From Terminator and Superman to Sicario and Face/Off, Movie Pyrotechnician and Stunt Coordinator has been blowing stuff up in movies for more than 30 years. We talk how movie explosions are made, the biggest explosions in movies and blowing up the Death Star.
Then, it’s Dallas and Charlotte vs. Madison and Lincoln as we countdown the Top 5 Cities to be Named After.
Anthony Simonaitis: 01:06
Pointless: 40:12
Top 5 Cities to be Named After: 01:04:46
Interview with Movie Pyrotechnician Anthony Simonaitis
Nick VinZant 0:12
Nick, welcome to profoundly pointless. My name is Nick VinZant Coming up in this episode, movie explosions and city name.
Anthony Simonaitis 0:21
The joke in the industry is composition P plenty and a lot of cars. Sometimes at the end of a movie, we have a parking lot filled with blown up cars that it, yep, that's that pickup truck right there. I think we launched it like 100 feet in the air, and it went about 200 feet down the road, and it weighed about 8000 pounds.
Nick VinZant 0:41
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it really helps us out. So I want to get right to our first guest, because over his career, he has worked in dozens of movies and set off 1000s of explosions. This is Movie pyrotechnician Anthony Simonides, so what makes an explosion a good explosion?
Anthony Simonaitis 1:10
Color, texture, detail, particles, not just a fireball, but stuff that moves through the air.
Nick VinZant 1:18
Why are we drawn to this for film. I think
Anthony Simonaitis 1:21
it's because it's a sense of danger, risk. It's energy, it's impact, excitement, it's big, it's dynamic on the screen. It's like, like, whoa. You know, it's like the audience will be literally blown away sometimes by the explosion. It has energy, so it ramps things up, including the performances of the actors when they're when they're in the shot, the real explosion has that sort of dynamic punch that gets everybody moving, that you can't do when the director says, bang, there has to be a bang.
Nick VinZant 1:55
What exactly like what goes in to creating an explosion for a movie or a TV show.
Anthony Simonaitis 2:01
Obviously, it starts with the script. You know, what is the what's in the story? What does the director want to see? So we look at that from a creative perspective and figure out what it needs to look like. And then there's the sort of design and engineering aspects of figuring out what it takes to create that. And then there's the regulatory side of it, where we have to go and approach the city and say, Hey, we want to do this thing here. It's going to seem a little crazy to you, but we're going to make it work. And then we have to convince them with our engineering and our track record and our licenses and our insurance and our lawyers, and then get the green light, and then we put it all together and we blow something up.
Nick VinZant 2:44
So how much explosive stuff will you usually be using in one of these?
Anthony Simonaitis 2:48
It can be anywhere from a pound or two of black powder, low explosive, all the way up to 10s or hundreds of pounds of high explosive. It depends on where the where the event has to take place more than anything.
Nick VinZant 3:01
So like, how do you figure out exactly how much you're going to need?
Anthony Simonaitis 3:05
The joke in the industry is composition, P plenty, right? That's you can see where that's going, but no, it's very carefully planned out. We have, obviously, years of experience. We kind of know what the size of the charge, and we work backwards from what the goal is, how big of the fireball has to be, how far does debris, debris have to fly? And then we through our experience and some engineering, we can figure out how much of a charge to use. And that's really more engineering than, I mean, more experienced than anything, because there's so many variables, and you can't just trust it to paper. You have to know that it's going to work. And we'll do testing, a lot of testing, sometimes, if it's critical, either due to safety and, you know, proximity to cast and crew, or if there's some sensitive environmental issues. There's a lot of reasons we would test and develop something very specific that is within those you know, those confines.
Nick VinZant 4:10
Is it a math equation at the end of the day where, okay, we have this much explosive we're going to go through this material that is this thick. We need it to go this far. How much of it is science, how much of it is
Anthony Simonaitis 4:22
art. So the way you just asked that, if you were actually breaking real things, it would be engineering. There's very specific calculations to figure out exactly how much explosive of what type you're using is going to create that type of damage. Most of the time we're blowing up something that has been designed to come apart. So we're just pushing things through the air. We're not actually shattering concrete. All that concrete is fake. It's all this lightweight plaster or foam coated with rubber and plaster to look like rock cement, and then we're pushing it. With a very low energy explosion that just kind of throws it far enough to be believable, as opposed to putting dynamite in a cement wall that's not very common in our world, we're distributing the energy generally by directing it in what we call a mortar, like a steel metal pot. The charge goes in, the debris goes on top of it. When the charge goes off, it throws the debris through the air. And we can position that to push a door off a car, to blow a door off a building, to blow a wall apart. And we will add all the extra debris in front of that charge to create that look. So that would just that could be one concentrated charge in the middle, creating the illusion of blowing that whole thing apart. Whereas, if we were doing it for real, we might what's the word distribute that amount of explosive over multiple smaller charges so they're more point effective.
Nick VinZant 5:56
Does it usually go the way you think that it was going to go?
Anthony Simonaitis 6:00
Yes, always, very rarely are we surprised.
Nick VinZant 6:06
Not even, like, a little bit and like, like, Oh no, that thing did exactly what we thought it was going
Anthony Simonaitis 6:10
to do, yeah, and because of the risk, the safety and all that, it may even be a little bit less than we'd wanted. Going bigger than what you want is a problem, because risk for stunt people, they get burned if they're too close to a fireball that was too big. Can't do that. So we have to know, and so our precision is what our reputation is based on
Nick VinZant 6:35
how many do you think? Do you remember? How many you've done,
Anthony Simonaitis 6:38
hundreds, 1000s, from the tiniest little things like someone's eyeglasses getting shattered, to whole buildings exploding.
Nick VinZant 6:49
To get some perspective on it, right? Because you've done so many different jobs, let's just look at, say, like the average one. The average one is going to take you this long from start to finish. It's going to cost this much, etc. Yeah. I mean,
Anthony Simonaitis 7:05
it can be a couple $100 to a couple 1000 for your average explosion, and it can be in the 10s or hundreds of 1000s if you're breaking and destroying a lot of material. And it's really not about the explosives, it's about the prep time, the fabrication time to build all this stuff, testing, we do a lot of testing, so that eats up a lot of time and a lot of man hours, and a lot of material and a lot of cars. Sometimes, at the end of a movie, we have a parking lot filled with blown up cars, and it's not because we're trying to figure out how to blow up the car. It's because we're trying to create a very nuanced look that the director is asking for. So we do a lot of testing and put it on video and and get approval from, you know, from the boss man. And so that's, I think that's probably where the biggest costs
Nick VinZant 7:55
come from. What is the director like? What are they generally kind of looking for? What stuff will they say to you.
Anthony Simonaitis 8:01
Okay, so here's the thing you'll hear this a lot, like, and it's a common joke in our industry, I don't know what I want, but when I see it, I know what I don't want, right? Like, yeah, not so much. I didn't like that. Try something else. You know, it's for anyone at you know, asking for something creative. There's a little bit of a you have to have a gift of explaining it, and the people you're explaining it to have to be able to interpret what you're saying. And there's a lot to be there's a lot that can get lost in that process. The one that I remember most is the guy said that we were blowing up like an ammo storage facility in the jungle. And he said, I don't care what it is. Just needs to be big, and it shouldn't look like an oil refinery exploding. I don't even know what that means. I think he didn't want just a giant fireball. He wanted debris flying and sparks and multiple steps to the explosion, you know?
Nick VinZant 8:57
And so this is the explosion of the Death Star. I remember
Anthony Simonaitis 9:01
seeing this in the theaters one of the first theatrical releases I saw. It looks a little corny now, but it was so awesome at the time. So how did they do that then? So a lot of those shots, because they take place in space. You don't want the sparks like in a fourth of July fireworks shell. They all start to fall towards the ground. You want them to just go out and just continue going out. So the way they simulated that was filming either from the bottom and hanging the charge above them and blowing the charge up, so everything just goes towards the camera or away, or they invert that and shoot straight down on it, and everything blows. You know. Does that make sense?
Nick VinZant 9:40
Yeah, no, I get you. You just shoot. You just shoot at a different
Anthony Simonaitis 9:44
angle. So gravity is working in your favor. Visually,
Nick VinZant 9:47
is there, like in almost any explosion that we're seeing, or in a lot of them, or whatever, are we usually seeing? Kind of a trick, in the sense that, like, you're not really looking at something in the way. That you think that you're looking at it
Anthony Simonaitis 10:02
very much. So in these kind of outer space movies where there's or underwater, where you have buoyancy and gravity and all these other forces, there's going to be a lot of trickery in the camera positioning and how the shots are arranged lined up so that they can take advantage of that or minimize the negative aspects of those environments. But for the typical explosion out on the street, not so much.
Nick VinZant 10:29
This is one that when I think of a movie explosion, I'm a date myself. This is the like one that always jumps out big to me. This is Independence Day, the first one
Anthony Simonaitis 10:39
that was a large scale miniature. So they these guys are experts at miniature pyrotechnics to look like they're large so they can use different materials that behave in a way that that scales properly with the scale model.
Nick VinZant 10:55
And they're just shooting that like real micro lens style. Then,
Anthony Simonaitis 10:59
yeah, the special lenses frame rates that are different than what you would normally use a lot of times. It's very high frame rates. And then they can slow it down, and they use pyrotechnic materials that burn a little slower and have more granular texture to the fire. So when they stretch it out on the big screen. It doesn't look like a tiny little teaspoon of gasoline exploding. It's got this thick, rich, you know, dark, black, Smokey,
Nick VinZant 11:30
what's usually the hardest part of the explosion to get right
Anthony Simonaitis 11:34
in these kind of shots, or just in general,
Nick VinZant 11:38
both, let's do these kind of, like miniature shots, and then, in general, these
Anthony Simonaitis 11:42
ones, it's scaling the velocity of the of the debris to make it look believable and realistic for what it is. You know, because it's a miniature, everything is different, including the physics. Well, the physics is actually, it's, it's you can't, you can't, you can't adjust the physics. So you have to work with what you have. And so they use Camera, camera, speed and and different techniques to blow things apart. It may not be high explosives. It could be compressed air with fireballs made with fuel and particulate. It could be small, black powder charges that are low, low energy. Sometimes there is high explosives wine, you know, laced in those buildings to break things apart. But that's not really the visual thing. That's just the mechanical destruction. And then there's a lot of techniques applied on top of that to sort of conceal that and bring everything into that slow, big, heavy, you know, dramatic look to the eye, it would look very different. You know, when you if you stand there and watch them blow one of those up, it's like, bang, what happened? And in the movie, it's huge, and it takes seconds,
Nick VinZant 12:57
yeah, because obviously, if you're blowing up a real car, it's going to move a lot differently than if you're blowing up a tiny, miniature, little plastic car. What about like in a large scale explosion, one that's not miniaturized? What's like the most difficult part of that usually,
Anthony Simonaitis 13:14
I mean, for me, the difficult part is always creating the the look the director is asking for, and then keeping it safe, for the environment and for the people. So that's, you know, you it's easy to make something huge, but that isn't always appropriate, you know, we do stuff in the middle of downtown Los Angeles with, you know, Chrome and glass buildings all around and we making these huge explosions, we can't be breaking all the windows. Be easy to just make a huge explosion, but then there'd be a cost to pay, loss of a license, going to jail, people getting injured. You just can't do that. So making it look big when it or even making it big but safe in those environments, that's that's where the challenge comes in. That's the hardest
Nick VinZant 14:05
part. So is this the enemy of the state? One, the building
Anthony Simonaitis 14:09
existed, concrete building, and they were going to tear it down anyway. So they got the location. Department found that building, it worked out for the scene. The director told the demolition crew that they wanted the building to come down in a certain way, and not just flat to the ground in a million pieces, but leave some residual of the building kind of toppled onto the pile. So it was kind of like the the cherry on top of the sundae, and he wanted the fireball to clear before the building fell, so that the fireball didn't obscure the structural demolition portion of that explosion. So timing, all of that, which involves some testing, calculating how long it took the fireball to clear before the building started moving. That was an elaborate timing plan that took a little bit of testing. And then, you know, from experience and understanding of how things work, we were able to achieve that with a team of excellent people.
Nick VinZant 15:16
Yeah, I can see what you're talking about. The fireball goes, you see the building, then the building starts to collapse, yeah.
Anthony Simonaitis 15:23
And you can kind of see the elevator tower structure kind of ends up landing on top of the debris pile.
Nick VinZant 15:30
So obviously, like, what's that pressure like, in the sense that you're not getting another shot at that?
Anthony Simonaitis 15:35
No, yeah, yeah. So the pressure is, is there, for sure, that's definitely a thing you cannot escape. But you know, with enough planning and enough preparation and enough understanding of what you're doing, there's eye confidence of success when we do these it's not, it's not a winging it situation.
Nick VinZant 15:58
Everything that we're kind of seeing here, will all of this actually be happening at the same time, or is it? Nope, it's just the explosion and the cars driving, but like, the actors aren't in those cars, right?
Anthony Simonaitis 16:11
No, there'd be stunt people in the cars, and they were actually driving out of the building, and the stunt guys hiding behind the car across the street. The train was real. The helicopters were real. There was nothing that wasn't real in there. But, you know, Will Smith and Gene Hackman weren't in there?
Nick VinZant 16:30
Have you ever had somebody not be rolling?
Anthony Simonaitis 16:33
Yes, really, yeah. Sometimes it's, you know, one of many cameras. So it's not the end of the world. Sometimes the camera jams, sometimes a battery dies right at the right at the moment, there have been a couple of those.
Nick VinZant 16:51
That's happened more than once. I wouldn't have like,
Anthony Simonaitis 16:55
it happens enough that it's, you know, they they always ask, are those batteries fresh? You know? Is there? Is there any reason we're not going to get this? Like, are you sure everyone's going to be rolling and up to speed before they pull the trigger with digital it's less important because the camera can run the whole time. I think on the Enemy of the State Building, there was a fire truck. Had to it's a long story. I don't know if you want to hear the whole thing,
Nick VinZant 17:18
but oh no, I'm hooked. I'm already in. I'm already
Anthony Simonaitis 17:20
in. So you saw there was a train that had to drive by the building, and there was cars that had to leave, stunt guys had to run out, helicopters had to fly in, and all this had to be timed with the building explosion, primarily so that everybody was in a safe spot, but so all the action in front of the cameras was happening at the right time. So we had the whole city closed off, and the blasting machine is being charged up. The detonators are all in place. Everybody's standing by. There's a countdown of actions for all the different pieces. The train has to start early because it takes a long time to get up to speed. And all these things are happening in this big, long, elaborate timeline, queuing all this stuff to start, including cameras, and then there was a fire or some emergency call on the other side of this big, giant lockup, and the fire trucks had priority, and they drove right through the lockup, and they crossed in front of the path of the Train. So the engineer had to stop the train, and when that happened, it put the whole sequence out of whack. But there was no stopping and resetting, because our 10 minute window of closing the interstate was about to expire, so they had to go for it. The helicopters had gone and done their pass and had cleared out, and the building hadn't exploded and and many of the cameras rolled out of film before the explosion happened. So they got it on, like three or four out of 14 cameras.
Nick VinZant 18:54
God, that is just the universe.
Anthony Simonaitis 18:56
Oh yeah, it was horrible. But, you know, they made the best of it. The editing they put it came together really well, but there was some shots I would have loved to have seen, like the helicopter shot looking straight down. We never got to see that,
Nick VinZant 19:08
all because of a fire, like, all because of, like, one,
Anthony Simonaitis 19:11
one they had priority. The security guards led him through. I guess, I don't know the details exactly, but it stopped everything. And that train took forever to get rolling again, and they couldn't push the button until the engine was past the building, so the guy, if something flew out of the building, it wouldn't hurt the operator or the train. Yeah, it was a big that was a big deal.
Nick VinZant 19:34
And that's one of those things that, like, you just, you have to do what you can. You can't, like, Stop, reset, go back, get a permit to open, close the whole highway again.
Anthony Simonaitis 19:44
It would never happen. All the Dynamite was in the building. All the black powder charges and fuel was in there. It was all ready to go. There was no coming back tomorrow.
Nick VinZant 19:54
Is there a discussion that's happening in those moments, or is it just like
Anthony Simonaitis 19:58
it was pre planned? If any. Goes wrong, it's going to go anyway. So we have enough cameras. If we lose it on one or two, we'll still be good. And they lost it on several, but they made the best of it. It cut together well.
Nick VinZant 20:14
But does part of you wonder like, God, what would that have looked like? Exactly? What do you think about people walking away from explosions like this.
Anthony Simonaitis 20:22
It's a genre, it's a cliche, and it's almost expected. It would almost be a mistake not to do that. I think in those kind of
Nick VinZant 20:30
movies, does it drive you nuts at all? Who in the right
Anthony Simonaitis 20:33
mind would stand out in the open with the building blowing up behind them? I mean, obviously there would be high explosives in a building, and the fragments are traveling 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet. You're not going to duck. It's just going to be over. You're going to be dead.
Nick VinZant 20:47
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Like, if this really happened, this is, I think, one of the Wolverine movies. I cannot remember exactly which one this is. Like, if all of that is really occurring. That explosion is there. He's there. What in this case? Like, really happens.
Anthony Simonaitis 21:08
So, like, you can see that debris flying in the movies on the set. That debris is lightweight, you know, cork, balsa wood. It's not going to go very far, and it's not going to have much energy. But if it's a real building, it's concrete and steel, so is it as it's flying past him, if it hit him, it would go right through him and kill him. You know, it's not, it's not fluff, it's, it's hard objects getting shattered with, you know, tremendous energy. Then the the radiant heat from the fireball would probably make him start to run and react. There's you're just not going to not react. I don't know.
Nick VinZant 21:46
Yeah, you're not. You're not. But this one looks more like that might, he might actually have been there.
Anthony Simonaitis 21:51
Yeah, he's not that close. And, you know, like I said, we can direct the debris very specifically and put the actor very close and have debris blow past him on both sides, and it looks like he's in the danger zone, but he's actually in the clear zone.
Nick VinZant 22:07
Do you like Apocalypse Now? Or Specter?
Anthony Simonaitis 22:11
Specter, I think had some had more like technically
Nick VinZant 22:15
sophisticated effects. It was the bigger one, right?
Anthony Simonaitis 22:19
I think this is one they claimed as the world record, but the one we did on Terminator was bigger than this in terms of the amount of fuel and the amount of explosives. So I don't know where they get their numbers, but Does this look familiar? This is, this is the scene of the harvester attack. Launching that pickup truck was pretty like we burned 8000 gallons of diesel fuel that afternoon.
Nick VinZant 22:44
Are you surprised when you see it on screen like, oh, man, that's how they did that,
Anthony Simonaitis 22:50
not usually like this movie. I was, I was pleasantly surprised at how everything cohesively tied together in terms of the look, you know, the air, the dust, the smoke, the vehicles, the lighting, you know, everything. It just, it didn't look like a bunch of random pieces edited together. It looked like it was part of a big
Nick VinZant 23:13
cohesive scene. Oh, I think there. I found it. I'm pretty I think this that
Anthony Simonaitis 23:17
it, yep, that's that pickup truck right there. I think we launched it like 100 feet in the air, and it went about 200 feet down the road, and it weighed about 8000 pounds. So there was, yeah, there's a full that's a real car going 100 feet in the air. That's crazy, and then through the roof, that's all real. When,
Nick VinZant 23:39
when you try to get these permits to people ever be like, you're going to do what?
Anthony Simonaitis 23:45
Yeah, yeah. And then they ask, how we're going to mitigate the risk, and are we going to damage their street? You know, like in this instance, there was a big natural gas pipeline buried underground right near where all this was happening, so we had to put seismographs out to measure the ground vibration, to ensure the gas company and the permitting authority that we were not exceeding the vibration levels that would be considered dangerous to the pipeline. So we had to do the engineering and make sure that we weren't detonating enough explosives to create that kind of problem, and then we had to document that we monitored and our vibration levels were below the limit.
Nick VinZant 24:27
Is it harder to get that? Is it usually harder to get the permit or harder to get insurance?
Anthony Simonaitis 24:32
At the production companies, get the insurance through whatever means they do, and it's usually as long as there's qualified people working on the job, they don't have a problem getting the insurance. They might have to pay extra for certain high risk things, you know, if there's humans, I mean, they try to take the risk out of it, but obviously there's some risk when there's big trucks driving around and debris flying through the air. But you know, it's all carefully organized and coordinated so that. Nobody's really in danger. So I think the insurance is probably the easier part. The bigger part is getting the city to to sign off on the plan. I could see that, you know, I mean, here we're out in the desert, we're in the middle of nowhere. There's not much to hurt there, but we do these scenes sometimes right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, like the scene from Live Free or Die Hard With the helicopter, and the police car crashes into the helicopter in the air blows up. That was right in the middle of all the high dollar banking buildings with expensive glass windows, and they had to close off, you know, blocks and blocks of the city for that.
Nick VinZant 25:38
And have you ever had somebody not be rolling?
Anthony Simonaitis 25:42
Yes, really, yeah. Sometimes it's, you know, one of many cameras. So it's not the end of the world. Sometimes the camera jams. Sometimes a battery dies right at the right at the moment, there have been a couple of those
Nick VinZant 26:00
that's happened more than once. I wouldn't have they,
Anthony Simonaitis 26:04
it happens enough that it's, you know, they, they always ask, are those batteries fresh? You know, is there? Is there any reason we're not going to get this like, Are you sure everyone's going to be rolling and up to speed before they pull the trigger with digital it's less important because the camera can run the whole time. I think on the Enemy of the State Building, there was a fire truck had to it's a long story. I don't know if you want to hear the
Nick VinZant 26:26
whole thing, but oh no, I'm hooked. I'm already in. I'm already in.
Anthony Simonaitis 26:29
So you saw there was a train that had to drive by the building, and there was cars that had to leave, stunt guys had to run out, helicopters had to fly in, and all this had to be timed with the building explosion, primarily, so that everybody was in a safe spot, but so all the action in front of the cameras was happening at the right time. So we had the whole city closed off, and the blasting machine is being charged up. The detonators are all in place. Everybody's standing by. There's a countdown of actions for all the different pieces. The train has to start early because it takes a long time to get up to speed. And all these things are happening in this big, long, elaborate timeline, cueing all this stuff to start, including cameras. And then there was a fire or some emergency call on the other side of this big, giant lockup, and the fire trucks had priority, and they drove right through the lockup, and they crossed in front of the path of the train. So the engineer had to stop the train, and when that happened, it put the whole sequence out of whack. But there was no stopping and resetting, because our 10 minute window of closing the interstate was about to expire, so they had to go for it. The helicopters had gone and done their pass and had cleared out, and the building hadn't exploded and and many of the cameras rolled out of film before the explosion happened. So they got it on, like three or four out of 14 cameras, you
Nick VinZant 28:03
Oh, God, that is just the
Anthony Simonaitis 28:04
universe. Oh yeah, it was horrible. But, you know, they made the best of it. The editing they put it came together really well. But there were some shots I would have loved to have seen, like the helicopter shot looking straight down. We never got to see that.
Nick VinZant 28:16
All because of a fire, like, all because of, like, one, one
Anthony Simonaitis 28:20
they had priority. The security guards led him through, I guess. I don't know the details exactly, but it stopped everything. And that train took forever to get rolling again, and they couldn't push the button till the engine was past the building, so the guy, if something flew out of the building, it wouldn't hurt the operator or the train. Yeah, it was a big that was a big deal.
Nick VinZant 28:43
And that's one of those things that, like, you just, you have to do what you can. You can't, like, Stop, reset, go back, get a permit to open, close the whole highway again. It would
Anthony Simonaitis 28:53
never happen. All the Dynamite was in the building. All the black powder charges and fuel was in there. It was all ready to go. There was no coming back
Nick VinZant 29:02
tomorrow. Is there a discussion that's happening in those moments, or is it just like
Anthony Simonaitis 29:07
it was pre planned? If anything goes wrong, it's going to go anyway. So we have enough cameras. If we lose it on one or two, we'll still be good. And they lost it on several, but they made the best of it. It cut together well. But does
Nick VinZant 29:23
part of you wonder, like, God, what would that have looked like Exactly? Are you ready for some harder slash? Listener submitted questions, sure, smallest explosion that you've ever done,
Anthony Simonaitis 29:36
it's probably the glasses. Somebody, I forget the reason, but the glass need to shatter in the glasses. So that was a tiny explosive charge very close to someone's eye, breaking a piece of special plastic that's designed to shatter,
Nick VinZant 29:54
biggest one you've ever done. As far as the
Anthony Simonaitis 29:57
biggest scene was probably the enemy of the state. Eight building implosion. But as far as like, the biggest fireball would have been on Terminator Salvation, and I believe we had, like, 2400 gallons of gasoline and a couple 100 pounds of explosive and and that made a giant fireball that looked like an atom bomb, and it lasted a long time, and it was pretty cool
Nick VinZant 30:27
when, when you see it like, Yes, what's your reaction when you see it go off the way that you thought it was going to?
Anthony Simonaitis 30:34
Um, it's a combination most of the time. You know, we're looking for the detail, making sure that all the things that we put in to make it look unique and special actually are visible, because sometimes everything just gets lost in the fireball. So there are times when we've kind of been disappointed in our own work. Everybody else thought it was awesome, but we were expecting to see something that just didn't really pan out the way we had hoped. Kind of, back to your earlier question, doesn't always work out exactly how you want, but a lot of times, that's a subtle nuance that no one's going to notice because there's this giant, 400 foot tall fireball, so they don't notice the little sparks around the edges or whatever. You know, it's like, we're our worst critics, harshest critics. How,
Nick VinZant 31:19
like, how intricate can you get with the explosion, right? Because I think of it as just, like, all right, there's the big fireball. But like, how do you you can then create the sparks. You can have the fireball go a certain way. Like, how intricate can you get with it,
Anthony Simonaitis 31:32
all of that, and then the debris. What is the debris made out of? What does it look like when it flies through the air? Is there dust and smoke? Is it a certain color? Does it have to match the environment? Like a bomb landing in dirt? If the dirt is red, maybe you want the debris blown up to be red, but you want some black in there to signify black smoke. So we put other material in there to kind of paint and color that dust explosion, you know, the debris flying through the air, and there's a fireball intertwined with that, maybe multiple fireballs, particulate matter, like granular stuff or chunks of lightweight material flying through the air, dragging dust with it. There's a lot of a lot of pieces to it that can all be finely tuned. And when everything's balanced right, it all looks seamless. It looks really cool. How many
Nick VinZant 32:21
people like, would you say that? Oh, you're just gonna blow it up, like, just put some c4 down there and light it?
Anthony Simonaitis 32:27
Yeah, that's that's usually pretty boring and really dangerous, because the explosion is really fast if the film can't really capture a high explosive event. So we stretch things out using low explosives that have a lower energy level, less velocity. They don't push things as fast, so the eye has a chance to recognize what you're looking at.
Nick VinZant 32:48
Yeah, like, do they shoot it in a certain frame rate then to try to capture it? Like, how do they usually shoot it to make sure they get it?
Anthony Simonaitis 32:56
Yeah, they'll often shoot it at a higher frame rate, so they have more more that they could slow it down in post.
Nick VinZant 33:04
How do people in the industry feel about CGI?
Anthony Simonaitis 33:08
Well, the people who do it love it, and it's CGI has its place. I mean, there's CGI, there's visual effects, and there's AI technology applied to all of that, the computer generated images. You know, everybody would love to have everything real. The people who build and design the sets want the whole set to be real. There just isn't time or money sometimes. So now, often they'll build the first floor of a building and all the rest is CGI, really? Yeah. So they can, they can do things like we had to blow up a piece of the White House on a movie. They're not going to give us permission to do that at the White House. It's just too involved. It's the permit would be too complicated. It's just not going to happen. So they built the they built a recreation of it, but they didn't build the whole thing. They extended it with visual effects. They built the area where the actors were going to be performing in front of so they have physical objects to light and film and for the cast to interact with.
Nick VinZant 34:12
Has it hurt the industry, or has it
Anthony Simonaitis 34:16
it's it's maybe reduced some of the construction labor cost. You know, they have to build less sets, but it's opened up opportunities to do things that we wouldn't ordinarily be able to do, and that includes like putting actors in a very dangerous position. We can use computer compositing tools we don't the visual effects department uses compositing tools to stick an actor in a place that they weren't it's blowing up, and make it look dangerous. And so it's helped us. It gives us an opportunity. It gives a director more what's the word, gives him more flexibility on how to achieve, you know, their vision, because you. They can. They can really, they can lean on all these different technologies. And, you know, between them and the department heads, they can pick the best, the best combination of technique to get, to get the final look. So I don't think it's hurt the industry in general. There's a few things that we can point to that they don't do anymore, because it's easier to do it in post the effects, like bullet hits on wardrobe. Used to be every movie. You had dozens of costumes that you had to rig with the blood effects. Now they maybe do one take of that, and the rest is all CG, composited. They don't want to spend the time on the set changing wardrobe and cleaning up blood. So we've lost a lot of that work to the visual effects department, but we've gained other things. So it's a changing business from a lot of different for a lot of different reasons.
Nick VinZant 35:59
Do you think they will ever be able to, like, really recreate an explosion, where you could have an explosion in real life, so to speak, and then have one that's just CGI AI, and people would not be able to tell the difference.
Anthony Simonaitis 36:14
Yes, 100% there's physics simulation software that they use for simulating risk analysis for oil refinery explosions and things like that that are extremely realistic. And they and the visual effects department can use that kind of technology, and they put their their textures and color palettes on there, and it's looks like photo realism.
Nick VinZant 36:36
So have you ever seen one that you couldn't tell? Well, if
Anthony Simonaitis 36:40
I couldn't tell, I wouldn't know I saw it that I couldn't tell, right? It's one of those things, but you can tell generally, because there's just subtle clues, lack of interaction with, you know, set pieces, maybe the way the lighting interacts, but they have control over all that. It's really how much they want to spend in post production tweaking those VFX shots, and they can make them look very convincing,
Nick VinZant 37:03
is the post production like of that? Would that be financially in a place where, no, it's actually just cheaper to blow it up? I'm going
Anthony Simonaitis 37:11
to go out on a limb and say it's probably cheaper to blow it up, and it probably is more dynamic on the set. It's going to have better impact on the screen, but it also comes with a cost. You know, there's prep time. We have to clear the set of all people while we're working, which holds up production. And time is money. So at the end of the day, the time that they lose for us to prep the explosion on the set, to blow it up, and then to clean up the mess and prepare for a take two is often more time than they're ready to spend money on. So for them, it financially makes sense to do the more expensive effect, because the time on set is more valuable.
Nick VinZant 37:55
That's pretty much all the questions I got. What's kind of coming up next for you? If people want to learn more about this, what should they do?
Anthony Simonaitis 38:03
I see it as really, it's a dying a dying art, because it's just the whole industry is kind of changing, and unless there's a big resurgence in the audience demanding realism, I have a feeling, because of risk and time on set, all these things are getting less and less common, so I have a hard time recommending the film industry as a career, but if people are interested in explosives and things related to that, there's a lot of college courses and degree programs related to explosive engineering.
Nick VinZant 38:38
What's that like then, in the industry, though? I mean, do the people who are in the industry, do they feel like last of a dying breed?
Anthony Simonaitis 38:45
Kind of, yeah, yeah. It's where we've all watched it change dramatically in the last you know, it's been a slow progression, but it's really taken a turn in the last couple of years. And we can see that the industry is it is an industry. It's a business, and so the balance sheet matters, and they're finding ways to make that how to say this without sounding cynical. They're fine. They're finding ways to make it make sense financially. But as they do less and less of that over time, fewer and fewer people are getting into the industry to become, you know, tutored by the older people that are retiring out and eventually there won't be a talent pool to pull off those kind of shots. That's the thing that we're all kind of seeing right now. That's a little bit depressing. It's like, you know, we don't have a younger generation coming up behind us. It's eager to really learn, and there aren't enough projects of that type to keep everybody employed. So people are leaving the industry.
Nick VinZant 39:50
I want to thank Anthony so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him, we have linked to him on our social media sites. We're profoundly pointless on Tiktok. Instagram and YouTube, and we've also included his information in the episode description, and if you want to see some of these explosions, the YouTube version of this interview is now live. Okay, now let's bring in John Shull and get to the pointless part of the show. What's your first bite of Thanksgiving dinner going to be, I'm
John Shull 40:22
usually going to go after the stuffing. I love stuffing. I could eat stuffing. I could bathe in stuffing. I love stuffing.
Nick VinZant 40:29
I agree. I agree that my first bite, mentally is really going to be stuffing, but in actuality, my first bite is going to be Turkey, because I just feel like you have to start there.
John Shull 40:41
Mean, yeah, you probably should start with the protein. Fill you up. I mean, it's either gonna be the protein or the
Nick VinZant 40:52
I hate that. I can't, I can't. I don't know when we started referring to meat as protein. I don't know when that happened in society, but that has always driven me nuts. I hate it when you go to a restaurant, they're like, What do you want your protein
Unknown Speaker 41:10
to be? Or like, Chipotle is bad at that.
Nick VinZant 41:12
This, this, to me, is symptomatic as symptomatic of one of the big problems of society, where we're constantly getting less but paying more. Oh, you're trying to make it sound fancy. What kind of protein do you want? But you're not giving me anything different than I had before. You're just charging me more money for it and calling it protein. I just don't I It's always, it's bothered me. It's always bothered me.
John Shull 41:40
I mean, it's, it's the way of the world, man, it's try to mask a pig with a dress. The pig's still a pig, right? Like, I think it's still still a problem.
Nick VinZant 41:50
It's not bad. You actually haven't brought up your basement in a while.
John Shull 41:54
Yeah, it's not much. I did get a treadmill recently that's been interesting.
Nick VinZant 41:59
Oh, you did? Did you have you used it? I have
John Shull 42:03
I'm realizing I'm not gonna call myself a runner or or a jogger. I'm more of a walker, you know, like a walk jogger, okay, okay. But it's much easier outside in the elements than it is on a treadmill just staring into blank space.
Nick VinZant 42:21
Oh, I could never, like, run on a treadmill. That, to me, is the most boring thing in the world. Why did you get a treadmill? You can just go outside. Men should not. Men should not have treadmills. I'm perfectly fine with the fair sex having a treadmill, if that's what you want to do. Men should go outside and run. I don't personally care how cold it is, unless we're talking it's negative 20s. You can go outside and run.
John Shull 42:47
I don't, I don't necessarily disagree with you, but, I mean, let's be honest, you wake up so you wake up at 4am and you're supposed to go for a run that day, and it's single digits even, and then the wind makes it feel like it's zero, negative five. You're most people are not going to want to go outside.
Nick VinZant 43:04
Oh, well, then you need to not be most people. You need to do what other people aren't doing. If you really want to go ahead and get ahead on your fitness journey, you're already throwing the towel in right like running inside on a treadmill, and your nice, cozy house was nice and warm. We don't maybe John because she doesn't want to get cold after I go up to heel.
John Shull 43:21
Or you could have just been a supportive friend of mine, like, that's great man. Good for you. Any movement is good movement.
Nick VinZant 43:29
Any movement is good movement. But look, I'm just telling you. I'm trying to be a supportive friend, and saying number one, you need to toughen up. You've had a problem over the last year of not being as much of a man as you should be. Okay? You have to you gradual wussification of you. It's been happening over the last year. You know, it has. You've got to get back out there. And now you bought a treadmill so you can stay safe and warm in your basement, your cozy little basement, probably going to have a blanket. Get your little ice packs ready for after your five minute jog, you're gonna need to ice up and take the rest of the day off. I'm just trying to help you out by saying, number one, you could have saved money. Number two, you could have corrected this problem that you've got. You've gotta, you gotta remandify yourself. You gotta get out there.
John Shull 44:14
I mean, listen, I don't agree with anything you said, but I will say I could have saved money. Yes, that's the one thing that I will agree with you on.
Nick VinZant 44:22
Oh, yeah, and I'm not one necessarily, like, you got to do it because you're a man. It's really more about me being cheap, like, I'm not gonna buy a treadmill I can run outside. It's free.
John Shull 44:34
When? When do you think you'll stop being frugal?
Nick VinZant 44:40
Oh, I don't think ever it's too much in my nature. It's too much in my major nature. My grandparents grew up during the Great Depression, they passed that along to their children, who passed it along to me. I'm actually probably the most, the least, cheapest one of my family, and I'm the cheapest person that I.
John Shull 45:00
Know, yeah, I am not. Money is a construct. We got it. Let's spend it. Can't take it with you when you're gone.
Nick VinZant 45:10
Well, you could pass it on to your children and give them a head start in life.
John Shull 45:14
No, we, we're raising children all right. There they have supportive parents, which unfortunately, is more than some have. Oh, yeah. So, okay, so that's not that's where I'm at.
Nick VinZant 45:26
Would you ever start with dessert first? Would you ever actually start with dessert first?
Unknown Speaker 45:32
No, not at Thanksgiving. No,
Nick VinZant 45:35
I don't think so either. I always hear people talk about it, but I never see anybody actually do it.
John Shull 45:41
I will say for the first time since I can remember having Thanksgiving meals, I will not have cranberry sauce at my table this year.
Nick VinZant 45:50
Why me is like you have to. I just
John Shull 45:57
kind of realized that I don't really like it anymore, and nobody else. And it's, I mean, it's just really my family that's there likes it. So why spend the dollar 29 on Ocean Spray when I can clearly put that towards a treadmill. They
Nick VinZant 46:12
don't even like, they don't even like the cheap stuff, because the cheap stuff is way better than the expensive stuff. I don't care if you've got hand picked cranberries from Vermont, or wherever they grow. Cranberries like I'd rather have the 99 cent can of Ocean Spray that expired a year ago?
John Shull 46:31
No, I mean, they don't like the can stuff. They don't like the actual stuff. It's fine because I don't, you know, I don't know. I would rather waste the calories on something else on the table, just like you know, why do you need mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes? Just make one kind of potato.
Nick VinZant 46:52
Because America, people like different things. Like people like different things. It's called being courteous to your guests. America, I think for Thanksgiving, we're gonna do a different Thanksgiving and just get, like, pizza and cheeseburgers. I'd much rather have that.
John Shull 47:10
I mean, I Yeah, I'm sure there's places that are open. I mean, I'm sure I know there is, or you could make it yourself as well. I mean, when's the last time you made from scratch pizza? I've
Nick VinZant 47:22
never made it from scratch anything in my damn life. I don't exactly, I think the most, I don't even know if I've made a cake. I don't think that I've really made anything more complicated. I don't know if I've ever made anything with more than four ingredients in a recipe. I really don't think so. Spaghetti. I'm just a firm believer of I'm not going to spend more time cooking something than I am eating it.
John Shull 47:54
Mean, and that's I mean, I Yeah. You know, some people enjoy cooking. They enjoy they enjoy it all, not you, no, by the way, you didn't make from scratch spaghetti, right?
Nick VinZant 48:07
Oh, no, no, no. I bought Exactly, yeah, no, I just boiled it.
John Shull 48:11
Just wanted to make sure I put that out there, because the way you said it, it implied that you had made spaghetti. When you write, you just poured it into boiling water,
Nick VinZant 48:22
right? I just boiled into board boiling water. I don't think that I've ever required any. I don't think that I've really made anything outside of pancakes in which I had to measure something. I'm just not doing that
John Shull 48:36
which, by the way, your your pancake is a cake. By the way, I
Nick VinZant 48:40
make a mean pancake. But they listen. Can we ask the other question? Did anybody fart in your office this week?
John Shull 48:49
I mean, I'm sure they did. I mean, the I had the usual suspects that did it, and then said, Hey, I did it. So, yeah, it's fine.
Nick VinZant 48:57
Good, though. Shout out to those people. Could you put them at the top of the shout outs, please.
John Shull 49:01
No, I will not, and I will say that more people in my office listen to this podcast than I thought, because I had multiple people approach me, one of which I had no idea even knew my name from a different part of the building and was talking to me about that segment. So I
Nick VinZant 49:24
hope people fart did anybody put the name fart box on it? Or they could worry about HR, yeah. Probably worried about HR, yeah. You can't really do that kind of stuff anymore. That's an eight. That's a trip to HR, and there's no real way to justify it. There's no way to just be like, Why are you in HR? Fart box on John's office.
John Shull 49:43
Fart box. All right, let some shout outs here. We'll start with Sheila Burnett, Nathan Salas, Noel Potts forest. Whitaker saw that had to pick that name out, though I'm 99.9% sure it's not the. Actor, though it would be cool if Forest Whitaker was a was a supporter of the show.
Nick VinZant 50:06
Would you want to share a name with somebody famous?
John Shull 50:12
No. I mean, I'm gonna say no, but I don't really care. I don't know if I would truly like it would matter to me.
Nick VinZant 50:19
I think I would find it annoying, like,
John Shull 50:23
I've always wondered, and I guess I could just Google search this if, like, anyone in history has been named, like, don't say it. I know exactly what I mean. Like the, just like the most hated people that have come and gone throughout time, I like, you know, I wonder if anyone's ever been named them. I don't think they are, but
Nick VinZant 50:46
Well, you certainly aren't naming them now, like you certainly aren't naming that some you're not naming somebody with the initials, ah, now, but you have to think that in that time, there had to be other people who also shared that name, because I wouldn't think that that's a uncommon name. So there had to be other ahs out there.
John Shull 51:10
Yeah, I mean, or, like, you know bad, you know, bad people who have, like, juniors, you know what I mean, like Saddam Hussein Jr, like Hitler
Nick VinZant 51:20
Junior, oh, boy. What's your name? Yeah, change it and like, the no judge is gonna be like, Why do you Wow, so Mr. Mr. Adolph, Oh, I see why you're here. Yes, yes, we grant you the name. Change that.
John Shull 51:37
That's probably one of those where you just go. You don't even have to come to court, we'll just change it right now,
Nick VinZant 51:43
everyone just assumed, like, they just changed it for you. You just got a letter in the mail one day saying your name has been changed. Like, oh well, they took some initiative there. Glad to see that. I think it's actually illegal. I think it is over there. Okay, you keep going with the shout outs. I look it up.
John Shull 52:04
All right. Waldo Carney, Wendy Smith, Jamie Greer rich, Neal chan Berry and Wendell Gaines, appreciate all of you.
Nick VinZant 52:19
It is not illegal anywhere. Well, sorry, let me re correct it is some states have banned it, and it is against the law in Germany and New Zealand and several other countries, but it is not against the law in the United States. So it is illegal in some places to do it, but it's not the majority. Because you would think people would have some fucking sense.
John Shull 52:46
You would think, all right, this is the hot button issue entering this week. It's, you're not gonna like it. But, I mean, we have to talk. Everyone's talking about
Nick VinZant 52:56
it, okay? I don't even know what it is.
John Shull 52:59
Yeah, you do? You give a shit? And I say a shit about the Epstein files being released?
Nick VinZant 53:06
Yes, oh, not because I think that it is going to change something, but I want to see how bad some people will still, well, let me, let me rephrase this. I don't think the release of them is going to change anything, but I'm fascinated to see, one, what's really in there, and two, the mental gymnastics that some people are going to do, because you can already see some of the mental gymnastics that like, well, you know, you're not really a pedo if they're 16. There's already that narrative is starting to start where people are kind of somehow okay with certain behaviors now that are clearly not okay. So I'm fascinated to see what's in there and how far the mental gymnastics is going to go, and what would be eventually the straw that would break some people's backs like, Okay, if there's a picture in there of him with someone that is clearly not 18 years old, and he's clearly doing something is, would that be enough? Like, how, how? How much would it take? That's what I'm fascinated by. I don't think it's ultimately going to amount to anything, but I'm fascinated to see
John Shull 54:23
I agree with you, and for two reasons. One, I think you know who has been in possession of these documents, right? I think certain courts have them, and the DOJ has them. Yeah, they're gonna be redacted as shit. And, oh yeah, Trump. I guess President Trump is how we should technically refer to him when he, you know, all of a sudden, had a change of heart that struck me as well. Someone briefed him and was like, listen, you're okay. Like, you're gonna be okay.
Nick VinZant 54:58
Oh yeah. I mean, I don't think. It's even though we just had a conspiracy theory researcher on here. This is one of those where we like, do we really think that the truth is going to come out in those like, people's names really going to be left on there? The question that I would have is like, Look, if you're not in, if I was actually advising him, I'd be like, you can't take your name out of every single thing. No one's going to believe that. So where are you going to keep your name in there? It's kind of like, Have you ever been late to work and you say, No, I've never been late at all. Like, been late a few times.
John Shull 55:34
Yeah, that's yeah. I just, you know, I a far right political blogger was saying this is actually going to boost his credibility. And it's an interesting take. And the reason I bring it up is, you know, if it comes out that he wasn't implicit and he, you know, there's nothing terrible in there, then what do people say? Right? Like, it's, it's okay. Well, great. Some documents were really, I mean, probably going to show other people being terrible humans, but not Trump, which, as we all know, that's, that's why people want them released.
Nick VinZant 56:09
Oh yeah, I want to see him. And do I think that it's going to be an accurate reflection of what people really did? Probably not, but it's definitely like, I don't think you go from absolutely don't release them to Yeah, go ahead and release them without knowing that maybe some changes have been made.
John Shull 56:30
It's just insane. It's just insanity. All right, let's here's a random question. Have you ever been in a restaurant or in your home and and animals just come in unannounced, unwelcomed that ever happened to you?
Nick VinZant 56:49
No, I mean, I had a bird like fly into the house, but what kind of animals are we talking about like you just had, well, let me say, a house or a restaurant.
John Shull 56:59
It was my house, and my daughters, we were putting up inflatables, inflate a fucking bulls, and my daughters left the door open and a squirrel got in here.
Nick VinZant 57:14
Oh, that's hard to get out. I'd much I got a bird than a squirrel,
John Shull 57:18
I will say I would have become an issue, but my dog,
Nick VinZant 57:21
oh, so the real man, so somebody else had to take care of your problem. This is where you could have stepped up and been the man in the house. And once again, you didn't come through. And then you got a treadmill, and now your daughters think you're weak.
John Shull 57:34
I ran right into the house, and by the time I'd run in the house, my dog had it cornered, and the squirrel didn't know what to do. I call my dog back. Squirrel ran right out the front door like, oh, that's, that's good. Squirrel was like, fuck this. I'm not gonna stick around for this. My I have a pretty big dog. He's like, 90 pounds, pretty big. And, yeah, I think he scared him a little bit. Yeah, you know that's I'm fine with that. He can be the me man of the house.
Nick VinZant 58:03
I also have a dog that's fairly decent size, and like, if somebody came into the house, I'm completely okay with the dog going after him first, like, the dog warm him up, and then I can come in later.
John Shull 58:14
No problem with that.
Nick VinZant 58:17
Oh, yeah, I wouldn't know what to do. Like, so you got this squirrel, the squirrel cornered. Did you have a plan, like, were you going to try to grab it?
John Shull 58:30
Um, it was more or less. So it was kind of backed up against another door. And I was like, Okay, if I can open that door like it'll see outside and go. But instead, my first instinct was to get my dog into another room, because I swear my dog was gonna attack this thing.
Nick VinZant 58:47
Oh yeah. I'm surprised the dog didn't get up go for it.
John Shull 58:50
So while he was like doing that, while I was trying to get the dog away, the squirrel booked it to where it came came from, because, of course, the door was still open.
Nick VinZant 59:00
Good, yeah, kids. For people who may not have children, they do not shut doors. I probably say close the door three to four times a day. Close the door. It's it's constant, constantly telling them to clean, close the door, like if the dog had it cornered and then the squirrel had to run out of the house. I don't really know what I would have done, like, try to get it into a bucket, try to kill it. No.
John Shull 59:28
I mean, obviously you don't want to hurt it. I mean, it's, it's more scared than you are. I was, I was just trying to think, you know, well, but I told you I didn't want my dog to devour this thing, which he's killed squirrels before in my living room like that would have been terrible.
Nick VinZant 59:44
Wait, he's killed squirrels in your living room, or he would have killed the squirrel in
John Shull 59:48
your living he would have killed the squirrel in the living room. And that's just a whole road I don't want to go down. Yeah,
Nick VinZant 59:55
that's a mess. I don't want to clean that shit up, because that's the problem. If you kill it like I killed it. Okay, well, now you gotta clean it up. Like, I don't know, clean it up so I would spare its life simply not to have to deal with the mess of it.
John Shull 1:00:08
I mean, imagine that squirrel going back that night to all its friends, like, I faced the beast guys, and I won it. Couldn't get me.
Nick VinZant 1:00:15
Well, you think that? Yeah, you think he's got a good story? Like, I went in there. Oh yeah. Huge thing in there. This is a top five that I want to do someday, because I was thinking of this. But what animals do you think should be allowed to marry each other? Would you be okay with a fox and a squirrel marrying each other?
John Shull 1:00:31
It's so funny. You say that out of the blue, I was having kind of a weird day at work the other day, and I nobody, and I listen, I love my co workers, but I cannot get a second alone. I don't know if you've ever had days like that, but every time I was trying to get one thing done, someone else would come in. So halfway through the day, somebody came in, and I just looked at them, and I go, you ever? You ever think about two water buffalos making love? And they looked at me and they were like, I don't know what that means, but I'm gonna walk out of here. I'll see you later.
Nick VinZant 1:01:06
Yeah, I've never done that before. I've never, like, purposely said something really strange to get people to leave me alone. But good for you. Like, how quickly did they leave but then see you're risking your reputation too much. Do you know them well enough, at
John Shull 1:01:22
least, yeah. I mean, you know, yeah, yeah. And, and I kind of, I kind of set it in jest, but then I did it after that to somebody, and that person got it, so I was like, hmm, I'm just gonna start using the water buffalo thing all the time, because apparently it works, and water buffalos should be able to marry each other.
Nick VinZant 1:01:40
Oh, yeah, same species can marry each other. Yeah, if I'm talking about different species, like, can a fox marry a raccoon?
John Shull 1:01:47
I'm actually kind of surprised that we haven't had an animal marriage yet in this
Nick VinZant 1:01:53
Okay, we'll do that next episode. We'll do a top five animals that can marry each other. I don't think that birds and foxes should be mixing. I gotta stay to your main like fish and a rabbit. It's just love that can't be true in the society that we live in.
John Shull 1:02:13
Well, I feel like, yeah, fit any fish with any land animal isn't gonna work out.
Nick VinZant 1:02:17
You got it. Look if you're in the water, stay in the water. If you're in the sky, stay in the sky. You like, what's the ostrich in the penguin gonna do?
John Shull 1:02:26
I just want to say that with the Trump stuff gonna be released, it's a shame that more people aren't reading the Amelia Earhart documents that were declassified, because those are fascinating, and if you haven't checked them out, you should, because you want to talk about a pioneer. Could you imagine flying an airplane around the world when she did it over 100 years ago now,
Nick VinZant 1:02:51
I mean, that is pretty crazy. Like, initially it was like, yeah. I mean, not that big of a deal. And then you think about it 100 years ago, like, yeah.
John Shull 1:03:02
Where she didn't have, you know, you didn't have the instruments, you didn't have anything, just the wind and a prayer like Bon Jovi would sing.
Nick VinZant 1:03:10
Well, I mean, it didn't work out for her, ultimately.
John Shull 1:03:13
And also, I was wrong. It was 1937 she disappeared. So just
Nick VinZant 1:03:19
about, okay, not getting into a conversation with you about a millionaire. Okay, that's one of those kind of things that, like, that's a mystery that has never really been interesting to me, because, like, what happened? Well, she died. She crashed into the ocean and died. That's, that's what happened, right? Like, that's one of those where the simpler answer is just the right answer. It's not interesting. It's not intriguing. It's not like she's in some deserted island, or she landed somewhere else, changed her appearance and became a man and ran for office or something like that. Like, no, she just crashed and died in the ocean.
John Shull 1:03:57
Wow, a way to basically just sum up all the declassified documents into two sentences,
Nick VinZant 1:04:03
yeah, that's what they found. What they find in the declassified documents. Why were they ever classified? Why were they ever classified in the first place? Was it top secret national security? What? That's the real mystery. Why were they classified?
John Shull 1:04:17
I always thought she was a Russian spy, but apparently I was wrong. So,
Nick VinZant 1:04:20
oh, now that would be juicy. I just think that, all right, like it's, it's the sad truth of the world, but also is comforting in some reason, and that, the way is the simplest answer, is always the answer. She a Russian spy? No, she just crashed and died in the ocean.
John Shull 1:04:38
Yeah, it's always a simple answer. Like it's that's the way it usually is. Okay. Speaking of simple,
Nick VinZant 1:04:46
are you ready for a top five? Oh, that's where we're going. Okay, I thought you were gonna say something else. I wanted to see what you were gonna do there. I really want, okay, also, next episode, we're gonna do something that my wife and I came up with. We're. Gonna play various sounds and see if you can guess what they are, but not like a cow mooing like someone like, I don't know. I'm gonna find random sounds see if you can
John Shull 1:05:11
water Buffalo's making love anyway, yeah, I've been ready
Nick VinZant 1:05:18
for our top five is our top five is top five cities to be named after, not necessarily saying the city is great or bad, just saying, like the name is good to number five,
John Shull 1:05:30
we're gonna start off in the West. For me here, my number five is Denver.
Nick VinZant 1:05:37
Oh, okay, I don't really, do you know anybody named Denver?
John Shull 1:05:42
I know two. Well, they're younger. I mean, they're, you know, they're in my kids school, but yeah, their names Denver. Their names are Denver.
Nick VinZant 1:05:48
Okay, Denver. That's surprising to me. To be honest with you, I can't say I agree with Denver, mostly because the airport is terrible. Have you been to the Denver Airport?
Unknown Speaker 1:06:02
No, I don't think so.
Nick VinZant 1:06:05
There's all kinds of like, conspiracy theories associated with the Denver Airport. The real truth is, it's the worst airport I've ever seen in my life, like none. It's like somebody designed it but didn't know what an airport was actually supposed to do.
John Shull 1:06:20
I mean, for those of us that haven't been there, like, what's the what's, what's some of the issues, what's or the issue,
Nick VinZant 1:06:27
it's out in the middle of nowhere. The rental car is nowhere near where you need it to be. Everyone goes through one of two gates, so you basically have created a massive bottleneck, and then nothing is where it needs to be. It's like, this is here, and the other thing is all the way on the other side of the airport. It's just like, Why did anyone design this? Like that? Like this was all a bad idea, and nobody I could go on about the Denver Airport. It's terrible. My number five is Dallas. The only thing wrong with being named Dallas is you get associated with the Cowboys.
John Shull 1:07:05
Yeah, that's kind of terrible, but Dallas is a good one. Dallas is a Yeah, I'm fine with Dallas is at number five.
Nick VinZant 1:07:15
If it wasn't for the Cowboys, I would have put it much higher, but you're just always going to hear about that? Yeah.
John Shull 1:07:24
I mean, maybe I don't know. I feel like Dallas kind of, I think it's a strong enough standalone name that people aren't going to just go Dallas. Dallas Cowboys,
Nick VinZant 1:07:34
hmm, think they might. I don't know most. Actually, people I know who knew named her Dallas or women. I don't know any men named Dallas,
John Shull 1:07:44
see, and I only know, except for Debbie does Dallas, which that's really Debbie. But regardless, I only, I can only think of men that I know that are named Dallas.
Nick VinZant 1:07:55
Oh, Dallas. Page, Diamond Dallas.
John Shull 1:07:58
Page, just stop. That's a good one, though. All right, my number four is Camden. What? Jesus, man, what over there? Just yeah, Camden. Why I like the name Camden? I think it's, I don't just always liked the name Camden
Nick VinZant 1:08:22
after, like Camden New Jersey. I think it's not really a great place,
John Shull 1:08:27
yeah, but you said it at the press of the, you know, prefacing this top five that it's doesn't necessarily reflect the city. It's just the name
Nick VinZant 1:08:36
interesting. My number four is Brooklyn.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:41
I think, I mean, okay,
Nick VinZant 1:08:44
I think the best ones are ones that you forget that they're actually a place. Like, oh yeah, Brooklyn is a city or borough or whatever it is. I don't know if it's a city
John Shull 1:08:54
or not. Um, yeah, I don't know. I just I know one Brooklyn, and I'm just like, okay, okay, fine. Do you know any Brooklyn?
Nick VinZant 1:09:03
I do three, three. Brooklyn's
John Shull 1:09:07
three, three. Brooklyn's nevermind. All right, all right, we're just gonna move on here. My number three is Austin.
Nick VinZant 1:09:19
Oh, I think that should be higher, but that's a good one. I think that should be higher.
John Shull 1:09:25
Famous song two by Blake Shelton, awesome. Check it out.
Nick VinZant 1:09:30
Okay, I'll pass, I'll pass on that one, but I'll, I'll file it away for later. My number three is Orlando, but ironically, like Orlando is my third best and would also be my fifth worst.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:46
Yeah, that's fair. I mean, Orlando's fine.
Nick VinZant 1:09:53
I like it, but I wouldn't want to actually be named that. I think anyone named Orlando would not. Want to be named Orlando, if you've actually been to Orlando, and you and I have lived in Orlando, so we know, like, oh, you really don't want to be named Orlando, but it is a good name. You don't really want to go there.
John Shull 1:10:12
Yeah, you don't. I mean, once you're there, I think a week would suffice. You know what? I mean, like, you don't really need to spend, yeah, any time
Nick VinZant 1:10:20
there, they need to go to Orlando. You could like, Okay, I've been there and then just leave. Okay. Number two,
John Shull 1:10:28
so I went way back for this one. But I love this name, and it happens to be a city in the great state of which you were born in. Oh,
Nick VinZant 1:10:38
yeah. What is this gonna be? Lauren Gaylord. Gaylord is a city. Gaylord,
Unknown Speaker 1:10:47
Kansas, yep,
Nick VinZant 1:10:48
no one is named Gaylord. Actually, sure there is Gaylord, by the way.
John Shull 1:10:55
God, sure there is. It, is, it is, I don't know it's one of the it's a city that's what, what is? What's north of Kansas? That's South Dakota. What's up there? Nebraska? Yeah, it's literally almost touches Nebraska. But Gaylord, Kansas, and so my number two is Gaylord.
Nick VinZant 1:11:15
Okay, alright. I mean, you're stretching. You're certain population 87 there's 87 people. Could you imagine? I know, being from Kansas, I grew up with a lot of people who are from very small towns, like people you would meet in college and like, I'm from a town of 10 people. What?
Unknown Speaker 1:11:39
Yeah. Like, how the
Nick VinZant 1:11:42
Oh, my God, why are you out there? You got to leave my number two is Austin. I thought a lot, thought a lot about putting as my number one, but I ultimately went with something else. But Austin was my number two.
John Shull 1:11:56
Have you ever been to Austin? Yeah,
Nick VinZant 1:11:59
maybe if I, if I have been, I've only been through it because I've been to Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, and I feel like you would have had to gone, go through Austin at some point to get to one of those cities. But I don't remember anything about Austin.
John Shull 1:12:18
I Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a 10 second ad for Austin. It is a great city, probably my favorite city in Texas. And I'm not even sure it's close, to be honest, it's, it's, it was awesome. I've been there twice. Every time I've been there, it's been fantastic to number one. So this is probably, maybe, maybe a weak one, but I'm gonna go that Gary,
Nick VinZant 1:12:48
I guess. Yeah, yeah, it's
John Shull 1:12:52
about, it's about as vanilla as you can get. Yeah. I was thinking about like names, right? And I was stuck on Gary, which is Gary Indiana, or Lincoln, for Lincoln Nebraska. And I'm like, there's not a lot of people that know that I know that are named Lincoln, but I know plenty of Gary's, and I feel like Gary is the same person. Like, if you know a Gary, it's the same person.
Nick VinZant 1:13:17
Oh yeah, that's why I just names like Gary. Carl, I couldn't imagine looking at a baby and being like, Gary, this kid's gonna be named Gary. Gary, this kid's gonna be what's his name? Carl, I just couldn't imagine other names make more sense, but those are just the most generic. Like, yeah, just man, and it's perfect. Gary Indiana is just like, Gary, like, you wouldn't even know it's different from any other place in the
John Shull 1:13:57
world. Oh, my God, it's your I mean, you're right. If, for those of you out there, you do not have to go to Gary Indiana, and that's not a slight against the town, it's just the name represents everything about the city. You
Nick VinZant 1:14:10
don't need to do anything. Let me look this up. What is Gary? Gary Indiana, famous for?
John Shull 1:14:17
Well, that Well, I could tell you that that's why do you think it's known? Well, don't they have a couple of pretty big car plants?
Nick VinZant 1:14:25
There it is in history. Is a major center for the steel industry. So it's also the birthplace of Jackson family, including Michael Jackson, who was born in Gary, Indiana.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:38
See, there you go. Okay, Harry.
Nick VinZant 1:14:41
My number one is Savannah, a little bit little bit different. You kind of forget it's a city. It's common, but different.
John Shull 1:14:53
It's a beautiful name, like Savannah is a gorgeous name, I just don't know on my crazy. Eclectic list, if it you know, I couldn't put it on the top five.
Nick VinZant 1:15:02
You don't think it runs with the likes of Gary Indiana?
Unknown Speaker 1:15:07
No, I don't. I don't think so.
Nick VinZant 1:15:10
What else you got? What's in your honorable mention? Because there's more than you once you start thinking about it like, oh, there's a lot of them. I forgot about Lincoln.
John Shull 1:15:18
This one was just for fun. I would not put this on a top five list, but I wanted to say this Eugene.
Nick VinZant 1:15:26
Oh, yeah. Eugene is, like a Gary. Eugene is, like the slightly hipster version of Gary, like, just as boring, but slightly different. Type of person
John Shull 1:15:38
probably going to be high most of the time is Eugene,
Nick VinZant 1:15:42
yeah, but still not fun, yeah,
John Shull 1:15:47
yeah, you're right. Still not fun. I thought Charles Charleston was interesting, though, I don't know any Charleston's. I know that has been a name throughout time that has been used, okay? Alec, Alex, Alexandrine, just okay.
Nick VinZant 1:16:02
I never even heard of those places.
John Shull 1:16:05
All right, let I have Savannah or Savannah, Savannah Obama,
Nick VinZant 1:16:11
Sister, Sister City to Savannah.
John Shull 1:16:13
And then, and then this, this was my number six, but I couldn't get it on the list. And that's Madison.
Nick VinZant 1:16:19
Oh, I have Madison on our honorable mention. I really thought about putting Madison on there. I The ones I have are Madison Jackson, but they spell it differently than a lot of the douche bags that are now spelling it with an X. I'm not Jackson. I'm Jackson, to the extreme, with an ax. I hate all those names Jackson.
John Shull 1:16:41
I actually just met a Jackson with an X, like, two weeks ago, and thought, yep, yep. You You're the kind of person that would have an x in their name. There's no need for it. You don't need the X. You can be a ck,
Nick VinZant 1:16:55
it's I just wonder, like, did they name them Jackson? Because they seemed like the kind of person that would be a Jackson, or did they, like, become Jackson? Like, what came first the person? Or the name? Did the name get to him? It's like Derek. Every Derek I've ever known was a jerk is the same person. It's yeah, always seem to be the same kind of douchey person every Derek I've ever known. Lance, same with Lance.
John Shull 1:17:29
Do you have any other ones? Charlotte? Okay, Charlotte, yeah, that's a good one. Charlotte's a good one. Very popular name, I think when we were having children, that's a very popular girl's name.
Nick VinZant 1:17:42
You have a lot in North Carolina, Raleigh, I've seen a Raleigh Winston, Salem, Murfreesboro,
Unknown Speaker 1:17:52
Winston's interesting Winston, maybe
Nick VinZant 1:17:55
Winston, but I don't think you can count that as Winston. Is there anybody? Do you know anybody named Detroit?
John Shull 1:18:02
No, no, I was gonna say Deidre, but that doesn't count.
Nick VinZant 1:18:08
If you were gonna pay if you had to be named after Detroit, would you be named Detroit or like Detroit? Like de tro?
John Shull 1:18:15
Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely, D like, with the accentuate Detroit,
Nick VinZant 1:18:20
that's for sure, God, for a dump. What an absolute dump. I can't think of any other ones. Napa, California doesn't have a lot.
John Shull 1:18:29
Well, I'm trying to offended half our listening base
Nick VinZant 1:18:33
in Detroit. Yeah. I mean, if it just now happened, I've been making fun of Detroit for a long time. It's really one of my past times. But it's not about it's not about the people of Detroit or Detroit. It's just about the fact that you like it.
John Shull 1:18:49
I do. We're couldn't imagine living anywhere else except Seattle.
Nick VinZant 1:18:54
Okay, that's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode of profoundly pointless. I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, leave us a quick review. We really appreciate it. Really helps out the show and let us know what you think are the best cities to be named after. We're only talking US cities for the purpose of this top five, but if you're one of our international listeners and you think that you've got one that's better Paris Luxembourg. I don't know if Luxembourg is a city or a country or both, to be honest with you, but if you have any other ones you think are top five worthy, let us know.