Modern Cuisine Icon Nathan Myhrvold’s Wildly Creative Life
Nathan Myhrvold believes that things worth doing are worth doing to the best of your ability. All images c/o Myhrvold.
After working as Microsoft’s first Chief Technology Officer, launching the invention business Intellectual Ventures (where he personally has been awarded 900 patents), and publishing numerous scientific papers covering everything from quantum physics and dinosaur paleontology to climate change and more, what could Nathan Myhrvold possibly do for an encore?
A lot. Myhrvold has embarked on a very successful parallel career path pursuing his interests in food, science, and technology. (This is in addition to being the CEO of Intellectual Ventures.) He assembled the Modernist Cuisine team in 2010 and has authored and published a series of influential books, beginning with the five-volume, 2,500-page cookbook, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking that won two James Beard Foundation awards. And he’s not done yet. Myhrvold recently published Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography, a book that reimagines food as high art. He goes deep into his craft to show us food in ways we had never considered before. Think ketchup and mustard exploding out of a glass bottle and splattering across French fries, and margarita liquid suspended in air the moment before it hits the ice-filled glass. (That last one required a balloon-pendulum robot. The robot pops the balloons and is synced with Myhrvold’s camera so that he can perfectly capture the intoxicating collision as soon as it mixes together to make a margarita. Obviously.)
Myhrvold is someone who takes his joy seriously and, as such, has pushed us to see what we thought we knew in new ways. Here, he shares how he views and exhibits his creativity; why he turned his photography passion into an exciting new career chapter; and, naturally, the story behind how he made ketchup look like fine art.
Myhrvold with wine.
Most people pursue hobbies as hobbies. You’ve pursued your outside interests with zeal and have even turned them into new career chapters. What drives you?
I have a principle that things that are worth doing are worth doing to the best of your ability.
If you are into something then why not go as deep as you can? I worked at Microsoft as the Chief Technology Officer and it was great in many ways, but, when you work 80 hours a week that crimps everything else you can do. (You’ve got to sleep at a certain point.) That’s ultimately why I left Microsoft, not because it was terrible but because it was so focused. I couldn’t pursue other interests.
The normal thing with a career path is that, the better you do, the more responsibility you’re given. I like to say that the only institution in life that routinely gives you time off for good behavior is prison. Good behavior at work probably means you’re going to get more work. That also means more pay and other things that are good about it. I was in a position where I was financially successful enough at Microsoft, but conversely, a lot of people with that financial freedom don’t take advantage of it. What’s the point if I didn’t take advantage?
You started the research division at Microsoft and were the company’s first CTO. Did you view yourself as a creative person? And, more broadly, how do you view creativity in the science and engineering fields?
It was creative, but creativity can take on a different meaning in different areas. There are the fields you normally associate with creativity, such as an artist, poet, and composer. But you can’t be a creative composer if you can’t read sheet music. There is a minimum level of knowledge that you have to have before you can start applying things creatively.
The same thing is true in technology. If you want to be creative in your application of computers or computer science, you need knowledge upfront. One of the things that’s a disadvantage in those fields is learning all of the boring stuff that’s a prerequisite. People who are writers have the advantage that the primary prerequisite is reading and you have lots of great literature. That’s more accessible than sheet music, which is a completely different system. When you get to highly-technical fields, all of the layers have prerequisites that you need to learn and they are typically not terribly creative. That can unfortunately weed out people who are creative.
But, if I had some bad medical condition that most surgeons said they couldn’t operate on and we found a creative surgeon who could figure out how to do it, well, that’s fantastic. By the way, all of those “simple” surgeries are only simple because previously someone was creative enough to say, “His hip is shot. Maybe we can replace it?”
Do you remember the first thing that you took a picture of?
I was always taking pictures of my family and of wild animals. Every time I saw a wild animal, I would take a picture of it. But I grew up in Los Angeles, so there wasn’t much in the way of wildlife.
What did you do to get better at the craft?
Photography has several elements. It has a technical component. You have settings on your camera. Over time, more of those settings have been made automatic, but it still helps to understand how the camera works. There is also the composition of pictures and what makes a powerful photograph. Those are useful to learn because they’re helpful to constructing your vision and realizing your artistic vision. But you also just have to practice, see what you got right, and then try it again.
When I started, there was a saying that the difference between an amateur and a professional was one thing, more film. With digital cameras, it is cheaper to take a picture. I always tell people that bits are cheap. Take plenty of pictures. You can always delete them. The other thing that is great about digital photography is you get immediate feedback. My photographic IQ when I’m looking at the picture is vastly higher when I’m taking the picture.
Don’t whack the bottle!
Half and half.
How do you look at something like a ketchup and mustard bottle and see something that can become art, when the rest of us just see condiments?
I like to look at familiar things in an unfamiliar way. Almost everybody has tried to get ketchup or mustard out of a bottle. It’s hard for a technical reason. Ketchup and mustard are non-Newtonian fluids. They fit like a solid until they start to move. Initially, it’s hard to get them to move. So you whack the bottle, then you whack it a bit harder. It starts to move and suddenly becomes not viscous at all. It flows fast and you made this giant splat. You’ve now got way too much ketchup.
I wanted to show people what happens when this stuff splatters. To do that, my team and I created this situation to take the picture. Part of that was splattering the ketchup in a repeatable way. It’s never exactly the same, but just whacking bottles of ketchup and hoping we would catch the right image. We could go through 1,000 bottles of ketchup and still not catch it. We had to go through a bunch of iterations to figure out how we were going to create the situation to take the picture.
To splatter ketchup in a repeatable way, we took an empty ketchup bottle and cut the bottom off of it. We rigged it up so we could pressurize it with compressed air. That was our robotic equivalent of whacking the bottle. It was controlled by a computer and helped us get the timing right. The whole thing took milliseconds — 1/1000 of a second. If you’re too early, the ketchup won’t be out of the bottle yet. And if you wait too long, the ketchup would have already hit the fries. One of our mottos here at the studio is that it only has to look good for 1/1000 of a second. After that, it can all go to hell. At the end of these shoots, we are usually covered in whatever we’ve photographed. It’s particularly funny when we’re doing the wine shots because our clothes are soaked with wine and our blood alcohol level is zero.
What’s another example where you went to great lengths behind-the-scenes to get a great shot?
When the team and I wanted to make a pizza in the shape of Italy, the first thing we had to do was make a pizza pan shaped like Italy in our machine shop. We baked the pizza and then, to set it as Italy, we realized we needed to have the equivalent of the Mediterranean Ocean. We put the pizza on little blocks and got gallons of red wine. We brought in the kind of fans they use to blow models' hair during a photoshoot and used those to blow the wine. The image is a pizza in the shape of Italy floating on an ocean of red wine waves. Without a lot of effort, you just don’t get that picture.
You seem to give yourself the opportunity to try things and miss. How do you view experimentation and possible failure?
It’s hard to do things that are creative and outside the box and yet guarantee success. I don't know how to do that. It runs counter to a certain sentiment in popular society that failure is not an option. If failure is not an option for you, you’re probably not doing something creative. You have to give yourself the freedom to try and fail.
Why make your own cameras and other tools when you can’t find what you want on the market?
Most photographers are happy working within the scope of photography that you can achieve with existing equipment. Then there is another set of people that say, “You can achieve something by doing it in a different way. Not necessarily better, but it’s different.” This happens to me quite a bit. Partly it’s because I like making the equipment or getting into the equipment. So I wound up making a lot of my own camera systems. Sometimes literally making the whole camera or its most important parts.
I make my own equipment in service of a larger creative goal because I’m trying to do a picture that nobody on Earth has done. Or the only people who have done it are nutcases like me that build our own equipment. If I want to take a picture of a snowflake falling that only lasts a tiny amount of time, I can’t bring the snowflake inside. I have to build a microscope that I can bring outside.
If you went back and shared a learning with your younger self, what is one piece of advice you’d tell him leading a successful creative career?
If we could rewind the tape of my life and play it again, things might work out in a different way.
You can always second guess things, but I don’t think that is as useful as asking yourself, “knowing what I know now, what should I do next?” Focus on the things that are in your control. And try to make it happen.
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