Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American entertainer Jamie Hyneman.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
James Franklin Hyneman is an American special effects expert who is best known as the former co-host of the television series MythBusters alongside Adam Savage where he became known for his distinctive beret and walrus moustache. 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 was deemed too dangerous for entry in the competition. He is the inventor of the Sentry, an unmanned firefighting robotic vehicle. He is also one of the designers of the aerial cable robotic camera system Wavecam used in sports and entertainment events.
I've ended up water skiing behind the Stanford rowing team as well as water skiing behind an excavator while it swung around in a circle.
I'm a builder, first and foremost.
We got a lot of gay fan mail when the show first started. Something to do with being in San Francisco and being a big, burly guy with a big moustache. But we're both happily married. To women.
You know, 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.
Is there some situation where square wheels would be better than round wheels? Sure! A round wheel has a pressure point directly under the tire. A square wheel's corners are going to bite and propel you forward. The square wheel could be superior on snow or mud or sand.
As far as I'm concerned, raising the bar or encouraging kids in large numbers to be interested in science, I can't think of anything I'd rather see happen.
Duct tape is like that. It's a building block. You can make a rope out of it, you can make a cloth out of it. And because it sticks to stuff it's even more powerful. It's like an uber-material because of the versatility of a sticky fiber.
On occasion, we at 'MythBusters' come across stories we want to test that require using a pig carcass to simulate human physiology.
At its core, what we do in 'MythBusters' is turn science into an adventure.
Science isn't just for guys in lab coats, you know? It's for anybody who wants to do a good job of understanding and investigating the world.
Just by going fast enough, you can ride on water with a motorcycle.
Children are just little scientists.
I was approached to do 'MythBusters' in 2002. I didn't think it would go anywhere, but I guess anything can happen if you wear a funny hat and have lots of facial hair.
If you get the question right, if you really define it, then the answers are just sitting there waiting for you. And it's something a little different than people usually think.
We've done a zombie episode - only one - and the way we look at it as is we understand that there probably aren't zombies out there for real, but there's a lot of interesting stuff we can test about them. We've tested how bodies of zombies pressing against a gate, would they push it through and things like that.
We've got a great deal of respect for each other on camera as well as off, no matter what it might occasionally look like.
For four years, I worked as one of the general shop crew on movies like 'Naked Lunch' and 'Arachnophobia.' I made lots of bugs.
Well, one of the myths early on that I think is one of the funnier things we've done is airline toilet seats. That one was about a large woman that sat down on a seat in an airline and flushed the toilet and got stuck on it.
My hair was falling out so I got in the habit of wearing a hat. And I didn't like baseball caps so I got a beret.
Now that I'm not a puppet for some director, the Hyneman is free to explore the world at large.
I found that cardiovascular exercise boosts my mental performance. If I have a problem to solve, like an engineering one, and I get on a treadmill, then time disappears; all I know is an hour later I'm all sweaty and the problem has been solved.
When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.
I wouldn't spend five minutes with Adam outside work if I didn't have to. But yet I feel somewhat displaced without him in the workplace... destroying my tools and leaving messes everywhere he goes.
We are seeing robotics creep into all areas and become accessible, where it used to be something tedious that only the most persistent people could access.
Pepper spray, a Taser, a suckling pig and a self-built motorized spit. It's a perfect Thanksgiving, 'MythBusters'-style.
I grew up on an apple orchard with a lot of surrounding wooded area, and I ran everywhere. I was outside all the time climbing trees.
I work out regularly because I don't see the mind and body as that separate.
Over the years, we've developed a respect for each other in the roles that we play and we rely on that difference to recreate clarity for the audience.
It's millions of times more efficient to collect hydroelectric power through a dam than raindrop by raindrop.
We're not friends - in fact, we pretty much as a rule irritate each other. But we've learnt to embrace it and use it as a strength... the other guy's always seeing something from the opposite pole.
I really didn't think this was going to be a success. We did the first three episodes and I said to Adam, 'I can't see this going anywhere. I've already used up all my urban legends.'
I think it's probably safe to say that continuing our onscreen relationship in front of the camera is probably not happening. I expect Adam may well pursue things in front of the camera, but I'm most likely not. It's not who I am.
In my case you can pretty well figure that you can put a beret and a mustache on just about anything you want and it looks like me.
We really do prefer to build things rather than destroy things, believe it or not.
I'm like a race horse attached to a freight wagon.
Adam's impulsive and energetic, and I'm calm and methodical.
I mean, we're - if I may say so - we're experts at using materials and processes in ways for which they were never intended.
There are things that you would think were not possible, and yet they are.
I have to say that we're not actors, at least on 'Mythbusters' or any of the other television projects that we've done.
I pretty much learned not to fight with it a long time ago and let it do what it likes to do. Otherwise, my shaving techniques are pretty mundane. I tend to do it in the shower because it makes the bristles soft and keeps the razor from building up the hairs inside it, and the mustache is dealt with with scissors.
Occasionally, you know, a myth is specific with a certain model of car, you know, like a Corvette or whatever. And so we end up spending some cash on those.
We're fond of pointing out that we've known each other for over 25 years now and not once sat down alone to have dinner together. We pretty much avoid spending whatever time together that we can.
Neither Adam or I are scientists, we're not engineers or anything of the sort. We just have a lot of fun and the thing is, fun for us happens to involve science and satisfying our curiosity.
In my case, the only thing to note is if I show up at home at an unusual time, it's cause for raising my wife's blood pressure because it only happens if... usually that involves stitches.
I'm a little suspicious of using microwaves.
If you build a robot, you're welding, machining sculpting, casting, dealing with electronics and hydraulics.
There are times when we're testing an actual explosion, and then there are times when we blow stuff up just because we can.
The core of what we're doing is, we're playing with the world. And our curiosity in doing that is what we are most proud of and what we like to put out there.
I don't see that we're any different than many, many people that are out there. And it's hard to kind of accept something like we're larger than life, super-people or something like that.
Algae are such basic, simple organisms.
It's the results that are surprising, even results where we've totally screwed up, and then learned something in the process, are the ones that stand out. Having our preconceptions overturned is actually thrilling for us.
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.
You know, when you look carefully at stuff that you deal with everyday, applying a little creativity to it and thinking outside the box, it's amazing what you can do.
As it turns out, one of the biggest choices we have doing the show is deciding the tangents we are allowed to take, the stuff that we see along the way. We're allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.
If we knew what we were doing we wouldn't be entertaining.
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.
After working as a charter boat captain and dive master in the Caribbean for a number of years, I decided it was time for a change.
One of the main reasons for success on the show is that we're not a demonstration show. We're an experimentation show.
I'm developing some new kinds of robotic firefighting vehicles to help with the massive forest fires we're dealing with in the West.
Some of the most important discoveries that scientists have made were not what they were seeking at the time.