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Podcast Transcript
May is upon us.
It is the month of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, of autumn in the Southern Hemisphere.
It is the month of May Day, Mother’s Day, as well as Bicycle Month and Haitian Heritage Month.
However, the most important thing about May is that it provides an opportunity for your questions and my answers.
Stay tuned for this month’s question and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Let’s jump right into things with the first question.
It comes from Dan in Australia, who emailed and asked, Hi Gary, with all the research you have done for your podcast, have you ever thought about going on jeopardy? Thanks
Honestly, I have never given any thought to appearing on Jeopardy or any game show. Jeopardy isn’t just a matter of knowing stuff. There is a skill involved that includes properly selecting categories, better, and buzzing in.
Could I become a Jeopardy champion? I think so. But then again, I could just as easily fall totally flat depending on the categories. There are a great many things I know nothing about, including a lot of popular culture.
I’m familiar with Jeopardy, but I’m not a regular watcher. I’ll watch it if it’s on, but I don’t go out of my way to watch it.
Moreover, if you are successful on Jeopardy, you have to record the shows several weeks in advance. I couldn’t do this podcast if I were successful.
Contestants can’t reveal the results beforehand, but if I were running weeks’ worth of encore episodes, everyone would be able to figure out the results.
HC Gamers asks on the Discord server, Gary, hello from Taiwan. Have you ever gone to Taiwan before? If so, what places do you like?
Yes, I have been to Taiwan….twice in fact. I was there in 1999 on one of my first visits outside of North America. I returned there near the start of my full-time travels in 2007.
During that eight-year period of time, Taipei changed dramatically. I can only imagine how much it has changed since I was last there.
I didn’t really get far beyond Taipei in either of my visits. The one place I would recommend people visit is the National Palace Museum.
What many people don’t know is that many of the greatest works of art from Chinese culture reside in Taiwan, not mainland China. They were taken to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war and still remain there today.
I’d like to go back at some point to see how much Taipei has changed and to see the rest of the island.
Michael Porras from the Facebook Group asks, Hi Garry! I’m originally from Costa Rica, and I’m in the process of opening a competionist club here. Have you ever traveled to Costa Rica? Do you plan on making an episode about it? I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Keep up the great work!
Yes, I have been to Costa Rica. I visited there in 2013. In addition to San Jose, I visited Rincon Volcano National Park and Tapanti National Park, both of which are World Heritage Sites.
Costa Rica has really been the shining star of Central America over the last century, as it has managed to avoid many of the problems that have plagued its neighbors, such as revolution and civil war.
Costa Rica will be the subject of its own episode in the future and will certainly get a mention in other episodes. I did an episode on Central America as a region a while back, and I need to revisit the area and do episodes on some of the individual countries.
McKinney from the Discord server asks, Hi Gary, I’ve asked before and will try again because I love food. Since you’ve traveled plenty and ate many types of food – a hypothetical question – if you were on death row, what would you choose as your last meal? No limit on price!
I guess I’d have to go with fugu. The form of Japanese sashimi that comes from the poisonous puffer fish. If it isn’t prepared correctly, it can be highly poisonous and can kill you.
If I’m on death row, there doesn’t seem to be much risk in the proposition. Regardless, if the dish isn’t prepared correctly, I’ll be dead either way, so why not?
It is probably the only time you could have the dish in such a way that it would be a no-risk proposition.
Fernando Díaz on the Facebook group asks, With so much knowledge on so many topics, what do you do with your money? Do you save it in a checking account, Treasury bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, gold… Do you have any simple recipes for what to do with the extra money? Is this a topic for a future episode?
I’m not going to get into the business of giving financial advice, as that is not my job, and I’m not going to get into the details of any specific investments.
That being said, I spend quite a bit of time following economic news at a macro level, and I have a few general rules that I follow.
The biggest thing is to determine large-scale, macroeconomic, technical, or demographic trends. Back in the 90s, I had a front row seat to the early Internet, and everyone at the time knew it was going to be a big deal. The trick was finding the right companies to invest in. There were many absurd companies that received funding, and some that even went public.
The general sentiment about the internet was correct, however, and it outperformed even some of the most optimistic estimates. The companies that did well did extremely well.
There are other trends today that are locked in, in particular, the demographic decline in most countries. This is something that can’t be avoided at this point.
Likewise, there is a vast amount of debt in the world today, and that is going to be impacted by the demographic decline I mentioned.
AI is probably going to be a major technology trend, but I’m not sure who will be the winners or how it is going to impact society.
The point of identifying these big-picture, long-term trends is that it helps narrow down what to invest in and what to avoid. I’m not a big believer in constantly trading. Successful investors like Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett have done extremely well with a buy-and-hold strategy.
If you don’t want to put in that much work to try to identify these trends, you can always just stick your money into an index fund, which is sort of the baseline for investing.
Bairbre N’Cinneide from the Facebook group asks, My father took a barge off the bottom of a lake in Ireland (many years ago) He was sure it would float because rust needed moisture and oxygen. How long would a metal boat survive underwater? Have there been cases of boats being salvaged years after the sinking? The lake in question was in Ireland.
For starters, there is dissolved oxygen in water, so things can absolutely rust at the bottom of a lake.
There are some lakes that are an anoxic environment, but they tend to be rare.
How long a metal boat could last after sinking would depend on the metal used in the boat and the type of water it was in.
The deep ocean has less dissolved oxygen than the surface. The further down you go, the more difficult it is for water to be replenished. Small organic particles will sink to the bottom and oxidize, removing dissolved oxygen from the water.
For the average lake, it isn’t deep enough to have anoxic conditions at the bottom. Some bodies of water, like the Black Sea, are very anoxic and are able to preserve shipwrecks for thousands of years.
Likewise, if it is an aluminum boat, it is going to be more resistant to corrosion than if it is made of iron or steel.
So, without knowing the boat or the lake, it would be impossible to say.
Jerry Gardner from the Facebook group asks, Since the NFL Draft was in your home state of Wisconsin, did you get to go? Maybe a good topic for a future episode would be the history of the NFL draft.
I had a bunch of people basically ask the same question about the draft, so I’m going to try to lump them all together and answer them here.
I have no idea how to evaluate a draft before anyone has actually played a down. I hoped that the Packers would draft a wide receiver and they did in the first round, but beyond that we’ll have to wait and see.
I think there is far too much time and energy put into analyzing the draft. The majority of draft picks never amount to much, and some are outright horrible.
The Packers probably had the worst draft pick in NFL history when they selected Tony Mandrich second in the 1989 draft.
The fact that Mandrich was a total bust wasn’t the bad part so much as the fact that the Packers passed up Barry Sanders, Dion Sanders, and Derrek Thomas, all of whom were Hall of Fame players, to get him.
Green Bay hosted the draft this year because the town is too small to host anything else. While a Super Bowl at Lambeau Field would be amazing, it’s too cold for the NFL ever to do it, and more importantly, there aren’t enough hotel rooms in the community to host everyone.
I, and everyone I know, avoided Green Bay while the draft was being held because it was so busy.
Peter Ertel from the Facebook group assk, Alternative history is fraught with difficulty, exceeding predicting the future. However, if Cesar hadn’t become dictator-for-life, any guesses how Rome might have evolved from there?
My guess, and it is nothing more than a guess, is that Rome would have eventually wound up with some sort of imperial system of government at some point.
The republic was on thin ice when Caesar won the civil war. If it wasn’t him, within the next century, someone would have probably made a move to consolidate power.
The legions had shifted their loyalty from the Republic to their generals.
This is one of the reasons why another civil war happened after Caesar was assassinated.
In such an environment, I think it would just be a matter of time before someone took an army to seize power.
Jordan from the Discord server asks, When you’re making episodes do you start from a clean slate every day (i.e. pick a topic at the start of the day, research, write, record, and publish that night) or do you constantly have several episodes at various states of completion at any given time?
The answer is…..it depends.
Ideally, I know what episodes I’ll be doing days or weeks in advance. Just knowing what the episode will be about is a huge part of the battle.
The actual writing and recording are done the day before an episode airs, but before I start writing, I need to have an idea of what the episode is going to be about and the arc of the episode.
After 1400 unique episodes, I’ve gotten to a point where once I know what the episode is going to be, the actual writing and recording can be done relatively quickly, in a few hours.
There are always a bunch of episodes I’m thinking about and some that I want to do at some point, but I just haven’t figured out how to make the episode make sense yet.
The last question comes from The Wyandotte on the Discord server, who asks, Would you travel to space if space tourism actually becomes a thing?
It depends on what it entails and how much it costs. I can’t see spending my life savings on a 15-minute suborbital flight for a few minutes of weightlessness. That is pretty much the current state of space tourism.
The costs would need to decrease by one to two orders of magnitude to be worth it.
That being said, it is possible that such a thing might happen over the next decade or two. If Starship can fly on a regular basis and it proves to be totally reusable, there is a planned configuration where it could take about 100 people at a time on brief orbital flights.
This would still probably be expensive, but not spend everything you have expensive.
Under that sort of scenario, it would be something that I’d at least consider, that is, of course, assuming that they have proved the safety of the ship at that point with dozens or hundreds of flights.
That wraps up this month’s question-and-answer episode. If you would like to ask a question for next month’s show, please join the Facebook group or the Discord server.
If you want to know what the next episode will be, I post it in both forums the day before.
Links to both of which are in the show notes.