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 should point out that if we feel like we've upset somebody and they're vitriolic, if people are actively pursuing some sort of complaint, then we've done our job.
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.
Sometimes the best people to be around are not exactly like you - because if they were, what is the point? If they contribute something different than you can, that is when they are valuable.
I always enjoy seeing Adam [Savage] in pain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.