MythBusters (Part 1)

The MythBusters are in the house. In Part 1, Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to discuss experiments, physics, urban legends and more.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Actually, you might have other personal astrophysicists. I pretend I'm your personal astrophysicist. I also serve as director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. And that those chuckles on the other side was none other than Chuck Nice. That's right. Chuck, welcome back as co-host. Thank you. Today's show is on the Mythbusters. We all know and love the Mythbusters. Who doesn't love the Mythbusters? They both came through town and I had them in my office and we chatted about like the genesis of their show and what were they thinking? Do you still have an office? Did they blow it up? Did they blow up your office? Because they blow up everything.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they touch stuff and break it and, you know, it's been a staple on the Discovery Channel for like 10 years. Yeah, very successful show. Wow, you know, how many shows last 10 years? Very few. Very few, very few. None of the shows I've...

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry about that Chuck. Exactly. All my pain! So, as you may know, they use the scientific method, basically, to test or validate or debunk myths, rumors, urban legends, certain scenes in movies that you say, "Could that have happened?" You know, internet videos that go viral, news stories. Yeah. This is what they do. It's a brilliant show. A brilliant show. Let's find out just how it all began. Let's check it out.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What were you guys thinking when you started this show? Actually, we were hired talent at the beginning. We had nothing to do with the pitch for Mythbusters. I won't say that we had nothing to do with the creation. So you were pretty faces, is what you're saying?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Well, it was just a job, you know, we gotta pay the rent.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Somebody contacted Jamie, said, "Do you want to do this show called Mythbusters?"

• 2:06Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "Like, that's ever gonna happen." But just as a matter of principle, I went ahead and tried it because you gotta try things, or you're never gonna-

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tried, you mean, screen test, or you tried it?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Well, actually, yeah, so he called me up and said, "Listen, I got this call from Discovery about this thing. I don't think I could do it on my own, but you're a ham, so you wanna shoot a demo reel together?"

• 2:23Speaker 01

  I had to think of who's a ham that I know, but also somebody that's good at doing what we do, because it wasn't just about talking, it was about replicating urban legends. And the fact that we were guys that build things was part of this premise, that we would actually replicate these things.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you become a participant in the test, not just an observer of something, some other effort?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Exactly, and in terms of, you know, being freelancers, where we're always trying to look at what the next avenue is, I had actually just bought a laptop, the first power book that you could edit digital video on, and I was teaching myself-

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way back in the day.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Way back, the Pismo, and I was teaching myself digital video editing. And so when Jamie called, I had all the equipment necessary, and we shot what ended up being a 14-minute demo reel, and they ended up kind of building the backbone of the show off of that demo.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got to shape the profile of the show based on how you expressed your talents?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  No one told us that we had done that for several years.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and you also have to understand a little bit of background. Adam and I, we're not exactly friends, but in fact, we don't get along very well at all.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  In 21 years, we've never had dinner alone together.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  But we have common interests, and I would call Adam up and, "Come down and check this out." I'm tinkering in the shop on the weekend.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  We're professionally interested in what each other was doing.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and one of those cases prior to this, for example, was I had gotten these cordless drills. At that time, they were new, they were really powerful.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NASA technology, you might add.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, 24-volt, heavy-duty cordless drills.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High torque.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I did what anyone would do.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Well, wait, wait, wait, he calls me up, and he goes, "What are you doing?" I haven't heard from him in like, four months. And I said, "I'm having breakfast with my kids." And he goes, "Well, I'm down at the shop, and I just built something, and I'm about to strap it on. You wanna come check it out?"

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I strapped them on to some roller blades with a little bevel gear, kind of a reduction going right into one of the wheels, and it had triggers, and I was riding around in the shop with powered skates.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were being the kid.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Well, I got this shop where I can build anything, so I call Adam up, and he comes down, and I'm like jerking all out, trying to not get killed on these things.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like an early Tony Stark.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trying to get the bugs out of the Iron Man suit.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. I'm convinced that that sequence in Iron Man is actually semi-inspired by us.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was in the habit of doing these things periodically, but I call Adam up when we got this call from a production company and he comes down and we filmed this thing.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  We actually lit something on fire and ran away from it.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it turned out to be what the show was.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're being kids who haven't grown up. You're setting stuff on fire. You're putting rockets on your skateboards.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  And it was somewhere in the, like, the second season, we realized, wow, actually, the structure of this show works best when we are having the most fun.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  We don't see any reason to make that line between kids and adults and play. Just because you look at a kid playing and you figure they're just doing it because they're having fun, but they're understanding their world through these little adventures that they're having, these little experiments. It's often very nonlinear, but they're building a foundation of understanding of the world. And there's not really that much difference as far as adults. A lot of scientists go in this linear direction and there are times that that's the way to do things and that's very productive, but a lot of the most important discoveries that have been made have been off to the side on some tangent.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  We say this at the end of our touring show, that someone once said that the phrase that typifies real discovery is not eureka, but, oh, that's funny.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was Isaac Asimov, who said

• 5:46Speaker 02

  That's funny.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You should really pay attention to when a scientist says, "That's odd."

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crazy dudes. That was Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the two Mythbusters.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Mythbusters. You know what I found really strange is that these guys are living in a real-world Acme Labs. They're like Wile E. Coyote, making rocket skates and blowing stuff up.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I don't know if they ever used an anvil for anything.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, they, you know, their background is in special effects, preparing special effects for movies. You know what I just learned recently? There's a difference between special effects and visual effects.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I know the difference. I'm still a newbie in this.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  All right.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But special effects are mechanical models that you film in a way that look real. And visual effects, you do it all on a computer.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  On a computer.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So they're old school.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, make something. Yeah, yeah. Go go in the lab and make that happen. And what what intrigues me is they know and they understand that if you play, you're doing science. If you play without rules,

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  just break something, try something. And kids do this all the time.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you got how many you I lost track. Six kids?

• 6:59Speaker 03

  It feels like six.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you allow them to do experiments in your house?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Believe it or not, yes, I do. As a matter of fact, my son and I, uh,

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How old?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Uh, my son is eight.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  And

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good age, good age.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Good age. The last experiment we did was, uh, we grew crystals. And, uh, he kept a

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crystal meth?

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Starting them early, Chuck.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Breaking Bad, Kenny style.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Nickelodeon.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Nickelodeon version of Breaking Bad.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, crystals are great. What kind of crystal did you grow?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Um, I'm gonna be honest, I don't know.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, what, what? I'll hook you up later. I'll tell you. At least grow grow sugar crystals, for goodness sake. Then you could eat it, eat your eat your experiment.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  That would have been, but no, uh, it comes in a little package, but the idea was to get him, uh, to to keep a log and to chart the progress.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think one of the great takeaways of Mythbusters is that it's trained you to think more deeply about things that happen in front of you.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And take good data. When we come back, more of StarTalk's interview with the Mythbusters.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil grass Tyson. Co-host today, Chuck Nice.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Thank you, sir. Yes, I am.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guy follow you, by the way.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't follow that many people. I just want you to know.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Well, I'm I feel honored.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're on the list.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, today we're talking about the Mythbusters. They're practically legendary at this point.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, without a doubt.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The two of them together. And they visited New York. They got them in my office and we just talked for like an hour.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Chopped it up for a while.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chopped. So let's find out what their background is and how they got into this and what... It's all about special effects which triggered their interest in this entire career that they've had for themselves. Adam, how many films have you worked on?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  I guess about a dozen.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your most known film among that dozen?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Star Wars, Episodes 1 and 2, A.I.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The original 1 and 2.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. That was 10 when those came out.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were 10 when they...

• 9:12Speaker 02

  No, they're so cute, I pinched your cheek. Oh, they're so cute. No, I worked on Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Space Cowboys, I helped build the space shuttle for that movie.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have some trivia for you for Space Cowboys. What STS shuttle mission did they fly on?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Oh, God, I don't know.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  200.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Oh, that's really late.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was very late and very wishful thinking of how long the shuttle was last. Because where did it go and went to only like 134, I think.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  And considering that the Gravity Shuttle mission was 158.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, that's right, in the film Gravity. So they're all taking the shuttles beyond reality. That's how you know how unreal they can be.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  NASA supplied us with all these binders of shuttle mission payload bay setups. And the payload bay was my personal job. And so every piece of equipment in the Space Cowboys shuttle bay is from a real shuttle mission. It's just from like 30 all at once, which astronauts look at that and they laugh.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because the asynchrony of it gives it away.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  And here's a secret about film space stuff, which is that we looked all over and did tons of camera tests to find proper gold foil that exposed and looked right to the gold foil they use on NASA missions. It turns out it's a Rolo wrapper.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Yep. So ILM, when we did it and later on at Mythbusters...

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Industrial Light and Magic?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And later on, when we did our Moon Landing Hoax episode on Mythbusters, we bought cases of Rolos and took off the wrappers and used those for our gold foil.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Jamie, how about you?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Somewhere's around 800 commercials and a couple dozen feature films.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Commercials?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And the feature films, arachnophobia, Naked Lunch, and Robocop.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the era of mechanical models. We're not talking about CGI here.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it almost doesn't exist.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that you're the last wave of who could do that.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even through the course of our experience with them, they started out with stuff like arachnophobia were cable driven. Those spiders and arachnophobia had an organ grinder kind of a device that had a stack of cams and levers, each one pulled on a specific cable that went into the spider.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And Jamie designed that, right?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, each of those spiders would have maybe 30 little axes of movement in its legs and so on.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The funny thing, when you design special effects like that, the movie then has a portfolio of artifacts left over from it. Nowadays, there's nothing.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  And it's funny, when you tour through Industrial Light Magic now, that's all they have is all those practical models, but they're growing more and more distant.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What commercials?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  You name it, any kind of soft drink or car.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Or beer.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Cereal.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Jamie did all the little penny commercials for Nike.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  For Nike.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Anthony Hardaway.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, yeah, they might be as simple as whore shots, you know, if you're pouring beer or soda.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Oh, here's a classic that Jamie worked on. Do you remember the York Peppermint Patty commercial where the Peppermint Patty goes, "Get the sensation" and you see it break? Jamie built that and he's got it on his desk.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  It's about eight inches in diameter.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  All the Hershey's Kiss ads where they're dancing around and that was the kind of thing that we would do, all the way up to the more advanced puppets. And towards the end of that run, the puppets had gone from cable controlled things to very sophisticated robotic kinds of things. One of my favorites that I think actually it was done while Mythbusters was happening was the, a 7-Up commercial where I had to take a 7-Up machine and put tank treads on it and it had to fire soda cans out the slot where you normally pick them up, so.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  The idea was 7-Up to bring the soda to you.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this machine had electric car motors in it and these big tank treads and it was all radio controlled and it would hold a...

• 12:41Speaker 02

  A magazine of about a dozen cans.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  It was like a 12-pack of 7-Up cans that would load in and you press a button and they would come out that slot about, I got kind of carried away, they would come out about 400 miles an hour.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So you tested it against the side of the building we were working in and it sounded like we were under mortar fire and then we realized we were.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's not only the velocity of the can. It's 12 ounces. There's the fact that the can is under pressure.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now you explode a can under pressure on impact.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  The beautiful thing was what was left of the can after it hit the wall was like a piece of tin foil. It was perfectly flat.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that thing was lethal.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boys and their toys.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Yes, tell me about it.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the can coming out, oh, 100 miles an hour wasn't fast enough.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need more power. How about 400 miles an hour?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. I just love the fact that he turned a 7-Up machine into Tiananmen Square.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it's interesting. You never know what your background will bring into a future.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into how you might capitalize on that later because here's all their background that nobody's using anymore. Yet they're still sort of rolled it into their current creativity, how to devise the experiments that they test.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how they, uh, so that I'm, it's a, it's a happy story.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  It really is. And you know, one of the cool things there is you get to see how many applications, real life applications, science has.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, who would think that, you know, here you are studying these, uh, laws and properties in school.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In school.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And then you have a job where they all actually come into play into real life on an everyday basis.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, uh, when I was tweeting during the Super Bowl, I, my opening tweet was, "Football, the greatest expression of the laws of physics in the universe." Spin stabilized projectile. Momentum transfer. Energy. Yeah, so physics is everywhere. We've got another clip of these guys in this segment here where we talked about some sort of unexpected limits they came up against when they first started out as Mythbusters. Alligators in the sewers. Is that a Mythbuster-able thing?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Well.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  It was on our list at the very beginning, as obvious as it is. One thing was New York wanted no part of us investigating that here.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you might actually find.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Well, and then we started to really look like, well, how would we do it? So the way we'd want to test that is go into New York sewers and assemble the same conditions that we find down there and see if you can raise an alligator in those conditions.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be, okay.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  And that's animal cruelty.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, you're very potentially killing an alligator to do that.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or you could be nourishing it with some kind of sewage. That could turn into a super alligator.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is part of the legend, right?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  A teenage mutant ninja alligator.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, teenage mutant ninja alligator. So animal cruelty.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  That's the thing where, you know, it's like, we're never gonna put a poodle in a microwave. As funny as it is to threaten to, and actually on our season one, we were doing promos and we said, we've got to tease this, so we got a poodle and we put it on top of a microwave and Jamie goes, "Don't you want the treat in there? Go get that treat." And we got all sorts of crap for that.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, people are funny about that stuff. I remember before this, in FX, doing commercials. Some pizza commercial where they had garlic puppet that gets chopped and burned and hacked and we got hate mail from the public and had canceled it.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was violence and effigy.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Vegetable killers.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  It's a puppet and it's garlic.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's odd that there you are chopping up a garlic puppet and getting mail about it. Yet nations go to war every day and actual human beings get cut up and shot.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're getting mail on a garlic puppet.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Oh my God. So we're idiots. We are idiots, because that is, what a salient point. People are dying every day at the hands of other people, but you're concerned about a puppet.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Made of garlic.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Made of garlic. You know what I mean? Like, I can see it now. Sarah McLachlan comes out. "Hi, I'm Sarah McLachlan. Do you know a puppet that's being abused in the arms of an angel?" "Hi, I'm Jim Henson's ghost. Please stop this carnage against the puppets." It's ridiculous.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, people got their issues. That's what it is.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the point is, the Mythbusters, they collect all these urban legends and see if they can work. What I found interesting is, they're smart enough to know that sometimes you can't do the experiment in situ.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the idea, even though they didn't follow through on it, that they might create a sewer environment.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a controlled lab, and then you can actually follow through on how and when and where that would happen.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody wants an alligator in the sewer. I'm certain of it.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  And you know what? That's one of my favorite urban legends. There is. Every time I'm waiting for the subway, I'm just somewhat hopeful that a giant albino alligator will show up instead of the N train.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An albino alligator?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know that the, the, you know why we fear reptiles?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Why?

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's been interestingly hypothesized.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Why?

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because back before the dinosaurs went extinct, our mammal ancestors were running underfoot trying to avoid becoming their, their lunch, their hors d'oeuvres. And so they were reptiles.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so deep within our DNA, we fear reptiles. And all the old B movie aliens?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were reptiles.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  And here all this time, I thought it was because they were icky.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more StarTalk Radio's interview with the Mythbusters.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Radio. Your astrophysicist here, Neil Tyson. Jack?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice with me.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're talking about the Mythbusters.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Talking about the Myth, you know, but before we get back into it, you were talking about, and I was thinking about this, how reptiles, and I was thinking, wow, that is fascinating, because everyone has a visceral fear of reptiles.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we think it dates all the way back to when we were running away from T-Rex, basically, 65 million years ago. Our mammal ancestors, deep within our DNA code, is a fear of reptiles.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and look at all the B movies that, and even in Star Trek.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Even in Star Trek.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The famous Gorn.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a reptile, if there ever was one.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So it's just fun to think about that.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  That is.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know who checks a lot of this is snopes.com. Have you ever gone there?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, just go and hang out, you know, tell other people about it. They report on whether any of these urban legends are true or not.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the poodle in the oven, that's the classicest case of an urban legend. And they say, no, of course it's not true, but it tells us that people fear technology that they don't understand.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  That makes sense. Yeah.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So I got another clip with the Mythbusters and we talk about how special effects that they've worked on creates the illusion of reality, but the Mythbusters do the opposite. Let's find out.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  The thing about special effects is that you're allowed to make something look like it is doing that without actually doing that.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  With Mythbusters, we have to do the opposite.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gotta be, it's gotta be real.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Real.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that, otherwise we'll call you out on it.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  You know, in television, sometimes you have to shoot things out of order. And occasionally with the location or some sort of scheduling problem, we'll have to shoot a sequence that's gonna happen before a sequence that we're shooting subsequently. And in those cases, we'll only do that if we're really sure about what the result of an experiment's gonna be. And every time we do that, we get screwed. The experiment doesn't turn out the way we expect. And so we have learned, never put our eggs in one basket like that. Never count on a specific result.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a shadow length checker. I know if you've done something before that should have been after.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your shadows don't lie. And usually you're not thinking of your shadow.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a documentary once. It showed scenes in Africa and there was a thunderstorm in the background. And I noticed that the thunder and the lightning were happening simultaneously.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I said, what made you decide to do that? I wasn't criticizing it. I just wanted to know, at what point do you say, I'm gonna fake this?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it looked like he was a little embarrassed. Oh, Dr. Tyson, you got me on that one. They showed the actual footage and it was dissonant, you know, where the...

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Right. Actually put your attention on the wrong thing.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was distracting.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  We had this with one of our first giant explosions. We blew up a cement truck with 800 pounds of...

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You blew up a cement truck?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Because we could.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  The myth is that you could clean out a dirty cement truck with a stick of dynamite. And it actually turns out that that's true. You actually can more easily remove cement from the inside of a cement truck with dynamite.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a crusty thing that is on the inside and it's brittle and it falls off from the

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it basically cracks and then it comes and it's like a self-cleaning oven.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So we decided to take this to the nth degree and we filled a cement truck full of dried cement and then we blew it up with Amfo and we were a mile and a half across a body of water from the explosion and the explosion took eight seconds to actually reach us. We could watch the pressure wave coming across the water towards us and hit us in the chest and the cameraman who had been instructed, the show's about Adam and Jamie, we have other cameras covering the explosion, focus on them. He did not turn around and get us. So the shot that you see in the show of us jumping, totally fake.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, but you knew it did happen.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we were there and we did jump. We just, the cameraman didn't get us.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it took so long.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  They asked us to do it again.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can't blow up another

• 22:26Speaker 02

  We can't blow up another cement truck, no.

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do-over. By the way, people forget to notice that at rocket launches because the nearest location at Cape Penavril is about three miles away.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But this is Florida, so there's a lot of marshy, wet areas. So you see the shuttle launch, you don't hear anything. And as the sound moves, you see birds starting to rise up out of the marsh and then you see the ripple along the thing and then you hear, but people are just looking up like that. You have to know to look around.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And to catch the rest of it.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  And it's a lovely thing, that delay.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is why a thousand people got injured in Chelyabinsk, Russia. That's why. Because the asteroid that blew up over that town was brighter than the sun.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In early morning during their breakfast. It was an air blast and so light is beaming through their breakfast window.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  They all look out the window.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Steven Spielberg, Alien style, right?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so they say, hmm, what is that?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  (laughing)

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they all walk up to the window.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Note to

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bam!

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then the shockwave hits and all the glass in the entire city shatters into people's faces.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Ah, it's a good note. If the sun comes out at night, don't look out the window.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And find out whatever.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Open the door! The door is perfectly fine.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  See now, if that had been Compton, nobody would have gone to the window. Cause when you see a bright light shining in your window in Compton, you know it's the police.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that where you live? I don't know.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so they, again, Pete, they like blowing stuff up. And who would have thought this about cement trucks? My goodness.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, to me, you could just tap it on the outside to crack it or something.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  How about that?

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then do you still have a truck when it's done? And therefore, of what use is this activity to clean out the truck? If you don't have a truck? Don't even understand.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyhow, when we come back with my interview with the Mythbusters, we just find out more about specific tests that they've done. What's the most expensive one, for example? I want to find out.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  I can't, if the cement truck isn't up there, I can't even imagine.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. Chuck Nice with me.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mythbusters are crazy guys.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  I love these guys.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mythbusters are Adam Savage and Jamie Hyman. I had them in my office. So there. But I had to cordon off all the stuff in my office, because no telling what, they'd be grabbing stuff.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  And breaking things and blowing things up and putting dynamite in your desk.

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But at all, at all times, they're testing an idea that someone had put out there. This isn't, they're not just wanton, crazy people. Right. There's, someone thinks this is true, let's test it. The art of the test. And what, in my office, I ask them, what's the most expensive episode of Mythbusters that they ever conducted?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  The third time we revisited the rocket car. It's an original Darwin Award myth where a guy strapped a military genesis to take off rocket to his Impala and supposedly flew a mile through the air and bedded into a mountain and they pulled his teeth out of the wreckage to identify him. That was actually our very first episode.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you wanted to redo that?

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Well, we did it first 10 years ago.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's something I want to do.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Then we did it a second time where we got these really powerful rockets that blew up on the stand. So we spent 20 grand on these rockets. Everything we did worked perfectly. The rockets blew up. Took us another five years to give us discovery to fork over enough dough to do it for real. And this time we did two launches last summer in the Mojave Desert. One with a car hitting a bump in the road and the other with a real straight up ramp.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why is that interesting? Sure, I put rockets on my car, I fly.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Ah, well, there's two things to this. The first...

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the car's version of a jetpack.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Essentially, except that rockets aren't shaped like cars for a very good reason. And so the first time we did it, we put the normal J dough amount of power on the car and it only accelerated the car to 150 miles an hour. And traditionally on Mythbusters, when we get to a place like that, we want to find out what would it take to replicate the behavior that is stated in the myth? To get the car to accelerate to 350 miles an hour and fly perhaps roughly a mile through the air.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  350 miles an hour, you go backwards in time.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  With the red shifting.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marty!

• 26:57Speaker 02

  So then we...

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the flux capacitor.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  The math said to get the car up to that speed and we attempted to balance correctly using, you know, model rocketry formulas to get the rockets in the right place. The question is, is if you have the car balanced and the rockets in the right place and they have enough power, will they actually make the car fly straight and true? And that was the answer we hadn't fully come to as the second part of the story.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was half of the design concern in the Apollo era. Have you have a straight rocket? How do you point it? How do you aim it?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we of course could have gone to a place where we start to add fins and do other things to this car.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  We get people that say, why don't you just put fins on the thing or anything? And we say, that's a car-shaped rocket. We want a rocket car.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  For us, there's an ethical difference.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your formula said that you'd be able to fly at 350 miles an hour.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Yes, according to the amount of rocket power.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So did it?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  It never really got the chance to be.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  They were so unstable that they.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the answer is no.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  The answer is.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say no.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Let me hear you say.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  The answer is no.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did it work?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  The scientist in me wants to say, I guess, on an infinitely straight track, maybe, but with us going off a bump in the road, it's too unstable and they bounced after about two hundred feet.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  What I was talking about, which is they interact with the ground rather quickly.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys have a whole euphemistic vocabulary.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  The other favorite term is catastrophic failure.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  That is my favorite engineering term.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we use that all the time on the show.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or in rocket propulsion lore, there are rocket launches that succeed and others that are rich in learning opportunities.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that one cost them, you know, when all was said and done, like tens of thousands of dollars just for the rockets and cars. So they made a brief mention of the Darwin Awards at the beginning. It was rumored that the person who did that originally, who died, of course.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was was eligible and possibly won the Darwin. It turns out he didn't win the Darwin Awards, whether or not that even happened.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know about the Darwin Award?

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Yes, for the dumbest ideas ever.

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  That's not the Darwin.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, well, yes, that's an element of the Darwin Award.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has to be an idea that you execute that is so dumb that you end up dying from it.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't know that that was a prerequisite.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that takes your genes out of the gene pool.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Oh, there you go.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Purifying those who remain.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Who's ever left, right. Making sure that you can't breed.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, actually, or or the act of you performing this stupid thing, if it doesn't kill you, it at least sterilizes you, which as far from a Darwinian perspective is the same.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Same thing.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same thing.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Because you're no longer going to add, so so forget it, you're done.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, and so you don't actually want to win a Darwin Award.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  No, I've got a great trick, but I can only do it once.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first person to fall into a black hole would win a Darwin Award. So so once again, I mean, I don't want to misrepresent the portfolio of their activities. Yes, people love blowing stuff up, but a lot of it is not blowing up. It's simple things and thoughts that people had and they wanted to test it.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Now, here's the thing, and I'm not going to, I'm not disparaging these guys at all. However, if you.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hold your however.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going to go to break.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck has a however. We're gonna go to break. We'll come back and we'll find out why you're not disparaging. All right, check it out.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, with Chuck Nice.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Your personal stand-up comic.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Everyone should have a personal stand-up comic. Just to change how things look, you know? Well, I had a bad day. No, you didn't.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're interviewing the Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyman. Professionally, they're like special effects prop builders, you know, in the old days. And they just converted all that talent to building experiments to test popular lore. And before we broke, you had some comment about the Darwin Awards?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Well, here's my point. Okay, if you're starting with something called the Darwin Awards, which presupposes that you are the biggest dumb butt on the face of the earth.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Why do you have to replicate that? Like, you know what I mean? Like, seriously, you're starting off with people whose last words are, you know, "Hi y'all, watch this." That's what you're starting with.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's their last word.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  That's their last word. Why do you have to replicate that to see whether or not it's viable? I mean, that's my only point.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I'm told, although I don't remember this, someone told me that in one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, they, he hypothesized, what are the last words ever spoken by anyone in the human species?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one scientist saying to the other, "I wonder what happens if we do it this way."

• 32:17Speaker 03

  And that's how civilization came to an end.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in our next and final clip, talk about unexpected outcomes from their experiments. Could you think it's gonna go one way?

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know, you do the experiment and you find out. Let's check it out.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Every idea you have, you have some expected outcome.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  What happens if nothing goes right? Not because you didn't design the experiment, right? But because the outcome was not anything you expected.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  That happens all the time, actually, and it's arguably...

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Is it refreshing or is it frustrating?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  It's arguably our favorite part of this whole job.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's one of the biggest surprises that we had when we got into doing this. Starting out as not scientists by training. We, over time of doing this show, realized that when you fail, you can't help but learn something if you pay attention. If we go through an experiment and everything turns out the way we expected and the way that we wanted it to...

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not even interesting.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And we just went through the motions. You know, you would think, okay, well, you pat yourself on the back for doing a good job, but...

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not in a new place.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  You're not in a new place, and you didn't grow from that. And for us, that's where the real value is, and it's counterintuitive. But when we go into something and we totally screw up and things turn out the way that we wanted to or expected them to, we're overjoyed because we get right into it and ask questions, why?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  And as long as we feel like our methodology is sound, what we've got is good data. And good data that doesn't match what we expected is really good data.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's interesting.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is. One of the things that we've been able to do over the past 10 years in San Francisco is build a set of relationships with different types of locations that give us different latitudes of what we can do there. Set stuff on fire, blow stuff up, drive cars around. And because of those relationships, we are able, when we come to a result we didn't expect, to call back to the office and say, tomorrow's location is off. I need you to find me a totally different location to do this totally different set of experiments. And thus, the narratives that you end up seeing edited on the show are genuinely driven by the narrative itself. We don't write down what's gonna happen. We do write down an outline of what we expect to happen. We almost never follow it.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what does happen shapes what does happen.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What gets filmed.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And we really feel like that has a freshness to it that the audience can smell.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  And this is what I find so profound about what we've done here with this show, is that we're not looking at this like, let's do science. We're looking at this just totally naturally, like, we wanna do a good job at this. And we're realizing that when we fail...

• 34:47Speaker 02

  We learn things and so we're okay with that. We like that. It's not something that's artificial.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, it's not in our culture, the value of a failure.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  No.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get blamed for failing.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  You totally do.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and that's got to change.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Reading Commander Chris Hadfield's book about NASA being, you know, in movies, something goes beep and an astronaut in the movie goes, "What's that?" And that would never happen at NASA because they've gone over every beep that could ever happen. They've gone over every worst-case scenario they could do, and that's what makes them so good at what they do when they actually get out into space. And that kind of culture is a brilliant way to do problem solving.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know Chuck, I think that in America, I don't know about the rest of the world, but in America, we are so quick to blame you for failure.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That I think if our brain were wired so that we viewed the world as a laboratory.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then failure would be viewed, failure would be viewed completely differently.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be, "Tell me what you learned."

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "What happened there?"

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Yeah, let's add that to the data set," rather than, "You idiot, you, you know."

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Right. "You screwed up. You did this." Right.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  "You're fired."

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People are not interpreting failure as learning experiences, and I think that's a problem.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to change that.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  If failure is a learning experience, then my life is brilliant.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  My life is an exercise in genius.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, here's the thing. You know, the difference is, you don't want to fail in the same way a second time.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Oh, there's the problem. So therein lies the rub.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. You, you don't want to make mistakes twice.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to make new mistakes.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and so this was, uh, one of the heads of NASA a few years ago, uh, tried to make the point, "Yeah, if you're going where no one has gone before, stuff is going to happen. Stuff will break. People will die."

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want to die for reasons that you could have foreseen.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the difference.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  There you go. You want to be the guy who beams down to the planet and you know you're not coming back because you're an ensign who's never been in an episode before.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just never wear a red shirt.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Learn from that experiences. All right, we got, we got to wrap this up. Chuck, good having you on StarTalk again. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.