Think we all know why we're here. We do It's for the execution of Adam Savage Remember remember the guns No, it's true so I'm gonna let him get started and A man that really needs no introduction Round of applause Thank you That was great How you guys doing? Nice, I just read a tweet of someone that said People are idiots for waiting half wasting half a day of DEF CON to see don't try this I want to see and I want to actually try a quick experiment I'd like only the people in the overflow room to yell for a second. Can we go one two three yell? I can't hear them There's no one in there Awesome, you're all here then excellent All right So I was going to start with a talk that I've been working on about failure And then I realized I'm also actually talking to the crowd that understands more about failure than actually I know I'm quite sure. I mean you guys your whole hobby. No, excuse me Your whole hobby is about inducing and exploring failures of systems, right? I'm not talking about you as failures Jesus, you think I'd open with that Failure has made me who I am today And I want to talk a little bit about how that works Um when I was 10 years old I got into magic like every 10 year old and I got so into it I ended up doing a magic show for my fifth grade class Does that hold your intent? Yeah my fifth grade class and I got a standing ovation from like 300 students And it was phenomenal and intoxicating the next year. I put together a really great great performance And then I think it was I think his name was david sax david sax Was my volunteer to come up on stage and I would cuff him in these chains behind his back and he wouldn't be able to get out of them And then I would demonstrate that I could get out of them except that david got out of them Which really kind of killed the whole flow of my performance Um and because I was not prepared for this. I actually I got really upset. I was 10 So after the performance, I was kind of you know Weepy and upset about it and he came over and sorry my teacher miss levine was like, what's the matter? And I was like David sacks ruined my magic show And david sax walks by and the teacher says what did you do to him? David sax is like I didn't do anything And I then called him. I think I called him a fat shit And that's when he punched me in the face and knocked me down David, I'm sorry um in 2000 1999 I Went from working for years in the commercial industry to working for industrial light and magic And it really was like graduating and going to heaven It was exactly the thing that I pictured it was since I was 12 years old working for some of my heroes working on building spaceships for christ sakes and One of the offshoots of doing that when you work in special effects There are no actual jobs you actually are constantly freelancing you're constantly picking up work Even if you're working full-time during the day, you're often doing night work for other people department stores whoever Will pay you to build things because you've got to pay next month's rent and one of the Side effects of working in industrial light and magic is all of a sudden the fact that you can say you work At industrial light magic means that no one wants to see your resume anymore They all think that that's enough that means that you know what you're doing And all of a sudden work starts coming from all over the place because it's a bigger pool of people who are Doing their own g-jobs and side jobs at iLM We called them g-jobs, which is stood for either government work or gravy work or both And Because you were getting all because I started getting all this great freelance work I was enjoying an income about twice as big as I'd been making in the commercial Industry and I got this call from my friend Ben and he said There's this job that everyone in San Francisco has turned down right now. It's Because there's not enough time this big department store wants to have window displays going up for the new San Francisco ballpark for opening day. They want six weeks of these window displays They want baseballs to pitch over the fences in these in these window displays and I thought, you know I'm a mechanical guy. I've done pneumatics work. I've done some middling electronics and stuff. I'm sure I think I could do it When you're bidding a job like this, you obviously want to bid what the market will bear and the fact that a big department store wants this window display in Five days. This is a monday. They needed installed on saturday morning Means that you can charge double Except that when I did my day rate and worked out how long it would take me to do it and I doubled it It still didn't look high enough because you can Sometimes smell the right figure and I knew that There also was this well the the new uh pismo laptop had just come out And it turned out to be just the right amount to add on to this bid So I have my priorities in order So I I gave them this bid it was very very it was the most I'd ever charged for a for a job like this And I started doing the started doing the job picked up some pitching machines picked up some adjustable relays at Granger and started working out a system for reciprocating the these baseballs and bringing them back in And what I didn't This story is going to be quite quick What happens is is that I didn't realize the movement of spheres through space is actually quite complex when you're moving them Slowly when you're moving them fast they actually behave in a very Repeatable and predictable fashion, but when you're moving light spheres through through air slowly They can you can get these vagaries that make them very hard to predict where they're going to go Even if you have a really big You know a really big thing to catch them Um And I noticed that I was getting about a hundred balls to pitch over the fence at a time and then one would fail And I did the math and I realized that meant that they'd fail about every eight minutes for six weeks And I didn't have that many baseballs, so I started to try and work out solutions and culminated in me staying up for And I just kept on seeing this money right this laptop was going to be there at the end of the week So I just kept on sort of barreling towards it. I didn't sleep Thursday night I didn't sleep Friday night and Saturday morning I you remember how Home Depot whenever they open somewhere they open 24 hours a day until they've shut down a Certain amount of local hardware stores and then they cut back to bankers hours So this was early in their tenure in San Francisco. There was I was there at like two in the morning I was there at four. I bought a router at two in the morning just because where else can you do that? I didn't need a router Um So I showed up on Saturday morning without any sleep figuring that I was going to be able to make this work And I I was kind of buying my own hype. I was saying I work at ILM. I ought to be able to make this work I've been I've done I've done 500 commercials. This is this will just work And after 13 hours of trying to install this thing where I discovered that they had actually made the stage I was reciprocating the returning baseballs under smaller and the backboard also narrower So that all of my tolerances became a little bit tighter Um everything was going far worse in the windows than it had been going in my shop I would have begged for a one in a hundred failure rate in the windows, but I was more getting like one in 10 And about 6 6 30 this I think teenager who was in charge of this job. She was like 20. She said, how's it going? And I said It's not gonna work I've never said that to a client before and she said what She'd never heard that from a vendor before And I said, uh, this mechanically is not going to work.  And I thought a lot about this. I thought, you know I'm earning some of this money So you still see the laptop in the future. I'm earning some of this money. I'm probably willing to refund them half I'm probably we'll just right away half. I mean this job is Everyone turned it down I still want to get paid for some of my time and I'm ready to do this But the first thing I say is look, let's try and salvage this. I'll come up with two solutions in the next 10 minutes And if you choose one of them, if you like it, I will implement it by 8 a.m. Tomorrow morning I should also point out this is 6 30 p.m. At that very moment my mom and my sister were arriving in san Francisco airport to spend the weekend with me and my wife and our new six month old twins Who I hadn't seen in three days because I've been working on this job Um, I figured at this point I'd be driving to the airport to pick up my mom But I wasn't I was now agreeing to stay up for another night And again, I was at home depot two four and six a.m Doing this basically stringing these baseballs on a on a on a monofilament and running them up and over the fence And they said, uh, yes, okay. No, we'll go for that again I'm still figuring that at the end of this she's going to say you owe us some money back And I'm you know if I implement plan b successfully I'll I'll just wipe a third of this And I spent all day saturday installing installing this thing and at the end of the day Um, the the the head of the vp of visuals comes in from out of town He takes a look at the windows. He walks up and down. It's great. That's great.  Um I told that story to a colleague at uh at ilm Later on and he said Man, I've never screwed up a job that bad And I thought really Really, I mean That makes me not trust you so much I mean, I told this with the benefit of hindsight It was about a year and a half two years later and I realized how important that experience was to me I People who have failed people who don't think that they've failed. I don't like working with them They're they're gonna they're gonna push me under the bus at some point um In 1986 I had uh Pretended to attend nyu for about six months Uh and then dropped out. It's kind of a family chip on the shoulder problem with authority that I had And uh, but I had made several of the friends I still have as my dearest friends in the world there and they were all attending nyu film school And so living in new york at the time for about four more years I got a kind of erzats new york university film school education by working on all of their films And the first and biggest one was for my friend david borla um And he was doing the super super ambitious senior thesis film called gargoyle and goblin a full-on fantasy 30-minute fantasy film taking place in new york shot in all the abandoned male porn theaters in midtown Why did we have access to them because david's grandmother owned them all He said getting to Thanksgiving dinner was an adventure Um She lived above one right he had to go through the lobby Anyway, we're working on gargoyle and goblin and david and I we had talked about it for months I knew it was coming and he asked me to art direct it and I did and actually I art directed it with With a couple of people who've since gone on to become really really amazing Hollywood art directors and it was the first time I'd ever done anything on that kind of scale And I I it really worked out well It was an incredibly consolidated crew 16 people shooting nights for two weeks living in this Block of abandoned buildings where we're filming constantly blowing out the power of one building tapping into the one next door to it until we blew Out power to that one Getting incredible footage in the can pneumatic wings on these on this gargoyle and all this stuff going on And it ended up winning best art direction at the nyu film film festival nyu film school film festival that year And I thought this might be really a viable occupation for me This this is the You know, I thought I wanted to be an actor before that I thought I wanted to be a juggler A magician a designer for lego. There were all these things that I had Desired to do but I thought the art direction really might be it And so I started to you know, throw my name out to friends If you want me to art director film, you know, I I could I could do it And my friend gabby called me up and asked me to do this film that she was producing She was experimenting with being a producer and she was working on this film called 10 key trauma Which is about a guy with a bad toupee who goes to an atm and the atm makes fun of his toupee And they needed uh, they needed one of those atm enclosures that are all over new york The door you have to put your card in to get into this little eight by 10 foot cell with an atm in it And they needed that whole thing and they needed control over it and they couldn't get the location So they asked me to build it and they had this huge budget 800 dollars And I I started working on it. I had never built flats before I had never really built any kind of Technical prop like a like a banking machine, but again, I I I'd been building things since I was five years old I you know cardboard. I've built anything out of cardboard I felt like I had the chops to do this and so I started to drag materials out to this distant remote location in brooklyn at my friend Dave mess of bob's house And building this set the first thing we needed was a floor davis had Wall-to-wall carpeting, but you know those those self stick vinyl tiles I stuck one down I jumped on it for a second and I peeled it back up It didn't leave any sticky stuff on the carpet. It seemed like it was going to be fine I had never built flats before but I had seen them building flats when I was in all the plays in the drama club in High school So I got some one by three wood and I made some triangular braces and I stretched some canvas over it And those guys said well, we've got some guys that can paint this and I said that's great so I went off to work on the bank machine and over about a month I kept on assembling I assembled more and more parts to this and Again, we came down to this like Wednesday afternoon when I realized that the crew was all going to show up on Saturday morning And I didn't have nearly as much ready as I was hoping to have I had the bank machine was failing miserably. I'd been down to canal street remember canal street back in like the 80s Oh God, it was the heaven I was down there at the all the different surplus places buying pieces of Hardware to make a viable bank machine and pieces were cracking on me. I was painting things the paint was crazing on me I was hitting all the disasters that you hit within the special effects industry except Um, similar to the the first story. I wasn't asking for anybody's help I thought I just is totally within my skill set. I could just do this and again from Wednesday to Saturday I did not sleep Saturday morning. I'd been in the location all night long. Oh, by the way, I showed up on location to discover that Those tiles don't like to stay together on wall to wall carpeting So the floor looked like crap And then the the paint that they put on the canvas on my flats was making the canvas wrinkle because I didn't know about The substrate you're supposed to put on canvas flats before you paint them Um, and the bank machine wasn't fitting in because I had gotten a couple of dimensions wrong And I'm just I'm running around running around running around Basically attempting to run around enough so no one can say I'm not actually trying But I'm also I'm on 60 hours without sleep I'm completely completely spent and at one point that one of the crew members Stops me and puts his hand on my shoulder and says, do you know what do you know what you're doing? Do you even know what you're doing? And I I really seriously thought This is the delusion of grandeur at the time. I thought I'll just say what indiana jones would say I don't know. I'm making this up as I go along And he didn't think it was funny That just right over his head and he put his other hand on my other shoulder and said go home We don't need you here anymore And I went home and I felt pretty bad. I felt really bad. I felt um I felt so bad. I didn't show up for the load out two and a half days later Um, I had heard that the crew pulled two all-nighters trying to film around my crappy set at the moment They were doing the load out. I was all the way across town having sex And they found out It's the one of the downsides of working in small clusters of friends um at any rate I went on that monday to go pick up my toolkit and uh The toolkit was this kind of this point of obsession with me during the process of making this of working on this film I had I'd found this leather like sample case On the street in new york you find everything on the street in new york and I had filled it full of tools It was the first toolkit that I made that was first order retrieve ability Which is Men I didn't have to move any tool out of the way to get to any other tool And I was really quite proud of it and I got there and there was literally like a Taped outline on the floor where my toolkit wasn't a note saying we have your tools call gabby Gabby now this is a close-knit circle of 18 19 year old kids in new york You know there's a there's a closeness you get with the people at that age that is never equalled by anybody else for the rest of your lives And this this this these were my friends gabby was one of them And I called gabby from the location and she just started she started in said what what did you do to me? I trusted you I trusted you to do this and I told these guys you The director of this film worked in a 711 for five months living with his parents to save up the money for this film And as far as we can see you pissed it all away and none of it showed up on camera If if you could have done she said If you could have done anything to convince me that you are not worth being friends with you have done it Now get over here with every goddamn receipt that you have because I want to see every penny that you spent and I uh I called my dad I I called my dad and I was like I was Weeping I felt like I felt like Shit on your shoe. I felt worse than I've ever felt in my whole life I felt worse than that since then I think but at that point that was the that was the worst and I he said there's nothing you can do he said you have I he said there's nothing you can do You can move on from here one of the most Phenomenal pieces of advice I've ever gotten And I went to gabby's I went to gabby's dorm room and I somehow actually Through some kind of bistro mathematics accounted for every penny in the budget And then when we were finished it took about an hour during which we didn't speak about anything but the budget I mean this was now an ex friend of mine. I was doing this with She said the crew was next door And they want to talk to you And now I'm starting to think they're gonna kick the crap out of me And actually the way I feel That would be that would be appropriate Like I feel like that would be an appropriate response to this circumstances And I would actually feel like it would be a release like I'd get to pay for my sins I'm thinking it's like animal house, right?   It just blipped up a little bit and I thought At least now it makes a good story I sat right down on the chair one of them commented later like he sat down on the chair like immediately I'm like, well, I know what my role is I sat down on the chair and the director sat and read out a list of about 100 things that I had said that I would do That I did not achieve in the course of screwing up his senior film Senior thesis film and he didn't miss a trick. I mean he had everything down And at the end of this which took about 25 minutes Oh, by the way, each each time he'd get to something really interesting a member of the crew might pop in and go Yeah, man, that really pissed me off Little peanut gallery comments from around. I can't see anybody. I'm just a spotlight on my face And at the end he says do you want to You have anything to say? And I said no, I really don't I'm I cannot tell you how bad I feel how responsible I feel You're a hundred percent right. You haven't missed a trick. I take responsibility for everything I recognize that means nothing. I'm sorry that my apology means no I'm sorry on like five different meta levels of sorry And I know that all of them don't mean anything to you and I'm sorry for that too And he's He says There's this long pause after I said that I don't think I was quite as funny and he says We're not trying to bring you down man It's I had a therapist point out years later like I grew up with this my dad was kind of crazy And you know when my dad had when my dad would get pissed off you Did not want to get in his way and I am the master at not getting in somebody who's pissed off's way I am the reed that bends And these guys were no match for my bill their anger was nothing compared to my dad's Went right by Terrible positive reinforcement for my skill set So what did this do for me though this this informed me that I was totally fallible that I need to ask for help That I could fail and move on that that These are really important things Every parent will tell you that every parent will tell you that you make a rule for your kid and he'll break it you put a wall up and he'll push against it and There's a prevailing theory I don't know who's it is that this is how a child learns the shape of the world And if you don't give them any boundaries, they start freaking out We all know children who don't get any boundaries They start freaking out because the world feels unsafe to them They need someone to tell them what the limit is and I think that failure In my life has worked in the exact same way. It doesn't teach me the limit of the world But it teaches me the shape of my intuition And if there's one thing I've learned as the dilettante Journeyman polymath that I you know aspired to be my whole life It's that a craftsman isn't somebody who doesn't make mistakes There's somebody who can smell the mistakes happening before you before you do and they can stop them happening in their tracks It's not about the cessation of failure. It's about recognizing that it's occurring recognizing that it's going to be an inherent part of the process and Recognizing that you've got to dance with it and if sometimes it's going to catch up with you Sometimes you're going to screw things up so badly and it's going to be fine in the end. I I've worked at places where they're so failure averse if a supervisor is messing up a job Other people will start to show up To help them finish the job But no one talks to the supervisor and tells them that they're screwing up He's just all of a sudden the crew's gotten a little bigger And consequently you end up with people who've you know worked in these companies for 20 years They don't realize that they've been screwing things up all the time because no one's telling them I don't trust people that haven't failed There's a There's a Raymond Chandler quote about his hero There's a he wrote a phenomenal essay about his hero Philip Marlowe Called the simple art of murder and if you haven't read it I would read it it is along with self reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson Probably one of the single most important pieces of writing to me as far as what it means to Be a person of honor in the world and at the end of this he says he gives all these great qualities about his hero His range of awareness his his his self of his sense of pride His uh his his ethic system and in the end he says if the world were full of people like him It would be a very safe place to live without being too boring to be worth living in And that's what I aspire to thank you Now, uh, I'm opening the floor to questions for a good what 40 minutes or so. Yeah, awesome And um anyone want to take bets on whether RF ideas the first second or third question I get Well, we can deal with that right away, but before we deal with that I have a question because I remember seeing this talk Uh, did you ever mend friendships with that the person that audited you? Um, Gabby, uh, yeah actually Gabby and her husband came out to san francisco about about a year ago and uh She and her they they and their kids and me and my kids had a lovely lunch together and You know after 20 years it really is water under the bridge, but uh, I have rarely had a thing with friends go so sour Thank you Now for this RFID thing Render Do I seem familiar to you at all? Yes How badly do you want to punch me in the face? No, that's fine Look, honestly, I'm gonna finish the RFID thing just by saying the truth is more boring than you think If you go and read all the press accounts, I will tell you that the Uh The companies that were in on that phone call the texas instruments phone call that I spoke so famously about They their account of that phone call is factually entirely correct um And that's all i'm going to say on the subject I just wanted to apologize. I did not mean to cause you any grief. That's fine And if you want it you can have a copy of my book. Excellent. I'll take it Is it signed? Awesome So let's do some q&a. Who's first? No, you got to stand up and come here This this is not a magical stretchy mic So I think what all of def gun wants to know is just how much taller is jamie than you? He's tiny Jamie's got like his feet are like this big I think it's from his time as a geisha in the 18th century And he's like he's like 5 4 he walks on apple boxes all the time Can you tell us about a myth that will never make it to the air that you've researched? We we Yeah, no, I'm I'm how far do I go? There's only been a couple a lot of people ask about the spectacular things that discovery won't allow us to do And honestly if you've seen my talks, I say this repeatedly the truth is that the things they don't let us do are often The things they think are too boring Um Coat hanger against high-end speaker cable All that kind of stuff right they still won't let they still don't think my my high fidelity episode is worth running But we did explore I'm just going to say we explored a myth involving lots and lots of liquid oxygen Oh And in my time on mythbusters working with all the different explosives There's nothing that frightens me more than than than flammable gases Except that flammable gases are a cake walk compared to liquid oxygen It is terrifying and when you start really going into the into the material that we read and Did a little bit of experimenting with Totally unpredictable Yo, yeah It's just it's terrifying stuff and we've just abandoned that story because it were it's involves working with too much liquid oxygen under two Hard to reproduce circumstances from too far away. And so we're just not going to go there I'm not going to tell you the myth Speaking of failure, what's the most epic failure you ever had on mythbusters on mythbusters? We were doing 22 000 foot fall. I know this instantly I mean there's been a lot we had one recently where jamie left the emergency brake on a car that had to drive but um It's actually really funny because it you could see him He's alone on this on this hilltop and there's cameras on him and we're away, you know looking at what's happening And if you watch the camera footage like this uncut five-minute take of jamie watching have their cars gone And he's wondering why it went the way it went and then you can watch the penny drop in his eyes This is like oh crap um, no, we were on 22 000 foot fall. We had this is a myth about a paratrooper falling out of a bomber Into a train station glass roof as it is exploding It's supposedly the blast pressure cushioned him's total hogwash But we um, we had a weather balloon holding buster up 450 feet above this fake train station roof we'd made and the wind was blowing it off in the wrong direction And well, we had to get the hit buster up to the top of this with a quick release And it involved was that we're also shooting up an angels camp North of san francisco on during the california heat wave of about four years ago where it was 118 degrees in the shade We actually had to stop working at 10 or 11 a.m Because the fire department was going to shut us down because the fire hazard was too high after that So we're getting on set at three in the morning and working by car headlights until dawn when we're you know Go to set up buster on the balloon. We're going to rise him up and Whenever you're taking a system off a tie off and releasing it into something else. There's this transition moment And I hadn't thought through the transition moment. I had uh I had this like extra length of about a foot of rope between where buster was tied off the weather balloons We're about to take him up and I had five people on guy wires ready to release him And I cut this I cut this tying tying wire And the force of him going up gave rope burns to all five people holding guy wires And everything went pear shaped. I mean the whole expat, you know buster starts to float away. We're running after him Worse than that. It's friday. We're supposed to be finishing this We're supposed this neck what happens next is that we're done working for a week in 118 degrees And I know instantly that we'll be back at 3 a.m. The next morning to do it again And yeah, it was awful.   So please excuse me But I do I do want to say first one very quick comment, which is that I do Actually suffer from social and anxiety a lot and so actually hearing that the the failure talk is very helpful My my my question is actually about The the Apollo mission Which is that was a wonderful Episode I was just wondering what you have liked to have done additional that you weren't able to do just because I actually had to share the shared that video With some co-workers to actually prove to them, you know, we actually did go to the mission but So Yeah, just anything it would be great. I I really like your show Well, we we love that episode that episode was what we sent out as a as an example of our best work last year To the emmy nominating committee and it's one of the reasons we got nominated for an emmy for the first time this year Thank you Um There's plenty of material in the Apollo moon landing I mean we have a whole another hour's worth of material we could do we we chose the stuff that we were most interested in um And it doesn't seem to have convinced anybody who Needed convincing unfortunately the need for a good conspiracy theory. I think is too hard to shake The need to I think it's a deep-seated need for just to find out that someone's in charge Scariest thing is that no one's in charge. Yes, except the systems administrators Hey adam just despite all the failure that you've decided to share Um hypothetically if zombies were to attack Could I live in your basement? Could you what could I live with you in your basement? Just like, you know, I'll be take up a corner I'm not sure I'd let you in I'd be under a shoot first ask questions later kind of mood All right, thanks By the way, if zombies did attack my favorite weapon would be the lawnmower But that's just because I'm deeply in love with uh that peter jackson film dead alive Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Mr. Savage. How are you? Very good. You're a very attractive man. Thank you A little closer like that Play to make so, uh So the one guy hit on a question. Are you currently working on working for the government? On staging a manned mission to mars type of thing, you know framing that The community's been asking and I just and secondly, where do you buy your cod pieces? Where do I buy my what? Cod pieces cod pieces No, this is real mate No, we're not working for the government helping them fake anything You think they turned to us. I know much more qualified people than me to do that So two questions on failure for you one for me one for you one.  And two um as a big fan of the show I I really want a replica of the myth buster sign. How does the myth buster's team make it? Um, we uh, it's a plasma cutter in about 30 minutes Uh, honestly, we just we we draw out the letters I think the last one we had a producer leave the show and he took one with him So I had to remake it about three years ago. Um, I made the but no, I think jamie made the original one I made the second one. Uh, we just cut out the letters and then uh, weld them all the way around to another sign I don't have a plasma cutter.  It would be pretty expensive. I have to admit um as for the multis falcon Uh earlier this year. I actually got to spend some time having an audience with a real T's falcon And I was able to take a couple of hundred photographs of it Um, I was last minute access. I didn't have a ruler So I did the old prop maker's trick of putting a dollar bill next to it I have a ton of reference material So I'm actually planning to re-sculpt the entire thing from scratch The next time I get a free weekend and I'm not sure when that's going to be But uh, no, it's that's an ongoing saga Thank you.  I'm hosting the geo The def con geo challenge. I'm the one that originally emailed you to get you out here. Well, thank you so much I'd like to thank you personally for coming out here and the prizes that Did you like the prizes that I found for you? We got the prizes or on one set of them is on display over at our booth in the contest area That's great. And uh, there's been a lot of excitement. It was a first year event It's really drawn a lot of attention to it So I'd like thank you for coming and for the prizes that you donated for our event My pleasure. I mean my first question in his email was like, yeah, sure. I'll give you some prizes But do you think you could let get me in to speak at def con? Thank you um, I've noticed that uh, there's Often a difference between uh, when you're confirming or busting a myth that sometimes sorry sometimes you uh Confirm or deny the myth based on the spirit of the myth and sometimes it's based on the letter of the myth Is there any reason for that difference? No, it is it's as we feel it honestly it um No, you're absolutely right It comes up just like that where we'll often get to the end of a bunch of experimentation and jamie and I and the producer We'll have three different ideas about how to call it We've even sent a blueprint to the editor saying well, this one's busted and the editor sent back Sent back word going I've watched the cut and here are the reasons I actually don't think it's busted And we're like wow you're totally right. All right, let's call it plausible It's a It's like science man. It's it's open to interpretation often the results And I mean we play it as we feel it and if we got it wrong, we'll go back and revisit it That's one of my favorite parts of the job Well, obviously the uh rocket car was one of your very first myths And then you tried it again and it didn't go so well Do you have plans to give it another shot because that would be fantastic. Yeah, no rocket car 3.0 is on the list And even though we built that ramp in two days for a total of about five grand It is was one of the most expensive episodes we've ever filmed I think it cost us somewhere close to a hundred grand to get the whole crew to the desert and get that whole thing set up the two guys who built Two guys with the company that built that rocket And guys who we interviewed on on the show who asked for their titles to be changed from rocket makers to rocket experts They have actually graciously Offered two rockets for free Which is a great big savings when I said I think someone owes me 10 000 bucks Actually, each of those rockets was 10 000 bucks. So it's 20 000 worth of rocket power At a certain point.  I was kind of wondering were you really that pissed or were you just kind of BSing it for the camera? No, no, no, I I was so pissed and actually my whole crew was so pissed It's my wife saw the episode after about six months.  It wasn't actually Kerry Grant or Scotty that had initiated that it was it was our producer at the time and uh At the time I I so I told my wife about it when she saw the episode She said it actually doesn't come across as bad as you made it sound When you came home and I said well, that's because actually my crew refused to go outside and film me During the 10 minutes. I was calming down because I was so enraged It's a hundred thousand volts. I mean even though it's for, you know, two milliseconds. It was right through the center of my heart um And it initiated what was kind of an unspoken agreement, which is a prank detente Among the myth busters crew specifically Jamie and I Which is because when it comes to when it comes to pranking. We're kind of I think like nuclear powers And it's it's like a mutually assured.  I fall asleep instantly and I snore really loudly Drives Jamie nuts.  I knew exactly what's happening. I literally before I'd even opened my eyes I'd smacked him in the back of the head And said do you really want to go here, man? Because I'll spend weeks planning something that's funny to everyone, but you That will be my goal and he was like Jamie did this You're absolutely right. I'll never do it again So speaking of monsew or walrus face um I got a quick question You having a good time here? Very very good. I love I love talking to engineers. I love talking to the geeks How many I usually ask how many people have yelled at their television at me?  Yeah, there you go. See I can hear it So, uh, what you doing next year around this time? I'll come right on back. What about the rest of the crew? I mean you're having a good time. We're having a good time. You got friends. We got friends I'll see if I can bring some I don't know if I can get Jamie to come out, but well come on We love Jamie. It's he's very anti-social Oh, he's anti-social He's not he's not anti-social All right, I'll bring grant next year. I promise he says you think she's going to come for an invite like that So so um one of our red shirts made a Red shirts made a um a note that Jamie does have to sleep occasionally and we have some very able bodies But he sleeps in a locked cryonic chamber, so let me introduce you to deviant So Adam you've blown stuff up a couple of times at my school in New Mexico now and I just wanted to ask Even though I've already heard it from Kerry and Grant what theirs was. What's your favorite explosion?  It's because I'm actually drooling I drooled on camera and tried to cover it up and be like that was great Um It's better if I had the footage but watch the episode again. You can tell your friends. He's drooling Um my favorite explosions honestly are actually not technically explosions. It's watching hot water heaters fail that I hope you never experienced it firsthand without proper planning But I thought I wasn't supposed to do that at home This is Jamie and I talk about like at this point after you know 800 some odd setup explosions They're like wines to us. We're like, oh that had a sharp snap with a nice deep rumble at the tail end I'm still feeling it Um And you know c4's got its crack and the amp foes got its thud and the the hot water heaters are just like guttural and I can't get enough of the hot water heaters There's so we did the hot water heater up through the roof of your house a couple years ago and people kept writing to us and said You know my house has two stories of my hot water heaters in the basement So coming up in october during the new set of premieres we have coming up We actually did a hot water heater and we we set set it loose in a two story house that we built And it's pretty cool Hey there, uh So normally in the tv show You have a narrator and the narrator tends to you know cast jamie as kind of like the You know well-thinking thoughtful guy and you as kind of the goofball guy Uh, so first off, do you have any say over what they say? And if not have you ever had any conflicts over what they've sort of put over you know put over the episode? Um, that's a good question Uh, yeah, I mean it comes down to no the show gets written in australia We drive how what we shoot so we have a we have an idea about how this narrative is playing out And we shoot after all these years at a fairly low ratio for reality television Um reality television Um So that when we get a rough cut we're pretty clear about what it was going to look like the the writers and producers who cut the show in australia Uh, we have a very good relationship with them. So i've never been really unhappy with something they've written in They do sometimes play around with the conflict Which is still quite genuine. I mean the the dislike you see between jamie and i and our methodology sometimes is absolutely there Um, there was a time actually early on in the show where I did end up having this concern that Well, I had this fan write to me and said I really like you so misbusters Actually, it's more like jamie so and you're his perky assistant I'm giving that guy that voice because you know that I'm editorializing And I I actually was like is this how people are perceiving this show because really it is The fundament is our interest level and our ideas and what we're doing And it is an absolute partnership in every sense of the word and the most important Professional partnership that I'll probably ever have and it's with a guy who drives me nuts It's with a guy who I have the deepest respect for um and uh That makes a big difference because it allows you to realize that you know This product is bigger than the sum of its parts You recognize that people love the show for what it is and they you know what you see really is kind of what you get um And uh, you know, we do fudge around sometimes there was a point in which jamie caught a terrible flu Uh Yeah, he caught a terrible flu when we were shooting the ninja part of the ninja episode the walking on water And so we ended up shooting that whole sequence around him not being there With insert shots for him to come in so that when he came back in we could make a maximum use of him Even down to it being his idea Um because within the context of the episode we make sure that we trade off so that you know One of us is doing this one of us is doing that we really want you know There to be a balance between stuff and so there are sometimes things that are That are my ideas on camera that were his idea in real life and vice versa It's a very spongy process Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for being here great talk My questions in two parts and they definitely are related One then your entire within your entire time during uh during mythbusters. Have you ever Gone through a myth that has really challenged Uh or opposed something that you truly believed or felt within yourself say hey This can't possibly happen because of I know of x y and z or I believe x y and z and the this thing happened Has that ever have you ever had something like that and q explain that also? If this has ever happened to you Do you somehow see that as a Maybe a of shortcoming or a failure in your own kind of beliefs or philosophy of anything And could you describe how that might how that might be or how that could have ever affected you? Okay, so That's a great question a great pair of questions We're often asked if we prefer busting things or making them or proving them And I mean we're really agnostic when it comes to that we don't we don't have a we don't care Whether we're going to bust it or or make it or prove it Um We have been wrong We're wrong all the time about what our intuition is about what's going to happen Um, we've had we've got one coming up called dirty versus clean car where the result absolutely knocked our fracking socks off And it's going to be hilarious and it's going to be I think kind of controversial um That being said we did an episode years ago called, uh Killer cable snap which is something every fisherman in the world believes is the case Which is if you stress a braided cable to its breaking point As it breaks it'll whip around and slice you in half like right out of ghost ship or something like that and Like I said, there's not a fisherman in the world who doesn't know that this is true That it's happened to people who've had their legs cut off and all sorts of stuff And so we set up a beautiful experimental process that jamie designed of Figuring out how to get cables to snap and whip in a specific direction by wrapping them around a bollard Which we had bolted down to this floor and this abandoned building on a naval base Um, we took varying cables from a quarter inch up to three quarter inch up to 80 percent of their breaking strength And we're cutting them with a pneumatic cutter that were whipping perfectly We had a bunch of dead pigs In the line of fire and we absolutely believed when we started out that experiment that morning that we Have sliced ham for lunch that we would be watching beautiful high speed shots of this cable whipping through I really believe that was the case and after the fourth pig that we merely dented and did not break the skin on I thought through our process and I thought our process is good I'm sure our process is good 80 percent of it's breaking. We can't ask for much more than 90 percent We're really right there and we should be seeing something that approximates the slicing of flesh And I called up our head researcher on it. Uh, linda woke of it Uh and said do we have any first person accounts of people getting sliced in half by a whipping cable? And I'm eliminating aircraft carriers because those cables that launch the planes are like eye beams They're not whipping at all. They're moving and they're heavy and they're big and they will kill you But not in the way that this myth posits And she went back and she said we have one doctor But he treated someone after it had happened It was probably a cable that pulled him up against a pylon on a dock or something like that Again, that'll cut your legs off, but it's not a whipping cable and we finished that day busting that myth and I don't consider it a shortcoming that we were totally wrong. I consider it throwing again. It's the shape of one's intuition and Uh the process of figuring out how something is going to work is a process of realizing that you were wrong most of the time And I think that's actually for my money. We didn't set out to make a show that was at scientifically educational And if we had we would have failed But what I think we do give to people in terms of their understanding of how science works is we show how messy it is I think that's really important that people understand It's not people in white lab coats going my my experiment was a success that it's my experiment yielded data And I so we we don't mind at all when we're wrong And we've got four minutes left so I have a very simple question Hey, adam, howdy Got a very simple question now that you've uh gotten in touch with this community a little out Now that you've gotten in touch with this community this community obviously loves the show Does that mean we'll see more computer related myths on mythbusters? You know That they're a tough sell for discovery. Yes. No Actually in the very first season we wanted to buy two computers and sign them both Do the same exact things with both of them sign them on to internet accounts and yet one We would click don't send me spam buttons And see what happened And they're they're a tough sell really for the most part we're we're allowed to do what we kind of want to do But uh Discovery draws the line on stuff they feel is going to be visually completely Unwatchable and so we're still trying to sell the stuff like that But yes, no the brain trust that I I'm seeing here I'm hoping absolutely for more computer related myths Okay. Okay. Well, it's it's time for you to move along sir Not but but there's more to come can I say thank you. It was a time horse def con. Thank you so much for having me here It's my honor to come talk to you guys.  I bow to you


Renee Brown says that those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect. There was a powerful message for leaders in this idea of fostering a sense of belonging. If we want the members of our team to feel empowered to take risk and succeed in the face of challenges, then we must create a culture where our people feel safe to do so. This means that, like our homes and our families, our people have an emotional attachment to their work and see themselves as integral to organizational success. This relationship is not simply a connection brought about through the technical skills offered by those that we lead, but rather this is a deeper and more intimate connection to the person as a whole. I have been, and currently am, in organizations that have this concept of belonging fully integrated into the culture, and my observation is that leaders embrace, live, and reinforce that culture in their own deeds and words and model what belonging and inclusion look like for each individual. Lead well this week.


and welcome to Discovery, Knight Foundation's weekly series that looks at the creation of informed and engaged communities through the lens of artists in the arts. I'm Victoria Rogers, Vice President of Arts for Knight. I'll be joined today by Dina Higag, President and CEO of United States Artists for a conversation around the dynamics of living and working as an artist. Please submit your questions throughout the show via Zoom using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, through Twitter using the hashtag Night Live, and in the comment section of your Facebook live stream. We'll get to as many as we can. Dina, welcome to Discovery. Thank you for having me. Thank you for taking the time to do it. So I was doing research the other day and I came across this quote by George Bernard Shaw. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. We definitely find ourselves in the midst of the crudeness of reality. But as you and I have discussed, in fact, it's never been a picnic to be an artist. Let's start our conversation there. What does it take? You know, it takes work to be an artist. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Yeah, so, oh man, yeah, it's definitely not for the faint of spirit to want to be an artist. Yeah, I think one thing that has always been abundantly clear both at our work at United States Artists and in my personal practice as a curator is how much labor it takes to be an artist, how many entrepreneurial skills it takes to survive economically as an artist, and how good artists are at hustling to make it because it is not infrastructureed as a very traditional profession with the traditional things that we understand to make a productive work force. Recently, United States Artists, and I know we'll talk about this in a bit, engaged in a large National Artist Relief Fund to support artists on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic recession. And really there, in that space of watching artists have to apply for these relief grants, did the picnic that none of us are at become incredibly apparent. And it also made apparent just how good so many artists are at business and how much so many of them have survived despite how little infrastructure we are as a professional field. But yeah, it's not easy to be an artist and I commend, if there are artists on this line, I commend every single one of you for being able to pull this profession off in the way that you have. What are some just related to that and the types of applications that you all have been seeing? Talk a little bit about those. Yeah, so Artist Relief is a large National Fund that supports all kinds of makers across the country. So everything from designers to filmmakers, theater practitioners, dancers, painters, poets, et cetera. And each of these disciplines has very different economies and structures. Every part of the country has very different needs. And one thing we've noticed in our pool is across every single discipline, we have seen both incredibly emerging practitioners and profoundly established ones. And it's made us realize that even when artists are at the height of their success, the precarity of our field is very, very present always. And when the economy stops, so does every single one of these disciplines. When something like COVID happens, writers can't do readings across the country anymore. Theater practitioners can't tour their work across the nation anymore. Visual artists lose their marketplace. Designers have their construction projects just stopped. And so I think one thing this fund has made clear is in this new world, whatever new world we are all hoping to build and emerge into, we will need to seriously revamp almost every discipline. And we'll really need to think about ways to support artists from the ones just starting out, all the way to the Pilter Prize winners. There needs to be a little bit more stability. And I think we've always known that a United States artist. It's why I think our fellowship is very committed to funding across a very diverse career stage spectrum. But artists' relief really, really animated that in a very different way. We've had a lot of conversations about the fact that artists are workers. You just talked about it. It really takes hard work. So within the context of your last two or three sentences, what does that mean today as we try to create a revamped discipline across all artistic genres? Where are those similarities? But what are the things that have to happen to enable people, artists in this case, to gain some modicum of sustainability? Or to really be sustainable? Yeah, so it's so interesting. For me, it actually feels like two separate conversations. So for me, there's a conversation which is what are we doing to better infrastructure and sustain arts organizations? And how are we encouraging those organizations to better respect the labor of artists? Right? It's the old, like, we got to clean up our own house first on the heels of this recession. And I know it is not easy to run an arts organization, but it's terrifying when the artist line item budget is one of the first things cut. And when we realize that the support for artists is decreasing rapidly in this professionalized space. So there's this whole new world. We really got to flesh out for our beloved arts organizations. On the other side, there's, you know, it's funny, with artists really full, a lot of people, we've been having conversations nationally about a new WPA, new jobs opportunities for artists. And all of those things are sort of needed and deeply important. But one thing we're really struck by is if we just had a better healthcare system, we wouldn't have half of our applicants. We're really animated by conversations that are happening with the domestic workers Alliance really funds the restaurant workers, the transportation workers, educators, other workers that really just need very baseline things to live healthy and productive and safe economic lives. And I think my biggest takeaway from artists relief is what are we doing to support the arts field so that it can better support the creation of work and the livelihoods of the people that make it. But more importantly, what are we doing to advance workers rights, cross sector, national, and there's a lot of amazing thinkers in the field, right? Laura's able at springboard for the art killing it in the space, right? I know Clay Lord is like trucking along at after like really trying to drive this point home. I mean, there are people on the ground trying to figure these things out. And I think I want, especially in an election year, especially the next, whoever this next administration will be, there are a lot, there's a lot of advocacy that'll be needed for workers. And we just have to keep reminding artists that they are workers. And then everyone else that artists are workers, and they need unemployment insurance and all kinds of things. So I want to get to advocacy in a minute, but we've got a question here from a seminar. I believe an artist is primarily a core identity and a profession secondarily. What do you think about that? I don't disagree. I mean, I don't disagree. And I don't, I feel like a lot of, you know, if you'd ask my, I think you could make that argument about any, right? Yeah, I feel like, you know, I come from a family of scientists and, you know, to them, science is the core identity of the family, you know, it's what they believe in. It's what motivates them every day. I think our challenge is to find ways to protect both, right? How do you preserve the identity of an artist so that they don't have to give themselves a way to survive professionally, right? So that they're not so beholden to a market, so beholden to things they don't always want to do. And then at the same time, how do you dismantle this notion that being an artist is a higher calling and thus completely dehumanizes artists into not needing very basic rights, right? And so I think we're kind of stuck in the middle of these two spaces. And I think, I don't think they're mutually exclusive and I don't think one is the primary and one is the secondary. I think we just got to find a way to meet them in the middle. So you talk a lot about your work being about advocacy. I'd love to sort of eavesdrop on some of the conversations that you're having with different people that you are advocating to about the arts, you know, whether it's somebody at the NEA, whether it's somebody in either one of the houses or state level, but talk some about that work and ultimately how can all of us who are so passionate about the arts fulfill that role of advocacy? Yeah, so I think a few things. You know, we, despite our name, United States artists are not affiliated with the government and when we say advocacy, our team and our board and I, I mean, we're not necessarily in the business of government and in the business of legislative advocacy because, you know, electoral politics is not our site of battle necessarily. What I think our work is and what I strive to do is really just like public will building, right? So one thing that was really clear when we first announced to artists, really, for example, we got some pushback online. Why are you working so hard to support artists when so many Americans are struggling right now? And there's, of course, this disconnect, which I think USA has been trying to resolve since its inception, this disconnect between what artists and who artists are and how we protect them. When we say advocacy, what I want is I want a more clarified understanding of who artists are in society, right, that they are everything from eighth generation basket weavers in South Dakota to blue chip painters in New York to Hollywood filmmakers, potters, poets and everything in between. And I think when I say advocacy, what I want to do is better illuminate who artists are and why they matter so that the NEA is and the houses and everybody else has an easier time convincing people legislatively that this is a group of workers that need to be protected. So for us, I think the battleground really is public will building. And I think that's why I'm so animated by United States artists as an org is it's easier to do that if you really look at every discipline, every state, every territory, every tribal nation, and you honor the collective cultural landscape, excuse me. So I'm an advocate as in a believer of artists and wanting everyone to know that there are artists in their community. And so what would we do locally for that? You know, you have you do have a national platform, which is phenomenal and so happy that you're in that position. But what are your suggestions? You know, some of the I've read a lot and talked a lot with Laura about some of the, you know, the openness they are about artists and the contributions that they make to communities. And then how do we ensure that they get that kind of support that not only can they make a living, but it also addresses them having a life. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think there are really small things. I think as arts lovers at a local level, we should try to bring more people with us. And I literally mean this as like taking my engineer brother to a play, like like really just like bringing people in that maybe don't realize there's something for them here. I think we really have to dismantle this like romantic notion of who an artist is at a very local level. I think and I think, you know, Angie Kim at CCI and Laura again at Springboard have been so good at trying to remind folks that artists is a broad spectrum. And I think at a local level, I would highly encourage, especially in our new world, that every institution really reconsider the kinds of artists that they're working with, you know, and to support artists locally in their community as well as national and global stars, right, to really start to build these local inroads to that. And lastly, I think that at a local level, I think there will be ample opportunities for arts organizations and artists to collaborate with things outside of our sector. I think we're going to be rebuilding a lot for a very long time. I don't know how those things get infrastructureed, but every time somebody says WPA, I, you know, I'm like, I don't, I don't know that that's happening at a federal level, but I think it can be enacted locally by foundations and arts institutions and artists and businesses and other nonprofit ventures on the ground. And so I think I'm curious to see what small things germinate from small cities and small towns that really support advocating for artists and their role in a rebuild. Yeah. On a personal note, I have a connection with that former program. My aunt painted murals at Berea University outside of Louisville, Kentucky. Oh, I love that. That was one of the ways she helped to support their family. I love that. Also, Berea is amazing. Yeah, Berea is pretty, it is a beautiful, it's a beautiful place, but you know, we also have been having a lot of conversations about the intrinsic and sort of extrinsic value of the arts. I want you to talk some about that because we believe in this intrinsic value of it to connect us to each other and to tell our stories, but it also does have an economic impact on our cities as we've discussed and the vitality of a city. So I'd really love for you to talk some more about that. Yeah, it's been interesting. So I'm in Brooklyn currently and have been really monitoring, you know, some of the local efforts here to really think about how the city and the state are going to survive in this new post COVID landscape and a few different things. So yes, right, like in New York and in most major cities, you can track the cultural spending and all tangentially related restaurants, hotels, etc. And they're usually pretty sizable figures, right? Like how much money culture generates in tourism and in local commerce. But one thing that I think has actually been really interesting in New York is we've been watching conversations unfold about the gig economy and how completely abusive and predatory it can be. And I was actually recently reading a study that the new school issued about how there are low earning gig workers and high earning gig workers. And this is a very, very gross generalization, but overwhelmingly they would categorize artists and cultural workers as like high earners. And they meant that as in most artists can control the conditions in which they work. It's a little bit different than a domestic worker or a landscaper, etc. They'll also they noted that oftentimes artists are both, right? Many artists end up having a low earning gig job like driving an Uber and being a playwright, right? Like they sort of live at the intersections. But one of the things I think the new school was trying to urge here was that not only do artists bring intrinsic or extrinsic monetary value to a city, they're also remarkable advocates for the gig economy. Because they have more power in these conversations, they oftentimes have two-year degrees and higher. And if you can get artists at the table to re-envision labor and work, they actually carry with them lots of other vulnerable gig workers. And a part of me beyond the monetary values of the arts, I want to remember artists as people and the skills they bring to a conversation. And I think in New York, there are some efforts to get artists at that table. What has it been like to work gig to gig in New York State and in New York City? What are the things that don't work about it? What are the employment insurances that they need? And if artists can advocate for themselves, they also bring with them taxi drivers, nannies, you know, restaurant workers. And I think we really need to remember that that artists are powerful and educated and can like blast through advocacy in ways that would help a lot of people. So we've got a question. I'm going to look down so I can read the question here. Do you think the Western concept of the artist as the outsider works against advocating for artists? Earlier in your conversation, you talked about Indigenous people where art is just ingrained in their being. I mean, in some, there's not even a word for art. It's just it's a way of life. So talk some about that and what you're seeing. Yeah, I would agree actually that the Western conception of the artist has worked against advocating for the arts. Not to get too, I don't come from a family that is in the arts, like it just confused them, that I did not become a scientist. And they are Egyptian immigrants. And it's funny, I think I spent the first like 30 years of my life thinking I was railing against them, like educating my immigrant parents about what art was and the value of it. And it wasn't actually until I got to USA and we could break the fourth wall, this sort of, you know, the title of our talk about what art is that it dawned on me that the reason this confused my parents so endlessly is back home where they're from in Egypt, art is just part of everything. They don't have to justify it in such specific terms. And so I've been really thinking about that in USA has definitely been a lesson in this as we've watched how different art manifests from New Mexico to Hawaii to New York and beyond. Um, but yeah, I, I don't know how to dis, I don't know how to work together to really dismantle this Western notion of the singular artist genius. I don't know a single artist that makes things alone. I don't know a single artist that can support themselves without their communities and without an audience and without a constellation of workers around them that make it possible. And so I think maybe one thing we could do in our new world is if you are an artist to be more overt about how it gets made and where it comes from and what it's like. And I think one attempt we are trying to have at this at USA is last year we started the Beresford Prize named after one of our co-founders, Susan Beresford, to honor administrators in the arts, the entire workforce that makes art possible. And I think the more we can do to highlight this ecosystem and how culture is made, the more it dismantles this idea that there's a man alone in a studio making two million dollar paintings, but that's not really how this works. But yeah, we really got to kill that fast. So we've got a question from Wayne Brown in Detroit now, formally with the NEA. Considering the duration of the pandemic, are you giving any consideration to support artists for more than one round of artist relief? And these artists that demonstrate exceptional artistry yet continue to try and navigate a really dire state? Yeah, that's an excellent question. So right now, frankly, no, we are not considering re-granting, if I'm understanding the question correctly, an artist that's already received a grant, mainly for two reasons. Right now, artist relief has almost 128,000 applications, many of whom are incredibly urgent. And so I think we're trying to reach as many people as possible. And it's one of the reasons we actually made the grant $5,000 is we were hoping it would buy people a pretty long runway to figure something out in such a crisis zone. Wayne, right now, our biggest priority is actually just to extend the grant past September and to take advantage of the IRS's Qualified Disaster Relief designation, which we think is the rest of this year. So we're just trying to work to making sure we can keep funding artists through December and then reevaluating as the pandemic unfolds. Yeah, today we have funded 2,400 people out of 128,000. So we're really up against quite a wall of need. So we, one of the other things we've talked about is even beginning to reimagine a new normal. And that we've also had conversations about moving from scarcity abundance. We talked last week when I was talking with Christy Bowlingbrook, who heads up the Choreography Center in Akron about that concept. But when you're dead in the middle of it, how do you move beyond that? Have you seen artists doing that? And what are those key things that enable them to do that? Are the ones that are able to do that, do they have a different kind of support system? Yeah. Yeah, you know, man, so a few things.  And we've seen it everywhere. Sometimes it's for other artists, sometimes it's not, right? We've seen artists like Lauren Halsey run food justice projects in LA for families that can't access food. We've seen artists in New York run bail funds. We've seen disabled artists run Crip funds for disabled people that can't access medication right now. And one thing that kept coming up this summer, which was really interesting was that artists could not administrate these mutual aid funds because they were growing faster than they realized. And essentially what artists were saying is I'm willing to deploy my social capital to make something possible, but I don't have the administrative support system to actually intake the money, distribute it, and safely record all of these dealings. And it was really hard this summer to find nonprofits that could take on that work for these artists for lots of complicated reasons, namely that most of the artists didn't want it promoted as a nonprofit project because they were really adamant that these were artist led mutual aid projects and this got kind of slippery. Most nonprofits didn't know how to take in an artist project in that way and not articulated as an artist led project. And so I think this summer we watched nonprofits come to the table and meet artists and figure out how to amend their infrastructures to help them in the way that they needed. And things happened, but they had to happen away from the guys of PR. They had to happen with very flexible finance departments and legal departments. And they had to happen because an institution and an artist truly collaborated on something. And that was really beautiful to witness. And I hope we see more of that. And the takeaway there was that the artists really led with what they needed and with what their community needed. And what the institution did was say, we have an infrastructure to surround us. And I think we'll need a lot more of that for the next few years. That institutions don't necessarily see themselves as the curatorial lead, but see themselves as truly a resource to artists and communities. And if you're listening, the artist knows what's happening in their community. And they know where the resources have to land. You just, I think, have to make yourself available to that artist in that way. But it's very counter to how we at the institution are so used to doing things. We're used to making the thing and then inviting the artist in. And this time, I think we just got to switch it up a little bit. And I think yesterday I was actually having a conversation with a few colleagues and one of them said, it's everything's just going to shrink. That's it. It's just all going to shrink. And so rather than fight tooth and nail to maintain it, figure out how to shrink gracefully. And I've really just all night been thinking about that. What does it mean as a cultural sector to shrink gracefully? And I think I don't know anyone that knows how to do things more gracefully on as little means as possible than artists. So we really got to let them lead here. And I also think, you know, we know that some institutions who obviously employ artists. So we're, it's, in this case, I'm talking about one and the same, you know, are really concerned that when they do that, they lose that talent. Yeah. And rebuilding, you know, nine months later, what does that look like if in essence, you're starting from scratch and wanting to really be able to continue paying or to continue supporting these artists that have been working with them. Yeah. So I think that gracefully doing it is one thing, but it does mean, you know, that not everything will survive. And then what is that? So that ties into our even reimagining what this future might look like. There's, there's another one in here that is, do you think that artists, arts, do you think the arts are being sufficiently discussed in our political discourse, both on a local or a national level? No. Oh my God. No. No, absolutely. Zero. No. Okay. Well, I'm going to issue your challenge here. No. What do we need to be doing? No, no, no, it's not being discussed enough. I mean, I also, I think maybe the question is, what are we asking them to discuss? Right. Like, what are we asking for when we say that we want the arts discussed more in these political arenas? Like quite actively, what are we saying? Which is one reason I don't honestly even know that I have an answer to that quite yet, aside from the fact that we cannot lose so much of the good cultural work happening across our entire country. For me, I think really, because I'm so focused on the individual, I am wondering what can artists do to better advocate for everyone around them? Right. Like actively, what can artists do to advocate for better healthcare reform? What can artists do to advocate for better unemployment insurance? What can artists do to better advocate for that low earning gig work? Or if they are not that already? So, for me, it's more like what are we, where are the kind of the what are we doing for our country? Not what is it doing for us? Like where are the productive conversations happening that are going to build a better, safer, more equitable United States? And how do we make sure artists are at that table and are fighting hard with their exceptional storytelling skills, language skills, community skills? But on a political frame, no, I worked in Baltimore for a long time. And there was a very contentious mayoral race. And there was one time I remember an organization and a foundation went out of their way to host a cultural debate. They had every mayor respond to the needs of the cultural community. I've never seen anything like that since in any other city I've lived in. But I do think that even that one evening, watching however many it was, half a dozen candidates have to answer difficult questions about how they were protecting their cultural bears felt productive. And on a small scale, I think we can all use more of that in our local municipalities. But politically, I think the question is, are artists politically engaged? And not just for artists, but for everyone? Because I think we're about to enter, I hope, a very productive legislative era for the US. And I want artists to be there too. You know, we've especially, you know, over the last couple of months, we've seen artists coming together to really talk about what's happening in this country now. And you see it at the core of so many cities, you know, whether they're voices, you just mentioned voices being heard. So we're seeing these voices. And it's, you know, it's about long standing biases that exist in our country. But it's also about, it's to me, this power of the artist to see, not only to look at what was, but to look at what is today and what might be. We don't have really any time left, but I still want you to talk about, you know, how the artists are that active, connective tissue in our communities. And because they're so important to the economic development and frankly, to the the challenging of long held beliefs and opinions, you know, it's such an important role. Yeah, I think, I think that in the United States, sometimes we do not like complexity, right? We want things to resolve very neatly, right?  You know, we love to point, you know, I don't know, like the civil rights movement was like a three day parade, you know, and then suddenly there were rights for everyone, and not better acknowledging how complicated things are. I think that art, what art does very, very well is it makes complicated things more legible. And it doesn't always need a tidy solution. Art reminds me that it's okay for me to not always know and to just feel something and to steadily move through it. And I don't know how we survive what our nation is going through right now. I think it's complicated everywhere. And I think if we do not incorporate artistic thinking skills, critical thinking skills, the things that make art viable, then I don't know how we make it. Recently at a party of socially distanced party where I just sat with two other friends and screamed at them from 10 feet away. Well, we were wondering about the value of our art history degrees, like we were just like, what was the point of this? You know, because there's ongoing conversations about whether people should get those degrees now in a very precarious economy. And one thing we all agreed on is art history made me feel like I was learning the history of my nation for the first time. There's the history told by the victor that I was taught in high school, and then there's everything I learned directly from artists who were alive, who left a record of what was really happening. And I think right now, that's what artists are doing. They are leaving a record of what it is like to be in the United States in 2020. And it's that record, it's really facing the thing truthfully, that's going to help us reimagine the future. And I think right now, months into this pandemic, this is not a pivot, we're not pivoting, we're really reimagining, we have to start over. And I think artists are the ones that have the record of everything we've tried so far truthfully in efforts to find the strategies we need to really move through as a country with a little bit more keys. And so I want the truth. I don't want the stagecraft. I want the truth. And I think that's what artists do. They tell us the truth. I agree with you. And I think our generations to come deserve the truth. Yeah, I really do. I also want to give a shout out here in Miami, locally to Rosie Gordon Wallace, who instituted a food program for artists. So it's that spirit and that generosity that we find in artists. And it's their perspective on things. That's not just their work, it's their lives. Well, it also shows how big and broad their interests are. These are people in our community. We work with them. We see them. We love them. So I cannot thank you enough. Thank you. Unfortunately, our time is up. I want to thank everyone who joined us. And of course, special thanks to Dina Haggag. I might say the amazing Dina Haggag. And to the night production crew, the beats of the top of the show were created by Chris Barr, our director of art and technology here at night. And the music that will play us out is composed and performed by the amazing jazz pianist Theron Brown from Akron, Ohio. Next week for discovery, Priya Sarkar, director of arts will be in conversation with Connie Martinez, CEO of SV Creates, about how you can center the arts and artists in your city's present and future. We hope to see you next week at 1 p.m. Eastern. Again, Dina, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Victoria. Thank you, night.