Questions and Answers: Volume 34

Podcast Transcript

September is upon us. It means going back to school and the autumnal equinox.

The days get shorter in the north and longer in the south.

The name September means sevenths, even though it is now the 9th month of the year.

Most importantly, it is the time when you have questions and I have answers.

Stay tuned for the 34th installment of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That concludes this month’s Q&A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month’s show, you have to join the Facebook group or the Discord server, because that’s where I announce it.