 Mae'r rhaglenion fwyaf ac yn fwyaf ar y gallu'r rhaglenion. Mae'r rhaglenion yn ei ddweud yma, yma ychydig fel America. Mae'r rhaglenion yn ymgyrchol, mae'n rhan o'r amser. Mae'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio o'r Star Wars, o'r Gaelix i Quest, o'r Matrix. Allwn ni'n gwybod rhai ydw i'r busdwys gyd-drygu hwnnw, cywbodaeth rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r busdwys. I think probably one of the greatest sceptical shows ever on television. What do you think? You guys are in for a fantastic time as I welcome on stage Adam Savage! Thank you. Thank you. Oh no, let's go back to the slide just for a second. Richard, it's an honour for you guys to have me here, Richard. Sorry, no, it's my honour to be here with you. Richard, I have to tell you that your Twitter feed makes me feel grossly unproductive. I try and tweet a lot, but Richard, it's the master. So I wanted to relate a conversation my son had with his school principal yesterday before we left San Francisco. The principal said, where are you going Riley? I have twin 10-year-old boys. They are appropriately precocious. Riley says, we're going to London. The principal said, what are you doing in London? He said, my dad is speaking at a conference. He said, what kind of conference? He said, well, it's called TAM. I said, what is TAM's stand for? He said, I don't know. He said, well, what is the conference? My son goes, I think communists? Then the principal said, oh it gets better. Then the principal said, really, communists? And my son said, maybe socialists? Then I run into the principal and he tells me this story and I say, it's skeptics. The principal thinks that's hilarious. And then as we get in the car I tell Riley, I said Riley, the meeting we're going to is a bunch of skeptics and it's not really a school of political thought, it's just more of a mode of thinking. And if they had a political school, I guess it would be primarily libertarian. My son said, what's libertarian? And I said, I don't know. How do you describe libertarianism to it? Anarchy for rich people maybe? And he says, isn't that already what we have? So one of the most common questions I get on mythbusters when we go out and do speaking engagements is how often are we surprised by the results? And we say all the time. The narrative you see is partially constructed, partially made up as we go along and partially pulled out of our ass as we're going along. But I wanted to illustrate that by telling you a story of one of the episodes that we went through. And it's actually a really good one full of lots of twists and turns. One that I wanted to do for a long time called swimming in syrup. Let's turn on the first slide. Swimming in syrup was a headline I read because an ignobell prize was awarded to Ed Cusler who determined that one could in fact swim just as fast in syrup as in water. Now this is a physics thought experiment. Could you swim as fast in syrup as in water? Does the thicker material provide you an extra amount of push while you're swimming that offsets the decrease in your forward momentum from the thickness of the material? And so what he did was he managed to get permission from his university to fill one of their swimming pools full of 700 pounds of powdered guar gum and turn it into syrup. And then he did trials with one of their swim team members in the regular water and in the syrup and he determined that there was effectively no difference and he had proven that you could swim and go. And I thought, let's see, you have to forgive me for this. There may be slides here that are out of place like everything else. I'm making it up as I go along. So yes, here's the news story about Ed Cusler and his students. Here's the swimming pool that they are adding the guar gum, turning it into syrup and there's their member of the swim team swimming through it. The second I read this, I'm like, this is absolutely a story that we have to do. I'm dying to swim in a swimming pool full of thick syrup. And it seems pretty simple. We get a couple of backhoes, we dig a couple of ditches and we have a race. This is the way I perceived it and this is the way I pitched it to my executive producer. I'm like, this is really simple. We dig two 75 foot trenches and Jamie and I race with each other. But it's not quite that simple. First thing I did was I called Ed Cusler and I talked to him about his experiment. Now, this happens to us frequently when we're doing research for stories like this. Ed has already done a few documentaries for Discovery Channel and History Channel. A lot of people picked this story up and so he's already had film crews come and screw his story up. We had this recently. We went to the University of Florida at Gainesville. They have a hurricane machine and you'll see this episode. This episode will start airing in the next few weeks. We took them about a day to warm up to us when we were working with the University of Gainesville kids and they said specifically it's because they've had probably 25 film crews come through there in the last five years since they built this hurricane machine and we're the first ones that actually listen to them and actually repeated what they said instead of coming with a preconceived story and running the story that they had arrived to tell. So Ed Cusler was a little bit jaded. Wanted to make sure we were doing it right. Told me some of the methodologies that they thought, actually corrected some of the ways that I was thinking about the experiment and also led me to, there's Ed Cusler, led me to the understanding it's all about the viscosity. It's all about having to create the viscosity. We've got to get the guar gum. It's very expensive. We don't have a lot of chances to do this. We probably can't repeatedly fill up a swimming pool and I want to do his story but as it turns out, let's see where are we, guar gum, his syrup is a physicist's idea of syrup and this doesn't come up until the end of an hour-long conversation. When he says syrup, he's thinking something that's double the thickness of water. When I think syrup, I think something you pour on your pancakes and this is a metric we use on the show all the time. We want to be down to what the average person thinks about a substance so his syrup was twice as thick as water. Now it looks milky in that swimming pool but in fact you wouldn't be able to tell from a field test or any kind of tactile or visual test except that it's milky that it's thicker than water. For reference, his syrup was actually four times less thick than blood or milk but to a physicist making something double the viscosity of water is pertinent. Here's a viscosity sale to give you some reference when we're looking at this. Water is anywhere from one to five times as viscous as water itself. This is how confusing it gets. You'll notice some of the numbers here. Hershey's chocolate syrup, 10,000 to 25,000 times as thick as water. The variables within the viscosity chart range really massively. How thick do we make our syrup? I made some more calls. I found out that the people who deal with viscosity as a concept are called tribologists and luckily there's a society of tribologists and lubrication engineers. Another thing I had no idea about. You search tribology. There's actually also an international association. There are regional associations. So I get the president of the society of tribologists and lubrication engineers on the phone and I start to talk to him about viscosity. Now, I'm now starting to formulate how this is probably also three months out before we're starting to shoot. I'm starting to formulate how I want to do this and I'm thinking, look, I definitely want to do one with double thickness syrup. But I also would like to do this experiment with something much thicker, something anybody would pick up and go, man, that is syrupy. And I want to demonstrate the viscosity. So I'm thinking this is actually pretty straightforward. I believe a viscosity thing is like you put it in a funnel with a small size hole in the bottom and it falls out at a certain time. I've seen this somewhere before. So I started asking my researchers to look for viscosity testing equipment and I called the STLE president and I started to talk to him. And this is another thing that happens familiar to us on the show. He starts to yell at me. He starts to try and explain that viscosity is not an absolute value. It's a relationship. It's not a thing inherent in a substance in and of itself. Actually, it varies greatly depending on temperature, depending on the bodies moving through the object, depending on how fast the substance is moving. In fact, as we started to dive into this, I've been hearing these terms Newtonian and non-Newtonian. Non-Newtonian fluid example everybody knows is if you put enough corn starch in water, it acts kind of like silly putty in which you can dip your hand into it. But if you punch it, it'll bounce right back. And Jamie and I actually filled a huge tub full of corn starch and water and we were able to run across it. So that's a non-Newtonian fluid. And I've been hearing these terms bandied around and I started to ask him about, well, you know, what point does the thickness make it a non-Newtonian fluid? And he's, again, he gets really mad and he's like, everything's non-Newtonian at certain levels, even water. I mean, actually water is very specifically non-Newtonian if you hit it really hard. It resists an impact and a direct proportion of the impact. And I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly how all of this is going to help us make an episode. Because I'm still picturing that there's, at this point, going to be three tests. There's going to be a straight water test where me and Jamie both do trials in water. There'll be a double water thickness test. Now I know that this test will yield a positive result. So now I want to go to the super thick syrup. And the question is, well, where does that place within the narrative? How am I going to tell the story? Am I going to come up with a positive result and then a negative result? That's not necessarily going to work narratively. But again, I don't know that my heavy thick syrup is actually going to yield a negative result. I'm not positive about that, so I want to accommodate. There are times often on the show where we'll actually shoot something without explaining when we're shooting it, where it falls within the narrative, because at that point we don't know. It may end up being the finale if it screws up really fantastically, or if the result is particularly awesome. At this point there's nothing for me to do except mix up, get some guar gum from the researchers, and start to play with it in the shop. We've already thrown away any idea of doing viscosity testing in the shop because it's just not going to be feasible. It's way too fungible in number. It's too difficult to pinpoint. So we're just going to start playing with syrup. I mix up a whole bunch of it and start to see how it goes, and I'm getting really excited. But then Jamie comes in and says, well, I mean, it's not going to work in honey, is it? And I said, what does that have to do with any of this? He's like, well, if it doesn't work in honey, then... I can't quite replicate the way he approached it, but we got in a big fight, which happens all the time. I'm trying to think through a narrative of how this thing is going to proceed, and Jamie is thinking on this other level, and basically what it comes to is he does point out quite rightly that there must be at some point an upper threshold of the thickness of the substance that you couldn't possibly swim through it as fast as water, and honey or tar is probably a great example. So if that's true that there's an upper threshold, how do we bring that upper threshold into the narrative of telling the story about swimming and syrup? This is, again, still three or four weeks out. Brings up a more complicated question because it necessitates a more complicated story to tell. If there is a threshold, we'd like to find it. Now it would seem we need three ditches. Now we'd like one filled with water, one filled with something super goopy, and one filled with some kind of Goldilocks syrup. This is a note here. When searching for the term Goldilocks with adult filtering turned off in Google. Does everyone know Rule 34 of the Internet? If it exists, there is pornography of it. All right, now it's time to call everybody and make a wild-ass guess. Jamie starts calling, well actually I started the call. Ed Cusler refers us to a swimming specialist in Amsterdam Hoob to Saint, who is actually like the genius of the fluid mechanics of swimmers moving through water. I call him, Jamie calls Steve Jacobs, otherwise known as Jake, who's the inheritor of Mr Wizard's Mantle. He's Discovery Science liaison. He gives us information. He sends us to a chemical engineer at 3M. Jamie and I start calling our own experts, and it's like dueling banjos, arguing about what the basic factors are, but in the end we're able to hone it down that the, yeah, here are some of the questions. What the hell is a Reynolds number? Reynolds number describes this relationship between a body moving through a fluid and how that fluid moves past the body. There are sheer points that are specific to the weak hydrogen bonding. This is the kind of thing emails going back and forth between me and Jamie and the experts, all in advance of starting to mix any guar gum or starting to film at all. However, it does seem at this point that we might be able to mix something. Now it turns out that our ultimate goal is something swimming in, two guys swimming in water, two guys swimming in double thickness water. We know those two tests have always been part of the narrative. They're not leaving, but now we'd like to do one in crazy thick syrup that fails, that's past the threshold, and we'd like to do one in the middle that works, something that anyone would call syrup that we can swim just as fast as in water. Here is an area where no one's ever gone before. In fact, everyone we call who to St. Ed Cusler, they're like, yeah, who knows? Sounds great, go for it. Love to see the results. And we'd have no point of reference. Everybody starts to make guesses, but even when one of these guys says 500 times thicker than water, again that could mean anywhere from 250 to 1,000 times as thick as water depending on the temperature. We then find, it's time to make a TV show and hope for the best. One of our researchers finds out that actually gwar gum, and this is another thing that goes on on the show all the time, you can buy chemical gwar gum, which is really expensive. It's like $8 or $9 a pound. And then you can buy food grade gwar gum, which is cheaper, it's like a couple dollars a pound. And then you can buy this gwar gum, which is made to thicken up water and spray it on a hillside. And it will hold water over the grass seeds and allow them to grow. And it costs like pennies per pound. And we find a guy with a truck that mixes this stuff. It couldn't be better. And we go out here. Oh, it also turns out that if you're trying, again it seems really straightforward. Oh, let's dig two trenches. You try and find someone who's going to allow you to dig two 75 foot long trenches on their property that you're going to fill with some chemical. And then you're going to leave them there. In the end, one of our old standbys, the Alameda County Sheriff's Bombing Range, which is where we blow up most of our crap. And they also have an evoc range where we do a lot of our driving stunts. They have a dog training range. They have a shooting range. We've used it all. These guys opened their doors to us. It's like our second shop. And they had this piece of property out on the edge, which they said is totally fine. Go ahead and do that. And then we dug two 75 foot long trenches for an extra week because we could use them. That was our rent. So in this we dug two 75 foot long trenches and driving these things is every last bit as much fun as you would imagine. We made the edges really neat. We lined them in white plastic and we filled it full of guar gum. Yeah, syrup. A 75 foot trough full of syrup. Set cameras in the bottom of the water. That's our second cameraman, Saza. And it's time to go swimming. First, Jamie swims while I time him. And then I swim. Jamie described these suits as like trying to stuff the sausage into a balloon. And here for just to solidify Jamie's and my gay iconography here's us taking a bath together. Now, there's this new variable that turns out, which is though I also want to go back and point out Jamie timing me. James, Franklin, Heidemann has no sense of rhythm whatsoever. So he goes like this. Ready, set, go, bang. And it's not consistent. It's all over the map. So I finally tell him to go, okay, Jamie, I want you to go like this. Ready, set, bang. And he goes, okay. Ready, set. Exhausting. But it turns out that in addition to having no rhythm while he's a very fine specimen of manhood, he's not a very good swimmer. He could probably swim for seven days straight, but not with any real beauty or consistency. And I'm actually, even though I'm flailing around, my times are actually pretty consistent within two or three or four percent of each other, which actually falls into the range of someone who's at least swimming consistently. So then the question is, what is the first test? Do we do? So we only have two trenches. We finally realize this property is only big enough to dig two trenches. We're not going to fill it full of four different kinds of syrup because again, the guar gum costs so much. We only have one chance at each of these. We've got four, wait, four different kinds of trenches to deliver. And even up to the point that we're digging these trenches, we're going back and forth about whether we're going to do one with water and one with double thick, and then race off those against each other. And then because we've already got the double thick, we could add more guar gum to it and make it the extra thick. But then it turns out that guar gum, when you mix guar gum into water, it doesn't actually want to, after it's been saturated, it doesn't want to mix any more guar gum in it, so it's very hard to mix more guar gum to something you've already got guar gum in. This means that we have to do new trenches for each one, but the fact that we've got the truck means that it's a little bit cheaper. But again, where does it place within the narrative? What do we want to finish with? Do we want to finish with the double thick? Now it probably seems like we're hoping we finish with the Goldilocks, because that's actually the best part. And in the end, we finally decide that the first test we want to do is water versus the super thick syrup. We figure, let's do water, let's do a failure, that's our act one. That's going to be the narrative that makes you, oh okay, I guess this is busted. So we mix something that is super, super crazy, disgusting, goopy. What did I write there? We mix up this stuff that's super crazy goopy, we get inside it and it's really cool. It's just really cool to swim in syrup, I have to say. For me it's also like hand feeding an octopus flying with the blue angels and other things I've got to do on the show that very few people get a chance to do. Swimming in syrup was like, it's gross, it's weird, it's also super pleasurable to know that you're doing something that not many others will get the chance to do. And sure enough we get the failure. And then we want to bring in, it's always also been part of our narrative to bring in an Olympic swimmer. I originally wanted to bring Michael Phelps, he wasn't available, and so we got this guy, Nathan Adrian, talking about a fine specimen of manhood, this guy's like nine and a half feet tall. He's like six feet wide, I think he's like sixteen years old in this picture. And he's super, super charming, great on camera, just like a sunny day, he's amazing. And this interesting thing happens, we wanted to bring in a professional swimmer because look what we had. But the funny thing happened when he started to swim is that take a look at the Olympic swimmers picture here. They swim and they follow this black line. In fact, Nathan Adrian for the 75 feet of the trough that we gave him never brought his head above water. It was too short for him to actually take a breath. And what took me like 13 strokes to make he did in I think five. It was magnificent to watch on the high-speed camera. But what these guys do is they look down and they follow a black line. We didn't have a black line for him. And there definitely was no way to follow a black line in the syrup. So that when he swam in our syrup, he was like pinballing across the sides. And our times are actually pretty indicative in the syrup he was let's see here. Adam Olympic swimmer No, that's the wrong chart. Sorry about that. It turns out that the problem is is he is such a specific he's trained to do something so specific that because we've thrown this loophole of water he can't see through no black line in the pool that his consistency goes out the window and his timings in the syrup while he's much faster swimmer than I am, they're all over the map and he's really thrown off by the circumstances. And it turns out that we get to do this in the end we let's see. We do the regular water, we do the super thick water that definitely doesn't work. So then in the narrative we realize actually it's really fun at this point to say well look, that's what your average person would call syrup but what would a physicist call syrup that's when we go to the double thick syrup and then we get this nice little segment in where the average person sees the world and the way a physicist sees the world and then we go to, we figure the Goldilocks syrup and we've made this wild ass gas about four or five hundred times the thickness of water about sixty weight motor oil and we get Nathan to swim in it and we get me to swim in it and my times are far more consistent and we get to do this lovely thing at the end which you totally didn't expect and Nathan's the one that says it we might not have done it if he'd been really upset by his results and we would have taken that into account but Nathan was like look you can't include my results they're way too inconsistent if you want consistency go with the person me who has no preconceptions about what they're swimming in and the swimming much more their times are much more comparative to each other so we end up throwing out our final results oh I had a last slide and it's gone that's not your fault it's mine so this is just my way of telling you how we really, we had the New York Times science reporter John Schwartz came out and spent a week with us on an episode and he said when we were driving back at the end of the last day he said you know I came out here thinking that this show had to be more scripted than it seemed and I leave totally proven wrong and it's one of the reasons that we are still having fun almost seven years after we began doing the show I think we've come very close to finishing a full week of television 24-7 I think we're shooting our 168th or 169th hour of Mythbusters right now and one of the things that keeps it fun is the fact that we don't know what's going to happen is the fact that we're just as surprised as anybody else and the crew gets really thrilled by that as we go you know that swimming and surf thing was everyone was totally psyched to see how it was going to turn out now I brought a couple of videos to show you this is just some stuff that's coming up we have a new season starting to air in the US on October 7th and I don't know when it's going to start airing you get a whole different version here in the UK right it's like half an hour long with the British narrator is it still good okay one of the episodes that we did one of the episodes that we did that's going to air soon is called Dumpster Diving and it involves we were ready to do an episode called Hang on There which is could you really hang off a roof and hold on to the damsel with your other hand could you lift yourself up could you lift your buddy up all the things you see people do on the edge of buildings and railings and airplanes and stuff we were going to try a succession of them but as we were looking at the narrative I didn't feel like it had a good enough ending there wasn't what do you just keep hanging there we got to drop off at the end and so then it leads to the question what do you drop off into and I thought dumpsters jumping into dumpsters like Butch and Pulp Fiction and The Matrix they're always jumping into dumpsters and like getting out and running away how safe is it to jump into a dumpster so we went to the dump we went to the dump to look through random dumpsters and the first one they give us I jump inside of course I'm in like gum boots and a Tyvex suit but the first one we jump in is filled completely with medical waste so we're like this isn't one you want to jump into second one is like all soft stuff on the top and refrigerators and washing machines underneath but within that we're finding things like shredded paper and packing peanuts and foam and we the dumpster of a mattress factory comes into play but in all of this of course we get to do one thing which I've always wanted to do which is jump off a building I've always part of my ongoing training as a stunt man I've always wanted to learn how to safely jump off a building so we got this Hollywood stuntman and no kidding his name is Randy Lamb and Randy taught Jamie and I how to stand on the edge of a building and take the giant step outwards and the protocol is you've got to land on your back in a spread eagle fashion with as much of surface area as possible perfectly flat looking straight up and if there's anything more counter-intuitive to your body than stepping off a building lying all the way back and looking up I don't know what it is at the end of the first day of training I was actually physically ill just from the adrenaline rush from jumping off five or six times but I got two of Jamie's of my jumps let's load that this is Jamie taking a jump off a 13 foot building this is the hot beret separation action this is a bag meant to you know drop your pressure the bottom stage stays inflated the top stage deflates with you the next one is me we were wearing sweatsuits that said stunt trainee on them it really upset Jamie to wear a costume I should point out here my form is perfect so of course when it was time to do the real jumps into the dumpster I thought of course now we've worn the stunt trainee outfits what's going to look to be the next thing that we wear of course Jamie's not going to wear something special but I can so I think what's going to look good on it should look good if I've got like a cape or something so I get a I put together a neo costume from the matrix yeah and like the big boots with the buckles on them and the climbing harness and the hains beefy tee and the long coat and I come out of the car and my crew I mean it's like they're really like oh dude really and so I'm a little embarrassed about it it's true but at the same time I'm also kind of thrilled I get to jump off a building dressed as neo I can push past this embarrassment maybe a child will see me do this and he'll be inspired he can go to dragon con and meet his people like I did so speaking of costume we have one with a second clip we also did an episode called shooting the gun out of the hand how is it really possible to shoot a gun out of someone's hand in different positions that you might find someone with a gun in their hand and of course the neo coat came to a second use in this where we got to do our own little sergio leon do we have audio for this let's run it that's some of the fun we've been having now how are we on time can I take some questions alright I'm going to take questions until someone tells me to stop considering that the viscosity test was something that you took a scientific study and then went further and asked new questions and tested those have you ever considered actually taking that and putting it in a peer-reviewed journal precious few of our have we ever considered putting that in a peer-reviewed journal precious few of the tests that we've run are remotely rigorous enough to put in a peer-reviewed journal most part it's kind of like this is interesting somebody else should take a real look at it a couple of times we have done bullets fired up where we tested if you fire a gun straight into the air will the bullet come down and hit you that is the one truly publishable episode that we've done where all of our data is really lined up backed up by multiple different experiments that all show the exact same thing across multiple lines across multiple metrics I've never gotten around to writing it up but it's substantively doubled the amount of information that existed before that of bullets fired up my favorite part of that is the US government wanted to know if you could fire bullets up in the air while you're approaching a town and just randomly kill a whole bunch of people in that town as you're heading towards it so in the 20s they set up a bunch of experiments where they went out to this lake they figured the best way to find a bullet you fired up in the air is to be on a lake you could hear it and they spent several days firing 500 rounds into the air this is all chronicled in a classic ballistics textbook called Hatcher's Notebook and out of 500 rounds they heard two found one lodged in the roof of their structure and found one so it's like a terrible result and they also determined that even if you fired hundreds of thousands of rounds in the air you might kill like three people it wasn't cost effective when we went out to the desert with our bulletproof panels which we set up in a circular fashion with a person under each one to use as a triangulated hearing device to the super quiet lake bed and we fired from the center of that circle 11 rounds from a 9mm handgun the bullet went I think about 1400 feet into the air before coming back down about a minute later we fired 11 rounds into the air and we found six of them and all six demonstrated the exact same pattern into the clay of the lake bed which is a bullet shaped hole showing that the bullet fell stably on its side they went the same amount down as the bullets we dropped from their terminal velocity 450 feet from a balloon and they showed all the stuff that we demonstrated in the shop in terms of stable falling so that's the one but for the most part we're just hoping it's food for thought by the fact that Parlament on the Moon pointed out it does have any effect on how it looks but it actually looks not as entertaining as I think there's a change to that I think The point at which long polymer chains, there's Einsteinian motion of something dissolved in a liquid. The Einsteinian motion describes that the particles act like billiard balls effectively. They're moving out of the way like billiard balls, but there's a point at which they're not really like billiard balls. They're actually long polymer chains, they're more like big, long strings of billiard balls. And there's a point at which if you move through them fast enough, they start to slip out of your way. called the shear point and that's the point where all sorts of new things kind of and all of this is relatively unstudied so we write these long well again this is the sometimes the dichotomy between me and Jamie. Jamie's like well I want to know exactly what happens with the weak hydrogen bonding of the molecules inside the water and I'm like I want to know how to finish this episode so a lot of that stuff is still really really unknown in terms of what it what it means and how it and how it works under those circumstances in general it's pretty much agree that a swimmer moves way too slowly for a lot of those those more advanced effects to take effect on the swimmer until the liquid gets really thick yes I hear that you have a talent with cards I'm sorry I have to tell you I'm very hard of hearing so you have to yell I hear that you have a talent with throwing cards did you ever as a child use that to threaten bullies did you ever use that to threaten bullies with throwing cards throwing cards threatening bullies no throwing cards is not a way to threaten bullies it's a way to draw them to you demonstrating any enthusiasm or skill at anything is just a guaranteed way to bring bullies running no it's one must be quiet one must juggle at home around all their Legos in the back there are you going to do an episode on evolution have you got any further than that the episode on evolution yeah it's really tough I we I wanted I said this in a skeptical podcast a couple years ago that I wanted to do natural selection and then I got all this mail it's like the biggest thing on my wikipedia page I got all this mail from people saying well you know that's that's not going to convince it's like yeah it's a tough one I would love to do something like it on the show we have looked into lots of different ways of demonstrating of demonstrating an evolutionary process on the show and it's very it's devilishly difficult to do within the time constraints that we have in a really visual and exciting way but hope springs eternal though it may still happen anybody don't want to ignore this okay there you never told us what happened with the gold goldilocks syrup and I don't have the goldilocks syrup yes it turns out and this happens a remarkable amount of the time that we were right that the wild ass guesses we made were all correct that the thick syrup we mixed was way too thick to swim into any time close to amount of water and the goldilocks syrup which any average Joe would pick up and go hey that syrup was actually thin enough that we were able to swim just as fast in the goldilocks syrup as we were in water thus taking the the concept of this whole new level and who to say and Ed cost were both really thrilled by that after doing moon hoaxes did you get a lot of hate mail from no I have not got any hate mail from the moon hoaxes I guess the main crackpot believes that we've actually proved his point because some of the demonstrations we did were so effective he was like well look if these guys could make a moon landing look convincing in this scale then clearly NASA could have done it the way so he used our episode to prove his own points what are you going to do go over to his house and smack him yeah hi there um many in this room will know that the bbc relaunched their prime time science program and on the very first x episode they did an air cannon where they blew over a loosely made building yeah that's bangos the theory now my question is this do you look at something like that because I saw them I thought man that'd be good on myth busters do you look at that thing how can I make a myth so I can do that yeah no okay so I I've seen bangos the theory I saw that episode and I I must admit I didn't think much of it um it disappointed me the vortex cannon is great the vortex we are going to use a vortex cannon on the show but as far as their methodology of the uh so for those of you who didn't see it they set up a straw house a wood house and a brick house and they attempted to blow them down like the bad wolf and their straw house was actually marginally a straw house it was it wasn't very large and they were able to blow it down with this thing called a vortex cannon which is basically a big cone in the back of which you light oxygen and acetylene and it sets out this this shockwave and it blew the house down and they set up one out of wood it was slightly different structure than the straw which starts to throw it out of any kind of testable analysis to me and then for their brick house they piled up some bricks in a wall about this big and without any mortar in them they just stacked they stacked some blocks is what they did and i saw that and i thought it's such a good idea using a vortex cannon why did they have to screw it by not doing anything that was remotely rigorous and this is i don't know why that happens i you know i know that discovery has tried several times to replicate what happens on mythbusters and i think that where everyone is messing it up is everyone thinks that there are everyone thinks that you could set up the parameters and it's interesting to watch someone play out the parameters but it's not what's interesting is to watch people who are doing what they're doing be curious about what they're doing it's not about so i mean i watched other shows i'm not going to name them by names because they're made by my employers but i watched these other shows and i can tell that a producer wrote out an outline and the people hosting the show are reading what the outline said as they're going and that's inherently boring as shit to watch jamie and i are at the at the top of mythbusters is me and jamie our director alice dallow and our producer dan tapster and the four of us are constantly nutting this out as we go on the in the field on the fly and we are really really tinkering like i showed here with with it as we go to get something interesting we would have never ever done anything those three buildings should be the same structure they should be the same weight they should have the same profile we'll talk about all these different factors involved in bringing wind towards them we'll try different kinds of wind different shockwaves that's the kind of thing that we would bring to it because we're actually interested in the results we're less interested in making television than we are and actually tinkering with this stuff and i think that's what i think when i saw bangos the theory actually on the flip side i'll say you guys have top gear which is one of it's another great skeptical show i mean i love it that they tried to do it in the US and i was like they're never going to do it in the US they have advertisers no one can say this car is a piece of shit in the US or just not allowed okay in the back there you tended to avoid issues that are sort of active between skeptics and believers and the exception i've seen is the moon land explicit why did you make that exception and is that a theme for the future wait the why don't i make the exception between what in midfaster's you tend to avoid issues that are contentious between skeptics and believers oh no not necessarily um i mean we're just the problem is with evolution is can you make it can you can you do it we can you do it within the timeline we've got it's not that i'm worried about pissing people off um not at all and what you really want to do is be able to demonstrate i mean for us the metric really comes down to telling a story that that starts from two guys in their garage on a sunday with some extra time and screwing around trying to figure out how something works and i mean all the almost all of our episodes follow from from that from that idea so you start with the simplest and go to the most complex and uh if someone's gonna i mean when you talk you talk about people getting upset you should have seen what happened when we did you should have seen what happened when we did airplane on a conveyor belt you know this is this is this classic thought experiment if an airplane is trying to take off on a runway the runway is a conveyor belt matching the airplane's speed in reverse can the airplane take off now this question causes hundreds of millions of pages of vitriol to occur on the internets i mean just people calling each other the worst things in the world and screaming and yelling and it's all because the question itself has a lie built into it it leads you to believe that the plane's not moving but that's a fallacy it doesn't say the question doesn't say none of the phrases of the question say the plane doesn't move they merely say the conveyor belt matches the plane speed in reverse and to just briefly go through it the fact is the plane doesn't use its wheels to push along the ground it uses a propeller the only thing the wheels are for is to keep the propeller from hitting the ground so it's pushing through the air not across the ground thus no matter how fast the conveyor belt goes it will never stop the plane from moving forward and thus the plane will take off and when we did it the response well first of all discovery said it was going to air and then it didn't discovery said oh it's going to air on Wednesday night and then that Wednesday night it was preempted because I don't know the Olympics were kicking our ass in the ratings or something and I mean the amount of vitriol like oh it's a conspiracy they've covered it up Jamie's shop machine Jamie's shop phone was like the message machine was filled the next morning when people just cursing into it and when it finally aired the general response from people who didn't think the plane could take off was they got it wrong why because they didn't come to the result I thought they would so we realized we're not going to necessarily convert convert the convert the convert our audience yeah sorry what's the most surprising result you've ever had on midboss the most surprising result we've ever had um I one of the most surprising is one we did called killer cable snap um which was uh there's a myth that uh there's a story of people getting whipped in half by a cable snapping on a boat and there's not a fisherman in the world who doesn't believe this is totally possible you get a boat and a storm steel cable gets stretched to its breaking point it breaks it snaps it'll slice you right in half and we had all this anecdotal evidence that it has happened aircraft carrier stories and fishermen stories and so we got a bunch of pigs we hung them we had this beautiful methodology we'd figured out how to make cables whip where we wanted them to by stretching them around a ballard and we were stretching them with hydraulics to 85 90 of their breaking strength and we were cutting them with a hydraulic cutter and they were just denting the pigs they weren't even breaking the skin and we were using many different types of cables and it was about lunchtime that we had dented three pigs with three different sizes of cable and I'm like thinking through this and I'm thinking I know our methodology is right I know that we're doing this right I know we can't make these cables go any taught more taught could it be that the research is wrong could it be that our assumptions based on the research were wrong and so I called up our head researcher Linda Wolkiewicz and said do we have any first person accounts of this I mean let's exclude aircraft carriers because the cables on aircraft carriers are like the size of buildings they're like five inches thick and they go past you they'll cut you in half but that's because so will a steel girder traveling that fast that's not a whipping cable so let's eliminate aircraft carriers and the military from it let's go to fishing boats you can easily get cut in half by getting caught when a cable gets stretched across something that's not the same thing do we have any first person accounts and she went back and called me back in half an hour later and said absolutely not we have lots of second-hand accounts of doctors treating people where it said they were cut by a cable but we don't have any first person accounts and that was one where we totally believed starting that day out that we would be we're very excited we're going to slice some pigs in half and in the middle of the day we had we we went back on our we went back to our our judgment and said this is probably you know everyone could be wrong about this and in the end we were right it was to me that was absolutely lovely yes hi um i think a lot of people will be making variations on this for like the last day and a half so i can only apologize for that but did you ever consider doing a syrup thing like homeopathically it turns out when we put one molecule of guar gum in that you can't swim at all yes on the evolution thing it makes sense if you haven't found a way to you know tell an interesting story visually and everything but i was wondering have you ever you know stopped something it's a censored yourself because you just can't bust that myth i mean like i might suggest for a future show that the miracles of jesus or something perhaps the miracles of g i mean the problem is there okay the miracles of jesus you're in what randy calls the woo territory and then you're trying to prove a negative which is just a losing game so we're never going to go look for the source of crop circles or their Loch Ness months or sask watch i'm sorry that we ever did pyramid power i mean a culpa i wasn't there that day um and no we haven't censored ourselves because we couldn't bust something uh we we have censored ourselves because we at one point we drifted into something close to product testing and while we love to go in that zone our employer doesn't want us to go into that zone um that doesn't mean we're not going to eventually do high fidelity miss someday i swear we will compare speaker cable to a coat hanger um but yeah um but only only once or twice only once or twice is that happened where it was just like we were going we're we got halfway through an episode of teeth whitening and discovery found out and they were like you can't i'm sorry you can't it's the same reason look i mean i hate to admit it but we're never going to do an episode on bottled water versus tap water it's just like i i mentioned that and everyone laughs like i'm trying to tell a joke um the the the stuff that discovery tends to not want to do are the stuff they think are boring um it's not like there's we've told some hugely tasteless stories in a very tasteful manner and they feel pretty confident with our ability to tackle difficult material and the more spectacular it is the better even if the deaths are really gory and stuff but uh they they tend to think that the high fidelity myths are actually just too boring to put on television um they tend to think that uh well we have one called the cereal gourmet which is about the safety of cooking roadkill uh can you poach eggs on your catalytic converter and cook cook fish in the dishwasher and stuff like that of course we had us the finale for that tenderizing meat with dynamite and we ended up making that a whole segment and then of its own yes what is the one thing you've always wanted to do but haven't had a chance yet the one thing i've always wanted to do that haven't had a chance yet well there's there's there's a list and it's ongoing i i i've been i've been doing a a talk lately called a hundred wishes where it's just a hundred things that i've always wanted and they're everything from uh there's everything from i'd like to hang glide alone and not like strap to some dude but like alone um to i want Chewbacca as my co-pilot to i would really like to bitch slap Dick Cheney in the face we wanted we wanted to do the Dick Cheney shooting on the show and again is like one of those things where the discovery guys are like that is funny you know it's not a joke we want to do the Dick Cheney shooting on the show and they're like no you're not going to do that Maltese Falcon collection coming off my Maltese Falcon collection well um since i gave the original talk on the Maltese Falcon and i talked about wanting to wrap my final bronze Maltese Falcon in a Chinese newspaper i've noticed that the primary maker of piece of shit Maltese Falcons out there haunted studios is actually now wrapping their Maltese Falcon in a Chinese newspaper although theirs is a modern Chinese newspaper mines a copy from a 1940s San Francisco newspaper acura to the date that the film came out um i got to spend some time earlier this year with one of the real Maltese Falcons um i took about 300 photos in 20 minutes i didn't have a ruler with me i didn't know the meeting was going to happen i pulled out a dollar bill and put it next to it for size reference it's convinced me to start again from scratch um i do have an open invitation to actually scan that one the next time i'm in the city where it lives and i've also befriended uh John Causton uh and Jay Johnston uh John Causton is the owner of John's restaurant in San Francisco where part of the Maltese Falcon movie takes place and in fact they had a copy of it given to them by Alicia Cook who's one of the actors in the movie and their copy like many other Maltese Falcons so far was stolen out of the restaurant in January of 2007 i believe that it's actually i don't have it i believe it's a conspiracy um however they have a copy of it that they've also agreed to let me laser scan so we're it's ongoing it's an ongoing process a new original is going to be made i've got a bronze one sitting in my house it's too short and it makes me sad every time uh behind there Adam Adam Adam one more question one more question okay no is our obvious suitable thing for a particular thing that interests me is the shoveling all the shit from me say that again no is our and making no is our would that be a suitable thing for a no is dark no is dark thank you so much again