you need to have some sort of generic argument or position you can fall back on, which you can apply to almost anything. This isn't ideal, but it's better than nothing, and at least you won't be taken totally by surprise. Dong on a swing from the Discord server asks, Gary, I know you have an extensive movie collection at home, but what do you think the future of cinema is?
How can the box office retain or potentially grow its audience as more and more people don't see the value in attending a movie in person? More experiences, cheaper tickets. What are your thoughts? I don't see a very bright future for theaters. Movies have gotten more expensive, while televisions have gotten larger, cheaper, and better. I have a 75-inch 4K television with HDR and Dolby Atmos.
It cost me less than what I paid 25 years ago for a gigantic CRT television that was heavier with a smaller screen and a lower resolution. More and more people seem to only be going to theaters for large blockbusters or epic films that really play well on a large screen. Personally, I don't think I've been to a theater in over two years.
I'd rather buy the physical media, which really doesn't cost that much more than buying a ticket, have the film forever, and then watch it from the comfort of my home on a system that is good or better than what I'm going to get at in a theater.
I'm not saying I'll never set foot in a movie theater again, but the circumstances under which I do so are getting fewer and fewer. Giselle T. asks, Have you ever been to El Salvador? Will you do an episode on each of the Central American countries individually?
Yes, I have been to El Salvador. I visited San Salvador and Sushi Toto. I probably will be doing more episodes on individual countries in the region in the future. Bard the Gamer from the Discord server asks, With so many episodes about exploration and historical figures known for traveling, Ibn Battuta springs to mind, have you ever thought of taking a trip that mirrors a historical traveler's trip while using only methods of travel available to them at the time?
Well, Bard, the answer is no. They did what they did during the time they did it, and I did what I did during the time I did it. I really have never had any desire to recreate someone else's journey when I can do my own. Finder asks, Since you've done a number of episodes on fairly complex topics, did you hit an aha moment for some of the bigger ones like nuclear physics or chemistry? Or was it more a gradual understanding? Do you have any favorite aha moments?
Well, there are actually several examples, but the best one is probably trigonometry. I took a trigonometry class in high school, and all the trigonometric functions were given to us as just the ratio of triangle sides. We had to learn it through rote memorization.
and it was never really explained exactly why they were important or the relevance of any of it. None of it ever stuck with me. Later in college, I had a college professor who explained the same thing, but this time they did it using the unit circle. and everything instantly clicked. From that point on, I didn't need to memorize anything because I could always figure it out by just knowing the unit circle and the endpoints of the sine and cosine graph.
From that, it was easy to know what trig function to use where, and most importantly, why. I had a similar moment with ternary diagrams in geology. For most things, you might have to hear it several times and in several different ways before something really sinks in. For kids in school today, YouTube is an amazing resource precisely because if they don't understand something from a teacher,
they can probably find a dozen people who all might explain it just a bit differently and find that right person who will make it make sense. And this is also why I don't feel bad about Encore episodes. Even if you did listen to the original episode, hearing it again after a year is probably going to make something sink in that didn't at first. The final question this month comes from Geronimo Richardson, who asks,
I noticed on Spotify how you can mark episodes as finished without listening to them. Would you be concerned that this may be used to falsely claim membership in the Completionist Club? Well, Geronimo, just to be clear, the Completionist Club is on the honor system.
I do not check, and there is no way to check if someone has actually listened to every episode. I can see no reason why anybody would have an incentive to lie about something like this, and if they did, they're only cheating themselves. And that wraps up this month's question and answer episode. If you'd like to ask a question for next month's show, please join the Facebook group or the Discord server. Links to both of which are in the show notes.
And if you ever want to know what the next episode is going to be in advance, I always post it in both of those forums the day before. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oakton and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible.
I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server. If you'd like to join in the discussion, there are links to both in the show notes. And as always, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it right on the show.