In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: BACKBLAZE: Fully featured 15-day free trial of unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC, which you can get for just $5/month Your Biggest Regret Is the the Thing You Didn't Do Mount Everest Isn't (Necessarily) the Tallest Mountain in the World The Deep Web Is the 99% of the Internet You Can't Google
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-deep-web-biggest-regrets-and-a-mount-everest-misconception
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn what science says people regret the most, why Mount Everest is not necessarily the tallest mountain on Earth, and the 99% of the internet you can't find on Google.
CODY GOUGH: Would satisfy some curiosity. Ashley, do you have any biggest regrets in life?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. Every single decision I've ever made was the right one.
CODY GOUGH: That's the spirit.
[LAUGHS]
Well, Curiosity has looked at a lot of research on regrets because we were curious about this. And a number of studies show the same thing. The mistakes of inaction are what bother our brains the most, according to science. You can actually predict a curve of regret. Now, in the short term, your brain tends to focus on what might be called active mistakes, like spending your money on something risky when you're feeling pretty confident about it.
So an active mistake might be putting a bet on a sports team that you're sure is going to win, for example. But as time goes by, most of those embarrassing choices you made tend to be forgotten while the times that you did nothing start to loom much larger. Stanford Psychologist Dr. Lewis Terman studied a group of people nicknamed Terman's termites over their lifetimes, and he found that when members of the group were in their '80s, their most common regrets were things like, I wish I'd gone to college, and I wish I'd been more assertive.
Regrets are also complicated by the ways our lives play out. So you can think of it in terms of your two different selves. We're going to get a little philosophical here. You can think of it in terms of your ought self, like I ought to have done something versus your ideal self. Your ought self is your imagined future of how things are supposed to go. Maybe you picture yourself getting a stable job, getting married, raising children, retiring, the stuff that might be expected of you.
Your ideal self, on the other hand, is your imagined self who does what you really want to be doing. That person is a famous playwright or a professional surfer or a successful rocket scientist. Obviously, you have to find a balance between your ought and ideal self, but it's regrets about our ideal selves that really bother us.
Researchers think this might be because ought self regrets are more immediate and in context while ideal self regrets are less obtainable. It's like if you regret not selling your house when you ought to have. You can look back, and you can say, oh, I really should have done that. But you also have the context of knowing that the housing market at the time wasn't really great. You understood your motivations at the time. Maybe you needed to keep it for a particular reason, and maybe you knew that not selling at that time. It didn't totally derail your life.
So you can look back and be like, oh OK, that makes sense why I did that. So you're not going to regret it forever. But if you regret not becoming a famous stand-up comedian, you're just seeing that ideal part at the end of the tunnel. You're regretting that you never were up on stage in front of 10,000 people. But you're not thinking about the hours of getting up in front of crowds that are really small or way too drunk or getting ripped off by a club owner who doesn't want to pay you or having to drive to another city through a blizzard, and having an erratic schedule, and getting harassed by people who come see you--
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, you want to talk about something?
CODY GOUGH: I know what you're talking about. But there are all these really terrible things that you have to do to get to that ideal self. So it's a lot easier to regret not being famous up on stage when you don't think about all you would have had to do to get there in the first place. So that's a little bit about why you regret the things that you don't do, and it's just another reason to go for it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. That actually makes me realize when you asked me if there's anything I regretted in life. I was trying to think of all the things that I did wrong. But now that I think about the things that I didn't do, there are a million of them. I can think of tons. It's really-- yeah. That is how the mind works.
CODY GOUGH: Exactly. And actually, one of my biggest regrets is legitimately something I didn't do.
ASHLEY HAMER: What is that?
CODY GOUGH: I got a computer virus and nearly lost all of my photos, and videos, and music recordings from high school and college. I've talked about this on the podcast before, and I didn't have my data backed up.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yeah, I've heard that story.
CODY GOUGH: That is a true story. And today's podcast sponsor can help you avoid making the same mistake.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody is talking about Backblaze, a data storage provider that offers unlimited cloud backups for your Mac or PC for just $5 a month.
CODY GOUGH: Seriously, in this day and age, you absolutely have to pack up your files. And we're going to make it super easy for you with a special offer for Curiosity podcast listeners. Visit backblaze.com/curiosity to try Backblaze for free for 15 days.
ASHLEY HAMER: Try it out. See how easy it is. And then protect your files for just $5 a month. Backblaze backs up everything, your photos, your documents, your videos, your projects, even your external hard drives. Remember, backup is unlimited.
CODY GOUGH: You can leave out files you don't want backed up, and you can access your data anywhere in the world on the web or on your phone. They can even ship you a hard drive overnight to restore your files.
ASHLEY HAMER: Backblaze has backed up 500 petabytes and counting, and they've restored more than 30 billion files. Backup your files today, free for 15 days at backblaze.com/curiosity.
CODY GOUGH: Again, get your 15-day free trial at backblaze.com/curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right, Cody, I know you know this. What is the tallest mountain in the world?
CODY GOUGH: Mordor.
ASHLEY HAMER: Mordor is not on the world.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, right. Then Mount Everest.
ASHLEY HAMER: A lot of people think that. But today on Curiosity, we wrote about how Mount Everest isn't necessarily the tallest mountain in the world. Mount Everest is tall at just over 29,000 feet or 9,000 meters. That is about 20 times as tall as the Empire State Building, so you are totally almost right. You could actually make the case that other mountains in the world are taller because it all depends on how you measure its height, right?
Right now, a mountain's height refers to how far it rises above sea level, but sea level varies. It varies across the world by up to 100 meters due to currents and gravitational variations, but that's not a huge variation. The biggest problem with Mt Everest is that it stands on a plateau that's roughly 16,500 feet high. So it's like a person getting their height measured while they wear heels. It's not really fair.
Measure Everest from the plateau to the summit, and it's not as tall as Alaskan mountain Denali, previously Mount McKinley, which stands at more than 20,000 feet. And what about mountains partially underwater? If you measure the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea from its underwater base to its peak, it's more than 30,000 feet tall.
And of all the mountains in the world, the summit of Ecuador's Mount Chimborazo is farthest away from the center of the Earth. Then again, it gets a boost from being near the equator because as we all know, the Earth bulges at the equator. It's not perfectly round. The moral of the story is that there's no perfectly fair way to measure mountains. What do you think? Are we making a mountain out of a molehill?
CODY GOUGH: All right, Ashley, are you familiar with the deep web?
ASHLEY HAMER: I am.
CODY GOUGH: Have you ever surfed it?
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, any time I check my email, right?
CODY GOUGH: Oh. Because what the deep web is.
ASHLEY HAMER: I do.
CODY GOUGH: Well, today, if you don't know what the deep web is, listener, you're about to learn about it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Here we go.
CODY GOUGH: Now listen, as a whole, the internet contains at least 4.5 billion websites that have been indexed by search engines, at least according to one Dutch researcher. That is a huge number, but it barely scratches the surface of what's really out there. The rest of the internet is known as the deep web. And according to some estimates, that's 400 to 500 times larger than the surface internet.
Most of the deep web, as you mentioned, Ashley, is just emails, social media profiles, subscription sites, like Netflix, and stuff that you need to fill out a form to access. So just stuff that's not, again, indexed by search engines. But because the deep web is hidden from search engines, some people use it for more nefarious purposes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Ooh.
CODY GOUGH: That's the dark web. The dark web is a very tiny portion of the deep web, and that is made up of encrypted sites. Almost everything there is anonymous or at least tries to be. Encrypted sites don't have DNS and IP addresses that usually make websites identifiable. And to access the site on the dark web, users often have to use encrypting software that masks their IP addresses, making the users really hard to identify too.
The dark web is what people are talking about when you hear about the Silk Road, that online marketplace for illegal drugs that was shut down in 2013. There are other sites on the dark web that provide resources for hitmen, terrorists, and other criminals. And even accessing sites on the dark web can set off red flags at the FBI.
Fun fact. Tor is the most popular software for making and accessing dark websites, and Tor was originally created by the US Navy. Even today, Tor is funded by the US government.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. And now you know.
ASHLEY HAMER: Huh. You can read about all these stories and so much more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.