adam savage here in my cave hello everybody i am answering questions uh from tested patrons
about my time on mythbusters and today's question comes from mark blair
mark i love this question uh mark says my hair is doing something funny here why am i why do i care
mark says how do you think young adam would react if you could go back and tell him all the things
that you get to do on mythbusters by the end of the show you practically had the skills
of a hollywood stuntman along with everything else yeah it's true um mark it's a great question
and it's it's a it's a framing it's a framing that i have thought about before totally so uh
a while back now how long ago probably seven or eight years ago i completed my first pass
at the zf1 egg gun from the fifth element and when i finish a piece that is
exceedingly important to me i frequently bring it home and i put it on my bedside table so i
can kind of live with it for a while if it's too big to put on the bedside table
i lean it up against the wall i just like to go to sleep and wake up
seeing the object that is my current fascination right now the hellboy samaritan
the one that i've just completed it's been on my bedside table for a while yeah mythbusters
mythbusters was an unparalleled sequence of the most impossibly fun weird strange
radical uncomfortable confusing scary amazing educational illuminating
experiences all of the above um i like
we made a show that went to a hu 275 hours of television something like
less than one percent of television shows ever get to 100 episodes let alone 275. um
mythbusters came about at a really particular time and that like i may never have another
ongoing television show that's certainly possible um i'll continue to make television but you know
that may be the one spike in the graph for me of doing remarkable things and if it is
that's just fine what an incredible 13 years of of like i said unparalleled experiences uh yeah i'm
exceedingly grateful for that um and 10 year old me would not believe it not one bit no it would
seem like there's no way you would you'd get me to believe oh no eventually you'll get to visit the
edge of space you'll get to swim with sharks and throw up in the back of an fa-18 hornet octopuses
will fall in love with you and you'll learn how to tactically drive backwards in high heels
ah maybe there's a you know it'd be really
i loved the format of doing these crazy things and telling stories about them
i i would love for you watching to be able to have some of the experiences i have i don't know how to
make that work but like some part of me sometimes wishes i could just i thinks about buying a pair
of junker cars and taking them out to a lot and with a few of my friends and just teaching them
how to bang into each other and drive tactically i've still never done it but i should because i
could give a you know a group of close friends some supervised mayhem wouldn't that be the best
i don't know why i haven't done that i mean partially because it's expensive to trash a
couple of cars even if they're used cars you got to worry about the material cleanup you got to
worry about the fluids you got to worry about the permits you also always have to worry about safety
and bring all the safety gear etc it's a fair it's a fair bit of stuff to do but i swear someday
i may just do it i like coming there was this one day in which jamie and i were doing the um
the grease the grease myth right of like could you have something on your wheel that could
cut up the car of the guy next to you and so i replicated the actual toothed wheel from greece
and then jamie got to try whatever he wanted which was diabolically insane it's just this
giant pipe with a spiral cut in it that tore the wheel off my car the second it touched it
it was brilliant anyway for the first pass at that we were driving up the alameda runway at
speed about 40 miles an hour and then banging into each other and frankly when you are
in a full five-point harness wearing safety gear with a neck brace and a helmet and you
start banging cars into each other there are few more fun things that i have ever done in my life
i still specifically remember that first hit like boom feeling the head and feeling just how like
with all the safety gear that that i was in including the crumple cage of
late model automobile i felt like oh wow this isn't this isn't that dangerous at all given the
way we're doing it the fact that i trust jamie and the way he drives so we smashed into each
other we separated we both looked at each other and i swear on the heinemann's face i saw like
like unparalleled joy unparalleled joy yeah i've seen it a few times on that man's face
i'll bet 10 year old jamie would even be amazed yeah yeah um look that marked that
question that framing of that question is something that i really appreciate i
i really like thinking about things from different vantage points the vantage point of
you know sometimes you have something difficult sometimes when you have something difficult to go
through something sometimes when i have something difficult to go through i think you know in the
future at some point in the future this will have already happened there is a future in which this
is through doing what it's doing and i will still be alive after this thing um and then there like
so that is a useful frame from which to kind of contemplate a thing but also looking at the thing
and thinking about how young you would have parsed it and perceived it and thought about it like
it is there's it's a very it's a just a lovely way of looking at the world that's all uh mark blair
thank you for that excellent question tested patrons please keep submitting your questions
and i will continue to answer them here in this forum again if you want to become a
test patron please do information is in the comments below i'll see you guys next time