422- In The Unlikely Event

Episode Summary

Title: In The Unlikely Event Summary: This episode explores the history and design of airplane safety cards. In the early days of air travel, safety cards were not regulated and acted more as advertisements for airlines. By the 1960s, investigators realized more plane crash survivors were dying from being unable to quickly exit the plane rather than from impact. Psychologists Dan Johnson and Bo Altman were hired by an airline to improve safety cards and procedures. Through experiments evacuating mock cabins, they developed visual-focused cards with simplified illustrations that significantly improved passenger evacuation times. Their new safety card designs were tested in a real-world tragedy with the 1977 Tenerife airport collision, the deadliest accident in aviation history. The visual cards they created were credited with helping passengers rapidly escape the burning plane. However, Johnson and Altman found most passengers overlook safety cards due to disbelief that reading them is worthwhile. The placid illustrations are designed to avoid increasing passenger panic. Creating the cards is an intricate process to accurately match aircraft details. Overall, safety cards have been pivotal in evolving airline safety, but passengers must take responsibility to review the information.

Episode Show Notes

If you’ve ever flown on a plane, you’ve been directed to study the safety briefing card in your seatback pocket.

Episode Transcript

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Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Do you remember airplane travel? Packing into a tin can with 200 other people all breathing each other's air? Well, these days, most of us are still avoiding planes. But in the before times when we boarded a flight, we all received the same familiar set of instructions. For everyone's safety, now would be a good time to review the safety information card, SPEAKER_02: which is in your seat pocket. SPEAKER_06: If you've ever flown on a plane, you've been directed to study the plane's safety briefing card. Every passenger plane, commercial or private, has to have safety cards on board. And if you're like most people, you probably never bothered to examine it too closely. That is, if you've even looked at it at all. SPEAKER_05: I always look at these things. As soon as I sit down on a plane, I pull out the safety card. SPEAKER_06: Today, I'm going to be talking with producer Mo Leboard about why safety cards might be worth a closer look. Hi, Roman. Hi, Mo. So you're saying you always pull out the safety card? SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, what can I say? I just love airplane safety cards. Honestly, I think I love them like a little bit too much. I don't just look at them. I collect them. I've been collecting for about 10 years. SPEAKER_06: Ten years. So when you say you collect them, what do you mean? SPEAKER_05: Well, whenever I fly on the plane, I just snag the card and I put it in my backpack. So you just take them. SPEAKER_06: Is that allowed? I actually don't. Is that a problem? It's a good question because it's technically not allowed, but I just have such a strong SPEAKER_05: kleptomania for this one object. Today in my collection, I have about 300. SPEAKER_06: That's cool. So why do you have 300 safety cards? SPEAKER_05: I think it's that for me, I fell in love with them because they're like safety themed comic strips. Like the outfits of the women are stuck in the 1960s. There are little girls wearing Mary Jane shoes and bobby socks. And it's just so the way they look is so fascinating to me. But more than that, like I am especially fascinated with the way that they depict a plane crash. Like it's this alternate version of events where there's no blood, there's no wreckage from the crash. Nobody's distressed and their hair doesn't even get messed up. Like it's so obviously the opposite of what an actual plane crash would look like. SPEAKER_06: Absolutely. When I see these cards, I always think of the movie Fight Club where Brad Pitt's character is just outright mocks the way that people look on these cards. Emergency water landing, 600 miles an hour. SPEAKER_10: Black faces calm as Hindu cows. The illusion of safety. SPEAKER_06: And then like later on, you see Ed Norton and Brad Pitt replace the normal safety cards with cards where everyone is like freaked out and panicking. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And I think that the Fight Club scene gets at something about how most of us think the cards aren't actually necessary. Like at some gut level, we just assume that if we're in a crash, everyone's gonna die. But then after I began collecting them, I started looking into the history of these cards and where they come from. And basically what I learned is that we have that all wrong. Safety cards work. SPEAKER_06: Really? I would not have thought that. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Reading a safety card can save your life. But also it turns out that safety cards have played a central role in our evolving understanding of how to survive a plane crash. All right. SPEAKER_06: Well, tell me more. What is it that we owe to the safety card? SPEAKER_05: Well, to answer that first, we have to go back a ways to a time when safety cards were pretty much useless. In fact, they weren't even really about safety because in the early days of passenger airplane travel in the 1930s, there was no regulation at all about what should go in the cards. And in the beginning, airlines had to convince people to get on planes because people were scared to fly. So the early cards were all about soothing passengers, selling them on the idea that air travel was safe and glamorous. And they were essentially just miniature versions of those travel postcards, like little advertisements for the airlines. So here, let me show you a really early card. This one was made by Imperial Airways in the 1930s. SPEAKER_06: Oh, okay. This one says Imperial Airways, comfort and convenience. And there's little cherubs carrying a fat fancy man in a hammock. That's lovely. That is not the depiction of air travel in any way, shape or form. No, it's a fantasy. SPEAKER_05: And if you open it up, all of the instructions pretty much, it's all text. Okay. SPEAKER_06: So here's some of this. Okay. To inflate the belt, hold the air bottle, which you can feel inside the belt in the left hand and press lever B upwards with the right hand. That is not very clear. Do you know what that means? No, I really don't. SPEAKER_05: And sadly, this card is characteristic of the whole first wave of safety card design throughout the thirties and forties. And to be fair, by the mid sixties, things had improved a bit. You start to see these things called fleet cards, which were almost like spiral bound booklets that contain the safety instructions for multiple plane models in multiple languages. But that often just made it harder to find the correct safety information because there were so many pages to flip through. SPEAKER_06: So how did we get from that to the kinds of cards that we're familiar with today? SPEAKER_05: Well, things really started to change in the late 1960s when airlines started noticing a troubling pattern when it came to crashes. SPEAKER_08: Impact survival was possible, but not escape. SPEAKER_05: Dan Johnson is a psychologist who specializes in airplane safety, and he says that in the fifties and sixties, air travel was growing increasingly safe. Planes crashed less often. And when they did crash, thanks to design improvements, those crashes were less fatal, all of which should have added up to more survivors. SPEAKER_08: But unfortunately, those survivors were not always getting out of the airplane in time to survive. SPEAKER_05: And I have to say, this is the part of the story that made me throw out everything I had assumed about airplane safety. Because it turns out that if you're in a serious crash, it's not the impact that kills you. SPEAKER_08: There's very few accidents that kill everyone aboard. SPEAKER_05: Instead, what kills you is what happens next. It's the smoke and fire inside the cabin after the crash. So the key to surviving is getting out of the plane as fast as possible. SPEAKER_06: Huh, I guess I never thought about it that way before, that the important thing is just exiting the plane. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and this is the realization accident investigators had in the 1960s. They calculated that in your average crash, people had about 90 seconds to get out of the plane before it became quote unquote, unsurvivable. But again and again, they found that passengers weren't making it out in time. SPEAKER_08: In one accident, for example, there were 101 passengers aboard, four survivors. And the people who were killed were not killed as a result of the impact, but because they couldn't get out through the door. SPEAKER_06: Oh, that's so dreadful. SPEAKER_05: It's nightmare fuel. And it was a nightmare for the airline industry too, which is why in 1968, Douglas Aircraft decided to improve their safety record by hiring Dan, along with another guy named Bo Altman. SPEAKER_10: I had never been on an airplane in my life. SPEAKER_05: That's Bo. Like Dan, he's also a psychologist who specializes in airplane safety. But back when he was first hired at Douglas, he says he didn't know the first thing about air travel. SPEAKER_10: Well, I didn't lie, but I'd never been on one of those great big monster airplanes. SPEAKER_05: So the first time he entered a proper passenger plane was to give it a safety inspection. SPEAKER_10: And my first inclination was when I entered the back door of the airplane was where are the exits? And I could not see any exits. I could only see the door which I came through. And I said, well, how does a passenger know where to go in the event of an emergency? SPEAKER_05: So he started walking through the airplane and he noticed all the doors were covered with curtains. And why were they covered? Was it just for aesthetics? Oh, yeah, they didn't want anybody to know that there was a possibility of an emergency SPEAKER_10: exit there. They didn't want to talk about safety at all. SPEAKER_05: And then he took a look at their safety cards. SPEAKER_10: So I looked at it and I said, this is terrible. I said, it's all in three languages and no pictures or nothing. It was just read it and weep. And I said, we've got a problem here. We need to teach passengers how to get out of that airplane in a hurry. SPEAKER_05: So Bo and Dan decided to found a company together to improve airline safety procedures. They called it the Interaction Research Corporation and their specialty was running tests in mock cabins full of research participants. SPEAKER_10: So Dan and I did tons of work on how do we get 450 people aboard that airplane off, everybody off, including the crew in 90 seconds. SPEAKER_05: And they would start by making each test as realistic as possible. They always made sure that there were X amount of people under the age of six and so many people over the age of 70. SPEAKER_10: And they have only been given their passenger briefing that it would be on a regular airplane. SPEAKER_05: And then they would just toss a smoke bomb into the fake plane cabin. Then boom, lights go off. SPEAKER_10: Emergency emergency evacuate, evacuate. Release your seatbelt, release your seatbelt. Get up, get up, get up, move, move, move, get to the exit. SPEAKER_05: And then when they got to the exit, they would be 15 feet above the ground and they had to SPEAKER_08: jump into an inflatable slide in the dark and they'd never done it before. SPEAKER_05: And trying to get everyone moving as fast as possible, these experiments could actually get dangerous. SPEAKER_06: I have no doubt. Yeah, they got a little out of hand. SPEAKER_10: We tried to provide as much realism as we could without hurting people. We still hurt a lot of people. Early. Yeah. A lot of people got hurt jumping out of the slides, but nevertheless we did it. SPEAKER_06: For the greater good. SPEAKER_05: Yes, yes. And their tests were an information gold mine. All the participants would be wearing numbered vests indicating their seat number, their age, their gender. And Beau and Dan would be filming the whole thing to see who went where and who did what. SPEAKER_08: I figured that I had looked at about 10,000 people over 10 years looking at whether they sat down at the door still, how long they waited, did they follow the behavior of the passenger in front? SPEAKER_05: So for example, with that thing Dan just mentioned, whenever people sat down at the door before going down the slide, they found that it took an extra half second per person. SPEAKER_08: And if you've got maybe a hundred passengers going out a door, then that's 40 or 50 seconds. SPEAKER_05: But if you need to get everyone out in 90 seconds, then 50 seconds is more than you can afford. SPEAKER_06: So I thought that jumping on the slide was a structural thing, but that's actually just a time thing? SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I thought that too, that sitting down would like damage the slide. Yeah. No. It's all about getting the passengers out as quickly as possible. Oh, that is fascinating. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. But one of the most important things Bo and Dan learned was that one of the best ways to get out of the airplane on time was, surprise, to read the safety card. SPEAKER_06: Wow. They're important. SPEAKER_05: They really are important. When they had people read the safety cards and when those cards had the relevant information, the evacuation times improved dramatically. So they began applying what they learned in the experiments to the design of the cards. SPEAKER_10: And we said, okay, how can we improve these? And then we said, no words, just pictures. SPEAKER_05: And then Bo and Dan would test the cards out on the public and see if people could understand the illustration. SPEAKER_10: We'd say, have you got a second here, mister? We've got something here we'd like for you to take a look at and tell us what you think. And we have to have 90% understandability or we're not going to sell this card. SPEAKER_05: And the result was cards that look a lot like the cards you see today. They used pictures to tell the entire story of how to exit the plane. And they zoomed in on specific important actions like how to open a door. And there were also things that you might not consciously notice, but which apparently really help, like using red for all the exit related arrows and pretty much having no text on the card except for the word exit. Huh. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I've never really thought about that, but exit is the only word. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they just contained all these visual strategies that nudge the reader towards comprehension. And as a final little design flourish, instead of like getting swallowed up by the seat back pocket, their cards actually fit. So the title would just peek out and sort of entice the passenger to open it up. SPEAKER_10: And when they looked down, all they could see was just in case. Intriguing. Just in case. Just in case what? SPEAKER_07: This is the ABC Evening News with Harry Riesner and Barbara Walters. SPEAKER_07: Good evening. SPEAKER_00: Yesterday, the averages caught up with a 747. Two of them, both on charter flights, both on the ground, collided at Tenerife Airport in the Canary Islands. SPEAKER_05: The Tenerife crash in March of 1977 is the moment where Bo and Dan's cards really were put to the test. Because it involved two large planes, it's still the single deadliest aviation accident in history. Why it happened is kind of up for debate, but basically a 747 belonging to KLM, an airline carrier, collided on takeoff with a Pan Am 747 that was still on the runway. And the KLM plane tore the roof off of the Pan Am plane. Oh my God. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And on the KLM plane, everyone died. And that easily could have been the case with the Pan Am plane too. SPEAKER_08: It got very hot inside the Pan Am plane because of the fuel. Fuel leaking down from the KLM plane into the cabin. SPEAKER_05: So at a certain point, the conditions in the cabin became unsurvivable. SPEAKER_08: But 67 people did survive. SPEAKER_05: And it turned out that Dan and Bo designed the safety card for the Pan Am 747, meaning their card was the one on board the plane with the survivors. SPEAKER_08: And one of them, at least that I talked to, said that if it wasn't for the safety card, he and his wife would not have gotten out of the plane. Wow. That's amazing. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Apparently this one couple, Paul and Floyd Heck, somewhat famously escaped the crash while clutching a safety card in their hands. And I actually have a copy of that safety card. Okay, so let me check this out. SPEAKER_06: So it says 747, just in case, dot, dot, dot. And you open it up. And it's really like the modern card, you know, like it has opened up the door, jumping onto the slide, the layout of the plane. And it is a quantum leap forward over those ones you showed me earlier that were all text, you know, and beautiful pictures, but really just impenetrable. Yeah, it seems like one that would save lives. SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And they really saw the fact that there were survivors in Tenerife as kind of a vindication of their work. And after Tenerife, Bo and Dan actually testified before Congress about the need for better airline safety procedures. And it's around that time that the all visual safety cards became the standard throughout the industry. SPEAKER_06: So did they learn anything else from the tragedy at Tenerife? Like were the things that they discovered that they could have done better even? SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's a great question. Given that some of the survivors said the safety cards definitely helped them, why weren't there even more survivors? And they found that there are really two big hurdles preventing people from absorbing the information in the safety cards. The first is that when the crash happened, a lot of people just froze. SPEAKER_10: Some of the survivors gave us some information on they were going down the aisle way to get to an exit and there were people sitting there with their mouth open. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know what to move. They didn't do anything. They just sat there and died. SPEAKER_05: Investigators at Tenerife found that some of the victims were still buckled in their seats. SPEAKER_06: Like they were so shocked they couldn't even unbuckle their seat belts. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it is pretty creepy, but it's also apparently common in plane crashes. It's called tonic immobility. And psychologists think that this is like a primitive defense mechanism because one way to get a predator to leave you alone is just to play dead. And it turns out that this explains the thing that from the beginning I have found the most perplexing about the safety cards. SPEAKER_04: Why in the world of the safety card is everything so orderly and sort of panic-less? SPEAKER_08: I think that there's a fear of being in an airplane accident and anything that we do that might increase that fear would probably increase the incidence of tonic immobility. SPEAKER_05: The placid faces, the perfectly coiffed hair, the very thing that Fight Club is making fun of, it turns out that that is not like a shallow corporate marketing decision. Dan says the bloodless design is at least partially about keeping passengers from panicking even more and maybe even freezing up. SPEAKER_06: So you mentioned that there are two big hurdles. One is that the people freeze up before using the information on the cards. What's the second big hurdle when it comes to safety cards? SPEAKER_05: The second hurdle is something that we talked about at the very beginning of the story, which is that nobody reads them. Nobody reads the cards. Besides you? SPEAKER_06: Yeah. SPEAKER_05: It turns out that the little just in case teaser doesn't really work that well. SPEAKER_09: You're going to get a lot of people that says, I am not going to do that. I don't want to read this. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to do anything at all about it, period. I want to get to Dallas and I don't give a s*** about anything else. I mean, that's their attitude. SPEAKER_05: Dan told me that even today, only three or four percent of passengers ever pick up the safety card. SPEAKER_06: Is this why they now do safety videos, you know, not not relying solely on the cards? SPEAKER_05: Well, the videos help up to a point, but even the briefing videos have their limits. Like they work really well with first time flyers, but they still fall flat, just like the cards when it comes to frequent flyers. So you get the cards, you get the videos and also things like the flight demonstrations. SPEAKER_06: But I wonder if there's any other way to reach the most resistant passengers. Like have they tried other things to inject the necessary information into people's brains? SPEAKER_05: So there are some other methods that airline companies have tried to get passengers' attention and they haven't gone that well. Bo told me about this one carrier, Eastern Airlines, that tried an experiment. They had everybody to come into the facility 15 minutes early and then they had to go to SPEAKER_09: this room and they got the passenger safety briefing in the room. Then they went out of business. SPEAKER_05: Bo says the cards, the demonstrations, the videos, they all help get more information across to more people. But in the end, the information will always hit this wall of resistance among passengers. SPEAKER_09: We try to teach them. We try to encourage them. We do all those things, but people's attitudes stick and you can't change that. You cannot change that. So you have to look at it and say, how many people can I trust to do what they're told to do? Probably 30%, 30%. But what do you do? You have to play the odds. That's all there is to it. SPEAKER_06: So really when it comes down to it, if I really want to survive a crash or some kind of problem on an airplane, the final step really rests with me. I have to watch the video. I have to read the card. This is my responsibility is take that final step. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And oh my God, I'm just cringing. I feel like at the risk of turning this whole story into a PSA, it really is the truth that we all have to actively participate in taking our own safety seriously. And I still, I love the cards. I just see them a little bit differently now before doing all this reporting. To me, they were just like physical laminated artifacts of people pretending to have control in a crisis. SPEAKER_06: Like they were endearing because they were so futile because they didn't matter. SPEAKER_05: Yes. That's like the main reason that I took them from flights. But now, and I know I'm going to sound like a goody douche who's saying this, but the next time I board a plane, I'm going to pull out the safety information card and I'm going to read it, note where the exits are, how to open the door. And then when I'm finished, I'm going to put it back in the seat back pocket and hope that the next person reads it too. SPEAKER_06: When we come back, we'll talk to some of the people who actually draw safety cards for living and find out why you really want them to do a good job after this. 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Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com slash invisible. So we're back with safety card criminal, Mo the board. So Mo, I know that there was some stuff that we couldn't fit in the piece and you talked to other people besides Bo and Dan. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. After researching this story, one of the things I learned is that Bo and Dan had all these great innovations, but you know, neither of them are artists. Like they don't draw the cards. So I got really curious about who it is that does the drawing. Like what actually goes into creating one of these things. So I called up Brock Fisher and Larry Brunz. SPEAKER_04: When you tell people this is what you do, what do most people say? SPEAKER_03: When I get a lot of, that's a real job or that pays the bills, I get that one quite a bit. Most people don't say anything. SPEAKER_05: So the first guy you heard is Brock and the second guy's Larry. Together they comprise Air Safety Art International and adorably they are a grandfather, grandson safety card design duo. Nice. I love it. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. SPEAKER_05: And apparently major airline companies have their own in-house design teams, but smaller airlines turn to companies like Brock and Larry's to make their safety cards. And they also do a lot of private jets and helicopters, which means that they have a lot of fancy clients, some of which they could tell me on the record and some of which they couldn't. SPEAKER_03: Okay. Yeah, I can tell you, I did Taylor Swift's Falcon jet. Really? SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I don't know if it's the same one she has now, but I did one of Taylor Swift's briefing cards. SPEAKER_05: Yes, I confess I was starstruck. I was very impressed. But even more impressive is that Larry is the guy who did all the drawings for Bo and Dan's first visual cards back in the sixties. Turns out he's Bo's brother-in-law. Oh, so this is like a family, family business. SPEAKER_05: Totally. Yes. Which means that Larry helped develop the classic safety card look, the retro clothes and the crisp clean lines. And of course, no words. SPEAKER_00: Words in a, in a briefing card just kill me. SPEAKER_06: And unfortunately they're out there. SPEAKER_05: And for the past few years, he's been teaching his grandson Brock all the secrets of safety card illustration. SPEAKER_06: Oh, so, okay. We have to hear some secrets of safety card illustrations. What are they? I mean, what, what goes into designing a safety card that maybe I am not noticing? SPEAKER_05: Well, the big goal is that grasping the information presented in the card should feel effortless. SPEAKER_03: So it's trying to make sure that it's a little story and that the whole story makes sense without someone going, Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. SPEAKER_05: And that little story is the story of how you get off the plane. And it starts with making sure you understand where you are in the cabin. SPEAKER_03: That's one that I kind of gets me when I'm on an airliner is if I'm looking at the card and I look up, do I see the same thing? SPEAKER_05: And then they need to make sure that each scene in the narrative has only like a few key details that stand out. SPEAKER_03: Because like it's in that aircraft, that handle is bright red. We need to show it bright red, not a generic gray or black. It needs to be red because if that's the only thing you remember, at least you know what you're looking for. SPEAKER_06: So the premise is if I'm panicking, I just have this glowing red handle in my mind's eye from the card. And I'm just thinking red handle, red handle. And then when I see it, I'm like success. Then the next step. SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Yes. But even conveying that is a lot of work because all the details you see in the card have to exactly match what's actually in the aircraft so that the passengers don't get confused. So Larry and Brock told me that they need images or samples of all of the objects in each carrier's version of each different plane. Like you would be shocked at how many different types of door handles there are or safety vests there are. There are so many types of inflatable safety vests. Larry and Brock say they've drawn about 150 types of life vests and rafts. SPEAKER_06: I never really thought of that, but that's totally true. Yeah, that has to be exactly right. Or it doesn't really do its job. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And the same thing goes for all the different actions that the passengers are expected to perform because they need to accurately convey what each of those actions look like, but also feel like. SPEAKER_03: When we draw people, we have them carry weight. Like we add muscle shape inside the lines. We kind of like show them bending and the crinkles in the shirt. So it looks like he's heaving this raft. So we create the illusion of mass and weight really quickly. SPEAKER_05: And that means that they've also ended up with a vast library of customized character poses. SPEAKER_03: So in the end, we probably have, I don't know, we've never done the math. There's got to be a thousand different characters and 985 of them are me. SPEAKER_05: So, yeah. This is the final safety card secret. Any of the characters you see in their cards, regardless of what they look like on the page, really, they're just Brock. They're just based on photos of him in a nice pair of slacks and a dress shirt. SPEAKER_03: People actually like wise up to that. They'll start to look and be like, it's just the same guy in every situation on this card. That's so good. SPEAKER_05: This is my favorite fun fact, because when Brock's body type won't do, they just recruit anybody. Like their cousin, their spouse, their friend to come put on business casual or like a flight attendant outfit and pose for the cards. SPEAKER_03: We for some reason, recruit waitresses from restaurants that we used to go to when we were in Bellingham. We asked them if they want to make an extra hundred bucks and they usually say yes. SPEAKER_06: Really? Just come over to my house and pretend to be a crash card model. Yeah. SPEAKER_05: And they actually asked me if I wanted to be a safety card model. Oh my God. SPEAKER_06: Did you say yes? SPEAKER_05: Yes. I was like, of course. It is super niche and super cool. They haven't had an order come in where they need basically a woman to do a very specific action yet, but when they do, I'll be there. SPEAKER_06: This has been so much fun. Thanks so much. SPEAKER_05: Thank you Roman. SPEAKER_06: 99% invisible was produced this week by Mo the board edited by Joe Rosenberg mixed by Bryson Barnes music by Sean Real Delaney hall is the senior producer. Kurt Kohl's data is the digital director. The rest of the team is Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Berube Vivian, Le Katie mingle, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker and me Roman Mars. Special thanks today to Johan pill, who we spoke to for the story about the history of safety card design, but whose voice we didn't get to include some of the images Mo and I looked at are actually from an incredible book he put together with coauthor Eric Erickson. It's called design for impact and it contains images of safety cards from different periods all over the world is absolutely gorgeous book and it's just so much fun to flip through. If you want to check it out, we'll have a link on our website 99 pi.org. We're a project of KALW 91.7 in San Francisco and produced on radio row which lives at the far corners of North America, but is centered in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We're a founding member of radio topia from PRX a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist owned podcast in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 pi org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can now order our first book the 99% invisible city at 99 pi.org slash book. We have links to purchase that anywhere you get your books including signed editions and the audio book. And if you did get a book and enjoyed it, review it somewhere. It's a huge help to us when you review it in lots of different places. For all your other 99 PI needs look no further than 99pi.org. SPEAKER_06: Perfect sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. CERTA's new and improved perfect sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions with zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover. 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