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Co-host today, Chuck Knight. Chuck. Hey, Neil. Always good to be here at the Cosmic Crib. And who we making a sandwich with here? We've seen him before. Yes, we have. We did. The one, the only, the inimitable Adam Savage. Yes. Adam, welcome back. Thank you very much.
It was like your third time on StarTalk. It's been too long since I've been in this office. And it's been too long. We enjoyed your last visit, and I feel like we're lifelong friends, even though we've only had a few times together. It feels like culturally we're... Culturally. Yeah, we like bounce. Nice. The cultural Venn diagram has quite the area where you two overlap. And that creates the friendship even without individual time together. I see what you're doing, and I think, oh, that's awesome. That's great. Cool, man. So we've got you on. You actually have a new book.
I do. Holy cow. I'll talk about your book. What are you saying? You have it. I'll do the talking about your book. Okay. All right. Okay? Okay. That looks better, doesn't it, Jakak? That is. That's called public relations. When he talks about his book, it's bragging. It's bragging. When you talk about it, it's public relations. There you go. But enough about me. What did you think of my book? So, Every Tool's a Hammer. Great title. And this, you know, my favorite picture in here is...
There's a lot of interesting pictures like you and your workshop. My favorite is the stuff that you dumped out of your backpack. But then neatly organized it. That was just cool. Like seeing what's in... And I like John Hodgman's comment. He said, this is a map of his brain.
Nice. I thought that was a very good comment. If you feel like venturing into that unknown territory, yeah, this is the map. Yeah, for some people, you don't want to go there. Right. But for Adam Savage, yeah, you want to see what's been driving him his whole life. That is so funny. Some people, you don't want to go there. Just my wife left her sheet journals.
She journals. She journals. And so the journal was on the bed. No, you did not. No, I'm laying on the bed and watching TV. The journal was sitting right there. She comes in the room. She goes, oh my God, I left my journal open. She goes, you didn't read it, did you? And I went, I don't know what's going on up there.
of what is happening in your head. Your wife said, I hope you didn't read my journal. That does not bode well. What movie exists in which someone read someone else's journal and it all turned out great? Good point. That's so funny. There ain't no movie about that. Right. My twin boys used to sit in their bunk beds and talk every night and my mom was like, what are they talking about? I'm like, I don't know. That's their private moment. I'm not going to listen in. I don't want to know. Let them have
their moments. But I want to know what's on in his head and so does our fan base. Now that is so true because I have their questions. Because this is a Cosmic Queries edition of Star Talk and we just solicited our fan base questions knowing they'd land in the lap of Adam Savage about just making stuff. Yeah. And so Chuck, I haven't seen them. You've
Chuck reviewed them just this morning. I'm actually reviewing them. Okay. Adam hasn't seen them, so let's see what you got. Yeah, and these are cool. And as usual, we always start with a Patreon patron because they support us. Because we're that low. Well, no. We're that high. We're that high. Okay, okay. That we have supporters. I want to be a member of Patreon so that I can get my questions answered by somebody. Believe it or not, you can. Okay.
You can actually donate to Patreon and then ask yourself a question. That's how I get on that list? Exactly. That's what I will do. I will ask myself. That would be funny. All right, I'll do that. All right, here we go. This is Biken Bird says, Hey, Adam, we've all heard of examples of items or procedures getting discovered by accident.
microwaves, penicillin, even chocolate chip cookies. Through all of your different experiments, was there an outcome or product that was produced that was applied to another test or maybe even applications outside of the show? Uh,
And this is just Justin from Texas. Is that kind of like, did he invent anything by accident? Did you ever invent anything by accident? It was a long way. It was a long walk around the block. That was a whole... That was a long walk around the block. Off-ramp? Exactly. You took the clover leaf to get back on? I have a comment and a question, but an autobiographical story first. Actually... And by the way, there's a word for that in science. It's serendipity. Okay. Yes. A great word. There was a moment...
I can't think of anything we invented by accident, but I do remember we were on... We were on Hawaii doing... On Mythbusters shooting Duct Tape Island. And this was the conceit. Jamie and I get stranded on a deserted island. Jamie, your co-host from Mythbusters. So Jamie Heineman and I get stranded on a deserted island and all we have is a pallet of several hundred rolls of duct tape. What do we do? That's...
Wait, wait, wait. So is MacGyver tuning into this episode? Right. More things to do with duct tape. Exactly. So we made shelter. We actually made traps and caught chickens. We ended up making a 21-foot-long outrigger canoe with which we were able to get past the breakwater of the North Shore of Oahu.
But there was a moment when Jamie was asked to make a still for distilling clean water, sorry, fresh water from the salt water. And so he was digging into the beach to make a hole. And the procedure is you dig into the beach, you make a hole. It's going to be a kind of a damp hole because it's on the beach. And you let sit in some plastic with a rock in the middle. And as water condenses from the salt water collects on the inside of the membrane you've put, you can catch it in a cup and drink fresh water.
However, Jamie noticed that when he dug in and tasted just the water that was being filtered through the sand, that it was much less brackish and salty. And so he got really excited about the idea that the sand of the beach itself was filtering the water. Interesting.
And we explained that this was a whole episode about duct tape. And while this was really interesting, it really didn't fit within our narrative. Right. But he kept insisting. And so we ended up shooting this whole sequence with Jamie, which I think we put on the web because that was the most interesting part of that day for him was the idea that the sand filtered the salt out. But this was a classic thing of Jamie going, this is the thing I'm interested in. And we're saying, no, that's not what the episode's about. He's like, I don't care what you're saying.
Make a new episode. I just want to talk about this thing. And now I love all my water gritty.
Yeah, just a little bit. I need just a little bit of grit in all of my water now. I'll drink it out of my boot, thank you. Cool. All right, cool. Next question. Great story, great story, great story. This is John Cole from Facebook who says, between StarTalk and the Tested YouTube channel, I am in heaven. Hello, Adam. How do you get over the maker's equivalent of writer's block? Oh.
Wow. What a great question. This is a great question. John Cole, you are thinking, my friend. So do you ever just walk into your garage and say, I don't know what I'm going to put together today? Totally. But more than that, I also hit moments where I spend a whole day assembling something and realize that I've assembled it chirally backwards.
And that I have to take the whole- We must explain what chirally means. Well, chiral is left and right. Your hands are chiral. I was going to let Chuck explain. I'm so sorry. Chuck, what is chiral? It's the mirror image without the mirror. Nice! Ooh, that was much more concise than that. That was way better than where you were going with that. Yeah, it was. I was being way too wordy. Because you can make something that is the mirror image of itself. Right. And then you hold them together and they're mirror images. Exactly. And our amino acids are-
have one chirality, and they all have the same chirality for all life on Earth. And when we found amino acids in asteroids, we found that they were 50-50 of both chiralities. So we knew that it didn't care, and there wasn't one life form, because amino acids aren't alive yet, that overran the other. So our chirality is the one chirality in the whole world. And there's suspicions that if there was another life form with the other chirality of our molecules, that
you wouldn't be able to metabolize them if you ate them. - Oh, wow. - 'Cause the molecules wouldn't fit together. - They wouldn't fit together. - Might not even be able to taste it. - Right. - Oh, that's cool. - And they would probably be like a guy, one half of his face would be black and the other half of his face would be white.
He's really angry and sweet. And he's right. Exactly. Wow. So from a standpoint of making, whenever you have two parts that are chiral, it can be a devilishly difficult assembly problem because everything looks very similar, but the order of operations is very precise. Tetris is kind of like that. Two of the pieces are mirror opposite each other. So regularly in making, you hit a spot where you... I saw 3D Tetris, I was thinking. Okay.
Sorry. So you hit a spot where you've screwed something up and I feel really dejected about it and I don't feel like moving forward or I don't feel like undoing the five hours of work I've just done. Wow.
Wow. And I'm angry. I'm pissed off. I feel sad about it. That's funny because I feel the same way whenever I put anything together from Ikea. Chuck, that table is upside down. Really? Yes, totally. Ikea is absolutely ripe for that kind of screwing up. But go ahead. And how does everything fit in a flat box anyway?
Isn't this something that should not be able to fit in a flat box? The Ikea car. All right, sorry. Go ahead. There's a line from Mary Carr, who wrote Liar's Club, wrote about...
about what she does with writer's block. And she says, if I can't think about what to write, I sit at my desk and I copy writers I love in longhand because my fidelity at the desk is to be writing, whether it's my own writing or not. Wow, what an exercise. It's a beautiful exercise. And I take that to heart in the shop. If I can't think of what to make, I organize something in my shop, a drawer, a shelf, a bin. I take something and I adjust it because...
So you do shop time no matter what. I do shop time. And I do so much more shop time than I ever did before because I realized it's a deep part of that whole process of prepping the shop and prepping myself for the work. I do a little bit something like that. I have a book called The Greatest Wits of All Time. And they're phrases out of letters and correspondence from people that have extraordinary wit. And I just read it. I say, wow, that was an awesome book.
juxtaposition of words or phrases or rhythm and that just sort of re-baptizes me into a mood that I then say, okay, I'm ready. That feels fertile. There you go. I like that. So do you ever suffer writer's block? No, no. I go through this exercise. I have a lot of books written
written by writers who like writing about writing, also about whatever else they wrote about. Right. Did that sentence make any sense? That sounded very meta. It's a lot of inception today. I would never want to write that sentence. That's only a speakable sentence. And there's one sentence that I think I uttered this in our last recording, a sentence from The Great Gatsby.
- This is a sentence where I knew I still have not become a great writer and maybe never will. - Oh, wow. Okay. I have to hear this now. - In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths amid the whispers, the champagne and the stars.
That's a great... I read that and say, that's why I am not a novelist. Yes. And he is. You're reminding me of one of my favorite passages from... Obviously, this is from the great Gatsby's party. Yeah. You're reminding me of a line from Chandler. That's like a perfect simile. Plus, he mentioned... Came and went as moths. Yes, as moths. That's beautiful. Amid... It's very elegant. The whispers of the champagne...
- And the stars. - Incredible. - You know, I didn't come here to feel inadequate. - And yet. - And yet here we are. - So what were you saying, Adam? - I was saying it reminds me of this line from Chandler where his hero Marlo is sitting in a waiting room for too long and he describes the time passing as the minutes tiptoed by their fingers to their lips.
Lovely. Okay, so I have one. It's a quote from my father. Uh...
Seriously, what the hell are you still doing here? You haven't moved out of the basement yet? That's a talk every father has. All right. What's next for you out there, Chuck? All right, here we go. Let's move on. Just to remind people, we got Adam here because he's got a new book. Yes. We would have him anyway even without the book. That's right. Let me just make that clear. Absolutely. I appreciate that. Okay. But he was made available to us by Simon & Schuster. Okay. Okay.
For free, right? He was like in New York doing media. And I guess we count as media. You do? We do, yeah. Nice. I can handle that. Every tool's a hammer. Life is what you make it. I see what he did there. Yeah, it's very cool. Right, right. So Adam. Every tool's a hammer actually does sound like something Donald Trump would say, though. I'm just saying.
You know, the phrase of mine he's grabbed is, I reject your reality and substitute my own. Oh, very nice. Is that a quote from you? That is. And he actually quoted that? No, he hasn't quoted that, but clearly it's his entire life. He's just living it.
- Living it. - Living it, okay. - I love it. All right, let's take Mitch Morris, who comes to us. - You're doing well with the words, with the names today. - That's because they're regular names. - Regular, yeah, regular. - Alliterative, alliterative. - How racist can you get? - I can get a lot more racist. I'm just letting you know.
Since we're asking. All right. Go on. But you are right. That is, it's extremely, what do you call it? Presumptive of me. All right, here we go. Mitch Morris from Instagram. You get a lot more presumptive. Chuck.
Miss Mars from Instagram wants to know this. What is the most important tool ever invented? That's for the both of you. What an interesting little question. Very simple little question, but very interesting.
I'll answer first because I want him to bring closure to the question. So when I was younger, I said, wow, this crescent wrench is really useful, right? Because you can adjust it. And then I discovered the... Miter saw? No, no. The... Vice grip. The vice grip. Oh. And I said, oh, I've died and gone to heaven. Yeah. Vice grip. And then... You got better than vice grip? Yes. Go ahead. The most important tool...
It's money to pay somebody else to fix it. That became the most important tool. I ain't fixing this plumbing. I'm going to hire a plumber. Wow. That's going to be my tool kit for this. You may have just answered the question. Okay. I have to say, in the circles I travel in, a crescent wrench is known as a nut corner rounder.
And the vice grips are known as the professional nut corner rounder. Okay. They can mess up. Don't get me wrong. I love both of those tools. Corner rounder means taking your hex and removing the edges to it. Until it can no longer be a nut corner rounder. I have to go to the simplest, I mean, one of the six simple machines, the lever. I feel like the ability to move heavy objects with a mechanical advantage and the lever...
The lever exists before the wheel or any rollers to me. He's still in Archimedes who said, give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world. I don't think he said lever. He just said, give me a place to stand and I can move the world. I think he was describing the object he was holding. Yes, of course. But I'm saying that was implicit. He doesn't give me a lever and a place. Just give me a place to stand and I can move the world.
Beautiful. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Next question. All right. Good stuff. Okay, lever. I'll give you the lever. We can do the lever. Here we go. Next question. Here's the next question. From Womushop. Womushop.
- Wumu Shop, yes. - Sounds problematic. - It does. - Do you have a brain injury that's preventing words? - I think I just had a stroke. - I really don't know what to use. - Can't pronounce. - Wumu Shop, hi Neil and Adam. You guys are both my heroes. Which would you say will be the more important for the future of invention?
good old-fashioned mechanical know-how or advances in material science. Ooh. I.e. inventing a new type of suspension bridge that is stronger and lighter versus discovering a stronger and lighter titanium alloy. Ooh.
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Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got Chuck Nice with me. Yes, sir. And we're doing Cosmic Queries. Yes, we are. And before we went to break, we had a question from Wumu Shop who says...
Hi Neil and Adam, you guys are both my heroes. Which would you say will be the more important for the future of invention, good old-fashioned mechanical know-how, or advancements in material science? Adam, go. Good old-fashioned mechanical know-how. We are always going to be advancing in material science, and there will sometimes be things that we cannot replicate because we lose a technology or we forget a process.
But as long as we have a deep foundation in mechanical knowledge, in making things and the roots of the physics of putting stuff together, we can utilize those advances and we can adjust to the changes in the available materials as they come.
Wow. Great answer. I only kind of agree with that. Uh-oh. I'm agreeing 50%. Oh, okay. Okay? I'm into material science. It is one of the most underappreciated, unheralded branches of science in this world. Okay. All right? If you go back 50 years...
hardly any... No, I'm not bragging about this advance. I'm just citing it as a difference in our lives. You go back 50 years, hardly anything was made of plastic. Correct. And...
Almost everything is made of plastic today. And it's working out great. For many things. As long as you don't have to throw it away, okay? It's working out great. The plastic is stronger. It's more reliable than other materials. And you can mold it. And just think of the things that having simple, quote, standard mechanical knowledge...
So what? Look what this material can do. They're materials now that have memory of a shape they once had. Okay. So you can deform it. I sleep on it. Then you wet it, and then it goes back to the previous shape. I got nothing to do. Nothing in your lab, nothing in your garage is ready for that. But within the one is better than the other, mechanical knowledge can push humanity forward.
on its own, whereas material science can't necessarily. With the good materials, you don't need the mechanical knowledge. It's built into the material itself. I totally disagree with that. Smackdown!
- Meet me in the octagon. - Yes! - We actually, so as an aside, I just finished a new show for the Science Channel called Savage Builds, in which I build absurd things every week. In the first episode, we made a suit of Iron Man armor in 3D printed titanium.
And speaking of material science, I discovered that when you 3D print titanium, you can attenuate its grain structure so that it is far stronger than normal titanium. Because you can give it these super tight little crystalline granules. They can get closer. Yeah. Wow. Wait, wait, wait. Except that makes it denser.
It seems to me. It didn't in this case. It didn't, okay. No, it's still 45% the weight of steel. Interesting, okay, okay. As strong or stronger. If you made it denser, you would lose some of the value of it being light. Yeah, no, this stuff was amazing. We had potato chip thin pieces. They were bulletproof. Bullets slid right off of this stuff. Now, wait a minute. Is this something that was already discovered? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or is it just something that you discovered? No, GE is using 3D printed titanium in their jet engines right now.
Absolutely. It's a property that you discovered. No, no, no, no, no. It's a property that you found for yourself. I was working with... To make armor out of. Right. There's an amazing engineering school called the Colorado School of Mines. Yes, everyone knows them. Those guys are incredible and I worked directly with them in their additive manufacturing department. Okay, so he just figured out a brilliant new material to make armor for knights. Yeah. So,
600 years late. That's great. Yeah, but I can't wait to see what new material is coming down the pipe and how that might transform how we live. I think about that all the time. Okay. All right. Excellent question once again from our listening audience. And just for the point of interest, we transitioned from, ooh, that's cheap, it's made of plastic, to, oh, it's made of plastic, fine.
I don't have any problem. It'll last forever. Right. That happened in... We're about the same age, probably? Yeah, yeah. That happened in our lifetime. It did. Yes. It did. Okay, just... I totally agree. Just...
I don't want to smack you down too hard. Just the octagon will decide this. Okay. Does anyone know what the octagon is? I'm sure they do. And there's a lot of UFC fans. Yeah, okay. I don't know what the Venn diagram is. Right now, there's a guy calculating an equation of kick-ass right now. So this is Mike. Okay. This is Mike Pumaking. Pumaking.
Pumocking? Pumocking. Pump making? Pump making. I don't know. Okay. Mike, these people, I think they're just screwing with me. You think so? I really do. They're like, is it Chuck? We're going to just make up names. All right. Here we go. Mr. Savage, what is something that you would think will be possible to build in the future that is now considered science fiction? Ooh, very good. That's a great question. Room temperature superconduction? Yes.
Wow. Wow, you went for a big one. I did. No, I'm really excited about... Speaking of material science, I'm really excited about graphene. See, it came back. It came back to me. That's true. Material science. All right. So now... So that's your answer? That's my answer. Room temperature superconduction is going to be a... I believe it will happen in our lifetimes. I think that...
And once that happens, will we actually be able to have, you know, spaceships that stop and hover? I don't know. At least we'll be, actually, we'll probably, one of the things we'll learn a significant amount about is our brains, is the processing power of our brains. I feel like as computers become more powerful, they're going to become a real interesting window into consciousness and sentience and what it is to think about
the thinker. Nice. You know, I hadn't quite heard it put that way, but now that I have, I agree 100% because it's hard for the brain to study itself, but if we make computers that are becoming better, better approximations of our brain, now we have something we can study. Mm-hmm.
And so we would asymptotically come to an understanding of our brain simply by making our computers that much more complex. Possibly one day achieving consciousness themselves and becoming our overlords. There you go. That's how the story ends. I think if we ever made a machine conscious, the first thing it's going to say to us is, what the f*** did you do? That's so true. All right, next question. All right, cool. Good, good, good question. Cosmic Queries version.
Of StarTalk. Let's see. Now, here's somebody. He calls himself or herself the Dragon Horde of Dice. Dragon Horde of Dice. There you go. That person's mom probably did not give that person that name. No, but I think her name is Kate because it says at Kate Nader. Okay.
So there you go. Hey, for Adam, since I know you do cosplay, what is the most complex mechanical prop costume you've ever tried to build? Like a prop or costume that had no moving parts or could collapse, expand, or something that you may have tried to just recreate? Did you make Transformers proud ever? Oh, gosh, no. I have not done a Transformers costume. A few years ago, I've been obsessed with armor.
since 1981 when I went and saw Excalibur with my dad. I love Excalibur. John Borman's film is amazing. My top five favorite films. Amazing film. And then I learned disturbingly Yeah. You know the fact you're about to tell me. Go ahead.
Oh, really? No, no, no. Maybe not. I don't know the fact. Please. Excuse me. I'm having a private conversation with my man here. Okay. So Excalibur from the early 1980s, John Borman, an early film that had Patrick Stewart in it. Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson was in it. Gabriel Byrne. And so is Helen Mirren. Helen. They're all in this movie. Okay. It's the King Arthur story told. Thank you. Much later, I realized...
I think half the reason why I liked the movie was because of the soundtrack. Oh, okay. It is very powerful, Wagnerian. And that which is not Wagnerian comes from Carmina Burana. Very emotional, energetic...
that you're just feeling every scene. Then I thought to myself, maybe the movie's not so good, but the music was amazing and that completely compensated for it. I watched it recently. It's still super campy and still really impressively great. But did you watch it on mute? No.
With subtitles and mute. Try that next time. I did not apply a control, Chuck. Okay, so your answer. So I've been obsessed with armor since then. And I actually, when I was a junior in high school in 1984, I built a suit of armor out of roofing aluminum with my dad and wore it to school on Halloween and passed out of heat exhaustion in third period.
This is all just up north at Sleepy Hollow High School. Hence your Twitter handle, Don't Try This. Exactly. At home. A few years ago, I called up Terry English, who's the master armorer that built all the armor for Excalibur. He lives in the southern tip of England in Cornwall. And I went to his studio a couple summers ago and spent 10 days embedded with him as his assistant while he and I
You were an apprentice. Manufactured me a suit of King Arthur's armor from Excalibur. You were an apprentice. I was an apprentice, and he made me my lifetime goal suit of armor of Arthur's armor from Excalibur. Wow. That's pretty intense. It was so intense. It was amazing. He lives in this incredible sort of overgrown shop in Cornwall. So he is you in England. Yeah, totally. Whoa. There's only room for one per continent, I think. I don't know. Yeah.
That was by far my favorite mechanical prop construction. Okay. But it was not electronic or anything. No. It was just mechanical. Hammering aluminum all day long for days and days. Did you have chain mail and everything? Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, man. Wow. That's pretty wild, man. Hey, congratulations on that. And you still have it. Oh, yeah. I wear it every chance I get. How did you get it through TSA? I actually...
I, when I, I, whatever they were known back then. No, I made, I actually took it to New Zealand last year to make a little film with Peter Jackson about it where a demon tears my arm off. We called it a farewell to arms.
Okay, things are getting weird real quickly here. When I carried the armor with me, I was thinking, this is priceless to me. I can't really insure this. So I checked it as luggage with a GPS transceiver in my luggage so I could monitor it being loaded onto my plane. That's pretty wild. I felt if the airline was going to tell me they couldn't find it, I wanted to know that I could find it. I got to tell you something. Plane goes down, they can't find the black box, but he found the suit of armor.
We found a suit of armor. I don't know what anybody else is. I have no idea why all these people are dead, but we do have an awesome suit of armor right now.
Oh, my God. Dang, dude. Wow, man. That's pretty wild. You're far weirder than I ever extrapolated for you. But wait a minute. I sent him that a high compliment. Yes. Wait, you and Peter Jackson are making home movies? Occasionally, yeah. What's going on? And for those who didn't know, the Lord of the Rings series was mostly filmed in New Zealand. By Peter Jackson. And Peter Jackson was inspired to, one of the key inspirations for him in making Lord of the Rings was Excalibur.
So I'm not the only one who likes Ex-Caliber. It's one of my top five movies. It's a super important film. But the other four are really weird, not that. But that's in there. That's... Sweet. Okay. I can't say it's one of my favorites. Yeah, okay. I'm not cool enough. All right. I need help. Here we go. This. One other thing. Go ahead. These five movies are like the only five movies I've ever not only seen a zillion times, but sat through the director's...
Narration. Narration. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Director's commentary? Director's commentary. Because you have to like the movie so much that you'll suffer through. You don't even need to watch this next iteration of it and hear somebody just talk through it. Yep. Nice. Well, you've also seen it that many times. Well, that's part of, that's how you earn the director's cut at that point. Right, exactly. Right. All right, now I got to know what are the other four movies. Yeah, no, I do too. Really? Yeah, because if that's part of the top five, and that means there's four other movies that made it to director's cut. Okay, number one, The Matrix.
Okay, I'll give you that. Number two, All That Jazz. With Bob Fosse? Bob Fosse. It's his movie. That's a good one. Roy Scheider. Roy Scheider sort of playing Bob Fosse. Okay. Three.
The Conversation. Ah, such a good movie. Oh, man. Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola is The Conversation. Conversation. Oh, my God. Four, it's a toss-up between... Oh, wait, Conversation, that's with a man and a woman? Yes. Okay, go ahead. That movie. That movie. With a man and a woman. Okay, all right, go ahead. Conversation. And then there's probably a toss-up here, but the West Side Story.
Amazing. That's great. And then Excalibur. I think it's fifth out of those five. Look, I say there's at least nine films in my top five. Wow, you have nine films in my top five. That's good. The top five lists actually can go quantum and we can fit lots of them. You'll get another dimension on it. Yes, exactly. You've got timelines on your... So those five are so unlike each other. And what an eclectic mix you have. It's really weird, but I totally... So I used to dance.
Okay, so hence the Bob Fosse. Have you done Dancing with the Stars? No, that's so cliche. I know it is, but I suddenly want to see you on that show. When I was dancing, no one was publishing my books. I don't need to dance anymore. Okay, so...
So, what, Chuck? I'm serious. I'm dancing for nobody, okay? My people have come a long way. Copy that. Okay. Okay? All right. So, there's that. And I wrote a column for a magazine under the pen name of Merlin.
So I have extra interest in the Merlin Arthurian legends and I have the Mallory book in vellum, you know, so there's that. Matrix, of course, is the Matrix one, of course, not two or three. Matrix has to be there. There are two other movies? And the conversation was just so, so well done. Amazing. And,
And there are no explosions. There's no chase scenes. Okay. It was a story. Well done. And so there I am. Nice. Those are my five. Now, listen. So there you go, people. Now you know what you're doing. Netflix and chill with Neil's List.
That's a weird list. What a weird list to Netflix and chill, right? My side story is New York. It's the city. I'm half Puerto Rican. My mother's name is Chintita Malia Feliciano Tyson. Okay.
Okay, that's her name. West Side Story is such a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece. A masterpiece. Masterpiece. Masterpiece. And while I don't know how to compose music, if I ever could, I'm imagining that I could compose the music that we hear in West Side Story. Wow. That's where I'm thinking that's what I would reach for. That would be your North Star. That would be my North Star. I like, well, beautiful. He's beautiful. I love Adam. Yeah.
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So next question, what was that? All right. So this was Lane from Minnesota who said, as a builder, I remember failed projects more than the successes. Is it true? So tell me about...
failures relative to successes. Well, we talk about this a lot these days. Failure is a really popular word. Silicon Valley says, you know, build fast and break things. We talk about educating kids. We talk about teaching them how to fail. And I have a particular take on this because I think failure is a fine word. By the way, a version of that from the 90s or 80s, which was shocking when we first heard it, was if it ain't broke, break it. Break it. Yes. Yes.
So that way you might invent something better than the thing you had before. And just because it worked doesn't mean that's the best version of what it could be. Indeed. Or you just end up with a lot of broken shit. If you're not creative. There's always broken shit. Don't heed that advice if you're not creative. All right, so go ahead. But we don't really mean failure. Wrong turns on the path to get to a success are not failures. They're simply iterations.
And I'm here. And that's not a euphemism or anything. No, my- Smells like one. What I want to preach is that both science and art are iterative processes that include tons of wrong turns. And the wrong turns aren't outliers. They're part of that process. And we go up the path and we're like, okay, this isn't the path. So let's go back to the fork and continue down another path and see if that's the path. And so, yes, I also remember my failures more than my successes because that's where I learned.
The failures are the, the failures, the wrong turns I took to get to the right turns are the, are the places that I learned the most about myself and about how to build things and about how to recover from those moments. You know what they say about rocket launch failures? That they're not failures, they're just experiments rich in data. Yeah.
Right in the movies, there's always the guy who says, my experiment was a failure. No scientist says that. No, no, we don't actually. If he's well-designed, a negative result is actually useful information to you. Indeed. Publishable information. We don't... You have to say that when somebody else is paying for what you do.
Yeah, but all of our, I was just reading an article the other day about how journals, publishing journals, don't highlight null results. They don't value it in the publishing. They don't value it in the publishing. And we should. And we should. More.
It's a problem. That's true. I never thought of that. But yeah, there is a great deal of value. It tells you what not to do. Exactly. It tells the next person, look, this is what I did. It didn't work out. And now I don't have to waste time going down that. And the scientific inquiry that is equally as important as some brand new fact about it. Oh, no. That makes a lot of sense. Chuck has a new hero of science.
the recent months, who may have been responsible for setting us down the wrong path. Because his mantra was, failure is not an option. This was from Apollo 13. And this is Gene Kranz. And so failure is not an option. And then that became America. We're not going to fail. And then we lost track of the value of failure. We lost track. The most surprising thing I learned from doing Mythbusters for 13 years
was how surprisingly creative the scientific discipline is and how it mirrors the creative discipline. To me, conducting and building experimental methodologies is every bit as creatively satisfying as making a sculpture painting, a painting, or writing a book. I agree 100%. But I think it's better when you call it a wrong turn, the way you put it that way. Because if you think about it, just from the...
a standpoint everybody can identify. A driver's standpoint. A driver's standpoint. When you make a wrong turn, how many times have you done that and discovered something that you really liked? Oh, there's a Botanical Gardens over here. Oh, there's a, oh my God. That process is the soul of stand-up comedy. Oh, absolutely. Right? Iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. Every joke, every joke. Even, listen, it's the same process
even when the joke works. Yes. You go back and you try to crack it open and see how can I make this even better? If it works, break it. No, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Super cool. Wow, Lane, what a great question. You're a hero, Lane. That's what you are. You are. All right. This is Chris Goes to the Park. Thank you, Chris. All right. Thanks, Chris.
He says, hey, Adam, are there any inventions your team created on Mythbusters that you have kept or that you might still use today? P.S. Loved your show growing up. It inspired me to study engineering. Now I'm an engineer. Ooh. Ooh. Always amazing to hear. There's nothing that we kept from the public on Mythbusters except for one thing. Ooh.
Cary Grant and Tory were... Wait, wait, I didn't understand the question. Do you mean, is there something you made on Mythbusters that the public never saw? Or is there something you made that you took home with you? Something we came up with or that we discovered on Mythbusters that we have somehow kept from the public. That's not how I read the question. Well, no, he meant... I like that. He meant, is there anything that you invented or came up that you were like, wow, this is so good, I'm actually going to put it to use in my life? Right, that's how I read it. Yeah. Wow.
Yes. I mean, really, it was more the process of telling the stories on MythBusters. Okay, but wait. That's not as interesting a question as the one you thought it was. I know. I was going to say. All right. Let's assume it was a question you thought it was. Exactly, which is. Cary Grant and Tori were testing the explosive. Sorry, my co-hosts on MythBusters, Cary Byron, Tori Beliche, and Grant Imahara, they were testing a story that involved a commonly available hypothesis
commonly available material that is as close to a description as I'm going to get, and it's explosive properties. And what they determined with this use case scenario was so spectacularly, terrifyingly explosive that we agreed to destroy the footage of the explanation and never tell how we got to that.
And I thank you for that. Oh, yeah. No. Bomb squads the world over know what we figured out on our own. Right. And are thankful that we've decided not to put that in the episode. So, yeah. It's like... Yeah, but our engineer Ben just found it on YouTube. Right.
Did you know if you took cotton balls and chewing gum, you could actually bring down the World Trade Center? Like, what? Yeah, no, that's crazy. Yeah, so... Okay, so the answer is yes, you did find something. Yes, yes, yes. So you quarantined that information. We did. And just said to hell with it. The world doesn't need it. It will not be better for this bit of knowledge. Okay, now just between us, what was the... What was the... What were the materials? Just between you and us. Yeah, just between us. What were the materials? So...
All right. Next question. I don't want to know, to be honest, because I can't be trusted. All right. This is Ring-A-Milly, who says, how do you create new things...
that haven't before been thought of? In other words, what is your process for creative discovery? Good. Is there any process that says, you know what, boom. I don't know if it's reasonable to think about something as, I want to make something that's never been thought of. I don't think we have the choice yet.
to sequester an invention or a build or something creative into a category before it's been made. And everything we made is based on everything that we've seen. So just as, is it Newton that said we stand on the shoulders of giants? Yes.
Just as Newton says that, we all do. It's called culture. If I see farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants who have come before me. And that is one of the greatest descriptions of culture that anyone's ever penned. That's exactly what's happening. When I was, you know... Especially now. When I was 17, I saw Alien. It took me five years to get the aesthetic of H.R. Giger out of my system. I had to...
recapitulate the aesthetics that he was doing because I found it so powerful until I kind of understood it. That recapitulation. So that person is what to the movie? Yeah, H.R. Giger designed the alien monster. You said it like, well, but we all have beer with H.R. Giger. H.R. Giger is this crazy German who designed all of the creatures and alien technology from the original movie Alien, Ridley Scott's first science fiction. Of course, with Sigourney Weaver.
Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton. That's one of my top five films. An amazing film. I mean, it's a gothic horror film, not a science fiction movie. My issue with it was that the alien still had a mouth, a jaw, teeth. Yeah, but he had a mouth and a mouth. I mean, that's pretty creative. No, no, I'm just thinking most life forms on Earth do not have a mouth and teeth.
Like trees and worms and butterflies and this sort of thing. So I, if you're going to have a complete alien, you should be more creative than even that. Like the blob. 1958 Steve McQueen movie. Yes. That's, it got no bones. It's nothing. It's just a blob. It's terrifying. What was it? It was a blob. It was a blob. It was completely terrifying. And it would eat your blood, suck your blood. And do you know when the blob first landed, do you know what color it was? It was transparent.
It only turned red after it ate its first victim. Whoa. Yes. You didn't know that. I did not know that. We didn't know that. I know that. I know that. Okay. So, and it can come through the vents into the, so that's, to me, that's creativity. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I, I don't think that you can say to yourself, I want to think of something that's never been thought. I think you have to just keep on thinking, what do I, what do I want that doesn't exist? What do I want to make extant? Mm-hmm.
that I can't obtain or I can't get. Oh, so your urges are guiding your creativity. Totally. Oh, there you go. Absolutely. Actually, that's what this book is to me. It's a permission slip to everyone to follow those weird urges. I call them secret thrills. So you shouldn't title it Follow Your Weird Urges? Yeah.
Be a bestseller overnight. The publisher rejected that title. Is it too late to change that title? Because that's a damn good title. Just remove the cover. Follow your weird urges. I know what I'm signing in your book, Neil. So...
So we have to go into a lightning round now. Okay. Okay, we have a few minutes left. I need from you soundbite answers. Great. Okay, are you ready? Yep. Chuck, go. All right, here we go. This is Olivia Waits from Instagram. She wants to know, how long does it take to usually come up with a truly new idea? Ah, that is impossible to quantify. Next. There you go. Can of slickers, sis. Wait, wait, let me ask. What's the longest and shortest time it took you to come up with a new idea? Oh. Ha ha ha.
Just to get the range. It's impossible to quantify the range between one minute and 17 hours. Okay, good. There you go. I'll accept it. Pull that one out of his ass. Sorry, we were looking for two days. Wrong answer. All right, go. Here we go. Uh,
Canassa liquor. That doesn't even sound... I think somebody made... Never mind. What is your most unique out-of-left-field inspiration that has ever happened to you or even surprised you? That is weird. Where did you find inspiration in a place that you never thought you would? Good. Oh, wow. I'm going to need time to think about that one. I don't have a soundbite answer for that one. You have until the end of the show. Okay, next question. Okay, here we go. Julie... Wait, wait, let me reword that question. Maybe it's the same question.
Among all your sources of inspiration, what has been the most fertile? Reading, actually always reading about the first experiment of something that was discovered. Reading Fizeau's speed of light experiment is so thrilling. Okay, good, good. Wow, what a great answer. Even better question. Sorry. Fizeau is in Doppler Fizeau. It's a, and late,
19th century, early. He calculated the speed of light with the clockwork and mirrors. Okay. There we go. Next. There we go. This is Juliak from NB says, or Frommed says, if you had unlimited resources and time, what would you build? Oh, I'd build a spaceship and I'd go to the moon and then I'd go to Mars.
There you go. With unlimited resources and material? Yeah, totally. I would start some interplanetary exploration. Beautiful. Love it. All right. In this office, I love that answer. All right. Last question? No, no. That's it? I don't think we have time. There we go. Just for final reflections. Chuck, give me your final reflection. I am going to now pursue my weird urges. Weird urges. And I am really happy that I have- Go for it. I'm happy I have permission to do so. Okay. Adam, you got this book.
Presumably, there's still stuff in you that's not in this book. Otherwise, buy the book and then we don't have to ever watch you again. That's true. Oh, yeah. I held some stuff. Tell me something that's not in the book that we should carry with us. Oh, wow. That all human beings really want to do is tell each other stories. And that's both science and art. It's how we understand the universe. Even if the story you're telling is how to build something. Indeed. Oh, I like it. Very nice. So what I'd like to think, if I can add to an earlier question...
about creativity, to have a thought, to see what everyone else has seen and think what no one else has thought, that's a commonly invoked definition of genius. But maybe it's not genius that we're honoring there. Maybe it's hard work.
where you have a lot of dangling thoughts within you because you've read a lot of books, you've seen a lot of movies, you've spoken to a lot of people, you've done a lot of tinkering. And they're sitting there waiting in your head, and then you walk amid all of these dangling parts. And you say, "Give me two bits of that, one part of that, one part of this," 'cause they're available to you to draw from. And out of that comes a brand-new idea, a brand-new object, a brand-new concept.
So I think the people who are cited as the great inventors and geniuses of the world are simply those who have more bits and pieces in their lives waiting to be assembled into something new. I totally agree. Very nice. It's beautiful that you agree with that. Because I pull that from the cosmic perspective.
Adam, thanks for being on StarTalk. Chuck, as always, you're my man, dude. Pleasure, gentlemen. You've been listening to, possibly even watching, this episode of StarTalk featuring Adam Savage, formerly of Mythbusters, and now he's just making stuff and he's got a science channel program that I can't wait to catch. Give me the name of it again. Savage Builds. Savage Builds. Nice. Sounds angry. May 12th. June 12th. June 12th. There we go. Okay.
Summer 2019 on the Science Channel. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you keep pulling up to Mickey D's just for drinks. Oh, yeah, that's me. Nothing extra, just perfection and a straw. Coming in hot for the coldest cups on the block.
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