vicky bly hello vicky wants to know when you did mega food fight watching you with tori belichi was
was nerd vanna for this mythbuster fan was working with him again just as much fun as it appeared
um who else did you consider to fight uh we reached out to ed helms
ed is a uh a a a pal uh and a maker and uh he was he he couldn't make the schedule work uh i think
that was i think he was one of the earliest texts i sent we were in way in pre-production
um but then when someone brought up tori's name in the room that that was that was a done deal
like it had to be dory that was yeah as soon as we thought about tori it was time to call him as soon
as he said yes we didn't think about anybody else um yeah it was just as much fun to work with tori
as it looked um but even more than that even more than that it was satisfying and
delightful in ways that might not even be really clear like tori shows up on set
and like i've had two whole two whole families with tori the the industrialized magic
family and the mythbusters family we go back a long time you know back to the late 90s and
within the mythbusters family you know well actually within both families within the within
the within the george lucas industrial light and magic family there are very few people that went
through what we went through together in that and that that binds us in in a lovely way and by the
same token with mythbusters you know that there are things that there are things we went through
with the crew and the network and then there are things we went through just as the hosts as the
five people at the center of this maelstrom and there are ways in which our experience
is one that only the others could understand and that that yields an intimacy of experience that
is very rewarding from a friendship standpoint
when i see my old mythbuster colleagues but especially the hosts
we share something uh that we feel really grateful for that i feel really grateful for for the time
we got to spend doing that and uh you know tori steps on the set and he brings with him
a set of institutional knowledge about how to be a host and be a guest on someone's show that is
very close to mind so honestly we needed to use very few pronouns tori understands the
stakes and the scope of that kind of battle for that kind of television better than most humans
alive and that means oh it's just it's just going to be so much fun he doesn't mind getting dirty
doesn't mind getting messy he knows how to raise the stakes that was delightful yep um
we had extra plans uh for subsequent seasons of savage builds of of course uh bringing in
other mythbuster hosts as well um mr heineman is not among those not that i wouldn't ask him
because i would but i pretty much guarantee you i think he would say no across the board
forever now which is fine it's totally his prerogative um mark blair wants to know he
says i love savage builds and i won't uncross my fingers until covet is over and we have season two
well you might be crossing them for a while forging excalibur was possibly my favorite episode
do you mean my excalibur sword forged from a meteorite yes i guess you do um let's see
having a sword forged from a meteor seems to me would be the coolest thing ever
out of all your collections can you say what your number one favorite piece is
or they all like you chill your children and you love them equally
um they are like your children
but not because you love them equally
because that's not true you you don't you you love each person in your life individually for
what they bring to your life it's not really a comparison
and it's definitely not a zero-sum game so when we say do you love all your children
equally you're kind of referring to family as if it's a zero-sum game i.e if one person
gets this amount of love the other person gets a commensurate lower amount of love and
that's not true that's not how this whole that's not how this thing works
um but they are like your children the things that you make but in more ways than you think um
this is i didn't this metaphor did not occur to me until i until i just started to think about it but
they are like your children in that they are their own thing and you can't impose your will upon them
which sounds funny to say because i often talk about the workbench as the place i go to enjoy the
illusion that i have some measure of control right like here at the bench my mind gets really quiet
and that becomes something i need on a regular basis for my mental health
and my mind gets quiet because it's a set of discrete problems and i can attack and approach
and manage each one as it comes so that is a level of control i have over what happens on the bench
but when it comes to the objects themselves that control is still just as much of an illusion as
it is in our daily lives because well we start out making a sword i made drawings about what i
thought this sword would be but then as we go we can't follow the drawings slavishly because we
may come to some different conclusions as we go every object brings with it its own
my dad used the phrase morality when he talked about it at one point to me
and it's a big word to use but i do kind of agree that objects of power objects that move us
bring with them not only their own narrative but also their own sort of moral compass
and i i i i'll that's something to talk about on a bigger scale a little bit later but
what i want to point out is that i make drawings of things and i make plans and then
often the object itself wants to go in slightly different directions and i've got to follow it
because it's an artistic process a creative process and i follow the process not the plan
and in that they're very much like children because anyone who's raised children knows
that there is no control it's triage for decades um but you can't turn a kid out
to be the way you want them to be you have to help them be what they're going to be
it's a process of discovery for you and the same exists for the objects we make
um the final look of my samaritan is very different than i imagined it would be
and i'm not even sure this is the final look there may be some more treatments on this um
and one of the things i do at a major stage where i think i've finished something is i
carried around for a few days like samaritan's been sort of moving around my house desk to
uh television you know it moves around with me so i can kind of keep on looking at it and that's
part of me trying to understand it and by the same token i do the same thing with my sons when i when
i talk to them my boys they want to think two are now almost 22. um and when i talk to them
my goal as a as a parent as a as a confidant is to meet them where they are not impose my will
upon where i think they should be but sounds really lofty um and i fail a lot at that but
that's the goal the goal is to meet the thing where it exists so your question
are they like your children is true but not for the reasons i think you thought you were asking
even more so um i've shown some old pieces like the keys to hell
that's a sculpture i made in the in the mid 90s and
that piece has changed over the years not because i have altered it but my relationship
to it has changed i now look at it and i can't believe i had the aesthetic wherewithal to make
something that beautiful almost 25 years ago i i consider myself far uh improved in my aesthetic
execution now as opposed to back then and yet i look at that piece and i'm like man
how did i know how to do that that that piece blows my mind and in that way it's still very
much like a kid like like a child i've raised because it changes over time and so does my
relationship to it and i think that all any creator of anything has that you know there's
you have an experience of the thing just after you've finished it and then after you've utilized
it and then later on and that relationship may actually change hold on just a second
uh will you go check the front door that's amazon
saying hey why isn't anyone answering the other door um yeah
this actually spins all the way back to this thing that jamie and i used to love to talk about which
is the ethos of the right idea um and one of the things i hate most in the world is
arguing over what execution we should choose for something and the person i'm arguing with
just wants their idea to be the one that gets chosen they don't actually care about
the quality of the idea they just want to be the one that came up with the solution
now that's a situation i deal with less these days in my life but back in the day it was something
that happened a lot and jamie and i took it as a point of pride that you know we might argue our
position for days but when the right idea shows up in the room it's really clear to everybody
and that's because the right idea plugs into the problem in a way that's surprising and
perfect right so the idea has met the problem where the problem is not where we happen to think
it being and that's the same thing with kids and that's the same thing with the stuff that you make
i'll tell one more story about this many years ago there was a wonderful book called the artist's
handbook by toby clayman and she was an artist who taught other artists how to protect their
copyright how to make sure they got paid for their work and she did a learning annex class down at
fort mason in the early 90s and my then girlfriend patty and i went and we took that class and it was
great it was full of art assignments but also assignments about looking at your copyright and
figuring out how to you know do different kinds of licenses and get paid and one of
the art assignments we got was take a piece and make six of them identically but finish them all
slightly differently i love this so i had been playing around with some alginate and i made a
casting of my ear and i made six different ears and then i finished them all in different textures
one i may look like wood one like marble one like plant matter one like brick etc
and then i was looking at these six ears they were all really neat and i thought
they were cool and i ended up weaving them into a kind of a spider web i don't remember
how it looked it doesn't sound like it looked that great now that i'm saying that out loud
but that was clearly what i felt that the pieces wanted they wanted to be unified into a frame
and so i did and when my girlfriend looked at it she was like that's not the assignment
i'm like what do you mean she's like well the assignment was to finish six things in
six different ways i was like i've done that she's like yeah but you joined them all into
one piece that's not six different pieces that's one piece and i was like oh well
i mean that's aesthetically what these things i made wanted me to do with them
the assignment the assignment can go to hell i i don't care about the assignment i'm just
going to fulfill what i see as the aesthetic need of these things that i've made and she was like
that's crazy talk and i'm like really cause the way you're talking sounds like crazy talk to me
we had this huge fight about it um and i i would like to point out that when we showed
the assignment and i showed my piece there was a pause after i was done with my presentation and
toby claim and said it's not really the assignment is it and i explained my position and she said
fair enough so i remember winning that argument almost 30 years ago
um yeah you got to follow the thing where it's going to take you you can't impose
your will upon everything you can't impose your will upon merely anything um all right
let's see here what else do we got thank you guys so much for watching that entire video
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