Top 90 Nathan Myhrvold Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

2. “Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!”

— Nathan Myhrvold

3. “Software sucks because users demand it to.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

4. “Don’t let the secret recipe die with the inventor.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

5. “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

6. “If you talk about sous-vide, then you have to talk about food safety, and microbiology, and heat.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

7. “The NeXT purchase is too little too late. Apple is already dead.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

8. “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

9. “Bill, we left megalomania behind a long time ago. Now we are gigalomaniacs.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

10. “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

11. “Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

13. “The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

14. “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

15. “Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

16. “There’s no way I’m going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It’s a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

17. “If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

18. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

19. “Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

20. “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

21. “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?”

— Nathan Myhrvold

22. “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

23. “If you take a scotch whiskey and distill out the alcohol, what is left has an amazing taste to it and can be used as a flavoring for a dessert.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

24. “I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

25. “It’s always easier to be a critic than a creator.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

29. “With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother’s recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?”

— Nathan Myhrvold

30. “By burning nuclear waste as fuel, we believe we can power the United States cleanly for hundreds of years without ever touching new resources.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

31. “The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users; every time they get more powerful, old customers upgrade.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

32. “Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

34. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

35. “When we first did ‘Modernist Cuisine,’ I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, ‘This is insane.’”

— Nathan Myhrvold

36. “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

37. “Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of ‘Star Trek’ or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

38. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

39. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

40. “Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

41. “Politicians don’t like to face unpleasant realities. In truth, nobody does, but as individuals, we have no choice; if we neglect to plan ahead, we are held accountable. Fail to meet your responsibilities at work, and you get fired. Ignore your car’s gas gauge, and you get stranded.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

42. “Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

43. “It is better to predict dramatic things that don’t happen than boring things that do.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

44. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

45. “People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it’s also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald’s, Applebee’s and the like.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

46. “One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

47. “The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore’s Law possible: ‘If we hadn’t brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?’”

— Nathan Myhrvold

48. “I was good at math and science, and I got lots of degrees in lots of things, but in a parallel universe, I probably became a chef.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

49. “Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary’s ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

50. “One of the problems with posing a ‘bold new plan’ is that you can’t just extrapolate from previous plans.”

— Nathan Myhrvold