Why fly to Japan and back in a day?
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- Опубликовано: 1 июл 2023
- From 'Jet Lag: The Game', Sam Denby, Adam Chase and Ben Doyle face a question about a return journey with a difference.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
GUESTS:
Sam Denby: @Wendoverproductions, / wendoverpro
Adam Chase: / adamhchase
Ben Doyle: / thewheatgerm
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023. 
Развлечения
Anyone else get the feeling that once Tom finishes his continual run of Monday videos next year that he'll have the time to be Sam's teammate on a season of Jet Lag?
That would be so cool
😮😮😮😮😮 MAKE IT HAPPEN!!!
THAT WOULD BE SO COOL! Ugh I hope this happens..
TOM PLEASE! DO IT!
I'm wondering whether Tom is really going to stick to that date for finishing his Monday videos!
Of course it’d be Ben who suggests getting drunk.
@@georgeprout42As a Gemini, I love this
zodiac signs mean nothing
@@Water-dnfu
Douglas Adams was quoted as saying "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go past." On the original Hitch Hikers Guide radio series, he was writing scenes and taking them down to the cast while they were in the studio recording the episode.
Any excuse Tom gets to use a reference to the most famous alum of his uni (besides him ofc 😂)
I love that specific quote from DA.😂
Douglas Addams understands me
There is another spurious tale of Doctor Who in the late 1970's, at the time the Producer was Graeme Williams, and Douglas Adams was either the script editor or a contributing writer.... the story goes that a writer was locked in a room with the producer, script editor, their notes and a typewriter, then threatened with a cactus being inserted as a suppository, unless they could produce a completed teleplay script for the upcoming story, scheduled to be recorded the following day.... that is not the rehearsal, but filming.
This seems to be an ongoing thing among creatives. Mozart and Rossini, among others, wrote music for some as yet unfinished operas getting the parts to the performers piecemeal as the rehearsal was taking place.
In 1985, my dad flew from Sydney to Honolulu, had lunch and flew back 😮 His US green card would expire if he didn't set foot on US soil at least once every 12 months. Since all of our green cards were linked to his, it would have made moving the family to the US a few months later quite a bit more challenging 🤔😂
My uncle once heard his workplace was getting VIP visitors from Japan and so tried to get the job of liaison by pointing out that he was the only person there who'd ever been to Japan. It was technically true; when his time in Viet Nam was done the US Army flew soldiers home, his plane stopped for refueling, and he got to see a few parts of Japan from his window seat - and even more of it as they flew over. His bosses did not buy this.
I thought for sure this was the reason.
I initially guessed it was something along those lines!
That was my guess: a visa expiring on that day. He had to prove being outside the USA, "more than a day"/"before the visa ran out", so he could get a new visa once he returned home.
I thought he wanted to brag about having made a trip around the world. If the same plane was used to fly from Tokyo over Asia, Europe and then New Jersey, it's a world trip of sorts. It would take longer than 14 hours though.
Well, the "much relieved" part and the fact it was a trip to Japan made me think that he was just really committed to using one of those high-tech Japanese toilets at least once.
I always envision what I think the guests look like in my head when I listen to an episode, then I watch the highlights and I’m never right.
To be fair, I don't know if anyone ever pictures Sam's face properly. I mean, I still generally picture him as a disembodied voice.
The fact that you didn't know what these guys look like means that you don't watch Jet Lag: The Game which I consider to be a great disappointment
This goes doubly for Sam. He... just doesn't look like he sounds on the Wendover videos.
@@benjaminanderson1014 Heartily seconded. It's a great show.
@@UrbanPanic As they say, he's got a face for the radio
Just a note from an audio engineer incase Sam and Adam happens to see this: Adam, you are speaking into the wrong end of the mic, you are supposed to talk into the front, where the logo is. Sam: that mic is designed to not have proximity effect (the addition of low frequencies when you talk close to it) which means, you can speak way closer to it, meaning you don't have to keep the gain that high, so the resulting sound would be less echoey
The 'only phone and laptop' part of the clue had me thinking that maybe it had something to do with the international dateline and what date showed on his devices when he performed some action. I was thinking that he needed something he did to be timestamped with the previous day's date, but then I realized that crossing the dateline going west would move him forward one calendar day.
Still, nice lateral thinking!
I think that would have been possible back when Concords were still flying. Neat idea.
Then when he said that it was something that you could only do on a plane my mind went straight to the "mile high club". 🤣 I could not figure out why he needed that long of a flight, but it did explain his sense of satisfaction afterward!
I thought international dateline too- specifically that you could skip an entire date by crossing the right part of the international dateline at the right time of day (there are small sections where the bordering timezones are 25 hours apart). It doesn't work with Tokyo, though.
I thought maybe he wanted to skip a day because of the end of the world that was supposed to happen on a particular date.
@@misterbobEA lol. Skipping the end of the world. I guess if someone thinks it's going to happen it would be worth a shot! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Perfect question for this cast xD Well done from the production crew to coordinate that
We don't just throw this show together... :)
@@lateralcast Still a level of attention to detail better than many, even professional channels, hence the compliment :)
Sorry for being stupid, but I don't understand why this question is perfect for this particular cast. What's the reason?
@@ajs41I assume they’re referencing the jet lag game that they never actually explained 😂
@@ajs41the three guests have a channel called Jet Lag: The Game, in which they play various travel games. The current season is playing capture the flag all over Japan, previous seasons have included going around the world in 100 hours, playing tag across Europe, and racing to claim the most US states by going to the capitals and completing challenges.
Tom not knowing something is always a surprise - especially when I had to study that very subject matter in high school haha
A nice reminder that we're not born knowing all these things - we had to learn them - and there's an infinite number of things any person hasn't learned yet!
@@azuradawn5683 helps keep one humble and grateful for the privilege of being privy to knowledge, eh? ;)
I was surprised that he had no idea what the Hagia Sophia was on Two of These People Are Lying.
That a British person shouldn't have heard of an American book isn't that surprising. That he didn't know about Hagia Sophia still boggles me.
I still believe that he knew what Hagia Sophia is, but didn't either just connect it or did it for the show
My first idea was that he had made some kind of commitment to visit every country in the world before a certain date, then realised he had missed Japan with only two days left on the deadline, but couldn't spend longer there because he had to work the day after.
Then I remembered a charity event that university students used to do, where it was a contest to get as far away from the starting point as possible in 24 hours starting with no money. There were legends of students who had made it to other countries by blagging plane tickets or getting a company to sponsor them. I don't remember what the event was called.
RAG Jailbreak Hitchhiking Challenge
@@joshuawan7004that's the one! I remember a couple of my uni friends doing this
I'd assumed it was to comply with a poorly-worded deadline that didn't specify time zone, but which was trivially doable from the airport (email or fax a document - so it's timestamped locally - before midnight on such and such a date). So you get off the plane, connect to cell service, hit 'send', and go straight to the departure lounge. Until I realised you'd be a day *ahead* in Tokyo.
Well, he obviously wanted to get it done ahead of everyone else, then!
...or something. Time zones throw me for a loop.
I read the questionultiple times to make sure I had the right direction.
Then I wondered how geolocation would work on an airplane's internet for that reason. Could you submit something via the plane internet when over the westernmost time zone and meet a deadline?
I do taxes on the west coast, there have been multiple instances where someone back east on the deadline day messaged me asking me to file something as they missed their cut off.
In one case I said "too late, do you know someone in Hawaii?" And the other person phoned up someone in Hawaii and got it filed on time.
I get a warm feeling anytime I hear fellow Americans praise Taskmaster.
Tom, with one of your 26 weeks left of the weekly videos, you should visit Walden Pond.
Edit: now that I have thought about it some more, this should be your final video in the ten year streak. It would be fitting to go to Walden to take some time off.
Agreed.
It's perfect. One could say, trancendent....
Dear Adam Chase regarding sound quality; The Blue Yeti is a front facing microphone, and in your environment you should be talking to the Blue logo at the front of the microphone. This will mean that your voice will be picked up properly rather than mostly the reflection from your room. I hope you read this and can improve your sound quality for future recordings! :)
It's possible you're not using the microphone in this setting to be honest, as the sound quality sounds like it may as well be from your earphones haha. If so, I'm sure you already know that you're not using the microphone as intended :p.
Adam might actually be the best guest you guys have had on lol. He's so funny and really thinks about it the right way
Quite the opposite. He's so aggressive and pretentious.
And here my first thought was some sort of immigration check-in - "If you don't set foot in Japan for five years, you lose your citizenship!", something like that.
well, i looked up Peter's books and I think it's fair to say the ACTUAL reason was a massive PR stunt/purely advertising, given that either that book or his next one was titled "Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain" and he also wrote, a decade earlier, "Can We Do That!: Outrageous PR Stunts That Work"
An even better comparison with Walden, then. Thoreau's writings about the experience of being self-sufficient in nature were essentially a chronicle of play-camping in his back garden while his mom literally brought him cookies and sandwiches and did his laundry.
He runs an ADHD podcast and has written many books on flights. So, while it's also a neat story, it isn't just invented for the sake of it.
@@lateralcast definitely not saying it didn't happen, just that he might have chosen something that extreme on purpose as a marketing stunt. I was curious as to what book he wrote that was worth the cost of that flight since I had never heard of him, and thought the answer was actually really relevant to the overall question - after all, it's a big ADHD coping action taken to finish a manuscript about ADHD!
so I'm sorry if it came across as negative towards him in any form - I was just trying to add interesting bonus info I found after this episode sent me down a rabbit hole :D
@@CeruleanstAlso, from what I can tell, Walden Pond isn't _particularly_ isolated.
Yes!!!!! This crossover is everything
Have you seen their tag in London video??
i love these guys' personalities, i thought it was just a bit when they were doing it on jet lag but it's just them, amazing
If anyone was wondering what the 'personality trait' was, Peter Shankman has severe ADHD. So he's even more sensitive to outside stimuli and distractions from the vast majority of us, which might have made the flight worth it.
As someone with ADHD, I instantly thought it would be a great idea for someone with such a brain.
I'd still find solitaire too much of a distraction for this to work. Or organizing "my documents", cleaning up the desktop...
@@geraldineelizabeth151 As someone with ADHD, I got this almost immediately after I heard "laptop". As someone in academia, I thought it was a thesis, though, but close enough.
Adam making fun of Tom for not knowing about the great American authors is even funnier now that Adam is officially part of American literary cannon
Even jet-lag the game wasn’t crazy enough to do this!
This is my question! Cool to hear the bloke from HAI answer it
Thanks for submitting it! You should be name-checked on the audio version and in the podcast notes too.
It's taken me a few years, but I think I may finally be getting accustomed to seeing Sam's face.
0:38 in I'm gonna guess he had a relative living in that area, and had somehow or other been given the impression that relative was in very serious danger of being dead, dying soon, or something similar. Guy books an emergency flight, finds out on arriving it was either mistaken identity or something similar, is very relieved, and goes back home to tend to business that was otherwise being put off but no longer can because there's no longer an emergency.
But they booked a return ticket, you have to schedule the return flight before hand usually
@@Volt64bolt Was it a return? Missed that. Would have been a better, less wasteful reason than the actual answer at least. Can't imagine paying 5k because of lacking the willpower to put the damn phone down voluntarily.
@@thattigercat According to his Wikipedia page the author has ADHD. So yes, he "lacks the willpower to put the damn phone down voluntarily" as you "so eloquently" put.
This is by far my favorite episode yet! Sam, Ben and Adam make for great contestants and funny moments.
I have a friend of a friend who is head of lounges for an airline. Flying half way around the world to check a lounge and going straight back again is a standard thing for him.
The collab I never knew I needed.
I am very disappointed in myself for not getting this one; having taken the train to London 3 times in the last year for the exact same reason.
(The internet doesn't distract me too much, even if the train wifi occasionally works; but I need a space where I can't start pacing around the room while I'm thinking)
Why travel so far or so much? Just leave all your computers and devices at home and go somewhere else nearby. It could be just down the road. That's what I do occasionally.
@@ajs41I don't have this form of experience but also need external force to be productive, so speaking from loosely related experience:
Popping down the road means the inherent ability to just pop back home. A prolonged travel time leaves you no real option, and the monetary expenses is a further motivator.
A train is the perfect environment for that.
Amazing episode!
I suspected that one (which is rare for me on lateral). I had a history teacher in high school who always booked really expensive high speed train tickets to travel through all of Germany and then back, just so she had an environment free of distraction to grade our exams.
Gosh, that guy must have loved 2020.
Also,
Walden is *not* well known in the UK, sadly. And it was Massachusetts, not Maine
Interestingly, I know Walden, despite living in Europe (though not in the UK). The reason I have read it is also an interesting coincident - I had sort of the opposite problem described in the video: I found myself on a long train ride without anything to do, because I had forgotten to bring a book, so my girlfriend at the time lent me her copy of Walden.
Suitable question for wendover production and jet lag
Walden Pond, is in Concord, MA. It's now a public swimming area, and currently is having a bit of an environmental crisis due to being subject to a century of excess human urine (because everyone swims when they pee, whether they admit to it or not)
I assure you that I have urinated many times without swimming.
@@petertaylor4980 D'oh! I meant "everyone pees when they swim," of course 😂
5:25 I love how it’s BEN who mentions the guy getting drunk
I love the jet lag crew!
Rarely do I click so fast - what a great episode!
My first guess was something about meeting a partners family but could only do it at a specific time...
My second guess was some bizarre fear or phobia of February 29th so flew out and landed on the 28th, and then returned passing the international date line and lands on the 1st March.
I thought quite a good possibility was that he bought the tickets as a cheap way to see the aurora borealis, as a lot of flights in and out of Japan fly very close to the north pole and, if it's dark and the right time of year, give you an opportunity to see something most people spend thousands of dollars to go and see anyway. And I wondered if the relief therefore came with ticking something off his bucket list...
Man if this show was full episodes on video I would be watching all the time. Might have to go listen just for the jet lag boys
I did a mileage run once. California to London, spent about a day and a half there, and flew back. I didn't actually need to go to London-Atlanta would have been far enough. But the cost of the ticket to London, plus not having to rent a car, made the trip significantly cheaper.
My thought was that this was one of those situations where a part to repair a machine needs to get to that machine as fast as possible. "I need a seat on the very next flight to x location"
"That will be $1,500"
"Yes and it leaves in 40 minutes hurry up printing it pls"
I know somebody who spent a weekend (Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon) flying from Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro and back to deliver some documents. To put the icing on the cake, those documents were printed airline tickets (it happened around 1998, before the e-tickets).
I did NYC to Singapore then turned around and went straight back to NYC. A lot more than 24 hours non-stop flying.
Wow... Tom managed to get Erling Haaland on the show.
6:00 lol that's what I was thinking from the start, time to get work done
Awww i was thinking he had to travel to yesterday over the international date line to do something he forgot to do in "time", but it really doesn't work like that as deadlines are tied to location and time zone.
I was convinced it was going to turn out that this guy could only poop on planes and I cant believe none of them guessed that.
like, does he need 28 hours to poop?
That was exactly my thought too!
Same! We took the "much relieved" too literally haha
There are curriers that do this for you, if you need something urgent they fly someone to get it, usually not even exiting the airport
*up in Concord, Mass. I just drove past it this evening. Lovely pond and greenery, apparently Emerson owned the entire estate and let Thoreau conduct his experiment there.
got this right at the start, knew it would be a deadline work task lmaoo
I can't believe it but I got this one right almost instantly. Not kidding.
Love Sam Ben abd Adam!!!
Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin in Concord, Mass(home of the old north bridge) and wrote on walden pond.
I was just on a 16 flight that had wifi the whole time, so times have changed
Writing this at the start of the video, i believe it has something to do with time zones and kind of going back in time to get the time to finish a task before it’s deadline
6:53 That "voluntarily" reminded me of the story behind my country's national anthem:
In 1853, there was a competition to write an anthem for Mexico.
Francisco González Bocanegra, a talented poet, wasn't really interested in it, but his fiancée Pili thought he was good enough to win.
However, he kept on refusing to participate. Pili started getting displeased, so much that she took matters into her own hands.
Pili filled a room in her parents' house with pictures depicting several events of Mexico's history, then lured González Bocanegra into it, and locked him. She then told him he would only be let out of it until he had produced an entry for the competition.
Four hours later, he slipped a ten-verse, one-chorus poem. Once Pili and her father read it, they let him out and entered the poem to the competition... which González Bocanegra won by unanimous vote.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
But... What was the manuscript FOR?!😅 We need to know!
The biggest surprise in this video is Tom's knowledge hole on Walden given the breadth and depth of his knowledge in general
I flew from Europe to Japan on a mileage run a few years ago. Stayed a few hours and flew back...
WOW! I NEVER thought I'd see Tom Scott HUMILIATED on his own podcast!
Good show lol
I live near Walden Pond! It's in Massachusetts, not Maine. And wasn't Tom looking for video ideas for the last 26 episodes? :) Alas, I feel like Walden pond fails the "and" test, though.
Are they actively doing anything about the urine problem? The last I heard they were just asking people politely to stop peeing in the pond.
@@BleuSquid Tom did do a video about this Electric River gadget that might be persuasive...
Hope this brings more viewers to JLTG
and here I thought it was a case of I want this document done by Friday.
its Saturday now when I got this document done but if I take this flight its will be Friday where I land (so I sent them in thoes I be in time).
and then return kind of deal.
"Lateral" popped up in my recommendations. Immediate subscribe...
I can imagine the dude, sitting in his $5000 cabin, telling to himself "There. I'll just watch one episode of Dexter, then I start my work."
I've had to do a last minute mileage run luckily only needed a short trip, so I flew from Maryland to Ohio and back in the same day.
Damn, Adam breaking out a deep cut from high school English Lit.
Yeah, Thoreau went to Walden Pond to be all on his own. Except for his mother who did his laundry and brought him home cooked meals because he was about a 20 minute walk from his parents' house. Puh-leeze.
One could fly to the “far east” (preferably Kiribati) to experience their birthday from the stroke of midnight and at some point fly to Hawaii (the far West) for something like 46-47 hrs.
Before watching beyond 30 seconds or reading the comments, here are my guesses:
picking up an organ for transplant
My other thought was a mileage run to maintain airline loyalty status, but typically you'd look for a flight that has a better value in terms of cost:distance
i was thinking maybe something about time zone , like in New York today is 12/08/2023 , some how 10 hours later the plane landed in that country , in that local time the day is 11/08/2023 something like that , by the way is possible..? is can happen if the plane fast enough , if can be done , so technically is time travel right..?
My guess was a visa expiring on that day. He had to prove being outside the USA, "more than a day"/"before the visa ran out", so he could get a new visa once he returned home.
Since you'll presumably be having more time on your hands soon Tom, by all means put Thoreau on your reading list. It's not a big investment in time, basically just a journal and an essay or two. Philosophy both personal and sociopolitical, one of the foundations of American thought. Standard fare in high school literature and/or civics classes.
But he is not American. Would you expect an American person to know all about an obscure British writer? Or a writer from another country like Australia? Of course not. Every country has authors who write about that country, but whose work is not relevant elsewhere.
@@Dave_SissonCalm down. I didn’t see Bob criticizing Tom, just suggesting that he read the book.
"Nature is nice." Okay, there, now you know what Thoreau said. He used more words and was much more eloquent.
I tried this once to work on school work. It worked great up until the invention of in seat entertainment. Now, I spend 14 hours, sleeping and watching movies. For some reason, I still take my laptop though.
Between “he can only do a certain thing on a flight” and “much relieved”, I was wondering if it had to do with using the lavatory
I've just realised I knew this answer because he wrote it in the book of his that I read. Now that makes sense.
It’s funny, watching this, and knowing the answer, because I read it in a book already
Ok Tom has to be in the next season of jet lag
I thought that the reason was going to be that he could watch the films on the screen, in flight entertainment that they give you. 28 hours is a lot of films
I was thinking he was trying to avoid his birthday by crossing the international date line at just the right times
as a Taskmaster fan, I'm surprised that they brought that up out of the blue 😹😹
I guessed pretty quick as my Dad told me this story recently. Interesting story
I always watch the videos at 1,75x speed and when I watched outro at normal speed I first thought they had a new song or smth
I’d prefer a cabin in the woods
This reminds me, one time like 30 years ago or so, my uncle went to throw out the trash and then called the next day from Moscow. (For context that happens in Bulgaria, and he lives in a small/mid sized town, so like not a world away, but still half a continent or so) and I dunno if he's ever shared the details, but from what my folks have gathered and told me (as I wasn't born at the time) most likely he was approached by some mobsters and they offered him some money to help sorta bodyguard some dancers (strippers probably) but they had to leave like right then.
Wait, I can't recall that Ben and Adam flew from NY to LA and back
Was this an earlier season? Or did they already film next season?
I was sure Sam would have been right. I have done what he said for several years to maintain my Platinum status in days when flying the miles was the only thing that counted. Now people buy their way into the status.
I fly JFK to LAX or JFK to SFO and back same day alllll the time. My statuse is high enough that I almost always get upgraded to a lay flat...and I have lounge access. I work, I sleep, I watch RUclips, and I drink lots of champagne
It's my kinda spa day😂
I was thinking something along the lines: wanted to make sure he missed being in the country on a particular date, cross the date line, and when he returned a day had passed or something?
I would love to see this made into a game you can buy, because i would play this
some people do this for immigration reasons, just so that they don't have to apply for long-term residency. my grandma used to do this because she found the US consulate such a pain to deal with
4:14 real ones know that taskmaster mn is the real taskmaster USA and that it was INCREDIBLE
I like how they never ended up actually explaining what Jet Lag: The Game is
Couldn't remember when this happened, but expecting the answer in the line of someone hating the idea of celebrating their birthday, so by crossing the International Date Line, they would of effectively celebrate that date at little as possible
Since it was 2015, the book Shankman was working on must have been "Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans", since it came out that year.
1:01 "We'll fill that in at the end."
Will we though?
Alternative solution: He lives in Kyoto and was visiting New Jersey. The plane stopped to refill, then he went back home
The funny thing is that this video is about tokyo, japan and currently they’re uploading videos about capture the flag across japan, what’s even funnier is episode 2 just popped up on my recommended
That was pretty nuts. But not as nuts as Tom not knowing Walden.
I was wondering if he needed to skip a day for some reason, by passing the international date line you could just skip one and get a different day back on the route back to the USA