March is upon us. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting longer, temperatures are getting warmer, and people are about to go nuts over college basketball for several weeks. There's an old saying that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. And that may be true, but I tend to think that March comes in like a question and goes out like an answer. Stay tuned for the 40th installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex-trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals. But it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspirituality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. Let's jump right into things with the first question, which comes from Dave Hudson on Patreon, because membership has its privileges. He asks, Hi Gary, long-time member of the Completionist Club. I love the show. Thanks so much for my daily dose of general knowledge. My question is, are there any alternatives to the format of college debate? I remember seeing a story about it, and I think it was 60 minutes, and I was shocked at the speed. I understand the concept that it's about the number of points the debater can make. My question is, are there any other debate societies in college or beyond that focus more on a measured approach that scores based on the quality of the argument as opposed to the quantity? For those of you who aren't familiar with it, academic debate at its highest level is a very fast-paced activity. For most of my debate career, in both high school and college, I was what was called a first affirmative second negative. The first affirmative constructive, the first speech in the debate round, is the easiest as it's scripted. The first affirmative rebuttal is usually considered to be the hardest speech in a debate round as you're responding to 12 to 15 minutes of arguments in just four or five. As such, you have to talk very fast. Likewise, knowing their advantage, the negatives may tried to speak quickly as well and put forward many arguments to cause problems to the first affirmative. So that was me, and like everyone else, I had to learn to speak very, very quickly at a rate that most people probably couldn't comprehend unless they were trained to listen at those rates. My college debate coach was Scott Nobles, who also happened to be the very first national debate tournament champion in 1947. When I was debating in the late 80s and 90s, I asked him how this style of debate developed, as he had been around for the entire history of the activity at that point. He said it started in the late 1960s. The team most notable for the style, known as spreading, was a team from the University of Houston, known as the Men in Black because they always dressed in black. So, this style has been around for over half a century at this point. Needless to say, not everybody liked this. In the 1980s, an attempt was made to create an alternative form of debate called Lincoln-Douglas debate, or LD, in high school. It was one person instead of two people, and the intent was for debaters to talk more slowly. However, LD soon fell into the same habits as two-person debate, known as policy debate. In the early 2000s, another form of debate called public forum debate was developed for high school. Public forum was similar in structure to policy debate, except that the speeches were shorter and the topics change more frequently And most importantly the debate rounds were judged by lay people from outside the activity not by professionals from within As such it remains much slower paced In college there is a format called parliamentary debate which is more akin to public forum and it's been around a while. All of that being said, the speed at which debaters talk is not a reflection of the quality of their arguments. It is still almost always the quality of an argument that will win a debate round. Niles from the Discord server asks, In team sports, there's a lot of special positions. Knuckleball pitcher, long snapper, place kicker, etc. What is your favorite niche position and why? Seeing I'm from Denmark, the place kicker in football holds a high place in my heart. Thank you for a great podcast. I was delighted to hear your episode on the evacuation of the Danish Jews during World War II. Regards from an elite platinum status member, Niles from Alberg, Denmark. Well, it has to be the long snapper because it is such a waste of a roster spot on a football team. While you certainly want someone who can snap long, it's a skill that could and should be easily developed by anybody who plays the center position. It's a single movement that can be practiced over and over at any time. It doesn't require any special physical attributes that the center wouldn't already have. And if you can develop the skill, it just makes you that much more valuable to any team. Kevin O'Keefe from the Facebook group asks, Gary, how do you use AI in your research now and how do you know if your sources are accurate? Just very curious how you evaluate all the information you're getting from the internet in terms of what sources are more accurate than others. Well, I got many AI-related questions this month and I will try to address them all here. As most of you know, I use AI to create the cover art for many episodes. And this is because certain topics don't have any images available, or the topic is so broad that it's difficult to find an image to represent it. I've had people complain about this, and they have said that I should hire humans to create it. And that is never going to happen. I have worked with many graphic designers in my life, and the process of getting custom artwork would take days at a minimum, if not weeks, and cost at least hundreds of dollars every image. Both the budget and time constraints render that impossible for the show. If I couldn't use AI images, I just wouldn't use cover art for the episodes. Beyond that, I use AI as a tool to understand things better. I use it as a tutor, a topic that I'll be addressing in my forthcoming book, which I'm working on and I'll get around to publishing it someday. For example, I've been working on an episode about quantum computers. But before I do an episode on quantum computers, I feel that on a scale of 1 to 10, I have to understand it at like a 6 or 7 level to do an episode that explains it at a 4 or 5 level. The beauty of AI is that you can ask it questions for anything you don't understand. No question is too dumb. I've also used AI to solve things that I couldn't find through normal searches. I could swear that I once read a quote by President James Monroe about the tyranny of space, that the vast overland distances in the United States were a very huge problem in the early 19th century. I searched for literally years and could never find that reference. I asked an AI agent where the quote came from, and it couldn't confirm it. It was probably just my imagination and the Mandela effect. Likewise, I had an episode idea about the five laws of stupidity, which I had read were attributed to Diedrich Bonhoeffer. Again, no matter how much I searched, I couldn't find a source. And when I asked an AI agent, it told me that it wasn't Diedrich Bonhoeffer, it was actually the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla Mystery solved I also had some weird comments over the last month in which people have accused me of using an AI voice to create the podcast Those of you in the completionist club who can remember me recording an episode while I was almost hoarse from a bad cold might chuckle at that accusation. But it's gotten to a point where anything posted online can be accused of being generated by AI, and I'm not entirely certain how you can prove a negative. Another sort of use of AI is the program Grammarly. I've used Grammarly now for over 10 years, and I've used it on literally every episode of this podcast since episode one. Initially, it was just software that was a glorified spelling and grammar checker. But now they claim it's powered by AI. I don't know how much of what it actually does is AI, or if it's just marketing, but that would be another use of it. I'm also working on an episode about artificial intelligence, but it's such a rapidly changing field that it's hard to pin down. I'm currently looking at installing an AI agent called OpenClaw on one of my spare computers just to play around with it, and I found the best way to learn things is usually just to jump in with both feet. As to the bigger question that you asked, how do you verify the accuracy of a source? This is actually an issue that's existed for thousands of years. Myself, Joel, and Olivia have all encountered the same problem that different sources will sometimes give different dates or names for the same event. Usually, the difference is only a few years apart, say 1842 or 1844. And rather than spending hours trying to pin down the correct date, the simpler solution for the purpose of script writing is usually just to say early 1840s. And there are many historical sources, often primary sources, that differ in their accounts of basic facts. Basically, the best you could do is just try to look for consensus. It's an issue that is actually further up the food chain from AI and has existed well beforehand. Oleg Yuligov asks, why doesn't the USA have a standard national ID? Is the fact that your identity is not documented consistently anywhere a source of all kinds of problems? If two people from the same name are born on the same day or die on the same day, how do you know who is who? Well, this is an easy one to answer, Oleg. The first is that the United States is a union of states. Each state has its own sovereignty to handle its own affairs, such as a driver's license. And second, everyone in the U.S. does have a unique identifier in the form of a social security number. Also, passports are federal documents that are universally accepted as a form of identification. Shanna Hollum asks, Gary, my husband and I have enjoyed the podcast since the beginning. Thanks so much for enlightening us to the world around us. As many have asked you about the possibility of writing a book about your podcast, I wanted to know what it takes to write a book, get it published, and be on the New York Times bestseller list. Book publishing has sort of become a ridiculous industry. More and more people are bypassing publishers. Publishers are incredibly slow, do a horrible job of picking what books will be popular, and don't even do much in terms of promotion. The author has to do most of the work. And the number of sales to make it on the New York Times bestseller list is shockingly low. As few as 5,000 sales can be enough for a nonfiction book to make the list. As such, many authors have cooked up all sorts of schemes to get on the list, including buying their own book or using the book as a way to launder bribes. I really don't want to shop my book around and go through the process. Throughout my life, I have consistently struggled with systems that rely on gatekeepers, so my inclination is just to publish it independently. Mr. Bill McBill on Discord asks, As an American who going to start traveling abroad soon what can I do to avoid the negative stereotypes of American tourists I afraid of being seen as just another annoying American to be dealt with and if I perceived that way I think it will prevent me from fully experiencing the culture of the place and people Any tips? Well, Bill, I have never had that problem. Almost everyone in the world understands the distinction between people and governments. And the further you get away from the United States, the less of a problem the negative stereotype becomes. For example, Australians have a negative stereotype in Bali because they're the most frequent tourists, and English do in parts of Spain because they visit there a lot. Whenever a place gets a lot of tourists from one particular country, that country that sends the tourists will usually get a bad reputation. In sum, don't worry about it. Eric Flores on Facebook asks, Hi from Mexico. Now with the help of the Olivia Ash and Joel Hermanson, what are the odds of getting a double or even a triple episode every now and then? Eric, let me make this perfectly clear. That is never going to happen. And I do appreciate you wanting more content, but if I had that much bandwidth, I would just work ahead so I could actually take a proper vacation sometime, or I'd produce special content for the good folks over on Patreon. Joshua Felty on Facebook asks, what do you think of the upcoming Artemis mission? And how do you think that'll compare to SpaceX and other private space companies? Well, Joshua, I did a full episode on the Artemis program back in August of 2022. If slash when the Artemis missions actually launch, it'll get a lot of attention on the news and it'll be pretty cool if they can make it back to the moon or even orbit the moon like Apollo 8. However, the entire program is a one-off. Like the Apollo program, it's using incredibly expensive disposable rockets, and it isn't creating anything that can be built upon in the long term. The Artemis program is going to be the last disposable rocket program in history. It makes no financial sense, and it's not sustainable if you want to do something long term. But the problem is, Starship isn't ready for prime time quite yet, so we might be a few years away before we can make really long-term progress on establishing a presence on the moon. The final question comes from Banana Man on Discord who asks, I heard you say you really love the Dune series in a previous episode. Do you have a favorite movie, game, or book? Personally, I really like Dune Awakening. Also, I love the podcast. Keep it up. Well, Banana Man, that is correct. I've read all the Dune books, including all the prequels and sequels, and I've read the core books multiple times. I own all the movies, both sci-fi channel miniseries on disc. And I even recently got the deluxe collector's edition of the David Lynch version from the 1980s. However, I have never played any Dune video games, so I can't really speak to that. I'm going to actually do a future episode someday about Dune and the Dune universe, and maybe one about the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and maybe 2001 A Space Odyssey, both the book and the movie. That concludes this month's Q&A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month's show, you'll have to join the Facebook group or Discord or support the show over on Patreon because those are the places where I will be soliciting questions. 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 right on the show.
