Do we like Michael Stevens?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Years of curious, inclusive science teaching and no harmful words or acts found, but little on the record about how he treats people or what he stands up for.
Stevens made the Vsauce channel, which started in 2010 as video game comedy. A video about hot peppers, driven by his own curiosity, got far more attention than the gaming stuff and pushed the channel towards science. By 2014 the original channel had passed 8 million subscribers.
The formative bit goes back to his childhood. He's told Nautilus his dad was a chemist and self-taught learner with a home lab, and young Michael joined in on the experiments. He later worked in a University of Chicago psychology lab, with a theatre background too, which explains the mix of rigour and showmanship.
On the harm test, we came up empty in a good way. We found no remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, no conspiracy rabbit holes, and no dodgy company: his big collaborations are Mind Field, a tour with Adam Savage, and The Rest Is Science. Absence of evidence isn't a glowing reference, so we've kept the score off the top shelf.
He also seems to practise what he preaches about honesty. In 2014 Digiday reported that he sees himself as a curator of info rather than a font of final answers, uses long video descriptions as bibliographies, and deletes and re-edits videos when he gets something wrong. That's a decent habit for anyone with an audience this size.
We found no court cases, lawsuits or credible allegations about him in the sources we checked. Tabloid-style or fan-wiki chatter about old fan frustration over Mind Field going behind a paywall is, well, not much of a scandal. That's honestly the whole list.