Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it.

We should have more invention.

The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.

The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company’s stock won’t rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

A blowtorch is a wonderful thing. You can get one of those for about 25 bucks at Home Depot. And there’s a ton of things that you can use a blowtorch for, in browning a steak or touching up the browning of a chicken or making creme brulee.

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

If you have two steaks, one that’s an inch thick, one that’s 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It’s four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don’t tell you that?

For relatively modest amounts of sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere, you could easily cool Earth by 1% or more, if you want.

We pay for content that we like, and we like the content we pay for. It’s a lot more satisfying to pay $7.50 for Steven Spielberg’s next epic than it is to watch my home movies for free. Even for me.

Mankind is not special by virtue of our address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated here. Slowly, but surely, we’ve been compelled to renounce the comfort of these beliefs.

If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do… We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things.

I’ve never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it… Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.

Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that’s what it is. It’s horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don’t get any erosion, and you don’t see any dinosaurs.

Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It’s the reactor of your dreams.

Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.

Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren’t very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it’s about stock options.

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat – and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented – putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.

An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job.

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.

No CEO ever says, ‘Damnit, we need to increase research!’ I want to encourage them to do that.

I’ve been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue’s interesting, because it’s one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to – there’s tremendous traditions; there’s secrecy.

Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There’s no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what’s available.

It’s very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable – broadly, that’s a good thing – in the case of patents, many that own them aren’t in a good position to take the next step.

In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the ‘Wall Street Journal’ took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.

A person’s basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.

The first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It’s like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up.

The magic words ‘on the Internet,’ if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.

In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.

We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program – Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers – look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration.

Records were replaced by CDs, and lead type died in favor of computerized fonts. However, each had a 100-year ride of popularity, so you can’t feel too bad for them.

If people don’t get paid for their inventions, that’s not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren’t in a position to take them to the next level. If you don’t enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.

Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: ‘Dad, how could this be true? You’re not even the most feared person in this house.’

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.

Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They’re doing what I’m doing!

Chefs think about what it’s like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll.

Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them.

Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it’s a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won’t mix with it. And then there’s how much energy it takes to heat water.

The idea behind a dish – the delight and the surprise – makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn’t just ‘Here’s the facts – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.’ It’s how you tell it.

It’s impossible that we’re alone in the universe. Every time we think we’re more special than others, we’re proven wrong.

If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!

If you had a really good – battery, it wouldn’t matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale.

Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn’t seen before. So, I had this idea of… let’s cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven.

Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft.

Regardless of how it’s done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you’re in the transaction business. They’re wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane – it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.