Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians. They are 14 years old, and I explain to them frequently that they will never realize the glory of a snow day. You wake up and the world says, 'Oops, it's too much fun to go to school, you've got to stay home and deal with the snow!'

Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.

I think at this point, there's a certain bizarre chemistry between Jamie [Hyneman] and I that we can't ignore a lot of the mechanics of, that we're quite aware of. Half of it is absolutely genuine, and half of it is us playing around with that fact.

Lists are how I parse and manage the world.

Isn't television glamourous?

Being a geek is all about learning the inventories of things.

There's few things that get you over your own crap more than working hard.