How To Do Everything - Carsickness And Traffic Jams

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Ian and Mike look to the skies to help a listener solve her problem with motion sickness. Plus, a survivor of the longest recorded traffic jam in history shares how she got through it.You can email your burning questions to [e-mail] To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait Don't…Tell Me! featuring show outtakes, extended guest interviews, and a chance to play an exclusive WW+ quiz game with Peter! Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org. How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Schuyler Swenson and Heena Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Ellie. What can we help you with? So, as a kid, I remember riding roller coasters. I remember my parents had a Volvo station wagon where the backseat you could face backwards, riding the subway, everything. I never got motion sickness, never got car sick. Now, as I've gotten older, like I'm 26, but I noticed, like, I can't do roller coasters the same. Like, I remember one time going to Disneyland as a kid and doing California screaming like six times. in a row and I could have done more but we had to go to dinner or something and I guess my question is just sort of like is there a way I could build up that stamina again now can't look at my

phone in the car or I feel like I get kind of ill feeling and just sort of like what changed from childhood to now I mean a lot of things but in terms of motion sickness yeah yeah yeah Ellie, I've noticed the same thing. I loved roller coasters when I was a kid, but I recently went to Disney World, and I rode Space Mountain, and I needed two hours to recover. Driving home from the park, I was just leaning my head against the window and moaning. Yeah, and it's, I should point out, this was a work trip, so there were, this wasn't like in the privacy of your own family. This was a work event. Yeah, a co-worker was, like, sitting next to me in the car on the way home, patting my back, but also positioning her body to be out of the way if I threw up.

And I think you left early from Disney World. No, you had to leave. No, but everybody else just kept riding rides, and I just had to stand outside, staring off into the distance. You're just a party pooper. All this is to say, Ellie, I feel your. pain. And I would say, Ellie, things are only going to get worse. That's what I'm worried about. And that's like, I'm still in my 20s, which is where it's like, you know, hangovers. I know we're only going to get worse as I get older motion sickness. There's a lot of stuff that I like, I'm still in. My body's still on the younger side. You still have elasticity in your brain, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. What if we go away to find an answer to this question and what we come back to you with is,

Ellie, enjoy this moment while you can. It's only going to get worse. Ellie, we actually have terrible news. You only have six months. You know who can help with this? Beloved Hollywood superstar Kevin Bacon. Kevin, when you guys were getting ready to shoot Apollo 13, you prepared on the vomit comet, right?

Well, not just preparing. We actually shot on the vomit comet. We shot quite a bit of the movie, because back in those days, you really couldn't recreate weightlessness using DFX, you know, special effect. I mean, you could try to take out a bunch of wires and have people flying around on harnesses like Peter Pan, but it was never going to work very well. Yeah. Yes, after we did the test run on this airplane, Ron came to us and said, Ron Howard, the director said, you know, so we're going to build the sets up on the bomb at Comet and try to shoot stuff up there. Wait, so what do you remember from that?

Tell us about what that experience was like. Well, I'm always grateful for all the crazy experiences that I get to have just by nature of the work that I do, the places that I get to go in the characters and the shoes I get to walk in. But this one was really, really kind of nuts. The KC-135, also known as a bomb comitist, is a plane that NASA uses to simulate no gravity on Earth, which a lot of people think there's such a thing as, you know, an anti-gravity chamber,

but that's literally impossible to do. So what they do is it's a large plane. It flies out over the Gulf of Mexico, and the pilot makes it climb straight up and then straight down. And as you go over the top of what's called the parabola, the centrifugal force balances out with the gravitational pull of the Earth. And so you create weightlessness for 26. seconds. So if you've ever been on a roller coaster and you go over the top of that roller coaster and there's a big drop, you know what that feels like. Your stomach goes up into your brain. And so we went out and once the sets were built up there, we did it 600 times.

600 times? What? Yeah, yeah. We would do 20 in the morning. Then we would break the lunch. Oh yeah, because you need something to barf up later. Exactly. And then we would do 20. in the afternoon. And it was kind of a miracle of, you know, film ingenuity. So, Kevin, that's a pretty stacked cast. Were any of your castmates, could they not handle it? Did any of them have trouble up there? Well, no.

NASA was given us some serious anti-nausea medication. Okay. Which definitely helped. I know that Tom and Bill, you know, the drugs were kind of a drag because, you know, I don't know if you've ever taken an anti-nauzzi medication. Sometimes they work because they sort of, you know, make you sleepy. You know what I mean? Yeah, right, right.

And so to combat that, we also had to take a stimulant. So, like, it was like a combination of two, and you never really knew which one was going to kick in. But one day, both Bill and Tom decided that they were going to cowboy it out and not. um oh yeah and they they were both pretty green there was a uh something that's kind of funny they call it an airman's corsage when you went up now we were in our costumes but everybody else that would go up was required to wear a flight suit and on the chest are two pockets you know with zippers and so you take the vomit bag and you stuff it in there and then you leave it you know, you leave the opening kind of poking out,

and they called it an Airman's corsage. So it's right there. Now, I did, so I didn't, I never, I never threw up. I did get thrown up on. Keep going. Well, okay, so if you can imagine when you're floating, you can't really use things like Dolly Track or whatever. Basically, it was all handheld.

Yeah. Because the cameras would float. And so the camera met the guy was operating, And it was a, you know, a shot of me, and I'm watching him, and all of a sudden he sort of pulls his head across out from behind the lens and pews. Now, the thing about that is that it's floating, too. Yeah. There was nothing for me to do about it. I just saw the pew coming and just, you know, tried to kind of roll out of the way, but it came right down.

Well, Kevin, we'll let you go, but I guess, do you, having been through all of this, these, 600 flights. Do you have any tips for Ellie? I can tell you one thing, Ellie. We were actually trained in this. On our very first flight, we were told not to swivel our head, not to look from side to side, but to keep your focus straight ahead. They say the same thing about being on a boat, that if you keep your eyes on the horizon, and it'll help with the nausea. So what's funny about that is I remember now, especially on the first few flights,

when we went up and down in the parabolas, they kept us strapped in, like we didn't leave our chairs. It wasn't until we had kind of gotten used to it that we started taking off our seatbelts and started flying around. But the first few flights, you were supposed to just keep your seatbelt on and stay in your chair, chair. And Tom, Hanks was in front of me. And I stared a hole in the back of his head. I just remember the back of his head so well because I was just sitting there, you know,

white knuckling it out in the chair, you know, before I got used to it and just, you know, staring right through him. I could probably draw your picture of the back of Hanks' his head. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for helping Ellie out. Yeah, Ellie. Good luck with that. All right, Ellie, we have another solution for you in case, for some reason, you can't get Tom Hanks to sit in front of you every time you're on a roller coaster. We just read this study in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience that says... We're always reading Frontiers and Human Neuroscience. We just love it. We skimmed a study. in the frontiers of human neuroscience that says listening to soft or joyful music after driving

reduces car sickness by up to 57%. You know who makes soft and joyful music? Me? Kenny G. Well, that research is very interesting. I was going to say, just make sure you're looking out of the window, but I guess there's more to it than that.

You know, okay, so I recorded a song Joy to the World from one of my Christmas records, because if it's joyful, that's going to be the perfect song. And I think that will be a, it'll probably make you feel good. Even in the middle of July, you'll probably enjoy hearing it. Yeah. Is there something, Kenny, in your vast experience that you think is key to making a song joyful? That's a good question.

I don't know, to be honest, I don't know if there's a real thing that makes it joyful. I mean, you could say, well, let's make it up-tempo. Well, that doesn't necessarily, to me, make it joyful. might make it faster. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I wish there was an answer for it, but, you know, I could say, well, if I play a D-sharp, you know, five times in a row, that makes the song joyful, but unfortunately, it doesn't work like that.

Do you have a horn handy there where you could demonstrate for us? I mean, you'd have to give me a few minutes, though, while we're talking. Oh, yeah. Can I get it ready? I didn't, I don't have prepared, but you have to give me a second, okay? We'll give you all the time you need. Well, we can keep talking while we're doing it. I'm going to brush my teeth while we're doing it.

I'm going to brush my teeth while we're talked. Wait, are you serious? Unless I brush my teeth. Wait, what? Okay. Sorry about that. You've got to have clean sacks. Okay, well, now we have a whole new question, yeah.

Is that ritual, or does that actually improve your playing? It doesn't improve my play. It's just, listen, I'm brushing my teeth while I'm talking. This is crazy. That's incredible. What happens is that I don't want any, food particles or anything to get in my saxophone. So I've got to make sure that when I'm blowing it in there, there's no like,

there's no like smell of onions or garlic or any of those kind of things or food particles. We don't want that in a saxophone. I guess it would come back to you the next time you played the saxophone. That wouldn't be, yeah. Well, you could, yeah, you might, like, I'll tell you, I was going to buy the saxophone. Look, I have my saxophone. It's the same one I've had since I was in high school.

It has a serial number. And the serial number equates to, it was, I'll tell you when it was born. My saxophone was born on March 17, 1959. I researched. Wow. Okay, that's my classical. Now, so when they made the saxophone, they also made other saxophones that day, let's say 30 or 40, whatever. And there's a serial number that's two, two more than mine.

It's on the same day. Same day in 1959 in Paris, saw the saxophone, not knowing that it was the same day. I just saw the saxophone, and it was in this green rubber case. Now, I remember mine came in a green rubber case when I first got, and I opened it up and said, oh, my gosh, this looks like my faxophone. Smote like smoke. Oh. Like I was a smoker. And I could not, I mean, I wanted to buy it because it was like, oh, I could, I could, my, I

Sacks could have a brother, and I couldn't even stand even having it on my fingers. It's stuck. So, all right, so I'm now trying to take my sacks out of the case. Now that my mouth is nice and fresh. You did such an impressive job of talking to us and brushing your teeth at the same time. Like, you can also do your circular, you're a circular breather, right? That's something you know how to do? Of course I know how to do.

So you could do all these things and breathe continuously, the whole. whole time. So let's see. All right. So what happens when you put a sax together is the reed has to kind of find itself on the mouty, so it doesn't necessarily play beautifully right off the bat for a minute or two. Okay. So anyway, I've got it out, and I'm just kind of doing.

If I was going to play something like, a minor key would be something like... Okay. So you see, that's kind of sad. Now, we can do something major, so that would be happier. And Ellie, I think this is what you need to listen to when you're feeling carsick. There you go, There you go, Ellie. That'll do it for you. Hey, if you've got a question for us, you can get it to us,

You can get it to us at how to at npr.org. We promise no matter how big or small, we will do everything in our power to address your question. We can do everything in our limited power to help you. Just send us an email at how to at npr.org. It's entirely possible that you are listening to this episode of how to do everything while stuck in traffic on your way somewhere. for Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. It doesn't, what I just said suggested is not currently a happy Thanksgiving. Fair enough. Sorry. Yeah. Well, you've got this Thanksgiving. We can't do anything about the traffic, but we might be able to help make you feel a little better. We read about in

2010, there was a traffic jam in China that lasted 12 days. Li Jajong, you were actually stuck in this traffic jam, right? Yes. We were lucky once. Some of the drivers got stuck there for days. Yeah. Some people got some water from the stream or river, whatever, started having showers on the roadside. Wow. I mean, good for them.

Like, you can't blame them after being trapped in your car for so long. Yes. So what did you end up doing when you were trapped in that traffic jam for so long? Like, how did you guys kill time together? We left Zanadu shortly after early lunch. We were in good spirit. My friend Tatiana, she was a diplomat, and she brought Brazilian biscuits and chocolates. So we were happy for a while until we got stuck for hours on the road.

And it was so funny because we were hungry. But the Chinese, you know, Chinese people were very entrepreneurial. And Chinese people also loved food. So on the roadside, you'll see people setting dumplings, selling hot pot, noodle pot. Oh, wow, yeah. And people set up food stores along the roadside. So people selling dumplings and hot pot, people showering with water from the creeks and rivers. Did you see anything else?

Or have you heard other stories of ways people dealt with it? I saw people, the lorry drivers, just took their shirts off. It was hot summer, and they just sit on stones and start playing cards. Why not? Well, based on now your experience with these traffic jams, what do you bring with you now on trips in your car just in case you get stuck? Oh, I always, even without the incident, I always bring food. I have nuts. I have dried fruits. I have not Brazilian, but biscuits.

Sure. Do you have a deck of cards? No, I don't. Okay. Well, that does it for this week's show. What'd you learn, Ian? Why I learned that they actually filmed Apollo 13 in zero gravity, in the vomit coming? Yeah. You don't see that kind of stuff anymore. Now it really is just computer-generated stuff. I feel like if whatever project I was working on, if I knew that people had brought in NASA to fly a space age vehicle, I would feel a lot of added pressure. I think I would blow a lot of takes if I were performing in Apollo 13.

Yeah, it's not funny when you crack and do a funny joke. Let's do it again. We'll just do it again. We've never seen the Apollo 13 bloopers. Tom Hanks, that was hilarious. You just cost us $45 million. I learned that before he plays his instrument, Kenny G. has to brush his teeth. Do you think that that's in Kenny G's rider? Like the only thing in his rider is a brand new toothbrush

and one gallon of aqua fresh. What kind of toothpaste do you use for that? I feel like he could make a lot of money. if he pitched or will be with Kenny G. How to Do Everything is produced by Skyler Swenson and Hina Shravastava.

Technical direction from Lorna White. You can get us your questions at how-to at npr.org. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. Thanks.