Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Max Shemtob asks Where do you see this podcast in 5 years from now? Still making daily episodes?

This podcast is a daily podcast. That is sort of its raison d’être. So I don’t particularly can’t see anything that would cause me to stop the show. If that were to happen, it would have to be something unforeseen.

I do assume that there will be changes in how the show is produced on the back end. That hopefully will not affect the end product but will make life easier for me in getting a show out every day.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Margarite Pardue Anderson asks, In general, when you travel, do you prefer to keep on the move to see as much as possible, or do you like to go slowly and soak things in? For example, I would love to just rent someplace and stay for a month (such as a house in the Scottish Hebrides or an apartment in Vienna,) but it is hard to convince myself to spend that much money and then just see one place.

It is a mix. If you move around constantly, you will get burned out. You can keep up that pace for a few weeks, but eventually, you’ll have to slow down.

When I was traveling full-time, I had to do this every so often. I spent a month in Melbourne, Saigon, Honolulu, and other cities just because I got burned out from moving around so much.

Spending an extended amount of time in one place is just a different way of traveling. It is the classic tradeoff between breadth and depth. I would have no problem spending a month in the Hebrides or in Vienna.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Ja Teng asks What language do you find most fascinating? Would you want to learn it?

I began studying Latin during the pandemic, and I’ve been keeping up with it, although not nearly as much as I should be.

I know a smattering of languages, but not enough that I could really claim fluency in anything.

Many people think that Latin is easy because it is the basis for so many Romance languages and because there are so many words in English that have Latin roots.

From a strict grammar standpoint, that’s true, but the structure of Latin is very, very different from any of the Romance languages. Latin is highly inflected, which means that the ending of words determines how they are used in a sentence. The order of words is largely irreverent in Latin, and there are no articles like ‘the’ or ‘a.’

On top of the structure of the language, there is the whole ancient aspect of the language and how it opens the door to understanding the past.

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Seth Louviere asks How do you construct your shows? I can’t imagine you simply copy and paste from one source like Wikipedia. How many sources do you usually try to get information from? Do you have some sources that are a go-to?

There is no single source for anything because every topic is different.

I have no problem with Wikipedia per se, but there are issues with using it.

For starters, I often find data that doesn’t jibe with other sources. When that happens, I often have to dig around to find the correct year something happened or at least check the original source that Wikipedia sites, and to be honest, there often either isn’t a source or the link to the source is broken.

There are some articles that are simply too long and too in-depth, and there are other articles that have almost nothing written. My goal is to tell an approximately 10-minute story, which requires trying to figure out the essence of what to say. That will often mean explaining the background of something or leaving out details that aren’t necessary.

Cutting and pasting anything wouldn’t really work because writing for the eye doesn’t usually translate well into writing for the ear.

One of the things I have to figure out for each episode is how I’m going to structure the episode and tell the story. Once I can figure out how the general arc of the episode is going to go, then it is just a matter of writing the script, which takes time but isn’t necessarily that difficult.

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Henry Suski asks Do you ever try engage both locals and tourists to be more interested in culture and history in the areas you’ve traveled too? When traveling, it’s been a common occurrence for me to talk to locals, who haven’t visited cool attractions in their own backyard.

Yes and no. I often meet people, but I don’t go out of my way to do so. Either it happens organically, or it doesn’t.

You are right that most people don’t visit tourist attractions where they live. It is one of the ironic things about people who say they want to travel like a local. People who live in a place aren’t traveling, and they aren’t thinking of doing travel things.

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Otterpaw over on the Discord server asks, What was your first experience travelling to another country and how did it happen?

My first trip outside of the United States was a trip to Canada my family made in 1979 on a road trip to Niagara Falls. I can still remember it, but mostly how everything was the same but just a bit different.

The first time I traveled out of North America was in 1999. I had sold my company to a much larger, international firm, and they sent me on a trip around the world. My first stop was in Japan, and I remember staying up all night watching Japanese TV because I was jet lagged and because I found it all fascinating.

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TheArchVillager asks on Discord, What do you think the world would have looked like if the Byzantines won at Yarmouk?

Honestly, I don’t think the world would be that much different if the Byzantines had won. The Byzantine Empire was in a very long, slow decline, and Islam was on the rise in 636.

If, for whatever reason, the Byzantines had won that particular battle, it wouldn’t have changed the overall trend of what was happening.

Instead of the battle of Yarmouk, it would probably be some other battle that we would remember.

Individual battles like Yarmouk often punctuate much larger trends. The battles usually are not the trend itself. There are exceptions, like the Battle of Gaugamela, but those are not the norm.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Fat Yankee asks on the Discord Server, How does the increasing popularity of the podcast affect you? Is it more stressful? Does it give you more drive knowing more and more people love your work?

The funny thing is, what I do on my end of the microphone is almost completely disconnected from the number of people who listen on the other end.

The production of the show today isn’t that radically different from what I was doing three years ago. In fact, one of the great things about podcasting is that it can scale almost indefinitely.

That being said, I’m certainly aware of the size and growth of the audience, and it does factor into the attention I give each episode.

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The first question comes from Sean Vergowven, who asks, “Curious as a Wisconsin fan (which we don’t hold against you) what are your thoughts on the new Big Ten”

For those of you who don’t know what the Big Ten is, it is a college sports conference. It used to consist of ten large colleges in the Midwest that would also play each other in various sports. These tended to be large land grant institutions such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, Minnesota, and Iowa.

In 1990, they expanded to eleven teams by allowing Penn State to join, but they kept the name Big Ten. This addition wasn’t really that bad.

Then, in 2010, three more universities joined: Nebraska, Maryland, and Rutgers. Nebraska made sense, but Maryland and Rutgers were completely out of wack and took away from the Midwest nature of the conference.

Recently, USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington announced that they would be joining the Big Ten, bringing the number of teams to 18.

So, my thoughts are…..

18 teams is too much for a conference, and the conference no longer has any regional focus. The reason this is being done, of course, is for money. College sports, especially football and basketball, are big business.

The current trend of dismantling and merging conferences makes no sense, especially considering that it is only for a few sports.

College football should consider a complete reorganization that only affects football and leaves every other non-revenue-generating sport alone. Even he current system of determining a champion is a bit ridiculous, selecting four teams by committee rather than determining a champion on the field.

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Graham McIntosh asks, “How do you and other Americans celebrate the New Year?”

Personally, I do absolutely nothing. I go to bed and wake up as if it were any other day.

That being said, I’d say the most popular things are fireworks and drinking. Some people watch the ball drop in Times Square in New York, and there is a tradition of singing the song Auld Lang Syne, even though most people don’t know the lyrics beyond the first few lines.

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Gabriel Cervantes asks You’ve been all over the world, shooting photographs. Where can we see your images?

You can see all of my images if you go to my website Everything-Everywhere.com. In the menu bar up top just click on “photography,” and you can view the many tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken all over the world.

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Fabio Fidanza asks “Do you know/practice computer programming? if yes, what’s your favourite language? Thanks!”

Well, I used to, sort of, but I haven’t in ages. Back in the 90s, I found myself at the right place and at the right time. It was right at the beginning of the World Wide Web, and my roommate at the time developed a tool known as Cold Fusion. Today it is owned by Adobe.

It was a markup language with elements of a programming language that allowed you to easily and quickly integrate databases with websites, which was a difficult thing to do at the time.

When he was building the product, some companies asked to have websites created with the tool, and he didn’t want to do it, so I began using the tool to develop these data-driven websites, and long with SQL statements of varying complexity.

I did this for a while, but I soon brought other people on board, and my focus shifted to running the company, not doing the actual programming.

I’ve considered going back to goofing around with some simple scripting to do things on my own network, but I usually never get around to it because I have other things going on.

So the short answer is I did in the past, but I haven’t done so in a long time.

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TwoBuck Howie asks, In all your travels, have you ever come across fellow explorers like Albert Lin or Josh Gates?

First, just because someone is on TV doesn’t make them great explorers. I know a LOT of people who are far better traveled than most TV personalities.

That being said….

We had Josh Gates as a guest on my old podcast, This Week in Travel, but I wasn’t on the show that week because of scheduling.

I once met the Australian photographer Peter Lik at the Camuy Caves in Puerto Rico. He was there filming a show for the Weather Channel.

I also stayed at the same hotel as Anthony Bourdain in Lafayette, Louisiana, during Mardi Gras in 2018, just months before he died. Every morning, I’d see him outside the front doors of the lobby smoking a cigarette, texting as his crew got their equipment ready for the day.

I also know a fair number of online travel influencers that I’ve met during my travels around the world. However, I’ve lost touch with many of them as I’ve shifted to podcasting.

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Derrin Brown asks Can we determine the average length of an empire/commonwealth/superpower’s reign?

Yes, you can, but there is a problem with the question. You can get an average from almost any dataset. You can get an average from random numbers.

However, I’m not sure that such an average would be meaningful. Each empire existed with its own logic and forces that caused its rise and fall.

Pharaonic Egypt lasted through 33 different dynasties over thousands of years. Nazi German lasted a little more than a decade. The Soviet Union existed for only 74 years.

Moreover, technologies have changed dramatically, rendering whatever lessons we could learn rather moot.

So, yet you can calculate an average, but I’m not sure that it is meaningful.

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Matt Goulet asks “Why do Americans call chocolate bars candy bars ?”

It is because chocolate is a candy.

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Steve Gulliver asks Do you suffer burnout from researching so much??

The answer is yes. Sometimes. I have no one to help me research, write, or record the show. The nature of the show is such that I have to get a show out the door every day.

So, the production schedule of the show is sort of akin to that of a newspaper or a newsroom.

The only break I get is the occasional encore episode. Thankfully, I’ve done so many episodes now that no one really seems to mind them so long as new episodes are still being produced.

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Ayo Abíólá asks, would you use AI like ChatGPT to just draft the script in a second? If you did, has it made this venture easier?

There has been a lot of talk about AI within the podcasting world. While I recognize there might be some use for AI, literally creating entire scripts just isn’t possible. Just for the heck of it, I actually tried to get several AI systems to write a script, and the results were horrible. If I actually tried to release something totally written by AI, people would stop listening. Moreover, a great deal of what I’ve seen is simply factually incorrect. You’d still have to fact-check everything, which is difficult enough when you aren’t using AI.

That being said, there are two things I have found AI useful for. The first is creating images for episode artwork. The second is to create an outline of major points for topics that are extremely broad. Trying to summarize some topics into 10 to 12 minutes is extremely difficult, and it can be helpful to help summarize.

Once it lists the major points, however, It’s up to me to make sense of it, and write and research the episode.

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David Javid writes, Gary, you are probably the most interesting person at any dinner table, but if you could host a dinner party, who would you host, living or dead? Second, if you could live in any time in history or civilization, with, of course, with the help of modern medicine, which time or place would it be? Third, I love your podcast and am an avid listener.

Well, I’m not really sure who I’d want to have at a dinner party. The obvious answer is usually famous and accomplished people. However, some people I’d love to meet from history would probably not make for great dinner guests.

Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and Peggy Guggenheim, I think, would make for great dinner guests. I’m not sure that Ted Williams or Emperor Augustus would be very entertaining.

Second, I wouldn’t want to live at any point in the past. By almost every metric, things are better today than they have ever been. I wouldn’t mind visiting the past, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Abdelrahman Wael asks Hey Gary, love the podcast. I’m from Egypt, where sports like baseball and American football aren’t played often, but I have gotten to love football as I could understand it through movies but I can’t do the same with baseball. How do I understand the rules of baseball, and how do I get into it as a non-American. Much love from Cairo.

Abdelrahman, your view of American Football and Baseball is quite common.

Football is easy to grasp the gist of what is happening. Each team tries to march down the field, and if you can get to the other side, you get points. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is most of the game.

Baseball is more complicated. Basically, there are four bases you have to run around without getting out, and you have to go all the way around to score a point, called a run.

There are a lot of obscure rules in baseball as well, many of which are rarely evoked.

What I recommend to learn how the game is played the same way I learned about cricket. I just watched games. When I encountered something I didn’t understand, I looked it up. At first, there will be a lot of things you don’t understand, but over time, it will become less and less.

I’ve done episodes on the history of baseball, but maybe an episode explaining baseball for people who don’t live in baseball countries might be in order.

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Findaer asks, Have you ever gone into a topic for an episode expecting that you know a good bit about it only to realize you were completely wrong as you continued to research it?

The only episode I can say where something like that happened was the episode on the serial killer HH Holmes. I had heard that story that most people heard, but then, as I started researching it, I found that almost everything in the common telling of the story was exaggerated by tabloid newspapers of the era.I eventually had to abandon the episode, and I put it aside for over a year.

That was an exception. Usually, I don’t find that something is totally wrong so much as I find that there is just more to the story. Most historical events either have more nuance or details than most people are aware of.