The Untold Truth Of Adam Savage

Adam Savage spent 13 years blowing things up, mistreating a crash test dummy called "Buster," and pouring cold water all over the party of every person who ever believed in a rumor, an urban legend, or a James Bond getaway. Indeed, as co-host of the long-running Discovery series "MythBusters," Savage had the world's coolest job, and he's left behind a legacy of broken myths and destroyed props, as well as a devoted fan base.

But there's far more to the story behind Adam Savage than just the sum of all the debris that some poor underpaid stage hand had to sweep up at the end of every show. A self-professed skeptic, Savage didn't just walk into the casting for "Mythbusters": From riveting suits of armor as a child to camoes on famous franchises and making models for actual "Star Wars" movies, Savage has lived the dream of anyone with a penchant for tinkering and entertaining. 

"Sesame Street" played a big role in Adam Savage's life, and not in the same way it did for most kids who grew up in the '70s. While Savage has natural talent, having proven in spades that he's artistic, creative, and clever, it's probably not a stretch to say that some of that came from his dad. Whitney Lee Savage was an animator on "Sesame Street," and also did work for another popular children's television show called "The Electric Company." Writing for AV Club, Savage said his dad spent two or three months a year drawing and animating 30-second animated spots for "Sesame Street," and then "he'd do what he considered his real work: paint for the rest of the year."

His dad's involvement with the show eventually led to Savage's first acting job — he did the voice-work for a series of "Sesame Street" spots that taught kids how common household objects worked. Savage also got a lot of inspiration from his dad's work, experimenting with claymation and animation, and even doing a spot for Swatch in 1988. "Those simple animations are what I thought of as 'Dad's work' growing up," he wrote. "To me, they represent a creative brain allowed to run free. What more can one ask?"

Ask any American kid about career ambitions and you might get answers in the range of 50 percent video game designer and 50 percent YouTuber. The kid version of Adam Savage once had career ambitions along those lines, as in he just wanted to get paid to play with toys all the time. He told The Sneeze that before he ever wanted to work in special effects or blow things up for a living, he wanted to be a Lego designer. "Hands down, the best toy ever has to go Lego," he said. "I mean, Lego fueled my desire to build things from age 5 to ... age 17, I think."

Savage didn't become a Lego designer, but that desire to build undoubtedly led him to his career in special effects, and later to his career in explosions and disagreeing with Jamie Hyneman all the time. Incidentally, Savage also said he won't buy video games for his own kids because "I don't want to listen to that," so there probably won't be any game designers coming out of the Savage household. As for YouTubing, well, Savage does have his own channel, though it teaches viewers to build and create stuff.

Just about everyone who lived in the United States during the '80s remembers big hair, boom boxes, and Mr. Whipple. While today's Charmin commercials inexplicably feature cartoon bears alluding to their number two bathroom activities, yesterday's Charmin commercials featured an old grocer named "Mr. Whipple," who got really bent out of shape when customers dared to "squeeze the Charmin."

By the time Adam Savage was a teenager, he'd decided that maybe acting was his thing. And because people who are new to acting don't turn down roles, no matter how silly they are, his legacy includes a brief stint in one of the Mr. Whipple commercials, where he plays an apron-clad stock boy named Jimmy. "Mr Whipple! The roof is leaking all over the new Charmin!" he cries as the store's ceiling suddenly pours all over the toilet paper display. And because that's not '80s-nostalgic enough, he also appeared in the 1985 Billy Joel music video "You're only Human (Second Wind)," in which he played a kid who is rescued from drowning, all overseen by a singing, fishing Billy Joel looking cool while sitting on a lifeguard tower in a black overcoat.

What's the world's coolest job, besides blowing stuff up for the Discovery Channel? How about designing models for science fiction movies? It might seem like a pipedream that anyone could possibly hold each of those positions in a single career, but Adam Savage is no ordinary person. Not only did he spend 13 years on "MythBusters," he had previously worked for Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as a model designer.

For Savage, watching "Star Wars" was a life-changing experience. His dad thought the iconic movie was "a piece of crap," but Savage was undeterred by his dad's lack of enthusiasm. Savage grew up reading Star Wars and special effects magazines, so by the time he landed a job at ILM he not only understood the Star Wars universe, he also knew how to create it. "I had a reputation at Industrial Light & Magic for being quite fast and that afforded me some really cool jobs," he said to StarWars.com. After three years at ILM, though, Savage says he started to become restless, and that's when he got the opportunity to work on "MythBusters," the other most awesome job of all time.

Going by the on-screen strained relationship between Adam Savage and co-host Jamie Hyneman, you might assume that the two seemingly incompatible personalities ended up hosting "MythBusters" together through some casting accident, but the truth is actually stranger than that. Savage and Hyneman knew each other before "MythBusters," having worked together in the 1990s at Colossal Pictures, a special effects house in San Francisco.

"Jamie actually gave me my first job in the film industry," Savage told The Sneeze. The pair collaborated for three years, making models for commercials, and they also built the semi-legendary Battlebot robot Blendo. In fact it was Hyneman who first called Savage about doing "MythBusters" — Hyneman had been approached by the show's creator, but didn't think he was "interesting enough" to carry the whole show on his own. So he called Savage, and thus began one of the most brilliantly antagonistic co-host relationships in the history of television.

After 13 years of myth-busting, it might appear that Savage and Hyneman actively dislike each other, but that's not entirely accurate. "It is true that we're not friends," Savage told Entertainment Weekly, but he also says the two have "a deep amount of respect" for each other. "We disagree about the small details every single day ... but we don't really disagree about the big stuff."

Pretty much everyone has a weakness, whether it be an unhealthy vice, a dislike of certain things, or even a chronic fear, otherwise known as a phobia. If you watched the self-hypnosis episode of "MythBusters," you know what Adam Savage's is: Apiphobia, which is the fear of bees.

Savage's fear of bees is serious enough that he volunteered to spend a week listening to a self-hypnosis CD, which was supposed to help him relax when confronted with his greatest fear, thereby curing him of his apiphobia forever. Did it work? Savage's stress level and heart rate in the presence of bees rose considerably, even after the week of self-hypnosis, so no. The good news is that if you're ever tempted to drop 17 bucks on a CD that will make a walk in the park or lounging by a public pool more bearable, you can save your money because that myth has been busted.

Adam Savage told Entertainment Weekly that the only myth he regrets busting is the one where razor blades are supposed to stay sharp if kept under a pyramid. "That falls into the realm of 'magic,' he said. "That's not 'MythBusters.'" That statement says a lot about Savage: he's a self-proclaimed skeptic, which means he believes in science and rejects superstition.

Now, good science is obviously the standard we should be using to make rational decisions about a lot of things, and we all want to live in a world where everyone understands climate science and vaccinates their kids, but telling ghost stories is still fun. Savage has often spoken at The Amaz!ng Meeting, which is an annual gathering of like-minded science folks who confront anti-science on a wide range of important topics like climate and genetic engineering. Savage is respected in the skeptic community, and he even won the Humanist of the Year award for 2017.

Even Adam Savage's most devoted fans aren't necessarily aware that he suffers from hearing loss. Given the nature of his job, it's tempting to conclude that the hearing loss must have happened when something blew up on the set of "MythBusters," or more likely, when lots of things blew up on the set of "MythBusters." But Savage's hearing loss is actually congenital — his ears have structural problems that leave him at risk for infections, which can potentially lead to larger problems like meningitis and partial facial paralysis.

In an interview with Still Untitled, Savage said he's undergone a series of operations meant to correct the structural problems in his ears, but his hearing loss is still severe enough that he has to wear hearing aids. "When I don't have my hearing aids in, I start to get panicked because I can't hear anything and the world gets very small very quickly," he said. However, Savage is open about his hearing loss and is a champion for the use of hearing aids. "Hearing aids changed my life," he said, "They saved my marriage."

You can't call yourself a bona-fide geek until you've gone to Comic-Con, and many do so in awesome cosplay. Adam Savage is not only a regular attendee of Comic-Con, he also goes there incognito in an elaborate, full-body costume that he either builds himself or commissions. Savage's costumes have run the gamut from Chewbacca to Hellboy to Totoro. In 2017, he attended Comic-Con as King Arthur in a 20-pound suit of armor made by Terry English, who also created the costumes for the 1981 film "Excalibur."

Funny thing, though, you can't really be incognito if everyone knows you're always incognito, and Comic-Con fans in the know have made a game of trying to spot Savage at the annual event. So the next time you're at Comic-Con, just look for the guy in the 100 percent self-contained suit who looks really hot and uncomfortable, and then ask for a selfie. He may not reveal his identity to you, but you can be pretty sure he'll eventually reveal the secret on social media.

There are some real job perks to being the star of a long-running television program in which you get to build super-cool things and then blow them up. One of those perks is the paycheck, and another is the opportunity to indulge in fanboy dreams. While Adam Savage debunked plenty of movie moments in "Mythbusters," he also got the opportunity to cameo in a movie, and in one of the most famous sci-fi franchises of all time: Bladerunner.

In 2017, Adam Savage got to appear (above) in "2048: Nowhere to Run," a film short promoting "Blade Runner 2049." Filmed in a disused Hungarian granite quarry, the story takes place in a crowded, underground marketplace and follows the shady activities of replicant Sapper Morton, played by Dave Bautista. Savage plays a "blood bag merchant" and can be seen over the shoulder of Bautista for roughly 16 seconds. It's not exactly the role of a lifetime, but the awesomeness points are pretty off the charts.

Adam Savage's career has run the gamut from building things to blowing things up, and often combined these by building things and then blowing them up, but his love of building things kind of also qualifies as a bit of an obsession. Back in 2010, for example, the Savages were house shopping when they discovered a four-bedroom Edwardian home in San Francisco's Mission District. Most house shoppers get a tour, talk to the realtor, snap a few photos, then go home and mull it over, but not Savage. He went straight to his workshop with the blueprints and some foam core and built a scale model of the house. 

"I built it so we could obsess over it," he told The Wall Street Journal. The model even included tiny versions of the Savages themselves, perhaps to visualize conversations about square footage, original fixtures, and the need for new wallpaper as they moved from one room to another.

During the 13 years that "MythBusters" was on the air, Adam Savage and his co-hosts used scientific principles to ask questions, test hypotheses, and arrive at conclusions. And yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic was raging across the globe in 2020, some fans were shocked when Savage firmly established himself as a pro-masker.

During the pandemic, Savage wasn't shy about voicing his support for mask-wearing, even though that alone was enough to alienate some of his fans, who for some reason were surprised to discover that he believes in science. In May of 2020, he posted on X (then known as Twitter): "Just piping in here to let you know that if you think that wearing a ppe mask=weakness, i have some colorful things to say about your intelligence. I'm astounded that wearing a mask is AT ALL CONTROVERSIAL, and yet here we are. WEAR A MASK!!"

Unsurprisingly, the post upset a couple of people, one of whom suggested that Savage needed to research the subject and threatened to delete all the "MythBusters" episodes from his DVR. To which Savage responded: "Delete away ... Oh! And we did a whole episode on how a cold spreads. Guess you'll never watch it now."

As kids, most of us got our Halloween and party costumes from stores, because the alternative was cobbling something together at home, and those store-bought costumes could be pretty lame. Adam Savage, though, was a lucky guy. 

Savage's dad was almost abnormally supportive of both his son's goal to have the coolest costume in class and his goal to have his costume be ridiculously detailed. When he was in high school, the pair built a suit of armor out of roofing aluminum. It even had rivets — 700 of them. Savage wore the armor to school, but it was so hot inside the suit that he passed out in class and had to be hauled unconscious to the nurse's office. Interviewed on The Jordan Harbinger Show, Savage revealed how upset he was when his costume was lost to an overzealous teacher, saying "... the principal of the high school went into the art room [and] threw out everything that was stored there, and so I lost that suit of armor to that summer cleaning."

For a long time now, every kid in America has been primed to believe that college is practically a requirement for opening the door to a well-paid and fulfilling career. In stark contrast to that idea stands Adam Savage, who is clearly a very clever guy with a career that most people can only dream of, and yet does not have a college degree. All he has is a high school diploma, and the sum total of formal education he got afterward includes a couple of classes and some on-the-job training.

However, while Savage has criticized the crippling cost of a college education, he acknowledges that it can be useful. But Savage tells fans that you should embark on your college journey with a clear purpose, not just because frat parties seem like they would be fun and your dad thinks you should. As Savage told CNBC, "I'm a big believer in knowing why you're going to college. I don't think 'because everyone else is going' is a good enough reason."

Adam Savage never earned a college degree, but fame can be a handy shortcut to adding a few more letters to your name. For example, Meryl Streep has at least 10 honorary doctorates, awarded by world-class institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Savage's honorary degree isn't from an Ivy League university, though. Instead, the university that honored Savage with a doctorate was the University of Twente, which you may not have heard of simply because it's in the Netherlands. 

Savage and "Mythbusters" co-host Jamie Hyneman both received honorary doctorates in 2011, mostly for all their hard work making science and technology appealing to the masses. The pair was even double-honored with a ceremony that included a royal guest of honor: Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Savage recalled the event fondly, posting on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the university "couldn't have been more gracious hosts."

Adam Savage may have earned himself a solid reputation in popular science, but his maternal grandfather, Cushman Haagensen, was a genuine medical pioneer. Savage talked about his grandfather during a tour of his home office for his YouTube channel "Adam Savage's Tested," as he was showing off a Japanese medical doll he'd inherited after his grandfather's death. Haagensen was a surgeon who was also an advocate of radical mastectomy as the best way to guarantee survival for breast cancer patients. The radical mastectomy is a procedure that involves removing the entire breast, plus lymph nodes, and some of the muscles in the chest wall (hence the name "radical").

Radical mastectomies are rarely used today unless the tumor is actually infiltrating those muscle tissues, but Haagensen's ideas were important in shaping the conversation about breast cancer and how quality of life should be weighed against risk. Three editions of Haagensen's study "Diseases of the Breast" were published between 1956 and 1984, so his legacy is far more important than just "grandson is a MythBuster."

Blowing things up for a living comes with a number of occupational hazards, including lacerations and broken bones, and "Mythbusters" has seen more than its fair share of accidents and injuries. Before Adam Savage was a MythBuster, though, he was already engaging in dangerous activities, including trespassing and ignoring the "no swimming" signs. In a 2021 YouTube video, Savage talked about how he gave himself a broken neck for his 18th birthday. 

Savage and a friend hopped a couple of fences so they could go for a swim in the Hudson River, which by the way isn't like one of those crystal clear bodies of water you've seen in tropical vacation videos. It's the Hudson River, after all, and you can't really see past the first couple of water molecules floating around on the surface. Savage dove in, hit a rock, and broke his neck.

Weirdly, he was lucid through the whole incident and at first thought he'd merely banged his head, but after a minute or two, it became apparent that something was wrong with his neck. Worse still, he had to jump a couple of fences to get back home. Savage says the injury turned out to be a large chip in his seventh vertebrae, and because he'd hit the rock straight on he'd merely compressed his spine instead of snapping it in two. "I'm a cautionary tale," he told viewers. "Be careful around the water, kids. Be careful."

By now, pretty much everyone has seen the video of Boston Dynamics' robot dog, which looks almost cuddly, in a terrifying alien robot sort of way. So, who might be best suited to turning what some might consider to be a robot monster with obviously evil intentions into something lovable? Adam Savage, of course, who was handed one by Boston Dynamics.

The plan was for Savage to develop custom hardware and software for the "mini" version of the robot, which weighs around 55 pounds and can run for up to 90 minutes on one charge. In one Tested video, Savage even addressed the "that robot is super creepy" problem by adding a cardboard head, rabbit ears, and a giraffe neck. At one point he even gave it some feathers and had it prance around to some circus music, which (shockingly) didn't actually make it seem any cuter. On the other hand, Savage's enthusiasm for the weird thing almost — almost — lifted the sinister veil.

Adam Savage's mom was a psychotherapist, and he married a marriage and family therapist. If you had to guess why, it's probably safe to say that Savage is either a really well-rounded, happy person or he's just very, very good at pretending to be a really well-rounded, happy person, so either way, having all those therapists in his life probably hasn't hurt.

Either way, Savage has nothing but great things to say about the mental health profession as a whole and is clearly interested in normalizing therapy and the importance of seeking help when you need it. In 2019, he posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) a message in honor of World Mental Health Day, stating: "I'm here to tell you that help abounds if you reach out ... I've been in therapy on an [sic] off my whole life and have received so much from mental health professionals." 

Adam Savage keeps his personal life personal, so other than the very rare family photo he tweets to followers and a few references to parenthood that pop up in his Tested videos, fans don't get to hear much about his family life. It's common knowledge that he's married now and was previously married at least once before — in fact, he has twin sons from that first relationship. Savage has never said anything about his ex-wife, so there isn't even a name, let alone a divorce story, for the tabloids to share with the world.

In 2013, Savage told Life of Dad that his twins were 14, and called parenting them "an unfathomable and incomparable journey." He also said he didn't really care if they followed in his engineering footsteps, as long as they knew how to use all his tools before moving out on their own. "I just want them to get obsessed. I want them to feed on whatever obsession that they have and let them run as far as they can with it."

Around the internet, there are plenty of photos of Savage posing with kids, but seemingly none of his own children, nor any easy-to-find mention of their names or what they do for a living, since they are now adults. This means that as public a life as Savage leads, he's been very careful to keep his kids' private lives out of the public eye.

Fans have a lot of questions for Adam Savage, and one is whether or not there was some overarching point to it all, besides just having fun and teaching viewers how colds spread. In a recent Tested video, Savage answered the question in a pretty unexpected way. As it turns out, the biggest thing he learned wasn't how to fire a cannon without putting a hole in some random person's house or how to safely get out of the car you just drove into a swimming pool. Nope. "My job is to paint myself into a corner," he said, "and then film myself getting out."

After Savage answered this question, he appeared to think about it for a moment, and he then acknowledged that this hard-earned skill will likely be a part of the fabric of his existence forever and probably doesn't apply to anything but television.

Adam Savage's father, Whitney Lee Savage, was an animator and fine artist whose works have been displayed in the Smithsonian. Despite the presence of art in his household, the younger Savage never considered himself a true artist. In 1985, he enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and developed a habit of wandering the streets to salvage items that could be used in projects. 

Armed with baling wire and a bucket full of springs and parts taken from discarded cash registers and typewriters, Savage built a mechanical hand sculpture and put it on his dorm room desk. "It wasn't like I was thinking I was making art with a capital "A" by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly I was exploring a muse," he said on "Adam Savage's Tested."

His resident advisor saw it on display on his desk and told him it was real art. Only then did it register for Savage that he was, or could be, a creative person. "It gave me a glimpse of the person, artist, designer, storyteller that I would become and gave me some context for the young person that I was, and for that I'm super grateful, he said." Not only did that episode indirectly inform projects like "MythBusters," but he kept making sculptures. Savage has presented his works in more than 40 art shows, primarily in New York, San Francisco, and his father's hometown of Charleston, West Virginia.

To some, "MythBusters" may have only looked like a show about a couple of bearded men blowing up stuff in the desert. It was that, but it was also very educational, instructing viewers on how things work and the finer points of scientific phenomena, as well as training them to be critical thinkers. The underlying philosophy of "MythBusters" was about fostering a healthy skepticism and asking questions. "We realized that the strongest episodes were the ones driven by the narrative of our curiosity," co-host Adam Savage told NPR's "The TED Radio Hour." "That is the nature of science."

For perpetuating all that progressive and constructive thought through entertaining television, Savage has been recognized and awarded by various serious and scientific organizations. In 2010, Harvard University bestowed its Harvard Humanism Award on Savage and his "MythBusters" co-host Jamie Hyneman. A cover subject of "Skeptic" magazine, New Jersey's Rowan University awarded Savage an honorary degree; a Doctor of Science. He was also made a member for life of the National Science Teachers Association.

Co-host Adam Savage often stared down danger and catastrophe while conducting even the most over-the-top, risky experiments during the production of "MythBusters." It seemed like he was up for anything, such was his thirst for knowledge and infallible scientific truth on behalf of his audience. And he usually was, but even Savage had to draw the line somewhere and leave a few myths un-busted.

After hearing a story about a chunk of highway that exploded due to spilled liquid oxygen igniting, Savage was eager to explore if something like that could actually happen. "We did enough investigation into liquid oxygen to discover it's one of the most terrifying things in the world," he told Blast in 2010. "On top of that, it's totally unpredictable. So when we looked at the unpredictability of it, we realized we were ending up with a myth that was either incredibly dangerous or nothing would happen." With a predicted result of either bad television or a horrendous disaster, Savage didn't go through the test.

In another episode exploring how tasers work, the "MythBusters" staff talked about using the shock weapon on one of its hosts. "It was obviously going to be me who was going to get tasered. The question was whether or not I would agree to do it," Savage recalled. "And I took a long look at it and decided I didn't want to do it.

"MythBusters" followed in the tradition of scientific concepts being joyfully exploited to make engaging entertainment. A previous entry in that history was the robot-fighting fad of the 1990s and early 2000s. Teams of engineers got together to make seemingly indestructible and extremely dangerous remote-operated robots out of common materials and then make them destroy each other. It was on this circuit that Adam Savage honed the skills that would serve him very well on "MythBusters," and where he also worked in a high-profile capacity with future co-host Jamie Hyneman.

In the mid-1990s, Savage and Hyneman devised and built a fighting robot they named Blendo. Consisting primarily of a 5-horsepower lawnmower engine fitted into a wok and enveloped by a steel ring of blades, it spun at 500 rpm and raced around at 80 miles per hour. In live "Robot Wars" events in both 1995 and 1997, Savage's Blendo was so devastating to other robots and the battle arena that it was pulled out of competition and declared a co-champion. When Comedy Central debuted the series "BattleBots" in 2000, Savage and Hyneman entered Blendo into the competition three times. Blendo quickly lost in each attempt, but the appearances at least acquainted cable TV viewers with Savage and Hyneman.

Whether it's working on high-level tech and science stuff on "MythBusters" or in his own workshop or remotely, Adam Savage requires a lot of tools, and he didn't like the black gear bags that dominated the marketplace. "I hate looking inside black tool bags for things because inside a black tool bag it's all black and you lose things because you can't see there," he said on Tested. In 2017, he created a company called Savage Industries with the idea to make functional bags that were also sustainable. Through another manufacturer, Mafia Bags, Savage Industries acquires used materials to make its products, namely cloth once used on boat sails.

The first Savage Industries item, the EDC One, was made with white sail cloth, but Savage realized that while they still presented operational troubles, black bags were what consumers most wanted. Savage's company now sells its efficiency-minded products in only white, grey, and black.

After pulling off a final series of extra-large and very ambitious tests in 2016, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman walked away from "MythBusters." Savage would return on his own to host the short-lived "MythBusters Jr." in 2019, demonstrating that he was more than capable of creating entertaining, science-based content as an individual rather than as one-half of a tight-knit duo. To that end, Savage published his first book in 2019, "Every Tool's a Hammer." A memoir of his career and adventures in the spot where art meets commerce meets technology, the title was marketed as an inspirational invitation to create and be curious. 

The former TV host does a lot of creating and questioning on Tested, a website and YouTube channel made for experiments, demonstrations, and Q&A sessions with fans. And in 2020, Savage joined the Silicon Valley Comic Con in the role of creative director. He helped to rebrand and expand the long-running fan expo, with which he's been associated since it began in the 2010s, as SiliCon with Adam Savage.