Adam Savage at The Amazing Meeting 7

well I'm delighted to make the next introduction I'm delighted to make all them this one gives me special pleasure when people learned that I'm friends with Adam Savage they almost always ask the same question they say please tell me he's as nice in person as he is on the show and I always say no he's he's actually nicer soon after I announced my congressional run last year I got an email from Adam demanding to know why I haven't already asked him for a donation and asking what he could do to help last year he stood for hours autographing ping-pong balls from the Mythbusters episode and had a smile and a warm greeting for everyone in the audience being the nicest guy in the planet would be enough for most people but not for Adam his resume is remarkable his phenomenal special-effects skills have been seen in the recent Star Wars movies in Matrix films and frankly one of my favorites Galaxy Quest which contains the great line why is there one of these and all these ships I love that movie and some really cool commercials but all these things I think pale in comparison to his national television work and I'm not even talking about the Mizpah Mythbusters which suddenly I can't say which is the greatest skeptical and critical thinking show of our generation no no I'm talking about playing the stock boy in a Charmin ad and having mr. Whipple squeezes Sherman and also as you saw for me from the program playing the drowning boy in a Billy Joel video I'm glad he made it with us Adam did have one request of you that he asked that I mentioned he said he worries that not enough people tell him all the little tiny technical things that they think the Mythbusters got wrong so he said he'd really appreciate if he could all come up in detail in excruciating detail tell him also he'd like your own theories as to how they could have done it better Adam Savage is a gifted artist and a rabid tweeter indeed between us we average thirty five thousand followers he has seventy thousand he'll bid it's not that hard people as I mentioned Adam is the nicest guy in the planet I'm so honored to know him the jeraf is so grateful he's here today ladies and gentleman our favorite mythbuster please welcome the inimitable the amazing Adam Savage oh thank you I'm glad to know that I've replaced bill plate as the nicest guy on the planet I there was a there was a contest and now Phil it's me I love coming to Tam I always forget to do this one I do talks which is to thank the people that brought me here and Randy you're one of my heroes and it's my honor to come here every year I'll keep coming until you guys lock the door on me Phil everybody Jamy Ian Swiss I've made some dear friends here over the years I have tons of amazing memories and you you guys are my people how many of you have yelled at me at the television while watching the show saying we're having a conversation that way but actually my what I want to talk about bears directly upon my introduction which is my resume people give an introduction they give my resume and because I've enjoyed a certain amount of success in my life it's easy to perceive me up here on television on stage as having a fairly linear path towards my success and nothing could be farther than the truth I know that also we are inundated with with successful people telling us that oh well they failed more than they succeeded in fact there's a great one of the greatest shows ever made for television was Aaron Sorkin's first show sports night I don't know if you've seen it but if you haven't even by both seasons on DVD and it's like the best 51 hour no sorry that's half hour episodes 26 hours of television watching you could get and at the end of the second season Dana the main character meets a guy who's going to buy her television show he's going to buy the the sports night show and he he has a company called quo vadimus which i think is latin for where are we going am I correct about that okay and he says to her he's a he's a billionaire he's developed some software thing and he says I've failed far more than I've succeeded but the question I'm always asking is quo vadimus where are we going that's what I say to my people and I noticed that successful people are always saying something like that but they're not they're not telling you how it works they're not telling you they're telling you that they failed in the abstract but I think the concrete example is an important one I mean when I say that I failed my first job as a PA I was given the keys to a truck and then I got into another truck with a guy who was driving in I drove two hours to a location so the first truck stayed where I was formerly for four hours while they came and found me and got the keys and then fired me I've caused car accidents I've yelled at my kids and scared them I've been divorced so I know failure I really I have I have been there and I want to tell you about within the one step forward two steps back that all of our lives encompass that there is no exception here in 1999 I took a job at Industrial Light Magic and started working for Lucasfilm which was something I had wanted since I was 11 years old and it was very much very much everything that I had hoped it would be I was working with heroes of mine people that in reading special effects magazines in the late 70s and I was finding that I had things to give to them I information that they wanted and I was collaborating on the scale on ships and things that I'd always dreamed that I would be making and I noticed there was this actually this other ancillary benefit to working for a place that was as well-known as industrial light magic which was that well I should point out that in the special effects industry there aren't really any jobs there are there are jobs for periods of time so you're effectively freelance and when you're freelance every freelancer knows your brain is constantly thinking what's next what am I going to do next where is the next month's rent coming from and so you are always while working on jobs chasing down other jobs networking talking to people spending a lot of time trying to line up the things that are going to pay your rent two months later the nice thing was is once you got work at Industrial Light magic people only need to needed to hear that and you didn't need to sell yourself anymore they just figured if you worked at Industrial Light Magic you are now one of those wizards and you could build what they needed and all of a sudden my resume was just three words for words and and so I started getting some wonderful jobs and in addition to working at Industrial Light Magic I had these I which was a nice bump in my income I also got these extra side jobs so I was doing quite well and my friend Ben called me up and said I've got this job coming up and I've had to turn it down in fact everyone in town has turned this job down because it's the timeline is too short but I think you might have the time in the inclination to do it and I I said when do they want it he was calling me on a Monday and the job needed to be installed in the windows of a large department store in San Francisco on a Saturday morning this is five-day turnaround and what they wanted was the new San Francisco ballpark was opening up and they wanted to do these commemorative ballpark windows in this where they had a fence ballpark fence and ball players but they wanted baseballs to be pitching themselves over the fence in three separate locations for six weeks and I thought well that seems pretty straightforward I mean you know I got some pitching machines and some kind of reciprocating device for catching them on the other side of the wall and feeding them back to the back to my pitching machines it shouldn't be that difficult and I went and met with them and you know when you're freelance also you bid your you bet your day rate I mean if there's nothing if there's nothing on your schedule and they have a reasonable amount of time you bet your day right you know three hundred five hundred dollars a day or whatever you you know think you can charge but then there's also what the market will bear and when a major department store needs something built for their windows in five days you know you charge the rush fee and when I looked at the rush fee it wasn't quite big enough I mean I was looking at the you don't want to leave money the last thing you want to hear when you bid a job is okay you want it you want to see this okay that means you bid ten percent over what they were hoping to spend but it's not too much that the job goes away and that's exactly what I bid on this job and it was a really fat paycheck for five days of work the most money I'd ever made on a day rate for that amount of work and I figured I've got the time my shop is all set up depos open 24 hours a day I ought to be able to make this happen and I started in on this thing I went and got some pitching machines I went to Grainger and I bought these beautiful little relay timers that would allow these allow these foam baseballs that I was testing to to find their way back into some kind of reciprocating ball feeder pause for a second kick them into the pitching machine knock him over the fence and I built a little uh built a little sample in my shop and it worked beautifully like about 70 times in a row and then one of the balls went a place I could not expect at all I mean it literally is like over the fence over the fence over the fence over the fence and then off to the left and I was like okay that seems like it's probably a solvable problem I'm going to continue now when you're working on stuff there are problems you can see coming and there are problems that you well actually this is this is a one of the great questions I've ever gotten was if you're working on Mythbusters and you're working on something you don't know how it works like you know we're doing swimming in syrup and I don't know anything about viscosity and so I've got to call the National Institute of tribology and talk to a viscosity specialists said how do you how do you start to perceive when you don't know anything and you know it's it's this process you you start to tackle the problems one by one and you know each one sort of illuminates something else next to it and I figured this problem of the ball going off to the left was a solvable problem and I could continue and as we were going I should point out also that my my son's who are now 10 years old they were like six and a half months old at that point so I was kind of working out of the home my wife was wrangling the kids and the mechanical problems with this job getting all these things lined up three separate pitching machines three separate reciprocation systems foam backing to let the balls die once they hit the wall and come on back all of this turned out to take a lot more time than I thought and I ended up staying up all day night and all Friday night and not getting any sleep from Wednesday from Thursday morning all the way through Saturday morning at 8 a.m. when I brought all of my equipment - - to the department store to try and install it this is a department store also by the way that searches your bags both entering and exiting no matter what kind of employee you are so it feels great to work there and I started installing the pitching machine and when I got there I discovered that a couple of small changes had been made that I really ought to have been told about one was that the stage that the ballpark set was on which I was told would be 10 inches high was now seven inches high and because I had to reciprocate a three and a half inch diameter ball across six feet under that stage it made the travel much much slower I also discovered you know those the machines where the balls the the mechanical machines in the airports where the balls go on their little journey on the ferris wheels and they go down the wire rails I discovered on that job why you use wire rails and not tubes to feed spheres is because a sphere on a rail will just go in one direction but a sphere in a tube can start to build up this oscillation and then it wants to take whatever amount of time it feels like to get down that to get down that pipe and because I had to lower that pipe that journey became much longer and much more unpredictable also the fence got higher and the windows became narrower so every permutation of this became more difficult to try and hit my target and instead of 70 balls in a row I was getting 3040 balls in a row and I started doing the calculation and I was thinking if I've got three pitching machines and they're pitching a ball about it for five seconds that means it's going to the whole machine is going to empty itself out and fail about every three hours holy crap I'm screwed and I started asking for help from the other guy installing and we started doing all these other solutions like adding air blowing down one of the reciprocating tubes to blow the balls down then there turned out to be this new problem which was I have never hooked up all three machines at once and I discovered this new problem which is as soon as a pitching machine kicks one of the balls out well the motor goes under a little bit of stress because it's got a push pass to kick that ball the moment that motor goes on our little stress it draws a little more power that little draw of power makes the other two pitching machines suddenly turn slower and it means that their balls start to miss now all of a sudden this thing's become really pear-shaped and I've been up for like 60 hours did I mention my mom and my sister were flying into town that that Saturday I was supposed to be done by 1 or 2 that was what I was thinking and they were arriving at 3 so my wife had to pack the kids in the car cuz I was at the department store and go to the airport and pick them up and endure the mother-in-law who you know I love my mom and she's my biggest fan and she idolizes me to a point that's that's lovely and also sometimes exhausting and she's there saying it's so hard Adam has to work so hard meet my wife's over there wrangling six month old twins so at the end of the day it's about 6 o'clock on that Saturday and the client comes up and says how's the job going and I said it's not working and she said what it was the last thing she expected I mean it's going ok might take me a little longer I had to admit that this thing it's not I wasn't going to be able to make this work with any amount of effort at this point and I've been thinking about this conversation in my head and I've been thinking well I came up with this she said what are you going to do about it I said well I'm going to present to you in about half an hour I'm going to present to you three plans you can choose one of them and I will implement it by 8 o'clock tomorrow morning and she said ok that's fair I still wanted to make this money I didn't want to give this money back this was this was like my new laptop I wanted I really really this was and you know I was thinking about the fact the whole time I was thinking I can do this I work at Industrial Light and Magic Man I'm one of those wizards I ought to be able to do it so I come back to her half an hour later with this plan of guarantee that the balls will make it over the fence I'll make three reciprocating wheels with a monofilament that goes and I'll string and not the ball onto the monofilament so there they go up and over the fence each one like a little like a little chain and she's like okay that sounds fine I should mention this this woman who was my client was actually like 23 with the ability to spend like tens of thousands of dollars on things like this with every little oversight which she should probably should have had I'm not blaming her I'm just saying it was funny to work for a client who was uh this inexperienced not funny for me then funny now so I bought off on the on the chain idea and I went home and again I stayed up all night that night as well I didn't have dinner with my mom and my sister I went to Home Depot I went to Home Depot at 8:00 p.m. I went to Home Depot again at you know Home Depot opens 24 hours until they shut down enough local hardware stores and then they go back to normal bankers hours so this is they were still in the 24-hour mode in San Francisco I was there at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. buying all the materials I needed and I finished them all I arrived on site at 8 a.m. the next morning and I spent the next five hours installing this system three chains ten Baseball's monofilament all of it stretched all of it working when the National head of display came and visited the set and took a look at everything and said this looks great those ball things they're out get them out I don't like them another story you'll notice a trend in 1985-86 I pretended to attend NYU for a year I didn't really go to class I got a job at the H Street Playhouse where the Rocky Horror Picture Show fad began and as a projectionist and I fell in with a group of friends who are still some of my best friends in the whole world and because most of them were going to NYU film school I spent the next three or four years after dropping out of NYU getting in airs at sand why you film school education by working on all their films and the first and biggest one that I worked on was my friend David's senior thesis film called gargoyle and goblin a super ambitious fantasy film taking place in Times Square helped by the fact that David's grandmother grandma Shelley owned all the male porn theaters in Midtown and we had a whole block of empty buildings each with its own power distribution because we kept on blowing the mountain to shoot an empty brooms empty buildings Fanny the we shot in the building that the theater that Fanny Brice's husband built for her which was at the point we were filming at the Adonis theater and David asked me to art direct it and I wasn't qualified to do something like that but if I say so myself along with the help of some amazing people some of them gone on to be really really big in a production design in Hollywood we knocked that movie out of the park at one the NYU film festival best art direction that year it was absolutely gorgeous we had a tremendous amount of fun and for a student film I mean we shot 16 nights in a row in midtown Manhattan sleeping on site and one of the buildings in this dormitory that but we made up I mean his of the camaraderie that early camaraderie of doing a doing a project like that busting your ass and killing yourself and succeeding at it was really thrilling and I felt like this is something that I could do I dropped out at IU I thought I wanted to be an actor it wasn't so sure at this point maybe wanted to be a filmmaker art direction it really seemed like it suited me I've been making things all my life I had using my skills this might be it and so I started putting my my name out there you know I could art direct your film and my friend Gabrielle asked me if she was a film student who was producing her first student film and asked me if I would art direct it now I Gabby was a really really close friend of mine within this close-knit group of about 10 or 14 friends Gabby and I were extremely close and she asked me to do this and I said yeah absolutely this is great she said the director has saved up money working at 7-eleven all summer long he's got an eight hundred and fifty dollar budget for the art direction and I thought that's loads of money that's plenty and the the subject of his film was a ATM that talks back I you know I I did a version of this talk at Maker Faire and I kept on saying ATM machine and is the only emails I got from people about the talk were don't say ATM machine it's an ATM that talks back at his balding owner and makes fun of his toupee so they needed a they needed a you know one of those rooms where the ATM is through the glass doors in an enclosed room they need to control over this room they needed to they needed basically to build it and I said that I could do that I figured I'd saw them build flats in high school when we did the high school plays I mean how hard is that it's just like a frame of wood description canvas over any paint at a stop yeah I could do that and the clear donors will be just buy some sheets of Plexiglas when we paint the wood silver to look like metal that should be fine and the ATM well they had a guy who did computer programming and some graphic work and all I had to do is just build a screen that he could put his monitor up behind this is going to be a cinch the house we found to do this in was out in Brooklyn way out in Brooklyn like you had to take the subway all the way out and then walk like 11 blocks so I spent weeks going to the hardware store and carrying like ten foot long pieces of wood on the subway no small feat and then out to the set in Brooklyn where we built this I built this in both of these jobs as I never asked anyone for any help I built this this set I I stuck those linoleum stick on tiles to his carpeted floor which you know when I did the first task seemed just fine you know I put it down pulled it up wasn't sticky it's fine I made all the flats they said they had some guys who could help me and I said well those guys can paint the flats and then I went back and started making the ATM machine and the details are pretty similar to the first story which is that round about Wednesday afternoon I realized the shoot was starting on Saturday morning and I wasn't anywhere close to ready and I didn't sleep for about 60 hours straight getting everything ready running to hardware stores and working on things that things started to go really really wrong like the screen I had that went in front of their their ATM display cracked but I thought all it's the urban environment they'll be fine with that I'll just tell them it's part of the art direction and it didn't go over so well so Saturday morning comes I go out on set to discover that the flats that they painted for me I didn't know this in theatres you have to pre prep the canvas with this stuff if you just paint it it can wrinkle and go all over the place and that's what this ATM machine looked like a like a worn-out shirt this this room was wrinkled and the wrinkles were going in every direction and the crew showed up and was like immediately pissed off and I'm just figuring I'm going to I can make this work I did gargling goblin man I could run around I'm running around taking care of things take care of things and everywhere I'm taking care of something someone's like hey what about this I'm like I'll take care of that I'm ready wait hold on I'll take care of that at a certain point one of the crew said do you know what you're doing do you even know what you're doing and I thought this shows how I still thought of myself in that moment like I was going to be the hero of this movie so I thought well maybe a line from Raiders of the Lost Ark would apply here so I said I don't know I'm making this up as I go along and it was lost on him he put his hand on my shoulder and said go home and that's when I felt like things had really now I had now was bad that was really bad and I went home I went home on Saturday and I I don't I don't I'm not even sure I actually went home I think you know New York you don't have to go home if you don't want to you can just go to a friend's house and go hang out and go eat stay up all night do it you will and Monday morning rolled around I knew they were done with a shoot and I went to the set to pick up my to pick up my toolbox and my toolbox wasn't there but it's very specific that there literally was like a taped area on the ground where my toolbox had been with a note that said we have your toolbox call me Gabby and I picked up the phone and I call it Gabby and Gabby said what did you do to me I trusted you you screwed us do you know that we pulled two all-nighters in a row to make this film work do you know that he worked the director worked all summer long saving up the money that you pissed away on his set she said if you could have done anything to convince me that you were not worthy to be friends with you've done it and she said come come here come come come to my room come to my come to my apartment I need to go over every goddamn cent of this budget because we didn't see it we didn't see it in the in the set I want you to account for every penny you spent and I hung up the phone and I just started crying I called my dad and like every other time I've turned to my I had turned to my dad I don't remember anything my dad said very specifically I remember him being very clear that all I could do was move forward from this moment I remember him saying something to that effect saying you no you have to take that you've screwed up and you've got to go talk to them that's all you can do and I went and saw Gabby and somehow I don't know how this works what kind of Bistrot math expose involved but every penny was accounted for in my receipt list somehow and it took us about two hours to go through this with my very clearly ex friend and then we finished and Gabby said the crew is next door and they want to talk to you now I'm thinking I'm thinking this is going to be like a scene from Animal House remember where the guy opens the door he thinks he's on a date the girl's boyfriend kicks the out of him and that's what I want to happen I feel so crappy at this moment that I want someone to beat me up that will feel like a release that will feel like I've gotten what I deserve I really felt like that and I opened the door and I'm not exaggerating at all what I opened the door onto was a dark dorm room with the entire crew of this film surround free a chair in the middle and a spotlight on the chair at moment I thought well now it makes a good story at least because no one's going to believe that they did this so knowing my place I went and sat dutifully in the chair and the director pulled out this pad of paper and just started reading all the things that I said I would do in the course of the two months that we were working on this film all the things that I said I would do that I didn't do and he didn't miss a trick he really had it all down was anime I had never made a list this complete but man he had every last item and as he was going through it occasionally as he was going through it occasionally the crew would pipe in with uh Emma and that really pissed me off at the Greek chorus to add insult to injury actually I want to point out that on Sunday night when they had already pulled two all-nighters making this movie and they were loading out to find of course that I had room into the carpet in this apartment with myself stick tiles I was all the way across town having sex and they found out about it they were honorable enough not to mention that but I knew that they knew and they knew I knew they knew and the the director said though what do you have to say and I said what what can I say you guys didn't you didn't miss a thing you're absolutely right i I I screwed this up from start to finish I can't describe to you awful I feel how low I feel how sorry I am I also understand how totally meaningless my my my feelings are in this moment and how meaningless my apology is and I'm also sorry for that I'm sorry on like for meta levels of sorry I'm not sorry and I know that that doesn't mean anything either I know this is a story about my personal failure but I do want to point out that after I said that there was this long pause and the director said I'm not joking he said because I think what I don't want to say I think they wanted to fight they wanted me to go no man I meant to do that Nick oh yo you didn't they wanted they wanted someone to argue it and I wasn't giving them that cuz you know my father was manic-depressive I know how not to argue with someone that's mad at me I know how to please the room I was I was the reed that bends and so there was this long pause after my format apologies and the director said look we're not trying to bring you down or anything I I had a therapist years later who pointed out she was like do you realize what shitty reinforcement that was for you how successful your ability to deflect their anger was as a terrible reinforcement of your abilities that you should not be using so I there's a quote in the beginning of Ian McEwan's and during love that sticks with me and I meant to look it up I forgot to look it up I'm going to try and paraphrase it but the the the analogy really works for me he says at one point in describing the opening of this book is him and five people four people in a public park watching a balloon accident and they're running towards this balloon accident and he describes it in and really it's an amazing first chapter and he describes it that there was just a moment when they heard a sound and a moment when they were running there was no decision made they just were running and he saw these people coalescing from the different corners of the space and he says we were running towards a kind of catastrophe in whose furnace our lives and our characters would be buckled into new shapes and that's what I have realized over in my life has happened in those moments there's a lot of things you can do when you when you when you screw something up badly a lot of people deflect a lot of people ignore a lot of people blame now I'm definitely not been one of those people and I don't trust people that don't think that they've failed if people you know I've worked at risk-averse places where if you start to screw up a job they just send you more people without telling you that you're going over budget and everyone does everyone feels like they do great I don't trust working with some of those people because they don't know their characters have it withstood having totally been responsible for screwing something up and recovering and moving on it's Co vadimus where are we going there's I mean somewhere in my early 20s I managed to figure out that I was thinking something totally different than I thought two years previously and I just made that as a little mark in my head whatever you think now you're probably wrong and so if I think of one one one quality that makes a skeptic that makes me a skeptic at heart it's having totally screwed up its failure and I'm not talking about the failure is always an option that we joke about on the show I mean it's a object screwing something up losing a friend hurting someone you love breaking something that you care about the other thing that's important about that and I get I feel nervous when I start quoting too much from books that I love because I feel like it's a weird sort of proselytizing makes me feel like a preacher but Rilke has this amazing letter in letters to a young poet where he's counseling he's counseling the young poet and he says we find our moments of sadness again I'm paraphrasing but it's translated from the German so who cares it's my translation he says we find our moments of sadness terrifying because we find ourselves standing in a place we cannot remain standing the past has left us and the future has not taken hold he says right where is it the future has not yet taken hold he says but we have changed as a house changes into which someone has entered and he says and this is why it's so important to be lonely and attentive and I love that particular translation because there's nothing lonelier than taking responsibility for something you've you've done he says this is why it's important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad because that's the point in which the change in your character occurs later on he explains it'll seem to happen as if from outside and he calls it the noisy and fortuitous time from outside but he says that's the moment right there where the switch gets turned and that's where you've got to be attentive to it lastly I want to point out that my favorite hero of all fictional heroes is Philip Marlowe from Raymond Chandler and in and the simple art of murder Chandler describes his hero and after giving all of his wonderful qualities and he it's beautiful essay to read and I'd recommend if you like channeling you haven't read it you read it right away because it's quite shocking how knowledgeable Chandler was exactly the kind of hero he was creating he gives all of his qualities and wow you see them all in the book you realize every scene he wrote he was following all of these all of these qualities but in the end he says if the world were full of people like him it would be a very safe place to live in without being too boring to be worth living in and that is what I have striven to be I like I take counsel from Chandler's hero I take counsel from Marlowe and the number of times that Marlowe screws up and I think about the fact that a person of honor takes responsibility for what they've done and they move on and that's all you can do thank all righty can you hear me great all right we have time for just a handful of questions if there are comments or again those technical details with miss Buster's that Adam you know wants to know about um can I actually state I would love questions about something other than Mythbusters I would keep coming back and you can walk up to me and talk to me about Mythbusters specifically but well now screw it ask me any I was mostly going for sticks they're all the way in the back talk among yourselves Michael I'm drinking your water you don't have any cooties or anything good we proved double-dipping there's no problem last week we're about to test stall one and four one two four of the bathroom the theory being that stall one is really clean because no one wants to poop next to everyone else already on your right way in the back dr. Kampf Los Angeles who is the German philosopher that you quoted please uh the german philosopher was Rilke the book is letters to a young poet Rilke also ah actually will corrode another quote that is one of my father's all-time favorite one of my father's all-time favorite quotes which was he wrote an amazing monograph on on Rodin and for the record Rodin couldn't stand Rilke he hated this tubercular little shrew that was following him around for several weeks but the opening line of his monograph on a Rodin is amazing he said he's it begins with an it begins with a man it begins with a name it is a famous name but what is Fame but the sum of all the misunderstandings that surround a name on the right all the way in the back hi Adam sorry this is a Mythbusters question college eyes advance no I'm Steve from Connecticut I've noticed some of the experiments you've done a few of them have actually been really quite good into terms of the data you returned and I'm wondering have you ever considered whether or not you might be able to actually do a Mythbusters experiment that would qualify for publication in a journal I have yet most of them don't most of them don't fall into that category with their data sets of one and two its Jamie's always wanting to finish the episode going well who knows and we have to point out it's television man we have to come to a conclusion based upon the data we collect music but I don't agree with the data we've collected like you still got to come to a conclusion if you piss somebody off that's fine we'll come back and redo it but you know we've got to engage we got to engage with the material like this the there is one episode in which I consider our results to be totally unassailable and it's bullets fired up the myth was if bullets are fired straight up into the air will they kill you when they come back down and the military actually wanted to know this and their their desire to know this is written about in a famous book on ballistics called Hatcher's notebook which I'm sure that some of you are familiar with the military wanted to know in the 20s could they advance towards a town that they were let's say a half mile away from and just let a raining hail of bullets fall on that town and take care of a certain number of the enemy and so they sent some researchers out to this lake on the theory that if they fired bullets in the air they'd be able to hear them hit the water and they spent several days in this protected shed on the middle of the lake shooting five hundred rounds into the air and I think they found one embedded into the roof and heard two in the water enough to conclude that it was not a reliable way to harm your enemy from a safe distance with inexpensive munitions we went out to the desert with the methodology that I'm really proud of we set eight lene twos of ballistic bullet-resistant glass in a circle at eight cardinal points with a person under each one facing outwards we had a handgun a 9-millimeter handgun in the middle we chose a round that was fairly slow that would only go to about a half a mile and rapid fire we also the math about how long it would roughly take those bullets to come back and hit the ground about a minute and we fired 11 rounds at a very steady pace bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang I hope that was 11 and then I counted off 5 second intervals until 1 minute and then I was quiet and it worked exactly as we'd hoped the people facing out from the rating radiating out from the circle heard the bullets hit the ground even about 200 feet away more than that some of them heard it clearer than others so he actually had a kind of rudimentary triangulation and out of the 11 rounds we fired we found six more than that those six rounds went exactly as deep into the lake bed as the bullets we dropped from 400 feet from a hot air balloon from a helium balloon which was the height required for them to hit terminal velocity so we knew that the bullets were going the same the same speed when they hit the ground they also made bullet shaped holes in the ground telling us that our Windtunnel tests in the shop were correct that a bullets most stable falling position is on its side and thus its speed is equivalent to everything that we tested in the shop and I think those results are totally publishable it turns out that if you're able to fire exactly vertically that bullet is not going to kill you it's just going to piss you off however if you are 2 or 3 degrees off that bullet will stay on a ballistic trajectory and come down much faster and go right through you when it hits the ground that episode is actually I think one that I'm more proud of than any other specifically in terms of the science hey Adam I'm Terry from Atlanta I just have a comment about kind of related to what you said it I am an editorial assistant for a peer-reviewed journal called teaching of psychology and it's probably pretty self evident from the title what the focus is there's a couple of psychology professors in South Carolina who are using your television show as a teaching tool and their introductory research methods classes and they've had control groups to see you know how enriching of a tool really is they submitted their manuscript last year was recently accepted for publication so come this time next year it should be officially in print Mythbusters will be a enter the scientific literature as a scientifically verified teaching tool for critical thinking skills and research methods so congratulations on that guy thank you thank you telling you that's awesome all your real science teachers I know that often we're just giving you talking points because we screwed something up we're aware of that on your left hi Adam Nathan from Edmonton Alberta Canada in the unlikely event of an apocalypse which of your handmade creations could you possibly not do without ya know they would all go what would I want I'd want the Leatherman on my belt they have flashlights in my pocket yeah no I mean I I'm not that attached to objects that I'd want to grab them out of a burning fire I'd go for my kids first and The Maltese Falcon by the way is heavy this will be our last question Michael southern from Australia how goes your research for your ignoble submission on the categorization of usage of words for very large and small amounts my taxonomy of nonsense words for large and small numbers it is it has been sitting by the wayside I talked to chip Denman about it about setting up a website of course you know self-selected to be sure I have not done any substantive work on it in a long time but still I'm still adding terms on occasion it's still it's still a dream to win a Nobel Prize a boy can dream thank you everybody so much see you next year well it's not an ignoble prize but it is a sincere token of our appreciation for once again being our guest thank you so much your honor to have you here Adam Savage

Channel: JamesRandiFoundation

Views: 116,866

Rating: 4.9246807 out of 5

Keywords: JREF, James Randi, skepticism, science, Amazing Meeting, TAM, Adam Savage, Mythbusters

Id: x3QS7vvOqwY

Length: 44min 45sec (2685 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/LPN]

He is a phenomenal storyteller