hey everybody adam savage here in my cave and i'm answering questions about
mythbusters and my time therein uh and today's question comes from tested patron mr
uh mr roboto says did i make that joke i probably make that joke every single time
sorry everyone in the world makes that joke for your username i
low-hanging fruit anyway um mr roboto says were there any skills that you were average
at when mythbusters began and excellent at when the show ended oh man so many
so many hold on i gotta close the door
so late in mythbusters tenure we wrapped the show in 2015. late in our tenure i'd say around 2012
2013 we'd already been doing the show for the a decade jamie and i started to we how did we
do this oh right so the real the ratings started going down right the ratings mythbusters ratings
uh basically went on a steady arc up up up up up round about till about 2010 2011. they crested
and held there for a long time this 2003-2011 like seven or eight years of steadily great ratings and
then they crested and they started to they started to fall again it's just a bell curve you know we
saw it coming we weren't necessarily surprised we were mostly surprised by how long it lasted but we
could see the end coming and that led to a a cause for reflection between the two of us about like
wow yeah we're as we're looking at the end of this thing we started having conversations about about
about it as an abstract concept like wow look at this thing that we've gone and done and
just to give you a little bit of history right jamie hyneman had been working in special effects
for 20 years i had been working in special effects for about 10 when we started making mythbusters uh
he had worked on dozens of feature films hundreds of commercials uh i had worked on uh
about a dozen film and a couple of hundred commercials i think jamie worked on over
a thousand um we had both been professional makers for the largest portion of our lives um
and we'd worked at industrial light and magic we've worked it for the big studios we've done
like we've done important like exciting work that that felt like it took all of our ability right
and we had both achieved what we felt like was some reasonable amount of success in in
the in that field of special effects model making and uh uh and the making of things
so when mythbusters started
i will admit that we both thought yeah we've got some skills to bring to this show right like we
kind of drunk our own kool-aid that the opening credits together with over 30 years of experience
and special effects like yeah we were like yeah we got some skills the thing that we both laughed
about 10 years later when we like assessed how it had gone and what we had done both of us were
like we were such babies we had no idea we had no idea what this job would be like we had no idea
how difficult it would be and neither of us had any conception of just how much we would learn
and the fact is yeah what we learned on that show is unparalleled and it
is less about a specific skill really than it is about the agglomeration of all of the skills
because as a problem solver my favorite kind of employment is employment that changes all the
time i like being occupied by different problems to solve it's why i gravitated towards special
effects and the high pressure atmosphere of a film set i like solving problems under pressure under a
deadline i like the way in which a deadline hacks branches off the decision tree i like the way it
refines your thinking down to the essence of what needs to get done right now when everything else
is costing 10 grand a minute to solve this problem how am i going to solve it i love that feeling
and in the i joke that i'm mediocre at all of the skills i have
really all of the skills i have i am mediocre i'm not an expert at any one
thing except what am i an expert at i didn't even know i i my expertise is in
all of the number of skills that i have
gained over the years and how to overlap them to get something done um and so in that regard
the the the doing mythbusters was very similar to working in film and special
effects different problems to solve every day under tight timelines under tight budgets
but the scale the scale was the difference because in special effects you're almost always working
you're working here you're working here i mean you know i have friends
that build sets for things like american ninja warrior and you know those are big
sets right those are huge logistical things that's not the kind of area that
i was in in special effects i was it's mostly localized right here the scale of
not only coming up with a methodology of how to do something and then figuring out how to
build the thing to adhere to that methodology and thinking about how to document it so the rigor was
apparent and then how to use that to tell the story to the lay person about what you're doing
the scale is the biggest difference between what we had done before the show
and what we did once we were doing the show and the scale of mythbusters was gargantuan uh uh
and so yeah it's really it's really about like resource allocation and project management
is without a doubt the biggest thing i came out of mythbusters with that i was way better at it
than when i started absolutely yeah resource allocation and for product
production management that's like how do you oh you know what i did become an expert at one
specific weird ass thing making mythbusters and that is i have a really i know that the joke here
on tested is that every one day build takes longer than a day and my powers of estimating are are
wrong the fact is is that is true when it comes to the stuff that i make for myself when i am on the
clock my ability to estimate how long something will take is fantastic it's a really i'm really
good at that but i'm really specifically good at knowing what i can complete within a day um so uh
the exact the example i will give you is uh on the smithsonian build uh to remind you uh uh in 2019
covet has thrown off all of my dates but uh yes in the summer of 2019 the tested team and i went to
the smithsonian institution in washington dc where we assembled in one day a hatch of the command
module the columbia command module from apollo 11. that hatch had pieces uh built for it by i think
over 100 makerspaces from all over the world i might be getting that number wrong
and so the question as we were going kept on coming to me from my team is are we going to
be able to build this in a day and i kept on looking at it saying yes yes we will you know
i could tell they were like i hope he's right man i hope he's really bright but this is this weird
specific skill i got is how how to paint myself into a corner where something has to happen by
the end of the day and i get this like i have this institutional knowledge now from mythbusters of
being able to hit that mark really really close um
mr roboto thank you so much for that awesome question tested patrons keep submitting them
and i will keep answering them if you want to know how to get in the club and be a tested
patron it's in the comments below thank you guys so much and i will see you next time