Grant Imahara AMA

hi Reddit! This is grant Imahara, one of the host of Mythbusters on the Discovery channel and this is my AMA, ask me anything. first of all i want to say thank you for the amazing response, there were over 2000 comments from the Reddit community. so, thanks for your support and your interest.

So, question number one.
What is the biggest screwup you have ever had on Mythbusters? Well, we've screwed up plenty, believe me. the one that comes to mind is from a myth called "saw dust cannon" and i stumbled on it because the thing we did was actually a step up from the original myth of the saw dust cannon. The original myth was to have a a bunch of saw dust in a little cylinder and you put a little flare in there and use compressed air to fire it up and it makes a huge fireball once the firedust reaches a certain point. It goes up and we did this and it worked. So what we wanted to do was the next step up. What would be the bigger response? So that would be something as flammable as sawdust - non-dairy creamer. So we used not one, but five flares and we used a really big cylinder and a really big air tank and maybe we'd get something bigger. so we set the whole thing up and we fired the thing off. The intial thing that happens is actually nothinmg, it goes up and *poof* then big cloud of craemer and we were like ummmm.. And then about a second later, it erupts into this massive wall of flame. and er the crew up comes in because really we have no idea how big this thing was going to be and because of the volume of thec reamer and the power of the air, it didn't go up in the saw dust cannnon did, it sort of went lower. and we had no idea what was gonna happen here. but what happened here was this low cloud of incredibly flammable non-dairy cmrea has caught fire and is now advancing towards us. this wall of flame is raining down little tendrils of fire and it was advancing towards us. this was the point when i thought, you know what? i am entirely too close to this and i thought what should i do, should i go or should i stand by ground? and i look around for tori and kari and they were just gone.. so yeah i call that one of our biggest screw ups. fortunately no one was hurt.

question 2. why don't you tori and kari work together with adam and the walrus anymore? i dont thing jamie likes that, you shouldn't call him that, at least not to his face. Is it simply because Discovery found better ratings with the two team format? or does jamie just simply depise Tori? No i don't think jamie despises Tori at all. the truth of the matter is that, it is a logistic problem. we got the two  teams; and at any one time, we are each working on two to three different myths because if you run into a roadblock on one, you can leap frog and start getting ahead on the enxt one. you know onces a location get becomes available or something. But if you want to do a really big myth that involves two teams, it essential means that both teams have to stop working on whatever they are doing at that moment and then come together and it's really otugh to line up all the schduels to make that work logistically. you know the ones that we;ve done are really good fun. i dont know it's just really otought to do. its hard to pull of that kind of scheudling acrobatics. oh and you know what, as far as the ratings go.. i just don't think so.. i don't think so.. i dont think there has been any major bumps as a results of that. there may be bumps because of other things, but not because of that.

question number 3.
do you ever feel awkward as a result of the script conversations? script really? you caught on that? They don't seem necessary as the best quality of the show is that everyone has the same character. yes i agree. other than that, love the show. the thing is certain parts of the show needs to be scripted. there are facts and figures that is necessary to be laid down for the rest of the show that is not scripted. before that used to be done by the myth lady. but before long we started doing them ourselves. oh by the way, the myth lady was scripted to, but they thought since we're paying these guys, why not have them read the script. but that's it, i mean it is awkward because we;re not used to being scripted. we're not good actors you know. but you hit the nail on the head. we do what we do, which is make stuff and test things and have fun and that is what the essence of the show is. and if the scripted part of the show looks awkward because they are scripted, they ARE awkward because they are scripted. so, but sorry, that's just how the show goes, it's part of the show, we need to have that and maybe in future we'll get better at doing scripted stuffs.

question number 4.
Thanks to the magic of editing, it appears as though constructing a robot takes you about 5 seconds. How long do they actually take, and is there one robot in particular you remember being a complete ass along the way? erm, yes it does take awhile, to built a robot and it just depends on the complexity of the robot. for example the surd swinging robot (?) took about 5 or 6 days.. some of them you do the intial built and then you have t make a lot fo changes along the way. some of them are roguehd in wihtin the day and a lot of finessing has to go. you know like the robot that we had for the Wanted myth with the swinging gun. it has to swing with the shoulder, with the wrist and fire with the gun at the same time every time. something like that requires a lot of noodling to get working properly. so basically the short answer is it depends on the robot. within the bounds of our show, we get about 10 days to finish the robot. so usually it'll just be a couple of days with our robots. is there one that was a complete ass along the day? yes, the dental floss robot. i initially tried to make it out of materials that you might be able to smuggle into a prison. this was on the myth "can dental floss over time cut prison bars', because it has a slight abrasive quality. the original version of that robot, i attmpted to make it out of a motor from tape recorder that i could have stolen from the library of the prison, i don;t know how many libraries in prisons still have tape recorders but anyway, that was the reasoning. but i used that motor and a couple of other things, dental floss, this robot would spin the dental floss really quickly. spin the floss real quick, and then spin it back, and then spin it up really quickly. but that totally totally fialed. had to throw it out. and i was really frustrated by that. and if i'm really frustrated by thigns. there are two tells. one is i carry a lot of stress in my neck, so i -twists neck to left and right- and the other thing is i throw things across the room. which i did with the dental floss robot. and that was the one i did for the prison break episode. that one really pissed me off. that one got working after i tried ti with other materials that could not be smuggled into the prison.

question number 5.
Since you are the only person on Mythbusters with formal scientific education, do you tend to approach problems differently from your fellow Mythbusters? And what this person is referring to is that i have a degree in electric engineering while the other members in the cast have degrees in other areas. I think i do, approach things from a more engineering perspective. instead of jumping in with trying to figure things out either with paper or popsticle sticks. i'll just get into CAD and try to work something out really quickly. i have a lot of experience with drawing things in CAD from working in industrial light magic. and one of the things i used to do is cut things on the laser cutter board. (which if you ever have access to a laser cutter, i highly reccommend it.) So basically, you drw something in CAD, whatever you can think of, whatever 2D shape you can think of, and you send it to the laser cutter. it cuts it out really quickly and smoothly.so yeah i'm really familiar with CAD i can do things fairly quickly. so usually i'll approach something from that perspective or i have an idea and i'll sketch things on paper and try to figure things out that way. my co-workers will probably prefer a method where yo go in and maybe gather some materials and try to fgiure things out. an example of this is during our recent myth of "the mash of the flying guilitine" which is based on this awesome 60s kungfu movie. anyway long story short, kari had an idea and it involves knives and she got knives and tried to figure it out that way. Tori tried to use form board and he made little prototpyes and then he cut it out of steel. and then I went directly into CAD and designed somthing with 5 blades and the whole thing. but anyway, i think that is the fun thing, that we each have different style of approaching a problem. and in the case of this, its fun to see how everyone has an idea, or takes an idea and hten make it into something real that we work with. so yeah there we go. Also, i have a lot of textbooks from college. so sometimes i will hit the books rather than the internet. and er you know, people ask this. how do you do your research? do you consult your books? (which i do) do you go to the internet? yes yes i do. i have been known to oook at various sources on the internet. but the single best thing for us is now that the show has been on air, and people know about us. we can actually call people and be like "hey we are from mythbusters and i see that you're the world's expert on, you know for example, laminar flow or something. or any biology or physics field, we can just call any expert up and consult them. instead of going on the internet and looking for answers there.

Question 6 -
how much of the show that we see is "real" footage and how much is reenactments and producer/director created content? Well, like i said, we are not very good actors. however we are fond of a certain type of reenactment, which is usually something silly. for example Star Trek, Gorn cannon. which was a personal favourite of mine, i've campaigned for years to try to get this one. in star trek, captain kirk is deposited on a planet -you guys a redditors, you probable already know this, but for other people- captian kirk, deposited on a planet, has to defeat a lizard like creature called the Gorn by creating his own cannon using bamboo and chemicals that he finds and diamonds on this planet. and given these natural reosurces, he creates this cannon to kill the gorn. and so the reenactment comes in where we get to play these characters from star trek, probably because we couldn't afford the stock footage, frankly. but anyway it was a great oppurtunity for us to have a a little but of fun, dress up and put on silly costumes and you know. same thing with Speed Bus Jump where i was playing Keanu Reeves and tori was sandra bullock. so you know that is about as far as reenactment goes for us. what you see on screen, when something is built, when something explodes. that all happens and you know, if you miss it. if the camera man misses it. and here is an exmaple on the Cement Truck. if you ask 9 out of 10 people what is your favourite mythbusters episode explosion. they'll say cement truck. but what happened on that, why you did not see any highspeed footage, even though that is a staple of our show and you see it on almost any other thing that ever explodes. the reason that you do not see any high speed footage on that one is that the hgihsped cmera man actually missed the shot. you know, everybody else is at least a mile away. and at a mile away, when the thing goes off, you feel like a thump on your chest. but the highspeed camera man was closer and so the explosion was so intense that it sort of shocked him and he missed pushing the button which actually records the explosion. so no reenacting there. that was what really happened and we just rolled with it. and the results speak for themselves. but you know, my personal oppinion is that particular explsion benefits from not having highspeed footage and what makes it so memorable is that one second the cemen ttuck is there, and the next second its gone. that's really shocking. that -gestures- sort of thing. but as far as producer/director created content, there are ceratin sequences that are animated that help us to explain what the myth is which usually involves weir animations of us talking or us flying through the air. but that is clearly something very separate from what we do  and work with.

question 7.
Do you hang out with any of the cast outside of the show? If so, who are you closest to and what do you enjoy getting together for? it's interesting because i had worked with adam jamie and tori for a number of years before mythbusters. and i had met kari actually before joining the show as well. but tori and adam and i worked in Industrial Light Effects, and i was there for 9 years. and i remember when Tori came to the shop and Adam came to the shop i think Tori came in on Starship troopers and Adam join in on a series of commericals called First Union. And we had been co-workers in the model shop making miniature space ships and these incredible robots and sets and these really cool things for a number of years and in fact the person i work most closely with over all those years was tori. and usually we'd be paired as a team because my specialty was electronics and so if anything lit upn or moved, i was invovled with it and tori was amodel maker and he was incredibly fast, very good with his hands. and so we'd both be involved with the builiding of these models with very large crews. and large i mean 15-20 people dependin on the size and complexity of the model. and after the model was built, it'd have to be photographed for compositing into the movie. you know, before movie effects and computer graphics is what it is today. so that meant either a period of time between weeks or months we'd be filming these models from all these different angles with these giant motion controlled cranes, that would simluate a camera move. multiple passes, and so you can't just send the model out to stage and have it good to go for the entire time. you need a support crew. so tori and i made the ideal support crew because i'd handle all the lighting on the modela dn whatever electronics it might have and tori would handle the painting and if something needed to be tweaked or if it needed a different look, he'll handle all that. we spent months working on a number of starwars shows.if you look on the internet, you'd find pictures of us. very young versions of us. you know, with these huge bags [eye bags as he gestures] working on the federation battle ship. which is the giant toilet bowl with the ball, that's one of hte ones that we worked on. of which there are pictures of at least. and we spent months working on van helsing's,on dracula's castle. some where out there, theres a very special edition bonus features where you can see both of us interview on our pre-mythbusters days. in fact that was just before Tori left for Mythbusters. so we were the closest team. and jamie would hire me on weekends and at night to come in to work for him because i was a radio control specialist and he had a lot of puppets that would come through M5 so he needed someone to step in right at the end and tune up the puppet and give it the final tweaks before it went for shooting. so he'd hire me to step in for him and moonlight for him. Who am i closest to? so the question is, do we hang out? yeah sometimes we do. we're all obviously different people and some of us have families, so it's not like we can all hang out after work like that, but occasionally we do. who am i closet to? i have rpobably hung out the most with jamie outside of work. jsut because we both like robots. we are both robot enthusiast, we both have that common language. and we used to compete actually on this fighting robot show called fightingbots. Jamie had this heavyweight robot, 220 pounds and i had this middle weight, 120 pounds. no we have never fought each other. he's got about a 100 pounds on me, and so does his robot. so yeah, jamie and i we'd come over to, as his wife would say "play robots at his shop"... ah good times. we would also go scavanger hunting at various surpluss shops here in the bay area. and jamie actually had a whole circuit that he knew all best surpluss houses and all the best dumpsters was. there's one place we used to go to called trianlge machine and the guy would see jamie coming and -grunts- and jaime would be like -grunts- "how much for this" and the guy would be like "20 bucks com'on 20 bucks. and jamie would be all like "eer i think this is only worth about 8 dollars". He was very shrewed business man. "Awwhh jamie you're killing me, com'on. jamie." unfortunately, triangle machine went out of business.... i don't know where they went to. wasn't because of us.. i guarantee you.

Question nr. 8
Favorite thing about the show that  viewers don't get to see? We actually do have, we used to have more  bloopers, which you can probably find online. They leaked our blooper  footage, but, certainly my favorite thing is when we do have a goof  reel, and I'm told that our production company pushed together a reel  christmas every year, and it's purely for internal use, nobody gets  to see it unfortunatly, i'm sorry, but so it contrains humor that is  probably not appropriate for televison, so, but you know those are, i  think those are the funnest things that you don't get to see. That  and that Kari, Tori and I break into song on occasion we have sung in  the blueprint room, if we're feeling especially punchy some day. But,  sorry, you probably won't get to see that either. Okay.


Question nr. 9
In the episode where you test out lie  detectors, oh here we go, you were asked if you had ever made a  female robot for yourself, and you said no. But it came up as a lie,  yes, that's true. So have you? All right so, point of clarification,  the question was «have you ever made or wanted to make a female  robot. You know, and, here's the thing about lie detectors. And that  is that, they don't respond to the context of your question, they  don't tell you yes, you're lying per say. What they tell you, is  based on a number of factors like heart rate and galvanic skin  response and, other things that you are likely lying. But the reason  that you are likely lying is because you are flushed, or you're  sweating more or your heart rate goes up. So, you see embaressment  can also be a false positive on the lie detector. And I think, when  Tori asked me that question, it was, it took me by surprise, so  anyway. And that's all I'm gonna say about that. Look, it's ask me  anything. It's not answer me anything, I tried to answer that one.  But yes, I thought about making a female robot, and no I have never  made one. And that's the weird part about the lie detectors because  there is two questions in one and I was confused.


Question 10
And finally! Question number 10 (damn  you reddit). Question nr 1.
rampantdissonance wants to know why was  Geoff constructed with only one movable arm, a rotating neck and  moving jaw, was that a resource issue or a comic decion? What  rampantdissonance is refering to is Geoff Peterson, the robot  skeleton sidekick that i built for the Craig Fergruson show, the late  show with Craig Ferguson. And, basically it is a plastic anatomic  skeleton with a moving jaw, a rotating head, a metal mohawk and one  arm that moves up and down. Originally, the idea was to have this  character that would interact with craig. And that would be this sort  of, either remote controlled, or something where you push a button  and it answers automatically. And from my perspective, having done a  lot of, having worked on a lot of different puppets from movies or  tv. Famouse ones you may have heard of R2D2, energizer bunny, is that  it requires a fairly skilled puppeteer to pull off  more than say 1  or 2 moves. For example to drive R2D2 only requires one operator,  under most circumstances. I know there are people out there who are  R2D2 builder enthusiasts and they want to build everything, like a  million different things into their R2. And they spend a lot of time  trying to cram fire extinguiser, light saber launcher and like all  these different things into this one little shell. But the truth  matters for the movies, we swap out to who, you know swap in  different things as the situation requires. You dont have to have  your stun guns in there along, crowded in with your fire extinguisher  and the light saber holder. And so when you're actually driving R2  for like public appearance, you only need to. Your right thumb to  drive, move R2 around, left thumb moves the hollow eye, index finger  moves the slider that moves the head around. And that's pretty much  it, so it's fairly easy to do. And that's enough for one person  control. In contast, energizer bunny requires 3 people to operate.  One person works the head, head turn. A second person runs the arms  and the stick twirling and the third person is the driver. And you  know, particulary with driving and this is true, R2 really needs  concentration, when you are driving around, especially when you have  people around you. Or in the case the bunny if you're close to,  precariously close to an edge, in which in many occasions he was like  driving on a counter or table or something like that. As far as geoff  peterson goes, so moving the jaw is the thing that you, as the  operator have to concentrate on the most. And turning the head and  moving the head and moving the arm, that's just icing on the cake.  But your main job is flapping the jaw. And you know, have two arms,  it becomes this whole thing where you know, what do I do with the  other arm? And then people have requests well can't you make him  drive away from the podium? Eh, course  i like to say no that's for  the protection of humanity. To make sure that I don't accidentaly  create skynet. But really that's, you know. Mostly it's about  puppeteer and the ability to control Geoff and i a meaningful way.  And you know, secondarily, there was, it worked out because there is  enough space in the torso, it's actually a fairly small skeleton, but  there is enough space to fit the servo for one shoulder, and the neck  in that chest cavity, with direct drive without having to do any  fancy gearing, belts or chains or anything like that. So it all  worked out in the end. And the servos that you have to use to move  this full sized human skeleton around are fairly beefy. They are  *unintelligible server name * it's matter of fact the cadillac of  large scale servos. But that's what geoff uses, and they are big and  they have to fit inside of you know, his little chest coat area, so  that he looks, you know reasonably human scale, and not like you know  this sort of hunched over giant hulky robot skeleton sidekick.

Okay! Well that's it, eeeeeh, thank you  so much Reddit for all of the, all of your interest and support,  thank you to the whole community, and watch our show mythbusters on  the discovery channel. Wednesday nights at 9 pm. Thanks.