Podcast 3 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 3: Adam Savage Interview (2007-03-05).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary Keywords

people, filter, site, farc, day, jamie, mythbusters, shoot, metal, big, myths, pretty, year, season, threads, slashdot, safety, tracking, outline, week

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:07 This is urine use.

mathowie 0:16 Hi, and welcome to episode three of the metal filter podcast. Now, that was chocolate cats miss me in the morning from metal filter music. This week we're going to do something a little bit different Jasmine's in Australia vacationing and giving talks. So this show will just be an interview that I conducted with Adam Savage from Discovery Channel's MythBusters, Adam joined the site in early 2005 posted a few comments on meta filter and started asking your standard technical questions on Ask meta filter. After a few weeks of his participation, people started notice that, hey, this is a TV guy. I remember emailing him early on just to make sure it really was him and not someone impersonating him that would cause him problems. And he assured me that he was the real deal. Here's my interview with Adam.

asavage 1:00 How's it going? It's Adam. Hey, how's

mathowie 1:01 it going? Thanks for taking time for this. Well, I'm

asavage 1:05 totally pleased to do it. Metal filters. One of my favorite sites is where

mathowie 1:10 do you want to talk about metal filter stuff first? Yeah, sure. So I was looking through your history. And it looks like the very first thing you ever said was someone posted about the Archimedes death, right? Or a death, right. And the first post you ever made the entire site was basically, yeah, I built one of those it didn't really work out so well. Nothing else, no reference to what exactly that entails. As already, did you find the site through researching for that show?

asavage 1:36 No, I think I think I found the site through Sasha fair Jones. He's a music critic for the New Yorker. And he's got a kind of interesting blog and my wife was using his site, he's links to all sorts of interesting things. And I think she's the first one that pointed me to metal filter as like this Compendium, you know, since Iris, she knows I checked FARC every day, she's like, you should check out metal filter. And so I started doing it. And then actually after about, I think it was about a month or two in before I discovered after meta filter. And then it was another probably two months before I actually signed up for an account. And yeah, then I mean, it's, it's funny, because there's the I definitely remember posting that reply and thinking, you know, I just want to keep a little bit reasonably quiet, sort of, you know, shove show up and be like, Well, I'm a mythbuster. And here's what we do. And in a way, one of the things I love about the site is that people have still allowed me to do that, even though everybody who's on a on a thread knows who I am.

mathowie 2:38 Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's why I emailed you, after a week or two of this because someone noticed it was going, that can't be him. Like, why would? Why would he plainly call himself by name, I think it's someone impersonating him, maybe you should email and make sure this isn't, you know, some impersonator, you need to shut down. So yeah,

asavage 2:57 I spend a lot of time actually probably three or four times a year removing fake profiles of me from MySpace. So it's good that you call but yeah, you know, I mean, I find that even in threads where, you know, people have disagreed with something that I've done, as opposed to other places like Slashdot or FARC. Just the level of discourse is much higher,

mathowie 3:20 people say webs, web communities are a reflection of their host. And I know, Drew Curtis is kind of a frat boy, and it comes off definitely that way. And

asavage 3:29 well, I mean, we have a joke here on Mythbusters. We were always happy when Mythbusters gets mentioned on FARC. And Discovery's always happy if your site gets a bunch of hits. But the fact is, is there's no single mentioned and this was just one fork that doesn't within five threads, deteriorate to people wanting to have sex. And then that's all the rest of the threads about and what I'm amazed is that even on metaphorically, when people vehemently disagree, they're still really quite, for the most part truly articulate about it.

mathowie 3:58 Yeah, I think the only time I've ever seen Kerry come up, it's people arguing over whether or not she adds to the show. Like it's a bunch of intellectuals kind of say she feels like window candy to

asavage 4:10 me. Yeah, we get that too. I'm kind of

mathowie 4:14 amazed Do you have time for at all meta filters? You know, one of the sites you typically look at during like a round of downtime?

asavage 4:23 Yeah, well, we have this isn't like a normal film shoot where everyone's blasting out 14 hours a day like crazy. We shoot pretty much all year round. So in order to get enough shows out per season for discovery, we shoot I think 47 weeks a year. Wow. So for us it's it's really it's much more like a regular job than a TV show job and I mean, we do do 10 hour days so that's kind of tiring. But it's just five days a week we take nice reasonable our lunches for the most part and during that downtime, I actually will often choose not to leave the shop and just sit at my computer veg for 40 minutes and Yeah, I mean, I check, metal filter as metal filter FARC. Read it, dig, slash DOD, and gadget. Gizmodo.

mathowie 5:09 Oh, that's cool. So on the AskMe edit filter, the Wild West show where you asked about are you guys in the research process?

asavage 5:16 We are actually we have actually, we finished up the Wild West minutes last week.

mathowie 5:21 Wow. That's great. How's that for speed? Jesus that is fast?

asavage 5:25 Well, I have to tell you the most amazing thing was see the first thing that's happened was the outline came from Australia. This is I think, discovery, we want us to do this. But the outline came from Australia. I didn't think that the myths that were on the outline were incredibly strong. And so yeah, as opposed to the metadata, like, Please help, what do you guys want to know? What do you what is it? What are the questions, and I figured, even if they're things that I thought were, like, perhaps too simple, but they wanted to people and medical to mention them, which turned out to be like shooting someone's hat off was great. I mean, we had 40 pages of material in two days, it was stunning. So I, I compiled it all into a reasonable taxonomy of what kind of myths they were horsemen, gun myths, tracking mats. And it's terrific, we actually ended up with enough material to move tracking human tracking and putting your ear to the ground to a whole nother episode, which will probably happen later on this season.

mathowie 6:21 actually works though, I didn't think that was gonna be a viable one. Because since I thought, it's

asavage 6:25 actually the research that I've done on tracking says that you actually will sound travels faster through solid and through air. So given the right kind of ground, it is entirely feasible that you could hear horses coming from a much farther distance than you could with your normal ears.

mathowie 6:40 Yeah, I mean, I've put my head to a track before and heard stuff like, you know, way, way before you ever see it,

asavage 6:47 right? And then yeah, the human tracking like Indians following book and stuff like that. That's also real. And we've actually found some amazing people that do it for the Border Patrol. You know, might actually require us traveling down to Texas or New Mexico, but should be really fun. So we did we ended up doing Can you shoot someone's head off? And we did, can you bust out a jail when they're only doing to their living conditions head off? And can you bust someone out of jail? By pulling on their bars or their jail with a horse or by by blowing the bars out of the jail with dynamite?

mathowie 7:21 Oh, man, that'd be awesome TV came out

asavage 7:25 great. It came out. It was like everything we do, it turned both turned out to be more complex than when we first thought. Specifically getting out of jail.

mathowie 7:35 The Bulletin hat seems pretty logical. Like it wouldn't work because there's no mass hitting,

asavage 7:39 you're pretty much correct in that the bullets mass and size is too small. However, shotgun blast will do it every single time. So there's a lot of we got this fire off a lot of good period weaponry at Grant's head. Oh, awesome Castle grand pad.

mathowie 7:57 So it'll be like a couple more months before it's on TV. Probably.

asavage 8:01 It should be at this point, we haven't we just delivered the final flow. Actually, we're shooting the final wrap up blueprint. So during the opening blueprint, I have a little easter egg that says Nephi on the blueprint set. And then I'm going to I'm going to ask to put it into credits to thanks to metal filter at the end of the day. That's awesome. Thanks. Because I mean, my producer in Australia was totally flabbergasted by the sheer volume of material. That's been one. To be honest, I've been thinking about doing that for about a year. Oh, yeah. And I've been kind of waiting for what I considered to be the right opportunity where I wanted a broad range of material and a real, you know, idea about what was what was good and what people were interested in seeing. And that was the perfect opportunity to work out so much better than I could possibly imagine.

mathowie 8:48 Yeah, I was really amazed that people really self edited and stuff and said, that look terrible on TV. Here's something that blows up. We should try this. Like, I was really amazed. People really thought about it. Like how it look. Yeah. Which was good. I'm glad it all worked out. Yeah, me too. So the show is like a full time job, I assume. Right? Oh, yeah. Is the show getting harder to do as you as you go on? Like, are you running out of myths or anything like

asavage 9:15 God, no, we're not running around. I mean, people are gonna start believing stupid shit. The, at any given time, we know what we're going to do through the end of the season. And often that'll change. Well, that changes frequently. But we have an outline that we're going to follow for the, you know, the shooting blocks that comprise the season. And even in addition to that, we've often got 30 or 40 minutes ahead. Oh, that's awesome. We bust about 6070 minutes per season. So we're always try to be about 30 or 40 ahead. And I mean, you know, I'll get an email one day from somebody I got an email about two months ago from a random fan saying I drive a big truck and here's three big rigs And they were so good. We're starting to shoot him tomorrow. Oh, that's awesome. I wrote an outline based on the two, two of the three revival for shooting. And I looked for a third one. And then on the big board, it was the river Knight Rider driving up into the big rig up with speed. Oh, yeah, I'd love to see that. Yeah, we're doing that on Thursday and Friday. It's like, it

mathowie 10:23 doesn't seem like especially the front wheel drive car spinning at 60 miles an hour, and then hitting that ramp without just total disaster

asavage 10:30 to remember, you know, we kept on thinking that and then we did some scale tests, we got a treadmill and an RC car. And we did some scale tests with it, and discovered it, you know, yes, it's true that wheel spinning at 60 miles an hour when it hits the ramp, so it's, it is going somewhat from zero 60 to zero. However, the cars got a tremendous amount of its own inertia. And, you know, resist that resistance to moving forward at some huge pace. So it turns out I think we're gonna get we're gonna get training from a professional stunt driver, we're going to try to 20 3040 and then 50 miles an hour.

mathowie 11:07 Oh, man.

asavage 11:08 That's pretty cool. I can't believe this. This this week is pretty amazing. And then the following week, we go up to Telluride to see if we can start to see if I can start an avalanche by yodeling.

mathowie 11:19 I guess every little industry has a ton of little folklore and myths. So I guess you never will run out of

asavage 11:25 absolutely. I mean, what the big stuff I didn't even know that big retires, killed dozens of people every year. Really working working on big truck tires. Huge deal. They're like three feet tall. Those when those things blow, they're like a bomb. Oh, yeah. And, you know, right there got explosions. You've got questions about how those explosions occur. And Jamie and I have plenty of material for sure.

mathowie 11:50 That's awesome. I imagine you guys get a lot of online scrutiny for the shows these days. I've heard you guys make small mentions of it on the show because that just bring you guys down or

asavage 12:01 I try not to read I pretty much don't read it that like I made the mistake of we got an interview with me got slashed audited. And I was pleased about that. And so I went to look at the Slashdot comments, guys, whoever's I feel like it's a simpatico community with the way I think about the world. But the posters on Slashdot were just absolutely vicious. To a degree that actually changed the way I did my job for like three days. I mean, I just like it really kind of messed me up and I felt got self conscious about various things. And then it was like, You know what, screw it. I look, I you know, I have this job because I'm good at doing what I do, not what anyone else thinks I should do. So I stepped away from the boards. The discovery boards are just add fire discoveries. I think Mythbusters alone comprises 25% of the site traffic that all of discovery 16 networks get,

mathowie 12:54 Oh, that's awesome. Is the scrutiny mostly people questioning the science? Or like what is it exactly?

asavage 13:00 Well, look, you know, we you have a we have a myth. And we try and go find the right piece of equipment or the right guy, and we do pretty good. But invariably, there's someone out there who knows a little more about it. So the boards are just full of people saying we're totally screwing up or, you know, we don't know what we're doing. And well, that's the point. We tend to get a lot of real scientists absolutely stepping up to our defense. Oh, that's great. You know, people from NASA and Sandia FBI, you know, they pipe up and be like, hey, but these guys are actually very similar to what my job as a scientist is like, although you know, I try for datasets more than one

mathowie 13:39 I would call it do you guys do like bucket science? You guys are really good at that like getting at the concepts of the thing you know, with what you've got available?

asavage 13:47 Well, that's the whole thing we the first test we always look for is what would two guys in their garage and a lazy Sunday, do ya? Like then we start to try and bring more equipment to bear on figuring out what's actually going on. But we really always try and start from what is the what is the dumbest way to approach this the simplest possible thing?

mathowie 14:06 Or do you either you or Jamie have a science background? Or

asavage 14:10 no, no, Jamie's got a degree in Russian studies with a minor and conversational Japanese and art. I have a high school diploma.

mathowie 14:19 Awesome. Just curious minds as

asavage 14:21 well. We both we both are real science geeks. We both read everything we can get our hands on book totally fascinated by like, delving into the realm of why something's going why something's happening. Trying to understand things on a real intuitive level is a constant exercise whether we're working or not.

mathowie 14:40 Yeah. On the Indiana Jones falling through scaffolding show, you got you got pulled for insurance reasons, and I was realizing now the show has been on like five years or it's coming up on five years, probably that like you're becoming more and more valuable to Discovery Channel. Are they doing this more often?

asavage 14:59 You know, they're a lot, but also, it's helping that. Yes, they are. Because yeah, I am a more valuable commodity than I was three years ago. But there's, it's funny that there's also this, we have our safety. We have a company that works with us to come the insurance adjusters and make sure we're doing everything as safely as possible. And these are the guys that do the safety for both Fear Factor and for jackass, Jesus. So they really know their business around strange, esoteric things that no one's ever tried before. And Nick, one of our safety guys is a former stuntman, so he really knows his stuff. And now we're doing more, we are doing more, a lot more stunt stuff where we, Jamie and I are, you know, we're driving up this ramp into a car. So that requires a day of training with a professional stunt driver. And, you know, with Nick's by off to the insurance company that he feels like, we're both intuitive enough to learn this in a day. They're, they're becoming more agreeable to it. But it's kind of like everyone's got to bump it up a level, they have to come with more confidence in us. And we'd have to have more training on site,

mathowie 16:10 or the safety guys knew, like just in the last year or so or

asavage 16:14 no, absolutely. I think it's been about a, it's about a couple years old, two years that we've been doing this suit, real serious safety program. I mean, before that, it wasn't that we were less safe. It's just that it was less. There's now kind of bureaucracy in place. Where we have flow charts with fill in for everything we're about to do we know what, you know, where the nearest hospitals are, whether we're going to have EMTs, what are the dangers, how we're going to address them all of that?

mathowie 16:40 What's the worst injury you've sustained on the show?

asavage 16:44 Actually got it about two months ago, of pushing piece of wood into a bandsaw. And I wasn't expecting the word to be so hard. I was pushing really hard into the blade when it cut all the way through my finger went right behind it. And I got 11 stitches in my left index finger. Ah, yeah. It's just now it's fully healed. But the scar tissue is still causing me some pain when I make a fist on my left hand.

mathowie 17:08 Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah,

asavage 17:11 but that's that's it. I think that's the worst injury anybody's received on this show. We've had we had one broken, good, broken Pinky, from one of the staff from one of our crew, but for the most part Touchwood it's been pretty it's been pretty low, low incident.

mathowie 17:26 So with the cast growing is that mostly a time issue with like, you and Jamie can only hit so many concurrent stories all year round? Yeah,

asavage 17:35 it's absolutely exactly that. They want 30 minutes per season, they want 30 episodes or so per season. And, you know, it takes Jamie and I between six and nine days to do on this and you do the math. There's just not enough time in a season to do it.

mathowie 17:52 Yeah, well, thanks a lot for doing this and I'll send you a link my

asavage 17:57 pleasure. I will continue to look the hell out of metal filter and post occasionally.

mathowie 18:02 Oh, if there's anything like if you can name anything you hate about metal filter, anything you could change what would that be?

asavage 18:09 I haven't come across it yet. I really I just love it. I love the the amount of work people put into the posts on metal filter. And I when I tell people about athletic filter, I'm like, Look, they'll ask everything. You know, every questions will run the gamut from should I use an SQL Server for this company now to how do I break up with my boyfriend? Yeah, it's amazing to me and I love that both will get the same number of ants.

mathowie 18:34 Yeah, it's something about like the size of the community is right like it's big enough to cover anything but it's not so big that people feel anonymous and they're jerks to each other. So there's just some sort of magical middle ground there at the moment.

asavage 18:46 Here's hoping it lasts for a long time.

mathowie 18:49 Yeah, thanks a lot for taking time for this

asavage 18:52 You're welcome and if you wanted to if you want to do this again like in a year so let me know Okay, all right. Okay. All right man, I'll talk to you soon

mathowie 18:59 all right bye bye

Unknown Speaker 19:17 to you friends or to keep it to yourself. Concentrate sometimes difficult to do see me Mr. Space focus points now The last two just go out there says he does bow down to your friend to yourself concentrate sometimes listen to me is justice just says he does

Unknown Speaker 22:19 a good job