All right the first question today comes from Jordan's Workshop and Jordan wants
to know ... Jordan says I watched every episode of MythBusters with my two sons.
Apart from just the fun of it the show helped teach my kids the process of honest inquiry. How
intentional was the educational aspect of the show? Um, not intentional at all.
Like not even a little bit. To give you some perspective
and a lot of this is well known -- I've talked about it before -- but I was working as a model
maker at Industrial Light and Magic. I was working on the Matrix sequels in the spring of 2002 when I
shot the pilots for MythBusters and then I went to do Terminator 3 uh and then wrapped Terminator 3,
wrapped the set that we built for that movie um the the particle accelerator set Fon Davis and i
and a bunch of wonderful colleagues at ilm built that and then i went off to film mythbusters it
was not my pitch it was not an idea jamie and i came up with we were hired talent
and we had no idea what hired talent meant we had worked on the other side of the camera for
you know a combined total of 30 years but uh as far as like what this job required of us
it was um it was like drinking from a fire hose um one minute we're working on models and literally a
few months later we're filming a tv show filming 13 episodes of a tv show in eight months which
is a tight schedule uh and the idea of what the show was about i don't think occurred to me until
almost the middle of season one so i had been filming for four or five months um
i was newly single which meant that i was totally insane person uh and there was this point in the
middle of season one where i was like you know what i'm doing i'm trying to date and i'm trying
to do this new job and i don't know the parameters i think i need to make things easier on myself and
i stopped dating i stopped i cleared that part of my head away and i started concentrating on the
job and in the beginning i was just thinking like okay what do i have to contribute to this to this
work what do what is the am i just here to talk on camera because that's the first thing i thought i
was supposed to do just i'm just here to talk on camera oh i'm also here to build stuff oh i'm also
here to actually build experimental methodologies and halfway through season one i came up with the
experimental methodology for um demonstrating that a penny has two terminal velocities wait
right there i built this wind tunnel i still have it because i am so proud of this build um i built
this wind tunnel and the particular salient feature of this wind tunnel is that has holes
off the sides of it and it has adjustable tongue depressors at the top so i can adjust how much
air is escaping from the bottom and when i put two high uh high volume air streams in the bottom here
and adjust them i can get 75 miles an hour air speed down here but a 20 mile per hour airspeed
up here and i built this on the theory that if you put a penny in here and it does have officially
two terminal velocities one on its edge and one on its face it should tumble up and down in here and
lo it did on my first try and the pleasure of that moment of coming up with a theory a hypothesis
coming up with a methodology to test that hypothesis the methodology
working and demonstrating that the hypothesis was correct um that is an endorphin rush
that i that is accessible to all human beings and it was a sea change for me um it's the longest way
of explaining that no we weren't thinking oh let's make an educational show this is the early 2000s
reality television of the kind that we jumped into with monster garage and american chopper and
trading spaces and other shows like that that all became ascendant right at that moment
we weren't thinking of how we fit into that cosmology um as the show started to air and people
started to say dude you got me through high school chemistry got me through physics and college
we started to learn that people were really we're learning from this and the biggest thing we did
when we understood that was we didn't change a thing why change something that's already working
like the show worked because the five of us were following our noses and where we followed them
things got interesting and when we followed our noses and we were interested in the subject what
we shot was interesting so it's like if if part of that question is sort of the inherent hidden part
of that question is how do you make educational programming and i know that's not what you were
asking by inference but that is like the sort of hidden question in there and the answer is i have
no idea except that i know that kids can tell when you're talking down to them and they don't like it
they'd rather be talked to like peers and i totally get that um so the way we phrased it
is that we were never thinking of the children
but they can tell and they like the fact that you talk to them like peers
um let's see uh frederick stromberg asks a really interesting question
and one that i have not gotten before which at this point is unique uh frederick says
i upheld a specific role in an organization for a long time and i can now see in retrospect
how this in many ways changed me you had a special world in mythbusters he says to me
uh where the expectation seems to have been that you were to be the opposite of jamie
do you think that the fact that you kept up with that role for so long affected your personality
uh no no i think unequivocally no i anything's possible and
the scientists in me doesn't ever want to say never or you know unequivocally no but
the the opposites being dramatically interesting
that is a reality television trope and it's definitely something that some reality
producers lean into uh they have a job reality television producers have a job they've gotta
get enough footage and camera to tell stories and it's hard to tell stories this way uh it
is hard to plan a day when you're not sure what's going to happen and it's even harder
to figure out what the narrative is going to be when you're trying to figure that out while
filming that narrative all at the same time and so a lot of reality television producers
in order to get the job done by the end of the day with the crew that they have
uh they invent some narratives and some of those narratives are this character hates that character
let's make some drama out of it um and part of the reason for doing that isn't just selling out
it is efficient right like as soon as you know a trope as soon as you know like okay there's going
to be conflict between these two then you shoot it in a certain way and it makes everybody's job
a little easier so i just you know i i know it's easy to go ah it's all this manufacturer drama
please understand that people making these dramas uh the largest part are people punching in time
cards are trying to get their job done by the end of the day and reality television can be difficult
and so i understand the reason for creating false narratives kind of moth that just fell in okay um
but as far as so in the early seasons of mythbusters there was definitely a leaning in by
by the producing team uh leaning into the conflict between jamie and i and in specific cases
uh the british have this great expression they call it pissing in your ear
and that's when you're saying something to someone
no it wasn't off pissing in your ear means when you're telling somebody something to make them
mad at somebody else you're like stirring the pot and that was definitely happening
but once jamie and i figured out that we weren't each other's problem and we were able at that
point in the producing cycle and seasons two three four around there um we were able to see that this
show that the episodes that did really well were the ones in which we were the most interested in
the material well then we realized that we didn't have to gin up any conflict but we certainly could
um let it be where it was right so if jamie and i had a disagreement about something we'd often just
make that disagreement part of the narrative and i don't mean the the conflict of disagreement but
he if he thought we should do something one way and i thought we should do something another way
we always looked for a way to make both of those paths part of our methodology because why not like
let's spread this spectrum um and many times the only reason we didn't do that or we wouldn't do
that is because we didn't have enough time to add another storyline um that being said we certainly
fell into a funny man straight man uh we we fell into those roles and jamie is like the greatest
straight man you could ever hope for because like there are many cases in which he does not
get the joke and there are many cases in which he absolutely gets the joke and can lean into that
joke with both hands and like jamie has said some of the funniest things i have ever heard
many of the ones that are at the top of my mind right now because i know you'd like to hear some
examples are unrepeatable i'm apologize for that uh and i know you're like how can you tell us
he's really funny and then not tell the story i'm sorry it's just not repeatable in a live stream um
but i you know the show itself completely changed my personality i don't mean
that i'm a uh that if you knew me before the show and you knew me after that i'm
a completely different person but you know i yeah everything that we do that
takes over our life uh it alters us you know if you work yeah i mean even the
i would say this i think that the thing that alters your personality that like maybe and
like part of the inference of your question is in a trajectory you didn't plan um is the overall
work environment and i will say um and i'm i'm proud of this i i our mythbusters work environment
was um definitely with some exceptions a very loving environment um we had some rough patches
here and there uh because of some personnel issues but uh really from like season four or five on
uh it was a very supportive and loving work atmosphere and i felt incredibly supported by
my colleagues um by the entire production team at beyond productions in australia
uh by the editors i mean at the by the time we were in season four we're like talking
daily to the editors and the producers were coming up with new ways of telling
these stories and being supported in trying new ways of telling stories
the show was a hit so discovery was letting us try everything we wanted to do it was awesome