Adam Savage, Michael Stevens Talk Brain Candy Live! Tour

Adam Savage of “Mythbusters” fame and Vsauce’s Michael Stevens discuss Brain Candy Live!, their science-based tour that infuses learning with excitement.

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Brain Candy Live!

Savage, who co-hosted “Mythbusters” from 2006-2016, is the head Tested.com, which covers topics ranging from Comic-Con to scientific breakthroughs. His extensive resume includes working on special effects on a dozen films, including “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.” 

Stevens is the founder of the ever-expanding YouTube channel Vsauce, where you can find videos addressing scientific and philosophical questions like “Would Headlights Work at Lightspeed?” And “Why Are Things Creepy?”

Savage and Stevens have teamed up for Brain Candy Live!, a nationwide tour that’s half scientific experiment demonstration, half comedy show.

The fall excursion kicks off Nov. 14 in Providence, R.I. Dates are booked through early December.

The duo spoke to Pollstar about the tour, working together and their passion for learning.  

Where did the idea for Brain Candy Live! come from?

Savage: Well, I have been touring since 2012 with [“Mythbusters” co-host] Jamie Hyneman. We took a kind of “Mytbuster’s” behind the myth show around the country, 200 cities in three different countries over about four years. In 2015 Jamie decided he didn’t want to do anymore touring, but I still did.

Being a big fan of Michael and of Vsauce, I called Michael up and asked him if he was interested in working on this stage show, and that was the first germination of what ended up becoming Brain Candy. It’s very different from the show I did with Jamie Hyneman. The collaboration with Michael really stemmed from a point where we blend over each other.

Brain Candy to us is the feeling you get when you learn something new or you see something in a new perspective that gives you a different insight to how things work. So we started working together about eight or 10 months before we hit the road for the first time in the spring of 2017.

Stevens: That’s right. I had just been on YouTube but I loved performing live, I loved speaking live, but I didn’t get a lot of opportunities. I knew that if I got the chance, I wanted to do it right. I wanted it to be big.

Being able to do it by working with Adam meant that it could be as awesome as I wanted it to be. There were so many things that I couldn’t do on a screen, like getting people to hear a frequency that a microphone couldn’t pick up and all that stuff that’s only possible live.

When Adam and I first started talking months before the tour actually all came together it was clear that we were both excited about the same things. Just being in that room and listening to us talk was like, “That’s a show in and of itself, wait until we actually add stuff.”

Matt Christine Photography – ‘Brain Candy Live!’

Savage: Exactly, we have a funny way of working together too. The actual writing of what we say in the show not only happens last, but it changes on any given night.

Because we have a show in which we do stuff onstage, we don’t just talk about it. We’re running these demonstrations and these experiments and playing with the audience live. We build all these rigs and jags and ideas, and only about five or six days before the first tour launched did we start putting words and concepts around what we were doing. The material is always fresh.

Stevens: We’re both naturally passionate about this so there’s no worry. Of course, we’re going to do these five things and we’re going to be able to talk for hours about each one of them. It all came together in that order.

How does the creative process go?

Stevens: First, Adam I get together and we would just talk, “If we have a whole bunch of people watching, what would we do on a stage?” We had notebooks full of ideas.

We worked with this brilliant director, Michael Weber, who could listen to all of our dreams and cool ideas and figure out, “How does this go together in a story?” How does it form a narrative and have a direction to it and what’s going to make the biggest and more memorable effects of the audience?

It came together that way. We sort of settled on the theme of air. But we don’t really talk about the theme during the show, because the theme is Brain Candy. It’s about being surprised and the joy of discovery.

Savage: The theme is a “coat hanger.” We plan to write multiple versions of Brain Candy with different “coat hangers” – different central ideas and rubrics that we build this thing on and that’s to give it internal consistency.

So no two show are going to be the same?

Matt Christine Photography – Adam Savage of ‘Brain Candy Live!’

Savage: Yeah, and that’s one of the loveliest things to me. I loved touring with Jamie, and he is one of god’s own prototypes and a very unique individual. But no one would accuse Jamie of having super comedic chops or comic timing.

I love being onstage with Michael and having an idea occur to me and saying a couple of words that are different from last night and seeing Michael’s eyes light up and watching as he takes the thing as I just suggested and takes it further. We play off each other and improvise onstage and the piece keeps developing.

You mentioned it started off as a “Mythbusters” tour. Have any elements from that tour carried over to Brain Candy?

Savage: I’m touring with the same touring company, MagicSpace [Entertainment], and a lot of the key people that helped Jamie and I build those first tours – when you’re doing something like this, the intuitional knowledge of a team that you could count on is absolutely – it can’t be overstated. I loved my crew on “Mythbusters,” I love my crew on Tested.com and I love our crew on Brain Candy.

They’re like a possibility engine. We talk about what we want to do and those guys help us make it flesh. It feels like such a treat to travel around the country for a few weeks a year and get excited about the stuff that excites us.

Did any elements transfer over from Vsauce?

Stevens: I think the things that carry over are things like the insatiable thirst for knowledge and the contagious curiosity, the like, “Well, I want to know why.” You just keep asking questions and going deep. The difference now is that it’s a demonstration on stage rather than, “And here’s a picture that NASA took years ago and you can look at it and you can listen to me talk about it.”

Onstage, everything can be a lot bigger, a lot more memorable. That same kind of, “Oh my gosh, I can tell that Michael and Adam wrote this topic and now I love it.” If you had told me that I would have left here with a giant passion for air pressure I wouldn’t have believed you but it happened.

What has the reaction from the crowds been like?

Savage: The reaction from the crowd is wonderful. There’s a great playwright – David Mamet – he said in one of his books that I read many years ago, “You can blackmail the audience into a standing ovation but you cannot blackmail them into a gasp.” In our show we have a couple of pieces elicit a genuine gasp from the audience and there is no lovelier sound.

You guys bring up a lot of participants on the stage. What’s that like?

Matt Christine Photography – Michael Stevens

Stevens: They’re really excited. And they don’t know exactly what they’re in for but the nature of some of the demonstrations do need people to have signed consent forms beforehand. So, it’s not always totally random. But we do some of that. It can also be hard to find the right kind of person in a dark auditorium when every auditorium is different day to day.

You often meet them after the show and they’re like “I was the one on stage.” And then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, you were such a wonderful carbon dioxide atom, you were perfect.” 

Savage: The other thing I love is how the demographics of our audience are super wide. It’s literally 7 to 70. When we look out and draw from the crowd it could be any age group and any type of person that is enthused about our various channels and shows.

You guys are obviously out to entertain and educate, but there seems to be something more to it. What are you hoping to accomplish with the tour?

Savage: I think what Michael and I have achieved is on the backs of our own enthusiasm, of the things that we find interesting and are curious about – there’s a tremendous empowerment about satisfying your curiosity.

This is open-ended education as opposed to closed education. It’s that process of, “Oh I haven’t read about x, let me investigate x until I have my own opinion about it that’s different than the research that I’ve been doing.”  If we leave the audience with just a germ of the ability to do that then I think we did our jobs.

Stevens: Hundred percent agree. You will learn things and you will be entertained but you’ll also leave feeling like, “Man, learning is way more fun and diverse than I thought.” It’s not just for scientists or super big brainiac people. Everyone has this ability and its rewarding to follow it and to be a curious person. You leave not only having learned things and how to do certain things, but you leave wanting to learn more.

It sounds very inspirational.

Savage: We have a lot of art to the show. The stage set and the way we make our transition – our goal is that it feels like you’re looking at the show from backstage, like we’re peeling behind the curtain and you’re watching how the crew put these things together, how we build these things. Our goal is not a shiny black box of information, but a lovely, messy, awesome shop full of information.

Stevens: It’s really authentic.  I know a lot of people would be like, “You know what I’d love to do would be like to actually hang out with Michael and Adam for a night.” Well, that’s what you get to do in the show, there isn’t a weird wall between us.

We answer questions from the audience at certain points and it really feels like a conversation with friends instead of, “This the show and we are different than you.” Learning is awesome and we’re all going to do it together and we’re going to keep doing it.

Did any specific shows or experiences with fans leave a lasting impression on you?

Savage: We’ve both had experiences with fans coming up to us after the show and explaining how the work that we did got them interested in a field that they are now an expert in. We’ve had fans come up on stage and be overwhelmed by the reality of seeing the two of us together, especially kids.

What are your plans for the future of Brain Candy?

Savage: I personally hope that Brain Candy becomes a phrase associated with the pleasure of learning. That’s my real goal. It’s not the Adam and Michael show, it’s the pleasure and thrill of learning new things show.

I think we plan to tour this show for the next couple of year and see where we are with it. For both Michael and I, our day-to-day jobs of making videos are not incredibly glamourous.  Heading out on tour and interacting with audiences? It’s not only as

Matt Christine Photography – Michael Stevens & Adam Savage close out ‘Brain Candy Live!’

close as I’ll ever get to feeling like a rock star but it also deeply impacts the stuff that I go back into my studio and do.

Stevens: It really does. I went back to the studio knowing – I mean, I’ve seen the people who watch my videos face to face and actually got in their hometowns, and the connection is a lot stronger because of it.

But yeah, Brain Candy is not the Michael and Adam show. Years from now when I’m dead, I hope that you’re going to see Brain Candy and there are all kinds of people involved in it and something that’s much larger than just today and us.