Myths Adam Regrets Tackling on MythBusters and Much, Much More

and we're live are we live we're live hey everybody thank you for sorry thank you for your patience adam savage here in my cave with a live stream this looks like this is gonna just drip yeah there we go that's in frame [Laughter] hey there uh today's top stories uh no hi everybody um it feels like it's been a while since i've done a live stream although i don't think it's been as long as i feel like it's been i've just been traveling a lot um i am here in my cave in san francisco it is a lovely day um this is the first week in san francisco that we can feel it feels like we can feel the fall nip in the air uh and it's nice to feel a little bit of fall valencia street the other day looked actually almost fall colors as i was walking down it which is not something you get a lot of in in california i know there are pockets of california but in san francisco the biggest way you know the difference between the seasons is usually by looking at the skies the skies get spectacular and the transitions between spring and summer summer and fall fall and winter etc before i go too much further i want to tell you today's live stream is sponsored by bloonstone usa we'll be talking about them later on um i wear them and like i said we'll be talking about them later on but i'm taking some questions and i have some questions we've gotten already but um this is an open chat so we're taking questions from everybody so uh once i answer a few of these we'll be checking my my texts from the crew and answering some of your questions live um hi i think these questions are frequently about mythbusters but there's also some about ghostbusters all the busters you know it's not it's funny that uh we got to see the ghostbusters afterlife in new york last weekend and it's stunning i loved it it is every bit as great as i was hoping it would be and it's even better the cast is totally amazing um but only every few weeks does it occur to me that like mythbusters owes its name lineage two ghostbusters i keep forgetting that part um anyway uh mechanics fx workshop opened right up and asks what has been the experience like of having a part on the new ghostbusters set driving the ecto-1 seeing all the props um we have so much more coverage of ghostbusters afterlife coming up on tested we got to spend a full week on the set with jason and the crew the cast was super welcoming uh there's even some of my uh some of my old mythbusters junior cohorts come in to come into this it's we get to really embed in a way we rarely get um and jason reitman and his whole team was just so uh so generous with their access that it was like a fantasy camp to a certain extent um there is a made main set in ghostbusters afterlife and they built it from scratch that there is a house on a hill there was only a hill where jason and the team showed up they looked everywhere for a house on a hill and eventually they just found a hill that worked and they built a house set on it and there was both an interior and an exterior set so for the actors in most movies when someone like pulls up to a house and walks inside the moment you cut to the shot inside they're in a sound stage they're not in the actual building it's very rare that you have a set that is both an interior and an exterior at the same time you asked about driving the echo one that was crazy great i knew that i would be covering the ecto-1 and their stunt driver was like you know we had talked about he's going to let me run through you know show me how it worked show me what they'd done etc but i didn't know that he was going to let me drive until in the video when i asked and he said yes like i learned as you did that i was going to be allowed to drive it um there's another question in here about some of the uh uh driving stunts that we did on mythbusters one of the lovely offshoots of all of the uh tactical driving training that jamie and i got on the set of the show i was trained to drive on two wheels trained to drive up a ramp like in knight rider into a truck container and did it trained to do a reverse bootleg 180. uh i can drive a tactical course backwards in high heels at a fairly reasonable clip um when we finally were in production on mythbusters junior and i was wondering if i could teach young cannon how to drive when he was only 12 years old i didn't know about the legalities of putting a 12 year old in control of an automobile and it turned out that not only is that okay if you are on a closed course with a a a a certified uh stunt driver and my my our our our stud coordinator nick pliche certified me to the insurance company as qualified to teach cannon how to drive and so i did that was fantastic i didn't know i had that certification i mean i think it's more like you know you work with the insurance company and say look you know what he can do you know his skill base you've watched it over the years he can supervise this safely and i did um that was a funny one because like when we first started doing mythbusters when we first become a hit show we become assets right so we're not just talent on the show but now the show's a hit we hold a value to the corporation uh and thus there were some interesting parts of the contract like all five mythbuster hosts weren't allowed to fly on the same airplane uh for a long time and so that also means that the insurance company doesn't want to hurt the assets so when jamie and i are about to do dangerous things they're like we're going to put some more safety procedures in place however as the show progressed it was frequently the case that jamie and i and our stunt team and our our our crew was the most qualified crew in the world to do the thing that we wanted to do and we had the evidence to show them that we had had experience in this realm before so unlike most talent on the show that gets popular we got more latitude to do the dangerous things over the years than less but that was like i'm now way past your original question um seeing all the ghostbusters props up close uh with ben eady and his crew and all of the special effects crews and i had friends who were on the cruise in la building the stuff that was getting sent to calgary i had friends up in calgary receiving that stuff modifying it playing with it um and every part of ghostbusters afterlife was built by crews who loved ghostbusters and you can feel it when you touch and handle and see those props up close and i hope that when the movie comes out there'll be places like the arclight used to be in la where they put hero props on display so you can see them because uh they look great on film they look even better in person yeah it was a a total love letter uh and yes there's fan service in the film of exactly what i consider to be the right kind of fan service um i loved it all the way through and uh again the cast is incredible okay um scott jenkinson has a question about mythbusters and their production schedule he says you've mentioned many times how grueling the production schedule was over the 14-year run of the show during that time how did the whole production team stay resilient and keep up their morale given your experience in film tv production etc what lessons about team morale and resilience have you brought forward into your work today um this is a great question right now because ayatsi is thinking about striking uh specifically because of the difficulty uh that crews are having uh with the schedules that they're being asked to work 14-hour days 12-hour turnarounds giving everyone fratter days where they work six and a half days a week 14 16 hours a day yeah maintaining crew morale over a long shoot is difficult um it means you've got to give everyone some time to rest um and it's a wonderful question you've asked scott because it was something that we had on our minds a lot um you you mentioned the grueling production schedule i should for those who don't know mythbusters was filmed year-round unlike most tv shows where they shoot for like six or eight months and then they have an off period where a lot of the actors go make movies mythbusters we worked 40 40 odd weeks per year and the way we did it was we would do three months on and about two weeks off three months on two weeks off we always took four days off for thanksgiving which was always a trade for that friday with columbus day if i remember correctly um we always did we always took that off we always took like two weeks off over or three weeks off over christmas and new year's which was lovely and so in fact when you're shooting 40 weeks a year having a break every three months was absolutely critical and well going back to having a show that turns out to be a hit when you are on television and you're on a show uh in the beginning no one's paying attention right like the network is just like they're hoping it flies but you know they don't have their hand in in your production very much but when the show starts to have real traction and legs and people start to watch it um everyone starts to pay attention and as the lead talent you get a weird kind of power right you have the power to like text the ceo of the company but that's not a power you that's not a thing you want to do until it really matters right like and what i mean by that power is you have the ability to kind of uh to ask a question of anywhere within the sort of corporate hierarchy whereas if you're just an employee you really don't you got to go to your boss and then they go to their boss etc um but like i said you don't want to use that that power of being able to talk to the ceo or the the president of the company indiscriminately you want to you want to use it like i said when it matters and for me i and jamie and i were both really clear about this at the beginning is that the moment we had a little power the only thing we tried to do with it was open up our production schedule so it wasn't just about three weeks on two weeks off it was also about how much time we had budgetarily to film every episode um and by the end of production i think we had almost like 12 shooting days per episode yeah uh just for point of reference like that is not common normally you want to finish an episode in less than a week you know i know that uh mike and his incredible team at dirty jobs they were able to do more than one episode a week when they were running on all cylinders that was really cleverly produced this totally different style of show obviously and like they just you know they had their methodology it worked great um for us the more time we had to film each episode the more time we had to sort of change our direction and adjust a methodology or adjust an episode when it didn't go the way we expected it to but it also meant that we weren't having to kill ourselves to get the episode done by friday and that is humongous because when you're pushed up against a date like that you you end up over tiring everybody you if you work a 16-hour day if you work like a 12-hour day on monday and a 18-hour day on friday monday no one's back to normal everyone's just sort of playing pick-up and i'll tell you in the first season of mythbusters we shot six days a week 10 hours a day and it almost killed us like that is not a sustain we did that for 25 weeks before we went to five day weeks and it was an unsustainable unsustainable pace um so we pushed to get more time to shoot every episode because that was both good for us it was good for the show and it was good for the crew it meant that we had more time and space to make the show that we wanted to make um that's the most global thing that's the most global part about keeping the morale up on the more specific level um neither jamie nor i nor any of the producers we work with stevo or alice um were micromanagers and that's another key thing about crew morale is not micromanaging your crew so each of our different producers whether it was dennis kwan or linda wolkovic jax marker claire mandel i mean we had so many wonderful producers and each producer would be given a story okay you're going to do you know let's say bifurcated boat your this is your story you're doing bifurcated boat you've got to find all the locations find the scientific experts talk to the hosts figure out what they want to do set up the permits set up the shoot so each producer was always working on one usually at least two stories one right now and one for the future and each of our producers built their own relationships with different locations one producer was really in tight with the people that managed the naval bases around the bay area another was really in tight with the sheriff's department another was really great with some of the rental parking lots we needed to use and each of those producers really considered those relationships highly sacrosanct uh because if you have a good relationship with a location and you've shown up you've paid them the right money but you've also left the location even better than you found it that means that when you call them for an emergency like hey i need to use this location tomorrow do you think we can grease the wheels and get the permits done quickly that they're more inclined to help and that specific thing of being able to call a location you have a relationship with and asking for a last-minute change of what the shoot was going to be was an absolutely vital part of mythbusters production i've said this many times before but a good portion of reality tv is written like an episode of reality tv is often written down by a producer and then filmed by a crew it is almost akin to narrative storytelling a lot of the time and mythbusters was totally not that um this was a show in which you really were filming when we were going and because of that autonomy we had to sort of follow our noses both the from the host's perspective carrie grant tori jamie and i but also from a producer's perspective it meant that everyone on the crew felt a real sense of ownership over the show and there's no greater thing for morale than everyone feeling like they're pulling on the same rope they're pulling in the same direction um yeah so we also you know there was no hiding of information you know it wasn't like we sequestered information from different tiers of the crew based on whether they needed to know that or not it's like everyone was across everything um and again yeah ownership of the show i it's a great question and it's an ongoing question like every time you produce something you need to you know consider your cruise resilience and morale uh because if they're happy your show is going to be better that's that's a straight up like direct bit of math happy crew means a better show every single time oh we already have some questions uh uh on the live questions from the actual chat here okay jonathan l says have you ever worked with or wanted to work with disney imagineering yes uh having seen what having what they do be tangible in the real world seems to line up with how you prefer to make stuff yeah um when i saw those uh the figures that they were flying through the air that were hitting superhero poses in the air that grant yamahara was working on oh man i could not my eyes did not believe that video when i first watched it and i just kept on reloading and watching it again and again to kind of wrap my head around how beautiful that whole thing was yeah uh i have been lucky enough to know many many disney imagineers over the years and yeah um it would be a delightful fantasy camp to go work well in any aspect with the imagineering team i got a tour uh through uh galaxy's edge in orlando with uh creative the creative director of the disney properties and the amount of i mean it's theme park stuff right so it has to be crazy robust uh and be able to withstand the most egregious abuse uh that the parks actually undergo at the same time it's just got to be the absolute pinnacle of magnificent engineering and aestheticism uh so yeah it does sound like a tremendous amount of fun to me you're absolutely right so no i haven't will i in the future who's to say can kauno i'm sorry ken for butchering your last name ken counto says have you ever accepted a job a movie commercial theater for prop building and regretted it here i am doing the math in my head should i name the production sure why not um in 1999 in early 1999 my then wife gave birth to my boys and uh i had been out of work for about a month um we had just wrapped had we wrapped episode one i think we had wrapped episode one which was why i was i was out of work ilm went from like 200 model makers down to very few uh and i was looking for work and on the day my boys were born i got a call from uh uh the the a prop master on bicentennial man robin williams movie based on an isaac asimov novel i robot and it filmed up here in san francisco because robin williams made sure that every film he worked on shot in san francisco because this is where he lived he brought robin just brought untold billions of dollars to the bay area because he wanted to shoot movies up here everyone in the film industry up here super grateful to robin for that and i had a couple of amazing experiences on that film in fact i'll tell you about those first let's start with the good stuff um working on a robin williams film meant that i ran into robin williams a bunch and he was amazing and delightful and meeting robin is kind of exactly what you would have hoped meeting robin would be like he's hilarious he's attentive he's crazy smart um and one morning i'm at the craft services table and i'm getting a bagel and there's robin in his like i think he was in like a jumpsuit like like a spandex jumpsuit about to get dressed in the robot costume and we're like making our bagels together and somebody we're talking about the news that morning and there was a story in the press that morning about a boat that had foundered off the coast of florida with like two and a half tons of cocaine on it and we we're talking about that because it's funny so robin supposed to do impressions of the kind of people that show up to help in a situation like that and then after a few of those and we're laughing he goes he ends up doing an unbelievable impression of a of a dolphin that's had too many amphetamines and that led to something else into something else and something else and now i'm standing there with bagel plate and it's like half an hour after i'm supposed to have started work over a couple of days over in the in treasure island shooting stages and i do i realize i must do something that like 10 year old me would have never imagined i would ever do which is i had to say robin i have to go to work now you literally you're getting like a private comedy show from one of the funniest people on the planet but you also know that commerce isn't going to wait for you and your boss is going to be pissed off so i actually said them i get i got to go to work oh okay you know i went off to work i'm still amazed that i somehow had the fortitude to turn off the robin williams show that was happening in front of me about three weeks later i was coming back from the bathroom and at that point i was already working with the scissor lift tool boxes shaped like doctors bags that sat at my table at a table height so that i could work really efficiently and i came back from the bathroom to uh to my workspace and robin was standing at my desk and he was in the full um the full incredible robot costume that um steve johnson and the guys at xfx built and if whatever you think of that movie and i think it's better than it generally has than its relative cultural opinion i i think it's a pretty good movie the robot suit in that movie is one of the most beautiful robot suits ever built by anybody and xfx just did an incredible job it is all back pain and petg so it's got this high candy coat finish it was a hundred percent coverage so there were like little you know nesting hemispheres at the wrists for wrist movement and on the shoulders and the arms so robin is standing there at my desk in the full robot suit without the head on and i come over and i'm like hey and he's like hey are these your tool boxes and i said yeah and he told me that his grandfather was a tinkerer and that he grew up like in workshops and that his dad would have loved these toolboxes and we had this whole discussion about toolbox meanwhile he's like i said while you look at the toolboxes if you don't mind i'm going to look at the suit so he's looking at the toolbox and i'm like holding onto his arm and like bending it to learn to see how xfx built the pieces of the suit um like i said a delightful human being there were other aspects of that job that weren't so great back then i don't know how it is but back then there were uh there was not an awesome relationship between la film cruise and san francisco film crews at least that was what i was led to understand and it meant that there were some informational bottlenecks that made our jobs harder um there was also some crew members on our crew that were pains in the ass to work with but mostly um i had a direct supervisor on that show who was not great and i did not enjoy working for them uh right um and i so i regretted working on this show within about three weeks and i spent three months on it uh and they were rough months they were the days weren't crazing long but the work was hard and again the work was lovely the stuff props we built were beautiful it's just that the way you had to go around building them with the supervisor that i had and some of the co-workers i had to work with is just uh difficult let's let's just say it that way um i ended up with an interesting problem which was that i didn't want to work on this show anymore i wanted to not work on bicentennial man and i'm going to give some real inside baseball here and i couldn't get hired up at industrial light and magic because i was already working on bicentennial man and the local in the local union you can't just jump from one ship to another so i ended up quitting my centennial man and then trying to get work back up at ilm after about a month or so uh and i eventually did i got to work up in episode two uh doug chang called me and asked me to come to the art department and work on episode two and i got to go up to the ranch and work in a little third floor workshop that john goodson and john duncan had cobbled together out of what they could find up at the ranch there literally was a full model shop on the third floor of the big house at the ranch we had a i had a special key a special key that would only allow me to go to the third floor it was so amazing also the cafeteria the one of the main cafeterias at the ranch when i was there uh again i still don't know if this is the case but like it's like a gourmet restaurant that charged you their cost so like a steak was like like 11 bucks or something like that it was amazing all right i think i've gushed enough about ilm um okay let's see here billy canimations asks did you think of mythbusters as a job or a fun hobby that you conveniently got paid for that is an interesting question and it leads to some interesting answers so let's let's work our way through it shall we um it was a job absolutely it starts as a job right and since i was freelance when mythbusters showed up i'd been working in the commercial and film special effects industry for about 10 or 11 years at that point uh the the the brain of a freelancer is what's next what's next what's next and everything you do you give it all of your attention so jamie and i jumped into mythbusters later on with cary grant and troy all of us treated it as an abs absolutely as a job way more than a hobby that we conveniently got paid for um but i will say that when we first started doing tested i definitely did have the mindset in the very beginning of thinking of tested as a fun hobby that i well i didn't get paid for but that i contributed to i got to build some cool stuff and i got to tell stories about it but it like there was an absolute kind of treatment of it as this is something less than a job i mean again because i wasn't getting paid you know own my own you know co-owner of tested so uh in the big picture you know i i get paid but not in the in the granular sense um and i had to admit after a period of time that didn't work for the content that i was making for tested there's a real difference between treating it like a job and treating it like i mean i i think that what you're asking about when you say between a job and a fun hobby um i mean with a fun hobby you kind of get to alight the parts you don't like necessarily it's pretty easy to sort of put it down but with the job you got to get it done by whatever the end of the day the end of the the end of the project um and having basically i've come around to feeling like everything that i do while it all began with some hobby nests the fact is i have learned over my life that if i treat everything as a job and i don't mean that that it's like a slog but i treat it with the respect that i pay my employment work if i treat it with that respect it's going to be better so i try not to treat anything anymore as if it's like a fun hobby i conveniently get paid for yeah i hope that was useful all right let's see let's see what else we've got here uh wow um just uh christopher bellflower said grew up on mythbusters i hope your house is still standing um he chose to become a mechanical engineer and thanks for all the knowledge and entertainment over the years we every one of us is just every every one of us who ever worked on mythbusters is so humbled when we hear that kind of thing uh because seriously we were never thinking of the children we were just making the show we wanted to make telling the stories we wanted to tell uh trying to do it honestly um and i'm eternally grateful that it actually had some real legs um i think it is almost time oh one more question okay we have a surprise uh okay let's see here uh keely cat's mom hi keely cat's mom um says i know you traveled extensively with mythbusters and touring what were some of the places that stand out or that you could have never imagined going to where would you go back to um we did travel extensively on mythbusters one of my favorite places we traveled was to south africa which is absolutely magnificently beautiful part of the world and i feel really grateful that we got to go there we got to spend like two whole weeks filming in simon's town uh on false bay there where the great whites leap entirely out of the water oh my god that was so incredible on the last day of our shoot we needed a few more shots of great whites and this was i think a day we were like devoting to trying to get some really good phantom high speed shots of the sharks sleeping out of the water and you know when you go out to film on on the bay like that you go out at the crack of dawn so we're up at five we're out there by like 5 45 we're out on the water in the swells and like just as the light is coming you're literally waiting for the cameraman i'm waiting for scott to go yeah yeah we got enough okay we got enough flight go ahead and what i've got is a foam seal off the back of the boat with some monofilament tied to it and this is going to be one of the targets um you can't feed the sharks in false bay you've got to use these non-edible targets that won't damage them if they do bite a chunk out of them so this piece of camping foam in the shape of a seal like and like i said with a piece of monofilament and i i literally like i stand up and i toss it into the water and i'm standing on the transom of a boat right so i'm like two inches above the water when this great white that i'm not exaggerating is maybe like yeah this big around maybe this big around yeah basically i put the seal in the water and here's the progression of events still goes pop and instantly this mouth comes up and grabs it and goes down and now i'm holding this reel that's going and the guys are like let go of the reel and i'm like no like you got to let go of the reel if the shark's got the reel he can pull you in and i'm like i've got a shark on monofilament i am not letting go this is the most amazing thing in the world i'm just watching this thing pay out i'm not trying to stop it or anything it's just the idea that at the other end of this spinning thing i have that there's a great white shark actually probably pissed off that he's bitten into what feels like a paper cracker right like wow you guys totally fooled me eventually i did stop the reel and the shark's tooth cut the monofilament i felt go and then like contract and eventually that seal with a bite in it not a complete bite a bunch of teeth marks in it eventually rose back to the surface um we also got to go to an incredible uh uh uh park we went to we flew about an hour and a half east of south africa to a place called shamwari which was a nature preserve and we had an incredible time an incredible day of seeing lions and cheetahs and giraffes and elephants ah elephants in the wild it literally was like a bucket list and an amazing thing to see the most shocking thing about elephants in the wild is how good they are at hiding it like it's intense how much an elephant you've been looking at like what looks like vegetation there's nothing around and all of a sudden like elven walks out seriously they are masters of camouflage it would seem um i you know i love traveling and i love seeing things that you don't normally get to see so another one that really stands out was a few years ago i was touring through uh through florida and i went to canaveral and got a tour of the vehicle assembly building this is the building in which they assembled the saturn v rocket uh for going to the moon and it is at least it was uh for a long time one of the tallest freestanding interior space buildings in the world it's like 575 feet high and the doors in it are like 550 feet high you can stand we got to tour all the way up to the roof we got to stand on the roof and look at all the canaveral platforms which is again one of those like holy cow i can't believe what i'm getting to see but then you look down and seriously like weather can move through the building underneath you that's how crazy that that that place is um yeah i'm very grateful for all the travel we got to do um now i i i i want to tell you i did wear one stones through almost all of mythbusters and i actually i found out from bloodstone that a lot of people hold on to their shoes and so do i so i'm going to go get this old pair of mythbusters blunts i have in meanwhile norm chen is going to tell you some stuff about bloodstone norm thanks adam okay well adam's going to grab some boots i want to let you know and first of all thank you everyone for joining us and thank you the bloodstone usa for making today's q a possible we have a lot more q a coming up but uh like adam says he wears his blunt stone and actually in fact a lot most of the tested team here wears blunt stones as well i have my 585s on right now i got mine about three years ago they've gone with me and tested all around the world you know now to mention visiting the ghostbusters afterlife movie set yep those are with us there we've gone to what a workshop with them jen schachter wears them we actually realize when we're filming builds here and gunther who also wears them was filming them we noticed in some of our bureau shops hey we're all wearing very similar boots but uh bloodstone it's a true heritage brand and has been making boots for over 150 years they carry a ton of different styles and colors including men's and women's boots and work boots and kids boots which someone with a toddler is very exciting to think about you can shop online and find a local retailer near you at blunstone.com so once again thank you bloodstone usa for making this live stream and public q a possible all right yeah so here are my an early pair of my boots uh from mythbusters one of the most common ways in which i had to retire boots was specifically these toes would wear through um one of my favorite things is they're waterproof up to the top of this webbing in my experience so i was fearless about walking through puddles but once the tow wore through they were no longer waterproof and that's often why i had to retire them but like once a pair of boots looks that great you can't get rid of them so i have a whole trophy shelf upstairs in my loft for my blennies yeah okay let's see here um oh that's a really good question jenny valton asks are there any myths that you didn't really want to do but ended up loving i'm gonna have to think about that one because it's a great question and not one i've heard before so i don't have a a ready answer vickie bly hello vicky tested premium member vicky bly wants to know i'm re-watching mythbusters and in season one you guys had a snake moving around during the blueprint portion i'm curious whose snake was it well i'll tell you jamie heinemann used to have the petting zoo from hell he really did he had rats which he raised and by the way rats are amazing pets i'm here to sing the praises of rats they are super smart they know their name they come when you call them um they're delightful companions they're very affectionate uh they love their scritches rats are great so jamie had rats that's fine a lot of people don't like rats they don't like that bald tail but they're wonderful pets uh he also had a tarantula the tarantula was purchased as reference for the movie arachnophobia for which mr heinemann built the uh several of the mechanisms that helped the spiders walk i'm doing this motion because one of the mechanisms was effectively like an organ grinders calliope sort of thing um and when you turned it it adjusted all of these cables and allowed a spider to walk when they were working on that film up at cwi they bought a a tarantula for production as reference so they could see how it moved and get the paint and color and all that right and anyway jamie kept that tarantula and they lived for a long time so he had it for a long time and then to round out the pet the petting zoo from hell he had a snake a boa constrictor named gomez i think it was gomez i'm pretty sure it's go i think it's gomez i don't even know why i'm thinking second guessing myself the snake's name was gomez now gomez came in the blueprint wasn't i don't think gomez's first appearance on mythbusters there's an oh wait wait wait right okay one of the most common questions we get is was there anything you filmed that didn't make it to air and the answer is very rarely uh almost everything we filmed made it to air in some form or another except for a myth we did in the very first season and the myth was i'm sure when you were a kid you're in the grocery store and your mom is filling the grocery cart with stuff for the house and you're like hey mom could we get this super sugar crisp cereal or the fruit loops or the captain crunch or the blueberry or whatever sugary cereal you wanted and your mom said hell no uh the box is probably better for you than the cereal inside and we thought that that was a testable proposition so the way we decided to test it is we set up um three we used white lab mice as our test subjects we had nine of them in three cages okay so we had one cage that was a control these were mice getting mouse food the little compressed pellets that they like to eat these mice were those were our control group then we had mice that were eating fruit loops yep they were getting fed on the same schedule as the mice eating the control food and then we had a third group of mice three in each cage the third group of mice was eating cardboard now it wasn't just cardboard we didn't just like throw the box in there we wanted to let the mice know that the cardboard was edible and the best way we thought to do that jamie jamie came up with this whole methodology because it turns out that jamie owned a pet shop in high school seriously not kidding jamie heinemann owned a pet shop in high school yeah anyway so what jamie did was he posited that the mice would be used to looking at their food in the pellet form so he took cardboard blended it in a blender added a little water and then compressed it um using some tubes into the shapes of the mice pellet food it was a great idea he even added artificial sweetener to like see if that would help turns out mice can't taste artificial sweetener i really don't know how we know that but apparently that's true that's an experiment i'd like to look up the methodology of at any rate um so again three cages three my siege control froot loops cardboard control is going fine oh and each day we're going in and we're weighing the mice on a little little scale to see if their weights are changing and i mean these mice weigh grams right like less than an ounce they're absolutely tiny but we're logging their weights every day and we started on a monday here comes friday mice all seem to be doing fine the mice in the cardboard cage seem a little tweaky they seem a little uh to have like faster reactions to stuff than the mice in the other two cages but it doesn't look like anything egregious is going on and jamie heinemann again because he owned the pet store is the one monitoring this so friday night he turns out all the lights he sees all the cages does the weighing and the logging turns off the shop and goes home monday morning we come in and everything is very different not in the control cage or the fruit loops cage everything is still normal in those and those mice weigh exactly the same as they did at the beginning of the experiment in the cardboard cage however there has been events there is no longer three mice in the cardboard cage there's one really really fat mouse and two carcasses yeah yeah i mean and they looked like they looked like bugs bunny cartoons of a carcass it was like head rib cage tail like like like the big one had eaten them like corn on the cob and so of course we nicknamed him killer and i mean you know this wasn't our intent we did not want this to happen it doesn't mean we're gonna like we just thought okay well we've got to finish this sequence so i pulled him out and i was like well killer and i turned to the camera and i said this is what can happen with mice attack we thought that was pretty funny uh and then uh we fed that mice to jaime snake gomez because it was feeding time and it seemed like hakuna matata circle of life and we're just pleasing ourselves i mean we just thought that was funny uh and apparently when discovery saw the footage they thought it was funny too but instructed us to never air it and we i don't think we have um in fact i ended up i had a rough cut of that episode and i showed part of that rough cut at a college and this is kind of like 2005. and i got a call from discovery corporate that was like destroy that copy of the episode you have and don't show it again so that was the that was the very first appearance of gomez the snake um but you never saw it so it was not officially the first appearance of gomez the snake was during the blueprint um how did it feel being in the water with sharks on the repel lee marsh highly uh tested premium member how did it feel tested patron sorry thank you patron um how did it feel being in the water with sharks on the repellent myth using dead shark smell well i love the fact that sharks are repelled by the smell of other dead sharks i think that's a very good policy on the shark's front and if they ask me i would tell them don't change that policy being in the water with sharks is always a mix of um it's it's spooky it's certainly spooky um and i think it's i've always i spent a lot of time thinking about why it's upsetting why it's obvious there's the obvious reason right you don't want to get bitten you don't want this thing to come out and get you obviously but recognize that for like a shark researcher shark attacks are still so so rare they're statistically non-existent on the on the order of people going to the beach and getting in the water shark attacks are almost a non-number from a statistical standpoint they're surpassingly rare so on a rational front i'm not that nervous but at the same time water is like it's a portal it is a portal it's horizontal whereas most of our video game portals are are vertical but it is a portal and it's a portal to another world and sharks are the masters of that world well they're one of the masters of that world so yeah there's a way in which that you always feel because i belong on this side of the portal and they belong on that side i feel like they've got the advantage because most of me is on their side um but the fear was really minor frankly doing shark week and repeatedly getting in the water with sharks remains one of the most rewarding and incredible things i've ever got to do sharks are so beautiful um and getting to spend hours and hours diving with them unparalleled i would do it again in a heartbeat um heading out there with whether it was with doc's crew on bimini or stewart cove's dive bahamas working with luke tipple who spent so much time at guadalupe i've always wanted to go out to the farallon islands i mean we did film out there on the we did circle the farallons on one of our very first shark week episodes but uh yeah it's it's a real treat and the very first time i got into water with a bunch of shark researchers and saw sharks was one of the most frightening things that has ever happened to me all i remember from that was like being in about 40 feet of water off the coast of bimini or above a white sand bottom and you kind of need that so you can see them and there's this just like small like one acre patch of white sand that we were snorkeling over and it was like ten of us all holding hands above this sort of place where sharks frequented and they we started seeing them and you first of all you need the right eyes to see them right because they they are somewhat camouflaged but once you see them then you can spot them and we're looking and i'm just sort of like i'm looking around like breathing heavier and heavy all i can hear is my breath and my and then i looked down and i saw i don't know how big it is underwater sharks look gargantuan underwater a seven foot shark feels like it's like 20 feet long because they're wider than you think they have more girth than you imagine and then i looked down and saw what seemed to be an absolutely massive hammerhead shark i don't think it was a massive hammerhead shark probably like 10 or 12 feet long but the hammerhead shark the way it was moving through just felt so alien and so other it that remains one of the spookiest things i've seen underwater the other one was we were diving off of um we were driving in a place called tiger beach about 60 miles off grand bahama this is where we filmed the the last shark episode that we did um with some of the shark cage stuff me in the suit of armor that's where that was filmed and at one point when we came through when we were down there a tiger shark came through on the hunt and a shark on the hunt has a very different sort of set of circumstances there's a way in which its fins are oriented and the way it swims and the way it's positioned itself that the shark divers we were with knew that this was a danger and they like got close to me and hustled me into the shark cage that was spooky seeing the hammerhead for the first time that early time was even spookier was really really upsetting and amazing amazing amazing i'm no longer scared of jumping into the water with sharks and i can't wait till i get to do it again so yeah i strongly recommend it um i struggled a couple of other stories here let's see here um oh um this is so charles white i've referred to this question uh earlier charles white says how did mythbusters refocus in a quick turnaround after coming up with a system and a methodology that looked great on paper but when in practice you had to rework it especially when you're working under time crunches to get the episode wrapped um and he points out example would be all the work to implement the octopus method and then having to scrap it and go with the box method when we were trying to lift the car with a vacuum this is a great question and this is one in which everybody understanding the mission was super super important um and it goes back to not micromanaging film is a wonderful industry that in my experience lacks uh the heavy-handedness of micromanagers like they don't it doesn't seem to attract micromanagers nor should it everyone on the film crew understands their job and where their priorities intersect with other peoples and how those all lead to getting the job done by the end of the day and on the mythbusters crew one of the ways we managed quick turnarounds for stuff like that when it wasn't going right was as i said earlier the relationships that our producing team built with different locations and different resources that we used that was one of the most key ways in which we were able to pivot uh on very short notice and nothing is more important than being able to pivot on short notice when something's not going right the other one is like jamie and i were really good at talking each other out of the sunk cost fallacy um and like all right yeah it's time to abandon this and start from scratch um and again that's about like knowing what your priorities are i realized like okay if we do this i think when we did that we realized that it was gonna add like four minutes right right then we know okay this is going to be a story beat the octopus method isn't working we're gonna have to switch to the vacuum method we're not going to be able to cover the vacuum the the straight box method in as great a detail as we did the octopus method because we have to get it done in a short period of time but we do feel confident that we can do it and that was the one of like jamie and i comparing notes with each other okay this thing that we thought would be the higher percentage working thing and it doesn't work uh jamie and i were really clear the priority is we got to get something spectacular to happen by the end of the day and it can't be just that we can't lift the car it's either that we lift the car and it fails spectacularly and falls but the one thing that can't happen is that we don't end up lifting the car because we know this is feasible we know this is possible um that was a that was a i always loved those moments working with jamie on that sort of thing of like all right we've talked through all the possibilities can we call it can we finish this by the you know and i don't even think we had to add an extra day of production for that one which is pretty amazing um we did this is one of the things that we would say at that point we would say to the in working with our producer we'd be like yeah we can do it in this new way but you guys are just gonna have to film it verite like we can't stop and talk a lot because we have to bust ass we have like four hours we think we can get this done in time but we're gonna have to go and we'll catch a sketch can in terms of catching up with the pieces to camera we call them pmts sort of a dumb nomenclaturement post-match talk or pre-match talk look essentially with every episode with everything that we did we talk about what we were going to do then we talked about what we thought was going to happen then in the middle of it we talked about what was happening and at the end of it we talked about what just happened what we learned from it and where we're going next and as long as we got all those pieces of camera per sequence we were able to move on but sometimes with something like the box method we had to like hunker down and just build while they filmed um yeah everyone keeping their own priorities yep all right let's see i had another one circled here that i wanted to talk about um what david martin wants to know what was working with billy joel like yes i worked with billy joel i was actually this wait before i tell you this story i know that a lot of you already know the story but i was recently at a couple of cons where the cast of the boys was um jack quaid anthony starr aaron and all the other cast are amazing karen fukuhara they're super sweet that whole cast i mean i know they play some of the most messed up villains and characters on television um in person they are all delightful humans and in the second season this isn't a spoiler but in the second season of the boys one of the regular leap motifs of the season is uh jack quaid's character's love of billy joel music and so each episode sort of features one or two billy joel songs and in one episode he's actually we hear the song a second wind you're only human which is a billy joel song nobody knows about but i got to tell jack quaid that i actually am in the music video for your only human i play the scrawny kid who drowns and i recorded that as my second acting job in the world and i filmed it in 1984 uh when i was 16. um that blew their minds delightful about that um and so i got to spend three days filming this music video with billy joel who was a freaking delight like so billy joel and his band played here in san francisco a couple years ago for the first time in like 30 years they played pac-bell park and i got to go um i have uh some members of my road crew overlap with some members of billy joel's road crew and when you know the road crews you know all the secrets to the world because the road crews they run everything um and billy joel's crew was very uh gracious and welcoming i brought my boys thing one and thing two and so we got backstage passes we got to hang out back there and everyone was it was incredible fantasy camp in insane and they let billy know that i was there and he came out he came out and hung out with me and the boys for about half an hour and he was like so is it really true i'm gonna give him a slate new york accent i know he's more from long island and i can't do his accent exactly but he's like is it true what was your first acting job and i was like yeah that's absolutely true and he's like what a terrible video he's like we had to make those videos in the 80s that was what you had to do ah they were always a little weird which is true it is a terrible video um so it's such a terrible video that when i showed it to my wife the first time we were halfway through a three-minute video and my wife was like is there any more of you in this because i'm not sure i can take it but that also was what billy was like on the set he was not precious he was not removed from everything he was just out and among us the whole time we were filming around new york for three days uh i got a mild hypothermia by shooting the drowning scene at coney island in i think like mid-november and billy billy joel's trailer was the only one with heat so i warmed up in that uh i think he even brought some beers to uh the cast later on um and actually christy brinkley also came by the set because they were married at that point and she like said hello to everybody she personally greeted everyone on the crew that high quality humans um and may i say billy joel's voice is still freaking perfect um so it was lovely to both work with him at the age of 16 meet him again in my 50s and find the same guy and i grew up on billy joel's music he's the he's the bruce springsteen of long island and that part of new york and as such like was absolutely one of my heroes uh glass houses and stranger are literally just like hardwired into my pop music brain um super important love that guy lubo in china which is a great name for a show lubo in china lubo in china says what was the most theoretically difficult myth to test i mean physics chemistry the stuff usually done by phds in research um well okay the one that comes to mind is break step bridge that still is a real ass kicker of a story to get right so in break step bridge the myth is that if you have a bridge and soldiers are marching across it in step which means they're all taking their steps in syncopation with each other that that syncopation can set up what's called a fatal harmonic to where the bridge starts to move underneath them and there's this particular way in which humans try and stop something from moving when it's moving and they actually make it worse this happened on the millennium bridge in london and required them to close it down and add a bunch of structure to it so the myth is that soldiers marching on a bridge can cause a harmonic that can cause the bridge to fail and it's an easy myth to state it is really hard to test because first of all you're not going to take a full-size bridge and put a bunch of soldiers on it so because it's you want to give it the best chance of failing you want it sorry you want to give the bridge the best chance of failing you don't want to prove it by like oh we marched in step and it didn't work you really want to try and give it the effort to make it work you want to try and impart that fatal harmonic and within engineering and specifically the engineering of structures fatal harmonics are a known thing and you know something that you you anticipate and accommodate for the thing about testing it for a bridge in scale which was where we had to go with it is that bridges are like ludicrously over designed and so like when you are in order to get this to work you need to bring the bridges uh uh the threshold of the bridge's ability to stay together needs to be close to the threshold of the energy being generated by the soldiers you need to bring these two energies to be close to each other because if you just march a bunch of soldiers on the golden gate bridge it's not going to do anything it's too big so you need to build a bridge small enough that you can see if a fatal harmonic will harm it and then you need to impart that fatal harmonic and this is actually one of the biggest fights that jamie and i had on the show and it was like season two couldn't have even been season one no i think it was season i think it might have been early in season one um because we got in a huge argument about it um he had these uh 90 degree pneumatic actuators that he wanted to put boots on and i didn't like that idea because pneumatics when you're talking about a fatal harmonic you're talking about a periodicity where each time the bridge moves you're imparting more and like pushing someone on a swing okay when you're pushing someone on a swing to make them go higher you're not pushing them at a constant beat each time they're coming back to you with a certain amount of energy you're matching meeting that energy and increasing it which means the periodicity of that swing is changing and you need to be able to change dynamically in order to impart that fatal harmonic i apologize to all the actual mechanical engineers out there that i'm probably getting a lot of the terms here wrong but i think i'm getting the explanation pretty close to accurate um and in the end uh jamie won i think i think he wore me out on that one i still disagree with that experiment i didn't want to use the pneumatics because i didn't there so sorry i got ahead of myself you want to impart a periodicity that is highly specific and i mean we're talking down to the millisecond in terms of being able to add energy into that system to see if it will harm the system and pneumatics are just not as accurate right pneumatics it's a soft system it's a there's there's there's there's backlash and there's you can't make a pneumatic thing hit a perfect beat down to the millisecond especially if you want to dynamically time it and change it over time you need something like and we actually did this and i don't know if it was for break step bridge i think it might have been um we had a linear actuator that was magneto driven so that there was like coils and a magnet like a tube with magnets reverse polarity all the way down and the coils as you turn them on could actually move the actuator grant and mahara these this was an actuator that was so new there was no programming for it so we got the actuator from the company but then grant yamahara had the custom write software for activating the coils and getting it to move back and forth on the time line that we wanted and that's the level of accuracy that you need for that story over the intervening years the more i've learned about bridge design and bridge engineering the more i realize how far out of our depth we were in the execution of that story so i still think of it as one of the biggest pains in the ass for us in terms of a story we were less than qualified look i i'm not going to say we were qualified to test everything but like that one we were definitely farther out of our depth than we realized and i've come to understand now just how far out of our depth we were um james dutrow says on the subject of your time in film uh did you ever suffer from creativity burnout um i wouldn't say creativity burnout i would say every time you finish a big thing there's like a dip in the mood that's certainly true but creativity burnout um in film no but that's also because i wasn't doing a lot of decision making in film that was like mission critical decision making i'm talking about my time working as a model maker in the film and television industry uh where i've had not burnout but i had what was called what was it some um decision fatigue that is definitely a thing um it was easier on mythbusters where we had a large crew and a lot of people taking care of stuff and like when jamie or i encountered something that we found super onus onerous uh you know some bit of subject matter or a build that we just weren't thrilled about we would often say do you want to take this one and like the other one would take it we did that both ways um we did that in both directions but on savage builds where uh that's my show i don't have a collaborator on the show i have a whole crew of collaborators but the decisions all come down to me and my producer john tessier but like you know everyone's coming at you and as somebody said in the film show runner they've only got questions and you're the only one with the answers i definitely had several days on savage builds where i was like someone came to me and was like should this be red or blue and i was like i have to go home now like just having to answer red or blue was like my brain was and then i found out there was a thing called decision fatigue like once you've made a certain number of decisions your brain was like we're done send us home give us a cup of tea give us a night's sleep and we'll come back with some answers tomorrow yeah also one of the reasons i don't think i suffered from creativity burnout is how well um industrial light and magic i felt like all of my job supervisors at ilm took really good care of their crews that that really like that was a place that had institutionalized good job supervision in the model shop particularly the various people i worked with whether it's lawn peterson steve golly brian grenand von davis um these are all soups who really pay attention to their crews and they want everyone to have a good time and they want the job to be excellent and they want it to be the highest possible quality but they also want you to have fun while you're doing it um and that makes a big difference i know that not everyone gets to work in situations like that so that's definitely you i think it might be unique to ilm and some other places i don't know but that was my experience ryan of the angels that's literally how they're written ryan of the angels asks adam did your background working behind the scenes in theater and film influence how you interacted with the crews once you became on-screen talent by the way thanks shout out and thanks to the testing crew for all they do yes my my time on my time behind the scenes informs everything with how i behave on set so i showed up into commercial special effects in the early 90s and i was like like we're saying i was behind the scenes i was building models so i built models for a couple of weeks then the camera crews would show up we'd set up the commercial on soundstage the clients would come they'd be in their own video village with all their laptops making their decisions the director would be you know moving around making decisions jamie and my boss at the time would we'd be running our stuff and then once it was all set up and you were ready to shoot and the lighting was done and the rig was ready to go excuse me they would say bring in the talent and that meant bring in the on-screen person who was going to be in that commercial you always called them the talent and in every every single time someone said let's bring in the talent people in the crew went just a little bit of a snicker a little bit of snicker cause it's funny in a crew full of like you know the most every film crew is an army of problem solvers as david mamet said um and an army of really smart intuitive dedicated hard working problem solvers and when you have a whole bunch of those people working for days and sometimes weeks to make something and then at the very end you say let's bring in the talent it definitely has a specific ring to it and it's a ring that invites a little bit of not derision but let us say a playful resetting of what the hierarchy is um so i'm cognizant when i i just shot some commercials recently when i step onto a commercial set like they don't know they don't know how i'm gonna be they they haven't met me they don't know if i'm gonna show up and be an they don't know if i'm gonna be late or if i'm gonna have strange demands and like my like i i want my tombstone to say he was nice to work with seriously i really really do um and i like showing up and setting the expectations nice and high that i'm going to be agreeable and easy to work with because i am there are hills that i will die on but i'm not going to insult anybody about them um hopefully those have been worked out contractually before i'm standing on set but even still i can disagree in a in a civil manner and i you know i like being easy to work with i like working on a crown which everyone's relaxed um again when the crew is happy it's gonna make a better show so absolutely actually the sound guy on these commercials i was working on was like wow you're really across all the sound stuff because i was like well i'd like to put it here but if i'm going to wear this coat maybe you want to put it here i can pop a hole and we can run it on my back and it's like thanks for helping me solve all these problems and i'm like you know that's we're all just here trying to get the job done um i also find that uh film crews that i have been lucky enough to work with whether it's on the expanse or on commercial shoots or or other stuff know that i come from that side of the camera and are very gracious and um complimentary and so that is really nice to be welcomed you know you you step into a a film crew you don't know it's like high school cafeteria time you know you're staring at a room full of people you don't know and they all work with each other they all know each other um how are you going to fit in i have found literally all the film crews i have worked with since working on mythbusters to be delightful and highly welcoming that's a great question ryan of the angels thank you um adam kerr says people often ask about what myth did you wish you did but never could get to he'd love to know what myth we did do that we wished we had left alone oh yes there is one and it is pyramid power i'm really sorry about that one the myth in pyramid power is that if you have a blade like a uh like a do i have a blade here nope like there we go that if you have a blade like a single edge razor blade like this and it is dull you can put it underneath the pyramid and by some magic of physics that pyramid will make the blade sharper this is malarkey on toast it doesn't make any sense it's absolutely asinine it falls into the realm of hunting for ghosts uh if it's a fiction we're in we're in total fictional territory here but at the same time understand this is like i think we did this in season three um faz who was the producer on that was was producing the m7 team and looking for material looking for we had already burned through most of the darwin awards and most of the urban legends that we found in the canon of urban legend literature within the first two seasons youtube was didn't exist at that point uh twitter was definitely not there the videos that went viral were barely a thing except for those orson welles commercials and so we were struggling in the early days i think of the early seasons to look for new avenues for viable material for viable testable ideas um and like i said twitter and youtube ended up being probably half of our myth load by the end of the show because of how fertile they were for spreading this information boy do we know about that now but in the early days you know we're like maybe james bond stories have some legs for us and in this one somebody suggested pyramid power i don't remember who um and you know faz and the team did a did their job to build a methodology for it but the the the basic premise is so unattached to reality that i'm sad that we did it uh because it that falls into what james randy would have called the woo-woo stories uh meaning like how does it work you know it's it's it's magic um that's really the other one is do pretty girls fart i mean jesus christ what do we ate um i also wish we hadn't done that one there's this moment in which jamie says panties to carrie and she's like could we stop saying panties it's creeping me out which is completely right and i like i still feel retroactively bad that we were like calling them flattest proof panties and yeah yeah i wish we hadn't done that one either okay so two um let's see here oh wow billy canimations wants to know what was your favorite movie to cover that had the best best myths on mythbusters so i mentioned james bond the funny thing was in those early days we did a james bond story early on and we thought when we did it that there would be all of this exciting material from the james bond franchise because all these movies all these stunts all this really cool stuff always the gadgets would cue i mean every movie seemed to have a structure engendered to give mythbusters testable propositions to experiment on what we found instead was like pyramid power so many of the james bond myths are so unhinged and unhingedly detached from reality that they're not even wrong the idea that you could fit a laser that could cut through steel in a watch is ridiculous it's not feasible yet not even remotely close to feasible um so when we i think we ended up doing maybe three james bond specials all told and that was like pulling teeth to get that third one like it was really really difficult to find material we're like every one of us is combing through all the synopsis watching the movies trying to find stuff to test and there just wasn't as much there there as we as we thought there might be um i have to say the best franchise from which we got testable phenomena was breaking bad yeah full stop without a doubt uh and that comes from vince vince gilligan the show runner being like super dedicated to science and being scientifically accurate um i'll tell you a story about vince uh one of the la one of the very last myths actually the last myth we did with breaking bad was uh the machine gun set up from felina the episode finale um yeah there's going to be some spoilers in here about breaking bad if you haven't watched it oh my god i'm so jealous that you get to watch it for the first time at the very end of myth but sorry very end of breaking bad at the very both actually i think this is a penultimate season myth maybe even a final season myth at the very end of breaking bad um brian cranston's character sets a machine gun up on remote control in the trunk of a car so it can shoot all the bad guys and uh we set that same thing up set up the same rig built the same oscillating rig using a garage door opener that he did we found all the exact same parts got a real machine gun we practiced firing it that was really amazing and then we set it up and we fired at a wall that was just like the wall that it was firing at in breaking bad and when it was over vince gilligan was like over at the wall and he's going like oh man i can see that the that the bullets are gathering up at the ends of the run and i didn't know that because on set i was telling them exactly where to drill every hole and now i see that i got it wrong i know i'm somewhat butchering vince's wonderful virginia accent but um he really is like that bubbly and sweet all the time and i don't know how that brain comes up with such dark um abidingly dark uh narratives but in person he's like one of the nicest people alive uh and so the very first story we did with them was sulfur sulfur so not sulfur hexafluoride it was um hydrofluoric acid that's it hydrofluoric acid um which is what jesse pinkman and walter white used to dissolve the body of was it crazy eight i think it was crazy eight yeah um those were some great stories oh my god dissolving that body and acid first of all hydrofluoric acid is terrifying stuff they use it for etching glass but if you literally spilled like a a shot glass of it on your foot it would eat all the calcium in your bones and you die in a couple of days i'm not kidding this stuff is awful to work with we went to cal with these big hoods wearing this gear to actually experiment with it it didn't turn out to be very good at dissolving bodies at all what was good at dissolving bodies was this stuff that was called piranha which was sulfuric acid with a a chemical booster that i still think i'm not supposed to mention so i won't um it dissolved that body in less than a minute and a half but it would have ruined the entire house it was in it created this plume of black smoke we were like 175 feet away on another rise away from where this was happening and the wind shifted and the chemicals smoke started blowing towards us we had to hustle the whole film crew is running to get away from this cloud of noxious uh cloud that is coming towards us yeah without a doubt breaking bad our favorite franchise to test from and if we were still doing the show i tell you we would be doing stuff from better call saul that would totally be the case how are you doing for time we're doing all right a couple more excellent i'm having so much fun you guys these questions are great by the way thank you so much everybody um what was the most nate p what was the most memorable mythbusters project you worked on with grant that's that's a tricky one because by the time grant came in in season three we were mostly codified as shooting separately uh carriatorian grant filmed over at m7 and jamie and i filmed over at m5 but we definitely cross collaborated you know what it is actually gonna be it was actually that that that linear actuator that he designed the programming for that was one of those ones where when we first realized that this actuator existed we thought it solved all our problems then we realized there was no code for it so we thought nobody could solve our problems then it turned out that grant could solve our problems and did and that was like that was awesome that was one of those first times i mean remember grant was the only one of all of the hosts who actually had a degree in the sciences or engineering uh and so for him to be able to come in and solve that problem and the way grant worked was that like he never showed you the stress like i've certainly i had certainly seen grant stressed over the years but like when he worked he would kind of tell him the brief you'd talk about how to do it he'd go away and come back with the thing that worked which is frankly from an engineering standpoint highly annoying right like everything i do is three or four iterations the first one is going to be an absolute crap show and slowly gets better that guy would go away and come back and be like i hope this is working and it's like perfect um all right let's see here oh russell sperry wants to know what the most uncomfortable day on mythbusters was haha okay this is a good one to finish with it's not one you think it's not flying in the back of a f-18 hornet and vomiting repeatedly that was not uncomfortable at all in fact repeated vomiting in the back of a f-18 hornet does not diminish from the pleasure of flying in a hornet at all uh i think if anyone else out there has ridden in one i think you can attest to that no the fact that the day we were having sucked does not show up in the episode but i remember it as being the most grueling day we ever had uh and it's whirlpool of death the idea is that a whirlpool that's spinning can suck you down with it um and we actually went out on the bay oh wow right we went out onto san francisco bay with the coast guard crew the coast guard cutter that is stationed just north of the bridge down there uh uh in marin and we went out because there are whirlpools you can find in the bay as the tides letting out and we're like looking at these active active whirlpools and there's this moment in which jamie and i are staring at the whirlpools and i think if i remember correctly peter heap was shooting he was like jamie say something our camera crew was all aussie and jamie was like whirlpools and whirlpools and whirlpools which sounded like jamie was reciting poetry and i thought that was really funny but then it came time once we had witnessed some whirlpools to make our own and to make our own we used a i think we used the same uh blow molded polyethylene container we used for our quicksand story so this container was eight feet in diameter and i think 16 feet high and to use it for whirlpool of death what we did was we had a huge inlet at the bottom and this massive pump with like an 18-inch intake and we fed it to go at the bottom in a circle right like sort of fed along the bottom edge of this thing with an output on that same line oh no no we did it up right our output was up close to to the top and our outlet was in the bottom and this allowed us to put water in and pull it out and so we got we were able to build a beautiful whirlpool the problem was this was out on alameda um i think it was close to this time of year it was late fall uh and cold like 48 degrees like san francisco doesn't usually get that cold i know the rest of the world is like but like it was it was bitterly cold and it was also doing that kind of ever so slightly pissing rain that is worse than real rain because it just means everyone's slightly damp and because you're slightly dim and it's like 40 degrees everyone is bone cold and we're working with this 16 foot tall container full of water and around which we've built painters scaffolding which is not the most like engineeringly robust stuff to walk around on and it's raining so it's slippery and it's cold and we're all bone cold and we're bone tired and for for some reason i can't even remember we had to get this episode completely in the can by the end of the day which was a a real uh ball breaker of a thing to get done so we're filming right up until dark i go in the whirlpool to do the experiment i'm in a wetsuit but still i'm freezing cold i'm spinning around we had had a big pizza dinner i threw it up i'm in the water that i threw up in i'm super uncomfortable i'm nauseous i don't feel great um we do get the episode done by the end of the day but like this is also before we knew how to set up real craft services or comfort for our crew this is an early location shoot it's like season two i think so we just had no amenities we're like in these big open spaces with no doors on them and the wind's blowing through and we're trying to eat some cold sandwiches and there's like it was awful everything about that day sucked except the very last part and here's where i'll wrap up um so we go through this really rough long day in the cold we're all tired we're all beat i have just gone into the experiment i've done the experiment i'm nauseous i've thrown up i go over to my car to nap because i feel pretty compromised and i nap a little bit and then i wake up and now it's totally dark because we filmed all the way until sundown now it's totally dark outside and i can see that oh i can look out the window and i can see that jamie is moving the giant forklift to be able to move this container out of the way i further know that if he's doing that i'm probably the only other person that can really work directly with him to help him so i come out of my car my hair is all like this and i'm like i look over at jamie and this is one of those things about him and i was like he looks at me and he's like and i know that precisely what he means is can you spot the lifting of this to make sure both it's balanced that the crew is safe and that there's a reasonable exclusion zone i know that's precisely what he means by what he gestured and then i'm like and so i start you know yeah okay steve over there yeah it's not okay listen okay good yeah we're good that's what's good over here great okay heineman you can go up start to pull it up okay great we're gonna clear the path you're going to pull out and we do all of this communication with each other heinemann and i without any words it is eye contact and like gestures and because in those moments our brains ran on just like such parallel tracks from an engineering standpoint there's such a pleasurable experience to do something big and dangerous in a way that you know is safe because you're working with someone you trust that was freaking delightful so the worst day on set was finished by like one of the more delightful brain uh inter-brain communications i've had um thank you guys so much um thank you also to bloodstone usa for sponsoring this live stream the questions were fabulous thank you to tested patron members if you'd like to know how to become a testament patron members you can find it on our website tested.com or on our youtube channel it's always printed in the comments below our videos uh i'm adam savage um please stay safe stay healthy have a great day and i will see you guys next time cheers adam out you

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

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Id: cS7mlM5yy1A

Length: 85min 31sec (5131 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021