Gary’s Q&A

Leisure travel as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon. The entire topic could probably be an episode of its own, but suffice it to say that leisure travel didn’t exist outside of a small group of wealthy people before the 20th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries, young aristocratic Europeans would often go on the Grand Tour of European capitals to finish their education.

Nothing allowed regular people to travel. It took a combination of more leisure time, more money, and better transportation technology.

The tourism industry as we know it today didn’t really develop until after World War II. Soldiers coming home had jobs, were given vacation time, and had automobiles that allowed them to travel. Commercial air travel also made it easier to travel further and faster than ever before.

Since the dawn of agriculture, the average person might not have traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born. The average person wouldn’t have had much leisure time, although medieval Europe had many feast and festival days throughout the year.

People spent time with their families and local community because that was their only real option. Something like cooking and animal care weren’t things you could ever really take a day off from.

I went and checked my analytics, and here is the breakdown of which apps people are using to listen to the podcast over the last month:

Beyond that, 500 different apps are where people listen to the show.

Personally, I do not care what you use to listen to the show. For me, it is all the same. I use Apple Podcasts to listen to podcasts, but not because I think it’s the best; I just started using it when I got an iPhone.

Likewise, some people use Spotify because it is what they use to listen to music.

There are many 3rd-party podcast apps out there, and they depend on your operating system and phone. From reports I’ve heard, many of them, like Overcast, are better than Apple or Spotify.

I will say that even though Apple Podcasts is the most popular app, Apple limits it to 2000 episodes. So, if you are trying to join the completionist club, over 300 episodes, as of the time of this recording, won’t be accessible.

On the website, I’ve been embedding episodes from Spotify for those first 300 episodes so people can access them.

Not trying to sync episodes to anniversaries isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. I have done it, especially with holiday episodes, and I’ll do it again. However, I don’t want to be limited to a “what happened in history on this date” format.

I want the flexibility to cover any topic on any date. That doesn’t mean we won’t occasionally tie an episode to a particular date, but I don’t want to be bound to talk only about specific events on certain dates.

I have nothing against podcasts that talk about what happened on a particular date, but I find it limiting. It makes it impossible to discuss bigger issues that span longer periods of time.

The Short answer is no. I used to go to England at least once a year to attend the World Travel Market in London. I used this as an excuse to explore another part of England. I’ve been to most of the south and as far north as Liverpool, but I still have much of northern England to visit.

Since I launched the podcast I haven’t been traveling as much. Had the pandemic never occurred I’m guessing I probably would have been there, but I haven’t been back to England since.

Thanks for asking, Dave, because this is one of the most difficult things I have to do. For the recent episode on Queen Ranavalona, it probably took me a full 10 minutes to record the first sentence of that episode. It was probably one of the most difficult episodes I ever had to record.I talked about this on Everything Everywhere Weekly, where Joel Hermansen and I go over the week’s previous episodes.

Suffice it to say, it isn’t easy, and I often have to repeat a word multiple times before trying to record it to make sure I get it right.

The term “open” originally meant that it was open to both amateur and professional players. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is open to anyone.In a tournament like the US Open in tennis, you have to be ranked to be invited. Because everything is match play, the number of spots is limited.

In the US Open in golf, qualifying tournaments allow amateurs to qualify. In theory, someone could come out of nowhere and win the US Open as an amateur, although that never happens.

The term ‘open’ doesn’t have the same meaning it did in decades past when there was a greater distinction between professional and amateur.

While Joel and Oliva have been a huge help in producing the show, ultimately everything goes through me. Even though I don’t credit myself as such, I edit every show, and every script goes through my editing process.

Sometimes my editing is very light, and sometimes I make massive changes to the script. I prefer it when I have to do very little editing because it makes my life easier. Sometimes I think certain sections are irrelevant, or that others need to be added. I also have to edit for length if the script is too long.

Of course, I’m also the one who reads the script, so how I read it and where I put emphasis will always be unique to me.

I would have to go with Robert Smalls, on whom I’ve previously done an episode very early in the show’s history. He was the slave who stole a ship, sailed it to Union lines during the Civil War, and became the first black captain in the American Navy and one of the first black members of Congress.

Personally, I try to get loose, individual issues. That being said, that is very hard to do. I don’t currently have any bound volumes in my collection, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have any in the future. The 19th-century issues are very, very hard to get as loose individual issues. Really, anything pre-1910 is hard to get in loose issues.

I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I do have an interesting story about it. When I came home from a trip to Ethiopia, I arrived at the Minneapolis airport and got a taxi. My taxi driver was Ethiopian, and I started a discussion with him about where I had just been.

I had a bunch of leftover Ethiopian birr, their currency. I asked him when he was next going to Ethiopia. He said about six months, so I gave him all my leftover birr as a tip for his next trip.

I figured it was a pretty efficient exchange. I couldn’t use it, he could, and the value was more than what he otherwise would have gotten for a tip.

Some people really overthink jet lag. You are trying to adjust your sleep schedule, which means either staying up late or going to bed early, depending on where you are going and in what direction.

The worst jet lag I ever experienced was flying from LA to London. The flight left in the afternoon and landed in London in the early morning, just when you would have been going to bed back in LA.I landed early enough that I couldn’t check into my hotel to take a nap. My only option was to power through the day with Red Bull.

On the other hand, I’ve also flown to London for a very short trip where I never even tried to adjust. I’d just wake up at noon and stay up late because everything I had to do was in the afternoon or evening.

Here are my tips:1) Fly west if possible. Jet lag to the west is generally easier to deal with than flying east because you just have to stay up a bit later.

2) Figure out if it is even necessary to adjust your sleep schedule

3) You have to decide if you want to sleep on the flight or just stay up through it. I almost always found it easier to stay up.

4) Take the shortest flight possible or have a layover. For example, if I have to fly to Australia, I prefer to stop in Hawaii or Fiji for a few days to adjust.

In summary, I don’t think there are any jet lag secrets. You just have to power through it.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s start with the big issue this month, which comes in the form of a question from Doug Huffer, who asks: How much do you care about the pronunciation of names and places – ie original vs. typical American vs. your own? Eg., Van Gogh is pronounced differently in Dutch vs. American English, or Arkansas is pronounced differently in Kansas vs. Arkansas.

This is one of the biggest issues I deal with daily when recording the show. This month, it showed up in the episode on New Madrid, which I pronounced as New Madrid.

English is a very weird language. We pronounce words differently in different places, and some place names have unique local pronunciations that make no sense based on the spelling alone.

There is a city in Wisconsin called New Berlin, but it is pronounced New Ber-lin. The change in pronunciation was deliberately done during the First World War.

Some words in English just make no sense. There really is no reason why Arkansas isn’t pronounced Ar-kansas, or why Kansas isn’t pronounced kan-saw. That’s just how it is.

English often has different pronunciations for foreign words, even if the foreign word is perfectly pronounceable. Rome instead of Roma, Paris instead of Par-ee, or Moscow instead of Moscova.

In Van Gogh’s case, the proper Dutch pronunciation uses a sound that isn’t in English, so it is pronounced differently.

When you get to Chinese and other tonal languages, again, English doesn’t even have tones, so words tend to be Anglicized or Latinized.

In many cases, there really is no good solution to the problem. If you use local pronunciations for all proper nouns, people won’t know what you are talking about, or you’ll just come across as pretentious.

Often, there’s no way to know what a local pronunciation might be unless you’ve been to that area, especially if the place is more obscure.

While I try to use correct local pronunciation whenever I can, I often have to make judgment calls. In the episode on Van Gogh, I used the traditional English pronunciation, not the Dutch Van Gogh.

I say, Julius Caesar instead of Iulius Kaiser, which would be the proper Latin pronunciation.

While I recognize that New Madrid is the local pronunciation, I also don’t think New Madrid is the end of the world.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Finley211 Any activity/game that you are outrageously good at? Like how I found out that my friend is a top Brawl Stars player

I was one of the top-ranked priests on Classic World of Warcraft for a while. I was ranked in the top 1500 in the world on the Sporcle quiz site.

About 25 years ago, we had a team that played the first-person shooter Tribes really well.

I can’t think of anything else.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

menegato asks: I think I’ve heard the sound of pages being turned when listening to some episodes. So my question is, do you read the script on paper or on a screen? If it’s paper, do you keep each episode, and if so, would you ever publish a book with the script of the episodes?

If you are hearing pages being turned, I have no idea what you are hearing. No paper is involved in producing the podcast. The scripts are written and read on Google Docs.

Maybe you are hearing my chair or some other background noise, but it certainly isn’t paper.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Kristen asks: I know you try to make Encore episodes the least listened to episodes, but I’m curious how many fewer times they’ve been downloaded? Thank you! Love your show ?

An episode’s download count has nothing to do with whether it is selected for an encore episode nowadays. The process is mostly random. When I run one, I just look for something interesting that was published at least one year ago.

The truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of variance in episode downloads. There is some, but it isn’t enough that I’d make decisions around it. Moreover, if I did use downloads as the criteria for encore episodes, I’d pick more popular episodes, not less popular ones.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Ralf Meuris asks: I just listened to the encore episode “The never-ending Voyager mission”. These probes have been flying through space since the 70s. How come they survive in space for such a long time without any protection against cosmic radiation and things like that? If you look at the Tesla that was sent into space in 2018, it is heavily disintegrated because of the extreme conditions in space.

For starters, the Tesla that was sent into space to test the Falcon Heavy rocket hasn’t disintegrated. It would take millions of years for cosmic rays and micrometeorites to cause any level of disintegration.

So, the structure of the Voyager probes is fine. The danger to any deep-space probe is the electronics. A high-energy particle can strike a memory cell or processor and flip a bit, corrupting data or causing a computer fault.

The Voyager probes protect themselves by hardening their electronics, adding shielding, and redundancy.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Derrin Brown asks: You’ve mentioned before that you’re unsure who the winners will be in AI. Now that we’re seeing reports of companies like Uber burning through their entire annual AI budget in just four months, and critics arguing that firms like OpenAI and Anthropic can’t actually afford their own compute costs, do you think the current ‘tokenomics’ model, where companies charge by usage, but the underlying infrastructure requires massive, ongoing debt, is fundamentally sustainable? Or are we looking at a structural bubble similar to what we saw with the dot-com crash?

I have no idea what the end business model for AI companies will be. I’m not even sure what the AI industry is going to look like.

Things are changing at a fast pace, and I don’t think even AI companies know what the future holds. Not only are AI models getting more powerful, but they are also getting cheaper and lighter. It is now possible to run some LLMs on desktop computers.

I do think we are in an AI bubble, and honestly, that is what is to be expected. Everyone can see the potential of artificial intelligence, just like how in the past everyone could see the economic potential of the internet and railroads.

Lots of money is going into AI, just like money flowed into railroads and internet companies before. During those bubbles, most of the railroads and internet companies failed, but the ones that survived became giants.

The valuations AI companies are getting are not justified by the revenue they are bringing in or their profits, which are nonexistent.

I’m not an investment expert, but it seems like there will be a correction at some point. I don’t know when or how big it will be, but it seems inevitable.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Kevin O’Keefe asks: So I now have two granddaughters- two years old and six months old and I’m constantly thinking about their future. Of course no one can predict what our world will look like but many people are starting to make educated ?guesses. I think you would agree that there’s been a huge shift in terms of what type of jobs we will have 20 years from now. With all the research that you’ve been doing regarding learning, where do you think the younger generation should start these days?

It is quite literally impossible to make such a prediction. About 25% of the US workforce today works in job categories that didn’t exist in the 1960 census. About 60% work in jobs that didn’t exist in 1940.

Of the job categories that existed in 1960, only one has been eliminated: elevator operator.

There is no way someone in 1960 could have predicted jobs such as web designer, podcaster, cyberathlete, or hundreds of other modern jobs.

One of my mottos is that the ability to adapt is more important than your ability to plan. When the World Wide Web was introduced in the 90s, I was in the middle of things, and we just had to learn as it evolved. When a new programming language comes out, you learn it by doing, not by taking a class. Everyone figuring out AI right now is learning as they go.

Future-proofing yourself isn’t about learning any particular set of skills per se. It is the ability to learn and adapt to whatever might change in the future.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Heather Swisher asks: My daughter asked me which animals hibernate and why some animals don’t. I have no idea.

There are different types of hibernation, and the word is often used to describe different sorts of behavior in which animals reduce their metabolism for periods of time.

While cold- and warm-blooded animals can both reduce their metabolism, only warm-blooded animals can truly hibernate. Some animals hibernate annually, while others hibernate as needed when food supplies are low.

Hibernation is a technique used by animals to survive periods of low food supply. This usually happens in colder climates when food is scarce in winter. Animals like bears gorge themselves to build fat reserves so they can live off that fat during winter hibernation.

This might be a topic worth going into more detail in a future episode.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Jacob Felty asks · I’ve got a few questions. Do you have a favorite skyscraper, and why? Did you get to visit the old World Trade Center before 9/11?

My favorite skyscraper, I would have to say, is Taipei 101. This is simply because I visited it very early in my travels, and at the time I visited, it was the world’s tallest building. They also have a massive mass-damping ball at the top of the building, designed to counteract movement during an earthquake.

I did get to visit the World Trade Center. It was back in 1998. I took a business trip to New York, and I always took a day or two after meetings to go exploring.

I went to the World Trade Center, but I didn’t get to the top or anything; I just visited the lobby and the plaza outside.