hello everybody i'm adam savage and i am in my cave here in san francisco and today i am
taking some questions from tested patrons about my old show mythbusters
and today's uh story comes from morgan crisp wants to know um
are there any myths that countered the laws of physics that were dismissed for being
too simple or other myths too simple for testing for example ones that were safe for home testing
not really uh
so i want to state right up front i'm really sorry we ever tested pyramid power the idea that
keeping your razor under some pyramid shape would make them sharper and let the blades stay sharp
total hogwash i'm really sorry we did that um
there is a myth that we never did um but not because it broke the laws of physics
uh and that's dowsing which does break the laws of physics and to be clear dowsing is the practice
of holding on to two ends of a fork stick and using the single piece out there to find water
this is a long and storied tradition and people have been using this method
to find water for hundreds if not thousands of years i don't know exactly how long
however dowsing has never survived empirical testing never it's never it's never survived
and there's been some pretty clever methodologies like putting someone in an empty building where
every floor is completely empty and putting a giant volume of water on one floor and taking
a dowser and putting them on the floor above that and they couldn't figure out where the water was
and they knew there was like a hundred thousand gallons of water somewhere on this floor like
that's a great methodological test so why didn't we do it it's because of the nature of our show
um the nature of our show is that we would have a question to answer and we would find experts to
help us answer it and we would conduct our own tests to figure out the the the answer
but it's very hard to prove a negative if you go out looking for bigfoot and you
don't find bigfoot you haven't proven that bigfoot doesn't exist you've only proved
that you don't know how to find bigfoot so proving a negative was something we actively avoided
but if you're going to try and prove a negative you really want a control
and the control would have been bringing in a dowser someone who believed in their skill
and have them apply it for us successfully under their conditions and then we would
give them our conditions and presumably we in the structure of the show we would make
a fool out of them we'd take someone who did this for a living and we'd show them to be
false about it show them that they were wrong no i get that some people would be delighted to
learn that but that kind of interaction that wasn't a myth buster's kind of interaction
that's not the kind of show we made it wasn't a gotcha show we didn't want to bring someone
on our show and make a fool out of them in fact we always wanted to bring on guests to make them look
excellent and we got in trouble a couple of times we had some experts who were real goofballs and we
ended up making them look great on television no i'm not going to tell you who it was but
my sympathy is such that it would have been i would have had a moral problem with bringing
someone onto the show to make a fool out of them and i i caveat here i want to explain i mean
someone who believes in what they're doing because a lot of people believe that they can douse now
when they take a stick out into a landscape i have no doubt that there are physical clues within that
landscape that they understand at the most deep and intuitive level and that perhaps that's being
externalized by the physicality with the stick that's completely feasible and that would be
lovely to tease out but that's a bigger longer set of experiments than we could do within a single
hour show a single a story for 35 40 minutes of television so we never did but i'm specifically
meaning like a person who believes in what they do somebody who claims to dowse but is lying
they're just a charlatan like psychics or spoonbenders or whatever those those people
they deserve your enmity and your ire and they deserve to be exposed again not the kind of show
mythbusters did but you want to know how screwed up dowsing gets yeah okay check this out ah
i'm gonna name names here um there was a company called a tsc
uh advanced tactical security communications limited and they sold a bomb detecting dowsing
device this device was an antenna on a stick and it claimed they claimed that this could detect
bombs from long range well detecting bombs at long range is something the american military
freaking every military is very interested in doing and a tsc sold
sold these devices to 20 countries in the middle east and asia including iraq and afghanistan
for as much as sixty thousand dollars apiece the iraqi government is said to have spent 52 million
dollars on the advice on the device excuse me 52 million on the device okay i'd like to air this
grievance of mine after all these years those people that invented that invented that machine
they were totally clear that they were making a piece of garbage and not only charging tons
of money for it which is bad enough that's bad enough for that you should all go to jail
but you sold a device that gave people a false sense of security in forward operating bases
in war zones across the world how do you go to sleep and kiss your children having done that
because you must know that there are dead people on your on your dance card
that you're responsible for that company that made that they're responsible for people being
dead because those people said oh that truck doesn't have any bombs on it and it did god
way way back in the day james randy called me and told me about those guys um 2007 2008
and we really workshopped tried to workshop an episode around it it just wasn't feasible
because again the structure of mythbusters so there's your story about a myth that broke
the laws of physics that we didn't test and there was every reason why um yeah
oh man it makes me so mad it makes me so mad oh selling bomb detectors so there's a story there's
a story that the american military set up a test where they had an 18-wheeler full of explosives
drive behind the guy testing the equipment and his needle didn't move even though this giant truck
container was filled with munitions yeah that's the kind of evil that's evil it's directly evil
there's no other to me there's no there's no qualifier for that that's just plain evil okay
i'm done being mad i'm not done being mad but i'm done with this video i'm done being mad on camera
uh thank you morgan um for that great question thank you tested patrons for all these mythbuster
questions i love these walks down memory lane um keep submitting them i'll keep answering them
stay safe happy holidays whatever holiday you celebrate and i'll see you next time