Jamie Hyneman Quotes

I think LEGOs are one of the best toys ever developed. While LEGOs are sold in kits in order to build specific things, there [are] very few people who leave their LEGOs in those kits. It very rapidly becomes an open system where you can build whatever you want. That's the one thing that signifies my entire life and my career. I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That's a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.

Science isn't just for scientists and guys in lab coats. It's something that everybody can do.

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.

Duct tape is not a perfect solution to anything. But with a little creativity, in a pinch, it's an adequate solution to just about everything.

We don't have formal training, that makes what we're experiencing a little bit more accessible to the viewers. If we actually knew what we were doing ahead of time, it would just be like talking at you, instead of experiencing the situation with you.

Fun for us just happens to be screwing around with anything that gets our attention and is thought-provoking.

If at first you don't succeed, C4

When I figured that I could do anything if I was simply methodical about it. 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.

I didn't do the engineering, and I didn't do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.

We have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science.

I don't think our death ray is working. I'm standing right in it, and I'm not dead yet.

Any day we create that much shrapnel is a good day.

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.

One of our neighbors is a salami distributor, and they pretty well - I mean, we used their salami to make a rocket engine out of. They just look at us and they're amused, they're fine with it.

I've learned that I can pretty much do anything I've wanted to as long as I was methodical and diligent about it. It may not sound very exciting really, but it works.

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.

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.

The idea that you can contribute is really important, especially for a kid.

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.

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.

From our point of view, we're just curious, we're poking around and having fun. If it's science, if it's accurate, if it's not accurate, we did the best we can to keep things clean and understandable, but we're just having fun, so sue us if we got something wrong.

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.

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.

There are a lot of times when we can just time something and say "busted" or "confirmed" or whatever, instead of building a robot or some gadget to make it happen more elaborately. In those cases, we're simply enjoying ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I always enjoy seeing Adam [Savage] in pain.

There are a lot of things that I'd do differently. But I can't imagine being more fortunate than I have been.

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.

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.