SIO397: Why Is Flying Not Any Faster Than 60 Years Ago?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 397. I'm your host Thomas Smith and though the last two episodes have been quite heavy, it's time to switch back to some science, some good old-fashioned physics, to have some fun and learn something back to the identity of the show. And so we have back, again, returning guest, all -star, Dr. Brian Gillis, to take us through some fascinating physics. So he explains it.

But in the bonus where I told some stories about QED, I talked about a little bit of airplane woes. And he thought, hey, you know, there's actually a lot of interesting physics around some of these questions. And we had fun with it. Stuff like, you does it work to break the speed of sound? What happens there? Why is there a sonic boom? Why Is it really hard to do? Do airplanes make up time?

Why aren't they any faster than they used to be for essentially the past 70 years or whatever it is, 60 years at least? Of interesting questions. And Dr. Ryan Gillis has the science for us. So right after this annoying auto ad break that you don't have to hear, if you're a patron at patreon.com/seriouspod, we'll get on over to the interview. We go. We're joined once again by Dr. Brian Gillis. Brian, how are you doing today?

0:01:36 Bryan: Doing well, how are you, Thomas? Thomas?

0:01:38 Thomas: Good. My flight's delayed by a half hour, but good news. The pilot said we can get the the good shit. He's us up somehow. How is he doing that? That's my question.

0:01:46 Bryan: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. For those who might not have listened to the QED special, I think this is where Thomas brought it up that this happened to you, right? You were behind, but the pilot wanted to make up the time in the air. Yeah, well,

0:01:52 Thomas: Oh, Always happens. Yeah, no, good. Thanks for resetting. Yeah. This was, it was funny. After that QED special, which you should go catch on Patreon slash series bot, uh, you just mentioned like, Hey, there's an interesting reason for that. And then there was like a few other flight related questions and like issues that we were going to talk about. And it was like, Oh, let's do a fun, uh, airplane flying episode. And, uh... I always figured it was just, you know, like a money thing. I just guess everything's capitalism essentially. So I didn't know if There was going to be like an interesting scientific answer, if it's just like, well, they actually can go super ridiculously fast, but it costs another nickel. So most of the time they go just normal speed unless they're way late, and then they'll give you the super speed. That's my guess.

0:02:23 Bryan: You're not wrong.

0:02:38 Bryan: We can get into the science and see how far off that is. Is a bit more complicated than that, but let's get get into that. So So Let's let's actually go off of your guess. Why do you think it would be more costly go faster?

0:02:40 Thomas: Well.

0:02:50 Thomas: I feel like, uh, I know with like car, just wind resistance, it's always the killer. It's like with with cars, I feel like when I was watching uh Mythbusters back in the day, or I don't know where I picked this up, but was like once you hit like 60 miles per hour or something, a percentage of the fuel just goes toward wind resistance, like it's just pretty pretty much all wind resistance at a certain point. And so I feel like if we're dealing with, you kind of capping out in terms of efficiency, that I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world too, with climate change, like if, if we're burning less fuel, but I'm sure it's for the airlines bottom line, yeah, but I know that airlines are always running it like just near bankruptcy at all times anyway. So I've, always I've felt like Like they could probably burn a bunch of fuel and go faster, but you know, it's not worth it. Not Not, efficient. I don't know.

0:03:20 Bryan: Yeah, definitely.

0:03:34 Bryan: And in the end, I think that probably is the ultimate answer is that airlines are in the business of making money. Of them, I think, are publicly traded companies, which in the US legally have to put making money above any any other concern. The interesting question to answer then is why is it more efficient? So yeah, you mentioned air resistance. So I think it's useful to think through the physics of why does going faster cause more force on you? And why does that result in more energy spent? Because if you think about it intuitively, it might not be immediately obvious, like sure, you have to expend more force, but you're expending that force over less time, is it possible that balance is out?

0:04:18 Thomas: Yeah, that's a good point. And it's also like, I could see it being, you know again, if we were just naively coming to the world and being like, well, sure. Wind resistance is a factor, but like once you kind of cover that, you know, once you kinda like use up that energy, then yeah, you can just keep going faster and faster. Yeah. I'm not sure. I guess I've never thought about precisely why it would kind of feel like some a diminishing returns at a certain point.

0:04:42 Bryan: It definitely is. And that's one of the big physical reasons. It turns out there are actually a lot of other logistical reasons that don't even go into straight physics. But we're We're on the subject of physics. Let's talk about that first. Just make a toy model of air resistance and see if we can get a mental model that gives us a good explanation of how it works. Air is just a bunch of particles that you're going to hit as you travel through it. So just Imagine instead of a smooth fluid as a bunch of different particles. The first step of that is then as you travel through it, you're going to be hitting those particles more frequently the faster you travel, right? So that's one factor. And it's a very simple relationship. The faster you traveling, the faster it's going to happen. The faster it hits particles. Particles so means that whatever the force of air resistance is, it should be proportional to one factor of the speed.

This we often try to do these analyses in science. If we don't have a complete model of what's going on, we can just think about what factors go into it, and often we'll end up with a model that it could end up being pretty close, or it could be that at least we get the right scaling relationship, and then we just need to do a few experiments to figure out where it matches on.

0:05:13 Thomas: Yep.

0:06:05 Thomas: Like find

0:06:06 Bryan: And yeah, like figure, okay, air resistance has to scale like this per our model. You do one experiment, you find the constant, do do a couple others to check that it's reasonable. And then you've got a model, even if you don't fully understand the physics, which which with fluid fluid dynamics is ridiculously difficult to do. You can get practical results out of it. We've got one factor of velocity. Now, let's think about what happens when you hit a particle of air. You're traveling forward at velocity, say, let'S 10. The air particle is just sitting there. There. So

0:06:06 Thomas: The constants or something to find those kind of. Yeah.

0:06:45 Thomas: We're thinking no wind. We're just kind of going.

0:06:47 Bryan: On average, we'll just say on average no wind. We're going to pretend air particles aren't moving. They're just sitting there because on average they will be. You come at velocity 10, air particle is just sitting here. Now compare you go at velocity 20, air particle is sitting there. As we've discussed in previous episodes, your frame of reference. So if we pretend we're always constant, either we've got air coming at us at velocity 10 or velocity 20. we might not know exactly how it's going to transfer force to us, but it's pretty intuitive that if it's coming at twice the velocity, it's gonna have twice the force on us, right?

0:06:47 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

0:07:29 Thomas: It's interesting. You can flip that frame. I always found it as a kid. I was always like when they show you those wind tunnels and they're just blowing the wind on the thing. I was like, wait, how does that work? You can just like blow the wind on The Thing. And then I was Like, well, yeah, I guess that makes perfect sense. Like you can just see how the air goes over that and then use that because like you say, you change your frame of reference and it still works out.

0:07:34 Bryan: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, Wind tunnels are how we do a ton of of experiments with fluid dynamics and how a lot of developments are made in like a shape or something like you can put a wing in a wind tunnel, and instead of moving it forward to get lift, you sit it there and blow air across it and see how much lift it gets. And that allows you to much more easily prototype than by trying to fly planes, a few of which don't get lift and crash midway through, and you have to replace the pilots. And there's the whole legal matters you have have to pay for the funeral. It's a mess.

0:07:57 Thomas: Right.

0:08:19 Thomas: I've also thought of the fact that like even it may come up with, I don't know if this has happened, but just in thinking through it, it's like, wow, I wonder if you've ever ever come up with some really counterintuitive results just by doing it that way. Whereas like, if you had to go like, start all with a piece of paper. Here's what I think a wing should look like. This'll probably work versus like in that situation, you can just try almost like a Darwinian evolution. Just try a bunch of weird crap and see what works. And the shapes of wings and airplanes, they are kind of counterintuitive when you look at them. It's like, I don't know why it would kind of have a bit of a bulge there, but then flatten out there. It is like, it's really interesting.

0:08:45 Bryan: Yeah. It's that whole Bernoulli effect thing, which we weren't even planning to get into. But that's the supposed effect that the air traveling across the top of wing takes a longer path, and so causes less pressure than the air across the bottom, which I haven't even researched the full physics behind that. But I think that's something that was found more experimentally, because it's not something you would think of of intuitively, but if you're working with wind tunnels, you can figure that out experimentally if you play around enough. Yeah, anyways, back on air resistance, talked about two effects. One is as you go through air, you hit particles more often the faster you're traveling, and the second effect is the faster your traveling, the faster particles hit you when you do hit.

0:09:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:36 Bryan: So this stacks together and you've actually got two velocity dependencies there. So now, uh, that air resistance is going to scale not just with velocity but with the square of velocity. So this means that as we go up to airplane speeds, it gets ridiculously high, but Well,

0:09:36 Thomas: Oh yeah.

0:09:54 Thomas: Math question. Why is it the square and not like just like two times it?

0:09:59 Bryan: That's the thing with scaling relationships is it's almost always multiplicative, and I think it helps if you just math it out a bit. Like, imagine we're going through a field of 10 particles or something. You let's say you hit one particle per second. So if you're traveling at velocity one, in one second you hit one, it has force one on you. Now if you are traveling at velocity two, in in one second, you hit two particles and they have force two on you, so you add the two together, and then at you hit three particles in one second, they have forced three. So you're adding up three three times, so so you multiply it together.

0:10:31 Thomas: Yeah. Well, there you go. Makes sense.

0:10:43 Bryan: Yeah. Far we're seeing air resistance scales with the square of velocity. Right here, we can go back and answer the question, you know, would the fact that it's taking less time cancel it out? And, you Know, if you go through the math, okay, how does time of a trip depend on velocity? That's simple division. You take velocity is is distance divided by time. You double the velocity, you half the time. And in this case, would say, okay, maybe there's an inverse dependence there, but at most it's an once dependence on velocity. It turns out we'd be doing the wrong calculation there. It's a bit more complicated in math, but the energy it takes to cover a distance, you actually multiply the force by the distance you travel rather than the time it takes to get there. Is probably more easy to visualize if you think of falling objects. Think back to our previous discussions about potential energy.

0:11:19 Thomas: Right.

0:11:48 Bryan: You have a ball up on on the top of the hill. It has the potential to roll down the hill and pick up energy as it does so. Now, the energy it picks up doesn't depend on the path it takes down, and it doesn't depend on how far down it falls.

0:11:47 Thomas: Yeah, the elevation essentially, the difference.

0:12:06 Bryan: Work

0:12:06 Thomas: Yeah, is this like in physics when you start doing things in terms of like work, or times distance, yeah.

0:12:09 Bryan: Is force times distance, and energy is the ability to do work. And it's one of those things that if you try to define it more precisely than that, it's really tricky to say what exactly energy is, but it's a very useful concept. Yeah, work force times distance. In the case of a ball rolling down the hill, you have the force is gravity. The distance is the change in elevation. And force times distance is only going to depend on those two factors and not how quickly the ball is rolling. And you can do a lot of sample calculations starting at different initial conditions to see it's true. Probably the easiest way to illustrate this would be to take an example, like just run it in reverse, like a ball starting off with velocity and going up the hill, stopping with zero versus going down the hill. Negating the velocity still, actually, I'm not sure that does work. But yeah, you can go through the math anyway on it, but it's not easy to do in a podcast.

0:12:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:20 Bryan: But you check it out. So the important takeaway is that the energy it takes is force times distance. And now force scales with the square of velocity. Distance, there's nothing you can do about that. And So we're in the place where just physics of air resistance says speeding up a little is going to take more energy. And energy means more fuel being burnt, which means more environmental pollution, which means the airline is going have to pay more for the fuel. And it also means that they're going to have to use even more fuel to accelerate the additional fuel they need in the first place. Like you remember talking about rockets, it's just the rocket equation as well. The fuel weighs down the plane, so you need even more fuel to get the first fuel up to speed. It's not something they want to do. I think the question is, why is it worth doing, or when is it worth doing? So what do you think about this, Thomas? Is it it worth doing?

0:13:34 Thomas: All- Right.

0:14:00 Thomas: You Got that. Rocket Rule. Yeah, yeah.

0:14:23 Thomas: Well. I feel like there's rules about delays and all that, like there're gonna be some complex economic calculation of like, sure, a 10 minute delay no one cares, but a certain amount of delay, if that throws enough people off their flights, then you gotta compensate them for their connecting connecting flights, all that, et cetera, et cetera, all that stuff.

0:14:37 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. From my research on it, there seem to be two primary factors. One is that about 30 minutes, it varies a bit by country. If you're more than 30 minutes late, it's officially recorded as late, goes into statistics, there may be penalties. Casualties, it's all regionally dependent. Yeah.

0:14:59 Thomas: Bad Yelp reviews, you know.

0:15:02 Bryan: And also, as you said, of course the more late it is, the greater the risk and the number of passengers who will meet connections. And for every passenger that misses a connection, you have to rearrange it for them, put them on a different flight. And if they're taking up a space on a different flight, their original seat might be be going empty, which is lost profit. You might not be able to sell that ticket on the other flight. So going to lose money for every missed connection. And you can avoid that by traveling faster. So let's just take some numbers here. Let's say you're traveling across the Atlantic. It's a six -hour flight, and you go 10% % faster, going to cost 21% % more fuel, which is significant.

0:15:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:53 Bryan: That is one of the biggest costs. You are going 10% % faster, so 10% % of six hours is 0 .6 hours, a bit over half an hour. So, yeah, if you save a half an hour, a lot of connections are reasonably tight. Like it's not uncommon for people to only have like a 45 minute connection or something. There's going to be a significant number of those, particularly for the longer flights. Tend to go hub to hub and then people get on a connection to a smaller flight. So a lot of the people on that flight are going to be getting connections, and a good number of those are going going to be tight connections. So going from a -minute delay where some people have 45 -minute connections in 15 minutes. Now, you're also traveling to different countries. They might have to go through passport control. They might have to pick up their bags. They might have go to a different terminal. Going to miss a good fraction of the people, have to reschedule them. And at that point, paying for 21% % more fuel, yeah, it it starts to make sense.

0:16:55 Thomas: Yeah. Okay, but here's my question. I actually thought this wasn't so much about fuel all the time as it is about flight path, because I feel like I've had put a pilot it in those terms before. But also, here's my other question, would, I guess, mean that either you're able to refuel last, last second, which maybe that's true, or you're always carrying around this extra fuel anyway, which as we've covered, just the cost of carrying that extra fuel feels like it would be unnecessary all the time. I know like a lot of my delays, we're just stuck on the runway forever. And maybe they're able to just be like, all right, get a little more fuel in there because we've been stuck for a long time. But I thought that all happened like before you start taxing, but I could be wrong.

0:17:32 Bryan: Yeah, so those are both good points. So let's start with the extra fuel. So like rockets where they know exactly what's going to happen. There's no weather in space you really need to worry about. Airplanes, you do have to deal with weather, and you can't predict that you'll be able to definitely make a safe landing at destination.

0:17:53 Thomas: Right. You may have to circle. You may. Yeah. Okay.

0:17:56 Bryan: Have to wait it out. Maybe they'll slow things down. Worst case scenario, you there, find that, oh, there's no way we're getting in. We have to make a detour to a different airport. So airplanes always take extra fuel.

0:18:09 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:18:10 Bryan: It's a necessary safety precaution.

0:18:10 Thomas: Gotcha. Gotcha. So they've always got extra fuel and it's priced in. They're taken as like, this is the cost of operating an airline.

0:18:16 Bryan: Yeah. Usually you don't use it up, but you do have to pay for carrying it around for safety. And airlines take safety ridiculously seriously. That actually goes into the next point of flight paths, is this is another way they can make up time in the air. This is less a physics explanation, but it is part of answering the question, is it's not not always the case that your flight path is directly from one airport to another. Now, being in the air, of course, you have more freedom to go directly from one place to another than you do on land. You don't need to follow roads. But there are still some limits. Biggest one is that you don't want to get too close to other planes.

0:18:17 Thomas: Okay.

0:19:00 Thomas: The Bermuda Triangle. No. Okay. Sorry.

0:19:03 Bryan: Well, yeah, you can't get close to the Bermuda Triangle because all all the lost planes are still there in the air circling around.

0:19:08 Thomas: Exactly. It's a high traffic area. They're in different times too. Some of them are in the 50s, 60s. It's hell. You don't want to do that.

0:19:10 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, So you can't get too close to other planes. So particularly for high traffic air corridors, the air traffic control has to do some arrangement of that to make sure all planes stare clear of each other. Because if they get too closed to each other, the turbulence and air disturbances caused by one plane can cause trouble for the other ones. And, you know, usually it'll be fine. But as we've said, airlines are a zero risk industry.

0:19:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:41 Bryan: That's their goal. And

0:19:42 Thomas: Back to Sam 1 Armageddon. So this is probably related to why you don't want to launch a his and hers rocket into space at the same time a hundred yards away

0:19:50 Bryan: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. And airplanes aren't even that bad with turbulence. So you don't want planes too close together. But once you're up in the air and you're late, now a couple things might happen. First of all, some other planes, some of their flights might have gotten canceled as well. Maybe once you look at the current traffic, you'll see, oh, it looks like that plane had a slightly better route. We can take that route since they got canceled as a well.

So the pilot phones into to air traffic control asks for what they call direct routing, and air traffic control may or may not give it to them. Now, the pilot doesn't know what the situation is. They ask air traffic controller who does, and if they find out that, yeah, oh, we can slip you in on this slightly more direct route, you can do that. Now usually this doesn't save much.

It can save you a couple of of minutes, but it's a couple of minutes that saves money overall. You don't have to pay extra for fuel. In fact, you're spending less. A more direct route means lower distance. So if you can, it's good win. Guess follow the-up question to this is why don't they do this all all the time?

0:19:56 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:04 Thomas: Yeah, why don't they make the plane out of the route better, why don't they build the whole plane, sorry. And

0:21:07 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, think the answer here is that usually because, uh, takeoff and landing slots are very tightly booked, that if you aren't running late, like let's say you're on time, you got a booked takeoff and landing slot. If you save a few minutes on direct routing, routing, you have a little chance of being able to get in a better landing slot, unless someone else ended up canceling, and then you'll just end up circling around the destination airport. And

0:21:42 Thomas: Then what's the point, yeah, plus

0:21:44 Bryan: And also you're bothering air traffic control over this for little likelihood of gain, and they're busy, they probably have better things to do. So

0:21:53 Thomas: I imagine that air that's right around closer to the airport is at much more of a premium than you, different, slightly different route you'd take somewhere over the ocean or something

0:21:58 Bryan: Uh Yeah. Yeah. That's a a good point too. They've already put you on a path that they know isn't going to get in anyone else's way. But the air in a holding pattern around an airport, there's probably going to be more planes around there. Again, what if there's bad weather there and a ton of planes get in the air? Could take bad situation and make it worse. So that's direct running. Worth It's doing if you're behind. Another reason it's worth doing is you can avoid basically rush hour traffic that way. Planes like cars have times where there's more or less traffic in the air. And the with more traffic, most planes tend to be in the times of more traffic.

And if one of those gets delayed, more often than not, it's going to to be delayed to a time with less overall traffic. Just the nature of having a delay at all means that once you do get going, you'll be able to get there faster. So this is just like if you commute to work or back, you can think of this like if You leave at 5pm, you're in the middle of rush hour traffic, it'll take you an hour to get back.

But if you stay at work or have a coffee nearby, by, wait it out for an hour or so. Maybe it'll only take you 45 minutes to get back. Never going to gain time this way, but you'll lose less time because when you do finally go, there's less traffic in the way, which gives you a better chance at direct routing.

0:22:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yep.

0:23:29 Thomas: Less time sitting in plane traffic rather than having a nice coffee.

0:23:33 Bryan: Yeah. Just imagine how bad a traffic jam is for planes. I wouldn't like to see that.

0:23:33 Thomas: Yeah. They're like I Gotta get home to my plane wife and my plane kids, you know, they guys are like, it works over, I'm clocking out, I'm off the clock, buddy.

0:23:44 Bryan: That's pretty much, I think that's what happened in the Bermuda Triangle. They've just had a bad traffic jam in there for a while.

0:23:46 Thomas: Yeah. And the boats too, you know, like it's the, it's everybody. It's planes, trains, automobiles. I don't know if any trains got stuck in the Bermuda Triangle, but there's always a first for everything.

0:23:59 Bryan: Well, actually, I saw a video game that actually made that joke. It wasn't the Bremuda Triingle. It was Psychonauts and the Rhombus of Ruin. They basically go underwater there, and yeah, you get stuck in a train at one point.

0:24:04 Thomas: Really? Oh, that's funny.

0:24:14 Bryan: Yeah. There's still one more factor that gives you a chance to pick up time in the air. Now,

0:24:13 Thomas: That's funny, Flat Earth. Sometimes they let you fly over the Antarctica. That's actually just a fenced off area. Did you see this? This was recently a thing on Reddit where it's actually pretty fascinating. Somebody posted their flight for it was one of those like r slash mildly interesting or something where it's like, Hey, my flight's flying over Antarctica because it was from, ah, shit. I don't know. It was like Chile to something.

0:24:21 Bryan: Oh, no, I didn't. Yeah. Like Brazil to Australia or something, maybe.

0:24:44 Thomas: Yeah. Something like It was, it might've been almost exactly that. And it was like, oh, that's weird. And then the funny thing was the guy was spamming it everywhere. So then for some reason, the internet being the internet, everybody just started posting thing the the same picture of his flight in every different subreddit and they were like this guy's flight and then they just posted it but are like yeah why is I feel like this never happens I've never seen this before and people are like well yeah you don't really want to crash over Antarctica you know like that's not like ideal to be crashing over there so

0:25:01 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, you also don't want to crash over most oceans.

0:25:16 Thomas: Most ocean. Yeah, that's true. Um, not sure, yeah, I wonder which is worse

0:25:17 Bryan: Yeah? Or the Arctic Circle. Well, the reason it doesn't happen often is there isn't that much land in the southern hemisphere compared to the North. I mean, in the Northern hemisphere, you go over the Arctic circle all the time. It just happens to be the most convenient route between like Europe and North America goes over the Antarctic. And I like, fly back to see my parents, I go on something London to Newark, and that takes me over Greenland. If you go up a bit further North.

0:25:20 Thomas: Yeah right yeah yep fly over Greenland a lot, yeah yeah

0:25:49 Bryan: Yeah. So it's just that there's so much less land in the Southern Hemisphere that there are so many fewer flights where it's convenient to go around Antarctica than there are in the Northern Hemisphere. But this let's go with this. How does the flat Earth allow you to save time in the air? Imagine we lived in the flat earth.

0:25:58 Thomas: Yeah I know you couldn't really yeah you're just, you're just stuck with the one route

0:26:08 Bryan: Oh, oh, no, You're wrong because this is a flat earth where they're trying to pretend it's round, so in order to pretend it's round, they make people fly along these fake great circle paths, so you're not taking a direct route, you're taking this big arch and if you're behind time, you say, hey, look, I, I know the Earth is really flat. Can you let me go straight this one time?

0:26:09 Thomas: Really? Oh, Okay, fly weirdly I love the idea that the pilot does have to get in that slightly hushed tone though, like just hey, hey, I know, I know, you're in on it, we all know, can I just, need a little bit straighter route, we're late, it's money, look, flat earth conspiracy, yeah, I get it, I'm in on it, I want it to succeed, all that, but like also capitalism, like, we can't lose that much money money to the, which is a strong argument against conspiracies like this. You know, like at some point there'd be a money -making opportunity, someone was, or a savings opportunity, something, someone would blow the lid on that.

0:26:35 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like, why are they wasting so much money having planes travel on these weird paths if they weren't the straightest paths?

0:27:10 Thomas: But it is funny. I did want to take a second to just mention that like geodesics, I'm surprised we haven't, you know, used that, that word yet, because every time you look at the, the dimensional, uh, like map of your flight path, it's always like, why the hell am I going on this big curve? That seems wrong.

0:27:10 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:23 Thomas: I feel like a straight line is a close thing. And it's because like you're not, the two -dimensional map doesn't reflect what's actually there.

0:27:29 Bryan: Yeah, the maps are really distorted. You can think of it like if you start with a globe and cut off one edge of it, then take the top and stretch it out. That's how you get a flat map. If But you imagine doing that while you've drawn a straight line up there, you're stretching out that straight line and then bending it, which is why it ends up being this curved path on a flat mat. That's how the flat Earth conspiracy allows us to save time in the air. But there's one more way, which actually happens to work in the real world. So it's kind of like direct routing. It's something that you can't figure out about until you're in the air and usually isn't worth doing because you'll maybe get there earlier and fly around waiting. You have any idea what it might be, Thomas?

0:28:18 Thomas: Going through the center of the earth. No.

0:28:21 Bryan: You can probably figure that out first. No, The answer here is

0:28:25 Thomas: Yeah, you're right. The weather? I don't know. Yeah, wind. Yeah, there you go. Well, there's always the jet stream is pretty consistent, right?

0:28:28 Bryan: Uh, Yeah. Wind. Yeah. Yeah, It's consistent, but it varies day to day. Like, it's kind of like on a climate, like on average you can predict how it's going, but day to date, the specific winds are going to vary. Well,

0:28:41 Thomas: Really? Well, okay. Stupid question. I thought the jet stream was just the rotation of the earth, essentially, is there? It's not like that changes, right? But it's just other chaos involved.

0:28:50 Bryan: The Rotation of the earth changes, but it drags air along with it. And there are also a lot of, you variances. It's affected by the different hot and cold air systems throughout the world. Like you've heard of El Nino, that's a regular cycle of like the hot and cool air, like, then the oceans heat up at different rates compared to the land. The weather and the wind systems get messy. The jet stream is complicated complicated and varies a lot with the weather. And, you know, you can get decent predictions of how it'll be.

Yeah, any predictions of wind speed to what it is at any given moment, it's always going to be off a bit. So this is something you take advantage of. Now, planes, yeah, to some extent, they can't control the wind. But what they can control is their altitude, and it could be that there are more favorable winds up higher or down lower. So once you're actually up in the air, you know what the wind is. Now, um can look. Okay, it maybe there's a chance that we lucked out and the winds are a bit favorable if we go to a certain altitude. Yeah, maybe not.

Maybe all the options are worse than expected on average. Yeah, you know, that happens a bit. Then you just have to burn more fuel to try to keep on time. But, you, you'll be able to find, okay, we can pick up a bit of time if we go up to a certain altitude or down to a different altitude where the winds happen to be a bit better for us.

0:28:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm.

0:29:18 Thomas: -hmm, gotcha.

0:29:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:19 Thomas: I, but also feel I, there's planes going, you know, there's a plane born every minute. Like, I feel like a lot of whatever plane last went on that route would be like, yeah, here's the deal. Does it change that quickly? To

0:30:29 Bryan: Some extent it does. You can see that down at surface level. Just look at a wind vane and watch how it changes. And Yeah, the jet stream, the overall motion of it is consistent enough that you can get a good idea. You know, this is also kind of related to how planes track turbulence. Is a lot of the ways they know turbulence is expected is because the plane in front of them on that route experienced turbulence.

0:30:36 Thomas: True. Mm. -hmm.

0:30:57 Bryan: Yeah.

0:30:55 Thomas: Oh, no, yeah, it's Pretty sure, yeah.

0:30:57 Bryan: So if the plane In front of him had turbulence, well, we'll probably have have turbulence as well when we get there. Maybe it'll have faded, or sometimes turbulence will come out of nowhere. You aren't expecting that, and then you just report it to the plane behind you. You can do the same with wind strength so that planes can take advantage of it.

0:31:10 Thomas: Okay. I know this is not like your area or anything, but is the hell's turbulence? Just different pressures, different, what? Hmm.

0:31:22 Bryan: So, turbulence is one of the things that's actually pretty hard to define. There isn't really a consistent definition of it, but I think probably the best way to think of it is kind of of the chaotic nature of a that a fluid such as air is a lot of little particles, and it's not always going to flow smoothly, all of them in the same direction, and sometimes little chaotic disturbances will build up. So what happens in fluids like this is you get what are called eddies, are which these little spiral structures that form for a bit of time.

And you you can kind of imagine if you're a plane going by, there's smooth mostly air, and then all of a sudden you hit an eddy where half of it is traveling in the opposite direction. That's going to cause a bump. So that's kind of one of the hallmarks of turbulence is just the air being on, like part of it forms into eddies. Turbulence, yeah. It's something they don't really teach us much about unless you're going into fluid dynamics. I think I even remember in class they had one day on turbulence, and they were very insistent. Okay, everybody, this will not be on the test. Repeat,

0:31:52 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Huh. Wow.

0:32:26 Bryan: This Will Not Be On The Test.

0:32:28 Thomas: So it's just chaos essentially, no no real way to, yeah, they

0:32:30 Bryan: Yeah, actually saw, there's a good video on the Veritasium YouTube channel a while back. I'll see if I can dig up a link for you. Maybe you can put it in the show notes for people who want to see more.

0:32:44 Thomas: I do love that channel. Okay, okay, so wind speed, what we're taking advantage of here. Or not.

0:32:49 Bryan: It's Yeah. So that's one of the things, maybe you can take advantage of it. So yeah, these are basically all the tricks pilots have. And you go through them all, most of these are minor games. And typically when they say they can make up time in the air, it's usually around a half hour at best they can do. That half hour can save them a lot of money in missed connections and hassle for the passengers too. They don't care about that. They only care about the money and the hassle causes them to lose money. Yeah, it's good for you if they can make up time.

0:33:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:22 Thomas: It really does, like, I've been on, every flight is late now, pretty much, that I'm ever on. But a high percentage of them do make up most of that time. It's interesting.

0:33:30 Bryan: Yeah. That me of another thing that might be going on sometimes is depending on the regulatory environment, airlines might just lie about the expected time. Let's say the regulators put in a penalty for being late, but not for being early. They might decide it's in their financial interest to predict every plane arriving like five minutes after they actually think it will. So when they say they're going to make up time in the air, they're actually just using the buffer they already built into their predictions.

0:34:02 Thomas: That would be surprising, just to feel like all of that is known to every actor in the field. You know, like every everyone probably knows all these routes, like these routes are not new, you know, like doesn't that seem like it would be known information to everybody? I don't know.

0:34:14 Bryan: Yeah. But governments don't always act on the best information. I'm not sure if that's actually what's happening. What I do know is happening is that, you are subject to a lot of unpredictable delays and they try to control that as much as possible. So what they do is push most of that buffer onto the passengers. This is why you face that problem when traveling to QED that they wanted you to arrive like 90 minutes before to check in because the planes don't want the risk of somebody arriving at the last minute and being a bit late. So they force you to arrive much earlier than you strictly need to, just to limit their own risk.

0:34:54 Thomas: Mm Seems insane to me. But, you Know, to I learn to adjust to the rest of the world.

0:34:56 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. It on airport. You really have to look up the airport and airline for how much they expect you to be there ahead of time. And security as well. Having a bad day, it can take you hours.

0:35:14 Thomas: But it's funny because security is so easy with, with all the clear and the TSA or the whatever that that's kind of why I got complacent. And I was like, oh, I don't need to be there that early. But they just decided that they need 90 minutes to get your bags from the check -in to the airplane, I guess. So, whatever.

0:35:27 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, well, they probably assume you have regular security, so they require everybody to be there that much earlier.

0:35:35 Thomas: No, I, I do, I think it's, it's a good idea. I don't think it matters. It's just truly the bags. Like they, they literally, you go to the check in, they're like, nah, nah, can't can't do it. Cause It you're not even at security that point. I don'T, it'S not about like, can you get on the plane? It'S about the bags, I GUESS. That must take a a really time to check bags for that.

0:35:39 Bryan: Yeah? Maybe. I was thinking that what the airlines don't want to have happen is they take your bags, put them on plane, and then you're stuck in security for two hours and miss the plane. Then they have to get all the bags out because your bags are way at the back and

0:36:01 Thomas: Be, could be. Okay, this is a question a lot of people have asked. I've actually watched some videos on this, it's pretty fascinating, but why hasn't air travel gotten much faster? It's it's actually shockingly old. Like, you know, like this this of jet travel that we have now, obviously things get marginally better here and there, but like pretty much since like I don't know the fucking 60s, like you could fly from New York to LA or whatever basically the same length of time for that long, it seems crazy. Mm

0:36:28 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. I think the answer there is in two parts. One is air resistance that scales with the square of velocity. So the faster you go, it gets more expensive at a greater and greater rate the faster you go. So you can compensate. You can fight that by coming up with more aerodynamic designs for airplanes. And there There have been a lot of advancements since air travel first came. But at some point, the gains get more and more marginal. You're hitting the limit of how aerodynamic you can make it. And so you just end up fighting that.

And the second factor is the speed of sound. Because everything we've talked about for air resistance, throw that out the window when you start approaching the speed of sound, because, yeah, it's no longer the dominant factor in how the air resists you. Yeah, so this is actually interesting, now every once in a while you'll hear people, um, this myth that people used to think it was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound, like often when we say, oh no, it's impossible to get faster than a speed of light, somebody will counter, well, you used to think it was impossible

0:36:52 Thomas: -hmm. Yeah. Oh, really? Huh. Hmm.

0:37:43 Bryan: To go faster than the speed of sound. And, you know, there was some physics that kind of led in that direction, but no one ever believed that. By the time we had a physical model for approaching the speed-of-sound, we'd already invented guns that could shoot bullets faster than a speed-of-sound. Yeah. And you can also show that the tip of a whip will travel faster than the speed of sound, and that's why it causes a crack and yeah.

0:37:59 Thomas: Gotcha. I had heard that, so that's not a myth, that's a real, that's the real thing, okay?

0:38:11 Bryan: It is, you can, know uh, track it with high speed cameras to prove it, or just, you know, model the arc in the air. And in fact there are paleontologists who believe that some dinosaurs were able to whip their tails and break the sound barrier with the tips of their tails.

0:38:11 Thomas: No.

0:38:25 Thomas: Way, that's crazy.

0:38:27 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I've read. You might need a paleontologist to come on the show and explain that, but We never believed it was impossible, but the physics, if you trusted our models of approaching the speed of sound, did make it look like it would require infinite energy. We knew the models would have to break down at some point, but we just didn't know why, so this is the complicated part, is why would it take infinite energy to break the speed of sound?

0:38:27 Thomas: Yeah. That's nuts. Okay, really?

0:38:45 Thomas: Hmm. That's what? I want to know, yeah, okay.

0:38:57 Bryan: Well, the answer there is the Doppler effect. So, the Doppler effect is, right, Thomas? So, it's basically that the frequency of sound, and it also affects light as well, but yeah, it is most noticeable with sound that coming off of something depends on its motion relative to you. Classic example is, They're standing by the train tracks. A train is coming down. As it approaches you, the sound of the horn sounds more high -pitched than normal. As it passes you and goes away, it sounds more low -pitched.

0:39:01 Thomas: OK, yeah, yeah. Or any waves. Yeah.

0:39:29 Thomas: Actually let me put that in American terms. We don't have trains, really. You know, when a big ass truck carrying a bunch of cheap shit for Amazon drives by and it's just like it goes, you Know, like that kind of sound, you knows, starts off higher because as it's coming towards you, the waves the are getting essentially accelerated at you. Right? Like it's like the wavelength is getting crunched in a way. And then as it goes away, it's getting spread out. Same, same reason, you know, for red shifting in universe, right? It's the same principle.

0:39:32 Bryan: Yeah. There you go. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. So what's interesting here is if you do the math on this, like imagine that you just have a horn traveling through the air constantly emitting sound that's just a single wavelength. As travels, you in front of it you're gonna have a higher pitch sound, and behind it you have a lower pitch sound. Now, sound is a form of energy that travels as a wave, and this energy depends on the wavelength length of the sound. Now, it turns out that what happens is once you started moving, energy required for the high -pitched sound in front increases, the low -pitch sound in the back decreases, but they don't cancel out. The high - pitch sound increases in energy faster than the low - pitch sounds decrease.

0:40:40 Thomas: Huh? Really?

0:40:42 Bryan: So we can think about this with some basic numbers. So say you've got a wavelength of 10 and is then inverse the wavelength. You have to put in the velocity there, but we'll just say it's one tenth. Wavelength of ten, then if you start moving half the speed of sound, so you can imagine that one peak goes out and then by the time the next peak is coming, you've gone half as far as that first peak. So So now the peaks are a distance of 5 apart. The wavelength has been cut in half and the frequency has doubled. Instead of 1 tenth, it's 2 tenths. Energy is proportional to frequency, so energy is doubled. Now look at what's going on behind you. Wave goes out a distance 10, but you've gone the other direction a distance 5. 5. So now the wavelengths are a distance of 15 apart. So that's a lower frequency. So it's gone from 1 10th to 1 15th. See here that on one side it's doubling and on the other side it's lost like 1 3rd.

0:41:51 Thomas: Huh?

0:41:51 Bryan: So as you get closer to the speed of sound, you put more and more energy into the high -pitched sound in front of you, and this keeps going as you get closer and closer to the speed of sound. Like, % of the speed of sound, so we're a wavelength of 10. By the time it's gone out, you've gone to 9 units, so now the wavelength is only 1 apart, and it goes from 10 to 1, or frequency gets multiplied multiplied by 10. So now you're putting 10 times as much energy into what's in front. You go 99 % the speed of sound, you're pulling 100 times as much.

0:41:51 Thomas: Uh, it's like that guy trying to cross the room. What the hell is that? What am I thinking of?

0:42:28 Bryan: Zeno's paradox.

0:42:29 Thomas: Yeah. It's like that almost kind of.

0:42:30 Bryan: Except in this case, it feels like it's an actual paradox, as, you know, with Zenoís paradox, there's nothing resisting him going forward. But when you get to the sound barrier, the resistance increases and increases by this model. Like, if you're at 99.99999% of the speed of sound, any energy coming off of you should take millions, billions times as much energy and resist you because of that. And from the experiments people did on things as fast as they could go before they could break the sound barrier, it did seem like this was holding up. Now,

0:42:37 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, huh?

0:43:10 Thomas: I, I confess I'm not totally understanding this, why the difference in the energy going you forward versus backward is. It Does it have anything to do with the fact that, like, I this has nothing to do MIT, it but I like just know from you dealing dealing in sound, when you're looking at EQ, the it's like that logarithmic scale, so, like, you the difference between zero to a hundred, uh or whatever the hell, is is way different in sound versus once you get to the higher bands, like you got to go from like 2000 to 3000 or whatever and it's like barely changes. Oh.

0:43:42 Bryan: In ways it is. I think probably the better to look at it is, so front of you, you've got energy increasing. Let's say the energy starts at one. In front of you, well, one can increase. There's no upper limit to what the highest number is. Behind you, the energy is at one, but there is a lower limit. It can only go down to zero, so On one side it's bounded by zero, and on the other side it goes up without limit, and it's, you know, roughly an inverse relationship between the two, and when you add the two together it will always increase overall, yeah.

0:44:03 Thomas: Interesting. Huh.

0:44:18 Thomas: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. And so what's the thing that would be capping, like in this model, you what's the thing would be stopping you? Though it's just the this model, the math is saying well you can't be generating infinite sound energy because that would break everything. Thing is, that what it is?

0:44:31 Bryan: And Yeah. It's like that. So essentially it is the air stopping you, but it's the air in a much more complicated complicated way. So once you get to effects near the speed of sound, you have to deal with basically the air hits one part of the plane, and then that part disrupts the air, and then those disruptions are transmitted at the speed of sound and can affect how it affects you other parts of the plane.

You know, it's kind of complicated to think about, but as a physicist looked into it, they They found that, okay, something is wrong with this model, and it turns out it that does break down. It's a simplified model, and there are a lot of ways that it doesn't end up working, and that basically what happens is at a certain speed, you just stop causing that sound. You cause infinite energy and sound because you don't pause the sound. It caps out at a certain amount.

And, you that amount is still pretty loud. And you do get a loud sonic boom from anything traveling faster than the speed of sound. But there are actually a lot of ways to mitigate that. And that's what a lot lot of engineering work went into, is figuring out how to control how much of a sonic boom there was and where it happened on planes. So

0:44:31 Thomas: Okay, yeah.

0:45:48 Thomas: I, I watched the whole thing on the Concord, and it's the most interesting thing because they had they had that for a while and then that was a big thing is, like, nobody wanted to be flying over land. So here's my question, I've always thought of the sonic boom as something that, it Guile, uh or whatever, from Street Fighter 2 did, or else it's you thing that happens in the mid -air but when you're flying at the speed of sound or greater, is just all the time following you, is it just like boom, boom, boom, everywhere, like the whole time?

0:45:54 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a continuous wave of sound. It basically comes out of the aircraft in a big cone around it. So like imagine it's at at one point emitting some sound, that sound spreads as a sphere, then it's moved forward faster than that sound. It's out the edge of it, but it's emitting new sound. So you've got a sphere growing from there. It goes forward again, starts emitting a new sphere, whereas the ones behind it keep expanding. So when you add all of these spheres together, you get essentially a cone cone coming out from it.

0:46:40 Thomas: Okay.

0:46:50 Thomas: It's like storing up all the sound and delivering it at once, essentially, kind of in a weird way.

0:46:54 Bryan: Yeah, That's to look at it. And then anybody nearby, you, these spheres expand in the shape of a cone, at some point it'll come over you and you'll hear a sudden large sound from all of the sound from the plane at once hitting you.

0:47:02 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Interesting, so that's a big, uh, that's a big challenge engineering wise.

0:47:14 Bryan: Yeah. It's a challenge. And no, they figured out a lot of ways to get around it, But unfortunately, a lot of those ways aren't very convenient for passenger air travel. Of the biggest tricks they found is that basically cross -sectional area of the plane has to change as slowly as possible throughout its length. So do you know what I mean when I say cross -sectionsal area? Area, yeah.

0:47:14 Thomas: Yeah. Uh, it makes something like a circle if you took a cross-section, or an oval, mm.

0:47:38 Bryan: Well I think probably the easiest way to think of this is, imagine, uh, you have a plane, um, it's put it down on your, uh, counter and slice it up like a salami. Each of those slices will have an area to it, and that area is the cross-sectional area.

0:47:49 Thomas: -hmm, right. Yeah. Roughly.

0:47:55 Bryan: So it's just the area.

0:47:56 Thomas: Circular.

0:47:57 Bryan: Yeah least along the fuselage. Once you get to the wings it gets more complicated.

0:47:57 Thomas: Yeah, something, yeah, mm. -hm. Sure. Yeah, yeah.

0:48:02 Bryan: Complicated What they found is that in order to minimize the sonic booms, you want to keep that area varying as slowly as possible down the length of the plane, and how exactly it varies depends on exactly what speed you want. That if you go you faster than the speed of sound, like many, many times, you want, uh, the the area to be greater near the rear of the plain, yeah. It's a a whole complicated thing, but that's the best way to minimize that. What this means, if you want to minimize the speed of sound, is you have to keep the fuselage relatively thin where the wings are. So a lot of planes would shrink the fuspelage where rings are, which is kind of tough to do with passengers. And in case, you don't want to get it too wide anyways, as air resistance depends on how wide you are, and you know, you're going twice the speed of sound, like the Concord would cruise at Mach 2, yeah.

0:48:02 Thomas: Yeah, hmm. Yeah. Oh. It would, oh wow, I didn't know that. I was actually, that was what I was gonna ask, is like, once you hit that Mach 1, is it, you know, is it it kind of free from there or not, like

0:49:00 Bryan: Yeah gets a lot easier, um, after that point, the air resistance, you know, it peaks right around Mach 1, and then drops off dramatically for a while, and then starts increasing again. Yeah, after like 25% greater than the speed of sound, I believe is around when it hits a minimum again, but don't hold me to that.

0:49:09 Thomas: Interesting.

0:49:27 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:27 Bryan: Is a point where you hit another minimum on the other side. So the Concorde recruits at but twice the speed of sound. Yeah, means that you want to design the plane just with that specifically in mind, which it make it a very convenient shape for a passenger plane. And keeping it thin, basically all of this told, in order to keep people in there, you have to basically give them no better than economy class seats.

0:49:43 Thomas: Oh. Wow.

0:49:53 Bryan: But at the same time, you're going, twice the speed of sound. And typical airplanes travel at, know, maybe 80 % the speed of sound, so you're going 2 .5 times faster. Now, if we were to use our old math, air resistance scales as the square of velocity, you know, that's over six times as much force. It doesn't really work in the supersonic realm, But it'll give you an idea that that's a ridiculous amount more force. So for each person, you've got to spend maybe six times as much on fuel, but you're only giving them an economy class seat.

0:49:53 Thomas: Yikes. Right.

0:50:32 Bryan: Yeah. And in exchange, you know, the overall flight time is maybe half as long because you can't go supersonic the whole time. You've gotto get clear of any populations because they don't want the sonic booms near them.

0:50:45 Thomas: You gotta get out to the I mean, just also just landing and takeoff obviously is going to be a lot of time that you're not going super fast, those

0:50:50 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. So all told, you'll maybe cut the flight time in half. And so, you know, just think of this from a consumer aspect. You've got two choices. You can go on the Concorde, which will get you there three hours airport to airport, but you've still got all the same time on either end of the airport for everything. Thing. Or you can go on a regular airplane, spend the same amount of money and get a first class seat. Even Not talking business class. First class is the ones where you basically got this little private cabin.

0:51:21 Thomas: Are really expensive, are you telling me the Concord was that pricey? Because holy shit. Yeah, no wonder, oh.

0:51:23 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Styled seat on the Concorde costed as much as a first -class cabin. So it's an insane price difference. And, you know, kind of from that alone, you can kind of see why it ended up not making much sense. You know, initially, it's a bit of a novelty. It's a status symbol to be able to get there twice as fast. But, you at a certain point, you you rather spend, few extra hours, but all of that time is in luxury where you can do things you like rather than squeezed in like a sardine.

0:51:31 Thomas: Wow, yeah, yeah.

0:51:58 Thomas: And it's sad it didn't concord they're just like, well, this fuck this, and like went out of business, and it just hasn't existed in, a in very long time, I definitely, yeah.

0:52:03 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, 20 years now.

0:52:07 Thomas: Oh. I thought it was longer, yeah, okay, but that is, it's sad, why isn't there a better way, damn it, can't we figure out some faster way to travel, let's get rid of all the air, yeah.

0:52:08 Bryan: Yeah. Oh, air resistance. You're starting to sound like Elon Musk. That's what he thought. That was his original idea.

0:52:20 Thomas: Let's dig a tunnel, that'll fit one

0:52:24 Bryan: Yeah, exactly.

0:52:24 Thomas: Car, yeah, uh.

0:52:26 Bryan: He planned on vacuum tubes to get rid of the air. Yeah. Problem is he can't really get rid of the error efficiently at scale. And so the project kept getting de -scoped and de - scoped until he just reinvented tunnels.

0:52:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, and not even good tunnels either, that is very silly. Well, my a fascinating journey, uh, I guess in the end it's it reminds me of aliens, because you just, I want the universe to be more interesting or whatever, you know, not that's not not interesting, but I want it to be like more conducive to space travel and go find other worlds and visit aliens. And then you're like, nah man, it's just, it's impossible. It's like, I would love to have this super fast travel that could take us places, half you the time, but still be in comfort and not cost a billion dollars. But I guess the earth says no. The earth says not today, not on my watch.

0:52:42 Bryan: No.

0:53:08 Bryan: Yeah well look at it this way, Thomas. You're in California, I'm in Scotland. We're having a conversation near instantly. You know, the future might not be delivering the results you expected, but it does have some pretty miraculous inventions, okay?

0:53:23 Thomas: It'S true. That's a great point. The only thing I want to leave listeners with is I remember watching a little video on the Concorde and one of the pilots about talked a droop snoot. I just want to want to let you know, a droops snoot is a real thing. It's a real term. It's a real part of the Concord. And I'll just leave you with that. If you want to look it up, there's something as ridiculous sounding as droop snoot, and it was kind it was of vital to how this weird, impossible aircraft worked. So with that said, thanks so much, Brian, for coming on and explaining. And I guess, well, we'll just be doing normal flight times from now on. We won't worry about it.

0:53:56 Bryan: Yes. Yeah. All Right. Thank you very much for having me on, Thomas. Uh,

0:54:06 Thomas: And as usual, go find your YouTube channel. Is that anything new going on? Are you back in work mode?

0:54:11 Bryan: No. That's on pause while I deal with some work stuff, um, hopefully I'll be able to get back to it sometime. If you're curious, go check out Brian Gillis on YouTube, B-R-Y-A-N G-I-L-L-I-S, um. But actually, Thomas, if you don't mind, I have a bit of a charity plug this November, on November 1st, a lot of people are doing charity streams of video games to raise funds for a foundation called Extra Life. And their goal is to make life worth living for children who are stuck in hospitals by getting video games for them to play. So that they're not just stuck there twiddling their thumbs. They're stuck there Twiddling Their Thumbs Against Thumbsticks. Recommend that people look at the site, find a streamer you like supporting. I'll involved behind the scenes on one of the streams going on for a streamers. His name is Andrew Eisen. That's E -I -S -E -N. I'll send Thomas a link. He can put it in the show notes and hopefully some people can come along, along, watch the streams, and donate to help get games for these sick kids.

0:54:26 Thomas: Oh, of course.

0:55:15 Thomas: That's excellent. I'm so glad you plugged that. Everybody check that out. I will put the link in the show notes. And once again, a big thank you, Brian. Until next time.

0:55:23 Bryan: Thank you again, Thomas.