Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 10

Starting point is 00:00:00 Every day in most countries of the Westminster system of Parliament, whenever Parliament is in session, there's a period known as question time. During this time, any member of Parliament may ask questions of the government's ministers. As with Parliament, this podcast also has a question time, and it occurs once every month. Stay tuned for Questions and Answers Volume 10 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? Throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to, uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. Let's jump right into the questions. John Higam asks, what counts as visiting a country?

Starting point is 00:01:07 My litmus test is, did I spend the night? By that measure, I've been to 51 countries, but I've spent quite a bit of time in Vatican City. And unless you know the right people, you're not. spending the night? Does that count as a country visit? Or I once spent several hours on a tour along the Wadde's in Oman but did not stay the night. Is that a visit? What's your standard for a visit? John, this is a good question, and one that comes up quite often in various travel communities. I understand why people use a stay overnight as a standard, but it's one that I do not subscribe to.

Starting point is 00:01:38 Let me explain. Back in 2007, I visited Macau. I took the very first ferry in the morning from Hong Hong to Macau and I spent a full day in Macau. I walked all over the island. I explored all the major attractions. I had three meals there and I took the last ferry back from Macau in the evening. I didn't stay overnight, but I think I absolutely visited Macau. Consider this compared to someone who flies into Macau, gets a room in an airport hotel, sleeps, wakes up the next morning, and goes directly to the airport to leave. Most of their time in Macau was actually spent unconscious in a closed room. They didn't see or experience anything, yet they technically spent a night in Macau. To me, visiting a place involves doing and seeing things, not being holed up in a room

Starting point is 00:02:23 unconscious. So what constitutes a visit is going to vary depending on what you're visiting. So I would say you have absolutely visited Vatican City. It's the smallest country in the world. If you've been inside St. Peter's and the Vatican Museum, you've literally explored more of the country on a percentage basis than you probably have for any other country. I'm not sure why being asleep in a closed room would make your experience any more meaningful. On the other side of the coin, a few years ago, I spoke at a conference on the island of Hainan in China. I was at a resort hotel for several days, but I can't say I really saw anything beyond the hotel. And that's the only time I have been to the People's Republic of China proper, not including the special administrative regions.

Starting point is 00:03:08 Have I visited China? Well, I guess technically. yes, but have I really visited China? No, I don't think so. Not really. I think trying to force a rule for every country doesn't make sense because every country is different. I literally walked across the entire country of Monaco, but I didn't spend the evening there because I was staying in Nice. The criteria I use is, was it a meaningful visit? And that is always going to vary from person to person and place to place. Fabio Fidnazah asks, are you into cooking? While I could answer this question with a simple yes or no, the actual answer is a bit more involved. From about 2010, when I started traveling full-time to about 2020, when the pandemic started,

Starting point is 00:03:51 I rarely cooked a meal for myself. I didn't have a kitchen to cook in or one to store food. And even when I was staying someplace like a hostel that did have a kitchen, I didn't find the idea of storing food in a communal refrigerator and waiting in line to use pods and pans to be very appealing. Especially when I could go just get a cheap, decent meal somewhere nearby. When I did finally get a place that I could use as a home base, I kept doing what I had been doing for years. I ate out pretty much every single meal. Eventually, I slowly started preparing my own food, but I was doing it with like a George Foreman grill.

Starting point is 00:04:26 George Foreman, great boxer, one of the greatest heavy weights of all time. However, I found the grill to be horrible. Eventually, I got to a point where I was making almost all of my meals at home, and I was becoming more adventurous with what I was making. I had been working on particular recipes, experimenting with them, and working on making incremental improvements. One of the things I've worked on perfecting is the recipe for scotch eggs. Scotch eggs are pretty simple. The first time I made it, I just used the standard recipe.

Starting point is 00:04:52 But with that starting point, I began making incremental improvements. I realized you couldn't just used any hard-boiled egg. You had to have one that was medium-boiled, such that the yolk wasn't hard, but also not runny. And that took me down the rabbit hole of trying to find the perfect eggs, as well as determining the perfect method. of cooking them that could be replicated. I switched from ground pork to a ground pork and ground beef mixture, thank you butcher box, and experimented with seasoning's coatings and other things. I'm currently going through a similar process with crispy pork belly. My first attempt was a solid B-minus. I've also reasonably become a devotee of cast iron. Turns out, a cast-iron pan

Starting point is 00:05:29 that I've been using that my father used to fry fish with is actually 80 to 90 years old, and I had no idea until I researched it. So to answer your question more directly, I wasn't into cooking, but now I kind of am. Trina Wellington DeAnda asks, what's the longest you've been stuck somewhere you didn't plan to be while traveling? Where? What happened? Probably the longest was in 2010. I was stuck in Spain when the volcano when Iceland erupted, which stopped transatlantic flights for five days, and then there were even more delays on top of that, as all the flights that were canceled had to be resolved. It wouldn't have been so bad, but for the fact that my father was in the hospital and I really needed to get back to the U.S. Other than that, when you're traveling full time, you're never

Starting point is 00:06:13 really stuck because you don't never really need to be anywhere. I was once going to visit Tokolau, a small set of islands in the Pacific, but the boat going there was broken. I went to American Samoa, and Tonga came back to Samoa, and the boat was still broken, so I just left and never made it to Togalau. Nick Kapp asks, you may have answered this in some form or another. Visiting the Seven Wonders of the World are on my bucket list, but besides the Seven Wonders of the World, are there seven little known or overlooked wonders that should also be on the list? First, Nick, I assume you're talking about the new seven wonders, not the seven wonders of the ancient world, because there's only one of them still standing, the Great Pyramids.

Starting point is 00:06:52 The short answer is yes. There are a whole bunch of places that are overlooked. A good place to start would be the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. There are currently over 1,100 natural and cultural sites in the world, and I've personally been to over 400 of them. I would say that nine times out of 10, they're worth visiting. Not everything has to be an ancient ruin. There are some incredible sites that are part of the history of the Industrial Revolution, and you can find many of these in Europe, especially in England. And there are also incredible Roman ruins that are almost never mentioned. You can find fantastic sites in southern France, Jordan, Algeria, and Spain. There are also some amazing national parks that almost no one visits. Nahani National Park in

Starting point is 00:07:34 the Northwest Territories of Canada and Torngot Mountains National Park in northern Labrador are two of the greatest parks I have ever visited in my life, and they both get fewer than 1,000 visitors a year. Most people visit places because they know about it. That's why everybody visits the same few places, because they don't know anything else. If you just do a little bit of research, you will find a plethora of great, underappreciated places, almost anywhere you visit. Evan Byrne asks, two-parter. Number one, how are you doing? Evan, I'm doing well.

Starting point is 00:08:08 Number two, when you plan on touring the global clubhouses of the completionist club? Well, not anytime soon. The schedule of researching, writing, and recording a daily podcast doesn't leave much time for exploring the world anymore. For the last three years, the production of this podcast has been a solo endeavor. Every aspect of every episode has been done by me. I'm now in the starting stages of getting help, so maybe at some time in the future I might have the ability to travel again,

Starting point is 00:08:34 but probably not anytime soon. Jimmy A.K. asks over on the Discord server, we take a vacation and line up five or six episodes to play while you're away. Do you still need to upload them each day on the day they're scheduled to play? Or do you get to upload them all at once and set them to their day somehow? I'm just wondering how automated your vacation really is. Stay safe in Puerto Rico. So long as they're already recorded,

Starting point is 00:08:57 which my encore episodes already are, it's actually easy to schedule everything in advance. Recording and scheduling is the easiest part of what I do. The hard part is the research and writing. If I had everything written and ready to go, I could easily record and queue up to weeks or months' worth of shows. But I don't because I have to spend all that time writing and researching. Darren Brown asks, what are your thoughts on the future of AI and its practical application to our lives,

Starting point is 00:09:24 especially through the context of historic technical innovation? There's obviously a potential for huge disruptions in certain fields. We're already seeing this with large language models that can produce well-written answers to questions. One of the best uses currently is in the area of customer support. If there is a set knowledge base of information, using AI as a quick and easy way to get answers from that knowledge base. However, there are still huge problems. People ask me all the time if I've used AI in the creation of this podcast. The truth is, I've tried, but the results have not been very good.

Starting point is 00:09:57 There are very serious factual errors I found in almost every search I've done on chat GPT. As of right now, it can create something that seems impressive, but has no idea if it's right or wrong. And it also doesn't care if it's right or wrong. I've had people suggest I could use an AI rendered voice of myself reading an AI-generated script, and if I did that, it would be a horrible experience for everyone. So as of right now, large language model seemed to work better on a limited data system, not a generalized one, and that's not a bad thing. One of the best applications I've seen for AI has to do with education.

Starting point is 00:10:35 For centuries, it's been known that the best way to teach someone is via individual tutoring. The problem is that tutoring doesn't scale very well. One tutor can at best serve only a few students, and even then it's expensive. However, an AI tutor can provide custom teaching for every person. It can correct particular mistakes that a person makes to help them better understand. Khan Academy is actually doing this online right now. There's also potential in applications that involve analyzing large sets of data. This could be revolutionary for the diagnosis of diseases.

Starting point is 00:11:08 It's hard to know exactly where AI will go because the term is so ambiguous. Everyone is excited about AI right now, but I don't think anything revolutionary has happened recently to justify the excitement. It's just that some tools like chat GPT have been made available to the public. It's become a buzzword that, people are now using to generate interest in their products and inflate their company's value. Many of the fears people have about AI, I think, are unfounded because computers don't have a will. They have no desire other than what they're programmed to do. Computers can do many remarkable things that mimic human intelligence, but ultimately they're not

Starting point is 00:11:46 the same as a human brain. Underneath, at least given how computers currently are today, it's all still Boolean logic. So I'm not too worried about. AI taking over the world. That's all I have for this month. If you have a question you would like to have me answer, just join the Facebook group or the Discord server. The links to both of which you can find in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:12:11 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 10

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