greetings earthlings adam savage here in my cave and i am answering some
mythbuster questions from tested patrons and today's question uh comes from carl buehler
carl says i like this question carl says as a dive master i've felt a feeling of what it's like to be
near the point of drowning and it's absolutely terrifying you've talked about how scary the
upside down underwater car was and we know about jamie's fear of heights but was there anything
else that you did that may not necessarily seem dangerous or scary but was almost everything um
there's a lot there's a lot in this question there's a lot in this
subject um an approaching things from a safety minded
standpoint
really changed so much about the ways in which jamie and i thought through then
carry torrey and grant uh thought through the execution of these methodologies um
but your question was was there stuff that was scary that didn't seem scary or dangerous but was
throughout the course of mythbusters we had a few close calls
we've talked about many of them some of them we don't some of them we don't talk about nobody's
ever nobody ever came close to dying uh but we had some close calls uh we had we we've
had parts of explosions go over our heads that was way back in the beginning days but
those close calls all served to do a couple of things one every single time we had one we
rejiggered every safety procedure until we felt confident in our safety margin this is the thing
you're never you're never gonna be able to make something safe
you can increase the margin of safety and as long as you're holding to that and you don't
suffer the illusion that you have made something safe then you stay in that
mental state that allows you to deal with the contingencies because they're going to happen
um the one thing that i left mythbusters with more respect for than i started
the one thing that i found at the end of the run scarier than any other thing flammable
gases yeah flammable gases are
they are so scary they can shift the margin of safety instantaneously they just
i was watching a movie the other day in which a character wanted to set something on fire so they
took a thing of gasoline and they poured it on it while they were given a speech and then they
talked about it and then they talked about it and they talked about it and then they took a
lighter and they went and they let this thing on fire
that seemed like a reasonable scene to the screenwriter and so they hired a pyrotechnician
to do it and i hope the pirate technician told them what the reality was because the reality
with gasoline is if you have a big pile of wood and kindling and you pour gasoline all over it
and then you wait before setting it on fire what's gonna happen is
that gasoline shifts from a liquid to a gas it starts it starts uh sublimating quickly
and that gasoline gas is the most flammable gas in the it's literally flammable gas it is
um one of the worst injuries i got on mythbusters was lighting a fire
and it wasn't a bad injury this third degree burn on the back of my hand that was just about half
an inch second degree burn on the back of my hand it was about an inch but what the way it happened
was i poured gasoline inside a car i put on a a proximity suit an illuminized fire suit
and i went to light it but i wasn't wearing a glove with the hand that i was lighting it
with and the fireball came out enveloped me and the only part of me that wasn't
covered was this hand because i had taken off the glove to light the lighter
i felt so stupid watching i felt i was so mad at myself watching the footage of that explosion
but here's the other thing about flammable gases
many of them like propane so so let me just state you don't ever want to use gasoline to accelerate
your bonfire it it won't it's not that it's gonna i didn't finish this when you light it and wait
and talk and bubble and then go to light it what's gonna happen is the second you light that lighter
all of those gasoline fumes that have been like occurring all that gas that is sublimated out of
its liquid state into a gas estate goes boom and you can find endless youtube videos of
this happening it's terrifying how fast it can move and the other aspect of flammable gases is
many of them that we use like propane are heavier than air which means that when you have a leak
it settles on the ground and if it's in your house then the ground just becomes this literal like
pool of gas yeah yeah no you are you getting as terrified as i am just describing that
this is horrifying this is why gas explosions tended level buildings um so it's not like
it's not like there was something some hidden danger out there that we uncovered on the
show uh which i think is sort of what your question was implying carl but it's more like
we learned that things could go sour at any moment for okay i'm going to walk you through our safety
procedure one of our safety procedures so we would have a story meeting we would talk about a myth
like okay we're going to take homer and we're going to build a homer simpson we're going to
fill him with water until he weighs as much as a real-life homer simpson would weigh we're going to
suspend him from a crane and we're going to make a five thousand pound wrecking ball in a house and
we're gonna smack them into each other okay that's the narrative we're gonna find out if homer could
have protected his home from the wrecking ball this is a story we did uh once we outline it on
the whiteboard it's how i think in terms of plot i have to write it in front of me in longhand once
we have the outline with the set of experiments wrecking ball build jamie does that homer build i
do that uh how it looks where these things go what location we're going to do it at the build etc
but then our insurance company wants to know how we're going to keep everybody safe so they have
questions like uh when you do the experiment what is the exclusion zone how far is everyone going to
be from it how far how close do people need to be and what are the precautions that we have for them
um and we walk through all of those parameters for every single story for every single location
shoot um and on the insurance form there was this wonderful guy that was like well how dangerous is
this shoot so there's always this like um you know this chart that was like what you're gonna do and
how dangerous it is and what's the likelihood that someone could die and we were always in the black
zone of like someone could die if something went wrong we were always in that black zone
so you've actually asked was there anything else you did that may not seem dangerous
but was and i mean my answer is everything we did had giant amounts of hidden dangers in it
which is i can't speak to the partnership between kerry torrey and grant and how those guys
operated because i wasn't privy to their on the ground uh safety discussions but
i'll assume that they went very similarly to the way they went with jamie and i which was
we were constantly cross-checking each other and that was the most powerful tool we had
at our disposal was someone's always checking your work someone's always going to challenge
you on your work and that's a pain in the ass and it's the best thing in the world
when i went into productions for savage builds the most recent show i did with discovery channel
um we got the production offices set up we started outlining stories and i i went into my office and
i outlined my first story and i think it was iron man uh the iron man suit build and i outlined it
and it felt really good i hadn't done that in a long time i hadn't outlined i hadn't i hadn't
broken a story for for for a year or so since mythbusters junior and then i looked at it and
i was like what's wrong something's wrong i'm like looking at my i'm looking at my at my outline i'm
like what is wrong and i realized what was wrong was i i wanted jamie to show up and challenge me
on the construction on the methodology that that was one of the most powerful creative tools i had
building the narratives for the show was having to justify and argue with jamie over all the points
that was a so i sat there for a day looking at my outline coming up with jamie id
with jamie responses and then having a kind of an argument with him uh in in my head that
was a useful way in which i ran through the safety checks on on savage builds um
i mean this room is full of things that could harm me i am cognizant of that at every moment
at the same time i still get injured all the time i'm using blades i'm using spinning things
i'm using machines i'm frequently using them for purposes they weren't intended
uh although less so now that i'm no longer doing mythbusters but
the the for me the the the hidden answer i have to your question was there anything that
didn't seem dangerous but was my answer is i learned on the show
that when something doesn't seem dangerous it's when you should be paying more attention yeah
yeah because it can go sour in a heartbeat and you better be ready for how it could go sour yeah i
i hope that was something of an answer to your question i don't i know you were looking for
a specific kind of nugget um but i used it as a handle to talk about safety in general
because it was such a a vital and important and key piece of the production that we did
um thank you carl for a terrific question like i said i hope i answered it if you end
up with a more specific one submit it and i will endeavor to answer it again thank you
tested patrons for these awesome questions thanks everybody else i'll see you next time stay safe