Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Welcome to 45 left to right podcast.
[00:00:25] I am recording on July 1 fifth and I do not drink, but I feel very hungover today.
[00:00:35] Part of it is we were out later than usual at our friend Karen and Dave's annual July 4 party, which is my favorite party of the year. And also our little puppy Luna isn't quite crate trained, potty trained or sleep trained yet. So we've been taking shifts during the night.
[00:01:01] I mean, she sleeps some of the night, but you know, you got to wake her up to go to the bathroom and all of that. So we're a little tired around here, but she is super cute.
[00:01:14] So we actually just got back from Colorado. My husband is from Evergreendeze, Colorado, which is about 40 miles southwest of Denver and it's actually at almost 8000ft. So it's a long buster, but it is so beautiful. Green everywhere. Mountains. There's usually wildlife. We actually were at Evergreen Lake and it's elk calving season, so they had part of the lake roped off and there were all of these elk and their little babies and I mean like dozens and dozens of them. So it was, it's always really awesome being up there. And we actually were up there with my brother in law Eric, his wife Anna, and our nephews Kellen, who is 13, and Shay who is twelve. And Devin and Shay are actually only a month apart, which is really cool. So Devin had some great cousin time and I just love seeing that they don't see each other that often, but when they do, they just get along really well.
[00:02:36] So while we were there, we actually went whitewater rafting. And I just love seeing Eric and his family enjoy the thrill of going down the rapids. Jeff and I have rafted several times when we were younger, in our twenties, but now that I'm older, I kind of pause before getting into the raft. Like, what if we fall in?
[00:03:07] Will the guide be able to help? Sometimes I wonder, will they be able to get me back in the boat? What is the worst that could happen? Well, a lot of things.
[00:03:19] And when we were younger, we would just get in the boat, man. Enjoy. Woohoo. Life is good. Nothing, nothing will ever happen to me. So it made me think about how I am much less willing to take risks now that I'm 46. And I think about some of the things I did when I was in my twenties and I wonder if I would do them now. And I think the most prime example is flying a helicopter.
[00:03:56] So flying a helicopter is really hard and so it's actually much more dangerous than flying an airplane, and there's actually a lot of really funny ways to describe it, like what it's like. And I can't remember all of the really funny quips my fellow pilots said when I was in the army. So I actually found some really funny descriptions on Reddit, which is the, on the flying subreddit. So pull stream, go boom. Said, try balancing a skateboard on a bowling ball that is getting blown in all directions by the wind that's trying to hover. Without a doubt, hovering is the hardest part of flying.
[00:04:50] Tuxedo tease says, I love these names.
[00:04:55] Flying a helicopter is like standing on a yoga ball, balancing a baseball bat on the palm of your right hand while trying to curl a light weight in your left hand. And he says, anyone can do it with practice and determination.
[00:05:16] Yeah, eventually you might get it. It's really hard. And then the last one is from Infowisky. If flying a plane is like riding a bicycle, then flying a helicopter is like standing on a basketball. And I just thought those were funny and actually pretty reflective of how hard it is. And then this is my favorite quote of all time about helicopters and helicopter pilots, and it's comparing helicopters to airplanes. And this is from Harry Reasoner from Approach magazine in November of 1973. Now, Harry Reasoner is kind of questionable and other things that he's written, but this one's really funny. Okay.
[00:06:09] The thing is, helicopters are different from airplanes. An airplane, by its nature, wants to fly. And if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other. And if there is any disturbance in the delicate balance, the helicopter stops flying immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
[00:07:01] That is why a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot and why, in general, airplane pilots are open, clear eyed, buoyant extroverts. And helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if anything bad has not happened, it's about to. Very true.
[00:07:32] All right, so let me tell you why flying a helicopter is so hard.
[00:07:37] So in a helicopter, you have three basic controls. There's a stick with a knob in between your legs called the cyclic. This controls your leg forward, back, left or right. On your left side, next to, like, the bottom of your seat is the collective, and this is a stick that controls your up and down. And then at your feet are the pedals. And that controls your yaw or the nose of your helicopter going left or right. So what is difficult about flying a helicopter is that if you move one control, you have a corresponding movement with the other controls. Up above you is the main rotor, which, of course, spins above you. But each rotor blade is like a wing that sort of flutters or, I think, feathers as it goes around. It doesn't just spin around, and then, you know, it goes around and, like, flutters according to what inputs you put into the controls. And then at the rear is the tail rotor, which basically makes it so you don't just spin around uncontrollably as a result of the main rotor. I mean, wouldn't that be fun?
[00:09:06] So if you raise the collective, you're increasing power and you're wanting to go up. So you also must put in left pedal and then adjust the cyclic as needed. Sometimes there is wind. Well, usually there is wind. And then the increase in power might throw you off a little bit. So when you first start learning to fly, it is a world of overstimulation.
[00:09:37] The hardest thing to do when flying a helicopter is a frickin to hover. So let's say you're on the ground with the rotors spun up to full speed. You want to lift off the ground and simply hover 3ft above the ground. That's it. Very simple, right?
[00:10:00] You pull up on the collective, you apply your left pedal.
[00:10:05] But since you want to remain stationary except for moving up, you have to move the cyclic to correspond with all that you're asking it to do. So if there's wind, you have to adjust it by applying the cyclic in the direction of the wind. But as you move the wind, the relative wind changes. So you have to continue moving the cyclic to keep yourself stable.
[00:10:33] If you look on YouTube, there are some hysterical videos from flight school students learning to hover. I mean, it looks like they are on a bucking bronco. It is so hard. And you have a grouchy instructor pilot sitting next to you, sometimes barking instructions. And then there's the fear that the ground is really close, and then you have these deadly rotor blades above you. You are nervous, and so you tend to just over control the hell out of the controls. And they call it stirring the soup. And it's just. It could. It's just. It's hilarious to watch, but it's really stressful to be in the cockpit.
[00:11:25] It's better to relax and make tiny movements. But you're inexperienced, and so you just can't do it. Initially, I had one of those grouchy instructor pilots. His name was Jim Young, and I believe he flew in Vietnam. Most of them when I was in were Vietnam veterans. And those guys had so many hours and did some really extraordinary things with their helicopters. And Jim had been an IP for a long time. He was very religious, and he introduced himself. He said, there will be no swearing and no gum in my helicopter. Very matter of fact, when my stick buddy Edgar and I were learning to hover, I don't remember Mister Young being particularly grouchy or impatient, but you could sense that he was. But he had, you know, instructed many, many, many students. So, you know, I think he had some sense of calm, but he was really intimidating. And, yeah, it was like a sense of, here we go again, these youngsters.
[00:12:50] He told us that we would know we could hover when we would look over at him, and he would be eating an apple, as in, his hands would not be near the controls.
[00:13:04] And I did not think I would ever get it and got really nervous before every flight session. And then one day, I looked over, and there he was casually eating his apple.
[00:13:21] At the time, I was 23, and the thought of flying a helicopter being dangerous never really occurred to me. I just thought, that would be fun. I want to do that. And for some reason, the army determined that they should let me do that if I had the choice now, at age 46 with a husband and a child, I would first do my research to see how risky this really was. You know, Devin is a daredevil, and we try to teach him how to do a risk assessment before he tries something crazy. I'm not sure he really does a good job of that, but maybe one day our lesson will get there.
[00:14:14] So I've thought about it, and if I were just learning how to fly for fun and not in a military capacity, I'd probably still do it. I mean, I still like to do risky things, but fly a helicopter, learning how to shoot things off of it, and potentially go to war? No, thank you.
[00:14:41] Honestly, if I had to serve, I would be an admin clerk or something like that. I would stay on the fob, which stands for a forward operating base.
[00:14:55] You know, that's just where I am in my life, because I have Devin, and I have a husband who has stood by me through a lot of crap, and I have the knowledge of all that can go wrong.
[00:15:27] Welcome back to 45 left to right podcast. We are at the research portion of this episode, and I want to try to answer the question, do we become more cautious as we get older. And the first article that I have is from the Guardian, and this is from December 2016, written by Ian Sample, who was or is the science editor, and it's called risk aversion in old age, down to changes in brain structure, scans suggest. So, basically, this is about a study, and the research conducted brain scans of 52 volunteers from the ages of 18 and 88. And they did a series of experiments.
[00:16:28] And in these, the people participating were asked to make decisions with kind of varying financial rewards.
[00:16:38] An example would be they could opt to receive $5 or enter a lottery that gave them a 20% chance of winning $20. And so, after the experiment, each volunteer was given a score that reflected their willingness to take risks. And then these volunteers next had their brains analyzed in an MRI scanner.
[00:17:09] So the scientists focused on the right posterior parietal cortex, and they actually looked for any sort of association between risk taking behavior and then other parts of the brain, but they didn't find any. But they did find that the amount of gray matter in a region of the brain that will actually. In the posterior. Sorry, posterior parietal cortex, that was smaller in people who were more cautious with making decisions. So less gray matter, more cautious. And then they had done a previous study, these same researchers, and they actually found there was more gray matter in the same region in people who took more risks. So, interesting correlation now with this research. The scientists didn't want to say, without more research, that a loss of gray matter as we age is why we're more cautious. But they think it is possible that as we get older, we are not more cautious, because we are wiser, which is honestly what I assumed to begin with. But it's because of a, as they say, limited neural computational capacity. So maybe limited means of computing, like making decisions, and I don't want to think about the implications for that.
[00:18:58] So, we talked about gray matter. So let's talk about what that is. This is according to a Cleveland clinic gray matter informational article, and I'm going to start posting my sources on my website. I just haven't gotten to it yet, just trying to juggle everything. But I'm going to try to do that because this is interesting.
[00:19:25] So, basically, gray matter is a type of tissue that exists in your brain and in your spinal cord, and it plays a significant role in your mental functions, your memory, your emotions, and even your movement. And there's actually several conditions that affect your gray matter, including having a stroke, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease.
[00:20:00] So there's two types of important matter in your brain. There's white matter, and then there's the gray matter. And approximately 40% of your brain consists of gray matter, and then the rest of it, 60%, is made of white matter.
[00:20:21] So gray matter basically consists of neuronal cell bodies and their dendrites. Basically, dendrites are like these little fingers that talk to the neurons that are nearby.
[00:20:38] White matter consists of these long axons of neurons, and then those communicate with, you know, more distance, distant regions of your brain and your spinal cord. So the gray matter is the things right around it, basically.
[00:21:00] And the gray matter is basically where a human's unique ability to think and reason lies.
[00:21:12] It's where you process have, like, processing of sensations, of perception, of making these voluntary movements, learning, speech and cognition super important.
[00:21:32] And so it's basically involved in all the aspects of human functioning. So, pretty interesting.
[00:21:44] All right, so there's a kind of a dissenting view that I found that doesn't put as much emphasis in, like, the brain differences. So this is from. This is from 2006. So it is a little dated, the research, but I think it's still interesting and could be still valid.
[00:22:11] So this is actually from a book called when I'm 64 byte Mara Mather. And again, I will post this on my website.
[00:22:24] So she talks about different factors for being, you know, quote, risk avoidant. So more cautious emotions maybe, but it's kind of difficult to determine how, you know, age related changes and emotion affect, you know, someone's willingness to take risks. So generally, people are either just as happy or happier as they get older. I'm not sure where she makes that assumption.
[00:23:05] It might be, you know, in other parts of her book, but she's basically saying the happiness or the positive effect that results in risky decisions is the same throughout a person's life. So if you get a kick out of taking risks when you're 25, you'll get the same kick out of taking risks when you're 46. So what's interesting is kind of the other side of that is that negative emotions like fear, anger, sadness, and disgust decrease as we get older. So, of course, fear makes people more cautious where anger makes them more risky, which I think is interesting because I don't go whitewater rafting because I'm angry. And that's kind of how I think of risk. But certainly there's lots of other, maybe more negative risks that you can take, like gambling, maybe, or acting out on somebody, that it would be considered risky.
[00:24:24] And so what she is saying, since both of these emotions you know, negative and positive decrease with age that they might actually cancel each other out. So pretty interesting.
[00:24:42] All right, so the next article is from HuffPost.
[00:24:49] And normally, I don't necessarily think HuffPost is a yemenite great source, but I just found this interesting. So the title is, this is how risk taking changes as you get older. This is by Carolyn Grigori February 2, 2016 and then there is a co author, Doctor Gregory same, and as Larkin.
[00:25:16] So it kind of starts off with this quote.
[00:25:21] It's too often assumed that risk taking changes dramatically with age, based largely on generalizations and stereotypes about more cautious older individuals. And this is from, I believe it is.
[00:25:43] Sorry, Gregory.
[00:25:45] Doctor Gregory. He's a Yale professor of psychology and neuroscience, and so he's talking about the largest study to date on the topic.
[00:25:58] So researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development showed that risk taking is actually a facet of personality that is subject to change throughout your life. They examined basically ten years worth of data from 2004 to 2014 from 45,000 men and women aged between 18 and 85 in this german socioeconomic panel study. So that is a big research. You know, that's a lot of research and a big sample size.
[00:26:44] I don't know if there are cultural differences, since it sounds like this is mostly german people, but still interesting.
[00:26:54] So it says that at nine different points during the study, these participants answer questions about their risk taking tendencies.
[00:27:07] Nearly a third of the participants looked at their relationship to risk in, like, different parts of their lives, including finances, recreation, work, health, you know, social interactions, and driving at up to three different points.
[00:27:30] So with another section of participants, the researchers conducted behavioral, behavioral experiments. I can't speak today that test risk taking behavior and trust. So they used kind of different methods of the different participants. So this is a quote from doctor Annika Yosef, and she's a researcher at the Max Planck Institute. And she also is one of the study's authors. She said risk taking propensity shows to have characteristics similar to a personality trait that is subject to change. So what they're saying is people who are extroverts and those who are high in the personality trait of openness to experience, which is kind of correlated with imagination, adventurousness, and creativity, those people are more likely to take risks. Okay, that makes sense. So if a person, if their extrovertedness changes as they get older, whether it's lessen extroverted or more extroverted, it's likely that they will either become more or less likely to take risks, which is interesting. I guess I always considered being one or the other extroverted or introverted to be something that wouldn't change throughout your life. But, yeah, we change, and that makes sense that your personality would change.
[00:29:20] All right, so if you don't know me, I am an extrovert, and I like taking risks, but mostly in terms of physical challenges, like skydiving, swimming in the ocean, learning how to surf, zip lining, flying helicopters. I love jiu jitsu.
[00:29:43] Skiing, snowboarding. I love all of that. I am not risky with finances. Mostly it's physical things, so I would still do some of those things, but I think it's mostly out of trying to prove to myself that I can still do it, and I get a rush from that.
[00:30:10] Conversely, if I see that I maybe can't do it anymore, I feel bad about myself.
[00:30:23] I tried to ski over the winter, and I'm not saying I can't do it, but perhaps it isn't the risk to my knees in particular to continue to do it. And this summer, we're going to go to the Atlantic, and I'm sure we'll go to the ocean there. And honestly, with all these shark bites going on, I don't know how far I'm going to get out in the water. I definitely am not going for any long swims out there. I just don't think it's worth the risk.
[00:31:02] But we'll see. I'll talk to Jeff about it. Even doing jiu jitsu, which is one of the great loves of my life, I realize, especially when I roll with someone much younger, I'm like, oh, boy. There are things that I just cannot do within this sport anymore.
[00:31:21] But I can make adjustments, too, to how I do things. But Jeff would be happy if I. If I quit jiu jitsu. But it is a sport I do where I'm like, no, I'm gonna prove that at 46, I can do it, and eventually, maybe I will go up in rank, but that's up to me. Okay. So I always feel like I have something to prove, and honestly, I really don't. I don't have anything to prove anymore. I think my life speaks for itself, but I also want to squeeze as much out of life as I can. And maybe that is part of being extroverted, at least extroverted for now.
[00:32:11] When I die, I want people. I want people to party and say, wow, she really lived quite the life, didn't she? That's what I want.
[00:32:25] But I also have Devon to think about, but not in the way that you would think. Obviously, I do not want to leave him without a mother, and I don't want to die.
[00:32:38] And that's certainly a motivator.
[00:32:41] But I also know that Devin is an extrovert and he is an innate daredevil. If there is something to jump off of, he will do it. He has scared me for as long as he could walk. If there is a trick to try, he will do it. If his friends dare him to do something, he's going to do it, which really scares me. If there's any way he can scare the ever living crap out of us, he will do it.
[00:33:19] And we were actually at the playground recently, and we were on the swings together. I like to swing. And it was kind of one of those moments of his dwindling early childhood that I really cherish. And it was unexpected.
[00:33:41] And we stopped swinging. And he said he wanted to talk.
[00:33:46] He asked me, mom, what kinds of crazy things did you do when you were a kid? Now I told them, I'm like, I don't want to give you any ideas, but I use it as a chance to talk about measuring risk.
[00:34:05] And, you know, we do talk to him about that a lot. All right, you want to do this crazy thing like jump off a 20 foot cliff? Do you just jump off of it? No.
[00:34:22] Gonna find out all that we can about it. What is the depth of the water below? Is it deep enough? Are there any hidden hazards that we need to know about, whether it's in the water or off the cliff or to the sides?
[00:34:41] Have you ever jumped from this height before? Are you going to go head first? No. Are you going to do feet first?
[00:34:50] And then where are you going to swim to when you've done it? You know, make sure you're not trapped. Can you climb back up the cliff when you're done? And so on? And then you ask yourself, do I still want to do this?
[00:35:24] Welcome back to 45. Left to right podcast.
[00:35:29] I want to tell you a story about a pirate ship.
[00:35:35] We were staying in Big Bear, which is about 45 minutes away from us in the mountains. And we were there during the summer, I think it was during COVID because we didn't take our usual summer vacation trips. You know, usually we head to Florida and Georgia and North Carolina to see my family and some of Jeff's family. We hadn't taken that trip, so we had a little, you know, weekend thing and big bear, and we had had a lovely day renting a boat on the lake. And we even let nine year old Devin drive the boat for a while. I know that sounds risky, but he's actually. He's actually a pretty good little boat driver. He's very cautious. And we're always right there, of course.
[00:36:30] And we saw that there was this pirate ship tour on Big Bear Lake. And, of course, we signed up for that. Like, how cool.
[00:36:40] And for the first 15 minutes of the trip, it was for, you know, of the tour, it was really cool.
[00:36:48] The captain was dressed up as a pirate, and he told us about some of the, like, the history of some of the houses on the lakes or really big mansions. I think one of them was owned by Al Capone. And I want to say another one was owned by Marlon Brando. I can't remember. But he headed toward this cove, I thought, too close to the shore. And it turns out it was. We ran aground.
[00:37:21] And he tried to get us unstuck, but didn't have any luck. And so the owner of this pirate ship, he came out with his little motorboat. And he would have sort of put the nose of the motorboat up against the pirate ship and gun it and try to rock us off whatever we were stuck on. And he did not know what we were stuck on. And when he started doing that, the ship started leaning a lot.
[00:37:55] It was really nerve wracking.
[00:37:59] And, you know, Jeff and I, like, started looking out. There was probably about eleven children on the boat, one of whom was our own. And there was a couple of children that had special needs. And we started to think about, like, what are we going to do if we flip over? You know, how are we going to help this, all these different children?
[00:38:25] And then we talked to Devin.
[00:38:29] What would you do, Devin, if you found yourself in the water and it was unexpected, you know, swim to shore?
[00:38:38] I think they had life jackets on. But here we are doing all of that planning for an emergency. And this stupid owner kept trying to get us off this, you know, kept using his boat to get us off the bottom. And we had a big crowd on the shore. So someone on the shore must have wisely called the lake patrol, because they came out to our rescue. And he told the owner he was an idiot.
[00:39:10] And the reason the owner was doing this is he did not want to issue any refunds. He thought, oh, well, if I can get the ship off the bottom of the lake, we can continue the tour, and I won't have to give these people back their money. And even after that, you know, the lake patrol, we got on the lake patrol boat, and they took us back to our cars.
[00:39:37] Even then, we had to fight for a refund. I was so ticked off.
[00:39:43] We signed up for this tour thinking, like, who would think it was dangerous?
[00:39:48] Certainly this pirate ship tour had passed some kind of inspection or had emergency procedures in place.
[00:39:59] No, I don't think so.
[00:40:02] And it made Jeff and I realize that really everything needs some sort of risk assessment, and maybe that is the change in us. I'm sure that our gray matter is decreasing and our personalities certainly pay, you know, play a part, but I think some of it is just life experience.
[00:40:26] Czech won't do the pirate ship ever again, and we'll probably ask a lot of questions if we try anything that is similar.
[00:40:39] But this experience isn't going to stop us from trying similar things. But I think we'll ask more questions. For sure. We're not just going to say, here's my credit card. I want to sign up. I'll sign your waivers. Let's go.
[00:40:57] I would ask, have you ever run aground? Dear pirate ship captain, what would you do if we did run aground? What are your emergency procedures? Is there some kind of lake patrol? What is their number?
[00:41:19] Have you been drinking today, captain?
[00:41:23] Will you breathe into this breathalyzer for me? Thanks.
[00:41:29] So what do we do if you're someone who has the tendency to take risks? Do you pull back as you get older or if you have been more cautious your whole life? Do you change and start skydiving?
[00:41:51] Do you embrace this so called midlife crisis and start taking really big risks?
[00:42:06] Thank you for listening to this episode of 45 left or right podcast.
[00:42:13] I'm going to continue this summer with kind of an every other week of new episodes, and then I'll republish previous episodes in the off weeks. Or if I can't get to making a new episode, they're just weeks. I just can't get it together.
[00:42:31] We have a very inconsistent summer schedule. We're traveling a lot. And then we have this new adorable yet untrained puppy that is wreaking havoc on our household a little bit.
[00:42:50] I say when she is awake, she's a little terrorist, but she's a really good dog. So will, we'll put up with all the things we need to do with her. So I'm sticking to just a less regular and kind of lighter content schedule this summer. And once Devon goes back to school, I have some great, more heavy hitting content that I've got planned.
[00:43:19] And don't forget, I'm on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter or whatever they call it now, xdev, and I'd appreciate any likes or comments you can throw my way even if it's older posts, that helps me. I also have a new website that has additional content. It's got more stories, pictures, and it's all about all of the episodes.
[00:43:49] So I hope everyone's having a wonderful summer. Staying cool. It's about 105 is the high today, but I hope it's going well and bye for now.
