I miss Mythbusters so much.
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It's amazing to me that Discovery hasn't tried to bring Mythbusters back. Instead they double down on Ancient Aliens and Pawnstars garbage.
I'm pretty sure they did try to bring it back but it wasn't as popular because it wasn't Adam and Jamie
Adam and Jamie were awesome, but I'm certain there are some passionate makers or something out there who could fill the role. It wouldn't be the same, but it could be it's own thing. Whoever the new hosts were must have just been the wrong casting, but also I don't know how much Discovery cared because I didn't know about it and I was a huge Mythbusters fan. I guess I just didn't pay attention because Discovery had already killed everything that was worth paying attention to them for by that point.
It's been a while since I watched them but I recall feeling like the new hosts weren't genuine. It felt more like a YouTube reaction video than an episode of Mythbusters.
Mythbusters fundamentally needs to capture the joy of engineering more than the joy of explosions. (Not that those aren’t fun too.)
I remember during the run of Mythbusters either Discovery or History or one of those tried to launch another show to cash in on Mythbusters' success, it was called Smash Lab, and it's clear the creation of this show involved a pie chart titled "Elements of Mythbusters by screen time" and there was one pie wedge labelled "explosions." It didn't last long IIRC.
William Osman and Michael Reeves + the other youtubers
That would mean Failed Mythbuster Allen Pan™ could redeem himself
They did try to bring it back, but it was really a show that needed its core cast to be what it was.
If you need you fix Adam savage is very active on YouTube and is just a wonder human being. It’s not MythBusters but Adam was a light during Covid and someone I put on regularly on YouTube.
Yeah, I watch him. It's not Mythbusters, but it's still entertaining usually, even when he's doing the most boring things. It really shows how good he was as an entertainer.
Quoth Adam Savage: "It's not 'my experiment failed', it's 'my experiment yielded data!'"
The Elephant and Mice episode was so wild, because if I remember correctly, the elephant didn't act afraid of the mouse, it acted afraid it would step on and harm the mouse; as if the elephant had a basic understanding and concern for the wellbeing of another creature conspicuously lacking in many human beasts
Yep. Elephants are wonderfully kind creatures. With my very limited understanding of elephant body language, it didn't look like an 'oh no, im scared' it was more 'oh hey little guy, didn't see ya there. ill get outta your way.'
Just smart as hell. This video makes me wonder if elephants legit have a sense of humor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VOvEFHDOaU
Animal behavior can be difficult to interpret (and even when descriptions come from experts, I often find myself asking "yeah, but how do we really know that?"), but this looks very close to being like someone who's known for lighthearted pranks.
Being able to separate your ego and desire to be right from the learning process is such an important skill.
I remember being stubborn, being proved wrong, continuing to be stubborn, and being proved wrong even harder, in front of others.
It's such a pathetic and embarrassing feeling to be that wrong.
I don't want to be wrong a moment longer than I need to be.
There's no shame in being corrected, but there is in holding on to shit ideas.
This is the right attitude more people should have. But all too often, when people are proven wrong, they genuinely believe that it must be the other person/group, because they cannot accept the emotional consequences of being wrong.
I know that I’ve had a hard time learning this because growing up I was never held to account for my actions on an emotional level. It was the 80s and 90s, and adults at that time would either shrug it off, or go straight to the nuclear punishment of corporal punishment. Never once would they sit down and talk to you about why what you did was wrong and how to do it better next time. I, anecdotally, believe that a lot of genx suffer this same way. They simply haven’t learned that there is a better way.
Or at least use classical conditioning to associate the I'm wrong feeling with the impending new cool facts feeling.
For anyone missing the show, there was a wonderful project called Streamlined Mythbusters where fans edited each episode down to remove the filler, pre and post ad recaps, etc. They usually also would reorder things so each individual myth was seld contained.
It's wonderful, but some episodes legitimately got cut down to be 16 minutes long with no real content loss, which can be kind of jarring.
There is also Smyths, which is the same thing.
Unfortunately Mythbusters edits have a tendency to get pulled from the typical video sharing sites rather quickly. I wish someone would make a torrent of the entire series edited this way, and call it a day.
This is why most skepticism based programs don't work, and Mythbusters did.
They didn't try to be smug about it, they didn't belittle people who believed in the myths, they never brought religion and politics into it, and the biggest pitfall they avoided: They never pretended that the "science was settled" and that they "already knew everything", they simply did the research and went where the data took them.
Too many skepticism based programs seem to think the scientific method is running into a church, yelling "FAKE!", and then running outside to hurl insults at passersby.
Mythbusters didn't do that, they skipped the dogma and went straight to the science.
Being excited about being wrong because either way it's information
This literally is the basis of science that I think a lot of people misunderstand. Science doesn't prove anything conclusively. What scientists try to do is disprove the leading theory and when they can't, it adds to the pile of evidence that increases the likelyhood of the leading theory being correct. Even things that we're very, very, very sure are correct are still like 99.99999999999...% confirmed.
A good example that's often used to show how it's more important to try to disprove a theory rather than trying to prove it is the existence of black swans. It was long thought that all swans were white and every time someone saw a white swan, that idea was reinforced. But when someone actually went out of their way to go looking for a black swan, they found a bunch of them!
It doesn't matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON'T CHASE YOU.
I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn't risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.
What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12' long from tip to tail and probably 2' in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn't attack me on land either - but not that confident.
but not that confident.
That's how you bust myths!
Sometimes they called stuff busted because they couldn't personally do it though, even though the myth involved elite athletics. I was pretty stoked when they brought in an actual ninja to test if ninjas can grab arrows out of the air. The guy actually did catch some arrows, which was quite amazing.
Yeah... There are many pitfalls to doing a Skepticism based program, sadly one of the few Mythbusters DIDN'T avoid was "Well I can't personally do it, so it's impossible for everyone!"
Remember kids: The difference between science and screwing around is writing things down.
The last comments in the image are exactly right.
It bothers me when I screw up and someone says "I fixed that for you" without explaining how I screwed things up, or how they fixed it.
If I'm wrong, I get it. I'm not always right, nobody can be right 100% of the time, IMO, that's impossible. But when I'm wrong, let me learn so I can avoid being wrong in the same way twice.
IMO, schools have failed us, they teach us what we should know but don't encourage us to always be curious and always be learning. It's okay to make mistakes, and it's okay to be wrong. What's not okay is never learning from your mistakes, and being so stubborn that when you are wrong, you double down on being wrong instead of seeking more information so you can be correct next time.
Being wrong is always condemned. You get low grades, you fail and get held back in some cases.... It's been rare that any teacher I've ever had would review anything from a test after its over. A very small number went back and said "a lot of people had trouble with x question from the test, here's the answer and this is why it's the correct answer". IMO, that should be way more common.... Review the test after its over and let the class know that low marks are not the end, they're a wonderful beginning to learning. If you know what you don't know and you have even the smallest amount of ability and willingness to improve, with the addition of opportunities to learn that, then you will always succeed.
Be successful. Get a bunch of shit wrong.
Ive told people this many times, we need to create more room for failure. From school, to jobs, to building businesses, to loans, to health.
If we can try something because if we fail we can try something else, we would find a hell of a lot more to care about in this world.
And the most important thing we would care more about is ourselves
I loved their episode where they made a led balloon.
Surprise origami!
I would say escaping from quick sand and escaping from an alligator chasing me were two major concerns in my childhood. LoL, global climate change was maybe not even on the list, for which I will curse the petroleum industry.
It make me really sad when I learned that James and Adam were not friend.
James said their relationship doesn't really extend beyond the show.
That's fine and I think its pretty much the perfect example of a solid professional relationship (no need to be buddies or "like a family") and what greatness can be achieved when you work with same endgame in mind. They may have disagreed plenty but only because they wanted to achieve the best outcomes possible.
While they are not friends, if you follow Adam on youtube, you'll realize there is a huge amount of mutual respect between the two, even to this day.
Boom De Yada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0
(for some nostalgic Discovery vibes)
My favorite is the fan mounted to the boat blowing the sail causing the boat to move. I mean there are a shitload more experiments in fun episodes that are far better and more entertaining, but this one is my favorite because it flies in the face of logic. It shouldn’t work. My brain rejects the possibility. But physics and fluid flow work otherwise and I found it pointlessly infuriating only because I’d been unassailable in my confidence that it couldn’t possibly work. Yet there it is with a perfectly logical explanation. I still find it irritating even if I accept the reality of it. (Episode 165 if anyone’s wondering)
That said, I still follow Adam on various platforms. That enthusiasm and joy of discovery is all still there, along with some maturity and some life observations. Literally the only celebrity figure I follow.
My fav was if you could shoot someone in water. Turns out that just 3 ft. of water was enough to stop a 50 cal! So as great of a film as Saving Private Ryan was, the opening scene where bullets wiz thru the sea killing soldiers was pure fiction.
My favorite is planes on a treadmill.
Mostly because fans still argue about it and it’s hit the point they had to ban PoaT comments.
Which is insane as it’s not that difficult to understand. When a plane is on the ground, its gear/wheels will roll at ground speed, but the wings provide lift at airspeed.
If the ground is being moved under the plane (as on a treadmill,) the wheels will just roll faster.
Sure they’re not zero friction and some of that needs to be overcome; but this is something encountered on a daily basis all across the world- or rather, the opposite.
If the wind is coming from ahead, its airspeed is increased and the plane needs a lower ground speed to get into the air where if the wind is coming from behind, then they need more.
(This is why carriers set course into the wind when launching jets,)
At no point is ground speed and airspeed necessarily the same (i suppose you could have a calm day, but most days, the wind is blowing at least some.)
MythBusters will always and forever be a treasure.
I still wanted them to see how much dynamite it would take to remove a dead whale.
Sometimes there's a twitch stream of random mythbusters episodes. It's so fun.
I wish they came back :/
"Failure is always an option."
I wish more people in general would be OK with being wrong. Noone ever learned something new without knowing they'd been wrong
Kind of related but there was a video on StarTalk a couple days ago on NGT rebutting a Joe Rogan interview with Terrence Howard. It's was joyous watching a breakdown in how science works while very politely calling TH an absolute moron.