why don't i stand i could be standing ah hello everybody adam savage
in my cave here in san francisco and i am answering questions submitted from tested patrons
about my days on mythbusters and today's question comes from thomas caldwell thomas wants to know
what would you consider the most important myth you busted the one with the most
real impact that made a difference um there are a few contenders for this in my humble opinion
um and there are several categories to the answering of this question um the first category
that comes to my mind is to highlight what i think of as mythbusters greatest methodologies
i'm the first one to admit that our iterations of experiments were painfully low
uh and that it is cheeky for us to claim after most of our experiments that we had definitively
determined the answer we had determined an answer not the answer um but
despite the fact that we understood those were the limitations of the time
money and budget that we had um money and budget of the same amount item anyway uh
i we really tried to take it as we tried to put our ethos into the methodology that is while we
understood our answers might not be definitive we always strove to conduct methodologies
that we considered were robust enough to determine the answer if we had enough runs
i think our airplane boarding episode is a perfect example of an amazing amount of infrastructure
brought to bear to answer a question uh our producer yvette solis uh became mythbusters
homegrown expert in wrangling gigantic crowds and that was a story that we were only able to like
when we did the archimedes death ray for the obama administration that was the first time
we'd ever had more than like 40 people participate in a story it was 500 kids
and that was so intense but also so successful as a shoot day that it led to this whole new era and
so things like the zombie episode uh the sever two or three different zombie episodes we did uh
and other ones that required large crowds like grocery shopping um yvette was the lead on on
those things and and airplane boarding was a phenomenal experimental methodology i believe and
i'm really proud of that one but is it the most is it the most important no um i think one of the
best methodologies that anybody came up with in the 13 years of the show is keri tori and grant's
p p pee pee ice cube falling off the plane into somebody's house oh my god that's that's an
amazing execution um you could talk about it in terms of lives being saved uh and in that
regard mythbusters has a pretty interesting record when we did in our very first season we did uh con
talking on a cell phone called an explosion at a gas station we highlighted the fact
that static electricity can if you're not moving in in correct ways can cause fires
at a gas station and before we aired our episode back in the early aughts i think the number we got
from the american petroleum institute a slightly biased institution as you would imagine but they
told us that about eight people a year died in gas station fires caused by static electricity
uh in the years after mythbusters that number dropped to like one or two
which was pretty cool uh but i don't think even that's the most amount of lives that we say that
we've gotten at least five or six different people that claim that our show about we're surviving
in an underwater car we did two episodes about it that the underwater car episodes saved their lives
uh there's a uh a policeman and his partner in uh northern europe there's a trucker down
in san diego a midwestern mom at least i think actually there's two midwestern mobs
but does that make it the most important story i mean those are those are really amazing things
that happened that we never expected but is that the most important story um
because to me the most important story the most important how do i say this like
my goal would be that the most important one is the one that imparted the best
information that people could really understand
and i think for that it's our flu episode i really do i think that's one of the most
lovely experiment experimental methodologies we ever did based on some studies that had been done
about uh transmission of a cold cold virus via touching stuff at dinner and i built a pair of
glasses that leaked a fluorescing fluid and finding a fluid that could fluoresce
that wasn't poisonous to me that could fluoresce really well was not not easy uh
and then we had this dinner party
and at the end oh so basically i had this basically a post nasal drip right it was a
fluorescing fluid though and it came off my nose and it just naturally i wanted to deal
with it i had tissues i had my hands and you know i kind of dealt with it in the way that one would
and the end result was absolutely disgusting i mean life-changingly disgusting because i think
it was like five or six of us carrie byron was at that was at that dinner at that experiment and
after we'd been eating for like an hour they shut off the lights and we turned on the blacklight and
everything at the table was covered with fluorescing fluid like yeah it was sickening
except for carrie byron carrie didn't have any honor carrie was already a germaphobe carrie's
the one i am most confident mate we'll make it out of covin without any hitches uh yeah she's like
the force is strong with this one and when the covet lockdown first happened uh i reached out
to discovery and said we should put this up you guys should put up the flu episode and
they did like the next day uh they put it up and look i'm i have no idea what kind of
ultimate effect them putting up that video at the beginning of covid
had i don't have any numbers on that i don't have any figures on that but it was uh i was delighted
to be able to highlight something we made many years ago that helped people understand the
situation we were currently in we are currently in and a lot of people wrote to me on twitter
and through various social media to say that episode really helped them uh but again that's
all anecdotal so i'm not proclaiming that like we achieved some huge change in the world because of
something we did because i can't really know that i you know i it's every every piece of information
i have is anecdotal and as we all know the plural of anecdote is not evidence sure but
it made me very proud of the show all of us worked so hard on for so many years to be
able to have a practical thing to share with the world between us the hosts and discovery channel
to hopefully make things just a little bit clearer and that's all science really is it's just the
goal to make things a little bit clearer sometimes you can make things a lot clearer but that's rare
it's more often that you're making some tiny little thing just a little bit better understood
and that's enough it feels really good thank you so much for that awesome question uh i will
continue to answer mythbusters questions here as long as you guys have them and uh
the questions are awesome so thank you uh i'll see you guys next time