6. Nathan Myhrvold: “I Am Interested in Lots of Things, and That's Actually a Bad Strategy”

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1:00Problems that are hard are usually hard because of the set of perspectives and tools that have been used to try to solve them. So you have to always ask, am I bringing something new to this problem? And if you're not, then you should say, well, maybe I should either try to get a different perspective or a different tool or anything, of thing, or maybe give it a rest and work on something that I can get a little more progress with.

1:33So there are people who know a lot about a few narrow topics, and then there are other people who know a little bit about just about everything. And then there's Nathan Meervold, who knows everything about everything. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. I first met Nathan maybe a decade ago. And from the very first time I met him, I was just blown away by his intellect and his enthusiasm. And I've never asked him a question where he didn't give me an answer that was just profound and detailed and knowledgeable. And what I love about talking to Nathan is not only that I learn a lot from him, but somehow he makes me feel like everything in the world is interesting.

2:25Nathan Mirvold, physicist, inventor, cookbook author, archaeologist, tech mogul, scholar of penguin poop and dinosaur sex. Let's just start at the beginning. You graduated from high school when you were 14 years old. You skipped four grades. Were you a likable kid or were you the most annoying kid that ever existed? You know, it's very difficult for a teenager to have that perspective on themselves famously. And, you know, I was never the weirdest kid in class or the most misfit kid. So in the pecking order, you were always at least one from the bottom with someone you could bully. Well, it's not so much that I could bully is, you know, I was never good at PE because I was three or four years younger than all of the other kids.

3:10Right. But I was never the worst. And the same thing was true with being socially awkward. I was more socially awkward. But was I the worst? Oh, no, there were others. Was it your idea to skip all those grades or was it your mom's? Oh, it was my idea. It was just so damn boring otherwise. And you don't regret it looking back? You know, we only get to live our lives once. So who knows what it would be like if I'd taken a different path. I don't know, but I certainly don't regret any of it. All right. So then you went to UCLA and you got an undergraduate degree there and master's. And then you went to Princeton where you collected, I think, another master's degree.

3:50And then you got your physics PhD, which eventually led you to Cambridge. I don't know, at the age of, say, 23, where you studied postdoc with Stephen Hawking. What was he like? I've always wanted to ask someone that question. I've never known anyone who knew him. Oh, Stephen was great. He had a terrific sense of humor, which made it very, very hard to feel sorry for yourself if you were with Stephen. because here's this guy who is telling jokes and laughing and enjoying life, and yet he's under such impossible physical circumstances. And you think, oh, my God, how does he get the energy? How does he not just crumple into a ball?

4:32And I asked him once, and he said, well, actually, his condition was an advantage. And I said, Stephen, what do you mean it's an advantage? And he said, well, they don't expect me to go to committee meetings. They don't expect me basically to do anything I don't want to do. And so I get to think about my physics. I said, sure, but thinking about your physics is still harder, isn't it? And he said, well, he found that his condition meant that he couldn't take notes. So he had to simplify everything to just a couple of core concepts. And he thought that discipline actually helped his science. So this was roughly 1980.

5:12He wasn't yet a celebrity. I've heard from some physicists much later who may have just been petty and jealous that he wasn't really that great of a physicist. Would you say that's true or is that completely off base? I think that's off base. It's always hard to say what makes a great, great scientist. You can look at the achievements that they have, and that's certainly one approach. A different approach is to look at how hard was it to find some cool achievement in the era that they were in. In the 1930s, for example, quantum mechanics had just been discovered. And from then through the 1960s, pretty much any decent physicist could count on finding some effect or some new thing and getting it named after them.

6:02It doesn't mean that physics was easy, but we had a very exciting possibility of a new conceptual framework, both relativity theory and quantum theory. And now we got to apply it to lots of things. Now, in the period where Stephen was active, there wasn't that much. The last thing that we could exploit like that, I suppose, was general relativity. And so Stephen did some amazing work in general relativity. And anybody who says that Stephen isn't a great physicist, I would say, okay, now tell me your answer about the singularity theorems, which are very impressive intellectual feats that help us understand that, assuming our understanding of physics is correct, there had to be a singularity in the universe.

6:54There has to be something like the Big Bang or end in a black hole. Very, very powerful things. Now, Stephen then turned to try to make sense of more fundamental physics, how you take quantum mechanics and connect it with general relativity. Of course, so did everybody else. And during this last period of 30, 40 years, there's been very little progress. The last couple big things were the completion of what today people call the standard model of particle physics. Well, Stephen and others tried very hard to reconcile the standard model and particle physics as we knew it with general relativity and gravity.

7:42And clearly that reconciliation has to occur because both theories exist in the same universe, and we've not been able to figure out how to do it. Recently, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN looked for one of the missing pieces of the standard model, the Higgs boson. And of course, they found the Higgs boson, and that was a wonderful achievement. but everybody involved thought they would find the next clue to fundamental physics, and they didn't. So, you know, if you say, well, gee, Stephen didn't solve that problem, I would say yes, and neither did anybody else during that period. We have the same evidence that we've had in the past that shows gravity and particle physics must be reconciled, and we don't have any new clue.

8:38Without a new clue, it's really hard to make progress. So you're saying that the lack of new empirical data is impeding the ability of theory to progress. At the moment, I would say that's hugely true. Now, it's a little funny because there are some episodes in the history of science, Newton figuring out Newtonian gravity, and Einstein figuring out general relativity, when that was done with only the barest minimum of any empirical clues. Now, unfortunately, we haven't had a scientist like that since Einstein. And if you count Newton as the previous one, we may only get them every 500 years. Yeah, it's a long time to wait.

9:23One thing that seems really different to me about economics and physics is that the set of questions that economists try to answer, it's huge. There's thousands and thousands of things that an economist could specialize in that one person might study, I don't know, racial bias in policing for a decade or models of job search or pricing of durable goods. And as a consequence, on any given narrow economic topic, there's only a handful, two or three or four, maybe one expert, one really knowledgeable economist. But in physics, I get the impression that there's a handful of problems, six, seven, 10, I don't know the number, and everybody works on the same problem, which is a completely different way of organizing a scientific discipline.

10:10Well, I think your characterization is broadly speaking correct. Now, there are subfields of physics where that's not the case. Solid state physics, for example, has a fair number of different subfields. I think it'd be unfair to say everyone's working on the same thing. When it comes to particle physics and what the fundamental theory of the universe is, we did two things. One is we had lots of people working on the same problem. That's correct. The second thing is that they also doubled down on particular theoretical approaches. So string theory was just starting to become popular when I was in graduate school.

10:52It had been around one form or another since the 1960s. But in 83, when I got my PhD, string theory became a incredibly hot topic without there being that much actual progress. And so I think in an economist terms, the field overinvested in string theory. and now it's turned out that we don't have that much to show for it. That happens. People make big bets that don't always pay off. I remember back when I was a postdoc at the Society of Fellows at Harvard and I would spend time with physicists. The only time I really spent time with physicists and I remember thinking how glad I was an economist because the physicists were afraid to take a vacation because if they went away for two weeks they felt like they were going to fall hopelessly behind and all of the people working on the same problem, we're going to race ahead of them and they never catch up.

11:47It was interesting incentives that were in place because people were working in such a competitive environment with everybody working on the same problem. Is that one of the reasons you should steer clear of academic physics? Well, I never decided I'm leaving physics. Instead, I worked in graduate school with a couple of friends on a software project on some of the first PCs that existed because it was right around that time. We got excited about it. I kept working on it when I was a postdoc. And I eventually took a leave of absence from my postdoc with Stephen to go work on this software project.

12:23And I thought I'd be back in six months. And after many, many years, I think 15 years, something like that, it was announced I was retiring from Microsoft. And I got this email from Stephen saying, should we clean out the office? That is great. So I always intended to go back, but I got to say, it's not been that intriguing for me to go back because LaField has been stuck in the conundrum it's currently in.

13:03you're listening to people i mostly admire with steve levitt and his conversation with polymathic inventor and former microsoft cto nathan mirvold they'll return after this short break

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15:31Do you remember the first time that you met Bill Gates and what was that like? Oh, I definitely remember. I come up to Microsoft to talk to them about my company. They thought they needed the technology. And I wound up meeting Charles Simone and Steve Ballmer and others. And we seemed to have a good discussion. And they said, wait a minute, we're going to arrange one more meeting for you. And they brought me in to see Bill. And I had a great meeting with Bill. I mean, I suppose if I'd had a bad meeting, some conditions could have been quite different. So this was in 1986. Was Microsoft a big deal?

16:11I don't even know Microsoft was a big deal then, was it? Well, they had gone public, and Microsoft was a very prominent company because they were doing both applications and languages like Microsoft Basic. and they had released one version of Windows, which was still not very user-friendly because it was its very first version. So Microsoft was a big deal in the industry, but it wasn't like the company that it became. And so you somehow very quickly became chief technology officer? Initially, I was director of special projects. it took a few years before i was chief technology officer you know i became the chief technology officer at microsoft never having had a computer science class now i wound up learning computer science very thoroughly but i never did have a class in it so you made a lot of money clearly being there and then you decided to leave you decided to start intellectual ventures what what was your thinking behind jumping off the ship at Microsoft?

17:18Well, I had a great time at Microsoft, but it was a very involving thing. And so I had one pursuit of mine that took 80 or 90 percent of my waking hours. And I kind of wanted to do some other stuff because I've always had lots of interests and they didn't stop when I was at Microsoft, but I had very little time to pursue them. You know, there's only one institution in life where they give you time off for good behavior, and that's prison. But most jobs, if you perform very well, you might get raises and bonuses, but you also typically get more responsibility. And, you know, the easiest thing is just keep going and stay in that rut for a much longer period of time.

18:03I thought, well, why? So I left. And describe intellectual ventures. It's not quite like anything I've ever seen before.

18:14So intellectual ventures is dedicated to the idea of inventing new technology. We try to come up with new solutions to various technical problems, some of which are big and broad. As you know, we've worked a bunch on what would a technological fix to climate change be. We also work on narrower things like how would you make airplane wings more efficient or what are new approaches for using AI in health. So it's quite a set of activities. So you created something you call the Salter Sink, which is a way of defanging hurricanes. Could you explain in simple terms what the idea was? Yeah, so a hurricane draws all of its energy from hot water on the surface of a tropical ocean.

19:09And the problem is the sun beats down on the ocean, makes the water warm, but the warmer the water is, the more buoyant it is. And so it really stops turning over and stops mixing. And that allows it to get warmer and warmer yet. But so to be a strong hurricane, you need to have the surface water be at least 80 degrees, 82 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can get up well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's the heat energy that's stored in that top layer of the ocean that ultimately drives the winds and powers a hurricane. So in conjunction with a guy named Stephen Salter from the UK, we had this idea, why don't you come up with a way of mixing the water?

19:58Because even though there's that layer at the top, if you go down 50 feet, 100 feet, the water's much colder. So you say, well, how do you mix the water? Well, nature's way of mixing the water is a hurricane. The idea behind the soldier's sink is you have a pump, if you will, which is made from a giant plastic bag. So you imagine a trash bag that you could put a sports stadium in. And if you put floats up at the top and you put weights down at the bottom, you can show with some pretty simple math that waves will crest over the top. that builds up the water level inside, which pushes water out the bottom.

20:44And so it acts like a pump. Well, it turns out it doesn't take very many of these plastic bags to take the water temperature in an area and drop it below the temperature where a hurricane is dangerous. So we thought, great, we have a way of stopping hurricanes or defanging them, as you said. You might stop them altogether if you made a couple halves of cold water out in the ocean, because as a hurricane comes in, if it hits cold water, it tends to bounce off. And we did a variety of work, both computationally and empirically, to show that it works. And then we tried to see if anyone wanted it.

21:29Nobody wanted it? Well, effectively, no. So every now and then, after a big hurricane the next day, they'd say, oh, the prime minister of this or that island is calling. But the problem is that this is the type of thing where the world has not taken a proactive stance against it. There are flooding issues where we do that. We build culverts or diversion of things or levees so that we can take flooding away. but there's no historical tradition for doing this in the ocean and it wasn't clear who was going to fund it and it's expensive of course to both do the research and to do it but not at all compared to the impact of even a single hurricane yeah like what would it cost you think to actually implement this a billion dollars or something like that oh our estimate is much less than that these things are literally giant plastic bags you would make them out of a geotextile cloth, which is effectively a super strong trash bag.

22:32And you could make them out of largely recycled materials quite cheaply. And then you deploy them months before the storm, this Hurricane Alley, you know that the hurricanes come that way. And so you could easily build something that would defend the Gulf Coast of the United States or defend various Caribbean islands. It's so crazy because, look, you might be wrong. It might not work. But what's the annual damage in the U.S. expected from hurricanes? Tens of billions. Tens of billions. So you get your return back. And a single bad one, the damage is hundreds of billions. It's just a market failure.

23:10Now, there's another funny thing. It turns out the stadium-sized garbage bags are no different sized than a lot of fish farms the world already has. In fact, whenever I'm flying in an area that has the fish farms, I always look out and think, those could be saving us from hurricanes. It turns out that the surface of the ocean that gets really hot and doesn't mix also depletes itself of oxygen. And because it depletes itself of oxygen, fish can't live in it. So it creates large dead zones where you can't have fish. and this first became appreciated when people noticed that the fishing was excellent near offshore oil platforms yeah you say like why should that be well the answer is that the offshore oil platform when waves hit it that does cause some mixing and colder oxygen-rich water comes up to the surface so we think this would also be a very pro-environmental thing we just need somebody who says, yeah, I really want to go do it.

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25:47You obviously get a lot of joy out of the inventing. Do you get an equivalent degree of frustration when you create something amazing and nobody will put it into place? So there's two big frustrations of being an inventor. The first is when you can't solve a problem. And of course, most of your ideas do fail. It takes a lot of iteration before you hit on something that really succeeds. And then this is the second one that you can't get the world to adopt it. But it also is kind of the game. We have a unit of our company called Global Good, where we work on solving problems in the developing world, problems of poverty.

26:31And there it's frustrating because you're trying to solve things in an environment that's mostly broken, which is, of course, why there's a problem in the first place. But you can't fix directly the reason why it's broken. So what you're trying to do is to say, well, even in a circumstance where there's a poor health care system, rule of law may not be that great. There's all these other issues. What can we do? So there, the positive thing is even when you make small improvements, it saves lots of lives. And so that feels good. Do you want to talk about TerraPower? Of all the ideas I've ever heard in my entire life, this is the one I found most captivating.

27:13This description of it blows my mind every time I hear about it. Okay, well, the world needs clean energy. To first order approximation, our standard of living is driven by the availability of energy. We both need to convert from the carbon-based energy to a non-carbon-based energy. We need to have that solution also extend to some of the poorest places on Earth. So we looked at all of the different ways of doing this and worked on several of them. But the thing that is the most practical approach for a carbon-free, easily scalable form of energy is nuclear fission. fission is of course what powers our conventional nuclear reactors that are out there today and you might think okay but we've got reactors and we know how to build them so what's new so a normal nuclear reactor burns and it's funny the nuclear engineers use the term burn even though it's got nothing to do with the way a log burns that's what we all say is burns it burns a fuel called U-235.