answered answered and answered hey everybody uh adam savage in my cave and i am taking
mythbuster questions that have been submitted by tested patrons and i'm answering them and
today's question comes from steve b steve b steve b says in the early seasons of mythbusters one of
my favorite parts of each episode was where you would give a percent chance of what you thought
could happen in any given test that went away as the show progressed and is there a reason for that
yes it did go away and yes there is a reason and the reason is is i i like the
i'm i'm i'm a storyteller that's that's been my primary occupation lo these many years it took me
a long time to realize that was my occupation but as a storyteller i like keeping the story
interesting i like narrative beats that gather your attention coalesce the information you've
thus far been exposed to and help you understand where things might be going or subvert where you
think things might be going so i came up with in the very first season this convention of like
all right i think there's a 10 chance it's going to work a 40 chance that all hell's going to break
loose and 70 percent and i would always try and make these these numbers equal a hundred percent
and at a certain point i realized i keep banging into this thing this was a gift from somebody
this is a steel cut out of my face um i gotta i'm leaning it up against my
my anvil here but i keep bumping it and it's bothering me so i'm gonna move it
there we go where was i right i would try and come up with like four or five
things that were funny and weird and i give them percentages and i try and
get those percentages to match up and then i realized that there was nothing
are you giving percentage are you giving odds those are two different questions and i was kind
of conflating the two concepts and then by making them add up to a hundred percent what i i i felt
like what i was doing was i was giving people bad ways to think about statistics and in this
current world in this reality we don't need anyone making statistics less clear they're already
a dark science of mental manipulation that has no bottom and so i i was basically i i
felt like i was reducing the quality of the discussion about statistics with my joke
what is that sound this is another thing that's leaning up over here
anyway
yeah i i i also got tired of the joke i mean that that also happens um you do something 30 times
and you're like i'd like to think of a new way to do something which is its own sort of spiral you
can get down because maybe there are some things you shouldn't abandon even though you feel like
you've done overdone them um yeah so that's why those went away um i would speak i mean
what we i'm sorry i'm trying i'm thinking through this i'm just trying to see if
there's anything i've forgotten here um i will also say that that was a
fun convention but what it led to was a much more structured convention where as we filmed sequences
uh our producer which for the longest time was alice dallow would pull us aside and say okay
you're just about to build the experiment you're just about to build the methodology
what do you think is going to happen and what do you think could happen and what do
if a or b or c could happen what do each of those mean for the experiment and then once you're in it
you've got to build okay you've got the experiment built how do you think the build went how do you
think it's going how do you think it's going to go okay now it's built and you've experimented with
it what does happen how do you feel about it how does that lead you to the next thing so with each
with each narrative beat jamie and i would answer a ton of questions on camera lots of redundant
questions about what we thought was happening was going to happen what we thought about what
was going to happen and what we predicted and what that allowed the editors to do was kind of
take each narrative beat and then we had some framing discussion around each narrative beat
it got tiring at times i mean i remember in penny drop sorry no in bullet drop versus fired
which was an experiment where we had two complete days just to adjust the rig
uh and then on the third or fourth day on the final day that we were filming we got
the we got what we wanted we got the bullet skipping off the ground at the same instant
the bullet hit the ground but got that shot at about one in the afternoon but in order to button
down that story we recorded pieces to camera for another three and a half hours and again this is
in reality television you can't be sure you always know what the story is in the field and
so you want to make sure you've given the editor the editorial team the producer and the editor
enough to work with whatever has happened in the field
that's a really really good tip because based on what we shot the editors could cut multiple
different kinds of stories and sometimes there were narrative beats like you know
you may have this narrative beat of like deciding on the color of the thing that you're painting
and there's a whole discussion you film of talking about the color of going to get the color and
painting it and you cut that whole sequence and it's going great but then on two days later um
maybe 300 goats wander on the set and that's way funnier as the narrative beat in the story so you
cut in a little sequence about the goats showing up in the goats going away and now you don't have
time for the color discussion that's that's an example of how stuff ends up on the cutting room
floor so to be sure the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor is just often slightly less
interesting than whatever was replacing it that's usually the equation you look for like what are
the best beats let's put those in um yeah there's some perspective in how we filmed that stuff
uh i appreciate the question uh it's funny no one else has ever asked me about their percentages in
in all this time um steve b thank you for being the first uh that was delightful tested
patrons keep submitting your awesome questions and i will continue to answer them stay safe everybody
and i will see you next time bye