 One of the hardest things that we have as academics is to inspire students. Obviously you guys have no trouble inspiring people. What's the key to getting people excited about science? We are not trying. Yeah, we just do what we find interesting and fun, and discovery in our production has found that if we're having a good time, it makes for good television. And they really have been great about getting out of our way. You know, we got hired into this show. We didn't conceive of it. We got hired in as talent, and then we sort of grew up and into and around the show, and it grew into being ours. We're now executive producers. But throughout all of that, we've never been thinking about inspiring kids or making science palatable. We've really concentrated on solving our own curiosity and telling a good and reasonable narrative story about that. And that's it. And we get emails every week from like PhD grads that say they got into their field because of us. That's how long we've been on the air. And we still try not to think of the children when we're making the show because as Jamie says, yeah, we're just trying to write a story about our own curiosity. Yeah, well, the beauty of that is that it puts out a message that science isn't just for guys in lab coats. It's for anybody that simply wants to do a good job of answering a question. And so that's all we do. We simply wanted to do a good job when we got hired to do this show. And so we're dealing with urban legends. We got to figure out some solution to some problem or answer a question. So we started to get real methodical about it. Well, that's science. Well, and I think that one of the things that we do do that makes the show connect with all different ages is that we really always try and start from the idea of what would two guys on a Sunday do in their garage to figure this out. The first test is the stupidest, not the stupidest, but the simplest. Well, and we often have to unfancy our ideas. We start off going, well, OK, so first we're going to get some tubing and we'll run some valves. No, no, no, let's do it with razor blades and chewing gum. We can set something up and just try it. And always trying to start from the simplest and then moving to the complex so that there really is a progression. One of the things that we've learned is that science programming up until Mythbusters is what we would call science demonstration programming. Say, here's the concept of terminal velocity. Here I'm going to show something that demonstrates it. We don't have any of that background. So we're like, all right, well, what's the terminal velocity of a penny? I don't know. Instead of doing it with math, let's actually conduct an experiment that figures it out. And that experimentation is the audience is right with us. They don't know what's going to happen in neither do we. And the fact is that there's no producer that writes down the story of our episodes before we start to film. We have an outline and we almost never follow it. And when we come to a result we didn't expect, we change directions. So why do you think people find science so intimidating? There's a place in which culturally we've placed science in this elite category of like, oh, well, that's for people who are smart. And it's not. It's for anybody. And when we started doing this show, we thought we came to the table with some skills because we'd both worked for decades in the special effects industry. And about three or four years ago we were on a plane and we were just kind of reassessing what we've learned over the previous eight or nine years. And we're like, wow, it's totally incredible. Just from our personal standpoint. And all we've been doing is arguing over critical thinking and an ethical methodology that is robust and rigorous and makes sense to both of us. And those sort of arguments while, you know, in the moment they might not be entertaining to be having, the fact is they breed such a refined result that we totally understand that that's part of the process. You know, I was talking to a friend the other day who was an editor. He's a filmmaker. And a wonderful filmmaker. And he, somebody asked him if he was good at math and he says, I'm great at math. I'm just not so good at numbers. And he had a beautiful point because as an editor, of course, editing is all about this careful math and alchemy of timing and rhythm and beats and telling a story. It's not about doing equations or an algorithm, but it's really about being sensitive to a rhythm. And that's math. And he's right. He is great at math even though he can't add or balance his checkbook. And if more people understood that, more people understood that science is merely thinking critically. So you could answer a question that someone presents to you just by sitting down and running some numbers or thinking through the whole problem rather than thinking, well, that's something for smart people to figure out. Do you think people can, I mean, obviously you guys have the equipment and at the time, it's your jobs to do this sort of thing. Can everyday people do myth-busting? The simple translation of what you just asked is, can everyday people answer questions? Yes, can they think critically? Can they think critically through a problem? Yeah, and yes, absolutely. They can do that and they can do it in more or less degrees of diligence and care. And that's dependent on the nature of what the question they're asking is and how important it is, how methodical they want to be. That's what I was saying, is that this was something that we came into to realize by accident was that we don't start doing one of these experiments saying, let's go do some science. We just want to do a good job. So any average person out there that wants to do a good job of understanding their world is in effect doing some form of science. They're just being methodical and careful about how they're moving through the process of answering that question. I'll give a great example of this. I had someone email me a few years ago and said, hey, I heard that the air around the Eiffel Tower weighs more. If you bound the Eiffel Tower in a box, the air in that box would weigh more than the actual Eiffel Tower. And I was like, that sounds like total BS. But it also sounds like math that I can do. So I figured out what the square of the base of the Eiffel Tower was. And then I figured out what the height was, length times width times height. I figured out how much air on the average weighs, low, not the case. But wait, I was measuring the square of the Eiffel Tower. What if I drew a cylinder with the square bound within a circle? At that point the air did weigh more and I was accounting for the thinner air at the top, averaging across. It was five minutes of sitting with the calculator on my computer just adding some numbers and putting them into a form and thinking about it. And I answered a question. And now, I mean, I found myself thrilled by the process. It's not that complicated to think critically through a problem and think, am I not thinking about this clear enough? Like, oh, I'm doing a square. Let's circle it and let's see what happens there. You know, that's the kind of stuff we do on the show every day. I personally find that the smartest people I meet that we get to meet and spend time with are always willing to say they don't know something. That's one. Two is they seem to be generally serially fascinated by many things. And that is something that comes from, I think, I believe, from critical thinking. That you may have your field of expertise, but if you're genuinely interested in it and you're interested in thinking critically about it to understand what its shortcomings are and maybe you can overcome them, then actually, all of a sudden, all these other fields become much more interesting because you can apply your own analysis to them. You can apply your analysis to the news that's happening. You can apply your analysis to a report about a scientific paper and say, actually, I don't think that there... It doesn't sound right to me. Let me look into their... I mean, we do that. And we know people that do that. And I find, it's like whenever we go to NASA, the scientists we've ever worked with at NASA has incredible hobbies that they do on the weekends. Either they race cars or they fly RC planes or they're interested in fluid dynamics. Whatever it is, they give their all to it in their off time. These are people who just need to feed their brains. And the fact is that it's exponential. The more you do it, the more you want to do it.