Adam Savage
Adam Savage
Adam Whitney Savage is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and television personality, formerly known as co-hostof the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters and Unchained Reaction. His model work has appeared in major films, including Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. He is a prominent member of the skeptic community. He lives in San Francisco with his twin sons and wife, Julia...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth15 July 1967
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Adam Savage quotes about
Let's blow some stuff up.
Remember kids, I have life insurance.
In theory, cars are fairly simple. If they don't start, it's either the fuel system or the electrical system. Teach yourself about the path of each in your engine and tracing it is fairly straightforward. But at the beginning, mastering each new system seems like an unreachable shore. The car is effectively a black box.
The best-case scenario is that the glass shatters in my face! How do you think that makes me feel?
Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.
The explosions, like the urban legends, are a great way of bringing people in to watch, because it's really fun, and you know we're always going to give you a satisfying ending.
After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.
I think at this point, there's a certain bizarre chemistry between Jamie [Hyneman] and I that we can't ignore a lot of the mechanics of, that we're quite aware of. Half of it is absolutely genuine, and half of it is us playing around with that fact.
I find it's too much for me to read endless critiques, even if we're being well-defended, of exactly what we're doing. When someone tells us something we're doing wrong on the boards, we try to respond, we try to be responsive to the fan boards, but yeah, I can't read them.
These are people from everywhere, from Lawrence Livermore and JPL and Sandia National Labs, the FBI, all over the place, real scientists who see what we're doing, and they consistently thank us. "I agree your results aren't always right," they'll say, "but your methods are clearly showing that science is a re-creative process, and it's an interesting process because it's messy, and no other shows show that."
I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other's designs, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.
We cleared all traces of our occupation out of M6 and moved to M7, and it's been quite smooth over there. We chose a place all the way at the end of an industrial park.
I felt like I had kind of played it out, and I wanted to see what was next, and then came Mythbusters. You know, it's the best job I've ever had, on its worst day it's better than anything else, but it's a huge amount of responsibility, and there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else's drawing sounds like going back to heaven.
In the summer of 2002, we had spent six weeks shooting the three pilots of Mythbusters, and Jamie[Hyneman] called me up afterward - well, first he called me up to tell me to clear my crap back out of his shop - and he said, "Well, that was kind of fun, wasn't it? I mean, I don't see where this could go, because we pretty much did everything. But it was fun."