HTDE: Carsickness And Traffic Jams

0:00This message comes from 3 Questions with Andy Richter. After wrapping up his run on Dancing with the Stars, his podcast remains lively, with great conversations every Tuesday and his call-in show every Friday. Three Questions with Andy Richter, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's your old friend Peter. Coming up, we've got a special Thanksgiving-themed episode of How to Do Everything, made by Wait Wait producers Mike Danforth and Ian Chillog. Now, if you're currently listening to this podcast while, say, driving somewhere for the holidays and you're starting to feel carsick, then make sure to keep listening.

0:34Once again, everybody, How to Do Everything will not live in this feed forever, whether that makes you happy or not. So be sure to follow them at their own feed. OK, Mike and Ian, take it away. 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 Screamin' like six times in a row.

1:16And 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.

2:05yeah and it's i should point out this was a work trip so there were p this wasn't like in the privacy of your own family this was that this was a work event 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 you're 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.

2:46That's what I'm worried about. I'm still in my 20s, which is where it's like, you know, hangovers I know are 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. Yeah. You know who could help with this? beloved Hollywood superstar Kevin Bacon.

3:29Kevin, 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 VFX, you know, special effects. 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 Vomit Comet and try to shoot stuff up there.

4:09Wait. So what do you remember from that? Like, 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 and 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 the Bomb Accomit, is a plane that NASA uses to simulate no gravity on Earth, which a lot of people think there's such a thing as 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.

4:55And as you go over the top of what's called the parabola, the centrifugal force balances that 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 for lunch. Oh, yeah, because you need something to barf up later. Exactly.

5:35And then we would do 20 in the afternoon. And it was kind of a miracle of 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-nausea medication. Sometimes they work because they sort of make you sleepy. You know what I mean? Yeah, right, right. And so to combat that, we also had to take a stimulant.

6:20So 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 take it. And 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 They called it an airman's corsage.

7:08So it's right there. Now, 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 cameraman, the guy was operating, and it was a shot of me and I'm watching him and all of a sudden he sort of pulls his head out from behind the lens and puke. Now the thing about that is that it's floating too. There was nothing for me to do about it. I just saw the puke coming and just tried to kind of roll out of the way but it came right down.

7:59Well Kevin, we'll let you go but I guess 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. And they say the same thing about being on a boat, that if you keep your eyes on the horizon, 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.

8:47It 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, you know, keep your seatbelt on and stay in your chair. And Tom Hanks was in front of me. And I stared a hole in the back of his head. I just remember, I 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 you a picture of the back of Hanks' head. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for helping Ellie out.

9:32Yeah, Ellie, good luck with that.

9:37All 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 are always reading Frontiers in 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 the window, but I guess there's more to it than that.

10:17You 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 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. It might make it faster.

10:56Yeah, sure. So yeah, I wish there was an answer for it, but I could say, well, if I play a D sharp 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'll have to give me a few minutes, though, while we're talking. Oh, yeah. Can I get it ready? I don't have it prepared, but you'll 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 talking. Wait, are you serious? I've got to play my saxophone unless I brush my teeth.

11:30Wait, what? Okay. Sorry about that. You've got to have clean sax. 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 playing. 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 gotta make sure that when I'm blowing it in there 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 the 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 yeah you might like I'll tell you I was going to buy this saxophone.

12:20Look, I have my saxophone. This is the same one I've had since I was in high school. It has a serial number. And the serial number equates to, let me tell you when it was born. My saxophone was born on March 17, 1959. I researched it. Wow. That's my saxophone. Now, so when they made this 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 was 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.

13:02Now, I remember mine came in a green rubber case when I first got it and I opened it up and said, oh my gosh, this looks like my saxophone. It smelled like smoke. The guy was a smoker. And I could not, I mean, I wanted to buy it because I was like, oh, my sax 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 sax 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, you're a circular breather, right? That's something you know how to do?

13:44Of course I know how to do it. So you could do all these things and breathe continuously the 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 mouthpiece. So it doesn't necessarily play beautifully right off the bat for a minute or two. So anyway, I've got it out. And I'm just kind of doing...

14:19Wow. If I was going to play something like, a minor key would be something like...

14:34Okay. 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 car sick.

15:11There you go, Ellie. That'll do it for you.

15:17Hey, if you've got a question for us, you can get it to us at howto 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 howto at npr.org.

15:40This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart. Get WISE. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. 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.

16:22We 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.

16:38we were lucky once some of the drivers got stuck there for days yeah some people um got some water from the stream or river whatever started having showers on the roadside wow i mean good for them like what 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 Xanadu 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.

17:28And it was so funny because we were hungry. But the Chinese people were very enterprising, 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 in 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?

18:20Well, 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 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

18:56Well, that does it for this week's show. What'd you learn, Ian? Well, I learned that they actually filmed Apollo 13 in zero gravity, in the vomit comet. 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, Yeah. 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.

19:39Tom 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 Aquafresh. What kind of toothpaste do you use for that? I feel like he could make a lot of money if he pitched Oral B with Kenny G. How to Do Everything is produced by Skylar Swenson and Hina Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White. You can get us your questions at howto at npr.org. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. Thanks.