No Stupid Questions - 133. Can You Really Work on an Airplane?

Episode Date: February 5, 2023

Are those travelers on their laptops just showing off? Why does V8 taste better at 35,000 feet? And why won't Angela chat with her seatmate? 

Gravity is so overrated, is it not? I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, how can you get the most out of your flying experience? When you're on an airplane, you behave airplane. Stephen, we have an email from a Stephen, but not you. We have an email from someone who's not you, but also named Stephen.

And here it is. Stephen and Angela, do travelers get any actual work done in airports or on airplanes? Based on my limited observations in airports, they don't. So why do they pretend? I understand this is probably hard to accurately measure, but just look around next time you're at the airport. I drafted this on a Friday while sitting at the Boston Logan International Airport lounge near three people watching shows on their iPads, playing on their phones, and quote-unquote working on their laptop. Whatever they were doing looked highly unproductive and pointless.

Maybe this is just how corporate America works, and I'm too naive. It almost looked like they were peacocking, showing off how important they were by working at the airport. Here's the last part of Stephen's email. I spent the last 14 years, my entire adult life, in the U.S. Army. I guess I've been fortunate in that none of the organizations I've supported have ever required anything of me while traveling except to make my flights and to show up ready to fight, which affords me the highly enjoyable opportunity to sit back and people watch at airports. Regards, Stephen B. There's so many fruitful contradictions in there. Regards, Stephen B. as he says, how important they are by working at the airport. That's an interesting observation to me, because I certainly think he's probably right in some of the cases, but I think that in many other cases. By the way, if you're going to peacock,

usually you try to show off in front of people who you care a little bit about, right? Not like the people who also are taking this flight from Boston Logan. Exactly. So, yeah, I find this to be a really interesting email about airports and airplanes, airline travel, let's call it, and about Stephen himself. I think one big differentiator we should maybe start with is some work is much more portable than other work, right? Yes.

I mean, that's a big conversation going on in the world today about occupational flexibility, not just temporal flexibility. In other words, can I do my work when I want to, but how much of my work can be done someplace other than the typical site? So it sounds like for Stephen, who's been in the army for 14 years, he is mostly an on-site worker. Maybe he's training, maybe he's fighting, as he says. Looking at marketing reports on an Excel which I have done a lot over the years, is probably, I'd say about 60% as good as working in my office. I'm guessing there are others for whom it is 90% as good. Or 120%, right? Because you could be better than you usually are, which is actually probably the case for me and for some people I know. That's hard to believe. In fact, I already register my disbelief. What? Yeah, there's no way. On a flight, what percentage of time,

Stephen, are you working? 100%? 50%? Overall, I probably work about, let's say I work 60% of the time. The remaining 40%, I would say probably half of that is sleeping because I can sleep pretty much anywhere. A gift. And I'm often underslept. And then the other 20%, I would say I would be either reading for pleasure or listening to music with no intent other than being happy and satisfied. And maybe 3% would be, let's say, chatting to a seatmate. My ratios on that would be pretty different. I try to speak to my seatmate like 0%. I know that sounds churlish. And I know there's research, by the way, showing that when you have these unexpected conversations with seatmates, you usually are actually happier and surprised that it was such a wonderful interaction. I know that research and nevertheless,

I want it to be as close to 0% as possible. You just never know. It's like Pandora's box, like the person might be a chatty Cathy. Yeah, but if you wear over the ear noise canceling headphones, which you must if you're going to travel, then you have a built in signaling mechanism for I am now ending the conversation. Right. Then you can pantomime like, I can't hear you. No, no, no, no, no, no. You don't even have to do that. It's like you take out the headphones. You say something like, OK, great talking to you. Got

to get back to work now. That's like closing your door. Just wait for a pause. By the way, I will also say this. I understand your churlish motivation. I do. But I will also say that I have learned a great deal over the years from talking to people I didn't know. I mean, that's what I do for a living, essentially, is talk to people I don't know and ask them questions. You are a journalist. In fact, this show that we invented and had for a couple of years that you were on, this is how we really got to to each other in a tin can 35 000 feet above the earth and i found that if the person told you what they did

and if your immediate response was oh huh tell me something i don't know about that thing you do like i produce porn films i am a rancher. I am a marketing consultant, whatever. I would say nine times out of 10, if I would ask them to tell me something I don't know about what you do, they would take that as both a challenge to tell me something truly interesting. And also just people seem to be flattered by it. Like, oh, this person actually cares about my life a little bit. So I'm not saying that everybody should do that. And in recent years, I talk probably a lot less, but not quite the zero level of Angela Duckworth. Right. 3%. I like your prompt, you know, tell me something I don't know. But the reason I'm not going to ask that is that I mostly want to do something else more. And that is work. Like,

I don't know, this Stephen B., who sent us this email, can't imagine why anybody would work except for if they, A, absolutely are being coerced to, or B, given the opportunity to work in this little tin can 35,000 feet above the Earth's surface, that's what you happily do. I agree with you entirely. And you and I happen to be in that same category of people who really like our work. So I would say to Stephen B., I personally am not a peacock in that regard. I will say this, however. I would argue that it would probably behoove most academic researchers that I know to spend a little bit more time outside their heads in the research. Talking to humans. Yeah, talking to humans.

It's one of the things I love about journalism. It is a commitment device to constantly be seeking out and hearing perspectives that are different from yours. And I just think it's good for the human instrument. The problem with the 3% rule, right? Oh, I'm going to spend 3% of my time on this flight talking to this lovely person from Kansas who's sitting next to me, is that it can become 100%. Listen to you. Listen to that sneer in your voice. That lovely person from Kansas, as if there are no lovely people in Kansas.

I love Kansas. Kansas is great. But look, 100% is what I'm worried about. It's like, you know, I can't say what you say. Like, oh, it's been great talking to you and put on my noise, which I don't real thing is that I can never say to that person next to me, I'm so glad this conversation happened and now it's ending. It has happened to me. Has this not happened to you that you end up spending like four hours in conversation with somebody and you just couldn't find a way out? That's what I'm worried about. I don't have any problem with 3%.

Okay. Here's what astonishes me. You are capable of getting a PhD in psychology. You're capable of writing a book. You're capable of having a family and functioning in all these different ways. And yet you're not capable of saying next to a stranger next to you on an airplane, it's been really nice talking to you. You can't do that? What does that mean you can't do that? I could practice this, right? But you know these Milgram experiments that, of course, everybody's heard of by now.

I was rereading the original Milgram stuff. Actually, Milgram, Stanley Milgram, Yale professor of psychology. This is now, I think, just after World War II, right? He was asking the question, you know, how could it be that Nazi Germany, completely healthy, normal, and kind people would end up killing viciously other people? How does conformity and especially obedience to authority, how does that work? Milgram experiments. You have these passersby who are off the streets of New Haven that Milgram invites in to the lab, and he sets up this experiment where the participant in the experiment, again, just a civilian, you know, nobody sadistic, nobody unwell. They're put into this position where they're asked to be a quote-unquote teacher, and the experimenter says to the teacher, like this other person who

also walked in off the streets of New Haven, I'm randomly assigning them to be the learner. And your job as the teacher is every time that learner makes a mistake, I just want you to like flip a switch on this box here. And the box has increasing amounts of electrical voltage. And that learner is going to experience first extremely mild, almost barely sensible pain all the way up to the last two switches. And they were like fatal, basically. It's not immediately obvious how this is at all related to sitting next to somebody from Kansas on a plane, but I think they're really very similar. In these experiments, two out of three perfectly normal civilians actually shocked other people that they thought were actually being shocked but it's actually an actor to the fatal zone.

Two out of three people. Now, lots of questions have been asked about, like, how can that be? What is going on? And what Milgram said is that, you know, when you're in this social situation, there's just no easy way to, like, break from the script of, like, okay, the experimenter says this experiment must go on. Please continue. And you just have this friction against saying, I'm standing up. I'm going to walk out the door. Nobody walked out the door in those experiments. And I think when I'm in a seat on a plane sitting next to someone from Kansas who's like, oh, my gosh, my second cousin's also from there. I also cannot get up out of my seat, as it were, or say like, yeah, you want this conversation to continue, but I'm putting on my noise-canceling headphones.

I'm like those people in the Milgram experiment. I can't get out. It's a script. And the script is very strong. And I personally don't feel comfortable breaking the script. It's an interesting parallel you draw. I find it to be mostly a fraudulent parallel only because the circumstances are quite different. But I hear you and I believe you.

What I would say is the fact that you use a word like script to describe what it's like to sit next to a stranger on a plane and the fact that you can't break the script. I will say it surprises me because among the other things that you believe in as a human, but also as a psychologist, are things like agency. Like I am the author of my life story. I am the captain of my fate. I am the master of my soul. There you go. And so it does surprise me a little bit that a given person, but especially you, would have such a hard time doing this. We like to think of ourselves as agentic and basically in charge of what we do. But I have recently been thinking about how we

are not the captains of our fate and we are not the masters of our soul. It is the ocean which is carrying us, the winds at our back that are carrying us where we need to go. So not us, but actually our circumstances and my thinking has been influenced by this psychologist I had never heard of. It's a fellow by the name of Roger Barker. Have you heard of Roger Barker? I haven't. So Roger Barker started out as a child psychologist, and he asked the very common-sense question,

why do some children do what they do and other children not? You know, some children are honest and others lie. Some children are kind and others are selfish. So he decided that the most common sense way to tackle this question was just to be observant of children. He wanted to kind of go out of the lab where you're like carefully controlling all of the circumstances. And Roger Barker said, that's hooey. Like you have to go out into the world and just observe people in their natural habitat. So he found a little town,

Oskaloosa, and I think it was Kansas. He convinced the people in this town that they should invite these researchers to just basically embed themselves, kind of like anthropologists tend to do. And he would do things like have his research team with their clipboards and their stopwatches watch a child continuously from the moment of waking and then all the way into the moment of sleeping. And through these meticulous observations, Roger came to the conclusion that really the thing that determined what someone did was the setting, was the situation, was the context. As he put it, when you're at the drugstore, you behave drugstore. And when you're at a faculty meeting, you behave faculty meeting. So, Roger Barker, I think, might say, when you're on an

airplane, you behave airplane. Whatever it is that you think is the script, the proper thing. When I'm in a conversation, Stephen, my understanding is that you think is the script, the proper thing. When I'm in a conversation, Stephen, my understanding is that you hold up your end of the conversation. You don't abruptly end it. And so it's not that we don't have any free will, but I do think if you just pause to consider how much you conform to at least what you think is the script for the situation, you realize it's a lot of the time. I don't disagree with anything you said, and I fully appreciate how much circumstance can dictate behavior. All I'm saying is that I don't feel that the circumstance of sitting next to a stranger

on a plane rises to the level of dictating your behavior in such a way that you would not be able to excuse yourself from that conversation. But I also think that I've tried to talk you into talking to strangers once in a while. You're not ready for that, Angela. I am willing to accept that what makes Angela happy and productive is devoting 100% of her time on an airplane to working. Thank you. Going back to what Stephen was saying, I will say this, the circumstance of where you're trying to do work can really dictate how well you do your work. I don't know about for you, but I know that for me,

there are certain kinds of work that I know I won't do well when I'm in an airport or in an airplane. I think about it as deep focus work. So writing or editing, if I want to be writing or editing successfully, I mostly need to be in a really quiet place like my own office. I think there are a lot of people who do a lot of quote work when they're in transit that they think is really well done work. And then if you go back and look at it, you might see that it's not well done at all. But because we feel we have to communicate and we have to respond to things while we're traveling, we do it so that we can tick the box.

But I think we often don't do it well. So what I would advise anyone is categorize your work and save the work that can be done well in transit and don't try to do the deep focus work that you may need a better environment for. I'm going to partly agree with you. There's this term that actually was invented in psychology. It's called an affordance, that certain situations afford you certain things. They invite you to do certain things, and they allow you to do those activities well, and then others not so well. So, for example, you could argue that the airplane has certain affordances. Now, for you, you would say that is not a place where the affordances invite you to do your best, hardest, deepest work. Another person

might say, oh my gosh, airplanes are the only place where like nobody's interrupting me, nobody's bursting through the door of my office. The fact that it doesn't have great Wi-Fi is terrific because I'm not constantly toggling to my email. So for whatever you're trying to get done, I do think asking yourself like, what would I like to do that's perfect for this behavior setting and these affordances? For me, and I could be delusional because you raised the point that maybe you think you're getting really great work done, but you're not. I think I do some of my best work on airplanes for all the reasons I just said. And your best work is actual thinking and writing and editing, yes?

Yeah, exactly. I think this time is awesome, but it's because for me, the airplane has all these affordances. You're just sitting there. What else is there to do? Still to come on No Stupid Questions, can changes in oxygen levels and air pressure affect your brain? Are you having any cognitive impairment? No, I'm fine.

Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about the challenges of working on airplanes and in airports. So, Angela, one reason you can be productive on planes, maybe, if you don't mind me saying so, you're not the biggest person in the world. You're a little on the petite side. I am 5'1". If, however, you're a larger person, and especially if you're not flying in first or business or economy plus whatever, it is kind of all you can do just to keep your body in its space.

Just existing. Yeah. That's true. I'm small enough, Stephen, that if I take my shoes off, I can like cross my legs. One of the benefits of being an extremely small person. The petite premium, we could call it. Yeah, they should have a petite premium, you know, class. I think that's what economy is, essentially. Now, I will share with you a few things about airplane travel. This is from the Cleveland Clinic, which I think are worth

considering for those people who feel they aren't at Angela Duckworth level in getting a lot of work done. This is from a piece called Six Ways That Airplane Travel Affects Your Body. Number one, raises your stress level. Number two, dehydrates you, exposes you to germs, empties your energy tank, puts stress on your ears, and makes your belly bloated. Your belly bloated? Really? Well, it says the same pressure changes cause the gas inside your stomach and intestines to expand, which is why you may feel bloated.

Here is another piece from BBC Future called How Flying Seriously Messes With Your Mind. of oxygen in passengers' blood between 6 and 25 percent. And with that effect, healthy adults can start to show measurable changes in their memory, their ability to perform calculations and make decisions. So it could be that you think the work you're doing is awesome, but that when you are back at full oxygen levels, it may not be. Now, that may also not be the case. Maybe you're doing your very best work on airplanes. Let me just back you up on that for a second. So the sleep deprivation research is so interesting in that there's nothing so reliable at impairing cognitive function as sleep deprivation. And these experiments are very straightforward, right? You just like restrict the amount of sleep that somebody can have over prolonged periods,

and then you just give them tests and you see how well they do. They think they do great, but they do terribly. And you ask them, like, are you having any cognitive impairment? No, I'm fine. So maybe I'm doing terrible work on airplanes. I just think I'm doing great. It would be interesting to know now that we've had this conversation, if the next time you examine the work you've done on an airplane is up to your actual standards. That's a very good point. I will try to self-monitor, as they say in psychology. I will say this. This goes back to Stephen's point about airports versus airplanes, which is how can all these people be really productive if there's all this chaos going on?

Airports are an interesting environment. We're actually doing a Freakonomics Radio series on airline travel. If you look at the World Airport Awards, which is done by some outfit called Skytrax, only 14 of the top 100 airports in the world are American. I mean, that doesn't sound like such a terrible number, but American airports are not known for being super awesome. They're noisy, they're disorienting. And most of the airports we've built have been during an era when what we were mostly thinking about was airports as sort of bus stations for airplanes. Like a waiting room. The point is to get you in and get you out. We're not here for

entertainment. We're not here for comfort. We're not here to soothe you. And so therefore, we don't need to focus on that. Distribution center. But now there is a big change, especially with the privately owned ones, where they consider an airport much less a place you enter into for just a utility, just to get from one place to the next, but as they like to call it, an experience. One thing that you're seeing is that they treat your senses differently. There's better design, there's better lighting, there's better sound, higher ceilings, there's more art. One of the airports I toured recently had a sensory room, which was a special room, small, designed for people who have sensory issues that may make airline travel very stressful for them.

This may be somebody on the autism spectrum. It may be somebody who has a fear of flying. So this little room actually has a mock-up of an airplane where you can sit in and get to know the controls. It also has this kind of smooth sensory environment where you can just chill out. These new airports also have, I think it's commonly called either the Disney Corridor or the Vegas Corridor, which is to say at Disney or in the Vegas hotels, they build these service routes, which is a hallway where all the work traffic goes, all the delivery

carts and cleaning carts and things like that, so that they're not mixed up in the main traffic with the people. And all of these things are being done in these airports to try to turn the experience more into a pleasurable experience and less into a sensory overload in this place where I'm just spending an hour trying to get from where I am to where I'm going. So I do think that as skeptical as Stephen is, there are enough people, millions of people who want to either be productive in airports or just want to not have it be unpleasant that there's a movement toward changing that. Well, Roger Barker would approve of all this. He said of these behavior settings,

like when you're in the drugstore, you behave drugstore. When you're in the airplane, you behave airplane. He also said that these settings could evolve, that we could, if we wanted to, collectively change a setting. And when you think about changing a behavior setting like an airplane or an airport, Roger said, you have to think of the physical elements. Is there going to be a sensory room? Is there going to be a separate corridor for the dollies and the work trucks? And he also said, you have to think about the social elements, right? Like the scripts and the norms. And of course, it's probably easier to change the physical elements than it is to change the social ones. Yes, but the physical elements certainly have a big influence on the

social ones, right? Exactly, because the physical elements often like signal to you what the social norm is. A trivial example is that like when you see a seat, you just know that, like, oh, you're supposed to sit there. Like, there's a tray. Oh, that's to put stuff on. So I do think that this idea that we could take the behavior setting of the airplane and the airport and change it is interesting. And I think there are always going to be, like, the Angela Duckworths who are hoping

that the behavior setting is going to be very work friendly. Like, please make even more affordances for me to get really high quality work done. Then there's probably gonna be like most of humanity, which is like, yeah, let's change the behavior setting of the airplane and the airport to be more fun. I want to have an enjoyable time there. I think you've just stated very beautifully the dilemma of anyone who does design for a living, which is to say that not all people are the same. And if you want to make a space work for the most number of people possible,

you need to think that through. Even if you are the minority, the person who wants to do nothing but work, you are worth creating an affordance that works for you while realizing that maybe the vast majority of people want to spend their time a little bit differently. Can I ask you, all of us who travel a fair amount have, I think, a hack list of how to do it well. Like pro tips? Pro tips. Can you give me your pro tips? Yeah. Okay. Let's see. First of all, I've gotten really good at flying. You don't even need a plane anymore. You just ascend yourself. No, I haven't gotten

that good. Gravity is so overrated too, is it not? No, I've gotten really good at being an airplane passenger. I always think to myself in advance, what am I going to get done on this flight? If it's a Google Doc, I try to like enable them, make this available offline. But I recently took this flight sitting next to some guy who worked at, you know how Google has like all these different divisions? He worked in the part of Google that makes robots. Wait a minute. How do you know that he worked there? Because I talked to him.

I know I broke my rule. I thought you didn't talk to people on planes. Look to him. I know I broke my rule. I thought you didn't talk to people on planes. Look, here's the exception and how it happened. You said zero percent, Angela. That was aspirational. Do you know what zero means? That was what I would like it to be. That was unclear to me. No, it wasn't descriptive. It was what I'm aiming for. Here's what happened. I'm trying to get on the Wi-Fi on this plane and I can't get it to work. And I'm trying to get on the Wi-Fi on this plane and I can't get it to work. And I'm like restarting my computer, entering my credit card again. And the stewardess says to me, oh, ask the guy who's sitting next to you who she somehow knew was from Google.

And so I did. And this guy was like the maestro. He was like, oh, let me see where we are. Okay, we're flying over Denver. That means they're going to go to this satellite. And suffice to say that he very helpfully helped me get on Wi-Fi. So I was very happy to be sitting next to this guy. And here's what he got me doing on airplanes. He was like, oh, order a V8.

Have you ever heard this? Order V8s when you're on an airplane? I drank V8 for about five years on airplanes without ice, of course. But yes. So tell me where you're going with Order V8s when you're on an airplane? I drank V8 for about five years on airplanes, without ice, of course. But yes. So tell me where you're going with your V8. Well, I don't know if this is why you were drinking V8 on the airplane, but he was like, oh, you know, things are different because I'm no air pressure, but it will taste different to you. It tastes okay on an airplane. Yeah, I know. I'm not a big fan of drinking V8 on the ground, but I ordered it. I was like, all right, I'm letting my I know. I'm not a big fan of drinking V8 on the ground. But I ordered it.

I was like, all right. I'm letting my hair down. I'm like talking to you. I never talk to anybody. But you got me on Wi-Fi. I'm forever grateful. And I don't know whether it was the placebo effect or whatever, but it was a great V8. I was like, this is fantastic.

And I do think there is some research on like tomato juice and the cabin pressure. I don't know how this all works. He probably gave me a lengthy explanation. He was giving me actually, I have to say, lengthy explanations of a lot of things, which I put up with because he got me on Wi-Fi. Since then, I have been ordering V8 with ice, by the way, which is a violation of your rule. I do remember coming across V8 on the list of pro tips for flying years ago when I started to do it a lot. So I actually don't dislike V8 even on the ground, but I'm told that the reason that people do like V8 in the air is because it's sort of substantial and nutritional.

You feel like you're kind of almost having a meal. There you go. And also, our taste buds are quite different in the air than they are on the ground. I have to say, I don't care about the V8. I'm so proud that you actually had a conversation with somebody sitting next to you on a plane and it worked out fine. So I would like to hear from listeners, tell us about a conversation you had with a stranger on a plane and what happened.

Maybe like Angela, you just got some good advice. Maybe you married them. Maybe you went into business together. Maybe you murdered them later. So successful or unsuccessful stories, talking to strangers on planes, use your phone to make a voice memo, do it in a quiet place, try to keep it relatively short and send it to us at NSQ at Freakonomics.com and maybe we will play it in a future show. You know what I want to know? You know how there's this like, is it a myth? Is it a thing? Do people really like in the bathroom?

Have sex in airport bathrooms? I didn't want to say it, but yeah, I wonder if that actually ever happens. I would say if you take the entire fleet of U.S. airplanes for major airlines and lined them all up and you could do some kind of truth serum. You, plane A, has anyone ever had sex in one of your bathrooms? I'm guessing you get a very high hit rate. Yeah. I'm guessing there aren't many planes out there that have not had. That are truly virgin. Yeah.

So to speak. Truly virgin. Maybe that's a better name for an airline then. Yes. Maybe that's what Richard Branson really meant. No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now, here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Angela breaks down the infamous Milgram experiments. She says she thinks they occurred right after World War II, but they actually took place in the 1960s. She also says that the subjects were, quote, passers-by off the streets of New Haven,

since the study took place at Yale. However, the 40 men who participated in the study were found in a slightly more systematic way, through direct mail solicitation and newspaper advertisements. Later, when discussing airport rankings, Stephen says that the airline review site Skytrax included only 14 American airports in its rankings of the top 100 airports in the world. He was referencing the 2021 list. In 2022, only 12 American airports ranked in the top 100. No American airports made it to the top 25. The number one spot was given to Qatar's Hamad International Airport, which also ranked first in 2021. Then, Stephen describes how airports are starting to add separate hallways and tunnels

for service workers. He calls them Disney Quarters or Vegas Quarters. Their official name is Utility Corridors. In Disney parks, they're Disney Utilidors. Supposedly, Walt Disney conceived of them when he passed a Disneyland employee in a cowboy costume in Tomorrowland, the park's futuristic area. Disney's next park, Walt Disney World in Florida, was built on top of a web of tunnels through which staff can travel from one area to another, out of sight of paying guests. Finally, Stephen and Angela wonder why people often think that V8 vegetable juice tastes better on airplanes than it does on the ground.

Researchers from Germany's Fraunhofer Society concluded that people enjoy tomato juice more while flying because human taste and smell receptors are less sensitive at high altitudes, and the low humidity in airplane cabins exacerbates these sensory changes. The result is that airplane passengers may only taste the juice's acidity and saltiness without the earthy flavor. That's it for the fact check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some of your thoughts on last week's episode on how to deal with knowing that so much of the world is suffering. Here's what you said. My dad used to joke that he'd resigned as general

manager of the universe. In retrospect, I think it was his way of keeping from getting overwhelmed by the world's problems. He really cared about the suffering of other people and repeating this little line may have helped him stay focused on doing what he could for the people that were close to him. Hi, I just listened to your episode on is it wrong to enjoy when the world is burning? And I think the flaw in the Bateson's analysis when he did the seminarian students is having somebody homeless and half dead laying in front of them is too big of a thing.

What are you supposed to do? Pick the person up, take them to homeless shelter, clean them up, put them in your house. It's too overwhelming of something to be able to do. But if it were something small, like helping someone cross the street or someone had dropped their purse or their iPad and you gave it back to them, I bet you anything, even if people were in a hurry, it still would have jumped up to a 95% compliance. And that's my answer for what I do when I'm faced with these existential issues, is I do something small within my capability, within my purview, because I can't handle all the big issues.

The world is burning, but I can pick up trash or I can recycle in my area and do my part. That was, respectively, Kirk Mazden and Hesha Abrams. Thanks so much to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts. And remember, we'd still love to hear about a time when you spoke with someone who sat next to you on an airplane. Send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics.com. Let us know your name and whether you'd like to remain anonymous. You might hear your voice on the show. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions,

Stephen and Angela discuss what it takes to become a super-ager, someone who remains both physically and mentally healthy into their 90s and beyond. I mean, that is kind of what happens when Edward Cullen bites your neck, right? His vampire blood goes into you, and then you become immortal. That's next week on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and Freakonomics MD. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston. Catherine Minkior is our associate producer. Our executive team is Neil Carruth,

Gabriel Roth, and Stephen Dubner. Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Warner Chapel Music. If you'd like to listen to the show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show, and on Facebook at NSQ show. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at Freakonomics.com. To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening. The Freakonomics Radio Network.

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