hi everybody it's tuesday uh yeah the holidays i hope your holidays are so far going well your
family is behaving uh and being reasonable that's all we wish for for the holidays isn't it um my
mom a friend of tested my mom just arrived in town yesterday i'm gonna be here for the whole month
we're very excited uh and yeah i'm gonna do a live stream today uh with a couple of show and tells
from mythbuster days and i've got some fantastic questions uh these were open to everybody these
questions were open to everybody i was telling norm before we started this man the questions
just get the further removed we are from the show the better the questions get uh there's some
really wonderful probing interesting questions based off of people really watching the show and
thinking what if uh thinking about our experience of making the show it's really freaking delightful
but to begin with i'd like to go over these show-and-tells because i've got two pieces
i have three pieces to show you but i'm going to open with two of them the first one i want to show
is my pilot cockpit this is um
i'm really really happy with how crunchy this looks this is made out of
crappy hardware store uh quarter inch ply i think this is even luan right so it's like one
big pithy layer in the middle with two veneers it's barely plywood um i slapped this together
in about two hours on the mythbusters production and the moment i finished painting it i knew i
wanted to keep this thing there is so this was for the episode maybe one of our most important
episodes of uh what is the best way to board an airplane we brought in a bunch of uh flight
attendants who worked for southwest i've since run into two of them in the intervening years one of
them is still working for the airline as of like a year and a half ago maybe two years ago and uh
yeah i wasn't flying a year and a half ago at any rate these amazing flight attendants
from southwest were our guides in how to manage customers we built a 200 plus was it maybe it
was 125 seat uh small body uh commuter airplane i think it was like 120 530. um and we filmed this
up in mare island and this is an episode made possible by the fact that our production team
uh over the latter half of making mythbusters from like 2009 forward our production team became
really really good at wrangling volunteers for a story this is not easy to do when we did the
archimedes death ray using all the students of ensenal high school out there in alameda 500 kids
man like even when you're not paying 500 people just keeping 500 people hydrated and fed and
safe out of the sun all day long is an expensive proposition and it's also a logistics heavy
proposition and that that story really kind of broke the dam on i feel like on bringing in
more volunteers and i if if i remember correctly yvette solis was one of the key instigators at
wrangling volunteers she would bring in all of our zombies for the zombie episodes all of
our stormtroopers for the star for the star wars episodes and she got us our passengers
so we had like 150 people cooling their heels in a building across the street and they got
different kinds of instructions for boarding the airplane uh the long and the short of it is the
fastest way to board an airplane of all the ways there is is random seed assignment random boarding
the second you try and prioritize anyone's boarding experience yes slow it down by like
a factor of two seriously it is like the the zones from the rear of the plane to the front is like
a quarter of this it it's like four times longer to board a plane that way than random seat random
seat assignment the southwest way um although the flight attendants told me that even with a fully
empty plane they would watch many passengers walk in and look at the empty plane with people behind
them i wonder where i'd like to sit the world is my they literally they say that people just
stand there in reverie over their choices okay enough complaining about airplane passengers
i knew when we were making this episode we were building our plane that i wanted to add
some color to that so i did two things i started assembling a pilot's uniform
the uh the the two the three or four stripes on the collar uh whether you're captain or co-pilot
the the right shirt the right tie the right hat i'm here to tell you um it's not easy to assemble
a pilot's uniform and i didn't fully succeed they make it difficult the people that make these
uniform parts make it difficult for you to uh uh how do i say this for you to reliably impersonate
a pilot and that strikes me as a probably good thing about the world like it should be hard
it shouldn't be that easy but i built a really lovely pilot uniform um and then i knew my pilot
needed to have needed to have a cockpit and i'm like there's no way i'm gonna like take
i can't take more than like two hours to build this cockpit and so this is what i made and
the third object i'm going to show you today which is in in response to one of the questions i got
um also drifts into this territory um this to me feels both playful and authentic
enough that i feel like it drifts into the pantheon of a certain kind of modern art for me um
people like klaus oldenburg and eve tangley uh robert rauschenberg the way jasper johns the way
these particular artists and then like ongoing jenny holtzer and barbara kruger and banksy
there's an irreverence to all of those artists work marcel duchamp tristan zara
and the surrealists uh there is a playfulness and a kind of thumbing your nose both the playfulness
about the world and a thumbing your nose at art that deeply invests in all of those artists work
and i feel like this one does too like the more i look at it in the future
in the intervening years since i built it like there's nothing i would change i'm just
i'm just so happy with it and i really do think of it as like a piece of early artwork from me
um so i'm really glad i still have it uh we shot i will try and find this video um we did one shoot
where i was like pretending to steer the plane and the whole crowd was behaving along as if they
were in turbulence we will find it and we will uh figure out a way to get you to see it because it's
it's so hilarious it feels like an outtake from craig ferguson's old late late show
um because that's absolutely who i was emulating as the pilot yeah um craig ferguson one of the
biggest fans of mythbusters in our entire history i think he had all of the hosts on his show
to sit on the couch and talk uh no other talk show host did that um at any rate that's my cockpit
on the other side is a much more important device because i believe i believe i believe it might
be the only one in existence when i was a kid there was a joke and the joke involved something
impossible from a genie or somebody and the punch line was catch my fart and paint it green
and that's supposed to be the punch line because both of those things are supposed to be impossible
i don't know about painting a fart green but i did build a machine to capture a fart and
here is my fart catcher yeah yeah no i know um i love this thing so the whole idea was exploiting
uh water pressure uh and air pressure and their differentials and the the the the way those two
materials behave when you put them under different uh uh uh constrictions it utilize just natural
water and air pressure to isolate the fart i will walk you through its function um first up you uh
let's see first up you empty do you empty it hold on just let's see here uh
wait wait wait okay so the funnel is meant to go in the bathtub to capture where the fart's gonna
come out that that seems pretty self-evident when you fart it actually gets gathered by the bubble
and the air volume of your flatus fills this vessel this first vessel here and
it's got lines every i think i i did this in milliliters or ounces i actually figured out
where what the line divisions were so we can calculate the volume of the fart um
how did this i'm literally i'm like actually trying to piece this together because there's
something i'm missing here so we had the fart captured then the trick is right right right
the the this vessel here is where the fart would eventually end up and we would fill
this with water all the way to the outer end and what you would okay wait a second oh why
don't i follow my directions the rubber stopper is placed at the bottom of the graduated cylinder
that's what it is i should have read my own directions this went into the mythbusters
exhibit yeah you were all watching going just read the directions and i'm like sitting here trying to
pull it out of my old brain right so you capture the part you put a rubber plug in the bottom then
you would fill this vessel with water and that would actually allow the flatus to be pressured
up into this vessel which was full of water until the flatus arrived the trick is to make sure that
the water level in this cylinder is higher than the water level uh than the tippy top of this
vessel and that means that water pressure brings the flatus up into the containment chamber um
i will admit to you that over the weeks that we were filming the flatus episode i was only able
to capture two farts it's just look we all have of different productive periods in our day as
we move through our day and my productive period turns out to be between 5 and 6 30 in the morning
you're welcome that's something you never wanted to know about me but now you do other
people have different productive times for their gas and um uh uh i love telling this
story my producer alice dallow one of the most intrepid producers i have or will ever work
with and for uh alice was watching us flail around in this cold bathtub in the middle of jamie's shop
and we were not getting what we wanted we're not getting what we wanted and she went all right
everybody out she sent everybody out of the shop floor and said give me an hour
and we came back an hour later and she was like toweling off and she had captured four
dude that is above and beyond absolutely freaking the champion alice was willing to go there and i
i have nothing but mad respect for that um dude i i mean what i what i love about this is that it's
it seems absurd it sounds ludicrous i made a fart catcher but in the annals of science it's right
up the middle like bat researchers who want to know about changes in diet and how they affect
bat guano how do you collect bat quantity you go into a cave and just wait to catch it that's not
very productive but somebody figured out at one point a way of modifying t-shirt cut-offs to make
these little tiny diapers for bats that they would poop in and then be able to collect a clean sample
from the bat that also sounds pretty much just as diapers for bat sounds just as absurd to me
as far catchers and yet the bat methodology is actually yielding really interesting and
useful information so i'm getting a package um and that's one of the lovely things like i love
reading abstracts like oh well we found what was i i don't have an example off the top of my head
but sometimes you read an experiment like oh an experiment researchers showed that men do this and
women do this and then when you go look at the methodology of how they achieved it it's often
hilarious or really really brilliantly clever um by the way for the rigorous scientists among you
yes i am totally aware that the water we are moving the flatus through is affecting the
chemical composition of the air of the flatus yes i understand that the h2o was absorbing some like
yes all of that but we were still able to use these to figure out which members of the crew
had methane in their flatus and which one of us which ones of us didn't i by
the way i'm a methane burner i can light my own farts and i i have um but this is
it sounds absurd but it is science and that's one of the most beautiful things about science is
reading the wonderful absurd ways in which people answered crazy questions with really simple
beautiful brilliant methodologies so i consider this one of my more important constructions
because i feel like the methodology is empirically sound if not in its execution it's lacking some uh
some rigor that one would prefer to have
yeah i'm never letting it go it's always gonna hang on the wall just like a piece of art
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 streams 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