Trade Shows

RCI Announces 2019 Keynote Speaker

RCI, Inc. is thrilled to announce that the 2019 RCI International Convention and Trade Show Keynote speaker is Jamie Hyneman. If you are not familiar with Jamie, we invite you to learn more about Dr. Dr. Dr. HC (it’s a thing) Jamie Hyneman.

Jamie’s extensive experience as a contingency planner, while not specialized in construction related areas, has given him a unique insight into how to spot potential problems before they occur. As everyone in the industry knows, construction mistakes can be hugely expensive and a big problem when they happen. Given that each project is contextually impacted and somewhat unique, Hyneman notes,"It’s not about the stuff that you know you have to worry about that’s the problem, it’s about the stuff you don’t know you’re going to have to worry about. You can’t plan for something you don’t know about. You have to hunt for it."

Needless to say, Jamie understands and has lived through the title of his presentation, "When Things Go Seriously Wrong."

Hyneman is best known as the host and executive producer of Discovery Channel’s long-running series Mythbusters, but he also already had a very diverse range of jobs and skills: farmer, wilderness survivalist, Russian linguist, sailboat captain, dive master, film effects technician, engineer, inventor, small business owner, in addition to being a lifetime member of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, as well as the National Science Teachers Association. He worked in a concrete testing lab and as a cook in restaurants.

The film effects work and the intense experimentation Jamie did on testing unusual and dangerous situations on Mythbusters was both figuratively (and literally, at times) a trial by fire, and was a fantastic education. As a result, Jamie is also a bonafide contingency planning expert.

Now that the series is concluded and he is "kind of over being in front of the camera,"Jamie has been producing a string of novel devices — some for the military, some for private entities, some just for fun. He recently started consulting on 3-D house printing for refugees, as well as working with an aerospace company on cost-reduction strategies for getting things into space. Jamie spends most of his time in his shop, M5 Industries Inc. in San Francisco.