Me And The Mythbusters

I recent­ly sub­mit­ted a ques­tion to the Freako­nom­ics guys for an inter­view with the Myth­Busters.

They picked my ques­tion as the first one!

Here’s my ques­tion and their answer:

Me: Could you describe the brain­storm­ing process that goes into an episode? How far in advance do you begin plan­ning? Who sits in dur­ing those meet­ings?

ADAM: The usu­al crowd at a brain­storm­ing ses­sion is me, Jamie, Alice Dal­low (our pro­duc­er), and whichev­er researcher is doing the seg­ment we’re work­ing on — either Den­nis Kwon or Eric Haven. We also have an on-the-ground exec­u­tive pro­duc­er dur­ing an offi­cial “sto­ry meet­ing.” We usu­al­ly have one or maybe two of them before shoot­ing a myth, but dis­cus­sions about sto­ries can hap­pen all over the place, and at any time.

Often, we’ll ask for cer­tain para­me­ters as far as loca­tions or mate­ri­als, and as we dis­cov­er what’s pos­si­ble or not pos­si­ble, we’ll hone it down to what we’re actu­al­ly going to do. The show’s researchers are fan­tas­tic about find­ing the weird­est of things and experts, and Alice is bril­liant at keep­ing us on track. The dis­cus­sions can be like herd­ing cats — there’s a rib­ald, fun­ny atmos­phere, and we’ll range very far from the top­ic at hand.

Plan­ning can take any­where from a month to a day or two, depend­ing on the sched­ule. We’ve had crit­i­cal loca­tions fall through at the last minute, and need­ed to turn 180 degrees on a few hours’ notice. We’ll also flag dif­fi­cult sto­ries as far in advance as we think nec­es­sary. Some things, like get­ting per­mis­sion to film at Giants Sta­di­um for the Jim­my Hof­fa sto­ry, have tak­en the bet­ter part of a year to work out.

Then there’s the dis­cus­sions that Jamie and I have. We’ll often take a dif­fi­cult prob­lem home, think about it overnight, and maybe dis­cuss the prob­lems we see in it while dri­ving to a loca­tion. We also play devil’s advo­cate with each oth­er — if one of us has a good idea, the oth­er will poke as many holes in it as pos­si­ble, and in this way we try our best to shake out any prob­lems before we hit them.

JAMIE: This is, believe it or not, the most fun we have on the show. There is no under­es­ti­mat­ing the thrill of a big cat­a­stro­phe or explo­sion; but if you real­ly want to know what gets us going, it’s the brain­storm­ing. Once a top­ic has passed muster, some basic research has been done by our research team, and we are down to nut­ting it out, Adam and I swing into action — sort of. Usu­al­ly we go home first and think about it overnight, and then come in burst­ing with ideas. We set up in front of a dry erase board, and lay out any solu­tions we came up with by our­selves.

Amaz­ing­ly, as much as we are of dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ments, we quick­ly spot the best solu­tions and chip in to flesh the approach out. It becomes like play­ing Ping-Pong with ideas. Some­times it gets so intense that there is no time to com­plete sen­tences; it becomes a bunch of ges­tic­u­la­tions, some pieces of words or phras­es, and then, when we come out on the oth­er end, the approach is fleshed out. We call it the “Myth­Busters Mind­meld.” To any­one lis­ten­ing, it is gib­ber­ish, but it allows us to plow through a huge amount of design­ing in no time (which is what we have a lot of on the show).

Read the rest of the inter­view.