Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Abdelrahman Wael asks Gary I’ve been getting into photography and content creation recently. What are some of the biggest tips you can give me?

Content creation generally and photography are two very different things. The rough rule of thumb for content creation is that the more of it you do, the better you get. This is something I’ve experienced firsthand with this podcast and with my photography. I did hundreds of podcast episodes and took tens of thousands of photos to get to a point of competence. As for photography, the main thing I recommend at a meta level is to practice using all the buttons and dials on your camera and to get to know what they do. Know how to adjust your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, and know how each one will affect the image. Depending on your camera, there might be certain setting that you can set to automatic, or at least let the camera determine within certain parameters. Beyond that, you just have to practice. When I was traveling, I had the good fortune to take thousands of images by visiting photogenic places around the world. You need to get out and shoot, and do so in a very deliberate fashion where you are identifying your weaknesses and trying to improve them.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Walt from the Discord server asks, Hi Gary, my wife wants to know – What is your opinion on astrology and how it has evolved over time? Thoughts on the 13th zodiac sign?

Well, I don’t think too much about astrology. As pseudosciences go, it isn’t a very good one. There is no mechanism by which the stars can guide our fortunes. All the horoscopes are different, and astrologers can’t seem to agree on the same predictions or set of principles. Astrology would be very easy to test and to run experiments for, and yet after thousands of years, no validation of it has ever been shown.

Astrology developed from ancient astronomy. The signs of the zodiac were simply a way to divide the heavens into 12 roughly equal parts, which corresponded to the 12 months of the year.

As the zodiac is an entirely arbitrary construction, so would a 13th sign. As far as I can tell, the idea of a 13th zodiac sign is one that was developed in the 1970s.

If you can just invent a new zodiac sign, it sort of goes to show how arbitrary astrology is.

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Laura Hairston asks I’m curious about Olivia Ashe. How did she come to work on EED? She’s done an amazing job, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of her work.

I know a history professor who works at the local university. I told him that I was looking for someone to help, and if he knew any history graduates, to let them know. He spread the word, and Olivia was interested. We talked about it and that was that.

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Curtis Poole asks I love your podcast, Gary! It’s really helped to fill the time during my commute to and from work! My son even asks to put on an episode on our never-ending rides to various practices. I’m curious, what are your top 3 Empires of all time?

That’s easy.– The Empire Strikes Back

– Empire of the Sun

– The Last Emperor

Honorable mention goes to Age of Empires II and Empire Earth.

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Jerry Gardner asks, I know that you have people from all over the world who listen to your podcast. I’m curious, is your podcast just distributed in the English language? Or is there an app or people that translates the podcast into different languages? The podcast is only distributed in English. Overwhelmingly, the people who listen to the podcast live in English-speaking countries: The United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Publishing the show in another language is possible, but it would require a lot of work, and the business case for it isn’t very good.

There are AI tools that will automatically translate the show, but I have no desire to do that.

Hiring someone to do a native translation probably wouldn’t be economical, given how non-English podcast advertising works.

I have heard of some podcasts that do translations, but there aren’t many, and I haven’t heard that they’ve had much success.

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Glenn Folau asks I was watching an MLB game on YT, and there was an infield “fly”, and the team in the field purposefully let the ball drop. It created all sorts of confusion, not only were the players confused, it appears that the umpires and commentators were confused. The runner on third strolled across the home plate, only to be called back to third, and then subsequently awarded the run, which understandably caused a brouhaha between the manager and his players and the umpire. Could you shed some light on this most confusing of rules?

Glen, you are not alone in being confused by the infield fly rule. Most baseball fans don’t really understand it. The premise behind it is simple. Runners on base can’t leave the base until a ball is caught. They have to wait until the ball is caught, and then they run.

If a ball is caught in the outfield, the base runner might have time to advance a base. However, if the ball is a fly ball in the infield, an infielder has an incentive to drop the ball rather than catch it. The runner has to assume that the infielder will catch it, but if he doesn’t catch it, they can actually get a double or maybe even a triple play because the runners are forced to advance.

The infield fly rule takes care of this. If there is an infield fly, the umpire can declare an infield fly, in which case the batter is automatically out. It is equivalent to the ball being caught, and it doesn’t give the infielder the option of dropping the ball on purpose. When the infield fly rule is evoked, the runners are not forced to advance. This is uncommon, but not rare. There are about 2,400 major league baseball games played each year, and it is estimated that the infield fly rule is evoked about 300 times per season on average.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The final question comes from Kevin O’Keef, who asks, and I have edited the question down for length…. I know you will be addressing a lot of this in your book, but to me, you are the ultimate example of someone who loves to learn. I’m not sure if you’ve ever commented on this, but could you let us all know where this foundation of curiosity came from in you and how you ended up continuing to be a lifelong learner? I think this could be instructive for so many young people. They may have enthusiastic parents and teachers out there, but how can the average person ??stay invested and continue to love learning when there’s always another paycheck and another job and another course to get a good grade in…

I wish I could tell you that there is some formula or some secret, but there isn’t.

I think that everyone is initially curious. Children incessantly ask questions about the world. Most kids go through a phase where they are into dinosaurs, astronauts, or other such things.

The key is to let them explore wherever their curiosity takes them and nurture it.

Curiosity is usually stifled in kids in school. They have to do what they are told, not what they are interested in.

The problem is that you can’t quantify curiosity. It isn’t something that can show up in test scores, which is all that really matters for most schools. Curiosity isn’t a result; it is the motivating force that leads to results. Because of this we have a world of people who are not in the slightest bit curious about the world.

Thankfully, if you are listening to this podcast, that is probably not you. This audience is rather self-selecting in that regard, and that is one of the things I like about doing it.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s just jump right into the first question, and I’m going to start this off by addressing a question that many of you asked, so I’m just going to answer all of you at once collectively. You asked what my thoughts were on the recent Micha Parsons trade.

For those of you who do not follow the NFL or perhaps live in a country that doesn’t have American Football, let me briefly explain what happened.

The Dallas Cowboys traded their star defensive end, Micah Parsons, to the Green Bay Packers in exchange for two first-round draft picks in 2026 and 2027, along with long-time Packer defensive tackle Kenny Clark.

Parsons subsequently signed the largest non-quarterback contract in NFL history for four years.

To put it bluntly, this is huge. This is easily the biggest trade in Packers history.

I asked several long-time Packer fans I know what first came to mind when they heard the news, and every single one of them said the exact same thing: Reggie White.

In 1993, Reggie signed as a free agent with the Green Bay Packers and was a huge part of their Super Bowl Championship in 1997. Reggie was the best defensive player in the league at the time and went on to win Defensive Player of the Year with the Packers.

The other player that came to mind was Charles Woodson. He signed with the Packers in 2006 and helped Green Bay win a Super Bowl as well, and also won a Defensive Player of the Year award with the Packers.

Micah Parsons is arguably the top defensive player in the NFL right now. If not, he is most certainly in the top three.

He is in the prime of his career and, absent injuries, is poised to have his peak seasons with the Packers. So far, he is on a trajectory to become a Hall of Famer.

Teams almost never, ever trade such players at this point in their career.

Moreover, the Packers got him for a steal. Kenny Clark had a great career with the Packers, but he’s 30 and had his worst season last year. Two first-round picks won’t mean much, given that they almost certainly are going to be picks in the mid to high 20s, which are nearly second-round picks at that point.

Micah Parsons perfectly fills the biggest hole on the Packers’ roster and does so in the best way possible.

I’ve been watching a lot of videos about the trade over the last few days, and the reaction to the trade has been almost unanimous that this was one of the worst trades in history for the Cowboys.

Time will tell the real impact of the trade, but we’ll have an idea in week one when the Packers play the Lions.

I don’t think they are a shoe-in to win the Super Bowl this year, but I think their odds went up considerably.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Jordan from the Discord Server asks, I’ve been slowly making my way through old episodes, trying to join the completionist club, and in May 2021, you mentioned approaching 500k downloads. How many are you up to now, or are there any other listenership statistics you can share?

Yeah. I just posted it about it on my personal Facebook profile and on Instagram, but the show just passed 50,000,000 total downloads.

Assuming each episode is 12 minutes long, that means there has been a total of 1,141 years of content which has been downloaded. If you took all 50,000,000 downloads and played them all, one after another at normal speed, you would had to have started in the year 884 to have finished today.

Every month the show currently gets approximately 1.5 million downloads which is about 35 years worth of content.

Assuming there is no growth in the show, which I hope isn’t the case, that means in about two years, I should be around the year 1.

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Jesus Chan asks Hi Gary, greetings from South Texas. After hearing your recent episode on Francisco Macias Nguema, and based on current events, I am struck by how many times in history people have followed leaders who turned out to be disastrous dictators. Why do humans continue to follow such figures despite so many examples of the harm they cause? Is it human psychology, social pressures, or something else at play? I don’t want to believe that people are really that foolish, but it seems hard to explain.

Most people aren’t following dictators. They are stuck with dictators.

The path that dictators come to power can be different. Some are popularly elected and then become corrupt over time. Some come to power through a military coup. Some are revolutionary leaders who lose sight of what the original goals of the revolution were all about.

However, once they become dictators, most of them stay in power through similar means.

Staying does not require broad-based popular support. People aren’t stupid. Most of them hate the leaders of their countries.

Dictators stay in power by creating a small class of people who benefit from their rule. They are given positions of power and prestige. They often are corrupt, and a blind eye is turned towards their corruption. They are allowed to enrich themselves, although not as much as the leader.

After a while, the leader and his small group of supporters stay in power for survival. They know if they loosen their grip on power, everything could fall apart quickly. This is exactly what happened to Nicolae Ceau?escu in Romania, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and most recently, Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

One of the things that often brings down a regime is that the dictator threatens someone close to them in their inner circle. This is what happened in Equatorial Guinea.

When dictatorships fall, they often collapse quickly, either through a popular uprising or a coup. All it takes is a general who thinks that he is going to get put up against a firing squad and decides to take action first.

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Richard Short asks, When did prehistory end and history begin? This is a relatively straightforward question to answer. History began with the invention of writing and the recording of history. Before recorded history, what we know is mostly inferred from archaeological evidence. We might know generally how they lived, but we don’t know names or even what a people might have called themselves.

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Alex Borelli asks, What is a place you’ve visited that you’ve discovered doesn’t match the popular perception (dangerous, unfriendly people, etc.)?

There are a lot of places that fit this bill. What most people know about a place comes from the news and the only thing the news reports on is bad news.

Most people don’t realize that life goes on in most places and the day-to-day reality for most people isn’t the worst things they see on the news.

The further away people get from a place, the less they know about it and the more they paint with a broad brush. I remember when there was an ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and people were canceling trips to Cape Town because they were both in Africa.

Sierra Lenoe is closer to London than it is to Cape Town, but people don’t bother to see that level of nuance. They just lump all of Africa together.

Many countries with murder rates, like Honduras, actually just have high murder rates in one city, and even then, just some neighborhoods of the capital city.

The rest of the country doesn’t reflect this high crime rate.

We don’t paint with such a broad brush the more we know about a place. If you live in a big city, you know there are neighborhoods you don’t go to, even if they happen to be near where you live.

That same level of scrutiny is lacking when people view the rest of the world they aren’t as familiar with.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Richard Cruz asks What are some science fiction themes that are now considered engineering challenges vs. theoretical ones? What is the concept of an engineering challenge in this context?

An engineering challenge is a problem where we devise a way to accomplish something, even if it is enormously difficult or expensive.

For example, could we send a manned mission to Mars? We probably do have the technology to do this right now. A great deal of thought has been given to this problem, and we’ve sent numerous robots to the planet. Sending humans would be an engineering challenge.

Sending a probe to the closest star would be a significantly more challenging engineering task. You would probably need a new type of propulsion, such as a nuclear rocket or a solar sail. We’ve never used these methods of propulsion before, but we have an idea of how they could work. We would also need to figure out how to send messages back to Earth.

Something like Star Trek teleportation or traveling via wormholes only has the vaguest theoretical explanations. We aren’t really even sure that it is possible, especially at a large scale. We would have no idea even where to begin with something like this.

We are now past the days of early space exploration. What SpaceX and other companies are now doing is trying to reduce costs. It is working on perfecting the engineering, no longer trying to prove the validity of space flight in theory.

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Kelli Kerns Brockington asks In your travels… is there any place you went where you got sick, either from food or the weather?

Yes. I got really bad food poisoning when I was in Kuala Lumpur, and I think I got it at a Kenny Rogers Roasters.

Beyond that, I’ve been pretty fortunate. I avoided getting sick for the most part. My theory is that constant exposure to new microbes in different places strengthened my immune system. I think I’d be more liable to get sick today if I were to travel than I was 10 years ago.

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Kristen Butlap asks This is selfish, but I’m getting to explore Wisconsin a bit in October- if you could go anywhere (besides McFleischmans, it’s on the list!), where would you go? I’ve only been to Milwaukee and will be leaving from there.

The state has several different regions. In the south, it’s mostly prairie. I’d recommend visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio at Taliesin.

In the southwest along the Mississippi River is an area known as the Driftless Region. This has lots of beautiful bluffs, and there has been talk of making it a National Park, but I doubt if that will ever happen.

Door County, which is the thumb on the eastern side of the state, is the most visited area. It shouldn’t be too bad in October, and you should have great color in the trees.

I’d also recommend going up north and visiting the Northwoods. There are thousands of lakes up there, and it is mostly coniferous forest. I’d go all the way north and try to visit Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Lake Superior.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Robert Casey asks You seem to do a lot of episodes that involve Roman history.

Do you have any special interest in Roman history? Is this something you have studied? What book would you recommend as a good short history of Rome that is also enjoyable to read?

There are several reasons for doing episodes on Roman history. Rome had an outsized impact on the development of the Western world, and perhaps more importantly, we simply know more about it than other ancient cultures.

Even though the vast majority of what was written in Ancient Rome is gone, what survived has given us a rich history of the period. We have Caesar’s commentaries, which are perhaps the oldest and most complete first-person accounts from a leader in the ancient world.

My knowledge of Roman history came from my own independent reading. If you are interested, a good place to start would be Mary Beard’s 2015 book, “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.”

However, there are many, many books going back hundreds of years, including translations of original texts that you can read, most of which are available online for free. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in the late 18th century, is in the public domain, and you can get a print version cheap on Amazon.

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The final question comes from Kevin O’Keefe who asks, How should we be educating our students today to prepare them for a future where a machine will write for them and think for them? This is a seismic shift that our society hasn’t yet figured out. Yes, there have been technological advances like the simple calculator ,where we did not need to do long division ourselves, but when you take away the rigor of thinking for yourself and allow a machine to do that for you, how prepared will our children be for the future?

I think that the jury on AI is still out. To be sure, it can do some incredible things, but lately I’ve been hearing a lot of “where do we go from here” talk surrounding it. That being said, regardless of where it takes us, there is going to be a lot of disruption. Some of it is already happening.

I have a lot to say on the subject of AI and learning. I’m actually working on a book on the future of learning, but don’t hold your breath. It will take a while to finish and publish.

What you’ve probably heard of AI and learning so far has been students giving an assignment to a large language model and then having it complete the assignment or write a full paper.

Clearly, this makes no sense as no one is learning anything. To prevent this from happening in the future, we are going to have to change how we teach.

Our current educational system isn’t designed to teach children in the best way possible. It is designed to teach children at scale. It isn’t for teaching one person; it is for teaching hundreds of people. Many of the things we think of as staples of the educational system, such as written tests and papers, are things that can be evaluated en masse.

I think that there is enormous potential for AI to actually be the teacher. One-on-one instruction has proven to be, hands down, the best way for people to learn. The problem is, you can’t really do that in a school with hundreds or thousands of kids.

Try this yourself. Go to a site like ChatGPT and tell it that you want it to tutor you in some subject. Pick something that you don’t know very well. If you think you aren’t good at math, then have it teach you exponents or logarithms.

It will go through things step by step. Feel free to ask it questions like a five-year-old if you don’t understand it. It will go at your pace and at your level of understanding, because there is no other level when working one-on-one.

How do we evaluate progress in such a way that we can be sure that AI isn’t doing all the work?

One solution will be to require tests or essays to be done on paper or on devices that are not connected to the internet. Some places are doing this already. Another way would be to treat the classroom like a dojo. To advance, you have to demonstrate your ability to a master or a panel of masters, aka teachers. You would have to prove to them via live questions and answers that you are competent and know the subject matter. If you talk to someone and ask questions, you can quickly tell if they know what they are talking about or not. There might be other solutions as well, but what they will all have in common is that it will require a rethinking of how we currently do things.

There is a whole lot more to be said on the subject, but the short of it is the way we’ve done things is going to have to change.

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s get things started with the first question. It comes from Stephen Klettke, who asks, In an earlier episode, you made mention of a time when you were launched off an aircraft carrier. Are you able to elaborate with the full story? Or is it one of those if I tell you, I have to kill you kind of things?

Nope, I don’t have to kill anyone. It is a very straightforward story.

The US Navy has a program where they invite journalists and notable people to visit their aircraft carriers when they are in port or when they are doing training exercises just off the coast.

My friend Jen Leo, who used to be a co-host with me on This Week in Travel and who also lives in San Diego, was invited to visit. After the visit, they asked her if she had any recommendations for people they should invite, and she gave them my name.

In 2015, they contacted me and asked if I would like to visit the USS Harry S Truman when it was conducting exercises off the coast of Norfolk, VA.

I drove down to Norfolk, stopping in Shenandoah National Park along the way.

It was a reasonably small group of us. In addition to myself was the head coach of the Navy Football Team, a former admiral, and a writer for Soldier of Fortune Magazine.

We flew to the carrier on a Grumman C-2 Greyhound, which is a smaller propeller plane designed for delivering supplies to aircraft carriers.

We did a tailhook landing and got the tour of the ship, and even got to stay overnight and had our meals in the galley.

The next day, we left and were launched off the ship on the same plane.

It was an incredible experience. Few people, including the crew of aircraft carriers, ever get to do a carrier landing and catapult launch. I have photos from the visit on my website.

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Eric Dombrowsky asks Very important question here. Is it Austin Oakton, or Austin Okton? I’ve heard both pronunciations in multiple episodes.

Yes, you are correct. When Austin became an Associate producer on Patreon, I had no idea how to pronounce his name. I looked around, gave it to some AI tools to try and get the correct pronunciation, and went with Oakton. What I should have done was just ask him, because despite the research I put into it, I got it wrong.

He sent me a message on Patreon telling me the correct pronunciation was OTT-ken.

I had prerecorded an outro with the wrong pronunciation, and I just haven’t updated it, which I really should do. When I read a review and do a custom outro, I’ve been using the correct pronunciation.

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Chris Armstrong asks, Gary, you strike me as an avid reader. I read many books, but I have switched to an e-reader, simply because my wife didn’t like books piling up. It’s great, but I do buy books every now and then, just to enjoy the paper, the feel, smell, and classic experience. Do you have a preference of old school paper vs e-books? Why or why not? Love the podcast!

Chris, this is an excellent question and I have a bit of a story behind it.

When I starated traveling full time in 2007, there wasn’t much in the way of e-readers. The first Kindle was technically out in 2007, but the first generation wasn’t great.

I would read a lot while traveling because you have a lot of spare time on your hands, but there was a problem. Books are heavy and english language books can be extremely expensive in non-English speaking countries.

I also hated to throw my books away or even leave them at a hotel, so I usually carried them around for far too long and eventually shipped them back home…..which was also expensive.

I eventually broke down and purchased a Kindle and it was truly game changing for travel. It was lightweight and I had the world’s biggest English language bookstore in my pocket.

Just to show how good it was for traveling, in 2014 I was in Cape Town, South Africa to board a ship that would take me to the island of Saint Helena. The ship took five days to get there, and five days to get back, with 8 days on the islands, which didn’t really have internet access at the time.

I was on the ship and it was starting to pull out of port when I realized I had nothing to read on my Kindle. I ran up to the top deck of the ship, got a 3G signal, and downloaded the entire Game of Thrones series in just a few minutes.

More than enough reading to keep me busy for three weeks.

Since I’ve stopped traveling full-time, I will still buy ebooks, but what bothers me is the fact that you don’t really own an ebook. Amazon and other book providers can and have removed access for books that people have “purchased.”Moreover, e-book prices have risen dramatically for some books, and they now cost almost as much as a print book.I’ve begun buying print books again. Ideally, I’d like to be able to buy an all-access book where you can get a print version, a digital version, and an audio version, but the publishing industry still seems stuck in the 20th century.