Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

There's a limit to how much you can deploy renewables, like wind or solar. People will talk about getting up to 30 percent of America's power from renewables, but you can't get to 100 percent because of their unreliability.

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

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

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don't tell you that?