Adam Savage Interview

September 30, 2017

Interviewed by Alex Miller

ALEX: Thanks, Adam, there were a lot of echoes there for programming, I think, for sure. People have been asking questions all day in Slack and I think you actually hit a number of them. There were questions about imposter syndrome and all sorts of different things.

ADAM: I sat and had lunch a friend of mine and I talked about imposter syndrome and oh, blah, blah, blah imposter syndrome, and he's like, wait, what's that phrase? And I said imposter syndrome and he's like tell me and it was like Dalian zoom out. And this 45-year-old man was like, "I thought it was only me!" And I got up from the table and I was like, "Oh, honey! We're all in this together."

ALEX: One of the things when you were talking about organization and things like that, we call making things visible and all that stuff, there's a lot of times in programming where they talk about optimizing for developer happiness from a language perspective and the language ergonomics and things.

ADAM: I have discovered drawers that I like, by the way and they're made of clear plastic and they're either freezer compartments or makeup storage.

ALEX: Is it more fun to make stuff or blow stuff up?

ADAM: To make stuff. Not that I mind blowing stuff up, but understand whenever we blew something up on MythBusters, we had the FBI, we had the bomb squads, incredible techs. The profile that makes a good bomb tech reads like an amalgam of Jamie and I. We can work alone, irreverent sense of humor, ... I'm not kidding, in the military that's what they look for in a bomb tech. But our crew is not looking to the experts. Our crew is looking at Jamie and I for where to stand, what's safe, what isn't safe. And they made the assumption that we're doing that so for me every explosion was "oh, I'm glad that went fine with no problems".

ALEX: I'm glad no one is dead, right?

ADAM: All that shooting, the exploding is icing on the cake.

ALEX: I'm a big fan of the duct tape episodes and probably other people are, as well, the Grand Canyon is one of my favorites.

ADAM: Not shot anywhere near the Grand Canyon anyway. Myth busted. [laughter]

ALEX: What's the favorite thing you've made with duct tape?

ADAM: Oh, boats. Boats, so much boats. We made a sailboat.

ALEX: I expected that might be the answer.

ADAM: We made a sailboat, we made a 14-foot outrigger canoe and then we made white water rafting boats and those are my favorites because in the safety briefing we're going through these class 5 rapids in northern California and they're like you're going to ride down here and you're going to hit this, hit this, and hit this and I said OK. And they said, now, here's the thing you need to know, if you bail in the white water, you have to get yourself on your back with your feet above the water and your hands over the chest because if you have any of your body parts down, they can get wedged in a rock and nothing can save you. Cool! Then they go, but!, if you bail, bail right here, there's this giant rock in the way, in which case we need you not to do this, we need you to go head first so that you can make the fall safely. So all this stuff to hold in your brain. OK, so I'll die if I do this, otherwise I might die if I do that, great, let's go. Clearly I survived, but I did bail right in the place where they said was the most dangerous. The only thing I lost was a pair of glasses. So somewhere a pair of my glasses sits as fish food in northern California.

ALEX: What bit of science fiction do you want to see become reality?

ADAM: Oh! Certainly not the world of Bladerunner. Yeah. Has anyone read receive Seveneves by Neal Stephenson? I love that book so much and Neal is such an amazing writer. He's a close friend and knowing him is just as fun and weird as reading one of his books. Spoiler alert, the moon blows up -- that's the subject of the book. It makes the earth uninhabitable for a period of time and while it's uninhabitable, the humans retreat into a small enclave and slowly build an environment for themselves around the earth, they build a ring world around the world, waiting for the earth to become habitable again, and it's beautiful. He posits, what if the moon blew up and the end of the world was coming like tomorrow and he writes about it as if it's completely contemporary. With all of the complex social dynamics of fakes news and politicized science and all the stuff we're dealing with right now, so when earth recapitulates itself in the future part of Seveneves, they have a great suspicion of things like smartphones and how much they can give you, and they make them dumber because as a culture they're suspicious of them and that's a culture I could live with.

ALEX: It's like the Amish or something, right? So I've read Seveneves, and I really enjoyed it but I found it depressing, as well. Because the baser instincts come out too, you know?

ALEX: So what are you most hopeful in terms of future technology?

ADAM: Oh,man, this is a dark time right now it feels like. I am hopeful in that I'm working on a book right now with Drew Curtis called Don't Give Guns to Robots.

ALEX: I just saw that!

ADAM: The tag line is, "oh, shit, we already did!" it's not a future prognostication, it looks at technologies as a tree of possibilities with some positive and some negative outcomes and when we've been interviewing people on every side of these, 3D, life extension, drone warfare, driverless cars. The cautionary tale is privacy, because we didn't pay attention and whoops, we've lost it and when we've talked to different people, one of the things that came out from talking with economists, even ones whose politics I didn't necessarily agree with is look, if you could be randomly born into any year in history, what year would you choose and the answer is this year. On the grand scheme of things (Hans Rosling did a beautiful video about the earth over the last 200 years) and it's indisputable that as dark and dreary as things seem right now and boy they seem pretty dark, at the same time, there is a general upswing, that there is a trickle down, there are early adopters that pay a fortune for that iPhone X and slowly that economy of scale moves on down and everyone gets to use it and that is a net good for the world. And it's a long way of saying that I feel based on that data that we're ultimately moving in a positive trajectory with some (I'm hoping) dying gasps from an old guard that are sounding really loud right now.

[applause]

And I want to state outright I'm not even talking politics. I don't even care if you think big government or small government is the key. I think at that point we're arguing about one of method but we all just want a better world for our kids, I'm talking about racist bullshit and the systemic racism, sexism, classism that is built into our country from the get-go.

[applause and cheers]

ALEX: It's obviously a very topical subject here right now.

ADAM: And my kids are blissfully part of another generation and it's totally different than mine and they see the world very differently and on a much wider scale and it's lovely looking at the world through their eyes.

[one person cheers]

ADAM: Thanks, one guy. One of my kids, ladies and gentlemen.

[laughter]

ALEX: So I'm a humanist and a member of the Ethical Society, a local humanist group and I know that you're receiving the Humanist of the Year award this year.

ADAM: I did, yes.

ALEX: Or did. I wasn't sure of what the timing was and I'm wondering how that informs the way that you think about the world and think about the future and things like that.

ADAM: Yeah, MythBusters, we didn't set out to -- our joke was: we never thought of the children.

[laughter]

we didn't set out to make an educational show. We didn't even set out with the axiom to make a scientific show. The idea and the fact that it has come to be inspirational for a generation or two of young people to see how creative science can be, is the greatest side benefit of anything I would ever do in my whole entire life. And among those things we're turning out to become real spokespeople for -- I got a call from James Randy, the founder of the James Randy educational foundation, and one of my heroes. I watched him on Happy Days. I have since really pulled in my use of the word atheist and my use of the word skeptic. I feel like those communities are full of really, really well-meaning people. And they're full of some real toxic jerk wads. And you know, when you have, like, major "educated at Oxford and Cambridge" atheists who will not admit to their privilege or you have famous atheists talking about profiling brown people as a sound security policy, I want to run in the other direction. [applause]

Yeah. But I think that you know there's always this idea to look at a group and try and come up with an opinion about the group, Are geeks bad, are nerds bad? Are this group bad? I think there's the same percentage of assholes in everything.

ALEX: Have you heard Sturgeon's law? It's that 90% of everything is crap.

ADAM: Yes. Which means that 10% of everything is Scottish.

ALEX: Very good, very good. He'll be here all week. So -- oh, I forgot what I was asking now.

ADAM: Just to continue, I am a critical thinker, and you know, my favorite people are deeply critical thinkers, they're the children that look at me like a deer in the headlights because they can't believe they're standing in front of a MythBuster but still go, um, I was wondering why you used white mice because that's not really natural, white mice don't appear in nature.

ALEX: That's a good question.

ADAM: And I'm like, you are right, little girl. We got it TOTALLY wrong.

ALEX: Very good. So here's a question, multitasking, is that a thing? Does it help or hurt?

ADAM: I don't know. I don't know. I'm always doing it. I mean I think of it as gear-shifting. Which is hard to do. It takes a lot of work to have one phone call about the fundraiser and then a second phone call about the commercial and a third phone call about the television show. These are all totally different creative buckets and require different things. I have found that I don't do well trying to do it all at once on the fly. So my method seems to be, I go into my shop and I build stupid things for as long as I can avoid all the other problems.

[laughter]

ADAM: And then I sit down at my desk at home which is where I do the actual writing work and I take care of all those other problems and I go back to my shop and I build stupid crap for a while.

ALEX: OK, this is a scenario question: You're in a Home Depot, you get a news alert on your phone that the zombie apocalypse has started. What do you do?

[laughter]

ADAM: Wow! Whoo! Lots of hammers, man. I think a good claw hammer on the end of a stick is a great zombie dispatch tool. Lots of hammers, lots of chain, lots of locks. Maybe you just need bolts. I can't imagine zombies are very smart. They'll be like, "uhhh don't know combo". Or "hm, all combo's the same. We're going to eat well tonight." Yeah, claw hammer is really hard to beat.

ALEX: So somebody asked, it seemed like you and Jamie sort of have a little bit different personalities and the --

ADAM: A little bit?

ALEX: He was being generous! But you still worked together very successfully for a long time. Was that a good thing?

ADAM: No, it's the best thing. We don't like each other. Jamie and I -- Jamie first hired me in commercial special effects in 1994, so 23 years of working with that guy, we have never had dinner alone together. We've had social dinners with other professionals, I mean we have work dinners, we've had work lunches, but if you give us the chance, we have no desire to hang out together. We did a corporate event a couple of months ago in some other city. I can't even remember where it was, but Jamie walks into the green room and he goes "hey" and I go "hey" and we go back to doing what we're doing. When we actually work together, we drive each other crazy on a minute by minute basis. We argue about all the small stuff. Should we use carbon fiber or aluminum, do we need to do this with garbage bags or should we go out and get some nice Visqueen and we would argue about all the stuff to the great annoyance to both of us but the strength in the partnership was that we understood that it was a business partnership, not a friendship partnership and as such, I never had to argue with him about the really big decisions. Like should we sell out our integrity to bust a myth for a car company? I can't tell you how many zeroes we have turned down in total over the years, but it is a lot, and I never had to argue it with him and I am so grateful for that.

[applause]

ADAM: On basic cable you don't get residuals, so we got paid for doing that show and we're done. We don't get any money for it so the integrity is the only thing we get. And we weren't going to trade that and in addition, while we sweated and argued about the small stuff the fact is when we were actually building stuff our brains run on these parallel tracks that were deeply pleasurable to deal with. We bought this 10 foot tall water bucket (basically you'd bury this in your yard for a tank or something). We took off the top and I got in it and I threw up my pizza dinner in it and got all sick and it was hilarious and we got great footage and now it's the end of the day I go back to my car to sleep, which is kind of how I would take care of myself after throwing up in a bucket of cold water. So I go to sleep, I sleep for about 45 minutes and when I wake up it's now dark out and my crew is packing out the location and I kind of gropingly step out of the car and I look over and there's Jamie with this giant extended reach forklift and they're trying to move this 18 foot tall, 10 foot wide container off of its train pylons that it's sitting on, onto the ground so it won't blow over and I can see that this is happening and I can also see that the whole crew isn't quite sure what's going on and I move enough so that Jamie moves over and sees me and I make a signal like this and he goes like this and we don't have to speak, and together we can safely dance this giant dangerous thing to a safe location. And that is -- there's nothing better than when you work it someone at that level. It's deeply deeply satisfying.

ALEX: It reminds me of when you play music with someone. A flow state between people and you can do it in programming, too.

ALEX: So what was the most fun thing that you got to do on MythBusters and the most challenging thing. Maybe those are the same thing, I don't know.

ADAM: If you want to do anything excellently, it's going to take everything you have. So it's going to be both the best job you ever had and the hardest and those just go hand in hand. Just some stats, we made MythBusters for 13 and a half years, we shot for 200 shooting days a year for 13 years. That is something like 18,000 hours of camera time. 278 episodes, 2500 separate experiments, so the superlatives are impossible to come up with. There are super highlights. Things like flying in a U2 spy plane. My top altitude is classified. I love that. They specifically said, you're only allowed to say I went above 70,000 feet. And I did.

[laughter]

I got to throw up in the back of a Blue Angels jet. It turns out those flight suits, every pocket is to hold at least two barf bags. I got to hand-feed octopuses. I have some type of skin that octopuses love. Every time I've met one they reach out and touch me and they go ooh, that's good and I go home an hour later with Hickeys all the way up to my shoulder. It is, you know, a set of unparalleled memories and a lot of them are also like sitting in a greased wet suit at the top of a 200-foot soapy water slide thinking boy, I hope we've solved all these problems.

ALEX: So there were a lot of questions that people asked about learning things, because it seems like you know obviously you have an immense set of skills about making things that you've developed over your whole life and so obviously you have to continuously be learning things and do you have like thoughts about the process of learning things?

ADAM: Well, I mean it starts with openness. I have -- you know, I'm sure this is the case in programming. I count among my friends a lot of really fine magicians and you'll find this gamut from them. Some of them are like, "you want to try magic, go right ahead, that's awesome" and whereas others are "yeah, most people screw it up" and they feel threatened by you coming into their territory. Nothing could be further from my goals. When somebody tells me "I don't know anything about making". To me, everything I've ever learned is an open book for anybody who wants to ask and the central ethos of knowing something is to pass it on. See one, do one, teach one. It's the end of every activity you do in medical school. And I don't really know something unless I've tried to pass it on to somebody else, so I try to do that as much as possible.

ALEX: What was the dumbest thing that you ever attempted to do in the name of science? Or myth busting?

ADAM: There were so many! Well, we were doing an episode called 22,000-foot fall and the myth was an that airman in WWII had bailed out of his bomber over Paris without a parachute, but luckily he fell onto the lattice glass roof at a Paris train station at the very instant an explosion was happening and he hit the glass like a pillow and somehow survived. I know. But in order to test this we went up to the same location that we blew up the cement truck in, angels camp in northern California and it was during a heat wave where it was 118 degrees in the shade. This terrible heat wave, people were like passing away in their own homes even with air conditioning, the heat was so diabolical. And it was also such a fire hazard that the fire department on the first day we got there was like, yeah, you got to wrap this shoot up by 10:30 a.m. So OK, so we got at the set at 5 a.m. and the next day we got there at 4 a.m. and on the experiment day we got there at 3 a.m. and we're working by the light of our car lights and the setup for this experiment was really complicated. We had to drop our airman at a height to reach terminal velocity, which for a human is between 100 and 130MPH which means he has to be 450 feet off the ground. There's a thing that happens with latex weather balloons when you try to inflate them in 118-degree heat. So we had bought every weather balloon in the United States and they kept on rotting and failing on us and we finally got enough to lift our guy and the trick was to lift him up and transfer his weight from the ground to the balloons, and I had him on a bunch of pulleys for five people so that they could gradually let him go up to 450 feet but there was this one shift between the ground and the balloons and I saw at the last minute that I was going to cut the rope that there would be a little bit of a jerk and I was like, "that's probably fine". No! So I cut that rope and five people instantly got rope burns and this guy shot north and like, everyone's running to lash these cords that are going and he blows away and all the stuff is happening and I'm finally holding on and everyone thinks I've got it but I realized I don't and I started to make those noises that a friend of mine described that you just don't make when you're kidding.

[laughter]

And worst of all, this is 9:30 in the morning and it's already 105 degrees, and the fact that I have screwed this up, we have to all go. We've got one hour so we've got to pack out and go and that means, this is Friday, we all have to come back the next day and do the same thing again. I went home that day a wet rag, literally of just sweat and shame.

[laughter]

And suffered in my hotel room for a few hours until the next day and we did it again. And it worked. I mean the myth was totally busted, of course, but sometimes you know how it's going to turn out.

[laughter]

ALEX: One last question and then I think we'll end for the day. I know you're obviously really interested in recreating props and creating things and things like that, I was wondering what sort of what you're working on now or what's your top project now?

ADAM: It's a lovely question. Yeah, I'm obsessed with objects, that represent different kinds of narratives. That is what I've come to determine. So I love movie props because the narrative itself meant something to me and the prop itself has some aspect to it that I find compelling so I need it. Sometimes very occasionally I have obtained an original prop from a movie but more often I've traded for a replica or made a replica and it's the same with costumes. I love injecting myself into a narrative. So all of this is that it keeps coming back to the story, to storytelling and investing and examining and exploring stories, because I think that human beings, among the many things that separate us from all other species, and some of these may get rethought after we are able to finally converse with octopuses and gray wolves, but one of the things that separates us is in addition to being able to use tools, we tell stories about them and when we tell stories, in my mind we take a set of facts or a set of observations and we put them in a linear arrangement that helps us remember them and it puts them in context to each other. This is one of the things I think is a problem with science education. When I was raised, we were taught science is a set of facts to memorize. But those facts don't mean anything unless you put them in context and when I had teachers who were able to put them in context, it was aha moment after aha moment. My freshman earth science teacher in high school told us the best way to think about to a glacier to think about a river on quaaludes. If you can think of a better way to describe that, I'd like to hear it. He made a story that I know now.

Recently I executive produced a show for a protege of mine. I spent 14 years on MythBusters learning how to host and produce a television show on the job. It's one of the most enriching creative exercises of my whole life and to take those tools that I've learned and a good portion of my MythBusters crew and present them to a protege at the beginning of their career who thinks like me, thinks storywise but also super engaged and to give them this toolbox and give them bits of advice that I wish I'd been told has been so creatively satisfying, that it actually took away some of the shine of building in my workshop. Now, I'm not viewing that as a tragedy. My whole life has been spent sort of climbing these ladders of creativity and trying different things and noticing -- I noticed when I first got into commercial special effects in the mid '90s, that after about a year I wasn't doing any more sculpture because the creative need in me that was fed by sculpture was now being fed by this commercial enterprise. I don't make that distinction. I was still investing it with all of my energy and all of my problem-solving and this is the same thing so as I think about the rest of my life, you know, I will do more television shows and more stuff online and I'll keep on doing that stuff and giving talks and that kind of stuff, but one of the key separations between my future and my past is that I'm also going to start produce shows for other people and helping them tell their stories and this is where I get super-super excited.

Thank you guys so much.

[cheers and applause]