The Tim Ferriss Show - #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Theo Chocolate, which is the first organic and fair trade chocolate company in North America. They reached out to me because they spotted some of their chocolate in an Instagram photo that I put up,

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Starting point is 00:01:26 salted almond butter cups, which are ridiculous and as dangerous as they sound, but they're worth it. In any case, as you might guess, based on what I said earlier, they use only organic fair trade ingredients, so you can feel better when you indulge, which is something I've been doing a lot of. They're also doing a lot of good things to drive the industry forward, including working with communities in the Congo and Peru to make the economics of the cocoa trade fair for farmers and by using sustainable farming practices, for instance. So whether you want to feel better about where you buy your goodies because of those reasons I just mentioned, or if you just want a really unique and delicious gift for yourself or someone else, Theo Chocolate has you covered. They are available

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Starting point is 00:03:49 Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types. My guest today is Adam Savage. You can find him online at DontTryThis on Twitter or TheRealAdamSavage on Facebook or Instagram. Adam has spent his entire life gathering skills that allow him to take what's in his brain and make it real. He's built everything from ancient Buddhas and futuristic weapons to fine art sculptures and dancing vegetables. Yes, I said dancing vegetables. Adam's previous positions include projectionist, animator, graphic designer, carpenter, interior and stage designer, toy designer, welder, and scenic painter. And he's worked with every material and in every medium you can possibly imagine.

Starting point is 00:04:36 Metal, paper, glass, plastic, rubber, foam, plaster, pneumatics, hydraulics, animatronics, neon glass blowing, mold making, and injection molding, just to name a few. And in 1993, Adam began concentrating his career on the special effects industry, which we talked quite a bit about honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars Episode One, Episode Two, Galaxy Quest, and the Matrix sequels. A decade later, Adam was chosen along along with Jamie Heinemann, to host Mythbusters. You may have heard of it, which premiered on Discovery Channel in 2003. 14 years, 1,015 myths, 2,950 experiments, 8 Emmy nominations, and 83 miles of duct tape later,

Starting point is 00:05:21 that version of the series ended in March 2016. Adam is never still for long. Today he hosts and executive produces Mythbusters Jr. as well as a brand new series, Savage Builds, which premieres on the Science Channel in June of 2019. That may have already happened, depending on when you listen to this. He also stars in and produces content for Tested.com, including behind the scenes dives into multiple blockbuster films, including Alien Covenant, Mortal Kombat, and Blade Runner. He also has launched Savage Industries and has begun to manufacture his own bags along with Mafia bags made in the US and constructed primarily from recycled sailcloth. Every bag

Starting point is 00:06:03 is not only durable and lightweight, but unique as well. And the current line, you can find it at adamsavage.com, includes two sizes of the EDC, that is everyday carry, and pouches with more on the way. Last but not least, this year, that is 2019, Adam wrote his first book, which is fantastic. Every Tool's a Hammer is the title, and the description is, quote, a chronicle of my life as a maker. It's an exploration of making and my own

Starting point is 00:06:31 productive obsessions, but it's also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. That's me, Adam, to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you're interested in that fascinate you and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you, End quote. You can find out all about it at adamsavagebook.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with the ever-entertaining Adam Savage. And one last thing. If you want to see the video of this conversation, because he is highly, highly, highly, highly animated,

Starting point is 00:07:03 and he is in his workshop, so you highly animated. And he is in his workshop. So you see little goodies that he's showing off. You can just go to youtube.com forward slash Tim Ferriss, two R's, two S's to check that out. So, et voila. Adam, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tim. It's so awesome to see you at least virtually on my screen.

Starting point is 00:07:25 Yes, Tim. It's so awesome to see you at least virtually on my screen. Yes, indeed. And there's going to be no shortage of things to get into. And I thought we might start, some people will be listening to this audio only, but I couldn't help but notice a piece of, maybe not memorabilia because you probably made it yourself, but there is a no face behind you in your workshop. And for those who don't know, it is from arguably my favorite film of all time, which is an animated film, Miyazaki, called Spirited Away. And could you please explain, because I don't know, why you have a no-face behind you. So Spirited Away is also one of my favorite films of all time, without a qualifier that it's animated. Hayao Miyazaki is one of the world's great treasures as a storyteller, and Spirited Away is a mind-blowing film. I love explaining to people that it's an entire universe that you only

Starting point is 00:08:22 get the tiniest details about and yet you're clear it's a completely consistent universe and the film is about a little girl who loses her identity in the spirit world uh and with the help of this strange uh a needy spirit name koniashi uh or no face uh she gets her name back and is able to escape the spirit world. And at one point in the mid-90s, I was at a Halloween party, and I saw a really terrible rendition of No-Face, but still seeing a No-Face in person made me jump, and I thought, I really want some of that. So once i started attending comic-con really regularly uh and thinking about putting on big costumes uh i made a no face costume i think it was my third or fourth con

Starting point is 00:09:11 and it is i have over 75 costumes and some i mean like the cane the cane space suit from alien behind me that took uh 14 years and cost me probably i have probably ten thousand dollars of my own money invested in that suit and the commissions and the collaborations. No phase here cost me about 75 bucks. I think the most expensive single item was arm length, um, Matt satin gloves from the lusty lady drag queen store here on mission street. That's no longer around. Um, and even though it was an expensive costume when i put it together in about a day uh the effect that it had on people when i hit the floor at san diego comic-con was shocking and not just shocking like they were surprised but i was also handing out gold coins to

Starting point is 00:09:59 people from beneath my oh i had chocolate gold coins so every time i took a photo i'd hand one out to someone and then someone's people started giving me back the gold coins angrily i could feel them grab my hand put the coin in and it turned out that of course it's no it's it's bad luck to take gold from no face in the film and this was like the expansion of my mind about what cosplay really was that it is a form of theater where the audience and the performers are all one thing. And we are all playing on a, on a,

Starting point is 00:10:31 about a narrative that we love. Uh, and it just, it started a lifelong fascination with what that process is. The process of putting on costumes, transformation, enjoying that transformation with others who are as weird and wonderful as you are and uh you know it's there's no end to it and no face was where that first tick of consciousness

Starting point is 00:10:52 about what it could be i am so glad i asked and i encourage everyone to try to see this film i i remember searching desperately a few years ago i didn't want to find it on Pirate Bay or somewhere else. I really wanted to pay for it, but it was so difficult to find Miyazaki films digitally. I couldn't find it years ago. Yeah, they still don't stream. You have to buy physical DVDs. And this is actually, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:21 I've been recently getting into more Japanese anime and some of the really, you know, i've been recently getting into more japanese anime um and some of the really you know satoshi ono and uh i'm not getting that name right i'm sorry but like there's some amazing filmmakers and so little of great japanese animated cinema streams in the u.s so i'm firing back up my old dvd drives for the for the laptop in order to be able to watch them. Yeah, everybody should check it out. It's the name in Japanese, which I think is Sentouchihiro no Kamikakushi or something like that. And she loses her name, but is given a new one, which is one character in her full name, which is Chihiro. So Chi and Sen are pronounced

Starting point is 00:12:04 the same way in Japanese. In any case, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole too far, but I thought we could flashback and tie this obsessive tendency or tendencies, really, that you've harnessed for the greater good, and certainly as a career, all the way back to a suit of armor, at least that's how I would describe it, that you built, I want to say sophomore year in high school. Could you tell us about this suit of armor? Yeah, the suit of armor has its origins in 1982 of going to see, which was the year, which was my sophomore year in high school uh 1982 john borman's film excalibur came out with an amazing cast of gabriel byrne patrick stewart liam neeson uh and some wonderful

Starting point is 00:12:53 british actors like nigel terry who played arthur from the age of 17 to the age of 65 and i was blown away by this film the armor in in it is so beautiful. The knights wear their armor all the time, which was certainly something I wanted to do at 14, 15 years old. And I made two suits of armor inspired by that film in high school. The first one was in my sophomore year. I made one out of cardboard replete with a white horse that I wore around me, like one of those silly horse costumes. And then I made one out of roofing aluminum and pop rivets. And it's where I learned, my dad taught me all about pop rivets, and we used about a thousand of them in this suit. And I wore it to class. I felt amazing. And I immediately passed out of heat exhaustion in third period from the oven that I was wearing.

Starting point is 00:13:47 And I woke up in the nurse's office. And this is one of those moments in life where you feel like a screenwriter is writing it. And maybe they're a little too on the nose. Because I woke up without the armor on. Because they basically removed it from me because I'd passed out. And I woke up and went, where's my armor? All right, I get the analogy of the armor being both physical and theoretical. But Jesus, we can tone it down just a little bit.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Now, you, as I understand it, have your hands in a lot of projects a lot of materials you've developed many divergent skills that then converged in interesting ways in high school what did you think you were going to be when you grew up um i thought i was going to be an actor i was uh the drama club was definitely my people the theater group at in high school were my people. It was where I found acceptance and camaraderie and collaboration. And by the time I was 15, when I was 15, I wanted to take it seriously. And I knew that my dad had worked in advertising in the 60s. And so he reached out to an old friend of his, Charlie Kimbrough. Charlie is famous for playing

Starting point is 00:15:05 jim dial on murphy brown um and charlie was one of my dad's oldest friends and charlie introduced me to his agent at icm doris mance and she took me on and started sending me out on commercials and i got the first commercial i auditioned for which was to play mr whipple's stock boy in a shaman commercial and i thought oh this is it it's that easy i went on an audition i got a great job auditioned for, which was to play Mr. Whipple's Stockboy in a Charmin commercial. And I thought, oh, this is it. It's that easy. I went on an audition. I got a great job. I then played second lead in a Billy Joel music video. And I did a few more commercials and stuff like that. And I really thought that acting was going to be it. I even went to NYU for six months and studied acting at Tisch School for the Arts before realizing that

Starting point is 00:15:45 my peers in that program were really serious about the craft of acting and I wanted to be an actor and there was a I got very quickly that there was a fundamental difference between their drive to study the thing and my desire to be a thing um my desire wasn't a real desire it was it was it was more like a theater it was more like a theater flat of desire there was nothing behind it um so i ended up giving that up and by 19 i stopped going out auditions and i stopped taking it seriously and i started concentrating on what i doing for work, which was to be a graphic designer and assistant animator. And I started doing a lot more working with my hands. I had read that in your 20s, you were concerned at points about being highly unspecialized. And you can't believe everything you read on the internet, so feel free to correct me. But it reads, and this I think is a transcript actually,

Starting point is 00:16:54 but I actually spent an inordinate amount of my time in my 20s thinking that I was too unspecialized. Could you comment on that and how you got to a point where you didn't feel like you were too unspecialized or that that was a liability? Yeah. So my early – I lived in Manhattan from age 18 to 23, from 1985 to 1990. And then I moved to San Francisco. And the move is really the turning point for me in that understanding of specialization. And the fact is, my closest friend still in New York was telling me in 1986, your problem, he said, is that you have talent, but no ambition.

Starting point is 00:17:44 Really? And he goes, yeah, if you had ambition, you wouldn't be talking to me. You'd be saying, I'm sorry, Mr. George Lucas, I can't make that by Tuesday. And he really was totally correct. This was a guy who'd been born and raised in Manhattan. And the thing that I now understand is that Manhattan is an amazing city if you know what you want out of Manhattan. It is a place built on and for ambition. And the people who get their work out and get seen in Manhattan have busted their ass to do it because it's the singular focus in their life. And it means culturally it's a really important city because only the stuff that has been fought for gets to your attention um and i think that many great cities are like that los angeles is totally

Starting point is 00:18:32 like that chicago um and london etc you know the world's great cities are worlds where the culture is something the culture of those cities is a competitive one. But if you don't know what you want to do, a place like Manhattan is a very cold and weird place. It's not going to open its doors to you and you're not going to be able to stumble into your ambition. And so after five years there of kind of trying several different careers and several different job paths and still like not having a singular focus, I moved to San Francisco, which is, I think, one of the great cities in the world for finding your ambition. It means that some of the culture here is not as good. It means that everyone, you know, if you want to have your artwork in the gallery, San Francisco, you could do it within a few months. It's not as hard to do it here as it is

Starting point is 00:19:25 in a place like Los Angeles or New York. And I think that has its good points and its bad points. Again, like I said, I think some of the culture here, some of the stuff you go out to see at night isn't necessarily as rigorous as it might be in a city like LA or New York. But at the same time, it saved me because I was able to call myself a sculptor and have my work in like 40 group shows in the first two years I was in San Francisco. I got huge amounts of feedback from people about what that work meant to them. And it gave me perspective in what it meant to me. And it slowly allowed me to sort of build an ethos of what I wanted to do with my hands and my life. And when I ended up stumbling from the theater

Starting point is 00:20:07 industry into the film industry, film and commercial television, special effects was where I all of a sudden saw that everything I'd been doing was leading towards this. This was an industry in which all of my excitement and creativity and passion and drive could be pointed in a singular direction. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to give everything over to this. Did you notice that in a moment, in a flash, or did it take a while to see sort of like the end of The Usual Suspects or the red doorknob at the end of The Sixth Sense or whatever. Did it take a while to realize that it was that, or did you recognize it immediately? No, so it happened like this.

Starting point is 00:20:55 So I was working in theater for several years, Eureka Theater, Berkeley Rev, Beach Blanket Babylon, and I started getting a reputation for solving weird problems. And that got the attention of Jamie Heineman, who was running a shop at Colossal Pictures. And he brought me in. We had a great interview and I ended up working for Jamie on and off full time for about four or five years. Just before I was working for Jamie, I was working at Berkeley Repertory Theater and I was working at Beach Blanket Babylon. And so I was basically putting in an eight hour day during the day. I was then doing three hours of a show every night and I was still staying all night long making sculpture in my studio in Hunter's Point.

Starting point is 00:21:39 So I was like never sleeping. I was just a one-man building machine. And when I started working for Jamie full-time, I noticed after about a year that I was no longer staying up all night building stuff. And I thought, huh. And then I thought, I think this is specifically because this work is satisfying all of that creative problem solving that I get in my studio. And then I went further and thought, oh, this is why so many people in film and special effects say things like, I used to be an artist. And I resolved at that moment, I get this. I get that this work for commerce is satisfying the emotional and aesthetic need I have to explore this type of problem solving I was exploring in my art. And now I can point all of that

Starting point is 00:22:34 in towards this career. And I am steadfastly never going to say I used to be an artist because it is the same mechanism. I recognized it. And I still do stuff for myself that's weird and sculptural and different. I still apply that aesthetic. And I didn't think, I think most importantly, I didn't consider it a loss of a purity to take that energy and point it towards something that had to do with commerce. Because I also saw that the commerce was feeding me, that this was a thing I could call a career. And hell spells, if it gave me the same kind of output thrill as making art, screw it, let's totally go towards this and see where it leads.

Starting point is 00:23:16 Are there skills in this? I have one answer for myself in mind. I'm not asking you to parrot it, but are there skills that you developed along the way that have ended up being very important to the success of Adam now? And the background in theater, for instance, seems like it might be one of those force multipliers for a lot of what you've been able to do. Are there any other kind of overlaid skills, kind of like Warren Buffett in public speaking, right?

Starting point is 00:23:56 He feels like public speaking just makes you, in many cases, unique or better at everything else. And so you don't have to be necessarily like Michael Jordan, top 1% of 1% of 1%. You could be top 10% in three things that are very rarely combined. And I'm just curious if any other skills or attributes come to mind. Yeah. I mean, well, there's a family story in my family that in the mid-60s, my dad partnered up with a producer in New York, and they formed a consortium. And my dad's partner would be the business side, and my dad would be the creative side. And at the time, his partner had more experience in the advertising industry, and he said,

Starting point is 00:24:42 we're going to make a big splash about forming this consortium we're going to put ads out we're going to get articles and millimeter and all these other trade magazines and i got to tell you if you start to believe in your own bullshit i'm going to cut you loose so there was always a family ethos about not believing your own bullshit and it's a necessary family ethos because my family because because the men in my family can tend to be very full of shit myself included um so watching the watcher and watching out for that drinking your own kool-aid is definitely an ethos i grew i was raised with um You're right. Theater is a force multiplier for its camaraderie, its low threshold to entry. In fact, I think theater as an art has the lowest threshold to entry because if there is an apocalypse and there are 14 people left in San Francisco and they find each other and make a

Starting point is 00:25:40 campfire, theater is the first art form that they will explore together. They will start telling stories and then they will start performing those stories because we as humans, we need narratives to help us make sense of the world. So I love theater. I have an abiding passion for it. And it was where when I was working in theater and I saw something I didn't know about, I can go, hey, what about that? And someone would make the opportunity for me. Oh, I'll show you how I do that. So for me, as soon as I got into film, it doubled my income because unfortunately the pay in theater is still really crappy. So I didn't look back from film. But the experiences that I had in theater of the camaraderie of the learning everything that I could get my hands on and of that low threshold to entry really have informed most of the rest of what I've done. You know, but all that being said, there's a quote in Steve Martin's book, Born Standing Up, when someone says to him, you will eventually use everything you've ever learned. And it's so true because that early acting training I had made me way more fearless about being in front

Starting point is 00:26:53 of people and being myself and being out there, uh, than I would have otherwise been. And I think, you know, like you were saying about Warrenren buffett in public speaking that ability to perform is it's the a it's part it's one of the biggest a's in steam if you want someone to understand your scientific proof you have to explain it and explaining it is an art form it is it is the art of getting your argument across and nobody can do that in a vacuum and so one of the things I thought was most amazing when Mythbusters showed up is I was like, oh, look at that.

Starting point is 00:27:30 The performer sat dormant for 15 years while the maker was ascending. And then all of a sudden this opportunity showed up and the performer and the maker get to meet on the same plane. Yeah, it's really, it's been fun. It's been a lot of fun to watch your career. I want a second Born Standing Up. That is an incredible memoir. I listened to it actually while I lived in San

Starting point is 00:27:53 Francisco. I walked the streets of San Francisco listening to the audio book. Just a fantastic, fantastic story. One thing about the audio book that I was sad about, because I read it, and then on a big road trip I read it out loud to my wife she read it out loud to me uh and then we got the audiobook and we listened to Steve Martin read it and the only problem I had with the audiobook was that Steve Martin didn't fully commit to his recapitulation of his own comedy bits yeah that's true that's true that would have that would have been the icing on the cake. Which I get. Totally get. And I don't begrudge that he must have had a very real and reasonable bumped into each other very briefly in person. I want to say it could have been. And this was

Starting point is 00:28:52 at the entertainment gathering, the EG. And it was certainly for me up to that point, my highest pressure, if you want to call it that, public speaking engagement. I was very, very nervous. And for those who don't know, the EG, I think an easy way to describe it would be a smaller TED created by the same person who created TED, Richard Saul Worman. He was a very funny guy.

Starting point is 00:29:21 And it was, I want to say at the time, what would you say, 500 attendees, something like that. And I remember- Not even. Not even. Yeah. It's very intimate. Yeah, it was very small. And I remember, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I want to say that you gave a presentation that involved the Maltese Falcon. Oh, that was that year. Yes, it was.

Starting point is 00:29:54 And what struck me, aside from the fact that it was a fantastic presentation, what struck me was that you, I don't know if you remember this, you started, you went for about 30 seconds, and then kind of like Adele when she did this tribute song for George Michael, not too long ago, you stopped and said, nope, I want to start that over. And then you started over and you just nailed it. I mean, the word per minute rate was so outrageous. It was clear that you really had planned and rehearsed and prepped for this, but I had never seen someone call an audible like that and start over. And I was so impressed because I remember thinking, if I fuck up my talk, I will not have the confidence to do that. Was that the first time that you'd done that?

Starting point is 00:30:42 And how do you think about, or how do you prepare for public speaking like that? That's a great question because there's many, many layers to this. First of all, that talk started its life as a 10-minute throwaway talk I did at IDEO at one of their evenings they called Quickies. They parade a bunch of people and each one does a quick rapid-fire talk, and I thought, oh, let me talk about something that's weird and personal, and I'll talk about how much time I spent on the Maltese Falcon. And I was followed by the world yo-yo champion who just blew the whole house away. It was a lovely, fun evening.

Starting point is 00:31:24 And coming off the stage, I ran into Kevin Kelly, who said, that's a really good talk. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, Cool Tools. Kevin is one of the Forrest Gumps of the internet, along with Stuart Brand and a few others. Yeah, totally. And Kevin said, that was a lovely talk. And I was like, thank you, Kevin. And he said, I think you should workshop that. And I said, I have no idea what that means. And he said, that was a lovely talk. And I was like, thank you, Kevin. And he said, I think you should workshop that. And I said, I have no idea what that means. And he said, I think you should continue to give that talk and keep refining it because I think there's a really great talk inside of it. And about a month later, my wife and my kids and I were in

Starting point is 00:32:01 Nashville airport waiting to change planes. And we ran into this other nuclear family, John Ennis and Arlene Klott and their kids. And Arlene and Beth Lissick run Porchlight, as they have for the past 20 years in San Francisco. And we started conversing. And we've since become friends. We've been friends forever now. But she said, I'm about to do this talk i'm about to do a porch light on obsession are you interested in giving a talk and i was like fascinatingly i have a talk that i'm working on about obsession so i went to cafe de nord

Starting point is 00:32:34 and i gave a version of the maltese falcon talk at the old cafe de nord where the audience is sitting all at your knees and you're right in front of them and among them. And it was one of those electric nights where it was everything fired on all cylinders. And I thought, I've got a really extra special talk here. I'm really, I can't wait to give it again. And that's when, that was the second year I had been to EG, I think, maybe even the third year. At any rate, in going to EG and having workshopped this talk, I decided that I wanted to rehearse it really, really precisely. And part of that meant that I wanted to tell the story with a lot of imagery. I wanted it to feel cacophonous because

Starting point is 00:33:20 that's the way my obsessions feel in my brain. I wanted the talk to feel kind of like a river moving past you. So I think I have something like 120 slides in 13 minutes. And the rhythm is really important. I think in the very beginning of that talk, I gave this, I say a cache or a cache of dodo bones was found. And that naturally happened the first time I was rehearsing a talk. And then I thought, I'm building that in because I think I can make it sound honest and true. I think I can act that moment. And so this was the first time I had taken a talk and turned it into a bit of theater. And so when I was up there and I was rolling through the slides, because if you remember, the first one was taking a bunch of shots of Google Earth and zooming in on the

Starting point is 00:34:08 island of Mauritius off the east coast of Madagascar. And that rhythm between the words and the imagery, it was music. And I could tell in that first pass that I was out of step. And because I was trying little things to get back in step and they weren't working. And I thought, you know what? I'm in my head. I'm doing this for two audiences. I'm doing this for the audience here, but I know they're recording this and I want the recording to be good. So screw it. No, I'm not going to get in trouble for asking to start again. And in fact, I may even bring the crowd more with me. This is a net plus. And that comes from, you know, the more you do public speaking, the more you encounter the fact

Starting point is 00:34:52 that each audience has a kind of a character to it. And some are difficult, some are easy. Some of the difficult ones can be your best audiences when you find that rhythm and the EG audience like the TED audience is a heady and intense crowd of people to perform for I mean years later I did it about four years ago I did a juggling talk for the EG and Michael Hawley who runs it neglected to tell me that all of the flying Karamazov brothers would be in the audience when I was doing my juggling. And I got heckled by the Karamazov brothers. But all this is by way of saying, I give talks in many different ways. When I talk every year at the San Mateo Maker Faire, and when I do that talk, I do very little rehearsal for it. I want

Starting point is 00:35:43 it to feel and be raw and off the cuff, because I feel that I owe that to my fellow makers. I want them to see that it is not all polish and perfection. And I want to be a little vulnerable with them. But when I spoke at TED in Vancouver four years ago, I rehearsed that talk so many times I forgot it. And then on stage it came to me as if a fresh thing. But a funny thing happened on the TED stage when I was doing the talk about cosplay, which was about a minute in, I thought to myself, fuck, I'm ahead of myself. I'm thinking a little too far ahead. And consequently, I'm not taking the spaces with the words and the concepts in this moment because I'm running the forward track a little too far forward. And then I thought, you're always this far ahead in the first minute.

Starting point is 00:36:39 Relax. It'll be fine. So you have the watcher, you have the speaker, you have the watcher watching the watcher, and then you have the watcher watching the watcher. That's really remarkable. I love the exercise. I love the exercise of interacting with the crowd. I love the laughs that come where you don't expect. I love, well, I particularly love the gasp when you can create a piece where the audience goes, I've only done it a few times. As David

Starting point is 00:37:14 Mamet points out, you can easily blackmail an audience into a standing ovation. It is impossible to blackmail them into a gasp. And thus, gasp, as far as I'm concerned, the highest possible achievement you can attain on stage. So let's talk about workshopping. Well, actually, this goes far beyond workshopping. Could you talk to the origin of the phrase, failure is always an option, please. So that grew out of a joke on set. It was the first season of Mythbusters. We were, I think we were trying to make biscuit dough explode inside a hot car. And this was the first season.

Starting point is 00:38:02 We had no infrastructure. We didn't know what we were doing. Jamie and I were still brand new to building scientific methods and thinking through worst case scenarios it didn't occur to us that even with 10 space heaters it would be really hard to get the temperature inside a car above 100 degrees um and it took hours and hours and hours and we're sitting there and it is so boring and we're also realizing that like are we getting enough on camera and i turned to the camera and i just said remember kids failure is always an option because i was thinking my sense of humor runs what is the opposite of the

Starting point is 00:38:37 right thing to say like to me the worst possible thing you could say is sort of like a stress reliever just to imagine in my head i don't't then say it, but sometimes when I find a joke where you say the opposite of what you should say, it pleases me. And failure is always an option was that's a wrong thing to say in that moment. And they cut it in show and it became a kind of a catchphrase. And then I realized once people started saying it back to me that there's a deep scientific truth about it, that the idea of success or failure to a certain extent is anathema to scientific exploration. And when I say scientific explanation, the qualifier, it's exploration of any kind. And when you want to explore anything in a rigorous way, you're doing it using the scientific method just by default. You're comparing the results to previous things.

Starting point is 00:39:29 You're building the future experiments based on the things you've learned in the past. And, you know, in film we have the mad scientist go, damn it, my experiment was a failure. And a scientist doesn't say that. A scientist said, I screwed up my methodology. I don't have enough results. Or, wow, the outcome was totally not what I expected. And to be honest, that's usually why the fictional villain is upset, because the results are the opposite of what they wanted. But a real scientist who comes up with the results that are the opposite of what they thought is the most thrilled human being you've ever met. They are ecstatic that their expectations and their biases have been

Starting point is 00:40:09 turned on their heads. And they have now this brand new, much wider understanding of what's going on. And that might be called failure by a neophyte who doesn't understand the scientific method. But to a scientist, that's opening up the whole world. Do you have any favorite failures that come to mind? And that could be a failure that set you up for something you later considered a success. It does not have to be MythBusters specific, could be from any point, but any failures that in retrospect ended up being very, very helpful? Well, so in fact, I had forgotten until you reminded me just now that at that EG talk, I stopped and restarted. And that is a huge example. That was the first time I'd ever done something like that on stage.

Starting point is 00:40:58 And I realize now that it was inspired by a singer who I love named Jane Sibury. And Jane Sibury famously did a beautiful duet with Katie Lang called Calling All Angels that was part of the Until the End of the World soundtrack way back when. And she's an incredible singer, has written many of my favorite songs. And back in the 90s, I used to see her perform whenever she came through san francisco and i saw her with a jazz ensemble at one point and she started a song and 10 bars in was like stop everyone stop we didn't get that one right let's go back to the top and i thought what glorious balls to do that on stage like and again it brought the audience closer to her to do that and i loved that and i'm sure that i was thinking of that at that moment i was like i'm gonna do what i saw that i thought was courageous i'm gonna do that thing that's not necessarily a failure uh in the in the

Starting point is 00:41:59 traditional sense and i think the distinction is important because we talk a lot, I'm sure. I know that in the lingua franca of self-improvement and making your output as impactful as you can, we talk a lot about helping kids to fail, helping them learn to fail. Silicon Valley, build fast and break things. But we don't mean failure. We actually are lying. It's a great word. It catches your attention, which is important. but it's not what we really mean. And I like to point out that real failure is getting drunk and missing your kid's birthday party. That's iterative and you have to go you have to chase up a lot of wrong branches in order to get to the right one and you're never going to end up where you think you're going to end up and while some people may think that that's a failure a true

Starting point is 00:42:55 creator knows that you follow the thing to where it's going not to where you think it ought to go um so you know i i have a couple of jobs I did where I took them on without the correct amount of experience or foresight, and I screwed them up. I've done jobs so poorly, I lost friends. I've done jobs so badly, I didn't sleep for 60 hours and, you know, delivered something that was way not what the client wanted. And I still feel, um, shame and sadness over those moments. But the fact that I got through those and the fact that I was able to see past them and learn from them, I remember at one point, the one that the job that I did that I lost a friend on, um, when she told me you couldn't have done anything more to make it clear that I should not be friends

Starting point is 00:43:46 with you. That's how she put it. And I called my dad. I was 19. I was weeping into the phone. And he said, look, you can't change what happened. You can't fix that. The only thing you can do, and you can't even tell her about this you can take in what you did you can absorb it realize what mechanism in you led to that screw up and resolve to not do that again and that is what it that's what being a human is about it's about noticing those things and trying not to do them again you think about it strikes me that you think about your own thinking a fair amount, which I think is worth digging into a little bit by way of looking at influences. And I'd read that you were, I think in your own words, radicalized by Noam Chomsky in your late teens. Could you speak to that and then also any other authors or thinkers, philosophers, anyone who has helped shape your thinking or impact you?

Starting point is 00:44:56 Oh my God, there's so many. I mean, starting off by reading all of Harlan Ellison's weird and complicated semi-misogynist canon back in my late teens, to Kurt Vonnegut, who showed me that you could have rigor and deep affection and love all at the same time, to Richard Feynman, who showed that it is genuinely possible for there to be brilliant polymaths in the world who can explore many disciplines and be at the top of their field at any of them. You know, all of that comes into play. Chomsky is amazing for, it's funny because I'm thinking a lot about Chomsky now. There are two current schools of political thought about our current situation. And especially as somebody who vehemently disagrees with everything the GOP is currently doing. These two schools of thought are important distinctions. One is that Trump is an aberration and all we need to do is win in 2020

Starting point is 00:46:05 and we can erase that aberration and get back to the status quo. The other is that Trump is a symbol or a measure of just how screwed up our culture really, really is and that we're going to need to open up and take a look at those parts of our culture that we might not want to notice and understand how each of us is complicit in that and really work towards building a society that we all want to live in. Those two distinctions are really important. And understanding my clarity for me is that I think that Trump is a symbol of what's wrong, of a significant amount of what's wrong with America. And Chomsky is coming back into this. You know, as I've been very upset about Trump, I get very upset about how the New York Times covers him because I feel so much both

Starting point is 00:46:50 sides-ism in the New York Times. And I read the New York Times and I feel like it's the pot of boiling water and I'm the frog. And then I think back to Noam Chomsky, you know, he's been telling me the New York Times supports the status quo and the power structure since 1984. That's when I read my first Noam Chomsky pamphlet. And it is about that. We are asking these questions culturally. And you may just, whoever's listening to this may disagree with me politically, and that's totally fine. I'm assuming that if we're all good actors acting in good faith, we're simply trying to make the world a better place for our kids and our friends and our family. And as long as, you know, you're with me on that, I'm happy to disagree with you about the methods we use.

Starting point is 00:47:33 But asking those cultural questions is about being part of a culture and trying to help define it so you can be a better part of it all at the same time. And it goes back to what you were saying, that watching the watcher, which is a very Buddhist, that, you know, Dharma is full of exhortations to be able to meta shift yourself so you see above the plane of what's going on. I remember at one point, speaking of watching the watcher, I remember at one point having an argument with a partner of mine at the time. And we were, it was one of those arguments where you both feel super vulnerable, but no one wants to give and you attack, you both attack. And I thought to myself, I have no idea what to do with this situation. Neither of us wants to budge. How do we get out of this? And then I thought, okay, let's say I was writing this scene as a screenplay. This is, again, it's a ship, right?

Starting point is 00:48:27 I'm watching the watcher. And I thought, if I'm writing a screenplay and I'm writing my character, how does the audience feel about my character? Oh, they don't like him. I've lost the audience. The last thing I said was shitty. And because I was looking to attack the audience can see that they can see my vulnerability and my venality, and they no longer are with me. And then I thought, if I was rewriting this scene, how would I bring the audience back to my character's side? And I realized, oh, by being vulnerable and telling the truth. And so I kind of wrote the scene in my head as I said it, which was, I am really sorry for the thing that I just said. I am not

Starting point is 00:49:05 upset with you. I am angry and vulnerable about X, Y, and Z, and it's coming out as this, and I am really sorry. And I said all of that also without expecting a specific response. I said it cleanly and for the reasons it should be said, but I didn't get to it without making that meta shift. Did you develop this watching the watcher habit organically? Did that come from parents? Did it come from books? That meta level of self-awareness. That's a good question. Yeah, where would you say that's come from,

Starting point is 00:49:43 if anywhere comes to mind? I'm really not sure. I know that I was reading a lot of – in my late teens, I was also reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda and a lot of Ram Dass. Yep. And Ram Dass talks about that a lot. And I do remember being with a girlfriend in 1985 or 86 and she was upset and i couldn't figure out why like i i yeah and so i thought to myself i remember distinctly trying this thought experiment once oh what is the world what if i could see the what if i could see this

Starting point is 00:50:25 scene through her eyes and so i literally thought of her head as a machine that i could climb in and look out through the eyes and when i did i saw a color like i saw a color and the color helped inform me where she was mentally now you asked me what I think that what was going on there. I think I was using the analogy of color to help tap into my own intuition that my emotion wasn't letting me tap into. I think that I built a framework. I think that's frankly what if, you know, if you're someone listening to this and you go to see a psychic and they help you, I'm quite sure that what that psychic is doing is using the cards that are in front of them, but mostly you being in front of them to kind of tap past an emotional response to an intuition about what's going on. That's,

Starting point is 00:51:15 that's, you know, we do that to our partners and our friends all the time, uh, in terms of giving them perspective. And that exercise really early on in my romantic life gave me a sense that there were other vantage points from which to view something rather than through your own angry eyes in the middle of the melee. You're a very well-spoken guy. I think that your abilities and the breadth and depth of your abilities can be intimidating to a lot of people. And I'm sort of speaking in the royal we here because I find it a little intimidating. So I want to ask, so I want to dig into it because you, I would have already mentioned this in the intro. We're going to talk more about it, but you have a book, Every Tool is a Hammer. And I'm super excited fantasy and this dream for a very long time. I've been to maker fairs in the Bay Area and kind of wandered around sheepishly looking sideways at various things, but not engaging too closely. I even long ago went through a number of areas in the Mythbusters

Starting point is 00:52:49 workshops with Jamie, and this has been with me a long time. But at my current state, I would consider myself a manual illiterate. I've never really built anything. And so I'd be really curious to know if there are any particular projects you would suggest for kind of remedial maker 101 or for people like me who know there's something there, who really desperately believe that using the hands kind of unlocks a certain humanness that they don't have access to, where might you suggest they start?

Starting point is 00:53:36 So number one, I don't necessarily think that the secret is always in using your hands. I'm really careful that I define making as any time you are creating something from nothing, even if it's a palm in your head. Every time we reach out mentally, physically, to create something that is generated from us, we are participating in our culture and we're adding to it. And I want everyone to have that experience.

Starting point is 00:54:00 But you asked specifically about the physical making of stuff um i do i i do have a project i think is a great gateway project to making and it is to build an architectural model of the living space you have your house or your apartment using cardboard and hot glue this is something that it is not difficult to understand and to parse, and it's not difficult to do a really good job at it. You can look at your room that you're in. It's got four walls at least. And this wall, let's say, has a window in it.

Starting point is 00:54:35 The wall behind you has a door in it. Those measurements are knowable measurements. You can build a one-twelfth scale model of that room simply by taking the inch number and making it a taking the foot number and making it an inch there you've done scaling you've cut a piece of cardboard out where the door is the right distance in inches as it is in feet from the wall and then you assemble these four things together and holy hell now you're looking at an architectural model of your room and it's five pieces of cardboard uh and you can go out from there i've built architectural models of all of my living spaces because it helps me put them into my head and

Starting point is 00:55:11 thus it helps me put them into my body uh i love understanding things from those different vantage points um what do you get out of putting could into your body? Could you explain that for a second? Well – Or what does that mean? So at the beginning, like let's say after our podcast, you start making an architectural model of the house. The mental process you're going to go through is going to be one of a constant gear switching from the macro to the micro. You'll be, okay, that wall is going to come to this and that measurement comes to this, and it'll be this kind of constant back and forth. For me, after all the years of experience I have, it's a very different mental process. I look around and I see the wall as a set of, like, I'm instantly translating it as a set of

Starting point is 00:56:01 actions from the real thing to the smaller thing. And so there comes a point in the making of things in which the discipline you've chosen gets past that gear switching mode and goes towards an almost entirely mental mode where I can build, I build something in my head first. And then what I do with my hands is just cutting the chunks I see in here. And it takes practice. So most of what happens when I'm collaborating with another builder is I'm taking my mental picture and attempting to grid it onto the one that they have. And it's best if we're doing that with pen and paper or with models in front of us. But frankly, you know, much of my building, like I said, happens in my head. The other thing that I would say, so I love the idea of building an architectural model as an exercise. Actually, when I did my first MakerBox, that was the first project. I gave people a

Starting point is 00:57:01 blueprint of my shop and thousands of people built architectural models and corrugated cardboard of my shop. And I love that. And many of them went on to build models of their house. That's a great exercise for sort of the gateway drug to getting you with the low threshold of materials, low threshold of cost, low threshold of skill, high probability of quality output because you're just cutting squares. There's nothing complicated about it. The other intersection that I suggest is to find something that you have to have. Now, I am sure in the explorations you do around the world that you go to someone's house and they show you the Japanese sword they have, or you go somewhere, you sit in a chair and you're like, holy hell, this is the greatest chair I've ever sat in. Or you see a cup that is like,

Starting point is 00:57:48 oh, I love this cup. And you want one. When you find something like that, that you can't not think about, that's the thing to maybe try and make. Because you want something out of the process. I've never learned any of the skills I had. The skills that I have are myriad, but I've never learned any of them in a vacuum just because I wanted to learn a skill. I learned them in service of achieving something that I desired, whether it's a ZF-1 from the fifth element or a no-face costume. Amazing. What is the last object or a notable object that you had to make yourself? Is there anything that jumps to mind? Adam has run off camera to grab an item. so last year for my i i'm friends with the guys at weta workshop peter jackson and richard taylor uh many of the amazing craftspeople at weta have become really close friends of mine and i love what they do and i love lord of the rings i love all the output that those guys do and last year

Starting point is 00:58:57 for my uh 50th birthday richard taylor gave me uh boromir's sword from Lord of the Rings. Amazing. This is one of the most beautiful objects I've ever seen. This is hand-built by Weta's sword master, Peter Lyon, who built all the swords for Lord of the Rings. It's an incredible blade, and this is a full-tang, battle-ready piece of spring steel that is razor-sharp. It's a masterpiece, and as soon as i had it i knew

Starting point is 00:59:26 i've got to build a scabbard for this and then i built four or five scabbards for other swords of mine in preparation for i've wanted this one to be beautiful and uh this is the scabbard i made for boromir's sword it is leather and it's steel and i use techniques i had never tried before uh and it is a suitable it is a suitable house for one of my favorite objects amazing yeah and i absolutely like not only did i have to do this but for the first, I did a lot of practicing before I built the Hero 1 that I wanted. And by the way, this is simply version 1.0. This is close by in my workshop because I'm just about to strip it all down and make it even more correct. For the building of a scale home with cardboard and so on, what are the materials necessary?

Starting point is 01:00:23 And if this can easily be found somewhere, you can tell us where to find it, but what tools does one need? Well, so let me explain the process, first of all, as I do it, which is, in general, most of us live in houses of a consistent ceiling height. The ceilings in your house look like they're maybe nine feet. So if you were building a 112 scale model, that would be nine inches. If 24 scale, it would be four and a half inches, right? Half of that. So the way I start any architectural model is I figure out my ceiling height, and then I cut out a bunch of strips of corrugated cardboard at that exact height. Now I've got my walls, they're all overly long. So I take a piece of cardboard that will be the base and I draw out the floor plan in scale. That only takes a right angle ruler and a pencil.

Starting point is 01:01:12 Once I have that, now I have a measuring device for these long strips of cardboard that are the correct height. So I measure all four walls. Now I have four walls that are correct height and correct width. Now I start to just measure where the windows and the details go. All of this takes a ruler with an edge you can cut against, an exacto blade, a hot glue gun, and a few Amazon boxes. And that's it. Awesome. You know, this makes me think of a documentary. I'm going to butcher the title. If you haven't seen it, I think you would love it. It's called, I want to say, The Art of Seeing. And it's a BBC documentary. You can

Starting point is 01:01:52 find it for the time being on YouTube. And it is about and features the artist David Hockney. Oh, yeah. I have not seen this, but he's a huge influence on me. Oh, he's amazing and hilarious and brilliant and very good at explaining his own thought processes, which I admire. But the reason he pops to mind is that at one point, I want to say, and I'm going to butcher this as a yank, but the Royal Academy something, something such, some very famous gallery, offered him the entire space for not a retrospective, but his new work,

Starting point is 01:02:30 which happened at the time to be landscape art. And he created an entire scale model of this multi-room gallery so that he could tilt it and look through different doorways to see how his various pieces of artwork, which he had also replicated to scale, would appear through different walkways and entrances. And when I first glanced at it, because I didn't have any of the explanation,

Starting point is 01:02:59 it seemed like potentially a huge waste of time. But as soon as he started demonstrating the utility it was uh so genius and also uh the the miniature artwork seemed actually quite difficult to pull off but aside from that reasonably straightforward exercise that later in at full scale in the facility made such a huge difference to the experience of everyone who walked through uh it's um that that is all to say i'm excited about trying out this project uh also yeah i'll give another example i was just in la for the upfronts uh and i stopped by a friend's uh production uh office because a friend of mine is filming a big feature film right now and they had they have this gigantic set they're going to build for the finale of this film it's it's huge it has

Starting point is 01:03:53 all these different parts and it's not just a set where the final action in the film happens it's also a set that has to fit with what the script is saying. So there's a part where one of the characters comes into the set and hides somewhere. So what they did was they built a scaled model of the exact extents of the soundstage they'll be building the set on. And then they have these things like rocks and stairs and architectural details, and they're placing them within that set but also asking okay in this scene if they're hiding behind here can we can we get over here so we can see that they don't have the eye line then then we'll build the set with this part that moves in that part that doesn't like it becomes a critical problem solving tool in bridging and this is bridging between the art department

Starting point is 01:04:41 the construction department and also how the narrative actually pieces together and what the audience will see and how the whole last part of the film plays out. And huge chunks of this have to be in the right place, otherwise the story won't get told correctly. So in the spirit of maybe low-tech or at least low-barrier-to-entry maker projects. I have read, again, in my Internet research,

Starting point is 01:05:10 that you are good at making eggs. I don't know if this is true. Oh, yeah, no, it's eggs are my... That you've thought a lot about making eggs. So this is a maker project, in a sense, right? And in a lot of respects, I learned to cook by testing all sorts of things on eggs. So this is a maker project in a sense, right? And in a lot of respects, I learned to cook by testing all sorts of things on eggs. I would love to hear how you think about making eggs or really any aspect of eggs that you find interesting.

Starting point is 01:05:38 Why eggs? Eggs are tough. Eggs are unforgiving. Eggs like chicken have a wide range of being edible, but a short range of being delicious. That's very true. And a lot of cooks and chefs that I know say that eggs are one of the hardest things to get right. I have always loved eggs. I've always loved scrambled eggs. I tend to not like omelets because I think in the US omelets are too full of shit, literally. And then I guess about 15 years ago, I came across this Gordon Ramsay video on YouTube where he talked about doing a slow cook scramble. And he literally, it's a very weird scramble. You crack the eggs in whole, you're stirring them constantly over a medium heat with a bunch of butter. And as soon as they start to congeal, you pull them off the heat, you stir them like a risotto, you never stop stirring.

Starting point is 01:06:41 But the temperature control and attunement is all about not letting them ever congeal too much. And I was like, oh, I got to try this. And I tried it and it kind of worked the first time. And I just, I've been doing it ever since. And there's this amazing moment I found. So first of all, when you talk to cooks they'll say oh yeah yeah the slow cook temperature adjusted scramble is just uh objectively the best way to make eggs it's literally like they come out like this sweet custard and it's there's nothing else quite like it and it's really hard to do right in a restaurant where you don't have 15 minutes of concentrated time for everyone's entree. So restaurants have all these really wonderful techniques for doing that.

Starting point is 01:07:32 And Ramsey was saying he makes new chefs cook him eggs in order to guess their chops. so much about myself and about the process of what makes food textural and what I want out of them by adjusting that recipe over the years. So now I make my eggs the same way. I tend to let them get a little bit more congealed at the very end so I have some tooth to some of the eggs because I've found over the years that I don't love it when they're all custardy and soft. But there's this great moment that happens when you're doing the stirring, when the eggs, when the heat helps the whites and the yolks fully emulsify. And this is before you've added salt or anything else. You just have butter in there. So you have some residual salt, but where the emulsification happens, I feel like it's because of the heat. When all of a sudden this sweet smell rises out of the pan.

Starting point is 01:08:30 And it's the moment I know, like, oh, cool, I'm on the home stretch. Now I got it. And Gordon didn't talk about that. That was like my own exploration. But every time it happens, because it happened to me spontaneously, it's part of my love affair with eggs is getting that moment out of that. And actually, I mean, we didn't start in 2016 after the most recent president was elected into office. We started just having brunches every Sunday and having friends come over because we just needed to be around a lot of people we loved on a very regular basis. And I made those scrambled eggs for everywhere from five to 25 people every Sunday. I'd make big batches, small batches. And sometimes I'd add in scallions or cheese or a little pepper

Starting point is 01:09:17 or something like that. But I have now cooked that dish thousands and thousands of times. I love it. Scallions are very underrated. And texturally, so I love eggs. And you can also learn so many fantastic principles and techniques related to cooking from eggs as a somewhat neutral palette, if that makes any sense at all. Highly recommend people play with slivered almonds right at the end, just when you're getting ready to eat the eggs. Yeah, fantastic. You don't want to put them in too early or they'll get soggy and brittle. But if they have that crispness, I remember a French chef told me at one point, and I don't know if this is in French, I remember a French chef told me at one point,

Starting point is 01:10:05 and I don't know if this is in French, but he said, you want to take the eggs off the heat while they're still a little snotty. And that stuck with me. And it's like, yeah, you want like a mild snot consistency when you take it off. And because you'll have the carryover cooking and so on but huge fan of uh of eggs on the flip side of that there's a there's a great cookbook you probably have it in your collection jacques and julia jacques papan is like the jedi master of dude watching him eat bone a chicken in two minutes and telling you afterwards that he went slowly because they were filming it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, his manual skill. I mean, when I was writing my third book, which involved a lot of cooking, I was prepared to dislike him for a few reasons. Number one, he had a fancy, to me, sounding French name. Number two, he was extremely well known. So I was like, how good could he

Starting point is 01:11:02 really be if he's sort of like French food for export? Like how technical could he really be? And his videos are just incredible. You watch him make a French omelet on high heat or any of these things, his knife skills alone. I did a pan flip once. I am not willing to try it again. Actually, when I do flip my omelets, my friends point out that actually as I'm doing the flip, I'm using the spatula and the pan. And my friends point out my whole body goes up. I literally try to make the whole everything weightless like I'm in stroke.

Starting point is 01:11:37 But Jacques Pepin and Julia Child both have the same way of finishing scrambled eggs. He does them fast over high heat. He does them slow over a medium heat. But they both take a half of a beaten egg and pour it over the scrambled eggs just as they're pulling it off the heat. And then they stir it up and you end up getting this lovely sort of

Starting point is 01:11:58 a little bit of extra wet on top of the scrambled eggs. Yeah. You can also use, I think McAvoy is the name of the olive oil that's in your neck of the woods in Northern California. You can use a finishing olive oil too, right in the last like 60 seconds and stir that in and you get a nice texture to it as well. I love eggs. So I appreciate you indulging the egg question. You know what I'd love to ask if you're open to it, because one of the risks in doing this podcast and speaking with people who

Starting point is 01:12:34 are well known for being very good at what they do, is that people who may be struggling or who have struggled in different ways may feel like everyone else is stepping up to bat and hitting home runs every time. Would you be willing to talk about, and certainly I've experienced some difficult times and talked about them publicly, do any particularly difficult periods in your life come to mind, difficult stretches of time? If so, would you be willing to talk about one or two and how you found your way out, so to speak? I mean, you know, I think it's the universal thing is that nobody escapes. Nobody gets out scot-free. Nobody suffers like the poor, as Charles Bukowski pointed out, but nobody escapes from suffering. It is the universal condition, and it's the reason it's the first of Buddha's truths. I love the output that we do on my website, on tested.comcom because I realized we don't make, so I do builds in my shop

Starting point is 01:13:47 on tested.com and I do them here in my cave. And I realized at a certain point that they're not how-to videos because I'm often discovering the process that I'm exploring on camera. They're more like what happened videos. And a couple of years ago, I was making some spacesuit parts. Actually, if I tilt the camera, you can see that I've got a murderer's row of classic and fictional spacesuits over here because I'm so obsessed with them. And my friend Ryan Nagata in L.A. is an amazing spacesuit maker. And I was making some parts for him. And I'm intimidated by the quality of Brian's work and I wanted my pieces to be as good as the output I see comes from his shop and I had I had I was

Starting point is 01:14:34 doing this build and I kept screwing it up and I spent this entire day with my camera team here just consistently getting these things to farther and farther along the line and then boning them with a bad with a bad choice about the tool usage or what I was doing. I was getting my order of operations all screwed up and I ended up finishing the day feeling super, super shitty, like depressed about how crappy the day went. And I went home and in this blue funk i literally had this thought you have no business making stuff and the the fact is i feel that that judge in me comes up on almost every build he shows up on almost every build when When I finally got to Industrial Light and Magic in 1998 into their model shop on episodes one and two and Space Cowboys, I found an incredible group of peers and teachers and friends. And there still was not a single build in the five years I spent

Starting point is 01:15:38 in that model shop where I didn't feel at some point someone was going to come up, tap me on the shoulder and tell me the relief pitch is coming out because I clearly have no idea what I'm doing and it's time to go home. And at a certain point at ILM, I was like, man, I'm in Valhalla. I'm in the place where like every model maker in the world wants to end up here. And I am good enough to get here. Why do I still have so much judgment every time I screw something up? And then I realized, well, that's part of my process. It's part of the process. Clearly, it's going to happen no matter how technically competent I get. So I'm just going to push past it. And untested,

Starting point is 01:16:18 that day that I finished feeling so crappy, I came in the next day, we filmed again for a day, and I got the part right. And then I turned to the camera and I explained all of that because look, I really appreciate the way in which you were openly last year, openly talking about your anxieties and about the things that inhibit you from fulfilling the things that you want to do. Uh, I love the way Will Wheaton is so forthright and honest about his difficulties and about depression. And I view it as incumbent on those of us who are able to find the luck and circumstance to achieve some success to explain that it is not linear. It's rarely on purpose. There's so much luck and privilege and love involved in the process. And we all feel

Starting point is 01:17:06 uncertain all the time. Because yeah, it really is easy to walk in here and go, Oh my god, you're so productive. And I was like, I was tweeting last night about Laura Kompf and Simone Yatch, two of my collaborators on one of the episodes of my new show. And I described them as annoyingly productive. I am sometimes annoyed by how productive they are. And I know that I have a fairly high degree of output. And yet I can get jealous about someone else doing something that I'd like to try. I can get venal. You know, we're all flawed. Look, and to be honest, confronting that, confronting the limits of one's ability to be perfect, that is tough. So I will actually – you've asked me to talk to this, and I think one of the most instructive things I can mention is I'm a pleaser.

Starting point is 01:18:01 I'm a mender. I'm a caretaker, and I want people to like me. So I am very, very attuned to the moods and the attitudes in a room when I'm in it. Um, and, uh, in my place and my family, uh, I was good at sort of doing that mending. And it's a terrible thing to be good at doing that because it means you're taking on a responsibility that isn't necessarily yours and you can suffer trying to be the place where those difficulties end like being the being the locust that doesn't allow them to get past you and it's still very difficult for me to confront the fact that I'm a flawed

Starting point is 01:18:44 human being there's still some part of me that thinks, oh, as long as I perform all these things correctly, everything will go smooth. And the answer is no, that's fiction. Nothing will ever go smoothly. No plan ever survives first contact with implementation. And we are all going to screw up and feel unworthy at a very constant pace in our lives. That's being a person. The trick is to be honest about that. I really appreciate you being willing to share. I think as you do that it's really important because it's easy, particularly in, or I should say, immersed in an online world where very often what you see is the

Starting point is 01:19:27 highlight reel, it's easy to feel uniquely flawed or alone. And I grew up seeing not just bipolar disorder, but schizophrenia in my family. I know you've certainly witnessed a fair amount of bipolar disorder. And if anyone listening is going through a tough patch, realizing that you are not alone, and you're not uniquely flawed, and that it is sort of part of the ride on this journey that we call human life. So thank you for being willing to speak to it, because I think it is very important. It will become increasingly important, I think, for people like yourself to speak to it when you have a chance, because I think increasingly what we see online will be aside from the, what bleeds leads headlines, uh, very often self-selected highlight reels

Starting point is 01:20:33 of sorts, um, which can make people feel very isolated. So thank you for that. And, uh, I've just a few more questions, uh, but start with, and I don't say this lightly, I am so excited to get your book. It's already ordered. And it is your first book, which a lot like first funds for investing, like I'm very bullish on first books, particularly after a career like yours and having practiced explaining and having workshopped so many things that no doubt made it into the book in some form or another. I have it here described as a love letter to creativity secret thrills exploring making and productive obsession could you tell us a little bit more about the book please okay so uh when i when i sold this book to the publisher to simon to atria at simon and

Starting point is 01:21:39 schuster um the chapter in the book that i used as my, as my North star is a chapter called use more cooling fluid, which is a, it's a joke that I've told for years, which is if I could go back and tell my young self one thing, this is an interviewer's favorite question. If I can go back in time and tell my young self one thing, it would be use more cooling fluid. And I'm being facetious to a certain extent, but actually there are some interesting keys to the castle in that phrase. Because on one hand, and I cover this in the chapter, I talk about why cooling fluid is important. How when you're cutting metal with metal, keeping your cutting blade cool is really vital, and I explain deeply the physics of what happens to metal when you let it get hot, how you cut metal with metal, the differentials between the hardnesses of the materials that you're using and where it can go south. talk about how using more cooling fluid is about taking extra time in order to do something right

Starting point is 01:22:45 and that actually is about a wider philosophy of addressing your work and by addressing i mean putting the things that you're working on in front of you at a comfortable position so your hands can actually operate them and even that is a philosophical choice that we make when we make things because sometimes i'm like oh i can do this without removing those three bolts. And then bang, something breaks, and I'm boned. Taking the time where it's necessary, at the same time as trying to go as fast as you can to be able to have a reasonable return on the investment of time you have in this project, especially if you're working for hire, taking the time to do it right saves a lot of time on the back end. And it is an ongoing conversation in my head between future me and past me. And so that was the chapter. And so we thought that all the chapters would end up being

Starting point is 01:23:35 like I describe one specific maker skill and talk about the physics of it and then talk about the philosophy and open that up to wider and wider onion skins of philosophy. Except that when I started to look at other things that I know, I definitely deeply understand the physics of cooling fluid. And I understand the physics of the glues that I use. So the glue chapter is also very much in that vein. But as far as a lot of other skills, I'm such a generalist that I am mediocre at all the other things that I know. And thus I felt really strongly that I shouldn't present myself as any kind of authority on these things if it didn't come naturally. That if I researched heavily the physics of something that I didn't quite understand, I realized that there was more to talk about from my autobiographical details that led me to the conclusions I came to about how I run my shop space, about how I deal with collaborations and partnerships, about how I'm a husband and a friend and a father. um and so whereas originally i thought it would be 50 instructional and 50 uh uh uh

Starting point is 01:24:48 philosophical with some autobiographical stuff peppered in it ends up being about one-third each um and both my editor and i were surprised by the book that came out when i gonna gave him the the final manuscript in december he was like wow this is totally different than i thought but it's a it's great it works it's it's its own thing and there's a there's a quote in the book from andrew stanton uh pixar director directed john carter directed the finding dory films and many other things and he's an amazing andy is like the story guy and he loves unpacking story and he was telling me things like you know pixar has institutionalized the late understanding of what a story is about right so he's like you go to the client and you say we're

Starting point is 01:25:40 gonna dig up a tyrannosaurus rex we're gonna spend millions of dollars digging up a tyrannosaurus rex and he's like and there comes a point when you're digging you realize oh crap we've got a stegosaurus are you gonna have the guts to go to the funders and tell them you know what turns out we have a stegosaurus um andy said that the central theme of Monsters, Inc., which is that the scream is the currency of the world. He said that didn't come to them until like a year before they were finished. so framed the world that they invested in all of the changes they had to make to weave that into the plot and make it central because they discovered they had a stegosaurus and they had to service that. Amazing. Amazing. You know, thinking also of Spirited Away, where we started this conversation, if you ever have the chance, and maybe you've already been, but if you go to Tokyo and have a chance to go to the Studio Ghibli Museum...

Starting point is 01:26:50 I'm going. I'm going. My wife and I are planning a trip right now to go to Kyoto and Tokyo. Oh, you're going to have the best time, particularly with the trained eye that you can use for the details. Look for the marbles that are within the metalwork on the spiral staircase. It's really just incredible. I mean, they have the full-scale cat bus and everything you can imagine from the canon of his work, including some of his working desks. And it really digs into the process in a way that I think you will find enchanting. There's one other thing I wanted to say about the book, which is that, you know, as we were talking about sharing our personal experiences in the hopes that they resonate with people who might feel that their own experience is unique and keeps them from exploring what they want to explore. I also took as axiomatic this wonderful phrase I heard from Mary Carr in an interview.

Starting point is 01:27:57 When she was writing Liar's Club, her first memoir, she was talking to tobias wolf about it and he said if you're going to write about yourself as a young uh pre and mid pubescent girl you need to write about yourself as you were he said don't sugarcoat it and the phrase he used was take no cure for your dignity dignity. And I love that phrase so much because when we really do share those parts of ourselves where we are venal and jealous and weird and sad and uncertain and vulnerable, that's when we get to connect with other people. And so in the very beginning of this book, I say that I like to think of this book as a permission slip from me to you if you need to be told to fly your freak flag and try the thing that you can't stop thinking about even though it's weird. And I admit that my – this whole shop is filled with my weird hobbies of early computer history and costuming and spacesuits. And I'm not necessarily solving the world's problems in this space. But I am feeding myself and I am using this as a springboard about my experience to help others follow their weird passions.

Starting point is 01:29:15 And that's my goal. I think that's an admirable goal. And people can say hello on Twitter. Don't try this is your handle at don't try this on Instagram and Facebook. The real Adam Savage. They can certainly find the book at anywhere books are sold. Also at Adam Savage book.com. Are there any other places or any other, any other places online, any other projects that you would suggest people check out? Well, so I just wrapped and announced a brand new show I'm making for the Science Channel

Starting point is 01:29:50 called Savage Builds. That starts airing on June 12th. Among the things we did on that show, absurd engineering. I work with different collaborators in every episode. In one episode, I worked with a master blacksmith to make a sword out of a meteorite. In another, I worked with the Colorado School of Mines, with an N, not mimes, to make a 3D printed suit of Iron Man armor out of 3D printed titanium. And it is mind-blowing. I also have a bag and apparel company called Savage Industries. And at adamsavage.com, I make bags out of used and recycled sailcloth. And we have a number of other small projects that also sell plans and kits for making your own bag if you want to go that route.

Starting point is 01:30:41 And I think that is all of the things going on right now. Amazing. Well, never any shortage of projects. And I will link to all of those in the show notes as well. So for folks listening, if you are commuting or juggling or doing something that doesn't allow you to take notes at the moment,

Starting point is 01:31:01 you can find certainly links to everything we've discussed at tim.blog forward slash podcast as well. And Adam, this has been such a pleasure. It's always fun to see you. And I hope we get to share scrambled eggs sometime soon. Like I said, I'm coming to Austin on the book tour. I'll ping you and give you plenty of notice so that hopefully we can go out and have a beer and maybe some scrambled eggs. That sounds fantastic. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments, suggestions, anything at all that you'd like to add before we close up? No, I think we've covered a lovely wide range of stuff today.

Starting point is 01:31:42 It's been really fun. All right. Well, thank you so much, Adam. I wish you all the best on the book tour. I'm really excited to dig into this and go get a glue gun and start my own cardboard project. So thank you for what...

Starting point is 01:31:54 Take pictures, man. I will take pictures and I'll make sure I get the process so it's not just this pretty final shot or not so pretty final shot. I'll get some of the ugly in-betweens. And really, really lovely to see you again. And until next time, thank you so much for sharing your stories and to be

Starting point is 01:32:14 continued, I hope. Of course. Thanks, Tim. All right. Bye-bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.

Starting point is 01:32:42 That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if I could only take one supplement, what would it be?

Starting point is 01:33:28 The answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that, and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance, and overall, it covers my bases

Starting point is 01:33:54 if I can't get what I need from Whole Food Meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users. I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first time buyer, you now get for a limited time an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with

Starting point is 01:34:26 any purchase. This episode is brought to you by Theo Chocolate, which is the first organic and fair trade chocolate company in North America. They reached out to me because they spotted some of their chocolate in an Instagram photo that I've put up, the title of which is something like Tim Ferriss OCD fridge, or if you Google that, you can find it. But there are three carefully stacked bars down in the bottom left-hand corner of their dark chocolate coconut bars, which are fantastic. And that's because I've been eating their stuff for years. Anyway, they spotted it, reached out. So here we are. This is a brand that does everything from scratch, and you can tell the difference. It's why they've been one of my favorite chocolate makers for a very long time, and they offer tons of stuff. Of course, lots of

Starting point is 01:35:12 bars, little snacks like coconut bites, and also some more uncommon and imaginative stuff like their cinnamon horchata bar, beer and scotch chocolates, and their signature s'mores bite, the Big Daddy. My personal favorite, however, is their salted almond butter cups. One more time, salted almond butter cups, which are ridiculous and as dangerous as they sound, but they're worth it. In any case, as you might guess, based on what I said earlier, they use only organic fair trade ingredients, so you can feel better when you indulge, based on what I said earlier, they use only organic fair trade ingredients, so you can feel better when you indulge, which is something I've been doing a lot of. They're also doing a lot of good things to drive the industry forward, including working with communities in the Congo and Peru to make the economics of the cocoa trade fair for farmers and by using sustainable farming practices, for instance.

Starting point is 01:36:00 So whether you want to feel better about where you buy your goodies because of those reasons I just mentioned, or if you just want a really unique and delicious gift for yourself or someone else, Theo Chocolate has you covered. They are available in Whole Foods and other grocery stores across the US. And for listeners of this podcast, Theo is offering 15% off your online purchase at theochocolate.com. You can use code on checkout, TIM15. That's good, TIM15.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons

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