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Leave a message for the 6th anniversary show!
June is upon us. It is the month of your solstice of choice, depending on your hemisphere.
The month of June comes from the Roman goddess Juno, who was the protector of the Roman state. She was also the queen of the gods, being both the sister and wife of Jupiter, which is in no way creepy.
However, I don’t think she must have been that great of a goddess if she had nothing to do with either questions or answers.
Stay tuned for the 43rd installment of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Before I get into questions, I want to start with a few housekeeping notes. The first is that Everything Everywhere Weekly is now up and available to all tiers on Patreon.
Everything Everywhere Weekly is a weekly recap of the previous week’s episodes with me and writer Joel Hermansen. We give our thoughts on the topics, cover things that didn’t make it into the episode, and just go off on tangents that are somewhat related to the topic.
There are currently five episodes uploaded, and we release new ones every week.
The second housekeeping note is that next month marks the podcast’s sixth anniversary. Instead of doing a question-and-answer episode, I’m going to be turning the episode over to you.
Just like I did for episode 2000, I am going to let you leave a message that can be played on the show. What I’m asking is for you to leave an audio message where you give your name, your favorite episode, and a brief explanation. Please keep it brief, or it might be subject to editing.
As with episode 2000, I have created a page on a site called Speakpipe where you can record and leave your message. A link to the page is available in the show notes and on the podcast website’s front page as well.
With that, let’s start with the first question, which comes from therat_mafia on Discord, who asks, I recently re-watched Back to the Future 3, and something occurred to me that I never considered the last time I watched the movie 20 years ago. Why didn’t Doc Brown distill his own gasoline? Crude oil was relatively accessible, and surely they had access to kerosene for mining lamps. Isn’t oil refining just about heating the oil to a certain temperature?
You are correct that distilling petroleum is really just a function of heating petroleum in the absence of oxygen. Different heat levels produce different types of fuel, such as kerosene, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The process is called fractional distillation.
I think it is fair to assume that Doc Brown would have known that if he was smart enough to discover time travel.
However, I would disagree about the accessibility of oil. According to the movie, Doc Brown traveled back to Hill Valley, California, in 1885. Hill Valley is fictional, but Back to the Future 3 was filmed in Sonora, in the Central Valley, so let’s assume that it is somewhere around there.
The first oil well in California was only drilled in 1876, nine years before Doc arrives in the past. The best information I can find is that several hundred barrels per day were produced in California around 1885.
So he probably could have easily ordered a single barrel of oil and had it shipped by train. Approximately 20 gallons of gasoline can be produced from a barrel of crude petroleum, and the DeLorean had a 13.5-gallon gas tank.
In theory, you could distill gasoline from something akin to an alcohol still, but it might be dangerous and inefficient.
So, yes, that could be done, but it would take time; hijacking a train is much easier and makes for a better story.
Kevin O’Keefe asks Gary as a teacher, I’m constantly struggling over AI. And I teach Second Grade where they’re not yet exposed to it. Yet in 20 years, they clearly will be living in a different world when it comes to learning. There’s so much that we can leverage using this powerful new tool in terms of learning and it being positive yet at the same time it could be a crutch with students and the public at large using it in a way that could erode our cognitive abilities. With all your research into learning for your book and without giving too much away, what do you see as the future of learning? ?
When AI systems first went public, no one was ready for it. Kids found them right away and used them to do their homework and to write papers, before their teachers knew what was happening.
Many teachers have already adjusted for this by returning to in-class essays written in long hand and other means of evaluating students that are AI-proof.
Basically, like other tools, AI can be used to make us better or to make us worse.
Having AI write a paper for you is an example of making us worse. There is nothing that is gained by having AI do this work for you.
However, just like with treadmills or gym equipment, AI can make you stronger if you use it correctly. In fact, I think if used correctly, AI can be the greatest advance in human learning the world has ever seen.
Here is some of the research I’ve been doing for my book…
The question of what is the best way for people to learn has been well known for a while. In 1984, an educational researcher named Benjamin Bloom identified a system of learning that was a full two standard deviations better than regular classroom instruction.
That is an astounding improvement. An average person using this method could perform at the 98th percentile of someone who received normal classroom instruction.
What is this magic method? Individual tutoring. Individual tutoring lets the student learn at their own pace, get all of their questions answered personally, and allows the instructor to teach for mastery, meaning you don’t move on until the student has mastered the subject. There are no Bs or Cs. This isn’t just after-school tutoring. This is full-time personalized instruction.
Various studies have produced different estimates of the benefits of individual instruction, but they all point in the same direction.
There is, of course, a problem with this that might jump out at you immediately. You can’t really scale individual tutoring for thousands or millions of people. Bloom called this the “sigma 2 problem.”
The first real tool we have that can solve the sigma 2 problem is AI. Right now, as I speak, some kids, the bright and curious ones, are figuring out that with AI, YouTube videos, and even podcasts, they can basically speedrun school. They can cover an entire semester-long course in just a few weeks.
If you don’t believe me, try this yourself. Go to your favorite AI program and tell it you want it to tutor you in something you know very little about. Ask it the dumbest questions you have that you might otherwise be embarrassed to ask someone. Ask it to explain it to you like you are 10 or 5 years old if necessary.
AI is now capable of passing the bar and medical board exams, and it is now solving unsolved problems in mathematics. In a recent panel of theoretical physicists, 100% of whom were using AI to assist them in their research.
The current system of schooling isn’t set up for this world.
However, there is a catch to this. You have to want to learn. If you have no desire to learn and are not curious, then all the technology in the world will not be able to help you. There are schools that are experimenting with this currently, and the results so far are extremely promising.
So my advice for a 2nd-grade teacher is to stoke their curiosity and make sure they have the basics of reading and writing. Then in a few years, give them the tools to really allow them to run with their desire to learn.
Jerry Mellon asks Hey, Gary since you’ve traveled the world in the past. Is there a particular airport that was your favorite, and a particular type of aircraft you would rather fly on?
The best airport, without question, is Changi in Singapore. Vancouver also ranks high on my list.
The type of plane is secondary to the type of seat. A business class seat on any plane is better than an economy class seat on any plane.
Landan Shay asks What is the most memorable or interesting conversation you’ve had with a stranger while travelling, never to see them again?
I have had many, many such conversations all over the world. Maybe the most memorable was the night I stayed up drinking vending-machine beer at a hostel in Tokyo with a rap group from Delaware who were there to perform.
Had we both not been there, I probably never would have met these guys otherwise.
Joshua Felty asks Inspired by Memorial Day, have you or anyone in your family history ever served in the military? If so, any interesting stories?
I almost joined the Marines after high school to pay for college, but didn’t end up going that route. I went to the recruiter and got the highest score they had ever seen on the aptitude test, so I had that going for me.
My dad served in the Marines in Vietnam. My grandfather served in the Navy in World War II. My great-grandfather was in the army in WWI.
The best story would probably come from my great-uncle Bob, who served in the Army in the Pacific during WWII. He cut General MacArthur’s hair while in Papua New Guinea.
Findaer on Discord asks, What is something that you’ve heard repeatedly is very difficult to understand but for you it comes rather easily? Conversely, what is something you’ve heard is really easy but you find it rather hard to understand?
The thing I’ve never had a problem with was nuclear physics, that being the mathematics and physics of the nucleus, isotopes, radioactive decay, etc. I took a graduate-level class when I was studying geology, and I aced the course. To me, it was much easier than something like organic chemistry, which is far more complicated.
Maaky on Discord asks, Which book series do you feel is well overdue a film or tv series?
Now that the Dune movies have been released, I can’t say Dune anymore. However, Denis Villneau is going to stop after Dune 3 which covers Dune: Messiah and Children of Dune. However, every Dune fan would really like to see God Emperor of Dune, which takes place 6,000 years after the events of Dune.
Even if Denis Villeneuve doesn’t want to direct it, I hope he would at least produce it and give the world the same feel as the first films.
I’ll also put in an argument for a faithful adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. The Apple TV series really shares nothing other than the name at this point, and can’t even be called an adaptation.
Richard Welsher asks Every time I travel I feel like I have forgotten to pack something. Forgetting about something like a visa or passport, have you ever gone somewhere and forgot “that thing” and then couldn’t get it where you went. For example, a razor or toothbrush and in the desert you couldn’t get either?
This wasn’t really too much of an issue for me because I was traveling full-time and had everything with me all the time. When I checked out from somewhere, I always did a basic check of the important things: wallet, passport, camera, computer, phone, etc.
One thing you quickly learn when traveling is that you can get almost anything you need when you are on the road.
VladSander from Discord asks, Hey, Gary. Recently, there was a Meteor that reportedly exploded off the Massachusetts coast. Could it have been something similar to the Tunguska event?
No, it wasn’t nearly as big. It was a daytime fireball, which is quite rare, and it was notable for that reason, but it was nothing on the scale of the Tunguska Event, which was basically the power of a 10 to 15 megaton nuclear weapon.
It was probably closer or smaller to the Chelyabinsk meteor which landed in Russia in 2013. It broke windows and set off car alarms, but didn’t kill anyone, although there were a lot of minor injuries from the debris.
The last question comes from sooner on Discord who asks Gary, can you see yourself in 5 years? If so, are you still doing this podcast or will you have turned the show over to another host and entered new opportunities?
Let me put it very bluntly: I got a really good thing going here. I’m able to research, write, and talk about whatever I want. It took a while to get the show off the ground, but now that it’s going, I have no plans on stopping.
I have no intention of having someone else host the show. Maybe if I were hospitalized or something and I physically couldn’t do it, I might get someone to step in temporarily, but the actual recording of the show is the easiest part of the entire process.
Now that I have some writers helping me, it has taken a load off my shoulders and made continuing the show much more sustainable. Editing an episode takes much less time than writing and researching a full episode from scratch.
I might expand what I’m doing. I’ve considered doing live shows or expanding into another show, but I see no reason to stop doing this. You have to do something.
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.
