Something You Should Know - Odd Quirks of the Human Brain & A Peek Behind the Scenes of Air Travel

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, you probably have never had a milkshake from hotel room service. And I'll tell you why. Then your brain works in mysterious ways and you're about to discover how. For example... It turns out that when you create a mindset, when you start looking for the things that bother you, you start seeing the things that bother you.

Starting point is 00:00:54 And the fascinating thing is, if you flip that switch and you start looking for the good things, you begin to notice more good things in the environment. Also, why irritating people are a threat to your mental health. And what goes on behind the scenes of air travel. And why some people are afraid to fly. I've always been surprised at how many people are put off by turbulence, by rough air. Because, you know, from our perspective, from the pilot's point of view, you know, we see it as a comfort and convenience issue, not as a safety issue.

Starting point is 00:01:26 All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers

Starting point is 00:02:13 so i'll bet you have at least one really good customer service horror story I've got one or two myself. Everybody's had some problem with customer service somewhere. And very often at the core of those stories is the fact that the person you're trying to get help from has no authority to solve the problem you have. And therein lies the frustration. Someone who's taken a fascinating look at this is a guy named Stephen Little. Several years ago, he noticed that it is almost impossible to order a milkshake from a hotel room service menu. Hotels just don't have milkshakes on their room service menu for whatever reason. So as he would travel around and check into various hotels when he traveled for business, he made it a point of calling room service and ordering a milkshake. And the conversation would usually go something like,

Starting point is 00:03:14 I'm sorry, sir, we don't have milkshakes. And then Stephen would say, well, do you have ice cream, milk, and a blender? And room service would say, well, yeah, sure, of course we do. Well, then why not whip me up a milkshake and send it up to my room? Now remember, Stephen did this hundreds of times over the course of several years. How many times do you think he got a milkshake sent to his room? It turned out in the final analysis to be about 20% of the time. The point of doing this

Starting point is 00:03:47 was to show how company policy often makes it impossible for employees to do their job. There is actually no reason not to make that milkshake, but hotel policies prevent employees from giving a customer what he wants. And this goes on every day at millions and millions of businesses.

Starting point is 00:04:09 It's bad for business, but policies are policies. And that is something you should know. How can you not be fascinated by the human brain and how it works, particularly when you step back and see that it sometimes works in very strange and mysterious ways. And I think the more we understand how the brain works, or at least shine a spotlight on it and observe how it works, the better insight we gain into ourselves. And someone who I think would agree with that premise is psychologist Art Markman. Art is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the co-host of a podcast called Two Guys on Your Head, and he is the author of several books,

Starting point is 00:04:58 including Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Hi, Art. It's great to be here. Thanks so much. So one of the questions you tackle, which I think a lot of people would be curious about, is why we find kitten videos so irresistible. The thing about kitten videos is that they are this perfect storm in the sense that one of the things that evolution has done is to recognize that infants are annoying in every species. And so what they do to make sure that parents still

Starting point is 00:05:32 want to take care of them is they do things to make them look really cute to the people who are going to take care of them. And so infants of every species have big eyes and they have little, little small features. And, and so we love those. And, and so what, what, what happens is kittens have that, that aspect ratio. They have big eyes, very small face, you know, very symmetric. And so what we're doing is getting this evolutionary dose of cuteness. And then rather than having to live life in all of its moments to wait for the one moment that's great, what a kitten video does is it's kind of like the highlight reel for football fans. You don't have to sit through the whole game. You just get the highlight, really the great part of it. And so what a kitten video does is it takes

Starting point is 00:06:25 this extraordinarily cute thing and then just gives you the highlights. And it's, they're absolutely fascinating. So talk about liars, because that interested me that how we can tell when people are lying, if we can at all. If you go on the internet and you start searching around, you will find all of these tips for catching liars. And a lot of these tips have to do with these unconscious tells that people are supposed to give off when they're lying. So they'll tell you if you look up or down or to the right or to the left, that means you're lying. Or if you make eye contact or if you don't make eye contact or if you hesitate. And it turns out that almost all of those cues, actually pretty much every one of those cues, is not a very effective means for

Starting point is 00:07:11 telling you who's lying to you. So really, absolutely the best way to figure out if somebody's lying is to follow up with them and ask them lots of questions whose answers they should know if they were telling you the truth. So if someone said to you, yeah, well, I took the bus to get to this meeting. Well, what bus? You know, where did it go? What are some of the things that you passed? Where if you actually had that experience, you would actually know the answer to that. And what happens is people, when they lie to you, they haven't necessarily prepared the entire world around that. And so it's fairly easy to get people to trip people up. And there are actually really good studies showing that, for example, the agents who are trying to catch people who might be lying at customs

Starting point is 00:08:05 and border control at various countries, if they use that technique, they're much more effective at catching people who are lying. But wouldn't you have to know the answers to what the bus went by in order to catch him in a lie? You might have to know the answers. And certainly, if it were important enough, you could go back and check some of the things that they say. But the fact is that what ends up happening is when you catch people suddenly where you start asking them a bunch of questions to follow up, most people have a really hard time actually coming up with answers to things

Starting point is 00:08:40 that ought to be at the tip of their tongue if they'd actually experienced the thing. Here's one that's always interested me, and I was just talking about it the other day with someone, that as I get older, it truly does seem that time goes by faster, and I think it's a fairly common experience. What is that? So there's several reasons, actually, that come together for why time feels like it goes faster as you get older. One of them is that a lot of what makes time feel slow is that your brain, when your brain is doing a lot of work to understand a situation, then in the moment, your brain is going to create lots of memories that will, when you look back on it, become these landmarks that feel like a lot of time has passed.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Now, when you're young, everything is new. And so your brain is constantly doing lots of work in order to understand the situation. And that influences your sense of the passage of time. As you get older, more and more of your life becomes routine. More and more of your life becomes predictable. And as a result, your brain is laying down fewer and fewer landmarks that make the time feel like it's gone slowly. And that's one of the reasons why a great way to slow time down is to take up new skills, to learn how to play an instrument or a new sport or something like that, or to expose yourself to new classes. Because what that's doing is forcing your brain to set up a bunch of new landmarks. Now, even if you do all of that, you're not going to slow the feeling of

Starting point is 00:10:26 the passage of time completely because there's another piece of it as well, which is that your brain is also taking into account how much other stuff you have learned about your life so far. So if you think about it, when you're six years old and then you go through another year, that year occupies a tremendous amount of space in your brain because you haven't been exposed to that much yet. You haven't learned that many things. But by the time you're 50, the amount of new stuff that you add to your brain in the next year is just a small fraction of everything. And so all of that gives rise to this sense that time is just rocketing by as you get older. You have a section in the book that's really interesting to me about slackers and how we

Starting point is 00:11:16 perceive other people to be flakes and slackers and not very conscientious. And we would never do that. And how can they do that? And I think it speaks to how we see our place in the world, and so talk about that. Well, there are two parts to it, right? So one of them is that we tend to judge people based on a particular set of values that we have. And so some people, particularly folks who are pretty conscientious, would like people to just either do it or not do it, but let me know in advance. And so there's a case where we're going to judge people on the basis of whether we would have done the same kind of thing. And that's a piece of what's going on. But then there's another piece

Starting point is 00:12:02 that's also kind of fun, which is we have a lot of what's called an egocentric bias, which means basically we overrepresent our own influence on the world relative to everybody else's, which is why if you have a group do a project and you ask everyone the percentage of the project that they were responsible for, and then you add up that number, the number is going to add up to way more than 100 because everyone is going to overestimate their own contribution to what happened. And so when you look at what people have done, one of the things that happens is you assume that you had a much bigger impact on results than other people did. And that ends up making you feel like, you know, you really carried the weight and everybody

Starting point is 00:12:51 else was just riding on your coattails. We're talking about things that go on in your head. And I'm talking about that with psychologist Art Markman. He's a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. And he is author of the book Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat.

Starting point is 00:13:40 Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful Download Bumble and try it for yourself. along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So Art, I remember hearing someone say, and it's always stuck with me, I heard them say, we judge ourselves by our intentions and we judge other people by their actions. That's right. And not just their actions, but the outcomes that come from those actions. So we don't even always see all of the effort that somebody put in. We just see the results. Whereas when we see our own actions, not only do we judge our intentions, we judge the amount of effort we put in, even if we don't completely succeed at the thing that we

Starting point is 00:14:41 set out to do. Whereas with somebody else, most of what we see is the outcome. And so we discount that amount of effort. By the way, that works also with how we credit other people for things that they've done. So, for example, if you go to a great concert and you see this amazing musician play, you often at the end of it say, man, that musician is incredibly talented. And you call them talented because up on stage, you don't really see all the work that they put in, all of the practice hours and everything that they had to do to achieve that amazing level of performance. And so you assume that a lot of what allowed them to play the way they did was talent rather than effort. One of the interesting questions you look at is why do we buy what we buy? And I think most

Starting point is 00:15:33 people would think, well, you know, I'm a smart guy and I sit down and I make a decision of where I'm going to buy this and not that because I'm a logical, thoughtful guy. And you're going to probably tell me that's not how we do it. You probably are a logical, thoughtful guy, but most people are actually driven quite a bit by just mere familiarity to things. I mean, one of the scariest things is the influence that advertising has on the kinds of decisions that we make and the kinds of things that we buy. There's a beautiful effect that, that, that was first categorized by a guy named Bob Zients back in the 1960s called the mere exposure effect. And what he showed was simply showing something to someone makes them like it better later.

Starting point is 00:16:26 And you see this, for example, with music, where when you first hear a song, you're not 100 percent sure how much you like it. But after you've heard it several times, suddenly you like it quite a bit more. And the same thing happens with advertising. It really doesn't matter what the advertiser tells you about the product. Most of the effect of advertising is just taking something and making it feel familiar. And so in the moment when you go to a store, for example, and you're trying to figure out which of the products on the shelf you're going to buy, you will feel more warmly towards something that's been advertised because it feels familiar. And then, and here's

Starting point is 00:17:05 the beauty of it, then you're going to backfill a story about why that's actually a better product. And you see people do this, for example, with certain kinds of products that are legally mandated to be identical. So for example, if you go to the store and you buy an over-the-counter cold remedy, that cold remedy has to have a formulation that fits within a particular set of FDA guidelines, which means that chances are every single brand of product that is that type of cold remedy actually has an identical formulation. And yet people still consistently buy the brand name products, in part because those products feel familiar relative to a generic product. And so then they'll tell themselves,

Starting point is 00:17:52 well, it must be higher quality, it must be a better formulation. But in fact, it's actually identical to everything else on the shelf. Something I think people universally experience is choking under pressure. And it might seem somewhat self-evident. We choke under pressure because there's pressure, but there's got to be more to it than that. So the thing about pressure is it does a couple of things. One of the things that it does is it decreases the amount of what's called working memory. So working memory is the amount of information that you can hold in mind at the same time. And the less information you can hold in mind, the less complicated a decision you can make. And so the more pressure that you're experiencing at any given moment, the less information you get to take into account when

Starting point is 00:18:43 you are working. And so that's one source of choking under pressure. And then there's another, which is particularly important for motor skills, for actions that you're performing. So if you ever think about if you've ever played golf or tennis or something like that, and you find in a pressure situation that suddenly you're hitting the ball terribly, one of the reasons for that is because another thing that you tend to do under pressure is to monitor your own performance. So you start paying attention to what you're doing in a way that you don't do when you're performing without pressure. Now, the thing about motor skills, about movements, is that actually paying attention to those movements tends to discoordinate those things rather than make them more coordinated. And so the more that you pay

Starting point is 00:19:33 attention to your own movements, the more that you lose that coordination that's important for skilled performance, which means that when you are practicing a skill that you're going to perform under pressure, a motor skill, one of the things that you want to do is to learn to pay attention to the situation you're in rather than to the motor movement itself. So this way, if you're playing tennis or golf or something like that, when you get under pressure, you start monitoring the situation rather than the performance of the skill itself. What about punishment? Does it work the way we think it works, that punishment deters future problems? Or how does the brain deal with punishment?

Starting point is 00:20:20 Yeah, so the fascinating thing about punishment is it works depending on the time horizon you care about. So punishments are negative things that you do to somebody that that that engage what's called the avoidance motivational system and rewards positive things that you give to people engage what's called the approach motivational system. And so and so here's the paradox. If you want to get somebody to do something right now, it is absolutely critical that they do it right at this moment. Absolutely. The best way to get somebody to do something right now is to threaten them and to and to threaten them with a punishment or some some some harm because in the moment people would rather do something than to and and avoid that punishment the the problem is that the avoidance motivational system one of the ways that you know it's active is through the emotions you experience and and the emotions that are associated with avoidance are fear and stress

Starting point is 00:21:25 and anxiety. And nobody really enjoys experiencing fear and stress and anxiety. And so as a result, over the long term, people actually go out of their way to try to avoid situations in which they might experience fear, stress and anxiety. And so in the long term, if you keep punishing people and you keep punishing people and you keep threatening people, they just find ways to avoid you altogether. So a workplace that's full of threats of punishment will in the moment get people to hop to it and get stuff done. But in the long term, you'll see lots of turnover and absenteeism and things like that because people don't really want to be around a lot of those punishments. Yeah. So talk about life's little nuisances and aggravations and the best way to

Starting point is 00:22:09 deal with them. I've got to know this. So, man, there's a lot going on, right? I mean, each of us has a set of pet peeves that are just things that people do that just annoy the heck out of us. And, you know, one of the things that we have to remember is that we have a tremendous amount of choice about what it is that we want to pay attention to and what kinds of information are going to influence us in the future. And it turns out that when you create a mindset where you start looking for the things that bother you, you start seeing the things that bother you. Your world actually becomes more and more surrounded with the negative things that are out there in the environment because you get this state-dependent memory. So when you're in a negative mood and looking for negative stuff, you remember negative

Starting point is 00:23:00 things, you see negative things, you start feeling badly. So that feeds on itself. And the fascinating thing is if you flip that switch and you start looking for the good things that people are doing, so you ignore those pet peeves and you actually start trying to look for better things, you begin to notice more good things in the environment. And it actually creates a situation in which people start interacting with each other in a way that starts to bring about those good things. So if you spend your time, rather than trying to be critical of everybody, if you spend your time finding really good things somebody has done, then you find they're smiling at you and then

Starting point is 00:23:41 you smile back and suddenly you're having a pleasant conversation. And so these things can really become a self-fulfilling prophecy in either direction. And so absolutely the best thing to do is for those things that are not going to threaten anyone's life, giving those things an opportunity to just pass by without comment and focusing on the more positive things actually just makes life infinitely better almost immediately. Good advice and interesting insight into how the brain works in real life, in real life situations. Art Markman has been my guest. He is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. And his book is called Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Thanks for joining me, Art.

Starting point is 00:24:31 Oh, my pleasure. It's great talking with you again. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat.

Starting point is 00:24:58 Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's Betterhelp.com. Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:26:09 Whenever you fly on an airplane, you probably sit in your seat and wonder about things like, how exactly does this thing fly? And is turbulence really dangerous? Why has air travel become such a hassle? Well, the person to ask those questions to is Patrick Smith. Patrick is an airline pilot and has been for some time. He's a blogger. His website is askthepilot.com, and he's the author of a book called Cockpit Confidential, Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel. Hi, Patrick, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me on. So let's start with this. Let's start with what the hell happened to air travel? Because I remember the day, I'm not that old, I remember a day when, you know, I never really

Starting point is 00:26:58 looked forward to getting on an airplane, but it wasn't the hassle and you didn't hear the stories and what happened? I'm the first one to admit that air travel has become an undignified and in many ways, uncivilized experience. It's noisy. It's just generally tedious and uncomfortable. And it's all of the things that we know. But you can also make the argument that air travel is in a lot of ways in a golden age right now. I mean, you hear often about people referencing this golden age of air travel that existed somewhere in the past, but nobody can really define where it was exactly or what it was. And in a lot of ways, I think it's a mythical construction and that you could actually make the argument that the golden age of flying is right now.

Starting point is 00:27:48 And that will sound completely preposterous to people. But let's look at it. Affordability of flying to begin with. Flying has never been less expensive than it is now. The average airfare is about half of what it was 25 years ago. And that's after you factor in all of those ancillary fees that airlines love and people hate. I know people feel nickel and dimed by the add-ons and fees. But in a lot of ways, they help keep the price down overall by letting certain people pick certain perks that not everybody wants.

Starting point is 00:28:21 People don't remember, younger people especially today, how expensive flying used to be. When I was a kid in the 70s and into the early 80s, I knew a lot of people who had never been on an airplane. And the main reason for that is because their families couldn't afford to fly. Yeah, I remember that. And that's not true anymore. Pretty much everybody can afford to fly most or sometimes. Then let's look at safety. Flying has never been safer than it is right now. And, you know, you go back to the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, we used to see multiple large-scale air disasters every year around the world, sometimes 10 or more of them every year. And now if there's one major accident in a year somewhere in the globe, it's a big story. Flying is far, far safer than it used to be. It's far cheaper. And, you

Starting point is 00:29:14 know, in some ways, and this will sound crazy, but it's also more comfortable. And what do I mean by that? Well, first, if you can afford to fly in first or business class, the premium cabins on today's jetliners are more luxurious than they've ever been. It's never been as swanky. And even in economy class, now you have on-demand video, seatback screens, you've got Wi-Fi. These are things that didn't exist even 10 or 15 years ago. You would have a hard time explaining to people, to some people, that after seeing some of these viral videos of fights breaking out and, you know, really bad behavior on airplanes, that this is the golden age of air travel. Well, everything I just said, notwithstanding, I mean, the indignities of flying are duly noted. And, you know, the long security lines, the delays, the congestion,

Starting point is 00:30:15 there are a lot more planes flying nowadays. And that kind of segues into a point that's, I think, sort of interesting. You know, more people are flying than ever before, but we're doing it in smaller planes, making more and more departures. For airlines now, frequency, the number of flights is the name of the game. And that has unfortunately clogged up our airspace to the point where when the weather gets bad, the whole system, you know, in some cases collapses and you end up with these two, three, four or five-hour delays. It didn't used to be that way. And part of that is the industry's infatuation with using regional jets instead of mainline jets for so much of their flying. That's something that began in earnest about 20 years ago.

Starting point is 00:30:57 And the major carriers began outsourcing more and more of their domestic flying to these regional affiliates that now make up for about 50% of all the takeoffs and landings in the United States. You know, there's a website that I look at once in a while. It's flightradar24.com, and it's a flight tracker thing. And I remember the first time I looked at it, and it shows airplanes in real time, what the planes are, what their destination is, and where they are in the sky right now. And the first time I looked at it, I was shocked at how many airplanes are in the sky at any one time. I mean, I didn't even know there were that many airplanes. It is remarkable. And then extrapolate that globally. How many airplanes around the world are in the air at any one point? Well, you were saying earlier how safe air travel is and how there are very few major airline disasters, certainly far less than there used to be.

Starting point is 00:31:55 But there is still this fear of air travel or the fear of the safety of air travel because, you know, occasionally you do see something in the news about something. When things do happen, even comparatively minor incidents, they become spun up in the media. And you have so much media now across all these different platforms vying for attention that, you know, a plane has a landing gear problem and it's a spectacle. And, you know, it's in circulation and goes viral, as they say, for days at a time. And most of those incidents, at least from a pilot's perspective, are non-events. I think as passengers, people are very sensitive to movement, abrupt movement in the plane,

Starting point is 00:32:42 either because of turbulence or because of turning the plane. So talk about that. I think people would be surprised to know that even in pretty strong turbulence, even in very rough air, a plane is barely moving from its point in space. A lot of people seem to think the plane is plummeting hundreds or even thousands of feet. And really, if you looked at the altimeter during turbulence, it's barely moving at all. I mean, maybe 10 feet. A plane will almost never turn at more than about 25 degrees of turn, of bank. Yet people will swear that their plane is banking 90 degrees or 60 degrees or some insane number like that. I'd love to bring you into a simulator or in an aerobatic airplane and show you what those numbers would really feel like. A very steep climb in a jetliner is about

Starting point is 00:33:33 20 degrees nose up. And a descent is usually somewhere in the order of two degrees or maybe five degrees at most nose down. And people hear that and they say, no way, there's no way that's true. I know my plane was going 45 degrees, nose down towards the ground. It wasn't. It just wasn't. And I wish I could take you into a plane and show you that, but for the time being, try to take my word for it. So Patrick, here's something I've always wondered about. So, because I see this in the movies a lot. So say I'm a passenger on the plane, and you're the pilot, and there's a co-pilot, and you've all eaten the bad fish, and you're all dead now. And I have to fly the plane.

Starting point is 00:34:14 I'm the only qualified person to fly the plane. Could someone talk me through it, like in the movies, and I could land the plane, or would I crash and kill everybody? You would crash it. There's zero chance of you getting the plane on the ground. And, you know, this gets into something that is one of my favorite slash least favorite things to talk about. And that's people's understanding of what cockpit automation does or more specific, specifically what it doesn't do, people have a very vastly exaggerated understanding

Starting point is 00:34:51 of what automation does and how pilots interact with that automation. There's this idea out there that planes fly themselves and the pilots are there just in case something goes wrong and then they jump in like Captain Sully in Save that's that's not the way it works at all i mean the idea that an airplane flies itself is like saying that an operating room can perform an organ transplant by itself um obviously you need the experience and the talent and the expertise of of the doctor and the same goes goes for the pilot in the cockpit.

Starting point is 00:35:30 And I think you'd be amazed at how busy a cockpit becomes, even with all of the automation on. More than 99% of landings are hands-on. I don't want to use the word old-fashioned. It's just the way they are. And 100% of takeoffs are hands-on. There's no such thing anywhere in commercial aviation as an automatic takeoff. Is it hard to land a plane? I mean, if you've done it as a pilot a million times, is the next one really that hard? Or is it like driving a car where after you've done it for several years, it's pretty easy for you? Well, ask a doctor if a particular operation is easy. I think what you're getting

Starting point is 00:36:07 at is that things become routine. I think routine is a good word. That doesn't mean anybody could do it or that it's easy, but if you're a professional trained to do that task, then at a certain point, it kind of comes natural. What are the other things that people ask you about the most? I've always been surprised at how many people are put off by turbulence, by rough air, nervous flyers, anxious flyers, especially. But it wasn't until I started writing and fielding questions from the traveling public that I realized what a big deal turbulence was for so many flyers because, you know, from our perspective, from the pilot's point of view, you know, we see it as as a comfort and convenience issue, not as a safety issue per se. The number of airplanes that have crashed due to turbulence in and of itself in the whole history of commercial aviation can be counted on one hand. And I don't want to downplay it too much, though, because every year, yeah, a certain number of passengers are injured by rough air, but normally because they're not sitting down with their

Starting point is 00:37:18 seatbelts on when they're supposed to be. But as a pilot, when the plane hits turbulence and it does that thing where it just feels like it drops and all, are you as the pilot concerned like, oh, we need to do something about this? Or do you just like ride through it knowing that this will work out? For pilots, a turbulence encounter is a very hands-off thing. You're not fighting the turbulence so much as just letting it run its course and the plane, you know, kind of rumbles through it. But, you know, there isn't this plummeting and there isn't this wrestling with the controls, you know, turbulence moves you one way and you fight it back the other way. No, it doesn't happen that way. It's very hands-off and planes are stable to the point where anytime they're disturbed from their position in space by their nature,

Starting point is 00:38:08 they want to go back to where they were. So the plane can more or less just ride through turbulence on its own. We're not gripping the wheel. We're not fighting it. I remember hearing that this came somewhat as a surprise to me, that it takes longer now to fly, let's say, coast to coast, because the airplanes have been slowed down by policy in order to save fuel. The typical jetliner actually flies a little bit slower than was the case 40 or 50 years ago, believe it or not. But that's in the name of efficiency.

Starting point is 00:38:47 Just the planes are designed to fly more efficiently and use less fuel. But normally, if you're slowed down flying cross-country, it's because of air traffic constraints. There are just so many planes and traveling at slightly different speeds. So if you're behind one airplane that's at such and such a speed, you may have to slow down slightly to preserve the choreography of, you know, which planes are on which routes. Sometimes there's flexibility, but sometimes air traffic control just assigns you a speed because that's all they can do because of the volume of planes. Oh, so air traffic control tells you how fast or slow to fly? Sometimes, yes. And how much pressure is put on pilots to get out of that gate on time and land that plane on time? Well, it's not pilots specifically.

Starting point is 00:39:39 It's the whole team. It's the gate staff and the flight attendants and the pilots and the ground crew. You know, sure, we're under some pressure to get the aircraft off on time. I think the last statistics I saw industry-wide in the U.S., something like 85% of flights arrive on time. And considering how many flights are now being pushed through the system, that's a pretty good number. And of course, though, the numbers will vary region to region. Some airports are just notoriously more delay-prone than others. As a pilot, you don't typically, I imagine, have a lot of contact and a lot of time to have contact with passengers. But what do you like to hear? I mean, do you like to hear people go, hey, good landing, or hey,

Starting point is 00:40:23 nice takeoff? I mean, is there anything that, like like pumps you up and like, yeah, I did well today? Oh, any compliment or any just smile and a thank you. And by the way, passengers are more than welcome to come up to the cockpit and say hello and maybe get a little tour at any point before or after the flight. You know, No, you can't come up during the flight, as was the case in the old days, but as long as things aren't too hectic or too busy before the flight, you're more than welcome to come on up and have a look around. Really? You like it?

Starting point is 00:40:57 That's not a bother to you? Yeah, there's a disconnect. You're in the cockpit. You're physically separated from the cabin. So to have that interaction in a lot of cases just feels nice. What is the difference between the pilot and the co-pilot? Are they equally qualified and why is one the co-pilot and one the pilot. This is one of those kind of perpetual misunderstandings that people have. The idea that there is the pilot and then the co-pilot who is, you know, maybe somehow not a real pilot. And that's not the case. I mean, I'm a co-pilot. I'm a first officer. Colloquially, we say co-pilot. But both of the people in the cockpit and there are all

Starting point is 00:41:45 are always at least two are full-fledged pilots who are qualified to operate the airplane in every regime of flight. The captain has, uh, the ultimate responsibility and the bigger check to go with that. But we both essentially have the same duties and we both fly the airplane. If you're, say, flying from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, the one pilot will be the hands-on control pilot for the first leg, and then the other pilot will be the hands-on control pilot for the second leg, performing the takeoff and the landing. The co-pilots take off and land airplanes all the time. So when you go on a flight, when do you get to the airport? And do you as a pilot or a first officer, do you really inspect the plane? Or do you leave that to the

Starting point is 00:42:32 people that do that? Or what's your prior to the plane leaving the gate? What is it you do? Great question. And like so many things in aviation, it depends. It varies. So one of the big variables here is, are you doing a short-haul domestic flight or a long-haul international flight? For a short-haul, run-of-the-mill domestic flight, I like to be at the airplane somewhere around an hour before departure. There are a series of checks that we run through. The maintenance personnel also run through a separate series of checks and inspections. So different things are going on and different personnel are performing those checks and tests. There's paperwork to go present an hour and a half before departure. And we typically go to a briefing room where we have little cubicles set up where we go through the flight plan page by page, looking at the route and charting it out on a map and all that sort of thing. There's a lot of paperwork involved. And also on the longer flights, any flight at my carrier anyway, over eight hours, we bring three pilots. We'll have a captain and two co-pilots, two first officers. And then once we're in the air,

Starting point is 00:43:50 we work in shifts. So one pilot will be on break with always a minimum of two pilots in the cockpit. And then on even longer flights, we'll bring four pilots and work in teams of two. Well, it's so interesting. And it's what I think people wonder about all the time when they fly is, you know, kind of what's going on behind the scenes. And I appreciate you filling in those blanks. Patrick Smith has been my guest. He is an airline pilot. And he has a website called askthepilot.com. And the name of his book is Cockpit Confidential, Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel. And there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Patrick.

Starting point is 00:44:28 Okay. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. So think for a moment. Are there people in your life that you would consider irritating? Well, if so, you might want to limit your exposure to them.

Starting point is 00:44:44 Researchers at the University of Southern California say annoying people could be messing up your brain. Whether we realize it or not, we tend to mirror the people we're interacting with. And if the person you're interacting with is a jerk, it throws our brain a curveball. When we're around people we don't like or who are different than us, our brains actually slow down in a mental act of protest. The good news is the brain damage is temporary. Not only will you get back to normal when the jerk leaves your life, your brain activity can actually speed up and improve by interacting with someone you really like. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:45:26 Please subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Subscribing is free and the episodes are delivered right to your phone or other device so you never miss one. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions,

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Starting point is 00:47:06 And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have

Starting point is 00:47:22 some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.

Something You Should Know - Odd Quirks of the Human Brain & A Peek Behind the Scenes of Air Travel

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