And steve and others. And it will always have a part of my heart. And its still an incredibly strong, strong company. It was some great internal values. But i think its lost its way in a few dimensions. Rose well, you should know why. Its hard to know why. I think its a better try say how. One is theres so many different agendas its working on. Rose Nathan Myhrvold for the hour. Next. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose Nathan Myhrvold is here. He is the c. E. O. And cofounder of intellectual ventures. For many years he was the chief Technology Officer at microsoft. He was known as one of the most Visionary Technology and Business Leaders anywhere. He is also a culinary pioneer. His newest project is modernist cuisine in which he explores the science of cooking. He recently published his third book on the subject. It is called the photography of modernist cuisine its a visual window into his experiments with food and science and preparation. Here is a look at the project. Rose forbes magazines calls nathans trilogy the decades most influential work about food. I am pleased to have him back at this table. Welcome. Thank you, charlie. Rose i want to be you, thats what i want. laughs rose i mean, its just food, photography. That would really be slumming rose food, photography, fishing, exploration. I mean, is there anything missing from your life . laughs im pretty busy so its not clear i need to add anything else. Rose how do you divide it up . Whats the secret to busy . Well, someone ive got great people around me that helped with these projects. I never could have written these cook books without a fantastic team of chefs and editors, art directors, people that really help us make the book. Its a team effort. My company where we invent new technology and develop new ideas we also have a great team. So that helps me fill in the places both when im absent doing Something Else but also just makes for a better product. Rose its always the Human Resources that make the difference, isnt it . Great people are what are behind all creativity, all innovation regardless of whether its culinary or aesthetic or scientific. So well come to intellectual ventures and all the other things youve been doing but tell me about the photography of modernist cuisine. One of my longterm interests is food but the other is photography. I got a camera when i was a kid and i obsessed over taking pictures. Sy later got a big view camera and built a dark room at home. I was completely into it. With these projects i was able to combine my love of food and my love of photography. Rose what goal, yes, exactly. So we wanted to show people a vision of food that they havent seen before. We all see food a couple times a day, right . Because we starve otherwise. But usually you wind up looking at it in a perfunctory way. You dont see it the way you do if you focus on it intently. So the photos we take try to show you a view you havent seen before. So we have things like the cover photo of a tomato thats focuses tonto may toe in a way thats quite different and unusual. Rose there you go. Its about a tomato its really about the leaves and the stem of the tomato even more than being about the tomato. Rose it dominates. Its like the red is background for the green. We have photos where we cut cooking pots and pans in half and cooked in them cut in half so we could show pictures of how cooking actually works and give you the magic view thats inside your food. Rose how does cooking actually work . Well, it depends, its complicated. Cooking is the only science experiment we do on a regular basis. And a simple act of cooking a male involves lots of interesting chemistry and physics,er thermo dynamics. Rose do most great chefs know science of cooking . No. Most great chefs have an intuitive knowledge of it but not a scientific people e knowledge of it. Rose to what use it is for them . If you want to do something new. You know, if you follow a recipe you can follow that recipe and you dont need to know how it works but you no if i do step a, b, and c youll get the result. But if you want to make up your own recipe and do something new and different that goes in a radical new direction then understanding how things works really help. Rose what goes together, what doesnt go, and what might lead to something unpredictable. Thats right. Rose so what kind of camera do you use . Mostly i use cannon digital cameras. All manner of them. And tons of different lenses and microscopes and equipment. Rose this is also an experiment in publishing, you say . Well, when we first made our cook books, the first version was six volumes, 2,438 pages. Rose i remember. No sane man would publish that so i published it myself. laughs rose laughs which makes you insane. Well, pretty much. With a preexisting condition is what they say on the insurance form. So weve built a Publishing Company around these unusual books. Theyre more indepth, bigger, more expensive. They deliver more value than traditional publishing is used to. Rose different value is what . Well, for example, a lot of cook books in particular are about dumbing things down for people. I totally understand that. But i think theres people in are intellectually curious. So we wrote about a book that was about intellectual curiosity. Even if you dont how this stuff works up front. Even if you have no intention of cooking this way well tell you how it works. Most photo books, for example, dont tell you how the photography is done. We have a 38page section in the back where we show how we took all the shots because i think thats kind of cool. Rose oh, i do, too. People always find process interesting. You know, sometimes its not attractive, as they say. Sausage and politics, making laws and making sausage you dont want to watch the politics. But other people are intrigued by how grow from here to here and what happens in between. I want to talk about the modernist approach here which you say is a new aesthetic that embraces abstraction, modern technology, scienceinspired ideas to create genuinely new experiences. Just elaborate on that. Well, we all love variety in food. Theres more food available in new york, more different types of food now than ever before in history. 30 years ago, sushi was rare in new york. Sushi is everywhere. Just a few year ago korean Fried Chicken wasnt that common in new york, now theres tons of places that go do it. And food trucks. We love variety. And one way to get variety is to import something from another culture. Sushi is a good example of that. Another way to get variety is to invent brand new things. And, of course, every great dish pizza, ice cream, ham bergers they were all invented at some point in time. Theres a set of chefs that have dedicated themselves to inventing and reinventing cuisine because by giving something thats really new and unfamiliar it provokes an interesting experience. Rose and who are they . Oh, in spain, feran add devil ray. The rocca brothers. In england Heston Blumenthal. In the u. S. Grant rose these are people who have great restaurants like Heston Blumenthal and adrian did before he went away to study or teach or whatever hes doing. Well, hes going to reopen it as a Culinary Foundation where they do research in food without serving food to paying customers. Which i say thats kind of what have my lab has been doing for the last five years. So in terms of guys that write cook books and do research in food without serving food im kind of one of those, too. Rose yeah, but do you like food because you love to eat or do you like food because its just an interesting thing for you that you can go off and explore . Well, its both those and one other. And so, of course i love to eat. And without a passion for eating and a passion for food you cant go very far in being a chef. You have to appreciate the subtle nuances. Rose do you believe thats true that most good chefs are also great eaters. They have to be great tasters. Rose they have to taste, yes. If you dont have a great sense of taste it would be like being a great composer that was tone deaf. Rose thats interesting. Or a great painter of color and things that was colorblind. I mean, it really is hard if you cant have the taste. And of course its interesting intransally, that was the second thing you mentioned, as just a point of curiosity how do these things work. And the third cooking is about sharing. You cook that so that yourself and others eat. And chefs get a tremendous pleasure out of seeing other people eat their food. In my case, its not so often that people eat the food, although sometimes we cook for folks. They consume our stuff by looking at the book, by looking at various other things that we do. Our web site and so forth. Rose all right, let me talk about some of the images that we have so we can get some sense as we show people at home what were talking about. Image number one is the modernist kitchen. This is your lab, what you built i guess at intellectual ventures. There it is. What are we seeing . So we were building a lab about six years ago to do machine shop work, all kinds of prototyping of new inventions and we had some extra space, i was just starting the cook book project so we built this culinary lab which features all of the equipment of a great restaurant kitchen and a lot of the equipment of a chemistry or biology lab all put together. Rose okay. The next slide is a salad cutaway. This is the Cross Section we talked about earlier of a salad bowl. There it is. So here we have two things going on. Were showing you a salad, were also trying to show you the ingredients. Once its all crunched down in the salad its hard to see but if you explode it up you get to see the individual pieces. Its inspired, actually, by something called an exploded diagram. When i was a kid i would work on cars and those chilton manuals for taking the engine apart would always show the engine and the screws are all coming up. Thats all taken apart in this magic exploded view so this is the magic exploded view of a salad. Rose the next someone of a Pressure Cooker cut away. Oh, look at that so in these pictures we are trying to describe how cooking works and the best try do that i found is visually. So this shows food thats pressure cooking and then we annotate it with lots of little notes describing how things work. Rose i mean, im so ignorant of all this. Is there a lot of use of Pressure Cookers in cooking . Yes. Rose its a big snool yes, its a big tool. Now it was bigger in your grandmas age perhaps than it is now. Rose because we have other things that achieve the same result . Well, its just gotten less popular. But we believe enormously in Pressure Cookers. Theres a Amazing Things you cant do anywhere else. Rose like what . We make a wonderful caramelized carrot soup. Theres pictures of that in there. It turns out that normally water boils at sea level at 212 fahrenheit, 100 degrees celsius. If you put in the a Pressure Cooker you can get it much hotter, 250 fahrenheit, 121 celsius before it boils because the pressure keeps the water from boiling even at a higher temperature. And means you can cook food at higher temperatures and it makes carrots caramelized, tenderizes tough meat. So this was originally for our big chapter on vegetables and we wanted to show vegetables the way they are in nature and were used to seeing them rose my First Impression is how colorful they are. Well, of course, we picked the goodlooking ones. laughs rose we dont want ugly vegetables do we. We dont want brown vegetables, we want green, red vegetables. Vegetables are something that comes of the earth. Theres a great vegetarian restaurant in new york called dirt candy. And this sort of expresses a similar idea that youve got some Amazing Things that grow in the dirt but they are sort of this amazing part of nature. Rose have you ever considered becoming a vegetarian or a vegan . Um, no. Rose laughs i love vegetables, i love fruit and vegetables. Rose but those are the things you dont want to give up. Not on a permanent basis. A vegetarian meal i love because it gives you a different way of experiencing a male. Rose exactly right. And it shows you what you can be done and find a perfectly wonderful meal thats all vegetables and how creative people can be with vegetables too. And when its done right you dont hardly notice theres no meat. Off fantastic fulfilling experience and say i guess theres no meat there. But i wouldnt want to swear off meat forever. Rose this is the Cross Section of a blender. And theres me taking the picture. Rose . Rose exactly right. So we have a section of how we did the photo. We literally take a blender and cut in the half in our machine shop. Then i arranged these tomatos in the blender. We were making tomato sauce. I used sewing needles to carefully stick the tomatos to each other in an unobtrusive way so they would all in the there. Twice they all fell slumping down. It was a disaster. Which is one of the lessons of cutaway photography. You make a hell of a mess. Rose really. Because it doesnt mold . It only has to look good for a thousandth of a second. As soon as the picture is taken we dont care if it goes to hell so that was a kind of funny shot that shows what its like to shoot half a blender. Rose the next someone a blueberry cut open. Yeah. Rose there you go. So everybodys seen blueberries but nobodys looked this close at blueberries and, in fact, a lot of people when they see this picture at first they dont know what it is. Rose i know i didnt. And blueberries have orange seeds who knew. If. Rose who knew. They also have these wonderful dusty powdery kind of texture on the outside of the blueberry. This is a way of showing you a blueberry which is totally familiar but in an unfamiliar way. Brown brown the next one is a mussel trapped inside balls of mussel juice. The technique is called spearfycation. Yes, this is a dish that was invented by Ferran Andrea. Rose the great Ferran Andrea. I love it because it kind of looks klingon food star from star trek. Its weirdly alien. Putting mussels inside a spherical capsule of their own juice which is delicious, by the way also just looks so unusual that its now challenging your idea of what food is. Nobody looks at this as, oh, yeah, like mama used to make. Rose yeah, they dont say that, do they . Whats the contribution of Ferran Andrea . Well, i think he had an amazing contribution to 21st century rose pioneering molecular cooking . Pioneering his own style. Ferran in 198 3coms to work as like a busboy in the restaurant of a miniature golf course. It was a seaside bar and grill of a minor miniature golf course. This is not a very propitious start to change the world. But over a period of time he taught himself and then kept innovating and innovating. Originally wanting to emulate the great masters in france, he emulates them and then he just blows right past, creating his own dynamic unusual cuisine. Rose blows right past. And how do you define cuisine . Well, i call it modernist. Thats my term for the entire thing. Theres a critic in spain that calls it technoemotional. Its the middle east intellectual view of cuisine youll probably have. Rose so he was blowing past chefs he admired in france, in your opinion cambridge studying with stephen hawking. Thats right. Thats right. And i heard about him cooking in the late 80s, again in the 90s and it took me a while to go down there and see what was up and i was amazed when i first did. Rose why did it take you a while . Too busy in yeah, too busy. Rose next slide is a bullet passing through a dozen eggs. laughs so we got an ultra high speed camera and we started using it to like film popcorn being made. Thats an awesome thing. Then we thought, well, you know, theres an old expression if you want to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs. And someone in the lab says you know, my cousins got a rifle. Rose laughs what caught the bullet at the other end . A big backstop. It was a shooting range. Rose oh, i see. We went out to a shooting range and theres no culinary purpose to it but my god it was found do. Rose all right, the next thing were going to see quickly is a global good vaccine canister. So now were switching gears to some of the projects that we do in the lab other than cooking. In the developing world we all get our vaccine shot, we dont think about how the vaccine got to the the doctors office, its not a big problem because weve got a good power grid. In africa a huge percentage of the vaccines spoil between being ship from the manufacturer and getting out tow the childs arm. That will cost money, but ultimately that kills children. Because kids will get diseases, sometimes fatal diseases, while waiting far vaccine to come out. Well, a lot of people have come up with solutions to this. Ours is this vaccine contain cher can hold vaccine cold literally for months at a time with no power whatsoever. Its a really, really good insulated box. Rose bill gates is involved in this idea, too. Bill is our biggest supporter in a project called our Global Good Fund where we try to come up with Clever Technology solutions that are appropriate for the developing world. You know, the Silicon Valley has been about Building Tools or toys for rich people and by rich people i dont mean rich in this country. Everyone. In this country rich on a global scale. And regardless of whether its a cell phone ar a computer its a tool or a toy. Theyve transformed our lives but we didnt need our lives transformed. Were not on deaths door. The people who didnt need transformation are those living on a dollar or two a day. Rose my question is the potential of Silicon Valley to affect global change, is it operating at 10 . Well rose is the whole idea of the richness of americas Human Resource and innovation to make a difference around the world in a very positive way and ive had and you might have heard the people bill gates for example say America Needs to do