KPCS: Adam Savage #99

[Music] he [Music] am as always but for the first time ever in front of a live audience chat show thank you thank you to the audience that's here at the cobs comedy club in San Francisco the uh the city of my birth I'll have you know I want to thank the folks at Children's Hospital so many years ago who made made that birth happen and to my mom for doing her part you're not buffering well it works live who' have thought who' have thought that bit Works live who would have thought that bit worked live good point Sammy certainly not me I'm waiting for like to come down and just like set the whole stage on fire you wait waiting for the catastrophe to begin I was hoping it wouldn't happen in the first 90 seconds uh we are two minutes into the show and already no one's on fire so uh that's good uh we are coming to you live uh those of you watching at home and around the world uh from the cobs comedy club in San Francisco where sketchfest 10th anniversary uh we slipped in right to celebrate the 10th anniversary we're very excited that they uh would have us here and host us here as well as the management at cobs comedy club and now we have our very first live audience for the chat show give yourselves a wonderful Round of [Applause] Applause um I'm going to at this point take a moment which I normally don't do because we're inside of a studio where we normally do the show in uh Santi montia and ask my director mik ratman if we are in fact online we are online okay great that's good news but they're watching I'm talking to okay good they're already in the chat room talking um we uh have a great show I would like to say as I always think um lined up for today but um yeah first of all just a couple things about uh coming here to San Francisco uh for the show uh it's it it's always been a dream of mine to somehow dreams to find a point um odd thought it's always been an odd thought of mine to someday do the chat show in front of a live audience and uh I was experimenting with uh thoughts about how and why and when and then this opportunity came up so I want to thank uh Cole and uh and everybody involved uh with sketchfest for making this opportunity possible um because then we just thought well let's just dive in you know let's just jump in and and get ourselves a fantastic guest and then invite people to come and 6,000 showed up which really surprised me yeah very odd cuz the room holds 400 yeah it's a real shame these aren't HD cameras so they can see everyone in the way back I know parking lot so the people up top in the in the balcony there thank you so much for cramming in they're like this and it's really uncomfortable and uh but I do want to thank everyone we have a we have a bar and a and a kitchen so just keep eating and drinking and yet no booze for the crew yeah right Boo ears boo ears I say boo ears um Sammy yeah buddy uh let's uh let's start with you in terms of uh the little your own little personal history with the sketch Fest H you were here a couple of weeks ago with the thrilling adventure hour was here with the thrilling adventure this is my sixth uh sketchfest that uh that's right that's right ladies and gentlemen uh yeah no I I love it it's not uh it's not a January February unless I come up to San Francisco and uh see and do some funny comedy well see mostly funny comedy in mostly how did the thrilling adventure go it was great phenomenal we had two uh uh I think two soldout shows and uh well don't get cocky well I'm sorry I just uh no we had Neil Patrick Harris on who is fantastic and uh and uh so much fun we did it at the Marines Memorial Theater and uh were there any Marines in the audience I'm sorry were there any Marines in the audience uh I didn't get shot at so no interesting that that's how you would test that I was thinking sfy or Hua something oh no Pacino was there oh good yeah no he was definitely in the room so you were yelled at I was I always yelled at he yells at everyone yeah yeah yeah I need more water I don't know why he's always yelling now that was horrible now listen you're not wrong um but uh so you they had the thrilling adventure and now this trip you brought up uh the lovely Eve I did yeah I did bring up the lovely where's the lovely Eve oh just going to make her feel great she's right there in the AUD darling we've never had her present in the studio this this one's a keeper yeah this one's a keeper yeah we're all very in favor of Eve uh except for the one crazy fan that's probably in the chat room now you'd be nice Sabrina's not there um but uh so well thanks Sam for making the trip hey my pleasure and uh other than the hour stop you drove here in three and a half hours from Los Angeles is that I think we made it in 2 hours and 21 minutes or so yeah just set the cruise at 250 mph we promise to transport you uh next time through the uh gold Bloom transporting uh pod oh fantastic yeah and Jamie what's up how are you I'm doing all right I got the chat room going very you got the chat room going we were very concerned we literally AR Mara's in Indonesia watching at 5:00 a.m. Martha is Indonesian let's hear from Martha uncore that's Martha Washington by the way we also transcend time and space yeah uh she's been uh such a great friend and fan from day one she always has good questions and she's watching in Indonesia and always has great questions we have a couple here today for our guest from uh from Martha um and I introduced her to Arby's and how was that when you introduced her to Arby's she never had it before and then she got hooked on the Horsey Sauce and she has to drive 30 minutes to get to the closest Arby's by her house and she does it it sounded like you said she got hooked on Horsey Sauce y she got hooked on the horsey saw and you're going to take full responsibility for that yes I also it was uh between Christmas and my birthday which was last week I have I have now about $85 in Arby's gift cards which is probably going to take me about three years to to get through considering that I spend about $4 dollar each time I go there but so if anyone wants to go to Arby's yeah we're taking the entire audience of Arby's after for the show is there even an Arby's here in San Francisco that's why I said that good thinking that's why I invited them that's good thinking to the Arby's knowing that it was a 2hour and 20 minute drive back down to Los Angeles s in the LaVine mobile well thank you both for uh agreeing to be on stage uh one of you that's a difficult thing uh so thank you in particular Jamie and uh do we have the U Paton Oswald vomit bag in case standing by I'm okay um all right so uh what else is happening well we we uh Jamie and I got in a couple days early and went to one of the sketch Fest events with the SNL uh panel uh Dan arroy Lorraine Newman Don nello and Tom Davis that was spectacular uh I think I was the only one in the audience that read his Memoir yeah he talked about uh Tom Davis talked about his book uh which is called oh jeez it has one of those really long titles I don't remember yeah it's like short a 35 years of short-term memory loss or it's one of those really long titles and even akroy said it's the the only definitive book on SNL because it was written by someone who was there he made a very uh proud point of that as opposed to the big tomb that was written that everyone thinks is the one I guess a journalist wrote that one and that b was kind of going off saying yeah that book's great but this one was written by the guy who's at the epicenter in Tom Davis so that was a phenomenal thing I also highly recommend for anyone who lives here or visits San Francisco uh something Jamie and I ended up spending about 3 hours at which is the Walt Disney Family Museum and the presio oh my God it is unbelievable I I mean I had it's just really well done I don't even know why it's in San Francisco because he spent his whole life in adulthood in Los Angeles thereabouts maybe someone can correct me or write into into the chat room any sort of explanation as to how it landed in San Francisco I'm thrilled of course as a Native Son take great pride in that all the Academy Awards it's one of the most uh thorough uh uh it's 10 rooms it seems like it's just ridiculous everything an amazing collection of a a man or Woman's Work uh life that I've ever seen and we've been to the warhall museum it's just ridiculous um so I encourage everyone uh here and anyone might be visiting to check that out it really uh is unless you have no soul and you hatey shockingly great unless you're Ben AER and you have no soul and everything now over the years you know originally the idea of the show was to do sort of uh in terms of everyone asking how you going to monetize how you going to monetize how are you going to monetize um every now and then we'll get a sponsor who steps up uh the original thought was 1950s TV this hour brought to you by but we've yet to ever find that big sponsor who says we're happy to uh take tremendous Pride week after week sponsoring the show we've been to every large corporation in the known universe and they've all said go [ __ ] yourself which I found offputting not going to lie uh but recently we did uh uh through the the sales staff for uh this weekend.com the mothership Network that uh Kevin Paul chat show is proud to be a part of uh Leda over there contact was contacted and back and forth with one particular uh wonderful entity that puts out the fabulous Boflex machine yeah and they said if you wouldn't mind uh you know actually getting on to the bow flex and working out a little bit um as you know to show what it looks like when a Jew is on a machine like that uh we would be happy to sponsor the show for for a handful of weeks and I said oh would you that's ridiculous I uh I can't get on the machine uh so for those of you uh watching on the interwebs we're going to show you uh a little ad we put together for the Boflex folk and for those of you here in theater you'll watch on the uh oh no why there's no screen there at all but for those of you at home uh I do want to thank uh the fine folks at uh Boflex for sponsoring this particular edition of the show check out the lower third on your screen for all the uh vital important data as a way to order up yourselves uh your own machine from the fine folks at Boflex Uh Kevin uh I just got an email from uh yeah from another Corporation we had not heard from yet [ __ ] are us uhhuh and no they said go [ __ ] yourself no they did they say go back yourself as well which I think it's just the tag on the bottom of their emails it may not I may maybe something else there are two things I love about that he bits for this for this I not screen a black screen no B he's writing bits Sammy worked with three writers on that I did he hit up Tom Davis the other night I saw him yeah he was in town he was in town you're not going to hit him up uh two things I love about that that you got laughs in front of the live audience and that um the fine folks at Bow Flex had to listen to that bit I I think in the end they're going to be happy as they're paying for this ad I think they're going to be happy in the end uh all right let's roll the ad how are you I'm here to tell you about Boflex tread climber oh this is exciting stuff the machine is called the Boflex tread climber the tread climber combines the Motions of a treadmill a stepper and an elliptical into one beautiful machine it's three workouts in one fluid motion you can't touch T it folks all you have to do to lose weight is walk that's it wow walk blex recommends just 30 minutes three times a week that's it how great is this blex did a study at a deli University that showed the TRC can burn up to 40% more calories than a stepper can burn up to two times the calories of a treadmill wow these are two ways to request the tread M info kit there are two different ways call Boflex at 1 1800 4366 63 I'm going to hit you with that number again watch this 1 800 4366 63 wow request one online if you wish www.w walkwith kevin.com easy enough it's easy peasy so what's in the info kit you ask I hear you the full color glossy brochure that describes the tread climber's unique motion 3 in-one design available models financing offers Etc also a free DVD so you can see it in motion and learn more about the machine and finally bonus bonus we love bonuses the bow Flex inside is guide which includes a free fitness assessment six weight loss Secrets anyone can use to start losing weight today forget yesterday we're talking about today info on nutrition superfoods and more hey did I mention it was free enjoy your bow Flex tread climber today um about 42 minutes from now we'll bring out my guest who's very patiently sitting backstage uh big part of the show to include our audience at home and around the world uh is a little portion of the show we like to call ask Kevin they're running Kevin graphic right now that you can't see either hi this from buying the chat show uh comes to us from um dside oruk hi Kevin could you possibly put on the site or here in the Forum some explanation of how to get the chat show legally now that it is in a paying mode I am willing to pay to get the show as it is my favorite favorite is spelled in The King's English uh show on the net uh with a great format great guest great [Music] [Applause] host enough ass kissing already as far as I can see the only way for us non USA residents to to catch the show now is to watch it live yes you should be watching it live generally between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. in the UK a uh the iTunes at in UK only holds teasers and Amazon uh video on demand only works to us residents and is now uh not fully up to date yet anyway YouTube was a great for ketchup but obviously that was free as well cheers dside UK yes um we are working out the Kinks of the new model in Archives of the show to include the UK and there Beyond so thank you very much for your concern and your continued support of the show we are not ignoring nor forgetting it just uh takes a wee bit longer than that was horrible a bit longer than um than we had hoped and uh the the straight up answer is we're not ready we never were we're still not uh and uh I will be making announcements on Twitter uh which remains International um as to the updates and and when everything will be available uh for iTunes uh this was a big surprise to me and an unfortunate one that it was iTunes USA only and we are I promise you busting ass to correct this situation so thank you very much for your uh support of the show Tracy brunette writes kudos Kevin for the last week's show I have just finished listening uh to the show after the fact and just have to tell you I could not have been more entertained Winnie and Paul that'd be Winnie Holman and Paul douly two of the sweetest people you've ever had on the show so far we'll wait to see today's I uh could have listened to their stories for another hour no you couldn't I am curious to know who puts together the guest list do you have group meetings do you call in a favor do you have a dartboard and a chance or just take a chance what to see whatever is working I think this last show was one of the best and um I it sure would be one of the top download shows on the list thanks so much for your show and get out of my face Tracy uh brunette um seems like Tracy Beret should be your name Tracy brunette makes no sense at all um in terms of who books the show this is show 99 and I have yet to speak with a manager agent or publicist I reach out personally on a weekly basis uh I've had help from Sammy on a few occasions um most of them came through no reason to name names how dare you I'm going to make good on that yeah um but yeah it it it's a point of Pride with the show that that I I uh for the most part book at myself and and people have been I went I exhausted my own um uh iPhone uh um contact list rather quickly long before we got to 39 let alone 99 so it has been uh an interesting thing once you you get a certain level of guess it turns out that uh others are are more inclined and the response so far has been pretty fantastic as you'll see from the list of guests in archives um today being no exception you know we sort of had some some help um reaching out to today's guests as well as guests in the past and then it becomes eventually a direct contact um and that's pretty much how it's done people are constantly making guest suggestions and we appreciate that although we're rarely able to do anything about it um but uh we'll you know the the calendar is up on the site kouture.com if you want to just go there to see who the future guests are and um that is Ever Changing we do have some great shows daythan fillian will be our 100th show next Sunday back in our live time slot of 3 p.m. uh and some other great ones coming up so check um I'm excited for the uh Lauren Graham I'm not going to lie who wouldn't be yeah last Sunday uh in February and this last ass Kevin uh is from Jonathan D Lim cuz that's a name uh as a want to be cartoonist animator I love that you got Seth McFarland on the show are there any plans for having another animator made her on the show at some point in the future absolutely not uh they stink no he was phenomenal I found we found out he liked Jack Daniels had a bottle waiting and thankfully he drank for two hours I highly recommend that particular episode of the show why it's hilarious um I can uh I guess put it off no further than to introduce Our Guest I he left yeah he might have left would someone check to make sure that um I like so many of you and uh that includes those of you watching around the world became a fan um first on uh on robot wars which we'll talk about and then ultimately on uh uh Myth Busters normally uh my guest is seated here uh off camera wildly uncomfortable during the opening 20 minutes um but because this was a stage and a live thing we thought we happen with the wings and I just realized the poor man's been on his feet for the last hour and a half waiting for me to introduce him so without any further uh delay please welcome Adam Savage thank you sir oh perfect that' be yours normally um thank you so much for coming first and foremost it means a great deal to me um that you were able to make it I know you live in these here Parts I do um wouldn't mind if you could give out the exact address dress now um but but I was so excited I think I wet the table so um let me just do that it's a it's a testament to Twitter yes that uh I was I was Googling myself on Twitter uhhuh I'm sorry can you do that no I got some email that said uh seven celebrities have tweeted about you this week and I thought oh wonder who they are and the first one that came up was Kevin PA agreed with the fan that you should come on his talk show and I agreed with that too then it turn out you're going to be here so we just drove across town yeah thankfully you agreed with that crazy notion um welcome uh first and foremost to um our first live in front of an audience show As you stood in the wings low these M last far too many minutes what was the feeling backstage as thing we're going on I to get a right up to the minute review for me I I actually I have an mission to make I am I am I have a congenital condition that makes me incredibly hard of hearing oh you yeah and I have a slight ear infection right now which means all I heard backstage was peanuts teachers talking I heard and I clapped when everyone clapped like a seal uhhuh um just to make this you know sound fully you know 3D uh but I I couldn't hear a gos darn thing perfect uh you probably got the best portion of the show certainly the best version um this has nothing to do with things blowing up nearby it does not no no no uh everyone thinks oh yeah of course you're heart of hearing no um I have a thing where my ustation tubes don't work and so those bastards I I I like I when I was a kid I liked this negative pressure in my head and what that mean was I turned my eard drums into balloons that like filled my ear cavities and rotted wow so I have a a new eardrum in here and titanium ear bones they actually cut my ear off my head went to work inside there put it back holy [ __ ] yeah the sad part is is that I realized recently I can now only wigger wiggle the unoperated on ear a that stinks I'm going to ask him to fix that next time I go under the night yeah would you mind taking my ear off again so that I can wiggle it please take a tendon from my foot and put it in the back of my head still yeah um so uh it's it's a slow burning condition but uh I have to get it care of and it means it might actually the operation doesn't actually fix your hearing it just stops the infection from giving you facial paralysis and other Terrible Things oh fantastic yes I don't want to end up like the guy in the diving bell on the butterfly oh sure you do uh so wow uh none of the uh of the research that we did uh talk talked about most of this at all yeah there is a there is a there is a uh a small contingent of hearing aid wearers and uh people who suffer from this condition that know about it there's actually been screenshots blown up of me on MythBusters where you can see my hearing aid behind my ear wow yeah cuz they want solidarity and yeah exactly sense of Pride exactly look he's like us I'm sorry [Laughter] what too soon Kevin too soon too soon too soon he just finished telling you ah um all right so let's uh let's back it up just a wee bit then and to the uh the childhood of uh the research suggest that you were building toys at a very young age what the hell uh I my father was a painter uh house paint no when I was a kid I was sitting in school and I was looking I was in detention and I was looking across the street and I noticed there was this auto garage from the turn of the century in my hometown and I recognized it that my father had painted a painting of it wow and I was like oh and this kid next to me said what I said my father painted that building and he goes oh yeah was painted recently and I thought how does he know and then I realized uh my father was a painter and so he had a studio in the back of our house and always had lots of materials to play with and uh I was encouraged to play with those materials so from a very early age I had masking tape and um single-edged razor blades and uh my father was an animator so I always had clear acetate which was really good for making visors of space helmets yeah um and drawing so one the first thing I remember making is a a taking a briefcase I bought at a garage sale and putting down a sheet of cardboard and making some cutout windows and buying switches at the hardware store and putting switches and lights in it so it's like James Bond's Mission Impossible open it up click a button something blows up somewhere in my mind that was one of the first that was one of the first and that was it was probably from age 10 I had the ability to go charge things at the hardware store on my dad's account oh and I never amazingly I never abused it nor did I set anything on fire yeah I'm not believing the never on fire thing uh by accident only by accident oh I never said anything on fire by accident I controlled about my fire experiments I was thinking failure was the reason that you hadn't indeed succeeded at setting something on fire exactly um and so do you do you recall any of the uh other toys that you actually built that you could have um I mean were you showing your friends was this a matter of no it was more just it was more extending extending my play there was this my parents weren't very uh well off when I was a kid so we didn't get I remember being having the experience of wanting a toy and being astonished that I got it for Christmas that was like so my parents were really tight and uh uh I remember being s years old and my dad said what do you want for your birthday and I said I wanted a a race car for my my bear Gus my teddy bear and my dad fiberglassed this insane race car in his studio for me for Christmas oh wow it's it's one I could sit in at the time but only for a very short time it was about this long and it was painted in white and then you know he did it all with polyester which is just noxious makes you vomit it's awful stuff but it was this point in which I realized oh you can make stuff that you want he totally made this possible so uh it was more extending my play I would find a piece of Styrofoam that was used to pack a VCR or something earlier than a VCR because it was the mid '70s and I would put toilet paper tubes and take all my Star Wars figures and turn it into a death star set wow and then because of the Legos I had lots of different things to extend the Lego play yeah a little unfair to those with a real Lego set around town well it was more like really the problem with Legos is topography like you can build all the buildings in the world but you need lots of topography to lay out a full City in your room I'll say and you know I had cities and I had space ports and right up until like I was 15 were you uh wow so like most kids will play in a situation like that uh a fictitious world of their own creation or imaginary uh were you doing voices and characters and things I mean uh it's one thing to build it but to inhabit it yeah I don't remember if I was doing what I remember significantly about that time was just years and years and years of being alone in my room listening to Casey KAS now the top 40 on Saturdays and this one's going out to you Adam exactly so all those all these songs from the 70s remind me of working with Legos and playing with things in my room oh W I guess myself too the soundtrack of your life yeah uh yeah so to me I I don't remember actually in investing these guys with voices although I did have adventures and one of the things I was most obsessed about in Legos was I would build a room but I was I always wanted Secret doors so I had secret doors that went was that like the opening of get smart nice I wanted you know everything irises whatever it was I wanted secret doors everywhere I finally I built a secret door in my old house that uh behind a bookcase my my office was behind a bookcase in the garage oh man yeah oh man that must have been fun it was it was great right up until I visited G mod del Toro's house and he's got a whole Wing behind a bookcase it's not a competition Adam way yes it is yeah I I desire that I just I want I want a whole Wing behind a bookcase yeah wow uh so the crafty thing goes Way Beyond uh the toys into adulthood of course um did you study uh architecture or did you did you find um any desire I I actually the because you seem so self-taught as a kid I I was I was in I I I excelled in art in in school and in high school so I took all the art electives I could and I really got into acting I actually uh I was a child actor I played Mr Whipple stock boy in the Chan commercial you certainly did um did a bunch of radio voiceovers and uh let's not leave out drowning teen in Billy Joel's 1985 music video you're only human yeah it's did you audition for drowning team I did I did I auditioned for that part against my best friend he couldn't drown just right he he he I think he was too attractive uh let's bring him out now I uh he actually lives here in San Francisco I damn it that is Billy Joel's worst music video and it's a it's a high bar I'm glad you said it it is it is so bad that when I showed it to my wife she didn't know about it for the first three or four years we were together and she was really you're in a mus Jo music video searched for it on YouTube and I called it up and we started watching I'm in the very beginning of it or in the first you know minute and after my drowning scene um I'm in a couple I'm in the graveyard scene and I'm in the graduation scene but after the drowning scene my wife goes is there any more to this cuz I don't think I can take two more minutes are you in anymore cuz I'll watch it if you are Sam my worst music video do you mean best no no no I mean just the most unwatchable oh it's so fantastically amazing for those people watching uh streaming us later I implore you to pause this go watch it on YouTube and come back back to this it because I'm not going to talk about it it's it's it's a wonderful life in like 2 and A2 minutes yeah Joel playing the Clarence part but he's cool Billy Joel and the long overcoat and everything it's such an amazingly awful video it's it goes back around awesome yeah yeah no I guess you're right it's like freejack what's that freejack it's like AB welcome to my mind that's right my AP um I like every square inch of that Sammy except for the part where you told people to stop watching this I said pause I said pause do not turn to another Channel pause pause how do they pause the live streaming you can hit pause on the live stream can you can't you no Mike our director is saying you idiot all right um two windows I don't at any who so I did not I did not uh study sculpture or making things uh I spent 6 months at myyu studying acting right um I was terrible at it I was an really arrogant little [ __ ] but you kind of said to your parents you wanted to do this I found that interesting in the dossier there that the folks said all right well let's give this a try they were they have always supported me doing anything that I wanted to do clearly if they gave you the uh the account at 10 to charge whatever you wanted it was it was a remarkable thing my father was some I had an example in him of somebody who did only what he wanted to do he Right started out in advertising in New York did a lot of commercials in the 60s got out of advertising because he couldn't stand the whole industry and raised us doing about two or three animated spots per year for Sesame Street wow he would go to Children's television Workshop every year and Pitch them about a dozen ideas of animated things and they would always buy two or three and that was enough to pay the mortgage for the year wow and then he would animate them um ink them paint them and film them all in his Studio behind our house for about 3 months and then the other nine months of the year he'd paint what an amazing example to set it it truly remarkable so you know I I had because of him I had every job I ever had for either a year or an hour if people were Schmucks I'd just say I'm going to go get a soda and I would not go back and it was always a soda I specifically did that you know that that that poster store on Fourth Street in New York just south of Washington Square Park that like poster store next to the bottom line I'm going to lie and say yes okay there's this poster shop and I I remember working there and I spent one day there and they're like you're the new guy huh well let's see how long you last and I was like no that's all I [Music] need that was it that was it um yeah so I you started auditioning you were 19 years old I I started auditioning for stuff when I was 16 actually and then I stopped when I was 19 CU I got into a a I was totally all over the place I didn't know what I wanted to do I had I had I had some talent I knew I was smart but I had no ambition yeah that's a tough combination and New York is a terrible place to for that San Francisco is the ultimate place to be it [Applause] is you're not allowed to have ambition here no actually with with with the thing was was that San Francisco allowed me to try everything so I got here I got into uh carpentry I got into prop making rigging um Electronics I worked for a robot sculptor and that's kind of what where I went to school I actually got hired as a carpenter and they said okay we need you to build these stairs and I built stairs like from here to the to the roof of this stage these big stairs and they were like great and I was thinking doesn't anyone want to check my work I've never built stairs before I just looked at the other ones and copied those 3 weeks later I was the you know Master Carpenter what outfit was this this this was a um Larry's house of no no no some of you guys some of you in the audience may remember this is George coats performance Works which was a multimedia um really sort of anti- audience uh extra avanza happening down uh at the Hastings law school at the mallister and Market holy crap yeah fantastic I got I I I ended up doing all these different things for as sculptors and and theaters and I got a reputation for being able to solve I my thing was mechanical problem solving I really got into that right um I had started by uh when I was 16 or 17 building all those buildings um out of paper books I don't know if you remember the Allen Rose series the world at your feet so I built a Taj Mahal in the Empire State building in the Chrysler Building in the Brooklyn Bridge and it's a beautiful education building buildings out of paper because um for those of you who aren't familiar if you could describe exactly what the hell this thing was CU I do remember this from my it was amazing it was a little paperback book you bought in magazine format and it had a building it it had stuff that you cut out of it it wasn't even diecut you didn't snap it out you had to actually physically cut every piece out and then you had to score every angle and then glue it all together with Elmer's glue and eventually after probably 30 or 40 hours of hard work you ended up with this you know tilting building yeah um and so they were very rewarding to make very difficult no one would sell them now because no one would buy them now um but when you build stuff like that you start to learn about how shapes are made and it actually turns out I have a whole book in my head I want to write one day that sewing and welding and carpentry are all the same thing they once you understand they're all planer forms meeting each other and you just have to understand the r tools by which they can meet if the material is soft or hard or flexible or or elastic uh and so solving Pro learning to build buildings like that allowed me to sort of picture things in a way that made me a very good Problem Solver and that caught the attention of my partner on the show Jamie heinan in 1992 and he called me and asked me to come in and uh I showed him some stuff and he hired me to work on a on a Nike commercial now how is it that he came to you came became on his radar as it were um the theater community in San Francisco was actually uh an incredible incredible vibrant place in the early '90s there was something like 10 different blackbox theaters in San Fran here um so there was lots of opportunity and the community was very small so people moved from place to place you kind of knew everybody and uh the film industry would reach into the the theater industry occasionally for people to help do stuff and this was 92 so Nightmare Before Christmas was going on and uh it was sucking up all of the good talent of for making things in San Francisco really and because of that Jamie had to hire something like 25 people to build all these vegetables for a Nabisco commercial these dancing vegetables who else would he go to um well so he started calling up a bunch of theaters and they sent over their prop makers for this long weekend and two of them kept on telling him you got to call this guy we know Adam Savage you got to call this guy and so Jamie called me up and I was working at the uh I was working at Berkeley Repertory Theater on woman warrior I was making a pair of robotic chairs remote control Lazy Boy chairs and so he called up and he said and this is I had tried to work in the film industry a couple of other times in commercial special effects and in each case the place where I was hired was such a crappy place I didn't last more than a couple of weeks so Jamie called me up and he said I've heard about you are we're going to need a little bit more of that actually I would love to come in and show me some of your stuff and I I was thinking this is the call this is the call I've been waiting for and I'm amazed that I get to actually say this I can't come in this week I'm building remote control Lazy Boy chair but I can come in in two weeks so I came in and for some reason I didn't go in with a portfolio I came in with the suitcase full of things I'd built really yeah how big is the suitcase I just I just decided to take a whole bunch of really good things that showed that I had a bunch of skills I later on realized how fantastic this was as an interview technique because right people in people think special effects is a very creative business and they think that they should come in and show you their sculpture and sculpture doesn't show me as a supervisor anything about your skills at making things show me that you could make this at a wood and I'd hire you in a second right um it's about replicating stuff and it's often insanely tedious yeah so uh I came in with the mechanical things of hand that I made out of copper that was remote control and some little doodads and um it actually how you just throw away the handmade of copper I still have it I still have it it hangs in my studio you mean like thing uh yeah well it's actually it's sheet copper um you know what it was is I had a roommate at the time who made this hand and I thought the mechanics were really lazy and sloppy and I wanted to show them how it was done so I made all these lovely little wrapped copper hinges with pins and showed him and he didn't care so I been the hey idiot look at this attitude that turned him off to yeah your work that's true you literally decided to build a better yeah wow if I see something if I see something in my head and I see a poor execution of it I want to make a better execution and you you uh insist that you lack ambition well I didn't have a specific ambition I had a you it's funny um my best friend in New York when I was like 19 he said you have he said it to me exactly like that he said your problem is you have talent but you don't have ambition if you had ambition you wouldn't be here in my guest bedroom you'd be saying I'm sorry Mr Lucas I can't build that by Tuesday right nice so cut to 16 years later I actually got to say I'm sorry Mr Lucas I can't build that by Tuesday yes you did and I called him right up and I was like get this and took a while um so I went in and I started telling Jamie about these you know we're talking about the mechanical problem solving and Arachnophobia had come out a couple years before a few years before and Chris whis who ran the company that built all the spiders had gone on Johnny Carson with one of the spiders and this he had made it the spider walk by turning this crank and I had seen that and understood that the crank was operating a set of lever shafts on cam arms that activated the legs in the proper sequence to make the spider walk and I told Jamie this whole story about how I saw this and Jamie waited for me to finish before telling me that he'd actually designed and built oh God that organ guer box it was a perfect it was a perfect storm oh my god um that really is truly a perfect storm he he hired me and I was I finally discovered something that I was really good at that that was a career I had been doing sculpture really seriously for a few years but in special effects all of these things I had been playing with came to full and I started using them all on this you know at work something I'd never done and um Jamie was really good enough to see that I was ambitious there and when I say you know if you're going to hire someone to build that I'll learn how to use the lathe in order to build that and I'll stay late and I'll just do it and often that was faster than finding someone and hiring them and bringing them in that knew how to use that tool so I just kept on going tool by Tool by Tool by Tool in his shop until I could no longer stand him as a supervisor and then I moved on literally yeah yeah I um I stopped working for him somewhere in the mid90s and I went to work for a a toy company a startup toy company really yeah um I well when you're freelancing so I did I I did commercial special effects out of my I know that you had stayed with him for that long I yeah about five years cuz that that that's a well I guess chronologically all right so let's um let's jump around a little bit because you mentioned the 16e later um crumb and I would rather feast and dine on that because um it we we discovered briefly how much of a personal moment that was and how it had been foretold yeah um but as someone who had uh taught themselves and continue to learn from others but continue to force themselves to learn new ways of vention MH to get to a place where you are dealing with a George Lucas uh I I'm very very curious about that introduction and about that working relationship well so the the spending five years working with Jamie and commercials was fantastic because commercial special effects is very different than film special effects you've got to do something in a day in two days the budgets are tiny the challenges are really difficult um five years of that was a tremendous education then I went to work for this toy company as the as the head of R&D it was a startup toy company it was very poorly run um it was an exhausting and stressful process I didn't build anything for six months which actually almost crippled me I discovered halfway through my year at this toy company that I had to build with the toy for an hour every day and I said after lunch for an hour every day I go downstairs and I build because this is what I do I have to do it I recognized it was a part of my process right and then I matured in that job enough to to know that I did not want that job mhm we're shocked by that aren't we I found my I found my replacement and uh I I decided I wanted to work at ilm at industrial Light and magic and so I had several friends working there they were in the middle of episode one Star Wars episode one so they were hiring all over the place and I just I I've checked back on this cuz I I keep thinking it's become apocryphal but it is true I think I called almost every week for about four months until they hired me and it turned out that the supervisor at the time had mistaken me for someone else that he didn't like which is why he wasn't returning my calls but because I kept on calling he brought me in on this job and four months about four months yeah he called he called it was like a Friday and uh it was 7 in the morning he was like you better get up man and I was like what he's like it's Mark Anderson from ilm you're coming in on Monday at 8 a.m. all right I was like yeah now now let's stop for a moment imagine that 4mon journey of not giving up of not taking no for an answer of uh having the faith and Keeping the Faith to the point of I don't know how long it's going to take because there's the couple of week Journey MH there's the couple of month journey and then for a lot of people it's even maybe someone in your life saying dude it's not going to happen Let It Go what part of you keep hammering this guy I'll beat him down it felt inevit it really felt inevitable in a couple of ways one is that I had three or four really good friends working up there who had gotten hired up there recently so I knew that they were bringing in fresh blood so you must have asked them and they must have said I don't know what his problem is just keep trying actually it's finally one of them uh went to him and held my resume up in front of him and this is what made him finally call nice she said he's been calling you for four months he's like I know I don't like that gu she's like you got him mistaken he's another guy call him how did she I don't I didn't know exactly how that worked but they had talked a little bit about it and she corrected his his misassumptions so he gives you the call 7 o' in the morning get your ass in here on Monday yeah and you know I'm um I'm one of these people who's obsessively on time you know your your director said I'd prefer if you shut up a 115 I think I walked in at 116 yeah you did um my wondering what happened my first day my first day at ilm I got a flat tire and I got lost and I was still 5 minutes early nice [Applause] flat tire now for most people that's potentially half hour I would have liked to seen the pit stop that you pulled off no I managed to get I managed to get a a a I pulled off the freeway realized that I was like rolling on the rim and I was right in front of a garage and I ran in and got fixel flat and came out and pumped up my course you were right in front of I said I had heard somebody had said oh well ilm is right behind the Best Buy in San Rafel and I was like where's Best Buy and they were like it's that way which was great great that he said that cuz I thought it was that way wow so I would have wasted more time and I pulled up um and it it happened and I didn't realize this at the time but if I you were mcgyver what's that you didn't realize that you were mcgyver at this point no I didn't uh I didn't know this at the time but when I finally got there I was fully qualified to be there if I gotten hired any earlier even before the toy company I would not have had the sort of the the right set of skills dealing with people and in making things and in seeing what I wanted and getting there in the middle of a big film when 150 people were working in the model shop was the ideal time CU nobody was fighting for their Dominion right nobody the union everyone when everyone's working in the union everybody's happy and no one's going to you know piss on your tree sure so uh I was able to sort of look around and I want what who do I know to who do I need to know to build spaceships well you got to know John's John Goodson and John Duncan they're the best spaceship makers they're both still great friends of mine wow um Larry tan who's one of the original model makers on on uh Jedi and Empire uh I worked with him on a spaceship and he kind of walked me through the characters in the shop um and I it got early on a reputation for being really really fast and that's from commercials right uh you had no choice in film you often specialize immediately and people who do one thing they do that really well but that's all they do and in film special effects it's the same thing there's the guy who does the mold making there's the guy who does the electronics and because I've done commercials I I do all of that and so I often got the jobs that were the really tight time constraint jobs that needed to be built electronically wired and painted and rigged on set all within a couple of days which is my favorite kind of stuff to do it must be be I'm I'm sensing that um not just OCD but I'm sensing that there is a wonderful curiosity that fuels a great deal of your uh efforts professionally that you are fascinated by all of this that you were able to learn from your dad that if you want to you can not only sort of uh create and build your own destiny you can do it at your time your your pace your hours but I imagine you must have also found in in that inspiration because a lot of times I'm curious about uh in the how you got from there to here those mentors those moments of inspiration who were you studying when actors or comedians s here I I'm sensing in your dad so much of this was was there I'm wondering at what age did you were able to kind of put it in perspective like I'm trying to do now which is to look back and go wait a second I got all these uh tools from this incredible example that was being set I always knew that there was an example being set you did yeah I was I worshiped my dad from like 11 on but that you're aware of it because I you know well I mean I always knew that he he was this kind of godhead to achieve right he had he had had this tremendous amount of success in his early life he had uh his first oneman show of paintings in New York in the late 50s and the heror and the Whitney bought three quarters of the show um he got uh written about in 62 PBS did a document uh chronicling like a dozen young American artists and it was motherwell and Warhol and lickstein and uh the abstract expressionists and my father was among them holy [ __ ] um at the same time he and he was selling so well this I'm getting I don't know why I'm getting chills telling this but he was selling so well he said at a certain point he was painting money and his work was selling sight unseen and he was just he was making a shitload of money in advertising and painting and none of it meant anything to him so he stopped showing he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship which he got um and uh family famous family story which is turns out to be true because I recently got a copy of the of the application he says I paint for the same reason I Splash in the bathtub wow okay so the inspiration and the mentorship actually goes considerably deeper than than I had uh started to gather in what I was going to say say was I I had always admired him and revered him and it took me a while to actually extricate myself from that admiration to see I was astonished I came out here to San Francisco to stay with my brother and my brother's like our dad's totally full of [ __ ] and I was like what no he's not no no he was we're all full of [ __ ] um really we are I am at least no no we all are um you know it took a while for me to realize what opinions were mine and what opinions were his it's funny I'm I'm I've got twin 11-year-old boys and one of them's just solidly in the worship phase and you know will'll come out of Tron and they'll go what did you think I really liked it I really liked it and they'll be like I well they'll say you didn't like it and I'll say well you know I you know the script was horrible to a point of almost torture and they'll go yeah it wasn't really that great I'll go no no no no you can like it you totally okay to like it there's it was enjoyable for somebody somewhere might as well be you [Laughter] yeah certainly for an 11-year-old so I'm think I'm always thinking in in that frame it took me a long time to extricate my opinions from my father's opinions and realize the ways in which we see the world differently and realize the ways I can do things differently he died in 1998 and uh in a way I'm I I'm very sad he hasn't he hasn't seen any of the success I've had with the show because I think he'd love how different it is than anything he would have envisioned or that I ever envisioned um it's lovely how how I thought I was going to be a sculptor at first I thought I wanted to be a director um you know I wanted to do these things that he had done and it's it's it's really nice how much it's diverged it took a while yeah it certainly did and it seems like when that you cross that bridge of your own thoughts and your own destiny things actually started to to happen you know there was this point at which I first got into special effects I've been in it for about a year and I noticed that I wasn't doing as much sculpture which was super important to me for about eight years I was doing all these different sculptures uh and art and I was showing in San Francisco and all these Galleries and there I was doing special effects I was excelling at it I was doing really well I was working all the time and I wasn't doing a lot of sculpture and I thought okay so I know this about myself I can only focus on one thing at a time early on when I was doing a lot of sculpture for about 3 years I became obsessed with pool playing pool and I the more I played pool the less I did sculpture so I understood this about my brain it focuses on one thing at a time and I thought are you going to focus this on this career instead of this art right so because your father would have chosen the art and I thought you know right now I'm having so much fun in this career I'm I'm going to let this Focus Shift happen and I'm not going to say I used to be a sculptor I'm not going to say oh I cuz there's a special effects is full of those people sure I used to do great art and no no no no there's there's something absolutely a direct line in terms of the creative output uh I mean if you find that thing that's fulfilling it doesn't matter whether someone calls it art or not it's what it is you know to do anything really excellently you have to go into yourself and it doesn't matter whether that that product has some Merit even as long as you're going deeper into yourself to make that thing better and I was watching this happen with effects and I think that was the point that which the the real Divergence happened right yeah you started to realize well first of all listening to your own calling as opposed to questioning yeah where you belonged um I want to allow the audience from the interwebs a chance to get in here we uh arrived at this location for the first live in front of an audience Chat Show and uh someone at one point said oh yeah you there's no Wi-fi sorry yeah so we thought um and sure enough it's telling me now that there may be a problem so we yeah I just lost mine you lost yours too okay good so so Jamie being a wonderful producer we to steal it from next door yeah apparently stealing is wrong stealing is wrong I want to make that perfectly Ser audience the kids at home Ste stealing is always wrong unless it's the Wi-Fi um so Jamie being a wonderful producer well I'll go ahead and uh pull these off these are questions that came in from Twitter and from the Facebook and uh we can share some we can print some out we still have the capability for that so this one comes to you from _ Itor JC uh from the Twitter uh what is the most repeated myth suggestion they get so as a way to launch into the discussion of your wildly successful uh television program uh we have this uh first question what is the most suggested myth we get it's yeah most repeated um is there um that's a really good question I'm not sure if I've noticed a specific grouping um there's a drunk people will always suggest something that has to do with the genitalia of their friends there's a lot of unanswered questions there that's all I have to say a lot of unanswered airports and hotels it's you get some very interesting requests um a lot of people suggest things that we've already done I mean we've done 200 hours of the show at this point so there's a there's a lot that people might have missed yeah um fuel efficiency tends to be the thing that people want to talk about we've done about six or seven episodes on different ways of saving fuel um and that gets people really going they get very excited about it they want to talk about it um but as far as a singular thing that most people ask about no yes does is penis enlargement actually work which in my in my capacity as you know if you're if you if you happen to meet me and I'm your I'm your personal mythbuster for that moment that we're talking and you want to know a question I would like to know the answer so I researched it and the answer is no oh shock to No One disappointment to several um well in terms of I love that airports and hotels is when they're asking you to blow up their friends genitalia um airports also there's a specific kind of aggression that happens in airports early in the morning there's you start to separate the fan interactions from the the quiet hand shakers to the the scared children autographs to the to the yellers there's people who just start yelling yeah um those are fun aren't they and they they yell in really quiet situations so like you sit down on the plane and they stand over you're going hey it's MythBusters dude it's MythBusters right over here but the in the airports early in the morning are these guys you know sitting on the benches in the airport as you're walking down the thing and they sit there and they go there he goes That's a mythbuster they don't actually want to talk to you no they just want to narrate for you yeah I it's happened dozens and dozens of times to me it's astonishing it's astonishing that people want to lay claim to to the sighting I saw him first it's really what they're saying EXA I had one guy walk up to me I was carrying a child in a bag and up and he held out his hand until I put down the bag and shook his hand and said you look so thin in person it's actually something I get a lot yeah well but my weight has changed over the years um and then he says how'd you get that job how'd you get that job it's great job you just fall into it right place right time that kind of thing oh my God and I I can't even remember the third thing he said but it was even more aggressive and my wife says as we're walking away look I understand that you have to be nice to everybody you need them all to go away with a good experience but do [Laughter] I and I said absolutely not no skin off my nose if I've got a crazy [ __ ] wife who yells at people water off a duck's bag Jamie pay attention none of this Jamie gets yelled at often uh at airports uh about me about yeah I will I will go into the menum or something and someone will yell what did I what do I know him from what is the uh yeah just tell me the name of the movie he was in I'm like I I don't know what you saw yeah you know if you have uh uh filmography you know technically when they come up and said what was that thing I saw you in there is scientifically no way to answer that right because I wasn't with them when they were watching it's you know I mean it's a guessing game of what movies have you seen yeah it's like have you seen a few good no and then that's the worst part you start going down the list name the really name the really esoteric ones first yeah so uh she'll get yelled at and she'll what movie did I see him in and she'll say well I don't know and they'll say just tell me like she purposely withheld the information that's great I've watched John Landis go if you don't know I'm not helping you yeah I sometimes I get to the point where I say you're going to have to do some of the math on your own yes uh there's there's this lovely commercial for a cell phone where David payer that one yes yes the at I love that close to that part this close the one time it actually paid Sam they went with David pamer with pamer he's a great one he's a great one of those character actors that you've seen him and everything you're like but who is that guy who is that guy and that's a perfect example yeah aome love him I always say that um to Kevin that whenever the people can't figure out who he is I'm like oh they just think you're David pamer yeah um I get people who will do this they'll call me Jamie sure and I have no quals in not responding because you want them to think Jam's an [ __ ] it doesn't matter if they go away thinking he's an [ __ ] it's fine for me and if they haven't gotten it right if they haven't watched the show close enough they also do this Jamie Jamie you know they try and get a response to see if I turn around it's the old Family Guy Tom yeah Tom Bosley uh all right uh at Venice Riley uh two-part any uh hurts or fails to humiliating and or not camera worthy to Air and then second part dead in turns how many ah we no dead interns damn it no um we have two broken intern fingers a broken not missing not missing just broken yeah that'll heal that's fine from from moving safety equipment around we we use these bulletproof Shield bullet resistant resist let's be clear yes um bullet resistant Shields that weigh about 160 lbs a piece and they are they've fallen on people and hurt back they've broken Two Fingers um I have about 40 or 50 stitches in my hands um but no major no major injuries as far as we have had one accident that wasn't on camera that we don't that we will never talk about um just that just you should Revel in that much information um besides that everything has been on camera uh I think oh no there is one that we filmed it they so it's not on our part that we're too humiliated to put it on camera it's the discovery won't air it and it was um we're doing an episode about uh your mom says don't eat that crappy cereal I'm not going to buy you that crappy cereal the box is more nutritious than the cereal so we decided to test it on on mice good so we we got we got four cages of mice a control eating normal Mouse food a a group uh eating uh uh Froot Loops very happy happy mice eating FR loops and then we took the box and we oh it's three cages and we took a box and we grounded up into a pulp and molded it into pellets that looked just like Mouse food fantastic and um we we uh we put them in the cages and we were we had four mice in each cage and we were taking them out every day and weighing them and putting them back in we had them numbered with Sharpie um and uh we weren't noticing any real difference they were drinking and they you know most of what they drink they were drinking a lot of water so I wasn't noticing any difference significantly in the mice in their weights and we went through this for about 4 days and it was Friday and jimie was kind of overseeing the cages cuz Jamie actually in a weird earlier life had bought a pet store when he was 16 and ran it for 2 years fantastic his yeah his mom his mom died when he was 16 and left him a bunch of dough and the pet store in in Columbus Indiana where he grew up was for sale so he bought it ran it at a tidy profit and put himself through through college oh of course yeah this he's been a freak forever so he was overseeing the mouse cages and Friday he's turning out the lights everybody looks okay the mice who were eating the cardboard box he had actually added some artificial sweetener as to some hopeful reward for tasting it it turns out mice can't taste artificial sweetener so to them it was just cardboard so they were kind of nibbling at it but not much and on Monday when we came in um there were no longer uh three mice in that cage there was one really fat mouse so we didn't we we you know no one will ever know what went down you didn't have the nanny can on them no now we would now we'd put a GoPro on it all weekend but we didn't no one knows what went down but the other two mice survival of the fittest is what went down the other two mice looked like a Bugs Bunny cartoon of mice that had lost this fight they were head rib cage and tail like like he'd eaten them like corn on the [Laughter] cob so I I held him up and I said well killer and I said I hope this goes I hope this teaches you a lesson kids this is what happens when mice attack camera zoomed in on the mouse and uh so Discovery somehow decided not to air that it also might have contributed to that that Jame that we then took the mouse upstairs and fed it to Jamie snake we thought it was only [Applause] right once it had tasted the blood of its Brethren it was not safe to put back out into the wild it only mattered time before you were in danger exactly exactly like the like the that ironing presser from that Stephen King story think it's cool to eat your roommate yes yes so uh they' discover your new roommate in fact actually one of the direct one of the editors sent me the segment edited as this is the funniest thing we've ever filmed on the show so I took it out to a college date that Jamie and I did and we showed it and brought the house down and then I got a call from Discovery it's one of the only times they've ever called to be like do not ever show that again in public yeah well technically they do own the it's true it's true but as long as you have hit show they'll no one will yell at you yeah no they'll just uh they'll yell at other people who will tell you that someone's unhappy yeah they'll make us a request I will know that our show is on its descendant on the the other end of the bell curve when someone finally gets mad in front of me I figur right that's one of the ways all know oh wow you're not wrong here it goes yeah yeah yeah um since we are uh enjoying the Twitter and the uh questions coming in from there we would like to uh have a little fun you're on the Twitter yourself under don't try this I am if anyone wants to follow uh Adam and uh We've uh found some fun uh with our own little version of a Twitter game that uh Sam is the host of there'll be a um a graphic coming up of those of you watching online here in the audience live not so much but it's time uh for the Twitter game who tweeted tweeted roll that graphic who tweeted who tweeted now oh thank you now you guys have watched the uh thank you four three okay you guys have seen the uh the program before you've seen me host the the who tweeted game yeah okay so you know how it works you don't know how it works here we go so uh this would be who tweeted Tyra Paris or Justin Bieber Edition nice reaction I like that in the land of the Blind Men so I'm going to read a series of eight tweets and uh at the end of each one you're playing against Kevin you're going to buzz in and tell me who you believe authored that tweet okay Tyra Paris or Justin Bieber who has a riding utensil anybody up front there any kind there we are oh what took you so long um all right so you're playing against Kev all four of those you ring in h you ring in by the way by pounding to the table or saying your name name I'll point I think sound would prefer you say your name rather than pounding the table yeah don't pound the table just say and uh and then I'll point to you you have 3 seconds to say Tyra Paris or Justin okay you're ringing you get it right you win Five Points you're ringing you get it wrong you lose three at the end of eight there'll be a winner now audience which we've never done this before please do not shout out the answers if you think you know however you're not actually competing however feel free to applaud wildly whether the person you're rooting for has gotten it correct or incorrect I want this to be a blood match a blood match and uh we are not playing for uh Shigs we're not no what are we playing for Sammy 20 us there you go gambling eh excellent little gambling here at cobs Comedy Club are you ready to play yes tweet number one belly button talk time I used to be an Audi now I'm an inie weird maybe I am an alien you Aude or innie and how often you clean it Adam yes sir that smells like Tyra that is [Applause] correct a sure is Tyra the game is a foot she's definitely captain of the all alien basketball team yeah I can't believe they lost to the Harlem Globe drums tweet number two I kind of like baggy jeans right now the tight ones are kind of ouch sometimes what denim you rocking Kevin Paris incorrect ah also Tyra whoa switching it up just didn't seem like a fella thing tweet number three n loving life and all its wonders it's apostrophe yes Adam Paris that is correct that was that was a lob really gramar police never sleep tweet number four nothing really exciting to say right now I'm just sitting here like what should I write Kevin Bieber that is correct on the board off the two two number five loving at am Diddy's new album Last Train to Paris check it out Kevin Paris can't be that is correct oh nice why would she love that song I can't imagine we got a we got a real game here gentlemen score of 10 to seven really anyone's game tweet number six you didn't really commit to that comment really anyone's game there you kind of trailed could be anyone's game all right I could still win tweet number six can't win them all just got to be yourself all days aren't fun but every day is another opportunity Adam Bieber that is correct it's just the kind of self-help clap trap I'd expect from a 16-year-old he's been taking a deepo choer seminars I think he's really going to help some people he's touring with Jewel now three correct answers in a row that's right interesting oh tweet number seven my friend Camala Harris just swore in as Attorney General of California my home state Kevin Tyra I'm supposed to call on you I think he was ahead of me I I was going to say the same thing but I think it's yours oh uh I was looking down so I missed I missed the uh what happened let's go to the audience for uh because there was a who ranking first oh I heard both say we have some controversy here all right by round of applause who rang in first Adam Kevin all right Mr Po I don't like this I tell you what on account of three well I it's been so long now I forgot what the Tweet was I'll be happy to remind you my friend Cala Harris I'm done uh on a count of three let's see if we both got it right or wrong you you count us down and we'll say the answer at the same time how about one two three Tyra yes of course all right then we'll throw that one out do you possibly have a replace well no actually I think we're going to we're going to keep that one in there because that keeps the game interesting my friend you mean you're giving it I'm going to give that one to you because that gives you 12 points to add 15 all right don't you see so it comes down to the final question it comes down to the eighth and final tweet we don't want to run away okay all right Everyone likes a close game I suppose and it's a good one this this tweet number eight all right here we go you only live once make the most of the life you live Adam Bieber I'm afraid that's incorrect which means we have a TI we do have it and are tied at 12 oh cuz he lost three I was thinking five and it's an exact tie that's right do you have a tiebreaker I do indeed a tie Breer always a tiebreaker we've only had a tie once in 99 shows this is number two none of your business who was the last one was the question here's the tiebreaker the rules are simple it was recently does anyone remember who the last one the tie was let's file that under on a need to care basis serious how it works I will read the Tweet buzz in you get it right you win buzz in you get it wrong you lose it's that simple guess what I'm saying is do what you love and never let anyone stop you stay true to yourself Adam Bieber we have a [Applause] and that is how you play TW thank you s line oh what a wild and crazy outing for who tweeted that was fantastic thank you so much for playing along uh Sam nice job Jamie how are things in the uh in the chat room at present anything oh they live playing along they like the addition of the Bieber no they do yeah that was your doing yeah Dem isn't tweet enough de and it's mostly about ending child slavery so you can't really use that there's only so many questions that before we realize yeah yes it was Emily's idea to do Bieber yeah oh Emily Goodwin gets the credit on that one good for you darling have you have you thought about doing a drunk tweets version do Lou CK and Kanye Louis CK Kanye and who's the other great trying think who else is tweet Hemingway Jamie he doesn't tweet that much anymore no not as much as you uh I want to know if we can jump around a little bit more now um about the Harvard uh humanism award oh yeah what the hell um yeah the Harvard humanist Society ordered uh offered awarded uh Jamie and I uh the Lifetime Achievement Award for uh advancing critical thinking this happened last year no when did this happen this is last year last year last year and um it was interesting because uh both Jamie and I are atheists um we we talked about aist Don't Be Afraid yes don't be afraid to applaud no it was funny there was this point at which just after it happened Jamie was Jamie and I were driving in a car and Jamie is absolutely a robot so he was saying I don't really know what to you know how to approach this do we should we tell them that should I say that I think that religion is stupid or should I you know and we talked about it a lot I'm a big reader of of uh you know Christopher Hitchens of Richard Dawkins of Daniel Dennett uh you know I I attend James Randy's uh the amazing meeting skeptical conference every year in Las Vegas um I'm very I pay a lot of attention to the movement and the the getting that call out from Harvard was lovely and I uh wrote a piece pie that uh I spoke there about my atheism I'm actually a I think a fourth generation atheist um fourth generation fourth generation that's got to be rare and uh it was a fantastic actually the funniest thing about it from a performance standpoint was I love performing in churches yeah the Acoustics are phenomenal they really are I was like how ironic is this yeah it's perfectly ironic uh so then the pro the actual um award ceremony itself and then you did you both speak at the we actually I had prepared I had prepared a piece talking about uh talking about the makeup of my you know the way I think about the universe and I finished with it actually turns out in a weird way that Jamie and I through totally different means have come to the same conclusion about life which is you can do something you enjoy and we've also read and loved many of the same books his and then both of our top five is 100 Years of Solitude and we both plowed through all of Carlos Castaneda in our early 20s while um one of us did a lot of drugs uh-huh okay both of us but actually no I'm sorry I've never done drugs much better so uh I had concluded with this with a piece about Castaneda saying um I said you know it's a lovely idea to think that there's a somebody watching over it's a it's an addictive idea I would love that to be true I I I can't conclude that it is but in castan's books which whether fact or analogy doesn't matter if you take them as analogy they're beautiful poetry there's this bit um at the end of one called the Eagle's gift in which the the the thing that gives Consciousness to people is described by the Indian Mystics as the eagle and they describe it that way because they've seen it and it is impossibly cold the way an eagle is when it hunts it is devoid of any emotion but it gives people their Consciousness and then when they die it gobbles their Consciousness back up this is what the mystics have seen and he writes about this as a as a vision that Casta has in the book and his teacher then tells him that there is no purpose to life there is no meaning to it the eagle gives you your Consciousness he gobbles it back up it is a circle it does not matter what you do it has no consequence but because Consciousness is such a lovely gift you can make yourself an especially nice meal for the if you widen your Consciousness as much as possible while you have it wow nice very nice I think that's as good a mission as any yeah yeah yeah uh wow uh I was so Jamie got up after I after I said I had written this piece over over uh a couple of weeks and Jamie got up he hadn't prepared anything and he said got up and he goes what he said which is great literally that he that's all he said he's got phenomenal comic timing occasionally he can bust out out with just like the most brilliant floor of the Crowd Oh my God uh cuz yeah I mean it's been said over and over again and even the the quote um how do you I was going to ask how you felt about being described as the more hammy of the two but the truth is there's a yin and yang thing happening and um that's a perfect example yeah of uh this laid out it's a it's a far out thing being partners with somebody you know you always you you don't when you're a kid hold on I just want to make sure it's not one of my kids calling me sure please um when you're a kid and you imagine you know your future should I be shocked that your screen on the iPhone is shattered I drove over it a couple days ago uh it still works great what what MythBusters hard at work you can drive over an iPhone it worked fine I'd actually can't make a call cuz it's AT&T my my friend Chris just calls it the iPad Nano neither makes it perfect um yeah when you picture yourself being successful as a as a kid you think someday I'm going to be successful you never imagine it's going to be with somebody else um but when you find a partnership that works and uh like I found with Jamie it's an astonishing thing because it's nothing like what you would expect a partnership would work like it thrives on adversity and conflict and you know pen andella are friends of mine and they that's the the the strength of their relationship is the fact that they drive each other crazy and the same thing with me and Jamie it wouldn't work if we weren't acting as as a Counterpoint to each other uh the stuff we do wouldn't have count nearly the Integrity right that uh that it does because each of us fighting all the time yeah you won't get away with this yeah and so you know there's a there's a point at which we I we codified it a little bit in terms of actually discussing it was we were just about to do Letterman and we going to sit on the couch it was a big thing it taken months of negotiation instead of doing a demo we were sitting on the couch and Letterman is a huge fan of the show he's really sweet about it he's watched every episode with this kid um but we were preparing for it and we we were preparing for it by actually watching really crappy Letterman appearances wow like people who were having really bad times and watching how it went sour watching Paris Hilton crisen Glover krispen Glover watching bear gorillas get just hammered away at we just taking note what we would do if we got you know cuz we didn't know how it was going to go we were very scared of Dave you did scientific research into how to appear on Letterman it did wow you are purist and and I said uh just the day before I was like so you realize when we sit down we're going to have to there's not enough time for us to do our normal Rapport we're going to have to revert to a funny man straight man thing so I'm going to do most of the talking and you're going to get most of the laughs nice and he killed he absolutely you know Jamie knows exactly when to throw out the right line it was great it was it's it's been a lovely progression both of us learning to perform in our own way um I promised uh before we started that I would allow the live audience an opportunity uh as was my nutty design uh a year or so ago when I thought it might be at some point interesting to try to do this in front of a live audience uh I promised them uh that they would have an opportunity to ask a question or two so the hands go flying up right away I'm going to start with a gentleman in the front center because at what time did you guys arrive here this morning be honest be honest around 1030 1030 around [Music] 7:30 uh around 10:30 a.m. uh I think we'll do I I'll just repeat the question instead of trying to work the mic and I think that'll probably take more time I was wondering uh are there any myths that Carrie Grant and Tor have worked on that maybe became so interesting while they were working on them that you felt an interest to get involved youting that question yet are there any misss that Carrie Grant Tor have worked on that we've gotten interested enough to come in and involve ourselves in the story um we are involved in their stories um Jamie and I are now executive producers of the show after all this time um and we all work together as a team to make the best stories um that being said I am sometimes jealous of the things that they get to to do and they are sometimes jealous of the things we get to do and there's there's just not enough stories to go around for us all to always do stuff that we really want to do um there is one I really wished I could have done which turned out to be one of my favorites um the myth is that your mood can affect your fuel efficiency driving angry is less fuel efficient than driving relaxed so they came up with this great methodology of choosing things for Grant and Tor and I think Carrie but I think most of I remember Grant and Tor that they really hated and then they made them drive right away so for Tori it was getting a massage from a dude and we had this we hadman you listening we had this Runner we had this Runner who's a who's a actor a budding actor he just got accepted into the Groundlings in LA and he he Matt cordiva Matt's man massage and he took off his shirt and he like rubbed Tori down and Tori H Grant turns to have a phobia of fish touching his feet that's not a thing no he totally made that up he totally has a so they filled uh that's actually not something that I appreciate you making fun of very very serious I believe Jamie you may have a a phobia of fish touching your feet I I'm afraid of fish yeah so if they in fact touched your feet I believe this would be oh I would freak the all right all right all right so so like I'll go in the ocean and if I see one fish I bolt like down the beach I'm so afraid of them wow so they filled two buckets full of koi goldfish oh the koi are the worst not pirona and catfish oh catfish are so and then they said he sat there for like 15 minutes and then they made him drive and in fuel efficiency if you can save 3 4% that's actually quite significant over a year of driving or even a month of driving um and at the end of this episode they found the difference between driving relaxed and driving angry was something like 14% oh my God it was one of the single largest results we've ever gotten from fuel efficiency stories and I would have loved to have tried it out that that that to me is really fun there are actually as a whole Japanese subculture of people who excuse me um uh try to drive in the most fuel efficient way possible and they've actually gotten up to like 60 m to the gallon out of unmodified cars they drive barefoot they sandpaper the bottom of their feet and they they they're probably the worst people in the world to drive behind which means they probably drive like San franciscans yeah stopping at every stoplight driving the speed limit it's just it's excruciating morons morons totally all right excellent question indeed I want to get away from the front row just out of fairness we'll come back to it perhaps yes right there um I was just curious I started watching Mythbusters when I was 13 how old are you now I'm 20 all right and so is that kind of surreal to that the show has lasted as long yeah it's is it surreal to me that you've been watching the show for seven years and you're now old almost old enough to drink yeah totally um we were in London my wife and I went to London for the Christmas holidays just to chill and we love good food so we ate our way through London and on last night we had a table we reserved a table in the kitchen which it turns out you can do at maiz which is one of Gordon Ramsay's places and the dinner was astonishing and the people there are amazing and it is like a movie set of people who are brilliant about food all making food for you and the head chef comes up to me and he says I love your show I've been watching it since I was little wow yeah never felt so old I know um yeah it's totally surreal it's lovely too I bless you yeah you got a little on you um cartoon character just sneezed I think I I I've gotten notes from people who've already graduated from college in engineering saying that watching the show inspired them to do that um oh wow yeah that is the most humbling part about doing this job we thank [Applause] you it feels like such a cheap Applause but it to me CU we really didn't set out to do that at all and we understand that not setting out to do that is the reason that it works absolutely um we don't try and be worthy we do not try and talk down to people you don't have to try and no but I mean the very core and and integrity of your efforts on the show is is what's having the effect not any sort of effort beyond that yeah and it so to the the fact of it that you know the California Science Teachers Association has made us honorary lifetime members extraordinary and they're we speak at their conference every year and they are the most am amazing audience and I have so much respect for those guys teachers I could not I hate all children except my own yeah I could not do it I'm not that fond of yours um never met them totally a lie all right uh over on this side there right there if you would stand up uh you guys opened up the rally for sanity with John Stewart yeah wonder if you could talk about that was far more surreal than this guy watching since he was a little um we were actually it starts with this jacket um we were at the Emmys last year let's reiterate the question sorry oh sorry the question is uh was it how what was the experience of working uh being the opening act for the rally to restore sanity and or fear with John Stewart and Steven coar um so it the Emmys last year MythBusters was nominated for an Emmy which we did not win and as we were walk when you go to the Emmys you go to the emms which the sorry these are the creative arts Emmys the schmies shm and they're like 17 hours long and then you file and Limp across the street to the Governor's Ball and while you're limping across the street you see all these people you admire and they're all far handser than you can imagine and then this group of guys was walking next to us I was thinking of John Hammer I'm impossibly handsome in person it's annoying it's crazy um this group of is walking next to us and one of them walks up to me wearing this lovely plaid jacket and he's holding an em and he goes hey I write for Steven coar and we just won so I thought [ __ ] it I'd say hi I'm a big fan oh my God so we started we started I said what table what's your table number I love you guys what's your table number and he told me and my wife and I went over and sat down with them for about half an hour and started a mutual admiration Society we started discussing things we started talking about ways that Stephen could come on the show and we could go on his show and play around fantastic and Stephen's a huge fan and uh I heard about the rally and so I wrote to the the writer and I said do you do you want us to come to the rally and he said would you want to come and hang out or do you want to do something and I was like yes whatever you would want yeah and culminated in uh I was in LA it was at dinner with friends and I got this email from Stephen which was like and Julie was my wife was like what and I was like look she like so I started text and she started writing back she go you're just going to write back to him like that just like that not going to plan anything no no no I'm just going to write uh so Stephen and I got on the pH you're not going to scientifically research it no and we got on the phone a few days later and talked for about an hour and a half and he had all these Amazing Ideas I mean he was saying things like you know you want to experiment on a on a on a quarter of a million people um we got to think of big things we got to think of big things it wouldn't play at Mesopotamia it won't play in Washington nice it's it's too big a crowd to be subtle with and what do you want to do and we went back and forth about several things I called a friend of mine uh Dr Richard wisman who's this wonderful uh personality and writer a psychologist in London and he came up with the idea of experimenting with the wave of exper you crowd that big you can experiment with the wave which is often called the Mexican wave sure although here in California that sounds like the wrong thing to call it um so we just call it the wave uh and uh we played around with having the audience say some things and then uh I had this idea that I'd always wanted to try of getting an entire crowd to jump and see if you could pick it up on a seismograph oh my God thought quarter of a million we thought it was going to be they had an estimate of about 150,000 people turns out in the final analysis there's about 240,000 people um from the stage it was a mile of people oh yeah it was astonishing and they jumped once and I could see that they weren't in sync because and this is this is this is lovely Stephen was like get them all jump at the same time and I said well of course you realize that we'd have to flash the jump command on the screen because the speed of sound is too slow to make that jump simultaneous and Stephen was like oh that's [Laughter] great um and uh so yeah I watched the crowd jump out of sync and the next time we did it I said everyone jump in follow this don't listen to the sound of my voice and I watched a mile of people jump at the same time I will also point out that backstage at events like that is the most surreal place on Earth it is like a dream sequence where you know people are chasing around your house with Sea Hunt rifles is nothing makes sense Kareem Abdul Jabar is chatting with Sam Waterston the Osborne just came up and said hello and John Legend is again far handsomer than any human should be allowed um so we're backstage and we're about to go up on stage we go up on stage and they tell us there's going to be the this big teleprompter out there so we can be looking out at the crowd and there is no teleprompter out there and we've written this 20 minute script we're the teleprompt right that's on the thing was is I had written the final draft the night before so I knew it but Jamie didn't know it and I had written it m Adam heavy so that I could give him some good laugh lines and good chunks and we talked through it but he hadn't memorized it in any way so it it we finally found this prompter on the ground that was scrolling through the lines oh my god um but so yeah we were winging it for most of that most of that 20 minutes um and some of this memorized from text as you said you finish the night before but and then Jamie having no idea when to really but he understands when I'm throwing him something so again we picked it up we pulled it out of the fire and we came back and everyone was super sweet and Stephen there's so many stories from this but the main one is that Steven came up afterwards about 10 minutes later and just grabbed me and gave me this big hug and said that was amazing that was awesome did you have fun yeah and his entire staff said did the same thing they all said it was great and then they all said did you have fun and apparently it's written up on the wall in their in their writing room is it funny is it sexy are we having fun let's do it wow I don't understand the is it sexy part but I like all I I I think he means sexy in terms of like does it get you going does it really something you've got to do um the other thing that happened when I got off stage is I was going into the you know you're just it's a it's a you're like so I got off and some this guy button holes me just as I'm about to go into the the the tent uh and he says how was it out there I'm G I can't do his British accent he was like how was it out there you know uhuh the my so my British is Australian um and he starts and I'm trying to answer these detailed questions he has about what a like to perform for a crowd that big and he's asking really pointed questions like can you hear them do you get any feedback what is it like and then after about 3 minutes I go [ __ ] and he goes what and I said you're Eddie [Music] [Applause] isard fantastic and and a perfect example of of a surreal experience like that and how it takes shape and and um and what a great moment to sort of uh not only uh have a memory of but to share with us uh like that Eddie holds the record uh for the longest uh interview here in the chat show archives 2 hours and 31 minutes wow um he's a talker um and uh in fear of of matching and beating his two hours and 31 minutes cuz I'm ready and we're ready um we I got nothing to do but return a couple of carpets yeah oh well I think we have some helping hands here if you should need them uh no uh the uh the fine folks at cops here um I have two shows to do and they sort of gave us a time frame and said can you be out by this time and they explained it to my director Mike rotman who brought it to me again no one's yelling at me but rather coming with requests but I have a hit show right I don't think they're going to yell at us exactly so I said all right well we're going to go 15 or some minutes long and that's just the way it is uh so I wanted to be um respectful as to as I now let the management know that we're about to go a bit over um and also um thank everyone for uh your questions and I'm sorry we couldn't get to to all of them I want to uh have one more up here as I said we we come back right over here to the front y uh two-part question no nope sorry just one part how often do people ask you about myths and have you heard the myth you can live almost indefinitely on nothing but Guinness draft and orang okay okay how often do people ask me questions about specific myths and have I heard the myth that you can live indefinitely on Guinness draft and oranges that sounds totally plausible it doesn't sound UNP it doesn't sound Pleasant for you or anyone around you yeah I can only imagine what your poop would look like after a few days on Guinness draft and oranges has been doing that it would be Richard has been living that way for 65 years forget the oranges love the the people that ask the specific questions are Science Kid science geek kids and they're some of my favorite favorite kids to talk to and I love talking to them so much I speak I've been giving a keynote for the last couple years at the national sorry the California Science Fair down at the stable Center and afterwards this year I'm going to do a thing with them where I'm going to bring autograph cards for them and I'll bring some pictures that they can have and I'll sign them I'll have signed them beforehand but I don't want to take pictures or do autographs while I'm there cuz I want actually want to talk to the kids right cuz I here's what happens kids see someone they know from television who's they they admire this deer in the headlights and they go they actually say things like wow they say it they go you're really here they say things like [ __ ] you're Edie isard yes and they kind of paus and their parents go what is that story you wanted to ask them about they go but the science K kids they do all the same stuff and then they go I was wondering why you use white mice and the elephants are afraid of White story because white mice aren't really natural in nature you should have used some other colors perhaps to make it more [Applause] accurate they step right past the social fear of meeting someone famous and right into the science and it is super fun to talk to them because you got to give it up yes you're absolutely right we messed that one up completely we thought we were producing fluff for the show we didn't realize we were conducting an actual experiment that would have a positive result right that's why we use white mice cuz we were making comedy we just accidentally made some science um which is the theme of our show in general pretty much um so yeah I love talking to kids about the show and I actually love taking questions about it people disagree I'll totally not stand by our results um I will explain why we came to them and why we you know stand by our methodologies that's the thing about the show is that we're not not scientists and we're not qualified through any educational background to do what we do but we do think methodically and we love telling the story of each experiment proceeding from its predecessor so if somebody has a problem it's either that they didn't watch the whole episode which is almost always the answer wow why did you do that experiment of that when did you come in in the middle um I rest my case or uh or uh a sequence got cut out which also happens we we we shoot almost for every episode we shoot some experimental sequence that doesn't make it in because we're we do too much we want to get this whole this whole thing in um I wish it could be one story per hour instead of two stories per hour uh but you know it turns out that it's just a little too much for us to do so in the end um the other thing that astonishes me over the years is that I actually can remember almost all of the stories that is odd there's about 600 separate experiments we've done over the years um 6 or 800 of them and I can pretty much go back over why we did something almost every time apparently if you were Mary Lou Henner you could say which one was number 237 which one was number 19 really she can actually you can ask her any day of her life an actual date really what happened this day sort of thing she has one of the she was on 60 Minutes or something Mar Mary Lu Henner the actress from Taxi the very one she's she I've met met her a couple of times um the first time I met her cuz she had a discovery show and I went right up to her and said I've loved you since and then I realized to say the figure I was about to say would be insulting and then I said forever yeah and then I was actually signing autographs at the California Science Fair down at Staple Center and she came up with her son who's a huge fan of the show and she said I don't know if you know but I'm Mar L Henny from Taxi I'm like are you kidding I had a crush on you I had such a crush on you way some sometimes um the other thing I wanted to include was um we mentioned at Martha S one of our original friends and fans uh who offered up um another ritual of the show to you specific a little thing we like to call Tweet five there's a graphic running right now on the of the show as a [Music] group not a lot of commitment but it's a nice sound we'll rehearse it next time uh I just noticed a couple of people are wearing the chat show t-shirts down front so thank you for that um all right so this um T5 comes from at Martha s this is a this or that Coke or Pepsi no correct answer sort of and designed usually specifically for the guests here we go with uh the T5 number one Lord of the Rings are Star Wars oh that's tough okay I have to say if if you're going to quantify one is better than the other you have to say is it all three Lord of the Rings movies versus all Six Star Wars movies in which case Lord of the Rings but given the fact that there are in fact only two Star Wars movies I say Star Wars and I don't think Peter Jackson would would would dispute that oh that's lovely and and 100% correct uh Chandler or mirami oh God that's lovely question someone's really researched um it's Chandler but only because he proceedes and inspires Mami oh nice um birite mint chip or salted caramel these are getting stalkerish Le I live around the corner from by right uhhuh mint chip is a favorite in our household I don't want to give away too much freaking information my new favorite's eggnog go to hell Tarantino Terry Gilliam Terry Gilliam Jesus Christ these are really hard Martha unor s does her homework she's also a super genius and went to Berkeley and you know really yes I hope I don't meet her because she sounds like she's got my number um it's Tarantino yes that is the correct answer also the correct answer correct answer we're we're talking we're talking tiny increments at the top of a huge scale uh uh DOTA Birds is aren't supposed to be easy DOTA birds or dinosaurs oh DOTA Birds oh that was easy all right thank you Martha for that um you know the audience has done so well I feel as though I want to as we're coming up on the 2hour Mark I want to uh maybe give uh one more opportunity at yes sir right up front um are you still doing any more effects worker consulting or just mainly MythBusters I am I still doing effects worker Consulting no I'm not MythBusters has been uh our full-time job for the better part of a decade now um we unlike normal TV shows that shoot like six or eight or nine months a year we shoot 46 weeks a year wow full- time why um because that's how long it takes to make it it takes us two weeks to shoot an episode holy crap yeah just so you know for those of you that may not uh follow the sort of information that is unparalleled yeah it's it's even a ridiculous drama that costs to5 million an episode doesn't shoot for two weeks no no it's um it's it's we've never found a way of making it more efficient although we R rapidly looking for ways to make it more efficient there's no pressure from Discovery I know you're a huge hit for them if not helping to Brand the network uh yourselves but uh two weeks my Lord so 46 out of 52 yeah so what we do is we shoot for 3 months and we take a couple weeks off which is just about enough time to realize that you're really tired uhhuh and we get back to work um I uh I still feed the the the bone the bone I still Feed the Beast that loves effects um I make uh and collect uh and trade movie props I loved making spaceships and I loved making props when I worked in the movies um I love it all stems from a deep love of objects uh and the narrative inherent in those objects are The Narrative I can give them as an artisan and uh there are objects that I love from movies I have there's a talk I have on for.tv uh about the malti Falcon and the dodo bird uh that's all about that that passion of mine and so I'm always working on two or three different projects right now um with help of of a good friend of mine and the studio that built it I'm replicating um Rasputin's meccan from the beginning of Hellboy yeah i' I I love the prop and Mike Elison from spectral motion that made the prop has afforded me some access to pictures and measurements I've never had access to a prop before I've usually had to do screenshots and make measurements off the screen and extrapolate and find found parts and stuff like this this I get to talk to my old colleagues like mark craan from you know who built the thing did all the mechanical problem solving I get to talk to him about some of the things that they did and what's inside that um so I'm having a lot of fun working on that right now I actually just uh my wife and I just moved into to the Mission District after a long time in the foggiest part of San Francisco we've moved into the sunniest um and as such uh because it's off street parking so important I rented a shop around the corner and I've got a a lovely shop where I get to spend about maybe three or four hours a month but I'm putting together a set of tools that allow me to work super efficiently when I get in there right to make the maximal use of that time all the rest of the time I spend building the stuff in my head and problem solving the stuff you know on planes and figuring out what I'm going to do once I get get into the shop um and when I'm all done I'll end up with a with a movie prop so it's kind of like working although there is this it's kind of like working in the effects although there is this part of me that thinks God if only I had an unfettered 40 hours to work on something like this it would be like a freaking vacation yeah unbelievable well it's pretty tremendous to see that the um uh NeverEnding Fascination uh that I think kickstarted if not drove your uh your childhood remain so vibrantly today uh in in the fact that you have access to these tools that you mentioned and and not to mention John Ham and Eddie Ard there's a there's a funny thing that happens though that um you might think about the narrative I certainly would from the outside as like you know geeky kid doesn't have a lot of friends and didn't know about girls until really late um makes good and now can do whatever he wants and is unembarrassed and is a total unabashed geek um the fact is actually I still get embarrassed and uh weirded out by some of the stuff that I find really thrilling um I go to Comic-Con and Dragon Con every year and every year I do I put together a full costume and I walk the floor in the costume and it is it is I I it's not a stunt I love putting on costumes I love the transformation it is a weird thing to love it feels like a foot fetish um I am definitely getting the full experience of what it's like to be Chewbacca um and and there's a part of me so a great example is that we did this show on MythBusters called dumpster diving and the movies The Action Hero will often jump into a dumpster to save himself at the end of a Chase sequence sure so is it really that safe to jump into dumpsters we went to the dump and we found a one full of medical waste that wasn't good for jumping in and then we found a mattress factories that was good for jumping in and I got trained by a stunt man how to jump into a dump had a jump from 20 ft which is terrifying absolutely I was physically ill at the end of The Dump looks this big from only 20 your body just won't doesn't want you to step over the threshold I was physically ill from the adrenaline the repeated Adrenaline Rush um so the way we' plotted the sequence was I was going Jamie and I were going to wear sweatsuits that said stunt trainee uhhuh we look like Russian pimps um and we would jump off that would be the first day and then we'd have a transition so different costume I'm always thinking terms of the costumes you know from the show so I thought I'm going to dress like Neo I'm going to get a nice flowing black Co so I got these big black boots on hate Street and I got this long coat on eBay and I put on these gold glasses in my contacts and I I walked out from around the back of my car and my crew saw me standing there and they I watched a whole crew of people who know me as well as anybody in my family knows me and we've worked together for eight years and they all went you can still surprise them and I felt like I was I felt that feeling of being 10 years old and embarrassed or you know even 15 and embarrassed there's still Legos in my room during the tour for the girl um and yet I was thinking no no no push past this cuz you know this is going to look freaking fantastic on highspeed camera and I did my first jump and my director came out came over she said I I was a little dubious and I thought it was foolish and then I saw that high-speed shot and full marks that was was amazing yeah so there is still to me and so I recognize that coming right up to that point of embarrassment of of being vulnerable like that is my stock and trade it's the thing that is making me my living and it's the thing that's making everything possible so I have to keep on doing that it's it's not it's not a comfortable place to walk the floor in costume it's weird and it's complicated and there's all sorts of things you have to confront about yourself if you love wearing costumes like that or you know want to be Hellboy and you know whatever that says about you but examining it is is is important and I realize it's also important for the 14-year-old kids I think about out there in the world that want to go do the thing that they want to do [ __ ] it they totally should and if they can see me do this and that's gets them down that path that's that's the I checked it's the least I can [Music] do thank you thank you very much um we uh we talked a little bit backst AG about hopefully uh a day not too long off when you and Jamie can both sit at uh our table our normal table in Sant Monica which is slightly larger than this and enough to accommodate both of you um and this has been uh a while coming for my own designs and desires and so this is uh not just the live part but of course you being here and and um I can't thank you enough I will try to figure out a way um and I I didn't want to forget though that you uh uh made an attempt to uh offer up a presentation St absolutely and I said let's save it for them you're a big fan of the show so I wanted to give you this in uh military and uh police units any kind of paramilitary unit uh there's a tradition called challenge coins and the challenge coin is a Talisman that every member of the unit carries and the the the requirement of the challenge coin is that you carry in your pocket at all times and if any member of your unit brings out his challenge coin everyone in the room has to bring out theirs and the last person to do it or whoever's forgotten there has to buy the round so over Christmas this year on our 8th anniversary of the show I uh I made a set of challenge coins and I'm giving you one there oh man thank you so much thank you so much Here's to Never buying around uh all I have for you is a chat show mug uh I'm $20 richer than when I started yeah that's that's more than that cause you've made a profit today sir nicely done I will cherish this forever as well as our conversation thank you so much Adam Savage everybody uh sit there uncomfortably while I wrap up yes Adam uh like all of our previous 98 guests before him uh will sit there uncomfortably while I wrap things up for the folks at home and around the world large um what a spectacular routing this has been um far less uh troubleshooting along the way and and problem solving as I had anticipated I want to thank of course uh the crew that worked uh behind the scenes Jeff up there in the sound booth and uh our our our sound man here today tell me your name again I'm sorry Mike Mike thank you again Mike very much for helping out I don't want to yes I want to bring out um the remaining members of our crew who really uh other than the crew gag uh each week aren't seen uh behind the scenes as they work outside the studio first let's bring up uh JM where's JM all right your bastard J there he is outside smoking yeah he we caught him in between cigarettes Jason McIntyre everybody bring up JM Take a Bow come on up Josh nean stand over here come on you guys center stage now come on can we cut Emily and let Emily come up while Mike uh somebody has to run the tricast right Emily Goodwin who runs sound and one of our producers Mike rotman our director have we left no one at the helm yeah and uh Jamie and Sam of course as Emily continues running the show from the tri cter and and everyone else who worked here behind the scenes at cobs and at sketchfest to make this possible thank you very much and as always until next time get out of my face he's all of the rainbows but none of the rain he's dry but he's an now alol he's hosting this train rank again and again and he wears a hat he's ke p

Channel: kevinpollakschatshow

Views: 67,295

Keywords: kevin pollak, adam savage, mythbusters

Id: 2K8TSzXl7t8

Length: 121min 49sec (7309 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2011