Nathan Myhrvold: Tech’s Renaissance Man

Nathan Myhrvold likes to challenge conventional wisdom. When the founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures (and former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft) isn’t running one of the world’s leading invention businesses, he’s busy doing norm-defying research on topics like dinosaur bone density, asteroid sizing, and the proper way to knead dough. Kara and Nathan talk about everything from AI, politics, nuclear power, and global warming to “splash shots” — photographs of colliding wine glasses. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram/TikTok as @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I'm Ina Garten and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garner. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Have you ever looked up and realized your leisure time isn't actually all that leisurely?

• 0:46Speaker 02

  So what starts out as wanting to learn something and wanting to progress through different ways of knowing how to do something turns into something that you're sort of like giving yourself a score on.

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• 1:50Speaker 04

  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 Myhrvold, 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 who are trying to reinvent conventional approaches to food and cooking. Mirval enrolled in college at just 14 years old and went on to earn three degrees, a

• 2:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  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 3? 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,

• 4:01Speaker 04

  and I don't want you to miss it. For tickets, visit voxmediaevents.com/elf. That's voxmediaevents.com/elf. I hope to see you there. Now, let's get to it.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  Welcome Nathan, thanks for being on ON.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  Well, I'm much rather be on than off.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  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 onstage 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.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  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 gotta run over, otherwise the plate will wobble and break.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  So, room temperature superconductors, or at least high-temperature superconductors are one example.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Explain what that is for the idiots like myself.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  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.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  Oh, so faster movement, less...

• 6:11Speaker 05

  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.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:46Speaker 05

  So if we could increase the temperature at which superconductors work, it could revolutionize all kinds of things.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  Right, right, because it doesn't require that much, because it's easier to deploy presumably.

• 6:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Well, that's also not very sustainable or very economic.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  But it proves that there is a configuration of matter that will allow superconductivity even at room temperature.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  All right, so that's one thing. What else?

• 7:30Speaker 05

  That's one thing.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  What's another thing?

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Uh, dinosaurs.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Yes, of course. You never leave dinosaurs, do you?

• 7:37Speaker 05

  So, well, they had the first laugh and they may have the last laugh.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  True, true.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Uh-huh.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  How big did it grow? How quickly did it grow?

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Why are you interested in that, besides making a movie that Steven Spielberg already did? And you kind of look like that scientist, by the way, FYI.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  Dinosaurs are interesting because they're a fundamental part of our natural world, and they're gone.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  And because they're gone, you have to use lots of indirect inferences to figure out what they were like.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  You know, if you find a fossil fish, even if it's from 400 million years ago, you'd pretty much know what the fish did.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Because the fish haven't changed that much in 400 million years. Details change, but the lifestyle is the same. Here you have dinosaurs that exist at a totally different scale than mammals.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  Uh, the largest um of the dinosaurs was probably over a hundred tons.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  Huge, huge.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Why?

• 8:54Speaker 05

  Um, you know, today we have a top tier apex predators like a lion or a tiger, a polar bear. They're puny compared to the apex predators.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Dinosaur would step on them, the dinosaurs. So you want to know why they were. You have a T-Rex in your house, right?

• 9:12Speaker 05

  I do.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Why? It's not living, right?

• 9:14Speaker 05

  It's good.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  You didn't call it, did you?

• 9:16Speaker 05

  Sadly, no.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Well, you'd be dead, Nathan, but go ahead, go ahead.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  Getting it shots, getting it a license, it's really hard.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  Um, I've loved science since I was a little boy.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  And uh, lots, you know, millions and millions of little boys and girls love dinosaurs.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  Paleontologists are people who loved dinosaurs as a child who never grew out of it, basically.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  What is the problem that motivates you the most? Uh, 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?

• 9:52Speaker 05

  Well, it's a great question because there's, 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. Um, uh, something that mixes those two is, uh, uh, I'm a vice chairman of a company called Terra Power, which is a nuclear power company that I started with Bill Gates, uh, and some other folks.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  We're making great progress there.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  Along the way, we figured out how to use a, weirdly, a kind of, uh, nuclear waste for a radical new cancer treatment.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  And that has the, when, when people have worked on this particular line of inquiry for cancer treatment for a very long time, it's called targeted alpha therapy.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  The problem is that it involves using a radioactive material. And that radioactive material is, is very, very difficult to make or obtain. Uh, so Earth didn't have enough doses to ever bring it out in a large scale before.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Wow, because?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Well, what happened, so, uh, you're probably familiar with people use radiation therapy as a way of killing, uh, cancer cells. But radiation therapy is very crude. Uh, it produces, it radiates large parts of your body. It gives you terrible side effects. And you can't use it for extensive, um, metastasis. You can't use it with this cancers all over your body already. It's only good for a focused spot. Well, somebody had the idea, if we take a, 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 on to a cancer cell. This very weak radioactivity will only kill the cancer cell. It won't hurt anything in the outside.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  Um, so the very, very best material that people have identified is something called actinium two twenty-five. And, uh, Earth could only produce a tiny number of doses per year. Just ridiculously tiny, not even enough for doing research, much less for treatment. Um, uh, so, uh, at Terra Power, although our main focus is building power reactors, some of the engineers said, hey, we have this idea. We could make this stuff.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  And so we think we'll be able to make at least 300,000 doses a year in a couple of

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Wow, so this is an offshoot. This is, 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.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  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. You know, as you know, there's sort of a worldwide bottleneck on making big, high-performance chips. That's part of what makes the Nvidia chips so insanely valuable. Well, because they're very hard to make.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Right now. I would say right now.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  Well, right, 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.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  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.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Explain what Moore's Law is for people.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  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.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  And it's it's been fantastic. I mean, we've we've had multiple factors of a million improvement in price performance.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  And smaller and faster.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Smaller or lower power. There's a variety of different uh, metrics you can choose as your uh, to what to do with the technology. Do I do I make lots of tiny chips to put intelligence everywhere? Do I make these really big AI chips that are maybe this big uh, to make large language models? It's all based on a technological idea that's depending how you look at it, forty or fifty years old. And it's getting to a stage where we really need to revitalize it. Well, so we've got a bunch of ideas about that.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so interesting. Everything I ask 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, think different kind of thing.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  It it feels though that 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 I have no idea of your politics, and I never did. I didn't know Gates's.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  Yes, and that's my design because I don't try to focus on it.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  That's not a problem I can come up with a solution for.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  That's correct. That's correct.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  Okay, it is not. There's no great idea that I have today or tomorrow or or ever that will fix the political quagmire that we're currently in.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  Well, good, that when we're done then. So one of the things I wanted to get from you was like, it's that 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. How do you and 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? 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 leftward shift either. You know what I mean? I never have thought either one of those things was true.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  Well, I I think most people who are successful in the technology industry love innovation and rolling out new products and solving problems for their customers. Um, over time, of course, it's been hard to ignore Washington as a tech company because you, when an industry becomes big enough and important enough, it attracts um attention from uh the government. Uh, that can be positive attention, or that can be negative attention. Uh, but mostly what government attention to a new area is, is uninformed attention. And as a result, uh, there was a, a point where the tech industry didn't pay any attention

• 17:50Speaker 05

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

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  We're gonna get screwed.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Right, which you didn't. Microsoft did, but nobody else did so far.

• 18:00Speaker 05

  (laughing)

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Right?

• 18:02Speaker 05

  Um, well, e- e- even Microsoft survived.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  Um.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  That's right. They're bigger than ever.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  But, but not for want of trying on the government's part at, at the time. Um, uh, for reasons that seem quite quaint.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Today.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  Uh, right. I mean, uh, well, they particularly seemed quaint in the five years after that big event, when all of the focus was on a whole new set of tech tit- titans taking over everything.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  Well, but it's very hard for tech not to be involved in government because government's involved in tech. And

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Sort of.

• 18:46Speaker 05

  It has to be involved in tech for a variety of reasons. Uh, 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.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  Okay, and uh, you and I believe that because we've been involved in this for a long time.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Not everyone in the country does.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Um, but I think that's super important. So of course, there's government attention. So of course, uh, Microsoft executives and executives from every tech company spend a lot of time in DC.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Right. Okay, that's different than what's happening now. And it tends to affect the election.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  Well, look, the-

• 19:30Speaker 05

  One of the technologies that tech has been enormous in expanding is communications.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  That's right, social media.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  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

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Broadcast.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Broadcast in one form or another to everyone.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  Well, that, I think that's created two things. One is it's created a lot of concern and possible misuse. It's also created, it, it, there's a concept of the law of an attractive nuisance. You know, 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?

• 20:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  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.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Why did you resist? You have better ideas than most people, the average Joe.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  Well.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  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?

• 21:21Speaker 05

  I am surprised at how people who have the skills and abilities to actually do something and who in, got where they are by lots of careful, reasoned, logical, rational thinking.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  Have become buffoons online. Um, uh, saying things primarily for the its shock value, entertainment value. Uh, yeah, i- i- in a way that. Uh, it, look, Kara, let's make a little pact here. If I ever do that, come and stop me.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Even if you're a billionaire tech magnate.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  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, you, you mentioned government, um, being a nuisance, essentially. Yeah, that's what I, which is a typical, listen, I've heard this many 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? Um, what do you, what would you like to see?

• 22:48Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  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. Um, uh, because government, practically speaking, does have a role in, um, and regardless of what you think about us, the fact is there are governments in the world that sponsor, uh, state-sponsored hacking and uh, cyber, uh, disruption and, and weapons of all, all varieties. So, yeah, you better have the government involved.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:36Speaker 05

  Um, but it has to be involved in the right way. And I, I don't have a particular, um, Agenda here where I've here's my five point plan. If I started to say that I'd probably be going beyond. I 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?

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Right, well, that's unusual, Nathan, let me tell you today. There's a lot of people who are do one thing and then they're an expert on another thing that had they have nothing to do with. You're more of an expert on a lot of things. So speaking of that, um, let's switch gears and talk about the it's 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? Right, AI has been around forever. You and I both know this. It's embedded in everything, but there's there's a moment right now with computing power with data.

• 24:31Speaker 05

  It's a very legitimate moment.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  So talk about that.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  People had a variety of ideas about AI, but 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 that when people first developed it, they thought, oh, this will be good for all parts of reasoning. We we crack chess, we'll have it all done. Well, turns out, no, that's not true. Um, machine learning was a different, uh, segment. Uh, a different technological base for building AI. And it was very effective at doing certain kinds of pattern recognition. Uh, and signal detection.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  But we couldn't do, uh, language. We tried, you know, Microsoft Word is maybe the best there is at a program that can help you organize words. And, uh, I hired our first, um, researchers for Microsoft Research. We're all in, um, natural language, understanding and grammar checking. So we made a hell of a grammar checker. We made, uh, a variety of things. Other people did similar things.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  You still hadn't cracked the language problem.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  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 hardcoded any aspects of language could figure language out.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  With enough data, is what you're saying, right?

• 26:18Speaker 05

  If I had been on a Nobel Prize committee, I would have given OpenAI the Nobel Prize.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  Because the discovery that that, with enough effort, now, of course, people say, well, they didn't do it alone. 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.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  It is.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  But goddammit, it worked.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  And so that's enormous importance, 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.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  This is understanding language in a way that we're still trying to grapple to understand ourselves.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  And it's also not very good, in a certain sense. You and I learned language without reading every book on Earth.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  Nope, not this one. And it's actually an old idea in AI. There's a researcher named Doug Linat. And we funded him at Microsoft, 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.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  You had to have it all, right.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  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.

• 28:19Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Delete Me. Have you ever Googled yourself and found your home address, phone number, and name of a family member? It's unsettling. Here's what you can do to help clean up your online data footprint. Go to joindelete.me/kara and enter the code Kara. You'll get 20% off Delete Me. Delete Me, of course, removes your personal information from data broker sites that sell it online. Delete Me was named the top pick for data removal services by Wirecutter, so you know you're in good hands. I know, I talk about this a lot. I am very adamant about privacy. I'm very good at it, and it's always a surprise when I go to my Delete Me dashboard and find all the nefarious things these data brokers are up to. You need to be aware and you need to have tools to help you deal with it.

• 29:04Kara Swisher?

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• 29:48Kara Swisher?

  On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:08Kara Swisher?

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• 30:50Kara Swisher?

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• 31:21Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  Well, if you're Protestant, you say the Reformation was a positive.

• 31:47Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  I'm not religious, so I won't argue that point.

• 31:50Kara Swisher?

  If you're a woman with the Gutenberg press and the Hammer of Witches came out, you weren't very happy about that, right? So, but still upheaval. The combustion engine played a huge role in global warming, right? Every, you know, I'm a Paul Verrelio fan, the philosopher, where he says, "When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck," right? That's how you do it.

• 32:06Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 32:07Kara Swisher?

  So, talk about what's happening here. Why are you a techno-optimist, except saying, "On 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?

• 32:23Speaker 05

  Well, first, you know, I think that a reasonable assessment of almost any broad new technology, or old technology for that matter.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  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.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  But.

• 32:55Speaker 05

  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 mythical founder Ned Ludd, who was a didn't really exist, but they were afraid of retribution, so they invented a someone you couldn't actually send a drone after.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  They were mad about stocking frames.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Because it cut jobs.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  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 as a to prison there were sent there because they were Luddites that were convicted of messing with stocking frames.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  Wow, no wonder no good shit comes out of Australia. No, oh my God, I'm gonna get killed. All right, Thor.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  So.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  The Hemsworth brothers.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Sure, 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.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  Well, to me, right now, the worrying technologies are not AI. The worrying technology is cyber vulnerability as more and more of society gets

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Jacked into the system.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  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.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Completely porous.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  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.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Right. But how should AI be regulated then? How should we be protected in that regard? I agree with you on both. How should, what kind of, how would you like to see? If Nathan could go in and you could just pick, what would you, what would you have happen?

• 36:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Biden did have a consortium dedicated to AI safety, for example, brought together some smart people, which, 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.

• 37:09Speaker 05

  Well, that that might occur regardless of what the executive order was about.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Right, that's true. He's just going to throw it out. Is there any, what, where, 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?

• 37:23Speaker 05

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

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Could be. Okay, all right. So let me-

• 37:30Speaker 05

  Massively more.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  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 OpenAI, making a deal to hire most of Inflection AI's employees and bringing in Mustafa Suleyman, 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?

• 37:57Speaker 05

  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 it, I think it's very clear now that AI is his signature new move.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 38:25Speaker 05

  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, you'd say, actually, a dozen projects doesn't make you first.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  No, just makes you distracted.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  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 than, 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.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Right. Let me, 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.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  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 at Intellectual Ventures, geoengineering ideas, like solar-related intervention, direct air capture. Where do you think the most important areas? I think nuclear would be my answer for you, but I don't know.

• 40:22Speaker 05

  Well, there's, 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.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  Now, in the United States, we're going to say we need more because we want more chatbots to talk to and to do AI stuff for us.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Among others.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 05

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

• 40:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  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 their houses be hot in the, you know, 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.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  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 as higher, because of course, we're not satisfied. We're going to restart nuclear power plants so that just to run data centers.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're doing one in Wyoming, correct, recently?

• 41:56Speaker 05

  We're building two in Wyoming in principle. One will come first, but so that's one side. It's how do we supply that energy? And I think nuclear is absolutely part of the mix.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  Nuclear has a lot of properties that renewables don't have. Renewables could be called unreliables. You know, the the sun goes down every day, and the wind stops blowing even in windy windy places. So you need to have some baseload power. If batteries were perfect, we wouldn't. Batteries are way far from perfect.

• 42:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  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

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Except.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, except for that. Now, the other approach is to say, look, currently, the world's doing nothing about climate change, the first order approximation. And the concrete measure of that is at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, they measure CO2 every year. That's they measured 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.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  Um, Germany spent three hundred billion dollars, uh, building renewables, uh, o- over like a twenty some period, year period. And their net carbon emissions went up.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:43Speaker 05

  And they went up because they decided to turn off the nuclear reactors.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Right. So you think that's the, the biggest solution?

• 43:49Speaker 05

  No, that's one thing, but what happens currently because we're doing nothing?

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  What happens if the climate really does get bad?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Now, this is a very controversial area because if people, there's a set of people who are activists for, uh, climate change that are really activists for something else and they're using climate change as their stalking horse to try to get, uh, other policy things that they want. If in fact, we get to a bad situation, can we do something about it?

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  But there's the possibility that we can, and that's called geoengineering, and there's a variety of different ways to do that. Um, 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. Uh, that has some fundamental difficulties, but we absolutely should research it.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  They're skeptical because this one weird trick thing makes people nervous.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Mostly there, it's because people, the people who are against research in this area, um, don't want there to be an alternative. They, they want you to, to, they want to, it, it, it's very much like a, 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.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  So every, every episode, we get an expert to send us a question. Let's hear yours.

• 45:28Speaker 07

  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. And 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

• 46:13Speaker 07

  pollution, lead to more acid rain, and increase asthma rates. Thank you so much.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  I think that's a genuine question.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a genuine question.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  So answer that.

• 46:22Speaker 05

  It's, it's a question that is mostly, I, I don't, I, I'm sure that the person asking it was completely genuine. There are people who, 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. And the, why would you mess with the climate when things aren't that bad yet?

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  On the other hand, if you say, we're gonna go through a tipping point, and all of Earth will be disrupted and billions of people will die, then you might say, you know?

• 47:08Speaker 04

  Maybe we should.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  We're willing to take a, a risk at something. And, and so really, that's the context in which you have to, 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 there's some, they have a good reason to say it. It's not just complete bullshit. It's, it, you can assess the probabilities differently, but we should do research. Doing research, if you feel threatened by us knowing more, then I, 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.

• 47:53Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 48:02Kara Swisher?

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• 49:14Kara Swisher?

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• 49:42Kara Swisher?

  Hey, y'all. It's Ested from [email protected]. We know that you have big questions about the world, and so do we. At Vox, we focus on covering the things that matter in your life and the things that make you curious. Whether that's the big politics questions of the day, climate solutions that might actually work, or hopeful news in cancer or Alzheimer's research. We believe that journalism made for the everyday curious person can make a difference in making a better world. And if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, Vox now has a brand-new app, and it brings all of our journalism together in one place. Go to vox.com/app to download today.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  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. You've been critical of NASA's knowledge and analysis of asteroids. NASA folks said your argument oversimplifies, and you know the back and forth.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  Where are we now with the asteroids?

• 50:50Speaker 05

  Okay, so first of all, although NASA said I was wrong, of course, they tried the... Is it 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.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  And that's utterly been proven since then.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  All right, asteroids. Let's get to asteroids.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  I've done a bunch of other asteroid research.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  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...

• 51:38Speaker 05

  is going to find literally millions of asteroids.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  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 to make the world a safer place because there is a low probability, but very bad event that could occur.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw that movie, you know, Nathan. It's with my favorite actress, Téa Leoni. It didn't end well. It didn't. It just well, it sort of did for some people. Well, not for Téa.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Well, all right. Okay, Morgan Freeman was president. You know, I love that.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  That would be great.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  And he led the country out of out of disaster and maybe you could be optimistic.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  So you're like, eh, 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 the specific dinosaur. What's the most interesting dinosaur thing you've done recently?

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Well, the one I'm most interested in is whatever I'm working on at the moment. The spinosaurus is cool because it's a huge predatory dinosaur. Roughly the same size as T. rex. Some people would argue larger.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  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. Of course, it's still huge, so much bigger than a seal or an otter.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  So the Loch Ness Monster, but go ahead.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  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.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:24Speaker 05

  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 vertebrae are taller than you and me.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:43Speaker 05

  They're enormous, long thing. 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.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Well, unfortunately, Spinosaurus was a lot like that Bayesian boat.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 55:04Speaker 05

  In that with that big sail there, we showed that it really couldn't have swum.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Because it didn't have a keel.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  No keel. Anyway, so that was interesting. The thing that we really don't have enough for Spinosaurus is enough new specimens, but at a conference, just...

• 55:25Speaker 05

  A couple of 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.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Okay. I'm going to finish up talking of 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're 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?

• 56:23Speaker 05

  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.

• 56:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  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, too 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.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Ah, do you remember the one?

• 57:39Speaker 05

  In the can, that's what mom used to make.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  Not just that, but you you remember the granules that you put in water?

• 57:44Speaker 05

  Yes, the the freeze dried taster's choice granules, which still exist.

• 57:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it does.

• 57:50Speaker 05

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

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Don't do it.

• 57:53Speaker 05

  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.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  And that's increasingly true for other things, but it's not true yet for bread, for example.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:20Speaker 05

  Bread is made of flour. Uh, the world went on this holy war to make bread and flour cheap. Oh, my God, did we ever succeed? We made uh, bread super cheap. But in the uh, in doing so, you also made it all of average quality.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:39Speaker 05

  And so that's why there's people, uh, 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. Uh, oh, yeah, Chad at Tartine is the one who makes the great breads. The the people who create the demand for the great breads, the ones who line up in front of Tartine to buy the bread.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:05Speaker 05

  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.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  You know, 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. I people who demonize fast food and say, oh, you should always have a slow cooked, you know, dinner that you slaved over.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Well, what's the weirdest thing you're seeing in food? What a tool? What's the weirdest tool you're seeing right now? Or an underrated?

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Well, TikTok.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  TikTok.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  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 if you have the proverbial one weird trick or a little technique or idea,

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  that has accelerated the rate at which people take those ideas and spread them around.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  Yes. Okay. So this is a perfect example. I'm not sure what you'd call that. It's somebody's creative idea.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  That outreach that allows innovation to to spread around the world is fantastic.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  So that's your next book about TikTok foods? Is that your next book on food? What is it?

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  No, my next book on food is pastry.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Pastry? That's so scientific. That's so scientific.

• 1:01:20Speaker 05

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

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  All right, very quickly, what's your what's the insight so far?

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  The cookies taste delicious?

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

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

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  Because it hasn't really been tested very well.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  And there are lots of new ideas and lots of new possibilities. So if you love pastry.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  What's the one that's wrong? Oh, you're gonna drive bakers crazy. What is it? Frank Shaw's gonna lose his mind. What? What?

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  What is the one thing, just very briefly?

• 1:01:59Speaker 05

  In our bread book, you know, Modernist Bread at Home is 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.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  It's all a fraud.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  So Nona was wrong. Interesting.

• 1:02:17Speaker 05

  Well, it still isn't you, 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 you were, was explained.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. So you said, okay.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

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

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:02:36Speaker 05

  Which Germany, Austria, a few other countries in Europe could make fluffy rye breads. The United States, the only way you can make a fluffy rye bread was to have a bread that was mostly wheat flour. And you added 15% maybe of rye.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  Oh, it's, yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  Why it took us, you know, in the 21st century to figure out how to make rye breads?

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  As well as in Germany, I don't know. It's not like Germany is a distant land.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  You know, there's millions of Germans in the United States, millions of Americans who've been in Germany.

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  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, so I gotta 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.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  So very briefly, tell me what that is.

• 1:03:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  And you've done well with that. You've done well.

• 1:04:14Speaker 05

  I did, but it was really contrary to my nature. You know, if I really had as much a 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 a 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.

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  And so 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.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  Ah, yes.

• 1:05:24Speaker 05

  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 is we made, we tried it. So then as you build more confidence and you do more tests and you develop more theory than some, 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

• 1:06:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  Which is called curiosity. That's what that's called. And it's been lost.

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  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,

• 1:06:27Speaker 04

  Friends are like, what are you doing with the food?

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  What's up with this cookbook stuff?

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  Why are you making meringues, Nathan?

• 1:06:31Speaker 05

  Come on!

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  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?

• 1:06:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  So for bumping wine glasses together, or for making one glass 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.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  And so that's when we set up the camera to take the picture.

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  Or sometimes you have a, a, a, a beam break thing. We, you have a, a invisible laser where if it breaks the beam, the picture gets taken. Um, and so, uh, we've made a whole bunch of these robots. Um, there's a technique in France called sabering to open up a, a bottle of champagne. It's, you take a sword.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:20Speaker 05

  And you have this broken bottle, but cleanly broken around the edge. So we made a sabering robot. And we sabered like a hundred bottles of champagne to get a couple of perfect shots.

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Um, the problem with those shots is you wind up at the end of the day being soaked in champagne in that case.

• 1:08:41Speaker 04

  Well, not the worst thing in life.

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  I and the, told my, the people who are 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 this stuff.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  All right. I'm going to end on that note. Drunk.

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:09:01Speaker 04

  He's not drunk, but he's covered with champagne. That is a perfect ending to Nathan Mirvel. Nathan, thank you so much. You're just what I needed. I, I.

• 1:09:08Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Mike, I.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  Well, thank you, Karen.

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  I really appreciate it. Your optimism is really infectious in many ways and I appreciate it.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Aaliyah Jackson, Rick Kwan, and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you'll be ready for the next asteroid strike. If not, go find a swimming dinosaur. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.