Adam, Will, and Norm discuss death and Star Trek, the real problem with the Holodeck, the problem with Dyson spheres, and Adam’s strategies for public speaking. Enjoy!
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Yet another podcast that did not disappoint… 🙂
And yeah, speaking of slowing down, that was the one thing that I wished that Adam would have done during his SXSW speech. It would have been nice if he had just taken and left each slide up on screen just a little bit longer. He blew through them at a blistering pace. I still enjoyed his speech, though.. 🙂
Time when you’re on stage is distorted. I once forgot my next line, and totally froze up on stage in panic. Another actor recognised what was happening, jumped in and said my line, and then everything was fine again.
In my head it felt like fifteen seconds of silence. In reality it was less than two seconds, and nobody in the audience would have noticed a thing.
I’ve been watching these podcasts for about a year now, probably since the time you started and I’ve always enjoyed them very much, so in that regard, thank you for your continued work!
As of today, I’ve finally managed to create an account to log in and comment here. I don’t know why, but up until now, it never worked for me, so I always had to sit quietly on the side lines and mumble to myself about this – which is nothing new for me. Anyway, the issue is resolved and here I am.
I do have a question regarding the Behind the Myths tour that Adam spoke about here. Obviously there’ll be a tour in the States, plus now one in Australia and NZ, but will there ever come a time when Adam and Jamie will bring the show to the UK? We’re somewhat bereft of Myth Busters here, save from ancient episodes being randomly shown on some backwater channel that no-one’s ever heard of.
It’d just be nice to welcome the guys to our shores and join in with the fun.
I like that you went with “Public Speaking and Dyson Spheres” and not “Public Speaking and Holo Masturbation”.
What, no wardrobe change?
Awesome the Behind the Myths tour is coming to Australia (Sydney)
So excited since I followed the last one on the blog
No reference to the orbs from Woody Allen’s Sleeper?! 🙂
My standard advice for public speaking (I’m in no way a professional, but why should I let that stop me from giving advice?) to complete newbies is to slow down your speaking to the point that you feel like it’s too slow. If you just slow down to the point that it feels “normal” when you’re in the adrenaline-induced time-dilation (tachypsychia), it will still be too fast for the audience. Research has shown that adrenaline can slow time by ~36%.
Ah, the Starship Troopers references never get old. Also, it was pretty neat to learn about the library at ILM about how the shots are put together. Public speaking… yeah, it still terrifies me, but classes helped (sort of) and the best piece of advice I ever got was to ‘be the ball’. I admit that I was so nervous that I completely missed the reference.
Wow this a great one of these. Holodeck went south pretty fast but hilarious!
Love the idea of more Behind the Myths!
Whats the bottle of Ginger ale/beer? I love ginger beer and would love to try a new brand.
As much as I love the concept of the Dyson Sphere (and a fantastic episode of TNG), why doesn’t anybody ever point out that the concept is impossible based on Newtons Laws!! A sphere will not orbit a central point such as a star because the different relative speeds of the surface of the sphere would dictate different orbits.
For example: Standing on the surface of the earth at the equator, you are rotating around the center of mass at some velocity. But for each change in latitude that velocity is decreasing to the point where at the poles you aren’t moving at all about the center or mass. No velocity about the center of mass is bad news for staying in orbit. Expanding this thought experiment to the Dyson sphere: you could never build it because the poles would just fall to the sun, they do not have the velocity to remain in orbit!
Suppose you just magically put a Dyson Sphere around the sun and spun it up. Again every latitude of the body would require the same velocity to remain in orbit at that distance (which a rigid body cant have), and she’d tear apart PDQ. The equator might remain in orbit like it supposed to, while the rest becomes the Dyson debris field.. A Dyson RING would be way cooler anyway!
I think the reason there was little response about, “getting notoriety, increases your feeling like a
fraud,” because few people in the audience may have ever achieved notoriety
for what they do. Everyone can relate to
feeling they are too lazy.
I took a speaking class at my university, a semester of weekly presentations and assessments, did absolute wonders to my ability to keep calm and slow my speech. As an ESL speaker, it also helped me be much more confident when tripping over the occasional word/sentence structure when answering critical questions about my work.
My biggest tip is to know how to start your talk, and have a standalone way of setting up the end, after which you don’t diverge from the plan. Depending on the setting it is good to have a flexible narrative that allows for asides and even a couple of questions, but anchoring the start and end of the presentation/talk’s structure with specific phrasing helps me relax. It stops some of the distracting processes the guys talk about happening during an interview process, such as thinking of how to link threads and topics on the fly.
Too dismissive.
Now that we are getting further from when Back to the Future came out it is becoming more fun to go to electronic stores, especially Best Buy, and asking the employees who hound you for converters for my flux capacitor to convert 1.21 gigawatts into usable energy. They either smile and walk away or head off to find an answer to your question. It’s fun to send multiple people off at once to get you an answer and then leave the store.
I loved the podcast, great work! I have to admit I am entertained by the ongoing GIF argument- however remember that it’s Graphic Interchange Format, not Giraffe Interchange Format!
Great podcast, and I got my ticket to the Sydney Mythbusters show this morning.
Guys, this is probably my favourite podcast yet. Ten years ago, I took a side job teaching InfoSec courses. Each course was 6 days, ten hours a day. I was 28 years old and while I did well enough, the lack of understanding the points covered here meant that it was too much for me and I couldn’t persist at it.
So here I we are now and I’m actually heading back into teaching these courses. More industry experience has obviously helped with my comfort level, but everything Adam said her about relaxing and understanding you can slow down are so accurate and very reassuring.
I
think Will has an idea for a whole new avenue for Star Trek. Imagine the Security red shirts regenerated, from
the transporter, after they are killed. Security’s
logo could change from the Engineering symbol to Wile E. Coyote.
Adam: so glade you are bring the Tour to Australia, and particularly that you are making the effort to come over to Perth! If you are using a Tour bus in Australian and you find yourself bored stiff driving across the Nullabor Plain then take heart that Perth people do appreciate the effort. See ya soon!
You guys are totally forgetting Quark’s pervy holodeck programming on DS9!
A big part of why I like these podcasts is the combination of infectious enthusiasm and calmness, it’s interesting to know that the calmness is intentional. The podcast cover picture (the RSS feed version) is so thoroughly the opposite of calm that I have a hard time spotting the podcast in a list.
Ooh I wish the Mythbusters tour would come to Seattle . . .
This is likely the wrong place to ask this, but I can’t for the life of me find any information on the Behind the Myths tour coming to NZ. When will it be held here, and more importantly, will it be in Wellington? I must know!
Great show guys!
The worst part of public speaking for me is – WAITING to get up and publicly speak.
That said, I now try to turn the ‘audience doesn’t exist’ notion on its head and find empowerment in having an audience, knowing full well that most audience members would be terrified to be on that stage.
I’ve bombed a few times at public speaking in the past and the biggest problem was always the fact that I had absolutely no passion for the subject matter on which I was forced to speak of.
Yeah I nearly flipped out when Adam mentioned it. However, I was looking for New Zealand dates, there doesn’t look like anything. The Behind the Myths tour website just has the Australia dates in August then US dates in November (a whole two months to squeeze in a show in NZ :P).
Yeah it’s annoying, and worrying too actually. The only place I can find that acknowledges that the tour is coming to NZ is ticketmaster, so I’m hoping for the best here.