(FORTUNE Magazine) – Nathan Myhrvold is a gourmand who loves French food, but he dutifully showed up at the Italian joint I suggested. Microsoft's chief technical officer didn't seem to have any urgent agenda, so as we tucked away some carpaccio I asked him to expound on what remains top-of-mind for anyone who covers his company: the Department of Justice action against Microsoft, which is ongoing despite a recent appellate court ruling allowing Microsoft to sell Win 98 with an integrated Internet Explorer.

"The market works," he started out. "Companies are humbled by the market." Intervention by the government is gratuitous, he believes. "In essence the DoJ wants Microsoft to fire me so we can't innovate in products. For instance, we're working on speech recognition. Will they allow us to put it in the operating system?" He was getting up a head of steam. "It's amusing that people think we should be pragmatic and give more money to politicians. That's a cynical, corrupt view of the world. The notion that none of this would have happened if we had just spread money around and been palsy with people is just extreme."

Now that we had dispensed with Washington, I brought up the so-called year 2000 bug, which arises because many computers, mainly mainframes and other large systems that predate Microsoft's reign, have only a two-digit date field and may not know what to do when 1999 gives way to 2000. "The whole thing was due to carelessness," said Myhrvold. "It just never entered people's heads that the first two digits could change. It's very hard to tell how bad the situation will be. I'm sure things will break. It's very hard to dispel a nightmare scenario. There are millions of lines of code in every person's life, and some percentage will be affected. The dark-side scenario of airplanes falling out of the sky and bank computers crashing is possible. But it's fundamentally very, very hard to know whether the impact will be little or big.

"If it becomes a crisis in some other part of the world, it could easily affect us here. It's one world. We can't say the iceberg hit his part of the Titanic, not mine. It could become a big lesson in how interconnected the world is. It's not just the dates changing, it's all the data that can get corrupted because somebody else's computer has a problem. Being resilient against the second- and third-order ripples could be impossible to test for. Somebody said to me, 'my pacemaker has a microprocessor in it--it'll be okay, won't it?' I just said, 'I guess you'd better ask your doctor.' Is it possible it could be a problem? Of course. So pick some very calm place to be, and stay indoors." He laughed. Myhrvold likes to laugh.

It was time for dessert. I reminded Nathan that he'd once told Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, that he was probably the online bookstore's biggest customer. "Jeff checked on that, and as far as they could tell, I was right," he replied. "I probably spend $5,000 a month on Amazon. For instance, I'm going fly-fishing in Mongolia later this summer. I may not buy all the books on Amazon about Mongolia or fly-fishing, but a lot of them. I found a $240, 1,000-page chronicle of all things Mongolian by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences."

But where, pray tell, do you put all those books? Perhaps inspired by his boss, Myhrvold is building a new house. A very large one, just down the road from the Gates'. "The architect's task is like building a library. There will be bookcases everywhere," he said. "I have at least a thousand cookbooks. I figure if I cook one dish from a cookbook that costs $30, that's not too much if I'm serving four to five people and spending two to three hours in preparation." Recently, Myhrvold's 9-year-old twin boys wanted a book on paper airplanes, and Nathan remembered one he'd repeatedly checked out of the library in Santa Monica, Calif., when he was a child. He found it on Amazon but didn't stop there. "I bought about 50." It was time to go. I let Nathan pay.