hey everybody adam savage here in my cave and i am answering questions today from tested patrons and
the question today is specifically mythbusters themed and that's why i'm wearing this shirt i
know it doesn't say mythbusters but bear me out um way back in 2000 i think five when we first went
down to the bahamas to go film with stuart cove and his incredible team uh we connected up with
neptunic the company that makes shark armor they make chain mail that you wear to go diving with
sharks and uh we dealt with neptunic and we jamie and i were required by the insurance company to
wear uh their shark armor while we were underwater and neptunic showed up and gave our whole crew
neptunic t-shirts that's what this shirt is it's neptune and what you don't know is that
everyone on the mythbusters crew that got one of these shirts loves it forever and every time any
one of us would wake up and put on this shirt our partners would go damn you look good in that shirt
that's a nice looking shirt like every one of us maddie saws all of us like we put on this shirt
our partners would admire it and you know you want to put something on that your partner likes
this right here i put it on this morning my wife was like oh i forgot about that shirt
so it seemed appropriate to wear my neptunic shark armor shirt for a mythbusters themed question
and today's question comes from tommy stevens who says with uh how often did
the myths that carrie grant and tory do excite you more than the one you were filming
uh and how much involvement or input did you have in their miss uh if any
uh first of all lots of involvement we it was a very uh uh cross-pollinated set of teams uh
absolutely like every everybody had input the the the story meetings that we would have were just
delightful uh for that and frequently in the story meetings that we would have um which was
every like about two or three months there would be natural like most of the time it was pretty
natural who wanted a story and who was going to tackle it right it was just like it became pretty
clear most of the time but there were several occasions in which those guys got to test a story
that i really really really really wanted and i'm going to tell you about the first one that's
going to kill me because i still want to do it and it's breaking out of prison using toilet paper uh
specifically as rope oh man i wanted this story it's so look if you want to wrap your head around
something weird just like realize that rope which can hold up you know you or your car or boats or
buildings are still made of tiny little threads which each one of them in and of itself does not
have a lot of tensile strength ropes are strong because of the grouping and the weaving and the
twisting and the frictional aspects of all of those little fibers and it turns out and those
guys proved it you could do that with toilet paper i still really want to try it as much as i want
to go back and do dorodongo again and make shiny mud balls yes i'm eventually going to do the tin
foil ball i should do that here on a one-day build at any rate that's a whole nother thing
they got to test breaking out of prison using toilet paper rope and they had this beautiful
location i think it was a jail i think it was a it was a jail at least a beautiful government
building over in oakland i i was jealous of the whole shoot it did they had so much fun doing it
ah yeah but you know sometimes you can't always get what you want where would you put it
the big story that i really really wanted to do was beating the lie detector um and right up front
can i just tell you that lie detectors are shite they're shite i i don't doubt that a talented
qualified operator could do better than a statistical guessing and figuring out the relative
truth of something here or there but this is like sure opera there are circumstances in which you
could come up with a result that was better than statistical guessing but for the most part in
scientific methodologies lie detection has never uh done much better it hasn't done much better so
lie detectors are terrible and they're shite i'm i'm i'm i'm i don't believe in them and that's
based on the research that i did however when i was researching this story i can't remember who
came up with it but i do remember being like oh i'm just getting on google and starting to
look at how other people methodologically tested them and one of the difficulties they have with
lie detectors when you want to test them is in real life the people who are trying to foil the
lie detector have the biggest stakes imaginable for succeeding it is almost always their freedom
or sometimes whether or not they get a job these are the biggest stakes imaginable right i mean
you're applying for a job and it depends upon you being truthful and that's a stressful situation
you've committed a crime and the fbi wants you to take a lie detector and you're trying to beat it
the stakes are your freedom that is a difficult emotional state to replicate
uh methodologically in a clinical atmosphere
and i didn't read many studies that got even close to that kind of emotional state
and so i came up with this idea uh and it was actually it was based on so uh linda wilkovich
was our amazing producer who was in charge of that shoot she found an incredible lie detector dude
who was on the good side he he he understood what it could do and understood what it couldn't do and
spoke very rationally about that so again linda was one of the great finders of experts and this
guy was great and he helped the carry torian grant uh concocted test in which they would go into
jamie's office and steal a 20 bill from his wallet and that's a fine test to do and all of them found
it really creepy to go into jamie's office and do that which was totally understandable
but here's the thing the stakes still aren't there jamie's not going to send them to prison
he's not going to call the cops he's not going to press charges so how do you add stakes well part
of what i was thinking was maybe you don't have to add the stakes maybe you can simply add an
emotional component because that's what the stakes do they add an emotional component to your answer
so what if we could i thought add an emotional component to stealing 20
from jamie's wallet and here's what i came up with i came up with
sorry for leaving i needed a prop i came up with they would go into jamie's office
and they would take a 20 out of his wallet and then they would open up this little vial of
dog poop and they'd take out a spatula and they'd spread a little dog poop just a tiny amount unlike
jamie's computer monitor here's the thing touching poop is freaking awful dog poop smells horrendous
that is an emotional component that is a disgusting thing to do it doesn't matter that
everyone knows you're doing it it doesn't matter that that's the structure of your job that day
that is a gross thing and uh i even talked to the guy after we'd finished shooting
but i talked to the the the lie detector expert that we brought on and he was like oh
that's really good and i was like beaming you're like yeah i had a methodological breakthrough
but again it wasn't my story it wasn't my choice i didn't get to try that specific aspect of it
and again i i don't say this i don't tell the story by any way of saying
that they didn't test it enough not at all uh their methodology was great it's just
everybody brings their own thing to it and that's what i wanted to bring to it i wanted to talk
about those emotional stakes talk about ways of of generating them yeah i mean how do you generate
emotion in jamie i think you have to add a new uh update card i think that's the best way to do it
uh i will add one more coda to this which is there was there was certainly here and there a
few stories that they did that i would have loved to spend a day doing some car driving
and other stuff but for the most part each team really got to do the things that they gravitated
towards that they were really interested in that they felt like they had something to contribute
to and that was really consistent across the whole thing i will say there is one story that
those guys did that blew my freaking mind and it's one of my favorite stories they ever did
and it's not carrie painting the leather cannon with uh the gucci logos was it gucci logos i think
it was gucci logos yeah or maybe it was coco chanel i might have been coco chanel logos no
it wasn't that one it was uh the frozen pea on the airplane toilet leak episode uh what
what grand atory and kerry sorry they're all three but i just remember specifically grand
touring went to the main location where they had this wind tunnel and they could test it and they
let their fake pee with the blue stuff leak out of the plane it created this ice block and then
it fell off and the part that fell off was about the size of the pieces that had fallen through
people's houses and the look that grand and tory gave each other where they were like oh ah
just again chef's kiss one of the one of my favorite moments of the show ever ever
yeah yeah thanks for those thanks for those memories
uh thank you guys for these wonderful questions tested patrons submit your
questions and i will continue to answer them and i'll see you guys next time you