[Captions by Y Translator] In today's video,
we're putting a popular internet myth to the test,
to see if you can make a crystal
out of a hot charcoal and peanut butter.
[Music]
All right Calli, have you seen this video going around?
It has like 195 million views so far,
and it shows how you can turn a charcoal briquette
and some peanut butter into a clear crystal.
There's no way.
I don't know, but we've had like dozens,
if not hundreds of people ask me to see if this works.
So we are going to try this out.
Here's the basic idea.
Following the video and the instructions as closely as possible,
we're going to see
if we can replicate the results of turning a piece of charcoal into a crystal.
My goal is to replicate is exactly as possible
how they show this being done in the other video.
They also have some written instructions,
which don't really show anything more than what the video does,
but talk us through what equipment we've got,
and what we're going to be doing.
It's really just a charcoal briquette,
some peanut butter, and some ice.
Now, we've done everything we could to replicate as
closely as possible to what we saw in the video.
So in the video,
I think we were able to make out a K on the briquette.
So we've got a Kingsford charcoal briquette.
You couldn't see what brand of peanut butter they're using,
but it was smooth peanut butter in a fairly large jar,
so we've got that.
They used a metal bowl, we've got a metal bowl.
They used small metal tongs.
We've got small metal tongs.
I think we've got everything
about as close as we can get, so it's time to get started.
First step, let's get some charcoal burning.
We're going to make a little pile of charcoal.
We're going to get some burning,
and then we're going to try and find a briquette that looks
like it's just exactly
the same amount of burnt as the one in the video.
Okay.
No!
[Music]
So now, we're going to take a burning charcoal inside the house,
which don't take burning charcoal inside the house guys.
Carbon monoxide's a real thing.
The entire house already smells like burning charcoal you guys.
This is a terrible idea.
If you don't have good ventilation, well,
don't do this anyways,
but especially, don't do this in like a closed room.
That's not how you do it.
Not all the way.
But yeah, mostly.
A little more.
Little more.
We're gonna dump some on top.
That looks good.
Charcoal into the peanut butter.
Swirling it around.
I don't--
Yeah, this is--
Okay, that looks pretty well coated.
>> Okay. >> Into ice.
Okay, more ice on top, more ice on top.
More! More!
A little bit more.
Okay, that's good.
Now, we put it in the freezer.
Okay, now real quick.
We have to leave it in here for 24 hours.
Real quick.
Okay, wait for it.
We're just going to live stream the next 24 hours.
All right, we've let the peanut butter covered charcoal sit overnight.
Now, we need to rinse this off in a bowl of warm water.
There's the--
It's just charcoal.
Briquette.
But in the video,
there's like a layer of it .You kind of got to work through.
Oh, come on. Come on.
Wait.
I think see something.
What?
No way! No way.
What?
Guys, there's a crystal in there.
[Music]
Okay, we've got a couple more.
Let's try these.
Okay.
[Music]
What the--
What is that?
What the heck?
It's like a metallic crystal.
Has anybody else ever gotten this result before?
Checkout. What's that?
Yeah, what's this?
What's this?
Whoa!
Hang on.
Guys!
Oh my gosh.
I think it's a Pokemon.
Guys!
It's a Bulbasaur.
I made a Bulbasaur.
Look at that.
The metal, the Bulbasaur,
and the crystal are all equally real.
None of these worked.
In fact, that's not even crystal.
That's isomalt.
It's a sugar substitute.
This is completely edible.
Do you guys want to know why this doesn't work?
There's about a thousand reasons honestly.
But let's break it down for you.
So we did have
actual charcoal briquettes to put in the freezer,
but what we showed pulling out of the bowl,
and then putting in warm water,
and you saw the reveal.
We rubbed away some charcoal and like, oh,
there's crystal behind it.
We just took one of these pieces of isomalt
that was kind of shaped like crystal.
We took some charcoal powder, we mix it with some water,
some corn syrup,
and some peanut butter to give it a good consistency,
and then we just stuck it to the outside of our Bulbasaur,
this is a small piece of gallium,
and our isomalt crystal,
and we just formed it into a sort of a briquette shaped,
froze it, we had liquid nitrogen.
So we use that, but you could have just as
easily said it in the freezer for a couple hours.
We just froze it,
and we just spread peanut butter on it,
and we put it in a bowl of ice.
None of these were even close to real.
Let's take a look at the real ones,
and see how those are different.
We're doing a real test as well.
We want to see what happens if we don't fake this,
and try and get some real results.
So we're going to take three more charcoal briquettes
from our little barbecue bonfire in the backyard.
We're going to did those in peanut butter,
and try and coat them.
But as you saw,
the peanut butter doesn't actually coat that well,
so I think even that part was fake.
And then we're also going to see if we can microwave one.
Calli, why are we trying to microwave?
So I looked at several videos online.
Yes, there is a really really popular one,
but it doesn't actually show you
how you're heating up that charcoal briquette.
I saw multiple other videos
that say that your microwaving that briquette,
and so that's what I'm trying.
You think 90 minutes is enough?
That should do it.
Okay.
Sorry about your house, Grant.
All right.
So what's the difference between this one, and the last one?
This one's real.
We're not going to take it out and put a crystal
inside of it before--
Before the reveal.
Oh, that smells so bad.
Also, the microwave's smoking.
This can't be healthy.
And that was two minutes.
Can you see how much time is left?
Oh, so the video I watched.
This guy put his briquette in the microwave,
took it out, dumped it in the peanut butter,
and then said, must leave for a hundred minutes.
I'm going to take this out and dunk it in there,
and I'm going to pull it out in like an hour and a half.
Don't show that part.
Please show that part.
[Music]
Microwave briquette.
[Music]
The briquette that we left in longer,
that had most of the briquette was like turning gray,
and it was on fire little bit.
Like that's been dunked in a lot of peanut butter.
It's under the ice.
It's burning right through the peanut butter,
still like smoke coming up out through everything,
and I can hear it.
It's like boiling some of the ice away too, I think.
So, I don't know if that's smoke from the peanut butter,
or steam from the heat and ice.
But our microwave looks like it might be about to light on fire.
So I think it's time to take that charcoal out.
We are about to set off the fire alarm.
[Music]
It's going to be there a while.
Okay, so we have let the charcoal from the microwave sit
in the peanut butter for a hundred minutes.
Aha!
Turned into a crystal.
It turned into a crystal.
It turned into-- Ah that is--
That is a really--
I can get it. I know I can.
Aha.
Yep, seems right.
[Music]
You know what?
I'm gonna call that good enough.
All right.
Let's let that sit for 24 hours.
It's now been 24 hours.
It's time for the reveal.
All right, moment of truth.
This is the real one.
An actual charcoal that was hot, we put in peanut butter,
and then we froze overnight.
Now, we're going to see what's really on the inside.
If there's actually a crystal in here,
I am gonna laugh.
Guys!
Guys, look at this.
It's still a briquette.
A slightly burnt piece of charcoal?
Can I break it?
Nope, Nate get the hammer.
Guys, the truth.
Whole lot of charcoal inside that charcoal.
Nothing else.
Our three briquettes at different temperatures.
So these were all on fire.
We let that fire burn out.
One was a low heat,
one was a medium, one was high,
and then this is our--
Microwaved.
And then left in the peanut butter
for a hundred minutes just to be safe.
Oh, look.
It's a charcoal briquette.
You better break it just to be safe.
There's the inside.
It's charcoal.
Here, try your medium one just in case.
Oh look, another charcoal briquette.
What?
Please.
Yay, more charcoal.
Shocker.
What about the one that was like--
Super heated.
Most of it was burning.
So first off,
you can see the scorch marks from when we dropped it
in the peanut butter.
>> Again. >> What?
No crystal inside?
All right, my microwave one,
but I followed all of the instructions correctly.
What's this?
Nate, Nate!
Is it charcoal?
>> It's charcoal. >> No way.
Oh look, a charcoal briquette.
Guys, you can't make crystals out of charcoal
and peanut butter.
Crystals are formed from volcanic activity,
different kinds of rocks are slowly cooling down,
often under massive amounts of pressure,
and I say slow.
I mean like it usually takes thousands of years
for good crystals to form.
You can get those kits in the store that you
can make chemical crystals over a couple of weeks.
But again,
that's a couple of weeks with chemicals,
that's different.
There are ways you can do it even faster than that.
Sometimes, I think Grant
has done somewhere he boiled off all the water in a pot,
and you are left with a bunch of crystals growing in there.
That looks pretty cool.
Yeah.
But like this doesn't even have an evaporation of water to leave
behind a residue
that's going to form into a crystal.
That's something else we should talk about.
Coal and charcoal, not the same thing.
Calli, what is coal?
So coal is actually the mineral anthracite,
and what that basically is is it's a mineral
composed of carbon.
It takes millions of years to make,
a lot of pressure,
and it's basically the breakdown of plant remains.
Whereas what we've been using, the charcoal briquettes,
charcoal is a sometimes called coal
because it kind of resembles it
and is used in similar ways when you burn it.
But charcoal is just wood or other similar plant material
that's been burned in the absence of oxygen.
It's something that you can make pretty easily yourself,
and happens pretty much every time you have a campfire.
You make a fire,
and then there's like the black stuff
at the bottom that is still just in lump shape.
That's just charcoal.
And the briquettes are charcoal that's been made,
and then broken up into like dust,
and then compress down into just the right shape,
with maybe a little bit of other chemicals
in to make it burn a little bit better.
At least, with this kind that we're using.
Not the same thing as coal,
and doesn't turn into crystals under this situation,
or possibly any situation.
So pretty much everything about this is just 100% nonsense.
And I think honestly,
the people making the video knew that it was 100% nonsense.
I don't think they are actually trying to convince anyone.
Well, they were trying to convince people it was real.
I don't think they thought it was real when they faked it,
because they definitely faked it.
They made a crystal.
We made a Bulbasaur.
We win.
Bulbasaur.
Can you make Pokemon?
Guys, that's not all,
we've always got more for you to see.
If you hit this box up at the top,
it will take you to our latest video.
The box at the bottom will take you to
what YouTube thinks you should be watching next.
Go ahead and hit this bomb in the middle.
It'll subscribe to the channel
so you never miss out on the fun.
Don't forget to ring that bell,
and we'll see you in the next one.
Talk to you then.