The Jordan Harbinger Show - 219: Adam Savage | Every Tool's a Hammer

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

Adam Savage (@donttrythis) is a special effects designer, educator, actor, former cohost of MythBusters, current host of Savage Builds (both on Discovery Channel), and author of Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It. What We Discuss with Adam Savage: What you have to gain by paying heed to your obsessions. The sublime benefits of real expertise. How deadlines spur action past the bottleneck of intended perfection. The universality of imposter syndrome. How an expanded vocabulary leads to unexplored solutions. And much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/219 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Build Your Network with Travis Chappell is a podcast for aspiring professionals who want to grow their inner circle and sharpen their relationships. Listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Start your free trial today. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. When I was a kid, I had three hobbies, building stuff, breaking stuff, and blowing stuff up. Today, we're talking to a guy who, in a stroke of genius, managed to turn these things into a very successful career. Today on the show, Adam Savage of MythBusters fame joins us. We'll discuss how following our thrills can lead us to interesting jobs and niches that previously didn't even exist,

systems for accomplishing amazing projects, and staying humble while doing it. This episode really helped me wrap my head around mastery of a craft, which is something I've been working on and thinking about. a lot lately. And I think you'll get a lot out of this conversation. If you want to know how we manage to get all these great guests, well, I've got a huge network and it's very deliberate my creation of that network. I'm going to teach you how to do it for free in our course six minute networking, which is at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests here on the show, they actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. All right, here's Adam Savage. I know you originally wanted to be an actor and then you found, okay, my drive

is not acting, how do you know when something you're doing is not your drive? Because I think a lot of people struggle with that. None of the decisions I have made in my life were made with the clarity of this isn't the thing I want to do. That's the thing I want to do. Or very few decisions were looked at as a cost-benefit analysis of my creativity. I was in the drama club. I found my people in the drama club in junior high school and high school and theater was really important to me. And as such, my dad knew some people and a good friend of his was Charlie Kimbrough who played Jim Dial on Murphy Brown, a newscaster. And Charlie got me my first agent and got me an acting job. And I did a few commercials here and there. And I pursued acting because I thought, I mean, I liked the idea of

being famous when I was 16. That sounded all. Forgivable. Yeah. And I was okay at acting. And I went to at Tisch School for the Arts and I went to you, for six months, only to see, I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was witnessing was a tremendous amount of commitment from a lot of people who were interested in the craft. And I wasn't intersecting with it as a craft. I mean, it's a long way of saying, like, by the time I was 19, and I was still doing some auditions here and there, I was like, I'm just not that into this. Yeah.

So then I just sort of let it go. You wanted, like, the result of the acting, not necessarily to be, like, a good performer. that is a great way to put it, I thought that being clever was good enough. And I did not know how to find a thing that was worth busting my ass for, and I didn't at all know really how to bust my ass. Interesting.

So you never thought like, okay, I've got to dive head first into this. But then it sounds like in the book you say, follow your secret thrills. So it sounds like once you find this thing that you're really into, that's where you know, okay, I can bust my ass making this gun over and over. So, again, I am resistant to describing my path as instructive, even though it is instructive to me. And there are many people in the world who have a clear idea.

I have a niece who knows she wants to be an orthopedic surgeon. That must be so nice. For a long time. Yeah, that must be nice. I agree. But for me, it took me a lot of bouncing around in different industries and different things before I realized. And it was very specifically within special effects.

So I had bounced around, I had bounced around a bunch of different careers from assistant animator to graphic designer, freelance graphic design. I moved to San Francisco in 1990 and just started working in theater. I worked in about 15 different theaters over two or three years. And that got me a reputation. And I was having a lot of fun in theater. I was learning a lot. I was learning stuff every week. I was becoming a much better carpenter, scenic painter, rigor, stage manager.

I was finding that I liked thinking about a big picture enough that made me value. to people that were hiring me. And that got the attention of Jamie Heideman, who was running a small TV commercial special effects shop in San Francisco at a place called Colossil Pictures. And so I was about six months into working with Jamie on Nike commercials and other small things when I realized, my after-hours life is very different. And what I noticed was when I was working in theater,

even when I was working all day long at Berkeley Repertory Theater, and then heading over to Beachbunk at Babylon, night to do a shift there. But even when I was doing those long days, I was still coming home and working all night and making sculpture and making things in my art studio all night long. And about six or eight months into working for Jamie, I realized I wasn't doing that anymore. I was, and I thought about it and I realized, oh, you know what, I'm getting all of the creative fulfillment that I get from coming home from doing theater work, I'm getting that at the job now. Yeah. And it's satisfying me on this really, really important creative level. Now,

special effects industry is packed with people who will tell you, who love the phrase, or who say the phrase, I used to be an artist. And being the child of an artist and growing up with the experience of someone who structured their whole life around being able to do this one thing that they had to do, which was pain. There was an importance to me of not saying I used to be an artist, that this was utilizing the same parts of my brain. And so what I realized, though, was that this is what a career could be. And this was the first time that light sort of peeked through a window. And I was like, oh, a career is something you're both really good at, but kind of obsessed with all at the same time. And so then I thought, okay, great, I'm not going to say it used to be an artist.

I'm just going to put all my energy into this stuff. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think you mentioned in the book that this is where your ideas come from, where you start getting engaged with something and passionate about something. We often dismiss that because we think we can't do anything about it. But it does segue nicely into this focused passion or this obsession that you... Well, we dismiss it. I think I dismissed it certainly because my schoolmates were cruel about my passions, right?

So, like, I was a nerdy kid and the things I liked were nerdy, and I didn't share them with my peers because kids can be cruel. And I think middle school and high schools where a lot of people learn to subsume those things. Because our obsessions and the things we can't stop paying attention to, whether it's aliens or fan fiction about Twilight or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever it is, those obsessions make us vulnerable because they reveal us.

They're showing people our bellies. And so to me, yeah, a lot of people don't pay heed to those things. And this book is my permission slip that when you do pay heed to those things that tickle at your head that you can't stop paying attention to that I'd call secret thrills, in my experience, I found myself in those things. I found it was like a secret formula for self-actualization, self-realization. It's important, I think, because a lot of us do overlook those things deliberately or we dismiss them. Your idea that obsession is a necessary and healthy ingredient, I think, is music. to a lot of people's ears because a lot of us will get obsessed with something and we just think, oh, I shouldn't even like this or I shouldn't focus so much on this because this is irrational or

there's never, nothing's ever going to come out of this. I'm just wasting my time even though I can't stop thinking about it. Exactly. And there really, that is a, so many things don't get started because people think that. What is this worth? What am I, what am I going to get out of this? Or is this really, my hobby's weird. Should I really do it? Yeah. And the answer is, Yeah, you really should. Because, and this is a specific because of this, which is that when you're obsessed with something, and let's say it's cosplay,

and you see other people do it, and you're like, I would like to try that. I'm not sure that I should, because it seems kind of weird and kind of freaky. Sure it might be. In my experience, when I went towards that and started to, like, assemble a costume, I realized, oh, I have this very specific point of view

about the kind of costume I want to wear, about the character, the original and I want to make this really accurate. And so again, diving into something where it has to fit within parameters that you've given it, that's, in my experience, that's pursuing your excellence. I need this to fulfill a thing for me. And I'm not sure what that thing is, but I'm going to go towards it. And when you're going towards something that's important to you, i.e. the stakes are high, the things you're going to confront along the way, your own biases, your own laziness, your venality, your jealousy,

you're in your, the things you're insecure about, that journey of going through that is, is understanding yourself. It's seeing yourself in different, in a different light. Sorry. It must be all that whatever blue stuff is on your hand causing an allergic reaction.

What is that? What is on your hand? That? Oh, that's a tattoo, but there's like a blue paint or something. Oh, it's a dicum marking fluid is what, it is. It is a lacquer that you spray on machine. I was working on some Apollo suit parts before I left the shop today. Why not? Yeah. Because why not? And when you're shaping aluminum to a specific

dimension, you hit it with this blue lacquer, and then you scribe in the lines where you want to cut it, and it gives you this hyper-accurate cutting border. So anyway, it's called marking fluid, and I always end up with it on my left. Well, you're marked now accurately. Yeah, I know about the author of for the costumes. I read about a suit of aluminum armor, speaking of aluminum, that was like 700 rivets and you wore it to school. And can you take us through that? Because this is like the portrait of a nerdy, bigger, obsessor guy. And I was really lucky in this story that my parents were the heroes that they were in affording me the time and the space and the encouragement. So in 1981, I was 14 and my dad took me to see Excalibur by John Borman.

And it was really, really amazing and transformative experience for me. And it's still an amazing movie. It's super cheesy and yet it earns its emotional stripes. It has some surpassingly weird and great moments in it. But the thing that I was really taken by was the armor. There's over 100 such of armor in the film of all different stripes. They all are part of the storytelling. They're not necessarily accurate to a specific time and place.

They're more narrative devices, and they were all built by a man named Terry English in Cornwall, England, who is, to my mind, one of the best armor designers in movie history. So when I was, I saw that movie when I was 14, that in Halloween, I made a suit of armor out of cardboard and wore it with a horse that attached to me with suspenders to high school. And then two years later, when I was 16, my dad and I got some roofing aluminum, and he taught me how to use a bravick gun, and we made me an aluminum suit of articulated armor with hinges, and everything. It straps.

We cut apart suitcases to have straps that could strap it to my body. And I wore it to school and passed out in third period of heat exhaustion from wearing the suit. And that is exactly the portrait of the young, obsessed man. And sadly, that suit of armor got stored in the art room where the following summer, normally like a lot of stuff you left there was left over the summer. and some weird like bit of zeal the principal of the high school

went into the art room and threw out everything that was stored there and so I lost that suit of armor to that summer cleaning very upset. That is, that makes me just kind of you want to shake that person

and be like, you don't realize how much, you've never made anything, huh? You don't like, because you look at something like that and you go, dang, that took somebody a long, long time. I totally agree with that. And that guy who did that, threw out a whole bunch of stuff that I had stored in the art room. And it was very, it was very

upsetting to me. Upsetting enough that I don't think I made stuff for another year or so after that. Wow. I felt so sort of gutted by the loss of all those. Yeah, like gut punch. Yeah. Like it just feels like, well, I can't make that stuff again. So what's the point? You lose your motivation. A lot of young guys like myself also would disassemble electronics and blow stuff up all the time. until now when you do that, I think they call the FBI. Back then in the 90s, though, they were like, oh, kids, just don't kill yourself, you know, or anyone else. I assume you were one of those kids, too.

But as I got older, I'm like, I'm scared to take apart certain things now. Like, I got shocked by a tube and a television. I almost died, you know, and those old, yeah, my friend almost died. I mean, it was like those tubes and those old TVs, they store a lot of power. A huge amount of capacitance around the outer rim of a CR. T-screen. Yeah, vacuum tubes. They were talking about.

They'll dump a lot of electricity into you. It's not pleasant. I've been shocked that way before. Yeah, it's something you remember. You ever take apart like a camera with a flash, too? Oh, man. Those capacitors are very strong. That is a lesson that you will not forget.

And I remember showing my shop teacher the flash stun gun that I made. And he's like, what happens when you get too much voltage going through that and you kill somebody? And I was like, that's not going to happen. He goes, come bring that to this doorknob over here. And he takes the wires and he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, He hits the doorknob with these two copper wires that I have sticking out of this contraption, and they arc welled immediately to the doorknob.

And he goes, you know how much voltage and heat it takes to instantly liquefy copper and stick it to this doorknob? And I was like, no. And he's like, here, he tells me, it's like, this is 1,800 degrees, probably a lot more. Yeah. Your skin can take like 120 of that. And before it starts getting. And I was like, got it, got it.

So they put up with that stuff. But like, I got older and I was like, oh, this, this shit. it can be dangerous. That just never happened to you. Oh, no, no, no. I realized it could be dangerous. I got hurt by a lot of things I took apart. But there's this, and it's a natural kid impulse to take stuff apart. And it's really important, I think, as a parent to foment that if your kid has some proclivity, because if you take enough things apart, you start to understand how they go back together. Yeah. If you start to, it's, it's not a direct lesson, but eventually structure starts to become clear. Like, you open up your tape deck because it doesn't work, as I did. And you

you look down and there's a fuse. Oh, I didn't know there was a fuse in there. And it's fried. There's a space in there. So I go to the stereo store and I bring it him like, you have one of these. And he's like, wow, yeah, I do. And pop it back in and I fixed my tape deck and I was 15. And I was like, I feel really awesome about that. You know, Robert Klein, a comedian, used to have this joke about like, why do we lift the hood of our car when it breaks down? Because we're expecting something to say, fix me, fix me. Like, is there something with a light on it? Right. And the answer is actually a non-zero portion of the time. There is something, obviously. wrong with something when you open it up.

And it's totally worth doing. And for those among us who actually fix stuff, I will tell you that one of the great secrets of fixing stuff is, I'd say seven times out of ten, you can fix something by taking it apart and putting it right back together. Yeah. And that somehow just takes care of the issue.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Adam Savage. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts from our amazing sponsors and to help keep this show going, visit jordan harbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify

your understanding of the key takeaways from Adam Savage. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means you get all of the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing from the show. Now back to our show with Adam Savage.

You're cleaning gunk off stuff as you put it back in. You're re-soddering things if you're doing stuff like that. You're tightening screws again. You know, you're going, oh, that must have plugged in here. But that's the thing that came unplugged when you dropped it off. One imagines, but it's never anything super obvious. And yet you put it back together and you're like, oh, now it works. Yeah.

The problem is when you put it back together and you go, shoot, that was in there somewhere. And now it's on the table. All those extra parts that Greg Brady left out. Right, yeah. Like, if it's not a screw, you're. probably screwed because there's something that's not going to work. You mentioned that nothing is ever finished. Does that not drive you crazy? Because for me, that's like, I guess I'm a completionist in a way, which is why I identify with your checkbox thing, your obsession with lists and checkboxes.

But the idea that nothing's ever finished, it makes me like get involuntary sort of chills thinking, like, oh, crap, something could be unfinished that you're going to work on still. It goes back and forth. And some things are totally done, but if it's something I'm really obsessed with, it's always an ongoing process. Like, I was making Apollo suit parts for a spacesuit that is effectively done. And anyone looking at it would consider it complete and finished, except there's some parts that are resonant. I want to be aluminum. So I'm slowly going back through it and kind of combing through and doing it. It's not to say I don't finish stuff.

And as I say in the book, I use deadlines all the time to get stuff to a place where it's wearable, or usable or demonstratable, and that's vital, because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just peter away at the tiniest details forever. And all that being said, yeah, there are some things where I really love them. There's just always something else to, some final little detail to add. You do mention the deadline thing. Do you set deadlines for yourself? Like, okay, this is going until Friday. After that, I'm done. No, my deadlines are larger than that. It's usually like, I want to finish actually, so I think, Comic-Con is coming up,

what costume should I wear? And if it's one that I'm in the process of completing, I'll be like, great, that'll be the custom I finish in time. And then I work backwards from there and think, okay, these are the days I'm traveling, these are days I'm in, I have these five days that I can put into it. I'm going to need to bring in some help,

and then I start to work outwards from there. So, sure, there might be stuff where it's like, finish it by Friday, but hopefully I've been looking at the totality of the project and like I know that my due date is my due date and I, oh, assemble what help and resources I need. Okay, that makes sense. Because for me, everything I do always feels like even preparing shows like this.

All right, read the book. I always read the whole book, read, watch or read or listen to five, six other interviews that the person is done so I don't just ask them the same crap as everyone else. And also that I don't miss something awesome that's like, wow, this isn't in the book. But then I'll have like eight pages of notes. I know I'm not going to get through everything. So then I have to trim stuff. And it's for me, it's like, oh, my gosh, I'm running out of time.

I'm reviewing this. Like, it's always, there's never enough time to finish everything perfectly. Okay. And finishing everything perfectly is totally not the goal for me of a deadline. And it's actually an interesting thing to talk about here. Because one of those reasons I love deadlines is because it hacks things off your decision tree. And it takes things out of your belt.

In order to get X done by Friday, as you get closer and closer to Friday, you start having to leave behind things you thought you were going to get done. Okay, so I'm making, let's say I was making an alien suit for Kane. I want this kind of communication. And you know what? I'm not going to get that done by Friday. I'm going to have to go with another style of communication, even though I had this grand plan about how I was going to talk to my crew while walking the floor at Comic Con. And what a deadline does for me is, as I said, it lops, branches off my decision tree. It makes me look at each thing I am looking to complete and ask myself, is this of the essence of the completion or is it ancillary to

the essence? And so I do a lot of interviewing other people and I always find it terrifying. I sit there while they're talking terrified, petrified, I'm going to not have a follow-up question or I'm somehow going to miss some area I wanted to talk about. So I do something similar when I'm interviewing people as I do with any other project, which is I read enough reference material until I feel until I sense that I have a point of view about the person that I'm interviewed. And the moment I have a point of view, then there's all these questions that are general questions that I'm suddenly no longer interested in. Right.

And sometimes it doesn't even matter to the interviewee. I interviewed Temple Grandin on stage a few years ago. She's an amazing human being. You know, I joked that Jamie Heiman and I are the patron saints of autism spectrum disorder. And my opening for Temple was that if we're the people, patron saints, she's by all means the pope. And I realized reading her book and looking at her material and reading stuff and actually speaking to her that she's really dedicated her whole life to alleviating suffering wherever she can find it. And that gave me this great lens with which to

frame questions. And in the end, I said that to her in the interview on stage and her response was, sure. And then she moved right on to the next answer. So it wasn't even like that uncovered some deep truth about Temple, but it helped me frame why I was there interviewing her. And that's, it's true. I'm never going to assemble all the questions I want to ask. And frankly, some of the best interviews I've ever done were ones in which I never ended. I made, I wrote up 65 questions for John Cleese. Oh my gosh. And I never looked at a single one. Yeah, that's a lot. Because he came so present and so ready to play that we went somewhere totally different. Yeah. And I, I, that to me gets really thrilling. I, I really enjoy that.

process. Yeah, I like that process as well. And so these notes, people always go, what are you doing? And I'm like, crossing off things we're naturally getting to anyway without using that. But it helps me navigate and make sure that I'm not like, oh, shoot, I can't believe I forgot to ask about this amazing tip that was the one top thing. Because there'll be something in there that I think about for a week and then go, shit, I didn't ask. The number of times I've concocted super elaborate questions for someone whose response was, well, I've never thought of it like that. And then we're on to the next thing. And then we're on to the next thing. and I've thought that we were going to get a real meaty discussion of comedy out of this and that person has no interest in discussing it.

You got to prepare more than you're going to use because nothing's worse than being like, crap. I figured that was a 14-minute block and we are at 32 seconds. I've had people I've interviewed on stage where I made, I usually do a question per minute. This is a sort of rough outline where I had 70 questions for a 60-minute interview and I used all 70 questions. Oh, wow. The interviewee was so not interested in interest.

They made me work really hard. Yikes, that's brutal. Everyone in the audience is just like, there are people who might have been at that interview who know who I'm talking about. That's totally fine. Yeah, they're still like nursing the beer that they had after that interview, I think. No, they had a great time. Yeah.

This was a lot of heavy lifting. Yeah, yeah. That's when you go home and you go, all right, I'm good enough that that didn't totally explode in my face. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, you were very self-aware. The book shows this, but in a lot of your interviews, it's really clear that you think a lot about how you think.

And where does that come from? I view that as one of our jobs as human being to watch ourselves, to watch the watcher and see and learn from the way we're doing things because we do so many things wrong. I mean, we come to these conclusions about how the world works as we're growing up and we're five, six, seven, we're 11, 12, 13. We're making decisions about the chaos we see around us and how to navigate it. And they might be good decisions in the moment, but they're terrible for navigating the

rest of life. And yet, as far as I've found, I'm still operating on assumptions that I made when I was between seven and 16 years old. That introspection comes from a family value. My mom is a psychotherapist. My father was in therapy for his whole life. and read deeply about the philosophy of thinking it talked about that. My wife is a therapist.

I've been in therapy for most of my life, and I'm a believer that talking and that introspection makes us better. It makes me a better person, a better citizen, a better father, a better husband, a better person. So there's a point in the book where I talk about having taken on a job that was too big for me, not realizing until way too late, not asking for help, ruining somebody senior thesis film

and losing a friend in the process. And when I called my dad in the midst of the darkest feeling of that, and he listened to me crying on the phone and feeling like crap, and, you know, I can't fix this. I can't make this better. There's nothing I can do. And he said, you can't fix this. You can't make it better. And that's true. You have to accept that. You can only take this in and learn what it is about you that brought this about to the degree that you're responsible, which is an important thing to rigorous. examine and try not to do it again. And in my family and among the people that I love, that is a value. That is a really important value to see what you've done, how it didn't work and did work, and try and operate from a place of love and compassion for yourself, which gives you lots of love and compassion for other people. Does that quote at the beginning of Rounders where he says, if you're at a poker table and you can't spot the sucker, you're the sucker. You're the sucker. Yeah. I've taken that on in life where if you're driving around and everyone's an asshole, it's you.

Yeah. That when you're in a bad mood, everyone seems like a jerk. And when you are unhappy with yourself or you're down on yourself, you're much more likely to get down on other people. So to me, the love and compassion that I'm able to have for other people comes directly from how much I'm able to generate for myself. The point really hits home. You know, if you go through, I went through a difficult sort of last year business thing. And I remember being like, I don't remember dealing with all these, all this bull crap all the time. What is everyone's, and I was like, oh, okay, what would I say to somebody else?

What's the common denominator in all these equations? Me, oh, crap, okay. But it's like having that realization early on is super helpful because then you don't wonder why quote unquote life is unfair. You just go, okay, what part of my playing in this and how do I fix it? Well, and that thing you just said, getting to understand it early on, it's something that I keep trying to get over because as far as I can tell, life is an endless series of me waking up and going, oh, my God, I had no idea that was going on. And it's, again, it's like, it's like combing.

I'm at a professional place in my life now where someone brings me a new project, even if it's in a genre or in a medium, I don't know. if I'm interested in diving in, the process starts out as one of what I call smoothing down the high spots. It's like looking at the totality of the thing until I have a point of view. Right. The same thing I was talking about about deadlines. And when I have a point of view, I can start to look and go, okay, there's a problem area because that one sticks out to me. It's like slightly not fitting with the other stuff.

So I sand that down and then I look for another high spot. Okay. Now I'm bringing this thing into some. I'm being very abstract here, I recognize. I think a lot of people understand what you mean, though. Or where I understand some totally different point that you're not making. It's also possible. It's just about the ways in which the things I understand about myself were mystery.

There's half a dozen things I know about myself now that were mysteries to me five years ago. And there's things I understood then that were mysteries to me five years before. It is, I cannot believe what an idiot I was, 15 years ago. I mean, like it's just appalling. I think you're supposed to feel that way at every age of your life. And that is, it's really important that we recognize that, that in any given moment, whatever we think the world is, we're stupid about it. And we're going to learn more. And then we're still going to feel stupid from the vantage point of the future of that future moment.

Just because that's, I mean, to me, it's just, it's an endless, it's an endless set of stairs in the best way. I mean, you know, there's something really that may. to open my eyes wider and to be more present with the people that are important to me. That's one of the hardest jobs of being a person, and it's the most important one. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Savage. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air.

To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on The Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Adam Savage. When you build things, you say you build them in your head and the rest is like cutting the chunks.

But sort of walk me through this a little bit because are you going, okay, I'm going to make this, so I'm going to need this tool. This is the material. I assume you're doing at least that. but how detailed is the visualization? Like, can you, are you thinking like, all right, well, when I'm doing that, I'm tightening that. Ooh, you know what? That's probably going to break because I'm going to have to tighten it enough where that's not going to do it. There is a lot of that.

There's a lot of that. Well, so I'll give you an example. So you do a podcast. How many podcasts do you do a year? Like 160. Okay. So when you think back to the first time you were making a list to make a podcast, you had almost zero institutional knowledge of your own.

Sure. You were relying on a whole bunch of other people's. But after 50 or 60 and then after a couple of hundred, you build this body of institutional knowledge that understands on a much deeper level than you could have possibly imagined at the beginning about what are the important aspects of this that you really have to button down. You probably in the first few podcasts wasted time taking care of stuff that really doesn't matter. Oh, yeah. And you've learned, yeah, that one doesn't matter. That one does. This one matters if we have time, but no one's going to notice if it's not there.

And knowing which questions to ask is everything about expertise. And so there becomes a point at which that knowledge becomes almost like a body memory. Right. Like you now have this thing where the podcast, instead of a set of separate actions that are overwhelming, it now has this arc to it. Like, okay, I know in the beginning there'll be this, then there'll be this, then there's the interview, and then there's the stuff after the interview, right? all of a sudden it becomes sort of coalesced like a thing you can almost see in your head. And I think of this, like, I had a roommate who was a serious chess player,

and I played a few hundred games of chess with him, thinking I was going to get better at chess, and I bought chess tricks and tips and traps and techniques, and I bought books on chess. I bought a chess computer and played chess. And reading about chess and playing a few hundred games taught me I was never going to be a great chess. because no matter how much I tried, the board was still a set of separate actions to be analyzed in and of themselves.

And I realize that a real chess player starts to see the board as a gesture so that they see that gesture and they can actually separate it into the available moves to them or they can look at it as this thing. And so I submit that in anything one can get to become an expert in, that expertise carries with it a kind of a physical understanding of the thing. So I think that it's a phase, it's not a phase, or it's almost like a plateau you reach with an expertise where, yeah, you can do a lot of the work internally before you lift a tool or a pen or start to actually do research. You see, you know, I'm sure if somebody said you've got to interview Barack Obama and you've got two hours or you've got to interview Barack Obama and you've got two months. Those are going to be two very different lengths of time with which to do.

But you'd be a lot less afraid of that from the vantage point of 200 podcasts than the advantage point of two. Yeah. So all of that is an extremely long way of saying, yeah, a lot of my mental building, a lot of my building happens mentally. A lot of the problem solving happens mentally so that I can get to a point where I can get enough materials in front of me to start to build it for real. And I encounter plenty of problems on the bench that I didn't think of in my head. It especially happens when I hit a snag and I can't figure out how to solve a problem. I will let it be and then I'll go off and I'll think about it for a while. And sometimes I'll think about it for weeks.

And then the answer will be like, there it is. And I'll be like, oh, my God, what a dummy, of course. That was the answer all along. And it's totally simple. Thinking about things like that and then running into these little snags reminds me, when I was an exchange student in Germany in the 90s, I would start to dream eventually in German, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and go,

oh, I woke up. Oh, because somebody was talking and then used a word, but I don't know the word. So I would have to keep a dictionary near the bed because I would run into like what you have, like a problem. And I'd go, I don't have anything mapped to that. He was going to say, I need to run into the phone booth.

And I'm like, how the hell do you say phone booth? And I'd have to look up the word. I'd go back to bed. And my dream would sort of start right around there and continue. Fascinating. So your brain is constantly running into these things when you simulate. I actually think that the language analysis is a really good one. I think that materials are languages.

Building is a language, and the specific materials are words that people don't know. The vocabulary of, you know, I tweeted recently about Chicago screws as a way to hold stuff together, and all these people tweeted back to me, I didn't know what a Chicago screw was. Thank you for that, because they looked it up, and there it is on Amazon. And if you know the name, it's also called a paper rivet. They're also called blind rivets sometimes, even though that's not the technical term for a blind rivet. And for me, when you know those secret words, you know all of these other solutions. So I love trading those little things.

Again, they're vocabulary words for making. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is fascinating. I actually think of it. I came up with the calling it Rumpel-Stillskin because I was replicating a prop and I was trying to find this tiny little. bottle. And it's made of glass and it's about an inch long. And if you want to search for bottles on

Google, the noise to signal ratio is one. Little bottles. So I thought dram bottles. Now perfume bottles. No, perfume samples. No. Apothecary. No. Homeopathy. Every last term I could think of about people who used small bottles, I searched for weeks and weeks and weeks. And then I bought some bottles. I bought lots of old bottles, so I could look at them and see if any... And then I started doing research on bottles themselves. This is where I should have actually started this whole process, because I discovered that bottles are classified by the type of lip. Get out.

Seriously. So if you want to find a specific type of bottle, you need to first identify the lip type, and then the rest falls into place. And so I looked at the bottle I was trying to find, and it had a specific kind of square lip. It's called a patent lip. And so then I was like, okay, I'd already determine. that the bottle held one dram, right?

I made the math of the conical interior. I'm sorry, the cylindrical interior. Okay, one dram. So I searched one dram patent lip. Hundreds of results have precisely the bottle I've been looking for for months. And once I understood its name like Brumple Stillskin, I cracked its spell and it had no power over it. So satisfying to do that.

Oh, my God. One of the best things that ever happened. And you're like, ooh, eventually AI is going to know what I want, even if I don't know what I want, which will be really useful. I'm not sure AI is ever going to get that smart. It would be great, though, sometimes. But then also terrifying because you're like, how did you know I was out of toilet paper? You're a really capable guy.

You have a ton of skills. And one thing that this show's done for me is put me around people like you and others on a regular basis. And, of course, the problem then with this is that if you're listening to this show or watching this show, it can really seem like, as a listener or a viewer, you're the only person in the world that isn't knocking it out of the park. like, oh, Jordan's got all these great shows. And then Adam Savage, man, that guy's, I am a turd. All I'm doing is I'm becoming a pharmacist. I'm never going to make anything out of my life's so ordinary.

And it's imposter syndrome. It's imposter syndrome. It's also what the Buddhist is called comparing mind. Yeah, and I live there sometimes. And it's such a freaking recipe for disaster. It is, it is a recipe for disaster, but it's also totally human. So, you know, my shop, while it is a wonderland that I've spent years putting together, I took it apart earlier this year to use all the things in it for the show I just made for the Science Channel.

And as such, I put it back together over the last couple months, but it's still not fully flowing. It's still not quite there. So today, I was in my shop and I was messing around and it was not going very well. And that happens no matter where you are in your career, no matter who you are, how much success you've had. I think there's this other aspect to it, which is deeply American, which is the scarcity. model, which is that everything I'm given would come at a cost to somebody else or everything someone else has is a cost to me. Yeah.

But that imposter syndrome, it is so vital to me to talk about it openly and to share stories about it because nobody escapes it. Every single human you have ever met experiences it all the time. And, you know, on a day-to-day basis, my life does not feel like a productive juggernaut of endless glee, it is another life like anybody else is living. And I have, you know, wonderful people in my life who I love, and I have difficult people in my life. And I have, you know, trials and tribulations like anybody else. And my tale about imposter syndrome, I was having lunch a few years ago with someone my age. And I mentioned imposter syndrome. And they said, wait a minute, what is

that thing you just said? And I said, the feeling that you don't belong where you are, even if you're successful, and that someone's about to come out and tap you on the shoulder and tell you it's time to go home. And he just turned sheet white. And he said, I thought it was home. Yeah, of course. And it made me so sad that he'd spent 45 years of his life thinking that he was the only one that suffered this. And somehow everyone else was escaping it. Yeah. And nobody else escapes it. That is, it's just so universal and so important that we, that we talk about that. Because, you know, I've met people that don't think that they're an imposter and they're interminable to be with. Yeah, well, it's a running theme on the show, the imposter syndrome thing because of the high performance element of the show.

But yeah, if you want to meet somebody who doesn't have imposter syndrome, go talk to a high school freshman, sophomore or senior because they know everything and their life is going to be amazing. But everybody, it's actually the mark of a high performer. I was in law school and I remember somebody came in and spoke and all these other people that talk about imposter syndrome. But they go to like Harvard, Yale, medical, whatever. And they're like, who here feels like they're the one that slip through the crap? and it's only a matter of time. And all the hands go up. But if you ask it, yeah, in a room full of people who are not doing much of anything or are really young, they'll be like, what are you talking about? It happens when you are around all of these people who are killing it, because

you are probably supposed to be there killing it too. Because it does, in a way. Because we also live in this, we live in a culture where we really, we really, we love the end of a story being happily ever after. We just assume that. Yeah. That is a very cultural thing the happily ever after. Oh, you're on TV once. You should be fine and rich forever. Yes. And the answer is, no, no, it doesn't work like that. And Conan O'Brien, actually, was talking with Howard Stern about this, like last week or about, and it was awesome to hear both of them go, yeah, I pretty much always get mad at myself after a show, or I pretty much always think, oh, I should have done this again, or I should have done this

a different way. You feel like you leave money on the table. Yeah. It's never done. It's never complete and frankly every single time i have experienced the emotion oh man i've got this wired life was rearing up with a big fat open hand to smack me across the face with humility and disaster yeah every every last time it's uncanny i know that your father did some sesame street puppeteer muppeteer not do this is a thing i cannot freaking on wikipedia i can't get it off my wikipedia do they like that's muppeteer do they Like that's muppets. I've asked people to remove it. I've pulled it.

I've flagged it. My dad was not a muppeteer. My dad was an animator. And when Sesame Street started in the late 60s, early 70s, their axiom was one-third puppets, one-third live action, and one-third animation. And this was groundbreaking for a kid's show as it was and still continues to be. And my dad was one of the very first animators they hired. And so he raised us doing animated interstitials on Sesame Street.

It did about two or three a year through all of the 70s. And how did he encourage you to be creative? And by the way, it's going to be off your Wikipedia after this. Because I think you saying, hey, that's wrong. We'll see. We'll see it before. Yeah, I suppose that's true. How did he encourage you to be creative?

Watching him paint every day imbued me with the understanding that this thing had a value and a really abiding and life affirming value to him. And, I mean, he was by no means uncomplicated. It was a very chaotic childhood that I had. But that example of someone painting every single day, someone who put that much value onto this weird thing, and I submit that almost all the things, that everything that we do is everything we do is a hobby,

everything that we have to do is a weird hobby. I mean, fishing is weird when you think about it. I agree with that. They don't have to be utilitarian. So every time I explored, you know, making something my parents were. encouraging about it. They liked it. They did not, again, it's encouragement. You know, telling your kid when he's starting to sing that he's singing off key is a really, really

shitty thing to do to a kid. You've got to let people have an open space with which to try and iterate and what they might think of as failing in order to find whether or not they're going to love that thing. And my parents definitely gave me that. You have twin sons. How are you encouraging them to create without putting unhealthy pressure on them. And I worry because I've got my new baby coming soon and I put unhealthy pressure on myself. So it's going to be really hard not to put it on other people who I love. I resolved very early to put the things they were interested in in front of them and make the materials and things that they were curious about available to them. So I bought a lot of drum sets and guitars and things that didn't get used, but I also bought a lot

that did. My kids are both very accomplished musicians. They're kind people. But there's no, it's not like I did, honestly. I mean, I don't know if it's the frame of this question, which tends to carry the assumption that I may have done something right is still not something I'm convinced of. Raising children is a lifelong exercise. And even though my boys are 20, I'm still smack in the middle of it. Yeah. I, I, I, try to speak to them openly. I try to, I try to, in my whole family, work hard to understand the family dynamics. There are dynamics between me and my kids. There are dynamics between each of us and our families, both our parents and our partners and our kids that we can even know about and

might not be able to change. But just knowing about them so that you can talk about them and you can normalize these experiences is really, really important. I was talking about. I was talking with a pen jolette on the show before and he had mentioned i thought oh well you work with this other guy tell her for a long time you guys must be really close and he was like no we are not friends no and i actually heard that similar to them you and jamy were not or are not friends and i i'm surprised but i get it also because i i've been through that similarly i guess we just assume if we see people together all the time they have to be getting along yeah it's not it actually is a and i think Penn and Teller are both good friends.

And they would say the same thing that Jamie and I would say, which is there's a real strength to a partnership that doesn't have an emotional component. We're not afraid to hurt each other's feelings, which means we're not afraid to go to the carpet, go to Matt on the things that we think about each other, when we think someone's being full of shit, we'll say it. And consequently,

that relationship's one of the most satisfying relationships I have had with Jamie. We've thought about the small stuff, constantly. But we really never thought about the big, we never thought about the big stuff. We never thought about turning down lots of money to bust myths about somebody's product or other. And the lack of the emotional component, yeah, it was a, it was a real strength because of the fact that we could concentrate on what's in front of us better. Yeah. This makes sense. I mean, it also went based on a deep amount of respect. So while Penn and Teller, aren't necessarily two people who would go out to dinner together, although, you know, you end up

sharing a lot of meals with your business partner. And the same thing is true for me and Jamie. We've never had dinner alone together in the 30 years. It's just so crazy when I heard that. I was like, how can that be the thing? But the respect that I have, knowing that Jamie would have been able to get this bill done by the end of the day, no matter what I think of the technique he's about to dive into, that respect is really paramount. So, you know, the difficult things we had, we're never based on a lack of respect for each other. And we never lashed out and were insulting with each other. We fought betterly about stuff, but it never got personal. And that's really important because also when your business partners with someone, like it or not,

you're going to be intimate in their lives in a way that's abiding and deep, even if they're not your friend. Jamie and I know things about each other's lives that few other people in our lives. No, just because we've shared that over those decades. I can imagine companies coming at you, speaking of turning down large sums of money. Like, all right, make sure we're going to bust the myth that Bronte isn't the toughest paper towel. And you're like, no, I'm going to not sleep at night. Well, early on, we would get these and we realized, wow. So basic cable is that you don't get residuals.

So we got paid for making Mythbusters and we never make another penny from the enterprise. It's fine. That's the rules. That's how those contracts go. But it also means that the only thing I have when I'm, when Jamie and I realize this early, the only thing we would have when we finished was our integrity. And that was a coin not to be spent unwisely. Sure.

Because, you know, you could just become Bob Vila. You could become what I consider kind of a joke about making stuff. Because, you know, there was a period of time when it seemed like there was not a product he wouldn't stump for. So I have no idea what to believe. He just seems like a product endorser. Yeah. Again, I haven't deeply researched.

Bob Vila. He's probably a lovely man, and I don't mean to insult him. He seems like I'm merely talking about the fictional Bob Vila that is a cultural symbol in my head. I don't mean to insult the actual human being. That loves everything that Kmart produces or whatever it was. But yeah, you know, we realized that we were going to do that if it mattered to us and if we believed in what we were doing, then we would take the money and we would do a thing about somebody's product. And we did actually, we did a lovely one for Corning wanted to do this set of videos called A Day of Glass. And it was one of the most delightful things because Corning is such a fantastic company

and everything you could think of to do with glass, they kind of invented it starting back in the 19th century. It was like this unfettered, easy decision to make because it was like, well, there's no problem with this company at all. There's no hidden skeletons. They didn't build Nazi warships or something like that. And this is awesome. Yeah.

Or they just did a really awesome cover up. No one's ever going to crack in it. Because you couldn't find it. The show, I was looking at it. for like interesting tidbits about the show. And there's stuff in there like a woman saved her own life and that of her infant because she was, had fallen into a ditch. Underwater car. Yeah, the underwater car. And then I found some way that you guys had accidentally found a really easy way to make an explosive out of a very common chemical and ended up like censoring that and then telling

DARPA the defense department essentially. And they were like, yeah, we know about that. Thank you for not telling anybody. Yeah, thanks for not putting on a really popular cable show. But the one that really stuck out was the cannonball accident. Yeah. Can you tell me about the cannonball accident? That's one where I bet you your whole, every sphincter in your body was clenched at max while you waited for the outcome of that. It was awful.

So it happened out at the Alameda County Sheriff's bombing range where a cannon was being fired to test its exit, the speed of the cannon ball. And there were a bunch of safety procedures put in place, but it was hard to, we had fired, Jamie and I have fired

cannons into the same hill before. and we'd used this basically, you know, 200 foot tall mountain, this tiny hill, as a backstop for cannon shots before. However, when this cannon was being shot, it was in the middle of the six-year drought that Northern California had. And so this hill, far from receiving the cannonball, was hard as a rock. And the cannonball bounced off the hill, flew a mile into Dublin, California, and bounced off a sidewalk, went up through the lintel of, this man's house, passed through the bedroom of his sleeping wife and child. Oh, I didn't know that. Flew another thousand feet, landed on the roof of somebody else's house, broke some tiles off of it,

bounced into the passenger seat of an SUV that had been parked there five minutes before. And nobody was hurt. Now, we started to get calls immediately. I got a call within an hour from Australia. And it taught me this. The first lesson I learned from this is that no reporter you've ever done an interview with has ever thrown out your number. Yeah.

They're ready to call you if they have that access. Number two is that the story that's going to have the most traction is the one people are secretly expecting. And the story from MythBusters of the idea of an experiment gone wrong and someone getting hurt, it just was like this perfect dovetail of people's secret desire for Mythbusters because it seems kind of dangerous. So shouldn't something dangerous happen at some point? Would they're like, oh my God, that totally happened?

So then we, the very first thing Jamie and I wanted to do was head out there and talk to the people whose property and their safety felt compromised by this accident. And we wanted to apologize to them. So we did. And we apologized to all the people this happened to. We made good on restoring their homes and their property to better than as good or better than it was before. each of the people we talked to requested that we, whatever safety procedures we had in place, we make them more robust. And that is an absolutely reasonable request, and we promised them that. And in fact, those safety procedures are still ones that I follow today in production. Luckily, we learned that without anyone having to get hurt. And then we walked out of the house of one of the people whose house was hurt by the

cannonball to a press conference. and I have never experienced this before. You know, 20 microphones sitting there in a big holder. And this bank of reporters with their trucks all ready with questions. And my brain did this really funny thing. I'm walking out towards this. And I'm thinking, oh, look at that holder for all those microphones. It's this big chunk of aluminum, about half inch thick with radiest edges and a port for all these different microphones.

That is a machine shop built that thing. They built it for that purpose. It can't be a big market. It can't be a huge market. It's got to be this limited thing. It's probably going to cost like $1,200. So every news, I started wondering, literally all the way walking, I'm thinking this, does every news truck have one?

And whose do they use for any given press conference? Is it the first guy to show up, the first person? So I'm just like sort of one of my ways of relaxing is looking at things and imagining how they got built. Like imagining the first meeting, the design meeting, the iterations, the process, the manufacturing, et cetera. And this was no different. So then I stand up at the mic, Jamie and I stand, and people are like, the reporters are asking, at first it's this very cacophist, oh, wow, wow, what's your question?

How did that guys feel about it? Okay. And we started to answer questions, and we were answering them, obviously. There was nothing to hide here. We had nothing to obfuscate. This mistake was made on our watch. We were responsible and we were taking that responsibility. And within like six questions, the whole energy became,

like diffused to the point of like it became a real quiet press conference and people asked like three or four more questions then everyone was like shrugged and went like all right think we got what we need yeah and it was another lovely lesson that to make a story not like we didn't we're both jamie and actually all five of us carry grant troy jami i our production team our producers our production company all of us were mortified by this And this is for us the darkest day of Mythbusters. Yeah, I mean, you could have killed a woman and a child with a cannonball. It was awful, absolutely awful. And we're still, you know, if I am talking to a large audience and someone says

cannonball and people laugh, I tell this story as a way of saying, there's nothing funny about that. I get the humor and I get how that humor dovetails with your vision of Mythbusters. But the fact is, nothing was funny about it. And we weren't treating it as something we were trying to hide, obfuscate or divest responsibility of. And that meant that, you know, the reporters were like, well, all right, I guess that's about it. Yeah. All right. So you tell me about this Iron Man suit, because this is, I know this is coming up, but like, this thing is next level. It's totally insane. So this is for this new show I have called Savage Build. It starts airing on June 12th on the Science Channel, after BattleBots. And it's, we,

we were in production on this show from January through March, through April of this year. And the very first episode, Yeah, we built a working suit of Ironman armor out of 3D printed titanium. Kevin Feige, the head of the Marvel group, gave me personal permission to get the original computer files of the Ironman Mark II suit from Shane Mayhan at Legacy Effects, the guys that have built all the Iron Man suits and made tons of incredible armor costumes for the Marvel and countless other films. And we worked with the Colorado School of Mines, which is in Mines with an end. And it's an incredible engineering school. Not mimes. Not mimes. Everyone makes that joke.

An incredible engineering school. And the best part about it was it just grew out of me having done an appearance at the School of Mines and them saying, hey, we've got this whole new additive manufacturing department. They literally built an entire building to teach kids about added manufacturing, 3D printing. And they said, we just got this new titanium printer. Got anything you want to make with it. And when we were in pre-production on the show, it's like, maybe we should make some ironman armor. And I called them up. And Eos, the makers of that machine, donated all the 3D printing, which is good because it was well over $250,000 worth of printing.

But the end result is, if Tony Stark became non-fictional, if you could wave a magic wand and Iron Man needed to make a suit, this is the process by which he would start. We made, if I consider, a working prototype of an Iron Man armor suit. It is bulletproof. Sweet. There is some flying involved. Did you test that? It was completely so much fun and such a wonderful thing to dive all into this fantasy. Oh, because it turns out that plate titanium has a certain kind of strength.

But if you 3D print it, you're actually laser sintering layers of powder titanium onto previous layers. And this means that you can use the lasers to attenuate the internal crystalline-grained structure of the titanium and make it much stronger than normal titanium. What? So it's Eve, like, I didn't know that when we started. But by the end of the episode, we were like, this is, this is not a fantasy armor. This is a working prototype of the fantasy armor made real. How do you know it's bulletproof? You'll have to watch the episode.

Okay. And I assume how do you know it flies? I've got to leave something on the, something for people to tune into and watch. I mean, thank you very much. My absolute pleasure. It was delightful. So Jason, the Mythbusters guy. I remember talking about getting Adam Savage on like five years ago or something like that.

I don't know. Finally we got around doing it. Yeah, I used to see Adam all the time when I lived in San Francisco. And I was always like, man, I want to go up and say hi. But I was like, he was with his kids. And I'm like, okay, don't do that thing. Don't be that guy. But I would always like kind of like give him like a little salute and a wink.

And he would always do it back. He knew the deal. So a very smart guy. That is cool. I often wonder how I'll be with kids. Because at some of, when the kids are little, yeah, you don't really want to be disturbed. But when they're like 10 to 20 or older, yeah, you kind of want them to think you're cool.

So it'd be awesome if someone comes up and it's like, hey, Jordan, oh my God, I'm a huge fan. Because then you're with your kid and you're like, hey, some people actually think your dad's pretty cool. And then after that, after they get older, then you don't want to be bothered again. So I'm interested to see what the phases of being a parent and having essentially strangers come up and say hi to you is going to be like for me. The kid's not even born yet, and you're already thinking about getting your dad cred. Come on, man. You got to. I just remember how lame I thought my dad was for a really long time, and it was, like, embarrassing to be with my parents. But when I was little, I thought he was really cool, and now that I'm older, I think he's pretty cool. But in the meantime, yeah, anybody who tries, I mean, anybody who tried to tell me my dad was cool, it was just in one ear and out the other. And it's probably going to be the same thing. Like, I bet you, there's got to be a point at which even, like, Jaden Smith is like, oh, I don't want my dad to go. It's like, dude, your dad's Will Smith.

You're good. Yeah, he's like, yeah, I know my dad's Will Smith. I grew up with him. I'm tired of it. That's the problem. I don't want to hear the dad jokes, the corny BS. I mean, you know, it's got to be just a universal thing. Yeah, I'm sure it is.

Yeah. Great big thank you to Adam Savage. The book title is Every Tool is a Hammer. Well, links to his stuff, of course, will be in the show notes. And if you want to know how we book these great people and create all these great connections, it's all about the network. It's all about that warm introduction. It's all about that good word.

And we're teaching you how to create network. works for personal or professional reasons and six minute networking that's our course it's free it's at jordan harbinger.com slash course don't wait don't kick the can down the road you've got to dig the well before you get thirsty i get so many letters in my inbox that are like hey didn't dig the well now i need a job what do i do and i don't want to be callous but my response is often you did you dug this grave you lay in it kind of thing but i know that that doesn't help somebody who's unemployed and goes i knew i should have done this, but don't be that person who's in my inbox going, I wish I'd done this 10 years ago and now I'm broke. That's not good. And it happens more often than I think any of us would like to

admit. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter, which you get when you sign up for the course. And I don't mail out every day or anything. It's like every other week at best. You can find it all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Speaking to building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Adam Savage. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with podcast one,

and this episode was co-produced by Jason MythBusted DePhilippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every single episode.

So please share the show with those you love, and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same.

Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that, I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts.

Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.