nick duckworth says who started the well there's your problem lying which seems to be said in more
than one episode and why did the team like to say it uh that was my joke i just think that's
a funny thing to say you know you work with a bunch of people everyone has a thing they
accrete to i remember one of tory belachi's favorite jokes is that's the second biggest
inner tube i've ever seen no matter what you were showing him no matter how large it was he would
say that's the second biggest i love that joke that's a great joke um and yeah um well there's
your problem is absolutely something i used to say at work in theater and in the film industry
and it stuck with me somebody cut it into an episode it became funny i'm watching i'm watching
that episode with the crew and when that line comes across we all laughed uh i get a laugh i'm
gonna say the same thing again yeah i'm gonna i want that laugh again so yeah that was my joke um
micah bruce you guys were always great about safety and we loved that you seem to have
aired the lapses if you can even call them that the cannonball that made it into a neighborhood
you losing an eyebrow and a jawbreaker exploding and causing burns was there ever a time you guys
guessed wrong and it caused a near miss yeah um i'm really grateful to say that almost all we
have are near misses um there were you know we had some broken bones and some lacerations but
nobody was seriously injured over the course of making the show um from one of our experimental
methodologies or from one of our locations um every time we had a near miss we did not
shy away from it we talked about it extensively deeply and thoroughly we wheeled in all of the
stakeholders we would talk to the insurance so for instance after the cannonball um the family whose
house was most damaged by the cannonball and went up through their house passing by a mother
and their sleeping baby i mean within six or eight feet of this it's literally the worst thing i can
possibly imagine and that family we met with them and they were pissed as everybody would have been
and to their incredible grace and credit they were like look we figure you'll fix the house
we just want to make sure that this never happens again and we said we're fundamentally shifting our
entire safety procedure to make sure that this doesn't happen again and we did and we followed
that stricture and we even increased its its rigidity um for the rest of our tenure on the show
um the very first time we had a near miss was the very first time we blew anything up okay
the second time the first time we blew anything up i think was the um the toilet gasoline toilet
episode so the myth is that a guy is like uh he sneaks into the bathroom to smoke a cigarette hey
kids back in the 70s and the 80s we used to think that if you smoked a cigarette indoors and no
one saw you that when they came in the room later they somehow couldn't tell we were freaking idiots
about it everyone smoked everywhere and it smelled awful yeah but so in this myth this guy goes into
his bathroom to enjoy his secret smoking what he doesn't know is that his wife has cleaned out the
toilet with a bunch of gasoline because she didn't have any other solvent and he puts the cigarette
out in the gasoline and boom it blows them off the toilet which it doesn't which it didn't do
um cigarettes are terrible a lit cigarette's a terrible way to ignite gasoline
not that you should feel comfortable with a licked cigarette around gasoline
but the second time we blew anything up was uh tree cannon this is a myth about a
uh a eastern european village that had no munitions but they had to fight an enemy
so they built a cannon out of a tree log they drilled and board down its center they made a
marble cannon ball and they loaded it full of gunpowder and we did the same we took a
tree we wrapped some bands around it to hold it together jamie made an incredibly beautiful
spherical cannonball we put it down that thing we launched it we launched it down the alameda runway
towards the bay and we never found the cannonball um i imagine that it landed in san francisco bay
um but that's not how you finish an episode you have to finish the episode with some
like oh so sorry the end of the myth was that it didn't work for the village that it blew up
uh and killed all the killed a bunch of the villagers so that the pressure created by the
by the gunpowder behind the cannonball actually made the tree fail so we needed to see that as
an example um we had hired a pyrotechnician uh that is who you hire in the movies when you want
something to look like it's blowing up and they do things like they set small chargers and they
put gallons of gasoline in correct places and they get these beautiful fireballs that don't burn too
hot and that are easy to put out it's a wonderful magic alchemy to watch a good pyrotechnician at
work uh and jamie and i had both had lots of experience working with different pyros over
the years and it's a very specialized job it's very hard to get certified to be a pyrotechnician
it takes years and lots of apprenticeships with multiple engineers uh pyroengineers um and
we said to him we want to blow this tree up down he's like all right
and we said how how much black powder should we put in there and he's like i don't know
because he doesn't make things blow up he makes things look like they're blowing up
he sets a small charge which will vaporize gasoline then a second charge which ignites it
and that gets the fireball that is like you know the white house blowing up for for independence
day he doesn't actually blow things up so when he said he didn't know we said well how much powder
could we put in here and he said i am licensed to handle five pounds of black powder at a time and
we're like great five pounds it is put it in there we poured five pounds of black powder in there
and then we had this aluminum billet that was just ever so slightly larger and we hammered
that aluminum billet with a rubber mallet big dead blow mallet we hammered that aluminum billet into
the end of this thing and then we said to the pyro where are you going to stand and said i'm going to
be 250 feet that way and we're like great we're going to be 250 feet we're going to be 350 feet
that way and we separate it out laterally from the cannon and we blew it up and it was sitting on a
bunch of these like eight by eight inch or ten by ten inch railroad ties
the log itself weighed like 150 pounds and every piece that it was sitting on weighed
like 100 pounds and every piece every single piece of that cannon flew over all of our heads
nobody was hurt i mean at one point one of my producers saw something coming and there's a
shot of him like just gently getting out of the way and landing terrifying
absolutely terrifying this is literally season one this is 2003. um absolutely terrifying
this the next time we had to blow something up it was with the help of the fbi
that's how that incident changed our procedures we went to the people who blow stuff up not to people
who make stuff look like it's blowing up the fbi introduced us to jd nelson
and the incredible crew at the alameda county sheriff's department out there in
dublin pleasanton where said cannonball left from um and we enjoyed 13
14 actually with savage builds 15 solid years of wonderful collaboration with the bomb techs and
we've worked with bomb techs all over the world it's a stunning group of people to work for um
oh let's see here um so somebody wants to know about artifacts from the show and i i'm wanting to
uh i'm wanting to answer this let's see um was there a myth safety line questions uh
okay so i'll get a live question about what artifact that jamie would have taken as a souvenir
jamie and i both took lots of souvenirs from the show many of the key objects from the narrative
of the show uh that we really enjoyed but uh for me it was often stuff that i built and
i'll show you one in a minute um for jamie it was more frequently the artifacts of an
explosion and when we were doing 20 000 foot fall we built this french train station roof
that was about like six by twelve feet uh and it had all this lattice work of of uh three-eighths
inch steel rod and half-inch angle iron and we blew it up with hundreds of pounds of explosives
and a piece of the of the 3 8 inch steel rod so a piece of 3 8 inch steel rod
yeah pencil is about 3 8 of an inch that it's about this thick so you'd be hard-pressed to bend
it it flew off of this of this uh skylight that we built and it flew away at such an incredibly fast
speed that it hit a tree branch and then each of its ends wrapped around the tree branch once full
around so that the resulting object was a piece of steel that made a pigtail around a tree branch
that is freaking mind-blowing and this was very much a jaime moment like at the end of
any explosion jamie would be like you know and stand up and kind of walk in concentric circles
because he really wanted to find those objects i saved objects that i found a particular affinity
for and we were doing an episode about gun myths gunslinger myths and we wanted to know what it
felt like to get a gun shot out of your hand and we looked at the energy created by a bullet
heading the steel of a pistol and we were able to calculate that it was not that far off from
a baseball pat baseball bat hitting that pistol so i made a pistol able to be hit with a baseball bat
and there it is this might be my single favorite object i made
over the course of the show i love this thing this is a solid piece of half-inch aluminum
uh cut to fit the uh the the handles of i believe a cult piece maker if i remember correctly um and
then it's completely monolithic and then i painted this this target on here and remember me saying in
regards to this like some of my favorite artists were people like klaus holdenberg and jasper
johnson this absolutely feels to me like a jasper john sculpture i love this thing this thing will
hang on a wall with me for the rest of my natural life i'm proud of it i think it's beautiful i
think it's funny i actually held it while jamie hit it with a baseball bat which hurt like hell
so i have actually a little trauma associated with it it's a perfect object in every regard
has a story it has a history i have a history with it yeah i love these kind of objects
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