How--and why--one of TV's most charismatic geeks has used Macs for years, can't live without his iPhone, and has never regretted it.

 

Case Study: Adam Savage

Occupation: Cohost of the Discovery Channel's MythBusters

Gear: 17-inch MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB RAM, OS X's Stickies app for capturing creative ideas and notes, Adobe Bridge for managing thousands of image files

 

It’s funny and a little embarrassing how easily we’re influenced by advertising and stereotypes.

When Adam Savage, cohost with fellow special effects veteran Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters, the Discovery Channel’s geek cult hit, tells us why he’s been an unapologetic Mac user for over 15 years, his explanation defies our expectations. We’re sheepish to admit that we’ve got Apple’s "Get a Mac" ad characters burned into our psyche.

So for someone like Savage (who started his career as a model maker and special effects tech, working over the years for a variety of big-name outfits, including George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic) to say that he prefers the simple elegance of the Mac and its OS to flexing his engineering muscles building any kind of computer he could possibly want from the ground up (i.e., a PC), we have to admit, we’re a tad surprised.

After all, PC geeks are quick to trot out the argument that “you can build a PC from scratch and customize it ad infinitum” to support their affinity for the platform. Savage, on the other hand, favors a more pragmatic, surprisingly nontechie explanation. He doesn’t even mention OS X’s Unix underpinnings.

“It comes down to totally agreeing with Steve Jobs’s core philosophy, with his central tenet that successful interactions with objects that you use should get simpler, not more complex--that you don’t need to be watching the car’s engine running in order to drive it, that the experience should be intuitive,” Savage says. “Whatever you’re comfortable with is the thing you should use,” he adds diplomatically. “I’ve consistently found that the Macintosh works the way I think it ought to work.”

Once you've swam in syrup, broken the sound barrier, and fondled tarantulas, donning a giant space helmet and goofing for the camera is cake. Follow Savage on Twitter at twitter.com/donttrythis.

Having used a Mac laptop since 1993, when he bought a PowerBook 170 with proceeds from the sale of a sculpture, Savage has seen the Mac OS through many iterations. “Hook, line, and sinker, I love Jobs’s core philosophy of everything.”

Well, maybe not everything--particularly when Apple tinkered with iMovie by radically redesigning it with the iLife ’08 update.

Savage has no beef with the reasons Apple undertook iMovie’s makeover. “The problem is they removed functionality that I need.” He says features like splitting audio tracks and manually editing transitions are key to how he’s become accustomed to editing video on his 17-inch MacBook Pro. In April 2002, after Hyneman contacted him to gauge his interest in the venture, Savage used iMovie to make the demo reel of MythBusters on a Pismo-based PowerBook, the last G3-based PowerBook Apple made.

Busted--Usually.

MythBusters, if you’re among the few we’ve asked who haven’t heard of it, is a show for people who like to see how things work firsthand, primarily so they can win arguments based on demonstrated scientific fact, rather than reliance on conventional wisdom.

The show’s core aim is to shatter such myths as whether a person can swim as fast in syrup as in water, or if the only way to clean out the barrel of a cement truck is with dynamite. But myth busters Savage, Hyneman, Tory Belleci, Kari Byron, and Grant Imahara are often just as happy to confirm a myth’s veracity. The point is to investigate and to devise experiments--many of which involve blowing things up, putting hand-built robots or Buster the crash-test dummy in harm’s way, and doing other things geeks the world over dream idly of making a living at. This is all in the name of busting, confirming, or proving a myth to be plausible.

Savage Apple Technolust.

Savage’s MacBook Pro, which he plans to upgrade as soon as possible to a unibody model, goes with him everywhere and serves as a repository for show ideas, creative project ideas, and a library of video presentations he and Hyneman show at frequent university and corporate speaking engagements. Ditto his iPhone, which helps him stay a hero among the good-food-loving MythBusters crew when they travel around the country for shoots.

The GPS chip in his iPhone 3G (which he recently upgraded to a 3GS after an unfortunate show-related mishap left his 3G’s screen shattered) combined with the Yelp app, makes short work of scoring decent eats in Middle of Nowhere, USA. As tech tools go, Savage’s iPhone is “completely indispensable.” He’s even “gotten several notes from the producers saying, ‘Please stop using it on camera.’” When we first interviewed him for this story, the iPhone 3.0 OS update wasn’t out yet, but Savage was looking forward to the cut, copy, and paste feature.


Just another Bay Area hipster in ripped jeans working on his Mac—from the comfort of an ejection seat.

"I have nothing to say to my friends with BlackBerries, who say, ‘Where the f** is copy and paste on the iPhone?’” he says. "I have been so well served by Steve Jobs’s unwillingness to add dumb features--that it’s so elegant and simple. It’s OK for me to wait two years for copy and paste. The iPhone is a beautiful, beautiful machine."

Savage’s appreciation of the iPhone isn’t surprising, but we were intrigued by his go-to Mac apps, which are…wait for it…Stickies (yes, Stickies) and Adobe Bridge, the media manager built into Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Savage uses Stickies to keep track of lots of things, not least of which are future show ideas--"It’s the longest Stickie I’ve ever had. It’s constantly being updated and it’s always open."

Bridge, which Savage calls "crazy useful," helps him manage the tens of thousands of images on his Mac, both those he’s acquired from other sources to squirrel away for later reference and those he’s shot with his Canon 5D Mark II. He’s up to Adobe CS4 and wouldn’t give up Bridge without a serious fight. "I hated the first version of it, because it was choking up blood on my computer. With 40,000 photos, start asking something to look at them all, it starts dying. The functionality has improved so much since then."

NEXT: Q & A with Adam and a behind the scenes photo gallery

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Table-Saw Terror, Lightsabers, and Father-Son Dynamics.

Enough with the obligatory deets about how Savage uses his Mac. We can hear what you’re thinking, and it’s probably not, "What’s in Adam Savage’s Dock?"

Here’s what Savage said when we asked him a few of our burning questions as fans of the show who’d be stoked to have him and his wife, Julia Ward, adopt us should they ever want more than two kids:

 

Q: How many times have you feared for your life in the course of filming an episode of MythBusters?

A: That’s only happened in seven years maybe three times, where we were really kind of freaked out by something that happened. We’re actually pretty good at foreseeing worst-case scenarios and accommodating them.

By the same token, every time I use a table saw, I’m scared because I know how much power it has, and I maintain a healthy terror of it. That’s the relationship I have with the show--it’s like one ten-hour-a-day table saw.

Q: How long did it take to clean up the cement-truck remains, when you obliterated it with explosives for that episode (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynZxVErTovg)?

A: Pieces of that truck flew well over a mile, but since we were working in a quarry where they had all the equipment needed to manage that, it was not a huge deal. That is one of the things we often have to worry about--where things will fly and how far.


It took Savage several days of hand-rolling to shape a chunk of ostrich scat into this perfect-looking, shiny orb.

Q: How many lightsabers do you own, and which is your favorite?

A: Seventeen. My favorite is the Star Wars: Episode 1 Obi-Wan saber.

Q: Do your 10-year-old twin boys ever invite you to be the celebrity guest at their birthday parties?

A: God, no. They’ve told me that if they step out of line or get angry at someone at school, the reply is, "Just because your dad is on MythBusters, doesn’t mean you get to do X." I said, "Tell them they’re absolutely right! You can even say, ‘I’m not yelling at you because my dad’s on MythBusters, I’m yelling at you because you’re an a**hole….’"

 

Q: Why do you like Twitter and what do you get out of using it as an avid poster and Twitter user?

A: I love Twitter. Twitter feels to me like one of those harbingers of the way things will change in terms of how we perceive media, because Twitter is a little like Facebook, a little like RSS. For me, as a celebrity who has a very different--very nonstandard--interface, for me it’s like a never-ending comment section without any of the negative comments. Why would I not read negative comments? I’ve actually had some nasty things said about me, which has really kind of changed the way I think about doing things on the show and I don’t like it. It’s not that I’m not open to criticism, I absolutely am happy to take constructive criticism, but when I have a story that appears on Slashdot or Reddit, I don’t read the comment sections because they have affected me too much in the past, and I don't like it. Something very interesting is going on socially on Twitter. Even though you’re talking to a bunch of people, it is a conversation and it’s happening right now. There’s a level of politeness that I haven’t seen in any other interface on the Web yet.

My wife uses Twitter totally differently than I do. She’s following Ana Marie Cox, Ari Melber, all these people sitting in the White House press briefing rooms twittering about politics by the minute, so she's got this hard-line feed to exactly what’s going on in the type of news she wants to see. It’s the ultimate poll medium for her in terms of seeing news. It's totally different from the way I use it, and I love the fact that we’re both doing it all the time in two totally different ways. It tells me something really interesting is going on. I love the idea of having a verified Twitter account--I’ll pay for that the moment they offer it. I’ve been burned by a couple of fake celebrities who I admire, contacting me

I know that people are quite pleased that I talk back and forth with the fans a lot. I really enjoy that. I get three or four hundred @replies a day. I’m probably only able to read about half of them, and I answer the ones that I’m interested in.

 

Q: have you been surprised by celebrities who are fans of the show?

A: We have fans all over the place. At the last [2008] Comic-Con, I got to meet a lot of people who watch the show. Simon Pegg [who did the voice of Buck in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs] watches the Christmas marathon every year with his family. Sarah Silverman told a MythBusters joke. Jamie Lee Curtis went on Oprah last year, and said MythBusters was her favorite show on TV. She’s a wonderful fan. We’ve talked back and forth. She’s fantastic and also crazy smart. I've heard Jason Lee loves the show. The Strokes--Fabrizio Morretti, the drummer, is obsessed with the show. I met Woz at an event a couple years ago. When I met him, I found out he’d been in the audience when Jamie [Heyneman] and I spoke in Cupertino and I didn't even know it.

People like Nicholas Negroponte, Penn and Teller, James Randi (I go to the Amazing Meeting every year in Vegas)....

 

Q: From the way you answered earlier when I asked you about fearing for your life while taping the show, it sounds like you really try to do a lot of the legwork ahead of time so that there really aren’t any surprises before you actually start taping an episode. Is that the case?

A: In terms of the dangerous stuff we tend to know how bad things might get, but in terms of the results of the experiments, we are surprised constantly by what we get, absolutely, every bit that we look like we're not sure what’s going on in the show--that's entirely genuine.

 Q: How many takes did it take before the Rube-Goldberg machine actually worked for the 2006 holiday special?

A: Seven. Unbelievably, it worked entirely all the way through on the seventh take, which none of us foresaw. We were actually planning to spend a whole other day doing it, and when we nailed it, it was like, that’s it, we’re done.

 

Q: Where do show ideas come from?

A: There’s a bit of push and pull for that. There are certain concepts Jamie and I have a particular penchant for, we’ll both find something and shoehorn them together. Today we’re starting on a myth I got through Twitter, about the fuel efficiency of dirty versus clean cars. It’s going to be a mighty fine episode. We still have a huge amount of interaction with the fans. We still take stuff from the fans very frequently, but we’re also ahead of ourselves. We’ve got about 100 good stories in the roster--at least two seasons' worth.

 

Q: So how do you guys get insurance?

A: We actually have a terrific company, and we work with two people directly, Nick and Angie. He’s a former stunt man, she’s in film production. What they do is they are actually our safety company. We talk to them about what we’re going to do, they make their recommendations, if there are things that we want to do that seem dangerous, we talk it back and forth with them until we come up with a plan that we feel is 100 percent safe. Then they take that information and explain it to the insurance companies.

And because they have done this for Jackass and Fear Factor, they have a lot of experience explaining nonstandard, strange things to insurance companies. As the experiments get bigger, we actually get more experience as we go. Jamie and I have now had half a dozen, extreme driving training sessions with various special effects guys, driving exploits, cops, stuff like that. We actually get more latitude to do stuff as we go because our expertise increases, and that’s specifically because of [Nick and Angie’s involvement] and [the fact that they make sure] we’re doing things safely.

 

Q: How does one get into doing special effects in the first place? Any advice for aspiring special effects techs?

A: There's been a sea change in the past 10 to 15 years, moving from practical model making to computers. I got into special effects at really the tail end of a very specific era, to work on models for Star Wars and AI and stuff like that, and a lot of my friends who I used to work with in the practical model making department have since gone on to work in the CG department at ILM and other places. What I’ve noticed actually is quite interesting, it’s that the same qualities that make someone good at model making make them good at CG. The film industry is rife with people who do one thing really, really well, but the people who really excel in special effects are the ones who do a whole host of things really, really well. There are a lot of people who think that the business is really creative, and that’s why they want to get into it.

Quite honestly, if you want to impress someone in an interview in special effects and you want to show them something you built, it doesn’t do me any good if I’m looking at your portfolio to show me artwork that you’ve made because it doesn’t tell me anything about what you can do for hire. But if you can build a perfect Chevy Nova on a computer, it tells me everything young need to know about your skills. There's an industry joke that says you don’t need to bring anything [to an interview] except a perfect shiny black box, because if you could build a perfect shiny black cube, I’d hire you in an instant, because it’s actually really hard to do.

So my advice to get into special effects is to become as knowledgeable about everything around what you’re working on. The people who are good at building models are also thinking about how those models will get painted, about the ways in which the facets they’re putting on the model will help the painter add detail, help the electronics people add light... It applies the same to CG, too. The more you know about everything that’s going on, the better the piece of it that you’re making will actually be.

 

Q: You mentioned agreeing with Steve Jobs’ product design philosophy...Ever had any direct contact with Steve?

A: I don’t know if you saw the thing that Jamie and I did last year for Nvidia where we demonstrated the difference between a CPU and a GPU with a paintball gun. It was a really fun gig--we’re going to be on the Guinness Book of World Records next year for the world’ largest paintball gun.

I had heard from somebody at Nvidia that they ran into Steve Jobs at an event and he told them he really liked that machine. I was very, very proud of the idea, that it was something we’d designed and built--and that he appreciated it.

Mac devotion. Lightsaber obsession. Dead-on appropriate use of the word "a**hole" in conversation with 10-year-olds. Three reasons--aside from his penchant for dropping Mentos into 3-liter bottles of soda--that we’ve started secretly referring to Savage as "our new adoptive dad who doesn’t know it yet."

For the MythBusters schedule, video clips, and more, see discovery.com/mythbusters (and follow Discovery on Twitter at twitter.com/discovery).