what was an aspect of creating a show like mythbusters that wasn't suitable enough to
be on screen but you wish more people knew about um the story meetings i really wish
we could have filmed the story meetings but i was the reason that we didn't um
as you could imagine i was certainly the most vocal person in any story meeting in our in our
team um i get passionate about stuff i jump to conclusions there's lots of problem solving but
what what i mean by story meetings is at the beginning of a shooting block uh and we shot and
we shot year round but we shot three months on two weeks off three months on two weeks off
and at the beginning of those three months runs we would shoot a certain number of episodes and
we'd beat out the plots of all those episodes the rough ideas of where those would go experimentally
and that's what i mean by a store meeting is the breakdown of each episode uh with the whole
production team answering questions about how we're going to cover this where we'd like to film
it what we're going to use where we're going to need to ask for resources how much money we might
need to ask discovery extra in order to make this build work um and at one point we thought
let's film a story meeting and i found that i couldn't talk um but really more specifically
i couldn't curse and there is this way in which i'm a cursor i'm a like cursing is just
part of the way i talk to people and as a public personality i don't curse often on camera because
as i've said on on tested and everywhere else i i like the idea that kids watch what i what i do
oh i'm getting a package i like the idea that kids watch what i do um at the same time i do
curse occasionally because that's part of life and kids who just know that adults curse from time to
time and it's cool when we do and when kids curse it's just gross i don't want to hear it
but i in story meetings there was a kind of a free-form way in which i would both jump into the
narrative of the story but also pull back and tell tangential stories or dirty jokes or random random
random anecdotes about stuff that i'd read in the news and for me that was all part of
the oscillation of this writer's room we had to create at the beginning of each shooting stretch
um and it meant that i couldn't have a camera running i just i like i couldn't
let go of myself enough to kind of allow my brain to go to those places it needed to go
um so yeah while i always have wished that you guys could have seen a story meeting um
i'm sure that some of the jokes i told back then were career-ending terrible terrible jokes uh so
i'm glad you don't see a story meeting um there was another question about ah here we go uh by
the way the last question was asked by grove's paths groves passed or grovus paz this next
question is asked by andrew myron uh andrew you've really got me with this great question andrew
um how did you guys develop such a good relationship with the people at the bomb range the
fire department and other governmental agencies all those experts always seem to enjoy helping out
with the dangerous elements of your myth busting yes they did um there are a few reasons why those
relationships were good relationships one is we understood that good relationships with the
bomb squads and fire departments and the police departments was the soul of our show uh and for
us we would set up an idea of like oh we're gonna go film this at that place but frequently we would
come to results we didn't expect and we had to change directions and go to a totally different
methodology to test out the next part of the story well in those cases having a relationship
with a bomb squad or a police department or a fire department that we could say hey can
we come down tomorrow and can we expedite this this permit process so that we can come and film
those relationships were completely critical to us making those narratives work and
those relationships were maintained by our again i'm forgetting some of our most
important producers linda wolkovic just the location whisperer linda wolkovic um
she used to run the shop at industrial light magic when i was there uh and ended up being one
of mythbusters main producers for its entire run and linda was a so amazing at finding a location
and then getting the people at that location to fall in love with us as a production crew uh and
then the next time you call them and you say can can we do this thing like in two days instead of
three weeks which is the normal permit time and they'd be like yeah come on down so that was one
way another reason we had great relationships is that bomb squads are all mythbusters
yeah i know you might think that mythbusters wasn't was an honorary bomb squad but i'm here
to tell you that all bomb squads are mythbusters so um bomb squads are composed of uh uh these
seasoned professionals who have to learn how to deal with something they don't know what it's
going to be they don't know who's going to leave a bomb somewhere might be some you know buddy
quiet you there might be somebody finding grandpa a grenade grandpa brought back from germany uh
and they took it to the police station or it might be some dumb kid made a pipe bomb or it might be
that someone really wants to blow some place up they have to be able to respond to all three of
those situations in the safest imaginable way so what do they do to do that they are constantly
training they are constantly training under all sorts of different different contingencies to
learn what happens they set fire to cars to watch how they burn they blow them up to watch how they
blow up and learn what different explosives do to stuff in that way they're constantly
testing different methodologies and learning how things work which is exactly what mythbusters was
so whenever jamie and i would meet a new bomb squad whether it was at the
international association of bomb technicians and investigators annual meeting in louisville
kentucky which we went to once which was amazing or we were at matsu county bomb squad up in alaska
or the alameda county sheriff's bomb squad uh headed by j.d nelson who was effectively
like the seventh mythbuster that bomb squad um we every time we met a bomb squad we found people we
felt super simpatico with in terms of that uh in terms of that mindset of the kind of contingency
planning problem solving that we were doing um and the last reason that we had good relationships is
we left every location we filmed at better than when we found it i can say that unequivocally uh
we were able to dig up the runway at alameda which you're not usually allowed to do but
we repaired it in a way that was perfect and we did it on the up and up we we broke things and
paid for them to be fixed um but in general we left every location we filmed at better
than when we found it and that is a testament to the whole ethos of our production team so early
or you guys asked me about the unsung heroes of mythbusters that ethos of uh getting the job done
but also making sure that these relationships were maintained and that these locations were
maintained again we're in not just california but northern california san francisco bay area one of
the most environmentally restrictive areas of the country for all these terrific reasons but it also
meant that when we wanted to do stuff as simple as like dumping 10 gallons of vegetable oil on
the ground we had to jump through some of the most surprising hoops in order to be able to do that
and the fact that we were able to execute that in every way that was environmentally safe and
sound and considered you know exactly what was needed by all the experts we worked with
that ethos permeated the entire production um i one more question uh excellent should i just pick
from this list yeah okay uh i have time for one more question and this comes from fixit tony um
fix it tony so i was thinking about your username fix it tony because when i had a fiat
and the fiat that i owned was a um spider a fiat 2000 spider yeah so uh that was a i had
two of those i had a 1977 and the 1980 and the fiat spider is a freaking great car it is that
is a terrific car you want a little two-seater jazzy little sports car for just a few grand get
yourself a fiat spider-man they are awesome but the reason i'm telling you the story about the
fiat is because everyone says it stands for fix it again tony um and i'm here to say that was
not my experience with the fiat spider and later on i had the fiat at barth and i loved that car
um by the way when you're talking about two-seater sports cars one of the great things about the that
mid 70s fiat spider is it was a better driver than any of the other sports cars made around that time
better than an mg better than the datsun better than the carmen gia i love the look of it but
man it's a murder it's a murder vehicle there's no engine in the front um all of those other cars the
mgs the alphas they you have to drive them like you're angry at them but the fiat was the most
modern of those cars back in the mid 70s i haven't even gotten your question sorry fix it tony so i
found myself wondering fixed with tony if you have a fiat and there's some like internal joke
going on with your username he wants to know how many different myths were you working on
at the same time it seems like you may have had a few at different stages of completeness and
one ready for showtime um thank you he says and my patron experience is very positive thus far
well thank you i am really glad your patreon experience is positive that that's our goal um
we had anywhere from probably two to five or six myths going at any given moment um
what were the drivers behind the numbers well you always need a backup plan in case it rains
and you're supposed to shoot outside um so it behooved us to have stuff to do
that we could fill in in case we lost days to to weather or other production contingencies um
there were also stories that took huge amounts of time um so in general we had
wow we had the best schedule in television for the longest time we had like 12 shooting days per
episode yeah so right now if there are any people who currently work in reality television for
one of the big you know nat geo or discovery uh and you actually have a tv show you're
you're looking at the camera going 12 days of shooting per episode and the answer is yeah
when mythbusters first became successful jamie and i found ourselves in the position of having
the power of being the stars of a show that was successful and it's a weird kind of power because
you can call up the head of the network but you don't want to waste this time you don't want to
be like i need you you don't want to start using that power indiscriminately so the only thing that
we did with that power was we pushed our schedule out so we had more time to shoot because the more
time we had to shoot the better the stories were and yeah by the by the time we were done just 12
shooting days per episode at one point when we renegotiated the contract discovery said
we got to hand it to you guys because we were asking for less episodes per year discovering
like no one's ever asked to do less episodes per year and we're like no we want more time to make
less episodes because they'll make them better um all that being said not every episode took 12
days some of them took months to come to fruition lead balloon is one that took a year and a half to
find a factory that could roll lead thin enough for us uh uh a rocket car the three times we did
a rocket car there were so many pieces that were that were contingent on expensive pieces coming in
so we would work in a very bulleted fashion okay we're gonna work the first half of this week on
that on the uh rocket car episode and then we're gonna do the second half of the week on
the polishing door dungo so we would often oscillate big stories and little stories
exterior shooting stories with in-shot shooting stories so that we could have that room to move um
a good producer always has a plan b a plan c and even a plan d uh and our producers were the best
so we always had those those then there were times in which we would plan to do something and it
would fail so spectacularly what is the well lead balloon is is one in which we had two false starts
we had companies that agreed to roll the lead thin enough and two separate times those
companies broke their equipment the day before they were supposed to deliver the lead to us
so there were two separate times on lead balloon where we showed up monday ready to film an
episode and we had to start filming a completely different episode and again that's also where that
film experience that jamie and i had so much of really comes into play is like it's not just well
here's what i love about the problem solving under that kind of contingency um let's say i'm
making this car engine uh for a film the amount of detail i can add to this is effectively infinite
i could spend an infinite amount of time making this look perfect i could take every logo and
take a picture of a real engine and match the paint job on every single one but that would take
years and it would be the most beautiful thing you ever saw but i can get this to 90 percent in a day
and how i do that is by knowing what you are and aren't going to see knowing what your eye is
and isn't going to be drawn to and knowing what things to throw out of that process in order to
get it done in that right period of time and that mental process of constantly weighing your options
chucking some out and keeping some in order to again hit that mark of 5 pm delivery on set
i just love that mental process it feels so good to go through it it really does and like i said
film that's what film is all film commercial reality television all of those disciplines
are all about that that mental process um you guys i didn't expect such a deep dive this week
into my old job but i really appreciate it it has been um five years since we wrapped mythbusters uh
late october 2015. or was it early november i think it's i it's it's within a couple of weeks
of the november uh october november uh switchover uh back in 2015 so it's been five freaking years
um and i i really appreciate this time to talk about it your guys questions were awesome there
was at least three or four of these questions i have never heard before and i've spent much of
the last 20 years answering questions about mythbusters so that's a real achievement
thank you guys thank you tested patrons thank you everybody else for watching
stay safe take care of each other and i will see you as always next time