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

Nathan Myhrvold

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" 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. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months. "

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

" 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

" 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

" Life has not been boring for me. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? "

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

" Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present. "

Nathan Myhrvold

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Nathan Myhrvold

" My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before. "

Nathan Myhrvold

" If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release! "

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

" 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