Top 90 Nathan Myhrvold Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

55. “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

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

57. “Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn’t make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

58. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

59. “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

60. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

61. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

62. “Technological ‘revolutions’ don’t really overthrow anything – they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

64. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

65. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

66. “Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie ‘Contact,’ which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

67. “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

68. “The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They’re both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they’re both enormously valuable.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

69. “My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

70. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

71. “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

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

— Nathan Myhrvold

73. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

74. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

75. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

76. “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

77. “If I want popularity, I go to a chef’s convention.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

78. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

79. “The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

80. “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.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn’t give a damn about patents – they copied each other willy-nilly.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

89. “Researchers who examined the voting records of wine judges found that 90 percent of the time they give inconsistent ratings to a particular wine when they judge it on multiple occasions.”

— Nathan Myhrvold

90. “I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience.”

— Nathan Myhrvold