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
pushing process insight
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.
atheist good-things skeptic
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.
stuff caterpillars company
I would love to have access to a company like Caterpillar. I would make all their stuff remote controlled and work ten times as fast.
views mind trying
If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.
tv-shows may tvs
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.
running rain wind
All of the experiments are really cool. Probably one of the better ones is "Running in the Rain." It depends on circumstances: how fast are you running, if there's wind, or any of the other things involved with the circumstances of running in the rain. That's a favorite, I suppose.
thinking challenges special
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.
thinking savages rewards
I have to say for both of us [ with Adam Savage], this experience that we've been having here has changed us dramatically, and we've evolved since we've come on the scene with Mythbusters, because of what we've learned, and that, I think, is the biggest reward for us.
jobs years world
Dealing with effects, as a job it's great, but with Mythbusters, the stuff we've seen, the stuff we've absorbed over the years, has just been fantastic, and I wouldn't change it for the world.
color missing make-or-break
There's no director who wants to portray cheese puffs with a certain color that's going to make or break the commercial, in his opinion. We don't have to do that, so I don't miss it at all, really.
home people trying
I always telling people to "not try this at home," because most of what we do on MythBusters is really dangerous. Consequently, we can't encourage people to try that stuff.
squad guy pressure
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.
axes two legs
One of the things I'm likely to start building in my shop is a vehicle wherein each wheel has basically a flight-simulator base as its suspension. It's known as a hexapod; it's basically a tripod but each leg is two pistons. So you have six axes of freedom on it. This will be something that can not only do what lowriders do, but shorten or extend its wheelbase and jump forwards, backwards, or from one side to the other. In an off-road situation it could be rolling at speed toward a ravine and then leap across it.
imagine i-can has-beens
There are a lot of things that I'd do differently. But I can't imagine being more fortunate than I have been.