Questions and Answers: Volume 31

Podcast Transcript

The month of June comes from the Latin word Iunius, which is derived from the Roman goddess Juno.

Juno was the queen of the Roman gods and was the goddess of marriage, love, and childbirth. Despite her domestic associations, she was often depicted ready for battle, holding a shield and a spear.

While there is no evidence to support it whatsoever, I think Juno also might have been the Roman goddess of questions and answers.

Stay tuned for the June installment of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Let’s jump right into the first question.

Alice Johnson asks, You talk a lot about good emperors and bad emperors. You allude to what you consider a good leader. Could you expound? Keeps his people safe? Prosperous? Oversees justice to a broad segment of his people? Unity? The goodwill of the people. Something else?

Alice, this is an excellent question.

The bad emperors are, I think, very easy to identify. They were often crazy, cruel, and hedonistic. They spent an incredible amount of money on themselves on palaces and parties; they delusionally referred to themselves as gods or gladiators, and they often meted out barbaric punishments for the most trivial things.

Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, and Egalabus checked most of these boxes.

The good emperors were the opposite. They were rational, reasonable, and fair. For the most part, they kept the empire at peace, or at least, defended it from invasion along the frontiers. For the most part, they didn’t expand the empire very much, as most of that had been done by the time they came to power.

The good emperors tended to have longer reigns, and many of the more forgettable emperors had rather short reigns.

While good and bad are obviously subjective, most historians largely agree on who the good and bad emperors were.

Christian Long asks, Given your origins in a relatively safe country when it comes to food and water, I am curious how you have fared throughout your extensive travels with the food and water in those exotic countries. Did you experience significant food allergies or poisoning in your travels? And what advice would you give travelers visiting countries where the standard food and water could prove a bit dangerous for those who have overly westernized digestive systems?

To be totally honest with you, Christian, this is something I never worried about or even gave much thought to during my travels. I’ve met hundreds of other extreme travelers, and I don’t recall the topic ever even coming up in that community.

The only time this would be an issue is if you are drinking unfiltered water directly from the tap, which is something I never did. If you drink bottled water, this really isn’t much of a problem.

No matter where you travel to, I’ve read that your gut microbiome will change within 48 hours of arriving somewhere. To be sure, some places will affect you more than others. I think there is a lot of truth to that.

Because I traveled so frequently, I believe that my body was more adapted to such changes. I was rarely affected by food or water issues.

The only time that I think I had food poisoning was in Kuala Lumpur after I ate at a Kenny Rogers Roasters.

I’m not going to say my experience will be like everyone else’s, but it was never something I gave much thought to.

Chip Thomas asks, At the end of each episode. You are always careful to give your production staff credit. You are well-known for doing your own writing and research. What is left in production? Editing? Uploading?

The short answer is that the show producers are just people who support the show at the highest tier on Patreon. They do not play any active role in the production of the show.

As of right now, I do everything on every episode and I have done so since the first episode.

Dan Last asks, I found this podcast through The Amateur Traveler Podcast a few years back. It sounds like you and Chris know each other professionally, but are you friends in real life? How did you meet? Keep up the great work, guys! Dan from Cleveland, OH.

Yes, I’ve known Chris for quite a while. We were co-hosts of a podcast called This Week in Travel for 11 years. I’ve lost count of the number of countries that we’ve met each other in.

I first met Chris when I started listening to Amateur Traveler when I was traveling. I contacted him and was a guest on the show for the first time when I talked about Micronesia. I recorded the show from an internet cafe in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

We met each other in person at a travel blog conference in 2009 in Chicago.

I recently had the pleasure of inducting Chris into the Podcasting Hall of Fame earlier this year in Florida.

Will Raber asks Have you considered adding video to your podcasts?

Yes. In fact, I’ve considered it before I even released the first episode. However, given that I’m hosting a daily show, to produce video, I’d need to hire someone to handle the video production. What I’m doing right now is already a full-time job, and there really isn’t time for me to add that to my plate….and quite frankly, I know nothing about video.

There are a host of reasons why I gave the audio podcast priority. YouTube takes a much larger cut, and you have to constantly be adapting to the YouTube algorithm….that is on top of the extra work that video requires.

Nick Hollfelder asks, With all the places to live and complete freedom to choose where. Why did you choose to come back to your hometown in Wisconsin?

This is a really good question, Nick. I was actually living in Minneapolis as early as 2020. I had also been living in the Twin Cities for years before I started traveling, as that was where I had attended college and launched several businesses.

I considered many places to live. One of the conclusions I came to was that large cities are, for the most part, just not worth it anymore.

Cities played an important function for thousands of years. There were many trades that were much easier to ply if you were around a lot of people. As the world industrialized, jobs were available in factories, which required a lot of people living in proximity.

In some industries, you just had to live in a certain area to take part in it. If you wanted to be in the motion picture business, you had to live in Los Angeles. If you wanted to work in publishing or finance, you pretty much had to live in New York.

Technically, the internet, and socially, the pandemic, changed everything. We can just as easily communicate remotely as we can in person.

The city I live in isn’t huge; it has about 80,000 people, but it isn’t tiny either. We have multiple restaurants of almost every type of cuisine you can think of, at a quality level that is on a par with what I’ve experienced in cities around the world.

I have a fiber internet connection. There is an Amazon fulfillment center on the edge of town.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything I’m lacking living here.

While I’m not losing much, I’m gaining a great deal. Prices here are significantly less. I’d probably pay five to ten times more for a similar apartment to the one I live in if I lived in New York City.

There is very little in the way of traffic. Crime is very low. There is almost no threat of natural disasters where I live. There are no hurricanes or earthquakes. I can’t recall there ever being a forest fire. The river I live on has never flooded in recorded history and probably never will, given that it has two large bodies of water on either end with dams that can control the flow.

Tornadoes aren’t even that frequent here. In the event of a drought, there are 15,000 lakes in Wisconsin, with two Great Lakes that surround the state.

People think of the cold, but the dirty secret is that it really doesn’t get that cold. Temperatures can sometimes drop below 0°F, but in many winterers, it never does, and 20°F is more normal.

I also don’t think that this is just a ‘me’ thing. The cost of living in major urban areas in almost every developed country has skyrocketed. This has happened precisely at the same time when the benefits and reasons for living in large cities have decreased, mostly due to the spread of the internet.

Now that Starlink is up and running, the number of places that have become viable has increased even more.

Bhakkawat-Top Bhasipol asks Do you have any advice for debating for a middle student, who just started debating. My daughter Kati has just joined her school’s debate team this year. She is the first member of the Thai Everything Everywhere Daily completionist club.

First, let me congratulate Kati. I do not recall anyone from Thailand being in the completionsit club, so she very well might be the first.

The key to being successful in academic debate is preparation. In American debate, this involves doing a lot of research. No matter what type of debate you do, you need to anticipate what your opponent is going to say in response before the debate round ever starts.

This is usually not difficult to do. Whatever the topic you are debating, there is probably a body of literature where people have spelled out their opposition to whatever argument you are making.

For example, let’s say there are five generally accepted arguments against whatever you are advocating. You then need to prepare your responses to those arguments well in advance.

In this respect, debate is like chess. You make your move, your opponent makes their move, and you respond to their move, and so on.

It is entirely possible that you encounter an argument you weren’t prepared for. In that case, you need to have some generic argument or position you can fall back on, which you can apply to almost anything. This isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing, and at least you won’t be taken totally by surprise.

Dog on a Swing from the Discord server asks, Gary – I know you have an extensive movie collection at home, but what do you think the future of Cinema is? How can the box office retain (or potentially grow) its audience as more and more people don’t see the value in attending a movie in person? More experiences? Cheaper tickets? What are your thoughts?

I have to admit, I don’t see a very bright future for theaters. Movies have gotten more expensive, while televisions have gotten larger, cheaper, and better.

I have a 75”, 4k television with HDR and Dolby Atmos. It cost me less than what I paid over 25 years ago for a CRT television that was heavier, with a smaller screen, and lower resolution.

More and more people seem to only be going to the theater for large blockbusters or epic films that really play well on a large screen. Personally, I don’t think I’ve been to a theater in over two years.

I’d rather buy the physical media, which doesn’t cost that much more than buying a movie ticket, have the film forever, and watch it from the comfort of my home on a system that is as good or better.

I’m not saying I’ll never set foot in a movie theater, but the circumstances under which I’d do so are few.

GisselleT asks, Have you ever been to El Salvador? Will you do an episode on each of the Central American countries individually?

Yes, I have been to El Salvador. I visited San Salvador and Suchitoto. I probably will be doing more episodes on individual countries in the region in the future.

BardTheGamer from the Discord server asks, With so many episodes about exploration and historical figures known for traveling (Ibn Battuta springs to mind), have you ever thought of taking a trip that mirrors a historical traveler’s trip while using only methods of travel available to them at the time?

Nope. They did what they did during the time they did it. I did what I did during the time I did it. I really have never had any desire to recreate someone else’s journey when I can do my own.

Findaer asks, Since you’ve done a number of episodes on fairly complex topics, did you hit an “Ah ha!” moment for some of the bigger ones like nuclear physics or chemistry, or was it more of a gradual understanding? Do you have any favorite “Ah ha!” moments?

There are several examples, but one of the best is probably trigonometry.

I took a trigonometry class in high school, and all of the trigonometric functions were just given to us as the ratios of triangle sides. We had to learn it through rote memorization, and it was never explained exactly why they were important or what the relevance of any of it was. None of it ever stuck with me.

Later in college, I had a professor explain the same thing, but this time they did it using a unit circle. Everything instantly clicked.

From that point, I didn’t need to memorize anything, because I could figure it out by knowing the unit circle…and the end points on the sine and cosine graph. From that, it was easy to know what trig function to use where, and most importantly, why.

I had a similar moment with ternary diagrams in geology.

For most things, you might have to hear it several times, and in several different ways, before something sinks in. For kids in school today, YouTube is an amazing resource precisely because if they don’t understand something, they can probably find a dozen people who all might explain it a bit differently.

It is also why I don’t feel bad about encore episodes. Even if you did listen to the original episode, hearing it again after a year is probably going to make something sink in that didn’t at first.

The final question comes from Geronimo Ritcheson, who asks I noticed on Spotify how you can mark episodes as finished without listening to them. Would you be concerned that this may be used to falsely claim membership in the Completionist’s Club?

Just to be clear, the Completionist Club is on the honor system. I do not check, and there is no way to check, if someone has actually listened to every episode.

I can see no reason why anyone would have any incentive to lie about something like this, and if they did, they are only cheating themselves.

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.