Can You Swim in Shade Balls?
31,174,812
Published 2019-06-13
All the signed shade balls have now been mailed out - thanks for your support!
Receiving a shade ball:
1. Support Veritasium on any Patreon tier and enter your address ve42.co/patreon
2. In about a month I will send out signed shade balls
3. I will cover all shipping costs but if things get really crazy I will prioritize existing Patreon supporters and higher tiers
My sense was that swimming in shade balls would be difficult but still doable. This was roughly true for the single layer of shade balls. The shade balls slide past each other so they act like a liquid, albeit a viscous one owing to their significant inertia. It's much more intense exercise and it's also annoying to be bombarded with shade balls on all sides of your body, particularly your head. With multi-layer shade balls (as exists on much of LA reservoir) things get significantly more difficult. The balls bunch together and when you try to move through them quickly, they become more rigid, providing significant resistance to motion. This has the benefit that you can lie on them and as long as they stay trapped under you, you can float on them. But a little bit of motion causes them to move around and you sink through quickly.
Special thanks to our Patreon supporters! Join this community to help us keep our videos free, forever:
ve42.co/PatreonDEB
Huge thanks to:
Jordan Schnabel and Cristian Carretero for filming and swimming and providing lifeguard services.
Raquel Nuno for filming and putting up with me.
Music from epidemicsound.com/ "Dubstep Mammoth 2" "Finally Here (Instrumental)" "The Last Arrival" "Sundown Love (Instrumental)"
All Comments (21)
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"But its like quicksand" - famous last words
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I am pretty sure Youtube's gonna recommend me this 5 years later
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It was really interesting noticing how he was essentially approaching drowning. There are very specific physiological symptoms that are present in someone who is starting to have that reaction- triggered by the feeling of failing to support yourself in water- that he was absolutely showing. Specifically when he attempted swimming in multiple layers, the way his voice had that panicked "cracking" and he was breathing very heavily. If this was the depth of a reservoir, and not a pool, you would definitely die.
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Exactly as I thought. 1. You can swim in shade balls, just harder to do. So you should not. Great to hear that the manufacturer sees this as a concern. 2. You can swim in shade balls, just not the shade balls in the water reservoir. 3. Pool with water and floating balls, hop in. 4. They do look like boba.
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those are the things mr incredible got bodied with in the first movie.
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I can't believe I just watched a man swimming in balls for 10 minutes instead of doing homework
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seeing light rays pass through the multi-layered shade balls at 6:50 is priceless! thanks for sharing this amazing experience with us
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The last part with swimming in multiple layers gave me anxiety.😱
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Him: don’t try this at home! Me: sadly puts away the 60,000 shade balls that i have in my pocket
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Girl: I think he's cheating Him and the boys:
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I love Derek's belly laughs. Also Raquel (presumably) laughing at him off camera. Part of why I love Veritasium videos is that y'all stay upbeat and leave in the goofiness.
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Biggest boba drink I’ve seen yet
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"lets see if you can swim in shade balls" -cameraman already in the pool "am i a joke to you?"
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Turtles: no more plastic Human: let's swim in plastic
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The pov of underwater with the shade balls above seriously looks so pretty.
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i love it when veritasium does fun stuff like this
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"I can hardly tell that there is water under me, it's kind if like sa-" -water seeps through He proceeds to drown
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"I can swim but I am getting a lot of balls in my face" ~Veritasium, 2019
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You did this for science, great job!
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You must be really powerful to swim through these like this, even Mr. Incredible couldn't manage it.
