60 Minutes - Sunday, July 14, 2019

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

Scott Pelley reports on the developments in artificial intelligence, and China's effort to dominate the AI field. John Green, the best-selling author of books like "The Fault in Our Stars," opens up to Jon Wertheim about exploring his fears through his writing. Lesley Stahl travels to Italy to meet Chef Massimo Bottura, whose kitchen creations are considered works of art. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You do believe it's going to change the world. I believe it's going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind, more than electricity. Kai-Fu Lee believes the best place to be an AI capitalist is communist China. One of Lee's investments is Face++. Its visual recognition system smothered me to guess my age. It settled on 61, which was wrong. I wouldn't be 61 for days.

I love the bug. It's amazing. Oh, thank you so much. If you don't know John Green, the teenagers in your life do. Hi! As an author, he dominates the young adult bestseller list. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Online, he has millions of YouTube subscribers. But here's what some John Green fans don't know and will learn tonight.

He has a serious mental health condition. I had a lot of self-destructive impulses and I felt scared all the time. What were you scared of? The short answer is everything. The restaurant ranked number one in the world is in the little-known town of Modena, Italy, Osteria Francescana, where you have to wait months to get a reservation.

Caesar salad in bloom. Chef Massimo Battura says it wasn't always like this. Those are flowers? All flowers, edible flowers. That his avant-garde eatery might never have become number one if not for a simple and spectacular dish of old-fashioned tagliatelle. So that turned everything around? Totally.

You are known as the maestro. Now, before they want to crucify me in the main piazza. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties.

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As we first reported in January, that's why so many people are desperate to meet Kai-Fu Lee, the oracle of AI. Kai-Fu Lee is in there somewhere, in a selfie scrum at a Beijing Internet Conference. His 50 million social media followers want to be seen in the same frame because of his talent for engineering and genius for wealth. I wonder, do you think people around the world have any idea what's coming in artificial intelligence? I think most people have no idea, and many people have the wrong idea. But you do believe it's going to change the world? I believe it's going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind, more than electricity. Li believes the best place to be an AI capitalist is communist China.

His Beijing venture capital firm manufactures billionaires. These are the entrepreneurs that we funded. He's funded more than 50 AI startups. We have about $10 billion companies here. Ten $1 billion companies that you funded? Yes, including a few $10 billion companies here. Ten $1 billion companies that you funded? Yes, including a few $10 billion companies. In 2017, China attracted half of all AI capital in the world. One of Li's investments is Face++,

not affiliated with Facebook. Its visual recognition system smothered me to guess my age. It settled on 61, which was wrong. I wouldn't be 61 for days. On the street, Face++ nailed everything that moved. It's a kind of artificial intelligence that has been made possible by three innovations. Super fast computer chips, all the world's data now available online and a revolution in programming called deep learning computers used to be given rigid instructions now

they're programmed to learn on their own in early days of AI people tried to program the AI with how people think. So I would write a program to say, measure the size of the eyes and their distance. Measure the size of the nose. Measure the shape of the face. And then if these things match, then this is Larry and that's John. But today, you just take all the pictures of Larry and John and you tell the system, go at it. You figure out what separates Larry from John. Let's say you want the computer to be able to pick men out of a crowd and describe their clothing. Well, you simply show the computer 10 million pictures of men in various

kinds of dress. That's what they mean by deep learning. It's not intelligence so much, it's just the brute force of data having 10 million examples to choose from. So Face++ tagged me as male, short hair, black long sleeves, black long pants. It's wrong about my gray suit, and this is exactly how it learns. When engineers discover that error, they'll show the computer a million gray suits, and it won't make that mistake again. Another recognition system we saw, or saw us, is learning not just who you are, but how you feel. Now, what are all the dots on the screen, the dots over our eyes and our mouths? Sure. The computer keeps track of all the feature points on the face. Sun Fan Yang developed this for TAL Education Group, which tutors 5 million Chinese

students. Let's look at what we're seeing here. Now, according to the computer, I'm confused, which is generally the case. But when I laughed, I was happy. Exactly. That's amazing. The machine notices concentration or distraction to pick out for the teacher those students who are struggling or gifted. It can tell when the child is excited about math or the other child is excited about poetry. Could these AI systems pick out geniuses from the countryside? That's possible in the

future. It can also create a student profile and know where the student got stuck so the teacher can personalize the areas in which the student needs help. If you do, raise up your hand. We found Kai-Fu Lee's personal passion in this spare Beijing studio. He's projecting top teachers into China's poorest schools. This English teacher is connected to a class 1,000 miles away in a village called Defang. Many students in Defang are called left-behinds because their parents left them with family when they moved to the cities for work. Most left-behinds don't get past ninth grade. Lee is counting on AI to deliver for them the same opportunity he had when he immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan as a boy. When I arrived in Tennessee, my principal took every lunch to teach me English.

And that is the kind of attention that I've not been used to growing up in Asia. And I felt that the American classrooms are smaller, encouraged individual thinking, critical thinking. And I felt it was the best thing that ever happened to me. What about this? And the best thing that ever happened to most of the engineers we met at Lee's firm. I went to Cornell for a master's degree in information science. They too are alumni of America with a dream for China. You have written that Silicon Valley's edge is not all it's cracked up to be.

What do you mean by that? Well, Silicon Valley has been the single epicenter of the world technology innovation when it comes to computers, internet, mobile, and AI. But in the recent five years, we are seeing the Chinese AI is getting to be almost as good as Silicon Valley AI. And I think Silicon Valley is not quite aware of it yet.

China's advantage is in the amount of data it collects. The more data, the better the AI. Just like the more you know, the smarter you are. China has four times more people than the United States, and they are doing nearly everything online. I just don't see any Chinese without a phone in their head. College student Monica Sun showed us how more than a billion Chinese are using their phones to buy everything, find anything, and connect with everyone. In America, when personal information leaks, we have congressional hearings. Not in China. Do you ever worry about the information that's

being collected about you? Where you go, what you buy, who you're with? I never think about it. Do you think most Chinese worry about their privacy? Not that much. Not that much. With a pliant public, the leader of the Communist Party has made a national priority of achieving AI dominance in 10 years. This is where Kai-Fu Lee becomes uncharacteristically shy. Even though he's a former Apple, Microsoft, and Google executive, he knows who's boss in China. President Xi has called technology the sharp weapon of the modern state. What does he mean by that? I am not an expert in interpreting his thoughts. Don't know. There are those, particularly people in the West, who worry about this AI technology as being something that governments will use to control their people and to crush dissent.

As a venture capitalist, we don't invest in this area, and we're not studying deeply this particular problem. But governments do. It's certainly possible for governments to use the technologies just like companies. Lee is much more talkative about another threat posed by AI. He explores the coming destruction of jobs in his latest book, AI Superpowers, China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. AI will increasingly replace repetitive jobs, not just for blue-collar work, but a lot of white-collar work. What sort of jobs would be lost to AI? Basically, chauffeurs, truck drivers, anyone who is driving for a living,

their jobs will be disrupted more in the 15 to 20 year time frame. And many jobs that seem a little bit complex, chef, waiter, a lot of things will become automated. We'll have automated stores, automated restaurants, and all together in 15 years, that's going to displace about 40% of jobs in the world. 40% of jobs in the world will be displaced by technology? I would say displaceable. What does that do to the fabric of society? Well, in some sense, there's the human wisdom that always overcomes these technology revolutions.

The invention of the steam engine, the sewing machine, the electricity have all displaced jobs, and we've gotten over it. The challenge of AI is this 40%, whether it's 15 or 25 years, is coming faster than the previous revolutions. There's a lot of hype about artificial intelligence, and it's important to understand this is not general intelligence like that of a human. This system can read faces and grade papers, but it has no idea why these children are in this room

or what the goal of education is. A typical AI system can do one thing well, but can't adapt what it knows to any other task. So for now, it may be that calling this intelligence isn't very smart. When will we know that a machine can actually think like a human? Back when I was a grad student, people said, if a machine can drive a car by itself, that's intelligence. Now we say that's not enough.

So the bar keeps moving higher. I think that's, I guess, more motivation for us to work harder. But if you're talking about AGI, artificial general intelligence, I would say not within the next 30 years and possibly never. Possibly never? What's so insurmountable? Because I believe in the sanctity of our soul. I believe there's a lot of things about us that we don't understand. I believe there's a lot of love and compassion that is not explainable in terms of neural networks and computational

algorithms. And I currently see no way of solving them. Obviously, unsolved problems have been solved in the past, but it would be irresponsible for me to predict that these will be solved by a certain time frame. We may just be more than our bits. We may. While you may not have heard of the author John Green, be assured that the teenagers in your life have.

He is America's answer to J.K. Rowling with his mega-bestsellers spawning blockbuster movies. Green has become wildly popular thanks largely to his loyal teenage audience. As we first reported in October, Green is also the rare literary talent who doubles as a podcaster and a YouTube star. His success stems from his intuitive understanding of adolescents, his ability to meet them on their level and on their devices.

To those who consider today's teens a disaffected tribe rarely glancing up from their phones in video games, John Green offers a counter-narrative. Let's talk about teenagers. 60 Minutes core audience, I understand. It's trending. Well, you know. You write a lot about teenagers. Yeah.

Why this cohort? They're doing so many things for the first time, and there's an intensity to that. There's an intensity to falling in love for the first time. And also there's an intensity to asking the big questions about life and meaning that just isn't matched anywhere else. You've said before that adults underestimate teenagers. Well, I think sometimes teenagers maybe don't have the language to talk to us in ways that seem compelling to us, and maybe that makes it easy for us to dismiss them or think of them as less intellectually curious or intellectually sophisticated than we are. But I don't think that's true at all. I love the book. It's amazing. Oh, thank you so much. John Breen's books in the YA, or young adult genre, dominate bestseller lists.

And while the stories take place in the U.S., this is the Swedish cover of The Fault in Our Stars. they echo worldwide, having been translated into 55 languages. Lithuanian, Slovenian, Croatian. Yeah, it's really wonderful to have your books travel to places you've never been. I mean, it's a weird but really beautiful experience. His most famous book, The Fault in Our Stars, was a bestseller for more than three years. travel to places you've never been. I mean, it's a weird but really beautiful experience. His most famous book, The Fault in Our Stars, was a bestseller for more than three years.

It's down to you, Hazel Grace. And adapted to a hit film in 2014 that grossed more than $300 million. I guess this water was the star-crossed love of my life. Tinge with tragedy, the story follows two teenagers with cancer who fall in love. I love you so much. Heavy and heady stuff for an adolescent audience. The subjects you deal with are quite weighty. Death and suicide and cancer.

A lot of teenagers haven't had these experiences per se, but these books resonate with them. How is that? Maybe lots of teenagers haven't had these particular experiences, but I do think they know of loss and they know of grief and they know of pain. Maybe the particulars of an experience aren't universal, but the feelings are. Okay, I'm going to need you to hit this button. One reason he connects so well with teenagers, at age 41, Green is still a kid at heart. I love that you're just staying in that corner. His youthful spirit drives more than book sales.

It made him a YouTube star. Hi there, this is John Green. And I'm Hank Green, and we are the Vlogbrothers on YouTube. In 2007, the early days of YouTube, John Green and his kid brother Hank began sharing videos as a way to stay in touch with each other. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. In short order, and in lockstep with the growth of YouTube, the Greens' videos amassed a huge

audience, now nearly a billion total views strong. This online video platform in turn has fueled John Green's readership. They play off each other. Yeah, in a way they're different sides of the same coin, right? Because what interests me really is the idea of connecting with a viewer or with a reader without having to like actually talk to them and look at them

and all of that. This preference, Green said, is the legacy of his own socially awkward adolescence. Who do you envision are your readers? I don't envision a reader. You don't? I think in some ways I'm writing back to my high school self to try to communicate things to him, to try to offer him some kind of comfort or consolation. Who was that guy? I had a difficult time in high school.

I wasn't a very good student, and I had a lot of self-destructive impulses, and I felt scared all the time. What were you scared of? The short answer is everything. He explores those fears in his most recent book, Turtles All the Way Down, a bestseller for 50 straight weeks

since it debuted at number one. Its theme? Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, OCD, based on Green's own. For this book, he obeyed that time-honored rule of the craft, write what you know. I wanted to try to give people a glimpse of what it is. I wanted to try to put them, you know,

at least a little bit inside of that experience. You use the word thought spiral. Mm-hmm. What does that mean? The thing about a spiral is that it goes on forever, right? Like, if you zoom in on the spiral, it can keep tightening forever. And that, for me, is the nature of obsessive thought, that it's this inwardly turning spiral that never actually has an end point. So it might be, I'm eating a salad, and it suddenly occurs to me that somebody might have bled into this salad.

Now, they probably didn't. This is what you're thinking. But this is what I'm thinking. And instead of being able to move on to a second thought, that thought just expands and expands and expands and expands. And then I use compulsive behaviors to try to manage the worry and the overwhelmedness that that thought causes me. So how do you get out of this coil? And how do you break this infinity? I have a few strategies. I exercise. That's probably the biggest thing. Dashed a Bloomington last night. Exercise is pretty magical in my life. I don't enjoy it. I don't relish the thought of going for a run, but it is very helpful because I can't think. I do feel lucky to have some distance from it sometimes.

John Green lives in Indianapolis, where his life comes short on stress, long on anonymity. It is very funny. He and his wife, Sarah Urist Green, a curator and online art educator, are parents of a son age eight and daughter five. Sarah began reading his manuscripts when they started dating 14 years ago. And I was really nervous because I really liked John, and I knew that if the book was bad, it wasn't going to work. The relationship wasn't going to work. The relationship wasn't going to work.

Not the book wasn't going to work. No, no, no. The book might have worked or not, but I couldn't be dishonest about that. And if I didn't like it, sorry. I mean, I'm super glad I didn't know that at the time. I don't think I'm going to handle that pressure. Unfiltered criticism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. John, do you remember when you told Sarah about your OCD? I don't know that it was an event so much as it was a process. And part of getting to know me

was understanding that I had problems with anxiety. There was never a moment where John kind of sat me down and said, I have OCD. It was more of a gradual process where we were able to kind of put this label on it. And so I can't say that I would ever wish it to go away because it's a part of him. I'd like it to go away, for the record. So much so that in 2015, fresh off the spectacular success of The Fault in Our Stars, Green decided to take a chance and go off the anti-anxiety medication he had been taking for years. Why did you do that? Well, because I bought into this old romantic lie that in order to write well,

you need to sort of like be free from all of these mind-altering substances or whatever. And the consequences were really dire, unfortunately. And I'm lucky that they weren't catastrophic, but they were serious. And coming out of that experience, I found myself wanting to try to give some sort of form or structure to this fear that I'd lived with for most of my life. Hello, and welcome to the annual Nerdfighter gathering. These John Green fans call themselves Nerdfighters, part of a community that now includes hundreds of thousands of members around the world. The Nerdfighters formed in response to Green misreading the name of this video game, Arrowfighters. Really what it's about is being enthusiastic. Being nerdy is really about how you approach what you love.

Unabashedly. Yeah. All five of you, proud, unapologetic nerds. Oh, yeah. We take the name of pride. We met these nerd fighters last June. They were attending the 9th annual VidCon, a YouTube conference John and Hank Green created

to help online video fans and creators meet in person. These five told us they were especially grateful to John Green for writing about his anxiety in Turtles All the Way Down. It's reassuring, for sure. For someone who does experience anxiety, he articulates things I could never articulate before, which both makes me feel seen, but also helps me, like, understand and sort of, you know, feel better from different things. Yeah, there's this metaphor of a spiral in the book.

Yeah. That was one of the most useful things I've ever come across in describing my own anxiety, and we use it in the house all the time. And being around this community of people that was so loving really made me grow to be a better person than I would have without it. I am a homeschool child. This was her, Presley Alexander, when she was just seven years old and she first came into the John Green orbit. You are my favorite teachers. Not by reading one of his books, but by watching him on Crash Course. Hi there, my name is John

Green. This is Crash Course World History, and today we're going to... The educational YouTube series that he started with his brother Hank in their manic signature style. Writing and the ability to read it are so-called markers of civilization. I mean, I don't want to get all liberal artsy on you, but I do want to... The videos offer lessons in the humanities and sciences. Our nervous system is divided into two main networks that work in harmony. The central nervous system...

With more than 8 million subscribers, they're now offered as part of the curriculum in classrooms around the country. On account of his popularity across platforms, Green cuts a figure that he never would have imagined when he was a teenager, something akin to a rock star. I want to know what your high school self would have thought if they saw you now. My high school self would be very, very happy and excited. I'm embarrassed to admit.

I wish that weren't the case. That's a great way to put it. I agree completely. Hi. The Green brothers are exceptionally supportive of each other. I've got a costume change ready. Especially when it comes to John's OCD, described so vividly in his latest book. Turtles all the way down. What was it like for you to read that?

It did help me understand John better. But in general, be more empathetic toward people who deal with anxiety and OCD. What did you learn about him? The extent to which sometimes he is at the mercy of his own mind. But did it cause you to re-examine or re-assess moments in your childhood? Yeah, I mean, there have definitely been times

when John had a less stable life where I think the family was worried about him. With good reason. Hello! Hi, everybody. Lately, there's a lot less to worry about. How are you?

With his multimedia, multimillion-dollar empire, John Green is using his pen, his keyboard, and his video camera to normalize teenage social awkwardness and also to destigmatize mental illness. You've said that it's important for young people to be able to see successful, productive adults challenged by mental illness. Yeah. Expand on that. Well, I have a really wonderful life. I have a really rich, fulfilling life.

I also have a pretty serious chronic mental health problem. And those aren't mutually exclusive. And the truth is that lots of people have chronic mental health problems and still have good lives. Today, when chefs can be as famous as movie stars and their creations in the kitchen as admired as original works of art. There are a few who rival the success and celebrity of Massimo Bottura. His restaurant, Osteria Francescana, has three Michelin stars. And as we first reported last year, it ranked number one on the list of the world's 50 best restaurants. It's located in northern Italy in a city called Modena,

where the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti was born. When we went to Modena to meet Chef Bottura, we were struck by how operatic he is. Imagine, imagine, imagine, dream. You have to dream about food, okay? Do you dream about food okay do you dream about food i always dream about food i always dream we first met massimo battora shopping for food in modena the home of italy's finest balsamic vinegar and parmesan cheese he buys the freshest vegetables, like green tomatoes, that he likes to top off with 25-year-old balsamic vinegar. Are you ready?

I can't wait. Okay. It's an experience that is going to stay with you for the rest of your life. I'm telling you this. This is a huge moment. It's a huge moment for you. The whole thing, just like that? Yeah, just one bite. Okay. It's a huge moment for you. The whole thing, just like that? Yeah, just one bite.

And close your eyes, connect your mental palate, and understand. Your perception, your receptor are talking to you right now. There are so many different things going on in my mind. Yeah, it is, it is, it is. Complexity. And that's his signature as a chef. And what's he making? He's making risotto, toasting rice with orange juice. Dishes that are complex mixtures of unexpected flavors.

Two people, two super menus, don't go! Don't go! In his kitchen at Osteria Francescana, he oversees a staff of 35 as they build his beautiful avant-garde masterpieces that he says are inspired by contemporary art. His creations are like canvases, and he christens them. He calls this camouflage made of wild hair, juniper berries, and cocoa powder. Oh, that's spectacular. Some of his dishes are beautiful. Some are whimsical. And then there's his version of popular Italian cuisine. That's chicken cacciatore. This is chicken cacciatore.

Oh, my God. You wouldn't recognize most of his Italian dishes. This is the crunchy part of lasagna. Spaghetti with tomato. Spaghetti with parmigiano. Spaghetti with fresh herbs. Battora is one of the most successful chefs in the so-called deconstruction school, where food is presented like abstract art. What do you call this dish? In three parts.

I don't know. His culinary creations are rooted in the traditions of northern Italy and his hometown, Modena, an ancient city of narrow streets and grand piazzas where they've been making Parmesan cheese and balsamic vinegar the same way for centuries. It's where Battora's love of food began when he was just a little boy hiding under the kitchen table. I remember my grandmother was rolling pasta. In the meantime, what I was doing, I was stealing

the tortellini from under the table and eat the raw tortellini. That's how you were beginning to develop your palate, was from raw tortellini. Yeah, from a raw tortellini you can understand a lot. You can understand the amount of spices they use, the amount of parmigiano, the amount of ham, you know, those kind of things. Even as a little kid. Balance, balance. How old are you at that point? You're a kid. Yeah, like kind of things. Even as a little kid? Balance, balance. How old are you at that point? You're a kid.

Yeah, like seven, six. And you're falling in love with food. In that moment, exactly. He started cooking for his friends when he was in high school, but his father wanted him to become a lawyer in the family's lucrative fuel business. I have to show my dad he was wrong because he tried to, you know, he tried to convince me not to get into that business. Being a chef? Yeah.

He didn't respect that as a serious profession. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, he didn't. No more money from daddy. Nope. That was it. No, no, that was it. Cut you off. And you're saying to yourself, I have to show you. I don't want to say it. Revenge is a very strong word. It's more like... Show that you were right. Show that I was right. But he wasn't right right away. When he and his American wife, Lara Gilmore, opened Osteria Francescana in 1995, amidst all that tradition in Modena, they were offering Batura's minimalist rendition of a bowl of tortellini, just six little pieces of pasta.

Six little, tiny, and that was it the biggest provocation of all you know a tortellini is something it's it's comfort food for for modernese it's like a religion if you don't believe in god you believe in tortellini but you don't want six you want a nice big abundant bowl of tortellini with the hot broth and he was serving this sort of room temperature broth gel and the tortellini were there and there were six of them, and the Modenese were, like, putting their hands, like, what did I come here for? Why am I here? Even you're laughing.

Food critics ask themselves the same question. A very important Modenese food critic came and ate. The Modenese food critic. The Modenese food critic came and ate at our restaurant. Of course, the review was terrible. The review was like, please don't go there. Don't go there. And hardly anyone did. His food was seen as a sacrilege

in a country that reveres mothers and their home cooking. Did you ever say to yourself, okay, I'm going right back to the old Italian cooking. I can do it. I know how to do it. Never. No. Now you can't do that. But after six years of bad reviews and empty tables, he gave in and introduced a handful of traditional Italian dishes, including an old-fashioned tagliatelle. And then a prominent national food critic happened by, ordered the tagliatelle, and wrote...

But these are the best tagliatelle in the world. He said that. Yes. So that turned everything around? Totally. You are known as the maestro. Now. Before, they wanted to crucify me in the main piazza.

Now they call me maestro. That's the difference. Some of the maestro's dishes are improvisations born out of accidents, like his, oops, I dropped the lemon tart. That's a classic. The story begins when his pastry chef, Taka, was making a lemon tart. I saw Taka completely white. He dropped one of the two tarts in the plate, upside down, just like that. Oh, God.

Taka was like ready to kill himself. And I said, Taka! Taka, no. Please don't. Don't kill yourself. Don't, don't. Look at that. That lemon tart is so beautiful that we have to serve the second one exactly the first one.

We did it. We rebuilt in a perfect way the imperfection. We smashed the other tart exactly as the first one. I can't believe we did that. If I think now, I was like, we were crazy. I was like totally out of mind. Oops, I dropped the lemon tart. Is Jackson Pollock on a plate? And it's one of the most popular dishes on a tasting menu of 12 courses that with wine can cost more than $500 a person. They serve lunch and dinner five days a week, and it's always booked.

Reservations open three months in advance and fill up in minutes. Are you prepared for the best salad of your life? He invited us to sample some of his other signature dishes in his well-stocked wine cellar. Caesar salad in bloom. Those are flowers? All flowers, edible flowers. All edible flowers. 27 elements in that dish. It takes two chefs to build a salad leaf by leaf, petal by petal. And for this dish, it takes a splash of seawater. This is seawater transformed into paper. You make paper out of seawater? Yes.

It may not look like it, but this is Botorra's fillet of soul, topped off with wisps of dehydrated seawater. He calls it Mediterranean combustion. How am I ever going to eat normal food again, ever? But you feel how light you feel? Very light. Yeah, but totally delicious. How long did it take you to create this one dish? Was it months? 32 years. 32 years of experience. Now 56, after all his hard work, Bottura is riding high, sometimes on his customized Ducati motorcycle.

But a few years ago, he began to feel something was missing in his life, that serving fancy food to international foodies wasn't enough. So like other celebrity chefs, he began to think about helping the poor by feeding them. This is late 2013. We had just sort of one year into having our third Michelin star that we had worked 20 years to get. And I'm thinking, now you want to start doing this? I thought it was a

terrible idea. But she relented and helped him open a number of what he calls refatorios, kind of souped-up soup kitchens. But he didn't want them to feel like down-and-out, stand-in-line cafeterias. So partnering with local charities, he created warm, inviting dining rooms in old abandoned theaters or unused space in churches where the working poor and homeless Italians and refugees from Africa sit side by side with volunteers who serve them three-course meals like in high-quality restaurants. The food donated by local grocery stores would have been thrown out

because it's slightly damaged or near its sell-by date. We are Italian, so we're going to make pasta. He's opened seven refatorios so far in London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and four in Italy, with more to come. Where did that inspiration come from? The numbers are mad. Numbers. 33% of the world production are wasted every year. 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year.

You know, think about one trillion of apples goes in the garbage. Think about how many, you know, apple pie you could create with those, with trillions of, you know. That's insane. The man who has for decades insisted on the oldest balsamic, the finest parmesan, the freshest tomatoes, now realizes their salvation in discarded leftovers. If cooked well, they can nourish the poor, as he says, by filling their stomachs and lifting their spirits. Massimo Bottura, number one. And his as well. It's absolutely necessary to give back some of the lucky life you're living.

So this is about giving back. It's what we need. We need dreams. If you don't dream and you don't dream big, you know, you cannot change the world. In May, Chef Bottura auctioned off a 49-year-old bottle of scotch whiskey for $140,000. The proceeds will go toward his fight against hunger and food waste, a cause that Time magazine cited when it named Bottura one of the 100 most influential people of 2019. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. And tomorrow, be sure to watch CBS This Morning.