hey everybody adam savage here in my cave uh answering some mid-buster questions today
submitted by tested patrons today's
question is from danny curry and danny curry wants to know my first time meeting adam was
the final mythbusters live show in san francisco i remember it well that was a really really fun show
what were some of the more exciting parts of traveling and slash performing live
as opposed to pre-recorded and edited tv what are some of the things you didn't like about it
this is a great question danny um
i love touring um just and to be clear uh i wrote i wrote my first touring show with jamie
uh in 2012. yeah is that correct yeah 2012 we took shows around the world for uh
three or four years three years i think we wrapped up in 2015. yeah the last tour we went on was in
late 2015 um and that was after we'd wrapped mythbusters we wrapped mythbusters in like
early november 2015 and then went out on what would be jamie's in my last tour i toured again
in 2017 with michael stevens but so i've spent a lot of time on the road i have taken big shows to
two to three thousand seat houses all over the world and i'm a road dog like i really
dig the road i like the tour bus action i like a different city every day i love the
look ultimately my favorite thing is telling stories
i tell them with the props that i make i tell them with these videos that i that i produce and i did
it with mythbusters and i did it with a touring show they're all different they're all different
ways of telling stories they're different ways of interacting with people while sharing stories
and i mean as far as interacting with human beings and sharing stories like television
is an unbelievable medium mythbusters reach was gargantuan and astounding and the feedback could
could be amazing um the degree to which we began mythbusters without much of a of a feedback loop
with the fans because that's the way television kind of was in the early arts and then we finished
mythbusters having what felt like a very direct relationship with the fans where between twitter
and youtube and instagram and snapchat and all these other ways in which myths and stories and
ideas came to us as well as feedback from the fans and elaborations and better methodologies
yeah i would say that the arc of the show on the discovery channel the arc of mythbusters
on the discovery channel was certainly an arc of of more and more fan interaction as
the show went on and the show only benefited from that so it would be natural i think uh
for the next thing i'm going to say which is that one of my all-time favorite things about
doing a stage show is that direct interaction with the audience there's nothing quite like it
and you can write a show and you can perform it for an audience and it can go fine and it
can be what you expected you can also sometimes find yourself in front of an audience that is so
loving and so accepting that all of a sudden all this material in your brain just starts sprouting
brand new material and the interaction starts yielding brand new insights about the interaction
i've had some really powerfully special moments on stage where i was having a conversation with 2000
people and it felt quite intimate that's real it really is great i love the meet and greets i love
the meet and greets of touring um and i i i i i've talked about this in other forms before but i'll
i'll talk about it in this answer um when you do a touring show you make your money in several ways
you make it from direct ticket sales you also make it for merchandising you also make it from
vip tickets that are are sold with a little more right and it's often a meet and greet and or photo
opportunity after the show and that's usually for between 50 and 100 people depending upon
the um performer's appetite frankly i think um and in the beginning days jamie and i did meet and
greets with 50 people every evening and i found it really tiring i found it really exhausting um and
the the the the degree to which it's exhausting turned out to be the degree
to which i was resisting the process i'll explain um when you meet someone you admire
when you meet someone you've been thinking about meeting for a while you bring a lot to that
interaction you know this person you're meeting and i've had this
with countless people i've met whose work i am a huge fan of
you want them to like you you want to be friends with them you feel like they have contributed
a lot to your life and you you'd like that to continue that's totally natural and as the person
who's been on both sides of that interaction but from this standpoint being on the receiving end of
that i feel that pull i feel the i'm an empathetic person like everybody is i can feel that somebody
wants something out of that interaction and that's a there's a psychic way to that pull
what i learned was simply to give over to it not to resist it when you resist it it makes you more
tired when you resist when you meet somebody and they are pulling you towards them and you resist
it it makes you more tired i am saying all this from the standpoint of being a dude in this world
at this moment in time your results may vary the ways in which i am describing fan interaction does
not apply to being a woman because i am not one and i cannot know what that is like so i really
just want to state right here that like there are ways in which in this world at this time women
need to protect themselves way more than i need to in a in a fan interaction that's just the truth
and it's a sad truth but it's the real thing sorry i feel like i've been talking to mile a minute
the
the psychic weight of those interactions is somewhat illusory in my experience
and that if one if i take my compassion and fully meet that person standing across from me
i find the end of that the end of that interaction is often a plus rather than a negative it is a if
it it gives me something rather than take something away from me and of course that's
why we protect ourselves we feel like something's being taken we feel like somebody wants to take
something from us so that's totally understandable human interaction is fraught and social anxiety
is real i suffer from social anxiety like anybody else does um but once i realized that the key to a
hundred person meet and greet every night because we bumped from 50 to 100 at one point the key is
drop in and focus all my attention on each person that i am meeting and at the end of that
90 minutes of shaking hands and taking pictures of the 100 people i am so wired i usually never
got to sleep before 3am what a delightful feeling and really it's mostly just about
meeting people where they are and exalting in similar stuff together um you asked for things
that i didn't like about it i don't like being away from my house for extended periods of time
uh in early 2017 when michael stevens and i first went out on our first tour together
uh that was the first time my kids were out of the house it was an empty nester so i'm
like wow let's do a seven week tour and we did a seven week tour and my wife and i discovered
we that's too long to spend apart yeah um that was just too long to spend apart
um so i've learned about myself that i like to travel for three maybe four weeks at a
time and then i gotta i gotta i gotta recoup um what else is tough about about the touring
frankly it's a freaking delight i mean it's a real unique existence waking up in a different
city every morning sleeping in the back of a bus living with your crew for weeks
meeting different audiences in different countries every single day that's it's really special and if
even if i never do it again um i'm so grateful for having gotten to do it uh that being said
i can't wait to do it again but it's gonna be a while um as you could imagine there are like
two full years worth of touring shows waiting to make back their investments
since govind began it's going to be a bit of a [ __ ] fight for a while um danny thank you
so much for that awesome question um i know that i've covered a bunch of this material
in the non-too distant past sometime in the last year but it's worth going over again
um yeah can't wait to get back out there and touring can't wait to see y'all
at the various cons and other things that uh the public stuff that will start to happen soon
yeah i'm looking forward to it just like you are
all right thanks you guys stay safe i will see you next time