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January is the first month of the year in the Gregorian calendar. Its name derives from Janus, the Roman God of beginnings and transitions. Janus symbolizes new opportunities and looks forward and backward. It's often associated with new resolutions, fresh starts, and winter in the Northern Hemisphere. While it marks the peak of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. January also represents something else. Questions and Answers Stay tuned as I answer your questions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. After years of fine print contracts and getting ripped off by overpriced wireless providers, if we've learned anything is that there's always a catch. So when I heard that all Mint Mobile wireless plans are $15 a month when you purchase a three month plan on, I thought, what's the catch? Well, there isn't one. Mint Mobile's secret sauce is that they sell wireless services online. They don't have retail stores or salespeople. I recently moved my phone to Mint Mobile and it was super easy. I didn't have to go into a store. And here's the best part. I'm using the exact same cell towers and network that I was using before, along with the exact same phone and same phone number to get this new customer offer and your new three month unlimited wireless plan for just $15 a month. Go to mintmobile.com that's mintmobile.comeed cut your wireless bills to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.comeed $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month new customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabits on unlimited plan. Additional tax fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

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B (2:07)

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The first question comes from Christian Long, who asks, okay, this question has been bugging me for a long time now. Why wwe? I mean, but it is just. But why? First, Christian, I should correct you. It isn't just the wwe. The WWE is the largest wrestling promotion, but there are many other smaller promotions including aew, TNA and a host of small regional promotions around the world. Second, the premise of your question, I'm guessing comes from the fact that you consider professional wrestling to be low Brown, you are probably thinking that as someone who covers so many highbrow subjects on this podcast, how could I possibly be interested in something so mundane as professional wrestling? The answer is that your assumption is wrong. Wrestling isn't low brow entertainment. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is the greatest performance art in the world today. A top tier professional wrestler goes to school to learn their craft and may spend years honing it by performing in front of small crowds in bingo halls. Those who make it to the big time are not only performing on television to an audience of millions of people every week, but they're also performing three to four times a week in front of live crowds with as many as 10 or 15,000 people in an arena. Professional wrestling involves a level of improvisational acting that most professional actors can't copy. And of course the physical requirements are on a par with that of a professional athlete. So if you look down on professional wrestling, and I know a lot of people do, I would suggest that you reconsider it. When it's bad, it can be awful, but when it's good, it can be great. Amy Elizabeth Morrison asks, besides Piltdown man, what were other great hoaxes from history? How far back are there examples of people trying to fool the masses? Well, Amy, there absolutely were hoaxes in history. What was unique about Piltdown man was that it was a scientific hoax. There weren't a lot of them before simply because science wasn't that big of a deal. However, there was an enormous amount of religious fraud. I haven't done an episode on it yet, but many people peddled fake holy relics throughout the Middle Ages. There was an obvious incentive for people to sell them, and there was an incentive for people to buy them. A church with a significant relic could draw pilgrims from far and wide to come and venerate them. Of course, there isn't a way to verify a relic unless it happens to come from a local saint who had some association with the church. And on top of that, there are tons of stories and fables that were undoubtedly made up by people that later became legends. Whether or not you want to call them a hoax, that's up to you. Kyle Kenyon asks, what are some fun rabbit holes to go down historical mysteries, etc. It is literally impossible to answer that question because there are so many. Literally every episode of this podcast can lead you down a rabbit hole if it's something that you're interested in. Just as an example, last night I found myself reading about jerry cans those are the square fuel cans that were debuted during the Second World War. I don't know if I'll ever devote an entire episode to the jerry can, but there's a whole lot more to them than I ever realized. They are incredibly well designed and engineered. You could fill an entire ship with jerry cans filled with fuel and then deliver them to individual vehicles immediately right off the ship. The jerry can is just an example, but I go down rabbit holes like this all the time, which I suppose is why I do this podcast. Everybody has their own interests, and what we're interested in at any given moment will also depend on chance based on what we encounter. Hello Gary, I've always wondered, does cold actually exist as a separate phenomenon, distinct physical entity, or is it just the absence of heat? Could we ever design an instrument to measure cold directly? Or would that just end up measuring the lack of heat like a thermometer does? Jesus. You will be pleased to note that you are not the first person to ask this question. In fact, ancient philosophers were asking this very same question about 2000 years ago, and the answer to your question is really straightforward. Cold is just the absence of heat, full stop. And that is why there is an absolute zero. But there really isn't an absolute hot. Well, there sort of is, but it's a theoretical limit so far beyond what we could measure or experience that for all practical purposes, it's meaningless. Jason Tripp asks, as a devoted Packer fan, where is the most unique place that you've tuned in to watch a game? Do you have any funny stories of trying to watch a game while traveling around the world? Yes, Jason, I actually have a really good one. In January 2012, I was on a ship off the coast of Antarctica. The packers were the defending super bowl champions and had gone 151 during the regular season. On January 15, they were playing the New York Giants in their first round of the playoffs. Watching and listening to the game wasn't an option given where I was, but they did have a computer on board the ship with a very poor and expensive Internet connection. So several times during the course of the game I went to get score updates while the game was in progress sitting on a ship off the coast of Antarctica. Packers ended up losing an embarrassing game. 37:20 Will Raber asks, have you considered posting your podcasts on YouTube? I think the graphics and other visuals would be interesting. Well, will I actually post every episode of this podcast on YouTube, but it's audio only and almost nobody listens to it on YouTube. But it is there doing a proper YouTube channel is something I've always intended to do, but I would need to hire someone to do the video as I already have my hands full researching, writing and recording this podcast Aiden asks, When you take photos during your travels, what type of camera do you use? For example Point and Shoot, slr, dslr, or just a smartphone? My current camera, which I confess I haven't used in a while since I started this podcast, is a Sony A7RII. It's a full frame mirrorless camera. Before that I used a Nikon D200 and a Nikon 3 hundreds. Smartphones weren't really a viable option when I started traveling. I literally began my travels a few months before the iPhone hit the market in 2007. The camera quality on smartphones has gotten pretty good. Now for much of what you might want to use a camera for while traveling, a smartphone is probably good enough for most people. There are some things that you can do to optimize your image quality on a phone, such as saving your images in RAW format instead of using a compressed format such as jpeg. Most newer smartphones have an option that will let you save images in RAW even if the option is hidden. Some third party camera apps make this easier. There are some things you can't do with a smartphone. Action and wildlife photography isn't very good. Low light images are poor on smartphones and and long exposures are difficult. The limits of smartphones for photography are primarily due to their very small sensor size and the fact that the lenses are fixed. If the light is good and you aren't trying to do anything fancy, however, it's probably good enough. Isaac asks, with all the traveling you've done, have you succumbed to any of the pickpocket scam artists? Have you seen any of these teams in action walking around with so much camera gear it seems like one would be targeted. Isaac, this is actually a really good question, and in all the traveling I've done, I have never been the victim of a pickpocket and this is due to a couple of things. For starters, I always carried my wallet in my front pocket, not my back pocket. It's far easier to slip a wallet out of a back pocket as you aren't looking and the pocket isn't as deep. There are other small things I did to make myself a less attractive target. If you have a backpack that has zippers on both sides, don't close the bag by having the zippers meet in the middle on the top. It's very easy to unzip rather have both zippers meet at the bottom on one side. That way to open the bag you have to zip up, not down. Another thing I did was to always have my camera bag attached to myself, so if I sat down somewhere I would put my leg through the shoulder loop of the bag. That makes it more difficult for someone to snatch and grab. Finally, I always use clothing with zippered pockets like pants and shirts from scottevest. I used scottevest clothing all the time when I was on the road. What all of these things have in common is that it makes things more difficult for a pickpocket or a thief. They will always try to pick the easiest target and you just want to make sure that that is not you. Real pickpocketing is actually an art form that's slowly being lost. There are some places, like Rome and Barcelona, where you can still find them en masse, but a lot of street crime now is much less subtle. I've heard of several cases in Bangkok, for example, where purse snatchers would ride past a woman with a purse and just grab it off her shoulder while they were on a scooter that was moving. As for scams, I have been the victim of a few small scale ones early in my travels, but none of them cost me more than about $20. I was in Manila when I fell victim to my first my meter isn't working cab driver routine, and again, I probably pay $20 rather than 5 or 10. One of the things I learned from potential scammers is that they will almost always initiate a conversation with you. If you're just standing on the street and someone starts a conversation with you that requires you to do something, it's probably a scam. Talking to strangers is not a problem, but it usually is when they talk to you. The final question comes from Steve Augustino, who asks, as this podcast has grown, how has your choice of topics evolved? Do you choose fewer U.S. centered topics to accommodate an international audience? What changes do you hope to implement in 2025? Believe it or not, Steve, the percentage of listeners in the United States has actually increased over time, not decreased. A few years ago, the United states compromised about 50% of my audience, and today it's closer to 75%. I'm not consciously considering the audience demographics when selecting shows. My biggest concern is how difficult this episode is going to be to write and how good the episode will be. If there are more episodes dealing with American history, then that's a reflection of me and the stories I come across. More than anything else, I would like to do more episodes on India, China, Africa, Central Asia, etc. And I will be doing more of those in the future. However, that requires me to roll up my sleeves and do more research. I have an episode on the Indus Valley Civilization that I've been wanting to do for a long time, for example, and likewise one on the Mali Empire. The only thing I am consciously doing when selecting episodes is trying not to do the same general topic in a row. With a few exceptions, such as Monster Week that I did around Halloween last year, I try to mix things up. So if someone isn't interested in Roman history, for example, if there's an episode on that, you can be sure that there probably won't be one about that the next day 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, links to both of which are in the show Notes. We currently have over 2,400 people in the Facebook group and over 500 on the Discord server. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Keever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day, and also Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord Server. Links to Everything are in the show Notes.