This video was made possible by CuriosityStream. When you sign up for an annual subscription,
you’ll also get access to Nebula, the only place on the entire internet where you can
watch the 40-minute Half as Interesting special. Okay, look, this is going to sound controversial
to some of you, and I know I don’t usually talk about this sort of stuff on this channel,
but I have stayed silent about this for far, far too long: it’s time that Half as Interesting
officially condemns the left and everything that it stands for. Wait no, no, no, I don’t mean the political
“left”—my angry cousin who films vlogs from the inside of his pickup truck has that
market corned. No, I mean left as in, like, literally the
direction left. C’mon, think about it: what good thing has
ever been associated with leftness? Christians have long associated the left with
Satanism and eternal damnation, Jews once considered the left to be the side of wicked
impulses, Muslims have historically discouraged the use of the left hand for eating, women
were accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake in Salem for being left-handed, early
criminologists believed that the criminal mind was biologically linked with left-handedness,
sexy singles in my area always swipe left when they see my profile on Tinder, and drivers
for the United Parcel Service have, since the 1970s, avoided making any left turns unless
absolutely necessary. Except, well, that last one isn’t about
wickedness or witchcraft or the tiny little hat I’m wearing in all of my Tinder photos—it’s
actually just part of a very elaborate mathematical calculation that UPS needs to make every single
day. You see, UPS trucks aren’t just aimlessly
rolling around the country with that Rick and Morty body pillow you ordered—there’s
a lot that needs to happen before it gets dropped off on your doorstep, hopefully in
an unmarked package. First, your package is labeled, scanned, and
taken by truck to one of several hundred regional sorting facilities. Then, if you’re one of those casuals who
only pays for ground shipping for your body pillows, it’s loaded on a truck or, if you’re
a true alpha, it’s loaded on a plane which, usually, goes to Louisville for the packages
to be processed through UPS’s centrally-located World Hub. There, it has a fun little ride on one to
two miles of conveyor belts, gets grouped with other packages destined for similar destinations,
and is flown, once again, to a different regional sorting facility, at which point it can be
loaded onto a truck for delivery. Now, driving a truck full of Rick and Morty
body pillows sounds simple enough—just step on the gas, stay on the road, and hope that
the police don’t ask you what’s in the back of your vehicle—but surprisingly, this
final part of the journey is actually the most complicated and most expensive part of
the entire shipping process. UPS only needs to account for 267 planes,
some of which are only flying one or two short flights per day, but they have an average
of 55,000 drivers, all of whom are working around the clock, making 100-200 deliveries
every single day. This means that one wasted minute per driver
per day would cost UPS $14.5 million over the course of a year, not to mention an additional
half million dollars in unused gas, and at least a thousand more dollars paying some
environmentalist guy to go on the morning news to apologize for wasting that half million
dollars on unused gas. The point is: every minute counts, so finding
the shortest possible route for each driver is absolutely crucial—except, that’s actually
not as easy as it sounds. This is known as the “traveling salesman
problem,” and much like the meaning of life or what age Paul Rudd is, there is still,
to this day, no elegant answer. Given a small amount of points, the traveling
salesman problem isn’t too hard—you can just try every possible route and compare
them, but that becomes harder and harder the more points you add. Say a driver has 120 stops, that means that
there are this many possible routes—and no, that’s not me being excited about there
only being 120 routes—that means 120 factorial, which is 120 x 119 x 118 x 117, and so on,
which, for the record, is otherwise known as this number and this number is otherwise
known as “way too big to deal with.” Then, on top of that number, there are all
sorts of other real-world variables that UPS has to account for: traffic jams, collisions,
bad weather, vicious dog attacks, slightly less vicious hamster attacks, the driver being
seduced by a sultry enchantress who lures him into her home, poisons him with a glass
of 1986 Chateau Lafite, and makes off with his truck full of Rick and Morty body pillows…
in short, there’s no way that UPS could calculate perfect routes for all of their
drivers. They can, however, implement general optimizations
that they know will, on average, shave time off of routes. These optimizations include driving with their
door open, not stopping to talk to customers, and, yes, never turning left. This is for two main reasons: firstly, left
hand turns almost always take longer than right hand turns, because they necessitate
cutting across traffic—this also makes them less fuel efficient, since drivers have to
idle while they wait to turn. Secondly, they’re also more dangerous—left
hand turns are more than 3 times as likely to kill pedestrians than right hand turns,
and while one guy’s body isn’t going to slow down a UPS truck too much, the ensuing
lawsuit makes this maneuver a little less profitable. By cutting down on every unnecessary left
turn when planning routes, UPS is able to save 10 million gallons of fuel, emit 20,000
tonnes less carbon dioxide, and deliver 350,000 more packages every year. Of course, all this doesn’t mean UPS trucks
don’t turn left, as some less renowned news sources report, but they do absolutely avoid
it, so maybe, the next time you consider cutting across traffic into a group of pedestrians,
you should try taking a tip from our noble boys in brown. Now, if you’re trapped in a hospital bed
because a reckless driver made a left turn and ran you over, or you’re trapped in a
normal bed because, well, waking up is hard, you probably have a lot of time on your hands. If I were you, I would spend that time on
Nebula, catching up on exclusive, ad-free content from your favorite educational creators,
including the very first almost-feature-length Half as Interesting brick special. But, before you run off and sign up for Nebula
for $30 a year, you might want to consider signing up for CuriosityStream instead — with
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