Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Will Raber asks, Have you considered posting your podcasts on YouTube? I think the graphics and other visuals would be interesting.

Well, Will, I do actually post every episode on YouTube. It’s an audio-only upload, and almost no one is listening to it on YouTube, but it is there.

Doing a proper YouTube channel is something I’ve always intended to do, but I would need to hire someone to do the video as I already have my hands full researching, writing, and recording the podcast.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Aidenn asks, When you take photos during your travels, what type of camera do you use? For example, point-and-shoot, SLR, DSLR, or just a smartphone.

My current camera, which I haven’t used in a while since I started the podcast, is a Sony A7rii. It is a full-frame mirrorless camera.

Before that, I used a Nikon D200 and a Nikon D300s.

Smartphones weren’t really a viable option when I started traveling. I literally began my travels a few months before the iPhone hit the market in 2007.

The camera quality on smartphones has gotten pretty good now. For much of what you might want to use a camera for while traveling, a smartphone is probably good enough. There are some things you can do to optimize your image quality on the phone, such as saving your images in RAW format instead of using a compressed format such as jpeg. Most newer smartphones have an option that will let you save images in RAW even if they are hidden. Some third-party camera apps make this easier.

There are some things that you can’t do with a smartphone. Action and wildlife photography isn’t very good. Low-light images are poor on smartphones. Long exposures are difficult.

The limits of smartphones for photography are due to their very small sensor size and the fact that the lenses are fixed. If the light is good and you aren’t trying to do anything fancy, it’s probably good enough.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Isaac asks, With all the traveling you have done, have you succumbed to any of the pickpocket/scam artists? Have you seen any of these teams in action? Walking around with so much camera gear, it seems like one would be targeted.

In all of the traveling I’ve done, I have never been the victim of a pickpocket.

This is due to a couple of things. For starters, I always carried my wallet in my front pocket, not my back pocket. It is far easier to slip a wallet out of a back pocket as you aren’t looking and the pocket usually isn’t as deep.

There are other small things I did to make myself a less attractive target. If you have a backpack that has zippers on both sides, don’t close the bag by having the zippers meet at the top. It is very easy to unzip. Rather, have both zippers meet at the bottom of one side. To open the bag, you have to zip up, not down.

Another thing I did was to always have my camera bag attached to myself. If I sat down somewhere, I’d put my leg through the shoulder loop of the bag. That makes it more difficult for someone to snatch and grab.

Finally, I always used clothing with zippered pockets, like pants and shirts from Scottevest. I used Scottevest clothing all the time when I was on the road.

What all of these things have in common is that it makes things more difficult for a pickpocket or a thief. They will always pick the easiest target, and you want to make sure that is not you. Real pickpocketing is an art form that is slowly being lost. There are some places, like Rome and Barcelona, where you can still find them, but a lot of street crime now is much less subtle. I’ve heard of several cases in Bangkok, for example, where purse-snatchers would ride past a woman with a purse and just grab it off her shoulder while they were moving.

As for scams, I have been the victim of a few small-scale ones early in my travels, but none of them cost me more than $20. I was in Manila when I first fell victim to the “my meter isn’t working” cab driver routine. Again, I probably paid about $20 rather than $5 or $10.

One of the things I learned from potential scammers is that they will almost always initiate a conversation with you. If you are just standing on the street and someone initiates a conversation with you that requires you to do something…..its probably a scam.

Talking to strangers isn’t a problem, but it usually is when they talk to you.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The final question comes from Steve Augustino, who asks, As this podcast has grown, how has your choice of topics evolved? Do you choose fewer US-centric topics to accommodate an international audience? What changes do you hope to implement in 2025?

Believe it or not, the percentage of listeners in the United States has actually increased over time, not decreased. A few years ago, the United States comprised about 50% of my audience, and today it is 75%.

I’m not consciously considering the audience’s demographics when selecting shows. My biggest concern is how difficult will this be to write and how good is the episode going to be.

If there are more episodes dealing with American history, that is a reflection of me and the stories I come across more than anything else.

I would like to do more episodes on India, China, Africa, Central Asia, etc., and I will be doing more of them in the future. However, that requires me to roll up my sleeves and do more research. I have an episode on the Indus Valley civilization that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, for example. Likewise, one on the Mali Empire.

The only thing I am consciously doing when selecting episodes is trying not to do this same general topic in a row. With a few exceptions, such as Monster Week last year around Halloween, I try to mix things up. If someone isn’t interested in Roman History for example, if there is an episode on that, you can be sure that there probably won’t be one about that the next day.

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Eddie Waters, asks, I need to know about beaches. Who doesn’t love a great beach? In your travels, I would love to know which beaches you found the most beautiful, relaxing, welcoming, etc… The US beaches are being gobbled up by development and franchise restaurants. Where is the best beach experience in the world?

Well, Eddie, you are correct. Lots of people love a great beach, but what makes a great beach?

For starters, there is a finite amount of beachfront property in the world. Without getting into the very tricky question of how you measure a coast, which is an introduction to fractal mathematics, they really aren’t making many more.

Many of the prime beaches in the world have been developed. However, you’ll be happy to know there are a lot of beaches which have almost no development.

I remember being on a beach on a small island in Fiji that was about a long as a city block that I had all to myself. There wasn’t another person on the beach by myself.

When I was in the Solomon Islands, I visited an island called Rennell. Rennell gets almost no visitors and has a population of maybe 2000 people. When I was there, they took me to a beach that they said no one had visited in several years.

Most beaches, especially in tropical areas, are actually very similar. The sand is made out of eroded shells and coral, aka calcium carbonate.

What makes for a great beach isn’t necessarily the beach itself. It might be the community around it, the people you meet, or the experiences you have. There are some beaches which have great sand. There are a couple that come to mind. One is Flamenco Beach on the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, and the other is many of the great beaches on the island of Anguilla. Again, I’m evaluating these just on the basis of the quality of their sand.

If you want to find a great beach, just go somewhere that isn’t a popular tourist destination. It is usually as simple as that. That compromises an enormous part of the world. You just need to do some research to find these places, and it really isn’t that hard.

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Jack Obergfell asks You mentioned having a degree in mathematics. Do you have any other ones? I think you mentioned some other ones at one point or another.

During my original undergraduate tenure, I had a triple major in mathematics, economics, and political science. This sounds more impressive than it was because it was largely a matter of efficient scheduling.

I was able to use courses in each department as electives in the other departments to pull it off. My primary focus was economics and mathematics, and political science was mostly to pad by grade point average.

On top of all that, I actually spent a lot of my time traveling around the country competing at academic debate tournaments. As I’ve said many times before, debate probably did more to prepare me for doing this podcast than anything else I’ve ever done.

Years later, after I sold a business, I went back to school to study geology and geophysics. Technically, I’m a few credits shy of getting a degree in these subjects because I had a case of vertigo that prevented me from attending classes my last semester, and by that time I realized I wasn’t going to pursue a career in academia, and and come up with the plan to travel around the world.

I have no desire to go back and get the final few credits in geology because I don’t really care too much about the credentials. I care more about learning than I do the piece of paper.

On top of that, via self study, I’ve probably easily, gotten the equivalent of a bachelors degree in history, just from all the writing and research I’ve had to do for this podcast.

Granted, what I write isn’t the equivalent of an academic research paper, but I’ve also written vastly more than your average undergraduate would ever have to write. I’d call it a wash, but I’m sure a professor of history would probably disagree.

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Barton Brierley asks In many of your episodes you mention a ? subject, and then say”that will be the subject of its own episode.” ? Do you keep track of all these loose ends? If so, is the list shr?inking over time or diverging to infinity?

On a related note, Steve Augustino asks At what point will your topics list become too unwieldy to be useful to you? Do you trim the list of related topics when you post a new episode? And have you considered licensing spin-offs as a way to address all the topics? (For example, Everything Roman History Daily)

When I started this podcast, I created a list of 100 episodes just to get me started. I created the list in a Google doc file.

Since then, I’ve added to the list when I have new ideas for episodes and delete from the list when I do an episode.

The current list had 935 show ideas. The list remains somewhat steady, but it will grow in spurts and then slowly fall back as I do episodes.

If I was more aggressive about coming up and documenting show ideas I could probably double or triple the size of the list.

What episodes I select is often nothing more than what I feel like doing on any particular day. I try to mix it up so that the same general subjects aren’t done in the same week.

As for spinning off a new show, that is a theoretical possibility, but I have absolutely no plans to do so anytime soon. I have my hands full just keeping up with this show.

If I were to spin off a new show, like a Roman history show, for example, it would have to be in a different format. I’m not sure bouncing around a topic would work for a show like that. A more linear format would work better for a single-topic show.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Abdelrahman Wael asks, Hey Gary, I have to choose between going to Athens or to Istanbul, which would you say is worth visiting more?

If it were up to me, I would visit Istanbul. That isn’t to say Athens isn’t worth visiting, but Istanbul used to be the capital of two different empires, and there is just so much to see in the old city of Constantinople.

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Brent Forliberty asks, What is your take on cold weather?

Cold is a function of adaptation. Let me give a few examples to illustrate the point.

I was once in the Kingdom of Tonga when temperatures dipped to a very unusual 68 degrees Fahrenheit, or 20 degrees Celcius. Not unheard of, but colcer than normal. People there claimed to be freezing because they weren’t used to it.

I was in Key West, Florida, once when temperatures dipped into the upper 40s Fahrenheit, or about 8-9 degrees Celcius. Again, people were flipping out about how cold it was as it was nearing a record-low temperature.

On the flipside of that, I was in Whitehorse, Yukon, in the winter once when temperatures reached about -50F or about -45C. It was cold, but people went about their lives. They wore jackets, but many of them would walk from their cars to whatever building they were going to with it unzipped.

I was in Antarctica on a ship, and out on deck, I wore a sweater and a hat, but no jacket. Temperatures were a few degrees above freezing. I’d call that chilly.

However, other passengers from Australia were completely bundled up for the same temperature because they weren’t used to it.

So, cold is mostly an issue of adapting, accepting, and dressing appropriately.

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Teresa Black asks What is your favorite (Wisconsin) cheese?

That is easy—fresh cheese curds from the DuPont Cheese Company in Marion, Wisconsin.

They must be eaten at room temperature, which is how you normally purchase them.

I’m not even sure if you can find them all over the state, as it is a rather small company.

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Robert Alan Nassif Jr asks What custom, habit, regulation, or law have you encountered abroad that seemed odd, arbitrary, or absurd?

The dumbest law I encountered was on the island of Barbados. When you fly into many countries, especially island countries, they often require you to have an outbound ticket already booked.

That is reasonable, and I’m used to that.

However, when I first landed in Barbados, I was asked by the person at immigration if I had a ticket out of the country, and I said yes. I had a ticket to the island of St. Vincent in just a few days.

However, she then kept prying. She insisted that it wasn’t enough that I had a ticket out of the country, I had to have a ticket booked to my home country.

I was detained for two hours while they debated letting me in the country.

I later met representatives from Barbados and they said that they had never heard of the law and had never heard of such a thing happening before.

I spent hours searching for this law after I left Barbados, and I eventually found something. However, it was very obscure, and it was never enforced. I just happened to be the wrong person in the wrong line with the wrong immigration officer at passport control.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Ajayi Samuel asks Hey Garry. What are your favorite books?

Likewise, Atak Lumo on the Discord sever asks, Do you have any literary “must-reads” that you would recommend to your fans? What are your favorite books?

My favorite book is Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I have read Dune many times, and every time, I get something new from it. I’ve read all of the Dune Universe books written by Frank Herbert and almost all of the Extended Universe books written by his son.

I even have all of the adaptations of the book for both film and TV.

I’m also a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I am less of a fan of the current Apple TV Foundation series, which seems to only share a title and some character names with the books.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

I’m going to end with a question from Jesus Chan who asks, Why has no one since Ted Williams been able to hit over .400 in MLB?

Jesus, this is a very good question and one I could probably talk about for an entire episode.

For those of you outside of the United States or who don’t follow baseball, a batting average is the percentage of times you get a hit based on your number of at bats, which doesn’t include base on balls.

If you get a hit 2 out of every 10 times, you are probably going to be released or demoted to the minor leagues. If you hit .200 and remain on the team, you must have something else good goin on. If you get a hit 3 out of every 10 times, you are one of the best players in the league.

Hitting .400 means getting a hit four times out of every 10 at bats, or to look at it a different way, it means failing 60% of the time.

Hitting .400 is extremely rare and if someone could do it, it means that are having one of the best seasons in all of history.

A .400 batting average has always been a major accomplishment, but it was more common before the Second World War.

The last player to hit .400 was Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, who hit .406 in 1941. No one has done it in over 80 years.

The closest anyone has come was Tony Gwynn, who hit .394 in 1994, and that was in a strike-shortened year.

So, why has no one been able to do this for the better part of a century, and why is it so hard?

There are a host of reasons, but basically, the game isn’t played the same way it used to be. This mainly has to do with better analytics and statistics.

For starters, batting average isn’t as highly valued anymore as is home runs and total bases. Through analytics, people eventually realized that a .250 hitter with power was more valuable than a .300 hitter without power.

Pitchers have become more specialized. They throw harder and are replaced more often, which means that pitchers can throw their best stuff more often than they would if they had to pitch a full nine innings.

Also, every .400 hitter played under a 154-game schedule. Eight fewer games means more opportunities to fail and regress to the mean.

Finally, anyone who were to flirt with .400 nowadays would be the center of a media storm. Not only that, but every team would try to get this guy out every game they played against him.

All of these things have conspired to work against having another .400 hitter.

That being said, could it happen? I think yes, but the odds are obviously slim. There are things that happen in baseball every year that are unprecedented or that haven’t happened in decades.

I think the most likely scenario would be for baseball to implement some sort of rule change that would make it easier for hitters. Something like limiting the number of pitching substitutions in a game.

So, it is possible that someone could just put together an amazing season, I just wouldn’t bet on it.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The first question comes from Merei Milbee who asks What has been your favorite episode idea that you’ve researched (whether or not it’s made it to air)? Can you name any that you’ve researched and decided NOT to make an episode on the topic once you started the research?

So, I don’t have a favorite, but I do have a recent example. I figure I should share this here because it isn’t going to make it into a full-blown episode, and this would be the best place to tell the story.

It has to do with Yang Kyoungjong. He was a Korean soldier who fought in the Secon world war.

He was conscripted into service in the Japanese Imperial army. He was brought to fight in China, where he ended up being captured by the Soviets.

He was conscripted into the Soviet army and was forced to fight in Eastern Front in WWII, where he was captured by the Germans.

The Germans then forced him to fight for them on their western front in France, where he was captured by the Americans after D-Day.

That is an incredible story and when I first heard, my initial reaction was that it would make for a great episode.

However, the more research I did, the more I realized that the story was almost certainly fictitious. There is one source for the story…..and nothing else.

I couldn’t, in good faith, do an episode on it.

Another episode where I had to switch plans in the middle of research was my episode on HH Holmes, America’s first serial killer. My initial research mostly consisted of rehashing the stories of the day. However, again, the more research I did, the more I realized that the stories of the time were exaggerated and sensationalized.

He was a murderer, but not to the extent that the papers would have you believe at the time.

Another episode I abandoned was the Gang of Four. This was the group led by Mao Zedon’s widow, who ruled China after the death of Mao.

My problem here was putting together a coherent story. I feel I’m in a much better position to do so now than I was when I first came up with the idea.

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Kevin O’Keefe asks; I teach 2nd grade. Knowing what you know now as an adult, if you had to go back to second grade, would you do anything differently? Would you focus on certain areas? What advice would you give yourself or others? ?

I don’t think second grade is about any particular knowledge or advice. It is about skills. It is about mastering literacy, basic mathematics, facts, and how to conduct yourself.

Any advice given to second-grade me would have been quickly forgotten because I wasn’t at a point where such advice mattered.

So, my advice to second graders would be no advice at all. Master reading, arithmetic, and basic knowledge such that when you are older you will be able to use those skills.

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Kate Adams Berich asks, How do you determine which episodes to use for encore episodes?

It is largely random. I can’t say I put a lot of thought into it before I make a selection.I never select an episode that was published within the last year and I also never republish and episode that was recorded in the first year I did the show.

I just don’t think the early episodes are up to snuff to run them as encore episodes any more.

i also try to not do a similar type of episode to once which was recorded within the last week or two. So, if I’ve recently done an ancient history episode, I wouldn’t post an encore episode about ancient history.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Margarite Pardue Anderson asks What are your thoughts on the recent pushback on tourism in places like Barcelona or the Canary Islands where locals are marching through the streets to protest all the foreigners coming to these locations? I actually have a lot of sympathy because of the problems caused by overtourism, but I don’t really see an effective solution. I think you might have some good ideas.

I have a great deal of sympathy for cities and towns that suffer from overtourism. I’ve experienced it firsthand many times.

That being said, the problem with overtourism isn’t too many tourists per se. There are too many tourists in the same place at the same time.

Most people only know about a few placed and so where they will visit will be limited to what they know.

Most people also only have a certain window when they can travel, usually in the Nothern Hemisphere summer.

I’ve been to Barcelona many times in different times of the year. Visiting in December is a vastly different experience than visiting in July. Likewise, I’ve been to Ibiza and Mallorca in December and there were almost no tourists.

Ultimately, the solution is to do what Venice does and charage tourists and entrance fee. It would limit tourism and bring money into the community

If you don’t want to pay the fee, then you need to go somewhere else. There are lots of amazing places in the world, the problem is most of them are not top of mind for most people.

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Steven Zopfi asks, When did you get your amateur radio license? Why did you decide to get this and are you active? What is the process to get licensed?

I got my ham license a few months before I started traveling. I have a uhf/vhf radio, but I currently live in an apartment so I can’t really set up a rig and an antenna.

I never was very active because I began traveling soon after I got my license. I still have my radio, but it is still in storage.

I let my license expire earlier this year just because I found the renewal process really difficult online.

Getting a ham radio license has gotten pretty easy compared to how it used to be.

From what I understand, and I’m 100% positive there are people in the audience more qualified than me to talk about this, everything is easier now including the test to become certified to talk on high frequency bands.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Daniel Rosenberg asks I never did debate in school. Now that I am older and hearing how debate has helped you in creating this show, I am interested in learning more about it. Do you have any recommended resources/tips for learning debate/research skills as an adult that is no longer in school?

For those of you new to the podcast, I’ve spoken often about my experience in academic debate in both high school and college. It was far and away the most rewarding thing I did, and everyone I know who competed seriously had the same opinion. That includes a great many people I know who went on to get PhDs and JD’s.

One of the ways that debate helped me in doing this podcast is in research. Debate is mostly about research. Most debates are won or lost before the debate round actually starts.

If you didn’t do debate, the thing I would suggest is to read everything, and listen to everything, very critically.

Even if someone says something you agree with, they might not actually make an argument that supports their conclusion. Someone you disagree with might make a good point that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that they claim.I’m to the point where I can read something and say “this part makes sense but this part doesn’t.” You need to have a very honed BS detector, especially for things you might be included to believe in. As the great physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

This isn’t easy to do. It requires a great deal of skepticism. The other thing is that you always have to hold out the possibility that you might be wrong. Treat your beliefs as hypothesis which are open to proof or disproof.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Donna Morris asks In a number of recent episodes you have mentioned that “is for a future episode”. How long is that list now? What are your upcoming episode list you are most looking forward to doing?

As of the recording of this episode, the number of episodes on my to do list is 938. Not all of those will end up becoming episodes. They might be merged into other topic or might never be recorded at all.

Mostly, in the course of doing research, I come across something else which I think would make for a good episode.