After the Myths: An Interview with MythBusters' Jamie Hyneman
The former co-host of MythBusters talks about life after the show; America's need for rational thought; and what he's doing with surplus army vehicles.
January 30, 2017
MythBusters co-host Jamie Hyneman got his start in the special effects industry. (image source: BigSpeak / Jamie Hyneman) |
Jamie Hyneman is pretty much satisfied. After 14 years as the co-host of the hit TV series MythBusters, he says he's left no myths behind. There's no hint of regret or even nostalgia when he talks about his time on the show, which premiered in January 2003 and ended its run in March 2016. Hyneman, who will be delivering a keynote address at Pacific Design & Manufacturing on February 7, talks about the show in the same way any other person might describe a productive day at the office – rewarding, but another chapter closed all the same.
“There's enough episodes of MythBusters that you could watch it for a couple of weeks,” Hyneman said via phone from his workshop in San Francisco – the famed MythBusters workshop that he now calls his own. “After 14 years the material did start to thin out. We figured it was time to throw in the towel.”
The very nature of the show – Hyneman and his co-host Adam Savage tackling all manner of urban legends, curiosities, and sometimes just outright intriguing questions, all via scientific experimentation – meant the MythBusters crew was among the hardest working in the television industry. “We didn't know how things would turn out,” Hyneman says, “For the most part it was legitimate experimentation. We may not have had large sample sizes, but we were actually experimenting and there had to be unpredictable results. We had to build things ourselves on a tight time frame.”
But through all of the crazy experiments Hyneman says the MythBusters team was never attached to the outcome. “We didn't care. We would experiment and present the data. Whether it was true or false was irrelevant. It's what the data said.Over the course of 14 seasons the show took on myths as varied (and dangerous) as whether using a cell phone near a gas pump could cause an explosion (it won't), to whether you can kill someone with a penny dropped from the Empire State Building (you can't), to stunts like determining whether you can survive two identical, simultaneous explosions by standing halfway between them (nope).
“One thing we did discover however is that the scientific process is a pretty good template for storytelling. You start with a hypothesis, you have a body of work in the middle, then you come up with a conclusion.”
Getting Methodical
Hyneman had several careers before landing on a hit TV show. He was raised in Indiana farm country and holds a degree in Russian from Indiana University, an honorary degree in engineering from the University of Maine, an honorary doctorate of engineering from Villanova University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
He cut his teeth and satiated his interest in engineering by working in the special FX industry. But in the time before starting his own FX company Hyneman worked, among other occupations, as a dive master, wilderness survival expert, boat captain, linguist, animal wrangler, concrete inspector, and chef. “At some point I realized I had done all of these different things and I thought I should become methodical about what I wanted to do for a living. Special effects was very creative. It involved a variety of materials and processes, working with variety of people, and the work itself didn't just end up on somebody's shelf; it ended up in a wider context,” he says.
His special effects career began as a shop assistant in the New York City area and he eventually made his way to Bay Area San Francisco. Over the course of 25 years working in FX Hyneman had a hand in producing effects for 800 commercials and dozens of well known and cult favorite films including Naked Lunch, Arachnophobia, and the original Robocop.
In 1996 Hyneman founded his own FX company, M5 Industries (the five M's are Models, Machines, Miniatures, Manufacturing, and Magic), but the company found itself struggling in later years as the film and TV industry moved away from practical effects to computer-generated ones. Seeking new avenues for the company Hyneman was tapped as one of several special effects artists being brought in to pitch themselves as hosts of a show for the Discovery Channel original titled Tall Tales or True, created by an Australian producer named Peter Rees. Discovery agreed to produce a three-episode series pilot to test the waters and brought on Adam Savage as the co-host. Hyneman and Savage had worked together previously on BattleBots – a TV series that featured homemade robots dueling to the death.
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“MythBusters was the last thing I ever thought would take off,” Hyneman admits, “Urban legends had no special interest to me. After the first three episodes I figured it was over because that was about all I knew of urban myths.”
But it took 14 years for the material to thin out. “The gist of it was it became more about satisfying our curiosity through experimentation. We had creative license to go after anything that attracted our curiosity and we had a checklist of three criteria: It had to have some unexpected, counterintuitive aspect; it had to be funny, hopefully; and bonus points if was at least sort of destructive.”
The Power of 'Wow'
In the dynamic of the show Hyneman was the straight man, balancing out Savage's almost manic curiosity with the sobering even-temperedness of a seasoned college professor. In one episode, in which the team attempts to build a rocket-powered car capable of flight, Hyneman remains the one stoic throughout the whole ordeal – uttering only a uncharacteristically loud, but still strikingly calm “Wow” as the car hits a ramp and bursts into flames. He's clearly interested in the data and results rather than the explosions themselves.
The MythBusters attempt to build their own rocket-powered car. |
That same sort of calm objectivity that comes through in his own personality is what Hyneman hopes will also be the lasting legacy of the show. “I would like to think we've done something and reached enough of the population to make people want to make thoughtful decisions and pay attention to science,” he says. “But there's a large portion of the population that doesn't do that.