Top 70 Jamie Hyneman Quotes

There are things that you would think were not possible, and yet they are.

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.

I was a problematic kid, to be sure.

On occasion, we at ‘MythBusters’ come across stories we want to test that require using a pig carcass to simulate human physiology.

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.

When I watch a movie I don’t really care too much about the plot – not that it isn’t important, but what I remember is the visual imagery, something that happens in an individual scene.

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.

Arachnophobia’ was one of the first films I did major effects for.

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.

I’m a little suspicious of using microwaves.

Over time, shop classes sort of disappeared or got marginalized in the states. I don’t really know why. Now with tech like 3-D printers and CNCs, shops have acquired a new shine.

We’re not too out there to educate people about any specific thing necessarily so much as we are to encourage critical and scientific thinking.

I’m sort of reluctant to celebrity.

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.

If you ever decide to build a boat out of wet newspaper, it’s important to remember to lay down the sheets like shingles on a house: One issue at a time, starting at the bow and moving aft, so water flows over the layers, not under them.

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.

It’s millions of times more efficient to collect hydroelectric power through a dam than raindrop by raindrop.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

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.

A lot of mythology surrounds British inventor Geoffrey Pyke. He supposedly made people come to his bedside to see his designs because getting up and getting dressed took too long.

Neither of us were experienced hosts on television. But the show seemd to moved in the direction of our characters, the way we approached things. It evolved around us and the things we think are interesting.

I never dreamed we would be on television at all, much less for such a long time and with so much praise for keeping a thought provoking show on the air. And best of all, we were able to do what we do and still have all our fingers and toes.

A good urban legend is something that actually did happen but it got twisted in the telling over time.

You have to remember that I’m a guy who is happiest in a dark room just thinking.

I work out regularly because I don’t see the mind and body as that separate.

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.

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.

I have to say that we’re not actors, at least on ‘Mythbusters’ or any of the other television projects that we’ve done.

There are times when we’re testing an actual explosion, and then there are times when we blow stuff up just because we can.

If we knew what we were doing we wouldn’t be entertaining.

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 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.

Algae are such basic, simple organisms.

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.

I think anybody who’s curious about anything, including their own mind, is inherently a skeptic.

I’m a builder, first and foremost.

There are a lot of scientists or other people who can be very skeptical or rational within their field, but they may well not do that in other aspects of their lives, when it comes to things like religion, or what have you. People have this amazing gift for being selective with their curiosity and skepticism.

Pepper spray, a Taser, a suckling pig and a self-built motorized spit. It’s a perfect Thanksgiving, ‘MythBusters’-style.

I am pretty much who I seem, and it’s not a television host.

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.

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.

We’re these guys that are very tech-savvy, so people tend to expect us to say our favorite gadgets are thing like the latest iPhone or the latest app or something like that. Adam is pretty much like that. As far as myself, I’m the kind of guy that tends to go for the absolute simplest things.

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 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.

Adam and I don’t consider ourselves friends. We don’t spend any time together that we don’t have to.

Personally I’m more into science and engineering types of things, not so much into testing ‘Star Wars’ myths.

One of the main reasons for success on the show is that we’re not a demonstration show. We’re an experimentation show.

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.

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.

I think when you do stuff in a computer people tend to dismiss it. It also allows you to make a lot of stuff totally not connected with reality because you’re not limited by any kind of reality.

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.

We’ve gotten quite creative with our use of explosives… It’s almost like an art form, rather than just blowing crap up.

Miles Flannery – he’s a beast. Very talented, but a brute. He’s one of three guys who help us keep the shop maintained, help us set up on location and assist in building something if time is short.

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.

I’ve run several of my own small businesses in my life.

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.

The daily work on special effects is fairly mundane.

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.

Both Adam and I come from a practical effects background.

We couldn’t be happier that the show has encouraged kids to have an interest in science and math, but we don’t try to do that. We just have fun, which is its own bold statement.

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.

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.