These MythBusters Stories Got Scrapped Due to Danger

silver Defender says not counting Canon cannibal Mouse and RFID was there any ever was there ever any stories that got filming scrapped or footage destroyed for reasons outside of your control outside of your control well okay the trivial answer is we would make MythBusters for the international audience which means it was like 49 minutes long because it's only 11 minutes of commercials internationally and then Discovery would cut our 48 or 49 minute episodes into 41 or 42 minute episodes I think we have now like 40 and a half minutes of television to 19 and a half minutes of commercials um Discovery would do the what you call the cut to clock and frankly Beyond My Control they butchered so many of my jokes in that cut to clock that killed me later in MythBusters tenure Beyond Productions our production company got the ability to do those edits but up until then man I watched a lot of my jokes get cut to Ribbons but that's the trivial answer um the scary answer and I won't give it much context is that uh we were looking at I'm going to be as circumspect and Broad as I can be for this we were looking at uh the explosive the purported explosive power of a commonly available material and what we found was something so energetic when we executed it that uh we agreed to not talk about what we learned yeah yeah it was common enough easy enough to implement easy enough to execute that we were like the world will not benefit from this knowledge this is the reason you never saw a silencer episode from Mythbusters is a potato a good silencer a pillow a 2 liter bottle of soda these are all really interesting questions and silencers are fascinating technologically but silenced rounds are not a benefit to humanity in my opinion and that's why we never did an episode about silencers and the same goes for this um the same goes for this uh this story about the explosive power of a common available material bomb squads bomb technicians and EOD explosive ordinance uh detection people know the thing we figured out by accident they know about that stuff and they're really grateful that we decided to never tell anyone about it is that circumspect enough for you oh interesting were there ever times when budget constraints or logistical challenges led to unexpected outcomes that made the show better yeah I'll give you a really really great one um the unexpected outcome we were doing a story called swimming and syrup the myth is that uh that you can swim in syrup just as fast as you can swim in water and the purported mechanism for this myth is that while the syrup is thicker and thus your for momentum is slower syrup is thicker and what you're pushing off of is greater and the idea is that the greater amount of push Force you get cancels out the slower forward momentum force and thus you swim just as fast in syrup as in water so we built a methodology uh we decided to test several different viscosities of syrup and then choose a sort of happy medium and then we dug some troughs that we filled with different viscosities of syrup and we were swimming in them and first we were swiming against each other and then we realized that because we're both different it made more sense for us us to choose whichever one of us had more consistent swimming times that was me and so then I was doing all the swimming in the water versus the syrup and doing the timings and all of this but that's like that gets us to about the halfway point uh in my mind as I was write as I was writing this episode but I thought if we're going to go for swimming we should find the most unassailably perfect swimmer so we found Olympic Olympian medal Olympic medal winner Nathan Adrien uh came on the show he's about 6 and 1/2 ft tall and about that wide he is a just a giant of sweetness he is a lovely lovely human being and he was really great and he was like willing to wear all of his medals on camera he was fantastic we asked him uh what are some of the oh right no no no no that this wasn't from the question we asked him we're filming we uh I get ahead of myself we dug troughs to swim in that sounds like a simple sentence but you try and get a permit to dig a trough somewhere it is not easy there's not a lot of people with property that they're willing to let you dig up there's not a lot of public property you're going to get a permission to dig up so we dug these troughs at the Alam County Sheriff's Department where they were like yeah we're about to raise this whole area go ahead and do what you will and so we did and then we're thinking about the fact that Jamie and I are going to be swimming and it's San Francisco so it's like cold so what should we do to keep warm you know what let's rent a hot tub so we rented a hot tub to stay warm between swimming and we bring Nathan Adrien in and the most surprising this was supposed to be the finale because what we're hoping to get from Nathan is uh a timing consistency that Dwarfs Mine like let's say my consistency was plus or minus a second on each of my swimming runs we expected his to be way finer than that and thus we were able to more starkly see a granular difference between the water and the syrup right but these troughs to say they are not what Nathan normally swims in is a understatement he gets in the trough and he's like pinballing off the sides cuz we we only dug it like you know an extra foot wider than shoulder width he's pinballing off the sides and his timings are ludicrously inconsistent and he gets out after the third swim and he says man that is so hard he says I go into a swimming pool and I look at a black line underwater and I follow it oh and by the way that water is like 90 degrees or like 80 degrees it's warm water they're swimming they're not jumping into cold pools to do their Olympic swimming by the way does warm water have less resistance for momentum than cold water that's an interesting question but back to the story what it turned out to be is that he was a machine built not just for swimming but he had trained himself to swim in a specific situation and location with the world class efficiency thus when we put him in this trough of 58 degree water that's like three and a half fet deep filled with syrup this is about as far from his operating conditions as you can take him and he's a really wonderful he's a wonderful sport about it and I then said well Nathan is it okay with you if we throw out the results from your swimming because I think my conclusion would be I said this to him is that being more of a generalist yet fasile with the swimming as I am I make a better test subject because I'm more adaptable to this weird situation we've got then Nathan who has adapted to such a precise and specific set of circumstances that he can't gain consistency in our experimental setup I love the fact not only that we got to go through that exercise but then that Nathan was such a good sport about throwing out his results and coming to the conclusion that we came and by the way I think we shot the finale of that episode in the hot tub so it's my favorite finale we ever filmed that's yeah that's without a doubt one of my all-time favorite favorite uh surprising outcomes leading to a an interesting conclusion because there's no circumstance under which I would imagine I am a more useful swimmer than an Olympic swimmer but in this methodology it turned out that is the case take one more uh and that wasn't that wasn't that wasn't time constraints or budget constraints or logistical challenges that that simply was our methodology was flawed and we didn't realize our methodology was flawed until the very end again the fact that that happened on our watch was amazing thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member uh details are of course below But it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get Advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live stream and we have some members only videos including the Adam Real Time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 642,052

Keywords: tested, adam savage, myth busters, tested adam savage, discovery channel (tv network), mythbusters behind the scenes, ask adam savage mythbusters, mythbusters rfid episode, mythbusters dangerous moments, mythbusters episodes, adam savage mythbusters, most dangerous mythbusters episode

Id: IZ3MSPZqDps

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023