Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man

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Not available in all states or situations. Hi, everyone.
From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Nathan Mirvold, a man of many titles, but when I met him in the 1990s,

he was the chief technology officer at Microsoft, which was a pretty big job.

After leaving Microsoft, he founded two companies that perfectly depict his wide-ranging interests.

Intellectual Ventures, a self-described invention investment fund that blossomed into a multi-billion-dollar firm

that manages a portfolio of patents and helps commercialize inventions.

And Modernist Cuisine, a collective of chefs, scientists, researchers, and photographers

and the into a multi-billion dollar firm that manages a portfolio of patents and helps commercialize inventions. And Modernist Cuisine, a collective of chefs, scientists, researchers, and photographers who are trying to reinvent conventional approaches to food and cooking.
Mierwald enrolled in college at just 14 years old and went on to earn three degrees, a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics, a master's degree in economics, and another master's degree in geophysics and space physics, you know, the easy subjects, before conducting postdoctoral work with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. He's a genius and a true polymath who has done fascinating research into everything from asteroids to dinosaur bones, and it's absolutely impossible to have a boring conversation with him.
And honestly, they're always joyful. I'm so sick of unpleasant techies.
And as you'll find, Nathan is not that. I just really, I want you to remember what some of these techies were like.
And Nathan is not perfect by any stretch, but he is so interesting and so forward thinking and so actually positive. Anyway, it's really fun to talk to him.
Our expert question comes from Dana Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University and the author of Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Let me just say, remembering curiosity is something we should all do, and Nathan does that every day.
By the way, do you have plans for tomorrow, Tuesday, December 3rd? If you're in New York, I hope you'll join me at a live special recording of this very podcast on with Kara Swisher, presented by Elf Cosmetics. To be CEO Anjali Sood and I will be tackling gender disparity in the boardroom and exploring how companies with women in the C-suite have better business outcomes.
I'm really looking forward to this discussion on equality and so much more, including TV, and I don't want you to miss it. For tickets, visit voxmediaevents.com slash elf.
That's voxmediaevents.com slash elf. I hope to see you

there. Now let's get to it.
Welcome, Nathan. Thanks for being on On.
Well, I'm much rather beyond than off. Oh, that's true.
That's fair. I'm thinking of doing another script called Off of people I don't like, but you're not one of those people.
So we have a lot to talk about. You're a man of many things, a renaissance man.
I've had you on stage many times over 30 years, I would say, about. But I'd love you to let me start by getting you to stack rank your current interests based on the amount of time you spend on each one.
Well, it's a little bit like those vaudeville acts where people would spin plates and they'd run to the next plate. So what demands the most attention isn't always necessarily the best.
It's the one that's happening right then because you got to run over. Otherwise, the plate will wobble and break.
All right. So I still run intellectual ventures.
That doesn't take as much of my time anymore. Of the projects that we have there, the one I spend the most time on is one we call deep science, where we are trying to do very, very ambitious scientific things.
Right. So room temperature superconductors, or at least high temperature superconductors are one example.
Explain what that is for the idiots like myself. Well, there's a pretty amazing property of some materials that when you make them extremely cold, they have zero electronic resistivity.
So normally, everything has a resistance to electrical current. The best conductors are things like silver or copper or aluminum.
Even those have a fair amount of resistance. It turns out, though, that if you can put the material into this special quantum state, it has exactly zero resistance.
Oh, so faster movement, less? Well, faster movement, way more efficient movement. Plus, you can do lots of things that are just not possible otherwise.
So at CERN, the big physics experiment in Switzerland, all of the magnets that power that thing are superconducting, but conventional superconductors have to be almost absolute zero. So it's extremely expensive and difficult to set the whole thing up and maintain it.
And so superconductivity is important, but not really mainstream yet. Right.
So if we could increase the temperature at which superconductors work, it could revolutionize all kinds of things. Right.
Right. Because it doesn't require that much, because it's easier to deploy, presumably.
Yes, easier to deploy. And there's no fundamental physics reason why you couldn't deploy superconductors up to room temperature.
In fact, people have made room temperature superconductors of a sort. But that's only when they take a material and they crush it at insanely high pressures.
Well, that's also not very sustainable or very economic. But it proves that there is a configuration of matter that will allow superconductivity even at room temperature.
All right. So, that's one thing.
What else? That's one thing. What's another thing? Dinosaurs.
Yes, of course. I'm doing a lot of dinosaur work.
You never leave dinosaurs, do you? So, well, they had the first laugh and they may have the last laugh. True.
True. So, I've published a couple of dinosaur papers this year.
I'm working on like four papers right now, working on different aspects of things. One of them is on understanding better how T-Rex grew.
Uh-huh. How big did it grow? How quickly did it grow? Why are you interested in that besides making a movie that Steven Spielberg already did? You kind of look like that scientist, by the way, FYI.
Dinosaurs are interesting because they're a fundamental part of our natural world, and they're gone. Right.
And because they're gone, you have to use lots of indirect inferences to figure out what they were like. Right.
You know, if you find a fossil fish, even if it's from 400 million years ago, you pretty much know what the fish did. Right.
Because the fish haven't changed that much in 400 million years. Details change, but the lifestyle is the same.

Well, here you have dinosaurs that exist at a totally different scale than mammals.

The largest of the dinosaurs was probably over 100 tons.

Huge, huge.

Why?

Today we have top tier apex predators like a lion or a tiger, a polar bear. They're puny compared to the apex predators.
Dinosaur would step on them, the dinosaurs. Why? So you want to know why they were.
You have a T-Rex in your house, right? I do. Why? It's not living, right? It's good to call it, did you? Sadly, no.
Well, you'd be dead, Nathan, but go ahead. Getting it shot, getting it a license, it's really hard.
Yeah. I've loved science since I was a little boy.
Yeah. And lots, you know, millions and millions of little boys and girls love dinosaurs.
Right. Paleontologists are people who loved dinosaurs as a child who never grew out of it, basically.
What is the problem that motivates you the most? Dinosaurs, interesting. All this stuff you're doing is interesting.
What is the one that keeps you up at night trying to think of ways to approach a solution? Well, it's a great question because there's two classes of answers you could give.

You could give a class of answer towards the super ambitious thing that might take many years, but we should start on the path today.

Or you can jump on the things which are much closer to fruition. Something that mixes those two is I'm a vice chairman of a company called TerraPower, which is a nuclear power company that I started with Bill Gates and some other folks.
Yeah. We're making great progress there.
Okay. But along the way, we figured out how to use, weirdly, a kind of nuclear waste for a radical new cancer treatment.
And it took multiple years for us to get this developed up to a stage, but it actually was given to patients in clinical trials just a few weeks ago. Okay.
And that has the – when people have worked on this particular line of inquiry for cancer treatment for a very long time. It's called targeted alpha therapy.
The problem is that it involves using a radioactive material, and that radioactive material is very, very difficult to make or obtain. So, Earth didn't have enough doses to ever bring it out in a large scale before, but people still worked on it, thank God.
In the cases where they have tried it, it has been an almost miraculous cure for late stage metastatic cancer. Wow.
Because? Well, what happened? So, you're probably familiar with people use radiation therapy as a way of killing cancer cells. But radiation therapy is very crude.
It produces, it radiates large parts of your body. It gives you terrible side effects.
And you can't use it for extensive metastasis. You can't use it with the cancers all over your body already.
It's only good for a focused spot. Well, somebody had the idea.

If we take a very weak radioactive substance, so it's something called an alpha emitter,

and we attach it to a molecule that will hone and stick onto a cancer cell,

this very weak radioactivity will only kill the cancer cell and won't hurt anything in the outside.

So the very, very best material that people have identified is something called actinium-225. And Earth could only produce a tiny number of doses per year, just ridiculously tiny, not even enough for doing research, much less for treatment.
So at TerraPower, although our main focus is building power power reactors, some of the engineers said, hey, we have this idea. We can make this stuff.
And so we think we'll be able to make at least 300,000 doses a year in a couple of hours. Wow.
So this is an offshoot. A lot of companies are like that, right? Slack was an offshoot of a gaming company, and Twitter was an offshoot of a podcasting company, which people don't realize.
So that's something that's positive for society, this idea. But many years ago, you remember, Walt, when you founded Intellectual Ventures, it's a private equity firm that focuses on creating commercializing inventions.
You got heat, which Walt and you talked about in Code in 2012 about being a patent troll. But explain what you're doing now and why you chose to do this.
Well, we still have some of our patent funds, but they're getting very late in life. Most of what we do now is focused on commercializing our most radical ideas, like this room temperature superconductivity idea.
We have a bunch of ideas for how to improve chip lithography. As you know, there's sort of a worldwide bottleneck on making big, high-performance chips.
Yep. That's part of what makes the NVIDIA chips so insanely valuable.
Well, because they're very hard to make. Right now.
I would say right now. Well, but in order for it to go from beyond right now, we really need, in the short term, I'm sure there'll be competition and there'll be more supply and there'll be a variety of things.
But in the medium to long term, you need to make fundamentally new lithography tools. And that's really hard.
The very latest lithography tools are made by a company called ASML. They do an amazing job.
One of their products must contain half a dozen or maybe a dozen miracles, just things that are beyond all rational belief that you could make work. Right.
That whole line of stuff is at, maybe not at its very end, but it needs some new technology injection, or Moore's Law is not going to continue. And some people say it's already stalled out.
Explain what Moore's Law is for people. So, Moore's Law is the idea that we can continue to make more and more powerful semiconductors or chips at lower and lower costs.
And it's been fantastic. I mean, we've had multiple factors of a million improvement in price performance.
And smaller and faster. Smaller or lower power.
There's a variety of different metrics you can choose to what to do with the technology. Do I make lots of tiny chips to put intelligence everywhere?

Do I make these really big AI chips that are maybe this big

to make large language models?

It's all based on a technological idea that's,

depending on how you look at it, 40 or 50 years old.

And it's getting to a stage where we really need to revitalize it. So we've got a bunch of ideas about that.
Yeah, it's so interesting. I asked you about a problem, you're talking about solutions, which I appreciate.
Let me just say, when I started writing about technology, I was drawn in by the creativity and inventiveness, even if it was crazy, right? That whole think different kind of thing. It feels though that optimism optimism has curdled as I've watched tech oligarchs hoard power and money.
And you're very wealthy, by the way, and even, you know, even help Donald Trump get elected. They've moved to the right.
I have no idea of your politics and I never did. I didn't know Gates's.
Yes. And that's by design because I don't try to focus on it.
That's correct. That's not a problem I can come up with a solution for.
That's correct. That's correct.
There's no great idea that I have today or tomorrow or ever that will fix the political quagmire that we're currently in. Well, good.
When we're done then. So, one of the things I wanted to get from you was like, I liked that.
I'll be honest with you.

I kind of like that because it was interested in the technology itself.

But they've been gravitating towards politics and towards far too much power, the power for power's sake.

Do you agree with that?

I don't even know what you think of this.

How do you look at what the development is?

And I don't think it's a full rightward shift, by the way. I think it's a small group of people who are super loud.
And I don't think it's a full rightward shift, by the way.

I think it's a small group of people who are super loud. And I don't think it's a leftward shift either.
You know what I mean? I never have thought either one of those things was true. Well, I think most people who are successful in the technology industry love innovation and rolling out new products and solving problems for their customers.
Over time, of course, it's been hard to ignore Washington as a tech company because when an industry becomes big enough and important enough, it attracts attention from the government. That can be positive attention or that can be negative attention.
But mostly what government attention to a new area is, is uninformed attention.

And as a result, there was a point where the tech industry didn't pay any attention to politics.

And then there was a point where it was like, oh, shit, if we don't pay attention to it, we're going to get screwed.

Right, which you didn't.

Microsoft did, but nobody else did so far. Right? Well, even Microsoft survived.
That's correct. That's right.
They're bigger than ever. But not for want of trying on the government's part at the time.
For reasons that seem quite quaint. Today.
Right? I mean, well, they particularly seem quaint in the five years after that big event, when all of the focus was on a whole new set of tech titans taking over everything. So why are they so involved in politics now? And do you think that's deleterious? Without any regulation, by the way, there isn't really regulation regulating those tech titans.
Well, but it's very hard for tech not to be involved in government because government's involved in tech. And it has to be involved in tech for a variety of reasons.
Look at the competitiveness of our nation in an economic standpoint or in a defense standpoint or technology or almost any sphere you look at depends on the fact that we have a vital tech industry. That's correct.
Okay, and you and I believe that because we've been involved in this for a long time. Yes.
Not everyone in the country does. Right.
But I think that's super important. So, of course, there's government attention.
So, of course, Microsoft executives and executives from every tech company spend a lot of time in D.C. Right.
Okay, that's different than what's happening now, and it tends to affect the election. Well, look, one of the technologies that tech has been enormous in expanding is communications.
That's right, social media. All communications was technology.
Radio was, telephone, telegraph, but this has expanded it enormously, number one. But it expanded it in a different way than before, so any individual can go out there and tweet or broadcast in one form or another to everyone.

Right.

Well, I think that's created two things.

One is it's created a lot of concern and possible misuse.

It's also created – there's a concept in the law of an attractive nuisance.

If you build a swimming pool in your backyard and you don't put a fence around it and neighborhood kids drown in there, you can be responsible because, damn it, you should have a fence around your swimming pool. Right.
Well, this is like an attractive nuisance in the sense that I think people have become addicted to tweeting and addicted to becoming a public persona. Right.
And now that's not always bad. I mean, people in your business have to be addicted into a public persona.
Right. And now that's not always bad.
I mean, people in your business have to be addicted to a public persona because you're out there asking questions on behalf of the world and making interesting conversations. And journalism is part of that, but it's a path to power and admiration and a whole variety of things.
Now, I don't do that. So I'm only trying to explain the fact that people are addicted to status increasing things.
Why did you resist? You have better ideas than most people, the average Joe. Well, you certainly have better ideas than many of these people, that's for sure.
Have you been surprised by the shift of some tech people into this area? Has this surprised you in any way? I am surprised at how people who have the skills and abilities to actually do something and who got where they are by lots of careful, reasoned, logical, rational thinking have become buffoons online, saying things primarily for its shock value, entertainment value, in a way that—look, Kara, let's make a little pact here. If I ever do that, come and stop me.

I will.

I tried with a number of them.

It didn't work.

It didn't work.

I tried.

Some of them it works.

Some of it works.

Some of it doesn't. This isn't just a tech industry thing.

This is true in all of life.

There's people who love being celebrities.

And it turns out that that's an attractive career path, apparently. even if you're a billionaire tech magnate.
Yes, it does. For some reason, I don't understand.
They should be doing other things, go back to the other things. So one of the things, you mentioned government being a nuisance, essentially, which is a typical, listen, I've heard this a million times, what would you like to see? Because we don't have a privacy bill.
We don't have antitrust regulation. There's no check on a lot of the power, which is something that's unusual for an industry, right? What would you like to see? I don't want to leave the impression I think all government is a nuisance.
In the early stages of government discovering tech, there was a real danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Correct.
With well-meaning people on the other side in government doing a kind of a knee-jerk thing they would normally do. Now, that doesn't mean that the government has no role because government, practically speaking, does have a role.
And that's what you think about us. The fact is there are governments in the world that sponsor state-sponsored hacking and cyber disruption and weapons of all varieties.
So, yeah, you better have the government involved. Right.
But it has to be involved in the right way. And I don't have a particular agenda here where I've, here's my five-point plan.
If I started to say that, I'd probably be going beyond. I try not to ski over the edge of my skis.
You know, if I don't have a remarkably better idea than other people, what's the point of speaking up? Right. Well, that's unusual, Nathan, let me tell you today.
There's a lot of people who do one thing and then they're an expert on another thing that they have nothing to do with. You're more of an expert on a lot of things.
So speaking of that, let's switch gears and talk about the one that's getting the most attention, obviously AI. You were part of ushering in the personal computing revolution, which caused enormous change in the way people use and approach technology.
How do you describe this moment in AI? AI has been around forever. You and I both know this.
It's embedded in everything, but there's a moment right now with computing power, with data. Well, there's a very legitimate moment.
So talk about that. In that people had a variety of ideas about AI based on quite different technological bases.

For example, chess programs is a very longstanding thing in AI.

They've gotten insanely good.

But that technology, when people first developed it,

they thought, oh, this will be good for all parts of reasoning.

We crack chess, we'll have it all done. Well, turns out, no, that's not true.
Machine learning was a different segment, a different technological base for building AI, and it was very effective at doing certain kinds of pattern recognition and signal detection. Right.
But we couldn't do language. We tried.
You know, Microsoft Word is maybe the best there is at a program that can help you organize words. And I hired our first researchers for Microsoft Research.
We're all in natural language understanding and grammar checking So, we made a hell of a grammar checker. We made a variety of things.
Other people did similar things. You still hadn't cracked the language problem.
And what OpenAI did, and I really want to single them out, is that it was a combination of some very old ideas. What makes this important was the discovery that with a large enough corpus of information, a relatively straightforward language system that didn't have hard-coded any aspects of language could figure language out.
With enough data is what you're saying, right? Correct. If I had been on a Nobel Prize committee, I would have given OpenAI the Nobel Prize.
Huh. Because the discovery that that, with enough effort, now, of course, people say, well, they didn't do it alone.
Of course, no Nobel Prize person ever does anything alone. But the proposition, if only we spend $10 billion more, it'll work, is a crazy proposition.

It is.

But God damn it, it worked.

Right.

And so that's of enormous importance.

Now, at the same time, scientific importance, okay?

Noam Chomsky is famous because he helped figure out lots of theoretical aspects of language.

This is an utterly different approach to language.

It's not a human approach.

Right.

This is an utterly different approach to language. It's not a human approach.
Right. This is understanding language in a way that we're still trying to grapple to understand ourselves.
And it's also not very good in a certain sense. You and I learned language without reading every book on Earth.
Right. Nope, not this one.
And it's actually an old idea in AI. There's a researcher named Doug Lanatt.
And we funded him at Microsoft or was one of the funding sources for him. He had several for many years.
And Doug originally was a Stanford professor in AI. And he had this idea that you couldn't actually get reasoning unless you had a critical mass of the world's information.
You had to have it all. Right.
But his idea was to code it all by hand with a bunch of people writing computer programs. And that approach didn't work for a whole variety of reasons.

But a glimmer of his idea actually did work, which is that you did need this critical mass. So I think it's an enormous step forward.
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Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. When it comes to fears around AI, obviously, people are paying attention.
Government is paying attention with job losses, existential fears embraced by people like Elon Musk. You're in the techno-optimist camp, I would say.
You've said you can't find enormous societal upheaval that was caused by the adoption of new technology. I'm not sure that's so true.
The printing press led to witch hunts and the Protestant Reformation. The steam engine led to the Industrial Revolution.
Well, you're Protestant. You said the Reformation was a positive.
Okay, but just those people. I'm not religious, so I won't argue that point.
If you're a woman with the Gutenberg press and the hammer ofes came out, you weren't very happy about that, right? But still upheaval. The combustion engine played a huge role in global warming, right? I'm a Paul Virilio fan, the philosopher, where he says when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck, right? That's how you do it.
Sure. So talk about what's happening here.
Why are you a techno-optimist except saying on the the whole, electricity's been good, and on the whole, cars have been good, right?

Except for blankety-blank, blank, blank. So why are you a techno-optimist?

Well, first, 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.
It's tremendously affected any positive metric of humankind. Right.
But, so 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 a mythical founder, Ned Ludd, who 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. Because it cut jobs.
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. Wow.
No wonder no good shit comes out of Australia. No, oh, my God.

I'm going to get killed.

All right, Thor.

The Hemsworth brothers. People are always, when a new thing comes up, people 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. You know, 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.
I get it. But this is a reductio ad absurdum argument.
You can be worried about AI without being a Luddite, right? Tell me what you're worried about and what's the most positive thing you can think of. Well, to me right now, the worrying technologies are not AI.
The worrying technology is cyber vulnerability as more and more of society gets... Jacked into the system.
And there's huge compelling reasons to jack it 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. You know, 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. Completely porous.
Completely porous. Completely.
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.

Right.

But how should AI be regulated then? How should we be protected in that regard? I agree with you on both. How would you like to see? If Nathan could go in and you could just pick, what would you have happen? 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. Okay? If only that were true.
Okay? There aren't enough damn NVIDIA chips for that to be true. Biden did have a consortium dedicated to AI safety, for example, brought together some smart people and did an executive order that seemed rather benign and basic.
Is there any regulation? What order would you like to see? Because Trump is going to rescind President Biden's executive order on AI, for example. Well, that might occur regardless of what the executive order was about.

Right, that's true.

He's just going to throw it out.

Is there any, so you get together and talk, and then if you could pass one thing, what's the most critical in the area?

Is cybersecurity, you still think?

Well, I think cybersecurity is a much more dangerous thing in the short run than any

AI issues.

Could be.

Okay.

All right.

Massively more.

So Microsoft, you've noted in 1997

that Microsoft has continually reinvented itself,

and that's absolutely true today.

CEO Satya Nadella made big investments in open AI,

making a deal to hire most inflection AI's employees

and bringing in Mustafa Suleiman,

one of the people behind DeepMind.

They're also facing an FTC probe.

Talk about what's going on at Microsoft

from your perspective.

Is this the right way to go about it? 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. Yeah.
And I think it's very clear now that AI is his signature new move. Correct.
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 DeepMind 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, it just makes you distracted.
But 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.
Right. 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.
Right. Let me ask you about that.
I want to move very quickly through a bunch of things. So one of the things is you're big on nuclear power.
I've talked to Bill about this quite a bit, Bill Gates. AI is going to need an enormous amount of energy.
Talk a little bit about where we're going. Obviously, Trump has called climate change a hoax.
He recently named an oil and gas CEO as his pick for energy secretary. We need real innovation in this area.
And this is something that's being done privately, I think, all over nuclear innovation, I think most of all. Talk a little bit about what you think.
You've researched intellectual ventures,, geoengineering ideas, like solar-related intervention, direct air capture. Where do you think the most important area is? I think nuclear would be my answer for you, but I don't know.
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 chatbots to talk to and do AI stuff for us.

Among others. 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.

Yeah.

And so those guys will spend a lot of money trying to have some angle on AI.

Right.

But it turns out most of the world doesn't have our level of power today. 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, 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 primary energy in the next 50 years as we do now, at least five times. And you could argue it's higher because, of course, we're not satisfied.
We're going to restart nuclear power plants just to run data centers. Yeah, you're doing one in Wyoming, correct? We're building two in Wyoming in principle.
One will come first. So that's one side.
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. You know, 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. Right.

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, but it emits fossil carbon.
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 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 then we've had a whole bunch of other setbacks. Right.
Germany spent $300 billion building renewables over like a 20-some year period, and their net carbon emissions went up. And they went up because they decided to turn off the nuclear reactors.
Right. So you think that's the biggest solution? No, 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 the 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.
You know, we put it there. Let's take it back out.
That has some fundamental difficulties, but we absolutely should research it. They're skeptical because this one weird trick thing makes people nervous.
Mostly it's because the people who are against research in this area don't want there to be an alternative. 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.
So every episode, we get an expert to send us a question. Let's hear yours.
Hi, I'm Dana Fisher, the director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University and the author of Saving Ourselves, From Climate Shocks to Climate Action. The big question I would ask is that you tell us more about how you integrate and think about the potential negative consequences of the technologies you are developing when you look at the feasibility of the technologies you're investing in to address climate change.
I'm particularly thinking here about how it might affect public health, how it might affect social systems, and how it might affect the natural environment more broadly. There's a lot of research that questions the environmental effects of different types of geoengineering techniques.
For example, techniques that simulate volcanic activity are found to cause substantial air pollution, lead to more acid rain, and increase asthma rates. Thank you so much.
I think that's a genuine question. Oh, it's a genuine question.
So answer that. It's a question that is mostly, I'm sure that the person asking it was completely genuine.
There are people who say 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. 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, 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.

We'll be back in a minute. Last week was our first playoff game, and my plexoriasis was so itchy under all my gear.
Sometimes just thinking about scratching could take me out of the moment. And then my doctor told me I could get clearer skin with a pill called Otesla.
Otesla apremolast is a prescription medicine used to treat adult patients with plaque psoriasis for whom phototherapy or systemic therapy is appropriate. Otesla can help you get clearer skin after just four months.
Okay, ready for the next game. Talking to my doctor about a pill was a total game changer.
Don't use Otesla if you're allergic to it. Get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing or swallowing, swelling of the face, lips, tongue, throat, or arms.
Severe diarrhea, nausea or vomiting, depression, suicidal thoughts, or weight loss can happen. Tell your doctor if any of these occur and if you have a history of depression or suicidal thoughts.

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I'm Claire Parker.

I'm Ashley Hamilton.

And this is Celebrity Memoir Book Club.

And we're thinking like monks this week.

If you've ever thought Kevin O'Leary,

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Headspace, those are men that are very, very monk-like. Oh boy, does Jay Shetty have the book for you.
He's written a book that tells you how to use your monk mind to become more like a billionaire monk. Pulling from three highly disputed years at an ashram, he's telling you stories of like when he was in eighth grade and got a bad grade on a test.
And how that was scary. And how now he knows Will Smith.
And if you want to reach your higher self, the billionaire version of you, think like a monk. Or listen to this week's episode of Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
Out now. Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left.
The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations. It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left.
But enough about Joe. We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude.
So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch. At least the only one who talks about politics all day.
What's going on, everybody? I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening, afternoon, prenew, no matter where you go. They want his co-sign.
They want his endorsement because he's young and he reaches millions of young people streaming on YouTube, TikTok, and especially Twitch. But last week he was streaming us.
Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like, hey, you should come on the show if you're listening. I was like, oops, caught.
You're a listener. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, I am. Yeah.
Thank you for listening. Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hassan Piker explain himself.
Okay, I want to spend, we only have a little more time, the rest of it I'm talking about your three favorite research topics, asteroids, dinosaur, and food. We want to get to food.
Very quickly, you came to the Code Conference in 2016. You did an entire presentation called Envisioning the End of the World, which was terrific.
It was about the next big asteroid that will eventually hit Earth, and you've been critical of NASA's knowledge and analysis of asteroids. NASA folks said your argument oversimplifies that you know the back and forth.
Where are we now with the asteroids? Okay, so first of all, although NASA said I was wrong, of course, they tried the, 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. Okay.
And that's utterly been proven since then. All right, asteroids.
Let's get to asteroids. I've done a bunch of other asteroid research.
Yeah. And I'm continuing to do 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.
It's a telescope that's fundamentally built to find broad scale things. So most telescopes are 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. Yeah, I saw that movie, you know, Nathan.
It's with my favorite actress, Taya Leone. It didn't end well.
It didn't. Well, it sort of did for some people.
Well, not for Taya. Well, all right.
Okay. Morgan Freeman was president.
You gotta love that. That would be great.
And he led the country out of disaster. And maybe you could be optimistic.
So you're like, it could happen and it'll be bad, people. So just remember that.
So dinosaur research in 2022 and 23, you published two papers about the Spinosaurus claiming to show that Spinosaurus did not swim, which goes against previous research you'd done on this specific dinosaur. What's the most interesting dinosaur thing you've done recently? Well, the one I'm most interested in is whatever I'm working on at the moment.
And the Spinosaurus 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.
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

I don'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 seal or an otter. So the Loch Ness Monster, but go ahead.
Yeah, it would swim, and it would catch fish, and it would dive, and it was an active predator in the water, the way a seal or an 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. So, 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. The sail is created by bones that come up from each vertebrae in the back.
And those vertebraes are taller than you and me. Right.
They're an enormous long thing. and basically when you 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.
Right. 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.
Because it didn't have a keel. No keel.
Anyway, so that was interesting. The thing that we really don't have enough for Spinosaurus is enough new specimens.
Right. 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 specimen. A different species, but a brand new thing.
So that's exciting. Okay.
I'm going to finish up talking about two things. Cooking.
I'm sorry I just got to it, but you're so fascinating. I love talking to you.
You reinvent food and photograph it. You approach it like a scientist.
You're quite good at it. You sent me a beautiful book of food photography.
It's gorgeous. A food writer at the Wall Street Journal once called Eating One of Your 30-Course Dinners the Most Exciting Meal of Her Life.
You haven't invited me yet, Nathan, but I won't be angry. You published your five-volume, 2,400-page cookbook in 2011.
You were using techniques that were novel at the time, like sous vide. I remember you're the first person who talked to me about sous vide.
Now, everyone's a foodie. What's the biggest change in how Americans cook food right now from your perspective, given you were out front of this stuff? Well, 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. You know, 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.
Right. And it's the same reason the United States is the world's center of basketball.
We care about basketball. What care about means is everything from little boys and girls want to play basketball to people want to be fans of basketball.
We support it. There's a huge economic engine.
This whole thing means we have great basketball. Well, you can't have good food if you don't demand it.
Right. You know, 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. But the primary way you fix our food system is by people demanding better food.
Right. And you can see this happening in things like coffee.
You know, coffee used to be this five or 10 cent thing that wasn't very good. You know, at home, it was, you had a choice of Maxwell's or Folgers.
That was it. Do you remember the way you came back? That's what mom used to make.
Not just that, but you remember the granules that you put in water? Yes. The freeze-dried, taster's choice granules, which still exist.

Yeah, it does.

And if you're in a hurry, it's better than nothing.

No, don't do it.

But chocolate and coffee and wine has been this way for a long time.

There was 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.
Right. 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, you know, the fantastic Bay Area Bakery Tartine is a good example.
But there's many other great bakeries that create incredible new breads, and you see people supporting it. But ultimately, it's not, oh yeah, Chad at Tartine is the one who makes the great breads.
The people who create the demand for the great breads are the ones who line up in front of Tartine to buy the bread. Right.
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 not be a passing fad.
It's not like bell bottoms or hush puppies. This is something where people 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. Well, what's the weirdest thing you're seeing in food? A tool? What's the weirdest tool you're seeing right now or an underrated? Well, TikTok.
TikTok. 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. TikTok, 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.
Yeah, it's true. You know what I just saw yesterday? Today? No, today.
They took an egg, they put it in a bowl, they opened the yolk up and put meat inside it. Like they put a version of meat, it must have been chicken or pork, I don't know what it was, and then they closed the egg and put it in a fryer, and then the egg was fried up and the meat was inside.
It was so cool, and it was on top. Yes.
Okay, so this is a perfect example. I'm not sure what you'd call that.
It's somebody's creative idea. Yeah.
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. Yeah.
But that outreach that allows innovation to spread around the world is fantastic.

So that's your next book?

And the great thing about TikTok Foods?

Is that your next book on food?

Weird.

What is it?

No, my next book on food is Pastry.

Pastry.

That's so scientific.

That's so scientific.

We are baking a ridiculous numbers of cakes and making cookies and meringue up the wazoo.

All right.

Very quickly, what's the insight so far?

That cookies taste delicious?

As we've found with other things, a lot of conventional culinary wisdom is just wrong.

Oh.

Because it hasn't really been tested very well.

Oh, no.

And there are lots of new ideas and lots of new possibilities.

So if you love pastry—

What's the one that's wrong?

Oh, you're going to drive bakers crazy. What is it? Frank Shaw is

going to lose his mind. What is the one thing, just very briefly?

In our bread book, you know, Modernist Bread at Home was one of our most recent books. In our

bread book, we discovered that kneading or dough doesn't work at all like anyone says it does. Oh.
It's all a fraud. So Nona was wrong.
Interesting. Well, I still knead 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.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

You know, we also found out how to make fluffy 100% rye breads.

Oh, not thick.

Germany, Austria, a few other countries in Europe could make fluffy rye breads.

In the United States, the only way you could make a fluffy rye bread was to have a bread that was mostly wheat flour and you added 15% maybe of rye. Oh, it's, yeah.
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 in the United States, millions of Americans who've been in Germany.
It is their thing, like hot dogs. They're so much better at hot dogs than here.
They are. They are.
All right, I have one last question because I've got to go. There's no obvious connection between geoengineering, asteroid sizes, cooking, the density of dinosaur bones, everything here.
It's clear as you're pushing back against accepted truths. That's what you just said.
You're just, rye bread is right now, your interest, or kneading, or whatever. I'd really like, in a very short way, if you can do it, connect the dots.
I think one of the reasons I wanted to have you is because I'm so sick of toxic tech people. I'm so sick of Elon Musk.
I'm so sick of his stupid ideas on things he doesn't know about. Explain to us, what's the process that leads you to see things differently, which is always a good thing if it's not toxic? So very briefly, tell me what that is.
I'm 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.
And you've done well with that. You've done well.
I did, but it was really contrary to my nature. You know, 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, I try to learn as much as I possibly can.
And then I try to test that knowledge by saying, well, if that's true, then we ought to be able to do this. And 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. 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.
Ah, yes. It's false.
It's just straight up false. And that's not because of some high-tech gadget I have.
No, what we did was we made, 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 and 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. Which is called curiosity.
That's what that's called. And it's been lost in a lot of people.
It's got a drawback, which is my friends in any one area don't understand why I waste time on all the others. You know, my dinosaur friends are like, what are you doing What the food? What's up with this cookbook stuff? Why are you making meringues, Nathan? What the fuck? Let me ask you one very brief question.
I believe that you own, you take beautiful photography, by the way, food photography, which is worth looking at. You have your own wine catapult to get some of the shots.
Is that correct? How many wine glasses have you broken exactly? Oh, we've 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 of 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.
And the robots are ways that you can do a particular action repeatedly. Right.
So for bumping wine glasses together or for making wine glasses go over, we made a catapult system that 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, you know, 175 milliseconds after we trigger.
And so that's when we set up the camera to take the picture. Or sometimes

you have a

beam break

thing. You have an

invisible laser where if it breaks the beam, the picture gets taken. And so we've made a whole bunch of these robots.
There's a technique in France called sabering to open up a bottle of champagne. It's you take a sword, or actually a big chef's knife works.
You use the back end of the chef's knife, the 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.
Well, not the worst thing in life. And so then I told the people who were assisting me on this, we've got to 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 reek of the stuff.
All right. I'm going to end on that note.
Okay. He's not drunk, but he's covered with champagne.
That is a perfect ending to Nathan Mirafold. Nathan, thank you so much.
You're just what I needed. Okay.
Well, thank you, Karen. I really appreciate it.
Your optimism is really infectious in many ways, and I appreciate it. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch.
Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Special thanks to Kate Gallagher.

Our engineers are Aaliyah Jackson, Rick Kwan, and Fernando Arruda,

and our theme music is by Trackademics.

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