The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 311: Adam Savage - Life Lessons From A Master Maker

Episode Date: May 19, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk #311: Adam Savage Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com  Adam Savage was the co-host and Executive Producer of the hit show, MythBusters on the Discovery Channel.  Fourteen years, 1,015 myths, 2,950 experiments, eight Emmy nominations and 83 miles of duct tape later, the series ended in March 2016.  He is the author of Every Tool's a Hammer - Life Is What You Make It. Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text LEARNERS to 44222 Notes Leaders who sustain excellence = "Obsession is the gravity of making" Obsession towards the project -- A "desire to see the thing they made to your satisfaction." Adam on failure: "I don't trust people who haven't failed." What it means to be a great boss? Give great opportunities... "The time, the facilities, reason, and logic." "Hey, you're doing great."  Let employees have the space they need. "There's nothing better than when someone leading a team project can just run with it." "Give total autonomy with narrow bandwidth.  Give ownership." Being a generalist -- "The specialist wasn't always helpful because answers are within the context of a wider story." It's very damaging to ask a nine year old what they want to be when they grow up: "Excellence --> The things we cannot stop thinking about."  That's what we should strive to be when we grow up.  Someone who pursues their curiosity and obsessions with great rigor. The WHO "I think about my relationships all the time."  The people you consciously choose to have in your life are everything "Am I serving those relationships? Am I being present and non-judgmental with them?  Am I with them in the room?" Stop getting mad at customer service -- It's not their fault.  And you'll feel better about yourself. Adam on his preparation process for a big speech: It depends on the engagement, but it's extensive. There are 2 specifics: Record yourself and listen to it -- "It illuminates where you're not hitting your mark.  It's the transitions typically.  How you link them together as a narrative whole." Memorize conceptually -- Practice, practice practice.  Get the reps. Communication as a leader -- "Story is completely vital to leadership in every way." "Language was invented to tell stories." Pay attention to how they people who move you tell stories How playing quarterback is similar to a work of art There is always something changing -- You must adjust on the fly How to become more self-aware? Write everything down -- Keep a journal of your thoughts.  Reflect.  Be introspective Have someone on your team who will tell you the truth.  "It's all about the team." How Adam lowered stress level: Stopped drinking alcohol Slept more Started meditating Increase your loose tolerance Learn by doing -- Take action -- "Creation is iteration." Being wrong isn't failing You don't have to have everything in place to start Be easier on yourself during the iterations Share everything: We love the myth of the lone genius, yet none of us make stuff in a vacuum.  Share credit, ideas, everything.  Increase generosity through sharing Use more cooling fluid: It takes more time on the front end, and forces time to clean up on the back end, but it gives more value to the final product -- "It's a reminder to slow down and reduce the friction in your work and relationships." Sweep up every day: "A clean workbench gives energy.  It helps the future me." Leave a place better than you found it The cultural malaise currently is based on the scarcity model.  Wrong.  There is enough food, be a giver.  Be generous. Use the "Get To Know You Document" Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea

My thesis is that human beings invented language in order to tell stories. That within the chicken and the egg, the story is the initial mover that generates language. Because we are taught in schools that science and math are groups of facts to memorize by Friday's test. But facts don't mean anything unless you put them into a context in which you can make them useful. And that's called a story. A story is an arc by which facts are changed and moved and mutated throughout the course of the narrative. So to me, being able to articulate the story of what the vision is is so paramount. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show.

I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. receive mindful Monday updates what I am watching, reading, thinking about, as well as the latest updates on becoming part of my book launch team. Text learners to 4-4-222. Now on to tonight's featured leader, the great Adam Savage. He was the co-host and executive producer of the hit TV show MythBusters on Discovery Channel for more than 14 years. Also given a number of incredible TED Talks and has a new book out called Every Tools a Hammer.

Life is what you make it. A few of the topics we got into. Adam defines what it means to be an exceptional boss and specifically what you should do in order to be one. Then his preparation process for giving keynote presentations, namely the one key tactic he uses in order to do a great job. than the importance of a generalist and the advantages of building a wide range of knowledge and how that will make you more valuable in your career.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's Adam Savage. All right, Adam Savage. So good to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man. Thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, to get us going. So you are a different guest than I typically would have on the show,

which excited me as I was going through my preparation process, reading your book, obviously watched you on TV a bunch. But I'm curious, thinking about it from your perspective, when you consider all of the people in your life who are makers or builders or creators and the ones who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time, what have you found to be the commonalities among those people? Oh, I love that question. I say in the book, I wrote a phrase in the writing of the book that sort of rocked my way. world. I was thinking about how to describe how important obsession is to the creative process. And I decided to give it a physics analogy, and I said that obsession is the gravity of making.

And when I say making, I don't just mean, you know, putting IKEA furniture together or crafting. I mean, every time a human being sets out to make something extent out of their own brain and put it into the world they're making, whether it's poetry or building a table or writing a song. it requires a little bit of an obsessive attention to the important parts of that project. And I don't mean obsessively micromanaging. Everyone has different management styles, and sometimes micromanaging is what's required. Oftentimes it's not. I mean an obsessive desire to see the thing made to your satisfaction.

And in order to do that, you're going, you know, we talk a lot about failure. I don't, as a culture, I don't trust people who haven't failed because it lends a tonic to your character and gives you a clarity and an understanding of what your limits are. And when you're obsessive, you can push past, you can often push up against and past those because you know yourself, because you've spent time facing down your own biases, your own proclivities. Wow, I love it, man. I was reading your acknowledgement section of your book.

I love to see the people, the people who I just finished my first manuscript. So I feel where you're at. And I just wrote the acknowledgement section. So I immediately flipped to that. I have been flipping that recently. I was reading yours. And you mentioned Jamie, your co-host on TV show Mythbusters. And the thing you said about him was he taught you what a boss could be.

And the reason I bring this up early here, Adam, is because there's a lot of people who are listening who are a boss. They have people that report to them. and they desire to do that well. They understand the importance of that. And so I'm curious when you named Jamie, as one of the few people mentioned in your acknowledgement section as about what he meant to you when it comes to being a boss, can you share more about that, what it means to be a good boss in your mind, someone who's a creator and a maker?

I love to hear about that. So when I started working for Jamie, I had some building skills. I had a very quick mind, but I was very green. And so I showed up in his shop and he paid me to do a few different things for different commercials. And then I started understanding the possibility engine that was his shop. And I started pointing to things like the milling machine or the lathe or the vacuum former and say, I want to try that. I want to learn how to work this. And he gave me those opportunities, not at great expense to himself, but he let me stay after hours and work on this tool or that tool.

He fomented in me, he gave me the time and facilities to learn things. Now, this made me a better employee for him. It increased my skill base. So we were both benefiting from this exchange. But it was really clear to him that that was fine. There was no sequestration of knowledge with him. And in addition, when I would check in and say, how am I doing? he was unapologetic about being totally open well I think on that last job you spoke to the

producer too much and she kind of got pissed off but overall your work's pretty good and after about a year and a half I went to him and said I hadn't gotten a raise and he was like oh I didn't even realize that of course let's bump you up two bucks an hour like in each of those things he was responding genuinely to a new data and taking it in with reason and lot of I mean, I love that about Jamie. You know, it wasn't like, Jamie wasn't a good boss because he thought to himself, I want to be a good boss. I'm sure Jamie wants to be a good boss, but like for him, it's not about like, hey, you're doing great, man, keep doing your thing. He's not that kind of charismatic boss, but he really did have his eyes on the prize of the important things, which is letting your employees figure out what they're really good at and letting them do it and helping them do it.

A lot of people, I agree, but I think people have a fear of, I don't know if they'd say, like giving them the reign, so to speak. How do you think he or how to have you developed this as you've matured and grown to be willing to allow others space, freedom, autonomy? We all want autonomy. There's a lot of research out about that. So how does one develop that? or was that just a natural, intuitive way he was or you've learned? What do you think about that? That's a great question.

You know, so over the years I've been building my team, the team that I work with on tested, the team that I produce television shows with, the team that I do corporate gigs with. And those are all overlapping groups of people. And for me, there's nothing better than when I can give somebody on my team. a project and know that they're just going to run with it and take it. And it's actually going to end up different than I thought because it's going to be theirs. I have, you know, I have five or six people I work with on a deeply, you know, on a day-to-day basis. It's not a huge team. And I was

on set of Pacific Rim a few years ago with Guillermo del Toro. And I was watching him direct this giant scene and he took me on a tour through the art department and I'm looking at 40 or 50 artists and I said, how do you, how is it possible to maintain any kind of aesthetic consistency with a team of this many art directors and this many artists? And he said, you have to give them total autonomy within a very narrow bandwidth. And I love that clarity. That is a brilliant thing to understand because you do want the people working for you to feel, you want them to have autonomy because you want them to feel a sense of ownership over what they're doing. It's going to be better if they own it. That's why micromanaging is a terrible practice because it means that you're

constantly asserting ownership over the person you've given ownership to. But within that narrow bandwidth means you understand that each of these things is a brick in the thing that you're building. And if they know where that brick is and you know where that brick is, then they can do whatever they want with it, it's still going to fit as a support for the building. I read that earlier in your career, you were more of a generalist. I just spoke with a guy named David Epstein who wrote a book about this, why Generalist Triumph in a specialized world, his books called Range. And so it's top of mind for me.

As I was reading that, I thought of David. I thought of you. And there are people listening who are at various points in their career thinking, I need to be a specialist. And I would love to get your advice on that for somebody perhaps earlier in their career on whether the advantages and or potential disadvantages of being more of a jack of all trades as opposed to a specialist. Well, that's another area I feel deeply passionate about.

Over the years on Mythbusters, we consulted countless experts and scientists and engineers. and by and large, when we needed advice about something, it was often the expert who was not incredibly helpful to us, specifically not because they weren't able to help us understand what their area of expertise was. It was specifically that within MythBusters, we were often dealing with an area of physics or chemistry, but it was within the context of a wider story.

And so we call a specialist who understood their field, but they weren't able to extrapolate how their field, intersected with physics or electrical engineering. So for our money, the best people we found on Mythbusters were always the generalists. And yes, I have always called myself a generalist. I have a large collection of skills at which I'm almost universally mediocre, but the skills are each like arrows in my quiver for problem solving. When it comes to choosing a specialization, I think culturally we have this,

we're asking eight-year-old kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? It's a constant refrain. And what we mean is, what are you going to specialize in? And I think this is very damaging because ultimately, at the end of any life story that involves any modicum of success, personal or professional, is a story about someone who couldn't not pay attention to the thing that they were doing. And again, I go back to a recession. So this is a long way of saying, I'm not sure that we can easily pick and choose our specialties. I think the ones we gravitate towards, the ones we will be good at are the ones we can't stop thinking about.

The places we will find our excellence are the things that, like, tick some box that we can't know about deep in our heads. And this isn't to say that, you know, if you're thinking about learning an extra computer language to be able to programmer, that's a different kind of, you know, increasing the range of your specialization. And those are business.

decisions. But when it comes to really exploring real excellence and doing something to the absolute limit of what you know is not only your ability, but maybe almost anyone could do, you don't necessarily have a choice over what you get obsessed about. I recently recorded with Brian Coppulman, a showrunner of the TV show, Billions. I don't know if you and Brian know each other. I don't, but I'm familiar with this show. I love the show. He, um, it was great. I got to sit in his office in New York and I was looking at him and, and I, I, I sense that you guys have this similarity about you.

He, he, he said like what excellence meant to him was following your curiosity and obsessions with great rigor. And I love that phrase. And I get a feeling that you've kind of lived your life with that ethos. Yeah. It's, it's, it's totally true. Um, it's totally true. totally true. And the rigor, so there's an interesting thing there, right? Like I watched this

amazing documentary about Bruce Springsteen recording darkness at the edge of town, how he spent over a year and a half recording 60 different songs, multiple versions of some, over, you know, 18 months grinding and grinding and grinding out this album, 12-hour days in the recording studio. That is not the kind of rigor that I indulgent. When I think of the rigor of my life, it includes my creativity, but it also includes my family. It includes being rounded and making sure I'm spending time with my friends and the people that I love as well as doing professional work that means something to me. And that's just the type of creator I am. I am different than Bruce Springsteen, as most of us are.

but the idea of yes following a curiosity with rigor is a perfect encapsulation of exactly of exactly what I think is the way you explore creativity it's where it's how it's it is the path upon which you're going to find something interesting you briefly mentioned your family a little bit about balance and I also gather that you have a real thoughtful and intentional approach to really everything, but specifically relationships and people. And from reading your book, that comes up as well. What is your overall thought process around the who, as Jim Collins would say, the who in your life? Like being very intentional about the people that specifically you have in your circle, in your sphere,

the ones that are going to influence you. How do you think about that? I think about it all the time. I have a wide-ranging group of great friends all over the world, and I'm incredibly grateful for their friendship and their counsel and their support and their love. My family is of surpassing importance to me. When I think about those relationships, the question that I keep redounding to is, am I serving those relationships? And by serving, I mean, am I being a good friend, a good partner, a good father, a good husband? And by that, I mean, am I paying attention?

Am I being present and not judgmental in the room? I live a life where I get a tremendous amount of attention. I get to talk at length in this podcast, for instance, about the things that are important to me and the ways in which I've come to the ideas that I have. And I love talking about that stuff. But that's not necessarily why my friends love me, right? I have all sorts of different friends for all sorts of different reasons. And this is a long way of saying, as somebody who is in the public eye,

I've certainly had dinners with friends that I know now that they might have found exhausting because all I was doing was talking about all the shit that I was doing. You know, I just got back from this. I just did this. I just did this. And like there's a certain point of like, okay, I get it. I get it. I get it, but let's have a conversation. And this is one of my personal journeys, right?

I have to, is seeing past that, that noise and that bombast of a life that I'm really grateful to have and being present with the people that I love in the room, supporting them and being present with them. It's interesting. Before we hit record, you know, we don't have a ton of time. We just want to get to it. We don't want to have a lot of small talk because I just wanted to record all this stuff so everybody could hear it.

But one of the things that you stopped and were very intentional about was you said, how are you doing? And we don't know each other because we got introduced by mutual friend. And I just, I hate to say it, but that's actually kind of rare to stop for a second and like, well, how are you doing? Because you're the guest, you know, you're the one who's kind of being featured here. And I just thought that it's a small thing, but the small things are big things and how you do anything. It's how you do everything.

I thought it spoke volumes about you just to kind of publicly say that. that that was a, it made me want to, I wrote a note about the who and relationships. And I thought, oh, I definitely want to talk about that early because it just, it showed me that you were thoughtful. It's, it's several times recently. None of us like getting on the phone and talking to customer service. That's a universal axiom. And getting mad at customer service is almost a cultural archetype at this point. But I stopped getting mad at customer service because it's not their fault.

And recently, I've had a couple of interactions on the phone with customer service people where I have said, I want you to understand, I am activated and I'm very upset. But it is not at you. And I recognize that you are not the cause of my problem. I am mad at late stage capitalism, not you, but let's see if we can solve my problem. that the whole thing of recognizing that you are always around people and that everybody has their has their own lives uh i was in a taxi just now heading downtown the reason i was late i got stuck in traffic and my taxi driver was clearly filing their taxes by phone while driving me downtown now the first thought i had was oh, I got a tweet about this because this is crazy.

And then I thought, you know what? This might be the only time they have during the day to actually do this. And they're like driving in traffic in New York City, which is, you know, I wouldn't wish that on anybody all day long. And if this is when they have to file their taxes, I can handle that. Like, that's not a problem for me. Wow. Adam, another aspect of you've got, you're such a wide ranging guy.

But I was watching you speak on stage. Ted talks, really good ones. And I was curious to learn as a lot of people listening are put in positions to be, they need to be an effective communicator, whether they're running a meeting. They're giving their own presentation or a speech, things of that nature. I would love to learn, and I know we're bounced around a bit, but that's how this will go. I would love to learn your thought process on preparing for big moments, specifically. I would imagine all the repetitions on a TV show probably helps, but I'd be curious to get your thoughts on how you prepare to do such a good job, you know, very little or none when it comes to filler words. It's obviously you know your stuff.

Like, what's your process for that? Long ago, I stopped. I made myself stop saying, uh, or um, that is a subroutine I run no matter what. Easier said than done. Oh, yeah. No, it takes rigor. again, it takes rigor and they come up and you have to force your body not to say it. And you have to sit with the silence that it would have filled.

Yep. Because the silence exists regardless. The TED talk that I most recently did three years ago on the 10th stage in Vancouver is an example of the highest level of the kind of public speaking I like to do. I don't mean in terms of the venue, I mean in terms of the work that I put into it. And for that, I'll talk a little bit about the process. I wrote a talk over several months before TED because it's a you want to do good. It's a heady crowd to perform for. And then I did a rehearsal for Chris Anderson and his team and the look of abject terror on their face about how bad my talk was was really scary and destabilizing.

But they were right. My talk was not ready. So I went back to my hotel room and I called it my wife. And she helped me. She and I workshoped. A brand new talk from scratch in three days. Whoa. And the process of doing that, she knows me incredibly well.

She knows my rhetorical flourishes, and she really helped me ferret out the meat and material out of what I wanted to say for the TED talk. I went through, so I do many different types of talks. I do corporate talks where I'll lead towards a specific theme. I do, like, I speak at Maker Faire in San Francisco every year. When I speak at Maker Faire, I go as off the cuff as I can. I want my talk at Maker Faire to feel raw and unbridled because I feel like that's the ethos of what goes on there. I want to show my homework in a way.

But on the TED stage, I wanted it to be a really what felt like an extemporaneous story. And to do that as a performer, you have to rehearse it until you forget it. And so I did. I probably read that talk to myself a hundred times before I performed it in three days, just going repeatedly back to my hotel room reading it. And at the end of each day, I did this key thing. So now I want to get to two specific parts of the process of public speaking. At the end of each day, I recorded myself doing the talk, and then I listened to it, both that night and the next morning before starting to workshop it again. And listening to myself do the talk was such a great

way of illuminating all the places that I wasn't hitting my mark. and in my experience, the places that I don't hit my marks, the most difficult part of a talk, are not the words, it's the transitions. So, you know, I start out with a talk. I want to talk about cosplay. Okay, I know all these things that I want to cover. And the trick isn't the material that builds those stories.

It's how I link them together into a narrative whole. And so I notice as I'm giving a talk that sometimes there'll be like a sentence I'm glazing past quickly. And I realize, oh, it's because I'm not really sure how to leave the old concept behind to move on to the new concept. I haven't worked out that transition yet. And then once I work out all the transitions, the talk feels totally normal. It feels totally cohesive.

But until I have, as I'm saying it, there's always going to be some part where I'm, like, I know the word is a stand in or it's like a first draft phrasing. and I need to refine what I mean between these two things linking together in order to get that phrasing right. And you write it and memorize the whole for Ted? Did you wrote it and memorized the whole talk? Like word for word? Yeah, actually.

For that one, I did. Wow. I have a pretty good power of memory. If you gave me a page and a book, I can probably memorize it in about 30 minutes. How do you develop that skill? Or do you? It's all, I've been in the drama club since. I was 13 years old.

So being an actor perhaps helps because you got to memorize pages worth of dialogue. That totally helped. I have a visual memory. So when I memorize dialogue, I'm literally seeing it as words on a page. I also think another way that I memorize is conceptually. Like if I know that this sentence has four clauses in it and they're conceptually, they move from A to B, then I don't have to memorize the words because I know the clauses and the words will take care of themselves.

Wow. How does a normal person do that? Practice. That's true. My mom thought it was of value. And when I was 10 years old, she had me memorized the preamble to the Constitution. And that was just an exercise. But then a couple years later, I had to memorize something for school.

What was it? Oh, right. We had an assignment. You had to memorize a speech from Shakespeare, and you got 100% if you got 50 lines, and you got an extra point for every line you memorized after 50 lines. And I memorized 150 lines. Wow. And so I also have, over the years, spent time putting poems and phrases and sayings into my head that were important to me.

So there's about two dozen poems rattling around in here. They're just pieces of writing that were surpassingly important to me. So again, it's sort of like it's practice and exercise. Well, I think what it comes down to is like most things in life, you've got to get the reps. Yes. My background's in sports. And I didn't have to think about how to execute the plays. Because as you said, I practiced them so many times.

A lot of cases, I was forced to practice them so many times that I forgot. I didn't even think. This was the play call, and I ran the play without even thinking. I was running it while reading a defense as a quarterback. So I think that to me, the reason that it was because there was so much repetition. And so the answer is not necessarily the fun answer for people who want to get better at this very important skill of standing up and giving a compelling talk to a group. But it's getting the repetitions, practicing, doing the work. That's what will make you good at that.

And what that leads me to, Adam, is another part, which is still key when it comes to communication, but that's storytelling. So can you talk as your great speaking stories as well as writing them here, I'm showing your book, very compelling storyteller? What is your thought process around putting stories together? And then maybe even think about how a person who works in a mid-level management role in a corporation who's leading a team, so they got people below them and they certainly got people above them, they have to regularly be telling the story. This is the story of my team or this is how the vision where we want to go team. Let's get inspired a bit. And stories are better than just the powerpoints with the charts and stuff. So what would you, what advice do you give to that person?

Well, I mean, actually, story is completely vital to leadership in any way. My thesis is that human beings invented language in order to tell stories. That within the chicken and the egg, the story is the initial mover that generates language. Because we are taught in schools that science and math are groups of facts to memorize by Friday's test. But facts don't mean anything unless you put them into a context in which you can make them useful. And that's called a story. A story is an arc by which facts are changed and moved and mutated throughout the course of the narrative. So to me, being able to articulate the story of what the vision is is so paramount.

I mean, part of that is paying attention to the way other people articulated their visions, the way they inspired. their teams. It's funny that you were talking about that memorization, that understanding. As a quarterback, I think there's a total analogy between art and sports. And let me, let me try this one out. As a quarterback, you have a group of plays. You have rehearsed them with yourself until they're physically part of your body and your body's arithmetic. And you've practiced them with your team, hopefully that the team itself is a body that has memorize these plays. And still, when that play starts at the snap, I'm positive that it never ever quite goes perfectly. That there's always something that's changing on the fly and that a good

team, a good quarterback and a good team working in concert can adjust on the fly. And that's because they understand not just the facts of the story. They understand the meaning of the story and what their ultimate goal is. I remember I remember hearing the 49ers Steve Young talk about hitting Jerry Rice, getting to Jerry Rice and realizing, oh, I'm going to have to throw the ball where I know Jerry can get even if I can't see him. Yeah. And that, I love, I love, I love that leap of faith. Yeah. What's your, so I think we definitely establish the importance of it. Now, what about the process of putting it together, whether it's writing or speaking? Speaking or both?

I think writing is really important. I write everything down. Sometimes many of my notes I don't go back to, but the physical process of writing it down is a really important one. I think having people on your team whose gut check matters to you is super vital. I was having dinner a couple of years ago with the head of a big network. And I was asking him about how you run a big network. It totally baffles me.

And he said, well, it's all about my team. And we delved a little further, and he pointed out that his head of PR, he actually checks programming decisions with them. Because they have a really terrific gut check. I have several, I have, I mean, almost everybody on my team has a take that matters to me on the stuff that I'm doing. And so I check with them. Is this the story that we want to tell? If I'm not positive, I bounce it off as many people as I can. I'll write it down and I'll read it again the next day.

The thing is, is that it's unless the story means something to you, it's not going to mean something to anybody else, which ultimately means unless you're being honest about what the real story is, all you're doing is play acting. I get this sense that you have developed a really high level of awareness, both spatial and others as well as, and most perhaps. importantly self. I'm trying, Ringo. How can, is there a specific way or a process to put in place to become more self-aware? Well, I mean, you know, it's making sure that the people in your life are willing to challenge you to help you be a better person. Who is that for you?

Is that your wife? Absolutely. First and foremost, that's my wife, my partner. You know, we support each other in that as a constant ongoing project. We're a little shocked at how far we've come with each other, you know. It's an amazing journey to go through it with someone who only wants you to be better and who you want to help be better. That self-awareness, you know, it's hard one.

It takes a lot of work. Somewhere in the middle of making MythBusters around 2007, 2008, the stress was getting to me. My boys were nine years old. I had twin boys. I was in full production full time, 40 plus weeks a year for 13 years. And I realized I needed to do some things to lower my stress. And the things that lowered my stress also made me more aware of my life and the world around me. And they were, I stopped drinking alcohol because I didn't like the way I felt both when I was drinking it.

And the next day, especially it doesn't hurt that when, it doesn't help that when you're in your 40s hangovers start lasting for two or three days. And I didn't have that kind of time to waste. I started making sure I got enough sleep, even simple things like that. And that was super important. And I started meditating and frankly, delving into meditation, mindfulness and also Buddhism and the Dharma has meant a lot to me in unpacking the, pieces of the illusion of the self that I've created and seeing how they impact the world and see how I might help make the world around me better. And it feels like all of those things you implemented to lower stress also would perhaps

create more moments for reflection. And I think we really learn in those moments of reflection. We really do. And, you know, it is such a privilege to have moments of reflection. And currently in our culture where so many people have to work two and three jobs. to make a really tight rent and also are raising children and also are working on a marriage. Those moments are really, really difficult. And it is, frankly, you know, I'm going to get a little political here.

But one of the biggest benefits I can see to a universal or single payer health care, for instance, is the amount of stress it removes from a culture. Because when I go to a place like Canada or New Zealand or Australia, there is a degree, because of those countries forward-thinking, vacation leave, maternity leave, and health care policies, the people who existed in those countries have so much more time for that reflection than the average American has, I believe. And to me, that's a net detriment to our society. It reduces the ability of our entire culture to do good work. Well, interesting way to think of that.

I have a few friends in some of the places you named. I want to have deeper conversations about that. I've heard that at a surface level, but that makes so much sense. I wanted to get in a few of the notes I took. I mean, part of what we've talked about, it was already been in your book, but a few of the direct quotes, if you'd like, for the last few minutes we have together. One of them is about increasing your loose tolerance. meaning like we're going to we're going to mess up right and I think one of the one of the ways that

you talk about is is that we got to we got to do stuff we got to learn by doing and creation is iteration can you share more about how people that haven't read your work yet read your book yet could like give them a teaser on this aspect of increasing your loose tolerance and doing stuff even if you're going to mess up right so if you want to make a machine that can handle being dropped. You want to build that machine with some loose tolerance. That means that the parts of that machine can rattle around without breaking. If you drop a Rolls-Royce carburetor, it's not going to work, but if you drop a nice 1970s Chevy SmallBlog carburetor, that puppy will work because it's built to a looser tolerance. But also within that chapter, I talk about having a looser tolerance on

yourself. There are so many people that haven't started their podcast or started the, the, the speculative fiction they want to write because they feel like they need to have everything perfectly in place to do it. And we also talk currently in our culture about educating children that we need to help them learn how to fail better. And we don't really mean fail. All of this is a long way of saying what we mean is creation is iteration. That in order to build something from A to B, you're going to follow a path. But it's more like a set of branches, which are going to include wrong branches, as many wrong branches as right branches. And none of those wrong branches are failures. They are simply part of the iterative process. So to me, you know, just as the way,

as I say in the intro to the book, most biographies of successful people feel like a linear arrow from a childhood obsession to an adult achievement. The fact is that lives are so much more peripatetic and strange than that. And the decisions that we make are based on all of these factors in the moment as well as our overall goals. But if we're a little easier on ourselves about those iterations, about those wrong turns, the number of times I've reached the end of a day and not gotten done what I'd hope to get done by the end of that day, if we're a little less hard on ourselves, it makes it easier to come in the next day and rebuild that thing from scratch because

you screwed it up. How hard is that for you to do? It's still really hard. I still hit point. I still have days when I'm, leave the shop thinking I have no business making stuff or pretending that I know how. I still get that hard on myself. And given what I do for a living, that's a factually ludicrous phrase for me to think. And yet I go to that dark place. And for me, being honest about it is one of the

best ways I can help inspire somebody else who might feel the same way. Because nobody escapes from the imposter complex. How about sharing? Something you talk about. Sharing. you know, what you're interested in what you've done, perhaps being a bit vulnerable. What's the importance of sharing for the, because like, I think people now, and I, you know this, Adam, because you're pretty aware, but people now, you've, no one's ever made it, but you've had years and decades worth of success in the public eye. And most people listening have not. And so they would say, well, it's easy for you to say now, because you're, you know, you're

successful. and you have been for a long time, so you can share even mess-ups and people laugh and they say, well, this is just his iterative process. But what about me? You know, I haven't felt any of that yet.

Should I still share? What do you say to that person? Well, I would point to them to my great friend, uh, and amazing creator Simone Yatch, the queen of shitty robots who built a brand on failing on camera and being honest about it at the same time as having real fun and, uh, hilarity about it.

Is she the one with the TED talk about the robots that were like useless? Okay, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Simone is one of my closest friends and I am inspired. I am so inspired by her because of her. She recently had cancer, had brain surgery, talked about all of it to her YouTube subscribers and to her fans was really, really open about it.

And she got a tremendous amount out of that exercise. The thing is, again, within our culture, we love the myth of the lone genius of the driven, brilliant human being. When the reality is that none of us make stuff in a vacuum. And as we go through our lives, when we don't share credit, when we don't share our ideas, when we don't share our misgivings, the things that we work on suffer. When we do share those things, we build inspiration. We increase the generosity, because when someone's been generous to you, it naturally makes you want to be generous to someone else. Paying it forward is an autonomic response, in my opinion. And we increase the community by which we are making stuff.

You know, part of my goal about talking about sharing is I have both had former assistants. give me work, and I have hired most of my former bosses. Wow. And I can't think of a better reason to be nice to everybody that you run into and to be open with them because you're going to run into them again. You're going to, you know, everyone you work with is part of a continuum. And, you know, even people we consider lone geniuses depend heavily on large teams of people to get their work done.

What about the cooling fluid? Why do we need to use more of this? This is a joke that I used to say. Someone asked me in an interview, if you could go back and tell your young self one thing, what would it be? And I said, use more cooling fluid. And the comedian in me likes that joke.

But it's a real serious thing. And it's actually that chapter is the chapter I sold the book on. That's what I thought the book was going to be a lot more like. And so the idea is using cooling. fluid is great practice in your shop because it means your tools will last longer, your holes will be more precise. And I talk about the physics of that in the chapter. But then I talk about the fact that using cooling fluid, it takes a little more time at the front end. You got to go get it. You got to use it. Then you got to clean up a little bit more. And that little bit of

extra time on both ends of the equation is a really, really important philosophical moment in making. And taking that extra time means that you are giving a value to the final product, not just to getting this next thing you're doing done. You are addressing your work both physically and mentally in a way that provides space to do it right. And so when I think, tell myself to use more cooling fluid, I think of all the ways that impatient me, and I am still a very impatient maker. I think of all the ways impatient me has screwed something up because I was holding it in my hand and drilling it rather than putting it into a vice, approaching it with a light and a pencil and a mark and alignment so that I did it correctly.

So the metaphor for life is perhaps try to build in ways to force patients. Indeed. You know, if you're, I've had a lot of different shops. I've had shops both inside my house and outside my house. And I've had many partners over the years who completely, that I spent too much time in my shop. Now, on one sense, this is a complaint about me not being present enough in the relationship. And I understand that.

In another sense, sometimes there's some people have felt competitive, but taking it as axiomatic that it's an issue about me being present within the relationship within my family. I have found that I can be more present in a shop that's a half an hour from my house. I can be more present with my family and what's going on in my house when I'm 30 minutes, away, then sometimes I've been with a shop that's in my basement. And that's just about the kind of consciousness I have around the unit that is the things that are important to me. What about sweeping up every day? Why is this important? That's the chapter I'm going to be reading when I go out and do public readings from this book. Sweeping up every day is the hardest

thing that I do. I never want to put all the tools that are sitting on my work bench away. And even the simplest task, I recently was replacing a watch band. By the time I was done because of the number of little parts and pieces of this watch I was fixing, I had like seven tools out on the bench. And I was like, nope, I'm going to take 45 seconds and put these seven tools back. That was it. It was 45 seconds. But I didn't want to spend it. But when I do spend it and I come into the shop the next day and the workbench is clean, it gives me energy.

and that energy is a gift from past me knowing that future me will enjoy this feeling. So past me and future, I've come to this allegory for myself that past me and future me are always in conversation. And past me is going, I don't really want to do this, but I know that you're going to get so much more work done, future Adam, if I do do this and you get to walk into a clean shop. So I'm going to take the time. And sometimes I still don't. Sometimes I'm like, I can't. I got to go home. This is great dinner waiting for me.

I got to go. And in those cases, I try again, as we talked before, to have a little more tolerance for myself and say, this is a one-off. I'm not going to make a habit of this. We've got to get this job back into shape first thing in the morning. But for right now, yeah, sometimes we can take a break. What about leaving a place better after you've been there than it was before you got there? So, Jamie Heiman, when he reads this book, and I gave him a copy last week, I had a copy sent to him last week, is probably going to nash his teeth in some of my talks about cleanliness because of how much I messed up his shop over the two decades of our acquaintance.

But leaving a place better than you found it, even leaving a room better than you found it as you walk into it is a really important ethos to me. It was vital in our crew on MythBusters for so many reasons, not just because it makes a vendor happy, but frankly, when we go to a weird space like Fort Mason, which is a protected national treasure building in San Francisco, and they let us shoot bullets in it, it was because we had a reputation built among all the different folks in the Bay Area of being highly respectful. We did exactly what we said we were going to do when we always let the space cleaner. Those relationships allowed us to make MythBusters in a way that almost no other television show could have if it didn't have those relationships. Because we'd have an experiment, have a different result than we inspected, and we realized, oh my gosh, we need a totally different location. Okay, let me call up Doug, because Doug will let us use the naval base for this because we've always done good by Doug. These are the ways in which we are constantly building relationships to make things possible. I think it's a great way to go about life in general.

A good way for us to wrap up here is just the fact that if you're always in the mindset of I'm going to leave this place better than I found. I'm going to leave this person better than I found them, trying to serve them, pour into them, help them. It's, I think, a way to go through life that could be very rewarding, happy. And if we all did that, not to get too woo-woo, but you know what I mean? it could be a lot better off. We all could be. So I think that just thought process of let's leave every place better than when we found it is a good way. It makes me think of James Kerr when he wrote the book, Legacy, about the New Zealand

all blacks. They swept the sheds every day. The players did. They were playing with other people that would have cleaned up, but no, it was about respect. And their reputation of leaving that place better than when they found it. And I think that's a critical way to live. So I love this stuff, Adam. And I could have talked to you for hours.

I really appreciate you investing your time. You're right in the middle of a book tour. So I'm so grateful for you. And thank you for putting this book out because it's had an impact on me already. And I love for my listeners to dive into. I know it'll help them regardless of their profession. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Well, so you can find out more about the book at Adam Savagebook.com.

I also have a website, tested.com. I have a weekly podcast up there and I do one-day builds. In addition, I have a bag company. I make tool bags made out of recycled sailcloth, and that's at adam savage.com. And I have a new show coming up on the Science Channel on June 12th called Savage Builds, an absurd engineering show in which I collaborate with different genius engineers and scientists and makers every episode to explore some absolutely ludicrous build. In the first episode, we made a working suit of Ironman armor out of titanium. Wow.

The last thing I'd love to say is purrier, and this has been a really lovely conversation. I really appreciate all the questions. The idea of creating that space and being generous to the people around you, it is the opposite of, I think, I think there's a cultural malaise within the United States right now that a psychologist would call the scarcity model. And the scarcity model is, we're all. all fighting for scraps of food and there's not enough food for all of us. And the reality is there is enough food for all of us, both metaphorically and physically. And there's also time for us to be generous to the people or to all of the people around us and realize that we are just like them

and that no amount of different position or money in your life insulates you from the same things going on with a mother, the single mother of six kids or the taxi driver. And that when you're nice to those. When you are present with all the people you encounter in your life, you are spreading that goodwill. It absolutely is a virtuous cycle. Love it, man. This is so good. Adam, thank you so much, man, for being here. I really appreciate it. And I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. And I'd love to meet you in person someday. It'd be a blast. Let's do it. I'd love to come back and do this again sometime. That would be awesome. Cool. Cool. Thank you. All right, man. Thanks, Right, Ryan. Okay. Bye.

Okay, wow. That one was fascinating to me. I find Adam to be a really thoughtful guy. We did this one on video so I could see his facial expression and the amount of thought he put into each answer. And I really appreciate that. It shows he's got such a wide range of knowledge, which highlights the importance of being a generalist and studying material from all. different aspects and industries. So I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you did as well. I love it if you would spread the message.

As I've said before, the best form of marketing is word of mouth, one person at a time. And I am so grateful that you continue to do that, which then also gives me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, which is have fascinating conversations with thoughtful people like Adam Savage, where I can learn, grow, and develop,

and hopefully you do as well. Thank you so much. I will talk with you next week. Can't wait.