Aug. 26, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:38:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Oh, hi, Lori. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| What's happening? | ||
| Pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Same to you. | ||
| I tried watching the Bourdain documentary, but I just got too sad. | ||
| I couldn't do it. | ||
| Did it feel weird? | ||
| Did you watch it, Roadrunner? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Did it feel weird when you knew that the voice was AI, sort of a recreation of his words? | ||
| It didn't feel weird to me because, honestly, it was less than 45 seconds in a two-hour film. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So, no, it didn't feel weird. | ||
| I knew exactly where one of the places was, that it was the AI, but the vast majority of that film is Tony's actual voice, and I think that really got lost in the discussion around the film. | ||
| Oh, it certainly did. | ||
| Yeah, I was under the impression that the whole thing was, that's how people are. | ||
| They're so gross. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| I always want to find the one thing that's negative about this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really bummed me out because that was the dominant conversation on opening weekend. | ||
| And it really kind of took away, for me, from, you know, it's a beautiful film. | ||
| I was a consulting producer, so obviously I have a dog in the fight and I want people to love the film. | ||
| But I think it's great. | ||
| It is really sad. | ||
| How far into it did you get? | ||
| I just started it and I shut it off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just got too sad. | ||
| Maybe it was my mood that day. | ||
| I just wasn't ready to watch something like that. | ||
| I was just like, I can't do this. | ||
| Yeah, I understand. | ||
| I've been steeped in all things Tony for over a decade, but since he died I've been making these books. | ||
| Working on the film and talking about him. | ||
| And so I've kind of got, I think, a layer of numbness in a way. | ||
| But sometimes stuff gets through. | ||
| The first time I saw the film, I cried like a baby. | ||
| But I was home by myself. | ||
| I was really glad to be alone, you know? | ||
| There's always this feeling when someone takes their own life, like if I could have just talked to them. | ||
| Like if I was there, if I could have talked to them. | ||
| I talked to David Cho and he had that same take on it. | ||
| You just don't know. | ||
| You feel like you fucked something up. | ||
| There's no peace. | ||
| If I think about him, I just always think, what a shame. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| What a shame. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, a guy who is so interesting and so loved, you know, to... | ||
| I found out about it from Maynard Keenan from Tool. | ||
| Do you know the story? | ||
| I listened to you talk to Tom Papa right after Tony died. | ||
| He made kind of a joke, right? | ||
| Yeah, Maynard's a funny guy. | ||
| And he was joking around. | ||
| He said that he knew that Tony was really into jiu-jitsu. | ||
| And Maynard really into jiu-jitsu, too. | ||
| And he's like, we should have a celebrity match. | ||
| Yeah, that would be awesome. | ||
| He was talking about it, and then he texted me and said, I guess the celebrity match is off. | ||
| And I was like, what does that mean? | ||
| I guess he just assumed that I would have already known about it, but I was in Chicago, and I had just woken up. | ||
| So then I googled it, and I was just like, ugh. | ||
| Yeah, that's not a great way. | ||
| I mean, there's no good way to find out that news, but that sounds like a particularly painful way to hear it. | ||
| It was confusing, you know? | ||
| It's painful, but it's almost like it's painful later. | ||
| In the beginning, it's just like... | ||
|
unidentified
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Shock. | |
| You're baffled. | ||
| You're like, how? | ||
| What? | ||
| Not there anymore. | ||
| Like, this person's not there anymore. | ||
| Like, if I text him, it's not there. | ||
| I have a phone that I won't get rid of. | ||
| Because it has text messages from him. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| I can always go back and look at them. | ||
| Yeah, same. | ||
| I'll never get rid of my last texts with him. | ||
| And what you were saying about, you know, you just wish you could have done something. | ||
| I mean, believe me, that is a conversation I have had with so many people. | ||
| And I think to myself, like, if I had just been a little more, I don't know, something. | ||
| If I had said something or if I had been more supportive or, you know, I just, I knew he was in trouble that week, but I didn't. | ||
| It never occurred to me that he would take that action that he did. | ||
| And the fact is, he had a lot of people around who were very close to him, who loved him. | ||
| And he had other people that were offering to come and be with him, because they knew he was having a hard time that week. | ||
| And he said, no, don't come. | ||
| Why was that week so particularly hard? | ||
| There was some stuff in the media with him and his girlfriend that was, you know, not great. | ||
| You know, he was very, very in love. | ||
| And I think there was some, I mean, I'm not saying anything that isn't public record. | ||
| And I'm always hesitant to talk too much about all of that. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's out there. | ||
| It was in the Italian press and maybe the French press that his girlfriend had been maybe or maybe not with another guy. | ||
| There were a lot of pictures that made it look not great. | ||
| And I think that was really hard for him. | ||
| And you'll see they talk about it. | ||
| It gets talked about in the film. | ||
| It gets talked about in my book. | ||
| I think he was... | ||
| He was deeply in love and I think he was realizing that this relationship maybe wasn't what he thought it was or that it just... | ||
| I think he felt humiliated, honestly, you know? | ||
| And I mean, that's a hard thing for a private person to metabolize. | ||
| And then, you know, your extremely public person who has been extremely public about this relationship, I think it was a lot for him to handle in that week. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah, there's not much you can do when that happens, in terms of, like, talking to a friend. | ||
| Like, words just don't work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, they don't... | ||
| You don't... | ||
| You're not gonna absorb them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know that a normal reaction to romantic trouble is to take your own life. | ||
| Clearly, there are plenty of people who have trouble in their relationships who stay alive. | ||
| You know, he was a really complicated guy. | ||
| He was a really, I think as public as he was and as much as he shared about the way that his mind and his heart worked, I think there was a lot that he didn't share. | ||
| And I think he was more troubled and more lonely and sad than I think any of us knew at the time. | ||
| You know, in the intervening three years, I've learned a lot. | ||
| And I thought I knew him inside and out. | ||
| I was his assistant for 10 years. | ||
| We wrote a book together. | ||
| I had done some traveling with him, not extensively, but I did a handful of trips over the years. | ||
| We were in contact every day. | ||
| And when I started to talk to people after he died, there was just a lot more to him, a lot more to his story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whenever anybody recovers from a serious drug problem, but yet still parties, I was always like, hmm, how's he pulling that off? | ||
| Like, the first time I hung out with him, I knew that he had gotten over the heroin thing, but I didn't quite realize how hard he drank. | ||
| I was like, Whoa! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Was that in Montana? | ||
| No, that was later. | ||
| That was after I'd known him for quite a while. | ||
| I mean, I think the first time I hung out with him was in Vegas. | ||
| Pretty sure. | ||
| It was when he was married to Octavia. | ||
| And they were there for the UFC. And I met him backstage. | ||
| I was like, wow. | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| It was one of the few people that I've met that I was like a little starstruck. | ||
| I said something really clunky. | ||
| Like one is to do when they meet someone they really admire. | ||
| My wife always used to say that he's my boyfriend because I would watch No Reservations all the time. | ||
| She was like, oh, you're watching your boyfriend. | ||
| And so I said, oh, my wife says you're my boyfriend. | ||
|
unidentified
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And he was like, who the fuck? | |
| He was so good at giving you that look. | ||
| I've said a couple of real stupid things to him, too, and I'll just never forget. | ||
| We were standing in the telephone store trying to upgrade my phone, and I was kind of new to the job and nervous, and I was like, what are we going to talk about for 10 minutes? | ||
| So I just said, how do you decide who to respond to on Twitter? | ||
| And he just gave me this look like, you're the fucking stupidest person I've ever met in my life. | ||
| You know, and I know he respected me, and I know he liked me, but I was just like, oh, God. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| It's actually not a bad question. | ||
| Yeah, I just, I don't know. | ||
| He just was like, I don't know. | ||
| The look on his face was just like, oh, man, I should have just kept my mouth shut. | ||
| Actually, David Simon told me a similar story. | ||
| You know, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, and Treme and, you know, really smart, articulate, funny guy. | ||
| And he told me that he said something to Tony that he just got that look. | ||
| That, like, you're a fucking idiot look, you know? | ||
| And it didn't ruin their friendship, but it made an impact. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I got really excited when Tony got into jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Because I'm like, well, now we have something really in common that I'm really good at. | ||
| So now we can talk. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I'm sure you were probably an influence. | ||
| I mean, Tavia obviously was the biggest influence, but I'm sure knowing that you did it, too, was another strong reason to get involved with it. | ||
| Well, that's very nice. | ||
| I'm happy that that's the case, if that's the case. | ||
| It was really interesting to watch him. | ||
| It's very rare that a person is deep in their 50s. | ||
| And has lived, you know, fairly sedentary lifestyle. | ||
| Certainly not athletic. | ||
| Certainly not, like, jiu-jitsu is a difficult endeavor. | ||
| It's not like taking up squash. | ||
| Maybe squash is hard, too. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've never played squash. | ||
| But it's not like, it's very intimate, where someone is literally practicing killing you, and you're trying to resist that. | ||
| And so to watch him get really into it, and then to watch him watch his personality sort of like shift, Into that, there's sort of a jujitsu mindset that you get when you start doing it all the time. | ||
| You start training, you start building confidence, and you start getting really into it. | ||
| He was fucking into it. | ||
| When we did that trip in Montana, he was asking me questions, and we started doing... | ||
| I was demonstrating shit on him in the dirt. | ||
| We were in the dirt, and I'm like, when you're in this position, and we're going over stuff on the ground... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Montana. | ||
| I'm like, that's how into it he was. | ||
| Like, he was really... | ||
| He wanted to ask questions. | ||
| He wanted to go over moves. | ||
| I was like, wow, you're really all in. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| I think, you know, Mo Fallon, I think, said this to you, and he said it in the film and in the book as well. | ||
| But, you know, if you weren't... | ||
| Like, I was not into jiu-jitsu. | ||
| It did not matter. | ||
| Like, Tony would just talk to you about it anyway. | ||
| You know, you just have to be like, uh-huh. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| You know, like, either feign interest or, you know, like, feign an emergency and get out of there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because it's just... | |
| At a certain point, you know, then he's trying to get you recruiting everyone. | ||
| He was successful. | ||
| He got a lot of his crew into it. | ||
| He's like, do you think you would ever do it? | ||
| After he's telling me about, like, you know, your nose is basically in somebody's asshole and you've got, like, blood under your nails, you know, and it's disgusting. | ||
| And I'm like, hmm, sounds great. | ||
| I'm gonna... | ||
| I'm going to stick to yoga and weight training. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| But I did make my kid do it. | ||
| And it was totally because of Tony. | ||
| I was like, well, I'm not going to do it, but I will get the eight-year-old involved. | ||
| Oh, that's a good age. | ||
| That's a good age to start. | ||
| They're all limber and flexible. | ||
| Yeah, my kids got into it early on, but then they got bored and they found girly things to do. | ||
| But they enjoyed it in the beginning and they still know some stuff like what to do. | ||
| My kid hated it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was like, you're going to do this. | ||
| You know how expensive this is? | ||
| I made him do it for like, I don't know, six months. | ||
| And then it was clear that like, I mean, he didn't hate it to the point where he was like crying, but like he did have a couple of like anxiety stomach aches in the car and I'm like, suck it up. | ||
| And I'm like, what am I doing? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's very bad to force anything on kids. | ||
| I don't force anything on kids. | ||
| I try to make them finish what they start, just so that they have this thing, like, okay, I started this, I'm going to finish it, I committed to being at these practices, I'm going to show up, but then when it's over, it's over. | ||
| That's a good policy. | ||
| You just get a kid that's resentful, and then whatever this thing that you're trying to get them to do that might have some real benefit to them, they're never going to realize that benefit, or it's going to be harder for them to realize that benefit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. | ||
| I realize this is not the way to get a raise or get a promotion with Tony. | ||
| He actually doesn't give a shit if your kid does jiu-jitsu, so let him play baseball like he wants to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When did you, like, how did your relationship with him start? | ||
| How did your working relationship start? | ||
| So I had been Mario Batali's assistant for a number of years, like in the late 90s, early 2000s. | ||
| And Mario and Tony became friends sort of at the same level of rising celebrity in New York in the restaurant world and in media. | ||
| And I was leaving the job with Mario and Tony asked him if he knew anybody that could help him with a cookbook that he was starting to work on. | ||
| It was called Anthony Bourdain's Layal Cookbook. | ||
| It was his first cookbook. | ||
| And Mario recommended me. | ||
| And Tony kind of hired me sight unseen, I think, because, you know, if I worked for Mario, then that was like a seal of approval for him. | ||
| So that was our first time working together was I did recipe editing and testing on that cookbook. | ||
| I think we met in person probably twice. | ||
| Everything was on email because he was already starting to travel for television. | ||
| He still kind of had one foot in the kitchen at Leal. | ||
| But we had a great working relationship So when you say recipe editing and testing, what does that entail? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| So it's different for every project. | ||
| But for this project, I would get the recipes from the kitchen at Layal. | ||
| So they were in huge quantities. | ||
| And they were written in like a very concise shorthand meant for the cooks to use. | ||
| They were not appropriate for a cookbook. | ||
| So I would take those. | ||
| And I had been to cooking school and I worked a little bit as a cook. | ||
| And so I knew how to deal with a recipe. | ||
| I knew how to cook and kind of what my way around the kitchen. | ||
| So I... Would take those recipes, scale them way down, kind of put them into a more accessible language for a home cook, and then test them at home. | ||
| Make sure that when I change the proportions and everything, the timing and the temperatures, and that it all still worked for a home cook. | ||
| So, were these, like, dishes meant for large groups of people? | ||
| Like, how did you have to scale it down? | ||
| Well, because when you're making it in a restaurant, you know, you're preparing enough for 60 portions in a night, you know? | ||
| Like, certain side dishes and things like that? | ||
| I mean, anything, really. | ||
| You know, if you're making a, you know... | ||
| I don't know, a soup. | ||
| You think you might sell 40 portions of soup that night, so you're making a huge batch of soup. | ||
| At home, you don't want that much soup. | ||
| You might want to make enough for eight people. | ||
| So that's kind of the scaling. | ||
| I mean, there's no reason to do anything in small quantities in a restaurant. | ||
| And when you say shorthand, do you mean shorthand like how some secretaries write shorthand? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I've seen people do that. | ||
| I'm like, what is that? | ||
| Chicken scratch, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's like Latin. | ||
| I mean, I'm surprised anybody even does that anymore. | ||
| It's cool, but I don't know. | ||
| But they do still, right? | ||
| Is that a dying thing? | ||
| I think it must be, right? | ||
| Like, that's from the days of the- You ever seen a show, Tony? | ||
| I mean, Jamie, whatever the fucking name is. | ||
| Have you ever seen it? | ||
| Yeah, the court reporters still do something weird like that, but it's not the same. | ||
| They do it typing though, right? | ||
| They only have like five buttons to use. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they have combinations of it that equal things. | ||
| What do they do? | ||
| I've never tried to read it. | ||
| I've looked into it once. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| This fucking kangaroo court system we have in this country. | ||
| With those five buttons. | ||
| Yeah, but I've seen people write in the shorthand, and I'm like, that is, like, how does one even learn that today? | ||
| Is that necessary? | ||
| Can't you just audio record? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, on your phone? | ||
| Like, you could just, like, if someone wants to, you know, dictate to you, it'd be so much easier. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| The fuck is that chicken scratch? | ||
| Pittman and Gray. | ||
| So there's different versions of shorthand? | ||
| That's so interesting. | ||
| Oh my god, that is nonsense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look what Indian is. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| How does that mean Indian? | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Or it's empty, depending on how big the circle is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's strange. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Oh my god, that's so nuts. | ||
| How do you know the difference between a parent and plenty? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| That is nonsense. | ||
| That's so crazy when you really look at that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's taught? | ||
| I mean, I seriously doubt it's taught much anymore, but I guess, right? | ||
| Somebody's still doing it. | ||
| It's got to be a dying thing. | ||
| With digital recording on your phone, it's got to be a dying thing. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So you just would sort of test out. | ||
| So you went to cook school, so you know how to cook. | ||
| So you would just test out these things. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| When you were doing this, he was just a local celebrity in the New York restaurant scene, right? | ||
| No reservation started yet? | ||
| Or Kitchen Confidential? | ||
| Yeah, so Kitchen Confidential came out in 2000. So he was already on the rise. | ||
| I think he was a season or two into a Cook's Tour, which was the very first iteration of Tony on television. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But there was no, you know, he always would say, like, I've got my 15 minutes. | ||
| I have no expectation that this is going to, you know, last forever. | ||
| I'm going to do as much as I can while I can. | ||
| But I think he was always waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under him, you know, as far as being a celebrity, whatever that is. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| It was really interesting. | ||
| It's like, it's hard for people to realize that other people appreciate them, I think. | ||
| Especially... | ||
| People that are genuinely humble. | ||
| He was a genuinely humble person. | ||
| He really didn't buy into his own bullshit at all. | ||
| So when you would talk to him about it, he was like, this could fucking end terribly at any moment. | ||
| Yeah, I remember being with him in the green room. | ||
| He did a book tour for the cookbook Appetites that we wrote together in 2016. And he did a series of lectures, basically like a one-hour stand-up routine in these theaters and then book signings. | ||
| So we were at the last one at BAM, Brooklyn, in the green room. | ||
| And he was just like, oh, God, I fucking hate this. | ||
| I feel like such a... | ||
| What was the word he used? | ||
|
unidentified
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Such a fraud. | |
| And I was like, what are you talking about? | ||
| You just had like 13 sold-out shows. | ||
| The book is doing amazing. | ||
| Like, you're literally Tony Bourdain. | ||
| He was like, yeah, it's all bullshit. | ||
| I'm embarrassed that people have paid money to come and see me talk. | ||
| You know, it was... | ||
| It's really illustrative to me to hear him talk like that, to realize he doesn't think he's as great as we know he is. | ||
| That's a common thing amongst, at least my people, amongst comedians. | ||
| In many successful people, it's called imposter syndrome. | ||
| And it exists because you have a certain... | ||
| Sort of a set perception of who you were just going through life sort of anonymously and then it radically changes and it doesn't feel real. | ||
| And so to other people who've just discovered you, they love your show, they love your writing, they love your take on the world as you travel and eat everywhere. | ||
| You know, you think, like, I'm the same fucking idiot that I was, you know, he's probably thinking he's the same guy he was in 95, and now here all these people love him. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I just feel like this is going to fall apart. | ||
| This is fake. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's also why he was so interesting, is because, like, the people that are, like, legitimately fool themselves and really think everything they're doing is great are gross. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're gross. | ||
| They come off gross. | ||
| When you see someone write like, I'm the shit, you're like, what? | ||
| That is so gross. | ||
| And it's such the opposite of what anybody ever wants to hear. | ||
| And maybe you could say it in jest and people think it's funny, but... | ||
| For the most part, the people that are really enamored with themselves and their work are just not nearly as interesting as the people that are tortured by it. | ||
| It's such a conundrum, right? | ||
| It's like a guy like Tony, who is such an interesting, fascinating person just to talk to, just to have a conversation with, because he had such a clear perspective on things, the way he looked at things. | ||
| He was very aesthetic. | ||
| He enjoyed a certain style of communication and of hanging out. | ||
| There was an art to just conversation with the guy. | ||
| So it makes sense that he hated himself. | ||
| In the most fucked up way possible, it makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, too, there was this disconnect between the guy that he was before he got famous and the guy after. | ||
| And I think he always thought about how the old guy probably would have made fun of the new guy. | ||
| Or he and all his buddies who were cooks stuck in the kitchen would sort of hate this guy with the expensive shoes and the nice apartment and flying first class. | ||
| Yeah, that's what happens. | ||
| You want to be punk rock and then all of a sudden you have a million dollars in the bank and you're like, hey. | ||
| I think I'm going to eat in a nice place tonight. | ||
| I think I want to buy a watch. | ||
| You really can feel like a fraud. | ||
| It's fascinating because so many people are really They're haunted in a lot of ways by the past. | ||
| And there's sort of like this rebellious, rigid attitude that you develop when you're struggling, when you're coming up. | ||
| You know it becomes like the structure of where your attitude comes from and then when that structure is sort of removed by success in Tony's case and then you're left with Okay, I'm not even like in his eyes He had done all these hours of being in the kitchen, the real work, those long days and long nights, and there was something noble about that. | ||
| And then, all of a sudden, he's just going to visit these guys, and he's not in the game anymore. | ||
| And, you know, he's going to visit these incredible cooks and seeing these amazing dishes and these insane restaurants. | ||
| And I think part of that he felt like a little bit of a fraud because of that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was always very careful to say, I was not a great chef. | ||
| You know, I think it's very, people kind of just, in the same way that people thought that, you know, the whole, with the AI thing, that it was all of the movie versus 45 seconds. | ||
| There's just a glossing over kind of sloppiness of recollection. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Because he was a chef, everyone would say, oh, he was a great chef or a celebrity chef or a famous chef. | ||
| And he was always really careful to say, I wasn't. | ||
| I was good at leading a kitchen. | ||
| I was good at getting food out on time, but I was not in any way a world-famous creative chef. | ||
| I was a leader of men. | ||
| And there was, I think, a lot of... | ||
| I don't know, insecurity, but just a recognition that he wasn't the kind of chef like Eric Repair, his good friend, or any of these guys that he really admired, and he wanted everyone to know that he knew that, too. | ||
| Yeah, it's just the genuine humility about him. | ||
| But it's also like that, you know, there are so many layers to the way he looked at things and described things. | ||
| It's what made No Reservations and then ultimately the other show. | ||
| Parts Unknown. | ||
| Parts Unknown. | ||
| But it's what made it so interesting. | ||
| It's really his own view of himself inserted into these environments. | ||
| It wasn't just the environments. | ||
| It was like this genuine enthusiasm that he had for these people that create great works of art through food. | ||
| And he was the first guy that ever shifted my perception of what food is. | ||
| Because I thought of food was just delicious. | ||
| I was like, oh, this food was good. | ||
| And then I watched his show and I was like, oh, it's art. | ||
| Oh, you fucking idiot. | ||
| How'd you not see that? | ||
| It's just art that people eat. | ||
| I was like, why all these chefs have fucking hand tattoos and they look like weirdos? | ||
| And I was like, oh, they're fucking artists. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| It really took watching that show because... | ||
| I didn't have a lot of interaction with chefs. | ||
| I maybe knew a couple chefs my whole life. | ||
| I didn't know them well. | ||
| If I enjoyed their food, I thought it was great. | ||
| But I didn't ever think, oh, this is an art form. | ||
| You're literally getting an expression of this person's essence that's laid out in food form in front of you. | ||
| In the best case scenario. | ||
| I mean, I think there's plenty of food that is not that artful, you know, or might be considered more craft than art. | ||
| But yeah, these guys that he loved at the highest level were definitely, you know, artists making consumable product every day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just his take on all kinds of things, on music and culture, and it just made for, you know, if he maybe, I don't know how good of a chef he was, but man, he was a fucking amazing host of a television show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was really, it was like the perfect guy for a travel show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And writer. | ||
| I mean, that's really what broke him through out of the kitchen. | ||
| It was not his television presence, which was a little clunky at first. | ||
| You know, I mean, he didn't spring fully formed as the, you know, confident guy that we saw in later years. | ||
| If you go back and when you're ready to watch the film or you'll see in the book, too, you know, he was... | ||
| He was a little awkward and quite more than a little hesitant on television at first. | ||
| But what he always was was a fucking fantastic writer, you know, from very, very young age and worked really hard at that to develop that craft. | ||
| And that's – I mean that's what comes through on television too is all that voiceover. | ||
| He wrote that, you know, and the way that he could speak off the cuff like it was something that was written and edited and perfective. | ||
| That was just in his head. | ||
| I mean he spoke like a writer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that clunkiness, to me, came off as authenticity. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I don't like polished, like, top 40 DJ voices. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, hey, coming up next. | ||
| It's like, there's a way that a person can behave. | ||
| Whether they're the host of a show or a radio host, whatever the fuck they're doing, there's a way that we know what a professional sounds like. | ||
| This is Tom with the weather. | ||
| There's a way we know, and that way is boring. | ||
| Because you've heard it too many times and you know that's not really who that person is. | ||
| This is a really funny video, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's this black guy who's working for a television station. | ||
| And he's doing the news somewhere on location and a bug gets on him and he switches and goes full ghetto in the middle. | ||
| So he's in the middle of his talking like this, like this motherfucker and like this bug is on him and it's hilarious. | ||
| And I'm like, man, if someone could talk to that guy and say, man, we got to figure out a way to let you be who you really are because that was hilarious once the bug was on you. | ||
| But when the bug wasn't on you, then you're just like this normal, bullshit, cookie-cutter, programmed robot. | ||
| And, you know, the thing about No Reservations was it was who he actually was. | ||
| So if he was clunky or if, you know... | ||
| Or if he was fascinated by something, it came across as being genuine. | ||
| It was very obvious that he wrote everything, too. | ||
| It was very obvious that he wrote the monologues. | ||
| You're not going to get some TV hack to write that kind of shit, especially for the fucking Travel Channel. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I noticed, I watched the Montana episode of Parts Unknown that you guys were on together and there was that enthusiasm. | ||
| There's a scene where he goes down into the mines, copper mines, old copper mines, and they hook up all the wires and he gets to be the one to press the lever or whatever to make the shit explode. | ||
| And he's just got this... | ||
| He's like a 10-year-old boy. | ||
| He's so psyched and it's so genuine that he has had the most fun just like blowing shit up. | ||
| And that's like the best of Tony. | ||
| As many experiences around the world as he had and as smart as he was, he still loved the dumb shit. | ||
| Or just the basic hilarity of blowing shit up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he stayed himself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's hard to do, you know? | ||
| It's hard to do. | ||
| And obviously, himself, there was... | ||
| Because of the drug abuse past, the addiction past, and then the end of his life, the boozing in particular, it's like there's obviously a lot going on there that wasn't that healthy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know for whatever reason and whatever whatever it was a masking thing if it was a genetic addiction issue thing Yeah. | ||
| It's, you know, it's really hard to say, you know, and I always try to be very careful not to diagnose or to, you know, all we can do is speculate and think about what, you know, we knew when he was around. | ||
| I mean, he was very upfront about his heroin addiction and his, you know, heavy use of cocaine and crack later. | ||
| And then he kicked those things, you know. | ||
| But I think that As somebody who has been sober for a couple of years and has kind of myself dived into the whole exploration of the 12-step thing, I can see what it is to be an addict. | ||
| And I don't think it's talking out of turn to say that Tony was an addict. | ||
| He lived his life like an addict. | ||
| Whether it was drugs or drinking or smoking cigarettes or jujitsu or work or travel or romantic relationships. | ||
| I mean, he just... | ||
| You know, just went after more and more and more stimulating experiences in a way that it didn't ever seem there was going to be enough of whatever it was to fill that place, you know, that addicts are trying to fill. | ||
| When we were drinking in Montana, that was one of the things that was shocking that he wanted to keep going. | ||
| Like, we were so drunk. | ||
| We were sitting around this campfire and we were fucking hammered. | ||
| And he's like, where's the fucking, where's the whiskey? | ||
| Is there any more whiskey? | ||
| And I'm like, you could really drink more right now? | ||
| Like, how could you do this? | ||
| Like, we're blasted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he was a tall guy, but he was really skinny. | ||
| It was just sort of like, where are you putting this, dude? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| You've got no body fat. | ||
| Especially when he got into jiu-jitsu and developed a six-pack. | ||
| But what you saw on him, though, was his face. | ||
| His face was aging. | ||
| It was aging rapidly. | ||
| Just in the time that I knew him, you know, the years that I knew him from the, like, I don't know how many years it was, seven, whatever it was. | ||
| But during that time, he aged a lot. | ||
| Like, you could see it on the show in the last season or two. | ||
| It's like the lines in his face, he just looked puffy and worn out. | ||
| It just looked rough. | ||
| And that's where it went. | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, that kind of lifestyle, or the multiple lifestyles that he had, you know, working as a cook, doing a shitload of drugs, drinking, smoking, you know, a couple packs of cigarettes a day, all of that, you know, plus he was, there's some actually some funny stuff in the book about his addiction to tanning. | ||
| He was like, obsessed with tanning. | ||
| Not like going to a tan. | ||
| I don't know if he ever went to a tanning bed. | ||
| He probably did. | ||
| But he would get in these tanning competitions with his cooks in the 80s. | ||
| And he was really competitive about wanting to be the most tan. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I had no idea. | ||
| That's so ridiculous. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| So I think that obviously catches up with you. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I don't know about that anymore. | ||
| I used to think that the sun is really bad for you. | ||
| But now I think it's like, how bad is sunscreen? | ||
| You know, that shit can't be good for you either. | ||
| It's probably not as bad as skin cancer. | ||
| I mean, I'm not a doctor, but, you know. | ||
| No, I'm not a doctor either. | ||
| But it's just, you know, obviously we need some sun for vitamin D. Yeah. | ||
| So what's going on with that? | ||
| I don't think that was what I was seeing in his face, though. | ||
| I was seeing it in booze. | ||
| Yeah, you know, he wasn't drinking that much. | ||
| Like when he was doing jujitsu, he was like very, you know, I don't say clean and sober, but he was rarely drinking. | ||
| He never would have booze at home. | ||
| I mean, again, these are things that he said on the record. | ||
| Yeah, no, we talked about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was, you know, because he was super into his cardio, so he wasn't smoking. | ||
| There was a point where he was getting ready for a competition where he was like, you know, I'm sure you've done this too, right? | ||
| It's like no, like only basically like boiled chicken with no salt, you know, and maybe like some vegetable, but really just like the no salt boiled chicken. | ||
| Well, he got no carb, but he went no carb, right? | ||
| Or very low carb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, you know, I remember him telling me, like, you know, just life loses all of its meaning when you can't have salt. | ||
| You start, like, licking the sweat off your arm just to feel something, you know? | ||
| It's like, are you not in good enough shape? | ||
| I mean, I know you have to get extreme to weigh in. | ||
| But you really shouldn't do that anyway. | ||
| You should have probably consulted with a nutritionist. | ||
| That's a terrible way to handle it. | ||
| You run into these guys at the gym, these sort of, like, bro scientists. | ||
| And some of them still have like 1990s knowledge where you're supposed to eat like just plain chicken with no skin and broccoli and they don't really do that anymore. | ||
| Like most people, even if they're trying to lose some weight, they eat a lot of healthy fat. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| And they eat sugar and they eat salt. | ||
| Like you have to have a certain amount of glucose. | ||
| It's like it's even in like there's certain hydration supplements that are electrolyte supplements and they have sugar in them because that's the best way your body absorbs all the different electrolytes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, he definitely didn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was subscribing to an old school system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we were talking about hormone replacement too and he's like, I got to find a quack. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I go, no man, you should find someone who's gonna like do your blood work and comprehensively like go over it with you and like Too much effort. | ||
| Yeah, you want the quack that's going to give you the solution fast. | ||
| He just wanted to get juiced up so he could compete. | ||
| Well, when he was telling me he was training every day, I go, every day? | ||
| He goes, twice a day. | ||
| I go, what? | ||
| And he goes, yeah. | ||
| He goes, I'm doing drills, so I'm taking a private lesson, and then I'm taking a class after that. | ||
| I'm like, wow. | ||
| So for someone to go from nothing to that is crazy. | ||
| And I was like, how are your joints? | ||
| Like, how's your neck? | ||
| How's your back? | ||
| How are your elbows? | ||
| Because, like, those things are, like, it takes years to build up the sort of tendon strength and endurance to be able to do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Especially, he's doing gay jiu-jitsu, so you're grabbing things all the time, so your hands are always sore. | ||
| Like, God. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he did land himself briefly in the hospital with some injury. | ||
| It seemed like it was going to take him out of competition, and then, I don't know. | ||
| That was the groin one? | ||
| The groin tear? | ||
| I think, yeah. | ||
| There was one day where his ear got all fucked up, and he got, you know, the... | ||
| Cauliflower. | ||
| Yeah, and then they put on this ridiculous, like, big yellow, looked like a piece of Swiss cheese from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and it was just kind of... | ||
| stitched or placed around his ear. | ||
| And the next day, he had some photo shoot, you know, with he had some endorsement with a whiskey company. | ||
| And they did a lot of shoots and stuff with him appearances, you know, and he's like, Oh, you better tell the whiskey guys that maybe we need to cancel because I got this shit on my ear. | ||
| And they they didn't want to cancel. | ||
| And so there's pictures out there of him looking absolutely ridiculous with this like, giant, you know, Swiss cheese ear, you know, because that's that is he would rather, you know, look like that than miss a day of training. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Did he get it drained? | ||
| I think so, probably. | ||
| I mean, he was pretty good. | ||
| I mean, there was definitely, in my job as his assistant, which I did for about 10 years, there was definitely a lot of, I got very familiar with all the doctors. | ||
| So there was, you know, there was the occasional draining or the chiropractor or the, you know, the skin doctor because there would be a weird staph infection from, you know, filthy mats or, you know, he really, yeah, he went really, really hard on the jujitsu. | ||
| But he was, you know, he was mentally, I mean, he was He was really happy. | ||
| You know, he was, I mean, he was, it was insufferable sometimes to listen to, like I said, but he was like, he had so much energy. | ||
| And he just was like, you know, the guys that would shoot on the show with him said it made such a difference. | ||
| If he would train in the morning, he would be Yeah. | ||
| I think human beings, men in particular, need a certain amount of physical conflict. | ||
| And I think most people don't get it. | ||
| And I think it's something that's built into just the human body. | ||
| And I think we have these reward systems that are... | ||
| Built into and designed so that your body can perform in adverse conditions. | ||
| Your body can deal with conflict, like physical conflict. | ||
| Your body can deal with physical struggle. | ||
| So because of that, there's actually... | ||
| Sort of an unmet requirement that most people have. | ||
| So they walk through life with this anxiety that they don't know where it's coming from. | ||
| And I think a lot of that anxiety stems from the fact that you're not meeting the human requirements. | ||
| Like the body has, especially the male body, and the mind has certain requirements for conflict. | ||
| Jiu-Jitsu meets all those. | ||
| So does trail running. | ||
| So does like CrossFit. | ||
| Like the reason why people get addicted to that stuff is because it's so difficult that it makes regular life easy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like my friends who do CrossFit, what they love about it is it's so fucking hard, which seems like, why do you love something that's so hard? | ||
| Because in doing something hard, it makes regular life easy. | ||
| Because when you are doing these box jumps and you have 25 to go and your legs are rubber and you're like, I can't do this. | ||
| But you can. | ||
| And when you do do it, you get out of there. | ||
| Everything else is easy. | ||
| The guy cut you off. | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| The guy cut you off. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Who cares if you miss the light? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| It doesn't have the same level of significance that it does if you don't have this physical conflict in your life. | ||
| That makes a lot of sense. | ||
| Yeah, so for a guy like him that was kind of tortured, I was so pumped. | ||
| Like I said, I was excited because finally there was something that he was really into that I could, like, I'm a black belt. | ||
| Like, I could say, ah, now I could tell you some stuff. | ||
| Like, before I just relied on you to tell me shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he really respected, I mean, anybody that had an expertise in anything, you know, he was really, like, just very teachable, very willing to listen. | ||
| You know, he was really always about, you know, the more I know, the more I realize I don't know. | ||
| He had a great respect for people that were really doing whatever the fuck it was that they were doing. | ||
| People that were really committed to anything. | ||
| Really passionate about it. | ||
| He wanted to talk to me and Joey Diaz. | ||
| We did a show in Vegas. | ||
| And he came to the show with his then wife at the time. | ||
| And then afterwards we were talking because he was doing these book shows. | ||
| And he was like, how often do you turn over material? | ||
| If I come to a town, when do you think I should... | ||
| How long I should take... | ||
| And I was like, we generally do it like this. | ||
| And I was explaining, you don't want to come to a town with the same material that you were at six months ago. | ||
| You have to write new stuff. | ||
| Otherwise, don't come back. | ||
| Unless you have such an audience that more people are going to come to see you that haven't seen you before. | ||
| So we talked about the whole idea of stand-up, because he was kind of doing stand-up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In fact, Bonnie McFarlane got him a spot at the Comedy Store. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Maybe like a year before he died or maybe two years. | ||
| The store or the cellar? | ||
| I'm sorry, the cellar in New York. | ||
| Yeah, he was working out material for the book tour. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he actually had Bonnie helping him do some writing, too. | ||
| But he wanted to really feel what it was like to be, you know, to do that. | ||
| And so she got him like a, I don't know, five minutes. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I didn't go, I mean, he didn't tell anybody, you know, which is smart. | ||
| It sounds like he did okay. | ||
| I think he really enjoyed it, you know, but it's like he really respected the craft of comedy, you know, and he understood that it was something you had to work at and develop just as much as anything else. | ||
| He certainly could have done it. | ||
| He would have got addicted to that, too. | ||
| He would have got sucked into that, and then he'd just be talking about stand-up all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| It's funny. | ||
| That is a thing that happens with people that get really, really, really good at things. | ||
| There's a guy named BJ Penn, and he's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time. | ||
| He won the Mundiales, which is the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championships, three years into training, which is unheard of. | ||
| Nobody's ever done that before. | ||
| Not only to get a black belt in three years is crazy, but to win the Mundialis in three years is even crazier. | ||
| And he and I were talking about this on the phone, and he was saying that he met this guy, and this guy was getting really good at jiu-jitsu, and he's like, man, that's incredible, you know, you're training hard. | ||
| And the guy suddenly goes, man, he goes, I'm addicted, just like you! | ||
| He goes, and then I realized, yeah, fuck, that's what it is. | ||
| I'm addicted. | ||
| But it's just a good thing. | ||
| It's being addicted to something that's actually beneficial as opposed to heroin. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Or booze. | ||
| Or anything. | ||
| Or women or anything. | ||
| I mean, you can get locked up in a relationship that's basically an addiction, too. | ||
| There's a lot of things that people do that... | ||
| They're just massive distractions and it's hard to parse that out in real time. | ||
| It's hard to figure out, is this good for me? | ||
| Am I just lost in this? | ||
| What's good and what's bad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think he knew to some extent that that's who he was and that's how he operated. | ||
| I think he had no interest in trying to moderate. | ||
| I think that was not at all interesting to him, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember telling him that I was... | ||
| I said, I'll always have my phone on except, you know, I've started going to AA meetings. | ||
| And so in that hour, I turned my phone off. | ||
| And he's like, what the fuck do you want to go to AA for? | ||
| Like, he just... | ||
| It's like, that's a cult. | ||
| You know, he just... | ||
| I was like, okay, we'll... | ||
| That being said, I'm going to turn my phone off for an hour. | ||
| Did you enjoy AA? Yeah. | ||
| I'm still... | ||
| I mean, I know it's sort of like you're not supposed to talk about it, but I'm still very much... | ||
| I was in a meeting this morning. | ||
| For me, it's great. | ||
| How come you're not supposed to talk about it? | ||
| Because it's anonymous? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is the idea about not talking about it? | ||
| Well, I think the idea is not sharing anything that you hear your fellows say. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm no historian or scholar of it, but I think that originally it was much more stigmatized to be an alcoholic. | ||
| So it was like, let's keep it on the down low while we get our shit together. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| So, yeah, I find it to be very, very helpful. | ||
| I wasn't a bad, rock-bottom alcoholic, but I was somebody who was on a bad path, and I have found it helpful for me. | ||
| Was it exacerbated by working with him? | ||
| Probably, to an extent. | ||
| I mean, you know, everyone's kind of responsible for their own shit, but... | ||
| No, you can blame him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's not here anymore. | |
| I mean, I will say that I found a lot of the way that he lived to be very romantic and very inspiring, and, you know, I was kind of a mess, and I thought, well, you know, this is... | ||
| Tony would approve or I'd talk to him about whatever kind of messy shit was going on in my life because I knew he would think it was funny or he could relate. | ||
| So again, I don't want to blame him because it was on me, but for sure it was very much okay to be a little bit of a mess and to work for him. | ||
| As long as you got your shit done and you showed up on time and you were good at your job. | ||
| I don't think it was a problem. | ||
| I mean, certainly, you know, you saw there's a lot of drinking on those shoots. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So definitely, the way that he lived seemed very, very appealing to me. | ||
| Less so now, you know, obviously. | ||
| But yeah, I think it was hard for me as someone who identifies as an addict of a kind, it was hard for me to see him as an addict until I really sort of saw myself and what my own behaviors were. | ||
| Like, oh, that's why, you know, he did this or that or, you know. | ||
| In those moments, those moments of camaraderie and the moments of looseness and of booze and smoking, there's a funness to that. | ||
| There's a freedom to that. | ||
| And also, there's a bonding that goes along with that. | ||
| It's very hard to capture with sobriety. | ||
| And I'm not saying you need booze to have a fulfilled life, but I am saying that there's something that comes out of that, those moments. | ||
| There's like a certain wild rebelliousness that's so attractive. | ||
| And for a person like me, who's a comedian, you know, once a year we do Sober October. | ||
| Me and my buddies. | ||
| And we don't do anything. | ||
| We're allowed to smoke cigars for some reason, which we decide is kind of cheating because it does get you high a little bit. | ||
| But you realize how much you kind of lean on that. | ||
| How much it's fun to just, like, guys want to do a shot? | ||
| Let's do a fucking shot. | ||
| You clink glasses and it's like, woo! | ||
| And the next thing, you're hugging and bonding and it's like, there's a wildness to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And there's a celebration of this rebellious, unknown aspect of life that comes from the romantic consumption of alcohol. | ||
| It's very attractive. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And if you can sort of keep it in check, people who can drink and use drugs responsibly, like... | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| For me, it was like I'd start my engine and then not stop until I ran it into the wall. | ||
| It's not cute. | ||
| I have a kid. | ||
| It's not cute. | ||
| Yeah, I hear you. | ||
| It gets messy. | ||
| Yeah, it gets messy. | ||
| It's not necessary. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| I had a real good time. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing, right? | ||
| No one wants to say that. | ||
| And also, it makes some great fucking art. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| So many musicians are just hammered. | ||
| You know, so many great poets. | ||
| Bukowski. | ||
| My buddy Lex read a Bukowski poem on the podcast the other day to end the podcast. | ||
| I was like, do you even write like that if you're not drunk? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's possible. | ||
| I'm a giant Stephen King fan. | ||
| I fucking love Stephen King. | ||
| But I really love the stuff that he did when he was fucked up. | ||
| That's my favorite stuff. | ||
| My favorite stuff is the Carrie days. | ||
| The days where he was doing The Shining. | ||
| He was tortured. | ||
| And he was doing Blow and stuff. | ||
| Toilet paper up his nose. | ||
| His book on writing is amazing. | ||
| Have you ever read it? | ||
| Yes, it's amazing right because like he kind of goes into the depths of his addiction and is the love the answer for his family and pulls him out of that and how he got back on the horse and figured it out again, but His best stuff was when he was fucked up. | ||
| Yeah Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's like an anxiety and a self-loathing and, you know, the euphoric highs that all kind of fuel that. | ||
| But, you know, it's not good if you're, you know, if you end up dead at the end of that. | ||
| You can't do any more writing. | ||
| Yeah, that's true, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's true, too. | ||
| I mean, if he died at 50 and left behind all those great books that he wrote when he was fucked up, he would probably be even more romantic, unfortunately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, look at Morrison and Hendrix and Joplin, they all died at 27, and Kurt Cobain, same thing, right? | ||
| Yeah, Amy Winehouse. | ||
| Right, we look at them like, oh, something about that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because there's a, you know, finite nature to life anyway. | ||
| True. | ||
| I mean, that's something I used to say a lot when I was drinking, like, life is short, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it is, but it's long too, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, we're probably all going to linger around a lot longer than is optimal, unfortunately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Science is pretty amazing. | ||
| They're coming up with some great shit. | ||
| You can do some pretty amazing things in your body as you age in 2021. When you're writing these books, did you take notes while you were working with him? | ||
| Did you have to go back and re-envision these moments in your mind? | ||
| How did you structure this? | ||
| Well, so the biography, the full title is Bourdain the Definitive Oral Biography. | ||
| So what that means is that this is not the strict, the biography that, you know, where the writer interviews a bunch of people and then writes their own thing. | ||
| This is, I did about 100 interviews with people who knew Tony from all aspects of his life. | ||
| And by and large, I let them tell their own story. | ||
| So this narrative, it starts at the beginning of his life and goes all the way to the end. | ||
| So it's pieces of those interviews sort of stitched together in a narrative. | ||
| So it starts with his mom and his brother talking about early life. | ||
| and I've got his high school buddies. | ||
| So the research that I did was to figure out who the people were that were important in his life that I needed to speak to and then learn as much about them as I could before we talked and then talk to them and then figure out what's juicy, what's usable of those interviews and what's usable of those interviews and then fit it into a narrative. | ||
| Tony told a lot of his story already in Kitchen Confidential. | ||
| He started from Early childhood memories to about age 40. So a lot of that story is already out there. | ||
| But it's, you know, Tony was a storyteller, and he was not averse to kind of sanding down the edges of a story or embellishing something or... | ||
| As you do to make it like a really good story that you can tell and that has good beats and lands well. | ||
| So even the stuff that we know about from Kitchen Confidential, there's a lot more nuance there. | ||
| People that were there with him in the bad old days of the 80s in kitchens and in Provincetown as a teenager. | ||
| So all of that is in the book. | ||
| So it was... | ||
| It was about asking the right questions and listening to people, letting them really tell their stories and helping them to really remember as much as they could about him. | ||
| How long did it take you to write it? | ||
| It was about two years. | ||
| I started shortly after he died, as much as I could. | ||
| I mean, you know, the few months after he died were pretty rough. | ||
| There was not much getting done. | ||
| But at least to have the book started, to have something to work on was really valuable to me, just to kind of keep moving forward in life. | ||
| So it was... | ||
| This one took about two years. | ||
| And then the one that came out in the spring called World Travel, I was working on it simultaneously, but a little quicker because it was due, the manuscript was due before the biography. | ||
| And World Travel is a book that we actually started working on together, Tony and I, before he died. | ||
| We didn't get too far into it, but we did start and it was intended to be co-authored with a living author. | ||
| And of course, that changed quite a bit after he died. | ||
| But I did want to Make something of it. | ||
| So it's a version of the book that we had intended to write together. | ||
| And what's the premise of that book? | ||
| So world travel is basically an atlas of the world according to Tony Bourdain. | ||
| So it's not every place that he went in the world because there are just too many of them, but it was all the places that he truly loved that he wanted to recommend that you go to. | ||
| So it's a It's like a little travel guide, but it's got tons of his writing in it. | ||
| So I ended up taking a lot of stuff from his television voiceover or stuff that he had written in books or stuff that he had said in interviews and kind of wove it into this travel book format. | ||
| I mean, it's not like your typical voters or, you know, whatever the travel books Lonely Planet, but it has aspects of that. | ||
| It has a lot of practical information, but it has Tony, you know, talking about getting the shits in Brazil after eating the Dende oil or, you know, stuff that's very specific to him and his voice. | ||
| Well, he literally traveled to almost every place you could go to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he did shows in Libya, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Libya. | ||
| And Libya after Gaddafi's death, which was essentially a failed state, right? | ||
| It was a very dangerous place to be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That sounded... | ||
| I wasn't there, but it sounded like it was among the most dangerous shoots that they did. | ||
| And there was a lot of... | ||
| There were a lot of dicey moments, I think, behind the scenes, but it's a beautiful episode. | ||
| And he really talks about how, yeah, this is what you see on the news and CNN, but here's some people. | ||
| Here's some kids playing with a balloon. | ||
| Yeah, he went to 93 countries, and a lot of them more than once. | ||
| And he traveled extensively around the United States. | ||
| And not until he was 40, which is really wild, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He really had traveled very little. | ||
| When he wrote Kitchen Confidential, he had been to the Caribbean a bunch, and he had been to Tokyo once, and that was kind of it. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he became like the most traveled man in the world. | ||
| Whenever I would travel somewhere for comedy or the UFC, I would text him, where do I eat? | ||
| And he would help you out? | ||
| Not just tell you, but tell you in great detail. | ||
| Like, what's the history of the place and why and, you know, you gotta go here and you gotta do this and you gotta do that. | ||
| It was just the coolest thing. | ||
| Yeah, he was a good friend to have that way. | ||
| He was like very, you know, if he was your friend, he was your friend like a thousand percent, you know? | ||
| He was really into Vietnam, which I thought was really interesting. | ||
| It made me want to go to Vietnam. | ||
| Have you gone? | ||
| I still have not. | ||
| But I was like, really? | ||
| He's like, my favorite place to go. | ||
| I'm like, Vietnam! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, you know, he was super interested in Graham Greene, The Quiet American, and Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now. | ||
| I mean, Apocalypse Now was sort of a seminal film, you know? | ||
| And, you know, being of the age that he was, I mean, kind of growing up with the Vietnam War going on when he was in his adolescence, I think it made a big difference. | ||
| But yeah, then he got there and it was, you know, and it is an extraordinary place. | ||
| I mean, it really, I was lucky. | ||
| I went with him once to Hue, right in the center of the country. | ||
| And I got it. | ||
| I understood, you know, it's like, it's just so the pace of life is different. | ||
| The smells, all the scooters on the street. | ||
| I mean, it truly, you feel like you are. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of places in the world you can go now and it's like, Am I in Austin? | ||
| Am I in Beijing? | ||
| Am I in, you know, wherever? | ||
| Like, it's all, everything looks somewhat similar. | ||
| Every place has got a, you know, au bon pan and a Starbucks, you know? | ||
| But Vietnam, by and large, has not succumbed to that level of kind of homogenization yet. | ||
| I'm sure it's coming, you know? | ||
| But it's very much a way. | ||
| And I think he really loved that, you know? | ||
| And the food. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's really good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've never had, you know, I don't think I've ever had Vietnamese food ever. | ||
| If I think about it, like maybe I have somewhere. | ||
| I don't, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Houston apparently has a lot of really good Vietnamese food. | ||
| So I think, you know, wherever there were communities of displaced Vietnamese in the U.S., Louisiana. | ||
| What is pho? | ||
| That's the beef noodle soup. | ||
| Right, but who makes that? | ||
| That's Vietnamese. | ||
| Okay, I've had that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I've had that. | ||
| That's pretty damn good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Although, I don't think I said it right. | ||
| It's not pho, but I don't think it's pho. | ||
| It's like pho, right? | ||
| Pho, yeah. | ||
| I think it's pho. | ||
| I never quite know how to say it. | ||
| Yeah, but when people do say it correctly, I get annoyed. | ||
| I'm like, oh really? | ||
| Let's go have some pho. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel like, you know, it's almost like a little trap. | ||
| You know, spell it P-H-O. Are you playing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuh. | |
| Fuh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuh? | |
| It's like a question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's like, it's a trap. | ||
| It's because you know it's spelled differently than it's pronounced. | ||
| And if you say it correct, you know, this is like a certain annoying thing when someone says Argentina. | ||
| You know, like, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, they say things the right way. | ||
| Yeah, we used to call it Trebeking. | ||
| I don't know if we still do. | ||
| Alex Trebeking? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was really interested in the different styles of humans. | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He loved that the people in Vietnam had such a distinctly different way of being than, say, people in England. | ||
| There was a way that they just... | ||
| There's an easygoing way that they existed. | ||
| They, for whatever reason, apparently have no resentment to Americans, which he found fascinating. | ||
| Like, how the fuck are you not mad at Americans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I think, I mean, my understanding is that, first of all, there have been so many wars, you know, before that. | ||
| They're just like, all right, come and get us, you know, fuck you. | ||
| Like the Chinese, the, you know, the French, like everyone has fucked with us. | ||
| A lot of the people are dead. | ||
| You know, it's a very, very young country. | ||
| I forget what the percentage is, but it's like a huge percentage of the people that are living now in the country were born after the war. | ||
| So they don't have a memory of it, you know? | ||
| But yeah, I mean, again, I don't claim to be a scholar or historian, but that was my understanding of how it could be possible, right? | ||
| Because like, yeah, we really visited some pretty bad shit on that country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, in talking to him, one of the things that he was really interested in is just the authentic way people existed wherever you went. | ||
| They varied so much. | ||
| And to really understand people, to really get an appreciation of all the amazing things this world has to offer, you kind of have to go to all these different places. | ||
| To see. | ||
| And every time you go, it's like it removes a little layer of the onion. | ||
| You just get a little bit better understanding of what it means to be a human being on Earth. | ||
| And that there isn't just this one set sort of culture that we're so accustomed to, particularly in America, where we're kind of arrogant about our culture. | ||
| Like, this is the shit. | ||
| We're America. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| And, you know, then you go to other places and you go, oh, okay. | ||
| Why are they so happy in Thailand? | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| Like, what's going on? | ||
| Like, why are they so, why are they celebrate so much in Brazil? | ||
| You know, as you do visit all these different places, I think he had this almost bottomless appetite for that sort of exposure to new cultures and meeting new people. | ||
| And was really good at listening and being able to hear and engage with an argument or a point of view that didn't match his, which I think, you know, I mean, there's a million reasons why I wish he were still here. | ||
| But that is one of the, you know, right at the top is this capacity that he had to have a conversation with people who disagreed with him, you know, without just trying to shut them down. | ||
| I mean he had very strong opinions about things but it didn't stop him from just communicating with people which is – it's not easy. | ||
| I'm sure you know this. | ||
| People get real riled up and then don't even want to just have a discussion about whatever it is that's – that they disagree about. | ||
| Trevor Burrus: Yeah. | ||
| It's a very valuable thing if you can do it, to be able to just talk to people, even if you disagree with them. | ||
| And it's really rewarding to have a conversation with someone where you completely disagree with them, but you're very friendly. | ||
| And at the end, you really enjoy that person's company and you actually like them. | ||
| There's quite a few people I have on this podcast where I agree with very little of what they have to say. | ||
| But I like to talk to them, especially if they're kind, if they're nice people. | ||
| And then we sort of have this interesting relationship over the years of these kind of conversations, where they know that I'm very different than them, and I see things different, but we're nice to each other, and so we can talk about stuff. | ||
| And so I can find out what it's like to be this person who thinks about things politically, socially, religiously, sexually. | ||
| They think so different than me. | ||
| It's real valuable. | ||
| But people are so dogmatic in their perspectives. | ||
| And they're defending their position like they're defending themselves. | ||
| These ideas are themselves. | ||
| It's not just an idea. | ||
| And it's very unfortunate that we... | ||
| There's nothing wrong with shutting down morons. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's fun. | |
| I love watching it on YouTube. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with arguing your position. | ||
| But there's also a great benefit in listening to how other people see things. | ||
| And he definitely was really good at that. | ||
| And not just really good at that. | ||
| There was a genuine enthusiasm about these kind of conversations with people. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I mean, that was like the only word in his Twitter bio was enthusiast. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, and that's really what it is. | ||
| You know, from everything, like, one of the most enthusiastic things he ever told me was how disgusting fermented shark meat was in Iceland. | ||
| He was, like, fucking animated with his hands. | ||
| He's like, it's fucking... | ||
| Fucking disgusting! | ||
| It's the most disgusting thing! | ||
| And I was like, wow! | ||
| Because that was the single thing. | ||
| Like I said, what is the grossest shit you've ever had to experience when you're trying out these different cultures? | ||
| Because I've got a pretty wide palate. | ||
| I love all kinds of different kinds of foods. | ||
| Very spicy foods. | ||
| But he's like, that's the one. | ||
| Did you ever have that? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I want to try it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes it seem so unappealing. | ||
| I might try. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'm all in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems awful. | |
| If I go to Iceland, it's the first thing I'm eating, 100%. | ||
| I want to experience that pickled shark or that fermented shark meat. | ||
| It just sounds like full survival food, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're just basically trying not to die. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then all the people that are alive all these years later just kind of celebrating the fact that their ancestors survived off this dog shit. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That's like probably the most fermented food you could have, right? | ||
| Like real good for your gut flora if it doesn't, you know, kill you. | ||
| Maybe good. | ||
| Might not eat. | ||
| Well, they're fucking animals over there. | ||
| You know, like they have some huge human beings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like Iceland produces an extraordinary amount of the strongest men in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Yeah, like when they have those world strongman competition, they're fucking Vikings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| These are leftover marauders. | ||
| So they know. | ||
| They're huge people. | ||
| Like, have you ever seen, like, the strongmen from Vikings? | ||
| No. | ||
| There was a vice piece on it many years ago trying to, like, decipher. | ||
| They were trying to figure out, like, why do so many men who win strongest men in the world come from Iceland? | ||
| Mm. | ||
| And I think it really is just Viking DNA, like this idea that there was these giant marauders that showed up, a lot of them on mushrooms, by the way. | ||
| That was the thing. | ||
| They would take psilocybin and then go on these marauding raids. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Huge, giant, mushroomed up men. | ||
| And now they're throwing, you know, barrels. | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
| Here's the Vaisvies, the giants of Iceland. | ||
| So this dude goes over to Iceland and sees all these men who are competing in this Strongest Man competition. | ||
| And there's not that many people in Iceland, too, which is kind of crazy. | ||
| Like, it's not, like, the biggest place in the world. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wild. | ||
| Now, you guys went hunting together, right? | ||
| You and Tony went pheasant hunting. | ||
| Yeah, I had gotten into hunting while I knew him. | ||
| I had gotten into hunting because I had come to this sort of ideological impasse in my life where I was like, okay, like, you're... | ||
| You claim to be a person who thinks things through and you care about life and the world around you, but you're eating fucking Jack in the Box, right? | ||
| What's in there? | ||
| And I would watch too many of those goddamn PETA videos and I was like, okay. | ||
| I'm either going to do one of two things, I decided. | ||
| I'm either going to become a hunter or I'm going to become a vegetarian. | ||
| Those are my two options. | ||
| And I had done vegetarianism when I was competing. | ||
| Back in my martial arts competing days, because I was trying to make a weight class that I was too big for, and I'd starve myself, and I was really fucked up. | ||
| I did it the wrong way, clearly. | ||
| But then when I went back to eating meat, I felt so much better. | ||
| And then it was like the best of my competition years were all I ate so much meat. | ||
| And then I was like, you know, an older person trying to think about what my place in the world is, And seeing these videos, I'm sure they don't represent most farming, but it was enough to know that that was out there and that perhaps I had participated in that. | ||
| So I got into hunting. | ||
| And that's actually how I met Mo Fallon. | ||
| I met Mo because Steve Rinella was the star of the show Meat Eater, and Mo was the director of the show, and that's how we met. | ||
| When, you know, he and I had talked about hunting, like, he had done some hunting with, um, what's that gentleman's name in England? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Marco? | |
| Oh, Marco Pierre White. | ||
| Yeah, Marco Pierre White. | ||
| I, um, so I know he had done some hunting with him, and remember he shot a deer and they smeared blood on his face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. | |
| And so we talked about, like, doing stuff for the show, and he said, you know, have you ever been pheasant hunting? | ||
| I said, no, let's go. | ||
| Sounds like fun. | ||
| It looks like fun. | ||
| It was just for me an excuse to do something with him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think a lot of people, that was his form of friendship with a lot of people, was we gotta have a reason to be working together so that we can have a reason to hang out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, I always love those hunting scenes. | ||
| I grew up in a, my dad's a big hunter, still is a big hunter, so I, I always knew my parents were going to like that episode and not complain about it. | ||
| It was always interesting to see him, Tony. | ||
| He was almost like travel host Ken in a way. | ||
| You put him in the hunting gear and he hunts and then you put him in some other thing. | ||
| He was so adaptable in that way. | ||
| For somebody who didn't handle a gun very much in his life, he did all right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He shot a bird that day. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was duck hunting in France that he did pretty well in. | ||
| I'm sure there was some magic of editing at times, too. | ||
| Well, he was enthusiastic about stuff. | ||
| And when you're enthusiastic about stuff, you can figure it out. | ||
| You do it. | ||
| He had a lot of horsepower. | ||
| He knew how to dig into things. | ||
| It was a fun experience. | ||
| I'd never been pheasant hunting before, and it's a fun experience, too, because you're just kind of walking through these fields hoping these birds freak out and fly away. | ||
| And you've got to be ready at any moment. | ||
| And the dogs. | ||
| I mean, that's a cool aspect of it, too. | ||
| There's a lot of moving parts. | ||
| And then there was the cooking at the end. | ||
| It was really cool because he cooked for everybody. | ||
| So we were eating this freshly killed bird and some steaks and some other stuff and doing it by the firelight. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| But I remember going home going, man, that motherfucker drinks. | ||
| Because I had such a headache the next day. | ||
| And I was like, how does he do this all the time? | ||
| He had certain things. | ||
| I mean, he also could get by on very little sleep. | ||
| I mean, when he was writing Kitchen Confidential, he would talk about how he would work until 11, go out, drink until 1, go home and sleep for a few hours and get up and write. | ||
| And whether or not that was sort of a little bit of self-mythologizing, maybe he didn't do that every day, but he did it enough to very quickly write a best-selling book. | ||
| So there was something there. | ||
| Well, he was very appreciative of hard work. | ||
| Like hard work meant a lot to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Punctuality meant a lot to him. | |
| He had a certain ethic that he lived his life by that it carried over into all the other aspects of his life. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| There's writings, everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think you have to credit the kitchen for that. | ||
| Whatever kind of fuck-up you are in the rest of your life, when you show up in the kitchen, it doesn't matter. | ||
| You've got to do your prep list. | ||
| You've got to be ready for service. | ||
| You've got to make the plates when the stuff gets ordered. | ||
| There's just no two ways about it. | ||
| It's a military-style precision and... | ||
| Well, in best case scenario. | ||
| I mean, it's also much sloppier than the military, I would think, in most cases. | ||
| But pirate ship maybe is a better metaphor. | ||
| I always love how he gave so much credit to the cooks that were working underneath him, too. | ||
| And he was like, the backbone of this city is these immigrant cooks that come in, and some of them can barely even speak English, and they're the people that are serving people and making these amazing meals in these incredible restaurants. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, guys from Ecuador and Mexico, that is 90% of the cooks in Manhattan. | ||
| And he would shine light on that. | ||
| He wanted them to get the shine. | ||
| That meant a lot to him. | ||
| Yeah, call them out by name and really acknowledge that they're incredibly skilled, incredibly hard workers, cheerfully sweating 12 hours a day making beef bourguignon and french fries. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a wild life, that kitchen life. | ||
| The people that do it, they almost universally tend to party. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It is a drunk, drunk profession. | ||
| Like, no question. | ||
| But it's also, it's like, it's a profession that is celebrating this sort of extravagance of dining, right? | ||
| Of consumption. | ||
| You're consuming these incredible meals and you want to have great wine and a great whiskey and, you know, there's something to all that that it kind of fits in together. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, it's hedonism as a product and hedonism as a lifestyle, but, you know, also as a way to sort of dull the pain of, you know, your aching body and your tiny paycheck and your busted up relationships. | ||
| I mean, it is, you know, it's really Island of the Misfit Toys. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| In a lot of ways, it's a lot like comedians in the misfit toy aspect of it. | ||
| Not in the hard work aspect. | ||
| The comedy world is so much easier. | ||
| But there's something about that. | ||
| It's like, oh, you guys are like kindred spirits in a lot of ways. | ||
| You're just more tempered by your profession because your profession requires so much of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's easy to forget that he was in the trenches, Tony, for close to 30 years, just pretty much nonstop cooking. | ||
| The crazy thing is that that life... | ||
| I mean, I don't think anybody should work for too little pay, right? | ||
| But the ones who do are really amazing. | ||
| It's like, why is that? | ||
| Why is it that these people that do struggle and do have all these obstacles and all these problems and yet keep showing up every day, they're so exceptional. | ||
| So many of those people that I meet are so interesting. | ||
| They're the ones I want to talk to at the bar. | ||
| They're the ones I want to sit next to. | ||
| I mean, it's a certain, maybe it's another form of addiction, or it's just, I mean, yeah, all the cooks and chefs that I know, it's just, it is who they are fundamentally. | ||
| I mean, you could leave the business and go sell used cars or whatever, but fundamentally, you're always going to be a cook and a chef and have that thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it is a thing, like an addiction thing in a lot of ways. | ||
| Because there's a funny aspect to it where it's hard work, but you have to keep up. | ||
| It's not hard work like you're digging a hole and you have a certain pace that you can go at and you can dig that hole all day. | ||
| No, the plates are coming in. | ||
| Like, let's go. | ||
| Like, you have to. | ||
| And so I think there's probably an addiction to the rhythm of it, an addiction to the requirements of it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| When you get into that flow state and, I mean, at the highest level or even just a chef of a, you know, mid-level steakhouse, I mean, they're Taking the tickets. | ||
| They're firing the plates. | ||
| They're watching this guy, that guy. | ||
| They see the garbage needs to go out. | ||
| They've got a manager and a waiter on their shoulder. | ||
| It's air traffic control. | ||
| It's very undersung, I think, the level of skill and concentration that goes into it. | ||
| So of course you want to drink 1,800 beers at the end of the night. | ||
| It's so stressful. | ||
| Was Kitchen Confidential really the only time where anybody had ever really kind of nailed that in book form? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, I think it definitely was a completely fresh perspective at that time. | ||
| I think the precursor is Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, which I think was published 1920 or something. | ||
| So it had been a while since there was... | ||
| And that's about Kitchen Wife? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Was George Orwell a writer and slash... | ||
| As a young man, he worked in some big, very punishing kitchens. | ||
| And labor conditions, not great in those eras, in those cities. | ||
| But after that, it was really not much. | ||
| And then Tony kind of broke down the door. | ||
| I had just started working as a food writer a little bit on the side when Kitchen Confidential came out. | ||
| And everything was about just smooth luxury. | ||
| Everything you were writing about was... | ||
| Golf courses and big steaks and beautiful wines and nothing ever about the real dirty business of what actually goes on in restaurants. | ||
| So I think he pissed off and scared a lot of people with that book. | ||
| I think there's a lot of reasons to not want That kind of information out there. | ||
| And after Kitchen Confidential, I think there were any number of other people that tried to do it, but there's only one. | ||
| There's almost no point in trying to write a kitchen memoir. | ||
| It's just like, that's the one. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're always going to know that you've read that book. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's part of the problem, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And same with travel TV. I mean, you know, and again, I talk about it a little bit in the biography that a number of people said, you know, people who work in television, they get all these pitches like, this is going to be the next Bourdain or the Bourdain of this or the Bourdain of that. | ||
| And they're like, you know, fuck you. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| There is no Bourdain of, you know, you can have a travel show or whatever, but like, don't try and replicate that. | ||
| There isn't going to be another one. | ||
| Yeah, that is the disgusting language of the producer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The producer pitching the show. | ||
| You gotta have your, you know, it's whatever, it's this meets that. | ||
| Yep, always. | ||
| Yeah, there's no way you can just, yeah. | ||
| Unless you have something that's already successful in some independent way, like on YouTube or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When you say you were a food writer, what does that entail? | ||
| Would you review restaurants or...? | ||
| No, I was never a reviewer. | ||
| It was, you know, writing about maybe talking to a chef who has something interesting going on using a new or interesting ingredient or, you know, I did a lot of like very just basic kind of service stuff like this, you know, new restaurant opened up in this place and here's 25 words about what their menu is and what the dining room looks like. | ||
| I did a lot of recipe writing. | ||
| I went to Sri Lanka, actually with Tony. | ||
| I went to Sri Lanka and spent a lot of time on my own learning about Sri Lankan home cooking and got recipes from these different women who would teach me what they were doing and then wrote a feature about Sri Lanka. | ||
| What is the style of cooking in Sri Lanka? | ||
| It's very similar to Indian. | ||
| Obviously, you know, they're very close geographically, but it's a lot punchier. | ||
| There's a lot of roasted whole spices. | ||
| Very little dairy is used. | ||
| I mean, of course, you know, Indian cuisine is a huge, you know, it's varied, you know, it's such a big place. | ||
| Sri Lankan tends to be a lot of coconut meat and coconut milk, super intense spices, a lot of warm spices, not a ton of meat, you know, a lot of seafood, because they're a little island nation. | ||
| So it's, you know, it's obviously related to Indian, but it's really its own thing, too. | ||
| Really interesting, delicious cuisine. | ||
| Super, super spicy. | ||
| Now, how complicated is it to recreate dishes like that? | ||
| If you're a person who goes to Sri Lanka and you sort of learn from someone who's cooking specific dishes over there and then you write down the ingredients, can you even get most of the ingredients in America? | ||
| And putting it together in the way they cook, how specific is their implementation? | ||
| Yeah, it's not. | ||
| I mean, it's a challenge. | ||
| I'd say now with the internet, there were very few ingredients that I couldn't get back in the States. | ||
| There were a few things that I picked up in Sri Lanka because I knew I wouldn't be able to get that specific spice blend or certain preserved fruits and stuff. | ||
| But for the most part, anything you want, you can get it now, as long as you're willing to pay sometimes exorbitant shipping. | ||
| And you just do your best. | ||
| I mean, I'm not going to cook something exactly the way that this auntie taught me to do it, but I took a lot of notes, I took a lot of pictures, I took video in some cases, voice recording, to try and get as close to it as possible. | ||
| And then when you do that and you try to recreate it, how difficult is it to recreate it on your own? | ||
| Depends. | ||
| I mean, sometimes if it's a straightforward stew or something, it's like, well, you just follow the steps. | ||
| And, you know, if you know what you're doing and you've taken careful notes, then you can get pretty close. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| It's not always going to be as good or as exactly right, but you can get pretty close. | ||
| There were some things, though, like there's a dish called hoppers, which is a fermented rice flour pancake. | ||
| And it was just, I mean, it was a disaster trying to recreate that, you know? | ||
| It's just, I just couldn't do it. | ||
| It was gross, you know? | ||
| And I just, at some point I just gave up and was like, that's not something that, you know, if I can't replicate it myself at home, I'm not going to write this recipe and tell somebody that's reading the magazine to try it, you know? | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| What was it like you tried that over there, though? | ||
| I tried it over there, but I had, you know, like somebody standing over my shoulder who had already made the dough and they had the pan that was, you know, very well seasoned. | ||
| I mean, I bought a pan on the street and, you know, I think you probably have to cook with it 150 times to get that patina so the dough doesn't stick. | ||
| And I just realized, like, this is not an endeavor that's worth it for my, you know, dollar a word article for this very small circulation magazine. | ||
| I'm gonna let the hoppers go and just focus on stuff that's easier for the home cook to do. | ||
| Now that you're done with these books, obviously your main focus will now be promoting them and getting them out there, but what do you do with your life now? | ||
| I mean, you had a decade of working with him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is something I started asking myself from the very first time I heard that Tony had died. | ||
| And, you know, I was very lucky to have a couple of years to do these projects. | ||
| You know, I'm going to keep writing books. | ||
| I'm working on a bakery book now, a bread book, with a British baker called Richard Hart, who has a bakery in Denmark. | ||
| So we're writing a book about sourdough bread, which, you know... | ||
| Everybody loves it. | ||
| Everybody loves to make it. | ||
| It's easy to do, but it's not easy to do well. | ||
| So we're going to try and teach people to master that. | ||
| Shout out to Tom Papa. | ||
| Oh, he's a big baker, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's awesome at it. | |
| He makes incredible sourdough bread. | ||
| I'll have to start looking at his... | ||
| Does he share on social media? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He shares in real life, too. | ||
| He always brings a loaf of bread whenever he visits us. | ||
| We have a deal. | ||
| I give him elk meat and he gives me bread. | ||
| That is a good trade. | ||
| Yeah, I'd like to keep writing. | ||
| I've gotten into trying to start being a producer a little bit. | ||
| What are you producing? | ||
| Like a couple of different TV shows. | ||
| I mean, it's very, very... | ||
| I mean, when I say TV, I mean probably like YouTube or, you know, whatever that's streaming. | ||
| One is about... | ||
| One is with a salsa singer named Tito Nieves. | ||
| We're in the very early stages of it, but he's starting to do a little cooking show with his wife, Janet. | ||
| And the other one is very early stages of a show about food and musicians. | ||
| So I think there's also some kindred spirits between chefs and musicians. | ||
| Maybe not so much as comedians, but there's that kind of road warrior mentality and that perfecting your craft. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| It's, you know, I feel like having worked for Tony for so long was such a gift and, you know, having these books has raised my platform a little bit. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| I would love to be able to keep writing and working creatively and not have to get a real job. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that. | ||
| I think you could do it. | ||
| I have faith in you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| The desperation of, you know, just fucking don't get a real job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, the last real job I had was working for Tony, and I just don't see myself working as an assistant for anybody else. | ||
| I had already kind of aged out of the assistant gig, but when Tony came along, I was like, well, obviously, yes, I'll work for you, but I don't want to be a glorified secretary. | ||
| Do you feel tied down to the food genre? | ||
| I mean, it's a lot of what I've done, you know, but not necessarily. | ||
| I realize that, you know, there's a lot more out there for me. | ||
| You know, I mean, I've tried to develop myself as a writer over the, you know, since I've always, you know, so no, I guess the short answer is no. | ||
| I'm interested in writing about and learning about other things. | ||
| Being connected to him, though, it's sort of like there's high expectations on whatever you do put out. | ||
| Well, you know, and he himself kind of drifted away from food a little bit in the later years. | ||
| I mean, obviously, there was always still food involved in whatever he was doing for television. | ||
| But the focus really had started to shift to people, you know, and maybe food as an initial way to kind of break the ice with people. | ||
| But he really got away from food porn, you know, except in special cases. | ||
| But it really was... | ||
| What does the food tell me about how you live, you know, or what you do or don't have or what your government is or isn't, you know, providing for you? | ||
| So, you know, I see Tony kind of forging a path there of going beyond just like what's delicious on the table, you know? | ||
| Well, that seemed the shift of Parts Unknown. | ||
| Parts Unknown seemed to shift more into a sort of an exploration of these different cultures as much as their food. | ||
| And almost the food was like sort of, okay, we got to do this too. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, some places, you know, he went to Lyon, France, and that was, like, all about the food, you know, because it's so intrinsic to the culture. | ||
| In other places, it was like, well, what's the, you know, what's the specialty? | ||
| All right, we're going to shoot that, and then we're going to talk to, you know, this guy that was a political prisoner for 10 years, or, you know, something that, there were plenty of scenes toward the end that had nothing to do with food. | ||
| Yeah, there were so many wild moments. | ||
| Like, what was, wasn't there an episode where they sat around and ate a camel? | ||
| That probably was early on, maybe. | ||
| I can't say with certainty that he ate a camel. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he ate a camel. | ||
| I think they were all sitting around eating a camel because I remember you had to eat it with your hands and there was very specific rules to where they did it. | ||
| I forget where he did it. | ||
| There's parts of the world where you wash your ass with your left hand and you eat your food with your right hand. | ||
| I'm 90% sure that they ate a camel. | ||
| I'd have to go back to the archive, but it seems totally in the realm of possibility. | ||
| I mean, he went to Egypt, he went to Oman, and I mean, just everywhere, you know? | ||
| Is it when you're looking back on this time that you shared with him and then you put all this down in these books, do you feel like you've in some way closed the chapter? | ||
| Does this give you closure in any way? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I mean, I think there will be a time when both of these books, this one will be out in the world, the biography, the travel book is already out and the promotional period will end and that will be it. | ||
| And I think it will be a very sad time for me because I think I have kept some sense of Tony's memory alive by working on these books. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel like the more time that goes by, the less closure I have in some ways. | ||
| This morning watching the Montana episode, it was like just every time I see something that I haven't seen from him in a while, it kind of breaks my heart open again and just makes me realize how fucking incredible he was. | ||
| I think working for him, you kind of lose perspective when you're talking to somebody every day and you're working with them and you sort of forget that they're How great they are until they're gone. | ||
| So, yeah, you know, I mean, I think very early on after Tony died, I had to, and a lot of us that were close with him had to sort of tell ourselves right out of the gate, this is not our fault. | ||
| You know, this is not something that we could have prevented. | ||
| As much as I still to this day think about, like we said at the top of this conversation, what if I had said this or that? | ||
| What if I had, you know, alerted somebody? | ||
| What if, you know, all the what ifs. | ||
| And you have to believe that this is a decision that he made that didn't involve anyone else. | ||
| But yeah, I think that with the nature of the way that he died, I think there's always going to be an open wound of regret and of just, you know... | ||
| Playing out the million scenarios that, you know, had things gone differently. | ||
| You know, I think about, God, if he were around right now, what he would, you know, A, he would be so... | ||
| I have this fantasy that he comes back and I'm like, dude, there's a pandemic, you know, and just how like, you know, like he would be in his sort of like nerdy, enthusiast way. | ||
| He would be like, that's crazy! | ||
| You know, he would... | ||
| I mean, as horrible as a pandemic is, he would be... | ||
| Really excited. | ||
| He would be really engaged with it. | ||
| He would have so much to say. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| That's sort of like the daily heartbreak, is like all of these things that are happening, that the world has gone on, and he stopped in June of 2018, and he's not getting to see the way that the people that he lifted up are continuing to grow professionally, to see his daughter, all of these things. | ||
| I don't think there's ever any closure to that. | ||
| There's just peace, trying to make peace with it personally and somehow try to understand it. | ||
| And unfortunately, and I say this with all hesitation because I know it's a fucked up thing to say, there's a certain romantic aspect to even the way he died. | ||
| One day when people review the life of Anthony Bourdain, that will be a part of the legend. | ||
| Be a part of the chaos of who he was and the pain and suffering and then ultimately what he felt like was betrayal and humiliation and he takes his own life and he's missed so dearly by everyone. | ||
| It's just it's part of the romantic legend that is that person and this wild Unforeseen ride from writing that one book to becoming this person that affected so many people that became in a lot of ways a cultural icon for travel and for the exploration of different regions of the world and different people and different cultures. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, you know, it sure is, you know, more romantic and dramatic than, like, getting ass cancer or something, right? | ||
| I mean, he would have... | ||
| That sounds like something he would say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, and he, I mean, you know, it's just not a surprise to say that, you know, he made a million throwaway suicide references as a joke, you know, always, there's a million of them, you know, in the TV show, in conversation. | ||
| I mean, this was just like... | ||
| Breathing for him. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I just have to think that it was a spontaneous, shitty decision. | ||
| Oftentimes that's the case, apparently. | ||
| I've talked to people who are, air quotes, suicide experts. | ||
| And that's one of the things I say is that you'd be surprised at how many people commit suicide with literally an off-the-cuff, random thought, and they just fall through with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, we'll never know, really. | ||
| But, you know, I wish that he had made a different decision. | ||
| I hope that, you know, people who think that it's a romantic way to go out will listen to the voices of the people that he left behind and see that, you know, the tremendous amount of pain that that caused. | ||
| I don't mean to laugh. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| You know, that it's... | ||
| I mean, he tapped out. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| But the rest of us are here kind of picking up the pieces. | ||
| We're left wondering what his take on the world at large today. | ||
| I mean, in so many ways, a lot of the facade of what we imagined was a rigid structure of government and And society has eroded so rapidly before our eyes over the last year and a half plus that it would have been fascinating to see his take on that because it really has revealed the true character of all these human beings grasping at straws, | ||
| trying to find relevance in this weird time that we find ourselves in because it is unprecedented. | ||
| So for a voice like his, which had been so sorely needed in a time like now, to not have him around... | ||
| It's a fucking shame for every reason, but that's just another one. | ||
| Who's to say? | ||
| I could never predict where he would come down on one issue or another. | ||
| If I would guess, I'd be wrong 50% of the time. | ||
| But he would certainly have a lot to say about The way that we are or are not taking care of each other. | ||
| The way we are or are not following rules. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows what he would have said. | ||
| But he was so well read. | ||
| He had such a deep, deep knowledge of history, especially U.S. history in the 20th century. | ||
| I feel like it was always comforting for him. | ||
| He could always pull up a reference like, well, this is like this time. | ||
| There was this sense of... | ||
| He knew. | ||
| He knew what was going on. | ||
| And all of the factors that had led up to whatever was happening in that moment. | ||
| He was a really incredible scholar. | ||
| For a guy who basically flunged out of college, he was an incredible scholar. | ||
| And he was very humble about that. | ||
| He would never tell you that he was a super well-read guy, but he absolutely was. | ||
| Well, he was interested in things, right? | ||
| It didn't really matter what his actual formal education was. | ||
| He was interested in things and the pursuit of those things and trying to understand stuff, which also contributed greatly to his enthusiasm as a traveler. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Anything else, Lori? | ||
| Should we wrap this up? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| Before we both start crying. | ||
| I'm glad I didn't cry. | ||
| In the beginning, I thought it was over right away. | ||
| I'm like, God damn it, you pussy. | ||
| You're going to cry in the first 15 seconds. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Get it out of the way. | ||
| Bourdain, the definitive oral biography. | ||
| Hold them up so people can see it. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| And that's out soon. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| September 28th, published by Echo. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that's out in about a month. | ||
| And then the other one is out right now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is World Travel, An Irreverent Guide. | ||
| And this is available now. | ||
| Laurie, thank you very much for being here. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And I really appreciate you writing these books, too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It was great to talk to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great to talk to you too. | |
| Alright. |
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