Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Kevin O’Keefe on Facebook asks, It’s a simple but complex question. In the age of AI how can people make money off of just being curious and learning?

I’m not sure why learning and curiosity are things you need to make money from. Curiosity is, by its nature, something exhibited because you are interested in something. If your goal is just making money, then it isn’t real curiosity. There is certainly nothing wrong with learning something to improve your employability. That being said, I don’t think that AI is cause for doom and gloom, at least not for people who are willing to learn. Artificial Intelligence might very well replace many white-collar jobs that are busywork, but there will always be a need for people who are knowledgeable and learned. Also, AI can be used to turbocharge your learning. Some of the initial research I’m seeing on the use of AI as an educational aide has been simply astounding.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Nina Schmidt on Facebook asks, I am a language teacher. Based on your extensive travels, what do you think are the most important phrases someone should know when visiting a foreign country?

Hello, goodbye, yes, no, please, thank you, excuse me, how much is this, and then basic phrases for getting food, lodging, and transportation. With that, you might not be able to have a conversation, but you will be able to perform basic tourist functions.

Beyond, I’m sure you can think of other scenarios that would probably be worth knowing phrases for.

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The final question comes from Elizabeth Lowe on Patreon, who asks, Gary, I’m very reluctant to become a member of the Completionists’ Club, despite all the impressive benefits. I make quilts, which means I sit at my sewing machine for several hours at a time, and I love immersing myself in your episodes. If I become a Completionist, I’ll only have one episode at a time! I currently have only about 150 episodes to go before I join that elite group, but I’m holding back. Love the podcast, and I’ve gotten several friends hooked on it too. Well, Elizabeth, there is a very simple way to resolve your dilemma. Once you join the completionist club, you can then begin your journey to Elite Platinum status in the club by listening to every episode twice. If you achieve that, then there is the Diamond Ultra status for those who listen to every episode three times. Beyond that, you probably need to seek professional help.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s jump right in. The first question comes from Soren Landblom on the Discord server, who asks: “What’s your dream car, and what’s your dream place to live?

Honestly, this might be hard to believe, but I don’t really have a dream car. I have no fantasies about sports cars, as I think sports cars are incredibly impractical. Even if I won the lottery, I would never buy a car like a Lamborghini. They are expensive, fragile, and you can’t use them anywhere close to their potential, given speed limits. Even cars like BMW or a Mercedes, I can recognize that they are quality cars, but I don’t think I’d ever buy one. They seem more for impressing other people, which I have no desire to do.I drive a Jeep Wrangler. I’ve had nothing but Jeeps since about 1997. They have excellent resale value, are extremely customizable, and there is a community of people surrounding the vehicles. Almost everyone who has a Wrangler waves to anyone else driving one who passes them.

As for where I would live, I’ve been to cities all over the world. Many of them are great places to visit, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to spend the rest of my life there. At this point, I’d rather find a place to build something rather than just move to some city.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Maaky asks, “I’ve recently started listening to the first tranche of episodes you released, and they are seemingly much shorter but nonetheless still very enjoyable and informative. What would you say is the biggest improvement you’ve made over the years to the podcast content or production that we may not have noticed?”

Well, you’ve noticed the biggest change. The length of an average episode has increased significantly since I first launched the show. The average length of a script is 2000 words, and that is the metric I use when writing scripts.

How long that translates to time depends on how fast I talk and other factors.

I think there was an early episode that was only 1200 words long, which I look back on in horror today. The longest episode, I think, was about 2700 words long.

The sound quality on the early episodes wasn’t very good either. That was because I was recording in a horrible location with hardwood floors and a refrigerator running 10 feet away from where I was recording.

The biggest thing is that, having done hundreds and hundreds of episodes, I’m just much better at the process of researching and writing episodes. The time it takes to get an episode out on average is much less than it took when I first started.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Pt asks, “Have you ever thought about ending the podcast or only releasing weekly?”

Nope. This show will remain with this format. If I were to change the format, I’d just launch a new show.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Max S asks, How many takes does the podcast usually take?

I don’t do takes as you are probably thinking of it. I only read through a script once, but I might reread particular paragraphs or sentences multiple times. There have been occasions where I’ve had to reread certain passages, maybe as many as a dozen times, if there are difficult-to-pronounce foreign words. If I had to guess, the longest I’ve done one uninterrupted take was about 5 minutes in length.

The benefit of the system is that by the time I’m done reading the script, I’m done recording the podcast. Turn-around time is actually one of the biggest things I prioritize when producing a daily show.

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You can’t deny me Gary! asks Hey Gary, have you ever been to Tokyo? And if so, what was your experience like? Love the show.

Yes, I have been to Tokyo. I spent several weeks there back in 2007, near the start of my travels. It’s a great city and I’d love to go back to spend more time there and visit many of the places that I didn’t get to visit the first time.

The Lion Cafe is a place I would really like to visit. It is one of the original listening bars in Tokyo.

Also, just for everyone’s reference, if you want to know if I’ve been to a place, you can just go to my website and search. You can also browse my photos, of which I have many 10,000s available online.

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Jim Kohn asks, “Why do you think it took until the late 19th and 20th centuries for medical care to advance when many other areas of science advanced even in the ancient world?”

For starters, there really wasn’t much in the way of scientific insights in the ancient world. Even if they got something right about how something worked, they almost always get it wrong when explaining why it worked.

The 17th and 18th centuries really began advances in systematically understanding physics. Likewise, if you remember back to my episode on John Snow, there was some progress in medical matters in the early 19th century. What often results in big advances is a theory that explains how everything works within a field. Natural selection did that in biology. Plate tectonics did that in geology. The structure of the atom and Newton’s Laws did that in physics.

A similar revolution in genetics took place with the discovery of the structure of DNA. Germ theory was the key that unlocked the big improvements in medicine. Sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines all came from that understanding.

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Kyle MacLea asks Do you have any science questions you’d like to tackle on the show but don’t think you’ll be able to, just because getting enough background to discuss the topic would take too long?

Yes. I’ve been thinking about an episode on the Standard Model for a long time, and also one on the Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics.

Both are difficult to explain without oversimplifying them and doing so in the amount of time allotted for this podcast. There are many other science and math-related topics that I’m thinking about, and I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to some of them

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Clif King asks Since you also host the Respecting the Beer podcast and seem to enjoy a 547 once in a while, what is the most interesting beer or alcoholic beverage you have tried in your travels?

For those of you who don’t know, I’m also the host of another podcast called Respecting the Beer which covers the science, history, culture, and economics of beer and brewing. For those of you who attended the 5th anniversary party, you know the answer is Basque cider.

Basque cider is very hard to find outside of Spain. I had to make a special order to get some here. I’ve seen it in a few specialty liquor stores, but it’s not something that you’ll find in most stores.

My favorite red wine is Argentine Malbec. My favorite white wines are Vino Verde from Portugal and Txakoli from Spain.

I’m not really much of an IPA guy, so I don’t have 547s that often. I prefer lagers, pilsners, and sours for beer. My test for a bartender is to have them make a Bloody Mary. The reason is that there is no set recipe for a Bloody Mary. They can be very good or truly awful.

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Michelle Hebert asks, “Why have there been relatively few episodes about Australia?” Is it because the flights are so blasted long?

No particular reason. I’ve done some and I’ll be doing more. It is a long flight to Australia, but I’ve learned to break up the flight there by stopping along the way in Hawaii or Fiji.

I’ve personally spent over six months in Australia and have been to every state and capital city. There are some more Australia-themed episodes on the list, and I might be getting to some of them soon-ish.

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Jarom Nelson asks Hey, Gary! I drive my daughter to school every weekday, and we listen to EED on the way. She loves your podcast. Her questions are: Who decides how much a dollar is worth in China? And why is school so early? Jarom and Amy from Livermore, CaliforniaFirst, let me say that school starting early is a holdover from when most people lived on farms. There is a fair amount of research that shows students perform better when school starts later, and kids stay out of trouble when the gap between school ending and parents getting home from work is smaller.I have no idea why school starts so early.

Depending on how you define it, there are over 150 different currencies in the world. Most of them have a floating exchange rate. Meaning that how much of it you can get for another currency depends on what the market will bear. Some countries have a peg, usually to the US dollar, because of its status as the world’s reserve currency. They will set an exact amount of dollars that someone can convert their currency for. What China does is somewhere in between. They have a managed float, which means that they will let the market determine the exchange rate, but only within certain parameters. Once the exchange rate goes outside of those boundaries, the Central Bank of China will step in and sell or buy Chinese yuan to keep the exchange rate within the parameters.

I might do a full episode on the subject of exchange rates and foreign currencies.

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Elizabeth Nobles asks Why do we have different names for foreign cities other than what the country itself calls it? For example: Rome/Roma or Moscow/Moskva. Like, why did English speakers meet people from a foreign city called Firenze… and say, “Nah, Imma tell people your from Florence”

This is a very good question, and there is no simple answer. It doesn’t apply to every city. Berlin is just Berlin, but Pari-ee is Paris, Roma is Rome, and Muscova is Moscow.

It’s really just a function of tradition and history.

This isn’t just a thing in English. Other countries do the exact same thing with cities in English-speaking countries. In Spanish, New York and London is Nueva York and Londres, but Milwaukee is just Milwaukee.

There is no simple or universal answer I can give you because the etymology of each city will be different.

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Gareth Morgan asks What is the deal with the Hawaiian forbidden island and how do American laws and rights apply?

The island you are referring to is Niihau.

Ni?ihau is a privately owned Hawaiian island purchased by the Sinclair family in 1864 and still controlled by their descendants, the Robinsons.

It is often called the “Forbidden Island” because access is strictly limited: only Native Hawaiian residents, invited guests, and the owners are allowed. The restriction is meant to preserve traditional Hawaiian culture, language, and way of life, which are still actively practiced there.

It is part of the United States and the State of Hawaii. All of the laws apply. It is simply just private property that happens to be an island. No different than your house being “forbidden” to anyone who might want to walk inside.

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Joshua Felty asks Are you a bookworm? Do you like browsing libraries/bookstores? Do you manage to find time to read what you’re interested in?

From middle school through college, in the pre-Internet days, I spent a LOT of time in libraries. After college, I’d go to Barnes and Noble at least once a week just to browse the books.

With the arrival of the internet, much of what I was looking for I could find online.

When I was traveling, I purchased a Kindle that allowed me to have access to the world’s largest bookstore from almost anywhere on Earth.

Nowadays, I’m shifting back to physical books and physical media in general. I’ve been trying to read and not be in front of a monitor for at least an hour a day

I’ve found that taking that time every day to read and not be online is actually really important.

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Hehehe from the Discord server asks, What are your thoughts on studying abroad? I would guess that you are very pro-get out and explore the world, but does that extend to studying abroad? As a university student, I was thinking for a long time that I wanted to do a semester abroad in Greece or Italy, but after playing with my course load, I found that I could just graduate a semester early and travel the world instead. Do you have any advice, such as it is better to settle down and try to live there, or maybe take your time, explore more things than just one city?

I personally never studied abroad, but I know many people who have. My impression is that those who take a semester abroad almost always use it to party and travel. The classes they take tend to blow off classes to facilitate their party and traveling. If you can graduate a semester early, I’d do it. There is no reason for you to pay tuition so you can go to Europe and spend money on top of that.I think your instinct here is correct. I’d graduate early. Not only will you save money, but if you do go to Europe, you’ll have much more freedom to do what you want and go where you want without having classes and other obligations hanging over your head. As for what you do when you are there, that is up to you. Personally, I’d play it by ear. If you want to stay in one place, then you can do that. If you want to roam around, you can do that too. You really won’t know until you get there and experience things yourself.

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Richard Short asks Loved your episode on mammals of Australia, and all three evolutionary branches of mammals are extant there. A semi-related question. Mammals evolved from reptiles, which evolved from amphibians, which evolved from fish, etc. What will evolve after mammals? What will a new class of animalia look like?

It is impossible to know this. Evolution takes place when creatures adapt to their environment. Adaptions that are successful get passed on, and those that are not successful die out. Mammals weren’t guaranteed to evolve from reptiles. Mammals arose because of the unique set of conditions that existed.

Without knowing what conditions might exist in the future, there is no way to know what sort of adaptations might arise.

Evolution isn’t on a set linear path. Many people think that humans are the natural end result of evolution, and that is not the case. There were countless, improbable things that resulted in the world we see today.

Mammals are pretty adaptable, so it is possible that there isn’t anything new and strange, but rather we just get better adapted and different mammals.

I should also note that mammals didn’t replace reptiles. Many reptile species died off, but reptiles as a whole are still with us.

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GongKing asks, Do you think time travel will ever be invented? How will the grandfather paradox be solved if we indeed invent time travel?

There are all sorts of different theories of time travel that people have thought of via science fiction. If the version of time travel is one that lets you go back in time to any point, then I don’t think that will ever happen because if it were to happen, we’d have evidence of it. There could, theoretically, be a form of time travel where you could go back to a particular point that was established beforehand. So if we made a time travel device, we probably couldn’t go back further than the creation of the time travel device.

That being said, it is entirely possible I’m wrong, and time travelers have already come back in time under controlled circumstances. But if that did happen, the question we have to ask is, why didn’t they kill Baby Hitler?

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Geronimo Ritcheson asks If there was a figure in American political history that you’d most want to meet, who would it be? Conversely, who would you least want to meet?

This is an easy one for me. The person I would most like to meet is Benjamin Franklin. He was a scientist and a philosopher and arguably the most interesting founding father. Not only that, but he clearly knew how to enjoy himself and I think he would be very entertaining to hang out with.

The person I would least want to meet…. that is a list that is very, very long.