Crash Test Girl

by Kari Byron

  Major downside: The pilot was about a waterslide, a super-steep waterslide. Water parks are a germophobe’s vision of hell. There is not enough chlorine in the world to counteract all that urine. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like to swim around in places that not only are pee-filled swamps, but have to post, “Persons having currently active diarrhea, open sores, or communicable diseases are asked not to enter the water.” I assume if they have to post the sign, there is history there. Just sayin’.

  I risked my life for that show. I hope Tory appreciates that!

  I assumed Thrill Factor would be an in-between-jobs job, a one-off pilot, that it wouldn’t amount to much. But it turned out to be a series of ten fun-filled episodes. I learned a valuable lesson, that you have no idea what’s going to happen, not only with the longevity of the job itself, but who you’ll meet, the skills you’ll develop, and what you’ll learn about yourself. I learned, for example, that waterslides are, basically, a power enema using hundreds of people’s pee. I also learned that Tory and I worked incredibly well together outside the context of MythBusters, and have been a dynamic duo on specials and series ever since.

  THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. IN EXPERIMENTS. IN JOBS. IN LIFE.

  If you know that no job is one-hundred-percent safe, and that you will always have more to prove, you can bounce back and on to bigger and better things if (when) the current job ends. I had to learn that key fact first, before I could start moving on. My recovery was in slow motion after MythBusters. It was two years before I felt rock solid about my prospects again.

  I covered projectile gourds on Punkin Chunkin for years, and Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships, as I’ve mentioned. I also MC’d robot competitions for kids, an annual highlight for me. Each kid’s homemade robot was assigned a task, like doing an obstacle course or picking up objects. I loved doing these kinds of events because the kids didn’t care who I was. They were just excited about their robots and wanted to tell you about them, how they came up with the design, how they put it on the wheels. The most beautiful thing in the world is a hyperactive and focused kid telling you about their creation.

  For two years, I went from gig to gig, and managed to pay our bills, but it nagged at me that I didn’t have something solid and long-term.

  Then, out of the blue, the former production company of MythBusters was approached by Netflix to develop a new show that would get the build team back together, and White Rabbit Project was born. I was really excited to work with Netflix, the new frontier of TV. The concept of the show was taking a cool topic like famous heists or tech from movies you’d like to see in real life, and then doing some online research on it. Anyone who’s done this knows what it means to fall down an internet rabbit hole. Hence, the title “White Rabbit Project” of taking those searches as far as we could, with adaptations and reenactments. I’m proud of the work we did, and we made ten episodes of great TV. But, sadly, there will be only one season. The gig economy is the wave of the future. For me, the future is now.

  Onward. To what? I couldn’t tell you. But I was, am, open to any and all ideas and opportunities. I started saying “yes” to everything. Every meeting, every part-time job, and sooner than later, I found myself working steadily at a bunch of different things.

  It’s All About Who You Know

  Now that I’m going from gig to gig, I realize that having the same job for over a decade is unusual. Most of my friends are writers and artists, people who bounce from project to project. And then there are all the people in my city, and the world, who are starting their own businesses, and don’t rely on the traditional model of being hired by a big company with all kinds of bonuses and benefits attached.

  As members of the gig economy, we have to reinvent ourselves constantly, and network like it’s going out of business—because if you don’t, you might go out of business. I go to every panel discussion, charity event, and convention because I might meet interesting people at the Google Science Fair or the robot competition who could help me down the road or connect me with someone who might need me immediately. A phone call or meeting you have in May might bear fruit in September. A job that might seem like a placeholder could open doors that take you exactly where you need to go. A few times, I’ve done a random spot on a show, and met a producer who called me years later with an offer. I’ve landed more jobs by showing up at random events and talking to people than I have by sending out résumés and pitching.

  Women need to learn how to network. It’s not just who you know, it’s who you’ll meet when you show up, introduce yourself, and just chat. Don’t laser target execs or high-up types. Talk to everyone who has something worthwhile to discuss. A receptionist today might be a CEO tomorrow. A production assistant today might be a network exec tomorrow. You just don’t know.

  I see half of my job as networking about future gigs. Last year, I was asked to appear at a college fair, and met the person, totally randomly, who was an author, and he suggested I talk to his agent to write a book about women being braver . . . and now you are currently reading it. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to write a book, but I realized, as I talked to the agent, that I did have a lot of things to say about how to make it as a woman, a DIYer, and a crash tester.

  This book, its very existence, is an example of what can come from randomly asking people how they wound up where they are now. The big mistake people make when networking is to ask for advice or to pitch yourself. People are far more interested in you if you’re interested in them, not necessarily what they can do for you. A lot of women in power positions would love to tell you their story, because it’s most likely a damn good one.

  In general, while networking, don’t ask, “What should I do?” to get a job, while between jobs, when figuring out what to do next.

  Ask, “What did you do?”

  Who you know might help you, but the real gold is in learning what they know.

  It’d be nice to have a road map for success, and I wish I could point you in exactly the right direction. But the road map doesn’t exist. As you plot your individual, totally unique course, it does help to talk to people about trail blazing. Their stories might inspire you to climb to the top of that wall, get that job, create that website, write that book. Your course to get from point A to point B might not be linear, so cast a wide net, be all over the map, and expect your destination to change.

  If there’s one thing I learned on MythBusters, it’s the value of critical thinking. It’s too easy to pigeonhole yourself by thinking you’re one thing. I never would have thought of myself as an “author,” but thanks to a chance encounter, now I am. I didn’t think I’d host a travel-and-tech futurist show on Nat Geo, but I do. If it ends, it ends. But no matter what, I’m going to live and work on my own terms. I’m not the same plucky redheaded girl from MythBusters anymore. I’m a woman with all kinds of skills.

  And FYI: The Theory slacks are still hanging in my closet, unworn. I told myself, “The day I cut the tags off is the day I stop trying.” The pants are now a symbol of resilience and a reminder to stay flexible and be open. One day, I won’t need the reminder, and then I’ll burn them . . . or blow them up. Yeah, that’s more my style.

  KEEP WIPING

  When you do anything in life, be it starting a new job, testing a myth, or shooting a cannonball, failure is always an option. You can hedge your bets by working hard, playing hurt, and being a valued team member. But you might still wind up on your ass, for a long time.

  Failure isn’t fun, but it does make you a better person. You grow a thick skin, and lose a lot of ego. When you’re not weighed down by ego—a feeling like you deserve success—you can move faster, get stronger, and be more flexible.

  Ideally, if you fail—on the job, getting a new job—you’ll learn from it. If I do this, or talk to this person, what will happen? You learn what will and won’t fly, and what won’t fly now but might fly later.

  When I was young, I struggled and took risks, had adventures, and me
t strange and wonderful people. I want to be that person—now and always. I’m happy in my beach ’hood townhouse; I have no desire to return to my crappy apartment. But risk-taking and adventures? Constantly meeting new people? Yes, please. I’ll continue on with that dream. Every career setback has brought a wave of new ideas and people into my life, and I’ve grown because of it. My earnings have grown, too.

  Here’s the truth that women don’t always want to admit: Safety at work can mean being stuck there. You won’t double your salary at the same job, even with a promotion. To make giant leaps, you have to break out of the safe space. The safe space, I’m sorry to say, is a trap. Even MythBusters was a kind of trap. Now that I’ve worked on other shows, I’ve seen how it kept me in a box. I’m out of the box in a big way now, traveling the world and working toward being the boss.

  Life is always going to be hard. When it stops being hard, it won’t be interesting. Even if steady work would give me a sense of security, I want it to stay challenging, and have an interesting life. That’s the larger goal.

  If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that shit happens. When I was a brand-new mom, I took Stella to MoMA to expose her to culture (she was an infant and had no idea what was going on; like I said, new mom). At one point, I caught a foul whiff and looked down. She’d made an explosive poop that went up her back into her hair. It was an unholy mess, and I wasn’t prepared with a new diaper or a change of clothes (again, new mom). I ran with my shit-covered baby into the bathroom, totally panicking. I got a paper towel and started wiping. And another one, and another. I told myself to just keep wiping, and she’d be clean. So I kept wiping until Stella was a naked pink sweet-smelling baby. I put her back in the stroller completely naked, and walked out of there. The security guard saw her, and just laughed. Must have been a parent, too. Since that day, whenever I get in a pile of shit and have no idea how to get out of it, I think:

  Chapter Eleven

  Bravery

  The smell of fear—that people and animals can unconsciously detect stress and fright in humans and know to attack—is a cliché of pulp fiction. Of course, like most movie motifs that sound too dramatic to be true, there tends to be a basis in scientific fact. It was perfect fodder for MythBusters. The first step would be to get some smelly samples from our own bodies, so we put pads in our armpits to absorb fear-induced sweat. And how did we induce fear? I got in a glass coffin for seven minutes and was then covered with forty scorpions.

  I was mainly glad it wasn’t rats.

  The glass coffin was so Sleeping Beauty. I just hoped I’d wake up if one of the scorpions stung me. I was given safety goggles so they wouldn’t crawl in my eyes. Some comfort until they put one directly on my face so I could stare directly at a barbed tail. I was just covered with them, from head to toe. The handler was a pro who has done snakes and bug wrangling for movies, including porn (snakes).

  He said, “Just don’t move and they won’t sting you.”

  But I couldn’t help it. I was shaking. My foot convulsed with fear involuntarily. The scorpions started biting my nails because my orange polish was the same color as their food. I was mumbling in terror because I was afraid to open my mouth or they’d crawl inside and burst out of my stomach Alien style.

  I tried to breathe shallowly and go to a Zen place, but I couldn’t calm down. I made it through the seven minutes—no idea how—of sheer hell. Paul came to the set that day. He hardly ever did, but he had to see this. I think he was just as scared as I was to see me like that.

  When I took the sweat pads out from under my arms, they were drenched, literally dripping with fear.

  As the handler collected his bugs, he said, “I’ve never seen someone film with scorpions before. I was wondering how this was going to turn out. You’re brave. I can’t believe you stayed in the box for so long! Especially when they started to bite.”

  If he’d told me that ahead of time, I would have said, “Fuck this! I’m not doing it!”

  LEAVE EVERYTHING ON THE STAGE

  When I turned sixteen, I was finally starting to feel like a woman, and so I wanted to wear a sexy costume for Halloween instead of the usual goofball options. My mom studied belly dancing when I was a toddler, and she had a lot of authentic I Dream of Jeannie colorful silky harem pants, and coin bras. I told my friends, “I’m going to wear one of those outfits to school!”

  I had to screw up my bravery because my stomach was exposed and the purple, balloony pants were low waisted. I couldn’t hide in them, even with a silk veil. I did my hair and my makeup and thought I looked pretty good. The only problem was that I wasn’t filling out the coin bra. My mom was a beautiful woman with a more generous body than my budding sixteen-year-old figure.

  I said to myself, “You have a problem in need of a solution.” The obvious solution was to stuff the bra. I made boob inserts from fabric scraps I sewed into little balls, and they did make it look like I was filling out the bra.

  So I arrived at school, belly exposed, finger cymbals clinking on my hands, and passed as a sexy dancer all morning. My school looked like Rydell High from Grease, with a big front lawn and a wide stairway leading to the Hellenic pillars at the entrance. The tradition was for the whole school to sit on the lawn out front during lunch to watch a costume parade/contest of kids walking down the stairs and striking a pose as an MC commented into a microphone. It was a “spirit day” kind of thing. I’d never participated before, but I felt good about myself and my costume, and said, “I’m doing it.”

  When it was my turn, I started walking across the stage. I threw my arms up in victory, and one of my bright white fabric falsies popped out of my bra, bounced all the way down the steps, and came to rest at the feet of my English teacher Mr. Hood.

  I had to decide in a split second if I should go over and pick up my boob, or just leave it there. In that moment of acute mortification—refuting the myth that a teenager could actually die of embarrassment—I just left the stuffing where it landed, rushed off to the girls’ room, changed out of my costume, and put on the regular clothes I’d brought just in case.

  The period after lunch, I had English class, of course. I walked into the room with a face still as red as a hydrant from embarrassment. Mr. Hood came into the classroom. He was usually a quiet man but today, he had a big beardy grin on his face, the kind you couldn’t suppress if you tried.

  He looked around the class and said, “Sooooo, does anyone have anything to share? Kari?”

  A bunch of kids burst out laughing. I thought, I’ve got two choices here. I could: 1) start to cry, escape to the nurse, pretend that I have malaria and go home, or 2) act like it never happened. I went with choice two. I sucked it up and acted like nothing happened. I blinked at the teacher and said, “I got nothing.” He grinned and then got on with the class. It may have planted a seed for a future in television. After all, as we liked to say on set, “There is no dignity in TV.”

  I learned about option number three for dealing with potential embarrassment—laugh your ass off—while traveling after college. I was sailing down the Nile with Lisa, and she really had to pee. We got off our little boat, went to this sandy area, and she pulled her pants down. The dusty patch turned out to be a high-traffic camel and horse crossing. Four Bedouins rode by, saw us, and started laughing hysterically. I guess I should have covered up my friend and helped her, but we both fell over laughing, too. She got covered in her own pee, which only made the hysterics worse. Being embarrassed can be just as funny for you as it is for the people who see you in a compromising position.

  Life is short; surrender your dignity. After you’ve been embarrassed a hundred or a thousand times, you understand that none of it matters, so you might as well enjoy every chance you get to laugh.

  WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO BE AFRAID OF?

  The Mountain

  This story isn’t about the perseverance of hiking up the mountain. That would be too basic. My story has a Byronesque twist: It’s about climbing down. My moun
tain wasn’t figurative. It was Annapurna in the Himalayas. You have heard of Everest? Annapurna is her neighbor, just shy of three thousand feet at her tallest peak.

  Dawn and I had hired a guide to get us up and down the tenth highest mountain in the world in fourteen days. We made the long, beautiful, arduous hike that led us low into valleys with falling pink petals and green grass, and then so high we were cutting ice steps to get to the top. We had to carry everything for all weather on our backs. Halfway through, my feet were a mess—bloody, swollen, and sore, losing a toenail. My blisters had blisters. But we made it, and the top was fantastic. We had climbed so high that I had slight altitude sickness and didn’t even care. Check that one off the bucket list. Now we had to get down and out before our permit expired or they’d charge you a fortune to come in and rescue you.

  * * *

  PUT YOUR SHIT OUT THERE

  Back in my twenties, I thought I was smart, tough, and honest. The truth was, I was insecure and kind of an asshole. I thought I knew it all, but I knew nothing. Yesterday, I worked with a twenty-five-year-old girl who was so full of cockiness, the brand of arrogance that comes with being young, and I just looked at her, remembering my past self, thinking, Oh, that’s so cute. You have no idea that you know nothing.

  I did some dramatic writing back then, poetry and stories I emailed home to my mother, just to let her know what I was experiencing while abroad. She dutifully saved them. I pulled out a dusty box recently and read through my poems and journals. They are beyond cheesy! So many platitudes and clichés about “life” and “passion,” as if I had all the answers, when, really, I didn’t have a clue. I thought I was Jack Kerouac, writing On the Road. More like On the Crapper. I thought my poems were so romantic and deep, but, oh my God, they are embarrassing. Mom thought I sounded great, and was so proud, she sent them to the Los Gatos Weekly, where some were published (why, Mom, why?).