Questions and Answers: Volume 38

Podcast Transcript

January is upon us, the month that honors the Roman god Janus, the god of two faces.

One face looked forward, and the other looked back. Janus was the god of beginning and ending wars. He was also the god of doors and bridges.

…and while I have absolutely no proof of this whatsoever, I also think that his two faces would have provided both questions and answers.

Stay tuned for Questions and Answers: Volume 38 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before I start, let me give a big shout to listener Jenna Hayes, who appeared on the December 31st episode of Jeopardy! And gave this podcast a shout-out!

Well done, congratulations on your appearance, and, of course, a big thank you for mentioning the podcast as part of your preparations for the show.

The first question comes from Dianna Meade on Patreon. She asks, I have loved your look-backs on the past centuries, and these will end after episode 2025. Will there be anything like this in the future?

I have received many different questions this month, all asking basically the same thing, and I’ll use Dianna’s question because she is a Patron supporter.

Membership has its privileges.

The answer is, yes, I am planning something; however, the current series is going to end in 2025 because that is, for all practical purposes, the present.

I am not going to predict what the world will be like in 2050 because that would just be making stuff up, and I have no clue how to predict the future.

That being said, I started the current series on episode 1500, and there is a lot of history that happened before that, so there will be episodes covering earlier eras.

You will just have to stay tuned.

Max S from the Discord server asks, Is Spain the only country to have reached out about ads? I always appreciate those episodes as they help build my knowledge about a specific topic. How did that relationship come to be? Is there a country that you’re surprised to have listeners from?

Every advertiser whose ad I read has reached out in some way.

However, the relationship with Spain is special. They were the very first advertiser for the show. In fact, they reached out to me very early on in the show to ask how we could work together.

My relationship with Spain goes back to 2010. I had been traveling around the world for 3 years and had grown my travel blog to a pretty good size at the time. A representative from the Valencia Tourism board, shout out to Joantxo if you are listening, reached out to me and asked if I would speak at a conference they were holding on tourism and the internet.

It was the first time anyone in the tourism industry, anywhere in the world, reached out to me.

Since then, I’ve returned to Spain many, many times.

Despite all my contacts in the travel and tourism industry, Spain has been the only destination that has truly grasped the power of podcasting.

As far as a country I’m surprised to have listeners from, that would have to be Eritrea.

Kelli Kerns Brockington from the Facebook group asks, How do you keep your voice & throat healthy while talking up to 20 – 25 min per episode?

Very easy. I don’t talk for most of the day.

It isn’t that I’m trying to protect my voice, its just that I live alone and I’m not talking to anyone most of the time. I will literally go some days without seeing another human and just be working on the next show.

Someone like a teacher who is in front of people talking all day would have far greater issues with their voice than I ever would.

Barb Grass-Miller from the Facebook group asks, Is there a destination in the U.S. that you haven’t visited but you’ve always wanted to go?

There are many places I haven’t been, but at the top of my list are the remaining national parks I haven’t visited.

I’ve visited the vast majority of US national parks, and I was set to finish visiting them back in 2020, but the pandemic changed that.

The remaining parks I have yet to visit are the US Virgin Islands National Park, Big Bend National Park in Texas, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Channel Islands in California, and New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia.

None of these parks is particularly challenging to visit; I just haven’t gotten around to them yet.

Thankfully, I’ve already been to the most difficult-to-visit parks in Alaska and American Samoa.

Deborah Wales on Patreon asks, Which city do you prefer and why: Amsterdam, Paris, or Munich?

I have to take Munich off the list because I haven’t really spent any time there. I just drove through it while on a trip visiting UNESCO World Heritage sites in Bavaria.

Amsterdam is a much more comfortable place to visit as an English speaker. You can get around Amsterdam, and most of the Netherlands, for that matter, just fine using English.

Paris requires a bit more work, not a lot, but there is more to see and explore, I think. If I were to create a list of things I haven’t seen in both cities, my Paris list is probably longer, even though I’ve been to Paris more times than I’ve been to Amsterdam.

Henry Suski from Patreon asks, How much time did you spend with expats or western tourists (from Aus, NZ, Europe, North America) while traveling?

The dirty secret of traveling is that you are going to meet more travelers than locals. If you think about it, this is actually to be expected.

If you are staying at a hotel, a guest house, or a hostel, you are going to interact with other tourists. When you visit tourist sites, it is going to be other tourists who are there.

Depending on where you are traveling, there might be a language issue. Locals who work in a tourist-facing business will see an endless stream of visitors coming and going.

I actually stayed at a hostel once in Minneapolis, which I where I lived for years before I started traveling, and while I was there I mostly interacted with foreign tourists who were staying there…just because they happened to be there.

Alan Massaro on Facebook asks, What is your Favorite historically based film and one you wish they would make?

That is an easy question. The greatest historical movie, and my favorite movie of all time, is Lawrence of Arabia.

Oddly enough, despite my love of the movie and my several visits to Wadi Rum in Jordan, I have yet to do an episode on either TE Lawrence or the Great Arab Revolt.

A great historical movie doesn’t necessarily mean it was accurate. There is always dramatic license taken when adapting history for the screen.

Other favorites of mine include:

Patton
A Man for All Seasons
Cleopatra
A Bridge Too Far
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
The Last Valley
Kingdom of Heaven (the Director’s Cut)

As far as what I would like to see, I think a film on the Battle of Alesia would be really interesting.

Matt Moehring from the Facebook group asks, Was there any legal wrangling when the movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ was released?

Nope. I have been using Everything Everywhere since 2006, the year I registered the Everything-Everywhere.com domain name.

Back in 2010, T-Mobile and Orange Mobile in the UK merged, and their new name was Everything Everywhere.

They actually reached out to me because I think they were more worried about me than I was about them.

In the end, they were in a different business and a different country, so there were no real issues with the name. The same is true of the movie.

If anything, more people have discovered the website and the podcast accidentally in the process of searching for the other brands, so I’d say if anything it was a very small net positive.

Chris Delloiacono on Facebook asks, What is the most extreme or daring adventure or stunt you did during your travels?

I wouldn’t call it a stunt per se, but I did go bungee jumping twice in New Zealand. I did a jump in Queenstown and once off the Auckland Harbor Bridge.

I haven’t been skydiving, and I have no desire to do so.

I’ve been in the water with great white sharks in South Africa, but I was in a cage, and it sounds far more dangerous than it actually was.

I’m not sure I can say I’ve really done anything else I’d call extreme. I’ve done a lot of fun things, but I’m really not an adrenaline junkie.

Tracy Swanson Romig on Facebook asks, You have traveled so much but now you stay home to work on this wonderful podcast. Have you ever thought about a pet? If so, what kind would you want?

Unfortunately, the building I live in doesn’t allow cats or dogs.

The closest I’ve ever come to pets was a huge 175 gallon saltwater coral reef aquarium I had before I started traveling. It was beautiful and really stood out, but it was also a lot of work.

I’ve considered getting a nano reef aquarium, something around 20 gallons or smaller, but haven’t made it a priority.

Currently, the only thing I have are houseplants.

Daniel Thomaschek asks Do you have a favorite metal band to listen to?

I would not say that I’m a heavy metal fan per se. I listened to Metallica and Black Sabbath in high school, but I actually listened to Black Sabbath coming from a blues direction, not a metal direction.

There are two bands I have a soft spot for, and again, I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of them per se.

The first is Rhapsody of Fire. Wikipedia calls them an Italian symphonic power metal band.

I discovered them in the weirdest way possible. Sometime, about 20 years ago, I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. When I woke up, I don’t even remember the channel it was on, I remember seeing a flaming skull on the screen.

It was a music video that also had Christopher Lee in it, who played Saruman in The Lord of the Rings movies. The song was Unholy Warcry, and the Band was Rhapsody, now known as Rhapsody of Fire due to a trademark conflict.

The other band is the Japanese band Baby Metal. It is a cross between a cutsie Japanese Kawaii band and heavy metal. It sounds ridiculous at first, but it actually works.

Markus Brütsch asks , Gary, when you set out to travel the world (like a high-class bum ? ), what logic did you use for your destination countries and places? Alphabetical? Bucketlist? Ranking World Heritage ranking? Throw of a dice? Thank you for your good work!

When I first started, my plan was pretty simple. I went west. I crossed the Pacific Ocean and jumped from island to island as best I could. I never really planned more than a week or two ahead of time.

It took me most of 2007 to cross the Pacific. When I got to South Korea I began going south until I got to Australia.

After a few years, my travels became more opportunistic. I’d go places where I was invited, or I’d manage to go somewhere for a conference and then take side trips in the region.

The final question comes from Richard Short who asks When did North American people begin to speak in a distinctly North American accent. In other words, Gary, when did your voice, that we all know and love, historically evolve into how we hear you now.

Basically, the evolution of the North American English accent began almost immediately once people arrived and were separated from England.

I should note that there isn’t one single accent. There are multiple accents that can be found across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.

That being said, for the most part, there has been less diversity in accents in North America than there has been in the UK, where towns just 20 miles apart might speak with very different accents.

Many of the North American accent features are actually elements of 17th and 18th-century accents from England, which died out over there, but remained here. In particular, the pronunciation of the letter ‘r’.

This is probably a subject for a full episode, but there are some places, like Smith Island, Maryland, which speak an accent that is considered to be the closest accent to what might have been spoken in Elizabethan England.

This is not just an English thing. Once populations are separated, changes start to occur. That is why French spoken in Quebec is spoken with a very different accent from French spoken in France, and why there are so many different Spanish accents in the Americas.

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 Discord server, because that’s where I announce it.