YouSaid · the spoken record

Nathan Myhrvold

lines on the record: 78
first: 2024-12-02
most recent: 2024-12-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so then I told the people who were assisting me on this. We gotta drive really slow on the way home because if we get pulled over, they're not going to believe the breathalyzer that we haven't drunk any because we're weak of the stuff”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we've made a whole bunch of these robots. There's a technique in France called sabering. Open up a bottle of champagne, you take a sword. Actually, big chef's knife works. You use the back end of the chef's knife. Dull part. And you whack the end of the champagne bottle and it cleanly breaks off and it goes flying. And you have this broken bottle, but cleanly broken around the edge. So we made a sabering robot and we sabered like 100 bottles of champagne to get a couple of perfect shots. The problem with those shots is you wind up at the end of the day being soaked in champagne in that case.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always broken a lot of wine glasses. So one of the shots that's fun to make is what we call a splash shot. So, this is when you take very high speed photography. Wine spilling or glasses colliding. And it turns out the way we do those, other people might have a different method, is we tend to build robots. The robots are ways that you can do a particular action repeatedly. So, for bumping wine glasses together, or for making one glass to go over, we made a catapult system. Could be electronically triggered. So that we can say, okay, we trigger it now. And then after doing a test, we know the wine glass will be right here at 175 milliseconds after we trigger. And so that's when we set up the camera to take the picture. Sometimes you have a beam break thing. You have an invisible laser where if it breaks the beam, the picture gets taken.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's got a drawback, which is my friends in any one area. Don't understand why I waste time or all the My dinosaur friends”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's even books that say you should take alcohol and clean the inside of your bowl because you'll never be able to make a good meringue without it. He just straight up falls. And that's not because of some high tech gadget I have. No, what we did is we tried it. So then, as you build more confidence and you do more tests and you develop more theory, then you look at things, you say, well, wait a minute. I don't care if you're an authority and you say this, but if we try it, it isn't true. And it's by this careful building a set of verifiable facts. That I can have confidence to sometimes say, Oh, yeah, all the king's horses and all the king's men are wrong about this. That's just not how it works. And by the way, here's the simple proof that that's why it works. So explain this away if you think I'm wrong”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, but it was really contrary to my nature. If I really had as much single-minded focus as, say, my friend Bill, Bill Gates, you know, sometimes I think, hey, maybe I might have amounted to something. I could have been successful. But I'll get interested in the topic, and I go in very humble. I don't go in saying, oh, NASA's all wrong about asteroids or needing is all wrong. I go in and I try to learn as much as I possibly can. I try to test that knowledge by saying, well, if that's true, then we ought to be able to do this. Often, but not always, that involves doing scientific experiments. Although scientific experiments really means being logical and rational in some way. Hey, you say that works? Try it. Like, there's all these people that say if even a drop of egg yolk gets into your egg whites, you can't beat them.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interested in lots of stuff. And it's almost a liability because the world generally rewards you for being really great at a narrow subject and being the master of that subject.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why it took us, you know, in the 21st century to figure out how to make rye breads. As well as in Germany, I don't know. It's not like Germany is a distant land. No. There's millions of Germans.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“United States, the only way you can make a fluffy rye bread was to have a bread that was mostly wheat floured. You added a 15% maybe of rye.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also found out how to make fluffy 100% rye breads. Germany, Austria, a few other countries in Europe could make fluffy rye breads.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it still is, we still, I still need a lot of bread that I make, and we're not saying it's a bad thing to do, but it does a different thing than was explained.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is the one thing? Well, in our bread book, Monarch Bread at Home is one of our most recent books. In our bread book, we discovered that needing. Doesn't work at all like anyone says it does. All a fraud”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we've found with other things, a lot of conventional culinary wisdom is just wrong. Because it hasn't really been tested very well. And there are lots of new ideas and lots of new possibilities. So if you love...”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Okay, so this is a perfect example. I'm not sure what you'd call that. It's somebody's creative idea. It may be something that we're all eating for the next 20 years, or it could be it has its 15 minutes of fame today. That outreach that allows innovation to spread around the world is fantastic.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a sense. So TikTok is a YouTube is a fantastic repository of culinary knowledge and techniques if you have the patience to watch the videos, but they tend to be longer form. If you have the proverbial one weird trick or a little technique or idea, that has accelerated the rate at which people take those ideas and spread them around”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not be a passing fad. It's not like bell bottoms or hush puppies. This is something where people will can identify through food. And many parts of the world have done this for a long time, but America was more about convenience with fast food, which is still an important thing. I'm not saying fast food is evil. People who demonize fast food and say, oh, you should always have a slow-cooked dinner that you slaved over.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you see people supporting it. But ultimately, it's not, oh yeah, Chad and Tartine is the one who makes the great breads. The people who create the demand for the great breads, the ones who line up in front of Tartine to buy the bread Because if you're not willing to spend a little bit more money or a little bit more trouble or a little bit more something, it goes nowhere. And so I'm very encouraged that we have seen the foodie phenomenon.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But chocolate and coffee and wine has been this way for a long time. People developed an interest. And then once you've developed an interest, almost any restaurant you go to that has wine will have a wine list with wines from all over the world and you have your choice. And that's increasingly true for other things, but it's not true yet for bread, for example. Bread is made of flour. The world went on this holy war to make bread and flour cheap. Oh my god, did we ever succeed? We made bread super cheap. But in doing so, you also made it all of average quality. And so that's why there's people, the fantastic Bay Area Bakery Tartine is a good example, but there's many other great bakeries that create incredible new breads.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The primary way you fix our prude system is by people demanding better food. And you can see this happening in things like coffee. You know, coffee used to be this 5 or 10 cent thing that wasn't very good. At home, you had a choice of Maxwell's or Folgers. That was it”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the biggest change is more of cultural than technological. It's that people identify as being a foodie. That we care about food. For a long time, France was the center of the world's gastronomy. And it was for a central reason. The French culturally cared about food And it's the same reason the United States is the World Center of Basketball. We care about basketball. What care about means is everything from little boys and girls want to play basketball. People want to be fans of basketball. We support it. There's a huge economic engine. This whole thing means we've great basketball. Well, you can't have good food if you don't demand it. A lot of people whine about the American food system And I think there are lots of our aspects of our food system that are out of whack.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No keel. Anyway, so that was interesting. The thing that we really don't have enough for spinosaurs is enough new specimens. But at a conference just... A couple weeks ago, there was a dramatic new announcement, and I was part of that paper also, although my role wasn't a very dramatic one, of a brand new spinosaurus. But a brand new thing. So that's exciting.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, unfortunately, spinosaurus was a lot like that Bayesian boat in that with that big sail there, we showed that it really couldn't have swum. It would follow.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it would swim and it would catch fish and it would dive and it was an active predator in the water. Way a sealer and otter would be for the 2014 paper. I had shown this was very unlikely or impossible, but that was right before we were submitting. We didn't have time to submit it as part of the paper. So we left that as a later thing. We wound up trying to show that in fact spinosaurus couldn't swim. And it couldn't swim for a very simple reason, which is Spinosaurus has a huge sail on the back of its back. Sale is created by bones that come up from each vertebrae in the back. And those vertebraes are taller than you and me. There are enormous long things. And basically when you get in the water, if you have a big thing up here that's heavy, you'll fall over. Okay, sailboats need a keel to prevent falling over.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the one I'm most interested in is whatever I'm working on at the moment is cool because it's a huge predatory dinosaur roughly the same size as T-Rex, some people would argue larger. It's a dinosaur we know very little about because we have very few specimens. The first specimen was found by a German paleontologist in 1915. It was only partial. It was destroyed in World War II. We had no specimen until 2014 when there was a landmark paper. I was one of the authors of the paper discovering this new specimen. In 2018, a group which I wasn't part of said, hey, this thing was like a seal. It was a semi-aquatic dinosaur, like a seal or an otter. Of course, it's still huge, so much bigger than a sealer and otter.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, okay, Morgan Friedman was president. You gotta love that. That would be great. And he led the country out of disaster. And maybe you could be optimistic.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a telescope that's fundamentally built to find broad scale things. So most telescopes like a telephoto lens, you're zoomed in on one little spot in the sky. This is the world's first huge telescope that's a wide angle lens. So you can take pictures of the whole sky. And so that has been under construction. It'll get turned on soon. I don't know exactly when. We're going to find millions more asteroids. And I think that will allow us to make the world a safer place because there is a low probability, but very bad event that could occur.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've done a bunch of other asteroid research And I'm continuing to asteroid research. We have published a bunch of papers learning all kinds of new things about asteroids. But the really most dramatic thing is about to happen, which is there's a telescope being built in Chile. The observatory is called the Vera Rubin Observatory. That telescope is going to find literally millions of asteroids.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so first of all, although NASA said I was wrong, of course, it's not all of NASA. There were some people at NASA, and they got the control of the PR machine of NASA. It turns out they were completely wrong. And that's utterly been proven since then.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're willing to take a risk at something. And so, really, that's the context in which you have to look at it. If climate change is a little problem, we shouldn't worry too much about how to fix it. If climate change is an existential problem, as many people say, and they have good reason to say it, it's not just complete bullshit. You can assess the probabilities differently, but we should do research. Doing research, if you feel threatened by us knowing more, then I don't have much use for that approach. Because it's by knowing more that we've gotten all of the good things that we have.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who says they raise scare tactics about any new thing. But I'm not talking about deploying it. I think we should research it. And that research should include the negative aspects. Unfortunately, the way you have to weigh those negative aspects is against what? If you weigh it against what's currently happening in our world, you have one answer. And why would you mess with the climate when things aren't that bad yet? On the other hand, if you say we're going to go through a tipping point and all of Earth will be disrupted and billions of people will die, then you might say, you know.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The genuine question is a question that is mostly, I don't, I'm sure that the person asking it was completely genuine. There are people who”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly it's because people, the people who are against research in this area don't want there to be an alternative. They want you to, they want to, it's very much like a fire and brimstone preacher telling you you have to do the things they say and not do the things they tell you not to do. Otherwise, you'll burn in hell forever. And if someone comes up and says, well, actually, maybe you won't burn in hell forever, it dilutes the message.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one thing. But what happens currently because we're doing nothing. What happens if the climate really does get bad? Now This is a very controversial area because if people, there's a set of people who are activists for climate change that are really activists for something else and they're using climate change as their stocking horse to try to get Other policy things that they want. If, in fact, we get to a bad situation, can we do something about it? Can we fix the problem with more technology? And the answer is yes, there's the possibility we can. Now, it's not a sure thing. But there's a possibility that we can, and that's called geoengineering, and there's a variety of different ways to do that. One of the ways to do that would be to suck the CO2 right back out of the air. We put it there. Let's take it back out.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Except for that. Now, the other approach is to say, look, currently the world's doing nothing about climate change to first order approximation. And the concrete measure of that is at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, they measure CO2 every year. They measure it in other places, but that's the gold standard because they've been doing it now for a very long time. And the rate has changed occasionally. The pandemic changed the rate a bit. It keeps going up. We haven't done shit for it. And you say, oh, but what about all the renewables? Well, yes, we've had a bunch of renewables, but we've had a whole bunch of other setbacks. Germany spent $300 billion building renewables over like a 20-some period period. And their net carbon emissions went up. And they went up because they decided to turn off the nuclear reactors.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're building two in Wyoming in principle. One will come first. So that's one side is to say how do we supply that energy? And I think nuclear is absolutely part of the mix. Nuclear has a lot of properties that renewables don't have. Renewables could be called unreliables. The sun goes down every day and the wind stops blowing even in windy places. So you need to have some baseload power. If batteries were perfect, we wouldn't Batteries are way far from perfect Particularly if you compare it to the cost of just burning natural gas, which is why Utilities burn natural gas. It's way, way cheaper. It's very simple. It's effective.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, the world average is four or five times less than America in terms of its energy usage per capita. But it's growing. They all want to get there. And they want to get there not for running AI chatbots. They want to have their houses be hot in the warm in the winter and cold in the summer and they want all the other good things of life that we take for granted because most of the world has a much lower standard of living and by most of the world i mean population wise so we're going to need to generate something like five times as much uh primary energy uh in the next 50 years as we do now at least five times and and you could argue is higher because of course we're not satisfied we're gonna restart nuclear power plants just to run Data centers.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or you could take a different lens on it and say you're a trillion dollar market cap company that needs to justify why you need to exist. And so those guys will spend a lot of money trying to have some angle on AI. It turns out most of the world doesn't have our level of power today.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's two sides to this. One is to say, how do we supply the energy that we need? And we're going to need more. Now, in the United States, we're going to say we need more because we want more chat bots to talk to and to do AI stuff for us.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes you distract. Microsoft had a lot of AI projects internally also. At the time they did the first deal with OpenAI. And that took an enormous amount of courage to bet on that. Analogous to, different then, but analogous to how Bill made this big bet on graphical user interface at a stage when the industry was very, very character mode oriented. That's where all the money was. He bet on it big. And that worked. I think Satya's bet is already working and will continue to work. That doesn't mean they'll be the only company in AI, though, because there's an awful lot of ways to apply these ideas. At the moment, AI is mostly a tremendous amount of potential. Looking to be harnessed.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's something that happened despite Microsoft not having some overwhelming lead there. I think most people would have handicapped Google as being further along because they had deep mind and Google Brain and maybe a dozen other projects. Now, if you understand technical numbers, you'd say actually a dozen projects doesn't make you first. No.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think my hat's certainly off to Satya. He's done an amazing job. You know, for the first few years, Satya also did an amazing job, but there wasn't a single signature technology that you could say, ah, yes, that's like the equivalent of graphical user interface. And I think it's very clear now that AI is his signature new move.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That might occur regardless of what the executive order was about. Right, that's true. He was just going to throw it out.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would try to have some very thoughtful people come together to discuss this and have some discussion and debate about it. It's not going to take over Earth by next Thursday, I promise. If only that were true. Okay, there aren't enough damn NVIDIA chips for that to be true.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely porous! And the time will come when that will be shown to the world to be a very dangerous thing, not because technology itself is awful, but we still have people that have bad intentions.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's huge compelling reasons to jacket into the system. That's why it's happening. But at the same time, because we don't have very fundamental security things figured out very well, nor does the government police those things very well. There's all of this political hoopla at the moment about our border and securing our border. Let me tell you, without making any positive or negative comment about the physical border and the immigration issue? Our digital border is completely porous.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to me right now, the worrying technologies are not AI. The worrying technology is cyber vulnerability is more and more of society gets”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People of envision scenarios like, oh my God, there'll be all this job loss. And they do a very poor job of both envisioning what the positives will be. Or even how the whole system will interact. So the tech industry had people terrified that we were going to lose white-collar jobs and clerical jobs. We have not lost those jobs. Those jobs have become more efficient. The jobs have changed. And thank God we changed with them because if you still had a society that was running on little slips of paper, it would be way less efficient. I get it.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, oh my God, I'm going to get killed. All right, Thor. So The Hemsworth brothers. People are always, when a new thing comes up.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because stocking frames were going to destroy the weaving industry and they burned factories, they destroyed stocking frames. Parliament in England was so outraged that they made destruction of a stocking frame a capital offense. And weirdly, most of the people sent to Australia to prison there were sent there because they were Luddites that were convicted of messing with stocking frames.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first, you know, I think that a reasonable assessment of almost any broad new technology or old technology for that matter, the good outnumbers the bad by such an enormous margin That just saying, oh, yeah, on the whole, electricity was good. Well, you can be electrocuted, but it was a good thing. At home, I've got a collection of different technological gizmos. And one of those gizmos is this hoop that has a bunch of wires that comes out of it. It's called a stocking frame. And the stocking frame was invented to make knitting stockings faster. And this is in the 19th century. And the Luddites were a group led by mythical founder Ned Ludd, who was a Didn't really exist, but they were afraid of retribution, so they invented someone you couldn't actually send a drone after. They were mad about stocking frames.”
2024-12-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT