#370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons

"A true creator knows that you follow the thing to where it's going, not to where you think it ought to go." — Adam Savage Adam Savage (TW: @donttrythis https://twitter.com/donttrythis IG: @therealadamsavage https://www.instagram.com/therealadamsavage/ FB: therealadamsavage https://www.facebook.com/therealadamsavage) has spent his life gathering skills that allow him to take what's in his brain and make it real. He's built everything from ancient Buddhas and futuristic weapons to fine-art sculptures and dancing vegetables. The son of a filmmaker/painter and a psychotherapist, Adam's previous positions include projectionist, animator, graphic designer, carpenter, interior and stage designer, toy designer, welder, and scenic painter. And he's worked with every material and in every medium he could fathom—metal, paper, glass, plastic, rubber, foam, plaster, pneumatics, hydraulics, animatronics, neon, glassblowing, moldmaking, and injection molding, to name just a few. In 1993, Adam began concentrating his career on the special-effects industry, honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Galaxy Quest, and the Matrix sequels. A decade later, Adam was chosen, along with Jamie Hyneman, to host MythBusters, which premiered on Discovery Channel in January 2003. 14 years; 1,015 myths; 2,950 experiments; eight Emmy nominations; and 83 miles of duct tape later, that version of the series ended in March 2016. Today, Adam hosts and executive produces MythBusters Jr., as well as a brand-new series, Savage Builds, which premieres on Science Channel in June 2019. He also stars in and produces content for Tested.com http://tested.com/, including behind-the-scenes dives into multiple blockbuster films (including Alien Covenant, Mortal Combat, and Blade Runner). In addition, after a lifetime of hunting for the perfect bag, Adam launched Savage Industries and began manufacturing his own, along with MAFIA BAGS. Made in the United States and constructed primarily from recycled sailcloth, every bag is not only durable and lightweight but unique, as well. The current line (available at AdamSavage.com http://adamsavage.com/) includes two sizes of the EDC ("Everyday Carry") and pouches, with more product both available on the site and on the way. Finally, in 2019 Adam wrote his first book, Every Tool's a Hammer https://www.amazon.com/Every-Tools-Hammer-Life-What/dp/1982113472/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which is, in Adam's words, "...a chronicle of my life as a maker. It's an exploration of making and of my own productive obsessions, but it's also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you're interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you." * This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at AthleticGreens.com/tim http://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  sustainable farming practices, for instance. So...

• 1:56Tim Ferriss?

  Whether you want to feel better about where you buy your goodies because of those reasons I just mentioned, or if you just want a really unique and delicious gift for yourself or someone else, Theo Chocolate has you covered. They are available in Whole Foods and other grocery stores across the US. And for listeners of this podcast, Theo is offering 15% off your online purchase at TheoChocolate.com. You can use code on checkout, TIM15. That's code TIM15. Or easiest is probably to visit TheoChocolate.com/Tim for more details. And you can check them all out, but don't forget Salted Almond Butter Cups.

• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If I could only take one supplement, what would it be?" The answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that, and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick, or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance, and overall, it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from Whole Food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count travel

• 3:20Tim Ferriss?

  pack for first-time users. I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one-dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first-time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at AthleticGreens.com/Tim. Again, that's AthleticGreens.com/Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

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

• 4:32Tim Ferriss?

  And he's worked with every material and in every medium you can possibly imagine: metal, paper, glass, plastic, rubber, foam, plaster, pneumatics, hydraulics, animatronics, neon glass, blowing, mold making, and injection molding, just to name a few. And in 1993, Adam began concentrating his career on the special effects industry, which we talk quite a bit about, honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars Episode 1, Episode 2, Galaxy Quest, and The Matrix sequels. A decade later, Adam was chosen, along with Jamie Hyneman, to host Mythbusters: You May Have Heard Of It, which premiered on Discovery Channel in 2003. 14 years, 1,015 myths,

• 5:14Tim Ferriss?

  2,950 experiments, eight Emmy nominations, and 83 miles of duct tape later, that version of the series ended in March 2016. Adam is never still for long. Today, he hosts and executive produces Mythbusters Jr. as well as a brand-new series, Savage Builds, which premieres on the Science Channel in June of 2019. That may have already happened, depending on when you listen to this. He also stars in and produces content for Tested.com, including behind-the-scenes dives into multiple blockbuster films, including Alien: Covenant, Mortal Kombat, and Blade Runner. He also has launched Savage Industries and has begun to manufacture his own bags.

• 5:57Tim Ferriss?

  Along with Mafia Bags, made in the US and constructed primarily from recycled sailcloth. Every bag is not only durable and lightweight, but unique as well. And the current line, you can find it at adam savage dot com, includes two sizes of the EDC, that is Everyday Carry, and pouches with more on the way. Last but not least, this year, that is 2019, Adam wrote his first book, which is fantastic. Every Tool's a Hammer is the title and the description is, quote, "A Chronicle of My Life as a Maker." "It's an exploration of making and my own productive obsessions, but it's also a permission slip of sorts from me to you." That's me, Adam, to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you're interested in, that fascinate you, and to

• 6:40Tim Ferriss?

  dive deeper into them to see where they lead you, end quote. You can find out all about it at adam savage book dot com. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with the ever entertaining Adam Savage. And one last thing, if you want to see the video of this conversation, because he is highly, highly, highly, highly animated, and he is in his workshop, so you see little goodies that he's showing off, you can just go to youtube dot com forward slash Tim Ferriss, two R's, two S's, to check that out. So, eh, voila.

• 7:18Tim Ferriss?

  Adam, welcome to the show.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tim. It's so awesome to see you, at least virtually, on my screen.

• 7:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, indeed, and there's going to be no shortage of things to get into, and I thought we might start, some people will be listening to this audio only, but I couldn't help but notice a piece of, maybe not memorabilia, because you probably made it yourself, but there is a no face behind you in your workshop, and for those who don't know, it is from arguably my favorite film of all time, which is an animated film, Miyazaki, called Spirited Away. And could you please explain, because I don't know, why you have a no face behind you?

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Um, so Spirited Away is also one of my favorite films of all time, without a qualifier that it's animated. Hayao Miyazaki is one of the world's great treasures as a storyteller. And Spirited Away is a mind-blowing film. I love explaining to people that it's an entire universe that you only get the tiniest details about, and yet you're clear it's a completely consistent universe. And the film is about a little girl who loses her identity in the spirit world, uh, and with the help of this strange, uh, needy spirit named Konoyoshi, uh, or No Face, uh, she, uh, gets her name back and is able to escape the spirit world.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  And at one point in the mid 90s, I was at a Halloween party and I saw a really terrible rendition of No Face, but still seeing a No Face in person made me, "Ohhhhh", jump, and I thought, "I really want some of that." So, once I started attending Comic-Con really regularly, uh, and thinking about putting on big costumes, uh, I made a No Face costume. I think it was my third or fourth con. And it is, I, I have over 75 costumes and some, I mean, like the Kane, the Kane space suit from Alien behind me, that took, uh, 14 years and cost me probably, I have probably $10,000 of my own money invested in that suit and the commissions and the collaborations. No Face here cost me about 75 bucks.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  I think the most expensive single item was arm-length, um, matte satin gloves from the lusty lady drag queen store here on Mission Street that's no longer around. (laughing) Um, and even though it was the most expensive costume, and I put it together in about a day, uh, the effect that it had on people when I hit the floor at San Diego Comic-Con was shocking. And not just shocking like they were surprised, but I was also handing out gold coins to people from beneath my- Oh, amazing. Uh, I had chocolate gold coins. So every time I took a photo, I'd hand one out to someone. And then someone's, people started giving me back the gold coins angrily. I could feel them grab my hand, put the coin in, and it turned out that of course it's

• 10:15Speaker 03

  no, it's, it's bad luck to take gold from No Face in the film. And this was like the expansion of my mind about what cosplay really was, that it is a form of theater where the audience and the performers are all one thing, and we are all playing on a, on a, about a narrative that we love. Uh, and it just, it started a lifelong fascination with what that process is. The process of putting on costumes, transformation, enjoying that transformation with others who are as weird and wonderful as you are. And, uh, you know, it's, there's no end to it. And No Face was where that first tick of consciousness about what it could be.

• 10:53Tim Ferriss?

  I am so glad I asked, and I encourage everyone to try to see this film. I, I remember searching desperately a few years ago. I didn't want to find it on Pirate Bay or somewhere else. I really wanted to pay for it, but it was so difficult to find Miyazaki films digitally. I couldn't find it years ago.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, they still don't stream. Um, you have to buy physical DVDs. And this, this is actually, you know, I, I've been recently getting into more Japanese anime, um, and some of the really, you know, Satoshi Ono and, uh, I'm not getting that name right. I'm sorry, but like, there's some amazing filmmakers and so little of great Japanese animated cinema streams in the US. So I'm firing back up my old DVD drives for the, for the laptop in order to be able to watch them.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, everybody should check it out. It's, uh, the name in Japanese, which I think is Sen to Chihiro no Kami Kakuji, or something like that. And the, she loses her name, but is given a new one, which is one character in her full name, which is Chihiro. So Chi in sen are pronounced the same way in Japanese. In any case, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole too far, but I thought we could, we could flashback and tie this obsessive tendency or tendencies really that you've harnessed for the greater good and certainly as a career, all the way back to a suit of armor, at least that's how I would describe it, that you built,

• 12:27Tim Ferriss?

  I want to say sophomore year in high school. Could you tell, could you tell, could you tell us about this suit of armor?

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the suit of armor has its origins in 1982 of going to see, which was the year, which was, which was my sophomore year in high school. Uh, 1982, John Boorman's film Excalibur came out with an amazing cast of Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, uh, and some wonderful British actors like Nigel Terry, who played Arthur from the age of 17 to the age of 65. And I was blown away by this film. The armor in it is so beautiful. The knights wear their armor all the time, which was certainly something I wanted to do at 14, 15 years old. And I made, I made two suits of armor inspired by that film in high school.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  The first one was in my sophomore year, I made one out of cardboard, replete with a white horse that I wore around me, like one of those silly horse costumes. And then I made one out of roofing aluminum and pop rivets. And it's where I learned, my dad taught me all about pop rivets and we used about a thousand of them in this suit. And I wore it to class. I felt amazing. And I immediately passed out of heat exhaustion in third period from the oven that I was wearing. And I woke up in the nurse's office. And like, this is one of those moments in life where you feel like a screenwriter is writing it and maybe they're a little too on the nose. Because I woke up without the armor on.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Because they, they basically removed it from me because I'd passed out. And I woke up and went, "Oh, where's my armor?" It's like, alright, I get the analogy of the armor being both physical and theoretical, but Jesus, we can tone it down just a little bit.

• 14:15Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you, as I understand it, have your hands in a lot of projects, a lot of materials. You've developed many divergent skills that then converged in interesting ways. In high school, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

• 14:35Speaker 03

  I thought I was going to be an actor. I was, the drama club was definitely my people. The theater group in high school were my people. It was where I found acceptance and camaraderie and collaboration. And by the time I was... Fifteen, when I was fifteen, I wanted to take it seriously and I knew that my dad had worked in advertising in the sixties. And so he reached out to an old friend of his, Charlie Kimbrough. Charlie is famous for playing Jim Dial on Murphy Brown. Um, and Charlie was one of my dad's oldest friends and Charlie introduced me to his agent at I C M. Doris Mance and she took me on and started sending me out on commercials and I got the first commercial I auditioned for,

• 15:21Speaker 03

  which was to play Mr. Whipple's stock boy in a Charmin commercial. And I thought, oh, this is it. It's that easy. I went on an audition. I got a great job. Uh, I then played, um, second lead in a Billy Joel music video and I did a few more commercials and stuff like that. And I really thought that acting was going to be it. Um, I even went to N Y U for six months and studied acting at Tisch School for the Arts before realizing that, um, my peers in that program were really serious about the craft of acting. And I wanted to be an actor. And there was a, I, I got very quickly that there was a fundamental difference between their drive to study the thing and my desire to be a thing.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Um, my desire wasn't a real desire. It was, it was, it was more like a theater. It was more like a theater flat of desire. There was nothing behind it. Um, so I ended up giving that up and by nineteen, I stopped going out on auditions and I stopped taking it seriously. And I started, uh, concentrating on what I was doing for work, which was to be a graphic designer and assistant animator. And I started doing a lot more working with my hands.

• 16:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I, I had read that in your twenties, you were concerned at points about being highly unspecialized. Um, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet, so feel free to, to correct me, but, uh...

• 16:52Tim Ferriss?

  It reads, and this I think is a transcript actually, but I actually spent an inordinate amount of my time in my twenties thinking that I was too unspecialized. Uh, could you comment on that and how you got to a point where you didn't feel like you were too unspecialized or that that was a liability?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, so my early, I lived in Manhattan from age eighteen to twenty-three, uh, from nineteen eighty-five to nineteen ninety, and then I moved to San Francisco. And the move is really the turning point for me in that understanding of specialization. And the fact is, my, my, my closest friend still in New York, uh, was telling me in nineteen eighty-six, "Your problem," he said, "is that you have talent but no ambition."

• 17:42Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 17:43Speaker 03

  "Believe?" And he goes, "Yeah, if you had ambition, you wouldn't be talking to me. You'd be saying, 'I'm sorry, Mr. George Lucas, I can't make that by Tuesday.'"

• 17:52Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 17:53Speaker 03

  And he really was totally correct. This was a guy who'd been born and raised in Manhattan. And the thing that I now understand is that Manhattan is an amazing city if you know what you want out of Manhattan. It is a place built on and for ambition. And the people who, uh, get their work out and get seen in Manhattan have busted their ass to do it because it's the singular focus in their life. And it means culturally, it's a really important city because only the stuff that has been fought for gets to your attention. Um, and I think that many great cities are like that. Los Angeles is totally like that, Chicago, um, and London, et cetera. You know, the world's great cities are worlds

• 18:37Speaker 03

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

• 19:21Speaker 03

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

• 20:06Speaker 03

  from the theater industry into the film industry, I, film and commercial television, special effects, was where I all of a sudden saw that everything I'd been doing was leading towards this. Like, this was an industry in which all of my excitement and creativity and passion and drive could be pointed in a singular direction. And so I was like, oh, I'm gonna give everything over to this.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  Did you notice that in a moment, in a flash, or did it take a while to see sort of like the end of The Usual Suspects, or the red doorknob at the end of The Sixth Sense, or whatever? Did it take a while to realize that it was that, or did you recognize it immediately?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  No, so it happened like this. So I was working in theater for several years, Eureka Theater, Berkeley Rev, Beach Blanket Babylon. And I started getting reputation for solving weird problems. And that got the attention of Jamie Hyneman, who was running a shop at Colossal Pictures. And he brought me in. We had a great interview, and I ended up working for Jamie. On and off full time for about four or five years. Just before I was working for Jamie, I was working at Berklee Repertory Theater and I was working at Beachplank at Babylon. And so I was basically putting in an eight hour day during the day. I was then doing three hours of a show every night and I was still staying all night long

• 21:36Speaker 03

  making sculpture in my studio in Hunter's Point. So I was like never sleeping. I was just a one man building machine. And when I started working for Jamie full time, I noticed after about a year that I was no longer staying up all night building stuff. And I thought, huh. And then I thought, I think this is specifically because this work is satisfying all of that creative problem solving that I get in my studio. And then I went further and thought, oh, this is why so many people in film and special effects say things like, I used to be an artist.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  Huh.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  And I resolved at that moment, I get this. I get that this work for commerce is satisfying the emotional and aesthetic need I have to explore this type of problem solving I was exploring in my art. And now I can point all of that in towards this career. And I am steadfastly never going to say I used to be an artist because it is the same mechanism. I recognized it and I still do stuff for myself that's weird and sculptural and different. I still apply that aesthetic and I didn't think, I think most importantly, I didn't consider it a loss of a purity.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  To take that energy and point it towards something that had to do with commerce because I also saw that the commerce was feeding me, that the, that this was a thing I could call a career and hell's bells if it gave me the same kind of output thrill as making art, screw it, let's totally go towards this and see where it leads.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  Are there skills, in this, this, I have one answer for myself in mind, I'm not asking you to parrot it, but are there skills that you developed along the way that have ended up being very important to the success of Adam now? And the background in theater, for instance?

• 23:40Tim Ferriss?

  Seems like it might be one of those force multipliers for a lot of what you've been able to do. Are there any other kind of overlaid skills, kind of like Warren Buffett in public speaking, right? He feels like public speaking just makes you, in many cases, unique or better at everything else. And so you don't have to be necessarily like Michael Jordan, top 1% of 1% of 1%. You could be top 10% in three things that are very rarely combined. And I'm just curious if any, any other skills or attributes come to mind?

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, there's a, there's a, a family story in my family that in the, in the mid 60s, my dad partnered up with a producer in New York and they formed a consortium. And my dad's partner would be the business side and my dad would be the creative side. And at the time, his partner had more experience in the advertising industry and he said, "We're gonna make a big splash about forming this consortium. We're gonna put ads out, we're gonna get articles in Millimeter and all these other trade magazines. And I gotta tell you, if you start to believe in your own bullshit, I'm gonna cut you loose." So there was always a family ethos about not believing your own bullshit. And it's

• 25:01Speaker 03

  a necessary family ethos because my family, because, because the men in my family can tend to be very full of shit, myself included. So watching the watcher and watching out for that drinking your own Kool-Aid is definitely an ethos I grew, I was raised with. You're right, theater is a force multiplier for its camaraderie, its low threshold to entry. In fact, I think theater as an art has the lowest threshold to entry because if there's an apocalypse and there are 14 people left in San Francisco and they fight each other and make a campfire, theater is the first art form that they will explore together.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  They will start telling stories and then they will start performing those stories because we as humans, we need narratives to help us make sense of the world. So I love theater. I have an abiding passion for it. And it was where, when I was working in theater and I saw something I didn't know about, I can go, "Hey, what about that?" And someone would make the opportunity for me, "Oh, I'll show you how I do that." So for me, you know, as soon as I got into film, it doubled my income because unfortunately, the pay in theater is still really crappy. So I didn't look back from film. But the experiences that I had in theater, of the camaraderie, of the learning everything that I could get

• 26:27Speaker 03

  my hands on, and of that low threshold of entry, really have informed most of the rest of what I've done. You know, but all that being said, there's a quote in Steve Martin's book Born Standing Up, when someone says to him, "You will eventually use everything you've ever learned." And it's so true, because that early acting training I had made me way more fearless about being in front of people and being myself and being out there than I would have otherwise been. And I think, you know, like you were saying about Warren Buffett and public speaking, that ability to perform is, it's the A, it's part, it's

• 27:09Speaker 03

  one of the biggest As in steam. If you want someone to understand your scientific proof, you have to explain it. And explaining it is an art form. It is, it is the art of getting your argument across. And nobody can do that in a vacuum. And so, one of the things I thought was most amazing when Mythbusters showed up is I was like, "Oh, look at that. The performer sat dormant for 15 years, and while the maker was ascendant." And then all of a sudden, this opportunity showed up, and the performer and the maker get to meet on the same plane.

• 27:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's really, it's been fun, it's been a lot of fun to watch your career. I want a second Born Standing Up. That is an incredible memoir. I listened to it actually while I lived in San Francisco. I walked the streets of San Francisco listening to the audiobook. Just a fantastic, fantastic story.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  One thing about the audiobook that I was sad about, because we, I read it, and then on a big road trip, I read it out loud to my wife, she read it out loud to me. And then we got the audiobook and we listened to Steve Martin read it. And the only problem I had with the audiobook was that Steve Martin didn't fully commit to his recapitulation of his own comedy bits.

• 28:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. That would have, that would have been the icing on the cake. I-

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Which I get, totally get, and I don't begrudge that he must have had a very real and reasonable reason. I just, I, I, I grew up on his stand-up comedy and I wanted to hear it again.

• 28:36Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to revisit 2008. And I mentioned 2008 because I think it might have been the first time we ever bumped into each other very briefly in person. I want to say it could have been, and this was at the Entertainment Gathering, the EG. And it was certainly for me up to that point, my highest pressure, if you want to call it that, public speaking engagement. I was very, very nervous. And for those who don't know, the EG, I think the, an easy way to describe it would be a smaller TED created by the same person who created TED, Richard Saul Werman. He was a very funny guy.

• 29:21Tim Ferriss?

  And it was, I want to say at the time, what would you say, 500 attendees, something like that. And I remember-

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Not even.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  Not even.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  It was very intimate.

• 29:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was very small. And I remember, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I want to say that you gave a presentation that involved the Maltese Falcon.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Well, that was that year, yes, it was.

• 29:46Tim Ferriss?

  And, and what struck me, aside from the fact that it was a fantastic presentation, what struck me was that you, I don't know if you remember this, you started, you went for about 30 seconds, and then kind of like Adele when she did this tribute song for George Michael not too long ago, you stopped and said, "Nope, I want to start that over." And then you started over. And you just nailed it. I mean, the word per minute rate was so outrageous. It was clear that you really had planned and rehearsed and prepped for this. But I had never seen someone- Call an audible like that and start over.

• 30:31Tim Ferriss?

  And I was so impressed because I remember thinking, if I fuck up my talk, I will not have the confidence to do that. Was that the first time that you'd done that? And how do you think about, or how do you prepare for public speaking like that?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  That's a great question because there's many, many layers to this. First of all, that talk started its life as a 10-minute throwaway talk I did at IDEO at one of their evenings they called Quickies. They parade a bunch of people and each one does a quick, rapid-fire talk. And I thought, oh, let me talk something about something that's weird and personal. I'll talk about how much time I spent on the Maltese Falcon. And I came off, I was followed by the world yo-yo champion who just blew the whole house away. It was a lovely, fun evening. And coming off the stage, I ran into Kevin Kelly, who said, "That's a really good talk." Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, Cool Tools.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Kevin is one of the Forrest Gump's of the internet, along with Stuart Brand and a few others.

• 31:39Tim Ferriss?

  Totally, yeah, totally.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  And Kevin said, "That was a lovely talk." And I was like, "Thank you, Kevin." And he said, "I think you should workshop that." And I said, "I have no idea what that means." And he said, "I think you should continue to give that talk and keep refining it because I think there's a really great talk inside of it." And about a month later, my wife and my kids and I were in Nashville Airport, waiting to change planes. And we ran into this other nuclear family, John Ennis and Arlene Klot and their kids. And Arlene and Beth Lissick run Porchlight, as they have for the past 20 years in San Francisco. And we started conversing, and we've since become friends. We've been friends forever now.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  But she said, "I'm about to do this talk, I'm about to do a Porchlight on obsession. Are you interested in giving a talk?" And I was like, "Fascinatingly, I have a talk that I'm working on about obsession." So I went to Cafe de Nord. And I gave a version of the Maltese Falcon talk at the old Café de Nord, where the audience is sitting all at your knees and you're right in front of them and among them. And it was one of those electric nights where it was, everything fired on all cylinders. And I thought, I've got a really extra, extra special talk here. I'm really, I can't wait to, to give it again. And that's when, that was the second year I had been to EG, I think, maybe even the third year. At any rate, in going to EG and having workshop this talk,

• 33:06Speaker 03

  I decided that I wanted to rehearse it really, really precisely. Um, and part of the, part of that meant that I wanted to tell the story with a lot of imagery. I wanted it to feel cacophonous because that's the way my obsessions feel in my brain. I wanted the, the talk to feel kind of like a river moving past you. So I think I have something like 120 slides in 13 minutes. Um, and the, the rhythm is really important. I think in the very beginning of that talk, I gave this, I say, a, a, a cachet or cache of dodo bones was found. And that naturally happened the first time I was rehearsing the talk.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  And then I thought, I'm building that in because I think I can make it sound honest and true. I think I can act to that moment. And so this was the first time I had taken a talk and turned it into a bit of theater. And so when I was up there and I was rolling through the slides, because if you remember, the first one was taking a bunch of shots of Google Earth and zooming in on the island of Mauritius off the east coast of Madagascar. And that rhythm between the words and the imagery, it was music. And I could tell in that first pass that I was out of step. And because I, I was trying little things to get back in step and they weren't working. And I thought, you know what, I'm, in my head, I'm doing this for two audiences. I'm doing this for the audience here, but I know they're recording this.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  And I want the recording to be good, so screw it. I, no, I'm not going to get in trouble for asking to start again. And in fact, I may even bring the crowd more with me. This is a net plus. And that comes from, you know, the more you do public speaking, the more you encounter the fact that each audience has a kind of a character to it. And some are difficult, some are easy, some of the difficult ones can be your best audiences. If you, when you find that rhythm. And the EG audience, like the TED audience, is a heady and intense crowd of people to perform for. I mean, years later, I did, about four years ago, I did a juggling talk for the EG, and

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Michael Hawley, who runs it, neglected to tell me that all of the flying Karamazov brothers would be in the audience when I was doing my juggling. And I got heckled by the Karamazov brothers. But all this is by way of saying, I do, I give talks in many different ways. Whenever, when I, I talk every year at the San Mateo Maker Fair, and when I do that talk, I do very little rehearsal for it. I want it to feel and be raw and off the cuff, because I feel that I owe that to my fellow makers. I want them to see that it is not all polished and perfection, and I want to be a little vulnerable with them. But when I spoke at TED in Vancouver four years ago, I rehearsed that talk so many times,

• 36:03Speaker 03

  I forgot it. And then on stage, it came to me as if a fresh thing. But a funny thing happened on that TED, on the TED stage, when I was doing the talk about cosplay, which was about a minute in, I thought to myself, "Fuck, I'm ahead of myself. I'm thinking a little too far ahead, and consequently, I'm not taking the spaces with the, with the words and the concepts in this moment, because I'm running this, the forward track a little too far forward." And then I thought, "You're always this far ahead in the first minute. Relax, it'll be fine."

• 36:43Tim Ferriss?

  So you have the watcher, you have the speaker, you have the watcher watching the watcher, and then you have the watcher watching the watcher. That's really remarkable.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  I love the exercise. I love the exercise of interacting with the crowd. I love the laughs that come where you don't expect. I love, well, I particularly love the gasp. When you can create a piece where the audience goes, "Oh." I've only done it a few times. As David Mamet points out, you can easily blackmail an audience into a standing ovation. It is impossible to blackmail them into a gasp. And thus, a gasp, as far as I'm concerned, the highest possible achievement you can attain on stage.

• 37:28Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about workshopping. Well, actually, this goes far beyond workshopping. Could you talk to the origin of the phrase "failure is always an option," please?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  So that grew out of a joke on set. It was the first season of Mythbusters. We were, I think we were trying to make biscuit dough explode inside a hot car. And this was, this was the first season. We had no, we had no infrastructure. We didn't know what we were doing. Jamie and I were still brand new to building scientific methods and thinking through worst-case scenarios. It didn't occur to us that even with 10 space heaters, it would be really hard to get the temperature inside a car above 100 degrees. And it took hours and hours and hours, and we're sitting there, and it is so boring. And we're also realizing that, like, are we getting enough on camera?

• 38:28Speaker 03

  And I turned to the camera and I just said, "Remember, kids, failure is always an option." Because I was thinking, my sense of humor runs, what is the opposite of the right thing to say? Like, to me, the worst possible thing you could say is sort of like a stress reliever just to imagine in my head. I don't then say it, but sometimes when I find a joke where you say the opposite of what you should say, it pleases me. And "failure is always an option" was, that's a wrong thing to say in that moment. And they cut it into a show, and it became a kind of a catchphrase. And then I realized, once people started saying it back to me, that there's a deep scientific truth about it.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  That the idea of success or failure to a certain extent is anathema to scientific exploration. And when I say scientific explanation, the qualifier is exploration of any kind. And when you want to explore anything in a rigorous way, you're doing it using the scientific method. Just by default, you're comparing the results to previous things or building the future experiments based on the things you've learned in the past.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  And, you know, in film, we have the mad scientist go, "Damn it, my experiment was a failure." And a scientist doesn't say that. A scientist said, "I screwed up my methodology. I don't have enough results." Or, "Wow, the outcome was totally not what I expected." And to be honest, that's usually why the fictional villain is upset, because the results are the opposite of what they wanted. But a real scientist who comes up with the results that are the opposite of what they thought is the most thrilled human being you've ever met. They are ecstatic that their expectations and their biases have been turned on their heads. And they have now this brand-new, much wider understanding of what's going on.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  And that might be called failure by a neophyte who doesn't understand the scientific method, but to a scientist, that's opening up the whole world.

• 40:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite failures that come to mind? And that could be a failure that set you up for something you later considered a success.

• 40:35Tim Ferriss?

  It does not have to be Mythbusters-specific, could be from any point, but any failures that in retrospect ended up being very, very helpful?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Well, so, in fact, I had forgotten until you reminded me just now that at that EG talk, I stopped and restarted. And that is a huge example. That was the first time I'd ever done something like that on stage. And I realize now that it was inspired by a singer who I love named Jane Sibbory. And Jane Cibery famously did a beautiful duet with Katie Lang called Calling All Angels that was part of the Until the End of the World soundtrack way back when. And she's an incredible singer, has written many of my favorite songs. And back in the 90s, I used to see her perform whenever she came through San Francisco. And I saw her with a jazz ensemble at one point.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  And she started a song and 10 bars in was like, "Stop, everyone stop. We didn't get that one right. Let's go back to the top." And I thought, "What glorious balls to do that offstage." Like, and again, it brought the audience closer to her to do that. And I logged that and I'm sure that I was thinking of that at that moment. I was like, "I'm gonna do what I saw that I thought was courageous. I'm gonna do that thing." That's not necessarily a failure in the traditional sense. And I think the distinction is important because we talk a lot, I'm sure. I know that in the lingua franca of self-improvement and making your output as impactful as you can,

• 42:12Speaker 03

  we talk a lot about helping kids to fail, helping them learn to fail. In Silicon Valley, build fast and break things. But we don't mean failure. We actually are lying. It's a great word, catches your attention, which is important, but it's not what we really mean. And I like to point out that real failure is getting drunk and missing your kid's birthday party. That, that's failing at what you should be doing. What we really mean when we say failure is we mean iteration. We mean the creative process is messy and it's iterative and you have to go, you have to chase up a lot of wrong branches in order to get to the right one. And you're never gonna end up where you think you're gonna end up. And while some people may think that that's a failure, a true creator knows that you

• 42:56Speaker 03

  follow the thing to where it's going, not to where you think it ought to go. So, you know, I have a couple of jobs I did where I took them on without the correct amount of experience or foresight and I screwed them up. I've done jobs so poorly that I lost friends. I've done jobs so badly I didn't sleep for 60 hours and, you know, delivered something that was way not what the client wanted. And I still feel shame and sadness over those moments. But the fact that I got through those and the fact that I was able to see past them and learn from them.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  I remember at one point, the one, the job that I did that I lost a friend on, um, when she told me, "You couldn't have done anything more to make it clear that I should not be friends with you." That's how she put it. And I like called my dad. I was, I was nineteen, I was weeping into the phone and he said, "Look, "You can't change what happened. You can't, you can't fix that." Um, "The only thing you can do, and you can't even tell her about this. You can take in what you did. "You can absorb it, realize what mechanism in you led to that screw up, "and resolve to not do that again." And that is what, that's what being a human is about. It's about noticing those things and trying not to do them again.

• 44:19Tim Ferriss?

  You think about, it strikes me that you think about your own thinking a fair amount, uh, which, which I've, I've, I think is worth digging into a little bit. By way of looking at influences. Uh, and I, I'd read that you were, I think in your own words, "radicalized by Noam Chomsky in your late, in your late teens." Could you speak to that and then also any other authors or thinkers, philosophers, anyone who has helped sh- shape your thinking or impacted you?

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Oh my God, there's so many. I mean, you know, uh, starting off by reading all of Harlan Ellison's weird and complicated semi-misogynist canon back in my late teens, uh, to Kurt Vonnegut, who showed me that you could have rigor and deep affection and love all at the same time. Um, to Richard Feynman, who showed that, you know, you can be, you, there are, it is genuinely possible for there to be brilliant polymaths in the world who can explore many disciplines and be at the top of their field at any of them. Um, I, you know, all of that comes into play. Uh, Chomsky is amazing for...

• 45:41Speaker 03

  It's funny, because I'm thinking a lot about Chomsky now. There are two current schools of political thought about our current situation. And especially as somebody who vehemently disagrees with everything the GOP is currently doing. These two schools of thought are important distinctions. One is that Trump is an aberration, and all we need to do is win in 2020, and we can erase that aberration and get back to the status quo. The other is that Trump is a symbol, or a measure, of just how screwed up our culture really, really is. And that we're going to need to open up and take a look at those parts of our culture

• 46:23Speaker 03

  that we might not want to notice, and understand how each of us is complicit in that, and really work towards building a society that we all want to live in. Those two distinctions are really important. And understanding, my clarity for me is that I think that Trump is a symbol of what's wrong, of a significant amount of what's wrong with America. And Chomsky is coming back into this. You know, as I've been very upset about Trump, I get very upset about how the New York Times covers him, because I feel so much both-sides-ism in the New York Times. And I read the New York Times, and I feel like it's the pot of boiling water, and I'm the frog. And then I think back to Noam Chomsky, and he's been telling me the New York Times supports the status quo and the power structure since 1984.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Like, that's when I read my first Noam Chomsky pamphlet. And it is about that, you're asking these questions culturally. And you may just, you know, whoever's listening to this may disagree with me politically, and that's totally fine. I'm assuming that if we're all good actors, acting in good faith, we're simply trying to make the world a better place for our kids, and our friends, and our family. And as long as, you know, you're with me on that, I'm happy to disagree with you about the methods we use. But asking those cultural questions is about being part of a culture, and trying to help define it so you can be a better part of it all at the same time. And it goes back to what you were saying, that watching The Watcher, which is a very Buddhist, that, you know, Dharma is full of exhortations to be able to meta-shift yourself

• 47:50Speaker 03

  so you see above the plane of what's going on. I remember at one point, speaking of watching The Watcher, I remember at one point having an argument with a partner of mine at the time, and we were, it was one of those arguments where you both feel super vulnerable, but no one wants to give, and you attack. You both attacked. And I thought to myself,

• 48:13Speaker 03

  I have no idea what to do with this situation. Neither of us wants to budge. How do we get out of this? And then I thought, okay, let's say I was writing this scene as a screenplay.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  This is again, it's a shift, right? I'm watching The Watcher and I thought, if I'm writing a screenplay and I'm writing my character, how does the audience feel about my character? Oh, they don't like him. I've lost the audience. The last thing I said was shitty. And because I was looking to attack, the audience can see that. They can see my vulnerability and my venality and they no longer are with me. And then I thought, if I was rewriting this scene, how would I bring the audience back to my character's side? And I realized, oh, by being vulnerable and telling the truth. And so I kind of wrote the scene in my head as I said it, which was, I am really sorry for the thing that I just said. I am not upset with you. I am angry and vulnerable about X, Y, and Z and it's coming out as this and I am really sorry.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  And I said all of that also without expecting a specific response. I said it cleanly and for the reasons it should be said, but I didn't get to it without making that meta shift.

• 49:22Tim Ferriss?

  Did you develop this watching The Watcher habit organically? Did that come from parents? Did it come from books? That meta level of self-awareness?

• 49:38Speaker 03

  That's a good question.

• 49:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, where would you, where would you say that's come from? If anywhere comes to mind?

• 49:46Speaker 03

  I'm really not sure. I know that I was reading a lot of,

• 49:51Speaker 03

  in my late teens, I was also reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda and a lot of Ram Dass.

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  And Ram Dass talks about that a lot. And I do remember, I do remember being with a girlfriend, being with a girlfriend in 1985 or 86. And she was upset and I couldn't figure out why. Like I, yeah. And so I thought to myself, I remember distinctly trying this thought experiment once. Oh, what is the world? What if I could see the, what if I could see this scene through her eyes? And so I literally thought of her head as a machine that I could climb in and look out through the eyes. And when I did, I saw a color like...

• 50:37Speaker 03

  I saw a color and the color helped inform me where she was mentally. Now, you asked me what I think that, what was going on there? I think I was using the analogy of color to help tap into my own intuition that my emotion wasn't letting me tap into. I think that I built a framework. I think that's frankly what, if, if, you know, if you're someone listening to this and you go to see a psychic and they help you, I'm quite sure that what that psychic is doing is using the cards that are in front of them, but mostly you being in front of them to kind of tap past an emotional response to an intuition about what's going on. That's, that's, you know, we do that to our partners and our friends all the time uh, in terms of giving them perspective.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  And that exercise really early on in my romantic life gave me a sense that there were other vantage points from which to view something rather than through your own angry eyes in the middle of the melee.

• 51:34Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, you're a very well spoken guy. I think that your abilities and the breadth and depth of your abilities can be intimidating to a lot of people. And I'm sort of speaking in the royal we here because uh, I find it a little intimidating. So I want to ask, no, no, so I want, so I want to, so I want to dig into it. Because you, I would have already mentioned this in the intro. We're going to talk more about it, but you have a, you have a book, Every Tool's a Hammer. And I'm super excited about it. Uh, in part because I have this uh, closet dream of being a maker.

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  Now specifically, a maker with my hands, right? So not necessarily a keyboard, but really making things. And uh, I have had this, this fantasy and this dream for a very long time. I've been to maker fairs in the Bay Area and kind of wandered around sheepishly, looking sideways at various things, but not engaging too closely. Uh, I even long ago, uh, went through the, uh, I guess, a number of areas in the, in the Mythbusters uh, workshops with, with Jamie. And I, this has been with me a long time. But at, at, at the, at my current state,

• 53:00Tim Ferriss?

  I would consider myself a manual illiterate. I've never really built anything. And so I'd be really curious to know if there are any particular projects you would suggest for remedial maker 101, or for people like me who know there's something there, who really desperately believe that using the hands unlocks a certain humanness that they don't have access to. Where might you suggest they start?

• 53:36Speaker 03

  So, number one, I don't necessarily think that the secret is always in using your hands. I'm really careful that I define making as any time you are creating something from nothing, even if it's a palm in your head. Every time we reach out mentally, physically, to create something that is generated from us, we are participating in our culture and we're adding to it. And I want everyone to have that experience. But you asked specifically about the physical making of stuff. I do have a project, I think is a great gateway project to making, and it is to build an architectural model of the living space you have, your house or your apartment, using cardboard and hot glue.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  This is something that is not difficult to understand and to parse, and it's not difficult to do a really good job at it. You can look at your room that you're in. It's got four walls at least. And this wall, let's say, has a window in it. The wall behind you has a door in it. Those measurements are knowable measurements. You can build a 1/12 scale model of that room simply by taking the inch number and making it a... taking the foot number and making it an inch. There you've done scaling. You've cut a piece of cardboard out where the door is the right distance in inches, as it is in feet from the wall. And then you assemble these four things together. And holy hell, now you're looking at an architectural model of your room, and it's five pieces of cardboard. And you can go out from there.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  I've built architectural models of all of my living spaces because it helps me put them into my head, and thus it helps me put them into my body. I love understanding things from those different vantage points.

• 55:19Tim Ferriss?

  What do you get out of putting it into your body? Could you explain that for a second?

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Well...

• 55:26Tim Ferriss?

  Or what does that mean?

• 55:27Speaker 03

  So at the beginning, like, let's say, after our podcast, you start making an architectural model of the house. The mental process you're gonna go through is gonna be one of a constant gear switching from the macro to the micro. You'll be, okay, that wall is gonna come to this, and that measurement comes to this, and it'll be this kind of constant back and forth. For me, after all the years of experience that I have, it's a very different mental process. I look around and I see the wall as a set of, like, I'm instantly translating it as a set of actions from the real thing to the smaller thing. And so, there comes a point in the making of things, in which the discipline you've

• 56:11Speaker 03

  chosen gets past that gear-switching mode and goes towards an almost entirely mental mode, where I can build, I build something in my head first, and then what I do with my hands is just cutting the chunks I see in here. And it takes practice, that, you know, most of, so, like, most of what happens when I'm collaborating with another builder is, I'm taking my mental picture and attempting to grid it onto the one that they have. And it's best if we're doing that with pen and paper, or with models in front of us, but frankly, you know, much of my building, like I said, happens in my head. The other, the other thing that I would say, so, I love the idea of building an architectural model as a, as an exercise.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Actually, when I did my first MakerBox, that was the first project. I, I gave people a blueprint of my shop, and thousands of people built architectural models and corrugated cardboard of my shop. And I love that, and many of them went on to build models of their house. That's a great exercise for sort of the gateway drug to getting you, with the low threshold of materials, low threshold of cost, low threshold of skill, high, high, uh, high probability of quality output, because you're just cutting squares, and there's nothing complicated about it. The other intersection that I suggest is to find something that you have to have. Now, I am sure in the explorations you do around the world that you go to someone's

• 57:39Speaker 03

  house and they show you the Japanese sword they have, or you go somewhere, you sit in a chair and you're like, "Holy hell, this is the greatest chair I've ever sat in," or you see a cup that is like, "Oh, I love this cup," and you want one. When you find something like that, that you can't not think about, that's the thing to maybe try and make, because you want something out of the process. I've never learned any of the skills I had, the skills that I have are myriad, but I've never learned any of them in a vacuum just because I wanted to learn a skill. I learned them in service of achieving something that I desired, whether it's a ZF1 from the Fifth Element or a No-Face costume.

• 58:19Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. What is the last object or a notable object that you had to make yourself? Is there anything that jumps to mind? Adam has run off-camera to grab an item.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  So, so, last year for my, I'm friends with the guys at Weta Workshop, Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor. Many of the amazing craftspeople at Weta have become really close friends of mine, and I love what they do, and I love Lord of the Rings, I love all the output that those guys do. And last year, for my 50th birthday, Richard Taylor gave me Boromir's sword from Lord of the Rings.

• 59:05Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  This is one of the most beautiful objects I've ever seen. This is hand-built by Weta's sword master, Peter Lyon, who built all the swords for Lord of the Rings. It's an incredible blade, and this is a full tang, battle-ready piece of spring steel that is razor-sharp. It's a masterpiece, and as soon as I had it, I knew, "I've got to build a scabbard for this."

• 59:31Speaker 03

  And then I built four or five scabbards for other swords of mine in preparation for the Boar Mere sword. I've wanted this one to be beautiful and this is the scabbard I made for Boar Mere sword. It is leather and it's steel and I used techniques I had never tried before and it is a suitable, it is a suitable house for one of my favorite objects.

• 59:57Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I absolutely, like, not only did I have to do this, but for the first time, I did a lot of practicing before I built the hero one that I wanted. And by the way, this is simply version 1.0. This is close by in my workshop because I'm just about to strip it all down and make it even more correct.

• 1:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  For the building of a scale home with cardboard and so on, what are the, the materials necessary? And if this can easily be found somewhere, you can tell, tell us where to find it, but what, what tools does one need?

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Um, well, so let me, I'll explain the process, first of all, as I do it, which is, um, in general, most of us live in houses of a consistent ceiling height. The ceilings in your house look like they're maybe nine feet. So if you were building a 1/12 scale model, that would be nine inches. Um, if 24th scale, it would be four and a half inches, right? Half of that. Um, so the way I start any architectural model is I figure out my ceiling height and then I cut out a bunch of strips of corrugated cardboard at that exact height. Now I've got my walls, they're all overly long. So I take a piece of cardboard that will be the base and I draw out the floor plan in scale. That only takes a right angle ruler and a pencil.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Uh, once I have that, now I have a measuring device for these long strips of cardboard that are the correct height. So I measure all, all four walls. Now I have four walls that are correct height and correct width. Now I start to just measure where the windows and the details go. Uh, all of this takes a ruler with an edge you can cut against, an X-acto blade, a hot glue gun, and a few Amazon boxes. And that's it. Oh, and a pencil.

• 1:01:39Tim Ferriss?

  You know, this makes me think of a documentary, I'm gonna butcher the title. If you haven't seen it, I think you would love it. It's called, I want to say, "The Art of Seeing", and it's a BBC documentary. You can find it for the time being on YouTube, and it is about and features the artist David Hockney.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I have not seen this, but he's a huge influence on me.

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, he's amazing, and hilarious, and brilliant, and very good at explaining his own thought processes, which I admire. But the reason he pops to mind is that at one point, I want to say, and I'm gonna butcher this as a yank, but the Royal Academy, something, something such, some very famous gallery, offered him the entire space for, not a retrospective, but his new work, which happened at the time to be landscape art. And he created an entire scale model of this multi-room gallery so that he could tilt it and look through different doorways to see how his various pieces of artwork, which he had also replicated to scale,

• 1:02:49Tim Ferriss?

  would appear through different walkways and entrances. And it was, when I first glanced at it, because I didn't have any of the explanation, it seemed like potentially a huge waste of time, but as soon as he started demonstrating the utility, it was so genius. And also, the miniature artwork seemed actually quite difficult to pull off, but aside from that, reasonably straightforward exercise that later, at full scale, in the facility, made such a huge difference to the experience of everyone who walked through. It's, that is all to say, I'm excited about trying out this project.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  I'll give another example. I was just in L.A. for the upfronts, and I stopped by a friend's production office, because a friend of mine is filming a big feature film right now. And they had... They have this gigantic set they're gonna build for the finale of this film. It's huge, it has all these different parts. And it's not just a set where the final action in the film happens. It's also a set that has to fit with what the script is saying. So there's a part where one of the characters comes into the set and hides somewhere. So what they did was they built a scaled model of the exact extents of the soundstage they'll be building the set on.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  And then they have these things like rocks and stairs and architectural details. And they're placing them within that set, but also asking, okay, in this scene, if they're hiding behind here, can we get over here so we can see that they don't have the eye line? Then then we'll build the set with this part that moves and that part that doesn't. It becomes a critical problem solving tool in bridging, and this is bridging between the art department, the construction department, and also how the narrative actually pieces together and what the audience will see and how the whole last part of the film plays out. And huge chunks of this have to be in the right place, otherwise the story won't get told correctly.

• 1:04:56Tim Ferriss?

  So in the spirit of maybe low tech or at least low barrier to entry maker projects, I have read again in my internet research that you are good at making eggs. I don't know if this is true.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, eggs are my...

• 1:05:18Tim Ferriss?

  That you've thought a lot about making eggs. So this is a maker project in a sense, right? And in a lot of respects, I learned to cook by testing all sorts of things on eggs. I would love to hear how you think about making eggs or really any aspect of eggs that you find interesting. Why eggs?

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Eggs are tough. Eggs are unforgiving. Eggs, like chicken, have a wide range of being edible, but a short range of being delicious.

• 1:05:56Tim Ferriss?

  That's very true.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  And a lot of cooks and chefs that I know say that eggs are one of the hardest things to get right. Um, I have always loved eggs. I've always loved scrambled eggs. I tend to not like omelets because I think in the US omelets are too full of shit. Literally. Um, and then I guess about 15 years ago, I came across this Gordon Ramsay video on YouTube where he talked about doing a slow cook scramble. Um, and he literally, it's, it's a very weird scramble. You crack the eggs in whole. You're stirring them constantly over a medium heat with a bunch of butter. Um, and as soon as they start to congeal, you pull them off the heat, you stir them like a risotto. You never stop stirring.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  But the temperature control and attunement is all about not letting them ever congeal too much. And I was like, oh, I gotta try this. And I tried it and it kind of worked the first time and I just, I've been doing it ever since. And there's this amazing moment I found. So first of all, when you talk to cooks, they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah. The slow cook, temperature adjusted scramble is just uh, objectively the best way to make eggs. It's literally like they come out like this sweet custard and it's, there's nothing else quite like it.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  And it's really hard to do right in a restaurant where you don't have 15 minutes of concentrated time for everyone's entree. So restaurants have all these really wonderful techniques for, for, for doing that. And Ramsay was saying he makes new chefs cook him eggs in order to, to guess their chops. And I have discovered so much about myself and about the process of, of what makes food textural and what, you know, what I want out of them by adjusting that recipe over the years. So now I make my eggs the same way. Um, I tend to let them get a little bit more congealed at the very end. So I have some like tooth to some of the eggs. Cause I've found over the years that I don't love it when they're all custardy and soft.

• 1:08:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  But there's this great moment that happens when you're doing the stirring, when The eggs, when the heat helps the whites and the yolks fully emulsify, and this is before you've added salt or anything else. You just have butter in there, so you have some residual salt. But where the, where the emulsification happens, I feel like it's because of the heat. When all of a sudden this sweet smell rises out of the pan. And it's the moment I know like, ah, cool, I'm on the home stretch. Now I got it. And Gordon didn't talk about that. That was like my own exploration, but every time it happens, because it happened to me spontaneously, it's part of my love affair with eggs is getting that ah, moment out of that.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Um, and actually, I mean, we didn't start in 2016 after the, after the most recent president was elected into office. We started just having brunches every Sunday and having friends come over because we just needed to be around a lot of people we loved on a very regular basis. And I made those scrambled eggs for everywhere from five to 25 people every Sunday. Uh, I'd make big batches, small batches. Uh, and you know, sometimes I'd add in scallions or cheese or a little pepper or something like that. Um, but it, I have now cooked that dish thousands and thousands of times.

• 1:09:24Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Scallions are very underrated and, and uh, texturally, so I love eggs. And you can also learn so many fantastic principles and techniques related to cooking from eggs as a somewhat neutral palate, if that makes any sense at all. Uh, highly recommend people play with uh, slivered almonds right at the end, just when you're getting ready to eat the eggs. Yep, uh, fantastic. You don't want to put them in too early or they'll get uh, soggy and brittle. But if they have that crispness, I remember a French chef told me at one point, and, and I don't know if this is in French,

• 1:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  but he said, you want to take the eggs off the heat while they're still a little snotty.

• 1:10:15Tim Ferriss?

  And that stuck with me and it's like, yeah, you want like a mild snot consistency when you take it off. And because you'll have the carryover cooking and so on. But huge fan of uh of eggs.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  On the flip side of that, there's a, there's a great cookbook. You probably have it in your collection. Jacques and Julia, Jacques Papan and

• 1:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  Jacques Papan is like the Jedi master of

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Dude, watching him eat bone of chicken in two minutes and telling you afterwards that he went slowly because they were filming it.

• 1:10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. His, his manual skill. I mean, when I was writing my third book, which involved a lot of cooking, I, I was prepared to dislike him for a few reasons. Number one, he had a fancy to me sounding French name. Number two, he was extremely well known. So I was like, how good could he really be if he's sort of like French food for export? Like, how, how technical could he really be?

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:11:10Tim Ferriss?

  And his videos are just incredible. You watch him make a French omelet on high heat or any of these things. His knife skills alone.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  I, I did a pan flip once. I am not willing to try it again.

• 1:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Actually, I do, when I do flip my omelets, my friends point out that actually, as I'm doing the flip, I'm using the spatula and the pan and my friends point out, my whole body goes up.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  The whole, everything weight, like I'm in strokey. But Jacques Papan and Julia Child both have the same way of finishing scrambled eggs. He does them fast over high heat. He does them slow over a medium heat. But they both take a half of a beaten egg and pour it over the scrambled eggs just as they're pulling it off the heat. And then they stir it up and you end up getting this lovely sort of a little bit of extra wet on top of the scrambled eggs.

• 1:12:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You could also use um.

• 1:12:05Tim Ferriss?

  I think McAvoy is the name of the olive oil that's in your neck of the woods in Northern California. You can use a finishing olive oil too. Right in the last like 60 seconds and stir that in and you get a nice texture to it as well. I love, I love eggs, so I appreciate you indulging the egg question.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  You know what, what I'd love to ask if you're open to it because one of the risks in doing this podcast and speaking with people who are well known for being very good at what they do is that people who may be struggling or who have struggled in different ways may feel like everyone else is stepping up to bat and hitting home runs every time. Would you be willing to talk about, and certainly I've experienced some, some difficult times and talked about them publicly.

• 1:12:56Tim Ferriss?

  Do any particularly difficult periods in your life come to mind? Difficult stretches of time? If so, would you be willing to talk about one or two and how you found your way out, so to speak?

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, I, I think it's the universal thing is that nobody escapes. Nobody gets out scot-free.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  Nobody suffers like the poor. As Charles Bukowski pointed out, but nobody escapes from suffering. It is, it is the universal condition and it's the, you know, it's the reason it's the first of Buddha's truths. I, I love the output that we do on my website on tested.com because I realized we don't make, so I do builds in my shop on tested.com and I do them here in my cave and I realized at a certain point that they're not how-to videos. Because I'm often discovering the process that I'm exploring on camera. They're more like what happened videos. And a couple of years ago, I was making some spacesuit parts.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Actually, if I tilt the camera, you can see that I've got murderers row of

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  and fictional spacesuits over here because I'm so obsessed with them. And my friend Ryan Nagata in LA is an amazing spacesuit maker. And I was making some parts for him. And I'm intimidated by the quality of Brian's work. And I wanted my pieces to be as good as the output I see comes from his shop. And I had, I was doing this build and I kept screwing it up. And I spent this entire day with my camera team here just consistently getting these things to farther and farther along the line and then boning them with a bad, with a bad choice about the tool usage or what I was doing. I was getting my order of operations all screwed up. And I ended up finishing the day feeling super, super shitty.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  Like depressed about how crappy the day went. And I went home and in this blue funk, I literally had this thought, you have no business making stuff.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  And the fact is, I feel that, that judge in me comes up on almost every build. He shows up on almost every build. When I finally got to Industrial Light and Magic in 1998 into their model shop on Episodes 1 and 2 and Space Cowboys, I found an incredible group of peers and teachers and friends. And there still was not a single build in the five years I spent in that model shop where I didn't feel at some point someone was going to come up, tap me on the shoulder and tell me the relief pitcher's coming out because I clearly have no idea what I'm doing and it's time to go home.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  And at a certain point at ILM, I was like, man, I'm in Valhalla. I'm in the place where like, all, every model maker in the world wants to end up here. And I, I, I am good enough to get here. Why do I still have so much judgment every time I screw something up? And then I realized, well, that's part of my process. It's part of the process. Um, clearly it's going to happen no matter how technically competent I get. So I'm just gonna push past it. And untested, that day that I finished feeling so crappy, I came in the next day, we filmed again for a day, and I got the part right, and then I turned to the camera and I explained all of that. Because, look, I really appreciate the way in which you were openly, last year openly

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  talking about your anxieties and about the things that inhibit you from fulfilling the things that you want to do. I love the way Will Wheaton is so forthright and honest about his difficulties and about depression. And I view it as incumbent on those of us who are able to find the luck and circumstance to achieve some success, to explain that it is not linear, it's rarely on purpose, there's so much luck and privilege and love involved in the process, and we all feel uncertain all the time. Because, yeah, it really is easy to walk in here and go, "Oh my god, you're so productive." And it was like, I was tweeting last night about Laura Kopp and Simone Yatch, two of

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  my collaborators on one of the episodes of my new show, and I described them as annoyingly productive. The fact is, is I am sometimes annoyed by how productive they are, and I know that I have a fairly high degree of output, and yet I can get jealous about someone else doing something that I'd like to try, I can get venal, you know, we're all flawed. Look, and to be honest, confronting that, confronting the limits of one's ability to be perfect, that is tough. So I will actually, you've asked me to talk to this, and I think one of the most instructive

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  The fact that I'm a flawed human being. There's still some part of me that thinks, oh, as long as I perform all these things correctly, everything will go smooth. And the answer is, no, that's fiction. Nothing will ever go smoothly. No plan ever survives first contact with implementation. And we are all going to screw up and feel unworthy at a very constant pace in our lives. That's being a person. The trick is to be honest about that.

• 1:19:10Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you being willing to share. I think, as you do, that it's really important because it's easy, particularly in, or I should say, immersed in an online world where very often what you see is the highlight reel. It's easy to feel uniquely flawed or alone. And I grew up seeing not just bipolar disorder, but schizophrenia in my family. I know you've certainly witnessed a fair amount of bipolar disorder. And if anyone listening is going through a tough patch,

• 1:19:55Tim Ferriss?

  realizing that you are not alone and you're not uniquely flawed and that it is sort of part of the ride on this journey that we call human life. So, thank you for being willing to speak to it because I think it is very important. It will become increasingly important, I think, for people like yourself to speak to it when you have a chance because I think increasingly what we see online will be, aside from the "What Bleeds Leads" headlines, very often self-selected highlight reels of sorts, which can make people feel very isolated. So, thank you for that.

• 1:20:38Tim Ferriss?

  And I have just a few more questions. But let's start with, and I don't say this lightly. I am so excited to get your book. It's already ordered. And it is your first book, which a lot like first funds for investing. Like, I'm very bullish on first books.

• 1:21:06Tim Ferriss?

  Particularly after a career like yours and having practiced explaining and having workshopped so many things that no doubt made it into the book in some form or another. Could you talk, so I have it here described as a love letter to creativity, secret thrills, exploring, making, and productive obsession. Could you tell us a little bit more about the book, please?

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Okay, so when I, when I sold this book to the publisher, to Simon, to Atria, it's Simon and Schuster, the chapter in the book that I used as my, as my North Star is a chapter called "Use More Cooling Fluid," which is a, it's a joke that I've told for years, which is if I could go back and tell my young self one thing, this is an interviewer's favorite question, if I could go back in time and tell my young self one thing, it would be, "Use more cooling fluid." And I'm being facetious to a certain extent, but actually there are some interesting keys to the castle in that, in that phrase. Because it's not, on one hand, and I cover this in the chapter, I talk about why cooling fluid is important,

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  how when you're cutting metal with metal, keeping your cutting blade cool is really vital. And I explain deeply the physics of what happens to metal when you let it get hot, how you cut metal with metal, the differentials between the hardnesses of the materials that you're using and where it can go south. And then, from there, I go on to talk about how using more cooling fluid is about taking extra time in order to do something right. And that actually is about a wider philosophy of addressing your work. And by addressing, I mean, putting the things that you're working on in front of you at a comfortable position so your hands can actually operate them. And even that is a philosophical choice that

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  we make when we make things. Because sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I can do this without removing those three bolts." And then, bang, you know, something breaks, and I'm boned. Taking the time where it's necessary, at the same time as trying to go as fast as you can to be able to have a reasonable return on the investment of time you have in this project, especially if you're working for hire. Taking the time to do it right saves a lot of time on the back end. And it is an ongoing conversation in my head between future me and past me. And so that was the chapter, so we thought that all the chapters would end up being like, I described one specific maker's skill and talk about the physics of it and then talk about the philosophy and open that up to wider and wider onion skins of philosophy.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Except that when I started to look at other things that I know, I definitely deeply understand the physics of cooling fluid and I understand the physics of the glues that I use. So the glue chapter is also very much in that vein. But as far as a lot of other skills, I'm such a generalist that I am mediocre at all the other things that I know and thus I felt really strongly that I shouldn't present myself as any kind of authority on these things if it didn't come naturally. That if I researched heavily the physics of something that I didn't quite understand, well then I'm kind of being dishonest in this book. And so as I started to flesh out the other chapters with the things that I wanted to

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  talk about, I realized that there was more to talk about from my autobiographical details that led me to the conclusions I came to about how I run my shop space, about how I deal with collaborations and partnerships, about how I am a husband and a friend and a father. And so whereas originally I thought it would be 50% instructional and 50% philosophical with some autobiographical stuff peppered in, it ends up being about one-third each. And both my editor and I were surprised by the book that came out. When I gave him the final manuscript in December, he was like, "Wow, this is totally different than

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  I thought." But it's great, it works, it's its own thing. And there's a quote in the book from Andrew Stanton, Pixar director, directed John Carter, he directed the Finding Dory films and many other things. And he's an amazing... Andy is like the story guy and he loves unpacking story. And he was telling me things like, you know, Pixar has institutionalized the late understanding of what a story is about, right? So he's like, "You go to the client and you say, 'We're gonna dig up a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We're gonna spend millions of dollars digging up a Tyrannosaurus Rex.'" And he's like, "And there comes a point when you're digging, you realize, 'Oh crap, we've got a Stegosaurus.'"

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  Are you gonna have the guts to go to the funders and tell them, you know what? Turns out, we have a Stegosaurus. Um, Andy said that the central theme of Monsters, Inc., which is that the scream is the currency of the world. He said that didn't come to them until like a year before they were finished. But once they understood it, it so framed the world that they invested in all of the changes they had to make to weave that into the plot and make it central because they discovered they had a Stegosaurus and they had to service that.

• 1:26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing, amazing. You know, thinking also of, uh, Spirited Away, where we started this conversation. Uh, if, if you ever have the chance, and maybe you've already been, but if you go to Tokyo and have a chance to go to the Studio Ghibli Museum.

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  I'm going. I'm going. My wife and I are planning a trip right now to go to Kyoto and Tokyo.

• 1:26:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you're gonna have the best time, particularly with the, the trained eye that you can use for the details. Look for the marbles that are within the metalwork on the spiral staircase. It's really just incredible. I mean, they have the, the full-scale cat bus and everything you can imagine from the, the canon of his work, including some of his working desks. Uh, and it really digs into the process in a way that I think you will find enchanting. Uh, well, I-

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  There's one other thing I wanted to say about the book, which is that, you know, as we were talking about sharing our personal experiences in the hopes that they resonate with people who might feel that their own experience is unique and keeps them from exploring what they want to explore. Um, I also took as axiomatic this wonderful phrase I heard from Mary Carr in an interview. When she was writing Liar's Club, her first memoir. Uh, she was talking to Tobias Wolff about it. And he said, if you're gonna write about yourself as a young, uh, pre and mid pubescent girl, you need to write about yourself as you were. He said, don't sugarcoat it. And the phrase he used was, take no cure for your dignity.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  And I love that phrase so much because when we really do share those parts of ourselves where we are venal and jealous and weird and sad and uncertain and vulnerable, that's when we get to connect with other people. And so in the very beginning of this book, I say that I like to think of this book as a permission slip from me to you if need to be told to fly your freak flag and try the thing that you can't stop thinking about, even though it's weird. And I admit that my, this whole shop is filled with my weird hobbies of early computer history and costuming and spacesuits. And I'm not necessarily solving

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  the world's problems in this space, but I am feeding myself and I am using this as a springboard about my experience to help others follow their weird passions. And that's my goal.

• 1:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's an admirable goal. And people can say hello on Twitter. Don't Try This is your handle, @don'ttrythis on Instagram and Facebook, TheRealAdamSavage. They can certainly find the book anywhere books are sold, also at adamssavagebook.com. Are there any other places or any other, any other places online, any other projects that you would suggest people check out?

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Well, so I just wrapped and announced a brand new show I'm making for the Science Channel called Savage Builds. That starts airing on June 12. Among the things we did on that show, absurd engineering. I work with different collaborators in every episode. In one episode, I worked with a master blacksmith to make a sword out of a meteorite. In another, I worked with the Colorado School of Mines, with an N, not mimes, to make a 3D-printed suit of Iron Man armor out of 3D-printed titanium.

• 1:30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  And it was glowing. I also have a bag and apparel company called Savage Industries. And at adamsavage.com, I make bags out of used and recycled sailcloth. And we have a number of other small projects there. I also sell plans and kits for making your own bag if you want to go that route. And I think that is all of the things going on right now.

• 1:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. Well, never any shortage of projects and I will link to all of those in the show notes as well. So for folks listening, if you are commuting or juggling or doing something that doesn't allow you to take notes at the moment, you can find certainly links to everything we've discussed at tim.blog/podcast as well. And Adam, this has been such a pleasure. It's always fun to see you and I hope we get to share scrambled eggs sometime soon.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Like I said, I'm coming to Austin on the book tour. I will, I'll ping you and give you plenty of notice so that hopefully we can go out and have a beer and maybe some scrambled eggs.

• 1:31:26Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds, that sounds fantastic. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments, suggestions, anything at all that you'd like to add before we, we close up?

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  Oh no, I think we've covered a lovely wide range of stuff today. This has been really fun.

• 1:31:43Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, thank you so much, Adam. I wish you all the best on the book tour. I'm really excited to dig into this and go get a glue gun and start my own cardboard project. So, thank you for what-

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  Take pictures, man.

• 1:31:55Tim Ferriss?

  I will take pictures and I'll make sure I get the process. So it's not just this pretty final shot or not so pretty final shot. I'll get some of the ugly in-betweens. And really, really lovely to see you again. And until next time, thank you so much for sharing your stories and to be continued, I hope.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Of course. Thanks, Tim.

• 1:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Bye-bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles. That I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:33:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if I could only take one supplement, what would it be? The answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all in one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in The Four Hour Body and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance and overall, it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count travel pack for first time users.

• 1:34:05Tim Ferriss?

  I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one-dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at athleticgreens.com/tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

• 1:34:29Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:35:11Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, lots of bars, little snacks like coconut bites, and also some more uncommon and imaginative stuff like their cinnamon or chata bar, beer and scotch chocolates, and their signature smores bite, the big daddy. My personal favorite, however, is their salted almond butter cups. One more time, salted almond butter cups, which are ridiculous and as dangerous as they sound. But they're worth it. In any case, as you might guess, based on what I said earlier, they use only organic fair trade ingredients. So you can feel better when you indulge, which is something I've been doing a lot of. They're also doing a lot of good things to drive the industry forward, including working with communities in the Congo and Peru,

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  to make the economics of the cocoa trade fair for farmers and by using sustainable farming practices, for instance. So whether you want to feel better about where you buy your goodies because of those reasons I just mentioned, or if you just want a really unique and delicious gift for yourself or someone else, Theo Chocolate has you covered. They are available in Whole Foods and other grocery stores across the US. And for listeners of this podcast, Theo is offering 15% off your online purchase at theochocolate.com. You can use code on checkout, TIM15. That's code TIM15. Or easiest is probably to visit theochocolate.com/tim for more details.

• 1:36:37Tim Ferriss?

  And you can check them all out, but don't forget, salted almond butter cups.