‘I’ve Got Questions with Mike Simpson’ offers bite-sized answers to the questions that keep us up at night
As you can probably tell from his voice, Mike Simpson is a daily radio news broadcaster, and as much as he loves his job, he has so many other things he’s curious about. As he moves through life, he finds himself jotting down questions he has in his phone’s notes app to search when he gets home, where he falls down multiple hour-long Wikipedia rabbit holes. Now, he’s on a hot pursuit to find answers to all of his burning questions in his podcast “I’ve Got Questions with Mike Simpson.”
“I’ve Got Burning Questions with Mike Simpson” is a new podcast from Audacy and KNX News, with only a handful of episodes out so far. These Biscoff cookie, bite-sized episodes (flight attendant jokes, you’ll get it in a second) are just 15 minutes long. In each episode, he tracks down people who can answer his many questions about how and why things are the way they are. It’s like a bite-sized version of “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.” Mike asks interesting questions to interesting people, simply out of sheer wonder.
And first up: flight attendants. Pre-pandemic, as many as one million people were 30,000 feet off the ground at any given moment. And of those one million people, tens of thousands of them are working to ensure the comfort and safety of the rest of us. Mike has to know: what’s it like working in a tube hurtling 500 miles an hour through the air.
To get his answers, he speaks with United Airlines flight attendant Bella Carter and former flight attendant-turned-TikTok-star Kat Kamalani. He’s interested to know if flight attendants know where they’re headed for the day, since obviously all of the passengers know where they’re headed. And, typically, they don’t. Well, the newer flight attendants at least. Veteran flight attendants not only get to pick what types of planes they want to be on but also what flight routes (and therefore layovers) they get to take.
Bella, a flight attendant for 30 years now, shares that she typically asks to work flights to and from Hawaii, but she’s partial to the occasional Paris trip. While younger flight attendants can find themselves stuck in a NorCal-SoCal-Phoenix triangle or making a tropical trip to Mexico before heading to Idaho, all flight attendants’ trips are subject to change especially if they face delays. A trip to Hawaii could turn into a trip to upstate New York in a flash. Yeesh.
Kat, who has been sharing the secrets of flight attendants on TikTok, shares some more of her knowledge, including one of her most viral videos that continues to leave people dumbfounded. Kat says that while passengers board the plane, flight attendants are on the lookout for people wearing dog tags, people with shirts that seem to be military garb, firefighters, etc., anyone who is an ABP: an able bodied person. Basically, they’re trying to spot anyone who would be able to help in the case of an emergency. Same goes for doctors, too! In the event of a medical emergency, odds are the flight attendants had already spotted the doctor on board long before the plane took off.
In his other episode, Mike is desperate to know why people are obsessed with true crime (Alesha, this one’s for you). He chats with Scott Bonn, author of Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers, and Erin Moriarty from 48 Hours on CBS about America’s obsession with the macabre. Erin has a few hypotheses – one being that true crime focuses on people who look and act like us but are capable of committing extraordinary acts of violence. The other reason is simply fear. Bonn says it’s the rubber-necking effect of not being able to turn away from sensationalized, grisly stories.
There’s more to both of these episodes, truly a shocking amount of information stuffed into just 15 minutes, but we’ll leave the rest up to you. And, if you have your own fascinations or questions about the world, you can actually email Mike yourself! Be sure to check out “I’ve Got Questions with Mike Simpson” to find a bite-sized answer for our collective burning questions.
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