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. – Nathan Myhrvold
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.’ – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
If people don’t find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It’s what I did with my cookbook, frankly. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain ‘We’re gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.’ – Nathan Myhrvold
Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free. – Nathan Myhrvold
An efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job. – Nathan Myhrvold
Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates’ relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive – and human knowledge would suffer terribly. – Nathan Myhrvold
The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our ‘leaders’ are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth. – Nathan Myhrvold
Nuclear energy is a baseload – meaning it’s power that you can run any time you want, day or night – and carbon-free. – Nathan Myhrvold
Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government’s ‘output?’ – Nathan Myhrvold
Risk is the sort of word that is easy to discuss upfront but tough to handle when it comes time to pay the piper. There will always be some who wimp out and second-guess when the pain hits, but that is a childish reaction. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn’t because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil. – Nathan Myhrvold
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. – Nathan Myhrvold
What you do on a dinosaur expedition is you hike and look at the ground. You find bones sticking out of the dirt and, once you see something, you dig. – Nathan Myhrvold
The simplest fix for better grilling is to line the inside of your barbecue with tin foil. It dramatically affects how evenly the heat is distributed. That crusty black hibachi or Weber grill is doing your food no favors. – Nathan Myhrvold
It’s impossible that we’re alone in the universe. Every time we think we’re more special than others, we’re proven wrong. – Nathan Myhrvold
When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I’d love to say it all turned out great. It didn’t. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it. – Nathan Myhrvold
Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways. – Nathan Myhrvold