December 10, 2024 • 51 mins
Meet Adam Savage, American special effects designer, actor, educator, television personality, and producer. You probably know him from the legendary show Mythbusters or his YouTube channel Tested. We have a great chat, I hope you enJOY!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Craig Ferguson Pants on Fire Tour is on sale now.
It's a new show, it's new material, but I'm afraid
it's still only me, Craig Ferguson on my own, standing
on a stage telling comedy words. Come and see me,
buy tickets, bring your loved ones, or don't come and
see me. Don't buy tickets and don't bring your loved ones.
(00:21):
I'm not your dad. You come or don't come, but
you should at least know what's happening, and it is.
The tour kicks off late September and goes through the
end of the year and beyond. Tickets are available at
the Craig Ferguson Show dot Com slash tour. They are
available at the Craig Ferguson Show dot com slash tour
or at your local outlet in your region. My name
(00:45):
is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy.
I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness.
On the podcast today we have a show business slash
science member of the royal family. Now that's not fair
because he's much smarter than any member of the royal family.
(01:07):
It's a very old friend of mine. He used to
be a ginger, but he's all right now. Please welcome
the fantastic Adam Savage. Adam Savage, look at you. You
look exactly the same, if anything, a little younger.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
The guy said, you look.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Have you been moisturizing?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What's happening?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's all turned gray? But yeah, no, the clean living
is the secret to my face.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, you know, here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Though you wear a ginger, at one point, gingers do
go gray.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
We go white, we go like sheet white.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, I know, it's kind of impressive.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It's I think it's the compensation for having been a
ginger that you then go completely white. I've seemed to
be developing some kind of weird, kind of fluffy thing
that's going on. It's very bad. I've noticed that my
hair has dried out completely. If you're just joining us,
by the way, this is the Haircare Podcast with Adam
(02:12):
Savage and Craig ferguson what what isn't? It?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Isn't French? Your name is it somebody that was French?
Speaker 3 (02:23):
I was just going to say that's the correct pronunciation.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
But we came over to Scotland around the fourteenth century,
right and from what I understand the savages or the
savages were mercenaries settling near the Antwerm peninsula.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Around the fourth that's been near Ireland then right, I.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Think there are a bunch of savages in Ireland as well.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
There certainly are.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I I wonder if if it was your family that
brought the ginger to Scotland, or if the ginger was
already there's It is a good question, and I know
no one.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I think you know it would be an excellent.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
MythBusters Red Hair was bought to Scotland or it was
already there?
Speaker 2 (03:08):
What's going on with that franchise?
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Now? Are you guys making MythBusters Junior or.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
No, dude, I haven't made television in years. I'm a
YouTuber guy.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
It's it's definitely the way to go. Yeah, are you
back at building? Are you back in your your your
day job? No?
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I over covid. I we leaned in one hundred percent
of my YouTube channel. We have almost seven million subscribers, now.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Shut the fuck up. Seven million.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
We put up a video almost every day. We put
up a video.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Oh my god, do you you must be an influencer?
Are you going to fight Mike Tyson or something that's happened.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
You know, the secret to having a YouTube channel is
that you basically have to be your own ad agency, and.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
That is what we do know, right, That's that's a
lot though. I like, I think I've got a YouTube channel.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I know that Tomas messes around with something, and I
know these podcasts go up, but I think I've got
like one.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Hundred subscribers or something.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It's no, it's not anything that anyone's gonna be excited about,
but it's definitely the way to go for sure. Is it?
Does it feel more comfortable being your own kind of executive?
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Can I tell you it's so nice?
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Because you know the TV executives they ride you so
hard on a pitch.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
They want everything button down into the moment they award
the show. They don't care about the show at all.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
They just want to know that the last five minutes
will bring all of the world to watching what you're making.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, and also the television executives, God bless them. I
used to hate them, but now I feel bad for
them because there's no work for those guys.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
No.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Can I tell you When I pitched a book in
twenty sixteen in New York, I spent a whole day
pitching all the publishers, and it was remarkable because I
realized halfway through the day, I'm repeatedly in rooms pitching
to people who love what I'm pitching. They love the
industry that they're in, they love books, And that's not
(05:11):
what I experience in television. I don't experience television executives
being like, I love television, I'm a television person.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
No, it's a very rare thing. I mean, one or
two of them, but most of them are are just awful.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
They're just.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
I think for many of them, it's kind of a
realtor job. You know, it's like, well, let's know what
I wanted, but you know it's decent money, and you
know I'll do it for now.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Well that works nickel and dime them until they have
no compunction left.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
I know. But it's quite interesting though, because I know
that I'm hurtling into my dotage.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Whenever I talk to them, I'm like, what do you want?
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Son?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's exactly that, Like, what the fuck you want?
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Like, well, we're very excited about are you really excited?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Fuck you you're not excited about it? Shut out exactly that.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
But I do people have to pitch you for your
YouTube channel now that do they have to like say, well,
we have this idea we'd like to blow up a hat.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
That does happen from time to time.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
I just had a company ask me, could you send
our product to space experimentally?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
And I came back with a totally different idea.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
Yeah, I am unwilling to do testing on behalf of
people's products.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I never was willing and I still don't want to
do it.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Well, I mean, doesn't it that would leave you home
to some kind of legal ramifications. Wouldn't as well? If
you test something and then somebody hurts themselves or something completely.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
But also it's like the first time I make a
test and adjudicate someone's product as being one way or
the other, no one will trust me.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Ever. Again, that's the way I feel.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
That's right, that's right now.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So what do you do in your YouTube channel?
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Because of course, obviously I subscribe to it, But for
the people that don't know about that.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
It is it's a fever dream of making.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
And so I'm in here five days a week, forty
hours a week in general kind of making whatever I'm
interested in. Right now, I'm currently working on. This is
sitting on my bench here. This is part of an
elevator panel I'm working on because there's a scene in
the movie Elf where Will Ferrell walks into an elevator
(07:27):
and he hits a button that's really pretty, and so
he hits all the buttons at once. So I'm making
that a Christmas decoration in my house this year.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oh, that's a lovely idea. And then as you make that,
you will film yourself making it. We'll go on the
YouTube and then hey, Presto Cash, absolutely yeah, and so
we do that, and then we also like I made
a raptor costume, a Utah raptor costume sixteen feet long
a few years ago, and just a few weeks ago,
I brought in a couple of friends and we spend
(07:57):
a week painting it and just a magnificent collaboration of
three dudes walking around this dinosaur for three full days
just adding and subtracting color and turning it into a
real character. That's really interesting. So you kind of like
you freed yourself. You've become like you're doing exactly what
you want, exactly on your own terms, and becoming a
(08:20):
petrillionaire at the same.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Time, A thousand there fit there it is. It's so
like the team is really small. It's just six of
us making this YouTube channel. Everyone's having a really good
time and we don't have to answer it anyone.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I bought out all my business partners a couple of
years ago.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
That's really interesting because that's kind of I kind of
did the same thing when when television started to turn
into this weird, kind of corporate, homogenized fucking shit show
where you know, you say one thing wrong and suddenly
you know, there's lawyers saying we don't encourage Greig Ferguson
and all that kind of stuff that I thought, No,
(09:02):
I got to strip this down to analog, right back
down to me speaking into a microphone in a dark
room with a bunch of people pointed in my direction.
That's it, you know, just like doing stand up. And
it was only recently, like in the last I don't know,
I don't know how, but long I've been doing this podcast,
(09:22):
like eighteen months or something, and you know, the iHeart
people who run. I'm like, God, these guys are just
the same fucking assholes as everybody else, So so I'll
probably won't keep doing it, but but maybe I should buy.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Buy them out.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
And well, you know, one of the things that people
who watch the channel tell me that they do is
they take my videos and some of them might be
eight minutes long, and some of them might be eighty
minutes of me like wiring something up, and they put
their laptop on their workbench with me working, and then
they work alongside.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
They do their own project while I'm working on mine.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I think that's that's very good.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
And I think that the myth Bursters is quite an
interesting thing.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I think MythBusters was kind of like doing it.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
The equivalent is if you do a vampire movie, like,
no matter what you do in your career, from that
point on, the vampire crowd will always consider you one
of their people. And I think myth Bursters has like
because I'm that, I'm like myth Bursters is such a thing.
Like I still see Carrie quite often. I haven't seen
(10:25):
you in ages, but you've been over in Scotland a
couple of times. And I mean I haven't seen you
over in a while unless you've been there and you
haven't told me.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
I have not been there and haven't told you.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
All right, good because during the lockdown. We were stuck
in Scotland all the time. We moved back to America though,
we're in New England.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Oh wow, okay, yeah, East Coast.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, well, you know that's where Meghan's people are from,
those icy blue blood Yankees who you know that Meghan
can trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Oh so can I Actually we have some relatives that
were on that boat together.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Because my theory is that only the crazy people made
it through that first winter. Only the angry crazy that
genetic code through that first winter. It was like your
Law and Megan Law. I wonder if you relate it
to Megan.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
I didn't get COVID for the longest time, for the
first two and a half almost three years, and there
was this period of time I thought I was immune
because my grandmother, who can trate my who was a Monroe,
who can trace her, who could trace her ancestry back
to the Mayflower, had survived the nineteen seventeen influenza.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Oh wow, So I.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Was thinking, like, I'm an x man, I got that
in my blood. But then I caught COVID and it's
still well.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
COVID's kind of I don't know. Look, I'm not a scientist,
but I feel like it's new. I feel like it's
a slightly newer thing. And I didn't get it for
a while. I didn't get it at all. We had
a party of our house afterwards. Bill didn't get it.
You were invited to that party? You didn't, I was.
I couldn't make it outright. Carrie was at Carrie Byron
was at the party. I think I was so jealous.
(12:08):
I think she got COVID. Had like fifty people got
COVID at that party, but I didn't. And then Meghan
we went to I was doing name that celebrity, named
that tune in Dublin for some reason, and uh, and
Megan came with me and she made me go and
(12:29):
see the Book of Kels, which I was. I couldn't
give a shit about the Book of Kels. And while
I was in there, it was all American tourists and
I got the Irish lepro COVID I got. That's when
I got it. From the Book of Kels. I got
the original ancient Irish the OHI Diddley COVID, you get
(12:49):
a which yeah, yeah, I wish that I hadn't gone
to see the fucking Book of kels Is when I went.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So listen, talk to me about about.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Your origins, because I haven't really talked to you ever
really about that. You're from Sleepy Hollow, right, is that
where you're from?
Speaker 3 (13:07):
I was born Crane Country, born in Manhattan.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
My parents were lovely bohemians in the West Village in
the late sixties.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Wow, that sounds like a lot of body hair.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Was They had a two They had a ten room
duplex on Eighth Street and McDougall Street.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
That'd be worth like a billion dollars now.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
They sold it to the Robert Jeoffrey Foundation in nineteen seventy. Wow,
to move their family up to Terrytown, to Sleepy Hollow,
New York, and where I grew up. That's where I
spent my whole childhood, about a block from the Hudson.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
That's a lovely part of the world. Is gorgeous there.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
But isn't it like there's a lot of ghost stories
and creepy stuff and all there. And I always think
of you as being someone who debunks all of that
kind of stuff. That is do you think that's what
started there? Was it to protect yourself from scary stories.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
No, I I think it was.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I think I believed you're reminding me that.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
There's this one moment in MythBusters when Guermo Del Toro
called us up and he was like, why don't we
go spend three days in the most haunted place in
the United States, an insane asylum in the Carolinas.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
And Jamie was like, why would we do this?
Speaker 4 (14:24):
And I was like, we would do this because it's Guermo,
got Giermo cal you gotta go.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
You got it.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
I haven't been in his crazy house of mad things.
Have you been in it?
Speaker 4 (14:35):
I've been to I've been to Bleak House and now
apparently there's a second bleak House.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
But yeah, he's good.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
No, it's an amazing collection. It's a pathology kind of.
I mean, look at what are we if not a
collection of pathologies.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
I've gone.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
I was going to say, you're kind of you're kind
of a bit of a hoarder, uh.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
High functioning hoarder.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
But yes, high functioning horder. I think kids did it.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
But it's but the kind of the whole ethos of
like MythBusters and you personally as well, even right down
to the I don't know if you're still an atheist,
but but like you're a you're a kind of you
really do like to get to the science of just
about everything, right.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
I do like to get to the science of just
about everything.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
But it's funny that you say, Uh, I wonder if
you're still an atheist because I stopped saying that and
it happened in your kitchen in in Durban.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Oh really, because we had come.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
Back from a thing back when we were hanging back
when I was visiting you there, and you said, it's
it's pretty Uh. You said, it's pretty fundamentalist to say atheist,
because I still believe that. Yeah, yeah, And I couldn't
I couldn't disagree with that, and so I now call
myself a New Testament agnostic. I can't know, I can't
(15:53):
know who tipped the first domino, but I agree with
everything Jesus said.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, it's very interesting because I wrestled with it over
and over and over again. It's it's like a constant
refrain from me. I always kind of go back to
I don't want to not believe things, but I can't
(16:19):
believe in a kind of angry man on a cloud
with a thunderbolts and stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I can't believe in that.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
But then I'm interested in mystics that have become fascinated.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Recently by Gorvi Dal. Have you read gorfy Daals?
Speaker 4 (16:35):
I have read a bunch of Gorvidale. He's the only
historical fiction writer who I like to read.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Oh my god, it's great. So right now I'm in
the middle of creation.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
When he's got that guy from Persia who meets Buddha
and confuses and so cars, it's it's I'm like, wow, man,
this is fucking pot boiler is fabulous.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
I always kneel. I always felt with him.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
The one I read and loved the most was Burr,
which is a fever dream. And also with Vidal, like,
I feel like I'm absolutely getting a whole bunch of
editorializing an opinion, but it's informed by the point of
view he got in his research, not by a bias.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, I feel it's quite What's quite interesting about Gourvidal
as well is that I don't really know where he
stands in in the in the belief system, I really
and I've read extensively, and I think what it is
is I think he bounces around, you know, I think
(17:39):
he but I think.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
It is almost that that is almost a defining feature
of real faith. Martin Luther King absolutely grappled with it
in his personal diaries. I mean, John Dunn hell Spells,
you know, was totally grappling with this the whole time.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
I think it is an essential component of faith that
it has to have doubt. If it doesn't have doubt,
it's not really faith. It's kind of it's certainty, and
certainty is a very different thing. But there's a weird
interview with Carl Young. I don't know if you've ever
seen it, or somebody asked him if he it's a
televised thing. I can't remember where it was, but towards
(18:18):
the end of his life where someone said do you
do you believe in God? And he said, it's different
for me now I know, I know there's a God.
I was like, oh man, Young freaks me out. I
think he's so amazing. But but I always I think
of you. It's interesting to hear you say that because
I didn't know you were into those videal historical novels,
(18:40):
because they they seem quite mystical to me, and I
feel that you are aren't that I guess you are.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
I mean the.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Science thing is a search for truth, isn't it. It
is a It isn't it in its way a spiritual hunger?
Speaker 4 (18:57):
I think science, it's absolutely and we're grappling with the
same questions.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I had.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
This seems Germaine to this. I had this epiphany about
four years ago. I was researching measuring things. I was
research which is the field of metrology, and within the
field of metrology, actually I happened to I did not
plan this prop but I have this right here. Within
the field of metrology. If you want to measure something,
(19:24):
you pass a certain point, you don't measure it, You
actually compare it to something. And this is called a
gauge block. And this is the most accurate comparison system
there is. This is a one inch block, and I
can tell you that this block is one inch to
within you know, a few nanometers.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
That's how accurate this block is.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
And I was showing my I was doing a video
about how to measure gauge blocks and how accurate they are,
and then I had this idea, and I put the
gauge block in my hand and held it for twelve
seconds and put it back under my measuring device, and
I was able to show that in twelve seconds, the
heat from my body had man the gauge block one micron.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Thicker because of heat expansion.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
And when I realized that, and I was looking at
the spec sat for these, which is every one of
these has been measured and certified, I realized that at
the bottom of the certification it says this is only
accurate at sixty eight degrees fahrenheit. That's amazing, which told
me that measurement is the faith I get in numbers
is misplaced because they aren't real that the measurement of
(20:29):
these blocks only exists under circumstances that we agree upon,
which means just like politics, just like culture, just like society,
it's all based on us being polite and trying to
work together.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
That's how it works.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah, it's it's funny.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
I had a similar experience when I was getting my
pilot's license, when I was learning to fly, because I
kept asking people about air speeds and altitudes, and air
speeds and altitudes, which are extremely important if your flying
a freaking airplane. Well, altitude there's kind of like five
different types because there's there's altitude above the ground, but
(21:04):
there's also sea level altitude, which we all kind.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Of agree on.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Then there's density altitude because that's how the plane's going
to perform at certain temperatures and uh, moisture in the atmosphere.
So it's like like radar altitude as well, I mean it.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
So it's like, no, we need to have one altitude.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
But there's not the same thing about the speed of sound,
Like how fast the sound, Well, it depends on the
temperature and it depends on the thickness of the air.
And it's so fascinating to me, and I think you're right.
I think I think that it is. It is very
very confusing to try and agree on one thing to
(21:48):
make things black and white. That's why I'm I'm against
fundamentalism of all kinds.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
And that's that's where you turn me around in your
kitchen table.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Was I realized, Yeah, no, I can't know, So all
I can do is keep gathering data. And I feel
like performers like because we both spend a lot of
time in front of audiences.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
We know that audiences can take on.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
A character that is different than the people that compose
that audience.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Unbelievable, unbelievable. I mean right to the extent of the
one night. And you'll know this because you did those
live shows, and you've done so many live shows. You
can go out in front of an audience and roughly
the same sized theater, at the same room temperature, at
the same time of day, in a town that's a
similar demographic makeup, and do exactly the same thing and
(22:35):
have a wildly different experience. And that's people's collective personalities.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
I'm like, what is it.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
It's it's that Youngian thing, isn't it. The collective, the
collective unconscious? Right, the collective unconscious?
Speaker 2 (22:51):
I do you know.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
I once had interviewed with Stephen King on the Late
Night Show and I said, have you He was talking
about bringing stories down. He said, I bring the stories
down from somewhere. I was like, oh, that's fascinating. And
I said to him, so about the it's kind of
like the young the collective unconscious.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
And he said, what is that?
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And he didn't know what I was talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Oh so great?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I was like, what I mean, you might.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Have been working with me, Stephen King, but it was
still listening.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
But there is also that Arlott Guthrie. I saw him
perform once and he said, I don't write songs. I
stand at the side of a river and I wait
for one to come by and I.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Scoop it out. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
And then he said, he said, I don't think anyone
downstream of Bob Dylan has ever even seen a song.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
But I think that was kind of interesting, as though
that that's a kind of that's a kind of weird,
unmeasurable thing.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
But you've been in front of an audience where something
came out of the ether into your head, yes, and
dropped like a bomb in the room.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yes, And it happened last night.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I actually I was doing a show last night and
oh Chicago, and that's why I'm in the hotel in
Chicago now. And about halfway through the show, I had
this idea and I went with it, and I was
making myself laugh at the audience seemed to be enjoyed too,
but I was having a great time with it.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
I view that as that's that's the other to me, right,
that creative thing that happens late when you do all
the practice and you do all the rigor that you
do to get yourself to this point, and then you
open yourself up and some creative thing comes in. You
don't know where it came from, but it informs the
whole thing you're building.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah, it's it's very interesting because it it leads me
as I you know, again, as I get older, I
start thinking about the inevitability of the you know, corporeal
decline and you know, and immortality and all that. And
I can't get my head to a place where I
(25:04):
can endorse the idea of the continuation of consciousness. I'm
quite happy to remain open to the idea of a god,
a primover, or an unexplainable deity, but I can't get
my head around the idea that it keeps going.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
I just don't see that.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Here's one that I'm always thinking about when this conversation
comes around is in Africa, they took some termite mounds
and poured concrete into them and then excavated to see
the shape of a termite city.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
And when they do this, the cities.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Are fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide, and they
include waste management, and they include air conditioning and convection
breatheable air. They include temperature control. And I couple that
with the fact that ninety nine percent of the cells
in my body right now are non human in origin, right,
(26:07):
I'm mostly a colony of other bacterium and other types
of organisms. So I find myself wondering if consciousness isn't
just a level set for different groups of organisms, and
that maybe it's not that our consciousness continues, but we're
just brought back into the continuum.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
That's fascinating the idea. I think also, if you get
the idea of infinity, of infinite time, infinite space, then
it would seem to me that anything that can happen
will happen, and so anything that you can think of
can If I'm days going on, I wonder if that's
(26:50):
even plausible, But it's it's this is one of the
reasons why I don't take marijuana. I feel like I
feel like it would be bad. Do you take recreational drugs?
I wonder if that's the thing for you.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
I did do a lot of psychedelics back in my twenties, really, yeah, absolutely,
and it was a couple of mushroom It was a
couple of mushroom trips during which I really absolutely connected
and still firmly believe that our consciousness is eternal and
that we don't that this is not a deterministic universe.
(27:26):
That is, we have free will here, but I'm not
sure where we come from that we do. And so
I make this leap that we come here onto this
corporal plane because eternity is exhausting, and we come here
to enjoy some beginnings and endings, beginnings and endings, beginnings
and ends.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Oh, that's a lovely idea. I think you might be
on the edge of a new religion as there could be.
I think I could get behind that as an idea.
That that's fascinating. I think the the idea though for
me that the struggle I have with spiritual hunger or
(28:08):
spiritual searching is it's so littered with organized religion, which
is not for me. You know, I kind of make
it work. You have you got any organizational structure for
that for yourself?
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Only that it seems to me that the that the
Buddhists have been right.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
All along, maybe maybe.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
That consciousnes Look, you know, at this age too, what
turns out to be most important to me is the
collaborations I get to do with people that I love. Yeah,
it's that taking a couple of minds and intersecting them
on the same problem and enjoying doing that and learning
from other point people's point of view. The more curious
(28:52):
I get about other people and their process, the more
I get a reward from that that interaction that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
So you become fascinated by the way other people approach
a problem which either you have looked at yourself or
are trying to or invest the gain.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
Yeah, one of the primary things we do on the
channels we go to movie sets, and on movie sets
the main thing that we do at a level that
most people don't do it is we'll talk to all
of the artisans about how we look.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
A movie crew is nothing but an army of storytellers
all the way down.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
And when you're talking to the pain or painting the problem,
he's thinking that, she's thinking about the narrative of that piece.
And I love talking about that problem. You get this thing,
how do you make it fit within that narrative? Go
And that's one of the great challenges of my creative
life is making things to do that, and I love
talking to other people about how they do it.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
It's funny, as you mentioned that that when we were
in Scotland, we wanted to paint an old part of
the house, and we didn't know how to do it.
And we didn't know how to do it. And then
I thought, you know what, let's call I had a
buddy who was a set painter on movies. Yes, I said,
let's have him come and look at it. And he
looked at it, and I said, I wanted to look
(30:13):
like it was painted three hundred years ago. But it's
got damp. But then it got dry again and it's okay.
Now it had woodworm, but it doesn't have woodworm anymore.
He's like, got it. And he did it in two days.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Right, because he's a Sunday Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Right, He's like, I got I know what you're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
I probably bought a bunch of Hudson sprayers to add
some dirt coming down the walls.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
It was amazing though, I mean the idea of it.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I'm fascinated by the idea that that. And you're right,
everybody is a storyteller, and like I was always interested.
I haven't made a movie in forever, but the wardrobe
people always fascinated me because the investigation that they do
and the work that they do is amazing.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
And the stuff they don't even tell you, Like I
was talking to Danny Glicker, who's Jason Rightman's costumer, and
he was like, the thing you don't realize is all
old clothes have shoulder burned because they've been sitting on
a hangar for decades. They're always a little lighter right
here on this line. And if you don't do that,
you'll know that it's not quite old. That's amazing, amazing.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
It's a big detective thing almost you ever drawn to
that you ever drun to, like forensics or police work.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
Absolutely, I love knowing how things work, so I love
peeling behind the curtain and having you know, MythBusters is
just put me in contact with tons and tons of
cops all over the world.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And I mean, I could not do that job.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
It is a view on humanity that is really intense
and difficult and a and look, I have huge problems
with the with the American police, but that's not what
I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about the general
job of being a police person and sounds both completely
intriguing and I could never do it.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
It's funny. I got I got a tattoo once in
New Orleans and it was late at night, as often
tattoos are and the guy was doing it. You know,
you get to talk and he's working away and we
were talking and he told me that he had been
a cop.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
He had been a homicide cop.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
And then during Katrina he was looking at three unsolved
you know, deaths a day, and he said, I couldn't
do it anymore. I couldn't do it anymore. It was
I had to go and do what I really wanted
to do. I couldn't. I couldn't do that. I always
wanted to do, you know, to be a tattoo artist.
And now I'm going to do that. And he's good
(32:48):
and I've got some good ink from him, and it
was it's a fascinating story. He said that weird thing.
He said, civilization and it was a quote from some
fancy French writer. I don't know. It was civilization is
three meals away from chaos.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
That's beautiful. Wow, that's completely true.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, I think so. I mean it's like I always think,
as well, you know, when when people are saying, you know,
they're there, there might be riots, and now, well, what's
the weather like? Because people never riot in the snow.
It's temperature based. It's effect. It affects the amount of rioting,
(33:32):
you're going to get totally right.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
And I was thinking, whoever said that quote?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
I feel like they had to be French, because the
French Revolution is where you learned that lesson.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, I think it probably was.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
It was probably with some you know, somebody that was
up to no good during all that. Do you know
what apparently during the French Revolution as well, that the
revolutionary pamphlets were all hidden inside pornography because because the
fancy pant aristocracy wouldn't look at the the pornography because
(34:04):
it was for poor people. Yeah, and all the people
would look at the And I'm like, oh yeah, and
apparently that I feel like I might be making this up,
but I think there's some truth in it that the
marquis decide.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
That's why he was so involved in all He was writing.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
These crazy pornographic stories, but also he was in revolutionary
as well.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
There's a Doris Lessing has a group of books that
are field reports on planets around the universe and science fiction,
and the first one is a field report on Earth
from about twenty thousand BC to three hundred years in
the future, when the world holds the White Man on
trial for crimes against humanity, okay, And in this arc,
(34:46):
at one point, one of the benevolent aliens that sort
of oversees the universe falls. He falls into the sickness
of rhetoric, all right, and to cure him of his
addiction to rhetoric, they send him to live a short,
brutal life as a peasant during the French Revolution.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Oh man, I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
I mean, you're still in San Francisco, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
San Francisco is I've always found a very complicated rhetorical
environment because on the one hand, there's this very liberal idea,
but we are very didactic and very hardline liberal idea
of life, which is hard to navigate. I find it
(35:38):
hard to navigate if I'm talking a law there, do
you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Yea, I feel like it's.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Quite easy to annoy people and audiences.
Speaker 6 (35:46):
I mean, you know, San Francisco exists in this tension
between that very open open end in philosophy that everyone
should try what they want and let their freak flag fly,
and we're all cool with it.
Speaker 4 (35:59):
But it's also one of the most beautiful physical places
on Earth, which means there's a tremendous amount of money here,
and the tension between the money and that hippie philosophy
is I think one of the things that defines se
Francisco well.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And also then you get into that weird hypocrisy of
Silicon Valley where they pretend to be flying her freak flag,
but they are like Andrew Carnegie or.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
The Trump one.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, the the I always think that it fascinates me.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Did you read the Vidal book?
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I think it was Hollywood the maybe Hollywood, or it
may be the one before that. It's a historical novel,
but he talks about the the feud between William Randolph
Hurst and Teddy Roosevelt, and and Hurst comes off like
proto Elon Muskets. It's very interesting. I was like, wow,
(37:00):
that's a fascinating idea. And you know, Teddy Roosevelt doesn't
come out but too great either slashes everybody trashes them all.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
I mean, at that level, it's all life among the narcissists, right.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yeah, Right.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
When's the first time you went did that tour of Washington?
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Have you done that? Like you go to the Senate
and somebody takes you around the Capitol building.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
I have never done that.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
They used to what I was doing late night.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
I thought it was a thing that everybody on TV
did at some point, that they would take you around.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
And I got.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Introduced to all these different people at the Senate, the
Senate and Congress and all these different offices. And it
was a whole day of just like you know, shaking
hands and schmoozing people. And at the end of the day,
I was with Megan and I we were sitting at
the end to day, I thought, Jesus Christ, you know
what really surprised me. It's fucking stupid. Most of these
(38:07):
people are there. They're they're like, not that smart, they're
just like they just kind of honk. They're like geese.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Believable. But it's it's annoying thing.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
But they've got a very nice museum there, well, a
couple of nice museums there, but that year in space Museum,
the Smithsonian in it.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Oh God, I sit on the board. Actually stop, of
course you do. And right now, actually over at the
airport at the Udvar Hazy Center, John Glenn's Friendship seven capsule,
the first American in space, Yes, is sitting about thirty
feet from a space shuttle.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
To see these two things this like one.
Speaker 5 (39:00):
Millimeter thick aluminum container, I know, versus this, you know,
one hundred and twenty foot long thing, and that that compression.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
Of human ingenuity is a really beautiful thing to stand
in the middle of.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah, but it's fair. I mean, that was the thing
that first fascinated me about America when I was I
think I was seven years old, yeah, seven when the
moon landing happened, and I remember seeing it. I was
allowed to stay up more on television and that's when I, like,
you start seeing all that American stuff and I was like, well,
I'd like to hang out with those guys.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
What did they do?
Speaker 1 (39:38):
I want to go there because there wasn't any I
didn't see any Scottish people doing it, But I thought,
what's going on here? What are these people love to
I find out later it's ald Scottish people coming over
to America. And you know, but it's a fascinating thing
because I think the science is part of America's not
only just the rise of America as as as this
(40:02):
global so omnipresent superpower, but the kind of spiritual soul
of America is that technology and that strive and that
you know, it's It's kind of like when I hear
people talk about global warming, which is kind of like
it is the number one issue, I guess, or climate change,
(40:25):
And I tend to think I would be interested to
hear your take on it, because I tend to think
at this point, we've gone so far it's no longer
an emotive problem. It's an engineering problem. We got to
we've got to fix a different way. It can't be
we have to stop Grandma putting her you know, hot
pocket thing in the correct ben that's not going to
do anything anymore. It has to be and have you
(40:48):
been keeping track of anything with that stuff?
Speaker 5 (40:50):
Are you?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Are you?
Speaker 3 (40:51):
It's that I agree with you.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
It's it's clear now that it's not a behavioral solution.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
There's not a behavioral solution to this problem.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
Humans have been given the chance, we have the knowledge,
we have the data, uh, and we aren't willing to
make the sacrifices, and so the response is will have
to be reactionary. It'll be, you know, at each stage
that things get more difficult, what do we do to
deal with that difficulty? And it's not a great plan.
(41:21):
It's a terrible way to attack a problem.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, But I mean, I feel like it's the only one.
I mean that the idea of you know, you know
this is I live in hope that someone develops a
bacteria that eats plastic in the ocean and shits out
tiny little you know, sea creatures or you know, these
seed the clouds that bring the temperature down or even
(41:45):
or and there is talk about all of these different things, right.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Yeah, I feel like philosophically, to me, the problem is
around the framing, weirdly of late stage capitalism, which is
which is that like late stage capitalism posits that life
is a zero sum game that my my, if I gain,
if you gain, it's because I lose. And I think
that's why global warming or behavioral solutions to climate change
(42:12):
aren't going to work, because everyone has this frame of like, well,
if I'm going to suffer, who's benefiting?
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Right, instead of what can we do to benefit all
of us?
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Right? Yeah? That sounds that does no sense politically attractive
to a lot of people right now.
Speaker 4 (42:28):
Yes, I know, And honestly, the most amazing things that
have ever happened to me in my life are because
of collective action of me and a group of people.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Well, I think that also that I mean, we are
the sum of the people that came before us. We
all are. And it's funny. I'm in Chicago right now,
and Chicago always makes me feel like this because it's
a time that I always associate I don't know why,
with the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I guess
like Prohibition and al Capone and you know, and the World's.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
Fair eighteen ninety seven or the Column ex Position in
eight ninety five.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, right, And so I think of all of that
when I would walk down on the lake today and
I look at it and just looking at the buildings,
and you know, I'm sixty two am you know, and
I'm thinking it's you're a fucking may fly, man, You're
a fucking mayfly.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
And but all of these buildings, all of this stuff,
all of this this temple of mammon that is Chicago,
and it's all built by people who have gone.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, have you? Chicago has this one. I love Chicago.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
It's one of my favorite grit city.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
And Chicago has an architectural boat tour up the river
that is one of the great three hour tourist trips.
Speaker 7 (43:43):
To do a three hour tour a three hour tour
on a bound of Chicago's architecture, everything from why there's
little buildings on the sides of every bridge to talking
about the Sears Tower.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
It's a really, really fun that.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Sounds like I've got the day off today. Actually I
might try to figure that out.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
Oh, it's a good one. That's a really good one.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I don't have a three hours to spare, but maybe,
but maybe I do. Maybe I do have three hours
to spare. I noticed that I don't know if.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
You have this?
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Are you How are you with your phone addiction? Everyone's
addicted to their phone. I think, do you have a
Are you okay with it?
Speaker 7 (44:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Are you strict with yourself?
Speaker 1 (44:24):
No?
Speaker 3 (44:24):
I go easy on myself about it.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Oh. I have a funny.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
Thing here in the shop, which is that I can't
I can't pick up my phone and look at web
pages while I'm standing in my shop.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
Okay, the ethos of this place. That doesn't feel good.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
I have to sit in my shop chair, which is
in the corner if I want to pause and serve
a couple of websites. So I almost never look at
my phone while I'm working here in the cave. But
at home, Yeah, it's it's it's fucked up my reading.
My reading is terrible. I used to read all the time,
and now I have to really push my self to
(45:00):
put books through my brain because I am a better
person when I am reading.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
I feel like my my feeling now is that I
push myself hard into analog experiences. So I don't like
driving cars that have a lot of tech in them.
I don't like, you know, I don't like. I like
to go to a theater and talk to an audience
who don't have their phones with them. You know, they're
(45:27):
or they're they're not allowed to use them. And or
a comedy club or a or a or watch a
theater show and it.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
But it's hard because those I don't.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
I used to think it was my addictive personality, because
I clearly have one, but I don't think. I think
everyone has a fuck I look at everyone seems to
be kind of drawn into this mess. It's weird.
Speaker 4 (45:51):
Neil Stevenson wrote a book a few years ago called
Seven Eves and I'm gonna spoil it right now, but
it's been out for years, so I don't think that's
go And in it, the moon blows up and starts
to break into chunks that are going to make Earth uninhabitable,
and the book spans people leaving the Earth in order
to survive and then going back to it several thousand
(46:13):
years later.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (46:15):
And when they go back to it, they have access
to all the technology that existed on Earth, and one
of the things they do is, yeah, we're not going
to do smartphones this time.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
That didn't work out for everybody.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
That's great.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Isn't that that beautiful? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (46:30):
There's a book by I think I can't remember the
author's name.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
He is great.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
I've read Evan, he's done Richard Harris.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Maybe is that a guy who wrote the trilogy about Ciceroule.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
I don't know it.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Oh, he's great, but he wrote He wrote a book
called Second Sleep, which is set in.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
Fourteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
After the so the second Middle Ages, after the apocalypse,
and as a guy starts finding old technology and starts
to realize what happened, because you know, it's exactly like
the Middle Ages, where in fact you're you're a couple
of chapters in the book before you know, he picks
up something and he sees the little Apple logo on it,
(47:16):
and you go, what the fuck? It because you think
you're in the Middle Ages and then suddenly you're not.
You're in the Middle Ages again. It's a fascinating, fascinating book.
Speaker 4 (47:27):
I was just reading a thought experiment from some researchers
that were like.
Speaker 3 (47:31):
Okay, if.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
If there, if it's possible that there was an intelligent
civilization of some kind of creature before human beings on
Earth that existed, you know, pre Pangaea, because there's actually
been there's another Pangaea that predates Pangaea. And so all
of the surfaces of all the land masses on Earth
have turned over, and you know, sedimentary layers have built up.
(47:57):
What when you look for to look for a civilization
that existed that long ago, what sort of non random
things would give you a hint that intelligence had yielded
some sort of effect on Earth's.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
Atmosphere, on its land masses, and we would you look for?
Speaker 4 (48:16):
Well, this is the thing they were just opening up
the thought experiment. But there's a lovely guy, Lee Cronin.
He's over in Scotland or Ireland, and he's we were
at a dinner party talking about what is a reasonable
definition of life? And he said, I got it. I've
got the simplest definition of life. Life, he said, makes
(48:39):
non random shit at scale. Yeah, all right, that's pretty good,
isn't that unimal?
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah? I read something recently about you know, the I
can't remember the name of it. It's passed the doortage,
but it was about the idea of the more successful
forms of life on Earth, and that was postulating the
idea that wheaked is the most successful form of like
on Earth because you know, it takes up the most
(49:11):
grounded everybody needs it. It's you know, it's now I
was thinking, I also try that with Louis c. K
had a bet which I loved about humans are the
most successful because we're not in the food chain anymore
and tweak most certainly fucking as And I think because
just it's a different perspective on this, the same thing.
Speaker 4 (49:34):
I once saw biologists give a talk from the frame
of sheep and cows were really smart when they traded
sexual selection for protection from humans.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
Oh, but.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
Just I love an alternate frame of Yeah, well, I
think the mover.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
I think that ultimately, where I come back to, or
where I am at the moment anyway, is that I
kind of feel like I'm with the stoics, which is
the only thing you really can control is your attitude
to what's happening. Everything else is outside your control. You
can look at it, you can see it, you can
(50:16):
absorb it a bit, but so few things can actually
be altered by anything other than the way you think
about it.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Well, this is like, this is one of my favorite
Buddhist prayers actually, or slogans is and it's actually it's
important enough that Julia, my wife, wrote this down for
me and put it in my wallet. And it's germane
to what you've just said.
Speaker 4 (50:41):
And it's about the fact that you know, we come here,
and we leave here, and we're not here for very long,
and we don't have much that we can get done
in the time we're here. But the last part of
this is, my actions are my only true belongings. I
cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are
the ground on which I stand.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
That seems like a great place to tie it all up.
Well done, it's lovely, it's lovely to catch up with
you atam. It's been way too long. I'll be in
San Francisco. I've got to be there soon. I'm on tour.
It's got to be in the future, will can you
and Julian and I please have been please? Yes, it's
been way too long, She sends her love.
Speaker 3 (51:24):
I told her I was doing this.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
In fact, Megan's saying turns to you, add to her.
So it's all good. We're back, we're back in the game.
But I love it.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
I love you, my friend. It's good to see.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
You, all right.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Think it easy.
The Craig Ferguson Pants on Fire Tour is on sale now.
It's a new show, it's new material, but I'm afraid
it's still only me, Craig Ferguson on my own, standing
on a stage telling comedy words. Come and see me,
buy tickets, bring your loved ones, or don't come and
see me. Don't buy tickets and don't bring your loved ones.
(00:21):
I'm not your dad. You come or don't come, but
you should at least know what's happening, and it is.
The tour kicks off late September and goes through the
end of the year and beyond. Tickets are available at
the Craig Ferguson Show dot Com slash tour. They are
available at the Craig Ferguson Show dot com slash tour
or at your local outlet in your region. My name
(00:45):
is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy.
I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness.
On the podcast today we have a show business slash
science member of the royal family. Now that's not fair
because he's much smarter than any member of the royal family.
(01:07):
It's a very old friend of mine. He used to
be a ginger, but he's all right now. Please welcome
the fantastic Adam Savage. Adam Savage, look at you. You
look exactly the same, if anything, a little younger.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
The guy said, you look.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Have you been moisturizing?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What's happening?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's all turned gray? But yeah, no, the clean living
is the secret to my face.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, you know, here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Though you wear a ginger, at one point, gingers do
go gray.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
We go white, we go like sheet white.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, I know, it's kind of impressive.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It's I think it's the compensation for having been a
ginger that you then go completely white. I've seemed to
be developing some kind of weird, kind of fluffy thing
that's going on. It's very bad. I've noticed that my
hair has dried out completely. If you're just joining us,
by the way, this is the Haircare Podcast with Adam
(02:12):
Savage and Craig ferguson what what isn't? It?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Isn't French? Your name is it somebody that was French?
Speaker 3 (02:23):
I was just going to say that's the correct pronunciation.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
But we came over to Scotland around the fourteenth century,
right and from what I understand the savages or the
savages were mercenaries settling near the Antwerm peninsula.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Around the fourth that's been near Ireland then right, I.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Think there are a bunch of savages in Ireland as well.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
There certainly are.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I I wonder if if it was your family that
brought the ginger to Scotland, or if the ginger was
already there's It is a good question, and I know
no one.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I think you know it would be an excellent.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
MythBusters Red Hair was bought to Scotland or it was
already there?
Speaker 2 (03:08):
What's going on with that franchise?
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Now? Are you guys making MythBusters Junior or.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
No, dude, I haven't made television in years. I'm a
YouTuber guy.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
It's it's definitely the way to go. Yeah, are you
back at building? Are you back in your your your
day job? No?
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I over covid. I we leaned in one hundred percent
of my YouTube channel. We have almost seven million subscribers, now.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Shut the fuck up. Seven million.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
We put up a video almost every day. We put
up a video.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Oh my god, do you you must be an influencer?
Are you going to fight Mike Tyson or something that's happened.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
You know, the secret to having a YouTube channel is
that you basically have to be your own ad agency, and.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
That is what we do know, right, That's that's a
lot though. I like, I think I've got a YouTube channel.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I know that Tomas messes around with something, and I
know these podcasts go up, but I think I've got
like one.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Hundred subscribers or something.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It's no, it's not anything that anyone's gonna be excited about,
but it's definitely the way to go for sure. Is it?
Does it feel more comfortable being your own kind of executive?
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Can I tell you it's so nice?
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Because you know the TV executives they ride you so
hard on a pitch.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
They want everything button down into the moment they award
the show. They don't care about the show at all.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
They just want to know that the last five minutes
will bring all of the world to watching what you're making.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, and also the television executives, God bless them. I
used to hate them, but now I feel bad for
them because there's no work for those guys.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
No.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Can I tell you When I pitched a book in
twenty sixteen in New York, I spent a whole day
pitching all the publishers, and it was remarkable because I
realized halfway through the day, I'm repeatedly in rooms pitching
to people who love what I'm pitching. They love the
industry that they're in, they love books, And that's not
(05:11):
what I experience in television. I don't experience television executives
being like, I love television, I'm a television person.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
No, it's a very rare thing. I mean, one or
two of them, but most of them are are just awful.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
They're just.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
I think for many of them, it's kind of a
realtor job. You know, it's like, well, let's know what
I wanted, but you know it's decent money, and you
know I'll do it for now.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Well that works nickel and dime them until they have
no compunction left.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
I know. But it's quite interesting though, because I know
that I'm hurtling into my dotage.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Whenever I talk to them, I'm like, what do you want?
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Son?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's exactly that, Like, what the fuck you want?
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Like, well, we're very excited about are you really excited?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Fuck you you're not excited about it? Shut out exactly that.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
But I do people have to pitch you for your
YouTube channel now that do they have to like say, well,
we have this idea we'd like to blow up a hat.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
That does happen from time to time.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
I just had a company ask me, could you send
our product to space experimentally?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
And I came back with a totally different idea.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
Yeah, I am unwilling to do testing on behalf of
people's products.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I never was willing and I still don't want to
do it.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Well, I mean, doesn't it that would leave you home
to some kind of legal ramifications. Wouldn't as well? If
you test something and then somebody hurts themselves or something completely.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
But also it's like the first time I make a
test and adjudicate someone's product as being one way or
the other, no one will trust me.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Ever. Again, that's the way I feel.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
That's right, that's right now.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So what do you do in your YouTube channel?
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Because of course, obviously I subscribe to it, But for
the people that don't know about that.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
It is it's a fever dream of making.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
And so I'm in here five days a week, forty
hours a week in general kind of making whatever I'm
interested in. Right now, I'm currently working on. This is
sitting on my bench here. This is part of an
elevator panel I'm working on because there's a scene in
the movie Elf where Will Ferrell walks into an elevator
(07:27):
and he hits a button that's really pretty, and so
he hits all the buttons at once. So I'm making
that a Christmas decoration in my house this year.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oh, that's a lovely idea. And then as you make that,
you will film yourself making it. We'll go on the
YouTube and then hey, Presto Cash, absolutely yeah, and so
we do that, and then we also like I made
a raptor costume, a Utah raptor costume sixteen feet long
a few years ago, and just a few weeks ago,
I brought in a couple of friends and we spend
(07:57):
a week painting it and just a magnificent collaboration of
three dudes walking around this dinosaur for three full days
just adding and subtracting color and turning it into a
real character. That's really interesting. So you kind of like
you freed yourself. You've become like you're doing exactly what
you want, exactly on your own terms, and becoming a
(08:20):
petrillionaire at the same.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Time, A thousand there fit there it is. It's so
like the team is really small. It's just six of
us making this YouTube channel. Everyone's having a really good
time and we don't have to answer it anyone.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I bought out all my business partners a couple of
years ago.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
That's really interesting because that's kind of I kind of
did the same thing when when television started to turn
into this weird, kind of corporate, homogenized fucking shit show
where you know, you say one thing wrong and suddenly
you know, there's lawyers saying we don't encourage Greig Ferguson
and all that kind of stuff that I thought, No,
(09:02):
I got to strip this down to analog, right back
down to me speaking into a microphone in a dark
room with a bunch of people pointed in my direction.
That's it, you know, just like doing stand up. And
it was only recently, like in the last I don't know,
I don't know how, but long I've been doing this podcast,
(09:22):
like eighteen months or something, and you know, the iHeart
people who run. I'm like, God, these guys are just
the same fucking assholes as everybody else, So so I'll
probably won't keep doing it, but but maybe I should buy.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Buy them out.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
And well, you know, one of the things that people
who watch the channel tell me that they do is
they take my videos and some of them might be
eight minutes long, and some of them might be eighty
minutes of me like wiring something up, and they put
their laptop on their workbench with me working, and then
they work alongside.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
They do their own project while I'm working on mine.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
I think that's that's very good.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
And I think that the myth Bursters is quite an
interesting thing.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I think MythBusters was kind of like doing it.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
The equivalent is if you do a vampire movie, like,
no matter what you do in your career, from that
point on, the vampire crowd will always consider you one
of their people. And I think myth Bursters has like
because I'm that, I'm like myth Bursters is such a thing.
Like I still see Carrie quite often. I haven't seen
(10:25):
you in ages, but you've been over in Scotland a
couple of times. And I mean I haven't seen you
over in a while unless you've been there and you
haven't told me.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
I have not been there and haven't told you.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
All right, good because during the lockdown. We were stuck
in Scotland all the time. We moved back to America though,
we're in New England.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Oh wow, okay, yeah, East Coast.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, well, you know that's where Meghan's people are from,
those icy blue blood Yankees who you know that Meghan
can trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Oh so can I Actually we have some relatives that
were on that boat together.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Because my theory is that only the crazy people made
it through that first winter. Only the angry crazy that
genetic code through that first winter. It was like your
Law and Megan Law. I wonder if you relate it
to Megan.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
I didn't get COVID for the longest time, for the
first two and a half almost three years, and there
was this period of time I thought I was immune
because my grandmother, who can trate my who was a Monroe,
who can trace her, who could trace her ancestry back
to the Mayflower, had survived the nineteen seventeen influenza.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Oh wow, So I.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Was thinking, like, I'm an x man, I got that
in my blood. But then I caught COVID and it's
still well.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
COVID's kind of I don't know. Look, I'm not a scientist,
but I feel like it's new. I feel like it's
a slightly newer thing. And I didn't get it for
a while. I didn't get it at all. We had
a party of our house afterwards. Bill didn't get it.
You were invited to that party? You didn't, I was.
I couldn't make it outright. Carrie was at Carrie Byron
was at the party. I think I was so jealous.
(12:08):
I think she got COVID. Had like fifty people got
COVID at that party, but I didn't. And then Meghan
we went to I was doing name that celebrity, named
that tune in Dublin for some reason, and uh, and
Megan came with me and she made me go and
(12:29):
see the Book of Kels, which I was. I couldn't
give a shit about the Book of Kels. And while
I was in there, it was all American tourists and
I got the Irish lepro COVID I got. That's when
I got it. From the Book of Kels. I got
the original ancient Irish the OHI Diddley COVID, you get
(12:49):
a which yeah, yeah, I wish that I hadn't gone
to see the fucking Book of kels Is when I went.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So listen, talk to me about about.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Your origins, because I haven't really talked to you ever
really about that. You're from Sleepy Hollow, right, is that
where you're from?
Speaker 3 (13:07):
I was born Crane Country, born in Manhattan.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
My parents were lovely bohemians in the West Village in
the late sixties.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Wow, that sounds like a lot of body hair.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Was They had a two They had a ten room
duplex on Eighth Street and McDougall Street.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
That'd be worth like a billion dollars now.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
They sold it to the Robert Jeoffrey Foundation in nineteen seventy. Wow,
to move their family up to Terrytown, to Sleepy Hollow,
New York, and where I grew up. That's where I
spent my whole childhood, about a block from the Hudson.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
That's a lovely part of the world. Is gorgeous there.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
But isn't it like there's a lot of ghost stories
and creepy stuff and all there. And I always think
of you as being someone who debunks all of that
kind of stuff. That is do you think that's what
started there? Was it to protect yourself from scary stories.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
No, I I think it was.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I think I believed you're reminding me that.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
There's this one moment in MythBusters when Guermo Del Toro
called us up and he was like, why don't we
go spend three days in the most haunted place in
the United States, an insane asylum in the Carolinas.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
And Jamie was like, why would we do this?
Speaker 4 (14:24):
And I was like, we would do this because it's Guermo,
got Giermo cal you gotta go.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
You got it.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
I haven't been in his crazy house of mad things.
Have you been in it?
Speaker 4 (14:35):
I've been to I've been to Bleak House and now
apparently there's a second bleak House.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
But yeah, he's good.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
No, it's an amazing collection. It's a pathology kind of.
I mean, look at what are we if not a
collection of pathologies.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
I've gone.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
I was going to say, you're kind of you're kind
of a bit of a hoarder, uh.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
High functioning hoarder.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
But yes, high functioning horder. I think kids did it.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
But it's but the kind of the whole ethos of
like MythBusters and you personally as well, even right down
to the I don't know if you're still an atheist,
but but like you're a you're a kind of you
really do like to get to the science of just
about everything, right.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
I do like to get to the science of just
about everything.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
But it's funny that you say, Uh, I wonder if
you're still an atheist because I stopped saying that and
it happened in your kitchen in in Durban.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Oh really, because we had come.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
Back from a thing back when we were hanging back
when I was visiting you there, and you said, it's
it's pretty Uh. You said, it's pretty fundamentalist to say atheist,
because I still believe that. Yeah, yeah, And I couldn't
I couldn't disagree with that, and so I now call
myself a New Testament agnostic. I can't know, I can't
(15:53):
know who tipped the first domino, but I agree with
everything Jesus said.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, it's very interesting because I wrestled with it over
and over and over again. It's it's like a constant
refrain from me. I always kind of go back to
I don't want to not believe things, but I can't
(16:19):
believe in a kind of angry man on a cloud
with a thunderbolts and stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I can't believe in that.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
But then I'm interested in mystics that have become fascinated.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Recently by Gorvi Dal. Have you read gorfy Daals?
Speaker 4 (16:35):
I have read a bunch of Gorvidale. He's the only
historical fiction writer who I like to read.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Oh my god, it's great. So right now I'm in
the middle of creation.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
When he's got that guy from Persia who meets Buddha
and confuses and so cars, it's it's I'm like, wow, man,
this is fucking pot boiler is fabulous.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
I always kneel. I always felt with him.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
The one I read and loved the most was Burr,
which is a fever dream. And also with Vidal, like,
I feel like I'm absolutely getting a whole bunch of
editorializing an opinion, but it's informed by the point of
view he got in his research, not by a bias.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, I feel it's quite What's quite interesting about Gourvidal
as well is that I don't really know where he
stands in in the in the belief system, I really
and I've read extensively, and I think what it is
is I think he bounces around, you know, I think
(17:39):
he but I think.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
It is almost that that is almost a defining feature
of real faith. Martin Luther King absolutely grappled with it
in his personal diaries. I mean, John Dunn hell Spells,
you know, was totally grappling with this the whole time.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
I think it is an essential component of faith that
it has to have doubt. If it doesn't have doubt,
it's not really faith. It's kind of it's certainty, and
certainty is a very different thing. But there's a weird
interview with Carl Young. I don't know if you've ever
seen it, or somebody asked him if he it's a
televised thing. I can't remember where it was, but towards
(18:18):
the end of his life where someone said do you
do you believe in God? And he said, it's different
for me now I know, I know there's a God.
I was like, oh man, Young freaks me out. I
think he's so amazing. But but I always I think
of you. It's interesting to hear you say that because
I didn't know you were into those videal historical novels,
(18:40):
because they they seem quite mystical to me, and I
feel that you are aren't that I guess you are.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
I mean the.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Science thing is a search for truth, isn't it. It
is a It isn't it in its way a spiritual hunger?
Speaker 4 (18:57):
I think science, it's absolutely and we're grappling with the
same questions.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I had.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
This seems Germaine to this. I had this epiphany about
four years ago. I was researching measuring things. I was
research which is the field of metrology, and within the
field of metrology, actually I happened to I did not
plan this prop but I have this right here. Within
the field of metrology. If you want to measure something,
(19:24):
you pass a certain point, you don't measure it, You
actually compare it to something. And this is called a
gauge block. And this is the most accurate comparison system
there is. This is a one inch block, and I
can tell you that this block is one inch to
within you know, a few nanometers.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
That's how accurate this block is.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
And I was showing my I was doing a video
about how to measure gauge blocks and how accurate they are,
and then I had this idea, and I put the
gauge block in my hand and held it for twelve
seconds and put it back under my measuring device, and
I was able to show that in twelve seconds, the
heat from my body had man the gauge block one micron.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Thicker because of heat expansion.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
And when I realized that, and I was looking at
the spec sat for these, which is every one of
these has been measured and certified, I realized that at
the bottom of the certification it says this is only
accurate at sixty eight degrees fahrenheit. That's amazing, which told
me that measurement is the faith I get in numbers
is misplaced because they aren't real that the measurement of
(20:29):
these blocks only exists under circumstances that we agree upon,
which means just like politics, just like culture, just like society,
it's all based on us being polite and trying to
work together.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
That's how it works.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah, it's it's funny.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
I had a similar experience when I was getting my
pilot's license, when I was learning to fly, because I
kept asking people about air speeds and altitudes, and air
speeds and altitudes, which are extremely important if your flying
a freaking airplane. Well, altitude there's kind of like five
different types because there's there's altitude above the ground, but
(21:04):
there's also sea level altitude, which we all kind.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Of agree on.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Then there's density altitude because that's how the plane's going
to perform at certain temperatures and uh, moisture in the atmosphere.
So it's like like radar altitude as well, I mean it.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
So it's like, no, we need to have one altitude.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
But there's not the same thing about the speed of sound,
Like how fast the sound, Well, it depends on the
temperature and it depends on the thickness of the air.
And it's so fascinating to me, and I think you're right.
I think I think that it is. It is very
very confusing to try and agree on one thing to
(21:48):
make things black and white. That's why I'm I'm against
fundamentalism of all kinds.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
And that's that's where you turn me around in your
kitchen table.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Was I realized, Yeah, no, I can't know, So all
I can do is keep gathering data. And I feel
like performers like because we both spend a lot of
time in front of audiences.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
We know that audiences can take on.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
A character that is different than the people that compose
that audience.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Unbelievable, unbelievable. I mean right to the extent of the
one night. And you'll know this because you did those
live shows, and you've done so many live shows. You
can go out in front of an audience and roughly
the same sized theater, at the same room temperature, at
the same time of day, in a town that's a
similar demographic makeup, and do exactly the same thing and
(22:35):
have a wildly different experience. And that's people's collective personalities.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
I'm like, what is it.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
It's it's that Youngian thing, isn't it. The collective, the
collective unconscious? Right, the collective unconscious?
Speaker 2 (22:51):
I do you know.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
I once had interviewed with Stephen King on the Late
Night Show and I said, have you He was talking
about bringing stories down. He said, I bring the stories
down from somewhere. I was like, oh, that's fascinating. And
I said to him, so about the it's kind of
like the young the collective unconscious.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
And he said, what is that?
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And he didn't know what I was talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Oh so great?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I was like, what I mean, you might.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Have been working with me, Stephen King, but it was
still listening.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
But there is also that Arlott Guthrie. I saw him
perform once and he said, I don't write songs. I
stand at the side of a river and I wait
for one to come by and I.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Scoop it out. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
And then he said, he said, I don't think anyone
downstream of Bob Dylan has ever even seen a song.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
But I think that was kind of interesting, as though
that that's a kind of that's a kind of weird,
unmeasurable thing.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
But you've been in front of an audience where something
came out of the ether into your head, yes, and
dropped like a bomb in the room.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yes, And it happened last night.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I actually I was doing a show last night and
oh Chicago, and that's why I'm in the hotel in
Chicago now. And about halfway through the show, I had
this idea and I went with it, and I was
making myself laugh at the audience seemed to be enjoyed too,
but I was having a great time with it.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
I view that as that's that's the other to me, right,
that creative thing that happens late when you do all
the practice and you do all the rigor that you
do to get yourself to this point, and then you
open yourself up and some creative thing comes in. You
don't know where it came from, but it informs the
whole thing you're building.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yeah, it's it's very interesting because it it leads me
as I you know, again, as I get older, I
start thinking about the inevitability of the you know, corporeal
decline and you know, and immortality and all that. And
I can't get my head to a place where I
(25:04):
can endorse the idea of the continuation of consciousness. I'm
quite happy to remain open to the idea of a god,
a primover, or an unexplainable deity, but I can't get
my head around the idea that it keeps going.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
I just don't see that.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Here's one that I'm always thinking about when this conversation
comes around is in Africa, they took some termite mounds
and poured concrete into them and then excavated to see
the shape of a termite city.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
And when they do this, the cities.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Are fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide, and they
include waste management, and they include air conditioning and convection
breatheable air. They include temperature control. And I couple that
with the fact that ninety nine percent of the cells
in my body right now are non human in origin, right,
(26:07):
I'm mostly a colony of other bacterium and other types
of organisms. So I find myself wondering if consciousness isn't
just a level set for different groups of organisms, and
that maybe it's not that our consciousness continues, but we're
just brought back into the continuum.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
That's fascinating the idea. I think also, if you get
the idea of infinity, of infinite time, infinite space, then
it would seem to me that anything that can happen
will happen, and so anything that you can think of
can If I'm days going on, I wonder if that's
(26:50):
even plausible, But it's it's this is one of the
reasons why I don't take marijuana. I feel like I
feel like it would be bad. Do you take recreational drugs?
I wonder if that's the thing for you.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
I did do a lot of psychedelics back in my twenties, really, yeah, absolutely,
and it was a couple of mushroom It was a
couple of mushroom trips during which I really absolutely connected
and still firmly believe that our consciousness is eternal and
that we don't that this is not a deterministic universe.
(27:26):
That is, we have free will here, but I'm not
sure where we come from that we do. And so
I make this leap that we come here onto this
corporal plane because eternity is exhausting, and we come here
to enjoy some beginnings and endings, beginnings and endings, beginnings
and ends.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Oh, that's a lovely idea. I think you might be
on the edge of a new religion as there could be.
I think I could get behind that as an idea.
That that's fascinating. I think the the idea though for
me that the struggle I have with spiritual hunger or
(28:08):
spiritual searching is it's so littered with organized religion, which
is not for me. You know, I kind of make
it work. You have you got any organizational structure for
that for yourself?
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Only that it seems to me that the that the
Buddhists have been right.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
All along, maybe maybe.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
That consciousnes Look, you know, at this age too, what
turns out to be most important to me is the
collaborations I get to do with people that I love. Yeah,
it's that taking a couple of minds and intersecting them
on the same problem and enjoying doing that and learning
from other point people's point of view. The more curious
(28:52):
I get about other people and their process, the more
I get a reward from that that interaction that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
So you become fascinated by the way other people approach
a problem which either you have looked at yourself or
are trying to or invest the gain.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
Yeah, one of the primary things we do on the
channels we go to movie sets, and on movie sets
the main thing that we do at a level that
most people don't do it is we'll talk to all
of the artisans about how we look.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
A movie crew is nothing but an army of storytellers
all the way down.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
And when you're talking to the pain or painting the problem,
he's thinking that, she's thinking about the narrative of that piece.
And I love talking about that problem. You get this thing,
how do you make it fit within that narrative? Go
And that's one of the great challenges of my creative
life is making things to do that, and I love
talking to other people about how they do it.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
It's funny, as you mentioned that that when we were
in Scotland, we wanted to paint an old part of
the house, and we didn't know how to do it.
And we didn't know how to do it. And then
I thought, you know what, let's call I had a
buddy who was a set painter on movies. Yes, I said,
let's have him come and look at it. And he
looked at it, and I said, I wanted to look
(30:13):
like it was painted three hundred years ago. But it's
got damp. But then it got dry again and it's okay.
Now it had woodworm, but it doesn't have woodworm anymore.
He's like, got it. And he did it in two days.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Right, because he's a Sunday Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Right, He's like, I got I know what you're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
I probably bought a bunch of Hudson sprayers to add
some dirt coming down the walls.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
It was amazing though, I mean the idea of it.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I'm fascinated by the idea that that. And you're right,
everybody is a storyteller, and like I was always interested.
I haven't made a movie in forever, but the wardrobe
people always fascinated me because the investigation that they do
and the work that they do is amazing.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
And the stuff they don't even tell you, Like I
was talking to Danny Glicker, who's Jason Rightman's costumer, and
he was like, the thing you don't realize is all
old clothes have shoulder burned because they've been sitting on
a hangar for decades. They're always a little lighter right
here on this line. And if you don't do that,
you'll know that it's not quite old. That's amazing, amazing.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
It's a big detective thing almost you ever drawn to
that you ever drun to, like forensics or police work.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
Absolutely, I love knowing how things work, so I love
peeling behind the curtain and having you know, MythBusters is
just put me in contact with tons and tons of
cops all over the world.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And I mean, I could not do that job.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
It is a view on humanity that is really intense
and difficult and a and look, I have huge problems
with the with the American police, but that's not what
I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about the general
job of being a police person and sounds both completely
intriguing and I could never do it.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
It's funny. I got I got a tattoo once in
New Orleans and it was late at night, as often
tattoos are and the guy was doing it. You know,
you get to talk and he's working away and we
were talking and he told me that he had been
a cop.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
He had been a homicide cop.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
And then during Katrina he was looking at three unsolved
you know, deaths a day, and he said, I couldn't
do it anymore. I couldn't do it anymore. It was
I had to go and do what I really wanted
to do. I couldn't. I couldn't do that. I always
wanted to do, you know, to be a tattoo artist.
And now I'm going to do that. And he's good
(32:48):
and I've got some good ink from him, and it
was it's a fascinating story. He said that weird thing.
He said, civilization and it was a quote from some
fancy French writer. I don't know. It was civilization is
three meals away from chaos.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
That's beautiful. Wow, that's completely true.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, I think so. I mean it's like I always think,
as well, you know, when when people are saying, you know,
they're there, there might be riots, and now, well, what's
the weather like? Because people never riot in the snow.
It's temperature based. It's effect. It affects the amount of rioting,
(33:32):
you're going to get totally right.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
And I was thinking, whoever said that quote?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
I feel like they had to be French, because the
French Revolution is where you learned that lesson.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, I think it probably was.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
It was probably with some you know, somebody that was
up to no good during all that. Do you know
what apparently during the French Revolution as well, that the
revolutionary pamphlets were all hidden inside pornography because because the
fancy pant aristocracy wouldn't look at the the pornography because
(34:04):
it was for poor people. Yeah, and all the people
would look at the And I'm like, oh yeah, and
apparently that I feel like I might be making this up,
but I think there's some truth in it that the
marquis decide.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
That's why he was so involved in all He was writing.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
These crazy pornographic stories, but also he was in revolutionary
as well.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
There's a Doris Lessing has a group of books that
are field reports on planets around the universe and science fiction,
and the first one is a field report on Earth
from about twenty thousand BC to three hundred years in
the future, when the world holds the White Man on
trial for crimes against humanity, okay, And in this arc,
(34:46):
at one point, one of the benevolent aliens that sort
of oversees the universe falls. He falls into the sickness
of rhetoric, all right, and to cure him of his
addiction to rhetoric, they send him to live a short,
brutal life as a peasant during the French Revolution.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Oh man, I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
I mean, you're still in San Francisco, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
San Francisco is I've always found a very complicated rhetorical
environment because on the one hand, there's this very liberal idea,
but we are very didactic and very hardline liberal idea
of life, which is hard to navigate. I find it
(35:38):
hard to navigate if I'm talking a law there, do
you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Yea, I feel like it's.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Quite easy to annoy people and audiences.
Speaker 6 (35:46):
I mean, you know, San Francisco exists in this tension
between that very open open end in philosophy that everyone
should try what they want and let their freak flag fly,
and we're all cool with it.
Speaker 4 (35:59):
But it's also one of the most beautiful physical places
on Earth, which means there's a tremendous amount of money here,
and the tension between the money and that hippie philosophy
is I think one of the things that defines se
Francisco well.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And also then you get into that weird hypocrisy of
Silicon Valley where they pretend to be flying her freak flag,
but they are like Andrew Carnegie or.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
The Trump one.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, the the I always think that it fascinates me.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Did you read the Vidal book?
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I think it was Hollywood the maybe Hollywood, or it
may be the one before that. It's a historical novel,
but he talks about the the feud between William Randolph
Hurst and Teddy Roosevelt, and and Hurst comes off like
proto Elon Muskets. It's very interesting. I was like, wow,
(37:00):
that's a fascinating idea. And you know, Teddy Roosevelt doesn't
come out but too great either slashes everybody trashes them all.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
I mean, at that level, it's all life among the narcissists, right.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yeah, Right.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
When's the first time you went did that tour of Washington?
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Have you done that? Like you go to the Senate
and somebody takes you around the Capitol building.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
I have never done that.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
They used to what I was doing late night.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
I thought it was a thing that everybody on TV
did at some point, that they would take you around.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
And I got.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Introduced to all these different people at the Senate, the
Senate and Congress and all these different offices. And it
was a whole day of just like you know, shaking
hands and schmoozing people. And at the end of the day,
I was with Megan and I we were sitting at
the end to day, I thought, Jesus Christ, you know
what really surprised me. It's fucking stupid. Most of these
(38:07):
people are there. They're they're like, not that smart, they're
just like they just kind of honk. They're like geese.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Believable. But it's it's annoying thing.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
But they've got a very nice museum there, well, a
couple of nice museums there, but that year in space Museum,
the Smithsonian in it.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Oh God, I sit on the board. Actually stop, of
course you do. And right now, actually over at the
airport at the Udvar Hazy Center, John Glenn's Friendship seven capsule,
the first American in space, Yes, is sitting about thirty
feet from a space shuttle.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
To see these two things this like one.
Speaker 5 (39:00):
Millimeter thick aluminum container, I know, versus this, you know,
one hundred and twenty foot long thing, and that that compression.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
Of human ingenuity is a really beautiful thing to stand
in the middle of.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah, but it's fair. I mean, that was the thing
that first fascinated me about America when I was I
think I was seven years old, yeah, seven when the
moon landing happened, and I remember seeing it. I was
allowed to stay up more on television and that's when I, like,
you start seeing all that American stuff and I was like, well,
I'd like to hang out with those guys.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
What did they do?
Speaker 1 (39:38):
I want to go there because there wasn't any I
didn't see any Scottish people doing it, But I thought,
what's going on here? What are these people love to
I find out later it's ald Scottish people coming over
to America. And you know, but it's a fascinating thing
because I think the science is part of America's not
only just the rise of America as as as this
(40:02):
global so omnipresent superpower, but the kind of spiritual soul
of America is that technology and that strive and that
you know, it's It's kind of like when I hear
people talk about global warming, which is kind of like
it is the number one issue, I guess, or climate change,
(40:25):
And I tend to think I would be interested to
hear your take on it, because I tend to think
at this point, we've gone so far it's no longer
an emotive problem. It's an engineering problem. We got to
we've got to fix a different way. It can't be
we have to stop Grandma putting her you know, hot
pocket thing in the correct ben that's not going to
do anything anymore. It has to be and have you
(40:48):
been keeping track of anything with that stuff?
Speaker 5 (40:50):
Are you?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Are you?
Speaker 3 (40:51):
It's that I agree with you.
Speaker 4 (40:52):
It's it's clear now that it's not a behavioral solution.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
There's not a behavioral solution to this problem.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
Humans have been given the chance, we have the knowledge,
we have the data, uh, and we aren't willing to
make the sacrifices, and so the response is will have
to be reactionary. It'll be, you know, at each stage
that things get more difficult, what do we do to
deal with that difficulty? And it's not a great plan.
(41:21):
It's a terrible way to attack a problem.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, But I mean, I feel like it's the only one.
I mean that the idea of you know, you know
this is I live in hope that someone develops a
bacteria that eats plastic in the ocean and shits out
tiny little you know, sea creatures or you know, these
seed the clouds that bring the temperature down or even
(41:45):
or and there is talk about all of these different things, right.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Yeah, I feel like philosophically, to me, the problem is
around the framing, weirdly of late stage capitalism, which is
which is that like late stage capitalism posits that life
is a zero sum game that my my, if I gain,
if you gain, it's because I lose. And I think
that's why global warming or behavioral solutions to climate change
(42:12):
aren't going to work, because everyone has this frame of like, well,
if I'm going to suffer, who's benefiting?
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Right, instead of what can we do to benefit all
of us?
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Right? Yeah? That sounds that does no sense politically attractive
to a lot of people right now.
Speaker 4 (42:28):
Yes, I know, And honestly, the most amazing things that
have ever happened to me in my life are because
of collective action of me and a group of people.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Well, I think that also that I mean, we are
the sum of the people that came before us. We
all are. And it's funny. I'm in Chicago right now,
and Chicago always makes me feel like this because it's
a time that I always associate I don't know why,
with the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I guess
like Prohibition and al Capone and you know, and the World's.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
Fair eighteen ninety seven or the Column ex Position in
eight ninety five.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, right, And so I think of all of that
when I would walk down on the lake today and
I look at it and just looking at the buildings,
and you know, I'm sixty two am you know, and
I'm thinking it's you're a fucking may fly, man, You're
a fucking mayfly.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
And but all of these buildings, all of this stuff,
all of this this temple of mammon that is Chicago,
and it's all built by people who have gone.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, have you? Chicago has this one. I love Chicago.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
It's one of my favorite grit city.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
And Chicago has an architectural boat tour up the river
that is one of the great three hour tourist trips.
Speaker 7 (43:43):
To do a three hour tour a three hour tour
on a bound of Chicago's architecture, everything from why there's
little buildings on the sides of every bridge to talking
about the Sears Tower.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
It's a really, really fun that.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Sounds like I've got the day off today. Actually I
might try to figure that out.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
Oh, it's a good one. That's a really good one.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I don't have a three hours to spare, but maybe,
but maybe I do. Maybe I do have three hours
to spare. I noticed that I don't know if.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
You have this?
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Are you How are you with your phone addiction? Everyone's
addicted to their phone. I think, do you have a
Are you okay with it?
Speaker 7 (44:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Are you strict with yourself?
Speaker 1 (44:24):
No?
Speaker 3 (44:24):
I go easy on myself about it.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Oh. I have a funny.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
Thing here in the shop, which is that I can't
I can't pick up my phone and look at web
pages while I'm standing in my shop.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
Okay, the ethos of this place. That doesn't feel good.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
I have to sit in my shop chair, which is
in the corner if I want to pause and serve
a couple of websites. So I almost never look at
my phone while I'm working here in the cave. But
at home, Yeah, it's it's it's fucked up my reading.
My reading is terrible. I used to read all the time,
and now I have to really push my self to
(45:00):
put books through my brain because I am a better
person when I am reading.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
I feel like my my feeling now is that I
push myself hard into analog experiences. So I don't like
driving cars that have a lot of tech in them.
I don't like, you know, I don't like. I like
to go to a theater and talk to an audience
who don't have their phones with them. You know, they're
(45:27):
or they're they're not allowed to use them. And or
a comedy club or a or a or watch a
theater show and it.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
But it's hard because those I don't.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
I used to think it was my addictive personality, because
I clearly have one, but I don't think. I think
everyone has a fuck I look at everyone seems to
be kind of drawn into this mess. It's weird.
Speaker 4 (45:51):
Neil Stevenson wrote a book a few years ago called
Seven Eves and I'm gonna spoil it right now, but
it's been out for years, so I don't think that's
go And in it, the moon blows up and starts
to break into chunks that are going to make Earth uninhabitable,
and the book spans people leaving the Earth in order
to survive and then going back to it several thousand
(46:13):
years later.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (46:15):
And when they go back to it, they have access
to all the technology that existed on Earth, and one
of the things they do is, yeah, we're not going
to do smartphones this time.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
That didn't work out for everybody.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
That's great.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Isn't that that beautiful? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (46:30):
There's a book by I think I can't remember the
author's name.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
He is great.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
I've read Evan, he's done Richard Harris.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Maybe is that a guy who wrote the trilogy about Ciceroule.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
I don't know it.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Oh, he's great, but he wrote He wrote a book
called Second Sleep, which is set in.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
Fourteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
After the so the second Middle Ages, after the apocalypse,
and as a guy starts finding old technology and starts
to realize what happened, because you know, it's exactly like
the Middle Ages, where in fact you're you're a couple
of chapters in the book before you know, he picks
up something and he sees the little Apple logo on it,
(47:16):
and you go, what the fuck? It because you think
you're in the Middle Ages and then suddenly you're not.
You're in the Middle Ages again. It's a fascinating, fascinating book.
Speaker 4 (47:27):
I was just reading a thought experiment from some researchers
that were like.
Speaker 3 (47:31):
Okay, if.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
If there, if it's possible that there was an intelligent
civilization of some kind of creature before human beings on
Earth that existed, you know, pre Pangaea, because there's actually
been there's another Pangaea that predates Pangaea. And so all
of the surfaces of all the land masses on Earth
have turned over, and you know, sedimentary layers have built up.
(47:57):
What when you look for to look for a civilization
that existed that long ago, what sort of non random
things would give you a hint that intelligence had yielded
some sort of effect on Earth's.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
Atmosphere, on its land masses, and we would you look for?
Speaker 4 (48:16):
Well, this is the thing they were just opening up
the thought experiment. But there's a lovely guy, Lee Cronin.
He's over in Scotland or Ireland, and he's we were
at a dinner party talking about what is a reasonable
definition of life? And he said, I got it. I've
got the simplest definition of life. Life, he said, makes
(48:39):
non random shit at scale. Yeah, all right, that's pretty good,
isn't that unimal?
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah? I read something recently about you know, the I
can't remember the name of it. It's passed the doortage,
but it was about the idea of the more successful
forms of life on Earth, and that was postulating the
idea that wheaked is the most successful form of like
on Earth because you know, it takes up the most
(49:11):
grounded everybody needs it. It's you know, it's now I
was thinking, I also try that with Louis c. K
had a bet which I loved about humans are the
most successful because we're not in the food chain anymore
and tweak most certainly fucking as And I think because
just it's a different perspective on this, the same thing.
Speaker 4 (49:34):
I once saw biologists give a talk from the frame
of sheep and cows were really smart when they traded
sexual selection for protection from humans.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
Oh, but.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
Just I love an alternate frame of Yeah, well, I
think the mover.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
I think that ultimately, where I come back to, or
where I am at the moment anyway, is that I
kind of feel like I'm with the stoics, which is
the only thing you really can control is your attitude
to what's happening. Everything else is outside your control. You
can look at it, you can see it, you can
(50:16):
absorb it a bit, but so few things can actually
be altered by anything other than the way you think
about it.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Well, this is like, this is one of my favorite
Buddhist prayers actually, or slogans is and it's actually it's
important enough that Julia, my wife, wrote this down for
me and put it in my wallet. And it's germane
to what you've just said.
Speaker 4 (50:41):
And it's about the fact that you know, we come here,
and we leave here, and we're not here for very long,
and we don't have much that we can get done
in the time we're here. But the last part of
this is, my actions are my only true belongings. I
cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are
the ground on which I stand.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
That seems like a great place to tie it all up.
Well done, it's lovely, it's lovely to catch up with
you atam. It's been way too long. I'll be in
San Francisco. I've got to be there soon. I'm on tour.
It's got to be in the future, will can you
and Julian and I please have been please? Yes, it's
been way too long, She sends her love.
Speaker 3 (51:24):
I told her I was doing this.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
In fact, Megan's saying turns to you, add to her.
So it's all good. We're back, we're back in the game.
But I love it.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
I love you, my friend. It's good to see.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
You, all right.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Think it easy.
Host
Craig Ferguson
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!