Ripten Interview: Deadliest Warrior’s Max Geiger Talks Horrifying Weapons, His Computer Simulation and What Scrares the Crap Out of Him

by Jonathan Zungre on June 1, 2009 at 4:19 pm

Deadliest Warrior is one of Spike’s top new shows, with ratings averaging 1.7 million viewers per episode, and one of the most downloaded TV shows on Xbox Live. And how could it not be? Each show answers the questions that burn deep within the heart of every man, such as, “who would win in a fight, a ninja or a Spartan?”

Max Geiger is part of the team that determines who wins the title of deadliest warrior for each show by collecting data from tests done on the warriors weapons and inserting it into a program which simulates the fight between the two combatants and determines a winner. Max took some time to tell us about some of his most exhilarating and horrifying moments while filming the show and gave us some clues on how the program chooses its winner.

Jonathan Zungre: What’s up man, how are you?

Max Geiger: Hey, I’m doing alright, man, how about yourself?

JZ: I’m doing really good dude. Hey, thanks a lot for agreeing to do this interview.

MG: Hey dude, it’s really not a problem at this point. I mean, it’s out there, I want the show to do well, so I like talking about it.

JZ: Awesome man, awesome. Hey, well, my first question is, dude, how do you feel about being part of one of the most awesome, manliest shows on television. I mean, what did it feel like when you first got this job?

MG: [Laughing] To be entirely honest, this is kind of blind dumb luck, how I sort of stumbled into this job. And so while we were actually shooting the thing it was awesome. It’s probably the most, like, fun job I’ve ever had. It was getting to wake up and go to Willy Wonka’s magical murder factory.

JZ: [Laughing] That’s awesome.

JZ: One of my favorite things about the show is how you get these guys on there that represent the different warrior types and they are passionate about their ancestry and they will talk smack on each other, like hardcore.

MG: [Laughing]

JZ: Honestly, bro, I’ve always wondered, has it ever gotten to the point where you’re like, “Oh man, this dude’s sincerely mad, something’s about to go down here. There’s going to be a fight.”

MG: Well you know the thing is, it’s kind of like how boxers work. You know where, like in the run up to the fight and in all the promotion for the fight, two boxers will give this gigantic impression that they hate each other, right? That they would like, eat each other’s children? That they have nothing more than this seething [loathing] for each other right?
But when we’re actually there doing the tests everybody’s professional and the off-camera stuff is all super professional. Because the thing is, the guys are actually former military or martial artists who’ve spent a lot of time working on their discipline. They have a professional respect for one another. In the moment of a test, because, yes, results are on the line, yeah, emotions can flare a little bit but everyone is still super professional and there’s actually a lot of mutual respect that goes around.

JZ: Oh that’s cool. Do you have any personal favorite characters that have gone on the show? I personally really liked the Mafia guys.

MG: I can’t really say like, “yeah this guy is a favorite of mine,” because I have to be as impartial as possible, but the viking vs. samurai was a totally awesome match up in my opinion and I would totally love to redo it with different weapons and more tests in maybe the second season.

JZ: Why was that, because you liked the guys demonstrating the weapons or you liked the weapons themselves?

MG: I’m just an enormous fan of both warrior cultures that get seen there. You know, it’s a little history nerdish but, you know, Japan had that whole thing where they were staring down the mongol invasion right? And it was only because of a Divine Wind that they avoided that, and in my head it’s not too hard to replace mongol boats in that fantasy with long ships that did make it. [laughs] That image right there, you know, long ships amassing on the shores Honshu would be just an amazing thing that I’d love to see in a movie.

JZ: What about the different weapons you’ve seen throughout the show? Have there been any that really surprised you, that really blew you away, or ones that you were just underwhelmed by?
MG: The thing that has startled me most about weapons is, you really don’t get the impression of it onscreen, but anything that spins. So, something like the morning star or, actually, [in the Shaolin Monk vs. Maori Warrior] episode, the twin hooks the Shaolin monk has, anything that uses rotational force or rotational momentum, you know angular momentum, is just very difficult to control and it’s also very difficult to observe and watch as a human being from a battlefield, tactical perspective.

So, because it’s bringing in all this power and it’s generating all this power but it’s difficult to control and difficult to avoid, those things are just the most dangerous things and I cringe every time on set one of them starts getting spun up because I’m like, oh man, we’ve got shields and everybody’s at a safe distance but, you know, this could still go wrong.

JZ: I saw that clip of the Shaolin monk’s twin hooks swords where he linked them together and did that ballet type move and slit the dummy’s stomach right open and I was like, “There’s no way that should work, but it does.”

MG: No, it’s horrifying and those things are sharp. You know, that makes sense to hold as a sword but when you’re putting them together and that’s not even a closed link, you know, it’s just like each hook is there and they’re not beaten together like a chain, it’s just like, “oh man, ah.” [laughs] It was a nerve racking moment.

JZ: As I’ve been watching the show, I’ve been seeing that you’ve been cutting up a lot of pigs lately. [laughs]

MG: [Laughs]

JZ: The Deadliest Warrior always says that a pig carcass is the best way to simulate what a human body is like, but I wondered, are you getting any heat from PETA from this?

MG: No.

JZ: No phone calls?

MG: I don’t see any of that, the producers would see any of that and they haven’t mentioned it to us. A rule of thumb on this, when it came to how many pigs we could destroy was there was an episode of Mythbusters where they shot a cannonball through like, four pigs, or something like that.

JZ: [Laughs]

MG: So our producers were basically comfortable with any level of carnage up to that.

JZ: [Laughs] The Mythbusters quotient.

MG: Right, right, exactly. So we do owe sort of a debt to the work that they’ve carved out and the path they’ve forged on ahead down this trail for us. Even though, it’s Spike and you know, we don’t like to talk about Discovery shows.

JZ: When you talk about Mythbusters, they’re very scientific in their approach. Sometimes on Deadliest Warrior, when you’re testing two different weapons in the same catagory, why doesn’t it seem like they get the same test? The test isn’t uniform. Like in the case with the hand grenade from the Green Beret vs. Spetsnaz episode…

MG: Yeah, yeah, everyone has been on about that test.

JZ: I mean, I thought the test was awesome, I thought it was super entertaining, but I was wondering…

MG: [Laughs]

JZ: I mean, hey, what can I say? But if the test isn’t uniform, can you really claim that it’s a true test?

MG: The thing is that there is about a week of testing that we do and there are four cameras rolling on that constantly. That all gets cut down [because] we have a huge shooting ratio, right. Part of that is that we just have so many weapons that not everything can make it into the show. And then, combined with the fact that the reality side of it, the testing, the labs, the dojo and out on the range is only part of it and then recreation [of the fight between the two warriors] is the other part of it, there’s not just enough time to show everything.

Unfortunately, one of the things that doesn’t make it into the show as much as it should, in my opinion, is the science. In the case of the grenade test, specifically, this is actually pretty interesting, those grenades both have a known quantity of explosive within them. In the case of the M67, it’s something like, I can’t remember off the top of my head how many grams it is, but it’s composition B, which is a combination of RDX and TNT, I believe. But when it comes to explosives, the industry standard is to relate everything back to TNT, I mean, like even nuclear bombs were thought of as, “well, it’s the equivalent of 10 megatons, which is ten million tons, of Trinitrotoluene [TNT].”

And so, this is more on Geoff’s end of it because he handles the hard science more directly, but Geoff actually has a calculator based on his biomechanics work and his injury and trauma mechanics, because he’s done a lot of IED testing, that will calculate the actual effect of the blast wave based on the quantity and type of explosive.

With those tests, what we’re actually looking at is more the effective range of shrapnel distribution and just, sort of, blowing something up in order to see the pieces that would come out of that, as opposed to looking at the direct effect of the blast wave because that’s a known quantity.

JZ: Now, you’re mostly in charge of the computer program that decides the result. That’s your area of expertise?

MG: Yeah, I am its keeper. [laughs]

JZ: [Laughs] I always see you press that button on every episode and then it goes into the computer, sci-fi sounds and then it brings up the fight at the end.

MG: [Laughs] They’re like, “Alright Max, we need a definitive strike on the enter key,” and I was like, “Are you serious guys, are we seriously doing this?” And so I was like, “Alright, I’ll do my best press on the return key.”

JZ: [Laughs] You, like, miss it sometimes.

MG: [Laughs] I wish I could press buttons that definitively in real life and other cool stuff would happen.

JZ: So the program is what really decides who wins the title of “Deadliest Warrior” for each episode. In your words, how exactly does it work?

MG: We’re taking something that was originally developed to simulate army on army combat and my job is to pull it down to an individual level. It was actually really funny because when we shot the pilot, I spent, like, three days sweating balls on how to get the graphics side of their engine to show two dudes actually fighting each other in the middle of a field and have it be accurate and load the right weapons in based on what they wanted. And so I show that to the producers and they’re like, “We’re just going to do a recreation for all that, you don’t have to worry about any of the graphics stuff.” And I was like, “What?”

So at that point I could just strip all that out, just basically ignore that, and look at the underlying functions and modules that determine the actual battle and get my hands dirty with that. And so everybody’s been like, “Oh my God, your advanced simulation software is just an Excel spreadsheet.” And I’m just like, “Ah, no dude, no see, the Excel is a really good tool, well it’s actually Open Office Calc, but Calc is a really good tool for managing large amounts of data, even the raw scientific data from the sensors that Geoff is pulling in, that’s getting stored in the spreadsheet format.”

So what we’re doing is taking that data and then crunching it so that so it can be packaged and then used by the sim. And then the sim goes ahead and gives us its output. So it’s all doing things in the raw, numbers way, so there’s not really a visual component to it.

JZ: Yeah, I remember some of the early advertisements said something about a CGI fight, or something like that…

MG: [That was] a misnomer on a PR person’s part somewhere. They’re just like, “Yeah, it’s going to be CGI because it’s computer technology!”

Unfortunately, in the TV world, there’s this understanding that “computers are magic!” And it’s like, “No they’re not but they can do this very well but not these things very well.” It’s like, “please, this is not Felix the Cat and his magic bag.”

JZ: [Laughs] In the case of the Ninja vs. the Spartan, I remember I absolutely fell in love with the ninja egg, remember this glass egg, you put the glass in the egg…

MG: The black egg.

JZ: When you showed the test with the ninja throwing it at the Spartan’s face it looked like it completely covered his eyes in glass. And I remember thinking to myself, that seems like it could be the decider of a lot of the fights, because I would feel that if your eyes got coated with glass, that would be something that would incapacitate you so that you could be killed very easily. The glass egg got zero kills in that episode, but I wondered if the program took into account…

MG: The kills for each weapon are the definitive, like “this weapon went into his body and then he fell over and stopped moving.” Like “this was the thing that put the critical leak in his circulatory system and then all of his blood came out.” So the glass egg isn’t, you know, you can get glass in your eyes and your not going to be able to see, but it’s not going to kill you out right. But the glass egg in the sim result contributed to basically every kill that the ninja did get.

JZ: Oh, ok, so that was going to be my question: Does the program take into account incapacitating damage?

MG: Yeah, so when you see the very end, when we’re in at the closest ranges, often times the guys are wounded, you know, they’re not doing well. And that’s when, at close range, things come out to really finish the other guy off.

JZ: Does the program take into account the abilities of the warrior himself, such as a ninja’s stealthy ability or the fact that the Spetsnaz knows all that crazy rolling around technique [laughs]?

MG: [Laughs] Well, ok, this is sort of a tricky row to hoe, as it were, because when we’re doing a test it would be very easy for us to say we’re testing our experts and we’re basing everything off of them but that’s not entirely accurate because as awesome as our modern ninjas were, they’re not the ninjas of legend. And as awesome as our modern Spetznatz and Green Berets are, the former Spetznatz have been out of active duty for 15 years.

And in the same way there’s also the historical consideration that modern people are bigger and healthier than ancient people in a lot of ways. This is kind of an interesting thing, a lot of people thought that the gladiator was this huge big tank and that’s the way they played it, but ancient Romans were actually pretty short, 5’4”, 5’6”. You compare that with the Apache and the Apache would have likely been bigger in many cases.

JZ: Oh, wow.

MG: When Europeans actually arrived in North America they were shocked at the height and over all health of native Americans. So there is that consideration to take into account, we’re actually looking at the ancient warrior not the expert and that’s part of the reason we do so much of the testing on the weapons, because once we know the weapons we can, sort of, put that into the hands of what we think that ancient warrior would be.

So, the warriors, in terms of skill or any sort of special tactic or training that we’re looking at, are good warriors. They’re not, you know, the once in a lifetime, legendary Miyamoto Musashi but then they’re not your average fighting man running grunt whose going to go get killed. They’re good at what they do.

When it comes to something like the ninja’s stealth skills, we’re looking at that in the context of terrain, for the most part and decreasing the accuracy of the Spartan’s weapons. So, yes, things like that are a factor.

JZ: So terrain, where the two warriors fight is also factored into the program?

MG: We look at cover, basically, and we give cover equivalent to different areas. For Yakuza vs. Mafia it was cover equivalent to the interiors and exteriors of a city block.

JZ: I remember in the Yakuza vs. Mafia matchup, the bat got the edge over the numbchuks. Was that just based on the damage the bat can do rather than the technique that the Yakuza member would have wielded the nunchucks with? I guess you already answered that question when you say, “We’re talking about good warriors.”

MG: Yes. And to speak to that test specifically, part of that is that the bat has a greater reach than the nunchucks. It’s able to get in there and strike further, but at the same time it does have its disadvantages, there’s a lot of lead on the shot, you can see a guy winding up to do it.

JZ: So overall, a lot of the matchup is decided on the damage and the power of the weapons but you also try to factor in what the skill sets of the actual warriors themselves would be.

MG: Right, right and the skill that’s required to use the weapon and the ability and the need to use it accurately. So things like the sling are inherently inaccurate weapons and we look at that.
We try to look at skill as much as possible, the problem is that once you get into a, sort of, skill pissing match it just comes down to, “well if you would have done this, he would have done this” and all objectivity gets thrown out the window. So we try to keep everything as testable as possible.

JZ: And you really have to go with the representatives that you have in the building at the time as part of that too, because the rest of it is just throwing out objectivity.

MG: Yeah, I mean it’s the core of a hypothesis, it has to be falsifiable. It can either be proved right or wrong. If it can’t be proved wrong, if there’s no falsifiability in the condition, then it’s a subjective bit of data.

JZ: You’ve got a controversial “Taliban vs. IRA” episode coming up. How are you feeling about that?

MG: [Laughs] Personally, I’m scared shitless.

JZ: [Laughs]

MG: It was actually a really difficult episode to film. Thankfully, the experts that we got in on it, and this is where things get a little bit trickier and we have to nuance the show a little bit more, so in the case of Spetsnaz vs. Green Beret we could get former operators, right, guys who had actually done it. In this case, it’s people who were close to the world of the IRA or the Taliban. One of our experts on the Taliban, for instance, is an FBI anti-terrorism agent. So he’s very familiar with that world and he knows how they would operate.

At the same time we have to be very clear and we took great pains to make sure that it’s clear these guys are not actual IRA or Taliban operatives, former or currently active. They’re experts on the subject material and that’s something that we’re trying to get across.

And then the other thing, which was a bit of a sticky wicket, was that we’re looking at guys who are killing people that, you know, exist today. We can’t hide behind history on this one, and that was an uncomfortable thing. I mean, we were looking at weapons like land mines and IEDs and people have lost people to land mines and IEDs. Land mines are currently a huge problem all over the world, places like Cambodia, Afghanistan, so on and so forth. So, actually, what we decided to do, because this is such a modern problem, we decided that one of the things we could do with the episode is use it to raise awareness about the effects of these weapons on civilian population in a lot of places around the world.

So the cast and crew got together and we all made a donation to landmines.org, which is the United Nation’s humanitarian fund, which goes and directly clears mine fields. They’re the adopt a minefield program.

Even though we’re looking at two of the most reviled people in modern history, or two of the most reviled factions in modern history, we’re hoping that some good can come out of this episode, so that we can get people to actually go to landmines.org and make a contribution and help to clear minefields in the developing world.

JZ: Well, great. What about any rumors of a second season? Are you hopeful?

MG: I am not privy to any of that. This is the period of time where Spike and MorningStar do the delicate dance of “is there going to be a second season, what’s that going to look like?” Everything becomes complicated as soon as money gets involved, you know, it’s Hollywood. So I’m going to be hopeful that there’s going to be a second season. I’ve been thrilled with the response online and I haven’t seen the cable tv ratings directly but I hear that we’ve been doing really well there. So I would love to come back and do a second season but, you know, at the same time I’m very much aware of the fact that this is television, this is luck as far as I’m concerned. It could all dry up in a moment.

JZ: What about possible match ups for the second season that you personally would like to see?

MG: Oh my God, dude, don’t even get me started, I’ve been thinking about this since day one. [Laughs]

JZ: [Laughs] Well you said something about the Mongols. The Mongols haven’t been tested yet, have they?

MG: Dude, ok, so Mongol vs. Polish Winged Hussar, like Golden Horde era Mongol vs. Winged Hussar is one of the fights I want to see most. It’s probably #2 on my list, right. #1 is both the Roman Empire and the Chinese, this was the Han empire at that point in time, you know, warring stage, romance of the three kingdoms period, both were aware of each other’s existence and actually made successful contact back and forth. But what I would actually love to see is a confrontation between a Roman Legionary vs. a Han Chinese foot soldier in the middle of the Parthian dessert, with the empire right in between the two of them and what that would look like if two of the ancient worlds greatest empires ever squared off.

JZ: Wow, sounds great, sounds fantastic. I’d tune in [laughs].

MG: You know, if we get the money, the other thing that I would love to see is a battle of World War II era frogmen. So the UDT, the underwater demolitions team, the Allied group, sort of the American military group that would go on to become the Navy SEALs, I’d love to see them against a Nazi frogman and just try and see what that battle would be like underwater because the stakes are much higher there, you know, you lose your air, you lose your life and just see what that would look like.

JZ: That sounds great man. Hey, thanks so much for the interview, Max.

MG: Hey, no problem.

Cross your fingers for a second season for Max and don’t forget to watch the “Taliban vs. IRA” season finale on Spike tv, your 360 or your PS3 and donate to Landmines.org.

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2 Comments »

DMWS
on June 2, 2009 1:40 am

I'd also like to see the ones that Mr. Geiger mentioned. My personal favourite would be Mongol vs. Winged Hussar, because we haven't really seen mounted combat yet.
AJDeano
on June 20, 2009 10:57 pm

We should See Aztecs vs Egyptian Magi because they were both part of big empires, they lived around the same time, and they lived on the opposite sides of the world so there techniques would be very different

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Ripten Interview: Deadliest Warrior’s Max Geiger Talks Horrifying Weapons, His Computer Simulation and What Scrares the Crap Out of Him

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