Jamie Hyneman
Jamie Hyneman
James Franklin "Jamie" Hyneman is an American special effects expert and was the co-host of the television series MythBusters alongside Adam Savage. He is also the owner of M5 Industries, the special effects workshop where MythBusters was filmed. He is known among Robot Wars devotees for his robot entry, Blendo, which, for a time, was deemed too dangerous for entry in the competition. He is one of the designers of the aerial robotic camera system Wavecam, used in sports and...
ProfessionReality Star
Date of Birth25 September 1956
CityMarshall, MI
We're constantly pushing these materials and processes to the extreme to see what will happen. It's an insight into things that you don't normally see.
When I figured that I could do anything if I was simply methodical about it. I went to the library - and this was before the Internet - and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects.
From our point of view, we're just curious, we're poking around and having fun. If it's science, if it's accurate, if it's not accurate, we did the best we can to keep things clean and understandable, but we're just having fun, so sue us if we got something wrong.
The idea that you can contribute is really important, especially for a kid.
I think "MythBusters" is a step up from special effects because we not only have to make things look like they work, they actually do have to work. It's more challenging and even transcendental.
I didn't do the engineering, and I didn't do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.
Duct tape is not a perfect solution to anything. But with a little creativity, in a pinch, it's an adequate solution to just about everything.
Actually I'm pretty adamant about, you know, the whole God thing and it seems that skeptics are by and large atheists or something approaching that, which I strongly identify with. So it turned out to be a good thing and I have become enthusiastically part of it.
We may not have a sample size larger than one, or we may not have unlimited resources - it's a TV show, and we generally turn these things around in about a week or so.
Any day we create that much shrapnel is a good day.
I always enjoy seeing Adam [Savage] in pain.
I don't think our death ray is working. I'm standing right in it, and I'm not dead yet.
There are a lot of times when we can just time something and say "busted" or "confirmed" or whatever, instead of building a robot or some gadget to make it happen more elaborately. In those cases, we're simply enjoying ourselves.
We've found that the biggest thing as far as the danger is simply pressure.When we work with explosives, we've got bomb technicians there, bomb-squad guys who go into unknown situations all the time, and they've dealt with it safely.