Commercial Aviation in the U.S., Part 2

In this episode, we’ll go from the international agreement that prepared for a global airline industry up to the deregulation of U.S. commercial aviation in the late 1970s. And then we have a special guest -- John Hodgman came by the studio for a visit!

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
So this is part two of a two parter, and
in part one we looked at the early roots of
commercial aviation and how airplanes went from being the latest

(00:24):
invention to starting to morph into a very real industry
at least until World War Two kind of put a
damper on commercial aviation for a little while. And in
this episode, we're gonna go from the international agreement that
took place near the end of World War Two that
prepared for a global airline industry all the way up
to the de regulation of the U S commercial aviation

(00:44):
industry in the late nineties seventies. And then there's like
a special bonus at the end. This is kind of
a double episode because we have a special guest, John Hodgeman,
came by the studio for a visit recently and talked
about his relationship with today's airline industry. Uh, and it
is very fun and silly chat. So we're going to
hop right into talking about how various world powers were

(01:07):
thinking about how to make air travel work after the
war was over. In late nineteen the Convention on International
Civil Aviation took place in Chicago. You'll see it referred
to colloquially as just the Chicago Convention. This convention established
the International Civil Aviation Organization the i c a O,
which is a u N branch to regulate air travel

(01:29):
at the international level. And during the Convention, the so
called five Freedoms of the air were developed. Per the terms,
each of the participating nations would grant all other participating
nations these five freedoms. There was some exclusionary language about
if they had had a previous conflict before this, that
there could be some wiggle room in these. But these

(01:50):
are the five freedoms. To fly across its territory without landing,
to land for non traffic purposes, to put down passengers,
mail and cargo taken on in the territory of the
country whose nationality the aircraft possesses, to take on passengers, mail,
and cargo destined for the territory of the country whose
nationality the aircraft possesses, to take on passengers, mail, and

(02:13):
cargo destined for the territory of another agreeing nation. And
to put down passengers, mail, and cargo coming from any
such territory. In short, it's all, hey, we're all going
to be cool with each other, flying in each other's
airspace and landing in each other's countries. The purpose of
the i c a O was also defined during the convention,
and it was stated as follows quote. Whereas the future

(02:35):
development of international civil aviation can greatly help to create
and preserve friendship and understanding among the nations and people's
of the world, yet its abuse can become a threat
to the general security. And whereas it is desirable to
avoid friction and to promote that cooperation between nations and
people's upon which the peace of the world depends. Therefore,

(02:57):
the undersigned Government's, having agreed on certain principles and arrangements
in order that international civil aviation may be developed in
a safe and orderly manner, and that the international air
transport services may be established on the basis of equality
of opportunity and operated sadly and economically, have accordingly concluded

(03:17):
this Convention to that end. It was signed on December seventh, NINO,
but the i c a OH acted as a provisional
agency until twenty six of the fifty two shining countries
had ratified it locally, and that happened on March fifth,
ninety seven. In the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties,
the British Overseas Airways Corporation built and introduced the world's

(03:38):
first commercial jet airliner that have Land commit. These jets
were beautiful and stylish, and ultimately they were disastrous. In
nineteen fifty three and nineteen fifty four there were three
terrible fatal accidents when the have a land Comments broke
apart during their flights. All the passengers and crew died.

(03:58):
And each of these disasters there's and after the third one,
the comment was taken out of production and a formal
investigation was launched into the matter. You can absolutely find
accounts of pilots and other people in the industry who
have remained very angry for a very long time about
the fact that it was not those measures were not

(04:19):
taken after the first accident, But the investigation found that
in each of these three cases there had been cracks
in the fuselage of the failed planes that was caused
by the pressurization cycle and a riveting system that wasn't
able to manage the stretching forces that were in play
the skins of these planes. It was just too thin
and the squared off corners the windows cracked when that

(04:41):
skin was stressed by takeoff and landing. The comets flew
beautifully when they initially went into active use, although there
are accounts from pilots who flew the comets that suggested
that there were a number of control problems with them
that were also a concern, at least within the pilot community.
But there can struction and their materials were simply not

(05:02):
adequate for ongoing use, and they were ultimately blamed for
the failures. These incidents were obviously tragic, but they also
led to significant improvements, and aircraft manufacturer companies around the world,
including Boeing and Douglas, made use of the findings to
improve their own designs and to safeguard against similar failures.

(05:23):
If you've ever wondered why planes all have those curved,
rounded edged windows, it's because of the findings that were
made during this investigation. Another tragedy took place in nineteen
fifty six that had a significant impact on commercial aviation
in the United States. On the morning of June, a
trans world Airlines flight bound for Kansas City, Missouri, left

(05:44):
Los Angeles at nine o one am after a thirty
one minute maintenance delay. Three minutes later, a United Airlines
flight headed to Chicago also left Los Angeles due to turbulence.
The t w A flight was granted permission to go
up to a higher altitude that put it at the
same altitude as the United flight. The United pilot wasn't

(06:05):
notified of the other plane that was near it, and
technology was very different at the time. Pilots had to
rely a lot more on visual surveillance in these circumstances,
and the cloud covernment that did not have nearly as
much visibility. At one am, the planes collided over the
Grand Canyon and all the passengers on both flights died.

(06:25):
This was not the first midair collision like this. In
the years leading up to it, there had been more
than five dozen others, but this one was a lot
larger than any of these others. It made it painfully
clear that safety procedures and regulations had not kept up
with the rapid growth of the airline industry after World
War Two. Yeah and the course of just a little
over a decade, it had ex fitted way more than doubled,

(06:48):
and there were just a lot more planes in the
sky to be managed. And in a moment, we're going
to talk about the legislation that came about in response
to this incident and this bigger problem that it it
really brought into focus. But first we're gonna cause and
have a word from one of our sponsors. In nineteen

(07:10):
fifty eight, Oklahoma Senator A. S. Mike Monroney introduced a
bill that would create a Federal Aviation Agency. On August
nineteen fifty eight, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal
Aviation Act, which created the new agency, established its purpose
as providing for safe and efficient airspace use, and transferred
the work of the Civil Aeronautics Authority over to it.

(07:33):
On November one, ninety eight, the first Federal Aviation Agency
Administrator was appointed. That was retired Air Force General Elwood
Pete Cassada, who took the helm of the organization as
outlined in the Act. The agency began its operations sixty
days after his appointment on December thirty nine. For the
agency's first several years, it actually had no official office

(07:55):
space set aside for it, so until it moved into
the newly built Fed Role Office building at eight hundred
Independence Avenue in nineteen sixty three. Its staff was scattered
around the Washington, d c. Area, sort of piecemeal, wherever
they could find desk space. On May one, nineteen sixty one,
the first US airliner was hijacked. The National Airline flight

(08:17):
was forced to divert from its Miami It's a key
West route into land in Cuba. This was the first
of four flights diverted to Cuba over the course of
three months. That prompted President Kennedy to hold a press
conference announcing new air travel security measures. In his statement,
he said, quote, now, let me say that we have
ordered today on a number of our planes a border

(08:38):
patrol man who will ride on a number of our flights.
We're also going to insist that every airplane lock its door,
and that the door be strong enough to prevent entrants
by force, and that possession of the key be held
by those inside the cabins so that pressure cannot be
put on the members of the crew outside to have
the door opened. The following year, the first air marshals

(08:59):
were sworn and into service. I think there's an episode
of the podcast Criminal that kind of talks about this
era of airline hijackings and how there were a lot
of them. Yes, and to be clear, this was not
the first time that an airline was hijacked that had
I think the first one is in the nineteen thirties. Um,

(09:21):
but this is the first time that a US commercial
plane was hijacked, and so and several started happening very quickly.
It really did make for some fairly significant concerns. Thus
this determination by the president, but shifting gears. In nineteen
sixty six, the US Congress authorized the creation of the
Department of Transportation, which started operations in spring of the

(09:43):
following year, and as part of this new organization, the
Federal Aviation Agency was rolled up under it and it
was renamed the Federal Aviation Administration, becoming the f a
A we know today In night The Professional Air Traffic
Controllers Organization was formed initially by New York air traffic
controllers who wanted to ensure that their members were represented

(10:04):
in negotiations with the f a A A. The relationship between
pat CO and the f a A had plenty of
difficulties over the years. In nineteen seventy, the union held
a sick out of three thousand workers, which resulted in
an increase in worker benefits, although things remained pretty strained.
And then, more than a decade later, in nineteen eighty one,
after a long series of contract negotiations resulted in a standoff,

(10:27):
more than twelve thousand PATCO members went on strike, grounding
approximately one third of u S commercial flights. After an
ultimatum from President Romald Reagan to return to work, I
think they had forty eight hours to do it, the
strikers refused and they were dismissed from their jobs permanently
by the f a A. A small fraction of those
people were eventually reinstated, but the drop in workforce was

(10:49):
a huge strain on air traffic control, and the f
a A and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization folded.
There was no union for air traffic controllers until the
National Air Traffic Controllers Association stepped into that role in
seven And this, of course, is a very quick version
of a protracted and much more involved story that as
we said at the top of episode one of this

(11:11):
two parter, there are a lot of pieces in this
brief history that could be their own episodes and even
multiple episodes. This is one of them because it's a
fairly significant moment. Yeah, and I mean I had a
lot of effects, not just in the world of air
travel and air traffic control, but also in labor rights
in general, like huge. In nineteen seventy three, the Paris
Air Show featured two different supersonic planes, and each of

(11:33):
them vibe to become the leader in what they thought
was going to be the next stage of commercial aviation.
The Soviet designed Tupolev T four had already made a
name for itself. It had first flown on the last
day of nineteen sixty eight, and it had achieved the
goal of supersonic flight half a year later in the
summer of nineteen sixty nine. The Concorde, on the other hand,

(11:55):
had its first flight in early nineteen sixty nine. That
was two months after the Tu one four. Though it
had been showcased at an event in to Lose, France
in nineteen sixty seven, it just didn't leave the hangar
during that event. It was kind of like, look at
this plane. We're not flying it, but it's cool. It
had been developed in a partnership between British Aircraft Corporation
and the French firm Aerospacil. After an initial agreement to

(12:18):
the co development had been struck by the British and
French governments in nineteen sixty two. Boeing had been working
on a supersonic plane, but it's funding was canceled by
the US Congress in nineteen seventy one and it never
made it past the design phase. At the Paris Air Show,
both the TU one four and the Concorde were on hand.
Both the planes and the rivalry between them drummed up

(12:40):
a lot of excitement at the prospect of supersonic travel,
and so at the nineteen seventy three show the two
competitors were once again on hand. The Concords demonstration flight
was solid and uneventful. It went perfectly, but the t
U one forty four, which had a much more grandiose
and ambitious show featuring flight tricks, broke apart in mid
air and it crashed into a nearby village, killing eight

(13:03):
people on the ground as well as six crew. While
the Soviet craft did continue development, the tragedy at the
Paris Air Show really set it back too far to
compete with the Concorde. Three years Later, in ninety six,
the Concorde began carrying passengers on supersonic flights. They ran
at an altitude of sixty thou feet and could make
the Atlantic crossing in three hours. You could also apparently

(13:25):
see the curvature of the Earth when you looked out
the window. While the Concorde was a massive step forward
technologically in the field of air travel, you'll notice they
are not running today. There aren't really any supersonic passenger jets.
Concerns about the noise limited the Concords flight patterns. The
mid seventies oil crisis also caused most of the orders

(13:46):
for jets to be canceled. They ran exclusively as parts
of British Airways and Air France fleets. The tickets were
also expensive, and then in July of two thousand and
Air France Concorde flight had a catast offic failure just
after takeoff when a blown tire caused the fuel tank
to rupture and the plane was consumed by fire. The

(14:07):
hundred and thirteen people died. All the remaining Concord jets
were refitted with new fuel tanks, but in two thousand three,
the last Concord flight took off from JFK International Airport
in New York and landed in London. There is another
company developing a supersonic jet right now called Boom, which
is apparently on track, but I don't know how they

(14:27):
will manage things like price point Um. Yeah, Concorde was
definitely the airline of the Richard. Yeah. I also imagine, like,
given how much discussion there has been, especially recently about
how much of a contributor to UH like global warming,
air travel industry in general is. I imagine it would
be really hard to get funding for something that would

(14:50):
allow more flights to happen more often, faster, Because if
you can make that trans atlantic flight in three hours,
probably the airline is not going to be like, okay,
will take the next four hours off, Like they're probably
gonna want to load it up with people again and
fly it more. I don't know, because I don't know
if there will be enough people that can afford to
be doing that. That's also a point. It's a I

(15:12):
don't I would not feign to have a firm grasp
of their business plan, but there has been in development.
We'll see if it um succeeds where Concord I mean
Concord ran for a while, but ultimately, for all those
reasons we mentioned, uh, it just could not sustain itself.
But as the nineteen seventies stretched on, air travel in
the US was governed by what had become an inflexible

(15:34):
system that had a lot of problems. Air travel remained costly.
It was something out of reach of the average person
for a lot of people that still is. This was
also a very costly time in the United States in
the wake of the oil crisis, so even the existing
passenger base, like the people that could afford air travel,
that they shrank because money got a lot tighter for
a lot of people. The various regulations that have been

(15:57):
put in place by the federal government could sometimes be
at odds with the efficiency of the airlines, and those
costly fares that we mentioned were regulated by the government,
so airlines had to compete for their customers based on
service alone, but they were thus guaranteed a certain return
on every flight. There was also this huge burden on
the government on keeping the Civil Aeronautics Board in charge

(16:19):
of regulating the air roots and fares in the industry,
and that agency had grown really inefficient at managing all
of it as the industry had grown. There are a
lot of um reports that you'll read of airlines submitting
proposed roots, like saying, hey, we want to run from uh,
you know, Chicago to San Diego, and here's the route
that we propose, and then it would sit somewhere in

(16:40):
the system, uh for like six years, and then the
government come back and be like, oh, this is kind
of a stale idea. Now we don't you need to resubmit,
and like those problems we're happening a lot. As Congress
started to examine this issue, economist Alfred E. Kahn, who
also served as the chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board,

(17:03):
championed deregulation as the solution to the problem. Cohn promoted
the idea of flexible pricing and air travel as something
that would benefit both the consumer and the airlines, and
thanks to CON's work to promote deregulation, the Airline Deregulation
Act was introduced by Nevada Senator Howard Cannon on February six.

(17:23):
It was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on
October twenty of that year. It's full title was an
Act to amend the Federal Aviation Act of nine to encourage,
develop and attain an air transportation system which relies on
competitive market forces to determine the quality, variety, and price
of air services and for other purposes. As for the airlines,

(17:45):
this was not a welcome event. A lot of them
had lobbied against the Act while it was under consideration
and the hopes that it would not be made into law.
There were very real concerns that deregulation would destabilize the
entire industry and put some company needs out of business,
and that did happen. Airlines including PanAm Eastern and brandof International,

(18:06):
among others, went under after this. Yeah, it's such a
huge shift, and there were a lot there are a
lot of articles at the time talking about how airlines
had to completely shift their business model because, as we mentioned,
they were up to that point competing on the basis
of service and so suddenly to have to shift from
we offer you everything too, we offer you cheaper fares

(18:29):
a very difficult thing to do. And on on the
internal end, like that's a big budget shift to make
in how you run everything, going from like oh, we're
going to serve you beautiful meals on fine China, and
that will be what sets us apart too. No more
fine China. We can't afford that. But people still wanted
to fly those airlines and get what they thought were

(18:50):
those airline experiences, so it was a real problem. In
the years after the de Regulation Act, a number of
aspects of the commercial aviation industry solidified. So the hub
and spoken at work that probably most of us are
familiar with became the standard, with airlines concentrating on certain
cities as their main basis of operations. The hubs with
airports that flights are routed through, and then the spokes

(19:12):
are the routes that run out of that airport to
smaller airports, and this idea became the standard business model
for a lot of airlines. By the nineteen nineties, low
cost carriers also emerged in the market, offering paired down
services for much lower fees. And the big consequence of
all of this is that more people started flying and
more often. It really speaks to that statistic you mentioned

(19:34):
earlier that proportionally more people in the US fly regularly
than in other places. While deregulation of the airline industry
continues to have its merits and its issues debated by
industry insiders and economists, and also travel writers. Con defended
deregulation for decades. In an article that he wrote in

(19:55):
the nineties, he said, quote, the United States Airline Deregulation
Act of nineteen eight was the raumatic event in the
history of economic policy. It was the first thorough dismantling
of a comprehensive system of government control since the Supreme
Court declared the National Recovery Act unconstitutional in n It
also was part of a broader movement that, with varying

(20:16):
degrees of thoroughness, transformed such industries as trucking, railroads, buses,
cable television, stock exchange, brokerage, oil and gas, telecommunications, financial markets,
and even local electric and gas utilities. You could have
a million conversations going on for years about the pros
and cons of deregulations of all those things that I

(20:39):
just read. Yes, And to be clear, a lot of
what led to deregulation was they had essentially just watched
the railroad industry really really kind of fall apart in
some ways because of regulations, and that's why they were like,
we don't want the same thing to happen to the
airline industry. So that was another another factor that led

(20:59):
Congress down this path. But this leads us to our
special guest for this episode, John Hodgeman. Uh. John's new book,
Medallion Status, is about, among other things, his relationship with
airline loyalty programs, and that is something that arose in
the immediate wake of deregulation, as airlines all trying to
find new ways to compete. We also have a weird,

(21:20):
a weird tradition almost in our workplace of if I
am on vacation, John Hodgeman, John Hodgman shows up. Uh.
This is less of a hard history segment than we
would normally have, but John is a delight Even though
I'm never in the office when he is, I can
attest to this fact and to keep it at least
history oriented. In the beginning, Holly made John answer some

(21:43):
trivia questions about the history of airline loyalty programs. Yes. So, uh,
But before we get to my chat with John, We're
going to take a quick sponsor break, and then when
we come back, we will have the delightful and charming
John Hodgeman. So now that I'm thinking about the airline

(22:08):
industry's history, particularly as it pertains to loyalty programs. We
have a guest who is the absolute perfect person at
this time, John Hodgeman, who has a new book out
called Medallion Status. Yeah, Medallion Status is my new book
of stories, uh, following Vacation Land, which was a lot
of stories about vacation. This is a book about work.

(22:30):
All the weird, oddball jobs but I've had in my
life since I was thirteen, the traffic counting, the cheesemonging,
literary agent ing, and probably the oddest of all and
most inexplicable, is the period of time I spent on
camera as a famous minor television personality. And it's a
book about losing that job, losing all my TV jobs,

(22:52):
and feeling very panicky about my status as white men
often do, shooting, and just chasing a new kind of
status which was specifically to make up for the loss
of my TV fame, specifically chasing diamond medallion status on
Delta's Frequent Flyer program. Although you do not name Delta

(23:12):
in the no, my book is not an advertisement for Delta,
so I refer to it as my beloved Airlines. So
although anybody who flies Delta would recognize all the terminology
used immediately. It's all part of the sick video game,
sick addictive video game, which is the sky Miles program.
Is I understand. I play that game regularly, So it
seems like a good point to kind of use you

(23:34):
as a jumping board to talk about some of the
history of this, some of your history specifically with loyalty programs,
because it's quite funny. So first, I'm going to ask you.
And there are no prizes, neither are their penalty, So
why am I doing it? If any of these are
stuff I'm not gonna If I'm not going to upgrade
my status, You're gonna learn at the end of it.

(23:54):
I'll give you like a gold Star of Learning. Yeah, okay,
that's that's good. First only child, That's all I want
is validation that I did the work. Uh, John Hodgman,
what year was the Airline Deregulation Act passed? I'm gonna
give you choices A nineteen sixty nine, B ninety five,

(24:19):
C ninety eight or D night. I think that it is.
You are two years too late. Yeah, because they were
trying to address the fact that more global I got
it wrong. I have to leave no medallion status going

(24:39):
to revoke it. They're going to bump you down to silver. Yeah,
and so it's no surprise that after deregulation is immediately
when these airline rewards programs started popping up, literally a
year later. A small carrier, Texas International Airline started offering
a miles program in ninety nine, and then right on

(25:01):
its heels, there were larger airlines that, of course, we're like, yes,
we need to stay competitive, so they started offering their
own loyalty programs. Which of these three large airlines offered
the first loyalty program? Was it American United or Delta?
You know, I'm a Delta person. I know you are,
but I don't think they started this, And I have

(25:24):
a feeling was America. You are correct, it's American. It's
their advantage. I was gonna say, I never know if
I could should call it a advantage or advantage, but
that is the oldest airline loyalty program still running. Really yeah,
because they started there's an eighty one. I was Platinum
Elite Plus there for a brief time. Ye fancy fancy Unicorn. Again,

(25:48):
as with all of these things, mostly it's just like
a card you have or a logo on your app
and you don't know if it's any difference at all
except you got it and someone else that doesn't have it. Yeah,
Next and last question of little importance, although historically interesting
and people love the trivia around this particular airline. Okay,

(26:09):
what was the name of Panama's loyalty program? Was it
a air pass? Be sky pass or see world Pass.
I'm gonna say world Pass. You're correct, see two out
of three? You're fine. If you if you were a
baseball player, you'd be miraculous that average. It would be
a miracle of play baseball. Uh. And then of course

(26:33):
when they folded, And there's many moving parts to what
happened with the end of Panama, but their um, their program,
people that were holding those miles went into built this program.
Oh interesting, So they didn't they didn't lose them all.
I knew that it had to be PanAm because I
knew you were talking about PanAm When you talked about
people were interested because people are fetishistic about the history

(26:55):
of Panama. There's there's Pam's design, history of Panama. It's
a lot there. We um. My husband's parents lived next
to someone that used to work in the travel industry,
and so we have a bunch of vintage PanAm posters.
And you would think that we are magical and cool
with these hanging in our lounge, but really we just
kind of inherited them. We're not, as I feel guilty

(27:18):
and cool PanAm people that would probably like really love
to have them. And one day I'll find one of
those people and have a magnanimous gesture. But or you
can just sell them, fleece them, Fleece those nerds a
world nerds' not a fleecers. See. I knew that Panama's
PanAm first of all, I knew in its history emphasized
its international travel, and of course at John F. Kennedy,

(27:40):
PanAm opened the world Port, which is their super fancy
jet age jetson's looking home terminal that featured it looked
like a giant mushroom. And it's because the central the
central terminal was was a McCall. It a cylinder and
on top of this big overhang so that jets could

(28:03):
pull up to the terminal and you could walk out
to the jet without getting wet. But then almost immediately
after they created this, they started using larger jets. They
couldn't go up to the terminal, of course, And I
only knew about it because I became a Delta terminal
and I flew out of the World Port about a
year before it was finally demolished. And is it because

(28:26):
you had been mayor? They said, that's it. We're just
waiting for Hodgmen to go through. Then we can start
taking this thing apart, brick by brick, And it had
fallen into profound disrepair because they had no interest in
repairing it. And it's historically, i mean architecturally beautiful and
of its time, but in impractical as a terminal. And
by the time this was I must have been because

(28:52):
they only recently got rid of it. And you know
at the same time that they're lovingly renovating the t
w A terminal over by Jet Blue, the euro Sarin
and E t w A terminal which is now an hotel. Uh.
They were just letting this piece of pop art crumble.
And there were birds, colonies of birds living inside and

(29:14):
water dripping everywhere. It's like you were walking through an
abandoned tropical temple. It was like a Disneyland set, frankly,
and they had big, huge, like orange translucent garbage bags
to collect leak water with these valves and plastic pipes
siphoning the water away. It was like a set from
the movie Brazil that is a little post apocalyptic. Yea,

(29:36):
it was very It was really intense, and it was
the final The once glorious Joel and the PanAm Crown
had now been totally tarnished and crushed and crumbled, and
it was sad to be a part of World Pass. Uh.
So you've already told us some of your travel history,
but you named your book after you're medallion status. I

(30:01):
used two words redallion and status go together. Will you
just give us a little bit of your history as
it relates to like your personal history of flying in
particularly becoming And I say this with absolutely no shame
an addict to this kind of system, because we all
get in it. It's design. I mean, it's designed. It's

(30:22):
it's it's gamifying consumer completely, and I mean obviously it
goes back hall all the way to a time before
there were video games. Honestly, do you know what I mean?
So it's the it's the original, it's the original in
f purchase kind of like commercial mind control. So you know,

(30:44):
I I my name is John Hodgman. I'm a writer, comedian, actor.
I used to be on the Daily Show with John Stewart.
When John Stewart was on the show. What was that
The Daily Show was a daily comedy show, and that
opened the door to a very impractic, as I say,
implausible career on camera. And I got to do some

(31:04):
acting work. And I still do still do a little bit,
but but less than ever before. But there was a
period between twenty and twenty uh sixteen or so when
I was traveling a lot by air, partly as a
touring comedian and storyteller and partly as a being flown

(31:25):
across the country back and forth all the time for
a small role on an f X cable comedy show
called Marriage That Doesn't Exist Anymore. And I was on
this show. I was I was the third best friend
of the leading friend. I wasn't like even the vice
best friend. I was like the president pro tempore his friend. Yeah,

(31:45):
in case the in case the other two best friends disappeared,
I would I would get to be this guy's best friend.
And by contract as a guest star, they had to
pay for my flights, and they had and they were
contractedly opplicated to fly me first class, and I was
going back and forth on Delta. Arbitrarily. I had not.
I had never wandered. I had been in a in

(32:07):
a program, and I had been an advantage account. I
still do advantage, but I had never chosen any of
these walled gardens to get trapped in. But it just
happened to be Delta, and it just happened to be
that I was lying back and forth so fast that
I was racking up all these regular miles and also
all these medallion qualifying miles. And this is where the

(32:28):
gaming really gets hot, because you can earn miles. Now,
you earn miles on anything, credit card purchases, whatever it is.
These so called miles, these reward points that you can
then trade in for like a thousand miles to a dollar. Right,
you can buy half of a one way flight to
Toledo with miles, or you can trade all your miles

(32:49):
in instead and buy a single French fry delivered to
your door on seamless or grubbub or whatever. Like. It's
not an efficient way to buy things, you know I did.
I'll tell you one thing, though, I racked up so
many it's a different loyalty program, but so many Amex
Rewards points that I was able to buy my son
the Stranger Things Lego Set, which is an incredible Lego

(33:13):
It's a beautiful set, and I am not surprised that
you you're a bit of a Lego head. Your go ahead,
you know what I'm talking about. And I don't know
what they were charging for it when it was released,
but it very quickly became highly sought after and hard
to get. So it was at Lego Set and I
was like, I can't pay three fifty dollars for a
Lego set, even though it would be so fun to

(33:35):
work on this with my son. But then I realized
I could cash in all of my Amex Rewards points
and there were a lot of them. Do you know
what I mean. That's a lot of points because I
have an Amex Delta, So I understand I'm double gamed
in Delta Reserve. I'm just a regular. Oh no, no, no, no,
you gotta upgrade, upgrade the Delta Reserve. I don't have to. Well,
I don't even know who I'm talking to you right now,

(33:56):
because I have Delta Reserve, right that's and we'll go
that come back when you get some fancy fants lady.
So I didn't care about any of this stuff, but
that's for me, a nice use of using points like
something you would never want to pay cash for it
a splurge item that you can Then I was also
getting these medallion qualifying miles m q m s, as

(34:16):
they say in the game. And these are the miles
that you accrue there are portioned differently, not just two
miles travel, because it's not a one to one, because
if you're uh, if you're traveling first class, you will
earn more medallion qualifying miles on the same flight than
if you're flying coach or you know, whatever they call
premium economy or whatever. And these are the ones that

(34:38):
determine what your status is as a flyer. And you
start at zero, you earn a certain number of m
q m s, and you lock in silver medallion, then
gold medallion, than platinum medallion, and then well, i'll tell
you about the next thing. I pretty quickly made it
to gold without even noticing, just because I was flying
so much. The only way I found out was that

(34:59):
I was going on a flight home and the person
as I was checking in, the woman at the gate
who scanned my bar coach. She's looked and she said,
thank you Mr Hodgman for being gold. And it was
the greatest thing that ever happened in my life, like
a magical dopamine hit. It was so so I mean,
it's you know, it's one thing, you know, for someone

(35:22):
from an airline to treat you like a human being
and simply say thank you, and then for them to
know your name, now you feel famous, and then to
say thank you for being gold. I mean, if you're
an only child as I am, and totally reliant upon
praise and acknowledgement as if it were oxygen, do you
know what I mean? Like being were thanked for being

(35:44):
gold was a very powerful bad feedback for me. It's like,
and you know, everyone think, you know, it's like one
of the things I talked about in my book is
I'm not recognized that much anymore, and yet when I am,
it's still wonderful. Because even even if it is, as
in the beginning of the book, this young couple that

(36:07):
approach me in our you know, in our town that
we that we spend part of the year and in
coastal Maine, and they're like, hey, it's John Hodgeman, and
I'm having a fight with my wife because we're both
freaking out over the fact that our our jeep dropped
its heater core and that and the passenger footwell is
filling up with engine coolant but we don't know what
engine coolant is, and it just looks like our cheapest

(36:29):
bleeding to death. And all of a sudden, these nice
people come and they go, hey, it's John Hodgman, and
I'm like, this is the worst time. I'm sorry that
you just saw me yelling at my wife, But okay,
I'm gonna get it together and be nice because it's
a gift. It's a gift to be seen. It's a
gift to be recognized. Most people on Earth aren't seen
or recognized even by their members of their own family. Really,

(36:51):
do you know, Like for someone to express interest in you,
it's wonderful and it's not something you expect when you're
boarding a plane to Minneapolis or to go home to
brooke it or whatever. So to be seen, say thank you,
John Hodgment for being gold even though it's this arbitrary,
dumb tattoo that this company has put on you. It

(37:12):
feels like people feel like, you know, everyone goes through life,
so like I think I'm gold. I think I'm gold,
but no one sees that I'm gold. Actually, I'm not
sure that I'm gold. I'm worried I'm not gold. I'm
worried that I've been tricking myself into being you know,
into gold, gold imposter. I'm worried. I'm worried that I've
I've been tricking everyone into thinking that I have value.

(37:33):
But I'm not sure that I have value. But all
of a sudden, there's a stranger in a in a
patterned vest saying thank you for being gold. It was
a really powerful feeling. And all of this, I mean,
I think that what started for airlines as a simple
like they needed a way to retain customers because suddenly
it was much more competitive in the marketplace. It was

(37:55):
a loyalty rewards program literally. But but I think for
people that I've talked to who get deep into the
into the medallion status game, it's really hard not to
take it personally. It's really hard not to take it personally,
like to have it feel like there is some special
validation to being Platinum medallion, for example, is a step

(38:19):
above gold, yeah, which I really, um am eager to
get too soon for an aesthetic, weird reason, which is
what when you're gold status, your boarding pass on your
phone has the ugliest background color of all and I'm
only like two flights away from getting rid of that.

(38:40):
You're going to hit platinum. Yes, it's very exciting. There's
a little ceremony. I don't want to spoil it for you.
I'm just ready to not look at that particular shade
of like rust brown anymore. Well, because it's reminding you
you're not platinum. I didn't mind when I was just
silver because it was that pretty gray with a little
sheen to it. It's the color, it's really it's aesthetic
for me over as a garbage medallion. And I don't

(39:01):
want to talk about it anymore. And then after traveling
for a while, my TV show was canceled, and that
was good news ultimately, because this travel was really the
amount of travel I was doing was really hurting my family.
My my children had grown to an age without my watching,

(39:23):
without my noticing, they had grown up to an age
where they actually cared about me. Mostly they like, they're
always fond of me, and I have them. Do you
know what I mean, but I had been traveling and
touring and you know, taking chunks of time to be
away from my family for all of their growing up.
And when they're when kids are young, they're resilient to that.

(39:44):
But my son had grown up to a point early,
you know, preteens. My daughter was the very early teens,
and they were noticing I was gone, and it was hard.
It was hard for me too, because I was starting
to appreciate they were going to disappear for real, not actually,
but to grow up and go away soon. Right. So,
even though it was hard for that job to end,
and it was the first time that I had no
jobs on television and that was scary, I was glad

(40:07):
to be home. And then I got an email from
Delta saying, you have been traveling lately. We just want
to remind you you're only seven thousand m q ms
away from making Diamond. I'm like, wh whoa diamond medallion?
But not like such a dealer move. I'm like, I

(40:27):
can't I have to get to Diamond, Like what does
it offer? What advantages? Does it offer? Very minimal, very
few perks? I mean, I guess you'd get to board
the plane first and sit in the pilot's lap. I
don't know, something like that. He feeds you candy and
it doesn't do anything. They hug you into your nap.

(40:50):
None of that. None of that. I mean you. You
are ostensibly on a on a priority list for complimentary upgrades,
but those never seemed to happen to me any way.
I don't know why. I don't know why. Very rarely,
and then you get some other little perks, but mostly
it was there is an imaginary medallion that someone has
that I don't, and I want it, and this is

(41:12):
my last chance to get it too, because my show
has been canceled, and if I don't make the way
these things work, and this is why it's so insidious,
is you log up your m q ms per year
and that locks in your medallion status for the for
the following year. So I knew that I was locked
in for platinum for next year. But if I didn't

(41:33):
make Diamond now at the end of the year, all
my mp ms would zero out. I had to start
building them up again. I would stay platinum, but gradually,
because I wouldn't be traveling as much, even though it's
better for my family. I would be home with my children,
and my children would be watching me as I dwindled
from platinum to gold, to silver and to nothing more.

(41:55):
Children to see that forward in group main three exactly,
and you know what happens. What I learned over the
course of this experience with fame, which is a very
weird kind of status. It's very specific, but it's also
a pretty a pretty good indicator of what all status is,
what all privileges like. It's often just arbitrary, right, I mean,

(42:18):
when you get famous for something, all of a sudden
people want to give you stuff for free, and you
get invited gifted gifting lounges at the Emmys, and you
get free jeans and free shoes, and John Lithogo is
there and wearing free jeans and free jeans and free shoes,
and he says it's John Hodgman. I mean, it's a
very specific memory from my life. But when you get
stuff for free, whether it's because by free I mean

(42:38):
without payment, or maybe just more easily without others, more
easily than others, do do you know what I mean? So,
whether you get stuff for free because you've been on
TV or you're born in America as a as a
straight white male, right, you know, as John Scalzy would say,
playing life on the easy on the easy mode. You
know what, when you don't have to be afraid, statistically speaking,

(43:02):
you don't think that you might be under threat every
time you walk into a room because of how you
look or who you are. Uh, you you can't, Hey,
you don't. You don't you stop noticing that you're getting
this stuff for free, stopping thankful for it and because
it's just happening to you, because right you have to
convince yourself that you've earned it, you know, and sitting

(43:23):
in first class the first time you ever get bumped
up to first class. It's almost always accidental, you know,
like you get bumped up or there is a mistake
or someone is paying for you and you get to
be in first class. You didn't buy that ticket necessarily,
very rarely, and you sit there in first class and
you're like, this is the most insanely happy thing to
ever happen to me. Look at this. I get a

(43:45):
sleep mask. Look I they're treating me like a human being.
I get this jar of brazil nuts that's been warmed
in a microwave for free. Like I'm so lucky in
the world, and then by the time you're landing, you're like, well,
of course I'm sitting up here. I'm I'm this smartest
and most successful person in the world. They actually are
gassing the first class cabin to keep everybody happy. When

(44:07):
you when you get status, when you get privilege. There
are legitimate things that you earn in this life, but
there are also things that you get just because that's
the way the law works, or that's the way the
market works, or whatever. And when you get stuff for free,
your mind quickly convinces itself you deserve it. It's a

(44:28):
self layer of self protection. Right, and then when the
status is taken away for whatever reason historical change, or
your TV show is canceled or whatever else, your mind
goes into a weird panic mode. Maybe not everybody's, no,
I think you're tapping into something very human. Right. If
you look at conflict throughout history, it is like you said,
it's a self protection Like you would feel guilty if

(44:50):
you didn't feel like you earned it, So you convince
yourself you earned it, and then when you lose it,
you feel shame over it. Right, You feel shame. That's
exactly right, because you've lost this thing the motivator for
so much poor behavior. Your historically of humans well, I mean,
you know, yeah, every everything from chasing diamond medallion status
to voting for a particular presidential candidate because you feel

(45:13):
that your historical privilege is being taken away and you
feel you feel your status slipping, and people do irrational things,
you know, and parents too. One of the interviewers who
talked to me about the book for Publishers Weekly whose
name has escaped me for a moment, but you can
look it up. She's a wonderful writer. I apologize she
made a connection that I didn't even make my own
bookcause a lot of my book is talking about parenting
and and my kids. And it's like when you're when

(45:36):
you're a parent of young kids, you are extremely famous.
You are the most famous person to walk into that room.
It's extremely gratifying. Like it's extremely gratifying to walk into
a room where someone goes, it's John Hodgman, you know
what I mean, Like presuming your John Hodgman, and whether
that's John, it's always so weird, stand what's happening. But okay,
I'm just gonna wrote. You know, you are a total

(45:56):
celebrity to your kids, you know what I mean. And
then they get older and you lose that status, like
they start to see you for your flaws and you're
no longer than they have start to have their own
thoughts and feelings and lives and so forth. And we
all deal with parents who are also aging out of
their careers. They're losing their their jobs, they're losing their

(46:18):
influence over their worlds, and it's a you know, it's
their inflection points in life where status just drops and
people deal with it very poorly most of the time,
you know what I mean. That's what midlife crisis is
for defer guys for sure, you know. So anyway, this
is all to say, I get this note saying I'm
seven thousand mqms away from Diamond, and I'm like I

(46:41):
need to have this, and I'm like that, how am
I going to do it? Now? There is I'm not
sure if there still was a secret website you could
go to just pay them a bunch of money to
jump up to Diamond. It's a black market of status. Yeah,
it's it's a secret website. I think it's Delta dot
com slash Elevate your status is that actually, but I

(47:01):
didn't know about that at the time. I thought I
had to go, so it doesn't sound very black. I
thought I had to earn it. So I'm I'm up
at two am now pricing flights, trying to figure out.
You know, here we are coming up. It's December, where
the holidays are coming up. I don't have time to
be away of commitments everywhere. The only way I can
make diamond medallion is if I fly first class to

(47:23):
get those extra m q m s from JFK to
l A X and then fly back immediately, just get
a cocktail and l A X and whipped around and
and it was gonna cost thousands of dollars, never mind
the amount of you know, carbon footprint that I was
adding to my life. It was unnecessary, total waste. And

(47:43):
then I thought about how I could possibly explain this
to my son as I got up, and you know,
he's been traumatized because I've been flying away so long,
but he's always a good sport. I would say, I'm sorry,
I have to fly today and go. You're going to work,
I understand. I'm like, well, not really for work, not
really for anything. I just have to go and get
an imaginary medallion, just whispering in his in his ear

(48:05):
and whispered diamond. Yes, I just have to There's an
imaginary diamond medallion in Los Angeles, and I have to
go get it because and you'll understand this, son, you're
a gamer, right, you got you gotta power up, you
gotta This is a magic dot that if I eat it,
I will turn big. And then I can turn around
and all those ghosts that have been chasing me through

(48:26):
this maze of insecurity and it's self loathing, They're gonna
turn scared and I can eat them for once, and
finally I'll be loved by a major corporation for a
whole year. So it's worth it. I won't tell you
whether or not I book the flight. Okay, you have
to read the book. That's fair. I think it's a nice,
you know, micro cosmic example of how we trade ourselves

(48:49):
for validation. Yeah, which is again a historical problem you
see in so many conflicts. If you break it down
to the component parts and the decision makers, it's a
very similar thing. They don't know that that's what they're chasing.
They're not cognizant. But it's diamond medallion status, but it
almost always is. And you know that there is one
thing that Donald Trump really really craves, and that's validation.

(49:12):
And he's he's wanted it his whole life, and he
lives in consistent insecurity, even even though he is the
president of the United States. He is consistently afraid of
losing status and acts acts like certain people who are
afraid of losing status act, which is rashly say. I'll
say that so polite. Your book is at October, is correct? Yes,

(49:35):
I just remembered that I didn't even have it written down.
And if this isn't if I don't know when this right.
Attention time travelers, if you have landed in this timeline
before October, you may preorder my book by going to
bit dot lee. That's b I, T dot l Y

(49:55):
slash medallion status all one more at all capital letters,
but Doutley slash medallions. That's a U r L, which
is the the That is an address to a website,
a form of information we use during this time. It
may be antique to you or maybe the far future
to you. I don't know, time travelers, but if you
land after October, you can go to that website and

(50:17):
buy it. You can go to a bookstore and buy
it audiobook, e book, hardcover, or you can come see
me on my book tour, which goes through November. John
Hodgman dot com slash tour. That's another U r L
for a website. I bet you could buy it at
airports too, I hope. So. I think that's fabulous. I
really want to do some off the cuff readings at
the sky Club. Um. There's a fun story that you

(50:43):
tell in your book about the first time you get
into first class by kind of just inviting yourself in there. Um.
And there's a line in that segment that I really loved,
which is when you get away with something brash and
ridiculous and unfair, it is natural for you to feel
that is perfectly natural. Um. I don't know brash applies,
but it feels ridiculous and unfair that I got to
spend this time just chatting with you, because what it's

(51:05):
like for me to me, it feels perfectly natural. Yeah,
thank you so much, Thank you so much. What a pleasure.
Good luck with history. We'll fix it still, they're still
making more of it. So you should have you should
have a podcast for a long time ago, we hope.
Uh yeah, we are categorizing John Hodgman as our listener
mail today because this is a long episode. But thank

(51:26):
you so much John for hanging out and talking to me.
The part you won't here in that is uh John
and I talking about Disney Parks for a shocking amount
of time before we ever got to airline discut. Yeah,
I'm sorry I missed you, John. I was in the
Internetlas Hills of the border between New York and Pennsylvania.
You know, everybody's gotta have some time away, you gotta unplug.
If you are still plugged in and would like to

(51:48):
reach out to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at house stofworks dot com. You can also find
us anywhere on social media as Missed in History and
Missed in History dot Com is our website. We would
love it if you would subscribe to the show. That's
kind of like our listener loyalty program subscription right um.
If you do that, you could do that at Apple Podcasts,

(52:09):
on the I Heart Radio app, or wherever it is
that you listen. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff Works for
more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.