Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Derrin Brown asks How do you combat and filter miss information? aka fake news?

This is one of the most important skills that someone can learn and it isn’t easy to do. It takes constant practice and diligence.

The first step is to be skeptical of everything. Don’t just blindly accept anything you read or hear.

One good start is to start applying Betteridge’s law of headlines to articles you read. Betteridge’s law of headlines states that any headline that is a question can be answered with “no.” That is because if it were true, they wouldn’t need to phrase it as a question.

Don’t assume that someone you agree with generally is always right and that someone you disagree with is always wrong. They might be wrong for reasons that are true, but they draw the wrong conclusions.

By the same token, someone might be right for the wrong reasons.

Sometimes, it can be hard to know if something is right. Even if you think something is right, I would never accept it 100%. I’d always accept the possibility that it might be wrong.

One of the things I try to do is to have a working hypothesis rather than an opinion. Once people develop an opinion, they have a natural tendency to stick to it nad defenend it, even in the face of evidence which might be contrary. However, if you hold something as a hypothesis, then you are much more likely to be willing to modify your position and would be less willing to defend it to the death.

Finally, sublty and nuance is important. There is always a desire to make things black and white, but the truth is usually not so simple.

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Randy Ryan What motivates you to keep pumping the fantastic podcasts out day after day? Can’t be the money, or can it?

Well, the podcast is my livelihood at this point, and that certainly is a motivation.

However, I’m in a fortunate position to be doing something I think i’m well suited for and something I enjoy. That is something that few people can say.

It is a lot of work, I can’t deny that, but there are a lot of people out there who go to work every day and put in just as much time under much worse conditions than me.

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Angela Acuna asks, Do you play any video games? If so, what do you play?

The game I spent the most time playing, by far, is World of Warcraft Classic. I am in the top horde raiding guild on the Mankrik server, and my primary character is an undead priest.

I also play turned based or real time strategy games. Age of Empiers II, Rome Total War, and Civilization V. All of those games are pretty old I realize, but they are also, I think the best version of those games.

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Jesus Chan asks Gary, greetings from Laredo, Texas, the once capital of the Republic of the Rio Grande! With all the excitement around human space exploration and the prospects of traveling to the Moon and Mars, what do you believe is the most critical issue we must address to ensure success? Is it a medical advancement to protect the human body in space, the development of a revolutionary propulsion system, the creation of artificial gravity, or something entirely different?

That is a very good question. There is a lot that we don’t know about making such a trip. For starters, we have only sent 18 humans beyond low earth orbit. All 18 were part of the Apollo program and they spent a very limited amount of time beyond low Earth orbit.

This is important because the further away you get from Earth and our protective magnetic field, the more radiation you will experience in the form of solar wind and cosmic rays. We have zero experience of human beings in interplanetary space.

The second problem is gravity. We’ve had many people now who have spent extended periods in zero gravity. While they can survive in that environment it isn’t ideal. Extended time in zero gravity results in bone loss, muscle atrophy, and a host of other problem.

Artificial gravity seems like an easy solution, but we’ve never actually tried it before. At some point, we are going to need some sort of revolving space station with artificial gravity if nothing more than as a proof of concept.

Finally, in terms of propulsion, if you remember back to my episode on the subject, nuclear rockets could dramatically reduce the time it takes to get to Mars. If we had a nuclear rocket, the first trip there might be a quick there and back to plant the flag and declare victory.

However, in the long run, you’d probably need to send supplies up beforehand for an extended stay base. Something close to the movie The Martian with Matt Damon…although the dust storms in the movie were highly exaggerated. The air pressure is too low to do that much damage.

In terms of the moon, because it has no atmosphere, you’d probably want to put a base either in a lava tube or at least cover it with lunar soil to protect it from radiation.

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Stephen Hultgren asks What is the most interesting or unique sporting event you’ve seen while traveling?

That is easy. I got to witness a Buzkashi game on the shores of Song-Kul up in the Tien Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

Buzkashi is a traditional Central Asian sport where horse-mounted players compete to grab and place a goat or sheep carcass in a goal.

I’ve also watched people playing sepak takraw in Bangkok. Sepak takraw is basically like volleyball, except you can’t use your hands.

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My last question comes from Abdelrahman Wael asks, Hey Gary, love the show. I have two questions: why do you make more episodes on ancient Rome than on ancient Greece, and who do you think was more influential in the history of human civilization?

There are more episodes about Rome than Greece simply because there is more writing that has been preserved, and there is more drama and stories that come from Rome. Rome was a unified empire with powerful rules that lasted centuries. Greece was, save for the very short period of Macedonian rule, a collection of city-states.

Rome was heavily influenced by Greece, but that was mostly cultural. Most wealthy Romans had Greek tutors for their children. Most of the influence that ancient Greece had on the world was through and because of the Romans who they influenced.

Also, Christianity arose during the Roman period, and that alone had a lasting legacy that we often forget. Latin was the lingua franca for centuries in Europe in a way that Greek never was.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The first comes from Brian Faulkner, who asks, “The name of your podcast is quite similar to a very successful movie… Was there any fallout (positive or negative) from the publicity during and following the buildup, premier, and theatrical run?”

For the record, Brian, I began using the phrase Everything Everywhere back in 2005, well before the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was ever conceived.

As anyone can verify by doing a WhoIS search, I registered the domain name Everything-Everywhere.com on April 17, 2005. I had previously decided to sell my house to travel around the world, and I knew I was going to have a website associated with the trip. I came up with the name while I was in my car, thinking of possible names to use.

Once I came up with Everything Everywhere, I knew instantly that it was the name I was going to use. What I didn’t do, which I now regret, was register the domain name without a dash. It would have cost me $2000 to get it, which seemed like a lot, but I had no idea I’d still be using the name almost 20 years later.I decided to stick with the name when I made this podcast.

The movie wasn’t the first time some other entity used the name. In 2010, T-Mobile and Orange Mobile merged in the UK, and the name of their new company was Everything Everywhere. They eventually stopped using the name and now just go be EE Mobile.

I had a lawyer look into what options I had, and basically, there was nothing I could do to them and nothing they could do to me. We were completely different business in different countries, so there was no confusion as to the name.

As for the movie, I’d say it was almost entirely positive. A few people I know discovered the podcast when searching for the movie.

The only downside is that some people, not knowing the history, think I took the name of the podcast from the movie, which is not the case.

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Matt Bitner asks I’ve been enjoying your other podcast, Respecting the Beer. What is your go-to type of beer?

For those of you who don’t know, I am hosting another podcast with my friend and astrophysicist-turned-brewer, Bobby Fleshman, called Respecting the Beer. The podcast covers the science, history, and culture of beer and brewing.

Bobby is a truly fantastic brewer, and he makes a wide variety of beers in every style you can imagine. Stouts, ales, lagers, pilsners, sours, cask beers, nitro beers, and many many others. His brewpub will usually have about 20 different beers on tap, with other beers rotating throughout the year.

My favorite beer is usually something that changes throughout the year. Right now, I’ve been having gose. Gose is a slightly sour, lemony beer with a low alcohol content. It is great to have in the summer.

In the fall, I’ll probably shift to the Oktoberfest beers that come out that time of year.

I am a big fan of barrel-aged beers, which I never really had until relatively recently. These are beers that are usually aged for about a year in used bourbon barrels. I can’t really drink more than about 7 oz and it is more for sipping.

Along those lines, my absolute favorite is Eisbock. Eisbock is a barrel-aged doppelbock that is stored outside and frozen in the winter. It is made in very limited quantities and is very rare.

The reason why it is so hard to find in the United States is that, legally, letting beer free is considered freeze-distillation, which requires a distilling license, not a brewing license, even though it requires absolutely no distilling equipment.

However, if you import Eisbock, it is imported as a beer, not a spirit.

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Tim DeLong asks, You often mention the NFL. As an avid fan of auto racing, I’d like to know if you’ve ever been to an auto race, either in the US or abroad? Road America, in Elk Heart Lake, Wisconsin, is a stunning venue. However, I’m partial to the Mid-Ohio Sports Car course.

Well, Tim, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an auto racing fan per se. I don’t really follow the support other than occasionally checking a few times a year to see who is leading the Formula One or NASCAR standings.

That being said, I have attended several races. Growing up, my dad used to take me to the Wisconsin International Raceway, which is where the great Dick Trickle used to race.

In the course of my travels, I’ve attended two races. I attended the Grand Prix of Europe in Valencia, Spain, in 2011 where I had the opportunity to ride in an actual Formula One car that was retrofitted to allow passengers to sit between the wheels.

I also attended a Formula E event in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, in 2018.

For both events, I was accredited as media, so I had access to the paddocks and I was able to see how everything worked behind the scenes.

Believe it or not, I’ve never been to Road America, even though I don’t live that far away. For those who don’t know what it is, Road America is probably the top road racing track in North America, and it hosts multiple racing events throughout the year.

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TwoBuck Howie asks, All my life, I was told that there is nothing that can go faster than the speed of light. Then I heard a physicist say that galaxies are moving away from each other faster and faster until one day, they will be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Then I see online that a different physicist claims 4 things that are faster than the speed of light. Is there anything that moves faster than light? Is Einstein’s theory incorrect?

As far as we know, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. As say, “as far as we know” because you always have to leave open the possibility of some future discovery.

When we say nothing can go faster than the speed of light, we are referring to a fixed starting point. If you turned on a flashlight in space, the photons from the flashlight would move at the speed of light from the flashlight.

Now, let’s say the flashlight could shoot light in opposite directions at the same time. The photons from each end would travel from the flashlight at the speed of light.

However, the photons would travel away from each other at two times the speed of light. Neither photon is traveling faster than the speed of light relative to their starting position in the flashlight.

The fastest the space between two moving objects can increase is two times the speed of light.

In the example you gave of galaxies, there is another wrinkle. In that case, space itself is expanding between the galaxies, which I confess is a very difficult thing to get your head around.

This is a much bigger subject that I can answer on a Q&A episode, but suffice it to say no object or energy can go faster than light, but that doesn’t hold for space between objects.

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Larry Slavens asks, Since I was slow in asking last month… Did you attend concerts in your younger days in Wisconsin and Minnesota? Favorite or notable shows? Did you attend concerts on your world travels, and if so, were they US/international acts, or did you seek out local acts?

This answer is going to make me very unpopular, and I know that I am in the minority in this subject, but the truth is, I really do not like live music or attending concerts.

I have been to some concerts, and I did not enjoy the experience. I hate large crowds, and I hate loud noise.

I had a friend take me to see Prince when he opened up his Lovesexy tour in 1988 at the Met Center in Minnesota. I went to see Guns and Roses at the Target Center in 1992.

I’m not into bands and performers like other people are. I am the opposite personality type of a person who might be a passionate Taylor Swift fan today.

That being said, if it was a very small venue and if the sound wasn’t amplified, I’d have no problem attending. This would be something like a jazz club or an orchestra hall.

The great Canadian classical pianist Glen Gloud held the belief that the advent of high-quality recordings basically made live performances obsolete. I’m sympathetic to the idea, although I understand the appeal of a live performance.

For me, it boils down to disliking large crowds and loud music.

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Jesus Chan asks, Hello again from Laredo, Texas Gary and you’ll be glad to know that this question does not involve aliens. Do thoughts, ideas, dreams, and memories have physical weight or mass? If not, then how are they, like memories able to persist or exist for an entire lifetime?

That is a fair question, Jesus. Information doesn’t require mass. It requires energy.

When you put data on a hard drive, the hard drive doesn’t get heavier. You are using energy to organize the magnetic bits on the drive, assuming its a magnetic drive, in such a way that the information can be read.

If you write something down on paper with a pen, the total mass of the pen/paper system is the same. What you are doing is providing energy to provide order to the ink to store information.

Think about it if you have a collection of letters for a letter board. What is required to turn those letters from a random collection into something legible is the energy to put the letters into some sort of order. No mass has to be added to the letters.

The same process goes on in your brain. Your brain uses a tremendous amount of energy. Your brain uses energy to build new circuits and connections between neurons, which is how memories are stored.

So, memories do not have mass any more than the data on a hard drive has mass. It uses energy to provide order to previously existing bits of matter.

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Jana Elsea asks When you travel, do you prefer hard side or soft side bags? Checked or carry on, Rolling or carry? Also, how many passport stamps/additional passport pages do you have?

During the entirety of my travels, I used a soft-sided bag. My primary bag for much of that time was an Eagle Creek Gear Warrior. I always checked that bag when I flew.

The reason why I checked a bag is because I had to. I lived on the road, and I couldn’t fit everything into a single carry-on. My tripod also made it impossible to have a smaller bag that I could fit in an overhead bin. The only times I’ve had problems with my checked bag, I could count on one hand. Three of those incidents involved Air Canada.

I have no idea how many stamps I have. I have used three passports in the course of my travels, and my second passport has three extra sets of pages, which is something you can’t do anymore.

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Nikcap, from over on the Discord sever asks, your episode on statistics got me thinking why do we have to learn advanced math in school. When will I ever need to know what a sine or cosine is, or what the quadratic equation is used for. These are grips I hear from high school students and their parents, but I don’t really know what the good arguments are to support the learning of high school mathematics.

There are several things I’d say:

First, you don’t know what career you will have when you are in school. It is easy to look backward and say, “I don’t need to know that.” However, it is impossible to look forward and know what you will need to know.

If you don’t study math, or science, or history, or anything for that matter, you are basically locking yourself out of a host of possible careers before you ever get a chance even to make that choice.

If you use the “I don’t use that knowledge” as the basis for what to learn, then for most people, you don’t have to learn anything beyond basic arithmetic and literacy. We could go back to not having to get anything beyond a 6th-grade education.

The second thing is that it is worthwhile to learn some things because they teach you a system of thinking. Mathematics teaches you how to think rigorously. I’ve gotten value from almost everything I’ve ever studied, not because I use it every day but because it is a way to think about the world.

I’ve talked to many adults who feel that they are “not good at math.” This is almost entirely based on their experience in high school because. I always suggest they go back and try learning it again as an adult. Try learning it without the pressure of getting grades or taking a test. There are plenty of resources online to help you do this. There are free courses at Khan Academy, for example, which will take you from 1+1=2 all the way through college-level mathematics. If you don’t understand something, you can find other sources online to explain it in a different way.

Finally, I do think that we should change how we teach mathematics. I’m very open to the idea that we should put a higher priority on statistics, which most people do encounter every day, rather than calculus.

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Let’s jump right in. The first question comes from Nafeesah Scott, who asks, Hi Gary! I must just say thank you for such a great informative, and concise podcast about everything everywhere! I loved your recent episode on air conditioning. It got me thinking: what do you think are the top 3 contributors to the advancement of today’s world are?

That is a very difficult question. To use your example, air conditioners have indeed been very important to the creation of the modern world for all the reasons I mentioned in the episode.

However, air conditioners are dependent on electricity—no electricity, no air conditioning. The same holds true for something like the internet. The internet, as important as it is, is predicated on computers, which is predicated on electricity.

So, if I were to pick three things, electricity and electrification would have to be on that list.

The next thing would probably have to be the development of the heat engine. I’m using “heat engine” as a catch-all for both the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which, while different, have a similar lineage. This would cover most transportation and industrialization, as well as creating electricity.

Finally, and I have covered this on several episodes, I’d have to include the development of germ theory. The discovery that microscopic organisms were responsible for most infectious diseases was the one thing that led to a dramatic drop in deaths and an increase in life expectancy.

If you were to start civilization over from scratch, you could avoid centuries of human misery by just knowing the basics of these three things.

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Jesus Chan asks, Gary, hello again from South Texas. In several of the last episodes, you have mentioned that some things have been discovered simultaneously by different people in different places. To what do you attribute the independent development of similar ideas across isolated human societies such as agriculture, pyramids, calendars, weapons, etc? Is it Aliens, Collective Unconscious, Genetic Memory, or something else?

Jesus, I think the answer is actually really simple. I’ll answer the question by posing another question: why do dolphins and whales look like fish? The answer is that similar problems will result in similar solutions. In the case of a dolphin and a fish, the problem of swimming in the water results in similar body types because that’s what works.

The same is true for innovations. There are many ideas which were discovered indepenetnly in different places, at different times. A pyramid is nothing more than a shape. It is a cone with flat sides. Children playing in sand or mud could easily come up with the shape.

If you were playing as a kid, you probably reinvented the lever just by playing around with sticks.

Many times, the discoveries occurred centuries or even millennia apart from each other. Looking back, the difference between 7000 and 8000 years ago might not seem like much…..but it was 1000 years.

Calendars are nothing more than people observing nature and the stars….and every culture and civilization were all looking at the exact same thing, so it should come as no surprise that they developed similar calendars based on the Earth, Moon, and Sun.

Ancient people in Mesoamerica and in Mesopotamia developed agriculture, as did the people in West Africa and Papua New Guinea, but all of those places cultivated totally different crops that they had available. However, the basic idea of planting seeds to grow plants to eat was a pretty simple one that doesn’t require aliens.

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Wayne Rothe asks, I recently joined the Sour Toe Cocktail Club in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. Would you do it? Yes, my lips touched the toe. Wayne, I am a three-time member of the Sour Toe Cocktail Club. For those of you who are wondering what a Sour Toe Cocktail is, it is a cocktail served at the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City, Yukon. It consists of alcohol of your choice….and a severed human toe.I kid you not.

I will leave this as a homework assignment for all of you, but the motto of the Sour Toe Cocktail Club is….”Drink it fast, or drink it slow; your lips must touch the toe.”

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Kevin O’Keef asks Most of us that listen to your show clearly are lifelong learners and I know you have mentioned that this is one objective of your podcast- to have citizens throughout the world be more knowledgeable. Anyone that went to high school or college can relate to “cramming“ for a test. Weeks later everything that we learned is probably lost -again because content hasn’t been recycled or used or reflected on. What I’m getting at Gary -is since you have this huge volume of content that you’ve learned have you figured out how to retain a lot of this long-term? I know there’s no magic pill for this, but if students can use some tricks or strategies that you used, I’m sure we will all be more educated as a society and better for it. ?

Kevin, what you have identified is a HUGE problem. Whenever we hear people talk about education, they usually talk about students’ test scores. That is fine, but student test scores are not the goal of education. The goal is to produce knowledgeable and informed adults.

The result of general knowledge tests given to adults is truly depressing. Most people, after years of education, come out of it having learned…..next to nothing. The average person couldn’t pass any final exam in any class they took past grade school.

I could talk for hours on this subject, but here are some fundamental things I think.

The first is that you are ultimately responsible for your education. If someone doesn’t want to learn, if they aren’t curious and don’t care, the best teachers cannot make them learn. You cannot inject knowledge into someone. If, however, someone wants to learn, such as the great 20th-century Indian mathematician Ramanujan, then it is hard to stop them from learning.

Second, is that learning never ends. Never. Too many people think that learning is only done in a classroom when you are a child or a teenager. That is when classroom instruction ends, but that is not the end of learning.

Third, is that you sometimes have to encounter things multiple times to make it stick. I took a trigonometry class in high school, which was nothing but memorizing things like the sine function was the opposite over the hypotenuse of a triangle. I took a physics class and didn’t know when to use the sine or cosine of something.

Later on, someone explained the trigonometric functions using the unit circle….and everything clicked and suddenly made sense. Once I understood that I didn’t need to memorize everything, I could just figure it out from first principles.

Publishing encore episodes isn’t just a way for me to take a day off (although that is a big part of it). It is a way for people to hear something they might have last listened to one or two years ago and serve as a refresher. When I watch a movie or read a book a second time, I always pick up something new that I didn’t notice the first time.

Today, there are many different ways you can learn almost any subject for free online. There are countless YouTube channels that will explain any topic, as well as articles and of course, podcasts. If you don’t understand it after consuming one source, go and check out another.

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Tim Manchester aks Can you go more into what exactly podcasting 2.0 is? I listen to your show on Spotify, am I missing out or robbing you of some benefit by not switching?

Tim, this is a great question.

Podcasting was developed about 20 years ago by Adam Curry and Dave Weiner. They adapted RSS feeds, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, to audio and video files.

RSS 2.0 is a new project, again involving Adam Curry, to expand the features available in podcasts. One of the big ones has been transcripts, but there are a host of other features.

The problem has been of a chicken and egg type. People need to use podcast players that support the new features, and podcast hosts need to support them as well. The hosts have no incentive to support the features if people aren’t using the players, and players have no incentive to adopt the features if the podcast hosts don’t support them.

My podcast doesn’t support many of the new features because the show’s format doesn’t need them and because my host, Megaphone, doesn’t support them. If you want to learn more, just go to podcasting2.org

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Jerry Gardner asks, With the current heat wave in the United States, with all your world travels what is the hottest and coldest temperature you have personally experienced? The hottest temperature was 50C or 122F which I encountered in the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, one of the lowest and hottest places on Earth. The coldest temperature would be around -50F or -45.5C, which I encountered in the winter in Dawson City, Yukon.