YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Savage

lines on the record: 87
first: 2019-04-30
most recent: 2019-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like I said, I'm coming to Austin on the book tour. I'll pen you and give you plenty of notice so that hopefully we can go out and have a beer and maybe some scramble at it.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 12th. Among the things we did on that show, absurd engineering, I work with different collaborators in every episode. In one episode, I worked with a master blacksmith to make a sword out of a meteorite. In another, I worked with the Colorado School of Mines with an N, not mimes, to make a 3D printed suit of Ironman armor. out of 3D printed titanium. Wow. I also have a bag and apparel company called Savage Industries and at AdamSavage.com I make bags”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I love that phrase so much because when we really do share those parts of ourselves where we are venal and jealous and weird and sad and uncertain and vulnerable, that's when we get to connect with other people. And so in the very beginning of this book, I say that I like to think of this book as a permission slip from me to you if you need to be told to fly your freak flag and try the thing that you can't stop thinking about, even though it's weird. And I admit that this whole shop is filled with my weird hobbies of early computer history and costuming and spacesuits, and I'm not necessarily solving the world's problems in this space, but I am feeding myself and I am using this as a springboard about my experience to help others follow their weird passions. And that's my goal.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's one other thing I wanted to say about the book, which is that as we were talking about sharing our personal experiences in the hopes that they resonate with people who might feel that their own experience is unique and keeps them from exploring what they want to explore. I also took as axiomatic this wonderful phrase I heard from Mary Carr in an interview when she was writing Liar's Club, her first memoir. She was talking to Tobias Wolfe about it and he said, if you're going to write about yourself as a young 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you going to have the guts to go to the funders and tell them, you know what? Turns out we have a stegosaurus. 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's 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”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Andrew Stanton, Pegstar Director, directed John Cartery, directed the Finding Dory films, and many other things. And he's an amazing. Andy is 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 going to dig up a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We're going to 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, as I started to flesh out the other chapters with the things that I wanted to 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'm 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 I thought, but it's great. It works. It's its own thing. And there's a quote in the book from...”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even that is a philosophical 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 describe one specific maker skill and talk about the physics of it and then talk about the philosophy and open that up to wider and wider onion skins of philosophy, except that when I started to look at other things that I know, I definitely deeply understand the physics of cooling fluid. And I understand the physics of the glues that I use. So the glue chapter is also very much in that vein. But as far as a lot of other skills, I'm such a generalist that I am mediocre at all.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm being facetious to a certain extent. But actually, there are some interesting keys to the castle in that phrase. Because on one hand, and I cover this in the chapter, I talk about why cooling fluid is important. How when you're cutting metal with metal, keeping your cutting blade cool is really vital. And I explain deeply the physics of what happens to metal when you let it get hot, how you cut metal with metal, the differentials between the hardnesses of the materials that you're using and where it can go south. 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so when I sold this book to the publisher, to Atria at Simon& Schuster, the chapter in the book that I used as my North Star as a chapter called Use More Cooling Fluid, which is 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. We're all flawed. Look, and to be honest, confronting that, confronting the limits of one's ability to be perfect, That is tough. I will actually, you've asked me to talk to this, and I think one of the most instructive things I can mention is I'm a pleaser. 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,”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, my God, you're so productive. It's like I was tweeting last night about Laura Kompf and Simone Yacht, two of my collaborators on one of the episodes of my new show. And I described them as annoyingly productive.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at a certain point at ILM, I was like, man, I'm in Valhalla. I'm in the place where every model maker in the world wants to end up here. And I am good enough to get here. Why do I still have so much judgment every time I screw something up? And then I realized, well, that's part of my process. It's part of the process. Clearly, it's going to happen no matter how technically competent I get. So I'm just going to push past it. 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 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 difficulty.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depressed about how crappy the day went. And I went home and in this blue funk, I literally had this thought, you have no business making stuff. And the fact is, I feel 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 one and two and...”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The camera, you can see that I've got Murderer's row of class 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 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 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it's the universal thing that nobody escapes. Nobody gets out scot-free. Nobody suffers like the poor, as Charles Bukowski pointed out, but nobody escapes from suffering. It is the universal condition and it's the reason it's the first of Buddha's truths. I love the output that we do on my website, on tested.com, because I realize we don't make, so I do builds in my shop on tested.com and I do them here in my cave. And I realize at a certain point that they're not how-to videos because I'm often discovering the process that I'm exploring on camera. They're more like what happened videos. And a couple of years ago, I was making some spacesuit parts. Actually, if I tilt.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole everything weightless, like I mean. But Jacques Papin and Julia Child both have the same way of finishing Scrambled Eggs. He does them fast over high heat. She does them slow over a medium heat. But they both take 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did a pan flip once. I am not willing to try it again. Actually, when I do flip my omelets, my friends point out that actually as I'm doing the flip, I'm using the spatula and the pen and my friends point out my whole body goes up.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watching him eat bone a chicken in two minutes and telling you afterwards that he went slowly because they were filming it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the flip side of that, there's a great cookbook. You probably have it in your collection, Jacques and Julia, Jacques Japan and Jacques.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Gordon didn't talk about that. That was like my own exploration. But every time it happens, because it happened to me spontaneously, it's part of my love affair with eggs is getting that moment out of that. And actually, I mean, we did it started in 2016 after the most recent president was elected into office. We started just having brunches every Sunday and having friends come over because we just needed to be around a lot of people we loved on a very regular basis. And I made those scrambled eggs for everywhere from five to 25 people every Sunday. I would make big batches, small batches, and sometimes I'd add in scallions or cheese or a little pepper or something like that. I have now cooked that dish thousands and thousands of times.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's this great moment that happens when you're doing the stirring, when the eggs, when the heat helps the whites and the yolks fully emulsify. And this is before you've added salt or anything else. You just have butter in there. So you have some residual salt. But where the emulsification happens, I feel like it's because of the heat when all of a sudden this sweet smell rises out of the pan. And it's the moment I know, like, oh, cool, I'm on the home stretch. Now I got it”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes food textural and what I want out of them by adjusting that recipe over the years. So now I make my eggs the same way. I tend to let them get a little bit more congealed at the very end. So I have some tooth.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, Oh, I got to try this. And I tried it, and it kind of worked the first time. And I just, I've been doing it ever since. And there's this amazing moment I found. So first of all, when you talk to cooks, they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, the slow cook temperature adjusted scramble is just objectively the best way to make eggs. It's literally like they come out like this sweet custard. And there's nothing else quite like it. And it's really hard to do right in a restaurant where you don't have 15 minutes of concentrated time for everyone's entree. So restaurants have all these really wonderful techniques for doing that. And Ramsey was saying he makes new chefs cook him eggs in order to guess their chops. And I have discovered so much about myself and about the process of what”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of cooks and chefs that I know say that eggs are one of the hardest things to get right. I have always loved eggs. I've always loved scrambled eggs. I tend to not like omelets because I think in the US, omelets are too full of shit, literally. And then I guess about 15 years ago, I came across this Gordon Ramsey video on YouTube where he talked about doing a slow cook scramble. And he literally, it's a very weird scramble. You crack the eggs in whole, you're stirring them constantly over a medium heat with a bunch of butter. And as soon as they start to congeal, you pull them off the heat. You stir them like a risotto. You never stop stirring. But the temperature control and attunement is all about not letting them ever congeal too much.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eggs are tough. Eggs are unforgiving. Eggs like chicken have a wide range of being edible, but a short range of being delicious.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here, can we get over here so we can see that they don't have the eye line? 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give another example. I was just in LA 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 have this gigantic set they're going to 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. 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you were building a 112th scale model, that would be nine inches. 24th scale, it would be four and a half inches, right? Half of that. So the way I start any architectural model is I figure out my ceiling height, and then I cut out a bunch of strips of corrugated cardboard at that exact height. Now I've got my walls. They're all overly long. So I take a piece of cardboard that will be the base and I draw out the floor plan in scale. That only takes a right angle ruler and a pencil. Once I have that, now I have a measuring device for these long strips of cardboard that are the correct height. So I measure all four walls. Now I have four walls that are the correct height and correct width. Now I start to just measure where the windows and the details go. All of this takes a ruler with an edge you can cut against and Xactoblade, a hot glue gun, and a few Amazon boxes. And that's it.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so let me explain the process first of all as I do it, which is in general, most of us live in houses of a consistent ceiling height. The ceilings in your house look like they're maybe nine feet.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I built four or five scabbards for other swords of mine in preparation for this scabbard. I've wanted this one to be beautiful. And this is the scabbard I made for Boromir's sword. It is leather and it's steel and I use techniques I had never tried before. And it is a suitable house for one of my favorite objects. Amazing.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So last year for my, I'm friends with the guys at WEDA 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. This is one of the most beautiful objects I've ever seen. This is hand built by Weta's swordmaster 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cost low threshold of skill, high probability of quality output because they're just cut in squares and there's nothing complicated about. The other intersection that I suggest is to find something that you have to have. Now I am sure in the explorations you do around the world that you go to someone's house and they show you the Japanese sword they have or you go somewhere, you sit in a chair and you're like, holy hell, this is the greatest chair I've ever sat in or you see a cup that is like, 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”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, much of my building, like I said, happens in my head. The other thing that I would say, so I love the idea of building an architectural model as an exercise. Actually, when I did my first MakerBox, that was the first project. I gave people a 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”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the beginning, like let's say after our podcast, you start making an architectural model of the house. The mental process you're going to go through is going to be one of a constant gear switching from the macro to the micro. You'll be, okay, that wall is going to come to this and that measurement comes to this. And it'll be this kind of constant back and forth. For me, after all the years of experience 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 chosen gets past that gear switching mode and goes towards an almost entirely mental mode where I build something.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 noble measurements. You can build a one 12th scale model of that room simply by taking the inch number and 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. 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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 poem 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. This is something that it is not difficult to understand and to parse, and it's not difficult to do a really good job at it. You can look at your room that you're in. It's got four walls.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Letting me tap into. I think that I built a framework. I think that's frankly what 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. We do that to our partners and our friends all the time in terms of giving them perspective. And that exercise, really early on in my romantic life, gave me a sense that there were other vantage points from which to view something rather than through your own angry eyes in the middle of the melee.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Ramdas talks about that a lot. And I do remember being with a girlfriend in 1985 or 86. And she was upset and I couldn't figure out why. And so I thought to myself, I remembered distinctly trying this thought experiment once, oh, 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. I saw a color and the color helped inform me where she was mentally. Now, you asked me what I think, what was going on there. I think I was using the analogy of color to help tap into my own intuition that my emotion was.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really not sure. I know that I was reading a lot of, in my late teens, I was also reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda and a lot of... And a lot of ram das.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 meda.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 dharma is full of exhortations to be able to meta shift yourself so you see above the plane of what's going on. I remember at one point, speaking of watching the washer, I remember at one point having an argument with a partner of mine at the time. And we were one of those arguments where you both feel super vulnerable, but no one wants to give and you attack, you both attack. And I thought to myself. I have no idea what to do with this situation. Neither of us wants to budge. How do we get out of this? And then I thought, okay, let's say I was writing this scene as a screenplay.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Chomsky is coming back into this. As I've been very upset about Trump, I get very upset about how the New York Times covers them because I feel so much both sidesism 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 I think he's been telling me the New York Times supports the status quo and the power structure since 1984. Like that's when I read my first Gnome Chomsky pamphlet. 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'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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of that comes into play. Chomsky is amazing for, it's funny because I'm thinking a lot about Chomsky now. There are two current schools of political thought about our current situation. And especially as somebody who vehemently disagrees with everything that 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 that we might not want to notice and understand how each of us is complicit in that and really work towards”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, there's so many. I mean, you know, starting off by reading all of Harlan Ellison's weird and complicated semi-misogenist canon back in my late teens to Kurt Vonnegut, who showed me that you could have rigor and deep affection and love all at the same time to Richard Feynman who showed that you can be there are it is genuinely possible for there to be brilliant polymaths in the world who can explore many disciplines.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should not be friends with you. That's how she put it. And I called my dad. I was 19. I was weeping into the phone. And he said, look, you can't change what happened. You can't fix that. The only thing you can do, and you can't even tell her about this, you can take in what you did. You can absorb it. Realize what mechanism in you led to that screw up and resolved to not do that again. And that is what's being a human is about. It's about noticing those things and trying not to do them again.”
2019-04-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #370: Adam Savage on Great Tools, Great Projects, and Great Lessons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT