Podcast - Adam Savage Project
Dream Jobs – 09/02/2014
In the conclusion of the epic jobs trilogy, Adam, Norm, and Will discuss their dream jobs. Enjoy!
Comments (54)
In the conclusion of the epic jobs trilogy, Adam, Norm, and Will discuss their dream jobs. Enjoy!
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
This episode of ‘Still Untitled’ is brought to you by LEGO.. 😊
What has happened to Adam’s tour blog?
At 4 I wanted to be a Indycar driver.
This coming from a long line of loggers (my grandfather started felling trees by hand before his 15th birthday!), the job of ‘logger assassin’ would be completely unfeasible.
You are too freaking exhausted at the end of the day (say by 3:00 PM), to do anything other than work on your saws before dinner. To even think of doing some any other sideline work, such as offing some guy James Bond-style in your ‘spare time’, would send some of my relatives in a fit of uncontrolled laughter..
Dr. Smith? Oh the pain… the pain… ! 😊
Since I was 6, I wanted to be a F1 driver. Now the goal is to work for an F1 team.
When I was in elementary school I wanted to be an astronaut, by middle school it had moved to aerospace engineer when I realized I only wanted to be an astronaut because rockets. Now I’m 21 and in college to be a mechanical engineer planning on going into automotive design and if the cards play out, starting an automotive company. It may be late to do gasoline cars, but electric isn’t practical for the masses yet. Its an awkward time to be in, but possibly an exciting one.
Funny thing is, when I got into college I just stuck with mechanical engineering because I’d gotten bored with the idea of engineering, but I didn’t know what else to do. Then I found a team on campus where we design/build/race a car, now its what I want to do, hands down, specifically aerodynamics. Full circle I guess.
when i was little i wanted to be an doctor but in high school i wanted to be a computer programmer now after having my degree my dream job would be being able to build and make custamized stuff for people all day
Had a co-worker give me the big letdown last year- apparently, 28 is too late to start on the path to astronautdom. The plus side is that I am a commercial diver, one of the secret blue collar jobs that lets you work with your hands and mind while wearing a space helmet and problem solving on the bottom of the sea.
I’m pretty sure they said “blogger assassin”. 😊 However, I do agree that a logger assassin would be impractical – the obvious axe wounds would be a dead giveaway! 😊
On the topic of secret rooms: Richard Garriot (who made the Ultima Series) has the ultimate secret room/hallway/display area house. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVkAoHS8SOg
Whenever I think of “So what do you want to do when you grow up?” question. I think of the very childish response of “I wanna be a plumber”. With the obligatory lowering of the pants and bending over to show ones ass cleavage.
I could only imagine how that might go over a more mature conversation say between a bunch of 40 year olds. With the obligatory part of course.
Yeah, you are right.
I had the volume down really low, and somehow I got ‘logger’ and not ‘blogger’.. 😚
I can totally relate to your Lego childhood Adam. I grew up when the same sets were coming out, and every birthday and Christmas i pretty much only got Lego sets and loved it.
I remember one Saturday morning I spent a few hours making this three to four foot long Lego boat oil tanker model. It was huge and had lots of detail on it. I picked it up to take it downstairs and show my mom and on the way down the middle of the boat broke in half and fell apart. I was left with a small part of the bow in my left hand and a small part of the aft in my right hand. So I put the two together quick and went to show her. I remember she had this “You spent all morning making just that little thing?” kind of look on her face.
Borrowing from a webcomic,
The best way to deal with the “What do you do?” question is instead of answering with your job, answer with your hobby, or what you do for fun.
I think that this is one of the most inspiring thing I have ever seen of overcoming handicaps and getting a dream job:
http://jalopnik.com/the-life-of-this-armless-nascar-engineer-will-inspire-y-870136620
I think it’s safe to say that building race cars for NASCAR is on most people’s dream job list.
I would also love to take Adams class!! Possibly a Tested viewer project. List a bunch of materials and quantities and have the viewer problem solve and create whatever is decided. Just found the YouTube channel about a week ago and I watch 10-15 a day at my job that is not a dream job. Thanks for providing an escape!! Look forward to each upload!!!
Now that I am self employed I have created my dream job(s).
wooow, ‘s black brick story is crazy and cute and awesome in the same way as the “we are all stardust” thing.
i always answer the question “what do you want to do when you grow up” with: “nothing, i don’t want to grow up”.
When I was young (And they packed me off to school?)
I told my mom, “When I grow up I want to be an actor.”
She said, “You can’t do both.”
And she was right.
My dream job? I watch Behind-The-Scenes footage of shows like Red Dwarf, Bottom, The IT Crowd, or Mrs Browns Boys… getting your new script on Sunday…. Rehearsing all week and shooting it live, in front of a studio audience on Friday…. Looks like an AMAZING process and fully acknowledging that I might get there and hate it (Or suck out loud at it) I keep going to auditions, cause maybe, just maybe, one day….. ,-)
With Adam’s class they could start with the same box that they used for inventern, without the phone.
True- those guys are crucial in maintaining the safety of the astronauts as they train, but they don’t get to experience the joy and terror of crawling in the dark on the seafloor. I am constantly reminded of Ridley Scott’s Alien whenever we work at the bottom of an oil rig- the claustrophobia and the darkness set all of your senses on red alert.
Holy shit. I think Mythbusters is going to do Flight of the Pheonix.
Great episode. My dream as a kid was to be the model maker in movies. However my skills at 8 were not that good. And like Will I thought those jobs only existed in Hollywood and were beyond my reach in Michigan. Also it is not exactly the career you tell your parents you want to do and expect them to understand.
Now I would like to learn to weld and electronics.
Haha: it’s only due to Will’s “Like us, rate us, blah blah blah” comment that I actually went as far as going to the Youtube channel to click ‘Like’. Here’s to my first, and hopefully not last Still Untitled ‘Like’.
I wonder how many people are like me? I never fantasised about what I would be when I grew up. A combination of a rather difficult home life and a belief that the cold war would inevitably go hot meant that I was convinced from a very young age that there was no future.* And I do mean young. I can remember asking my mother if there would be a spaceship we could escape on before the bombs came. This happened when I was still young enough to be read a bedtime story every night.
Completely unrelated: I saw Jaime and Adam in Melbourne and really enjoyed the show. There was one point where I was laughing so hard I couldn’t see. Fun stuff.
*Why yes, I did have pointy hair and wore a lot of black as teenager. Why do you ask? 😉
Dream job would be designing stuff but my brain can’t wrap around the starting at nothing add this that the other thing put the doohickey over there and there ya go aspect. Nor can my brain wrap around the math skills necessary to do it the other way. I have fixed pretty complex optical equipment, edging machines, lens layout machines, lens generators (old ones at least) and see how it was done and for the most part put it back together and get it working on the first try, expect for that damn extra screw or washer, all with out pretty much any instruction. But to start with blank paper, yeah it stays blank. To create something from nothing but my ideas.. yeah that would be hella cool.
So I’m 24 and I’ve been married for 2 years now (young I know, but I was lucky enough to have found the love of my life early) and I work on an assembly line where my input doesn’t matter and I am constantly surrounded by incompetent idiots. I dream of being a machinist/engineer and possibly starting my own business one day. How do I get out of the factory and into machining without losing a bunch of money?
A 41 minute Still Untitled episode? I’m in heaven!
Hooray for Red Dwarf!
JBradley,
Night school? Start talking to the guys in the tool room? Look, I don’t know where you live, but in my area the Community colleges have an active program for advanced manufacturing technology offered after hours. Start checking around. If you have the space at home, buy a mini mill and lathe on Craig’s list and start looking at youtube videos. Go to the local used bookstores and look for books on machining. I did all of the above after I got my engineering degree. Education doesn’t end just because you have a job or a degree.
My dream job would have to be a novelist. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller like Neil Gaiman. He and a few other writers like him just have this beautiful way of not really writing a story like most writers, but telling a tale that just makes anything they write seem like a fairytale from your childhood. If I had the talent but more importantly the drive and ambition, that is what I would be.
As a kid though, it was Rockstar all the way!
Talk to the management at your factory, or your union if you have one. My Dad worked at an International Truck plant for 15 years and they were always sending people for special training who had the interest and drive to be more. If your plant does anything similar, do it, take every class or bit of training you can take. Even if you don’t think it will really apply to what you want to do. Education is the greatest step up to reaching your goals, especially if it’s paid for by some one else.
Way back in grade 1 or 2 when I was asked what I wanted to be, my answer was “Mad Scientist” and I think it came from a mixture of a Frankenstein movie and Lego. Later on, I seriously tried to become a Lego designer (but due to location and skillset this didn’t work out) and then it slowly switched over to engineering.
Now, I work as a mad scientist (sort-of) for a wireless engineering company, so I think it all worked out!
I have never known what my dream job would be and I never knew as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. None of my dreams are realistic.
Thanks for pimping Dave, .
I saw the Behind the Scenes for Star Wars (reruns as I was not alive when the original trilogy released) and from that moment on I wanted to be a special effects artist and work for Industrial Light and Magic. I was writing this on class projects for what I wanted to be when I grew up and I wasn’t even old enough to spell all the words in the job title.
Later when the new trilogy came out and much of it was computer generated I realized it was no longer what I wanted to do. I really had dreamed of making hard edge models and huge miniature landscapes with explosions (which I realize is several separate jobs)
this is the way to build lego for transport, “obviously”
http://imgur.com/gallery/jShuF
I’m now a laboratory medicine resident because I messed up in med school and didn’t get into anesthesiology.
And I’m kinda glad, even though that could have been rewarding, it’s also kinda soul crushing.
Now my top dreams rotate between just doing actual hard science stuff, becoming a writer or getting into politics.
Oh, and going to Mars. That’s a job, right?
Part of the reason why I enjoy Tested so much is that when I was in the third grade, I would always tell adults I wanted to “either work for ILM or be an Imagineer” (I’d guess that most people had no idea what I was talking about). And as someone who grew up in the pre-Internet 80s in West Virginia, I also idenfied with Will’s statement of also having the sense that coming from Appalachia meant that such a thing would never be possible. Had I grown up watching Tested, things might have been different. 🙂
Thanks for this, guys.
Awesome podcast guys, I enjoy them all on my way to work. When I was young I always played with Lego Technic. It somewhat surprises me you guys don’t mention that ever. I love the gears, pistons and later on the mindstorms set.
And indeed as a kid I wanted to be a designer for Lego Technic. Now I’m a programmer and when people ask me what I do I tell them I build with legos in a digital way 🙂 The lexicon being the individual blocks/parts and the syntax the small subconstructions that make sense (a gear on a shaft).
Speaking of Lego, check out James May’s Man Lab Lego house build. Fun stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HShqL3q8D7s
I’m lucky enough to actually have my dream job. I teach Technology classes to 6th 7th and 8th graders. We get to do robotics, rockets, 2D/3D design, 3D printing/scanning, very basic web design. Lots of great problem solving happens everyday. It’s great to see students get over hurdles each in their own way. The only part that I would like to change is that I don’t get to do as much as demo, I show them how but don’t often get to run through the tasks/problems etc myself. Tested and their build videos have really helped me start to do my own Making in what free time I have.
Norm won’t say, but I’ll take a crack at his ‘now’ dream job. I’m thinking UX Designer.
I wanted to be an architect. Then I realized it involves lots and lots of math.
I’m getting very excited to see Adam and Jamie out in Auckland in two days! I hope they enjoy NZ, and I promise not to ask them what they think of it!
I don’t think I ever really asked myself what my dream job would be, but given that I played video games a lot and was a fan of movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones (before either got their modern installments and I hired them out on VHS) it’s little surprise that I’d like to be an animator for video games or film, or to just help contribute to making either.
Grew in Ft. Worth, TX, large B-52 base, high school had 1 foot wide windows, I believe we were were in the top 10 cities to be bombed. When I liven in Cheyenne, WY, 60 Minutes did a story about the now “Russian” missile force, they were at a silo with an American general verifying the reductions of their force. They asked the Russian general where that particular missile was aimed…Cheyenne, WY. I saw the missile with my name on it. Luckily it doesn’t seem to have been fired yet.
Just checked out adamsavage.com lol throwback thursday
How do you start the master builder program you talked about in this episode? I’ve looked on the lego website and all I found was the MBA, which sounds different than the program you described.
I 100% would have loved to done the whole ” throw stuff at students and they have to create” but in england at least and 16-18 yearolds , it simply cannot be done, there are so many things to hit, target wise that introducing something creative like that in a “creative” lesson is really really hard.
I guess there are things that could be done but I think it would be so much nicer to have maybe 5 “sandbox” lessons in a row or a week of them and at the end you have all created some work. We would never get that, chance
I wanted to be a paleontologist
It’s probably a little late for now, but you don’t need to be a fighter pilot or have 20/20 natural vision to become an astronaut these days. If memory serves, 20/200 is the minimum requirement for a NASA mission specialist as long as it’s correctable to 20/20.
u should do Masterchef (though the US one is sort of garbage vs Masterchef Australia!)
Ha!
I’ve done it, guys! I just got a job at a tool and die/prototyping company in west Michigan. I’m super excited! We do CNC machining and have 4 huge 3D Systems SLA machines. We do resin casting and injection molding- and I get to learn it all!!
It’s really weird that I’m running across this now. When I was 20, I wanted to be a Mythbuster. Before that, I wanted to be an architect. Now I’m 32, and I want to be an engineer, but I also want to edit fiction. I’ve never had one thing that I’ve wanted to be or do. I’ve never been drawn to just art or just science. It’s always been both. I suppose it’s more accurate to say that there are skills I want to collect, and tasks I want to accomplish.