How Much of That Cheese is Real?

This morning, I watched Youtube with breakfast. As time passes, seems like there is less and less content I like. I decided to watch Adam Savage’s channel.

Savage is the nerdy store clerk from the old Charmin commercials. He and Mr. Whipple amused America with their clever banter. You probably know him as one of the hosts of the show Mythbusters.

He has some tool skills. He has worked in special effects, and he has built various things for movies and, I would guess, TV shows.

Wikipedia says:

Savage has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Mummy, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others.

I’ll go out on a limb and opine that he wrote that himself. It looks like something you would put on a resume. The language is vague, and the writer is trying to puff him up.

If you, personally, design the CGI software used in a groundbreaking project like The Abyss, you will put that in your list of accomplishments. You will say, “I designed that.” You won’t say, “I worked in the production of the special effects for The Abyss.” If you are vague about what you did, it means you didn’t do all that much. Maybe you fetched doughnuts for the people who did the real work on a movie. Maybe they sent you to Radio Shack when they needed resistors. Maybe you held things while they welded them. Savage, or some other Wikiperson, says he has “worked as an animator, graphic designer,” et cetera, but he doesn’t tell you what he did.

I don’t know why I’m inconsistent with my use of Italics. I just am.

I can write a Wikipedia and call myself a patent attorney whose work has appeared before the federal courts, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Library of Congress. I can call myself an experienced litigator. I can say I’m a fabricator, and that I have designed and created a number of useful and somewhat complicated weldments. I can say I’m a composer. A writer. But should I really say those things?

I don’t practice law any more, and I would want to brush up before handling new cases. I have litigated, but not in a long time. I really am a fabricator, but I can barely TIG, I don’t know much about sheet metal, and I’m not very good at stick welding. I have composed a bunch of tunes, but no one has paid me for them. I got some books and articles published, but I don’t live on writing income.

I could say I taught physics in one of the world’s leading university departments, but I was a teaching assistant, not a Ph.D.

Reading people’s lists of accomplishments is like reading grocery labels. For example, “Key West lime juice” means the juice of Persian limes, not key limes, but “key lime juice” means it’s the real thing.

Persian limes are the normal limes you are familiar with. People in South Florida call them Persian limes in order to set them apart from key limes, also known as Mexican limes.

Little tip for the yankees.

People who write food labels and copy are very deceptive. Guess what “made with 100% real cheese” means. It means, “Some of the cheese is real, but the rest is fake.” The real cheese is 100% real, but less than 100% of the cheese is real.

I enjoy Savage’s videos, because he’s a tool guy, and he tells interesting stories about showbiz. He makes a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I have noticed that he does a lot of bad and mediocre work. A person who has been doing his kind of work for three decades should be better.

He does projects he calls one-day builds. One project was a brass nut and bolt. The bolt was supposed to be around 1.5″ thick, so you can imagine how big the nut was supposed to be. These objects served no purpose except to give him something to do.

He made lots of mistakes. He butchered the bolt, which should have been a simple project. He made a blank for it and held the head in his lathe’s chuck, unsupported at the tail end, and he tried to thread it using a carbide tool pushed straight in. He pushed the bolt out of the chuck several times, resulting in a lot of damage.

No real machinist, and no decent amateur, would have done these things. You make your blank. You center-drill the small end. You chuck the head and put a live center in the cavity you just drilled. This keeps the bolt from flying away when you apply pressure.

You don’t push your cutting tool straight into the work to thread it unless you know you can get away with it. You push it in at an angle so only one side of the tool is cutting. This reduces the pressure and gives a cleaner result. Carbide is a bad idea unless it’s really sharp. Steel is easy to put a good edge on.

Savage ended up with a nut and bolt, but they were not what he originally planned. He had to cut out a lot of brass in order to remove his mistakes.

He made a little cabinet for metal tooling. I guess it was around 10″ deep. It had drawers. He didn’t use drawer slides. Just grooves that slid on strips of wood. Of course, it didn’t work well, and it should have been obvious the design was bad. He ended up buying drawer slides and doing it over.

His shop is miniscule, and there isn’t much stuff in it. Maybe it’s small because it’s in San Francisco where real estate is expensive. He has a mill about like mine, the same table saw I have, a cheap Chinese lathe that looks to be a 14″ job, a hipster woodworking table which is unnecessarily pretty and clever, and a billion small tools stored in storage doodads he made. He also has a gas welding rig.

I am pretty sure my amateur shop is better than his pro shop. I have plasma, TIG, MIG, stick, a hydraulic press with an air jack, a heavy-duty finger brake, a bunch of woodworking tools…if I had to do a project with tools, I would take my shop over his without hesitation.

I considered these things today, and it made me think about impostor syndrome. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: “a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.”

Many people have impostor syndrome. On the other hand, there is Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which convinces stupid or inept people they’re much more capable than the rest of us.

I guess there are shades in between these extremes.

A lot of successful people seem closer to the Dunning-Kruger end. They create wondrous resumes they can’t really live up to. I don’t think they’re true Dunning-Kruger types, because they know they’re exaggerating, whereas a true Dunning-Kruger really believes he’s a genius.

It looks like I can do anything Savage can do, plus a bunch of things he can’t. He must be better at some things than I am, but I doubt he can do anything of which I am completely incapable. So, do I have impostor syndrome because I would never hold myself out as a real tool guru?

If I’m better than a recognized Hollywood special effects technician, maybe I’m closer to the real thing than I admit to myself.

Hollywood is an interesting place. It’s full of self-promoters. People show up there and claim they can do this and that, and they get hired whether they’re telling the truth or not.

A law school friend of mine decided she didn’t like law, so she asked my advice about a career change. She wanted to become a talent agent in Hollywood. Not long after, she showed up at the offices of Endeavor, then called the Endeavor Talent Agency. They represented lots of big names. They took her on, and she succeeded. She ended up working at Fox as some kind of executive. She has worked as a producer on 4 TV shows. She had no training for any of this.

She told me something about Hollywood. She said she heard it from other people there. They said, “No one here knows what they’re doing.” To make it there, people simply arrived and showed their willingness to take on projects. People who needed projects taken on, and who knew nothing about completing them, hired them. Eventually, things got done, and I suppose skills developed.

I guess that’s how Adam Savage got where he is.

There are lots of people on Youtube who can do things he will never be able to do. They make all sorts of stunning projects. But they’re not in Hollywood, telling people how great they are, so he has a Hollywood business and a name, and they don’t.

Some of these people develop skills and businesses extremely quickly. Over maybe 5 years, they’ll go from tiny machine tools in apartments to big shops with CNC stations. Adam Savage has not done that. He is probably not much better today than he was in 2000. I don’t think he has a gift for what he does. Just tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s all very interesting to me.

I’m not knocking him. Just assessing his real place in the food chain. I like his work, even if his projects aren’t always good. I’m also thinking about myself. I’m not great, but maybe I’m better than I think I am.

Today I have go to out and get back to work on my tractor brush fork attachment. I feel a little better about it. If Adam Savage can get Hollywood studios to pay him, I should be able to design and assemble a tractor attachment.