Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman have worked closely with each other for 14 seasons on "Mythbusters," but that doesn't mean they were close.
Possibly the biggest myth the duo has busted is the belief that you can't work with someone you don't get along with.
"[Our relationship has] radically changed, but it's also stayed the same. Jamie and I make no bones about the fact that we're not friends," Savage told Business Insider recently, as the Discovery and Science Channel show approaches its series finale.
"We don't get along very well together on a personal level. In 25 years we've known each other, we've never had dinner alone together. We do not choose to hang out if we don't have to be in proximity, and yet, there's a couple of things that happened, and they're pretty remarkable."
Savage said there are several ways he and his cohost have made it work. Some ways came quite naturally, while others took some work.
Here's how Savage said he and Hyneman survived 14 seasons of "Mythbusters," although they don't get along:
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The cohosts had a process that worked and believed in it.
"When we're making something together, our brains begin to run on exactly parallel sets of tracks, and there are few other collaborations that I have found as fruitful in the execution of making things," Savage told BI.
"We challenge each other, we push each other to do better, we pick each other's ideas apart, and there's a real integrity to that process, as annoying as it might be on the temporal level."
They respected each other's work ethic.
"You don't have to get along with someone if you respect their work," Savage told BI.
"It's important to respect what their abilities are. Jamie and I might argue back and forth about how to execute something, but the simple fact is that I know by the end of the day that he'd get it done, even if I wasn't there, and he knows the same about me."
They didn't let their egos get in the way of doing the right thing.
"When the right idea shows up in the room, it's point of pride with us, and it's always been a point of pride with us to step out of the way and execute the right idea," Savage said.
"There's nothing I find more boring than arguing with someone because they want to use their idea instead of the right idea. And half the time, we couldn't figure out which one of us came up with the final way to do something."
He added, "Ultimately, the takeaway is we don't have to get along as long as we have our minds and our eyes on the same goal, which is to tell an elegant story about genuinely coming to an answer about a question we're absolutely, honestly curious about."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider