Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Dean Koutsoubis asks, Are you considered a member of the completionist club if you’ve listened to every new episode once but have not listened to all the encore episodes?

I will leave this up to your interpretation as membership in the completionist club is ultimately on the honor system.

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Glenn Folau asks This question may have been asked before, but are you one of the 2 percent of Americans who have been to every state in the US? Secondly, I have just heard that the Cleveland Browns have decided to move to an undercover all purpose stadium and leaving their traditional home. I have read that this is a trend among some franchises. Any chance the Packers would ever move to an all purpose roofed stadium?

Yes, I have been to every state. In fact, I’ve been to every state twice. If I were to drive around New England again, I’d have visited every state three times.

Domed stadiums are becoming the norm in the NFL. They remove the elements and are more comfortable for fans.

That being said, the Packers will never move into a domed stadium.

One of the big reasons for building a domed stadium is that it can serve as a venue for concerts and other bing events. There are no big concerts that come to Green Bay, Wisconsin. The town is so small, there is nothing but football.

The Packers have invested a lot of money into Lambeau Field, and as more and more teams build indoor stadiums, the advantage of playing outdoors, especially in a cold climate, becomes greater.

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Abdelrahman Wael asks Hey Gary, I recently went on a trip to central Europe after not traveling for 12 years, and now I’m planning on seeing the world, but I still have a tight budget. So, given that you’ve been all over, what are your tips for traveling on a budget?

If you travel extensively, you want your money to go as far as possible.

The single biggest thing which determines how much money you spend is where you travel to. If you visit Zurich or Oslo, even the cheapest option is going to be extremely expensive.

The cheapest dorm room bed in a hostel in those cities will get you a nice hotel room in Southeast Asia.

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Berkleigh Rathbone asks Hi Gary! I have a really silly question but a question nonetheless. Throughout your podcast you’ve made comments about candy corn and pineapple on pizza. Would you rather eat a large handful of Brach’s candy corn or a personal sized pizza covered in pineapple?

That is an easy answer. I’d take the pineapple-covered pizza any day over the candy corn.

I have no problem with pineapple, per se. I just don’t like to mix it with pizza.

Candy Corn, however, are the devil’s seeds.

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My final question is from AmyElizabeth who asks, In your travels, have you ever found yourself in a potentially embarrassing situation culturally? If so, how did you gracefully extricate yourself?

Not really. I think this is largely overblown. Maybe in the 19th century, this could have been a problem, but not in the 21st century.

The closest thing I can think of took place in Thailand when I was told how to say hello. A woman told me to say Sawadee Ka.

The problem was, the way the Thai language works, what you say isn’t just dependent on who you are talking to, but also who you are.

Sawadee Ka is how a woman would say hello, and I went around saying Sawadee Ka.

Thai people understood that I was a foreigner, so they didn’t say anything. Eventually, someone told me I was saying something wrong. I was saying it like a woman. Men should say Sawadee Kap.

Again, not really embarrassing, but that is the closest I’ve done.

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Walt from the Discord server asks If you were suddenly teleported back in time to the year 0 and appointed to a position of power in any society, how far do you think your current knowledge could advance society? Could you spark the Industrial Revolution?

Putting aside the fact that there was no year zero, the answer to your question is no, I don’t think I or anyone else could spark an industrial revolution.

Maybe, at best, I could speed things along such that it would take place centuries earlier, but it certainly couldn’t happen within my lifetime.

Telling people 2000 years ago about the modern world would be the equivalent of telling them science fiction stories. I don’t think you can jump ahead that far.

Let’s take, for example, the steam engine. To make a working steam engine, you first and foremost need fuel. Wood simply wouldn’t work. It doesn’t have a high enough energy density, and within the span of years or decades, you will have chopped down all the forests around you.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t take off until coal started to be mined as a fuel source.

The other thing you need for an industrial economy would be some sort of organized civilization.

Returning to year 1, we find such organized civilizations in China, India, Persia, and Rome.

Of those, Rome had little in the way of coal deposits. The biggest deposits were just outside of the borders of Rome in Germany. Later, they conquered Britain, where there was also coal, but being on an island made it difficult to use.

Likewise, there was little coal in Persia or India. China has lots of coal, and it would have been the best chance of an Industrial Revolution 2000 years ago.

I think you’d need to introduce mathematics and science first before you get into engineering. To do that, you’d need to introduce mathematical symbols and probably the base ten system of numbers, and maybe Indo-Arabic numbers as well, to really speed along mathematics. You’d also have to teach people that the world is made of atoms and the germ theory of disease, as well as generally trying to convince intelligentsia of the period of the scientific method.

To do all that, you’d probably have to demonstrate that these things work, create tools such as lenses, and simple inventions that could be used immediately by people so they would believe you. Maybe if you could pull that off, and there is no guarantee that you could, you might light a spark that will catch fire several generations after you.

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Xristerj from the Discord server asks, Gary, you said when you decided to travel the world, you sold your house and bought a camera you didn’t know how to use. Then the pandemic ended your traveling phase. So do you now live in a house again? Do you rent an apartment? Or do you live in the back of a van by the side of the highway with a microphone and an Internet connection?

I actually had an apartment for about three years before the pandemic that I used as a home base between my travels. After a decade, I had gotten burned out, so I had a place I could go between trips. I was still on the road about half of every year at that point.

Today, I still have an apartment. I rent instead of own because I don’t want to get stuck with a long-term mortgage should I want to move somewhere else. I’ll most certainly be traveling again at some point, but it wont be traveling full time and living on the road like I did in the past. I’d probably stay somewhere for three to six months before moving on to somewhere else.

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Courtney Klassen asks, Can computers think? And what does it truly mean, “to think”?

My answer to this is no. Computers, even advanced AI, cannot think as we humans do. Moreover, it is my opinion that no silicon-based machine can ever really think.

We can create machines that can ape intelligence, but they are simply providing an output for a given input. All computers, as they are designed today, are based on boolean logic. They are rapidly undergoing a series of steps and executing a program. If you put in the same inputs, you will get the same outputs. You can add randomness to change the output, but the process is the same. People are impressed with how large language models can answer questions, but no AI ever asks questions. It doesn’t know if it’s wrong, it doesn’t care if it is wrong, it can’t adapt and learn to correct itself if its wrong. There is no will. There are no desires. Anything that can be done with an integrated circuit could, in theory, be done with transistors, vacuum tubes, or even on paper. It would be many orders of magnitude slower and inefficient, but it could be done in theory. Computers and AI will get more impressive, but that doesn’t indicate true thought.

I know there are a lot of people who disagree with my views on this, but I think it is a fundamental limitation of anything digital.

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Jason Scott asks Have you traced your family genealogy and traveled to the destination where they are from?I’ve spent a lot of time on ancestry.com, which has a lot of resources. I’ve been able to trace all but two my ancestors back five generations. That would be my great-great-great-great grandparents. They mostly came from Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. However, I have one great-great grandmother that had a totally different ancestry. Her ancestors were largely English and Scottish. Some of her ancestors were very early arrivals living in the Plymouth Colony in Massachuttes. Through her lineage, I’ve been able to link myself to King Robert II of Scotland. He is my 20th great-grandfather. That might sound impressive, but it really isn’t. When you go back 20 generations, you have 2^20 ancestors from just that generation or 1,048,576 ancestors.

Going the other way, King Robert II probably has millions, if not tens of millions, descendants. For the majority of my ancestors, there is a huge black hole of information around the time of the 30 years’ war which ravaged northern Europe. Many churches were burned, and the birth, death, and marriage records were all destroyed with them.

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Nonato Nonnie Ramirez asks When you were traveling the world at your peak what camera gear did you use?I started using a Nikon D200, which was the top-of-the-line crop sensor camera at the time. I then upgraded to the D300s when it came out.

I waited for years for Nikon to come out with an upgrade and they never did. Meanwhile, Sony had become a leader in camera innovation. I eventually just completely switched over to Sony and to full frame cameras. The reason for the switch is that my biggest challenge doing travel photography was low light. I couldn’t use a flash in the vast majority of situations, so I needed a camera that performed well in low light.

I have a Sony a7rII, which is a bit old at this point, but I haven’t really done much photography since I started the podcast. I normally only carried three lenses with me when traveling: a super zoom, a wide-angle lens, and a 50mm f/2 lens. I also have a 600mm lens I use for wildlife photography, but I didn’t normally travel with it as it was so large.

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Shana Hallam asks We are very impressed by the fact you have completed 3 national park passport books. We’ve currently trying to complete our first book. What is your secret to visiting each one?

Just to be clear, I have three national park passport books. They are not necessarily filled. I purchased three because I had a couple trips where I forgot mine and just bought a new one.

That being said, I’ve been to 226 of the 431 units of the National Park Service. Of the 63 sites that have been given a National Park designation, I’ve been to all but six: New River Gorge, Big Bend, Virgin Islands, Channel Islands, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia. The remaining six are not that hard to visit. It is just a matter of making it a priority and doing it.

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Tom Allen asks With the recent surge in disinformation, has your research effort gotten harder? No, and that is due to the nature of this podcast. As I deal with subjects that are historical or scientific, they are for the most part immune from organized misinformation campaigns. Most misinformation campaigns are conducted for some purpose. They want to sway public opinion about some current issue or policy.

As most of the topics I do episodes have little bearing on current events, it isn’t something that really affects me or my research.

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Enio Nery asks, When and where did the Concept of playing Sports to make a living Start? I’ve been meaning to know the answer ever since i’ve learned that the 1st ever person to win at the Original Olympics was a cook now, of course i’ve done my research but i think it would make an Interesting topicI don’t know if it’s possible to know the first person, but I would say the first people to make a profession out of competitive sports were probably Roman charioteers. In a previous episode, I covered the life of Gaius Appuleius Diocles. He was the most successful chariot racer in Rome and became one of the wealthiest men in Rome as a result.

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Martin Hanley asks What would you tell a high school junior or senior about choosing a college (4 year/ 2 year/ trade), military, straight to work, “gap” year, or crash in parents’ basement and play video games?

The advice you give totally depends on the person you are giving the advice to. Given the cost of college and the potential debt burden, I wouldn’t go into it lightly. People often say that you will make more money if you have a college degree. However, it overlooks all the people who went to college and didn’t graduate yet were still stuck with all the debt. So, I honestly wouldn’t recommend college unless you are sure you are a good enough student to graduate in four years or less.I also don’t think that college is wise if you don’t know what you want to do. It is a very expensive attempt to figure things out. I’d recommend traveling for a year as it is much cheaper than college.

The one bit of advice I always give people who are starting out is if you want to ensure long-term success in life to be great at something. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. Many skills don’t even require a formal education. The editors behind Everything Everywhere All At Once won the Academy Award for editing, and they learned how to do it on YouTube. Playing video games in your parent’s basement isn’t just a waste. It shows a lack of ambition. There is nothing wrong with playing video games per se, but time spent in the basement doing that could just as easily be spent in self-study learning something.I’ve made massive career shifts several times in my life. Each time, I threw myself into whatever new thing I was doing. Sometimes, it took a few years of study before I could claim any sort of mastery.

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Davan Woolley asks With four years of the podcast and climbing, and all the fact-checking, research, editing have you thought about scaling down to Everything Everywhere Weekly? I’m always amazed at the amount of work and effort that goes into each and every episode. The short answer is no. The entire premise and format of this podcast is that it is a short-form daily show. Yes, its a lot of work, but I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.

Four years isn’t very long in the big scheme of things, and after a thousand episodes, I’ve got a good system down for doing this.I know I’ve mentioned it for a long time, but the plan is to hire someone to help out eventually. Getting help will be a much more sustainable solution rather than changing the entire podcast.

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The last question comes from Ja Teng who asks, What kind of music do you enjoy listening to the most? What is your favorite instrument and why?

I mostly listen to classical music and more often than not contemporary classical music. Usually composers like Philip Glass and Max Richter, but also some newer composters like the Polish musician Haina Rani. That being said, I also have an extremely eclectic taste in music. I have an enormous playlist on Spotify where I dump anything I like. In there, you’ll find everything from big band to hip hop to jazz to country to rock and everything in between. The only thing in common is that it is something I like.

As for my favorite instrument, it would have to be the pipe organ. I have to respect any instrument that makes you come to it.

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The first question comes from Patricia Kemmer, who asks,“Why do lithium-ion batteries catch fire? Love your podcast.”First, lithium-ion batteries catching fire is rare, but it can happen. It is due to something known as thermal runaway.

It starts when there is some sort of damage to the battery. This could be physical damage, such as a cut in the outer skin of the battery. It could also come up with a manufacturing defect or an internal short circuit.

These defects can cause a localized temperature increase where the damage occurs. The temperature increase can cause defects to occur in adjacent parts of the batter, which can then cause more defects, more temperature increases, and so on. This is how it becomes a runaway effect. This can be made worse if as the temperatures increase, the gasses which are produced are trapped inside the enclosed battery increasing pressure.

This is one of the many reasons why researchers are trying to develop solid-state batteries that don’t have a liquid or gel electrolyte. In addition to having higher energy density, they would also be much safer.

This is also why you should never use a damaged lithium-ion battery.

Again, this is a pretty rare phenomenon and, for the most part, easy to avoid.

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Davan Woolley asks, Hadrian’s wall is 73 miles long what would that be in Roman miles? What’s the difference?

Good question, Davan.

A Roman mile is close to the imperial mile that we still use in the US and the UK. In fact, the imperial mile was based on the Roman mile.

The Roman mile was called a mille. In Latin, mille is just the world for one thousand.

The Roman mille came from the fact that it was measured to be 1000 paces. The Romans measured a pace by the number of times your left foot was set down. We might measure a pace as one step, but the Romans would have measured it with two steps.

As you can probably guess, this was a very inaccurate method of measurement. The length of the mille was based on the length of a pace, which depended on the person’s stride.

Agrippa, the number two guy to Augustus on whom I’ve done a previous podcast, standardized the Roman foot to….his foot. He also defined a pace as five feet, which made the Roman mile 5000 Roman feet.

It is believed, based on distances between Roman mile markers, that the Roman mile was 91.9% of an imperial mile. So, Hadrians Wall would be 79.4 Roman miles.

In England, the old mile was based on 5000 feet, but they had a different definition of a foot. Under Queen Elizabeth I they modified the mile to being eight furlongs which ended up being 5,280 feet. The change was made for tax reasons.

The origin of Imperial Units should probably be its own episode because all of the units have such a bizarre origin.

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Megan Sandmann asks, I assume tasting the local cuisine and photographing major attractions are of top priority when you are traveling. Is there anything else you prioritize doing at all the locations you visit?

One of the big things I did when traveling was visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There current 1223 World Heritage sites and I’ve visited a 412. Some are very easy to visit and some are incredibly hard.

Most UNESCO Sites have some sort of cultural or natural significance, and that is what usually draws me to visit somewhere.

Food isn’t nearly as big of an attraction as most people think it is. You can eat many types of cuisine and many different places, and much of it is quite good. For example, Chinese and Indian restaurants can be found everywhere around the world, as can sushi.

That is not to say you can’t have good culinary experiences in certain places, but food is something that can be transported easily. Cultural, historic, and natural sites cannot.

Susan K Emerson writes, Hi Gary Arndt long time listeners here, Eliza (11) Nellie (8) and mom. We are wondering if you could go back in time to when you were a kid what would be the place you would most want to travel and why.

If you were ask me when I was 8 or 11, I probably would have wanted to go to Disney World.

If you asked me when I was 13 or 14, I would have definitely said Cape Canaveral to see a space shuttle launch.

I should add that my family didn’t travel very much so both of those things were never really options.

Now, however, as an adult, if I could retroactively fund some sort of travel for my younger self, I would have tried to go to someplace that doesn’t exist anymore. Perhaps go visit West Berlin before the wall fell down.

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Mike Varoz asks Gary, have you ever visited or crossed the Boundary Waters connecting Minnesota and Canada? Is there an episode on the area? Your library is getting vast – is there a better way to search than asking in Q&A?

To answer the first part of your question, I have been to the boundary waters. I visited Vouyagers National Park and I did one of their boat tours that go into the park. There are sectionis of the tour where you actually, technically cross into Canada in the middle of the lake, but there is no one around the check.

The Kettle Falls Hotel Bar is one of the most interesting places in the park and very hard to get to.

As for searching past episodes, If you go to my website Everything-Everywhere.com, I have a page with all 1500 episodes on a single page. It is easy to search by title.

There is also a search function which lets you search the script of every episode.

I will confess that the search functionality isn’t great. I had an AI tool that would read all of my scripts and answer questions on the Discord server, but it no longer works.I’m looking at putting in a similar AI search functionality on the website because I too find my current search setup very frustrating when I want to look for something.

Right now there are a ton of AI search tools available and I just need to find a good one that works well.