Podcast - Adam Savage Project
More Questions! – 9/15/2015
Adam and Will take more of your questions, including topics such as encounters with superfans, our favorite Tarantino film, and more. Enjoy!
Comments (37)
Adam and Will take more of your questions, including topics such as encounters with superfans, our favorite Tarantino film, and more. Enjoy!
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Thanks for answering my question.
OK.. Now we all need to know. How did Jamie and Adam get involved in Tested?
When talking about Tarantino’s stuff, I don’t think Four Rooms comes up enough – QT’s segment of that is a riot… A condensed, high-potency dose of some hilarious and iconic Tarantino archetypes. Obviously not in contention for “his best film,” but I think it needs to be brought up more often. 🙂
Also, I grew up going backstage at concerts so meeting musicians has never been a major big deal to me, but if I meet a hero of another sort, authors or actors, I mostly make a complete ass out of myself and spend the rest of my life occasionally thinking back to it and getting embarrassed.
I doubt that I will ever have a chance to meet Adam, but Mythbusters is probably the thing that pushed me to engineering. As a kid I was always waking my parents up with the sound of digging through the recycling for materials to make things. I chose electrical engineering technology because it is a small department and is basically exactly what I wanted. But I am absolutely fascinated by machining and other mechanical stuff too. I am very fortunate to have gotten a job for an engineering company where I get to do a little bit of everything even though I started there my senior year of high school.
I don’t want to sound like I am bragging about myself or anything like that. But Adam said that he loved hearing how Mythbusters pushed people to the field of engineering and I decided to write this post.
$3530 is THREE TIMES my mortgage on a 3br/2ba suburban split-level in St. Louis. Yes I know it’s the Midwest and California is beautiful but aaagh it’s so cheap here in the humidity-belt!
Yup. I’ve turned down 3 jobs in the bay area because I would be functionally homeless due to high rents.
Speaking of Billy Joel – Songs in the Attic is a fantastic live album. Highly recommended.
I really doubt The Whole Bloody Affair ever gets a home release. QT really doesn’t do special stuff for his movies on home video. The commentaries he’s done are for films he didn’t direct and he doesn’t go into bonus features like Rodriguez does.
Plus it’s been rumored to come out every year since vol 2 came out.
I have waited three long years to hear the answer to this one simple question. And right when we were on the verge of getting an answer, it was completely passed over for questions that have been talked about numerous times.. 😔
C’mon, Man!
One would have to take home a minimum of $42,360 (after taxes!) just to pay your rent. That is insane! What eating food, buying clothes, and all the other stuff that we take for granted?
No wonder there are so many homeless people in the Bay Area. They can’t afford to live there doing just a menial job..
Thank you so much for answering my question! Really appreciate it. 🙂
Check out This is Only a Test episode 112. Will and Norm explain how it happened
PS. If you want to waste an afternoon falling down a wormhole of crazy.. Just go back and watch some of the old tests and podcasts.
When I moved from SF in February, me and my roommate were paying a total of $1900/month for our two bedroom apartment in the Outer Richmond. That was a fucking steal, and could easily have been twice that if our landlord had felt like fucking us over. Luckily he didn’t and it was only $100 more than we paid when we moved in, back in September 2010. Rent has risen like crazy over the last five years.
A friend of mine pays $1200 for a shared studio apartment in the Tenderloin. That’s $2400 total for a zero bedroom place, with two beds. Its bananas.
As for how Adam and Jamie joined Tested, I would assume that the fact that Adam and Jamie were developing shows with BermanBraun (Dangerous Toys special and Unchained Reaction) has something to do with it. As most probably know, BermanBraun became Tested’s new parent company after the Whiskey Media split, and since everyone was in SF and had similar interests it was a good match.
Thanks! That must have been right before I joined Tested.. 😉
I would have loved to see this question answered too. Will and norm breiefly answered this question in this video This is only a test 281 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PMHILyLFPM at the 15:20 mark. However I’d love to hear from Adam his perspective in meeting Will and Norm and why he got involved in tested. An origin talk would be great.
Yeah, I’ve seen that video.
I guess I just wanted more details than what Will very briefly talked about in that video. 😉
I was fortunate enough to meet Adam a couple years ago and stumbled through what I wanted to say about going into engineering and being really excited to thank him personally.
I went into engineering because of mythbusters. I love to build stuff and love math so I went into mechanical engineering. My favourite part of school was learning how to design the movements of a linkage to follow a path you want using math. That was something I spent hours doing with Lego, but it was all trial and error until the math was explained to me.
I can honestly say I wouldn’t be the person I am today without Mythbusters/Tested and especially Adam Savage. Keep on inspiring!
Death Proof
Zoe Bell, popping up from behind the bushes “I’m alright!” gets me EVERY FKNG TIME! I LOVE IT!!!
First movie in theatre
Animated Disney Robin Hood
Nice episode!
All my old college pals grew up in NYC or Long Island. So through them I learned how speak New York and dig all those great musicians Adam clearly loves. See you at the show….
re: High Prices in CA… what do people do for a living out there so they can -afford- those high prices? Or do they have to sell their first-born male sons?
I’ve watched the HGTV channel and was shocked when they said things like “and our budget is $500,000… between the two of us…” And that might not have been CA!
–Paul E Musselman
Well, a big part of it is that highly-educated and well paid people working for the big tech companies have driven rents crazy high in popular areas, affecting the median rental prices.
A majority of these people are young and unmarried which means they aren’t buying in the burbs, but rather willing to spend a large portion of their income on rent to live close to the action.
Anything that is decent standard and size with easy access to the peninsula (Google, Facebook etc. have their own buses that drive workers from the city to their campuses) goes through the roof.
The spontaneous New York accent in the few minutes at the end was amazing.
I don’t want to sound like fandom trash ( or a troll *snicker snicker*), but I think that Adam would enjoy the ridiculously roundabout and nonlinear storytelling of Homestuck. Please don’t hate me.
It was explained on one of the early Still Untitled questions episodes many moons ago.
Can’t remember off hand which.
*edit*
If I had read all of the following comments, I’d see this was already answered. oops
About the housing Market down there you talking under a million for a detached house? I have to be in a 50 mins out of the city to get under a million in a detached house… so come to Vancouver and take advantage of our dollar dropping :D.
Regarding the “Which universe would you live in?” question, it seems to me that the only sensible answer if you are a regular shmoe is Star Trek*. You get to enjoy a post scarcity, self-improvement oriented society with replicators and holo-decks, and (BONUS!) all of the Type-A’s ship off to space.
*No. That wouldn’t make you a red shirt. Despite their ignominious ends those guys are engineers, comm specialists, and security personnel on a UFP starship, meritocratic one-percenters, if you will.
No Red Shirts!
When you talked of “OMG she played that!”, I will love that Harold Abrahams’ girlfriend Sybill in “Chariots of Fire” was The Borg Queen !
Resistance is Futile.
I succeeded at inventing the crocheted klein bottle you suggested a year ago. Missed you at PAX this year, I really enjoyed the Tested meetup in Seattle last year.
I haven’t figured out yet where to go hang out with makers. It’s fun to show off my stuff to friends and people at work, but that meetup showed me that it’s really inspiring to chat with people who love making stuff.
Klein bottle from the side.
Klein bottle from the bottom.
Crocheted gyroid (mathematical figure is somebody else’s invention, crochet pattern is my design).
$1.2 Million?? For what is essentially a fixer-upper? Yikes!
That’s within the city of San Francisco, right? Surely the home prices are lower the further out that you go; like down in Pacifica where you live?
I liked the bit about Billy Joel. I did not know he had a regular New York concert. I saw him in my home town once 6 or 7 years ago, and it was exactly how Adam described.
btw, (and ) , if you want to watch an interesting documentary about Billy playing in New York (though not at Madison Square Gardens) that doubles as a story about Shea Stadium’s life from concept to construction, home of the Mets, the Stadium the Beatles played at, and leading up to its demolition in 2009, you should really check out “Last Play at Shea” (2010)
“unwatchable” doesn’t begin to describe that music video. Wow.
The essay on politeness was by Paul Ford on Medium!
These are just bloody amazing! Well done for the imagination to want to do something so cool.
Thank you!
The funny thing is, my crafting ideas come really slowly and sort of grow and morph at what seems like a glacial pace. And then there’s just plain getting ideas from other people and implementing them myself.
Years ago, I frequented a site that sells those little high-powered magnet spheres (zenmagnets brand), and they had regular themed contests for building neat sculptures (pictures of the sculptures would get voted on, and somebody would win sets of zenmagnets). I’m not really great at artsy design, and only had single-color magnets to work with, so I didn’t bother participating much. But one of the contests wasn’t about style, it was a dare to make a gyroid out of magnet spheres (first person to send a plausible looking picture and followable instructions wins). I poked at the problem for a while, and then succeeded before anybody else did.
That got me thinking about gyroids, and how to construct them modularly (the contest linked to this http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6497) and I started thinking about doing it in crochet. And I tried doing it in crochet. And I failed hard. I did several things that just weren’t going to work, and I set it down for years. Fast forward to a time when I had discovered Mythbusters and Tested, and got all inspired to re-attempt hard projects. I looked at the gyroid project again, thought carefully about what went wrong the first time, and took another run at it. And (eventually) succeeded! Oh boy was that a lot of time with a 3D modeler, a tiny crochet hook, and 216 little yarn hexagons.
I brought the thing to the Tested meet-up in Seattle a year ago and showed it to people. Will was impressed and suggested trying other crazy shapes, like klein bottles. I started on the klein bottle pretty quickly, did a bunch of spreadsheet work, played around with ways to make the hole in the side (it actually works; that spout threads through and you can feed small smooth objects like jellybeans into the interior), made a blue and white one that is almost right, and then got it pretty much right with the orange and off-white. Fortunately I also recorded what I was doing in a google document.
Part of it is just figuring out how to nurture the mental processes that result in creative ideas. I end up running a sort of crafting branching algorithm; since I don’t get many ideas, I take the ones I have and see what else can be done to reuse them in slightly different ways. And of course, finding a good group of people to bounce ideas back and forth with is pretty great, but I haven’t figured out how to do that regularly yet.
My first movie was Empire Strikes Back and then Raiders Of the Lost Ark. I know Adam will get a kick out of hearing that. I’m Pretty sure my dad regretted taking me to Raiders at the age of 3 (lol) when the faces started melting. It was PG, the MPAA after that movie created the PG13 rating, but the first movie that was PG13 wasn’t released until 84 (The Flamingo Kid). So there was no middle ground between PG and R at that point.
0:36:43 – “What once was just a Tuesday afternoon is now crippling alcoholism.”
Oh, it was always alcoholism. People just didn’t call it that. 🙂