Questions and Answers: Volume 23

Podcast Transcript

Every October in the Northern Hemisphere, leaves on the trees turn color and fall to the ground.

While the leaves turn from green to the bright colors of autumn, listeners’ green questions are also transformed into colorful answers.

Stay tuned for volume number 23 of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Let’s get right into it with the first question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think you’d need to introduce mathematics and science first before you get into engineering. To do that, you’d need to introduce mathematical symbols and probably the base ten system of numbers, and maybe Indo-Arabic numbers as well, to really speed along mathematics.

You’d also have to teach people that the world is made of atoms and the germ theory of disease, as well as generally trying to convince intelligentsia of the period of the scientific method.

To do all that, you’d probably have to demonstrate that these things work, create tools such as lenses, and simple inventions that could be used immediately by people so they would believe you.

Maybe if you could pull that off, and there is no guarantee that you could, you might light a spark that will catch fire several generations after you.

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

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

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

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

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

We can create machines that can ape intelligence, but they are simply providing an output for a given input.

All computers, as they are designed today, are based on boolean logic. They are rapidly undergoing a series of steps and executing a program. If you put in the same inputs, you will get the same outputs. You can add randomness to change the output, but the process is the same.

People are impressed with how large language models can answer questions, but no AI ever asks questions. It doesn’t know if it’s wrong, it doesn’t care if it is wrong, it can’t adapt and learn to correct itself if its wrong. There is no will. There are no desires.

Anything that can be done with an integrated circuit could, in theory, be done with transistors, vacuum tubes, or even on paper. It would be many orders of magnitude slower and inefficient, but it could be done in theory.

Computers and AI will get more impressive, but that doesn’t indicate true thought.

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

Jason Scott asks Have you traced your family genealogy and traveled to the destination where they are from?

I’ve spent a lot of time on ancestry.com, which has a lot of resources. I’ve been able to trace all but two my ancestors back five generations. That would be my great-great-great-great grandparents. They mostly came from Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium.

However, I have one great-great grandmother that had a totally different ancestry. Her ancestors were largely English and Scottish. Some of her ancestors were very early arrivals living in the Plymouth Colony in Massachuttes.

Through her lineage, I’ve been able to link myself to King Robert II of Scotland. He is my 20th great-grandfather.

That might sound impressive, but it really isn’t. When you go back 20 generations, you have 2^20 ancestors from just that generation or 1,048,576 ancestors.

Going the other way, King Robert II probably has millions, if not tens of millions, descendants.

For the majority of my ancestors, there is a huge black hole of information around the time of the 30 years’ war which ravaged northern Europe. Many churches were burned, and the birth, death, and marriage records were all destroyed with them.

Nonato Nonnie Ramirez asks When you were traveling the world at your peak what camera gear did you use?

I started using a Nikon D200, which was the top-of-the-line crop sensor camera at the time. I then upgraded to the D300s when it came out.

I waited for years for Nikon to come out with an upgrade and they never did. Meanwhile, Sony had become a leader in camera innovation. I eventually just completely switched over to Sony and to full frame cameras.

The reason for the switch is that my biggest challenge doing travel photography was low light. I couldn’t use a flash in the vast majority of situations, so I needed a camera that performed well in low light.

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

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

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

That being said, I’ve been to 226 of the 431 units of the National Park Service. Of the 63 sites that have been given a National Park designation, I’ve been to all but six: New River Gorge, Big Bend, Virgin Islands, Channel Islands, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia.

The remaining six are not that hard to visit. It is just a matter of making it a priority and doing it.

Tom Allen asks With the recent surge in disinformation, has your research effort gotten harder?

No, and that is due to the nature of this podcast. As I deal with subjects that are historical or scientific, they are for the most part immune from organized misinformation campaigns.

Most misinformation campaigns are conducted for some purpose. They want to sway public opinion about some current issue or policy.

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

Enio Nery asks, When and where did the Concept of playing Sports to make a living Start? I’ve been meaning to know the answer ever since i’ve learned that the 1st ever person to win at the Original Olympics was a cook now, of course i’ve done my research but i think it would make an Interesting topic

I don’t know if it’s possible to know the first person, but I would say the first people to make a profession out of competitive sports were probably Roman charioteers.

In a previous episode, I covered the life of Gaius Appuleius Diocles. He was the most successful chariot racer in Rome and became one of the wealthiest men in Rome as a result.

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

The advice you give totally depends on the person you are giving the advice to.

Given the cost of college and the potential debt burden, I wouldn’t go into it lightly. People often say that you will make more money if you have a college degree. However, it overlooks all the people who went to college and didn’t graduate yet were still stuck with all the debt.

So, I honestly wouldn’t recommend college unless you are sure you are a good enough student to graduate in four years or less.

I also don’t think that college is wise if you don’t know what you want to do. It is a very expensive attempt to figure things out. I’d recommend traveling for a year as it is much cheaper than college.

The one bit of advice I always give people who are starting out is if you want to ensure long-term success in life to be great at something. It almost doesn’t matter what it is.

Many skills don’t even require a formal education. The editors behind Everything Everywhere All At Once won the Academy Award for editing, and they learned how to do it on YouTube.

Playing video games in your parent’s basement isn’t just a waste. It shows a lack of ambition. There is nothing wrong with playing video games per se, but time spent in the basement doing that could just as easily be spent in self-study learning something.

I’ve made massive career shifts several times in my life. Each time, I threw myself into whatever new thing I was doing. Sometimes, it took a few years of study before I could claim any sort of mastery.

Davan Woolley asks With four years of the podcast and climbing, and all the fact-checking, research, editing have you thought about scaling down to Everything Everywhere Weekly? I’m always amazed at the amount of work and effort that goes into each and every episode.

The short answer is no. The entire premise and format of this podcast is that it is a short-form daily show. Yes, its a lot of work, but I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.

Four years isn’t very long in the big scheme of things, and after a thousand episodes, I’ve got a good system down for doing this.

I know I’ve mentioned it for a long time, but the plan is to hire someone to help out eventually. Getting help will be a much more sustainable solution rather than changing the entire podcast.

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

I mostly listen to classical music and more often than not contemporary classical music. Usually composers like Philip Glass and Max Richter, but also some newer composters like the Polish musician Haina Rani.

That being said, I also have an extremely eclectic taste in music. I have an enormous playlist on Spotify where I dump anything I like. In there, you’ll find everything from big band to hip hop to jazz to country to rock and everything in between. The only thing in common is that it is something I like.

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

That wraps up the questions for this month. If you’d like to ask questions for next month make sure to join the Facebook group or the Discord server, links to both of which are in the show notes.