Hey everyone, this is Gary. I have something a little bit different for you today. For the second time, I have recorded a podcast in front of a live audience. As before, this is a very different sort of show from what you're used to. This was not scripted. Everything was extemporaneous and off the top of my head. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you'll probably pick up on bits that have been mentioned in many other episodes.
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you can't go wrong with adding the Jordan Harbinger show to your rotation. It's really interesting and there's never a dull show. Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show. That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to this show. I am here to tell you something that you don't know and maybe some things that you have never thought of before.
We think of the ancient world, we think of these dusty relics or city and museums and people that lived thousands of years ago that have absolutely nothing to do with our lives today. And nothing could be further from the truth. If you pull out your phone right now... You'll see the time and you'll see the date. All of this comes from the ancient world. And if you don't believe me, strap in. So let's start out.
our calendar system. Why is it April 10th? Why is it 2025? Well, the calendar system came from a guy that you may have heard of called Julius Caesar. The Roman calendar was the dumbest thing that has ever been invented in history. Let me tell you how dumb it is. Have any of you ever wondered why the month December? starts with deck, like decade and decagon. That means 10, right? But it's the 12th month. It's because the Romans had 10 months.
And by 10 months, I do not mean that they split the year into 10 units. No, no, no. They had 10 months like we have 10 months, and then they just had mystery time in the winter. And that's not a joke. That's the truth. So December was the 10th month, November 9, October 8. August used to be called Sextilis and Quintilis was July before they changed the names.
And so what Caesar did is he got the idea from a guy named Sysogenes of Alexandria. He was a Greek living in Alexandria, and he developed a solar calendar. And with his calendar, the equinox and the solstice would be on the same day every year. And it got rid of the two mystery months. So Caesar's like, this is great. Let's do this. And it sounds very familiar to what you're used to. 365 days a year, a leap year every four years, and 12 months in a year.
Great. We call it the Julian calendar after Julius Caesar. And what did he get for it? A salad and stabbed in the back. But the problem is that calendar was good, certainly an improvement over the mystery months. But after a long time, 1,500 years, people realized there was a problem. They were 10 days off. Having a leap year every four years was close, but it wasn't good enough. And so, Pope Gregory XIII in the year 1582 decided we need to make a change.
So instead of doing it like that, if it's divisible by 100, it will not be a leap year. But if it's divisible by 400, it will be a leap year. So the year 1900 was not a leap year, but the year 2000 was a leap year. And that got us ever closer. We call that the Gregorian calendar. And so today... The Gregorian calendar is 13 days off of the Julian calendar, which is still used by the Orthodox Church because they didn't like the whole Pope being involved with it. And that's actually the truth.
The year 2025. Why is it the year 2025? I think most of you know how the year naming system went. It was supposedly counted after the birth of Jesus. However, that didn't come up for quite a long time. It wasn't until the 6th century when a monk by the name of Dionysus Exegus came up with this numbering system. And he also came up with a way of calculating Easter.
And he was in the Byzantine Empire. He lived on the shore of the Black Sea in what is today Romania. And this caught on. And so this is why we have the... year dating system that we do today and it's caught on pretty much everywhere in the world at this point. People may not even realize what it's counting but that is where 2025 comes from. So now one of the things David didn't put up here is what is the day of the week today? It's Thursday. Thor's day, as in Chris Helmsworth's day. But why?
That comes from the Babylonians. Well, it starts with the Egyptians. The Egyptians divided their, they had a week of 10 days. There was their attempt to try to divide a lunar month. but 10 doesn't really go into 28 as much as 7 does, and the Babylonians had 7. And they also, there were seven planets in the ancient world. And to the ancient people, a planet was anything that moved in the sky. So the planets were Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Those were the seven planets. And because there were seven planets in seven days, they named the days after the planet. This was a great system. The Greeks adopted it, and the Romans stole everything from the Greeks, and they adopted it. But their planets were named after gods. So they named their planets after gods. Does anyone here speak Spanish a little bit? What's Tuesday in Spanish? So what happened is the Germanic peoples, who were not conquered by the Romans,
They picked up the system too, except they didn't pick up the planet thing. They just used the God thing, and they used their own gods. So Thursday, if you are speaking a Romance language, like French or Spanish, would be the day of Jupiter. he was the god of thunder and so the norse people who were the ones who eventually moved into england the angles and the saxons named after their god of thunder who was thor which is why thursday is
Thor's day. April. Again with the Spanish. Does anyone know what the word for open is in Spanish? April simply means, it comes from the Latin word, to open. Because April was the month where flowers opened. That's all it means, but it comes from the Latin Aprilis. The number system that we use did not come from the Greeks or the Romans. They couldn't figure this out. Our number system is called the Hindu-Arab number system.
and it's base 10. And what we'll see in a moment, there's a very good reason for this. And one of the reasons why they weren't able to develop this is because the Greeks, who in many ways developed mathematics, could not accept the fact that there was a zero. And that sounds like a joke, but they really couldn't. In their worldview, there couldn't be nothing. So the idea of a mathematical zero, or the idea of...
A vacuum did not work in their worldview. But over in India, they had no problem with this. and it had to do with their worldview and the religion and everything else and so It turned out zero was really useful, which is why we have a ones and a tens and a hundreds and things like that. And then a lot of the symbols then came through Arab traders during the time of the Islamic Caliphate. They developed this system, which was then picked up by the Europeans, which is why we use it today.
So, David didn't even less that one, but we also then have India in there as well. But then... Why do we divide our day into 24 units? Why not 10? Why do we have two sets of different units of 12 hours? We got to go back to Africa for that and the Egyptians. What the Egyptians did is they divided their night. They had 36 stars in the sky. So at any time in the year,
They had certain stars that were spaced out where they could tell when the stars passed over the horizon, and they could tell the time at night by the passing of these stars. And they would use 12 of them, and they would change throughout the year. And 12 is also the signs of the zodiac. And then for symmetry purposes, they separated day and night by also units of 12 for 24.
And that's where that comes from. And that again was picked up by the Greeks and then took it from the Romans and why we use it today. So PM and AM, does anyone know what that means? I think that's probably a little more common. post-meridium and anti-meridium, which is just Latin for before and after noon. We have 365 days in a year, seven days in a week. We have months that can change and go from 28 to 31 days. And then under a day, we have 24 hours. Then each hour is divided into...
60 minutes. Why 60? That we have to go back really far. And that was the Babylonians. The Babylonians had what was called a sexagesimal numbering system, which was on base 60. which sounds stupid if you have a base 10 system, but in many respects it actually worked really well, because 60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, and it made math really easy.
So when Greek astronomers started doing astronomy, they borrowed heavily from the Babylonians who had developed a lot of this stuff. And so when they were making observations, it was easier for them to use the Babylonian system of base 60 for dividing up the evil. Now, when I talked about the Egyptians and how they divided up the night into 12 units, what we would call an hour was not a standard thing.
Like they would be different times of the year. Hours would be a different length depending on where the stars were. It wasn't perfect. It was just 12 units. And the Greeks were the first ones to realize that maybe we should have a standard unit of time. And this was eventually codified under the Islamic Caliphate when a lot of their astronomers realized that we need to actually have particular measures for this.
The sexagesimal system was used for the hours and then it was also used for the minutes as well for the exact same reason. It was very easy to do mathematics for it. But then we go down to the second. The ancients didn't care about seconds. They had nothing that could calculate a second. It was too short a unit of time for them to care about. They had a difficult enough time calculating what an hour is. They used candles or sundials or water clocks or things like that.
So when we get down to the second, there's 60 seconds in a minute, obviously. But then below a second, if you ever watch a sporting event or something when they time a race, it's in tenths of a second. Not 60th of a second, which you would think would be what we were doing that that way would continue with. And the reason is because by the time we were at a point where we could measure anything below a second,
We were well into the metric system already, and base 10 is what kind of made sense. So we just went from a 124th to a 60th to a 60th to a 10. Now, there are people out there that realize this makes absolutely no sense when you think about it. And most of you have probably never thought about it, which is good because you get a nosebleed if you think about it too much. But the point I'm trying to make with all of this is every second of every day.
You are influenced by people from the ancient world who lived thousands of miles away and thousands of years ago. 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.